Blogcritics Author: Pedro Groppo

Movie Review: Apocalypto

Pedro Groppo — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:20:13 EST

In 2004, Mel Gibson shocked the world with his depiction of the final hours of Jesus with the religious posturing of The Passion of the Christ. His next project, Apocalypto, was to be even more ambitious. Spoken entirely in Yukatek and depicting a pre-Colombian civilization before any contact with Europeans, Apocalypto had great potential to explore a world never before visited in the cinema.

The trailer indicated that could've been the case. It was creepy and ominous, but most of all visual and exotic. It's a pity there are only a couple of scenes in the actual movie that convey that sense of wonder. Most of the movie is just a tame narrative lacking in imagination and bristling with historical inaccuracies and racism.

The plot is not simplistic, but it is a complete waste of an opportunity to show something really new. Mel Gibson and screenwriter Farhad Safinia not only conform to the most formulaic story elements of the American cinema, their script does not even deliver as a satisfying action-adventure. If that is the premise, there's something fundamentally wrong here. If you are making a film about a pre-Colombian civilization and a culture that has been so far neglected by most mainstream art forms, is action the genre you really want to go with?

We are presented with a Mayan village and their inhabitants, mostly hunters. Exposition follows in the most trivial manner - a group of hunters taunting a fellow who has marital problems. The comedy here is probably intended to endear viewers, but it seems like a cheap way out, instead of providing us with something that would be really interesting.

Apart from them speaking Yukatek and the fact that they're almost naked, there is nothing to indicate that these are Mesoamerican Indians. We have no sense of their culture, values, hopes and dreams.

The village is seized by another group of Mayans, this time much more civilized. What they gain in technology they lose in morality, as they are portrayed as heartless and sadistic, killing all the women and children and taking the men to their city. Our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) manages to hide his family in a pit in the hope he can come back to rescue them. The sequence in the city is the only reason to see the movie, as it shows what Apocalypto could have been if Gibson had wanted it to.

The Mayan city is visually exuberant, a marvel in production design. The Mayan aesthetic and architecture is as strange to us as anything in a science fiction movie, and probably even more alienating, since we still retain a sense of this being a culture that actually existed in the remote past. It is beautiful, confusing, and terrifying at the same time, and for ten or so minutes the film lets itself be completely descriptive. For the first time we see what is most important in a film about ancient cultures: culture.

Unfortunately, barbarism is not the absence of culture; quite the opposite. The urban Mayans are highly immoral and have seized the men from Jaguar Paw's village only to sacrifice them. The biggest flaw of the film is not its excessive violence, as many have noted, but choosing to tell Jaguar Paw's story over that of the Mayan civilization.

The very elements that should have been the focus become only background to what quickly becomes an action film. The last fifty minutes or so of film is a cat and mouse chase in the jungle, complete with fights, a jaguar, and traps. Two particular scenes resemble scenes from Mission Impossible II.

The ominous title reminds us that this is a time of revelation and possibly the end. It doesn't seem appropriate at all until the very last scene, which I will not discuss. That scene, along with the title, suggest heavily that Apocalypto propounds to be a very serious movie about civilizations rather than people. Somewhere along the line, however, Mel Gibson decided that the fate of one not particularly notorious man is of more interest than that of a whole civilization.

Movie Review: Babel

Pedro Groppo — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:30:13 EST

It is unfortunate that Alejandro González Iñárritu, who is clearly a talented director, still sells himself short. Ever since 2000's Amores Perros, the film which granted him international notoriety, he has been working with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga within a very closed formula of sorts: accidents having dire consequences on the lives of people involved, even if by the most tangential way.

Both Amores Perros and 21 Grams have car accidents whose causes and consequences are explored in this manner, interconnecting the stories for maximum dramatic effect. By now it is startlingly clear, that is as far as Arriaga and Iñárritu wish to develop their projects. In Babel, they have attempted to use this model in a global scale, but they fail at delivering any sense of purpose (or lack of, even) or resonance.

In the Moroccan desert, kids play with a rifle and end up wounding an American tourist (Cate Blanchett) in a bus. Her husband (Brad Pitt) tries desperately to get help. Meanwhile, back in California, the couple's children are taken to Mexico by their Mexican nanny (Adriana Barraza) for her son's wedding. On the other side of the globe, a deaf Japanese teenager (Rinko Kikuchi) struggles with sexual frustration.

There isn't very much going on in terms of plot (or even character, more on that on a bit). The three or four stories are clearly intended to be meditating on the problem of communication between cultures. When you think of what could have been done with such an ambitious premise, Babel is not only very tame, but also very shallow.

