Why Do They Make Movies like "Battle: Los Angeles"?

Apocalypse Again
Battle: LA is the kind of movie 9/11 was supposed to make unthinkable

By Steven Rosen

(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 3-16-11)
. . . . . . .

Back in 2003, I interviewed director Peter Weir on the occasion of his newest film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That was, all in all, a good action/adventure movie. Based on a well-regarded Patrick O’Brian novel about British Royal Navy life and set on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars, it was rooted in history, had an excitingly palpable sense of oceanic journey, was free of excessively gratuitous mayhem and had involving, complex characters played by such good actors as Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany.

Best of all, it didn’t ask viewers to suspend their intelligence in order to get some thrills — it appealed to something other than the latent human desire to see things explode and humans shot up on the big screen. In other words, it wasn’t Independence Day, Armageddon, Con Air, Godzilla, Deep Impact, Twister, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard sequels, True Lies, et al ad nauseam.

Weir explained to me how he managed to make such an unfashionable film. He and John Collee had spent a full year working on the script, beginning in August 2000.

“Then everything was put on hold because of the tragedy of Sept. 11 (2001),” he said. “It wasn’t until later in September that we kind of staggered back to work that they decided to go ahead. I think they had canceled all the movies about terrorists but were looking for an action/adventure thing, so suddenly this became a plum.”

We tend to forget now that Hollywood’s 9/11 guilt — the Onion famously compared the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to a “bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie” — produced a cease-fire on using CGI to churn out $100 million-plus films depicting mass urban destruction. Even Bruckheimer, the chief culprit of such films, decided to turn to more benign movie fantasies like Pirates of the Caribbean (and crime series for TV).

Alas, while hardly a flop, Master and Commander didn’t earn the kind of money domestically ($94 million) to make Hollywood clamor for more. And, slowly but steadily, with time we’ve been seeing a return to the pre-9/11 urban-destruction extravaganzas.

The new Battle: Los Angeles is a prime example.

Many of these movies have been disguised as comic-book fantasies (Dark Knight) to avoid being pegged as exploitation of history; Day After Tomorrow and 2012 by Roland Emmerich (the pre-9/11 Independence Day) have been floated as ecological cautionary tales. (A low-budget 2006 indie film called Right at Your Door imagined a terrorist attack on L.A., and barely got released for going there.)

In Battle: Los Angeles, Aaron Eckhart leads a small contingent of badly outnumbered Marines through one ear-blasting, gritty firefight after another with aliens who have wiped out Santa Monica and are moving eastward toward downtown L.A., killing all humans in their way. We follow them on their interminable journey to survive and, maybe, save America.

The story is kept barebones to heighten the action — the movie aims to put you in the middle of a war, rather that to be about a war. The upside of that, I suppose, is it heightens the ultra-realism, as do all the shaky camera movements and terse, minimalist dialogue. The downside is that it drains the film of any ideas.

There are some real-world touches. The Marines are combat veterans of Iraq/Afghanistan; the aliens use drone planes for air attacks. This had me wondering for awhile if the film’s director, Jonathan Liebesman, and writer, Christopher Bertolini, meant it as metaphor for civilian casualties in our overseas wars — see how it feels when it happens to you! But, if so, it’s way unarticulated (as opposed to a “realistic” 2009 film about aliens amongst us that pronouncedly read as a commentary on immigration and apartheid, the South African District 9).

By the way, there’s an honorable tradition of science fiction trying to scare us with end-of-the-world scenarios. Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds — presented as news bulletins — tapped our fears about the Depression and European war threats. A whole slew of 1950s monster movies got at our fear of nuclear war or, in the great Invasion of the Body Snatchers, post-war domestic conformity. To some extent, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds was an attempt to respond to post-9/11 anxieties, although he overdid it with the mayhem and succumbed to melodrama.

Battle: Los Angeles isn’t bad because of its science-fiction element — that’s what’s good about it. It’s bad because it emulates two recent war films that, while praised at the time (by me, among others), in retrospect can be seen to have had a detrimental influence on the art of cinema: 2001’s Black Hawk Down and Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan.

While Saving Private Ryan realistically shows the D-Day invasion no-holds-barred (“blood” splatters on the camera lens), Spielberg then goes on to recreate another horrific battle, as if he can’t get enough. Black Hawk Down, produced by Bruckheimer and directed by Ridley Scott, strips away all the complex background of U.S. involvement in Somalia and focuses solely on the struggle by U.S. soldiers to survive an attack.

If these films’ rationale was to make us civilians feel the hell of what our soldiers actually went through, they also allowed us to get off on it by indulging in excess. They created a formula. These films seemed to enjoy staging battles for battles’ sake.

And so we have Battle: Los Angeles. It led the box office last weekend with $36 million. I can’t imagine it will do well for very long — it’s arduously repetitive in a Black Hawk Down way, without even the benefit of truth as an excuse.

Moreover, current events have quickly overtaken it — watching the misery and horror produced by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan takes the pleasure out of viewing something similar in the name of entertainment.

Who Is Harry Nilsson -- Really?

Who Is Harry Nilsson? (Review)
Lorber Films, 2010, Not Rated

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat (12-15-10)
. . . . . . .

Harry Nilsson was a late-1960s/early-1970s Los Angeles-based songwriter’s songwriter — The Beatles adored him and Three Dog Night recorded his “One” — who also had such a fluidly expressive vocal range that he briefly became a best-selling recording artist with both hits that he wrote (“Me and My Arrow,” “Jump Into the Fire”) and ones he covered (“Everybody’s Talkin,’ ” “Without You”). But a weakness for booze and drugs, as well as a reputation for being difficult and ambivalent about success, caused a fade from public view long before he died of heart disease at age 52 in 1994.

