Total Recall (2012)

Saturday is traditionally "Take out the Trash" Day

Written at the time of the film's release...

You Don't Know Dick (Philip K.)
or
I Can Misremember It For Your Wholesale

The reviews that I've seen for the new version of Total Recall have not been kind. Rotten Tomatoes, that fine aggregator/cuisinart of opinion, put it on "puree" when it said "While it boasts some impressive action sequences, Total Recall lacks the intricate plotting, wry humor, and fleshed out characters that made the original a sci-fi classic."

Huh? What the wha...?

 

Maybe I'm in Rekall right now and this is all some elaborate alternate reality, but my vivid memories of the Schwarzenegger Total Recall (made 22 years ago by that "master" of intricate plotting, wry humor and sub-tle human interactions*, Paul Verhoeven) was of an R-rated Sci-Fi gore-fest, light on "Gee-Whiz" and heavy with Cheese-Whiz, that seemed to mark the limit to how much Arnold could contort his face.** The one thing I remember being amusing was Sharon Stone as Doug Quaid's wife, in an arch performance that basically made her a star.***

This "re-imagining" (if you will) has Colin Farrell as Quaid,**** working on an assembly line for synthetic security forces—robo-cops (although they more resemble—and collapse just like—the battle-droids in the Star Wars prequels).   The elaborate set-up has the world decimated by chemical weapons making the world inhabitable on only two islands, Britain and Australia. The most precious commodity, thus, is living space, and the commute from one to the other is a tough one, a high-speed transport through the Earth's core—the shortest distance between two points being a straight line (would really have hated to be a construction worker on that project!). 

Anyway, Quaid is beset by dreams of running, chasing, shooting and loss, waking up in a cold sweat to find himself sleeping next to Lori (Kate Beckinsale, a fine actress—remember her in Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing—who is going to be stuck in kick-ass roles as long as Keira Knightley, Michelle Williams, and Carey Mulligan are alive), who works for security for the United Federation of Britain, and its leader Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston), which begs the question: Where's the Queen? And begs the question: she's married to a factory worker?

But if we start picking nits we'll be here until the time the movie's set in. Leave it that there are plot-holes larger and deeper than the one running through the planet, and it all begins when Quaid decides to go to the Rekall facility in his local city (which I believe is Great Britain, but owes a lot to Ridley Scott's Los Angeles in Blade Runner...and Spielberg's D.C. in his own version of Dick's Minority Report), a divey section of town with a yen for Chinese decor. Basically, he wants a spy fantasy, where there are double identities, secret plots and no one can be trusted.

He gets it, but whether it's reality or a drug-induced fantasy he has no way of knowing.  Something goes horribly (horribly) wrong, and by the end of his session, all the Rekall technicians are dead, as well as a dozen security forces, who burst in (pretty quickly, too) and whom Quaid overcomes in a single-shot, digitally-tracked shot that resembles a first-person shooter game.

Which is what this movies is, essentially—game scenarios, one after the other, trying to get to the next level. It's not that this Total Recall is anything less than competent. It truly is, and the cast is fine and all. But, it's never anything more than that, there's nothing very inspired...except from other sources, movies and video-games, mostly,***** and tangential stuff at that.

But, although attempts have been made to make it sleeker and faster-paced, there is no attempt to make it better or develop themes that the first film dropped for kinetic thrills. When you're dealing with alternate realities, why leave it at one? Why not keep the audience on edge on what's true? Why not make the stakes a little bit higher, so there are more consequences (like what this movie hints at in an early scene) for Rekall users, so there's more at risk than physical pain? This is Inception-material, but on only one level, and it's a sub-level at that. The potential was there to do more, but, instead, it's more of the same.

And Len Wiseman, the director of this, and the "Underworld" films, seems not to have much ambition for the "new." It's a few films in now, and one can say that he's not aspiring to much, other than keeping both the budget and the pace high. It's not so much directed, as art-directed, full of detail to distract from the lack of depth—highly finished, but with a sub-standard foundation. There was so much that anyone could do with this material to make it rise above the first one, rather than just make it worse.

