When the Trailer was better than the movie - #1

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace

Those of us who were Star Wars fans even before the resurgence in the early 90s lived in a minor, tepid state of anticipation for George Lucas to go back and tell the prequel trilogy.
This teaser was the first glimpse anyone had really received of the long-awaited Episode One. And it so tingles with the essence of what made that original trilogy so special.

–You believe it’s this…boy?
–He was meant to help you.
–Anakin Skywalker, meet Obi-Wan Kenobi.

It’s just hard to believe that what we got in the end was Jar Jar Binks, and a space farmboy shouting “yippee!”

But, oh, that first prequel still had so much potential. It was a hard core fantasy story, and Lucas deserves numerous accolades not only of the film’s groundbreaking visual effects, but its stab into a deep mythology built up by so many years of fan anticipation. On its own, it’s great story. The flaws creep in through the telling.

Here’s the trailer (pardon the subtitles).

City of Ember (2008)

Mythmaking in the movies has never enjoyed a more fruitful age than this present era of special effects. What’s missing, however, is the depth and subtly the filmmakers of the past could weave without easy access to glitter and glow. City of Ember, another Walden Media kid-lit adaptation, has all the ingredients needed to create a compelling myth. What it lacks is the patience to let it all simmer.

Ember, based on the book by Jeanne Duprau, begins as the Builders prepare humanity for the end. They have constructed Ember, a vast city, deep underground, to shelter the human race from an unnamed catastrophe. In a small parcel, they lock away a prepared a set of instructions to lead the people out once enough time has passed. They set the parcel’s timer for 200 years, and as the years tick by, the parcel is passed down to each of Ember’s mayors, until by accident, the parcel is lost.

Now, the Builders are regarded as little more than legends, the timer on the box reached zero long ago, and Ember’s vast array of lights are beginning to flicker and go out.
It is Assignment Day; the day Ember’s young students will draw a job out of a hat and start a career. Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) wants to work in the generator room. Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) wants to be a messenger, and when her and Doon end up with jobs neither one likes, a trade suits both their desires—Lina accepts Doon’s messenger assignment, and Doon heads for the pipeworks.

The story unfolds against Doon’s obsession with learning the massive generator’s workings, and a tiny parcel Lina’s little sister Poppy discovers in the closet. Inside, Lina finds the Builders’ instructions, half chewed by the precocious toddler, and she enlists Doon’s help to learn its secrets.

Differences between book and film always create a divide between any established fan base, and the film’s audience. In this case, screenwriter Caroline Thompson (who also penned Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride) adds the character of Doon’s father Loris (Tim Robbins), who helps to elevate some of the thematic weight that takes the book 50 pages to convey.

Loris likes to build things when he’s not rambling off words of wisdom to his son. “Notice the things no one else notices,” Loris tells Doon, “and you’ll know the things no one else knows.” Though it may seem a tad cliché, it serves the narrative’s thematic direction: pursuit of the intended will and purpose entrusted to them by those who sought to protect them. “If you have proof, you have to pursue it!”

The people of Ember, however, embody a collective disillusionment. Their mayor (Bill Murray) espouses unity and courage, yet drinks from the cup of corruption once he steps back behind his veil. Devout believers in the Builders wander the streets singing hymns, yet most of the city’s inhabitants believe the Builders abandoned them. Food is in short supply, and the city is cursed by frequent blackouts that last longer and longer. The quest to find a way out becomes a linchpin to the narrative—the Builders never abandoned them; they left instructions.

The plot garners all the magic of modern mythmaking—new beginnings, transcendence, courage and conviction. The filmmakers fail, however, in not taking enough time to unfold its developing themes, and linger on their inherent beauty. Not that the film looks bad—cinematographer Xavier Perez Grobet lifts Ember right off the pages of Duprau’s book, lighting the city’s interior with bright phosphorescent yellow, contrasted with the deep black of the city’s dark outskirts.

Director Gil Kenan (Monster House) lends some competence to the film’s shortcomings—he knows the value of the landscape of a character’s face, but spends too much time setting up pay-offs that end too soon. His cast, however, delivers. Bill Murray downshifts his antics and delivers a surprisingly subtle villain, and Tim Robbins channels a little of Andy DuFresne’s meticulous patience.

