Hunger’s Weighty Issue

Robert De Niro went one way in Raging Bull. Matt Damon went the other way in Courage Under Fire. Tom Hanks went both ways in Cast Away. For decades now, actors have been fattening up or thinning down for movie roles. For every Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary), there’s a Christian Bale (The Machinist). For every George Clooney (Syriana), there’s Jeremy Davies (Rescue Dawn).

That’s why I wasn’t shocked by the conclusion of Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which includes ghastly images of a sickly looking Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the IRA activist who died of starvation in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike. Still, I was troubled by the almost sexual ogling of Fassbender’s emaciated frame over the film’s final act, and I remain troubled today.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Fassbender lost 40 pounds for the role by “living on nuts and berries for 10 weeks.” That’s 40 pounds off a guy who didn’t have an ounce to lose in the first place. The result is unsettling, to say the least, though not to McQueen. “That’s the job,” the director told the Times. “The film is called Hunger. It’s not a vanity trip. It’s an essential necessity for the film. The guy (Sands) didn’t eat in order to be heard. It’s work. He’s a professional actor.”

On that last point, we agree: Fassbender is a professional actor. But is starving one’s self to replicate starving “acting,” or is that “doing”? I’d say the latter. True enough, Fassbender’s weight loss was inspired by history; in that respect his starvation wasn’t a “vanity trip,” nor was it some kind of flippant artistic choice, as in Clooney’s rather unnecessary filling-out for Syriana. But was it “an essential necessity”? Mere months after Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were aged and de-aged digitally for The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, I’d say no. Sure, Hunger lacked the budget of David Fincher’s Oscar-luring epic, but McQueen wasn’t without options; good old fashioned makeup effects would have worked, too.

Regardless of the method (or the Method, for that matter), McQueen’s best decision would have been to suggest starvation without actually replicating it. In other words, he should have asked Fassbender to, you know, act. Not only would this have been the more humane choice, I’m not alone in thinking that it would have been more dramatically effective, too. As Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor puts it in his review: “In the end, it is not Bobby Sands but Michael Fassbender we are looking at, and this realization takes us out of the movie.” Indeed, that’s true. The horror I felt at the end of Hunger wasn’t for Sands, who believed he was fighting a life-or-death cause; it was for Fassbender, who was starring in an ultimately trivial movie.

Of course, Fassbender is an adult who can make his own decisions about how he treats his body. On an individual human rights level, I support that. But I’m saddened at the thought of any actor feeling compelled to take such measures in order to land a part. If McQueen views Fassbender’s weight loss as “an essential necessity,” it’s safe to assume that Fassbender wouldn’t have gotten the role without agreeing to fast. At that point, one could argue that Sands had considerably greater control over his decision to starve himslf than Fassbender did. That’s disturbing. What’s even more troubling is the sense that such weight games are becoming somewhat commonplace, despite the primitiveness of the stunt. And, effective or not, that’s what Fassbender’s weight loss is – a stunt.

Speaking of stunts, near the end of Tarsem’s The Fall, there’s a terrific montage of death-defying stunts from the silent film era. Death-defying when they worked, that is; simply deadly when they didn’t. No filmmaker today would ask a stuntman to take the unharnessed risks of those latter day acrobats, so why, with all that we know about human health, digital effects and makeup, are we unnecessarily turning our actors into silent era stuntmen? As Rainer suggests, “filmmakers don’t often give enough credit to the imaginations of their audiences.” Or maybe it’s the filmmakers and actors whose imaginations are limited.

A Film of Few Words: Hunger

Margaret Thatcher isn’t a flesh-and-blood character in Hunger, and yet she delivers what is perhaps the film’s most significant piece of dialogue. Not that she has much competition. Save for a 20-minute stretch that is nothing but words, words, words, this 96-minute film is nearly void of expository conversation. That’s why Thatcher’s words, crackling into the drama over a radio, make such a profound impact. In the debut feature of director Steve McQueen (no relation to the King of Cool), nothing is careless. Thus, comments from the prime minister that would be mere historical context in another film, here make for biting commentary. Says Thatcher: “There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence.” In Hunger, the line between political and criminal action is nearly indecipherable.

