For Chrissakes People, You've Had Six Chances to Get it Right

 Saw VI

Directed by Kevin Greutert

Zero Stars

My response to the “Saw” franchise has been an ever-evolving process.  I began with relative indifference to a mediocre original that showed an early penchant for romanticizing Stockholm syndrome.  The film’s most notable watershed was simply that it provided us with manipulation while depriving us of revelation, the concept that the entire franchise would eventually be founded on. 

With the second in the series, however, came the formula, and I found myself suddenly enthusiastic about the inevitable franchise’s comical ineptitude.  My friends and I would have bad scary movie nights, of which “Saw II” and “Saw III” became staple finales, following the likes of “Mosquitoman”, “Stay Alive”, and “Santa’s Slay”.  Hilarity always ensued.

But somewhere during the fourth installment the joke grew old, and I began to realize that what I had always been laughing at were the people who reveled in this tripe, the people who were systematically blown away by the exact same plot line on repeat, the people who confused fear with their gag reflex, the people who just plain got their kicks out of people being mutilated.

I sat through a sold out weekend opening of “Saw V” last year offended by this country’s reprehensibly bad taste.  The crowed whooped and hollered and clapped and cheered.  They thought they were watching something shocking, something provocative and clever.  That anyone could look at the “Saw” franchise and see that, let alone enough people to make the series an annual chart topper, shows what a decrepit state this nation’s culture is in.

Of this year’s “Saw VI” I can describe my experience only as catatonic, not quite asleep and not quite alive, watching the movie as though I were waiting for it to catch up with me.  “Yes, yes, I already know this,” I found myself thinking.  “This happens in every movie.  No need to present it as some kind of mammoth reveal.”

The theater this year, which promisingly was only modestly full on opening night, erupted in applause after a young woman chopped her own arm off.  I shook my head.  This is why they came.  This is what they wanted to see.  They’ve proven that with their vocal enthusiasm.  The masochism in this society is off the charts.  This is a problem. 

The story of “Saw VI” proceeds as it usually does, loaded with cheap little mysteries, the most tantalizing of which was why on earth anyone would care.  Of this film I will not provide any explicit spoilers, but I will point out that in every “Saw” sequel up until now, the main character has died, always only moments after it is revealed that their ‘game’ had one unforeseen phase remaining.  Oops, my mistake.  Looks like that was a spoiler after all.

I say this of course, because there are scores of people out there who still insist they go to the “Saw” movies for the story, and I have to wonder what the hell they’re talking about.  People who are excited by the storylines in the “Saw” series, I would modestly propose, do not have a very good idea of what constitutes a quality “story”.  I would recommend that they try films like “Diabolique”, “Psycho”, or “Rosemary’s Baby” if they wish to meld their horror fetish with inspired storytelling.

I am sure that there will be a “Saw VII”, and I am sure that I will see it.  The experience will continue to evolve.  However, I doubt very much that I will see fit to give a higher rating to next year’s installment than I have given any of these sequels, which has always been the lowest rating available.  Why I continue to see these films I cannot say for sure.  Perhaps my own level of masochism is equally distressing.

Rollan Schott
October 29, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

How Do You Solve the Problems of the Justice System? Disregard the Justice System

 Law Abiding Citizen

Directed by F. Gary Gray

One and One Half Stars

“Law Abiding Citizen” is a film about all of the horrors of the American justice system.  You know, like diplomacy and civil rights.  It’s a film that advocates the death penalty, such that one of two potential corpses is about a dozen too few.  That the film is reasonably well acted and directed doesn’t make it any less irresponsible.

Gerard Butler plays the instigator, Clyde Shelton, one of those wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly-unless-that-fly-was-really-super-annoying tough guys with an adorable little daughter, a beautiful wife, and a history they probably don’t know about.  One night his doorbell rings, and he is greeted with a baseball bat to the face and a pair of serial killers who murder his wife and daughter.  If the word arbitrary doesn’t come to mind, you’re not paying attention.

