Avatar is Titanic

The long awaited (12 years since Titanic) and hugely expensive ($400 million) film by James Cameron has finally arrived.  During the shock and awe marketing campaign before the opening of Avatar, I was struck by how negative the geek community was about this movie. The general consensus was that Avatar was going to suck. I'm not sure why this was, although Titanic did leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. But this is James Cameron, director of geek classics like Aliens and Terminator. So I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I was thinking that Cameron had lost his nerve after Titanic and couldn't come up with something to top it. Well, Avatar doesn't suck. In fact, it's pretty good. And technologically, Avatar is a huge leap beyond previous motion-capture "animation" films like Polar Express and Beowulf. Cameron seems to have overcome the main problem of these movies, which is that the characters look dead. In Avatar, the characters' faces are very expressive.

Avatar tells the story of a soldier (Sam Worthington), who has been wounded and lost the use of his legs. He jumps at the chance of a new life by shipping out to the planet Pandora where an extremely rare mineral is found. The planned strip mining of this beautiful planet has been slowed down by the presence of an indigenous people, the Na'vi. The head of the mine (Giovanni Ribisi) and an army colonel (Stephen Lang) have been unable to convince or force the Na'vi to move. A scientist (Sigourney Weaver) has cloned Na'vi bodies that humans can "inhabit" in a manner very similar to hacking into The Matrix. Weaver has tried using this technique to befriend the Na'vi but without success. Worthington is able to join up with the Na'vi after being separated from his fellow pseudo-Na'vi, and immediately begins to bond with them, particularly with the beautiful Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). You can guess the rest. The army moves in to wipe out the Na'vi, and Worthington switches sides to help them to defend their land and their lives. In addition to Weaver, a couple of other humans switch sides to help out, a geeky scientist (Joel Moore) and a hotshot helicopter pilot (Michelle Rodriguez).

Storywise, Avatar employs the timeworn plot of a hero who, for whatever reason, feels like an outsider in his own world and yearns for somewhere or something different. Then his wish is answered, and he (I use "he" because it is almost always a "he" in these movies)  is plunged into another world where he actually is an outsider. Over time he becomes one of them and when the time comes, he defends them against his old world. This plot has been used innumerable times in films like Lawrence of Arabia, A Man Called Horse, Dances With Wolves, Medicine Man, and The Emerald Forest. Avatar strongly resembles Dances With Wolves, since the Na'vi, other than being blue, are quite like the Indian tribe that take in Kevin Costner. But there are also more than a few hints of Medicine Man and The Emerald Forest as we see huge bulldozers destroying an Amazon-like rainforest on Pandora.

Avatar is also a SciFi movie, of course, and in the first scene where we see Sigourney Weaver, she is waking up from hypersleep with a bunch of soldiers around, reminding one starkly of Aliens. It is unfortunate that Weaver never picks up a gun  in Avatar because Ripley really rocks. There are lots of other nods to SciFi classics. The Na'vi live in trees and look a lot like the elves in LOTR, and they talk a lot about, "an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." Wait, that's a quote from Star Wars, but you get the idea. I don't know who first came up with the idea (Cameron has been working on his script since 1994) but Avatar and Eragon have almost identical concepts of dragon riders who are bonded to their steeds. Avatar is bit cooler since the riders actually plug themselves into the dragons in a sort of Matrix within a Matrix. Maybe I'm being unfair with all these comparisons but Avatar does feel very derivative. They even use "Unobtainium" as the name of the mineral that they are mining. This was also the name of the very dense metal used in The Core. And at some points in the movie, I almost expected Worthington to start miming a buffalo while saying, "tatonka."