Saoirse Ronan (who earned an Oscar nom for her work in Atonement) is an actress to watch. While Ember never really gives her a chance to stretch her legs, at 14-years-old, she’s already learned that her eyes convey the best body language.

Duprau’s novel is a visual, imaginative splendor, and a ripe candidate for screen adaptation, particularly for Walden Media. And while City of Ember certainly falls among the better entries in the Walden canon, it still cannot maintain the grasp needed to carry the weight of creating a modern myth.

(you can also see this review at Blogcritics here)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

The most problematic element of Picnic at Hanging Rock is that it will likely soar right over the heads of most viewers born after 1985. Thrillers and suspense yarns have had their high principles undercut by overused conventions and stylized pop that have contributed to the waning appeal such stories used to make on our conscious perceptions of grand thematic ideas. In 1975, director Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, Witness) could make this film without having to live under the heavy shadow of hockey mask clichés or Scream parodies. Today, this is a rare find, and a lovely blend of genres and textures.

On Valentines Day in the year 1900, the girls of Mrs. Appleyard’s College prepare for a day-long visit to Hanging Rock, a 500 foot tall dormant volcano. Four girls separate from the group to explore the rocky base and attempt a climb the rocky slopes. Three of them never reemerge. As the hour grows late, their caretaker attempts to locate them, and disappears as well. The one girl left behind arrives at the base screaming, witness to an invisible horror.

There is no easy way to classify Picnic. Rather than shape the film’s horror around a conventional villain, Weir instead molds it from the chaotic, unhealthy mind of unchecked, unmeasured desire. Every character yearns—be it the school girls’ romantic longings, or the cold, rigid pursuit of strict behavior and pragmatic, passionless logic shown by some of the teachers. The disappearance of the girls is only the catalyst that cracks each character’s safeguards and strips away all pretenses, revealing their inner strength, or frailty.

This is not to say that the film is without any dramatic tension. Weir takes his time to pull his narrative threads taut. Certain moments ring with the ticking clock of suspense that characterized much of Hitchcock’s work. Yet these moments never lead to any of the presumed ends an audience would expect.

As the mystery surrounding what happened on the rock unfolds, the film offers little to no answers. It extends, in a way, the notion that what you cannot see is much scarier than what you can. Instead, Weir postulates that what you don’t know — what remains unsolved, irresolute — is more disquieting than what you do. This would shock any viewer accustomed to the paint-by-numbers scare fests that fill theaters today, but to succumb to the temptation to provide all the answers in a neat package at the end betrays the film’s core motivations: character and desire.

Desire abounds among the film’s players—between one student for another, between two boys watching the girls hike up the rock, and between the teachers and their ideals. The opening trip to Hanging Rock is fraught with the girls’ warm and silly romantic ruminations on love, purpose and eternity; the kind of vague naivety common to young ladies on the cusp of womanhood, their pure ideals as yet untainted by the world’s cruelty. Chief among them is Miranda (Anne Lambert), a lovely, graceful presence whom one character even calls a “Botticelli Angel.” Juxtaposed to Miranda is Sara (Margaret Nelson), ordered that day by Mrs. Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) to stay behind at the school under the pretense of falling grades. Sara’s aloof nature separates her from her peers, though she retains a strong attachment to Miranda, hinting at her own buried desires for love, friendship, and perhaps even companionship.

Most of the cast serves the material beyond what’s on the page. Certain portions of the film focus so much on the girls’ charged emotionalism that it almost overwhelms. The film receives a breath of life from smaller moments and characters influenced by healthier expressions of desire—two caretakers discussing the bizarre details of the mystery, the calm persistence of the constable’s investigation into the case.

Weir’s choice of composer Bruce Smeaton for the film’s score anticipates his later selection of Maurice Jarre for Dead Poets Society. In both films, the score complements the tension surrounding pivotal moments, playing soft chords that grow steadily louder as the moment evolves. Smeaton even manages to capture the eerie ambiance of the late summer quiet.

