Jason F.C. Clarke

Unlike the venerable Mr. Humphries, I am a Star Wars fan. But I think he’s wrong when he claims that most SW fans were disappointed with the first prequel and would equally criticize this one. The majority of diehard SW fans I’ve spoken to have been willing to overlook all flaws of both the first prequel and this one, even, in some cases, trumpeting what I saw as some of the worst faults. I, however, do not think Lucas has given us his best work.

When I first sat down to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on opening day three years ago, I could hardly contain my giddy excitement. I knew hardly anything about the film, having deliberately stayed away from the websites, but from the trailers it looked as if I were in for a wonderful, mythic prelude to some of my favorite films. As the film opened with John Williams’s blazing, familiar score, and that gigantic yellow scrawl began at the bottom of the screen, I felt as if I had gone home again after sixteen years. The film began. Liam Neeson as a Jedi, Ewan McGregor doing his best Alec Guinness impression – all good. Then Nute Gunray opened his big, ugly frog-like mouth. The minute I heard that vaudevillian mock-Chinese accent, my jaw dropped. It was so blatantly stereotyped that my mind instantly tried to rationalize it – was Lucas doing this to make the pre-Empire universe more diversified? Somehow that argument didn’t fly.

Things only got worse. Jake Lloyd, the 10-year-old who played Anakin, wasn’t quite up to his monumental task. The two-headed announcer at the pod race, with his Bob Costas-style commentary, made me cringe. Jar Jar Binks was just annoying – and not funny at all. We’ve already got C3PO in this movie (for whatever reason), why do we need more comic relief? Besides, everyone knows that stuffy British accents are much funnier than goofy patois ones.

It’s now three years later and here comes the Attack of the Clones. I won’t comment on the title except to say it sounds lame and is counterintuitively related to what happens in the film. Is Attack of the Clones better than The Phantom Menace? Yes, but not by much.

I went into Clones with a skeptical and, I’ll admit, even negatively-biased disposition. Lucas had botched the first film badly and had set up a framework that I didn’t think was viable. After the confusing mess that serves as a plot in Clones, I see I was correct. At its most basic level, the plot is identical to that of the previous film: Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) secretly stages an elaborate power play to consolidate his control of the Galactic Senate. That’s it in a nutshell, for both films. Lucas may pull the ol’ switcheroo by making the Darth Sidious character (also played by McDiarmid and clearly meant to be the Emperor of Return of the Jedi) a clone of Palpatine, but I’m not going to let him use that to weasel out of the fact that he basically recycled the plot of the previous film. There is apparently “unrest in the Senate” and some planets are trying to separate – the “Separatists” mentioned ever-so-briefly in the opening scrawl. But the evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, playing his worst-named character ever) is apparently working with the separatists (who will presumably form the core of the Rebellion), while the Jedi are secretly developing an army of clones to crush the separatists (or are they? So Dooku or Sidious or whoever poses as this long-dead Jedi to order an army of clones, and when the Jedi, led by Yoda, find out about this, they decide to just use the clones in a manner that turns out to benefit Palpatine perfectly? I mean…honestly). I have to admit, this whole Jedi-as-Gestapo thing bothered me. By the end of the film the Jedi are aware, or at least suspicious, that a Dark Jedi has control of much of the Senate. Yet they brutally defeat the separatists and “preserve the peace,” and apparently, since “Begun the Clone Wars are,” as Yoda says, many more separatist worlds will feel the heat of Jedi lightsabers and Jedi-commanded clones.

Perhaps most annoying of all is the fact that this highly confusing plot (which forces almost every line of dialogue to be one of exposition) is really only a backboard for five or six videogame-like action sequences. Watching the film I just knew that this or that scene would soon be found on your friendly neighborhood Playstation 2.

The acting is spotty. Ewan McGregor does a fine job as always playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lee, fresh off his role as an evil wizard in The Fellowship of the Ring, is fine as the evil wizard Count Dooku, or Darth Tyranus, whichever you prefer. Despite the script, McDiarmid manages to play Palpatine as a suave bureaucrat obviously plotting everyone’s downfall. Jimmy Smits plays Bail Organa, Senator from Alderaan, future foster father of Leia and future victim of the Death Star. But no one ever identifies him as Organa, so he’s just Jimmy Smits doing a cameo in a Star Wars movie. I’m serious – I just checked the script and no one ever says his name.

