Edge of Darkness November 24, 2006
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Directed by Martin Campbell, 1985 (Color, 4:3, Mono, 305′)
Starring Bob Peck, Joe Don Baker, and Joanne Whalley
The Edge of Darkness is a brooding film about a murky world. It sees the lives, economics, and politics of rural Yorkshire through a smudged, green-tinged lens. It hears buzzing florescent lights, groaning air conditioners, tea kettles boiling in empty homes, and silence. Sometimes, it listens to a baleful electric guitar moan and wail.
Ronnie Craven works in that murky world. He sees corruption. He listens as the authorities discourage him from investigating a mining union’s odd elections results. He hears his boss tell him that it would be best if he let his colleagues look into his daughter’s murder. He suspects they have a point, but he won’t pay it any heed. He’s haunted by his own corruption, and he thinks that’s what caused his daughter’s death.
But Craven wants to find out for sure. He’s going to see just how deep the corruption runs. He will find out why his daughter’s possessions are seeped in radiation, why two intelligence agents think she was a terrorist, why her boyfriend would betray his political allies just so he can keep pecking away at the people he betrays them to, why the local water table makes Geiger counters nervous, and why a multi-national mining corporation, and its government allies, don’t want him to ask what they’re doing with refined plutonium.
Craven will not, however, ask why water seeps from the spot on his lawn where his daughter was shot. And he’s too lonely and miserable to question why he hears, and sometimes sees, his dead daughter speak to him.
The Edge of Darkness is a film that inhabits a world one step removed from our own. But it’s a small step, and Bob Peck’s crestfallen portrayal of Craven never allows us to doubt his reality. Joe Don Baker’s morbidly humorous depiction of Craven’s CIA ally both adds to the slightly surreal atmosphere of the story and grounds it in human eccentricity. And the rest of the cast aptly handles the compromised, callous, and, sometimes, guilt-ridden characters that politics, and conspiracy stories, require.
Flight 93 November 17, 2006
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Directed by Peter Markle, 2006 (Color, 9:5, Stereo, 85′)
Starring Jeffrey Nordling, Ty Olsson, Brennan Elliott, Colin Glazer, and Kendall Cross
Most of Flight 93 shows people making phone calls while paying little attention to those around them. The movie isn’t, however, a satire of modern America, where everyone seems to spend most of their time in public talking to invisible people on the phone. It is, instead, a dramatization of one of the most traumatic moments in our national history.
It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers would want to play it safe with this subject matter and stick as closely to the known facts as they can. After all, the repercussions of these events are still causing us pain, and most of what we know about what happened on this flight does come from the phone calls the passengers made after they had been hijacked. But playing it so safe prevents us from getting to know what those passengers might have been like and how they may have related to one another while enduring an event so psychotic that it’s a miracle they were able to make sense of it and act before even more lives could be taken.
The film works best when it’s showing us how the people who received the phone calls try to deal with the situation. One passenger’s wife, for instance, calls the authorities and, when she finally gets through, tries to speak to employees so accustomed to rote procedure that they get confused, keep interrupting her, and, repeatedly, pass the call off to some other department. A phone company employee handles a call from another passenger by flipping through her manual of operating procedures to see what the company wants her to do if someone who’s been hijacked for a suicide attack needs someone to talk to.
This is the first of the dramatized accounts of 9/11 to appear, and it seems to answer the question movie makers have been asking. Is it too soon to deal with these events as stories? For these filmmakers, the answer was yes. Caution prevented them from making a good film, instead of just an adequate one. If you’re going to turn part of the most severe terrorist attack in history into a story while memories of it are still in everyones’ minds, you might want to wait until you think you can make it an effective, well-told, story, instead of an average, unimaginative, one.
Phone Booth November 10, 2006
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Directed by Joel Schumacher, 2003 (Color, 7:3, Surround, 80′)
Starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, and Forest Whitaker
Stu’s an unlikable guy. He treats people poorly. He plays tit-for-tat. He lies, a lot. He’s a publicist and a hustler. His life is about taking as much money from people as he can manage, unless they’re an inconvience, when he’ll shove money at them to make them go away.
Stu lives his life on the phone; not that he wants anyone to know it. He tells people he’s in a meeting in an expensive conference room, or that he’s just dined with some bigwigs, because that’s who Stu is. He’s full of it, and no one that he talks to will ever know the difference. Because no one can see him when he’s on the phone.
