Clarkson Malaysia

No need to define the trend, it’s obvious. No need to talk about the reasons why. They are fairly obvious as well, and the reasons that aren’t so obvious have probably been picked through like a complimentary bowl of mixed nuts at a cashew convention. So instead of the set-up and dwelling on the how’s and why’s of Hollywood’s (and the public’s) current hyper-enthusiastic embracing of comic book movies, I’d like to take a sec and talk about one release in particular. 

Captain America was the first movie I’ve ever walked out of. I surprised myself. I was a bit troubled by the previews: sets seemed a little too bare, dialog a little wooden, but I over-intellectualized my way out of it: maybe this is a throwback to pulpy war movies of the ‘50’s, where action felt more stage-y and stilted, where lines and the accompanying acting was a bit too rhythmic and plastic. All that being said, I walked into the theater cautiously enthused.

Captain American, first scene, arctic wasteland. Heavy storm, low visibility, headlights approaching. Oh no. They are copying Close Encounters. Double oh no. They are copying Close Encounters shot for shot. Triple oh no, they are copying dialog from Close Encounters while shooting directly from CE3K’s storyboards. They even copied the intonation on specific lines of dialog. They copied the actor putting the hand on this hat (hood) to keep the wind from blowing it off. They must have had a digital copy of CE3K on the set, running on a 60” HD LCD for reference. 

[Seriously, go back and watch the first five minutes of CE3K and compare it to the first five minutes of Captain America. You’ll be astonished.]

I love early Spielberg films. It may sound overly romantic, but my youth is entwined and strangely defined by them. I saw Close Encounters three times in the theater. I made my dad take me. I was five. You know how many times I saw Star Wars in the theater? Zero. I was a Close Encounters freak. At its core it was a love of Spielberg or at age five, the love of the colors and music, and that appreciation grew well into the ’80s with 1941, Raiders and E.T. and, finally being old enough to watch it, Jaws. A lot of my understanding of tension and staging comes from Spielberg’s visual lexicon. Among a laundry list of talents, he had a gift of understanding the camera as representing the audience (that’s worth another post altogether) and the concept of tableau. As such, I totally get it when a director, cinematographer, or writer goes back and is inspired by some of early Spielberg’s cues and devices. Most modern blockbuster directors have “quoted” Spielberg in their movies, some effectively, some not so, some heavy-handedly, some with more finesse.

To borrow down a wee further for a second:

To me, there are three levels of imitation (there are more, but breaking things into three’s gives good-enough fidelity.)

1) Adaptive integration: the highest form of flattery. A technique is seen, and remembered, and then adapted and made itself a new thing. Like the dolly zoom in Vertigo being appropriated for Jaws, and from there dozens of imitations since. You really have to earn that move, and it has to fit into your sequence. 

2) Replicating with understanding or synthesis: you understand why the mechanism works, and you have a need for it because of similarity in sequence, be it emotive or action oriented. “Understanding” here is a fairly broad bucket and also includes “having a moral and ethical system in place and enough creative self-respect not to wholesale lift someone else’s work.” It might not make sense to use the device, but you do it ‘cause it is neat. At least your heart is in the right place.

3) Copying (replicating without understanding): Eff it, we’re too lazy to figure out something new, copy-paste from someone who knows what they are doing.

The opening of CA was a total lift of the beginning of CE3K. Captain America started with a Level 3 Imitation. Bad start. And I am ignoring the heavy-handed Aliens, Transformers, and The Thing influences. If I went into actual execution, we’d be here all day, and I tend to be verbose, so moving right along …

The above is a beef with a particular sequence. Movies are made up of individual scenes. Those scenes are brought together to create a sequential and coherent plot. There are fundamental changes that take place in the characters over the course of the that plot. These are called arcs. You could argue that the arcs are the movie, without which there would really be no reason to shoot the story. But, again, a topic for another time.

On its surface, Captain’s journey is familiar: Luke Skywalker, Frodo Baggins, that Karate Kid guy. Same arc, different characters: scrawny insignificant guy with dreams of something greater gets his wish and is off and running. Usually, they succeed, and they end up the heros of the world. The world can be big (in Star Wars, a galaxy) or small (in Karate Kid, Ralph Machio’s school). It really depends on the scope set by the picture, but the arcs are still the same.

Luke, Frodo, and Daniel (had to look it up) all end as fundamentally different people by the end of their respective arcs. Luke goes from being a boy to a man (his orgasmic gasp at loosing the lethal shot into the Death Star is pretty obtuse, but so is the death of his ‘parents’ and his mentor). Frodo goes from being a rather pleasant and naive adventurer want-to-be to becoming a severely damaged recluse. Daniel LeRusso goes from being a victim to being fulla’ beans with an awesome crane impersonation and a date to the prom.

What is Captain America’s arc? The only obvious one I can find is this: he goes from being a little runt to being a large muscle-bound guy. Hell, that’s an arc, right, John? No. No emotion. We could watch a guy lift weights for two hours and have the same emotional attachment (maybe more so: the weight-lifter would be earning his muscles through hard work.)