The casting of Avatar is quite nice. It's really great to see Sigourney Weaver in a fairly meaty role even though it's a supporting one. And she looks great as a Na'vi. Sam Worthington has gone from total obscurity to being hot, hot, hot in 2009. He came out of nowhere earlier this year to star in Terminator Salvation along with Christian Bale. I'd forgotten but I had seen Worthington several years ago in Somersault, the Australian movie that launched Abie Cornish's career. I like him. Another person who has gone from nothing to something this year is Zoe Saldana who starred as Uhura in the new Star Trek and as Neytiri in Avatar. Unlike the other leads, she appears only as a Na'vi. I like her too. Stephen Lang, who is the  singleminded Colonel, played exactly same part in Men Who Stare at Goats. Strangely, he doesn't change anything in how he plays the role and that movie was a straight comedy. Giovanni Ribisi is pretty much miscast and wasted as the mine director on Pandora. It was very nice to see Michelle Rodriguez. I have missed her since her character, Ana Lucia, was killed on Lost. She has a nice part  in Avatar as a soldier with her heart in the right place.

Avatar definitely exceeded my expectations, which weren't set that high to begin with. Make sure you go to the bathroom first since it runs 2 hours and 42 minutes. I think this is already the director's cut. But this is a very watchable movie and it doesn't drag in the middle. As I mentioned above, the motion capture in Avatar is very good. The Na'vi are quite realistic and easy to watch. The cinematography is beautiful and Pandora (actually New Zealand) looks great. This movie was many years in the making and cost an incredible amount of money but it came out ok. You should definitely see Avatar. It'll probably look better for you that for me since I was forced to see it in 2D at the Galaxy in Owen Sound, Ontario.

I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus is the title of the new movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, about the early days of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. It is also a short poem written by William Ernest Henley which ends with these words,

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."

Nelson Mandela kept  a copy of this poem written on a piece of paper with him while he was in prison. 

This movie tells the story of Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) when he was newly elected as the President of South Africa. He was struggling to find a way to make the minority whites feel included in the new South Africa. The country's national rugby team, the Springboks, were an icon and symbol of the old Apartheid regime. The whites loved the team. The blacks actually rooted for any team that played against the Springboks. The new government's Minister of Sport planned to disband the team. But Mandela had other ideas. He wanted to support the Springboks in the upcoming Rugby World Cup which was being held in South Africa. He approached the captain of the Springboks, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), with the idea that if the team could win the World Cup it could bring the country together.

This is Morgan Freeman's movie. Everyone else including Matt Damon is a bit player. One reason that I hate biopics is that I have trouble accepting an actor playing someone that is so familiar to me. But Morgan Freeman does as well as anyone could in becoming Mandela for the screen. And it doesn't hurt that Mandela is my hero. I love the guy. In one of the first scenes of Invictus, Mandela arrives at work on his first day as President to find the government workers, all whites, are packing up their offices and leaving. They expect that what actually happened at the DA's office in New Orleans, is going to happen here; they are all going to be fired and replaced by blacks. Instead, Mandela gathers the workers together and asks them to stay to help him and the country. Damon has a harder time making an impact with this role. His character is a stoic Afrikaner from rural South Africa. He is potentially the most interesting character in the movie, because he decides that he trusts Mandela and supports him. But we never get into Pienaar's head. He just seems to be a good guy who does the right thing. But as a result, Damon's character isn't that interesting. Damon is incredibly buff in this movie and looks great with his shirt off. There are a lot of locker room scenes.  But he is still really small compared to the real rugby-playing Pienaar who is 6'3" and 240 lbs. 

This yet another movie from the most productive director in Hollywood, 78-year-old Clint Eastwood. He really knows how to put together a movie. And Invictus is no different. Even though this is a "Mandela" film, it follows the playbook of many previous underdog sports movies like Hoosiers or We Are Marshall.  We see lots of scenes of the Springboks losing and losing, followed by scenes of hard training, inspirational motivation, and then redemption. Always, one of the characters, usually the coach is in need of personal redemption as well as the team. Here, that character is Mandela. Strangely, the coach of the Springboks is not even a character in the movie. The hard part with Invictus is that the sport is rugby which is totally unfamiliar to the American audience. Eastwood has decided to ignore that and just show the game without even trying to explain the rules. And he shows quite a bit of rugby including over 20 minutes of the World Cup final game.

