Battle: Los Angeles

Posted on March 11, 2011 at 3:40 pm

Destined to be remembered primarily as yet another step toward closing the gap between games and movies, the essence of “Battle: Lost Angeles” is a lot of boom-boom and a bunch of “ooo-rah.” And essence is all it is; no room here for anything but action. That’s a good thing because every time they start talking, you hope for the chases and explosions to start up again.

We see that the world is under attack and then we see 24 hours earlier, just enough time for brief introductions to the characters we’ll be following. Come on, say it along with me! Seen-it-all and seen-too-much vet on his last assignment, still struggling with survivor guilt over the men who died on his watch, innocent from the sticks whose mother signed for him to enlist at 17, guy about to get married, Navy corpsman earning his American citizenship and hoping to become a doctor, team leader just out of Officers Training School and about to become a father, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter much because pretty soon they will all be wearing so much gear and running around so fast we will hardly be able to tell them apart.

At first, it appears to be meteor showers that for some reason were undetected until they were about to crash off the coast of California and some other regions. But then we learn that the objects hurtling toward earth are slowing on descent; they are mechanical. And then stuff starts blowing up in a “textbook military operation” from another planet. And they have all the intel. We know nothing about who they are, what they want, what weapons they have, and basically, how to stop them from the complete annihilation that appears to be their goal. Troops are mobilized and deployed, with circumstances changing so quickly around them that quickly they are providing more information and support than they are getting. Our group is originally sent to rescue a small group of civilians and get them out of the way before US forces bomb the city to eradicate the enemy. But things are far worse than they thought. Contrary to their briefing, the aliens are attacking by air as well as ground. Their mission becomes survival, recon, and then out and out combat.

It tries to be “Independence Day” crossed with “Black Hawk Down.” It doesn’t come close to either. It’s howlingly bad in places, with clunky construction and ham-handed attempts to insert moments of drama in the midst of all the action (one of the men just happens to be the brother of a Marine who died under the Staff Sergeant’s command, and sadder but wiser civilians and fighting forces learn that war with aliens is hellier than ever). No one expects this film to be anything more than a delivery system for adrenaline and testosterone, with a bit of alien autopsy and some welcome recognition of the abilities and integrity of the military, but even in that category, it doesn’t pass muster.

Mars Needs Moms

Posted on March 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

There is one perfectly charming moment in “Mars Needs Moms,” but it does not come until the closing credits, when we get some live action glimpses of the voice actors. Their faces are covered with reference dots and they are strapped into contraptions so that computers can turn them into computerized 3D animation. We get to see them perform some scenes we have just watched with much more energy and life than anything in the movie. Important note: if you are going to make a film whose moral is that mechanical objects can never replace people (or Martians), you should try not to make exactly that mistake.

Based on the illustrated book by “Bloom County’s” Berkeley Breathed, it is the story of Milo (voice of Seth Dusky, movements of Seth Green), who must rescue his mother (voice of Joan Cusack) when she is captured by Martians.

Milo’s mother makes him take out the garbage and sends him to bed after dinner for lying about eating his broccoli. He angrily tells her, “My life would be so much better if I didn’t have a mom at all!” Feeling guilty when he can’t sleep, he gets up to apologize only to see her being carried off in a space ship.

He manages to stow away. All of the females on Mars are busy imposing order and marching around in armor, so the children have to be raised by super-strict “nannybots.” They want to use Milo’s mom and her memories to program the nannybots because their reconnaissance revealed that she did not spoil her son the way some of the other Earth mothers do.

On Mars, Milo meets up with another human, Gribble (voice of Dan Fogler), a pudgy tech-whiz who has been hiding out from the Martians for 25 years and is given to enthusiastic exclamations like “Gribble-tastic!” Milo wants to rescue his mother before sunrise, when the emptying out of her brain will destroy her. At first Gribble wants Milo to stay so he can have a companion beyond the hairy underground creatures who have been the only living beings he has seen. But both Gribble and Milo learn something about the responsibility and joy of taking care of someone else. So the rescue gets underway with help from Gribble’s nuts-and-bolts pet and a rebel solider who intercepted some US transmissions of a silly 60’s sitcom. She thinks being a hippie chick is groovy (Elisabeth Harnois as Ki) and wants to know more about that “crazy love thing.”

