It's not just me - Part 1

“Star Trek Into Darkness”: Who made J.J. Abrams the sci-fi god? - Salon.com

Readers will know I don't care for the directorial work of JJ Abrams, so it's good to read a review by a critic who seems pretty lukewarm on him too.   (He's enjoyed him more than me, though. I think.)

I'm also lukewarm on the new version of Star Trek, and was bored with Abram's first effort. 

This new movie has good reviews, but after reading Andrew O'Hehir's, I don't think I'll bother seeing it.

O'Hehir's review is pretty witty, if you ask me.  It ends on this note, for example:

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Star Trek Into Darkness” – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing. (Here’s something to appreciate about Abrams: This is a classic PG-13 picture, with little or no sex or swearing, but one that never condescends.) That’s the way almost everyone will experience it, and fair enough. Still, if you feel like bitching about it, come on over. We’ll crack a couple of watery brews and complain (in Klingon) about Uhura’s ill-fitting romance with Spock, or Chris Pine’s frat-boy weightlifter Kirk, who completely lacks the air of provincial, semi-educated suavity that made William Shatner the greatest bad actor in TV history. Or the fact that those in charge of the “Star Trek” universe could have entrusted its rebirth to someone who actually liked it.

Things achieved on a long weekend

* Unblocked the Vacumaid via the application of the old (normal) vacuum cleaner to the inlet that was not sucking. My handyman (handyperson?) credentials have soared, but from a very low base.

* Went to Lifeline Bookfest, and about the first thing I spotted, sitting in a face up position, was volume 1 of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. Purchased for $3, I doubt I will venture past this volume, but having read Greene's short autobiography of the first part of his life last year, I'm curious to see what he left out. See, I told you that the Bookfest was great.

* Saw Super 8. I'm surely not the first to say it, but it's "ET with teeth and a bad temper." I thought it was not bad, but not likely to linger long in memory; still, it's probably the best JJ Abrams movie I have seen. You see, long time readers know I have a problem with him, and dammit, he's still doing it.

He's the Director of the Giant Faces, who seems to think you need to be able to see skin pores to understand the emotion of a scene.

I get tired of pointing this out. Someone - Spielberg, his wife, his dog - I don't care who it is - tell him to frame a shot and then pull back half way and re-compose it. It is just the Abrams rule of thumb that will never let you down - "you are too close."

Anyway, as many reviewers noted, the young teenage(?) actors are really good, and the script as a homage to early Spielberg is quite good too. I liked the ideas better than the execution; but that always seems to be my fate with JJ Abrams.

* Taught the children how to play poker, as well as Pig. (I only found Pig as an adult in a Hoyles book, but it is a remarkably good party game for kids and adults.)

Sorry, but JJ Abrams just cannot direct for a big screen

Three years ago, I complained about JJ Abram's claustrophobic direction style in Mission Impossible 3. I just got back from the Star Trek movie, and I reckon Abrams hasn't learnt a thing. Everything I said in 2006 still stands:

It seems he is inordinately fond of close to medium length shots, where it looks like the camera is no more than a few meters from the actors.

This is fine for some sequences, where it can help rack up the tension, especially in the opening scene. But after 30 minutes or so, I really found myself wondering why this movie was shot so tight for so long. Especially during the action sequences, I longed for wider shots to make better sense of what was going on around Cruise.

There is also a quasi-handheld sort of style for all of the action sequences. It's not exactly jittery, but I did start longing for smoother camera movement in many sequences, and less choppy editing.

The point is, he simply seems to insist on composing shots like he's shooting TV (in fact, for TV of 20 years ago before it went all supersize and widescreen.) Longer shots are never held for very long before it's back to giant faces filling the screen. I swear, any actress with concerns about the size of her pores ought to avoid working him at all costs.

Why do so few critics seem to notice this? Why doesn't crap editing of action sequences (again in abundant evidence here) get up more noses? Full marks to Jim Schembri in The Age though for saying it clear:

... Star Trek sports some of the worst cinematography ever featured in a blockbuster as crash zooms, swish pans and epileptic-like editing reduce many of the action scenes to indistinct blurs.

Did I enjoy it despite this? Well, it was just OK. The actors did pretty well, but sadly I did not find the story particularly innovative or touching. (Bryan Appleyard found himself tearing up during it. I am sure medication could help.)

