Philadelphia Weekly

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Manufactured Landscapes
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., June 29

Unlike fellow artists Andy Goldsworthy or Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Canadian still photographer Edward Burtynsky's work doesn't necessarily demand a documentary.

Goldsworthy's nature-infused art pieces (offered up in Rivers and Tides) are, it turns out, best presented through cinema, while Christo and Jeanne-Claude's mega-installations are all about the process of creating and taking in art, making the string of Maysles brothers docs on their pieces a logical extension. But Burtynsky's photographs--which fixate on natural landscapes transformed/contaminated by human hands--work pretty well on their own.

Yet Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal's doc on Burtynsky, is the furthest thing from a standard meet-the-artists doc like Rivers and Tides. In the film's justly drooled-over opening, Baichwal whips out an eight-minute lateral tracking shot across the floor of a seemingly endless (and endlessly populated) Chinese factory.

Sure, the shot's inspired by one of Burtynsky's photos. But it's really its own thing--as influenced by Burtysnky as it is by Koyaanisqatsi or Godard (who opened his 1970 Maoist tract British Sounds with a similar shot). Throw in the fact that Burtysnky doesn't even pop up on the soundtrack till five minutes into the take (and then adds little but superfluous elaboration), and you have a doc that almost doesn't even need its ostensible subject.

That's not exactly fair, though Baichwal is certainly anything but reverent. Trailing Burtynsky as he shleps through China, snapping up factories, piles of junk metal and the notorious Yangtze River Three Gorges Dam project, Manufactured Landscapes in equal turns annotates, elaborates upon and enters into a dialogue with the artist and his work.

Sometimes Baichwal simply converts Burtynsky's photos into cinema, as with the opening shot. Other times she offers an unflattering look behind the scenes, as when she films him lording over a mammoth shoot featuring yellow-suited workers standing between yellow factory buildings (amid dandelions--also yellow) with a Cecil B. DeMille-sized army of extras and techies at his disposal. (Manufactured, indeed.)

The likes of Al Gore have seized upon Manufactured Landscapes, claiming it as only the latest anti-industrialization tract. Yet environmentalism is just one of the film's many primary concerns, among them the limitations of art in representing the world--the concessions and fibs one must employ to make a valid point.

Perhaps more important, you're unlikely to find a more hypnotic and visually striking film playing theatrically. Davy Jones and his CGI-enhanced octo-face have nothing on this one's river of reddish toxic waste.

Live Free or Die Hard
Directed by Len Wiseman
C-
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Wed., June 27

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"You're a Timex watch in a digital world," hisses Timothy Olyphant's cardboard villain at Bruce Willis' ever-iconic John McClane, during a particularly depressing sequence in Len Wiseman's unasked-for, absurdly tardy third Die Hard sequel.

A full 19 years after Willis and original director John McTiernan rebooted the summer action extravaganza, bringing unforeseen depths of vulnerability and a sense of everyman audience identification to a genre previously owned by monosyllabic Sly/Arnie muscle men, Wiseman's foolhardy update spends most of its time pandering to a generation that wasn't even born when the first picture was released.

So absurdly illogical it reminds me why I stopped watching 24, Live Free or Die Hard finds Willis' potty-mouthed caveman cop protecting Macintosh pitchman Justin Long from a cabal of sinister computer hackers who shut down the entire East Coast, knocking out everything from traffic lights to the New York Stock Exchange.

Mark Bomback's nonsensical screenplay is full of arbitrary developments, as when the traffic tangles close down every main street in a massive CGI gridlock, save for the throughways required for several car chases. (They're suddenly miraculously empty.) Cell phones and landlines no longer work, unless the plot requires them to. Perhaps it's only a fool who looks for logic in a Die Hard movie, but please, just give me a little internal consistency here.

Lacking the elegant simplicity of a guy stuck in a building with some bad guys, Live Free or Die Hard sends McClane breezing from New Jersey to Washington, D.C., to West Virginia in record time (especially since all the roads are supposed to be jammed). It devotes most of its energy to fetishizing a lot of Internet server firewall gobbledygook that'll be dated in about three months, and sets up an awkward love story between Long's techno-dork and McClane's daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who can indeed sound exactly like the old man when given the right lines).