Horror Challenge entry #3: Daybreakers (2010, Michael & Peter Spierig)
A stylish and darkly funny social satire with horrific elements for much of its running time, but it’s clearly a film where the concept was a strong draw yet the Spierigs never quite figured how to fully utilize it. They set up the world, set up the conflict and set up the characters, yet on the evidence here they never quite nailed down how to resolve that conflict with the characters and world provided. What was pretty neat starts to go wobbly around the midway point, when the vampirism cure starts to foreground itself; by the third act, the film has broken down into generic action-packed blood-n-bullets mayhem, with convenient heel turns (and vice versa) and heroic characters who are never as dead as expected. Also, Ethan Hawke is such a wet blanket, I mean really, and the good-brother/bad-brother conflict is weary, weary shit. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I have to say I still prefer the Spierig’s scrappy crappy debut Undead.
From the Shelf: Alphaville (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Acquired: This past February from criterion.com.
Seen before?: Once - Spetember 20th, 2007, from a copy of the Criterion disc that I checked out from the library.
Even though I covered most of the salient stuff the first time around for this Godard doozy, I still managed to underestimate it. A second viewing didn’t uncover anything new or unexpected; instead, it merely reinforced what I already knew the film to be. What did change was my opinion of the effectiveness. What once was an unusual and interesting transitional work now, to me, seems like the pinnacle of Godard’s achievements. This is more than a mere stopgap or artistic evolution - this seems to me the perfect synthesis of everything Godard had done up to that point and everything he was going to do in the ensuing years. The shiny coat of genre paint makes the philosophizing go down much easier than in a lot of his subsequent works, and the dry and stilted tone of much of the dialogue makes sense in the context of the film’s mechanical and sterilized logic-only world.
Plus, Eddie Constantine is fabulously rumpled and hard-boiled, Anna Karina is alluring as ever (and gets the film’s swooning penultimate image), Godard’s puckish sense of humor has rarely been this delightful and the action sequences are terrifically staged. Seriously, check that first sequence where Lemmy is attacked in his hotel room - using basic camera setups and creative blocking, Godard crafts an fight scene that plays with notions of limited perspective and chaotic movement without sacrificing spatial coherence, unlike all those who utilize the shaky-cam “realism” that has come into vogue these past few years. Basically, he makes Paul Greengrass look like a stooge thirty years before the fact.
And that sense of humor - loopy and dry, intellectualized without seeming overthought. The “Insert Token” gag still kills. (It might be my favorite moment in any Godard film ever,) Alphaville has the probing, ruminative intelligence, involved revolutionary rhetoric and pretension out the ying-yang that would come to define its director’s metier (even more than it already had), yet it never forgets one key thing: entertainment value makes the medicine go down. I always wondered if I would see a Godard film that I could point to and go, “Yeah, that’s a masterpiece.” Turns out I already had - I just needed to recognize it. (Makes me wonder how many other of Jean-Luc’s works will improve the second time around.)
Up next: A whale’s vagina!
From the Shelf: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)
Acquired: In 2002, used from a Blockbuster.
Seen before?: Theatrically, but never via DVD.
The world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…
I can’t remember my exact objections to A.I. the first time around that led me to give it a B. Probably, they were related to the unexpected turn taken by the third act and the the film’s general inability to live up to the extraordinary, measured creepiness of its first act. The latter issue is just unfair - the opening forty-five minutes are potentially the finest work of Spielberg’s career, and it’s difficult to imagine any film being able to sustain that particular mix of gorgeous and skin-crawling over the course of two hours and twenty minutes. The former issue, which was the party line at the time of the film’s release, supposedly offering as it did concrete evidence that Spielberg’s sentimental sensibilities were opposed to Kubrick’s coldy rational outlook, now strikes me as misguided.
See, without that third act turn (achieved, admittedly, in a way that still strikes me as awkward), the film is an unrelieved procession of misery and pain visited upon a sweet-natured little boy. Judging from the contemporaneous reaction, critics and audiences alike would have preferred to see Spielberg craft a futuristic version of Lilya 4-Ever rather than the emotionally striking parable he made. If there’s sentiment in the ending, it’s earned. Anyone who spends 2,000 years frozen at the bottom of the ocean deserves at least a modicum of a happy ending, no?