The cast is very good, especially Freeman who is one of those actors who could read from the phonebook and make it interesting. Damon shows again that he can play anyone. He has obviously made a decision to take interesting character roles rather than just going for leading men. As a result, he is making some nice movies (The Informant!) as well as blockbusters like the Bourne and Ocean's Eleven series. 

The thing I hate most is that all biopics change well known facts for dramatic license. As a result, when Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison addresses the jury at the end of JFK, you might expect that he would be giving Garrison's actual speech since it was in the court transcripts. Ditto the speech given by Russell Crowe as John Nash accepting the Nobel Prize at the end of A Beautiful Mind. It isn't the speech that Nash actually gave. So you won't be surprised to find out that at the climax of Invictus, when Mandela gives the Springbok captain a copy of the poem just before the final of the Rugby World Cup, this didn't actually happen. In reality, Mandela gave Pienaar part of Theodore Roosevelt's, The Man In The Arena speech which was more appropriate to the occasion,

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

The most interesting subplot in Invictus involves Mandela's security detail which is made up of his own black guards as well as whites from the South African security service who used to arrest people like Mandela. The white guards are big rugby fans; the black guards not so much. Their story is a microcosm of South Africa today.  Invictus is really a fantasy movie because it implies that Mandela and rugby have produced a new united South Africa. The reality is not quite so clean and simple but it does make a nice movie.

The End of The Road

The Road is the new film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's book. McCarthy's last book to be adapted for the screen, No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture two years ago. The Road is very different and not just because it isn't directed by the Coen brothers. This is an end of the world story much like I am Legend, where the world as we know it has ended. In I am Legend, a plague has killed almost everyone and for a long stretch, the main character played by Will Smith, is the only character in the movie. Multiply the number of survivors by two and you have The Road. In this new movie, civilization has also been destroyed and most people have died. But we never find out what actually happened.

This film tells the story of two survivors of the holocaust, a man (Viggo Mortenson) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who are literally on the road, trying to find a way south where it is warmer and where there might be a better chance of surviving. The weather is certainly bad. It seems to be raining and cold all the time. Most of the movie deals with the father's desperate attempts to save his son. This is all he is living for. We learn in flashbacks that his wife and the son's mother (Charlize Theron) was pregnant around the time of the disaster, and after giving birth could not deal with what was left of the world. So the man was left alone with his son. On the road, they meet very few people. Those they do meet include, a gang of marauders (including Garret Dillahunt), an old man (Robert Duvall), and a young couple (Guy Pearce and Molly Parker). These other characters, even when played by well known actors, appear only briefly in cameos.

The director, John Hillcoat is yet another director from down under. The Road is his second movie. He recently directed Guy Pearce (another Australian) in The Proposition, an outback outlaw movie. Hillcoat is yet another director who started out directing music videos, in particular Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (you guessed it. they are Australian). They do the score for The Road which is pretty appropriate since their music is pretty dirge-like. I like Nick Cave a lot. He is on my iPod.

The Road has a very small cast. Most scenes are just Mortenson and Smit-McPhee. The latter is making his first feature film. They are both excellent and have a good chemistry together. Mortenson and Theron, two very good looking actors, do their best to look haggard, desperate and down on their luck. I almost didn't recognize Robert Duvall, who plays a sick old man they meet on the road. His one scene was almost over before I realized who he was. Duvall, Dillahunt, Pearce and Parker are hardly on screen enough to make an impression. I wish they had been given more screen time. The biggest supporting cameo concerns a thief (Michael K. Williams) who steals the cart carrying all of Mortenson's belongings.

