God Have Mercy

Temple of Doom was like so much more believable

The problem with Steven Spielberg isn’t that he makes bad movies. Lots of people do that – they’ve been doing it for a hundred years. The problem with Spielberg is that he makes bad movies extremely well. Hollywood had been churning out meaningless adventure movies for decades before Spielberg came along, but they appealed to a specific demographic. They didn’t ruin people’s appetite for slower, more thought-provoking films. Jaws, however, was such a well-constructed spectacle, such pure distraction, that it was as irresistible as refined sugar. Suddenly everyone wanted this stuff – at least a little bit of it, some of the time.

Released between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark was conceived by George Lucas as an extension of the Star Wars franchise and a way to cash in on its most charismatic star. But one need only compare Raiders with the original Star Wars trilogy to see what unique gifts Steven Spielberg brought to his first Lucasfilm project. Whereas the spectacle in Star Wars is all about the compelling world that is created, Spielberg’s Raiders ignores the world and brings us intensely, alarmingly close to the characters at the center of it.

In The Empire Strikes Back we watch Luke Skywalker battle Darth Vader from a distance, observing their reactions to each other at the same time, as if we were hiding in the shadows of Cloud City’s lower decks. The viewer is afforded no such distance at any point of Raiders of the Lost Ark. With a virtuosic display of camera techniques – close ups, shot reverse shots, elaborate crane shots – edited together like the voices of a fugue, Spielberg’s mission is to eliminate any distance whatsoever, and to a great extent it is the viewer’s closeness to Indiana that prevents Raiders from seeming like the Star Wars clone it was supposed to be. The bottom line, however, is that Indiana Jones has never had any relationship with the real world (unlike Star Wars). It has always been about mindless entertainment alone. In a good way – if you like that sort of thing; which we all do.

So is it just my imagination, or is everyone taking the new Indiana Jones movie just a little too seriously? I don’t care if people dislike the film; it’s the reasons they give. I’ve heard disappointed reactions from at least four friends in the last week, and they’ve all used words like “ridiculous”, “unbelievable”, and “far-fetched” with negative connotations. My response to all of them is: when was the last time you watched The Temple of Doom?

The truth, perhaps a disillusioning one, is that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is of a piece with the entire series. Like its predecessors, Crystal Skull is a bad film, but it knows that it is; and that goes a long way. It’s better than The Last Crusade, and almost, but not quite, on par with The Temple of Doom. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the closest Steven Spielberg has come to making the perfect bad film, will never be repeated.

So if you’re an Indy fan, don’t be afraid of Crystal Skull. As the poster on the wall of the New Zealand Consulate in Flight of the Conchords says: “Don’t expect too much, and you’ll love it.”

1. Inland Empire (David Lynch)
2. Noise (Matthew Saville)
3. Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton)
4. I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)
5. Zodiac (David Fincher)

Under normal circumstances attaching the word “Affleck” to a film is a reliable way to prevent me from seeing it. The last film of his/theirs I saw that sucked only a little bit and not a lot was Good Will Hunting. Now I have seen another one of similar calibre, Gone Baby Gone. This time the film both stars and is directed by an Affleck.

Why did I see this? I direct all the blame to Rotten Tomatoes. Trying to figure out if there were any films worth seeing in Santa Cruz, I scrolled down from the 95% critical consensus graphic for this one and stupidly paid attention to critical soundbites such as Affleck, whose taste in projects as an actor has been questionable at best, has directed his first film with a sensibility and intelligence that never let him down (Lawrence Toppman) and The brothers Affleck both emerge triumphant in this mesmerizing thriller (Peter Travers).

I should have paid more attention to Kenneth Turan, who nailed it with: Brooding, somber film is ragged around the edges and not without problematic aspects. It’s clear that critics, astonished to find any merit whatsoever in the film, have confounded their level of surprise with the film’s real quality.

