Prometheus

Or, Goo bye and goo riddance.

How much meta-content do you want in your horror movies? Prometheus has been panned by some on the grounds that it starts out promising to tell you the origins of humanity and then fails to do so. To me, that's not nearly as much of a disappointment as the fact that it promises to scare the daylights out of you and then fails to do that. 

Our main characters, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), and her husband, Dr. Charles Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered cave paintings of big people pointing at a bunch of dots, which conclusively proves where life on Earth came from. I have no problem buying this premise, as long as it gets us to a really creepy planet. Which it does, of course, but it takes about half the movie to get there.

On the way, we are introduced to David, an android played by Michael Fassbender, who likes to watch Lawrence of Arabia for pretty much no reason except perhaps to learn a British accent. It would make more sense if he had been watching 2001, or Terminator 2, or Saturn 3. Are the robots ever the nice guys in movies like this?

David is in charge of waking everybody up from the obligatory cryosleep, at which point we meet Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the corporate executive who has been sent on this mission to do pushups, apparently, and walk around as robotically as David and bark at everybody because she's a corporate executive and that's what they do. Since Ridley Scott brought us Blade Runner, it's worth discussing whether Vickers is herself an android. If this review doesn't put you off the movie entirely, or you saw it too late, come back and discuss in the comments.

Are you scared yet? Exactly. 

There are a lot of conversations about how we're here to find out who created us, and Dr. Shaw wears a cross, which we discuss at length. If this makes you suspect that it is a symbological sledgehammer which will later be wielded against you, go to the head of the class.

There are a bunch of other characters. I'd tell you who they are, but they're all redshirts, so that'd be pointless.

Finally we get to the planet. They find a mysterious cave (yawn), and some mysterious black goo (probably not good, right?) Then a storm comes, and two redshirts get stuck outside the ship, and I thought, finally! The movie's starting!

It kind of never does, though. We've just seen this all before. There are nasty lifeforms, but they're surprisingly ho-hum. David does what you knew all along he was going to do, and again the results fail to truly scare. There's a creepy alien birth sequence, which would have bothered me more if I hadn't seen it coming since the otherwise pointless sex scene. The miniseries V had a creepier alien birth sequence thirty years ago (and I hear the Twilight series had one too), so if you're a connoisseur of these things, it's worth a look but otherwise not a reason to watch Prometheus. Oh, and you're pretty sick.

In between, the humans discuss whether the aliens on the planet made them, and David points out that humans made him, just in case you missed that wrinkle. I'm mystified that reviewers would say this movie was obtuse, because the characters really refuse to let the audience figure anything out for themselves.

And at the end, it turns out this is an origin story of sorts...the origin of a new set of sequels. That might be the most predictable thing about this very predictable movie.

Arbitrage

Or, A Criminal Waste of Susan Sarandon.

Nudity in art, if it has a reason to be there, can be very explicit and not be accused of prurience. But if it has no reason to be there, no justification, no artistic purpose, then it's just pornography.

Arbitrage is the bastard child of Wall Street and Bonfire of the Vanities, with the exploding car from Michael Clayton, but without the virtues of any of these. It's a film that spends a lot of time in fancy restaurants, richly furnished offices and townhouses with spiral staircases that would be at home in the last scene of Sunset Boulevard. But it's empty and pointless. It's just another form of pornography. And Arbitrage is too preoccupied with its real-estate porn to bother with a sex scene, anyway. It's M&A without the T&A. 

Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a Wall Street hotshot who made one incredibly bad investment which he is now trying to cover up. This involves a lot of boring conversations about bridge loans and Russian copper mines, so the writers have manufactured a subplot about the death of his unbelievably annoying mistress in order to manufacture some urgency.

In a better movie, this script might be used to prompt us to ask ourselves about the values of loyalty and family, and what money can buy and what it can't, and whether the police are any better than the criminals they're pursuing. 

Director Nicholas Jarecki simply isn't up to the task. He adds nothing to the script, which has some serious weaknesses. The police commit an act of jaw-dropping misconduct, they're caught by a judge, and he doesn't really seem to consider the possibility that this might be a case for Internal Affairs. Robert's wife catches him philandering and perpetrating fraud, and he appears to claim that this behavior is justified because she shops too much. 

Robert's daughter Brooke actually is helpful enough to point out another flaw in the script when she mentions that as the film's Chief Investment Officer, nobody is going to believe she didn't know anything about the missing $400 million, so it's kind of a cheap shot for her dad to claim he committed the fraud for the family, since she's probably going to jail too. Since Brit Marling, who plays Brooke, turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to go into acting, it makes you wonder if she helpfully suggested that her character shoot a huge hole in the movie.

