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Jazz on a Summer’s Day

8 February 2010, 8:34 pm

(1960) dir. Bert Stern
viewed: 02/05/10

After watching Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (2007), which featured clips from this film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, I didn’t even spend a second wondering why I’d never seen the film and just queued it to the top of my Netflix list.  It’s an amazing film, while documenting some amazing jazz legends and the setting for this scene of event, it takes a more Impressionistic approach to documentary, capturing much though not commenting on it greatly nor even trying to fully explain what all it is one is witnessing.

Director Bert Stern films the musicians, the audience, the countryside, the town, children, adults, yachts (the Presidents’ Cup was going on that day, too) and only uses some introductory voiceovers from either the stage or the radio to give any clarity to the specificity of much.

From a pure jazz/music perspective, you’ve got Thelonious Monk, Anita O’Day, Dinah Washington, George Shearing, Mahalia Jackson, Chuck Berry, Gerry Mulligan, Big Maybelle, and Louis Armstrong to drop a name or two.  I mean, that is pretty much “can’t go wrong” music.  And it’s interesting how even at the jazz festival in 1958 the music was already spread out along Blues, Rock’nRoll, and Gospel, and you can certainly hear it all coming and going from one to another in this formative time, leading into Soul and other types of music.

The Impressionistic approach is apt and lovely at times, such as when Stern focuses his camera on the reflecting light on the moving water as a visual dance along to the music played onstage.  My one complaint is that during Monk’s one piece, he interposes a radio anouncement about the yacht race.  This seems pretty lame.

But he scores big time with O’Day’s performance of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two”.  The whole thing is fascinating, from the faces of the audience in this affluent, white town, the still pre-1960’s America, looking like Jackie Kennedy, pre-Civil Rights Movement, and with a few rock’n'rollers alongside the nattily-clad elite.

But the film is just that, images, music, capturing some amazing artists, a glimpse in time and place.  It’s really quite an aesthetically pleasing film, a wonderful picture with music, without too much knowledge, without too much analysis, just eyes and ears opened, drinking in all there is.

Filed under DVD, Documentaries.
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The Hobbit

7 February 2010, 2:43 am

(1977) dir. Jules Bass, Arthur Rankin, Jr.
viewed: 02/05/10

I rented this for the kids for Friday night and then wasn’t so sure that I would write about it here or not, it being a made-for-TV movie, not a theatrical release.   But last year I watched Steven Spielberg’s debut, Duel (1971), so the classification had already been brought to bear.

I remember when I was first introduced to The Hobbit, which was around this time.  I don’t recall seeing this on television before having my 4th Grade teacher read it to the class over a period of time.  The book, as I found it at the time, was pretty enthralling.  And my memories of the made-for-TV movie were positive but not enthusiastic, as I’d recalled, though I might have had some cultural effluvia related to it, too.

While Peter Jackson has made or re-made The Lord of the Rings series in mostly very good live action filmmaking, and has had plans to either direct or produce a version of The Hobbit too, well, I can’t say as it wouldn’t be worthwhile.  There is a significant earnestness to this film, with lyrics to songs from the book and some very heinous folk music to accompany it.  The film is made to be as good as it can.  As good as American-produced, made-for-TV animation could be in the 1970’s. which is to say about as good as a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, though with much more uniquely-styled characters.  The could well use the re-boot.

Some years ago, I’d revisited the Ralph Bakshi version of The Lord of the Rings (1978), which came out on the heals of the popularity of this version of The Hobbit, but they ultimately failed to make themselves memorable.  Though in 1980, director/producer team Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin, Jr. made a version of The Return of the King.   I think that at the age of 10 or 11 I had burned out after the 2nd book and though I wanted to find out how it ended, I didn’t feel like reading it all the way through.  Sort of like where I am today with the “Harry Potter” franchise.

The characters are largely nicely designed, particularly Gandolf, Smaug the dragon, the spiders, the goblins, and Gollum.  It’s a shame that poor quality production couldn’t help along these elements.  And it’s not like it’s a shabby voice-cast.  John Huston, Otto Preminger, Orson Bean, and Hans Conried, among others make the voice-acting sound good.

But the film tries to fit too much into too short a run-time.  At less than 90 minutes, the film speeds through sequences so fast that the kids can hardly take them in properly, and whole sections, understandably, are omitted.  Most lame of all is the “battle of the 5 armies” which is shown from above as a bunch of dots moving around on a blank-ish landscape.  Not just cheap but lazy too.

