Chris Holmes Online

I had no intentions of writing any sort of review for this film. It is over a year old now, and it is not relevant to the current release schedule. I try and only write reviews of films that are currently open. But this film arrived via NetFlix and I pushed it into the DVD player like any other.

And then something happened…

This is a rare film that touched me in a rare way. So rare that I can only recall one other film even coming close to having the same impact on me. (Which film was that? I’ll make you wait until the end.)

“The Fountain” is a film that is difficult to describe. In fact, I’d say it’s impossible; pure folly. It can’t be done without the description sounding completely and utterly ridiculous.

“The Fountain” is the rarest of films. It is ambitious, beautiful, multi-layered, and difficult to follow on the first viewing. It is a rich story with more elements than you will grasp upon the first glimpse. And therein lies its power: it is such a deep, complex, layered piece of work that words do not even begin to do it justice. It requires the visuals (and repeated viewings) for full appreciation to take effect. In fact, it requires even more than that: it requires conversation. It requires debate with other people who have seen it. Then, and only then, can it really be appreciated for what it is.

To say that “The Fountain” doesn’t follow the conventions typical of most films is an understatement. Is it a science fiction story? Yes, but not as you know science fiction. Is it a love story? Yes, it is that too, but not as you know love stories. “The Fountain” is something else entirely.

I said describing it is pure folly. It is, but I have to begin somewhere.

“The Fountain” is the story of Tom (Hugh Jackman) and Izzy (Rachel Weisz). Izzy is dying; she has a brain tumor. Tom is her husband. He also happens to be a research doctor who is trying to find a cure for the tumor. His experiments on monkeys have lead to an amazing discovery. Trapped inside the bark of a tree seems to be a way to stop aging…

But that is only one story, and already I have misrepresented what “The Fountain” is. It is not the story of Tom and Izzy. It is actually three different stories about Tom and Izzy, in three different time periods, told together in one film. That there are three stories inside this film is enough to confuse some viewers. That director Darren Aronofsky cuts back and forth between all three stories without warning, using techniques that purposely blur the differences, makes it even more difficult. But that is part of the art of the film.

The other two stories take place in different times. The second story – and the one the film opens with – is the story of Tomas the conquistador searching for the biblical “Tree of Life” hidden among the Aztec empire in a lost temple. Tomas has been sent there by the Spanish queen, Isabelle, during a time of great trouble in the Spanish empire. This story is a fiction, however, and Aronofsky doesn’t let us flounder in confusion too long before revealing to us that it is the work of Izzy, who is writing a book called “The Fountain”. There are parallels between the fiction of “The Fountain” and Izzy’s real world, as Tom discovers when he reads her manuscript.

Then there is a the third Tom. Tom Creo, traveling through space 500 years in the future, in a spaceship that looks like a glass bubble. The ship contains only a tree, Tom, and Tom’s ghosts. Tom passes time in the bubble ship by doing Tai Chi, giving himself tatoos, and conversing with his ghosts. He stays alive by eating from the bark of the tree… Is this story a fiction or real? This is part of the debate of the film…

I’ve described the three stories, and as I thought would happen I’ve done nothing to convey the power of this film. I am convinced it cannot be done with the written word.

The power of “The Fountain” comes not from the three individual stories, but from how they are woven together by Aronofsky to create the larger fabric. All three stories work on their own in small, specific ways, but woven together they achieve something entirely new, and you begin to see themes overlap and ideas emerge, and then the power of the whole story begins to take hold and you realize that there is a lot more going on than what seemed to be at first. By the end of the film you’re not 100% sure what you just saw, but you know there’s more to it, and you’ll want to discover what else is out there.

The movie does not explain everything. It is not a film for the dull or slow of mind. It does not lead you down a singular path. Some portions of the story are open to interpretation by the end credits. But “The Fountain” is not really about clear cut answers. It is about impact; it is about creating emotion in the audience, and given the right audience member, it does this very well.

I should mention one other thing: “The Fountain” has some of the most jaw-dropping beautiful special effects I’ve ever seen on film. The budget for “The Fountain” was small, so to create the effects they used a technique called “micro-photography”. I do not know what that is or what it entails, only that it created imagery like I have never seen before.

