Brandon loved ‘9′

Here’s what he had to say about it:

I first saw Shane Acker’s Oscar-nominated short film on which 9 is based at the Telluride Film Festival nearly five years ago. It was an intriguing film: dark yet captivating, dynamic yet baffling, oddly familiar yet undeniably surreal. The short always felt like part of a much larger whole, so it is no surprise that when visionary director Tim Burton (Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) saw the film, he, together with Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Nightwatch) encouraged Acker to develop it into a feature-length film.

9 opens just after the end of the world. The dark and frightening landscape is one of rubble and half decomposed human corpses. Mighty war machines lay where they fell, apparatuses out of place even in a world of shattered buildings and apocalyptic desolation. Ravenous fires lick at any available fuel source, and an impenetrable shroud of pollutants and ash cloak the sky. Following an all-out human vs. machine war, neither side came away the victor. Reflecting a dictate of modern atomic theory, mutually assured destruction was imminent, and now the surface of the planet is a blight, wiped clean of any living human presence.

In a building located somewhere in the desert of annihilation, a rag doll tumbles off a shelf and somehow comes to life; exactly how this happens, we’re left to wonder. The doll, simply known as “9″ (voiced by Elijah Wood), wakes in a battered lab. He’s made of burlap and sealed by a zipper running the length of his middle. He’s no larger than a child’s action figure with blinking, apertured eyes—like camera shutters. To the newly alive 9, everything is fresh, mesmerizing and astonishing. Yet even he senses something is far from normal beyond the disintegrating walls of his birthplace. By chance, 9 finds a small community of others like himself—diminutive, sentient rag dolls—hiding in the sanctuary of a decimated church, and from them learns to evade a series of monstrous mechanical/animal hybrid wraiths intent on ingesting his and his fellow dolls’ souls. (To reveal how they got their souls would be a spoiler.)

But when 9 learns that there may yet be hope to save those who have already fallen to the beasts, he convinces the others (including 5, voiced by John C. Reilly, and 7, by Jennifer Connelly) to go against the advice of their leader (1, voiced by Christopher Plummer) to leave well enough alone and go on the offensive against a menace that is growing in strength and size.

The casting of Elijah Wood is certainly no accident. 9 is steeped in both the imagery and mythology of The Lord of the Rings, a detail made all the more interesting given the fact that director Acker once worked for Weta digital workshop, contributing to the visual effects in The Return of the King. Watching the tiny figures stumble across a blasted landscape toward a towering structure lit by a red, eye-like light source seems to be a reference to the arduous journey made by a pair of persistent hobbits.

It is far from the film’s only homage. 9 also invokes The Wizard of Oz, borrowing the familiar refrain of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and twisting it to reflect a new, sickening reality—this is not a place where rosy cheeked little girls wake up from Technicolor dreams; this is a horrific, all-too-real nightmare in which all that made humanity unique and special hangs on, literally, by a thread.

The original world Acker creates is both splendid and terrible. Part steampunk (Acker calls his universe stitchpunk), part dystopic fantasy, 9 waves a believable and rich tapestry. Like The Littles, the animated series in the early 80s in which tiny people furnish their lives out of what we all throw away, the rag dolls acquire and reappropriate discarded human objects, using the most innocuous items as the tools and weapons with which they survive. However, it is a creative imperative with a distinctly macabre flipside.

Though the machines were once forged in massive factories, they are now forced to build each other from whatever materials they can scavenge, oftentimes taking on the ghastly appearance of crude, perverted life. The beasts in 9, cobbled together from mechanical scraps, organic remains and found items, are genuinely terrifying. They take the form of prowling cats, complete with sun-bleached skulls; slithering snakes with great hoods hiding cracked doll heads; a pterosaur-like fiend with wings of leather and a scorpion tail; and, of course, spiders. They remind us of the cephalopod-like sentinels in The Matrix.

9 leaves us with numerous unanswered questions. Why make miniature rag dolls in an attempt to save the human race? Who built the first mechanical beast and why? Why is the enemy machine’s brain intent on claiming souls, and how does it do it? Some will see the lack of explanation and back story as appropriately ambiguous, while others may simply find it vexing.

