Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

As you might guess from my glowing review, I was happy to see The Aviator nominated for best picture in this year’s Academy Awards. I’m fairly convinced it will win, too, based on Oscar’s track record. Here’s why:

1. It’s an epic. Let’s face it: comedies and smaller movies rarely win best picture. More often than not movies like Dances With Wolves, Braveheart, Titanic, Gladiator, and Return of the King win the day.
2. It features crazy people. The Academy adores mental illness (see: A Beautiful Mind, Shine, Silence of the Lambs, Rain Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, etc.).
3. It’s about Hollywood. OK, this is probably my weakest argument—I don’t really have anything to back it other than, say, The Player (which was nominated for lots of things but didn’t actually win any). But come on—we all know that Hollywood is deepy narcissistic.

I think this hat trick attack will allow Aviator to handily trouce its competion.

I spent most of New Years Day feeling, shall we say, a bit under the weather (let’s just say that the restaurant we ate at the night before has been called one of the five best places in the country to drink tequila). Nonetheless, some friends did manage to coax me away from my deathbed long enough to catch one of the movies I’d most been looking forward to: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Rushmore is one of my favorite movies, and I liked The Royal Tenenbaums, but based on its lukewarm critical reception, I had low expectations for Wes Anderson’s latest effort. Fortunately, the movie was well worth braving the waves of debilitating nausea I was feeling.

Certainly, Anderson’s movies don’t appeal to everyone. Unlike, say, The Aviator, which I thought was a masterpiece of structure, the plots of Tenenbaums and Zissou tend to be almost secondary to character and setting. Rather than following a distinct arc, Anderson’s characters tend to meander dejectedly from episode to episode, finally finding peace with themselves and others in the end (seemingly more out of weary resignation than any great personal epiphany). I also think Anderson’s pacing tends make his films seem a bit long, and they’re not exactly what you’d call “laugh out loud funny.”

If those are the kind of things that bother you, then Zissou is definitely not the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you’re the kind of person who laughs hysterically at the absurd image of an enraged and Speedo clad Bill Murray engaged in a pitched firefight with Filipino pirates, or who claps delightedly upon recognizing the opening strains of “Life on Mars” as sung in Portuguese and accompanied on a classical guitar, or who appreciates Anderson’s devotion to Futura, or who lusts after a pair of limited edition Team Zissou Adidas, then you will walk away happy. I certainly did.

It’s been a long time since I felt strongly enough about a movie to write about it here, but I think The Aviator, which opens nationally today, deserves praise as the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time (warning: mild spoilers ahead). I’d always thought of Howard Hughes only as a paranoid, germaphobic madman who built a ridiculously large wooden plane, but I walked out of Scorcese’s beautifully crafted movie with a new sense of awe at his life and a profound admiration for his accomplishments.

Ever since I became aware of Robert McKee through Adaptation (another one of my absolute favorite movies, by the way), I’ve had a fascination with story structure, particularly as it is brought to bear in adapting non-fiction. I can’t speak for him, of course, but I think McKee would nod approvingly at the way screenwriter John Logan hammered parts of Hughes’ biography into a well-constructed arc, beginning with his arrival in Hollywood as an unknown outsider, continuing through his amazing successes in both aviation and film, following his descent into darkness after a near-deadly plane crash, and finally climaxing with his victory in a congressional hearing meant to destroy him (but wisely ending well before his permanent descent into mental illness).

As incredible as the story is, though, it’s ultimately the acting that sells it, and Leonardo DiCaprio (as much as I always want to hate him) lends Hughes an impressive amount of charisma and panache. You simply can’t not like him. Cate Blanchett also delivers a jaw-dropping performance as Katherine Hepburn—I was practically gasping for breath right along with Hughes during a scene in which the two play a friendly game of golf (and marveling at her perfect Yankee accent—no mean feat for an Australian actress).

It’s a shame Hughes’ memory is marred by the eccentricities of his later life, because I think he should really be remembered as a true pioneer in the two most glamorous industries of his time. I suppose in a way you could say he was the Steve Jobs of his day: his success in two different industries, his perfectionistic demands for straighter rivets on a prototype plane, his detailed involvement with the decor of TWA planes, and his David vs. Goliath rivalry with Pan Am’s Juan Trippe (think Bill Gates with fashion sense) are a few of the parallels the movie offers.

