Solarbabies

My friends at NoBulljive suggested that I check Solarbabies out because it is really "...something."  That might not sound like a glowing recommendation to you, but I watch a lot of movies that are, at best, really...something...so, I thought I'd give this one a shot.

Wow.  Bad idea.  Kids, don't do as Donnie Don't does.

Catch a rerun instead of this movie, please.

In a post-apocalyptic future, what do you think the world will be like?  If you answered "a desert wasteland that is surprisingly roller skate friendly," then you hit the nail on the head.  Unfortunately, you hit it with your face.  Yes, the future is a dire time period and it is in need of some heroes.  I know what you're thinking..."We don't need another hero, we don't need to know the way home.  All we want is life beyond Thunderdome."  Well, what if I told you that in this desert-y future, orphans are kept in medium security prison-like facilities?  And the primary way for these orphans to rebel is to sneak out late at night and play each other in a game that is apparently a cross between lacrosse and roller skating?  And furthermore, what if I told you that a sentient, super-powered orb shows up and helps the kids escape their prison and topple the evil regime?  You would probably say that sounds like a terrible, terrible movie.  And you would be right.

Solarbabies (taken from the main characters' rollercrosse team name) is not exactly an acting tour de force.  Sure, it boasts Jason Patric in his first movie, but it also shows off some early work from Jami Gertz, Peter DeLouise, James LeGros, Lukas Haas and the apparently time-proof Adrian Pasdar.

What makes his hair even better is the fact that he plays a roller skating falconer.

There are some veterans in the cast to try and add legitimacy to this movie, but Richard Jordan isn't the sort of actor you want to headline your movie.  Unless, of course, your movie is about post-apocalyptic roller skating teens who befriend a glowing orb named Bohdai.  Charles Durning, on the other hand, is a much better actor, but his part is minuscule (and surprisingly sweaty).  Despite all that, the acting isn't too awful.  It is, by no stretch of the imagination, good.  It isn't as bad as the film premise might suggest, though.  They act poorly, but it is obvious that they have all memorized their lines and can deliver their ridiculous dialogue with a straight face.  I find it interesting that this movie was directed by Alan Johnson, who is most famous for providing choreography for Mel Brooks' movies; it's interesting because the man clearly was familiar with stupid comedy, but opted to make this film stupidly serious.

An actual publicity shot for Solarbabies, which wisely chooses to have nothing to do with the movie.

I don't want to waste my time analyzing this movie, but here's a list of things that I laughed at in the film:

• Their roller skates have lights to help with skating in the dark.
• When given the task of disabling a camera that will, at any moment, report that the Solarbabies are escaping their prison, one of them chooses to try and break the camera by hitting a rock at it, baseball-style.  That has to be a fairly unlikely path toward success.
• Roller.  Skating.  Falconer.
• There is apparently still hair dye after the apocalypse.
• Roller skating is apparently very easy on dirt roads.
• The police cars look like Darth Vader helmets on wheels.
• Five good guys get captured by two bounty hunters, even after the hunters admit that they won't use lethal force.
• Dogs have flashlights on their heads...to help track roller skates with flashlights on them, maybe?
• Smokey Robinson provides the song for the credits, and it includes the name "Bodhai" frequently in the lyrics.

Leave it to a DeLouise to be happy about a bad movie.

Take one part Rollerball, two parts Mad Max, and thirty-six parts of suck, and you will get Solarbabies.  Now, you might be thinking that Solarbabies can't be as bad as the cabbage role at the Terra-Phelevo Penn, or the oatmeal at the Cook County slammer, but (in the immortal words of Matt "Guitar" Murphy) "they're all pretty bad."

That's half a star for Adrian Pasdar's hair, half a star for never relenting with the roller skate gimmick, and half a star for a post-apocalyptic rollercrosse team that instinctively knows the best team colors are found on the American flag, dammit!

You better think before you watch Solarbabies with Aretha.

