Here (2024)

Here...But Not Really There

or

"Time Sure Does Fly, Doesn't It?" ("And Then I Blink...")

I kept thinking of Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter while watching Here, the latest film by director Robert Zemeckis.

 

"One shot." "One shot."

 

Which is what Here is. Based on a graphic novel* (by Richard McGuire, which is done the same way), the film eliminates the one major creative decision for a director—"where do I put the camera?"—and takes it, literally, out of the picture. Zemeckis, as a director, is a weird cat. Where a lot of directors will look for thematic material and then build the technical aspects around it, Mr. Z seems to think of the technical challenge first and then find the story to fit it. He was ground-breaking in making mo-cap animation films and as the Uncanny Valley started to get flooded with product so that nobody could see it any more, he started to trust the CGI with drama. It can be done. But, as amazing as Zemeckis' films can look, they sometimes have the heart of a demonstration disc. Inspiration but not aspiration.

So, here's Here. And, technologically, it is pretty amazing, but for reasons that have nothing to do with story-line (except in some nicely worked-out places) or the fact that it re-teams Tom Hanks and Robin Wright nostalgically from Forrest Gump. They are basically irrelevant other than box-office draw (frankly, I was more intrigued to see Kelly Reilly—from "Yellowstone" and the Downey Jr. "Sherlock" movies—and Michelle Dockery—from "Downton Abbey"—in it. It's not a movie where you can judge performances, scattered as they are in this movie's timeline.

And the incidences feel like snap-shots—or worse, like "Saturday Night Live" skits—they pop up, do a bit of business and generally exit on a laugh or a dramatic hit ("And...scene"). God forbid that they should interrupt one of those slices-of-life in mid-chaos and have it resolve later in the story. That would have felt random, instead of calcified and calculated as this movie too-often feels like.

It starts out with its gambit efficiently enough—that one angle—whether it's in a house on that particular parcel of real estate or in its origins as primordial ooze when the boxes start fading in, initially with subtle borders around them until we get the knack of it and then those borders start fading away and they begin to make transitions so we see the neighborhood go from dinosaur stomping ground to hellish landscape to ice age (only one of two times when the camera actually moves) to Native American habitat to the neighborhood of William Franklin (Benjamin's ever-loyal-to-the-king non-rebellious son) to the story-heavy 20th century.

The Franklins' eventual neighbors are The Harters (he's excited that an "aerodrome" will be built nearby and intends to fly—something his wife is dead-set against); there's the bohemian Beekmans, she's a free-spirit and he's an inventor, perfecting a chair he calls the "Relaxo-boy"; post WWII, the non-surnamed folks we'll spend most of the time with (let's call them "The Gumps") move in, sail through the 50's and television, raise Tom Hanks, who gets his girlfriend Robin Wright pregnant, they get married and move in with the folks and eventually age out of the house; then we get the Harris', the only minority couple—besides the Native Americans—that reside there. We get nudged a lot about how things change—the Harris' give their son "The Talk"—and not—frailty and death are inevitable, as apparently is influenza.

For the most part, these folks are chess-pieces that get moved around depending where the boxes show up and those boxes highlight the transitions between entertainment systems, gas-lights to electric, rugs versus hardwood (versus verdant forest), couches to sectionals. Art changes, but the view rarely does. Dramatically, the film underwhelms except in some key places. But, it's not a waste of time...or space. Not at all.

We are used to being manipulated in movies by mise-en-scene and blocking. Directors let us see what they want us to see and use blocking to change the focus of our attention. This gives us the illusion that we're peeping through a letter-boxed slot-view a 360° world-view (we're not, of course; it's an illusion). Here subverts that. We are given one angle to look at—the world may change within it, but it's basically that one section of cinema real-estate, like we're looking at the Closed Circuit Camera of Eternity.

That's where McGuire's boxes come in. Yes, blocking will direct the eye, but it's those moving boxes and their shifting perspectives through time (but not space) that directs your attention, whether it's what's on the television screen, or the silhouette of the car (or buggy) going by the window. Transitions flash in the wink of an electrical storm or a camera flash. Things shift, warp, grow their hair out and stoop but only for a moment of time. If only to have The Beatles on Ed Sullivan accompany the wedding shot (see below).

