This is a very different kind of animated film, much more of a literary exercise than the standard DreamWorks/Pixar cartoon outing, other commentaries classing the black and white, techno-nightmare fable as cross of Blade Runner and Sin City. Finally released in 2006 after six years cooking, Renaissance is a dark tale set in 2046 Paris about a hard as nails cop assigned to find a beautiful young genetics researcher gone missing.

Daniel Craig voices the snatch squad captain, Karas, with Romola Garai as the missing girl, Jonathon Pryce well-cast as her devious corporate box, Ian Holm as her mentor and Catherine McCormack as Garai’s gorgeous older sister rounding out the top line cast.

Karas, we see straight from the start, is a stereotype, the I do as I see fit copper constantly running afoul of his superiors and so you won’t be surprised that halfway through, after pissing off the case’s prosecutor he gets suspended. His team are loyal to him despite the prospect of serious career damage and, of course, the sister and Karas fall in love. Not many surprises in either plot or characterization.

No, the attraction of Renaissance is the striking visual of his motion capture animation and I wasn’t surprised that the opening credits featured (that is, the ones before the title, usually only given to production companies, stars and the director) those responsible. Director Christian Volckman gives us a future Paris that mixes the mega-urbanity of Blade Runner’s Seattle and the Fritz Lang 1927 classic Metropolis where daylight seems to be vanishing along with, say, the flora and fauna.

recommended

This odd 2004 indie production (e.g., $7,000 budget) caught my eye in the program grid and with nothing else on on Christmas Eve afternoon. Weird is an understatement, even for an old time science fiction fan like me. Though this film does indeed fall into the science fiction wing of the library, it isn’t Star Wars/Star Trek big bang SF but rather more from the Stanislaw Lem/William Gibson school of intellectual puzzles and the SF aside, the movie it most reminds me of is Memento.

Frankly I don’t think I can do much good explaining Primer but Roger Ebert takes a decent shot and it did win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Drama. Shane Carruth wrote, directed, produced and stars and I give him credit for doing a lot with that slim budget.

You will come away puzzling over nearly everything about this movie, in a good way, if you watch on day when you mind is open for business.

moderately recommended

This big budget fantasy caused a bit of controversy over it’s perceived anti-Church message, albeit apparently much toned down from the original novel by Philip Pullman, but honestly if I had read about the protests and complaints I’d have never noticed it, nor did TS1.

We both enjoyed The Golden Compass. The first of a trilogy, this movie introduces us to 12 year old heroine Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) and launches her on an adventure to, well, save free will across all the Earths in the many parallel universes in existence. The controversy is that she’s saving it from the Magisterium, essentially a worldwide church that also is the secular political power. Lyra’s uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig, in his second big post-Bond debut role) is the scientist who figured out how to travel between Earths and the Magisterium plans to crush him and use his innovation to extend their grubby grasp.

Lyra isn’t about to let that just happen so its a good thing she’s no ordinary 12 year old orphan girl. Not only is she smart and courageous, Lyra also has (and understands how to use, a rare skill) the last Alethiometer, a special compass-like device that shows her the true answer to any question she poses to it.

The big adventure begins when Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) shows up at the university where her uncle has left her in the care of his fellow researchers. Coulter knows that Lyra is special and probably the child named in an unspecified prophecy and she’s also plugged in right to the top of the Magisterium so when she asks that Lyra accompany her on a trip to the frigid north (no child labor laws on this Earth) no one has the nerve to say no.

We also get good performances from Sam Elliot, in all his gray-haired, Texas drawl glory as an airship pilot he joins Lyra’s quest, Eva Green (Craig’s Casino Royale love interest) as the queen of the good witches, Ian McKellen as the voice of a princely bear (this world’s bears are sentient but do not have souls as humans do) who also joins with Lyra, Christopher Lee and Derek Jacobi as two of the Magisterium’s high councilors, veteran Brit character actor Jim Carter as head of the rebellious Gyptians (who also join with Lyra, for a little girl she gets lots of adults to sign up without as much as a fluttering of her eyelashes) and Ben Walker as Lyra’s best mate Roger.

I thought Chris Weitz did a good job with the screenplay and direction of The Golden Compass. Its a very different kind of movie from his previous work, none of which were fantasies or even big budget actioners: The American Pie farces and About a Boy. As a science fiction fan I’m probably more disposed to accept the fantastical elements than most but Weitz did well to avoid lapses of logic that be really annoying to viewers like me, and he avoided the trap of trying to explain every little detail (e.g., the odd gyroscopicish devices that seemed to power airships and ground vehicles).

recommended

Sandra Bullock stars in one of the earlier (1995) “the internet will doom us all, but at least we can work from home in pajamas” thrillers. The technological conceit at the heart of The Net is surprisingly possible, albeit not quite in the form used–no single piece of security software will ever get to the necessary level of market share to do the damage envisioned in the film without being unmasked by the quite vigilant group of researchers tracking the security market.

