Even robots age

“I’m old, not obsolete.” That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 (Model 101) defending his—and Schwarzenegger’s—continuing role in saving mankind by delivering a quip so quippy it’s dispensed no less than three times over the course of Terminator: Genisys. But ol’ T-800 could just as easily be defending the entire Terminator franchise, which, in terms of narrative cohesion, has permanently guarded itself against obsolescence by incorporating a confusing series of parallel destinies generated by its characters’ ability to travel through time and alter history. No amount of time travel, however, can alter the fact that the original Terminator remains the most inspired, efficient and charming—and cheap!—of the current quintet of Terminator manifestations.

Which is not to say that Genisys is without merit. Beginning in 2029, the story follows post-apocalyptic resistance fighter Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) as he travels back to 1984—the year of the original film—to protect Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) from killer robots so that she can give birth to John Connor (Jason Clarke), the leader of the anti-killer robot resistance. But circumstances are such that Kyle and Sarah, with the help of Schwarzenegger’s T-800, whom Sarah affectionately dubs “Pops”, then need to travel to 2017, which, now that history has been repeatedly altered, has become the year formerly known as 1997, a.k.a. the year of “Judgment Day,” when the killer robots take over and slaughter most humans. I can’t possibly explain all this here, but you’ll be glad when you make it to 2017 because that’s when some good actors—J.K. Simmons!—arrive to infuse the supporting characters with a little life. Genisys, alas, follows the original Terminator in placing the star in a supporting robot role while sticking a robotic actor in the lead, while replacing tough Linda Hamilton with baby-faced and not terribly convincing Clarke. Still, it’s fun how “Pops” assumes the role of overprotective dad to Kyle’s hubristic suitor. And it’s appealingly morbid how Kyle has spent his whole life in love with Sarah, a dead woman he knows only from a snapshot of her wearing a headband. Until, of course, he gets to meet Sarah (sans headband) in 1984 and they take a trip to 2017 together, naked and embracing in the time machine.

The film is quite entertaining, and so many things in it are almost interesting: the  nods toward La jetée and Frankenstein, the nonsensical discussions about free will—and, by the way, where do the robots keep finding the will to destroy mankind?—and the story’s overriding anti-consumerist critique. That’s right: Terminator: Genisys is critical of you buying stuff, “Genisys” being the name of a new operating system that will link every device you own—and, little do we stupid tech-mongers realize, allow the robots to crush us all in their invincible liquid metal grips! Which reminds me: do you like monster truck rallies? Because there is this larger question, looming over Transformers, Terminators and superheroes alike, about how long it takes it lose interest in machines pummeling each other without ever getting being in danger of annihilation. It’s not exactly suspenseful.

Also, speaking of boringly invincible robots, that quip—“I’m old, not obsolete”—is made because Kyle notices that Schwarzenegger’s T-800’s flesh looks less fresh than the other terminators. The logic being that, while robots stay the same inside, robot flesh is just like human flesh—which is weird because “Pops” gets his flesh ripped to shreds multiple times in Genisys and within minutes it seems to grow right back to normal 67-year-old former-governor-of-California flesh. Baffling! But I’m confident the next chapter in the interminable Terminator saga will figure out why this is, and explain it in some expository dialogue.

                       

Time, stillness, returning, remaking

How do your memories, your visual memories, come to you, as stills or as moving pictures? I have a hunch about this, but I wonder if the answer is generation-dependent, photographs no longer holding the monopoly on our access to the past they once did. Still, there’s something poignant about the arrested moment, the sense of having stopped time. It’s surely one of several reasons why La Jetée (1962), despite being a featurette (it’s only 28 minutes long), remains the mysterious French filmmaker Chris Marker’s most famous movie. Despite being a featurette, yes, and maybe even despite not exactly being a movie. Comprised of still photographs, voice-over narration, music and soundscapes, La Jetée calls itself a photo-roman. It is something between cinema, comic books, photo albums, radio drama and storytelling. And it’s a perfect marriage of form and content, this “story of a man marked by an image of his childhood,” an image of someone dying on the pier at Orly Airport, an image that is actually two images: he also remembers a woman’s lovely face. The man is one of a small number of survivors of World War III, forced to live underground due to poisonous levels of radiation on the planet’s surface. Because his fixation on this childhood image is so acute, so powerful, some rather sinister scientists select the man for an experiment in time travel, a way “to call past and future to the rescue of the present.”

