Month: March 2010

It’s Not Easy Being Green.


On this St. Patrick’s Day, what better recent release to discuss here at GitM than Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone? Not only do we have two shades of emerald in that last sentence, but we’re now on the cusp of the 7th anniversary of the beginning of the War in Iraq. (It broke out, I well remember, just as I was heading to a March Madness weekend in Vegas.) Alas, I just wish I had a better sitrep to report.

I don’t mean to be too harsh — There’s nothing terribly wrong with this edutainment-y attempt to explain de-Baathification, highly dubious detainee procedures, and most notably the faked WMD casus belli to disinterested laypersons by way of action-thriller. And, in a way, I sorta admire the gutsiness of the the attempt. But, if you were already well aware of these grim developments, and I assume most GitM readers are, then it’s hard to escape the sensation that one is mainly just being talked down to for two hours. Wait, there were no WMD in Iraq? You’re kidding me, right? And, while I’m a great fan of Greengrass’ previous output — I said over and over again in this space that I wish he had stuck with Watchmen, and on the Top 100 films of last decade list, Bloody Sunday was #84, his two Bournes were at #49, and the exemplary United 93 was at #6 — The Green Zone feels quite a bit more leaden than usual.

As with the political edutainment project Greengrass aspired to here, I like the idea of fusing his highly visceral action work (the Bournes) with his fly-on-the-wall discursions into recent history (Sunday, ’93)…on paper. But The Green Zone gets lost somewhere in the interstice, and lacks the gripping power of either of these previous Greengrass grooves. Instead, Zone ends up mostly being two grainy hours of watching Matt Damon run around at night, as he tries to uncover an insidious government plot that our nation has been fully aware of for years…and has chosen to greet with a yawn.

More on that depressing problem in a bit, but, first, to bring y’all up to speed: Loosely based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a non-fiction examination of Dubyaite imbecility and excess in post-war Baghdad, Green Zone begins with a brief sequence set amid the original Shock-and-Awe period of the war, followed by, a few weeks later, a tense raid on a possible WMD storehouse by American soldiers. Led by Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon), this crack MW2-ish assault ends up finding, well, bupkis, just like the time before and the time before that.

To Chief Miller, the problem here is obvious — the intel must be rotten. But, when he brings this up at the next briefing for high-level military muckety-mucks, he is basically told to shut up and do his job. Nonetheless, events soon conspire to introduce Miller to the “Jack of Clubs” in the Dubya deck, a Baathist general (Yigal Naor) with a still-clearly extant power base in Baghdad. And, when our hero digs deeper to figure out how this Jack might know “Magellan,” the top-secret source of all this lousy intel, he soon finds himself trapped — along with a very Judith Miller-y reporter (Amy Ryan) — in a power play between a slimy executive branch bureaucrat (Greg Kinnear, stuck no more) and a grizzled CIA hand (Brendan Gleeson), one that might just end up getting Miller fragged by the creepy Special Forces guy (Jason Isaacs, with great accent) who keeps popping up…

Along the way, there’s a digression into a detainee facility with all the makings of an Abu Ghraib waiting to happen, the tearful homecoming of the administration’s hand-picked Iraqi stooge (re: Ahmed Chalabi), some rather pained attempts to make the decision to de-Baathify an action beat…In other words, Green Zone is basically an attempt to dramatize the Iraq war for people who, for whatever reason, weren’t paying much attention the first time ’round. And, to be fair, it’s done with solid acting all around (including several folks recognizable from United 93), quality production values, and a reasonable degree of versimilitude throughout. (Note also the brief Paul Rieckhoff cameo, which should nip any IAVA whining about dramatic license right in the bud.)

But, for all its edutainmenty truths to tell, Green Zone still ends up feeling rather fake and film-ish to me, perhaps in part because — unlike Greengrass’ other recent histories — it seems to subscribe to a very movie-like All the President’s Men view of things, where, once word of misdeed gets out, justice will be done tho’ the heavens fall. Not to get all Debbie Downer up in here, but that’s not really the way the world works anymore, is it? One of the saddest and scariest moments in the recent and very worthwhile Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America is when Ellsberg explains how he thought everything would change once the Pentagon Papers got out…and then he finds that, in the face of clear and irrefutable evidence of government wrongdoing, most people just shrugged.

