Reviews: The Book of Eli, The Lovely Bones
Note:
I struggle with which journal to put movie reviews in. Sometimes they end up here and sometimes they end up in my personal one (especially if I use a lot of curse words to describe the film in question). I think it depends on how artsy-fartsy I get in my interpretation of why I liked or disliked the film, but even that isn't consistent. In any event, I doubt anyone who knows me as a writer or poet or musician knows or cares that I am a big movie buff or that I briefly reviewed them for an online journal a while back. Since this is an art-as-job-focused journal I don't think my audience largely comes here for this sort of thing, so this will be the last set of movie reviews I'll do here unless it feeds a larger artistic point.
Since it's goodbye I'll give you two films, both brand new: The Book of Eli and The Lovely Bones. Also, since it is impossible to talk about Eli the way I want to without acknowledging a huge spoiler, I'll save that review for last.
The Lovely Bones
Hated it. I read the book but it had gotten cold to me by the time I started seeing trailers for this. I remembered enough of the book to know that the trailers I was seeing did nto largely support the tone of the book. Man, was I right.
As it turns out this movie doesn't so much throw the book out the window as it opts to focus on the story from a slightly different emphasis on different characters. Characters that were less important in the book suddenly become major. It's like only watching the third act of Rashomon: you know there's supposed to be more there, but they don't give it to you. The special effects were stock and in the end this film made What Dreams May Come look like Avatar. This movie should have been dripping with irony and pathos and quiet horror. As it stands we're getting the After School Special version of The Lovely Bones, and that's a movie you couldn't have paid me to see. The film pulls too many punches to its detriment, but blame some of that on the Hollywood sceening process: a movie that started out for adults screened better for young ladies, so they remixed it for girls who hangout in malls. The grit that made the matter-of-fact tone of the book work is gutted to its lovely bones here. Too much narration, too much gloss, too little power. I do not believe this stuff was on the cutting room floor. I simply think jackson took a turn with the material that was misguided. It was kinf of why The Road lost some power onscreen: the really tough stuff wasn't there to develop an emotion around.
Mind you the book wasn't perfect, and I don't just mean the ending. It had a number of pull-outs that even when the film tried to change them up were just exacerbated as flawed from scratch. But the book had meat and heart. The film is all manufactured angst (smash the bottles, cry, repeat) and a Pop Rocks heaven that looked better when Robin Williams was running through it.
I don't recommend the movie at all, especially for readers of the book. No, not even for the touted Stanley Tucci performance. It's not THAT great. He wore some contacts and did a little twist on Flanders from The Simpsons. Big deal. I think he's getting such great props because the rest of the movie stank so bad.
Bigger fish to fry:
The Book of Eli
I mentioned not too long ago how much I despised knowing everything a movie had to offer by the trailer, and this one didn't disappoint in that regard for the most part. The story is just what you think it is: a really tough guy with a "secret book" AKA The Bible walks through a desolate nuclear-blasted landscape *coughTheRoadcough* trying to stay out of the world's way (by walking on paved roads sick with bandits) and ends up crossing Uncle Entity in Bartertown, has to fight a hundred people against his good nature, gets beat up, tries to save a girl, turns her into his jedi apprentice and blah blah blah. You got all that from the trailer. I haven't spoiled anything yet.
I will rectify that now.
(Seriously: if you don't want this movie spoiled for you, don't read the rest of this until you've seen it. I'll tell you now that it's worth watching as an action flick but has other issues.)
The trailer doesn't show how violent and cool the fight scenes end up being, though it does show you all of the fight scenes in the movie. There was some nice choreography here, and as a man partial to knife fights, the two in this film are pretty nice. Short, but nice.
Denzel is Denzel here, no surprises there. At this point you can judge the earnestness of his character's thoughts by how he mugs his face. He talks to every other character the same way in every movie, so if you like Denzel and he's the only reason you go see any movie he's in, you won't be disappointed - or challenged - by this one. The man is content to play himself for the rest of his career, even if he has to do it in a beard sometimes...you know, for effect.
