Prometheus (Sunday, June 10, 2012) (55)

So in 1979, Ridley Scott re-wrote the look, style and tone of scifi movies with his brilliant Alien -- the best movie he has ever made (or ever will). Of course, that film launched a multi-movie franchise, including James Cameron's 1986 sequel, Aliens -- which is arguable better than the first film. 


So now that everyone in Hollywood is totally out of ideas, Ridley is back with Prometheus, a prequel to the earlier franchise. This is a very big and thick scifi movie, filled with all the stuff that the original films didn't have: sex and love, god and existentialist quandaries, near-human robots and power-hungry billionaires. It's all so dumb, clumsy and boring, there's basically nothing good to say about it. 


The film begins with an alien dude standing on the edge of a waterfall. He takes a drink of a mysterious substance and jumps to his death in the falls. This is supposed to mean something or connect for us, but it just seems random and disconnected. We then see a team of scientists, lead by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discovering how cave paintings from around the world all have a similar constellation in them -- and that that set of stars is in some far-off part of the universe... so they get in a spaceship with a team of "scientists" (funded privately by billionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce)) and ride off into the cosmos deeply in love.


As the crew sleeps (because they're traveling at light speed, natch), a humanoid android named David (beautifully acted by Michael Fassbender) takes care of the ship. He styles himself after Peter O'Toole from Lawrence of Arabia and reads all the dreams and memories of the people (because that's deep, you see... an android who wants to be human). 


They land at some planet where they find a big pyramid and decide to go into it -- because as scientists they know that fucking with their study subject is the best way to do research. They realize there's living stuff there and they bring some of it back on to their ship (again - that's the scientific method). The leader of the mission on the ground is some skinny blond lady called Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) who is probably not a robot, though she seems to be one... and also seems to be the daughter of Weyland -- though that is presented in a way that could be sarcastic (and it doesn't really matter... like everything in the movie, it's more about loading the story with informational stuff than really exploring anything). 


Ultimately the aliens, who are probably our forebears, infect the ship and kill all sorts of people in boring ways. We ultimately see the famous phallic-vaginal alien guy from those earlier movies emerge from people's bellies -- three times like the great scenes in those early movies... because once you have a good trick you should do it over and over and over and over.


In most big, heady (or fake heady) movies today almost no clear information is presented, and instead, we are given with lots of texture and information, but no synthesis. I firmly reject the notion that a movie has to be oblique to be worthy of discussion or analysis. Great movies are frequently presented straightforwardly, but it seems that many directors can't just leave well enough alone and have to overly complicate stuff. 


The questions this movie presents about our origins are facile at best. Does god exist? Did he create us? What about aliens? Can a robot be a human? It's all so boring. 


On top of this, there's a really uncomfortable and bizarre element that Elizabeth wears a cross around her neck and several times makes it clear that despite finding out that human existence has more to do with aliens than with a creationist myth, she clutches her totem closer and reaffirms her faith. Why? I dunno. Some upside-down ef-you to athiests and scifi geeks who deny god's existence? It's hard enough to believe that an evolutionary scientist would trust so closely in a Judeo-Chrisitan god -- but then that she reaffirms her faith when shown that it's all bunk is just annoying and dead-ended. What am I supposed to do with that information? Does that make me think about my own faith more? No - it doesn't. 


Most of the problems with the film are in the script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Linelof... of Lost), which is undercooked and banal. We don't need a love story to make us care about people and certainly don't need to see the same gags three times to appreciate them. There's nothing clever or interesting in the film and it all comes off as totally flat and dull. What a disappointment. 


Stars: 1 of 4

Sound of My Voice (Saturday, April 28, 2012) (43)

Oh, shit. Here we go with what is sure to be a rash of hipster, post-mumblecore indie sci-fi flicks that are totally under-cooked and rely more on young people's love for small and niche things than for anything about good filmmaking and effective storytelling. Following on the heels of Brit Marling's film Another Earth last year, which she co-wrote and starred in, comes Sound of My Voice (there really should be an article there, guys), another movie she co-wrote and stars in (is it just a co-incidence that she co-writes movies and her partners direct them? Seems sorta fishy to me...).

