Why Star Trek is a better movie than State of Play

The essence of what’s wrong with Hollywood is the desire to make money along with a solid contempt for the intelligence of the consumer. It’s all profiteering with no concern for providing even the semblance of a good product. State of play is a perfect example of one of those, Star Trek is not.

State of Play is about a journalist, a slovenly, chubby Russell Crowe who, as a newspaper-man stereotype in years past, would have drank and chain-smoked, but now, in a Hollywood where smoking is fashionably unpopular, just drinks. Anyway, he runs into a story, a murder that gets connected to his old college-buddy, a politician, played by Ben Affleck. Affleck is on a committee investigating Pointcorp, a ruthless and corrupt Blackwater-like contractor employed by the US government. The story throws up a few red herrings, some gratuitous action scenes to make the trailers pop, then fizzles out with a cowardly Law and Order ending. There was a point in the story when this seemed like a statement movie, like you had a script that, right or wrong, was taking on real-life entities and adopting a definite stance on something important. Silly, naive you. They started out making a point, and then decided that it could cause repercussions if they went all the way with it, so they castrated it at the end. They know the audience, passive and stupid, won’t care.

Star Trek, however had no serious point, and never pretended to have one. With a large, dedicated consumer-base, Hollywood cannot risk doing anything from this franchise badly, so they brought out their biggest geek-star, JJ Abrams to throw this one together. Abrams, savvy profiteer that he is, watched all the old movies, and then ripped off the best parts (interrogation-slugs, time-travel etc.) along with some Spielberg-like improvisations and gave them their slam-dunk. This movie is about pushing the right buttons in a worshipful fanbase, while aggressively trying to grow it. There is nothing original about this movie, but Trekkies don’t want originality, they want the tried and true gimmicks, and they got it. This movie did what it was supposed to, what the trailers promised, and what its opening sequence and all its history promised: a generic, old-fashioned seafaring story set in space with planets instead of islands.

Hollywood was always about business, not art, but business itself has two faces: the-take-a-sucker-for-all-he’s-worth face, and make-the-customer-happy face. Here we have both.

The appealing gimmicks of Reservoir Dogs

The coolness of a group of guys with a purpose
Armed robbery is definitely man’s work. It’s not for pussies or people who don’t know how to plan and execute as a unit. Team-work, Military work. It’s so manly you can taste the testosterone. There is camaraderie and the focus of going into a job with the intention of getting it done and being rewarded.

Torturing cops
Who hasn’t wanted to catch an authority figure with his pants down at one time or another? If you have ever been ticketed or worse then you probably would like to see a police officer in a vulnerable position. You not only get to see this, but get to see the cop show himself up as an asshole who probably deserved it.

Lots of cursing
Most people don’t curse relentlessly in a work day. They weren’t raised that way and their bosses don’t tolerate it. No, they save the cursing for casual situations with people they know, and for anger, to make a point with “fuck”. Movies in which characters curse freely feel cathartic, like a lot of their pent up profanity is being released by the actor on the screen.

Cheesy 70s pop
There are not a lot of movie plots that this genre of music is suitable for, therefore it will provide a hiply entertaining contrast wherever you put it. You can put some KC and the Sunshine Band as the soundtrack to the Deliverance rape sequence and it would work.

Button is Gump

Benjamin Button is Forrest Gump, yes, I realize that the book is much older than Gump, but perhaps it is where Winston Groom  got his inspiration. Gump the movie got made first so this is like Gump the movie. This is how it got made, by being sold as a story about a guy has epic adventures on a massive scale. Yes, this will appeal to the same kind of audience of Forrest Gump. The same people who saw profundity in Gump’s Vietnam experience will feel the same thing in Button’s WWII experience. On the simplest, most obvious level you have an epic starring Brad Pitt and which was directed by the guy who did Fight Club. You can’t go wrong. The fantasy element can help or hinder, but the selling point will be the Pitt and Fincher combo. 

Pitt is Miscast
He is not a very good actor unless playing a certain kind of character and Button is not it. I recognize the fact that something like this would probably not have been made without his interest in it, but still, there is nothing here that says that the role had to be played by him the way Tyler Durden could have been played by nobody else. It doesn’t call for his kind of frenetic, twitchy energy or heavy-handed brooding. As a result you get to see his flaws, that he can’t sell a character by voice alone. Pitt’s Button is boring, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of the movie is, necessarily.

