Renter's Adventures, Part Two

Pathology (2008, Marc Schölermann)

In Pathology, a young doctor (a bland Milo Ventimiglia) slowly discovers that the autopsy staff is playing a strange game. They’re competing to see who can pull off the perfect murder. The bodies come through their morgue, giving the other players in the game the chance to puzzle through the cause of death. Is our protagonist shocked by such behavior? A little bit, I suppose. But soon enough, he’s partaking in the games. This is a good concept, ripe for luridness and, sure enough, the filmmakers indulge in grisly autopsies and brutal murders, throwing in plenty of drugs and abuse as well. This should be a schlocky good time, but the whole thing falls flat.

First-time director Marc Schölermann has a serviceable style that neither dazzles nor distracts but the script by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor brings the real disappointment. The two of them wrote and directed Crank a hyperactive, and ridiculously lurid, action movie that barrels forward with such a crazed energy that those with strong enough sensibilities can find themselves swept up in the ride. I found Crank a little exhausting by the end. I was overwhelmed by the sheer excess but admired the style. Neveldine and Taylor have guts and talent and I still hold out hope that they’ll turn out some great genre work. With Pathology, though, they pull back the pace which only serves to make the plotting seem sleepy.

There’s a sense of matter-of-fact movement in the dialogue and plotting that makes even the most shocking hard-R content seem boring, routine, or just plain silly. The deeper and deeper Ventimiglia is pulled into the dark game, the more I felt my attention slipping away. It’s frightfully uninvolving, even for a third-rate knockoff and mash-up of Se7en and Coma. This is one seriously undercooked B-movie. Where’s the urgency? Why don’t the stakes seem life-and-death? All thrillers need a sense of danger and forward momentum. I never felt that here. Pathology is just well-shot nonsense, dull and grimy, lingering in the mind just long enough to feel uncomfortably sleazy.

Tokyo! (2009, Michel Gondry/Leos Carax/Bong Joon-Ho)

Tokyo!, an underwhelming triptych ode to Tokyo, presents three short films from directors who are not natives to the city: two Frenchmen and a Korean. Each film presents a distinct vision, has a few enjoyable sequences, but none of them truly satisfy. There is certainly none of the great sense of rambling unevenness married to a sense of relentless artistry that came with Paris, Je Taime, an anthology film featuring mostly great Paris-set shorts from nearly twenty different directors.

The first film, Interior Design, comes to us from Michel Gondry, of Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film follows a filmmaker and his girlfriend as they move to Tokyo. The banter between the two is charming, as are the scenarios in which they find themselves, such as finding a dead cat or competing for the same gift-wrapping job. This being a Gondry film, though, I was constantly anticipating a shift into whimsy and dreading the prospects since the short unfolds with such unforced heightened, but not much, reality. When the shift arrives with the girlfriend finding a new purpose in life, I was disappointed.

The second film is Merde from Leos Carax (who hasn’t directed a feature since Pola X in 1999), about a strange creature who emerges from the sewer and storms down a city sidewalk snatching bouquets and sandwich, pausing occasionally to frighten a baby or lick an innocent bystanders armpit, all in a mesmerizing sequence that plays out in nearly one continuous shot. When the creature’s antics turn more dangerous, it is captured and put on trial. The whole short is entertaining but it can’t match the high of its opening moments.

The third, and final, film is Shaking Tokyo, about a recluse who makes eye-contact with another human being for the first time in some time. That’s all I shall say about this one, plot-wise as it both the simplest and my favorite of the three. Director Bong Joon-Ho, who also directed the fun monster movie The Host, from a few years ago, shoots his short gorgeously with great pacing and patience in its warm human comedy and poignancy.

I’m not sure Tokyo! would have been worth seeking out in theaters, but now that it’s available for renting, it might be worth a look. After all, with anthologies, if you don’t like one contribution, you can skip ahead and hope you like the next one.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009)

I Love You, Beth Cooper opens with its best scene though, given the quality of the movie, that’s not saying much. The stereotypically nerdy valedictorian proclaims his love for the prettiest, most popular girl in the school during his graduation speech by uttering the movie’s title. Played by Paul Rust, the character's speech is mildly amusing. The movie’s all downhill from there. It’s a comedy, supposedly, but I laughed a grand total of once, and smiled only a few times more.

Television star Hayden Panettiere plays Beth Cooper. She brings the pretty and the popular but she lacks the depth to pull off the character’s subtext. You see, popular girls aren’t perfect. Are you surprised? Beth Cooper shows up at the valedictorian’s house, where he and his best friend (Jack Carpenter) are having a small party, and proceeds to flee from her crazy military boyfriend (Shawn Roberts), nerds in tow. The movie is filled with all kinds of flat, unimaginative dialogue and self-consciously wacky behavior. It’s like a painfully awkward person who has intellectualized comedy but has no capabilities to perform it.