But the main lesson is: keep Abrams away from that widescreen format.

Late comments on the Last Jedi

Yes, I know you've all been waiting for my opinion on this.  No?  I don't care, you're getting it anyway.

I thought it was just OK.  Let's do this in dot form, and I guess you might not want to read it if you still haven't seen it:

*   For a movie for which I had taken much effort to avoid reading spoilers, I found there was a disappointing lack of important ones.   And did everyone like me suspect that Leia was going to be killed off (perhaps via a late re-write), given the unfortunate demise of Carrie Fisher?   Speaking of her, I have to note this, if I haven't before in this blog:  her voice/accent in both Force Awakens and this one did bother me.  In the original movies, I thought she strived for something a bit mid-Atlantic (it helps to sound a bit British if you are playing royalty, after all.)  But in the revivals, she has sounded like she had spent the intervening years is some smoky New York bar roughening up her throat.   I didn't care for the effect.

*   It's a more than a bit embarrassing to admit, but I do get some of the alt.right-ish backlash against the number of women in the movie.  What's been going on in the Resistance?   Did they start sacrificing men to some volcano or something?   Were the members of the Rebellion who didn't bother turning up at the end all guys who got sick of the positive discrimination policies under Leia?   "Ha!  I got overlooked for promotion 6 times for ethnic girls who kept flunking their X Wing course before they lowered the standards, and you think I'm coming running when you need me?"

Really, I quite liked the multi-cultural-ing of Force Awakens, and  Rogue One, and didn't mind that they had female leads, but with the increase in the number of women in (what seems)  every single scene in Last Jedi,  I thought the politically correct motivations are starting to look just too obvious.   That, along with the key theme that "men are too impulsive and gun happy to understand strategy and are going to get us all killed", and even the morally ambiguous position of Luke Skywalker through most of the film, all indicate a serious case of over-compensation for the lack of female roles in the first three movies.  (By which I mean, movies 4 to 6.)    In fact, not that I care at all about the prequels, but I would guess the amount of female presence in the Star Wars series if graphed would look something like this:

(Sorry I misspelt Abrams)

*   I'm not convinced that Rian Johnson is all that good a director, particularly of light sabre fight scenes.  I thought the whole confrontation with Snook's henchmen was very underwhelming, with a set that looked too simple and fight choreography that had too many silly, unnecessary spins and twirls.   I think JJ Abrams did a substantially better job in Force Awakens.

[Gee, this is coming out way more negative than I anticipated.]

*  What did I like?   Some of the jokes were pretty good, and I don't mind the general theme of Luke having a crisis of confidence, given that the Jedi just keep on seeming to stuff things up with some of their decisions.  Mark Hamill was pretty good in the role.    I guess I don't even mind the theme that you don't want to let old style, fundamentalist religion bog you down to seeing what's right and good.    But that also leads to the main problem with the film:

*  The on-going problem with the series is that it can't seem to decide on the nature of the Force, or give a coherent account of it in terms of evil.  Yes, it has a theodicy problem.

It is almost certainly not worth over-analysing a nebulous term written by a young director with a vague idea of inserting a mystical element into his fantasy universe, but when you read articles like this one (a semi defence of the awful idea of the Force as mediated by Midi Chlorians) you can see that writers and viewers of the movies have been trying to make sense of it, but failing.

This article in The Atlantic discusses the substantial change in the nature of the Force in this latest movie.  I suppose that, in principle, I don't mind the democratising idea that anyone can be a Jedi (or use the Force), but it does just seem to come out of nowhere, doesn't it?    I mean, if the series had done something like have a Buddha or Christ figure who, at some sort of universal level, had come to bring the Force to all, that would make sense?  But the sort of burbling on by Luke, Rey and even Yoda (although I was pleased to see him, and in puppet form), just didn't do near enough to clear up the change.  Or the nature of the Force.

Another in depth discussion of the movie by David Roberts explains that he felt the movie kept indicating it wanted to make a clean break from a good/evil dichotomy, but eventually pulls back from it.   I'm not sure I agree - I think the movie just leaves the nature of the Force vis a vis good and evil more confused than ever.

