Moon (09, Duncan Jones)

When your primary base of cinematic style is Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are generally two things that your audience will be cued into: your art direction and your profound, ostensibly befuddling message. Given its clean, white, yet mechanical ship interiors and mysterious and often WTF-inducing premise, Moon seems very deliberate in referencing the earliest benchmark. I don't mean to say that Duncan Jones' debut is indelibly linked with Kubrick's classic, but given that most buzz about the movie makes the comparison (as does the film in strange ways that I will discuss later), I think that a comparison between each film's goal might illuminate Moon.

The film's premise is a lot like what the trailer suggests. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut whose corporate sponsored gig is to monitor energy mining units on the surface of the moon. Left alone for a three year mission, Sam's only got 2 more weeks till he reunites with his wife and small child. We witness Sam sending and receiving recorded messages with his family. Oh, he also has a HAL-inspired robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey) to keep him company, a machine with HAL's electric eye but also an LCD screen that displays emoticons to simulate emotion. After an accident on the Moon's surface, Sam struggles to last out his time on the station as he descends into an increasingly bizarre conspiracy.

So, the first act orients the viewer to Sam's isolation, his extreme loneliness, the distance he feels from the world (a touching moment has him sardonically commenting to HQ that their delayed football feed almost felt "live"), and the ambiguous relationship between Sam and the corporate-built robot. Distrust of corporations, technology, the premise of renewable, clean energy as some kind of dubious redemption for mostly malevolent big business that insists on taking the human element from its employees... okay, we have a pretty wide canvas to sketch on here.

And here come the clones...

So, the film puts down another layer, the commodification of human tissue. I guess here is where we get into the "profound" stuff. Big existential crises? Check. Plot turns by the minute? Check. The film moves so fast from plot point to plot point by this time that all of the questions about the evil of corporate greed, energy, etc. fall by the wayside (did I mention that the HAL-inspired robot ends up being benevolent!?!). Duncan's simply too busy running the plot through to take time to address these things. Even though the film plays out in an increasingly gripping way as more and more of the nature of Sam's life become clear, the flick plays it out for its admittedly compelling drama rather than any of the implications. 

The film seems rather content to focus on this emotional level without doing anything with the idea that one could have clones, could be a clone. The film seems too hinged about a classic 3 act structure to do anything interesting. Instead, the film seems to fall back on the evil, faceless corporate inhumanity angle, but because the film's zipping so fast, there's really no comment there other than to say that corporations do soulless things, a message that anyone with enough consciousness to realize that her/his shoes are made in a sweatshop should have had in place before they got to the multiplex. 

There's a certain laziness to the thought behind the narrative, as if Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker decided they wanted to make a "deep" movie but forgot to fill the jar. Even the film's most brilliant idea, throwing an emoticon generator onto HAL, falls completely flat. Seeing that at once, you might think, "Wow, so when HAL turns evil, it will further expose the lack of interpersonal communication and its manipulation that the film also seems centered on." But the electric eye turns out to take a backseat to the good guy smiley faces on the display, a conclusion that seems oddly out of place in the film's insistence on humanity (and no, neither the robot nor Kevin Spacey have any real morals, they're programmed...go watch Terminator 2 already for your feel good robo kicks). 

Because of this inability to focus on any of its implications, Moon is ultimately a very beautiful and often entertaining piece of cotton candy. That the film even doesn't manage to aim as meagerly as Blade Runner in the conceptual department should ring some bells, and Moon ain't half as gorgeous as Blade Runner. 

Public Enemies (09, Michael Mann)

Michael Mann's gone from being an innovator in what is often called the Mtv style of the 80's (think pastels and rain-soaked streets) to one of the most forthcoming in the use of digital video. Whether you liked his 2006 Miami Vice revamp (like me) or hated it (like everyone else), one thing that must be acknowledged is that it doesn't look like any other flick. The smoothness of movement in the format (accentuated by Mann's often questionable choice of having it overtly handheld with bumps and jarring movements within the frame) seems the perfect 21st century counterpart for the high tech equipment and technical garble that Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell spout throughout the movie. So, acknowledging all of this, how does this format work when the setting is switched from 2006 Miami (a place that seems ultra-modern) to Depression-era Chicago? I ask this question primarily because Mann mostly uses the same guns in his holster to shoot Public Enemies. Despite all of the grimy takes on period dramas lately (think The Proposition or, even better, Deadwood), Public Enemies might be the first time that what I'd say is a modern aesthetic was fully applied to a period narrative. Grimy locales and filthy dialogue are surely later takes on that social milieu, but the aforementioned titles are done largely using basic aesthetic strategies. In Public Enemies, Mann takes the sloppy, handheld look and the motion-blurred yet strangely smooth DV motion and applies it to a historical narrative.

"Historical narrative" is the important word here because it's not the narrative or its time period that creates the tension between the new technology and the period piece in Public Enemies. However, the trappings of the historical narrative as applied to film, namely in terms of costuming, art direction, and set design, create a certain disjunction that, I suppose, film could suture in the past with an aesthetic of chiaroscuro lighting, smoke and fog, and the comparatively mirage-like movement created by celluloid. That's not to say that HD digital video and a period setting are incongruous in general, but the scrubbed-clean costumes, the oddly artificial sets, and the studied Hollywood dialogue do not seem to suit this new aesthetic, to an extent that I spent the first forty-five minutes of the film attempting to get used to the style of it. Needless to say, outdoor scenes of action fared better (is there anyone working in Hollywood now who can shoot an action scene as confidently and wonderfully as Mann? Don't think so). 

And when the DV works, Mann approaches creating something like a new aesthetic. The close-ups in this movie are numerous and, owing largely to a talented (and beautiful) cast, rewarding. Individual moments, a great underslung shot of Depp leaping over a teller's booth, have a certain stamp to them that makes one wish Mann would have strove for the whole film to make this kind of sense. Instead, it falls somewhere between a costume drama and a tightly-reined, digitally shot piece of gangster cinema.

I think this conflict is caught in the film's title as well, referencing William Wellman's film and a completely different era of gangster filmmaking. The film's costuming and set design also seem to reference this. Mann almost seems to be working in two modes here, that of the crafter of cold and calculating dramas like Heat or The Insider and that of the melodramatist who seems to resort to stock plot twists or romance subplots to fill in his gaps in characterization in Miami Vice and Collateral. Here, just as in Miami Vice, what could have been a lean crimer is over-inflated and ultimately sunk in an underdeveloped and uninteresting romance angle that does little to characterize its female love interest or develop the male protagonist. In the end, the portrayal of John Dillinger is too thin, alternating between two briefly breathed motivations, that of reckless youth and fame-mongerer. Neither is terribly compelling, and despite a fine performance by Christian Bale, the story of a fed who discovers that her/his methods are uncouth is simply too familiar. The first half hour of this film will be exciting as Mann's characters unfold and the style of it shocks you, but after you get past those buckets of water to the face, you just find yourself bored and wet.