That seems to be the point. Hunger is, by the end, the story of IRA activist Bobby Sands’ 1981 hunger strike, which ended with his death after 66 days of starvation. But more than that, Hunger is a documentation of Maze prison in Belfast in the days leading up to and through Sands’ fatal protest. In fact, Sands doesn’t enter the film until after the 30-minute mark. Until then, McQueen reveals Maze to be a place of routine and wretchedness. Day after day, the IRA prisoners smear the walls of their cells with feces. Day after day, the prisoners flood the corridor outside their cells with urine. Day after day, a Maze worker comes through the corridor and sweeps the urine back into the inmates’ cells. And on any given day, the prisoners are removed from their cells to be beaten and otherwise debased. This, Hunger suggests, is the cost of both fighting the system and trying to protect it. Political protest leads to criminal action, which leads to political imprisonment, which leads to criminal inhumanity – from guards and inmates alike.

It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for the prisoners, huddled naked under blankets next to piles of maggot-infested food, especially given that McQueen makes no attempt to share the crimes that landed these men in Maze, as if those actions are irrelevant. No crime could be worth this, the film seems to say. And, at the same time, perhaps no political cause could be worth this either. Hunger is yet another film illustrating that war, as seen through the battlefield of Maze, brings out the worst in mankind. While McQueen documents with an unflinching gaze every brutality endured by the prisoners, he doesn’t omit the effect that it has on their jailors. The first character we meet is a guard played by Stuart Graham who regularly soaks his right hand, bloodied and swollen from administering beatings, in a sink full of water, and who begins each day by lying on the ground to check the underside of his car for bombs. This guard lives a better life than that of a Maze inmate, to be sure, but Graham’s character is a prisoner, too, of Thatcher’s hard-line policies that require him to be an enforcer and put him in the IRA’s line of fire.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, Hunger isn’t for the squeamish. I spent what felt like a third of the picture involuntarily lurching in my seat, as if trying to avoid the film’s ghastly imagery, to no avail. Hunger gives us no place to run. Like The Passion Of The Christ, this film stares directly into every bloody wound, and yet McQueen doesn’t romanticize the pain endured by his film’s martyr(s) the way that Mel Gibson kneels in awe for his messiah. Whereas The Passion is moved along by John Debney’s mournfully reverent score, Hunger is without an emotive soundtrack and its patient camera captures the suffering clinically, almost dispassionately, as if made by a lifetime slaughterhouse worker who has grown accustomed to the grotesqueries of his surroundings. These images need no embellishment, and McQueen, already a successful visual artist before moving to feature filmmaking, needs no cinematic crutches. Hunger isn’t exploitive; it’s procedural. And, fittingly enough, Hunger is arguably the most claustrophobically evocative film since The Diving Bell & The Butterfly, the latest effort by painter-turned-director Julian Schnabel.

Interestingly, Hunger’s only show-stopping bit of standard theatrical fare is also its intermission, a welcome respite from the gauntlet of suffering that is the film’s first and third acts. Everything we know about Sands the man is stuffed into a 20-minute scene in which the still virile and charismatic Maze militant sits across a table from a priest and outlines his upcoming hunger strike. Sands is played by Michael Fassbender, the priest by Liam Cunningham, and the majority of their scene is captured in one unbroken take that’s as effective as it is noteworthy. In capturing both characters from the side in one shot, McQueen levels the playing field, lending as much credence to the protests of the priest as to the philosophizing of Sands. Likewise, McQueen keeps us at arm’s length, thwarting our desire to look Sands directly in the eyes, to be moved or at least convinced by his fervor. As a result, the scene provides a true battle of words and ideas between two men flinging lightning bolts at one another with Godlike certainty. Before the end of this swift second act, McQueen caves to convention, giving us a close-up of Sands’ face from the priest’s point of view, but not before treating us to some of the liveliest tête-à-tête one can ever hope to find at the movies – a scene that feels suitable for the stage but designed for cinema, possessing an emotional heft that reminds of the classic Marlon Brando-Rod Steiger exchange in On The Waterfront.