This is the uncomfortable horror that Green Zone almost seems willfully designed not to recognize. The whole premise of the movie seems to be that, if We the People knew what really went down in Iraq (or could just be taught via action-movie), we would be totally livid about the corruption involved. But, is the problem really that the American people don’t know what happened in the build-up to Iraq? Or is it that we know pretty well what happened and don’t much seem to care?

Just as with our indefensible dabbling in torture and indefinite detention in recent years, we have known about the lies and incompetence that fueled the Iraq fiasco for awhile now. And, alas, nothing ever happened. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and the whole awful, lying lot are still deemed Serious People with Serious Opinions by the nation’s domesticated media watchdogs, who, by the way, have also been studiously ignoring the Blair hearings overseas. Our current president, elected with the largest mandate for change in a generation, has deemed all of this just the sins of the past and refused to “look backward” (or worse, made himself complicit in these Dubya-era crimes.) And life continues, much as it has this past age, with no sense of reckoning whatsoever for the Big Lies that were told.

One of the main reasons Bloody Sunday and United 93 work so well is that they offer complex, nuanced portraits of complicated times. But, as Green Zone moves along, it just ended up feeling more and more like a cartoon to me, and one predicated mainly on wishful thinking. Like I said, I guess I admire what Paul Greengrass & co. were trying do here, but Green Zone as an action film feels flat and mostly uninvolving. And Green Zone as a political enterprise — Iraq War: The Movie!, basically — often seems at best condescending and at worst dangerously naive.

Life in a Northern Town.

 

This is the North, where we do what we want.” Welllll…unless you’re Brian Clough, of course. After a rough start of Alice and Brooklyn on Friday, movies #3, #4, and #5 of last weekend righted the ship considerably. Those would be the dark and very worthwhile Red Riding trilogy, based on the four-book crime series by David Peace (also the author of The Damned United.)

Consisting of Julian Jarrold’s Red Riding 1974, James Marsh’s Red Riding 1980, and Anand Tucker’s Red Riding 1983, these, unlike the various threads of Brooklyn’s Finest, are three interlocking crime stories than actually enhance and deepen one another, all the while telling one story. And, like The Wire and unlike Brooklyn again, nothing is spelled out for the audience, and all the pieces matter. Over six hours, it all adds up to a grim, complicated, and often harrowing portrait of the Evil that Men do in deepest, darkest Yorkshire.

In the first and arguably best installment, it is the Year of our Lord 1974, and a young girl has gone missing. On the case right away is Eddie Dunford, an enterprising journalist just back from a long stint in London (Andrew Garfield, late of Gilliam’s Imaginarium), who very quickly — too quickly, for the cops on the case — ties the disappearance to two earlier murders. But when the child’s body is found, with swan wings stitched into her back, no less, the case officially passes into the hands of Jack Whitehead (Eddie Marsan, late of Sherlock Holmes), the paper’s lead reporter and something of a worthless drunk.

Regardless, Eddie’s interest is piqued, and he continues to follow the leads where they take him — from the arms of a beautiful-but-sad Girl of the North Country (Rebecca Hall) to the clutches of the local developing magnate (Sean Bean), who holds grand ambitions and no small amount of pull in the community. And, while Eddie first thought his drinking buddy Barry (Anthony Flanagan) was a wee bit paranoid for ranting on about disappearances and death squads in li’l old Yorkshire, he starts to wonder about it some when Barry becomes the victim of a horrible sheet glass accident. Was Barry in fact murdered? And if so, how deep does this rabbit hole go?

Deep enough that Detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is still trying to sort things out six years later, in the Year of our Lord 1980. A Manchester cop reassigned to this beat to help catch the Yorkshire Ripper, or at least to figure out why he hasn’t been caught after thirteen victims, Hunter and his team (Tony Pitts, Maxine Peake) uncover some…discrepancies in the case files of one of the victims. Either the police work is exceedingly shoddy, or the Yorkshire Ripper now has a copycat — or maybe it’s just convenient for some murders to look like Ripper victims.

