WARNING! Spoilers for Richard Kelly’s The Box, and semi-sort-of-not-really spoilers for John Sayles’ Limbo…
Richard Kelly is now three for three. In terms of bad movies pretending to be thought-provoking artistic statements marrying SF, philosophy, pop culture, and visually uninteresting motifs, that is. His notorious and oft-lauded feature debut was Donnie Darko, a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS SF thriller about a boy, a weird rabbit, and something about time-travelling through an Einstein-Rosen bridge, all wrapped in pilfered Lynchian atmospherics. It also featured the line “Go suck a fuck”, which annoyed me so much at the time I think it made my brain come unglued in my head. That said, it also featured some interesting ideas.
Kelly was smart enough to take the filmmaking capital he earned with that movie and instantly spend it on Southland Tales, a love letter to Los Angeles that doubled as a hyper-stylised satire of the political state of America post-9/11, with surveillance culture running out of control and alternate fuel technology creating some kind of instability in the space-time continuum. Seeking to comment on every hot-button political issue at once, it ended up saying nothing. It didn’t help that Kelly couldn’t keep his imagination-dick in his brain-pants, and thus saturated the movie with dozens and dozens of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS events that remained unexplained by the time the credits rolled, even if you read the bewildering graphic novel he wrote as a prologue. It was a 21st Century Wild Palms, only 3000 times more self-indulgent and, regrettably, not co-directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
It was a critical and commercial disaster, premiered in rough cut at Cannes to an audience that hated it and then unleashed on a world that just didn’t care about it. As with any visionary SF movie a cult sprung up around it, but even though I have been known to champion all kinds of flawed but ambitious projects, Southland Tales made me livid. Kelly tantalises us with yet more interesting ideas, but these are left unformed or unexplored, leading to a finale of desperately opaque meaning. Either Kelly created an intentionally vague movie to cynically provoke discussion, or he doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. This interview features a telling paragraph:
As “Southland Tales” was going down in flames at Cannes, Mr. Kelly was still sorting through the details of his back story. He wrote the first book before the shoot and completed the second just before Cannes. He wrote the third while re-editing the movie. Working on them simultaneously helped clarify the big picture. “I needed to solve the riddle in my own mind,” he said.
I’ve heard most writer-directors say they figure out what story they are telling during the editing process, but I always thought that was a metaphor. This disjointed, sprawling nonsense – Short Cuts, as directed by a cross between Philip K. Dick and Cartman — is the work of someone with no concept of discipline. His magnum opus turned out to be little more than a bloated Pez dispenser filled with dreary hallucinations, alt-rock standards, and misunderstood quotes from T.S. Eliot. Other than entertaining performances from Seann William Scott, Amy Poehler, Wood Harris and (especially) The Rock, it was worthless.
And yet I’ve been desperate to see The Box ever since it was announced. During a recent Twitter conversation about Donnie Darko, I said that what had disappointed me most was that it was exactly the kind of movie I would make if I had been given a camera and lots of money when I was younger, but seeing it onscreen showed me that my ideas were too woolly and unformed to be committed to celluloid (be grateful I’m just a blogger with a bug up his ass, film fans). Nevertheless, you can tell Kelly has a restless mind, and if he could focus that energy and that imagination into a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, we might get something truly special. As The Box is based on a classic Richard Matheson short story (“Button, Button”), it seemed like Kelly had learned his lesson and was going to tell a simple but effective SF story with a philosophical dimension.
Sadly, that simple story has been expanded to become another intentional vague and melodramatic conundrum, this time about aliens, the afterlife, and bad 70s wallpaper. As with Matheson’s story, struggling parents Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) are offered a chance of a lifetime by a mysterious stranger, Arlington Steward (Frank Langella, with a CGI hole in his face). This chance comes in the shape of a box with a red button on it. If pushed, someone they do not know will die, but they will be given one million dollars. Wracked with uncertainty about their future, Norma pushes the button, and instantly they both regret this decision. What happens next is certainly challenging, but ultimately silly, baffling, and emotionally empty, no matter how hard Kelly tries to convince the viewer otherwise.
Make everything in the movie look as ugly as possible. Film in grey and orange exclusively. A complex palette is your enemy.
Overlight every shot. No shadows. Shadows are for those other film directors who have no artistic sensibility.
Hipster music is essential. It will either lend flat scenes an energy they don’t deserve (Southland Tales) or will totally overwhelm your visuals (Arcade Fire‘s soundtrack for The Box).
Direct your female cast members as poorly as possible (see Diaz and Celia Weston in The Box, Mary McDonell in Donnie Darko, and Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nora Dunn, and Cheri Oteri in Southland Tales).
After your first edit, remove five scenes at random to create the illusion of mystery in your story.
Include visuals about water and bland CGI space-time tunnels or vortices or something. These are your THEMATIC CONSTANTS and are TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS!
Cast Holmes Osborne in a supporting role. He’s an okay enough actor, but it’s fun to have someone be in all of your movies. Proper directors do things like that.
Quote clever people like Eliot and Sartre. This is what artists do.
If David Lynch does it, it’s okay to do it too (e.g. have people standing around staring like zombies, or slowly zoom in on people cackling). That bit in Lost Highway with Robert Morse telling Bill Pullman he is in two places at once? Do a pastiche of that. Lynch won’t mind. He obviously enjoys putting TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS things in his movies for no reason and everyone loves him.
If you’ve spent more than a couple of weeks editing your movie, you’re doing it wrong. Just slap it together. The audience enjoys puzzling this shit out. Anyone who demands more coherence from their movies is a fraud and an imbecile.
These concerns are mostly surface annoyances with Kelly’s stubborn adherence to a set of stylistic tics. Even a humbling experience like Southland Tales‘ reception couldn’t dissuade him from reusing them. Nevertheless, it’s also worth breaking down the narrative dead-ends, holes, and ambiguous complications in Kelly’s “plot”, as they provide evidence that he has no idea what he is doing. Certainly he squanders that fantastic, thought-provoking central premise: would you press the button even though it would kill a stranger? Matheson certainly uses this starting point to make a wry comment on whether we ever really know anyone, even our loved ones, and Kelly addresses this original ending in a hilarious, poorly written philosophical debate between our protagonists (he also alludes to the alternate ending from the Twilight Zone episode that Matheson disowned).
Of course, Kelly — who has never written a recognisably human character when he can create a thinly-sketched caricature with a wacky name instead — is never going to make a movie that truly ponders that question, not when he can throw in “creepy” shots of mind-controlled humans standing around being “creepy”, or repeatedly cut to a poster of Edwin Austin Abbey’s Quest of the Holy Grail which also features Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. That only seems to have been included to allow Kelly to add all sorts of visual splurge with the excuse that hey, it’s alien and advanced so it can look like however I want. He can also add a reference to Purgatory because then he’s making challenging movie about aliens being God and this plane of reality being a form of punishment, or something. Because, you know. Deep.
Yes, Kelly can’t just tell a morality tale. He has to tell a morality tale with added aliens. Again, this is worryingly close to the sort of hare-brained nonsense I sometimes think would make for good drama when drifting off to sleep. As far as can be deduced from Kelly’s maddeningly tortuous plotting, the button is created by an alien intelligence, one that has arrived via lightning to take control of Arlington Steward’s dead body to test the morality of humans by giving them the opportunity to chase instant gratification at the expense of another’s life. As he’s doing this one couple at a time, with a large group of brainwashed minions who gawp and haemorrhage through their noses (a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS visual image, that), it suggests this alien has the patience of a saint. Why test us? If we fail, we are obviously on a slippery slope to destroying ourselves, and therefore the aliens will annihilate us. Why can’t they just leave us to it, then? It’s hinted that it’s because of our exploration of Mars, but as this is not stated outright, this is mere conjecture.
Norma and Arthur’s decision to press the button sets in motion a series of ill-defined yet terrible events (including the pretentious graffiti shown above) that hint they are being punished for their decision, just as many others have in the past. That’s pleasingly neat, though it does make explicit something the Twilight Zone adaptation only hinted at, to greater effect. However, the initial morality test only really works if you believe pressing the button will kill a person. Norma and Arthur have no reason to believe it does, simply because it’s an empty box given to them by a stranger with half a face, and that belief that the button will do nothing seems to inform Norma’s decision to press the button. What happens next seems awfully cruel considering they did it half-thinking they were the butt of a joke.
The chain of bizarre events that follows lead to a heavily telegraphed finale in which Norma and Arthur’s child Walter is kidnapped, though with one unexpected development: the alien intelligence renders Walter blind and deaf. They are then given another choice. If Arthur shoots Norma in the heart, their child will be cured. If not, he will remain impaired. As Norma suffers from a deformity and what seems to be a fear of disability, the choice is easy to make. Arthur shoots her at the same time another couple presses the button, as happened earlier in the movie. It has the air of being very well thought through, though it’s rich to try to turn the movie back to being about wrenching philosophical quandaries when the middle section of the movie sees Arthur travelling through water-portals and Arlington’s brain-controlled minions stalking Norma or congregating in sinister groups. That are “creepy”.
Any emotional charge that the final scene could have conjured up is dissipated by the nonsensical plot convolutions, untied loose ends, and dreary effects sequences that brought us to that point. As with Russell T. Davies on the recent Torchwood: Children of Earth mini-series, Kelly has come up with what he sees as a fascinating moral quandary (how far would we go to protect our children?), but to get to that point has to mash any plot together. Again, the end result is a plot that resembles a blob of Silly Putty squished in a fist instead of rolled into a nicely linear sausage. Without a sturdy narrative framework to give these characters a believable reason to face this problem, it has zero heft, and the tearful, super-dramatic finale is not earned.
The issue is muddied further as another button is pushed by another woman at the same time Marsden fires. Are we to assume he has no free will? If so, where’s the tragedy? If not, and he fires of his own accord, then the button has nothing to do with the killing, and Arlington is potentially skewing the results of this game so that he can report back to his “employers” that we are doomed, and then justify their plans to destroy us. This is the most interesting idea thrown up by the film, and one that makes me think Kelly is actually onto something. Arlington even seems fond of Norma and Arthur: his final scene is riven with regret. In that case, maybe he has already made his mind up that humans are beyond saving, and Norma and Arthur are unfortunate casualties of this. If that is the case, I like the movie a little more.
However, these moments are less than ambiguous, and more like inconclusive, and this explanation has a whiff of fanwankery. Am I constructing a coherent explanation from clues left by Kelly? Or writing an alternate explanation using supposition and exaggeration from my own misinterpretation of the plot “tea-leaves” Kelly has swirled around the bottom of the teacup that is his movie? I’m all for pondering the meaning of a vague ending, but only when I think the writer or director is using inconclusive plotting to muddy their otherwise clearly expressed intentions. Compare any of Kelly’s endings to one of the truly great unresolved endings ever: John Sayles’ infuriating but brilliant Limbo. That movie has no concrete ending because Sayles is making a point about how real stories and lives have no satisfying ending. It invites speculation from the viewer, but offers no hints. It’s just the mystery of the next moment of our lives rendered in more dramatic — and humbling — style. (See also several open-ended Coen brothers movies.)