And—as with McGuire's work—that's the point it's making. Life seems long. But, in the scope of things, it's transitory, gone in the blink of an eye. And that little plot of space we inhabit will still be there, long after the seas rise, the epidemics cull us, idiots atomize us, and we're just dust. Like George Carlin said "Earth Day?! The Earth will be FINE! WE'RE screwed!" Enjoy the details, the movie seems to tell us. We're just passing through.

A couple of shots—little clever instances I liked. The one below, which is the only time we see the rest of the main floor courtesy of a moved bureau.

And this one haunts (and pays a little respect to the McGuire work): while Paul Bettany's "Dad" sleeps on the couch, a box appears to show an earlier version of his long-since-passed wife (Reilly) and she says the first words of McGuire's graphic novel: "Hmm. Now why did I come in here again?" That raised goose-bumps.

It's an interesting experiment for a movie that somebody might come up with a dramatic reason to exploit. But, the point's been made. Like the guy who invents the La-Z-Boy you have to ask yourself—what's it good for?

 

* McGuire's work is so seminal and so tied to the film's strategy—and expanded to different platforms—that the Zemeckis film is almost unnecessary. It started out in 1989 as a 6 page story in Raw Volume 2 #1:

The original's time-frame is from 500,957,406,073 BC to 2033 AD

In 1991, the story was adapted into a student film by Timothy Masick and Bill Trainor, students at RIT's Department of Film and Video.

 

In 2014, McGuire expanded "Here" into a 304-page graphic novel with vector art and watercolors and extending the timeline from 3,000,500,000 B.C. to A.D. 22,175: 

That would be a herculean jump enough, but the Ebook addition of "Here" allowed you to scroll between pages with animated gifs inserted. Which is mind-blowing enough, but at the 2020 Venice Film Festival, a VR version of it was presented.

 See what I mean about the 2024 movie being "unnecessary"—it feels like, artistically and technologically, we've already moved beyond it.

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Christmas is Monday. B/CL is closed on Mondays...like theaters and like museums...so I won't be posting then. Besides, it's Christmas, Scrooge!  So, here's what I would've posted on Monday were I posting.

Written at the time of this version's release (Oh, don't worry! I'm sure another version is coming out shortly).

"God Bless Us, Every Mega-Pixel" 

  

Everyone has a favorite "Christmas Carol" (or I should say, "version" of "A Christmas Carol").* A novella, it is the perfect length for adaptation to movie (with some padding) or television special (with some commercials). And being as it's in the Public Domain, anybody can adapt it without paying any money to Mr. Dickens (who probably haunts the producers, every one!). Hence the title: Disney's 'A Christmas Carol.'tm **

 

Disney may own it, but it's Robert Zemeckis and Jim Carrey's "A Christmas Carol," and it stands up against even beloved ghosts of "Christmas Carols" past. Face it. There are so many, that presentation becomes the main criterion to base a judgement, like "Hamlet." And format has a lot to do with what drives Zemeckis' version. Skip the 3-D aspect for a moment. This motion capture-CG "take" does some very interesting things with the story (adapted within a farthing of Dickens' original by Zemeckis himself) that are only possible with animation—the ghosts being integral to the story.

"A Christmas Carol" is a ghost story. The ghosts and their tours of Scrooge's life past, present and future must be enough to slap Scrooge giddy, make him "scared straight," turn his perspective from "profit" to "a common good." 

In other words, it must turn him from a "cool, conservative man" to a "bleeding heart liberal."*** You have to have really scary ghosts to do that. Really scary ghosts. Any half-steps and Scrooge would be a "champagne liberal," and what good are they?