Marker was inspired in part by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and the homage made explicit by a scene in which the man and a woman, just like Scotty and Madeleine, examine the rings in an old tree as a way to read time. Like Vertigo, La Jetée is about projection and morbid nostalgia, about the desire to fashion the current object of one’s affection into a copy of someone long-lost—and in both films, the current object of affection and the long-lost love are the same person. The woman is played by Hélène Chatelain, an actress about whom I know little, but whose screen presence, whose captivating ability to transmit thought and emotion in just a handful of still images, is absolutely essential to the haunting power of La Jetée. There is a sequence, which could be memory or dream, in which the man remembers watching the woman sleep, the images of her slumbering head draped in light shadows, dissolving one into the other until that astonishing moment when this photo-roman, ever so fleetingly, becomes motion picture.

from Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

So this singular little masterpiece of French cinema is a genre film, a work of science fiction—another reason to love it. It could be a Philip K. Dick story. And it inevitably became a major influence on subsequent films, most obviously 12 Monkeys (1995), which Edmonton's Metro Cinema will be screening as a double-feature with La Jetée on May 24th, and which is essentially a big-budget, star-studded, elaborately designed extrapolation of La Jetée, though there are many, many others. (An eerie coincidence: between watching La Jetée and 12 Monkeys on DVD at home, I went out to a screening of Je t’aime, Je t’aime, Alain Resnais’ rarely seen 1968 film, which I bought a ticket to for no other reason than it’s being a rarely seen Resnais. I knew absolutely nothing about it. But my jaw dropped when about ten minutes in I realized it was about a guy haunted by an event from his past who’s selected by a group of scientists for an experiment in time travel! Also, for the record, it is deeply creepy, intermittently baffling, and very, very good.)

Maybe coming right off of the narrative elegance and emotional complexity of Chris Marker (and Alain Resnais) spoiled me. Maybe I’ll just never completely get the ostensible appeal of Terry Gilliam’s trademark cartooniness, his Dutch angles and bulbous long-lens close-ups. (This cartooniness strikes me as much more controlled and effective in what’s widely accepted as Gilliam’s masterpiece, 1985’s Brazil.) Maybe, no matter how much I’ve grudgingly come to admire his work in recent years, I’ll never stop feeling annoyed when Brad Pitt acts “crazy” and surrenders to that fidgety finger flinging he does when he seems to not know what else to do. (And yes, Pitt was nominated for an Oscar for this.) Maybe all of the above and other biases dulled my experience, but 12 Monkeys left me underwhelmed. The film utilizes every essential aspect of La Jetée’s story, yet seems to have misplaced that story’s soul.

That paucity of soul certainly can’t be blamed on any lack of woundedness being conveyed by Bruce Willis, in the role that seems to define his battered and bruised, vulnerable macho man persona. (He actually gets pretty hysterical at points.) And it’s hardly as though there’s any lack of imaginative production design: those cavernous, at times seemingly infinite interiors; the frost-encrusted post-apocalyptic surface ruins overrun by wildlife (who apparently aren’t affected by radiation?); the subterranean cages in vertical rows that make it look like living in the future will be like being trapped in a mine for your entire life. (Though all of these locations are weirdly over-lit, or just ugly-lit.) Perhaps it’s simply that, for all its 129 minutes of impressive spectacle, 12 Monkeys never takes the time to stop time, to suspend us in a single moment-image like the one that marks the man. Perhaps the only way to travel through time is to learn how to be truly still. 

                               

Magic Markers

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness...” These words, spoken by a woman never seen or named, and, rather briefly, the image these words describe, constitute the vestibule of Sans Soleil (1983), a film so devoutly forged upon inspired impulse and seductive digression as to result in a something like a labyrinth of sound and image. It’s a film I long to get lost in. The woman comments on, or reads directly from, letters she’s received from a vagabond cameraman named Sandor Krasna, over a dizzyingly diverse, rhythmically varied stream of images, presumably taken or compiled by Krasna. We visit Japan, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Île-de-France, San Francisco, and, of course, Iceland. So maybe Sans Soleil is a travelogue, maybe an essay, maybe amateur anthropology. It’s associative and lyrical, playful and meditative. We circle themes of memory and history, time and its ceaselessness. There are continual leaps in editing, sudden freeze-frames, and the fleeting, rebellious thrill that arises when a subject looks directly at the camera. Sans Soleil is one of the best-known works of the reclusive 90 year-old polymath who calls himself Chris Marker. It feels like a hazy miracle, daring you to slip in and out of concentrated states of viewing, demanding repeat viewings. You can now watch it over and over again on blu-ray, thanks to a gorgeous new disc from the Criterion Collection that collects both it and Marker’s other most famous work, the masterful, haunting, equally sui generis “photo-roman” about traveling back in time before World War III, La Jetée (1962), aka, for a lot of people my age, the film that inspired 12 Monkeys (1995).

