Worse Than Hitler

I'm moving to Tumblr

2011-01-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

Fuck this noise.

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Trash and Treasure

2011-01-09T19:36:00.000-08:00

I recently watched the Coen Bros re-envisioning of True Grit, and I liked watching it. I had fun. There was shooting, and snappy dialog and a comically hyper-competent 14 year old girl, and Jeff Bridges out-crusting the Duke. And yet...after watching it I was left with the same feeling I had after watching Winter's Bone. I knew that I had just witnessed a superbly crafted entertainment: well acted, masterfully directed, rich with themes and evocative imagery but...there was just something missing. For the longest time I was unable to put a finger on what I really felt was lacking, but reading some reviews of my preliminary favorite film of 2010, Black Swan, has led me to a revelation. These movies just aren't trashy enough.

A whole bunch of reviewers have referred to Black Swan as trash: high-toned, well-made trash, but trash nonetheless. One of these reviews (which was a rave, BTW) defined "trash" cinema as film-making that seeks to combine elements of high culture and low culture. Along with this definition, the review listed a number of examples of great trash cinema, including my favorite film from last year, Inglourious Basterds. This year, I preferred a piece of well-executed trash (Swan) to the consensus "best" movie of the year, Winter's Bone. Last year, I preferred a piece of well-executed trash (Basterds) to the consensus "best" movie of that year, Hurt Locker. And those were both, roughly defined, war movies. Hurt Locker is a very good movie that I enjoyed a great deal, but there is an essential difference between it and Basterds (the same difference between Black Swan and Winter's Bone). That is: Inglourious Basterds and Black Swan are HIGH WIRE ACTS. They take RISKS. Making a movie about World War Two and the Holocaust, two of the most hallowed subjects in contemporary memory, and filling it with a bunch of meta-textual tomfuckery, not to mention shooting Hitler in the face with a submachine gun, runs the risk of alienating a huge chunk of your audience and being dismissed as crap by discerning viewers. On the other hand, a verite, grunts-eye view of the Iraq War is pretty much a can't miss proposition for the cultural gatekeepers, and if you doubt me, Katherine Bigelow's got the Oscars to prove it. The same can be said for a fevered, horror-movie take on ballet compared to a restrained docu-realist examination of Ozark culture. What's there to dislike about a note-perfect excavation of a corner of America that most of us didn't even know still exists? Nothing. But by the same token, there's also not much to love. No, I reserve my love for movies that risk driving away discerning viewers through resolute applications of tastelessness and boundary-pushing. Not the boundaries of content, really, since there's nothing that burnishes the "new classic" credentials of a would-be masterpiece like graphic, ratings-challenging content. More the boundaries of taste, of decorum, of accepted filmic structure. That's why Adaptation will always have a special place in my heart: that movie is willing to burn down everything it's created w/r/t character and plot just to make it's point about the impossibility of expressing truth in narrative cinema.

The beauty of trash cinema is that is can be found in every genre, unlike the restrained virtues of tasteful film-making. Take a piece of action trash like 2007's Shoot 'em Up. Instead of satisfying itself with generic blood-letting, writer-director Mark Davis risks turning his whole film into a bad joke by emphasizing the cartoonish nature of action movie tropes and, most daringly, by strapping the film with a heavy-handed pro-gun control message. Now, the film's ostensible ideological content is silly: how can a movie that that's basically a 90 minute shoot out dare to criticize gun culture! But the inherent conflict between the pro-gun control text of the film and the blood-drenched subtext brings into focus the unacknowledged ideology of all action movies. Making an anti-gun action movie is silly BECAUSE ACTION MOVIES ARE INHERENTLY PRO GUN AND PRO VIOLENCE-AS-PROBLEM-SOLVER! Shoot 'em Up is willing to look stupid for making a pro-gun control argument in the interest of revealing the implicit pro-GUN argument of action films in general. That's the sort of ideological jujitsu you can only pull off if you're willing to make a fool of yourself. When a trashy film fails, it's an embarrassment to all involved. When it succeeds, it not only provides the giddy rush of genre thrills, but also the additional layered goodness of critical incisiveness and the audacious awesomeness of Knievel-like ballsiness.

Preliminary Top Film of 2010: Black Swan

2010-12-19T16:06:00.000-08:00

Darren Aronofsky's filmography ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, encompassing genres as diverse as kitchen-sink melodrama (The Wrestler) to hallucinatory sci-fi (The Fountain). The connective tissue between all of these films is an obsession on the part of the filmmaker with the massive psychic toll suffered by self-conscious beings bound by decaying physical vessels. Our glories are fleeting, our decline is assured, even our greatest moments are bound by physical and mental limitations. Aronosky explicates these themes more painfully and insightfully than most directors, but every one of his films to this point have been wildly uneven. Requiem for a Dream is a visual tour de force, but it's manic singularity proves exhausting and somewhat hollow. The Fountain is the rare film to confront the issue of mortality without resort to metaphysics, and its also sometimes embarrassing to watch. The Wrestler introduced a new strain of effective naturalism to Aronofsky's repertoire, but it also hewed too closely to familiar genre beats. Black Swan is the culmination of Aronofsky's inquires into human fragility; he brings together every element that worked in his previous films while doing away with anything clunky or unconvincing. There's something deeply enthralling about watching a film director hone his craft to a point of absolute incisiveness.

Black Swan and The Wrestler were originally conceived of by Aronofsky as parallel stories in a single film. At first glance, it seems like a terrible idea, and it's clear that breaking them up was the right call, but the two stories make for a striking mirror image. Randy "the Ram" Robinson and Nina Sayers share a central dilemma: they are both characters defined, both to themselves and to the world around them, by their physical bodies. Randy the Ram is only alive to the degree that his leathery hide dishes out and absorb punishment in the wrestling ring. Nina's only means of self-expression is the voiceless grace of her body. Both of them are haunted by the specter of their inevitable physical decline: Randy is smack in the middle of his own, while Nina sees her future all too clearly in the person of Winona Ryder's fading star ballerina. Both characters are driven to self destruction by their insatiable demand for perfection and adulation. Black Swan distinguishes itself as an altogether more penetrating and brilliant piece of work by burrowing so deeply into Nina's warped psyche and by expertly dissecting the specifically feminine dilemma she faces.

Natalie Portman's Nina lives an absurdly proscribed existence: her daily routine, her life goals, her values, her self-esteem, are defined by dance. Her mother, a failed ballerina living vicariously through her daughter, uses a complex system of passive-aggressive conditioning to keep Nina focused on presenting herself as a symbol of purity and aesthetic perfection. When the film starts, Nina is somewhat comfortably cocooned in her frigid little world (although there are signs that the prospect of playing the lead in her company's production of "Swan Lake" has already put some cracks in the veneer). The real trouble begins when she wins the part of Odette and her director, played by Vincent Cassel, demands that she get in touch with her sexuality in order to channel the Black Swan, Odette's seductive alter ego. The tug-of-war for Nina's soul waged between her Mother and her Director places Nina in an impossible situation. She must simultaneously embody Mona Lisa and Mata Hari. It's the classic Virgin/Whore dichotomy all women have to navigate in some way, heightened to psyche-shattering heights by Nina's preternatural focus and artistic devotion. Her mechanisms for coping with the uncertainty and peril of depending on her intensely vulnerable human body (just listen to the knuckles of her toes crack as she gets out of bed!) are all based on a mechanized rigidity that cannot process paradox. She's like a cartoon robot sent into sputtering meltdown by a logic puzzle.

Aronofsky documents Nina's mental breakdown by deftly synthesizing every effective gimmick in his directorial bag of tricks. He utilizes the over-the-shoulder shots and overall sense of docu-drama realism first displayed in The Wrestler to wed the viewer to Nina's point of view, making the film's lurch into Requiem for a Dream-style hysteria credibly disorienting. While Requiem's all-out visual assault created a fatal distance between the audience and the character, Black Swan's hybrid approach draws the viewer inside Nina's head so effectively that her descent into madness is heartbreaking, terrifying and mercilessly logical. The performances are universally excellent, with Natalie Portman finding the role that her icy, repressed screen presence was made for. The dance sequences recall the fight scenes in The Wrestler in their emphasis on awesome grace and grim physical punishment. The film's themes; sex, decay, artistic obsession, radiate from every frame. Black Swan is the work of an artist at the peak of his power; someone who has clearly wrestled with his defining subject matter for years and has learned through grueling trial and error the most effective application of his gifts.

2010: Back in Black

2010-12-18T18:55:00.000-08:00

I'm back. All anyone needs to know is that I didn't stop seeing movies after Inception. And I'm still waiting on True Grit and a few others before I lock any of these choices in.