Kelly’s endings tend to mean less than nothing. Not “Oh the world has come to nothing and we must bear witness to the pointlessness and randomness of it all”. I mean “there is no ending as I couldn’t think of one. But there are a lot of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS things that have already happened, so mix-n-match those until you have something that seems logical. Jane’s Addiction roolz!” We’re not given enough concrete information to make up our minds what is happening, and so we can spin hypothetical explanations until the cows come home. A great way to keep your movies in the minds of your acolytes, but a boring and frustrating experience for those of us who think Kelly is a fraud who would rather namecheck Kurt Vonnegut or Jean-Paul Sartre than finish any of his potentially interesting ideas.
For example, Darko ended with a Christ-like sacrifice from Donnie, but left the reasons for the events unclear, though eventually explained by Kelly as a form of gibberish about Tangent Universes that seem to be describing a movie he made in his head while making an entirely different movie in the real world. Southland Tales ends with the return of Christ being thwarted by a disaffected asshole with a rocket launcher while two alternate versions of Seann William Scott create a portal that will something something. I think the world was doomed. Again, I had to finish the story for Kelly, coming up with my own interpretation. Same with The Box. Arlington’s actions make sense when I make them make sense, but then a bunch of other events make that interpretation false. Perhaps further viewing will make this interpretation clearer.
Nevertheless, this is the kind of faux-intellectualism that appeals to stoners who have read A Brief History of Time and Slaughterhouse 5 and think the universe is looping in on itself so that time is just space turned into a twelfth dimensional gas, man. In a way that could be appealing or forgivable. Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void (one of my favourite films of the year, and one that has a couple of similarities to the inferior Donnie Darko) is woolly-headed and naive, but it is such a mesmerising and beautifully rendered rush of sound and image that any silliness is forgiven. Kelly doesn’t have the technical skill to pull this kind of thing off, relying instead on dispiriting compositions, eye-scorching overlighting, bombastic music, and indifferent art direction. Imagine Altered States made by the director of a straight-to-DVD sequel to American Pie after he’s eaten a bad batch of ‘shrooms. That’s what this feels like.
Even worse, he doesn’t know what to do with his actors. Diaz gives yet another terrible performance as Norma, overplaying her big scenes, underplaying her quiet ones, and speaking with an accent oozing with so much Southernness I spent much of the movie waiting for her to raise a lace-gloved hand to her forehead and bellow, “Well ah do declayuh!” She’s never been good at doing anything other than be goofy (she was likeable enough in the first Charlie’s Angels movie), but after her unforgivably bad, tension-killing overacting here and in Nick Cassavetes’ disastrous My Sister’s Keeper, hopefully now filmmakers will stop casting her in dramas. Shades of Caruso favourite James Marsden fares better, probably because he’s a much better actor, but every so often a ludicrous, over-written line of dialogue will defeat him. It made me want to rewatch his triumphant turn in Enchanted for the ten millionth time, just to remind me of happier times.
Frank Langella’s impressive work is no surprise: the man is usually the best thing about every movie he is in. Though he is an eerie presence for much of the movie, even he is undone during a scene opposite Diaz in which she proclaims something about how “you wey-uh yo pay-un uh-pon yo fay-uss!”, and Langella’s look of regret is either brilliant acting showing Arlington’s sadness over the effect of his test, or Langella momentarily revealing his horror at Diaz’ continued employment. He is similarly unable to save a terrible, pretentious speech triggered by an NSA agent asking him why the alien morality test involves a box, which sounds like Kelly anticipated some confusion from the more curious members of his audience. Unfortunately his rationale is that we live in boxes, drive in boxes, watch boxes, and end up in boxes, so why not? Langella intones this monstrous wodge of contrivance as if he were playing King Lear, but the outrageous profundity-lite still reduced me to amazed giggles.
It would have been nice for Kelly to pose more questions about his authorial decisions, either to provide more amusement or to actually explain why anything happens in the film. How many people are in on Arlington’s plan and who why? How culpable is the government in this? Are they working with Arlington or against him? Why is it only women who ever seem to press the button? Why is there a rehearsal dinner and wedding in the movie? Is it just to get our characters in large groups where they can be menaced by creepy teenagers who laugh creepily? Why does Arthur travel through a portal in the middle of the movie? How much of this was just mood-setting, and how much necessary to the plot? Why is disability so important to the plot? Etc.
Actually, there is a potential answer to one question that threw me: why does NASA feature so prominently? We know Kelly’s father was a NASA scientist, and the movie is set one year after his birth, so is this somehow autobiographical? I’d be much more interested in it if that were the case, and that would certainly make the movie more than just a mixture of The Quatermass Experiment, The Astronaut’s Wife, and the pulp SF that gets namechecked in a mid-movie segue. For the first time we would see a connection to humanity amidst these dreadfully self-conscious exercises in intentional vagueness and poorly orchestrated atmospherics. The fact that all of these movies feel of a piece with each other, sharing similar motifs and concerns, make me wonder if Kelly is trying to tell a single story and failing no matter which direction he attacks it from.
It’s as if he once had a dream about water and tunnels and time travel and is constantly trying to figure out what it meant by telling different stories. Who knows, perhaps there really is a coherent story being told here about Living Receivers and how water is a Fourth-Dimensional Construct but he has yet to figure out how to make the pieces fit together. It’s this suspicion that brings me back to his movies even though I dislike all three of them. Perhaps one day Kelly will figure out how to tell this one story coherently, or to create some kind of key that makes all of the stories fit together, or just learn to modulate his glaring and annoying lighting scheme or find out that just referencing religious themes is not the same as fleshing out an SF story with a spiritual dimension. Either those revelations or he will get over his weird phobia of water. It’s just liquid, not a portal to the Nth dimension where the Judgemental Dream Aliens live, you crazy son of a bitch.
At that moment I will give him a break, and happily take back every negative thing I have ever said about him. Hard though it may seem after this lengthy rant, but I’m really rooting for him. I want that alternative explanation for Arlington’s test to be true, not just because it would justify spending money on his previous movies, or the countless hours I will inevitably spend pondering his ill-defined ideas, but because it would show Kelly has improved as a storyteller and has managed to hide a jewel of an idea at the centre of a tedious labyrinth. The tragedy is that, after sitting through so much uninspiring and downright exasperating chaff, I cannot believe Kelly has managed to pull off that feat. It’s a crying shame.
We walked on a red carpet on Monday. I felt like an interloper, especially clad in hobo jacket, Converse, and Green Lantern T-Shirt, but it was still a weirdly thrilling moment. Getting tickets to the first UK performance of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! (oh, that infuriating exclamation point…) was an accident of timing, not an attempt to rubberneck at a glamour collision, but it’s fine. The London Film Festival seems to be pretty casual. Only Soderbergh, writer Scott Z. Burns and producer Gregory Jacobs were dressed to the nines, and even then they seemed relaxed. Seeing Soderbergh delighted daisyhellcakes, who has had terrible luck spotting celebrities in the past (so far she’s seen Johnny Vegas, Bill Bailey, Jeffrey Archer and Queen Nigella), but refused to take a picture of the great man, stating that it would be gauche. As I’d seen the Enter The Void audience eagerly snapping away at Gaspar Noé last week, I figured it would be okay, but after taking this blurry picture…
…I convinced myself that the final stutter in Soderbergh’s short speech was caused by him spotting me and thinking, “Dude, that’s totes gauche.” For the record, I’m sorry Mr. Soderbergh. I liked Solaris, if that’s any consolation.
The lack of a distribution deal for Enter The Void is making me unbelievably sad. Attending that screening was something I did on a whim after seeing Drew McWeeny become so enthusiastic, and now I realise that if I hadn’t gone I might never have had the chance to see it on the big screen. Just yesterday Edgar Wright was tweeting his frustration at having missed it, and it threw my good fortune into perspective. Is there any way to start a campaign to save it from oblivion on DVD, when the only distribution deal it has seems to be getting a release in Finland next April? As the version I saw was seemingly different from those at Cannes and Toronto, perhaps it’s still being fine-tuned, and then it will be put on the market again. Certainly there are longueurs at about the 100 minute mark, but I’m not sure what could be removed without ruining the flow.
The one thought I had would be for the Prince Charles Cinema to stump up for their very own print. Despite its punishing length, this is the perfect midnight-screening cult movie in waiting, with massive appeal to counter-cultural audiences and cinephiles who can understand what Noé is trying to achieve (a group that excludes J. Hoberman and Variety’s Rob Nelson, who completely missed the point of the movie). It would take time for them to get their money back, as the buzz on this film has yet to grow properly, but it would be a wise investment. Unless it did suddenly get a distribution deal and the film turned up elsewhere, but still, right now, it’s not looking too good.
Sadness over the fate of that one movie aside, the festival has been extremely enjoyable so far. Even the one movie I’ve not liked — Jason Reitman’s disappointing Up In The Air, which I hope to write about soon — has its pleasures, especially the terrific performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. For the most part audiences have been great too, with enthusiastic responses to The Men Who Stare At Goats and The Informant! reminding me why seeing movies at the cinema can be a rewarding experience, though Mr. Honking McOverlaugh who sat behind us during The Informant! was a bit of a trial. Yes yes, it’s a very funny film, but Mr. Soderbergh is sitting at the back of the room and even your guffaws cannot reach that far, especially when my eardrums are absorbing 90% of the sound energy.
It’s not all roses, though. If you’re a new reader visiting this site after searching for info about London Film Festival screenings, please can I beg you to do the right thing and arrive at the screenings with plenty of time to spare? If you’ve not already picked up your tickets, there can be terrible queues, and that’s after navigating the barriers, security guards, and photographers blocking the pedestrianised roads of Leicester Square. The movies have tended to start a few minutes late, but there are no trailers or adverts, so if a film is supposed to start at, say, 16:15, the film will be on the screen at around 16:20, and arriving at 16:30 is going to piss a lot of people off. Oh, and the tickets have allocated seat numbers on them FOR A REASON. This message is directed at the numerous people who seem to love sitting wherever they want, and then look put out when they are evicted from their seats by ushers not long after the film has already started. I’m looking at you, selfish idiots who figured sitting by me was the thing to do and then ruined the start of Enter The Void and White Material, with extra bonus fuck you’s to the couple who turned up late at White Material and then left their phones on. Assholes.
