Helvetica

Gary Hustwit, UK, 2007
2 out of 4 stars

On certain occasions, I can be somewhat susceptible to persuasion when someone makes an off-the-wall film recommendation, particularly in the classroom for some reason, and this is a perfect example of it; a feature documentary on a font, for gosh sakes, that a guest lecturer in my “history of the book” seminar enthusiastically recommended.

I actually respect it as a valiant effort, but of course it turns out to be largely boring to someone who doesn’t already care about fonts or design. Helvetica consists of two kinds of scenes; talking-head interviews with designers and typographers, and series of brief shots of Helevtica use, mostly in various street signs. I’m slightly more interested in fonts than most people, and I was surprised to realize, for instance, how many major logos are all in this same font, which honestly in its large street-style is almost unrecognizable from its computer version. I found the London sequence to have some particularly interesting visual touches, but overall these sequences are quite repetitive.

As for the interviews, I felt that relatively few of the people with whom the director spoke with were either interesting or insightful (much less both). The young designers come off as pompous art-school twits with almost nothing to say, while the experts who tried to explain its historical origins nearly bored me into a stupor. A few people make some interesting points about Helvetica’s cultural and economic significance, and at times I almost felt like the film was worth it. Overall, it’s not; this could have been an interesting article but for the unconverted it cannot be an interesting film.

Source: Red Envelope DVD
19 May, 9:05 PM

Iron Man

Jon Favreau, USA, 2008
3.5 out of 4 stars

When the script and the actors suck, a superhero action movie, with minimal action and maximum buildup and exposition can be one of the most painful things to suffer through. The best recent example of this is the excreable Fantastic Four, which doesn't even feature a battle sequence until the last 15 minutes of the film, rather spending most of its running time as the lifeless cast blandly ruminates over powers that only took them a minute to obtain. Thankfully, Iron Man is more in the vein of Batman Begins, another film in which a man with no inherent superpowers accumulates both the skills and the experiences necessary to ultimately inhabit his role as superhero.

Yet although I've given them the same rating, I should be clear that Batman Begins was definitely a deeper, more complex and more thought-out film. Iron Man would probably be significantly worse without the presence of Robert Downey, Jr., who seems to be gradually making up for last time, even as he cleverly trades off of his own unfortunate public persona in his role as the dissolute-but-brilliant Tony Stark. Unlike Bruce Wayne, Tony is not traumatized, he's just in a stage of arrested development that has prevented him from considering the consequences of his actions as a weapons designer/merchant. It takes an origin story centered in Afghanistan to reorient his thinking and kick off some gradual, but worthwhile, character development.

Interestingly, the original Iron Man was born of the Vietnam War, and that story's attitude towards said war was much less complicated, to put it lightly. The comics have already updated both the setting and the politics, so I'm not sure how this stacks up to more recent incarnations (I only really started recognizing Marvel injokes during the very last scene), but I think Jon Favreau's film walks a fine line regarding the depiction of terrorists and ultimately succeeds in avoiding the main pitfalls. Overall the attitude is one of sophistication, although some things are nonetheless overlooked out of necessity.

As for the action, well, as I said there's not exactly tons of action in this film, but the story and acting are such good quality that the action feels even more earned. Watching Iron Man fly around is in itself exciting, which is somewhat surprising considering that "you'll believe a man can fly" was the original superhero movie tagline, even before I was born. Above all, it did leave me looking forward to the sequel (and I wouldn't mind if there was a bit more action that time).

By the way, if you go see it, make sure to stay until after the credits.

Source: Paramount 35mm print
16 May, 8:00 PM

Solaris

Stephen Soderbergh, USA, 2002
3 out of 4 stars

Something, not quite explained, is going wrong at the end (or at least it feels like it) of space, but despite the somewhat-goofy spacesuits, the significance of the events is much more focused on the interpersonal. Sent to investigate this phenomena (even the message apparently doesn't mean what it seems to mean), Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is soon visited by someone who could not actually be there, specifically his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone). Flashbacks ensue (not for the last time, either) in which we get a surprising level of detail about their relationship, from beginning to end.

