2009: The Apocalypse Came 3 Years Early

Jest though I may about the prophetic predictions of 2012, one has to admit, it is staggering the number of films focused on the end of the world, or some other science-fiction related event which have sprung up in the last few years (well, really, this year). Well, all right, it's not just the apocalypse, and it's not just science-fiction--2009 has proven to be a truly revolutionary year for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. And of course, disaster.

I think it was around late August when I began to adopt a very bleak outlook on the year's list of movies--I had little hope for the late-year entries and there were only a handful of (admittedly amazing) high quality movies from the summer. However, that was before I was assaulted by the year's horror trifecta--I missed Drag Me to Hell in theatres, so I was treated to it on DVD not long ago. Bizarre as it is, I enjoyed every minute. Alison Lohman is beautiful as ever and of course she has a very good performance, and the overarching themes of the movie were quite staggering on certain levels of interpretation. (I'm fascinated by someone's idea that the entire movie is an allegory for Lohman's character struggling with anorexia.)

Next was Paranormal Activity--the best low-budget movie which became the most overrated low budget movie is actually really, really good. I had the convenience of seeing it before it was in fashion to call it overrated--I saw it with a bona-fide terrified audience, and rarely do I ever have so much fun in a theatre. The simple tactics work beautifully and kept me extraordinarily entertained. I can say comfortably that I loved it and was pretty scared by it.

The third film in the trilogy was quite possibly the best, and it never actually reached the big screen: "Trick r Treat" is probably the most underrated movie of the year purely because even the studio deemed it unworthy of national attention, when really it's a fantastic and really fun gem. It's essentially an anthology film, four stories presented one after the other, each getting more and more amusingly disturbing. With all of these great horror movies, it was quite the year for Halloween enthusiasts.

2009 was also an amazing year for anyone remotely interested in sci-fi. There was a barrage of great sci-fi pics during the summer, ranging from entertaining popcorn (Wolverine, Terminator) to really great, well-crafted works (Star Trek) to by far the best (so far at least), District 9. As I write this I realize that it has also been a year for small, low-budget pictures from new directors; District 9 is the epitome of that, taking a little and making it absolutely astounding. Vikus's character journey and the sheer terror which he encounters along the way is one of the best I've seen committed to film in a long time, and District 9 remains my second favorite film of the year so far.

While my outlook on the fantasy entries of the year is a tad more limited, that's largely because the central one (The Lovely Bones) is not yet available for my viewing, but I certainly expect that to be a major force in the genre. Also in the field was the sixth Harry Potter film, which (as I said in my review) was the best of the series so far. Up was one of Pixar's best, arguably a fantasy of the most rudimentary kind, as an old man paired with an upward-gazing boy grace the skies in the way only impeccable animation can deliver.

And of course, there's 2012, which I really loved, despite the fact that as far as film quality goes it's not that high up there. It's just one of those movies I enjoyed the hell out of. Somehow all that destruction was just so fun to watch.

All of this does not even mention Avatar, set to arrive in a couple of weeks, and that is to be the major tour de force of all of these genre films--if it is as revolutionary as has been said, 2009 will go down in history (at least for me) as one of the biggest years ever for this kind of movie.

The Long and Winding "Road"

"The Road" was an extraordinarily well-received book which I did not read; however, I know several people who did read it and were madly in love with it. Consequently I was expecting "The Road" to be a film well worth seeing--perhaps a masterpiece. It has received generally positive reviews, and raves for Viggo Mortensen's performance.

Happily I can say that Viggo delivers enormously, and that his performance is excellent. Not so happily, I must admit that I found the movie to be completely and totally insubstantial. That may sound like an odd criticism, but it's really my main fault with the thing: the performances are very good, the production values are high quality, the music quite pretty. My chief problem lies with the script.

As I said I have not read Cormac McCarthy's novel, but I have heard that the script's presentation of the story was very askew with respect to the source material. This does not surprise me, as the truth is, I found that not much really happens in the movie. It all seems like a trailer--a preview of the movie in full. Dialogue makes vague implications left and right, and we are never really apprised of what anyone is trying to say. There are not so much plot events as anecdotes; little stories about what happened when a dad and his son were travelling down a road during the apocalypse.