Ok, it will be boring to some
If you don’t get in on the ground floor, early on in the film, if you don’t find that hook that grabs you because it resonates with your own canon of experience, then this will be a long, deadening slog. There will be a lot that you don’t get, that has no significance. This is not meant for the casual viewer. This is not a thrilling, suspenseful film, sure, there are new characters and new events, but nothing cataclysmic, big, awe-inspiring. Much like Gump it plods along episodically from one chapter to the next, not saying a whole lot beyond it’s premise of a man getting younger, losing all the other people around him the way we all do. It’s a story about aging and mortality and death. Not your light, entertaining topics.

This is Fincher’s entry into the Zemeckis/Spielberg oeuvre of grandiose sentimental epic. You start it knowing that it has to end with a dead baby. This is obvious the minute the premise is clear to you, which means it was obvious to those of us who read the reviews before seeing the film. This is where Fincher is different from Zemeckis and Spielberg, neither of those would have the balls to even try to pull that off. That said, he panders to the lowest common denominator, the Pitt fans who would inevitably flock to the movie. It becomes bland and too sweet in places, but in other places it is cold and pragmatic. It is the definition of a cult movie. It won’t appeal to everybody, but it might appeal to just you. 

Fighting: marginally less bad than you might think

The truth about Fighting is that it’s not a very good movie. I knew it wouldn’t be, based solely on the trailers. There is no aspect of the entire enterprise that could be seen as an attempt at quality, or even originality for originality’s sake. Still, there is a problem: this movie does not suck as bad as it should.

It should suck outright because Terrence Howard is an overrated over-actor and Channing Tatum isn’t really an actor at all. The fight scenes operate on the old good-guy-gets-his-ass-kicked-before-fighting-back rule, and the story isn’t really there.  The suspense and anger that you need for a movie like this to work (think Enter the Dragon) never gets built. What the people who prefer that kind of thing in their drama  get is a plot where some guy goes around and fights a couple of people, spread out over a lot of padding. Considering that the word "Fighting" is the title of the movie there is not a whole lot of combat and what there is is is strictly PG-13 shirtless Karate Kid stuff, not edgy at all.

This movie, however has a big asset that makes it work on the same level that movies like the Fast and the Furious and the Mummy worked: they are very knowledgeable about their audience and what it takes to reach and please them. The story is not really as much about fighting as it is about being poor and doing what you have to do to not be poor any more, and if you have ever been poor you probably won’t hate it as much as you think you will going in. The actors also do their best within the limitations of the script, nobody is lazy here. The bad guys make sure you hate them and Tatum does what he can with his ordinariness. Terrence Howard is a minor distraction as plays his character with a strange accent and slight creepiness, but the important word is “minor”, meaning not much of a distraction.

Fresh: A Ghettoful of Dollars

  A 12 year-old heroin courier and speed-chess player decides to execute a vaguely chess-themed revenge plot against his bosses.

This movie deserves its cult following. It’s a crime thriller set in the ghetto that is not about rap music or gang-culture. In fact, don’t believe that there is a single rap song anywhere on the soundtrack. It’s not a retelling of Scarface, nor does it glorify violence. That said, it’s not the unique gem that its devotees claim it to be. It’s A Fistful of Dollars with a little kid instead of Clint Eastwood (the same device used here). The chess theme is just a MacGuffin-like gimmick to hold the story together. When it becomes clear what the little sociopath is up to, however, it’s difficult to not feel a little malicious glee.

• Things to note about Fresh that the cult won’t tell you:
  This is a black movie. I know you see Samuel L. Jackson on the back of the DVD and you may have already guessed this, but I mean this is a black movie. It makes the Madea movies look like Steel Magnolias. Unless you are familiar and comfortable with inner-city black American culture you will likely be perplexed and/or completely unable to relate to any of the characters. The sub-titles will likely not help you, either.
• It’s pretty gritty. Writer-director Boaz Yakin does not attempt to make this a pleasant film-going experience. This is not your faux grungy PG-13 ‘hood from Law and Order Episodes, this is the one where a writer goes out of his way to ram home how unpleasant the projects are in order to seem “authentic”. Note that several little kids get murdered in the course of the plot.
• This movie is dated. The slang, the clothes, the haircuts, all offer a pretty good picture of early 90s urban American fashion, but if you are not familiar with that generation you will need to pay close attention as you may be easily distracted by how goofy everybody looks.
• Samuel L. Jackson is a supporting character, not a lead. The fact that he appears on the DVD case is misleading, one of those marketing ploys to capitalize on fairly recent fame. He does a good job, and there is no question that his character is important, it’s just not a lead.

