Prometheus

Posted on June 7, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Is it possible that all of the elements of life on earth, from the protozoa to the human, were the gift of god-like creatures who came to a barren planet to create us in their image? And that they stayed long enough to teach our prehistoric ancestors, leaving evidence behind in cave drawings that date back 35,000 years, seven times as far from the present as we are from the earliest days of the Old Testament? Hard to say.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see the evidence of the DNA building blocks in this film that trace directly back to its predecessors, the Aliens “In space no one can hear you scream” series. It wavers at times between enthralling variations on the themes of the originals and over-reliance on repeating and reinforcing them.

One of those building blocks is stunning visuals and it is a tribute to the earlier films (which take place after this one) that the special effects and design were were so prescient that the connection feels seamless. This is not like those early “Star Trek” episodes where the computers look like shoeboxes with blinking lights. Scott is meticulous about making sure that all of the technology in his films looks both amazing and believable and the visuals here are enthralling. The rolling 3D probes feel as immediately real and indispensable as Dekard’s then-not-yet-invented scalable computer display.

“Prometheus” is the name of the spaceship that is taking a crew in search of the very origins of life on earth. Archeologists have decoded ancient pictures (like the Chauvet cave paintings documented in Cave of Forgotten Dreams). They believe it is an “invitation” to find the beings who brought the original genetic building blocks to our planet. A monumentally wealthy man who is very old (Guy Pearce) funded the voyage, knowing he would not live to see the results. The expedition is led by the fiercely disciplined Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), who lives in Captain Nemo-like luxury quarters while the scientists on board sleep their way through space travel. As they approach the target planet, they are awakened and prepare to land.

The archeologists are thoughtful seeker Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace of the Swedish “Dragon Tattoo” movies) and excitable, impetuous Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green of “Dark Blue”), who are a couple. Along for the expedition are some other scientists you don’t have to worry about getting to know very well and an all-knowing and extremely polite and handsome android named David (a well-cast Michael Fassbender) who seems like a combination of Data, C-3PO, and the “Danger, Will Robinson” robot from “Lost in Space.” The captain of the ship, Janek (“The Wire’s” Idris Elba) has a different mission from the others. They are seeking what is out there. He is there to make sure nothing gets back to earth that could be destructive.

Interruption for an important safety tip: no matter what your instrument readings tell you and how excited you are, when you are exploring a new planet, keep your helmet on.

Things are exciting, things are promising, and then things start to go very, very wrong. As in previous Scott films, we end up with a woman in her underwear being chased by something pretty appalling. And the call is, if you know what I mean, coming from inside the house.

Scott and his screenwriters, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, are not afraid to take on the big, big questions, and this movie gets credit for making room for Shaw’s insistence on wearing a crucifix despite Holloway’s claim that what they have found invalidates her faith. “It’s what I choose to believe,” her father tells her about heaven in a flashback. The movie leaves some questions open (wait until the very end of the credits for an enigmatic clue relating to “Alien”), but the answers it does give are disappointingly superficial and a little silly. (See point about helmets above.) Instead of Prometheus (the Greek mythological figure who was thought to have created man from clay and stolen fire from the gods to give to humans), they could have just named the spaceship “The Hubris.” But without some audacity, no big undertaking would ever be attempted and this one succeeds in so many categories that the suggestion that another chapter is to come allows us to hope it will be as good as “Aliens.”

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Trailer: “Wreck-It Ralph”

Posted on June 6, 2012 at 3:18 pm

An 8-bit video-game character attempts to shed his bad-guy image by escaping into a popular first-person shooter, but inadvertently wreaks havoc in the video-game universe by freeing a digital villain. Here’s the first look at Disney’s big end-of-year release, featuring John C. Reilly and Sara Silverman, Wreck-It Ralph.

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“Graceland” — 25th Anniversary Re-Release

Posted on June 3, 2012 at 8:00 am

Paul Simon’s brilliant song and album of the year Grammy-winning Graceland album celebrates its 25th anniversary next week with a re-release that includes bonus tracks and a new documentary by Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost, Metallica – Some Kind of Monster) that covers the controversy about the making of the album. Back in 1987, Simon traveled to South Africa to work with local musicians at a time when the racist apartheid laws had led to widespread boycotts. Berlinger’s film includes commentary by anti-apartheid activists and a thoughtful consideration of the role of art in addressing political issues and lingering questions of the line between cultural cross-pollination and appropriation or exploitation.

