Batlle: Los Angeles

Jonathan Liebesman

Though the title's use of snappy punctuation promises great things, this movie lacks some essentials: Ice Cube, Jerry Bruckheimer, Robert Downey Jr. as a black man and /or Jeff Goldblum.

Instead of leading characters, played by dynamic, charismatic actors we get some hard-core guys who auditioned for Generation Kill and failed. The best we get are Aaron Eckhart doing his damnedest to put pathos into an aging staff sergeant and Michelle Rodriguez's air force … something.

For Rodriguez, this is her element: hot, hard-core chick out with the boys in a knife + gun fight. She gives the best delivery of lines, moves the most naturally, and steals the best line (I'm not giving anything away by telling you it's “That hurt!” as she retaliates against an alien).

Eckhart, however, is rightfully typecast as the swaggering charmer of Thank You for Smoking and The Dark Knight's Harvey Dent. He is able to deliver serious lines like “your brother was my friend and I miss him every day,” but he also seems too smart for them to be coming out of his mouth.

The writing just doesn't let either of them take the movie by storm. I kept waiting for them to go off as a pair, jet around on automated, alien drone ships, or, at the very least, work together to take down the mother ship. There was teasing to this end, but action kept being dispersed to what could easily be a Desperate Housewife, some useless marine from New Jersey, another useless marine straight out of officer training, someone with a mustache... etc.

So much for a good movie skeleton. That's fine—it's an alien movie. I can watch Transformers despite the teenage melodrama—there are transformers transforming WHILE THEY FLY. It's cool. I'll just wait for these aliens to do cool things, too.

But, alas. They look pretty neat. They make really fun sounds. Their ships kick ass. Skywalker Ranch might just want to gang press the people who designed those hovering, sectional drone ships. However, again, the coolest things are denied their natural birth-rite. As soon as we get a good shot of them, the cameras movie to the face of a screaming child, or scared marine^¹.

Why? Because Liebesman had a vision. He was going to make this movie as a war documentary sort of thing, but with aliens. A nice concept. How would America really react to an alien invasion? Suddenly, the evacuation, chain of command, and dispersal of dramatic action makes sense.

I get it, but the reason Generation Kill is so good, the reason Black Hawk Down is so good, the reason Saving Private Ryan won all those Oscars is not just because of their lack of aliens, but because the characters are fucking brilliant and the writing allows genuine humans to say and do genuine human things.

Besides, Gen. Kill has seven plus hours to let us care about a dozen different guys. And Black Hawk and Ryan are both movies first and realistic second. You know this because they start at one time with funerals and such, then back pedal through time. The film colors change. The sets are recognizably different places. It's tough to differentiate and design sets for bombed-to-shit apartment complexes in Santa Monica, but that's why they pay you the big bucks.

You can only rely on “it's supposed to be realistic, man.” for so long. Especially when your allowing already charred cars to bully a single hand grenade into a 30 foot plume of fire that miraculously takes out (for all intents and purposes) an ATAT and three humanoids. Previously marines had to empty three assault rifle magazines into a single alien to kill it. Discrepancies like this accumulate the closer Liebesman gets to the 2 hour mark and somehow has to resolve everything.

There are two sorts of sci fi flicks: Alien and Armegeddon. One takes itself seriously. One doesn't. Unfortunately, B:LA sets up characters who very much take themselves seriously, and puts them in a situation that by no rights should be treated seriously.

For better versions of this film, download:

1. Independence Day

2. Peter Jackson's District 9

3. Generation Kill

4. Plan 9 from Outer Space

¹The marines I know wouldn't take this much time gawking. That's their whole raison detre: to be focused. The number of times Eckhart has to tell not only his subordinates or commander to focus is enough to make me want to insert myself, Uzis at ready.

Dear Whore Goddess, "Burlesque" Does You No Justice

Burlesque

Steve Antin, 2010

An endearing attempt at romanticizing something genuinely awesome and falling on its badly written face with plot.