The picture’s only downfall might be it’s length, and there are certainly a few lulls, but they’re evils necessary to the telling of a story as big as The Aviator. If you’re looking for something to do after opening your Christmas presents, I highly recommend checking it out.

I always know something is creating a sensation in movie geekdom when not one, but both of my movie geek friends forward me the same article (thanks Josh and Michael!). In the case of their most recent messages, though, I can certainly understand what all the hubub is about. It seems Darren Aranofsky, the man behind one of my favorite movies, Requiem for a Dream, has been tapped to direct the long-awaited film adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel, Watchmen!

The more I think about this choice, the more I think it makes sense. Aranofsky’s dark style (see Pi, for example) makes him the perfect man to bring Rorschach to the screen, and his track record of brilliant filmmaking alleviates the fears of Hollywood ham-handedness I expressed the last time I wrote about Watchmen. Here’s hoping that Aranofsky can save Watchmen from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s fate!

Reading through the previous week’s accumulated email this morning, I came across a message from my friend Josh bringing tidings of a Watchmen movie in the works. If this is true, and the filmmakers don’t utterly screw it up, this is exciting news indeed!

In my opinion, anyone who thinks the medium of comics is fundamentally immature or incapable of rising to the level of “literature” should give Watchmen, or, for that matter, a whole lot of other stuff by its author—British comics genius Alan Moore—a read.

Moore, whose gifts are so great that DC Comics editors reportedly “scoured” his office for scraps of paper containing his ideas after he split from the company in 1989, was among the first to really push the boundaries of genre comics. Watchmen, which is widely considered his magnum opus (except by me—I would give that honor to From Hell) is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the superhero genre and, by way of a clever story-within-a-story, the comics medium itself. It’s one of those thrilling pieces of art that make you giddy just to contemplate the profusion of ideas that seem to be flowing effortlessly from the author’s mind.

So far the movies based on Moore’s books have been a mixed bag. From Hell departed fairly significantly from its source—although, to be fair, it would have had to due to the book’s length, and I think the filmmakers still captured the essential spirit of the original. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, on the other hand, absolutely bears the indignity of having been “messed with” by Hollywood. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing it, admittedly, but the casting of Sean Connery (who is not nearly haggard enough to play Moore’s Allan Quartermain), the addition of an American-pandering Tom Sawyer character, the Vin Diesel-esque “LXG” acronym used in advertising, and a round of terrible reviews were enough to render it DOA for me.

Hopefully the people in charge of making Watchmen will take their cues from Peter Jackson and approach the material very carefully and respectfully (I can already think of certain aspects of the story—such as the Tales of the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic—that will be difficult to adapt to screen). Moore fans can forgive the mangling of “LXG,” which is still a relatively minor work in the Moore canon, but marring the legacy of Watchmen with a botched movie would be a real tragedy.

About a week ago, Eric Albert and I decided to check out Russell Crowe’s new swashbuckling flick, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. It’s a beautifully filmed movie, and an interesting historical portrait of the British Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (man, oh man, did those people idolize Lord Nelson!), but I walked out of it with an odd feeling of déjà vu. The whole thing had seemed strangely familiar, and I couldn’t figure out why.

It wasn’t until later that I finally hit on what the movie had reminded me of: the original Star Trek series! Consider the similarities:

• Both have as their main character an impetuous (some would say reckless) captain who overcomes more powerful foes through a combination of guts, guile, and “outside-of-the-box” thinking.
• Both use the ship’s doctor as the captain’s best friend and confidant.
• Both portray a constant tension between the higher calling of scientific exploration and the more immediate demands of war.

I suppose similarities like these are the inevitable result of the fact that both Star Trek and Master and Commander are very much genre fiction, but I still can’t help but wonder if Patrick O’Brien had some latent Trek memories in his mind when he began writing his series (in 1970).

With the Jesus & Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” in the trailer, incidental music by Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream) on the soundtrack, Bill Murray (who I loved in Rushmore) and Scarlett Johansson (who I loved in Ghost World) in the cast, and Sofia Coppola (who directed one of my favorite movies of all time, The Virgin Suicides) at the helm, Lost In Translation is rapidly becoming my most anticipated new film since 28 Days Later.

