The Forgotten

The Forgotten (2011)

Dir. Joe Rueben

Written by Gerald Di Pego

Starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, Gary Sinise, Linus Roache

I’ve wanted to see this turkey ever since I saw the first trailers for it. And for good reason. If you haven’t seen the trailer or don’t remember it, I’d like to you take a moment and youtube that shit. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Believe me, it's worth it! But be sure to watch the whole thing.

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OK! You're back. So, yeah. It starts off looking like any old unimaginative big studio psycho-thriller that Julianne Moore might star in, not all that different from that stupid FLIGHTPLAN one with Jodie Foster. Moore plays the stupidly-named Telly Paretta, a suburban mom with a respectable movie profession (book editor) who is trying to get over the death of her son. Only, suddenly all evidence of his existence is gone, and people are telling her she never had a son to begin with! Is she crazy, or is it more likely that there’s a massive conspiracy involving the government, magic, and an alcoholic ex-point guard for the NY Rangers? Good concept for a paranoid thriller, right? Can you trust your own sanity? Do you dare defy these shady authority figures and all logic and reason to fight for what you know in your heart to be right? And can you do it with even a hint of doubt that maybe this is all in your mind and you’re the crazy one after all?

Well, since you’ve seen the trailer, you know why I love this concept. Rather than taking the obvious path of “is-she-crazy-or-not,” which might potentially have resulted in a good movie, they instead dramatically put to rest any doubts in the last few seconds of the trailer when out of the blue fuckin aliens rip the roof off a house and abduct a guy right in front of their eyes. That is some crazy fucking hootch and I respect it. Whatever else it may be, explaining this standard conspiracy thriller with roof-stealing alien body snatchers is going for the fuckin’ gold. You’ve pretty much guaranteed that your movie is going to be either the best thing ever or a spectacular, hilarious camp classic. And I think by this point we have a good idea which one of those is more likely. Good job, producers of THE FORGOTTEN. I admire your hubris. Thing is, though, I assumed that they had carelessly ruined the ending for us in the trailer. I mean, after you’ve discovered it was aliens, where is there to go after that? So I never bothered watching the actual movie until now.

As you can see, this slick big studio production spared no expense, they got boxes of files, actors, the whole deal.

I was wrong, though. Not about the movie being an instant camp classic, because it is; I was wrong about them spoiling the ending. In fact, the ballsiness of this movie is such that the scene in the trailer occurs roughly halfways through. Our heroes correctly decide (based on no particular evidence) that aliens are responsible for all this maybe 30 minutes in. Which means the movie wastes precious little time pretending we care if Julianne Moore is crazy or not, and instead gets right down to demonstrating that the writers of this film are clearly crazy.

For once thing, apparently omnipotent alien overlords control our minds, the sky, and the very fabric of reality itself. They successfully erase the memories of our loved ones, destroy physical evidence, and rearrange the world as they see fit. Pretty scary, but if that’s true how can poor Julianne Moore prove she’s right, that this is all a coverup and she’s the only one who remembers? Well, these aliens are very good at what they do. They seamlessly erased her husband’s brain, blanked out her books of photos (why leave a photo album which is nothing but blank pages, as if that wasn’t going to arouse suspicion?) somehow managed to alter period newspaper articles --even on microfiche--, presumably also blanked the memory of every person who ever read those newspaper articles, as well as the computers of the people who wrote, published, and edited those articles, and physically erased all physical, legal, medical, and economic traces of this lady’s son. Alas, despite doing all that stuff really, really effectively, their Achilles heel is that they use shitty home decorating contractors. See, Julianne goes to see Jimmy “Dominic West” McNulty, who she knows is also the father of a missing child. He denies ever having a kid, but something catches her eye... what’s this, the room has recently had new wallpaper put up, but not particularly well and it’s kind of peeling away. She immediately knows the thing to do is rip off the new wallpaper, which reveals --dear god, this can’t be!!--  children’s drawings on the drywall! She was right, this is all a coverup! In this case literally!! Here’s a thought, aliens of the future: next time just spring for a new paint job.

For unknown reasons, this is the only image Roger Ebert chose to use to illustrate the movie for his review. In tribute to him, I include it here as well.

