Review: Self/less (2015)

Is it that the business, by nature, wears people down and turns them into inert husks of the warriors they used to be? Does part of that nature include an element that does everything it can to sabotage the project and its leader? It seems that way when a film is seconds from becoming immersive and is then followed by five decisions that undercut and apologize for getting that close. I would love more than anything to put the blame on the editor, Robert Duffy, because he edited this thing like garbage, but -- goddammit, he also edited Singh's good films, didn't he? So, bottom line, if we focus all points onto one man for success, we must also do the same for failure.

Self/less is Death Becomes Her and The Game, brought to you by Apple and Google. A bunch of nonsense followed by even more nonsense, some inorganic character development that indicate the time for the audience to use the restroom, scene problems solved numerous times by characters running on the other side of a small hill. It isn't the bizarre fuck up that was Mirror Mirror, merely a generic sci-fi actioner that's biggest crime is that it wastes the talent of the people involved.

Some Tarsemyness manages to sneak in. There are brief symmetrical tableaus of characters sitting in beautifully arranged settings that would have played perfectly from there until Singh decided he needed to include every single angle they shot that day. There are sweeping sidelong dollys and montage techniques absorbed via a close friendship with David Fincher, and at least one or two frames of the Living Paintings gimmick. The more surreal approach that Singh is known for (and what we all show up for) could have only helped elevate the material, but is currently out to lunch. Alas, we may have to install another gravestone in the visual stylist's graveyard and put Singh's right next to Alex Proyas.

Review: Mirror Mirror (2012)

Tarsem was unlucky enough to land in the middle of a bizarre Snow White resurgence, and it didn't help that Mirror Mirror's three screenwriters couldn't pound out a single good joke. None of these people know a comedian? No, Nathan Lane doesn't count.

Woof. So what happened here? Well, answers seem clearer, this time. I think somebody had too much faith in their ability to fix problems well into production. Shit's been broke for awhile now, dawg. Even farce, good farce, doesn't follow an 'and then' formula. The Queen despises Snow White. And then Snow White sneaks into the ball. And then the Prince is robbed by dwarves on accordion legs. And then the Prince and Snow White duel. And then the Mirror Queen turns Nathan Lane into a cockroach. And then with a certain amount of terror, you notice you are only halfway through the movie.

These scenes are all paced quickly enough and the film retains a softened version of Tarsem's usual beauty, but it's all irrelevant when nothing seems to matter to the characters within the film. If Roy tried telling this story to Alexandria on that hospital bed, she would have fallen asleep before he had the chance to manipulate her. Shit, everybody's asleep. Even frequent collaborator Eiko Ishioka is phoning it in ("Eh? I don't know, put a bird on her head."). And don't you dare try tacking on a dance number in the closing credits to trick me into thinking I had a good time, I don't care how many letters your last name has. It's a wading pool of drying concrete, getting through this thing. Try making it to the end of the trailer, even. 

Review: Immortals (2011)

Scream to us, o nudes, an evocation of old Harryhausen and ignite a flame under that testosterone cauldron inside all of us, the same one that encourages you to fistbump your wife after the closeup of the virgin oracle's butt. The very same that causes her to oblige.

Cribbing from various details of Greek mythology but throwing the details into the pits of Scaldor, we are whisked away on a fast moving adventure that can only insist on a massive scope but remain confined to what looks like about four greenscreen sets. Things move quickly, and then much too quickly, and then much much too quickly. Truly amazing moments stand inches from each other, moments that need at least thirty seconds of separation -- a time lapse or a montage or something -- in order for the story to actually function. How characters travel so quickly or why we couldn't start the film in the salt mines so that Mickey Rourke's war can seem endless, are deemed irrelevant. They occasionally are irrelevant in the face of a violent encounter with a Minotaur, a God of War set piece crushing everyone's head with a hammer, and a Call to Arms speech punctuated with sword smacks to the shield. Sparta where?