Irwin Winkler, who was primarily a producer for 30 years before this on many big movies including the Rocky series and a number of Martin Scorsese’s films, made this his third directorial effort. The Net, though, was his first shot at a big box office event, following two smaller Robert De Niro dramas (Guilty by Association and Night and the City). The script came from the team of John Brancato and Michael Ferris, whose career is littered with sequels (Terminator 3 and the upcoming Terminator reboot, Catwoman) minor films that sound better on paper than on celluloid (The Game).

Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a nearly agoraphobic, mysanthropic top rank computer programmer. She works from home in Santa Monica (for a San Francisco software outfit), orders delivery rather cook, has a social life consisting of hanging out in a chat room with other geeks she’s never willing to meet IRL and ventures out mainly to dutifully visit her Alzheimer’s-wasted mom.

Angela decides to take her first vacation in six years a day after sending a friendly co-worker a new virus for his collection. Dale returns the favor but says he will fly down in his Cessna to talk about his find over breakfast before she leaves for Mexico. As he’s not arrived by the time she needs to head to LAX, Angela calls his office only to be told Dale dies when his plane crashed. We viewers, though, already knew it and also that the crash was caused by some chicanery to the Cessna.

On her vacation’s last morning, sitting out on the beach, Angela connects with a cute British guy named Jack Devlin (Jeremy Northam, in a role that was probably turned down by Hugh Grant as too dark). This is no coincidence, though, as Devlin somehow is constantly exactly on the mark with every choice from favorite movie to dinner on a romantic powerboat followed, of course, by a night of passionate sex.

Jack, you see (and you would see, since Winkler and his writers telegraph nearly every move), is a ruthless mercenary only interested in retrieving that disk Dale sent Angela and making sure there are neither copies nor anyone else who knows of it’s contents. Those questions answered, and the sex finished, Jack’s ready to kill our heroine and dump her body somewhere off the coast of Cancun.

Angela realized this just before and was able to remove the bullets, though for some reason didn’t keep the loaded gun for herself. Anyway she knocks Jack silly with a wine bottle, disables the boat, dumps him overboard and makes her getaway in the main boat’s dinghy. Sadly, it wasn’t a clean getaway and she herself is knocked unconscious after running into some rocks. Her recovery in a local hospital provides Jack with the time to erase the computer existence of Angela Bennett.

On making her way home Angela finds her house emptied of it’s contents and a realtor holding an open house to sell it; unable to convince the realtor, a neighbor or a pair of patrol cops the house belongs to her or even that she really is Angela Bennett, she’s arrested and her life spirals further down.

But this woman is no wimp even if she is a nerd! No sir. And as good as her opponents’ computer skills may be, her’s are better and besides she has her former lover/psychiatrist (a feel good, wants to feel Angela again Dennis Miller) on her side.

You see, what Angela and Dale stumbled onto was nothing less than the attempt to subvert the entire business and government infrastructure of the United States by a group dedicated to taking down institutions that, well, just get too big for the general good. The Praetorians, Devlin’s employers, are lead by another very smart geek, not really seen much on screen or a character in this movie, but you can think of him as an evil Mitch Kapor or Larry Ellison. GateKeeper, his Trojan horse security software app, is gaining more and more marketshare while keeping it’s true purpose hidden.

Overall I think this is an entertaining 90 minutes because for 1993 or 94, when presumably the script was written, the core concepts are pretty insightful and while Winkler may not be a great director (see my review of his best received work, the 2001 Life as a House) he learned from Scorsese and other great ones while producing and knows how to keep the action moving and the plot on point.

mildly recommended

This 1981 early Roger Donaldson effort was one of the first I remember seeing from Down Under and was perhaps one of the seeds of my fondness for that part of the world. I admit to all along believing this was an Australian films when, I found out flying home from Auckland on Air New Zealand, it’s actually from the Kiwis. Weird.

Smash Palace was written and directed by Donaldson (who next gave us The Bounty and Cocktail) and stars Bruno Lawrence, Anna Jemison and Greer Robson as Al, Jacqui and Georgie, the family Shaw, and Keith Aberdein as Al’s best mate, local copper Ray Foley. The Shaws own and live at a junk yard (the literal meaning of the movie’s title) out in a remote small New Zealand town and Al stays sane working on cars he occasionally races.

Jacqui has no similar outlet and the isolation is harder on her than Al–he grew up here but she emigrated from an unspecified city in France. Georgie is more puzzled than dismayed because the junk yard is a fine playground for an eight year old. Still, no big domestic issues until Jacqui cannot bear the boredom and finds herself alone and drunk with Ray.

