Stephen Rowley

379 posts

When Stanley Met Arthur

Film Film Reviews

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

The popular remembrance of the reception to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 is of a generation of hip, pot-addled college students letting the sound and light show wash over them, and then arguing long into the night about the film’s meaning. In 1969 the veteran science fiction writer Harlan Ellison sarcastically complained about acquaintances boring him at 3am with lengthy treatises on the film’s commentary on “the philosophy of the Vedantist movement, and the incredibly brilliant tour de force of Nietzsche-esque subplotting Kubrick pulled off.” Critics’ reviews at the time alternated between those hailing a masterpiece and those deriding the film as a pretentious con.

As much as it would have been fun to have been part of that initial wave of appreciation, looking back it’s hard to see what was so puzzling about 2001. While the film has never quite shaken its reputation for inscrutability, watching it today there’s nothing so mysterious about it. Not only have there been many more genuinely obtuse science fiction films since (starting with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris in 1972), but the basic themes and devices of Kubrick’s film have been so absorbed into the genre that they now seem like familiar standards. Yet 2001 hasn’t been reduced by this process: if anything, that increasing comfort with its message and approach has defused the criticism of those who would dismiss it as a pretentious think-piece. And when we no longer characterise it as a giant-budget art film, it’s easier to appreciate its grandeur on its own terms and also to discern its lasting impact on a wider front.

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First Monster Perspective

Film Film Reviews

Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008)

After all the viral marketing and secrecy, it turns out that there’s nothing that secret about Cloverfield. It’s exactly what it looked like in that original teaser trailer: basically, a giant monster terrorising New York, shot on a handycam by affluent yuppies who must run for their lives. The film is structured as an uninterrupted playback of the full contents of a memory card from a digital video camera; after a brief prelude, it starts with a party as these privileged young New Yorkers prepare to farewell their friend Rob with a surprise party. But then (as we saw in the teaser) there’s a blackout, and a distant explosion, and the head of the statue of liberty lands in their street. Cue running, and screaming, and a fair bit of stomping and biting.

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Mr Anderson

Film Film Reviews

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Wes Anderson has a hugely loyal following, but I’ve never quite been fully on board. For example, The Royal Tenenbaums – anecdotally his most popular movie – inspired enormous devotion in many who saw it. Yet as much as I could admire Anderson’s wonderful visual style and understated humour, the characters left me distant and I didn’t feel that the whole thing amounted to much. (I thought the television show Arrested Development, which riffs on many of the same themes as Tenenbaums and was probably inspired by it, was richer and more interesting). However, his new film, The Darjeeling Limited, has come much closer to winning me over. A mix of comedy, drama and travelogue, it takes us on a train journey across India with three brothers: the confident and overbearing Francis (Owen Wilson); the withdrawn writer Jack (Jason Schwartzman); and Peter (Adrien Brody), who is still deeply in grief about the death of their father. Francis wants to take them all to find their mother, who is living in rural India, but complex layers of mistrust and loyalties run between the three siblings.

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Self Parody

Film Film Reviews

Enchanted (Kevin Lima, 2007)

Enchanted is the Disney corporation’s lavish tribute to the kind of films it has decided to stop making. Having assumed there was no longer a market for animated fairytales along the lines of its previous films Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast, it has instead filled the market void it created with an affectionate live-action retread of those films.

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Prisoner of Werner

Film Film Reviews

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006)

Werner Herzog is notable as one of the few directors to earn a reputation as a genuinely A-grade filmmaker in both fiction and non-fiction formats. His latest feature, Rescue Dawn, sees him underline his strength in both fields by revisiting the subject of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a conventional feature. The result is Rescue Dawn, which tells the true story of Dieter Dengler (played here by Christian Bale), a pilot shot down over Laos at the start of the Vietnam war. Dengler was captured and held in a POW camp, only to escape and flee into the jungle.

The film is one of Herzog’s most conventional films, but it is a solid effort nevertheless. Christian Bale revisits the territory of his debut film, Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, and anchors the film with a typically robust performance. He is supported by convincing portrayals of his fellow prisoners by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies: imprisoned earlier than Dieter, they have long since given up hope of escape. Herzog is much more interested in the interaction between the men than he is in the usual mechanics of how to escape, and the focus on the way the prisoners’ imprisonment is psychological as much as physical is one of the film’s main points of difference with more traditional POW movies.

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Bee Minus

Film Film Reviews

Bee Movie (Steve Hickner & Simon J. Smith, 2007)

Nearly a decade ago, in 1998, Dreamworks released Antz. It marked the emergence of the first major competitor to Pixar in the field of computer animation, a rivalry highlighted by its superficial similarity to Pixar’s release for that year, A Bug’s Life. While both were good films, the Dreamworks offering was exciting for the alternative perspective it offered: where the Pixar film advocated a comfy theme of community solidarity, Antz satirised the hive / mob mentality and offered a more cynical voice than the Disney-backed Pixar studio could. This diversity of approach seemed an eminently healthy start to the computer animation boom. It’s a little disheartening, then, to now be confronted with Bee Movie, a lightweight and mediocre retread of Antz that sees almost everything of interest leached from the Dreamworks recipe. Pixar are still making interesting (if uneven) films, but Bee Movie is a telling example of the mediocrity that has characterised their competition.

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Not Actually About the Animals

Film Film Reviews

Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi, 2007)

A lot of the time, when you hear observers of the film business talk about how particular films are likely to perform, you hear them theorise about how a particular film might attract a fervent cult following, but has no prospects for wider commercial success because the central characters aren’t “likeable” or – more obscurely – “relatable.” Like most attempts to explain the mysterious alchemy of commercial success, I haven’t generally been impressed by the worth of this notion as a predictor (as opposed to its undoubted value as a self-perpetuating rationalisation for marketing gurus). Yet I kept thinking about it as I mulled over my reaction to Taika Waititi’s comedy Eagle vs Shark.

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Beowulf vs Animation

Film

Robert Zemeckis’ new computer-animated epic Beowulf is modelled as the future of cinema. Designed for high-definition digital 3-D projection, it is Hollywood’s latest attempt to create a unique theatrical experience that can’t be downloaded. Yet the film is something of an oddity. Despite Zemeckis having paid tribute to the classic cartoonists with his 1988 feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, his new film is deeply at odds with the traditional practice of animation.

Beowulf advances “performance-capture” techniques Zemeckis had previously used on his 2004 film The Polar Express, in which the movements of actors are mapped directly onto digital characters. Peter Jackson did a similar thing to use performances by Andy Serkis as the basis for Gollum in his Lord of the Rings trilogy and Kong in King Kong, with celebrated results. Yet Jackson was working to achieve characters that couldn’t be achieved by traditional means, and the motion-captured performance was considerably reworked by a team of animators.

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State of the Artless

Film Film Reviews

Beowulf (Robert Zemeckis, 2007)

Beowulf is a test-bed for a combination of technologies that might be the future of the movies. It utilises “performance capture” animation, which some think will revolutionise computer animation. In many theatres it is being exhibited in 3-D, and that technology is acting as something of a trojan horse for the accelerated roll-out of digital cinemas. And its regular theatrical release is paired with showings in IMAX. It’s all very reminiscent of the 1950s, when extreme widescreen processes and early 3-D were used to try to give theatrical exhibition a competitive advantage against the threat of television. Today, the threats are DVD and illegal downloads, but the impetus is much the same. And Robert Zemeckis, in particular, has devoted much of the last decade to this technology: he hasn’t made a live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, and won’t for some years (with his next picture locked in as the computer-animated A Christmas Tale, due in 2009).

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