marblespire Reviews

Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

Everything good about this movie happened off-screen.

[16 January 2003]

I'm serious.

What do I mean by that?

Well, what I mean is that all the really interesting elements of 'Thir13en Ghosts' were accomplished Before and After the camera rolled.

For one, the house. The house is simply a MASTERPIECE of design, function and plain-out coolness. It has to be seen to be believed--and even then, you may still have some trouble. Whoever designed it knew EXACTLY what they were doing.

For two, the design and execution of the ghosts. Now, I admit, I'm not much of a horror-film person, so my experience is decidedly limited. But the ghosts were very interesting, because, visually, they were extremely striking (with the exception of Ghost #4, the Withered Lover; for plot reasons she had to look reasonably unscathed). According to the "back story" of the film, all the ghosts met violent, ghastly demises, and the character designers tried to create apperaances that would communicate some of that violence. If you ask me, they succeeded.

If there's anything to complain about, however, it's the OVEREXPOSURE of these ghosts. I haven't seen 'Alien' but I'm told the treatment of the alien in that film set a standard in fright movies--show just little bits of it and let the audience's imagination do the rest. 'The Brotherhood Of The Wolf' is a film that actually USED that technique, and it worked quite well. But in 'Thir13en Ghosts' you see several ghosts frequently... And the shock value wears off. Some more subtlety would probably have been wise.

Back to what makes this film good. For three, I've always been a sucker for snappy dialogue, and Matthew Lillard has a lot of good lines. Watching him bounce frenetically off weary, incredulous Tony Shalhoub is a sight to behold. Lillard knows how to overact to good effect, and it works well here. (Why didn't he do it in 'Wing Commander?' The character he played there is the KING of overacting. But that's another story.)

Four: the editing. The movie switches constantly between shots of the 'normal' world and the 'ghost' world--often alternating between slow- and fast-motion. This could be confusing, but, thankfully, it isn't. As proud a movie as 'Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship' lost me during its battle scenes by shaking the camera too much; it's hard to create confusing-but-still-comprehensible images out of fast, flickering action. But 'Thir13en Ghosts' manages it. ...And the rest of it was crap. I went along with the plot only because I wanted to see what would happen next. The characters were the stereotypical Horror Movie Brainless Morons. The music was nothing special, and the sound effects were about what you'd expect from ghosts who have iron cages strapped to their faces. The actors had very little to work with, and their performances were accordingly flat.

But 'Thir13en Ghosts' isn't ABOUT characters, or plot. It isn't even really about scaring the bejeebers out of the audience. It's about presenting striking, interesting visual imagery. It's eye-candy. Maybe the producers tried to make it more than that, but it didn't work, so don't bother, you'll be disappointed. Just drool over the eye-candy. 'Thir13en Ghosts' is one of the most visually creative movies to be released in a long time.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

This is how the series ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.

[10 January 2003]

My best friend and I went to see Nemesis on opening day. We're both unabashed Trekkers and we've been with the series since about half way through NextGen. We went in with high expectations, myself especially; my favorite movie has always been Star Trek VI, and Nemesis looked like it might be able to recapture some of that movie's perfect blend of action, politics and character drama. The fact that Nemesis has been marketed as NextGen's last movie only heightened the parallels in my mind.

What we GOT was a plot that should've been submitted as a 1-hour episode--and been shot down there.

The plot was very simplistic. Here it is, in summary: 1) Picard meets Shinzon. 2) Shinzon shoots at Picard. 3) Picard blows up Shinzon. Oh, God, the excitement. The real drama should've been a contrast between the choices Picard and Shinzon have made, and how those choices shaped them into who they are today. 'Should've been,' because this conflict NEVER EVOLVED. Sure, there was some ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of it, but did the two of them ever really start comparing their lives, justifying themselves, trying to persuade or convince or--might as well admit it--DESTROY the other's identity? No! Neither of them even DOUBTED themselves, which is pathetic. We come to Star Trek to see humans, not superheroes.

I was disappointed with the special effects; they wouldn't've looked out of place on TV. Seriously, what did we have? No writhing energy ribbons; no big 30-on-1 space battles; no cute Data-as-life-preserver moments. Just spaceships throwing energy at each other. Maybe that was cool around the time of the ORIGINAL Star Trek, but nowadays it's par for the course; we want MORE.

(Am I the only person who thought that, when Picard rammed the Scimitar, the ships should've crumpled like automobiles instead of shattering? In the first place, who makes a spaceship out of such brittle metal? Of course, most starships are in fact made of lots of SMALL METAL PLATES, so maybe fragmenting is more realistic. But I honestly expected crumpling.)

