22 Things I Learned From 'Star Trek'

1. Starfleet spacesuits come in a range of primary colours.

2. The senator for Iowa has enough pull to ensure spacecraft construction occurs there. Rather than in space.

3. After five television shows and eleven films, I still have no idea what Starfleet is actually for.

4. Mining ships are equipped with bunker-busting missiles and near-impregnable shields.

5. No one ever thinks to bring a phaser to a sword-fight.

6. Bruce Greenwood is far too old for this ship.

7. There’s no corner that can’t be written out of with recourse to warp drive or the ability to beam anywhere in the universe in seconds.

8. It’s no fun when the unstoppable bad guys are so bad and so unstoppable.

9. Chris Pine’s William Shatner impression is at times uncanny.

10. Karl Urban’s DeForest Kelly impression is just the right side of weird.

11. Simon Pegg’s Simon Pegg impression is just the wrong side of tacky.

12. Apple (or possible Brawn GP) do Starfleet’s interior decorating.

13. Starfleet’s ‘peacekeeping armada’ is neither an oxymoron, nor in any way effective. In the twenty-third century equivalent of an oilrig taking on an aircraft carrier, the former consistently wipes the floor with the latter.

14. Engine Rooms on warp-drive equipped space ships look like a warehouse in Swindon with overlarge see-through plumming.

15. It still isn’t advisable to be the third man on an away team.

16. It takes three years of training, a famous father, and being an insufferable git to gain control of the flagship of the Federation.

17. There’s more cataclysm in ten minutes of this film than all seven seasons of Jean-Luc Picard’s tenure.

18. It’s not blockbuster entertainment without a spot of genocide. (See also Star Wars.)

19. Director J.J. Abrams never met a lens flare he didn’t like.

20. Writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci never met a character they wouldn’t undermine.

21. The Enterprise’s mission to explore new worlds and civilizations will have to wait until next time.

22. With its bright lights, uncomplicated morality, and lack of responsible adults, this is a children’s film at heart.

22 Things I Learned From 'The International'

1. Trailers that suggest a film is going to be a Jason Bourne-style frantic-a-thon are often misleading.

2. Always look both ways before crossing the street.

3. All Italian police are corrupt.

4. Evil banking consortiums hire the best architects.

5. Hiring an assassin with an identifiable physical abnormality may be de rigour for this kind of thing, but it’s still a stupid thing to do.

6. The walls of the Guggenheim Museum are bulletproof.

7. The people who control the money don’t necessarily control the world, the people who control the debt do.

8. Airport security works just fine.

9. The ubiquity of capital investment in dodgy political regimes is now presented in film shorthand via an African despot (see also Casino Royale and the current season of 24).

10. Inside Interpol, Scotland Yard is referred to as “the Yard”.

11. Armin-Mueller Stahl hasn’t forgotten how to act, it’s just that he hasn’t been trying lately.

12. Armed goons still aren’t a cost-effective problem-solver.

13. Attempting a Noo Yawk accent for two lines of dialogue is enough for Naomi Watts, thank you very much.

14. Compared to the International Bank of Business and Credit, Halifax and Northern Rock conduct themselves ethically and sensitively.

15. Helicopter shots can still be breathtaking.

16. Clive Owen is now the icon for the modern man: single-minded, confused, belligerent, ultimately ineffectual.

17. Acting is only as bad as you think it is.

18. The mafia always get their way in the end.

19. As in property, as in spy films: location location location.

20. Crossing Michael Clayton with Quantum of Solace and throwing in some Niall Ferguson-style economics works rather well actually.

21. Director Tom Tykwer is a much smarter man than he wants you to think.

22. Movies that are only released to cinemas for about twenty minutes aren’t necessarily crap, just misunderstood genius.

Land of the Parodic, Home of the Absurd: A Review of ‘Watchmen’

...and I feel fine: Faithfulness to the quintessentially novelistic source material turns out to be the weakest link of Watchmen.

A joke: a man in the midst of a deep depression visits the doctor in an attempt to alleviate his malaise: he can find no solace in a harsh world and its vague future. The doctor prescribes a visit to world famous clown Pagliacci, which is sure to cheer him up. The man bursts into tears – I am Pagliacci, he explains. What hope do we have when the distractions we have assembled to take our minds off the nastiness of the human condition become themselves afflicted?