"But, I don't WANT to be in a bad Schwarzenegger movie!"

"Vhich one: Jingle All the Vay or Last Ahction Hero?"

* ...usually involving fists, but in this case involving anything that could penetrate a human torso or face. This one was a particularly nasty exercise in excess, and I remember Schwarzenegger shilling it on Entertainment Tonight: "Yah, It's a GREAT FAMILY moo-vie, Bring the KIDS!" I was horrified to see that some idiot-parents actually did, and those kids have probably been in therapy for a couple years now.

** ...without  special effects, anyway.

*** It put her on the path, anyway, as Verhoeven was so impressed with her that he cast her in Basic Instinct, then she was a star in a flash.

**** A better match, I think, than Schwarzenegger. Farrell is more relatable, and you could see him as a factory worker, which makes the concept—which is telegraphed and anticipated to the Nth degree in both films—work a bit better. Schwarzenegger can't be believed as a factory worker—he's too much of a "800-pound gorilla in the room" to be hiding in such plain sight. The original concept...and casting...had someone like Richard Dreyfuss in the role. Now, THAT would have been fun, and surprising.

***** A lot from the first film, of course, but it's weird stuff—the plaid pattern that Quaid wears at some point, the woman in the transport station—there to fake out only the audience that had seen the first film—and the triple-breasted prostitute (probably because it's what the geeks remember...and want). All of which will bring me to an up-coming point...

Star Trek (2009)

Written at the film's engagement. Some thoughts follow after.

"I Dare You To Do Better"

I got a call from the Captain about 5 o'clock (that'd be 2000 hours for him) on Friday, and when I saw who it was, I called him back and said "I know what this is about."

The Captain is a life-long Trekker. He knows the arcana of "Star Trek" in its canon, that being the television series—both broadcast and syndicated—and film. Plus, he's a little "inside," having drinks with the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry, introducing Patrick Stewart to "Buzz" Aldrin, and calling up Jonathan Frakes the day show creator Gene Roddenberry died to talk about "what it all meant."

The Captain knows from "Trek." So I was particularly interested in his take on "The New Version" of J.J. Abrams, or "Star Trek Begins" (a version of which producer Harve Bennett had proposed away back in the time-space continuum before Star Trek V—you know, the Shatner-directed one best forgotten). I'd watched the trailers warily, noting the emphasis on disrobing cadets and slam-bang action (not mutually exclusive), but noting a certain underlying devotion, not entirely slavish, to the original. They weren't trying to re-invent the warp-drive, which was a good thing.

"So..." I said, "what'd ya think?"

"This is the way they should have always done it.." he began.

Yeah. It is.

Star Trek is a rollicking world-and-expectations-shattering version of the Gene Roddenberry original, and most niftily, done in a way that fits within its science-fiction-y concepts. The whole movie is its plot-point and one watches in wonder how the deconstruction happens before one's eyes, while simultaneously nodding acquaintance with the tropes, concepts, and characterizations of the original. One gets the feeling of happy ebullience watching a favorite building imploded with the added delight of seeing it rise simultaneously from its own ashes to be sleeker, shinier and un-compromising.

Part of it is due to budget. Abrams was given a fat check to re-launch Paramount's key franchise (which it had nickeled and dimed into the ground the first time around), so the limitations the creators always had to contend with aren't so apparent. The Enterprise corridors no longer look like motel hallways, Engineering isn't a big space with a back-lit perspective painting behind it, and the aliens restricted to stereo-eyed bipeds with varying head-ridges. No, there's a lot of imagineering going on here in the Enterprise's brave new world of industrial-strength space-faring (at one point the new Captain Kirk sprints—of which he does...a lot—through what I swear was a brewery standing in for some section of the Enterprise's inner workings). 

The creatures have evolved differently* with nonhuman proportions, sometimes tossing out the human baggage entirely. It's a messy universe, but a full one with good ideas and concepts tossed amid the dialogue. It's a "Star Trek" Universe so full of potential, that there's no chance of coming across a creatively bankrupt parallel Earth, although the film manages to do exactly that in its own clever way.