This one tells the story of Peter (Christopher Denham) an intrepid journalist in LA (those exist?) who takes his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius... who got a vicious nose job as a teen, apparently) to a strange cult where they listen to a young woman named Maggie (Marling) who claims to be from the future. It's not clear what exactly Maggie wants them to do or why. She seems more like Jack Lalanne telling them to eat healthy food than Jim Jones or Charlie Manson. Apparently she will ask them to do something soon.

As the film opens Peter is sure that Maggie is a fraud (duh!) but is interested in the scope of her plan. As they spend more and more time with her, and go through more and more unusual tests (there's a handshake they have to do that's an elaborate paddy-cake hand game; at some point Maggie makes all the followers puke on a tarp), Peter and Lorna begin to fall apart as he becomes obsessed with Maggie and Lorna sees her for what she is.

Director Zal Batmanglij does a very nice job with the process part of the story, showing us how the followers have to bathe, get blindfolded and taken to a mysterious spot in the Valley to meet Maggie. There is a lovely dynamism to these sequences. He also does a nice job showing the intimate spaces of the basement and the very quiet, calm moments when the followers meet Maggie.

In the end, this is a decent concept that really doesn't have enough going for it to be a feature (a short about Maggie would probably have been very interesting). By the end of the film (not really giving anything away) it's clear that she is probably a fraud, with only a slim chance that she might be legitimately from the future (again, it's never clear what she's doing now that she's back in our time), but this really isn't all that interesting or important to us. I never felt at all invested in any of the characters, Lorna is rather sympathetic but underdeveloped, Peter seems like an idiot, Maggie is more phantom than person, and the scrappy simplicity of the story belies the fact that it's just not that interesting.

I don't totally get what Brit Marling is doing in this world of ours. She's pretty gorgeous, seems to be a better-than-average actor and a decent co-writer (Another Earth was much, much better than this, though it had issues too with sentimentality). Will she continue to work on the edges of the industry in indie sci-fi or will she be used, for her looks, in more big-budget and studio stuff? I guess I shouldn't blame her for keeping it small for now, but what she's doing is so unusual that it totally makes no sense to me.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

In Time (Tuesday, November 22, 2011) (104)

In Time is a dystopian sci-fi movie that is totally silly and terrible, but actually really fun and very close to being interesting. The film is a straight-up Marxist polemic about a future world (of downtown LA) where all money has been turned into time. In this world, humans are genetically modified to live until they're 25 and then stop aging. At this point, a digital clock on their arm (genetically built into them, you see) turns on and begins to tick off one year, after which they're supposed to die.

This being a hellscape, it's not so simple, though, as one can work and earn more time (as one would earn more money) and the "rich" of this world are able to buy and sell time, as if it was money. Ersatz "billionaires" live wonderful lives, and, because they don't age past 25 and have unlimited resources (time), they lead totally different lives in another "zone" from the poors. Of course they're all hot. (This is complicated.)

At some point, Justin Timberlake gets sick of always being poor, that is, close to being dead, and he is given a century by a rich guy who is sick of living anymore. JT goes into the world of the rich looking only to see how they live, but once he gets there, he finds that he's not trusted and not wanted.

The idea of the film is actually pretty clever, and I totally give writer/director Andrew Niccol credit for making such a blatant and angry Marxist film (it fits in very well with the current Occupy Wall Street movement). Still, the dialogue is totally laughable throughout the film, either totally banal or filled with every "time" and "clock" pun you can imagine ("I'm gonna clean your clock" - literally; "your time is up"). Also, the acting by JT and Amanda Seyfried is really terrible and hard to take seriously. It feels as over-the-top as Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but it's played as totally serious.

