STEP BROTHERS
After back-to-back missteps of vacuity, i.e Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, Will Ferrell gets it on like he should with Adam McKay, their 3rd whimsically vulgar collaboration following Anchorman and Talladega Nights, drag-assing the indomitably ethereal John C. Reilly along for some ebullient, wide-eyed and high-hearted bumpus time. With Step Brothers, McKay and Ferrell again use the built-in genre excesses of frat-row comedy to deftly probe what's steadily becoming their intaglio MO: monochromatic social congeniality and formality as cultivated and disillusioned by cultural susceptibilities to submit to the stagnancy of comfort and convenience as manifested from economic and consumptive disenfranchisement and fear of change, as well as the bungling and sophomoric American expression of male bond and sexuality. Mouthful.
Step Brothers was one of the most solid and entertaining comedic chestnuts of the last couple years and a tender keeper. But, as much as I regret to say this to a fellow alum, Will Ferrell's brand of wide-eyed, trusting, irreverently spirited comedic sentiment is nearing its course's end. Maybe within the next half-decade there'll be a tangible transition toward a sense of comedy elaborating on Ferrell's ironic search for sincerity, something that strokes with more focused self-awareness and resolve while sustaining that cherub wonderment. Step Brothers, the title suggests a yearn beyond cynical irony, a near-genuine yearning for brotherly unanimity.
Will Ferrell is the most important comedian of the 21st century, at least. Steve Carrell gets honorable mention.
WALL-E
Pixar delivers another gem, possibly the studio's masterpiece so far. Apart from Cars, Pixar Animation hasn't miscued. What makes Wall-E particularly brilliant and revelatory is its ability to communicate with enduring simplicity its universals of Love, Purpose and Responsibility, all basically without the crutch of talk and rhetoric. This is what children's high-fantasy and Horror as polarized genres can achieve, the purity and universality of the eternal laws governing us, of the potentials we have to ascend and of the temptations which cause us to fall.
I'm searching for my Eva...
MIRRORS
Splat Pack members Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur return with their 3rd gore galore (High Tension, Hills Have Eyes), and it's a studiously adept if underwhelming massacre. I applaud them, at the very least, for attempting to construct and examine the social and perceptional ramifications of mirrors as literal and symbolic artifact for vanity, consumer culture and existential distortion. But generally, the French haven't got the eyes for real, raw horror. Their experienced, fluid narrative romanticism works against them in this genre, aesthetically and sentimentally. Some of these directors included loosely in the Splat Pack don't make the grade; of the ones listed on Wiki (Aja, Darren Lynn Bousman, Neil Marshall, Greg McLean, Eli Roth, James Wan & Leigh Whannell and Rob Zombie) I would in all generosity drop Bousman, Wan & Whannell. The Saw series is like all the insulting sequels to Friday the 13th and Halloween packaged into something slightly and modernly less inane. Wolf Creek by McLean was frenetic and a skilled orchestration, but all aesthetic. Neil Marshall's a solid commercial director and The Descent was one of the best Horror films of the past few years, but Doomsday was a huge letdown. I liked Zombie's Devil's Rejects, but he's obviously limited. Of this list, Eli Roth is the only true auteur. He could potentially be one of the finest auteurs in cinema's future, if he doesn't let the celebrity get to his creative virility, which is very viable risk with Eli.
Speaking of the Horror genre, look out for the writer/director of Transmission 1 from The Signal.
HANCOCK
I felt cheated. Rather, my feelings were voided. So po-mo. Similar to Iron Man, Hancock was just a fragmented, postmodern collage of scenes brusquely and clumsily strung together to construct some undercooked narrative of coolness. In another potential-unrealized flop by Will Smith (the other being I Am Legend), Hancock was particularly a frustrating disappointment because there were many flowers which under the brass knuckle direction of Peter Berg weren't able to blossom. Hancock was the epitome of manufactured sincerity and the aesthetic cover-up of a film under-conceived. This hearkens back to the Iron Man comparison because Berg and Favreau are both comedic actors-turned empty flash directors and were co-stars in Very Bad Things. Now, as directors they suffer from the same postmodern symptom, overstatement and lack of fluidity. There's more to say, especially about the amateurish subterranean commentary on true masculinity, but I'm over this blog. I will give props Jason Bateman, as well as Vincent Ngo, my fellow Vietnamer, for writing the script 12 years ago.
Showing posts with label Manufactured Sincerity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manufactured Sincerity. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
shymalan's the happening
Gee whiz, M. Night Shymalan, what a fall from grace you've had. Not only commercially, but cinematically, the once-heralded Spielberg-Hitchcock popcorn successor, has plunged into the darkest of artistic recessions, that quite frankly, sees almost insurmountable odds of reprisal. I've never been a bandwagoner (jumping on or off it) of Shymalan, though I've always respected his commercially-adroit & manufactured craftsmanship. With The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable & Signs (his masterpiece), he established himself as a solid, even premier, commercial genre auteur, one adeptly attuned to genre conventions & appeals. He's a prime exemplar of critic fickleness, they took him in & praised him & just as swiftly pounced on him like hyenas. The pouncing began with his 4th feature, The Village, which despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction still generated $100m-plus box office, & I must say up until his patented-twist ending turned on him, was a solid, if not impressive, outing. Then, Disney lost faith in him, jumped the boat, & he went from prize-winning horse to a limping, woebegone gamble.
In 2006, with much anticipation of a bounce back from the disappointment of The Village (or for industry insiders, the affirming failure) came Lady in the Water, again starring a fantastic ensemble cast headlined by Giamatti & Bryce Dallas Howard. No critical punches were pulled for this one, it was almost in snickering glee nationally panned & generated only a notch above $40m domestic. Again, I disagree with the reception, which seems to me blatantly fueled not by critical objectiveness but by prebiased emotion. I found Lady in the Water to be a well-directed, well-intentioned children's high-fantasy in which Shymalan matured as an artist in his dwellings on the inner workings of "fate" & "destiny". He found a dab of sincerity in Lady in the Water, which can easily be said Shymalan lacks in his generally contrived & conventional directorial manner. This was all lost in the shuffle, & the critics focused on Shymalan's role in his own film as a struggling artist who becomes a future prophet. It was egotistical, megalomaniacal, they said. In a sense, yes, they were right, & considering Shymalan's artistic vision, he's somewhat disillusioned of his own ability, but it was also audacious & if not that, honest. Because in all truthfulness, he simply embodied what all artists, great or think such, see themselves as: prophets.
Okay, The Happening. This, is perhaps, the case of an auteur who's lost almost entirely, the belief in himself & his personal vision. An artist who tried to please everybody, work outside of his own capability & in the end, made thus far, his very worst film. To see such a solid director fall & dissipate so tremendously, even from one film to the next, is remarkable & horrific. Everything was off in The Happening. The casting, which Mark Wahlberg & Zooey Deschanel, two very specific role actors, completely stunk up the joint. The usually taut, sure-handed tension, which was replaced by merely the absurdly grotesque. & the humor & satire which was without balance & came in excessive amounts & at moments completely out of wack with the flow of the film. In his past efforts, Shymalan's manufactured sincerity was well-enough glossed over by the entertainment of its package, but with The Happening everything has completely unraveled, making one of the most wooden, contrived films probably in cinematic history. Shymalan, was perhaps, just that last postmodern blockbuster director that came in the flicker of the right pre-millenium dawn & now in our cultural yearn for sincerity, has faded just as fast.
In 2006, with much anticipation of a bounce back from the disappointment of The Village (or for industry insiders, the affirming failure) came Lady in the Water, again starring a fantastic ensemble cast headlined by Giamatti & Bryce Dallas Howard. No critical punches were pulled for this one, it was almost in snickering glee nationally panned & generated only a notch above $40m domestic. Again, I disagree with the reception, which seems to me blatantly fueled not by critical objectiveness but by prebiased emotion. I found Lady in the Water to be a well-directed, well-intentioned children's high-fantasy in which Shymalan matured as an artist in his dwellings on the inner workings of "fate" & "destiny". He found a dab of sincerity in Lady in the Water, which can easily be said Shymalan lacks in his generally contrived & conventional directorial manner. This was all lost in the shuffle, & the critics focused on Shymalan's role in his own film as a struggling artist who becomes a future prophet. It was egotistical, megalomaniacal, they said. In a sense, yes, they were right, & considering Shymalan's artistic vision, he's somewhat disillusioned of his own ability, but it was also audacious & if not that, honest. Because in all truthfulness, he simply embodied what all artists, great or think such, see themselves as: prophets.
Okay, The Happening. This, is perhaps, the case of an auteur who's lost almost entirely, the belief in himself & his personal vision. An artist who tried to please everybody, work outside of his own capability & in the end, made thus far, his very worst film. To see such a solid director fall & dissipate so tremendously, even from one film to the next, is remarkable & horrific. Everything was off in The Happening. The casting, which Mark Wahlberg & Zooey Deschanel, two very specific role actors, completely stunk up the joint. The usually taut, sure-handed tension, which was replaced by merely the absurdly grotesque. & the humor & satire which was without balance & came in excessive amounts & at moments completely out of wack with the flow of the film. In his past efforts, Shymalan's manufactured sincerity was well-enough glossed over by the entertainment of its package, but with The Happening everything has completely unraveled, making one of the most wooden, contrived films probably in cinematic history. Shymalan, was perhaps, just that last postmodern blockbuster director that came in the flicker of the right pre-millenium dawn & now in our cultural yearn for sincerity, has faded just as fast.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
i am legend
This is a blog from December when I Am Legend released, and a comment posted on it.
I Am Legend
Starring Will Smith
Directed by Francis Lawrence
We live in a detached hyper-reality. The blockbuster reaffirms this detachment, this problematic disconnect from cinema, the primary constructor of aforementioned hyper-reality. We look for titillation, cheap thrills, and commerce acting as it only knows how, treats us to such. The blockbuster, especially I Am Legend with its post-apocalyptic topicality, can be so much more. It can be real. It can be inspiring. It can be a MANIFESTO.
It doesn't have to cheat essence to be entertaining. But we let it do so, and thus it stays on the surface, never exploring what we truly need it to. In these fragile moments, I Am Legend could've shown us, taught us, inspired us, had meaning. Blockbusters like I Am Legend can be more, they can be projects for humanity. Cinema of this magnitude has the potential to enable the most visceral message. It gives us the opportunity to embody, to empathize with the context, the situation, our mistakes. Imagine the beauty of a visual manifesto. Entertaining, but uncompromising to its sincerity.
Socialized cinema in America would be a beautiful revelation. I kept thinking what if Malick did this or Aronofsky. What if we funded films like this for the best American auteurs to create together? Collaborations of the most profound, of the most timely, of the greatest purpose. Perhaps, better in theory, than practice.
Yet, we can embody this hyper-reality we have constructed. Art imitating Life. Life imitating Art. Life becoming Art. Such is the cycle. Such is the most universal, revelatory human narrative: Redemption.
Comment by Syd:
Since the end of tribalism, cannibalism and the formation of civilization, evolution seems to manifest culturally before physically. And since civilization, or at least Herodotus’ time, the world has been divided into EAST and WEST. And since the edification of civilization and thus, society as an evolutionary petri dish, the greatest strides in human evolution seem to come as a result of interactions between east and west... (for example, the Renaissance and Mercantilism in Venice, then Impressionism later, up until the turn of the 20th Century where two World Wars brought people from all walks of life into the Pacific theater, the beginning of socialized globalization rather than colonialism.) The science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s were continuing this story of humanity, east and west. Coming off of the trend of earlier 20th Century Western philosophers writing in the 1880's to 1950's(Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Charles MaCkay and infamously Aleister Crowley) who at the turn of the Century traveled to the East, and then came back West to open schools and publish books mixing Philosophies, histories, psychology, ontology, epistemology and a tad of the occult, delivering it all in the Eastern style of education: teaching their “worldly” knowledge, recruiting monks rather than students and focusing on personal growth rather than group performance— the scifi-authors of the seventies were a mixture of novelty and prophecy... This association somewhat discredited them over the years in Academia. Just as their aforementioned predecessors from the 1880's-1950s, the 1970s scifi gurus represented the most recent cultural interaction between east and west, and thus, a stride in evolution.
They all saw something, a glimpse into a possible future. Authors such as Philllip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pyncheon, Asimov and of course Hubbard where all given access to privy knowledge— whether through legit insanity and dreams, LSD and drug use, or backgrounds in government and military that exposed them to information, they all saw and knew something. Reacting to the previous generations of authors who were the brilliant products of East and West interactions under post-colonial Modernity, the scifi gurus of the 1970s wrote their own philosophies. Some, like Hubbard, were able to convince masses. But since the trend of establishing schools in the Eastern-style of education faded, (due to elitism), these neo-philosophers lost their academic audiences. When I AM LEGED by Richard Matheson was written the world was changing. 1977, the year it was written, was the year of Aquarius and the beginning of that age. The Earth’s poles began to shift. Hip Hop and Rock were emerging as eternal as our bodies learned to move anew. The art scene was bursting while socially, the Bronx was Burning. It was the Summer of Sam and the beginning of the end for most. For the first time, we had no prophets telling us what was going to happen…enter the era of great scifi guru. Unlike the previous era (1880’s-1950s) where metaphysical philosophies were abundant and often accepted as commonplace even having not read them, those who read scifi knew it was more, but those who didn’t had no idea. So if you really want to know what is going to happen, just read it. They all say the same thing through different stories. The end began back in 1977 and has been going on since. In 2009 something bad will happen as it all comes to a head. In 2012 a resolution will happen. As for translating these works into cinema, I think we need to evaluate “cinema prophecy”— how can cinema, like the other art forms, be used to signify the future? In order to do this, we must find a visual language that cinematically accomplishes this. The last film to accomplish cinematic prophecy was Star Wars— the last film to have truly changed the world. My friend Ana just saw Kurosawa’s RAN. She remarked how she knew Lucas had looked to Kurosawa and his films for inspiration, but she had no idea that he had made a shot for shot remake of RAN. Lucas relied on Kurosawa’s visual language to tell his prophecy and as Ana pointed out, the last film to truly change the world is clearly an interaction between East and West. Upon watching recent Asian films, particularly horror, it is obvious that this is the solution to creating cinema prophecy in our time.
I Am Legend
Starring Will Smith
Directed by Francis Lawrence
We live in a detached hyper-reality. The blockbuster reaffirms this detachment, this problematic disconnect from cinema, the primary constructor of aforementioned hyper-reality. We look for titillation, cheap thrills, and commerce acting as it only knows how, treats us to such. The blockbuster, especially I Am Legend with its post-apocalyptic topicality, can be so much more. It can be real. It can be inspiring. It can be a MANIFESTO.
It doesn't have to cheat essence to be entertaining. But we let it do so, and thus it stays on the surface, never exploring what we truly need it to. In these fragile moments, I Am Legend could've shown us, taught us, inspired us, had meaning. Blockbusters like I Am Legend can be more, they can be projects for humanity. Cinema of this magnitude has the potential to enable the most visceral message. It gives us the opportunity to embody, to empathize with the context, the situation, our mistakes. Imagine the beauty of a visual manifesto. Entertaining, but uncompromising to its sincerity.
Socialized cinema in America would be a beautiful revelation. I kept thinking what if Malick did this or Aronofsky. What if we funded films like this for the best American auteurs to create together? Collaborations of the most profound, of the most timely, of the greatest purpose. Perhaps, better in theory, than practice.
Yet, we can embody this hyper-reality we have constructed. Art imitating Life. Life imitating Art. Life becoming Art. Such is the cycle. Such is the most universal, revelatory human narrative: Redemption.
Comment by Syd:
Since the end of tribalism, cannibalism and the formation of civilization, evolution seems to manifest culturally before physically. And since civilization, or at least Herodotus’ time, the world has been divided into EAST and WEST. And since the edification of civilization and thus, society as an evolutionary petri dish, the greatest strides in human evolution seem to come as a result of interactions between east and west... (for example, the Renaissance and Mercantilism in Venice, then Impressionism later, up until the turn of the 20th Century where two World Wars brought people from all walks of life into the Pacific theater, the beginning of socialized globalization rather than colonialism.) The science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s were continuing this story of humanity, east and west. Coming off of the trend of earlier 20th Century Western philosophers writing in the 1880's to 1950's(Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Charles MaCkay and infamously Aleister Crowley) who at the turn of the Century traveled to the East, and then came back West to open schools and publish books mixing Philosophies, histories, psychology, ontology, epistemology and a tad of the occult, delivering it all in the Eastern style of education: teaching their “worldly” knowledge, recruiting monks rather than students and focusing on personal growth rather than group performance— the scifi-authors of the seventies were a mixture of novelty and prophecy... This association somewhat discredited them over the years in Academia. Just as their aforementioned predecessors from the 1880's-1950s, the 1970s scifi gurus represented the most recent cultural interaction between east and west, and thus, a stride in evolution.
They all saw something, a glimpse into a possible future. Authors such as Philllip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pyncheon, Asimov and of course Hubbard where all given access to privy knowledge— whether through legit insanity and dreams, LSD and drug use, or backgrounds in government and military that exposed them to information, they all saw and knew something. Reacting to the previous generations of authors who were the brilliant products of East and West interactions under post-colonial Modernity, the scifi gurus of the 1970s wrote their own philosophies. Some, like Hubbard, were able to convince masses. But since the trend of establishing schools in the Eastern-style of education faded, (due to elitism), these neo-philosophers lost their academic audiences. When I AM LEGED by Richard Matheson was written the world was changing. 1977, the year it was written, was the year of Aquarius and the beginning of that age. The Earth’s poles began to shift. Hip Hop and Rock were emerging as eternal as our bodies learned to move anew. The art scene was bursting while socially, the Bronx was Burning. It was the Summer of Sam and the beginning of the end for most. For the first time, we had no prophets telling us what was going to happen…enter the era of great scifi guru. Unlike the previous era (1880’s-1950s) where metaphysical philosophies were abundant and often accepted as commonplace even having not read them, those who read scifi knew it was more, but those who didn’t had no idea. So if you really want to know what is going to happen, just read it. They all say the same thing through different stories. The end began back in 1977 and has been going on since. In 2009 something bad will happen as it all comes to a head. In 2012 a resolution will happen. As for translating these works into cinema, I think we need to evaluate “cinema prophecy”— how can cinema, like the other art forms, be used to signify the future? In order to do this, we must find a visual language that cinematically accomplishes this. The last film to accomplish cinematic prophecy was Star Wars— the last film to have truly changed the world. My friend Ana just saw Kurosawa’s RAN. She remarked how she knew Lucas had looked to Kurosawa and his films for inspiration, but she had no idea that he had made a shot for shot remake of RAN. Lucas relied on Kurosawa’s visual language to tell his prophecy and as Ana pointed out, the last film to truly change the world is clearly an interaction between East and West. Upon watching recent Asian films, particularly horror, it is obvious that this is the solution to creating cinema prophecy in our time.
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