There are two stories here. 1. Christina Aguilera goes from Iowa to LA to be a singer and is so dazzled by the first bar she walks into she decides to be a burlesque dancer. 2. Burlesque is a romantic, girl-friendly version of stripping.

Preference is given to Aguilera's sweeter-than-ether, workaholic, vocal prodigy plot. Ali (Christina Aguilera) is somewhere between Floozy and Modern Woman, but is marginally less annoying than Liza Minelli in Cabaret (Gelatin Hour #2). In fact the whole thing is like Cabaret minus the Nazis. In place of Nazis we have real estate sharks. Instead of picturesque Berlin, we have LA. Instead of characters with complex motivation, we have people-as-props.

Of the three leads (Chick, Mentor, Love Interest) only Mentor has the genius to act her way through a flat character. Cher, thank you. Christina Aguilera is hot as hot gets and has pipes to out-shine and wail and belt any pop diva out of her way, but she is given a bad character here and has no idea what to do with it. The Love Interest's appearances defy ridicule. The other living models are dancers interchangably trying to recapture some Fosse, and are let down by lackluster choreography.

Thankfully, the background characters are played by competent people. Stanley Tucci, Kristen Bell and Alan Cummings completely steal the show from the Chick, Love Interest and the dancers. Bringing us to Examples of Purpose 2:

a. “When you're putting on your makeup, it's like you're an artist. Except instead of painting on a canvas, you're painting on your face.” instructs Tess to inexplicably uninstructed Ali.

b. Three original song numbers titled after it and devoted to it.

How do the characters feel about dancing burlesque? After all, burlesque dancing is a charming, sometimes comical, and usually tongue-in-cheek version of stripping. The only dialogue is written in example a. up there. Clearly Tess loves her club, but if it's because she's just stubborn or really likes the place is unclear.

The others just wanna be idolized (read: objectified). The fact that they never address this leaves the entire escapade hollow and whorish. It's third wave feminism at its worst, rather than letting third wave really grasp at something empowering.

That is, Tess is the savvy proprietress of Burlesque, the, uh, burlesque club. She's tough, full of advice, and business retarded. She can fix anything in the club with talk and a glue gun, but she can't even bring her self to try to understand the mortgages of the building she's being forced to sell..Ali meanwhile grabs at every girly thing and reacts to all her situations sans thought.

Normally I don't like getting on the Vagina Soapbox, but when shitty lost feminism gets in the way of otherwise superfun dance numbers with ostrich feather fans, stripey tights, finger snapping, and tango music – well, that's just a fucking sin.

And not a fun one like burlesque, the dramatic caricaturing act, is supposed to be.

Katy Perry -- Firework

Loathe as I am, historically, to condone over-produced poppy mass pop, I just watched the video for Katy Perry's single Firework, and actually, physically, teared up.

I don't even like this song very much. It's predictable and even dull on its audio own. So, here's proof that visuals sure help people pay attention.

It has all the makings of a fearsomly air brushed, sentimental tear drop of a video. Airbrushed heroine. Candy-sweet colors. Linear build-up of action to a climax. That climax features spontaneous dancing in the streets.

And the supposed plotline follows some of the more saccharine stereotypes: Female Alopecia Victim. Fat Girl at Pool Party. Scared Gay Boy in Public. And of course, as Perry's gospel-trained voice swells, they break out of their shells and join the fun! woo!

Things that counteract this:

1. Ridiculously bright fireworks bursting from their chests. At first inkling of challenging their inner fears shows as a little glow. When the camera catches them making the decision to live fully, little sparks appear. When the Victim runs out of the hospital, Fat Girl jumps into the pool in her panties, and Gay Boy displays some very public affection, these sparks shoot forth in volleys of ecstatic color. I am such a sucker for surreal imagery.

2. The fact that there is a clear telling of each character's story. In 3 minutes and 45 seconds, the viewer swallows no fewer than 5 fully told story lines.

3. There is a woman in severe pain, giving birth. She's only a step in Victim's journey, but she bursts with fireworks. Damned cool.

4. Perry herself ends the thing wearing a summer dress I think I own. Go fashion sense that doesn't always demand sluttishness.

