Rise of the Geek Squad

District 9 (B-) Solid Sci-fi actioner set in South Africa. Well, in the whole history of sci-fi, the aliens always appear in the United States, so why the hell wouldn't they appear over Johannesburg, for a change? You might think it's a satiric commentary on apartheid, but it's not. It's an action movie with elements of docu-drama to keep the movie's pacing going. This level of convolution is to hide the fact that director Neill Blonmkamp is the newest member of what I like to call, 'The Geek Squad'. Pardon me while I digress...

THE RISE OF THE GEEK SQUAD

In the beginning, there was George Lucas. A skinny hot-rodder from Northern California, he got into film after a near-fatal car crash. He went to USC to study, and made his name with a short film called 'THX-1138'. Also while there, he made friends with a gentleman named Francis Ford Coppola. Once they graduated, they formed their own film studio called 'American Zoetrope', where they could make films without studio interference. (It was their version of United Artists.) Lucas made an expanded version of his student film, 'THX', then made a crowd-pleasing little comedy set in the 'fifties called 'American Grafitti', which touched a nerve with film goers in the early 70's who were then in the middle of a nostalgia boom.

Then Lucas made 'Star Wars'. I'm sure there are lost tribes in the South Pacific who know who Darth Vader is, so I'll spare you the rehashing of the movie and the impact it's had on movie making since the late 70's. What 'Star Wars' is most responsible for, is the rise of a subset of filmmakers I like to call, 'The Geek Squad'.

The Geek Squad consists of filmmakers who favour style over content, who ooh and ah over the most mundane technical detail of the film making process, and who's eye for detail and ability to reference older films pushes out any concern for things like plot, characterization, or story. I think the problem kicked into high gear once CGI became so sophisticated it wound up shortcutting the creative process of problem solving for a film maker.

Please understand, I'm not trying to condemn a whole end of the movie industry here, I'm just trying to get a handle on a particular process of the filmmaking industry that's gone out of whack. The particular metaphor I'd like to use is of a cake. The film in and of itself consists of a cake with frosting. The story, the theme, the characterization is the actual cake itself, and the special effects are the icing. The trick is that you want the audience to eat the cake. (May I interject by pointing out that this is a very clumsy metaphor, but I'm stuck with it for now, and so are you.) The members of the Geek Squad that I'm going to list below are all united by their common ability to pile too much icing, as it were, on top of their metaphorical cake...

First, the Good: David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron. Sam Raimi. These are the guys who understand the balance between the icing and the cake. While they acknowledge that the special effects in their films are important, they are more than willing and capable to use complicated, time-consuming, expensive special effects in throw-away shots that last for maybe an instant on screen. (Not surprisingly, these guys tend to have money fights with the money people at the studios they're working for.) While the films they make aren't as timeless as Martin Scorsese's or as universally loved as Spielberg's, they've developed enough of a body of solid, substantial work to make any time you spend watching their films time well spent. I'm keeping an eye on Fincher, in particular. 'Fight Club' was an amazing piece of work that makes me think his best is still yet to come. What's interesting to note: they all got their start doing low-budget films, paid their dues, so to speak, and proved they all had the chops for bigger and better things. (Yeah, Fincher's got the type of career arc you'd see with Micheal Bay-about which terrible things are about to be written-but he's managed to shake off the various stigmas his early film career saddled him with.)

The Not-So-Bad: The Wachowski Brothers, Peter Jackson: While I officially like most of the films these guys have done, I have absolutely no desire to ever see any of them again. While they operate by the same standards as the Good guys in the above paragraph, they tend to get bogged down in the little details of the technical craft of film-making. One statement for the prosecution: Notice how the CGI characters in their movies tend to have more, well, 'Life' than the actual actors? Gollum, in the LOTR trilogy, has more personality than all the other characters combined. Their movies tend to drag from plot point to plot point, and you could play an endless game of "Who would you cast instead of (blank) in (movie) over (blank) with all their films. For instance, if you put Will Smith or Ewan MacGregor in the lead in the Matrix trilogy, you wouldn't get a different or better or worse movie out of it.

