NINJA ASSASSIN

Where to begin with this movie?  This review is going to be a little shorter than most others, mostly because this film is baffling in its ridiculousness.  It makes it hard to say a lot about it.  I think it is only fair to lead in with an introduction of what, if anything, a “ninja” is, because the makers of Ninja Assassin had absolutely no idea!

The ninja were a class of people who are known to exist since the 14^th century.  Their main role was in times of war to carry out the dishonorable tasks that the samurai would not such as spying, sabotage, and assassination.  During the Sengoku Period they reached the height of their power, but after the Tokugawas unified Japan their usefulness waned and they mostly disappear from history.  After this point many assassinations were blamed on ninja and through retelling their exploits became mythical leading to many of the depictions of ninja in our modern society.  The mystical skills of the ninja, ninjitsu, are far less based on martial arts than most would expect, including, spiritual refinement, water training, horsemanship, meteorology, and geology as well as weapons training. 

So what is Ninja Assassin?  This film is a gory action flick about a rogue ninja who is trying to take revenge on the ninja family that trained him.  This is about all there is to it with a lot of unimportant side stories.  But the real question is why, and the answer is about the silliest I have ever heard.  According to the Wachowski brothers, when filming Speed Racer, Rain, the Korean pop star’s performance in the ninja scene made them want to have Rain star in his own ninja related movie.  From the very beginning this does not bode well.  From its very conception the only idea the creators had was, “Rain being a ninja”.  Already you can tell we don’t have a lot to work with.

Director James McTeigue has a long history with directorial work in the form of assistant and second unit director with the Wachowski brothers.  This is one of four films he was actually in charge of.  According to McTeigue his influences for this film included The Getaway, Badlands, Panic in the Streets, Ninja Scroll, and Samurai Champloo.  This makes my job easy and hard at the same time.  On the one hand he has just told us what he was thinking when he made the film, so why should I write about this or do any research?  On the other hand, I don’t believe his claim at all.  I have watched all of these, and accept for Samurai Champloo I don’t see influences from any of these films.  I suppose you can make the case that in Panic in the Streets there is a health inspector claiming that there is an impending plague of Pneumatic Plague sort of like how the Europol agent is claiming that there is a vast underworld network of ninjas, but that’s about it.  Oh and that two of his sources have ninjas in them. 

I can half way understand the Ninja Scroll reference.  This is an animated film where the ninja character Jubei must fight several assassins all with special powers.  The ninja character can slip into flat shadows to evade his opponent and this was probably the coolest thing Ninja Assassin did, having ninjas come out of shadows that were obviously too small for them to really hide in.  For all the criticisms of this movie that I have I am proud of it for not giving too many superpowers to the ninjas.  True, they are a little ridiculously over powered and have the shadow hiding skill but otherwise it’s just a martial arts movie.

This is a case where I don’t believe the director really had any idea what he was doing other than making an action movie.  What really astounded me was that from very early in the film, it was obvious to me that there were serious Terminator parallels all through the movie, but the director did not site these.  Party 1, a woman, is pursued by Party 2, but only because he is protecting her from Party 3.  Parties 1 and 2 flee with intermittent flashbacks about Party 2’s past.  Parties 1 and 2 are picked up by the authorities holding Party 2 as a criminal and acknowledging Party 1 as innocent.  Then the authorities are torn to pieces by a Party 3 attack.  I have just described Terminator from the beginning to the police station shootout and probably the first hour of Ninja Assassin. 

There really wasn’t much of a theme to speak of other than revenge.  You might think that there was a killing people is wrong moral but the main character kills boatloads of people so ok…  All of his motivation revolves around his friend/sister/girlfriend? Getting killed for trying to run away from the ninja school and yeah, that’s about all there is to his character.

This film follows in a long line of unsuccessful martial arts movies that rely heavily on computer graphics.  I blame The One for starting this.  One of the draws of a martial arts movie is to watch the martial artist prance around in the most amazing way possible.  That he or she is actually performing the feats on the screen is what is impressive.  Jackie Chan hit upon this by insisting on always performing his own stunts.  The One was a sci-fi movie about inter-dimensional travel between parallel universes where you could kill your counterpart and gain their power, sort of like Highlander.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to say any of the staff on this movie were thinking about The One, it set up a market for this kind of sloppy martial arts knock off films. 

More to blame is The Matrix and the Wachowski brothers' wild success with the franchise.  Both are fans of anime which involves many unreal fight scenes and modified physics.  The transference of anime into live action was explored in their Matrix movies with varying results.  By the end of Matrix Revolutions they had full CG fight sequences that looked more like Dragon Ball Z than any previous martial arts films.  This has little to do with the movie itself and more of a style choice made by the Wachowski brothers.  Their Speed Racer film is another example of their attempts to accurately transfer animated source material into the realm of live action.  Ninja Assassin is heavily laden with over the top action sequences and gun fights both of which are better suited in an animated medium.  There are several sequences in the movie where the action is not shown, like Rain stuffing another ninja into a washing machine, because the physical action of how to accomplish this has even escaped the film makers. 

