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AN AMERICAN CAROL (2008)
Written by David Zucker, Myrna Sokoloff and Lewis Friedman.
Directed by David Zucker.
Starring Kevin Farley, Kelsey Grammer, Trace Adkins, Robert Davi, Gail O’Grady, Chriss Anglin, Dennis Hopper, Bill O’Reilly, Leslie Nielsen and Jon Voigt.
This wildly unfocused and immature retelling of A Christmas Carol recasts Scrooge as liberal activist and filmmaker Michael Malone (Kevin Farley, and you can tell his late brother Chris had all the talent in the family). Patterned after Michael Moore of Roger and Me and Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, Malone is visited by the ghosts of George Patton (Kelsey Grammer), George Washington (Jon Voigt in some bad latex makeup) and the Angel of Death (Trace Adkins) to teach him the error of his America-hating ways. Made by the guy who did Airplane! and The Naked Gun movies, this film is the same sort of over-the-top spoof and is an unrelenting cinematic failure. Even putting all politics aside, watching this film is like rubbing a cheese grater across your face for 83 minutes.
It’s kind of pathetic that the people who made this movie thought it was going to be a scathing conservative satire of American liberalism. The only funny thing about this movie is that it’s actually a scathing satire of American conservatism. The only intelligent people who could enjoy this film are condescending liberals. They can laugh at all of the lame, labored and painfully unfunny attempts at conservative comedy and they can see every single negative stereotype they have about conservatives confirmed. An American Carol is stupid and petty and shallow and insular and oblivious and cowardly and irrational and obsessed with the forms of patriotism without any understanding of what Americans should be patriotic about. This film is like a leftwing parody of what a conservative movie would be like, except it was made by people who claim to be conservative.
There is neither wit nor intelligence to any of the political comedy in this story. All of the conservative humor functions at the level of the unironic fart joke. And while sometimes dumb, blunt and crude can be funny, the obnoxious self-congratulatory smugness that permeates every moment of An American Carol stops you from even getting any entertainment from it on even that level.
There are only three punchlines in the entire script and they’re just repeated over and over and over again. They are…
1. Michael Malone/Moore is fat!
2. Nobody cares about documentaries!
3. If you disagree with absolutely anything conservatives believe, you’re stupid and you hate America.
Now, you may notice that only one of those punchlines is even vaguely connected to anything resembling a joke. The other two are simply unthinking expressions of partisan anger and arrogance. I mean, trying to make fun of Michael Malone/Moore because he’s a lowly documentarian is like making fun of Rush Limbaugh because he’s a lowly talk show host. They’ve both become fabulously successful and wealthy doing what they love doing. How precisely do you mock someone for that?
If you want to understand how the Republican Party and conservatism went from the cusp of becoming a permanent governing majority in the United States to being widely despised, ludicrous and possibly a permanent political minority…watch this film. You can find an example of virtually every intellectual and emotional mistake and weakness embraced by the rightwing and see how decayed and degenerate the whole thing has become.
There have been great conservative movies, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. There have been great conservative comedies, like Thank You For Smoking. An American Carol is an embarrassment that should make everyone watching it cringe, whether you’re a conservative or not.
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN 1971
Written by Nelson Gidding.
Directed by Robert Wise.
Starring Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson, Kate Reid, Paula Kelly, George Mitchell, Ramon Bieri, Kermit Murdock and Eric Christmas.
If there’s one movie genre that ages the worse, it’s science fiction. Technology has advanced so far and so fast that settings which once seemed advanced, now appear primitive. Circumstances that once boggled the imagination, now seem commonplace. Challenges that were once staggering, now come off as corny. It takes a really good science fiction movie to hold up over time. The Andromeda Strain is THAT good.
Based on the novel by Michael Crichton, this film tells the story of a military satellite that returns to Earth with a deadly organism from outer space and the team of scientists called up to stop it from destroying all humanity. Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) is the man in charge of the team and the man who spearheaded the U.S. government’s preparation for alien contamination. He’s joined at the secret Wildfire lab by Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne), Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson) and Dr. Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid). They have to find out what killed the entire town of Piedmont, New Mexico and what they find is a deadly life form unlike anything ever seen. But to defeat the Andromeda Strain, they must also grapple with blind chance and their own human weaknesses.
This is a tense and suspenseful tale that blends together scientific mystery and social commentary in an emotional pressure cooker. It understands what all great suspense stories understand, that you can’t just keep cranking the tension up to a higher and higher level because you either wear out the audience or you go too far and end up an unintentional comedy. Instead of just increasing the heat, the story sets off little sparks and allows them to simmer until they all come together at the end in a big conflagration.
Visually, The Andromeda Strain does look a bit dated. There’s really no way around the fact that the real 1971 technology on display is primitive by today’s standards and the fictional high tech cooked up for the movie looks even worse. It doesn’t detract much from the story because it’s not about the technology, but about the people surrounded by all the machinery.
