By Joe Bendel. Fred Stiller does not know Kung Fu. However, he learns some hard truths about The Matrix decades before the Wachowskis sent Keanu Reeves down the rabbit hole. In fact, he helped develop what is known as the ‘Simulacron’ in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s newly restored two-part 1973 television miniseries, World on a Wire, which opens theatrically this Friday in all its three and a half hour glory at the IFC Center in New York and in select art house theaters nationwide.
Prof. Henri Vollmer’s death was suspicious. The disappearance of his friend, Günther Lause, the head of security for his supposedly nonprofit research facility, is even more so. At least people remember Vollmer as the man who created the Simulacron. However, Lause seems to have disappeared entirely from people’s memories after literally vanishing in the midst of a conversation with Stiller, Vollmer’s trusted deputy.
In a case of good news-bad news, the Machiavellian foundation head promotes Stiller to Vollmer’s position, but the researcher is equally unreceptive to proposed commercial applications for the Simulacron. Essentially a virtual environment populated by six thousand artificial intelligence programs, the Simulacron is designed to project social development twenty years into the future. None of the sentient identities knows they are artificial, except Eisenstein, the designated contact program. As one would expect, he is a rather morose collection of code, never particularly happy to see Stiller or his lead programmer when they helmet up to pay him a visit.
By Govindini Murty. The final film in the Harry Potter series is a pleasant surprise. Directed by David Yates, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II offers a satisfying conclusion to the eight-film Harry Potter saga, finally allowing some light into the dark and providing a rousing depiction of the forces of good fighting back against the forces of evil. Deathly Hallows Part II moves along at a brisk pace, keeping things to a lean 2 hours and five minutes. The film provides a number of well-crafted action and suspense sequences, while not short-changing key emotional moments in which the characters reveal themselves in manners that are both dramatic and affecting.
This is all welcome because the prior installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, had been a rather melancholy affair. In Part I, the evil reign of the villainous Lord Voldemort had extended itself over all of England – with the forces of good apparently unable to fight back. Albus Dumbledore, the kindly and wise Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry had been killed by the treacherous Professor Severus Snape. Teen wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley had dropped out of Hogwarts in order to hide from Voldermort’s forces while hunting down the “horcruxes” or splintered pieces of Voldemort’s soul that Voldemort had hidden away in order to evade death. Voldemort himself was on his way to possessing the “Deathly Hallows” – a set of three magical objects consisting of the all-powerful elder wand, the cloak of invisibility, and the stone of resurrection – that would make him immortal and invincible. The film’s bleak coloration, air of inescapable doom, and depiction of Voldemort as an all-powerful Hitlerian figure who installs a racist, Nazi-style regime that massacres non-magical human beings (known as “Muggles”), had made for rather depressing viewing.
Fortunately, in Part II things start to turn around as Harry Potter and his allies finally rally and fight back against Voldemort. A series of long-laid plans start to come to fruition, and we finally see revealed the full details of Harry Potter’s destiny. After a number of sequences that include a dramatic infiltration of a goblin bank, an escape on a white dragon, and the hunting and destruction of more horcruxes, the action culminates in the Battle of Hogwarts. A fantastic array of good witches and wizards, plucky Hogwarts faculty and students, animated stone statues, magical shields, swords, and spells are used to defend Hogwarts against Voldemort’s supernatural army of evil witches, wizards, ghouls, giant ogres, enchanted snakes, and shape-shifters. This could all make for rather busy and frenetic action, but director David Yates has managed to weave all these disparate characters and thematic strands into sequences that are coherent and compelling.
In doing so, this last Harry Potter film illustrates what may be the key achievement of the entire series, which is to create a complex fantasy world that fuses mythological and cultural symbols from a number of traditions, while still maintaining a forward-moving momentum and narrative clarity.
My Libertas co-editor Jason Apuzzo commented recently on the information-dense, “palimpsestic” quality of Michael Bay’s Transformers films, and I have to say that that quality very much characterizes the Harry Potter films, as well. In fact, it may be the defining characteristic of the major fantasy/sci-fi film series of the modern era. This trend most notably began with George Lucas’ mythologically-rich Star Wars films, continued through the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films, and is now fanning out into innumerable other fantasy and sci-fi novels and movies. Continue reading LFM Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II & The Western Cultural Tradition
By Patricia Ducey.Horrible Bosses, is not, well, horrible – it’s what I call a Friday Night Movie, one best seen, if at all, after Happy Hour with your work chums in a theater filled with other people who have done the same. Laughter is infectious, and a slight buzz often helps that along. A way-too-serious and gross first half gives way to some real laughs in the second half, and the ingenious script does at times truly surprise and delight. But Bosses never does rise above a grade of ‘C,’ due to its 3-4 rating on the Apatow Scale (zero being no F-bombs or raunchiness; 5 being F-bombs/raunchiness equal to an Apatow movie). Most of the time, the raunchiness here is just a distraction from dumb writing, as becomes apparent.
