2012 – A Review

When a battleship squishes the President of the United States, you know you’re watching a Roland Emmerich movie. The same man who introduced the world to Will Smith by having Big Willie knock-out an extra-terrestrial; the same man who had Jake Gyllenhaal fend off the next ice age with a campfire; the same man who gave you Ferris Bueller versus Godzilla!!!…brings you this: the end of the world as we know it (unless you’re a hard-up character actor, or a cute kid, or a giraffe, or a Tibetan monk). For shear, insane, eyeball-trampling spectacle, Emmerich deserves a medal. For story-telling (and everything else), he deserves a punch.

As predicted by the ancient Mayans, the world goes tits-up in 2012. Solar rays melt the Earth’s core. This is pretty f—ing bad news for six billion people, but (on the plus side) it does mean John Cusack will get back together with his ex-wife. In vintage Irving Allen disaster movie fashion, the Apocalypse is really just the cue for broken-hearts to get mended; for small girls to overcome incontinence, and for a cute dog to escape death…by a whisker! Scant attention is paid to the enormous loss of life (or to the laws of physics) as a ragtag group of disparate survivors struggle with their personal problems, weep for countless extras and teach us how to love.

Saying this movie is ridiculous is like saying a hurricane is loud. You think Roland Emmerich doesn’t know his movie is ridiculous? In 2012, the Earth’s crust moves just so John Cusack and his family will have someplace to land a stolen plane. It’s a movie where a drowning monk gazes up at a forlorn giraffe; where the Chinese army airlift an elephant onto a steel ark in the Himalayas. Woody Harrelson seems sane in this movie. We’re talking about a magnitude of crazy that exceeds all grasp. By the time Oliver Platt confesses to assassinating the director of the Louvre (for being “an enemy of humanity!”), the word “ridiculous” feels puny.

John Cusack acts like the painkillers have just kicked in. He looks like he’s trying to block the movie out. But Cusack’s deadpan delivery comes in for a rough ride in 2012, because even the drollest f—er on the planet would have a hard time looking nonplussed as Los Angeles exploded around him. Cusack’s job for most of the movie is to run away while another landmark goes kabluey. His dialogue mostly consists of saying “now” (as in “we have to go now”), or giving his kids bogus assurances that “everything’s gonna be ok” as Hawaii burns in the background. As a father, he’s about as plausible as the science of 2012, but he kisses Amanda Peet like he means it and he seems to drive a limo like a bat out of hell.

Most of the cast deserve a mention just for their death scenes. Danny Glover: crushed by the Washington Monument. Woody Harrelson: obliterated by a super-volcano. Thomas McCarthy: eaten by a big cog, and completely forgotten by the end of the movie, even though he’d been a perfect step-father to Amanda Peet’s children and in all ways an excellent second husband to her (literally, his wife and step-children seem to forget him about five minutes after he dies). George Segel: killed in a Poseidon Adventure sub-plot. The entire population of L.A., Las Vegas and Washington D.C.: annihilated in the hope someone would find their deaths “awesome”.

By the time a gigantic steel ark is veering towards Mount Everest, you’re either enjoying this nonsense or you’re not. 2012 trades in a kind of porno death hysteria that doesn’t offer a middle ground. The key thing is to enjoy the lunacy of the premise. Roland Emmerich isn’t the go-to guy for psychological realism, or dialogue a human being might say; he’s into cataclysm. People in his movies are like ants trying to evade a magnifying glass. Think: beetles for the legion of cars (and drivers) who meet their doom. You could feel ashamed for whooping at this fun-packed holocaust, but why bother? If one thing is certain: Roland Emmerich has no shame.

Bright Star – A Review

Jane Campion says she made a movie about John Keats because she “was terrified of poetry”. A tricky poem was like a spider in a high corner of her brain; making meaning hard to reach; staining her enjoyment. But Keats proved a good teacher. As he says in the movie: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.” Bright Star is about a love of verse.

