Change Your Image
Captain Kite
Reviews
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
A more restrained Moore
Michael Moore is the first to say this film isn't really a documentary, it's an op-ed piece, an open and scathing indictment of a corrupt and alien administration which has stranded American soldiers in a no-win, no-exit war. Taking that approach, Moore isn't going to be likely to swing many voters in his direction. All talk of this film affecting the election aside, however, I don't think that's Moore's real intention. He set out to make a powerful piece about what he saw as a betrayal of American troops and the democratic process, a piece to resound with him and others like him, and in that he's succeeded admirably.
What's notable in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the amount of restraint Moore uses. While he usually puts himself front and center in his films, Moore sits most of ths one out, only pulling two real "stunts." For the most part he lets the images speak for themselves, and while there's a certain brand of acrid humor playing through the first half, it dies out more and more as images of the fallen and the bereaved play out on the screen.
While there are plenty of cheap shots in this - images of Bush, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, etc. getting grotesquely made up before they go on camera, for example - there are plenty of deeply moving, unsettling, and affecting moments, moments that cut past partisan feelings of who should win in November or how America should deal with terror and reach into the heart of who we are as human beings. We connect with the mother of a slain soldier, with the dead and wounded Iraqi civilians that suddenly become real. That doesn't mean this movie would turn a die-hard Bush supporter into a Democrat; I don't think it would, and I don't think it's supposed to. I think it's supposed to put words and images to the feelings of the tens of millions of Americans who feel betrayed by their government right now.
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
good action movie - not a good Next Gen movie
Let's face it: Picard's generation aren't made for the action-smash movie set. They don't fit with it. Kirk and company were made for brash brawling and gunning down Khan and the Klingons, which made for great movies that were true to the original series; Picard's series dwelt on the more cerebral affairs of diplomacy, temporal paradoxes and altered realities. The higher-concept stuff of Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn't feel right squished into a movie setting, where flashy explosions and high energy levels are expected. "First Contact" is a good action/sci-fi flick - but it takes one of TNG's better sci-fi concepts and trashes it in the name of marketability.
Yes, "First Contact" has great action sequences - the zero-g fight, the weird radioactive gas thing in the end, even the delightfully kitchy holodek mobster fight. The plot on earth works wonders simply because of James Cromwell's portrayal of Zephram Cochrane - his character and his story are compelling. And Picard's "Ahab Syndrome" was pretty sweet too.
The problem in this movie is the Borg - and more specifically, with the introduction of a "Borg Queen." The reason why the Borg are so frightening in the Next Generation TV series was not merely because they were powerful, but because they were so incredibly alien: they were a race in which no individuals exist. The Borg are not a "hive of drones" who are ruled by a "queen"; they are a single mind spread throughout billions upon billions of bodies. A single Borg is not akin to a drone in a hive, which has an individual nature but which is oppressed in a rigid hierarchy; rather, it is akin to a cell in an organism - it has no free, meaningful, or distinct existence beyond the larger body. There is no head or "ruler" of the Borg, any more than there is a single cell in your body that governs what you do. What makes the Borg's outlook on the rest of the universe so disturbing is that they cannot comprehend individuality, and thus individual lives are utterly insignificant to them... they take life without compunction because to the Borg, they aren't really taking lives - killing a human is like scraping a cell off someone's skin, an inconsequential act. The Borg are a truly alien species with a completely alien mindset - a rare gem in mainstream sci-fi.
But "First Contact" gives them a Queen who struts around and acts for all the world like a nasty human in some expensive makeup. She exchanges quips with Picard. She drips sexual innuendo over Data. She acts more like a James Bond temptress than a member of an alien cybernetic overmind. It completely demystifies them, makes them more human, when what made them so compelling is that they are so completely inhuman.
Without the Borg Queen, this movie would have perhaps been less approachable to casual moviegoers - after all, most expect their villains to have a face they can react to, and the Borg are nothing if not faceless - but it would have kept the Borg at their chilling and pure best. Instead, "First Contact" waters down Next Generation's brilliance and replaces it with some smirking one-liners and a lot of stuff that gets blown up.