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Moonrise Kingdom

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:30 pm

Wes Anderson films are not so much directed as curated. Often accused of being more interested in his props than his characters, Anderson’s fussy, even obsessive focus on the objects and sets gives his films a missing the forest for the trees feeling that seems claustrophobic and frustratingly precious to some audiences and astutely ironic to others. Some, I think, see both.

On a fictional island called Penzance off the coast of mid-1960’s New England, two middle school pre-teens run away partly to be together but mostly to be someplace different from where they were. Sam (Jared Gilman) is an owlish-looking orphan who escapes from “Khaki Scout” camp overseen by the very meticulous Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). He wears glasses and a coonskin cap. He lives with foster parents who have rejected him and, as we find, after camp is over he will be sent to live in an orphanage by a woman so odiously officious the only name she goes by is Social Services (Tilda Swinton).

Suzy (Kara Hayward) is a serious and determined girl who lives with a family that does not appreciate or understand her. She wears knee socks, packs a record-player, and is very attached to her binoculars, which give her a chance to look at places far from home. Her mother (Frances McDormand) addresses her children in their home via megaphone. Sam first sees Suzy when she is in costume as a bird, about to appear in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera about Noah and the flood. They engage in a secret correspondence and make plans for their getaway.

Sam and Suzy create a world for themselves that is part fantasy, part very real. They are practical, if limited, in their understanding of their situation. Sam uses his camping skills to provide food and shelter, and they rename their site Moonrise Kingdom, establishing themselves as rulers of a place that exists in the opposite of the harsh daylight of their previous reality. They try some kissing but sleep next to each other in complete innocence. Suzy brought a record-player as one of her essentials, and they listen to music.

Meanwhile, Scout Master Ward, Suzy’s parents, and the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), who is having a joyless affair with Suzy’s mother, are searching the island for the missing children. Sam, who was ostracized for being weird by the other scouts, becomes a hero for his daring and romantic adventure and they help him try to escape with the assistance of another Scout leader (Jason Schwartzman) who is less upstanding than Ward. Even Ward ends up complimenting Sam on his “commendable” campsite.

Sam and Suzy may not have a plan for taking care of themselves past a few days and one of the things Anderson does best is conveying that exact moment between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence (Suzy’s home is called “Summer’s End”) when things are animated by imagination that can feel completely real. Like Peter Pan and Wendy, Sam pretends to smoke a pipe and Suzy presides over a group of Lost Boys to create a family that allows them to be both adult and forever young. Like the young heroes of Dickens’ story about Mr. and Mrs. Harry Walmers, Jr., the young runaways seem to have an almost incantatory faith in the power of marriage to create a bond that will protect them from the power of the grown-ups.

In many ways Sam and Suzy are more adult than the grown-ups around them, who are petty, foolish, or lonely. And, as usual in Wes Anderson films, they are not as fully realized as the props and settings around them. It is telling that the children assume a paper mache decoy will fool the adults; it almost does. Suzy’s library books in particular are a marvel of period detail, so vivid and evocative audiences of a certain age will swear they had those books on the shelf next to Madeleine L’Engle and Norton Juster. It’s details like the coonskin cap that delight his fans and infuriate everyone else. No one in the mid-60’s and no 12 year old of any era wore a coonskin cap. The omniscient “Our Town”-style narrator (Bob Balaban) can tell us a storm is coming but he cannot make the emotions of the story feel real or meaningful.

Parents should know that this film includes some sexual references and experimentation by middle-schoolers, teen and adult smoking and drinking, some strong language, some violence, and human and animal characters peril and injury.

Family discussion: Why did the scoutmaster change his mind about which was his “real job?” Why did the children run away? How does it change the story to have it set in the 1960’s instead of today?

If you like this, try: “A Little Romance” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

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Snow White and the Huntsman

Posted on May 31, 2012 at 6:06 pm

Director Rupert Sanders is known for making television commercials that look like fairy tales, with angels falling from the sky for a guy who uses Axe body spray and a boy battling samurai warriors with Excalibur to sell X-Box game consoles. With his first feature film he has made a fairy tale that looks like a commercial, with every frame filled with eye-popping images and a lot of dramatic posing. A 30 second version would have made a great commercial for perfume or skin cream. As a movie, it is just so-so, with uneven performances and dodgy pacing. After over 100 movie versions of the classic fairy tale about the girl whose lips are red as blood, skin is white as snow, and hair black as ebony and the evil stepmother who orders her taken into the woods and killed, the Disney animated version is still the fairest of them all.

