Frost/Nixon, The Spirit, City of Ember, Transporter 3, Bolt

Prague Filharmonic Advent Category + In Article

A compelling story well-told: Ron Howard´s Frost/Nixon fleshes out the famous 1977 TV interview between British talk-show host David Frost and former US president Richard Nixon, his first public interview following his resignation over the Watergate scandal. Frost/Nixon has scored 5 Academy Award nominations, which include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay; it may not win any of these, but it´s my favorite of the five films nominated for Best Pic. The film is told from the perspective of Frost (played by Michael Sheen), who was a highly unlikely candidate to deliver a probing interview of Nixon. He´s the host of a popular talk show in Australia in 1977, but looking for…something more. Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) has said goodbye to America with a wave and a smile, never taking responsibility for the Watergate affair, and disappeared from the public spotlight. Why does Frost care? Well, he doesn´t, really. But he sees an opportunity to make an impression, and he grabs it – risking all the money he has, and some that he doesn´t. Nixon agrees to the interview – his first since his resignation – on the assumption that it´ll be a fluff piece and he´ll be able to control the conversation. Nixon aide Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) stands in his corner, while Frost´s assistants, which include Americans James Reston (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), prepare an incisive interview that demands an apology. But during the recording, everything lies on Frost´s shoulders. The majority of Frost/Nixon is a verbal game of chess between the two leads. Given the amount of time we spend just watching Frost and Nixon talk (not just during the interview, but before & after as well), the film simply wouldn´t work without excellent lead performances; both actors, thankfully, are terrific. Langella has the showier role as Nixon, and is so good as we almost end up rooting for him (as long as there is a little ambiguity, the strength of a performance is directly related to the sympathy we feel for a character – see Ben Kingsley in Death of a Maiden). But Sheen is equally good as Frost, a flawed character who takes on a bigger responsibility than he´s prepared for. Peter Morgan´s script, based on his play, is an incisive look at both of the characters; he also wrote The Queen, Stephen Frears´ not-dissimilar look at the Queen of England. Director Howard keeps everything moving at a brisk pace, and the technical credits are first-rate throughout. I do have one real gripe with the film. In faux-documentary scenes, some of the supporting players look back on the events and underscore every point the movie has made, stripping Frost/Nixon of any hint of subtlety or ambiguity. These scenes stop the film just short of being exceptional; it´s a tired framing device that´s only a step above having the main characters look back on an important event in their lives. Biggest compliment I can pay the film: with renewed interest in the subject, I hunted down the original David Frost/Richard Nixon interview and was richly rewarded. However, the interview is clearly not as win/lose as Howard´s film makes it out to be and I missed the ambiguity even more. Still, knowing the backstory from Frost/Nixon makes the original interview that much more compelling.

Gloriously, oh-so-wonderfully awful in every respect, Frank Miller´s The Spirit is a must-see for bad movie lovers everywhere. It is, consistently: ineptly filmed and edited, filled with bizarre jump cuts and continuity errors that ignore basic filmmaking guidelines like the 180-degree rule; boring, and I mean really hellish to sit through – all style and no substance is what they were going for, and they overshot that; offensive – it´s tough to get offended at stuff like this, but just wait till the scene where Samuel L. Jackson, in full Nazi garb, with swastikas and a Hitler lithograph in the background, melts a kitten, leaving two eyeballs rolling in a sink.

So. Anyway. A plot description is useless so let me run down the characters. There´s The Spirit, played by a stoned-face Gabriel Macht (with some Joker-like facial surgery), who protects his city – unnamed in the movie, but New York in the comic – because, you know, she is his mother, and she is his lover, and he is her spirit. Makes sense. Then there´s arch villain The Octopus, played by Sam Jackson, who goes predictably over-the-top; I don´t know why he´s called The Octopus (“I have eight of everything!” he screams at the end, though that doesn´t seem to make sense), but he does have quite an egg fetish (“No egg on my face! Not a glob!”). There are some femme fatales, played by Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, and Paz Vega. And regenerating lunkheads, all played by Louis Lombardi, the only actor here who seems to know what kind of film he´s in, playing it broad and dumb. The rest of the cast is awful, most notably Johansson, who has never been more wooden: we expect to see the cue cards when they cut, ’cause she sure isn’t looking at the other actors.

