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.

Return of the robotical son: Astro Boy

Based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved manga and anime franchise, Astro Boy is set partly in the clean and luxurious floating Metro City, and partly in the vast trash heap that constitutes the planet below, a dystopian vision in which the segregation of the wealthy elite from the underprivileged majority has been pushed to extremes—as have issues of waste disposal. Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) experiments with “pure positive” and “pure negative” energies, which gets war-giddy President Stone (Donald Sutherland) jazzed on inventing excuses for some ultra-high tech ass-kicking to help boost his chances at re-election.

During one such experiment, single parent Tenma’s precocious only-son Toby (Freddie Highmore) is killed. Tenma plummets into grief and determines to bring Toby back to life by fusing some of the kid’s DNA into the body of a powerful robot look-alike, complete with all of Toby’s memories. But Tenma quickly becomes horrified by his creation, this cheerful little golem with his dead son’s smile and voice and demands for love. The robot Toby, our Astro Boy, is finally stranded on Earth, where other robots are onto his artificial nature while humans assume he’s one of them. He hooks up with a band of orphans led by one Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a futuristic Fagan who hosts monster robot rallies. So Astro Boy has to keep a low profile, pose as a normal boy, conceal from the world his jet-propelled feet, superhuman strength, and machine guns ready to pop out of his synthetic flesh. Something that proves difficult once he knows that President Stone is on his tail and calling for his super-charged heart.

I’m not sufficiently versed in existing Astro lore to be certain how much of Flushed Away director David Bowers’ feature version extrapolates, bastardizes or re-invigorates the source material, but there’s no denying how engaged I was in Astro Boy’s recasting of Pinocchio, not to mention Oliver Twist, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and Freaks, its merging of familiar myths with modern concerns of class, isolationism, technological ownership, the environment, and the residual effects of rampant consumerism. Of course the implications are all pretty explicit, which seems perfectly legitimate given that this movie, with its moral parables, its colorful, fluid imagery and its exciting, explosive set pieces, is clearly geared toward a family audience.

Despite some notable histrionics from Cage, the vocal performances go a long way toward making Astro Boy feel buoyant amidst several detours into tragedy and eerie questions about what it means to be human. Sutherland actually underplays President Stone’s obvious roots in Bush Jr., Kristen Bell gives surprising texture to Cora, Astro Boy’s teenage love interest—speaking of eerie questions—and Samuel L. Jackson has a lot of fun within the very limited range of vocal possibilities of Zog, the giant robot pal revived by Astro Boy. Fantastic and somewhat simplistic as Astro Boy is, there’s a pleasing degree of investment here in what the consequences of our continued exploration of virtual culture and the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence. Sure beats the hell out of Surrogates, in any case.

Don't worry, this'll only hurt for about 88 minutes

If you’re dying to know what it might be like to see a movie made entirely by robots you could do worse than Surrogates. This new Disney product is top to bottom a sleek, smooth and fully deodorized work, completely devoid of such pesky eccentricities as can occasionally spontaneously pop out of the human imagination. There’s an early scene where a boy FBI robot (a wigged and air-brushed Bruce Willis) and a girl FBI robot (Radha Mitchell, looking rather like Rebecca De Mornay) question a robot while another robot looks on. It’s like an interrogation scene played out between cucumbers, except not so lively. Or funny. Once an actual human or two enters the picture, with Willis receiving his requisite ass kicking quickly enough, things only get slightly more animated.


Surrogates is based on a comic book and adapted for the screen by Michael Ferris and John Brancato, both of whom worked on the last couple of Terminator flicks, which surprisingly weren’t enough to dissuade anyone to keep these guys away from more robot movies. Artificial intelligence is a subject that in theory lends itself to any number of provocative, thoughtful stories, yet it so rarely yields anything above a dim-witted extrapolation of Frankenstein or Blade Runner. In imagining a near future where everyone stays home and has their robot surrogate—usually a younger, blander version of themselves—go out and do everything for them, Ferris and Brancato, in league with T3 director Jonathan Mostow, convey a truly astonishing lack of interest in their scenario’s consequences. And if we can agree that science fiction requires a modicum of plausibility to counterbalance the fantastical, these boys are barely showing up to work. The opening flurry of boilerplate newscast exposition informs us that 98% of the global population is using surrogates. That’s right, Tibetan monks, Bangladeshi disaster victims, underpaid Peruvian coffee growers, homeless guys living under bridges, nomadic Kazakh goat herders subsisting without electricity or running water—all of them are plugged in, kicking back and having their robot doubles plow the fields, get laid, breakdance, and take out the trash. This is when ignorance becomes offensive. I don’t think 98% of the world’s population even owns a fucking radio.