Why isn’t his arc Brooklyn no-one to American hero? Because, simple, he doesn’t change anything to get there. His mindset, outlook, emotions. Nothing changes. Therefore, there is no arc. There is no change. The circumstances have changed, but he is the exact same.

So what is Steve Rogers / Captain America’s arc?

I’d say this is Steve Roger’s (Capt.) arc: he goes from being an extremely dedicated and patriotic idealist to being an extremely dedicated and patriotic idealist with a dame.

Let’s discount my snarky “with a dame” right away. The romantic arc of the movie is not rewarding, nor is it remotely central to the plot. It seems that Hollywood has started putting women into movies where their sole function is to be love interests, or the pivot points, for the male leads. Captain America, Star Trek, Green Lantern, Paul, Tron Legacy, Twilight, etc etc. Some of these movies pull it off better than others. Some actually manage to weave the female character into the plot, and give her some backbone and responsibility. Most of them don’t and you end up with the female character as an “object” to be won and a rather shallow pandering to the female demographic. That drives me bonkers. But I digress.

What I am saying is this: Captain America has no arc.

Once you remove the dame, Steve Roger’s arc does not change at all. His character does not change at all. In the beginning, as a little skinny guy, he throws himself on a grenade. He has heart. He wants to kill nazis. In the end, as a big guy, he would throw himself on a grenade and wants to kill nazis. His mindset has not changed one bit. His performance doesn’t change one bit. In the car, as a weakling, he is still chatting it up with the female lead. He isn’t shy, he isn’t pip-squeeky. He’s Captain America, but in a little body. His arc is completely flat and without inflection. A body change is NOT an arc.

How would you fix it? What makes a more emotionally involving and sympathetic character for the audience to journey with? Well, why not have Steve Rogers start out as a victim, due to his size. He’s small, runty, has a high-pitched voice, and is uncertain around people because they’ve always treated him as a second class citizen; because they’ve judged this book by its cover. He can’t talk to a girl to save his soul, but inside, he’s a heart of gold and courage galore. And slowly, after he gets the new body and after he starts to learn how to use it, he begins to lose that uncertainty and gains confidence. He is no longer a professional victim, but a true leader. But he has to earn it. He has to fight through the entire second and third acts to get there. And since we, the audience, have agreed to go on that journey with him, we are fighting for him to get there. We want to see the little runty kid grow up and win it all, and we will sit there and feel great about it all when he does, and will feel terrible when he makes the ultimate sacrifice and ditches the flying wing into the, um, frozen tundra.

Nice reversal to be had there. He’s on the radio, about to ditch the plane, he looks at his hands, turns them over. “I haven’t changed at all. Since the day I threw myself on the grenade, all those times I got beat up, I haven’t changed at all. This body doesn’t matter, this uniform, the shield. They don’t make a difference. Why couldn’t they see that? I could have done all this stuff. There was nothing wrong with me, with me before.”

••••••••

Maybe I don’t dislike the flatness of that arc as much as I dislike the wasted opportunity the filmmakers and screenwriter’s had access to and threw away. There could have been some powerful parallels between Rogers and the Jewish doctor that befriends him early on, and some interesting interplay between Rogers and his new found troop of buddies, as he learns to accept them as equals, and stops fearing them as potential tormentors.

I could do deep dives on this stuff, but I am keenly aware of the clock ticking and the value of your time, dear reader, and thusly, moving forward:

There are some key pivot points in the movie that make no sense. Since it is a comic book movie, I am willing to let go of a lot. And frankly, I WANT to. If you are doing a comic book movie, feel free to blow it out. Play with proportion, play with characterization, play with this and that. At the end of the day, I ask you one simple thing: have it make sense. And be consistent.

Even with accepting that certain genres are compatible with, or even ask for, exaggeration, there are still rules. Here are the two main inflection points in Captain America that blew my mind (in a bad way) and the ultimate reason I walked out of the theater. The fact that they occur within 90 seconds of each other didn’t help.

1) During the final fight between Red Mask and Captain America, somehow the Blue Cube of Valhalla pops out of the mega-wing’s Cube Holder. Red Face grabs it and … screams … and burns up. Whoa. What? This is almost as bad as Anakin accidentally popping a couple of caps into the shield generator in Star Wars 1. To repeat: the blue cube pops out by accident, the bad guy grabs it for some unknown reason, and he gets de-rezzed and sent to Valhalla for another unknown reason. Sort of random. Not very satisfactory.

2) Captain America grabs the yoke of the mega-wing, and decides there is no way to save New York but to crash the plane. Hard, nose first, at a 75 degree angle. Into ice. Howabout leaning a gun against the yoke, grabbing a parachute and floating gently to the ground while the plane ditches itself in the ocean? Howabout turning off the ignition and gliding to the waves below and pulling a Sullenburger? Howabout just pushing the pilotless bomb (remember, they had soldiers flying them to their destinations) out the door and flying safely home? 

I crushed five people’s feet getting out of my row.* It had become a point of pride not to finish watching Captain America.

*For that, I feel terrible. I interrupted the ending of a movie for a couple rows of people. That is a criminal offense. Honestly, I owe those people their money back. I have a rule never to interrupt a movie in progress (even Captain America) and I broke that rule that day. 