But the biggest problems are with Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman. First of all, I’m ending my silence – Portman is not a good actress. She’s cold and unemotional and plays every role that way. I know she had horrible dialogue to work with. But so did Kirsten Dunst in Spider-Man – and she still managed to imbue her role with warmth and sexuality. Portman is frosty and her character is fairly boring. That’s part of what makes Christensen’s task as Anakin so thankless; he’s stuck delivering lines of burning passion to a character that wouldn’t start a brush fire in most men’s hearts. The result is a forced, rushed romance that requires more suspension of disbelief than all the computer-generated mayhem. In one scene, Anakin pours his heart out in front of a fireplace while Padme listens to him, immobile and emotionless. The scene is unquestionably dreadful, and I suspect you’d find most viewers would agree it was the worst in the film. I’ve spoken with some other SW fans who claim the romance in AOTC is better than that of Han and Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. To those people I say: you really need to try falling in love.

There are a few redeeming things about AOTC. Visually, of course, it can’t be beat. Lucas’s digital effects empire, Industrial Light & Magic, is where all the money goes in these films. The battles are all well-done and fairly cool – particularly when a certain diminutive Jedi Master opens up a can of whoop-ass on Count Dooku. That was, by far, my favorite moment in the film, and the one point in the whole prequel saga so far that matched the heart and small-scope grandeur of the original films. Also, Anakin’s slaughter of the sandpeople that enslaved his mother was a good bit of character development, even if Anakin then told Padm about it and she didn’t seem to care. Finally, I’ve never found C3PO that funny, but in the last half-hour of the film he not only provides some desperately-needed comic relief, but they’re genuine laughs. British accents=comedy.

AOTC fails because of its script. The whole film seems rushed and the romance is forced; Lucas is desperately trying to make his saga fit properly with the original films, yet each prequel adds a whole host of new loose ends. I suspect the problem lies in the way that the SW saga has been fundamentally changed since the first films came out. Author Kevin J. Anderson once pointed out that writing novels based on the SW universe was hard because, unlike Star Trek “when Star Wars was developed, modeled on a mythic cycle, it wasn’t designed to have many many other adventures tacked onto the end afterward. In true mythic cycles, the main characters are allowed to die heroic deaths, etc., and we are under tougher constraints in producing spin-off fiction.”

This didn’t stop Anderson from writing dozens of SW novels, of course. The confusing mess of plot in the prequels may be a result of this rapid expansion of the SW universe. One of the main locations in the prequels, the capital planet of Coruscant, was invented by sci-fi author Timothy Zahn in a trilogy of books that came out in the early 1990s. The Sith and the Fetts have volumes of material written about them in both books and comics. The name “Darth” was almost certainly not a title until the ancillary media made it one. Lucas actually has continuity editors on staff who are supposed to make sure all the novels, comics and movies hang together.

But all of this extra material has only made Lucas’s task with the prequels even more difficult one. He has forgotten how much success the original films had with using a smaller scope. In the modern world, epics only work when they have strong internal consistency, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Even Tolkien’s character names were derived from Tolkien’s complete fictional languages or real-world historical ones. The SW universe is randomly-constructed and contradictory, even within the films themselves. The average reader or audience is much more amenable to fantasy when it is solidly grounded in realistic characters – characters that, most importantly, the viewer can identify with.

This is where Lucas has failed. A friend once remarked to me that Lucas doesn’t really understand the original SW saga. He thinks it’s about his precious avatar, Luke. But it isn’t. Star Wars is about Han Solo – the human character we viewers can identify with. Han has complex morals and a sardonic cynicism about the universe that serves as a necessary balance to the goodie-goodie nobility and idealism of Luke and his Jedi mentors. Luke is a freak – he has weird powers that normal people don’t have. Han Solo anchored the fantastic plot of SW and gave us a way to look at the incredible events and characters as we would see it ourselves, just as the quotidian and practical Hobbits do in The Lord of the Rings.

Han has no corresponding character in the prequels, and I believe it is this that turns me off from them so much. I can’t identify with all these politicians and Zen Jedi. I can’t even identify with whiny Anakin – is any young man so incapable of understanding responsibility, or of employing subtlety in his behavior? It’s clear that Darth Vader is going to turn out to be the biggest dupe in the galaxy, passively succumbing to Palpatine/Sidious’s influence. No wonder Peter Cushing could boss him around so much in Star Wars. He’s a wimp.

Critics have more or less pounded Men in Black II. A lot of my friends have also told me they thought it sucks. I didn’t, but I might as well admit up front that I seem to be in the minority opinion. In this review I’ll address a few of their arguments against the film, but just so you know, gentle reader, I am not on the bandwagon with this one. If you’re one of those people who believe the majority opinion dictates truth, then caveat emptor.

