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Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge)
Idiocracy has one fundamental flaw–and plenty of little ones, but the fundamental one is too glaring and too fixable–the two leads do not have a romance and the film pretends they do. Foul-mouthed prostitute Maya Rudolph all of a sudden starts talking without slang and doing sweet things. Then, at the end, there’s supposed to be some romantic connection between her and Luke Wilson, who spends the movie thinking she’s a painter (one who’s really scared of her art manager). The romantic element isn’t part of Idiocracy because it doesn’t fit with what Mike Judge is trying to do (which is to mix Sleeper with some Fight Club cynicism–with a handful of fart jokes) and so he avoids it. But in the end, when Rudolph is finally acting–Wilson acts the whole time–the mix needs to work and it doesn’t and Idiocracy goes out with a whimper. The ending is similar to a 1960s educational film reel about… moths or something. It doesn’t just stop, it crumbles away.
Wilson gives a really good comedic leading man performance in Idiocracy, except he comes off as way too smart for the guy who’s supposed to have a hundred IQ. He’s not one of Idiocracy‘s litany of problems. And the most apparent problem, the one starting from the first minute, is the narration. Idiocracy is fully narrated (lending to the educational film reel comparison) and that method, in addition to the ludicrous fade-outs, suggests there wasn’t enough story. Even if the narration and the fade-outs were in Judge’s first draft of the screenplay… there wouldn’t have been enough story in it either. Fully narrated films are either The Magnificent Ambersons or they are not. Idiocracy is not (also because the narration doesn’t make any sense… the narrator is talking to the audience in the present day, not the people who would be listening to it in the year 2700 or whatever).
Other significant problems are the special effects. Lots of futuristic movies are made cheaply and well. Idiocracy instead goes with video game level (and not state-of-the-art) CG and it looks silly. At first I thought Judge was doing a Planet of the Apes homage, which would have been funny, but he wasn’t.
Dax Shepard and Justin Long are both funny in the easiest roles in the history of cinema (idiots), but Terry Crews does a great job in the role of the best elected official (the President of America) since the Duke of New York.
The movie’s funny (I laughed every two minutes or so… good fart jokes, anti-corporate sentiment, and a general mockery of red state Americans)–and, compared to other current comedies, it’s still inexplicable why Fox hid the theatrical release–but as Judge’s follow-up to Office Space, an incredibly thoughtful, if flawed, film, it’s an abject failure.
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Live Free or Die Hard (2007, Len Wiseman)
Remember the “Simpsons” episode where Bart watches ‘Die Hard’ jump out the window? Live Free or Die Hard–the title, incidentally, has nothing to do with the film’s content–is the first one where I expected McClane’s nickname to be ‘Die Hard.’ They come close in terms of self-reference….
Still, as a Die Hard movie, it’s about as good as a Die Hard movie featuring Bruce Willis versus a fighter jet is going to get. It’s really well cast, which carries a lot of the film. Much like the third one, it follows the short codas of the first two–which are fine for those (i.e. with Bonnie Bedelia–has everyone else forgotten the first two Die Hard movies are like a Thin Man on angel dust?)–but the movie doesn’t have a closed narrative. It has a fake ending, not going on long enough. The immediate action is resolved, then it just stops.
That good casting is necessary–and Len Wiseman’s enthusiastic direction is helpful–because the writing is terrible. Willis has some good lines and he and Justin Long have some good scenes, but it’s incredibly stupid. The Die Hard movies kept their predicaments small and manageable–even the third one kept it within reason–but Live Free is crazy big: it’s the end of the world as we know it (something left unresolved).
For half the movie, I felt like the script came from John Carpenter’s unmade Escape from Earth.
It isn’t just the dumb ideas, but a lot of the setups. McClane’s stalking his daughter in this one, which makes little sense (especially since the image of him alone, his heroism costing him everything–conjured by a discussion–is so much more striking). Luckily, there’s a lot of decently executed action. Die Hard movies always create an aura of reality, usually because of Willis’s performance and the production design–and he makes the unbelievable Live Free palatable.
As a director, Wiseman has no personality, but he incorporates CG well enough. As a Die Hard movie with CG, which means it’s fundamentally broken but it is what it is and it’s fine.
Cliff Curtis, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Timothy Olyphant are all fine. Curtis is sturdy, Winstead is feisty and Olyphant is hissable (if a little foppish).
As for McClane versus the fighter jet… it’s the kind of ‘too much’ even Willis can’t ground. Combined with that flimsy ending… There’s also the issue of Wiseman’s blue filters, which I won’t expand on, since I want to end on a high note:
Live Free or Die Hard isn’t the best it could be, but it’s far from the worst. It’s fine.