Ultimately the script suffers from the same emaciation which plagues the man and his son; ambiguity is taken to such a degree that we never really know if anyone is trying to say anything with this movie. The characters are mere outlines of truly fleshed out human beings. The characters ask what is happening, and there are significant looks between them during which there seems to be communication to indicate frightening or disturbing events, the nature of which we are very rarely apprised. The relationship between the father and son is developed largely through these significant glances, and thus the entire movie the audience (or at least this audience member) feels as though they are not nearly as aware of what is going on as the characters do; a kind of reverse dramatic irony. Personally, I did not enjoy being the subject of this irony.

Ultimately I think I have identified the problem: this book was not meant to be cinematized. It's like trying to adapt Catcher in the Rye; it's pointless. Some things are meant to be absorbed from the page, some from the screen, and some both. I believe The Road is one which should have been left to the reader to consume. Books, which can be digested over a long period, have the luxury of being entirely ambiguous and developing characters almost completely without dialogue; when you make such a book into a film, it seems rather like watching a foreign film without subtitles. There may have been any number of utterly fascinating (or more importantly, affecting) things going on, but I will never know. As it is, it is a relatively interesting film worth perhaps a passing glance for the relationship between father and son, and Viggo Mortensen's performance.

"They called me Mr. Glass."

M. Night Shyamalan, as of right now, is a terrible director, and it's made all the worse by the fact that he thinks he's one of the greatest directors ever. "The Happening" was an atrociously acted, terribly written and directed attempt at horror. He called it the best B-movie of all time.

That's 2008. Rewind eight years, and you'll find Shyamalan on top of a really great movie (one that we can file under undiscovered) called "Unbreakable," a movie about finding out who you really are. The film has fascinating cinematography largely conceptualized by Shyamalan himself, as we see very long extended shots of multiple characters as they converse, express their emotions subtly, give little away on the exterior but show the truth bubbling below the surface. Samuel L. Jackson gave one of the best performances of his career, and Bruce Willis and Robin Wright were also great.

So, how exactly did this happen? It's easy, of course. He was swallowed by the temptation of fame. I can just envision him in a meeting with a producer on "Lady in the Water," as he is asked if it's really the best idea to make a movie for his kids, and Shyamalan would have probably asked, "Were you nominated for a Best Director Oscar?"

These days, you'd be hardpressed to find someone actually complimenting Shyamalan for anything. But, it's hard to ignore for me that he did have some excellent endeavors early on, before he succumbed to temptation and became one of the most hated (and admittedly worst) directors working in Hollywood today.

"Unbreakable" is somewhat slow-moving, taking its time to unfold its themes about identity and the terror of losing it. Both central characters, played by Willis and Jackson, are essentially searching for the truth within themselves. David, as played by Willis, has perpetuated a lie to his wife for ten years, and a rift between them, nudging the possibility of divorce, has been the consequence. Elijah, played by Jackson, is lonely, surrounded by the inpenetrable cloud of solitude. He has suffered from a terrible physical condition for all his life, one which commands great effort and nerve just to step outside. It is therefore inevitable that he sees his opposite in David, who was involved in a train crash and emerged unscathed.

This film is steeped in slightly odd fictitious situations, but it feels very genuine and real the entire running time. There is harrowing intensity in the few scenes which intend to put the viewer on the edge of their seat. Shyamalan is able to create the most pulse-pounding scene of the movie out of a boy pointing a loaded gun at his father. Such sequences demonstrate Shyamalan's directorial finesse, and the writing isn't half-bad either.

The twist in the movie is a much more significant and even surprising one than that of "The Sixth Sense." The final line has to be one of my favorites of any movie ever. Accomplishments like that add to the overall experience of the film, and of course enhance the overall confusion over the debacle that Shyamalan's career has tumbled into.

I loved "Unbreakable," and despite its lack of attention from movie-goers or critics, I honestly believe this is his best movie and recommend it to anyone looking for a rewarding cinematic experience. Unfortunately, I would put a great deal of money down that Shyamalan will never achieve this high of quality again in a movie. If nothing else, he has become the benchmark for up-and-coming directors--don't be anything like him.

"A guy gets on the metro here in LA and dies. Do you think anybody'll notice?"

As I add more movies to my repertoire, you the reader shall find that there is no logic to the selections I make; if nothing else I hope not to fall into any sort of pattern, lest I begin to get boring. I'll mostly be trying to tap into underrated, overrated, and largely undiscovered movies. Obviously there is no point in singing the praises of say, "The Shawshank Redemption," my favorite film, as it has already been universally praised.