Arriaga and Iñárritu are a great deal more interested in how the stories are connected, apparently to show how everyone is a world apart from each other. The connections are as random as one would expect in real life, but the truth is, it really doesn't matter that the rifle once belonged to a Japanese hunter who happens to be the father of our deaf teenager. Learning this does not enhance our understanding of any of the stories, nor does it comment in any meaningful way on problems of communication or solipsism.

I expect my sneakers were probably made by an underpaid worker in Indonesia, and whether this hypothetical man's wife is dying of cancer or not, I cannot care. It is only a pair of sneakers, and people die of cancer regardless. This is as significant as any connection in Babel.

We are given a handful of characters who are not only very one-dimensional (one can barely remember their names), but correspond to racist stereotypes, something also reflected in terms of cinematography and production design.

Tokyo is streamlined and glossy, their inhabitants cold and distant. Mexico is dirty and messy, and Mexicans are dirty, dumb, and like to play by pulling heads off chickens. The American couple is rich and good-looking. The Moroccan family is equally astonished that their kid shot a woman and spies on his naked sister, and so on.

If this is a critique or not, we cannot be sure. Babel propounds to be highly moral and serious (the title alone being enough indication), but instead of presenting randomness, confusion, and ambiguity as the ultimate comment on human communication (isn't that how the bit about the Tower of Babel in the Bible goes?), we get lowly stereotypes and a heavy-handed use of literary technique. The stories are interconnected, but fail to build upon the other. If Babel is saying there is a message, what is it?

This is a far cry from Robert Altman and Raymond Carver's Short Cuts, where stories were interconnected but every single one of those sets of characters were fully developed and their position in a web of personal relations were equally important. Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia goes in the same direction. Michael Haneke's Code Unknown goes the opposite way, where characters are less important than the haphazard way their lives intermingle.

In Haneke's film, however, we do not fully learn exactly how they do so or their full consequences. It seems to me that this is a more realistic approach, as we ourselves do not fully comprehend how our lives are affected by others and vice-versa. The promise of communication between people and cultures is difficult and even impossible.

I believe Iñárritu and Arriaga's project was to somehow be as cynical as Code Unknown, but striving for the emotional weight of a work such as Magnolia. While this may seem antithetical at first, in my opinion Altman's Short Cuts achieves a fine balance between these two tones.

Babel could have been a great miniseries. Iñárritu's filmmaking style is very TV-driven. If we take apart each of the four stories, they would be of a length approximate of a one-hour drama episode (40 minutes). Each of the episodes would be a story from one part of the globe and still retain the interconnectedness, but one wouldn't have to be constantly reminded of them. It would be left to the viewer to make connections between episodes. I believe this would achieve a much subtler effect. It would not solve much of the stereotyping issue, but one has only to remember that TV is all about stereotypes anyway.

Movie Review: Blood Diamond

Pedro Groppo — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:07:19 EST

Edward Zwick returns with a film that is short of a sequel for his embarrassing The Last Samurai. Both are set in exotic lands (oh adventure!) with two Hollywood big names playing mercenaries who are in the end redeemed by honor and the power of love, which is just ridiculous. Blood Diamond at least gives Leonardo DiCaprio an opportunity to play his meanest character ever -- earning his second Oscar nomination for best actor -- but which makes the aforementioned redemption even harder to swallow.

DiCaprio's mercenary, Danny Archer, is a diamond smuggler, and he comes across Solomon, a miner (Djimon Hounsou) who has found a rare blood diamond the size of an egg, but who needs help finding his family. To the rescue comes Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an American journalist who obviously kindles a relationship with Archer, softening the guy's heart.

The plot is simplistic and almost non-existent, which wouldn't be a problem in an adventure film like Romancing the Stone (with which it shares the same basic premises). However, instead of any sense of adventure, humor, and fun, what we get is the political backdrop of commercial exploitation, war, and the poor living and working conditions in Africa caused partly by the illegal commerce of diamonds. Blood Diamond does not know if it wants to be a political thriller or an old-fashioned adventure, and it fails at both.

The political aspect is ludicrous for its absolute lack of consistency. Take Jennifer Connelly's character, who condemns American girls who buy diamonds for a magazine wedding and have no idea of the suffering it may have caused to an African. Later she stops to take pictures of homeless Africans -- which Zwick decides to put on screen in black and white frames as she takes them, making us complicitous in this act of romanticizing Africa once again.

