Meh: three blockbusters fail to bust my block

Maybe it's just me. I don't feel as excited as I once did about film, these days. Is it disappointment at being rejected by UBC - almost a year ago now? Am I watching too many movies, or simply too much Ma-friendly fare? (The other day we took in The Long Long Trailer -- though I have to admit, I was rather charmed by it). Maybe it's just that I have more important things on my mind? I can't really say, but in the last couple of weeks, I watched three of the biggest films going, was not very excited by any of them, and have very little interest in writing about them now. It makes me retroactively want to give Prometheus a little credit, in hindsight; silly as that film is, it at least provoked me to care about it, even if just to reject it.

Life of Pi is visually magnificent, I'll grant. It was quite something to watch (and watch in 3-D on the big screen; I can't imagine it any other way). It's impossible not to be wholly engaged in looking at this film, and as such, it presents the strongest argument for the validity for 3-D I've yet encountered; it's one beautiful object to behold. It was very strange to me, though, that on the level of meaning, the film's highly overt statement of theme is plunked out in casual kitchen conversation with such a matter-of-fact, banal delivery that I have no doubt countless viewers, far from being forced to reconsider the whole film from the point of view of this line and/ or shuddering in some revelatory truthgasm, will wholly miss its significance, or, if they notice it at all, brush it aside as a distraction from the real business at hand (the making and consuming of pretty pictures). I imagine it is not handled thus in the book; I haven't read it, but based on the evidence of the film, Martel seems to be offering (and I guess this is some sort of spoiler) a variation on Keats "Ode to a Grecian Urn," that we can be drawn to certain sets of beliefs, certain stories because they are beautiful and poetic, even if they're not actually true, and that faith in God is one such instance. I'm not actually sure that I buy that - it seems a bit of a New Agey pseudo-profundity, and a none-too-original one at that; so in a way I can rather forgive Ang Lee for downplaying such elements, in favour of telling a visually arresting story about a boy on a boat with a tiger. Still, doesn't all this imply that the film fails on some level? When a story exists in service of an alleged Big Idea, and no one involved has much interest in the Idea, when it is unveiled, or is inspired to spend any length of time thinking about it - that's a kind of curious phenomenon, eh?

There are no big ideas to ignore in the case of The Hobbit. The biggest challenge the film poses, depending on what region you live in, is figuring out which theatres offer 48fps projection of it, which is also known as high frame rate projection, and, where I saw it (on Vancouver Island), was being described as Ultra Avx projection. If that's not confusing, different websites offer different information, mention different theatres that feature this relatively new tech; and listings for theatres that don't have it don't go out of their way to make sure you realize this fact. The fuss, in any case, has been whether this relatively new way of showing film, with exactly twice the visual information one finds in conventional film, works; I find myself within the camp that is evenly divided. I got over the "sped-up" quality that some have mentioned within the first minute, but I thought the interiors, particularly at the beginning of the film, looked exactly like the sets they were, that the "clarity" of the image made everything look fake, and at times I was struck with the uncanny feeling, watching the actors, that I was watching a BBC-TV adaptation, where you're very aware that these are people in costumes reading lines, and you have to consciously agree to go along with it (they're really GOOD costumes, but they're obviously costumes no less). I really, really didn't like the "shot on video" feel of things, either - a look I do not care for.

On the other hand, the creature effects and the CGI are astonishing, and almost cool enough to redeem the film. Before I saw it, just having read about it, I was irritated with Peter Jackson, grumbling about his gimmicky innovations and his need to speak in an epic, Hollywood-sized voice, and thinking back fondly to his smaller, earlier works, some of which - The Frighteners, believe it or not - I am very, very fond. However, the trolls and goblins (and Gollum!) were all so interesting to watch, so real-looking, so detailed that I could immediately connect with his fannish desire to make the fantastic as real as possible. Some of it IS excessive - there's a goblin-kingdom that is so huge and spectacular that it loses its reality and leaves you very conscious that you're not watching a special effect, but the monsters themselves are worth the price of admission, and should delight anyone with a taste for the fantastic. If there was an award to give for "best monster," I think the goblin with the giant one-ball scrotum for a chin would easily win...

