Chronicle: Best Picture 2012

In the 80’s, Katsuhiro Otomo and Izo Hashimoto co-wrote a manga called Akira. Otomo adapted the incredibly popular story to film. Akira is the story of a gang of teenagers caught between their friend’s transformation into a god and the government forces who try to stop him. The film is a mediation on adolescence and growth and the tremendous danger inherent to ignoring a teenager. Akira’s kinetic action, ideas, and depictions of the homosocial dynamics of male friends captured the imagination of American audiences and the film has since become one of the most popular films from Japan to be released in America.

Naturally, since 2002, Warner Brothers has been threatening to ruin the film by remaking it for American audiences, replacing the Asian characters with White actors, going so far as to agitate the gag-reflexes of a generation by offering the lead male role to Garret Hedlund. Thankfully (mercifully), they reconsidered. In 2011 production was shut down for the fourth (and hopefully final) time.

That same year the internet began lighting up with footage from a small film with no previous buzz. 20th Century Fox was advertising a project they called Chronicle – which proved an ostensible remake of Akira with a cast of unknowns and a first-time writer/director combo. Although it abandoned Tokyo for Seattle, Chronicle followed a the conflicts of a teenager with mysterious and god-like powers who lacked the morality necessary to control those powers.

Friends, let me tell you, they did it right.

It is hard to be a teenager. I know, I was one once and now I work with 100 of them each day. They are a roiling mass of everything unsettled in humanity. The body changes its dimensions, shape, and size. The skin erupts. Overnight, boys and girls gain abilities and status they formerly lacked. For many, these changes come too fast with no time to adjust. They’re far too large for themselves, equipped with strange dimensions they have yet to discover or fully plumb. They emit strange smells and feel unknowable compulsions to hurt themselves and one another. Childhood, which is never stable enough or safe enough, ends. The confusion and terror of adolescence never does.

In that sense, puberty is makes one an x-man/woman and adulthood is its secondary mutation. As such, it is the trembling vigil of a parent, coach, teacher, minister, etc. etc. etc. to watch children grow and wonder what they will become. Is this one a hero? Or are they a villain? I suppose that every adult is one or the other in every moment of the day, depending on circumstance and affection. Chronicle assumes the translatable potency of this metaphor and extends it to the big screen with devastating simplicity and incredible effect. Every person associated with the production of this film should be given whatever boost they need to become a big star. This is a first big play for all the players (Josh Trank (director), Max Landis (writer), Alex Russel (hero),  Dane DeHaan (villain), and Michael B. Jordan (a former child actor who shines here, having lost none of his charm as a grown up actor).

The premise of the film is the fulfillment of every teenage boy’s fantasy. 3 boys leave a party and, in an unexplained process whose follow-up implies greater narrative complexity, gain the power of telepathy. The film’s first and second thirds show the development of their friendship as they bond over their shared experience. They prank each other and their friends – manipulating legos, teddy bears, and footballs with their new powers.  Over the course of the film they develop their telepathy from manipulating legos to throwing cars at each other.

One of the boys – Stephen (Jordan) – is a popular athlete, poised to win the presidency of their student body. The second – Matt (Russel) – is a good-natured, dope-smoking philosopher. The third – Andrew (DeHaan) – is a bad seed. Initially, Stephen and Matt view Andrew with contempt. He’s weird and sullen. Bullies pick on him. However, their contempt turns to affection and then concern as they legitimately befriend him. Andrew comes from a troubled home – his father drinks and worries about money while his dying mother, when lucid, shines rays of affection on him. Caught in the riptide of these two influences, Andrew plays the perfect teenager. He responds directly to the strongest stimulus he experiences. Desire, anger, friendship – he is captivated by whatever is in front of him.  This includes a series of beautiful sequences that highlight the boys’ growing power and budding friendship. However, the instability of Andrew’s home life and his own anxiety overburdens his fragile ego, one bad night topples the narrative the film has constructed and in a heart-aching sequence he becomes a villain. As Andrew spirals inward, his friends must find a way to save him or to stop him. I won’t spoil the film’s climax (its spectacular) except to say that the film ends with the birth of a hero and the promise of a sequel and then you realize then that you have seen an origin story that is not an origin story. The film’s larger direction is significant. Artistically, it speaks to something beyond effects and explosions and incredible action staging. If the 00’s were the decade of the Big Tentpole Superhero Film then Chronicle is their apotheosis and, perhaps, pinnacle.

