It’s a load of malarkey. There were many many cringe-worthy moments, which I will list later. So cringe-worthy that I literally squirmed about in my seat, and a couple beside me burst into laughter at it. Needless to say, it was supposed to be a poignant moment.<\/p>\n
I’ll start with broad impressions, and then list specifics later:<\/p>\n
Some of the effects were very cool – although some were not so cool and not so well-done. Shocking, in a film which really is all about the special effects. I thought a lot of it was pretty shoddy, actually.<\/p>\n
It amazes me how actors can still come up with shreds of their dignity intact when dealing with such heinous material as that god-awful script. Roland Emmerich should be barred from writing his own stuff. He CANNOT WRITE. But still – working with that really bad script – some of the actors managed to turn in some nice performances. Not GREAT, but nice.<\/p>\n
And here’s my broad thought about the film (I am all over the place right now):<\/p>\n
It has nothing to do with global warming. Or science. It has no social message whatsoever. Roland Emmerich might THINK that that was what he was doing, but I can tell, through my psychic powers, that this is not the case at all.<\/p>\n
What he was ACTUALLY doing in that film was working out the nagging anxieties we all feel about our prospects on this planet following September 11. It may have been subconscious on his part – maybe it was – and like I said: I’m just giving you my psychic reading on the whole thing.<\/p>\n
We all deal with anxiety in different ways. The post-September-11 world has affected everybody – but not in a monolithic way. Everyone has to cope. Life must go on. So we cope in different ways.<\/p>\n
Some began to drink heavily. Some became workaholics. Some sold all their belongings and proceeded to live on houseboats. Some began to have indiscriminate sex. Some threw themselves into arts and crafts.<\/p>\n
And some … decided to make movies about global disasters – featuring the ultimate destruction of New York City.<\/p>\n
It’s an acting-out. A fantasy. Or a nightmare. A true fear being expressed – however spectacularly, and however coldly (I find all the digital film-making really cold and alienating at times, I have to say.)<\/p>\n
Film noir, with its feeling of menace, its elongated shadows, its overwhelming feeling of alienation – the lonely hard-bitten detective – alone at his desk – fighting the forces of evil – but he, too, the detective, is also, in his essence, an anti-social man… All of these stylistic elements came out of a specific time and place. And it’s not like it was conscious – that a bunch of film-makers or studios had a round-table discussion: “Okay, we need to come up with a style now to express our anxiety”. It was a natural progression – a trend – coming out of the tenor of the times.<\/p>\n
I think that all of the epics and myths and legends that we now are seeing come to the screen – Troy <\/i>and King Arthur <\/i>– and Alexander <\/i>(saw the preview for that last night) – are all subconscious expressions of the fear of what happened on September 11, 2001. There is a straining in the mind to go back – to look backwards – way way <\/i>back – to the ancient times, to ancient apocalyptic moments when civilization hung in the balance.<\/p>\n
That’s how I interpret this trend, anyway.<\/p>\n
Film-makers, writers, and also the audiences who flock to these epics – are all asking themselves – subconsciously: “How did we – the human race – get through THAT? We did … we did get through it … civilization survived … and whatever lessons there are to be learned from the story of Troy, the story of Alexander the Great … whatever lessons there are back then – perhaps we could use some of that wisdom NOW.”<\/p>\n
Again, this isn’t a conscious thing. It’s something going on in the subterranean level.<\/p>\n
Myths – or old stories handed down – act as repositories for a community’s hopes, desires, fears. It’s like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example. Life isn’t pretty. Beneath the surface, there are things that always threaten, life is potentially very very dangerous. But we can’t walk about KNOWING this at all times – and so we create stories, to let out some of that fear, to express some of it. These stories are like containers. We can pour into them our own fears, our own desires, our own questions …<\/p>\n
That is exactly what I was thinking last night, as I watched the tidal wave destroy New York City in the film.<\/p>\n
I mean, the effects were all right, I thought the best moment was the wave rising, rising, rising, around the Statue of Liberty …<\/p>\n
But what I was really thinking was: Wow. This film is really about September 11, and the horror of watching those towers fall – on television if you were far away – I also made a guess that Emmerich was probably nowhere NEAR New York City on that day. This isn’t a criticism. I’m saying that: I know, at least from my friends who don’t live here, that their fears and anxieties are very different from mine, because their experience of that day was watching it on television and desperately, desperately, desperately trying to get in touch with their loved ones (me) who lived here.<\/p>\n
Very very different experience than watching it happen.<\/p>\n
And so – this film was expressing some of that terror of that day.<\/p>\n
And by making it all much WORSE – New York City completely BURIED, DESTROYED – it becomes like a myth. A story, a legend. It becomes the repository for that free-floating anxiety about our prospects, about the fragility of our world, of our civilization … a giant wave could wipe us all out at any moment. Let’s imagine what that would be like if that happened!!!<\/p>\n
None of this is a criticism – I’m just telling you what I thought and felt as I watched the movie.<\/p>\n
I felt a deep alienation, in myself – something in me stood way way back from it. I was almost angry, actually. Like: our fair city, our fair city. Also, because the film was made post-September 11 – the skyline is our new and truncated one. And – I’m JUST NOT FUCKING USED TO IT, okay?? I can’t just look at the skyline calmly and think, “Huh. There’s the skyline.” No. There is always something missing, and something aches within me – It is NOT normal, I can NOT forget, I am NOT used to it (although, of course – life goes on) – but I am NOT accustomed to it. Long swooping shots of lower Manhattan, and … I’m sorry, but it just looks weird to me. It looks like an amputated leg. It doesn’t look RIGHT.<\/p>\n