Unlike The Road and just like every other post-apocalyptic film we've ever seen we know how this world ended 30 years before: nuclear war. Somehow this just comes off novel. I mean, who still uses nuclear war? Of ways man is likely to kill the planet, this ranks pretty low anymore. Do we even make nuclear bombs anymore? Whatever: the country (and we assume the world) is still dusty from nuclear war. Mind the water.
Denzel plays The Man With No Name (or at least he has no name for half the movie until you glimpse a name tag in his backpack that says Eli) who carries around a big book because a voice told him to. He has the completely ironic misfortune to find himself face-to-face with a town despot who sends his murderous marauders out every day in search of books with the hope that he can find - you guessed it - a bible for his collection. Guess what the guy's name is. No, go ahead, guess. Okay, I'll tell you. It's Carnegie. No, seriously: his name is Carnegie. Like the guy who gave millions to start up libraries.
So you've got a religious fanatic - Eli, which is conveniently short for the name of a prophet (Elijah) and a book collector named Carnegie. So far we've got a story that's as transparent as, I don't know, a Sunday School parable. Anyhow, lots of violence ensues as Eli takes off with the book, Carnegie chases him in a couple of trucks that weren't blown up shooting The Road Warrior, and Eli buddies up with a girl that can't do anything except provide excuses for him to shoot people while protecting her from her own stupidity.
(Aside: What's with the pretty women in the post-apocalyptic worlds? Come on: these women are firm, cute, got all of their teeth, have bouncy hair full of body, and fresh Botox. Do you think we come to these flicks because of the women? We don't; we come for the carnage. And dropping some hottie in front of a burning car isn't cool. It's stupid.)
Okay, up to this point I've been playing nice, but here's the real spoiler action:
This movie was largely okay by action film standards until the end, when Eli loses the book to Carnegie, who discovers that he can't read the book because it's in Braille, which means - get this shit - Eli was blind. Eli then shows up at an enclave that's trying to jump-start civilization again by preserving culture and books and he then recites - from memory - the bible to the caretaker so that they can print it and send it back out into the world. Did I mention we burned all the bibles after the bombs dropped? Did I mention I don't buy that for a second?
They had a good thing going here: Carnegie wants the bible so that he can use it to indoctrinate and control his dusty empire. Opiate of the masses and all that. That's kind of cool. And if you suspend your belief enough to allow for the one man in possession of a remaining bible (which requires suspension as it is) to cross paths with the one maniac looking for a bible, well then you got yourself an action movie.
But you can't make Eli blind AND able to do all of the things he does in this movie. Sorry. Can't do it.
Now here's the thing, and this is the thing that will keep me from discussing this film with some of you: you have to decide which movie this is before you start talking about it with someone. This is either...
a) a movie that makes no bones about not only God's existence, but suggests that he directly affects people's lives much in the way he does football games: moving bullets out of the way, stopping evil from effecting the righteous, and the magical gift of Daredevil-like radar sense, or...
b) a movie with a more agnostic, realistic view of how man makes his way in the world, suggesting that faith is more powerful than anyone gives it credit for.
The problem with the first film is that it's not the film we've been sold and it isn't the better film. It does allow for the ending we're provided with, but that movie taken as a whole sucks. It's like The Judas Project except "Jesse" (wink wink) cuts people's heads off with a machete. I watched The Judas Project so I get to make that comparison. Don't judge me. It was in a real theater and everything. What can I say? I thought it was an action film.
The problem with the second film is that because it's more realistic and suggests more about what it means to be human, the ending makes it fall completely apart on a logical level. Eli does things that blind people can't do in the "B" film, no matter how much faith they have. By making Eli blind they mess up the better film, and by the time we realize the reveal I don't want to go back and make the film into the "A" film to justify it. I'd rather they just made him a guy who can read Braille for one of a dozen reasons - maybe had a blind kid or a sibling or a parent, or was a teacher of blind kids before the war, or taught himself how to do it for the 30 years he’s been on the road. But to make him blind is to make the film X-Men Origins: Eli. Ugh.
So there it is: two new films, two exercises in futility. At least one of them is watchable.
