More Than One Lesson

LEGION (2010)
Directed by: Scott Stewart
Written by: Scott Stewart and Peter Schink
Starring: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Adrianne Palicki, Lucas Black

Boy, oh boy.

Just when you thought you knew everything about Christianity, here comes Legion! You thought angels were bulletproof? WRONG! You thought only demons possessed people? WRONG! You thought Dennis Quaid still had a respectable career? WRONG and WRONG! […]

Avatar – we’ve been hearing about it for ages, and now it’s finally here. We were skeptical, but the response is amazing. Critics are praising writer/director James Cameron’s new epic to a fault. Now it’s being compared to what many consider the greatest science fiction film ever, Star Wars. Ebert equates the two in the first sentence of his celebratory review. The comparison may be a little contrived, since Cameron was pushing it before any of us had a chance to decide for ourselves. But it’s an interesting comparison, and the commonalities between the two hulking sci-fi wonders give it credence. Is Cameron raising the bar in bringing us a new galaxy far, far, away? […]

In this episode, Tyler is joined by filmmaker Josh Long to discuss being a film fan in the Christian community.

JOSH LONG is an actor and filmmaker from central North Carolina, currently living in Los Angeles. He studied theatre at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and attended the Los Angeles Film Studies Center in 2004. A true culture junkie, he invests most of his time in movies, music and literature. He is currently a contributing writer for More Than One Lesson.

GLADIATOR (2000)
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: David Franzoni, John Logan, William Nicholson
Starring: Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris

Ancient Rome is a subject that has captured the imagination of the cinema for years. The pomp and circumstance, the epic war stories, the myths and legends of the Caesars have given us many of cinema’s great films. While they remained popular into the 70s, American movies tended to shy away from Rome for much of the 80s and 90s. But Ridley Scott brought us back to the Coliseum with 2000’s Best Picture winner Gladiator. […]

FANTASTIC MR. FOX (2009)
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Michael Gambon

I think “delightful” is a good word to describe Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. In a time where the animation world is dominated by CG, it’s fun to see a divergence from the norm. In taking on a well-loved classic, Anderson and his team give it a pleasant, whimsical re-imagining.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on the children’s novel of the same name by Roald Dahl of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” fame. Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is a lovable scoundrel trying to steal from three of the meanest farmers around. Things get complicated when the farmers decide to fight back. The cast is mostly woodland creatures; fox, badger, rabbit, weasel, and so on. But we also get some great moments with the evil farmers. The ringleader is voiced by Michael Gambon, who expertly gives us both sinister and hilarious moments. Among the rest of the voice cast we find Wes Anderson regulars such as Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman.

The look of the movie is one of the things that gives it so much charm. The color pallet is full of soothing fall colors, and the landscapes are beautiful in a simple way. That’s the way all the animation is. It goes in the opposite direction from the super-realism attempted in some animation, which gives it a lot more character. It has its own aesthetic as well, coming from relatively unknown animation company MacKinnon and Saunders. And everything in it encourages you to come along for the ride.

The script is simpler than other Anderson films, being based on a children’s book, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting. It still has a recognizable crackle of Wes Anderson/Noah Baumbach dialogue. There are a few moments when the film seems to pop out of its kids genre to throw something to the indie-movie lovers, who will undoubtedly be out in droves.

Because it’s simpler (I wouldn’t call it simple, but simpler), the story is not as compelling or moving as Royal Tenenbaums or Rushmore. Also lending to this is the mere fact that it’s animation on animal faces – you’ll never get the same emotion from an animated image that you would from a true human face. But the movie isn’t trying to change your life, it’s trying to tell a good story in a fun way, and it succeeds.

You’ll see here some of the same “father” themes that regularly pop up in the work of both Anderson and Baumbach, but not to the same degree. The story arc between Mr. Fox and his son Ash (Schwartzman) has a heartfelt setup and a tender pay-off. The character interplay is enough that it will have something for all audiences, even if it doesn’t blow your mind. Anderson’s directing style is also still there, for certain. There are lots of straight-on close-ups, long wide shots, and his typical attention to set design. A scene showing the animals in different levels of the sewer will remind savvy audiences of the presentation of the Belafonte in The Life Aquatic. And as always, there’s lot of great classic rock music, from the Rolling Stones to the Beach Boys.

Some might question whether or not this is a movie for kids, considering the big debate over Where the Wild Things Are this October. I think Mr. Fox will be enjoyable for both kids and adults. The animation is fun, the story is basic enough for kids to follow, and hey, it’s got talking animals. It moves quickly enough that it shouldn’t lose children’s attention. At the same time, the themes are pretty universal, so parents can take something from it, and they’ll get more of the jokes.

