In Revue: Two Types of Nostalgia

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie-obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Seth Rogen decked out in superhero mask and 3-D glasses. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

January’s generally considered a cinematic dumping ground. If your movie’s not good enough to qualify for the Oscar race, it generally gets slotted for January. So as a rule, January’s a pretty rotten month for movies. We’d love to tell you that this month the exception to the rule, and that The Green Hornet, which we’ve all been losing our minds waiting for, is an exceptional film. But you wouldn’t want us to lie to you, would you? Would you have us make liars of ourselves? We hope not. On the plus side, there is a great new Chilean documentary opening at the Lightbox. And it doesn’t have Seth Rogen in it! Double-plus good!

The Green Hornet is a muddy, incoherent mess of a film. It’s PG-13 filmmaking for kids weaned on Shrek: a sneering, cynical pop culture mishmash, compulsively winking at twenty-four frames per second. Pitched from the development hell where it has languished for nearly two decades, the film suffers from two bungling missteps: the signing of Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) as its guiding creative forces.
Starring, executive produced, and co-written by Rogen (with Superbad collaborator and good-time buddy Evan Goldberg), Hornet finds itself burdened with having to harmonize its superhero source material with Rogen’s stammering schlubbery and Gondry’s auteurish flourishes. Cooks in the kitchen, as they say. Rogen and Goldberg’s screenplay attempts to strike a balance between the outlandish superheroics and the buddy-buddy bromantic interplay between Rogen’s Britt Reid (a playboy inheritor to a media fortune-cum-urban avenger) and his sidekick Kato (Jay Chou). It doesn’t work. The film’s tone is scattershot, a problem compounded by Gondry, who suffers from hewing so close to genre expectations and possesses no capacity for coherently directing an action scene.
Rogen and Goldberg’s script falls flat, excessively indebted to Rogen’s grating comic persona and embarrassingly dependent on exposition. (Edward James Olmos’s character to Rogen: “I was your father’s best friend and confidant for forty-five years.”) Even Christoph Waltz annoys as cartoonish L.A. crime boss Chudnofsky, a role originally meant for Nicolas Cage before he dropped out due to creative differences. James Franco shines in an early face-off against Waltz, but his scene-stealing turn is quickly forgotten, subsumed as it is by tactless violence and Rogen’s camera mugging. Unsurprisingly, The Green Hornet will see theatrical release in 3D. Just as predictably, the effects function as a tacked on afterthought, one of the least imaginative uses of the technology to date; trendy techie varnish that falls well short of polishing this particularly offensive turd.
The Green Hornet opens Friday, January 14 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Stunningly beautiful and deeply sad, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light opens on the Atacama Desert in Chile. It’s craggy, dry, lifeless, and generally pretty, uh, deserted. But it’s here that two profound searches for life take place. On the one hand, the desert’s thin atmosphere makes it a prime location for stargazing, and home to high-tech telescopes charting the movement of stars, spiralling of galaxies, and other extra-terrestrial bric-a-brac. On the other, survivors of General Pinochet’s regime comb the soil for the remains of loved ones, political prisoners who not-so-mysteriously “disappeared.”
The two threads Guzmán tugs at may seem discrete on paper, and equating them may seem like a bit of a slight. Astronomy and genocide, after all, hardly seem comparable. But it’s a marker of the director’s delicacy and genius that the comparison holds, and that Nostalgia for the Light hangs together so beautifully. Just as contemporary Chileans must actively unearth (often quite literally) their recent history, as a way of reconciling their present with their troubled past, astronomers undertake a similar project: gazing into ancient galaxies in order to make sense of the present. It’s this fitting analogy that motivates the film. For many Chileans, during and after the reign of Pinochet’s junta, watching the skies was more than just a form of wistful escapism.
Though placid (and sluggish in places), Nostalgia is packed equally with harrowing stories of life under Pinochet and exquisite outer space cinematography. For anyone unfamiliar with contemporary Chilean cinema—skim the Wikipedia entry on Pinochet before seeing the film; we did—keeping pace with the film can be a bit exhausting at times. At the same time, this historical and cultural specificity distinguishes Nostalgia for the Light, as it does many of Guzmán’s films. Nostalgia is a rare documentary, one that harmonizes conflicting emotional narratives and emotional registers while still admitting that its stories, like the past, can never be fully rationalized.
Nostalgia for the Light opened Thursday, January 13 for a limited run at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Click here for showtimes.