Yearly Archives: 2003

20 posts

Half Dead

Film Film Reviews

Kill Bill, Volume 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

Volume 1 of Quentin Tarantino’s bisected Kill Bill is at once less than I hoped, and better than I feared. Tarantino’s first three full-length films – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown – were amongst the best films of the last decade, but the possibility loomed that Kill Bill would favour all his worst instincts. Tarantino’s stated intent was a large-scale tribute to Asian exploitation movies, and the danger with such a project was that it would leach the substance from his work and leave only the sensationalism. After all, there was the clear precedent of his 1996 collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, From Dusk Till Dawn. That film was a tribute to lurid horror movies, and while cleverly done, it’s also a rather unpleasant and barren film. I feared Kill Bill would follow that pattern.

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Dirty Dogs

Film Film Reviews

Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)

The problem with reviewing Reservoir Dogs is that right from its release in 1992, even its detractors generally agreed what its merits were: to review it risks simply listing them. Tarantino, in his first film, had shown he had a good eye for direction, and that he could write slick dialogue that was heavily laden with pop-culture references. He was capable with actors, or at least had a good eye for casting, with the ensemble he assembled here somehow already having the feel of a repertory company (looking back, what is surprising is how few of these actors he actually went on to use in his subsequent movies). And everyone agreed he had a talent for narrative: scrambling chronologies with confidence, he had crafted a taut thriller on a low budget. This is not to say that everyone loved or even liked the film, but rather that its detractors – many of whom remain vocal over a decade later – tended to react not to Tarantino’s technical skills, but rather to the personality that they perceived the film as embodying.

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Fish

Film Film Reviews

Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton), 2003

Here’s one for those who like conspiracy theories: during 2003, Steve Jobs (head of Pixar animation studios) and Michael Eisner (head of Disney) were renegotiating the deal that allowed Disney to distribute Pixar’s films. With four straight hit films under their belts – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters Inc – Pixar had a strong bargaining position, and Disney expected their cut of the profit from Pixar films drastically reduced. Yet in 2002 and early 2003, rumours circulated that the upcoming Pixar movie, Finding Nemo, was not up to the standard of its predecessors. This put a small, but significant question mark over the future of Pixar – was their strong negotiation based on past glories, rather than a realistic assessment of what might be to come? Were Pixar due for a fall? Ultimately, the negotiations dragged on until Finding Nemo was released – whereupon it received universally positive reviews and eclipsed Disney’s The Lion King as the highest grossing animated film ever. Pixar’s status as the studio that could do no wrong was protected, and the cloud over the negotiations lifted. But here’s the question – could Disney possibly have started the bad buzz on Nemo to force their hand?

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Rogered

Film Film Reviews Urban Planning and Film

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

When people talk of the revival of animation in the 1990s, they tend to date the start of the resurgence from Disney’s 1989 feature The Little Mermaid. Certainly there is more continuity in personnel between The Little Mermaid and the 90s hits (such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King) than there is with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Yet I would argue that the strength of the 90s boom came from the fact that it crossed over into adult audiences: this is clearer when one looks past just the Disney films and considers the full array of animation that sprang out of this period, which includes not only the wave of excellent computer animation (Toy Story, Antz, Monsters Inc, Shrek) but also television work (“The Simpsons,” “Futurama,” “South Park,” and many others). The fact that adults were prepared to go along to these films, or watch these shows, contributed significantly to their success. Adults did so largely because appreciation of the Hollywood tradition of classical animation had bubbled through to the mainstream. People who grew up with the cartoons of the “Golden Age” of the 1930s to 1950s (a staple on TV from the 1960s onwards) were now adults who appreciated the quality of what they had seen. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis’ elaborate tribute to Hollywood cartoons, served as a marker for this nostalgia, and hinted at the widening of the audience for animation that occurred in the 90s. Yet it still provokes mixed feelings amongst animation fans.

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Buried Treasure

Film Film Reviews

Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker), 2010

The failure of Disney’s Treasure Planet to attract a theatrical audience has been much discussed: it brought into focus a lot of criticism of the studio that had been quietly bubbling away for some time. The studio suddenly seems a long way from the halcyon days of its early nineties revival, when films like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King built on the success of 1989’s The Little Mermaid. Back then people were talking of a new golden age in animation, and while that talk hasn’t gone away, they aren’t talking about Disney anymore. They’re talking about computer animation or even television work. Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Treasure Planet don’t look like a golden age. (Copper at best).

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What Was the Matrix?

Film Film Reviews

The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 1999

The Matrix was the third in a cycle of movies to arrive in the late nineties with a strikingly similar theme. Like its predecessors from the previous year, Dark City and The Truman Show, it tells the story of a seemingly ordinary man who suddenly finds that his whole life is faked: he is trapped in an artificially created environment designed to keep him in submission. Like the heroes of those earlier movies, Keanu Reeves’ Neo starts to realise that he is somehow special, and tries to escape the confines of his prison. Yet while I liked both Dark City and The Truman Show (particularly the latter), I think The Matrix found the most perfect framework in which to play out such a story. The artificial city of Dark City was essentially a fantasy construct, kept running by creatures with mysterious magical powers; while The Truman Show was a more reality-based media satire that showed its fake world constructed painstakingly out of bricks and mortar. The inspiration of The Matrix is to graft this plot into a cyberpunk premise in which the world is a computer simulation, created to keep humans enslaved so that machines can live off the energy produced by their bodies.

