The Return of Capsule Reviews (Positive Edition)

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The Damned United (d. Tom Hooper) – Hooper’s new film The King’s Speech is currently angling its way towards some Oscars, or so people keep telling me, but his previous film, The Damned United, about the disastrous 44 days Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) spent as the manager of his one-time rival soccer team Leeds United, is sort of an Oscar-bait film in miniature. I don’t mean that as a knock, either, because The Damned United – based on a novel by David Peace, whose work also inspired the Red Riding Trilogy -- is hugely entertaining and satisfying. Sheen’s performance is one for the ages, all Yorkshire ego, brains and anger. In some interesting ways, this film is a sort of English version of The Social Network: smart fellow with a hidden store of arrogance gets snubbed and uses that experience to fuel not only his future success but also his disasters. Though I see I’ve already pretty much said this, Sheen’s work cannot be praised too highly, because while the film is a good one, and he’s surrounded by some prime supporting actors (Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Graham, and so forth), it’s Sheen’s hysterical and fascinating Brian Clough that elevates this film to the realm of the Endlessly Rewatchable. Michael Sheen, über fucking alles!
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The Tingler (d. William Castle) – Please note the above image. Taken from Castle’s 1959 film The Tingler, it is one of the most striking images from horror movies from that era. The Tingler is probably nobody’s idea of the best of the genre, but almost any time it’s mentioned, the context is Castle’s ridiculous and ingenious gimmick of rigging the seats in the theaters that showed the film with little thingamajigs that would shock the viewer any time the titular creature made some sort of feeble gesture towards violence. But the film – about a scientist (Vincent Price) trying to isolate the tingle one feels in one’s spine when one is scared, ultimately discovering that it’s caused by a nasty-looking electric worm or whatever – is actually a good deal better than the gimmick (which, again, was awesome) would imply. Price gives a fine performance, seeming worldly and kind and natural throughout, but even better, or at least very different, is Philip Coolidge, who plays a movie theater manager whose deaf-mute wife you can see above. His entrance into the film, and ultimate motives, take on different meanings as you go along, but Coolidge never plays the guy as anything other than an aw-shucks, good neighbor sort. It’s kind of weird, actually. As is pretty much the whole film, and right smack in the middle is that bloody bathtub sequence, which is powerful, disturbing stuff created by Castle as a kind of sub-gimmick, a warm up to the literal shocks he had in store. You don’t see showmen like that anymore.
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Rampage (d. William Friedkin) – A film I’d very much like to see on DVD is this one, Friedkin’s low-budget 1987 adaptation of William P. Wood’s thriller about a Richard Chase-like serial killer (a quite unnerving Alex McArthur), whose murders are both horrifying and repulsive, and who is finally brought down by the police and put on trial. The film’s main character is the prosecutor, played by Michael Biehn, who makes the counter-intuitive journey (for Hollywood, anyway) from being anti-death penalty to pro. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen Rampage, and it wouldn’t shock me to learn that Friedkin stacks the deck in favor of Biehn’s ultimate conversion, and in any case my own views on the subject are nowhere near as confident as they were when I first saw the film. However, there’s something very powerful about the direct, cheap-paperback way in which Friedkin approaches the material, not to mention bracing about an American film not walking the expected path on a controversial topic. Not that any of that matters so much, really, because the film also features, apart from the good work done by McArthur and Biehn, Royce D. Applegate as a man whose entire family, save his son, were slaughtered by the killer, and Friedkin actually follows this man and his boy in the aftermath as they try to get away from it, leave everything, including the horror and anger. This section of the film doesn’t take up a hell of a lot of screen time, but almost no other film would include it at all. Add to that a typically excellent, yet forgotten, score by Ennio Morricone, and yeah, like I said, I really wish this was on DVD.