I’ve had fun with the odd connections between the movies I’ve seen so far. The Informant! and Claire Denis’ White Material are centred by main characters (played with great skill by Matt Damon and the incredible Isabelle Huppert respectively) whose inability to see the dire consequences of their behaviour dooms them. In Soderbergh’s movie Mark Whitacre’s insanity is played for laughs for the most part, though those laughs run out by the end as you realise the man is so deeply embedded in his fantasy life that he doesn’t even seem capable of keeping track of it. Maria Vial — the protagonist of White Material — is in just as much denial, but perhaps even to the extent of not recognising her own cultural and ethnic background. Her ambiguous actions in the final moments of the film could be the product of derangement or berserk revenge, but whatever their origin, they were enough to deeply upset the lady sitting next to me. She seemed traumatised, poor dear.
Other connections abound. Jason Bateman teams up with Jason Reitman again for Up In The Air, and also features in Extract, which I’m hoping to see tomorrow. Melanie Lynskey appears in Up In The Air and The Informant!, and is similarly weak in each movie. Clooney appears in The Men Who Stare At Goats and Up In The Air, and co-produced The Informant!Up In The Air and Up (which I saw again on Sunday, though it was not part of the festival) is about men who find escape in flying, and learn to connect with others. The protagonists of White Material and Enter The Void are often filmed from behind: in White Material as a representation of how Maria is hiding her true face from herself and others, and in Enter The Void as a consequence of the PoV conceit. Enter The Void and The Men Who Stare At Goats features talk of esoteric beliefs, as well as the use of hallucinogens.
That was one of the things that annoyed me most about Goats. While Enter The Void took the use of hallucinogenic compounds seriously, Goats used it as a stupid punchline, with characters acting as if they were drunk and high-lariously falling over a lot and talking about how hungry they are. Goats was a lot of fun, but the relentlessly silly tone made it hard for the film to shift gears in the final act when we see the negative consequences of letting a bunch of insecure New Age dipsticks into the army. What was, in Jon Ronson’s excellent book, a sobering portrait of US psy-ops torture techniques gone weird is here transformed into a slapstick romp with one minute of “Oh noes, war is bad” added to give the protagonists something to fight for. The book still manages to be funny, but Ronson’s a skillful enough writer to juxtapose the wacky with the awful. Here it’s shoehorned in, and seemingly only to give a dramatic edge to the Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey) character arc that suddenly appears midway through the movie. Writer Peter Straughan does some good work in translating the oddness of Ronson’s book into movie form, and keeps the funniest material mostly intact, but the artificial three-act structure and neatness of the final few minutes smack of laziness. Still, it remains very entertaining, and what it gets right it really gets right. Jeff Bridges — as New Earth Army leader Bill Django — perfectly channels the craziness of First Earth Battalion leader Jim Channon…
…and first-time director Grant Heslov is good enough to recreate the pictures shown in Channon’s manifesto: a lovely touch. It feels like the film will touch on all aspects of the insanity of war in a similar way to Clooney’s previous Gulf War film Three Kings, but even with the addition of warring Blackwater-esque security forces and asides showing Clooney and Ewan McGregor wandering through Iraq getting into scrapes, it never fully takes off. I’d still recommend it, though. As with Up In The Air, Clooney does miracle work holding everything together. It’s easy to forget what a great film star he is. He does comedy and drama equally well, and now he’s removed almost all of his tics, he can excel at both over-the-top dopey comedy or subtle and moving character work. We’re lucky he’s around.
My recommendation for The Informant! is much stronger. Though we were exhausted while watching, and were sitting in the Odeon West End which — unlike the Vue West End which is showing the majority of films — is not air-conditioned, it turned out to be almost as good as we had hoped. Spoilery trailers and press releases have given away the delusional nature of Mark Whitacre, but Soderbergh and ace writer Burns hide the depth of his craziness until a wonderful final act where everyone involved in the Lysine price-fixing investigation is shocked by his slowly unravelling web of lies. The cast doesn’t have a single weak link, with an unexpectedly complex performance from Matt Damon at the heart of the movie, but I have to give special props to Scott Bakula, who is particularly affecting as the enthusiastic FBI agent whose career goes awry thanks to Whitacre’s deceptions. His increasingly heartbroken face adds a bittersweet note to the zany proceedings. Props also to Joel McHale in his first dramatic role: weird seeing the snarky Soup host playing straight man to Damon.
I also heartily recommend White Material, but I’m still processing that one, so I won’t go on about it too much, except to say that a) Claire Denis has a mastery of pace and atmosphere that would shame other directors, but then you probably already knew that, and b) Christopher Lambert was good enough to make me partially forgive him for his dire performance in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. I can lay the blame for that on Kelly, I guess. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, after all.
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show:Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get jusdhfjsh in to direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What setsSons of Anarchyapart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superbDollhouse– is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger and potentially ruinous moral compromise, the show became something that could well rival the mightyShieldfor complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best casts on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnignificence from the ever-awesome Kim Coates, let’s not forget) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, wwho blows everyone else away with her unhinged warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show:Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year:Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot:Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot:The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series:Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year:Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year:Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year:Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year:House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
As mentioned yesterday, exposure to the brain-lacerating horrors of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road has left me in a bit of an emotional state. His command of image and mood is been used to conjure up something even more terrifying than Anton Chigurh and Judge Holden combined and multiplied; a vision of a world turned to ash by nuclear war, with no sunlight and no plant life, the survivors pretty much waiting to die or banding together to eat their fellow man. McCarthy is ruthless and relentless, and by the time I was done with it, even the small glimmers of hope found within (and the beautifully rendered relationship between the protagonist and his son) are not enough to dispell the cloud of doom hanging over my head. Stupid genius writer.
In an attempt to cheer myself up I have watched comedies and quality contemporary drama, but neither did the trick. So, in an attempt to vaccinate myself (after the fact, but still), I decided to watch some dystopic sci fi set in post-apocalyptic future worlds, except this time I figured I should go for something less brutal, more fluffy. There are grades of awfulness within the genre, with The Road being at the top of the awfulness chart, and everything else seeming jolly in comparison. Several contenders came to mind, including Richard Stanley’s Hardware, the 2000AD comic strip “adaptation” (i.e. the rip-off that caused a lawsuit) that came out in the 80s. It was shown on Zone Horror a week ago (not long after they screened Stanley’s second film, Dust Devil), and I watched it to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Amazingly, it was even worse, being little more than a clumsy barrage of noise and image and embarrassing dialogue and silly acting. Just appalling, and quite hideous. It’s so bad that I’m beginning to suspect that his version of The Island Of Doctor Moreau might have been just as bad as John Frankenheimer’s version, and it might not even have been as entertaining. That would equal total fail.
So which films to watch? Thankfully Neil Marshall’s Doomsday just hit DVD and Blu-Ray in the UK, and Mathieu Kassovitz’ Babylon A.D. came out last Friday, so it seemed logical to try those out for size. I will say that, in their own way, they made me feel better about the forthcoming end of the world, but were they any good on their own terms?
Actually, Babylon A.D.‘s only real gift to my tortured psyche was to show a plausible future world that wasn’t a landscape of mere ash and death, but was a well-designed cyberpunk-style amalgam taken from various different sources, most notably Alfonso Cuaron’s magnificent Children Of Men. Of course, as we’re talking about cyberpunk here, there is also the unavoidable influence of William Gibson, godfather of the sub-genre, whose Neuromancer remains unfilmed while his ideas pop up in other movies all the time. And yes, I’m still bitter that Chris Cunningham never got to make his version of that book.
Babylon A.D. is based on a French cyberpunk novel called Babylon Babies, by Maurice G Dantec, whose hyper-aggressive website has to be seen to be believed. I’m sure I read somewhere that he is a contemporary of noted humorist Michel “Monsieur Happy” Houellebecq, which makes me want to read his books even more now (thanks to the lovely chaps at Aphrohead Books, my copy of Babylon Babies is on the way). From what I gather from this MIT Press synopsis, Dantec’s book sounds pretty dissimilar to the movie I saw on Monday.
Set in the hidden “flesh and chip” breeding grounds of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian Mafiosi, Babylon Babies has as its hero a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired by a mysterious source to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada. A garden variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered an even higher fee by another organization, he realizes Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human life as we know it.
Inspired by Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, Gilles Deleuze, and other extrapolationists [OMG my new favourite word! - Neck] of the future, Babylon Babies unfolds at breakneck speed as Thoorop risks his life to save Marie, whose brain—linking to the neuromatrix—loses all limits and becomes the universe itself. Exploring the symbiosis between organic matter and computer power to spin new forms of consciousness, Maurice Dantec rides Nietzsche’s prophecy: “Man is something to be overcome.”
It sounds like a Gallic version of Gibson’s Count Zero, but with a focus on Catholicism instead of voodoo. While the movie is set in the Russia of the future, and presented as a broken society filled with barely functioning ghettos, black marketeering, and militaristic mercenaries, it ends up in New York, which, according to this excellent review, is not how the book ends. It features hints of a virus bomb, ineptly expositioned by Vin Diesel during one of the many slow dialogue scenes (a shame as this hastily explained plot point is the engine that powers much of the later half of the movie), and the young girl ferried by his character Toorop is indeed a genetically engineered faux-Messiah created to give credence to a new religion formed by Evil Charlotte Rampling (the one idea in the movie that I liked), but there is nothing about a Neuromatrix, nothing about Jeremy Narby’s theory of conscious communication with DNA itself (which is a damn shame), and barely anything about trans-human or post-human theory. Instead we get The Transporter, transposed to the grimy future, and without even a greased-up Jason Statham to entertain us.
Of course, as I’ve discussed before, Mathieu Kassovitz has publicly disowned the movie and called Fox a bunch of assholes, for which I will always kinda love him. The movie I saw on Monday is apparently nothing like the vision he had originally, and so maybe in the version there would have been a Neuromatrix, and a woman who is one with the universe, and ayahuasca visions, and a proper ending. Instead, the film is a framework of setpieces and locations, with talented performers moving from place to place and having conversations that mean nothing. Emotionally the film is dead in the water, and with budget cuts and other tamperings evident throughout, the action set-pieces slam and crash and oof but mean nothing. It’s your actual “sound and fury signifying nothing”, except in a credibly realised, if unimaginative, dystopian future.
The world Kassovitz has created is fun for the most part. The Russian scenes (filmed in the wintery cities of the Czech Republic) look convincingly desolate, with the locals dressed in either warm winter coats or Euro-trash tracksuits and bling, which was another touch I loved. The few shots we see of the country from the air show few lights, the odd enormous crater, cities broken and jerry-rigged. It’s all great, and the industrial settings in “Vladivostok” are convincingly depressing, as are the scenes of cramped markets, crowds of refugees, and the odd bit of chaotic and ill-explained ultra-violence.
Nevertheless this cheered me up way more than McCarthy’s bleak vision, because at least in that world there is still a semblance of society, with a barter system and entertainment and a version of community spirit that is brutal (i.e. Diesel punches the odd person while growling), but still better than the terror of The Road. I would hate to live in Babylon A.D.‘s world, but it’s better than McCarthy’s alternative.