Brick

I did not have a particularly scandalous high school career; it should come as no surprise that I spent a lot of time reading and watching movies.  When I did manage to poke my head out, though, I was surprised by all the drama I found my peers involved in.  Fights, dating, drugs, alcohol, sex, pregnancy --- high school has it all.  Most movies about high school focus on superficial social cliques, but Brick makes a deliberate and stylistic decision to focus on the seedy underbelly of high school.

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an outsider by choice in his high school.  He's cool enough to earn some respect from nearly everyone in school, but he is indifferent to his social status and chooses to spend his time alone, whenever possible.  His ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), called him in a panic one day, rambling on about a bad brick and the Pin.  What on Earth does that mean?  Brendan starts to nose around and finds that Emily is involved in the school's drug trade, although it is unclear how much trouble she is in.  That gets a little less mysterious when Brendan finds her dead body in a storm drain.  Instead of calling the police or talking to his principal or any other adult, Brendan decides to uncover the responsible party for Emily's death at any cost.  To do that, he must infiltrate the same dangerous groups that somehow got Emily killed, figure out who played who in this mess, and muddle his way to a clear answer, all without being hassled by his principal (Richard Roundtree) and the police.

Brick is not just another high school movie.  It's actually a neo-noir that just happens to be set in a high school setting.  A lot of your appreciation for this film will depend on how open you are to that idea.  Noir is not typically given unique settings; it typically has tough guys and dangerous women, where the only thing you can truly believe is that everybody lies.  That's a little more adult-themed than some people like their high schoolers.  Personally, I thought it was an inspired idea, although the setting did cause a few minor problems for me.

The acting in Brick depends heavily on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance.  The lead role in noirs is typically a guy who is smarter than everybody else, and the viewer realizes things at about the same pace as the main character; he just jumps to some conclusions a little faster than the audience, sometimes.  Gordon-Levitt does a really good job of filling those noir shoes.  This is a plot-propelled film, but his too-cool-for-school performance helped this fairly standard noir plot feel a little more special.  I'm not a fan of noir characters that show their feelings, but he also did a good job showing believable grief, when the time came.

Noir heroes take a licking, but keep on playing both sides against the middle.

The rest of the cast primarily just filled their roles, but there were a few parts that were odd and varied enough to stick out.  I thought Noah Fleiss did a surprisingly good job as the hot-headed Tugger, the muscle for the drug trade.  I also liked the absurdity that Lukas Haas brought to the table as the improbably powerful Pin.  Matt O'Leary was okay as the Brain, but it was kind of an easy role.  Of course, no noir would be complete without a few dangerous women.  I wasn't too impressed with Emilie de Ravin, but I thought Nora Zehetner did a passable job as a femme fatale.  As for Richard Roundtree's brief appearance as the school principal, it was almost like he was Reverse Shaft; he was the straight man, while Gordon-Levitt told him how it was going to be, and if he didn't like it, tough.  As a Shaft fan, that was a little hard to swallow.

Writer/director Rian Johnson managed to do a lot of things right with this film.  The pacing is crisp, and he is able to convey urgency and mystery with the story.  I liked the tone of the movie, and I liked his direction.  At times, it felt a little idiosyncratic, like a lightweight Coen Brothers ripoff, but only because he only hinted at quirkiness and never fully embraced it.  What I liked best about Johnson's writing and directing is that he actually pulled off a noir movie within a high school setting.  That's brilliant!  It takes all the adult issues that high school movies like to toy with, and amps up the seriousness without being morbid, like Kids.  Plus, let's face it, it's just nice to see a high school movie that isn't about fitting in.  Like most high school movies, it overly simplifies the social groupings, but that is a small price to pay for a compelling crime story.