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Transformers (2007, Michael Bay)
Transformers features giant robots fighting each other. Such scenes look excellent, from a special effects standpoint. Depending on the specifics of the scene–how the giant robots are fighting, fists or guns, and whether or not there are humans involved–sometimes the scenes are very well directed. While Transformers does have a lot of action, the robot fight scenes are mostly reserved for the end… and then Bay either does well or poorly. He can’t compose a real–punching, kicking, scratching, biting–fight scene. If there aren’t guns and cars involved, while it looks cool with the CG, it’s a flacid.
Complaining about that particular defect of Bay’s direction of the movie is a little cheap, because there’s so many bigger complaints to make. To get them over with… Bay doesn’t really get interested in the Transformers themselves. They only have a handful of scenes with any attempt at characterization and only one of them goes well and it’s because it’s a comedy scene and Bay used to direct comedic commercials, so he does it well. He’s also more in love with his military story than Shia LaBeouf’s, taking to so far as to give Megan Fox’s stupidly written character a lot more emphasis. LaBeouf’s character is poorly written too, but Fox’s is worse. What else. Oh. It doesn’t look like Michael Bay. There’s no sensuality–did I really just say Bay has a sensuality to his style? He does: the overcooked thing. Transformers has maybe five or six of those Bay shots. The rest is style-less. The action scenes are great, the chase scenes are good, but there’s no personality. It’s like Bay didn’t want to get bad reviews for his fast cuts or something (Spielberg’s a hands-on executive producer when it comes to blockbusters… anyone else remember the rumor he added the T-Rex-sized ghost to The Haunting himself?).
Even Bay’s creative casting is gone. In his Bruckheimer days, Bay movies would be filled with recognizable faces. Not so with Transformers. I kept hoping for someone interesting, but no one popped up. Not well known actors in supporting roles (like Bernie Mac or Kevin Dunn), but recognizable character actors in small roles. Nothing along those lines here….
I thought it might be because the Transformers were going to be significant, but they aren’t (as characters, anyway… as giant robots fighting, they’re fine). The present action of the film takes place over three or four days, with the Transformers coming in the night before the last day. They’re hardly there, which is one of the script’s major problems. Though maybe not. It’s a problem, but the script is so bad, it’s difficult to make qualitative judgments. Even if the movie makes no sense, the Transformers don’t have to have terrible dialogue. But they do. The script hurries things along so much, flipping between LaBeouf and Josh Duhamel’s army story. LaBeouf is far from an acting giant, but the script really does him a disservice… it sets him up as a shallow jerk-wad. I heard one of the screenwriters compare it to E.T., but it’s like E.T. if the audience was supposed to hate Elliot (I’m sure it’s just Bay who dislikes LaBeouf’s character, since he doesn’t fit the Bay macho man mold).
I was hoping it’d be something like Jurassic Park or Twister, an effective summer blockbuster with some degree of wonderment at its content. It has none. Bay’s just not the right director for it, even though some of it looks really cool (but I think that credit belongs to ILM).
But, who knows? Maybe if Bay were working from a vaguely competent screenplay… But the Transformer based on Stripe (from Gremlins) was really funny.
★CREDITS
Directed by Michael Bay; written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on a story by John Rogers, Orci and Kurtzman; director of photography, Mitchell Amundsen; edited by Paul Rubell, Glen Scantlebury and Thomas A. Muldoon; music by Steve Jablonsky; production designer, Jeff Mann; produced by Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce; released by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures.
Starring Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky), Tyrese Gibson (Technical Sergeant Epps), Josh Duhamel (Captain Lennox), Anthony Anderson (Glen Whitmann), Megan Fox (Mikaela Banes), Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime), Hugo Weaving (Megatron), Rachael Taylor (Maggie Madsen), John Turturro (Agent Simmons) and Jon Voight (Defense Secretary John Keller).
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Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird)
While Ratatouille features Pixar’s finest three-dimensional CG, it also features their worst two dimensional characters. The problem’s apparent from the start–the main character has one conflict and it turns out to resolve itself quite easily in the end. There are other conflicts in the film, but they’re all external to the main character, Remy–whose name is easy to forget because he doesn’t really interact with anyone for the majority of the second act. Ratatouille bored me for most of the film, only really engaging me once it got incredibly manipulative towards the end.
There’s a lot to keep busy with… like I said, the CG is phenomenal and there are some okay gags, but there’s very little content because there are no real character relationships. Brad Bird does some really nice things with composition–and, wow, can he ever fill a movie with lengthy action sequences to hide the lack of substance–he does a really nice focus thing, so nice, combined with the Pixar CG, I had to remind myself they really did nothing more than apply some blur filters in Photoshop or whatever the Pixar rendering program is called.