I don't know whether this will ever be capable of proper resolution.  I fear it would take some character to sit down and give a 20 minute lecture to clear up the matter, and it's not going to happen.

*  But anyway, it's not completely forgettable, like the prequels.  It's probably fair to say I enjoyed it at the time of viewing more than this analysis would indicate, but some movies do suffer a bit when you think about them too much.



  

At last - Mission:Impossible 3

I finally got to see MI3 tonight. My comments:

Good points: script is quite good really. The acting is more even than in previous M:I movies, and in fact I would say Cruise and Phillip S Hoffman actually do very good acting, within the limits of this kind of material. Exotic locations are used (although shown very briefly - see my comments below,) and there is very seamless and unintrusive use of computer effects. (You know that certain things can't be being done "for real", but it is almost impossible to tell where the artifice begins. For example, one very cleverly done scene almost makes you believe those super realistic rubber masks could really work. There is also a jumping off a building sequence which - at least initially, before the editing starts cutting it up too much - looks as real as it possibly could.) The movie has some (limited) humour, and some scenes of human warmth, and in that sense is more "realistic" than M:I1. However, its tone is darker, with a genuinely sadistic villain, and as such ends up being not as much fun.

But, there is a lot to like.

Bad or distracting points: the direction. For the last few years, I have seen very few one hour shows on TV. I am therefore unfamiliar with the popular work of JJ Abrams. However, direction of M:I3 is claustrophobic, for want of a better term. It seems he is inordinately fond of close to medium length shots, where it looks like the camera is no more than a few meters from the actors.

This is fine for some sequences, where it can help rack up the tension, especially in the opening scene. But after 30 minutes or so, I really found myself wondering why this movie was shot so tight for so long. Especially during the action sequences, I longed for wider shots to make better sense of what was going on around Cruise.

There is also a quasi-handheld sort of style for all of the action sequences. It's not exactly jittery, but I did start longing for smoother camera movement in many sequences, and less choppy editing.

I hate overly fast editing. It is, to my mind, the major problem with younger action movie directors since the 1990's, and is the special "trademark" of directors who have come from an advertising or music video background. (I especially despise it in dance and musical numbers, where it takes away all sense of the quality of the dancing itself.) M:I3's action sequences are nearly all edited too quickly (especially parts of the Shanghai sequences,) but (fortunately) not so quickly as to ruin the movie.

I mentioned in an earlier post how well I thought Brian De Palma directed the first M:I movie, and it was this more "traditional" style of direction and editing that I missed.

I don't think I have (yet) read any reviewer who has mentioned the "tightness" of so many of the shots, which I find surprising. (To me, it seemed such an obvious and distracting feature of Abram's style.) Slate's review did say: "The action scenes are thrilling in the modern, quick-cut, disorienting way." I can agree with that.

Overall: I have lingered on the downside for too long. Many people don't notice this sort of thing anyway. And overall, I was happy to have seen it and would happily see another M:I installment. Still, M:I 1 stands clearly ahead as my favourite. The less said about M:I 2 the better, although it does help M:I 3 look very good by comparison.

UPDATE: It's not just me. Here's one reviewer (who really didn't like the movie at all):

It's filmed almost entirely in close-ups and medium shots, in extremely shallow focus with no depth of field. (It's something of a sick joke that Abrams elected to use the extra-wide CinemaScope aspect ratio, as he tends to obscure or blur out anything that isn't smack dab in the center of the frame.) There's no oomph to the images, and the monotonous, confusingly edited action scenes just lie there, dead.

I don't agree that the action sequences "lie dead"; I just thought they could have been better with a different director. But certainly, he seems to have almost no interest in the composition of shots.

In other science fiction news

*  I see that old Galaxy magazines are available to read on the internet now.   Might be stuff of  nostalgic interest in there, but reading quaintly out of date predictions of the future does seem an exercise not really worth devoting too much time to.

* There was an interview with author Neal Stephenson in Vanity Fair recently that I forgot to link to.  I've never read him, but he apparently is given much credit in Silicon Valley for predicting things:

In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”

The interview is short, but of interest.

*  The Disney Star Wars additions to their theme parks do sound like they will be fun.  

*  One of the more intriguing sounding science fiction movies due out later this year is God Particle, written by JJ Abrams and (apparently) part of the Cloverfield franchise - even though the synopsis at Wikipedia makes it sound rather unrelated.   One of the most surprising things about it - Chris O'Dowd stars.  (As an astronaut, I presume.  Hard to imagine!)