The art direction and costumes are really wonderful here, probably some of the best art direction and production design of any film this year (Gattica looked great too, by the way). Everything is 1960s-70s futuristic. The cars are either '60s Lincoln Continental sedans or '60s Dodge Chargers (or some such Mopar car) but always painted matte black. There is something wonderful about how part of the nightmare of this world is that they went back in time for their future. It's a very clever thing and looks amazing. In spite of this, though, it's a goofy movie that's much more unintentionally funny than serious.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Friday, August 5, 2011) (65)

So, it's pretty special right now that there's this new blockbuster called Rise of the Planet of the Apes and there's also a documentary called Project Nim and they're both about chimps and human-chimp interactions. In fact the first 20 minutes of Apes lines up almost directly with the first act of Nim. Special. Of course one film is more or less scientifically rigorous and raises questions about our humanity and methods and the other is a popcorn-seller that feigns those things, but really just gives us a bunch of shrieking primates (humans and chimp) and no story, structure or sense.

Will (James Franco) is a scientist working for a lab to develop an Alzheimer's drug. When one of the apes he does his tests on goes crazy he smuggles its baby out of the building and into his home attic for safekeeping. It seems that this chimp, Caesar, has been genetically enhanced by meds given to his mother. OK. Will's dad (John Lithgow) suffers from Alzheimer's, but when he's given these still-untested meds, he shows tremendous mental recovery. Will thinks he's on to something... .

What he's not onto (what would have been clear if he had watched Project Nim) is that living with a chimp is not easy and that chimps are really strong and can be very violent. At some point, Will meets a veterinarian (Frida Pinto) who explains to him that he has to let Caesar run around in the outdoors out of the house (he's been living with the feckin' chimp in the attic for three years! Jesus!). They fall in love.

Five years later, they're still living with the chimp (by which point it's probably bigger than a human and many times stronger) until he attacks a neighbor (stupid gag: the neighbor gets attacked or harassed several times in the film; it's actually not funny). He's sent to a primate collection center run by Brian Cox and Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy), who apparently hate primates, or something. Over time we see Caesar becoming the king of this zoo (oh, I get the significance of his name now!) and ultimately his revolt against the humans. Then there's a big fight on the Golden Gate Bridge (even though they start on the North side and then end up on the North side... confusing).

It's never clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are here. Draco and Brian Cox are clearly bad, but Franco is good (even though he's the worst scientist in the history of the world and Frida Pinto is the worst vet and the least interested girlfriend/wife ever) (there's a scene where, after living with him for five years, Franco shows Pinto the research he's been doing... and it's all out in plain view in his study in the house... as if she never though to wander in that room and read the stuff). The big pharma lab Franco works for seems to be bad, but we really don't care about it; the apes are good, then bad, then good again. There are a lot of people who die but no blame is assigned for their deaths. It's not as if this is ambiguous and interesting, it's just confusing and impossible to align with anyone (or anyape).

Technically this film is a big steaming pile of apeshit (question: why is 'apeshit' a synonym for 'crazy', but 'horseshit' is a synonym for 'shit'? Ima change that.). Baby Caesar looks like a special needs child (crossed with a Conehead) and looks nothing even close to real. The CGI animation here is a joke, particularly in the early stages of the film.

At some point when Caesar gets to be "fully grown", he is animated with the help of human-puppet-like-person Andy Serkis (who also did the "acting" for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies). Much attention and praise has been given to Serkis - and I absolutely can't figure out why. It basically looks like it could have been animated the same crappy way with or without him in a motion-capture suit. And really, if we're giving credit to the actor playing the ape, doesn't that mean the actors playing humans are doing a terrible job? (They are.)

(I want to add a few points here: 1) Most people don't know what the heck apes look like or how they move, so to say Serkis looks natural as an ape is bunk because that's an assessment based on no reference; 2) The original 1933 King Kong looked much more "natural" than this, whatever the hell that means; 3) I don't think Serkis does anything that thousands of modern dancers/Cirque de Soleil people couldn't do and I don't know why he's getting such attention.)