Sad Proof that George Romero May Be Losing It: Survival of the Dead. I have been a staunch Romero apologist for years. When Land of the Dead divided audiences, I stood firmly with those who thought it was a trenchant social satire hamstrung by a low budget, but otherwise great. I even defended Diary of the Dead, which had many fewer adherents than Land. But Survival...man, what a botch. It's everything that Romero critics claimed Land and Diary were, only worse. His puzzling obsession with having his actors do bad Irish accents doesn't help.

"Modern Classic" That I Just Can't Get Behind: Winter's Bone. Now, understand: I really enjoyed this movie. I've seen it twice, it works on every level, and I'd definitely mark it as one of the top ten movies of the year. The performances, especially by John Hawkes and Jennifer Lawrence, or riveting. Debra Granik's direction is crisp and focused. The backwoods Ozark setting is richly realized down to the smallest detail. And yet...there's something missing. The whole thing feels a bit like one of those dry odes to rural suffering that used to clog the docket at Sundance before the days of sex, lies and videotape. It's important to remember, in a year when many of the best films revolved around the impact of technology on 21st Century life, that some parts of the country haven't seen the 21st century (or even the 20th) arrive yet, but it feels like that's all that's going on in Winter's Bone. As a result, I can't put it near the top slot as so many smarter, better informed critics are doing.

Inaugural Rodriguez Paradox* Award Winner: Robert Rodriguez for Machete. For the most part, I really, really enjoyed Machete, Rodriguez's epic Mexploitation extravaganza, but it left me strangely disappointed. I couldn't put my foot on what was wrong at first, but I've since figured it out: Robert Rodriguez movies are inherently paradoxical, and therefore perpetually unsatisfying. Rodriguez's seat-of-the-pants approach to filmmaking and deep love for lurid trash leads him to make raucous, intensely entertaining action lollapaloozas like Planet Terror and Machete. But that same unfocused enthusiasm and lack of pretensions to taste leave him incapable of really executing his visions successfully. Look at Grindhouse: Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino both undertook to make filmic tributes to the exploitation films of their youth, but only Rodriguez really channeled the trashy energy of the genre. Planet Terror is as over-the-top and lurid as anything that ever played to the trenchcoat crowd in 70s Times Square. Tarantino, on the other hand, couldn't help himself: he just HAD to turn his entry into a talky, audience expectation-defying deconstruction of serial killer movies. But look at the climactic sequences of both films: Death Proof ends in a gripping, expertly paced car chase that culminates in a glorious explosion of female-empowering violence that acts as an orgasmic exclamation point to the whole Grindhouse experience. Planet Terror, by contrast, ends with a should-be epic gunfight between an army of undead soldiers and a ragtag collection of survivors. The scene is so haphazardly staged and edited that it ends up dissipating much of the bloody energy that had been sustaining the film to that point. It makes you wish that Tarantino had shot that sequence (remember the House of Blue Leaves? Yeah, imagine that with zombies and assault rifles!). But if Tarantino HAD directed Planet Terror, it would have lacked the pulpy intensity of Rodriguez's vision. There would have been a bunch of dialog, a few quick bursts of zombie mayhem, and more shots of Rose McGowan's foot than strictly necessary. Machete, which began life as a fake trailer in Grindhouse, epitomizes the Rodriguez paradox: it's an audacious chunk of unapologetic trash, filled with moments that stand out as some of the most deliriously awesome of the year, but at every turn, Rodriguez's slapdash directing and editing keeps the action from making any real impact. Hell, it even ends with the exact same sort of confused, haltingly-aced shootout as Planet Terror (and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Desperado, for that matter) and similarly deflates the movie like a gore-filled balloon that's sprung a leak.

Movie That Doubles as a Treatise on the Audience's Feelings towards its Star: Salt. Angelina Jolie is supposedly the protagonist of Salt, and yet, for almost the entire running time, the viewer has no real idea what her goals are or where her allegiances lie. The dynamic is an odd way to frame a blockbuster action movie, but it's dictated by the essential alienation between the American moviegoer and the persona of Angelina Jolie. Her public image is so outsized and unrelatable (from knife wielding, blood-drinking brotherfucker to globetrotting, Pitt-wooing, serial adopting humanitarian in the blink of an eye) and her face is so unnervingly proportioned, with thost anime-character eyes and mile-wide lips, that moviegoers can't really accept her as a fellow member of the human race. At this point in her career, she's simply unacceptable as a traditional protagonist.

A Children's Treasury of Unrealized Premises: Human Centipede: First Sequence, Piranha 3D, Predators, Faster. To one degree or another, all of the above films managed to botch a seemingly can't-miss genre concept. Some of the botches are more egregious than other. Human Centipede and Faster, for example, both managed to take the nugget of a great idea and squander it by ineptly relying on tired formulas. Piranha 3D, on the other hand, was about two thirds of a fantastic movie, but it was sadly undermined by glacial pace. The climactic beach-party massacre will rightfully go down as one of the greatest moments of carnage in screen history. In fact...

Best Moment of Screen Carnage of This and Perhaps Any Other Year: Beach-party massacre, Piranha 3D.

Proof that Foreign Films can be Just as Lame and Middlebrow as Hollywood: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Played with Fire/Crossed the Road.

Funniest Scene of the Year: Sam Jackson and the Rock jumping off the roof, The Other Guys.

Double Feature on the peril and promise of 21st Century mass media: Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim Versus the World. Both of these movies explore and exploit a current of popular culture: comic books heroism and video gaming. One of them is blunt and dumb, the other lively and insightful. One traffics in cheap transgression, the other weaves jokes into the very fabric of the film. If you don't know which is which, you suck.

Suitable for Framing Award: Shutter Island. This movie has its problems, but Scorsese shows that he can deliver some of the most arresting visuals around, as well as delve into the deep psychology of film noir. It's pastiche, but it's energized, insightful pastiche.

Ov-Er-Rat-ed! Clap! Clap! Clapclapclap!: Red Riding Trilogy. I must be missing something.

I'm so far behind on the seminal films of the year, that I'm going to hold off on a year end Top Five for now. Instead, I'll shortly post a full review of my current favorite film of 2010, and, in a month or so, put out a complete Top Five.

*Alternately the Wes Anderson Paradox

Inception

2010-07-19T19:44:00.000-07:00

At first glance, it seems absurd to suggest that Christopher Nolan is an underrated film director. He's made a string of well-regarded films, including the biggest comic-book movie of all time, and Warner Brothers gave him $200 million dollars to shoot his original script, which is rarefied air indeed. But it still seems like critics in general have failed to recognize the singular nature of his accomplishments, especially the stunning achievement of Inception. This is evident from the instantaneous mini-backlash that's developing that Inception has inspired. Now, these critics aren't saying that the film isn't good, but they seem dedicated to proving beyond all doubt that it's not great, and certainly not a "masterpiece" (whatever that means). The whole debate is really a meta-critical argument about what sort of film's belong in the Great Canon. Folks like A.O. Scott and Stephanie Zacharek know what a great movie looks like, and Inception ain't it.

The backlash is partially an inevitable reaction to Inception's pre-release hype and the orgasmic reaction of fanboys the world over. Yet, the very nature of Nolan's achievement makes it almost impossible for some people to really recognize it. Like all of the human race's feeble attempts at artistic evaluation, film criticism functions in a relevant context. Criticism is largely the practice of placing films in relation to other films of similar genre or by the same director. Critics are aware that James Cameron's technical innovation and visual wizardly rests on a platform of borrowed tropes and easy cliche. Compared to fellow blockbuster-machine Michael Bay, who can barely manage to make his wafer-thin stereotypes and pointillist plots even vaguely coherent, Cameron is the Kurosawa of empty spectacle.

Inception's blend of idea-driven science fiction, art-house emotional catharsis and big budget special effects is pretty much unprecedented, and as a result, critics don't seem to know how to evaluate it. Put simply, Christopher Nolan is doing things with Inception that simply are not done in motion pictures. No other filmmaker is fusing such an intimate personal journey with puzzle-box plotting, idea-drive science fiction devices and jaw-dropping special effects action. Taken as component parts, none of these specific elements rises to the level of greatness: the action scenes are relatively perfunctory compared to the best the action genre has to offer, the mind-bending dream effects don't have the sheer delirious power of, say Terry Gilliam (although they're not supposed to), and the characters are a bit thinner than those found in the best serious dramatic films. Taken as a whole, however, Inception is a unique film experience. Not only does Nolan include a strong emotional element in the character of Leonardo DiCaprio, but DiCaprio's psychological journey is so strongly embedded in the plot that it actually proves the driving force of the entire film, not to mention the film's climax. Not to mention the richly-textured near-future dream-invasion technology and the brilliant decision to make the film a heist movie, which makes all the necessary but potentially deadly exposition gripping instead of inert. The level of ambition and execution and the richness of ideas and the inventiveness of the plot and the rawness of the emotion and, of course, that genius ending....it's unlike anything you're likely to ever see in a theater. If we don't feel comfortable calling it a masterpiece, then can't we invent a new term that acknowledges just how amazing this movie truly is?