As for the actual portrayal of ninjas, being the brain child of the Wachowski brothers, or at least requiring their approval, their interest in anime hurts the accuracy in ninja portrayals.  Much like being a sniper, the life of a ninja is the art of waiting and not being seen.  To make a movie about a good ninja wouldn’t be very interesting since you wouldn’t be able to see him.  Instead they lean to the opposite end of the spectrum and these ninjas have more of a Naruto feel with as much flair and collateral damage as possible. 

This is a very silly movie with lots of jaw dropping astoundment moments.  The story is incredibly bland as we have seen it many times before and the characters are very one dimensional.  This film is clearly another experimental/pet project of the Wachowskis and is not much more than a bloody action movie with bad acting.  A final note, Ninja Assassin was not shown in 3D yet it came out at the height of the most recent 3D craze and features several scenes where weapons and debris appear to be flying out of the screen.  This looks to me as if they originally intended it to be shown in 3D but ran out of money.  This film has made about $61 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.

Movies Referenced:

2009-Ninja Assassin

2008-Speed Racer

2003-The Matrix Revolutions

2001-The One

1998- The Matrix

1993-Ninja Scroll

1986-Highlander

1984-Terminator

1973-Badlands

1972-The Getaway

1950-Panic in the Streets

BATTLE: LOS ANGELES

What I love about reviewing movies with their history in mind is that sometimes you can learn the craziest things from them.  This week's film is Battle: Los Angeles. 

This film came out earlier this year from Columbia Pictures with a relatively minor advertising campaign.  I remember seeing a teaser trailer months before and then at the Superbowl they had another preview that made it look like the next big blockbuster.  After the travesties of Transformers and the infamous Transformers 2 with Michael Bay waggling his giant robot testicles in the audience's face (it's actually in there), I was really excited for a alien robot action movie that took its audience a little more seriously.  Shortly after that I saw two trailers for the movie that portrayed it in two completely different ways.  The first, was a slow and somber affair with a musical overlay with slow motion and fading of dramatic scenes, especially panning shots of alien drop pods raining down onto the California coast with military helicopters flying by.  It was a sight to see, and I think the appeal of the trailer was evident that I saw it on youtube on a netbook screen.  Not long after I saw another trailer, both of them official, but this one made it look just like a Michael Bay action flick.  Lots of yelling, explosions, jump cuts, and just oozing EXTREME!  It was a little terrifying.  To see such an interesting concept as a conventional war against alien invaders being fought on American soil and being done with a real budget be demoted to a Transformers level film had me scared and as a result it has taken me a month to get up the courage to see this film. 

There's something I would like to talk about before continuing and that is the subject of science fiction.  The genera can be defined in two ways, there is futuristic stuff, or the world being futuristic is a way to subtly comment of the reader/viewer's society or way of life.  Star Wars for instance has little to comment on other than the old lesson that mean people suck where as Gattaca has very little action and is mostly a commentary on what it means to be human as well as the nature versus nurture debate.  Gattaca however can be seen as the not so distant future, but the world the movie is set in is just different enough that any criticisms of the viewer are concealed enough to not offend but instead get them to keep watching.  District 9 did this masterfully.  As I have said I hate having a social message forced on me when I'm watching a movie, but this film which was basically about the South African apartheid shifted the oppression onto an alien species and one with flaws thus creating a new world that the viewer is unfamiliar with and must therefore reevaluate any moral and ethical judgments they prescribe to in the real world.  Now I always appreciate seeing a thought provoking sci-fi movie but that does not mean that the straight up action sci-fi films are all bad.  These two extremes have only in recent years begun to come together, probably starting with The Matrix.  But even while substance is being injected into your sci-fi thriller it's still the action and special effects that sell the tickets.  This is how Michael Bay is making his millions and the makers of Battle: Los Angeles had a similar plan in mind.

