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David Gordon Green may be on the verge of blowing up as a mainstream filmmaker. The indie stalwart behind All the Real Girls and George Washington directed The Pineapple Express, an upcoming comedy starring and written by Seth Rogen, who seems to spin comedy gold these days. But even if Green is about to become a household name, he’s throwing one last hurrah for his indie roots, with the melancholy and elegant Snow Angels.
Based on a novel by Stewart O’Nan, Snow Angels is a wintry collection of several interconnected stories, all taking place in the same small New England town. Arthur (Michael Angarano) is a typically gawky teen, busing tables at a local Chinese restaurant and flirting with co-worker Annie (Kate Beckinsale), who was his babysitter as a child. Annie is going through a divorce from Glenn (Sam Rockwell), her high school sweetheart who has since become more than a little unhinged. Living with his parents and devoting himself to Christianity, Glenn tries to maintain a relationship with his and Annie’s daughter Tara, but his self-loathing and drinking problem keep getting in the way.
Arthur is also witnessing a relationship fall apart in his own home, as his father (Griffin Dunne) moves out and Arthur’s mother Louise (Jeannetta Arnette) works to start her life over again. Meanwhile Arthur has started a flirtation with the local too-cool-for-school girl Lila (Olivia Thirlby), a romance that seems entirely innocent and hopeful compared to Annie and Glenn’s downward spiral.
Attempting to muddle through the new situations in which they’ve found themselves, each character makes some poor and selfish decisions. Arthur’s father is stranded, lonely, in an antiseptic condo, while Arthur himself no longer knows how to speak with his own dad. Annie embarks on an affair with coworker Barb’s (Amy Sedaris) husband, while Glenn continually shows up at Annie’s house uninvited.
All of these stories carry along on their own until one explosive, heartwrenching incident punches each character in the gut. It’s not the kind of crazy coincidence that makes an audience groan, but rather the kind of tragedy that unites every small town. Though Arthur and Annie and Louise and Lila are all coping with different emotions, they all must find a way to reckon with the same inner turmoil.
That’s a vague description, of course, but most of Snow Angels takes place in smaller moments rather than plot. The characters unfold and come alive slowly on the screen, with Green presenting them simply rather than asking you to judge or take part in their stories. The film veers occasionally into suspense or mystery, but mostly is content to study its characters, examining the small mishaps and revelations that make up most of our lives.
The character of Glenn is what sets much of the story in action, but he also feels the most out of place. As a man losing touch with his sanity he’s sympathetic, but sometimes skews a bit closer to film villainy that everyday melancholy. Rockwell commits himself to the performance but never quite succeeds in making Glenn’s actions fit in with the film’s overall realism. The rest of the cast all blend into their roles marvelously, looking as ordinary as movie stars can look these days. Thirlby is well on her way to be the Thora Birch cool-girl crush of the moment, and she brings a liveliness that is often totally absent in the token girlfriend role.
Snow Angels is an indie for people who love indies, meandering and wordy and, yes, sometimes slow. But its sadness and despair is suffused with great hope and humanity, making it far more than just two hours spent wallowing in other peoples’ sadness. It’s the same aesthetic that has made Green a modest success thus far, and possibly what will propel him to super-stardom with Pineapple Express. But with his innate understanding of how humans work at their lowest, we should hope that he doesn't stray too far from his roots. The quirk and snark-laden indie filmmakers of today need an earnest dreamer like him to keep them in line.
When he’s not making big-budget, empty-headed blockbusters I have no idea where Roland Emmerich’s movie watching tastes lay. But I can think of at least five movies which I know he’s seen, since his new movie 10,000 B.C. takes them, grinds them up into a paste, and spreads them liberally across the screen. Emmerich’s script is a rehash of Apocalypto, with a dash of The Ten Commandments and 300 thrown in. His production design borrows liberally from Lord of the Rings, and his villains were lifted straight out of Stargate and plopped down in the middle of a brand new desert. All five of those movies are good on their own, but when they’re ripped off by Emmerich in one sprawling epic; the result is a tedious bore in which grubby people stand around muttering in a variety of badly chosen accents.
It starts with a primitive mountain village where generation after generation has subsisted by hunting the great mammock. The great mammock looks a lot like a wooly mammoth, I guess 10,000 years ago they hadn’t invented the “th” sound yet. Luckily, they have invented the rest of the English language and so our caveman characters speak in lovely, strangely accented American. There’s a lot of prophecy mumbo jumbo at the outset, which feels as if it drags on for at least the length of the Mesozoic age, until finally we get to the story. Strange men on horses kidnap half the village and run off with them. The three remaining hunters set off on foot to save their kidnapped friends, and along the way encounter mud and vicious proto-Egyptians.
D’Leh (Steven Strait) is our hero, a glassy-eyed primitive from a race of people with an affinity for not bathing and wearing bad Rasta-wigs. I saw no sign of the herb, but if they were smoking it, that might help explain the movie’s downright lethargic, disinterested pace. D’Leh drifts across the countryside in pursuit of his girlfriend and his people, and whenever there’s a problem the movie invents another random prophecy spouted by an aged oracle to solve whatever corner the plot has managed to paint itself into. At one point they quite literally dig a wise man up out of the ground to give the movie its next, much needed MacGuffin.
