Her (**3/4)

The premise of Her — man falls in love with operating system — is both intriguing and goofy. Written and directed by Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), it uses a nominally sci-fi premise to explore the meaning of love. In its vision of the near future, not unlike the present day, everyone walks around talking into electronic devices. Also, men get divorced and are lonely, like cubicle jockey Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who composes, and dictates to a computer, apparently heartfelt letters that others pass off as their own. (One imagines the reactions of widows realizing that their monosyllabic husband’s exquisite love letters were the words of another.)

Twombly walks out of the office dictating to a cute little device that made me think of a foldable mirror that might be kept in a purse, but in this case reads emails to him. But a new operating system, simply called OS1, has been invented that will interact with you as never before. It comes with paper directions and, in what seems like whimsy in a movie that is not whimsical, asks Theodore a few random-seeming questions, then emerges with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, naming herself (itself?) Samantha, just because she (it?) likes the name. (OS1 gives you the choice of a male or female voice, but not a gender-ambiguous one.)

What this reminded me of before I saw it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored love and identity with a nominally sci-fi premise. However, where that movie was funny and kinetic, this movie is deliberate and earnest. It is occasionally funny, but not often. Once, during a sex scene, it is unintentionally funny. Virtually so, anyway. At other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to other people’s love letters, like the ones Theodore invents. The sincerity can be almost cloying at times.

It’s not that I mind a serious or even somber movie, but a lighter tone might have helped sell me on the idea that a human would not mind the absence of a body, or that an artificial intelligence that thinks fast enough to read hundreds of books in seconds would not be bored by a human. The latter point is, in fact, addressed eventually, and Jonze certainly does make you think about what it means to love, about loneliness, and about how we will interact with our computers in the future. This is mostly about the first two questions, using Twombly as the experiment. The other significant characters in the film are his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and his office friend (Amy Adams), so there is only a glimpse of a vision of what true artificial intelligence might mean for society. I can see the reason for the movie’s acclaim; it has a depth to it, and a stylistic unity. But, I still liked Robot & Frank better.

IMDb link

viewed 2/6/14 6:55 pm at AMC Cherry Hill; posted 2/9/14

Surviving Progress (**1/4)

This liberal feel-good (or feel-bad) documentary, adapted from a book by Ronald Wright, makes the case that our society is a kind of bubble that may soon burst. Specifically, Wright argues that modern humans have fallen into a “progress trap.” As with ancient hunters who became so adept at slaughtering mammoths that they killed off the source of their wealth, we have become so adept at exploiting natural resources that we are exceeding the capacity of Earth to regenerate them. He gives 1980 as the date when we began to do this on a global scale, although the film echoes people like Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, whose warnings of catastrophe began 40 years ago and proved, at least, premature. It’s not quite clear why 1980 is the key date, but perhaps it’s not coincidental that that’s when Ronald Reagan was elected. That’s also when the United States began to experience an increasing concentration of wealth that continues. The film implies, not entirely correctly, that this is a phenomenon everywhere. Economist Michael Hudson links wealth concentration to the fall of the Roman Empire and says “that’s what’s threatening to bring in the Dark Ages again.”

Only the fiercest anti-environmentalists would deny that the explosive growth in output and wasteful use of resources in the last decades brings challenges with it. But to declare, as the film does, that a phenomenon that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in Asia since 1980s is a “failed experiment” is at best premature and overstated. Geneticist David Suzuki broadly criticize economics, which is “not a science,” for ignoring pollution and other societal costs. “Economists call these externalities…that’s nuts.” However, plenty of economists, including Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman, have written about the problems of externalities. Suzuki seems to disparage the profession for having created the very term. Repeatedly, the documentary argues by such assertion, rather than proof, wielding very little empirical data. A detour to Brazil provides some detail about deforestation, but, generally, I longed for more specificity.

To be fair, proving such a bold thesis is well beyond the purview of a feature-length documentary. Wright’s book, which I have not read, dwells more on past civilizations than our current one. Given that it’s far easier to explain the past than predict the future, perhaps the directors, Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, should have followed that path. Alternately, they might have deeply delved into some specific areas where the negative effects of human activity are undeniable. There’s a lot of talent on hand here—the talking heads include Jane Goodall, Stephen and Hawking, and authors Robert Wright and Margaret Atwood—and building a film around any one of them might have been better than giving each a few sound bites. One participant, writer-engineer Colin Beavan, actually made his own film about his and his wife’s experiment in nonconsumption. Though based on a gimmick, Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Documentary nonetheless seriously grapples with the idea of conservation in a more concrete (and entertaining) way.

