Midnight Movie Madness (Updated & Revised)

Today I'd like to repair the reputation of a couple films which didn't get the level of respect I feel they deserve. I think critics and fans alike should take another look at these solid pieces of film-making and re-think their assumptions.

I won't bother to make the case for Swept Away. There's been a whole procession of flops released since to take its place and it has yet to make the canon of films that are called 'rediscovered genius.' You probably wouldn't believe me anyway, but for the record, its a brilliant satire of bourgeoisie concepts of desire and possession. The fact that Madonna's husband wrote and directed it specifically for her only adds to its power, rather than acting as a distraction to the work itself.

(Side note: What's really tragic about the Swept Away thing is that Guy Ritchie has yet to make a decent comeback, making it increasingly unlikely that future generations will somehow uncover the genius of this film. If anything, I think Ritchie will be a director whose works are divided into early classics and then a precipitous drop into unwatchable dreck.)

Cloverfield: The overdose of pre-release hype deserves some of the credit for the slightly bad rep given to this film. Set expections that high and you need a pretty huge payoff. But, I'm going to give critics some credit and assume that they'd be above unfairly sinking a film just because of an aggressive marketing campaign. The reviews weren't terrible, per se, but there was a general feeling of disappointment with the final product at the end of that long trail of a marketing campaign, which started with a brilliant Super Bowl spot.

As I recall, a lot of the reviews and word of mouth had trouble with the technique and the characters. Those were the central criticisms, at least. The camerawork is took shaky and its making me queasy! The protagonists are douchebags and I don't get why they like each other or why we should care!

Cloverfield's problem is generational, plain and simple. Failure to effectively bridge this generational divide has led to film being unfairly held in poor esteem.

This film portrays and communicates with a specific age & locale demographic, the 20-something urban dwelling narcisstic. Oh, its an intense narcissim and we see that in the film. I know these jerkoffs. I am one of these jerkoffs, to a degree.

The folks a bit older than us, the film critics' generation seem to dislike our generation a great deal. You know, the "kids today blah blah blah..." stuff. Quite fairly, I might add.

Which leads me to my next point, our generation loathes itself. Its a byproduct of the narcissism. Omnipresent irony is a manifestation of this self-loathing. (E.g. Hud's content-devoid droning throughout or the cameraphone encircling of the decapitated Statue of Liberty in the midst of obvious tragedy, which also works towards the central conceit of the film, detailed below.) The casual passive aggressiveness we exhibit towards each other, even to our friends and loved ones, is pervasive throughout the film. (E.g. Marlena early on in the film or Beth's bringing a date to the party.) Its not that the characters are too unlikable. Its that we are.

As for the shaky camerawork, which I'm only giving a small part of the blame for Cloverfield's problem with the critics, well, that's the point of the film, isn't it? Its the film's central conceit: This is happening in the real world and this film is not really a film, its found footage. I think it services this concept well enough, while at the same time making the appropriate concessions to a coherent & entertaining film narrative. If the director had pressed the point, there'd be a whole lot more dead air and shots where the lens wasn't properly capturing the scene. Not only that, but the characters would have been even more unlikable.

Overall, Cloverfield comes out as probably the best monster movie of the present era. It blows the Roland Emmerich Godzilla out of the water, at least. Its also superior to the Japanese Godzilla 2000, which mostly served to demonstrate how stale the genre had grown since its Cold War heydey. I can't think of any other recent challengers for the title, but I'd be willing to defend my claim against anything you can come up with.

Speed Racer: Why did this film bomb? The plot is dumb, sure, but that's hardly ever stopped a film from suceeding. I'm going to attribute failure here to the same problems experienced by the first Hulk film.

Like Ang Lee's attempts to create a comic book mis-en-scene (which critics recognized but maligned), the Wachowski Brothers attempt to recreate, literally, an old Speed Racer cartoon but using fancy new computer graphics.