The movie is filled with wonderfully nutty shit like that. And since they’re not saving their big abduction scene for the finale, they get to reuse it several more times to increasingly hilarious effect. Every once in a while, someone will be talking, usually about to reveal helpful information, when suddenly whoosh! off into the sky with them. Not too many movies can promise that kind of effort. And the few that can definitely cannot boast a cast of classy A-listers and slick big-studio locations shoots. How many movies can offer a chance to see an Academy-award-winning actress react to her co-stars getting whisked off into the sky not once, not twice, but on four separate occasions? Too few, I say.

The movie needs that kind of ridiculousness, because in every other way it’s exactly the kind of standard, pretty, bland big-studio thriller that was getting released in the 2000’s. Remember all that shit, like ALONG CAME A SPIDER or TAKING LIVES and so forth? I dunno, I guess there are a few exceptions, but in general I think the rule is that the Big Studio process does not lend itself well to effective thrillers. They’re too big, too many egomaniacs want different things and want to throw their weight around, and the final result is always watered down, unfocused and tepid, despite the pretty production and better-than-average casts. It’s just not a good environment for someone who has a clear vision of a cool thriller.

Fortunately, Hollywood has a short memory, and in this case they hired someone they thought was just some hacky studio guy (he directed SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY and MONEY TRAIN). But had they looked back a little further into his resume, they’d have found that Joe Ruben was an established B movie director long before he ever met Julia Roberts, with committed ridiculousness like THE STEPFATHER, DREAMSCAPE, and THE POM-POM GIRLS clearly marking him as a guy who knows to never go just far enough when you have the option of going too far. Sure, the script by Gerald Di Pego (MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, INSTINCT, PHENOMENON) is as lazy and hacky as they come (sample line: “[shouts] Telly Paretta, stop! I'm Detective Pope! I tracked the man to this house. I shot him in the leg, and nothing. He is not human! I believe you!”) but Ruben knows to play it enthusiastically to the hilt, with no hint of the shame he should obviously feel. Occasionally, he even manages to throw something unironically good in there, for instance in his casting of the always excellent Linus Roache as the mysterious villain, or the photography in the final sequence which uses the hard geometry of the shadows in an aircraft hanger to lure some gothic expressionism into the frame. It’s long, long past the point where you could actually be involved in the story, of course, but hey, credit where credit’s due.

I'd just like to say that I think this guy Linus Roache is a fantastic actor, and look forward to the day when he might appear in a movie which was at all watchable.

I could sit here and list the many convoluted and whimsically absurd directions this thing takes, like when Dominic West’s alcoholism is cured by love or when you realize that the small airport outside NYC which is owned and operated by aliens has filed for bankruptcy and is having its assets seized (guess they didn’t feel like doing the whole mind-erase thing on the IRS?). But unfortunately, the movie is just slightly too shitty for me to wholeheartedly endorse as a nonstop yuk-fest, and mostly that is because it’s central protagonist is just a little too unlikable for it to be a completely fun experience. Obviously I’m glad the filmmakers approached this ridiculous concept as seriously as possible, but I wish they had let the two leads loosen up a little bit, or at least not be quite so dour. I know, I know, their children were kidnapped by evil aliens with poor financial practices, but they’re so singlemindedly focused on this minor problem that everything else gets ignored. I mean, I get it, you want to find your son, but don’t you find it even a little interesting that aliens exist? You never get the sense that Telly is interested in anything other than having yellow-tinted flashbacks of watching her smiling son laughing at a playground, or at the dinner table, or on the way to the airplane that carried him to his death (man, did that kid do anything except laugh?).

Maybe moms can identify with this character more than I could, but it actually just seems kind of pathetic that this lady is so fuckin' obsessed with this dead kid that she doesn’t give a shit about her job, about the aliens, or even about her poor husband, who also gets his mind erased but she doesn’t seem too bothered about it or ever mention it again. She keeps finding people who can give her information about the conspiracy, but every time they try to explain what’s going on she cuts them off and says she only cares what happened to her son. Lady, we, the audience, would actually like to hear about this stuff, pipe down for a minute. Your son isn’t getting any deader while we actually hear some details about an awesome alien conspiracy. Although in fairness, when the aliens actually get to explain their plan a little, it doesn’t turn out to be very interesting and all they can think to do is make scary faces at her. Even the aliens don’t seem to be trying that hard, so I guess you can’t really blame her that she openly does not give a shit. But still, fun as it is to watch something this silly unfold in dead seriousness, it’s kind of a bummer that the leads are such wet blankets. At least McNulty gets a quip or two early on (“Do you get drunk every night?” “No, sometimes I’m drunk by noon.”).