My only fear when I see such a “dream team” (at least by my standards) involved with a movie is that it will turn out to be an exercise in style over substance—filmmaking for filmmaking’s sake, if you will—and the synopsis of Lost In Translation (American actor and younger woman embark on a free-form, life-affirming romp through Tokyo) doesn’t exactly allay my concerns. Still, I’m a sucker for movies and music that convey a strong sense of place, and from what I’m seeing, I’d be willing to bet Coppola’s movie can get by on that (and Ms. Coppola’s excellent taste) alone.

A conversation with my friend Josh upon leaving Pirates of the Caribbean last night:

Me: Hmm…so evidently pirates weren’t that bad after all!

Josh: Yeah, they were more like a peacekeeping force!

When I first heard about Pirates, I had absolutely no interest in seeing it, since it smelled of summer blockbusterism and (worse) corporate synergy. Then I started to hear wonderful things about Johnny Depp’s performance (Entertainment Weekly described it memorably as a channeling of Captain Morgan and Keith Richards) and I began to warm up to it. Combine that with the soft spot I’ve had for pirate material since I first encountered Alan Moore’s brilliant comic-within-a-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter (in his magum opus Watchmen), and I was ready to give Disney the benefit of the doubt.

The results were fairly predictable: the movie is a hell of a lot of fun as long as Johnny Depp is on screen, but the moment it shifts its focus away from Captain Jack it becomes fairly tedious. Orlando Bloom’s character is a complete bore, Geoffrey Rush has much less to sink his teeth into than you would expect, and the movie itself could have used a bit more time in the cutting room. Oh—and the ending is extremely weak.

My recommendation: rent it on DVD.

Finally—someone gets it! Just when the brutal backlash (read the Kuro5hin review, pointed out to me by Justin Williams, for example) was beginning to make me feel like a complete moron for raving about The Matrix Reloaded, satisfied PodWorks customer and weblogger Evan DiBiase linked to Erik Davis’s wonderful article in Salon.

Davis has almost exactly the same take I do: the movie is not without its problems (the Zion scenes are a bore, some of the dialogue rivals The Phantom Menace at its most wooden), but these flaws are more than compensated for by the dense and heady web of intellectual allusions (and illusions) woven by the Wachowskis. As Davis says:

…I have no problems with the pretentious, concept-heavy dialogue. Some reviewers imply that this metaphysical kitsch detracts from the fun; for some of us, it is the fun.

I couldn’t have said it better myself! Watching The Matrix Reloaded, I found myself excited in both my gut and my head, and I can’t remember the last time I could truly say that about a movie.

(Update: Apparently Apple über-coder David Hyatt is also among the ranks of those who “get it.” He even comes to the same conclusion I did about the true nature of Zion. Good on you, Dave!)

Now that I’ve seen The Matrix Reloaded, here (as promised) are my impressions (oh—and though it makes me feel like a goofy, Aint-It-Cool-reading fanboy to say this: spoilers!):

• Justin Williams hits the nail on the head in his review: the scenes in Zion are every bit as lame as Adam Gopnik said they would be. Morpheus’s speech (“Hear me Zion!”) is so corny as to be cringe-worthy, while the big “rave in the cave” dance sequence is gratuitousness itself. For the most part, the Zion interlude provides prime material for the proverbial “cutting room floor.”
• Nearly everything after the Zion sequence is pure, unadulterated genius! I’m not being facetious here—I went to this movie with a very healthy amount of skepticism and came out a true believer. Even the much-ballyhooed philosophizing, which I was quite ready to snicker at, impressed me. Believe the hype: the Wachowski brothers have actually managed to make an action movie that vividly dramatizes some of mankind’s oldest philosophical questions (free will, systems of control, cause and effect, McLuhan-esque speculations about our symbiotic relationship with technology—they’re all in there). I would be particularly interested in reading a transcript of the “Architect” scene—there was so much being said there that I didn’t really have time to digest it all!
• I disagree with Jason Kottke’s assertion that the CG during the huge fight scene looks fake. I was looking pretty closely, and it seemed surprisingly natural to me. Kudos to John Gaeta and company!
• The 14-minute car chase alone is worth the price of admission. The twins are very bad-ass characters. ‘Nuff said.
• It’s pretty clear to me, based on Neo’s conversation with the counselor on the “engineering level,” Agent Smith’s sudden ability to influence events in the “real world,” and Neo’s newfound ability to stop sentinels, that Zion is just another level of the Matrix. I guess we’ll find out for sure in November.