Having said that, I have to admit that it doesn't always work.  By taking the serious tone of film noir, this movie has several scenes that are ridiculous enough to have rough juxtapositions with that tone.  In a hard-boiled crime story, do I really need a scene where the queen of the high school theater clique is talking trash while receiving oral sex from a freshman?  Um, no.  Do we need a scene with our hero being trapped by those that he is hunting to segue into a scene where the villain's mother offers the captured hero some cookies?  Again, no.  I'm not saying that I didn't find those scenes kind of funny, I just think the film lost more than it gained by their inclusion.  Another problem that the high school setting provides is the unexpected realization that noir is oftentimes absurdly melodramatic.  On the one hand, I know that real life isn't anything like a Humphrey Bogart movie, but this film occasionally makes the notion seem just silly.  It does feel intentional, but there are just too many moments in Brick where I had to admit that, while the dialogue might sound cool, it's pretty darned unlikely that anyone would act/speak that way.  The noir aspect of this movie also made the very end of the film more predictable, because there are some character types that simply must fulfill their destiny.

Despite undercutting itself, I really liked Brick.  Is it just because I am a sucker for noir?  Quite possibly, but they did a lot of things right.  Every character interaction for Gordon-Levitt was tough (except for those with his ex-girlfriend) and smart; my favorite was when Nora Zehetner's character was being nice to him, and his response was "You really are dangerous."  That's great.  You just don't get that type of response to romance in normal movies.  Is this movie great?  Probably not, but it is definitely good.  Brick makes the best case I have seen for Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a serious lead actor, and its old-timey noir charm hit all the right buttons for a noirista like me.

Inception

Christopher Nolan obviously has a fascination with the notion of reality.  In Memento, he focused on how our memories shape us and how we shape our memories.  In The Prestige, he looked at the power of illusion.  Now, with Inception, Nolan ditches the pretenses and goes for broke; this film delves into the world of dreams.

In this story, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate spy with a unique modus operandi: he enters dreams with his intended victims and steal their ideas right out of their minds, a process called extraction.  Inception is the flip side of that coin; instead of stealing an idea, you plant one.  Just as it is far easier to destroy than to create, it is far more difficult to perform inception than extraction.  Indeed, Cobb's partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and others insist that inception is absolutely impossible.  However, after botching a job, their intended victim, Saito (Ken Watanabe), makes them an offer they can't refuse.  If they successfully perform inception and convince his corporate rival's heir, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to dismantle his father's massive corporation, Saito will pay everyone handsomely and give Cobb access to the only thing he truly wants --- his family.

There's more to it than that --- a lot more --- but I can't simplify it and still do the story justice.  I can, however, marvel at the unique story elements.  This is a very intelligent story that has been thought through from start to finish.  To pull off the inception, Cobb and his crew design several elaborate dreamscapes and they layer the dreams one inside of another inside of another.  So, they all go to sleep and go into the shared dreamscape, and then they go to sleep in that dream and then go to sleep in the next dream to reach that third layer.  Does that sound complicated?  Well, wait.  Each layer of dream has a different concept of time.  In the first layer, five minutes of real-world time equals an hour of dream time.  In the second layer, that becomes ten hours, in the third, a hundred.  What makes that notion interesting is the fact that the dreamers have some level of awareness with the level above them; like someone that has water dripping on them might dream of drowning, these characters are affected by what is happening around their sleeping bodies.  There is an extended sequence where a car is falling, for instance, and the next dream layer has everyone floating in mid-air because their bodies are all asleep in the falling car in the dream layer above.  What only takes a few seconds (a falling car) feels like several minutes to those dreamers.  That opens up a lot of layered storytelling possibilities and introduces some tricky timing, and Christopher Nolan did a great job making each layer work.

While this is more of a psychological thriller than anything else, Inception has its share of solid action sequences.  There is a surprising amount of gunfire in the movie and a lot of full-contact driving sequences.  These are nice, but that should come as no surprise from the director of The Dark Knight.  The movie's uniqueness is shown primarily in a great scene where Joseph Gordon-Levitt fights in a hallway with no consistent gravity.  It's not a particularly flashy scene, and Gordon-Levitt doesn't come across as ridiculously bad-ass or anything, but it's a wonderful illustration of the possibilities available in the dream worlds.