This delicate, methodical study on desire earns its merits by exploiting the strengths of film as a medium. Weir spends as much time on the intricate landscape of his characters’ faces as he does on the jagged outcropping of rock, lending a strange, ethereal bent to the world of the film. No doubt some viewers will feel jilted by the film’s lack of closure, but the resolution does offer a sort of close, suggesting in the end that Weir wanted to give us a fable — tough comeuppance awaits the heart that blindly surrenders to its desires.

When the trailer was better than the movie - #2

The Matrix Reloaded

The original Matrix was a fine film. A little flawed, but a gorgeous “neo-techno-noir” piece with a certain…well, class. The original film follows the hero myth to the letter—even has a resurrection scene—and tells a solid story brimming with an implied scope that left audiences hungering for more once it was all over.

This teaser was our first glimpse. It resonates with the first film’s strongest attribute—the surrender of these characters to a something far greater than themselves. Lawrence Fishburn’s voice teases us, and haunts us, with its implications. “This is a war, and we are soldiers. What if tomorrow the war could be over? Isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t that worth dying for?”
Morgan Freeman could not have made that sound better. (All right, maybe he could have.)

What we got in 2003 was a bloated video game, and a lot of mindless pontificating with an absolutely unnecessary rave scene. Jeffrey Overstreet put it best when he said it felt like characters would fight just for the sake of saying hello.

And for what it’s worth, as HISHE said, Morpheus should have been the one to die for Neo.

Here’s the trailer:

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

There is, I believe, a small resurgence in the kind of cheesy, action / adventure / horror-oriented films we love to remember from the 70s and 80s. They're called comic book movies.

The Incredible Hulk begins much the same way as some of those pulpy old reels, giving us muted snippets of our hero’s tragic back story/origin over the opening credits. Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) worked as a bio-tech scientist helping out the Army with experimental research until one of his tests went awry, and he zapped himself with gamma radiation. Now, whenever Banner gets too angry or too excited, he becomes a monstrous green hulk, fueled by terrible rage and fury.

Hiding out in Brazil, Banner works in secret to find a cure for his disease, communicating with the elusive Mr. Blue (Tim Blake Nelson). A contrived accident, which supplies Stan Lee his requisite cameo, alerts Gen. Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) to his whereabouts sending him and his new point man Maj. Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) out to extract Banner’s curse for use in their secret superhuman/weapons program.

First-volume comic book adaptations will invariably spend too much time boring the tears out of an audience with an origin-story before cutting to the meat of the narrative. Hulk jumps right into the story, but trips whenever it begins to borrow pages from the old ‘80s action paradigms, and relies more on contrivances than any real character motivations.

The cast picks up the material and turns out solid work to help make up some of the difference. Norton delivers a sympathetic hero with a believable pathos, similar to The Fugitive, with enough charm to lend itself some credibility. General Ross in particular receives a thorough treatment, and Hurt provides the warmth and menace needed to address the character’s moral complexities.

Roth does what he can with Blonsky, a dedicated, self-aware fighter fully confident in his abilities. His sudden obsession with obtaining the Hulk’s power never receives an explanation, other than Blonsky’s unquenchable desire to fight, making him a caricature more like an old Rutger Hauer villain than a viable antagonist.

Banner’s relationship with the general’s daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler), picks up without any real context to help anchor the audience’s sympathies. Tyler is best when she can add a little range to her typical mellifluous voice—her reaction to a Mario Andretti-inspired cab driver injects a little more life into an otherwise stock Liv Tyler performance. She needs a chance to spread her ability around a little, and the filmmakers never give her the chance.

I would suppose the need to keep as faithful to the source material as possible (so as not to upset the fan base) compels the filmmakers to avoid taking these relationships any place other than what’s found on the comic book page. Watching Bruce and Betty, and given their loyalties and challenges, you almost hope for a kind of tragic/flawed romance similar to Rick and Ilsa. But Norton and Tyler are no Bogey and Bergman, and this is certainly not Casablanca. There are no grand moments of inspiration to set the film into its audience’s consciousness in any kind of meaningful context. Blonsky’s obsessive behavior simply rises out of the plot's need for a villain for Hulk to defeat. Betty Ross appears to fill requisite role of the hero’s girlfriend. Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) cameo lends a serialized quality to this film, and the idea that these movies are moving to one larger effort creates a grander sense of scope, but only on a superficial level.

