Michael Prescott's Blog

A New Age Bond

All the critics said Casino Royale was a new type of James Bond film. They may have been more right than they knew. Although the film has many of the trappings of earlier entries in the series, it also carries an unusual subtext with distinctly unBondlike overtones.

Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it. Anyway, here's what I saw. (Warning: a couple of specific though relatively minor plot spoilers follow.)

Bond is introduced as a raw agent earning his license to kill. Much is made of his inexperience and his lack of refinement. He is, as M indelicately puts it, "a blunt instrument." Both M and Bond girl Vesper Lynd tell Bond explicitly that he must lose his ego - advice he is too cocksure to accept. His impetuousness and arrogance lead him to commit several costly blunders.

And then things change.

Bond dies.

Well, he dies for a few seconds, anyway - his heart flat-lining until a defibrillator revives him.

When this happened, I had a cheeky thought: I wonder if Bond had a near-death experience. This idle fancy took on more significance when, in a later scene (unrelated to the defibrillator episode), Bond regains consciousness to see hazy, ghostly, possibly angelic figures against a field of bright white light.

We now have been exposed to two of the iconic images of the NDE - the resuscitated patient and the appearance of spirits in bright light. And what is the most commonly reported aftereffect of an NDE, other than a diminished fear of death? It's a change in personality, an evolution  toward a more mature, less ego-driven mindset. Which is exactly what we see in Bond.

After his reawakening he is mellow, serene, even loving. His "armor" has been stripped away, he says. He even quits his job. He wants to get out of the business of killing in order to preserve ''what little soul I have left." This may be the only time in any Bond film when the word soul is mentioned, and certainly the only time when it's meant to be taken seriously.

Needless to say, Bond does not remain permanently in his newly enlightened state. Circumstances intervene. The armor is strapped back on - never, we suspect, to be removed again. And yet briefly we did see the real man - the real soul - beneath the facade of the ego and the armor of the killing machine.

As I said, I may be reading too much into a slick, globe-trotting action film. But I suspect that someone - writer, producer, director? - slyly slipped a New Age subtext into this movie, investing it with a layer of meaning unexpected in a film of this type.

If so, it was a high-stakes but ultimately winning gamble - exactly what one would hope for in Casino Royale.

Butt seriously ...

Just watched the (bad) animated movie The Ant Bully. Curious to see what my fellow Netflixers had to say, I checked the customer reviews. And I found this charmer:

I have not seen it yet, but im hoping i will soon. I have the book. I will go see it soon, and it looks funny, but im not sure mom is going to take my little brother, because they say "butt" a lot and we're not allowed to say that.

Cute. Way more entertaining than the film itself, in fact.

Movie review: Miami Vice

Man, was this not a good movie.

While watching this thing on DVD, I seriously started to wonder if there was something wrong with my hearing, because I could understand only about a third of what was said. Imagine my relief when I went to the Netflix reader reviews and found that many other people had the same problem. The film's soundtrack is muddy, the actors speak in mumbles, there is a lot of distracting background noise, and at least one actress (Li Gong) seems to be delivering her lines phonetically, and not well. I literally could not follow more than about ten percent of her dialogue, and since she delivers a great deal of presumably important exposition, this is a problem.

The two main characters, Crockett and Tubbs from the old TV show (which I've never seen), had zero chemistry and zero characterization. In fact, I kept forgetting which one was supposed to be Crockett and which one was supposed to be Tubbs. They are interchangeable. Apparently the director, Michael Mann, who has done some fine films including Last of the Mohicans, Manhunter, and the phenomenally great cop movie Heat, decided to indulge his taste for minimalism by eliminating everything that smacked of conventional storytelling. Vice begins in the middle of an undercover op that is never resolved, and then tells the story of another, bigger UC op which is also never resolved. Along the way there are speedboats and machine guns, but not enough of either, as well as an impromptu trip to Cuba and a lot of gratuitous sex stuff that I fast-forwarded through.

