“That integrity shone through in the roles he played. I can’t ever remember, in all the productions he undertook, anyone having a bad word to say about him and he never had anything bad to say about anyone else either.” Sgt. Howie (and TV’s The Equalizer) finally had his appointment with the Wicker Man: R.I.P. Edward Woodward, 1930-2009.
Category: Cinema
Do NOT Press This Button.
And, once you get that subterranean standard out of the way, The Box is sadly more of the same. Pretentious, overwrought, interminable, unnecessary…The Box is just irritatingly bad at times, and it makes the original Donnie Darko look more and more like a random fluke (or, given the lesser state of the over-explained director’s cut, an actual case of timely intervention by the studio suits.) I like The Twilight Zone, I like science-fiction, I like NASA, and I like most of the other things Kelly throws into the blender here. But, after an hour in this inane, sophomoric Box, I’m sorry to report, I wanted to push a button myself — fast-forward.
If you’ve never read or seen the story before, Kelly’s version goes like this: It’s 1976, and a young Virginia couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) — he’s a NASA physicist, she’s a schoolteacher — are barely making ends meet in the ‘burbs. Then, one winter night, a plain-wrapped box appears on their doorstep. Accompanying this mysterious receptacle eventually is a visit from one Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a courtly gentleman with a horrible (CGI-enhanced) disfigurement. For reasons that are not immediately clear, Steward makes this couple a horrible proposition: Push the red button on the box, and they will receive one million dollars. Also, somebody they don’t know will die. Should they press the button? Well, it’s a lot of money, and people die every day. I dunno…would you?
That’s the basic gist of Matheson’s story (Marsden’s character does make a brief nod to the original, biting ending) and the Twilight Zone version (different ending, but still decent). But here, there’s more. Much, much more. Y’see, Mr. Steward may or may not be a visitor from another realm. And, when I say “another realm,” I could mean Mars, where NASA’s Viking probes just kicked up a lot of dust, or I could mean the Hereafter –After all, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so the converse probably applies as well. And he can possess dozens or hundreds of people at a time, at the risk of giving them nosebleeds, and have them do things like babysit and hector people in libraries. Steward’s wife is also running around, and she, as Convert #1, presumably, can create watery teleportation doors when the need arises — like, when you want to play Let’s Make a Deal for no reason at all. Ah, yes, and did I mention there’s a follow-up corollary to the original deal? It actually has nothing to do with the “someone you don’t know” part of the equation, or, really, with anything that’s come before. But, hey, that’s apparently how we roll in the Kellyverse.
In essence, Richard Kelly here has taken an eerie and perfectly self-contained 30-minute story and overburdened it with ninety more minutes of half-baked riffs on The Abyss and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, grandiose allusions to Sartre’s No Exit and Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, and oodles of quasi-scientific Trek-speak like “the altruism coefficient” and vaguely threatening flimflam like “the Human Resources Exploitation Manual.” The end result is subtraction by addition — the longer Kelly ties himself and his characters up in nonsensical knots, the more and more ludicrous the whole enterprise becomes. (Apparently, the first cut of this film was over three hours long — baby Jesus wept.) In fact, Kelly throws so much at the wall here to see what sticks that he completely forgets about the money. Once the million is paid out, our couple locks it in their safe and never mention it again…um, ok.
Sure, there are a few moody images interspersed throughout The Box, as well as solid performances by Marsden and Langella and brief, enjoyable turns by wily veteran hands James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne, and Celia Weston. (For her part, Cameron Diaz seems off.) But, otherwise, The Box is eminently missable — it would probably seem an even worse disaster to me, were it not for the lingering stench of Southland Tales. Here’s a proposition for you: Keep your ten bucks and go let someone else see it — preferably someone you don’t know.
Paranormal Activity.
But however frothy about its subject at times, The Men Who Stare at Goats manages to sustain a low-key whimsy and amiable weirdness for most of its run. If anything it feels a bit like the much-maligned and underrated Ocean’s 12: a bunch of exceedingly likable actors — George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Root, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick — all enjoying an extended goof. Consider it the Road to Iraq, Hope and Crosby-style. David Crosby, that is.