Something that surprised me about this film was the emotional content.  Clever ideas and good action are nothing particularly new to Nolan because his movies are all about the plot.  Honestly, I don't think I've seen an incredible acting performance in his movies, aside from the notable exception of Heath Ledger.  That diligence to the story usually sacrifices any true emotional attachment.  Here, though, we are given two distinct and satisfying stories with heart.  On the one hand, we have Robert Fischer, who felt like a disappointment to his empire-building father (Pete Postlethwaite).  By the film's end, though, there is a genuine moment between the two; the fact that the moment was completely engineered by Cobb and his crew doesn't negate the scene's emotion.  On the other hand, we have Cobb.  He has been dealing with intense loss and guilt for a while, to a degree that is affecting (and infecting) his work.  When he finally confronts the manifestation of his guilt, there are a few minutes that acknowledge the importance and limitations of dreams, and these moments are the core of the story.  If that scene had felt forced or flat, the whole movie would have seemed like a clever piece of filmmaking, but not an important work.  And this is undoubtedly an important film.

What is odd in a movie filled with oddness is the absence of any truly charismatic character.  Leonardo DiCaprio does a very good job as Cobb, willing to risk his sanity and that of his friends just to see his family again.  The character is smart, but flawed, and DiCaprio (who I think is a good actor that is smart enough to work with great directors) gives his best performance in recent memory.  He is the heart and brains of the story and he deserves recognition for how well he carried this film.  Of course, his performance would have been wasted without someone of equal talent in his scenes.  Marion Cotillard turns in a varied and emotional performance, alternately cooing with love or screaming with hate.  DiCaprio's performance required someone to react to him, and Cotillard played her part well.  Her performance is somewhat hampered by the limitations placed on her character, but she still was able to convey a lot of emotion.

The rest of the cast is good, but their characters are not as integral to the plot as DiCaprio's or Cotillard's.  Cillian Murphy has the next most emotionally complicated role, and he does it well.  Resentment is often a trait that makes characters unsympathetic, but he is able to show that emotion and still come across as someone in need.  Ellen Page acts as the story's point-of-view character, the character least familiar with the dreamscape.  Her scenes are primarily used to show off the possibilities of dreams, and her character acts as Cobb's conscience.  It's not a terribly complex role for Page, but her character still seems well developed.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt turns in another subtle performance as the matter-of-fact member of Cobb's team, but he shows personality in a few brief scenes that help change him from just another character into someone you're rooting for.  Tom Hardy is appealing as the rogue of the group as well.  The rest of the cast has more limited roles, either because of screen time, or because of their character's role.  Still, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger and Lukas Haas all add something to their roles that make them feel more substantial than they are.

This film was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.  I've already mentioned how clever the story is, but it's worth mentioning again.  This is a smart screenplay that has heart and some humor.  Most importantly, though, this is a unique story.  You can argue that it shares some similarities with Dark City or The Matrix because it plays with the notion of reality, but Inception is a lot deeper than that and is better in almost every way than any movie with a similar conceit.  The acting is full of competent performances, but it is noteworthy that this is the first time Nolan has been able to capture this much honest emotion on film.  The cinematography is good for the most part, with a few truly exceptional scenes that show the potential of the plot.  I think this is Nolan's best work to date.

The one thing it lacks is an extraordinary character.  I find it odd that a movie with so many bigger-than-life moments has characters that are all essentially normal.  Well, except for the entering people's dreams thing.  I can see the importance of having DiCaprio, Cotillard, and Page as regular folks, but I think an opportunity was missed by having Hardy do the same.  Hardy was somewhat sarcastic, but I think his character would have been a little more appealing if he had been a little more of...I don't know...maybe a lovable bastard; he was only a few steps away from the guy you like to hang out with, but wouldn't trust alone with your sister, but those few steps can make a big difference for supporting characters.

That is just me nit-picking, though.  This is a visually interesting, intellectually fascinating movie with good direction and acting.  It has a good ending, too, but it's better seen than read.  I expected to enjoy this movie because I like so many of the people involved, but this turned out to be the best new release I have seen in a few years.