Really, the film’s earnestness, its relatively nice aesthetic (though Bilbo’s hair is like the worst thing ever drawn), the film pretty much sucks.  Felix and Clara liked it alright, which is partially why I decided to try it on them.  I thought we might try reading it and I wanted to gauge their potential interest.  Victoria was down with us, and she’s never been one for scary things.  She complained twice, aptly in my opinion, “Why is this movie so depressing?” (I think the Glenn Yarbrough folk tunes stuck in her craw — though now it’s painfully stuck in my head) and when Gollum comes on the scene talking “Preciousss…”, she almost left, saying “Now this is getting freaky.”

Filed under DVD, with the kids.
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Cold Souls

7 February 2010, 1:41 am

(2009) dir. Sophie Barthes
viewed: 02/04/10

Cut from a similar cloth perhaps to the work of Charlie Kaufman, especially films like Being John Malkovich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Cold Souls is a film high on concept and straddling the gap between absurdist comedy and meaningful drama.  The Being John Malkovich analogy is most apt in that this film could have been titled “Paul Giamatti’s Soul”, since it’s about Paul Giamatti, an actor, played by Paul Giamatti, the actor.  And though it’s not the same one, it is the same one.

The concept is that a technology is developed for extracting one’s soul and putting it into deep storage, to lighten one’s life a bit.  And the technology also allows people to take others’ extracted souls, harvested largely from Russia, and to use them for various forms of enlightenment.  In this concept, the soul is more like a gland in the brain and has varying visual representations from jellybeans to chunks of coal to Giamatti’s soul which is the size, color, and shape of a chickpea.

There are moments of broader humor, physical humor, as in when gesticulating, Giamatti tosses his soul out of its container.  But the film is also more focused on the exeriential meanings of using or trafficking others’ souls in your head.  It’s meant to have your laughs and cry it too (or at least be poetically moved).

For the most part, the film works.  There are lots of plot point holes, etc. if you really start contemplating it, but the idea for this film is not so much to get worked up over the details and just trek along with the story that the film is telling, with its chosen resonances rather than your brain’s own curiosity of the situation.

Surrealist comedy.  Maybe that’s the genre.  This and every Terry Gilliam film ever made.

Filed under DVD.
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Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

4 February 2010, 7:33 pm

(2007) dir. Robbie Cavolina, Ian McCrudden
viewed: 02/03/10

I’ve been an Anita O’Day fan for some years now, but really, I didn’t know more than a general sketch or bullet points of her life and certainly not as much of her significance in true jazz circles.  So, when I saw that there was a documentary about her life, I was pretty keen to see it.

Names like  Billie Holliday or Ella Fitzgerald resonate even the most non-jazz types.  But what is interesting, at least with the folks interviewed in this film, that Anita O’Day is actually considered as pure a jazz singer, as prime a jazz singer, as unique and important, seen in the same light with those other legends.  But O’Day is not the household name that those others are.

The film is extremely earnest and loving, interviewing O’Day toward the last couple years of her life (she died in 2002), but featuring performances, interviews, footage all from throughout her life and career.  So, while there isn’t one definitive set of interviews, we do get to see her with both Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder and even the annoying Bryant Gumbel.  She performed with so many of the legends.

But what I didn’t know was how much an innovator she was.  She came up with Gene Krupa in the Swing Band Era, also playing with Stan Kenton, but her Krupa tracks are some of the best swing tunes in my opinion.  But she innovated as well by deciding to move into playing with smaller groups, quartets and trios, and really influenced by Be-Bop, she also was massively into improvisation, not just scatting, but playing like crazy with tempo.

She tells a story about how during her tonsilectomy her uvula was accidentally cut off, which limited her ability at vibrato and sustained notes, which led her to stylistically play with shorter, more up-tempo variations, which wound up being her style.  And during the film, she shows a couple of times how aware she was of tempos and the variations that can arise from playing with those, changing a song in a multitude of ways.

She also was a heroin addict for 14 years, which led to an overdose that nearly killed her, and finally got her to clean up in the late 1960’s.  She’s one of those performers whose whole storytelling is part of their persona, so has a brassy openness about her hard times and talks frankly about drug use and withdrawl and survival. 