Men in Black II’s basic premise is one so obvious I actually thought of it myself just after seeing the original: Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) has to be brought back in for some reason or another, and they use a “deneuralizer” to give him his memory back. As it turns out, the reason K has to be brought back in is that an evil alien called Serleena (Lara Flynn Boyle) is after “The Light of Zartha,” an object that was supposedly sent away from Earth twenty years earier. But Serleena comes looking for it, killing innocent bystander aliens in the process, and the last agent who saw the thing was K.

Thus, Agent J (Will Smith) is sent to get his old partner back. J’s been having a tough time of it, deneuralizing one inadequate partner after another. He’s also become the top agent at MiB over the last five years. K, meanwhile, is now the postmaster of Truro, Massachusetts, blissfully ignorant that he works with a staff composed entirely of aliens. J soon whisks K back into service as a man in black.

Personally, I wasn’t expecting MIB2 to be one of those sequels that improves upon the first one. Men in Black was based on a number of jokes that were amusingly original in the first film but couldn’t possibly be as funny in a sequel, once you knew them. And the very fact that the film had a plot I myself had concocted gave me the impression that the filmmakers (including returning director Barry Sonnenfeld) weren’t bending over backward to try and reinvent the franchise. That said, what I did go in hoping for was a good time, and I think I got that. This is no Godfather II, nor is it a Ghostbusters II or a Batman and Robin. I’d probably rate it as a Batman Forever – not a great film, but entertaining with some good performances.

I was a little dismayed to see Smith phone in a performance, but I think I can understand why – audiences basically ignored his two-year-in-the-making tour-de-force, Ali. But, as Smith doubtlessly knew would happen, they’re flocking to see him get beat up by worms and act with pugs in Men in Black II. The message is essentially, “we don’t take you seriously unless you’re fighting aliens or making fun of rich people. No drama!” Other than Six Degrees of Separation and Ali, Smith has usually listened to this message, but still – I choose to forgive his somewhat lackluster performance here based on those grounds.

Jones, on the other hand, hasn’t done much recently, so why is he so low-key? It’s possible that he’s simply giving the same Joe Friday performance he gave in the first film, but Smith’s lower voltage weakens the contrast between J and K.

Rounding out the cast are Rip Torn, reprising his role as chief agent Zed, Rosario Dawson as a witness to an alien murder, and Boyle as Serleena. Oh, and Johnny Knoxville plays some evil alien too. There’s nothing particularly notable about their performances, though Boyle gets to make a wicked reference to her perception as a too-thin waif.

And lest we forget, there is Frank the Pug, who steals nearly every scene he’s in. Love that dog.

I think what bothered me the most about the film was the editing. Some shots and jokes just seemed to be slapped together at random. The story, as mentioned above, is fairly by-the-numbers – it’s almost something I’d expect to see on the short-lived MIB cartoon a few years back.

BUT…it was a fun movie. I enjoyed it. At 88 minutes long, you’ll hardly notice the time go by. But, unlike the first film, I’ll admit you probably won’t miss anything by renting this one rather than spending $8 to see it.

The Bourne Identity is based on a 1980 novel by Robert Ludlum, the first of a Cold War-themed trilogy of spy novels centering around the character of Jason Bourne. The novel was previously adapted into a very 80s TV-movie starring Richard Chamberlain. The story has been retooled for a naughts audience and most of the Cold War aspects have been removed, though with all the European locations and jittery intelligence bureaucrats it can t help but have a few traces of the Reagan era.

(A brief side note: I think the first thing I ll comment on is the fact that The Bourne Identity is up against The Sum of All Fears – it s Affleck vs. Damon in the battle of the spy flicks! Over the last few years, as Affleck tried to become the next big action star in movies like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor (why one was a hit and the other a flop is beyond me, since both are dreadful and cheaply manipulative), Damon preferred to star in more touchy-feely flops like All The Pretty Horses and Bagger Vance, with the occasional Talented Mr. Ripley and Ocean s Eleven to maintain his credibility. The Bourne Identity represents Damon s first foray into the Big Action Flick (BAF), whilst Sum is only the latest in Affleck s attempts to co-opt the genre. Fortunately for viewers, neither film is a representative of that sub-genre of the BAF, the Big Dumb Action Flick, to which Armageddon and Pearl Harbor belong.)

