Never Let Me Go

Posted on September 23, 2010 at 6:44 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some sexuality and nudity
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Disturbing theme, some images of medical procedures and injuries, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 24, 2010

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day, about a butler who devoted his life to service without questioning his master’s authority or the validity of his judgment became a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. And now his book, Never Let Me Go is a movie that while very different in genre addresses some of the same themes. Once again, the setting is the English countryside, and once again the main characters are born into a life of service that they do not question.

It’s a science fiction story without a single lab coat, spaceship, or gizmo. It isn’t even set in the future, but the recent past. It appears very much like the world we knew in the the 1980’s, but we are told before it begins that a medical discovery in 1952 has led to life expectancy of 100 years in 1967.

Then Kathy H. (Carey Mulligan of “An Education”) starts to tell us her story. She is a “carer,” and thinking back on her childhood at a school called Hailsham. As we go back to see her there with her friends Ruth and Tommy, it all seems perfectly normal at first. But there are some elements that seem strange. The headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) makes the usual speech after finding cigarette butts at the school, but why does she emphasize that for these children especially “keeping yourselves healthy is of paramount importance?” Why do they seem to have no families or even last names? And what is that panel on the wall that beeps when they casually touch their wrist to it every day as they come back indoors?

The excitement in the children’s lives comes from the visits by “Madame,” who examines their artwork and selects the items she thinks are the best for her gallery, and even more on the rare opportunities they have to buy trinkets with the tokens they are given for good behavior. They are very happy when they hear they are getting a “bumper crop” and enjoy their treasures but to our eyes the items look like garage sale cast-offs. These are not poor children; they attend school in an almost-idyllic countryside setting. But they do not seem to have anything.

Just once, a teacher tells them the truth, and then she is fired. SPOILER ALERT: the secret not fully revealed until the end of the book is disclosed much earlier in the movie so I am going to include it here. If you don’t want to know, skip this paragraph. The fate of these children has already been decided. They have been bred for use as spare parts. They are to be kept healthy and happy like farm animals until, in their 20’s, they will become “donors.” And after three or four “donations,” they will “complete.” Their purpose is to give of themselves literally and ultimately to keep others alive.

Director Mark Romanek (“One Hour Photo”) understands that just as “Rosemary’s Baby” tapped into a whole new category of dread by putting a Gothic story in modern Manhattan, giving us an alternate reality that seems so familiar to us is eerie and unnerving. It is not familiar through experience, set in the recent past. But it is also familiar through movies. The accents and Hailsham setting lull us into a Merchant-Ivory/Masterpiece Theater civilized world of tea being served at four. The fact that the truest horror happens off screen is haunting. When the headmistress says, “We were answering questions no one wanted asked,” it is as devastating as any gory attack by zombies or aliens. When the characters show their humanity by hoping for a better outcome, we see how much has been taken from them because they have no idea of how to insist on it.

The title comes from a “bumper crop” treasure, a used audio cassette by a torchy 60’s singer (performed by Jane Monheit), given to Kathy by Tommy. She plays it over and over. What does it mean to have someone who wants to hold on to you that way? Kathy knows how it feels to care deeply about someone. She loves Tommy. As they grow up, though, it is Ruth who becomes his — what? Girlfriend does not seem the right word as they have little sense of what that means. Ruth does tell Kathy that she will not let Tommy go. But then things change and as she has to let go of so much more, she thinks about what she can leave behind, what will give her life meaning beyond the limited scope that has been set for her.

Romanek, best known for music videos, is stronger on visuals than with story. He does very well in creating a world so believable, so thoroughly familiar and sturdily institutional, that the slight variances from what we know quickly seem natural. Like the people who proposed and approved and benefit from this system, the ones who are never seen and hardly referred to, we can watch without considering too deeply the consequences and significance of what we see — for a while.

The three sections of the film are starkly different in architecture and color scheme. Hailsham shows a little of the benign neglect of institutions that have existed for hundreds of years and are expected to be around forever. After graduation, they move to “cottages,” rural, rustic, remote. They make shy ventures into the world but can barely order a soda in a restaurant and feel most at home on a beach where an abandoned ship washed up on the shore somehow seems to resonate with them, an empty vessel, once useful, with nowhere to go.

Preview: The Jensen Project

Posted on July 9, 2010 at 8:00 am

The people behind the sensationally popular “Secrets of the Mountain” have a new family movie called “The Jensen Project,” starring Kellie Martin and premiering July 16 on NBC. It’s the story of a couple who once worked at a secret retreat for top scientists who must return when one of their former colleagues goes rogue. As they work to keep the world safe they reconnect to each other and their son.

Avatar

Posted on April 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm

NOTE: The DVD being released this week is a stripped-down 2D version. Later this year there will be another release with many more extras.

