Category Archives: film

Terminator Salvation

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The great thing about Japanese TV is that when a Hollywood sequel is released in theaters, every previous movie is shown on TV. In the last few weeks, we got to enjoy all three of the previous Terminator movies.

So by the time I got to watch Terminator Salvation, I was able to get a nice review of the entire series.

In previous incarnations, cybernetic assassins had come back to kill the mother of the future leader of the resistance, the leader himself, and then when those attempts failed, the officers of the resistance. In T-4, the conceit of robots being sent from the future is retired, and the future is finally the main backdrop for the movie.

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I’m a sucker for cool futuristic machines, and for post-apocalyptic narratives. Those things alone were able to erase many plot holes. I chose to ignore how people were able to survive nuclear blasts (two are in the movie). I also turned a blind eye to how easily humans were rescued from the epicenter of the robot civilization. It was conspicuously undefended.

I also chose not to be troubled by the fact that the “capital” of the machine world was San Francisco. It somewhat makes sense since Silicon Valley is nearby. But it seems like a sneaky subtext of portraying leftist SF as the ground zero of technological evil. It’s straight out of some right-wing paranoid fantasy.

Because the story is set in the future, many characters no longer make an appearance. Most conspicuously, Arnold Schwarzenegger is absent except through a computer rendered version. But I guess he figured he’s overseeing enough real life carnage and havoc in California’s economy. The psychiatrist who has appeared in every previous movie is gone. Sarah Connor only appears via voice recordings, consulted by her son as a kind of tabletop prophecy or oracle. The role of John Connor’s father is reprised, and it was cool to see an actor picked who looked like the original actor.

Even though John Connor, as the leader of the human resistance, should be the most important character of the story, he is presented as more of a McGuffin to the compelling Marcus Wright character, played by Sam Worthington. This would make it the second movie in a row that Christian Bale has been overshadowed by a supporting Australian actor (the first one being his Batman taking a back seat to Heath Ledger’s Joker).

When watching a movie like T-4, my only requirement is that I be entertained, that the flaws of the movie not be distracting. But this time, the slick designs of the imagined future distracted me from improbable plot points. And that’s good enough for me.

Angels and Demons: Decrypting Dan Brown’s Formula

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Underwhelming But Entertaining
I recently watched Angels and Demons, the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel. Like The Da Vinci Code, I was a bit underwhelmed, but only because I had thoroughly enjoyed the novels. And invariably, what your imagination invokes from words is a much more personally compelling endeavor than what someone else invokes from them.

However, I still enjoyed watching the movies. It’s thrilling to actually see the cathedrals, statuary, works of art, and cryptic objects that the author describes in the books.

Ron Howard provides his usual bland but workman directorial vision. He doesn’t have Spielberg’s ability to emotionally manipulate the audience. Nor does he have the ability to thrill the viewer like any number of action/thriller directors. Nowhere was I moved into any strong feeling about any character. But that’s alright. At least he entertains.

Tom Hanks kind of mails it in, but still manages to delivers a fine performance. The female lead was remarkably uncharismatic and had zero chemistry with Hanks, which was surreal. In the novel, there was a lot of romantic tension between these two characters. They should have casted Megan Fox and called it a day.

Narrative Patterns
Angels and Demons was billed as the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, but actually, the novels were written as the other way around. I’ve read all four of Dan Brown’s novels, including Digital Fortress and Deception Point.

By the time I read the third of these novels, I was able to predict the plot. All four have the following elements.

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• Each novel has a young, smart, attractive women as a lead character. She is highly educated in some kind of science, has father (or grandfather) issues, and is involved with a…

• Middle-aged academic who is obsessed with some obscure specialization. In Angels and DaVinci, he’s the main character. In Digital and Deception, he’s more of a supporting character.

• A tough cop appears to be a bad guy, but has been manipulated by some sinister shadow figure.

• This shadow figure is somehow involved in a secret society or cabal, whether it be religious, governmental or scientific. The shadow figure uses a…

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• A cold-blooded assassin. He runs amok and tries to kill the protagonists. He kills a lot of other people during the proceedings. They have some element of freakishness or weirdness about them. There’s an albino assassin, a deaf assassin, a member of an ancient order of assassins, and there’s also a Delta force squad.
• There are many secrets and cryptographic mysteries to puzzle over.

• And finally, the shocking twist (but so very predictable) is that the most helpful benefactor of the protagonists is revealed to be the main bad guy.

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Once I gleaned these patterns, I was able to predict the ending. Nevertheless, I still am a big fan of Dan Brown because the stories are well researched, the twists are meticulously plotted, and the guilty pleasure of reading low-brow pulp fiction is expertly painted over with quasi-scholarly conspiracy theories. How’s that for a left-handed compliment.

The Dark Knight

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Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark Knight is a study of the evil in everyone. The center of the story is the Joker. I searched in vain for anything resembling Heath Ledger, the actor who played the Joker, and found only a soul in shambles, a horror show of lost humanity.