To say the wrting and directing in the film are bad is to insult bad writing and directing. (And yes, this might have a worse script and be directed more ham-handedly than Transformers 3.) Director Rupert Wyatt so totally doesn't know how to organize a competent sequence or scene that most of the time we're left wondering about basic things like what we're looking at or the geography of floorplans. The crowning jewel of the film is a totally unnecessary shot of Caesar and his crew, having busted out of ape jail, on top of a San Francisco trolly-car going over a hill and posing; the reverse shot of their backs show the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, mostly obscured by the apes themselves. This is terrible shot construction (all digital, of course, meaning they could have put any of those elements anywhere on screen) and fits in nowhere to the continuity of the story.

The script, by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (veterans of schlock horror garbage), is a structural mess: the first two acts are really about nothing but Caesar being locked up and not being an interesting character and only the last act has any action in it. It also has some of the worst dialogue in recent memory. When Will finally finds Caesar after he's thrown his feces all over San Francisco, all he can do is to ask him (nicely) to come back home with him. Yes, Will, your pet chimp just went fucking crazy all over town, killing people and destroying a major steel bridge; I'm sure he'd love to move back to your suburban attic. Stupid.

I can't imagine why so many reviewers are so kind to this film. It's an absolute turd and has no redeeming qualities to it. Everything from the wooden acting (Franco has that in him, to be sure) to the terrible technical stuff to the terrible artistic stuff makes this movie just awful. Rather than seeing it, you should see Project Nim. It's a very similar story and done much better.

Stars: 0 of 4

Another Earth (Sunday, July 31, 2011) (61)

As Another Earth opens, the young Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling) is partying in her Connecticut town before she goes off to college at M.I.T. She drives home and hears on the radio that a new planet has entered the solar system and is now visible with the naked eye. Transfixed by this tiny blue dot in the night sky, she does not pay attention to where she's driving and crashes head-on into another car with young family inside.

When Rhoda gets out of jail (a four-year stint for manslaughter), she seems to be a changed person. Sober now in every sense, she realizes that she was reckless as she tries to re-start her life in a much more modest way. During the the four years that have passed, that blue dot in the sky has come closer and closer to Earth and scientists have studied it and have come to understand it as an Earth clone, Earth II, which seems to have the exact the same land masses, cities and people that we have on our planet. That is to say there is a likelihood that each person has a double on Earth II.

What is wonderful about Another Earth is that while this very challenging string-theory-multiple-Earths story line is going on, what we experience from scene to scene is really just a very down-to-earth tale of Rhoda coming to terms with killing two people and trying to make right with the man who survived the accident, John (William Mapother). In order to do this, she becomes his house cleaner, trying desperately to help him through his depression and trying to find the right moment to reveal her identity to him. It is clear that such an existential change as Earth II affects everyone in dramatic ways, but this is much more of a melancholy drama than it is a sci-fi movie (the way Moon, District 9 or 2001: A Space Odyssey are really just dramas set in a sci-fi genre).

I really like the moody, gray-green look to the film. That it takes place in winter, gives everything a cold and wet look, which is very important to creating an interesting atmosphere. We're constantly reminded of how mediocre life is for most and the outside world works as a nice objective correlative for the internal struggles of both Rhoda and John.

As the film moves along, there's a lovely idea that Earth II represents a mulligan, a do-over, for people on Earth (I). Clearly Rhoda and John are in need of such a do-over, though as much in an existential sense as a literal one. This is a lovely device, if a bit heavy-handed. (In fact it's perhaps that it's so unapologetically heavy-handed that it works so well. Co-writer/director Mike Cahill and Marling never flinch from the inherent silliness of the story and never stop to answer questions, like "won't this new Earth crash into our Earth?" Nobody ever blinks about this construction and it works because it's so earnest.)

Marling is really amazing in this movie, particularly for a new actress I've never seen in any major role before. OK, first, she's objectively beautiful, sorta a grown-up looking Jennifer Lawrence or blond Jessica Chastain. But she brings with that a self-effacing honesty and an elemental naturalness that's refreshing and particularly rare for actors of her age. She feels like a mumblecore star with a legitimate script and real makeup. Rhoda is ashamed of what she did and feels obliged to suffer now that she's out of jail and "free," but also is a bit of a mouthy 22-year-0ld whose first-instinct sometimes is to talk back.