That's the big picture. The question is the actors; the franchise will live or die on how "the New Kids" can portray the old characters. Fortunately, it's where this Star Trek shines. Everyone will have their favorites—mine are Karl Urban's note-perfect blustering McCoy and Simon Pegg's hyper-driven Scotty—but Chris Pine is a genuine find for Captain James Tiberius Kirk, employing none of the Shatnerisms (well, there's one deliberate vocal steal that made me laugh), but supplying the one thing that Shatner always brought to the table—energy. John Cho's Sulu is terrific and it's a hoot to see Russian actor Anton Yelchin employing the wretched "wessels" accent of the original Chekov. 

Zoe Saldana is given much more to do as Lt. Uhura, and given that he had Leonard Nimoy on-set for inspiration, Zachary Quinto might have taken the easy way out with a direct imitation, but his Mr. Spock is far less serene, more volatile and haughty, betraying that human half far more subtly than Nimoy did—and I believe saying that might be a court-martial offense in my house.

Where the other "Trek" movies have fallen down have been the secondary characters, but here they're just as important—Ben Cross and Winona Ryder play the star-crossed parents of Spock, while Bruce Greenwood is a superb Captain Christopher Pike. And Eric Bana, who can be on or off depending on the movie, is terrific as the long-suffering, revenge-driven Romulan Nero.

There will be a lot of sniping from the "Trekkies" who want things their way, or no way—that's to be expected with any "Trek" movie. But in the words of the former Captain Kirk: "Get a life."

Star Trek certainly got a new one.

After-thought: My, my. I did a lot of dancing around on this one because it was imperative not to give too much away (although I was doing some "punning" references to it just to amuse myself). What was wonderful about Abrams' re-boot—far better than his "Star Wars" sequels (although they're entertaining)—was his and the writers pushing "Re-set" on the entire franchise and wiping out the whole old Star Trek Universe in an ingenious time-travel story where another alien goes back in time to kill his version of Hitler, who happens to be Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock.

That's just clever and daring and enough to put the fear of interfering with time into anybody. But, it also wiped the creative slate clean. The Vulcans, on whom the Star Trek Universe became so dependent, became a Universal diaspora. Time-lines could be cleaned up—like the "Eugenics War"—and a better Star Trek could be rebuilt without having to necessarily wipe out "Next Generation" and its successors. And if anybody gripes about it, it's just a parallel timeline; the other one still exists, Ramada-In hallways and all.

It was thrilling—in fact, I did a couple of "Sunday Scenes" around this movie—about aspects that just made me smile.

But, it didn't last. The next Abrams Trek (Into Darkness) did the "Khan" story-line a little too soon and a little too derivatively. As I said in that review, with a new Universe to play with, it was too soon to go back to the well. And the third "Kelvin Universe" story, Star Trek Beyond, attempted to do something a bit different, along the lines of the Original Series, but its dependence on a "movie-villain" and its subsequent disappointment (even Idris Elba couldn't do anything with it) was a let-down, and the film under-performed, perhaps because it was less an "event" film than an "episodic" one.

That was four years ago and everybody's getting older. A new Trek movie was stalled when Chris Pine—and Chris Hemsworth (who played "Daddy" Kirk in the first one, indicating it was another time-travel story and a dull one at that)—had contract demands (money or credit) and it stalled. There's talk of two Treks in the works: one a new production and Quentin Tarantino production of a "Star Trek" movie, which—because QT can't keep himself from talking—was revealed to be merely be his version of a Trek story about the Eugenics War. More time-travel? Tarantino seems to be no longer interested (and I never was).

Whatever the future of "Star Trek" in the movies, one hopes that it will "go boldly"...which means that a bolder studio should take control of it as Paramount seems to be fresh out of ideas.

* There is a wickedly funny bar scene where Kirk tries to pick up the comely Lt. Uhura, while between them sits an alien seemingly modeled on the "Spitting Image" version of Leonard Nimoy, when it suddenly dawned on me what it was doing there: "Why the long face?"