Also so very profound is her performance of “Sweet Georgia Brown” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, captured for the film Jazz on a Summer Day (1960).  It’s considered one of the great jazz vocal live performances ever caught on film, certainly one of the greatest performances of that song.  I quickly added the film to my queue and sent it right to the top.

While the film is good and earnest, it’s not a masterwork itself of any kind, cobbled together as it is, but still so important that it’s also the first documentary made about this amazing jazz singer/stylist, who is truly among the great ones despite her relative obscurity.  I’ve got her playing as I write this and feel pretty damn happy to have learned about and been reminded about such an amazing artist and a truly interesting woman.

Filed under DVD, Documentaries.
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Up in the Air

3 February 2010, 6:22 pm

(2009) dir. Jason Reitman
viewed: 02/02/10 at the Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

It took me a good long while to get around to seeing the George Clooney film, Up in the Air despite generally strong positive reviews.  It’s hard to get motivated to see a film about a corporate downsizer flying around the country firing people and then coming to a realization that his life “on the road” aint’ all that it’s cracked up to be.  It’s not a marketer’s gem.

But the film is good.  Well worth praising, if not so much for Clooney, who is fine in it, but for it’s somewhat timely poignancy.  I mean, here I am, unemployed, watching George Clooney quite gently firing people all across America, and all the shock, upset, and disharmony in their reactions.  I mean, it would have been nice if my company had cared enough to hire George Clooney to fire me.

But seriously, it’s not just “the economy, stupid” but the recession that most resembles “the Depression”, great or not, and the reality of losing one’s job.  The messages tucked into the film about starting over, that family is important, that you can expect to take a month for every 10K you expect to earn to find a job (is that a real statistic or did they just make that up?)   Any way you slice it, the film captures itself an audience that can well-identify with what is happening onscreen.

Throw in “breaking up by text message” and even seeing Clooney “sexting”, you’ve got yourself a film of the times.  And of America, middle America, the towns and capitols of the Mid-West and all over.  The cities, largely seen from above or from a corporate park or an airport, the bland world of Des Moines, Omaha, Milwaukee, St. Louis…(my apologies to these towns) but the film’s milieu is that bland, dull office space where “real Americans” work.  And the irony that someone of Clooney’s looks and charms, who prides himself on his air miles and never setting down roots, would be satisfied with these types of places.  No New York?  No Boston?  No Los Angeles or San Francisco?  No New Orleans?  Nowhere outside of the continental United States?

And of course beyond the downsizing of America, Clooney’s character is pinioned in his potential downsizing of his life, as his company attempts to shave budget by ending the travel that is his life, in preference of firing people through video chat.

But Clooney’s crisis is bigger than his career.  It’s his lonely lifestyle that he is finally forced to confront, by means of his relationship with Vera Farmiga (his self-proclaimed doppelganger “with a vagina”), his kid sister’s wedding, and the influence of a bright go-getter colleague played by Anna Kendrick.  I don’t care who you are, it’s hard to feel sorry for George Clooney, even when he’s looking sad.

The film is directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, son of director Ivan Reitman, who has come to be a media and critical darling after his first two feature films Thank You For Smoking (2005) and the much over-praised Juno (2007).  While I would say that this film has a bit more going for it than his prior films, it’ll take more to prove out all of what he’s got going for him.

Up in the Air has kept me “up in the air”, first about whether or not to get around to seeing it, now with trying to feel definitively about it.  For Clooney, the perpetual bachelor, is the film some sort of self-referencing referendum on his non-settling lifestyle?  I mean, really, a character who claims that life is happiest when the baggage is the least encumbering, isn’t that just someone who is waiting to hear, “But what about love? Family? Children? A home?”  Even George Clooney isn’t going to always be so damn George Clooney, is he?

Who knows, maybe he will.

Filed under Theatrical.
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Mister Lonely

1 February 2010, 7:25 pm

(2007) dir. Harmony Korine
viewed: 01/31/10

After watching Gummo (1997), Harmony Korine’s first directorial feature film, I was pretty sure that I was not going to bother with any more of his movies, perhaps ever.  That said, I maintained a curiosity in his following film, Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) for some weird fixation (I’ve still not seen it.)  I came into awareness of him after his notoriety as the young screenwriter of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), a film that totally disturbed me and put me off, though I assumed intentionally so.

