Wilmington On Movies - November 17, 2009

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call,2012, The Blind Side, Planet 51 and more ...

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Chris Weitz, 2009

Mopy, gloomy, drenched with romantic longing and erotic terror (from vampire chic to werewolf beefcake), The Twilight Saga: New Moon continues the teen vampire series based on Stephenie Meyer’s books, this time with more polish, more visual lyricism, and less slam-bang action. Like its heroine, Kristen Stewart -- once again playing the central character of tormented, horror-smitten high school outsider Bella Swan -- it’s moody and pretty, and constantly in the throes of a wild supernatural crush. But I didn’t like it much. And the fact that audiences are coming in droves didn‘t reassure me.

In the old days, when I wrote for establishment newspapers, I used to faithfully read almost every single main novel, play or book source for the movies I reviewed. (A waste of time for some editors, who preferred sarcasm and witty knocks, no matter what the movie.) But I‘m glad I didn’t bother with these books, because life and time are short, and I feel cheated in the end that not more of mine was spent on the people I love and loved, who deserved more of my time and help, and that so much of that life was squandered on inferior shows, idiotic office politics and background research for movies I didn’t like much. What a waste of time! How much I want, yearn, for something like time travel or horror tale immortality to give me a second chance.

That kind of dark hopeless feeling, that sense of loss and lament for mortality, of course, is part of the appeal of these Twilight books and movies, which show typical teen high school romances -- Bella with the melancholy, sensuous-lipped rich kid Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) or Bella with the hunky Native American jock Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) -- that here become suffused with the eternal, when Edward’s vampirism or Jacob’s werewolf world kick in. It’s not just a teenage crush. It’s forever. And you don’t have to worry it may be gone by the end of summer. It never dies.

That’s also why movie vampires over the years have evolved from the scary, nauseous, murderous Bram Stoker-inspired monsters originally played by bloodthirsty Bela Lugosi (in Dracula) and the supremely creepy Max Schreck (in Nosferatu), to the high school dreamboat of the Twilight tales. So we spend our time in this movie, watching Bella mooning away for sad-eyed Edward and flirting with ever-smiley Jacob (as Stephen Stills said, “Love the one you’re with“), until the inevitable clashes come -- both romantic and supernatural.

Every so often there’s a supernatural battle, usually in the forest, involving marauding bloodsuckers or huge rampaging wolves, to remind us of the story’s horror-icon roots -- leading to an Italian palazzo sequence where Dakota Fanning does a vampy cameo, and where Michael Sheen pops up as the leering Aro, deftly displaying the playful, witty, knowing tone the whole movie might better have had.

The movie revolves around Kristen Stewart, just as the camera revolves around her in the “collapsing time” camera pan we see swiveling around distraught, silent Bella, the sad girl gazing out the window as the seasons swiftly pass, in a gaudy shot that suggests the eerie, rapt camera revolution around yearning Jimmy Stewart and his recreated love Kim Novak in Vertigo. She’s a real camera-catcher, and, in this role, refreshingly unglamorous and emotional. But it seems to me a flaw in the movie, and in the Melissa Rosenberg script -- and, for all I know, Stephenie Meyer’s novel -- that so little is given us, beyond what the actress can suggest, to show Bella‘s taste and sensitivity and brains, the extra qualities that would have won her other-worldly beaux. Instead she just keeps mooning and surviving menace, like a Jane Eyre who never reads.

Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton used to make great little RKO B-movies that mixed romanticism and horror in somewhat the ways the Twilight moviemakers strive for here, films like I Walked With a Zombie and the original Cat People, and he did it with a heartfelt grace, spookiness and marvelous economy, that mostly eludes director Chris Weitz and company. Those pictures never die. But, setting aside its huge grosses and teen screams and dreams, I’m not so sure about Twilight.

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Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call (Four Stars)
U. S.; Werner Herzog, 2009

Bad Lieutenant: New Orleans Port of Call is a weird title, but a great, crazy film. Its greatness is inseparable from its craziness, or from Nicolas Cage’s fantastic, raging, brilliantly over the top performance as the bad madman cop, Terence McDonough.

The movie, which starts in a parking lot simmering with police brutality and then shifts to a flooded jail in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, first focuses on Cage‘s Terence being bad alone and then being self-destructively good. We see him robbing and raping suspects in the lot, then perched on a jail walkway with Val Kilmer as his partner, smooth Stevie Pruit, debating whether to save a trapped prisoner in a cell with the water rising. Cage’s Terence makes fun of the jailbird‘s plight, then jumps in the water, soaking an expensive suit and underwear, and as it happens, also wrenching his back and throwing himself into near-constant pain afterwards.