Loosely based on the book by British journalist Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stares at Goats begins with an ambiguous disclaimer (“More of this is true than you would believe“), a Kitty Pryde-experiment gone awry, and a voiceover by one Bob Wilton (MacGregor), a down-on-his-luck reporter for the Ann Arbor Daily-Telegram. (Wilton, unlike Ronson, is an American, although MacGregor’s scattershot accent may make you wonder. Ewan’s a fine actor, but, lordy, he can’t get the Yankee patter down to save his life — yes, it’s worse than Peter Sarsgaard’s British accent, although it’s still better than Don Cheadle’s cockney.)
Anyway, after a chance interview with a psychic hamster-killer (Root) and a falling-out with his cuckolding wife and their mutual boss, Bob alights to Iraq, where he presumes he’ll learn how to impress his now-ex with grim tales of life as a veteran war correspondent. But unfortunately, he can’t even get into the country…until he happens upon Lyn Cassady (Clooney). Disguised as your run-of-the-mill private contractor, Cassady in fact turns out to be a psychic spy, a master of the “sparkly eyes,” a, as he puts it, “Jedi warrior.” (To which MacGregor consistently responds, “Jedi?,” with an arched eyebrow. Like, who in their right mind would spend years doing that?)
Cassady, it turns out, was trained in the psychic arts by his very own Qui-Gon, Bill Django (Bridges). A Vietnam veteran who discovered his own psychic powers through a rigorous regimen of Hippie indulgence, Django managed to convince the Pentagon powers-that-be back in the day that the Age of Aquarius would soon eclipse the Atomic Age on the battlefield — we’re talking peace warriors, psychic samurai, astral projectors, the awesomely unstoppable power of good vibes, brah, you know? (Put simply: “This aggression will not stand, man.”)
Some of the brass (mainly Lang) become fervent believers in Django’s New Age warfare. Others figure, heck, if there is something to this paranormal business, we’d really hate to be on the wrong side of the ball when the psychic shooting starts — Let’s throw some money at it just in case the Russkies are reading our minds right now. And so the First Earth Battalion is born. (And, yes, it really was born — your tax dollars at work.) But, of course, problems emerge — Not all the recruits have Django and Cassady’s intrinsic shamanic gifts. And once the Jedi are founded, there is naturally a Sith waiting in the wings…and, he (Spacey) has no compunction about using the team’s psychic powers for evil. Ya fook one goat…
The rest of the story involves Wilton and Cassady having crazy misadventures in Iraq, while Lyn fills us in on the rise and fall of the First Earth order…which may or may not be gone for good. (After all, someone’s gotta put the psy- in psy-ops.) I presume much of the Iraq narrative was added by Heslov, and sometimes it’s a bit hit-or-miss, frankly. There are brief encounters with Iraqi bounty hunters, ne’er-do-well Blackwater types, and even the infamous Barney-fueled detention chambers, but the tone is too breezy to sustain any kind of edgy or cutting critique of this stuff — It’s more like Syriana on nitrous oxide. (There’s also a sequence involving a LSD-crazed soldier shooting up his army base, which feels more uncomfortable than probably intended, coming right after the tragedy at Ft. Hood.)
Still, while Syriana, or Three Kings, for that matter, — My, Clooney has done a lot of tours in the region now — offers more in the way of food for thought, The Men Who Stare at Goats has its own low-key charms. As I said, the actors are all top-notch and clearly having fun with this project. It’s always good to see the Dude again, even in passing. And the script is relentlessly witty, with wry jokes that slowly creep up on you like a psychic ninja — For example, Spacey talking about the power of subliminal messages, then being distracted by Twizzlers. Mmm, Twizzlers.
Speaking of subliminal messages, I’ve had Boston’s “More than a Feeling” stuck in my head for over a week now thanks to this movie, and I really can’t stand Boston. So, well-played, Jedi, well-played.
The Teen Titans.
In today’s trailer bin, director Matthew Vaughn borrows a little bad reputation from Freaks & Geeks to make the case for his adaptation of Kick-Ass, with Aaron Johnson, Chloe Moretz, Nicolas Cage, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. (So far, so good — from all indications, Moretz’s Hit Girl will steal the show.)
Meanwhile, Sam Worthington takes on big scorpions and sundry other Kraken-like things in the very 300-ish trailer for Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans remake, also with Alexa Davalos, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Danny Huston, Gemma Arterton, Pete Postlethwaite, Jason Flemyng and Mads Mikkelsen. Frankly, it sorta lost me with the lousy aggro-whiteboy rock, but ya never know. And “Titans Will Clash!“…ugh. Who were the ad wizards who came up with that one?
Teen Superheroing, Don’t Do it.