Miami Vice had an estimated budget of $135 million and made $165 million in worldwide boxoffice receipts. Though this may sound as if the film turned a profit, it did not. The finances of the movie biz are notoriously murky, but in general a film needs to recoup at least twice its production cost to break even. This is because exhibitors take roughly half of the ticket revenues. So Vice would have had to gross $270 mil before it was in the black, and it didn't even come close. Yes, DVD sales and TV rights will add some money to the asset side, but promotional and distribution costs will contribute to the liabilities side, probably balancing out. Bottom line: the movie bombed.

What's disturbing is that a fair number of critics professed to like the movie. I assume they were intimidated by Mann's  powerhouse reputation. Or maybe they've just spent too much time in the dark, and lost touch with what entertainment is all about.

I don't pick up on things like this myself, but many Netflixers were particularly peeved by Colin Farrell's hairstyle, described as a bad dye job, a greasy mullet, and porn-star mustache. I sort of noticed that he looked even more disreputable than usual - to be frank, he looked like he'd just crawled out of a garbage can - but I didn't focus on the details of his grooming, since looking grimy and grungy seems to be par for the course for him. A lot of people who saw Vice in a theater also complained about the muddy, grainy photography - the whole film was shot in high-def digital video, giving it a rather cheap, homemade look - but this issue is less apparent on DVD.

I guess the director of Heat is entitled to a flop like this. Mann will recover. Probably so will Jamie Foxx, though his choice of this project after the mega-bomb Stealth doesn't speak too well for his (or his agent's) judgment. Li Gong undoubtedly will continue to be bankable in Asia. But you've got to pity poor Colin Farrell ... after Phone Booth, Alexander, and Miami Vice, it's hard to keep pretending that this guy is a bona fide star.

And the porn-star 'stache sure didn't help.

Cars

So I just saw the Pixar-Disney flick Cars, about a world inhabited entirely by cars and other machines, with no people. It was fun and beautifully animated, though I found the middle kind of slow. And if there's one thing a movie about race cars probably should not be, it's slow.

Because it was slow, I had time to think about the cars and their lifestyle. Possibly I had a little too much time. Anyway, here are some of the deep thoughts that occurred to me.

If there are no people in the world, why do the cars have seats?

Who makes new cars? Okay, maybe robots on an assembly line. But who makes the robots? Other robots, maybe. But ... who made the first robot?

Do cars believe in Intelligent Design? And really, shouldn't they? 

At one point the cars are told to start their engines. This means, I guess, that their engines have been off. But if their engines were off, wouldn't the cars die? Wouldn't it be like having your heart stopped?

At another point, a car runs out of gas unexpectedly. Wouldn't he know he was low on gas, the same way humans know they're hungry or thirsty?

The cars get new tires all the time. Is this like getting new shoes, or is it more like foot-replacement surgery? How much of the car is alive?

How do cars die? We know they do, because we see a deceased Stanley Steamer.  But if their engines can be shut off without killing them, and they can be wrecked and repaired without longterm consequences, what could ever prove fatal? Terminal rust?

The cars, trucks, helicopters, planes, robots, and even phones are human in personality, but tractors are like cows. What's up with that? And shouldn't Broncos and Mustangs be like horses?   

When cars mate, do they do it in the backseat?

As I say, I might be overthinking it.

The movie was cute, but I liked Over the Hedge better.

A Thanksgiving turkey

One of the advantages of belonging to Netflix is that you can track down and rent movies you've always meant to see but never got around to seeing. The downside of this policy is that some of these movies turn out to be really, really bad.

Case in point: Fight Club.

This 1999 drama, or comedy, or whatever the hell it's supposed to be, got some pretty favorable reviews. And it features two high-powered actors, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. So I figured, how bad can it be? Answer: bad enough that 40 minutes of this dreck was all I could take before hitting the eject button on my DVD's remote control.