It’s not a terrible film. There are in fact, several things about it that are great. What stands out the most is the terrific performance by Amy Ryan. Ed Harris is also great, and so are many of the other supporting cast. Hell, everyone’s pretty good, including the Affleck brother who plays the lead.

What lets the film down the most is the script. It seems to have been adapted from a book by the author of Mystic River that makes you question all sorts of things about morality etc. But there’s this crappy, snappy dialogue. It can be funny in a film to listen to characters walk into room after room and engage in witty banter and tough repartee with shady characters, but not in a film that takes itself as seriously as this one does – there is a mismatch between the gritty realism (which is pulled off very well for the most part) and the film noir script and it just comes off as trying to be too cool. The Departed (which was okay) had the same problem, as did Brick (which was terrible). Mystic River avoided the problem by being more consistent in tone and characterisation. Kevin Bacon was tough, as was Sean Penn, but they didn’t need to start each scene with a few lame jokes about each other’s mothers to seem so. Mystic River may not be the most “Boston” of these three Boston films (forget I mentioned Brick) but its the best by a wide margin.

I arrived in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and turned on the television to see Michael Moore arguing with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical reporter. Apparently the two had been brought on Larry King Live at short notice because of a difficult interview that Moore gave the day before on CNN, in which he vehemently criticised (amongst other things) the lead-in piece to his interview; a short synopsis and review of SiCKO by Dr. Gupta.

Moore was angry for a few reasons, but mostly because Gupta had alleged in his piece that he ‘fudged facts’. As it turned out on Larry King Live, the main statistic that Gupta had cited as being incorrect – that Cuba spends $25 per person on healthcare – was a misquote. Gupta admitted that it was he who had been provided with incorrect information by his team at CNN. “Michael correctly said $251 in the movie”, he said, semi-apologetically.

But the two continued to argue over one of the core tenets of SiCKO, that every western nation, except the USA, provides its citizens with free, universal health care.

‘I think it’s a bit misleading to say that it’s free,’ said Gupta.

‘It is free,’ said Moore.

‘Well, if you look at the situation in France, they’re drowning in taxes…’

‘It is free!’

Two nights later Lucy and I were having a beer with some friends and the subject came up. A friend of ours expressed a similar view, that free healthcare is not really free because it’s paid for with taxes. ‘France is drowning in taxes,’ he argued.

But even if Moore does fail to adequately explore the issue of taxes in his film, these sorts of arguments seem unfair to me. When Moore says that healthcare is free in Canada, France, England, he’s saying that a homeless person can get a triple bypass if needed and the government will pay for it. That, as Moore says, ‘when a person gets sick, they don’t have to worry about whether they can afford it or not’. Fuck taxes – health care comes first.

SiCKO is Moore’s best film. Of course it’s flawed in several ways, as all of his films are; for example, it could have been improved by just giving two or three minutes more time to addressing the views of his critics. But it’s not flawed because Moore ‘fudges facts’ or presents misleading information. We, the people of the western nations that do have universal, free healthcare, know that he’s spot-on with this one. Don’t hand our health over to greedy corporations!

You can get a clear idea of what the main problem with TRANSFORMERS (2007) is going to be simply by comparing its cast list with that of THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (1986). The IMDB profile for the original animated film (itself a spin-off of the TV show, based on the comic, inspired by the toys) sports a list of names recognisable to anyone familiar or even slightly acquainted with the franchise: Optimus Prime, Megatron, Soundwave, Hot Rod, Ultra Magnus…the list goes on. These are the sorts of names that ring bells for people born between 1975 and 1985 (well, Optimus Prime at least); names that get exchanged in those ‘how good was that show from the eighties?’ conversations that often start up after midnight at a party of twenty-somethings after a joint has been passed around. The only recognisably ‘human’ names are Spike, Daniel, and the Narrator, with good reason: they are the only human characters in the story.