Richard Gere is capable of subtlety as an actor, but he's at his best when he's cast against type. As the cuckolded schlep of a husband in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, he's the best thing about the movie. He's surprisingly compelling in the improbable role of a Japanese-American in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August. But here, there isn't any subtlety for him to bring out. He winds up yelling a lot. It's almost as if Jarecki can't decide if his character is supposed to be sympathetic or not, and frankly, Gere seems just too nice to play a total jerk. Do we want the police to catch him or don't we?

The supporting cast is uneven. If this is the best movie role Susan Sarandon is getting offered these days, she should decamp for the small screen. She was hilarious as Frank's jailbait-loving teacher on 30 Rock. Here, she's window dressing. She's almost too good: the audience is bound to wonder why Robert would sleep around with Laetitia Casta's whiny, self-doubting, needy French artist tramp when he has Sarandon's elegant, fit, devoted Ellen waiting for him.

Tim Roth disappears into the role of the bloodhound detective determined to sink his teeth into Robert's leg, but his motivation is puzzling and neither the script nor the director comes to his aid. Nate Parker has the thankless role of the righteous poor African-American who demonstrates the hypocrisy of the rich white man.

Even the makeup fails this movie. Robert sustains some kind of stomach injury as the result of a car accident. This injury is key to the plot, but the editor doesn't stay on the shot more than a few frames, evidently because the makeup job is so unconvincing that lingering on it for so much as a full second would reveal its incompetence. In another scene, the police detective comments on a head injury that Robert is supposed to have but for the life of me I couldn't see.

For some reason this movie was a film festival darling, screening at Sundance and earning raves. Personally, I'm mystified. Maybe lefty critics are just happy to see a movie that portrays Wall Street moguls as selfish bastards. If so, they should browse the documentary category and pick up Inside Job. The truth in this case is so much more compelling than the fiction.

ParaNorman

Or, 28 Decades Later.

ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart. 

Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.

I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.

Not that I'm complaining.

Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.

As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.

ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?

The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."

This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.

Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.

So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.

It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets. 

The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.

The Artist

Or, The Silence of the Frogs.

I love what André Bazin called the "exquisite embarrassment" of silent films. Freed from the fetters of speech, silent film was a more universal medium, a more transfixing one. When the images tell the entire story, you can't close your eyes or look away.

The Artist is a loving hommage to the golden age of Hollywood silent film. And heaven knows Hollywood loves nothing more than a loving hommage to itself, except maybe an hommage made by the people who invented the word hommage. 

So it's no surprise that Hollywood was wracked with ecstasy over The Artist. And it's a superbly crafted film, a cinematic wedding cake; you wouldn't want to eat it every day, but it's perfect for a special occasion. Silent film star George Valentin, on his way down, meets rising talkie star Peppy Miller on her way up–in fact, in one scene, he does so literally. The Artist is filled with  clever moments like that. An exquisite cut on the drumming of fingers; a riff on the famous montage of Charles Foster Kane and his first wife at breakfast; a wink at Garbo's most famous line.

If silence awakens creativity, it has aroused a sleeping giant in director Michel Hazanavicius. He has chosen the perfect collaborators: actors Jean Dujardin, who gives Valentin a megawatt silent-movie star smile; and Bérénice Béjo, whose Peppy Miller embodies the word ingénue. Perhaps more important is his third star, Uggie, who plays Valentin's valorous pooch. Dujardin and Béjo adapt well to silence; but only Uggie speaks it natively, and at times he almost trots away with the film.

Actually, there isn't a false note in the international cast, which finds American superstars playing the supporting roles–John Goodman as the ruthless studio head; Penelope Ann Miller as the faithless wife; and James Cromwell as, of all things, the faithful chauffeur. Where else but in a silent film could a director get away with that?

Like Charlie Chaplin, Valentin's downfall is his inability to talk. Which begs the question: why make this movie, anyway? Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho wasn't just bad because it was poorly executed and occasionally just plain silly; it was bad because it was attempting to xerox genius. 

As a lover of silent film, I wanted The Artist to point the way to a new era of silent film. Unfortunately, it points resolutely backwards instead of forwards. It's almost as if it needed to be made because people haven't seen the genius of The General or Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera. And that's a worthy goal, I suppose, but it wasn't enough for me. There is one exception–a Trojan Horse of sound inside the silent city walls, a comic nightmare–that at once violates the film's code and redeems it. 

I look forward to Hazanavicius' next film with quiet anticipation.

The Queen of Versailles

Or, "Cinderella, Foreclosed."

A successful documentary often requires sheer dumb luck: sure, choosing the right subject is important, and finding the story in the footage is critical. But sometimes a filmmaker starts out to make one film, and ends up making something quite different. The Queen of Versailles is one of those films.