I was also disappointed at all the scenes that were cut out, because as far as I can tell, those scenes were the GOOD ones. Furthermore, you could see the holes they had left. My most vivid recollection is in the last conversation between Data and B4. Data says, "I must deactivate you because you have no respect for others," and the audience says, "Wait, when was THAT established? We thought B4 was just reprogrammed by Shinzon, and besides we haven't seen him doing anything worse than spying." You get the feeling that they deleted the scene where B4 went to kindergarten and slaughtered all the cute little kids. Or pledged his soul to Al Qaeda. Or SOMEthing.

One bright spot: I was VERY pleased by Picard's dialogue, at least prior to the Argo scenes. This is quite possibly the first time we have seen the good captain unbend, and it's really refreshing to see him cracking jokes and making fun and being, well, happy. Kudos to John Logan for that; it is, unfortunately, just about the only thing he did really well.

As to the other characters... Wait, WHAT other characters? They were afterthoughts. We were promised a story that would send EVERYONE off in style. Instead we got Picard and 6 co-pilots; if the Enterprise wasn't such a big complicated gadget that it takes at least seven people to run it, Patrick Stewart could've done this movie solo.

Now, before anyone jumps down my throat, I want to say that yes, I DID enjoy this movie. Seeing Picard get to joke around is worth ANY amount of bad plot, in my opinion. But as a writer and a perfectionist, I always look at what a movie COULD have been, and unlike most Star Trek outings, Nemesis fell far below its potential. What could've been a truly gripping psychological drama about the conflict between darker and lighter natures was instead reduced to a action-oriented shoot-'em-up... And not a very good one, either, because of the run-of-the-mill special effects. I mean, Attack Of The Clones ALSO had bad character and plot work, but at least there were lightsabers involved.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Eye Candy But Nothing More

[10 October 2002]

For a movie based on a video game, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was very good. Next to such atrocities as Tomb Raider and Street Fighter, it positively shines, and when compared to the complete gibberish known as the Super Mario Bros. Movie...

Having said that, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within could have been A Lot Better.

If you paid attention to the Final Fantasy games, to any of the hype surrounding the movie, or to the CGI industry in general, you already know the computer animation for this movie is far-and-away the best ever done. Back when Square first started producing the movie in 1998, they were progressing at a rate of about one second of film PER DAY, because of the immense quality of the graphics, and none of that quality was lost as technology caught up and time passed. The backdops are jaw-dropping and the CGI actors look more real than some actual actors. Really simply, Square declared itself the current king of CGI animation. Pixar, Dreamworks, move over--the studio that cut its teeth on PlayStation games is in the house.

Unfortunately, having been a fan of the Final Fantasy games since it first sprouted on the original Nintendo, I'm a little jaded towards visual grandeur. And when you take that away, there isn't much left.

The plot is pretty standard--Earth is a wasteland; most of Terra's population has been wiped out by the unexpected invasion of mostly-invisible aliens called Phantoms. The remaining Earthlings struggle to survive. Aki Ross (the main character) and Dr. Cid (there's been a character named Cid in EVERY Final Fantasy production since 1991) have isolated eight Earthborn Spirits--not ghosts, but tangible lifeforms; one of them is a plant, and don't ask me how the plant has a spirit--that, if combined, can wipe the Phantoms off the planet entirely. With the help of Captain Grey Edwards and his crack band of soldiers, the Deep Eyes (Final Fantasy also has a knack for weird names--I mean, who came up with 'Premium Heart'?), Aki sets off to find, capture and use those eight Spirits. And then finally there's General Hein, a megalomaniac fellow who's just trying to blow everything up using a a very large gun.

No problem there. Anyone who plays Final Fantasy is used to Fetch Quests (in which the main characters perform a service to a ruler, generally retrieving a stolen object of enormous power, in return for help from that ruler). What I want to complain about are the characters themselves.

They are FLAT.

A lot of them die, and we don't miss them except that they don't speak any more lines. Grey and Aki (male and female lead) don't really evolve over the course of the story--and Cid is just there to provide technobabble. Oh, and by the way, there's almost no 'fantasy' elements in this movie, with the sole exception of the Spirits.

My two favorite games in the Final Fantasy series are numbers Eight and Ten. They are my favorites because they have unique, interesting, convincing characters. True, most Final Fantasy games take 40 hours or more to play, giving the writers a lot of time to flesh the characters out, but generally within the first five minutes of being introduced to a character (sometimes within the first few SECONDS, as with Zell and Kimahri) you know most or all there is to know about them--they are already convincing, already realized in the player's mind. Square's GOOD at doing that sort of thing.

