{"id":17721,"date":"2022-01-17T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17721"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:15","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:15","slug":"welcome-to-paradise-hawaiian-movies-done-right-and-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/welcome-to-paradise-hawaiian-movies-done-right-and-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Paradise: Hawaiian Movies Done Right (and Wrong)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Winter is a great time to go to Hawaii \u2014 or at least watch movies set and filmed there. But choose carefully: just because a production takes place on one of the 50th state\u2019s gorgeous islands, it doesn\u2019t guarantee a vicarious escape to paradise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With temperatures hovering around 80 degrees and an endless breeze repelling oppressive humidity, the Hawaiian climate is built for people to experience it outside. Films that occur (From Here to Eternity<\/em>) and are shot there (Jurassic Park<\/em>) have famously taken advantage of the land\u2019s plentiful natural wonders, yet in the early 2010s, two mainlanders took decidedly different approaches to respecting that historical precedent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of Cameron Crowe\u2019s Aloha<\/em>, it\u2019s often difficult to tell why the director decided to set his film there at all. Easily the worst feature from the man behind Almost Famous<\/a><\/em>, Vanilla Sky<\/em>, <\/em>and Jerry Maguire<\/em>, Aloha <\/em>is undone by an unconvincing romance, busy storytelling<\/a>, and groan-inducing catchphrases (e.g. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to pick my brains. They\u2019re unpickable\u201d). But for anyone who\u2019s been to the islands, another major issue is Aloha<\/em>\u2019s failure to showcase Hawaii as a place, despite being filmed entirely on Oahu.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crowe’s self-professed \u201clove letter\u201d<\/a> to the state, the bulk of the action mysteriously occurs indoors in largely windowless rooms. Of the scenes that are set outdoors, many take place at night, while those in the daylight depict a limited range of vistas with actors filmed too close up to highlight their beautiful surroundings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A glance at Crowe\u2019s career, however, suggests that such results should have been expected. Though the innocuous, post-Elizabethtown <\/em>rebound We Bought a Zoo <\/em>makes perfectly fine use of a man-made nature preserve, Crowe\u2019s films haven\u2019t exactly established him as an outdoors enthusiast. From the arenas of Almost Famous <\/em>to the sports agent offices of Jerry Maguire<\/em>, his best work predominantly takes place indoors with memorable exterior scenes from those films, Vanilla Sky<\/em>, and Singles <\/em>occurring in urban settings. Even the tree-lined \u201cIn Your Eyes\u201d boombox serenade of Say Anything\u2026 <\/em>isn\u2019t something that had the Sierra Club blowing up Crowe\u2019s pager to helm their next campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As such, it\u2019s understandable that the filmmaker would restrict much of Aloha<\/em>‘s action to the safety of Hickam Air Force Base in Pearl Harbor and, with precious few exceptions, shy away from engaging with the lush Hawaiian landscapes in a meaningful manner. In turn, outdoor shots make up roughly 20 of the film\u2019s 105 minutes, with the rest lensed in a handful of unremarkable interiors, suggesting that the production could have taken place anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Despite the assignment\u2019s would-be no-brainer nature, in tandem with a narrative that purports to be at least partially about the conservation of land for native people, expecting someone with this background to respectfully depict the state\u2019s beauty is perhaps too big of an ask. And though Aloha<\/em>\u2019s obliviousness of place is all the more egregious arriving four years after Alexander Payne\u2019s The Descendants<\/em>, the success of the latter as a Hawaii movie makes significantly more sense in the context of its maker\u2019s filmography.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Crowe, Payne\u2019s early work sticks closely to cityscapes \u2014 more specifically, those of Omaha, Nebraska. But beginning with the roadtrip saga of About Schmidt<\/em>, Payne\u2019s scope expanded and welcomed in the great outdoors as a supporting player and muse. While Sideways<\/em> has its share of indoor scenes in the hotels, restaurants, and wineries that Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church) visit on the latter\u2019s stag weekend, it\u2019s the expansive outdoor shots \u2014 be it Miles\u2019 Saab on the highway or the old friends taking in the beauty of California\u2019s wine country \u2014 that helped elevate Payne from quirky indie filmmaker to Oscar winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, the honor was for adapted screenplay, but the experience nevertheless helped unlock Payne as a filmmaker in tune with nature. Following the subsequent seven-year hiatus that saw him direct the pilot for the HBO comedy Hung<\/em> and a segment of the anthology film Paris, Je T\u2019aime<\/em> \u2014 as well as play Oscar Wilde in Wes Craven\u2019s chapter \u2014 Payne returned to cinemas with The Descendants<\/em>, a film that revels in Hawaii\u2019s outdoors and seems impatient to return when its characters venture inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Driven by a story that demands to be told in the daylight, the Oscar-winning adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings\u2019 novel follows Honolulu-based lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) and his decision of whether to sell \u201c25,000 pristine acres on Kaua\u2019i that [his] family has owned since the 1860s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In true \u201cChekhov\u2019s gun\u201d fashion, Payne and his go-to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael will eventually show the land in all its glory. But in the meantime, Matt must contend with his wife\u2019s coma following a boating accident, the revelation of her infidelity, and the likelihood of raising his daughters Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) alone \u2014 a far more compelling mix of conflicts than Aloha<\/em>\u2019s simplistic yet convoluted hodgepodge of scenes, subjects, and crises that don\u2019t convincingly belong together. Payne and Crowe may have earned screenwriting Oscars in the 2000s, but only one was living up to that legacy in the 2010s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though plenty of The Descendants<\/em>\u2019 <\/em>scenes take place indoors, they\u2019re almost always during the day and feature the island\u2019s copious flora through large, unobstructed windows. If open-air ICUs were a thing, there\u2019s a sense that Payne would have set his hospital scenes in one of them, and in the rare instances when a scene is set at night, it\u2019s almost always at a place that\u2019s previously been shown during the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the outdoor scenes, they\u2019re a natural extension of the narrative and almost too frequent to mention \u2014 a running depiction of Matt\u2019s conscience and his evolving stance on what to do with his ancestral property. It might as well be a glimpse into Payne\u2019s mind: following The Descendents<\/em>, the director returned to the midwest with his best film thus far, Nebraska<\/em>, which combines his enhanced eye for exterior shots with a distinct flair for dramedy rooted in the people and customs of his home state. And his most recent feature, Downsizing<\/em>, hinges on a fantastical sci-fi premise to curb humans\u2019 detrimental impacts on Earth, suggesting that his environmental interests have become an integral part of his art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without this loving attention to nature, and despite a plot that likewise centers on preservation (sort of), Aloha <\/em>plays like a bizarro version of The Descendants<\/em>, zigging where Payne\u2019s film zags and may as well have been shot on a Hollywood soundstage. By contrast, The Descendants <\/em>feels like it couldn\u2019t have been made anywhere else and should serve as a template for future Hawaiian productions. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In two movies of the 2010s, two filmmakers attempted to capture the charms of the island state – with wildly varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":547,"featured_media":17723,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-17721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/547"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22075,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17721\/revisions\/22075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}