I'm not sure exactly when I began to realize that I was watching a truly awful motion picture, but I think it may have been the scene where a dying cancer patient tearfully tells a support group than in the brief time she has left, all she wants to do is "get laid." What's inexcusable about this scene is that it's clearly intended to get a laugh. That's right -- we the audience are expected to find the woman's plight amusing, to snicker at her comical desperation for one last experience of intimate human contact. (The fact that the narrator describes the painfully gaunt woman as resembling "Meryl Streep's skeleton" is a tipoff.)

Laughing at cancer patients is in pretty bad taste, to be sure, but Fight Club is a movie that revels in bad taste and in sheer ugliness for its own sake. It abounds in jokes about terrorism and death and violence and sexual impotence and disfiguring medical conditions and plane crashes and how much blood a person can swallow before passing out. Yes, it's a laugh riot.

Around the time that I decided I'd had enough of Fight Club, I took down the two movie guides on my bookshelf to see what they had to say about this cinematic abortion. Leonard Maltin disappointed me, rating the movie an overly generous two stars out of four. But the other book, the less well-known Video and DVD Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, nailed the film dead-on. In fact, I have to say that this is the single most accurate movie review I have ever read in my life, and I am therefore going to reproduce it in its entirety:

If Director David Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls intended to make us believe that we haven't advanced a jot  from the putrescent slime that once may have spawned mankind, they succeeded brilliantly. This appalling, grotesque, and interminable endurance test is fairy-tale fiction for serial killers, imbeciles who succumb to road rage, and frustrated white guys: all the morons who seek excuses to justify their increasingly bad behavior and hair-trigger tempers. Proceed with caution.

The Video and DVD Guide rates movies on a scale from five stars (excellent) to "turkey" (symbolized by a little silhouetted turkey). Fight Club earns the latter rating, of course. So it looks like I got my Thanksgiving meal a little early.

Too bad it wasn't easier to swallow.

---

P.S. Two other notable reviews are cited in the Wikipedia entry on the film. Roger Ebert called it "macho porn," and Rex Reed found it "a film without  a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in Hell."

Top ten

Political blogger John Hawkins recently posted his list of the ten best science-fiction movies of all time. With all due respect, it is one pretty piss-poor list. I mean, Spaceballs? Mel Brooks' Borscht Belt send-up of Star Wars? Okay, the movie has a few good gags, but it doesn't belong on any top ten (or even top hundred) list. And Signs as the number one SF movie, ever? Come on, man, try watching some movies produced before 1980.

Rather than curse the darkness, I decided to light a candle. That is, I wrote up my own list of the top ten SF movies.

It was surprisingly difficult to keep the list to only ten titles. Worthy contenders like Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World, Richard Matheson's The Incredible Shrinking Man, the original Japanese version of Godzilla, the original Planet of the Apes, and Stanley Kubrick's dystopian A Clockwork Orange had to be ruthlessly omitted. Yet somehow two Jim Carrey movies made the final cut. What can I say? The man chooses interesting scripts.

Anyway, here's my list, which, I'm sure you will agree, is way better than Hawkins'. And there's not a Pizza the Hut in sight.

10. War of the Worlds (original) - George Pal's colorful depiction of alien invasion has a better script than Spielberg's remake. So what if you can see the wires holding up the Martian war machines? They're still cool, and the movie's pace and energy have not faded in the least.

9. Things to Come - dated but fascinating H.G. Wells drama about the fall and rise of civilization. An ode to technocratic elitism which may seem more alarming than inspiring today

8. The Day the Earth Stood Still - thoughtful, serious study of an extraterrestrial's arrival on Earth, with subtle parallels to the story of Christ. (He takes the name "Carpenter," for one.) Remember: Klaatu barada nikto

7. Metropolis - Fritz Lang's remarkable silent film, set in a city of the future that remains one of the most elaborate miniature sets ever built

6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - complicated, ingenious comedy-drama with sci-fi overtones

5. The Truman Show - a brilliant performance by Ed Harris highlights this sharp, funny, wistful film, one of the most imaginative movies since Groundhog Day (which is a fantasy, or it would be on this list too)

4. Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers - low-budget epic with an unusually smart script and classic Ray Harryhausen special effects

3. The Empire Strikes Back - probably the best of the Star Wars saga, with astounding visuals that still hold up, a solid storyline, and an epic sweep

2. Aliens - amazing James Cameron SF war movie that owes a lot to the Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers (and is lightyears better than the movie later made from that book)

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey - often astounding, sometimes awe-inspiring, ultimately bewildering, a film unlike any other

Art for art's sake

For the past six years, ever since moving into my condo, the wall over my living room sofa has remained bare. I knew something should go there, but I couldn't think of anything I wanted in that pivotal spot.

But that's all changed now. Last night I was looking through some old magazine articles when I saw a particular piece of art from my all-time favorite movie. "Heyyyy ..." I said slowly as the great idea dawned, "I wonder if that's available as a print."

A little Googling revealed that it was. The price is a tad high, but I've ordered it anyway.

I will mat and frame it, and then my living room will be complete.

Here it is.

I know, I know - now you want one! But I got mine first.

The logic of "Conspiracy"

Here's a movie worth watching -- the 2001 HBO telefilm Conspiracy, starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci.

The film is based on the surviving minutes of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, a January 1942 meeting of Nazi military officers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals, hosted by Adolf Eichmann. The purpose of the conference was to settle the "Jewish question" once and for all, and its outcome was the plan of action that would be known as the Final Solution. (An earlier German docudrama, titled The Wannsee Conference, is said to be even better and more historically accurate, but does not seem to be available on DVD.)

Impeccably acted, faultlessly directed, Conspiracy plays out more or less in real time, tracing the inexorable progression of the Nazi agenda. Though some of the men at the table have qualms about the mass extermination plan, all are eventually led to embrace it. A few are merely cowed into grudging acquiescence, but most -- it is clear -- are compelled by the simple logic of the case.

For it is logical. Given the premises of the argument, the conclusion follows ineluctably. The Jews are consuming scarce resources; crowded into slums, they spread contagion; most are unfit for manual labor; none can be counted on to support the regime; they are the historic enemies of "true German culture." There is no place to put them. Other nations don't want them. What, then, can be done? There really is only one solution. If they cannot be allowed to stay, and there's nowhere for them to go, then they must be made to disappear. Q.E.D.

Rationalists like to imagine a "scientific ethic," grounded in nothing but logical reasoning, unbeholden to intuition, faith, or tradition. This fantasy, though less popular than once was, persists in some quarters. That it is only a fantasy is the subtext (whether intentional or otherwise) of Conspiracy.

What the film makes clear is that logic and reason will work admirably to carry you to a conclusion in line with your assumptions -- but will have precious little to say about the assumptions themselves. Start with the premise that "Jews are subhuman creatures of inferior blood who contaminate, corrupt, and pervert society," and logic will lead you to the Final Solution -- a solution imagined and implemented not by drooling sadistic monsters but by seemingly civilized, educated, even affable men.

But what makes it possible for intelligent people to accept such premises in the first place? It is not logic or reason, but something much more basic, with which logic cannot argue: the ego.

The overwhelming impression left by these Nazi leaders and middle managers is that of fundamental insecurity. These are frightened men, hiding their timidity behind loud uniforms and loud voices, behind bureaucratic jargon and intellectual cant. They are small men with ridiculous pretensions and absurdly grandiose ambitions. When one of them boasts that he is working on a four-year plan for Germany, another retorts that he is working on the Fuhrer's thousand-year plan. They take for granted the subjugation of Russia, and joke (but not idly) about living "next year" in the White House. They live a daydream, oblivious to the fact that the tide of the war has already turned against them; as the film's epilogue makes clear, for many of them their days were already numbered.