There are also all kinds of odd fight scenes between Rust and Roberts that are ostensibly humorous and filmed in a dreary sitcom style, but the blows are matched with painfully heightened sound effects. Each punch thrown lands with a booming thump that doesn’t match the damage we see on screen or make the moment funnier. It’s not funny to watch a nerd get beaten up, at least not any funnier than watching a Hummer plow through the front of a mansion or having a teenage girl (an embarrassing Lauren Storm) admit fairly disturbing facts about her life while looking into the foreground with a blank stare.

Chris Columbus directs with a flat, uninspired style that drums its way through the dull plot. Rust and Carpenter are vaguely entertaining – they have a commitment to the material that’s endearing – and there's a sweet little romance that barely develops between Carpenter and a girl played believably by Lauren London, but they can’t salvage the mess. This is a studio comedy that feels prepackaged and focus-grouped from the start. It’s light and harmless enough, I suppose, but uninvolving to its core, so desperate for laughs that it goes to the well of cheap animal gags not once but twice. The movie plays like a bad PG-13 Superbad rip-off, with best friends trying to fit in with some cool girls. But, unlike Greg Mottola’s wonderful, and wonderfully vulgar, teen comedy, Beth Cooper isn’t funny, isn’t original, and has zero emotional impact or relevance. It is a perfect closed system of a movie, originating and terminating within the Hollywood studio bubble without ever making contact with the real world.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

At this point, it is satisfying enough to go to a new Harry Potter movie looking for subtle differences, similar themes and scenes played in different keys and at different tempos. With six films, the series is consistently good in all aspects of its production. It’s simply enjoyable enough to be reunited with these characters, these actors, for another few hours. There’s a joy to be found in merely seeing these people again. Oh, look how they’ve grown, we can say about the child – no, young adult now – actors. More importantly, once we are absorbed into the world, we can say Look, there’s Hagrid! McGonagall! Flitwick! Why ignore the pleasures of entering into a fantasy world and enjoying its texture, its populace, its richness of imagination?

With The Half-Blood Prince, the Potter films have become a firmly mature piece of fantasy storytelling. This movie cannot be dismissed as mere child’s play. It’s a beautifully languid film of great humor and emotional impact, powerful in its exploration of the ways the past intrudes on the present, the ways children of all ages will behave when hoping to carry out the wishes of a parental figure. In this film, there are two students on two separate missions for their elders. There's Potter himself, working for Dumbledore, but Draco Malfoy stands out in a wrenching and tense plotline that gives Tom Felton some real acting to do after five films of practicing his sneering. Malfoy has been chosen by Voldemort to carry out an aspect of his evil plan, which sends Malfoy into an unbearable angst. He becomes more than a stock bully, more than a proxy for his more villainous father (played by the great Jason Issacs). Malfoy gains great depth and becomes a richer, more interesting character through his torment.

All of the characters get richer characterization, more emotional dialogue, this time around. The characters are older once more, sending the teens headlong into fully realized crushes and romances in addition to the usual doom and gloom of the foreboding encroaching forces of darkness. At times the film threatens to become a tad too sudsy or cutesy but pulls back at just the right moments. The lead trio – still Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson – have become more confident and skilled, once again, successfully navigating this tricky tone. Interspersed among the students' antics and the dark wizard’s evil schemes, as usual, is the great adult cast. Some, like Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane, have little more to do than show up once in a while to remind us of their presence and their perfect inhabitation of their characters. Others, like the always great Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon, in their best performances of the series, get more to do this time around, meatier monologues, shocking revelations and satisfying moments. Still others, like Jim Broadbent, are new to the series and fit in perfectly. Has there ever been a better cast series of movies? Every role thus far is perfectly filled and perfectly played.

Taking the directorial reins once again is David Yates, who merely competently handled the last installment. Here, working with veteran – but new to the series – cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, he creates one of the finest looking Potter films yet, casting even the lightest, funniest scenes in a haze of melancholy. The compositions are splendid; a charming early scene looks straight up the middle of a winding staircase with different characters at different heights. Later, an underwater scene plays out in a long, nearly silent, take with a beautiful dapple of green and orange. It’s ostensibly a scene of terror, and so it is, but it’s shot through with a deadly hypnotic visual charm. Throughout the film there are scenes of equal skill. It’s as if Terrence Malick was collaborating with the ghost of Orson Welles to create such skillful visual interest. It’s an approach that is vastly different from Cuarón’s work in Prisoner of Azkaban, but an approach that creates an equal effect. With an effortlessly moving camera revealing angles and crannies, gorgeous colors and palpable atmosphere, never before has the wizard world, Hogwarts specifically, looked so eminently livable, explicable, fit to explore.