The positives of the film include some nifty time-lapse simulations and the opening and closing segments, in which gorillas trying to solve a logic problem. (This sort of ties into the idea that our brains have not evolved too far beyond that of apes, so we’re lousy at anticipating long-term consequences.) But the most worthwhile portion of the documentary is the one about solutions, which includes the expected warnings (by Beavan and others) about the need to conserve but also interviews with geneticists, notably Craig Ventner, about the possibility of generating artificial organisms to repair damage or even improve upon human physiology. Like everything else here, it’s quite speculative, but since the turf is less familiar, also fascinating.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/12 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 5/23/12 and 5/25/12

District 13: Ultimatum (***1/4)

A sequel to one of the better action movies of the last decade, this one comes with a generic-sounding subtitle, but shows that the ever-fecund mind of its screenwriter/producer Luc Besson ( La Femme Nikita, The Transporter) is still fertile. (Besson also has a hand in the simultaneously opening From Paris with Love.) Certainly District B13, set in a near-future Paris where the city’s most crime-ridden section had been walled off from the rest of town, would be better known were it not in French. The simple-but-serviceable plot provided a sturdy framework for original action sequences involving David Belle, inventor of a discipline called parkour. Parkour involves efficiently adapting one’s movements to the surrounding objects, which in practice means a lot of running and jumping.

There is unfortunately less parkour than in the original. Belle’s character, a kind of thug-turned-hero, plays second fiddle to the cop character played by Cyril Raffaelli in both films. Hand-to-hand combat and martial arts are the specialties of Raffaeli, who often works as a stuntman or stunt coordinator. In an over-the-top but highly entertaining early sequence that turns out to have nothing to do with the rest of the plot, he infiltrates a corrupt club, uses a disguise to lure the bad guys one by one, and uses an original Van Gogh painting as a weapon/shield while keeping it from getting scratched. Again, circumstances require that the cop and the ex-thug team up to save District 13, this time from outright demolition. The district is portrayed as a multicultural jungle so lawless that even the cops fear to tread there, yet in the end cynicism yields to the French values of liberté, egalité, fraternité.

IMDB link

viewed 1/28/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/29/10

Avatar (***1/4)

The majority of blockbusters these days are special-effects movies, but no amount of effects can save a cruddy script. Yet very occasionally effects can make a decent movie into one worth recommending. Director James Cameron’s most famous film, Titanic, probably falls into this category. Even those who found the romantic tale rather pedestrian had to admire his re-creation of the famous disaster. It may be the same with his latest venture into sci-fi turf, in which he and a couple of thousand other people create a beautiful alien world (shown in 3D on many screens) with effects whose chief virtue is that you forget that they’re effects and concentrate on the story.

As for that, Cameron has always been a better director and idea man than screenwriter, and once you get past the visual aspects the movie feels more familiar. In fact, the plot resembles nothing so much as Dances with Wolves, wherein the main character is a white guy who by turn of circumstance winds up immersing himself in the culture of the oppressed. As was frequently the case with American Indians and aborigines, the goal is subjugation for financial purposes. The fictional planet, Pandora, contains massive deposits of the amusingly named “unobtanium,” a rare mineral. One tribe, the Na’vi, resides above the largest ore deposit, and Jake (Sam Worthington), is part of a team sent to study them. Sigourney Weaver plays the tough leader of the scientific team, probably the most complex character. Zoe Saldana also deserves praise for bringing to life the Na’vi warrior who educates Jake, much like Michael Caine does the title character in Educating Rita.

From a sci-fi angle, the most interesting thing is the way that the humans interact with the Na’vi. The humans create hybrid cloned bodies using alien and human DNA; these “avatars” are controlled by the humans they resemble. Elsewhere, there are certain familiar tropes. Jake manages to learn the Na’vi language in a couple of months despite the fact that the Na’vi he talks with conveniently speak English most of the time. For reasons left mysterious, Jake is favored in other ways by the Na’vi godess. It reminded me of The Last Samurai, wherein westerner Tom Cruise seemingly manages to become a better samurai than every single Japanese person, although that level of absurdity is not reached. The Na’vi themselves seem representative of New Age philosophy; the old image of natives as savages (held by the film’s villains) is replaced with that of the enlightened primitives: without technology but morally superior and literally connected to nature. They are, however, monogamous, and their society is not too unfamiliar to us. Their harmony with nature is explained via a combination of science and religion. Many things about Pandora seem conveniently similar to Earth, like the dichotomy between plants and animals, the single intelligent species, the fact that the intelligent species look much like humans (only larger and bluer), the way many other species (trees, dogs) look like Earth species, etc. Perhaps Pandora has an evolutionary connection to life on Earth.