The two men are caught.  Motivations are not pursued.  Clyde lands attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Fox) who cuts a deal with the DA to send one of the two murderers to death row but lets the other off with a short jail sentence in favor of his testimony.  Clyde is less than satisfied.  They both deserve to die.

And so, ten years later, Clyde begins his killing spree, wiping out everyone who had anything to do with the case.  This includes everyone from the judge right down to the prosecutorial assistants.  The process calls not for the suspension of disbelief, but for the euthanization of it

Part of me wants to admit that there’s a “Clockwork Orange” style courage in director F. Gary Gray’s assault on human decency and fairness.  His approach here suggests that fairness within the legal system is too often insufficient to provide adequate justice.  If you know that someone is guilty, why do you need to prove it to the court?

There is a difference between being the best available justice system and being a perfect justice system.  Because this system proves itself imperfect during Clyde’s case, he assumes it to be a total failure, and aims to dismantle it entirely.  In favor of what?  He doesn’t seem to have any alternative outside of unrestrained violence.

There’s something reprehensible about “Law Abiding Citizen” and the way it misrepresents the capacity of the courtroom for the purpose of unleashing anarchy on the audience.  That Nick Rice learns a ‘valuable’ lesson, taught by said anarchy, sinks the project completely.  Of my final observation of the movie’s message I will not comment, but rather will leave that to you.  The American court system will only work on those who choose to work it.

Rollan Schott
October 28, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

The Year's Biggest Bombshell is All About Preventing Explosions

 The Hurt Locker

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Four Stars

"Open the hurt locker, and learn how rough men come hunting for souls." -- Brian Turner, from his poem "The Hurt Locker"

The Hurt Locker has no axe to grind, pro or con, with the current Iraq war. The film opens with a quote by American war correspondent Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug." Perhaps a tad obvious, and I'd like to think I would have worked that out for myself from the film that follows the quote, but the quote doesn't only apply to the people on the battlefield. War is a drug for humanity. We wage war over resources, over beliefs, for power. It has been said by many that if we lived in a world without religion, many of the great wars of our past would have been averted. Nonsense. If there was no religion, we would find other reasons to murder, maim, and attempt to control each other.

Kathryn Bigelow's film -- one of the most riveting, spellbinding and best of the year -- doesn't care about the politics behind the Iraq war. It cares about the people on the battlefield, the effect that war has on them, and the massive chasm between the reality of on-site war, and the way the public respond to it. The Hurt Locker dispells some myths that we all perpetuate about this war. I am no authority on war personally, never having enlisted in the Army, Navy, or Marines. My grandfather was with the air force, though, and I think he would agree with what I'm about to say: war is messy -- despite the press conferences for our benefit held by generals about tactics and progress, war is by nature anarchic. War is also surprisingly quiet. Punctuated by disturbances of violent attacks and explosions, yes, but for longer than we might think, it involves waiting. War is also, despite what the recruitment advertisements propagate, not fun.

At no point in The Hurt Locker do the characters appear to have fun. The film opens with a spectacular sequence involving the diffusing of a bomb in Baghdad. An elite Army bomb squad, led by Sgt. Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), performs a delicate operation in trying to disarm a bomb on a quiet Baghdad corner. One thing I noticed in this scene, and just about all subsequent scenes involving bomb disarmament, is that the local Iraqis simply stand on the street or their balconies and watch the proceedings. They're just as helpless as the Americans, though the Americans have the illusion of possible control of the situation. Sometimes they get lucky. And it does feel like luck, despite the fact that these men know bombs intimately, and behave like neuro-surgeons when faced with dismantling them.

Let's just say that in the opening scene, they don't get lucky. It's not a big spoiler to tell you that we see the bomb go off, and for the rest of the film dread experiencing that feeling of resignation and hopelessness again. The rest of the film follows the team, particularly Sgts. William Jones (Jeremy Renner) and JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Gerarghty) on their bomb squad rotation. They patrol Baghdad, and sometimes are called to diffuse a bomb. Sometimes, trouble just finds them.

