Random Thoughts on Film for February, 2011

I watched Blue Valentine a couple weeks ago.  That flick was so grimey.  So many things about it appealed to me.  The tragic ending, the layered vulnerability of the characters, the creative splicing of past and present storylines… I’ve always been a fan of real-life, heavy dramas.  The heavier the better.  I wonder what a psychologist would say about that…

I also recently saw Buried, the 90 minute advertisement for Ryan Reynolds’ acting career. I tend to avoid these types of movies where there’s just one actor operating in one setting for the entire time.  I find I just get bored.  A few other movies have done it successfully.  Castaway, and Sam Rockwell’s Moon both come to mind.  But those movies both had brief snapshops of the Main characters’ home life, which offered a well-needed respite from the cinematic claustrophobia that this subgenre otherwise engenders.  And even with these snapshots I got bored.  Buried is like Castaway on steroids.  Not only is Reynolds the only person you ever see on screen, but you’re never even given so much as a glimpse of any setting or landscape besides the interior of the coffin that Reynolds is buried in.  For me the fact that movies allow viewers to visit different times and places by proxy is a huge part of the filmic experience.  I guess the idea is that after a while the confinement starts to fuck with the audience psychologically.  But I just found it annoying.  As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one time when it’s appropriate to spend an hour and a half staring at another person in a dark enclosure.  That’s if the person is your twin, and you guys are still in the womb.

Speaking of movies comprised almost entirely of one-man introspection marathons, I also recently watched 127 hours.  Frankly I don’t see what all the fuss was about.  This movie suffered from the same problem as Buried, although to a lesser extent.  It also didn’t help that I knew how it ended going into it.  Some movies can get away with that.  This one couldn’t (IMHO).  On top of that, I’m skeptical about the truthfulness of the story.  Aron Rolston, the mountaineer about whom the story was based, strikes me as being just the type of narcissist that would make it all up for fame and attention.  Think about it… What are the odds that an experienced mountaineer would go to such a dangerous place by himself and not tell a single person and not bring a cell phone with him?  It smacks of stupidity.  Then consider that the events took place in 2003.  I refuse to believe Rolston, an engineer at the time, didn’t own a cell phone in 2003.  I owned a cell phone in 2003, and I was a broke undergrad student.  Then I read on Wikipedia that Rolston is now a full-time motivational speaker commanding $25000 per appearance.  Not bad for a fraud.

Another good movie I watched this month was the British film Never Let Me Go, which is based on a Japanese novel by the same name.  The movie follows the brief lives of three children who grew up in an unusual orphanage in the English countryside.  It’s unusual because all the kids there are clones created specifically to donate their organs to sick people in need of transplants.  As soon as they’re old enough they begin donating their vital organs until they eventually die, usually after the third or fourth donation.  This movie is listed on Flixster as a drama, but it could just as easily be classified as a horror film.  Watching ten-year-olds stoically resign themselves to the horrid fate that awaits them is nothing short of spooky.  One thing that bugged me though, was that the movie didn’t spend much time discussing why none of the children ever tried to run away or otherwise escape their prescribed destiny.  Even when they become young adults they dutifully volunteer themselves to be mutilated repeatedly.  I guess it’s supposed to be a meditation of the psychology of the caged human soul.  You know the whole phenomenon about the caged bird that doesn’t fly away even if you open its cage and place it next to an open window?  Whatever the message was, I felt like that theme could have been hashed out a little better.

My last thought pertains more to a filmmaker than to a specific film.  A few weeks ago The New Yorker published a lengthy article that exhaustively recounts the events leading up to Paul Haggis’ less-than-amicable split from the Church of Scientology.  For those that don’t know, Haggis is the Canadian-born, Oscar-winning, Hollywood writer and Director who was once one of Scientology’s most prized possessions.  He resigned from the church in 2009 after the organization refused to take an official stance against California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in that state.

Haggis is best-known as the writer of 2005’s Million Dollar Baby and 2006’s Crash.  Million Dollar Baby didn’t blow me away, partly because I think Clint Eastwood has the lowest ratio of actual talent to perceived talent in the history of directing.  But I thought Crash was a gem.  I remember watching it in the theatre.  There was that part where the old Persian man nearly shot that little girl in the back, but nothing happened because his gun had been loaded with blanks (you kind of have to see it to get it).  That was the one and only time I’ve ever seen a cinema audience clap in the middle of a movie.  Had I known then that that sequence was written by a Scientologist, it probably would have tainted my enjoyment a little bit.

Haggis had a lot of reasons to leave the church before 2009.  They had bilked him out of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on bullshit “courses” and “audits”.  They had forced his wife to “disconnect” completely from her family, which, according to Haggis, caused her great pain.  They made young children sign away their lives in billion-year contracts, which stipulated that they would spend most of their time at sea performing menial labour for slave wages as part of the Church’s “Sea Org” program.  On multiple occasions the church forbade severely mentally ill members from seeking medical help, which lead to at least one highly publicized fatality.

But in the end, it was the church’s stance (or lack thereof) on gay marriage that pushed Haggis over the edge.  And I suppose that’s as good a reason as any.  Especially given the fact that Haggis’ two older daughters are both gay.  But if I had the chance to ask Haggis just one question about his departure from Scientology, it would be this. “Now that you’ve left the church, ostensibly for political reasons, does that mean that you no longer believe the story about the evil alien warlord Xenu, who implanted hoards of disembodied alien spirits in the bottoms of volcanoes billions of years ago, and those spirits are the source of all the problems that plague humanity today?  Or is that stuff still kosher?”