I'm Bout It
Directed by Master P
No Limit Records
It's not often a movie like this comes along. "I'm Bout It" is an
independently produced film written, directed and starring Master P.
For those unfamiliar with Master P, he is a West Coast / New
Orleans-based rap artist. Also the C.E.O. of No Limit Records, Master
P has become somewhat of a multimedia entrepreneur in the last decade.
"I'm Bout It" represents his debut foray into cinema.
The story follows the exploits of an urban group of drug-dealing youth
as they stumble through their criminal and personal lives. The basic
premise is a one-dimensional rise and fall tale, blended with the
popular "escape from the ghetto" motif. This very basic story is
carried off in a plodding and predictable manner. The little boy who
Master P was going to help escape the ghetto is murdered, evoking a
salty tear of sympathy and a fiery tear of rage. The coke-head
sidekick who Master P turns around and molds into a worthy drug dealer
is blown away in a low-budget spray of blanks and ketchup. And Master
P himself, who walks a fine line between falling irrevocably into the
corruption of the New Orleans underworld manages to overcome his
destiny by killing a crooked cop and becoming an international rap
star.
Despite the amateur style and story, the movie is quite watchable. It
is in particular salvaged by its varied and bizarre subplots. There
are a number of characters that appear, enchant us and disappear never
to be seen again. How could one deny the audience's true joy as Master
P's mother sternly admonishes one of his brothers to give up his life
on the street and get a good job, all the while with a huge smile on
her face? While there's too many characters to list here and still do
the multi-layered, rich ambiance of the film's social environment
justice, the most memorable and important ones are worth mentioning.
There's the knife-wielding, blunt-smoking grandmother. Who could forget
the fur coat-sporting pimp who brings his own glass to the drug
dealers' parties? And of course there's Smurf, Master P's enigmatic
friend / cousin who claims to be in a lot of trouble, but communicates
no information to us during a five minute long mumbled monologue.
Cinematically, the film is narratively heavily influenced more by the
Hollywood gangster genre than by contemporary African-American cinema.
There are multiple heavy-handed allusions to "Scarface", whom Master P
seems to emulate as the definitive anti-hero. Of course, a major theme
of the film ("the escape from the ghetto" motivation) is borrowed from
legitimate African-American productions. However, besides this rather
cursory foundation, the film largely ignores its contemporaries,
instead preferring to degenerate into a unique and overall unfortunate
rehashing of gangster movies. This hybrid, poorly-designed concoction
is still with merit, surprisingly saving itself through its randomness
and unintentional humor
-Jeremy Richards
Antz
Directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson
Dreamworks
In another movie, it would be too derivative to succeed: Woody Allen as a therapy-attending bundle of neuroses unwilling to fit in. Sylvester Stallone as a musclebound lug just trying to do the right thing. Grant Shaud (Miles from Murphy Brown) as a tool of the system. Gene Hackman as a fascist. What here haven't we seen before?
It's the magic of Antz that the answer is: everything. The first feature produced by computer animation firm PDI, as well as the first animated film released by Dreamworks, Antz tells the story of a lone worker ant, Z (Allen), who can't stand the monotony of colony life and strikes out after individuality.
The movie pushes feature computer animation through the next paradigm -- tactility. The players in 1995's amazing computer-animated Toy Story had the cool sheen of the plastic and wood of which they were made, but the characters in Antz look like the best puppets you've ever seen. Multiple times throughout the film, you'll have to remind yourself that although clay models were used in the design process, what you're seeing onscreen was never matter but always just light, and that light shines brightly enough to grant a little brilliance to even the dimmest aspects of the movie.
Certainly the most shadowy facet of the whole production is how famliar things are, and it's not restricted to the casting. The most egregious example is the storyline, which cobbles together plot elements from sources like Disney's Aladdin, The Lion King and Toy Story. While those films didn't exactly originate the ideas (a princess covertly descends from the palace to see how the other half live, for instance), they're pretty fresh in the memory of this movie's core audience. Conventional wisdom suggests Dreamworks/PDI should have borrowed from less recognizable sources than the most popular works of its nearest competitor.
At the same time, recognition is key to the film's humor. Z is such an Allen-caliber malcontent that he would seem vacant with anyone's voice but the comedian's, and for those who can relate Z to other Allen roles, it's even funnier. Similarly, the diabolical General Mandible is a stitch because we've seen Hackman play a straight-laced fascist so often that to those that know his work, his detached, grumbling megalomania here is pure laughs. Even the main character and premise -- Z leading the masses into revolt against an oppressive regime -- are, to be generous, an homage to Costa-Gavras' 1969 Z.
The saving grace is that directors Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson present all of these familiarities anew. Anyone with the capacity to be captivated by animation will be well-rewarded here. Of course, if the flash and style were inappropriate to the narrative, it would be a double hindrance. But rarely in the film is it just about PDI's capabilities; instead, the technology serves the filmmakers in creating characters that are very well-matched to their personalities.