Searching

Inter-Drag-net
or
Oh, What a Tangled World Wide Web We Weave

Searching, the excellent, very clever thriller by Aneesh Chaganty begins with a 15 minute sequence so gut-wrenching to the heart that it reminded me of the beginning of Up, which was a masterpiece of tugging the emotions. The two sequences have a comparable story-telling strategy—laying the foundation for the story to come, setting up the ground-work to show the prologue that will serve as motivation for what will come, and act as a salve when things get rough.

The story for Searching is simple—the strategy telling it is not. There have been so many "missing children" movies, it could have it's own genre...from The Searchers to Close Encounters to Taken, the story of the search for a child is compelling no matter what the setting of the film is.

But, Searching is unique. It could be thought a "found footage" movie, but it isn't. It takes the strategy of Paranormal Activity and does it a few steps better for the computer age and it's announced with it's very first image (which takes a momentary pause of orientation to realize that all the studio credits have ended), so common—but only for the last 30 years—and so much a part of our world that one might feel cheated by the idea that it's cheap film-making. It's a shot of a computer-screen with a family wall-paper on it. And for the next 106 minutes, you will rarely leave that page. So pervasive is computer technology now that you don't need to tell a compelling story without moving away from the screen. As movie-goers, we're watching a screen, anyway, but there's an eerie kaleidoscopic effect when you're watching screens within screens—like being in a hall of mirrors. It focuses your attention—as opposed the split-screen experiments started in the 1960's, which divided it—and you find yourself lasering in on the information, and you don't have to go far to find it—the landscape is very limited. 

Plus, you're in the position of the person in front of the screen.

We meet the Kim's—through home video at first—David (John Cho), Pamela (Sara Sohn) and daughter Margot (played at various ages by Alex Jayne Go, Megan Liu, Kya Dawn Lau, and mostly by Michelle La)—video's first, then e-mails, PM's, calendar's, Google searches—especially the one for "lymphoma" and "fighting lymphoma as a family"—as we see the arc of a young family, loving, bonding, and eventually in crisis.

It's a brilliant way to tell a story, through archived material, compressing time and efficiently jumping from highlight to highlight, until the story is complete. Director Chaganty doesn't even have to do a transition into present day. "Real time" is presented with Personal Messages, a "Facetime" call. Dad David calls daughter Margot to tell her she forgot to take out the trash. It's a big deal to him, requiring escalation from text to video and Margot picks up to tell him she can't do it right now, that she's in a study group. Okay, says David. when will you be home? I'll probably be going all night, she says. Dad's not pleased but urges her to talk to him when she's done.

David talks to his brother Peter (Joseph Lee), who's trying to prepare a meal that David's wife Pam had "down." David can't help but notice the container of weed on the kitchen counter, which Peter says is actually oregano and they squabble, like returning to a subject both have gone over again and again, which neither one wishes to re-visit. Glumly, Peter goes into Pam's partition of the computer and send him the recipe. He isn't feeling well, and the next we see of him he's asleep, a bottle of pills in the foreground in front of the computer's cam. 

Margot texts. It goes unnoticed. She calls once, twice. Unanswered.

The next day David is at work, tele-conferencing, and he hasn't heard from Margot. He's pissed. She's grounded. But, as the day wears on, he starts to investigate. Margot takes piano lessons on Fridays. He doesn't know the teacher. He searches, finds her number, calls. The teacher's a bit annoyed that he called during a lesson, but he asks to talk to Margot. Then, there's a bombshell: Margot hasn't been coming to her lessons for six months and had, in fact, canceled them. Well, he gave her money for the lessons—what happened to that? Margot conveniently left her laptop behind and David starts to use that and Pam's files to start calling friends and acquaintances—the study group is unhelpful (kids!), but talking to the mother of one of Margot's childhood friends gives him some hope—a bunch of them were going to the mountains, Margot was invited, and they're out of cell-range. Of course! David calms down, and waits for Margot to call.