Their insecurity and the various defenses employed to mask it -- grandiosity, arrogance, manipulative deceit, power games, hatred of "inferiors," tribalism, intellectualism, crude locker room humor and macho posturing -- are all characteristic of the ego. For all its apparent forcefulness, the ego is, in reality, quite flimsy. It is an artificial construction -- and what has been made can be unmade. The ego works hard to protect itself. It is perpetually fearful and chronically vigilant; paranoid; prone to narcissism and self-importance; quick to hate; forever comparing itself to others in order to establish its superiority or gauge a possible threat; emotionally stunted; intellectually blinkered. It splits the world into self and Other, objectifying, dehumanizing, and demonizing the Other.

And the ego is an expert at logical reasoning. It can rationalize any behavior that suits its purposes -- any behavior at all, including genocide, which is simply, logically, the extermination of the Other en masse.

This last point is a salient reminder at present, when some extremist voices are beginning to call for a policy against Islamist terrorism that looks very much like the Final Solution. The people who write casually of rounding up all Muslims or nuking the whole Middle East ought to watch Conspiracy -- and then ask themselves if their agenda would have seemed out of place at Adolf Eichmann's table.

Sounds good

I'd heard nothing about this before, but ABC will be airing a two-part miniseries on Sunday, Sept. 10, and Monday, Sept. 11, called The Path to 9/11. I read a review on FrontPage magazine's Web site, and it sounds well worth watching:

"The Path to 9/11" does a tremendous job in bringing to life the complex web of international characters and organizations that lay behind the events of that tragic day. ABC has created a miniseries that is truly epic in scope - a richly textured tapestry that weaves together a fascinating array of people, places, organizations and events both here in America and around the world.... It was fascinating to see the crowded urban slums of Pakistan where the CIA captured Ramzi Youssef, the desert fortresses of the Taliban and Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Manila nightclubs where the 9/11 hijackers planned their attacks, the Tanzanian locales where the embassies were blown up, the meetings of the terrorists in Spain, and the various locations across America where the conspiracy comes together.

Admittedly, this reviewer is writing for a conservative publication, and the rave review is prompted partly by the miniseries' unsparing depiction of the Clinton administration's ineptitude in countering the growing al Qaeda threat. Here's a scene I look forward to watching:

One astonishing sequence in "The Path to 9/11" shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan.  They're on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead.  They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed.  National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they'll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization.  That way, their necks will be on the line - and not his.  The astonished CIA agent on the ground in Afghanistan repeatedly asks Berger if this is really what the administration wants.  Berger refuses to answer, and then finally just hangs up on the agent.  The CIA team and the Northern Alliance, just a few feet from capturing Bin Laden, have to abandon the entire mission.

This apparently did happen. The miniseries is based on testimony before the 9-11 Commission and on the nonfiction book The Cell by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell.

Kudos to ABC for tackling this important subject in a straightforward manner, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Night's fall

I must admit to taking a certain cruel and malicious pleasure in watching the disintegration of M. Night Shyamalan. The director who came to prominence with the superb occult thriller The Sixth Sense, and followed it up with the intriguing though flawed Unbreakable, has been on a downward spiral for some time. Signs had some powerful moments but didn't quite work. And then there was The Village, surely one of the very worst movies to come out of Hollywood in the last, oh, hundred years - a movie so pretentious, dull, nonsensical, labored, and incoherent that it makes Ed Wood look like John Ford.

Along the way, Shyamalan has become more and more full of himself - taking larger roles in his own movies, hawking the American Express card on TV, and bloviating about his own unappreciated genius. He is supported by the usual enablers - dizzy fans who think their hero can do no wrong, lazy critics who write positive reviews of movies they slept through, studio execs who don't dare say a discouraging word to a director who's currently hot.

Well, he ain't so hot anymore. His latest release, Lady in the Water, is underperforming at the box office even as it is raked over the coals by critics and eviscerated by word of mouth. This should come as no surprise. The script for Lady was so poor that Disney passed on the project despite Shyamalan's strong commercial track record. When a studio as money-hungry as Disney lets a brand-name director like Shyamalan get away, you know the script must have sucked like an Electrolux. Perhaps the fact that Shyamalan based the script on a bedtime story he told his children was a harbinger of things to come. Bedtime stories, after all, rarely make much sense ... and are mainly intended induce sleep.