This is a film in no hurry, drunk on its own mood and tone. At first glance, that may seem like a backhanded compliment, and for a lesser movie it would be, but after so many hours of Potter films, I care about this world, these characters, and I feel a genuine swelling of happiness and familiarity in getting to spend more time here. It helps that the mood and tone are first-rate and evocative. We’re truly in horror territory at times, with long gliding shots down gloomy hallways, creepily distended tension, and even a few great jump moments. At other times, we’re in a great boarding-school melodrama, with easy comedy, moody students, shifting allegiances, and a sinister and strange faculty. This is a magical series indeed, with so much feeling and warmth consistently present amidst its shifting tones. The film feels of one piece, sending warm laughter and cold shivers in equal measure, sometimes shifting in seconds. (Look at the scene involving the love potion cure for an example). Near the film’s end, we are given one of the most elegantly moving scenes in the entire series, a scene that fills the screen with a soft light that, however briefly, chases away the encroaching clouds of darkness. The movie does the same. It's a fine piece of escapism, a fine piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, and one of the finest Potters.

The Half-Blood Prince succeeds not just because it’s a compelling world, a gripping story, or an interesting allegory, though it is all three. It succeeds not just because it has excellent production values, great source material, and a hard-working and uniformly excellent cast and crew, though it has those too. It succeeds because we care about these characters, have seen them grow, age, and change, and are consistently presented reason to have confidence that this series will do them – and their source material – justice.

The Proposal (2009)

There has been talk lately of Michael Bay as an auteur. This is healthy discussion as it does good to remind us all that acclaim is not a prerequisite for an auteur and talking about a director in such terms is not necessarily an endorsement. This thought came to me while watching, of all things, The Proposal, choreographer-turned-director Anne Fletcher’s third film after Step Up and 27 Dresses. She makes films in a flat, unremarkable style centering on female characters whose professional drives cause them to neglect their personal lives. Her films aren’t good – I’ve yet to like one of them – but they share this theme. Is Anne Fletcher an auteur? Maybe so.

The Proposal isn’t a good film despite the (diluted) presence of likable comedic performers Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. The set-up is crisp, clear screwball template: career-woman Bullock will be deported and demoted unless she can get a green card. The door opens and there stands Reynolds, her handsome assistant. She can’t get deported, you see, because they’re getting married. (If he doesn’t go through with the ruse, she tells him behind closed doors, she’ll ruin his career.)

To prove it’s a true marriage to a steely-eyed government official, the two of them take off for Alaska and Reynolds’s hometown. Lots of tomfoolery occurs and it’s nice to see so much of the comedy (initially) rest on the faces of the leads. The first several minutes of the movie is fairly entertaining as Bullock and Reynolds can bring down the house with the smallest shift of their expression. It’s not so nice to see these quick-witted, likable actors saddled with a dreary plot that cares more about the coincidences and contrivances than the characters or the chemistry between them. I never bought that the two of them would fall in love. Nor did I believe Reynold’s twinkly-eyed sitcom family, including big-hearted but cold-shouldered dad Crag T. Nelson, warm and loving mom Mary Steenburgen, hottie (and nice! and smart!) ex-girlfriend Malin Akerman, and too-good-to-be-true grandma Betty White.

This is all sitcom-ready casting and material, but this is no half-hour pilot. The movie drags on for nearly two hours with limp, hokey slapstick and unbelievable leaps and changes within the characters. That I uniformly liked the cast made it all the more disappointing. With this cast, and this situation, this could have been an overheated, tightly-wound screwball comedy (or at the very least a door-slamming farce) but it was not to be. The movie never gets the right momentum for takeoff.

By the end of The Proposal, I began to rethink my initial thought about Anne Fletcher as an auteur. Sure, she’s returned to the same theme three times now but is blandness a distinctive enough style? After sitting through an overlong supposed comedy (you can tell it’s funny because the poster is white with red letters) that neither worked as intended or irked, I came to only one firm conclusion about Ms. Fletcher. I’m not ready to defend her until she makes a film that’s worth my time.

Land of the Lost (2009)

The key to decoding Land of the Lost comes from a 70's pop song, played three-fourths of the way into the movie, that croons, among other lyrics, “summer breeze makes you feel fine.” The movie is nothing more or less than a summer breeze, a sweet-and-sour candy confection, lightweight, insubstantial, and not at all good for you. The movie takes the basic concept of the cult-favorite 70s show (and the mostly forgotten 90s series remake) and turns it into a freewheeling, goofball Will Ferrell plot with googly-eyed pop-art set design by Bo Welch and stylish direction from Brad Silberling. This isn’t a great film but it works, at least some of the time, on its own terms.

Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a washed up paleontologist who lives in shame from his outburst on The Today Show, a scene that opens the movie with a funny performance from Matt Lauer and great callbacks to a certain movie star’s appearance on the same program. Marshall is encouraged by Holly (Anna Friel), the only scientist who believes his theories about time warps, to test out his theories. They meet up with Will, an ambitious redneck carny (the always funny Danny McBride), for a routine expedition that soon encounters the greatest earthquake ever known. The three of them end up in the Land of the Lost, a funky world where lizard-people, monkey-people and dinosaurs coexist with other strange flora and fauna, not to mention the copious cultural detritus like a hotel, mannequins, and an ice cream truck.

There’s an off-kilter charm to the set design and special effects. I was thoroughly delighted by Enik, a lizard-scientist who greets our heroes and agrees to help them return home. The plot seems almost incidental to these characters that stumble and bumble around this strange land. There’s no real reason for them to be there, so thoroughly ill-equipped to handle the zaniness around them. There’s a palpable disconnect to the style that has these people starkly standing out from the background, the semi-fake scenery and the collision of the kiddy humor and adult innuendoes. It is this very disconnect that provides an uneasy tension and a source of humor. This doesn’t play out like a good-natured spoofing of a classic show, nor does it roll out as a slick fantasy thriller. Rather, the film shuffles through a combination of the two with truly odd commitment to both halves. It’s a film that never really comes together, but the odd tension at its center (driven by a bongo and banjo score by Michael Giacchino) makes it compelling and entertaining.

Renter's Adventures, Part One

12 Rounds (2009, Renny Harlin)

On Blu-ray 12 Rounds, the creaky B-movie actioner from hit-and-miss director Renny Harlin, has some clear imagery and fine booming explosions, but those do nothing to mask the horrid noise the plot makes as its gears turn. It stars John Cena – a professional wrestler with solid screen presence – as a police officer who runs afoul of a criminal mastermind (Aidan Gillen) who creates a series of convoluted scavenger-hunt style traps, most involving morality lessons, stuff that blows up, or both, for his foe to navigate. Though Cena holds his own as a competently compelling action star – it’s no worse than early Dwayne Johnson stuff like The Scorpion King – the villain never seems threatening, nor does there ever seem to be any real menace behind any of the traps. By giving us the outline – 12 rounds – in advance, it never seems to matter what happens moment to moment. The gears turn. On to the next round. I barely cared enough to shrug.

Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (2009, Bruce Hendricks)

The filmed Jonas Brothers concert (aptly called Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience) is not a great concert film. There’s no thought or artistry behind the presentation (like Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz), no immediately obvious historical importance (like Woodstock or Gimme Shelter), but it looks good. The boys are polished performers and their songs are catchy enough even though their sometimes antic movements (spins, flips, and cartwheels) ring false and their lyrics err on the side of bland. In Blu-ray, the image really shines. The lights, fireballs, water and smoke pop off the screen in vivid, dazzling ways. Freed from the burden of being forced to watch the film through a hazy 3D veneer, the image is beautifully striking.

The movie’s shoddily constructed, though, with dumb clips of crazed fans and staged moments that are awkwardly inserted and quite unnecessary. A chase sequence that opens the film harkens unflatteringly to the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, a film – and group – with infinitely greater energy and style. A clip package of hysteric fans seems to border on poking fun at these people who are ostensibly the movie’s target audience. Another package of clips showcases Jonas Brothers impersonators. Why are they in this movie? I doubt even the director has insight into this inclusion, with no possible motivation other than padding the runtime. During the performance itself, an oddly phallic symbol is brought out – if you see the film, you’ll recognize it – but luckily it’s discarded fairly quickly. Surely, though, someone amongst the Disney/Jonas Empire would have been juvenile enough to point it out before it made it to the tour, let alone get recorded for a film.

Beyond all that, though, are great visuals and sound that dance across the screen and speakers, capable of creating a superficially enjoyable experience for the open-minded viewer. If you walk in hating the Jonas Brothers, there’s no hope for you. It’s strange, though, to note that the Jonas Brothers seem to be as slickly commercialized, and often robotically disengaged from the pure act of performance, as the Rolling Stones in last year’s equally callously corporatized Shine a Light. (Though, to that film’s credit, it also looked and sounded great, with the added benefit of some of the best cinematographers in the business and a better, more diverse, catalog of songs). Have the Jonas Brothers been hollowed out so soon by corporate interests? Let’s hope not. They have genuine talents and I sincerely hope they get a better chance to use them.