Movies I Didn't Get

OK, I’m going to admit it: I absolutely love nature documentaries.  Perhaps “March of the Penguins” and BBC’s “Earth” are two that come immediately to mind as nature pictures that have stayed with me since watching them.  The latter, a brilliant work narrated by James Earl Jones was interestingly acquired for U.S. release by none other than Disney’s new kid on the block Independent nature documentary group, Disneynature.  Being as moved as I was by “Earth,” when I found out Disneynature had put together their own documentary, I was ecstatic to hear it’d be getting a Japanese release so I could see it over here.  With its ambitious attempt to document the massive bodies of water that cover 3/4’s of our planet, “Oceans” is a visual and auditory masterpiece put together by French directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud.  On a visual level I have to be honest that I never been moved to ohh and ahh more than I have when watching “Oceans.”  And yet, as beautifully shot, edited and scored as the film may be, what didn’t I get about it?  I’ll sum it up in one word for you:

Robots.

Robots you say?  Yeah, I’d be thinking the same thing too.  But I wasn’t thinking this when I went in to enjoy what I thought would be a documentary about that big bowl of water out there and all of its amazing inhabitants.  Immersed completely in the visual and audio experience of the film, I didn’t learn until after I got home later that night that the scenes in the film showing cruelty towards sharks, sea turtles, whales and other sea creatures were actually all just done using robots!  Yep, friggin’ robots.  Now you might be asking yourself like I did, why would the creators of this project want to spend thousands of dollars on animatronic sea animals as a way to portray the cold reality of mass net fishing and certain fishery industries’ practices?  Perhaps the scene that sticks most with me was the one showing the de-finning and de-tailing of a mid-sized shark, with the fisherman then coldly discarding the still alive shark back into the water as the camera makes us follow the poor creature to its grave at the sea floor, blood pouring from its gills.  It’s images like this that would make just about anyone want to join Green Peace or Sea Shepard and blow up all the fishery industries of the world.  And yet that’s where I have to draw the line and say that a documentary is a documentary only when it is telling the unedited truth.

So what did the filmmakers have to say for themselves?  Reading Japan’s Asahi Newspaper and its interview with both directors, when asked why they chose to use robots in the cruelty towards sea animal scenes in their film, the two state that from one living creature to another, they could never sit back and document such a grotesque incident as it’s happening.  Granted I share the same feelings as they do and would also be unable to sit passively on the sidelines, that doesn’t mean I’d use robots to re-enact such a horrific scene in my so-called documentary just to get my audiences fired up and angry about cruelty towards sea animals.  In fact, I wouldn’t have put a scene using robots in my documentary at all if I ever wanted my work to be considered a vehicle of truth.

Granted that it’s absolutely fine for one to have their own opinion and to express it how they see fit, that doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with or like the way in which said individual chooses to express their opinion.  In the case of “Oceans,” I have even more trouble seeing why such a strong opinion as that of the two filmmakers had to be veiled beneath a gorgeously shot film that pulls viewers in only to side-punch them with a political message that is constructed using robots to get said message across.  As such, I feel like the efforts made by the filmmakers to sway me to their way of thinking were cheap and misplaced, resulting in my ultimate dislike for this film and discounting it as a documentary altogether.

So ultimately the reason I don’t get “Oceans” is I cannot agree with the filmmakers use of re-enactment just so they can get their political message across.  I think that is the real challenge of documentary and really all filmmaking and storytelling for that matter: always always always tell the truth in your work.  In the case of documentary, you just have to work that much harder to tell the truth.  So if you want to portray cruelty towards animals and take on that responsibility as a documentarian, put away the robots and go out and shoot some real material, as disturbing or haunting as it may be to you.  Otherwise stop calling your work a documentary and go make some recruiting videos for Green Peace.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

Carl Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” is arguably one of the most famous children’s story books ever published.  Its beautiful imagery and simple story touch on a desire in all of us that even into adulthood many of us never shed: the desire to go home.  When I found out this incredible tale would be put onto the big screen helmed by none other than quirky music video director extraordinaire Spike Jonze, I was doubly intrigued.  How would the images burned permanently into my mind be realized on screen?  How would the wild things look?  Would they just CG the hell out of everything and make a husk of a film with no soul?  The answer to the CG question was boldly answered by Jonze (spending tons of studio money in the process) on expensive Jim Henson Workshop produced real-working puppets and crazy wire-work stunts that have definitely advanced puppetry to the next level.  And yet, despite the love and care that so obviously went into the crafting of this film, I still sat through it asking myself: “So when does the story start?”  I still sat there three-quarters of the way through the film saying to myself: “And now the little kid decides to just go home?”  How could a children’s book that had no more than 10 sentences capture so much that a 2-hour film could not?  The answer is simple: a story.  To me Jonze’s film has none because A) Max the protagonist (if you could call him one) never changes and B) none of the problems of the characters in the film are solved.  Instead you have an attention starved kid who rants and raves around for a couple hours amidst the strange relationships of some weird monsters and then decides it’s time to go home after he can’t help them all get along and be friends.

