Premonition

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Premonition a sort of hybrid genre of family drama, tearjerker, and supernatural thriller. Oh yeah, a puzzle picture too.

The Story has Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) a very-happy wife of a very-happy husband with two cute adorable little girls. Well, maybe things aren’t so happy because one day Linda wakes up to hear a phone message from her husband who’s off on a business trip. Then at the door there’s a cop telling her that her husband is dead in a car accident.

Linda has to go through the whole day, not believing, barely able to cope with the news. Good thing her mother is there to help with the kids. Linda finally goes to sleep … and wakes up next to her husband. She passes a whole day in which her husband is alive … next day he is dead … next day he’s alive … next day he’s dead…

The tale is one of her recurring premonitions of the future all of which are true and not true, so it’s kind of impossible to pull everything out of it. The DVD has a commentary track with the director and Bullock which undoubtedly explains it all, and if you watch a second time I bet you get a lot more out of it, puzzle-wise. In the end (after the midpoint, when Linda figures out what has been happening) she makes a calendar and tries to work out what happened or will happen on what days.

Something similar would have helped us too in the audience. Why didn’t they give us one? I think there are two reasons:

1. They want us to share her dislocation and confusion and her sense of horror. There’s a way to pitch this script as a horror movie, and it was undoubtedly pitched that way at least once. Maybe it would have been more successful as straight horror.
2. More interesting though: if they had given us titles, like ‘Monday’ ‘Thursday’ ‘Tuesday’ ‘Saturday’ ‘previous Sunday’ it would have seemed as though Linda was really going through time, which isn’t what is happening, even though it seems like it.

In fact, what we have is a flashback/flashforward structure in this picture, only the heroine goes through it in movie-time just like we do. She is half in the audience herself in a weird way. She only knows and experiences each day based on her knowledge of the previous day and the day before that, in this jump-ahead, jump-back pattern.

They change her outfit every time she wakes up, which helps, and there’s a lot of Hitchcock-style glance-object cutting, along with a bunch of hyper-realistic moviemaking. Which kind of bugged me, it was too much.

At first Linda is increasingly upset and confused at what’s going on. She meets people who know her but they are strangers to her, because she met them in the past – their past, not hers, because she has skipped that day (in her dreams or premonitions which seem to come at night and begin with her waking and then living through an entire day). So there is a double dislocation which comes from this: not only does Linda not know what happened on the intervening days, but the premonition is false when it comes to her, and true when it comes to everybody else. What I mean is that in her premonitions she sees what other people will do, what will happen to them, but she is reacting as she would from the past and not as she will react when she actually lives through that day. So on Saturday, the day of the funeral, Linda in her premonition doesn’t believe her husband is dead, causes a scene – several – and ends up being committed by a psychiatrist – all because she is foreseeing this Saturday from Tuesday, or Monday, or Sunday night before, before her husband’s death, before she figures out these are premonitions. But then when Saturday does come, will she think he’s still alive, after she turns out to have been on the scene and witnessed his death on Wednesday?

And yet the final scene is some months after her husband’s death. And her daughter still has scars, from running through a glass door, which she does in part because Linda is screaming to her in a distraught state, because at this point Linda is in a premonition or suffering the dislocation of having been seeing future.

I think this sort of puzzle makes the movie hard to grasp emotionally. There is a double set of emotional reactions we have. First there are the feelings of strangeness and fear and alienation we share as we follow Linda through the fractured time, knowing only a little more than she does, what is going on. Then there are the feelings of what she is going through: learning her husband might be, is, is considering, sleeping with the hot blonde at work, feeling that he really is more of a roommate than a lover, and finally coming to terms with this and loving him anyway, trying to save him from the accident she knows is coming.

Of course, part of the reason the picture fails to satisfy is that she can’t forestall the future she has seen. Her daughter does get cut running through the glass doors, which seems to set up a possibility in reverse way, that Linda might save her husband. (Yeah, that sounds irrational, but I’m thinking not in real terms but in movie-goer terms: because she couldn’t stop her daughter’s accident, she will be motivated to try very hard to stop her husband’s accident; because she fails to prevent one, we are being forewarned that the husband’s accident is not forestallable, which would make for a very happy twist if she could forestall her husband’s accident – see?)