Combined with the prospect of the business going under or giving in to a mediocre purchase offer from an out of town real estate company, Jacqui’s decision to move out until she sorts out her feelings pushes Al over the edge (the figurative meaning of the title) and launches the movie’s third act right into the stratosphere.

While this is a small film, in the same sense of, say, Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi, as with both of them Donaldson and his core cast deliver an excellent result. Watching this while struggling with sleep on the previously-mentioned trans-Pacific flight I had no choice but to focus on the dialog and emotional interaction and, while I admit sleep would have been nice, this was a very decent second choice.

recommended

In his second directorial effort, Robert De Niro does not live up to the quality of A Bronx Tale, his first, nor his status as a god in the acting category. The Good Shepherd is a good movie when it sticks to telling us the spy side of the story but has two key problems that block it from being really good or excellent.

The problems: despite constantly shifting between the movie’s main time period, the weeks just before and after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and an episodic look at how protagonist Edward Wilson (Matt Damon) grew from a Yale scholastic stud and poet into one of the CIA’s top leaders, there’s just too much wasted screen time in the nearly three hours this runs, and, second, Damon plays Wilson as if he were made of rock, which is terrific for a spy but terrible for what is a drama and not a Bourne-style thriller.

De Niro and scripter Eric Roth (Munich, Ali, The Insider, The Postman) are attempting to give us a retro-modern lesson on the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency (referred to as CIA, never “the CIA,” since as one character says late in the movie, you never say “the God”) via the Wilson viewpoint character. They feel we need to learn about Wilson as a person to give the Agency’s actions context and humanity so we see Edward as:

• a college student at Yale, his induction into Skull and Bones, his only real love affair–with Laura, a lovely deaf Yale coed played by Tammy Blanchard–and his shotgun albeit career enhancing marriage to Clover Russell (Angeline Jolie), sister of a Bones mate and daughter of a US Senator, all in the two years before WWII;
• his return home after spending the entire war in Europe to a wife with whom he has no emotional connection and a six year old son he’s never met and who he also never bonds with
• a one night sexual reunion with that deaf woman, 18 years after their last date, after a chance meeting.

These scenes take up at least 45 minutes and probably closer to an hour, which could have been condensed to about 15 minutes without losing any of their plot setup or audience identifying effects.

Damon is generally quite capable of delivering a much better performance than we see here (Syriana, Good Will Hunting, The Departed, the Bourne trilogy) and I can only attribute the difference to De Niro’s instructions. Perhaps he wanted us to believe or understand that the spy’s need to display the ultimate poker face cannot be turned off and on at will; those willing to back up their extreme patriotism with ruthless dedication, that is, have little compunction in sacrificing family either, but instead of extraneous verbiage and scenes this could have been delivered in a few scraps of dialog. However, even in the scenes with Laura or his college poetry class, which I expect are intended to gift us a glance at who Edward might have been, I felt Damon was never allowed to soften his granite body language.

If The Good Shepherd had only focused on the rivalry between Mother (the KGB’s nickname for Wilson) and Ulysses (CIA’s codename for his KGB counterpart, played by Oleg Shtefanko) I think this could have been the success that De Niro, Roth and Damon expected cinematically and as a historical analysis. This rivalry takes center stage in the movie’s final third, rewarding the patient viewer with the emotional energy absent from most of the first 100+ minutes with dramatic spy games that continually raise the stakes and provide a meaningful payoff to the interspersed scenes in which Wilson and his constant companion Ray Broca (John Turturro, who wisely offers his emotions throughout) are analyzing the reasons for the failure to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

moderately recommended

This feel good for freaky teen boys flick, a surprise Summer 2007 hit, was actually sweeter and kinder than I’d expected. Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), hefty and goofy looking, a geek’s geek, scores a one night stand with the stunning Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) via far too much booze and yet not enough to prevent him from getting her with child. The meat of the movie is Ben’s decision to put aside his childish things, well-represented by his slacker pals (Jason, Jay, Jonah and Martin), and become the husband and father Alison and his child ought to have.

Another hit from the mind of writer/director Judd Apatow, who previously gave us Fun With Dick and Jane, The 40 Year Old Virgin and the TV series Freaks and Geeks. He smartly makes the conflict about more than just slacker goof versus career-minded or beauty versus beast (which Alison’s sister Debbie, played by Leslie Mann, can’t get past) but proffers a complete disconnect of worlds and ways of thinking between the two groups. Coming somewhere in the middle as symbol of what Alison might have had is Debbie’s husband Pete (Paul Rudd), a yuppie on the surface but whose inner geek has nearly been stomped out of existence by his wife’s utter dominance.

Knocked Up compares well with Virgin. In fact Ben and Virgin’s Andy Stitzer (Steve Carrell) are two sides of a very similar coin, if Ben hadn’t connected with Alison and continued on his previous, sad path.

recommended