Pride Unprejudiced: Three for the Weekend

WALL-E ***1/2

A plush cousin to Idiocracy, the latest humbling eyeful from Pixar-Disney, Wall-E has a nagging undercurrent that our society's are going to die for our consumption habits, except for a few fat fumblers shot out into space to stay afloat on gallons of refreshing cold drinks and reality-obscuring media choices.

While less profane, Wall-E, directed by Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) is, except for a lovely credits coda (much like the differently-styled sequence that ends Ratatouille), more pessimistic than Mike Judge's dark mess. The movie's protagonist is the titular rusty robot that no one bothered to turn off 700 years earlier when the survivors of a ruined earth are shipped to a luxury cruise ship, the Axiom, deep in outer space. The tableaux of a ruined Manhattan are thrilling, drawing from myriad influences, which Stanton could likely tick off with the fast, furious alacrity of Martin Scorsese at his most voluble. I'd note Blade Runner tempered with ideas from artists like Jodorowsky, Mobius, and Jacques Tardi, among other hands from the Métal Hurlant era of comics. Wall-E becomes a Sisyphus building and ascending ziggurats of consumer waste that would appeal to Philip K. Dick in this post-human Metropolis, spending each day compacting and constructing step-at-a-time towers of Babel, with the watercolor look of Bruce McCall's inventive apocrypha atop a Brueghel canvas without human figures.

For the first forty minutes or so, there's no dialogue outside of sound design and the eye wanders through an inventive tapestry of the remnants of a lost civilization. Stanton et al. make the most of silence (along with Ben Burtt's terrific sound design). No brand names are given pride of placement, only the Buy N Large megacorp that's absorbed all before the fall, including the government. (Wall-E-Mart?) Fred Willard makes a cameo as Shelby Forthright, the cheerleader CEO, using the memorable phrase, "Stay the course." (Are those words really 700 years old?)

Wall-E's daily routine includes collecting things he likes: he's a dogged packrat assembling a curiosity cabinet of technology and junk. He owns a single videotape (of Hello Dolly! on BetaMax!), which he watches through a contraption that includes an early iPod. It's reminiscent of Culver City's Museum of Jurassic Technology, as if civilization were a long-gone myth, an invented legend collated by a robot from scraps. When Wall-E's solar panels are filled each morning, it's signaled by the Mac start-up chime, which in one of its iterations, while rushing through the rings of Saturn, is strangely touching. (What's he running? Mac OS MMDCCLXXV?)

Where Cars erred on the side of trying to make 1950s style internal combustion engines into a thing of shiny love to dazzle the most prehensile of animation watchers, Wall-E's anthropo-dwarfism goes the opposite direction, toward an eco-fable that's more than majestic in its detailing while keeping its characters exceedingly small. (Wall-E's sidekick is a resilient cockroach.) Stanton has said words to the effect that most of the Pixar projects to date were sketched out on a napkin over lunch more than 15 years ago, and while the napkin has grown many terabytes larger, the idea of "the last robot" remains.

And there's a lot of "last" to go around. After meeting a sleek female robot, EVA, that's been dispatched to find vestiges of vegetation in the barren, windblown topsoil, further destruction ensues, including the nuking of a rank of tankers that at once is apocalypse and invokes the image of ship-cutters in India and other countries who take disused ships apart piece by piece. EVA's intense minimalism suggests a trigger-happy universal remote that Apple design guru Jonathan Ive - listed in the end credits-could well have had a hand in. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (No Country For Old Men) was a consultant, too, and the textures of ruined earth, especially a scene between Wall-E and EVA at brick-red sunset seen from a bench on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, looking across an empty river bed to the dead lands of the island of schist and shite that Manhattan became, are haunting in their densely detailed grimness. It's a memorable major apocalypse, detailed with the lucidity of a cruel religious prophecy.