Director Robert Wise does a very nice job grounding the story in as much personal and practical reality as he can. There are moments when he uses a split screen to let the audience see what the characters are seeing and what they are thinking which are quite effective and a scene where a monkey is exposed to Andromeda is as unsettling as anything produced by modern movie magic. Wise also successfully walks a fine line suggesting that what we’re watching is a true story or at least based on one, without compromising the dramatic integrity of the film.
The Andromeda Strain is also a great example of writing and acting working hand-in-hand to spin an entertaining yarn. The four main characters serve more as archetypes than supposedly real people. Dr. Stone is the voice and presence of The Establishment and is always about following the plan and doing things by the book. Dr. Leavitt is the cantankerous counterculture that feels hemmed in by people like Stone and envious of people like Dr. Hall, who represents the bold humanist that still pushes against the boundaries of society. Dr. Dutton is a weary misanthrope , speaking to the part of us that gets jaded and bored with ordinary existence until that existence is genuinely threatened. The drama of this film doesn’t come from the external threat of the alien organism. It comes from the forceful and occasionally comic interplay of these broadly drawn and sharply portrayed characters.
If you’d like to watch a sci-fi flick that cares more about thinking than explosions or computer generated images, I think you’d enjoy The Andromeda Strain. However, I’d strongly recommend you watch this movie if you’ve already seen the cable TV mini-series remake. In this case, watching the original AFTER the remake is the way to go. Viewing the movie first will massively emphasize how much dumber, convoluted, boring and immature the mini-series is. Watching the overdone mini-series first, on the other hand, will only increase the enjoyment of seeing the story done right in the film.
APOCALYPTO 2006
Written by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia.
Directed by Mel Gibson.
Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead, Carlos Emilio Baez.
The only thing wrong with Apocalypto is expectation. If you look at it as a foreign language movie from a South American filmmaker, it’ll seem marvelous. If you think of it as the movie that followed an Academy Award winning director’s most provocative work ever, you’ll find it a bit disappointing. If you think of it as being from the mind of Mel Gibson, you probably won't bother with it.
Set in the dying days of the Mayan civilization, give or take a few historical inaccuracies, this story is about a young hunter named Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood). As his jungle tribe is assaulted by Mayan raiders, Jaguar Paw barely manages to hide his wife and child in a deep pit before he and all the other men and women of the village are taken prisoner. They are trekked across the rain forest with another captive tribe until they reach a Mayan city. Jaguar Paw must survive human sacrifice, becoming target practice for the Mayan raiders and one of the longest foot chases in movie history to return home and rescue his wife and child, who became trapped in the pit with no way out.
I say expectation is the only thing wrong with Apocalypto because in almost every respect, this is quite a good film. The acting, writing and direction are top notch. Emotionally, it’s exciting, terrifying and touching. Even thought all the dialog is spoken in Mayan or some other ancient South American dialect, it doesn’t create any barrier to getting involved in this story.
As fine a work as it is, Apocalypto is nothing more than a basic adventure story. It’s like The Outlaw Josey Wales or some other Western-style tale of survival and revenge, except all the characters are really, really tan and wearing loin cloths. If a thousand years ago there had been a Mayan version of Hollywood, this is exactly the sort of summer action movie it would have turned out. Unfortunately, when you’re watching the film, you can’t escape the sense it should be more than that.
The only thing this movie has to say about the Mayans is that they wore a cloak of civilization over a primitive and savage heart. This story is full of brutality and violence and Man’s indifference to the suffering of his fellow Man. But though you can clearly see signs throughout the movie that Mayan society is falling apart, absolutely nothing is said about why that’s happening. The Mayans are shown to be much more culturally and technologically advanced that Jaguar Paw’s jungle folk, but they’re beset by famine and plague. There’s never any effort, though, to explain or explore if the Mayans are declining due to luck, fate or bad decisions.
None of that would ordinarily be a problem but after Mel Gibson makes The Passion of the Christ, you can’t help but expect him to do something more than just make a really good action flick about ancient South Americans. If you’re going to go to all of the trouble to make a movie about the Mayans, to the extent you do it in the native languages, why bother with all of that for a story about a guy who turns into a jungle hybrid of Chuck Norris and MacGuyver?
I’d definitely encourage you to rent Apocalypto, just don’t expect anything deep, profound or enlightening.
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 1976
Written and directed by John Carpenter.
Starring Austin Stoker, Darwin Joston, Laurie Zimmer, Tony Burton and Charles Cyphers.
Some folks might refer to the original Assault on Precinct 13 as a “cult classic”, but that’s not right. “Cult” films are bad movies that nevertheless have something about them to which a small segment of people really respond. Assault on Precinct 13 is actually good and is the rare film that feels better now than when it originally came out.
Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker) is a police lieutenant who gets assigned to take over a precinct that’s being closed. Almost everything and everyone has been moved to the new precinct that opens up tomorrow and all Bishop has to do is “hold the fort” until the building officially closes. Then a prison bus has to stop at the precinct due to a medical emergency. One of the prisoners is Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), a death row inmate who’s never specified murders were so remarkable that cops can’t help but ask him about them. Then an older man runs into the precinct, in shock and unable to speak, and before anyone realizes what’s happening, the precinct is under siege by dozens of street gang members seeking revenge for a police ambush that killed one of their own. With the phone and power cut off, bullets crashing through the windows and relentless gang members trying to get in like zombies after human flesh, Bishop, Wilson, a civilian secretary named Leigh (Lauire Zimmer) and another prisoner name Wells (Tony Burton) have to find a way to really “hold the fort” and survive the night.
Going you should know that Assault on Precinct 13 is a very simple story that relies heavily on atmosphere. If you want an action film where stuff is blowing up every 20 seconds, this ain’t it. But helped by a striking musical score (also by John Carpenter), this movie creates a tremendous amount of dread and foreboding as it sets the scene and assembles its characters. Then when the violence begins, it starts with a wrenching suddenness that’s much closer to reality than what you see in most action films. That gives the moments of fighting and death a surprising edge that can still shock you 3 decades after the film was made.
Assault on Precinct 13 also offers you something now that people wouldn’t have noticed back in 1976. It’s a real window into the cultural mood of its era. No film, of course, can ever really tell you what it was like in the past but it can let you see what folks thought and felt about the time they were living in. Running throughout this movie is a sense of dystopia, a sense that civilization is held together by only the thinnest strands and those strands are almost completely frayed. Carpenter, though, also captures the essence of social decline in Assault on Precinct 13. It’s not just that things are going to hell. It’s the sense that things deserve to go to hell. The threat in this story isn’t fromt outside, it’s something from within society and looms as a replacement for the world as it is.
For a low budget action film, Carpenter and his actors do a good job creating characters that are more than just heroes or cannon fodder. Lieutenant Bishop is straight-laced and by the book, but he’s also a black man from the ghetto who doesn’t feel alienated from his roots. Wilson and Leigh are both hardened souls who can’t really let their guards down anymore, not even under threat of death. Wells embodies the “I’m just in it for myself” side of people who has to bend to the needs of the group. Even some of the minor characters like Starker (Charles Cyphers), the cop leading the prison bus that stops at the precinct, are allowed to be more than just pawns that exists only to service the story.
Now, there is one scene where gang members run away and leave one of their own to be gunned down by a grieving father that makes absolutely no sense. And the big, explosive finale to the film is quite lame, especially when compared to the scope and intricacy of modern movie violence. But for a basic, low-budget action movie, the original Assault on Precinct 13 offers a whole lot more than what you’d expect or what you’d get from other such films.
ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (2005 Remake)
Written by James DeMonaco.
Directed by Jean-Francois Richet.
Starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Byrne, Maria Bello, Drea de Mateo, John Leguizamo, Brian Dennehy and Ja Rule.
Watching this movie reminds me of an argument I had with a guy over the NBA. He claimed that today’s NBA players and teams are better than they ever were and that the original Dream Team couldn’t compare to the Redeem Team that won gold at the recent Summer Olympics. I argued that today’s players are bigger and faster and may have certain individual skill levels that are higher, they aren’t as good as players used to be because they don’t really know how to play the game. The remake of Assault on Precinct 13 is another example of something that can seem better while actually being worse.
Only the basic core of the original remains in this film. It is still about a group of people trapped in a police precinct as bad guys lay siege to the building and try to kill them all. And there is a bus of prisoners that stops at the precinct and gets stuck there, with a particularly charismatic bad guy on board. Pretty much everything else is changed and while you can imagine how the filmmakers thought they were improving the story, what they came up with was pretty much worse than the original in every way.
Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is a cop who got the rest of his team killed when a drug bust went bad and he’s ended up in charge of a police precinct about to close down, hiding away from responsibility in a haze of booze, drugs and self-pity. Marion Bishop (Laurence Fishburne) is a big time drug dealer who gets caught after killing a guy in self-defense in a church. He winds up on a bus of prisoners forced to stop at Precinct 13 for the night. Then the bad guys start shooting up the place and Roenick and Bishop have to work together to get the cops and the crooks trapped inside the precinct to work together to survive.
If you just casually glance at the two Assault on Precinct 13’s, you might be fooled into thinking the modern version is better. It’s faster moving. It has a bigger budget. The plot and the characters seem more complex on the surface. The dialog is mean to be more realistic. And there’s a lot more action in the remake. But this movie is actually inferior to the original in almost every respect.
