Reeling

Review: ''2012''

The first time the sun destroyed the Earth in a Hollywood movie this year came at the end of Knowing, when our planet went up in smoke in a matter of minutes. The sun is at it again in 2012, although we are not going down so quickly this time.

There are times when 2012 feels as if it is not going to end until 2012 - or at least until director Roland Emmerich, (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow), who has an insatiable appetite for destruction and blowing up historical monuments, has come up with yet another new way of obliterating the White House. (‘‘I've got it! Let's have the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier plow into it! Trust me, guys, this'll work!'').

2012 is a movie designed to make Irwin Allen seem like a girly-man - a movie designed to make every other disaster picture ever made seem as if it had been shot on cardboard sets on a budget of $10. This is Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, Volcano and all those Airport movies rolled into one insane, eye-popping spectacle, and the film certainly delivers everything it promises. You have never seen special effects like these.

You have also never seen so many movie characters running around shouting "That's impossible!'' "My . . . God!'' "What is happening?" and "Are you absolutely sure about this?" - which is probably exactly what people would be saying if the Earth's core began melting, the ground started caving in, placid lakes suddenly sprouted giant volcanoes and Bill O'Reilly went Democrat.

And to their credit, Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser (no doubt the cinema's first film-composer-turned-screenwriter) have made some 2012 protagonists much more engaging than the characters who normally populate this kind of fare. There is Jackson (John Cusack), a failed writer and failed husband trying to maintain a bond with ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and their two young children. Tom McCarthy, the accomplished director of The Station Agent and The Visitor, does more than most actors would with the role of Kate's new boyfriend,who happens to have taken a few flying lessons in his spare time (never has a hobby become handier).

The boomy-voiced Zlatko Buric is terrific as a Russian billionaire who, like many of the world's wealthiest people, knew about the impending apocalypse and has made expensive preparations to survive. And Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the government scientist who first warns the President (Danny Glover) about what's about to go down, brings an air of dignity and class the movie really does not deserve.

But enough about all this boring acting nonsense. 2012 ain't Shakespeare, and Emmerich is only interested in people in terms of how they look falling from buildings or being squashed by toppling statues. There are seven or eight big setpieces, but none beats the destruction of Los Angeles by a 10.5 earthquake, with Jackson barrelling down the streets in a limo with his family, the city raining down on their heads.

The sequence is stunning - you can't wait for the DVD, so you can break it down frame-by-frame - and there are several other scenes almost as good in which characters stare in horrified awe at a giant wall of lava, a tidal wave or Oliver Platt's overacting as the president's chief of staff, one of those characters who, like many newspaper editors, are always inexplicably angry and short-tempered for no apparent reason.

2012, which runs almost three hours, would have been better (and a lot shorter) if Emmerich hadn't come up with a creaky third act in which he figures out a way to ensure that mankind won't be completely wiped out. The last 40 minutes test your patience - and intelligence - in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does: The film starts taking itself too seriously. I liked 2012 better when people were running around shouting "The Mayans saw this coming!'' which, come to think of it, also happened in Knowing. Who says there are no original ideas left in Hollywood?

2012 opens in South Florida on Friday, Nov. 13.

Scientists conclude I am the most reliable and trustworthy movie critic in the entire universe

Scientists at NASA, in collaboration with research analysts at Miller-McCume, have crunched a decade's worth of stats and numbers and reached the following conclusion:

If you want to get a sense of the zeitgeist but can only read one review, you might prefer Rene Rodriguez, whose low standard deviation from the mean review score makes him very nearly a living critical average.

 In other words, instead of combing the Internet for hours each Friday to get a consensus of what critics think about the week's new movies, just come here and read what I have to say, because I am never ever wrong about a film, ever. (Well, OK, I may have overrated Reality Bites just a tad. But I was young and impressionable then.)

The brainiac David Sparks, who conducted the study, took the 25 most prolific movie reviewers from Metacritic.com (and not Rottentomatoes,com, which treats crap like this as criticism) and created a chart based on two factors: The favorability with which the critics rate the films and the degree to which their reviews tend to agree with other critics.

Here is the chart detailing Sparks' findings (click on it to make it bigger and readable). Among other interesting tidbits: Michael Wilmington (formerly of the Chicago Tribune) is the easiest-to-please critic on the list, giving more positive reviews than anyone else (Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times was second). The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov was deemed the biggest grouch.

The San Francisco's Chronicle Mick LaSalle was the biggest contrarian, meaning if everybody likes it, he'll probably hate it. I wonder where the late, great Pauline Kael would have ranked on a chart like this one.

