5 Movies

I figured I'd talk about some of the movies from my must-see list that I've gotten around to seeing in the past few weeks:

Sideways - I saw this a few weeks ago and let me tell you... this thing was brilliant. Alexander Payne has finally made a movie that captures his full potential: a perfectly balanced mix of the comedic promise he showed with Citizen Ruth and Election, and the dramatic material in About Schmidt. The best stuff is the comedic banter between the two guys and the great, romantically sad metaphors relating wine to life. A great film, and the best reviewed movie of the year.

The Life Aquatic - Saw this on Saturday. I was very impressed with the movie. Although I must say, I was a little worried about this one at first, since the first 20 minutes or so of the movie felt really detatched (not to mention the negative reviews it's getting). After a bit though, I settled in to the film's brand of humor (much different than any previous Anderson film) and thoroughly enjoyed myself for the rest of it. But it doesn't just stop there. The film moves on and on and gets better and better until it arrives at a beautiful moment (the ending) which is nothing less than the best thing Anderson has done yet. This film is both the funniest and most dramatic thing the director has done. It stands heads and shoulders above The Royal Tenenbaums (a film that I never did really like) in what it accomplishes, leaves Bottle Rocket in the dust (a great little film though), and even surpasses Rushmore in some places (something that I never thought would happen) - especially the end. This is a movie that people will either love or hate...there's no in-between. The ones who hate it will find it pointless, and the ones who love it will take something away from it, like me. The crowd that I saw it with loved it.

Napoleon Dynamite - I have to say that although this is billed as a comedy, this was the most depressing movie of the year. This is the latest "cool indie" film, a movie slightly outside the norm, appealing mostly to college kids, offering only surface moments and nothing of emotional substance. It's almost if the director, Jared Hess, wanted to create an experiment to see if he could make a movie in which not only do you not learn anything about the characters, but you don't care one lick about them either. Granted, this has been done to good effect before (but with a clear purpose) in Elephant, where the distance we feel from the characters is for many different reasons...A statement about the effect TV has had on human tragedies, the "invincible" feeling of adolescence, etc. I know, I know... this is just supposed to be a movie where you're supposed to laugh, right? Well that's fine, and yes, I did laugh on a few occasions, even out loud a few times. But the rest of the film was spent in an alternating tornado of depression, tediousness and the painful evidence, every once in a while up on screen, that this could have been a much better film. The depression comes from how the characters are treated. I didn't feel that Hess (both director and screenwriter) had any love for his characters at all, or at least didn't show any on screen. Characters are emotionally and physically bullied, with no time or energy put into how they are feeling from this abuse. It may be funny at first, but if you really look at it, the characters are being held up in plain view for us to laugh at. What that amounts to is the simple fact that we're laughing at the character, not with him. And when the laughs do happen, they're few and far between, because the "loser" characters in the film are so pathetic, and seem so unable to fix their situation (and the screenplay offers no evidence that they even want to fix their situation), that (A) you don't give a shit about any of the characters, and (B) it overwhelms whatever may be funny about the film. I just read that and I see that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense... hmm, ok... An example: Napoleon's uncle is a failed high school football star who dreams of being back in his prime, where he thinks he could have played pro ball. There's an early scene of him talking to Napoleon, giving a somewhat soul-searching talk to him about how he could've made something of his life. Then, throughout the movie, we're supposed to laugh at the crazy and pathetic ways he dreams up to make money. It's almost as if Hess has no idea what he's doing - whether he was trying to write a dramatic or comedic character, or even any sort of basic idea of joke setup and execution. How are we supposed to laugh at the patheticness of the uncle character after that talk to Napoleon? Sure, if you turned your brain off and watched the movie, which is sort of an unspoken rule with most comedies (which is fine by me, by the way) you'd be fine. But it's quite obvious that Hess is trying to do something different, whether it be the monotonous tone of the film, or the characters, or the style... He's trying hard enough to make a different kind of film to where we can't categorize it as turn-off-your-brain comedy anymore. Another example comes from a joke late in the film...one which is admittedly very funny and that I laughed at: In a desperate attempt to try to change his wasted life, Napoleon's older brother Kip buys a time machine off of eBay to go back in time and change things. Obviously, it doesn't quite work. It's a pretty funny joke at the time, but after it's over, and the next depressing stretch rolls by before the next joke, it quickly becomes apparent how depressing that idea actually is, because of how many people in that film would jump at the chance to use that machine. People that weren't distracted by the goofiness and style in the film (the latter taken from Wes Anderson...Hess has a similar color palate but the association ends there; he's quirky but much more subdued than Anderson and has none of his fantastic visual direction) would realize how much lack of hope there is in that punch-line, and the rest of the film.
The tediousness comes from the aforementioned monotonous tone of the film. It's quite hard to center a film on a character like Napoleon - a person with a droll, one-note voice and a personality to match. It's actually quite a strange thing to consider, but I believe the film would have been much more interesting and enjoyable if Napoleon had been a supporting character rather than the lead. He simply cannot propel the film. I found myself watching the film and wanting to spend more and more time with the other characters - especially Pedro - and less and less time with the title character. What makes this more frustrating is the fact that we learn nothing - I repeat, absolutely nothing - about the main character the entire length of the film, apart from surface details. No meaningful dialogue and no characterization ever takes place to help us get to know him, or even to let us know why we're supposed to be on his side in the first place. It's taken for granted that if a character is a certain way in a film - a geek, in this case - we will automatically side with him. Because there is no attempt to flesh out even the most basic parts of this kid's personality beyond the surface details and cool catch phrases (something even the worst teen films usually accomplish), it destroys whatever joy might be felt by seeing him triumph in the end, not to mention making that plot device cheap and more overly insulting than usual, letting the loser win, while not even knowing enough about him to know if he deserved to have won in the first place.
Finally, there are parts in the film which hint at the better movie this could have been. Not surprisingly, these occur at moments when emotion accidentally finds its way into the film. The last shot (well, before the agonizingly unnecessary new epilogue at the end) is quite good, mostly because of the song it's set to. And the best moment in the film for me is when our three loser teens are at the dance, standing in front of everyone else who is cooler than them (i.e. everyone), watching them dance, while "Forever young" plays on the soundtrack. It's this great little painful moment. It actually semi-reminded me of Freaks and Geeks... but that was the only length of time in the movie that reminded me of anything like that great show. Napoleon Dynamite is like Freaks and Geeks after it's been watered down, censored of anything good, and ripped to shreds. Not that it's the worst movie ever or anything. No, don't get me wrong... I realize I've bashed this quite a bit on here, but it's just a movie that a feel very strongly against. It's a strange case - and I think this might be the first time this has happened - where I felt semi-pleasant while watching the movie, and even right after watching it, but as more and more time passes, I've become more and more annoyed with the movie, and even angry with it, and even angry with the fact that it exists and that it's gotten such a positive response... Anyway, you may like Napoleon Dynamite, but it's not for me.