Batman in comparison is wooden, predictable, only made interesting as he was drawn closer to the game the Joker played. Although his moral inflexibility results in him losing the people he loves. The Joker’s game is to turn everything upside-down, inside-out, and grinded into sloppy joes. And then convulse back again. His only goal is to create chaos for the sake of chaos.

Morgan Freeman, who plays Batman’s inventor and business liaison, and Michael Caine who plays the butler, loyally cling to any sense of a moral compass. I wish these two had shared one scene at least. I wanted them to look at each other, and acknowledge the only other points of sanity in the movie. They wouldn’t even have to say anything. Just glance at each other. Then return to their jobs of eking out a sense of calmness and reason.

I watched the movie with a late night audience that felt sinister to sit among. I’m sure it was just the usual stoned university crowd, but the Joker sucked me into his world of paranoia on the brink of violence.

What a heavy movie. But I loved the risk it took for a Hollywood movie to embrace despair and pitilessly trample the notion of a happy ending.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

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On the plane ride over the Pacific there were no individual TV screens. This made me not watch 3 movies, play video games, and stay up for the whole flight. I didn’t even read anything or write. I closed my eyes and slept. That was new. It also helped that the movies being shown on the overhead screens were a a movie I’d never heard about, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and I Am Sam.

I did watch The Spiderwick Chronicles though. The movie was about a notebook writen long ago that held secrets of supernatural creatures, collected by Mr. Spiderwick. An ogre and his evil toad-like followers want this book so he could have power over all magical creatures.

The adventures center around a boy with anger issues who blames his mom for his dad leaving. His sister is tough and wields a saber. His twin brother often exclaims, “I don’t do conflict.”

There are fairies, sprites, brownies, a griffon, hobgoblins. And the elderly daughter of Dr. Spiderwick, who’s dealing with abandonment issues of her own.

Seeing imaginary creatures is always cool and the allegory of moving beyond daddy wasn’t tiresome. Clearly the writer had an absent father. The more interesting subtext is about the misuse and dangers of knowledge. Because Spiderwick refused to destroy his notebook, the bits of knowledge that leaked out to the ogre was used to hurt others, including his own family. And the message? Maybe we should just experience the wonders of the world instead of trying to unlock it’s secrets.

Apocalypto

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Apocalypto is the story of a young Mayan tribesman, Jaguar Paw, whose village is destroyed and the villagers killed or taken captive by a party of fierce raiders led by the intimidating Zero Wolf and taunted by the cruel, menacing Middle Eye. Because of a recent plague and drought we discover that the men will be sacrificed to appease the gods, and the women will be sold to slavery.

As in all of Mel Gibson’s movies there are many inaccuracies or distortions. For instance, mass human sacrifice was more a feature of Aztec culture, and was only practiced by some Mayans that neighbored the Aztecs. The first Spaniards arrived long after the Mayan civilization had collapsed. There is no evidence to support mass graves, or even widespread slavery.

The movie also ignores Mayan achievements, focusing on imagined depravities instead of their mastery of mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, literature and art. However, the film is a fable of the collapse of a society. Many of the reasons for their collapse correspond to what Jared Diamond writes about in his book, Collapse. Diamond devotes several chapters to the Mayan case study, citing drought, possibly lasting 200 years, as a factor.

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Historical inaccuracies aside, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is gorgeously made. The costumes, the hair styles, the tattoos and piercings were all copied from Mayan artifacts. Although, elements from various historical periods and geographic locations were conflated into one Mayan aesthetic. The Classical Period, for instance, lasted almost 700 years. So I imagine it would be like mixing George Washington’s wig and breeches, with Kennedy’s pinstripe suit and Lincoln’s top hat to represent an American aesthetic. Still, for someone not well-versed in Mayan culture, it was pure, enjoyable eye candy.

The use of the Mayan language is an inspired layer of realism, with most of the cast actual Mayans. Several of the leads weren’t Mayan, but the exclusive casting of an all Native American cast lends an aura of credibility to the film.

From a narrative standpoint, the story moved briskly, with lots of action. Jaguar paw’s escape is one of the highlights of the film as he begins to hunt his pursuers in his own element, the jungle. But if you’re sensitive to graphic violence, this may be a movie you might avoid.

Knowing Mel Gibson’s evangelical Christian bias, the arrival of the Spaniards probably represents the salvation of a sick, heathen society. The allegory of a decaying society, rotting away from within, is reinforced several times throughout the film. A shaman tells of the story of a never-satisfied man. A girl, afflicted with disease, prophesizes destruction of the captors.

All of these commentaries within the story are warnings of the possible decay that we may be facing, contributing to our own collapse. Intended or not, we are warned of the false embrace of religion that arises out of fear, whether it be sacrifice to one priest in a headdress or another bearing a crucifix.