Like District 9, this film is rooted in historical fact.  A little known part of World War II history is the attacks made by the Japanese navy on the western coast of North America.  Not three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor there was an attack on Ellwood, California from a Japanese Submarine.  Ellwood is about 70 miles from Los Angeles and had sizable oil fields.  After being the victims of a surprise attack from the other side of the world and then having the Japanese shelling California created incredibly high tensions and is suspected to be the main cause for the Battle of Los Angeles.  On February 25th a few days after the bombardment of Ellwood, a visual sighting was made over Los Angeles that was suspected to be Japanese air units.  The city went into immediate battle readiness.  For about an hour and a half artillery was fired wildly in the air supposedly causing even more panic and impressions of being under attack when in actuality there were no planes in the air.  Declassified reports now suspect that a stray weather balloon may have been the cause of the panic, but since the event UFO enthusiasts has pondered if a UFO was misinterpreted as a Japanese bomber.  This is the basis for the reasoning of the film.  According to the film this was a scouting mission to earth and the film begins with the arrival of the main attack force.  While the attack is worldwide, the events of the film focus on a small group of marines tasked with evacuating civilians from Los Angeles which is becoming occupied by hostile alien forces.  What I love about this though, is that none of the back story is explained.  Maybe in the director's cut we'll get an annoying conspiracy theorist character who gets to exposition his little heart out about how the government angered the aliens and they're out for  revenge or something, but in its current version, you just have to know the history which makes this little shout out to obscure WWII history even cooler. 

The basic plot is this, aliens attack, Los Angeles is going to be carpet bombed in an attempt to wipe out their initial invasion force, groups of marines are going into the blast area to evacuate civilians, and they only have three hours!  This is simple.  It is a basic survival horror film with a military twist.  Normally most of the characters will be picked off one by one by the seemingly invincible monster but in this case, all the characters are highly trained and heavily armed soldiers.  This is similar to the setup in Aliens but these marines seem infinitely more confident and competent than their space faring counterparts.  While the basic premise seems like survival horror, the feel of the movie is a lot more like a serious modern war movie like Black Hawk Down.  According to the director, Jonathan Liebesman, he looked at war movies as well as footage from soldiers in Fallujah to put together the film and their efforts really show.  He also had a tactical advisor on staff to instruct actors on set how to move in particular formations and how to react to different situations.  This is not your Michael Bay soldiers that go in guns blazing and blow up everything.  True, they do a lot of shooting and blowing stuff up, but it's more of the fighting for your life kind of action and the attempt to have you identify with the characters worked just enough that you actually care whether they live or die.  This feel of the movie is partially due to the fact that they refrain from showing the aliens for most of the film which makes the initial ambush of the team all the more frightening, like being attacked by an army of snipers.  However, once more of the aliens and their ships are shown on camera the suspense dies down and the film begins to lose its appeal and become more of a shoot 'em up action film.

From the previews it looked like this film was marketed based on its visuals which are pretty amazing, but they are not anything too special compared to films from the last few years.  This is probably because almost all of the special effects were done without the aid of computer animation so it didn't look as crisp as other films.  Filming was done not in Los Angeles but in Baton Rouge.  For one particular segment where they blow up a bus on a freeway, they constructed a multi story green screen as the backdrop to edit in Los Angeles, but the explosions are real.  I am always a fan of using real effects over computer generated ones as is Liebesman who regretted not being able to use models for more of the aliens.

I've made a couple of references to Michael Bay and they seem warranted just on viewing the movie.  However, Michael Bay is actually a big part of this film's past.  Director Jonathan Liebesman is a South African director who got his start working on horror films.  His work caught the eye of Michael Bay who recruited him for his production company Platinum Dunes which remakes old horror movies.  Liebesman's association with Bay clearly had an influence on him as this is his first action movie.  However even with the $100 million budget the action was restrained except for a few maddeningly intense firefights.  Liebesman's background in horror is probably the most noticeable thing in this film and I called it without knowing anything about the man while watching.  The initial ambush scene I mentioned earlier is sort of scary but when one marine gets separated and hides in an empty house, it screams monster movie.  You know the monster is coming to get him and so does he, but you have to wait for it.  The low to the ground camera and emphasis on doors and windows brought attention to what Liebesman is good at and that is creating suspense.

The characters were another thing I liked in this movie.  The tough call was made to not deify our armed forces but to give the characters lots of flaws which resulted in a group of realistic characters.  One of my favorites was the character of TSgt. Elena Santos played by Michelle Rodriguez.  Honestly I don't really like her acting and I've never liked any of her roles, mostly because she plays the over the top strong female character that always comes across as forced and being the token woman in an action movie that has to be put in as an attempt to appeal to a broader audience.  Her inclusion in this movie is no different but her character was downplayed to the point that it was believable.  Yes, there are female soldiers and a lot of them, but even now they are not assigned active combat roles (except for artillery).  This is very important because it means that when the lost tech sergeant joins their group, the marines skepticism of a woman joining their group has a tactical basis and not a sexist one.  In reality she would have had far less experience than any of the combat veterans in the film and her expertise was in tracking transmissions.  She is readily accepted into their group but the fact that the male characters actually have a reason to doubt her combat ability is really an isolated case in film which I found very interesting. 