When EVA finds a plant that Wall-E had stowed in a Chaplin-style boot, a race to space follows. (A skyful of fallow space trash against a clean, bright star field joshes the opening of Star Wars.) The style shifts radically when the pair arrive on Axiom, with its thousands of blubberous passengers, grown lazy from generation upon generation of pampering in the 700 years onboard. They're like inflatable Incredibles, ponging around on levitating air chairs. (Another keen homage: as the robots emerge into the corridors of Axiom, they're hit with a crush of people just as the characters in Lucas' THX-1138 are just outside the expanse of white infinity they believe they had been trapped in.)

Just past 40 years since debut of 2001 and HAL, Wall-E's pastiche of Kubrick's notions of space stations and cold computers has a few tickles, including Sigourney Weaver's voicing of the onboard brain. Jeff Garlin's voice work as the stupefied captain of the ship amuses, too. But nothing trumps a finely detailed apocalypse. And how do you get a happy ending from the end of the world? It is possible, and when you do, you have Peter Gabriel sing atop it, backed by the Soweto Gospel Choir.

Wanted ***

Only Timur Bekmambetov could have made Wanted. And that's a grand thing.

Opening with the familiar Universal logo that has sparkling space dust girdling the globe, we're quickly thrown into a comic book adaptation written by Scots by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, set in a lustrously-shot Chicago, with a Scottish male lead and an American female. We're quickly propelled into a loonily labyrinthine, gratifyingly Byzantine weave of immaculately produced visual filmmaking. Wanted is not breathless in the sense of Michael Bay's accelerated cutting, although the cinematographer, Mitchell Amundsen, shot Transformers and knows from <i>gleam</i>.

Bekmambetov's Nightwatch (2004) and Daywatch (2006) were reportedly Russia's biggest hits ever, but didn't crossover here. Of Daywatch, I noted that his "full-tilt willingness to be incomprehensible is his keenest talent," and of Nightwatch, its "convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug." Ah, but now. Wanted is a tonally aggressive, wildly expressionistic, extremely violent, rude, foul-mouthed, yet satisfying film, a sleekly machined action powerhouse, words I hardly expected to type this summer.

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy, sporting a fine American accent) is a lowly Chicago office worker who takes anti-anxiety medication and knows that his beautiful-but-shrill girlfriend is having sex with one of his coworkers on their Ikea kitchen table. A voice-over by this cubicle-bound sweet-faced nerd is profane and echoes with hapless exasperation the self-realization gab of Fight Club. (A character named Darden may just echo "Tyler Durden.") Wesley's revenge on his co-worker, involving flying bits of keyboard and teeth is foolishly funny.

But that schematic similarity is only a component of the many layers offered up by Bekmambetov and screenwriters Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan (from the comic book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones). Bekmambetov, like George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson before him, owns his own effects house, and there are generous swirls and dabs of technique throughout this story of a young man who's enlisted by a secret society of assassins who've persisted for a thousand years, led by Morgan Freeman, and whose mostly-silent teacher of the arts hardcore is embodied by Angelina Jolie. She has fun. She smiles. But she has as little dialogue as a Walter Hill heroine. Yes. (Her action scenes could well be from a movie called The Driver.)

Bekmambetov's going for baroque at each available instant. While there are eastern European locations in the third act, including the Czech Republic's 12th-century Krivoklát Castle, it's his street-level and sky-high view of Chicago that rings true. A variety of interiors may have been shot in Prague, but the movie's view of the Windy City impresses. On recognizable streets in the Loop and near North (around Clark and Newport), atop El trains always curving or going under low underpasses, Bekmambetov elevates and heightens the city in rare fashion, much like Michael Mann or Andy Davis (The Fugitive, Code of Silence). Lake and Wabash; Wacker and Wabash; lower Wacker: all stylishly rendered. The multiple uses of and references to the El are integral to the tale, not visual or sonic scene-setting. (An opening shootout that takes place partly atop the Carbide and Carbon Building, home of the Hard Rock Hotel, is immaculately cut and composed for maximum narrative and visceral effect.)