She doesn't call. The friend does. Sure, he invited Margot, but she didn't go with them and he hasn't heard from her. David panics and calls the police, filing a missing person report. Eventually he's contacted by Det. Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) with the San Jose police department. He checks up on her, is impressed and starts doing his own investigative work, contacting Margot's friends, determining where they were on that Thursday night and coming up with an alibi database for use by the police. But, he's obsessive about it and that worries Vick. His work leads him down blind alleys and he starts accusing people who are taking a more cavalier attitude to Margot's disappearance. He's losing sleep and becoming more agitated...and more of a loose cannon.

But, as David does some more obsessive spelunking, he finds some disturbing things—thast Margot is a little isolated at her high school, that her photos cached on Facebook are a little glum, that she's started a blog and a chat channel and some of the participants there are a little sketchy, He sees that she's been depositing the money intended for the music lessons in an account of her own, and that she had recently withdrawn it. Then, Vick calls and says that they've found some security footage of Margot's car leaving a gas station on that Thursday night and leaving town. She also produces a fake driver's license under another name. Vick is convinced that Margot is a runaway. And David comes to realize that he may not know his daughter at all.

Let's stop there. Going any further will produce spoilers, even for the blind alleys and wrong turns in the investigation. But, that is the gist of the details.

Searching does a great job of subtly showing the positives and negatives of the social age and archiving your life on it. It's a source for sharing and expression, but it is also porous and public. Despite all the security protocols in the background, it's all out there and can be disseminated to anyone, good, bad, and maliciously indifferent. One has to be careful, for at the same time you're being open with your life, you're also opening it up to scrutiny and manipulation, where intentions can be decidedly mixed—just read the comments of...anything.
Searching throws that into stark relief, both as distraction and as plot-point.

One could nit-pick. Searching doesn't always live up to its rigorous intended mise-en-scene—there are some liberties taken in the third act with the point-of-view, and you get the impression it's not happening solely on David's or Margot's computer. It's not a cheat, really, it's just a little disappointing that the focus gets a little fuzzed up. There's not a real need to open it up, but the story demands to get resolved in some way and David can't be a passive watcher to that. He has to participate, and so perspective changes. Understandable, even if it also does make the denouement feel a bit tidy and rushed...and more importantly, less amateurishly captured.

What one cannot argue with is the performance of John Cho—he is nearly on the screen every single moment and we see him go from a young family man to one shouldering pain to an absolute frazzled mess. The actor must have lost a lot of sleep during the making of this movie because you can see him physically age throughout the movie without benefit of make-up and merely by simulating the trauma that the character goes through, the lines in his face deepen, he becomes more haggard and you become worried that he is going to fall apart. It is stunning work, and if I had my choice right now, I'd put him on the short list for the Best Performance by an Actor Oscar.

Star Trek Beyond

This is Where the Frontier Pushes Back
or
"Let's Hope This Doesn't Get Messy"

Simon Pegg's character Tim Bisely in "Spaced" once stated: "... as sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every odd-numbered Star Trek is shit."

Irony time. Star Trek Beyond is an odd-numbered "Star Trek" film...and he wrote it (along with Doug Jung).

Of course, J.J. Abrams busted that track record with the odd-(un-)numbered Star Trek reboot (2009), recast the entire original crew and managed to survive the potential solar shit-storm from some of the most vocal of pop-culture's fan-maniacs. The reason was that movie did everything differently while still reminding you of what was so damn good about the original series. There was a bit of a let-down with the second (at least for me) because the first one warped Star Trek-space so ingeniously that one was expecting something more than mere future history-re-writing, by cribbing the plots of two of the original cast's movies so soon into this new, re-booted series.

Which is why it's so damn funny when Captain James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), 966 days into the Enterprise's five year mission, and after a diplomatic first contact that does not go very well, saws into his Captain's Log that things are beginning "to feel...episodic." Even exploring new worlds gets to be a drag (ask Lewis and Clark) and the crew is definitely feeling the lethargy. A stop back to Earth's new orbiting city in space, Yorktown (nobody's thought of this before? Just the field-offices in space?) and the crew can't wait to get away from each other—even the Enterprise's "power-coupling" is fraying: Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is wanting to break up with Spock (Zachary Quinto). Kirk is being pulled other directions, so is his Science Officer. 

