A TOWN CALLED PANIC
Movie critics from time to time bemoan the lack of originality and creativity of the films coming out of Hollywood. The story formulas, the stock characters, and the by-the-numbers direction often make critics cranky and cynical. To anyone complaining about such things, I offer A Town Called Panic as the antithesis of modern movie malaise. Just bring some aspirin.
Quite possibly the cheapest-looking stop-motion film ever made, A Town Called Panic features a bunch of plastic toys that go on ceaseless, careening adventures. The protagonists – Cowboy, Indian, and Horse – all live in a peculiar house in an unspecified (possibly French) countryside. The “plot” of the film involves Cowboy and Indian accidently ordering 50 billion bricks as a birthday present for Horse. The ensuing narrative that arises from that tiny germ of an idea could not be divined by God Himself, nor ever understood.
While I admire the painstaking work involved in making these simple-looking toys come to some sort of life, this is simply not a good movie. No matter how crazy a film gets, it still requires a tangible plot or character arcs that justify sitting in a theater for ninety minutes. This film, however, plays like a never-ending freefall into insanity. When mer-men inexplicably climbed out of the farm’s pond and stole a house, I was ready to leave. The film just goes on and on like that, with one spastic event leading into another without reason or sense.
The animation is hideous, although I did very much like some of the vast landscapes conjured as a backdrop. The characters, standing on little pedestals just like those old army soldier toys, bounce back and forth when talking by way of little globs of clay being postioned under their feet. This technique becomes very distracting, then amusing, then annoying. The puppets used are fairly ugly, and are kept in long shots most of the time. This, however, gives a depersonalizing effect to the film that prevents us from really loving what’s onscreen. Ultimately, this film looks like a very ugly toy set hyperactively scrambling around on its own.
I could have gotten onboard for the technique and look of the film if it had anything going on in its head. But it doesn’t. The film doesn’t make a lick of sense, the characters are barely sketched, and the tone of the film provides little engage an audience. If this is the alternative, then I think I’ll stick to Michael Bay films instead.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Oh dear.
Fifteen years ago, the words “Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland” would’ve inspired eunuchs to ejaculate. At that moment in his career, Burton had his trademark visual flair married to a sense of character and story. While I doubt that Burton would have remained true to the original books, he probably would have tried to to keep the focus on the titular character and her story.
Unfortunately, it is not fifteen years ago. The Burton of today, now reduced to a fat-cat idiot savant, cares only about upping the special effects in order to achieve a sort of ceaseless blast of art direction. One could argue that Burton always had a problem with story, and his fantastical drawings/designs were the centerpiece of his films. But films like Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice never felt that way. They came off as character-driven stories with very eccentric art direction. Burton’s latest, Alice In Wonderland, feels like it’s the rock-bottom of Burton’s creative downward spiral.
CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
Every dominant civilization in history follows the same arc: a sweeping rise to power, a relatively brief reign, and then a disastrous decline (barring, of course, a sudden overthrow of that government). At one time, the sun never set on the British Empire, and now it’s been reduced to a square mile patch of land around Big Ben. It’s just the way things go.
America has enjoyed a brief time at the top of the heap, thanks to her capitalistic foundation and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Money and greed have fueled all of her ingenuity; let’s invent new weapons … let’s develop new technologies and new medicines … all in the pursuit of a dollar bill. Thanks to these efforts, the United States became the most powerful nation on Earth in a short period of time, and has remained such at the turn of the century.
But dangerous forces, ones driven by capitalism at its most extreme, are at work in the top levels of her government. Polticians and corporate leaders have become a ruling class, presiding over the average American worker in much the same manner as the King George did over the Empire that birthed the U.S. so long ago. Only now, the members of this ruling class are not robbing people through taxation; they are robbing them outright in plain sight, scaring the people into bailouts and costly wars that go to fill their coffers. It’s a disgusting sight.
It’s this growing concern and anger that fuels some of Michael Moore’s latest provocation, Capitalism: A Love Story. The love story in question is one in which various institutions (political, corporate, financial) combine forces in order to help each other become obscenely wealthy at the expense of the common man. You know, those little people that the U.S. Constitution was supposed to protect.
Moore sounds angry and defeated throughout this film, which is unsurprising given the massive forces aligned against his ideology. Unfortunately, this anger causes Moore to continue his provocative gimmicks, like shouting at Wall Street with a bullhorn like some sort of unhealthy Alex Jones. While slightly amusing, these gimmicks do nothing to support his message. In fact, they detract from the message, making Moore look like an annoying clown, rather than someone who has a message and a plan for change.