Get Him to the Greek

2010-05-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

Judd Apatow rules the comedy universe because he and his collaborators have mastered a simple formula: raunchy humor plus emotional heft. His characters like to trade barbs about gayness and masturbation and other chestnuts, but they also have textured relationships with each other and genuine emotional arcs. It's an approach that has produced some hilarious and heartfelt films (and Funny People, which is by no means a bad movie, but also by no means a comedy), and a couple of botch-jobs. One of those is the fitfully gut-busting Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and, now, Nick Stoller's spin-off of the very good Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek. It's not a coincidence that both of these failed efforts focus on drug addicted rock stars. The "Apatow touch" works by taking generally generic characters pursuing generally generic comedy plots (a virgin trying to get laid, a dude getting over a hard break-up), but taking those plots into unexpected directions. When your lead character is a drug-addled rock star dealing with his trademarked "nightmare descent into booze and pills," there really aren't any unexpected directions. Dewey Cox and, in this film, Russel Brand's Aldous Snow, are larger-than-life characters with VH1-ready problems; drug addiction, distant family members, and the essential emptiness of the hedonist rock god lifestyle. Not only are such travails difficult for your average filmgoer to relate to, they hit such obvious dramatic beats that nothing of interest can emerge.

Even worse, the Apatowian obsession with dramatic weight ends up derailing the comedic momentum of a movie that should move with a frantic energy. The plot summary suggests a comedy bullet train a'la After Hours mixed with the drug fueled antics of Cheech and Chong, but the hijinx are undercut at every turn by bathos-laden stabs at meaning. For a movie built on a ticking clock premise and fueled by the heroic intake of booze and hard drugs, Greek never hits the sort of delirious heights it should. There are a few moments that feel like they're about to tip the balance of the movie into outright madness, but they're never sustained enough, and at any rate are consistently undercut by rote and boring character development. Aldous Snow is funny as a rock 'n roll caricature, He's downright ponderous as a redemption-seeking Leif Garrett stand-in. All these words, and really all that needs to be said is that Sean "Diddy" Combs is definitely the funniest thing in this movie. Make of that what you will.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

The announcement that Robert Downey Jr. had been cast as Tony Stark signaled to all observers that the Iron Man franchise was going to be a different type of comic book movie. One that would privilege character and story over empty action sequences. The first Iron Man meet those expectations to the letter, foregrounding Tony Stark's rakish wit and inner turmoil while portioning out the actual Iron Man ass-kicking sparingly and spending little time developing a memorable villain. Iron Man 2 doubled down on all of these elements, spending even more time detailing Tony Stark's mood swings and less time on flying and punching and such.

This approach is initially effective: when Downey's Stark is milking his newfound superhero status and messing with stuffed shirt politicos, Iron Man 2 has the humor and ramshackle charm of a Judd Apatow movie. The charm starts wearing off, though, as director John Favreau and writer Justin Theroux crank up the Stark angst with each passing scene. First, it's shown that the palladium in Stark's arc-reactor heart implant is quickly poisoning his blood, then Defense Department goons start demanding Stark turn over the Iron Man technology, then the arrival of sexy young legal aid Scarlet Johansson complicates Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts, then, to top it all off, it turns out that Tony has a bunch of unresolved issues with his dead father, Howard (played from beyond the grave by Mad Men's John Slattery in the casting coup of the year). And all of this before rogue Russian physicist Mickey Rourke shows up in his own Iron Man suit to get revenge on the Stark family for long past crimes. None of these elements can get the screen time they need to really develop, and so they sort of drift by, unconnected to any greater narrative arc while Tony gets more erratic and sullen. This pattern continues until the inevitable moment when all the audience wants is for something to blow up already. Eventually, things do blow up, and when they do, it's pretty impressive; certainly an upgrade over the perfunctory climax of the first film, but as in the first film, the villain is so undeveloped that the stakes and impact of the conflict are muted.

Iron Man 2 wants to be a real movie, not just a comic book exercise, but the necessities of the comic book genre end up leaving most of the character interaction undercooked. Particularly, the interplay between Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, which was the emotional engine of the first movie, feels muddled and scattershot here. Their interaction has a loose, improvisational feel, but that authenticity works against generating a coherent through line. It's of a piece with a film that feels garbled and shapeless throughout. There characters still have a vividness that is rare in the comic book genre, and that's due once again to dynamite casting. Downey is his usual charismatic and tortured self, Don Cheadle is a huge upgrade over Terence Howard, Sam Jackson's Nick Fury has an appropriately entertaining swagger, while Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell make the most out of their underwritten bad guy roles. The first Iron Man did a good job of mixing rock 'em sock 'em with effective character work. The sequel, like most blockbuster sequels, seeks to ratchet up every element from the first one that worked. When you're talking about CGI robots fighting, that's an easy enough task: just increase the numbers and firepower of said CGI robots. "More and bigger" is a strategy that just doesn't work when it comes to character and relationship arcs.

The Essence of Badassery

2010-04-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

Let me start out by saying that I'm not terribly interested in the above film. It looks to be a forgettable A-Team ripoff chock full of a painful, forced jocularity not seen since Smokin' Aces. I will not be seeing it in the theater.

But I'll definitely rent it, and there's at least one thing about The Losers that genuinely excites me: it looks like Jeffrey Dean Morgan is bringing back the old school movie badass.

There was a time, before the bulging, greasy pecs of Swarzenegger and the show-offy ninja moves of Van Damme turned action films into thinly veiled gay porn, when all you needed to be an action hero was the ability to convince audiences that you could fuck somebody up if the occasion called for it. Not because he was physically strong or adept at martial arts, but because he possessed the will, the essence, of the badass. Guys like Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen weren't particularly muscular, and I doubt any of them could execute a spin-kick to save their lives, but nobody doubted that, if roused to anger, they could pull your spine out of your nostril and floss with it. In short, the fuckers could ACT. They weren't master thespians, but within a very narrow range of characters, they could convey confidence, menace, and a supreme comfort with violence with just a hooded glare or a crooked smile. By the mid-80s, action stars didn't have to possess charisma or even a thorough command of the English language. They proved their badassitude with rippling muscles and/or martial art chops: guys like Stallone and Seagal and Dolph Lundgren were really just glorified stunt men. They didn't convey a character, they were simply bodies in motion. This made for some memorable action scenes, but not much in the way of memorable action characters. Worst of all, these inarticulate man-slabs guaranteed that all the non-fighty scenes in these movies (and even the most action-heavy film is at least 50% talking) were flat, mumbly stretches of dead air.

This brings us to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who is definitely a big dude, but as the trailer indicates, not a former Mr. Universe. He's also got the sort of brick-shithouse body that pretty much preclude any of that Oriental chop socky tomfoolery. The only way he's going to sell being the head of a renegade Special Forces unit, besides shooting a bunch of dudes, is by embodying the badass. Judging from the trailer, I'm optimistic about his chances: he's got the grizzled, world-weary air and rumpled sport coat of Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Here's hoping he, along with Jason Statham, can help usher in a new era of essential badasses.

DVD Roundup: Bronson

2010-03-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Winding Refn made his name as a director in his native Denmark with the Pusher trilogy, naturalistic crime films examining Copehagen's drug-dealing underbelly. The Pusher protagonists are a decidedly unglamorous bunch living hand-to-mouth on the surprisingly meager proceeds of their pathetic drug operations, looking no farther ahead than the next day's pay-off. Refn's most recent film, Bronson, deals with an entirely different sort of criminal. Michael "Charles Bronson" Peterson, a real-life figure often labelled Britain's most dangerous prisoner, is a post-modern criminal, someone whose acts of violence (mostly committed against guards and fellow prisoners) are designed to procure maximum notoriety. With a subject who treats violence as performance art, Refn ditches the Pusher trilogy's gritty handheld look in favor of meticulously controlled framing counterpointed by a swelling orchestral score and lush pop tunes. Comparisons to A Clockwork Orange are inevitable and accurate, but Bronson never feels derivative because the choices Refn makes are so perfectly tuned to twisted but fascinating main character. These choices are crucial in shaping a movie that is one of the most interesting portrayals of a criminal psyche ever committed to film. Also crucial is the fact that "Charlie Bronson" happens to be one of the most interesting criminals to be the subject of a movie in the first place.

