The Hype Monster vs. The Great and Powerful Backlash

Hype is tough to avoid. The dutiful moviegoer and friend that I am, I like to recommend a good movie when I see it. Plus, if a good film does well at the box office, there may be more of its kind down the road and less garbage wasting screens at my local theater. There’s a difference though between a recommendation and hype. A recommendation says, “See this, I liked it and you will too.” Hype builds the anticipation to levels a film could never possibly satisfy. As a result, people who didn’t see the movie the opening weekend and aren’t riding the hype train feel underwhelmed when they finally do get to the movies. Thus, backlash ensues.

This happens with movies of all kinds from summer blockbusters to the Oscar-nominated. It happened with Avatar last year, The Dark Knight two years ago and it’s starting again with Inception right now. All of the above are critically acclaimed and the first two have become megahits with the latter likely to follow suit. I enjoyed all of them too, but it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Critics and moviegoers alike were hailing Avatar as a game-changer. Movies would never be the same, they said. Six months later, Avatar hasn’t had nearly the cultural impact of Star Wars, which the film was repeatedly compared to, or even Cameron’s own Terminator films. For better or worse Avatar has popularized 3D and proved it to be a profitable investment for studios. Yet I’m at a loss to quote a single good line from the movie and I can only think of one memorable scene off the top of my head. (I rather like the scene when he first gets into the avatar and feels the dirt under his feet.) For me, Avatar remains in my mind what it was when I first saw it theaters: A visually stunning and creative but poorly written sci-fi action movie.

When The Dark Knight came out two years ago, there didn’t seem to be any other movie out that summer and were people so wrong to treat it as such? The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie yet (though Spiderman 2 is a close second for me) and I admire the way director Christopher Nolan gave his film the tone, structure and grandeur of a crime epic. Is it a great film though, in the Citizen Kane, Godfather or Fargo sense of the word? Probably not. That didn’t stop me from championing it as such at the time, of course, but I have to be honest and look at the film in perspective. Heath Ledger deserved every bit of hype he got, but Christian Bale’s grunt can be a bit much and I wish the movie didn’t end with such an obvious sequel set-up. (That last shot of Batman on his motorcycle was cool at the time, but it’s more frustrating than anything else now.) Still, I look forward to one day showing Nolan’s Batman movies to my kids the way my father showed me Richard Donner’s Superman movies. As a piece of pop culture, The Dark Knight is a classic. But remember, that’s pop as in popcorn.

Now Nolan is at it again with Inception, a movie that everyone and their grandma have been calling a “mindfuck.” I’m still not sure what that means and how the word qualifies as a recommendation but I think I understand the intentions. Personally, I prefer the way a Charlie Kaufman movie makes sweet love to my mind and doesn’t just leave the next morning but to each their own, I suppose.

Since Inception’s release, some critics have laid out reasonable critiques of the film, mostly arguing that the movie’s action sequences and set pieces lack the mystical and amorphous qualities of real dreaming. This is true. I admire all of the above-linked reviews, particularly the A.O. Scott one, but I think some of these critics are missing the point. Christopher Nolan set out to make an action movie sprinkled with thoughtful ideas, not the other way around. If he did, he would’ve made it more Waking Life than The Matrix. Those are two more movies I like, but for very different reasons.

Movies operate on a sliding scale of ambition and Nolan has succeeded wonderfully in making a brilliant action movie. That little trick about how ten seconds in one dream equates to twenty minutes in another and an hour in a third is ingenious and I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s an inventive little cheat to give our heroes more time and who cares if it doesn’t hold up to anything resembling logic in the real world?

Those proudly waving the flag of backlash are shouting that the movie is not a visionary masterpiece. Who said it was? Certainly not Nolan. Ah yes, that snow-balling monster of hype did, giving a perfectly entertaining action blockbuster labels it never wanted.

When I searched for a synonym for "hype" in my computer’s thesaurus, I got "ballyhoo" as an option. I like that word more because I think it captures the ridiculousness of people's tendency to overrate. See Inception and see it again but please, let’s try and keep the ballyhoo in check.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/19/10

REVIEW: Inception

Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout). Running time: 148 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.

A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.

Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.

The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.

This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.

Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.

The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.

Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10

REVIEW: Predators

Predators (2010): Dir. Nimród Antal. Written by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak, based on characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Starring: Adrian Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Alice Braga and Danny Trejo. Rated R (strong creature violence and gore, and pervasive language). Running time: 107 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

I’ve never seen Predator or Predator 2. I’m not sure how these pop culture gems slipped past me all these years – perhaps I spent too much time watching the Alien and Terminator movies instead – but I think I can infer enough from their titles and trailers to know everything I need to approach this film, which thankfully ignores the embarrassing Alien vs. Predator crossover movies in hopes to breathe new life into the franchise.

New hope means new blood and Predators begins by introducing a not-so-merry band of murderers and trained killers, led by an American mercenary (Adrian Brody) and an Israeli military woman (Alice Braga), who the camera sometimes catches looking at Brody long enough to suggest attraction, but there’s no time for romance when there are aliens to be killed, and these few shots are all we get of that subplot. The rest of the crew is filled out by a checklist of requisite minorities including a big Russian, a bigger Mexican, a samurai-slinging Asian, and an African who has a habit of starting his sentences with, “In my culture.” I won’t spoil who dies first.

The movie categorizes these characters by race and killing specialty, keeping them one-dimensional because ethnicities are more fun in action movies when a personality doesn’t get in the way of delivering cool lines in broken English. When Topher Grace shows up too in the jungle, they ask him who he is. He responds, “I’m a doctor.” Of course, the funny doctor. Yeah, we could use him too.