If everything mentioned above suggests that Hunger is an exemplar of greatness, the film’s downfall is its slightness. Hunger is an anti-epic, insular and thin. If the benefit of this approach is refinement, the detriment is rendering McQueen’s film the cinematic equivalent of mezze – whetting the appetite as often as satisfying it. This is a minor sin, as sins go, especially in an era when so many filmmakers force-feed the audience with more than we need. Still, there’s a disappointing irony to the way McQueen ogles Fassbender’s unsettlingly emaciated frame over the final act: Just like Sands was starved for nourishment near the end, so is Hunger. In the beginning, McQueen’s film speaks softly and wields an enormous stick, eschewing platitudes in favor of stark visceral realism. In the end it melts away all too quickly, as if it was never really there.

Notebook: Play Ball!

Searching for Stacy Carroll
Since the major league season opened Sunday night, baseball has been about the only thing on my mind. Meantime, the red envelopes from Netflix sit unopened. I’ll get to them soon enough. For now I’m hanging on every pitch – less invested in any team than in my love of the game itself. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about movies. In recent days I’ve thought about baseball movies. Movies like Bull Durham, so endlessly quotable that, like Pulp Fiction, it would be easier to list the forgettable lines than the classic ones. Movies like The Natural, which ditched Bernard Malamud’s original ending and added Caleb Deschanel’s luscious cinematography and became the most romantic baseball film of all time. Movies like Field Of Dreams, which demonstrates how the action between the baselines can serve as a lifeline in the relationship between fathers and sons.

I’ve also thought about Major League, that silly, rude and undeniably funny R-rated comedy of 1989 with its oh-so-80s primary players: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Corbin Bernsen and Wesley Snipes. Rene Russo’s decade of success in the 1990s was essentially launched by this film, while Dennis Haysbert would have to wait until 2001 for 24 to give him a part more memorable than the curveball-cursing Cerrano. Major League’s cast also includes broadcaster Bob Uecker as plaid-coat wearer Harry Doyle, plus prototypical “that guy” actors Chelcie Ross as Vaseline-baller Eddie Harris and James Gammon as manager Lou Brown. And then there was Stacy Carroll.

You remember Stacy, right? She played Suzanne Dorn, wife to Bernsen’s philandering third baseman Roger Dorn. Suzanne is the one who decides to enact revenge on her husband by sleeping with Sheen’s Ricky Vaughn. To do so requires her to transform from this …


… into this …


Now, I know what you’re thinking. You really had to see Major League in 1989 to come away thinking that Suzanne looks sexy in her Jessica Rabbit getup. But, hey, she got Vaughn’s attention. And, truth be told, she got mine; I was 12 at the time.

Anyway, this got me wondering: What’s Stacy Carroll done since? Off I clicked to IMDb, where I discovered that Major League was Carroll’s first film role … and her last. Her only other credit: “Woman Victim” in a 1987 episode of a TV show called Sable. So there’s a stat for you.

Stacy, wherever you are, you’re not forgotten.



Since I Mentioned Bull Durham
Awhile back I had an idea for a fun post that would involve two of my many favorite moments from Bull Durham. Problem is, this post would be best achieved as a video mashup, and since I have neither the necessary video editing software nor the time it would take to learn how to use said software, the mashup is unlikely to come to fruition. That said, let’s just free the cat from the bag, shall we?

My idea was to link several movies (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-style) via their use of songs. Preferably, the songs selected would be integrated into the drama itself. If not, the songs would at least be memorably employed as background music (think: “The Sound Of Silence” at the start of The Graduate.)

As conceived, the video could begin with the curtains parting in La Vie En Rose for the performance of the titular song by Marion Cotillard’s Edith Piaf. This would lead us to Bull Durham where Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” is playing at the house of Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), prompting Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) to say, in typical Nuke fashion, “I can hear that crazy Mexican singer.”