This anecdote appears in Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel ‘Watchmen’, released in the mid-eighties, and evoking a M.A.D world on the brink of nuclear armageddon, peopled by a citizenry who are fanatical about anything but love or truth, burying their heads in gang-culture, nostalgia, and even comic books so as to avoid sensible engagement with an increasingly eschatological world. Masked avengers in this work are not emblems of justice in a gothic metropolis, but are rather symptom of personal gratification and the power of consumer branding.

In adapting the novel to the screen, director Zack Snyder and his team have retained this grim yarn, as well as most of the words and images, translating them sometimes slavishly onto the screen in a similar, if with a more varied palette, manner of the Snyder’s popular version of Frank Miller’s 300. But this is not a story about Spartans and Persians and constant mythologizing and bloodshed. Moore’s novel, and by extension the script of the film, is an attempt to strip away myth and grandiosity, replacing it with troublingly deep psychology and an acute examination of why people dressing up in masks and fighting crime appealed and appeals so much to the American psyche, and how this appeal is tied up with the outcome of the Second World War and the unseen forces at work in the subsequent Cold War. That’s a lot to squeeze in, even with Watchmen’s two hours forty minutes running time. In making the attempt, the film reveals the massive potential of its own medium – unfortunately, by failing to fulfil it.

As with the novel, there are a wide variety of characters, themes, alternative histories, flashbacks, locations, plots and sub-plots. Without the structuring of chapters, and even the careful positioning of cells on a double-page layout, many elements lose their force. A cannier director may have made more of an attempt to translate the visual and thematic language which Moore and artist Dave Gibbons worked with so carefully into the filmic dimension. Instead, he transliterates. Snyder reproduces, rather than reinvigorates. The narrative feels like a constant plateau of meaning and emotion, only rising and falling by tiny increments, rather than tightening the nearer the metaphorical doomsday clock gets to midnight. Never mind that the surprise reveal of the villain is undermined by fresh framing and sequencing, the finale fails to flare the imagination more than the rest of the film because it is handled in the exact same manner as the rest of the film. Shot, reverse-shot, slo-mo punch, smashing of a glass table, repeat. The title sequence, in which ideas and referents from the novel are presented as Wes Anderson-like tableau’s to the unmediated tune of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, manages to avoid this flattening-out, as does the depiction of a trip to Mars (don’t laugh) and the metaphysical anguish one character feels by his very existence and responsibilities, all set to some of Philip Glass’ music from Koyaanisqatsi (a 1984 film concerning the disharmony and unsustainability of modern life).

These interesting and unexpected musical cues are not alone: also used are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel, some more successfully than others, but all adding some cultural heft otherwise absent: no use listening to Rorschach, a single-minded vigilante, bitch about the state of New York (“this city is like an open sewer with sidewalks of blood”) when the film makes no effort to ground itself in the streets he walks. Like the back-lot of a Spiderman film, or the digital sets so beloved of late, even constant views of the Twin Towers on the skyline fail to position the audience as anything other than outsiders looking in on a fish-tank, our perception warped, the objects we study unreal. This quality might suit the plotline involving two retired Watchmen who re-don their costumes for the thinly-veiled sake of some soft-core action and empowering beat-downs (focussing as this strand does on the infantilism and egoism inherent in the genre), but the sheen does not sit well with either the intensely violent and uncompromising Rorschach or the corporeally challenged Doc Manhattan, a scientist turned to pure energy in an experiment who can eviscerate opponents and used this skill to win America the Vietnam War. These two characters, as well as the fallen comrade who opens the film and the truly Machiavellian adversary who was behind the whole scheme (nothing less than saving the world from itself), are all embodiments of moralistic outlooks, each embedded strongly with American (and human) history. Watching such lofty personifications duke it out at one-quarter speed is disappointing, at best.

What then of that poor, existentially troubled clown? Perceived wisdom is that the superhero comic book is an escape, a fantasy of masculine power and ethical simplicities in which good triumphs and no thanks ma’am, no need to thank me, just doing my job. Comics may not be the opiate of the masses, but they help the opium go down. In examining this phenomenon in such detail, and stressing the danger it poses not just to American foreign policy but also to the basic human ability to relate to one another, Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ bit off more than it could chew, but asked questions about the nature of escapism, and the danger of fabulist story-telling and mis-used imagination. Snyder’s Watchmen, through the configuring of an invisible Russian threat and a caricature Nixon, fails to exhibit the same apprehension about its own medium, instead settling on being a spectacular, morally swampy distraction.

