Jump Cut: Blue Like Jazz (2012)

Been a while since I posted a review. Haven’t seen that many films lately. What few I have seen warrant some attention, but it takes time to pound out 700 words about something and make it interesting, let alone readable. And besides, the writing that pays has to come before the writing that doesn’t. That’s just the way of things.

Hence the “Jump Cut.” This allows me to put something down about the films that compel me to write about them, and gives me an excuse to keep it brief.

(c) 2012 Ruckus Films

BLUE LIKE JAZZ
Read and loved the book several years ago. I was never too wild about the prospect of turning it into a movie, but dir. Steve Taylor turned in a pretty good film.

It isn’t great. The first twenty minutes lag, and those minutes capture some of the most embarrassing moments ever set inside a church. That may have been the point, but it’s not interesting to watch. The Office does a good job of capturing embarrassing moments and making them interesting, and whatever the secret sauce is, Blue Like Jazz doesn’t keep it under the bun for the entire first act. Once Don Miller finds his way to Reed College, however, everything starts to change, mostly for the better.

This is a Christian film meant to swim against the current of other “Christian films.” It’s raw, it’s dirty, and it wants to ask some serious questions while it answers some serious indictments. It’s not the most artfully made film about the challenges of faith in a messy world full of messy people, but it earns a place at the table, even if it doesn’t quite earn the catharsis for which it aims.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

(c) 2012 Warner Bros.

You expect a film called The Hobbit to at least keep the character in question front and center. Peter Jackson’s newest foray into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, however, spends too much time on things that really don’t concern the furry-footed protagonist.

Bilbo Baggins lives a quiet life in the Shire, a walking testament to the hobbit society as a whole. They’re a self-sufficient, very insular people, happy to go about their business with no concern about the goings-on in the wider world around them. Before the wizard Gandalf came to visit, Bilbo was just another hobbit. But the old wizard sees something in Bilbo that Bilbo himself has ignored for so that long he’s forgotten it. Hobbits do not like adventure—not all of them, anyway. There was one, the old Took, who thrived on adventure, and Bilbo belongs to the old Took’s family line. Once a company of dwarves invades Bilbo’s quiet life of solemn serenity, he’s at first put out, but after a few lines of an ancient dwarvish song—a haunting tune of longing for a home ripped away, waiting to be reclaimed—something “Tookish” awakens.

That’s what Tolkien’s book tells us; I’m not sure the film makes that very clear. It’s a small diversion that grows into a bloated, over-extended exercise of excess.

Amber Alert (2012)

(c) 2012 Bluefields Entertainment/Underground

I have a blind spot for “found-footage” films. I almost called it a genre, but that wouldn’t be right. Like animation, found-footage could probably tell any type of story. Done well, they create an unsettling illusion of reality, and they’ve found a warm home in the horror/suspense camp. At its best, horror extrapolates our nightmares and daydreams, and Amber Alert goes the distance on a daydream more than a few drivers have probably had roaming the freeway.

The film begins with an admonition to create the illusion: what you’re about to see was admitted into evidence by the police the day after it was filmed. Two friends, Nathan and Samantha, with a little help from Samantha’s little brother, spend a day making an audition tape for their favorite reality show. Wired for action, they tour their favorite haunts, even Samantha’s workplace. On the road, headed to another location for filming, they spot a car with a license plate matching the one flashed across a freeway amber alert. At first, they do the logical thing and call the police. They do their best to follow the car at a distance, but the police are too many minutes away, separated by a growing number of miles.

J.J. Abrams will direct the next Star Wars, and I feel fine…

(c) Lucasfilm

I do. Because the success or failure of the next Star Wars film doesn’t rest on the talents of J.J. Abrams alone.

I’m not as super-thrilled as I would’ve been had Brad Bird gotten the gig (though Bird assures us that his next project—Tomorrowland—will still be very good), but I feel fine about the decision. Is Abrams the perfect choice? Probably not. But then, who would be? I mean that seriously—dozens of critics have already sounded off with a “yeah,  but…” meme. If Disney had hired Guillermo del Toro to direct the film, another collection of critics would have hopped online with another set of worries.

The read I get from detractors suggests they feel that Abrams’s résumé is too uneven. Much of that reputation, I think, comes from the general reaction to Lost when it finished up, and possibly the fact that Abrams received a writing credit for Armageddon.

Lost had its faults (and we can argue over their extent some other time), but what many fail to realize is that all of them rest on the shoulders of Lost’s showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Abrams directed the pilot episode (from a script which may bear his name but is, by his own admission, mostly Lindelof’s), and didn’t guide a single nuance of the show’s trippy narrative past the very beginning of its third season.

As for Armageddon, eight writers (only four of whom received screen credit) worked on that film. When a movie has eight writers contributing to the chaos, the blame cannot land on any one of them alone. Armageddon was a true collage—love it or hate it, Abrams was just a cog in the mechanism.

All of that to say this: if we want to get a better understanding of what an Abrams-directed Star Wars episode is going to look like, we have to look at his actual creative output, not at the myriad titles that simply carry his name.

Abrams began his career as a screenwriter. Before Alias made him famous, his scripts for Regarding Henry and Forever Young earned him some renown. Besides his prolific television writing, he’s written, or contributed to, a total of eight films. (That I know of—it’s possible he’s done some uncredited work here and there that I just don’t know about.) I don’t want to get bogged down with critical analysis of every one of his filmed screenplays, but we can rest assured that he at least knows how to move a plot from A to B to C.