Now the movie is out, and the reviews are in. For fun, I ventured over to Rotten Tomatoes to see how Lady in the Water was faring on their Tomatomometer - a roundup of critical commentary from print media, TV and radio, and the Net. The verdict: Rotten.

Here are some of the choicer comments.

"Have you ever been approached by someone who was really drunk, and they tell you some rambling, incoherent story? Well, that's what watching this movie is like." -- Mike McGranaghan, AISLE SEAT

"Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art." -- Liam Lacey, GLOBE AND MAIL

"Lady in the Water isn't just another disappointment. It's a jaw-dropping catastrophe -- a picture so wrong-headedly intoxicated with itself you view it through an embarrassed haze." -- Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

"Who am I to knock the work of the man who, in his own film, casts himself as a writer whose ideas will inspire a future leader who will save the world -- an artist whose work will not be fully understood in his own time, but only many years later?" -- Jim Emerson, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

"The story is exceedingly dull; to become involved in it would require not just a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of mental faculties altogether. [A] bewildering misstep for a director of Shyamalan's caliber." -- Kurt Loder, MTV

"In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan's descent into self-parody is complete." -- Shawn Levy, OREGONIAN

"When film historians discuss what happens when a filmmaker of limited talent has a huge success and then goes out of control, this is the movie that will be cited." -- Daniel M. Kimmel, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE

"Far-fetched is the kindest thing to say about Lady in the Water, a disjointed and mind-numbing story." -- Diana Saenger, REVIEWEXPRESS.COM

"Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

"Hollywood cannot pollute the ozone with anything more idiotic, contrived, amateurish or sub-mental than Lady in the Water." -- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER

"You won't see anything else like it this summer, and you'll be really glad about that." -- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION

"Lady in the Water marks M. Night Shyamalan's official leap off the deep end. Not everyone agrees on Shyamalan's talent as a filmmaker, but few, up till now, have questioned his sanity." -- Dana Stevens, SLATE

"Silly and sappy ... Shyamalan continues on his steady descent in quality." -- Steve Rhodes, INTERNET REVIEWS

"An act of spectacular (if unwitting) self-immolation." -- Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST

"M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an ego problem. He's just a humble screenwriter and director who makes himself a star of his own movie -- as a character who is a writer, whose words will save the world from despair and destruction." -- Michael Booth, DENVER POST

"A screenplay so eye-rollingly dippy that it plays out like something a bunch of second graders cooked up on a rainy day playing fort in the living room." -- Donald Munro, FRESNO BEE

"Stunningly self-indulgent claptrap." -- Nell Minow, MOVIE MOM AT YAHOO! MOVIES

"'Narf' and 'scrunt' are more than weird character names. They are the sounds you may involuntarily make while watching this thing." -- Michael Elliott, MOVIE PARABLES

"Has M. Night Shyamalan lost his damn mind?" -- Sean Burns, PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY

"Embarrassing. Stupid. Incomprehensible. A mess. Absurd. Fake." -- Boo Allen, DENTON RECORD CHRONICLE (TX)

"Shyamalan's latest exercise in foundering pretension may be the silliest movie of all time. Seriously. ... Will someone please lock up this pompous stiff in Johnny Depp's Dead Man's Chest and throw away the key?" -- Thomas Delapa, BOULDER WEEKLY

"I just want to punch this movie right in the face." -- David Cornelius, EFILMCRITIC.COM

"You wonder if Shyamalan has crossed from mere self-regard into actual mental illness." -- Josh Bell, LAS VEGAS WEEKLY

And finally, the most devastating comment of all:

"Lady in the Water doesn't have even The Village's slim virtues." -- Andy Klein, LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT

Ouch.