Like Tarsem’s superior “Mirror Mirror,” released earlier this year, this version makes Snow White into an action heroine, leading the battle against her evil stepmother. Charlize Theron plays Ravenna, who literally bewitches a king grieving for his late wife. She murders him on their wedding night, taking over his kingdom with the help of her creepy brother/henchman Finn (Sam Spruell) and locking the young princess in a grubby tower. Ravenna cares for just one thing — eternal beauty. She swans around looking haughty in fabulous Colleen Atwood costumes that can best be described as haute predator couture, with all kinds of intricate spikes and skulls. Everything is either sharp or poisonous and laced-up tightly, with talon-like finger-armor. She stalks and flounces nicely but when it is time for her to get ferocious she is all eye-rolls and screeches, a bad version of Carol Burnett doing Norma Desmond.

Ravenna has an enormous gold mirror that looks like giant frisbee hanging on the wall, and the robed creature who lives inside assures her that she is the fairest in the land. She also gets some reassurance from skeevy Finn, with whom she shares the creepiest brother watching his sister take a bath scene since “Bunny Lake is Missing.” You also know he’s twisted from his terrible haircut, a sort of medieval mullet.

While Ravenna is bathing in thick cream and literally sucking the life out of young women, Snow White (Kristen Stewart) is still locked in the tower. For years. But she stays so pure that when the birds come to perch on her window, she does not grab and eat them. She just allows them to show her a loose nail she can use as a weapon, which comes in very handy as Finn arrives shortly to indicate some predatory tendencies and take her to the queen. The mirror guy has informed Ravenna that Snow White has come of age. Her purity is so powerful that she alone has the power to destroy Ravenna, says the mirror. But her power is so great that if Ravenna can eat her heart, she will no longer need touch-ups and refills. Her beauty will stay as it is forever.

When Snow White escapes into the Dark Forest, where everything is creepy and scary and even Ravenna has no power. The only person who knows the Dark Forest well enough to bring her back is The Huntsman (no name), played by “The Avengers'” Thor, Chris Hemsworth. Ravenna promises to bring his dead wife back to life if he will capture the prisoner and he agrees to go. But Snow White isn’t the only one who gets tripped up in the forest. Sanders gets much too enmeshed in all of the tree-branches-turning to snakes-style special effects and the forest section of the film goes on much too long, with at least three too many set-ups and confrontations, including the return of Finn. And it gets worse when they emerge into a sort of Light Forest fairyland, when the story really starts to go haywire, with a whole “chosen one” theme that had people in the audience groaning. Stewart is out of her league. She is fine playing characters like the vulnerable Bella in “Twilight,” but when called on here to inspire the troops, she sounds like she is ordering pizza.

And then there are the dwarfs. It is hard to imagine that in 2012 anyone could think it is appropriate to cast full-size actors, no matter how talented and no matter how persuasive the special effects, as little people. It is a shame to see Bob Hoskins, Nick Frost, Ian McShane, Toby Jones, and others in roles that should be played by little people. By the time they show up, the plot has fallen apart, with an unnecessary love triangle and a preposterous encounter with a troll. Nearly everyone’s accents waver, some of the dialogue is truly awful, and I am certain no one in a fairy tale should ever use the word “okay.” Recasting Snow White as the hero of her own story is long overdue and production designer Dominic Watkins creates some real magic. But this is not only not the best Snow White; it’s not the best one in the last four months.

Parents should know that this film includes fantasy and battle violence with many characters injured and killed, and some graphic and disturbing images including bloody wounds, bugs, and snakes. There is brief partial nudity and some scenes of a brother watching his sister bathe and then suggestively touching a young woman in a predatory manner.

Family discussion: How did Ravenna’s costumes reflect her character? How did the three drops of blood spilled by both characters’ mothers show their connection?

If you like this, try: Some of the more than 100 other movie versions of this story including the recent “Mirror Mirror” and the Disney animated classic