2012 *

Director: Roland Emmerich
Cast: John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor
Thandie Newton, Thomas McCarthy, Oliver Platt, Morgan Lily
Liam James, Johann Urb, Zlatko Buric, Beatrice Rosen
Danny Glover, George Segal, Woody Harrelson

If the law of attraction had scientific validity, then Roland Emmerich would be held responsible for the apocalypse.
Throughout his career he has destroyed the planet by way of aliens, natural cataclysms, giant reptiles and meteors; this time he goes the conquistador's way and exploits the Mayan by stating that according to their calendar the world will come to an end on December 21, 2012.
And just as they predicted, when the date arrives the planets align, the sun emits radiation that causes "the Earth's core to destabilize" and the disasters begin.
Los Angeles succumbs to a massive plate movement, Yellowstone Park becomes the Earth's largest volcano and a Tsunami covers the Himalayas.
Fortunately there's a backup plan; as G8 members have been working on the construction of massive arks to help preserve art, animals and for a billion-Euros-a-seat, the planet's finest people.
But Emmerich can't let the world go down in this corrupt hedonism and for every dirty politician like the US President's Chief of Staff, Carl Anheuser (a slimier than usual Platt) there's someone whose spirit is nothing but saintly like the President played by Glover, or the film's leads.
On one side we have Jackson Curtis (Cusack), a failed sci-fi author, working as a limo driver, who discovers about the disaster from a loon in the woods (who else but Harrelson?) and runs to save his two kids (the lovely Lily and James), his ex-wife (Peet) and her new man (McCarthy).
We also have heart-o'-gold scientist Adrian Helmsley (Ejiofor), one of the first people to discover the Mayans were right and becomes advisor to the U.S. President, only to discover that the people behind the arks don't really care about humanity (gasp!).
The predictable plot will unite their stories at one point, but before that we are subjected to two hours of terrible acting, ridiculous dialogue and more CGI than you'll ever want to see in your life.
One of the film's major problems is its need to be so big about everything; therefore Emmerich has to steal from any other major disaster movie you can think of.
There's a mini Poseidon drama (where poor Segal is relegated as a stock player), "Earthquake" like moments of cheesy tragedy, Ejiofor and Cusack trying their best to be Paul Newman and Steve McQueen from "The Towering Inferno" and even a nod to "Titanic" as the life saving arks find themselves in peril.
What this movie fails to do is connect us to the people in the midst of the tragedies. Watching Cusack's character most of the time feels as if it's taking the fun out of watching the preposterous ways in which the director can think of destroying historical monuments, especially because the whole thing might even be a manifestation of his regret about losing his family.
So Emmerich removes the morbid fun out of watching the world collapse, by preaching to us why it should be saved, through characters that never really justify their need for salvation, besides the billing of course.
What's more, for all Emmerich has to say about what makes the world such a wonderful place, he constantly does his best to remind us about our worst.
One of his plotlines includes the death of a French art curator (think "The DaVinci Code" with Thandie Newton) who is killed in a car accident in a familiar looking Parisian tunnel.
That the director chooses to kill a man in the place where Princess Diana died, isn't what's disgustingly tacky, but the fact that he states it as something "curious" is a repulsive nod to tabloid lovers everywhere.
Another moment has him getting rid of almost every Russian character in the plot; because why would a new Earth need mobsters and Russian brides he asks.
And then, in one of the film's most cringe worthy scenes he seems to suggest that reality television will not die with the apocalypse, but will become a way of bonding and learning.
Perhaps Emmerich believes his movies to be just entertainment, but deep within their plots there often lie ideas that glorify the Western world and squeeze even the last cliché out of everyone else.
The world will not come to its end because of prophecies ancient civilizations made, but because of a humanity that has the technology and resources to exalt the beautiful things we can create, yet chooses only to glorify the very worst in our nature.

Blindness *1/2

Director: Fernando Meirelles
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, Gael García Bernal
Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura, Don McKellar