Hulk represents a real danger for Marvel’s heroes as they evolve on screen if this is the level of excellence they hope to achieve from film to film. Heroes appeal to the audience when they inspire meaning and hope. Hulk has the muscle. What it lacks is the heart.

When the trailer was better than the movie - #3

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Here’s a classic example of a trailer that promises a lush, full story, where the actual product is much emptier.

Benjamin’s gimmicky age-reversal is curious while the rest of the film unfolds as a ponderous look at mortality, and neglects the implications such “unusual circumstances” would hold. You can’t build a full-length feature out of whimsy.

But the trailer does everything a good trailer should—tempt you with the unforgettable. Unfortunately, that’s a goal the film never achieves.

Fearless (1993)

Fearless opens in a cornfield. Max Klein (Jeff Bridges), a successful architect, leads a small parade of dirty refugees through the tall foliage and into a clearing to find the remains of their plane that fell from the sky.

Emergency crews have arrived, spraying the fires, pulling people to safety. Max leads his caravan to aid. Were you on the plane, an EMT asks. No, Max says, and we know he’s lying. He hops a cab and heads to a motel. He rents a room, showers, and stares at himself in the mirror. You’re alive, he says. But he does not appear convinced.

What we learn about the crash evolves throughout the film in flashbacks (a precursor to Lost, in a small way), and early on, we get our first look. Max is flying home with his best friend and business partner (John DeLancie). The plane jerks, the engines whine. The pilot cuts in over the PA to tell everyone that the plane has suffered a complete hydraulic failure, and that they’re going to have to ditch. The plane banks, pitches, and starts a rapid decent; the flight attendants do their best to get everyone organized, even lock all the ladies’ high-heeled shoes in a lavatory. Max grips the armrests of his seat, terrorized.

Recall, for a moment, an early scene in Big Fish where little Ed Bloom looks in the witch’s eye, and sees the moment of his death. This knowledge has already frightened two of his friends, who fled the witch’s house screaming. Bloom, however, calls the knowledge a “help,” and later as he spins his tall tales, he faces certain dangers and threats with a special kind of courage. “I don’t die here,” he declares at one point, just before Bloom confronts a giant. On the plane, Max attains a similar catharsis: this is the moment of his death. And he is unafraid.

Director Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, Witness) unfolds a layered study of psychological trauma. On one end is Max, suffering a peculiar form of post-traumatic stress syndrome where he requires the continual high of overcoming his fear, and thinks he’s invincible. On the other is Carla (Rosie Perez), oppressed by crushing guilt and remorse over losing her toddler in the crash.

Given film’s unique ability to create an experience within a narrative, some have argued that the experience is the medium’s chief end. Weir seems to embrace such an understanding, at times using his film’s narrative to prod the audience into questions through subjective visuals, rather than allow them to lapse into concrete understanding by spelling out the details. Be it the girls of Appleyard College (Picnic at Hanging Rock), or the boys of Mr. Keating’s English class (Dead Poets Society), Weir uses their stories to plumb their inner worlds, and invites the audience to do so as well.

One of the themes that under girds — sometimes more implicitly than anything else, lying just under the surface — much of Weir’s work is the pursuit of LIFE, as opposed to mere “life.” “Life” is sometimes tawdry, repetitive, meaningless and rote. LIFE is active. It lives. It creates, overcomes, adapts, learns, and finds excitement, even in the midst of fear.

At one point, pressured by the lawyer looking to cash in on the tragedy, his best friend’s wife suffering from her loss and desperate for some kind of reprieve, and his own wife’s (Isabella Rossellini) struggle to reconnect to her husband, Max flees to the rooftop of a high-rise. There, though he basks under an endless, open sky, it isn’t enough to conquer the walls closing in. So he perches himself on the edge of the roof. It’s a long way down, and he’s terrified. He fights the strength into his legs and wills them to raise his posture to stand at attention, screaming all the way. But he stands. And he finds himself unafraid. There on the ledge, with the childish joy of a kid knocking the hell out of a soccer ball, he actually dances. What a lunatic. But he has captured LIFE, and wrestled it into submission.