There’s a lot of grunting and threatening each other with guns, but the humans eventually realize their commonality: they’re all killers. But why were they dropped into the middle of a jungle? After cycling through a few seasons’-worth of LOST theories in under minute (This is an experiment! This is a dream! This is Hell!), they arrive at the conclusion that they have been brought here for the purpose of being hunted by the More Dangerous Game – those dreadlocked aliens known only as the Predators.

Everything up to this point is pretty tedious and carried out with dialogue that consists of either clichés or inane questions (“Who are you?” “Where are we?” or my personal favorite, “Wanna see something fucked up?”), but it’s just obligatory exposition before the action kicks in. Unfortunately, even the action feels as if it’s going through the motions. We get a lot faux-tension from gun reloading drama – don’t characters realize that when a spiky alien dog is running at them, they’ll always have enough time to reload before shooting it mid-jump? – followed by some post-battle pondering about whether it’d be better to find cover or search for high ground.

While these are hardly transgressions in an action movie, they become too much to bear without a single relatable character in the bunch. The aforementioned killers all have their cool moments, but they’re too flat to generate anything in the way of audience sympathy. When one dies, we shrug it off and get excited for the next action sequence the survivors will find themselves in. Worst of all is Brody’s character, the supposed protagonist who dismisses each death with such callousness we soon despise him when we should be cheering for him. The film seems to expect that we’ll champion his cold heart simply because he’s the first character we meet, but when a character is this morally devoid, I’d just as soon root for the Predators.

There is a glimmer of hope with the introduction of Laurence Fishburne as a military man who, after holding out on the planet for “ten hunting seasons,” has developed some clever survival tactics as well a split personality. His performance is a reminder of the actor’s charisma and in his limited screen time he brings some much-needed humor and intrigue to the movie.

Predators isn’t terribly interested in either, however, preferring to stack the movie with aimless action sequences. The characters are trying to survive and maybe even make it back to Earth, but we never get any idea of how many Predators they’re fighting against, so there’s no sense of their progress. With great difficulty, a few Predators get killed, but the death toll for humans is twice that and the aliens are barely trying. Finally, after all the shooting and stabbing and exploding, the film doesn’t even have the courtesy to end its narrative with a satisfying conclusion. Yes, the ending is a sequel set-up, but judging by who’s left at the end, I can’t say I’m all that interested in investing more time in their struggle for survival.

Somewhere in this film there’s an interesting parable about the inhumanity of violence, and you wouldn’t have to lose any of the action to turn it into one. When Adrian Brody solemnly decides to sacrifice the weaker men in the pack, director Nimród Antal expects us to nod in agreement. He’s just telling it like it is. But when our lead man has no discernible humanity, maybe we are better off rooting for the aliens. If in the mind of Predators, the last mud-slathered man standing is right and all his preceding decisions are irrelevant, then what the hell was the point?

- Steve Avigliano, 7/11/10

Do We Need 3D?

I don’t fully understand the technical reasons why watching a movie in 3D is worse than a normal viewing, but I do know these things: 1) The picture is dimmer in a 3D movie. 2) The 3D effect is distracting. 3) It adds a surcharge to an already expensive ticket.

There are technical reasons why 3D gives us a dimmer picture, but you don’t need to be an expert on film projection to notice the difference. Should you see Toy Story 3 in 3D, consider for a moment past Pixar movies. The studio’s films have always been vibrant and colorful and yet here (and when Up came out in 3D last year), everything is a shade too dim, as though the entire film were taking place at dusk. Why is this? Something about the 3D process makes the image dimmer, but those glasses don’t make it any better. Granted, they’re a marked improvement from those red/blue glasses that used to be the standard, but they’re still a discomfort. And if you already wear glasses, they’re even worse, having to awkwardly place them over your prescription lenses.

But this gets more into my second problem with 3D – that it’s a distraction. When Avatar came out, the buzzword everybody used was “immersive.” James Cameron’s innovations in 3D technology were supposed to pull the viewer in and make them a part of the experience. For many, the effect worked. For me, it was frequently distracting. Yes, those sweeping shots of oceans and flying mountains looked pretty spectacular in 3D (though I suspect they’d have been just as memorable without it), but what about the dramatic scenes in between the sweeping effects shots and action sequences? Did you notice the way the image blurs a little when two people are just sitting and talking to each other, or walking? Some call the effect “ghosting” and it was all over the place when I saw Avatar. The 3D blends nicely in action scenes, but for those quieter moments, it became very noticeable that I was watching a 3D movie, pulling me out of the experience rather than into it.

3D is being touted as the next great innovation in movies, as if 2D movies are suddenly inferior and outdated. Even using the term 2D is a misnomer. Were you ever unsatisfied with how “flat” movies used to be? No, of course not. That’s because since birth, our eyes and brain have worked together to interpret pictures and film as representations of depth and movement. Adding the artificial third dimension only calls attention to the fact that we’re watching a movie.

And then there’s the price. We’re paying extra money for an inferior product. I’m dazzled enough by Pixar’s animation, or the latest CG effects, why do we need 3D? The simple answer is that we don’t. Studios like it because they can make money off it, and they are. Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all-time, largely thanks to the 3D surcharges. Then there’s the IMAX surcharge that, in an AMC theater, charges you for putting a faux-IMAX screen in front of the regular screen.

These scams will exist as long as people are paying for them. Christopher Nolan spoke out recently against 3D in response to questions about how the third Batman will be filmed. He explains that the choice is not up to him. Audience members speak through ticket sales and studios listen by looking at box office receipts.

So ask yourself: Do you need to see Toy Story 3 in 3D? Or Harry Potter? Or (God help us) the new Jackass movie? You can voice your opinion one way or the other with a ticket purchase.

Further reading: Roger Ebert’s “Why I Hate 3D (And You Should Too)”

- Steve Avigliano, 7/01/10