Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Okay... I’m still dazed from the entire spectacle of the Super Bowl yesterday and the mounting pressure of what I’m working on and my friend Patton’s totally eccentric and wonderful birthday party tonight, and last night, I had no choice... I collapsed. I know, though... I promised I’d put something up this past weekend, and I’ve dragged my feet way too long on a couple of items.
First up, let’s run down the SuperBowl spots, which you guys have already been debating endlessly on a few of the other TalkBacks. I think the HULK spot is aces, and I’m already weary from listening to pinheads bitch about how he looks like CGI. The day someone can show me a film... ANY FILM... from any era of filmmaking... that relies on a lot of special effects and that is absolutely photoreal and flawless, then I’ll become a nitpicky crybaby. Until then, the things that remain important to me regarding the use of FX in films include “Do they serve the story?”, “Does the film have an overall style that allows the FX to be part of a cohesive world?”, and “Is there a sense of performance on the part of a CGI creature?” The irony of the increasing cacophony of whiners who nitpick each shot of each new trailer for each new film to death is that the reason they are becoming more and more vocal is because the overall quality of visual effects is becoming more and more pronounced. We are seeing things right now that filmmakers simply couldn’t have accomplished 20 years ago, and it’s remarkable to watch how people continue to try to expand the vocabulary that other filmmakers get to use. When I see THE HULK, I don’t give a fuck if he looks real. I just hope he looks real cool.
THE MATRIX spot was jaw-dropping, I thought. A real throw-down. Joel Silver’s been crowing for months about these films, which is fine since the Wachowskis won’t do it for themselves. Seeing this commercial, his PT Barnum-level hype feels justified. These look like remarkable SF/superhero stories, and there are about ten money shots in this one 60-second spot. Part of the fun of having both of these and the ANIMATRIX and the ENTER THE MATRIX game all in one year is that you can just sort of wallow in this world and enjoy all the strange corners of it, and it really does feel like an event. It’s like the “every Christmas for three years” strategy with LORD OF THE RINGS... it’s different, and it makes you really think about how much of it you’re getting. After the end of 2003, that’s it for THE MATRIX, so why not just revel in it right now?
The BRUCE ALMIGHTY spot was kind of mild, but the film still looks like it might have some big laughs in it. I thought ANGER MANAGEMENT was a little better, but nowhere near as good as the theatrical trailer, and it sort of looks like the kind of film where it will work better in context. The DAREDEVIL spot was nice, I thought, and at this point, I don’t want to see another frame of film until I see the movie. I think I’ve seen too much of it, and want to see it put together now. BAD BOYS II was just a shorter version of the theatrical trailer that I liked when it was released last month.
And that leaves just two more movie spots worth discussing. Both are sequels. I think one looks like it knows EXACTLY what it’s doing, and will deliver EXACTLY the ride it promises, and the other looks like a train crash of epic, agonizing proportions. What surprises and saddens me is that it’s CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE that looks like it delivers, and it’s TERMINATOR 3 that increasingly looks like a mistake on a nearly Biblical level.
I mean... I’m not sad that it looks like FULL THROTTLE delivers. As strange a concept as this is to many of our TalkBackers, I don’t ever find myself rooting for a filmmaker to fail. I thought the first CHARLIE’S ANGELS was silly and fun and entirely without pretension. It was exactly what it claimed to be... a big-screen adaptation of an entirely silly and fluffy TV show. This time out, the script is basically an excuse for the three girls to dress up in an ever-more-outrageous series of fetish-style costumes while elaborate stunt sequences spontaneously erupt and Bernie Mac rolls his eyes in exasperation. Count me in. It looks like McG is one of those guys who gets it... if you’re not even trying for realism, then make sure you make it fun and pump the energy up. Also, that preposterous gag with the truck and the helicopter in the first trailer for FULL THROTTLE is shot with more clarity and a greater sense of geography than anything in the entirety of Michael Bay’s career. If McG does step back in as the director of SUPERMAN (which just might happen) now that Bay has passed, then I would actually be inclined to get excited about the film. And like I said... I don’t root against filmmakers. There comes a time, though, where you almost have to start acknowledging that something just doesn’t look like it works. For many of you, DAREDEVIL seems to be that way, but I don’t get what it is that outrages you. Maybe this is a case of reading the script and knowing how things fit together. If so, then maybe that’s why the T3 trailers depress me so much. It looks a hell of a lot like the script I read by Teddy Serafian, no matter how much Mostow supposedly rewrote it with Ferris & Brancanto. I’d also argue that there’s not a single image in that new spot that adds anything to the TERMINATOR series. I love Cameron’s films and the way the second one upped the stakes on the first one and filled in the mythology of John Connor. This time out, it just looks like more of the same. Shots of Arnold and gunplay and more Hunter-Killers and more endoskeletons... but nothing original in terms of action. Their big money shot for the Super Bowl spot is people running from a green-screened explosion? Oh, boy... that hurts. Of course, all of this is based on brief glimpses, and in the end, it’s the films themselves that are either going to work or not. But it was fun to sort of roll around in all the geekdom as I watched my hometown Buccaneers do the impossible. Made for a really nice afternoon...
