The Aviator
The Aviator received the most Academy Award nominations for the year 2004, with 11 total. This is very difficult to understand because the film is a painfully weak piece of work for Martin Scorcese (director) and John Logan (writer). Both Scorcese in Gangs of New York and Logan in The Last Sumarai have shown that they can do justice to historical material on the big screen. After seeing or reading a good biography we are supposed to understand a person better. Logan’s script about Hughes fascinating life fails to explain anything. All Logan does is to copy the explanatory structure of Orson Well’s Citizen Kane and provide us with a contrived childhood explanation for Hughes adult life. Scorcese empathizes with Howard Hughes so strongly that he seems to have lost his own directorial mind in the process. Scorcese, for example, designed each year in the film to look just the way a color film from that time period would look. Furthermore, many of the sets are designed very cheaply, perhaps also to imitate movies from the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, this means that you never forget that the drama is staged. Rather than lend sophistication to the film, it makes the film look amateurish. Then suddenly, out of the blue, comes a scene in which Hughes crashes with his plane in the middle of L.A. Using the best special effect technology that money can buy today, the scene has more realism than most scenes in the film. Clearly enormous amounts of money and effort went into the scene. But it is clearly over the top in its scale and its violence compared to anything that happened before. At this moment you murmur to yourself: What happened to Scorcese legendary touch? The only explanation I can offer for why the The Avatior won the Oscars for best art direction, best cinematography, and best costume design, as well as for best-supporting actress is that the average voters in the Academy of Motion Pictures are so self-absorbed that they would vote rather for a bad movie about Hollywood than a good film about another industry. The one Oscar that strikes me as well-deserved is Kate Blanchett’s for the supporting actress. Blanchett does an outstanding job playing Katherine Hepburn. If Howard Hughes were alive today, he would have made a better movie.
Man on Fire
Men on Fire is the most fantastic thriller in years. It pulls off what most films of this genre lack: Emotional depth in the midst of an action-driven plot. Denzel Washington plays John Creasy, a retired CIA operative/contract killer whose conscience has got the better of him and led him to the whiskey bottle. Visiting a former comrade in Mexico, the old friend (Christopher Wallken) ropes him into the job of protecting the young daughter of a Mexican industrialist Samuel Ramires (Marc Anthony) whose American jet-set wife Lisa fears for the life of their daughter after Mexico City is caught in a wave of child-kidnappings. Creasy only reluctantly agrees to serve as the body guard of the nine-year-old Pita (Dakota Fanning) because he is afraid that the body of an alcoholic would be too weak to protect the girl. But Creasy has no idea how difficult Pita will make it for him to continue on the path that he has chosen.
I, Robot
I am not much of a fan of the Sci-fi genre, but this film kept me entertained while sitting on a plane. It is based on a book by Isaac Asimonov, who was clearly informed about the debates philosophers carried out over the last 5 decades concerning artificial intelligence. Will it ever be possible for robots to think and feel like human beings? Robots have become so cheap and so sophisticated in Chicago of 2035 that people buy them in electronic stores as cheap labor. Will Smith plays a cop who does not like robots and suspects that they are not as peaceful and moral as the largest manufacturer, US Robotics claims. The chief scientist of US Robotics is found dead after falling down 30 stories into the courtyard of the U.S. Robotics firm. Will Smith correctly believes that the apparent suicide was murder but who did it? Could a robot ever turn against the human creators?
House of Flying Daggers
This is one film that deserves an unequivocal endorsement: Absolutely beautiful! It is a feast for the eyes and for the heart. You don’t want to miss this motion picture event.
The Butterfly Effect
The Butterfly effect was coined by scientists who discovered that small changes can have dramatic consequences over long distances (both in space and time). A hurricane in the U.S. may have been set off by the flap of a butterfly wing in Honk Kong. The film applies this idea to the life of individual people. The first third of the movie is not very exciting, but then the drama picks up as we are suddenly drawn into different possible realities. The main character has problems with memory either because of a genetic predisposition or childhood mistreatment. As he is trying to remember what happened, we are presented with different versions of the past and we no longer know which one is true. Small changes in childhood events lead to very different adult lives.