While The Hurt Locker is a war picture, it's also an exciting action movie. Bigelow constructs her action sequences with clarity and tension. She shows us what the consequences are if these guys don't do their job right. The action scenes in this film are infinitely more exciting than those in most blockbusters you'll see this year, because we care about the characters involved. While they may merely be cannon fodder from the callous and indifferent war's perspective, to us they are human.

Jeremy Renner brings massive intensity to his role as Sgt. William James, and Oscar glory could well await him come February. There is relatively little dialogue in The Hurt Locker, but no line is wasted. Every conversation, every exchange between the characters says something to us about their state of mind. One scene in which the group come to blows in their dormitory shows us the lengths some will go to in war-time to feel something, even if it that 'something' is anger with the people that are supposed to be on their side.

In so many ways The Hurt Locker represents how the public at large feels about this Iraq war, but it never once calls attention to the political forces that instigated it. Like the soldiers, we're all tired and weary. Most of us feel that the war is directionless and infinite. The Hurt Locker offers a rather uncomfortable suggestion: we might all be right.

Jonathan Fisher
October 26, 2009
Originally Featured at The Film Brief

A Child's Imagination Run Wild

Where the Wild Things Are

Directed by Spike Jonze

Two and One Half Stars

I suspect that many lifelong fans of Maurice Sendak’s acclaimed children’s book, “Where the Wild Things Are”, have already formed in their minds a masterpiece of a film.  They’ve become fans of it on Facebook weeks before its release and will exchange catchphrases like “it’s gonna be awesome” as they stand in line to see it.  It is a testament to the human imagination, I suppose, that many people will leave the theater convinced they’d seen that masterpiece, regardless of what transpired on screen.

Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are”, an adaptation of Sendak’s immortal children’s book, is very much about that kind of imagination.  It is an emotionally poignant movie distracted by wildly inconsistent characters and obtrusive camerawork.  Jonze does a wonderful job in his film recalling the essence of a nine year old boy, but he does a poor job of really bringing this particular one to life.

Max Records assumes the lead role of Max, a young boy with a penchant for applying his fantastical ideas to his not-so-fantastical reality.  Most notable is his ability to internalize great tragedies out of ordinary familial conflicts, which is the type of incident that sets the real story in motion.  Max’s mother (Catherine Keener) is, for all I can tell, a loving a devoted parent.  She empathizes with Max when his sister’s friends smash his snow fortress, but promptly and responsibly punishes him for his revenge.  She also has a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), which brings to mind the potential trauma of losing a father in some way or another.

When Max flees into the night and into his fantasies after a spat with his mother, it isn’t because she is an abusive or neglectful parent (as would have been the case in a lesser movie), but because Max likes to think she is in order to fuel his wild imagination.  Then Max sails away on a sea of fantasy to an island where the wild things are.  They are most unhappy, and he determines to help them.

Why are the wild things unhappy?  Because this is Max’s fantasy, you see - a scapegoat the film falls back on a few too many times.  “Where the Wild Things Are” eventually begins to feel like a game with a child who keeps changing the rules.  Sure, it’s an accurate depiction of the mind of a child, but it’s not much fun to participate in.  This inconsistency subjects the wild things to bizarre mood swings and choppy relationships.  Even Max becomes more and more of a mystery as the tale proceeds.  Instead of learning more about him, we begin to doubt what we thought we already knew.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is a beautiful film, full of gorgeous landscapes and exciting images, but it’s difficult to get a good look at any of it, because Jonze’s queasicam is out of control.  The camera shakes gratuitously, disorienting and nauseating the audience for no apparent reason other than to needlessly doll up the production with the whimsical notion that the whole thing was shot with a handheld camera. 

