Dog Days of Summer Part I: Shyamalama-ding-dong and A Scanner Darkly

As the summer movie season has started earlier and earlier, the blockbusters seem to pitter out by mid July. This makes perfect sense, and honestly, event movies are much more enjoyable in the weeks when I'm anxiously wanting for the school year to end rather than when its summer. It's cooler in May and June, and I'm just in a better mood then. Strangely though, the film release calendar is working in the exact opposite way, at least in Atlanta, Georgia. It's not just the pseudo-independent films arriving after the usual LA/NY debut , but after a lethargic June, there are even more interesting mid- to high budget studio films flooding theaters. So, since I haven't updated in a week, I'm going to play catch up with some quickie reviews in the next up of days. None of them are great, and only one is even really good, but quite a few are absurd and grotesque enough that they're hard to forget.

I was more than looking forward to join the lynching of "auteur" M. Night Shyamalan with Lady in the Water. (I hesitate to use the term, but whatever the proper definition, Shyamalan definitely thinks he's one). I was more than ready to join in on the latest wave of Shyamalan stoning. An excerpt from the film's making of book, The Man Who Heard Voices, was hillarious, praising Shyamalan's "genious" against a board of small minded Disney meanies. The Village is is one of the worst movie I've ever seen. I can't think of another movie I've hated more for its ideology. I can't stand that the film ultimately defends isolationism, and I hate that Shyamalan excuses the characters' use of imaginary monsters to maintain control, but exploits the creatures to create horror.

As gratifying as outrage can be, Lady in the Water wasn't that terrible, and not nearly as ideologically apalling as The Village. The mythology isn't compelling since it doesn't really have its own absurd logic, and Shymalan expects the audience to believe his fantasy immediately. The movie also builds upon The Village's annoying aesthetic. It's almost entirely composed in medium shots, but only showing one of the two characters in the frame. Sure, this could reflect isolation, loneliness, or what not, but the fable celebrates the unity of the film's multi-cultural apartment dwellers. The cinematography also undercuts what could be some very funny moments. One of the characters only works out on one side of his body, but the film never cuts to a close-up of the other side of the body. Surprisingly, even though the film is bout a sea nymph who serves as a creative muse, sex and desire is felt for for the eponymous character, Bryce Dallas Howard . But I almost admired the movie for its earnestness, and Jeffrey Wright is charming as a crossword puzzle devotee.

Like Lady in the Water, A Scanner Darkly suffers from a similarly monotonous tone. The digital animation accentuates the film's pessimistic and foreboding story. Instead of using the technique to capture the protagonist, Keanu Reeve's, split identity, it shows how the entire world of law-enforcement, politics and economics are dependent on this drug. Yet I never understood why Substance D, the film's magic drug, was such an addictive escape, since the film is all glum, all the time. The film's political conspiracies felt forced in by director Richard Linklater, and are far less interesting than the pain and dynamics between Reeves, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.

Muy Interesante

Salon.com has a very interesting "it's overrated!" piece on The Searchers (1956): The Worst Best Movie: Why On Earth Did The Searchers Get Canonized?

Turner Classic Mummies

In one of his articles for Film Comment, Guy Maddin observed that the booming DVD market and TV stations like Turner Classic Movies tended to "mummify" older films, making it harder for audiences to critique or find insight into these movies. I completely agreed with him as I watched the TV premiere of TCM's Edge of Outside, a terse one hour documentary on the history of American independent filmmakers (the broad term includes directors like Sam Fuller or Stanley Kubrick who worked “within the Hollywood system”). Like all TCM docs and commercials, Outside’s collage of film clips were deliciously polished to jazz music, enticing me to find out more about the movies shown. Yet this gloss is that the doc turns the films discussed into pretty pages of a coffee table book. This equating of old movies to class and sophistication insists that viewers need to love these films with a proper nostalgic reverence, not with a critical opinion.

Of course, this approach is designed get viewers interested into less well-known films. An hour long documentary can’t go too in-depth. But Outside, doesn’t stimulate debate or discussion. Contemporary auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Darren Aranofsky wistfully recollect their influences, but I couldn’t see the artistic compromises or choices that made their forebears such daring Mavericks, or why they made the decisions that they did. The doc simply says that realism and experimentation are good, directors like Orson Welles and John Cassavetes are geniuses, and producers and studios are petty bad guys. This is strange , especially coming from TCM, whose constant airing of 30’s-40’s MGM and Warner titles have done so much to maintain the allure of the Hollywood studio syste.

It’s not just TCM that uses the same tactics, but practically any venue or company that caters to curious film viewers Landmark Theatres, The Criterion Collection, etc. They don’t just advertise films, but a kind of erudite lifestyle which appreciating these movies allows a viewer to possess. I fall for this marketing all the time. But I feel that by perpetuating this snobbery, I'm only dulling my critical abilities.

Superman Returns

Bryan Singer and DP Thomas Newton Sigel really know how to shoot romantically dizzying set pieces. In X2, I was impressed by the immersiveness of the action sequences. That film's half-hour final battle, in which the mutants infiltrate an underground base, is conceptually no different than any other action movie climax in a villain's secret layer. Yet the sequence was so captivating because the filmmakers' defined and gave depth to the space and location. The multi-level sets and deep-focus wide-shots and multiple lighting sources created different textures and shadows. Combined With the film's refreshing indulgence in the X-Men's soap-opera pathos , X2 was a sublime, intense comic-book movie.

Singer and Sigel take a similar approach for Superman Returns' action sequences, which are among the film's highlights. Early in the film, Superman saves Lois Lane from a crashing plane. As the plane crashes, the camera pans and tilts vertically and horizontally in pretty much any direction possible. Yet the suprisingly subdued lighting is gorgeous. In one shot, Lois sits in her seat as soft sun-light pours through the window. It's excellently shot, even different sides of the plane alternate between darkness and light as the plane spirals around the sun. The scene was exciting, that getting thrown batterd and burnt looks as fun as the Discovery Zone.

Unfortunately, for a movie about a superhero dedicated to "truth and justice (a character notceably omits the "American Way"), the Metropolis citizens are pretty bland. In previous comics and films, Metropolis was a tribute ahustlin' and a bustlin' American cities. Lois Lane and the Daily Planet staff were funny, hungry and hucksterish. On the otherhand, Returns seems like a movie about 30'ish yuppies. The Daily Planet looks like a law office, Jimmy and Clark get a beer after work, and the staff even eats burritos in the conference room after hours. This makes sense for a sequel that wants to show how characters have aged and moved on, but they're not really fun . At least Kevin Spacey as Luthor, and Parker Posey as his sidekick bring some camp .