Revisiting Sans Soleil for the first time in years, what the film now reminds me of most is W.G. Sebald’s uncategorizable literary masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. We have the intimate voice that’s mostly talking about others, the rigorous wandering, the compulsive thought-detours into subjects such as street parades, video games, holidays, revolutions and military coups, panda death, Vertigo, television, Jean Jacques Rousseau, volcanic ash, public sleeping, Apocalypse Now, wildlife, the absence of adjectives in Japanese poetry, and large-scale advertising: “pictures larger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.” It’s a film for those who feel at home everywhere but at home, who are fascinated by the sacred-exotic, who want to remember everything even though they know perfectly well that memory’s really just the lining of forgetting. Or it’s for anyone drawn to the essence of movies, because that’s also what Sans Soleil is essentially about. In one of Criterion’s superb supplements filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin describes Sans Soleil as “a secret map.” Which again calls to mind the travelogue, except that Marker’s navigational skills are all tied up in the facilitation of his wanderlust. Which has guided him through a long career that embraces many forms, formats and themes. He’s still at it, some 60 years after helping to found the Left Bank movement, still embracing new technologies, still merging the very personal with the global, the political, the arcane. And he’s still too little known. My wish list for future Criterion releases? More Marker, please!

PS: Random cool thing I found via Wikipedia: the full text for Sans Soleil.

Prince of dumbness

Making even the Middle East safe for budget-busting spectacle cinema, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is the invasion we were all waiting for. Today’s empires don’t colonize but rather colon-ize. This video game adaptation with the long-winded title, the colon and the words that follow presumably promising abundant sequels, sweeps viewers off to CGI-enhanced ancient lands and holy cities and holy shit is it ever devoid of new ideas. The opening anonymous voice-over actually begins with the words, “Long ago, in a land far away…” (You mean, um, Iran?) Three different scenarists, not to mention Jordan Mechner, the video game’s author, actually got paid to write that.

Jake Gyllenhaal, who has never before been such a dry screen presence, plays this street rat who gets plucked from a life of scavenging by a benevolent polygamist king and grows up to be this disturbingly inflated, giant-necked super-acrobat and ultimate fighting champ with L.A. rocker hair and stubble and a distractingly hazy British accent. Ben Kingsley’s his uncle, always looking a little fishy, wearing too much eye liner, and talking too smart for his own good. An unsanctioned invasion transpires, the king is killed by a cloak soaked in something flammable, and Jake takes the rap. With the help of Bond-girl Gemma Arterton’s ornery princess and a time-reversing knife, Gyllenhaal of course sets the record straight and saves the day. The fevered dumbness and political obliviousness wouldn’t be so bad if things weren’t so punishingly generic.

About the only thing that makes Prince of Persia relatively diverting is Alfred Molina, who keeps turning up with his entourage of black guys who don’t get to talk much. Molina mostly complains a lot about taxes but goes wild for ostriches, whom he races and kisses while fretting over their habitual depressions. Molina’s clearly been given a lot of room to stretch out with this potentially negligible supporting role, and that’s about the smartest thing director Mike Newell does here, taking his orders from the Jerry Bruckheimer/Disney juggernaut. The camera whips around a lot yet Newell can’t seem to piece together a scene with any real coherence, particularly when there’s a lot of action to track, often resorting to excessive slow-motion to cover the lack of useful coverage. Newell’s made some actual movies before, most notably Donnie Brasco and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but in joining the ranks of Michael Bay he’s managed to completely erase any sense of directorial personality. Given that video games, to my knowledge, don’t employ directors, you have to wonder if soon enough movies like Prince of Persia won’t save a few bucks and simply be helmed by robots.

Bruising my religion: Year One shows daring, lacks bite

It’s left ambiguous as to whether the forbidden fruit consumed by portly Paleolithic hunter Zed (Jack Black) near the start of Year One actually bestow its eaters with divine knowledge. But it’s worth noting that after gobbling these honey-dipped orbs, which resemble Christmas tree ornaments and seem to possess hallucinogenic properties, Zed will question his people’s most deeply rooted beliefs, invent applause, and resolve a riot that threatens to topple Sodom. (He’ll also, apparently, travel through time.) Zed’s exile from his brethren may not lead him to found his promised “Muscle Tribe of Danger and Excellence,” but with the aid of his slight young sidekick Oh (Michael Cera), he will be present for a numerous quasi-historical events such as Cain’s slaying of Abel, the ideation of circumcision, and Abraham’s near-slaying of Isaac, the sacrifice prevented not by God’s intervention but Zed’s. It’s no wonder Oh, encouraged by Zed’s precocious doubts, begins questioning the existence of God altogether.

