(originally published in The Outreach Connection in August 2004)
Mopping up some summer movies I haven’t covered already.
I Robot
Vaguely inspired by Isaac Asimov’s classic novel, Alex Proyas’
blockbuster depicts a generally recognizable future world, but one in which the
use of ultra-sophisticated, all-but-human robots has proliferated. Will Smith,
swaggering through the movie like a Shaft throwback, is a police detective with
an anomalous hatred for robots; amazing coincidence then that he’s put on the case
when their famous creator is murdered, apparently and unprecedently by one of
his own androids. Actually, the movie’s extremely tortuous plotting ultimately
reveals it’s not a coincidence.
The film is a bit of a flat experience: monotonous and emotionally
thin, and it’s disappointing that director Proyas (whose Dark City was regarded by Roger Ebert as the best film of its year)
does so little to evoke the texture of the future world. There are some
throwaway lines about escalating environmental problems, and about the economic
turmoil generated by robots supplanting jobs, but none of this coheres into an
understandable picture – Spielberg’s Minority Report, similar material in
numerous respects, was a much more accomplished creation. And at a time when
movies are increasingly overcoming the clinically fake look associated with
computer generated images, I Robot
represents a regression; I swear in some scenes I almost felt back in the days
of Dr. Who.
In a way though, the film’s weaknesses provide some unintentional
thematic interest. The robots have been criticized for looking lightweight,
almost ethereal, and that’s quite right – they never have a persuasive
presence. Which in combination with the pallid work by Smith and the film’s
other principals reinforces the sense of dehumanization and alienation. It ends
with a tacked on epilogue seemingly attributing some kind of spiritual destiny
to the robots, which is more than any of the human characters ever seem in
possession of. You walk out feeling somewhat more attuned to the perils of our
technological momentum, which is definitely of some value, even if it’s
something embodied rather than explored by the movie.
The Door in
the Floor
Tod Williams’ film, based on a section of John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, has lots of superb
moments that ably communicate the writer’s fluid quirkiness. It’s really a mere
anecdote, about a teenager who comes to spend the summer with a renowned author
of children’s books. The author turns out to be rampantly eccentric, and then
the kid develops a crush on the man’s estranged wife – and she reciprocates! (women
do that kind of thing in Irving’s stories). Williams, whose first film was the
even quirkier Adventures of Adrian Cole,
has a sensibility that’s unusual nowadays, engaging his characters’
eccentricities with considerable style and patience. This pays dividends in the
author character played by Jeff Bridges, a mixture of geniality and bluster and
hedonism that’s one of the year’s more complex characters. Unfortunately, the
other main characters are far less distinctive (Irving’s trademark
liberal-minded approach to overlapping destinies feels pretty arbitrary here),
and the film leaves little after-impression: almost as soon as you think it
might be spreading its wings, it draws itself back into a ball and disappears
down that eponymous, unchallengingly metaphorical door in the floor.
Control Room
Jehane Noujeam’s documentary about the infamous Qatar-based
Al-Jazeera cable network arrived here on the same weekend that the CRTC
announced its widely criticized decision to license the channel for Canada:
they allowed it, but subject to a monitoring requirement for carrier companies
that seemed uneconomic to most observers – thus the CRTC added to the existing
web of opposing perceptions about Al-Jazeera’s place in the world. Control Room, shot in a straightforward
style, raises numerous questions (even more than most documentaries, although
less than Fahrenheit 9/11) about how the
choice of what to put on the screen was made, and the extent to which the
presence of Noujeam’s camera influenced events. On the basis of what’s seen
here, the channel gets a bum rap elsewhere. Although obviously not denying an
inclination to the Arab perspective, the station’s employees appear methodical
and conscientious (in one scene, for instance, we see a producer criticize the
choice of an American “expert” interviewee who’s too one-sidedly anti-US in his
on-air views).
But the film’s real case for Al-Jazeera is made by contrast with
the Americans, whom we see engaging in extreme news management tactics (all
flowing down from the self-righteous Donald Rumsfeld) and perhaps deliberately
bombing the network’s Iraq bureau (the Americans say it was in response to
sniper fire from the roof). The American we see most of, a mid-ranking press
attaché, seems fairly decent, allowing in one scene that Fox News has a bias
(doesn’t sound like such a confession, but did you ever hear it from anyone in
the Bush administration?) and sounding genuinely pained by Iraqi losses. Maybe
he’s just a better faker than the rest. Anyway, Control Room runs less than 90 minutes, which may be enough to give
you a reasonable sense of Al-Jazeera, but leaves the experience feeling rather
hermetic. One day, a future Marcel Ophuls may
make a vast sprawling documentary about the Iraqi war, and despite what
we think we already know, I expect we’ll all be devastated by it.
The Bourne
Supremacy
The sequel to The Bourne
Identity has been getting lots of good reviews from respectable critics;
for example, David Edelstein in Slate
called it “simply a tour de force of thriller filmmaking” and saw something
existential in the way that the central character’s relentless action
substitutes for his absence of much of a self. I can see all that, but it
doesn’t excite me very much, and I can’t help thinking that the praise directed
to this meat-and-potatoes movie is an overreaction to the preponderance of
digital effects in movies like I Robot
(indeed, a number of reviewers basically admitted as much).
Matt Damon returns as Jason Bourne, still plagued by amnesia and
thrown back from exile into a complicated set-up of espionage and
double-crossing, through which he weaves his way with the relentless ease of
someone determined to finish a particularly difficult jigsaw before going to
bed. The movie is well made: quoting Edelstein again, the action scenes are
frequently so “close and blurry and tumultuous that they summon up your
primitive fight-or-flight instincts.” But this also struck me at times as
bordering on incoherence, and as such retro pleasures go I kept thinking of the
late John Frankenheimer’s Ronin,
which had similar existential facets but a much cleaner, classical approach to
the characters and the action.
Metallica:
Some Kind of Monster
Better than any of the above, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s
documentary on the making of Metallica’s last album delivers all the rock genre
goods, but with a bizarre (until you’ve thought of it, that is) contemporary
twist: the band members undergo relentless talk therapy as they try to hold it
all together. It’s intermittently hilarious and always fascinating, and
Metallica are still a big band, so why did this movie disappear from theaters
so quickly? One to see on the repertory circuit, for sure.
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