Lessons of Darkness

Project: Makeover

Bored with the old site design, I decided to give The Nick Schager Film Project a visual overhaul. I think it gives it a cleaner, more compact look, and hopefully is a bit easier to both read and navigate.

And a big ol' Thanks to Yancey and his friend Marie for helping with the new site logo - it's much appreciated.

Slacking Off

After last week's mammoth ten-film post, I only have seven new online reviews for your reading pleasure. Sorry for being so lazy. But hey, at least this current batch of write-ups covers a few winners (including Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's stunning Sin City).

This weekend's two duds:
Guess Who (Slant magazine)
Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous (Slant magazine)

A great new Criterion Collection DVD:
The Sword of Doom - DVD (Slant magazine)

Next Wednesday's sole (lame) release:
Beauty Shop (Slant magazine)

Two really good April 1st films:
Sin City (Slant magazine)
Kontroll (filmcritic.com)

And finally, an underwhelming April 15th sports doc:
The Year of the Yao (Slant magazine)

And below, you'll find recent site reviews of Miss Congeniality, Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Shaolin Soccer.

Shaolin Soccer (2001): A-

Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer takes a hackneyed sports story – down-and-out underdogs band together, learn the value of teamwork and sacrifice, and triumph – and turns it into a blitzkrieg of hilarious kung fu craziness. Shaolin disciple Sing (Chow) is desperate to find a way to promote his unique martial arts technique, and finds the perfect venue when crippled former soccer star “Golden Leg” Fung (Man Tat Ng) convinces him to get on the pitch. Sing recruits his fellow Shaolin masters (all of whom have given up kung fu for mundane 9-5 jobs) to train for the national championship tournament, setting up a showdown against the Evil Team (led by Patrick Tse Yin’s Hung) that quickly erupts into a battle of insane CGI-infused athleticism. Shaolin Soccer’s special effects are modeled after hyper-stylized Japanimation shows like Dragonball Z, such as when a flaming soccer ball transmogrifies into a roaring beast and fiery backgrounds magically appear behind Sing and his superpowered cohorts. Yet the über-cheesy film’s strongest attribute is Chow, whose comedically manic direction (and performance) provides the zany, homage-laden proceedings (Game of Death, The Matrix, and Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns are all referenced) with an infectiously giddy punch.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004): C+

Whereas 1995’s Ghost in the Shell artfully merged anime action with meditative philosophy, Mamoru Oshi’s 2004 sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is one long, tedious rumination on the blurring distinction between man and machines. Years after Major Kusanagi disappeared into the digital ether, her former cyborg partner Bato – now teamed with detective (and family man) Togusa – has become a morose loner worried that his (mostly) synthetic mind and body have stripped him of his humanity. Bato and Togusa are assigned to look into a brand of high-class pleasure robots (amusingly dubbed “sexoids”) who seem to be killing their owners and then suicidally self-destructing – distinctly human behavior that leads the cops to believe they were illegally implanted with ghosts stolen from real people. This mysterious set-up is enhanced with an awe-inspiring blend of 2-D and 3-D animation techniques, resulting in a marriage of old and new that’s not only visually breathtaking – highlighted by Oshi’s amazingly corporeal protagonists – but also speaks to the film’s fascination with organic and artificial symbiosis. Too bad its narrative – awash in solemn, pseudo-profound discussions about reality and virtual reality – is ultimately about as intelligible as the squeals and screeches of a PC modem.

Ghost in the Shell (1995): B

Mamoru Oshi’s landmark Ghost in the Shell – which superbly melds two-dimensional artwork and computer graphics – has rightly been decried for helping usher in an age of convoluted, spectacle-driven science fiction. Simply blasting the film’s surface-over-substance storytelling, however, is to shortchange its intriguing (if frequently pretentious) investigation into the nature of reality. Major Kusanagi is a cyborg cop with a soul (the titular “ghost” in her buxom shell) who, along with her mechanically enhanced partner Bato, is hot on the trail of a hacker known as The Puppetmaster. Major is plagued by nagging doubts about her own “humanity,” unsure of whether she was ever a person or, on the other hand, just programmed to believe in her organic origins. Her hunt for The Puppetmaster thus becomes a quest for identity, and what she ultimately learns from the notorious hacker – and what the philosophical film attempts to posit – is that a sentient entity (human or synthetic) is defined by its capacity for memories, self-analysis, reproduction, and death. Such questions about the complex relationship between man and machine are juvenilely gussied up with Oshi’s voluptuous nude fembots, with Major regularly undressing before engaging in battle (such as during a thrilling, if brief, fight with a six-legged tank). But inflated boobies aside, the influential Ghost in the Shell – a film the Wachowskis repeatedly “borrowed from” for The Matrix – delivers a fairly entrancing vision of a human race overrun by evolving artificial intelligence.