Cast Away
I rented this movie because I heard that Tom Hank’s who plays an FedEx employee shipwrecked on a small island entertains you all by himself for an hour and a half. It is not true. The movie is painfully slow in large part because it has nothing significant to say. I had so much time while watching the film that I almost wrote an entire script for a another Robin Crusoe movie. In my script the stranded person, contrary what you would expect of the genre, does not get rescued but after a long life dies all alone on peacefully island. Because the person strangely enough lived out an interesting life on the island you are not upset about this end. Rather you would leave the cinema telling yourself yourself: Hey, if one can have a meaningful life all by yourself on a small island one should have a great life in the midst of civilization! Cast Away is predictable and boring.
Bad Education
After seeing Almodovar’s two recent movies Talk to Her and All about my Mother, I left the theatre deeply satisfied. Both films were extraordinary pieces of cinema. I felt different about Bad Education. It took me some time to figure out what made this a good film yet noticeable inferior to his two previous efforts. Autobiographical material can lend a piece of drama authenticity. But without some distance to the experience, it can also get in the way of communicating the significance of a piece of art. A more appropriate title for the film would have been “Lost Love.” Almodovar made the mistake of mixing three types of feelings, Pedophilia (Bad Education), Homosexuality, and Love as if they were the same thing. They are not. In doing so, Almodovar trivializes the crimes pedophilic adults (here catholic priests) commit against the children they are entrusted with. Despite this shortcoming Bad Education has much to offer. It is filled with layers upon layers of narrative and meaning, inviting you back so that you see it again to catch it all. The single most gratifying feature of the film is the spectacular acting of Gael García Bernal.
Grapes of Wrath
One reason why people see the same film in very different ways is that we filter it through our past experiences and hopes for the future. Grapes of Wrath, made in 1940, documents the hardship of one family that can no longer make a living on the depleted soil of Oklahoma and leaves the Dust Bowl for California. The family believes California to be the land of milk and honey. But during the Great Depression jobs are very hard to come by even in California. The family finds it very difficult to put enough food on the table. In this struggle for survival, the family disintegrates in part because individual members think they can survive better individually. I once heard that President Roosevelt through his New Deal polices saved “Capitalism” in the United States. This film offers a portrait of how the Great Depression pushed a large number of American families into poverty and despair, shaking the foundation of America’s belief in inevitable progress. Watching the family pack up all their stuff on one truck and then drive to California constantly brought back to my memories of The West, a documentary about how California, Oregon, and Washington State were first settled a hundred years before the Great Depression. I noticed that making it across the Rocky Mountains and the dessert with horse and wagon was incomparable harder and more dangerous in 1830 than in 1940 with a motorized truck. I also marveled about the portrayal of the notion of a “family.” I always thought that American immigrants, with the exception of Mafia crime rings, had left behind in Europe the idea of a family as an extended household. The film romanticizes the American family. It implicitly celebrates the family as the most important social organization in agricultural societies and mourns the loss of strong emotional bonds between blood relatives apparently brought about by industrialization.
A Streetcar Named Desire
In contrast to On the Waterfront (1954), this film—also directed by Elia Kazan— feels dated although it is only three years older than On the Waterfront. Brando’s acting is not at fault. It is impeccable. The film has the timeless theme of the battle between men and women. But it is so much grounded in the Zeitgeist of the immediate post World War II period that we no longer can easily relate to what moves the characters. In fifty years from now, nobody may be able to relate to what people in New York felt during the first month after September 11. The film, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, takes place in a small apartment in the French quarter of New Orleans. In this particular version of the battle of sexes, the energy that makes the sparks fly derives from the differences in the backgrounds and characters of the two protagonists. He is working class, hot-headed, dominating, realistic, violent and full of life; she is aristocratic, shy, unstable, nymphomaniac, unrealistic, and on the decline. With an updated social context, this would still be fantastic material for a drama.
Kinsey
Kinsey is quilt-like, stringing together scenes that are crafted with brillance and others that are poorly conceived and enacted. I wish the writer-director had spent a little more time removing the occasional second rate material from the film. What makes the movie charming is our amazement about how far western society has travelled in only 60 years when it comes to talking and thinking about sex. Kinsey interviewed thousands of Americans of all races and classes in the 1940s and recorded their sexual biographies. The strongest scene in the entire film happens shortly after Kinsey’s mother passes away and when Kinsey asks his unappreciating, dictatorial father to sit for one these scientific interviews. To appreciate the situation, think about how you would react to finding out everything about your parent’s sexual history…
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