From there the montage would fade to Nuke on the team bus playing (incorrectly) “Try A Little Tenderness” (“Women do get wooly...”), and that would cut to Jon Cryer’s Duckie dancing to “Try A Little Tenderness” in Pretty In Pink or Donkey singing a line from the song in Shrek, or something else. It’s here that I always got stuck. Connecting “Try A Little Tenderness” to Pretty In Pink would be easy and ideal (involving two memorable scenes), but what song would I use to get out of Pretty In Pink to connect us to another movie?

An easier way to get out of Bull Durham would be to cash in on its use of “Rock Around The Clock,” employed at the start of a minor league game when Max Patkin is performing on the field. That could segue to American Graffiti, as memorable for its use of music as any film, which has oodles of songs to choose from to send us to something else. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Maybe someday I’ll sit down and finish the outline. (Connecting it to a Kevin Bacon movie is unnecessary.) For the moment, however, without the video mashup capability, it’s not a compelling blog topic. Unless … anyone have ideas?

If you have other pieces to add to the puzzle, even if you can’t connect them to the thread I started above, let me know. If a few of us created a songs-in-movies chain worthy of mashing-up, perhaps one of the blogosphere’s many video talents could be convinced to edit the appropriate footage together into a montage. Until then, it’s an idea best relegated to the minor leagues.



Dorked Up
Last week my movie geekdom took a backseat to another form of dorkiness: fantasy baseball. Since 1993, I’ve been in an NL-only keepers league powered by Scoresheet, a fantasy sports simulator that takes my players’ real-life performances and pits them against my opponent’s players’ performances in fully simulated games that are unmatched in sophistication. I won’t bore you with the details except to say this: while standard fantasy baseball systems generate “points” based on things like wins, losses and offense, offense, offense, the Scoresheet model actually considers things like on-base percentage, player speed and defensive range. In movie terms, you might think of it this way: a standard fantasy league measures quality by performance at the box office; a Scoresheet league measures quality in the ways that really count.

The annual auction for the fantasy league took place Sunday. I participated by telephone, patching in with another player who lives in Colorado to conference into auction headquarters in Oregon. There the owners of the other eight fantasy teams sat around a table with stacks of stats in front of them, as if reprising the terrific scene in Knocked Up, when Paul Rudd’s character, decked out in an Orioles jersey and cap, is caught in the act of playing fantasy sports. To my knowledge, no one showed up to our auction table in baseball gear, but the geek quality was undeniable nonetheless, as typified by this exchange: “I’ll nominate Zimmerman.” Which one? “From Washington.” Which one? “The third baseman.” Oh.

The auction took an intense four hours. By the end, even the best poker faces (or poker voices) were losing composure like Teddy KGB with the Oreos in Rounders. Two days later, my brain is still recovering, cramped for the moment with details that will be mostly useless until next year’s auction. For example, did you know that Jake Peavy’s VORP last season was 50.6 while Dan Haren’s was 53.7? I bet you didn’t. Then again, you probably don’t know what “VORP” is, and you probably don’t care. Nor should you. Like I said, the information in my brain is mostly useless and only further confirms my geek status. You know, as if my movie reviews referencing Jean-Claude Van Damme movies didn’t do that already.


Etcetera
I got a good laugh this week from a piece on Yahoo reporting that “Vin Diesel” isn’t Vin Diesel’s real name. As if it wasn’t obvious. From the first time I saw Diesel a little over 10 years ago in a Dateline special that showcased his efforts (and also Darren Aronofsky’s with Pi) to break out from obscurity at Sundance, he’s annoyed me with his oversized ego. You know, the kind of ego that would lead a guy named Mark Vincent to tell his friends to start calling him Vin Diesel . . . Disturbing news from my old hometown. The other day, someone committed suicide halfway through Watchmen. Sad deal, and I don’t want to trivialize it. Still, I find myself assuming that this person had seen the movie before and perhaps timed his death with a specific scene. I don’t say that to imply that Watchmen is the kind of film that encourages suicide. Quite the opposite. As a film lover, I like to believe that even the worst of movies (which Watchmen isn’t) would make life seem worth living for at least a few minutes longer.