The inadvertent race-comedy that is Obsessed

If this movie had been made with a simple switch in characters, lets say the temp big black guy was stalking his white female boss, there would be no end to the uproar. This would be the most offensive piece of film-making since Birth of a Nation. Even if you were to throw in the token same-race same-gender cop to show that all black guys are not crazy white-chick stalkers you would still be making a movie that was incredibly offensive. That’s because the dangerous black guy, longing for white women is an established stereotype. The crazy white chick who stalks black guys is not. If people don’t know they should be offended they won’t be.

The people at whom Obsessed is aimed should be offended. They are not, but they should be. It was made by calculating producers with absolutely no respect for their audience and no respect for film-making. There is no plot, really, just a series of set-pieces that would make the trailers tantalizing to a certain demographic, water-cooler talk for a certain age and gender and racial profile. It will also do well in the Third World, places with dark-skinned people, where white women and relationships with them are more the stuff of urban legend than real life.

Obsessed is the kind of movie that presumes that it’s audience will not know how an office works, and that the generic TV office lingo (“let’s meet for lunch and discuss the Johnson account”) will suffice. It’s the kind of thing you put into daytime soap scripts to pad out the dialog for people who will never hold a job that pays more than minimum wage. They will neither know nor care about whether it makes sense or is realistic, they are mostly there to see the crazy white girl get pummeled by Beyonce. It’s aimed at the younger version of the Madea crowd, and where the two markets intersect. The characters don’t exist anywhere in real life, and they don’t have to. They are just shells, cardboard cutouts for the audience to project themselves and people they know onto. The story is Fatal Attraction with no nuance, no passion, and boiled down to the most sensational elements.

Key plot point: There is a scene in which the “crazy white girl” character attempts to rape the big black guy character. Not tempt him, not seduce him, but to physically manhandle him into sexual intercourse. It’s there because there is no way the target audience would ever be able to sympathize with him after that.

Pity porn: You are supposed to feel empathy with the poor here

If you have never been poor, like really poor, or lived around destitution, come into contact with it, been around people who life and a lack of money and contacts have thrust into a small, enclosed space, then movies about poverty are like science fiction.

Your average American has no idea what to think about the slum scenes in Slumdog Millionaire, or with Mickey Rourke’s character’s life in The Wrestler. It does not have the effect that the writer or the director wants, because the audience, or large chunks of the audience simply cannot relate.

The people who do not like science fiction usually have a problem with the genre’s apparent distance from real life, the fact that on a cosmetic level it does not resemble situations they already know. It makes them unable to engross themselves in the story. It’s the same reason many people prefer movies with casts from their own ethnic group.

Poverty, true poverty, not the short-term kind like having ramen for dinner the night before payday, or that faced by many college students, is almost impossible for the non-poor to comprehend. It looks like a different animal than it really is. The main ingredient, for instance, is of helplessness, it is like drowning if you are unable to swim. Learning to live with poverty is like learning to be calm as you suffocate under water.

Movies on the poor are written to make it all either seem scary, or pitiable. You are supposed to feel sorry for poor people. The problem is that their problems go deeper than merely having no money right now, and feeling bad for them or donating your cast-off clothing or some money doesn’t really help. The pity you feel is a part of the effect for people who have never been brought to their knees financially speaking. Porn makes you feel horny, action movies make you feel exhilarated, horror movies give you an adrenaline rush, CGI movies make you feel wonder, and movies about destitute people are intended to make you feel pity.

The wealthy and middleclass pay money to be able to look at depictions of squalor and despair and feel better about themselves and feel bad about the protagonists. Feeling bad about the poor people on screen allows them the distance of it being “just a movie”, and it makes them feel compassionate. They will then give money to charity organizations so as to feel decent and so that they don’t really have to get too close to those people.

Movies to stop you from being racist

 

You realize that the only reason Sidney Poitier’s character in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a doctor was because the prejudice would have been justified if he had been, say, a sharecropper, or a shoe-shine boy. You can’t make the case that black people are equal if you show them in a role that people think is inferior no matter what color is doing it. Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte were successful because they were from the Caribbean, not America. The fact that they did not sound like your average American black made white people of the day stop and think, what else about this nigger will surprise me? They were able to pave the way because their speech was non-stereotypical, like Obama’s and therefore made them seem to have potential that your average American black did not possess.