It's almost Kirk's birthday and over a drink he and Dr. McCoy (Karl Urban) hash out Kirk's issues—he's lived longer than his Dad (who died on his birthday) and Kirk's motivations were not the same as his. Now, the job just isn't fun anymore. It's routine and Kirk is thinking of applying for a Vice-Admiralty position with Starfleet (Lord knows he has enough vices to qualify for the job).

But, a distress signal from an uncharted nebula pulls him back into the chair—he and the crew warp out together, maybe for the last time for a rescue mission. They're given coordinates by a returning Starfleet officer Kalara (Lydia Wilson) and find the nebula is not that tough a commute—sure, it's blocking signals from Starfleet, but...hey, what's that on the view-screen? And before Star Wars' Admiral Ackbar can make a cameo saying "it's a trap!" they're being bombarded by so many projectiles, they don't have the weaponry capable of taking out everything and they get boarded, the warp-nacelles of the Enterprise cut off from the ship (no one has thought of this before?) and the ship goes powerless. Time for Scotty (Pegg) to do a little re-routing to the impulse engines and the ship is underway, albeit slowly, with the crew together, but being picked off one by one.

Then, things really go down. In the same type of swarm attack that took out the nacelles, the ship starts to get eviscerated to knock out all power to the ship. Kirk orders the crew to evacuate and their capsules start jettisoning into space. But, they're soon hi-jacked and taken to a planet in the nearby system. With the Enterprise crippled and heading to the planet's surface, Kirk has no choice but to abandon ship and take his chances on the planet.

With no ship, the crew scattered, the mission becomes one of survival and making do the best they can. It's a great way to find out out just what your crew-mates mean to you and cure that contempt that too much familiarity breeds.

The film-makers do shake things up a bit and despite throwing in as much action as they can possibly muster, they manage to give to this Star Trek what has been skimped on a bit in the past films—interaction. What works in the Star Trek movies is what worked on the television show, which is the characters and Pegg, Jung and director Justin Lin take pains to pair off the crew-members unusually—Kirk with Chekhov, Spock with McCoy (well, naturally), Uhura with Sulu and Scott with a denizen of the planet named Jaylah (Sofia Boutella, who played the lethal kick-master Gazelle in Kingsmen) that manages to play to everybody's strengths.

One is drawn in because it's a situation that one has seen before on the original series, but never like this, and one's attention is focused because you're not exactly sure what will happen next—something Into Darkness, retreading tried and true territory, never accomplished. The story seems fresh and full of surprises, except that sometimes things are a bit too convenient in resolution, but that may be that things are withheld in back-story that might be telling.

One gets the feeling that quite a bit has been chopped out of Star Trek Beyond, as some transitions are rough, at times confusing, and for a scrupulous refusal to not go into too much detail about the film's chief villain Krall (Idris Elba). It's a bit refreshing, that, actually, because ultimately who cares what the guy's backstory is—his motivations are a bit confused and his actions way too extreme to make any sense whatsoever. Basically, who cares? He's a bad guy. Stop him. The same goes for the McGuffin in the movie. Everybody says it's dangerous, but not too willing to explain how. Without that, you're not sure what the rules are or what the stakes might be, and that undercuts the suspense factor somewhat. But suspense is not what the director is after. What he wants is visceral.

Director Lin is an action-movie guy and he does a lot of story-length swoops and camera tilts to keep you disoriented through those sequences...too much so, actually. He's less concerned with the build-up to something as long as he gets the "money-shot" in. That grows tiresome after awhile, and the final action furor seems like one too many (and relies on what you think the gravity issues on a globe-shaped city in space would be like). A space-battle would be just as familiar, I guess, and maybe Pine thought he was robbed of a big climax last movie (Spock had to do all the running and punching), but with all the hand-to-hand combat, one wonders what they have phasers for.

Still, bumps in the warp-drive not withstanding, Star Trek Beyond is a good use of material and a reminder of why the thing has lasted 50 years...almost. It premiered in September, 1966. 

And they keep making ships.

Bob Peak's poster for the original Star Trek: the Motion Picture

next to "The Director's Edition" which featured the original key photographs.