So why then Mister Lonely, Korine’s bizarre film about a Michael Jackson impersonator (played by Diego Luna) who meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (played by Samantha Morton), who takes him to a commune in Scotland entirely populated by impersonators: Abraham Lincoln, The Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Sammy Davis, Jr….  And then some other sort of unrelated plot line with Werner Herzog playing a priest who drops food to needy villagers and when he accidentally drops a nun too, creates an amazing miracle of nuns that freefall from airplanes who survive impact apparently due to their piety.

After watching Beautiful Losers (2008) recently, I was reminded of Korine (though not in a good way), but then started thinking about what I’d read about Mister Lonely and wondering if I shouldn’t give it a shot.

My problem with Korine has been that while he plays in absurdist motifs, they’ve also attempted to be sort of “gutterpunk”, depicting poor young kids, homeless people, and people who are or seem mentally challenged.  Perhaps one might compare some of this to something akin to Diane Arbus or something, but it felt more exploitational (not that her work wasn’t, but that still images imbue a bit more silent dignity perhaps).  And while there are moments in Mister Lonely that feel like these, when the Michael Jackson “hoo-hoo” performance in a French old folks’ home with shots of drooling and giggling elderly patients (seeming non-actors) and another weird scene in which Herzog absolves a man of his sins, who babbles partially non-sensibly.  It’s sort of like using the non-actors in ways that makes fun of them rather than what is often done in using non-actors to achieve “realism”.  Though again, that could be an arguable point.

However, Mister Lonely, partially due to the tender performances by Luna and Morton and a couple of the other impersonators, and partially in the script itself, there is something more here.  The absurdity of images of Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe against the beautiful Scottish mountains and lochs, the other people who strive to be people other than who they are, like transsexuals, but in this case, transpersonalities, plays out with humanity and poetry.

The impersonators strive to put on “the greatest show on Earth”, a series of skits and dances by the characters, playing to a small local audience who don’t know what they are in for.  And there is this striving for identity and happiness that seeps through.  Could it be that Korine has evolved?  It could.

It’s easy enough to say that Mister Lonely is still quite far enough out in the world of cult and oddity that it’s not going to work for the average filmgoer.  Not that any of his work would, mind you.  But it’s a striking thing, a somewhat moving film, something that feels like it will linger in the mind.

Filed under DVD.
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What About Bob?

31 January 2010, 9:24 pm

(1991) dir. Frank Oz
viewed: 01/31/10

I’d never seen this early 1990’s Bill Murray comedy about a man (Bob) with a multitude of social disorders (back when psychiatric shenanigans were funny), who is transferred to and the plagues his new psychiatrist, played by Richard Dreyfuss.  It’s really of the era just prior to the explosion of medications for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and stuff like that.  What’s funniest, perhaps, about the film is that Dreyfuss nor anyone is as afraid of the man who wouldn’t go away as probably one might be today.  I suppose that you could re-make this movie today as a horror film.

Directed by Frank Oz (he of Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy fame, as number of varyingly bad Hollywood films.  Some of his crimes against humanity include Bowfinger (1999) and The Stepford Wives (2004) — and okay, so I’ve never seen The Stepford Wives, so what?), it has a pep and overall cleanliness of comedies of that era.  And nowadays, with Bill Murray sort of a living saint among cinephiles, it’s interesting to look back at him with his shaggy brown hair and more overt personality.

The story has a darkness in that Bob, while ingratiating himself with Dreyfuss’ family, manages to drive Dreyfuss into a psychosis of his own, in which he ultimately tries to kill Bob.  And then he ends up catatonic himself.

I’d always heard of this film but never saw it.  And the character Murray plays is an occasionally referenced archetype that has piqued my curiosity to see.  Believe it or not, this is one of those films that I’ve been sort of meaning to see for almost 20 years.   And it’s not a great film, though it has its moments, which I kind of anticipated.

So, what about What About Bob?   I don’t know.  He’s the man who wouldn’t go away.  A stalker, a genial, needy, lonely stalker, who just needs a family to love him.  Not Prozac.  Not Lithium.  Not Zoloft.  And maybe that is a better message, I don’t know.