Now granted I realize Jonze and his team had a hell of a mountain to climb in taking on a story such as this which has been loved the world over for so many years.  As someone who has written a few screenplays myself, I can only imagine how much of a challenge it must have been.  But I would think that in 111 studio approved pages that there would have to be some sort of a story rather than just some annoying kid who doesn’t get enough attention at home going to an island to be friends with some prozac-deprived monsters only to decide he just wants to go back home when the problems of his new monster friends are just too complicated for him to solve.  That’s when I realized that maybe this story-less film made it through the gates because the studio just left Jonze to his own devices due to his reputation and the built-in audience they knew they had who would go to see the film for nostalgic purposes alone.  That’s why to me Jonze was able to sneak in an anti-plot film produced by a major studio that uses a well-known children’s story as a platform for his ideas about how messed up relationships can be and how sometimes we just want to go home.  So let me ask you this: as much as you may have loved the children’s book from your childhood, would you go out of your way to see a bunch of depressed monsters loll around for a couple hours, get bossed around by a kid who just wants to be paid attention to, and then have him go home with none of the problems introduced in the film solved whatsoever?  I would hope your answer is the same as mine: N-O.

Soundtrack-wise I was also very excited to see this film with the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s frontwoman Karen O producing the soundtrack and one of my favorite Arcade Fire songs “Wake Up” being used in the well-put-together trailer preceding the release of the film.  In the end I got let down when Arcade’s song appeared only in the trailer and Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O’s so-called soundtrack was just her and her backing band wailing like banshees and bashing their instruments for two hours and calling it a day.  I thought to myself how pretentious everyone was who worked on this project just to push out their artsy fartsy crap without trying to tell an actual story.  I thought how wrong it was for them to use people’s nostalgia to adapt a wonderful children’s story and make a platform for their own masturbatory and armchair-psychologist-ideas about relationships.  Lastly I thought to myself: “Damn I wish I could get paid to make a story-less movie with a crappy soundtrack just ’cause I’m an artsy, young and edgy music video director.”

And so as the film reached its so-called third act and my wife looked over to me and gave me her “So this is the film you dragged me to?” look that she’s so good at doing, I wished I could get my 2,000 yen (about $20 US) back and at the same time thank the creators of this film for bastardizing such a classic children’s story from my childhood.  My only hope is that none of my other favorite children’s story books are adapted by Spike Jonze any time soon.

A personal message to Spike: Stick to making music videos, man, and leave the real storytelling to those out there who can actually do it.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

2005: an unlikely time to see a Western being made.  Yet this Western comes with a unique twist.  Not having been moved to watch a Western since Eastwood’s Unforgiven in the ’90s, I was excited to watch The Proposition, starring one of my favorite late-90s independent actors Guy Pierce.  LA Confidential and Memento being two of my favorite films from the 90s both starring Pierce, I thought I was in for a treat.  The trailer for The Proposition is also top-notch.  And yet, there was just something about this film that didn’t quite make it into the masterpiece I was led to believe it was.  I’ve been thinking about why this might be for the last three weeks while trying to put together a few paragraphs about the film for this blog, and yet it’s still quite difficult for me to pinpoint why I didn’t get this movie.

The film is put together very well, introducing new characters at a very natural, fluid and almost seamless pace; almost as if we already knew these individuals and are just stopping back in to check up on them.  Not wasting time on introducing who all the characters are, the film gets right to the story: a trio of outlaw brothers, one too young to know the evil of his brothers’ ways, one so evil the blackness seeps out of him, and the last played by Pierce stuck in the middle of his innocent brother and his evil brother.  Through watching the film you find out that there’s been a falling out between the brothers, with Pierce taking his younger brother and getting as far away from their evil brother as possible.  It’s not long until the law gets its hands on Pierce and his brother, with the gallows waiting for them.  The two are basically good as dead until the sheriff makes a proposition to Pierce: find your older brother and bring his head to me and I’ll let you and your younger brother free.  This seems like an easy choice for Pierce who wants nothing to do with his older brother, until he does eventually track him down and is saved by him after being ambushed and speared by a group of Aborigines.  Now Pierce feels indebted to his brother, but at the same time torn between needing to kill him to save their younger brother.  Coming clean about why he suddenly came looking for him, Pierce and his older brother scheme to break their younger brother out.  Only problem is they arrive too late after the younger brother has been publicly whipped by a townspeople hungry for any kind of justice they can get against the three outlaw brothers.

