9: About a 7

9 (2009) • View trailer for 9
Three stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, quite scary images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.11.09
Buy DVD: 9• Buy Blu-Ray: 9 [Blu-ray]

Its way-cool creations, mesmerizing landscapes and grimly compelling tone notwithstanding, 9 is something of a mess.

It's also quite a downer, but that's to be expected of a post-apocalyptic setting, even in an animated film.

The steampunk-style, post-apocalyptic world that our stitched-doll hero finds
himself in is filled with dangers, as becomes clear when a new comrade comes
to a rather unfortunate end.

The major problem lies with director Shane Acker's clumsy and contrived story — co-scripted with Pamela Pettler — which too often feels as if stuff is being made up on the fly (a frequent failing of so-called steampunk sci-fi, it should be mentioned: all high-concept, no narrative heft).

I wasn't the slightest bit surprised to find Russian writer/director Timur Bekmambetov among this film's eight (!) credited producers, because his Night Watch/Day Watch series is exactly the same: marvelous to look at, and dripping with golly-gee-willikers imagination, but utterly incomprehensible.

Even the most mind-boggling images and concepts can't survive when mired down by daft, incoherent storytelling. Absent the obvious cuteness factor, we wouldn't even have a reason to empathize with the "stitchpunk" protagonists who drive this film's clumsy storyline.

Like so many before him, Acker has borrowed hoary clichés from numerous earlier sci-fi sagas, stitched them together much like his diminutive heroes, and unleashed the results with the hope that we'll not recognize the deja vu all over again. 9 actually is expanded from an Academy Award-nominated 11-minute student film short he completed in 2004, which may explain why he raided established sci-fi lore to beef it up.

Extract: Flavorless

Extract (2009) • View trailer for Extract
Two stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, drug use and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.10.09
Buy DVD: Extract• Buy Blu-Ray: Extract [Blu-ray]

Some indie productions — Juno and Little Miss Sunshine leap to mind — overcome their financial limitations and modest production values practically from the first frame. All involved obviously are talented and working just as hard (if not harder) as they would on a big-budget Hollywood production, if only to demonstrate that "low budget" need not be synonymous with "cheap."

Other indie productions are strictly amateur hour: dull, plodding curiosities that might have pleased the participants as the cinematic equivalent of home movies, but never should have been made available to an unsuspecting public.

When Joel (Jason Bateman, right) shares his marital unhappiness with longtime
best friend Dean (Ben Affleck), the latter concocts a crazed scheme to "trap"
Joel's wife into infidelity, thus paving the way for our hero (?) to soothe his
soul with a little of his own action on the side. Granted, cynical human
behavior has been exploited successfully in countless other film comedies,
but this one's strictly a nonstarter.

Extract belongs to the latter category.

This third live-action effort from writer/director Mike Judge, best known for his animated TV shows Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, is as limp a noodle as I've endured in awhile. Whatever his facility with pencil-and-paper characters, Judge hasn't the faintest idea how to direct actual living human beings; everybody in this tedious blue-collar comedy drifts somnambulately from one scene to the next, as if the catering truck had laced its lunches with the mind-altering pills this story's hero pops at one point.

These are entry-level problems: humdrum camera angles, bland color palettes, poor pacing, indifferent editing — far too many useless scenes that run too long — and actors who always seem to be half a second late with their line readings.

All of which reminds us of the skill possessed by a truly competent director, because at least two of the cast members here — Jason Bateman and J.K. Simmons, and perhaps Ben Affleck on a good day — are capable of much better work. More crucially, much better comic timing.

Judge, however, can't extract a good scene from anybody. I'll give him credit for penning some amusing lines, but they'd have been a helluva lot funnier if the characters had put some effort into delivering them properly.

An additional problem isn't entirely Judge's fault: Familiarity breeds contempt. Extract is another in a long line of recent comedies that surround only one reasonably intelligent protagonist with supporting characters who collectively possess the IQ of a butter dish. Honestly, I'm not sure these people could dress themselves each morning.

One hopes Judge didn't intend this as some sort of indictment of factory workers, because the collective portrait is pretty damning.

Taking Woodstock: Bummer trip

Taking Woodstock (2009) • View trailer for Taking Woodstock
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, drug use and considerable casual (and chaste) nudity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.4.09
Buy DVD: Taking Woodstock• Buy Blu-Ray: Taking Woodstock [Blu-ray]

Demetri Martin's flat and lifeless central performance is the core problem with director Ang Lee's curiously uninvolving adaptation of Taking Woodstock, a saga that we can't help expecting to display more of the exhilarating atmosphere that was central to the famed counter-culture music festival.

But no. Just as Martin's Elliot Teichberg never quite makes it to the festival per se — the stage and its music always just off-camera, over the next hill — Lee never taps into the vibrant energy necessary to tell this story properly. Like Teichberg, who wanders about in a perpetual haze, as if he's already heavily influenced by the pills and other controlled substances he keeps refusing, Lee's film just doesn't catch fire.

Having spent all his time behind the scenes, helping or watching as scores of
individuals orchestrate the chaos that finally results in the three-day Woodstock
festival, Elliot (Demetri Martin, center foreground) finally leaves his family's
dilapidated Catskills motel and heads down the road, hoping to get his own
personal taste of counter-culture joy.

Julie Taymor's crazed, opulent Across the Universe, for all its grotesque excess, did a far better job of capturing the unbridled, 1960s-style joie de vivre that we keep wishing from Lee's film.

In fairness, these expectations are fueled mostly by this film's publicity campaign, which leads patrons to expect a full-immersion bath in the heady waters of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll ... but that's not really the story Lee sets out to tell.