Hapless, harried office workers Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) work in their own private hells, victims of their unbearable bosses: Kevin Spacey as Nick’s manipulative, Machiavellian boss at a financial firm, Colin Farrell (whose physical transformation from sexy Irishman to cheeseball cokehead is astounding) as Kurt’s bete noir manager at a chemical company, and Jennifer Aniston as Dale’s sex-obsessed, harassing boss/dentist.
After a few beers one night, the trio decides that a well planned murder of these three villains is the answer to their problems, so they head downtown to the nastiest bar they can find to hire a hit man. There they find Jamie Foxx, a “murder consultant” who gives them a general outline of a plan (cribbed from movie plots) in exchange for five grand. Later, after discussion and soul searching, they hit upon a variation of the consultant’s plan and decide to forge ahead. After all, they have watched enough movies and Law & Order episodes to guarantee they can concoct a foolproof crime … or crimes! In other words, they are idiots – and with reasoning like theirs, you can guess that all does not proceed smoothly. Soon the guys are running into and from cops, killers, and overly amorous women. Hilarity occasionally ensues. Continue reading LFM Review: Horrible Bosses
By Joe Bendel. In today’s China, girls are an endangered species. Largely due to the government’s one-child policy, sex-specific abortions and abandonments have sky-rocketed. It was not much easier for Chinese girls during the early Nineteenth Century, either. However, the Laotong (roughly translated as “Old Same”) oath of friendship helped sustain many young women. Yet the turbulence of the time will test two women’s Laotong bond in Wayne Wang’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (trailer here), which opens today in New York.
Snow Flower and Lily were born under the same sign and had their feet bound on the same day. Even though Wang waters down the literally bone-crunching reality of this practice, what the film shows is still enough to make a brawny man cringe. Unfortunately, this was considered necessary to strike a suitable marriage bargain.
Despite her family’s mean circumstances, Snow Flower’s dainty feet earn her a prestigious match. In contrast, Lily experiences the reverse social mobility, winding up betrothed to a lowly butcher after her father’s opium addiction ruins her family. Though separated by events obviously beyond their control, the two women exchange messages written within the folds of a fan, employing Nüshu, the secret script used by many Chinese women up until the Twentieth Century. (One hopes there is now an internet equivalent in widespread use today).
In parallel lives, Faye Wong Canto-pop listening high school students Nina and Sophia become a late Twentieth Century Laotong pair. Nina excels academically, while Sophia struggles emotionally in the wake of her bankrupted father’s suicide. Despite their recent estrangement, Nina puts her career on hold when a traffic accident renders Sophia comatose. As it happens, Sophia was carrying on her person a copy of her manuscript, which tells the story of Snow Flower and Lily.
Based on Lisa See’s bestselling novel, Secret Fan’s screenplay (credited to Angela Workman, Ron Bass, and Michael K. Ray) adds the contemporary story arc, allowing them to write in a part for Hugh Jackman as Arthur, Sophia’s sketchy night club impresario love interest. He even has a musical number, a novelty love song probably not designed to showcase his Broadway chops. Continue reading Laotong Story: LFM Reviews Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
By David Ross. I wrote a while ago about David Mamet’s splashy conversion to conservatism (see here), about which I was naturally excited, Mamet being the highest ranking defector in the modern Cold War between right and left. I eagerly awaited his book, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, hoping for a manifesto that would function as an elegant rapier thrust, or at least a solid groin kick, and hurt all the more coming from a man whom the left cannot write off as a cretin from the land of “low-sloping foreheads” (to borrow a phrase from New York Times columnist David Carr). Mamet has, after all, lent intellectual heft to Broadway and Hollywood for more than three decades.
It pains me to confess that Mamet’s book is dreadful. It’s not, as one might imagine, that his conservatism turns out to be a smug centrism in the David Brooks mode or an idiosyncratic wire-drawn intellectual construct in the Hitchens mode. On the contrary, he shares the talk-radio mindset of bitter far-right disgust, and he seems sturdily committed to the entire Republican platform, for better and for worse. Conservatives will immediately recognize Mamet as their man.