If Square had bothered to invent real characters for Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the movie would have SOARED. As it is, it just barely limps along under the power of a few snappy lines of dialogue and a lot of pretty vistas.

It's worth seeing once, for the same reason any museum is worth visiting once--you'll get to see things you've never seen before and may not see again. But if you're like me and prefer your movies to have interesting characters and plotlines, be prepared for a disappointment.

Cowboy Bebop (1998–1999)

An exceptionally well-done anime.

[3 October 2002]

I'm not a big fan of anime. When I hear that word I think of Cartoon Network, of the overly wordy internal monologues from 'Speed Racer,' of the pseudo-interesting transformation scenes from 'Sailor Moon,' of one person rushing at another from what appears to be several hundred yards away in 'Dragonball Z,' of convoluted plots and robots that pull mile-long guns out of thin air in 'Gundam 0083.' It's all overly ridiculous, and in their attempts to look 'cool' a lot of animes instead end up looking stupid.

So boy was I surprised when I first saw 'Cowboy Bebop.'

I'm still in the process of watching all 26 episodes, so I don't know everything about the series, but from what I've seen, it's head-and-shoulders better than any anime out there.

It's a fairly simple premise: around 2020 there was a weird explosion which took out part of Luna and put moon rocks in orbit around Earth in a miniature asteroid belt. Earth was rendered more or less uninhabitable, but the same weird explosion also held the keys to Hyperspace Gates, a safe and reliable form of transportation which the planetless Earthlings used to colonize their solar system. With this expansion came an explosion in the Mafia, the black market, the criminal underworld; to control it, InterStellar Space Police was created. But even the ISSP wasn't enough, and so the Police began to put out bounties on criminals. A subculture of bounty hunters evolved; best estimates suggest that there are over 300,000 in the Sol system alone. They have revived and adopted an ancient title: "Cowboy."

'Cowboy Bebop' focuses on the travels of bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, a tall, lanky martial artist who oozes more style than Baz Luhrmann. He and his partner Jet Black travel the solar system in their ship, the Bebop (hence the title of the show), tracking down bounties and entertaining their audiences again and again. But it's not entirely accurate to say that the show FOCUSES on Spike and Jet, because there are two main characters who join the show in later episodes--Faye Valentine, a sexy, outrageous woman with a shadowed past and no tact (and a wardrobe that the animators seem to enjoy making look like it might fall off at any given moment) and a bizarre 13-year-old girl named Ed (don't ask) who can basically hack into any computer system and provides surreal comic relief on the side. But it's not entirely accurate to say the show focuses on THEM, either, because the star is undeniably Spike. The show starts and ends with his past. What about that past? Ah, but that would be telling.

In a medium where characters routinely jump fifty feet into the air and then produce huge beams of energy from somewhere, CB's realism is welcome and refreshing. The animation is fluid and subtle--watching Spike fist-fight the week's bounty in the premier episode is a sight to behold. It's obvious that the animators have put a lot more thought into realistic movement than they normally do. These cel-bound wonders are mixed with a sprinkling of CGI that would do Babylon 5 proud. All together, it creates a visually appealing mix, made even more endearing by the fact that the laws of physics evidently still apply. Despite his extensive martial arts training, Spike produces no energy beams, makes no Matrix-esque leaps, and more or less keeps his feet planted on the earth, the same as the series does.

Characters are handled exquisitely. With only four characters and 26 episodes to deal with, it's a little easier to keep everything vigorous and interesting, but it's still refreshing to see CB using ALL of its characters in EVERY episode--and generally managing to develop them all too. I know of NO television series where every episode manages to add something new to every character. Frankly, I don't think there is one. That alone says something about CB's quality.

Finally, we have the music. It's no coincidence that the show is named after a style of music, and composer Yoko Kanno has created over three hours worth of lush, diverse, interesting music for the series. In a medium where music is created, thrown away on a weekly basis, and generally only exists to warn the viewer that something significant is going to happen, Cowboy Bebop uses its soundtrack to maximum effect. I've only seen eleven episodes, but I can already point to three or four moments when the music absolutely MAKES the scene, and I've probably missed more.

One thing I should say--Cowboy Bebop, like most animes, isn't really meant as commentary or satire. It is not intended to be socially relevant, to present controversial themes, to make viewers sit up and re-evaluate their lives. It is simply intended to entertain--and that it does. The stories it tells are not unique, but the way they are told is. Strong animation is combined with incredible storytelling and extraordinary music to create an anime unlike any other. One anime reviewer suggested that Cowboy Bebop will be the first of a new genre. This may not be accurate, but it tells you exactly how different and interesting this particular show is.