Bird’s writing does Ratatouille in… he doesn’t create engaging characters, certainly not compelling character relationships–Remy spends most of his time talking to an imaginary friend. In many ways, I felt like I was watching an old Disney formula movie, competently pulled off–disingenuous as all hell.
It’s sad when Pixar movies–which used to mean something, but obviously peaked with Monsters, Inc.–are fake and fluff. It’s all so slight, none of the voice actors stood out. The lead, Patton Oswalt–thanks to Bird’s ineffective characterizations–leaves no impression. The whole thing relies on rats being cute and doing cute things, like having little ladders.
Hey, it worked for “Tom and Jerry,” no reason it won’t work for Ratatouille.
There’s also an odd–and apparent, as a little girl asked about it in the row behind me–absence of female rats in the film… in fact, there’s only one woman in the whole thing, human or rodent. The little girl was asking where Remy’s mother was (while I was asking where the female rats were)… but in the end, it really doesn’t matter. Bird wouldn’t have done anything good with her.
★★CREDITS
Directed by Brad Bird; written by Bird, with additional material by Emily Cook and Kathy Greenberg, based on a story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco and Bird; director of photography, lighting, Sharon Calahan; director of photography, camera, Robert Anderson; supervising animators, Dylan Brown and Mark Walsh; edited by Darren Holmes; music by Michael Giacchino; production designer, Harley Jessup; produced by Brad Lewis; released by Walt Disney Pictures.
Starring Patton Oswalt (Remy), Ian Holm (Skinner), Lou Romano (Linguini), Brian Dennehy (Django), Peter Sohn (Emile), Brad Garrett (Auguste Gusteau), Janeane Garofalo (Colette) and Peter O’Toole (Anton Ego).
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Angel-A (2005, Luc Besson)
I can’t believe I’m about make this statement… Angel-A would be better if it were American. Besson could still direct, still write the base story (someone else would have to come in and add… you know… subplots), still have his lead Rie Rasmussen (who’s Danish, not French, as IMDb informs… which makes sense–I’ve never seen a six-foot blond Frenchwoman), but his music composer and soundtrack producer would have to go… and so would his other lead, Jamel Debbouze. Angel-A has a really interesting problem–besides the utter lack of subplots (an Our Gang film has more)–for the first half, Debbouze is good and Rasmussen is bad. For the second half, Rasmussen is good and Debbouze is bad. The problem is a combination of script and actor. Rasmussen plays bare and emotion well and in the first half she’s enigmatic and emotionless. Debbouze is an engaging moderate scumball and the second half tries to turn him into a desperately romantic leading man. He doesn’t do change and Besson seems to realize it, because in the second half, he really brings up the music for effect. Sometimes the music works… most times it doesn’t (or it just goes on too long).
As a fantastic romance, Angel-A is something of a rehash of The Fifth Element, only without a story (or a real understanding of effective music–where’s Eric Serra when Besson really needs him?). I think I’d have been more irritated with its lack of momentum–the long dialogue sequences don’t work, especially since Besson assigns so much weight to them–if I hadn’t gone in knowing it was only going to be ninety minutes (something I should have told my fiancée). Besson pedals in place for the majority of the film, trashes a lot of good starts to scenes. It’s like he couldn’t fill the running time so he added minutes to conversations, never really pausing to see when the film wanted more space.
The bevy of complaints aside, the black and white photography is amazing. It looks like a cross between good French New Wave and L’Atalante. There’s an astoundingly beautiful sequence at the end–unimaginably wonderful–which makes the film worth seeing (and, possibly, even owning in some hi-def format… I’ve never seen anything like it). The black and white gives everything a surreal feel, at least the outdoor shots when people look like their filmed against the best rear-screen projection ever done, creating a striking visual style (too bad Besson loses it inside). His command of composition is better than it’s ever been, it’s just too bad he didn’t have a better script. Besson’s been writing crappy (if sometimes entertaining) action movies for seven years… and a lot of them–maybe the bad habits rubbed off. He also only had a fifteen million euro budget. And it’s a shame, because with some relatively simple tweaks, Angel-A would have been really good.
★½CREDITS
Written, produced and directed by Luc Besson; director of photography, Thierry Arbogast; edited by Frédéric Thoraval and Christine Lucas Navarro; music by Anja Garbarek; production designer, Jacques Bufnoir; released by EuropaCorp.
Starring Jamel Debbouze (André), Rie Rasmussen (Angela), Gilbert Melki (Franck), Serge Riaboukine (Pedro) and Akim Chir (le chef des malfrats).
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