David Siegel, the King of Timeshares, was a very rich man. When he and his wife Jackie set out to build the largest single-family house in the United States, modeled on the French palace of Versailles, filmmaker Lauren Greenfield set out to document the construction.

The collapse of the real estate market in 2008 took David's empire with it, and what begins as a story of jaw-dropping opulence gradually becomes a not-quite riches-to-rags story. The house, during the course of the movie, remains an empty shell. The Siegels, just like so many people in America, found themselves at the mercy of the banks. That's both its singular power and its greatest flaw: the Siegels do not, of course, wind up on welfare. But the story is still tremendously revealing. Greenfield has a knack for pulling out moments that will stay with you long after the film is over; the dull parts will be easy to forget.

You might wonder why the film is called The Queen of Versailles. Isn't it about a couple, after all? It is, and it isn't. Jackie Siegel is a fascinating character: a beautiful girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and eventually married one of the richest men in America; a woman who got an engineering degree and went to work for IBM yet still isn't quite the brightest pixel on the plasma display; a model who went on to have seven children; a generous woman who took in her niece and sent a check to a high school friend who couldn't pay her mortgage. It doesn't take an MFA to recognize a character like this when you see her.

Meanwhile, whenever David shows up, the movie seems to transform momentarily into Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. David is only interesting as long as he's rich. Towards the beginning of the film he takes credit for putting George W. Bush in the White House (and he's a Florida billionaire, so you have to at least consider the possibility that this is more than mere boastfulness). He doesn't quite sweep the audience off its feet, but you can at least understand the appeal, as Greenfield investigates the epic grandeur of the timeshare business. As the family fortune spirals lazily down the drain, though, David quickly becomes a grumpy grandpa, huddled shirtless in the TV room surrounded by boxes of papers.

If you think Jackie's a golddigger–and come on, of course you did–this is where she will surprise you. Partially. She's neither as shallow as your suspect nor as plucky as you hope. On the one hand, she clearly isn't going to leave David, and in fact she refuses to despair or even to raise her voice.

On the other hand, she clearly wasn't cut out for the drudgery of taking care of a Brady Bunch-plus of rugrats in house which (we learn early on in the movie) has seventeen bathrooms to clean, to say nothing of a few dogs. As Jackie herself puts it, in one of the previously-mentioned moments that will stay with you, she'd never have had seven children if she'd known she had to take care of them herself.

The movie makes a token effort to contrast the lifestyles of the not-quite-so-rich with the lifestyles of the servants-of-the-not-quite-so-rich, notably the filipino nannies and the limo driver with a secret. These make for some of the movie's most important moments, and the only really touching ones. It simultaneously leaves you wanting more and undercuts the entire narrative. 

The nanny hasn't seen her son since he was seven (he's now twenty-six). That makes it really hard to feel anything at all for the Siegels. Greenfield was extremely lucky to find both a memorable character in Jackie Siegel and a once-in-a-lifetime story in the disintegration of the Siegel empire; but she doesn't really manage to universalize that story. At one point Jackie says that if the family had to move into a three-bedroom home it would be fine; but that only makes you feel for the people who might have lost a three-bedroom home so that the Siegels could move in.

Brave

As the father of a very independent little girl who wears pants, I've been excited about Brave for about a year. Her world is filled with Hermione Grangers–strong, independent, second-fiddle female characters.

And Brave truly is all about the female characters. It's about the tension between mothers and daughters, in this case Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald). And the conflict isn't about them having different ideas of who Merida should marry (although it's kind of about whether she should marry at all). Theoretically I applaud the choice. It's almost like the movie was designed to pass the Bechdel test. My only objection is: does she have to be a princess? Is that some kind of unbreakable Disney rule? Sigh.

Because the princess thing is feeling a little tired. If you've seen the trailer for Brave, you can pretty much arrive forty-five minutes late and miss nothing. Elinor just wants Merida to be all princessy and sew and sing and get married, and Merida just wants to ride through the forest and shoot arrows. It feels like a movie that would have been very progressive in 1972. What mother in 2012 wouldn't just go ahead and enter a daughter like that in all the archery contests? She's a better archer than Hawkeye from The Avengers. If nothing else, she might grow up to get a part in The Hunger Games!

And surely a really caring mother would never make her daughter marry anybody as buffoonish as the three prospective suitors who come seeking her hand? Here Elinor hints that Merida's being selfish and endangering the peace by refusing to marry, but suggesting that she's pimping her daughter out for the good of the realm hardly makes her seem like a better mother.