The story, though? It's much like The Lord of the Rings, only slighter. I like Martin Freeman better than Elijah Wood, but generally this isn't the kind of film that does it for me. Mostly, exiting the theatre, I felt a bit old, and envious of children for whom this will be a formative cinematic experience; what a sense of the possible they will surely grow up into, what a bold new paradigm for filmmaking is at hand. I've been rather fond of cinema as it has existed, mind you, and am rather saddened by the rapid changes we're seeing, but I can't turn fogeyism into a basis for criticism...

...Though speaking of younger viewers, it's too bad that Jackson didn't have the jam (or the freedom) to be a bit gorier. Never before have I left a Peter Jackson film complaining about not being shown the full aftermath of a disembowelling...!

I have little energy left with which to write about Django Unchained. It also was a bit of a disappointment. It was entertaining, and had moments of brilliance - but seems also to be Tarantino's slightest, shallowest film to date, taking on a very serious subject matter and doing very little of interest with it, save for reiterating ideas from his previous film (its another movie about how the power of storytelling and performance can right the wrongs of history, especially if a filmmaker feels free to depart dramatically from the historical record - something that is actually not that new or daring, for Hollywood; Hollywood has been lying about history from the gitgo.  I mean, maybe Quentin could make a movie about the Indian Wars where the Indians win, next?). Jamie Foxx doesn't really accomplish much with the character of Django; Christoph Waltz, described by many as a scene-stealer, was actually somewhat irritating, as was the generally chatty, digressive, self-indulgent Tarantino-esque "flavour" to things. As with Inglourious Basterds, the most interesting, most fully-realized characters - Leonardo di Caprio as a sadistic plantation-owner and Samuel L. Jackson as his shrewd, suspicious Uncle Tom - are the bad guys.

As for the film's connection to spaghetti westerns, there are obvious nods for people who know - Franco Nero, who played the original Django, pops up; the original title-song from that film is recycled and recontextualized; and there are other pieces of music that strike genre notes (like Beethoven's "Fur Elise," which also appears in The Big Gundown, one of Tarantino's favourite spaghettis). But the sort-of spaghetti that it most brought to mind - a highbrow, unusual entry in the subgenre, to be sure - was Pontecorvo's Burn!, a film I greatly admire, even in its abbreviated English-language cut. Both involve European white men who help to liberate and instruct slaves in their uprising (on different scales). To the extent you notice the parallels, however, you can't help but notice how much lesser a film Tarantino's is, how less ambitious, less interesting, less provocative, right down to its large-scale, "satisfying" Hollywood ending. That was really where the film lost me, actually; all the while while watching it, I'd kept hoping that it would end in such a way that it would make me appreciate the beginning and middle more, that the film would end in something startling or uncomfortable or unexpected, that would somehow enrich and enliven what had gone before, but instead, quite the opposite took place. You need to understand that, like films noir, spaghetti westerns were one of the few popular film subgenres that often ended on downbeat, cynical, or ambivalent notes, leaving audiences uncomfortable with what they've seen, sending them out into the night with a bad feeling, often with political or moral overtones. Burn! sees both of its protagonists dead, and its revolution crushed. The original Django ends in a shoot out where the hero has both his hands smashed and can barely use them. One of the other much-admired Corbucci's, The Great Silence, ends with all the good guys dying. By contrast, for all Django Unchained's brutality, there's not much of that at hand here; in fact, whatever horrors we're shown are meant to be resolved by a particularly big, satisfying explosion, like we're suddenly in Michael Bay-land. All has been resolved! Go now and leave the theatres happy! One particular shot of a grinning Jamie Foxx, mugging in front of a flaming plantation, just sort of hammered in the nail: you have just invested nearly three hours of your life in something entirely trivial; don't you feel stupid, for having cared?

But like I say, maybe it's just me. I would have liked to like the Tarantino film, of the three, but I can't say I did, much; perhaps it will take more than one viewing for me to come to admire it, but my next viewing, I think, will be several years from now. I'm in no rush. I watched twenty minutes or so of Graham Reznick's film I Can See You last night, and was more excited and entertained by those twenty minutes than with the whole of the above three movies combined. Maybe I need a break from the multiplex...