In contrast to the grungy desolation of Eastern Europe, when our band of heroes arrives in New York, we see it looks like it’s doing just fine in the future, which struck me as strange. I’m sure any economist would predict America would not be thriving in a future that sees Europe fall so far towards the brink of anarchy, but I guess New York would certainly thrive (certainly in the centre of the city) while the rest of the country suffers. We don’t get a chance to see what the rest of the US looks like at this point. It does seem to have a very strict passport policy (it involves implants in the neck), and outside Manhattan the roads are messy enough to allow for some ineptly edited car chases, so maybe it’s falling apart there too. Still, at least New York has the obligatory futuristic talking adverts covering the sides of skyscrapers, though sadly it merely makes it look like Jean-Michel Jarre’s concert in Houston taken to the Nth degree.
The onscreen world is pretty much all I liked about the movie. I’ve defended Diesel in the past, but he’s on the verge of parody in this movie, posing as a tough guy in an unconvincing manner and merely hinting at an inner life of regret and courage. Again, perhaps a longer version of this will make a difference, and it is possible his performance was gutted by the editing as Kassovitz has hinted, so forgive me for being rude when in fact he might have been better in the original cut, but in the version I saw, he did not convince. He spends most of the movie with Mélanie Thierry (playing the Virgin Mary-esque Aurora) and Michelle Yeoh, whose role as a kung-fu nun should have been the best thing about the movie, but sadly wasn’t.
The trio of characters certainly evoked memories of Children Of Men, which is a comparison Babylon A.D. just doesn’t need, especially as, in the original novel, Toorop is joined by an Israeli army vet called Rebecca and Irish assassin named Dowie, and not a kung fu nun who spends most of the movie denying her kung fu nunniness, much to my disappointment. Why Kassovitz and co-writer Eric Besnard thought that echoing Cuaron’s superior movie by paring the group down to three (and eventually two) was a good idea escapes me. Okay, so changing up Pam Ferris for Michelle Yeoh appeals to me as a dedicated Yeoh fan, but Ferris was great, as were Clive Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey. Plus, Kassovitz is utterly unable to replicate Cuaron’s imaginative action scenes and visual trickery, falling back on little more than the CGI effect of making cameras go through closed windows over and over again. He did this numerous times in Gothika as well. Can someone stop him from overusing this trick, please?
Mélanie Thierry is fine; she has to play vulnerable and messianic, and does those two things reasonably well (i.e. she shrieks and looks calm at different points of the movie), with the bonus challenge of feigning sexual interest in Diesel despite that being out of character, but Yeoh is utterly wasted. Her natural gravitas, maturity, and grace are barely in evidence here, replaced instead with almost mute fear and sporadic outbreaks of poorly shot kickassery that happen without explanation of how a nun from a Mongolian monastery is able to beat the crap out of anyone standing in her way. This is one of the cardinal sins of the movie, as Yeoh’s presence was one of the deciding factors when debating whether to see this or not. She is the hardcore goddess of kung fu cinema, and keeps getting stuck in choad like this. Adding a bunch of free runners jumping around a cramped warehouse does not mitigate the side-lining of the formidable Yeoh.
The rest of the main cast are almost as wasted. Mark Strong appears wearing yet another unappealing wig, playing a smuggler who may or may not be trustworthy (hint: he’s not, obviously). He gets little to do other than be friendly and then deceitful, and missed a trick by not cackling maniacally when his easily predicted betrayal happens about ten minutes after he is introduced. Lambert Wilson pops up as a geneticist who is also the father of Aurora. Entertainingly, he is covered with plastic wires to denote his part-cyborg nature, and is appropriately benevolent and tragic.
It’s a bit of a nothing role, and his hasty departure from the movie leaves about a million questions unanswered. Compared to his memorably oily and hammy performance as The Merovingian in the Matrix sequels, this is forgettable stuff. Gerard Depardieu is also featured as Russian bigwig Gorsky, almost unrecognisable under a bad wig and a prosthetic face. He resembles Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, to be honest.
Why they did this is beyond me, and his low-wattage performance also disappoints. This is the guy who played the definitive Cyrano de Bergerac? Who acted De Niro off the screen in Bertollucci’s 1900? Still, at least he’s not playing Obelix again, even though anyone could have played this part. Hell, I could have done it. Slap a fake nose on me and I’ll tyalk with Rhoshyan accent forrr pennies if necessary. Film producers, contact me via email if you need cheap acting in a hurry.
Worst of all, Charlotte Rampling’s appearance as the High Priestess of the Noelite cult is utterly mystifying. She’s only on screen for a little while, but she makes a hell of an impression. At first her cold and steely demeanour are de riguer for this kind of impassive and sinister religious nutjob, but as the film enters the incomprehensible final act, she starts twitching her head like a robot, delivering her lines with a mixture of artificial flatness and bad-guy posturing. It makes very little sense. Though it’s not up there with Fiona Shaw’s unmissably berserk appearance in Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia it’s still the kind of eccentric acting that makes you wish there was more of it. Certainly a longer cut might give us more fun, though it could also explain what the hell is going on with her, and in a perverse way I don’t want to know. It stands alone as a kind of curio; further exposition will merely remove the fascinating mystery.
Still, for the most part I was pleasantly bored, less than excited by the slow-moving plot and appallingly badly edited action scenes, but held in my chair by what I will have to refer to from now on as the Genre Baseline, which is the automatic amount of forgiveness and pleasure I will have for any film or book that is of a genre that I love (I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way). I’ve said it before, but just once more for the record, I love sci fi so much that even crappy sci fi holds a grip on me, as long as it has the odd good idea or gimmick. I’d much rather see the good stuff, obviously, but I’ll be more forgiving of the not-so-good (example; Equilibrium is derivative tosh, but it’s derivative tosh featuring GUNKATA and Christian Bale breaking bones and so therefore is automatically awesome).
For most of its running time, Babylon A.D. is kinda dull, with the odd interesting setpiece to distinguish it. I especially liked a mad scramble across an icy expanse to get onto a submarine, though sadly not long after that we’re given a shoddy action scene with Diesel’s stuntman flipping his snowmobile through the air and shooting down missile-laden drones. Where did they get the snowmobiles? Why are these dangerous drones vulnerable to pistol-fire? Bleh.
It continues in this manner until about fifteen minutes before the end of the film, with Aurora saving our hero by shooting him (?!?!?), doing something mystical with a big exploding missile (apparently the immaculately-conceived twins she is carrying are able to manipulate reality), and then disappearing. Lambert Wilson rebuilds Diesel using some plastic, and then hacks his memory to find out where Aurora is hiding. Diesel goes to find her with a couple of Wilson’s men, while Wilson gets shot by the High Priestess, who then disappears from the movie and is never mentioned again.
Diesel finds Aurora, battles with some of the Noelite redshirts in a boring and badly edited car chase that involves Diesel using grenades and his brand-new enhanced arm to generate some extra ‘splodey, and then several months later hangs out with Aurora as she is about to give birth. Look after the twins, she says, and so we fade to several years later. The twins (one black, one white, both girls) are sitting in a pretty garden as a white-clad and benevolently smiling Diesel walks up to them, tells them a storm is coming, and then takes them into the nearby house. The End.
I’m not kidding, that is how it ends. Now, I don’t mind obscure finales, and have passionately defended many films with impenetrable final acts, but that is ridiculous. There is no line of dialogue anywhere else in the movie that sets up this finale. There is no way of interpreting it because there is no possible logical interpretation. It just ends, with characters dropping out for no reason (did Aurora die? Did she turn into a ball of light and vanish? Did the High Priestess just give up?), and no hint of what it is that the “storm” represents. Once more I assume Kassovitz and Besnard knew what they were doing originally, and had their cut changed by Fox suits, and apparently the French release has a different ending with no car chase and more chat between Diesel and Aurora, but who the hell thought this was an acceptable way to end a movie? Did some bean-counter at Fox get assigned to the film and think, “Fuck it, it’s sci fi, we can just make the ending completely impenetrable and they’ll make up excuses for it, cuz sci fi fans are stupid”? Did they get Richard Kelly to re-edit the ending? It certainly seems that way. Intentionally creating an ambiguous and incoherent ending in the mistaken belief that not making sense is the same as generating profundity and post-movie debate is his bag, after all (if you don’t believe me, bite the bullet and watch the criminally terrible Southland Tales).
The ASBO-YOBS that filled the cinema when I saw it took great pleasure in hooting at the screen (prior to stabbing it with their knives), and I felt like joining in. I’m sure the source material has a peculiar ending, but it must have made sense to someone. This, on the other hand, is a debacle. I don’t blame Kassovitz and Diesel for disowning it; I would have done the same thing. No matter how generous you feel, or how much you wanted it to succeed (and I certainly did), this is a failure. Once international box office is taken into account, perhaps the movie will make a tiny profit (it’s not like Fox can be expected to add much to the surprisingly small $70m budget in terms of advertising, as the film got almost no promotion). If so, Fox will inevitably milk the teat with a director’s cut, if Kassovitz is willing. If so, I look forward to it, and I can’t wait to read Dantec’s novel. That doesn’t mean I think the world desperately needed to be told this story, but I’m willing to wait to see if there is a version of it that justifies this movie’s existence, because this version sure as hell isn’t it.
(Apologies to anyone who read an early draft of this and thought it was poorly edited. It was, partially because I’m a terrible idiot, but mostly because the computer I’m using is massively unreliable and I had to just post and walk away or it would have gone out of the window. Hopefully things are fixed now.)
My plan to chronicle my adventures in sci fi cinema pretty much foundered not long after I started, a long-gestating plan to talk about Southland Tales falling by the wayside. That said, I still do intend to inspect that, as it is a fascinating project (which is not praise, BTW), but it will be in a different, more combative format. I’ve still been experiencing good and bad sci fi since my last Sci Fi Through Space/Time post, but never got around to talking about them. In fact, I woke up today fully intending to talk about a movie I saw recently and fell in love with, but instead, while trying to eat a bowl of penne (aka the worst pasta shape in the world), I decided to watch Bob Shaye’s The Last Mimzy, and it’s such an oddity I just had to bring it up here. The other movie will have to wait until another time (hopefully not next September).
Ostensibly a kids’ movie owing a debt to ET, The Last Mimzy is actually a mash note to Buddha that will doubtless be picked up by New Agers the world over, portraying as it does a post-Age of Aquarius world filled with flowers and telepathy and flying children in stark contrast to the nasty now, which contains nothing but hate and gadgets and fear and other deeply unpleasant things. I got a hint of that from the trailers, and it made me curious to see it when it had a feeble release last year, but mainly it stuck in my head because Charlie Brooker used to use the word “mimsy” as a slang word for the lower ladyparts, and the thought of a kids’ movie about that amused me greatly.
