In my time as a movie buff, I have taken some pretty interesting stances on certain celluloid issues, from my position that "Sucker Punch" is neither the god awfully piece of work its haters say it is, nor the masterpiece its defenders claim it to be, but simply an "ok" action flick; to the fact that I find "Dances with Wolves" to probably the most overrated piece of media in existence. And today, I get to lay down yet another one, I have a particular dislike for the current independent film industry. STOP! Let me clarify! I don't HATE it, but I really don't think it's some seminal area of film making, good things do come out of it, but like Hollywood, it has it's share of indefensible total crap. Allow me to explain with two examples, both from last year, and both technically independent works i.e. they were done without the aide of the big Hollywood studios during production.
The first is the movie "Another Earth". This movie embodies absolutely EVERYTHING I despise about the indie scene. It's a movie that has a decent enough premise, in this case that a second version of Earth has appeared in the solar system and it appears to be a very similar version of our own. Cool premise, right? It's why I watched it. But that's not what it's really about, no, it's about a girl that got drunk and killed a man's family in a car accident and how she deal with her crime and makes penance for it. I can't tell you how awful I found this movie, it reeks of self indulgence that's just clawing for any reason to exist outside that fact. This movie has a principle protagonist that is in EVERY scene, and this main actress (Brit Marling)was also the co-writer of the script, so there is no defending that point. This was her trying to create a vehicle for herself to show off her "acting" and I can't describe how horribly she fails. First of all, there are many many scenes where she's just sitting there doing nothing, well, not NOTHING per say, but they are clearly scenes there to "enhance" her character but, since she's kind of bland all over, they just end up being padding. Added to all this, the script seems to try and play her off as likable and sympathetic but given the actions she takes in the movie, I really don't want to sympathize with her, what she does gets down right cruel!
Not to mention that this movie is about as interestingly shot as a TV sitcom. It's just a bunch of close ups and some coverage shots to mix it up between the pretentious shots of our oh so likable main character walking in front of an effect shot of the second Earth while talking heads drone about its existence's implications. This brings us to the big flaw of the movie for me. Yeah I know I said that the actor co-writing the script bugged me but that's just because it felt like she was trying to bite of more than she could chew, actors can write and act in things very well, Simon Pegg springs to mind here. No, the big flaw I have with this movie is how it handles its main theme, Existentialism.
I don't really have time to go into too much detail on it, as it is a big philosophical principle, but I'm just going to say this: If your movie is an existentialist work, it had damn well explore the implications of that well and that is no simple task. This movie fails in it miserably as what it's trying to explore is with a poorly performed character that does some out right horrible stuff. This is a common trap for lazy writers that deal with Existentialism, and I'm frankly sick of it. But what really gets my teeth grinding about something like this is how the protagonist is usually played off, they are just depressed. Now, this doesn't instantly bad, a character coming out of an existential depression can make for a good story, hell it's basically a good part of the plot to "Clerks", a personal favorite of mine! But here, like most others, the character just never evolves, never become all that interesting, and just basically spends the movie say "Oh life is awful and I'm terrible and poor pitiful me." This is one of the things I despise most about the indie scene as a whole, it's a lot of people that are just making less stellar versions of things that have worked before, and maybe adding in things that they heard vaguely from their Philosophy 101 class to make it sound like their shallow movie is somehow deep and moving. However, this isn't always the case. One of the best films of last year was the art house crime thriller "Drive".
"Drive" gets everything right. It's fantastically shot, amazingly well directed and perfectly acted. In it Ryan Gosling plays a mechanic/part time stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver, and is actually never given an identity outside simply Driver. He begins to form a bond with a female tenant of his apartment building and decides to help her fresh out of prison husband with one last job and then things go south fast. Already that plot sounds like something that isn't even remotely original and yeah, it's not, but that's where the execution comes in.
This movie is less about the action, though it does go there in its own way, but it's all about mood. It has a very hazy atmosphere and actually feels like a bit of a send up of Tony Scott's "True Romance" (yes, I know it was a Tarantino script, don't correct me, I'm meaning the director here, who had more say on shot design.) This is helped by the amazing cast, from Gosling's almost emotionless, yet utterly human Driver. To Albert Brooks' absolutely jaw dropping turn as one of the gangsters (I'm not joking when I say he was totally snubbed by the Oscars.) Plus, I'm seriously not exaggerating when I say this is one of the most amazing well shot and edited movies I've seen in a long time. It's just that rare movie that you watch and it just washes over you with how good it is, and you have to keep reminding yourself that it's basically got the plot of a low budget movie that Canon might have released in the mid 80's.
It also proves my point, both movies do actually. The independent film industry can produce truly amazing work like "Drive" that just proves even if you have an unoriginal story, you can always leave your own touch on it, while "Another Earth" just proves that even without the constraints of a major studio watering everything down, you can still produce a total turd. And as a last little bit of food for thought, next time you want to bash Hollywood as soul less and all about the effects unlike Independent films, consider this: The "Star Wars" prequels are technically independent films.
Final Scores:
Another Earth: 0 out of 5
Drive: 5 out of 5
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