As in Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener, there is still a great infatuation in making it too exotic, and that shows also in other areas. The action scenes are almost all completely unnecessary and boring. It is no wonder the only interesting character in the whole movie is Archer. We couldn't care less for Solomon, because he is not given any emotional depth, verbal skills, or characterization (Hounsou has been reprising his role from 1997's Amistad ever since, and there is even a scene in a courtroom that brings back frightful associations). The bad guys, part of a militia that recruits children, are shown to be really bad by giving children machine guns and cigarettes, but also by listening to hip-hop and wearing Snoop Dogg t-shirts.

The movie ends with titles that say something like "ensure that any diamonds you buy are conflict-free diamonds." I may be wrong, but the demographics of moviegoers don't really overlap with that of diamond buyers, and even if it did, a) do you really think they would pay more for a "conflict-free certified stone" or b) sellers would tell the truth -- even if they knew it themselves? It's all part of the naïveté of the movie: that all you have to do to help is to ensure the provenance of your diamonds, and even bad guys
like Archer can save an African.

Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Pedro Groppo — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 08:01:16 EST

In an article published on the Alternate Takes website, James McDowell discusses a tendency in contemporary American cinema, which he calls "the quirky new wave." Others have named it plainly "indie" filmmaking, but the truth of the matter is that there are a bucketload of recent films which follow a similar formula and have a similar "quirky" tone.

In its most reductive and banal instance, there is the American Beauty formula, which is about a middle-aged man whose life is so dull he has to break free from its numbing grip and find joy in marijuana and plastic bags flowing in the wind. There is always a woman who reaches out and touches the character's heart too, and she is the catalyst. Hey, even Zach Braff's Garden State is in that mould. The idea behind this predicament is one of redemption and finding one's true essence (as irksome as that may sound), one that has been lost by one having to conform to societal norms.

These are usually dumb but sensitive characters, and the narratives usually begin with them in a silent, unacknowledged depression. Some of them find their "truth" in the love of a woman or in some aesthetic endeavor (sometimes both), and the dumber and number the character is in the beginning, the bigger the turnaround. Theorists have been calling works following this formula as belonging to a "movement" called post-postmodernism, in which the loss of identity and purpose of postmodernism is violated in order to find a "beauty" or "truth" that is buried there somehow, reverting back to the idea of "essence" of the modernists.

Postmodernism is very well recognized as the locus of metafiction and metalanguage, and in recent American filmmaking, Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation) and Woody Allen (Deconstructing Harry) have explored the concept with great intelligence and taste. Adaptation was impressive in its full commitment to this project about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman trying to adapt a novel called The Orchid Thief, and the movie is about the failure of doing so, and about the process of adaptation itself (also metaphorically) and it treated the movie itself as part of this experiment. The metalanguage gimmick is kind of overplayed and banal by now, and in this case, Kaufman adds something new to the mix.

In Stranger than Fiction, what happens, I suppose, is that writer Zach Helm employs metalanguage not as a gimmick or an aesthetic project, but only as a plot device. His film is in full-fledged post-postmodernist mode, with an almost caricatural depiction of the "numb" character, Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), an IRS employee who works like clockwork, almost literally, and finds his life being narrated by an author (Emma Thompson). Worried, he seeks a literary theory professor (Dustin Hoffman), whose input is limited to trying to find out whether he's in a comedy or a tragedy. His romantic interest is Ana Pascal, a baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) whom he is auditing. Turns out the author is really writing Crick's story as he lives it, and she's decided he has to die.

What really bothers me is that the literary thing -- Crick being a character rather than a real person, his life is being written as he lives it -- does not go anywhere. There is not the fictional universe in contrast to the real universe: they're the same, which raises a number of important points due to implausibility and inconsistency (e.g. at first, Crick can hear the author narrating his life when he is undertaking his routine tasks, but not others, which implies that the mindless routine is the prison of fiction and an acknowledgment would lead to a more "real" existence, which later is contradicted). One way to avoid this would to make the film itself metafictional, but no: the narrative of the film itself, rather than the narrative of Crick, is very straightforward as not part of the "gimmick" at all. It's like American Beauty is trying to be Adaptation, and fails miserably because it does not understand the first thing about being meta.

In Stranger than Fiction, Crick's life having an author is only a plot device to explore some aspects of determinism -- he knows he has to die in the name of aesthetics, and what can he do? And one of Dustin Hoffman's lines is the most truthful about the film, that there is nothing literary about Crick at all. It's acceptable in Adaptation when Kaufman writes about The Orchid Thief because that book is very literary; but in this case, it's impossible to accept Crick having to die in name of art because if the novel he's in is anything like the film, it wouldn't be anywhere near a literary masterpiece.