Silestone — ‘Above Everything Else’.

By Alex Roman. Completely computer-generated. More here.

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I’m a big fan of Aaron Sorkin, but I saw The Social Network last night and was quite disappointed.

First, some notes: I don’t think there are any spoilers in what I’m about to say, at least not beyond what you would read in a typical review. Second, I didn’t have a problem with how the movie presented the Internet; my reaction is not about that, because the movie really is not about that.

It’s not a bad movie, just disappointing, and a little long. Even the dialogue was way less interesting than what the glowing reviews had said, and what we’ve come to expect from the writer of the West Wing.

I had two major problems with the movie, both due directly to the writing. (The acting and editing were good. I also like the Trent Reznor score.)

First, the movie is cliched. It’s about the cool kids against the snobby frat kids, with the difference that the cool kids are the geeks. Predictable and boring. Also, I didn’t recognize what I know of Harvard in it, although I admittedly am in an odd corner of the place.

Second, I thought the portrayal of the main character was lazy and cowardly. The movie shows Mark Zuckerberg as affectless, arrogant, and without empathy or social graces. (Forget the cheap irony that was probably the original motivation for the movie: Oooh, the guy who invented the world-changing social networking site is not social.) The only explanation we’re given for his anti-social behavior is banal and silly, having to do with a couple of incidents that caused MZ some social class envy. That’s lazy. Then, at the very end, a two sentence re-framing of his character is presented that I think we were supposed to think is revelatory. But it wasn’t, at least for me. It contradicted everything the movie had led us to believe about MZ, and gives a non-sensical characterization unsupported by anything else in the movie. Honestly, when I heard it, I thought the movie-makers were just thinking about how to dodge getting sued by MZ.

By the way, I heard Sorkin say that the movie makes no judgments, and tells the story three different ways, in a Rashomon way. Baloney. In the movie there are two sets of plaintiffs and one defendant, but the movie presents a single view of what happened. In one of the two cases, we are left with some doubt about who was right. But that’s not exactly seeing the same events multiple times through different eyes, as in Rashomon.

(An early note to Oscars wagerers: Because I thought the script was disappointing, I am predicting that the movie will win at least best screenplay.)

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Last night, we went to the movies, and the small crowd in the theater watched a really good trailer. People trapped in an elevator. Lights out. A shriek. Lights on. Someone’s been wounded. A confrontation. A flash. The elevator jerks. A sudden noise. Cool. The trailer completely shut off the pre-show banter around us.

Then a title screen came up, simple white lettering on a black background: “From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan.” And the entire audience let out a soft “Oooh” of disappointment … followed by a loud laugh at our collective response.

Mr. Shyamalan, your focus group results are in.

(The movie is Devil and you can see the trailer here.)

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We saw Inception last night. Here are my predictions for its Oscars:

That’s twelve nominations. Titanic was nominated for 14, Avatar for 9. Inception is certainly better than either of those two movies, not that that has anything to do with it.

I’m not saying I agree with the Academy’s decisions here. I don’t think Marion Cotillard deserves a nomination, and I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who was very good in this, will win to reward him for playing humans with decent haircuts in indie movies after “3rd Rock from the Sun.” But then you have to ask why Ellen Page didn’t get a nomination. Sometimes I just don’t understand the Academy!

But Inception is an excellent movie. Much better — in my opinion! — than Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I thought was a mess rescued by Heath Ledger’s performance. I also liked it better than Nolan’s The Prestige, a movie I liked a lot even though in the end the plot cheated. As for Memento, well, that movie is just special. Inception is special, too: a Hollywood movie of its sort (no spoilers here!) that actually works. It is conventional enough that you’ll predict some large-stroke stuff, it’s arbitrary enough in its rules that you’ll feel it’s all a bit weightless, and it’s confusing enough that you’ll leave not sure if it followed its own rules (I think it does). But it’s well-imagined and extremely well-told. It’s The Matrix with a brain.

M. Night Shyamalan must be kicking himself that he didn’t come up with the idea of Inception so that he could direct it and really f*ck it up.

Screenrant’s page on Inception is nothing but spoilers, but it usefully goes through the film’s rules and narrative. Read it after you see the movie…

[Later that day] Here’s a Donald Clark’s thoughtful appreciation of the movie, also full of spoilers (via Seb Schmoller).

[Later that day] I put in “screenplay” twice. D’oh. I meant to include cinematography. So, I fixed it.

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Avatar is a big, visually beautiful movie whose march to dumbville is relieved by only a couple of bright ideas.

One of the bright ideas is the one you enter the theater knowing [SPOILER ALERT, IF YOU HAVE AVOIDED ALL $150,000,000 SPENT ON MARKETING THIS MOVIE]: A human can mentally inhabit an alien’s body. After that, it’s pretty much all downhill, making it the world’s most expensive computer graphics demo. Cool graphics, though!

It’s actually not a very imaginative movie. The landscapes are standard issue alternate-world stuff, albeit filled in with eye-gobbling detail. Worse, the plot and characters are straight out of a thousand other movies. There’s Mel Gibson doing his Brave Heart exhortation (right down to the blue skin). There’s Star Wars’ weirdly anti-technology message. And, yes, as my wife pointed out, most of all there’s Fern Gully‘s sentimental environmentalism. And these are not coy, arch Tarantino-esque references. They’re James Cameron thinking he’s touching our hearts and our minds. It’s pap. (For the record: So was Titanic.)

The racist tinge is the inverse of the old godawful racism that sees indigenous people as “savages” and “primitives.” Instead, Cameron sees them as wise, mother-earth-worshipping perfection. That’s a lot better, but you watch Avatar’s forest folks and see too many embarrassing resonances with stereotypes of native Americans, with occasional guest stereotypes making cameo appearances. (On the other hand, James Cameron’s most fully realized person in any of his movies was a cyborg, and #2 was a ship, so maybe we shouldn’t expect too much.)