It belongs in a different category than his other films, but Fantastic Mr. Fox is still a great offering from Wes Anderson. It’s a fun ride, it might pull at your heartstrings a little bit. I’d say…well, I’d say it’s delightful.

No, Roland Emmerich, you may not have 250 million dollars.

This November’s offering of disaster-movie-maker Roland Emmerich’s most recent disaster movie cost $250 million. This, my friends, is ridiculous. That’s $100 million an hour. To break it down further, every second of 2012 cost about $280,000. Can this possibly be worth it? Is there any way that this movie can justify spending so much money?

Let’s look at the campaign leading up to 2012. For months now (especially if you live in LA), you’ve been seeing posters, bench ads, billboards, all sorts of publicity for the movie. All of it has one thing on the poster – the number 2012. That’s it. The marketing campaign is based on the number 2012. Maybe a sleek minimalist concept to make it fit in with late fall’s Oscar contenders, but let’s take a look at the trailers. They contain almost nothing but disaster scenes. We see nothing but giant waves destroying buildings, monuments, and highways, cars being tossed from side to side, and planes crashing into the ground.

Now after you watch the trailer, what would you think the movie’s about? The world ending, yes. But what else? What’s the plot? What is the story, who are the characters, why does it all matter? There is nothing in the advertising campaign of 2012 to give us any idea of the actual movie, besides that it has lots of very, very expensive disaster scenes. And how do these scenes fit into the story? Lets think about it. We see scenes of destruction in Washington DC, LA, Rome, London, Rio de Janeiro, the Himalayas; the list goes on. Are we to believe that every one of these places has people that are important characters in the movie? Are we to believe that the movie has a good, story or theme based reason to show us destruction in these places?

A good movie comes up with a story and uses plot point to move that story along. What 2012 does is take a plot point and throw a story around it. There’s no way that we need to see the destruction in all these exotic locales. It’s just an excuse to throw in ridiculous special effects and mock ironic scenes (Emmerich has a penchant for showing the world’s most famous monuments being destroyed in fantastic ways – the toppling of the Jesus statue over Rio de Janeiro is a particularly stupid one). It’s a huge two-and-a-half hour gimmick. And it’s not even a new idea. Roland Emmerich has done this before with Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day. It’s not a new addition to the “disaster movie” genre, it’s just the same movie all over again with a different impetus. Is this fair to viewers? Should we be expected to watch a movie with almost two hours of destruction that we’ve already seen?

Yet the trailer only showcases the destruction, and the posters only tell us the name. They’re not even hyping the actors in the movie. John Cusack is playing second billing to “disaster.” Apparently Woody Harrelson’s in it, but there’s nothing telling us anything about that. There is a reason for all this – the makers of 2012 are holding their cards very close to their chests because they know that the movie is terrible. They know that there is nothing in the story, the character, the idea, the themes; nothing anywhere that makes this a redeeming piece of cinema. But they don’t care. They still want you to see it, because they’ve got to make that money back – that 250 million dollars.

Is this what film has become? Filmmakers like this have taken an art form and turned it into some dilapidated industry where they spend piles of money trying to trick audiences to go see something they will not enjoy. Like the three-card monte tricksters of old, they want you to pay them in hopes of getting something they have no intention of delivering. How much money could it really take to make a good movie? Let’s look no further than Paranormal Activity, still flying high at the box office. That’s a great concept and an enjoyable movie. But Roland Emmerich is allowed to spend Paranormal Activity’s entire budget 20 times every second. Does that make any sense? If a quality movie can easily be made for less that $10 million, why are studios still spending so much?

This is a call to both filmmakers and audiences. We can make great films without spending a king’s ransom. Let’s look for quality instead of proven tactics. The age of the blockbuster has been in a stunted state of growth for nearly 20 years. Producers complain that things are shabby at the box office, but only offer pallid regurgitations of what has worked in the past – more sequels, more remakes, more TV shows gone to the silver screen. Time has come for filmmakers to rise to the occasion and make something new, something great, something that defies convention. The cinema is an industry that is pleading for a few brave souls to give it some new life.

And audiences have a responsibility to stop seeing the same old schlock because they need something to do on a Friday night. If people keep paying for bloated over-budget blockbuster clones, producers will keep making them. Like a toddler with a bad habit, if you encourage him, he’ll never stop. Producers can’t be more discerning unless they believe that their audiences will be. And why can’t we? If you know that 2012 is going to be the same movie that you’ve seen Roland Emmerich make twice already, you should stay home. If you want great cinema to survive, you cannot patronize bad cinema.