The plot: oh, it´s an origin story, we find out after an hour or so. I was wondering what the point of this was. The Spirit is invincible – more so than Superman, as there´s no kryptonite – and we´re treated to a number of scenes of him being pummeled, shot, thrown out of windows; of course there´s no suspense when all of this is going on, as he always gets back up. The Octopus is invincible too. The main storyline has him searching for something that will make him even more invincible. Yeah, that´s right.

A needlessly complicated backstory has your standard crew of baddies, led by Mr. Johnson (a hammy Robert Knepper), wanting to deliver a boatload of toxic waste to a Ukranian harbor; government official Leonid Vasilev (Jeroen Krabbé) isn´t too keen on this, so Johnson´s crew kidnaps his daughter and forces him to sign the required paperwork. They also need someone to drive said daughter (a fetching Natalya Rudakova) from Marseilles to Odessa for some reason I must´ve missed, and that´s where professional driver Frank Martin (Statham) comes in. To ensure he makes his delivery, Johnson rigs an explosive device to Martin´s wrist, which will explode if he gets 75 feet away from his car.

Still, it´s not a total waste. The car chases work pretty well, and often employ the mad inventiveness we come to these films for (at one point, Martin is driving at a 45-degree angle between two eighteen-wheelers.) And despite finding myself just waiting around in-between action scenes for the next one to come, I can´t say I was bored; the filmmakers don´t quite have a handle on pacing, but they seem to know the maximum time allowable between action scenes before the audience will give up on the film.

Major flaw: the hand-to-hand combat scenes are over-edited and under-shot, reaching a bizarre middle ground where we can´t really follow what´s going on, but we frequently notice the glaring continuity errors. And the first films, directed by action experts Corey Yuen (1) and Louis Leterrier (2), handled these so well. Here, director Megaton (now, he does have the action director name, I´ll give him that) goes so far as to speed up the fight scenes, to such a laughable effect that it feels like they´re overcranking the camera in a silent comedy. Remember the days of Enter the Dragon, when Bruce Lee delivered a fatal dropkick to the chest of an opponent, it was shot in super slo-motion and you could see each individual muscle contract and the flesh ripple upon impact? Now that´s how you shoot a fight scene.

Hundreds of years in the future, a society of underground dwellers resides in the majestic titular city. But things aren´t all going according to plan: the city´s power generator seems to be faltering, and the food supply is running low. Teenager Doon (Harry Treadaway) thinks he can fix the generator, but on Assignment Day, where the youngsters are given the jobs they will carry out for the rest of their lives, he pulls ‘messenger´ out of the bag. Still, he´s able to trade up to pipeworker with friend Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan). Close enough to the generator to maybe work. Now, Lina finds a 200-year-old box that was passed down by the town mayors until it was forgotten, and seems to contain some directions for getting out of the city. Maybe there´s more to the world than Ember.

My biggest complaint here is a lack of exploration of the film´s sci-fi elements: what happened and why these people are living underground is never really explained. I assume there was some nuclear apocalypse, and the 200-year-old box opens when it´s safe to go back outside – that would explain the giant, mutated moles and insects – but then again, Ember doesn´t seem to be a fallout shelter completely separated from the outside world, with tunnels that lead directly to it. But this is first and foremost a kid´s movie, so expectations should be tempered – short attention spans are catered for.

Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) is a canine TV star who is oblivious to the fact that there´s a reality outside the world of his weekly TV show. He plays a superhero of sorts, who has super-speed, heat vision, and the deadly ‘superbark;´ once a week, he teams up with Penny (Miley Cyrus) to save her father from the clutches of the evil green-eyed man, Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell); the plot of this TV show is shockingly similar to Inspector Gadget, right down to the girl´s name. In any event, Bolt is accidentally shipped off to New York City and has to contend with the real world while coming to grips with the fact that he doesn´t really have superpowers; joining him on his quest to return to Penny are cat Mittens (Susie Essman) and hamster-in-a-plastic-ball Rhino (Mark Walton), who provides the (usually effective) comic relief.