09 December 2004
MOVIE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004).
A young skeptic gets taken on an eye-opening ride to the North Pole aboard a mysterious train. Before I get into it, note two things: 1) I am a huge fan of Chris Van Allsburg's luminous, haunting illustrated children's books, and 2) this film adaptation was specifically created for projection in IMAX 3D.
Now that you have that information, I can stand firm and say that this movie was a definite mixed bag. The art direction (gorgeous, other-worldly, and like nothing before it) captures perfectly Van Allsburg's style: the mystery of the train; the vast, deserted elven city at the North Pole; the magical bell from Santa's sleigh. At moments like these, movie simply enveloped the audience like a fog.
But the rest of the movie (as in the entire second act) feels just like your typical action flick: danger around every bend, chase scenes atop moving train cars. At first I spat in disgust at the sacrilige--until, hours later, I realized that those wacky, over-the-top roller coaster sequences were deliberately designed to wow a holiday audience of bespectacled pre-teens into gripping their armrests as the screen lurched before them. Forgiveable, then. I have to admit that even on a normal screen the roller coaster scenes were fun as hell.
Aside from this frenzy, we have an uncomfortable child duet about chasing dreams, more jarring 3D gimmicks (although I'm sure I would've groped amazed at the air before me if I'd seen it in an IMAX theater),and a general creepiness that, while coming nowhere near the sublime pathology of Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, hits close enough to the mark to make its point.
I could go on and on, but that's only because I'm a big dorky Van Allsburg fanboy. There's the dark, majestic inner workings of Santa's workshop, realized with turn-of-the-century retro high-tech straight out of Myst or Gadget. And a surprise appearance by Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, of all people. No--just go see this overcommercialized, big-budget, Hollywood spectacle in 3D if you can, and question afterwards your own cynicism with as much honesty as possible. And then relent.
I can still hear the bell.
08 December 2004
MOVIE: ELF (2003).
A 30-year-old man raised by elves in the North Pole returns to New York City in search of the father who gave him up for adoption. Will Ferrell is like Reddi-Wip. Everyone loves the frothy, sweet fun of nitrous-powered Reddi-Wip, and I've been known to take clandestine wipit hits while Nicki sleeps.
As such, I was really, really rooting for this movie the whole way through. Maybe I was hoping too much of a version of Anchorman dressed in a santa suit, or maybe the movie landed firmly in the vanilla no-man's-land of every All Audiences film hence, but I couldn't help feeling that people had taken an essentially clever idea only to do surprisingly unclever things with it. I smiled my hardest, willing the movie to get up and go when it dragged, but to no avail.
Seeing Ferrell sample department store perfume, in his mouth, was a riot. And watching him walk about in his ridiculous outfit can't be anything else but amusing. But in the end, I had to admit: Elf was slow, its few gags only sparsely littering the landscape. With Jon Favreau at the helm, it had seemed to have the potential to be as memorable as other modern holiday classics like A Christmas Story or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Shucks.
Now, before we learn how to make extreme graphics chipsets, let's go over the three rules of Christmas Spirit.
06 December 2004
PHOTO DIARY.
Big block of crushed aluminum cans at the Santa Monica recycling center. Reminds me of my old ASUC Recycling job during college.
A trio of creepy-ass singing Santas. At night, they thirst for blood.
A parking space reserved for drivers with spectacularly bulbous asses.
PHOTO DIARY.
We picked up O Tannenbaum over the weekend.
Then, we threw a little tree-trimming party. Andrew was there. So was Amanda, my brother, and Jung.
After eating ham (chef: Nicki) and lasagna (chef: me)...
...we set up Nicki's little winter village...
...and decorated the tree. Pritty!
Then I got pretty drunk...
...and proceeded to take close-ups of everything. Shiny.
MOVIE: CLOSER (2004).
Two London couples grapple with jealousy and transgression. This movie is based on a play, and boy can you tell. All the action takes place in single rooms and the dialogue is stilted, quick and pretentiously flashy; David Mamet's fuzzy little head comes to mind. Like Mamet, and like Neil LaBute too (In the Company of Men, The Shape of Things), the writer of this work is primarily interested in beating the crap out of his characters and then leaving them bleed to death in the street, all under the thesis of Brutal, Honest Truth. An impulsive writer dumps his girlfriend for an ex-stripper drifter; then he cheats on her with the alluring photographer wife of a perverted, misogynistic doctor. Oh, things get messy quick. There's much Honest Brutality to be slugged out over, but with not a single sex (or sexy) scene, this spartan collection of verbal skirmishes allows for only a slim bit of emotional significance--not enough for even a toehold. Even the audience was driven to chuckle at such over-wrought silliness as:
Perverse M.D.: "I slept with a whore in New York. I'm sorry."
Leica-weidling Wife: "Oh. Well. That's fine."
There is a denial of instinct here, and a bloodless, forced drama that trivializes its own conclusions about relationships: the writer falls in love with love, the photographer loves the abuse doled out by the doctor, and the stripper is too cowardly to play fair and bare her soul. Maybe the movie's point is to say that pointing out human folly is also folly. Whew! Wheels within wheels. Andrew, who sat shaking his head after the movie let out, said he was reminded of a better Spanish film called The Other Side of the Bed, which treats the absurdity of love & desire through a more effective strategy: humor.
Have you ever seen a picture of the human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Now fuck off, you writer! You liar!
|