Oh, and he out swims a submarine. C’MON, REALLY?

This is not a review. This is a film buff’s take on the film No Country for Old Men, written and directed by the Coen Brothers, based on a novel, published in 2003, by Cormac McCarthy.

This entry is a jumble of opinion. It is not exhaustive: this is a subtle movie, with many layers of interpretation and emotional complexity, and I could go on at great length. But, I’ve already been over-indulgent. If you want to hear more, buy me a pint someday.

Be warned: this will contain spoilers. If you don’t know the movie, you won’t get much out of this.

[Read W.B. Yeats ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ the source of the title. I’m not being all that clever in what I am writing here; I think it is all there in the poem.]

____________

I’ve never read the book. For an avid book reader like myself, I find that strange. I read The Road, enjoyed it, as much as a person can enjoy a book about utter despair and desolation. I suppose I appreciated it, more than enjoyed it.

My reason for not reading ‘No Country’ is pretty simple: I saw the movie first. I like it and don’t feel I have room in my brain for an alternate version of the story.

I have read a few message boards on what the movie meant. The subtext. The meaning of the hotel scene near the end, where Ed Tom hesitates in front of the door and we see Anton’s reflection in the blown out knob. That seems to draw everyone’s attention. Is Anton really there? If so, why is he suddenly not there when Ed Tom opens the door?

I’ve read a lot of explanations. Anton is death. He’s a ghost. He’s next door. I’ve never read a take on it that mirrors my take on it, so I’ll offer it up later in this ramble.

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But first, some exploring.

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This is a movie about Ed Tom. We open with his VO, we close on his face and on his lines.

It’s curious that this is a movie about Ed Tom because of everything that happens in the movie he is never a mover of events. He’s not even a witness, other than as a gatherer of evidence.

Mostly, Ed Tom relays stories to other characters. He tells Llewelyn’s wife about Charlie, shooting a bolt into a cow’s head [that story made up.] He relates to a deputy about something he read in the paper, a story about two hotel owners killing elderly tenants, hiding the bodies, and then taking and cashing their victim’s continuing social security checks. He wants to hear the story of his uncle’s death. He tells, at the end of the movie, two stories about dreams he’s had the night before.

Taking a step back for a second, I think we could agree (I hope that we could agree) that ‘No Country for Old Men’ is a movie about death. We spend two hours watching people die, observing corpses, ruminating upon death. We are constantly reminded of death through the images and dialogue.

Bluntly: this is a movie about the spiritual death of Ed Tom. At the beginning, he wants to live. At the end, he is ready to die.

There are no words spoken that didactically lay this out. It is all inside dialogue, a mental shifting within Ed Tom. And hence, his stories: it is how we learn the state of Ed Tom’s mind and the progress of his journey in No Country.

While Anton Chugar and Llewelyn Moss are central to driving the plot, this isn’t their movie. They exist to illustrate modern crime and how the nature of crime has changed. They are a backdrop. Catalyst.

Let’s take a look at the closing lines of the opening VO spoken by Ed Tom:

…The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, OK, I’ll be part of this world….

“Meet something I don’t understand.” This is an interesting line. Obviously, in No Country, that is Anton. He’s a force that moves through the world, apparently reckless and without remorse. If there are any designs in his machinations, that are difficult to divine.

But this line, at its core: it sounds like an old man. How often have we heard, “I don’t get this generation”, “I don’t understand people any more.” At the pace the world changes, it is exceptionally difficult to fathom what quietly erodes and replaces the world we grew up in, grew comfortable in, and surrounded ourselves in, as we grew older. If Ed Tom’s life purpose is solving crime, meeting it face to face (and I believe it is, the opening VO establishes that) then his life is defined by his ability to fathom his life’s purpose. When he can no longer fathom crime, when he can say, “I don’t want to know”: that is a man turning his back on his life’s purpose, and his life.

Ed Tom is not there yet. He’s just laying out his terms for the audience. We know the beginning stance of his trajectory, the first dot in the connect-the-dot game.

The closing line, “a man would have to put his soul at hazard.” That seems to me to be a perfect definition of death. In this case, I do not believe that it means a forensic physical death, but a mental death: the loss of the will to live. If someone loses their soul, then they have no will or drive to live.

As I stated above, this is what we watch Ed Tom lose: his soul. He loses his will to live.

____________________

For me, the revealing moment of the film, and my favorite scene: where Ed Tom drives out to talk to Ellis.

[Did I just skip most of the movie? Yes I did. If I went into each scene of Ed Tom talking and sketched out each point of his inflection we’d be here till 2014. Again, buy me a pint.]

In this scene, we learn a lot. A tremendous amount. What do we learn and how do we learn it?

• We learn that Ed Tom is obsessed with death. He asks how his grandfather died (‘Uncle Mack’ to Ellis). He then asks, “When did he die?” and is not interested in a date: he is interested in how long the grandfather lingered before passing. Ed Tom is interested in learning about the pain, the ‘reality’ of a death.