The Plame Supremacy.
Take-no-guff CIA agent Angelina Jolie is forced to become a rogue asset when she’s falsely outed as a Russian spy in the new trailer for Phillip Noyce’s Salt, also with Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Noyce has been making international-minded prestige pics of late (Rabbit-Proof Fence, Catch a Fire, The Quiet American), so this is more of a throwback to his early Jack Ryan days (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger.) And Jolie’s never hard to watch, and I think she could make for a fun female Bond…but let’s hope this is better than their last pic together, The Bone Collector (or, for that matter, Doug Liman’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which most obviously comes to mind here.)
When Things Go Bump in the Night.
And Paranormal Activity is…decently unsettling, I suppose. I give props to any scary flick that goes the J-horror route over Saw-style serial killer torture porn, which is a tired, boring, and lazy subgenre at this point. And I admired the film’s narrative economy and inventiveness — With nothing much happening most of the time, Paranormal Activity has we, the audience, doing almost all of the heavy lifting for it by sitting around, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and scaring ourselves. Paranormal Activity is basically Hitchcock’s ticking-time-bomb (or, to take a more recent application of the principle, Don’s-mistress-sitting-in-the-car on Mad Men) for 90 minutes. And I give it definite points for cleverness.
That being said, I also found the original Blair Witch — lost in the deep dark primordial woods, and unable to escape supernatural forces — to be a more fundamentally frightening experience than this film, which involves hanging around a San Diego split-level, and doing really dumb things to provoke supernatural forces. (For that matter, the similarly-premised Drag Me To Hell earlier this year was a good deal more fun.) And the movie has a bit of a Cloverfield problem, in that the main characters grow increasingly unsympathetic — particularly you-know-who — to the point where I stopped caring after awhile if bad things happened to them. Nonetheless, I could see this being a very creepy rental, under perfect (re: at home by yourself at 3am) conditions.
After a brief thank you to the families involved and the San Diego police department (wink, wink), Paranormal Activity begins with a young day trader named Micah (Micah Sloat) noodling around with his brand-new video camera. After showing us around the house, he goes to pester his live-in girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston), just arriving home, with his new acquisition. It seems Micah is a bit of a tech-geek (and has control issues — more on that later), and he’s procured this top-end video equipment to catch some paranormal activity — namely, the same weird happenings that Katie has been complaining about since the age of 8 — on tape. And that’s about it, really — Katie, Micah, and the video camera, hanging around the house, trying to make sense of the increasingly obvious encroachment of a Malevolent Force from Beyond.
This is all fine and well, although maybe a bit repetitive after awhile. (Katie and Micah do enlist a kindly, New Agey, certifiably So-Cal psychic (Mark Frederichs) at one point, and the funniest moment in the movie is him showing up to make everything seem so much worse.) But the real problem with Activity isn’t the repetition or the lack of events, but the blatantly stupid behavior by our two principals here. Y’see, Micah apparently is a firm believer that his home is his Castle. And, when presented with more and more evidence that what he and Katie are dealing with is out of human control, he tend to double down and become more belligerent about the situation (“Is that all you got, demon?”), to the point where it’s hard to take either of them seriously as characters anymore.
I don’t want to give the game away, but at a certain point an old photograph is found in the attic which has absolutely, positively no business being there. If they hadn’t done so already, this is pretty much the moment when 99.9998% of the population would say, “Uh, ok, we really need to enlist some outside experts on this. Ghostbusters stat!” But, no, Micah gets weird and territorial again, and there’s more interminable wrangling over whether or not to call a demonologist. Wrong answer.
Not coincidentally, this is about the point where I finally checked out of Paranormal Activity for good and started rooting for the Thing from the Nether Realms. As in any horror flick, once folks have gone above and beyond the call of stupid in order to stay in harm’s way, it’s hard to take the supernatural threats to their person all that seriously. Still, aside from making mad bank and injecting a little extra fear into those creaky stairs and hissing pipes late at night, Peli’s Activity does make one thing emphatically clear: Women haunted by demons from an early age should probably try to stay out of relationships with Type-A control freaks, and vice versa.
Vizier Quest.
Donnie Darko appears to be having more trouble with the timestream (at least as far as I can ascertain without sound) in the CGI-heavy full trailer for Mike Newell’s The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton (late of the last Bond), Alfred Molina, and Ben Kingsley. (Does Kingsley say no to projects anymore?) Eh, it looks like The Mummy meets one of the later Pirates movies, but I guess it could be fun in a turn-your-brain-off, two hours of air conditioning kind of way.