There is a priest who talks like a scientist and when Linda tells him of these crazy dreams, actually can pull out right away a book where he has marked all the pages of historical incidents where people had visions of the future that came true.

I sense a lot of different cooks messing with this stew. There are several production houses involved, and two studios, Tristar and MGM (MGM outside the Bond franchise is an almost sure sign that a movie is going to have problems these days), and even though there is only the one screenwriter credited, I wonder mightily if this script hasn’t gone through a few incarnations, one of which was the straight Lions Gate or Dimension Films horror movie, then Sandra Bullock got involved, she’s not doing a cheap horror movie, now the premise can be re-envisioned and look at the wider implications of knowing the future; as Linda asks after finding out her husband was getting interested in the blonde, ‘If I let Jim die, is it the same as killing him?’

Then there is a big strained reach after this bit of added meaning: when the priest explains his way of thinking on all this, he tells her that faith is not religion or God or Catholicism, but instead just having something outside yourself you’re willing to fight for. Linda answers, ‘I don’t know what to fight for.’

Oh yeah, here’s the climax: she knows that her husband died at mile marker 220 on the highway. She drives after him on the fateful Wednesday morning, talking to him on cell phone. He’s about to tell her about the blonde, she says she already knows all about her; he says he didn’t want that any more, he now wants to make a fresh start with her (and the picture commits the fatal flaw of telling us that he hasn’t gone through with boning the blonde yet; a rather stupid way of trying to redeem him a little). This makes Linda smile. She gets him to pull over off the highway, he does, then she notices that it’s mile marker 220. She tells him to turn around, he does, then he almost collides with a car coming the other way. His car is sitting in the middle of the highway. He tries to start it, the engine is flooded. Along comes an oil tanker truck (just so we can get a big spectacular explosion, which is more hyper-realism and a cheap, though very expensive, way to end things) and totally destroys him. Right in front of her eyes.

The final scene has her waking one last time. Her daughters come in, and we learn it’s moving day. Even as we opened the picture seeing how the husband surprised Linda with this house, buying it without telling her, we close on her moving out. The cut daughter’s face is healing well, it looks like there will be no scars. And when Linda rises to go out to meet the movers, we see she is pregnant in a shot that seems added on, it’s so poorly designed – as though a few cooks got messing with the stew even in postproduction, and wanted to give her something good to come out of all this, too.

(28 April 2009)

Baby Mama

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Baby Mama a comedy (semi-romantic comedy) that came out last year, starring two women stars of Saturday Night Live.

Kate (Tina Fey) is a successful vice president of a natural food grocery chain, given the biggest assignment of her career, to open up the biggest, best ‘Round Earth’ healthy food store in Philadelphia, where the chain first started. But unknown to all her colleagues, Kate has a secret longing: she has always wanted to have a child. And now at age 37 the urge has completely taken over her mind.

She tries everything. Nothing works. Her specialist tells her she has no better than a one in a million chance of getting pregnant herself. As a single woman, she will have to wait for years on lists before any institution will consider allowing her to adopt a child.

At last she signs up with a clinic which, for a $100,000 fee, will oversee impregnating a surrogate with Kate’s egg, fertilized from artificial insemination from a sperm bank.

All that is left is to find the woman who will be the surrogate, and even this is hard: the surrogates, in short supply, get to choose which infertile women whose eggs they will carry. And as a result Kate ends up teamed with Angie (Amy Poehler) who is in every way opposite to Kate (surprise surprise!) – she loves junk food, never graduated from high school, and is a total loser in life … except she gets pregnant really, really easily. In addition Angie is living with a total yahoo jerk of a boyfriend, who put her up to ‘the baby business’ in the first place.