Singh is running fast here. The script is barely ahead of the cameras and as such, we lose out on a better constructed story, something the filmmakers deserve as much as we do. Tarsem has allowed improvisation to change the nature of the script before (The Fall's climactic sword fight originally involved the Hypochondriac as villain, not the Actor), so he's no stranger to driving himself completely nutso. It works partially towards the film's benefit that the story is so bare -- it ends up as a fairly accurate echo of a poet's song. Neal Stephenson once used an analogy for squished history, compact information you can breeze past in a line at Disneyland, something you can never unspool and examine. If we are the child at the end of the film, staring at a depiction of Theseus's adventures on a statue, knowing only the highlights and not the ordeal, we are content but long to have actually lived it.

Review: The Fall (2006)

"Why are you killing everybody?"

Films about filmmaking are usually self-congratulatory douchefests designed to inflate art's importance so that nobody loses their job. A way to sidestep that pitfall would be similar to an optical illusion, where the magic happens on the periphery, although I think the result is identical to simply telling a good story. Here, we have two! A man in a hospital bed begins an epic tale to a young child (a western, though not imagined as such) solely to earn her trust and get her to retrieve pills from the hospital's dispensary. The narrative cross-stitching functions completely without the technological excuse in The Cell, only by the imagination of the cutest little girl in the world, and the reality of the hospital and her life influence the casting and visuals of her imagination in monumentally clever ways. The film pulls you in two different directions at first; the more visually arresting is also less important, a tough thing to meet halfway until the stakes of real story increase and Roy's motives become clearer and less tasteful. Tableaus are constructed and discarded, quickly and effortlessly, and we are pulled into a third direction as his tale become dangerous. The brutal squeeze it puts on your heart by the end is a hammer collapsing your chest, where it is hard to tell if we are Alexandria, demanding a happy ending, or Roy, bitter and broken by life's hardships. It's an awe-inspiring achievement with an insane amount of connective tissue weaved throughout the various themes.

You don't need to be part of a hero myth to pull someone out of hell. The movie is incredible, Lee Pace is a motherfucking boss, I cry a bunch. Oh, and look, Bedtime Story again! This guy loves Mark Romanek.

Review: The Cell (2000)

Jennifer Lopez and her booty have to travel through Hirst, Nerdrum, Giger, various Tarkovsky films, and the Losing My Religion, Closer, The Perfect Drug, and Bedtime Story music videos in order to find the location of a comatose serial killer's final victim, in a situation so specific that it's hard to imagine the Dreamsharing Institute ever getting its own television show. Nonetheless, our reward for all of those directors learning their craft at MTV at the height of its power is the occasional art film/genre picture hybrid, where it's hard to tell if one side is elevating the other or if one side is a weight dragging the other down.

It would have been so easy for The Cell to be a run-of-the-mill Silence of the Lambs clone where the science fiction element is wasted on someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Tarsem Singh was definitely the person to hire for the dreamstuff, but his craftiness bleeds into areas outside of the money-shots; the killer's victims are given proper, horrific detail, D'onofrio's arrival to the institute is a thing of vaguely unsettling beauty, and the implication of Vince Vaughn's molestation as a child is later used as a seduction technique. We got really, really lucky.

The weights come in the form of clear outside interference, boxing gloves and shoulder pads. A woman's life hinging on Jennifer Lopez's success is infinitely more important than proving her worth to the parents of a comatose child. The dramatization of D'onofrio's ridiculous dragonlike seizures cruelly undercut the kinetic, purely pornographic FBI siege on his home. Dylan Baker's folksy explanations of the dreamcloths to the detectives (therefore, the audience) become embarrassingly superfluous when the director has already done such a bang-up job conveying it visually. And there's not much we can do about the ending, where a connection established with a child pre-murderer through a mercy drowning had to also include a crossbow showdown(?).

There should be a cut of this with the handholding excised. The insane visual effects, the fusion of Howard Shore's Naked Lunch/Se7en score and the inclusion of Fantastic Planet on a television screen all belong in full-throttle surreality, where the genre trappings are cemented closed and the gunshy studio notes are set on fire. You don't have to perform gymnastics for so long (40 minutes) just to get to the juicy stuff, and we can understand braindiving in this universe without too much justification. We came to a goddamned movie, after all.