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After Earth (2013)

Rated PG-13

This film publicity image released by Sony - Columbia Pictures shows Jaden Smith in a scene from "After Earth." (AP Photo/Sony, Columbia Pictures) ORG XMIT: NYET842

Sony – Columbia Pictures

Yes, it’s a project of hubris (Will Smith turned down Django Unchained for this?), and yes, director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, The Happening, The Last Airbender) is in a rut. Even so, After Earth isn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t measure it against the current crop of summer movies, but it’s one of those watchable flicks you stumble into while flipping through one of your hundreds of cable TV channels.

BloghouseIn the distant future, man has long ago departed earth for more hospitable climes. Nova Prime is our new home and Smith’s Cypher Raige is the leader of our peacekeeping Rangers. Rangers take on the S’krell, alien beings bent on our destruction. The S’krells hope to vanquish us with their vicious Ursa creatures which, though blind, can hunt by sensing fear. Cypher discovers how to defeat the Ursas by “ghosting,” which is a method of controlling one’s fears, thus becoming invisible to the creatures. He is legend. Now if only he could connect with his distant son Kitai (Jaden Smith), who strives to prove himself to himself and his doubting father.

Father and son each carry the burden of guilt over the loss of daughter/sister Senshi, who died defending young Kitai from an Ursa. So with the pieces in place, father and son are goaded by wife/mom Faia into using a Ranger training exercise as a bonding getaway. Things get bad when their spacecraft encounters an asteroid shower, worse when it crashes on quarantined earth, worse still when the captured Ursa brought along for training purposes escapes the wreaked vessel.

With the ship’s distress beacon flung miles from the scattered ship, and Cypher critically injured, it’s up to Kitai to traverse the hostile environment, with the Ursa on his tail, to retrieve the beacon. Can the son overcome his fears? Prove himself to dad? Avenge his sister?

Will Smith’s role in this is limited. This is a showpiece for his son. Jaden is serviceable, though he lacks his dad’s effortless charm and needs a few more laps around the acting track. To be fair, he’s younger than his dad was when Will got his start, and Jaden carries the burdens as well as benefits of nepotism. But he doesn’t embarrass himself and involved me in his plight. It’s a decent time-waster, but you can waste that time once it comes to TV.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Video review

Upstream Color (2013)

Rated PG-13

upstream

erbp

What a delicate film this is.

To be sure, weighty and absurd ideas are stacked upon each other, scene by scene, but underneath is a foundation so delicate you wonder how it can support this film. And yet it does.

The BloghouseOK, here we go: Women pick blue flowers growing near a great tree on a riverbank. A shady fellow buys these flowers and harvests grub worms from the soil of the plants. A chemical is extracted from the worms to create a potent drug that, depending on how you use it, can place you in synchronicity with the environment, can link your mind with that of another person who’s also on the drug, or can be wielded as an instrument of mind control.

The opening segments befuddle and intrigue as we observe—with sparse dialogue and music—the man as he worm-drugs a woman named Kris, takes her back to her own home and through mind control (and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden) encourages her to empty her bank accounts and give up personal belongings. He keeps her in this fugue, compliant state (for days? weeks?) while he bleeds her dry. Finally he packs up and leaves. Kris slowly comes back to what was once her reality starved, bruised, confused, jobless, penniless, shattered. Her world no longer makes sense, her mind and emotions are altered in a way that encourages viewers to acknowledge that reality can sometimes be a fragile, fleeting idea.

Just as we’re wrapping our minds around this segment, we’re introduced to a musician/pig farmer, credited as The Sampler, who calls Kris to him using his sound-recording devices like a pied piper. The Sampler removes a now much-larger worm from Kris and implants it into one of his pigs. From time to time the man tosses piglets into the river, which then float downstream to our tree from the beginning, where the piglets rot, freeing the worms from within, which become nutrients for the magic flowers the women come to pick.

Got that? We’re witnessing a life cycle, which Kris and many other unwitting victims—and their corresponding pigs!—are now a part of.

Another such victim is Jeff, who is drawn to Kris, perhaps because his pig couples with Kris’ pig back on the farm. They are two mind-scattered peas in a pod who can’t even discern whose memory is whose, even as they piece together the riddle of their lives, and fall in love.

You think I’ve told you too much of the plot; I think I’ve done you a favor. It took three viewings to piece this much together, as the story is told out of sequence, in fragments and largely with only sound and subtle cutting between related images, as dialogue is kept to a minimum. (The last 20 minutes, all the way to the credits, are dialogue-free.)

I think the director (Shane Carruth, whose debut microbudget, mind-frying time-travel flick Primer set the indie world on fire in 2004) wants to immerse the viewer in a sonic, wispy-image experience that approximates Kris and Jeff’s shattered and reforming mindsets. And maybe this approximates our truest selves: how we are merely a collection of our selective memories, which we figuratively hold tightly in our hands like a bunch of cards. This movie is about what happens when someone or something swats those cards to the ground and we have to pick them up again. I think that’s the foundation of this film.