For a spy movie the set-up is relatively simple. A French fishing boat comes upon a man (Damon) with no memory, excellent hand-to-hand combat skills and a Swiss bank account number sewed into his thigh. A trip to said bank reveals that the man is one Jason Bourne – along with several other identities. The rest of the film focuses on Bourne s quest to recover his memories and his true identity, as well as evading a number of shadowy assassins led by Ted Conklin (Chris Cooper), who runs whatever intelligence organization Bourne of which is/was a part.

The story is fairly standard spy stuff – nothing new here, not after decades of Bond movies. The look and feel of Bourne Identity is often similar to that of the first Mission Impossible movie, as Damon is hunted across Europe much as was Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.

The film s real strength is in the performances – in particular, the chemistry between Damon s Bourne and Marie Kreutz (Franka Potente), the young woman he hires to drive him from Zurich to Paris for $20,000. Potente gives the role much more characterization and realism than it deserves, playing Kreutz as a girl trapped in a rather unlikely spy game. It s an understated performance, but you get the sense that Damon and Potente are two likable people (in real life as well as the film) stuck in a bad situation.

The action scenes are generally top-notch. It s a relief to see some normal chop-socky heroics in an age of slow-motion bullets and revolving camera angles. This may be a result of the film s relatively modest budget (for an action flick, anyway), but it may also be partly due to Liman himself, who doesn t exactly have a reputation for cinematic style (the overrated Swingers and Go were filmed a bit better than a Kevin (Dogma) Smith film, but not much better). This serves Bourne well; by getting rid of the stylish CGI tricks and ridiculous stunts, the film looks and feels more realistic (thereby heightening the tension and forging a better bond between the audience and the main characters).

That s not to say the film isn t without its faults. While the film features a breathless, well-directed car chase, it also drags inexplicably during certain action sequences (such as one where Bourne spends ten minutes climbing down a wall, and another where he and another spy duke it out in the midst of a grassy meadow). Liman still needs to work on his pacing (though he s miles beyond Swingers now).

The film resolves itself predictably and, naturally, a sequel is certainly possible – and one I would welcome, particularly if Potente is involved. The Bourne Identity is good, quality fun, like a Bond movie, and Damon is engaging enough to carry the franchise. If only they ll call the next one Bourne Again rather than the more staid title of Ludlum s sequel to the novel, The Bourne Supremacy.

In preparation for the film, I read the novel by H.G. Wells. It’s just over 70 pages, so it’s a quick read. In the famous novel, the main character – known only as “The Time Traveller” – takes his time machine 800,000 years in the future, where he encounters two species: the small, peaceful but rather stupid Eloi and the violent, cannibalistic Morlocks, who prey upon the Eloi. The novel deals with both Marxism and Darwinist evolutionary theory and is surprisingly relevant to our modern day and age. The new movie deals with Guy Pearce and the “7-Up Guy,” and lots of special effects.

The movie begins with the Time Traveller (Pearce), now known as Professor Alexander Hartdgen, taking time off from his scientifical work (which involves lots of numbers and letters scribbled on chalkboards) to propose to his so-perfect-she’s-doomed girlfriend. One gunshot later and our hero has his idee fixe: to build a time machine and change the past.

Alex builds the machine, but finds to his shock that he can’t change the past. So, assuming that his descendants will be much smarter, he heads into the future to find out why. After a brief stop in the twenty-first century to talk to a holographic museum guide (played by Orlando Jones of “Make 7-Up yours!” fame) and witness the destruction of the moon, Alex accidentally leaps 800,000 years into the future.

In the novel, after 800K years the human race had split into two classes, the aristocrats and the workers, who eventually evolved into two species. The Eloi are little more than domesticated cattle for the Morlocks’ dining pleasure. In the movie, the Eloi are noble and intelligent Native Americans who run like cowards when the Morlocks come to eat them. Alex decides to take things into his own hands and show these monster-movie rejects who’s boss. Along the way he meets the bizarre, brilliant leader of the Morlocks, played by Jeremy Irons and referred to as the “ ber-Morlock” in the film’s credits.

The addition of the Irons character is probably the biggest departure from the novel; it’s also the most confusing, and serves to eliminate most of the Marxist and evolutionary questions that were in the novel. Irons is game for the hammy role, as he was for the evil sorcerer he played in the awful Dungeons and Dragons, and even in this brief cameo he outshines Pearce, who is all grimaces and pain. For what amounts to little more than a goofy sci-fi film, it’s a shame Pearce takes it so seriously (he’s capable of more; witness his passive-aggressive, effeminate portrayal of the villain in The Count of Monte Cristo). Samantha Mumba, as the Eloi love interest Mara, has one of the most pleasant, comforting screen presences I’ve ever seen, but she doesn’t get to do much else.