So a conflict that should be interesting becomes a conflict between a three-dimensional teenage girl (nudge nudge, wink wink) and her two-dimensional mother. There is, however, one truly breathtaking shot in which Pixar's superb animators show us exactly how alike these two stubborn women are. A lot has been made of Merida's red hair, but it is a real artistic achievement. I don't know if anything else about the animation really stands out, which is either a mild criticism or a backhanded compliment acknowledging that Pixar movies are all so visually stunning that we've become totally jaded.

Once the movie moves beyond the trailer, Merida does something she shouldn't out of teenage anger at her mother, and spends the rest of the movie trying to undo it. Part of the trick of making a children's movie is sweeping the audience away so thoroughly that they forget that the happy ending is guaranteed.


Brave never quite does that. We've waited so long for the movie to actually get going, and then it sort of limps along. Maybe the problem is that there's not really a villain. Merida is a wonderful character, brimming with energy, and she's breaking down an open door. She's so good with a bow, and yet she never actually shoots anything except a target. Where's the Angus McGhastly standing in the way of her dreams?

More critically, it feels like this awful event is just an excuse to teach Elinor the error of her ways. If Elinor had been less of a cardboard character, maybe this wouldn't have been necessary. Is it possible that Disney has finally bumped up against the limits of the princess genre? First we had princesses who waited for their prince to come; then we got princesses who wanted to choose their prince; then we moved on to princesses who got to fight for their prince. Now, finally, we have a princess who really just doesn't want a prince at all.

Merida repeatedly misses a good opportunity to take responsibility for what she's done, which, considering that she's a teenager, seems realistic–but, of course, movies aren't about reality. Screenwriting convention requires that Merida change, and I didn't really see that.

Instead, the rest of the world changes to accommodate her, which is a nice thought. The world is always changing to accommodate men, after all. But there's usually a price to be paid for that, even for the guys, and it's almost as if the writers were afraid to exact that price from a girl.

On the flip side, Chris Heller in the Atlantic says that it can't really be a coincidence that Merida stands up for young people being able to choose who to marry in an era when gay marriage is front and center in the national political arena, and he may have a good point.  Pixar films have always been good at appealing to adult sensibilities where humor is concerned, but maybe this one just wants to make the adults go "hmmmm...." while the kids clap with delight.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

The performance artist Marina Abramovic declares in a manifesto, "an artist should not fall in love with another artist." I followed her advice, which often makes it difficult to convince my wife to watch movies about people like Marina Abramovic. I'll let my wife tell it: "if you'd told me you wanted to watch a movie about a woman who sat in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art and stared at people for three months, I'd have said 'What? No way.'"

Performance art is a little like documentary film in that both are often obscure, hard to appreciate, and let's be honest, a little boring. But when well done, both are mesmerizing; and both Marina Abramovic's art and Matthew Akers' documentary are. 

Akers chooses to document an installation where Abramovic sat on a chair all day, six days a week, for three months, and museumgoers could sit on a chair opposite her and look at her, for as long as they wanted. This is a big challenge for a documentary, because film is about movement and Abramovic doesn't move. 

Thankfully, Akers is a cinematographer and he has made a beautiful film. Usually documentaries can't compete with narrative films visually–they're shot on crummy formats, they're underlit, poorly framed, and the camera is moving around like it's 1994 and NYPD Blue is really avant-garde. Digital video has made documentaries so much cheaper and easier, but often it doesn't do the genre any favors. Sometimes you feel like you're watching The Eleven O'Clock News: The Feature Film.


The Artist is Present does none of that. It's easy on the eyes, but don't get the idea that I'm so grateful I'd watch a documentary about anything if they used a tripod. It's a beautiful story, during the course of which you come to understand just what performance art really is. Maybe the most telling moment in the entire film is when James Franco comes and sits in front of her; Akers doesn't identify him, but he does show Franco talking with audience members afterwards (one of whom asks innocently: "are you an actor?") One woman says that what Abramovic is doing is very much like acting; Franco denies it, and having come to this place in the film, you realize he's totally right. The actor is playing a role, and the artist is playing herself. Actors may be motivated by realism but not reality; they may talk about exposing themselves, but they can't do it as truly as Abramovic does.


Or as bravely, or as selflessly. You may not leave the film understanding her art any more than you understand credit default swaps, but you will certainly appreciate the grit and fortitude that it requires. There is a religious aspect to Abramovic's performance, and there are many shots of people moved to tears by it, or inspired by it to stare intensely at each other in the hope of finding the same fleeting feeling. 


That's not to say that The Artist is Present doesn't have its tangents and its dull moments. Personally, I found the story of her romance with fellow performance artist Ulay to be a little thin, although it does eventually provide a huge payoff, which I wouldn't want to spoil. The film finds many such small moments of beauty, and it is refreshing to see a movie that can move an audience by crooking a finger rather than unleashing an earthquake.