To be clear – this isn’t a review. I haven’t seen 2012. I haven’t seen it, and I’m telling everyone I know not to see it. I’m sure that the word will spread eventually that it isn’t worth seeing, but by that time, they might already have the money, and we can’t let that happen. The producers desperately want to make the top of the box office in that opening weekend, and if they don’t get it, that’ll send a message. The advertising campaign is all designed so that you don’t know you’re wasting your money until it’s too late. And then they don’t care. They’ll start taking that money and making a new, terrible, waste of a movie.

The people have the power. If the product is bad, don’t buy it. If Roland Emmerich wants to destroy the world again, he shouldn’t be allowed to have $250 million to do it. If 2012 fails miserably, maybe someone will get the message.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2009)
Directed by: Grant Heslov
Written by: Peter Straughan
Starring: George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a comedy about people who have (or think they have) Jedi powers. It has an all-star cast, an interesting concept partially based on reality, and potential to be very funny. All the pieces are there, but are the filmmakers able to put them together?

The movie opens with an intertitle reading “More of this is true than you would believe.” And from the trailers and commercials, we kind of had that idea. It’s a fictional story based on a real life army group called the “First Earth Battalion.” Adapted for the film as the “New Earth Army,” they are a team of “warrior monks” who use New Age techniques as simple as yoga and as wild as psychokinesis. Ewan McGregor takes the role of a journalist who follows Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a member of the New Earth Army, into Iraq on a secret mission. Throughout the mission, we flashback to scenes chronicling the way the battalion began and grew through the 70s and 80s.

Clooney and other characters specifically refer to themselves as “Jedi” which adds a clever joke, since audiences will remember that Ewan McGregor played Obi-wan Kenobi in the recent (terrible) Star Wars prequels. And the idea isn’t totally unbelievable. The real-life First Earth Battalion began as an extension of the “human potential movement” in California, closely associated with hippies, free love, and LSD. That someone would take something as popular as the New Age movement and find in it military applications is not a huge surprise. Clearly it isn’t something that would actually ever go through, and in reality they were never actually endorsed by the US military, as they are in the film.

The cast of quirky characters is fun to watch; Clooney is especially entertaining. His performance will remind viewers more of his O Brother Where Art Thou? days. And there are some great one-liners. But despite an interesting concept and some huge names, the movie falls apart in the third act. Up through the first two I found it enjoyable, if not particularly compelling or challenging. It’s fun, it has a goofy concept behind it, and several good laugh moments. But as the third act begins (it’s a pretty clear break), things start to spin completely out of control.

Without giving too much of the story away, I can say that Clooney and McGregor’s characters are suddenly and inexplicably re-united with the old team (Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey in a joyless and utterly wasted performance). The plot points that continue after this are so unlikely and so unbelievable (even in the context of this unbelievable concept) that I was convinced the main characters were dreaming or hallucinating. But they’re not. The pacing is wrong, the characters don’t act like they should, we rely on character development that hasn’t happened – this is the third act of a terrible movie pasted in after the first two acts of a decent movie.

The rest of the movie keeps us invested because there’s a doubt in our minds whether or not these “Jedi powers” are real. Everything attributed to psychic powers could be explained by natural science, even if it’s a far-fetched coincidence. When the movie stays on the fence this way, it makes the warrior monks so much more interesting. But in the third act it’s as if the movie gives up entirely and falls ungracefully to the wrong side of the fence. I haven’t read the book, but I would guess that this is where the divergence between the real story and the fictional account takes place.

For the first two-thirds I was willing to accept some things that were strange or inexplicable because I assumed the movie would lead to a point where it all made sense. Unfortunately, I was giving it too much credit. The strange albeit interesting title, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is actually a pretty good analogy for the movie as a whole. We know, as the audience, that there has to come a scene in the movie where they stare at goats. And when it finally comes, it’s not that interesting, and ultimately doesn’t matter very much. It sets you up for something that, when you get it, turns out it wasn’t worth it in the first place. If you want to see it for pure comedic enjoyment there are some good moments, but overall the movie ends up being a disappointment. Which I found…well, disappointing.

