Sunday, October 21, 2007

On Rendition

Rendition is much better than the reviews are implying. It's after 11 and I'm and old man and exhausted so excuse me if this isn't a real review (or even altogether coherent, natch) I type up here, but I do have to get something off my chest. I do get sorta spoilery below.

I was just skimming through the reviews for the film at Rotten Tomatoes and a couple phrases kept leaping out at me and making me cringe - there was a lot of calling the film overly sentimental or even Hallmark-like; and then there were numerous references to the other global-spanning, multi-threaded, political films of recent years, a la Babel - of course, the implication being that where Babel tread correctly, Rendition tread falsely. Hopefully y'all remember my feeling on Babel - "hateful piece of shit" sums them up, if you don't - so you might know where I'm going with this.

Yes, Rendition is probably sentimental to a fault, in the end. It's not a perfect film - it uses the rhythms and devices of mainstream movie-making, of "the thriller," too thoroughly; there's far too much convenience and cleanliness for a topic this messy. But ya know, in the end I'd much rather watch a film that actually cares about its characters than one in which I feel like the director is spitting in their, in my face the entire time. One that appeals to people's decency and doesn't feel like I'm listening to a spoiled teenager throwing a tantrum, yelling, "We don't get it; people suck!"

I get that message walking through Times Square every day, thank you very much. I'm certainly not one to argue that we only go to the movies to be entertained - I do love my horror movies keeping me up at night - and that a film - specifically a film about United States sanctioned torture, at that - shouldn't make me feel bad. But just because this film ends with an admittedly implausible "happy" ending, it doesn't erase everything we've seen come before, and it doesn't mean that I walk out of the theater thinking that this "happy" ending is what really happens in the world. But, heaven forbid, it feels good to have characters do the right goddamned thing in one of these movies, ya know? Perhaps there really ain't enough of that in the real world, but once in awhile, I know that the Innaratu's of the world might not get this, but once in awhile it's sort of inpiring, within our art or even just our basic entertainment, to present us with the option of basic human decency.

See, I am indeed just rambling. I apologize. I'm pissed off looking at the reviews and the shitty box office this movie had this weekend knowing that it'll be dismissed from here on out. Because Rendition is by no means a bad movie, and it's most definitely a thousand times more worthwhile than anything that's been shat out of Paul Haggis' pencil.
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2 comments:

Cherita said...

Thank you for that, JA.

I know the two of us bring our pro-Jake bias to this movie, but the terrible reviews I've seen are not justified. I did have my own level of disappointment in it but that's because I had built up so much hope and expectation that nothing this ambitious could ever have satisfied me fully. I can't even point out a single specific issue with the film, other than that it tries to do so much that there isn't enough time with each storyline. But I know why Sane and Hood were doing that, and the comments I've found from non-critic viewers (aka unpretentious real moviegoing folks) have been relatively positive. People are being made to think by Rendition, if they have enough brains in the first place to choose it over yet another Tyler Perry farce. That's the real problem this movie faces: dumb American audiences.

Jason Adams said...

Yeah, I went out of my way last night to not mention jake, because I didn't want my love of him clouding the issue, which was that it sucks that everybody's screaming FLOP today because of the box office and critical failure and that it's not a film worthy of such gleeful scorn as I'm seeing. It's a fine film, and everyone within does a fine job. It ends up being, like I said last night, too neat with its politics and its story, but it's far from awful, and it's a shame that it won't get enough credit. And if I'm gonna bring up Jake now, I thought he gave a really swell performance here that didn't feel like anything he's done before. And I was glad that Reese's screaming in the trailer was only a tiny snippet of what she does and I thought she did a fine job as well. Everybody did - Meryl of course, and Peter Sarsgaard, and Alan Arkin, and Omar Metwally.