I don’t know whether it was a leftover from Cannes, but I’ve managed to squeeze in four screenings at the cinema this week, two sessions of back-to-back films.
Advanced warning: there are probably some spoilers below.
I started with Mission: Impossible 3, followed by The Da Vinci Code, a couple of days away then X-Men: The Last Stand and, last but not least, Brick.
By the time I got to the final film I had put a lot of hope on it being good. The reason for this is because Hollywood still seems to be producing terrible films.
That’s not to say there weren’t good moments in the films I saw, but overall I was left cold by the big-budget films.
MI3 and The Da Vinci Code seemed to suffer from a couple of problems, most notably that they seem to think that the audience doesn’t want story, or characters, just more and more action, so they just try and jam pack more action sequences in and rush from one to the next as fast as possible. There’s no attempt to build tension, or empathy. This obviously gets a bit odd in MI3, as Ethan Hunt pulls off supposedly impossible missions left, right and centre. They go off without any hitch, no problems at all, so you never doubt they’ll complete them. In fact, when there’s a chance of building tension, when Ethan is really under threat of missing a deadline, they skip most of the action altogether. The Da Vinci Code has added problems of trying to squeeze everything in the novel into the film, which means hurtling through the entire story at warp 9.
The problem with both films is that there’s no time for you to care about the characters, to get involved in the story or to build any sort of tension. They just leave you feeling numb. There seems to be this new theory in Hollywood that all the audience wants is more action, more stunts, more effetcs, bigger, bolder and better than they’ve ever seen before. Effects and stunts get very boring after a while, they’re supposed to be used to enhance the story, not replace it.
X-Men: The Last Stand, was better, but far from perfect, suffering from a chaotic storyline, which introduces tons of new characters, for no real reason other than to mix up the powers and stop us getting bored of Storm producing yet another lightning strike and Wolverine jumping into battle only for Magneto to stop him using his control over metal. There seems precious little about the Phoenix/Jean Grey in the film, considering her importance, following the lacklustre idea of a ‘cure’ instead. Rogue, too, seems very under-used, and seems purely there to try and make the whole thing deeper as she struggles with not being able to touch the ones she loves. She could happily have taken a much bigger role, especially given her power. As with the Xavier Institute, the whole movie seems to lose its direction when he’s gone. It turns out like an X-Men paint-by-numbers, all the elements are ticked off, but without any real enthusiasm.
So Brick had a lot riding on it, I was hoping it was going to save my week, it didn’t quite do that, but it was better than the others. It’s a teen noir mystery. Brendan, a very smart kid, is asked for help by his ex-girlfriend, who he’s still in love with. So Brendan sets out, using The Brain as an undercover information source at school, to find her and see what’s going on. He meets a few other caught up in the drug scene, including high-class socialite, Laura. Then Emily (his ex) changes her mind, and comes to see him to tell him to stay away. Next thing, Emily is dead.
Brendan carries on, keeping the vice-principle loosely informed as he works his was deeper into the inner circle of the local big-time dealer (The Pin), trying to find out who killed Emily and why.
There’s a lot of fast an witty dialogue, a lot of which I didn’t understand, but a fantastic look and feel to the movie. This is a far cry from the sugar-coated high-school romances that appear to be coming off a production line. There’s plenty of twists and turns, complex plotting and a complex environment (more complex than the real world I’d say, but with the carefree feel of teenagers with nothing but school taking up their time — The Brain evens says “he’s supposed to be old, like 26,” about The Pin at one point).
Writer/Director Rian Johnson spent six years trying to raise the money to shoot it, in the end getting the cash from friends and family, a deserving tale, and it’s a good film, but its not perfect, something just didn’t gel, but it still left the Hollywood fair in its wake. Definitely worth a watch, especially if you like films that need you to be awake to understand them, but certainly not “the new Donnie Darko,” as some have called it.
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