Yep. Maybe I'm over tired, under exposed to humanity, haven't been hugged in awhile. Maybe the idealistic nature of my work is getting to me (I did overdose on JFK and Sargent Shriver videos yesterday) but whatever it is, I suggest you head over to YouTube and watch this thing.

Brick

Brick

2005, Rian Johnson

A black and blue detective story told without pulling a single punch or dropping a single cliché. Beautifully written and directed. Delicately acted. With a host of teenagers playing what could quickly become a melodrama, and with mouths full of slang like:

Brick - A term used to describe a pound or kilogram of any drug, in the case of this film, its heroin.
Bulls - Cops; e.g., "What first, tip the bulls? Also, as a verb, to turn over to the cops; e.g., "I bulled the rat."
Copped - Obtained; e.g., "She copped the junk."
Duck Soup - Easy pickings.
On the Nail - immediately; e.g., "He wants cash on the nail. That's a pot-skulled reef-worm with more hop in his head than blood. Why pay for dirt you can't believe?"
Pick - A ride in a car (as in "pick-up"); e.g., "Did she get a pick?"
Raise - To get in touch with; e.g., "You couldn't raise 'em?" This is also used cleverly when Brain asks Brendan, "You couldn't raise her?" referring to Emily whom he could neither contact nor raise, as in raise from the dead.
Shamus - A private detective.
Shine - To wield (as with a weapon); e.g., "He shines a blade."
Take A Powder - To slip away; e.g., "Why'd you take a powder the other night?"
Yegg - A criminal

It's a wonder the cast does not blow the screen up with hot air. How the characters all remain calm and collected is a mystery in itself.

It's probably due to two things: Johnson's direction and his casting choices. Our lead is the grossly underused Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and he is supported by chameleon Lukas Haas, Lost's Emilie de Ravin and the gorgeous (I swear she looks just like my friend Faith) Nora Zehetner. The whole lot are talented character actors and it shows. They find ways of posturing, leaning, slouching, blinking, smoking, holding hands, running. They're amazing.

Granted, they have a tight script and pretty well-worn characters to fulfill (Brendan was Bogey, Laura was Greta Garbo, the Pin – Sidney Greenstreet).

Our Bogey/Sam Spade is Brendan Frye, loner extraordinaire. He eats lunch behind the trash cans of the school, reading Faulkner. Ostensibly, his ex girlfriend Emily Kostich ate there too, three months ago, before they broke up.

She dumped him, you see, because he was so determined to be this loner, to hate on everyone. And he ratted out one of their small time drug dealing friends to the school VP.

Yep, the romance is laid in the tangled plot of a drug deal gone horribly wrong, and little Emily takes the rap. Our very first image, in fact, is of sweet Emily's limp, braceleted hand in a sewage stream. No punches pulled.

The rest of the movie follows Brendan as he sets out to “break some deserving teeth.” Of course he learns more than he ever wanted to know, and nearly loses a few of his own teeth in the process. And so a dozen supporting characters surface and glitter their exquisite word play, and down play their emotional motivations, mislead, swipe at and dodge each other, pushing Brendan to the brink of what a normal 17 year old is capable of handling.

He's not a normal 17 year old, he's a character, by all appearances 30 years older, so he can. Johnson has remade the Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammet story and dressed it down to a place we would never have expected or recognized it. It's Swiftian satire, but with absolutely no humor or irony.

Not a brilliant turn, perhaps, but it has a brilliant outcome. Brick is stunning from start to finish, from music to schematics. If you know nothing or everything about film, this is a beautiful thing to behold.

Unless maybe you have a glass jaw. In which case, scurry down to the local Blockbuster, or scurry to your remote and order/download The Brothers Bloom. Brilliant for all the same directorial reasons, but with a fun, upbeat heist through Eastern Europe feel.

Fun Fact You Can't Find on IMDB: The whole cast of Brick appears in the first party scene of Bloom. Apparently they quite liked each other off screen!