Bronson joins movies like John Boorman's The General, Andrew Dominik's Chopper and Peter Medak's The Krays, all part of a very specific sub-genre I like to call "Biopics of criminals from the British Commonwealth." Those other films tended towards kitchen sink realism and a studied remove from their characters; a necessary condition when dealing with a class of people who tend to intentionally deflect scrutiny. On that score, Refn is blessed with a subject whose violent criminality seems less driven by economic necessity or even pathology than an all-consuming desire for fame. As such, Bronson has spent a good portion of his thirty-some-odd years in prison (most of it in solitary confinement) writing books of poetry, memoirs and exercise manuals. That gives Refn and company a wealth of insights into what makes a seemingly psychotic creature like Charlie Bronson tick. As Charlie, whose bombastic monologues give the episodic film a spine, points out early on, he is not a product of his environment. His parents were solid middle class folk from Luton. He beats up classmates, cops and, once he's finally thrown in prison for robbing a post office, inmates and guards, out of boredom and a failure of imagination. Like many people, young Mickey Peterson yearns for the validation of fame, but lacks an outlet. In the cloistered environment of prison, he finds that outsized acts of violence are the fastest way to notoriety, and that said notoriety provides him with an artistic project. His life becomes a series of theatrically staged outbursts, each designed to send the message to his fellow inmates, prison officials, the general public and Queen Elizabeth herself, that Charlie Bronson is a man not to be fucked with. Bronson's prison fame grows, but since it only extends to the prison population, he's got to stay inside in order to enjoy it. That's easy to do when you keep caving guy's heads in all day long. One of the most intriguing threads in the film is the idea that Bronson seems to have fallen into his violence-as-art routine by accident, and would probably rather not spend thirty years in prison, but is too bullheaded and self-aggrandizing to admit it to himself.

All of Refn's well-crafted shots and the gleeful profanity wouldn't amount to much without Tom Hardy's lead performance. Hardy's Bronson is ferocious and menacing, but also childlike and calculating. His volcanic rage is wholly terrifying, but Hardy manages to convey a sense of the character's bifurcated nature. He's ruined his life with blind aggression, but he's done so deliberately, with artistic flair and methodical stagecraft. Hardy's grasp of the character coupled with Refn's mastery of film elements make for the most vivid and insightful investigation of a criminal mind in recent memory.

James Cameron is, in fact, King of the World.

2010-03-10T18:40:00.000-08:00

Because I hate life, I read US Weekly. Recently, Linda Hamilton, one of James Cameron's innumerable ex-wives, quoted him as saying the following during their marriage: "anyone can be a father or a husband. There are only five people in the world who can do what I do." Now, at first blush, this seems like the ravings of a cartoonish egomaniac, exactly the sort of uber-douche whose tyrannical behavior on his film sets has become the stuff of Hollywood legend. But after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that, if anything, Cameron is actually being modest in that quote.

As far as I can tell, there is exactly one person on earth who can do what James Cameron does, and that's him. What does Cameron do, exactly? He conceives, from story to screenplay to storyboard to every aspect of technical filmmaking to post-production, movies that make obscene amounts of money and grab the zeitgeist with both hands. Nobody else, that's who. All other possible claimants fail at least one critical test. Spielberg? The man doesn't write his own screenplays. Peter Jackson? Lord of the Rings was an amazing accomplishment, but he had a huge built-in fanbase created by the Tolkien books to work with. George Lucas is really the only other contender, and he hasn't had an idea that didn't involve midichlorians or gay Jamaican lizards since 1984. For all his reliance on cliche story elements, Cameron finds a way to make those cliches resonate with millions and millions of people. Not just enough to get people to shell out billions of dollars to see his movies (he wrote, produced and directed the two highest grossing films OF ALL TIME!), but enough to make the characters, dialogue and iconography of those movies indelible fixtures of the pop culture landscape. All from shit that he just made up. I mean, the dude invented a new kind of camera in order to shoot Avatar. Even if his screenplays are weak, there's no denying the power of his images and his ability to hit the sweet spot of audience appeal, and I care a lot more about what he comes up with next than whether or not he remembers Suzy Amis' birthday.

Shutter Island

2010-03-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

Somewhere along the way, Leonardo DiCaprio went from being a fetal man-child to a legitimate leading man specializing in angst-ridden tough guys. Looking back at his soft little nubbin of a face in Titanic, this seems like an impossible transformation, but some time in the past decade he developed a dramatic, vertical worry-line between his eyes, and that makes all the difference. With a smooth brow, DiCaprio was Robert Pattinson with better acting chops. But with that angry little wrinkle exploding like the crack of doom between his eyes, he exudes a the raw pain of a wounded animal. Leo's perma-furrow works overtime in Shutter Island, expressing the inner torment of haunted WWII vet, widower and U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels. DiCaprio, along with new partner Mark Ruffalo travel to a remote mental hospital on an island in Boston harbor to hunt down an escaped female prisoner. Along the way, DiCaprio struggles with the memories of Dachau and his dead wife (Michele Williams) as well as the mysterious goings-on at a facility that has connections to U.S. Intelligence circles and HUAC, and which may well be hiding dark, very cinematic secrets.

Shutter Island doesn't have much in the way of conventional plot momentum or effective suspense. It's mostly two hours of DiCaprio scuttling around the smoke-wreathed corridors of the musty old booby hatch. Along the way, director Martin Scorsese flits between rock-ribbed film noir pastiche and hallucinatory flashbacks pitched just shy of hysteria. Like the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, Shutter Island is a neo-noir film most interested in exploring the pscyho-historical roots of the genre. The Red Scare, the Holocaust, the looming specter of nuclear annihilation, all contribute to DiCaprio's bone-deep sense of unease and dislocation. DiCaprio is a stand-in for the generation that first confronted the prospect of "megadeath" in death camp ovens and mushroom clouds, and Scorsese emphasizes the psychic toll of such awareness by repeatedly filling the frame with a succession of floating particles; paper, ashes, snow, rain, all swirling around DiCaprio. He's a man finding himself in a world with nothing solid to hang on to, and the only available mechanism for dealing with the trauma is the alienating and antiseptic tool of modern psychotherapy.

The thematics are richly layered, if not exactly groundbreaking, and the plot basically stagnates until a third act twist that will probably end up annoying people who haven't read the original Dennis Lehane novel, but the reason to see Shutter Island is Robert Richardson's cinematography. Pretty much any random shot from this movie is suitable for framing. With lush, rich colors that reflect DiCaprio's fevered mindset and a note-perfect replication of noir's iconic interplay between light and shadows, this might be Scorsese's most visually stunning work. The operatic pitch and violent colors call to mind Scorsese's Cape Fear and, like Cape Fear, Shutter Island suffers from an overdose of homage without a strong point of view to give the noir trappings weight. Shutter Island certainly isn't a heartfelt film, but it has a mad grandeur that captivates, even if it doesn't tread any particularly novel ground.

Very Preliminary 2009 Top Five.

2010-01-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

I've got a bunch more '09 releases to catch up with on DVD before I offer a definitive top five for the year, but in the interest of completing the decade retrospective, here are my preliminary picks.

1. Inglourious Basterds

This movie, more than any other I saw this year, sticks in my mind. The brilliant suspense set-pieces, the dense web of film allusions that, for the first time in Tarantino's filmography, have a relevance beyond the director's compulsion to make them, wall-to-wall memorable performances and an insight into the power of narrative to shape memory that I frankly didn't think Tarantino was capable of. It's a bingo.

2. The Hurt Locker

Jeremy Renner's Sgt. James lives as the hero of his own personal action movie. He risks his own life and the life of his men, and chases the rush of danger without a second thought. He can't die because he's the hero. He can't do wrong, because he's the hero. It's a non-stop blast (in all senses) until he gets his friends hurt and begins questioning his own perceptions. Then, there's a moment of repentance and humility, a brief attempt at returning to the safety and tranquility of domestic life, but before long, the itch returns, and he's back in the war zone, disarming bombs with a smile on his face. In short, he's a stand-in for the American attitude and history with warfare. We're drawn to the excitement and imagined moral clarity, we get our initial thrill and indulge a fantasy of absolute victory, then slowly come to the realization that we're hip-deep in blood shed for no good reason. Then, it's a brief moment of caution, a "Vietnam syndrome," before all that unpleasantness is forgotten and we plunge headfirst back into the fray, chasing the same heady rush we remember from the last time.

3. A Serious Man

Second only to Basterds as brain-stickiest movie of the year. There's nothing in it that the Coens' haven't done before, but this is the most vivid and chilling explication of some of their favorite themes. It's confounding and somewhat off-putting, but also genuinely thoughtful and, in a weird, Coen-ey way, offers a glimpse of the cosmic unknowable.

4. Crank 2: High Voltage

Making perhaps the best action film of the decade has got to be worth something.

5. In the Loop

Of all the earnest, dewey-eyed documentaries and docudramas that tried to make sense of the Iraq war, it took a troupe of British sitcoms shenanigans to cut to the heart of the matter. Armando Iannucci and company lay out the craven self interest and fortuitous idiocy in the inner circles of government that paved the way to war. As a bonus, it's also maybe the funniest movie of the year. It's certainly the most quotable.

The End of the World for Dummies: Knowing and 2012. Never before have two films so thoroughly failed to earn the right to kill billions of people on screen.

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Gomorrah. It's definitely a good film, but I suspect that the subject matter (the corrosive social impact of the Naples-area mob) and the pseudo-documentary style make it seem 'important' enough to merit raves. The "you are there" immediacy is bracing, but too much screen time is wasted on uninspired retread characters.