The action in this movie is set against a stark, almost dead world. Much of the movie is shot in rural areas in Oregon and near Mount St. Helen's. But for the urban scenes, the locations chosen were Pittsburgh and New Orleans. Of course, parts of New Orleans really are post-apocalyptic and post-industrial. The Road is determinedly low key. This film is a really mood piece and the mood isn't good. You feel the weight bearing down on Mortenson in every scene as he tries to find food each day just to keep his son alive. And also as he tries to bring some semblance of a normal life to his son, reading to him a bedtime out in the middle of nowhere. You have the feeling as you watch The Road that there can't be a happy ending but it comes close. There is an uplifting message like that given by I am Legend. The message is, that even when the veneer of civilization is scraped away, it is still possible to remain human. It is Smit-McPhee as Mortenson's kindly son who is constantly reminding his father of this as they walk down the road. This is a very good film. Go see it.

December 21, 2012

(Warning! Many spoilers are included in this review)

I almost never want to get up and leave the theatre during a movie. Usually, no matter how bad it is, the movie has some redeeming features or at least will lead to a funny review. The only times I can remember wanting to walk out are: 1. Patch Adams, my least favorite movie of all time, and 2. The Two Towers, because I got so mad about what Peter Jackson did to Faramir.  But I never have actually walked out. And, I didn't walk out on 2012 even though it is the worst movie that I have seen in a long, long time. I mean this movie was just unwatchable. And it has to be bad for me not to like a John Cusack movie. I love the guy. I want him to play me when they do the movie of my life. But he isn't even John Cusack in this movie. No one is anything.

The movie is so bad that the bad science on which it is based hardly makes an impression. I enjoy a good bad science movie like The Core. But 2012 doesn't even have unintentional humor to save it. They don't spend much time explaining what is responsible for destroying the Earth. And even the Mayans who caused this whole 2012 debacle are barely mentioned. There is one brief scene explaining how the alignment of the Earth, Sun and the center of the Galaxy is the root cause. (BTW, the Earth, Sun and the center of the Galaxy line up every December 21st and so far we are doing OK.) Anyway, this alignment causes the Sun to go crazy and shoot off a huge solar flare which is full of neutrinos. This is strange since neutrinos come from the center of the sun. Anyway, they aren't normal neutrinos because on the way to the Earth, they mutate  into something that will get absorbed by the Earth's core (normal neutrinos go right through the Earth) and melt the core. No matter that the Earth's core is already molten. This makes it give off microwaves which  cause the Earth's crust to start shifting around such that there are huge earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis everywhere.

Some scientists have figured all this out, and The POTUS (Danny Glover) and other world leaders have started to build some Arks that will hold about 400,000 of the best and the brightest to try and save the human race from extinction. You know the drill. This has been the plot of innumerable end of the world stories. There is nothing new or interesting in 2012. Ok, there is one amazing thing. Right at the end, the President's science advisor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is able to receive a cellphone call while inside a large steel Ark high in the Himalayas from a Indian friend who is about to be killed by  a very large Tsunami. Thank God the cell towers were still working. 

This brings me back to John Cusack. Disaster movies always have some plucky people who are fighting to save themselves and are invariably not included in the 400,000 chosen to be saved. In 2012, Cusack is a good for nothing writer who ignored his wife (Amanda Peet) and kids until his wife left him. Now she and the kids  are living with her new boyfriend (Tom McCarthy) who is a plastic surgeon. OK, here is something unusual about 2012. The guy that the girl left the hero for, is actually a much nicer and better guy than the hero is. And, of course, this means that he must die. Otherwise, why would Amanda Peet ever take Cusack back.

Anyway, once the world starts to fall apart (literally), Cusack, who for reasons I won't try to explain, but it has something to do with Woody Harrelson, knows what is happening and why. He decides to rescue his family, including the new boyfriend. He needs the boyfriend because he has had two flying lessons and he proceeds to fly them across the globe as they race to get to the Arks in time. There are many, many scenes of Cusack et al. driving or flying through the world as it is being destroyed around them. Repeatedly, they are shown standing and watching 10.0 earthquakes destroy everything around them. The are not thrown to the ground. They are apparently in some sort of force field that protects them from the  devastation. John Cusack and his family are always able to outrun earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis. which approach in extreme slow motion.  This is what they call artistic license.

