Ben Shoemate's Notebook

This week an intriguing new film, Utopia in Four Movements, screened at Sundance. It explores the way people in the past imagined the future. We can't wait for it to bust out of the festival circuit.

So far only a few handfuls of people have seen the film (a "live documentary," screened with performances by San Francisco musician David Cerf and Brooklyn band the Quavers).

Utopia looks at various disparate seeming images and issues — Lenin's revolution, the J,G. Ballard/George Romero-like abandonment of the world's largest shopping mall, Esperanto and nudist communes.

Peggy Orenstein touched on the movie in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, "The Coast of Dystopia," about how economic and cultural pressures were moving California out of the "utopia" category:

This month, Sam Green, a documentarian who, like me, is a Midwestern transplant to the Bay Area, will screen "Utopia in Four Movements" at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie explores early-20th-century faith in a perfectable, socially engineered future - for instance, that adopting Esperanto as a universal language would put an end to war. "In general, that joy in imagining the future doesn't happen anymore," Green told me. "People can only envision it as a continuation of current problems. And in California, rather than having this fantastic notion of what could be, people are now just trying to hang on. It's such a lowering of ambition and expectation."

Here is a whimsical interview with Green — whose The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award — on The Rumpus, and here a video interview with the director on the world's largest shopping mall.

Here is a slide show of images.

Utopia, of course, means "nowhere" or "not place" in Greek, so it's no surprise that this impulse for perfection doesn't always end well.

Images courtesy Utopia in Four Movements

Chinese writers condemned Avatar, a branch of the Russian communist party condemned it, the Vatican has weighed in, and other groups are endlessly debating its political meaning. What makes people respond so strongly to this flick? It's the realism.

But how can such a blatantly fantastical movie be realistic? This is a movie about blue cat people who ride dragons and bond with six-legged horses. The whole thing takes place on the moon Pandora, whose lush mega-forest is actually wired up with synapses so that the moon can think like a giant brain. Plus, one of the most memorable features of Pandora, other than its bizarre flora and fauna, are its floating mountains that hover inexplicably over a weird magnetic anomaly that's never explained.

Nevertheless, this is realism of the highest order. I'm not just talking about the special effects, which are as close to photorealistic as you can get with computer animation. I'm also referring to the extreme levels of detail in the way director James Cameron presents this world. He's said in interviews that he thought about everything from handles on boxes (they need to fold in to get through narrow doorways on spaceships) to how the six-legged horses would breathe (through airholes in their necks). Pandora and the human military base aren't just vaguely sketched-in concept art that we view in backgrounds. They are vividly realized, and our brains rarely have to fill in little details to flesh out the fantasy of being on another world. All those details are already there.

Avatar's realism goes beyond visual effects, however. While Cameron's dialog in this film may not be the most complex, his depiction of relationships between the characters is. Cameron easily evokes the kinds of relationships that form between soldiers on a base in a hostile land, and between scientists on a dangerous assignment. We immediately understand why Sully is loyal to the military at first, and it's easy to understand why he's able to fit into Na'vi society so easily: He's a trained soldier, and the Na'vi respect warriors. Sully and his comrades come across less as epic heroes and more as the confused, angry, lustful, and occasionally righteous humans we meet every day. They may find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, but they're not megabeings on a date with destiny.

It's worth noting that Cameron has long been a master of bringing a believably awkward human realism to his science fiction scenarios. The comraderie in Aliens between the marines, full of dirty jokes and bullet-riddled bonding, was hardly the stuff of outer-space adventure heroism, but it worked. People who've seen the movie years ago still remember both the minor and major characters because their tight-knit unit was so vividly portrayed. The family relationships in Terminator 2 were similarly believable. John Connor is a squeaky-voiced geek and his mother an unstable badass - even when they tangle with unbelievably futuristic robots, we never forget the relatably mundane details of John's life as a foster kid whose coolest possession is a dirt bike.

Given the intensity with which people have responded to Avatar, it would seem that Cameron got his wish for a fully-immersive fantasy that felt real. The problem - or maybe the benefit - is that when something feels so real, people react to it much more strongly. Instead of enjoying the movie as fantasy, they find themselves asking, "What if this were real? What would it say about my life?"