I wrote at the beginning of this review that I’ve never been this affected by a film before, except once. There was another science fiction love story that I’ve seen that had a similar impact, but not nearly as great as “The Fountain.” That film was Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris.”

“Solaris” had some powerful ideas, and I left that film feeling quietly giddy; happy that a director had created a love story with that much thought and depth, without all the cliches and predictability of similar stories. But I did not ponder on it nearly as long as I did with “The Fountain”. With “The Fountain”, I turned off the DVD player and went to bed, and for the next two days I couldn’t get it out of my head. I thought about every aspect of it, every idea, every theme, every moment, every visual, and when I finally felt like I had digested it fully, I felt in awe. The only thing I could think was, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“The Fountain” is not a perfect film. Some of the transitions between the stories make it overly difficult to follow, and some of the obscurity simply isn’t necessary. Fifteen minutes into it I thought for sure I was seeing a total bomb. But while it may not be a great film, it is a powerful one. The themes and ideas in it are strong and thought provoking, and the love between these two people is of a magnitude that is incredibly rare. You will leave this film thinking that every man should be lucky enough to have an Izzy, and every woman should be lucky enough to have a Tom.

And if you’re really fortunate, you’ll leave this film with your head spinning, your brain fully engaged, and your senses overloaded. And you’ll be happy.

What if?

This is the question that famed author Stephen King asks to spark the ideas for his stories. What if an author was kidnapped by his most devoted fan? What if pets came back from the dead? What if a virus developed by the military got loose and killed 99.9% of the Earth’s population?

What if?

Cloverfield asks this question too, maybe as well as any Stephen King novel ever did. Although King had nothing to do with the creation of this film or its story (it is from the mind of up-and-coming J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost), Cloverfield is definitely from the same neighborhood that King’s creative mind lives in.

What if a giant creature attacked Manhattan? What if you were there? What if you had a video camera?

There’s a word for what Cloverfield is, and that word is creative. It’s also derivative, but derivative film has never been done this well. It is not that we haven’t seen this sort of thing before; we have, just not like this. We’ve seen giant monsters before (Godzilla) we’ve seen hand-held cameras used to tell a story (Blair Witch Project) and we’ve seen humans running in terror (28 Days Later). But we’ve never seen it done quite this way, or quite this well.

The camera isn’t just a means to view the events in Cloverfield. It is a character in the film all to itself. It is the one constant in the chaos from beginning to end. It is also possibly the best use of a video camera prop in any film to date.

Yes, this does have a drawback: The camera shakes. This is very much a home video of human beings dealing with an unbelievable, terrifying disaster that their minds can barely comprehend. And that means shaky camera shots: flashes of people running, darkness, feet, legs, rubble – everything you might expect from people who are pumped full of fear, adrenaline and shock as they run for their lives.

But unlike the intentionally shaky camera in the recent Bourne films, this works. It works because director Matt Reeves knows when to give us a big, juicy bite of the action; he knows when to give us the payoff. He has an uncanny sense of just how long to withhold the obvious camera angle from the audience while he builds the yearning, and then he knows exactly when to give them just what they’re craving.

Cloverfield is not a deep story. It doesn’t have time. There are no convoluted plots, amazing heroics or slapstick comedy. It is very much an answer to the question of “what if?” Abrams and Reeves don’t waste time with story elements that don’t fit. Instead, they ask the question “What if a monster attacked Manhattan and you were there to witness it with a video camera?”

And then they answer it. And boy, is it a great answer.

Pay special attention to the very last scene – watch the ocean very carefully…

Sometimes, when a film is based on literary source material, like a novel or short story, it is enough to get the broad strokes right; to get the soul of the story correct at the exclusion of minor details. Often, a filmmaker doesn’t have the time or budget to fully realize a complete interpretation of a novel. Other times the source material is simply too big or complex to fit into the narrow frame of a two-hour movie. In these cases a skilled writer/director/producer team can extract the essence of the literary work and translate it to film in a way that is satisfactory and fulfilling to both fans of the original work and moviegoers. Minor details may be left out, but the core – the heart of the work – is maintained.

This is not the case with I Am Legend, the new film from director Francis Lawrence.

