retro movie review: Soylent Green

42 years after it was released, Soylent Green is remembered for two things: the then-shocking plot twist at the end, and, to a lesser extent, screen legend Edward G. Robinson's touching final scene, both in this movie and, as it turned out, in movies in general. So much attention has been paid to the plot twist at the end that people tend to forget that most of the movie isn't directly about soylent green at all. Soylent Green definitely has some undeniable elements of science fiction, but for the most part, it's just a straight-up murder mystery, a hard-boiled detective story with 1970s aesthetics but an almost 1940s sensibility.

The story is set into motion by the murder of a reclusive millionaire, William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten, in a necessarily small role). The murder is made to look like a burglary gone wrong, but the cop on the case, Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) pretty quickly sees through this facade, and realizes that something more is going on. A couple of decades earlier, and this plot could have been made with Humphrey Bogart in the lead role.

Mr. Simonson turns out to be an influential member of the board of directors of the Soylent Corporation. In a future society where overpopulation has run amok and food sources are scarce, the Soylent Corporation has a near monopoly on food production, which makes the murder of one of their board members a big deal.

During the course of Thorn's investigation, he has to deal with the usual film noir elements: uncooperative witnesses, attempts on his life, and, of course, pressure from authority figures to declare the case closed long before it's actually solved. But if all of this makes Thorn still seem like a character meant for Bogie, there's one highly prevalent aspect of the character that makes him seem more like Alonzo Harris, the Denzel Washington character in Training Day: Thorn is a dirty cop. 

Yes, Thorn's attempts to solve the murder are sincere, but his methods are despicable. He routinely physically abuses suspects, sleeps with female witnesses, and steals items of value, both from crime scenes and from suspects' homes. In one particularly disturbing scene, Thorn attempts to pick a fight with a witness named Tab Fielding.

"I won't hit a cop!" Fielding protests, knowing that if he does so, he'll be arrested for assaulting an officer.

"I know!" Thorn chuckles with a devious grin, just before he gives Fielding a savage beating. When this fails to antagonize Fielding into hitting him, he tries plan B, and starts beating the witness's girlfriend instead. When Fielding hits Thorn in an attempt to defend his girlfriend, Thorn gloats, "for that, you'll get thirty years!" and then proceeds to beat them both a little more. And Thorn is supposed to be the hero!

All of this would be fine except it's presented at a snail's pace, and with a by-the-numbers presentation that quickly induces yawns. The only redeeming aspects of both the main character and the movie itself are in the touching scenes between Thorn and his best friend/ researcher/ roommate, played with gentility and humor by Edward G. Robinson. There is an almost brotherly love between Sol and Thorn, and their camaraderie is both amusing and heart-warming. These scenes almost don't feel like they're in the same movie where Thorn is going around cracking heads and referring to women as "furniture."

For the most part, this is a fairly unpleasant movie, with long stretches of boredom punctuated by the main character's reprehensible behavior. People love to make references to the title and the twist ending, but nobody ever talks about the fact that the supposedly sympathetic main character is really a vicious bastard. After watching Soylent Green, I suspect that the reason why the movie is so fondly remembered is because, ironically, it's actually not remembered very well at all.

new to DVD: The Hobbit: The Battle of the 5 Armies

One of my favorite books of all time is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. For those of you unfamiliar with the book, it tells the tale of a cute, innocent little creature who, to his surprise, is recruited to join a group of dwarves on a mostly light-hearted adventure across a fantasy landscape. Yes, Bilbo Baggins, the title character, often finds his life in danger -- it is supposed to be an adventure after all -- but this is a book well suited for children. As a child, I fell in love with this book, as many before me have as well.

Tolkien later wrote a sequel, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Although the two stories are directly related in their continuity, even sharing a couple of the same characters, they are remarkably different in length, tone, and, I suspect, intended audience.

Filmmaker Peter Jackson doesn't seem to understand any of this. His three-part cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings has been hailed as a masterpiece, and for the most part, I am not inclined to disagree; regardless of whether or not Jackson's version of Rings fits my personal taste, or yours, for that matter, there is no denying that, at least in terms of sheer scope, Jackson's accomplishment is phenomenal. But here's the thing: whereas it made sense to turn Tolkien's Rings trilogy of epics into a trilogy of epic films, the logic falls apart when he also adapts The Hobbit into a trilogy of epic films. The Hobbit, as a book, is epic in neither length nor scope, nor was it intended to be. As a result of Jackson's desperate attempt to duplicate his earlier success, his adaptation of The Hobbit ends up being true to neither the letter nor the spirit of Tolkien's book.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the final film, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Here, Jackson takes one chapter from a relatively short book, and stretches it into a two-and-a-half hour movie. If Jackson's Lord of the Rings films were exercises in excess, the very concept, let alone the execution, of making an epic film out of a single scene from Tolkien's book is an exercise in excess to the Nth degree.

