Alex Garland is a writer who seems to be very concerned with how people behave when they're cut off from society. I had my first exposure to him when I read his novel The Beach, about a small group of people who try to create an idealistic society...
[+] Read Full Review

Alex Garland is a writer who seems to be very concerned with how people behave when they're cut off from society. I had my first exposure to him when I read his novel The Beach, about a small group of people who try to create an idealistic society on an isolated island, in 1999. The film based on his book--which I thought wasn't as good as the book but also wasn't as bad as so many people thought it was--was Garland's first collaboration with filmmaker Danny Boyle. 28 Days Later, their next, set a small group of people adrift in a desolately empty London, alone but for their occasional run-ins with zombies. And now their latest film, Sunshine, takes a small group of people and places them on a ship bound for the sun. The crew's mission is to launch a massive bomb into the star from a safe distance, thereby "restarting" the dying sun and keeping it alive, while the crew returns back to Earth. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that not everything goes totally according to plan.

Sunshine is, first and foremost, visually gorgeous, though the beautiful crew is also perhaps a bit implausibly young for a mission requiring such skill, one of such vital importance. But what's really memorable about the look of Sunshine is the visual effects. The ship, ominously named Icarus II, looks like ships did once upon a time in science fiction films: big and clunky and ugly but very functional. It also looks real; I could be wrong, but I think many shots of the ship itself rely on miniatures rather than computer-generated effects, or maybe we're just getting to the point now, finally, where computer-generated effects really can be as good as miniatures once were. In addition to the ship itself, there are numerous shots of planetary surfaces, gorgeous oxygen gardens on the ship, and other spectacular sights the movie takes its time in showing us, set to a beautiful score by Underworlld. The cinematography, too, is constantly inventive; at times claustrophobic, at times epic in scope, always interesting.

So, on one hand, the movie has this art-house sci-fi vibe to it, with a distinct visual sensibility that I thought was awesome. It's also a pretty relentless thriller. I constantly found myself wringing my hands and covering my eyes out of tension and empathy for the grueling situations the crew was being forced to endure. And I thought these two elements--art-house flick and sci-fi thriller--worked together surprisingly well for the most part. There's an element that comes into the story later on that I thought was really weak and unnecessary. I felt the same way about something that happens near the end of 28 Days Later. It's as if Garland doesn't trust his set-ups to be able to provide satisfying resolutions on their own and so feels a need to bring in something from out of left field to wrap things up, when it only ends up making things messier. Still, I think Sunshine may be the best, most effective thriller-on-a-spaceship since the original Alien (which I don't think is saying very much), and as a work of visual artistry, I think Sunshine may be just about unforgettable.

In the early moments of King Kong, I thought Peter Jackson had missed the mark this time. Sure, his Depression-era New York is pretty enough to look at, but it initially feels a bit too removed from us. In an odd way it feels less real than the...
[+] Read Full Review

