Alien Film Cute But Safe. Too Safe...

Planet 51

I should probably preface this entire post by admitting that I love animation - drawn, pixel-lated, what have you, I think it's a great medium for film, and I find it a little saddening that there's hardly any animation out there that embraces more adult themes, rather than catering to kids and families. The last truly adult animated film I watched was The Simpsons Movie but I think you could make a case that The Simpsons was always intended as a family show - the writers on that show always made sure that the adult jokes would go over the heads of any kids watching. The last truly adult animated movie I recall seeing was The Triplets of Belleville, which came out in 2003. (Good movie, incidentally. I highly recommend it to those who are interested in excellent animated stories.)

I've been a big fan of the product coming out of Pixar and Dreamworks - The Toy Story and Shrek franchises have been enjoyable and profitable - and that says nothing for The Incredibles, Wall-E, Bolt, and Ratatouille (probably my personal favorite, since it combines animation with food). All these films don't even consider the Disney revolution of the nineties, which were (for the most part) the drawn-by-hand old fashioned variety. But I've noticed a real trend, or formula with these films, and I hope someone does something to break out of it soon, because it's getting stale. (A side note - I haven't seen the most recent Shrek or Toy Story films, and I hear one did well while the other did not. Perhaps I'll get a chance to review those soon.)

Planet 51 is the first film release of new Ilion Animation studios. It's okay in every sense you could define a film, but really great in none of them. The film just seems to meander its way through its storyline according to formula until suddenly its over. The concept is very cute, the animation very clean, but I just never felt like jumping out of my seat for anything in the film, from start to end.

Quick summary - Lem (Justin Long) has just scored a job at the local observatory, where he'll help explore the stars. He and his friend Skiff (Seann William Scott) are big movie fans, and loves the films where the aliens land and ravage the local populace. They live in your standard 1950's small town; the only twist is that this 50's town, replete with malt shop and jukeboxes, are on another planet and Lem and Skiff are green aliens with antennae!

Lem is about to ask out his sweetheart Neera (Jessica Biel) when out of the sky comes a capsule, discharging a scary human explorer who is surprised to find the planet inhabited. Captain Charles T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock) befriends Lem and hides, and together they attempt to get the bewildered astronaut back onto his capsule without being captured and vivisected by paranoid General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and his mad scientist Professor Kipple (John Cleese).

The film doesn't seem to know exactly what plot lines it wants to cover; the love story between Lem and Neera, the camaraderie of curious astronomer with space traveler, the juxtaposition of the movie concept of the drooling alien bent on conquest v the reality of Captain Baker being a somewhat surprised and fairly scared stranger in an unexpectedly strange land. There are more as well. Planet 51 tries to cover everything at once, and so we get marginal character development across the board. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was so interesting about Neera that Lem would consider her to be a real prize, since she spoke a total of about three lines until the last ten minutes of the movie.

Technically, everything goes over well; the animation is good, the voice acting is spirited even though the script is sometimes a little tepid. My belief is that we have a story concept that was so exciting to the creators that they wanted to explore every plot line and story angle very thoroughly, and perhaps the original run-time came in at three and a half hours. Cuts were made, but nobody could lose their own pet project entirely, so we get snippets of what should have been a much larger story.

The film could have gotten away with a little confusion about plot-lines, if only it had taken some risks in the film to mark this project as somehow different from others out in the field. It simply doesn't. The film simply doesn't try to be a mold-breaker in any way. It sticks to what's safe in animated movie making, which in the end is what makes it mildly enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.

I'd love to start documenting incidences of formula a person watching all these films can point to recurring again and again, but at the moment the idea is more a nagging sensation than something I can concretely grab hold of. What I can define in my head is that if I saw a script for an animated film, I could by just looking at it know if it was being developed by Pixar or if it was a Dreamworks project, and I would do it based directly on the sense of humor projected from the script, in the same way you could tell if a joke were written by George Carlin or Eddie Murphy. Ilion is clearly trying to imitate Dreamworks in Planet 51 but the humor just doesn't come off as well as it could - whether due to the writing or due to the fact that I'm just tired of hearing that same style of joke, I'm not sure.

How John Cusack escapes everything except this bad bad movie.