Sadly the third act of this film is a complete mess, filled with sentimental, romantic garbage that feels contrary to the real dark story of angst and self-torture (although I'm sure it puts butts in seats, as they say). This sequence is much more typical of what you would expect from a Hollywood production than an independent one (though it's hard to begrudge the filmmakers for wanting to be able to sell their movie, I guess). I should say my favorite directing moment happens here, when an aleatory pants pulling gives a glimpse of unplanned reality. Sometimes the best moments in movies are unscripted.

This film really is good, even if the last 20 minutes are annoying. I like the way it's a movie about the effects of science, but not really about the science itself. I think as an atmosphere piece it is very effective and indelible. I look forward to seeing more of Brit Marling and more from Mike Cahill. Clearly they're talented and know how to do the things they do.

Stars: 3 of 4

Transformers: Dark of the Moon 3D (Saturday, July 2, 2011) (48)

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemöller

On a space shuttle launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Simmons (John Turturro), a government-worker-cum-freelance-Transformers-hunter-expert paraphrases this poem as he speaks to the heroic Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf). He's talking about how as a gesture of weakness and conspiracy, the U.S. government agreed to the demands of the Deceptacons to send the Autobots out of the country and off into the wilds of space. Simmons is upset that the holocaust of the humans at the hands of the Decptacons will continue and, like the German pastor before him, he will have tacitly endorsed the heinous act by not fighting against it.

You might say that director Michael Bay and writer Ehren Kruger are being a bit heavy-handed, invoking the Holocaust to a sci-fi action story like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but you would be wrong. They are presenting a deeply searing critique of modern consumerism and a deep post-structuralist analysis of the past 60 years of world history. "Was it all worth it?" is the question that they wrestle with. Taken down to it's basic parts, we see how the hope, good fortune and lessons that came out of the Second World War was all an illusion, that capitalism and the concept of "freedom" are broken systems and that there is only a bright future for us today if we embrace femininity.

The basic story of the film is much too complex to understand from a wide point of view in the context of this column (a fact which is, in itself, a comment on American consumerism, of course), so to put it simply, you have to know that the Deceptacons have come back to Earth, are more Communist than ever and are trying to get a bunch of fuel rods that were crashed on the moon in our pre-human-history. It seems these rods (read: phalluses) are the basis for re-building the Transformers' home planet of Cybertron. If they can insert the rods into our buildings, they'll be able to summon Cybertron inside of Earth's atmostphere. (Spoiler alert: When they succeed in bringing Cybertron to Earth, it looks like a big breast with a gigantic nipple.)

The role of sexuality is ever-present and central to the story. It reminds me of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo: 120 Days of Sade, although here most of the sexual torture is replaced by violence and we are left only with symbolic rape. The Deceptacons are a class of super-masculine bourgeoisie, in the waning days of their own empire. They are led by a Prime (see: The President, The Bishop, etc. from Salo) whose goal is really just to dominate and subjugate. They have their own set of laws, which can be amended at a moment's notice; they appreciate youthful vigor and seem to have as much of an interest in boys as they do in girls.

Their main tool of destruction is Shockwave, a robot that can grow to infinite lengths (like an awesome erection) and burrows through the land and buildings with sharp teeth (like an awesome erection). He is, of course, a gigantic penis with teeth, a Freudian nightmare far worse than the vagina dentata. He is a clear symbol for the Deceptacon culture of over-excess, fucking the world, force feeding people excrement and acting on the most depraved thoughts and desires one could conceive.