Reading the above, I am reminded of how tightly put together the film is, setting up an interesting triangle of objects of desire that all three brothers want.  Even more interesting, their desires all conflict with each other and yet because they are family, somehow they remain loyal.  That is until the very end when Pierce finally completes the end of his bargain with the sheriff.  The only problem is at that point it’s too late and there’s no point to him killing his older brother as their younger brother is already dead.  Perhaps this is where the film’s narrative fell apart for me.  Being a film-viewer driven by protagonists that stop at nothing to get what they want, only to have it taken right out from under them and have them left with nothing in the case of The Proposition, it just sort of left me feeling empty and wondering why I took the time to watch such a dismal and depressing film.  Though I know not every story is meant to end happily and wrapped up in a nice little package, the nihilistic “life sucks and then you die” motto is definitely not something I want to invest 2+ hours in when all I really want to do is be blown away by an amazing Western.

The Proposition came very highly recommended to me and given the surface craftsmanship that went into it I could see why.  Unfortunately on a narrative level, the film fell apart for me when the protagonist suddenly lost the very object he’d been striving to obtain from the start of Act 1: his younger innocent brother still worth saving.  At the end of the day, if I want to watch a good ol’ Western I’ll throw in Unforgiven and be reminded that even a dark film in which most of the main characters are killed can still leave a little bit of hope by the time the end credits roll.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

Will Smith is on fire. A big blockbuster nearly every year for as long as I can remember and it doesn’t seem like he’s going to stop anytime soon. Now for any of you who follow his work, you’ll know that Smith has played the last-action-hero or beaten-down-nice-guy-against-the-rest-of-the-world role before (I Robot, I Am Legend, The Pursuit of Happyness(sic)). Personally I have loved him in every one of these roles because there was always something unique about his character that compelled me to watch him succeed through all the struggle put before him.

Earlier this year when I finally had a chance to see Hancock, I have to say I felt more than a little giddy to see what Smith would bring to the role. To me, there’s something about Smith’s whole aura that just makes me want to watch him do what he does. He has a full range of emotions at his disposal not to mention his consistency in picking interesting characters that have unbelievably difficult obstacles put before them. On the surface of I Robot, Smith is a detective bent on solving the murder of a leading scientist who was also his friend. Underneath the surface of this detective exterior is a character that hates robots.  This is a problem for him in the overly robot-reliant society he lives in and makes his struggle all the more difficult (and as such compelling to watch).  In I Am Legend, Smith is again the lone man (in this case literally) trying to find the cure to a disease that has either killed and/or mutated the remaining human population into viscous zombie-like carnivores. Throughout the film we see the protagonist’s clockwork routine that he has undoubtedly developed through near life-and-death experiences fighting the once human now zombie-like creatures that only come out at night.  This routine is what has kept him alive and the meticulousness of it is real and tangible, thus making him an interesting protagonist to watch succeed.  In Pursuit of Happyness (which was based on a true story), Smith plays a salesman trying to sell these ridiculously difficult to sell x-ray machines all while his family is falling apart at the seams.  Despite this, his strange knack for memorizing numbers and his insanely driven work ethic are character attributes that make him incredibly interesting to watch as he struggles to get what he wants.  No surprise this too was a film I loved.  Now let me get to Hancock.

As I said above, Smith has been consistent in taking on roles in which one man faces the world alone. Amidst this struggle, there has also consistently been some unique attribute that made Smith’s characters interesting for me to watch. In the case of Hancock, he’s a modern-day super hero.  The catch: he’s a reluctant to help, depressed, alcoholic and temperamental superhero.  As we get more into the story, Hancock agrees to work with a PR agent who wants to clean up his unpopular image.  This makes for some marginal comic moments for the first hour or so, but ultimately I was looking for that one special attribute about Hancock that made Smith take on this role like he did with his films leading up to this point.  One major different from his recent films is that the one special attribute that sets his Smith’s character apart is not revealed right at the start of the story. This is the answer to the question of “How did Hancock become a super hero?” Now with some more unique writing, I think the writers of Hancock could have figured out a way to show their cards earlier instead of making the reason to watch the film to just find out the answer to this question. In the end, the answer to the question of why Hancock is a super hero is about as simple and contrived as can be: Hancock is a super hero because he is a god. OK…

Now this may very well be a cheap shot at the creators of an otherwise enjoyable-to-watch and pretty well put-together film, but I felt like the god angle to explain Smith’s super powers was a cheap device used to lure me in as a viewer instead of respecting my intelligence and either coming up with a better reason for Hancock’s powers or at the very least showing all the cards at the start of the film and constructing a more compelling narrative. Sitting here writing this piece, I literally imagined to myself the concept team for Hancock sitting around a big conference table asking themselves: “So how did Hancock get his super powers?” until one naive writer spouted out “I know!  What if we made him a god?” Easy answer, easy solution. And thus the keystone for Hancock’s plot was born.