Mr Tibbs showed that a black man could wear a suit and do official government shit. Surprise, surprise. This was Liberal Hollywood educating the rednecks in middle America who were only comfortable with blacks if there were being deferent to the point of invisibility or else hanging from a tree.

The far away Indians who once upon a time did tech support for major American companies because they were poor, plentiful and cheap, they need humanizing now. They need humanizing because there is money to be made if they are not seen as cockroaches crawling all over the low-paying jobs that Americans are suddenly so possessive about. If you get to where you can think of these people as human, then you may be less hostile to them. You may let them take your abuse because idiot consumers don’t believe an accented person could possibly know anything about how their expensive shit software works. If they can’t figure out how to get it to work, how could this curry-eating Third Worlder possibly know?

Enter Slumdog Millionaire, the corporate attempt to get Americans to stop bitching about the outflow of jobs they never wanted, so they can get to whine at a fellow American over a telephone. The idea is to show you that these people are human too. Look, they have feelings and everything. They fall in love, get pissed off, shoot people, many even speak passable English. Surprise, surprise. It will feel enlightening to some, only because they were so ignorant about India before, while they are still feeling the warm glow of Danny Boyle’s hyper-sweet melodrama.

Movies like this come about to change popular thinking, because people, rightly and wrongly, are perceived to be clinging to wrong notions and some filmmaker believes that it’s his job to change it. I get the feeling that there are many such scripts, insert-an-ethnic-group scripts. Slumdog Millionaire could easily have been set in Mexico City, or Nairobi, Kenya, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner could have been about a Japanese guy marrying into an East Indian family, or a Brooklyn Jew marrying into a Texan family, In The Heat of the Night could have had a Chinese Tibbs. The point of the movie has to do with the ethnicity of one or more performers, to get you to focus on the group that one actor happens to be from, and nothing else. They are given awards and celebrated because the intention of trying to right the wrongness of human thinking is seen as noble.

Lucky, annoying number Slevin

The dialog is arch and unnatural, like Dawson’s Creek or any other TV show aimed at tweens. The plot is preposterous and contrived to have a Sting-like surprise at the end, except by the time it gets to that surprise the rest of the movie no longer has any footing in reality.

I like Morgan Freeman, and I like Ben Kingsley, I think they are excellent actors, brilliant craftsmen, but both come off as creepy in this. Freeman gets too many close-ups and an awful story of "the Shmoo", which is a creepy concept in itself. Kingsley gets to do a stereotypical Brooklyn Jew accent that made my skin crawl after a couple minutes. It is reminiscent in awfulness of Gary Oldman’s True Romance ebonics. You get the same feeling from both characters that you get from seeing mug-shots of pedophiles or watching Bill O’Reilly. They try to be cute with Lucy Liu in this, she is given a role that would be better suited to a young Drew Barrymore rather than O-Ren Ishii.

With all the creepiness and the general implausibility I still find it difficult to completely dismiss this film. It has a few good points, namely that it was an attempt to make a movie built on writing and originality rather than special effects and stupid kid-friendly plotting.  There is also the fact that it was trying to be smart. It didn’t succeed but it made the attempt and Hollywood doesn’t make that attempt very often anymore.

The Watchmen opening sequence

Much has been said about it. I have heard it called “one of the best opening sequences ever”, and supposedly is something to see even if the rest of the movie is not your thing.

It’s impressive and will likely grow on me even more over time.

It’s unashamedly melodramatic and sentimental. It feels dated, but in a good way, like all of the sensibilities of 80s-90s film-making compressed into one little montage. It feels like an old music video. While being shot in a way reminiscent of the 80s (the decade in which the story is set), the subjects are from comic books earlier in the last century and so you get that kind of nostalgic feel too. In a way it’s perfect.

The Times They are a-Changin’ soundtrack makes it even more sentimental and melodramatic. This is Zack Snyder cunningly trying to reach all of the market right off the bat.

Here it is isolated from the rest of the movie.

Problems with it:
Like the rest of the film, it’s overwrought, overproduced and feels like a lot of people analyzed and tweaked the shit out of it before it got before an audience. It does not represent anyone’s particular single artistic idea let alone that of Alan Moore and David Gibbons.