The cast list for the forthcoming incarnation of TRANSFORMERS, directed by Michael Bay (okay, so maybe you don’t need any further explanation of what the problems with this movie are going to be), is a very different one. ‘Sam “Spike” Witwicky’, ‘Mikaela’, ‘Captain Lennox’, ‘Maggie’, ‘USAF Master Sgt. Epps’, ‘Keller’, ‘Glen’, ‘Agent Simmons’, ‘Banachek’…these are the first nine names you have to read through until you get to the first Transformer. After Optimus Prime, Megatron, and Barricade, the list continues with humans: ‘Bobby Bolivia’, ‘Sarah Lennox’, ‘Admiral Brigham’, ‘Major Slesinger’, ‘President’s Aide’, ‘Pentagon Air Boss’, ‘Pentagon Analyst #2’, ‘Sector 7 Agent’, ‘Two Star General’…and on and on and on – it’s a really long list of human-sounding names. There aren’t any other Transformers listed. I’m sure that there will in fact be other Transformers in the movie – some of them might even have lines. But the point is, who are all these human characters, and why are almost all of them military people?

Like many people who grew up with the toys, I felt a spark of excitement when I heard there was going to be a new Transformers movie. But it turns out that there is not going to be a new Transformers movie; there is going to be a movie full of scenes that look like this:

It’s not difficult to guess what’s going on in this scene:

Uh oh, that was a BIG MISTAKE…

My memories of the Transformers universe are vague, but I seem to remember the human impact in the series as being quite minimal. It was all about the Transformers and their story; the Autobots and Deceptacons fighting over their homeworld if I remember correctly. I’m not saying that the movie has to be super-faithful to the original – I’m just saying that there are so many different ways that one COULD re-interpret a comic/toy/video-game/cartoon franchise, and the new TRANSFORMERS movie has adopted a method that has failed dismally many, many times in the past: the psuedo-realistic disaster movie. Basically, TRANSFORMERS will be a patriotic military explosion-fest in the pattern of GODZILLA (1998), INDEPENDENCE DAY, and Bay’s own fabulously poor ARMAGEDDON.

Good scifi/fantasy interpretations – such as Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS and KING KONG, or Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN (1&2) – have respect for their genres. They realise that their characters and stories have value in and of themselves and don’t need to be transported into a US military scenario to make them relevant/interesting to the audience.

Rather than ask the question ‘how can we make this movie feel like a comic book?’ as Raimi obviously did with SPIDER-MAN, Michael Bay has asked the question ‘how can we take these toys, this cartoon, this fantasy universe, and make them plausible?’ Michael Bay, you’re asking the wrong questions.

RE-ENVISIONING TRANSFORMERS: EIGHT ALTERNATIVES TO THE “MILITARY DISASTER MOVIE”

• The whole movie takes place on the Transformers’ home world and is primarily about Transformers, not humans
• The film has no CGI –the whole thing in high-quality 2D animation with a quirky storyline a la STUDIO GHIBLI films
• The movie is set in the 1980s and a young child’s Transformers Toys become a portal for him to escape depressing Reagan-era America and travel to a fantasy world where he is the leader of the Autobots, a la PAN’S LABYRINTH
• Optimus Prime strives to uncover the origins of the Transformers, eventually discovering that they evolved from cars thousands of years ago and quickly wiped out the human race. The climax is when, wandering through the desert, Optimus stumbles upon the Statue of Liberty and realises that his homeworld of Cybertron is, in fact, Earth.
• In the near future, the Deceptacons will be set to wipe out humanity until one man – Sam ‘Spike’ Witwicky – is clever enough to defeat them. Megatron is sent back in time to 2007 to kill the young Sam, whom Optimus Prime and the Autobots, also sent back in time, have been programmed to protect.
• The preview does not feature the phrase ‘On July Fourth, the Battle for Our Freedom Begins’, nor a soldier yelling ‘Bring It!’, but does feature a cover by BECK of the original Transformers theme song ‘Transformers, more than meets the eye’
• The movie is directed not by Michael Bay but by Michel Gondry and combines elements of stop-animation, live action, CGI, cartoon, actual Transformers toys, and multiple languages