My Mission Impossible reservations

OK, just got back from Mission Impossible 7, which has a remarkably high Rottentomatoes score (96%), but a more realistic 80% on Metacritic, and I have to say it was enjoyable enough, but I still wish it wasn't Christopher McQuarrie directing.     

From what I can gather, he is more like a collaborator with Cruise than a mere director, coming up with ideas for whole sequences.   And it's not that he's incompetent, exactly; it's just that, as with the last MI movie (which also was overly praised in reviews), I find myself often thinking that action sequences could have been shot in more interesting ways, to give the audience a better spatial understanding of what is going on, and with longer takes and less choppy editing.   (I doubt it is really the editors fault rather than the director's - and I assume they work closely together anyway.)

This is now the third in the series he has directed, and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed his first (No 5), but I really recall very little of the last one, except for the fact I found myself critiquing the direction and editting.

I think 7 is better than 6, perhaps because of a key likeable new character, and it is a huge relief to have the malevolent danger not a nuclear bomb or virus, but something that is extremely topical and (given the AI doomerism of the last 6 months) actually pretty plausible for a movie of this type.   But it was talkier than I expected, and during those scenes, I also found myself thinking McQuarrie has a touch of the JJ Abrams issue of filling the movie screen with giant faces, as if we were only only looking at a TV screen.    

Gee, I'm sounding more negative than I feel I intended.   It's a good movie, just not a great one.

And I still think the best in the series were the ones most stylishly and creatively directed:  the first (yay, Brian de Palma) and fourth (poor old Brad Bird, who seems to have sunk out of view.)  Pity if McQuarrie had an accident and had to hand over direction to someone else.   Because we all know: Spielberg collaborating with Cruise one last time - what a dream that would be.  Can't Putin arrange a window push if I ask him nicely?   (Just from a first or second floor - no need to actually kill him, a broken leg might be enough.) 

But I guess my nasty imagination won't be fulfilled, and I will be back to see the last MI movie, with McQuarrie at the helm, so I can continue grumbling about his style one more time.  

Update:  I re-watched (for the first time) MI 5 - Rogue Nation last night.   It really was a good film, with a good script (co-written by McQuarrie) and my only persistent reservation being the silliness of the idea that security access information would be stored in a giant water tank.  But the underwater sequence is nonetheless stressful to watch.

I think a large part of the reason I didn't like 6 was due to the whole "been there, done that" scenario of  "we're back to terrorists wanting to let off nuclear bombs, to no clear purpose".    And I still think the helicopter action at the end was poorly edited.  

   

Force awakened

Just saw the new Star Wars - which is a more literal way of putting it than you might think, if you haven't been reading the reviews.

On the down side, I did have to suppress a scream due to a key plot feature which I warned the world would disappoint me.   But on the upside, the film is in most respects more Empire that Wars, in that the key action and drama is more one-on-one, human-centric, than on the "X Wings versus yet another gigantic space ball weapon" scale.

Yes, Christopher Orr was right:  the movie is pretty much a "mashup masterpiece"; and so was the more cynical  Anthony Lane (who pretty obviously enjoyed it anyway) when he writes that the movie "feels young" and "as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip."  (It really does seem to take only about 3/4 of its actual length, and the pacing always feels just right.)

Yeah, I have to give JJ Abrams his due:  this is pretty well directed. And well scripted - there's an air of mature credibility to much of the dialogue that is so refreshing after the terrible lines in the prequels.

So while I did enjoy it for what it is, the best thing is perhaps that this is all the mashup-ery that is really possible in the series, so that the next movie must surely have to tread some new ground.  They can't just recycle Empire, can they?  It's my new hope that they can't.  (Heh...)

[And on a "meta" observation:  this has been a huge, huge year for movie franchises that have revisited their past.  Certainly, there was a large element of it in Spectre; and with Mission Impossible, it was once again a case of Hunt having to defy the authorities and work in some sort of unauthorised ghost-like mode.   Jurassic World was in many respects rather like the first, but with hundreds of victims in a cooler looking mega park.   The trouble is, as much as I would like a bit more originality, I enjoyed all of them a great deal, and they all were pretty huge hits.  I guess we only have ourselves to blame if we don't get more plot novelty.]