And what of the significance of that ending? David goes to sleep, when it’s earlier stated explicitly that his programming makes him unable to do so. Roger Ebert’s review has the famed critic admiring the craft while admitting the lead’s robotic nature made him unable to sympathize and thus unable to appreciate the emotion at the film’s heart. But is this not ultimately a film about evolution, much like Kubrick’s 2001? When David chooses to sleep, is he not confirming that, despite his circuitry, he has at last become a real boy? Jude Law’s last words are, “I am… I was!” We should be mentally appending that to, “I think, therefore…” right? When David meets Professor Hobby, the prof straight up tells him, “You are the first of a kind,” and says he’s a real boy, “or at least as real as I’ve ever made.” If Professor Hobby is a stand-in for God (which, yeah, he is), what does that make David? It’s not like this shit is hard to piece together, people. Just because it’s about robots doesn’t detract from what it’s clearly saying about the human condition, the meaning of life and our need to understand something larger than ourselves.
And if you aren’t down with that… well, shit, just turn the sound off and soak in how stinking incredible this film looks. Every frame just explodes into your eyeballs.
Up next: Another film about a very special boy who is orphaned, meets a sentient teddy bear and witnesses the end of the world…
From the Shelf: Able Edwards (2004, Graham Robertson)
Acquired: Unsolicited promo sent to me in early ‘07 by the now-defunct Heretic Films.
Seen before?: Nope.
So here’s where this year’s project starts: with an out-of-print DVD for a film nobody has seen put out by a defunct company. Taste the excitement!
That half-hearted shrug you’re feeling right now? That’s kind of how I feel about Able Edwards.
Not to say there’s nothing of worth here. Graham Robertson’s micro-indie sci-fi feature counts itself as the officially-recognized (by the Guinness Book of World Records, it seems) first film ever shot entirely in front of a greenscreen. Now take that information, and then consider that the story is about the title character, a futuristic entertainment magnate cloned from the man who founded his company (himself a blatant, intentional gloss on Walt Disney). Edwards rises to prominence by recreating the theme parks built on Earth by his genetic benefactor, thus selling people a real experience rather than the simulations to which they’re grown accustomed. The dissonance between the medium and the message, simulations and bits of computer code used to tell a story about a man obsessed with proving the value of reality over simulacra, is a fascinating one and likely intentional. Even if you allow that the greenscreen technique was implemented as a cost-saving measure, there’s no way anyone involved could have missed the import, and to the level that it’s exploited, it’s the film’s finest asset. (Given the direction the plot goes, it’s also a bit poignant.)
Shame then that most everything else in the film doesn’t convince. The script’s major issue is its construction - what Robertson has done here is take his Disney-in-space tale and wedge it into Citizen Kane, time-tripping structure intact. Where the fluid storytelling style of Kane made that a viable choice, though, Robertson has awkwardly invented an unconvincing corporation-on-trial framing device that serves as a distraction and a bald provider of exposition. Too, the majority of the actors seem stilted (it’s harder to act to nothing than it looks) and Robertson’s direction is clumsy. (Just try and suss out the spatial dynamics of a late-film theme-park accident.) This is the kind of film that it’s tempting to praise because of its moxie and behind-the-scenes story, but it’s a temptation that I can resist.
Up next: Underwater and underwhelmed with JC…
Note: I thought about it a lot, yet I couldn’t come up with a decent name for this feature. “From the Shelf” is stupid, but it’s the best I could do. Bear with me.
Horror Challenge entry #6: Pandorum (2009, Christian Alvart)
Is this what I get for thinking that Antibodies showed promise?
