Well I Wouldn't Want to Live There

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Three and One Half Stars

Much like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy earlier this decade, James Cameron has created with “Avatar” a world that I would like to experience first hand.  I want to stand on the road-like branches of these mountainous trees.  I want to see the moist glossy fauna of the forest floor illuminate under my bare feet and swim in the stainless crystal springs.  I want to emerge from the cover of the canopy and the heavy fog and see the Hallelujah Mountains floating in the sky above me.  More than anything else in “Avatar”, the lush and ethereally beautiful planet of Pandora is Cameron’s crowning achievement.

 Plenty of people will argue that the Na’vi, Pandora’s indigenous race of shamanic blue giants, are the real technical accomplishment, but I would contend that they are one of the many components of Pandora, and a vital one as you’ll eventually understand.  The Na’vi, with their slender, blue patterned bodies and feline characteristics, are somewhat of a miracle of motion-capture technology.  They are wonderfully expressive and fully realized, and occupy the screen comfortably alongside their human counterparts, who are no more or less real, but rather share Cameron’s universe as beings of equal authenticity.

The Na’vi occupy the Hometree, a mammoth culmination of symbiosis resting over the planet’s largest known deposits of Unobtanium (clever), a metal that has attracted a hoard of humans (American, of course) in the year 2154 to the far away planet to mine it dry.  The metal, and who knows how its function or location was initially discovered, is apparently vital to preserving life on Earth.  The Na’vi, as one might have guessed, are less than thrilled with our presence.

The humans bring with them an arsenal of military technology and rock-em sock-em soldiers to secure the operation.  The quaint, poison-tipped wooden arrows of the Na’vi are no match for our alloys and armors, but they have no intention of backing down.  This is their land, thank you very much, and they’ll be damned if they’ll be chased off.

They do have a distinct advantage, however.  Apart from the knowledge of the land, they can breathe the air, which is toxic to us.  We wear masks for rudimentary activities, but for extensive outdoor work, we have designed the Avatars, organic replicas of the Na’vi infused with the DNA of selected scientists and soldiers.  Their pilots, for lack of a better word, operate the Avatars with their thoughts inside sensor-ridden pods.  The transition from human to Avatar is not permanent, which is an important element to the story.  Their minds can be returned to their human vessels with the push of a button.

One of those minds is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine who was brought into the project after his twin brother, whom an Avatar was fashioned for, was killed in a mugging.  Jake finds the freedom of his new body liberating, and his lack of preparation quickly finds him recklessly involved in the Na’vi tribe, under the watchful guidance of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).  Meanwhile, at the base, Sully is torn between conflicting objectives from the environmentally conscious Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and shoot-first-shoot-again-later military Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

Lost yet?  This is all just a broad outline of the establishing sequences of the film.  Pandora harbors an interesting secret revealed later that reminded me of the oceanic consciousness of “Solaris” (1972).  An inevitable relationship forms between Jake and Neytiri that doesn’t carry a lot of weight, but is adequate to move the story forward.  Hitchcock once said that if you introduce a gun in the first hour of your film, that gun must go off.  Well Cameron introduces a lot of guns, and they all go off in a final battle that pits among many other creatures and weapons, Jake’s mentally piloted Avatar against a humanoid robot piloted from within by Col. Quaritch in one of the film’s more subtle metaphors.

But rising above all else is the film’s immaculate spectacle, realized with an extraordinary eye for detail and a livid imagination.  Cameron is much better at shooting these big budget action movies than his evil counterpart Michael Bay.  He leaves the money on screen long enough for us to savor it, and places it in service of something more than just effects.  The project is more palatable than other recent action flicks, particularly films like the monochromatic club to the face "Death Race" from last year.  It is also well edited and choreographed, setting apart from this year's other mammoth budget spectacle "Transformers 2", which overdid the former to disguise the absence of the latter.  Cameron has a superb eye for place and scale.  Not for a second in “Avatar” does this universe not make perfect sense.