The Kids are All Right

The Kids are All Right

2010, Lisa Cholodenko

Don't let the light color palette and airy trees and open spaces fool you. This film means to be taken seriously. Lesbian raised families are now a norm in California, sure, and the kids are super normal suburban kids. . . but what's this? A sperm donor? Curiosity? What?

Enter the nominee roles of Annette Benning and Mark Ruffalo. They play the head of said family and donor, respectively. Both put in an effortless seeming performance. Both pull sympathy from their audience, and their characters hate each other. If not directly in accordance to the script, then certainly in accordance with their humanity.

That is, they are written as people trying to comply with society in order to nurture the teenagers on the brink of success/failure from opposite court ends. They even, conveniently, represent opposite ends of parenting extremes. It's beautiful. It's a p.c. American Beauty. Will Benning win this time round?

Honestly, I hope not. Her role in AM had a dozen more turns of emotion than this. Though it's brilliant to see a woman directing / writing up for Academy recognition, she tries so hard to present normalcy that the movie itself falls a little flat of its objectives. She even sets up a Chekov's Pistol in the form of a hot hippy chick with dreadlocks, and dumps her two lines out of a requisite five.

Bad form.

It's nice, evenly paced, well costumed, well acted etc. but it does not jump out and grab you and demand you listen. In fact the most interesting characters (son and cheater half of the parenting duo) are snubbed over all. In an attempt to be totally equal and forgiving of everyone, there is no lead role. The fact that Benning is up for Best Actress is a joke because she is written as a supporting role of Julianne Moore and Ruffalo, who in turn support the kids, who in turn support the hippies, who supprot Ruffalo who supprots Benning.

It's brilliant if you want a panoramic view of a contemporary family unit, post-Diablo Cody, but otherwise kinda dull.

The King's Speech

The King's Speech

2010, Tom Hooper

A lovely movie whose settings barely matter in the face of the actors. That is The King's Speech, as you may be able to tell from reading a one-line plot blurb, is only worth watching if you want to see actors giving performances. The plot is dull, the writing trite, and the cinematography and music overwrought in the hopes of lending weight and emotion to a simple turn of tension: The first king of the civilized world totally on the airwaves has a frightening stammer.

Colin Firth surpasses an already stellar career. Geoffrey Rush is average Geoffrey Rush. Supporting cast of Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce are fluid and engaging. This film is made for the physical personality of the Academy Awards. In fact, Firth and Rush are so good their chemistry outshines the romantic roles prominent in this years awards. As much as I love Marky Mark, he just can't deliver passion to my perfect Amy Adams as well as either of these men.

Otherwise, seriously, this movie just puts every effort possible into drama that simply can't be felt by a normal audience. The only blip of real energy in the film is in the last 9 minutes. In these last 9 minutes Firth delivers the speech of a generation—that given on September the 3^rd, 1939 by George the third to the entire empire going up against Hitler.

The whole bloody plot leads to this, and no where in this plot do we care. However, the Anglophile audience member will have heard this speech delivered a dozen times, and teared up each time. Thus, an actor impersonating it, with a sweet montage of empire hoipoloi tearing up, cannot help but bring a bittersweet sting to the listener's ear.

Otherwise, almost a total waste of emotional investment and 2 hours of my time.

Black Swan

Black Swan

2010, Darren Aronofsky

POSSIBLE SPOILER

The most beautifully put together show of the power of the human mind I've yet encountered. I no more regret ditching ballet when I was 6 now, than I did 3 hours ago, but I am inspired. Aronofsky has managed to seduce his audience and fill them with horror. He uses gimmicky, overly visual things we expect from him, from his repertoire, but controls himself better than usual to actually tell the story, not just splurge on gorgeous sets.

Nina Sayers, after a bunch of initial tension to set the scene of a professional ballerina's life, gets the part of a lifetime: not just the White Swan of Swan Lake, but the Black Swan too. Nina excels in the white half, but can't get it through her control-crazed mind to relax and actually take control, rather than keep herself under control. The odyssey then is Nina realizing in order to do as she's told, she has to break all the rules she thinks are already in place. At the end of the day, it's like trying to make a killer android's head explode.