But Bay and Kruger are not making a direct parallel to Pasolini, of course. In a very post-Roland-Barthes way they take the predicate of the Holocaust and twist it. Here the Capitalists (the Autobots and the US Government) are the Fascists and are fighting the Communists (the Deceptacons). The American freedom they are tying to defend is best symbolized in the hundreds of brilliant product placements throughout the film. One of the cars is a NASCAR stock car that is sponsored by Target. As we see our heroes fighting the bad guys, we see Target right there in the mix. The film is a polemic about American consumerism. What they are fighting to defend is a world of no choices, corporate overlords and the force-feeding of industrial crap (read: excrement). In the middle of the wreckage of post-battle Chicago, a brand new Ferrari drives down the street unscratched. Overconsumption and the post-feeling world have won and we can celebrate by dreaming of buying cars we'll never be able to afford.

The fact that Bay made this in 3D and has begged people to see it in that format, promising us more than we've ever seen, is a cynical commentary by him on the state of the movie industry and the filmic format. Like Werner Herzog did with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bay shows us here how everything we see is not just done well, but amazingly overdone and and we have to pay more money for the honor of beholding it. We already live in the world he's showing us in the film.

Even the human characters and locations are tied to this theme of post-choice hyper-saturation. The film is set in Washington, D.C. where Witwicky (even his name is a comment on the outsourcing of encyclopedias to the crowd-sourced Internet) is dating a bodacious blond English girl named... uh, I don't remember, but she's a Victoria's Secret model (even here, the poor woman's humanity is stripped away and she becomes a symbol of her employer in the real world; the nightmare that Marx feared has come true and we are all just drones to our corporate masters). In this post-hellish reality, there is no United States or United Kingdom. All Western governments are the same and they're all are marching in lock (goose) step to subjugate the masses with garbage (and to make us bend over so they can rate who has the best ass, so they can then kill that person).

Similarly, though the film is set in Washington, it is shot in Chicago (home of awesome tax breaks... again, a comment on the film making process) -- before the action ultimately moves to Chicago. This is a brilliant way of showing that all American cities are the same. There is no capital city and no "Midwest". There is just one big nightmarish post-Capitalist stretch of cities in American tied together by Interstate 88, the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway. The American government is a fascist organization, it will rape you. In the words of Pasolini's Duke, "the fascists are the only true anarchists." And, I'll add, in the words of his Bishop, "all is good if it's excessive".

Indeed.

Finally, the film shows us that the hyper-masculine nature of the Deceptacons cannot be defeated simply by complimentary warriors fighting a battle, but femininity is the key. It is only after Optimus Prime loses his trailer and rocket arm (is castrated) that he's able to beat Megatron and Sentinel Prime (a new character, a Prime who switched to the Deceptacons when he wasn't able to sell more product). And Wikipedia's girlfriend this time has even bigger lips and more amazing flowing hair than that Megan Fox chick, which means she's able to deflect danger with her feminine charms (read: her gigantic tits and super short skirts... and, by the way, she totally flashed us her crotch when getting out of the Mercedes SLS AMG Gullwing car... a car once described to me by an Italian man as a "pussy magnate"... true story). But it's really only when WikiLeaks is totally emasculated, after he's beaten by Dr. McDreamy and that dude from the Las Vegas TV show, that he's able to help out in any significant way.

This is a deeply moving comment on our world and on our lives. It is a film that I would call *important* (and at 157 minutes, you can't not understand that). It needs to be studied more for it's intricate symbols and allusions. We need to understand better why Cybertron looks like a breast when the Deceptacons are so masculine (is it an Oedipal relationship they have with their world? Is that why there are no female Autobots?) and to figure out why exactly John Malkovich is needed in the story at all. I think he's the key to something. His three-piece suits stand out as some sartorial commentary, I think. They're certainly of the same quality as the members of the cabal in Salo. Woah, it's getting even deeper as I continue to think about it....

Stars: 7 of 4

Never Let Me Go (Sunday, September 19, 2010) (119)

I will be very careful here with the film Never Let Me Go, as I never read the highly regarded book and don't have any emotional connection to the story, beyond what I saw on the screen. I will say that one thing that baffles me about the film is that the trailer totally gives away the entire story and even some important details that are only revealed in the last ten minutes. I really don't know why they did this - I don't think knowing major plot points going into the thing enhanced my viewing experience. Mostly I was just waiting for these revelations to happen, thinking the whole time that somehow the trailer was cut in such a way that it was not as straightforward as the marketing department made it look. Alas the film was exactly as simple as the trailer.

