The Bourne Identity
Doug Liman’s scarred take on the James Bond myth isn’t a work that deserves superlatives, but then again, it isn’t really beckoning for them either. This is a trim, merciless thriller devoid of the blockbuster hypertrophy that was rapidly kicking the James Bond pictures into an early grave circa 2002, and it is relatively content to be just plain fine and nothing more. With a muted, sometimes monochromatic palette of bleak, unforgiving grays and frigid whites, Identity is straight-laced and admirably buttoned-up; even its sometimes awkward tonal swivels suggest a post-traumatic mind flickering with memories of its past and awkwardly swerving between new identities in a mad dash to figure out what it wants to be in the present. Continue reading
Beneath the ostentatious, rat-a-tat action and state of the art technology underwire, Justin Lin’s newest Star Trek feature is a séance for an antiquarian spirit that dishes on not only the usefulness of seemingly past-its-prime technology but reminisces for and embodies a long-lost ethos in big-budget blockbuster cinema. In this case, it is the progenitor race of the Star Trek universe that is resurrected, with the aww-shucks nature of Gene Roddenberry’s original television show surprisingly at home in the casual riffing and interpersonal dynamics that girder Lin’s more casual, insular take on the material. The result is an exultant ode to camaraderie and ingenuity much closer to the spirit of democratic interpersonal imagination as an avenue for overcoming conflict and feeling out one’s own humanity that was the backbone of Star Trek in its original incarnation. 
The pictorial inclinations of King Hu’s rhapsodic camerawork in his monumental wuxia epic A Touch of Zen are his film’s most gilded gestures, but they are no mere poetic filigrees. Rather, Hu’s investment in the physical space of his film and the way that a camera and a mind can intake and reform space informs a conscious refusal on the director’s part to explore character drama in a vacuum. Without the crucible of bounding characters by the natural environments that often remain overlooked in the world of cinema, Hu suggests that person vs. person conflict may be tenuous and unresolvable; an understanding of the earth itself it necessary first. The illusory beauty in the frame often suggests a new perceptual realm beyond the typical threshold of human consciousness, as though we are peering into an ethereal plane of color and space that eludes humanity’s typical tasks and goals. Space is otherworldly here, but also tactile, exerting a magnetic pull on the characters who weather through frames as if attracted by the deception of an unknown specter in the air. Or as though they characters were being exhumed from their internal, civilized spaces – and metaphorically the confines of their internal minds – to confront the outside world, to explore new perspectives in a desperate quest for self-actualization. 
A pair of surrealistic modern animations this week on Midnight Screenings.
At first glance, molasses rolls uphill faster than The Company, Robert Altman’s penultimate film and his most radical late-period work (excepting perhaps Short Cuts). But beneath the elegance of the pristine stillness, Altman – ever a chronicler of humanity’s dances of distance and performances of connection – stages a malapropism of conventional drama by infusing every nominally placid moment with a galvanic reverie of human possibility, both clarifying humanity’s physical and mental limits and crystallizing around the species’ undying, even improbable, volition to undue those limits by riding the contours of life and inviting love even in spite of its fragility. And I do mean “the species”. Technically the story of a youthful rising-star Ry (Neve Campbell) in Chicago’s famed Joffrey Ballet, Altman instead farms energy out of the interpersonal lives of the principal players as a collective, emphasizing the beauty of movement and marginalia rather than central, individualist conflict. 
Another fell Ice Age demon was unleashed this past weekend by Blue Sky Studios, who rely on the franchise for blockbuster potential to pursue their other, more artistically valuable productions. Let’s guess which ones I’m looking at today!
After the towering, messianic, heralding-of-a-new-art-form success of Disney’s first feature-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the spectacularly egotistical businessman Walt Disney nearly destroyed, obliterated, and defaced his company’s livelihood with a duo of divine artistic achievements that were, in their individual ways, far too radical, even fanatical, for the box office mainstream. Pinocchio was an id-logic nightmare glimpsed through a murky ether, and Fantasia a resplendent rhapsody that owed more to avant-garde sound-and-space films like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and flaunted its rejection of the reality principle at every turn. His company’s shining star had flared and glistened and tested its own mettle and might by flying to the sun in a matter of years, and it was about to implode and burn with Uncle Walt left with naught but a fiddle to wallow away his time watching the tattered rummage of his hopes and dreams. 
2016 is 75 years on from 1941, one of the finest years ever in cinema. Let’s dredge up a little history for the week in honor of that cabal of films. 
Years later, even if it isn’t always effective filmmaking, it is plainly apparent that Don Bluth’s second film with Fox Animation was never given its due process. Hired to best Disney at their own game with 1997’s Anastasia, Bluth had a one-film hot streak under his belt when he fearlessly jumped into the animation deep end with its follow-up, 2000’s Titan AE. His arrival at that point, the world now on his shoulders, was a two-decade-long torrid affair with the powers that be. After originally rising through Disney’s ranks in the ‘70s, when the company was in a downhill slide, he absconded in the ‘80s in belief that he could outdo them. His dream of besting his once-master was briefly given feral life, but Disney’s ‘90s renaissance was too much for him to handle, ultimately resulting in screwing himself over in the early ‘90s in a desperate craze to keep up with his former masters resulting in failure after failure. His career was over, until Fox Animation ceremoniously afforded him one more shot to best his former bosses (admittedly, he was the only one in history that had accomplished this goal before, so one can see why he was the natural candidate). Anastasia triumphed commercially just as Disney was beginning to falter itself, and the stage was set for Bluth to return to investigating the crevices of animation rather than simply aping his former masters as he did with Anastasia. 
With all the slashing and piercing found within, it isn’t really a surprise that John McTiernan’s disastrously over-budget The 13th Warrior is so disemboweled. This tonally promiscuous production vacillates between effectively brazen horror viciousness and petty, watery cartoon-viking bombast, the two tones functioning like combative enemies rather than fascinatingly differentiated tonal inversions. Devious wrongdoings behind the camera and disastrous reshoots ensure a production that runs the gamut from pastoral myth to Manowar album cover, a grungy, dirge-like epic of alternately jaundiced and flowery discombobulation.
The Long Take 