• We learn that Ed Tom retired / quit his job because he feels “outmatched”. I think, ultimately, this points to an overwhelming fear of death. But why this fear, now? Because he can sense it is near, in one way or another (Anton, or old age). By quitting his job, he is attempting to prolong his life, to eliminate one possible type of death (in the course of his job). But the other type, natural death of old age … that is still there, looming. That leads to …

• Ellis’ closing statements: “Whatchya got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” Ellis completely and utterly divines Ed Tom’s intentions behind his visit and his line of questioning. It is why Ed Tom seeks him out in the first place: to hear the truth, to play his thoughts off a sounding board, a sage. Ellis arrows in on it: Ed Tom has become mortally afraid of dying, and the retiring (“quiting” to Ellis) is a product of that. BUT. You can’t stop what’s coming. That is the lesson that Ed Tom has learned, and Ellis just drove home: but until then, Ed Tom hasn’t internalized it yet.

[Allow me to gush: I love that scene. It’s sublime. Low key, well acted, well directed, and exquisitely written. It is the keystone of the film for me.]

And finally, the end scene. Another sublime bit of work which I feel reinforces the ideas above, this time in Ed Tom’s own voice, via his subconscious. To have Ed Tom say something like, “You know, I feel it is coming near. Death. I’m ready.” would be silly. But, to have his subconscious tell him and us just that, to say that perhaps there is a wish there, and that the end of death might not be as cold as he imagined … that is powerful stuff.

The first dream, about the money, alludes to the story we just witnessed: it is easily dismissed. Why? Because it is not that important. It is literal and not important to Ed Tom. And it is the storytellers telling us that it wasn’t that important either.

But the second dream, the dream about the father on horseback, carrying the fire into the darkness, ahead and waiting for Ed Tom. That is death, and in that death Ed Tom now sees a loving and welcoming presence. He might not have had God come into his heart, but he has a kernel of hope in there that there is another side to it all. That is his subconscious preparing him for the end. Softening it with thoughts of a little warmth.

This last scene has Ed Tom at his most unguarded: he is in his own home, in his kitchen, talking to his wife. He is without pretense. He is sad, incredibly sad. And why? Two things: one, he understands what his dream means. That he is mentally preparing, that his soul has gone, the fire extinguished, and he will die. And two: he woke up. He wakes to find that he wants to be on a camping trip with his father, in the cold and darkness, because there is a fire there, and companionship.

Ed Tom wants that. Why else would he be so crestfallen on waking and finding that he was still alive, and that the dream was not a reality?

If you watch Ed Tom’s right arm before the cut to black, it is beginning to shake. He’s a man on the cusp of losing it. I never saw that before I was writing this piece. Tommy Lee Jones is subtle, the Coen Brothers are subtle, I just wanted to make sure. I went back to see exactly how crushed Ed Tom is at that moment and wow, Ed Tom is about to fall to pieces.

It is devastating. I sensed it, but I never saw it. Actually seeing the arm shake is like taking a punch to the nose, even as the final cut to black is like a slap.

“And then I woke up.”

How incredibly unhappy Ed Tom is to find that he is still alive.

____________________

And finally to close with the riddle: what is Anton doing in the room that he ends up not being in?

I don’t think Anton is there. I think we are witnessing Ed Tom’s projection of fear and death. I think Anton is imagined by Ed Tom, and that mental projection disappears once the door is opened and Ed Tom knows that the room is empty. Prior to opening the door, Ed Tom has conflated death and Anton Chigurh. As the audience, we are witnessing his mental projection of this confusion: we feel his fear, as well as the relief when that fear turns out to be unfounded. Because, through the last hour and a half, we too have come to equate Chigurh with death. [Which is also the reason for Chigurh to be smashed up in the car crash: the Coen’s are making the point, yeah, we confused the issue for you and Ed Tom, but listen up: Chigurh is NOT death, so don’t get too carried away.]

Hello there. This is not a review of Contagion. This is a film-buff’s thoughts and insights on the film. With that in mind, this post proceeds on the assumption that you’ve already seen Contagion: I won’t go into great detail setting up or explaining the plot, and there will be spoilers. Stop now if you are looking for a casual review.

Actually, here is a casual review: go see Contagion. It is intelligent and restrained filmmaking. It is well cast and acted and follows from a pretty good script. It is an exciting story, without having to rely on cheap gimmicks (guns, explosions, exploitation of women, hackneyed reversals, bad CGI, etc.)

This post lacks any sort of structure or editing. Forgive me in advance, but this is the first one I’ve written on film, and I have a lot to say. I promise to calm down in future posts.

I’ll use the actor’s names when referring to their characters. No reason to have to cross-reference with IMDB or Wikipedia.

——-

The Reality of the World and the Story’s Place in that World

One of the main things I appreciate about Contagion, and the basis for its effectiveness, is it’s straightforward, ‘realistic’ nature. We have characters that act like real people. They populate a world that is familiar and filled with the imperfections of the everyday world we all kick around in. Granted, the context is a bit larger in Contagion: you want the special isolation jet? Can’t have, its been rerouted for a Senator. You want to tell the sick guy to get off the bus? He’ll fight you, and then proceed to touch every visible surface and cough on every single passenger on his way out. But yeah, that’s the life we all know: not really fair nor considerate.