I Love You This Much: A Review of ‘Rachel Getting Married’

Explain Yourself: Try as she might, Anne Hathaway's Kym cannot get away from the mistakes of her past.

On my way into the screening of Rachel Getting Married I was informed by the woman tearing my ticket that it was not a romantic comedy. Warned, perhaps, rather than informed, as though the first Anne Hathaway bridal comedy I was hankering after had been all booked up, and this was the second, more dangerous choice. Not to cast aspersions on Gary Winick (whose work on Ugly Betty has been exemplary, I am sure), but when forced to choose between his Bride Wars and the latest Jonathan Demme, which in a way I was, I will always choose the latter, taking the risk of another The Truth About Charlie if I must.

Hathaway here plays Kym, a damaged, self-involved young woman who has just been released from rehab (again?) in time to attend the wedding of her older sister, which is being extensively prepared for and rehearsed. Tightly wound and pale-skinned, Kym moves through her childhood home like a ghost, before stumbling to and from a narcotics anonymous meeting; she is an instantly likeable but at the same time callous and scathing character. Not for her the sharp put-down barbs that we have been trained to expect from the jaded teen-grown-up.

The film seems to be positioning itself as a comedy of humiliation in the same vein as some of the more cringe-worth episodes of The Office as Kym desperately draws attention away from her pre-nuptial sister and towards her own neuroses with the repeated excuse that it is part of the ‘healing process’. Entertaining as this might be, it is something we have seen before, as is the suggestion of a redemptive romance with the best man. When Kym stands up during the rehearsal dinner to make an impromptu speech the room around her tangibly recoils with embarrassment. However, she does not make a comic foil of herself, but rather only a nuisance, and the scene continues. In tandem with Kym, and with a sensitive touch, the film begins to shed its self-destructive and unenlightening narcissism. A later moment involving the competitive filling of a dishwasher, in which Kym dissolves into the crowd around her and is happy to remain a spectator rather than a participant is quietly moving, although the scene turns on a small revelation that comes indirectly from Kym herself and which – the more we learn of the family and recent history – implies some kind of cosmic moral punishment of Kym, who, as we have seen, does a perfectly good job of punishing herself.

The script is by first-time Jenny Lumet, daughter of the world-famous Sydney, and it shows the same intensified, guilt-ridden family dynamics of her father’s recent Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, only shorn of the cumbersome criminality and temporal editing games. Both her and director Demme are smart enough to play the story straight, the latter’s experience with concert films perhaps contributing to his confidence and lightness of touch in filming an actuality without intruding upon it. (Even the title seems to purposefully toy with the grammar of reality: ‘what did you do yesterday?’, ‘I saw Rachel getting married’, ‘who’s Rachel?’) He is, of course, assisted by his actors – Hathaway has justifiably drawn praise, but credit is due to Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel, and the chemistry that the two share. Bill Irwin’s paterfamilias Paul is perhaps the most surprising interpretation of a role on display, his flighty attempt at fortitude becoming more compelling as the film goes on.

While occasionally heavy-going, the film is never heavy-handed, and seems rosy-cheeked during the moments it is put in the position of being as dramatic as the people depicted, preferring the momentous commitment of marriage between two people. The most striking aspect of Rachel Getting Married may be the way it conjures up the spine-tingling mixture of momentousness and pure joy which attends the union of two people very much in love. Depending on your mood, Rachel and her fiancé Sidney’s success, feeling quiet even in the face of all the fuss and bluster created around it, creates either hope for all the Kym’s of this world, or pushes them into oblivion because of its incredible unassailability.

Butter Side Down: A Note on ‘Valkyrie’

