Chris Holmes Online

Where are we?

In the future, where mankind has figured out how to harvest the ore of the moon and use it as a fusion-based energy source. According to the Lunar Industries advertising campaign, this fusion-based energy accounts for 70% of the planet’s total energy consumption. And it’s all thanks to the hard work of people like Sam Bell.

Or more specifically – just Sam Bell.

Sam, played brilliantly by the versatile Sam Rockwell, is at the end of a three-year contract. His job is that of caretaker; responsible for welfare of the automated harvesters that comb the lunar landscape and process the topsoil for the precious H3 ore. Sam’s job is to handle what cannot be automated, which involves periodically rendezvousing with the harvesters when they are full and shipping their ore back to Earth. He passes his time jogging on a treadmill, carving intricate buildings into a replica of his hometown, watering plants, and listening to video messages from his wife and daughter back on Earth. With the exception of his robot companion, GERTY (voiced by the familiar Kevin Spacey in a role that strongly evokes the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey), he’s all alone.

Sam has two weeks left on his contract. He desperately wants to go home and see his wife and daughter. “Three years is a long haul”, he says. We see he means it with every ounce of yearning on his face. The long stretch might be a bit more bearable if it were not for the broken communication system on the lunar station that doesn’t seem high on the priority list for Lunar Industries to fix. Sam is only able to get video messages from his wife via Jupiter satellite relays on tape delay. He’s lonely. It’s time to go home.

The last two weeks on the lunar station should be as boring as the first two. But if you’ve seen the trailer then you know something happens. I will not reveal exactly what that something is, because to do so would spoil the film. The trailer does a good job of creating some ambiguity; there are a few possibilities as to what might have actually happened and keeping the audience guessing, at least for a little while, is a strength of the film.

The “surprise”, however, is revealed fairly early on (and many movie goers will be able to riddle it out anyway), but that isn’t the point: the film is not just about the surprise. The film is about reality, and more precisely our perception of that reality. And our expectations. Sam discovers things about himself that he didn’t know, and it is this discovery – and the way Sam handles this new information – that is at the heart of the film. We might not fully agree with the way Sam handles his situation or the way he reacts to things, but that is because we’re not Sam. We’re different, and our perceptions are different.

Moon is very much a throwback to the science fiction films of old. Director Duncan Jones writes that he is a big fan of films like Outland and Alien; films “where blue collar workers tried to maintain there humanity in dehumanizing, off-Earth environments”. You can feel the influence in every frame of Moon. This is a character-driven film; it’s about emotions and motives and the way people think and behave. And it is simply amazing.

If there’s a downside to Moon, it is that it has such a limited distribution right now. I had to travel two hours to Spokane, WA to see it. I doubt it will play anywhere near where I live by the time its run is over. Which is a shame, because for people who really love film and can appreciate a great story, Moon is something that should be seen. It’s certainly much better than some of the summer’s other science fiction offerings (I’m looking at you, Transformers and you, Terminator: Salvation).

Seeing a book come to life on the silver screen can be a blessing or a curse. The blessing comes when we’re rewarded with a faithful adaptation that manages to reach beyond our own imagination; putting visuals on the screen that leave us in awe; telling the story we’re familiar with in a way that still manages to capture the drama and suspense of the written form. Peter Jackson managed it with The Lord of the Rings trilogy: we cry when Gandalf falls, even though, as readers of the book, we know it’s coming. The flight from the Balrog down the great steps and across the bridge of Khazad Dum is a perfectly executed scene that contains an immense buildup of drama and ends in a painful and heartfelt climax.

The curse is when we’re not rewarded with a faithful adaptation; when the source material isn’t taken seriously; when we’re presented with a story that is not as visually stunning as the one conjured in our mind; when important details are left out of the story and it leaves us feeling cheated and unfulfilled; when scenes that played out dramatically in written form are left to die on the screen, devoid of any real drama or emotion.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a strange mix of blessing and curse; it is a film that looks good and sounds good – it is polished in every way we’ve come to expect – and we think it should be good, but ultimately it falls short of greatness by a very long way. And it is only after we – the readers of the book – have had time to sit back and really digest the film do we realize just how much we’ve been cheated; just how must went missing.

Director David Yates and his special effects crew do a wonderful job of putting us squarely in the Harry Potter universe; we are greeted with all the familiar characters and locations and enough cameo performances to remind us just how big the tale is that we’re following through these six films. But he also manages to delete just about every important detail from this particular story, which leaves the whole thing feeling sterile and (to non-readers of the book) unnecessarily confusing.

