Movies: August 2006 Archives

Snakes on a Plane may be a mediocre, lowbrow fright film, but Silent Hill is something much worse — a laughably pretentious one. Radha Mitchell, an actress who deserves better parts than this, plays Rose, who finds herself stranded in the abandoned town of Silent Hill, West Virginia, searching for her lost daughter.

Of the half-dozen westerns Jimmy Stewart made with ace genre director Anthony Mann in the 1950s, this is widely considered the best. Stewart plays a bounty hunter whose situation gets stickier than expected when he crosses paths with an old prospector (Millard Mitchell) and a shady lieutenant (Ralph Meeker) who's been booted from the cavalry, and his crafty prey (Robert Ryan) tries setting the three men against one another. (Janet Leigh is the tomboy love interest.)

Ryan Gosling anchors Half Nelson with a sturdy, utterly credible performance as a crack-addicted Brooklyn schoolteacher struggling to keep his life together. Strung out and depressed, he’s befriended by a student, Shareeka Epps, who’s fighting her own private battle in an environment that offers up drug-dealing as an easy way to exploit your neighbors for easy profits.

OK, nobody was expecting this near-disaster area of a movie to actually be any good -- but at least it doesn't even pretend to be any good. Snakes on a Plane is cheerfully shitty, from the barely-diegetic sex scene that shoves some tits onto the screen to the cheap frights when phony-looking CG snakes explode toward the camera lens. (Why didn't New Line shell out for an Imax 3D version of this one?) The biggest liability may be the tension you can sense between the humble B-movie that was made when New Line wanted a PG-13 trifle, and the significantly cockier picture that was patched together in reshoots after the unprecedented Internet buzz encouraged the studio to forge ahead with an old-fashioned R-rated creature feature. Since most of the really gruesome material takes place in the digital realm, it's easy to imagine how the bulk of the film's graphic violence could be dialed up in the post process. But the film has the feel of a disjointed mix-and-match mess. Because that won't matter to anyone but pointy-headed critics, New Line was quite right to refuse screenings of this to the press. Besides, it's fun to see a more-or-less completely unknown quantity with a noisy crowd on opening night.

I saw a screening of a new talking-heads documentary called Cinematographer Style last week. I can't offer a general recommendation, since it really is a talking-heads documentary — no movie clips at all — and I know that makes lots of people itch. But it's a very good-looking talking-heads documentary, and it does offer the pleasure of seeing cinematographers (call them "directors of photography" at your own risk) in their native habitat (that is, up on a movie screen) and listening to them go on about their lives and art. It's especially fun in the moments when several of them take control of the shoot, swapping out lenses or lights to make a point. Interviews with something like 110 different cinematographers are compressed into about 96 minutes, so if you do the math you'll see how quickly this thing actually moves. (Vittorio Storaro and Gordon Willis are the real stars of the show.) But if you have a more-than-cursory interest in the art and craft of cinematography, it's worth a look if you get the chance.

Antonioni's Amazing Grace

I can’t remember ever being as bored in a movie theater as I was at an Antonioni film, Red Desert. It was my first week living on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. I had no friends in town and not a lot of money, and just about the only thing doing for friendless paupers was the International Film Series, admission to which was probably three or four bucks at the time. And the movie was Red Desert.

Whew.

Or, Buried Alive on the Fourth of July

If you're buried alive under a pile of smoldering rubble in an Oliver Stone movie, it seems your salvation may come from one of two places. First, there's Jesus. If he shows up, he may offer to deliver you from suffering, but it will likely mean punching your ticket. Hang on, buddy, because your second saviour is the U.S. Marines. And if the Marines show up, boy howdy are you in good hands. That's the non-ironic gist of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, a conservative yarn of life in these times rife with sentiment and earnestness. I'll go so far as to say the bit with the Marines is a well-timed moment of catharsis in a movie that needs it. It made me smile and laugh out loud in spite of myself. Sometimes, hokum works pretty beautifully. The film's opening is just lovely — a sober collection of shots of New York City, skyline still intact, coming to life in the morning. It reminded me a little of the majestic opening montage of Woody Allen's Manhattan, set to "Rhapsody in Blue," but this version is laced unavoidably with overwhelming sadness.

There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Miami Vice where Crockett, feeling some oats, sensibly decides to sow them in the direction of Gong Li. They get on a speedboat and whiz off into the ocean blue. You can tell she’s sweet on him, and when she announces she’s taking him to her hang-outs in Havana — Havana! — for mojitos and dancing and maybe something more, suddenly this hard-boiled cop movie inflates with a sense of romantic wonder and possibility. To get on a boat in Miami, tear away from the shore and bounce across the waves, setting a course for Havana?