Instead of weird and surely illegal child-friendly porn, it’s based on this short story, Mimsy Were The Borogoves, by sci fi writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, operating under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. Originally (as you can see if you read that handy version of it linked to above), it was a dark tale of children coming across a box from the future, filled with toys (to be used as markers and nothing more) which educate them enough that they learn a new language and a form of multidimensional geometry that enables them to translate the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky (written by Carroll’s muse, who was in possession of another future toy sent back earlier). With this knowledge at hand, the children create a wormhole taking them from our dimension, much to the horror of their booze-drinking jerk parents. It’s quirky and clever and kind of sinister. It was previously adapted as a TV series on French TV as Tout spliques étaient les Borogoves. I have no idea how that turned out.
The Last Mimzy ignores the intellectual and atmospheric (even quite cynical) tone of the story, going instead for something much more optimistic and woolly, but with incidental details that held my interest throughout. As I said when I started this project, I was looking for sci fi films that were not of the norm, that were as inventive and original and peculiar and stimulating as the best of sci fi literature, and though this falls far short of those expectations, it represents a collision of sci fi tropes, cultural markers, and potential corporate fiddlings that fascinated me.
Beginning in a cuddly tunic-wearing pastoral future of much lazy sci fi, a teacher mind-melds with her young students and tells them the history of their civilisation, beginning with the travails of a scientist attempting to save humanity from itself. The world soul and the gene pool have become so corrupted that humanity faces extinction. Nothing in that world is pure enough to save us, and so he sends objects back in time using a complicated and interestingly visualised Einstein-Rosen Bridge in the hope of educating the recipients enough to reconstruct the mechanism and send back the living computer (known as a Mimzy, and yes, I did smirk) with a sample of their DNA, which, compared to that of his fellow man, is pure. Knowing that adults would not be able to understand such a concept (an idea taken from the short story), he packages the Mimzy as a toy rabbit, in the hope that it would be handed to a child, who would then communicate with the Mimzy, learn from it, and save the future.
There’s a hodge-podge of ideas all over this plot, and that’s before I get into the meat of the movie (the previous paragraph accounts for 3% of the movie’s length, and about 75% of the interesting ideas). There are many influences here, more than I could find right now, so I’ll just go through the ones that came to mind while watching.
Sending things to the past to save the future = The Terminator franchise (and Harlan Ellison’s Soldier primarily please don’t sue me Harlan!!!).
Using the past to save the future = John Varley’s short story Air Raid and the subsequent movie Millennium, which also reminded me of The Last Mimzy due to its unorthodox effects and ugly, muted pallette.
Children targeted by peculiar force = John Wyndham’s Chocky, as well as the kids’ TV show from the 80s, which also featured tunnel effects and crystal shapes.
Children taught to use advanced technology during dreams = Explorers, which was one of my favourite films when younger.
Humanity transformed to a higher state of being thanks to powers that appear to be paranormal = Phenomenon, one of the most New Age movies ever made.
Future jeopardised by the death of the world soul = Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within, as well as the seventh installment of the game that inspired the movie.
Future society as utopian, peaceful land of plenty = Star Trek.
Well, there are lots of examples of utopian sci fi, but that’s the one that sprang to mind, mostly because The Last Mimzy is filled with the kind of New Age sentiment and imagery beloved of the more extreme Star Trek fans, the ones who believe Gene Roddenberry was providing a template for humanity to live by (similar to the goals of Scientology, though without the Church and the structure and financial power). The film definitely posits that we will one day be saved by the potential of the human race (a potential which is contained within an object of such unbelievable sentimental significance that it threatens to drown the movie in a sea of cynicism from the more sceptical viewer, but I’ll get to that soon), and living in a utopian society that makes Roddenberry’s vision look like Baltimore in The Wire, but prior to that it has to cast us as lost souls missing out on realising our full potential, and it leads to some amazing anvillicious moments.
Shaye and his writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich (from a screen story by Carol Skilken and J.M. Barrie fan James V. Hart) go to great lengths to show us how the modern world is in the process of enormous FAIL. Metal detectors erected in schools, kids using technology to cheat at exams, a populace disassociated form itself; it’s horrible! Except not really. My favourite shot is of a bus full of people ignoring each other because they’re listening to iPods, texting, typing on laptops, and playing PSPs (which appear throughout, though I can imagine Sony is really pissed at how the machine is used as a symbol of youth corruption). I weep for humanity!
Except that might work in an idyllic area like the one this film is set in (the outskirts of Seattle and some lovely looking areas of British Columbia), but everywhere else, there is no way people want to be talking on the bus. Just a couple of days ago, while trying to get home and read a book I was really interested in, I had to wait for the driver to argue with a guy who crashed into our vehicle, and then bitch at some passengers who had a go at him a bit later. There was no one on that bus I wanted to talk to. Yay distractions that stop me from having to communicate with my fellow man who are often quite hostile and unpleasant!
After setting up this horrible world of soullessness, we are introduced to our two protagonists, Noah and Emma Wilder, played by Chris O’Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. He’s older and is truly obnoxious and nasty, she’s cutesy and innocent and cloying. Noah is a pretty unpleasant kid at the start, deep in an existential fugue so powerful he lashes out at everything around him, hating himself and his life, cutting himself off from everyone by incessantly playing evil computer games, and picking on his sister. By the end he is a little hero helping to save humanity, but in the early stages he is tough to associate with. That’s fine. I get what the goal was there, but showing him using games to cut himself off from everyone else is a bit rich coming from a film co-written and directed by men whose company, New Line, licences out its film properties to gaming companies for adaptation. Perhaps Shaye resents this, and doesn’t want the money. If so, it’s news to Peter Jackson. As you can see, I had trouble reconciling the nature of the filmmakers and the message they were trying to sell.
The kids are taken to a beach house by their mother, Jo (played by Joely Richardson), while their father David (played by Timothy Hutton), can’t make it because his law job keeps him from spending time with his kids blah blah, While playing on a beach they find the mysterious box sent from the future by the scientist. Inside it are weird mineral artifacts, a blue blob thing (which I thought would come to life and start interacting with the kids, though it thankfully doesn’t), and a toy rabbit that talks to Emma and educates her. Noah fixates upon a slab of green crystal, which his mother only sees as a rock. Oh adults, your wonderless minds are impermeable as steel!
After spending time with the objects, the kids (especially Emma) realise they have properties that appear magical, much as Arthur C. Clarke said future technology would appear like magic to us. Fragments of a broken rock, when thrown at the floor, will hover and rotate, creating a localised field that temporarily undoes objects on a molecular level. Mimzy communicates with Emma and unlocks her telepathic potential, as well as predicts the future for her. The crystal slab improves Noah’s vision, as well as teaches him how to access a lattice of connective energy in reality that can be used to open small wormholes, and shows him how to generate sound waves on a frequency that can be used to manipulate insects and spiders into doing his bidding. Using that, he makes a mindblowing science fair entry, using spiders to create a bridge structure that could revolutionise the construction industry. This is what would happen more regularly if computer games and Facebook were banned obviously.
This was my favourite section of the movie, pulling weird concepts and effects out of the ether even though many of the ideas would come to nothing later. I particularly liked the scene with Hutton showing his son how to play golf, and Noah using his wormhole power to send the ball 300ft. So, you know, yay for humanity, but bad news for Titleist. I guess the future contains no sport. (Wow, can I go there tomorrow?)
Sadly, the film goes off the rails in a peculiar way at that point, and by peculiar I mean predictable, but featuring plot developments I really thought I would never see in a kids’ movie. The growing power of the kids scares their parents, who react badly to the presence of the objects. Richardson in particular has an unpleasant freakout, after which the family starts to fall apart. At around this time the crystal slab merges with the weird blob artifact, creating a new object in an electromagnetic pulse explosion that wipes out Seattle’s power grid.
This is enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security, headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan, who barges into their house under the authority of the PATRIOT Act (yes, in the middle of a kids’ film), and detains the family, impounds the objects, and generally acts like a bit of a dick. It’s at this point that we can add Poltergeist (family unit threatened by outside force) and ET (family unit exposed to otherworldly thing detained by government) to the list of films mimicked.
Poltergeist was strongly on my mind during the scenes with Noah’s science teacher, Larry (played by super-awesome Rainn Wilson), and his fiancee Naomi, played by Kathryn Hahn. Noah’s accelerated braingrowth attracts Larry’s attention, as does his doodling of complex Tibetan mandalas. While Noah and Emma’s parents are wary of their children now that they have begun to change, Larry and Naomi see the potential of the two, Larry because of the science angle, Naomi because she is a big Buddhist hippie type. They try to convince Jo that the kids are special, in a scene similar to one in Poltergeist, when benign paranormal investigators attempt to help the Freeling family. However, in that film JoBeth Williams is receptive to what they say, but here Joely Richardson’s character freaks out.
To be honest, I don’t blame her. She has put the weird behaviour of her kids down as just growing pains, and then suddenly two hippies show up blathering on about mandalas, tulkus and palm reading. This is especially bogus as, except for the mandala idea (mandalas being maps of the universe, as well as being a pretty pattern that shows up throughout the movie), none this litany of Buddhist folklore has any bearing on the film whatsoever.
Which is one of the reasons the movie baffled me so much. Here I was watching a very optimistic movie (almost to the point of parody) that had been made by guys I thought were nothing more than suits, as well as being co-written by someone who appeared to be the most downbeat person in Hollywood. In the past I have resisted watching movies by Bruce Joel Rubin as they are entirely humourless and self-consciously obsessed with death. In an interview with Premiere magazine conducted prior to the release of Jacob’s Ladder, Rubin spent a lot of time talking about how fascinated he was by death, and how it was his muse. A quick look at his IMDb page shows him working almost exclusively on this topic for years. Brainstorm is the bonkers tale of a machine that records what happens to Louise Fletcher after her death. Ghost is obviously about Patrick Swayze stalking his girlfriend after death. Jacob’s Ladder is about a Vietnam vet who doesn’t realise he is dead and in a Hell populated with Francis-Bacon-esque fellas with the rapid shaky head thing that’s been ripped off repeatedly ever since. My Life is about a terminally ill man coming to terms with his impending doom. Deep Impact is about an entire planet coming to terms with its impending doom. Even his adaptations of books, Deceived and Deadly Friend, are about death in some way (faked death and implanting a brain into a robot after death, respectively). Only Stuart Little 2 seems to have escaped that, though I haven’t seen it. Perhaps the whole family dies at the end, after trying to come to terms with it for a while.
I don’t know. It’s an impressive sight, someone who has managed to corner the market on an entire subject, but his obsession with it always smacked of self-importance, as if this was his badge of profundity, not helped that his scripts have often been horribly depressing. Deep Impact in particular made me miserable for weeks after seeing it. Of those movies, I only really enjoyed Brainstorm, and I don’t even think it’s that great. I just liked the concept, and Doug Trumbull’s weird decision to turn it into a slapstick comedy whenever he could.