And so I guess I had some anger (really?? heh heh) – because the film glided over that – treated the skyline of New York as though it had always been that way – and then the film went ahead and destroyed the REST of it.<\/p>\n
However: back to my original thesis: This whole film was like a little kid in the backyard playing a game in which he pretends to kill his father – the father who, in real life, has beaten him his whole life. The child is enacting a ritual, the child is playing a game where he can pretend to be powerful, where he can pretend that he is in charge, where he can lash out. He stamps on his father, he whips him with a stick, he jumps up and down, he feels no remorse. The child is letting out his rage, his fear, his sadness in his GAME. The GAME gets to be the container – the child gets to fill up this container with all of his conflicting emotions.<\/p>\n
That’s what “Day After Tomorrow” felt like to me.<\/p>\n
Good thing I didn’t go see the film on a date, huh?<\/p>\n
Now for the cringe-worthy moments<\/b>:<\/p>\n
— I love Dennis Quaid, but his performance stinks up the joint. It’s overblown, it’s obvious, it’s badly executed. I felt bad for him.<\/p>\n
— This was the worst: when the young girlfriend says to her soaking freezing boyfriend, “I’ll warm you with my body heat” – and then they embrace. The entire audience was snickering.<\/p>\n
— Why on EARTH were they burning books, when there was all that wooden FURNITURE around? Not logical. Rip up the tables, rip up the chairs – use the WOOD. Dumb. It was just an excuse to have a conversation about burning books. And while – I liked elements of it (the black geek kid calling to the others, “Hey, here’s a whole shelf of Tax Law – let’s burn this!”) – it was dumb. Not logical.<\/p>\n
— I thought the Empire State Building freezing like a popsicle was very poorly done. It didn’t look real, somehow, and (forgive the pun) left me cold.<\/p>\n
— The music was over-the-top. Corny. Sentimental.<\/p>\n
— The preachy statement at the end made by the Vice President was so dumb – and some man 2 rows in front of me actually groaned.<\/p>\n
— The two lovers making out by the roaring fire was stupid. They are waiting out an Ice Age, she has blood poisoning, it is freezing, there is no escape, the snow has covered the ENTIRE building. Now, I completely believe that if I were in that situation – I would find a way to snog with someone. Disaster sex is quite common – end-of-the-world sex – no problem with that. It was just the scenario – it was too romantic. A roaring fire, of all things. If I had been directing the film, I would have had them huddled up in the darkness between book stacks, freezing, dirty, desperate, clawing at each other’s faces, trying to eat the life out of one another. True disaster sex. Nothing romantic about it. There’s not enough time.<\/p>\n
— I thought at the very beginning when the ice cap crumbled and Dennis Quaid was dangling above the abyss … Has anyone else seen it? I thought it was so badly done. It didn’t look real. It looked like a B-movie effect. You could tell it was a blue screen with an abyss projected onto it.<\/p>\n
— The beginning – with the slow pan over the ice bergs – was quite beautiful – but there was something missing in it for me – because it was so obviously all fake, and all digitally recreated. Now a REAL helicopter ride over some REAL icebergs – that might have given me an actual sense of danger and death. But the camera “moves” were too smooth, too sure, too fake. Left me cold. Again.<\/p>\n
— At the very end – when Dennis Quaid and his partner – walk across the frozen Hudson to get into Manhattan. Member that part? They walk by the frozen Statue of Liberty – they see the frozen city – the emptiness, the snow drifts that go up 30 stories. Now, here’s the problem, though: If they come in from that side, then they are walking EAST. Their first steps into Manhattan are on what is known as the “West Side”. The West Side looks out over the Hudson to Jersey. Anyway. Here’s how the scene goes. They trudge to the side of the city – which, by my calculation, means that they are right on the West Side Highway, the western edge of the city. Dennis Quaid says to his partner, “My son is hiding in the library – where is the library?” His partner looks at his little gyroscope thing-y (whatever) and looks at his friend, with dawning horror (so cheesy): “It’s right here.” Now, I’m sorry, but that’s not right. The son is holed up in the New York Public Library – the massive one – with the lions in front – which is in midtown – it is smack-dab in the center of the city – on 42nd Street. It is not on the EDGE of the city. It is on 42nd and 5th – which means you have a good 6 or 7 block walk to get there from the West Side Highway. So I didn’t like that. If you’re gonna destroy New York City in your movie, then at least deal with the geography correctly.<\/p>\n
Things I liked<\/b><\/p>\n
— Sela Ward as the ex-wife of Dennis Quaid. She’s always good. There’s just something so substantial about her acting. Good, good, good.<\/p>\n
— Ian Holm, as the scientist in Scotland, was also very good. He seemed to be the voice of true doom in the film (unlike Dennis Quaid’s more frenetic posturing). He looked at incomprehensible charts, as the snow piled around his building, and you could see on his face that it was bad.<\/p>\n
— I did think it was funny to see Americans migrating into Mexico illegally.<\/p>\n
— The ravenous wolves who escaped from the zoo were, to my taste, the only truly scary thing in the movie. I thought that was actually a cool detail to include: animals. The animals in the zoo knowing that something is coming before the humans do. And then – wild wolves escaping. They were scary.<\/p>\n
— All of the birds filling the skies over Manhattan. Very nice effect.<\/p>\n
And that’s about all I have to say. Phew!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a load of malarkey. There were many many cringe-worthy moments, which I will list later. So cringe-worthy that I literally squirmed about in my seat, and a couple beside me burst into laughter at it. Needless to say, it … Continue reading