SPIKE JONZE IS A NUT...

...and a genius. I can't wait to see his next film, his adaptation of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. Here's a sweet new picture from this sure-to-be-trippy film. It hits theaters October 3, 2008.

REVIEW: SOUTHLAND TALES (**1/2)

SOUTHLAND TALES (**1/2)

How can one accurately “review” Richard Kelly’s mind-bendingly asinine new film SOUTHLAND TALES? Kelly, who’s first film was the cult classic (and quite enjoyable) DONNIE DARKO, has stumbled with his second directorial effort, but he gets points for trying. A sprawling, semi-coherent, Los Angeles-based, head-trip of a film, SOUTHLAND TALES feels like one of the most expensive experimental films ever made. It’s a maddening sit, and at two-and-a-half-hours, it feels its length, especially during the film’s rambling mid-section. However, it’s impossible to completely dismiss this film as some critics have; while flawed, it’s a surreal, distinct vision that could only have come from a filmmaker with some serious talent. It’s an over-indulgent mess of a story that takes elements of political satire, post-apocalyptic nightmare, science-fiction fantasy, romantic drama, and movie-musical and throws them all into a blender and swirls them all up into a wacky smoothie of a movie, one that is only partially digestible.

It’s an impossible movie to dissect, but let me try. The film starts off in 2005, at a backyard, Fourth of July barbecue in Texas. Home video camera footage shows families playing with sparklers and eating hot dogs. Then, the unthinkable—a mushroom cloud can be seen in the horizon. An atomic bomb has been dropped in Abilene. The world is forever changed. We then jump three years into the future to Los Angeles; again, it’s July 4, 2008, but the world we knew is gone. Society stands on the brink of social, economic and environmental disaster. A fascist government is in control; big brother is lurking everywhere. Boxer Santaros (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is an action star who's stricken with amnesia. He crosses paths with a conniving porn star named Krysta Now (a sadly fully clothed Sara Michelle Geller), who, among other things, is developing her own reality television project. The two of them concoct a movie idea that has Boxer set to play a cop. Meanwhile, good-guy cop Ronald Taverner (an excellent Sean William Scott), agrees to allow Santaros to shadow him so he can get the feel for police life. But, it turns out that Taverner may hold the key to a vast conspiracy that nobody is ready to comprehend. There’s a lot more to SOUTHLAND TALES than that. Radicals are stirring up a political uprising, using Venice beach and Santa Monica as their home base; much of Los Angeles has been reduced to a DMZ. Armed soldiers monitor the beaches and streets with itchy trigger fingers. Then there’s the finale with two Roland Taverners, time-portals that open up into new dimensions, a floating ice cream truck, rocket launchers, and an exploding, futuristic zeppelin. There’s more…much more…but I’m at a loss to know how to summarize all of it.

Making all of these disparate threads add up to a cohesive whole is just one problem that Kelly encounters. Clearly, he’s bitten off well more than he can chew, but I have to hand it to him—while flawed in many respects, his film is never boring and is fascinating on many levels. One of the key problems with SOUTHLAND TALES is that Kelly is satirizing a world that doesn’t exist; its one thing to reference the work of Stanley Kubrick and other surrealist filmmakers, but Kelly doesn’t have a grip of his material. Sure, he’s created a frightening political and social landscape, one that in fact may not be too far away for all of us in reality. But by not basing his vision in any sort of realistic setting, the audience isn’t in on the joke like Kelly; he’s poking fun at a world that is so far removed from our own that his satire holds no weight. It might all make sense to him, but it doesn’t add up for the audience. The performances are broad, and in many respects, way over-played. “The Rock” has been effective in a few action flicks (check out Peter Berg’s underrated THE RUNDOWN) but here, he never fits into Kelly’s idiosyncratic groove. Geller, while still sexy, is over-eager in her role, and by the end, a bit of an annoyance. However, Sean William Scott, still best known for his immortal role of Stifler in the AMERICAN PIE franchise, is terrific; granted, his character (much like the audience) spends most of the film in a fog of confusion, but the charm and ease that he brings to this silly movie is effective and almost too good for the film in general.

This is the sort of film that feels like it’s been made by a bunch of stoners with tons of ideas and no sure way of expressing themselves. SOUTHLAND TALES lurches towards its fiery climax, and it’s only then that the movie takes off; the last 30 minutes are actually pretty awesome in a deranged, Terry Gilliam, chuck-it-all abandon that makes for some delirious fun. But if you asked me what the point of the film was, I wouldn’t know. And if you asked me what happened to every character (and more importantly why) I wouldn’t be able to answer. Kelly worked on this film extensively after he was booed at the Cannes Film Festival after he screened an almost three hour cut of the film. He snipped about 30 minutes from the run time, got rid of entire characters, added some special effects, but was still unable to create a tangible sense of purpose with SOUTHLAND TALES. Again, a film this creative, unique, and brazen could only come from an individual with an enormous imagination. And in today’s cookie-cutter Hollywood landscape, he deserves points for making a film as out there as this one. Too bad he couldn’t bring it all together to form something truly special, as SOUTHLAND TALES threatens to become. As is, SOUTHLAND TALES is an ambitious failure, one that I had some fun watching, have had more fun thinking about in the days after watching it, and should serve as a precedent for Kelly—next time, relax, and tell one story, not twelve.