"Modern Comedy Classic" I just can't get behind: The Hangover. Is it really THAT easy to get young dudes chuckling across the nation? Never mind, of course it is.

Best Science-Fiction film of the year: 2009 was definitely the year of science fiction films, between Star Trek and Avatar and Terminator: Salvation and, to be pedantic about it, Transformers and GI Joe. The best of the lot, though, was the low-budget South African production District 9. It's instructive to compare District 9 and Avatar: on a basic story level, they're strikingly similar, but filmmaker Neil Bloomkamp and his collaborators invest the story with so much inventiveness and wit that nobody thought to call it a Dances With Wolves ripoff.

Best Opening Credit Sequence: Watchmen. There's a lot of things wrong with Zack Snyder's adaptation of the classic graphic novel, but the brilliant collection of meticulous tableau that run behind the opening credits sure as balls isn't one of them.

The Unjustly Overlooked: Observe and Report is a genuinely daring comedy that didn't get nearly enough recognition as such. Duplicity, lame title and typically bland Julia Roberts performance aside, is a crackling, grown-up, well-constructed grifter's tale that fell down the memory hole unjustly. And Julia Roberts' lameness is more than cancelled out by the sheer awesomosity of Paul Giamatti.

Two horror films that demonstrate conclusively that "less is more" when you're trying to scare people: Paranormal Activity and House of the Devil.

Line of the Year: "Totally...Totes McGoats!" --I Love You, Man

DVD Roundup: Big Fan

2010-01-20T12:27:00.000-08:00

Robert Siegel, who wrote The Wrestler and is the writer/director of Big Fan has a very specific vision for his films. He takes tragic archetypes from past eras of film history that you don't see in movies that much anymore, and implants them in the media-saturated post-modern reality of 21st century strip mall America. Randy "the Ram" Robinson from The Wrestler is an updated version of every broken-down palooka from every boxing movie made back when people gave a damn about boxing. He's Anthony Quinn in Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Wallace Beery AND Jon Voight in the two versions of The Champ. Of course, boxing hasn't been culturally relevant since Rocky beat Ivan Drago, so Siegel's version of the character is a mashed-up veteran of one of the violent, contrived spectacles that has partially supplanted boxing in American culture: professional wrestling. Paul Aufiero, the desperately pathetic protagonist of Big Fan is another recognizable character type from a different golden age of cinema: he's the obsessive, anti-social loner that skulked his way through theaters in the 70s, a character that Martin Scorsese used to specialize in. He's Travis Bickle for the current moment. While Travis Bickle's maladjustment was signaled by his complete alienation from popular culture, Aufiero's abnormality is fueled by a full-body immersion in pop culture, or at least a small corner of it.

Paul is a New York Giants fan, to the exclusion of everything else in his life. It's understandable: he works at a hospital parking garage, he lives with his hectoring mother, he has only one friend, who he only relates to by talking about and watching the Giants. His only moments of true joy and self-expression are watching the Giants win and calling in to a local sports talk radio show with meticulously crafted bits of generic boosterism. Unlike Travis Bickle, who was tormented by his yearning for normality, Paul has no interest in connecting with the rest of the world or anyone in it. He's got the Giants, and that's enough. When he gets into a strip club fracas with his favorite player that results in the player's suspension and a Giants' tailspin, Paul loses his only source of enjoyment in life and his very identity. Paul sees himself as a part of the Giants team, and sees his talk radio monologues as integral to their success. Overnight, he has to process the notion that he's responsible for his team's failure. This puts him into a freefall that leads to a predictably-70s style resolution.

But just as The Wrestler took a stale plot skeleton and invested it with vibrant life, Big Fan tells the familiar story of an imploding loser with an attention to detail that makes it all feel fresh. Paul is played by the brilliant stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt, who brings a raw, anguished vulnerability to the role. His Paul is passionate but dead-eyed, filled to the brim with love for his team and a desire to express it, but limited by his child-like inarticulateness. His life is filled with a parade of grotesques and Bridge and Tunnel stereotypes, all of whom he works diligently to avoid in favor of the imagined world where he is the ever-spinning engine powering the New York Football Giants to victory. His journey to resolving the identity crisis created by his beating never strays too far from formula, but it does flow from his wounded character, and the ending provides a couple of moments of genuine surprise and a coda that's simultaneously funny and deeply sad. Siegel's movies have so far made up for their familiar structures by bringing old archetypes into a new era and using that juxtoposition to generate thoughtful observations about the ever-changing cultural context of American life. I'm looking forward to Siegel's next reimagination of a classic film trope.

Up in the Air

2010-01-09T17:41:00.000-08:00

George Clooney's character in Up in the Air is addicted to the pre-packaged luxuries of business-class travel. The express check-in, the VIP lounges, the free drinks and pre-warmed rental cars, the brilliantly cheerful customer service representatives. Yes, they're mass produced and artificial and a bit too slick to be lovable, but there's also no denying the very real comfort that a complimentary high ball and heated leather seats can provide for a weary traveller. Jason Reitman's movie is a lot like that: a chocolate-stuffed gift basket in a high-end hotel room. Impersonal, maybe, but still pretty damn delicious.

Much has been made of Up in the Air's zeitgeisty hook: Clooney jetting around the country laying off employees at company after company, with the parts of some of these unlucky workers being played by genuine fired people. These scenes are riveting, and offer some interesting opportunities for character development and drama, but they're generally ancillary to the proceedings. The film, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, is more interested in the emotional evolution of Clooney's commitment-averse travelling hatchet man, as he awakens to a long-buried urge for human connection and a place to call home. Clooney's arc is largely predictable, but it's executed with insight and deftness, fueled by consistently pungent dialogue and the subtle, affecting work of George Clooney in the part. What makes this programmatic but nicely crafted film carry a lasting weight is a surprisingly willingness to leave its protagonist at loose ends. In most films, especially character-driven awards bait like this, a characters development of maturity is rewarded by a newfound sense of security and, usually, a freshly-minted love interest. Up in the Air is willing to suggest that Clooney may well have been better off as a callow jetsetter. It raises questions about the definition of maturity and growth that are usually left unasked in such well-manicured fare.

The other part of Up in the Air that lingers are the great details and vivid supporting turns. At one point, a cabin cruiser full of corporate revelers powers down while anchored off Miami beach and everyone has to run, shoeless and wet, through a hotel lobby. It's a bit of comic business that's enlivened by a sense of tactile exuberance and the sheer left-field realness of it. And, of course, everything is made better by presence of Young MC. (Backwards, it's MC Young)

Sherlock Holmes

2010-01-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

There's no denying that Avatar is going to lose most of it's luster on small-screen DVD viewing. Factor in the reality that continual improvements in visual effects are going to render it's groundbreaking techniques obsolete within a few years, and it's a good bet that Avatar will be remembered, if at all, like The Jazz Singer is today; as a technical milestone, not a film. Sherlock Holmes will similarly look a lot worse on DVD, when you're not in a theater full of relatives you're sick of talking to. But, it's definitely one of the best Christmas time-filler releases of recent memory. Robert Downey Jr. makes a bold choice, playing the iconic sleuth as a severely damaged social defective whose default expression is a sort of barely repressed panic. It's a smart move, because it makes his smarmy expressions of super-genius less obnoxious: he's clearly compensating for his inability to function without Jude Law's Dr. Watson. It's basically the House dynamic, with Victorian duds and some half-assed plot about Satanic peers and steampunk machinery. Guy Ritchie's vapid visual pyrotechnics are doled out sparingly enough to avoid calling undo attention to themselves, even if the Olde London Towne CGI looks like fresh-baked ass. Speaking of fresh-baked ass, Rachel McAdams, as Holmes' American paramour is completely out of her depth, not to mention given an underwritten, incoherent part to play. There's enough footage of Downey making dazzling deductive leaps to make it all palatable, especially if the alternative is eating leftover ham with the inlaws. Now, if the alternative is watching an actually compelling film on your Netflix queue, that's another story.

Avatar

2009-12-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

When the first ads for Avatar came out, promising that the movie would "revolutionize" film, it was the duty of all thinking people to snort derisively. What hubris! But now it is indeed clear that James Cameron is redefining the relationship between film and film audience. Traditionally, film has been a narrative medium, analogous to literature or theater, and designed to engage its audience with a compelling plot and fully realized characters. The interaction between film and filmgoer is, above all, an intellectual one, and a film's capacity to enthrall an audience rests primarily in its ability to generate satisfying plot and character dynamics. The rise of the blockbuster has seen a number of filmmakers (cough!MichaelBay!cough!) who've tried turn film into pure mindless spectacle, but they've all failed. Explosions and gunshots, no matter how grandiose, and no matter how large a screen they're projected on, are always experienced at enough of a remove to prevent the audience from being fully transported by them. Until now. Avatar's fully immersive CGI universe points towards a radically new conception of cinema, one that engages the audience on a purely visceral level. It's a type of cinema where inventive plots and textured characters are, at best, vestigial, and at worst dire distractions from the sensory overload on display. Cameron's 3D wizardry and operatic scale are designed to bypass the intellect and stimulate the reactive senses. The sort of films that will follow in Avatar's path will be so distinctly different from something like, say, Up in the Air, that they won't even be considered the same art form. James Cameron is pioneering an entirely new genre: cinema as theme park ride.

