Tag Archives: 2010

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CAPSULE: INCEPTION (2010)

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Must See

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Dileep Rao

PLOT: Cobb (DiCaprio), a mercenary with a unique skill set—he breaks into targets’ subconsciouses as they dream in order to steal business secrets—assembles a team to enter the mind of an heir to a billionaire’s fortune; but will his preoccupation with his lost wife, which is poisoning his own subconscious, destroy the mission?

Still from Inception (2010)

WILL IT MAKE THE LIST?: There’s a rule around here: no movie officially makes the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time until it’s released on DVD, so that we can pore over individual scenes at our leisure. That said, Inception is probably on the borderline. That’s not to suggest it’s a bad movie; in fact, Inception may well be the best movie released so far in 2010, and has surely already nailed down an Oscar nomination and a spot on most critics 2010 top 10 lists. The question is, is it weird? By Hollywood standards, a psychologically thriller about professional dream infiltrators is damn weird; so out there, in fact, that only someone with the clout of a Christopher Nolan could get it made and released as a summer blockbuster. (Though to be honest, the subject matter is not as weird, to a studio executive, as is the concept of purposefully releasing an movie with a script that’s so complicated and tricky it throws viewers into a state of total bafflement within the first ten minutes). Nolan’s latest is pop-weird; it creates just a little bit of pleasant confusion that viewers trust will be substantially resolved by the end. It’s not a movie that will risk leaving us stranded in a psychological limbo. Nolan’s dreamscapes are surprisingly based in realism, carefully constructed from cinematically familiar parts—mainly old heist movies, film noirs and spy flicks—rather than from abstruse symbols, Jungian archetypes, and monsters from the id. With its focus on action and self-contained narrative rather than mysticism and mystery, Inception has more in common with crowd-pleasers like The Matrix or Total Recall than it does with 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stalker. (Although, if we were forced to select the weirdest movie of 2010 in July, we’d be forced to go with this one; thankfully we have five more months of movies to select from).

COMMENTS:  I wondered going into Inception: if I was making a thriller about dreams, one Continue reading CAPSULE: INCEPTION (2010) →

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CAPSULE: BURNING INSIDE (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Nathan Wrann

FEATURING: Micheal Wrann, Kristina Powis

PLOT: An amnesiac wakes up from a coma; an internal trauma stemming from a

Still from Burning Inside (2010)

brutal, repressed tragedy is gradually revealed in scenes that mix flashbacks with uncertain reality.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a noble low-budget attempt, but it’s not distinctive enough, and not ready for big-time weirdness.

COMMENTS:  When I glanced at the back of the Burning Inside DVD case and saw that the running time was 120 minutes, I got an anxious feeling; I was afraid that I might end up trapped iside the work of a young director in love with his own vision, who didn’t know when to turn the camera off.  After watching the first scene—five minutes of a nurse shaving a comatose man—my suspicions were confirmed.  The man (known only as John Doe) awakens from his coma with a gasp; 15 minutes later, he hasn’t spoken and we haven’t learned anything at all about him.  30 minutes in, all that’s happened is that he’s drawn a mysterious picture on the wall.  By that time, most people will have given up on the movie, which is a bit of a shame because by the halfway point the pace picks up, the weirdness commences, and some interesting things start to happen: chief among them is a montage mixing a slaughter and a love scene, set to “Ave Maria” (the sudden introduction of music is jarring considering the near silence of the surrounding soundtrack).  Unfortunately, Burning Inside falls prey to a style-over-story fallacy that’s too common in the avant-garde: the filmmakers believe the atmosphere they’re creating is so intoxicating that viewers will want down time to breathe it in without the constant distraction of plot developments.  It ain’t so.  Visually, Burning Inside takes its cue from the grainy, high-contrast monochrome aesthetic of great weird films like Begotten and Pi (not to mention Eraserhead, from which Wrann also took the idea of using a far off industrial hum as sonic wallpaper).  Weird movie fans who’ve seen these black and white classics will feel they’re in a familiar landscape.  There are some very pretty shots along the way, including some bleak landscapes where the contrast is turned up so high the grass glows like snow, and some interesting uses of double images and dissolves (there’s a very effective dissolved where the protagonist appears to be going cross-eyed, until the image resolves and we see that another character has been sharing an eyeball with him).  Some sequences use a washed out color for contrast, as if we were looking at someone’s old Super-8 home films.  The attractiveness of the b&w cinematography is undermined at times by the grain added to the film, which looks blocky and pixelated and very obviously digital.  The performances are competently amateur for the most part, but star Michael Wrann, usually shown in a grimy wife-beater and two day growth of beard, has an effective presence: he displays the necessary mix of torment and menace, and remains enough of a cipher that we’re able to project imaginary tragedies on him.  He’s asked to over-emote at times, but he’s more effective when he stands unspeaking, grim and mysterious. Enough plot is eventually revealed to piece together a backstory, although there’s nothing especially shocking or surprising about the tale, and the viewer will still have to sort out what’s flashback and what’s fantasy.

