A Year of Movies is over. Now: morewertzler.com

The Extra Man
1/25/10 9:30pm - 1/25/10 10:30pm

Yes, it’s true, I was annoyed by the movie before it started.  My brain hurt from free beer, and the filmmakers’ intro was horribly obnoxious.  I had already seen Paul Dano on Main St. subbing in for a bongo drummer in a street band, big pink hat on his head, and big dumb grin on his face.  I can’t stand that guy.

And I can’t seem to believe he is old enough to be a college teacher either, which is the character he plays in this movie.  I’m boring myself trying to remember the plot, but suffice to say it was pretentious and reeked of literature-hipsters.  (Library hipsters?  Hip-lit?  Is that a term yet?)

A few misogynist and fart jokes later, John C. Reilly makes an appearance as the best part of the film— the Grandfather-Twilight-bearded neighbor who doesn’t speak a word.  It was brilliant.

The rest?  Not so much.  I’d love to love you, Kevin Kline, but the writing just felt stale.  The characters’ eccentricities felt forced and trite.  And I’m just getting really sick of Paul Dano’s face.  Play a different character for once, guy.  Directors: Cast a different conservative loner for once.  I should have left when the opening credits read, “Based on the novel by Jonathan Ames.”  I’m out.

Frozen
1/25/10

I had already been in line for 40 minutes before I saw the gushing quote from Harry Knowles on a miniposter someone was carrying around.  So you’ll understand that I wasn’t about to give up, despite all signs indicating this would be a waste of time.  I should have listened to my instincts.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but, this is really just one of those movies that I wanted to know the ending of, and nothing more.  And it would have been successful if it had gotten straight to the point—just show me how these 3 kids, stuck on a ski lift when the lodge closes for 5 days, stay alive (or don’t).  An 8 minutes short, yes.  A 90 minute feature?  No.

It was an admirable effort to set up empathetic characters with backstories, and foreshadow the events to come.  But really, everybody in the theater just wants to know how they die.  We don’t need half an hour of dialogue that sounds like a Kevin Smith first draft.  (And you’ve seen his final drafts, so you know what I mean.)

One common tenet taught in screenwriting classes is: Avoid stagnant locations where there’s nothing for the characters to do.  Cars, bars, restaurants, ski lifts.  All they can do is talk.  And talking is boring.  Especially in a so-called horror movie.  Writer/Director Adam Green wrote himself into a corner by trapping these “kids” (20 years olds played by 30 years olds—why is this always the case?) in a singular location, left to make pop culture references and get in heated, overacted arguments.  We don’t care about that.  We want to see horrific things happen to these people.

However, even the gnarliest of outcomes isn’t so bad.  In the world of Frozen, everything that can go wrong on a ski lift (and then some) does go wrong.  But only for a few minutes—then everyone magically seems to regenerate their stamina or mental health or the skin on their hands.  No problems last much longer than the next scene, when a new hazard takes precedence.  Show me the compounded impact of wolves and frostbite and broken bones, not just one at a time.  Then I might care.

Then again, when the emotional climax of your film is somebody crying over pissing their pants, you’ve got bigger problems to handle.

Space Tourists
1/24/10

One of my favorite parts about film festivals is being able to see a film with literally no idea what it’s about, aside from the title.  I went in blindly to Space Tourists, which very well could be the reason I enjoyed it so much— I had no expectations to begin with.  (See the trailer here, if you’re curious.  But I find it not very representative of the film as a whole.)

I spent the first 5 minutes trying to figure out if I was watching a doc or a narrative feature, which was actually a rather thrilling experience.  Much of this ambiguity is due to the refreshing directorial style of Christian Frei, who expertly plays with documentary form, toeing the line between factual and fictional cinematic tropes.  It’s unclear at times whether the narrator is a pre-written inner monologue of a character, or an excerpt from an interview.  It’s almost as if he is in disbelief of the subject matter, which can seem quite unbelievable.

One of the most refreshing elements was the near-complete lack of talking heads.  In the last decade, I feel the documentary genre has become severely saturated with copycats who own DV cameras, read an interesting article in a newspaper, and set out to hit it big with a doc feature about a subject worth maybe 1500 words at best.  Contemporary American documentaries by newcomers especially have encouraged the idea that docs only require an interesting subject, not any formal style or artistic thought from behind the camera.  Get some interviews, scan some photos, buy rights to stock footage, and find an editor.

Thankfully, the ongoing narration by all characters in the film is coupled and juxtaposed with A- and B-roll, creating a thought-provoking synergy between sound and visuals.  Frei literally jumps from Kazakhstan to outer space to the middle of the Russian plains in a matter of seconds.  For these stylistic and narrative risks, I can forgive the film for its shortcomings, which are few: I felt there were too many characters, which left me unable to fully engage with one single storyline.  With so many threads, the narrative felt meandering at times, and the messages became muddled by the end.

I fully admit I am a sucker for outer space, and might even consider space tourism if I could remotely afford it.  There is something completely awe-inspiring about seeing footage from space, especially as recent as the scenes in the film.  What really resonated with me though was how the film embraced and then moved past current documentary trends toward cynicism and pessimism.  I see so many films about how we are destroying our world, how society is falling apart, and how nobody cares about anything.  And there is a place for these films, but they are starting to suffocate me.  That Space Tourists acknowledged Earth’s plights, and suggested a possible solution really felt refreshing.  Maybe we aren’t completely doomed, after all.