2012

2012, and Roland Emmerich are prime examples of the exact sort of Hollywood movie I've grown to loathe; all flash and no story. If we simply wanted to show a lot of destruction, we could have cut the dialog from this film and finished watching it in about twenty minutes. It might have been worth seeing then.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that the cycles on the Mayan calendar indicated not "The end of the world" in a rapture-esque manner that Christians tend to buy into, but rather a reshuffling of the world order in a more spiritual, attitudinal sense. Brief research on the internet indicates that the Mayans simply look at December 2012 as the tripping of their calendar's odometer, like watching your car hit 100,000 miles. I'd love to have a discussion of this with people who are more knowledgeable about it than I am, but not in the tin foil hat/FBI agents are using the fluoride in your toothpaste and flu vaccines to control your mind vein.

At any rate, Emmerich seems to have decided that he can ride the hype and repeat the same dull formula that made him some bucks in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. He recruits a new set of actors and directs their careers off a cliff. We'll see if they miraculously escape Emmerich's effect as well as they escaped his special effects.

The movie boils down to this. Everything blows up, and John Cusack and some of the people he travels with barely escape from all of it. I didn't mark it all down, but Cusack manages to outdrive an earthquake and a volcano (the first in a stretch limo, the second in a Winnebago) and then his ex-wife's new boyfriend manages to take off and dodge rampant destruction no less than three times.

They have to ditch an aircraft in the mountains in China and do a Temple of Doom improv scene, before they barely manage to sneak onto one of three giant arks that have been secretly made to hold humanity's expected sole survivors. Once he's on there, he becomes (naturally) the only person on the boat who can save them from certain destruction; a tidal wave has knocked the ark into a collision course with Mount Everest, and Cusack must clear some gears in order for the ark to power up and avoid the rocks. By the time the ark is ponderously inching toward Everest (of course it's Everest! What other mountains are there in the Himalayas?) I was actively rooting for people to die.

I wonder how actors like Cusack wind up in movies like this. He's been in a lot of great films and he's acted well in them, so we know the guy's got talent. Sure, he's been in a dog or two (War, Inc. comes to mind) but at least the film itself was risky in the sense that it was a very off-beat sort of film to make. Cusack signing on to make something like 2012 smells of someone desperate for a quick check. I pray that actors have higher standards, but maybe that's all it really is. Maybe Cusack needed to get real paid for this film, so he could continue to sign onto films with better plots but less box-office draw.

Maybe I'm being silly. Maybe they believe in the film. I have to think Will Smith thought that Independence Day was going to be good work. It certainly made his name a household word. I just can't imagine though that these people look at the script for this movie and say "Yeah, that's gonna be a classic piece of work, and ROLAND EMMERICH is going to be writing, directing, and producing it! This is going to be awesome, because The Patriot kicked so much ass too, and people everywhere loved Godzilla with Matthew Broderick!"

What I would like to do to Hollywood after watching this film...

Here's the kicker: this film made a lot of money. Over at Box Office Mojo I see that Emmerich spent 200 million to make the film, and the studio grossed roughly 769 million from sales worldwide. So as rancid and horrible as this dog of a film was, until we stop watching these films when they hit the theaters my guess is that we're going to be served up with more of the same. I'm guessing that blowing up the White House (again) and the Vatican using CGI graphics is probably cheaper than blowing up models the way he did in Independence Day, so maybe dollars per effect is more efficient now than ever before.

What isn't efficient is screen time for actors. Amanda Peet and Cusack, Oliver Platt and a host of other high-pay actors spend the entire film delivering stilted lines and screaming a lot. The screaming is only slightly more convincing than the dialog. By the end of the film, we've come to realize that Cusack is a failed author, but we still haven't heard much about the book he wrote that nobody read; well, nobody except all the important people who are sailing on this arc.

The film deviates not a whit from formula. Cusack even hooks back up with his estranged wife in almost exactly the same way Jeff Goldblum (also playing a bumbling failure role) does in Independence Day. Every explosion requires another lucky escape. Nobody in the film can turn a corner without some new potential disaster unfurls. Don't worry though, they escape or stop the bomb when the clock winds down to one second remaining. You saw this film twenty years ago, it was just different stuff that blew up.

Add Emmerich to the list of producers/writers/directors to avoid. His works continue to disappoint those of us who wish to see a real story.

Avoid this film at all costs!