Firstly, this is both a stupid movie and a movie that thinks its audience is stupid. It asks you to believe that the bad buy snipers are both good enough to shoot people right between the eyes from a hundred yards away and bad enough to repeatedly miss easy targets like near-sighted Sleestaks. It never does anything without having a character stop and explain what’s happening and what it’s supposed to mean. Instead of letting the heavily armed and trained bad guys stage an all-out attack that would have ended the film in a couple of minutes, the bad guys only try and break into the precinct in ones or twos, like movie ninjas standing in line for the hero to karate chop them. It has a “twist” toward the end that makes absolutely no sense at all.
This remake is also strikingly phony at every point where the original tried to ground itself in some sort of reality. The original tried to base itself on the societal decay and unleashed violence of the 1970s. The remake just slaps together a crooked cops storyline and doesn’t even try to be relevant. The hero of the original is a normal guy who clings to his concepts of law and order even as things fall apart around him. The remake’s hero is the same, generic, wise cracking doofus haunted by past tragedy we’ve seen a thousand times before. In the original, the bad guy who helps save the day ends up heading to death row anyway. In the remake, the hero lets the bad guy who helps him get away because, you never know, there might be a sequel.
While very dumb, the remake of Assault of Precinct 13 isn’t aggressively bad. It’s just lifeless and artificial and contrived.
Oh, and about that NBA discussion, when I brought up the idea that if the talent and skill level and competition in the league today is sooooo much better than it’s ever been, that must mean the Boston Celtics that won the title this year are the greatest team ever in NBA history…the other guy didn’t want to admit that. But if today’s players are better and today’s teams are better and the Celtics still managed to put together one of the most dominant performances ever against that higher level of competition, then these Celtics must be better than those great Bulls, Celtics or Lakers teams of the past, right?
AVATAR 2009
Written and Directed by James Cameron.
Starring Same Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi, Joel Moore, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Laz Alonso.
Avatar is that rare film where everything you ever hear about it is absolutely true. All the criticism is valid and all the praise is justified. It really is the sibling of James Cameron’s Titanic, in that it is a very ordinary story presented in an extraordinary fashion. Your opinion of it will be determined by whether you care about what a movie has to say or how it says it.
Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a crippled Marine in a future where a corporation has established a mining colony on the alien world of Pandora. Jake’s twin brother was part of the Avatar program, where human beings have their minds projected into genetically engineered bodies that resemble the natives of Pandora, 10 foot tall blue humanoids called the Na’vi. The idea is that by presenting themselves in similar forms, they can more successfully interact with the Na’vi. When Jake’s brother dies, the wheelchair-bound Marine is offered the chance to take his place because only someone with his brother’s DNA can “drive” his alien form.
When Jake arrives on Pandora and jumps into his Na’vi body, he finds himself caught between the scientist Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who wants Jake to help her learn about the aliens and their world, and Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who wants Jake to get him militarily useful intelligence on the Na’vi. The head of the mining colony, Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi) doesn’t care a whit about Jake, he just wants the Na’vi to leave their homes so he can dig up a mineral called unobtainium which is worth 20 million dollars a kilo.
You may have heard Avatar described as “Dances with Wolves in space”. Well, that’s a pretty fair characterization as the rest of the movie is all about Jake becoming part of the Na’vi, learning their ways, falling in love with a female named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and eventually siding with the aliens in spectacular battle against the humans that are trying to exploit Pandora for their own needs.
The computer generated images of Avatar are the most extensive and best looking stuff that’s ever been on the silver screen. The scenery is incredibly detailed and realistic. The Pandoran wildlife and the Na’vi themselves are phenomenally lifelike. The advanced technology of the humans, like their Battletech-style armored suits, are more clearly defined and believably designed than anything you’ve seen before. And unlike some films where the CGI action sequences turn into little more than blurs of color and motion, Cameron is able to slow things down and keep things clear so you can follow what’s happening in even the most dynamic moments. Watching this entire film is like the first time you saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park or the morphing T-1000 from Terminator 2.
Now, the verisimilitude of computerized special effects doesn’t really blow me away. I certainly enjoyed looking at Avatar, but I generally need more than that and I just barely got it from this movie. This is an extremely formulaic and pedestrian story. There’s nothing boring or stupid about it and if you took away all the CGI effects, this script wouldn’t have made a bad film. It just wouldn’t have ever been made into a film because there’s nothing interesting or compelling about the tale Cameron has written. In fact, there area couple of points where it seems like Cameron deliberately avoided more complex and potentially engaging story possibilities. I’m not sure if he wanted to keep the story as dumbed down as possible or if he simply focused too much on the special effects, but this is probably the least dramatically ambitious tale Cameron has ever told.
Avatar is a fun, exciting film to watch. I can recommend it with no reservations…but unless you’re obsessed with the latest advances in CGI technology, I can’t really call it a “must see”.
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