The only problem is that Cameron doesn't seem to know that he's doing this. The stock characters and the plot pilfered straight from Dances With Wolves would be forgivable if Cameron viewed them as regrettable elements that are necessary to build his overwhelming audio/visual universe. Instead, he seems to take the white guilt narrative and heavy-handed politico-historical allegory seriously. And so the movie spends lots and lots of time on the kind of tooth-grindingly patronizing business (a white man discovering that the 'primitive' race is noble and pure, but not quite smart enough to defend themselves without the leadership of a White Messiah) that would give Kevin Costner and Steven Seagal mindboners. It's a painfully earnest and obvious scenario played out by hand-me-down characters from other, better James Cameron films.

But just when you're ready to hunt down James Cameron and kick him in his well-intentioned but privilege-addled nuts...a giant rhinoceros-looking thing charges through a richly detailed jungle and right into your grill, a giant mecha-mercenary crashes through a river and the air in front of you fills with mist, pterodactylesque creatures plunges through the sky and you get a momentary headrush of vertigo. In those moments, Avatar isn't just another muddle-headed exercise in empty spectacle. It's an experience and one unlike anything you've ever had in a movie theater before. It's a full-sense emergence in an exquisitely detailed, fully realized 360 degree alien landscape. And then it's Dancing with Space Smurfs again.

The contrast between the lukewarm cliches of the narrative and the full-tilt techno-gasm of the imagery may cause brain leakage, but it's a byproduct of the protean nature of Cameron's unwitting paradigm shift. Avatar is an intermediate species, like one of those prehistoric fish with wrist bones. In the future, this sort of technology will go towards making hour-long non-narrative films that immerse the audience in exotic and intense environments without bothering with the drudgery and distraction of plot and characters. They'll probably have their own theater, right next to the Food-Pill dispensary and the jet pack repair shop. For now, we must endure the outdated demands of conventional cinematic structure if we want our revolutionary technological innovations.

Of course, whether it's a good idea to turn a movie into a rollercoaster is a whole other question. It might be wise to remember that there's probably a reason that the Iron Wolf only lasts two minutes.

2008:The Fucking Catalina Wine Mixer!

2009-12-21T09:27:00.000-08:00

The retrospective won't be finished until I post the 2009 list, but there are still way too many flicks to catch up with on DVD for me to make one yet, so this will be the last one for a while.

1. The Dark Knight

What can be said has been said. Best comic book movie ever and a revolutionary blockbuster.

2. Wall-E

Will always be connected in my mind with The Dark Knight. They're two movies that came out during the same summer popcorn season that redefined what movies aiming for a mass audience are capable of.

3. In Bruges

This movie is the ultimate corrective to all the post-Pulp Fiction movies about super cool assassins and their quippy, murdery ways. Also the rare example of Colin Farrell not being insufferable.

4. Rachel Getting Married

One of the few family melodramas of the decade to contain the emotional multitudes of family life, the drama and resentment, but also the joy and sense of security.

5. Hunger

British artist Steve McQueen set out to make a movie about IRA martyr Bobby Sands and his fatal 1981 hunger strike. He had plenty of film models to work from when it comes to historical docudrama. A good example could have been 2008's other movie about imprisoned terrorists, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. It's a solid film that mixes a assiduous compilation of the exploits of West Germany's Red Army Faction with enough intimate moments with the members to give them shading and depth, but the main focus is documenting the motivations and actions of the group. McQueen goes in a completely different, and vastly more satisfying, direction by ignoring big picture questions and a blow-by-blow documentation of the "troubles." Instead, McQueen sets his film entirely inside the Maze prison in Northern Ireland and focuses entirely on the politics of the human body. The IRA prisoners in the Maze had nothing at their disposal to protest their imprisonment than their own bodies. So they refused to bath, smeared shit on their cell walls, and, in a last ditch effort to gain the attention of Margaret Thatcher's government, stopped eating. The ideology and the strategy of the IRA take a backseat to the day-to-day struggle between the prisoners and the guards over control of the prisoners bodies, and in the process McQueen generates some brilliant imagery in banal and grotesque situations: snow melting on the skinned knuckles of a punch-happy prison guard, intricate designs made from human feces being blasted from walls with a high pressure hose, a prison trustee methodically sweeping pooled urine from a hallway. McQueen has time to investigate the struggle of the flesh in all its poignant dignity because he doesn't have a list of historical incidents to dramatize. If you want to find out what happened with the Bobby Sands hunger strike, you can read his wikipedia page. McQueen offers something much more valuable and interesting than the gloomy details of the IRA hunger strike: perspective, insight and poetry.

So-bad-it's-good doubleheader: Twilight and The Happening

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: The Wrestler. This is kind of misleading, because I actually really enjoy The Wrestler, but I've been seeing it on some best of the decade lists and that seems to be a bit much. Yes, the funny script and Aranofsky's direction and Rourke's performance help elevate the sports-movie cliches, but that doesn't change the fact that much of the film is overly programmatic. And there's something sort of queasy about the way that Mickey Rourke and Randy "The Ram" sort of meld into the same person. Are you watching a great performance or are you just voyueristically grooving on the wasted wreckage of Mickey Rourke? Still, this is the only one of these "modern classic" debunkings that I actually think could qualify as a great movie (especially that fantastic ending), and it's really only here because there aren't any other plausible 2008 candidates for the position. Oh, wait! I forgot about Slumdog Millionaire! And Milk! Nevermind! The Wrestler is great.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: Slumdog Millionaire. How long is it going to be before we can all admit that this movie isn't good? There isn't a single element of this film that isn't contrived or cliched or frankly insulting to the audience. If it weren't for the alluring "foreign-ness" of the setting, this could be any mechanical exercise in romantic audience manipulation. I mean, the supposed lovers whose relationship forms the spine of the whole movie have barely a dozen lines of dialogue together! There are like a million ridiculous plot coincidences that wouldn't make it into a Kate Hudson movie without the handy "destiny" excuse. Also, Milk.

Guillermo Del Toro achieves apotheosis: the death of the tree monster in Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. All of Del Toro's films to date have revolved around the intersection of the mundane and the fantastical, and no single scene has encapsulated that dramatic contrast better than the scene in Hellboy 2 when Hellboy blows the head off of a giant tree god and it's corpse slowly melds with the crumbling tenements of the Lower East Side.

Best comedy performance: Danny McBride in The Foot-Fist Way. With this movie, McBride and collaborators Ben Best and Jody Hill took the Will Ferrell model of the comedic protagonist: oblivious idiots with unearned confidence, and took it to a new level of pathos and aggressive stupidity.

Best horror scene: the swimming pool sequence in Let the Right One In. After two hours of exquisitely slow-burning tension, this brilliant take on the vampire genre breaks out the ultraviolence in such a way that it delivers all the gory payoff a horror fan would want without betraying the film's tone.

Pornography of Violence Award: a tie between John Rambo blowing a dude up with point blank heavy machine-gun fire in Rambo and the Punisher blowing a dude's face off with a shotgun WHILE HOLDING A CHILD IN HIS ARMS in Punisher: War Zone

Line of the Year: "I'm a lead farmer, motherfucker!" --Tropic Thunder

DVD Roundup: Humpday

2009-12-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

The bromance has emerged as it's own genre in the past five years or so, thanks to Judd Apatow and the increasing extension of male adolescence. Most of the humor in your average bromance centers on the narrow line between platonic male camaraderie and full-on cockgobbling. Wringing cheap laughs from gay panic isn't the noblest of comedic endeavors, but the best bromances play with the poignant vulnerability of two dudes who love each other but can't express it frankly. And then there's Lynn Shelton's Humpday, which takes the bromantic comedy to it's logical, and sexy, conclusion. Married career man Ben (Mark Duplass) reconnects with his bohemian artist college buddy Andrew (Josh Leonard) and during a drunken bull session, they basically dare each other into making an amateur porn movie together for a local film festival. The ensuing drama, as the two alternate between trying to find a face-saving way to back out and convincing themselves that their very souls depend on going through with it, is frequently hilarious and always diamond-sharp in its observance of male interaction. Specifically, the delicate balance between intimacy and competition that drives dudley friendships. Ben and Andrew certainly love each other, but their slow, terrifying march towards boner-on-butthole action is driven more by their need to prove themselves to each other. Ben wants Andrew to know that he hasn't become a joyless suburban square just because he's married and has a mortgage. Andrew wants to show Ben that his open-mindedness and artistic sensibility aren't just poses. It all comes together in a fantastically awkward topless show-down in a hotel room that's got to be one of the richest, funniest scenes of the year. All in all, it's sort of the endline for all bromances. It's hard to image any new bromance covering the topic with this combination of wit and insight.