The Last Airbender

I'm really not sure why I kept giving M Night Shyamalan more chances to disappoint me over the years, but seriously, The Last Airbender is the end of the line. Shyamalan has written, produced, and directed the ugliest dog of a movie to come along since Battlefield Earth.

Is it really that bad? You better believe it! Shyamalan has odd ideas of casting, worse feel for direction, scripting that makes Lucas look competent, sub-par effects, shoddy camera work, and no feel for putting together his own movie. The end result is a mess, more comedic and sad than enjoyable.

To try to give credit where none is really due, I haven't seen the cartoon the movie was supposed to be based on. Judging by how incomprehensible the plot line to the average Dragonball Z episode is, Shyamalan may have been a little challenged to explain to us about his world of spirits and elementalists. Watching Akira, Princess Mononoke, or Ghost In The Machine can be a little difficult for the unfamiliar, but a dedicated viewer can pick up the story pretty quickly, even if the theme isn't what we're used to seeing. Mononoke and Final Fantasy go on interminably about spirits and spirit worlds, but at least at the end of it all, it makes some sort of sense. I'm not sure Airbender made much at all, and I am sure that I didn't care.

Story (such as it is) goes like this - a hundred years in the past, the world was balanced and at peace, and special people in the world could harness the power of the elements. There were fire people, earth people, water people, and air people. Among all the people of the planet, there was one avatar, who could wield the power of all the four elements together (though he inexplicably was born and raised amongst the air people every time he reincarnated) and he kept the balance of the world together. The air people had found their new avatar in young Aang (pronounced Ug?) and were very excited, but Aang didn't want responsibility and all that nonsense so he runs away and gets frozen in a block of ice for a century.

Flash forward to what can only be called the present day in strange world - a girl and her useless older brother stumble across Popsicle boy frozen in the ice with a giant flying beaver/dragon/thing about a hundred feet from their eskimo village. Girl and useless boy bring him back to their village where they are accosted by the beginning of a long line of horribly miscast characters, Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire as confused villain Prince Zuko. Zuko kidnaps him for no particular reason, discovers his avatar nature, and then promptly loses him again.

What follows is a mish-mash of a bunch of inept villains chasing girl, useless boy, and the avatar as they dance-fu across the world. We learn that Aang needs to master the other elements to really come into his power, but by the time the film ends he's only master of air and water. Aasif Mandvi takes villainy to new lows; not only is he horribly miscast (I spent the entire time watching him on screen thinking of The Daily Show) but his prime act as a villain was - wait for it - stabbing a fish!

Your dance-fu is not strong!

So we have a hopelessly confused plot line, bad script, hapless villains and hopeless heroes. But at least we have great effects, right? Right? Nyet! Bad green screen effects abound from the movie's outset, and it seems the lighting crew really couldn't get together with the CGI guys to figure out where the sun was going to be in any scene. The elemental effects are cleaner, but still pretty pedestrian for the $280 million this film cost to make. Sadly, for all that cash, most of what we see is Aang and friends assume dance-fu positions as the camera pans around them. At least they weren't talking.

Even the choreography was disgraceful. The fight scenes were repetitive and unimaginative. As the fire people attack the water city Shyamalan has a golden opportunity to live up to Roland Emmerich and Micheal Bay and at least create some interesting destruction. In this, he fails as well. Water and fire masters apparently don't work as teams or do anything really interesting together. It doesn't really matter I suppose, because the standard warriors aren't really into the whole fighting thing either. During the heat of the battle, warriors of both sides drop everything to stare up at various events at least three different times.

Why have people been giving Shyamalan work for all these years? The only film of his that I can recall even remotely enjoying was The Sixth Sense, which incidentally was his only film that he didn't produce. The Village was bad on a historic level. I remember being outright angry at the end of that film. I managed to resist watching Signs, The Happening, and Lady In The Water, with the help of being warned off by friends who weren't as lucky. The Last Airbender should be the clinching proof that Shyamalan should be kept away from film studios at all costs.

Substitute boredom for marginal excitement!

Surrogates

It's probably not wildly apropos to make my first real post a discussion about a film that is neither a classic nor current release, but it's what the wife and I watched last night, so it is what sits on my mind. Initially we did try to watch The Awful Truth starring Cary Grant, but it turns out that he did in fact star in a few flicks that were pretty forgettable, this being the foremost example of that.