I Am Legend is about the life of Robert Neville, the sole survivor of a virus outbreak that has left everyone on Earth either dead or transformed into creatures akin to vampires. By day, Neville roams the empty streets of Manhattan hunting animals for food, pumping gas (to run generators), picking vegetables in a makeshift garden, broadcasting radio messages to anyone who will listen, and trying to find a cure for the virus in a very fancy laboratory that he has setup in the basement of his apartment. At night, he barricades every window, door and potential opening and sleeps in a bathtub with his dog and automatic rifle clutched tightly, the sounds of the howling vampires echoing in the streets.

If this setup sounds familiar to the 1954 Richard Matheson novel that it is based upon, that is because it is. But the setup is where the similarities end. There is a point in the movie where it makes a significant departure from the novel.

I did not read the Matheson’s novel prior to seeing the movie. But I did read the condensed synopsis of the story on the Wikipedia. The Wiki reveals many details of the story that I will not spoil here. However, it does offer one very interesting piece of information about the title of the novel, which in itself reveals much about the primary story:

He (Robert Neville) finally realizes why the new society of the living infected regards him as a monster: just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the infected living while they are sleeping. He becomes a legend as the vampires once were, hence the title.

Unfortunately, while the film retains the title I Am Legend, it does not retain any of the brush strokes from the source material. The film comes to its conclusion via a much different path, and it is not nearly as superior of a story arc as the one Matheson created.

That is not to say that I Am Legend is a bad film; it is not. But it is not what it could have been if only the creators would have stayed true to the heart of the novel. In shaping this version of I Am Legend for the screen, the creators have twisted the meaning of the very words of the title so that by the conclusion of the film they mean something entirely different than what they meant to Matheson’s novel.

Despite the severe deviation from the novel, the film still works on its own. Will Smith does an admirable job in the role of Robert Neville (although Christian Bale might have been a better choice) given that he is asked to carry the film for at least the first hour with only himself, a dog, and the barren city streets of Manhattan. Director Francis Lawrence steals a page from Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away) during this time by significantly limiting the soundtrack, which helps create a very isolated atmosphere.

There are moments during the film where we really feel like we understand Neville and his state of mind. The isolation has affected his sanity, yet we know he’s smart enough to realize this himself, and still he can’t seem to help but talk to the mannequins in the video store he frequents.

If there’s a misstep here (other than deviating from the novel in a significant way) it is the use of CGI to create the vampires. They look fake. The clearly artificial villains hinder the film; they take something that feels very real and terrifying and pull us back a bit to remind us that what we’re watching isn’t real at all, which is disappointing considering that some recent films (The Descent, 28 Days Later) were much better done without all the CGI monsters.

I Am Legend feels like a film that should be better than it is. It is the third time that Matheson’s novel has been made into a movie. It is by far the best film version of his story, but a far cry from being the “charm”.

Director Robert Zemeckis has a love affair. It is not with a woman. It is with the tracking shot.

There is a scene very early in Beowulf where the camera tracks backwards, away from King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) Mead Hall, in one long, continuous shot. The camera slowly backs away from the hall, then the town, then flys over the land, beyond hills, through forests and caverns until it comes to rest upon the monster Grendel. It is a shot that is reminiscent of one that Zemeckis used in the film Contact, where he tracked the camera away from Earth, through the cosmos, beyond planets and stars for what seemed like several minutes.

Tracking shots are difficult to accomplish without special effects. Zemeckis clearly loves them, and this goes a long way toward explaining why Beowulf is 100% computer generated. Peter Jackson showed, with the Lord of the Rings, that these sorts of films could be made without CGI characters, but Zemeckis composes so many complex camera shots and uses so many long, uncut tracking shots that it becomes clear, very early in the film, that he could not have accomplished all of his goals using live action and real actors without an astronomical budget.

This begs the question: Was it worth it? Well, yes and no.

It is easy to admire what Zemeckis has accomplished with this film. There are moments when the camera is panning around, scanning back and forth, allowing us to see every meaningful moment of action with long, uncut sequences, and the overall effect is breathtaking. It is a feast for the eyes, and we immediately realize we’ve never seen camera work like this before. Zemeckis zooms us around, up and down, from sky to ground with such effortlessness that we feel a bit like a God, observing from on high, the events unfolding. It is a marvelous way to behold the retelling of a legendary story.