We know what happens to the Indians and the aborigines, but making this about aliens gives Cameron a chance to write the history. Dances with Wolves highlighted the cruelty of European conquest. Avatar asks whether, given the chance, we would do it any differently today. (Less overtly, it raises the question of whether the natives, knowing what’s coming, would prefer slaughter or subjugation.) Although there isn’t much nuance in the film’s anti-imperialist message, Cameron does deserve credit for creating a somewhat different kind of blockbuster movie and visually raising the bar for any future creators of alien worlds.

IMDB link

viewed 1/3/10 at Riverview (in 3D) and reviewed 1/3–4/10

Wall•E (***1/2)

Another year, another brilliant movie by Pixar Animation Studios. This was written and directed by Andrew Stanton, who performed the same chores for Pixar’s Finding Nemo and wrote screenplays for Monsters, Inc. and the Toy Story movies. Here, he may have come up with his most original effort yet. Like I Am Legend if Will Smith were a robot, or like a less-dystopic A.I., Wall•E imagines an Earth fallen victim to its own folly. A battered, rusty old machine, Wall•E patrols the land stacking garbage, “working to dig you out,” as a left-behind billboard broadcasts to no one. For fun, Wall•E watches very old movies on an ancient VCR salvaged from the day job.

I could’ve watched this opening segment, mostly silent except for music, for much longer than it lasts. There’s something intriguing about watching what someone, even a sentient robot who looks like an R2D2 knockoff, does alone. (I love Cast Away.) Earth is so realistically rendered in its fetid glory that I only slightly wondered what happened to all of the people, and was mildly disappointed when the movie literally goes off into space. This happens shortly after a newer robot called EVE crash lands looking for life. Wall•E, on the other hand, is looking for love, and if it sounds corny to have a robot romance, Stanton keeps it so low-key, and nearly wordless, that even (or especially) adults will be charmed. The hovering, sleek EVE looks like nothing so much as a robot designed by Apple computer. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs also was Pixar’s main shareholder until its recent acquisition by Disney.) Scruffy Wall•E reboots using the Microsoft Windows startup sound, so much of the story resembles kind of a computer version of Romeo and Juliet.

But it’s Romeo and Juliet sent to a world that resembles a odd cross of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Idiocracy, the latter being the Mike Judge comedy in which machines take over and human intelligence devolves. It won’t do to give much away here, other than that Stanton rather hilariously satirizes modern consumer culture. Back on earth, we had already learned that a giant corporation called BNL controlled nearly all aspects of human existence before everyone disappeared. This is taken to its logical conclusion.

Even more than other Pixar films, Wall•E can be enjoyed by adults, as a straight sci-fi film with a satirical edge. Smaller children are actually likely to have trouble following the plot, especially the first half. Only the last part seems like familiar warm-and-cuddly family film territory.

It’s worth noting that each and every one of Pixar’s main characters has been a male, even when it’s a male car. (The Incredibles has no single lead character, but male characters outnumber female ones.) It seems incredibly depressing that studios so clearly see girls as box-office poison, and even more so that they may be right. Wall•E may be sexless, but even so has a male-sounding name and voice, and EVE, an acronym, sounds female; it would have been more daring to avoid any hints of sexual identity. Leaving this aside—I don’t mean it as a criticism of this movie in particular—Wall•E is a mostly remarkable film.

IMDB link

viewed 6/28/08 at Moorestown; reviewed 6/30/08

Meet the Robinsons (***1/4)

? An animated Disney film about a orphaned science geek who dreams of finding out about his past but gets side-tracked by the future. Based on the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce.
+ Visual invention and conceptual imagination are all over the place. The plot hinges on the boy’s attempt to invent a device to look back in time, and while that’s a fanciful idea, it’s appealing too. Futuristic flying machines, a talking bowler hat that’s smarter than its wearer (the nominal villain), and genetically altered, singing frogs are all part of the story. Thematically, the message of the movie is to follow your inner goofball.
- So much is happening all at once that some people mind find all the zaniness overwhelming, and the youngest kids will probably get lost in all of the Back to the Future type contradictions.
= ***1/4 On the whole, a lot of fun.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/6/07

The Last Mimzy (***)