There’s a lot of wrestling going on in Max’s soul. On the inside, everything is fighting to heal, and at first, he can’t figure out how to do it. He latches on to the nearest warm body with whom he can share in (commune with?) his journey. We already died, he tells Carla. We’re ghosts. His words provide an appealing thematic exploration of pain and discovery, though Carla’s reaction to his grandiose, almost supercilious behavior renders the balance he needs. Perez injects Carla with a terrific, discerning and mature self-awareness, even in the midst of her deep pain.

The moral complexity of Max’s decision to pursue his relationship with Carla unwinds against Max’s wife’s attempts to reconnect to her husband. It’s a setting that, in the hands of other writers, could go in any number of interesting (and many more uninteresting) directions, but Weir and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias (who adapted the script from his novel) choose to focus on her stalwart devotion. Rossellini lends Laura Klein strength replete of any mawkish indignation, and braced with determination to cleave to her husband.

Weir directs his cast to unexpected performances, including a nicely understated John Turturro as a psychologist intent on helping Max along the healing process. The film’s most glaring fault is that it fails to find a place for him as the film starts wrap things up by mid-way.

Yglesias writes his characters as adults. While a handful of moments dip into sentiment and drip with emotional appeals for tears, others cast a sublime light on the emptiness of fear, and the virtue of commitment. The narrative never draws a decisive corollary with faith or spirituality, but is deeply concerned with the questions such beliefs raise. Max states that he doesn’t believe in God; a curious contrast to Carla’s serious and unpretentious religious faith. His disbelief, however, is bracketed by a visit to church with Carla, and a defiant shout to the heavens.

After crossing a busy city street, Max alights on the curbside, lays on his back and cries out, “You want to kill me, but you can’t!” he declares. One has to wonder if this is expressive of his defiance of divinity, or perhaps a subtle recollection (however unintentional) of the portrait of grace present at Moses’ defense of the wayward Israelites before God, who was ready to wipe them all out.

Evangelicals often assert that the opposite of fear is faith, which sounds nice behind a lectern, but doesn’t allow enough room to challenge the roots of fear, whether traumatic or irrational. Fear suppresses LIFE, Weir seems to say here. So he asks questions, suggesting the opposite of fear may instead rest on a tenuous relationship between faith and knowledge.

Upcoming Reviews

Later today, look for a review of an often overlooked Jeff Bridges film from 1993 -- Fearless.

Also, expect to see reviews of :

The Incredible Hulk
Picnic at Hanging Rock
City of Ember

When the trailer was better than the movie - #4

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Years of effort went into bringing Douglas Adams’s classic work to the screen. He had even taken a whack at a script himself before his unfortunate death. Yet what ended up on the screen betrayed almost everything that made the book (and its sequels) such charms to read.

The trailer, though, captures it beautifully.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I have had a few moments when a film hit me in a way the filmmakers had not intended. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes a close, pondering, and artful look at mortality, and while the film urged me more and more to think about death, I kept drifting to thoughts of childhood—something Benjamin never really gets to experience.

In a hospital room in New Orleans, an elderly woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett) endures her last moments on the eve of Hurricane Katrina’a fateful landfall, watched over by her daughter (Julia Ormond). Daisy, weak from old age, asks her daughter to read from a small book tucked away in her belongings. These are the memoirs of Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), born under unusual circumstances on the night the First World War ended.

Amid the raucous celebration in the streets of New Orleans, Benjamin’s mother dies in child birth, and his father, upon witnessing the unusual circumstances of his son’s birth, ditches the child on the steps of a hospice home in a fit of desperation. Benjamin the baby looks old and wrinkled, crippled by arthritis and cataracts, and does not appear to have enough life in him to make more than a few days. Queenie, the lady that runs the care center, takes him in and cares for him. Overtime, the plot device we all know from the trailer makes itself known—Benjamin ages in reverse.

At the home, Benjamin learns to read, feed himself, and eventually walk (during a Pentecostal healing service, no less). Aided by Brad Pitt’s voiceover, we learn of Benjamin’s awareness that death resides close by the residents of the home, and the story’s central theme receives the beginning of a thoughtful, quiet development within the lives of the elderly.