There are, however, gems embedded within the antics. At one point Moore talks about “dead peasant” policies, which shocked the hell out of me. Apparently there are corporations in America – big ones, like WalMart, Hershey’s, and Citigroup – that are taking out secret, high-paying life insurance policies on their workers. The corporations receive the monies from those policies when a worker dies. Moore talks to a woman who was left with bills when her husband suddenly passed, only to then found out that her husband’s company made 1.5 million dollars from his death due to one of these policies. It’s horrific. Even that name – dead peasants – demonstrates the attitude of the people behind these schemes. It’s like America is some sort of Soylent Green factory, and America’s citizens are headed for the grinder.
Moore does a convincing and sometimes entertaining job of summarizing how the humming captialism of fifties America went off the rails, cleverly using advertisment footage to hammer home some of his points. It’s during these moments that Moore almost resembles a documentarian, despite the obvious point of view projected onto it. Inevitably, though, Moore reverts back to his silly and truly pointless attempts to trespass and bother security guards. I wish Moore would stay on the facts, where his editorial opinion carries much more weight.
The film focuses on the recent bailout of the American financial district by the taxpayers, easily one of the most ludicrous moments in her history. Had this been attempted in 1790, the American citizens of that day would have risen up and murdered those politicians with pitchforks. Unfortunately, the American citizens of today are lazy, distracted by garbage like IPads and Jersey Shore, and more concerned about the infidelities of Tiger Woods than the infidelities of their government. Moore senses that the current crop of American citizen lacks the courage, intelligence, and intestinal fortitude necessary to tackle these overwhelming problems, so he leaves the finale of the film open-ended. There are no answers given here, mainly because the real answer – revolution – is one that will not be considered by the blob-like peasants working the factories across America.
Unfortunately, with all Moore gets right in the film, his politics – much like the partisan politics that choke Washington – cause him to miss the mark on occasion. For instance, Moore spends a lot of time mocking George Bush and his cronies for this mess, which is deserved. But then Moore practically presents Obama as some sort of agent of change and hope, completely ignoring Obama’s huge and very convincing role in promoting the bailout. It’s this type of left/right political nonsense that undermines Moore and his film.
The raping and pillaging of America’s wealth and prosperity is an important subject for a depp, powerful, and probing film. I wish Moore would have set aside his politics and clownish antics and made that film, rather than produce a half-hearted attempt to explain the problem. If these are the best arrows that people like Moore can fire at these criminals, then America truly is fucked and the bad guys will most certainly win.
THE CRAZIES
Since the invention of the modern zombie movie in the late sixties, there have been a wide variety of zombie variants that have attempted to scare up lots of dough. Many resemble traditional zombie narratives, while others try to superimpose a more realistic spin on the same events. Films like 28 Days Later and REC are examples of the latter. The reason why these films scare audiences is simple: it’s scary to imagine everyday people turning on us and trying to kill us. It’s certainly more believable than Godzilla, anyway.
The latest film in this growing genre is The Crazies, a remake of a 1973 horror film by Night of the Living Dead creator George A. Romero. As in the original, the population of a small town is slowly succumbing to a mysterious man-made virus that causes them to attack and kill everyone around them. The new film stars Timothy Olyphant as David, a sheriff who quickly discovers that something is terribly wrong with everyone when an armed man casually walks onto a little league field during a game with a shotgun and attacks him. Soon David, his wife (Radha Mitchell), and his deputy (Joe Anderson) are trying to get out of town as quickly as possible.
Like many horror films these days, the filmmakers assume that the audience already knows something about the premise and therefore feels no obligation to explain anything. The film wastes little time in introducing the entire town before the first “crazy” shows up on that baseball field. In this, the film feels like the original Night of the Living Dead, creating a sense of shocking horror out of the mundane. Unlike that zombie classic, however, the “crazies” here never really feel threatening or unstoppable; they stare, they stalk, they wander around, but they never feel substantially evil or terrifying.
The subplot of the film involves a massive government conspiracy involving this man-made virus, which leads to a very annoying story device in which a satellite can see anyone anywhere. There are various shots from the point-of-view of the satellite that completely distract from the believability of the film. I hated this aspect of the film.
Olyphant is fine in this role, and he certainly exudes enough charisma to carry a film of this sort. The rest of the cast screams and runs well, which is all their roles require of them. In a film like this, nobody is looking for a Streep-like performance, however.
The direction of Breck Eisner is uselessly cliched. There are approximately 3.1 million jump scares in this film, each one accompanied by orchestra hits. A mother turns a corner while looking for her boy — Hand on shoulder!! Orchestra hit!! Mother screams!! — and it’s revealed to be her boy. Moments like this litter the film, diluting the truly unnerving scenes. This is ashame, because Eisner and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre have crafted some nice shots that might have worked better in a less-manipulative film.
Ultimately, The Crazies suffers from too much gloss, too many phony jump scares, and an uninspired screenplay. Rather than being derived from a master of horror, the film feels like any run-of-the-mill horror film released in the last twenty years. And that isn’t something to get too crazy about.