Man, I wish I were in La Jetée, or at least 12 Monkeys.

Maybe a tanning bed.

The story as such concerns an investigation into a murder enacted with a secret zap gun that fries a surrogate’s insides so fast that I guess it somehow gives the same jolt to its human counterpart. Or something. Anyway the victim’s the son of the original surrogate inventor (James Cromwell), who now holes up in his mansion and is clearly up to no good. Bruce decides to rough it and try first-hand experience again after his surrogate is blown to bits following a chopper crash into the inner-city fortress of a band of anti-surrogate insurgents, all of whom, for some reason, are unpleasant, overweight, unshaven, and dress like pissed-off hillbillies. They’re led by Ving Rhames, dolled-up like a Rastafarian mystic, but there’s something fishy about him, too. So we sit patiently and wait for all the drearily predictable plot twists to play out, building to a climax that offers the one genuinely nifty sequence in the whole movie, with dozens upon dozes of life-size Kens and Barbies collapsing in the streets like they’re reenacting that Radiohead video where they guy can’t get up. Think how much better the movie could have been had it started there.

Lunatic fringe: Duncan Jones talks about sending Sam Rockwell straight to the Moon

We first catch sight of Sam Bell working the treadmill, pale and beardy as a muskrat, sporting a T-shirt that reads “Wake me when it’s quitting time.” Sam’s the sole human inhabitant on the lunar landscape, an on-site foreman and crew combo for a project that’s single-handedly rescuing Earth from its energy crisis by mining the local geology for deposits of solar power. (A clever gag has him grooving at one point to ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’) He’s on a three-year stint that’s nearly reached its terminus. The station is modern, at once buzzingly bright and cocoon-like, but also grimy with isolation, a disheveled bachelor pad more remote than the Unabomber’s. Other than occasional prerecorded messages beamed to him from his wife and toddler back home, the closest approximation to company is a boxy robot named GERTY, whose little screen offers a series of emoticons in lieu of facial expressions and converses with Sam in the not especially comforting tones of Kevin Spacey.

The loneliness is thick, the food all comes in baggies, and the night never ends. Moon is the antidote to space opera explosion movie. The frontiers it traipses upon are internal as much as extraterrestrial. Sam’s ostensibly gleeful last days on the moon are thwarted by an accident he has while driving his lunar land rover. He already seems to have been suffering from hallucinations before the crack-up, and now in his weakened, perhaps paranoid state things become only more confusing. Sam overhears potentially conspiratorial murmurings between GERTY and ground control, and he starts to see double—as in another Sam. Embodied by the wonderful, still underused Sam Rockwell in what is essentially a one-man show, Sam Bell begins to question all his assumptions about his life on the moon, his purpose there, and the very fabric of his perceived reality. If there was someone to form a union with, maybe he could go on strike. Then again, maybe there is someone…

Director and co-scenarist Duncan Jones cut his teeth making commercials, but it’s probably more pertinent that he studied philosophy before graduating from London Film School. Extrapolating on the work of Daniel Bennett and Peter Singer in applied ethics, Jones wrote an independent study thesis titled How to Kill Your Computer Friend: An Investigation of the Mind/Body Problem and How It Relates to the Hypothetical Creation of a Thinking Machine, which sounds very much like a dry-run for some of the ideas percolating in his feature debut. To be sure, it is ideas, and the emotional prompts they house, that imbue Moon with its richest features. The story itself may not seem fully propelled or resolved in any conventional sense, but the way revelations unfold—and, strangely enough, the way certain relationships develop—are what make this trip highly rewarding.

Moon director Duncan Jones

When I spoke with Jones he seemed energized, full of praise for Rockwell, and very friendly and easy to engage in discussion about all the notions and emotions lovingly poured into Moon. If he was slightly less enthused about discussing the fact that he’s the son of David Bowie, that’s pretty understandable, but I couldn’t resist asking one question. I think you’ll see why.

JB: For such an intimate film, Moon addresses an impressive number of contemporary anxieties. I’m thinking not only about environmental and genetic science concerns, but also about our dependency on telecommunications to verify our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. Did you set out to tap into these anxieties or did things just kind of turn out that way once you started fleshing out the premise?