I think that is a hallmark of a believable story: you have a story that exists within the framework of a reality. The arc of that story is shaped and defined by the rules and laws particular to that reality. The more faithful the story is to the context of the world, the more tightly it integrates into what we are viewing (or more generally, experiencing, if we are talking about books) and the more apt we are to believe it and become emotionally involved. In order to accomplish this, a lot of importance is placed on the writer / creator understanding the underlying nature and rules of the world: if the story exists outside of its environment, the audience will feel like it is being lied to. The story feels phony. (More on this in a separate post, because it is an interesting and important topic that I can go on about at some length: it applies not only drama and “real world” scenarios, but also to sci-fi, action, and animation. )

The stories in Contagion sit neatly within their world. Actions and reactions feel genuine. Extraordinary things happen, but when they do, it makes sense, because the movie respects and understands the rules of the world in which the story is unfolding: the reality of human nature and bureaucracy (which is the more mundane parts of human nature amplified) within a period of slow-motion calamity. Just as much as any one character in Contagion acts on its environment, its environment acts on the characters.

The simple rules that dictate Contagion’s world are these: take the world as we currently know it. Now, introduce a lethal disease with an R-nought value of X and an extremely fast incubation, maturation and nasty outcome. Set-up the characters who we will follow through it. Now, what happens? At the risk of oversimplifying, charting the course of the narrative at that point it is simple physics. (Yeah, I am ignoring pacing, an ear for dialog, a deep understanding of human nature, actors and actresses etc etc etc etc. I said it was an oversimplification, but just keep following my thinking …)

The obvious example of this interplay of story and environment is Kate Winslet: she’s out and about, investigating in the thick of it, so it would make sense she’d get infected sooner or later. OK, that’s pretty easy. We’ll buy it. We won’t like it: she’s a likable character with moxy but eh, shit happens in this real world.

The fall-out of Winslet getting sick leads to a more subtle play of character vs. world rules, which is why Contagion feels “real”. Winslet is good at what she does. Fishborne sent her into the field cause he trusts her to do the right thing, and obviously cares about her as a worker and human. Once she falls ill, he wants to help her but try as he might, Fishbourne is unable to get Winslet out of the field and back into professional care. Nurses are striking. Hospitals are overrun or shut-down. Travel is limited or at a stand-still to help prevent spread of disease. The CDC’s contagion airplane is being used by a Senator. So what happens to Winslet? She gets tossed in with the other poor slobs at the converted ice rink. And what happens to poor slobs at the ice rink? They don’t get blankets, they don’t get good care, and waa laa. They die. Exuent Winslet. That’s grim stuff for movies, treating your characters indifferently and at the whim of the environment. In this case it feels ‘true’ exactly because it is indifferent. The rules of the world dictated the outcome.

Sort of a “path of least resistance” in the narrative flow.

Tension Without Drama

As the movie progressed I felt the tension in myself ratcheting up. I could explain this in many ways: I was buying more and more into the world and the reality of the situation, I was getting more emotionally involved with the characters, the disease was widespread and therefore was everywhere, the collapse of society had created dangers at every corner, etc. All of those are probably true.

Also, to paraphrase (poorly) from Jaws: “the only time I was scared was when they were picking us out of the water.” You are near the end: bowing out at the finish line would suck.

But the base reason I got tense is something different. I think it was this: there was never a cathartic moment of emotional release.

A lot of movies have set pieces, reversals, loud quiet loud. First act, second act, third act, and we’re out. Contagion was paced and executed far more subtly: the story kept grinding on. It was all progression, no resolution. Again, this is in keeping with real world rules: nothing really ever “ends”. Things keep going, life keeps oozing forward. Hollywood largely ignores those rules. Cell phones ring at perfect times, the killer shows up in the coffee shop at the opportune moment, the hero never gets shot but still manages to kill dozens. Surveillance cameras see everything. The computer always resolves the image. The action stops, everyone takes a breather.

In Contagion, for the last 40 minutes, I was expecting some type of catharsis. The movie seemed to get quieter and quieter. Inversely, my expectation of an explosion or gunshot increased. My brain was waiting for a landmark event, some exclamation point in the flow. It never came.

To illustrate that, let’s look at the creation of the vaccine. Jennifer Ehle stands in front of a row of caged monkeys (as Dr. Ally Hextall, great casting: she exudes “brilliant enigmatic detached creative genius with wry humor”). All of the monkeys are dead, except number 37. Ehle stands there quietly in her puffy bubble suit, still as a rock, with a small smile on her face. Cut to: she injects herself. She develops no terrible contraindications, her eyeballs don’t pop out, no vomiting out a kidney. She talks to her dad. She’s just saved tens of millions of lives. What? The movie doesn’t celebrate this? Most movies would; its a really easy emotional moment. Instead, we jump to the next problem: manufacturing and distribution. A lottery drum of birthdays. Even Fishbourne asks Ehle, who is later quietly working on a computer in an empty room, to come out and bask in the glow. Naw, she says, there’s work to do. She’s speaking for the movie, in a way.