In this version, Carrey not only plays "Scrooge" (through Zemeckis' ever-improving "motion-capture" technique) but also the three Ghosts: a cooing Irish flame for the past, a roaring Scottish present, and a funereally silent Future. Each has their own presentation of their visions, Past whisking Scrooge to his old haunts, Present turning Scrooge's sitting room into a camera obscura to spy the current Christmas, flinging Scrooge to a stage street to present Want and Ignorance, two feral spirits—the one growing up violent behind prison bars, the other morphing into a hooker and into a straight-jacketed mad-woman. And Future, in a neat touch, forms itself from Scrooge's own shadow. 

There emerges during the sequence a chase as Scrooge is pursued by his own nightmarish funeral cortege pulled by two red-eyed horses, a bit that old Walt would have been proud of. It soon deteriorates into a demonstration of 3-D (which Zemeckis and Pixar are already masters of—the previews of James Cameron's Avatar shows a few problems) as bedlam as a mouse-sized Scrooge must scramble through the sewers to escape a terrible fate. One could live without it, as well as the "snuffing" episode of Christmas Past were the sequence not a vivid demonstration of just how well Zemeckis uses the technology to bring a life-like edge to the movie. And that's where this "Christmas Carol" truly makes its mark. 

Where this version of "A Christmas Carol" is unique is that this marks the occasion when "motion capture" CG "got the faces right." Zemeckis' previous experiment in this realm, Beowulf, had an odd, plasticene feel to it, mouths didn't crinkle correctly in speech, faces wobbled in perspective. Not here. Carrey is a broad actor, to be sure. But he's also an actor of simultaneous quicksilver subtleties, and this film captures it all. It's one thing to flit the camera perspective through snow-storms and sail through the chains of a scale, falling chestnuts, and the "eye" of a wreath (all done in the film's credits), but it's quite another artistic thing to capture the look of pleased instant love on young Ebeneezer's face when he first meets his beloved Belle (Robin Wright Penn), or to show the pleading terror and remorse when a ghostly Scrooge comes "face-to-face" with a mourning Bob Cratchit (a perfect Gary Oldman). Keep your dizzying flights of fancy 3-D. It's in those moments of intricate expression when "Disney's 'A Christmas Carol'" truly soars.

* Well, since you asked, I have my own favorites—usually the ones that are a bit scarier in their psychic psychological warfare on Scrooge. I like the "Alastair Sim" version often sighted as a favorite, and love the "George C. Scott" version for television from 1984 (he's scarier at the end than at the beginning!), but my favorite—and this is probably a case of "Mom's Apple Pie Syndrome"—is "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol," which, even though it is a musical, even though it is a cartoon and even though Scrooge is Jim Backus, still manages to pack an emotional wallop, more than any "live" version I've seen, including this version.  

** They've already done a version with Mickey Mouse: "Mickey's Christmas Carol" (1983). Scrooge McDuck played Scrooge. Natch.  

*** I have to bring this up: a couple years ago one of the Zucker bros. directed a conservative version of "A Christmas Carol," but it took the Christmas out of it—I guess it's "An X-mas Carol," then,...talk about your "Wars on the Holidays"(sic)—called "An American Carol" in which a Michael Moore type (played by Chris Farley's brother—more popularly known as "Chris Farley's brother") is shown the Ghosts of America Past, Present, and Future in order to "scare" him into being more conservative—frankly the Bush II Administration had the opposite effect on me. Not to paint with too large a brush, but conservative political humor tends to be so ham-fisted and structurally unsound that it can't even see its own hypocritical ironies.

Wonder Woman 1984

For the Wonder Woman Who Has Everything

or 

"Cheetahs Never Prosper" (Despite Magical Thinking)

In 1985, DC Comics published a "Superman Annual" (#11), that contained a "Superman" story that was much beloved of comic fans called "For the Man Who Has Everything." It was commissioned by Editor Julius Schwartz and the rumor is, he merely wanted the artist Dave Gibbons to draw it and Gibbons had the choice of who to write it.