Now I don’t mind plot devices that service the story, but when the plot device is so elementary that a 10 year old could have come up with it, I lose faith that the writer’s of today are even trying to push our stories to their limits. In a movie climate rife with remakes, rehashes, sequels of remakes of rehashes; originality and taking new risks is a rare commodity and much appreciated. Hancock was a pretty well-received movie critically because of Will Smith standing behind it, but despite him choosing solid scripts these past few years, I just didn’t get why he decided to take on this two-dimensional role.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

By Michael Forstein (www.michaelforstein.com)

Ok, ok. I’ve resisted the temptation to use this (or any) forum to write about movies. It’s too easy, and I could spend far too much time doing it. There was a moment in high school when I thought film critic would be a novel career, but I quickly decided against it – citing, in equal parts, a world already saturated with critical opinion, and a desire to make movies of my own. But while watching Inglourious Basterds, I realized I was witnessing one of the great feats of modern storytelling, and that poor Mr. Tarentino – simply because, along with being a gifted filmmaker, he happens to be a sick f*$# and fills his movies with grotesque and offensive oddities, while often treating serious moments with levity and irreverence, and because, though he draws on cinematic tradition, he doesn’t care about fulfilling anyone’s expectations of what a movie should be but his own – would not get half the credit he deserved for what clearly is his masterpiece (what a beautiful cherry on top, that closing line), and thus, I realized I had something to say. Incidentally, I promise there will be no more awful run-on sentences like the previous one. Let my lack of brevity be a testament to my passion for the subject. I love movies – always have – and it bothers me that the two best movies in recent years were, and will continue to be, so shallowly dealt with and often times misunderstood by critics and audiences.

Quentin Tarentino’s Inglourious Basterds, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood before it, possesses a unique psychological underpinning, the depths of which we seldom experience in film, or any art, for that matter. In There Will Be Blood, we wrestle with the psychology of Daniel Plainview – the most epic, nuanced and tragic film protagonist since Charles Foster Kane. In Inglourious Basterds, we wrestle with the psychology of both the viewer – which is to say, ourselves – and the director/writer – Tarentino – as we watch one man’s interpretation of post-Holocaust collective subconscious unleashed via simple characters and a straightforward, albeit clever, plot. I loved No Country For Old Men, and I’m sure I’ll love whatever movie ends up beating out Basterds for this year’s Oscar, but despite what critics and award juries might conclude, Inglourious Basterds, like There Will Be Blood, represents a feat in storytelling so grand, so rare, and so profound, we’re lucky to experience it at all, let alone twice in three years.

There Will Be Blood had such an active protagonist in Daniel Plainview that, for once, critics actually wrote about the most important aspect of a movie – the protagonist’s goal, and what he does to achieve it – or, the plot. Usually critics take up far more column inches on the acting, cinematography, etc. – all vital elements, but only insofar as they serve the story, which is the reason the movie is made, and the reason people go to see it. With There Will Be Blood, we finally had such a strong protagonist that critics were actually paying attention to his actions and motivations. Unfortunately, the majority of the reviews only went skin deep. There was all this talk about “greed” and “capitalism”, when really, what drove Daniel Plainview was similar to what drove Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane – a crippling desire to fill an unfulfillable void. Kane spent his entire life trying to fill the void left by his mother, who abandoned him as a child. Plainview spent his entire life trying to fill a void left by godlessness. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t believe in God. He was incapable of coping with this absence of meaning. He was empty inside, and his fatal flaw, really, was that he lacked the insight to understand why. While others flocked to church, he sat back, scoffed at them, and built an empire. Was he greedy? Did he just want a bunch of money? Or was he searching, always, for fulfillment he would never get – a fulfillment everyone else in town got each Sunday at church? There Will Be Blood provided writers and critics with a golden opportunity to delve deeper into the subjects of greed – what motivates it – and capitalism – the human forces driving why it operates the way it does. But too many of them were excited to draw some sort of comparison between Plainview’s own imperialism and the US’s presence in Iraq, or, failing that, prove their own benevolence by casting off his actions, implying that he got what he deserved, and that we’re a more fulfilled moviegoing public for it. Sure, Plainview deserved his fate, but the most profound aspect of the film wasn’t that he was greedy, but why he was greedy. They pinned this movie as an epic allegory about capitalism and greed, but had they looked deeper, they would have found the most compelling film meditation on god and religion ever made.

While There Will Be Blood engages us – the viewer – to be a quiet witness to the action, Inglourious Basterds keeps us at a distance. From the opening credits – which utilize multiple colors and fonts, switching almost arbitrarily from one style to another – the hand of the director is present. There are, at various points, a comic book style reveal of a bomb strapped to a character’s leg, a bold title superimposed over a freeze frame to introduce a supporting character well into the film, and a descriptive note with an arrow pointing to one of the characters, superimposed over the image (harkening back to Mia’s “don’t be a square” moment in Pulp Fiction). There are scenes of utter suspense, but Basterds never dwells in fictional verite for very long: multiple films within the film; film trivia playing a vital role in the plot; and celluloid itself – the very fiber of it – responsible for the fate of not just the story, but, within the story’s conceit, World War Two. Film and filmmaking at once make up the viscera of the world of the filmmaker – the story and the techniques used to tell it – and the world of the film itself – the mis-en-scene – forcing us to be aware, constantly, that we are watching a movie. This is crucial to the experience of watching Inglourious Basterds, because the meaning of the film exists not in the characters’ psyche but, uniquely, in our own.