My other favorite character was Michael Pena, one of the rescued civilians.  This film is a landmark for action films in my opinion for its gritty realism.  It is one thing to have a movie about soldiers going out to kill a bunch of aliens.  It's another thing entirely to have a rescue mission where the hardened soldiers are shown in a role protecting and dying for civilians they have just met.  Among the civilians they find are two children which completely changes the attitudes of the marines but the film in no way becomes a "protect the children" moral tale.  Instead through the character of Michael Pena the theme of sacrifice is solidified as he joins the fight against the aliens for about 5 seconds saving his son and one of the marines before getting gunned down.  His death is given little significance in the film just because it's going for realistic timing and in a firefight you don't have the luxury of a 20 minute Hollywood dying monologue.  But what does come through is that he almost certainly knew he was going to die but did not hesitate at all to save his son which is noticed immediately by the soldiers.  This fits in with the main subplot about Sgt. Michael Nantz getting his team killed in Iraq (watch the movie, you'll get it).  What I took away from this very short sequence was that there are certain fundamental qualities that can manifest in all people and our typical perception is that only certain people like soldiers, police, firemen, ever put themselves in danger to save others like there is something special about those people to begin with.  In this situation it's a civilian who does this without hesitation taking on the soldier role.  To me this was easily the most powerful scene in the movie even though it was a subplot. 

Even more interesting is that in action movies whenever a civilian jumps into the fight they usually survive and seem to have incredible luck or innate ability.  I, Robot comes to mind when Dr. Calvin takes Spooner's gun and starts killing robots.  She's a main character so the most she would get is a shoulder wound.  The real purpose of something like that is to elevate the importance of supporting characters that serve little purpose except for exposition and to draw in the audience by saying, "look! that person is just like you and look at all the cool stuff they are doing!"  It's a marketing strategy that works but is very awkward if you see the pattern.  This film differs greatly from this strategy by killing the well meaning civilian almost immediately, and instead of the soldiers shaking their heads saying "what an idiot to jump out of cover like that" they all seem to understand the significance of his intentional sacrifice. 

My overall impression of this film was that it was ok.  Was there anything really wrong with it?  Not really.  It had an interesting concept, ok characters, great action, and the drama was a little heavy in between the shootouts.  This seems more like an experiment in film making than an actual money making action film.  There is a very simple concept and plot that was tweaked in many ways to experiment with character roles as well as a what if scenario that really doesn't have a happy ending.  It ends on a positive note to let people leave the theater feeling good but really Earth is still screwed at the end.  I still can't help compare this to District 9 because they are the only two movies I have seen anything like this so I'm setting the bar pretty high.  I also have to compliment the director on doing a phenomenal job as this is his first non-horror film.  Sadly I don't see this film getting too much attention in coming years as the hype seems to have died down within a month of its release.  If you like military science fiction this is definitely the movie for you, if you want to see lots of action and pyrotechnics see this, but if you are looking for an all around great film with a lot of sophistication and class, Battle: Los Angeles made a valiant effort but fell short.  No doubt it is an entertaining movie I will enjoy for a long time but it's not going to win any awards.

Movies Referenced:

2011-Battle: Los Angeles

2009-Transformers 2

2009-District 9

2007-Transformers

2004-I, Robot

2001-Black Hawk Down

1997-Gattaca

1977-Star Wars

CATWOMAN

A thought before I get on with this week's review.  I'm not looking at a lot of these films as whether they are good or bad, though I do make a lot of calls like that.  I'm more interested in looking at the process and history that allowed these films to be made.  Part of this process requires me to have at least some knowledge of the genera and similar works.  It has come to my attention that there are simply films that I cannot give adequate reviews to just because I don't have the knowledge to say anything intelligent about them.  This would be like an medieval Italian art historian teaching about sub-Saharan art history.  You need a certain amount of knowledge on the subject to come up with insights and there are some films out there that leave me baffled.  On a similar note, there are some films that literally come out of nowhere and then make no impact.  Historians do not study every day of everyone's lives, they study the details of important figures or the people involved in important events.  If a film is so bland it had no major influences or influence there is not a lot to say about it.  I've been thinking about this and it really saddens me because I really don't have any formal training in evaluating film on its own so if I have no common ground with a film I have difficulty appreciating it.  That said, there are some films I will never do and others I have a lot of research to do on before viewing.  And now, on with the show!

Recently I have been giving mostly positive reviews.  This week's film will not get one.  We are looking at Catwoman, the 2004 reboot of the Catwoman origin story.  There are many things wrong with this movie including its subject, cast, plot, acting, writing, and its themes.  Abandon hope all ye who enter here...

