Battle: LA Review

As I critic, I would much rather give a glowing review of a film than rip one apart. Sure, there’s fun involved and ranting and raving, in pounding out a scathing review, to pick apart another’s entertainment with the strokes of keys. But I much prefer recommending films. So much so in fact that I try so hard to find something good about every movie I see. Battle: Los Angeles made this very hard for me.

Aaron Eckhart (Thank You for Smoking, The Dark Knight) stars in the latest alien invasion flick as a marine with literally no life who retires at the beginning of the film. Kind of. Then he’s called back because aliens have landed in LA in incredible volume and threaten to take over the city. As it turns out, all around the globe, in major city after major city, a similar invasion (or colonization, as we are told by an expert scientist in the film) unfolds simultaneously.

After 20 minutes of very poor background exposition and attempts to make us care for the men we are about to see die, Harvey Dent leads a group a marines into the shit. Hoo-rah! Most of the film plays like an odd endorsement of the marines, with jokes coming at the expense of the air force and other armed forces. I found the main characters’ ability to make off-hand jokes at sarcastic comments in such stressful times to be remarkable. Are they really in this? Is anybody really in this?

Though some of the constant special effects are impressively detailed, I was unimpressed with the alien design. As a bit of an alien-invasion nerd, the aliens looked uninspired. The whole film played like a mish-mash of bad, unrelated ideas thrown together with little consistence. In the beginning of the attack, the viewer is lead to believe that the aliens are trying to abduct humans, perhaps eat them. We find out later, they only want to shoot us, though.

But all of this, plot, characters, intelligence, are pushed aside for scene after scene of mediocre action. Roger Ebert wrote that the experience was like watching a friend play a bad video game for two hours without ever getting to play yourself. That’s precisely it. Battle: LA is too disjointed, too episodic. Each scene plays like another level on a game where the creators are merely trying to challenge make viewer gratification and endurance.

By now, I think you have an idea of how much I loathe this film. But I think it would be fair to let it speak for itself. In one scene, a “civilian woman” offers to help Aaron Eckhart find out how to kill an alien by performing surgery on it. “I’m a veterinarian,” she explains. I guess she thinks that would help in dissecting E.T. After heart-pounding moments of Aaron Eckhart hacking at the beasts chest, he proclaims “shoot it where the heart would be!” So, why did you have to perform surgery to learn that. Another character, the platoon doctor, says “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” I wanted to explain to him that this might have something to do with the fact that it just dropped out of space, but…you know. I’m just sayin’…

Battle: LA is an exercise in excess. It’s an example of everything that’s wrong with Hollywood films right now. Grab the nearest formulaic script, add an action star and throw $100 million at it. Boom! You have a box office hit on your hands. This formula is tried and true. At the time this review was written, Battle: LA had garnered $115 million worldwide. The system works. Teenage boys wanna go see things blow up.

Do not go see Battle: LA. Not only do I hate it and think you will too, but it offers nothing new and does nothing very interestingly. Do not throw your dollars at this garbage. Send Hollywood a message: we want District 9. Or at least Armageddon or Independence Day. If you’re going to make a stupid film, at least make a fun film. If you’re going to be a joke, at least show you’re in on it.

One good thing: it does end.

One bad thing: it exists.

0.5/5

On Mildred Pierce: Part I

The American Dream is not available to everyone. This truth haunts some of the best drama of the American modernist fiction. It asks how far someone will go to have it all? What will they sacrifice? What can they stand to give up? How compatible are freedom and liberty?

Mildred Pierce introduces all of those questions and more. The novel, written by James M. Cain in 1941, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1945 starring Joan Crawford and helmed by Michael Curitz (Casablanca). Mildred Pierce takes place in the suburban white California in the 1930s, and follows the title character’s struggle to redefine her role as a housewife in order to provide for her family during the Great Depression. This series of essays will consider on the 2011 mini-series director Todd Haynes crafted into 5-parts. The series is currently airing on HBO. Parts I and II premiered Sunday and have encore performances all week. Part III will air first on April 3^rd, and the series concludes of April 10^th, with Parts IV and V.

