Film: Idiocracy dir. Mike Judge

Idiocracy
directed by Mike Judge

I was frustrated as hell last year when Mike Judge's Idiocracy was dumped into only a handful of theaters and never played the Greater New York area. I was pissed. I love King of the Hill. I was one of the twelve people who went gaga over Office Space before it was released on video. I'd been waiting for this movie eagerly ever since I'd seen it listed in Entertainment Weekly's Summer Movie Preview. I scanned the horizons, ever watchful that it would soon splash across screens on the isle of Manhattan. Nothing. The jeezly flick never played here. In New York!

So, when I saw that it was coming out on DVD, I moved it immediately to the top of my Netflix queue. This weekend, at last, I saw this movie to which I'd been looking forward for ever so long.

Meh.

The premise of this movie, I think, is ripe with comic potential. The over-breeding of dullards in today's society leads to a future world inhabited by utter morons? Awesome! What a great comment on the sad intellectual state of the world we live in. The sequence in which the evolution of this catastrophe is laid out is hilarious. But, once we get to this future world, there's only so many different ways it can be hammered home that these people are stupid.

My wife didn't feel that there was really anything you could do with this premise to give it a longer shelf-life than, say, ten minutes. I think Mike Judge could have done a whole lot more with this, if he hadn't been saddled with a number of other problems.

First off, he attempts to stick fairly closely with the post-apocalyptic movie genre story beats. Massive threat to civilization; our hero manages--somehow, in this crazy, mixed-up world--to restore some semblance of order. Throw in futuristic product placement here and there, as well as a gladiatorial scene; blah blah blah. It's not something that works if played straight with a goofy type of apocalypse grafted on.

Second, Luke Wilson is just kind of boring. I like him. You put him in the right movie, with a strong cast supporting him, and he can pull off a leading man with some credibility. But he's just not strong enough to anchor something like this.

Third: Maya Rudolph. Ugh. I've never understood why she lasted more than a season on SNL and I have no idea why anyone would hire her for a movie. NOT A GOOD ACTRESS.

Do I think this movie is a brilliant, underappreciated gem? No. Hell no. On the other hand, I still don't understand why it didn't get a wider release. There's a whole bunch of crap put out on a regular basis that is five times stupider than this and doesn't even try to make a comment on our society. Epic Movie was the number one film in the country this weekend. I rest my case.

Reviewed by Joe Wack, 494 words

Film: World Trade Center dir. by Oliver Stone

World Trade Center
directed by Oliver Stone

A few disclaimers. I hate Oliver Stone due to my intense annoyance at being whacked with Stone’s thematic Gallagher-sized mallet. I also am criminally uninformed about movie news, so when a friend called and asked if I wanted to see a free sneak preview of World Trade Center with him, I agreed while knowing nothing of the film. Not even the director until a few hours before the screening.

And, for the first time, Stone’s name actually gave me hope. Aren’t movies with an edge of social-political commentary what Stone should be good at? Is not his own strength a willingness to court controversy?

The hope was woefully misplaced.

Stone doesn’t rely on his usual cinematic hyperbole with WTC, a story of two Port Authority cops among the twenty survivors pulled from the wreckage. The collapse of the towers is surprisingly understated, as Stone seems to recognize that the power of the events is already established.

But this inspired another bout of empty hope, as the story focuses, from the moment the first tower falls, on the two trapped policemen and their families. The heartstrings plucked are easy notes (who won’t be moved by a four-year-old perhaps soon to lose a father) and the light moments tedious affectations (Nicholas Cage’s trapped sergeant frets over his unfinished kitchen).

Where are the conspiracy theories? The alternate explorations of the day’s events and their ramifications? Hell, where is the jingoistic support for the narratives that day has spawned or allowed to prosper? Even that would have been more substance than what is here.

Instead, Stone has crafted what I imagine he sees as an affirming story about the power of the human spirit, designed to sell to those with an uncomplicated view of 9-11 and its aftermath and a need to consume simple affirmations of the mythological (and admittedly well-deserved) status of first-responders: when others rushed out, they rushed in. It is a one-note symphony, struck repeatedly for two hours .

The only interesting character in the movie is retired Marine Staff Sergeant Karnes, wonderfully creepily played by Michael Shannon. Watching the events unfold on TV, he suits up in uniform, travels to Ground Zero, and makes his way into the wreckage, eventually discovering the trapped officers. He never drops his Marine persona once he re-adopts it, and never alludes to anyone that he has retired, setting him up as an odd and unlikely hero. And then it comes. At the close of the rescue, he looks up at the wreckage and says that they will need good men to avenge this. Moments later, the epilogue informs us that he re-enlisted and served two tours in Iraq, subtly reinforcing the specious 9-11/Iraq connection hawked by the administration.

But, an interesting moment doesn’t make an interesting movie. WTC will play well in those communities already gobbling up such narrative, but has little to offer those with a complex worldview. It is Stone-lite at best, which says very little coming from me.