There have been many articles citing Inglourious Basterds as a Jewish revenge fastasy, which, for at least some, it most certainly is. Eli Roth, co-star, described the film as playing out a “deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling.” And Lawrence Bender, Producer, went one step further, calling it, simply, “a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Whether or not – or to what degree – the film is a revenge fantasy depends solely on the individual viewer (I know where I stand, but that’s another essay entirely). But the film brings about an even more nuanced dilemma than the question of what, in our wildest fantasies, could or should have happened to Hitler.

Unlike Daniel Plainview, whose tragic lack of self-awareness leads him to make choices that subvert his real desires, the characters in Basterds know exactly who they are and what they want. While Plainview is startlingly real and complex, the Basterds and company are simple, inhumane, and unrealistic. Which is fine. There is nothing real about what takes place in Inglourious Basterds. The film is a postulation. As Tarentino has explained, none of this stuff happened, but had the characters been real and had they been placed in WW2, it would have – which is to say, it doesn’t matter whether they are realistic, as long as what they do in the movie is true to their characters. And what they do, if you haven’t seen the film, is scalp Nazis, carve swastikas into their foreheads, and, ultimately, burn them all to death – Hitler, Goebbels, et al. Whether or not Nazis (and please note that I understand the difference between Nazis, SS, German infantry, and Germans, and concede that their conflation in the mind of some viewers is a possible negative side effect of the film) or anyone ever deserved this treatment is a philosophical question I don’t care to tackle. What concerns me, and what Inglourious Basterds so brilliantly, viciously posits, is what the legacy of the Nazis should be. By carving swastikas into their foreheads, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) spends the entire film making sure no Nazi left alive will be able to “remove his uniform.” This way, they will never be able to hide – from others and from themselves – what they did. While this is certainly the most exacting manifestation of “never forget” imaginable, its implications extend beyond the Holocaust, and beyond war altogether.

We face transgressions, and the many different ways to deal with those who have transgressed, on a regular basis. We can forgive, forget, hold permanently in contempt, or we can exact revenge as a way toward catharsis. We encounter this dilemma in all facets of life – often times with our enemies, but also with ones we love.

True, the Jews in Inglourious Basterds never existed, and therefor never had to deal with the memory of their transgressors. But we – the Jews living today – do, every day, in our collective memory and inherited knowledge of what happened. Our story is one of many. We are not alone amongst cultures, tribes, and human beings who have to wrestle with this dilemma. While most filmmakers tell the story of the Holocaust in relatively black and white (no pun intended, Spielberg) terms, Tarentino took a bold approach, and instead of telling us how bad it was (come on, we know how bad it was), he raised some of the most important questions we – as Jews, as human beings, as those who have ever been wronged – could possibly ask. How do we look upon those who have wronged us? Do we seek vengeance? Do we offer forgiveness? To what lengths should we go – must we go – to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

Take Tarentino’s predilection for ultra-violence with a grain of salt. This is a brilliant man who, like Anderson, made a film that won’t be recognized as the best of the year, but deserves to go down as one of the best of all time.

And with that, I’ll say goodbye to my inner film critic for another few years or so. There certainly are enough others to do the job. And, more importantly, I’ve got a movie to make. Au revoir.

*Michael Forstein is an active filmmaker, editor and writer living and working in Minnesota.  He agreed to let us post this incredibly well-written movie essay to Movies I Didn’t Get so we hope you enjoyed his writing.  To see more of his work, point your browser to his portfolio site www.michaelforstein.com  There you can see excerpts of his documentary and other film works as well as keep up on the latest going’s-on in his world.  Thanks again Mike and we hope to share more of your work soon!

Don’t get me wrong.  Remakes can work.  I actually liked the American remake of Seven Samurai (Magnificent Seven).  Hell, I even enjoyed The Ring and The Grudge remakes after seeing the original Japanese versions of both.  But when Martin Scorsese decided to remake Infernal Affairs, one of my favorite more recent Hong Kong films, I have to admit some lines were crossed.