This very well might be the loudest and stupidest film released this year. Having not seen the second Transformers flick, I can’t say for sure, but the only thing louder than the constant crashing/screaming/screeching on the soundtrack is the thunderous idiotic obviousness of the convoluted screenplay - Alvart’s taste for blunt symbolism is on full display from the start, when it’s revealed that the spaceship on which much of the action takes place is named Elysium (and its predecessor was named Eden), and anyone who can’t tell where the Dennis Quaid plot thread is going was probably declared brain-dead prior to having been wheeled into the theater. One thing I can say with certainty, though, is that this is easily the ugliest film of 2009. I don’t mean in terms of content or moral thrust - I mean in a literal, it-hurts-to-watch-this sense. Underlit, squalid and cast primarily in shades of gray and green, the visual look of Pandorum combines the blue-collar industrial grit of Alien with the rotting steel-and-tubing of Brazil and the desperate griminess of any number of post-apocalyptic thrillers yet leeches away anything that made those visual schemes interesting. It’s a derivative thing that concentrates on only the worst parts of that which it’s ripping off.
The story flails and thrashes in some attempt to generate some manner of interest, throwing flashbacks and hallucinations and side characters (Norman Reedus is fourth-billed for a role comprising roughly two minutes played under heavy makeup) out willy-nilly in order to disguise the fact that the film boils down to Ben Foster wandering through a monochromatic steel labyrinth while Dennis Quaid sits in a chair and gives the worst performance of his life and the monsters from John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars run around like rage zombies and eat the occasional extra. There is literally nothing in this worthless film that hasn’t been done better elsewhere; even the film’s last-minute leap into pseudo-profound philosophizing is a pale copy of what executive producer Paul W.S. Anderson was trying to do with Event Horizon. And in that, I find myself slightly offended by this film’s existence. Think about that: This film can’t beat Event Horizon at its own game. That right there is a mark of apathy and/or incompetence that I can hardly fathom, yet some executive somewhere thought it was proper to throw $40 million at this.
This is a film made by people who weren’t trying, advertised with a trailer that revealed nothing, released by a studio that seemed embarrassed by it onto a public that didn’t want it and is destined to be that film that people across America will see on the Redbox display and thinking about renting for a minute before invariably muttering, “Nah, maybe next time,” and taking home something with Sandra Bullock instead. Intended as a dark celebration of the triumph of the will to survive, Pandorum is instead a monument to reckless waste.
Horror Challenge entry #4: Dark Universe (1993, Steve Latshaw)
This film is a fucking awful earthbound ripoff of Alien. And it’s not like they’re even trying to hide it. Seriously, check what the monster looks like:
The fact that the filmmakers (one of whom is the legendary Fred Olen Ray) made a point to stick little praying-mantis arms onto their monster speaks to me about how much of a ripoff they were consciously making and knew they had to change something about the design so they didn’t get their asses sued off.
However, let us not forget that, at least ‘round these parts, fucking awful and fucking unwatchable are two different animals. Dark Universe may be a terrible film, festooned with brutally declamatory acting, loathsome asshole characters, two-buck effects and hysterically clumsy dialogue. But it’s also grandly entertaining, precisely because it never makes the mistake of trying to be anything other than a cheap, amusing ripoff made to kill an evening with the help of tons of beer. Latshaw may not have much in the way of directorial chops, but he does well in keeping the film moving from setpiece to setpiece, and he wisely doesn’t attempt to hide the script’s retardation. (Golden moment: When a character complains about the futility of trying to find a wrecked spaceship in the middle of an enormous swamp, then turns his head and sees said giant wreck five feet to his right.) Most importantly, the film offers hearty helpings of everything a potential viewer would like to see without any of the stuff that they wouldn’t give a crap about. So the film has your daily recommended allowance of gore, slime, goofy monster outfits, bad science, morphing FX and tits. (Yep, tits. In a film set almost entirely in a Florida swamp, with exterior shots comprising 95% of the footage, the filmmakers still found a way to get two of the women in the film to doff their tops.) Wonderful crap.
Oh! There’s also Joe Estevez! He doesn’t have much to do as rocket-building rich guy Rod Kendrick, but he does get to set the film rolling with a beautiful display of low-budget intensity in the prologue.
