Butter (JimField Smith, 2012)

Butter is an unfunny, arrogant satire that tries to skewer the Midwest but exists so far outside the realm of reality that it says more about the ignorance of its makers than its targets. This is a film written with such hyperbole that the actors conflict with the roles they play by virtue of being human beings, bringing a basic sense of human decency to such wafer-thin stereotypes. Occasionally, it gets a laugh in spite of itself, but Butter is so condescending and superior that it mainly just made me feel angry at those who thought it was clever enough to fund.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011)

It almost pains me to dismiss an Andrew Niccol film, as I think he should be encouraged. He takes the notion of "high concept" to heart, even if those concepts lead to inconsistent and oversimplifying conclusions. In Time may be his simplest yet, a film that takes its social commentary to such a ludicrous endpoint that even this liberal was howling at some of its conclusions about the rich.

You see, in the future, babies are genetically engineered not to physically age past age 25 but to die a year later unless more time is bought. As such, time is literally money in this society, where the rich can live for centuries while the poor give a whole new meaning to "living from paycheck to paycheck." (I apologize, but the time puns are endless.) The problem with In Time is not that it unfairly posits extreme wealth as soaked in the blood of the poor—that's been true forever. It's that the metaphor barely extends to the hour mark, and the film subsequently falls into a muddied action thriller that prevents Niccol from playing to his strengths.

In Time follows ghetto rat Will Salas (Justin Timberlake), who lives with his 50-year-old mother (Olivia Wilde) struggling to pay the bills with never more than a few hours to spare. One night while drinking with friends, Will comes across a man named Henry Hamilton, a man in the wrong zone with more than a century on his clock. Weary of having lived too long and too meaninglessly, Hamilton decides to give the remainder of his time to Will, leaving only a message telling him not to waste it.

And then, In Time promptly goes nowhere fast. As someone who has always had to make every second count, Will runs everywhere even after he scores enough time to get into the wealthiest zones. Niccol does not match that sense of urgency, even when Will finds himself hunted by authorities. Instead, the film abruptly grinds to a halt, Will heading to ultra-rich area New Greenwich and lolly-gagging around gambling and exchanging Significant Looks with Sylvia Wies (Amanda Seyfried), the daughter of one of the richest, most powerful men in the world (Vincent Kartheiser, delightfully insufferable as always). Even the authorities, with the exception of head Timekeeper Raymond Léon (Cillian Murphy), move lethargically.

This pacing would work if Niccol built the entire film around an immersion into this society, as he did with his flawed but marvelous Gattaca. But even when In Time suspends its plot, it merely stops for some sickly pretty shots of industrial yellow glows of the ghetto. Well-composed as they are, these shots don't generate the same atmosphere and visual storytelling as Gattaca's overwhelming, suffocating feeling of being watched. We know that Will and, when she joins up with him, Sylvia are being monitored, but they escape so easily one wonders whether half the CCTV cameras are even working.

Furthermore, Niccol speaks too many of his ideas rather than merely showing them. Shots of timed-out corpses on the street as desensitized poor shuffle past speak volumes more than the mood-spoiling, Big Theme dialogue that they elicit. Likewise, seeing every rich person flanked by a body guard and living in safe little shells to ensure an accident or a violent act doesn't spoil their chance at immortality humanizes their own plight in this system more than Sylvia's dejected ruminations. By stiffly voicing his themes, Niccol robs In Time of the undercurrent of sadness and anger that never successfully rises to the surface.

And these are the film's best moments. Elsewhere, it turns into a disjointed Bonnie and Clyde, Sylvia disgusted and galvanized by the effects of the class system when confronted with the poor. She elects to take down her father's empire with Will, and the two eventually flood the ghetto with so much time that society itself might collapse from sudden shifts in stratification. Not once does anyone at one of these banks even try to stop them, despite the fact that no two other people on the A-list right now look less imposing than Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. Even a rent-a-cop at small-town bank would break their teeth with a nightstick if they tried to start something. Of course, it would help if the guns they wield weren't so huge that our stars resemble children having dangerously stumbled across dad's .45.