He chose Alan Moore, who had been writing comics in Britain in 1984 and had achieved acclaim for his work cross-pollinating the "Swamp Thing" comic series and allowing its fortunes to bloom. Moore would go on to write "Watchmen" for DC Comics and "Batman: The Killing Joke" (two of the most critically acclaimed stories in the DC history) when he was allowed to play with "all the toys" in the DC Multi-verse cast-list, but for this "Superman" one-off he wrote a melancholy and savage story of Superman on his birthday being "gifted" by a villain with a present ("The Black Mercy," a telepathic, parasitic alien plant*) that granted whomever it latched on to their heart's desire, lulling them into defenselessness—in Kal-el's case, it is a mental fantasy that Krypton never exploded and that he has grown up on his home planet with his original parents—only to find that, in his fantasies, an un-cracked Krypton is not all it is cracked up to be.

Director Patty Jenkins, who directed the first sublime WW movie, and scenarists Geoff Johns and David Callaham—he had a hand in writing The Expendables, the latest Godzilla, and Zombieland: Double Tap (which does not inspire confidence)—have "homaged" that story for Wonder Woman 1984, which finds Princess Diana of Themyscira (Gal Gadot, MVP) working for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. as Diana Prince and surreptitiously super-heroing as the Amazin' Amazon—we've been told in Batman v. Superman that she's one of the "secret meta-humans" operating under the radar and hasn't been seen since WWI. Not that she hasn't been busy—there are moments (but they are moments) when she takes pains to make sure there's no record of her being there, but they are weak attempts...and one jewelry-heist bust-up is so out-in-the-open that the only way people wouldn't remember it would be unless there was a post-robbery visit by the Men in Black.

The movie proper starts with the by-now accepted Princess Diana foreshadowing voice-over as she recalls her youth in Themyscira: "Some days, my childhood feels so very far away. And others, I can almost see it: the magical land of my youth, like a beautiful dream of when the whole world felt like a promise...and the lessons that lay ahead, yet unseen. Looking back, I wish I'd listened, wish I'd watched more closely and understood. But sometimes, you can't see what you're learning until you come out the other side." 

The Themyscira scenes from both Wonder Woman and Justice League are fondly remembered, but here it's limited to a Themysciran version of "The Titan Games" and Quidditch rolled into one. The ten year-old Princess Diana (Lilly Aspell, also back) is competing against women twice her age and when she gets in trouble, takes a short-cut and is prevented from completing the course by Antiope (Robin Wright), much to her consternation: "You took the short path. That is the truth...The true hero is not born from lies, but patience, diligence and the courage to face the truth."

Okay, then, roll credits.

Zip ahead to 1984 and that mall-heist, the tone of which is rather winky, feeling a bit in tone like those fights in the "Batman" TV-series—or even the "Wonder Woman" TV-series—for all the threatening the bad-guys do, they're by turns mean or comical. It doesn't help that Jenkins piles on the "strange" sartorial splendors of the 1980's here, as it tends to undercut any feeling of menace—it's preceded by some street-action life-saving that reminded one of the Richard Lester-directed "Superman" films. A lot of little girls are shown getting inspired by a strong kick-ass woman, even though the impression is supposed to be fleeting. I mean, Diana tiara-smashes a lot of incriminating security cameras, but she stops to smile and wink at the little girls? It's also where the first brain-disconnect moment occurs: the bad guys rob the mall-jewelry store because there are ancient artifacts being smuggled there on the black market. Really? In a mall? A high traffic area mall?

Anyway, it's always good to see Gadot playing Wonder Woman. She's the best thing in the picture and although the movie doesn't live up to expectations, she's never less than fully committed and pulls off a lot of janky scenes just by her persuasiveness. That's a great component of the "Wonder Woman" persona, even if the movie sometimes forgets what she's all about.

We're given a glimpse of her post-World War I life, literally snap-shots—she lives at the Watergate hotel and scattered throughout are photos: Diana at the double wedding of WWI team-mates Charlie and Sameer, Diana on a New York ferry with an aged Etta Candy, Diana with The Chief comforting a woman at a liberated concentration camp...Diana in plaid flannel visiting Trevor Ranch. Pictures of Steve (Chris Pine). Many pictures of Steve (Chris Pine). That answers some questions—and shows that Diana wasn't just ignoring the ravages of WWII—and instills a certain nostalgic factor.