Top 10 Favorite Characters

There’s a new meme taking the blogosphere by storm, and I’ve been tagged by Cooler pal Fox of Tractor Facts to participate. The charge? To name my 10 favorite movie characters of all time. That’s characters, take note. Not performances. As meme originator Squish puts it: “Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes or Bond may be your favorite filmic sight on screen but you may hate the Mel Gibsons, Basil Rathbones or George Lazenbys who've played them.”

OK. Easy task, right? Or incredibly difficult. I’m still not sure. There are a number of ways to approach this. The first thing I did was to attempt to look beyond performances. For example, Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront is a favorite character of mine, but he’s made interesting in large part because of the brilliance of Marlon Brando. Put a lesser actor in that role and Terry is just a meathead working the docks, not a cinema treasure. Thus, Terry is out. In his place I tried to pick characters I thought were written or implemented in such a way that they were can’t-miss. That said, you don’t get to be a top-10 cherished character without being powered by tremendous acting (of some kind), and I’m sure some great-on-paper characters have been overlooked entirely or forgotten too quickly due to lackluster performances. So you can never completely remove the performance aspect, but I tried. To a point.

I also excluded characters based real people and characters I thought were established in print before they became creatures of the movie screen. Then I really concentrated on the word “favorite” (not “best”) and went with my gut. I scribbled down about 16 names and cut it to 10.

Give me another hour, I could give you an entirely different list. But, for better or worse ...

My 10 favorite characters in the movies (today, at least) ...


Max (Sunset Boulevard, 1950)
You’re thinking I picked the wrong character, right? I hear you. Norma Desmond is a classic character, no doubt. But do you know what’s more interesting than a monkey-loving suicidal forgotten silent film star with delusions of grandeur? It’s a guy who used to be her director and her husband who now lives with her as her butler and is dedicated to her happiness. That’s Max. (Quote: “If madam will pardon me, the shadow over the left eye is not quite balanced.”)



Scottie Ferguson (Vertigo, 1958)
Homeboy falls in love with a woman, witnesses her fall to her death, finds a woman who looks like her and then painstakingly recreates this woman to look like the now dead woman he was in love with. Need I say more? Didn’t think so. (Quote: “Judy, please, it can’t matter to you.”)



Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate, 1967)
Anne Bancroft’s performance here is one of the greatest of all time. There’s not a stone of Mrs. Robinson’s psyche that goes unturned. That said, even on paper the character is fascinating: a grown woman and mother who seduces her friends' son while trying to run from the misery of her shattered dreams. Forty years later, female characters this well-imagined are still hard to find. (Quote: “Would you like me to seduce you?”)



Thomas Crown (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968)
This isn’t my favorite Steve McQueen performance, but it has to be his most compelling role. Thomas Crown is a rich dude who plays polo, beds women and, oh yeah, orchestrates bank robberies for the pure fun of it. Brilliant! I think somewhere between McQueen’s performance and Pierce Brosnan’s take on the character from the 1999 remake is the best Thomas Crown. If a third version of this film gets made, I’ll watch. (Quote: “Let’s play something else.”)



Percy Garris (Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, 1969)
Ah, Percy. He spends his days in the most out-of-the-way place in all of Bolivia and doesn’t bat an eye when two Americans show up looking for work. He spits tobacco, he sings, he answers his own questions. Strother Martin provides a colorful scene-stealing performance, but Percy was always going to upstage Butch and Sundance in their limited time together on screen. (Quote: “Morons. I’ve got morons on my team.”)