It's this kind of realism that has inspired Chinese people evicted from their homes to call the plight of the Na'vi their own. It's what turned representatives of the Vatican into film critics, evaluating whether this piece of fiction undermined Christianity with its portrayal nature-worshiping aliens. And it's what inspired me to write an essay several weeks ago about the race politics of a story about blue people. Even though we are well aware Avatar is fiction, all of us are behaving as if the events in this movie are woven into the fabric of our real lives.

If anything, Avatar has reminded us that realism isn't just the purview of drama, or even of science fiction that bends over backwards to get physics right. Realism is in the details of worldbuilding. It's about making a fictional space look as messy and complicated as our homes and neighborhoods do. Remember that scene in Avatar when the science team is fleeing the military to a remote lab, and when they arrive things are kind of broken and dusty and there's crappy food in the fridge? That felt like a more realistic environment than most of the "real life" spacious city apartments I've seen in dozens of so-called realistic dramas set on Earth in the present day.

Perhaps, for this reason, it was too easy to imagine ourselves into the world of Avatar. Maybe we are overreacting to what is after all a fictional story. Or maybe this film is a reminder that stories, when told realistically enough, can change people's minds and lives. And that isn't always a bad thing.

When District 9 director Neill Blomkamp makes his next film, he won't have a $100 million budget. Instead, he'll keep making films on the (relative) cheap, because it's the only way to make science fiction movies with creative freedom.

In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, Blomkamp made it quite clear that he wants nothing to do with $100 million budgets and major studio releases. The reason for this, he explains, is that he wants to be able to tell his own stories in his own way, and that just isn't possible when such massive amounts of money are involved. He cites this overwhelming need for studios to protect their investment as the main reason why almost all science fiction films are either adaptations, sequels, or reboots.

Blomkamp's observations weren't limited to the purely financial. He also delved into how these considerations affect the creative side of science fiction movies:

I think about this a lot – a hell of a lot actually – and how it plays out within the genre of scifi and horror. This concept of "Where does that fiction [in its source material form] come from?" If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from. But go back and look at something like [Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel] "The Forever War" – that is very much rooted in his experience in Vietnam, that's where the stimulation comes from. And that's my goal, really, is not to draw from other films in terms of the overall inspiration and stimuli. You can in terms of design and tone and stuff, certainly, but not in terms of the idea and the genesis of that idea.

In terms of his own future making movies, Blomkamp reflected on his process promoting District 9 as a template for what he hopes to achieve next time. Since District 9 cost relatively little to make, it didn't need to attract a particularly wide audience for it to be a financial success; the fact that it did become something of a minor mainstream hit was just a nice bonus. Blomkamp felt fairly comfortable that the film would do all right financially after it enjoyed such a positive reception at Comic Con. As long as his movies can keep finding an audience with genre fans, he feels confident he can keep making movies for the foreseeable future.

Blomkamp concluded the first part of the interview with his thoughts on what he was trying to say in District 9 and whether he feels audiences understood his messages:

For the most part, "District 9" is absolute popcorn. It's absolute fluff compared to how serious those real-life topics are. The topics in the film are on my mind all the time and they're very interesting to me. The bottom line is "District 9" touches on 1% of those topics in terms of how severe they could be portrayed, and I knew that when I made it. But people got the messages. Xenophobia, racism allegories – they got all of it. I don't think the film was misunderstood. Not everybody loved it. Nigerians weren't happy. They were pissed. And I suppose that's fair enough because I directly named them and they don't come off well in the film. But that was part of the whole satirical nature of the film. And that conflict, well, that's a South African thing.

The rest of the interview will be published on the L.A. Times blog in the near future.

[Hero Complex]

This was a year of extremes: huge CG-heavy spectacles and low-budget gems. Most of all, 2009 made us feel the boundaries of cinema were stretched... for good and ill. Here are the 10 best and 10 worst films of 2009.

Best:

10. The Road

One of the most significant SF-themed literary novels of the past decade, Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic epic, was adapted into an arthouse film starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. And while the novel's themes didn't quite work as well in a movie format, and we had serious issues with the movie's sentimentality, we still found the movie's post-apocalyptic vision compelling. In an era where the apocalypse strikes inside cinema with alarming regularity, this was the grimmest and most unflinching look at a world where every ounce of green, and almost every spark of human kindness, has been destroyed.