Catwoman is a character from the Batman series.  You probably know that.  She also has an incredibly complex and contradicting back story.  Originally she was Selina Kyle, a cat burglar, nothing too special, just a thief, but a good one.  It was established in the Batman comics very early that there was a romantic connection between her and Batman and this is probably the only part of her character that has remained the same over the years.  Her origin stories in different comics has her as a cat burglar, an amnesiac flight attendant, a prostitute, a nun, as well as being an expert gymnast and martial artist, in one origin story trained by an armless ninja.  Over the years her origin changes and she shifted from villain to hero to anti-hero.  Understanding the character is already a mess as you can see, and the film versions only added to the confusion.  Much like Batman, Catwoman had no powers and instead relied on skill, cunning, and gadgets to be a super villain.  This is a very brief description of the character that leaves out a lot.  Luckily for us, the movie disregards every origin story in the comic universe so who cares if I left anything out.

The history of Catwoman's production goes back to 1992 to Tim Burton's Batman Returns...which was a good movie.  In this film Selina Kyle plays the role of timid secretary to the evil industrialist Max Schreck who tries to kill her by pushing her out a window.  This film marked the modern popular reinterpretation of Catwoman as some kind of superhero with powers.  After her attempted murder her comatose/dead body is swarmed by a bunch of stray cats and she comes back to life with a multiple personality disorder where all of her frustrations with being a timid woman in a man's world are unleashed when she dons her mask and takes on the persona of Catwoman.  While this never happened in the comics there is president for this.  Over the years Catwoman turned into the feminist power character over at DC.  While she had conflicting origin stories it is generally true in whatever incarnation of comics that Selina was at one time abused by men and becomes Catwoman in part to take revenge but mostly to express her more aggressive tendencies that had previously been building.  The revenge part also extends into protecting other helpless women.  So, the Batman Returns Catwoman was being just as faithful to the character in spirit.  In fact this was probably one of the better representations of Catwoman's character as the whole movie focused on the darker side of the Batman universe.  Let's be honest, Catwoman has a lot of fun jumping around in a skin tight vinyl catsuit and blowing up department stores, but at the root of it is her psychological trauma and the film focuses on that.  The producers of the film were less than enthusiastic about Burton's final product due to the dark storyline and adult portrayals of the characters compared to Burton's Batman which was a fun colorful and cartoony take on Batman harkening more back to the days of Adam West then contemporary comics.  And so Burton was removed from the Batman series and new talent was brought in.  Burton however loved his second Batman film more than the first and wanted a spin off film following his Catwoman character.  He tried to get his spin off project off the ground for years but it stagnated into near oblivion.

And now enters our production staff from stage right led by our writers.  All three of them had lengthy filmographies, with Theresa Rebeck being a prominent writer for television.  The pair of John Brancato and Michael Ferris have almost the same filmography working together for years.  Surprisingly they both were responsible for Terminator Salvation and Surrogates, both movies I liked.  So far this is a reasonably tame writing staff.  The odd man out worked on the screenplay not the story, John Rogers.  John Rogers worked on such atrocities as The Core and Transformers as well as The Adventures of Jackie Chan.  Catwoman seems to have been the setup for Transformers.  Take a good idea with a long history of success and a large fan base, and use a poorly thought out fan fiction as your story which grossly ignores and goes against the canon of the established character.  In this case he is using Burton's story of Catwoman.  This is an instance I think where Burton should have had more creative input and stayed on the project.  I think it would have had a lot more depth to it had he not move on to bigger and more horrible films.  In fact, the producers are the only connection to the original source material at all as the producer worked on all of Burton's early films and 2 more have been involved in every Batman related project in the last 30 years.  As director they chose Pitof, a French special effects man.  Apparently he's pretty good working on Alien: Resurrection and City of Lost Children.  He is not, however, a good director.  I have not seen the only other film he directed and have no desire to.  This seems to be a chronic problem in Hollywood.  If you are around movies long enough you start to think you can run the show.  Special effects men are very knowledgeable about the process and visual aesthetics of film, possibly more so than many directors.  This does not mean they can direct the human element or piece together a good story.