Darth Vader (Star Wars, 1977)
Why? Because he’s the ultimate figure of evil, and I’m from the Star Wars generation. To me, Darth Vader will always be the gold standard of cinema villains. (Quote: “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”)



John McClane (Die Hard, 1988)
OK, so this one owes a lot to the performance of Bruce Willis. A lot. But, like I said above, I discounted the acting only up to a point. That said, dated though the 1980s dialogue is, John McClane’s lines have swagger even on the printed page. (Quote: “Yippee-ki-yay!”)



Catherine Tramell (Basic Instinct, 1992)
Let’s see: She writes books, fucks men, fucks with cops and kills guys … with an ice pick. Did I mention she doesn’t wear underwear? (Quote: “Have you ever fucked on cocaine, Nick? It’s nice.”)



Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe (Pulp Fiction, 1994)
With all due respect to Harvey Keitel, here’s a character so well written that even Nicolas Cage couldn’t screw it up. No other character in cinema history casually jots notes like: “One body. No head.” No other character would show up at a suburban home that’s hiding a bloody corpse and introduce himself with the professional dullness of an electrician. No one else would kill time during bloody-body clean-up by talking about oak furniture. The Wolf is a can’t-miss character. (Quote: “Now when it comes to upholstery, it don’t need to be spick and span. You don’t need to eat off it. Just give it a good once over.”)



Captain Jack Sparrow (The Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, 2003)
Captain Jack's greatness is all due to Johnny Depp’s Pepe Le Pew meets Keith Richards portrayal, right? Well, sort of. Depp makes him classic, sure, but this is a pirate with black teeth who thinks he can bed any woman. He’s a pirate who makes his entrance on a tiny sinking boat who thinks he can take control of any ship at sea. And, well, he’s a pirate. Gotta like that, right? I do, and it's my list. (Quote: “Commandeer. We’re going to commandeer that ship. Nautical term.”)

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Oh, almost forgot: I tag Hokahey, Craig, MovieMan0283, FilmDr and Daniel Getahun, and anyone else who wants to play along in the comments or at your own blog.

Call it Fate, Call it Karma: Knowing

A Nicolas Cage performance is like the sun: you stare directly into it at your own risk. From silly hair to silly accents to plain old silly acting, Cage routinely serves as the walking punch-line in scenes that aren’t meant to be funny. On those terms, it’s fair to call Cage something of a joke as an actor, but he deserves some respect, too. If nothing else, Cage is a bankable joke, starring in about two movies a year and routinely winning the box office battle (on opening weekend, anyway) in the face of critical scorn. How does he do it? You tell me. Anyone who suffered through Ghost Rider shouldn’t want to see Next, just like anyone who winced through the trailer for Bangkok Dangerous shouldn’t want to see Bangkok Dangerous or any Cage movie thereafter. And yet Cage continues to star in films and attract audiences at the same time, almost as if fate were involved. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cage’s latest film is Knowing, an inane sci-fi yarn about fate, “randomness” and disasters in which Cage plays John Koestler, a professor, widower and father who gets thrust into the part of investigator, protector and action hero. It might seem ridiculous on paper, and it is, but at the same time it’s a good role for Cage. Much like his Benjamin Gates character in the National Treasure films, Cage’s Koestler is an incidental lead: we don’t care what he thinks or how he feels, we just want him to move us from one plot point to the next. And move us, he does. True to form, Cage swings from under-animation to over-animation as if clueless about what’s in between, and it hardly matters. Knowing is so explosively absurd and so absurdly explosive that Cage’s performance is moot. You’ll find no bigger Cage loather than me, but I have to admit that I can’t think of a single actor out there who would have made this a better film.

Much to my surprise, it turns out that a bigger cinematic sin than casting Cage is utilizing a screenplay that was written by committee. Ryne Douglass Pearson, Juliet Snowdon and Stiles White are credited for Knowing’s screenplay, which feels like the cinematic equivalent of a potluck dinner in which no one arrived with the main course. Knowing is a mishmash of reheated leftovers. There isn’t a single thing about it that feels unique. Not its main character’s numbers obsession or his ability to see the future (The Number 23 meets Next). Not the menacing dudes in black coats (Dark City). Not the climactic visitation (Close Encounters Of The Third Kind). Not the decimation of Manhattan by natural disaster (The Day After Tomorrow, to pick one of way too many). Certainly not the creepy black-haired girl who forecasts doom (The Ring). Heck, not even the goofy sign language ritual between father and son (Sudden Death). Nothing. Knowing is a bucket of table scraps tossed into the empty trough that is March for our desperate consumption.