Back to the topic at hand, "Collateral" is a film I watched quite recently, rather in correspondance with Michael Mann's latest effort, "Public Enemies," which I loved, but that discussion will have to wait for another time, when I've fully collected my thoughts in a manner adaptable to a blog post.

"Collateral" is a movie which I did not fully realize the value of until I had seen the film a few times. It's not Mann's best movie, but very possibly his most entertaining, and one which I find to be enormously pertinent to humanity. This may sound a bit shallow, but I truly find the relationship between the unwitting taxi driver and the precise, confident assassin to be fascinating and oddly addicting, as this is a movie that has yet to wear on me.



Michael Mann does demonstrate his love for two central characters, on opposite sides of the ethical line, revealing a great deal about each other. As trite as it may sound, Mann finds exactly the right pitch, as do Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, to portray these characters. Cruise, especially, often underrated and dismissed because of his fame, gives a highly intriguing turn.

Of course, Foxx has a more important part to play, as he is the identifier with the audience. He is the everyman, Joe the Plumber, the epitome of a guy in a crappy job that one falls into after losing grips on one's dreams. I mean, how much more average can you get than driving a cab?

So, as Foxx's cabbie is presented with a harrowing, life-or-death situation, he is awoken to the truth of the outside world. As Cruise's Vincent notes, they're just tiny dots on the surface of the planet amidst countless galaxies, and "who notices?" Foxx's Max turns the tables on Vincent, waking up from his interminable stupor and embracing the life that has been given to him, rather than watching it roll by.

There is a beautiful scene after one of the more intense action setpieces when Max attempts to psychoanalyze Vincent, who rebounds with saying everything that Max fears in the deepest trenches of his soul; Max claims to be working on a limo company and that driving a taxi is only temporary, yet he's been doing it for 12 years. He accomplished getting a number of a girl earlier on in the night, a number which Max knows deep inside him that he will never call. Max knows, as Vincent tells him, that one day he'll be old and decrepit, and his dreams will have evaded his grasp. Of course, Vincent doesn't have to say any of this to Max. He could sit in the back of the cab and not speak a word of outreach to his driver as he goes around town killing people, but Vincent finds a twisted kind of friend in Max because he is average. Vincent has lived a life of torment and suffering, abandoning moral direction and being locked into a prison of doing the same thing for the rest of his life, or being killed himself. In the average person, Vincent sees the true nature of so much of humanity--we, like Max, feel imprisoned by our circumstances. We pity ourselves, we wish we could attain our highest dreams, but don't really do anything about it. Vincent couldn't change his life path if he wanted to. He kills or is killed. It is this contrast that makes the insights of the film so authentic, and ingenious.

"Why is it that when something happens, it's always you three?"

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" may seem a bizarre choice for my first movie discussion out of the almost unlimited mass of films I could have chosen, but it is the freshest on my mind.

I have to preface this by saying that JK Rowling's seven books have created quite the intimidating tableau. It's not perfect, but it is insanely entertaining and actually has a high degree of depth and even some genius to it. However, the series doesn't quite ascend to that next level until it includes the final book, the best and the justification of everything that has come before it. This fact therefore creates a bit of unease with respect to the film series; after all, how can any of the first six films feel like their own, individual pieces of filmmaking without being only as good as the movie before or after it?

The first film, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," achieved exactly what the book did. Nothing more, nothing less. It was very entertaining and a joy to watch. However, it did not achieve anything greater on a cinematic scale. Quite the same can be said for number 2, "Chamber of Secrets," which is actually brought down by the fact that it has very few differences with respect to the first.

It was at that point that we arrived at Alfonso Cuaron's "Prisoner of Azkaban," one of only two films in the series of six which achieves the status of great film. It was dark and very stylistic, weaving a fascinating intrigue with entertaining characters. Cuaron showed me (and much of the movie-watching community as well) that these books could be translated into not just high quality movies, but films worth watching of their own accord. Then, we had "Goblet of Fire" from Mike Newell, perhaps the most successful film in the series, but not the best simply because it was trying to be a very entertaining action flick, and that mission was accomplished.

Another rather large cornerstone in the series was 2007's "Order of the Phoenix," but this time not in a good way. The fifth novel is probably one of the weakest, being overlong and very scattered. David Yates unfortunately displayed an inability to find a focus in the adaptation, as the movie was even more of a mess than the book. Though "Order of the Phoenix" was filler in the novel, it was massively entertaining filler. Yates (and the newbie scriptwriter Michael Goldenberg) apparently also felt that the book was lacking in substance, as the movie has almost none. The extremely entertaining, addicting chapters of the book were dissolved into attempts at bizarre, unfunny humor and giving Imelda Staunton a room to light up, as opposed to taking advantage of the hooking plot.