This is decidedly second-tier Disney with third-tier visuals. It makes sense to give the Martians a drab color palette to evoke their oppressive environment, but it makes the experience of watching dull as well. The rows of marching female soldiers in armor evoke many other, wittier, images from “Monsters vs. Aliens” to “Metropolis” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” video. And there’s something just creepy about imagining a world in which the females are all domineering and robotic and the males are all incompetent and ignorant. The vertiginous 3D effects work all right unless you move your head, causing the edges of the images to splinter. And the script is weak and predictable, even for children.

The biggest problem is what animators refer to as the “uncanny valley,” the feeling of disorientation and unease we get when we see a depiction of a human face that is close but not quite right.

Our brains are naturally wired to recognize and empathize with faces with the merest suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth. As Pixar and Disney have shown us, we can happily feel affectionate toward fish, cars, mice, dogs sharing spaghetti, and even bugs as well as simplified human-ish faces that are intended to look like plastic, as with Buzz and Woody in the “Toy Story” movies.

“Mars Needs Moms” would have worked much better if the faces of Milo, his mother, and Gribble were more stylized and caricatured. Instead, based on reference dots and computer algorithms, they are at the same time too close and not close enough to make us feel that we are watching our own species. The Martians appear more familiar than the humans, as we are powerfully reminded with the live action shots at the end when it literally comes to life. That makes this movie only Gribble-so-so.

The Next Three Days

Posted on March 8, 2011 at 8:00 am

Paul Haggis loses his way in “The Next Three Days,” a labored prison escape drama that never recovers from a serious miscalculation midway through and then goes completely off the rails in the end.

Russell Crowe plays a sometimes deliberate and over-thinking professor named John Brennan who is completely devoted to his sometimes hot-tempered and impetuous wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks). After a public quarrel, Lara’s boss is murdered and Lara is arrested. She protests her innocence, but the circumstantial evidence is too persuasive, and she is found guilty. Three years later, all of her appeals exhausted, she cannot bear the thought of a life in prison, and attempts suicide. John, who teaches “Don Quixote” and knows something about righteous quests, decides he will find a way for her to escape. “I promise you, this will not be your life.” He consults an expert (a brief movie-brightening moment with Liam Neeson), watches a video on YouTube about skeleton keys, and comes up with a plan.

Every movie creates a world for us, and each of them can be plotted along the continuum between real world (a verite documentary) and movie world (flying dragons, superheroes, planets with long blue people). It does not matter at which point a movie locates itself, but once it does, it has to stay there. If you tell us horses can fly in one scene, then don’t tell us they can’t in the next. This movie tells us that justice matters, killing people is wrong, and that John is an English professor. It establishes itself as being on the drama-about-people-like-us point on the continuum. It then veers into a whole other over-the-top heist-style scenario with one of those plans where a lot of things have to go exactly right and then somehow they all do and killing people might not be such a bad thing after all. And then it insults the intelligence and goodwill of the audience with an ending that is jarringly out of place. One of the worst mistakes a movie can make is to assume greater fondness for its characters than we are willing to feel. This movie never lets us like its characters and then tries to make that seem like our fault.

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Inside Job

Posted on March 7, 2011 at 8:00 am

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some drug and sex-related material
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Reference to drug use with some images
Violence/ Scariness:	True story of betrayal and corruption
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	October 22, 2010
Date Released to DVD:	March 8, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0041KKYBA

Americans are generous in need and forgiving of mistakes. But we are outraged by injustice. This indispensable film shows us the who, what, when, where, and how of the financial crisis, finally placing it in the context it requires — a failure of decency, fairness, accountability, and honor. Even for those who want to put a pillow over their head when they hear terms like “credit default swap” and those whose eyes glaze over at the thought of watching a hearing on C SPAN will find this movie, the 2011 Oscar-winner for best documentary, a mesmerizing saga of corruption and greed, the biggest heist story of all time, and sadly, all too true.