The funniest thing about the ranting that has erupted both here and on other sites around the Internet is that the spots that appealed to film geeks and the spots that appealed to the general public weren’t remotely the same thing. According to THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, BRUCE ALMIGHTY was the most viewed movie spot by TiVo users during the SuperBowl, with CHARLIE’S ANGELS close behind. THE HULK was one of the least popular ads, just barely beating out ANGER MANAGEMENT. Don’t know what that means... or if it means anything at all. Maybe there’s just a lot of Jim Carrey fans who have TiVo.
CITY OF GOD
Enough with this talk of trailers. Let’s talk about something tangible, something finished, something you can see right now. Well... right now if you live in New York or Los Angeles or one of the other cities where the 18 theaters currently playing the film are located. For the rest of the country, CITY OF GOD is about to start rolling out, and I can’t say this strongly enough: keep your eyes peeled, because you don’t want to miss the first no-shit masterpiece to be unleashed this year.
Now that I’ve seen the film, I’m dying to read the novel by Paulo Lins that was based on his life growing up in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. It’s evidently 700-plus pages with over 300 major characters. As dense and unfilmable as that sounds, directors Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund, working with screenwriter Braulio Mantovani, managed to find just the right cinematic language to paint a sprawling landscape jammed with stories worth telling, a rich tapestry that serves as a freeze-frame of an entire cross-section of characters. The main character in the film, the eyes through which we see everything, is Rocket, based loosely on Paulo Lins himself. The film begins in the ‘60s, in a housing project created by Rio’s government and nicknamed Cidade de Deus, or City of God. It’s a lovely name for a place that I’m sure many people would call hellish at first glance. For Rocket, though, it’s home, and it’s the only world he knows. He doesn’t dream of escape because that’s simply not an option that anyone seems to be capable of. To these characters, the whole world can be found in the City of God.
One of the things that the film does so well is portray the full breadth of experience that Rocket and the characters around him have as they grow up in this place, and by doing so, the filmmakers refuse to slap any easy categorizations on either the place or the people who live there. Yeah, we may see a robbery of a gas delivery truck as it tries to drive through the area, but we also see how the robbers are teenagers who don’t care about much more than making ends meet, and who end up giving away free gas to everyone who can carry it. There’s an innocence to much of this first segment that makes sense when you look at how young the main characters are, and it also becomes heartbreaking later when we see what happens to each of them. Rocket, Li’l Dice, Benny, Shaggy, Stringy, Melonhead, Goose... we meet a lot of characters in this first segment, and we’re moving fast. At first, it seems like it will overwhelm the story, but the film moves with such grace that it never happens.
For me, it’s the middle section of the film, set during Rocket’s teen years in the ‘70’s, that is the most gutwrenching, and it’s because of just how good a job Meirelles and Lund do at making us care about these kids. Li’l Dice, who starts his criminal career young, changes his name to Li’l Ze as he gets older, and he makes his best friend Benny his second-in-command as he begins to consolidate his hold over the favelas where the film is set. Benny’s not like Li’l Ze, though. He’s not a stone-cold killer. He’s got a generous heart, and it’s important to him to have friends and to have a life. Even if Li’l Ze wanted those things, he doesn’t seem wired to be able to reach out for them. There’s opportunities at every turn for the film to lapse into tired cliché, but Meirelles and Lund avoid these traps. It’s the energy of the film that keeps it moving at every moment, relentlessly human and alive, and I never expected to be so moved by something as simple as the use of “Kung Fu Fighting” in a big party thrown in Benny’s honor. The closest thing I can compare this to in terms of energy is Martin Scorsese’s GOODFELLAS. There was something so particular about the way Henry Hill’s memory twisted and turned, never seeming to lay out an obvious narrative. It’s the same way here, but with a unique voice that could only have come from these surroundings and this cultural backdrop, making it feel like a complete original.
The last few years have seen a real surge of Latin cinema making inroads on American screens. AMORES PERROS was loved by many, as was last year’s Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN. That’s not even taking into account the audience that Almodovar has built here over the last decade or so. I’ll go out on a limb, though, and say that CITY OF GOD is better than any of those films. In the last section of the film, set in the ‘80’s, Rocket is finally fumbling towards a life outside his home. His lifelong infatuation with photography blossoms into an internship at a newspaper, and when a horrific gang war erupts inside the City of God, there’s no way any outside photographer is going to be able to get pictures of it. Rocket can, though, and the way the last act of the film unfolds is beautiful and disturbing and heartbreaking in equal measure. The cycle of violence seems to accelerate, revenge destroys whole families at a time, innocents are turned into killers, and the entire power structure of the city is threatened. Knockout Ned and Li’l Ze find themselves turned into icons, names that excuse any act of random madness, and the origins of the fight are lost completely. This movie manages to pull off the same things that GANGS OF NEW YORK strives for but fails at, and it’s so effortless that you almost don’t realize how beautifully built the narrative is. It’s even more amazing when you realize how much of the film is true. During the closing credits, we see news footage of the real Knockout Ned, and it’s striking how closely the news footage was reproduced. Using these moments of reality and then blurring the line, the directors have accomplished something that will endure, an important and unforgettable work of art that kicks 2003 off with a bang. Don’t miss it.
I’ve got two script reviews (both comedies, although at opposite ends of the highbrow/lowbrow spectrum) for you this week, my take on FINAL DESTINATION 2, and the long-delayed return of my DVD column. Lots to do, and almost no time in which to do it. I’ve definitely got my work cut out for me. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