Or, so he thinks.
It turns out that there are a few people who know even more about phones than Stu. Some people know, for instance, that calls can be rerouted, lines can be encrypted, and phones can be located and tapped. There are even a few people who like to do those things, and one of them calls Stu at the phone booth he uses when he doesn’t want his calls logged.
There are, of course, worse people than Stu in this town. And Stu knows it. He knows that he’s better than the pimps and hookers and grifters that live on the block with his favorite phone booth because, hey, he dresses better than them. But Stu can’t see how the Caller dresses, because the Caller is on the phone too. This puts Stu at the same disadvantage he uses against everyone else.
And fancy duds or not, the Caller proves to be even smoother than Stu. He’s also a lot more disturbed. He knows exactly what Stu’s been up to, and he’s about to punish him for it. He’s going to trap Stu on the phone he’s lived his live through, and he’s going to heckle, coerce, and torment him. The Caller thinks it’s all for a good cause, but you won’t.
Phone Booth is a tense, claustrophobic, and chilling film. The script is tight. The setting is limited to a phone booth and the few yards surrounding it. Nothing is in this film that doesn’t need to be there.
And even if you’d rather not meet most of them, the characters are believable, and the actors handle their roles well. The Caller is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland in a remarkably expressive, menacing, and ironic manner. Forest Whitaker portrays the police negotiator, who’s calm, likable, and much smarter than his colleagues think, very nicely. And although Stu may be a callous jackass, Colin Farrell allows us to sympathize with him, and he manages to move easily from an oblivious narcissist to a frightened, cornered man — who turns out to be just as concerned about the people surrounding the phone booth as the one trapped inside it — without breaking character.
Mission: Impossible III November 3, 2006
Posted by Sandsquish in Rubber-Mask Ruses.add a comment
Directed by J.J. Abrams, 2006 (Color, 7:3, Surround, 125′)
Starring Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, and Michelle Monaghan
Mission: Impossible III could have been subtitled Attack of the MacGuffins, if this movie series used subtitles. It doesn’t, though, and perhaps that’s just as well because, despite all the embellishments, the third movie in this series is really just the first two movies pared down to their essentials.
This time around, Ethan Hunt is married, and while you might think this would change things for someone who has spent his time globe-hopping under aliases and blowing up things while people shoot lots and lots of bullets at him, it really doesn’t. There’s a cute sequence with his wife early in the film, where we learn about a unique, and, as it will turn out, useful skill he’s picked up since the last installment, and there are a few lines of dialog about how Impossible Mission Force agents really shouldn’t get married, but, well, it’s all just a MacGuffin. The marriage only raises the stakes for Hunt, and gives him a weak spot for the villain to exploit.
This film, like its predecessors, has the trappings of a caper film, but, really, they’re just MacGuffins too. The various breaking-and-entering, impersonation, and theft schemes aren’t really planned and played-out elaborately enough to make them central to the movie. They’re there to add a dash of suspense to the fascinating travelogue of exotic locations our heroes travel to.
And why, exactly, do they travel in cargo jets, to places like the Vatican, or elaborate subterranean office complexes, or abandoned warehouses filled with high-tech weapons, or the back streets and skyscrapers of Shanghai? Well, they’re trying to track down the Rabbit’s Foot. This is, we learn, a gadget with a biohazard symbol painted on its side. And that’s about all we learn about it. So, yes, it’s a MacGuffin too.
Well, if Mission: Impossible III isn’t really about people with improbably hazardous jobs getting married, and it’s not really about the habits and character of far-flung locales, and it’s not really about a biological weapon, then what is it about?
If you’ve seen the first two movies, you know the answer to that one. It’s about a cold-blooded villain, a tenacious high-tech hero, and lots of very impressive stunts. And this time around, it works, and it works well. The stunts are stunning, and while they might not be particularly believable, they’re not as ludicrous as they were the last time around.
These stunts are meticulously weaved into the framework of the various MacGuffins and everything is beautifully filmed in a vivid chiaroscuro of architecture, faces, and color. Want to know what’s going on? Just look at the lights. Lively greens and golds mean Hunt is in the field and another stunt is coming up soon, and soothing blue tells you he’s back at his home base cooking up the next stage of the plot.