By way of warning the dispossessed Colonel Stauffenberg about the consequences of his embryonic scheme to eliminate Adolf Hitler in 1944, General Erich Fellgiebel states that ‘When the S.S. catch you, they will pull you apart…’ Like dogs tearing at a piece of meat, all sharpened teeth and gristly violence? ‘…pull you apart like warm bread,’ finishes Fellgiebel. It does not help that the line is delivered by comedian Eddie Izzard, whose decadent camp dressed up in a Nazi uniform is the closest Valkyrie gets to examining the aristocratic, fascist excesses of these men. Unfortunately, after his threat that the mostly unseen and entirely unthreatening S.S. will turn Tom Cruise into a complementary appetiser at an Italian restaurant, Izzard is relegated to the sidelines of this effective but highly simplistic ‘based on true events’ tale. Cruise is his usual stolid dramatic self, sans – but not on the poster, natch – a hand, eye, and several fingers, and little is asked of him or the other characters in Bryan Singer’s slick but bland production other than to be cogs in the machine. Rather than impart the piece with an air of impending tragedy, this clunkiness only serves to reveal much of Singer’s conservatism and narrow focus. This is a movie about Hitler’s attempted assassination, and nothing else – the villainy of the man and his party is taken as read, and the only dramatic idea of note developed is that of the struggle for the soul of a country (perhaps a relevant idea in the U.S. of late). It may have been out of Singer’s remit to include anything but the slightest nod to the wider social reality of wartime Germany, but when this extends to a depopulated and stage-set like Berlin it begins to seriously hinder the work. In hindsight, Fellgiebel’s warning seems rather appropriate: Valkyrie is lukewarm entertainment which won’t spoil your dinner.

Round-Up of 2008

Two lists: 1)the best, and 2) those of which much more was expected, and so are more deserving of listing than “the worst” (the prize of which goes to Redacted); neither list is in any particular order.

The conclusion of this year of cinema-going? I need to be more adventurous. Only one foreign-language film, no documentaries, not even a plucky ham radio trying to make out with an iPod. Despite temptations to rename the list (“Large-Scale Hollywood Establishment Products Round-Up of 2008”) I chose to stick to my guns, and take the flak.

No honourable mentions here, but it should be said that Tropic Thunder nearly made both lists, and so got caught in an un-listed purgatory: the blame, for both, belongs to Ben Stiller. Also hovering between the brilliant and the banal was Quantum of Solace, in which director Marc Foster seemed to make up for the wholesale surrendering to Bournestyle by filling the margins of the film with unexpected delights: the regional fonts, the pill-peddling of Giancarlo Giannini, the sleekly swampy sound design and the J.G. Ballard-bothering desert finale to name just a few. (Please note that while Gone Baby Gone was only released in the UK mid-’08, it is a true 2007 film, and so is not included here as one the very very best).

The Best:

The Dark Knight
What can one say about this film that hasn’t been said a dozen times by reviews, articles, and conversations in coffee shops? A superb jumble of ideas and philosophy which somehow struck a chord with the entire country, being openly adored by people for whom the superhero genre is normally a punchline.

Appaloosa
Not only a showcase for some of the most majestic performances of the year, but also a literate and unusual film about semantics and specificity. A warmly affectionate piece of work which addresses Western mythos with an understated charm.

Franklyn
Due for a release in the UK soon (late February), Gerald McMorrow’s debut feature is at times stilted, but manages to create some rich and sombre alternative realities, and then just about keeps all the plates spinning as these begin to crash into on another in the final act.

Shine a Light
For the collection of incredible cinematographers working at their peak. For the unexpected explosion into full-screen twenty minutes into the IMAX version. For the witty, if stage-managed, prologue. Most of all, though, for the sheer elevating joy of the thing.

No Country For Old Men
For some a 2007 film. Also, for some, an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. To its fans, however, it’s an excruciating exercise in cool detachment. Simultaneously too faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel and not faithful enough, this is a brave, swiss-watch-accurate piece of film-making, only falling down in the more metaphysical tenets of the story.

In Bruges
Martin McDonagh’s debut as a film director was one of the unexpected gems of the year. Balancing darkly abrasive humour with metaphysical guilt and outright surrealism, In Bruges also boasts fine location shooting and three fantastic central performances.

The Chaser
This strange, hypnotic Korean film about an ex-cop turned pimp frustratedly trying to find the third of his girls to go missing is well worth seeking out both for the atmospheric visuals, and a script which is rich in subtle ironies, if not psychological depth.

The Missed Opportunities:

Taken
Liam Neeson playing Jason Bourne – what could go wrong? Plenty, it appears. Choppy film-making, a strong Europhobic streak, and some of the most unfittingly bizarre narrative choices of the year make Taken a frustrating and insulting watch when it could have been a first-class guilty pleasure.

Hellboy II
Included here only to mark the nailing of the coffin into my enjoyment of Guillermo del Toro’s cinema. Every time I get excited, and every time I get the same melancholic doomed love, extended central sequence of astonishing banality, clock-and-cog aesthetics, and irrational characters. Enough, I say. But that’s just me.