If Year One focused more on Zed and Oh’s pursuit of skepticism and heresy it may have been more satisfying as a narrative while maintaining it’s good natured, amusingly picaresque tone. (Maybe we could have had a smarter, more entertaining and less condescending version of Religulous.) But writer/director Harold Ramis and co-scripters Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg have opted to shuffle almost aimlessly from gag to gag, and few of these gags would work at all were it not for the fun duo of Black and Cera, whose pairing invokes a sort of reverse Quixote and Panza, though neither of them seem to break a sweat here. (Maybe they should have let Black sing something. He's got metal hair and everything.) Whether eating shit, nearly getting sodomized by Sodomites, or getting car sick from riding in a donkey-drawn cart that goes slower than pedestrians, there’s a lot that’s almost funny.

Comedy, especially of the dopier variety, is dependent on timing, and I think if Year One fails to generate the desired number of laughs—the audience I watched it with certainly seemed more sedate than one would expect for such fare—it may also simply come down to basic directorial and editorial choices. Judging from the number of scenes that cut out just as something spectacular is ostensibly about to happen—such as Oh getting rescued by Zed from becoming lunch for snakes or cougars—its possible Ramis, rather than being willfully elliptical, simply lacked coverage. Yet it’s just as likely that the coverage he did get just didn’t serve the scenes. There are numerous dialogue sequences comprised of far too many close-ups, and as Ramis keeps cutting from one to another it seemed to me that something in the comedy was getting lost, or at least severely dissipated in the lack of interplay. But its equally true that the brand of comedy that distinguishes Year One may just be too stale for 2009, a sensibility, replete with casual homophobia, so outdated they actually resorted to putting a blooper reel over the credits, a technique that even Jackie Chan has surely abandoned.

Space issues: Star Trek

“Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,” so states a flustered Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) en route to the heavens in Star Trek. Yet while Bones’ assessment sounds right, those vacuous descriptives don’t really jive with the colossal spectacle of director J.J. Abrams’ film, a fully loaded throwback/re-conception of the beloved 1960s television series with the bountiful offspring. For two solid hours, darkness and silence are held at bay by explosions that dazzle and bellow in the galactic depths and heated debates between crewmembers that echo unnervingly throughout the starship Enterprise.

It starts with plenty of death and one conspicuous birth. I guess it can’t be helped when a lady goes into labour at the precise moment that her husband chooses to sacrifice himself for the survival of millions while under attack, but it sure leaves her son, one James T. Kirk, with a serious case of survivor’s guilt, which will manifest as arrogance self-destructive behaviour when he grows into a young man (Chris Pine). Meanwhile, another troublesome legacy brews when Vulcan dad meets human mom (Winona Ryder!), generating a half-breed burdened with finding the balance between paternal logic and maternal emotion. Baby Spock will grow into a seductively smart and ambitious young fellow (Zachary Quinto) who’ll serve as the perfect foil for the wild, undisciplined Kirk. These guys barely make it into space before unfathomable terror causes their antagonistic tendencies to flare up and only gradually settle into the collaboration necessary to save the universe from some ireful Romulans in possession of some red matter that makes black holes and kills off entire planets in the blink of an eye.

As I watched Star Trek with a capacity audience, I actually heard some people behind me hyperventilate, usually upon the first appearance of some familiar character with a new face. Full disclosure: I am not one of these people, but, breathing disruptions aside, I know there are millions of you out there and, presumably, unless you had to be hospitalized during the first ten minutes, you’ve all seen the movie by now. I can’t speak for Trekkies, but it seems to me that Abrams’ film, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, whom Abrams worked with on Alias, walks a pretty fine line between homage and camp. Pine and Quinto give engaging, original and fairly nuanced performances, even if Pine succumbs to his own version of Shatneresque excess on occasion. But a number of others work so arduously to invoke the mannerisms of the original cast that it feels like parody, an effect that’s heightened still further by some pretty one-dimensional villains.

This tension between reverence for the old Star Trek and the thirst for innovation is mirrored in an uncertain overall tone. With a plot that hinges on wildly implausible/poetic coincidences (just wait until you see how they manage to wrangle Leonard Nimoy into this thing), this Star Trek feels at times cut from the blunt stencils of ancient myth, yet at others it’s imbued with the clarity and psychology of a very modern, textured drama. I guess there was no way of avoiding any kind of Star Trek that wouldn't get tangled up in trying to be many things to many people. But whatever it is, this Star Trek is relentlessly entertaining, has sequences of striking beauty and otherworldly strangeness, and speaks to the sort of old-fashioned heroism rarely invoked with any conviction anymore.