We should be offended by any film that treats its audience like undiscerning cattle, and yet I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that the cud tastes good from time to time. Not that it should come as a surprise. Knowing’s methods are tried and true, proven to please. Sure it’s eerie when Koestler must investigate the abandoned house in the middle of nowhere in the dark of night. Sure it’s exhilarating when a subway car goes screaming down the tracks toward another car that’s still servicing the platform during rush hour. Sure it’s compelling to try to figure out who the dudes in black are, and what they want and why they need to drive cars when they can seemingly materialize wherever they want. This kind of stuff – like serial killers and sex scenes – provides can’t-miss stimulation, but only for a short time. In the end, quality matters, and this is where the film fails to satisfy. Watching Knowing is like diving into a large bag of Funyuns; only those with the strongest of stomachs or the blandest of palates will make it all the way through without feeling nauseous.

When it comes down to it, the truly revolting thing about Knowing isn’t Cage’s acting or the blatancy of its unoriginality, it’s the sloppiness of its execution. This is a film, directed by Alex Proyas, that takes every shortcut available without shame. Need to make a search for a missing girl scary? Have people search the grounds by flashlight rather than turning on any building lights. Need to add an extra wrinkle to the cryptic sheet of numbers that’s at the center of the plot? Have the only two letters on the page (capital Es) inexplicably written backward so that they are mistaken for the number 33. Need to convey sorrow or worry or angst? Have the main character chug alcohol instead of, you know, emoting. Need to heighten the intensity? Have a police officer run in fear from a crashing plane that, due to poor staging, he couldn’t possibly see approaching. Need to heighten the intensity even further? Have the survivors of the plane crash run across the field while on fire. Still not intense enough? Create a subway crash in which the derailed train consumes thin CGI figures like a vacuum cleaner sucking up cartoon clouds of filth in a Hoover commercial. For every problem, Knowing provides a tired solution.

All that said, there will be worse films than Knowing this year, I’m sure of that. Here, when all else fails, at least we’ve got Rose Byrne, whose ability to take a poorly written character in ridiculous circumstances and make her seem semi-plausible is a considerable achievement. Also noteworthy is the show-stopping CGI spectacle of Manhattan being blown to bits, which is so impressively achieved that I can almost forgive the cliché. Almost. Knowing borrows from so many different films that it never defines itself. It’s a film with twists and turns and mysteries that becomes less interesting the more one thinks about it. Knowing, simply put, is a disaster long ago forecasted. This is a Nic Cage film, after all. Some things are written.

The Conversations: Overlooked, Part II—Solaris

In Part II of our "Overlooked" installment, Ed Howard and I discuss Steven Soderbergh's Solaris to close out the third edition of The Conversations over at The House Next Door. In analyzing Soderbergh's film, our debate touches on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film of same name, Stanislaw Lem's original story and, you guessed it, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (inevitable, right?).

In Part I, posted yesterday, we discuss David Gordon Green's Undertow.

Check out Part II. Add to the conversation by leaving comments at The House Next Door.

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)

The Conversations: Overlooked, Part I—Undertow

For the third edition of The Conversations, Ed Howard and I discuss a pair of “overlooked” films from the past 10 years. In Part I, now live at The House Next Door, we debate David Gordon Green’s Undertow, which leads to some discussion of Terrence Malick (no surprise) and even Quentin Tarantino. In Part II, appearing tomorrow, we take on Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.

Check out Part I. As usual, Ed and I hope that our conversation will lead to a larger one among our readers. If you are so inspired, please leave your comments at The House Next Door.

Previous Editions of The Conversations:

David Fincher (January 2009)
Mulholland Dr. (February 2009)