At the same time, we feel a bit cheated. When the camera has to fall on human flesh, it is clear that the characters are artificial, and they move with the same awkward stiffness as their cgi counterparts in Shrek. They lack the emotional range or weight of real actors, and that weakens the human element of the story. Of course, the lackluster writing and forgettable dialog don’t help matters much either.

But Zemeckis did not set out to create a tear-jerking, heart-pulling epic like Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Beowulf is all about spectacle. It is about translating a fantastic story into an equally fantastic film. And in that regard Zemeckis has succeeded. Beowulf is, above all other things, fun to watch. It is an explosion of imagery; a bounty of wonderful camera work and long, uncut scenes. It is the visual antidote to films like the Bourne Ultimatum.

Vampire lore makes it clear that sunlight is one of the few means of certain death. What better location then, to feed on human prey, than a small Alaskan town near the northernmost part of the state where the sun disappears for 30 straight days? That is the setup for 30 Days of Night, a film that bears some stylistic resemblance to recent horror successes such as 28 DaysLater and The Decent, but doesn’t quite live up to the pedigree. That is not to say that the film is bad – far from it considering the lengthy history of horror films, and the vampire genre in particular – just that it never quite gets off the ground. Where those other horror films succeeded in creating a frantic pace that is borne of fear, tension and drama, 30 Days of Night supplants those elements in favor of blood, gore, and… more blood.

The film opens by explaining the nature of the town’s latitude, thus giving the film makers an excuse for the crafty title. Today is the last day of sun; the majority of the town’s five-hundred-plus residents will take leave during the 30 days to warmer climates where the sun behaves in a normal fashion. Stella Oleson (Melissa George) is one of those people trying to get on the last flight out of town. Her estranged husband, Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) is the local Sheriff, who spends the last hours on the last day of sun trying to track down a series of vandalisms that have occurred.

The vampires, who have arrived on a desolate looking ship, have sent a familiar, played by Ben Foster, to hinder the remaining resident’s attempts to flee. A helicopter is destroyed, sled dogs slain, and a communications outpost eliminated. Soon night falls and all hell breaks loose.

30 Days of Night is filled with all the typical horror film fare: fast moving blurs on the edges of the screen, shapeless masses leaping out of dark corridors and dragging off unsuspecting prey, loud symphonic blasts that try to get you to jump out of your seat. None of this is new.

What the film does do is restrain itself from patronizing the audience. It is assumed that everyone in attendance knows something about vampires, and thus nothing is ever explained. For instance, the “V” word is only uttered once, and when it is, it’s so late in the film that by now all of the survivors have finally come to grips with the fact that these invaders could be nothing else.

But up to that point the characters in the film behave as anyone would when confronted by a life threatening situation: they shut themselves up in their houses and try to stay safe. There are no shots of teenagers disregarding the sheriff’s orders and slinking off to make out, for instance, only to be nabbed by the vampires. Instead, everyone takes the threat serious, and in terms of mood and atmosphere, that makes all the difference.

Because the characters in the film approach things seriously, it is easier for us to do that as well. Despite the gore and bloodshed to follow. And does it ever follow.

Where 30 Days of Night breaks down – where it is weakest – is where it spends the most time: in the middle act, where the vampires feed on the necks of the townsfolk. The opening act seems too short and condensed by comparison; it feels rushed.

The middle portion of the film spends too much time showing gore and blood and not enough time developing the story or characters. We’re lead to believe that these people may survive for the whole thirty days by hiding in attics and stockpiling supplies, but their situation seems so dire that without the subtitles telling us how many days have passed (Day 18…), one would only think a few hours had transpired. What happens during those days and weeks seems improbable and the director gives us little reason to believe otherwise.

There is some redemption toward the end, however. I will not reveal what happens, but only say that it was not an ending I saw coming. I had not read the source material prior to seeing the film (it is based on a mini series comic book written by Steve Niles) and was pleasantly surprised by what occurred.

The film is shot well and looks good. Roger Ebert says the movie is

well-made, well-photographed and plausibly acted, and is better than it needs to be.

I would disagree with that last part – it’s as good as it should be, and it could be better. I don’t see any reason why these sorts of films should slide by with bad camera work and terrible writing/directing. 30 Days of Night doesn’t elevate its source material to the same level as something like The Descent, but it does an admirable job of taking the horror genre above the B-movie line.