James Schamus' script, based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber — yes, it's the same person, albeit with a slightly different name — focuses more on the unlikely events that allowed Elliot to turn his small community upside-down, and the impact the resulting chaos had on him personally. At least, that's where the screenplay wants to go, but Martin's performance is so colorless that we never get a sense of growth.

Although firmly planted in Greenwich Village in 1969, working as an interior designer and attempting to embrace his own sexuality via the gay rights movement — but the film leaves this aspect of his life awfully vague — Elliot is forced to return to the Catskills that summer, where his hapless parents are badly mis-managing the family business: a dumpy motel laughingly dubbed the El Monaco. The local bank is threatening to foreclose, but Elliot successfully wins a brief stay of execution.

One cannot imagine a worse choice of parental career, because Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) haven't the faintest trace of people skills. Sonia, in particular, is a blustering, overbearing, ill-kempt cross between a dock worker and a water buffalo: a rude, waspish misanthrope in whom the milk of human kindness must have curdled decades earlier.

Staunton, it must be acknowledged, tears into this role for all she's worth. God forbid you should request an extra towel for your room.

Inglourious Basterds: Paths of Gloury

Inglourious Basterds (2009) • View trailer for Inglourious Basterds
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, brief sexuality and relentless violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.3.09
Buy DVD: Inglourious Basterds• Buy Blu-Ray: Inglourious Basterds (2-Disc Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

I don't often say this about films that already run well in excess of two hours, but Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds should have been longer.

Probably quite a bit longer.

This 152-minute crazy-quilt homage — echoing everything from The Dirty Dozen to Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns — too frequently feels as if important stuff has been left out. Backstories and plot logic have been sacrificed for lengthy isolated scenes that are fascinating to watch, but really don't advance the story.

Donny Donowitz (ELi Roth, left) admires Aldo Raine's (Brad Pitt) handiwork,
after the latter carefully carves a swastika into a minor Nazi soldier's
forehead: a mark by which the young man will be recognized forever, should
he survive the war.

The always self-indulgent Tarantino has many strengths, starting with his enthusiastic affection for All Things Cinema, and the imaginative way he can construct a scene to be vibrantly fresh, while simultaneously a sly nod to some well-loved (and sometimes obscure) exploitation flick from days gone by.

Tarantino also is gangbusters with dialogue scenes, particularly in terms of the subtle power struggles that take place beneath the surface of even the most benign conversations. Although the climactic car chase was the best part of 2007's Death Proof, the lengthy session of filthy gal talk between Sydney Poitier and her BFFs was quite entertaining, and Kurt Russell's seductive come-hither wooing of Rose McGowan (poor, poor woman!) was deliciously unsettling.

Inglourious Basterds opens with an equally mesmerizing conversation between two characters: a prologue of sorts, set in 1941, that finds Nazi Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) on what seems a purely routine visit with a rugged French farmer who, while wary of his guest, doesn't appear too worried about him.

The chat — which takes awhile, but isn't the slightest bit dull — evolves through numerous moods, the apparent "lead" passing from Landa to the farmer, as we wonder just where the scene is heading. (This is Tarantino, after all; we can be excused for imagining that the farmer's three nymphette daughters are quietly slaughtering the trio of Nazi soldiers outside, as this parley takes place in the farmhouse.)

But then the penny drops: Control of the conversation swings irrevocably to Landa — we realize, perhaps belatedly, that he dominated the encounter all along — and the scene's true purpose emerges: the introduction of Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who narrowly escapes Landa and his minions, and survives to become a key player in what follows.

Adam: Tender beginnings

Adam (2009) • View trailer for Adam
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for brief profanity and mild sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.28.09
Buy DVD: Adam

Advocacy cinema takes many forms, the most effective examples often arriving stealthily, as quiet, consciousness-raising little dramas that call attention to disenfranchised members of society.

Writer/director Max Mayer's Adam is just such a film: a sweet, poignant character study about a young man with Asperger's Syndrome — a form of high-functioning autism — and a sympathetic young woman who falls in love with him, and attempts to expand his sheltered, withdrawn lifestyle.

Unless confronted directly, Adam (Hugh Dancy) prefers to ignore other people,
having learned that he frequently misinterprets what they say. This initially
puzzles Beth (Rose Byrne), but she gradually discovers that an honest soul
lurks beneath her neighbor's reserved exterior.

The film is being marketed as a romantic comedy, which seems misleading; although certainly laced with amusing moments — most derived from the title character's tendency to take statements and actions at face value — Mayer's script is rather too serious to be lumped with inconsequential fluff such as The Proposal.

But calling Adam a sensitive "message movie" probably would be the box-office kiss of death, so I can't really fault Fox Searchlight's approach.

For the most part, and especially when he concentrates on his story's two primary characters, Mayer's film is thoughtful, absorbing, poignant and gently informative: a clearly sympathetic portrait of a man trying his best to cope with a condition that makes him utterly helpless in social and interpersonal situations, which the rest of us casually take for granted.

At times, though, Mayer's tone is disrupted by the intrusion of a secondary plot line — and the needlessly over-the-top performance of a supporting actor — that are unnecessary and out of place, and rip us right out of the core narrative.

I find this mis-match surprising for an individual (Mayer) who has directed more than 50 new plays Off-Broadway and around the country, and is a veteran director for TV shows such as Alias and The West Wing. I'd expect Mayer to have a better understanding of balance, and recognize how he damages his otherwise delicate film with occasional "Hollywoodizing" elements.

Fortunately, most everything else pales alongside the excellent work of Hugh Dancy (The Jane Austen Book Club, Confessions of a Shopaholic), who delivers as carefully shaded a performance as I've seen since Cliff Robertson (Charly) or Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man).