Besides, Cusack and his family, the other important characters are the President's science advisor (Ejiofor) and the President's chief of staff (Oliver Platt). Platt has made a career of playing unlikable characters in a likable way. But here, he is just nasty. He even leaves his mother behind when he heads to the Ark  There are many scenes where Platt argues with the saintly Ejiofor about why they should try to save unimportant people. Platt gets left in charge after the sad sack president decides he wants to stay behind at the White House and get crushed by the aircraft carrier, USS John F. Kennedy. And they say irony is dead. Usually, in this kind of movie, there are many subplots following

different people as they try to save themselves. But in 2012, there is almost none of that. We get a couple of small vignettes about two old musicians performing on a cruise. One of them is the father of the science advisor.  We get one scene about a family in Tibet and then we don't see them again until near the end of the movie, when John Cusack needs to be rescued and they just happen to drive by. The subplot that gets the most screen time is about a Russian mobster, his two kids, and his floozie girlfriend who knows Cusack's ex's boyfriend because he did her boob job. It's a small world when it's being destroyed.

I was really hoping they would all die but instead we get an excruciating climax where Cusack et al. sneak onto one of the Arks and in doing so screw up one of the doors so it won't close right.  Cusack then has to heroically try and fix the door before the Ark crashes into Mount Everest. That's because the water level on the Earth is 28,000 feet above sea level. This is explained by more crustal shifting. Anyway, even though the engines on the Ark (It's called The Nautilus) are fine, Captain Nemo refuses to turn them on to save the ship until the door is closed. No reason is given. It's not clear why all this crustal shifting causes the world including the Himalayas to be covered by water. But this is a disaster of Biblical proportions so build an Ark! We even see Giraffes andother animals  being loaded onto the Arks in case we don't get the analogy.

The director, Roland Emmerlich, has made some very decent disaster movies in the past including Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. But this movie is a fiasco. I don't know what happened but it is awful. Maybe I missed something. If John Cusack is anything, it's that he is alsways likable. Maybe this is the best performance of Cusack's career and he should win an Oscar for making himself really unlikable. This movie is so bad that I don't even feel like it deserves even one beer bottle. Please, don't go and see this movie.

Silence of the Goats

Ok, I think I just spoiled the best joke in Men Who Stare at Goats, the new comedy that is in theatres now. It has a great cast, George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. And having those guys on the screen is almost enough to carry this film without worrying too much about the plot or characters or a screenplay. Men Who Stare at Goats was directed by Clooney BFF Grant Heslov who wrote the screenplay for Good Night and Good Luck. That was a great movie. But Men Who Stare at Goats is Heslov's first time out as a director. Before this he has mostly been an actor and producer. The screenplay such as it is was written by Peter Straughan. Heslov should have written it. It is adapted from a "non-fiction" book by investigative reporter Jon Ronson. It's hard to know how much of Ronson's book is actually true, but the movie is a heavily fictionalized version of the book.

Ewan McGregor plays some version of Ronson in the movie, and Jeff Bridges plays a character based on Jim Channon who actually did write the First Earth Battalion Manual. In reality, it was never put into practice, but in Men Who Stare at Goats it is. Bridges trains a military outfit, including Clooney and Spacey, in New Age mumbo jumbo and also tries to build up their psychic abilities. This is where the title of the film comes in. Clooney is the best "goat starer." The fun really starts when McGregor runs into Clooney in Kuwait during the Iraq War. He tags along on Clooney's mission, which turns out to be using his talent for "Remote Viewing to find his former commander (Bridges) who has gone missing. Beyond this, there is not much point in relating the plot because it makes no sense.

There is some quite funny stuff in the movie. I like Ewan McGregor and I really like George Clooney and I love love love Jeff Bridges. Kevin Spacey, I used to like, but now not so much. He always seems to be just playing Kevin Spacey and not doing it very well. Men Who Stare at Goats is just the first part of the George Clooney full court press this fall including Fantastic Mr. Fox (voice only) and the film I am really waiting for, Up in Air where Clooney plays a million-mile frequent flier.