Turns out I misunderstood where Rubin was coming from, and poking around the internet today has shown me the error of my ways. His obsession with death is not the morbid and ostentatious thing I thought it was, but rooted in his belief in Buddhism. He’s been a believer for twenty-five years, and though the theme of dealing with death has been prevalent in his work, The Last Mimzy is the first film of his that I’ve seen that deals with his Buddhism. Seems I was wrong about his interest in death all along. That’s not to say I suddenly like his work. I still don’t enjoy any of the films I listed earlier. I just think he’s not as pretentious now, is all.
Sadly, considering this is the first time I’ve seen Rubin’s belief system represented within a film, it’s via the characters of Larry and Naomi, who are almost the comic relief. Perhaps it’s just that Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn are light and likeable (and of course Wilson is Dwight Schrute, which tends to hang in the head even when he plays someone completely different), but their Buddhism isn’t taken very seriously. Rubin isn’t the last name on the script; the last draft of the script appears to belong to New Line Head of Production Toby Emmerich, who might have rewritten them a bit. I suspect this is definitely the case as Emmerich’s only other screenplay credit is on Frequency, at the end of which a secondary character become a multi-millionaire by investing in Yahoo! thanks to a stock tip from the future. In The Last Mimzy, Naomi obsesses over a dream Larry had where he accurately predicted lottery numbers that he never played, and at the end of the film he has another prediction. Emmerich has a big boner for characters coming into unearned money, it seems.
The thing that really grates about that scene, though, is that Naomi reads Emma’s palm and sees that she is indeed a tulku, and has great potential to change the world. This turns out to be the case, but what has her status as a tulku got to do with the future? Why is she the chosen one? She discovered the box by accident, and there’s no hint that it was aimed at her. It’s just a weird shout-out to Buddha that is shoe-horned in with extra palm-reading thrown in (or is part of a larger plot that was removed in the final draft). Even the mandala stuff is half-heartedly explained. It’s a map of the universe? Or a nice design for a rug? You decide. It’s all such a peculiar hodgepodge of religion, superstition, and science.
When Homeland Security finally storm in and arrest the whole family, they take Mimzy from Emma, who is already freaking out about her friend dying in a total lift from ET designed to add some artificial suspense to what has been aimlessly flicking back and forth between genial sci fi exploration and shrill family drama. After the scientists have had a chance to poke around with it, they discover it is in fact an enormously powerful sentient computer, and an electron microscope shot of part of it unveils the most bizarre bit of product placement since Evolution turned into a huge ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo.
Yes, Mimzy is built using an Intel processor. Again, not the best product placement as Mimzy is dying by this point, but it’s okay. Using their new powers, Noah and Emma escape the building and meet up with Larry and Naomi (who gets contacted via dreamail), before heading back to the beach house to send Mimzy back. While on their way there, Emma cries about Mimzy’s increasing feebleness (not as emotional a scene as Elliot crying over ET’s corpse, but then it is an inanimate toy that occasionally chirrups that we’re talking about), and a tear falls on the rabbit/supercomputer. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you.
In a burst of effects, Noah and Emma manage to use the future tech to send Mimzy back to the future, with all the adults present. Michael Clarke Duncan’s Homeland Security boss is turned into a pussycat and forgives everyone, the family reconciles, and Larry gets those lottery numbers. Better still, the future scientist uses the DNA included in the tear to heal humanity, and the benevolent future-teacher finishes her story, at which point her students lift into the air and fly off. Very satisfying, though utterly mechanical.
At this point the film goes into code-overdrive, with image after image of New Age significance appearing. Just like Republican presidents are good at filling their speeches with coded lines that can only be picked up by their hard-Right Christian followers, The Last Mimzy resonates with New Age symbolism. In ET the film ended with a resurrection and a rainbow, two things that chimed with Christian viewers. Here we have mandalas, greys (or rather future dwellers wearing environment suits that look alien), doorways of light, and vortexes, all of which would excite those viewers who think The X-Files is a documentary in disguise.
That’s not a criticism, but it’s something you would expect from a filmmaker operating on the fringe of Hollywood. Instead it’s directed by the CEO of a major motion picture production house, written by an Oscar winner and the head of production of that same studio, and given a hard sell and wide opening on over 3000 screens (an opening it didn’t capitalise on; it only grossed $26,702,770 worldwide). It’s not a good enough movie to justify the time I’ve spent talking about it except that it is such a peculiar movie to come out of Hollywood, pretty much qualifying as ET meets What The Fuck Do We Know?
I’ve shown this movie to a lot of people and most people don’t think twice about televisions in the family house all the time. That, a little bit more heavy-handed way at the beginning of the movie – that bus scene where the two kids are riding, there was a lot more stuff about people working on computers; it’s beautiful outside in the middle of Seattle, the mountains are incredible, the mist and all that stuff – and all people can do is watch their video screens, or listening to music, or stare off into space.
Staring off into space is pretty much analogous with looking out of a bus window at the pretty trees, Bob. I too like looking at pretty things, and it definitely makes me momentarily happy, but working on a laptop, playing a handheld game, or surfing the net is a form of interaction far deeper than passively staring at stuff. The mind is working, not idling. Still, I do think he believes in what he’s talking about, even though I think he’s horribly wrong. Moving on, I especially like how he rationalises making horror movies and then railing against modern civilisation.
So, am I worried about humanity? Well, I am worried about humanity, but there’s more to it than that, and this does make you count after a while when you don’t recognize this stuff. When I was making Nightmare on Elm Street, I had two daughters, who at that time were 10-12 years old; and I actually showed them early cuts of the movie – ‘Is this scary? Do you like this?’ They gave me good ideas and they were really delightful. When I came home after work, I would turn on the television and the news would be on, and they would get up and walk out of the room, every time; and it finally dawned on me what was going on – it was just too bloody scary.
Or, as Canyon pointed out, it’s because the news is horribly boring to a teenager. Yes, Bob, even your brainy kids. To be honest, fair enough. I do not hold to the theory that modern culture and media are responsible for the alienation of children and the breakdown of society, so I’ll give him a break on that (especially as some of my favourite movies are on that New Line list), but his complaints about technology are ill-served by the movie. He seems to think they’re part of the reason our society is so fractured, but anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, and interacts with people over it, knows what a wonderful connective technology it is. One of the movie’s utopian ideas is that eventually we will become telepathic. Great! Less strain on our vocal chords. Otherwise, it would bring people together in much the same way that the internet does now.
But people who use the internet are not interacting with the people around them, I hear you cry (using my telepathy)! Fine by me. When I’m at work and using the internet to communicate with people, that’s because I don’t want to talk to the people around me. Better than any form of communication yet devised, the internet brings people with similar interests or mindsets together, and that’s a wonderful, inclusive, joyous thing, and being done via a laptop or iPhone or Nintendo DS doesn’t make it any less valid. Daisyhellcakes and I know all about this, having met online.
What’s worse is that no matter how cleverly the objects sent from the future are made to look like natural objects (slivers of crystalline mica, sea-shells with crystals embedded in them, floating rocks), they’re still forms of technology. Human potential appears to be unlocked in a New Agey way, but how much of that is because of the presence of the technology? Will the kids keep their powers once the tech is sent back to the future? Even if they do, it’s all down to the machines we make. Worry all you like about technology, but right now, email and message boards and talkbacks and online gaming (yes, even the kind where 12 year olds call me a faggot and then teabag me) bring us together. Sorry, personal bugbear. I’ll move on now.
Oh, and that future tech is used to fix those awful problems and save the world. So how can he really hate it? Right, sorry, now I’ll move on.
Thanks to all of this research, I realise now that Shaye and Rubin and Emmerich really seem to believe in what they are doing, and have committed themselves to sending a message, using the film to teach kids about New Age philosophy in much the same way the artifacts teach the kids. Creepy, but I guess they’re honest about it. Shaye in particular is very happy with the idea of a child’s tear saving the world, an idea so schmaltzy it could actually kill a person. I’m serious. His explanation of why that was included is almost more entertaining than the film itself.
So, that is ultimately what this is about; is it possible, and it happens to be scientifically feasible, that there are a set of genes that actually together are responsible for behavior that we would call innocence. And there is good scientific evidence that there very well might be; and as we do carry junk DNA around in our body, nobody knows what this is doing there – this is DNA that doesn’t operate, it doesn’t turn on other genes, it doesn’t do anything. They don’t know what that DNA used to do, and it is possible that over time, whatever the kind of ‘quote, innocence, unquote’ that we carry around us today, because of disuse, they may ultimately turn off, and that’s the underlying theme.An interesting story, I don’t know if it’s press worthy, but I’ll tell you anyhow; so, the little voice over at the end where the teacher is talking about Emma’s tears and all that stuff, there was a line in the film that ‘The precious gene of innocence was returned to humanity.’ It may be a little overly arch, but notwithstanding that; so at the last test screening, when we were in the middle of mixing the film, it got very good test reactions. They said, the guy who was running the test, the focus group, how many people rated the film ‘excellent’ – I don’t know, half the group did; how many rated it ‘very good,’ and another third, and how many rated it ‘good,’ and that’s what they would get. So just to sort of get a perspective on what’s going on, he asked one of the guys who rated it very good, ‘Why didn’t you rate it excellent,’ cause that’s what they do. He said, ‘I was about to rate it excellent, until that teacher, or who ever it was, talked about the gene of innocence; I said enough of that stuff.’ So we actually went into the mixing studio the next day and took the line out and changed it. So as I said, it’s a fine line to tell a story, but not really tell the story; but I do believe we are getting isolated, more and more isolated.
Ignoring the fact that someone with Shaye’s fierce reputation is worrying about other people losing their childlike viewpoint is a bit rich, I guess even the most committed of storytellers will be afraid to go all out and just use phrases like “Gene of Innocence” in their movies, but I’m quite pleased that Shaye thought that idea was important but was willing to not use it because of a test screening. If he had ignored it, after using test screenings to judge his studio’s movies, I would have cried havoc and let slip the Dogs of War (they’re outside right now, in the Kennel of War, chewing on a Bonio Dog Biscuit of War).
So, I find myself in an odd position, tentatively welcoming a personal vision of the world from a bunch of multi-millionaires who would normally be considered to be the enemy of personal visions, and in one case has been instrumental in screwing over a filmmaker who just wanted to know how much money his movies had made (which is not exactly advanced future ethics at play there). A project like this that is willing to run as counter-programming to the Christian monopoly over message movies is rare enough, but I guess when you’re as rich as Croesus and have a studio at your beck and call you can make whatever the hell you want. Shame The Golden Compass had its balls removed though, eh Bob?