Burning Inside has about 45 minutes of story to tell, but tries to cram that plot into 120 minutes of film. It could have been an effective mood piece at 80 minutes, and still have been a very leisurely tale with plenty of time for the viewer to soak up the atmosphere. This is a case where studio interference would have been a good thing: would the director really go to the mat for the extra three minutes of shaving footage?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Wrann’s style of filmmaking reminds me a lot of David Lynch’s, not for its weirdness, but in the way it stretches scenes and moments out to almost unbearable length – and yet I could not stop watching…  definitely a film worth seeking out, just don’t expect something you can watch with your friends and a six pack as part of a Friday night double feature; it isn’t a low budget slasher/monster flick, but a surreal trip through one man’s bent mind.”–Greg Lamberson, Fear Zone

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Channel Midnight.

Capsules

CAPSULE: ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Tim Burton

FEATURING: , Johnny Depp, the head of , , voices of Stephen Fry and Christopher Lee

PLOT:  About to be proposed to by a doltish fop, Alice excuses herself to tumble down a rabbit hole where she learns she has been chosen to slay the Jabberwock[y].

Still from Alice in Wonderland (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not weird enough.  Burton, perhaps fearful of angering the gravy-train drivers at Disney, dims down the absurdity in this version of Alice, recasting the tale as an epic fantasy war fought by a cast of weirdos.

COMMENTS:  Alice in Wonderland (which should have been titled Alice in Underland, if anyone had been paying attention) is a good-looking film with a few positives, but a recycled story that’s far from enchanting.  The candy-colored visuals are as top-notch as expected, with plenty of little details to soak in: look for a dragonfly-sized flying rocking horse and a moat with floating stones that appear to be petrified severed heads.  Helena Bonham Carter’s macrocephalic visage is almost worth the price of admission, and her performance as the Red Queen is suitably comic and imperious.  But the story—ouch!  Alice’s previous visit to Wonderland—oops, make that Underland, as it’s denizens insist it’s properly called—nine years ago was real, but she’s forgotten it for some reason, which is fine because her past adventures served no purpose whatsoever.  In this sequel, the poem “Jabberwocky” is a prophecy that predicts Alice will find the vorpal blade and snicker-snack it into the neck of the dreaded Jabberwock(y) on Frabjous Day.  The Mad Hatter reads the verse word for word to the disbelieving Alice, neither of them noticing that the lines refer to a “beamish boy;” Alice may be beamish, but she’s no boy.  But who cares about such details?  They can’t even get the monster’s name right after reading it off the page: everyone refers to the Jabberwock as the “Jabberwocky” (which is like calling Odysseus “Odyssey”).  We may wonder about such inconsistencies, but such uffish considerations only matter in a tightly constructed nonsense world like Wonderland; we’re in Underland, and here there are quirky companions to collect before galumphing off to slay dragons with magical swords.  Burton’s non-nonsense epic fantasy plays like an original concept by Lewis Carroll that’s been script doctored by J.R.R. Tolkien, then sent back by the corporate suits to add more fight scenes to appeal to boys and a feminist moral about self-actualization for the girls.  Despite the occasional chase scene by a pack of guards who look as much like Terminator robots as playing cards, curiously, for the most part the early story plays out much as in Carroll’s tale.  Alice retraces her steps, eating and drinking shrinking and growing potions and cakes and meets a hookah smoking Caterpillar.  The Cheshire Cat directs her to a mad tea party.  But things get less and less curiouser and more and more familiarer as the tale continues.  It turns out that the tea party really isn’t mad, it’s just a ruse by the Resistance to avoid detection by the authorities. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter isn’t mad either (and certainly not bonkers); perhaps he’s slightly perturbed, but his faculties are all about him as leads the fight for freedom, even taking up a sword for the final battle.  I have no problem with taking liberties with Carroll’s tone and story, but if you’re going to depart from the original you should replace it with something interesting, not just a generic fantasy quest rehash.  Nick Willing’s Alice, with it’s human “oysters” being drained of their emotions, tapped into a more cusiously skewed Alice scenario.  It’s a shame that that premise couldn’t have been matched to this budget.  Tim Burton’s Alice isn’t bad, it’s just forgettable—something that could only happen in Underland, not Wonderland.

To some extent, Burton may be the victim of high expectations.  Carroll and Burton seemed the perfect match, and there were high hopes that this material might allow Tim to return to the glory days of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, when his fantasies managed to tap the popular consciousness while still dripping with edgy originality. Those of us who got our hopes up should have recognized that Alice in Wonderland is a kids’ movie intended as a blockbuster; Disney isn’t about to let Burton take chances with the story.  His commission directed him to deliver Tim Burton visuals inside a safe script, and that’s what he did.  The movie works fine for the little ones, but offers little to adults besides eye candy and a couple of chuckles.  If Burton’s going to bounce back (and I’m starting to doubt he ever will), we’ll have to wait until he feels like he’s finally garnered enough dough and Hollywood validation to start taking chances again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…neither is [Burton’s] Alice, sad to report, in the least bit lysergic. On the contrary, the movie is positively sober in its positive image projection and concern with itself as a business model. Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game—and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming.”–J. Hobermann, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)