And so the tension is passed forward to the next scene. What could be played as a huge turning point in the film, isn’t. Finding the cure is a major event played off as a minor inflection point. That’s wonderfully subtle and smart: it keeps the tension paying forward. You can imagine it going a different direction: big party, everyone drunk and smiling and talking about the Nobel prize and rebuilding society, gosh, we’ve learned our lesson, Ehle and Fishbourne talking about retiring on some mountain lake in Colorado and then: a phone call. Fishbourne takes it. It’s the President: the disease has mutated into something that thrives in drinking water and has an R-nought of 112 and everyone will be dead in 24 hours. Waa waa.

Or, we have a cure and everything thereafter becomes simple wrap-up. Snooze.

As silly as my made-up scene is, that and scenes like it, are a reset and the norm. They release the audience’s stored up tension, ratchet it all down a couple of notches, and then introduce the next problem to tackle. Heavy handed movies flow like that (not really flow per se, more like they are constructed), and therefore don’t build up enough tension to ever have a payoff in releasing it. Other movies release it all and start on something new (George Lucas seems to love this: Star Wars: A New Hope and The Phantom Menace are both three mini-movies strung together. We won the pod race. No more tension. Next conflict please.)

A lot of time these resets are manufactured. Up and then down. Fast then slow. The car chase followed by a heart to heart on a quiet dock. The “there was nothing you could have done” speech. That sorta thing. Those moments begin to feel forced, and have been used so often and so ham-fisted, that an audience can feel ‘em coming.

Contagion doesn’t reset, not in any meaningful way. The only resets it allows are deaths and they don’t represent any relief; they tend to cause more tension. Usually, deaths are of people we want dead (bad guys) or are impetus for the protagonist to keep going (revenge, mourning). In Contagion, death is loss. It drives and defines Damon’s character (with the death of the wife and step son at the beginning), or represents the loss of important knowledge and experience (Winslet). These events are not really resets or resolution: just because a story-line in Contagion ends, doesn’t mean it is resolved. Each storyline, even if it ends in a death, keeps feeding forward. That’s fairly relentless.

Problems

There are two story lines that feel wacky within the context of what I outlined above. If you’ve set up a world and characters and have expectations, all is wonderful when you follow the rules. The more subtle that world and those characters, the more apt that breaks in that world and rules will stand out.

There are two such breaks in Contagion.

The first is the blogger character, played by Jude Law. I can understand the thinking behind having this character (roles of media, roles of amateur opinion vs. professional). And simply, he is the closest thing the movie has to a “evil” character. He’s wrong, and doing the wrong things, which all go against what the right, “good” characters are doing. That is all fine, but Jude Law’s character is also loaded with intent. Way too loaded, way too much intent. He’s anti-establishment, big on conspiracy theory, has a following of 12 million netizens, offers up a ‘cure’, but also wants to earn big money. That’s a lot to heap on one character in a movie that is full of subtle characters and motivations. Jude Law’s character can’t be subtle, there is too much heaped on top of him and so he doesn’t really work. In his case, his character is driving the world, while the rest of the characters are being driven by the world. It doesn’t fit.

It doesn’t help that Law plays this character with a bit too much gusto. Most of the other performances are letting the dialog and narrative flow drive the emotion and energy, but Jude seems to be pushing a little too hard to emote. A wee bit too much chutzpah.

And while I know bloggers have growing influence in today’s “media landscape”, I sincerely doubt that, in the face of a high mortality pandemic, that a blogger is going to grossly influence popular opinion enough to cause riots and sway world markets (Forsythia futures, haha).

Law’s character approaches caricature in a movie that is doing its best to avoid just that.

The other break is the kidnapping subplot of Cotillard. This one I did not buy at all. If I can accept the WHY of Jude’s character but not the execution, with Cottilard’s character I cannot fathom either: the situation is too sensational and the follow-through on it is non-existent. Cotillard’s running about, she’s carted away, and the next time we see her she is teaching kids in a village. She’s traded for an Igloo cooler full of saline solution and the kidnappers, who up to this point have been patient and methodical, say hell yeah we win and leave her and take the placebo. What? Really? You are jaded enough to resort to kidnapping and holding a human at gunpoint for four months (to save a small village, talk about a mixed up moral-ethical system), and yet you are naive enough to give away all of that hard work to a lone stranger, a vague promise and a metal box of water-filled nose plungers? Boo.

The kidnapping plot line added nothing to the story. I can understand the macro-micro structure of the movie: personal level, people in the field level, manager level, government level, but I don’t get the kidnappers and victim angle. Can’t imagine that is a broad stroke in how the upcoming pandemic will play out, and if it does, hopefully it won’t play out as lamely.

Subtle and Not So Subtle Endings

One more teensy point, before I wrap up.

Soderbergh shows us the beginning of the outbreak near the end of the movie. Wonderfully subtle, but pretty damn clear: Damon in the closet looking at pictures of his wife on her digital camera. Pictures: wife in the casino. Wife drinking. People eating. People eating PORK. More people eating PORK. And then wife clasping hands with a CHEF. A CHEF who cooked PORK. The disease is a combo pig-bat concoction. JESUS, IT’S IN THE PORK. IT’S THE GODDAMN CHEF. Ok. We got it.