This all brings to mind the last time Detective Hunter found himself in this godforsaken corner of the North. That would be six years earlier, when he was assigned to look into a bloody crime scene that left a few extra bullets and lots of unanswered questions. The problem is, some folks in town don’t seem to want either of these mysteries looked into anymore, and Hunter has left himself dangerously exposed by recently engaging in an illicit office romance. Something’s gotta give, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be the wall of silence that surrounds so many of the sinister goings-on in this riding…

Cut to the Year of our Lord 1983, when, just as the Ripper’s bloody swath through this area is at last fading into grim memory, another local girl goes missing. This conjures dismal memories of the case nine years earlier for Detective Superintendent Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey, a.k.a. “The Next Doctor“), one of the higher-ups on the Yorkshire police force, who we’ve seen engaged in some dodgy behavior in the first two installments. (He’s known as the Owl, not to be confused with the Wolf, the Swan, or the Badger.)

Meanwhile, on a visit to his late mother’s home, a local solicitor (Mark Addy, soon of Robin Hood) is guilt-tripped by his old neighbors into revisiting the case of the developmentally disabled man (Daniel Mays) convicted of the 1974 child murders. Suffice to say, there are some troubling holes in the prosecution’s story, and they seem to point right back at “enhanced interrogation” practices in the Yorkshire PD. And when another local man (Gerard Kearns) is taken into custody for this new child disappearance, well, it starts to seem like this has all happened before — and the good lawyer’s father might have been deeply involved.

In all honesty, the story skips off the rails a bit in 1983 — A medium becomes involved in the previously played-straight story, and the original village conspiracies get to be a bit too baroque for plausibility. (Even notwithstanding the huge body count at this late date, there would now seem to be [spoilers-highlight to read]two different and almost-completely unrelated shady operations at work by now.) And, in any event, the overarching three-film plot becomes so byzantine at times that it does get quite hard to maintain the thread. (I’m still unclear as to why [same]the cops shot up the Kirachi Club after Eddie left in 1974. What were their intentions anyway?)

But taken as a whole, this glum trilogy has an admirably dark mojo to it. I mentioned The Wire early on, but perhaps the best analogue for these films is to think of them as sort of an extended British version of Zodiac. If you can handle the violence, the accents, and the unrelenting Yorkshire gloom, the Red Riding trilogy is worth the trip…just be careful who you talk to while you’re there.

 

Keep the Prius: I’m going Fett.

“The jetpack is made from carbon fiber, with a touch of kevlar in the rotors, and generates 600 pounds of thrust. Because the center of gravity is below the ‘center of thrust’ (a notional point between the engines), it is self-righting: If the pilot lets go of the controls, he hovers steadily in one spot.” Where is my jetpack? Ah, it’s right here, for the paltry sum of $75,000-$90,000. [You can see it in action here.]

Found on a Drowned Man.

“Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth…[T]o keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.“

But it’s not torture or anything: Recently-released CIA documents explain exactly how we went about waterboarding suspects during the Dubya era. “‘It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water,’ Nance wrote in the New York Daily News. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.“

Update: Oh, by the way, Karl Rove is “proud” of these despicable acts.

The Dark Knight Returns.

“Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story, and in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story. We have a great ensemble, that’s one of the attractions of doing another film, since we’ve been having a great time for years.” Christopher Nolan discusses Batman and Superman (but no World’s Finest)

Bed-Stuy Flow’s Malicious.


So, in an attempt to get the unfortunately atrocious Alice in Wonderland out-of-mind as quickly as possible, I pulled an audible last Friday night and decided to follow it up immediately with Antoine Fuqua’s conflicted cop saga Brooklyn’s Finest. And, well, I’ll give Fuqua’s film this: At least it turned out to be weirdly lousy, rather than just straight-up lousy like Alice.