I complained about this problem in my Order of the Phoenix review:

While the director David Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg wisely trim the film of many of the side stories and sub plots from the book, it could have used another twenty or thirty minutes of development for the main story. Having read the book prior to seeing the movie, I noticed several scenes in the film that were exceptionally brief almost to the point of being unclear. Some viewers are going to feel like they’re missing out on a larger story (and they are).

Apparently, Yates didn’t learn his lesson with Order of the Phoenix. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is even more condensed than its predecessor; crucial information that pertains to the main story arc is simply not even presented to the viewer. And it’s a shame, really. Because Half-Blood Prince is easily one of the best Potter books and should have been one of the best films.

Readers of the book will recognize a vast array of missing and incomplete story elements: Harry’s infatuation with the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book that borders on hero-worship; how Harry comes to learn of the qualities of the Beazor that ultimately saves Ron’s life; Harry learning about the origins of the Inferi; Hermoine’s never ending attempts to decipher exactly what “Half-Blood Prince” means and discover the identity of the previous owner of the potions book; the seriousness of Dumbledor’s hand injury; how Dumbledor injured his hand; Dumbledor attempting to figure out how to remove the locket from the water basin… All important elements of the story in the book, and all missing from the film.

And yet, like its predecessor, Order of the Phoenix, so many of these missing or incomplete story elements could have been easily handled with some very simple and effective scenes. An additional 20 minutes of film could have done wonders. I wanted so badly, for instance, to listen as Dumbledor explained the concept of the Inferi to Harry, but that teaching moment never came. I waited patiently with excitement to see Dumbledor riddle-out the answer to the locket and the water basin, but instead the answer pops out of Dumbledor’s mouth about as brutally as it must have landed on the script page.

And then there is the real crime of the film: the ending. The moment of the film when it should have been built up and set upon the audience with the grandest of climaxes, it instead is treated with irreverence. The final crucial scenes had no impact and no weight.

As a grown man reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I wept when I set upon the dramatic ending. I was surprised, completely unprepared for what happened, and utterly saddened. I re-read the ending more than once because of the sheer weight of the drama; it was powerful and heartfelt and it hammered me emotionally. Everything about those final pages was perfect – the build-up, the execution, the final moments. It was all perfectly done, perfectly written by author J.K. Rowling. All David Yates had to do was put it on the screen.

And he didn’t even come close.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince should have been the best film of the series so far. It could have been – with a few more key moments sprinkled in and an ending that would have stayed faithful to the book, it would have been.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

“So what do you guys think: Ancient Mayan temple off the beaten path?” – Jeff

Conventional wisdom says the beaten path exists for a reason: it’s safe. But conventional wisdom isn’t much of a match for a group of young travelers who wish to avoid “tourist traps” while on vacation. And so, with little reservation, best friends Amy (Jena Malone) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) head off to an ancient Mayan temple at the urging of their boyfriends, Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore).

The group has been intrigued by a foreigner named Mathias whose brother, Henrich, has gone to the temple with his archaeologist girlfriend. Neither has returned, but Mathias quips that it’s probably because they’re having so much “fun”. At an old Mayan Temple. In the middle of nowhere.

Queue scary music here.

Amy gets cold feet when the group comes to an apparent dead end, only to find that the trail has been concealed with bushes. A couple of silent, young children show up several yards away in a creek bed to manufacture tension because apparently young children are scary. Amy’s intuition is to turn around and go back to the cushy confines of the hotel and pool. Why her boyfriend Jeff prefers visit dusty old ruins instead of jumping her bones at the hotel is a mystery.

No sooner does the group arrive at the foot of the ruins than some gruff looking “natives” arrive, complete with horses, guns, bows and arrows. They seem very threatening from the word “go.” A language barrier prevents either side from being able to explain themselves, and soon thereafter things turn bad. Pretty soon the tourists find themselves atop the ruins, unable to leave thanks to the folks with bows and guns.

To reveal what happens next would spoil the surprise of “The Ruins.” It is sufficient to say that it is probably what you did not see coming. In a way, “The Ruins” can thank recent horror films like “The Descent” and “28 Days Later” for priming its audience. Viewers will likely enter “The Ruins” thinking they have an idea of what to expect. They will be wrong.