6/10
eXistenZ (1999)
Twisted reality done right
In the post-"Matrix" world, where a sci-fi question both as sublime and compelling as "What is reality?" inspires not a well-written science fiction story but the banality of Keanu Reeves jumping through the air and firing off slow-mo bullets at refugees from some MIB spookshow, a movie like eXistenZ is remarkably refreshing.
The story involves highly popular immersive virtual games which almost perfectly simulate reality, and whose existence is opposed by violent reactionaries who believe that it distorts reality. The newest of these games is called "eXistenZ." The twist in eXistenZ is that the story of the game involves a highly popular immersive virtual game which almost perfectly simulates reality, and whose existence is opposed by violent reactionaries who believe that it distorts reality.
Cronenberg essentially creates simulations inside of simualtions, and lets us feel the mounting paranoia of not knowing where the real world ends. The transitions between various levels of reality in the film are so frought with uncertainty that our trust in the fake world versus the "real" world completely dissolves... we feel more comfortable seeing the characters in the game-world, because there, at least, we know for sure that their surroundings are simulated. That Cronenberg can make us distrust the real world by dint of its authenticity speaks volumes: he is trying to mess with our heads, and it is working wonderfully.
The usual wonderful Cronenberg stylistic touches are here, most notably his characteristic love of biomechanical items: the video game system which is itself a living thing, the cell phone that looks like a glowworm, the gun that shoots teeth. Jennifer Jason Leigh is magnificent in her perverse repulsion from the real; Jude Law is excellent as the clueless little real-world man out of his depth; Willem DaFoe, as always, has freaky teeth.
The close of the movie is one that is both wonderfully haunting and gleefully tricksterish. If you find yourself glancing around hoping for something to unplug yourself from, you will find yourself out of luck...
The Shining (1980)
One of the few genuine horror films
One of the problems with Stephen King is that ultimately, he's not good at writing horror. This isn't a harsh condemnation; very few people create convincing horror; the genre is so choked with bad writing and bad filmmaking that successful horror films these days are almost always of the post-"Scream" detached-ironic-half-parody variety; few if any know how to actually use horror to actually frighten a viewer anymore. So it's not bad that King can't write a convincing, terrifying horror story; it's just bad that King insists on sticking to this genre when his forays into sci-fi (The Dark Tower), drama (Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption) and apocalyptic epic (The Stand) are far more successful.
So it's not surprising that "The Shining" is at best an unimpressive book. Good thing then that Kubrick makes it into an entirely new creature in his film. Kubrick downplays the showy gimmicks King uses to make "Shining" a flat-out haunted house story and gives us something far more chilling: a portrait of a man losing his mind.
In Kubrick's film we are provided with the inverse of a haunted house. Jack does not go insane because the house is full of ghosts and murder; the spirits of the Overlook Hotel emerge almost in response to Jack's madness. Up until the end, it is unclear if this entire nightmare is supernatural or psychological in nature; it could easily be nothing more than the tale of a man going mad. Nevertheless, it is chilling in a way that the vast majority of horror films never manage to become; its presentation, and not its content, is what proves terrifying.
Kubrick's slow shots of the hotel keep us drenched in atmosphere and setting more than the activities of the characters; the hotel becomes as much a character as the unfortunate family members are. Nearly all of the terror is fueled by the anticipation of terror rather than actual terror itself; without the slow crawl of the camera to the woman in room 273, her transformation into a laughing carcass would be far less upsetting.
Some have balked at the movie's slow pace, or its excision of some of the more fantastic elements of King's novel (such as the reanimated corpses of hunted animals), but the movie's pace and subdued tone are flawless. I have never been scared by the cheap gore of many of King's books and movies, but Kubrick knows how to manipulate the emotions of an audience in a way that proves far more chilling. Fear is a psychological phenomenon, after all; only in a movie that dwells in the mind as much as "The Shining" does can one truly experience the fear that horror is meant to instill.