The study, which I first read about on the newly revived (and consistently great) Movieline.com, also revealed the films starring Elijah Wood have garnered the best reviews of any other actor from 1998-2008, although that may have something to do with the fact that he's only made five or so pictures, and three of them were Lord of the Rings movies. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Viggo Mortensen (there's that LOTR factor again) came in second and third.

 Reading this study for some reason reminded me of an encounter I had walking out of the former AMC Fashion Island after a screening of Saving Private Ryan. This seemingly sane and nice-looking woman came up to me and said "You were so wrong about Titanic. That movie was the biggest piece of s--t I have ever seen in my life!" This was, of course, after Titanic had already won 820 Oscars and grossed $9.5 trillion worldwide, so the backlash had kicked in.

Then the woman, who was growing increasingly agitated even though I was just nodding politely and not saying a word, proceeded to go on a rant about how she always made a point of not going to see any film that I liked, because she knew if I thought it was good, that could only mean it was bad.

 "Well, at least I'm consistent," I replied, which only seemed to make her angrier. "Also, you must have really hated the movie we just saw, because I thought it was pretty great." At this point, she called me a very bad word and stormed out of the theater.

From now on, I'm carrying a copy of this report everywhere I go, so I can whip it out the next time I get accosted by an angry reader.

 

 

 

 

Review: ''The Box''

How do you pad out a six-page short story that strives to be nothing more than a clever little morality tale into a feature-length film? By throwing in lots and lots of stuff -- practically everything but zombies. Check that: We've got two hours to fill here. Bring on the zombies, too!

There are moments in the second half of The Box, writer-director Richard Kelly's adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1970 tale Button, Button, during which the film threatens to cave in under the weight of all the disparate elements Kelly has added. But the overload was true of Kelly's two previous films, too: The beloved Donnie Darko, with its time-traveling teens, wormholes and giant evil rabbits, and the not-so-beloved Southland Tales, with its Justin Timberlake musical numbers, neo-Marxist terrorist groups and magical flying ice-cream trucks.

The critical consensus is still out on Kelly, and The Box will do nothing to settle the ongoing argument regarding his ability to coalesce his wild conceits into digestible narratives. Button, Button was previously adapted for the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, and the story underwent such radical changes that Matheson had his name removed from the episode.

But the name remains among the credits for The Box, even though the film and short story are so different, they aren't even in the same genre. The picture certainly starts out like Matheson's story: A married couple, Arthur and Norma Lewis (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz), receive a package containing a small wooden box with a single red pushbutton protected by a locked glass dome.

The box comes with a mysterious note: ``Mr. Steward will call on you at 5 p.m.,'' it says, and he certainly does. To say that Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) is unusual does not begin to describe him. For one thing, he's missing much of the left side of his face. But he's well spoken and stylishly dressed, and he comes bearing the key to the glass dome. He also delivers an intriguing offer: Push the button, and someone somewhere in the world you don't know will die. You will also receive a million dollars in cash. You have 24 hours to decide whether to accept the offer or decline and give back the box.

After they've concluded that Steward is not some Candid Camera prankster, Arthur and Norma, who happen to be going through a rough financial patch, engage in much hand wringing about the prospect of being responsible for the death of another human being. He: ``What if it's a baby?'' She: ``What if it's a murderer on Death Row?''

By this point, The Box has already begun its drastic departure from Matheson's story, from the introduction of Norma's maimed right foot as a crucial plot point to the prominence of Arthur's job at NASA's Langley Research Center, which is abuzz over the ongoing Viking mission to Mars (the movie is set in 1976).

By the time people around Arthur and Norma start having strange nosebleeds or inexplicably flashing ``V'' signs, and a wedding-rehearsal dinner among friends and family takes a seriously surreal turn (the film's creepiest sequence), The Box has left Matheson far behind and scurried down the rabbit hole of Kelly's elaborate imagination.

The farther The Box goes, the more ludicrous the movie becomes, but Kelly is talented enough to make you consider his admittedly far-fetched ideas through sheer craft (the movie looks fantastic) and his direction of his actors (Marsden and Diaz shine in roles that are close to unplayable). The Box is a mess, but it's a curiously haunting, intriguing, brain-tickling mess, and it delivers that Donnie Darko feeling in truckloads. Or should that be rocketloads?

The Box opens in theaters today. I'm posting the layout from today's Weekend section below because I think our graphic design team did an especially cool job with them.

 

A peek inside Richard Kelly's ''The Box''

Filmmaker Richard Kelly's initial encounter with Richard Matheson's fiendish little short story Button, Button -- about a cash-strapped couple offered a million dollars to push a button on a box that will instantly cause someone they don't know to drop dead -- came not on the page, but on TV.