The end of 9, which occurs far too quickly, engages in a bit too much hocus-pocus—a disappointing deus ex machina dénouement. After setting up a world of gears and levers and pulleys, suddenly introducing supernatural elements feels like a magical cheat, an unnecessarily and unwelcome metaphysical bow with which to tie up the storyline. We can see that the film is trying to draw a very clear and wide swath between humanity and machine, but it takes it a step too far.

9 seems to say that technology employed without the application of a human soul is easily corrupted—not a new concept (neither is the sci-fi trope of machines rising up against their human creators), but a valid one. But even this statement grinds against what we are shown—a barbaric humanity that first builds the war machines to decimate their very human enemies. Only later do the machines turn on their masters. Obviously humanity is far from pure and perfect, despite the fact that the end of the film insists that it is the human soul alone that has the integrity to survive and thrive long after humanity itself is ash. But we know better. Machines weren’t the problem. Neither was the so-called dark science that enabled their creation. We were. “We have the power to make [the future] however we want it,” is the film’s closing line. But it is warped and cracked, this image of humanity upon which they plan to remake the world. And history has a devastating way of repeating itself.

Through it all, 9’s visuals are magnificent, its animation breathtaking. It’s all done on computers, but it has a stylized look that resembles stop motion. Animation is one of cinema’s greatest mediums because it is constrained by nothing but the imagination of its creators. While many have bought into the fallacy that “cartoons” are just for kids, many others understand that animation is an unbounded dream world, unfettered by the constraints of physics and the laws of the rational universe. 9 is an enthralling and beguiling step in that direction, a flawed but gripping narrative suffused with wonder, imagination and dread-tinged awe.

HERE’S WHAT I SAY:

OK for young teens, but, unlike “Wall-E,” it never made me care about the characters enough to get involved with their non-stop peril.

I did come up with a much sicker and darker ending: The sock creatures discover they were created by the evil machine to give its Beast playthings to stalk.

Can’t imagine kids would like that one, though.

About Tarantino’s movie, here’s what Brandon said:

Inglourious Basterds is a piece of bravura filmmaking, a scrumptiously over the top revenge fantasy that melds high comedy with tragic melodrama for pure hypnotic effect. I’ve never enjoyed a Tarantino movie more.

Inglourious Basterds begins in German-occupied France with the introduction of Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Jew-hunting Nazi who executes an entire family hiding beneath the floorboards of a small cottage, minus a lone daughter, Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), who narrowly escapes. Shoshanna flees to Paris where she assumes a new identity and sets herself up as the owner/operator of a movie house popular with German soldiers.

Elsewhere, U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) has been put in charge of a company of select soldiers whose mission is not simply to harass and harry the Nazis, but to strike the very fear of God into them. Raine’s men (including director Eli Roth, B.J. Novak and Til Schweiger) are composed entirely of Jewish soldiers known as “The Basterds,” who engage in guerilla style sneak attacks, beating their enemies to death with baseball bats and then removing their scalps as mementos. (This is the sort of war film Sam Peckinpah would have been proud to make.) Naturally, the Germans become appropriately agitated.

When the unfathomable opportunity arises to take out all the leaders of the Third Reich at once, the Allies jump at the chance, pairing Raine’s squad with the adored German actress and undercover secret agent Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) and British film critic turned soldier Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender). As Col. Landa and Lt. Raine are drawn toward an inevitable confrontation, an even greater collision is poised to occur as Shoshanna, hungry for revenge, sets her own wrathful vengeance in motion.

Director Quentin Tarantino has always been a polarizing figure, always been at the very center of the debate as to where homage ends and plagiarism begins. This film won’t be ending that debate anytime soon. Inglourious Basterds, an unrecognizable remake of an Italian film of the same name, is the cinematic offspring of a threesome between a period war film, a 70’s sploitation film and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Though comprised of several chapters that don’t initially appear to belong together, this is probably Tarantino’s most linear film yet.

The American bad boy of cinema is one of the most distinctive directors working today. He has imitators, but no peers. Hit or miss, his films are always unmistakably his own. As a filmmaker, he is so polished that he must actually work hard to appear raw. His films are always extraordinarily entertaining—self indulgent to be sure, but undeniably entertaining nonetheless. His latest is no different.