While I haven’t seen it, the 1960 George Pal version of The Time Machine incorporated a nuclear war into its plot, using that to account for the degeneracy and mutation of the Morlocks. This one makes a cursory attempt to keep the class issues intact, but it’s mostly concerned with giving us a lot of cool special effects. This, at least, is one place where the film delivers: the effects showing the passage of time are impressive, and the damaged moon, with chunks orbiting its remaining form, is one of the more terribly beautiful images I’ve seen in film.

I suppose it really goes without saying that a big-budget film like this wouldn’t exactly force its viewers to really think. It’s happy to play with the possibilities of time travel and throw up lots of fancy images. And that’s okay; I didn’t begrudge the filmmakers that hour and a half of my life when it was over. The scenes with Orlando Jones are amusing enough to warrant seeing the film.

Todd Solondz is the director behind the art-house hits Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness. I regret to say that I have yet to see these films, so I saw Storytelling without the greater context of Solondz’s canon. Whether this is a positive or negative thing seems to be a hotly debated issue; I have friends who swear that Dollhouse is the worst film they have ever seen, while others cannot stop singing the praises of Happiness. The only common thread I picked up in reading articles on Solondz is that he is “ungenerous” to his characters – a claim that is certainly supported by Storytelling.

The film is split into two separate stories. The first, subtitled “Fiction,” centers around Vi (the always game Selma Blair), a college student taking a creative writing course. We meet Vi in the throes of passion with her boyfriend Marcus (Leo Fitzpatrick), who has cerebral palsy. It’s clear Marcus is trading sex for Vi’s assessment of his stories. Later, in a brutal (but accurate) scene, Marcus’s story is torn to shreds by his writing workshop.

Brutal as it was, I enjoyed this scene. Solondz has clearly attended a writing workshop or two. The tentative attempts to find good things in the story, then the one criticism that opens the floodgates. The only wrong note is the creative writing teacher himself, who’s a bit more severe than any CW teacher I’ve ever met.

Following a break-up with Marcus, an upset Vi finds herself in a one-night stand with the writing teacher, a large, intimidating black man. Solondz is playing with dynamite here as about three or four cultural taboos (past and present, conscious and unconscious) take center stage. It’s difficult to describe the feelings the scene elicits. The professor practically (definitely?) rapes Vi while ordering her to scream racist obscenities at him. (Incidentally, the actual copulating figures are obscured by a red rectangle; the MPAA wouldn’t give Solondz an R rating with the scene as it was, so this is his way of underlining the censorship.) Yet, like Vi, any modern American viewer, raised in an era of tepid political correctness and smoldering undercurrents of racial conflict, will probably have a difficult time sorting out their assessment of the scene. My conclusion is that it was a rape. The difficulty was keeping race out of it.

The second story, entitled “Nonfiction,” focuses on an amateur filmmaker (Paul Giamatti) looking to make a documentary on the modern high school student. He settles on Scooby (Mark Webber), a slacker senior with no ambition other than to maybe get on television one day. Scooby is trapped in a suffocating upper-middle-class family (headed by a stern John Goodman, whose talent for displaying barely-concealed rage is put to good use). Even more interesting than Scooby is his kid brother, Mikey (Jonathan Osser), who torments the family’s El Salvadoran maid with seemingly innocent questions that shred the illusions of American class equality. The rage seething in this respectable, well-off Jewish family is fearsome.

I’ve never seen a filmmaker treat his characters with such near-contempt. He seems to have sympathy for no one – except, perhaps, the glumly passive Scooby. The Giamatti character (”Toby”) is, I would guess, intended as an avatar of Solondz himself. None of these characters are well-fleshed out, though some are creepy (particularly Mikey). I found it amusing that when Vi presents her rape as a story in class, one of the students asks the same question I was at the time – was it a rape? After all, Vi did what the professor asked. Of course, she was being intimidated – or was she? I think she was, but I suppose it’s open for interpretation.

Storytelling is not a film to move its viewers. Its mission is to shock, surprise, maybe even elicit a few nervous, guilty titters. How many directors would dare make a film that makes fun of people with cerebral palsy, has a black man rape a white girl, has a kid who mercilessly and innocuously torments his foreign au pair, and brutally exposes the raging undercurrent of middle class America? The film speaks the unspoken and dares us to face up to it. I only wish there were at least some spark of goodness to counter the cynicism.