That mall-robbery sets up the story: among the antiquities housed in the backroom of the jewelry shop is something called "the Dreamstone"—there's one in the comics but it has a different history involving stories from "Justice League of America" and Neil Gaiman's "Sandman"—and everything gets carted away to the Smithsonian for study by their new hire Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a multi-doctorate but whose low self-esteem makes her nearly invisible to her co-workers...unless they see her as a door-mat. 

Except Diana. The two have a mutual interest in the Dreamstone, but neither realize its importance: It's base has a Latin phrase carved into it—"Place upon the object held but one great wish"—and it gives the bearer it's heart's specific desire...but at a cost not known to the stone-wisher. Diana wishes that Steve Trevor was back. Barbara wants to be more like Diana. 

But, there's another man who covets the Dreamstone and that would be Maxwell Lorenzano (Pedro Pascal), who has changed his name to "Maxwell Lord"** and become a fixture on TV for his company Black Gold Cooperative, hawking the public with the idea that, sure, "Life is good. But it can be better! Why shouldn't it be? All you have to do is want it." Max has bought up a bunch of oil properties that have come up dry holes—and is in debt up to his well-coiffed hair to one Simon Stagg (Oliver Cotton), who up to this point has bankrolled his schemes. But, those debts are catching up to him. Desperate for a solution, he charms and seduces Barbara into getting his hands on the stone and does what every good entrepreneur does—eliminating the middle man by wishing the stone to convey its powers to him directly, so anyone who touches him making a wish will have it granted and, in reward, bestowing him with...something. Certainly power of some kind.

Now, granted, what will stick in people's minds is gonna be that Max Lord is supposed to be Donald Trump in disguise. That will be the people who are "woke" enough to Trump's S.O.P. or those in the Trump Camp who are feeling like Hollywood is picking on Their Savior. Well, Citizen Kane is all about William Randolph Hearst...except it isn't. Similarities, sure, but differences, too. The 1980's has gone down in History as the "Greed" Decade, so any entrepreneur, empowerment coach (Tony Robbins, hello), or televangelist would fit the bill. Jenkins has gone on record that Gordon Gekko—of Wall Street (1987) fame—is a model, but George W. Bush could be, as well, given the oil tactics. Besides, this Maxwell Lord has self-image problems and wants to look like a "winner" to his son. Trump doesn't care what others think about him. All he cares about is maintaining his own self-image. Maxwell Lord is just like his comics character, a snake-oil salesman running a ponzi scheme.

But, he is successful enough with this stone that pretty soon he's a billionaire, has all sorts of mineral rights in the Middle East, has the U.S. and Russia hemorrhaging nuclear missiles and firing at each other, and—via an orbiting communication system—has the entire world making wishes that are destroying the world in an apocalypse of entitlement and self-absorption.

Wait, wait, wait. Which of the screenwriters thought this was a good idea? The scenario would include so many conflicting wishes that literally nothing would work—people's wishes would cancel each other out, negate others, and end up not making anybody's wishes come true. Forget any "monkey's paw" "be careful what you wish for" homilies, the scenario is just blinkerdly stupid, reminding me of the world-"Super-Computer" idea of Superman III or the Riddler's tapping into everybody's brain-waves "Box" in Batman Forever. The idea is "big" enough to sell a Warners Exec, but dumb enough to have no discernable logic to it other than as a polemic against mass-greed.

Oh, along the same lines: Diana's wish is to get Steve Trevor back.*** I can't think of any reason beyond contractual obligation to do that. Wouldn't she wish for world peace? At least an end to war? Isn't that why she's in "Man's World"? How about a little sexual equality—there are enough leering jag-off's in this film to inspire that. How about wishing to go back to Themyscira? See Hyppolyta for a little pep-talk, maybe—a refresher course on the Games competition? A speech is given to Diana: "I give and give and give and all I ask is for this one thing..." Gadot sells it, but I lost a little respect for the character in that one exchange. And Trevor's soul has to inhabit another guy's body to do it? That's a little creepy. But, then selfishness, at other's expense, is what the movie's all about.