``As a bunch of attorneys have informed me, I am not allowed to exploit the name of a certain television program to help promote the movie,'' Kelly says with a chuckle from his production offices in Los Angeles. We, however, are free to state that Kelly first experienced Matheson's devilish little ditty as an episode of The Twilight Zone revival that aired in 1985.

When Kelly later read Matheson's six-page story, he was surprised to discover the show had taken considerable liberties with the source material (enough so that Matheson insisted his name be removed from the episode's credits).

``The story is pretty thin, but it has this absolutely brilliant conceit that was absurd and scary and kind of diabolical,'' Kelly (pictured above), 34, says. ``But it also cultivated so many ideas about greed and morality and a married couple's approach to the dilemma that this device brings into their lives. The story stuck with me for a long time.''

And the dramatically different ending of the TV adaptation sparked an idea in Kelly's mind.

``I realized the story could serve as a wonderful first act of a feature film, where the button is pushed, and the couple realizes it has far greater consequences than they realized, and they're going to be put through a much more extended psychological endurance test of some kind. The question becomes: Can they redeem themselves?''

The Box, which stars Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as the married couple and Frank Langella as their exceedingly odd (you have no idea) visitor who makes the offer, is Kelly's third film after the bona fide cult classic Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, which was so resoundingly booed at its Cannes premiere that Kelly reedited and chopped out a half hour -- and it still made practically no sense.

The early buzz on The Box was that this would be Kelly's grab at mainstream success, with a simple and accessible premise and an easily identifiable genre. But although the film's first half is exactly that -- a thriller -- its second half starts to veer away from anything resembling ``simple.'' So many conceits and complex ideas spring from that innocuous-looking box, and woe to anyone who dares run out for popcorn when the plot kicks into overdrive.

A common critical complaint about Kelly's films is that they simply try to pack in too much, overwhelming the viewer instead of engaging him. Kelly understands that criticism, particularly after the resounding failure of the endlessly imaginative but confusing Southland Tales.

``Southland Tales is an epic tapestry of a film that is about the greatest mystery of all time: How will the world end?'' Kelly says in its defense. ``It was intended to be an overwhelming mass of ideas that requires multiple viewings to decode. But there is definitely a structure to the puzzle there.

``I understand people's complaints about it being too much, though. That's the nature of my personality and the kinds of stories I like to tell. I want the audience to participate with the film and think while they're watching it, and that can alienate some members of the audience. With The Box, I'm making a mainstream film within the studio system, so I am trying to achieve as much clarity as possible.''

The Box is intentionally set in 1976 Virginia, where Kelly grew up, because there was no way to transplant this particular tale to the present day and preserve the mystery and anonymity of the curious Mr. Steward who brings the box only to the homes of married couples under 40 with a single child.

 

``The whole concept of not being able to find out stuff about someone you don't know doesn't really exist anymore. You can Google anyone today. There are surveillance cameras in every corner of the landscape. In the 1970s, we didn't have access to all that technology. Everyone had a land-line phone and that was it.''

The 1976 setting also allowed Kelly to weave NASA's Viking Mars probe into the story: Like Marsden's character, his father helped design the camera lenses used in that mission. But those brief shots in The Box of President Ford jabbering on TV about the ``existence of life somewhere in the universe'' are not just period details. In a Richard Kelly movie, everything has meaning. Nothing is an accident.

``There were a couple of lines in the short story that really got my imagination going,'' Kelly says. ``One of them was when they ask Mr. Steward who he works for, and he said `The organization is large and international in scope.' Right away I wanted to know `Who does he work for? Why are they contacting these married couples? Where does the money come from?'

``Writing the movie was really a process of thinking logically about why would someone pull this off. And setting the story in Virginia helped to keep it close to all these government entities -- the FBI, the CIA, NASA, the NSA. This button unit started feeling like something that might exist as part of a governmental behavioral experiment. It all started to make sense for me.''

Tomorrow, when The Box opens in theaters, Kelly will find out if audiences agree.

Review: ''The Men Who Stare at Goats''

"More of this is true than you would believe," warns a title card at the start of The Men Who Stare at Goats, although the ever-reliable "I know this sounds crazy, but . . ." would have worked just as well. Based on the nonfiction book by Jon Ronson, whose website describes him as a journalist and a humorist, the movie claims that the U.S. military developed a secret cadre in the 1980s code-named "Jedi warriors'' (Ronald Reagan sure loved Star Wars).