Only, I guess we didn’t get it. So we have a outtro with a bat eating a banana, a bat slobbering out a banana over a pig pen, and a pig eating a bat-banana and a chef and waa laa, back to Day 1.

Yeah, ok, nice symmetry. It explains why we started on Day 2. Wraps us up at the beginning. We’ll all go back and see the movie again cause it ended at the beginning. Yeah yeah. But, eh, I like the subtlety of the clues in the closet, not the ‘in your face’ ending that doesn’t add anything new.

And the whole indictment of the corporation feels like an afterthought. The logo is on the bulldozers killing the rain forest and she worked there and we are killing ourselves by killing the rain forest. That’s a different movie, guys.

The start of the pandemic is meaningless in context of the ending of the pandemic. This isn’t The Sixth Sense. We just watched 100 million people die and the fabric of society dissolve under the sheer weight of panic and suspicion, and you feel it necessary to show us a bat and a banana? I guess you could make the case that incredibly terrible things can happen from such inconsequential happenstance as a bat dropping a bit of banana. I can buy that. Nature is crazy neato that way. But I can’t buy this movie ending with that. If you really feel compelled, show it at the beginning; it will add context for the entire movie. Showing it at the end feels forced and clever. I have to wonder if the movie wasn’t originally cut to start on Day 1 but some tricky producer out-clevered himself …

Miscellaneous Notes:

• Every character that falls ill ends up dying. That’s strange because the disease only has a 25-30% mortality rate. I guess we focused on some unlucky folks.

• If this had been a Michael Bay film, sick Kate Winslet would have been flown to a secret government base in a titanium-clad F-35 prototype ‘Virus Buster’ CDC Level-5 armored jet fighter that incorporated advanced AI and flew itself. The jet would have provided comic relief by making inappropriate jokes about the frailty of humans and the size of Winslet’s boobs. The wise-cracking jet plane would have had a Canadian accent and been named “Big Dick”, as in, “They call me Big Dick. Hold on there, eh, I’d hate to see a pretty piece of flesh like you die the Friendly Skies, you know what I mean? Eh!” ZOOM!!

• How does Damon know that the supply truck is empty? Why does he feel the need to tell no one in particular that “the truck is empty”? Does it really matter? The soldier already said it. People are irrational. The audience gets that; there isn’t any need to remind us. You might just as well had Damon record a VO: “I watched on in horror as the Mob plundered an empty army supply truck. My god, is this what we had come to?”

• Lawrence Fishbourne, you are awesome. Not once did I look at you and think, that guy is acting. Everytime I see Fishbourne, he’s great. Predators? Darn bad movie, but Fishbourne made his scenes believable. Hollywood: more Fishbourne, please.

• Kate Winslet is great too, and has the best scene in the movie: she’s almost dead, and the guy next to her needs a blanket. In her last dying moments, she weakly pushes her coat towards him. Really all she does is push it off her cot. Defines her character really well, and the need to do good in the face of hopelessness.

And before, in the hotel when she finds out she’s sick: is she crying because she is afraid of dying, or because she can’t help anymore and she feels a failure? Both, I like to believe. Winslet and the script convey that complexity without actually saying it out loud. Good stuff.

I’m going to be writing more about movies here on out. They’ve always been my passion. Below is a quickie look into my background.

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I was a film major at Pratt in Brooklyn. In my four years there, I made a few short movies, acted in more than a few, and worked on way more than a few.

Since graduation back in ‘94 I’ve moved far away from film but my heart and brain are still there. Writing about it will give me a place to vent. Movie reviews, my take on film theory, some analysis of the whys and hows of movies that work (or not). Should be a hodge podge, but fun.

I can tell you where it all started. In first grade I was drawing a series of pictures that I called “A Place in Space”. Large colorful planets on a meticulously colored black field. I burned through a lot of black markers. I can remember my little kid brain always making stories: rocket ships stick-figure astronauts planting flags, a house with a smoking chimney on a ringed gas giant. I loved to draw, but the Place in Space was more about telling a story, visually. In hindsight those drawings were about entertaining people through creativity, but I didn’t know that then: I was content to look at the crudely colored planets and imagining bouncing from one to another.

In middle school I got a camcorder. My dad was always supportive of my hobbies, so when I wanted to get into ‘making movies’ he bought me a VHS-C video camera. I can still remember the smell of the camera when I dug it out of the box; a strong acrid plastic that invaded the nose and lingered, fading to a vague scent (and taste) reminiscent of celery.

The VHS-C was a small format tape: to play it back on a VCR you had to pop the mini VHS-C tape into a full sized VHS shell. As the rollers of the shell exposed and stretched out the recording media, the tape always seemed always on the verge of snapping. The rollers moved with a herky-jerky motion, much like the stop-motion Terminator in the first movie. The whole wonky mechanism was crude as hell and it was a constant wonder it worked at all.