It has been said that Tarantino is in love with the sound of his own voice, that he enjoys nothing more than to place a handful of his idiosyncratic characters around a table and let them talk for inordinately long periods of time. But when they are given such words to say, can you blame them? While Tarantino’s predilection failed him in Deathproof (not because the writing was bad but because it violated the rules of the grindhouse genre), it is mesmerizing here. Tarantino’s script positively purrs. His language is milk and honey one moment and venomous antifreeze the next, containing not a drop of sentimentality. His plot doesn’t generate razor sharp tension—he accomplishes that with his words alone.

Tarantino has once again created characters who refuse to be overlooked or forgotten. Brad Pitt’s over-the-top mannerisms and appalling southern accent creates a (mostly) intentionally cartoonishness which works… eventually. Of all the Basterds, he alone is allowed this revelation. The remainder of the men are painted with broad, stereotypical brushes. We don’t ever get to know them. They are not the Dirty Dozen with back-stories to endear them to us or convenient handles for our sympathy. They are Jews there to butcher Nazis and that’s all we need to know about them. The one Allied solider who is given lavish time is Fassbender’s Lt. Hicox, a walking mix of preening Anglo arrogance and chiseled good looks. How amazing is Fassbender, that an actor of his stature and appearance could be such a chameleon, staring in 300, Hunger and now Inglourious Basterds and not be readily identified in any film.

Tarantino also continues a tradition he started with his earliest films, creating devastatingly strong female characters (does anyone create stronger?), especially that of Shoshanna who comes face to face with oblivion and turns into an relentless wraith of vengeance as a result. But she is not an automaton; beneath her cold, resolved exterior beats the heart of a terrified and wounded child.

None of these characters, however, are even remotely as interesting as that of Col. Hans Landa. Christoph Waltz, in his first English speaking film, is absolutely spellbinding, breathing life into a true villain for the ages. We love to hate him, a multi-dimensionality that is not exactly humanizing, but does grant him a certain autonomy from his own abhorrent wickedness.

Yet even Landa is not the star of Basterds. That coveted place belongs to cinema itself. Tarantino litters his film with dozens of pop cinematic references, some overt and some obscure. Sometimes he is elucidating a moment; other times he is simply showing off. The cinema has never been just an entertaining diversion for Tarantino—it has the power to create and to destroy and he proves it here more than in anything else he’s ever made. Basterds is a film in which the climax takes place in a theater, in which movie stars and film critics play pivotal roles and in which film literally saves the day and perhaps ends a war.

Like the brilliant but troubling Leni Riefenstahl, the actress and filmmaker who immortalized Adolf Hitler in Triumph of the Will and is invoked throughout Basterds, Joseph Goebbels has created a film of unadulterated hero worship, Nation’s Pride, an ode to carnage on a colossal scale about an episode of extreme violence made respectable by soft filters and key lights. The film, about the heroics of lowly private (Daniel Brühl) who in real life has taken a touching interest in Shoshanna, is an attempt to distil the jingoistic essence of Nazi Germany into a singular piece of high art. The gory irony then is that film is both literally and figuratively a combustible material that, in the end, turns on it creators and consumes them. Just as a holy God wreaked vengeance on the Nazis for violating the sanctity of his Ark of the Covenant with their unmitigated hubris in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so too does Tarantino give us an ending in that same epic vein—full of larger-than-life wrath, a sort of wish fulfillment judgment day.

Tarantino gives us exactly what we want, a revenge fantasy we can feel good about. After all, if you can’t find satisfaction in killing Nazis, where can you find it? If this is immoral, it nevertheless reflects the audience’s (and I dare say the director’s) own dark and perverse desires. Ultimately, the film abandons reality for an alternate history in which the audience gets to remotely participate in the wartime denouncement they’ve always dreamed of seeing. Tarantino sees no disconnect in any of this. He feels no obligation to treat the Nazis any differently than he would any other characters he’s written over the years and he obviously feels no obligation to history either. This stance—which will disturb some and thrill others—is just the sort of balsy, audacious, foolhardy posturing that makes Inglourious Basterds one of the year’s most magnificent and controversial experiences.

I AGREE WITH BRANDON ON THIS

Cartoonish, but brilliant. A revenge flick worth cheering over.

One thing what occurred to my friend Barry as we were watching this is that by showing Hitler laughing his butt off at a film that’s nothing but pure violence, Tarantino is making a comment about both him and his sadistic audience (us!)

Very clever.