I don’t know if I understood everything going on here, but this I know: I worked up quite a bit of empathy for Kris and Jeff’s plight and was deeply moved as I reflected that emotions and motives are still powerful even when untethered from the sanity of everyday life. By the finale, I found myself very satisfied by an ending that isn’t really as happy as it seems, once you think about it.

For days after I saw this it swam in my mind like a magical worm upending my notions of a conventional narrative love story.

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Quik Flix Hit

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Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Rated PG-13

star-trek-into-darkness

Paramount Pictures

As the end credits rolled for Star Trek Into Darkness, an obviously old-school Star Trek diehard (I’m not using the ‘T’ word) came up to me and my wife in dire straits over his belief of the new film’s disrespect of the space drama’s canon.

Bloghouse“The finale, shot-for-shot, matched the finale of (1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan),” he shouted at us in the dark.

“Well, they did swap the main characters’ fates this time around,” I antagonized, to my wife’s chagrin. This guy has singlehandedly assured that I won’t be watching anymore of these films in the theater with my wife. Thanks, pal.

OK, this isn’t your father’s Star Trek, or even your older brother’s. But it does manage to hit the sweet spot between Roddenberry devotees, Next Generation Gen X’ers and millennials, who have no intention of looking back as they head warp speed into J.J. Abrams’ universe. But that was the plan all along, wasn’t it?

Am I mistaken in my understanding that the franchise reboot established that this was a different approach to the Trek of yore? Wasn’t the 2009 film’s debut the time to rail against this new Star Trek, or just bow out altogether? That film was a smash, though, drawing in hardcores and newbies alike. My wife, no fan of sci-fi, thought it was fantastic. So if you came back for more, Mr. Shot-by-Shot, why complain? The new franchise is firing on all its Abrams cylinders, which is to say it holds respect for the original series, but doesn’t feel bound to be a slave to it.

Quick summary: Young Capt. Kirk, still the rogue, against-the-regulations leader of the USS Enterprise, is fuel by revenge after the Federation is attacked by an unknown terrorist. Shades of 9/11 abound, as a shaken Federation looks to harsh, secret strategies in the wake of the devastation. This includes the machinations of Dick Cheney, I mean, Peter Weller’s Federation muckety-muck Marcus, whose sneaky efforts could precipitate all-out intergalactic war.

Spock’s cool logical Vulcan mind collides with Kirk’s burning ideas of revenge, but as always, the two level each other out. A quick lovers’ quarrel between Spock and Uhura, Bone’s dalliance with Tribbles and Scotty’s silly/brilliant hijinks fill in the gaps between story proper, which is largely told in bold swaths of action.

Benedict Cumberbatch is wonderfully powerful as Khan. I don’t know how we get from this to Ricardo Montalban, but, hey, this guy was a fierce and daunting opponent who, at turns, outwits and/or outfights the Federation, Kirk, Spock, Marcus and special guest, the Klingons. By the hour-and-a-half mark I was about to put a big “S” on this guy’s chest and call it a day.

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Cloud Atlas (2012)

Rated R

 

It’s hard to write something short about a movie so long. Three hours of mind-bending, audacious, off-the-map filmmaking.

Here’s the lowdown on the basics: The movie was codirected by the Wachowski siblings (The Matrix trilogy) and German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume). It was adapted from an equally complex, enigmatic novel by David Mitchell. The film details six interlocking, yet time-spanning, stories. Ten of the main actors—including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent—play multiple roles (as few as three each, as many as six), which cast them as different races, genders, even synthetic creatures.

A theme of connectedness and reincarnation binds the stories—lovers who face tragedy in one life, might find happiness together in another; sins and hopes of the past ripple through time and sometimes switch places, depending on the era.

While I didn’t follow all of it (no one’s walking out of this with a clear understanding of everything—at least not in a first viewing) I did follow enough to keep me engaged in each of the stories and their characters. For a film with so much going on, I was surprised by how much it cares for its characters. I was left with questions, of course, but felt I got the overall plot and ideas behind each story, even with the constant cutting between them.

I think people who love time-jumping puzzle-plot movies will see this repeatedly, and likely catch something new each time. I think people who don’t like to work too hard in the theater will still say they walked away with favorite scenes vividly recalled because of the beautiful human moments or the striking visuals.

Something’s going on with this film. The directors are reaching to redefine filmmaking, I think. Do they succeed? Time will tell. This movie will be studied and talk about, dismissed and touted as groundbreaking. It’s as if the filmmakers were trying—within theses six mini-films—to encapsulate the whole of human existence, purpose and emotion. It’s trying to document the histories of how we love and create with passion, how we are as cruel as we are forgiving, how we move through time and space while changing those things and ourselves as we go.

This ambitious film might not do well out of the gate (it demands attention and thought), but my guess is, over time, it’s going to be regarded as something of a milestone.

See it | Skip it

Side note: Several Asian characters are portrayed by non-Asians actors, which is in keeping with the film’s reincarnation theme that involves actors in multiple roles, but I wonder if it won’t be seen as offensive, particularly since some of the makeup effects could be seen as playing to stereotypes. 

 

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