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Cinema Roundup: Origins and Afterthoughts

Poltergeist, Tomorrowland

Both movies at Valley Cinemas are held over this week, which gives us a chance to catch up before the next onslaught of big, new releases. So here are addenda to last week's previews of Tomorrowland and Poltergeist.

The predictable knock against the remake of Poltergeist is that it's unnecessary, there being nothing wrong with the 1982 original. But have those who argue this point seen that old film recently? Even at the time the acting was obviously uneven, the special effects were poor, and the cause of the hauntings was incoherent and inconsistent. In addition, there were two now-forgotten sequels that further muddied the concept. In its favor, however, was a finely honed recreation of tract home suburbia and the presence of one of the big screen's great moms, played by JoBeth Williams.

While the original began excitingly with the family already ensconced in a lively community, this muted, sluggish Poltergeist begins like a typical origin story, with the Bowen family first arriving at their new house in the 'burbs. How they managed to afford it when dad has been laid off by John Deere goes unexplained. The mysteries of their new home are tediously added up, but one sequence that could have been exciting, in which the three kids are all dealing with different lures (scary tree, basement goop, lethal closet) while the parents are at a party, falls flat when it could have had the excitement of a D. W. Griffith cross-cutting chase scene. The CGI-based scares are moderately improved over the original, but the tone is passive and predictable like a hundred other haunted house movies of the past 10 years.

The modest hit of the Memorial Day weekend, Tomorrowland, turns out to be a kids' film. This should have been obvious from the tone of the commercials and the fact that the central characters are young girls, and, frankly, because it was released by the kids' film arm of the Disney empire. Still, its kiddie orientation comes as something of a shock, though a pleasant one. Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) is the main character and a younger girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) is her companion, with the "name actor," George Clooney, not appearing for about 40-minutes – as an adult character, anyway. Their girl power union is probably the best thing in the Tomorrowland.

The quest resting on their tiny shoulders is nothing less than saving the universe. To do so they have to gain access to Tomorrowland, located in some place that is Intersteller-like, and they can only do that with the aid of the adult Frank Walker (Clooney). There, they must do battle with Hugh Laurie's unsubtly named villain Nix, but what ultimately has to happen is that those now knowledgeable about Tomorrowland must set forth into the world and convince others to join them in the crusade to save Earth. The film ends with a positive message, that we can save the planet, in the philosophy of the film as enunciated by Casey's dad and derived from Native American thought, by feeding the good wolf of hope and action and not the bad one of passivity and despair.

Which by the way, leads the thoughtful viewer to some speculation on the meaning of the film. Sending out kids with marching orders to find like-minded youth to join their league under the badge of the Tomorrowland lapel pin, where they will subversively alter public attitudes smacks of communist propaganda; that is if there were any communists left. Or the film could be an unsubtle, typical ly liberal Hollywood attempt to convey an uplifting pro-environment tract. As it turns out, though, there is much chatter on the Internet about the alleged influence of Ayn Rand on director Brad Bird, which people have tracked through The Incredibles and even in Ratatouille, unlikely venues for closely argued political statements extolling selfishness and the profit motive. Though the director apparently denies these "hidden messages," the argument is that he extols the virtues of the lone creator in the face of mass mediocrity that otherwise tries to tear down the artist-industrialist's good works, as in The Fountainhead, and results, as in Tomorrowland, in a cabal of smart people uniting to make their own utopia, a la Atlas Shrugged. If indeed Brad Bird is an objectivist, as Rand's take on things is called, then he shares that libertarian ethos with other Hollywood directors, such as Jason Reitman, who, incidentally or coincidentally, has also sought the collaboration of George Clooney (Up in the Air). If Hollywood dares to continue to insert actual ideas into its tent pole films, we may need to instigate another House committee to ferret out this, as we did with during the last gasp of communism back in the 1950s. Or, we could trust movie viewers to be able to think on their own.

 

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