Writer-director-producer James Cameron (“Titanic,” “Terminator”) spent a record-breaking $230 million on “Avatar,” and the good news is that he got his money’s worth on the technology — the 3D motion capture technology is stunning, many levels above anything that has ever been done before. He has literally created an entire world, the planet Pandora, so that every insect, plant, animal, waterfall, humanoid creature, and landscape and all of the physical properties that govern the way they interact has to be carefully thought through and consistently applied so that it is at the same time imaginative and credible. If it manages the second better than the first, that is still very impressive. And if it runs out of imagination and even some credibility when it comes to the plot, well, there is still enough on the screen to qualify as entertaining eye candy.

It takes place more than a hundred years in the future. Sam Worthington plays Jake, a former Marine confined to a wheelchair following an injury. His twin brother, a scientist, has been killed and Jake is given the chance to replace him on a major project for a big corporation. Jake does not have his brother’s training and experience but he has something even more important — the same DNA. Jake’s brother and his colleagues have mixed some of their DNA with that of a humanoid race on the planet Pandora to create hybrids that can be used as sort of puppets, manipulated by the humans to interact with the creatures on Pandora. Since Jake’s DNA matches, he qualifies. And he has a powerful incentive to participate. With the money he will get, he will be able to afford the surgery that will restore his ability to walk, which is not covered by his VA benefits. (Apparently, even a century from now we still won’t have that health care thing licked.) So Jake goes into a pod sort of thing and the next thing and into a sleep sort of state and the next thing you know he is digging big, blue toes into the Pandorian ground (I guess you don’t call it earth if it’s on another planet).

Those are very big, blue toes. The Pandorians are 10-foot tall, skinny, long-limbed creatures, sort of like America’s Next Top Model if they were blue and had tails. They have cat-like faces and long, braided hair that surrounds a sort of tentacled membrane that can be used like a USB cable to plug into energy sources in plants, animals, other Pandorians, and whatever they call what we here call earth. And speaking of whatever they call things, I’m just going to refer to them as people from now on.

So the Pandorians are a gentle people who commune deeply with nature. They kill animals for meat but they do it respectfully. They plug into to the special tree as though it was a cell phone recharger and reach out to each other in kumbaya circles to get in touch with their ancestors. And here is where the juggernaut of Cameron’s budget and energy outruns his imagination and it all starts to look like it was pieced together from bits of “Ferngully,” Pocahontas, National Geographic, assorted historical failures of colonialism, imperialism, and international intervention from the Indians to Viet Nam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, plus “Dances With Wolves.” “When people are sitting on that you want,” explains one character, “you make them your enemies.” And, sure enough, the mercenary former Colonel calls the Na’vi “hostiles,” “aborigines,” and terrorists.

All of that work goes into designing the look of the planet and then the best name they can come up with is Pandora? As in the woman who unleashed all the troubles of the world, at least here on planet Earth? Why? And, since we know there has to be some sort of McGuffin (Alfred Hitchcock’s term for whatever it is that the hero and heroine have to get or do before the end of the movie) that must be difficult to obtain, let’s call it “unobtainium.” That sounds like something Dr. Evil would be cackling about while Basil Exposition brings Austin Powers up to date. It made me want to give Cameron an ultimatium.

Unobtainium is some very rare and precious ore underneath a tree sacred to a Pandorian tribe called the Na’vi that the evil corporation headed by Giovanni Ribisi wants to get at any cost. But for some reason, the Na’vi have resisted their efforts to cajole or bribe. When they agree to teach Jake their ways, the corporation realizes that if he gains their trust, they can use him to lead them to the tree. And then no more Mr. Nice Corporation. Bring out the bulldozers and the private army. Meanwhile, Jake is getting very close to the daughter of the Na’vi leaders (Zoe Saldana, with this and “Star Trek” now the 2009 fanboy dream girl). Apparently, another thing that is universal is kissing. And also falling for the guy your parents don’t approve of.

I am willing to believe those things occur on all planets, even the pervasiveness of the evil corporation as bad guy, too. But there are other elements in the story that just seem unoriginal and not very well thought through. The creatures seem like tweaked versions of Earth animals. Putting an extra pair of legs on a horse is, like stretching out a human form, not all that exciting, though it does add a bit more thunder to the hooves. The Na’vi wear conventional noble savage attire (skimpy, lots of beads), but the human avatars somehow fit cargo pants and t-shirts onto their Pandorian bodies (dealing with the tails must be a challenge).

But let’s face it, the unobtainium we seek in a movie like this one is not profundity. If the story is not new, the visual effects are. Even the subtitles (for when the characters speak in Na’vi language) help give the frame additional depth. The 3D is inviting and immersive, adding to the sense of vertigo or constriction. The integration of the live action and CGI footage is seamless and the performances of Worthington, Sigourney Weaver as a scientist, Michelle Rodriguez as a pilot and Stephen Lang as the Colonel provide some of the depth and grounding that the pixels and script do not deliver. And the pixels deliver the kind of fun that movies — and fangirls like me — were made for.

9

Posted on December 29, 2009 at 8:00 am

An award-winning animated student film has been turned into a full-length feature with intricately-designed visuals but a story-line that feels stuck together with chewing gum and Scotch tape. Tim Burton protege Shane Acker has proven a better student of the letter of his mentor’s work than the spirit. Burton’s films are macabre, even grotesque. His characters may be haunted (literally or metaphorically), tortured (ditto), or murderous (ditto again), but they are as rich and complex as his strikingly imaginative visuals. Acker permits his images to overwhelm the story and the result is a film that is too dark for children and too thin for anyone else.

9 is a little burlap rag doll (voice of Elijah Wood) come to life who finds eight other doll-creatures who appear to be the only sentient survivors of an apocalypse that has extinguished all living things on earth. They are being stalked by the same murderous machines that wiped out their human creators and the movie’s greatest strength is the design and operation of these contraptions. Indeed, it is impossible not to think that the film is more interested in them than it is in its ostensible heroes.

The story keeps getting in the way of our connecting to the earnest little figures whose quest is murky at first and then undermined by an unsatisfying conclusion. “9” only gets a 6.

Related Tags:

Animation Fantasy Science-Fiction

District 9

Posted on December 22, 2009 at 7:45 am

This is the smartest alien movie in quite a while. But then movies about creatures from other planets are never about the aliens; they’re about the humans, and about what being human really means.
It has cool and creepy giant insect-looking aliens and there are very cool sci-fi weapons and shoot-outs and chases and space ships and a super-cool giant insect-robot thing, and it is very exciting and scary and sometimes extremely gross (but in a cool, sci-fi way). But, like all great science fiction, it is in aid of speculative allegory. The interactions between humans and aliens all the more powerful for being understated, taken for granted, and filmed in an intimate, low-key fashion that makes it feel like a documentary. Instead of running around and shrieking, this story posits an even more believable human reaction to an alien invasion — a bureaucratic one.
Humanity’s history sometimes seems to come down to the lines we draw, metaphorically and literally. Boundaries establish real estate ownership, communities, and countries, and battles over those boundaries have continued, in some cases, over millennia. We draw lines to distinguish ourselves from others and we draw lines to separate others from ourselves. This movie is not about an invasion from outer space. It is about life twenty years after an invasion. At first, the huge spaceship just hovered over Johannesburg. There was no attack, no communication of any kind. Finally, the South Africans went up to the ship and broke in to find the creatures badly malnourished and ill.
Two decades later, as this movie begins, the humans and aliens exist in uneasy proximity, assigned to “District 9,” fatuously assigned generic human names like “Christopher Johnson” and provided the flimsiest of “rights.” In the name of “humanitarianism,” they are living in the title area, little more than a junkyard. The government has outsourced the supervision responsibility to a contractor. The creatures are exploited by crooks, and called by derogatory epithets like “prawns” (the South African term for shrimp), based on their physical resemblance.
The alien population has grown and so the entire community is about to be “relocated” (evicted) to a new facility, a slum even more remote and meager than the current one, with tents instead of corrugated huts. Wikus Van De Merwe (brilliant newcomer Sharlto Copley) is selected by his boss, who is also his father-in-law, to oversee the “relocation.” This involves, for some absurd reason, going hut to hut with clipboards eliciting some form of “consent.” Copley, much of whose dialog is reportedly improvised, is terrific as the well-meaning but hopelessly overmatched bureaucrat, who has no idea of how offensive he is or how much he is missing as he talks to the company’s camera recording what he thinks will be his triumphant moment. When he unexpectedly inhales an alien substance, he is at first more worried about looking like he knows what he is doing on film than about any possible harm. But soon he is feeling sick. And then things really get out of, uh, hand.
This is where Copley really takes off as Wilkus has to draw on depths of courage, skepticism, analytic ability, and trust he never anticipated. He goes through external and internal changes raising questions about who and what is truly human and he shifts loyalties more than once. The movie shifts, too, combining the documentary footage with news accounts and other perspectives to show us what Wilkus is seeing but to get a glimpse of what lies ahead of him — or is chasing him.
Its setting in Johannesburg immediately suggests the metaphor of apartheid (and some critics have objected to it as a superficial or slanted portrayal — see links below). The film is more clever and ambitious than that. Just as the classic original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is claimed by both the right and the left as representing their side, this is a movie that is designed to be discussed and argued over. It is those conversations about Its meaning in light of the way that struggles with the notion of “the other” can inspire both the best and the worst of what it means to be human.

(more…)

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Science-Fiction