I suspect that much of the triumph that “Avatar” has become isn’t necessarily explicitly visible on screen.  Cameron utilized many state of the art FX technologies, many of them he invented himself.  What we see is more of an exhibition of product, a fun but clunky story seeing itself through in a utopian vision.  Cameron was aiming for the heavens with this project.  If he had to burn a few clichés to get there, well, I can forgive that.

Rollan Schott
December 18, 2009
Jon's review of "Avatar" is available at GoS' brother site, The Film Brief.

The Prodigal Son Defamed

Brothers

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Three Stars

Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers” comes out focused and prepared. It takes a strong warm-up lap, properly does its stretching and calisthenics, steps up to the blocks, and hits the showers. It is an excellent first two-thirds of a film.

Sheridan based this film of postwar trauma on a Danish film of the same name, in which a prodigal son is sent to war while his delinquent brother is saved from the battlefield by his own delinquency. Toby Maguire plays the prodigal son, Capt. Sam Cahill, in an intensely over-the-top performance. He has a wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two daughters, and they are, of course, quite happy.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the delinquent brother, Tommy, who houses a quaint shyness that makes it hard to picture him as someone who just got out of prison for armed robbery. The two men share a relationship that is respectful but under duress. Expectations, both failed and surpassed, have formed a wall between them, and their father (Sam Shepard) has laid the mortar.

Of the general plot, I will not go into extreme detail. The whole of the story is explained in the trailers, and if you’re like me, you felt like the trailer had only revealed the establishing sequences of the film.

Sam goes to war and is presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Grace is distraught, and Tommy, fresh out of prison, eases into her and her daughters’ lives as a surrogate father.

But Sam emerges alive and returns to his family, strung out, traumatized and paranoid. He senses a relationship between his wife and his brother and punishes himself for a life-changing decision he made while imprisoned in Afghanistan by allowing his paranoia to snowball into violence.

“Brothers” is, in many ways, a story that Michael Cimino told with “The Deer Hunter” in 1978, which was a far superior film. Both films deal with the psychological and emotional losses that soldiers face when returning from war.

Cimino’s film was more about the soldiers, though, and the emptiness that they felt at home after returning from Vietnam. “Brothers” assumes the reverse perspective of Grace and Tommy and how they attempt to recreate a family that was destroyed overseas.

Grace goes through the motions of the loving marriage she had with Sam before he left, but he is a different man now and their love seems one-sided. Grace is clinging to an idea more than a person, and her daughters respond to the new-found distance in their father with a growing fondness for their uncle Tommy.

Sheridan observes this family drama with great detail. The project is a bit too glossy to become completely involving, but the performances, particularly Maguire’s manic, bug-eyed intensity and Gyllenhaal’s gruff shy-guy warmth, bring gravity to the film and its themes.

Most importantly, though, the film ends far too soon, cutting itself off when it is only beginning to break into something genuine. Sheridan seems afraid to make the leap. He cuts his emotional ark short by mistaking the firing of a gun for the climax of the film, and tidies up to such an extent that he jeopardizes the very commentary he was threatening to make.

“Brothers” is a good film. Make no mistake. If I seem harsh it is because it got off a station too soon and, in so doing, amplified many of its other shortcomings. Consider simply that if it were not a good film, I would certainly not be complaining that it ended sooner rather than later. “The Deer Hunter” was more than three hours long.

Rollan Schott

December 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Loving Only Our Own Perceptions

Solaris

1972

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

 Andrei Tarkovsky made “Solaris” as a response to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” from a few years before, criticizing that film as too cold and detached to convey genuine emotion.  He was wrong about Kubrick’s film, which is about evolving beyond our petty human sentiments and is transcendental of the ‘genuine emotion’ he accused it of lacking.  But “2001” and “Solaris” are nonetheless excellent companions for one another.  Kubrick’s film reaches out, while Tarkovsky’s reaches in.

