Twixt

"There are no minor decisions in moviemaking. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down.” - Sidney Lumet. 

Twixt tells the story of a writer, Hall Baltimore, who is trying to regain his stature as a preeminent horror novelist by writing his first vampire novel. For inspiration, he hides away in an isolated, ghostly town where Edgar Allan Poe once lived. As he begins to write his novel, dark memories of a troubled past begin to haunt him while reality and alcohol infused dreams meld together into a frightening, sometimes farcical nightmare from which there is no escape. 

Twixt could have been a great film. In theory, a Francis Ford Coppola vampire movie starring Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning sounds wonderful. In reality, that movie turned out to be a major disappointment, brought crashing down by more than a few terrible decisions. 

First, it was shot using digital cameras. Big mistake. The pristine quality of the digital image makes everything in Twixt look absolutely awful. There's no texture to the picture, no real darkness or shadows. Everything looks too good, too perfect, making the whole visual style  of the film flat and lifeless. The effect becomes less bothersome during Baltimore’s black and white dream sequences, which avoid the disaster of the color segments most of the time and are even beautiful on occasion. Coppola can still compose great images, so it's even more frustrating that they look so poorly. However, even if this was shot on film, from which it could have greatly benefitted, or had some significant changes made to its digital photography, it still wouldn't have mattered much. Twixt is a fumbling mess of a movie, never sure of its tone or where its story is going. 

Is this supposed to be Coppola having fun with genre conventions and doing his own little thing, or is he trying to accomplish something meaningful? For most of the time, the picture comes off as dull and bizarre in its overbearing attempts to create an unsettling, tragic atmosphere. You start with a creepy looking town? Great. You have a narrator telling us why this town is creepy? Fine, but we can see that already. You then have the angry old sheriff/bat-house maker of the creepy town telling the protagonists about the resident serial killer that makes the town even creepier? You're starting to annoy me. Perhaps Coppola was trying to be humorous with that one, but he sure seemed to be taking seriously the dream sequence where his protagonist named Baltimore has a chat with Edgar Allan Poe who tells him that Eleanor, Annabel Lee, and all of the female protagonists of his poems are based on his dead wife, Virginia, a name awfully similar to Vicky, the name of the deceased daughter of Baltimore whom he also meets regularly in his dreams. Oh, and the overriding theme of the movie, if you haven't guessed, seems to be something about the protagonist coming to terms with the death of said daughter.  A bit on the nose for my taste. 

Meanwhile, when he’s not being chased by the specter of his daughter, Baltimore impersonates Marlon Brando and a gay black basketball player from the 60s. With both comedy and tragedy, Kilmer’s incredible. It's just baffling that these many disparate scenes are part of one movie. Sidney Lumet also said that he knew he was doing his job as a director well only if everyone on his team was making the same movie. No one here was making the same movie. 

Even then, some of the scenes carry real weight and a melancholy beauty, particularly when images just flow together without any dialogue as when Baltimore struggles to unsuccessfully to repress the memories of his beloved daughter. The fact that Coppola lost a son in the same way as the protagonist lost his daughter makes even the duller moments of the movie sting. Elle Fanning works wonders with the shoddy material she's given as a young girl who reminds Baltimore of what he lost. At least Coppola steers the comedic elements clear from her storyline, so she has a steady, tragic tone throughout her scenes, making them relatively coherent. While alive and well, she radiates hope. When she is betrayed, true innocence is lost.

Lumet failed to mention that one great decision can elevate a middling movie. Twixt was a great concept brought crashing down by many bad decisions. The visuals crippled it. The story dealt the death blow. Yet, with the aid of Fanning, it came back to haunt me. 

Verdict- 2/4

Twixt (2011) 1h 28min. R. 

Pacific Rim, Take II.