It's the beauty of having Netflix attached to our Wii; you can stream so much content and if you're bored with it, just stop. I've been living in a content-saturated dream for the past two weeks. Surrogates happened to be available for download, and since it had Bruce Willis and robots, both the wife and I were satisfied to give it a try.

The film is based on a graphic novel of the same name. The plot goes a little something like this: in the not too distant future, people can leave their flesh bodies on a table at home and control a sleeker, sexier robot version of themselves out on the town. The robot suffers all the risks associated with leaving your house and have become ubiquitous in society. Inexplicably, crime becomes almost unheard of, as well as disease and inhibition as the streets fill up with replaceable custom robot bodies, controlled by their human masters safely from home. People who can't get with the times relegate themselves to human-only ghettos, from whence they plot revenge against the robot takeover. The movie doesn't really explain why.

Everything is fine until a pair of lecherous robots come face to face with one of these humans, who has an interesting weapon. Not only does it fry the robot he uses it on, but it also kills the human who controls the robot remotely. Bruce Willis heads up the FBI team that investigates this crime, which ultimately threatens the whole surrogate way of life.

The plot was specious enough to have the wife and I skeptical from the outset (wife asked me several times "Why is crime almost zero?" and "You'd think with a robot body you'd do all kinds of crazy stuff and wouldn't care about consequences!" and most often "Did I miss something important here while I wasn't paying attention?") but the action plugs along at a pretty good clip and we as viewers stopped asking as many questions as more attention developed around the murder mystery.

Sadly, the film can't maintain that plot much either. I have to admit, I haven't read the graphic novel, so I don't know if they're working with the story as given, or if they've made some changes which made the storyline in the film flow more smoothly but make less sense.

The villain in the film (James Cromwell) uses robots to be everywhere at once, but nobody seems to consider it odd that he can maintain so many robots - especially robots infiltrating the human-only ghettos - without being discovered. Cromwell's motivation for villainy? He was fired by his own robot company, and they started marketing robots in a way that Cromwell didn't like, even though he uses them throughout the film in exactly that same manner. His son is the first victim of our mystery weapon, but we can't really attribute his death to the plotting of his father, since he had apparently already gone to great lengths to plot the downfall of robot-people before his son's tragic death came into the picture.

Furthermore - the weapon was developed by (dun dun dun!) the same company that makes the robots, and they made it for (dun dun DUN!) the military, which initially pretended to know nothing about it. Inexplicably, Bruce Willis' boss at the FBI is somehow involved in the murders and cover up, though nobody ever stops to ask why anyone would bother to involve him in the plotting in the first place. Bruce Willis finally defeats the villains and stops the world from being destroyed with the ticking clock reading 0:02 or somesuch nonsense.

What we're left with is a film that has an interesting but flawed premise that goes to a formulaic conclusion in the span of 89 minutes. It wasn't bad by any real stretch - technically, it does everything it needs to, the acting was serviceable, the direction okay. The film was just too generic to be memorable, which is sad considering how exotic its premise was.

Side note - I know it's not fair, but seeing James Cromwell on the screen after his role in L.A. Confidential - I just knew he was the villain from the moment I saw him. He does evil well, but I think I need to see him in some other good roles to banish my typecasting bias.

In the beginning...

A friend of mine and I were talking over dinner a year or so ago, and we got on the subject of movies. I can't recall exactly what film we were talking about; you could probably pick any one of the fifty action flicks that came out last year and it would be as good a guess as any other.

I asked her if she was intending to see it, and she responded with a marvelous little piece of wisdom about the state of the movie industry now; in the age of computer generated graphics, THX sound and green screens, you can do absolutely anything and make it look real on screen. Her hopes would be that the art of storytelling would reassert itself on the screen again soon, because it apparently was out to lunch.

I'd like to say its not really enough to make a visual feast on screen anymore and completely ignore storyline, but ticket sales probably indicate otherwise. Avatar was epic on the visuals but pretty weak on story - Dances With Wolves meets eight foot tall blue aliens - but it raked it in at the box office. The continued success of tech wonder films, high on visuals and low on plot, leave those of us who are hoping for a good American film to come along high and dry.

"ToTonka!"

In creating this blog, I hope to explore ways in which Hollywood makes or breaks movies, critique films old and new, and enjoy new and different points of view. In this blog I get to rant about my peeves in film and rave about scenes that blow me out of the water. Feel free to comment and help me armchair-quarterback the movie industry.