From then on, in one appalling scene after another, Terence races around New Orleans, in the catastrophe’s aftermath, bent over from crippling pain, and swallowing and stealing stronger and harder drugs to kill it (from vicodin and percodan to cocaine and heroine), laughing explosively and chattering maniacally, beating and blackmailing more suspects and perps, recklessly piling up huge gambling debs with the increasingly perturbed local bookie, Ned (Brad Dourif), plotting felonies with local crime boss and suspected murderer Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner), screwing and snorting coke with his prostitute girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes) and shaking down her customers, defying Internal Affairs, jamming his gun penis-style down his pants, threatening old ladies in wheelchairs, and in general behaving as badly as any lieutenant possibly could -- including Harvey Keitel, who was the original Bad Lieutenant in Abel Ferrara‘s blistering original 1992 film. (Ferrara’s was more violent and just as crazy as Herzog’s, which is close to it only generally and thematically, but not as flat-out weird. For one thing, there were no iguana and alligator P.O.V. shots.)

I complained about Nicolas Cage‘s movies recently, and this one is so damned good, I‘m sorry I did. Looking over Cage’s filmography again, I can see how he’s kept slipping in decent or challenging roles (From Adaptation to Matchstick Men, with the box office crud, like National Treasure. But it was hard to accept those vacuous blockbuster parts with a straight face, when you remembered what he did in his ‘90s heyday: the hell-bent alcoholic Hollywood guy in Leaving Las Vegas, his Elvis from Hell outlaw in Wild at Heart or his burnt-out paramedic in Bringing Out the Dead.

Now in Bad Lieutenant, Cage again abandons restraint and lets it rip. It’s as good (and deep-down bad) as he can do.

The rest of the cast manages to match him or keep up with him -- either as great straight men and reactors (like Xhibit, Mendes or Dourif) to his killer clown routines, or over the top themselves,

But though it’s Cage’s show, it’s also Herzog‘s. The best old noirs were often made by German or Austrian émigrés like Lang, Wilder, Preminger, Ulmer and Siodmak, and modern Teutons like Fassbinder, Wenders, Schlondorff and others have all had a whack at the form. Maybe it’s a matter of temperament. The cold-eyed, flat-looking vision of hell with which Herzog surrounds Cage here, is noir in the old best sense: stylishly exploring the dark spots, tearing open and blazing a light on the urban jungle.

Bad is mostly not shadowy neo-noirish, except in spots. It’s noir as it is in the brutal, straight ahead vision of a Sam Fuller, a Don Siegel or a Phil Karlson, style that disguises itself as near documentary, with a touch of Bunuelian surreal nightmare around the edges. Ferrara’s movie was about a man plunged into Catholic guilt, and going down, down, down, without a stop. There are some real surprises in Herzog‘s film, but, like true noir masterpieces like Rififi, Touch of Evil and Double Indemnity, Herzog’s movie is about individual sin and social evil, with bad Terence as the crazy house mirror reflection of all the madness around him. Paint it black, Herzog. Knock ‘em dead, Nic.
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2012 (Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.; Roland Emmerich, 2009

A post-mortem on a flabbergasting success, “2012.”

Roland Emmerich, like too many top-budget Hollywood moviemakers, seems to find it far easier to destroy a world than to make us believe a simple conversation between a dad and his children (John Cusack and kids), a president father and his daughter (Danny Glover and Thandie Newton) , or a scientist and his amoral boss (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Oliver Platt).

Unfortunately for Emmerich‘s artistic aspirations (not his commercial ones, obviously), it’s those intimate scenes and how well they’re written and done, that might make us buy emotionally the idea of those same characters fighting their way through all the torrents, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes and havoc of 2012.

The German-born Emmerich obviously intends 2012 as the ultimate disaster movie, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing these earthquakes, cueing these torrents, and stage-managing this havoc any better -- which is why audiences are flocking to it. Say what you will, 2012 offers us an experience, especially when that L. A. nightmare, the long-feared San Andreas Fault, goes kaflooey.

But the reason poor Cusack, as writer-dad-hero Jackson Curtis, and all Jackson’s fellow disaster-sufferers as well, begin to look like ridiculous here -- as the earthquakes, volcanoes and floods stalk and pursue them everywhere, like rabid dogs -- is because, in the interims, none of these characters really act or talk like people facing either a family crisis or a planet about to be ripped from its axis.

Emmerich, who co-writes most of his scripts -- as he did here, together with the film’s Austrian-born composer/producer Harald Kloser -- should really hire himself a good dialogue man next time. Kloser is primarily a music man, and his only other film writing was the prehistoric dialogue for Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. (Here the characters talk like mammoth hunters who’ve been to high school and watched a few movies.) But a well-chosen word or a crackling line is often as vital and memorable as Hawaii in flames, or the Washington Monument toppling down on us.

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The Blind Side (Two Stars)
U. S.; John Lee Hancock, 2009

Another would be heart-warming sports movie: the story of football phenom Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a huge, quiet, castaway kid with an absent father and a crack mother, who’s adopted by wealthy, feisty Southerner Leigh Anne Touhy (Sandra Bullock) and her colorful family. Somehow Michael, who can drop in swishes on the basketball court, never learned to play football, though he’s as big by himself as an average high school blocking line. Then Mrs. Touhy takes him in hand. She plays on his protective instincts by telling him to protect the quarterback. Varoooom! (But how did he learn to swish those shots?)