Filed under DVD.
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24 City

31 January 2010, 3:46 am

(2008) dir. Zhang Ke Jia
viewed: 01/29/10

It’s not like I don’t have aspirations to be more read, more appreciated, attract more readers, but the bottom line is the way that I do this film diary thing is that I write about the films that I see, the films that interest me, not the films that just come out every Friday and draw the dollars into the theater or even the “big” DVD rentals of the week.  Case in point is 24 City, a film by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Ke Jia who probably fewer than 1% of film viewers will have ever heard nor will ever see the films produced by this fascinating director. 

The difference for me is that while on a jag of his films, having watched Unknown Pleasures (2002), The World (2004), and Still Life (2006), I read about his film 24 City, a film about a Chinese munitions/airplane factory that was like a pseudo-pre-fab city and its transition into modern deluxe housing, I was totally excited.  I was feeling like “This is a film I want to see!” and it took some months to come here, and then ultimately to DVD/Video rather than theatrical release despite its playing at the Cannes Film Festival.

Who is going to be reading my damn film writing with the same interests as me?  Fucking nobody. 

Hey, I get it.  But it’s something I committed to almost 8 years ago and still use for a crazy outlet of my own thoughts, my own discovery of cinema, world cinema, contemporary cinema, historical cinema, trash cinema, DVD’s, genre films, all whatever fucking interests me.  How many people who will even stumble on this (my writing) who have even heard of Zhang Ke Jia?  Surely in deeper cinematic circles, people respect and are struck by the vision that he offers. 

The fact is that Zhang Ke Jia is perhaps one of the most interesting Chinese filmmakers in more than a decade, perhaps in some ways, potentially ever.  His films deal with China, the enormous, deeply historical country, that is coming to shape the future of the world.  It’s his country, it’s not an outside perspective.  But also it is a perspective that tries to understand the drastic change that is happening, the monumental against the tiny individual.   The human individual’s story against the backdrop of the massive change, the most massive country, the most massive changes, culturally and functionally, but also physically.  The dramas that play out in his films seem like poetic documents from a time of fantastic transition and significantly historical change.

24 City is a weird film in many ways, some strange mixture of straight documentary mixed with interpretive narrative fiction meant to portray the same tonality and stories.  Actually, it might be a sort of fascinating document fighting the concept of documentary against Neo-Realism.  And it’s interesting that he should choose such a dramatic change to experiment with his filmmaking. 

A factory, which was created in the 1950’s to build arms for war, which drew people from a village to a new place, drew them from their families in a battle for greater good, in which individual lives gave way to the greater machinations of the country.  But now, this factory is changing again.  Only existing a generation or so, it could so easily be a historical oddity, but people’s lives happened within its rules, within its walls.  And this change is a change that reflects the change of this massive nation.

Zhang Ke Jia’s film may not be as powerful and moving as I’d hoped it would be, but I have to say, given his other work and his general approach to his work, it will likely be a strange, complicated document of change, of this humanism contrasted against the most massive world event changes a nation has to attempt to maneouver.  It’s crazy, hard to fully fathom, to understand, much less in a world in which these things have far from finished from playing themselves out.

A document from the depths of a history that is still working its changes and events upon the world, the smaller voices, the lives of people who work, live, and support this, but from a place in which these changes cannot yet be understood.  For those of us so far outside of this world, it’s a fascinating chance to understand elements of a country that is our neighbor and brother, who may come to appear and change our histories.  We can glimpse, try to understand what there is to be understood.

And beyond that, this strange and challenging work about documentation and the oppositional fictions created that are meant to enlighten those issues.  I don’t know what to do with that stuff.  Documentary vs. realistic fiction.  When no lines are drawn.  Strange and extremely thought-provoking.

Filed under DVD.
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Police, Adjective

31 January 2010, 2:58 am

(2009) dir. Corneliu Porumboiu
viewed: 01/29/10

The Romanian New Wave, anyone?

Well, outside of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), I can’t claim any experience with it, despite the fact that director Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) and Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) have had the buzz that typically draws one to films that one doesn’t necessarily know that much about.  Well, anyways, the press must be continually lazy calling it the “Romanian New Wave” because while new, surely, and a wave perhaps, it’s not particularly poignant nomenclature.  Heck, I don’t begin to have a picture of it too much yet.