The problem is twofold: 1) What seems to Mamet revelatory a year or two into his conservative phase is not so revelatory to those of us who’ve spent twenty or thirty years toiling in the conservative vineyards. He’s like a blind fellow who can suddenly see and proceeds to inform everybody that the sky is blue and the grass is green and chesty women look good in tight sweaters. 2) The book is badly argued (where it’s argued at all) and badly written in the basic mechanical sense. Mamet’s prose is gnarled and parenthetical and weirdly affectless (c.f. his nerveless, deadpan directorial style). It’s not as bad as Sean Penn’s prose, which is almost literary anti-matter (see here), but, lord, it ain’t good. Here’s a sample, cherry-picked only slightly:
If a country, a region, a race is in difficulty because of a lack of funds, any new or recurrent failure subsequent to any subvention in aid may be attributed to insufficient aid, and provide the rationale for that funding’s increase. But it may only do so given the acceptance of the nondemonstrable, indeed disprovable theory that government intervention increases wealth. (pg. 36)
This is to say, more or less, that governments like to throw good money after bad. I can only suppose that writing street-smart dramatic dialogue and writing elegant expository prose are entirely different skills, and that Mamet is a writer only in a restricted sense. Continue reading LFM Book Review: David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge
As I’ve said before, I like the concept of building a film around the ancient Greek hero Theseus, lover of Ariadne and slayer of the Minotaur – but from this new trailer it still looks we’re dealing with more CGI overkill here from the same producing team that gave us 300 – a film which, for all its cheeky/politically incorrect depiction of the ancient Persians, still felt way too much like a cross between a video game and a Chanel ad. Immortals looks like it’s picking up right where 300 and the Clash of the Titans remake left off, substituting CGI and TV commercial styling for a lack of storyline or interesting characters. I’ve seen two trailers for this film so far, and I still have no idea what the film is about – why, for example, as the tagline goes, ‘the gods need a hero’ (gods being gods, they usually don’t need human heroes) – although I have seen a lot of massed CGI armies and shouting. And Mickey Rourke wearing what look like Bronze Age bunny ears.
And by the way, where’s the Minotaur in this film? There’s no sign of it – nor of the Labyrinth. I’m hoping the creators of this film are aware that what Theseus is most famous for is slaying the Minotaur inside the Labyrinth – think of slaying the Minotaur as being for Theseus what, say, the 56-game hitting streak was for DiMaggio – and that it might’ve been a shrewd idea to include either a Minotaur or a Labyrinth somewhere in the film or the trailer. Is it too much to ask for a Minotaur or a Labyrinth in a movie about Theseus? Hello?
• Speaking of 300, the big news about the prequel is that it will no longer be called Xerxes, but 300: Battle of Artemisia – a triumph of brand marketing over common sense. The new film, of course, is not about the 300 Spartans, and is about Xerxes – but no matter, brand triumphs over all and the producers are obviously worried that no one in foreign markets like Poland or Thailand or West Virginia will understand that a film called Xerxes is actually a prequel to 300. (Maybe they should just call it 200 – that makes about as much sense.) In any case, Zack Snyder will not be directing the prequel – it will apparently either be Noam Murro and Jaume Collet-Serra. (Murro, interestingly, has done commercials for the Halo video games – and may do the next Die Hard film.) So what does any of this mean? Not very much, except that this would-be franchise is still on the drawing board while a lot of time passes. By the time Battle of Artemisia hits theaters (in late 2012 at the earliest), both Clash of the Titans and Wrath of the Titans will have been released, along with Immortals, and 300 will be at least 5 years in the past.
One of the things that made 300 so intriguing was its apparent relevance to our contemporary War on Terror. With Iran becoming more belligerent all the time, that relevance will likely still be there by 2012 or 2013, but one can’t help but wonder whether an opportunity is being lost with this franchise …
Jason Momoa as Conan.
• Conan the Barbarian 3D has a new international trailer out, an amusing new ad, and also a red band trailer for the more bloodthirsty among you. This film seems to be cruising along toward its late summer (August 19th) release, without a lot of heat or buzz – mostly, I suspect, due to the cast not being filled with A-listers. But the film looks diverting enough (as these things go), and – in an important carryover from the Schwarzenegger films – willing to have a sense of humor about itself. This, incidentally, is what’s noticeably lacking from the Immortals trailers thus far – a sense of humor.