Max Payne
How do you screw up a heady brew of noir plotlines and apocalyptic aesthetics? Here’s how. That the unremarkable Constantine did it better tells you all you need to know, really.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
A film which, the more I think of it, the less I think of it. In telling the story of a man’s unusual life it succeeds finely, but in saying something more, something fresh, something sweeping, it fails. Perhaps this was intended, but for a Fincher film to evoke Robert Zemeckis seems like, well, a missed opportunity.

Body of Lies
William Monaghan, shame on you. We’ve come to expect poorly conceived but richly executed films from Ridley Scott, but your writing for him here is like an after-school exercise in Middle East suspicion.

Pride and Glory
Firmly in the tradition of other (both lesser and greater) corrupt cop thrillers, the crime of Pride and Glory is to offer so much and then deliver so little. Barring a completely unnecessary expository scene the first hour is bracingly shot entertainment, culminating in a fiercely believable confrontation between a seething Colin Farrell and a polite drug dealer in a frostbitten backyard. Then it all goes pear-shaped, and not even the brilliant closing shot can save it from ignominy.

The Myth of Central Control: A Review of 'Eagle Eye'

There is something deeply unpalatable about the ability of characters in recent Steven Spielberg films to survive. Thrown, bashed, lodged, stretched – they always come out with nary a bruise. Of course, this is no different to the action films of many other directors, but there is a delight and glee in Spielberg’s work of the dangerous robbed of danger. He only executive produces Eagle Eye (the directing duties left to the beige DJ Caruso), but his fingerprints are all over the whirling-dervish car pile-ups and conveyor-belt shenanigans – the only difference here is that they make a fiendish kind of sense.

We can maybe believe Jason Bourne’s survival through numerous collisions and falls because he has been trained for what may as well be an eternity and has the spatial awareness and physical prowess of a robotic big cat; it frays the imagination when James Bond throws himself into another fight by literally falling off a rooftop in Seville, smashing through a glass skylight and landing with a lucky thud on internal scaffolding; when Jerry Shaw, the hero at the heart of Eagle Eye, is told to jump from the interior of a car being swung across a dock by a wrecking crane and lands on a passing barge it is completely beyond comprehension. But this film has discovered a canny stand-in for the maniacal demands of a laws-and-physics challenged action-world – Jerry is being guided by someone that knows everything. It knows when the barge will be there, it knows when Jerry needs to jump, it even knows the tone of voice to use to make him leap at the right moment.

The discombobulated voice, portrayed with an amusing matriarchal streak of disapproval by an uncredited Julianne Moore, guides both Jerry and his fellow layperson-caught-in-massive-conspiracy Rachel through car chases, downed power lines, prison breaks and fighter jet attacks, keeping them safe as they drive eighty miles an hour through a busy urban street and somehow don’t crash; she insulates them from the things other action stars avoid through sheer dumb luck (and isn’t one of pleasures of these films the look of staggered bemusement on the hero’s face as the helicopter crashes inches away?). Through this simple conceit, Eagle Eye is able to ratchet up the absurdity of its near misses while also, laughably, giving them the sheen of plausibility.

In other areas to the film goes so far over the top as to launch itself from the planet like some kind of Baudrillard-inspired mockery of modern cinematic disbelief. The parodic casting of bombshell Rosario Dawson as an Air Force Investigator and hard-case Michael Chiklis as a pacifistic Secretary of Defence; the instant “witty” banter between the young leads thirty seconds after they meet and in the midst of fleeing several dozen police agencies; the grandly incomprehensible plot which shoehorns in Islamic terrorism in the most bizarre manner possible; yet all these pale in comparison with the race-against-time finale, which (seriously) involves preventing a ten year old playing a musical instrument. Thankfully, lead Shia LaBeouf has the right look of stern panic for this kind of business (the same cannot be said of the oddly drifting Michelle Monaghan), and the script is smart enough to keep him in the dark and obeying perverse orders for much more of the running time than one would expect.

It’s certainly not for everyone, and I find it hard to conceive of a situation when I would excitedly sit down to watch it again, but the very disposability and inconsequence of Eagle Eye may be part of the point, and perhaps supremely ridiculous fictions such as these will serve as a kind of tonic and re-adjust the focus of solid Hollywood fare away from exhausted trope of dangling, landing, lithe American bodies and back towards something with an investment in character and an awareness of the unpleasantness of injury, rather than the glamour of its narrow escape. Then again, perhaps not.