Pacific Rim starts out with a giddy Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) waking up his brother as if it were Christmas Day. The cause of his excitement? A massive Kaiju (extraterrestrial dinosaur) has just been spotted coming from the sea, and it is up to them to pilot their one-of-a-kind Jaeger (a big, customized robot) to stop it before it reaches land. Pacific Rim is a magnificent action film, and from the opening fight scenes, director Guillermo Del Toro delivers.

Del Toro brings an impressive clarity of vision not only to the elaborately detailed, Kaiju ridden, cynical world he created to stage his fights in, but also to every beautifully composed shot of the film. Pacific Rim is never dull or dark, like so many contemporary action movies, a phenomenon that can be traced to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. It relishes fluorescent blues, bright neon pinks, greens and oranges above all. It is brimming with color and life in every frame, and it is edited in a way that lets viewers behold the majesty of the Jaegers and the Kaiju with plenty of wide shots -- to emphasize the overall choreography of the action sequences -- and loving closeups  -- to take in the painstakingly designed details, such as the rocket-propelled metallic arm of the main Jaeger, the Gypsy Danger. But for all of its monsters versus robots glory, at its core, Pacific Rim is a film about relationships, about the bonds we build to make life worth living.

 At the beginning of the story, even before the first fight, Del Toro takes care to show how much Raleigh’s brother Yancy means to him. He dies relatively quickly, but the impact of that loss carries deep consequences which resonate throughout the film. Raleigh loses faith in humanity as a result of his personal loss, and resigns himself, like most of the scattered population, to hiding from the Kaiju by building a wall that no one really thinks has a chance of stopping the beasts, but a wall that allows enough escape from life to be a welcome project for many who no doubt have suffered similar loses as Raleigh did. Del Toro quietly studies the cynicism which has corroded humanity, but never shines a spotlight on it like he does on the action. It exists just beyond the edges of the frame, making it much more powerful and understated. But it is there, and it lends an emotional weight to the action lacking in many movies. When Raleigh fights the Kaiju, we get a feeling that he’s fighting to restore humanity from its current, broken state. 

After the prologue, the film picks up with Raleigh in this dark place and traces his classic hero’s journey as he regains hope and finds new reasons to live. I find the drift -- the connection which requires Jaeger pilots to be honest with one another, to share memories and feelings as they jointly control their machine -- to be a brilliant, incredibly useful concept. It is used as a simple metaphor to explore our need for our need for codependence, and it also serves as the justification for a few flashbacks, thus providing the film with some of its finest scenes and images (Idris Elba piloting a Jaeger solo!). In the drift, Raleigh is forced to face his past and the death of his brother, which eventually allows him to move on, with the help of his copilot Mako, of course.

There are  so many great character moments in this film that it astounds me that it was simply brushed off as another massive, meaningless action film. Almost every character is given someone to care about, someone to fight for, and Del Toro provides plenty of scenes with several different pairs of characters to deepen their bonds and show us why the battle against the Kaiju is worth the trouble. A particular favorite scene of mine features Marshall Pentecost, the resistance leader, quietly chatting with Mako, his adoptive daughter, before he goes to his death. He reassures her, and lets her know he's proud of her, but before he goes on to give his "cancel the apocalypse" speech to the troops, he looks her in the eye and straightens his posture, something that makes Mako snap up from her slumped position. It is like a little private joke to which the audience is only partly privy.  These characters have a shared history, a life that extends beyond the film, and possibly into an unknown future. That’s the reason they fight the Kaiju. They make the action matter. 

Verdict- 4/4
Pacific Rim (2013) 2h 12min. PG-13

Random Thought
- “Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out,” said Martin Scorsese. I thought about the quote a lot while watching Pacific Rim this time.
- Hannibal Chau, “you like the name? I took it from my favorite historical character and my second-favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn.” 

Sky High

Sometimes, I revisit movies from my childhood just to see what they were really like. Occasionally, they inevitably end up dissatisfying me and are only worth the watch for the nostalgia factor. Other times, however, no matter how many films I've watched since then or how much film history and theory I've studied, some of them simply turn out to be well made movies that still have the capacity to delight and impress me now, many years later. I'm proud to say Sky High falls into the latter category. 