Queasicam shots have become a technique that lazy filmmakers fall back on when they have nothing exciting to shoot but want to manufacture the illusion that they do.  It has become a common practice in gunfights and car chases, over-simulating the sensation of displacement within the action.  But Jonze does have something exciting to shoot, and I was quite frustrated that I couldn’t get a clean look at it.  This could have been an infinitely better film if Jonze had busted out the tripod and actually composed a shot.

That said, there is a beauty to Jonze’s imagery, and the essence of Sendak’s artwork has been effectively translated to the screen.  If I seem a bit upset at “Where the Wild Things Are”, it is because, like you, I was very much hoping for a masterpiece, and am convinced that there is just such a masterpiece barred away within this film, trying to break free and roar.

Rollan Schott

October 16, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

It's Alright, I Suppose. Could Use Some Spicing Up.

 Julie & Julia

Directed by Nora Ephron

Two and One Half Stars

I knew very little about Julia Child going into Julie and Julia, and as such wasn't quite sure what to make of Meryl Streep's performance. After seeing the movie I did a little research on Julia Child and from what I read and saw, Streep's performance is spot-on. During the film I wondered if she was hamming up the role of Child, with the strange accent, mannerisms and peculiarities. Having watched some Julie Child on YouTube, it seems that Streep has underplayed Child, if anything.

Nora Ephron's Julie and Julia is an enjoyable enough flick, even if it eventually reveals itself to be a standard mid-year comedy/drama. Just about everything about it is light, inoffensive and not particularly challenging. The music swells, subsides and chirps at the right moments. The dialogue has a patter that only exists in movies like this, and the movie's conflicts are all-too-perfectly timed.

Meryl Streep plays Julia Child circa 1959, as she travels with her diplomant husband Paul (Stanley Tucci). When the couple move to Paris, Julia studies haute cuisine at a school for professional chefs. Eventually Child would write a groundbreaking cookbook called "Mastering the Art of French Cooking", a book that made French cooking accessible to Americans. Not that it really helped. I get the feeling most Americans would rather a Philadelphia Cheese Steak over boeuf bourgignon nine times out of ten.

Amy Adams, always engaging, plays Julie Powell, a mid-level NYC bureaucrat who in 2002 began a blog chronicling her attempt to cook 524 of Child's recipes in 365 days. The blog begins as an outlet for her creativity, but eventually grows into an all-consuming activity that alienates her from her supportive husband (Chris Messina) before being picked up for a book deal and, eventually, turned into a movie. Julie and Julia cuts back and forth between these stories, not-so-subtly reminding us of the parallels of these two women. Both love to cook, love to eat, want to write, have supportive husbands and feel a little out of place in their respective environments. Child was 6'2" and, while not unattractive, had an unusual demeanour. Julie, in 2002, finds herself as a poorly-paid public servant with high-flying friends. In one scene, she has lunch with her friends who tell her all about the success of their professional endeavours while simultaneously texting, calling and e-mailing. It's scenes like this that tip Julie and Julia into standard, unchallenging territory (not, to quote "Seinfeld", that there's anything wrong with that). The film tries its darndest to show us the dichotomy between the women's desires and the reality they find themselves in. Many scenes like this are presented in the most straight-forward, palatable way as possible. Fine if you want pure escapism, but I'm a guy who likes his movies with a little meat on their bones.

Even so, it's interesting that a film like Julie and Julia couldn't exist at any time but this one. Ephron labours on the similarities between Julie and Julia, but the most interesting difference between the women to me was their methods of attack. Julie's is a quintisentially modern one, and is the dream story for an internet writer -- an average person begins a blog which becomes hugely popular before being turned into a best-selling book. Despite that, there's a kinship between her and Julia Child, who had to rely on the analogue methods of writing a book, and persisting and persisting before convincing someone that it is commerically viable. In that way, Julie and Julia is kind of comforting, presenting technology as a helpful, logical progression in humanity's timeline, rather than something to be feared.