I’d be remiss to mention that young Benjamin (who looks like really old Benjamin) eventually meets the granddaughter of one of these residents—a spirited redhead named Daisy.
Benjamin’s story unfolds against episodic tales that are supposed to show his growth as a human being, and perhaps enlighten us as to the quality of his character. And while the film represents significant achievements in visual effects and directorial talent, the story lacks enough substance to avoid using its premise as a crutch.

As anyone can guess, Benjamin and Daisy frequently pass in and out of each other’s lives, and the audience knows early on to expect these two to meet somewhere in the middle of their emotional journey when they reach the same approximate age. Yet the movie avoids most of the more compelling implications of Benjamin’s unusual circumstances, the biggest being the question of what shape his relationship with Daisy will take once he reaches the appearance of a teen or adolescent.

It’s a compelling question that never gets an answer. Benjamin ages in reverse in appearance only—in soul and mind, he endures the very same stages of life you and I endure. Once he regresses to the appearance of adolescence, he’s stricken with a form of Alzheimer’s—he has little memory of the life he led prior, and his behavior more closely resembles the senility of those residents with whom he had initially grown up.

The film’s final acts offer some uncomfortable meditations on mortality, and perhaps resonate the strongest (more on that in a moment). Getting there, however, you have to muddle through two hours of empty, unfulfilling narrative. Setting the “present day” of the story on the eve of Hurricane Katrina carries little, if any, thematic weight. The script offers whimsical, poetic moments that play beautifully, but never mature into full thematic tissue that connects the larger story.

In the film’s opening moments, for example, we’re told of an old and blind clockmaker whose son had died in World War I. He’s commissioned at the end of the war to build a grand clock for a new train station in New Orleans, and at its unveiling, we learn that he built the clock to run backward. “I made it this way,” the clockmaker says, “so that perhaps, the boys who were lost in the war might stand and go home again…home to farm, to work, have children, to live long, full lives.”

And that’s the last you hear from the old clockmaker. His clock appears and receives attention here and there, but that’s about it. And an episode rich in subtext ends, five minutes into the film, never to be revisited. Shame, really—I kind of wanted to see that movie.

By the time credits roll, we’re left with more of a figment of Benjamin than an actual character sketch. He comes to rest as a flat, unbending hinge up which the rest of the cold narrative turns. The gravest flaw emerges over Benjamin’s relationships to his two lady loves—an American representative’s wife (Tilda Swinton), and the lovely Daisy—and neither ever deals an honest hand to the audience. John Nolte, who blogs at Dirty Harry’s Place, makes the best observation when he writes that, “This idea that adultery liberates and rejuvenates or is somehow acceptable and without consequences between two people who can’t be together has moved beyond offensive and straight into boring.”

Cate Blanchett perhaps deserves the highest praise for her portrayal of essentially three roles. At first impetuous and naïve, Daisy grows into a thoughtful, mature adult, and finally into a venerable old woman, fiercely dedicated to her love as he fades out of existence. The final, touching moments of an old Daisy cradling an infant Benjamin rocked me to my very core.
Before heading out to see the movie, I spent significant time watching my 19-month-old son play, running back and forth down the hall, laughing and screaming in full delight for no other reason than that he could. An early moment of the film shows young Benjamin (then the appearance of a frail 75 or 80-years-old) peering down the steps of the old folks home to watch children play. It occurred to me, someplace down deep, that Benjamin’s unusual circumstances had never really allowed him the opportunity to be a kid. There I saw and felt a real tragedy. And it crushed me.

I have no clue as to whether dir. David Fincher had ever intended to move his audience to such a place. But it impressed upon me the vital, deep inherent value of childhood, and left me in tears knowing Benjamin never laughed as full and as rich as a toddler can at the joy of something as simple as running.

Though a profound technical achievement, the film never reaches the depth such a premise could, and should, fulfill. Film is a unique medium in its ability to engage an audience, and while I do appreciate the experience, getting there was a trip I do not want to retake, and the success of a myth lies in the enjoyment of its retelling.