Sky High follows Will Stronghold, the son of the world's most famous superheroes, The Commander and Jetstream, in his quest to discover the true meaning of heroism, a particularly hard lesson for him to learn since he did not inherit any powers like his mother's flying abilities or his father's super strength. In superheroland, this means that once he enters his new school, the titular Sky High, he's relegated to the ostracized sidekick community, which is full of lovable oddballs with subpar superpowers (like glowing, turning into a ball, and melting) who are taught to worship and serve all heroes. At first, Will is bummed that he is not as special as he once thought, but he eventually finds out that sidekicks can be heroes too. Awww. 

Broadly outlining the story yields almost no surprises. Like any high school movie, Sky High comes with bullies (one super fast, the other one extremely elastic); stuck-up cheerleaders that just seem like an omnipresent force in all schools; a goth chick with a heart of gold; the awkward hero; his girl next door best friend; his nemesis; and his senior-year crush, a beautiful girl with a sinister secret that betrays her flowery clothing, her charming musical motif, and the soft-focus three point lighting reserved for her. Spoiler, she's the bad guy.

Sky High instead embellishes this broad, universal story with little grace notes and pitch perfect execution. Watch the painful attempts Will makes at hiding the fact that he has no powers so that he can avoid the inevitable heartbreaking conversation with his parents. Notice the beautiful encouragement his best friend Layla provides on how to break the news to them. “When life gives you lemons,” she tells him... I won’t spoil the punchline, but it is surely sweet and unexpected. A conversation that takes place in a Chinese restaurant in which a villainous character reveals a little wisdom and a lot of previously unseen kindness is a favorite of mine, and it is but one of many charming touches that elevate Sky High above the standard superhero popcorn fare. 

The performances are mostly good, with remarkable work, as always, by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who for some reason remains a largely unknown and underrated actress. Throughout, she shows small hints of the anger and psychopathic lust for revenge behind the high school sweetheart stereotype her Gwen seems to embody, until, in the end, she just unleashes the madness that is Royal Pain. Danielle Panabaker gives Layla an openheartedness and an earnestness that make her irresistible. In a movie full of superheroes hiding behind their false identities, superpowers, and labels, Layla is the only completely honest, innocent character, something Panabaker pulls off without ever seeming pretentious or frail.  She's the MVP of the movie. The action, too, is worthy of praise, since at least director Mike Mitchell has a clear sense of pacing and spatial relations that make the action sequences enjoyable and stand in stark contrast to the headache inducing, anarchic, handheld shaky-cam free-for-all that characterizes modern action filmmaking. The final battle that crosscuts among several one on one superhero duels throughout the school while the structure comes crashing to the ground is pure, manic fun yet never disorienting or overindulgent. 

Burdened with nine year old special effects that look embarrassing today and Mitchell's odd fetish for canted angles -- the film’s major flaw, presumably used to make slower scenes visually exciting and the action even more frenzied -- the movie still fares well compared to a lot of "action" films of today. One more thing about Sky High: it has fun with superheroes, and it embraces the silliness of men in tights punching things. Remember, not every superhero movie (or most, even) should be modeled after The Dark Knight! I have absolutely nothing against that film, but sometimes I wonder if it did more harm than good to the genre. Scripts like this one, full of sly jokes and witticisms, silly superheroes and evil duplicitous villains, should get more attention as potential sources of inspiration. Anyway, the script is pure fun, with some great wordplay to boot, yet another of its many appeals; Even if Sky High tells a largely traditional story, it goes about it in an unconventional, emotionally moving way. I couldn’t ask for much more from an old favorite. 

Verdict- 3.5/4 (Bumped up an extra half a star because of what this movie has meant to me since I first watched it in the theater.) 

Sky High (2005) 1h 40min. PG