I was 12 years old and committed. My friends and I shot a heckuva lot on that Phillips VHS-C camcorder. We’d make up plots, lines and characters on the spot. Everything was improvised. Blocking was rehearsed only if the action was complicated enough to give worry. Not much gave worry. All editing was in camera. Our productions were born purely of first takes. If something went calamitously wrong, such as an unexpected laugh, a careless adult, a prop malfunction, we’d rewind to the end of the previous take and re-shoot. More often than not we’d cut into the previous shot or not rewind enough and end up with a couple frames of the aborted take. The final product was sloppy as hell, and more often than not, a hell of a lot of fun.

One of our first movies was a horror flick, shot at my friend Gordon’s house. The 12x20 foot corn patch in his tiny backyard figured prominently. The reasons we made a horror movie are complex and highly involved: one, it was night time and two, it was foggy.

I make quote fingers when I say “horror flick”: we didn’t take ourselves seriously enough to create any movie that, regardless of our initial intentions, didn’t quickly dissolve into comedy. For instance, the villain in our horror movie was a cluster of fake grapes that we found in Gordon’s basement. Depending on the shot, they were either the size of a house (made possible through the age-old movie magic of foreshortening) or in the few close up attack scenes, they resolved to regular plastic grape size. They’d burble around on the victims chest, wiggling back and forth, cackling wildly. Yes, the age-old movie magic of monofilament and meticulously crafted models and off-screen cackling.

In high school I started hanging out with a group of guys a year older than me. We were all geeks and, as we quickly learned, film fanatics. We were cast from similar molds: Monty Python, Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas. We’d talk about Spielberg’s influence on Zemeckis and Dante, and who was the heir apparent to Spielberg’s early legacy. Deep discussions on whether or not Spielberg directed the first half of Superman, the pleasure of discovering Bergman one memorable night, the horrors of watching really bad movies (Shakes the Clown, anyone?) but realizing that even bad movies are worthy of watching, observing, remarking, and discussion. And heck, they were making movies. It is hard to fault someone for seeing a complicated and creative endeavor to the end, no matter the result.

Still, we’d bemoan the millions wasted and often complained bitterly that we’d never get those two hours back. We had high standards. Or strong opinions. I suppose it could be both.

All this time we were shooting. We had moved up to a full-size VHS camera. The battery lasted longer than an hour and wonders of wonders, we even had an extra. We no longer had to be glued to an electrical outlet. We could use full sized VHS tapes, which helped on cost, duration and playback. The beast of a camera even supported two audio tracks. Editing was still done in camera, but after shooting was over you could lay down a simple sound track.

We were industrious in those summers during high school. I ascribe that to also being jobless. We’d knock about, shooting here and there and everywhere. We all took turns directing, acting, and as cinematographers. I use that last term loosely, but I am not willing to admit that we didn’t take the direction or acting seriously. It was fun and a team effort, and we cared in a reckless, hasty fashion about achieving a level of quality in our films that all of us, by tacit approval, had bought into.

We made innumerable shorts. China Rice was a spoof of Miami Vice. Crocket and Tubbs had to bust a crime syndicate that had introduced a deadly designer drug (green ooze in a dolled up Play-Doh can). Before you hit me for racism, about half of the guys I hung out with were of Chinese decent. In China Rice we replaced Edward James Olmos as the police chief with a large rubber Yoda puppet who, by some wonderful design flaw, could only make one motion. Sort of an awkward bending in the middle. Yoda had both hands in front of him, holding a staff. Interestingly, that one motion made it look like he was masturbating. Delightful. You better believe we featured Yoda prominently, and often.

We did Colors 2: The War in the Suburbs. Yeah, that was us. Made during a snow day off from school. We had a girl in that one (laugh all you want, but that was a coup.) Colors 2 was the story of the ethnics against the whities. On one side we had three Chinese and an Indian. On the other, the Caucs. We wore X-Small t-shirts from the Dollar Store. They all were printed, “Where’s the Beef?” The Foreigners got blue ones, the Natives got yellow. Get it? Yellow? The climax of Colors 2 features our female lead laying on top of my dining room table, holding a gun in each hand and exclaiming, “Free at last, free at least! Thank God almighty, I’m free at last!” I’d like to extend my apologies to the entire human race.

In hindsight, Gangs of New York stole the its plot from Colors 2.

The high water mark of those amateur years was Under the Bottom. It was a spoof on the Stallone arm wrestling movie, Over the Top. An out of work lonely loser finds solace in arm wrestling (wow). We took our cues from The Karate Kid, and incorporated into the plot a stern but nurturing father-figure who trains our loser; in our movie, Mr. Miyagi was played by a self-gratifying Yoda. Hilarity ensues. We had perfected our art at that point, and that 12 minute movie was fairly tight.

Yes, I say that with a straight face. Why? Cause it was. It was a fine piece of film making. Made by a dozen goofs in a small Baltimore suburb. I’ve seen some amateur films. I’ve seen student films of mediocre directors and great directors. I’ve seen hundreds of Hollywood movies. I am telling you: we stacked up.

OK OK OK. Enough waxing nostalgic. If you made it this far, a gentle and reverent bow in your direction.

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Coming up next, a look at Contagion! Get the fever!