2012 gave me a Panic Attack

If Roland Emmerich is your movie God, pray not to be marginal or ordinary. Joe the plumber and his ilk are the first to suffer several million terrible deaths in this inexcusable waste of money. The end of earth as a world and culture unifying event? Only in Roland’s mind. If you aren’t a cog in his story-telling machine, you are as good as dead.

With “2012,” Roland “Independence Day” Emmerich has made the most violent film of all time. For almost three hours, the end of human civilization is arbitrarily and graphically depicted. There are no bloody deaths, such realism has no place in a film made by a man who alleged in his previous movie that mammoths, humans, pyramids, and ships all existed at the same time twelve thousand years ago. There is the motif of people being hit with tidal waves and looking peacefully at the camera right before their watery deaths (as was the case more than FIVE times in this stupid movie) continuing. The acceptance of a terrible death by these characters, many of who are major, is an extremely annoying occurrence. This goes back to Emmerich’s God complex: characters die this supposed “merciful” death if Emmerich considers them important, if not, a horrific death awaits. Major characters are ground up in gears and shown graphically and pointlessly drowning.

Emmerich’s latest begins during 2009, when scientists discover that the tectonic plates that make up the earth’s crust (I think) are shifting and behaving erratically, forecasting disaster for humanity everywhere in a few short years. The governments of the world keep this a secret, hoping to use the projected time wisely to prepare for humanity’s survival. However, it soon becomes apparent that even the best predictions are inaccurate, and that humankind is generally screwed. Before a single effects-driven event, we also learn that the wealthy private sector was given the right to buy space on massive “arks,” which are later revealed to be foolish-looking cruise ship-submarine hybrids.

The film follows several characters. There is the main scientist/White House staff member played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is morally conflicted from the beginning about his government’s action yet does nothing really to prevent anything or warn anyone, except his cruise-ship performer father. Danny Glover plays the president of the United States, and Thandie Newton plays his daughter. There is John Cusack as Jackson Curtis, a limo driver/science-fiction author, and Amanda Peet as his ex-wife. The film uses Mr. Cusack’s character as the one the audience is supposed to follow and identify with the most, similar to numerous Emmerich hero-fathers of past films. The main problem with “2012”’s characters are that they are not in fact characters. Everyone in this film is a cog in a machine, with Emmerich’s God-complex soaring to new heights as he plays evil puppet master, sparing people and condemning them with the most arbitrary nature. No character has anything resembling a personality, and the excuse that this is an effects-driven action film is no excuse, even Emmerich’s own past films had great characters without sacrificing the spectacle.

As the film moves on, so to do its characters, trotting the globe most inexplicably given the fact that fuel and resources are now mostly underwater. When our heroes, lead by Jackson Curtis, arrive in China or wherever the arks are being launched from, the passengers and potential survivors of the events of 2012 are revealed to be, not surprisingly, a very homogenous bunch, with the future looking mighty like something Adolph Hitler would’ve imagined. This should be the final insult of the film, but there are still thirty long minutes to go. With its oppressive run-time, shoulder-shrugging approach to the death of millions, and ridiculous happy-and-ambiguous-at-the-same-time ending, “2012” has managed to do the impossible and unseat “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” as the worst film of 2009.

Film Grade: F

Non Combatant

I am not a fighter by nature, in any sense of the word. I stand up for myself, but actual fighting eludes me as a solution to many of my day to day situations. There are things that I believe to be worth fighting for, and fighting against. I'm not talking about other people or their ideas, that scope is far too narrow to include anything I take arms against. I strike against sloth and apathy, in myself. I wage war for cleanliness and comfort. I take pause from any battle for a good-tasting meal. 

Recently I have come into combat with bad films. After a string of articles dishing out the merits of films of a lesser importance, I decided to become a combatant against lousy cinema for a time. This did not mean delving into the stereotypical pool of "classics" that, as my Uncle would put it, "high-minded cineasts" would put forth. I went in to my own backlog of films I had never watched. Impulse buys, thefts, and gifts were all piled up, numbering at least fifty, and I needed to make a dent. So I pulled out a few, and watched.

I started with "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," a meditation on "snitching" amongst criminals, ranging from low to higher ranking. The film followed, arguably more than its title rat, a team of bank robbers, an amateur gun-runner aiming for the big time, and an old, low-level gun broker. The gun broker is the titular Eddie Coyle, who is looking at 3 to five up north (In New Hampshire, Coyle is located in Boston.) Eddie, and most of the film's other criminals, all have a relationship of information-trading with a cop, Foley, and it is this cop Coyle goes to in order to try and get his sentence reduced, for being friends with "Uncle." We meet and see more of Coyle's potential targets for giving up than Coyle himself. Coyle's problems are shown to us in single scenes; one scene at home with the wife and kids, a few with the small-time gun runner, a few with Foley, and a few with fellow rat Dillon, played by Peter Boyle. This makes viewers feel as though they know Coyle intimately, we know him well with only a few scenes. The film is fun to watch, understated in story, with very good visuals. It is a rewarding world of thieves to get sucked into for an hour and forty minutes.

Next was "The Conversation," Frances Ford Coppala's 1974 film starring Gene Hackman. It is a simple-seeming story of a wiretapper, a professional, detached, bugger, Harry Caul, who gets involved in a conversation he tapes, embarking on a hazy, trippy dangerous journey to the truth. A couple may be hurt if Harry hands over his recordings, and this possibility unnerves him to the breaking point. The film is like a horror movie, with garbled audio serving to scare, and dehumanize characters. Hackman plays the main character, who has about 90% screen time, as a private man who carries nothing personal with him. Harry Caul is awakened from this life when he realizes the impact of the consequences of his personal involvement; audio turns to human voices for him. The film that follows this sudden change plummets Harry into a feverish nightmare of truth-seeking, and the result he found blew his mind, and mine as well.

Next in line was "The Road," in theatres. This film was reasonably mind-blowing. The vision of apocalypse unleashed on viewers should scare anyone; this is where we are headed and what we will become when we get there. The fact that the story, of father and son struggling to reach the coast in false hopes of life being easier there, moves relatively slow serves the film's purpose: one should be distracted by observing every inch of the screen, which is packed with the grim, pathetic, whispering decay of the world. The father and son are secondary, functioning as human diving bells for the viewer, entry into this world of cold and gray and lifelessness. The film wrapped me up completely, and didn't let go once.

Combat against unworthy cinema is a necessary precaution, but bad cinema must be tolerated. It is often humorous to watch, humorous to write about, and humorous to read about. It is humorous to discuss. For any of those humorous things to occur, bad cinema must also be tolerated. Besides, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will always be seen by an audience manyfold larger than that of "The Road," way of the world. But as long as bad cinema has an intangible way of upping the quality of my own life, I will continue to, and be happy to, wage an endless war against it, forever going back and forth between non-combatant and combatant.