Josh Long is an actor and filmmaker from central North Carolina, currently living in Los Angeles. He studied theatre at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and attended the Los Angeles Film Studies Center in 2004. A true culture junkie, he invests most of his time in movies, music and literature. In the few spare moments, he enjoys Ultimate Frisbee and good Italian food. He also does not like to speak of myself in the third person, so there’s that.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
Written and Directed by: Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez
Starring: Heather Donahu, Joshua Leonard, Michael C. Williams

Has it been ten years? It really doesn’t seem that long since this horror classic popped up out of nowhere. It was an unheard of concept; a theatrically-released movie where half of the footage looked like it came off a Sony Hi-8 camcorder. I know we all remember thinking at the time, “how did this one make it past the powers that be?” And now, ten years later, here comes Paranormal Activity. Same approach, similar concept, and blowing the box office out of the water. Who says the little guy can’t win? 1

Looking back at Blair Witch Project, it’s fascinating to see the way it works as a horror film. For those who don’t know the story, it’s about 3 student filmmakers who go deep into a Maryland forest in search of a legendary spook, the Blair Witch. As they search for the witch, they get lost, they fight amongst themselves, and things get creepier and creepier. The movie is shot like a documentary, and treated as such;2 a prologue suggests that the video to follow was all shot by the three students before they disappeared into the woods. The filmmakers (the real ones) employ the use of two different cameras, a 16mm film camera that the students are using for their film, and a home video camcorder, which the director (Heather Donahue) uses to document the process. The result is surprisingly frightening.

Many people didn’t like this movie when it came out. Your average horror movie lover is looking for big scares, gore, and probably some sex. Blair Witch has little, if any, of these regular horror movie staples. The film is instead about the characters and their downward spiral. The horror comes not from weird looking ghoulies or from disgusting blood and guts, but from putting us squarely in the middle of a very scary situation. It’s shot like it’s real, and it feels like it’s real. The more an audience believes what’s happening, the more they’re engrossed in the story – and this is why the film succeeds. And it isn’t just the weird things that happen that are scary either, it’s the way that the kids continue to stay lost. Who would have thought that the woods could seem claustrophobic?

The students give performances that lend perfectly to the realism. Their style and attitude is so believable, that you often forget you’re watching actors. The dialogue is for the most part improvised, 3 and comes off so naturally; it often feels like they’re saying exactly what I might say in that situation. And there are clear and different objectives for all three, which quickly turn into one – get the heck out of Dodge.

SPOILER ALERT!

The ending is an oft-debated topic between horror movie junkies. Heather and Mike find a broken down house in the middle of the woods, and go inside looking for Josh, who has gone missing. Each of them is now running with their own camera, separated, hearing strange noises, frantically searching. We see Mike’s camera go into the basement, and go out. Heather then follows down into the basement, and the last thing she sees (we assume) is Mike just standing there, ominously facing the corner.

A lot of people wanted this ending to be something different. They wanted to see the witch, or they wanted to see the gore. They wanted Josh to be ripped open and dissected by the witch. But I, for one, am glad they didn’t. It’s not a moment that puts popcorn on the ceiling, but it fits perfectly with the tone of the film. There’s no special effects elements, just realism in an unsettling way. It’s Mike, but what he’s doing is so unnatural that it’s extremely frightening. Like the rest of the movie, it puts you in their place, and something in your head says “that’s not right,” and that’s what’s scary. Besides that, the movie stays scary by not showing us the witch. We’ve all seen horror movies that are terribly frightening until we see the monster, and it’s a hokey CGI or rubber latex mess. By keeping its cards close, the movie succeeds in letting us imagine the most terrible thing possible. We don’t have to see the witch to be scared of her. I think the final scene is very well done, in style and substance, not to mention the way the frantic pace really gets your heart racing to set you up for that anti-peaceful climax.

It’s fascinating to look back and see what this little film was, and that it’s still frightening even ten years later. It’s an innovative concept, both well-executed, and employed for the right reasons. One sign of a truly good movie is that its effect goes beyond its time. Horror movies often fail in this regard because they’re so reliant on a specific, timely audience. But less is more with The Blair Witch Project, and the simplicity is one of the things that makes it just as effective today as it was in 1999.

1 Paranormal Activity was shot for around $11,000, and at the writing of this article, is at the top of the box office, with a to-date gross of $61.6 million. That’s the kind of success story a filmmaker loves to hear.

2 Many people wondered at the time of its release whether or not it was a true story – it wasn’t, but the fact that people thought it might be really says something for the effectiveness of the film.

3 The story goes that the actors were given envelopes with directions and just sent out into the woods; each day they would open a new envelope that would give them directions or tell them what was supposed to happen that day.