COP OUT
I’m not a fan of Kevin Smith. I mean, I wrote this almost two years ago, and my feelings haven’t changed much since then. I think Smith has a way with dirty language, but I don’t find his scripts as a whole to be clever or thoughtfully constructed. And then there’s his direction, which can only be described as flaccid and uninspired.
His latest film, Cop Out, is a departure for Smith in that it marks the first time he has directed a feature that wasn’t scripted by him. That, unfortunately, doesn’t prove to be a positive, since screenwriters Robb and Mark Cullen are obviously aping Smith’s sophomoric level of toilet humor. I can only imagine Smith’s first reading of this script, cackling like a lobotomized hyena at mentions of “ass-to-mouth” and dick-sucking monkeys; he must have felt like someone was reading his wet dreams. Fittingly, they also managed to construct a limp, haphazard storyline that perfectly imitates the carelessness that Smith regularly displays in his own screenplays.
Bruce Willis stars as Jimmy, a weathered cop who has had to endure a nine year partnership with streetwise Paul (Tracy Morgan). We’ve seen this police dynamic already in at least five hundred films, but Willis and Morgan have some decent chemistry and make some of it feel fresher than it deserves. The “story” that befalls these two characters is far too convoluted and inconsequential to dissect, although I can say that it involves a silly Mexican gangster (Juan Carlos Hernandez), a stolen baseball card, and a thief and parkour specialist (Seann William Scott).
I can also confirm that much of it is very laborious and not very funny. The script meanders aimlessly, pinpointing on endless character asides that are supposed to be (a) funny and (b) enlightening, yet end up being (c) pointless. For instance, Morgan’s character is jealous of his wife, so he installs a camera in their bedroom to see if she’s cheating on him. The contents of that camera become an running concern throughout the film, even in the middle of a crime investigation. It goes on and on, with Morgan carrying on lengthy dialogues about his wife and his feelings for her. Yet we are not really given any reason to care about their relationship, so why spend so much time on this? Almost every character in the film has this type of business going on, featured in protracted scenes that fail to build into a cohesive whole.
Also, the central crime storyline is so silly and weightless that the tone of the movie becomes confusing. Despite the extensive gunplay and frequent shootings, the film plays almost as if it was supposed to be a joke, rather than a serious crime story played with laughs. Imagine if Beverly Hills Cop had been about Axel Foley trying to retrieve an antique lighter from a mobster – that is the level of story we’re dealing with here, and it sucks.
To make matters worse, the script basically hands the entire investigation over to the two policemen in huge chunks without even the slightest hint of clever detective work. For instance, the two cops stop a car thief in order to find out a vital clue; for laughs, the thief is an eleven year old boy, who then blurts out the name and whereabouts of the villain. It’s sloppy and extremely lazy screenwriting.
But “lazy” is the best term to describe Smith’s entire film catalog, and his direction here does not change that impression. Dialogue scenes are simply multiple camera set-ups edited together without rhythm, ping-ponging back and forth like the most robotic tennis match in history. Then Smith employs shaky-cam for “action” scenes, proving that he’s much better off setting his camera on a very rigid tripod. The editing in these scenes feels a little more dynamic, especially in a car chase at the halfway point that contained some nice shots. But these brief moments barely punctuate the blandly static scenes that never achieve life.
What a shame that Morgan, who has been criminally underused for a decade, couldn’t have found a more appropriate project with which to launch a much-deserved film career. Both Morgan and Willis put in fine work, all in a lost cause. This is simply another waste of time and talent from Smith.
CRAZY HEART
Playing like a country-western version of The Wrestler, the new Jeff Bridges Oscar showcase Crazy Heart plums familiar territory with a gentle touch of humor and humanity.
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THE WOLFMAN
Universal has taken the risky gamble of remaking all of the monster films from its archives. Judging by the first, The Wolfman, they stand to lose a lot of money.
Benicio Del Toro stars as Larry Talbot, an English actor in 1890 who has gone to seek his fortune in America. When Larry’s brother is brutally murdered, Larry reluctantly returns home to be withhis estranged family, including his mysterious father Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins) and his brother’s fiance Gwen (Emily Blunt). During his investigation into his brother’s death, he is attacked and bitten by a horrific creature in a gypsy camp, which gives him unnatural powers when the moon rises …
It seems unpleasant and wrong to discuss the turmoil in the making of a film when reviewing it, but it is unavoidable in this case. The Wolfman is a narrative mess, and many of the hackings and arguments behind the scenes show up unpleasantly onscreen. Particularly bad is the entire first act, which flops around in a vain attempt to establish a character and a romance for Larry. Rather than take a careful pace to build up to Larry’s infection and transformation, the film rushes headlong to that point without anything really making an impression. The direction by Joe Johnston is typically workmanlike, but flails in the face of massive script and performance problems.