Like “The Descent”, “The Ruins” doesn’t play any dirty tricks with its audience. It stays faithful to the rules it establishes early on. But unlike “The Descent”, the film only works because of a bit of manufactured drama, namely, the “natives”, who serve to keep the tourists trapped in their predicament. The film justifies this mechanism logically, but even so it still feels forced and mechanical, and detracts from the overall quality of the movie.

Still, “The Ruins” works. It achieves what it sets out to achieve and does so with a fairly creative horror device. It’s not as good as “The Descent” or “28 Days Later”, but it deserves a seat at the table.

…is bad disks.

For about the 3rd time in as many months I’m saddled with another scratched and damaged DVD that won’t play. This time it’s “Michael Clayton.”

I’m sick of this. Are you listening Netflix? You must not be, because there’s easily accessible way for me to contact you on your website and tell you THIS SUCKS!

Netflix and other online movie rental companies want you to think that having movies mailed to you is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But the basic problem is that the media is too fragile; DVD’s are too easily damaged. It’s far too easy for the average person to incidentally scratch a DVD to the point where it is unplayable. Never mind the careless folks who just don’t give a shit and scratch them up because they’re clumsy oafs.

This would be manageable if Netflix would comp you a free movie when this happens, but they don’t. Instead, they ship you out another movie on the next business day. Meanwhile, you have to eat the lost time in shipping since you got a bad disk you can’t watch.

What’s really disappointing in all of this is that no one apparently considered the fragile nature of the DVD when they were attempting to create the next great removable media. Every time I see a science fiction film or television show where the actors utilize some snazzy, futuristic removable media (think “Serenity”), the media is always a well-protected one, encased in a shell that prevents it from getting scratched (or destroyed by martial arts fighting villains).

A disappointing end to the weekend.

Savvy moviegoers know that very few films reporting to be “based on a true story” are actually real or accurate. Hollywood likes to dramatize whatever nonfiction it gets its hands on. It’s tradition. And here, with “21“, we have Hollywood doing its very best dress-up job, complete with all the standard plot devices and dramatic accessories.

The film is loosely based on the best-selling novel “Bringing Down The House” by Ben Mezrich, which itself is loosely based on real events of the MIT Blackjack Team. After a couple degrees of separation one wonders how much the film resembles the source material.

If there’s a flaw with “21″ it comes in the form of a fairly generic script that follows the standard plot points required of such films. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, in the film, the main character, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) joins the Blackjack team because he needs to come up with $300,000 to pay for Harvard Medical School. In reality, Jeff Ma, the player whom Ben is based on, got involved because he thought it would be “fun”. There is no denying that the Hollywood version provides a bit more drama.

But while the film is pedestrian in terms of plot, it still works, for two reasons in particular. The first reason is because of all the smaller moments that ring true given a person in that situation. As Jeff Ma explained in an interview on Ain’t It Cool News:

…the transformation that Jim goes through from being a nerdy MIT guy to all of a sudden being able to land Kate Bosworth as his girlfriend… That was something that definitely happened to me through the blackjack experience, where I became much more confident in what I was doing. The first scene where they fly into Vegas and he looks out the window and sees the lights and everything like that, that was a feeling I certainly remember. That one scene where he is lying in bed and he calls and tries to get room service and he’s in his dorm room, not a hotel… Those kinds of things just happened all of the time, because of the craziness and sort of duality of our lives.

The other reason the film works is because of the strategy used by the MIT team.

Counting cards is not illegal. It is, however, frowned upon by casinos, for obvious reasons. And because casinos are private property in Las Vegas, gamblers can be asked to leave, and must do so or face trespassing charges. We learn from the film that the really difficult part of card counting is not the actual mathematics; anyone with reasonable math skills can practice it and get good. The real difficulty of the system lies in avoiding detection. For this reason “teams” are employed, which consist of various members, mainly “spotters” and big bettors. The team members work together to detect when a table is “hot”; that is, when the odds are in the players’ favor. The spotter’s job is to bet the minimum at all times and look inconspicuous while keeping track of “the count”, then signal the big bettor when the table’s count is in their favor. The bettors job is to come in and bet huge sums of money. Together, a successful team remaining undetected can rake in thousands of dollars in a weekend.

Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne do an admirable job with roles that are pretty thin. Overall the film is shot well and the acting is fair. It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it does manage to be entertaining throughout.