Still, despite some quality performances throughout, Brooklyn’s Finest is not a movie I can really recommend. In its gritty street rhythms, shades-of-gray plotting, and all-star cast of dirty cops with streaks of nobility, the film clearly aspires to the greatness of The Wire. (In fact, Michael K. Williams (Omar), Hassan Johnson (Weebay), and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (Clay Davis) are all in this movie, the latter prompting an hilarious chorus of “shheeeeeeeeeits” at my late-night showing.)

But, for all its admirable ambition, this movie ends up feeling a lot closer to Crash. Like that film (and like another considerably over-praised film of the same type, Babel), Brooklyn’s Finest tells three disconnected stories, seemingly in the hope that they might add up to more than the sum of their parts. But, other than the fact that some of these cops work in the same precinct, and all of them rather implausibly end up in the same apartment block in the climax, they don’ t really have anything to do with each other. Unlike The Wire, where actions on the street (say by Bubbles, or Herc) will reverberate through the system and have unintended consequences that affect the highest levels of the Game (say, the Mayor’s office), nothing that happens in any of these stories has any effect on the other tales being told. In other words, these dirty cop vignettes are basically stovepiped, and, as such, they’re somewhat redundant.

So, instead of one story, you get three. And, also like Crash, the writing’s pretty ham-handed in all of them. For an excellent example of this tendency, look no further than the opening minutes, as — message alert! — Vincent D’Onofrio gives an on-the-nose speel about there being no right or wrong, just “righter and wronger.” Alrighty then. (Speaking of D’Onofrio, between he, Will Patton, and the Wire guys, Brooklyn’s Finest sometimes feels like a Recovery Act-funded jobs program for cop and robber actors. I spent much of the movie half-expecting Michael Rooker to show up.)

So, with the writing dropping the ball rather egregiously, the actors involved have to carry Brooklyn’s Finest on their own for its two and a half hours. And, as it turns out, they’re mostly up to the task. As the working-class Catholic cop in desperate need of some drug money to fix his mold problem (yes, you read that right), Ethan Hawke gives a variation on his twitchy loser from Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and is better than the material warrants. (Strangely enough, he’s also once again paired up with Brian O’Byrne.) Meanwhile, Richard Gere is miscast as the lousy, alcoholic peace officer a week out from his pension — I would’ve gone Fred Ward — but he struggles through, despite some excruciatingly embarrassing scenes involving his hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold girlfriend. (One involving fellatio, the other the Honeydrippers.)

And the best third of Brooklyn’s Finest involves Don Cheadle as the Departed-style cop “lost in the Game,” i.e. so deep-undercover he’s forgotten which way is up. This is not only because Cheadle is great, as per the norm, but also because he’s got the ablest supporting cast to work with — the aforementioned Will Patton as his handler, Wesley Snipes in a nod to his New Jack City days, Michael K. Williams as the anti-Omar, and a couple of scene-stealers in Hassan Johnson (who, outside of a well-placed Busta Rhymes track, has the funniest line in the movie) and Ellen Barkin (who aims to prove she has the biggest cajones in the film, by a country mile.)

Still, even tho’ I recently made the case for “actors workshop”-type movies with 44 Inch Chest, actors can only do so much. And, despite the occasional well-performed scene, Brooklyn’s Finest is just too fumbling and Haggis-y in the writing department to really warrant the time investment. Put briefly, Brooklyn’s Finest is to cop movies what Milwaukee’s Best is to beer — only a worthwhile option if you’re intentionally slumming it.

Suffer the Kings and Arrows.

In the trailer bin this morning, Russell Crowe grimaces once more for Ridley Scott as the titular character in his take on Robin Hood, also with Cate Blanchett (Maid Marian), Mark Strong (Evil Henchman), Max von Sydow (Pa Marian), Mark Addy (Friar Tuck), Kevin Durand (Little John), Oscar Isaac (King John), Danny Huston (Richard the Lionheart), and William Hurt (William Marshall).

Well…ok. But how many times have we seen this movie now? (Not the Robin Hood tale, but the King Arthur-ish “story behind the story” period war epic.) For that matter, how many times has Ridley Scott made this movie now? As such, it’s hard to get too excited about this.