2007: My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

2009-12-17T19:16:00.000-08:00

1. There Will Be Blood/No Country For Old Men

Don't make me choose! And I say I don't have to choose, goddamn it. These movies, with their desolate locales, portrayals of boundless evil and the meatgrinder logic of capitalism, their similar visual brilliance, and the fact that they both rocked my ass, will always be linked in my mind. I've written about how awesome these movies are before: ya'll know it! The only thing I want to point out is that the end of There Will Be Blood is sheer genius, and those who deny it can lick my butt. Also, "I'm finished" doesn't refer to Daniel Plainview's life, it refers to his dinner.

3. Grindhouse

This is a case of the whole being much, much greater than the sum of it's parts. Planet Terror is a fun gorefest, and Death Proof is a nifty genre deconstruction with a bunch of talking, but taken together, in a theater, with some hilarious fake trailers thrown in courtesy of folks like Eli Roth and Edgar Wright, and you've got a singular cinematic experience. Yes, you can knock it for being a shallow exercise in mimicry, but it's SO MUCH FUN.

4. Zodiac

I saw this movie for the first time at a packed preview screening, and one of the most memorable theater experiences of my life was the hugely audible exhalation of disappointment that burst forth from the audience over the final title cards. It's a whole film built around failure, obsession and lack of catharsis, where the brilliant structure and subject matter come together in such a way that the lack of closure on a story level actually achieves catharsis on an artistic level. Plus, the Lake Berryessa murder scene is one of the most chilling in recent film history. A bright sunny day, a beautiful lakeshore, a young couple at leisure...and who's that guy walking behind that tree? Getting serial murdered has never felt so awfully plausible.

5. Hot Fuzz

You know how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg made Shaun of the Dead, and were able to hilariously send up the zombie genre while still delivering genuine zombie delights? They did it again with the action genre in Hot Fuzz. They also solidified their status as the makers of the most complete comedies out there. The plot isn't a necessary delivery system for jokes: every scene builds on the scene before it, with allusions, callbacks and parodies thick in the air.

Honorable Mentions in the best film year of the decade:

Margot at the Wedding, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Michael Clayton, I'm Not There

Biggest gap between talent of filmmakers and quality of film: Charlie Wilson's War. Tom Hanks? Aaron Sorkin? Philip Seymour Hoffman? Mike Nichols? How the hell did this crew, which as collectively made dozens of good to great movies, completely and collectively forget how to make a film altogether?

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Atonement. Half of a great movie.

Best all-time performance by an Affleck: Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This is a beautifully shot movie with moments of pure visual poetry, bu the most memorable part of it is Casey Affleck's turn as the hero-worshiper turned murdered Robert Ford. He manages to convey a 21st century relationship with celebrity while still being credibly Olde Timey.

Best monster attack: The Host. When the amphibious mutant in The Host runs riot through Seoul, the scene is shot without any of the usual tricks and tropes of the monster-attack genre. It takes place under the bright light of day, and the creature is not shown in bits and pieces in close up. No, long range shots of the whole ghastly creature smashing shit up, filmed more like something from an Animal Planet documentary than Godzilla.

Justly-famous scene of badassery: the naked sauna fight in Eastern Promises. Fighting with edged weapons with your junk in the wind is the very definition of badass.

Underrated scene of badassery: bullet-hand scene in Shoot 'em Up. Clive Owen has been shot to hell, his arm is like Swiss cheese, all he's got to defend himself against the villain are some loose pistol shells and a working fireplace. What does he do? He shoves the bullets into his arm wounds, then sticks his arm in the fire to ignite the gunpowder.

Line of the Year: "Edith, I told you, I can't build you a candy house! It will fall down. The sun will melt the candy. It won't work!" --Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

2000 Addendum

2009-12-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

3. You Can Count on Me

While looking over my decade-end spreadsheets, I made note of the well-loved movies from every year that I hadn't gotten around to seeing yet. For the hella-weak year of 2000, the one movie that bugged me was this one. I suspected it might have made it on to my best of list, but I couldn't wait to write it because I'm having so much damn fun with these. Well, I just finished watching this, and sure enough, it's easily the third best movie of 2000: brilliantly acted, well-observed, funny, rich, everything you're looking for. Kenneth Lonergan needs to get his shit together and make another movie, post haste.

This knocks Wonder Boys down to 4, O Brother to 5, and gets that unsightly Traffic off the board altogether.

2006: Sexy Time

2009-12-16T19:49:00.000-08:00

1. Children of Men

I've written plenty about how great Children of Men is, and I would have just put this one up here without comment if it weren't for a stunningly wrong-headed article Mike D'Angelo wrote for the Onion AV Club a few weeks ago. In it, D'Angelo condemns the scenes that Children of Men is best known for, the car ambush and refugee camp sequences that famously utilize long, uncut tracking shots. His central complaint is that the scenes are too "show-offy," and he can't watch them without thinking about the herculean acts of camera trickery required to pull them off. This is some straight-up bullshit. D'Angelo even admits that a non-film expert would probably not notice the lack of editing unless he pointed it out to them, so he's admitting that it's really his own issue. I like to think I know something about movies, and the first time I watched the car ambush scene, I only realized that the camera hadn't cut away until the very end of the scene. If Mike D'Angelo can't stop thinking about the technical aspects of filmmaking, that's his own hipster-ass problem. D'Angelo also challenges people who claim that the scenes are "realistic" by claiming that editing doesn't lessen realism because the human brain edits together images all the time. I don't know who's claiming that the tracking shots are realistic, but as far as I'm concerned, the lack of cuts doesn't contribute to greater verisimilitude, but to heighten the sense of tension. In an action sequence, every edit is a minuscule reprieve, a chance for the audience to catch it's collective breath and choose a point on which to focus their eyes. By using an unblinking camera eye, director Alfonso Curon doesn't give the audience any time to reorient themselves, thrashing their nerves raw by the time the camera finally turns away.

2. United 93

How the hell do you make a narrative film about the 9/11 attacks that isn't exploitative, mawkish or jingoistic? Hire Paul motherfucking Greengrass to direct it.

3. The Descent

Best horror film of the aughts.

4. The Prestige

This movie left me somewhat cold the first time I saw it, but over the years, I've come to appreciate the performances, the typically Nolan-esque puzzlebox structure and, most of all, the brilliant marriage of theme, subject matter and setting. It ends up making some interesting and ingeniously-presented points about film, performance and the impact of scientific progress on our collective imagination.

5. The Departed

This is sort of the anti-Prestige, in that I loved it when I first saw it, but once the sugar rush faded, some of the film's flaws became more glaring over time. But I still love the super-long opening sequence and most of the performances, especially Jack Nicholson, whose over-the-top shenanigans are a perfect compliment to his character's place in the world, rather than an exercise in failed hammery. OF COURSE he's ridiculously theatrical! He has to be! A mob boss has no legitimacy beyond the appearance of legitimacy, and he generates it be behaving like a swinging dick who deserves to be in charge.

Worst superhero film not produced by Roger Corman: Superman Returns. This pile of turgid mopery makes Ang Lee's Hulk look like Iron Man.

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Pan's Labyrinth. It was pretty good. Let's just not go nuts.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: The Last King of Scotland. Bugnuts Forest Whitaker or not, this movie is one of the most egregious "Africa-through-the-eyes-of-white-people-because-they're-the-only-ones-who-count" ever. Hotel Rwanda might not have been great, but at least it didn't require a love-struck Caucasian to make the Rwandan genocide meaningful.

Best "gearshift" moment in an action movie: the bizarre, extended child molester scene in Running Scared. This movie is mostly notable for being a particularly grimy example of the undercover cop genre, but halfway through, it achieves a certain left-field audacious brilliance. A runaway kid gets abducted by a creepily wholesome-seeming husband/wife pedophile team. He spends some time in their child-proof, escape-proof house, and, realizing that they're some bad folks, he tries to hide out in the bathroom to stall for time. While in the bathroom, a shadow creeps across the wall behind him that looks eerily like some kind of spider-legged monster. He doesn't notice it, and when he leaves the bathroom, it's never mentioned again. Random weirdness like that is a rare and beautiful thing.

Best awful Nicholas Cage performance: Given the fact that Nick Cage has exclusively trafficked in awful performances ever since winning an Oscar (with the aforementioned exception of Adaptation) , there's a fuck-ton of competition for this award. And yet, The Wicker Man is the hands-down winner here. He actually yells "No! Not the bees! Not the bees!" when he's not punching women in the face. The movie is actually pretty dull until the last twenty minutes...but oh, what a twenty minutes!