Duncan Jones: The idea of long-distance relationships was very much a conscious one. My personal life at the time was burdened with a long-distance relationship and I wanted to channel that emotional material into the film. But the idea of social networking and using technology to communicate with people in a way that’s less direct that actually meeting them, that was more subconscious—though it’s something people seem to feel a real connection with.

JB: Your film caused me to reflect on how nostalgia-generative technology has become. We now have so many ways of archiving virtually every form of communication available to us. It’s as though we don’t necessarily have to nourish our relationships if we can get some morbid emotional fix by replaying their greatest hits.

DJ: Absolutely. I must admit that when I look through my own archive of emails I see an awful lot of old message from ex-girlfriends. We’re able now to sort of carry so much of our history around with us this way.

JB: I do the same thing. Makes me think of that Smog song where Bill Callahan sings about “getting off on the pornography of my past.”

DJ: [Laughs] That’s a great line!


JB: Another critical motif in Moon addresses the ways in which the culture is geared toward making absolutely everything disposable, including individuals.

DJ: Planned obsolescence, sure. That’s definitely there in the subtext. But in contrast to that, we also wanted to get across the value of humanity, how every individual counts—no matter how these individuals are brought into the world.

JB: Well, as I was watching Moon there was this knee-jerk part of me that was wondering who I was rooting for, only to realize that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to any of the strange individuals who crop up.

DJ: And I think that’s how the characters end up feeling. They become like brothers, antagonistic but finally wanting to help each other.


JB: There’s a clever series of red herrings for sci-fi aficionados in Moon’s early scenes. You set a tone of comfortable familiarity by openly invoking such influential films as 2001 and Solaris, only to go in quite a different direction, particularly with the way you develop GERTY, the robot that so immediately recalls 2001’s HAL 9000 but whose own trajectory proves quite distinct. I wonder how you felt about the ostensible burden of influence one assumes when trying to make a thoughtful science fiction film.

DJ: Because I was so in love with those films the only burden I felt was to get it right. If I was going to pay homage I wanted it to be clear that I’d truly appreciated and absorbed the source material. We wanted to utilize these references to films we love, yet it was integral that we create something original, that we give the audience a new experience. What makes it work, I hope, is the personal stuff we brought into it, again, the long-distance relationship that I was going through, or the idea of meeting yourself and how would you get along. I’ve always been deeply intrigued by this thought experiment, by the question of whether or not I would like myself. If I met myself as a younger age, for example, I know that my younger self would have problems with me now, and I’m almost certain that me now would be frustrated by the younger me.

JB: I think this is also where science fiction can lead us back to older narrative archetypes, those involving doubles, this notion that a double is inherently suspicious, that there isn’t room enough for the two of us. Philip K. Dick was especially visionary in this regard. Were his books important to you either growing up or as you were developing Moon?

DJ: I was a huge Philip K. Dick fan growing up. I was also a big J.G. Ballard fan. His approach to taking what’s almost a contemporary setting and then adding a single little twist that turns it into science fiction is something I’ve always admired.

JB: And he had such a talent for crafting these utterly unsentimental tales that nevertheless provoke an intense emotional response.

DJ: It just breaks my heart that so many of his best works have already been optioned for films, because I’d love to do one!

JB: Before we run out of time I did have one inevitable dad question to ask.

DJ: Ah well, go on. You can have one.

JB: When we look back on your father’s breakthrough single from 40 years ago and compare it to Moon, there’s an intriguing symmetry of motifs: the lone man isolated in space, missing his wife, dependent on tenuous communication with the distant earth. Were you thinking about ‘Space Oddity’ at any point during the conception of Moon?

DJ: I totally understand the question and I know it might be impossible for people to believe, but I really wasn’t. It’s just a very strange piece of synchronicity. I was brought up by my dad, my parents having gotten divorced when I was very young, and I was probably surrounded by an awful lot of the same things that were interesting him when he was still roughly in that same creative period, so I’m sure it had a massive effect on me. But when I was writing Moon none of my dad’s work was what I was thinking about. It was my own personal situation, my wanting to work with Sam Rockwell, and talking about all these great science-fiction films from the 70s and 80s. That was really the root of it all. The rest just has to do with what planets you tend to orbit, I guess.