The cast is what sold this film, and by cast I really mean Halle Berry.  Fun Fact: Halle Berry played the secretary in The Flinstones, Sharon Stone.  Halle Berry in Catwoman is fighting the evil Laurel Hedare, played by Sharon Stone.  Halle Berry got her start as a model and moved into acting.  She got into movies in the early 90's and quickly found success.  In the mid 90's her career picked up and she became the spokeswoman for Revlon, a cosmetics company.  She seems to have been fighting her way to the top until her big break in 2000 with X-Men where she became a well recognized actress, quickly defining her as the hot ethnic woman in an action movie.  In rapid succession she was in X-Men, Swordfish, Die Another Day, and X2.  Notice a pattern?  However she has since faded from the good graces of the public due to several poor career moves such as Gothika and i, which earned her a Razzie for worst actress in 2005.  I don't know if the writers were going for some kind of subtle irony, but Berry was an interesting casting choice given that in 2004 she renewed her Revlon contract and at the same time was working on Catwoman where the villain runs a cosmetics company.  As far as acting talent goes, this did not seem to be on the casting directors checklist.  Berry gave a horrible performance as did every other actor in the film.  I understand they weren't given a lot to work with and the idea was already a reboot of a story that was intended to be a spin-off, not even a sequel, but really, most of Berry's role in the film is to walk around and look pretty, it's a little embarrassing.  On the subject of visual aesthetics, Michelle Pfeiffer was originally approached to reprise here role from Batman Returns but turned down the role because the costume was uncomfortable.  Guess it's good they got a model to play the part.

At this point the changes to this version should be mentioned.  As I said earlier, Selina Kyle becomes Catwoman.  Well, in this version, Catwoman is Patience Phillips, a name change due to an inability to obtain full rights from DC I'm sure.  However this is covered up in a quick scene where it is revealed that there have been catwomen through history and Selina Kyle from Batman Returns is in one of the images shown.  It's a sloppy cover up and serves no purpose other than to appease fans, but since anyone who cared about the Catwoman comics or earlier movies is going to hate most of this movie it's a poor concession.  The other major change is that Catwoman actually has super powers.  In every incarnation she never had any but now she obtains powers through...wait for it...the Egyptian cat god Baset.  That's right, Catwoman is not only brought back from the dead by an Egyptian deity, but also imbued with mystical powers.

I can forgive a lot in a film, however there is one thing about Catwoman that grated me all the way through and that was the sexist/feminist themes from start to finish.  If there is anything that bothers me in a film its having a social message crammed down my throat, but this film can't even decide on that.  I really don't understand what the film makers were going for with this one.  Catwoman does have elements of female empowerment to her character, and if they had stuck to that the message might have gotten annoying after a while but at least it would have been coherent.  This film does not know its audience.  In one scene it will be showing Catwoman as the strong, sexy, confident woman, crushing men beneath her 4 inch heels, and the next women are portrayed in horrible stereotypes like they are suddenly trying to appeal to a male audience.  What's more, the villain, also a woman, runs a cosmetics company.  It's like a bad crossover between Barbie and DC.  And of course there is also the woman who reveals to Patience the history of the catwomen who was expelled from academia for her theories, though she says it's because she is a woman.  I'm sorry but if the crazy cat hippy at my school started publishing papers about how the Egyptian cat goddess Baset was resurrecting wrongfully killed women though history and giving them superpowers I would kick her out too.  This film suffers from a female-centric casting without a clear reason.  If they were going for the female demographic I suppose this makes sense but that's not the demographic you market a comic book movie to.  The film portrays women in every negative stereotype, timid, scantily clad, obsessing over their looks, owning lots of cats, etc...and tries to make up for it all by saying, "but look!  Catwoman can beat up men so it's ok."  On the subject of male portrayal...with the most screen time is our love interest, Tom Lone, who is a police officer and strangely enough probably has the funniest scene in the film where he mistakes Patience being stuck on the ledge of her building for a suicide attempt.  Otherwise he is an all around nice guy and incredibly bland.  He plays basket ball with intercity kids, gives crazy Patience second chances, let's her out of jail because "he trusts her...?", and does all the behind the scenes heroics that Catwoman doesn't take care of.  All in all he's pretty easy to understand, he has no character development or purpose other than to give Patience a contact to the police and a romantic connection to create a poor attempt at drama.  Next highest billed actor plays George Hedare, Laurel's playboy husband.  I'm sure he was picked because he plays a good jerk.  He spends the whole movie, until his untimely demise, having an open affair, with several more hinted at, and pretending to run his cosmetics company, which his wife actually takes care of.  Womanizer, wife beater, abandons his responsibilities, abuses his power, on top of being a capitalist and making Patience sad!  I think they had to cram in a few extra negative traits since there are so few men in this film that weren't armed henchmen or jewel thieves. 

What really bothers me about this is that they didn't need to film the movie this way.  Nothing was stopping them from making a good Catwoman film that had a strong female lead and a strong female antagonist with male supporting characters that were also well developed.  Instead they went for a caricature of the reality of gender relations as if the audience wouldn't get the more subtle hints.  They went out of their way to focus on the sexuality and not the gender inequality issues of the characters.  Watch a film like Alien or Terminator 2.  Does it really matter that the main lead is a woman?  No, Ripply or Sarah Connor being women barely effect the plot but they are both incredibly strong and well written characters.  Every time I see something like Catwoman it makes me want to cry.  Films like this basically make the argument you just have to be confident and flaunt your sexual power over men and that will make you powerful.  There is so much more to writing a strong and independent character and that is why it is so rarely done, and even rarer with female characters. 