Actually, for me personally, this is kind of an unusual thing, because I watched this film on Pay-Per-View, which I am categorizing as “TV”, though it’s still on its theatrical run.  I guess it’s some deal struck by the IFC film channel, which I don’t even get, and distributors, but both this film and the English film Fish Tank (2009) are available while still in cinemas (Fish Tank just opened yesterday in San Francisco).  And what with liking going to the cinema, being pretty well satisfied by Netflix, this isn’t something that I’ve done too often (as in never), watching a film that perhaps I should be seeing in the cinema on cable.  I’ll spare you my Comcast drama around this, but let’s just say that I had some ironic setbacks in trying to forge a new relationship with Pay-Per-View (so I am not necessarily endorsing it here).

Police, Adjective sounded interesting to me, but it’s not the kind of film that is apt to sound interesting to “just anybody”.  It’s viciously slow and downbeat, low energy and perhaps ultra-understated.  The story follows a plain-clothes policeman in a Romanian town, set to follow some pot-smoking teens, set to bust one of them for sharing his stash with friends, therefore (distributing).  But the cop doesn’t feel that it’s a crime really, considering how other European neighbors treat such an offence, and is loath to send the kid up the river unnecessarily.

The film follows his dull routine, following these pot-smoking teens, who really don’t do anything unusual.  He spends hours just waiting for nothing to happen, and it starts reflecting badly on him professionally.  Ultimately, he’s faced with a conundrum, moral law (his personal feelings about right and wrong given the circumstances) and the literal interpretation of terminology, not just the law as it is set, but the definitions of “law”, “moral law”, “morality”, “police”, as spelled out by his superior from a Romanian dictionary.

And really, this is what the film is about.  Semantics.  Language.  Meaning.  Morality.  Rules.  Interpretations of rules.  But also a set of legal rules that have come down through a historical system (and without questioning their meaning or rightness), the requirement of one to follow said rules.  It’s really quite funny how a film, so slow moving, slow-evolving, a film where so little happens, becomes so thought-provoking while so low-key, so down-beat, and so seemingly unchallenging.

Perhaps this is part of the nature of “The Romanian New Wave”.  Something to do with the social structures, the power, the old Soviet structures (buildings and rules) that have been left behind to be interpreted in the here and now either by literalists or by those with a broader perspective.  It’s really quite amusing.  Like a joke whose punchline gets delivered in full only hours after the movie has finished.  Irony, yet implacability.

Interesting.  Seriously interesting for those willing to challenge themselves to such a thing.  And on Pay-Per-View too, if you can’t find it in your local cinema. 

Is it a good or a bad thing, this?  I don’t know.  Neither literally, nor figuratively, nor morally, nor symbolically.

Filed under TV.
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Pandorum

30 January 2010, 4:59 am

(2009) dir. Christian Alvart
viewed: 01/29/10

Bad science fiction.  I’ve talked about how I like that, right?  Well, badness is in the eye of the beholder, no doubt.  And conversely, when the most unusual of circumstances arises, when one of these pretty badly panned films turns out to be a little better than I’d been reading, I gotta say, is it bad, is it good?  Hey, I don’t totally know.

This film, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster, is set on a deep space mission, a “sleeper ship” in which everyone has been put to sleep to survive the distance traveled and time spanned.  But they awaken to find the ship sabotaged, the timeline way off from their expectations, and worst of all, some crazy humanoid cannibal monsters hunting and killing and preying on all the frozen people.

While it’s far from great art or great filmmaking, the film manages to be a little more interesting than a lot of others by situating the story in the mystery.  The characters don’t know what’s going on, nor does the audience.  And while the film does start with a few words of prelude about the end of the Earth due to overpopulation and the seeking of perhaps something in outer space, well, the story unfolds, unwinds with the mystery intact.  And I liked that.  It dragged me in.

And while the movie winds up not being overly inventive or logical as the story does start to get explicated (and even the explication is kind of annoying when it does come), it holds together on the whole.  I won’t ruin it by detailing what they find out because that was the primary pleasure in the film for me.  And again, once the curtain has been raised, the story is exposed, it’s arguably pretty lame, I wound up liking the damn thing.

Foster is actually pretty good as the hero, sort of understated, as he works his way toward the center.  And I liked Quaid as well.

It’s not “good” science fiction.  I wouldn’t say that.  But it’s not terrible science fiction either.  It’s a more interesting than average little film that isn’t generally considered to be all that good.

Filed under DVD.
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