? After finding some unusual objects on a beach (sent from the future), a brother and sister gain unusual abilities. Based on the 1943 story “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” by the pseudonymous Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore).
+ At its best, the movie is reminiscent of E.T., but darker, almost creepy. The short story is basically a bit of philosophy with a science-fiction underpinning. Less explicitly presented here, the idea is that children have minds that aren’t hard-wired to look at things a certain way, and are therefore more adaptable. The young girl (played by the talented Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) is smart enough to use the word “dexterity” but not to realize that her ability to make objects defy gravity is apt to freak out the adults around her, including, eventually, the government agents. The boy isn’t especially smart at the beginning, so when he suddenly starts demonstrating unusual talent, the parents (Timothy Hutton, Joely Richardson) just don’t understand. Only the curious science teacher (Rainn Wilson) seems to want to. The script does well fleshing out the child characters and extending the premise so that the past connects to the future, and vice versa, in a way that explains what’s going on.
- But it also adds an unfortunate element of pseudoscience. What kind of science teacher has a palm-reading girlfriend whom he calls “very gifted”? Whatever gifts she has are completely unnecessary to the plot and make the scientific advances in the story seem akin to magic. I wish the time wasted on her character had been used to extend the very brief future segments.
= *** Despite the fact that the main characters are about 10 and 6, the film is probably more suited to older children and even adults. There are some lightly comic moments (that’s what the palm-reading girlfriend seems to be there for), but not so many warm and cuddly ones as in E.T.

IMDB link

reviewed 3/29/07

Children of Men (**1/2)

 ? It is the year 2027, and the world has fallen into chaos and despair in the wake of the global infertility epidemic that has prevented any woman from giving birth in the last 18 years. Only Britain has retained some semblance of a functional society, and even then it has resorted to harshly punitive conditions for refugees, and violent thugs roam about. Our hero (Clive Owen) is contacted by a long-lost girlfriend (Julianne Moore) who embroils him in the struggles of a refugee-rights group branded as terrorists by the government, and with little notice he becomes the savior for the human race’s future.

+ This is a fascinating premise. How would people react to the idea that humanity might end? The last segment, set in a refugee camp where the inmates are in open warfare with the state, is suitably horrific and best depicts the movie’s answer to that question. Injecting a helpful dose of levity to the movie is Michael Caine, an offbeat but loyal friend of the savior.

- I love science-fiction that’s about ideas, not simply high-tech action, I loved screenwriter-director Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, and I’m a fan of P.D. James, the author of the 1992 novel on which this is based. But there’s something very flat about this movie. Its depiction of a near-joyless future didn’t ring true to me, and that’s partly because it’s not well explained. What James’s novel does that this film doesn’t is show what happened in the years after the last babies are born. Perhaps Cuarón felt that there wasn’t time for this in a two-hour movie, but what the story boils down to is really a very long chase sequence set in a future police state. There’s enough character development that it’s a little more than that, but only a little. There is talk of something called The Human Project that the main characters are trying to reach, but we don’t know much about it. Are there others like Owens character? We don’t know. In short, we know very few of the details that might help render this dystopian future more comprehensible, complex, and compelling.

= **1/2 It wouldn’t be fair to call this movie slow-moving, but I would call it monotonous, visually and narratively. Watch it if you want to see what a world gone to hell might look like, but not if you want to see how it might get there.

The Fountain (**)

? Darren Aronofsky (π, Requiem for a Dream) wrote and directed this ambitious film that centers around a doctor (Hugh Jackman) frantically trying to save his sick wife (Rachel Weisz) but also has segments set centuries in the past and future. Inspired by (according to news articles) the Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mayan mythology, and his parents’ cancer diagnoses, Aronofsky has created a philosophical work about death and rebirth and the idea of the eternal.

+ What most unites Aronofsky’s three features is their distinct visual styles. Even people who hate this movie (and there will be some) will marvel at its stunning visuals, which look computer generated but mostly weren’t. Most prominent are the future segments, which, I learned from reading, are supposed to be in the 26th-century but could just as well be in Aronofsky’s vision of heaven, or some fantasy world. A unique chemical process is responsible for many of these images, many of which show a tree that looks like copper with swirling branches. Abandoning the quick editing style that was prominent in Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky induces feelings of calmness here. The scenes in the 16th century are mostly dark and dirty, the ones in the present are insular and sedate, and the future ones are simply other-worldly. The actors are able to successfully tackle taking on very different personalities in the different parts, and also look different. Weisz is a regal queen in one part and a fragile writer in another. The scenes of her and Jackman together in the present-day setting are tender and intimate. (Weisz looks like she isn’t wearing makeup.)

