"Repo Men" an Organ Groaner

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 19 March 2010 02:22

Written by Frank Lovece

Directed by Miguel Sapochnik
Written by Eric Garcia, Garrett Lerner, based on the novel The Repossession Mambo by Garcia
Starring Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schreiber, Alice Braga, Carice Van Houten, Chandler Canterbury, Joe Pingue, RZA (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs)

Repo Men, right to its remarkably telegraphed ending, follows a map of Brazil as it tries to juxtapose carefree Latin music and arch satire with a Dystopian future where killing people is just bureaucratic business-as-usual. Only where Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) made the agents of bureaucracy those of a totalitarian government, this adaptation of Eric Garcia's 2009 paperback novel The Repossession Mambo makes them those of a corporation literally able to get away with murder. The problem is that where Brazil created a world all of a piece to make its points with surreal abandon, Repo Men shifts its tone jarringly from action thriller to cautionary drama to black comedy, while ultimately having nothing to say other than maybe, "Pay your bills."

It's not good when the futuristic super-science of everyday artificial-organ transplantation is the easiest thing with which to suspend disbelief. Screenwriters Garcia and Garrett Lerner and first-time feature director Miguel Sapochnik, a former storyboard artist, present a standard blue-neon Blade Runner city in which salespeople for a megacorporation called The Union sweet-talk terminally ill family men and others to buy organs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars — pooh-poohing rumors "you may have heard on the 6 o'clock news" (as if there were still a 6 o'clock news in the future) about repo men who come and take back your organs if you're 90 days past due. And so, all through the movie, you somehow have several corpses a day littering a single city alone, all with organs removed, and these are just "rumors"? Forget about police — there apparently aren't even any blogs or forum postings wondering why all these dead people keep popping up like mushrooms after a rain. The waiting room at The Union sales office has a steady stream of customers who never notice all this, or know anybody that it happened to?

The lack of logic starts right off, as repo man Remy (Jude Law) talks about having become work-partners with Jake (Forest Whitaker), the kid who used to beat him up in fourth grade in this clearly North American city – even though Remy inexplicably has a British accent as thick as Marmite. Where is this, exactly? Because somehow in this town, everyone, not just rich folks, are buying $600,000 organs — even down-and-out singers and the big, fat, sloppy guy eating a chili dog in the bad part of town.

This isn't just about the ridiculous milieu. It's about a disjointed and unfocused idea, which doesn't seem to be anything more than the bare concept of, "Hey, would happen if corporations got so powerful they could repossess organs?" But a concept is not a movie, and without anything rational to say, it's also not a story.

For more by Frank Lovece: http://franklovece.com

"Green Zone" Shocks and Occasionally Awes

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 15:28

Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick

Directed by Paul Greengrass
Written by Brian Helgeland, inspired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran's nonfiction Imperial Life in the Emerald City
Starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan, Yigal Naor, Khalid Abdalla

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008; U.S. release 2009) earned overwhelming positive reviews, in part by shoving the polarizing politics of America's Iraq war into the background. Irish director Paul Greengrass' Green Zone wears its politics on its sleeve, a nervy stance for a $100 million, major-studio thriller starring Matt Damon, since mainstream audiences of all ideological persuasions have so assiduously avoided movies about Iraq and the war on terror, from Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) to Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008). Even the lauded Hurt Locker couldn't recoup its $15 million cost after six months in release.

Baghdad, 2003: One month after the "shock and awe" invasion, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) and his team are on the front lines of the search for deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's vast weapons stockpile — it was, after all, the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that justified American military intervention. But all they find is abandoned toilet factories, where the only biological threat is years' worth of calcified pigeon droppings.

Though military to the core, Miller can't help wondering whether there's something fishy about the intelligence. But Miller's questions are casually dismissed by his superiors, defense department weasel Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) and even his own men, who toe the "ours is not to reason why" line. The only sympathetic ear is cynical CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson), an old Middle-East hand whose warnings that American's plans to bring democracy to Iraq, starting with the installation of a puppet leader with strong Pentagon ties, guarantee that Iraq will quickly descend into civil war between rival Ba'athist, Sunni and Kurdish factions whose longtime animosities were kept in check by Saddam's brutal regime, are routinely ignored. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reporter Lawrie Dane (Amy Ryan), who traded her integrity for exclusives, has begun to harbor her own suspicions about the top-secret informer codenamed Magellan, the Pentagon's primary source of information.