Anyway, hardly required viewing, but I must admit there is something kind of magical about a story this dumb getting the slick big studio A-list treatment. If you absolutely must watch a film which has both a scene of Julianne Moore and Dominic West eating Oreos together and a plot point about aliens having their assets seized by the IRS, you could definitely do worse.

scary face.

Transformers 3

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011)
Dir. don't make me do this
Starring Shia LaBeouf, John Turturro, Frances McDormand, various others, Leonard Nimoy, Peter Cullen, Alan Tudyk, and we're all just going to agree to forget John Malkovich was in this, OK?

Elephants --lets face it-- look cool. They're big, they got those huge tusks and the prehensile trunk, they sometimes get into a crazed sex frenzy and tear shit up. They're cute when they're little. They look impressive when they travel in herds, traversing gorgeous terrain. They're fairly rare if you don't live in areas where they naturally occur, and when given the opportunity to see one I'm usually fairly excited.

But, at the end of three two-and-a-half hour films, you just find yourself asking, “So, is this all there is? Just shots of elephants?”

Yes, I gave in to my darkest impulses, the most shameful and disheartening side of myself, and went and watched TRANSFORMERS 3. Don't worry, I paid for CARS 2 and snuck in (in what I hope will be a down payment towards Pixar making a film I want to see a little more than CARS 2) but still, I willingly opened my eyes and invited the devil inside. The human eye is composed of 33 distinct parts, and for most people is their primary sensory organ. It is so complex that some people argue that its stunning perfection proves the existence of the divine. And I put Michael Bay in mine.

Michael Bay believes an elephant and an explosion make a movie. I'm simply not convinced that he's correct. Eventually, I'm going to want the elephant to do something, or mean something, or feel something. I want the explosion to threaten something, or change something.

There's plenty of obvious things Michael Bay does poorly which don't really need exploration here. Obviously the script, the acting, the --shudder-- “humor”, anything having anything at all to do with human beings, the awkward politics, the awful soundtracks, the cheeseball mawkishness. I don't really believe in this idea that we need to settle for less in these big expensive movies, but by this time Bay has a pretty consistent track record and you can't really claim to be surprised. But he's supposed to make up for that by blowing shit up real good. I'd like to try and make the case that even here, in the dubious best of the series, he doesn't quite deliver the spectacle that you want. There are two basic reasons why, which I feel are so far under-examined, and a worthwhile way to ask the question of why some action movies succeed where these fail.

The first is the fact that while all elephants are cool to look at, your ability to watch them for an extended period greatly increases if they're doing different things. Surprisingly, the same is true for giant computer animated toys. You want your robots to fight, of course, but jeez, it's been three movies now and all they do is fight. And their fighting is not particularly interesting, except that its done by robots. It turns out that after you've seen giant metal dudes ponderously slugging each other for a few minutes, the novelty wears off a little. Here, in the service of 3-D, Bay finally pulls his camera back a little, dials down the ADD editing, and lets us actually see what's happening, which is at least an improvement on the last two. But it turns out that once you get to see it, its only moderately interesting and certainly not worth building a two-and-a-half hour film around. Elephants rutting is pretty cool, a nifty display of the raw power and dramatic focus in these huge beasts. But by the time you've gotten to the fifth or so scene of it, you're kinda hoping something a little memorable is gonna happen with it.

Yeeeahh, if we could just make everything shitty, that would be great.

That's the problem, as I see it. Technology has reached a point where any conceivable scenario can be realistically portrayed, and Michael Bay has the money to make it happen. He's limited only by his imagination. But it turns out that's a pretty severe limitation. There's hardly a single interesting concept, gimmick, or set piece in this entire trilogy, and so it ends up being about as memorable as any given punch in a rock-em-sock-em robots game (I'm sure I'm not the first person to make that comparison, but I actually played the game yesterday in preparation for this review so I feel I have a certain legitimacy in saying that). With nothing unique and thrilling to get us excited, the action all runs together into a gray, monotone mess of whirring gears.