Well, Angie gets pregnant all right, but then the trouble starts. Angie has a fight with her boyfriend and moves in with Kate. Kate is totally possessive and demanding, and wants to control everything Angie eats, what music she listens to, everything she does while pregnant. The ‘odd couple’ pairing is set up for lots of gags and laughs.

But there’s a twist or two along the way – of course! This is Hollywood! In the first place Kate meets a guy she likes (Greg Kinnear, who has made a career out of this kind of part). But the big twist is that Angie isn’t pregnant after all. She failed to get pregnant, but she and her boyfriend figured they would go on collecting checks from Kate for 9 months, then escape with the money. And the boyfriend keeps turning up, demanding that Angie come back to him or he will tell Kate that Angie is lying to her.

Over and over, Angie makes up her mind to tell Kate. But every time she tries … she can’t do it. Finally she is undergoing ultrasound, when the truth must come out, she tries really hard to tell the truth – and finds out the ultrasound checks out. She is pregnant after all. But, it’s with the boyfriend’s baby, not Kate’s.

So there is another lie, another secret that Angie hides. But in the baby shower, it all comes out when her boyfriend bursts in. Kate learns Angie has been lying; boyfriend learns that he will be a father (again, I guess, unless Angie has been having abortions … which might be true); and Kate on her part tells Angie that as part of the process, the pregnancy test might have given a false negative – the baby might still be Kate’s. Meantime Kate’s boyfriend hears about this for the first time, and Kate breaks up with him.

Months pass, and at a court hearing, Kate and Angie meet for the first time to learn the official DNA tests. It isn’t Kate’s baby. Awwwww… Kate is disappointed. But out on the street Angie goes into labor, and Kate takes her to the hospital, and attends the labor, and faints.

And in the morning Kate is told she is pregnant! Hurray!

An epilogue shows the party for Angie’s kid’s first birthday. Kate is there with her baby and boyfriend/fiancé, Angie’s boyfriend is there, still a jerk … most of the cast is there, all one big happy family while the credits roll.

I laughed at several points in the movie. There were good gags. Not a waste of time. But, to apply your test: $8 ticket worthy? $2 ticket worthy? Worthy to watch on TV for $0? Hmmm.

This movie of course is pitched at women, not me. I’m not the audience for it, except maybe for boyfriends and dates the women drag in with them. So, I would say in that regard, it is worth it. I mean, if my girlfriend or wife says, ‘We have to see this movie!’ I will go with her, and I won’t feel that I wasted my time.

The biggest annoyance here was the use of montage. Honest, there must be 10 montage sequences in this sucker. That is about 10 too many! It’s as if the writers and director (credit is given to one guy as writer and director, but I’m sure Tina Fey and Amy Poehler contributed gags, and Fey had her whole TV show writing crew on set with her every day) don’t know how to make a scene. All they know how to do is come up with gags. So the montage sequence lets them throw up a whole bunch of gags. One or two will get a chuckle, at least, then move on.

I think there should be a movie rule: No more than one montage sequence in any movie. And, zero is better than one!

Another thing that struck me is how awkward it is to film on location. They chose Philadelphia as the location and, since this is not Los Angeles or New York, they had to insert local flavor references and shots. Even though they didn’t advance the story or have anything to do with the story. So we have scenes shot out on location that aren’t conducive to good performances, good sound, and that just plain distract us in the audience from what is going on.

Finally, there is just one little other thing. This is a common complaint of Hollywood movies. Kate is a ‘successful career woman.’ Fine, but does she have to be a bloody millionairess to be called successful? I mean, as soon as she agrees she will pay $100,000 to a service just to have a baby, she puts herself outside the category of almost every other woman on Earth!

People have real problems out there. Like having a job, any job. Like getting enough food to eat. Like getting an operation or medication to stay alive. Seriously, $100,000 to buy a baby? What kind of world do these Hollywood writers and executives live in, anyway? Why the hell do they have to blow everything up to such absurd levels? And then they try to pass Kate off as just Everywoman with a fertility problem?