"Allegorical poetic films never do work."
- Pauline Kael

In an unnamed city, in an unnamed country, an unnamed man (Iseya) suddenly becomes blind.
His wife (Kimura) rushes him to an ophthalmologist (Ruffalo) who assures him that they will find a cure, or at least an explanation, for whatever caused this.
The following morning the doctor wakes up and realizes he's gone blind as well. During the following days the disease, which becomes known as the "White Sickness", spreads among the population leaving the government no other choice, of course, than to quarantine all the affected and leave them to their own devices until they know how to handle the situation.
Unbeknown to most people is the fact that the doctor's wife (Moore) has inexplicably retained her eyesight and pretends to be blind in order to be with her husband.
She however seems to ignore Erasmus' famous saying and chooses instead to become some sort of slave in what slowly turns into a decaying microcosm.
The blind are left at the mercy of the military who fears becoming infected by the disease and are forced to live in inhuman conditions. Soon a dictatorship is formed in one of the hospital wards, where a man (Bernal) names himself king and takes over food distribution exchanging it for jewelry, money and sexual favors.
As the people adapt to this new life, we are left to wonder what exactly caused it, how will they survive and even more mysterious, what exactly is going on outside the hospital?
Adapted from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago's homonymous novel, "Blindness" is the kind of film that should come with a warning letting us know that allegories and metaphorical laziness are closer than they appear.
Within the pedigree it boasts, it has forgotten that at the core of any artistic experience is the need for identification.
People don't need to agree with art for them to take it as art, what they need is to feel that the author meant to say something and knew how to justify his message.
"Blindness" is so selfconscious of its own didacticism that it forgets to care about itself or the characters in it.
While the idea that anonymity encourages empathy seems to be effective, the problem is that the characters here aren't just missing a backstory, but an identity.
The actors play archetypes instead of characters and they do a bad job because the traits given to them have been so diluted for instant consume that they are left with nothing to work on.
The casting which tries to be all politically correct and United Nations like by having Asian, Hispanic, Black and White characters in the lead roles fails because instead of promoting diversity it encourages racial stereotypes.
Therefore we are left with an exotic Brazilian prostitute (Braga), a wise, weathered black man (Glover in a role that Morgan Freeman could've played in his sleep) and a slightly chauvinistic Asian man (Iseya) all subjugated by the opression of minorities in the hospital scenes and later left to be rescued by the almighty white characters.
Yes, it's true that the people in the film can't see what they all look like, but the audience can and despite cinematographer César Charlone's attempts to emulate the milky blindness of the ill, we remain esentially visual beings and the film's style remains esentially pompous going on humble.
Saramago's book was colloquial and his writing even vulgar to a point, but the way in which his pen spits the words (without even taking the time to punctuate) gave his story an urgency that Meirelle's lethargic interpretation completely misses.
We know all along that at some point of the film something within us is expected to click and make us go "Oh! This isn't so different from the world we're living in", but the moment never comes precisely because not even the director himself seems to have faith in the story he's telling.
It's true that allegories retain an implicit sense of ambiguity, but we must remember that even artistic symbolism springs from a precise sociopolitical and historical context of which this film seems to be unaware.
When referring to the doctor's wife one of the characters expresses how having a "leader with vision" makes them feel safe.
And while the term makes sense during these politically minded times (and almost seems to have been borrowed from some presidential slogan) the same can not be said of Mereilles who takes his film into emotionally drained, intellectually selfindungent roads where it's always the blind leading the blind.

Be Kind Rewind ***

Director: Michel Gondry
Cast: Jack Black, Mos Def
Danny Glover, Mia Farrow, Melonie Diaz
Paul Dinello, Sigourney Weaver

Michel Gondry was probably born in the Island of Misfit Toys.
Or maybe he just went to school there.
He has a unique view of a world populated by underdogs filled with problems they can't solve because of their impossibility to grasp reality by the horns and choose traditional solutions.
Whether they're having their memories erased or breaking into their crush's apartment, Gondry's characters will probably never face life like the rest of us do.
What's surprising about this behavior is that when it should result completely annoying and impossible to identify with, we end up actually understanding and even envying them.
Somehow everything that Gondry does and starts off sounding like the blowup of a "Saturday Night Live" sketch, ends up having a childlike innocence to it that results absolutely refreshing.
"Be Kind Rewind" is no exception; set in Passaic, New Jersey (but looking more like a Cyndi Lauper video) it tells the story of Mike (Mos Def) a clerk who works in a declining VHS rental store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Glover).
Mike's best friend, Jerry (Black), spends his time hanging out at the, often empty, store, when he's not trying to destroy the power plant he lives next to.
When Mr. Fletcher gets notice that his store will be demolished unless he renovates it to keep up with city safety standards, he leaves on a mission to spy on a Blockbuster like chain of movie rentals and discover what makes them successful (no, DVD is not as obvious to him as to us) and leaves Mike in charge.
Following a failed attempt to sabotage the power plant, Jerry becomes magnetized and accidentally erases every tape in Mr. Fletcher's store.
When the store's most loyal customer, Miss Falewicz (Farrow), drops by to rent "Ghostbusters" the guys come up with a plan; they will make their own versions of every movie and rent those.
After recruiting a local woman (Diaz) and claiming that their tapes come from Sweden, which is what makes them special, they create "sweded" versions of every movie, from "Rush Hour 2" to "Driving Miss Daisy" and "2001: A Space Odyssey".
This unleashes Gondry's mad genius and has him come up with alternative ways to represent the films they're recreating, while he delivers an essay on progress, the importance of history (Mike is obsessed with Fats Waller) and a big hearted take on the intrusion of big corporations.
While Mos Def doesn't contribute nothing we hadn't seen before and Jack Black amps up his annoyance factor to the x level, the film's supporting cast is extraordinary.
Glover's innocence is made of the stuff we don't see much of nowadays and Farrow is magical.
In a movie so in love with the movies it's not by chance that Gondry hired Farrow, who after her ethereal performance in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" seems tailor made for stuff like this, when during the movie she says "our past belongs to us we can change it if we want" you will feel transported to the magical New Jersey where the film is set.
Gondry's directorial skills are more polished than ever which in his case means that things look very manufactured. And if there is one thing you wonder about the film's ideology is whether Gondry is trying to say that his sweded versions make justice to the originals or if he's "simply" encouraging in others the creative spirit that inspired him.
The thing about Gondry is that he possesses such a childlike innocence that you never know if he's inviting you to play or winking sarcastically.
If Frank Capra and Jan Svankmajer had a love child he would turn out like "Be Kind Rewind".