Between this and December's cel-animated Prince of Egypt, Dreamworks has a slate that presents a solid challenge to Disney, which also has two animated features in 1998 (Mulan and November's A Bug's Life, also featuring computer-generated insects). Antz isn't as winning as its direct forebear, Toy Story, but it's just as worthwhile. Even if its tale of individuality and community responsiblity isn't original, it never hurts to hear it told, and rarely has that telling been more spectacular.
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Sean Weitner
What Dreams May Come
Directed by Vincent Ward
Polygram
"In the case of What Dreams May Come, the film's depiction of the afterlife is based on a spiritual, not religious, quality. Yet it targets the question many seek: Is there something beyond the world we know? Is eternal happiness centered on the eternity of love?" -- Excerpt from "A Note on the Afterlife," from the What Dreams May Come press kit.
No matter what questions What Dreams May Come "targets," it only addresses one satisfactorily: Is there production design after death? To which it answers: Yes, and it's glorious.
Practically confrontational in its beauty -- "You haven't seen anything like this," it insists with every shot -- Dreams honestly looks like nothing ever filmed before. Although cinema's history is full of lush and lovely fantasies, few filmmakers have had the palette available to director Vincent Ward and crew in the age of Godzilla and Armageddon. Dreams succeeds where those films don't because it revels in its artifice instead of striving for "reality," but like those films, its visual bravura more than once derails its storytelling.
(The following discussion lets slip one of the film's plot developments, one leaked by so many media outlets already that you might not know it was supposed to be secret. Consider yourself forewarned.)
Four years after a tragedy nearly destroyed his marriage, Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) dies in a car accident. He goes to heaven, escorted by cherubic Albert (Cuba Cooding Jr.), and finds paradise is living inside one of the works of his painter wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra). As he's trying to come to terms with the afterlife, Annie commits suicide, and since suicides are, in Dreams' theology, too self-absorbed to realize that they're dead and therefore can't come to heaven, Chris descends into hell to find her.
At the heart of Dreams -- with a screenplay by Ron Bass from the novel by Richard Matheson -- is a classic myth structure, with the hero resolving the inadequacies of his character in order to be pure enough to enter the deepest depths of the enemy's territory, save his beloved and escape sullied but victorious.
This doesn't really pick up until the second half, but once there, the movie smartly interweaves flashbacks and simultaneous action in the afterlife and on Earth. Ward and Bass have a wonderful sense for leading us between the three, and through this structure we gain a far greater admiration for and identification with Chris and Annie than seems possible through more traditional storytelling. Chris' trek to and through hell is some of the year's most amazing filmmaking and worth your time and money.
To get this far, though, you have to get through the first half. The deliberate pacing of the story while Chris is alive slows to a near-halt when he dies and goes to heaven.
It's a two-fold snag. First, the filmmakers, like Chris, get lost exploring the wonders of their creation, making these scenes almost twice as long as they need to be. They offer oodles of impressive effects, like Robin Williams flying and creating a heron, but they're pointless, and as we wait for everyone to stop showing off, our emotional closeness to Chris and Annie wanes. For once, an effects-driven movie has characters as compelling as the spectacle, and the distraction here is unmotivated and unwelcome.
The second part is that the filmmakers get hung up explaining the ins and outs of their rooted-in-nothing theology. Dreams is the flagship project of Metafilmics, a production company dedicated to metaphysical issues, and the movie earnestly subjects its viewers to a hodgepodge of "spirituality" -- Afterlife? Sure. God? Sure. Reincarnation? Sure. Dead pets? Why not? Dreams takes pains to set up how things work in the Great Beyond, but makes almost no relevant use of these explanations for the remainder of the story.
The main reason all of the filmmakers' ratiocination about the afterlife is for nought is because the heaven/hell framing device is just a metaphor-laden dressing for a straightforward story about how people who love one another help the other cope. To escape hell, Chris has to do what he couldn't do for Annie four years earlier. It's a wonderful fable that Ward preserves despite the baggage of Metafilmics' charge, and though it could easily veer hopelessly into sentimentality, he keeps it level and gives it real poignancy.
He's aided by a roundly excellent cast: Williams, Sciorra, Gooding Jr., Jessica Brooks Grant, Josh Paddock, Max von Sydow and Rosalind Chao. If anything, the film indulges Williams too much; the recent Oscar-winner, who never looks as near tears as when he's about to laugh, and vice versa, has made a career out of being the most likable guy ever. It's a weakness of Williams' -- he's desperate to be loved. In Dreams he's the ultimate sensitive male, and his relationship with Sciorra is just barely on the believable side of too perfect.
Because the movie is more about life than death, it's value to those dealing with the tragedy of loss is questionable -- is it comforting to know Chris can't make things right with his family until after he's died? With that and the bunco spirituality, the movie's almost irresponsible, although those are no doubt the elements that will make it a big hit. (Look for the biggest movie-induced editorial barrage since Saving Private Ryan.) But glittering and intact at its core is a potent, mythic love story.
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Sean Weitner
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