Monday, November 12, 2012

Drunkboat (2010)

Drunkboat (2010), dir. Bob Meyer
 *

Drunkboat is an insipid little film that I had stumbled upon (although 'tripped over' may be a more accurate phrase) purely by chance.  I came across it at a bootleg DVD stand in Korea, and seeing that it had John Malkovich and John Goodman (two actors I greatly admire) in it, I thought I would give it a try.  What a waste of two very talented actors.  Despite the poorly written script and lackluster plot, both Malkovich and Goodman somehow still manage to deliver admirable performances, but it's something akin to listening to Vladimir Horowitz play on a Chinese-made piano.
Malkovich plays a recovering alcoholic/ex-writer who returns to his childhood home in the Chicago suburbs, occupied by his sister and adolescent nephew.  The nephew, along with a friend, are goaded by maritime stories, mostly passed down by the nephew's older brother, and have extravagant plans of procuring a sailboat in which to travel the world in.  John Goodman plays a scheming huckster, who in addition to dealing in bottles of ersatz Cutty Sark, also sells ramshackle boats.  The boys, with the mother away, need Malkovich to sign the bill of sale, as they are both underage.  Serving as 'bookends' to this simple story, is the boy's older brother, a drifter who has had run-ins with both Goodman's and Malkovich's characters.  And well, that's about it.
Drunkboat is an independent film, directed and co-written by Bob Meyer, a little-known actor.  It's his first and only attempt at directing/writing.  I've often been drawn to independent films because they often tread 'unsafe' territory, and by 'unsafe' I mean a financial gamble for the films' producers.  A well-made indie film can often present us with meaningful stories, offering insight into our own existence.  Many of which end up badly, culminating in a non-Hollywood ending, so to speak.  God forbid a movie should end sadly, so say the high priests of Hollywood.  But there are a lot of really bad indie films, as well.  These are usually the ones that seem satisfied with showing us the mundane parts of our own existence, that most of us know all too well, coupled with extraneous amounts of acoustic guitar music.  Drunkboat does have a pretty good musical score actually.  It's quirky and I liked it quite a bit.  The film tries to be quirky in other ways, and seems pretty pleased with its failed attempt at quirkiness.  The long, drawn out banter between Goodman and his business partner have a touch of writer's arrogance to it.  But it's neither funny nor clever.  And the camera's obsession with a highly disheveled Malkovich gets old very quickly.  Malkovich has a fascinating face, but nearly every filmmaker who has used him exploits that feature, so it has little effect here.
My main qualm with Drunkboat is that it has nothing to say.  At best, it makes attempts to comment on human struggles with alcohol, and dishonesty, but is very superficial in doing so.  We never get much deeper beyond the surface.  Combine that with a plot that is wholly uninteresting and it doesn't amount to much.  If you happen to come across this film as I did, I hope your footwork is a bit more nimble than mine.
   
 

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Wolfen (1981)

Wolfen (1981), dir. Michael Wadleigh
**

While watching Wolfen the thought that kept running through my head was, ‘my, how dated this film is!’  This was probably because there really isn’t much going on for most it, and so you find yourself with little else to do but to make note of the little things: peoples’ hairstyles, the rotten shape New York City was in at that time, the film’s musical score, and so on.  Of course any film that is aged more than a decade could feel dated, but notice how we never say that about a great film.  That being said, Wolfen is not a great film.
      Directed by Michael Wadeigh, of Woodstock documentary fame, Wolfen is about a New York homicide detective, played by Albert Finney, who is investigating a strange group of murders that appears to have been done by a wild animal of some sort.  I had occasioned to read a few reviews of film written around the time of its release, all of which were positive, and was genuinely surprised after having viewed it myself.  The general consensus was that Wolfen is an intelligently made horror film.  If you placed Wolfen in the context of the time in which it was released, that’s probably a very fair statement, given that in the early ‘80s Hollywood was inundated with misogynist mad slasher films, most of which were deplorably bad.  As intelligent as it may be, Wolfen simply isn’t scary—not by today’s standards, or by the standards of thirty years ago.  This is regrettable, because by and large I find the horror genre to have been far more effective in achieving overall scariness thirty years ago than it is capable of doing today.  This is more of an aside, but I find that today’s horror films are far too over-produced, rendering them unable to create any sense of realism that allows the audience to relate to what it’s seeing.  In the horror genre, without realism, there’s no scaring anyone.  Wolfen, given when it was produced, has the advantage there; the cinematography is done entirely without effect (with the exception to the first-person camera shots from the killers’ perspectives), and the actors look like real, everyday people—they are not glossy models like the actors who populate today’s horror films.  Wolfen unfortunately has terrible pacing.  The story unfolds very slowly, with all of the murders being seen from the killers’ eyes, who incidentally are not human; therefore some very antiquated optical effects are used to illustrate this, along with sped-up tracking camera shots.  It all amounts to a very dizzying effect that creates very little impact, if any at all.
        Eighty minutes go by before we get our first glimpse of the murderous beasts responsible.  This I feel was the film’s largest blunder.  With such a significant delay the film needs to be padded with a few interesting plot points to compensate, but there aren’t any really.  There is a brief love affair between Albert Finney’s character and the female lead, but it is wholly uninspired and leads nowhere.  And Edward James Olmos is introduced as a possible suspect, but is eliminated as such with one of the most utterly humiliating scenes I can recollect ever having seen an actor endure in film.  It involves him entirely disrobing by the shore of what may be the East River in New York and having a manic werewolf moment.  It’s laughably bad, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that scene continues to haunt him to this day.
       There is a final showdown toward the end of the film that is somewhat riveting.  But it really only serves to illustrate how much better the film could have been had a scene such as that been introduced earlier on.
        I’m relatively new to the horror genre, but have seen a fair amount of both notable and obscure films in the past few years.  If it were up to me I wouldn’t categorize Wolfen in the horror genre at all.  It’s a thriller at best, but a vapid one.  If you’re looking for a good scare, then let me recommend one I saw about a month ago.  I embarrassed that it eluded me for so long, but it’s John Carpenter’s 1978 film, Halloween.  It scared the pants off me.           