An Education – A Review

You know you’ve learnt something when you’re changed by what you’ve learnt. If you’re still you, plus a memorized inventory: no dice. That’s why most of most what we learn in school is only exam fodder. There’s a big difference between knowledge that helps you get on in life and knowledge that helps you live. The new British movie, An Education, is about a valuable lesson taught to a 16-year-old by her first whopping great mistake. She is Oxford-bound, a straight-A student, so she could easily have stuck to her books and missed her opportunity. Thankfully, she studies her mistake – appreciates it – and allows experience to enhance her mind.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – A Review

Terry Gilliam has a reverence for failure. In his movie The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges talks (ruefully) of Nietzsche’s “bungled and botched…expendable masses” who “get close to greatness, but never get there.” In a Gilliam movie, the hero is always either a fool or a madman, someone who sees much but blows his chances, aims high but is often speared by the world. As screen alter-egos go, these characters are candidly self-lacerating. Alexander Pope’s aphorism “To err is human…” is like a dare to Gilliam. He needs to conceive of movies that can’t work in order to prove that they can. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a case in point.

Less Than Zero – A Review

Watching a new zombie movie recently, I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis. Put a pair of Wayfarers on any reanimated corpse and they come to resemble one of Ellis’s creations; the blank indifference to life, the remorseless appetite. For over twenty years, Ellis has been hacking away at our world, again and again writing “tan” when he means “damned” and “tried to smile” when he knows one verb cancels the other out. There are no characters in Ellis’s books, there are only bodies. Much the way a zombie looks at the world and callously notes a holocaust, so the rich kids of Less Than Zero stare indifferently at the death of their souls.

The Soloist – A Review

Contrary to what Terry Gilliam movies teach us, going mad is no fun. The only thing real madness makes you aware of is how you should prize sanity. There are no life lessons to be learned, sadly, from slipping out of your head. Real madness is a hell with no dimensions: ungraspable and unkind. There’s something especially pitiless about a disease that corrupts thought. The new movie, The Soloist, tells the true story of a schizophrenic Julliard-trained musician named Nathaniel Ayers. He is, by turns: loquacious, gentle, intriguing and capable of snapping your neck. He is not changed by the movie’s end, and the movie is better for it.

Twilight – A Review

Wuthering Heights makes more sense if you’re a teenage girl. Heathcliff is clearly hot. For starters, he’s filled with inner turmoil. He doesn’t have parents, so there’s no-one to cramp his style. His sudden violent outbursts are mostly directed at less-hot men. And he shares his name with the late Heath Ledger. It’s a crying shame there were no teenagers around when Emily Bronte wrote the book, as you could have saved critics years of wrangling over subtext. Fortunately, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was immediately understood by its readership. It’s about a Heathcliff-type named Edward, who struggles with love (and being a vampire).

Gamer – A Review

Ninety per cent of New Media makes me feel like Buck Rogers. I look at something like the Second Life phenomenon as proof I’ve fallen through a hole in time. The idea of living vicariously through a computer-generated alter-ego just seems bat-shit insane to me. Call it my Gil Gerard-reflex, but when I read about a real-life couple who met through a computer game and divorced when the husband had a virtual affair, my sense of what’s real goes a bit 25th century. Admittedly, the new action movie, Gamer, is not the ideal platform for questioning the direction of early 21st century social-norms, but the story is (at heart) a Second Life parody.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra – A Review

Solider is one of the few jobs that make sense to a six-year-old. If your noun can be a verb – if your job implies an action – it has kid-appeal. That’s why Army Men are popular at playtime and Accountant Men stay in their original packaging. Accountancy, like most office work, is a profession that ill-suits six-year-olds. Sitting at a desk can only engage the mind for so long. But to be in the army! Think of it the way a small person does: a) you shout; b) you shoot at stuff; c) everyone gets a gun. No wonder G.I. Joe is catnip for kids. The new movie may even reacquaint a few office drones with their inner child.

500 Days of Summer – A Review

If you’ve ever mooned over a girl, this movie’s for you. Yes, savour that paper-cut smile. You know the girl I’m talking about. You met her in your teens or your early twenties. She had a way of dressing just so. Her quirks were sonnet-worthy. She probably rode a bike, or played an obscure instrument. The chances of the relationship working were nil, but her cool only encouraged you. For you, love was all about delay. So you pratted about; writing a script for the pair of you, while she eyed up someone else. It ended. You met the right girl. And now you get to laugh fondly at yourself in 500 Days of Summer.