In Men Who Stare at Goats, Clooney is in his total wacko comedy character which is very amusing. There's a nice running gag concerning the fact that Clooney keeps crashing his car even though he is supposed to have clairvoyant powers. And the men in Bridges' outfit are referred to as Jedi. Ewan McGregor, you may remember, played Obi Wan Kenobi in the most recent Star Wars Trilogy, so they milk this joke for all it's worth. And it's funny the first two or three times. The rumor is that Heslov hired McGregor not knowing that he played Obi Wan. Mostly, the comedy in Men Who Stare at Goats is total slapstick. They get a lot of mileage out of people high on LSD doing goofy things. My favorite bit in Men Who Stare at Goats is "cloud bursting," where you stare at a cloud and make it disappear using your psychic powers. I've done this myself. It really works. Try it!

A Serious Movie Fan

Ok, I was a bit busy writing my NSF proposal so I decided to wait a week to see the new Coen Brothers movie, A Serious Man. But it turns out that this movie by the guys who made Raising Arizona, Fargo and many others, including No Country for Old Men which won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay, played for exactly one week in Baton Rouge, A.K.A. the whirlpool of despair. Ok, no worries, I thought. I can still see it in New Orleans. although this is somewhat harder than it used to be since my favorite Indie theatre, Canal Place, is now closed. It was still playing at the AMC Elmwood Palace 20, but when I checked the listings, I noticed that Thursday was its last day!  So that's why I drove 75 miles Thursday night to see a movie that wasn't called New Moon. I saw the second last show in all of Louisiana. Now the closest theatre playing A Serious Man is in Houston.

A Serious Man tells the story of a very serious man, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), seen above, who is a physics professor in Minneapolis, MN. At the start of the movie, all is seems well for Larry and his family, but very quickly things start to fall apart. First, the good news. Larry is about to get tenure at the university and his son is about to have his Bar Mitzvah. Now the bad news, Larry's wife (Sari Lennick), seen below, announces she is leaving him for another man (Fred Melamed), his melancholy, gambling, whoring brother is arrested, a foreign student tries to bribe Larry to get a passing grade, and someone is sending nasty anonymous letters to the tenure committee. And to top it off Larry's son (Aaron Wolff) is always complaining that he can't get good reception on the TV when he is watching F Troop. You may think that I am spoiling this movie for you but this is just what we find out in the first half hour of A Serious Man. There is much worse to come.

This movie is all about the Undertoad, that strong feeling of foreboding one gets from time to time. To set the tone, the movie starts with a vignette somewhere sometime in eastern Europe that tells a folk tale about a family who is visited by a Dybbuk. A Serious Man is a very Jewish movie. It's a Woody Allen movie with a Coen Brothers spin. There are lots of quirky Jewish characters and a lot of angst. Larry's lawyer (Adam Arkin), seen below, is eventually handling Larry's divorce, his brother's arrest, and Larry's dispute with his strange cranky neighbor. But it's not all gloom and doom. There is some hilarity provided by Larry's son and his transistor radio. The cast other than Adam Arkin (Life, The West Wing) is mostly unknowns. Michael Stuhlbarg who plays Larry does a really great job. Other standouts are Richard Kind who plays Larry's depressed brother and Aaron Wolff who plays Larry's son.

A Serious Man is a bit like Fargo or No Country for Old Men. In these movies, the Coen Brothers follow the John Irving playbook by subjecting some fairly normal people to more and more abnormal events until something explodes. I live with Undertoad every day, so I quite enjoyed this movie. At first, it seems almost boring in its banality, but it sucks you in and soon you get caught up in the desperation of Larry's life and hope that he can at least improve the reception of F Troop. But you also know that isn't going to happen because this is the Coen brothers not Woody Allen. The last scene is amazing. You'll have to go see the movie to see why. As Larry tells his physics class as he is describing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you can't tell if Schroedinger's cat is dead until you look in the box.