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall (2012), dir. Sam Mendes
**1/2

I’ve been a great fan of the James Bond series of films for as long I can remember.  When I think back to exactly what it was that drew me to them, I think it is their sense of fantasy—what with the marvelous gadgets, the diabolical villains and their absurdist schemes for world domination, and the indestructible figure of James Bond himself, moving both heaven and earth to save the day.  What had made the James Bond films so special and unique in the past is that they really had a monopoly on the genre.  There was the occasional copycat film released here and there, but none really had the propulsion to infiltrate Bond’s territory.  Nowadays however, Hollywood has been inundating us for more than a decade at least with some of the most gratuitous action films imaginable.  The Bond series as a whole, while each film had a modest collection of spectacular stunts, was never really thought of as a high action series, certainly not in the way that we regard high action today, i.e. the Die Hard films.  The series dabbled in this toward the end of Pierce Brosnan’s stint as Bond, and these were some of the absolute worst Bond films made, in my opinion.  When Daniel Craig was selected as the new Bond, it was obvious that they were attempting to give the franchise a makeover.  My recollection of 2006’s Casino Royale is somewhat cloudy, but I do remember thinking to myself, ‘Is this a Bond film I’m watching?’  Daniel Craig is by far the most athletic of the Bonds, possessing an equally as impressionable sense of rebelliousness.  But the most striking feature, and also the most difficult to accept, is the effort made to transform James Bond from what he was in the past, a caricature, into a character—feeling, perceiving, and expounding emotion.  This notion may have been a leap too far from the typical formula that made Bond what he is in the realm of pop culture.  Without the martinis “shaken, not stirred”, the wry one-liners, the fantastic gadgets, and Bond sleeping with an average of 2.36 women per film, Bond has become just yet another typical action hero.  Who cares if he’s now an affected individual?
           The latest Bond film, enigmatically titled, Skyfall, is a very slickly produced film.  And it does a good job of drawing you in, until you come to the realization that the typically overblown plot can actually be reduced down to the most banal of revenge stories.  Not only that, it recycles two plots already used in previous Bond films: one, that of an ex-MI6 grudge-bearing agent as the villain (1995’s Goldeneye); and two, “M” being the target of revenge (1999’s The World Is Not Enough).  I suppose that at some point the decision to develop the character of “M” from the avuncular, pipe-smoking bureaucrat, played by Bernard Lee (who would usually only appear at two points in most films: one, to debrief Bond in his mission at the beginning; and two, to approvingly pat Bond on the back at the end of each film, saying more or less, “a job well done.”), into the at-times highly antagonistic, ultra-feminist “M”, as played by Judi Dench, who at the same time has certain skeletons in her closet that come back to haunt her, seemed natural.  After twenty-three films, it seems inevitable that some effort must be made to expand on the characters, even if it does break the formula.  But then, is it still a Bond film that they’ve made?  Some efforts have been made in the past to give Bond a sense of humanity.  He was married at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, only to have his bride murdered by Blofeld, the quintessential Bond villain of the earlier films.  However, when Sean Connery took over once again in the following film, Diamonds Are Forever, only the opening sequence was devoted to Bond’s revenge, and after that it was back to business as usual. 
In Skyfall, it seems as though the producers are coming to a similar realization, that James Bond must remain a caricature.  The previous film, Quantum Of Solace, was a grave disappointment.  I saw it, but it was a completely vacuous experience, as I have nearly no memory of it.  In Skyfall we are starting to see remnants of the old Bond reemerge—the tuxedos, the martinis, and even Bond’s iconic Aston Martin is utilized.  Now, if they had only given us a story!  Javier Bardem plays what could have been an effective villain.  Sharing a highly provocative first encounter with Bond that made me think that we might be seeing the first homosexual villain in a Bond film (Kidd and Wint from 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever notwithstanding).  But when we learn that his highly elaborate scheme is merely intended to allow him to shoot “M” during a parliamentary hearing, we’re let down.  It really felt as though the film were building toward more.  There are a host of superb British acting talents in Skyfall, including Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney, but they too are not given much to do.  This really felt like a write-off from the screenwriters. 
The final minutes reminded me somewhat of the end of the most recent Star Wars film, The Revenge of the Sith, in which preparations are made to segue back to the first film.  At the end of Skyfall, preparations are made to revert back to the Connery days of Bond, it seems.  We’re given a new “M”, male once again, who maintains an office with a similar décor to Bernard Lee’s “M”, complete with a new Moneypenny and all.  The familiar Bond theme, which has been noticeably absent from the Daniel Craig films, is played with very retro orchestrations.  And the iconic opening with Bond shooting toward the camera, also absent from the film, is this time shown right before the credits.  They seem to be preparing us for more Bond films, and I wonder if these future films will be looking more backward than forward in their vision.  For a franchise that had been accused of running out of steam decades ago, I’m not sure if this is a good idea.  But they seem to have hit a brick wall otherwise, and at the same time are not quite willing to let the franchise die off just yet.