Reviewed by Jim Jewell, 499 words

Film: The Proposition

The Proposition
Written by Nick Cave
Directed by John Hillcoat

Nick Cave’s surly, mystical, white-trash magic realism was so easily applied to the landscape of my own observation that the notion of his having a landscape of his own to inspire his fevered visions never crossed my mind. His stories of retribution, mad love, gruesome death and implacable deities had the clear ring of the universal. Of course, the most universal art often emerges from artists telling their own stories, the stories of their own backyards, their own tribes. With Cave’s dazzling screenwriting debut, the grim, lyrical Aussie Western The Proposition, the whole spectrum of Cave’s work will now call to mind the baking Australian desert, the portentous hum of flies on a dead carcass (or its living observers), the piercing shame of colonialism, and the bottled discontent of exploited aboriginals.

Directed with stark delirium by John Hillcoat, The Proposition is built on the simplest of conceits. A lawman, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) makes captured outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) an offer he can’t refuse, sending him on a simple-but-gruesome errand for a simple-but-urgent reward: if he kills his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), Stanley won’t hang Charlie's younger brother Mike (Richard Wilson).

The plot is elemental, but the intricacies of the internal relationships lend the film a stealthy complexity. Rather than the hero, or even the antihero of the story, Charlie is the cipher; Pearce gives him gravitas, but he’s a mythical everyman in a story that indulges in mythological flourish even as it demythologizes its own particular history. Huston and Winstone do the heavy lifting, bringing poignancy and potency to their respective studies of damaged men. Emily Watson, as Stanley’s jittery wife, carries a tremendous thematic burden with aplomb; her comical displacement as a bourgeois wife in the unforgiving wilderness is as nuanced a portrayal as I’ve ever seen of the plight of the colonial wife, separated from her element and increasingly estranged from a husband who fights with every fiber to maintain justice, however convoluted his ideas definition thereof has become. And I won’t even try to explain John Hurt’s giddy cameo: it must be seen to be believed.

The Proposition isn’t for the faint of stomach. Even my desensitized constitution reeled a little when a man wrings blood out of a whip in the midst of a brutal—and revealing—flogging. As with many revisionist Westerns, the impunity with which men kill supersedes moral preoccupation; death relegates all victims to yet more rotting matter in a punishing wilderness. But for all of that, the movie still whispers, croaks and chants its way into the viewer’s consciousness, like Cave’s own muffled voice on the insinuating score, by Cave with longtime collaborator Warren Ellis (Bad Seeds, The Dirty Three). Cave may play the nihilist, but the key to his script, as to his music, is the tiny sliver of hope for redemption that still cries out from its dark, bloody heart.

Reviewed by thelyamhound, 494 words

FILM: The Power of Nightmares, Dir: Adam Curtis

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
A BBC Documentary Written/Directed by Adam Curtis
180 Minutes, in 3 episodes
Making the Film Festival Circuit; available, for free, at the Internet Archive.

What the US mainstream press pundits willfully ignore about Stephen Colbert’s recent display of supreme satire at the White House Press Corps Dinner is that, while lacerating the current administration, Colbert’s speech also doubled as a damning indictment of the press itself, print and broadcast mediums alike, and their uncomfortable inability to discuss it as such is pretty telling.

One wonders how much, if any, opprobrium is felt by the news teams at ABC, CBS, (MS)NBC, and CNN when viewing the product coming out of their British cousin BBC News (FOX News, residing at the Weekly World News end of the spectrum, probably doesn’t give a whit). Particularly if they ever decide to take a look at The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis’ exploration of the similarities between Fundamentalist Islam, and the Neo-Conservative movement.

Insightful, in-depth, and eye opening (Islamic fundamentalism was birthed in Greeley, Colorado?), Curtis excels in documenting the facts in such a cold and logical manner, it makes the fumbling, sensationalistic nature of anything coming out of the likes of Dateline or 20/20 seem amateurish by comparison. It puts the impassioned, if well-intentioned, Michael Moore into the ham-fisted category.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a bias in the film, there is; however, its arguments are nearly irrefutable, simply because it doesn’t go that step too far. The movie gives you the facts and allows you to jump to your own conclusions, even though there’s really not that far to jump.

For example, there is a segment dedicated to the NeoCon’s first foray into power at the White House, where many of the familiar faces of this movement were starting to develop the practices we are now inured to. Specifically, it’s the “just because there’s no discernible evidence [that the enemy doesn’t have x weapon], doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent” ruse. In the case of the 70s, the deadly weapon is a sub-sonic submarine the Soviets are purported to have, and how it is supposed to be impossible to trace by any known methods.

Most would be content to take that bit of non-logic and leave it to the viewer to plumb its maddening nature. Instead, Curtis wisely finds the people who were in the intelligence field at the time (some of them who went on to hold powerful offices in the FBI), and has them, in no uncertain terms, refute the possibility, and, in turn, the logic, outright.

It is fascinating to watch Curtis, using this scalpel-like precision, essentially marry the NeoCon movement with that of Fundamentalist Islam. The similarities may have been noted before, but Curtis makes those connections concrete, once and for all. Just as fascinating is watching the forward progress made by these movements repeatedly fall apart for, essentially, the same reason:

Humanity’s hunger for dominance and power is only outmatched by its desire to live in peace.

Meanwhile, tonight on Dateline: Is Your Neighbor Releasing Rats Into Your Basement? An In Depth Investigation.

Reviewed by Jose’ Amador, 489 words.