BEST OF 2007

Here is my full list for the best and worst of 2007, in groups of 10:

Julian Schnabel’s THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
Andrew Dominik’s THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
Joel & Ethan Coen’s NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Sean Penn’s INTO THE WILD
David Fincher’s ZODIAC
Ridley Scott’s AMERICAN GANGSTER
Susanne Bier’s THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE
David Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES
Sidney Lumet’s BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD
Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON

Peter Berg’s THE KINGDOM
Zack Snyder’s 300
Paul Greengrass’ THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS
Jimmy Mangold’s 3:10 TO YUMA
Judd Apatow’s KNOCKED UP
John Carney’s ONCE
Werner Herzog’s RESCUE DAWN
Joe Wright’s ATONEMENT
Jason Reitman’s JUNO

Ben Affleck’s GONE BABY GONE
Kevin Lima’s ENCHANTED
Todd Haynes’ I’M NOT THERE
Dan Klores’ CRAZY LOVE
James Gray’s WE OWN THE NIGHT
Paul Haggis’ IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
Gavin Hood’s RENDITION
Gore Verbinski’s PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 WEEKS LATER
Billy Ray’s BREACH

Jake Kasdan’s THE TV SET
Peter Hedges’ DAN IN REAL LIFE
Michael Moore’s SICKO
Charles Ferguson’s NO END IN SIGHT
Wes Anderson’s THE DARJEELING LIMITED
David Silverman’s THE SIMPSONS: THE MOVIE
Adrienne Shelly’s WAITRESS
Richard Kelly’s SOUTHLAND TALES
Brian De Palma’s REDACTED
David Von Ancken’s SERAPHIM FALLS

Mike Binder’s REIGN OVER ME
Bong Joon-ho’s THE HOST
Joe Carnahan’s SMOKIN’ ACES
DJ Caruso’s DISTURBIA
Michael Winterbottom’s A MIGHTY HEART
Steven Soderbergh’s OCEANS 13
Craig Brewer’s BLACK SNAKE MOAN
Terry George’s RESERVATION ROAD
Zoe Cassavettes’ BROKEN ENGLISH
Michael Davis’ SHOOT ‘EM UP

Scott Frank’s THE LOOKOUT
Mikael Hafstrom’s 1408
Greg Mottola’s SUPERBAD
Robert Zemeckis’ BEOWULF (IMAX 3-D)
Jonathan Kasdan’s IN THE LAND OF WOMEN
Luc Besson’s ANGEL-A
Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini’s THE NANNY DIARIES
William Friedkin’s BUG
Mark Polish’s THE ASTRONAUT FARMER
Will Speck & Josh Gordon’s BLADES OF GLORY

Antoine Fuqua’s SHOOTER
Curtis Hanson’s LUCKY YOU
Gregory Hoblit’s FRACTURE
Nick Cassavettes’ ALPHA DOG
Edgar Wright’s HOT FUZZ
Nimrod Attal’s VACANCY
Akiva Schaffer’s HOT ROD
Quentin Tarantino & Robert Rodriguez’s GRINDHOUSE
Sam Raimi’s SPIDERMAN 3
Bruce Evans’ MR. BROOKS

Len Wiseman’s LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD
Walt Becker’s WILD HOGS
Dennis Dugan’s I KNOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY
Joel Schumacher’s THE NUMBER 23
James Foley’s PERFECT STRANGER
Dave Meyer’s THE HITCHER

TWO MORE EXCELLENT FILMS

ATONEMENT and JUNO, two very different movies, were both excellent. JUNO is a fast, razor sharp comedy that is surprisingly well observed. And ATONEMENT is a classic, sweeping, beautifully photographed romantic epic. More to come this week on both.

ASTONISHING

Julian Schnabel's masterpiece THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY was an overwhelming experience to view on the big screen. Certainly one of the best films of the year (if not the best...), it's an emotionally shattering work of art, with some of the greatest camerawork and visual storytelling that I have ever seen. I have not digested this amazing picture fully, but let me just say that if you live in a city where this film is playing and you don't see it, you're doing a disservice to yourself. I will not lie--this is a tough picture to watch at times, and while never agonizingly graphic, it's a film that will invade your mind, and take full control of your emotions.

THIS WEEKEND AT THE MOVIES

I plan on seeing THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY on Saturday and both JUNO and ATONEMENT on Sunday; should be an excellent weekend at the theaters!

