Introduction
This week I
thought I’d step aside and let somebody else contribute to albertnet. In this post, the film critic Maynard Steele
reviews my stop-motion animated movie, Lego
Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok. Here is
the movie:
Movie Review – Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs
Run Amok
Making
movies is one of those vocations that doesn’t require any specific education or
credentials. Many is the actor who,
after achieving fame and fortune, tells a fawning magazine, “What I really want
to do is direct,” and then proceeds to do just that. And sometimes a director has no film
background whatsoever, such as James Cameron, who was an English major until he
dropped out of college to become first a truck driver, then the second
highest-grossing film director in the world.
It would
seem wise for an industry outsider making his or her first film to start out
with something simple. Top-grossing
director Steven Spielberg began his career with Duel, a very basic action movie about a psychotic tanker truck
driver terrorizing an innocent motorist.
For Cameron, it was Piranha II – The Spawning, which was about flying piranhas attacking people. Both directors waited until they had more
experience before getting all film-school-y.
At first
glance, the debut movie from blogger Dana Albert looks like a safe bet: a basic action movie about dinosaurs
attacking a motorist. But from the
opening frame of the film, we see that Albert is trying to achieve a level of
sophistication that a motion picture newbie would be wise to avoid. His camera fixes its attention not on the
action itself, but on the stage set where the stop-motion animation is done. A weak voice-over from Albert, mumbled and
ineloquent, gives us some background on the making of the movie. This “meta-film” movie-within-a-movie device
has stymied far better directors than Albert.
For example, Joe Wright’s recent Anna
Karenina featured a stage set where we viewers, as though in the audience
at a play, watch the action unfold. Why
not immerse us in Tolstoy’s world, like the novel does? Such added artifice almost never works, and
is particularly weak in Albert’s film.
There’s also
the matter of the medium chosen for this film.
When bloviating to the press, Albert has claimed that his decision to
use stop-motion animation for Amok was
a simple matter of budget: he couldn’t
afford live action special effects or CGI.
But I’d guess there’s more going on here: I think he secretly hopes reviewers like me
will compare him to such icons as Bertolt Brecht, who used absurdly basic props
(e.g., a cardboard box labeled “sleigh”) to keep his stage play audience at an
intellectual distance from the drama, to ensure that their rational, critical
minds weren’t subverted beneath emotions and strong association with his
characters. Only a desire to ape this
kind of device could explain Albert’s use of crude plastic dinosaurs and Lego
in his film. It’s a cheeky move,
considering the vast intellectual gulf between geniuses like Brecht and mere
hacks like Albert.
That said,
the action in Amok unfolds crisply
and the camera-work—this was shot using a handheld Motorola Droid—is efficient and
unfussy. Albert’s collaborators, other
first-timers including his two daughters and his mother, do a great job with
characterization. (Different dinosaurs
were manipulated by different hands, and it shows.) Most of the movie was gratifying to
watch. Seeing the dinosaurs rallying to
flip Lego Guy’s car over on him, I found my pulse quickening dramatically; I
haven’t had such a satisfying visceral response to cinematic violence since the
restaurant assassination scene in The
Godfather. Small details like the
way Lego Dude’s arm thrashes wildly as he’s pinned under the car are either a
tribute to, or subconscious imitation of, something from a Sam Peckinpah movie.
All of this
might have helped me forgive the weak start to the film, except that at the
very end, Albert again inserts another blatantly artificial effect: a giant human hand appears, its finger
pointing at—what? The answer is, who
cares? This kind of abrupt rupture of
scene is doubtless meant to recall other, greater works in which the creator
shows his hand, dissolving the world of the narrative. Albert, who wrote his college thesis on
Vladimir Nabokov, may well have had Bend
Sinister in mind, in which the ill-fated main character is rescued by the
author: “Just a fraction of an instant
before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again: You, you—and the wall vanished, like a
rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos
of written and rewritten pages….”
I can’t help
but think how much better Amok might
have been with some tighter editing.
Normally there is a post-production process, involving focus groups,
that ensures a film doesn’t overly indulge a director’s vain artistic
flights-of-fancy—but in this case the producer was the director’s mother, who
probably couldn’t bear to oppose her son.