Super Size Me - Good film, and it brings to attention some things that definitely need to be known by the public... but its strongest parts are actually when director Morgan Spurlock focuses on the facts: school lunch programs, hard numbers about how unhealthy certain foods really are, etc. The film actually starts to suffer a little when we deal on the central stunt of Morgan eating McDonald's for 30 days. While it never ceases to be entertaining, these scenes are interesting enough, and don't need Spurlock's overgrown class-clown antics. The first few things he says are funny at first, but he quickly becomes annoying. Nevertheless, the film is quite enjoyable and interesting, and I thank God that his eating stunt was intercut with all the other factual information and interviews and everything... A less organized project would have focused for 90-minutes on the eating and its result. The one thing that sort of gets me about the film, though, is that Spurlock won the Best Director (documentary) Award at Sundance last year for this, but it stands as a film that almost anybody with at least some understanding of documentary film could have done a serviceable job with. And it doesn't stand out as an overly impressive directorial achievement in documentary filmmaking. Some of it even overly dumbs-down things (but I guess that can be forgiven, for the sake of trying to reach the biggest audience). Anyway, I'm just saying that the easiest thing to document is yourself, and I wish the director award would have gone to something like Born Into Brothels...basically just something whose narrative is propelled more by filmmaking ability than by a gimmick. Although I must say, Super Size Me takes that gimmick and runs with it, going farther with it than most films would.

Shaun of the Dead - Started out great, with wonderful promise, and funny in-joke references to Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and The Evil Dead trilogy...then suddenly decides to take itself very seriously, becoming a flaming disaster (at least in terms of being an enjoyably fun horror/comedy). The problem is that writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright aren't quite sure what kind of movie they want to make. It starts out as wonderfully fun, campy movie that is actually based on a clever idea: Shaun's life - working in a job that sucks, having no girlfriend, being basically a loser - has made him so sedated to life, and the world around him, that he doesn't even realize when zombies began to take over his neighborhood (the bigger idea, of course, being that - in this world of cubicles, machines, and suburbia - people are sort of like zombies anyway). It's definitely a promising start, and it ends up becoming one of the most disappointing movies of the year. What begins as a joy, quickly turns into a serious and dramatic horror movie, which I have no problem with, but which has no place here. Everything after the first half hour seems way out of place, and I became increasingly frustrated as the movie went on, desperately wanting the filmmakers to stick with one film tone or the other. Genres can be mixed and merged together, but the team behind this film, veterans of British TV (particualarly "Spaced") haven't quite figured out how to do it yet.