It’s not a bad movie. The graphics were enough to carry me along for 2.5 hours. But it takes every opportunity to be predictable and sorta dumb. You leave wondering how many better movies could have been made if it’s $500M budget had been divided among 500 young filmmakers.

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Last night I watched two things on TV.

First, I caught up with some of The Onion’s news clips. One was a report about a video game — “Close Range — that consists of nothing but shooting people in the face. Although the “news” item wasn’t The Onion at its hilarious best, it was at least brief.

Then we watched Oliver Stone’s “W.”

When will I learn? Stone continues to be the worst major director of his generation. Perhaps we can quantify this by saying that he’s the worst Academy Award-winning director in my lifetime. That’s not to say that everything about every movie he makes is awful. But it doesn’t matter, for all of those good moments put together are washed away by the mighty river of awfulness that goes by the name of “Alexander” [My review and followup]. So, yes, “W” has some ok moments. Well, actually it doesn’t. It has a good vocal impersonation of Bush, and the humorous revelation that Richard Dreyfuss actually sort of looks like Cheney. But otherwise it’s made out of 100% cliche and cardboard. It also has two more of Stone’s signature qualities: It goes on too long (it should have stopped when Bush wins the presidency) and it uses embarrassingly failed tropes that Stone thinks are arty. (In “W,” he cuts to Bush alone in a baseball field, as if in a dream. Or something.)

My conclusion: The four minutes parody news report from The Onion, of average quality, is far superior to all of Oliver Stone’s work put together. Especially if you were to put all that Stonage together and actually watch it.

PS: The Onion lets you play “Close Range” for free.

[Tags: movies tv the_onion oliver_stone reviews fps games ]

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Video games have gotten one rev away from awesome. While the graphics on PC games are not yet truly photo-realistic, they are good enough that, in the hands of superb graphic artists, they are not only immersive, they are stylistically interesting. Bioshock is a terrific example of this. Far Cry 2 is realistic enough that you want to pull over and watch the scenery now and then. The new Call of Duty is visually good enough that killing Nazi and Japanese soldiers was too gruesome. The human figure, facial expressions, and even dirt and dust are getting very close to being good enough for drama.

So, here’s the movie I’d like to see using these tools. It’s a drama, possibly a mystery. Multiple narrative threads and interdependencies. All set within a single city, or in sites that I can teleport between (unless travel becomes more rewarding than it is in most games). I want the characters to enact the plot. And I want to be free to wander around the city, eavesdropping. I want to be a ghost, a disembodied eye and set of ears, a camera, moving around the room where characters are now interacting, choosing where to look and who to listen to. The first time through, I’m not going to be in the right spots at the right time. Eventually, though — and perhaps with some guidance from the plot or extrinsically (“Go here now!” arrows) if necessary — I will see and hear everything, and I will understand what happened.

I don’t want to interact. I don’t want to choose my own ending or help characters find the key or move the crate. I want to watch a movie, but be completely free to move through its settings as I want. And, perhaps the software will let me record the movie as I’ve seen it, and share my path with others.

I wouldn’t know how to write a movie like this. Maybe it can’t be done in a way that makes for a satisfactory experience. But I’m curious. I’d like to see one. [Tags: movies video_games theater art narrative ]

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If spoilers were as incompetently directed and edited as Quantum of Solace:

Kwantom of Solars begins with this bigg car chase where it luks like a heliokopter is going to smash into a tunnel, but it turns out that the haliockropter is rally just where the camera is. Anyways, Jammes Bond lives at the end of the caar chase. Oh, but first there’s this carr chaise where three carrs are all the same, even the colorr is the same because they’re black, and they’re filmed like all quick and everything. So, one of the carz is going real fast, and another car is oh and there’s a truck, but it’s all smudgy in the shooting, so another carr or maybe the first carr is shooting at the second smudge and then the first smduge, no wait, it was the second no wait it was the third, well, no then the third smudge would be shooting at itself, anyway the blurry one is now the traffic is going the other way and there’s a truck and two of the smudges are clunking up against one and other, and wait one of them probully has Jumms Bornd in it and twank twank you here the zounds of them bullits twanking and it’s really exxciting what harppened?

[Tags: movies james_bond quantum_of_solace spoilers marc_forster incompetent_directors humor ]

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Scott Kirsner has posted his ten favorite worst predictions about the movies, drawn from his just-published book. My favorite of his favorite: Jack Valenti’s. (I missed Scott on Science Friday…)

[Tags: movies scott_kirsner ]

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Saw it last night. It was that or its polar opposite: That ABBA movie.

It left me oddly unsatisfied — odd given its virtues — the way professional wrestling does. The plot has no natural momentum, which is disappointing given that it was written by the folks who brought us Memento and The Prestige, two movies driven by strong plot ideas and ornate, wonderful plotting. Instead, it seems to be a movie written by The Joker, the principle of chaos. So, you’re left with booms, beatings, and a dark mood. It kept my attention without actually being entertaining, and I came out feeling worse than when I went in.

I also came out with two questions:

1. I found the car chase (ok, so now I spoiled it; there’s a car chase) hard to follow. It wasn’t the worse of the shaky-cam extravaganzas we’ve seen in the past few years, but it was bad enough. Shaky-cam editing has become so common that I’m beginning to think it’s my problem, not the director’s. Maybe I’m just too old to keep up with the rapid, blurry editing. Is it just me?

2. If you saw The Dark Knight, were you also bothered by the implicit endorsement of torture as a morally acceptable (i.e., Batman’s) way of getting information when dealing with terrorists?

NOTE: There are some spoilers in the comments …

[Tags: dark_knight entertainment movies reviews ]

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