Comic books display action and convey verbal elements of storytelling in a way that's particular to comic books (e.g. static images, panel transitions). Its too far removed from live storytelling to translate without including some Engrish. Succesful comic book adaptations in recent years have avoided this problem by forgoing storytelling elements from their source materials in favor of simply borrowing the form of the image or echoing iconic images. The Raimi Spider-Man films are loaded with such iconic borrowed images (e.g. the "Hero no more!" Peter Parker walking away from a trash can into which he has dumped his costume), as are the Nolan Batman films (e.g. Batman perched atop a gargoyle observing his fallen kingdom, Gotham City).

The "Frank Miller school" of comic book films--including Sin City, 300, the upcoming The Spirit and, for good measure, Daredevil--avoid much of the comic book translation problems because they rely so heavily on Miller's source material. Miller himself is something of a wild card in terms of his comic book output. His Daredevil was influenced more by classic film noir than anything in the comic medium, with the exception of Will Eisner, paticularly The Spirit. Eisner himself was also heavily influenced moreso by cinema than by the funny pages. Based on the trailer for The Spirit, it appears that Miller is attempting to integrate some of the panel transitions from the Eisner comics, but there's too little available to truly judge if this expiriment will be succesful. As for Sin City and 300, the original comic books were written after Miller returned from a stint in Hollywood (Robocop II & III), and bear the marks of noir influence even more heavily that his predeccessor works. The individual comic book panels are individual stills from a film reel more than anything else. This becomes apparent in the finished movie product, which faithfully re-creates those panels; the comic book-ness of the source material is basically irrelevant. Thus, the cinema output of Frank Miller is an outlier rather than representative of comic book adaptations.

Cartoons, while possessing their own idiosyncrasies, also have the benefit of being moving images. Even when the animation was relatively primitive, like the original Speed Racer cartoon or the the Hanna-Barbara aesthetic, its still got motion involved in the storytelling.

The critics can whine about the choppy action in this film all they want, but it was there in the cartoon too. It was integral, in fact, to convey how fast everything was going and it works to the same effect here. More fluid cutting would not achieve this result.

To my mind, the only jarring element here is real human actors in world that's too cartoonish by comparison. The contrast is too much to bear sometimes. I'm thinking the image might be too sharp. Why the box office failure of this film and not Transformers? Perhaps the explanation lies with the Transformers toys and then cartoons being modelled on real world objects and attempting to portray what is essentially a faithful version of our reality. Even Scooby-Doo might well have existed in some parallel reality where dogs can talk, since the concessions to cartoon logic in the orginals were minimal. Speed Racer exists in a distorted funhouse world, as only cartoons can create. Other films which derive from cartoon source material avoid this problem by either remaining cartoons (The Simpsons, The Jetsons) or setting expectations very low (The Flintstones films).

(Neither I nor the critics seem to have had a similar problem with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but then again, the live image there had some grain to it while Speed Racer is immaculate.)

This is high speed, bright light, big action cartoon fun and I'm just fine with that. If the Wachowskis were any less fond of their source material, and tried to depart from it too much in order to conform to critical and audience expectation, it would not have been a Speed Racer film; it would've been a sub-par, ho-hum racing film with some bright colors.

Lending a Helping Hand

I just donated money to the Obama campain. It's my first time donating to a political cause, but frankly, I'm scared. I've never donated to a campaign before--and I didn't donate much--but I'm too afraid to lose in November. I keep reading all of these articals about how Obama is sexist, and Biden is taking shots at Palin, and all this BS and I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!! People believe this crap. They really do. Women will vote for McCain because he picked a woman VP. I don't buy it, but since I know so many do, I decided that I need to do SOMETHING to help. So I did. I don't know if it will help in the end.

I hate double standards. It's more than apparent that Obama can't talk without it being thrown back in his face, regardless of the issue. When Biden said that people with disabled children should support stem-cell research, the GOP blew up and said he was attacking Palin. Well guess what: Parents of disabled children SHOULD support stem cell research. If it happens that Palin doesn't, well then she's not the advocate she said she'd be for disabled children! How come McCain can use the "lipstick on a pig" comparison while Hillary is still in the race, but now that Palin's in it, Obama can't?

The sad thing is that all these crap responses from the GOP are changing people's minds. Well not mine. And I hope not yours. I found a way I can try to help. Maybe you can help too....