They do have much in common.  They are both science fiction films, they both explore the nature of man on a very broad scale, and they are both tremendously slow and meditative.  Their aims are to use the vast and quiet stillness of space to reveal the truths of our existence, to take their audiences to a place of emptiness and reverence where they can contemplate these themes more clearly.  Tarkovsky’s aim is to question what it is that makes us human.

Its brilliant concept is adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem.  Earth has recently discovered another planet on the far outreaches of our solar system, which we have named Solaris.  Studies have shown that the planet is covered by an oceanic consciousness that has the power to manifest itself as the desires of alien minds within its proximity.  Russia launches a space station into orbit around the planet to investigate but after only a few weeks, contact with the crew has become mysteriously infrequent and nonsensical.

Russia selects their top psychologist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) to go to the space station and determine if further research can safely be conducted.  He doesn’t particularly know what he’s getting into, and there is a significant chance that he is walking into a death trap, but he has struggled to carry on since the death of his wife two years before, and isn’t bothered much by the danger.

Kelvin boards the space station to find it in shambles from neglect.  The crew wanders the halls quietly mad, nearly traumatized.  They disregard Kelvin’s presence.  They assume that he is not the real Kelvin, but a manifestation created by Solaris.  This proves not to be the case, however, when Kelvin makes his way to his quarters and finds his wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) there waiting for him.

His wife is dead.  He knows this.  The crew knows this.  She is a product of Solaris, which has probed Kelvin’s mind and manifested itself as his deepest desire.  Khari does not know this.  This is where “Solaris” elevates itself above standard science fiction fare.  A lesser movie what have made the planet Solaris a malevolent mind that would aim to destroy the members of the space station by taking human form.  But Khari is precisely how Kris remembered her, not just in appearance but in personality.  She loves Kris as the original Khari had, and Kris can’t help but love her back, even though he knows she is not technically human.

Ultimately, Tarkovsky is asking us, how real are we if an artificial duplication of our soul mate can inspire the same feelings?  Is it our fellow humans that we love, or is it simply the idea of them?  What exists outside of our own perception of reality?  These are not easy questions, and Tarkovsky certainly doesn’t have the answers.  How could he?  That he had the courage to ask them at all is telling of his brilliance.

Tarkovsky is often listed alongside Sergei Eisenstein as one of the most important directors of the Soviet Union, and the two filmmakers could not have been more opposite in their approach to the cinema.  Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” revolutionized the concept of the montage, rapid cutting to juxtapose several images into a uniting theme.  The “Odessa Steps” sequence in that film is among the most important seven minutes in the history of cinema.  The camera cuts rapidly between innocent bystanders and the soldiers gunning them down.  The average shot is about two seconds long.

But fifty years later, Tarkovsky’s films favored shots of twenty or thirty seconds.  He felt that the long shot had the power to unveil certain higher truths that can only be revealed over time.  His films move incredibly slowly because of this.  They become reverential.  They require that we slow down with them.  A film like “Solaris” can only work this way.  Tarkovsky gives us time to think about what he’s showing us, he wants to give us time to reflect, to recall our own memories and see them before us, rejuvenated.

Rollan Schott

December 7, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Are You Cussin' with Me?

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by Wes Anderson

Three and One Half Stars

There is a moment late in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” when Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Company pause to recognize a moment of serene beauty, a majestic(ish) wolf on an elevated stone before the backdrop of snowcapped mountains. 

It seems like an ambiguous moment, or at least it seems like it’s meant to be ambiguous.  What’s strange is that it isn’t.  It’s a flat moment, relatively void of meaning.  I was frustrated with this at first, but quickly realized that this moment isn’t about mysterious themes or hidden meanings.  It’s a send-up of those same moments in other films.

Understanding this conceit is central to appreciating “Fantastic Mr. Fox” which relies on flat compositions and deliberate actions to achieve a dry and wildly audacious style of humor that Anderson has made all his own.

He occupies his films with characters who are either bored stiff with the roles they are meant to play or relish them with the enthusiastic thrill of classical theater.  Consider the way two relatively similar characters inhabit this world. 

Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), a wildly talented white fox with speed, brains, and a budding romance, trudges through the film with relative disinterest.  It’s not that he’s bitter, he’s just, I don’t know, indifferent?

Mr. Fox, on the other hand, has the same athleticism and smarts, and a loving and devoted wife, and he walks upright and speaks in an assertive matter-of-fact enthusiasm that is most certainly on the smug side.  His suave confidence lends the film much of its wit.

Mr. Fox, having sworn off chicken thievery at the request of his wife, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), moves his wife and son Ash (Jason Schwartzmann) out of their lowly hole-in-the-ground hole in the ground and into a lavish tree after assuming an occupation as a newspaper journalist (who nobody reads).

But his identity cannot be denied.  He is a fox, after all, and foxes steal chickens.  Mr. Fox plots to rob the three heavyweight famers nearby, Boggis and Bunce and Bean.  He succeeds, of course, and the three outraged farmers plot to steal his hide in return.

Fox and his family burrow deep beneath their tree, meeting up with other members of the local animal population.  Their misfortune is held against Mr. Fox, who seems unfazed, and tensions mount as the farmers try first to blow them out then to starve them out then to wash them out then…

Much of the humor in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” comes from moments outside the narrative, or at least moments that exist within the narrative that are not well-suited to its continuity.  I can think of no better example than the poor bloke playing his banjo and improvising a song.  The song itself is funny, but the response it garners is one of the biggest laughs of the year.

And what a deliberate movie this is.  When the camera races in on a face you can almost hear Anderson somewhere off screen shouting “Aaand CLOSEUP!” The characters all say their lines matter-of-factly, their expressions artificial but strangely human.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to slip the jokes past us.

But that moment with the wolf is still haunting me.  It is a funny moment, over the top and obvious in its intentions, so what’s with the staying power?  The secret to the film can be found here.  That secret may well be that there is no secret at all, that the movie is what it is and should not shy away from its clichés, a theme that digs deeper than it seems.


Rollan Schott
December 2, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Before I leave this Earth, I will laugh at YOU

Amadeus

1984

Directed by Milos Forman

Antonio Salieri cuts a pretty tragic figure in Milos Forman's Amadeus. In Amadeus' vision, the Italian composer was a deeply bitter and resentful man, brilliant enough to see just how special and extraordinary Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was, and perceptive enough to understand that he would never be able to compose music as easily and expertly as Mozart did. There is a moment in Amadeus in which Mozart has just composed and presented a new opera, proclaimed by the Emperor as the 'greatest opera yet written'. The opera climaxes, the crowd erupts and Mozart is smothered in adulation. The camera cuts to Salieri, sitting in a box, cowering in the corner and staring at the events unfolding before him. The look on his face is a combination of malice and self-pity, perfectly captured by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his performance. The central, burning question at the heart of Salieri's actions in Amadeus is "Why? Why Mozart and not me?"

Salieri's question is directed both inwards and outwards. Half-way through the film, Salieri disavows God, concluding that no benevolent higher being could be so cruel, heartless and callous to allow Salieri the ear of a genius, but the talent of an also-ran. This is compounded by Salieri's personal view of Mozart. One of the best things that Amadeus does is to present Mozart not as a brooding genius, but as an immature, socially stilted goofball with an odd laugh who delights in his own talents, but does not realise how painful his very existence is for Salieri. Every time Salieri witnesses Mozart's genius, the ease with which he pens masterpieces, it is a dagger in his heart. Amadeus is in part a story about the dangers of constantly comparing yourself to others. In the words of the Desiderata, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

Amadeus, despite its title, is actually about Salieri and his personal demons, the hatred that he harboured for Mozart while simultaneously admiring his work and talent better than anyone else. Since its release 25 years ago, when it emerged as a towering achievement and an Oscar darling, it has become widely regarded as the best 'Great Composer' movie ever made, precisely because it subverts the formula of the genre at every turn. Most movies about great artists focus on their personal struggle to create their art, the personal demons they face, and usually, their battle with whatever substance they choose to abuse. Amadeus takes almost all of that out of the equation by turning the story of Mozart into a story about how us mere mortals view the mega-talented. There is always a sense of self-comparison, however subconscious, when we observe the great achievers around us. In a peculiar and cruel way, their genius is both something to cherish, but also acts as a kind of mirror for our own shortcomings.