In the middle of yet another fruitless search for WMDs, an Iraqi civilian (Khalid Abdalla) alerts Miller off to a nearby meeting of high-level Ba'athist military officers; Miller gambles on his veracity and comes away with a glimpse of the fugitive General Al Rawi (Yigal Naor) and a notebook that everyone seems to want. The more Miller learns about the deals, agendas and compromises behind the carefully managed facade of Iraq's liberation, the closer he's drawn to a showdown between loyalty and principals.

Greengrass is a bold, visceral director, as comfortable with using hand-held camera and frenetic editing to give fact-based narratives like United 93 (2003) the urgency of fiction and lend espionage fantasies like the Bourne movies a discomfiting air of reality. Unfortunately, Brian Helgeland's screenplay inspired by Washington Post editor Rajiv Chandrasekaran's scathing 2006 account of the machinations within Baghdad's heavily fortified green zone, where American administrators made key decisions about Iraq's future, relies so heavily on conspiracy clichés that it's easy to lose sight of how much fact is been woven into the fiction.

I imagine the filmmakers' intent was to use the conventions of action-packed entertainment to stimulate serious discussion about America's intentions and actions in Iraq, but I doubt that Green Zone will. The subject is so irrationally polarizing that it's more likely to reinforce existing opinions and fuel furious rants about liberal media and Hollywood leftists.

For more by Maitland McDonagh: MissFlickChick.com

"Remember Me": Forget About It

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 15:08

Written by Maitland McDonagh / Miss FlickChick

Directed by Allen Coulter
Written by Paul Fetters
Starring  Robert Pattinson, Pierce Brosnan, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, Tate Ellington, Martha Plimpton

Veteran TV director Allen Coulter and first time screen writer Paul Fetters head down the road of good intentions, but it's viewers who wind up in a hell of overwrought melodrama with a monumental twist.

New York, 1991: On a deserted subway platform, 11-year-old Ally Craig (Caitlyn Paige Rund) watches in terror as her mother (Martha Plimpton) is first harassed and then murdered by a gang of thugs.

New York, 2001: Rumpled, moody NYU student Tyler Hawkins (Twilight's Robert Pattinson) joins his family — father Charles (Pierce Brosnan), a sleek, hot-shot lawyer; bohemian mom Diane (Lena Olin) and her easy-going current husband (Jbara); and precocious baby sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins) — for their annual visit to the grave of his older brother. Despite Diane's efforts to keep the peace, Charles manages to belittle Caroline, already a talented artist at age 11, and piss off the already disgruntled Tyler.

That night, Tyler and his aggressively annoying roommate, Aidan (Tate Ellington), go out drinking and wind up in jail after Tyler mouths off to hard ass Sergeant Neil Craig (Chris Cooper), who goes out of his way to humiliate Tyler. Soon after, Aidan discovers that Craig's daughter, Ally (Emilie de Ravin), just happens to be a fellow NYU student and comes up with the perfect revenge: Tyler should seduce Ally and then cruelly break her heart. But the beautiful, haunted souls instead fall in love.

A bumper crop of secondary angst is woven into the story of Tyler and Ally's tempestuous relationship: Eccentric Caroline is bullied by middle-school mean girls. Ally fights with her (understandably) overprotective father. Tyler has a series of increasingly fractious run-ins with his dad, whom he blames for his brother's suicide. Diane tries to heal the emotional wounds that have sundered her loved ones.

And so it goes for most of the movie's 113-minute running time: Soul-searching, emotional anguish and dramatic confrontations punctuated by little stabs at happiness. And then along comes the great big twist — read no further if you don't want to know what it is.

It's not just 2001: It's September 11, 2001, and someone just happens to be at the World Trade Center bright and early on that fateful Tuesday morning. The sight of a plane plowing into the towers is clearly meant to drive home the message that every moment is precious and every day should be lived as though it were the last. But it has exactly the opposite effect, throwing into high relief the fundamental triviality of family feuds, lovers' spats and schoolyard squabbles, and making everyone look spoiled and self-indulgent.

For more by Maitland McDonagh: MissFlickChick.com