Neytiri Calls Me Skxawng

Yeah, so, I watched Avatar. Or as I like to call it: The John Walker Lindh Story. Ah, see, because at its heart James Cameron's insanely successful science-fiction epic is an allegory about the Iraq War, with US Marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington) finding his sympathies shifting from US/Earth interests to those of the Na'vi, the humanoid inhabitants of Pandora. And Pandora is the planet the US/Earth Marine/mercenaries are set to plunder for natural resources, and they're willing to bomb the shit out of everything to get it, and the phrase "shock and awe" is used in relation to the military tactics used by the Earth forces. Also, this time around the US blows up the World Trade Center. It's all very confusing.
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This latter detail highlights why I won't be getting into the politics of Avatar -- or indeed any aspect of Avatar -- very deeply. The basic reason is this: while the politics are there in Cameron's film, and while I detest them, they are also completely moronic, barely thought out, and utterly toothless. They're also kind of an afterthought. Cameron has been kicking around the idea for this film for a very long time, or so I understand, and I doubt the Iraq War and Sept. 11 material was always on his mind. When he got around to actually making the film, he just threw everything in, getting so mixed up in the process that he credited his Sept. 11th allegory to those who were, in reality, the victims of it (the crumbling WTC, incidentally, is evoked in a scene where US forces launch a missile strike against the Na'vi's very best tree), but he never really cared about it that much. I mean, he meant it, but he didn't care about it, because James Cameron is essentially a gearhead, or a tech-geek; what matters to him is creating big worlds with big effects, the likes of which haven't been seen before (well, on movie screens, at least -- book, magazine, and album covers are another thing, because those can't move). Ultimately, and broadly, I'm ready and willing to give the political aspect of the film a pass, or ignore it, because it's clear so little effort was put into it. The only thing I really object to is being forced to notice the analogy, and then asked to not follow that analogy through to its logical conclusion, which should be self-explanatory to anyone who watches Avatar and makes note of the rooting interest Cameron wants us to take up.
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But anyway! So with the politics dispensed with (in a more involved fashion than I'd planned, but oh well), what's left? Top of the line special effects, occasionally stunning imagery, all to the service of a nearly three hour film, most of which time is taken up with learning how all our brains are connected to trees' brains. Avatar is a thuddingly dull film for great stretches, with no new ideas, but some pretty great technology at its disposal. The whole film is a rehash, sometimes of classic science fiction, sometimes of Cameron's own films. Giovanni Ribisi's Parker, for instance -- the casually evil corporate goon who's behind all this -- is just a less-well imagined, boiled down version of Paul Reiser's Burke from Aliens (by the way, I've heard some people criticize Ribisi's performance, but I think he does a pretty good job of playing the character as written; it's the character as written that's the problem), and Michelle Rodriquez's tough-girl pilot, and the whole space marine thing, are from Aliens, too (and, erm, from Heinlein's Starship Troopers).
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But let's not get bogged down with where Cameron's ideas came from. If he'd done anything with them, nobody would care, but there's a shocking absence of drama in all this. When things really start to heat up, a major character is killed off in one of the lamest death scenes I've ever witnessed in a film like this. It's as though Cameron took it as a given that we'd be moved, so he needn't bother. The fact that the character dies, and is then taken by our heroes to the Na'vi who are asked to save this person using their native magic, the final prognosis being, in essence, "Nope, sorry, she's too dead", signalled to me that things were edging away from the dull into the unintentionally hilarious.

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In the credit where credit is due department, I should say that Zoe Saldana's performance as Neytiri, our window into the Na'vi's world and Scully's love interest, is quite good. I don't know if this is because she threw herself into the job of motion-capture performance with an unusual amount of gusto, or if the computer whizzes who worked on her character were particularly on their game -- I don't know how this stuff works, but it's probably a bit of both. In any case, Saldana provides the story with far more life than any other element in the film. Not a hard distinction to achieve, however, since more than any other Cameron film -- and I'm generally not a fan -- Avatar feels like a jumble of technology that needed some sort of basic and self-consciously earnest story as an excuse be used.

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Contrast all this with Cameron's Aliens. This is by no means a perfect film -- for one thing, God is that fucker long, and, related to that, it doesn't know when to quit -- but there's a tension to it that never lags. A good hour of the film goes by before we encounter any alien mayhem (said mayhem, by the way, when the Marines get ambushed after they've been made to give up their ammunition, is actually much thinner than I remembered it; the shit hits the fan, there's an explosion, then a bunch of fuzzy monitors and yelling), but Cameron never lets the audience's attention wander. When the film first came out, part of this effect was, no doubt, attributable to the anticipation created by Ridley Scott's original film (and the idea that Cameron's sequel is somehow better than Scott's is an objectively provable untruth that needs to die), but the fact that I still felt that tension yesterday says something. The fact that, after two hours, I was also saying "Shit, Bishop still hasn't been ripped in half?? How much longer does this thing go on!?" says something, too.

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There's also the, or some, performances in Aliens. Avatar has Saldana and, sort of, Ribisi (I'm not sold on the opinion that Stephen Lang's villainous Quaritch was anything special), and that's it. Aliens has a rock solid central performance from Sigourney Weaver, typically easy and strong work from Michael Biehn, and Paul Reiser, who, against all logic, is really good as the odious Carter Burke. The facts of his awfulness are pretty over-the-top, but Reiser really sells it well, especially when he's been found out, and is being interrogated by Weaver, Biehn and Bill Paxton. Reiser plays Burke as a skilled liar who is unsure if this talent can save him, but it's all he's got left.

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And what about those special effects? Obviously, the film was made before the CGI era, and there's a moment in Aliens when, after the shit has hit the fan, our surviving heroes are hustling to meet their command ship, which they hope will whisk them to safety. That ship has been infiltrated by aliens, and the ship crashes right in front of our heroes. I don't believe that a spaceship has ever actually crashed only a few hundred feet away from Sigourney Weaver, but you'd never know it to watch that footage. It's seamless. Meanwhile, in Avatar, even at its absolute, considerable best, you think "Man! That is only barely a cartoon!"

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I'm not anti-CGI, and defend it often. But when a film completely lives on those effects (as well as the 3D Imax presentation, which I didn't experience, so I don't now spend my nights wishing I could live in the movie), as Avatar absolutely does, it's hard not to wonder what the big deal is, and why so many people care so much. What would have been great is if, with Avatar, Cameron had created those same effects, and had attached them to a story that was engaging right off the bat, before a second of film had been shot.