Tag: Robert Rodriguez

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Alita: Battle Angel

Today’s useful Hollywood term is “development hell.” That’s the phase of production between ostensible green lighting and the start of actual filming. When all goes well, that’s called “pre-production.” But when it doesn’t go well, you go to development hell, and you can stay there for a really, really long time. Mad Max: Fury Road is an extreme recent example. George Miller was stuck in development hell for 18 years — with production sidelined by things like 9/11, Mel Gibson’s legal problems, and an unexpected rainy season in the Australian desert. The result was one of the greatest sci-fi action films of all time. But the more common outcome of a stint in development hell is either fatal bastardization or outright cancellation.

James Cameron first decided to adapt Yukito Kishiro’s Alita: Battle Angel in 1999, the year after Titanic put the director on the “top of the world.” For the next two decades, Alita was going to be Cameron’s “next project.” But there were detours along the way, to the alien planet Pandora for Avatar in 2009, and then to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, because he just wanted to go there. Eventually, Cameron decided to devote his directorial time to making Avatar a franchise, and he recruited Robert Rodriguez to helm Alita. And now, two decades and an estimated $175 million later, Alita finally hit the IMAX screen.

Rosa Salazar (above) stars at the eponymous antimatter-powered hero in Alita: Battle Angel.

I’ll have to admit, I had pretty low expectations going in. Cameron has made some unassailable classics, but Avatar always felt to me more like a technology demonstration reel for the 3D cinematography and motion capture systems he developed than a fully realized film. Rodriguez, likewise, is a first-wave indie hero who has done some great work (Spy Kids is fabulously underrated), but seems to have been coasting for the last decade or so (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For should have rotted in development hell). My expectations, I’m happy to say, were greatly exceeded.

Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens in what looks like a teenaged girl’s room. She has no memory of who or where she is, but her body, while human-shaped, is robotic. She discovers she is the pet project of Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz), a cyberneticist living in Iron City in 2563. Three hundred years ago, there was a terrible war that ended with The Fall, in which all of the Earth’s massive floating cities came crashing to the ground, killing billions. The only one that survived was Zalem, which now hangs over Iron City like a storm cloud filled with rich fascists. Iron City is their heavily populated junkyard, which they rule from afar with a murderously heavy hand. The only sure-fire way to get from the slums to Zalem is by becoming the grand champion of motorball, a kind of combination of NASCAR and soccer played by cyborg gladiators on inline skates.

Alita’s initial quest to find her identity takes us through the war between the United Republic of Mars technocracy and Earth’s oppressive oligarchy. The flying city built at the bottom of a broken space elevator, keeping the huddled masses in line with a fully privatized justice system where police have been replaced by bounty hunters, provides the class war metaphor. In a conflict-scarred world where cybernetic implants are ubiquitous, there’s a lively trade in stolen artificial body parts. This proves perilous for Alita, when it is revealed she is an advanced, antimatter-powered cyborg, and thus greatly in demand. It’s refreshing to see a new world, not based on a Marvel hero or Star Wars, that feels integrated and lived-in. The story, adapted from five years worth of manga and who knows how many script drafts in the last two decades, ends up feeling episodic as Alita explores the aspects of her fallen world.

Perhaps Alita would have felt more timely had it been made when originally planned, back when the kick-ass kawaii girl still felt Buffy fresh. Ghost in the Shell covered similar thematic territory, but Alita is superior in every way. Salazar is a natural, and, thanks partly to a patiently paced first act, she really grows on you by the time the stakes are the highest. Rodriguez avoids grossly sexualizing his heroine, even while she navigates her tragic teenage love story.

What holds the whole project together is the incredible visuals, which push Cameron’s 3D IMAX tech to its limits. Iron City has layers upon layers of architecture, built up as the centuries passed and technology advanced and retreated. Flashbacks take us to a spectacular battle on the lunar surface. If world building is your thing, Alita is your movie.

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Film Features Film/TV

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

The modern era of digital cinema that began 21 years ago with Steven Spielberg’s photorealistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park came of age in 1999 with Star Wars:The Phantom Menace. At the time, George Lucas said he believed digital cinema would allow filmmakers to work in a more “painterly” fashion. No longer constrained by what they could make happen in front of a camera in a real space, directors could let their images run wild. Many subsequent big budget science fiction and fantasy films, such as Alphonso Cuarón’s Gravity, have had more in common with animation than with traditional narrative cinema. But animators have from the beginning been willing to push their form to its limits, while films that starred humans have almost always focused on looking believable, especially if the stories they told were fantastic.

Among the very few who are willing to test the visual extremes that digital cinema could achieve is Robert Rodriguez. The man who once sold his body to medical experiments to finance El Mariachi now commands a legion of digital artists, and he has no compunctions about deploying them aggressively. In Sin City, his 2005 collaboration with comics old master Frank Miller, he made one of the few comic book movies that actually looked like a comic book. He put Miller’s visually striking, hard-boiled world in motion, and catapulted Jessica Alba to the A-list in the process. Sin City had no interest in photorealism, and its striking black-and-white compositions are like nothing else before or since. The sequel, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, often equals the original’s visual bravado, but ultimately falls short of its potential.

Reprising their roles from the original are Alba as Nancy, the stripper with a heart of gold; Mickey Rourke as Marv, the musclebound psycho with a heart of gold; Rosario Dawson as Gail, the warrior prostitute with a heart of gold, and Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, Sin City’s crime patriarch with a heart of lead. Newcomers this time include Eva Green as Ava, the titular dame to kill for; Jeremy Piven as a wisecracking detective; and Joseph Gordon Levitt as Johnny the supernaturally lucky gambler. A series of cameos include Bruce Willis as the ghost of Hartigan, the last good cop in Sin City who was killed off in the last installment; and Christopher Lloyd as an underworld doctor.

Like the original, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is episodic. But the 2005 installment’s brutal short stories added up to a satisfying whole, while the sequel is an incoherent mess. Comics are the ultimate auteur’s medium, and having total control over every aspect of a world seems to drive creators insane in a special way. They retreat into the fantasy worlds they create and lose sight of what it means to be an ordinary human. That’s why the deep empathy of comics artists such as Scott Pilgrim’s Brian Lee O’Malley are so treasured. Even in today’s comics-obsessed cinema, Edgar Wright’s 2010 O’Malley adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, is one of the few films outside of the Sin City franchise to go outside the realm of the real, pointing a way forward for comic book moves.

But A Dame To Kill For‘s Miller-penned script points only backwards. The exaggerated noir tropes that were fun in 2005 are just grindingly grim now. All of the men are hard-drinking, scrappy fighters motivated by revenge. All of the women are burlesque dancers, whores, or femme fatales, which is to say, in Miller’s mind, all the same. Everyone swigs vodka straight from the bottle and rockets around in awesome vintage carts before getting thrown from windows by invincible foes until it becomes hard to care about who’s doing what to whom. Miller’s comic works, which include Batman: The Dark Night Returns and The 300, have been hugely influential on both comics and film, but A Dame To Kill For cements Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises as the last good grimdark comic movie, and no amount of hoochie dancing or beheadings can save it from a descent into tedium.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.