Amy Adams makes good work of her character, who could easily have had a simple up-down-down-up arc. As Adams plays her, every facial expression and line has something to say about Julie. She's a great actress being a little reined in by this material. If Julie's character was a tad constrictive for Adams, the character of Julia Child is right up Meryl Streep's alley. Her Julia Child is flamboyant and lovable, cheeky and kind. Streep seems to be in the 'enjoyable' phase of her career. It's nice to see her breaking up roles in intense fare like Doubt with films like this one.

Julie and Julia, while competently made, is not entirely this reviewer's cup of tea. The ending, particularly, overdoses on gooeyness and actually struck me as kind of creepy. Does Julie want to be Julia Child, or does she want to be with her? Hero worship in the movies can only go so far before seeming a little sinister.

Jonathan Fisher
October 15, 2009
Originally Featured in The Film Brief

The Free Market's Gotten a Bit Expensive

Capitalism: A Love Story

Directed by Michael Moore

Three and One Half Stars

Michael Moore’s latest documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story” brings new life to a simple truth, that capitalism parades itself as a vehicle for free enterprise but ultimately rewards greed more than any other virtue.  Those who have benefitted the most from the free market have become a significant threat to the rest of us.  Capitalism began as a revelatory concept for a national economy, but as time went by the disparity between the top and the bottom stretched out of control.  I’m reminded of a little piece of wisdom from a little movie called “Citizen Kane”.  It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.

Moore makes a pretty compelling case against capitalism here, even if he doesn’t really offer any solution.  Make money your number one priority, he argues, and you shall reap the rewards of capitalism, but it’s your own fault if your dream job doesn’t pay well, or if your employer keeps that extra surplus for himself, or heaven forbid, if you have a pre-existing medical condition and must spend your life savings on hospital bills after a car accident because you can’t acquire health insurance.  Some people just work harder than others, you see, and those people will make more money.  That’s only fair, and everyone gets an equal opportunity.

No, there is very little that’s fair about capitalism.  At least not anymore, not since President Reagan opened the doors and let the hounds of Wall Street loose on the United States government.  The wealthiest one percent of the country has more money than the bottom ninety-nine percent combined.  This has nothing to do with some people working harder than others.  This is about people who have more than enough, more than they could probably spend if they tried, many of whom came into inherited fortunes, who used their money to gain power, and used their power to systematically steal from the undeserving middle class.

How are they doing this?  Moore takes a close look at a few examples, which make up the bulk of the film.  The most interesting of these are derivatives, which, as best as I could tell, basically mean that your bank bet your mortgage that you won’t foreclose.  They chopped it up, divided it, and invested it, and if you foreclose, they’re screwed and will try to regain what they’ve lost by screwing you.  Moore’s best advice in “Capitalism”: if the bank forecloses on your home, assert that you will not budge until they produce a copy of your mortgage.  Often, the bank has mutilated it to such an extent that they can not.

Michael Moore is an artist of blatant propaganda, but I’ll be damned if he isn’t a great filmmaker.  Often, it’s not about Moore being right, but about him raising the right issues.  The state of the free market is a scalding subject right now, and the word itself has taken on a kind of divine connotation, which the far right recite in glory and reverence against the domestic threat of “socialism”.  Isn’t it interesting that Obama began to significantly pull ahead in the 2008 election as McCain and Palin began to fervently label him a socialist?  Perhaps middle class America has grown tired of capitalism not serving their best interests.

“Capitalism” is an attempt to remove the rose colored glasses from the concept of capitalism.  Moore shows us plenty of figureheads reminding us that capitalism is the best economic system there is.  Whether or not this is true, I cannot say for sure.  But even it is, capitalism is far from perfect.  Moore’s documentary is clever and provocative, as one might expect from the man.  Love him or hate him, agree or disagree, there’s no denying that he has made some of the most significant films of our generation.  He’s the best there is at stirring the masses.

Rollan Schott

October 6, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan