Wall▪E, Pixar’s latest animated cash-cow-in-waiting, is two
parts robot love story, one part cautionary Mother Earth tale. Well,
unless you listen to director Andrew Stanton, who seems eager to
position his movie in as neutered and apolitical a light as possible,
lest GOP ticket-buyers think it’s part of some secret, liberal
Hollywood agenda. For the full read, from New York Magazine’s Vulture, click here.
Daily Archives: June 26, 2008
Wanted
The latest brawny, slick, slow-motion-fed shoot-’em-up to air-quote reinvent the action genre, Wanted is a hyper-stylized swirl of color, outlandish gunplay, acrobatic escape sequences and punishing sound design. It will titillate and enthuse a young, rabid (and overwhelmingly male) fan base for the summer, doing big box office business and leaving a deep international footprint. And then, like The Big Hit or Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever or Aeon Flux, it will disappear with a gentle plunk!, to be not much thought about outside of its fan-boy base until it pops up on cable television some drizzly evening 10 years hence.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian filmmaker behind Night Watch and its 2006 follow-up, Day Watch, the highest-grossing native movie of all time in his homeland, Wanted is based on a series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. Filmed in Prague against a panoply of architectural styles, the movie centers around Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), an accountant who leads a droning office existence (a la Office Space, and The Matrix), and is so non-confrontational that he can’t even bring himself to dump his girlfriend, a harridan who’s cheating on him with his equally insincere and duplicitous best friend.
Wesley’s life gets turned upside down when hit-woman Fox (Angelina Jolie) crashes into him on the business end of a smoking gun, and informs Wes that his presumed long-dead father was actually an elite-level killer just recently cut down by the vengeful Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Escaping a rubout from the latter, Fox whisks Wes away and introduces him to the not-very-originally-named Fraternity, a secret, thousand-year-old sect of assassins derived from… weavers? Yes, honestly. Leader Sloan (Morgan Freeman) then explains that they “keep the order and balance” by bumping off individuals whose names are spit out from a loom, encoded in binary form by whether certain strands lay above or below other stitching. (Seriously, one can’t make this stuff up.) Drawn into the Fraternity, Wes learns to slow down and focus the 400-heartbeats-per-minute panic attacks that besiege him, all as he trains to seek revenge against Cross.
As shot by Transformers cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, Wanted is an anthology of eye-popping steeplechases and nutso special effects, with characters leaping across city streets and flipping cars to fire guns down through the top of open sunroofs. It’s extreme and willfully over-the-top, in other words. It’s also very well put together, powered by special effects from Bekmambetov’s own visual effects house in Moscow. Several of the action scenes (Fox scooping up Wes in a red Viper, saving him from Cross; a train-set sequence which concludes in crashing fashion on a bridge between two steep cliffs) get the blood pumping. There are also cool visual conceits — like a waxy rejuvenation chamber which heals bruises, cuts and apparently bullet and knife wounds as well — and an exacting sense of each of the main characters’ presentations. “Toil” and “Tears” read the tattoos on the insides of Fox’s arms, accompanied by a string of ones and zeroes on her left wrist, presumably the code for some long-past target of special importance.
The problem is a matter of rootedness. Wanted aims to position itself as an outrageous slice of aspirant pop-cinema, about the transformation of a “nobody” into an unparalleled enforcer of justice; indeed, part of the direct-address marketing campaign touts the fact that “six weeks ago I was just like you.” The inspirations for the source material, and its cinematic translation, are fairly obvious, from Star Wars to The Matrix and Fight Club. A bigger part of the problem, though, is that the movie never convincingly sells us on its tone, and setting. Keanu Reeves’ transformation into Neo in The Matrix worked because of the differentiation established between two worlds. Here, everything is angled, and “extreme,” right down to Wes’ obese, grotesque boss (Lorna Scott), who could be something out of a Tim Burton film, or maybe even a Dr. Seuss book.
Centuries of presumed Fraternity customs, traditions, codes and the like are boiled down to vague directives (“Like an apostle, your task is not to interpret, but deliver”) and even vaguer overall motivations, and Bekmambetov can’t stop himself from pitching things at an ironic angle. Bits like the rejuvenation chamber, meanwhile, notwithstanding their visual appeal, render large chunks of the action wholly irrelevant. The movie also ends on a needlessly nasty and condescending note, with a direct-address dismissal of its core viewership.
Wanted isn’t lastingly odious or offensive — in its own warped way, it’s perfectly serviceable for what it is — but it is emblematic of what I like to think of as Cinema of the Now, which is to say films that answer to no greater sense or discipline than what works in the moment. Entertainment like that can wash over one pleasantly at times, but it isn’t ever a cleansing rain. Nor a particularly memorable one. (Universal, R, 108 minutes)
Jenna Fischer Talks Jobs Both Crappy and Good
I chatted with Jenna Fischer a while back, in advance of the sadly aborted release of The Promotion, and she confirmed that The Office was a dream gig for her in more ways than the obvious. “I was a secretary for five years in various offices and I loved it,” says Fischer. “I always thought if I didn’t have a career in acting, I’d want to be the secretary to the President of the United States. Like, what is the biggest job you can shoot for as an assistant? I think I can do it, I can anticipate his or her needs!”
Here she laughs a bit, then continues. “I really did like it, though. I like filing, I like organizing things — not in my personal life, but I love going to work and working on an Excel spreadsheet. My Christmas list is on an Excel spreadsheet — any reason to make an Excel spreadsheet! But really, I like offices, and I like office work, so to get an acting job set in an office was like my dream come true — they combine my two loves. Even now, if you take to a Staples, I’ll get lost in there. The sheer variety of Post-It notes is amazing to me.”
Not everything in Fischer’s occupational past is peaches and cream, though. “I didn’t like catering very much — catering is so weird. I was always offended when people would look right through me, like I was a moving prop of food, but then I didn’t want anyone talking to me either,” says Fischer. “I was like, ‘Please don’t ask me any questions, don’t ask me what’s in it, I’m just going to make it up.’ I was always very grouchy as a caterer. If I was at a wedding and everyone [is getting] chicken, just don’t ask for the sauce on the side, just don’t. Because I don’t want to have to walk back to the kitchen and get sauce in a little cup and remember where you’re sitting, because you look like every other person at every other wedding that I’ve done for the past two years. So I was very grouchy, but as a result, when I’m at an event that is catered, I do not ask for my sauce on the side. I am polite but not too chatty with the staff, because I’ve been there.”
Firestorm
After suffering heavy losses of aircraft during attacks on German factories, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered — or at least allowed — cities to be targeted, in order to smash German morale and reduce the number of workers available for the Nazi war machine. Roughly 500,000 German civilians were killed as almost one-and-a-half million incendiary bombs turned the center of cities like Hamburg and Dresden into tornadoes of fire. Sixty years later, a new debate is underway over the reasons for this lethal bombing campaign. Were these relentless aerial attacks — many of which came in 1945, in the war’s waning days — a necessary tactic? Or was it an act of revenge by the British and Americans? Michael Kloft’s 2003 documentary Firestorm examines this issue, in fascinating if somewhat distracted fashion.
Kloft has a vast array of historical footage at his disposal (maybe too much), and it’s this material that forms the backbone of Firestorm. There are also plenty of interviews with former bomber pilots and survivors of the destruction too — from British bombardier John Chatterton, now an 83-year-old farmer, to American pilot Robert Morgan, whose B-17 “Memphis Belle” provided Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler with the first color footage of an American bombing run of Germany. The recollections these subjects provide, and the film’s exacting sense of detail with respect to the chronological escalation of this so-called moral bombing (euphemistically referred to by the British as a “de-housing of the industrial suburbs”), give the movie a genuine sense of engagement.
Yet Firestorm isn’t really a sustained moral inquisition. In German historian Joerg Friedrich and British counterpart Richard Overy, Kloft has two compelling advocates for at-odds points-of-view. But he doesn’t contrast these opinions and disagreements over matters factual and moral as directly as he should, and too often fritters away the heavy ethical lifting with digressive asides, like ducking into (some admittedly hilarious) footage from a National Socialist Party firefighting training video. The film would also benefit from a slightly more academic explanation of the British and American research that actually informed saturation incendiary bombing — how British Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris plotted for the roofs of buildings to be first blown off, and then peppered with small stick bombs that would shoot flames after the initial explosions, burning for only 10 to 15 minutes but, in sum, overwhelming German firefighting capabilities. This wasn’t accidental collateral damage, in other words — this was truly a scorched-Earth policy. Knowing the specifics of the research that informed this policy would be interesting.
A lot of Firestorm is preamble, though perhaps necessarily. It’s only in its introduction and its final 25 minutes or so — detailing the bombings of Hamburg and Mainz, and then the fire-bombings of Berlin, Dresden and another port city in Eastern Germany, full of refugees — that the movie truly examines some of the more controversial bombings of World War II. If a debate about moral equivalence is mostly avoided, though, that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t put those questions in your mind.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Firestorm is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and comes with eight minutes of (silent) amateur film footage of a bombed-out Germany in ruins. There’s also a scrollable text biography of Kloft, who from 1989 to 1995 worked as a
freelance director of historical TV documentaries for Chronos-Film in
Berlin and for Spiegel TV, and has since personally produced a variety of historical
films in addition to serving as the head of Spiegel TV History. Extra interview material would have been nice, but for history buffs this title is still a solid, meat-and-potatoes kind of meal. To purchase the film on DVD, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)