These filmmakers get Chicago. Bekmambetov uses everything at his disposal, adapting more than lifting styles, techniques and gags that have been in movies by David Fincher and the Wachowskis, for instance. But this florid, perfervid visual style delivers. No romcom-style reverse-angle tick-tocks of conversation. Yet the rush of imagery doesn't suggest videogames as much as a romping pulp infraction.

Credit, too, must go to Chicago names in the credits likely to have something to do with the look, such as location manager Mark Mamalakis, as well as prop work that includes the characteristic Loop newspaper kiosks with headlines about a violent act, all done in the correct style of the newspapers on display. A character back at tough-love assassin HQ drinks from a Bears glass. A restorative bath involving some kind of chemical-wax compound comes to resemble shards of broken ice eddying around Wesley's face (Alexander Nevsky much, Timur?) The costume design, Varvara Avdyushko, is also typical of the attention to detail: everyone's garb is slightly heightened and nicely detailed; Wesley's costumes are plain and tend to beige and brown yet are immaculately refined.

Even the stripped down, quintessential cod-philosophical twaddle doesn't slow the movie's raison d'etre: velocity. "Why are you here?" "I don't know who I am!" "That's good enough for now." And when you can pull off Morgan Freeman intoning, "We call this the loom of fate," causing you to grin rather than laugh out loud, something's very right. You come to accept characters slinging armory like a chef with an omelet pan or a tennis player at the top of their game. The El itself becomes one more weapon in their expressive arsenal.

Still, with such impressive filmmaking in every technical respect, and decent respect for comic book flummery while acknowledging its essential silliness, you want something to tie it together, a deeper undercurrent other than the obligatory Zennish bromides. Something that validates its body count and serene delineation of violence. Perhaps an undercurrent about terrorist cells? Mmm… No.

[SPOILER ALERT.] The man who made his name (and fortune) in modern Russia pulls it off with gleeful aplomb. In the last scene, which is one of a corkscrew-laden movie's most elaborate twist-and-turn sequences, when the last one standing shows how it's done and confronts the audience head-on with a profane provocation? It's the grace note: the winner who takes all, head spinning throughout from Kremlin-style hail of smoke-and-mirror reversals, now resembles the trajectory of one triumphant figure on the world stage: Vladimir Putin. And we know what the fuck he's done with his life recently. Za vas, Timur! Za vas!

My Winnipeg (****)

Winnipeg! Home of ice, snow and Guy Maddin! Winnipeg! Sleepwalking capitol of the world, where you're allowed to keep the keys to past apartments and current tenants are obligated to keep you safe until you wake if you sleepwalk in at all hours of the night! Winnipeg! Where gay bison demolished Happyland amusement park! Winnipeg! Maddin's latest, perhaps his masterpiece! A surrealistic fictional documentary of the loins and environs from which he sprung! Rhythmic! Cyclical! Murmurously mad! Slyly sussurant! My Winnipeg in no way surpasses Maddin's short, The Heart of the World (2000), an anthology of all his stylistic twitches, but as ostensible perambulation down the tracks of his tearaways from childhood onward on the Manitoba prairie, it's an elusive tone poem compacted from his many idées fixe (he also narrates). Mom, played by the elderly Ann Savage, perhaps the ultimate femme fatale in Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 Detour, plays perhaps the ultimate controlling mother as Maddin sets up house in the home where he grew up to attempt to recollect his childhood. Any man who can confound the fork of the Red River and the Assiniboine in central Winnipeg with his mother's lap, his mother's pubis, knows no public shame. As dream state doodling through private and civic self-mythology goes, this is precious surrealism, including visits to the courting yard on a frozen river studded with the heads of stampeding horses that froze there in panic while escaping a fire. Comic and post-quaint, My Winnipeg is deep delight.

June 28, 2008