Okay, I know I said ‘finally’ up there, but there’s another thing. The whole ending. This movie is about surrogacy. Only it ends up not being about surrogacy at all. Angie doesn’t carry Kate’s baby, and Kate ends up getting pregnant anyway! COME ON!!! Maybe this is the most annoying part. None of the whole plot was necessary. A deus ex machina reached down out of screenwriting Heaven and gave Kate her own baby with a cute guy who is going to marry her anyway!

I know you like the stories to end with everybody getting what they deserve. But this is just too much. This is giving everybody what they want. Moral of the story: you can do everything and have everything.

You don’t have to live in reality when you’re in a Hollywood movie.

(8 April 2009)

Juno

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘Juno.’

Hmm.

I can’t deny that it choked me up and engaged me. So, I must’ve liked it.

But I was trying not to like it almost from the start – certainly from the convenience store clerk’s overwritten dialogue, and all the slang.

Here’s the story, though I bet you’ve seen it.

16 year old Juno discovers she is pregnant. She is a geeky girl, a nerd outcast of sorts, though her dad and stepmom both support and like her.

At first she goes to have an abortion, but something about the clinic setting freaks her out and she can’t go through with that so she finds a childless couple who seem the perfect couple, and they say they will pay for her medical expenses, and she says she will give them the child.

Her pregnancy follows, including her awkward relationship with the kid who is the father, but they are not really dating; her friendship with the cheerleader, the discomfort of being heavy. But most of the scenes revolve around her growing relationships with the adopting couple. The husband seems to be relaxed and able to relate to Juno on her level, talking about rock bands and music and horror movies. The mother though is a corporate worker bee, and too tightly wound, wanting the child too much, too anxious, too eager, too desperate.

But the twist comes when the father adopter is afraid to be a father, he initiates divorce proceedings against his wife, and moves out.

This precipitates the crisis, the second curtain; Juno doesn’t know what to do, and we get a series of short scenes in which clues for the resolution are given to us, but not the full answer. (this is rather a cheat but it leads to a more satisfactory ending because it prolongs the suspense for us).

She reconciles with her boyfriend and they become truly boyfriend and girlfriend. She has the child, and it’s almost the usual giving-birth sequence of scenes. And she doesn’t see the child after delivery, because she considers it to be the adopting mother’s in reality.

Adopting mother, alone, not alone, gets to hug and hold her baby.

Juno and her boyfriend get to go back to practicing for their rock band, kissing, happy together.

There are points about it that bugged me, though.

The witty repartee strikes me as over the top – it fits a stylized movie world but not this indie/naturalistic world.

Best moments were the quiet ones where the witty repartee stopped.

For this reason, perhaps, Jen Garner steals the picture for me. She has the highest ration of silent to talky scenes, and she almost never has a witty banter line. Almost all (or even all) of her lines are straightforward, sincere, honest, never trying to conceal her emotions under witty banter or pop culture references.

Camera moves were clichés all the way. So much they annoyed me, but then those moves that annoyed me were subtle and so common that most viewers probably would not even notice them.

Lighting was good, production design good, costumes good, focus was rarely a problem. Technically, this is top notch for an indie, though I don’t know if i’d call it an indie really, outside of the script.

I think it’s a bit too girl-power as a subject to grab me all the way, and that’s probably a big part of my resisting it.

I had a great fear lest Juno and Bleeker wed and raise the kid themselves. The script and direction successfully pushed me in the direction of that fear (I suppose it would be ‘hope’ for many in the audience but it was ‘fear’ to me because it would have been too neat by half). I was so happy they fooled me. Though I should have remembered the note would pay off, and how else could it pay off? With a shot of Jen Garner sobbing and alone and miserable over a note saying ‘the kid is mine, you don’t deserve a child’? That wouldn’t have been very nice, and then the picture wouldn’t have had the boxoffice legs it did, and I knew it did have those legs, and would arrive at a very satisfying ending for bourgeois Americans over a very controversial subject, you know?).

(written around 6 March 2009)