Movies: April 2006 Archives

A project like “United 93,�? about the one hijacked 9/11 plane that did not hit its target, seems fraught with peril. There’s the “is it too soon?�? angle, which has been discussed at length in the media – the trailer was pulled from a New York theater when patrons complained. There’s also the question of whether audiences can respond to the quality of the filmmaking when the heroism of the passengers who assaulted the cockpit is staring them in the face.

And, of course, there’s the question of whether any filmmaker can do justice to such a raw, key piece of recent history. Oliver Stone is also working on a 9/11 film, tentatively entitled “World Trade Center,�? and knowing Stone’s love of the subtle, the film might actually be more traumatic for viewers than watching the horrific events unspool on TV was five years ago.

A&E aired “Flight 93�? a few months ago, and flew under the radar (so to speak) so that it avoided the hand-wringing accompanying “United 93.�? (It did well for the network.) But “United 93�? is a big Hollywood movie with a sizable marketing budget, so it makes for an easier target.

Watching it with an audience is an eerie experience. For the first part of the film, you sense the intense concentration from those around you – it’s almost as if, as a group, you’re desperately trying to will events to unfold differently than the way we inevitably know they did. The comfortably prosaic manner in which the movie opens – pilots conducting their flight check, flight attendants exchanging idle chatter – serves to make what we all know must happen shocking nonetheless.

Writer-director Paul Greengrass, almost miraculously, never missteps in bringing this awful saga to the screen. His film has the feel of a documentary (some of those who monitored the tragedy from the F.A.A., airline towers and military bases play themselves in the film; it’s impossible to separate them out from the actors). There’s not a moment of hyperbole, not a whit of speechifying, not one moment that feels “Hollywood.�? (OK, so now we know it can be done in the studio system; why can’t someone else manage it?) (No, this point cannot be stressed too much – even a modicum of manipulative storytelling would’ve cheapened this project immeasurably.) The closest he comes to stylistic contrivance is when he cross-cuts between the passengers and the terrorists praying in the final minutes of the flight.

In short, it’s exemplary filmmaking, if wrenchingly exhausting to sit through – when the film went to black at the end, I’d swear my heart skipped a beat for long, agonizing seconds until a title card appeared. Greengrass, a British filmmaker, doesn’t try to embellish his story. He’s smart enough – no, brilliant, really – to know he doesn’t need to.

All that said, I could’ve picked a better movie to see the night before I fly to New Orleans.

As dopey pop culture obsessions go, I'm far more behind the folks who are having fun with "Snakes on a Plane" (not opening until August 18) than people who think celebrities giving birth is major news (and then mistake themselves for cool by referring to the infant as, say, Tomkitten, then questioning the parents' choice of exotic baby names).
"Snakes" sounds like it'll be a good, silly watch; as the title so obviously states, it's about Samuel L. Jackson battling poisonous serpents in an enclosed space thousands of feet up in the air. As if that weren't enticing enough, it's directed by David Ellis, a former stuntman whose two previous filmmaking efforts, "Cellular" and "Final Destination 2," combined lots of scares and laughs very effectively.

A couple of weeks after a screed about certified, before-a-dime-is-spent bomb “Dallas,�? a film version of the TV show, comes this even dumber announcement/rumor: that the Wachowski brothers, auteurs of the “Matrix�? trilogy and “V for Vendetta,�? are preparing a movie based on the ’60s manga TV show “Speed Racer.�?

The link jests endlessly at certain gender issues of the writing-directing-producing team, yet scarcely addresses the idiocy of the project itself. “Speed Racer�? was a cheap show with crappy animation but a fairly peppy theme song – does that really make it worthy of Hollywood’s big-budget, tent-pole treatment? I knew someone who worked a couple of years on trying to develop “Astroboy�? – a similar if arguably better-known entity – into a feature, only to abandon the project.

Honestly: What can the Wachowskis bring to a pretty simple, stupid concept that will justify somewhere between $50 and $100 million in bringing it to the big screen? (And, of course, there’d be 10s of millions of more bucks spent trying to revive interest in a show that cost an hilariously ironic fraction of all of this.) And aren’t the Wachowskis more visionary than this, than to transform a pretty-much-forgotten cartoon into an obviously manufactured media event?

And what great insights might they subversively attempt to bring into such a project? That Speed Racer is a pawn of the proletariat? Hell, anyone who’d even be duped by studio propagandizing into considering seeing such a film is a pawn of the proletariat.

So if you’re ever asked, as Neo was in “The Matrix,�? to consume “the red pill or the blue pill?�?, your answer is clear: Isn’t there a purple pill? A green pill? Some pill that’ll direct me far away from the pseudo-philosophical-crap-that’ll-lead-to-shockingly-puerile-garbage-that-the-system-is-clearly-leading-me-to?

While some will rightly bemoan the witless, idea-lacking spoof sequel "Scary Movie 4" winning the weekend's box office derby, I say, look at the silver lining - and I don't just mean that "SM4" had a pretty good Viagra joke. Also opening, and bombing horribly, this weekend was Disney's latest computer animated animal comedy, "The Wild." To which we should only go, Yay!

Haven't seen "The Sentinel" yet (and, in fact, probably won't), just the commercials (in heavy rotation, unsurprisingly, during "24"). As far as one can tell from the commercials, Kiefer Sutherland plays a Secret Service agent who has to protect the President against an assassination plot by a rogue former Secret Service agent (Michael Douglas) who mentored Sutherland. Eva Longoria figures in there somewhere, just to provide some pulchritude, probably (she doesn't do much in the commercials aside from look glamorous, but to be sure she's good at it).

Season One of "24" featured Sutherland's Jack Bauer protecting the President from an assassination attempt. This season, Jack's squaring off against his former mentor in their unhinged battle against terrorism, played by Peter Weller. Any resemblance between "The Sentinel" and "24" is purely coincidental, I'm sure, as was, I'm equally certain, Sutherland's casting.

. . . or, rather, don't start again inviting people who know how to write (critics like me, in this case) to advance screenings of subliterate films.

Some of my colleagues have been complaining lately that studios are more and more refusing to schedule critics screenings of movies they figure we'll hate before their commercial release, thereby insuring no bad reviews on opening day. All I can say is, thank you studios. Any hours of my life not spent getting brain-raped by the latest leather-clad vampire rehash or Tyler Perry's self-righteous sermons are precious indeed.

The Daily News' Bob Strauss wasn’t wowed by “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,�? a documentary about the Texas-based singer-songwriter and his epically poignant battle with madness. And, I concede, when you first hear Johnston, with his cracking, whiny voice, perform his material, it’s initially difficult to get past the amateurism of his self-recorded material (a point more or less made in the film when other Austin musicians were outraged when he won some key local-music awards).

I saw the film last year at Sundance (where, granted, the thin air has inspired ill-advised euphoria for films, particularly by acquisitions executives who spend waaay too much on some movies), so what I saw may differ a bit from the film as released. But there were a couple of things about director Jeff Feuerzig’s documentary that just blew me away.

Feuerzig had access to hundreds of audio tapes Johnston made over the years, many of them stream-of-consciousness burblings. Essentially, Johnston unwittingly kept a real-time audio diary of his descent into insanity. Feuerzig artfully combines Johnston’s rants with his home movies and other point-of-view shots that squarely place the viewer in the mind of someone losing his grasp on reality with an unnerving precision. To get better insight into what such an experience is like, you’d probably have to go crazy yourself.

And then, there’s Johnston’s music. Perhaps due to his mental issues, Daniel has absolutely no censor in his head when he writes his songs – they’re as stripped and close-to-the-bone in their emotional content as anything you’re likely to hear. …