Maybe I‘m getting surfeited with heartwarming sports success movies, but I couldn’t buy this new effort from director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie). Too much uplift. Too much sentiment-fondling. Too much interior decoration. Pretty good mother scene from Adriane Lenox. Too much sideline coaching. I like to have my heart warmed as much as anybody, but we need another good cynical sports picture that knows the score.
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Planet 51 (One and a Half Stars)
U.S.-Mexico; Jorge Blanco/Javier Abad/Marcos Martinez, 2009

Cutesy cartoon fluff, awash in clichés, that might play well on a rainy Saturday morning. In this Mexican-made science-fiction satire/comedy, little green Shrekkie-looking suburbanites on a distant planet have somehow evolved a civilization that resembles an ‘80s movie about a ‘50s American small town, trapped in the throes of invaders-from-outer-space paranoia. They all talk English, despite their rubbery green skin, lack of noses and hairdos that resemble bunches of unripe bananas.

Are you still with me? The Spielbergian kid protagonist Lem (voiced by Justin Long), is a planetarium worker and sci-fi fan, with a crush on a cute green neighbor (Jessica Biel), who’s being wooed by a Dylanesque protest guitar-strummer. Into their oddball world comes an American space launch and a good-natured astronaut, Capt. Chuck Baker (Dwayne Johnson, punishingly cheerful), who has a bouncy little R2-D2 clone. Chuck is immediately mistaken for a monstrous alien invader with murder on his mind by tyrannical General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and vivisection-happy Prof. Kipple (John Cleese).
        The plot and the soundtrack are rife with echoes of Alien, E.T.,  2001, and almost every other sci-fi movie classic you can think of. The screenwriter, Joe Stillman, also wrote Shrek and Shrek II, but he’s not cooking here. The only things the “Shreks” have in common with this movie are characters with green skin.

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La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris (Three Stars)
U. S.; Frederick Wiseman, 2000

Fred Wiseman, the director of The Titicult Follies, High School, Welfare, Domestic Violence and, more tellingly in this case, the 1995 Ballet -- is a master documentarian and a specialist in social issues and what the French call cinema verite. In his many documentaries, Wiseman, with his austerely understated camera and editing style, usually captures candid, unforgettable scenes of mundane, troubled or under-privileged American life.

Here he records, as usual without narration or comment, the inner workings of the life and are of the Ballet de l’Opera de Paris, as the dancers, choreographers and directors rehearse and perform seven ballets (including Tchaikovsky‘s The Nutcracker and other more modernist works), and as they fund-praise, or gab in the offices, or (the only scene that really reminds you this is a Wiseman film) as they get together for a labor union meeting.

I was mixed on the modernist works performed here, and would have preferred more of a variety. And Wiseman‘s customary silent observation and long take scenes leave you somewhat afloat at first -- as always. But they also make you more alert about what’s happening in the frame, which of course is what he wants. A legal expert and teacher before he was a filmmaker, he is a cinematic witness and investigator. Most of his films, in a way, are evidence.

Here, in “La Danse,” he presents the facts, unvarnished but sometimes beautiful, about the Ballet de L’Opera. At the end, the music and its practicioners, the people and their work, move you. As always. (In English and French, with English subtitles.) At the Music Box Theatre, Chicago.

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Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon (One and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Mary Mazzio, 2009

A bunch of inner-city kids start their own businesses, prepare their own presentations and compete against each other to impress moneymen (and women) in a national contest sponsored by the NFTE (the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship). I guess Ten9Eight’s heart is in the right place. But its money is where its mouth is, and vice versa. Too slick by half. And I’ve got a problem with any movie about how up-and-coming kids wangle financing with ten minute speeches. Is that how long bankers listen to you? No wonder we’re in a financial mess.

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Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime  (Three Stars)
France; Alain Resnais, 1968

One of Alain Resnais’ lesser-seen films, and (an optional) part of the traveling Resnais series now roaming U. S. film buff quarters, this is a welcome revival of a bizarre science fiction drama, a brilliant curiosity from one of the world‘s great living directors.

That estimable actor Claude Rich is Claude Ridder, a failed suicide who is recruited for a time travel experiment: Claude (and a memorable white mouse) are sent back in the past, where, unlike the modus operandi with most time travel films, he doesn’t operate freely, but instead experiences everything that once happened to him, all over again, including the unlucky love affair with Catrine (Olga-Georges Pigot) that drove him to attempted suicide. But this time, he sees everything in fast fragments and snippets, edited together in the non-chronological, out-of-order style of Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, or Muriel.

Claude Ridder is also listed as a character in the French omnibus anti-war film Far from Vietnam, though there Ridder was played by Bernard Fresson (also in the cast here) in the segment directed by Joris Ivens and Chris Marker. Je t’Aime, not first rank Resnais maybe, but quite fine all the same, reminds you, except for its anti-chronology, of his simpler, more deliberately archaic later work. It’s also a science fiction movie in the manner of Marker’s La Jetee: tense and melancholy, more about today (or then-today) than yesterday or tomorrow. (In French, with English subtitles.) Now at Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago.