Me [right after watching Wanted]: It was stupid.
My friend Laurel: Yeah, but it was cool stupid.
Some of my friends think I’m something of a movie snob, and honestly, I’m not, but people still think my first reaction to the summer movie season is usually running for cover. On the contrary: I happily succumb to its adolescent delights every single year. This summer’s lineup, in particular, is shaping up to be a darn fine one, what with lots of stuff being blow’d up and unchecked CGI abuse everywhere.
An example, as hinted above, of “cool stupid”: Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted. There’s no need to rehash the ridiculous plot here; it’s about an elite fraternity of weaver-assassins with incredible muscle control, but who seem to forget their skills at inopportune moments. It also features Angelina Jolie, who isn’t really called upon to act, because all she needs to do is be there. (She steals scenes using only her lips, glistening crimsonly in the background, even when she’s out of focus.) Wanted is taken from a comic by Mark Millar, but it doesn’t even have the emotional depth of a graphic novel; it’s pure adrenalin-fueled videogame goodness wired directly into your brain. (Come to think of it, it shares an odd narrative resemblance with Kung Fu Panda, though without the cuteness or culinary gracenotes of the latter.)
When I talk about “videogame movies”, though, I’m not talking about such horrors as House of the Dead or Silent Hill, both movies made from video games — stinkers all, except for the hilarious 3D sequence in Doom. And I’m not talking about films that seem like trailers for the inevitable amusement park ride, like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whose entire middle section practically sketches out the roller coaster’s architecture. Wanted, in contrast, seems to play exactly like something on an Xbox 360, complete with bad cutscenes, training sequences where you master different skills (there’s even the equivalent here of a “Retry Mission” do-over), different boss levels, and so on. Wanted has all the thrills of an immersive game practically unhampered by narrative requirements.
There’s a side-effect to all this, of course (and no, please spare me the lecture on movie violence). It has to do, ultimately, with reducing the audience (and the target market) to that of a 15-year old boy. The way the market works — and I’m still surprised by all the attention given to box-office receipts in this country, or who paid who for what and how much at Cannes or Sundance — is that the producers of the cool stupid movies can simply point to the numbers and logically say, “This is obviously what the public wants.” It’s not much of a surprise when the audience isn’t given much of a choice, though. (These movies are also, inevitably, what get exported around the world, to be peddled to folks in Asia as the cream of American cinema; nothing like using bullets to traverse cultural borders.) In turn, similar projects get the green light and the funding, thus fueling the vicious cycle of mediocrity. (There’s a political resonance about this too, about governments and the consent of the governed, but we won’t go there.)
Sometimes, though, it’s exactly what the audience wants. I was certainly one gratified customer. What Wanted actually does most impressively — other than the exhilaration of its action sequences — is to cram the highlights of cult movie-geekery in the last decade into just one film: every mock-ironic torture scene since Reservoir Dogs, the bullet-time sequences from The Matrix (with The Killer and Hard Boiled as its antecedents), Office Space’s bureaucratic tedium, and the sardonic nihilism of Fight Club. There’s surely a kind of art in this. The next time a self-proclaimed movie snob (like me) talks to you about “discerning” audiences, or the “dumbing down” of American cinema, tell them there’s a time and place for cool stupid. It’s summer time after all.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one movie currently in theaters that’s well worth your time, quietly competing for your attention amidst Hellboy 2 and The Dark Knight: Yung Chang’s brilliant debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, on China’s Three Gorges Dam Project. I wrote on my other blog that “Chang has such a remarkable sense of drama and rhythm, for the elegant ebb and flow of the parade of ordinary images before the camera — so much so that it feels less and less a documentary than a narrative feature,” but don’t take my word for it. Here’s the Metacritic review summary, but most illuminating of all is the Angry Asian Man interview with the director.