If they'd limited it to Barbara Minerva, whose wish turns her into a being as strong as Diana (by decreasing Diana's power), and then into the sub-human Cheetah, then we could have had The Big Lesson, but not the confusion, or the lame "Kumbayah" at the end of it

But, also, the whole movie is about Magical Thinking...even in regards the film itself. If you build it, the audience will come. They may come, but they may not come to buy. There's another significant Latin phrase, not written on the base of any stone that says "Caveat Emptor." And the movie is full of Magical Thinking: Diana and Steve steal a jet-plane from the Smithsonian to go to the Mid-East—the jet is fueled up? Enough to fly that far? And Steve can fly it when the last thing he flew was bi-planes? Diana suddenly can turn things invisible (thus, bringing into the movie WW's Invisible Jet, which she shouldn't need as she's supposed to be able to fly)? Steve's rather vague notion of flying teaches her to do that? I'm all for ideology and visualization, and you can even have "The Secret," but I've seen too many Roadrunner cartoons to teach me that wishing doesn't make it so.

It is such a disappointment. But, then, second films in a series tend to lag. Oh, it has its moments. Gadot, of course, is splendid and her scenes with Pine are excellently played, especially when their roles are reversed from the first film and Diana have to show him the ropes of life in 1984 (I just wish they hadn't been written), and both Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal do terrific work selling their material, as weak and ill-considered as it is. And the movie LOOKS terrific, even if Jenkins seems to have abandoned her wide-screen sensibilities to make this movie look like it was shot to avoid being panned-and-scanned on a square TV (the way directors compensated in the old days before HD TV's). Definitely a big step down.

There is a visual thematic thread throughout Wonder Woman 84 that is used again and again and it's a bit of a distraction—that video "fritz" effect that sometimes transitions scenes, introduces titles, and generally breaks up the picture. I don't know what it's doing there. To show the ever-presence of media in the 1980's? A way for Warner Brothers to unite the latter DCEU movies with obtrusive graphics? Cynically, I see it as a metaphor. You don't get those "glitch" kinds of defects unless there are flaws in the material. There's an abundance of them in WW84.

Stick around for the mid-credits scene for a cameo—not a preview—that will, however, make you smile...another nod to nostalgia. I just wish they hadn't made me nostalgic for the last movie. (See that about wishes?...doesn't work.)

"We can do better..." Yes, you can.

* Fans of the "Supergirl" TV-series will notice that the same plot and device was used in the Season 1 13th episode "For the Girl Who Has Everything."

** The choice of Maxwell Lord as the villain of the piece is interesting for his history in the DCU. In the DC comics, Max was an entrepreneur/con-man who brought together an incarnation of the Justice League called Justice League International, which did not operate on U.S. soil (it included Wonder Woman in its original line-up, but due to her being used for her own book and to avoid any character dis-connect, she was never seen in the JLI). In one of the big "event" storylines for their publishing year—called "The Omac Project"—Lord uses an ability to telepathically control others to make the DC super-heroes look bad in the eyes of the press and public (in Wonder Woman Issue 219). When he takes over Superman, Wonder Woman narrowly defeats S-man by knocking him out, and Lord tells her, when bound by her lasso, that once Superman comes to, he'll just control him again. WW asks him how she can prevent that and Lord says, simply, "Kill me." So, she snaps his neck. *Krk!* Not something the comics-Superman or Batman would do, but then, WW is an Amazon warrior. It was still controversial among fan-boys. Lord's neck is saved, in many ways, in WW 1984.

*** I LIKE Chris Pine. He's a terrific actor. Plus, he and Gadot riff off of each other like nobody's business, and they do so in this movie. They're terrific together. But, he wasn't necessary. And there were better ideas that could be explored for that wish trope.  As good as he is—as good as THEY are—I hope they don't bring Steve Trevor back in the future. As they used to say on Themyscira, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and Wonder Woman doesn't need a bicycle, either. Or an invisible jet. The woman can fly on her own.