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Two Murders in Dallas: Documentary, Reality, and Dubious Truths

Film

“It’s plausibility, its authority, is the special quality of the documentary – its attraction to those who use it, regardless of motive – the source of its power to enlighten or deceive.” – Eric Barnouw1

The distinction between fictional and non-fictional filmmaking is seldom neat. While the terms invite the suggestion that fiction and non-fiction can be readily separated (“fiction” is that which is invented, and “non-fiction” is everything else), most writing on documentary cinema recognises that the waters are muddier than the terms imply. The link to “truth” or “reality” that might seem documentary’s defining feature is often a tenuous one, since every stage of the production of a film apparently distorts the subject. This includes not only the artistic devices imposed upon a film to give it some sense of structure or coherency (editing, framing, narration etc), but also the choices of subject and the mere act of filming. These elements of construction separate the documentary text from the original referent, and are for the most part shared with fiction films. Since both fiction and non-fiction films often employ these techniques to similar ends (to create narratives, for example) this has led to suggestions that documentaries must themselves be considered fictional constructions. Even if the two forms aren’t merged in such a fashion, certainly such an approach to documentaries casts deep doubt over any claim a documentary might express towards stating a truth. This is particularly true where the statement of fact being expressed is itself a controversial or strongly contested one. But is it perverse to argue that claims to truth or reality in documentary are illusory if these are the essence of the form? In this essay I look at two films, Erroll Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), and Oliver Stone’s JFK (1990), against the context of this debate. Both these texts are hybrids of fictional and non-fictional techniques, although most would agree that Morris’ film is ultimately a documentary while Stone’s film is a fiction. They each take real events as their subject, and make a claim to revealing a truth about an event. In each case, that statement of truth contests an official, government endorsed verdict. Since the quest for the true story is a central motivating concern of each film, they make ideal case studies when examining the idea that documentaries must be considered a form of fictional filmmaking. This essay will explore the differences and similarities between the two films (and the two forms), the ways in which fictional and non-fictional traits cross from one form to another, and the implications this has for the representation of real events by the cinema.

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Repuzzled

Film Film Reviews

The Matrix Reloaded (Lana and Lilly Wachowski), 2003

The Matrix Reloaded labours under mighty expectations. It isn’t that this is the most expensive and hyped movie of the mid-year round of blockbusters: we don’t have high expectations of heavily hyped movies any more. It’s that its predecessor, 1999’s The Matrix, is so well regarded. With that film, Larry and Andy Wachowski blended elements such as cyberpunk, comic books, Jet Li-style kung fu, and John Woo-style gunplay into a satisfying and exciting narrative. The elements that were mixed weren’t unfamiliar: indeed, many were already well on the way to hackneyed. But the film fused its checklist of geek favourites into such perfect harmony that it was a deserved critical and financial hit. Only four years later it has already staked a convincing claim as a modern sci-fi classic.

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The Enigma of Rosebud

Film

This is a recycled undergraduate essay, originally written in October 2002; I’ve left it on the page as I think it holds up relatively well as a survey of some of the main writing on Citizen Kane, and it used to get a lot of hits when it was posted on my old page.

Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) is probably the most celebrated film that has ever been made: it is unnecessary to recite the list of top tens that it has dominated to make this point. It is a cliché that Citizen Kane is “the greatest movie that ever has been or will be made.”(1) In this role it acts in the kind of calibrating role that Shakespeare’s plays do in literature: when arguments about canon formation threaten to descend into squabbles about the subjectivity of greatness, Citizen Kane serves a useful function as a marker of almost universally accepted merit. A cursory glance at the literature on the film highlights the fact that it has attracted the attention of many of the most prominent writers on film, across the spectrum from both popular critics to academics. The list includes Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, David Thomson, Peter Bogdanovich, Andre Bazin, Andrew Sarris, David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Laura Mulvey, and many others.(2) This veritable rogue’s gallery of big names attests to the insatiable urge amongst critics and theorists across the cultural spectrum to add their own take on Kane. Given that most of these writers ascribe to the essential view of Kane is a masterpiece, they add an impressive strength to its cultural status. Yet upon closer examination the inevitable diversity of opinions amongst these writers makes it harder to describe the “Kane as masterpiece” positioon as unified. The writing on Citizen Kane starts to resemble the film’s eyewitness descriptions of Kane himself: the more contradictory explanations of the movie are offered, the harder it is to reconcile a clear view of what the film’s virtues really are. Often, a particular account of the film is also accompanied by an implicit (or even explicit) assertion that it is the writer’s own view that really describes the film’s central great qualities. Such an invocation of a critical “Rosebud” – the observation or critical approach that really serves to throw the jumbled mass of Citizen Kane into focus – is to be expected. One such critical “Rosebud” is Noel Carroll’s essay on the film, which speaks of two contradictory meanings in the film and suggests a way of reconciling them. In this essay, I will use Carroll’s article as a starting point for a survey of popular writers on Kane (Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and David Thomson) and more academic approaches (Carroll, David Bordwell, and Laura Mulvey), noting in particular their divergent approaches to the key question: what is Citizen Kane really saying?

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Lordy

Film Film Reviews

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003)

Peter Jackson brings his epic Tolkien adaptation to a triumphant close with Return of the King. It doesn’t quite pick up directly where The Two Towers left off, instead starting with a brief but effective prologue showing the fateful moment in which the ring first fell into the hands of Smeagol / Gollum. Structurally, this prologue is all wrong (it was apparently intended for The Two Towers, and that is where it would have sat more logically), but it’s an added treat: it feels like you’ve received a bonus before the movie itself has truly started. Then we’re back into the action where The Two Towers left off, once again cutting between two main threads to the story. Frodo and Sam are still trying to reach Mordor to destroy the ring, while Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Merry and Pippin play various roles in the defence of Gondor from Sauron’s armies.

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