A briefer, leaner Amok might
have worked as a straightforward action flick, with the film-school shenanigans
held out for the “Director’s Cut” DVD.
At the same
time, I have to concede that something would be lost through such a
revision. Clearly Albert had something
serious in mind with this movie. Beyond
the crowd-pleasing gore lurks a subtle didactic message that lingers beyond the
cheap thrills. Could we surmise from the
film’s shortcomings that this greater meaning is accidental? No, it’s intentional, and we can tell this,
oddly enough, by the film’s MPAA rating.
Your typical
action movie is PG-13. That rating, more
than any other, brings in the teenagers, who are the darlings not only of
Hollywood but practically every other industry as well. PG movies strike teens as lame, which is why
they’re an endangered species; teens need to know a film will be edgy. (Before the PG-13 rating, George Lucas fought
to have Star Wars rated PG instead of
G, for fear it would be thought of as square.)
And yet, Albert campaigned vigorously, and successfully, to have Amok rated G!
Why would he
do this? Is there precedent for a
violent movie getting a G rating? In
fact there is: the 1972 sci-fi flick Silent Running. Though
it’s not a hugely violent movie, every
single human character is killed. The
main character, Lowell, objecting to the planned destruction of the last flora
from earth, housed in spaceship-attached greenhouses, murders the entire
crew—bludgeoning one to death with a shovel—and then kills himself. Only the plants survive (and a few
robots). Why the G rating? The MPAA must have decided that the
environmental message was just too important to withhold from any part of the
moviegoing public. (Environmental ethics
aside, I think it was actually the piped-in Joan Baez music that drove Lowell
over the edge.)
Albert also
has a message to impart, to as wide an audience as possible. Through his Brechtian machinery, Albert asks
the audience to draw back, detach from the bloodlust, and reflect on what he’s
seen. What really happened here? At first blush, it seems the simplest of
plots: a car crashes into a dinosaur,
and several other dinosaurs converge on it and kill the driver. But how and why does the driver crash his car?
Watch
again: there’s a passenger on the back,
lacking not just a seatbelt but a seat, who falls out and lands grotesquely on
his back. This distracts the driver,
who—panicking—actually takes his hands
off the steering wheel. This is why
he veers right and plows into the stegosaurus.
He’s immediately attacked by a dinosaur to our right, who might just be
hungry, but the other dinosaurs—witnesses to this driver’s incompetence—are
clearly retaliating when they roll his car up on him.
Are we
supposed to identify with the motorist, or the dinosaurs? For my money, it’s the dinosaurs. The movie satisfies because so many of us—as
pedestrians or bicyclists—have felt so vulnerable when a car has endangered us
… but what if we were giants and could slake on our basest thirst for revenge? In his blog, Albert is fond of mentioning the
“lizard brain,” and what better manifestation of it than the actual walnut-sized brain of
Thunder Lizard? The dinosaurs get to
carry out the retaliation we only dream of.
And yet,
there’s always that pulling back, that emotional detachment Albert builds in to
the movie. He’s telling us yes, enjoy
the revenge theme, but then remember your essential humanity; we had a little
fun here, but only giant lizards are allowed to kill. And there’s more to it: he’s inviting us to watch again, and look
more closely. What else do we notice
about the film, upon repeated viewings?
Did you catch what happens to the passenger, whose fall started the violence
in motion? Apparently unhurt, he gets up
and flees the mêlée! The cause of the
crash, the flailing of the arm, the flight of the passenger—we don’t see these
at first, just as drivers see so little
of what’s going on around them. It
all just happens too fast, which is why we should all drive slower and try to
pay more attention. And that, we realize,
is the central message of this film.
Why not just
say so, then? Well, Albert has, but words can be so easily ignored.
Surely Albert has chafed at the limitations of mere text, and nobody
likes a high-handed lecture or public service announcement. The brazen fun of Amok—its rapture of violence—transcends the limitations of priggish,
didactic works. Notwithstanding its art
and subtext, Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run
Amok is an action flick at heart.
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