A Star is Bored.
But, all that being said and Mulligan’s future potential aside, I didn’t find An Education to be all that interesting a film, sadly. And if you took her away from its center, you wouldn’t be left with very much movie at all. Here’s the set-up: It’s 1961, and while Betty Draper is chafing at the oppressive confines of suburban domesticity in the former colonies, young Jenny (Mulligan) is being groomed for an Oxford education by her social-striver parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and her elite private girl’s school, mainly just so she can go get her M.R.S. Her English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) thinks Jenny should aim much higher than a well-off husband and pursue the academic life she seems clearly suited for. But Jenny — a budding Francophile and connoisseur of fine art, fine literature, and fine smokes — wants more out of life than either the domestic or academic path provides.
Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a thirty-something fellow who spies Jenny out in the rain with her cello one afternoon and offers her a ride home in his spiffy automobile. This should probably set off bells and alarms for Jenny (and her parents, who soon meet this potential beau and rather illogically warm to him), even if they’ve never heard the Police song. But, as we’re still a few years shy of Emma Peel and Swinging London, or for that matter the lads from Liverpool, David seems like a pretty good opportunity of escape for young Jenny. He goes to concerts and auctions in the city, hangs out with interesting people (Dominic Cooper) and their well-meaning girlfriends (Rosamund Pike), and generally seems to be much more a Citizen of the World than anyone in the stuffy suburbs. But is it possible that David is just too good to be true? Well, it wouldn’t be much of a movie otherwise, now would it? And sure enough, one she gets past all the preening finery and being tipped in cigarettes, Jenny finds herself peering into the corners of a very Dark Life.
There are a lot of little things that don’t really work in An Education. Some of the characters are written too broadly. particularly Alfred Molina as Jenny’s overbearing-with-a-heart Pop and poor Rosamund Pike as a dim bulb London party-girl. The ending seemed way too overdrawn to me — Yes, adulthood is mostly a condition imposed by the passage of time, but I still think it takes more than one dodgy and/or bad relationship to become mature and worldly-wise. And, like I said above, I don’t think it makes much sense, given how protective they are of her at first, that Jenny’s folks would go along for the ride as they do here. They would have to be willfully obtuse not to catch on what a weekend in Paris would entail, for example.
That being said, the biggest problem here is that Peter Sarsgaard seems miscast to me. He’s an actor I usually root for, but he’s way too creepy to be plausible as a suitor Jenny might actually be interested in. (Either that, or he carries the baggage from too many creepy roles in the past. As David Edelstein noted, he gives off a definite Malkovich vibe here, and the occasionally slipping accent doesn’t help.) This is a part I could see Ewan MacGregor or James McAvoy or Orlando Bloom (originally cast in the Dominic Cooper role) pulling off with more aplomb. But Sarsgaard just seems too blockish and needy to me in the part, and any gal as ostensibly on-the-ball as Jenny is portrayed here to be would see through his wheedling and double-talk pretty quickly, I should think. Just because the year is 1961 doesn’t mean young women (and their parents) can’t spot an obviously bad apple. But here’s hoping Mulligan fares better in her next few roles, which are no doubt forthcoming.
Single White Human, Looking for Group.
They don’t care what’s in your character bank: Paraplegic veteran Sam Worthington rolls Draenei and goes native in the brand-spankin’ new second trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar, also with Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, and Michelle Rodriguez. (Well, actually this trailer has been floating around in bootleg form for a few days now, but I figured this movie more than most needs to be judged and/or appreciated in hi-def.)
Anyway, so far, so good. Ribisi and Rodriguez seem a lot like Paul Reiser (Burke) and Jenette Goldstein (Vasquez) from Aliens respectively. And while a lot of the “Dances with Thundersmurfs” hectoring out there can be chalked up to the usual aggro-fanboy haterade, Avatar‘s whole central plot-line does seem pretty doggone similar to Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Dune, or any other flick/book you can name where a good outsider throws in with the “noble savage” locals to beat back the massively superior technological firepower of the would-be colonialists. (“This is our land!!” It is? No, it’s their land, buddy. Ease up with your bad self.)
Still, it’s gonna make for some amazing eye candy, that’s for sure. And as long as the Na’vi don’t squeal like Ewoks or Gungans as they fight, I should be able to dig it.