What all this boils down to is a modern reinterpretation of the "breeches role".  After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 theaters reopened after several years of Puritan influence in the government.  One of the new developments was the allowance of actresses to perform on stage.  The most common incarnation of this was the breeches role where women dressed as men and usually had to expose themselves in some fashion as a plot point of them being discovered to be women.  While the allowance of women to act on stage is argued to be a great leap forward for women, it became a way not for actresses to display their skill, but a way for poor young women not wanting to be prostitutes to be provocative on stage and catch the eye of a wealthy noble.  Catwoman does the same thing.  It pretends to be a movie about strong female characters proving themselves in a male world but it's really all about watching Halle Berry prance around in tight leather.

I don't recommend you see this unless you are looking for a bad movie.  If you are then this film is for you!  So far this film still hasn't made back its $100 million budget and it's not likely to.  Somehow most of the cast has come out of this harrowing experience with their careers intact.  Let's hope that Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Rises will treat Catwoman with a lot more respect than this one did.

Movies Referenced:
2012-Dark Knight Rises
2009-Terminator Salvation
2009-Surrogates
2007-Transformers
2004-Catwoman
2003-Gothika
2003-X2
2003-The Core
2002-Die Another Day
2001-Swordfish
2000-X-Men
1997-Alien: Resurrection
1995-City of Lost Children
1992-Batman Returns
1991-Terminator 2
1989-Batman
1979-Alien

MINECRAFT

This week's movie is a real treat and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  The order of the day is the independent British film Minecraft.  For those of you who haven't been playing videogames for a while, Minecraft is the virtual equivalent of legos.  Created by Swedish programmer Markus Alexej Persson, Minecraft is a sandbox game that places you, the player, in control of an entire world ripe for the picking.  This isn't like Second Life where you are given godlike powers of creation and destruction.  Imagine being shrunk down to the size of a lego person and being placed in an entire world made of legos, trees, caves, wild pigs, and all and being able to build anything as long as you can find the right blocks.  The game is very simple in that there is no objective at all, just go forth and build.  The game focuses on a few styles of gameplay.  First is "the grind".  Grind is that part of a game where you have to go and collect items you will need later and is mostly busywork.  Second is "the build".  After "mining" the items you need out of the ground, trees, animals, etc... you can begin to construct anything you want out of the blocks you have obtained, each measuring about 2 meters on a side in virtual space.  Third comes "the combat".  Not only is this a creative building game, it is also a survival game.  The game world is set on a 10 minute day/night cycle and monsters appear at night, stressing the building element of the game to build bunkers to hide from the monsters, or create weapons to defend yourself with.  Minecraft has been incredibly popular and recently reached over one million copies sold.  So it was only a matter of time before some joker made a movie about it.

I'm no stranger to the genera of video game movies.  Typically they are atrocious and grossly unfaithful adaptations of their source material if the film maker has any knowledge of the game at all.  Some of the more well known travesties against the gaming community include Super Mario Bros., In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and Doom.  Originally the problem was how to translate the bizarre visuals from video games into a movie.  This was approached with a strategy of reimagining with lots of references to prove the film makers had at least heard of the appropriate vocabulary associated with whatever game they were butchering.  This set a bad precedent of relying on name recognition to sell movie tickets and screw the content and fans.  Sadly this is a business strategy that works all too often.  More recently, Disney tried their hand at this with Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.  While reviews panned it as another poor adaptation of a game, there were several who saw the merit that it was so far not as offensive to fans as previous films.  This may truly have been the case since Minecraft can truly be said to be the first good video game movie.

One of the primary problems film makers have when approaching video game movies is what story to tell.  There is the option to retell the story of the game, but often the story is not good enough on its own and it was the addition of gameplay that made the original game a success.  There is also the unrealistic quality of videogames that would make a straight adaptation appear more like a bad wire-fu movie that most film makers shy away from.  This would also include direct references to gameplay such as the first person shooting scene at the end of Doom.  Interestingly both of these problems were embraced by Minecraft.  Since the original game has no plot there was immense freedom in creating an plot.  This erased the problem of offending diehard fans or trying to follow an already lacking plot line.  Visually this was probably the best adaptation I have ever seen especially given the Minecraft world which is built out of cubes.  The choice to film on site in Hammerland, Finland was a gutsy one but paid off in the end.  The peculiar geological formations and ecology, the cube like geography and large population of wild pigs, there inspired Persson to make the video game in the first place.  British director Pete Curran, rather than express the setting for the film as a cheap digital effect, chose to film Minecraft on the tiny island of Aland to better capture the feel of the game.