Miss Congeniality (2000): C-

According to Miss Congeniality, there’s nothing quite as liberating as a beauty pageant. Skipping this dreadful Sandra Bullock vehicle, however, has got to place a close second. Donald Petrie’s makeover-by-numbers comedy follows a tomboy cop (Bullock’s Gracie Hart) as she goes undercover at the Miss United States competition to ferret out a killer. Gracie is a mannish nightmare loathe to the assignment until she’s worked over physically by Michael Caine’s Victor Melling – who gives her a haircut, a coating of makeup and a lesson or two in Femininity 101 – and romantically by her partner Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt), whose interest proves to Gracie that she might have some sex appeal. Predictably cute and idiotically misleading, the film manages to depict aspiring beauty queens as intelligent sweethearts apt to help fellow contestants prepare for the big show (instead of stabbing them in the back with a curling iron) while painting the galas themselves as venues for self-actualization. Somehow, though, I’m not sure its moronic “female empowerment” message – that women aren’t really women (and don’t get to have Tom Jones’ “She’s a Lady” as their theme song) until they’ve learned to behave like brain-dead Barbie dolls – is exactly what feminists had in mind.

Ten Spot

This post is proof positive that I've been working too hard, as I have TEN new reviews for this fine Friday evening. I've ordered the following eight theatrical films according to release date, with this weekend's films at the top.

3/18/05:
The Ring Two (Slant magazine)
Ice Princess (Slant magazine)
Steamboy (Slant magazine)
Melinda and Melinda (filmcritic.com)
Face (filmcritic.com)

3/25/05:
The Ballad of Jack and Rose (Slant magazine)
Lipstick and Dynamite (filmcritic.com)
Nina's Tragedies (Slant magazine)

I also have two new DVD reviews - one for Otto Preminger's classic 1944 noir Laura, and the other for one of my all-time favorite films, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Laura - DVD (Slant magazine)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - DVD (Slant magazine)

And below this post, you'll also find new reviews of Akira and Predator 2.

Predator 2 (1990): C+

Half as taut and twice as dumb, Predator 2 is also exponentially funnier – and therefore more fun – than its Schwarzenegger-headlined original. In downtown L.A., renegade cop Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is navigating a “war zone” in which drug gangs engage in armed conflict with the police, yet crazy Latino cokeheads and voodoo-practicing Jamaican ganja-smokers are nothing compared to the Predator, who arrives in town to hunt anyone carrying a weapon. Glover, wearing baggy grandpa pants but swearing like a sailor, is an odd choice for an action hero, and the film hilariously pairs him with the always-insane Gary Busey as a mysterious government operative who seems to know a lot about the city’s resident invisible extraterrestrial. Bill Paxton (even hammier than in Weird Science), Maria Conchita Alonso (whose pregnancy is revealed as a tantalizing subplot, and then totally dropped), Morton Downey Jr., and porn legend Teri Weigel round out a cast of campy over-actors, and director Stephen Hopkins’ absolute inability to create tension or excitement from his lame special effects and boring set pieces – such as a nonsensical chase through a meat-packing plant – only further compounds this ludicrous B-movie’s goofiness.

Akira (1988): B+

Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyber-punk anime classic Akira may be as muddled and ridiculous as it is exhilarating, but there’s no denying its still-astounding animation. Otomo, adapting his own 2,000+page manga, packs his convoluted film with too many extraneous side-stories involving anti-government protestors (angry about tax reform?), an army coup, and a romance between a rampaging superboy and a dainty waif. But as a purely visual experience, this science-fiction epic is a furious spectacle of lush colors and dynamic movement that deftly combines elements of Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In post-WWIII neo-Tokyo, the military-industrial complex maintains tenuous control over rebuilt Japanese society, biker gangs rule the streets, and one kid – Tetsuo, a picked-on member of popular Kaneda’s moto-delinquents – becomes an out-of-control semi-diety when he crashes into a psychic child. Mid-way through, Akira’s story – which, like so much anime, is concerned with man’s relationship with machines – unravels into incomprehensibility, though it’s clear the film functions as both a parable about technological (specifically, atomic) progress, and a coming-of-age story about one maligned kid’s angry retribution against authority figures. Yet to really enjoy Otomo’s masterpiece, it’s best to just turn one’s mind off and enjoy the incredible imagery.

March Madness

This week brings another batch of less-than-enthusiastic reviews for the latest Bruce Willis action film, a Penelope Cruz-headlined disaster, and a horrible South Africa-set drama starring Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche. Those in NYC, however, might want to take a chance on a low-budget science fiction film called After the Apocalypse that'll be playing downtown starting on March 16.

Hostage (Slant magazine)
Don't Move (filmcritic.com)
In My Country (filmcritic.com)
After the Apocalypse (Slant magazine)

Fortunately, I've seen some decent stuff on DVD recently. My thoughts on Stander, Tokyo Godfathers and The Five Obstructions can be found directly below this post.