Killer pacifism: The Day the Earth Stood Still lands again on DVD

The premise, however mimicked over the years, still intrigues. The spacecraft descends upon Washington DC, the stoic alien emerges from within, the gasping crowds look on, the rifles, canons and tanks are at the ready. Before he can get a word out, before he can offer his enigmatic little metallic flower/toilet cleaner thingee, the alien’s preemptively shot in the chest by jittery US military. He’s taken to hospital, is examined, and recovers completely. In appearance and mode of expression he seems one of us, more or less—he’s played by English actor Michael Rennie—but is very emphatically an Other. He speaks of “your months,” “your miles” and “your Walter Reade Hospital.” He speaks to his robot in a language that sounds like Japanese. He’s a chameleon. His name is Klaatu. He’s come a long way to give us some sobering advice. He seems unshakably civil, but if his words aren’t heeded, he promises to exact an apocalyptic wrath beyond comprehension.

Though made during those first tender years of the Cold War and wielding an overt message in response to the proliferation of nuclear arms, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) pulsates with age-old anxieties. It’s a religious impulse, perhaps, this desire to be visited by some colossal vision, illuminated by some transcendent Word, chastised and threatened with awesome punishment. There’s a desperate longing for oblivion blended deftly into this entertainment. We are rendered small by it. But the eagerness to repent and defer to a higher authority deserves some serious consideration.

Directed by Robert Wise, written by Edmund North, beautifully photographed by Leo Tover, mesmerizingly scored with double Theremin in the mix by Bernard Herrmann, the film is far too superbly crafted to be dismissed as period kitsch, even if he appearance of Gort, Klaatu’s mostly immobile giant robot, its featureless visage the subject of many creepily inert close-ups, locates it firmly within the imaginative limits of contemporaneous science fiction. Following Klaatu’s unmet demands to confer with ambassadors from every country in the world, the story slides from the grandiose to the intimate and back again, with some of the most memorable scenes occurring during Klaatu’s escape from captivity and quiet immersion in everyday American life, his spooky arrival at the rooming house bathed in shadow, or his final taxi ride with Helen (Patricia Neal), a single mom who along with her happy little boy represents our best hopes for betterment. The fact that Klaatu mixes in so easily is of course the point—the Other we fear so is really not so Otherly after all. It’s a fable in service of tolerance and multiculturalism.

Yet if we allow ourselves to play devil’s advocate, to set to one side the supposed moral clarity of Klaatu’s call for the cessation of violence, if we look carefully at this offer we can’t refuse, there’s a most contradictory nature to it that feels ironically akin to recent US foreign policy and the clash of civilizations. I come from a distant place where we know better, Klaatu declares, and your earthly ways don’t jive with ours. Frankly, we can’t tolerate it anymore. Change, Klaatu instructs. Be like we are, and make peace. Or we’ll kill you all. Hegemony rules, and whether international or interplanetary, whether the subjects of the new empire are in the Middle East or the Midwest, the ostensible simplicity and benevolence of this proposal is compromised by the condescension and threat behind it.

So Klaatu is the enlightened alien Other, yet is also quintessentially American, or, if you prefer, human, doing what humans are wont to do when granted immense power. While this reading may very well counter the intentions of Wise, North, et al, addressing this aspect of The Day the Earth Stood Still isn’t meant to belittle it but rather reveal just how complex and durable its proven to be. It’s a virtue of the best science fiction that its value to audiences will shift with time and revelation.

Fox’s new two-disc special edition of The Day the Earth Stood Still, presumably prompted by the theatrical release of the remake, may not offer alternative readings, but it is loaded with supplements to help appreciate the film’s gestation and legacy. A making-of featurette has amusing testimony from Neal—who apparently couldn’t stop laughing during the filming—insights into the film’s technical innovations, and some terrific weird facts, such as Gort’s later life as a performance accessory for Bozo the Clown. There’s also a fun little doc on flying saucers that covers the basic territory—Kenneth Arnold, Betty and Barney Hill, Roswell, et cetera—and equally welcome profiles of North and of Harry Bates, the forgotten magazine editor and author of the course material. These docs are annoyingly cutty, with too many commentators and not enough content from each of them to justify their appearances, but they still give you a flavour of the conditions of the film’s development. There’s also a new audio commentary from Nick Redman, John Morgan, Steven Smith and William Stromberg that, like their commentary for Fox’s recent release of Garden of Evil, focuses exclusively on Herrmann’s music.