Before I get too ahead of myself, let’s contemplate for a minute why remakes are even made in the first place?  If the original was so inspiring, why does it need to be redone?  And in one’s remaking of an original work, what do the creators intend to change to make it in their mind better?  I think this gives a hint as to why films are remade in the first place, but there’s also the question of accessibility and reception.  How will the original work be received if the audience has to sit through a film with (gasp!) subtitles?!  Unfortunately, the general American moviegoer is definitely not up for a film where they have to sit and read words on the screen.  Unfortunately for these viewers, they miss out on a wealth of amazing films.  And yet, with these moviegoers being the ones who fill movie seats, they are the judge and jury of what kind of films get greenlit, thus we get foreign films perfectly fine being left the way they are getting remade to be more attuned to American audiences.  That being said, though the original Infernal Affairs was a box office smash hit in China, who was to say it would be as big of a hit when it hit the states?  Though Miramax did bring the original Infernal Affairs over for a relatively successful limited release in 2004 (two years after its release in China), I guess Scorsese just couldn’t resist taking a stab at the narrative himself.  I remember back in 2004 when I was still reeling off the excitement after seeing the original Infernal Affairs, only to find out Scorsese was planning to make his own American version.  With Scorsese at the helm I was actually pretty excited at the time, but flashing forward three years after The Departed came out in 2006, I’m definitely wishing I could go back to a moment in time when this film did not exist.

I’m sure I must sound like some sort of fanboy, pissed off that his precious little film has been mangled by a director who can make any film he wants, but this is only because I think The Departed was a remake not worth remaking.  Scorsese, a director whom I have been fond of for as long as I can remember has always been a master of portraying raw violence in an almost tangible way through film.  Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Good Fellas are three films he has made that I don’t know if he will ever top for me.  His realistic portrayal of violence is just as potent in his remake of Infernal Affairs but the problem is, to me he took a story germane to its location (Hong Kong) and tried to cut and paste it into an Irish mob-based Massachusetts setting to little effect.  Another thing to consider is that elements from Infernal Affairs II and Infernal Affairs III were put into the script that Scorsese shot, thus making it a sort of mutant remake trying to compress way too much story into one film.  This to me drew out The Departed making it way longer than it needed to be to get the point across.  I think Andrew Lau, co-director and co-star of Infernal Affairs put it best in his Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily interview when asked what he thought of the film.  Lau responded saying, “Of course I think the version I made is better, but the Hollywood version is pretty good too. [Scorsese] made the Hollywood version more attuned to American culture.”  I think Lau hits the nail on the head.  Though you can take a story and attune it to your audience, if the original story is a product of the environment it takes place in, there’s some “Frankenstein’ing” that will have to be done to make it work (i.e. screenwriter William Monahan having to borrow elements from all three Infernal Affairs), thus leaving you with an amalgamated and non-cohesive story.  At that point I don’t care if Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin are in the film.  Again, without a solid story even a killer cast can never save your film.

Looking back though on just how well The Departed was received, grossing nearly $27 million in its opening weekend not to mention taking home four academy awards including Best Picture and Best Director, I have to accept that my opinions are definitely in the minority.  But after finally checking the film out myself three years after all the hype has died down, I couldn’t help but recall how much I liked the original better, and how much I wish certain films were never, ever remade.  I know Scorsese definitely feels differently, with The Departed marking the first time he was able to take home an Oscar in his career.  When asked why he thought he won, Scorsese remarked: “This is the first movie I’ve done with a plot.”  Too bad it wasn’t your own, Martin.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

Pretty pictures and A-list voice talent unable to save a convoluted story…

Hello again folks. Thanks for checking in. This time around I’d like to switch gears from live action and focus on a 20th Century Fox animation called Robots. Being a huge fan of all forms of animation, from old fashioned cell to state-of-the-art CG, the little kid inside of me still gets a little giddy every time I’m about to watch an animation I haven’t seen yet. It was no different when I happened upon an animation released in 2005 I had heard very little about called Robots. Now I’ll go and see just about anything Pixar puts out, but I’ve had mixed feelings when it comes to 20th Century’s animation attempts. I want to see Fox put out great works so Pixar has some competition to keep them on their toes, but unfortunately Robots was definitely a movie that I did not get into.

The premise of Robots is simple. The Copperbottom’s are a happy robot couple who live in their peaceful world, filled with spare parts and resources in abundance.  The Copperbottom’s decide to build their own robot son Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) and raise him the best they can. Rodney is a good son with dreams of becoming an inventor like his hero Bigweld. Rodney’s inventions never seem to quite work out the way he intends, but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to show his latest invention to Bigweld and become a famous inventor in the big city. So here we have a simple “small town boy wants to make it in the big city” premise that seems like a reasonable enough base to build from. Despite its unoriginality I was still intrigued enough to go along for the ride at this point. Unfortunately things went downhill from here.