Riverworld pt 2

The film is the story of a terribly uninteresting man (played by Tahmoh Penikett) and eternal love, maybe. You might recognize him – he played Karl ‘Helo’ Agathon on Battlestar Galactica. Penikett was actually (in my opinion) that show’s only resolutely ‘good’ character. Originally written as a sort of redshirt character for the miniseries, he was brought back full time because fans liked him so much. Unfortunately, Peniket’s post-BSG career has not been so ‘stellar.’ He shares Channing Tatum’s misfortune (as observed by Roger Ebert).  Their names are much more interesting than they are ever allowed to be. Penikett’s misfortune is that Hollywood, ever the fickle mistress, only has room for one weird named movie star.

Riverworld begins when Penikett’s character decides to propose to his girlfriend while they are on a cruise. Before he can pop the question, however, everyone at the party is killed by a suicide bomber. After a CGI vision of bodies in spheres waking up underwater, Penikett’s character (I think his name is Matt)  surfaces on the shores of a body of water that looks suspiciously like a lake. We are emphatically told that it is a river. He meets passengers from the cruise, who are overjoyed to be alive and evidently translated from old age into an ideal physical state.

The film’s most interesting ideas emerge here – a vision of scores of people emerging from this lake in prime physical condition. Lost lovers embrace each other – Penikett briefly encounters the young woman who’s bomb murdered him. He attempts to speak to her but she flees. These ideas are the film’s greatest selling point for me, they speak to my own hopes for life after this one where misdeeds and improprieties are accounted for and we receive joyful reunion with those people who’ve proceeded us in death. Farmer’s ideas about how this might take place are thoughtful and interesting. In this afterlife the living are given ‘grailbands’ – bracelets that can be inserted into pillars located all over that provide food and drink several times a day. Penikett decides that he cannot rest until he has found his erstwhile fiancee.

This is the story’s essential conflict and its weakest part. I don’t understand why Penikett is so attached to this woman. The filmmakers never give us any context for their relationship. They never reveal anything essential about her – she’s a figment for most of the film.  When we finally meet her again we discover that, having emerged from the river years before Penikett, she hooked up with the film’s villain. I won’t begrudge her that – the villain is actually essentially only villainous because he takes Penikett’s girlfriend. The film’s secondary conflict, a fight between factions of blue skinned aliens who understand the workings of the said Riverworld, is never adequately explained. Because every other conflict is framed by this one the film is  hollow at its core. I like love stories. My two favorite films are both love stories – but they are woven through with reasons for their characters to love each other. This film provides us with no compelling reasons for Penikett to love his girlfriend, other than they love each other and we discover that is not really true.

There are reasons to watch Riverworld. Shortly after his reemergence from the river, Penikett encounters Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro is building an empire using slave labor. Penikett allies himself with a Japanese warrior woman (who is also searching for her lost love and inexplicably played by a white woman), Samuel Clemens, and Ludwig Durr. The film makes its greatest conceptual reach by including these ostensibly real people in its narrative. Mark Deklin plays Clemens. He doesn’t actually play Samuel Clemens; instead he plays a kind of memetic representation of what we all imagine when we think of the author. He is necessarily embodying a stereotype – Colonel Sander’s suit, cigar-chomping, and riverboat in all – and it is marvelously entertaining because he is clearly the only person in the production who is allowed to have any fun.

Penikett’s other allies aren’t offered much by the script. They come and go with very little accompanying context, which can be very amusing in the case of Penikett’s videographer friend, who is reintroduced only to be dropped off the edge of a cliff with no ceremony. In a world where resurrection is guaranteed, death serves little purpose in Riverworld’s narrative function.