Caution urged

I'm getting rather concerned that the new Star Wars film may be being burdened by the extraordinarily high expectations of the public.   Can it live up to its hype?

I'm not really the Star Wars nerd that some other middle aged men (and women) seem to be.   The first movie was good and ground breaking in several ways;  the second was terrific; unfortunately the promise was squibbed in the third.   The prequels are notable for many things, but none of them positive:   Lucas' tin ear for dialogue; his tin ear for mythology after all, with the strange quasi-demolition of the mysticism of the Force via the "midi chlorian" explanation ( I am betting the new movie tries to forget completely about that - and Jar Jar Binks); and of course the un-engaging results of making adventure movies with way too much CGI.

But yes, I am relatively keen to see the new movie, although I think my expectations are realistically lower than those of many.   (I am not convinced that JJ Abrams is that good a director - but everyone's so relieved it's not George, it may hardly matter.)

Anyhow, I was thinking this morning:  what things would really disappoint me in the new film?  Here are a few ideas:

*  if it ends with an X Wing attack on a new and deadly space based weapon, I'll scream.  That's what made Return of the Jedi a dull re-write of the first film:  it must not happen again.

* any mention of midi chlorians (see above);

* a CG  army of Yoda clones (although I would be slightly amused if some sort of long lost loser son of his turned up and had to learn the way of the Force from aging Luke - as long as the son is a puppet, not pixels);

*  a set of Chewbacca pups could be funny too, as long as they make a brief appearance only;

*  no ewoks, please.

Lane on the monster that ate New York

Monstrous Times: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

Anthony Lane writes a witty review of Cloverfield, and although he seems to have found it somewhat silly fun, the whole concept of the movie (Blair Witch meets Godzilla, as several other critics have said) leaves me cold.

JJ Abrams is over-rated as a creative force, I reckon.

Significant movie news

At last!   Some confirmation that Spielberg is about to start shooting his next movie:

The Steven Spielberg-directed Cold War era movie is currently taking over the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Signs for the previously untitled project, now going by St. James Place, began popping up around the area surrounding the Manhattan Bridge this week, and this morning about two blocks have been taken over by the production.
The film will star Tom Hanks, Amy Ryan, Eve Hewson, Alan Alda, and others. According to a Variety report from June:

"DreamWorks and Disney have dated the Cold War spy thriller for Oct. 16, 2015. Joel and Ethan Coen came on board last month to write the script, which Marc Platt and Kristie Macosko Krieger will produce with Spielberg. The Coen Brothers, who won screenwriting Oscars for Fargo and No Country for Old Men, are revising Matt Charman’s script."

The movie is based on the true story of attorney James Donovan (Hanks), who was "enlisted by the CIA during the Cold War to surreptitiously negotiate the 1962 release of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot who was shot down over Russia two years earlier." During his lifetime, Donovan also negotiated deals with Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion,
counseled during the Nuremberg Trials, and in 1962 was backed by Kennedy for as the Democratic candidate for a New York Senate seat (which he lost to Jacob Javits). In the late 1960s, he was the President of Pratt Institute.

 Sounds quite interesting, no?

In non Spielberg related news, I also noticed this week that the new James Bond will be directed again by Sam Mendes, who I thought did a very classy (and distinctive looking) job with Skyfall.  Shooting starts in December, for release in November 2015.  

Then, in December, will be the release of the new Star Wars film.  I don't hold any particularly high hopes for that, as I think JJ Abrams is a poor director.    Possibly better than George Lucas, though.  At least, it would appear, he is limiting the amount of CGI, which is a good thing.

The end of 2015 is going to be pretty full of highly anticipated movies....    

I'm going with "daughter of Luke Skywalker"

J.J. Abrams Says Rey's Parents Not In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Then Clarifies Comments | E! Online

Re-watching Force Awakens this weekend, I'm more convinced than ever that Rey is Luke's daughter.   I would think it likely that Luke inadvertently put mother and child in danger; perhaps the mother was killed, and he decided the only way to protect his daughter was to hide.  I presume he left her in someone's care, but they got killed too?  I have to re-watch the "flashback" scene of Rey again, though...