More on Hot Docs 2008: stalags, robots, writers, killers and ample opportunity for revisiting both the past... and the future

My recent posting on Hot Docs 2008 was organized around the films I’d seen which specifically addressed the use of home movies, but there remain other films worth noting that don’t fall into this realm. In the absence of an equally useful organizing theme, I’m just going to offer some quick comments on these remaining titles in no particular order.

Ari Libsker’s outstanding Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel concerns a trash paperback genre that arose in Israel in the 1960s, garishly illustrated tales of American soldiers captured by the Germans and sent to P.O.W. camps to be tortured and raped by Nazi dominatrixes who they would later exact like revenge on. In exploring the nature of the genre’s enormous popularity, Libsker dissects the labyrinth of issues that created a sort of impenetrable shroud over the development of a Holocaust culture in Israel, as well as the intersection where fantasy and atrocity collide. How does pulp fiction operate as a barometer of a culture’s subconscious fears and desires? Why are these fantasies dictated so specifically by American masculinity and the urge to force sex upon figures of genocidal menace? Provocation of the highest order, Stalags is very worth tracking down should it not get the attention it deserves.

Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love moves between Emersonian images of natural tranquility and portraits of rubbery robots in repose. Fascinating, troubling, and yet consistently playful in tone, it studies the slow progress of one Professor Ishiguro and his team as they develop his android double in preparation for an interview between it and Ishiguro’s wife and young daughter. Working a field described as bridging engineering and psychology, the focus of Ishiguro’s research is on identity, behaviour and self-knowledge. Confessing to not being much a husband, Ishiguro genuinely wonders whether his wife will even notice the difference between he and his geminoid, a running joke that alludes to some deeply serious questions. Less overtly addressing of the film’s themes but no less fascinating are the scenes Ambo captures in nursing homes in Europe where lonely elderly woman befriend robot seals. Ambo has caught a disquieting glimpse of the future in Mechanical Love, yet she resists facile qualification.

Someone else who should rightfully be acknowledged as having some special insight into the future is legendary SF writer Harlan Ellison, though you’d never really know this from watching Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a biographical documentary that leaves zero doubt as to Ellison’s elevated place in the genre nor his awesome powers of inspired, cantankerous, hugely entertaining gab, while offering zero lowdown on his work. Ellison talks up a storm throughout Dreams, regaling with tales of humble beginnings, hard work and colorful anecdotes galore—the time he mailed a dead gopher to an editor, the time he wrote a short story in five hours while on full display in a bookstore window—and he’s never anything less than a hoot. Too bad anyone not already familiar with his stories and novels will find here precious little to prompt them to seek them out. Nelson gives us a rousing impression of the man’s charisma and an astounding dearth of insight into what the hell he’s been writing about for the last 50 years.

A more compelling, textured, and purposeful portrait of a writer—if hardly a laugh riot—is Killer Poet, Susan Gray’s chronicle of the strange fortunes of Norman Porter, a.k.a. JJ Jameson. Convicted of two homicides, Porter was handed two lifetime sentences back in 1960. A model prisoner, he served 25 years before escaping and starting a new life as Jameson in Chicago, where he’d help get a black mayor elected, renovate—or should we rather say rehabilitate—dilapidated homes, become a highly regarded poet, start up a day care in a church, and become a close, caring friend to many. This lasted 20 years before the fuzz finally caught up with him and returned him to the slammer. Gray makes a strong case for redemption while dutifully representing every significant angle in the story and ultimately exposing some of the more infuriating detours of justice.

During Gray’s Q&A following the screening I attended an audience member stood up and revealed herself to be the daughter of the woman who ran some of the inmate educational programs that Porter rose to the top of, giving testimony to the man’s kindness, noting how he helped her father when he was dying of cancer... What strikes me as the key difference between those willing to give Porter a chance and those who see only a pathetic creature who should never experience anything beyond his assigned punishment is simply the belief and understanding that identity is not so fixed, that any one individual is capable of actions both malicious and altruistic over the coarse of a lifetime, that destiny can be brutal or benign. The survivors of Porter’s victims (and it should be added that there appear to be considerable doubts surrounding Porter’s guilt in the crimes) themselves confess that his being back behind bars changes nothing with regards to their loss, but they feel better knowing that justice is served. Their faith in organized justice is obviously stronger than mine.