Once Rodney gets to the city, he heads straight for Bigweld’s headquarters. Problem is, Bigweld has gone missing and the company has been taken over by the story’s villain Ratchet. Eventually you find out the one really calling the shots is Ratchet’s mother, but nonetheless, Rodney is turned away by Ratchet with his new objective to find the missing Bigweld. His efforts are threatened by the large collector bots roaming the city vacuuming up all older model robots to have them melted for scrap. These collector bots are a part of Ratchet’s ultimate scheme to stop wasting money reparing non-working robots while forcing any robot who doesn’t want to get scrapped to pay for expensive upgrades.

So with Bigweld missing and Rodney’s dreams of becoming an inventor seemingly crushed, Rodney sees a need to be filled repairing the shunned away and destined-for-scrap-metal robots in the lower part of the city.  This of course infuriates Rachet, causing a conflict between he and Rodney and sets up Rodney’s new goal for the rest of the film: stop Ratchet and restore peace to robot civilization.  Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a protagonist that wants something (even multiple somethings in some cases). But for me, Rodney has just plain too many goals and they keep changing throughout the film. If you haven’t figured this out about me from my Vantage Point article, I am definitely of the quality over quantity camp, and keeping it simple and to the point always hits home for me. Recapping what I’ve written thus far, I’ve come up with five goals for Rodney’s character.

1) Get to the big city
2) Become a famous inventor
3) Save his hero Bigweld
4) Repair all the old robots
5) Stop Ratchet and restore peace to robot civilization

Though arguably his ultimate objective is “restore peace to robot civilization”, Robots muddles the power of this goal by taking too long to present it, slowing down the efficiency of the storytelling with a bevy of not-so-funny characters and side plots that only convolute and weaken the story even more along the way. Despite the many things I think Robots does right, there is too much it did wrong and I just didn’t understand why until I decided to write this article. Every story needs a protagonist who has goals. Robot’s protagonist just has too many that didn’t scream out to me to want to watch him grow and struggle to accomplish said goals. Every story needs a villain who also has something they want, but Robot’s antagonist’s potency is muddled by his mother who is the real antagonist (in other words, one antagonist would have worked better). Ultimately Robots tries too hard to compensate for its predictable story by giving its protagonist too many goals, packing the cast to the brim with a swell of characters voiced by A-list talent (from Ewan McGregor to Robin Williams), beautiful animation and way too many lame jokes. By the end of the film I could care less that there was a happy ending with all parties involved getting what they wanted. All I really wanted were my two hours back.

Contrarily speaking, perhaps Robots might have worked better as a longer format TV series animation since it had so many story angles and characters it wanted to introduce. The series format for animation is much more forgiving than the feature-length format. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the standard two-hour movie format is an unforgiving vehicle to try to deliver a story in.  Especially (in my opinion) when it comes to animation.  So even if your CG/animation quality is top notch, your story better be even more top notch if you want it to work. Though I think audiences tend to suspend their disbelief and be a little more lenient with animation, chocking it up to being just for kids and the like, I would argue that with the influence of Pixar, Miyazaki and Japan’s animation industry on the whole, feature-length animation has become just as brutal of a format to tell stories in as live action feature films and gets taken just as seriously.

Unfortunately for Fox’s Robots, it wasn’t able to keep pace for me. Hopefully in this article I was able to sum up exactly why this was the case. Quality over quantity my friends. Quality over quantity. Robots.  Amazingly beautiful pictures to look at but not much else.

-Review by Corey Birkhofer

I’d like to start this review off with a question: Does anyone even know about this film? The reason I ask is for those of you who don’t know, I am currently living in Gifu, Japan where the selection of films from the west that make it to rental here are not always the most well-known or popular back home. Having only read Wikipedia’s plot description of Vantage Point to refresh my memory of the plot, I saw there that the film got a 95% at Rotten Tomatoes and was overall a box office success when it was released February of 2008. Though after seeing the film I am unable to fathom how that could be the case, why was I suckered into watching Vantage Point? Two words: Matthew Fox. For those of you who are fans of Lost, let me just tell you, it’s even bigger here in Japan. So if any Lost fan sees Matthew Fox’s face on a DVD cover at the store here, they’re going to rent it. Being a diehard fan of Lost myself, I got suckered in by the same Hollywood tactic. Although the premise for the film is a little too reminiscent of 24, I liked the idea of a film that employed Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” effect of showing the same event from multiple perspectives giving the viewer the responsibility of sifting through the facts and coming to their own conclusion. Vantage Point tries to one up Rashomon however in that it gives us eight different perspectives of an assassination attempt on the president while he speaks at an anti-terrorism rally in Spain. Now that you know why I gave Vantage Point a chance, let me get to the real heart of the matter. Why didn’t I get this film?