Which brings me to my other problem: Structure. Bay has no sense of it. His films have no rhythm, no build. They don't go anywhere, they don't crescendo. Of course there's no storyline, but even the action scenes don't climax. The final fight isn't longer or more intense than any other fight, there's not particularly more at stake, and it seems like it could have fit equally well anywhere in the film. It's all turned up to 11, but it just means that none of it has much impact. All Bay knows how to do is shout, and after awhile it just doesn't have any impact anymore. It's kind of a slog, truth be told.

So despite the millions of dollars which clearly ended up on screen, there just isn't much here. It's the equivalent of watching stock footage of car crashes. You can watch a little and find it exciting and visually arresting, but by the time you've watched it a dozen context-free times, the rewards considerably diminish.

I mean, there are a few nice things to be said about it. The script somewhat resembles some kind of basic narrative this time, if you don't stop and think about it for even a second. It's a little more serious and there seems like a little more at stake, which helps rope you into the fights a little more than before. There's a few genuinely nifty sequences – the bit where a human gets tossed out of a transforming car into the air, only to be caught by the robot again and reincorporated into the car (all done in 3-D digital slow motion) is a pretty cool shot which I don't think I've seen anywhere else. There's a kind of tunneling worm robot or vehicle or something which seems to be associated with this one cyclops transformer, I don't know, maybe not, but its pretty cool to watch. The bit with it tunneling into an ever-slanting office building with some humans inside is probably the one sequence in the film which comes close to original, although needless to say it has nothing to do with anything. The wingsuit sequence is also a great idea, someone should put that in a real movie someday. The destruction of Chicago is admittedly pretty epic, the production work on the effects and sets is top notch and it has a nice apocalyptic feel. The cinematography is sometimes quite pretty in that sleazy, car-commercial Michael Bay kind of way.

Some of the cast ends up limping away with dignity intact. Frances McDormand of all people, despite being saddled with some painfully embarrassing dialogue, sells it like a champ and mostly manages to avoid humiliating herself. John Turturro somehow manages to make his Jar Jar Binks character feel a little more fun this time around, I hope he can begin looking people in the eye again after this. He gets some welcome help from Alan Tudyk as his sidekick, who against all odds creates the only endearing character in the entire series. Leonard Nimoy manages to add enough gravitas to his poorly written role that he at least seems like a suitable opponent for Peter Cullen's voice. And poor Buzz Aldrin manages to escape with the majority of his and our national dignity intact, despite being patronizingly told by a giant cartoon toy that it's an honor to meet him.

Less successful are Hugo Weaving (again given nothing at all to do as the film's apparent villain) Tyrese and that generic white guy as unnecessary soldiers, some other white guy as a villain, the eye candy girlfriend, and Bill O'Reilly.

Disastrous, unfortunately, goes to John Malkovich this time around, who apparently didn't learn from John Turturro the first one that acting as if what you're doing is funny does not, in fact, make it funny. Even more embarrassing is Ken Jeong, of whom the less is said the better. LaBeouf is this time around inexplicably saddled with a truly unpleasant character; an unholy cocktail of entitlement, insecurity, and sad sack whining which he tries fruitlessly to make tolerable.

Also apparently James Remar plays the voice of a character named Sideswipe (jeez, did he spend all that Dexter money already?), Frank Welker plays two (?) characters named Shockwave and Soundwave (I think Shockwave was the cyclops, because people kept pointing to him and saying his name as if it meant something, but its odd because I don't remember him talking at all) and John DiMaggio reprises his role as Bender (nah, that would have actually been funny and hence has no place in this film. He plays a character named Leadfoot.)

I dunno, man. The thing isn't as stunningly bad as its predecessors, but in a way that just makes it bad in a more mundane, boring way. The fundamental flaws in the last two were kind of obscured by the aggressive, insane and borderline surreal layers of flaws which actually made them (the second, especially) sort of memorable. This one's closer to a real movie, but it's still so far away from a good movie that it's almost a step back. The one thing that made them interesting was how unapologetically awful they were, and this one is professional enough to reveal how completely empty is is of anything interesting. If you truly believe simply seeing giant robots punch each other on screen is enough to sustain your interest for nearly three hours, the film does deliver that. Me, I think I'm gonna break out my PLANET EARTH DVDs. Now those guys know how to make me care about an elephant.