In the end, I’m alright with unresolved plot points with non-linear arcs. I think they can be incredibly interesting. They make me, as a participant, work that much harder to follow along. If an artist is going to tell me that they purposefully designed a narrative this way, they need to give me better characters or better story. Either one could have saved this film; but it lacked both. I own Riverworld on DVD. I’ll watch it again soon. I admire its reach but deplore its lack of depth.  This film offered me a lot to get excited about, but ultimately let me down.  Big ideas are important – but they are sheep and sheep are stupid. They need a shepherd.

RIVERWORLD: Pt 1

I have this picture hanging on the wall of my office.

It is Rene Magritte’s painting called “The Treachery of Images.” The caption (in French) reads: ‘this is not a pipe.’ Magritte said this about the painting;

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!

For me, this painting is a kind of litmus test. Most people I interact with in my office don’t know anything about art history and that’s ok – it has limited appeal anyway. But, when they ask about it (and most do), and I explain it to them – I find that their reactions go a long way in helping me understand how they think about art. I think about this painting in the context of what Chip and I mean to do on this site. Like paintings, films are simulacrum of real life – but they are not real life. Even the grittiest documentaries are constructed artifacts that remove us from reality through actual filters and the choices of directors and editors.

I think about this painting quite a bit. You must remember that every time you watch a movie someone, somewhere had to be convinced to give money to the filmmakers in the first place. This is called a pitch and sometimes when I watch films I can’t help but wonder how the pitch went. The Day After Tomorrow was allegedly approved with a 1 sentence pitch: “scientists fight against personified global warming” or some other, tired bullshit. The catch is that the pitch isn’t always what is transferred into the production stage. Sometimes the pitch mutates and becomes deformed. Sam Raimi repeatedly stated that he would never introduce Venom into his films. He evidently wanted Spiderman 3 to focus on the Sandman and James Franco’s Id but a studio executive got involved and we ended up with a hot, hot mess of a film. McG meant for Terminator Salvation to be something else but then he signed Christian Bale and suddenly it wasn’t. If we care, then we’ll have to argue whether or not this is a bad thing. And it presumes that someone is at fault and if that’s true – who’s fault is it that the movie is terrible? After George Cosmatos died, Kurt Russell claimed that his involvement in the direction of Tombstone was so significant that Cosmatos was really the film’s ‘ghost-director’ and Tombstone is probably the greatest western ever filmed.

You see, film, like all art, is an investment in culture, not artistic truth. Generally the investors who fund the film’s production expect the film to make back twice its budget to be profitable. This break-even point increases in proportion to the film’s budget. Disney/Pixar’s upcoming John Carter cost $250 million dollars to produce and market. Industry standards require it to make $400 million to break even.  And when I watch a movie that is really, just terrible I think about that first pitch. What provided the momentum to get executives to open their pockets to get that ball rolling?

The Sy-Fy channel is, next to Lifetime, America’s rummage bin for film production. I’ve written about this before so I won’t trot out the Asylum for another beating except that I wonder how they got started and how the filmmakers imagine these productions before they begin. Do they start with visions of art floating in their minds? Or do they understand that they are making films that are not films? I’d love to work for the Asylum. I create ideas for a living – but receiving test scores isn’t a very satisfying product. I’d be so happy to have a film credit to my name. Think about Bowfinger – Steve Martin’s character lives for the chance to receive a script in the mail. That’s a film about the essential compromises that ‘artists’ make on the road to creation. I admire Martin’s perceptions. Maybe we’ll come back to Bowfinger later on; but for now; lets leave the Asylum on the insane/brilliant section of our bookshelf.

In 2010, Sy-Fy ran a 4 hour miniseries production of Jose Farmer’s Riverworld Saga. When I saw advertisements for Riverworld, I suspected that the filmmakers began their project with elaborated, hopes of cheaply producing a high concept Sy-Fy film. It had to have started that way – the texture of the film suggests too much thought for it to have been a slap-dash production. And, I can easily understand that these were devoured by the twin faults of money and talent when the cameras started rolling. I can tell that the wheels are spinning. I always try and give these movies a chance when its clear that, for whatever reason, the project did not quite make the frigid passage from concept to reality. That has to be heartbreaking. And yet, a flawed vision is better than none, right? I have to give credit for people who go big instead of just going home. I think there are geniuses and then there are people who get the job done.

 

After all, these are not mutually exclusive terms.