Appropriately for a film about the importance of each second, Niccol's film could not have come out at a better time. With economic tensions in the United States higher than they have perhaps ever been, In Time could appeal to those who recognize that extreme, unchecked wealth truly does effect the lives of the poor. But Niccol's film is so clumsy, so awkward, and so easily sidetracked that what might have been a suggestive, chilling view of how massive wealth requires the suffering and even death of others finally emerges as a lifeless thriller. Watching people's lives literally tick away should be compelling. Instead, I spent most of the time looking at my own clock.

Tron: Legacy

The modest but devoted fanbase for Tron alleges the 1982 film was ahead of its time, referring to its extensive and pioneering use of computer-generated imagery. Unfortunately, one could not say that its sequel, Tron: Legacy, is even of its time. Caught between presenting an updated version of Tron's computer world that better reflects the compounded evolution of digital technology or simply wallowing in the dated vision of futuristic cyberspace interaction offered by the original, director Joseph Kosinski opts for the latter and cements the insular pointlessness of the whole exercise. The Lawnmower Man has more to say about the possibilities of cyberspace.

Tron: Legacy opens with swooping, animated crane shot that plunges the film into the Uncanny Silicon Valley, where an artificially young Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, who spends half the film creepily animated) talks about his creation with 11-year-old son Sam (Garrett Hedlund in the boy's adult years). Flynn promises to take Sam with him to the Grid the next day, but he never comes home after leaving that night in 1989. Twenty years later, Sam abandons his father's company, profiting as the principal shareholder but spending most of his time slyly undermining the profit-driven number-crunchers who took over for the more idealistic Flynn. When Kevin's old partner (Bruce Boxleitner) gets a page -- yes, a page -- from Flynn's old office in his abandoned arcade, Sam heads there in the faint hope that his father might finally have returned from wherever he went. He discovers a hidden room with a strange device attached to a computer, and, well, you know the rest.

Inside the grid, so little has changed that one might assume Kosinski feels the biggest advancement in design over the last 30 years has been rounded corners. Where light cycles once traveled in straight lines, now they curve, and that's about it. Tron: Legacy might as well have been a reboot than a sequel, doing nothing more than updating the famed graphics of the original. (That is the double-edged sword of special effects pioneering: great stories live on forever, but effects are always being outdone. George Lucas has alienated nearly his entire fanbase by grappling with that problem.)

Kosinski's vision hedges closely to Steven Lisberger's, using neon chiaroscuro of plunging blacks offset by bright, pale blues and throbbing oranges set against a pixellated world. The souped-up visuals sure do look incandescent, including a few moments here and there that make good use of that most unnecessary of gimmicks, 3-D (though I can think of no better story to be told in 3-D than that of a film that likewise concerns stagnation and horizontal, not vertical, development of technology). Without resorting to a barrage of quick cuts, Kosinski manages to craft sequences of pulsating frenzy, as the colors bleed and swirl until downed programs dissolve and shatter into pixels. But it gets old so damn fast, a repetitious blend of blue and orange that dips into a sad nadir with a fight in a club that dovetails into absurd, cringeworthy cutaways to Michael Sheen hamming it up as a Bowie-esque club owner who contorts his face and body into odd configurations as if the director included only the shots of Sheen horsing around on-set. (The cutaways are a problem in general, such as a strange close-up on Sam's dog early on and a few awkwardly inserted fluff scenes that break the flow for no reason.)