9. Gamer

This film, on the other hand, may have boasted slightly less of a literary pedigree. But if you love over-the-top, crazy exploitation films with a satirical edge — and we certainly do — then this tale of remote-controlled killers and sexbots will surprise you. It's easy to see why Gamer never got its props: It's crude, nasty, and full of day-glo wigs. But its plot, about a new biotech called "Nanex" that can replace your brain cells with remote-control devices that can never be removed, is creepy. And the architect of this evil scheme to own your brain? Is Dexter (Michael C. Hall). Who does a song-and-dance number about how much he enjoys yanking your synapses around. Really.

8. Coraline

Veering back towards literary adaptations, there's Henry Sellick's gorgeous version of Neil Gaiman's Hugo award-winning horror/fantasy book. Forget Avatar — this was the most visually striking use of 3-D this year, and it was in the service of a story that felt like a classic fairy tale.

7. Drag Me To Hell

Thank goodness Sam Raimi decided to take a break from Spider-Man movies and return to his horror roots, with this amazingly snarky, Evil Dead-esque journey into the heart of class insecurity. Charlene, a young loan officer at a bank, is desperate to advance up the corporate ladder and escape her hick past, not to mention impress her boyfriend's snobbish family. So she decides to deny a home loan to an old woman — who turns out to be the wrong person to mess with. As we said in our review, "Like all good horror, Drag Me To Hell takes real-life fears, dresses them up in blood-soaked costumes, and sets them running."

6. Paranormal Activity

As we mentioned, this was the year of low-budget movies that focused on a few unforgettable characters, and this film managed to turn a low budget into maximum scariness. As we wrote in our review, "Nothing ever felt like padding or gratuitous "we're going to amp up the tension with cheap jolts" bullshit. The terror was raw and real - all the more so because it was so understated." But the real horror in this film is the dysfunctional relationship at its core, between a woman stalked by a demon and the boyfriend whose antics wind up making things much worse.

5. Zombieland

This post-apocalyptic comedy swept us away with its cool style points — Columbus' rules for surviving the zombie apocalypse, Tallahassee's creative zombie-killing techniques — but it really won us over with its clever romance between Columbus and Wichita, and the way it conveyed the experience of geeky coming of age against a chaotic backdrop. Like all the best road movies, it's about the journey.

4. Avatar

James Cameron's long-awaited out-of-body-experience movie was everything we were expecting: It was just as clunky and preachy as his original "scriptment" suggested it would be, and the native peoples were just as much of a "noble savage" stereotype as we'd expected. But it was just as beautiful and thrilling as we'd expected, too. People have been in the habit, lately, of saying that Avatar has great special effects and a terrible story — but in addition to the incredible CG world-building, the film also does have some thrilling performances from Sigourney Weaver and Sam Worthington, in particular. It's not just the cool flying dragons that suck you in — it's the characters.

3. Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry's optimistic space opera needed a long rest after the blunders that were Enterprise and the last two movies. In fact, we weren't sure Trek's tired old saws ever needed to be brought back. But J.J. Abrams somehow managed to make Trek seem fresh again, mostly by giving Kirk and Spock a new backstory. Unexpectedly, we found ourselves caring what happened to these guys again, and the scene where Sarek finally admits he married Amanda because he loved her is surprisingly powerful. For the first time in too long, Star Trek became a universe where anything could happen — even the destruction of Vulcan. Who knew Trek could be unpredictable?

2. Moon

Sam Rockwell brought enough conviction and character for twenty actors to this story of a lonely worker trapped in a lunar mining outpost. His loneliness and brushes with madness are captivating — and that's even before there turn out to be two of him at once. By the time this psychological thriller unravels into a story of an evil corporation treating its workforce as a disposable commodity (literally), we're so wound up into Sam Bell's loneliness and yearning to go home that the fate of both Sams becomes more urgent than the fate of entire worlds.

1. District 9

It's easy to think of this film as just a polemic against Apartheid and the mistreatment of refugees — but the story of aliens herded into shantytowns is much more than that. The story of Wikus Van De Merwe, a total bastard who enjoys watching alien children pop like popcorn, feels uncomfortably like our story. After Wikus gets infected with some kind of alien goo, he starts to discover what it's like to be one of the downtrodden aliens, but this revelation doesn't particularly make him a more noble person, at least not for most of the movie. Brilliant production design adds to this film's sense of stark realism, and even some ugly Nigerian stereotypes fail to detract from the film's unforgettable portrait of human cruelty and alien family values. This was the film, more than other, that stuck in our heads long after watching it.