REVIEW: BEOWULF

BEOWULF **

Robert Zemeckis’ BEOWULF is one of the great disappointments of the year. Even after seeing it in the much hyped 3-D IMAX format, I was left completely underwhelmed. Sure, the technology is cool and the movie has some fun moments, but overall, it’s boring, cheesy, campy, and repetitive. Zemeckis’ passion for and reliance on his much discussed motion-capture CGI technique has started to overshadow his wonderful storytelling abilities. True, BEOWULF offers some simple pleasures: you get to see Angelina Jolie mostly nude, there are some nice fight sequences, and the great Ray Winstone is a true man’s-man. But the exciting moments are few and far between, and the story’s repetitious structure becomes a slog, especially after the one hour mark. Having never read the epic poem that screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman have adapted for the screen, I wasn’t comparing the film to its source material; I was at the IMAX theater for pure spectacle. And it just didn’t pop the way I thought it would.

Winstone is Beowulf, the mighty monster slayer who is brought to a Dutch village by King Hrothgar (a de-aged Anthony Hopkins) that is being terrorized by a sadistic creature named Grendel (a disgustingly rendered, motion-captured Crispin Glover). Grendel gets upset when the king and his villagers throw drunken parties; it gives him a headache. Or something to that effect. So Grendel makes it a habit of party crashing, usually with the goal of slaughtering everyone in the vicinity. After an inexplicably nude Beowulf takes on Grendel in a one on one fight to the death, Beowulf realizes a much greater danger lays in wait for him: mommy. Grendel’s seductive and evil mother (the otherworldly sexy Jolie) makes him an offer he can’t refuse and the plot thickens. Beowulf becomes a king and fights a massive dragon, all the while still contending with his actions stemming from his encounter with Grendel’s mother. The message of the film is simple and timeless: hot women can’t be trusted.

I pretty much hate the motion-capture process when it’s used exclusively to tell a story. The entire film looked like a Playstation video game and while the 3-D elements were at times striking, the overall effect had an artificial and numbing quality to the images. When director Gore Verbinski and the geniuses at ILM created the motion-capture character of Davy Jones in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise, they chose to create the character as a motion-capture CGI creation. But the reason why that worked so well was because the rest of the film was shot live action combined with real actors on real sets in real time. The overall effect of seeing so many computer effects in BEOWULF completely detaches the viewer from the viewing experience. Fine, some of the renderings were amazing. Jolie looked even hotter than she does in real life, and Winstone looked pretty cool. But the other female characters were soft and gauzy looking, and there’s something so strange about looking at a younger, almost alien looking Anthony Hopkins. The process was never consistent and it just grew irritating. And while the 3-D was snazzy in fits and starts, it all started to feel like the world’s most expensive pop-up book.

BEOWULF makes a huge step back for Zemeckis, a filmmaker I have loved without reservation for many years. I found his last 3-D motion-capture film, THE POLAR EXPRESS, to be a truly thrilling cinematic experience. Some of the enjoyment that I got from that film was on a purely sentimental level; the novel was read by my father every year at Christmas. The motion-capture IMAX 3-D experience of THE POLAR EXPRESS was infinitely more enjoyable when compared to what’s on display in BEOWULF. In THE POLAR EXPRESS, you're on that gigantic train as it skids over that frozen lake and winds through the snow-capped mountains. I never got that visceral rush once while watching BEOWULF. Zemeckis seems to have lost interest in making real films. Much like James Cameron, Zemeckis has become an innovator first, filmmaker second. And I am disappointed by that. I loved BACK TO THE FUTURE 1-3, CAST AWAY, FORREST GUMP, CONTACT, and WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (where Zemeckis was innovating AND telling a great story). The way that Zemeckis, in the past, has blended his special effects into live action shooting is nothing short of trendsetting and remarkable. But again, in movies past, the special effects served the story, rather than becoming the story. I maintain that if Zemeckis had mounted a live-action $150 million version of BEOWULF with a few motion-captured characters (Grendel, the dragon), the overall result would have been much, much better. Actually, it probably would have been amazing. Imagine BRAVEHEART in 3-D. GLADIATOR in 3-D. Now we’re talking. Creating an entire film in motion-capture is silly and childish. Why we’re treated to a glimpse of Hopkins’ digitally smoothed-over naked rear-end as he plays a younger version of himself is just the tip of the ice berg.

I wanted to enjoy BEOWULF. I had every reason to believe that I would love it. But I didn't. And I had a nagging sense during almost the entire film that Zemeckis was more interested in playing around with whatever the latest technology was/is, and that he lost sight of telling a rip-roaring action adventure story. When I initially heard that Zemeckis was going to make this film, I was very excited. The prospect of a 3-D IMAX action film on a scale like this was something to be excited for. And even though I wasn't a huge fan of the motion-capture process, I had faith in Zemeckis as I've never truly been let down by one of his films. Alas, BEOWULF turned out to be just that—a major league let down.