Let me start at the start. What’s the film about? I think the explanation over at Wikipedia gives a much better rundown of the plot of the film, but even so, the Wikipedia breakdown is difficult to follow. Let me ask the more important question then: Why is this film so difficult to get? Let’s jump back to Kurosawa for a moment. For those of you who haven’t seen Rashomon, Kurosawa revolutionized the world of cinema in 1950 when he made a film that showed the attempted rape of a young woman from four different and conflicting perspectives (the attacker, the woman and her chivalric samurai husband, as well as a nameless woodcutter). Rashomon rocked the cinema world with this concept, and its influence is still felt today as evidenced in Vantage Point taking on the same technique in the telling of its own story. So aside from Kurosawa being a master of storytelling, why was he successful where Vantage Point’s director Pete Travis was not? In my opinion it comes down to quantity over quality. Kurosawa gave us four sharply distinct perspectives where Vantage Point gives us eight. This is simply put too many perspectives to sift through and form a conclusion. Instead of piercing our hearts with a shocking event shown to us a few times, we get the same moments leading up to an assassination attempt on the president ad nauseam, until we don’t even know why we wanted to see the film in the first place. Though some of the characters in the eight vantage points do have intriguing stories, the impact of their struggle is muted by lesser important side characters whom we have to sit through and watch their perspective of the same event. Director Peter Travis would likely argue that every vantage point in the film is there to service the story, but after seeing the same event eight times, I think even he realized audiences might be annoyed and want to move further into the story instead of getting in the 10 minutes leading up to the attack, rewind, showing another character’s point of view of the 10 minutes leading up to the attack, times eight. By the fourth or fifth time of finally getting done with seeing one perspective, I prayed I would be allowed to go further into the story, only to get forced back to watch the same 10 minutes from another character’s perspective.

So who exactly are these characters? Let me say the cast is pretty ensemble, with a ton of well-known faces from Dennis Quaid to Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Sigourney Weaver and even William Hurt! Talk about pulling off all the stops. The other three perspectives of the event are from some newer faces, played by Ayelet Zurer, Eduardo
Noriega and Édgar Ramírez. But as awesome as the cast was for Vantage Point, we’re all smart enough to know a great cast can never save a lackluster story. Aside from the unoriginality

of its opening, at least the film starts off with a strong inciting incident that propels us into the story. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of films without a strong inciting incident and let me give my two cents that if you want a film to draw your viewer in, a strong inciting incident is definitely going to help that along. However, even more important than a strong inciting incident is a CLEAR inciting incident which Vantage Point definitely does not have. Though the first couple perspectives we see are interesting and very realistically shot, the power of the attack gets more and more muted as the film rewinds us eight times over. With so many characters and perspectives to sift through, it was hard for me to find my “that could be me” character that I wanted to see grow throughout their arc. Instead, everything became a mess as I was introduced to too many perspectives, some with characters that the film never revisits which left me all the more frustrated. The only character that seemed to have any real beginning/middle/end arc was Dennis Quaid’s character Thomas Barnes. Barnes is a burnt out Jack Bauer archetype working as a secret service agent taken off the field for stopping a bullet meant for the president several years previous. Still shaken up from the shooting, he is extra paranoid while the president speaks out against terrorism in a huge outdoor coliseum filled with spectators. To Dennis Quaid’s character, everyone is a potential suspect and we see just how paranoid his being shot has made him. Barnes’ integrity is questioned by his partner Kent Taylor, played by Lost’s Matthew Fox. Taylor feels it’s still too early for Barnes to be back on the field at such an important event. We later find out Taylor has shed his American ties and is working in alliance with the terrorists from the inside. His goal is then to stop Barnes’ who is the only real threat to their plans to assassinate the president. From Quaid’s character, the character’s get more and more thin as you go down the line. Forest Whitaker’s character had great potential to lend an interesting perspective to see the event from as he plays a tourist on vacation in Spain. At the event with his video camera in hand, he records the anti-terrorist rally in the minutes leading up to the explosion. After the attack, his footage is quickly confiscated by Barnes who is hell bent on capturing the people responsible, but from there Whitaker is now camera-less and has lost his eyes with which to show us his perspective from. Director Pete Travis shows us several more sympathetic perspectives to try to get us to come along for the ride, but ultimately each character is only given their few minutes to show us their perspective before we’re pushed on to t he next point of view.

Though I tip my filmmaker hat off to the filmmaker’s in their attempt to center an entire film around one shocking scene, by giving us too many perspectives of it the impact of the event is muddled, we are unable to sympathize with any one character, feel any anger towards the antagonist and most importantly want to see the protagonist change. In short, you can’t center a story around one single shocking event if you erase it’s impact by showing it to us too many times with characters who never have a chance to grow. Quality over quantity 101. This is something Kurosawa realized in Rashomon. So if you haven’t seen either film I would recommend: watch Vantage Point first, then watch Rashomon and tell me what you got out of both. Now in the interest of not repeating myself eight times over, I’ll wind this down and wait to hear back from you. If it sounded like I was repeating the same gripes over and over in this article, maybe Vantage Point has had more of an influence on me than I realized. Time to go watch a movie that I actually get. Hello Rashomon!

-Review by Corey Birkhofer