The result is probably the weakest of the movies, despite some moments of pure gold, such as the lengthy series of action sequences near the end. Naturally, David Yates had some catching up to do with "Half-Blood Prince."

Again analyzing the source material, "Half-Blood Prince" is actually a very strong book that is similarly entertaining but with more depth and thought. Also, Steve Kloves returned to write the script after Goldenberg's unsuccessful standing-in. It seemed to be this combination that has resulted in the second "Harry Potter" film to transcend its name and become an excellent film on its own.

David Yates demonstrated his directorial aplomb in the aforementioned scenes in "Order," but this time around, his skill is all over the movie. He has managed to find a very precise focus that doesn't wander or get messy, and turned an entry in the mythology into a character drama with the backdrop of a war, one which just so happens to be magical.

Many have wondered several things about the adaptation, such as the focus on the romances, the deletion of a large battle scene at the end, and the excising of certain sequences which reveal more about Voldemort's past.

What many don't seem to understand is that this movie is about growing up when faced with the darkness and threat of war, and to exclude the three central characters falling in love would almost be naive. However, the majority of these scenes remain highly entertaining in their well-executed humor, and the few serious ones contribute to the development of these young characters. That's not to mention the excellent acting of the trio from Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint, who have been more than spotty in the past but find just the right harmony in this installment.

The battle scene at the end would have greatly detracted from the emotional, shocking climax had it been included, so the decision to maintain the focus without it was the right one, in my opinion. Also, though it is tempting to explore the tragedy of Lord Voldemort in the films, it would be unwise to humanize your murderous villain in an installment where he is nowhere to be seen to remind viewers that he is an evil SOB.

The acting across the board is superb, from the Oscar-worthy turn of Jim Broadbent as Professor Slughorn to the series-best acting from Tom Felton as Draco, and everyone in between: Michael Gambon, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Mark Williams, and Helena Bonham-Carter give pitch-perfect performances.

On the subject of specific characters, Draco Malfoy's arc in the movie serves as both an excellent backbone of the movie, as well as elevating the movie into present-day significance, as the sixteen-year-old has very much been recruited to strap a bomb to his chest. Also, the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore is really the core of the film, from the brilliantly chosen first shot of Harry in the Ministry to the tragedy in the final sequence.

There are a couple of weaknesses in the movie, but overall they don't detract from the rewarding experience. The lack of explanation as to the nature of the titular character seems to confuse most non-readers, which is an unfortunate transfer of book to screen, as the tedious exposition which explains the title was clearly cut in favor of having a better flow. The romance between Harry and Ginny seems slightly unnatural as well, while there are a couple of scenes in the first half that do not particularly advance the plot that last for a tad bit too long.

I would be remiss to not mention the technical aspects; the visual effects and art direction are splendid as always, and Nicholas Hooper improves massively from the last film on the musical score, which is bordering on epic, and, of course, the shining jewel is Bruno Delbonnel's moody, beautiful cinematography which should really be nominated for an Oscar.

The small complaints are petty, as overall, Yates has proven himself in spades as actually being capable of elevating the film past the book, as the movie in this case focuses on the emotional dramatic aspects to produce a well-focused, well-acted, beautiful piece of celluloid which can claim the title of being the best of the "Harry Potter" series so far.

On a side note, from having read the final book to seeing many pictures of the filming (and being armed with the knowledge that Eduardo Serra is the director of photography), I can safely say that the two "Deathly Hallows" films are going to be, quite simply, remarkable.

Welcome to the Screening Room

I have created this blog with the simple purpose in mind of discussing movies, with no particular rhyme or reason. I won't necessarily be reviewing films as much as I'll be talking about them, in blog posts and in the comment sections whenever the situation presents itself.

I believe that film is one of the most transcendant of all art forms, one which combines entertainment with exploration into the human mind and soul. Watching movies at a theater is a social opportunity as much as it is a gateway into the potential depth and art therein. I do have in mind a certain desire to become a film director once the time comes, and I certainly believe that little can shape one's skills in filmmaking that is not watching and analyzing movies.

Hopefully this site is a good vessel for such analysis and discussion, for anyone who wants to read or discuss, cineaste-in-the-making or not.