- For me this didn’t quite work. I had the same feeling about it as π, which I admired for its heady mixture of science and philosophy but thought was too incoherent to warm to. I don’t necessarily want to be told what to think about a movie, but it’d be nice to know what the filmmaker was thinking. The idea of the movie could be that the actors are reincarnated, that they are metaphorically able to live forever, or something else, but there is too much that seems arbitrary about how the different parts of the movie fit together, and too much that seems extraneous. It’s hard to say why I didn’t like this movie more, but I think I just was not able to fit everything together in a satisfying way. There’s a lot of repeated motifs that also may make the movie seem slow for a lot of people.

= ** I heard a woman say, “I’m glad this was free,” as I walked out of the screening, and I think a lot of people will share her feeling. At the same time, I think a certain type of person will want to watch The Fountain again and theorize about what it means. Those who enjoyed the Matrix trilogy but thought it could have done without all of those action scenes, for example, may find much that’s intriguing. People of certain types of spiritual beliefs may find the movie a beautiful reflection of them. I’m a more literal-minded person and probably would have liked The Fountain better if it was a more straightforward science fiction film, set in the present day, about a guy trying to prevent aging.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening

District B13 (***3/4)

Vile thugs, dirty cops, clean cops, and thugs with a conscience intersect in 85 action-packed minutes full of surprise twists and novel stunts.

A botched theft turns into a botched kidnapping, a casino scam goes awry, and a cop and a crook team up in this fast-faced import. It’s an extremely stylish movie that put me in mind of the films of Luc Besson (The Professional, La Femme Nikita), France’s best-known master of action films, and I wasn’t too surprised to find Besson listed as the co-writer and producer. This overseas hit, set in 2010 Paris, particularly recalls the Besson-scripted Transporter movies, but are even more inventive in terms of both plot and action scenes. (The other writer, Bibi Naceri, plays a crime lord named Taha who, in an early scene, shoots his subordinates for losing a million euros’ worth of heroin.)

The two stars of the film are Cyril Raphaelli, a former stuntman and stunt coordinator, and David Belle, the co-inventor of a martial art-like discipline called parkour, which involves efficiency of moving through space and avoiding obstacles. I’d never heard of this, but I have an idea of what it is after watching the movie. In addition to the usual gunfire, these two jump, kick, and bust heads without aid of special effects. Both of these guys have the looks and skills to be action stars. I expect this movie would be a huge hit if it were in English and had a big name or two in the cast. Maybe they’ll get Vin Diesel if there’s a remake, but honestly, he’s a poor man’s Cyril Raphaelli. The above factors and the lack of an American marketing campaign will probably doom this movie to a short theatrical release, but it’s a must for fans of no-nonsense action films.

IMDb link

posted 8/16/13

Aeon Flux (**1/4)

Sux is more like it in this live-action version of MTV’s 1990s animated sci-fi series; some amazing visuals don’t compensate for incoherent storytelling.

This was a film that made me think. I thought, what is it that makes Oscar-winning actresses decide that a poorly received action film is the way to cement a reputation as a serious actress? (See Berry, Halle, to say nothing of Frances McDormand’s disembodied cameo here.) The actress here is Charlize Theron. She’s an assassin of 400 years’ hence whose original incarnation was in 1991 segments on MTV’s animated Liquid TV. That led to a ten-episode series in 1995. (See mtv.com for a sample episode.) The film’s (sole) strength is some amazing visuals: lithe ninja moves, curvilinear production designs, and so on. It splits the difference between the dialogue-free shorts and the talkier series.

Theron was quoted as saying “I really like telling stories with my body.” The story her body tells here is that a nearly six-foot, rail-thin woman who crops her hair, walks stiffly, and wears a black costume resembling a wet suit will look surprisingly like a stick figure. To be fair, she’d have needed the mother of all boob jobs to resemble her cartoon counterpart. The grotesque bodies and kinky eroticism are toned down from the TV show. The violence remains, but the action scenes aren’t special, and the dialogue is pedestrian and delivered woodenly. At least until the second half, there’s hardly any plot or character development, and no moral complexity that characterizes good sci-fi. Watching the series would have provided details missing here, like, what was the “industrial disease” that preceded the events in the movie, and what is the “resistance” that Aeon Flux is part of? However, I doubt most of the people who see the movie will have seen the series, and they’re apt to get impatient with the story and annoyed at all the whispery flashbacks that hint that there is one, buried somewhere.

IMDB link

viewed 12/3/05 at Moorestown and reviewed 12/05/05