As a director, Abrams has four films under his belt: Mission: Impossible III, Super 8, Star Trek and its upcoming sequel. He only carries a writing credit on M:I:III and Super 8. Super 8, easily the strongest of the bunch, had its flaws, and I would argue that all of them had more to do with Abrams’s script than his actual direction. You could make the same case for the other films. Behind the camera, though, Abrams has demonstrated more than enough competency to carry a film; it’s the stories themselves that could have used improvement.

Which brings me to my final point: Abrams is usually only as good as his script, and he isn’t writing Episode VII. Michael Arndt is. And Arndt carries some solid writing cred.

Everyone looks to The Empire Strikes Back as the benchmark for future Star Wars films, and rightfully so. But another Star Wars film that rises to that level isn’t going to get there by trying to replicate Empire’s disparate production elements down to their finest details. Star Wars thrived best under the spirit of collaboration. For whatever reason, George Lucas decided to fly solo on the prequels, refusing to assemble talent that strengthened his weaknesses.

Kathleen Kennedy (Lucasfilm’s new chief) so far seems intent on avoiding that pitfall. As little as we know about the details that really matter at this point, that’s enough for me.

Primer (2004)

(c) 2004 THINKFilm

Try to go into Primer knowing as little about it as possible. I promise I won’t tell you anything more than you can get from the Netflix summary. It’s a small independent film, but don’t let that turn you off. What Shane Carruth manages to do with a box of wires and a digital timer rivals most of the CGI output the A-list puts out in a single film.

Aaron and Abe live a life common to any entrepreneur. They work during the day, hold families together, and spend much of their after hours pursuing a dream; in this case, a technological engineering dream that finds its roots in a garage. They stumble onto a discovery that carries profound implications. It’s bizarre, they’re not even sure how it works, but one thing is certain: whatever it is, it does work. Their journey into the unknown starts out carefully enough. They take their time, plan for every detail. Yet they can’t stop the freight train of their imaginations because the possibilities of what this newfound power is capable of really are endless, and so is the depth of the abyss they find themselves falling into. What they learn, what they ultimately decide to do with it, tests their friendship, their moral fiber, and the fiber of time itself.

It starts with a simple premise, but it’s one you have to settle into because the movie isn’t interested in dragging you along for the ride. It drops you right in the middle of something that’s almost impossible to comprehend at first. Give it time. This film rewards your patience in spectacular ways. It’s a twisted maze of moral complexity and creates knots of tension that would have made Hitchcock burn with envy. The ring of a cell phone in this picture creates more genuine terror than a dangerous man with a knife.

As the film starts its final turn, the narrative layers start to build on top of one another like a Jenga tower. It achieves the same level of wonder and dread of Inception without all the booming brass and bombast. It actually eclipses Inception by achieving the revelatory nuance that Nolan’s film needed. Both films’ third acts look cluttered and chaotic, but where Inception grew cluttered because of the glut of its spectacle, Primer‘s clutter has purpose and direction, and every inch of it matters.

You won’t find any familiar faces on screen, yet each of these actors turn in honest performances that could stand toe to toe with the most seasoned thespians. Their chemistry works so well you forget that it’s all staged. You’re getting a glimpse into someone else’s life, someone else’s secrets, and the cameras just happen to be there to capture it.

Primer was made for $7000, and it stands taller than most of its big budget cousins. Carruth took three years to make the film and did everything on the cheap. He wrote it, shot it, starred in it, edited it and scored it. He shot 80 minutes of footage, and the film runs only 77. It is a marvel of economic storytelling, and a work of profound integrity. It’ll take less than an hour and a half to watch, but you’ll be thinking about it long afterwards.

Then you’ll just want to watch it again.

Starring
Shane Carruth
David Sullivan
Casey Gooden
Anand Upadhyaya

Written and Directed by Shane Carruth

Trailer: The Host

I’m usually pretty dismissive of the Twilight Saga. There are some things there to admire, and I’ll probably write more at length about it someday, but for the most part, Stephanie Meyer’s work doesn’t really interest me.

All that being said, I was ready to ignore The Host, based on Meyer’s other, lesser-known novel. The story’s an obvious riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The trailer plants it right inside the Twilight camp with its kisses in the rain punctuated by some generic pop power-ballad.

Underneath all that, however, is a man named Andrew Niccol. Niccol wrote a couple films I really admire (Gattaca, The Truman Show), and I’m ready to believe he might pull out some surprises with this film, even if it is based on a Stephanie Meyer novel.

X-Men (2000)

(c) 20th Century Fox

If we can blame anything for the superhero glut that swells the belly of the multiplex every year, we can blame X-Men.

Wisely, director Bryan Singer and an army of screenwriters ditched a formal adaptation–instead, they captured the heart of the comics, and set the film a world resembling ours. No one wears spandex. We don’t have to suffer through endless narrations that spell out the inner thoughts of our conflicted characters (a fault in the comics where long narration sequences, wrapped in bulbous thought clouds, often stretched over a multitude of panels). It also helps that it’s a relatively short film—less than two hours. This was Marvel’s first major comic release, and no one was sure how well it would work. No one calls a shot and swings for the rafters. The story keeps a tight focus on two characters—Rogue and Wolverine. Everything else on the peripheral references the greater world at large, and all of those things matter, but for the purposes of this story, the focus stays on these two.

Rogue’s real name is Marie. When we meet her, she’s just a Mississippi gal hanging out in her room with a boy. She tells him about her dream to travel the world. An awkward silence slides into a tentative kiss, but something happens. She literally sucks the life right out of the poor kid. Marie hits the road, always covered now in various layers of clothing, even gloves, all in the attempt to keep from having any physical contact with anyone. She eventually makes her way to Canada (for reasons unknown and never revealed) where she meets a pit fighter named Logan.