In the early moments of King Kong, I thought Peter Jackson had missed the mark this time. Sure, his Depression-era New York is pretty enough to look at, but it initially feels a bit too removed from us. In an odd way it feels less real than the Dwarven mines and white cities of his Lord of the Rings films, largely because the characters inhabiting it seem as broad and two-dimensional as if they'd walked out of, well, a silent movie. There's Naomi Watts as the struggling actress with a heart of gold. There's Jack Black as the wildly ambitious filmmaker. (Sound like anyone else we know?) But everyone knows that we don't stay in New York for long, and on an uncharted island in "the last blank space on the map," Jackson unleashes all his powers as a filmmaker and makes us forget what had come before. To run down the list of things Jackson trots out for our entertainment, amazement, and horror on Skull Island would be to spoil some of the surprise (and anyway I don't even know the names for half of those things, if they even have names), but suffice it to say that we encounter a brilliantly imagined, fully realized collection of creepy crawlies and massive monstrosities. We can almost imagine Jackson, like the host of a circus sideshow, delighting in our looks of awe and disgust as he throws creature after creature in our faces. And Jackson doesn't just trot these things out; he puts each one to spectacular use, and the film's action sequences are all superb exercises in controlled chaos. While the early parts of the film seem flat and removed, there's a sense of rollicking movement to all the film's fights and chases that's remarkably effective at pulling us in and creating a feeling that everything's happening in a three-dimensional space. (One sequence, in which a boat is tossed to and fro on the waves, was almost a bit too effective for me in this regard. But then, I can't play Mario Kart on the bus, either.) Of course, amidst all the bats and dinosaurs and giant millipedes and nasty-ass tentacle things that Skull Island holds, one creature reigns supreme, and Jackson's Kong is a breathtaking creation. Just as Gollum, a product of human performance combined with CGI artistry, was one of the most expressive and affecting characters in The Lord of the Rings, Kong is more than able to hold his own opposite Academy Award-nominated actress Naomi Watts. Kong doesn't have the benefit of speech which Gollum put to such good use, but he doesn't need it, and in the scenes between Watts and Kong (who, like Gollum, was modeled on a physical performance by Andy Serkis), he conveys a surprisingly complex range of emotions. The moments in this film in which half the screen is taken up by a giant CGI ape often feel a lot more real than those moments in many films in which real live people are acting with each other, and the fact that we can now get such effective performances out of such realistic CGI creations means that there is no excuse for anyone casting Keanu Reeves in a film ever again. Everyone knows, too, that the story makes its way back to New York, but the flatness which occupied the film's beginning has been long--and I do mean long--since left behind. King Kong's third act is passionate filmmaking that also pays tribute to the story's inherent themes and raises questions about the true meanings of civilization and savagery. (In my favorite little moment, a crowd of theatergoers in their tuxedos and evening gowns politely applauds the progress of industry represented by the use of chains made of chrome steel as they take entertainment from a creature's imprisonment.) As the film approaches its iconic conclusion, Jackson switches gears from thrilling action to tender romance to inevitable tragedy so swiftly and assuredly, and pulls everything off so skillfully, that we're left wondering if there's anything he can't do. King Kong is, in a word, beautiful.

There are a lot of things that are funny about the new comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The title, for one. Funnier than that is the big cultural mess that Sacha Baron Cohen, as...
[+] Read Full Review

There are a lot of things that are funny about the new comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The title, for one. Funnier than that is the big cultural mess that Sacha Baron Cohen, as clueless, homophobic, anti-Semitic Kazakh reporter Borat, discovers the U.S. and A. to be on his travels from New York City, through the American South, on his way to Los Angeles. The movie is at its best when Cohen uses Borat's imaginary prejudices to get the unsuspecting people he encounters to reveal their own very real ones. Seeing a gun shop owner not bat an eye when Borat asks which gun he should get to protect himself from Jews isn't exactly hilarious, but it is compelling cinema. Equally chilling is Borat's stop at a rodeo, where producer Bobby Rowe kicks off with a torrent of offensive stereotypes about Muslims and goes on to agree with Borat that homosexuals should be executed. But the film often abandons the path of sharp cultural satire and settles for resorting to shock for shock's sake. For instance, at a dinner with a Southern dining society, Borat stretches social decorum way past the breaking point by requiring someone at the table to instruct him in the finer points of going to the bathroom, and he also rather cruelly insults one of the women he's dining with. Now, many of Borat's victims get what they deserve. I have no sympathy for the frat boys who spout racist and misogynistic garbage during their drunken Winnebago party, for example. But the people at the dinner with Borat seemed perfectly nice, and I'm not sure what point about American culture humiliating and insulting them is supposed to make. It seems like a missed opportunity, because surely there are plenty of members of polite Southern society who harbor beliefs and engage in behaviors that are anything but good and decent, and if Borat had been dining with such a bunch of hypocrites, then I would have delighted in seeing him cut them down to size, but as it was, the whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously a very brave comedian. After all, it takes a special kind of courage to be willing to butcher the national anthem at a rodeo, and when his courage is employed in the service of such biting cultural comedy, the results are fantastic. But a more focused approach would have served him better; in this film, his shots are all over the map, and not all of his targets are deserving. Insulting and humiliating people, in and of itself, isn't funny, and being brave enough to do so, in and of itself, isn't a virtue.