So what about the film itself? It qualifies as occasionally intriguing sci fi even though it often feels like a mixture of ideas from other better works, but is it actually any good? For the most part, no. The performances are quite indifferent (and the kids are not that well handled by Shaye), though I enjoyed watching Wilson and Hahn, who seemed to be the only cast members trying to force some life into the movie. It’s also a strikingly ugly movie, lit poorly and blocked incompetently, with some scenes featuring a hand-held camera so badly operated that it masks what is going on and interferes with the tone being set.
What makes that especially irksome is that the DoP is the usually excellent Jim Muro, whose work on Roll Bounce and Open Range was so impressive, and who was responsible for the classic horror-comedy Street Trash. For some reason, his work on this is murky and hard to watch. It annoyed me greatly. Even worse is the insipid and repetitive soundtrack by musical genius Howard Shore, whose work on the Lord of the Rings films was so beautiful, and whose ongoing collaboration with David Cronenberg is one of the most fruitful joint ventures in cinema history. His “discography” is littered with classics, and many a poor movie has been saved by his work. Here, however, I wanted to mute the movie.
Horribly disappointing stuff, and that’s before we get to the big song, Hello (I Love You) by Roger Waters. Quick disclosure: I hate Pink Floyd and cannot understand the appeal of their dreary prog noodlings. Only a couple of tracks from Dark Side of the Moon would get onto my iPod, and then I’d probably delete them after one listen and then hate myself for spending 79p on them. When I realised that Pink Floyd references kept cropping up throughout the movie I was annoyed, but as it seemed in keeping with the New Age ethos, I let it go. And then, over the credits, plays the most insipid piece of sentimental doggerel I’ve heard since Ringo Starr’s Liverpool 8. Apologies if you feel compelled to click on this video and are rendered diabetic by the cloying sentiment within.
That video encapsulates why I ended up not liking the movie. For all of the stuff I liked, and for all of the boldness of the concept (especially as this is meant to be a kids’ film), and ignoring the shoddiness of the filmmaking on show, the pompous and self-important tone of it was alienating. Didacticism in movies is bad enough when the thing you’re being lectured about isn’t even a concrete thing. Bitching to kids that playing games is no way to live your life is one thing (and as a gamer I resent that already), but not having anything to replace that is pretty rich. Is the film telling kids to put down their games and master the ability to warp reality? If so, is there something about today’s youth that we don’t know about? Screw knife crime, I want to make sure I don’t get teleported into a volcano, Jumper-style.
For a kids’ film it’s not very entertaining, and for adults it’s too light, so it ends up pleasing no one, despite the positive things it has. Compare that to Joe Dante’s Explorers, which features three kids getting dream messages that contain plans for a force-field generating circuit that, when plugged up to a PC and car battery, allows them to fly into space to meet the aliens who beamed the information to them. Whereas The Last Mimzy features desperate scientists contacting children to save the future, in Explorers the aliens are just teenagers who are bored, have stolen a spaceship from their dad, and are looking to make friends and watch TV with them. It’s the tonal opposite to The Last Mimzy, and is flawed, but works beautifully anyway just by being so willfully odd and eager to flout convention.
That said, there is one thing The Last Mimzy has over all of the films I’ve mentioned here: Rainn Wilson walking around in his pants!
I’ll let you decide if this is a good or a bad thing.
These reasons for loving Lost are entirely too pretentious, but it’s my brain and adrenal glands responding to this, so you’ll have to suck it, Lost haters.
Complexifying (?) the universe with easter eggs and real-world Alternate Reality Games:
*Warning! This post contains many uses of the nebulous word, “metatextual”*
Did you know that the man who discovered electromagnetism was called Hans Christian Ørsted? Did you know that The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (seen in the Swan Station) features an underground complex in which can be found a substance called Omnium, which can transmute itself into anything you can wish for? How many Wizard of Oz references have there been? Or Alice in Wonderland? Were you aware that the mark on the tree to point Juliet towards the case of “vaccine” is the same as that of the planet Ummo? Do you know that the guy who got sucked into the engine in the first episode was not only dating the flight attendant Cindy (kidnapped and brainwashed by the Others), but wrote a tell-all book about the Hanso Foundation that got banned, leading him to “write” the novel Bad Twin, which also exists in our world (and is a detective story about The Hanso Foundation and evil twins and isn’t actually as bad as Carlton Cuse has made out)? Do any of these things matter to the plot? Not at all. In that case, why keep them? Just to make me happy, I’m tempted to say. Because I love Easter eggs even when they’re pointless, and even more when, as I suspect with Lost, they add up to more.
A few years ago I went crazy with anticipation for the release of the sequels to my favourite movie, The Matrix. Warner Brothers and Silver Pictures went into hype overdrive, and I lapped it all up and asked for seconds. I rewatched the original over and over again, devouring books explaining the symbolism of every object, name or event on screen. The first sequel was everything I ever wanted from an extension of the first movie and more, expanding the mythos and throwing out numerous allusions to real world (or Matrix, depending on your viewpoint) religious and scientific ideas and motifs. I saw that movie so many times during that summer, building my excitement for the finale into a frenzy that was horribly shattered when Revolutions came out and seemed to be telling an entirely different story than the one I had expected (which was my fault), as well as sucking on a narrative and pacing level (which was the Wachowski’s fault). I’ve given it a break since (and still maintain Reloaded is excellent), but at the time I was gutted. And yet, the experience of picking apart the dozens of textual and metatextual details still made me happy, and I don’t regret it for a second.
It was around that time that I got heavily into The Invisibles, Grant Morrison’s complex metatextual diary/call to arms that had finally been collected in its entirety by DC and Vertigo. My first runthrough was done through a perpetually confused squint. So many of his references made no sense to me that I had to get a primer to get the most out of it. Thanks to those two complex works, my library became much more esoteric.
Lost has the same effect on me. The references to real world books and people sends me scurrying to the internet at the end of each episode, to absorb facts about them not just to see how they fit into the Lost experience, but why the showrunners thought them interesting enough to get a mention. Sometimes the books are included just because the writers like them and want to promote them (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume), because of a cool fact they like and want to include (Desmond saving Our Mutual Friend so that it is the last book he ever reads is actually based on John Updike’s plan to do the same thing), or because the book has some thematic connection with the plot (The Fountainhead‘s protagonists are world-changing individuals not unlike the ambitious Alvar Hanso).
Similarly, the naming of the characters delights me, though I also regret not paying more attention while studying for my philosophy degree. John Locke, Rousseau, “Desmond” David Hume, and the most over-the-top one yet, Mikhail Bakunin. There are other connections, less obvious. Anthony Cooper, Kate Austen (okay, different spelling, but still), James Ford, Ben Linus (bit of a stretch, that one). I love that the actual character names are real people who lived in our world, but the aliases used by some of the characters (Sawyer, Henry Gale) match up with fictional characters. I think there might be some significance to the name Christian Shephard but it eludes me right now. The showrunners say that there is a point to this name-linking, but whether it is connected to the mystery or is merely another way to increase the complexity of the thematic web is not yet clear.
I love all of that detail, and think it enriches the narrative and gives the show an air of seriousness. I won’t say it gives it an air of intelligence because I think it’s plenty intelligent already without namedropping, but it does put the events in the context of the world of ideas as much as the onscreen drama makes it a show about action. It’s an understatement to say that not everyone is convinced. John Patterson, the formerly brilliant and now increasingly curmudgeonly film columnist in The Guardian, recently railed against Southland Tales for its aimless complexity, and he had a point. That film meant nothing, probably on purpose. His main thesis, though, is complex works of pop culture and why they’re “not as good as the films of the 70s, when Robert Altman blah blah, and Bert Schneider yada yada”. You get the drift.
It joins a number of similar pop-culture artefacts, like John August’s The Nines and the TV shows Lost and Heroes, among others, whose ambitions are not equalled by execution, and whose immense complexity often proves self-defeating. These are not stand-alone items either. Sprawling and expansive, with multilayered storylines and timeframes, most feature huge casts and, in the case of the television work, are possessed of enormously complicated “Show Bibles” (the ever-expanding encyclopedia of a show’s mythos). Their stories spread everywhere, linking every character in a web of coincidence and interrelatedness.
Sounds great to me. He criticises Heroes, saying it had failed because of the same overcomplexity. I’d say it’s more to do with the writers forgetting how to pace their show, but whatever. Then he started in on The Nines (which I’ve yet to see), and then Lost:
Made up of three interlocking stories using the same actors – Ryan Reynolds is, successively, an actor, a screenwriter in a reality show, and then the star of his own TV show, ie inside the show’s fiction – it piles inspired weirdness upon witty conceit upon many layers of pop-culture and TV in-jokes, to the point where the resolution to the story can only be a letdown; where the answers retroactively ruin and discredit all the questions. When all is tidily resolved in the final moments, you feel like an idiot for hanging around so long.
This seems likely to be the fate of many Lost viewers as well. Remember, the show’s writers have almost as little idea as the viewers about where the show can go next. They might be 10 episodes ahead of us, but that’s all. Beyond that, they’re as clueless as we are. Each season sees another desperate opening out of the plot into another dimension, answering some questions but foreclosing other possibilities forever. As with The X-Files, the final explanation can only be a disappointment.
So why bother? Why even make anything that is ambitious or filled with metatextual references? Has he no idea what these things do? Firstly, the internet games such as The Lost Experience give valuable information about many aspects of Dharma Initiative’s and Hanso Foundation lore, such as the Valenzetti equation, the Life Extension Project, and Magnus Hanso’s New World Sea Traders company.
I admit, it’s sad that less obsessive viewers of the show don’t know of these aspects of the beautifully detailed Lost universe, and probably missed out on the subtly revealed news that the polar bears are on the island to be used for genetic testing by Dharma, in an attempt to keep them alive following drastic climate change. Without the urge to delve deeply into the show, information like this eludes viewers, but that’s fine. It’s their choice and I respect that. However, I do get mad when stupid TV critics who have no respect for the show bitch about it not even giving up any information about that one thing from the pilot just because they don’t have enough respect for a heavily layered sci-fi show to do some research. They’re genetically modified to survive a different climate! Get over it! Move on! Other stuff has happened since!
Secondly, as I said above, it nods to the viewer that Lost is about ideas and theories and allegories that aren’t spelled out implicitly within the show. The characters don’t debate philosophy and theology out loud, but their actions and their beliefs dramatise this debate implictly. The philosophical detail points us to that and provides a contextual framework for the attentive viewer.
As for the little touches like the brand names (Apollo chocolate bars, MacCutcheon whiskey), businesses (Widmore Corporation, Paik Heavy Industries, Herarat Aviation), and research organisations (Mittelos Bioscience, the Global Welfare Consortium, and of course The Hanso Foundation), having these things crop up within the universe over and over again (with connections revealed in-show or in-game) creates that sense of having a functioning, coherent fictional world, as well as giving the show context (it’s as much about the scientific research world as it is a world where big business leads). Patterson might be convinced that storytelling only works when confined to the 90-180 minute duration of a movie, and anything else is time-wasting, but with the internet and long-form storytelling coming of age, we can tell stories of much greater complexity, with connections being made between characters, events, themes, organisations, etc., that could never be touched on in previous formats. These connections might seem like frippery, but they mean something to the viewer willing to invest time in finding out about these things.