Honorable mentions: I really wanted to give a shout out to Men Who Stare At Goats and Push, two films that got unfairly panned this past year. Goats is way more fun than people gave it credit for, and had occasional moments of total brilliance, especially from Jeff Bridges. Push is stylishly shot in Hong Kong, full of homages to Wong Kar-Wai, and features world-builiding about mutant powers and secret organizations that feels lived-in and clever.

Worst:

10. Surrogates

This film could have been terrific — based on a brilliant graphic novel written by Robert Venditti, this "shut-ins go out in robot bodies" epic is a potent metaphor for our relationship to technology. Unfortunately, the film version, starring Bruce Willis, is a cluttered, clunky mess. It's every dumb action-movie set piece jammed together with bits of chewing gum, plus an incredibly preachy screenplay that doesn't trust the audience to reach conclusions on its own. And that's really the worst sin a dystopian movie can commit: force-feeding us messages, because the dystopia isn't powerful enough to reach us on its own.

9. The Fourth Kind

Even as Paranormal Activity was making the Blair Witch-style "real-life recordings" vibe seem fresh again, The Fouth Kind was trying to pass off fake alien abduction tapes as real, and unfortunately the film-makers put more effort into trying to hoodwink the press than they did into crafting a compelling movie. The actual film is a mish-mash of bad "archival" footage, unscary alien abductions, and flaky plot twists like the idea that a professor can speak ancient Sumerian because he's seen some texts.

8. New Moon

There's something to be said for a book and movie franchise that has converted so many new people, especially girls, into SF/fantasy lovers. But still, this movie slathered us with cheese and bored us with long stretches of Bella moping after Edward, who's decided they can't be together. Edward starts appearing to Bella, Obi Wan-like, as she becomes an adrenaline junkie and runs around with shirtless Jacob. The moments where the film winks at the audience, or veers into outright self-parody, can't quite make up for the goopiness of much of the rest.

7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

If we had a crane with a camera on it following us around all the time, we would feel tempted to look up at the ceiling and howl as well. Where can we get one of those? The fourth film in the X-Men saga continued X3's slide into mediocrity, with too many random mutant cameos and a campy mutant self-discovery plot that felt instantly forgettable, even without a memory-erasing magic bullet. At no point in this endless film do Logan and Sabretooth feel like brothers, and we don't really care which one of them kills the other. Is there any way that Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool movie can make up for this disaster? We can only hope.

6. The Time Traveler's Wife

We loved Audrey Niffenegger's clever, disciplined time-travel novel just as much as we hated the schlocky, smug movie version. The film excised some of the coolest parts of the novel, and substituted a lot of cookie-cutter romantic-dramedy whininess and angst. What was a classic love story, as well as a insightful look into the way in which we're all time-travelers because we're constantly reliving our pasts and dreaming of our futures, becomes a mindless (and heartless) exercise in pouting as character development. All the more disappointing, because it had such great material to work with.

5. 2012

It's tempting to give this film a free pass, because who expected greatness, or anything other than explosions, from Roland Emmerich's umpteenth disaster film? But it's worth calling out this film for its brain-dead destruction porn and focus on special effects to the total exclusion of characters, or anything really. Bad science, bad writing, bad acting... but most of all, it's kind of boring, and you really have to turn off your brain to enjoy any of it. To quote from some of the comments in our review: "I didn't care who lived or died," "I felt dead inside," "My problem with this movie isn't the rampant destruction, but the boringness in between."

4. Knowing

Making fun of a Nic Cage movie these days almost feels like challenging a dyslexic to a spelling bee. But really. This film was so insultingly bad, that we can't let it slide. Cage plays a college professor, whose idea of teaching astrophysics is to hold model planets and say stuff like, "Hey, man. The sun is like, really, really hot. Did you ever think that maybe things happen for a reason?" It's like stoner astrophysics 101. And then he gets hold of a time capsule from the 1950s that's full of numbers which somehow predict every disaster, including the end of the world. Even if you can ignore coincidences like a plane crashing next to the highway where Cage is driving, you'll be clutching your head by the time this movie's final plot twist is revealed. If this is Knowing, then ignorance really is bliss.