The Downright Should've-Been-Drowned-At-Birth-Ugly: Zack Snyder, Michael Bay, McG, Paul W.S. Anderson, Stephen Somners: Now we're in the dregs. These guys ram their production values down your throat with a chimney sweep brush. I'm pretty sure they all got their start doing commercials and music videos, and any thing that they've learned from their time in those trenches is something that they've never built on. Bay, in particular, is the most offensive. Every movie he's ever made looks like an extended Chevrolet car commercial. You know your film career's taken a turn for the worse when the nicest thing anyone can say about your work is that "The fight scenes were somewhat coherent"...

So where does Blonmkamp fit into all this? Right now, he's in 'not-so-bad' status. The thing is, he's making the wrong film. (The story involves a Michael Scott like bureaucrat getting infected by an alien fuel and slowly mutating into one of the disenfranchised aliens in the movie.) What the film needed to focus on more was his alien transformation. As it stood, the focus of the film was around the near-perfect CGI with the aliens and their armored combat suits-where Blonmkamp's short "Alive in Johannesburg" was centered around. Where he goes from here, in my estimation, is another version of Peter Jackson.



Patton Oswalt: My Weakness is Strong. (A) So what is this 'alternate comedy' of which the young people speak? Is it chuckles delivered from behind rectangular glasses and a flannel shirt underneath an ironic t-shirt of a teddy bear cuddling a honeypot and the words "Jesus Woves OO!" in script underneath? Well, my personal belief is that it's comedy that the audience gains the most enjoyment from when they themselves are bringing something to the experience. That is, their routines require that you, the audience, has a certain level of education and life experience that they are bringing to the venue that the comedian is performing in. Unlike, say, Dane Cook or Carlos Mencia, for example.

In Oswalt's case, the enjoyment derived is like listening to a slightly drunk English teacher with about fifty unpublished novels under his considerable belt. His work is literate and refined in that way you can imagine he writes out his work about a dozen times, field-tests it over and over again in clubs, and distills the best parts for us. With dick jokes. Also, there's always been an underlying glee and genuine enthusiasm in his work in that he just can't wait to bring up the absurdities in his life. It's why he got the part of the rat chef in 'Ratatouille', basically. He's truly enthralled about the things he likes, and he's equally thrilled over the things in life he hates. It's infectious.


Kate Beaton-Hark! A Vagrant (A)

How to describe the work of Kate Beaton? Well, here goes...

Kate Beaton is like your friend's bratty little sister, and you're over at his parent's basement, smoking shitty weed and playing 'Altered Beast' on his Sega Genesis. And Kate comes in and watches you both for a bit, with a sour expression on her face and her arms folded. Then she snorts, "Video games are gay!" And your friend goes, "Shut up, Kate! You're just here 'cuz you've got a thing for Tom!" And Kate turns red and shrieks in horror and says, "EWWWW! No way! I'm here to keep you two from having gay sex with each other!" And your friend throws the 'Altered Beast' case at her head as she runs off, cackling like a sea hag.

Then a short time later, Kate slinks back into the basement, stands really close to you, you look up and she shyly hands you a folded piece of paper, and says, "This is for you" while not looking you in the eyes. You open it and it's a cartoon of you getting double-dicked up the dirt pipe by Sir John A. MacDonald and Lester Pearson. You go, 'WHAT THE FUCK?', Kate runs off cackling again, your friend hits 'pause' , jumps up, chases Kate down and punches her in the upper arm. Kate squirms off, and runs upstairs crying, "I'M SO TELLING MOM YOU'RE SMOKING POT!" and slams the door behind her.

And several years later she gets a history degree, inflicts her rich, expressive comics on the world, and we all win.