I cannot say too much about the plot at this point because I have neither read the novel nor seen the Joan Crawford film. I have only see Parts I and II of the Haynes film. Part I attacked the story right before Mildred Pierce (Kate Winslet of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Little Children) and her husband (Brian F. O’Byrne from Million Dollar Baby and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, but better known for his stage performances in Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia and the Catholic drama Doubt) spar verbally about a possible affair. Mr. Pierce leaves to move in with his mistress, leaving Mildred alone in a large home with her two daughters and no source of income, save her selling of homemade pies. Part I shows Mildred attempt to find a job that she believes is dignified work. “I won’t wear a uniform,” she tells her neighbour (Melissa Leo from The Fighter and HBO’s Treme). After walking out on a woman offering her a job as a housekeeper (Hope Davis from Synecdoche, New York and American Splendor) because she was treated as a lesser, Mildred is forced to jump at the nearest job for an opportunity. She must choose between taking a “disgraceful” job, or “facing her starving kids.” Part I ends with Mildred’s anxiety about her older daughter, Veda, finding out that she is a waitress.

Part II chronicles Mildred’s success as a waitress and incorporating her pie-making into her work. She plans to open her restaurant and meets a playboy suitor (Guy Pearce from Memento and The Proposition) and spends a weekend with him before tragedy strikes.

That’s a brief plot summary, but I cannot say which threads the mini-series will pick up and leave dangling. The strengths of the first 40% of the series are mostly attributed to the extremely talented cast and to the guidance of Todd Haynes.

Haynes (director of Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, Poison and the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There) is one of the most interesting and maverick auteurs in American cinema. With that said, he’s much more a European filmmaker, but more on that later. Haynes makes decisions about his projects that remain incredibly faithful to his players, subjects and the nature of his story. Haynes was willing to abandon I’m Not There unless he could get permission to use Dylan’s music. With Mildred Pierce, Haynes said that the 1945 film left whole parts of the novel untouched that he thought were essential to the story. The result is a five-hour film that only found a home at cable’s continuously bravest and successful network, HBO. I don’t think Haynes would have continued with the project if he was forced to cut it for a 2-hour theatre run.

I said that Haynes is more a European filmmaker than an American filmmaker. That’s perhaps a deceptive comment. I meant more that he is influenced by European New Wave auteurs than commercial Hollywood studio filmmaking. He continually cites Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk as two of his more important influences. Far from Heaven is in a lot of ways an ode to the Sirkian melodramas of the 1950s. I’m Not There, composed of several parts, contained parts influenced by the aesthetics and themes of Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini (specifically 8 ½).

Haynes is often concerned with social outsiders who are alienated by their personal identity or unconventional sexuality. As a result, his protagonists are often homosexuals (Haynes is often identified as a pioneer of “New Queer Cinema”) or women struggling to define a fluid identity in a male-dominated world. Hayne’s sense of individual identity is at odds with socially-constructed concepts. Look no further than his African-American incarnation of Bob Dylan in the Confederate South, his casting Cate Blanchett to play Dylan, and the ode to the hippie westerns in the Richard Gere segment of I’m Not There. For Haynes, a self is a collective, like 6 people all playing Bob Dylan, or Mildred Pierce finding an identity in relation to her neighbour, co-workers or as a mother. His protagonists challenge power structures and disrupt social norms. Haynes works with postmodernist ideas of redefining the self more in terms of a feminine caretaker than a Kantian rational being. In that way, his protagonists are an assault on traditionally-defined male hierarchy.

Often, Haynes draws portraits of artists. In I’m Not There it was Bob Dylan; in Velvet Goldmine it was David Bowie. These artists found their creative output to be the greatest opportunity to exercise expressive freedom. Hayes is not concerned with individual freedom or market freedom. His concept of collective identity is less self-centered and more communitarian than that. In Mildred Pierce, Mildred expresses her freedom through her delicious and beautiful baked goods. Not only does she identify this as her greatest talent, but it offers her a means by which to make the money needed to care for her children.

I want to briefly mention the general aesthetic of Todd Hayne’s project. Filled with a mix of vibrant colours and burnt browns, Haynes contrasts the constrictions of social norms on Mildred’s life with makes her free. Take a look at the vast open spaces of the set design. Haynes likes to juxtapose long shots with more intimate close ups to create a sense of isolation or separation in his mise-en-cine that comments on the atmosphere that Mildred lives in. How at home is she in that vast, empty house? What about the transformation of the building she plans to make a restaurant? Glass appears frequently throughout Mildred Pierce creating both a clean, gleaning, reflective surface that’s quite fragile, but also putting Mildred constantly behind a barrier looking in. In some shots, all we can see of the action is what is reflected through these surfaces. As Haynes’s script unpeels layers and surfaces, appearances and masks from an overly-stylized made-up world of the bourgeious, what we could see might scandalize. What lies behind the picket fences and well-manicured lawn her husband spends so much time on in the first scene? Mildred Pierce is more aesthetically restrained than I’m Not There, but that’s likely because it’s narrative is more linear, straightforward and organized. Both approaches are appropriate for their respective projects. If I’m Not There was about the flamboyancy of performance and the deconstruction of persona, Mildred Pierce is concerned with restraint and masks, with creating the illusion that everything is sunshine and pies, until you step inside the house.