3. Pandorum

Zombies infest a spaceship — how could that be bad? Well, um... how about if it's zombies on a spaceship where Dennis Quaid is doing a crappy pastiche of Fight Club? How then? We never knew space madness could be so boring. Actually, the biggest problem with this film isn't Quaid's endless freak-out, or the random cannibal guy who's diagrammed the entire plot in graffiti, it's the boredom. The makers of the film seem to have mixed up suspense with "nothing happening for long stretches," as our heroes skulk around dark tunnels endlessly. It could have been so much better, if the themes of reclaiming your pride as an officer and sticking together had been foregrounded. Even a cool ending can't save this stew.

2. Terminator Salvation

We debated whether to include T4 among the worst letdowns of the past decade — but there were already so many from 2009 on the list. It's shameful to admit it now, but we expected more from this film, thanks to the reunion of The Dark Knight's star and writer, Christian Bale and Jonathan Nolan. Instead, what we got was the giant head of Helena Bonham Carter delivering exposition. Sam Worthington does his best with the role of Marcus Wright, who discovers he's a cyborg, but he's hobbled by a nonsensical plot. And Bale is a major disappointment as John Connor — it's hard to believe anyone could make us miss Nick Stahl.

1. Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

We celebrated this film as the ultimate apotheosis of Bunuel-style surrealism, but if you're expecting it to make a lick of sense, you might as well expect ants to climb out of your hand. Honestly, 2012 only wishes it could be as dumb, as massive — and yes, as boring — as this clunker. These robots can turn themselves into anything — except for compelling characters. And unlike 2012, in which the action set pieces are the punctuation in between long boring sequences, this film's action sequences are the most boring part, because it's hard to tell what's supposed to be going on, and we don't really care anyway. If 2009 was the year that giant CG rainbow showers finally conquered movie screens, then Transformers 2 was the worst offender.

Quite a few people will be taking in 3D movies this holiday season, and quite a few of them will leave the theater with headaches. Avoid getting a 3D-movie-induced headache with this simple trick.

Movie-centric site Shadow Locked put together a simple guide to avoid getting a headache when you go see a 3D movie. First, you have to understand why many people get the headache in the first place. In traditional 2D cinema, the out of focus areas of a scene often have interesting details and information in them that we've been conditioned to look at—the spooky shadow in the background, the action occurring behind the hero, and so on. When elements of the picture appear 3D to us however, our brain gets confused when we try to look at the background details and the background fails to come into focus.

The trick to avoiding the headache? Ignore your experience with 2D movies and stay riveted to the in-focus action. When watching a 3D movie, whatever is right in front of you and in-focus is what you want to be paying attention to—focusing on the background details for too long triggers headaches and disorientation.

Have a tip or trick for enjoying your movie going experience? Let's here about it in the comments.

Iron Man may have seemed as polished as fresh power-armor, but the movie actually had no screenplay at all, says Jeff Bridges. The chaos freaked him out, until he decided to think of it as a $200 million student film.

In an interview with InContention, Bridges explained that the Marvel superhero movie rushed into production to make its release date, with the director and star making up scenes as they went along:

"They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn't know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, 'You got any ideas?' Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on."

Bridges, director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. would literally act out sequences during primitive rehearsals, Downey taking on Bridges's role and vice versa, to find and essentially improvise their way to full scenes, the actor recounts. Bridges says that the entire production was probably saved by the improv prowess of the film's director and star.

"You've got the suits from Marvel in the trailer with us saying, 'No, you wouldn't say that,'" Bridges continued. "You would think with a $200 million movie you'd have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script, ‘Oh, we'll have the script before that time,' and they don't have their shit together.

"Jon dealt with it so well," Bridges continues. "It freaked me out. I was very anxious. I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines, man, that's my school. Very prepared. That was very irritating, and then I just made this adjustment. It happens in movies a lot where something's rubbing against your fur and it's not feeling right, but it's just the way it is. You can spend a lot of energy bitching about that or you can figure out how you're going to do it, how you're going to play this hand you've been dealt. What you can control is how you perceive things and your thinking about it. So I said, ‘Oh, what we're doing here, we're making a $200 million student film. We're all just fuckin' around! We're playin'. Oh, great!' That took all the pressure off. ‘Oh, just jam, man, just play.' And it turned out great!"

First off, that's amazing that he called them "suits." He really is The Dude. And second, this is just hilarious. I can't believe they let Robert Downey Jr. and Jon Favreau just run with this stuff. But, thank goodness they did, because what came out was a pretty great action flick blended with biting humor. Still I can't imagine what it must have been for everyone else on set. [InContention via Worst Previews]