I struggle with which journal to put movie reviews in. Sometimes they end up here and sometimes they end up in my personal one (especially if I use a lot of curse words to describe the film in question). I think it depends on how artsy-fartsy I get in my interpretation of why I liked or disliked the film, but even that isn't consistent. In any event, I doubt anyone who knows me as a writer or poet or musician knows or cares that I am a big movie buff or that I briefly reviewed them for an online journal a while back. Since this is an art-as-job-focused journal I don't think my audience largely comes here for this sort of thing, so this will be the last set of movie reviews I'll do here unless it feeds a larger artistic point.
Since it's goodbye I'll give you two films, both brand new: The Book of Eli and The Lovely Bones. Also, since it is impossible to talk about Eli the way I want to without acknowledging a huge spoiler, I'll save that review for last.
The Lovely Bones
Hated it. I read the book but it had gotten cold to me by the time I started seeing trailers for this. I remembered enough of the book to know that the trailers I was seeing did nto largely support the tone of the book. Man, was I right.
As it turns out this movie doesn't so much throw the book out the window as it opts to focus on the story from a slightly different emphasis on different characters. Characters that were less important in the book suddenly become major. It's like only watching the third act of Rashomon: you know there's supposed to be more there, but they don't give it to you. The special effects were stock and in the end this film made What Dreams May Come look like Avatar. This movie should have been dripping with irony and pathos and quiet horror. As it stands we're getting the After School Special version of The Lovely Bones, and that's a movie you couldn't have paid me to see. The film pulls too many punches to its detriment, but blame some of that on the Hollywood sceening process: a movie that started out for adults screened better for young ladies, so they remixed it for girls who hangout in malls. The grit that made the matter-of-fact tone of the book work is gutted to its lovely bones here. Too much narration, too much gloss, too little power. I do not believe this stuff was on the cutting room floor. I simply think jackson took a turn with the material that was misguided. It was kinf of why The Road lost some power onscreen: the really tough stuff wasn't there to develop an emotion around.
Mind you the book wasn't perfect, and I don't just mean the ending. It had a number of pull-outs that even when the film tried to change them up were just exacerbated as flawed from scratch. But the book had meat and heart. The film is all manufactured angst (smash the bottles, cry, repeat) and a Pop Rocks heaven that looked better when Robin Williams was running through it.
I don't recommend the movie at all, especially for readers of the book. No, not even for the touted Stanley Tucci performance. It's not THAT great. He wore some contacts and did a little twist on Flanders from The Simpsons. Big deal. I think he's getting such great props because the rest of the movie stank so bad.
Bigger fish to fry:
The Book of Eli
I mentioned not too long ago how much I despised knowing everything a movie had to offer by the trailer, and this one didn't disappoint in that regard for the most part. The story is just what you think it is: a really tough guy with a "secret book" AKA The Bible walks through a desolate nuclear-blasted landscape *coughTheRoadcough* trying to stay out of the world's way (by walking on paved roads sick with bandits) and ends up crossing Uncle Entity in Bartertown, has to fight a hundred people against his good nature, gets beat up, tries to save a girl, turns her into his jedi apprentice and blah blah blah. You got all that from the trailer. I haven't spoiled anything yet.
I will rectify that now.
(Seriously: if you don't want this movie spoiled for you, don't read the rest of this until you've seen it. I'll tell you now that it's worth watching as an action flick but has other issues.)
The trailer doesn't show how violent and cool the fight scenes end up being, though it does show you all of the fight scenes in the movie. There was some nice choreography here, and as a man partial to knife fights, the two in this film are pretty nice. Short, but nice.
Denzel is Denzel here, no surprises there. At this point you can judge the earnestness of his character's thoughts by how he mugs his face. He talks to every other character the same way in every movie, so if you like Denzel and he's the only reason you go see any movie he's in, you won't be disappointed - or challenged - by this one. The man is content to play himself for the rest of his career, even if he has to do it in a beard sometimes...you know, for effect.