A story told in a film can be a world. A story told in a complex narrative form like that of Lost can be a universe, and within that universe we can have that cathartic feeling of coming to a conclusion over and over again. The finale might suck and leave the viewer disappointed, but the outcome of the Lost Experience ARG satisfied people, and the scene where the mystery of how Locke broke his back was incredibly satisfying, and Charlie’s sacrifice was satisfying, and over and over again we get moments of closure within the Lost universe that resolve things we needed resolved without finishing the story. It’s not your parents’ storytelling, Patterson. We’ve moved on. Come join us.
As I’ve said in a previous post, screen sci fi has recently left me unsatisfied, rehashing the same ideas and stylistic tics, as well of repeatedly offering up lukewarm martial arts sequences as an extra crime against cinema. In an effort to renew my love of the genre, I’ve resolved to cast about in an effort to find something new and challenging, and I’m betting on looking away from contemporary American cinema. Of course, upon deciding that, Richard Kelly’s notorious Southland Tales was released today, and if nothing else, it’s certainly original (while being massively derivative. More on that in a little while).
In the meantime, to France in the 1970′s! René Laloux’ La Planète Sauvage, based on a novel by Stefan Wul, is a movie that’s haunted me since I was a kid, even though I never saw it. I was an avid reader of the sci-fi magazine Starburst, and they ran a feature on Laloux’ pre-production sketches for his final movie, Gandahar. The imagery for that movie was odd enough, but the few pictures from La Planète Sauvage were even more outside my sphere of reference. What the hell were these bleak hellscapes, sporadically dotted with organic shapes that resembled nothing on earth? Why did the Draags (the technologically superior race living on Ygam) look so peculiar, with the breasts and the dead eyes? Even the humans didn’t look right. I was looking at things I couldn’t possibly understand, and it creeped me out. Luckily I was not in a position to see that movie, so my easily baffled young mind was safe from the freaky Frenchness of those films.
It was only recently that I found out that the oddball DVD distributor Eureka had released it, and my reticence caused by my childhood fear was finally conquered, now that I had become so disillusioned by modern sci-fi movies, what with their simplistic Manichean conflicts and Campbellian hero dynamics. My dim memory of those disturbing images, and the incomprehensibility of this trailer, led me to believe I was in for an experience unlike any other.
And I was, to a certain extent. The setting (the planet Ygam, orbited by the moon of the title) is unique, filled with nightmarish flora and fauna, and populated by alien creatures of a civilization so advanced that their customs and technology are inexplicable. Laloux has great fun depicting these bizarre rituals of meditation and communication, as well as offering samples of the workings of the (un)natural world. Those are the most appealing sections of the film, even though I spent a lot of it squicked out. The sleazy 70s chicka-bow guitar soundtrack didn’t help. God knows why I have such a visceral reaction to French prog rock mixed with images of squirming organic shapes. Did I have an early exposure to some bad 70s porn? Other than Barbarella, that is?
So far, so unlike contemporary sci-fi. However, through no fault of its own, La Planète Sauvage had a plot that has been reused again and again by other writers and filmmakers, stymieing me in my search for a wholly original movie. Humanity has lost its way to such an extent that it is in a primitive state, ready for mass abduction by the towering Draags, who take the humans to their home planet. I think I missed the reason for that, but the upshot it domesticated Oms (the name for humans in this movie; we’re considered so separate from our current existence that we’re given a new name) are kept as pets, and wild Oms live and forage in parks filled with surreal and hostile plants and animals. The pet Oms are kept on a futuristic leash, and Draag children use them as playthings. It sounds silly, but is quite chilling.
In a touch that was obviously very topical at the time the film was made, the Draags get high a lot and meditate, sending their minds out of their bodies to float around in the air. Just say non, Draag losers! This involves them putting their consciousnesses inside bubbles which float around, which seemed like yet another peculiar detail added merely to enhance the alien nature of the Draag culture, but turns out to be super-important later on.
Sadly, it’s not all free love and tripping; they also like to exterminate Oms using machines that dispense what look like urinal cakes that emit a deadly gas, so the choice is servitude and no dignity, or trying not to get killed in a park but feeling free. They also have remote craft that project white circles on things (I have no idea how that works, but the Oms sure dread it), and best of all, spheres that roll around picking Oms up, like some kind of hellish space version of Katamari Damacy.
Eventually the Oms learn enough about the Draags to band together and escape Ygam, flying to the moon known as the Savage Planet, where they find the Draags’ meditating consciousnesses have floated there to meet with other races from other planets, who have meditated as well. So I guess if this movie were to be made now, the allegory would be that meditation is the internet, and La Planète Sauvage is the personals section of Craigslist. In a mean touch, the Oms go nuts and destroy Alien Facebook, which shocks the Draags enough to change their ways, creating a new moon for the Oms to live on in peace. Awwwww!
While alien invasion is a common plot template for sci fi tales, as is human rebellion against oppression, the mixture of the two, alien conquest and subjugation of humanity, crops up less often. Our overlords are often ourselves at our worst, or the products of our ignorance and hubris. 1984, We, The Matrix, Brave New World, Alphaville, Zardoz, etc. etc. You know the drill. I’m sure that if I put my mind to it for a few hours I could come up with as many sci fi tales about human enslavement by alien overlords and our subsequent rebellion, and any hardcore sci fi fan would probably think me a fool for not coming up with a dozen right away, but seriously, they just don’t come to mind as readily. I guess those tales don’t resonate as much as the stories I’ve listed above (not counting Zardoz, which is despicable anti-penis, anti-Vortex, pro-death propaganda). The only thing that pops into my head right away is the superb Porno for Pyros single, Pets.
Children are innocent A teenager’s fucked up in the head Adults are even more fucked up And elderlies are like children
Will there be another race To come along and take over for us? Maybe martians could do Better than we’ve done We’ll make great pets!
::hugs Perry Farrell:: This song kept running through my head all the way through La Planète Sauvage. I’m sure Laloux was attracted to the project to some extent by the perversity of the subject matter. I have no idea what his politics were (though he was interested in psychology), but I wondered if the movie was an allegory for the French presence in Algeria, but then I might be reading too much into things.
Most horrifying of all, during La Planète Sauvage, the film that kept coming to mind was the most unintentionally entertaining movie ever made, Battlefield Earth, especially as the Oms come to steal a teaching device and learn enough to get to an intellectual level where they can hurt their captors. In Battlefield Earth, the heroic Johnny Goodboy Tyler uses a brain training device (obviously the inspiration for Dr. Kawashima’s popular DS game) to overthrow the evil kerbango-drinking Psychlo scumbag Terl, played by John Travolta and a large leather codpiece containing a spare copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. Again, no fault of Laloux and co., but my experience was sadly compromised by the memory of the other movie.
Even the most notable aspect of it, the resolution, was very similar to that of The Matrix Revolutions. This is no bad thing. Too many sci fi tales involving the subjugation of one race by another (or themselves) are resolved with the destruction of the enslavers. I’ll admit to finding that satisfying from time to time; who isn’t glad that the Rebels bring down the evil Empire at the end of Return of the Jedi? Still it’s heartening to see a diplomatic resolution, even if it’s backed by force; the Oms are only able to convince the Draags that they are more than dumb animals by interfering with their meditation rituals, and the humans in Matrix Revolutions only reach a détente with the Machines after much carnage and the sacrifice of Neo.
I feel terribly churlish criticising La Planète Sauvage for not being 100% original. It is, after all, at least visually unique (it’s the only feature length movie filmed using cut-out animation. Even the cut-out South Park movie uses digital animation, heavily disguised as analogue), and is set on a world with a varied and imaginative ecosystem, atmospherically depicted.
It’s more likely that my frustration with the film is a symptom of the growing sense that my quest for a truly original science fiction experience is a Quixotic one. I started off with La Planète Sauvage because I thought it would represent a highwater mark of quirky, visionary uniqueness, all the better to compare everything else to, but it still echoes other movies. Plus, it’s based on a book; as a standalone work of art, it already falls short of my criteria.
I’m loath to call this self-imposed project a bust already, though. A truly original idea is an impossibility. There are always going to be influences and references. Even in a movie as pointedly different as this, even if Laloux has no intention of making connections to historical and cultural events or motifs, the audience might make them. Some lazy bloggers (not naming any names, of course) might even try to make a comment about France and Algeria that was inspired by a recent viewing of Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, hoping it would make him look like he knows something about French history that doesn’t involve Waterloo or Trafalgar. Ahem.
Also, La Planète Sauvage has all the hallmarks of a subset of science fiction; tales of the subjugation of humanity, with all its attendant biblical resonance. This is a mark against it, but then even before we get into the whole “There are only seven stories to be told” thing, biblical tales tend to crop up a lot in sci fi, so it’s bound to happen.
Actually, even then it might not count. Laloux’s determination to eradicate all possible recognisable human cultural influence in order to create a plausibly unfamiliar alien world means that there are no direct visual cues to religion or politics within the movie, which saves it from that easy kind of reference. That insistence on peculiarity is one of its strengths. The Draags eat food by sucking on blobs of matter from a pulsating white globular thing in their domiciles, Even the fight scene in the middle of the movie is as bizarre as the rest, with weird mouthy aliens strapped to the Oms’ chests and then forced to bite at the opponent. The first rule of Om Fight Club is you do not feed the bitey alien before you fight, apparently.
So, perhaps from now on, I should be focusing on being grateful for any experience which has any originality, whether it be narratively or stylistically. Maybe I should set myself some parameters, now that I’ve embarked on my journey. Praise the movies that do something new, that isn’t just a rehashed space opera or a Matrix rip-off or a misunderstanding of what makes Philip K Dick’s writing so appealing. While La Planète Sauvage tells a tale that has occurred in science fiction many times before and since, the execution is utterly unique, and creates a fascinating world that somehow remains plausible.
Maybe that’s the best I can hope for, and though I wasn’t sold on the movie entirely (the anti-septic storytelling and the disposable nature of the Oms means it’s hard to relate, other than to be creeped out by the weirdness), there was enough unique content to still make this something of a success for my project, and certainly if you’re interested in a different filmic experience, this is pretty much where it’s at.
Next up, hopefully in the next few days, a movie that steals from dozens of pop culture artifacts and yet still erroneously considers itself unique; Richard Kelly’s extraordinary movie-spoodge, Southland Tales, featuring a lipsynching Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn tasering John Larroquette’s balls, and yet another magnificent turn by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