Now, perhaps you are wondering, "but Movie Man, if this whole movie really is based on just one chapter of a short book, where does Jackson get enough material to stretch it out into more than two hours?" Well, dear readers, Jackson heavily relies on two methods. First, he includes a bunch of stuff that just plain doesn't belong. This includes several references to the events in The Lord of the Rings. No doubt Jackson and his co-writers thought this was clever, as such references serve as both call-back (in terms of order of the the films' release) and foreshadowing (in terms of the story's chronology). Jackson also includes several scenes involving the internal politics of both Laketown and the elven royal family, as well as a sappy love triangle between one of Bilbo's dwarven friends, a female elven warrior named Tauriel, and her would-be lover, the elf prince Legolas. Note that the adventures of Legolas and Tauriel get a lot of screen time, even though neither of them ever appear in Tolkien's book! Jackson, in his pointless desperation to needlessly stretch out the running time, just randomly added these two characters out of the blue! It would all be justifiable, I suppose, if the characters of Legolas and Tauriel added something to the film besides running time, but they really don't; their scenes add nothing of value to either the narrative nor the themes of the story, and each of their scenes seem jarringly out of place.

Speaking of scenes that are out of place, let's briefly address the lengthy opening sequence, in which the dragon Smaug attacks the fishing village of Laketown. This scene, unlike the scenes with Legolas, Tauriel, and all the talk of future portents, at least comes from Tolkien's book, but the entire sequence also so clearly belongs in the previous movie, that that movie was actually named for this scene; viewers of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug sat through two hours of characters talking about the horrible, terrible, powerful, infamous dragon Smaug, but that movie ended exactly just before Smaug actually got to desolate anything. I can't help but wonder if anybody threw their remaining popcorn at the movie screens in frustration.

Here, in the very beginning of The Battle of the Five Armies, Smaug finally gets to desolate something. Visually, the entire sequence is spectacular. But does it belong in this film? It's so sloppily tacked on to the beginning of the movie that Jackson doesn't even try to set the stage. It seems to pick up at the very second where the previous movie left off, and if that sounds cool, it's really, really not. Think about how movies begin. There are many ways to begin a movie, even in the middle of actions and storylines that have already been set into motion, but Jackson doesn't even bother to acknowledge that the movie is beginning. It's so jarring, you feel like you should try to rewind the DVD to see what you missed.

Oh yeah, earlier, I said that Jackson had two methods for stretching out a single book chapter into an entire epic film, and so far, I have addressed only one, adding Stuff That Doesn't Belong. Jackson's other method won't surprise anyone familiar with Jackson's previous work: Remember how each of the Lord of the Rings movies over-emphasized the battle scenes? Oh, come on. Even if you like the movies, you have to admit that the battle scenes went on for a long time. Armies would fight for twenty minutes of screen time, and just when it looked like one side would win, reinforcements for the other side arrive. Well, one look at the title of The Battle of the Five Armies should give you an idea of Jackon's strategy this time around.

But wait a minute. We've got the desolation of Smaug (in the wrong movie, but still, we've got it), we've got elven and human politics, we've got the ridiculous love triangle between Kili, Tauriel, and Legolas, and we've got well over an hour's worth of pure battle footage. But where does the title character fit into all of this? What of the Hobbit? Tolkien's book was aptly titled, as Bilbo constantly remained the main character, one we could root for. Here, he disappears for long, long stretches of time as Jackson busies himself with all of the distractions he's added and over-emphasized. This is supposed to be Bilbo's story. It no longer is. I'm not really sure who this new version of the story is for. For people who like to see armies and fantasy creatures fight each other, I guess. Those people will love this movie.

random DVD review: The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl

During her life, Leni Riefenstahl was a technically skilled dancer, a beautiful woman, an astoundingly accomplished mountain climber, a courageous adventurer, an admired and popular actress, a highly respected photographer, and a filmmaker who was groundbreaking both in her cinematic innovations, and in the fact that she had a respected career back when female filmmakers were almost unheard of. In the interview segments of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, she exhibits an obvious  but unarrogant pride in each and every one of these accomplishments. If her life could have been summarized by that list of achievements and nothing else, it could have been a fascinating subject for a documentary

That she was also a personal friend of Adolf Hitler, and that she almost single-handedly created by far the most infamous and powerful work of Nazi propaganda that the world has ever known . . . well, these facts change the dynamic of the entire story.

Riefenstahl insists that she knew nothing of Nazi politics or plans for genocide, and that her propaganda films were not expressions of her own feelings, but merely works for hire about subjects she cared and knew nothing about. But her credibility is strained when director Ray Muller catches her in a few bald-faced lies. When asked about her social association with Joseph Goebbels, for example, Riefenstahl, who up to that point has been exhibiting a great deal of charm as an interviewee, suddenly throws a tantrum. She denies not only knowing Goebbels socially, but also, oddly, the objective fact that Goebbels's private diaries even mention social occasions with the two of them together.

"There's nothing in the diaries that say that!" she insists.

"Would you like me to show the entries to you?" Muller asks. His tone is non-accusatory, and, if anything, he seems to be trying to give Riefenstahl an opportunity to respond to Goebbels's claims. But, bizarrely, Riefenstahl instead continues to insist that the diaries don't even mention her. As Muller later points out to the viewer, the diary entries are pretty unambiguous.

This is not the first sudden tantrum Riefenstahl throws in this movie. Earlier, in an even more petty moment, Muller asks her to reminisce as she walks across a film studio floor. Riefenstahl objects that she can't walk and talk at the same time. Note that she's not referring to her advanced age. Her peculiar argument is that no one could possibly be expected to walk and talk at the same time; it just can't be done, she insists. Apparently, she would consider the "walk and talk" segments of The West Wing to be accomplished purely by special effects, or perhaps, that the performers in that show are not mere humans, but somehow supernatural in their ability to accomplish both walking and talking at the same time.

She later throws a third tantrum when Muller brings up Victory of Faith, her first notable Nazi propaganda film. She suddenly grows furious. Victory of Faith was an artistic frustration, while her follow-up, the similarly themed Triumph of the Will, is widely considered to be her masterpiece. So, naturally, she'd rather discuss the latter film. Muller tries to explain that he wants to discuss the earlier movie in order to provide some context for the latter accomplishment, but Riefenstahl is beyond reason. She shouts, she makes nonsensical claims about what is and isn't possible, -- "you can't discuss both of them!" she cries out, as if mentioning one topic of conversation forever prevents any further topics from being raised.

Indeed, her claims in each of these tantrums are so bizarre that you almost wonder if, in her old age, Riefenstahl suffers from some sort of intermittent dementia -- until you consider the self-serving nature of each of her ludicrous claims, and you realize that her breaks with reality serve as suspiciously convenient defense mechanisms.

Think about it. Riefenstahl is peaceful enough when Muller wishes to discuss her brilliance as a director, but as soon as Muller himself comes up with a filmmaking touch that's more dynamic than a mere talking head, Riefenstahl claims that one can't walk and talk at the same time. When Muller politely but directly asks her about the social nature of her association with the infamous Goebbels, Riefenstahl, who has ferociously clung to the claim that she was never privy to the Nazi inner circle, falls back on denial and refuses to budge even when confronted with historical evidence. And, most tellingly, her ridiculous claim that you can't possibly discuss two different topics in one documentary just happens to come up in a context where she would love to discuss her masterpiece at length, but would rather that her other movie on the same topic, widely considered to be a comparative failure, remains conveniently forgotten.

And yet forgetting is something that Riefenstahl, for better or worse, seems unable to do. When discussing her series of mountain-climbing films -- at the time, considered to be a genre unto themselves -- she not only tells amazingly detailed stories, but she is even able to lead Muller to the exact mountain where each movie was made. She points out the exact spots where anecdotes of events that occurred over 70 years earlier took place. She remembers names, incidents, and exact chronology with astounding detail. This does not seem like a sincerely confused woman.

Aside from the isolated moments when she suddenly goes into hissy-fits, Riefenstahl is an exceptionally good interview subject. Her years of filmmaking, even if long behind her, have clearly refined her ability to tell a good story. But it's more than that. There is an extended segment in which she discusses the artistic strengths of her various silent film collaborators, and her praise strikes a perfect balance of objective analysis and subjective admiration and gratitude. Most importantly for a documentary, Riefenstahl is an excellent explainer; she is able to discuss artistic decisions without sounding self-indulgent, cinematic innovations without sinking into a morass of technical terminology, and the thrills of mountain climbing so convincingly that I finally, finally understand (as much as any non-climber can) the sport's appeal.

In short, Riefenstahl mostly comes across as a charming, eloquent, and insightful woman. You almost want to sympathize with her when she uses a mixture of otherwise shameful tactics -- denial, dishonesty, and a particularly manipulative form of subjective interpretation -- to distance herself from the horrors of the Nazi Party. I mean, who wouldn't want to distance themselves from Goebbels and Hitler. The obvious difference is that most of us don't have to struggle to do so. I have no doubt that Riefenstahl is telling the complete truth when she points out that she was never directly involved in the Holocaust or the war, nor was she ever directly involved in the decision-making processes that led to either of those horrors. But -- and here is the moral point that Riefenstahl herself seems largely unaware of -- she is still guilty of perpetuating the fanaticism that made those horrors possible. If only Riefenstahl could be defined by her earlier accomplishments, her life would have been wonderful indeed. That it also was a horrible life -- in moral consequence and context -- is a fact that seems to be disputed only by Leni Riefenstahl herself.