The story here is about an orphanage for kids who we quickly find out are part of a national organ donation program in Great Britain (in some alternate space-time universe). They are all clones of people living in the world and the idea is that they will be able to donate three or four organs before their bodies expire and they die. The story follows three kids, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightly), who are friends and sometimes lovers. Tommy and Ruth hook up early, though Kathy and Tommy probably have a closer connection. The three remain friendly for about a decade until they grow up and grow apart.

The structure of the story is pretty simple: The first act has the kids in their school, Hailsham; then the second act has them moved to a sort of half-way house where as young adults they live in a cottage in the countryside preparing to either become organ donors or caretakers of organ donors (like Kathy, who will also donate her organs ultimately); finally the third act has them out in the world either getting cut up for their organs or helping others.

Throughout the film they are constantly looking to see if they can find the original person whose genetic material they are based on. This connects to the rather boring theme of whether or not they have souls and whether or not they are real people (or simply organic things that grow organs for transplants). I gotta be honest and say this was not at all compelling or at all original. This could have been some SciFi film from 60 years ago about whether or not a robot was human because it too had some sort of emotional life. Who cares?

Director Mark Romanek's work here is really pretty terrible as he telegraphs the emotions and the symbolism of each and every moment with the most ridiculous objective correlatives. We see garbage blowing in the wind just after Ruth goes on a long rant about how they are "modeled on trash and garbage" (oh - I get it!). When Kathy feels isolated in the cottage, we see her in big, wide shot sitting alone in the middle of emptiness. Ugh.

There is the root of an interesting discussion here - a post-modern question that comes up in the first act (and rather fades away by the end) about what is the nature of these kids existences if they are just created to be destroyed. They are given only certain amounts of information about their situations and are given a very limited language set to better control them. This is very similar to what Giorgos Lanthimos does in Dogtooth, but it's a lot simpler and dumber. By the time the film ends, it doesn't really matter that there was this interesting opening.

This is an interesting concept for a story, but it's done so ham-handedly and so boringly that it's really not all that interesting. On top of this, if you watch the trailer, you basically see the entire film - and that's only two minutes long! There is almost no depth in this film and no real emotional interest in the characters. Ruth is always a bitch; Kathy is always a smart geek who is emotionally distant; Tommy is sorta dim and child-like. They are like this as kids and they remain like this as adults. They don't grow at all. Maybe this is what the story is about - being denied the tools of socialization, they are emotional outsiders. But that's not really all that interesting either.

Stars: 2 of 4

Avatar- IMAX 3D (Monday, December 21, 2009) (202)

Avatar is the story of Lieutenant John Dunbar who moves to the Dakota Territory during the Civil War and becomes friends with the Native American tribe in the area. He ultimately marries the daughter of the tribe's chief and leads his tribe to a small victory in a battle against the American Army. Wait - that's not it... Oh, right - it's the story of Marlow, a sailor who is asked by his country to go up the Congo River to look into the actions of a crazy man named Kurtz. Wait - again, that's not it. Oh golly - oh right! It's the story of a hacker named Neo who goes into the Matrix, a reality below our own reality, and becomes *The One* for the people who live inside of it. They seem to be unable to take care of themselves, and despite talking like a surfer moron, he helps to liberate the people. Shoot - that's still not it.

OK - it is actually the story of how in the year 2154, there is a planet somewhere in the universe called Pandora where there is a special metal called 'unobtanium'. In order to mine it, a private contractor enlists the the U.S. Marines to secure the land from the thousands crazy alien animals that might come out to hurt the operation. Ex-marine Jake Sully is put into a scientific unit who is trying to help and learn from the giant blue humanoid people on this planet called the Na'vi. He is paralyzed from the waist down, but when he gets into a pod, he becomes an avatar - a Na'vi look-alike that can move in this world easier than a human can.

