Celluloid Zeros

Films/DVD Asylum

Movies from comedy to drama to your favorite Hollyweird Star.

Here's an article from today's Boston Globe. Best line: ''Apocalypse Now'' is a film that believes in film. All but a handful of this summer's films believe in nothing but the opening weekend grosses.

Celluloid Zeros
By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 8/24/2001
As movie screens get larger in size, movies get smaller in substance. Even by the relaxed standards of summer movies, this season's batch can only be regarded as jaw-droppingly dismal.
The immense promise of ''A.I.'' was only partly met, the ''Planet of the Apes'' remake was a dud, most of the others were instantly forgettable, and altogether too many had a 2 or III after their titles, sending a message of creative abdication.
As usual, a few small off-Hollywood films emerged to save moviegoing from movies - ''The Deep End,'' ''Ghost World,'' ''Hedwig and the Angry Inch.'' But the best film of the summer - and the year so far - was made in 1979: Francis Ford Coppola's recut ''Apocalypse Now Redux.''
Regardless of how you feel about ''Apocalypse Now'' (I thought it a great film then and an even greater one now), it's immediately clear what sets it apart from this season's puny crop - ambition. It's a big film taking big swings at a big subject - Vietnam, and like its source, all war, and war's consequent irrationality. In how many contemporary films is this aspiration matched? ''Apocalypse Now'' is a film that believes in film. All but a handful of this summer's films
believe in nothing but the opening weekend grosses.
Part of the reason for the transmogrification of film is the profound cultural shift that both accompanies and feeds on the current deadening of political debate. High culture and low culture have flip-flopped in what may at first have seemed a welcome overthrow of elitism, but has instead encouraged the magnification of trivia, and the discrediting of substantive debate on the grounds that it isn't entertaining.
Intellectual fashion is still under the sway of post-modernism and deconstruction, neither being a building block of great art. In the novel, narcissism has been eclipsing narrative. In film, sensory jolts have been driving out expression. And all art forms, befitting a materialistic age of ever-shortening attention spans, have been relegated to marketing fodder. That's why the deal often has more passion than the movie. That's why the opening weekend grosses (usually followed by a precipitous drop) seem all that matter.
Films did have one chance to be relevant this summer, but didn't make enough of the chance to focus on the theme of humanity redrawing and even extending its boundaries. As research into cloning, robotics, and genetic engineering accelerates, the most interesting movie was ''A.I.'' Standing for artificial intelligence, it remains virtually alone in a summer of artificial stupidity as it focuses on an ethical question - how much love do we owe a robot programmed to love us? Started by the late Stanley Kubrick and finished by Steven Spielberg, ''A.I'' predictably was buried in clouds of shrill rhetoric excoriating Spielberg for daring to touch Kubrick's unborn child.
Although flawed and weighed down with an unsatisfying ending, ''A.I.'' is an underrated film of visual and thematic grandeur, with brilliant performances by Haley Joel Osment as the robot Pinocchio, longing to be a boy, and Jude Law as his Jiminy Cricket, a worldly, benevolent guide.
Onto Kubrick's pessimism about man's uses of technology, it grafts Spielberg's archetypal lost child, dreaming of a reunion with an absent parent. This is the same potent dynamic that informed ''Close Encounters,'' ''E.T.,'' and the vastly underrated ''Empire of the Sun.''
Although Kubrick has always done much better at the hands of critics, it seems to me that Spielberg will ultimately loom larger in film history. He is every bit the image-maker Kubrick was, and, far from being the mere sentimentalist he often is dismissed as, his films on the whole have more uncomplicated primal punch.
It is often the lot of the popular and successful to be dismissed as mere entertainers in their time, only to be elevated later. This, I am convinced, will be the case with Spielberg. Critical and industry respect for his achievements has been as grudging as his popularity and success have been immense.
''Planet of the Apes'' had a chance to really dig into questions far more fascinating than the ones raised by Pierre Boulle's somewhat dated allegory. If men and apes have pretty much the same DNA, as science now tells us, what would have happened if they changed places in the evolutionary pecking order and apes ruled? This would have been an interesting and relevant prism through which to develop a highly charged take on ''Planet of the Apes.'' But except for better makeup than was on display in the altogether more entertaining original film, Tim Burton's new version was curiously tepid, never probing, basically just another clunky sword and sandal variation.
`Shrek'' and ''Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within'' gave the season a computer-generated lift. ''Shrek'' was by far the more entertaining film and, in fact, has become the summer's biggest hit, thanks in part to its irreverence and ability to put new spin on an old story. Yet ''Final Fantasy'' is the more interesting of the two for the window it opens onto the not-too-distant future. In ''Final Fantasy,'' humans are replaced entirely by computer-generated clones. The characters look artificial - lifelike, but clearly not alive. That's part of their appeal. They raise artifice to an alternative mode of reality, enjoyable in its own right, like the obviously computer-generated nicks in the computer-generated woodwork in ''Toy Story.''
''Final Fantasy'' hastens the day when more and more actors will step out of computer keyboards, not air-conditioned trailers. Still, its dazzling visuals couldn't conceal the fact that ''Final Fantasy'' is a pretty routine space opera, reminding us that films made from video game characters often are only video-game-character deep, which is to say, not very.
That's the lesson of ''Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,'' which was pretty bland and would have arrived stillborn if not for the spunky verve of Angelina Jolie. Star power helped give the summer season what feeble pulse it had. ''The Fast and the Furious'' may have been a mindless wall-banger of a hot rod movie, but it felt alive, thanks mostly to the vigor of Vin Diesel, he of the shaved head, bulging biceps, and caring eyes. This one jumped off the screen.
All but one of the inevitable crop of sequels scored low in all departments except brand recognition - the reason they got made in the first place. ''The Mummy Returns'' played like a big-budget video game, right down to the Scorpion King, as embodied by that World Wrestling Federation mainstay, The Rock. ''Jurassic Park III'' was notable only as an opportunity to chart the progress of dinosaur software design since ''Jurassic Park II.'' ''Dr. Dolittle 2'' was numbingly nondescript, barely distinguishable from the equally bloodless ''Scary Movie 2.'' And based on ''American Pie,'' I didn't see ''American Pie 2.''
Only ''Rush Hour 2'' seemed fun, a real improvement on the original. Then, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker were still feeling each other out and were sometimes out of synch as new working partners. This time, they're at ease and grooving. Which is more than one can say for this deadly summer, which can't slide into oblivion quickly enough. With the possible exception of ''A.I.,'' it surely won't contribute anything to the moviegoing season 22 years from now, as 1979 contributed ''Apocalypse Now'' to this one.

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Topic - Celluloid Zeros - clarkjohnsen 06:40:14 08/24/01 (0)

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