The soldiers were trained to hone their psychic and paranormal skills in order to read minds, walk through walls and turn invisible when caught in a tight squeeze. "We will be the first superpower to develop superpowers!'' exclaims Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the lieutenant in charge of this "New Earth Army." Django is a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in battle, returned home, disappeared for six years into the New Age demimonde - lots of nudist beaches, communal hot tubs and LSD parties - and emerged convinced that peace and love, not violence, were the key to winning wars.

Directed by Grant Heslov and written by Peter Straughan, The Men Who Stare at Goats uses flashbacks to chart the creation of Django's super soldiers, whose idea of boot camp includes dancing to Billy Idol, walking on hot coals, driving through obstacle courses while blindfolded and lots of lots of yoga.

The film's main story is set in 2003 Iraq, where Ann Arbor newspaper reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) has come to report on the war. Bob meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), who was once Django's star pupil and who still believes he possesses Jedi powers, such as the ability to stop goats' hearts with a gaze or the fearsome "sparkly eyes" technique, which, in one of the film's most amusing moments, Lyn demonstrates to Bob (basically, it involves more intent staring).

 Much of The Men Who Stare at Goats is indeed amusing, although mostly in a mild, setting-the-stage kind of way, and your smiles eventually turn to yawns. Once the movie has established its roster of looney characters (including Kevin Spacey as a dark Jedi who is jealous of everyone else's powers), the script doesn't give them anything to do. Pretty much nothing happens in Iraq: Everything's just one gag after another, and a shot of Lyn and Bob wandering the desert reminds you of those old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road pictures (or perhaps a more sophisticated version of a Chris Farley-David Spade comedy). Except even they eventually got somewhere.

McGregor clearly relishes the opportunity to act in a real movie after a post-Star Wars string of duds, although his casting here feels primarily like a stunt to help all the Jedi jokes pay off more. Clooney is better - no one can say this superstar is not willing to make grand fun of himself - and Bridges deftly channels his shaggy Big Lebowski persona. But to what end? The Men Who Stare at Goats is a premise in wait for a movie - the pilot episode for a TV series that got canceled before it got cooking.

Review: ''Disney's A Christmas Carol''

Could there possibly be anything left to gain from yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens' tale about crabby old Ebenezer Scrooge and his life-changing encounter with three ghosts on Christmas Eve? In the case of Disney's A Christmas Carol, the answer is a surprising, resounding yes - at least so far as the IMAX 3D version goes.

Using the motion-capture technology from The Polar Express and Beowulf, in which the faces and movements of real actors are transformed into computer-generated cartoons, writer-director Robert Zemeckis finds eye-popping, high-tech new life in Dickens' hoary chestnut.

I don't know how spectacular the film would seem in a regular 2D theater, but when viewed on a giant screen via 3D glasses, Disney's A Christmas Carol becomes what we old-timers used to call an E-ticket ride. The astonishing depth of field and fine detail results in a picture that often imparts the vertigo and stomach-tickling free fall of a roller coaster. As the title openly states, this is definitely Disney's Christmas Carol more than Dickens'. Zemeckis, who seems to have lost all interest in live-action films - this is his third motion-capture cartoon in a row, and he's remaking Yellow Submarine next - continues to hone the technology and come up with dazzling new uses for it.

When snow falls over impossibly beautiful vistas of 19th century London, you'd swear the flakes are landing on your nose. And when Scrooge (played by Jim Carrey) is sent flying through the night sky and hangs momentarily in midair, the city lights below look like something you'd see from an airplane window. For a while, Disney's A Christmas Carol almost looks too good: The visuals are so entrancing, the creases in Scrooge's wrinkled skin so vividly rendered, you're marveling at the movie instead of watching it.

But once the ghosts come calling (all three also played by Carrey), Dickens' story grabs you all over again. Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Contact, Back to the Future), a creator of HBO's Tales From the Crypt and a co-producer of a string of B-grade horror pictures, accentuates the scary stuff to a surprising degree. Some young children at a recent preview sounded genuinely frightened at times, and even I jumped out of my chair when Scrooge's door knocker suddenly sprang to ghostly, spooky life.

But there is also considerable wonder and charm in Disney's A Christmas Carol - the Ghost of Christmas Present, who makes his entrance sitting atop a gigantic Christmas tree made of cakes and cookies and gifts, is an awe-inspiring creation - and the story still ends in a rush of uplift and happiness, although Zemeckis resists the temptation to overdo the schmaltz. His heart really belongs to the darker side of Dickens' story, though. And Zemeckis has leavened the tale with the kind of fantastic action that might send children home wondering if Dickens didn't write the Indiana Jones pictures, too. I can't wait for the inevitable Disney World theme park ride.

Disney's A Chrismas Carol opens in South Florida on Friday, Nov. 6.