So, I encourage you to take a look at Mildred Pierce. The first two parts are probably airing right now on HBO. Part III will play this Sunday night. If you do, look for these occupations of Haynes’s themes. I think Mildred Pierce is a fitting next step for Haynes’s career that continues to look again at mere appearances. Next week, in Part II of my essay, I will look more closely at the setting of suburban, white California for Mildred Pierce. I will consider the genre fiction that James Cain brings to the project and explore more closely how the social and economic characteristics of 1930s Glendale effect the family in Mildred Pierce and offer a glass through with to examine America in the 2010s.

I hope to see you next week!

Radiohead’s Latest The King of Limbs Needs a While to Bloom

I made a mistake asking to review Radiohead’s newest album The King of Limbs. I have nothing new or insightful or say about it, really. You can stop reading now.

Over at Wash U, the music editor Steve Hardy, one of my former fellow reviewers, is taking heat from pretentious indie disciples and burnouts galore. “You don’t know or feel music,” they retort. They cry afoul: “nonsense.” This is likely because Mr. Hardy is committing sacrilege. He’s calling a bluff on Radiohead’s part; the obtuse British band is playing tricks on their fans and critics. Maybe, after the universal success and acclaim that surrounded In Rainbows, The King of Limbs is just a big joke, like the Coen Brothers following up No Country for Old Men with Burn After Reading. I am not ready to claim that The Kings of Limbs was designed to defy interpretation. I just don’t get it.

If you are a Radiohead fan, then you already know there is a lot to like about The King of Limbs, from the Philip Glass-ian piano opening in “Bloom” to the complementary guitar tracks in “Morning Mr. Magpie” to the mystifying, possibly code-ridden lyrics of “Separator.” And “Little by Little,” my favourite track. But, if you are a Radiohead fan, you don’t need me to tell you to listen to this album.

The King of Limbs won’t convert any new listeners to the cult of Thom Yorke. Like the rest of their albums (save Pablo Honey which I refuse to listen to lest my worship of the band be tarnished), The King of Limbs offers a tough first listen. I have experienced the album thrice now, each listen revealing new layers like a lotus flower (sorry, I had to). But I still don’t know what it all means. Is it a masterpiece? How about a likely successor and continuation of In Rainbows? For this amateur reviewer, it is too early to tell.

There is much ado about a possible part 2 to The King of Limbs. When will this be released if it even exists? No one knows. I’m not sure Thom Yorke does. Radiohead has a reputation of maverick strategies. In Rainbows was released for free on their website, and no one knew The King of Limbs even existed until a week before its scheduled release date. Rabid fans have taken a crack at decoding the lyrics of “Separator,” which promises “if you think this is over then you’re wrong.” That must mean there’s a part 2! Right? I mean, after all the song is called “Separator.” Furthermore, the download file was called “tkol01,” and the vinyl release contains two albums when all eight tracks would easily fit on one with their brief, 38 minute running time.

What interests me about all this commotion is how Radiohead is playing with the way we experience music as a community. Radiohead acknowledges that this isn’t 1967. In his sixties class, Dr. Hal Bush attests to the collective pop culture phenomenon that was the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. In class recently, Dr. Bush predicted that if all his students wrote down their three favourite albums of the last year there would be little overlap. Our iPods have little in common these days. Even if the music industry is fractured, small communities emerge, like the Radiohead faithful. Saturday, February 19, 2011 at 12.01am was going to be an event. My roommate and I had planned on a celebration the minute the album dropped. Could this be the closest modern music can get to a collective experience like the one in the summer of 1967 when Sgt. Pepper dropped? And then Radiohead released The King of Limbs at 5am on Friday morning to a surprised fanbase. On overload, their website took 45 minutes to download the album. I got mine in 7 minutes at 11am.

I think Radiohead is prophetic. Fans will attest to the band’s lasting influence on rock music, especially with Kid A. Personally, I can’t get enough of the anti-technocracy of OK Computer. In Rainbows is a near-religious experience, even on the 15^th listen. What does The King of Limbs say about the world we live in? I can’t answer that, but maybe the sparse 38 minute running time criticizes expectations and attention spans in an increasingly technology-savvy, fitter, happier world. That Thom Yorke is a pesky one. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He’s like a detuned radio.