In movies with lots of misdirection, like this one, and lots of things flying through the air in unlikely ways, like this one, it’s important to have a nice simple theme – whether it’s good guy vs. bad guy or green setting vs. blue setting – to hold everything together, and this one does.
Mission: Impossible II October 27, 2006
Posted by Sandsquish in Preposterous Plots.add a comment
Directed by John Woo, 2000 (Color, 7:3, Surround, 125′)
Starring Tom Cruise, Dougray Scott, Thandie Newton, and Ving Rhames
Mission: Impossible II contains many impressive stunts and takes place in several exotic settings. Its resourceful hero makes clever quips, falls for a gorgeous, plucky anti-heroine, and is menaced by a slick, psychotic villain. It is, like its predecessor, an entertaining film that’s part caper flick and part action movie. It is also, unlike its predecessor, a pretty bad movie.
It’s the sort of movie where everything that could possibly go wrong and spin out of control does, every time. For instance, our hero, Ethan Hunt, gets involved in a car chase, on a narrow winding road, dodging cars and trucks that show up around every curve, which ends in a slow-motion car crash, inter-cut with plenty of close-ups of the hero and heroine’s wind-blown hair whipping around their faces, that leaves both their vehicles hanging, precariously, on the edge of a cliff.
Why does this happen? Well, apparently, Ethan just wanted to say, “Hi,” and check in on his potential recruit and love interest, Nyah.
Sound silly? Get used to it. If you’re going to watch this film, and it’s a very impressive-looking film, you’re going to end up snickering a lot. All of the main characters get to posture. Repeatedly. Usually in slow motion. Often with a camera moving majestically around them. If you had any doubt that villains could be vilely villainous, this movie will erase those doubts, many times over again. Often gratuitously. If you’ve ever suspected that heroes are not courageous, athletic, graceful and indestructible, this film will demonstrate that you are wrong. If you don’t believe that heroines can deal with impossible situations while melting your heart, you’ll find out otherwise. Talk about laying it on thick.
I won’t even mention the film’s extended finale except to say that it’s tough to read it as anything other than a satire of Hong-Kong action movies.
The real problem with this film is that it gives the viewers no indication that the filmmakers knew they were being absurd. With only a few tweaks Mission: Impossible II could have been a good satire of action movies. But it wasn’t. At least, I don’t think it was. I know I felt uncomfortable when I laughed aloud at some of the scenes, and, well, that’s probably not the way you want the audience to feel during a farce.
Mission: Impossible October 20, 2006
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Directed by Brian de Palma, 1996 (Color, 7:3, Surround, 110′)
Starring Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Czerny, Emmanuelle Béart, and Ving Rhames
The Cold War is over but the Impossible Mission Force is still doing what it does best: planning elaborate capers and pulling off hair-raising heists in the name of patriotism. Things have changed, of course, and Mission: Impossible uses this notion to play off our expectations from the TV series of the same name.
Things start off normally enough. Well, normal for the IMF, at least. Our specialized spies are fooling everyone with their schemes, but not, as you would expect, without things going awry and creating suspense. However, when things go wrong this time around, they go really, horribly, wrong. And, this time, the problem might not be with the — not as foolproof as it seemed — plan. The problem might not even be enemy action. The real problem just might be that our heroes are every last bit as deceptive as they’ve been portrayed.
Things are rarely as they seem in Brian de Palma’s films, but things do usually seem very pretty. The European settings appear elegant, baroque, and sinister all at once. Saturated colors pop out of shadowy environments. Cameras move through walls, on occasion, disorient us with odd angles, when necessary, and transform the exotic into the surreal, just before next plot twist.
But, just like the IMF’s plans, or personnel, this move isn’t as flawless as it might like to be. The villain’s motives seem a little trite, even for someone who’s been backstabbing people for decades. Mission: Impossible’s computer usage, which is central to its plot, is questionable enough to distract computer-literate viewers. And the final stunt goes far enough overboard that the filmmakers, wisely, realize that they’ll need to throw the audience a wink after things finally stop flying around.
All in all, however, the film does what it sets out to do pretty well. It creates suspense, startles us with pyrotechnics, and turns the TV show’s convoluted tropes inside out.