No Alice Aforethought.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. And why this film was stinking rot, and so darn bad it stings… Sigh. Well, if you were going to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the box office numbers seem to indicate that you probably already have. Nonetheless, I’m sorry to report that — Mia Wasikowska, some of the art direction, and perhaps a scene or two notwithstanding — this Alice is a thoroughly woeful enterprise, and just an aggravatingly bad adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s world. If you hold any fondness for the book, trust me, you’ll leave Mad as Hell.

I say Lewis Carroll’s “world” because, as you probably already know, this is not a straight-up adaptation of (the often-combined) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. Rather, this movie takes up Alice’s tale as a teenager on the threshold of womanhood (Wasikowska), who, while weighing the pros-and-cons of betrothal to a rich, haughty, and very Burtonesque suitor (Leo Bill), finds herself Down the Rabbit Hole and back once again in, uh, “Underland.” So, in other words, at best this iteration of Alice already feels like reading somebody’s random Lewis Carroll fan-fiction on the Internets.

Worse, the fan in question seems to have really dug The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, to the point of just grifting liberally from Narnia to write this sequel-story. Now, Alice is basically a Pevensie-ish “Daughter of Eve” prophesied to free Won…uh, Underland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). Note the picture of Alice at the top of this post, brandishing the sword and armor on the battlefield(?), and standing next to Hathaway the White like she’s at Minas Tirith — Does that look anything like Alice in Wonderland to you?

So yeah, all the playful word games and off-kilter logic puzzles of Carroll’s book, and your usual Alice adaptations for that matter, have been thrown out the window here. Instead, we are left with…well, basically your average dumb summer movie. The Mad Hatter has become a major character, for seemingly no other reason than to accommodate the presence of Johnny Depp. We are told Alice is destined to slay the Jabberwocky early in the second reel, which means we spend the rest of the film just sitting around waiting for this prophesied shoe to drop. And — spoiler alert — when our heroine finally accomplishes the deed at the Big Battle and puts the dragon (and by extension the audience) out of its misery, she even gets to throw in a John McClane/Schwarzenegger one-liner. (“Off with your head!)

Put simply, this is just a blatantly stupid movie, and looking back on it, I can think of only one or two grace notes worth mentioning. As you might expect from most any Tim Burton production, the art direction is quite impressive at times (The 3-D, on the other hand, is muddy, and really doesn’t add anything to the experience.) So, for example, the design of the Red Queen’s soldiers is rather appealing, but these flourishes still aren’t really enough to keep things moving along. There’s one very brief scene involving frog and fish servants of the Red Queen that made it seem like the overall film would be much more fun and imaginative. And, while Wasikowska herself is actually quite solid throughout the movie, this Alice only manages to capture some of the real Wonderland magic in the Eat Me/Drink Me sequence early on.

Otherwise, tho’, hoo boy. While Tim Burton and the screenwriters clearly deserve the lion’s share of the blame for this fiasco, there’s more than enough Terrible to go around. (For his part, Depp is strange as usual, but is neither a plus nor a minus, really — Just don’t get me started on the breakdancing scene.) Somehow, someway, Crispin Glover, a.k.a. the one-eyed Knave of Hearts, seems like he’s overacting even when surrounded by talking dogs, rabbits, and pigs. But even he isn’t as lousy here as Anne Hathaway, who is high-school-production-bad. (I should know — I was in one.) As the White Queen, I couldn’t tell if Hathaway was trying to riff off of her Princess Diaries co-star Julie Andrews, or whether she was just totally lost amid the CGI, Natalie Portman-style. Either way, this isn’t a career highlight.

So, to sum up, Alice in Wonderland is pretty much just a travesty. (Or, to quote the lady of the hour: “Of all the silly nonsense, this is the stupidest tea party I’ve ever been to in all my life.“) One way or another, and just like Alice, Tim Burton has managed to accomplish an impossible thing here. He’s taken a beloved children’s classic that seemed very well-suited to his strengths, and somehow managed to suck all the magic out of it.