At some point he gets lost on a scientific mission and finds himself in the Na'vi world. He soon begins living with them and dating Neytiri, the daughter of the chief, who becomes his tutor for all things Na'vi. After some time, the mining operation wants to relocate, so it moves into the area where the Na'vi live. The natives, with the help of Jake, fight the humans in an effort to save their way of life.

This is one of the most over-hyped, over-reviewed worst movies of the year. There is basically nothing good about the film. The story is totally dumb and recycled, the writing is terrible with laughable dialogue. Lead actor Sam Worthington, as Jake, is a joke as an actor. The special effects of the film and the CGI settings of almost the whole thing are terrible - and the film looks worse than many other recent films (that were made for a much smaller budget).

It's been 12 years since writer/director James Cameron made Titanic - and I was under the impression that he had been working on this script for a long, long time. But what we get is a total rip-off of Dances with Wolves, Heart of Darkness and/or The Matrix. There is absolutely nothing new here plot-wise and nothing that is better than the originals it rips off. Every idea here is tired and every twist is predictable and visible from miles away. I mean, not to spoil the ending, but there is a Return of the Jedi-style Yub-Jub song and dance at the end.

Sam Worthington is terrible, clearly cast for his physical looks and muscle rather than his acting. He plays a dumb marine who doesn't know much when he arrives and doesn't grow all that much mentally throughout the story. Listening to him speak, it is hard not to laugh at how bad he is. (Also, curiously, in the second act, his looped-in voice over suddenly changes accents from American to Australian. Why this couldn't have been corrected is bizarre to me.)

Sigourney Weaver is much too overdone and comes off as too much of a bitch at the beginning of the film (she also asks for a cigarette in her first appearance... aren't we beyond that, James?). She seems basically unnecessary in the story as the scientific research she does seems to go out the window after the first sequence. Considering Jake had a better rapport with the Na'vi, it is unclear why she moves into their camp with him. (My favorite thing about her character is that in the avatar world, she wears a Stanford tank-top, as if the Na'vi would respect her more because of her top-level degree.)

At no point in the film did I think that I was in the world I was seeing onscreen - or that that world actually existed. It looks like a big animated world - not all that dissimilar from bad CGI one can find on many Saturday morning cartoons. The Na'vi look entirely animated - not even as good as Pixar toys or cars. This is a big problem as it was a constant cause of separation between the story and me. The Na'vi never felt like real things that I could sympathize with. They always looked to be animated, in a world filled with a few real-world things like humans and helicopters. I am told that this film cost several hundred million dollars to make - and that that money went into the technology and animation. But I don't see the results. To me it looks like any old CGI movie that could have been made 10 years ago. I don't get it.

On top of that, seeing it in 3D was frustrating because when you're wearing the glasses, you have to look exactly straight ahead or the picture will be out of focus. You cannot turn your head slightly and look out of the corner of your eye, for instance. In addition, you have to look at exactly what the filmmakers want you to look at. If they are focusing on something in the bottom right corner of the screen, but you are looking at the top center, what you are looking at is out of focus. I don't know why these faults are not getting more attention, but it was super frustrating for me. I think the 3D technology is not totally up to par yet. I also don't think it's worth the extra $3 to watch in 3D as I think the movie would have been just as good standard.

The most frustrating and insulting thing about the story is the tired suggestion that because they Na'vi are closer to the earth and more 'native' than we are, they are better. This is hackneyed and dumb. It's the old idea that Native Americans respect the land so they are better people or how Africans are more connected to the spiritual world. The Na'vi are all played by African-American actors, yet they seem rather Native American in their dress and ways. Of course, after telling us that more simple and spiritual is better, we then see the Na'vi using modern head-sets to communicated and machine guns to fire - because I guess human culture does have some good uses. Ugh.

This is really a total joke of a movie. Again - the ore they are trying to mind is called *unobtanium*. That's so beyond stupid it's insulting. This is a terrible script, it does not look half as good as it should and it absolutely 100% not fresh. What a waste!

Stars: .5 of 4