On his way down, Nilsson and John Lennon once famously got ejected from an L.A. club for heckling the Smothers Brothers.

For this documentary, which has a wealth of archival footage — as well as excerpts from candid audio interviews with Nilsson about his life — director/writer John Scheinfeld sets out to explore in depth just how strong his artistic accomplishments were. And he doesn’t shy away from the self-destructive aspects of his personality.

A who’s-who of L.A.’s great Boomer songwriters (Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Paul Williams, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson) are on hand to share their opinions and remembrances. (So, too, are the Smothers Brothers.) Richard Perry, the producer of his million-selling breakthrough Nilsson Schmilsson album, offers deep insight into the creation of that classic, as well as some damning opinion about why Nilsson subsequently tried to sabotage that success.

But actually, as you hear the music he went on to make — including a stately album of standards and a lovely song for the movie The Fisher King — you wonder if Perry was right. Nilsson also honorably dedicated himself to handgun control after Lennon’s assassination and tried to do right for his family as he grew weaker from ailments.

Overall, he emerges as a kind, caring but deeply flawed man and a terrific songwriter. Grade: B+

Movie Review: Bong Joon-Ho's "Mother"

By Steven Rosen

Movies, especially suspense movies, have taught us that motherhood isn’t always as nurturing and character-building as it’s cracked up to be. See Hitchcock’s Psycho, which clearly showed how it can be too much of a good thing for some lonely, troubled boys.

Mother, from the gifted South Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host), isn’t Psycho, but its mixture of darkly humorous eccentricity and equally dark psychological anguish (plus some flashes of ugly violence) makes it an impressive film. He has a wonderful eye for composition and lighting, and for staging some scenes to make them seem weird and possibly funny, but then letting them flow into something more dangerous and chilling.

Bong also has one of his country’s most well-known veteran actresses, Kim Hye-Ja, as the mother — a role she has played more sweetly many times in her country, especially on television. Here she is as maternal as a wolf holding off predators from its young — spying on, hunting down, pleading with, crying at and deceiving those who can help prove her 27-year-old son is not guilty of the murder with which he's been charged.

Wandering home drunk one night, her son Do-joon (Won Bin) inadvertently follows a schoolgirl through a rundown urban area. He mumbles some sexual advances, she chases him off and the next day her body is found hanging over a building’s rooftop barrier. Police arrest him, despite the lack of physical evidence, after tricking him into a confession.

As the mother, Kim is an unbridled, emotional force of nature, and Bong emphasizes that by having her walk in pouring rain, or swaying and dancing in an open field as if the wind is moving right through her bones. Her black hair is in constant need of brushing and she wears mostly drab clothing that makes her look weary and tired. It’s a phenomenal performance, especially since she takes it into difficult territory, some of it David Lynch-style erotically kinky and some of it Shakespearean in its tragic overtones.

Director Bong, 40, has such a command of the visual language of film that the key plot point — the revelation — hinges on an editing technique (the fast cutaway) rather than anything in the screenplay. Because it doesn’t announce itself when it happens (it fits perfectly into his overall approach of lots of short, sharply delineated scenes), you’ll probably want to watch it twice to see what you missed. In that regard, Mother is like Michael Haneke’s 2005 thriller Cache. But it’s also a bit of a trick, since you can’t see it coming. (Boon wrote Mother with Park Eun-kyo and Park Wun-kyo — the director wanted a vehicle to show off actress Kim’s capabilities.)

There’s also an unpleasant sadistic strain in Mother — both in its language and depiction of violence — toward high-schoolers, especially when dealing with their views on their sexuality. One girl creates a “pervert phone,” for example, and a boy gets his teeth kicked in during a vigilante-style interrogation about that phone that goes on much too long.

There’s something of an immaculate-conception-gone-wrong nature in the mother’s raising of son Do-joon. She is single, living more or less in squalor in a small city and relies on collecting/bundling herbs and amateur acupuncture for her income. It can’t be much. She smothers her son in love and concern; he still sleeps in her small bed with her.

She's also almost telepathically (and maybe physically) close to him, a relationship Bong establishes early in a scene where he cuts from her chopping herbs to Do-joon being hit by a car in the street outside. When he’s hurt, she’s hurt — she loses control of the cutting blade and cuts her finger. Talk about being a self-sacrificing mom!

But something isn't right with the relationship or with Do-joon, who not only looks child-like, with his Beatle-style bowl cut and boyish eyes, but also because he acts like he’s developmentally disabled. He’s also apparently a virgin. Others call him a “retard,” a slur that provokes him to fight.

Further, he harbors a passive-aggressive hostility to his mother, which she seems to bear like a cross. Boon brings that out in a weird scene in which she watches him urinate on a wall. After he leaves, she even tries to clean up.

If she’ll do that, what won’t she do when he’s charged with murder? She knows he’s innocent, but she also doesn’t really care. “Even if you really did it, you should deny it,” she tells him, after police coerce him into confessing. That outburst comes during one of many dramatic, explosive scenes that take place in the jail’s visiting room. Boon shoots these well — his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, keeps focusing in and out of the little windows in the glass partition to create an otherworldly effect.

Like Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Boon approaches some of the characters with a perverse humor, such as when the lawyer the mother hires bellows to her through a microphone at a karaoke bar. But that offbeat humor subsides as the full dimensions of the nature of the mother-and-son relationship are revealed.

Mother also benefits from a beautifully subtle score by Lee Byeong-woo that features folky, jazzy acoustic guitar. It accentuates the strangeness of the relationships and is used especially well in a late sequence on a bus — a dance scene, strangely enough — that is positively ghostly. It’s a strange final scene for a very strange mother.

From Cincinnati CityBeat; April 21, 2010