Charles Ferguson (“No End in Sight”) is now at the front rank not just of documentarians but of film-makers, investigative journalists, and participants in the public policy debates. He begins with the story of what happened in Iceland, which went from one of the world’s most stable economies to bankruptcy almost overnight following deregulation. Its GDP was $13 billion; its debt was $100 billion. Still, at first this seems like an odd choice, but it quickly becomes clear that Iceland illustrates the same mistakes, oversights, bungles, and corruption that led to our own financial catastrophe. And by the final chapter of the film, it comes up again in a stunning interview. A flustered academic has to explain why a paper he once wrote about the financial stability of Iceland (without disclosing his financial arrangement with the people behind the deregulation) is now listed on his c.v. as being about Iceland’s instability. His explanation? It must be a typo.

This chilling absence of any sense of honor or shame or responsibility pervades the film. This is the story of “massive private gains and public loss.” Ferguson points out that this is just the most recent in a series of financial crises, each one causing more damage while the industry made more money. He describes the “great big global Ponzi scheme.” And he names names and shows us the faces of the people involved. He makes leverage, securitization, and yes, credit default swaps as fascinating as the Empire’s plans for the Death Star. And he points out that in the 21st century, it is financial instruments that are the real weapons of mass destruction.

The Adjustment Bureau

Posted on March 3, 2011 at 5:54 pm

The first great movie of 2011 is thought-provoking, exciting, and swooningly romantic. Writer/director George Nolfi takes on the biggest questions of all — faith and doubt, fate and free will, God, love, the meaning of existence — with an absorbing story about who we are and why we do what we do.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a popular politician with a bad habit of losing control that has just cost him an election. As he gets ready to deliver a safe and appropriate concession speech, he has a brief meeting with a young woman and feels an immediate connection. And then he gives the concession speech and it is frank and outspoken and of course, appealing to the voters who find his candor refreshing. His political prospects are bright again, but he can’t stop thinking about the girl.

We’re used to seeing people, especially people in power, surrounded by fixers, arrangers, smoothers, tweakers — publicists, managers, agents, advisers, lawyers. David has those, including his best friend/campaign manager. But there is something different going on. There are men in hats giving each other odd directions with a strangely compelling sense of urgency, as though they are organizing a rocket launch. But why would someone be deployed to spill coffee on David’s shirt?

To keep him off a bus, for one reason (though the deeper reason will not be revealed for a while). But the coffee isn’t spilled in time. He gets on the bus. And the girl from election night is there. Her name is Elise (Emily Blunt). She is a dancer. And David is besotted with her.

The men in hats are from an Adjustment Bureau. They have enormous power and a secret system of doorways that allow them to bypass miles in a few steps. The hat men step out of the doorways like a less cheery version of the minions who keep things running smoothly at Disney World.

The Adjustment Bureau doesn’t want David and Elise to be together, and they are acting on the highest authority. But even that authority cannot stop the most powerful force in the universe.

A knockout cast and imaginative visuals provide a sumptuous setting for the romance. Anthony Mackie, moving with the graceful economy of a cheetah, is the Adjuster who has come to care for his charge. Other Adjusters include “Mad Men’s” John Slattery as a harried bureaucrat and Terence Stamp as the ruthless enforcer brought in when all else has failed. Damon makes David intelligent, brave, sensitive, vulnerable, curious, and great-hearted, and Blunt makes Elise everything a man like that would be willing to risk it all for. There are a few surprising rough edges for such a well-crafted story. Elise’s reason for being in the men’s room where she meets David for the first time is oddly off-putting, a loose end that is never explained. And a story David tells about his political inspiration would have to have occurred about 15 years before he was born, unless he is the youngest-looking baby boomer in history. But what does work in this movie works exceptionally well, a bracing engagement with the reason for everything that gives us a good reason to remember this movie for a long time.

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