Spanish stratagems: Timescrimes, King of the Hill

It is the province of smarter science fiction makers to invest as deep if not an even deeper sense of wonder in the simplest, most familiar apparatus as they would the monolithic machines of elaborate fantasy. In Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímines), a pair of binoculars becomes just such a vessel of intrigue. When Héctor (Karra Elejalde), having recently moved into his country house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández), begins to explore the peripheries of his property with his binoculars, it is as though the bizarre, mind-boggling journey he will soon set upon has already begun. And of course, it has already begun.

The mysterious phone call; the sight of a pretty girl undressing in the woods; the upturned dumpster and abandoned bike by the side of the road; the mute, scissors-wielding maniac whose face is obscured by a pink bandage: all of these items which pull us so deftly into this story are luring the curious, casually voyeuristic Héctor into a trap whose genesis will prove unusually elusive, even by the standards of more synapse-sparking sci-fi. The chain of causality in Héctor’s spiral into misfortune, injury and alienation from his own existence remains to the very end impossible to trace back—though god knows Héctor himself tries arduously to figure it out.

Before I confuse you too much, let me clarify that Timecrimes is, as you might guess, a movie about time travel. (And before you read on, I'll warn you that it's kinda hard to decide what a spoiler is in Timecrimes, so read as your own discretion.) But rather than hurl its protagonist centuries into the past or eons into some far-flung future, Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s pretty ingenious and hugely sinister little feature debut tosses hapless Héctor a mere couple of hours back, which results in tremendous havoc. He catches sight of his own double doing everything he did two hours ago. He’s told by the mysterious lab technician (Vigalondo himself) who got him into this nightmare scenario, whose own motives are kept pretty obscure by the sweaty urgency of the story, not to interfere with what is, so to speak, deigned to pass. So Héctor, clumsy, middle-aged, overweight and easily exhausted, must run around frantically setting up reenactments of things that haven’t happened yet. Suffering from a persistent disconnect between seeing and being, he becomes tangled in a loop. The craziest part of it is that the avalanche of weird shit that got him into this mess is now rendered as echoes of their own internal continuum of events.

Newly out on DVD from Mongrel, Timecrimes is all action and often chillingly hilarious, a hybrid of an especially well-oiled The Twilight Zone episode and some especially physically taxing silent comedy. It manages to stay compelling even when you can see exactly where it’s going. Naysayers could make a case for it’s being a movie about little more than its own geometries. There’s talk of an American remake, and with the right talent—Cronenberg has been rumoured—I could certainly see how Vigalondo’s premise could be imbued with some darker layers of psychology. But you could just as easily laud the film for this very same sort of purity. It sets up an intricate network of activities that need to be fulfilled and deposits the utterly committed Elejalde into the thick of it like some poor, out-of-shape gerbil in some cosmically forbidding exercise wheel.

Like Héctor, Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is an errant Spaniard who stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up caught in a stratagem whose design or purpose is obscure. King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) begins with Quim getting robbed by some hot young babe (Maria Valverde) in the washroom of Spain’s most desolate gas station. At first it seems like he might be finding himself the antihero of some sexy, fatalistic rural neo-noir. He should be so lucky! By chasing after the girl and getting lost in some unpopulated mountain range, he’s actually slipping into a rethink of Deliverance or Duel, the randomly selected mark of some unseen maniac hunter with a rifle, scope, pooch and predilection for tormenting his prey.

King of the Hill is out on the Dimension Extreme DVD imprint, though I’m not sure what’s all that extreme about it save for a few particularly nasty looking wounds. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego from a script by Javier Gullón, the film shares Timecrimes’ unfussy, action-oriented rigour but lacks its wit and eye for odd detial. López-Gallego uses the bleak location well and cranks up tension with his insistence on tight shots that fragment the action and disorient the viewer at precisely those moments when we’re grasping for some visual context. But while its simplicity can be read as a virtue, the film is so miserly with exposition that it risks long stretches given over to not much more than scrambling around, panting and crying out in pain and desperation and not much else. We do eventually get some hints at what sort of twisted creature has fixed Quim in its sights, but the little we do learn winds up feeling rather trite. Maybe it would have helped if Quim could have gone back in time and wound up with Don Siegel, or maybe John Boorman or Walter Hill in their 1970s prime as his puppet master.