I will say one thing for 10,000 B.C.: the special effects aren’t as bad as they look in the trailer. Or maybe I simply didn’t notice them, since almost all of the movie’s big special effects are actually in the trailer. If you’ve watched any advertisements for the film, you’ve already seen nearly all of the excitement it has in its bag of tricks. Between the ten seconds of running mammoths and growling saber-toothed tigers 10,000 B.C. has nothing to offer but a lot of wandering around in the mud and guys thrusting spears into things off camera. Well maybe that’s not quite fair. There is a scene in the middle where everyone plays Honey I Shrunk the Kid as they run around in the midst of oversized blades of grass being eaten by giant, squawking turkey vultures. But other than that it’s a lot of half naked, grungy Rastafarian primitives standing around holding spears and trying to figure out which prophesy to follow next. Here’s a prophecy for you: You’ll hate this movie. See something else.
In Vantage Point, an action movie masquerades as an intelligent mystery, and nothing is really what it seems to be. Normally I’d be opposed to watching a terrorist attack played over and over and over again, but that’s what the movie does for its first sixty minutes or so. It does so under the pretense of showing us the attack from different perspectives as a way of uncovering what’s happening, but all it’s really doing is introducing us to all of the movie’s major players before abandoning it’s multiple perspective conceit and launching into a big, no holds barred, car chase finish filled with coincidence.
It stars, among others, Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, and Forest Whitaker. Quaid and Fox are secret service agents assigned to protect the president (William Hurt) while he makes a speech in Spain. Quaid is the old agent whose lost is nerve and probably should have retired, and it’s the kind of role Dennis could probably have pulled off in his sleep. Whitaker is an American tourist, who happens to be in the crowd with a camcorder when the president is suddenly shot, and for no apparent reason gets it into his head that the best way to help the Secret Service is to chase after them on foot with his camcorder. It’s a bizarre decision, one of many which the movie pursues simply because it’s a movie and they needed an excuse to get these people where they want them for the aforementioned, guns blazing finale.
The movie introduces each character one at a time, following them right up until the attack and then shortly thereafter. Then it stops, literally rewinds and shows us the same thing from a new character’s perspective, following that character until he too reaches a predetermined cut off point. At the end, everyone is in the same place and Vantage Point abandons its gimmick and simply lets fly.
Aside from that gimmick, it’s a pretty standard case of “save the president”, and Vantage Point pulls that off admirably. It’s consistently taut and intense. Sometimes the specifics of the chase get a little silly, but it’s largely entertaining, and only becomes even more so once the movie stops rewinding and simply starts going. The movie’s script asks little of its actors, except to stand around looking determined and grim. It’s almost like a vacation for someone as accomplished as Whitaker, who normally makes his living playing deeply troubled dictators or tackling roles that might earn him an Oscar. He and everyone else involved in the film is good, but they ought to be in something so simple.
If there’s anything to complain about, besides the script’s occasional dependence on coincidence and unrealistic behavior, it’s that the movie’s vantage point gimmick serves no real purpose. It’s there because the script is too lazy to weave all its characters together into one narrative, and not because they’ve thought of some unique and interesting way to tell this story. It works, but Vantage Point would have worked just as well told traditionally, maybe even better. Sure the movie's multiple viewpoint contrivance is just an excuse to get to a car chase, but it's a good car chase.
Jumper takes a pretty cool sci-fi idea, and doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with it. On the surface it should be a stronger film. Everything’s there, but director Doug Liman, helming his first film since 2005’s success Mr. & Mrs. Smith, never puts all the pieces together.
Hayden Christensen stars as David Rice, a boy from a single parent, broken home who at the age of 15, discovers he has the ability to instantaneously teleport himself any place he can visualize. David uses his ability to teleport himself away from his father, and years later we catch up with him as a young adult. He’s used his abilities to make himself rich, and he lives a solitary life of leisure, teleporting from his couch to the refrigerator, and from the refrigerator to Egypt where he has lunch sitting on the head of the Sphinx. Distance means nothing to him, and he appears content to go on skulking around the world sleeping with women in different countries and having the kind of good time we all wish we could have.
Of course nothing that good lasts forever, and it’s not long before David is discovered with a secret organization whose sole purpose is to hunt down and murder “jumpers” (their term for people with his abilities). After narrowly escaping his first violent encounter with the nameless organization’s top operative Roland (Samuel L. Jackson with white paint on his head), David runs home, gets the girl (Rachel Bilson) so he can put her in extreme danger, and then joins forces with a fellow jumper to kick some secret organization ass.
The problem with all of this is that Liman never stops to make any sense of it. We get a good feel for David, but never any notion of who or what this secret group is, why they’re attacking him, or how they’re able to find him in the first place. Most of what happens in the film happens simply because it’s written that way. It’s almost as if the movie needed to be longer. It touches on too many different subplots and never really resolves any of them. The movie sets itself off on a certain path, and that path leads absolutely nowhere. And so what could have been an interesting science fiction adventure ends up as a fun, but ultimately unsatisfying adventure flick.
Jumper is fun though, and maybe that’s enough to justify seeing it. Some of the action sequences are moderately thrilling, even if they don’t seem to really mean anything. Samuel L. Jackson is wasted, but the teleportation effects are cool and Hayden is adequate as a spoiled man-child turned pseudo-hero. It’s an empty special effects flick which had the potential to be better than it is, but it's so riddled with plot holes that it never musters up the mental energy to actually be better. Sometimes thrilling, occasionally confounding, Jumper is a great concept which seems to only have half of a script, cut up into bits and pieces.
David Gordon Green may be on the verge of blowing up as a mainstream filmmaker. The indie stalwart behind All the Real Girls and George Washington directed The Pineapple Express, an upcoming comedy starring and written by Seth Rogen, who seems to spin comedy gold these days. But even if Green is about to become a household name, he’s throwing one last hurrah for his indie roots, with the melancholy and elegant Snow Angels.