If the original Tron suffered from a lack of narrative momentum, its successor is overloaded with a surfeit of plot. Discontent to simply give the audience what it wants -- mindless, sparkling action -- Kosinski and his writers, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, insist on forcing some kind of emotional connection by taking the most outlandish, shameless approach possible to wring a mass reaction without a personal bedrock.* Flynn never returned from his visit to the Grid 20 years previously because the program he created to fashion the perfect digital world, Clu (Bridges with the digitally young face), naturally turned on its maker, and it also set about destroying a new type of program spontaneously created by the system. "It was genocide," solemnly sighs the aged Kevin when he fills his son in on the gaps. Every fiber of my being wanted to shout, "No it goddamn wasn't." Aware that Clu could use his identity disc to break into the real world -- don't even ask -- Flynn hid out for 20 years with the last remaining isomorphic program, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), attaining a Zen-like calm that offsets the severity of the Holocaust allegory with a Dude-esque performance. "Biodigital jazz, man," Kevin unhelpfully says when describing the isomorphic algorithms, his vague, hippie speech tragically serving as the logical foundation of the film's plot.

Meanwhile, Bridges' performance as Clu may be the first time I have completely failed to buy the greatest living American actor in a role. Part of this can be explained by that damn uncanny valley he has to carry on his face the entire time like a digital albatross, forcing all attention away from one of the best faces in the biz onto the horrid, plastic stiffness of the cheek muscles (this crime is particularly egregious, as few smile like Jeff Bridges; see the ones he gives with his proper features as Flynn for proof). But he is also forced to act essentially as a Hitler substitute, obsessed with purification and perfection under his rule. Bridges has been a capable and believable villain before, but Hitler? That aggression will not stand, man.

I found the anti-corporate attitude of the first Tron a bit on-the-nose but refreshingly cheeky. It is not inherently hypocritical for big budget movies to resent a capitalist attitude, and the first Tron cared enough about advancing the medium to give its idealism a certain pluck. But the lazy application of that same philosophy here seems nothing more than a cynical appropriation of elements of the first film without a moment's thought for context. Tron: Legacy is one of the most transparently for-the-franchise movies I've ever seen, something that exists solely to cash in on nostalgia and sell a new crop of toys and video games. The film even makes itself willfully irrelevant to better ensure it doesn't rock the franchise boat.

I would have liked to see a modified vision of cyberspace, one in which the power is now disseminated among millions of users instead of a single mastermind. But Tron: Legacy has nothing to offer. It does not even work as a mildly experimental music video for Daft Punk, whose soundtrack is a notable step down from the inventiveness of their usual work, a driving but soulless buzz of squall that serves as the de facto plot momentum given how leaden the actual structure is. Having listened to the soundtrack before seeing the movie, I can say that the above-average electronica works much better in the context of the film, but it too is a disappointment.

If anything, the grid animated through modern graphics is less imaginative than the one rendered on early animating computers. The programs tend to just act like people, as if the filmmakers realized that any real focus on the aspect of a machine's "soul" would raise too many philosophical questions that would limit box office appeal and steamrolled over the subject. And where and how is there food inside the computer world for Flynn to eat? Proving the point that this movie is about nostalgia, nearly all the plot is delivered through flashbacks and reminiscences, as if we're watching the third planned film in the series after the original idea for the darker middle movie fell through during production, leaving enough completed scenes for recycling.

Tron: Legacy is a hollow, clanging piece of capitalist opportunism, a spectacle that wears out its welcome for the rigid repetition of the grid's stunted possibilities. That, in a nutshell, is the film's chief failing: even after nearly 30 years of rapidly accelerated technological advancement, computers still offer the same vastness of potential for growth. If only anyone involved cared about showing that instead of making a $170 million video of a middle-aged person finding and playing with his childhood toys. A single shot in Tron: Legacy fully caught my eye: as Quorra and Sam sit at the front of a transport ship, a POV shot of Kevin looking at them from the far end temporarily overcomes the shallow focus of 3-D and pulls the two characters out of the screen from a the middle plane of a long shot and communicates for a few seconds the kind of possibility and forward-thinking vision of user-program harmony the rest of the film brushes aside for its empty regression. What a tantalizing and frustratingly teasing three seconds they are.


*Cheap emotional manipulation without sincere character development? Wait, let me check...yep, Horowitz and Kitsis were Lost writers. Of course.