Unlike The Road and just like every other post-apocalyptic film we've ever seen we know how this world ended 30 years before: nuclear war. Somehow this just comes off novel. I mean, who still uses nuclear war? Of ways man is likely to kill the planet, this ranks pretty low anymore. Do we even make nuclear bombs anymore? Whatever: the country (and we assume the world) is still dusty from nuclear war. Mind the water.
Denzel plays The Man With No Name (or at least he has no name for half the movie until you glimpse a name tag in his backpack that says Eli) who carries around a big book because a voice told him to. He has the completely ironic misfortune to find himself face-to-face with a town despot who sends his murderous marauders out every day in search of books with the hope that he can find - you guessed it - a bible for his collection. Guess what the guy's name is. No, go ahead, guess. Okay, I'll tell you. It's Carnegie. No, seriously: his name is Carnegie. Like the guy who gave millions to start up libraries.
So you've got a religious fanatic - Eli, which is conveniently short for the name of a prophet (Elijah) and a book collector named Carnegie. So far we've got a story that's as transparent as, I don't know, a Sunday School parable. Anyhow, lots of violence ensues as Eli takes off with the book, Carnegie chases him in a couple of trucks that weren't blown up shooting The Road Warrior, and Eli buddies up with a girl that can't do anything except provide excuses for him to shoot people while protecting her from her own stupidity.
(Aside: What's with the pretty women in the post-apocalyptic worlds? Come on: these women are firm, cute, got all of their teeth, have bouncy hair full of body, and fresh Botox. Do you think we come to these flicks because of the women? We don't; we come for the carnage. And dropping some hottie in front of a burning car isn't cool. It's stupid.)
Okay, up to this point I've been playing nice, but here's the real spoiler action:
This movie was largely okay by action film standards until the end, when Eli loses the book to Carnegie, who discovers that he can't read the book because it's in Braille, which means - get this shit - Eli was blind. Eli then shows up at an enclave that's trying to jump-start civilization again by preserving culture and books and he then recites - from memory - the bible to the caretaker so that they can print it and send it back out into the world. Did I mention we burned all the bibles after the bombs dropped? Did I mention I don't buy that for a second?
They had a good thing going here: Carnegie wants the bible so that he can use it to indoctrinate and control his dusty empire. Opiate of the masses and all that. That's kind of cool. And if you suspend your belief enough to allow for the one man in possession of a remaining bible (which requires suspension as it is) to cross paths with the one maniac looking for a bible, well then you got yourself an action movie.
But you can't make Eli blind AND able to do all of the things he does in this movie. Sorry. Can't do it.
Now here's the thing, and this is the thing that will keep me from discussing this film with some of you: you have to decide which movie this is before you start talking about it with someone. This is either...
a) a movie that makes no bones about not only God's existence, but suggests that he directly affects people's lives much in the way he does football games: moving bullets out of the way, stopping evil from effecting the righteous, and the magical gift of Daredevil-like radar sense, or...
b) a movie with a more agnostic, realistic view of how man makes his way in the world, suggesting that faith is more powerful than anyone gives it credit for.
The problem with the first film is that it's not the film we've been sold and it isn't the better film. It does allow for the ending we're provided with, but that movie taken as a whole sucks. It's like The Judas Project except "Jesse" (wink wink) cuts people's heads off with a machete. I watched The Judas Project so I get to make that comparison. Don't judge me. It was in a real theater and everything. What can I say? I thought it was an action film.
The problem with the second film is that because it's more realistic and suggests more about what it means to be human, the ending makes it fall completely apart on a logical level. Eli does things that blind people can't do in the "B" film, no matter how much faith they have. By making Eli blind they mess up the better film, and by the time we realize the reveal I don't want to go back and make the film into the "A" film to justify it. I'd rather they just made him a guy who can read Braille for one of a dozen reasons - maybe had a blind kid or a sibling or a parent, or was a teacher of blind kids before the war, or taught himself how to do it for the 30 years he’s been on the road. But to make him blind is to make the film X-Men Origins: Eli. Ugh.
So there it is: two new films, two exercises in futility. At least one of them is watchable.