Plot wise this film is very much like the 1960's television series The Prisoner.  With no explanation whatsoever, our protagonist, Pete, played by the director, is whisked away to an unknown island with his wife Gemma.  The rest of the plot is a psychological thriller/drama as the pair deal with their new lives on the island and their quest to discover why they are there.  While a reference to The Prisoner is shaky at first, I was so happy to hear the Rover roar the first time Pete encounters a monster in his mineshaft.

If you have played the game you know that mining one block at a time is a tedious process, yet Curran deftly handled this part of the film.  Instead of an intense mining montage like most film makers would do, the film transitions into Pete's day dreams in a clear reference to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  Curran's love of older cinema shines through in these daydreams as Pete daydreams about playing chess with a creeper (The Seventh Seal), crossing the desert (Laurence of Arabia), and fighting zombies (Night of the Living Dead).  All the while keeping with the gamelike visuals.

For those who haven't played the game, there is no tutorial and players typically figure out how the game works by trial and error.  This fit perfectly with Pete's experience on the island.  Not only is he utterly confused as to how or why he is there, but his confusion at this new world echoes the audience's wonder at his surreal surroundings.  It did at times fall into the old habit of having the characters ogle the special effects as if to say "hey you, audience, you should be impressed with that effect!" a la Star Trek the Motion Picture.  It wasn't as bad but there were shades of a bad habit in there. 

For the most part though the digital effects were down played in favor of more traditional special effects, very uncommon now a days especially for a low budget film.  A definite plus for all you monster fans out there, Doug Jones came back to the big screen to play the creepers.  Jones is well known for his many roles as movie monsters, especially in Guillermo del Toro films such as Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth.  This however was his first time working as a stuntman as the creepers attack Pete and Gemma by blowing themselves up.  For some reason the choice was made that Jones was perfect to portray all the creepers and this was one of the instances where digital effects were used to show Jones on screen in costume several times at once.  This is reminiscent of Multiplicity with Michael Keeton, with Jones interacting with himself in several scenes.  Jones' inexperience as a stuntman however nearly killed the film, and himself, several times as he was unprepared for the trauma of packing his green creeper suit full of TNT like a true stuntman.  In this regard Director Curran probably made a bad call which stalled development for eight months as Jones was admitted to the local Hammerland Hospital of Odin's Wrath six times.  Jones however was a great team player.  Jackie Chan has almost killed himself with death defying stunts uncountable times and in the same fashion Doug Jones distinguished himself as an artist of the highest order risking life and limb for his art and the final product was well worth the effort.

Curran was somehow able to negotiate a phenomenal supporting cast including Mark Hamill, Laurence Fishburne, and Laurence Olivier.  Laurence Olivier has had a very slow career since Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow bombed at the box office so the Shakespearian actor was probably easy to win over.  The choices of Mark Hamill and Laurence Fishburne are both interesting casting choices as inhabitants of the island.  Both actors have been featured in film roles based on game performances.  Hamill was a major character in the full motion video (FMV) game Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger.  Laurence Fishburne played the crazed survivor in Predators, which while technically was part of the Predator series, was a spiritual sequel to the Alien Vs. Predator films.  Incidentally Fishburne reprises almost the same role except he hides in a mineshaft and not a crashed spaceship.  Apparently his character, Cubes, was originally intended to be played by Samuel L. Jackson who was more than happy to play the part, however after he was told there was no place in the film for a purple lightsaber he left the project.

The tension between the characters really heart-wrenching as the characters turn on each other in a fight for resources on the island.  The supporting cast performed beautifully as a web of lies and intrigue grows to engulf Pete and Gemma.  The eccentric and emotional character personalities are as close to being caricatures without crossing the line into comedy as they could get.  I won't reveal the twist ending but I will say that because of the strong ties the audience makes with Pete, the ending is worthy of Hitchcock.  This film has slowly been making its way across the international market and is being released in the US today, April 1st.  I encourage everyone to see this film and support director Pete Curran in his mad quest to bring honor to the until now humiliated video game movie genera.  Since this is a small international film you may not be able to find it in your local theater but keep looking I'm sure you'll find it eventually. 

Films Referenced:

2011-Minecraft

2010-Predators

2010-Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

2007-In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

2006-Pan's Labyrinth

2005-Doom

2004-Alien Vs. Predator

2004-Hellboy

2004-Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

1996-Multiplicity

1993-Super Mario Bros.

1987-Predator

1979-Star Trek the Motion Picture

1968-Night of the Living Dead

1967-(TV)The Prisoner

1962-Laurence of Arabia

1957-The Seventh Seal

1947-The Secret Life of Walter Mitty