Amadeus presents this phenomenon by showing us stretches of both Salieri and Mozart composing. For Mozart, the process seems to be joyous and organic, and the music that came from him was enormous in scope and core-shakingly powerful. Salieri himself suggests that Mozart is taking 'dictation from God'. Salieri struggles away to create inoffensive-sounding jingles, but nothing really revelatory. Salieri recognises this better than anyone, which makes him feel worse. Then comes a heart-breaking moment when, at a masquerade ball, Mozart takes requests from the audience. When no-one can think of anything to suggest to Mozart, Salieri says (behind the anonymity of his mask), "Play Salieri". Mozart, drunk from the alcohol and fan-adulation, proceeds to play a Salieri piece, accompanied by a cruel impersonation of the composer, culminating in Mozart passing wind. The effect of this scene is magnified ten-fold because Salieri never removes his mask. While everyone is laughing at him, all we see are his eyes and mouth, cold and unmoving. Ouch.

Moments like this, reminding Salieri of his inadequacy next to Mozart's brilliance, compound until eventually Salieri decides to pose as Mozart's ally while surreptitiously working to tear the composer down. Via flash-forwards that frame the film, of an elderly Salieri confessing to a young priest, we see what a toll Salieri's relationship with Mozart was to have on his life. The elderly Salieri is a sad, remorse-plagued man. He is convinced that he killed Mozart, despite the evidence that Mozart died of tuberculosis. Even when on death's door, Salieri is torn between his love for Mozart's music, and the resentment he feels towards the man himself.

This remarkable film adaptation of Amadeus, directed by Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), was based on the play by Peter Shaffer and came under the slightest of criticisms for Americanising the story, for making Mozart's character seem like an 'American buffoon'. I don't see it like that -- for me, Tom Hulce's portrayal of Mozart, while oddball, is one of the best lead performances of the last 25 years. In reducing the character to a joking man-child, Hulce and Forman express what so many of us suspect about geniuses. They can afford to be relaxed and casual because often their gift comes so easily to them.

Amadeus is a thrilling movie, set to a soundtrack of some of the most beautiful music ever written by a human being. It is a thriller, a character study, and sometimes even a comedy. Milos Forman, a Czech director who migrated to America to make his films, explored the dangers of being an outsider and running against the grain in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and even manages to express that theme here. Mozart's character, despite his genius, is very much an outsider. That is expressed through Hulce's laugh, body language, and even in the way Forman and costume designer Theodor Pistek dress him. There's something almost anarchical about Hulce as Mozart. The wigs don't seem to wear him as well as they do the Emperor and Salieri. He was like an 18th Century Sid Vicious.

Eventually in the film, Mozart does die. There is a suggestion that Salieri may have played some role in his death (within the context of the film, of course. Amadeus does not try to re-write history, only to interpret it to explore the inner workings of this version of Salieri), but right to the end Salieri was conflicted about his feelings towards Mozart. "Before I leave this earth, I will laugh at you," he secretly promises Mozart. Mozart's premature death must have been, in some way, satisfying for Salieri. But in the final scenes of the film, as Salieri helps an ailing Mozart transcribe his final masterpiece, it is clear that Salieri loves Mozart's music more than nearly anything. Salieri is a man that is unable to control his very human jealousy for the sake of appreciating the 'voice of God'. That is his tragedy, and Amadeus is a warning to the rest of us to be wary of falling into the same trap.

Editor's note: In preparing for this article, I re-watched "Amadeus" a couple of times on Blu-Ray. In 1080p high-definition, Milos Forman's thrilling film is elevated even more by the clear image and sharp sound. I recommend the experience.

Jonathan Fisher
December 1, 2009
Originally Featured at The Film Brief