And explode it shall, for how else can the marvelous Aronofsky work his trade mark surreality into the film? Dopplegangers, animal sounds from humans, talking paintings, anthropomorphism... Yet, in this instance, I feel he might actually have restrained, himself, a little too much. Most of the crazy stuff is saved for the end. Like the producers were reining him in at every scene.

Instead, he relies on filling Nina's life with wholly realistic shows of being overly immersed in a little princess' world (dozens of stuffed animals, all pink everything at home, mother's obsessive paintings of her daughter) desperately trying to take control (she continuously barricades herself in her bed or bath room).

He makes tension by keeping the tightest possible shots on Nina. He goes way overboard on setting up character through costume choice. Nina is always in white. Her rival, Lily, is always in black, and even has a giant tattoo across her back. Her ring tone for her mom is the pinnacle for Swan Lake. Her mom puts on a wind up ballerina jewelery box playing, you guessed it, the pinnacle for Swan Lake. It's this shit that pulls away from the suspension of disbelief – not the spontaneous growth of feathers on one's back.

Either because Aronofsky himself is fascinated by the gritty lives of ballerinas, or he's trying to show the duplicitous tensions therein. Either way, it works. At every possible opportunity he points out masochistic crackings, rippings, pukings. The only slow motion is in an early scene. Tight on of Nina's foot as she lands all her weight repeatedly on the point of her toes of one foot you can see the floor boards bend under the force. Later, there's a scene with the physical therapist/chiropractor. A past habit of self-abuse leads Nina's mother to strip her naked and cut Nina's nails for her. How to break in a new pair of shoes: with scissors and banging and ripping.

The overall effect is a stunning balance between grit and pure satin—the two sides Nina tries so hard to capture in her life. Ever willing to help is the ever-in-black Lily. She is the perfect opposite of Nina. She is promiscuous, always wears a ton of make up, dances with her long hair down and is crazy sure of herself. And she does help...sort of. Lily becomes a fixation of what Nina knows she needs and incorporates this into her growing psychosis.

So easy to let this one go awry, Aronofsky, or his (no kidding) 15 producers, keep it together right to the end. Dream or hallucination scenes have heavy uses of mirrors and tampering with the light. Realistic scenes don't have ambient music. Initial verification for later hallucinations are established immediately, thus the audience is sucked in immediately.

Depending on how you feel about “living fully in the moment” or achieving perfection, Nina does manage to wrestle this out of herself. Through the pressures of her rival, her mother and her director (does ballet have a special name for that?) Nina alternates her clamping with new rebellions as she slowly starts realizing what people may or may not mean by “lose yourself in the role.”

Gluing it all together is the soundtrack to Swan Lake itself. Already haunting, Aronofsky wracks a dozen lesser known strains of it through the repeated practice sessions. He abstracts strains of them and reverbs them between cuts. Not a lot. Just enough to be jarring. Oh, and blending in techno for the ecstasy scene of course. But even that has an underlying riff of Swan Lake. The soundtrack holds it all together.

Major plot hole type things. Why is Lily not chosen over Nina? Is she so much better just in Nina's obesessive head? No. It's verified by Thomas. Why does Thomas focus only on Nina's dancing when all he has to critique her is her attitude. We see three instances early on of him trying to pull out this darker, more fluid, magnetic character. It clearly isn't the steps that are her problem.

Major awesomenss: all the performances. I think, under-appreciated always is Vincent Cassel. Very subtle cuts and shifts of perspective. The exquisite layering of clothes the ballerinas wear: uggs, leg warmers, arm warmers, whatever “shrugs” are, leotards, cami tops, tights, socks, shoes, things on one leg and not the other, things on one arm and not the other, hoodies, scarves, earrings... It's a guidebook on how to look like a collage.

Overall, very very good. Not the best, not my favorite, but I've watched it 3 times in 2 days and like it more each time. Besides, this story isn't confined to ballet. It's the path of the girl's mind that matters. The steps, the dance, are just a vehicle for showing her ascension and downfall to perfect artistic expression.