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October 23-29, 2008
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Dubya
by Michael Phillips
Payneful to the max
by Michael Phillips
 Dubya
by Michael Phillips
There’s a lot working against City of Ember in terms of its commercial prospects. Among the question marks: an indistinct title, taken from a popular-but-not-epoch-shattering series of books; an apocalyptic vision of the future that resists the usual swells of triumphalism; and dialogue that is markedly free of jaded wisecracks and references to Jerry Maguire or Cops.
Also, it’s good. So it has quality working against it, too.
It’s a little fuzzy in terms of story, and too dour for young kids, but City of Ember comes from director Gil Kenan. He and his designers create a sharply realized and fantastically rich underground city, held together by cables and wires and string. Kenan made Monster House, also good, also not for the young ones. If he ever lucks into a project worthy of his imagistic strengths that has some populist hooks going for it, look out.
The story plops you down in a rough situation, after the end of the world as we know/knew it. While life above ground regenerates, the citizens of Ember cope with their makeshift contraption of a city, built to last for 200 years. Time’s almost up. The infrastructure’s crumbling. The place is run by a genial fascist of a mayor (Bill Murray, playing it straight and padded with an enormo-tummy).
Children at the age of 12 are assigned jobs to help keep the machine grinding along, amid power blackouts and food shortages.
Saoirse Ronan, a deserved Academy Award nominee for Atonement, plays Lina, who gratefully switches assignments with her pal Doon (Harry Treadaway of Control) so she can become a fleet-footed messenger and he can go to work in the elaborate pipe works.
The rest of the story, adapted by Caroline Thompson from Jeanne DuPrau’s novel, involves a treasure hunt-type secret map and humanity’s salvation. Thompson tosses in a giant sewer mole for a thrill sequence that seems out of place with the rest of City of Ember, but I suppose kids — like movie producers — feel cheated unless something with considerable sharp teeth threatens to chomp a protagonist.
Even with the mole and a conventional shoot-the-rapids climax (taken from the book), I liked the texture, tone and spirit of this movie.
The blend of art direction and computer-generated effects favors the former, not the latter. This is a project wherein you really notice the sets — big, three-story ones, too big for a typical Hollywood soundstage. (The picture was shot mainly in Belfast.) Thompson’s script stumbles a bit expositionally, but who knows? If older kids and adults seek out this picture, which 20th Century Fox and Walden Media clearly aren’t sure how to sell, they may well find themselves drawn into a subterranean world of considerable imagination.
—MCT
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 Payneful to the max
by Michael Phillips
Max Payne offers max pain along with min invention, and the only thing that keeps it out of the bottom of the Dumpster — it’s more of a top-of-the-Dumpster movie — is the presence of Mark Wahlberg, who really ought to line himself up a good project soon, to mitigate the grief inflicted by The Happening and now this joyless, joystickless adaptation of the 2001 video game.
I admit it: If an action film strains to impress an audience, over and over, with slow-motion first-person kill shots, I am not likely to be impressed. But even the target demographic for Max Payne, the ones who spent untold hours working their way through the game, may well resist director John Moore’s film. It’s sluggish as well as hard on the eyes (interiors and exteriors share the same hot, flat, blue-gray schmutzy lighting — stylized in the least imaginative ways). “I don’t believe in heaven,” Wahlberg says in voice-over in the opening seconds, audibly scowling the scowl he wears throughout. “I believe in pain.” Let the games begin!
The plot is essentially a series of “rooms” to be entered so that Payne can lock, load, kill and relock and reload and kill again, and then go back to searching for the scumbag who murdered his wife and daughter. The back story relates to a military experiment gone wrong (first time in the history of cinema!) involving a bright-blue liquid drug, Valkyrie, which gives the user/instant addict the sensation of invincibility and the fierce fighting spirit of the meanest Norse mythological gods around. Max Payne climaxes with Wahlberg taking the drug in order to clean up the mess and take out the trash, and the message is pretty simple: Cool drug, no? Honestly, you find yourself rooting against Payne’s survival, even with a good actor in the hollow role. There’s nothing inside the film’s sour, slovenly spirit of vengeance. It’s as not-there as the fake digital snow falling all over Manhattan.
Initially, Max Payne was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. Director Moore, whose film may be more dull than offensive but is offensive nonetheless, won the appeal, and presto: PG-13, and now 8-year-olds can check it out, or else wait for the “gamer dedicated cut” (hard R, most likely) due in a few months on DVD. “I’m surprised we eventually did get away with what we did get away with,” Moore told gamedaily.com. Meantime, Rachel Getting Married snags an R for a handful of harsh words. The clowns at the MPAA continue to put the bull in “double standard.”
—MCT
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
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