All this unfolds at a fairly deliberate pace, despite the short running time, and it can be quite captivating at times; there is a certain visual appeal to the shot composition (really starting to wish I had the language to describe this stuff better) and the performances are often compelling. Overall, though, I couldn't quite get involved enough in the thing, even though I felt like I cared about the characters, and was at least interested in what was going on without being too removed from it. The spaceship sets don't look particularly good on a mid-sized television (I'm gonna assume that they look much better on a movie screen), which is a bit of a problem considering how long we end up staring at them when not that much is going on. The ending is interesting, but I wish I knew what it meant, although I suspect that I'm being needlessly obtuse here (it was probably the best part of the film). I consider this a good film, overall, but I'm not sure that I would recommend it; it's just too hard to get a handle on.

Source: Fox DVD
9 May, 8:56 PM

Sólo con tu pareja

Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico, 1991
4 out of 4 stars

I have been working my way through Cuarón's filmography ever since, believe it or not, I saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I was just as pleased with this film, his feature debut, as I had been with his others. It's basically an absurdist sex comedy, at times solidly in the realm of farce, while other times it verges into even stranger or darker territory. Despite the more limited resources and the seemingly less-conducive subject matter, the film looks great and has the same sense of visual inventiveness that one sees in his later films

The protagonist is the usual lothario type, who we meet in the process of fooling around with both his boss and the nurse that works for his amiable neighbor, a good bourgeois doctor who is content to live vicariously through tales of his sexual exploits (although even this leads to problems for both characters on more than one occasion). We also learn that the hero is not particularly concerned about protection, which also becomes an issue.

I definitely wouldn't try to claim that the film is entirely original; it seems fresh enough to me, but some aspects of the story are more familiar than others. What I like is that there is nonetheless a good balance of optimism and cynicism which allows the viewer to forgive some of the lapses. More importantly, the film just gets more and more hilarious, particularly the darker it gets. It's definitely worth looking into.

Source: Image DVD
3 May, 9:57 PM

No End in Sight

Charles Ferguson, USA, 2007
3 out of 4 stars

I was slowly making my way through "Bush's War", a two-part "episode" of PBS Frontline, when I got the notification that this movie would be the next to arrive in my mailbox. The redundancy seemed unfortunate, but I ultimately became so consumed with what I learned in "Bush's War" that I found myself interested in seeing and learning more, so I went ahead and watched the film. The result of all of this is that I found myself in a better position to actually judge No End in Sight on its merits as a work, rather than giving it a knee-jerk four-star rating due chiefly to the shock of what I learned from it.

Instead, I found this documentary to be a solid piece of work, but perhaps a bit undeserving of its de facto status as the flagship Iraq War documentary. Part of this is indeed because Frontline has in fact, it turns out, been doing shows on this stuff for years; "Bush's War" was something of a synthesis of earlier shows, with the focus to some extent being on the decision-making process that led us to war, whereas No End in Sight is more interested in the colossal mistakes made in the beginning of the occupation (there is apparently a Frontline on this subject as well, and director Charles Ferguson even uses a clip from it at one point!). Being that it is PBS, it is also pretty neutral on the face of it; of course, the facts line up to present a picture so damning that there is no real need to lay it on with any extraneous, overt ideological critique.

Ferguson, of course, is not a public television journalist, so he has no need to strive for objectivity; even so, he seems to have sensed that the facts speak for themselves (not something I always believe, mind you, but clearly the case here). The question is, really, whether he has made any use of film as a medium. There seems to be a very small amount of original footage (although who knows how original), but it's mostly a talking-head piece. This is compelling enough, as much of the things we learn are quite shocking, and not all of it was covered at least in the particular Frontline that I saw. The downside to Ferguson's approach and his status is that he is able to get only one unrepentant proponent of the Bush policies. With this guy, he sets up a very theatrical, indirect "confrontation" with one of his key witnesses; the narrator makes a point of informing us that these two men were interviewed again in order to reconcile contradictions between their testimonies. Although contrived, it's also satisfying in that you always wish that these things were actually "resolved" more thoroughly, and the confrontational aspect of it is something that Frontline largely eschews.

Overall, though, this is best suited for television; I really can't imagine watching it in a movie theater (although the occasional use of split screen did render some footage hard to focus on for someone with a modest-sized television). For film, I think I would be more interested in one of the docs that actually focuses on original, on-the-spot footage. Ferguson does augment the work of the PBS journalists, but he ultimately comes off as a little redundant. All that said, you're more likely to want to see this film then you are to watch three hours of "Bush's War" on streaming video, so on that basis alone I recommend it; this is stuff you need to know, and you will be better off, albeit angrier, for having seen it.

Source: Red Envelope DVD
29 April, 9:41 PM