Best performance by a otherwise boring old British lady: Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal.

Genuinely effective Clint Eastwood-directed sequence: the grenade suicide scene, Letters from Iwo Jima. As I've written before, Eastwood is usually so overly-fussy and somber in his composition that it's impossible to evoke genuine emotion. But when the scared Japanese soldiers reluctantly (very goddamn reluctantly) kill themselves in their cave in Letters from Iwo Jima, the tight focus on the character's eyes tells a tragic and complex story that second-hand WWII legends about Japanese soldiers who refused to be taken prisoner could never convey.

Line of the Year: "I'ma scissor kick you in the back of the head, Chip! I'm all hoped up on Mountain Dew!" --Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

2005: "You wanna know how I know you're gay?"

2009-12-15T14:11:00.000-08:00

1. The Squid and the Whale

The most painfully accurate kid's eye view of divorce on celluloid. Also, one of the most painfully accurate views of childhood, period. There's none of the dewy-eyed nostalgia that most movies about kids display, where aging filmmakers gaze back to a simpler time in their lives. Noah Baumbach channels all of the raw nerves, confusion and shame that tend to fade in our memories over time.

2. Syriana

I don't care that nobody seems to understand the plot. I don't care that it's didactic. I don't care that "serious people" find the geopolitical analysis puerile. I love Stephen Gaghan's Syriana because it's the only American film to seriously and thoughtfully engage with the "war on terror." Every other Hollywood product either exploits the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as an easy background for action scenes or to make rather banal points about the traumatic effects of war on those who fight them. Syriana, on the other hand, examines the moral implications of our oil-based economy with deftly intertwined stories of terrorists, CIA officers and sheiks. There's just enough time spent teasing out the characters to make you care about them, with the rest of the running time devoted to the dispiriting and wholly inevitable bureaucratic machinations that happen when you run your country on a rapidly diminishing resource that largely rests under the sands of one of the world's most unstable regions. No bullshit about defending freedom, or how tough it is to be a solider, or other airheaded pablum; just a serious wrangle with a bloody, amoral foreign policy and the chest-thumping pieties that accompany it.

3. Cache

Michael Haneke's tightly controlled frames, audacious subject matter and mastery of atmosphere make his movies compulsively watchable, but they're also rarely enjoyable in any traditional sense. He's too bent on punishing his audience for having the temerity to seek film entertainment in the first place. Even with the stately pacing, colonial allegory and moments of upsetting horror, Cache still stands as the closest thing Haneke has made to a crowd pleaser.

4. The Constant Gardener

This is sort of the anti-Syriana, in that it takes on global economic and political issues and filters them through an intensely personal prism. Fernando Meirelles' follow-up to City of God, based on one of John Le Carre's post-Cold war novels, Constant Gardner deals with the merciless logic of global capitalism while also telling the supremely affecting story of stuffed-shirt diplomat Ralph Fiennes, who falls in love with his activist wife only after she's murdered by a pharmaceutical company. Fiennes' grief blooms in tandem with the revelation of the company's crimes, culminating in an ending that manages to simultaneously offer a stem-winding denunciation of the exploitation the Third World and a beautiful tribute to Fiennes' failed relationship.

5. A History of Violence

A lot of people posit this movie as some kind of allegory for American foreign policy. I guess. For me, it works more as a family psychodrama, a movie about the limitations of romantic intimacy and the inherent contradictions of raising children who avoid their parents sins. David Cronenberg's direction is his usual deadpan violence, minus the surrealism (unless William Hurt's loopy turn as a gangster counts as surreal), and Viggo Mortensen has never been better as the docile cafe owner with a bloody past.

Worst theatrically released horror film I've ever seen: Boogeyman. Truly worse than Hitler.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: Crash. What the fuck was up the praise for this movie? Was it some elaborate, Borat-style prank on the public carried out by rogue Academy members and film critics.

Best zombie-scene in a non-zombie movie: the car riot scene in War of the Worlds. Spielberg's allegorical treatment of 9/11 has a lot of scenes of people in distress banding together to survive, but one memorable scene where fear drives ordinary citizens to frenzy and violence. When Tom Cruise's family drives their pilfered minivan into a crowd of fleeing refugees, the previous inhabitants of suburban New Jersey descend on them like a pack of ravenous undead. It's a sobering depiction of the chaos that sleeps below the surface of orderly society.

Insane and insanely memorable scene in otherwise forgettable action movie: Tom Waits as the stigmatic preacher in Domino. Domino is remembered, if at all, as Tony Scott's single most visually incoherent movie, but there's a sequence at the end, scripted by Donnie Darko mastermind and all around nutter Richard Kelly, that stands out for it's batshittery. Before sexy bounty hunter Domino Harvey and her motley gang head off to their doom in Las Vegas, they stop in the desert for a chat with a crazed prophet who happens to be bleeding from his palms. Of course he's played by Tom Waits, and of course he spouts a bunch of gibberish about destiny, and it almost redeems the rest of the movie, which is basically a migraine-delivery system.

Most genuinely shocking moment in a horror film: the scene in the garage, Wolf Creek. I hesitate to write too much about this scene in case people haven't watched it, because if you don't know what's coming, the moment is a gut-punch of surprise. Seriously.

Most ridiculous murder in film history: Christian Slater killed by liquid nitrogen in Mindhunters. Must be seen to be believed. He doesn't just get frozen by a tank of liquid nitrogen that's knocked over by a ludicrously complicated Rube Golberg contraption, but he falls over and smashes into a bunch of Slater-chunks.

Line of the Year: "Why in pluperfect fuck would you pee on a corpse?" --Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

2004: "I would have named you Kingsley."

2009-12-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Charlie Kaufman's screenplays are intensely interior: they're all about the uncharted, dangerous territory between our ears. That can create a challenge for directors looking to give visual expression to such subjective, symbolically-loaded material. Michel Gondry's homemade special effects trickery and ceaselessly moving camera deftly express the Kaufman's vision. And it's a damn amazing vision, brimming with comedy, sadness and an unblinking examination of the perils and rewards of love. Nothing beat that amazing ending, after the memories have been wiped, the connections have been severed, and all Clementine and Joel know is that their love was so traumatizing that it drove them to experimental memory erasure...and they still want to give it another go.

2. Shaun of the Dead

It's almost impossible to make a fully successful parody. You either drop the ball on the comedy, or you drop the ball on making a cohesive, compelling film. Unless, of course, you're Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. Then, you're able to consistently send up genres while simultaneously delivering the authentic pleasures that the genres have to offer. I probably can't judge Shaun of the Dead objectively, since I'm a huge mark for all things zombie, but when you consider that this is not only one of the funnier films of the decade, but also one of the very best non-George Romero zombie films ever, I think I'm in the ballpark here.

3. Kill Bill Volume 2

This movie marked the beginning of Quentin Tarantino's run as a master of the cinematic bait-and-switch. After busting out two hours of non-stop bloodletting in Kill Bill Volume 1, setting up his audience for an epic explosion of badassery, Tarantino's sequel spends the bulk of its running time on talky digressions. It' s not just a bit of audience-punking, though. The operatic violence of Kill Bill 1 was criticized by some for being an empty exercise in style, but Volume 2, in addition to featuring style to burn, gives shades and depth to its characters that give retroactive meaning to all that arterial spray.

4. Sideways

Like his earlier film About Schmidt, Alexander Payne's Sideways is a bout a confused, angry man adrift in a sterile, passionless world. Unlike Warren Schmidt, Paul Giamatti's Miles is achingly, punishingly, brutally aware of every way in which the world and his own carbuncular personality prevent him from finding happiness. And yet...it doesn't do a bit of good, because the self-loathing that bubbles up like black tar in Miles' soul can only be soothed by the sweet elixir of alcohol. But if it's fancy wine, it doesn't count as alcoholism! So Miles and his best friend (who, in a great touch, he doesn't really seem to like) Thomas Hayden Church tear up wine country in search of transient pleasures. There's a bit more redemption at the end of this one than About Schmidt, and it comes courtesy of Miles' ability to express his pain artistically. Just like Harvey Pekar. This movie clinched Paul Giamatti's status as Schlub of the Decade.

5. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Will Ferrell was probably the biggest comedy star of the 00's, and this is easily his best movie. It's the most effortless mixture of parody, character work and flat-out absurdism to be found in the decade. There wasn't a funnier sequence in film during the aughts than the news team fight scene and post-fight conversation in Anchorman. It starts with an amusing conceit: rival newscasters rumble West Side Story-style. Then, during the rumble, the absurdism explodes with the introduction of horses, nets and, of course, tridents. Everything comes to a delirious head in the next scene, when Ron's crew dissects the fight and, instead of leaving the super-over-the-top violence as a bit of throw-away wackiness, they bring everything back down to earth, starting with the immortal line "Brick killed a guy." There's an unwritten rule that when a comedy turns the absurdity knob up for one scene, it won't effect the rest of the movie, and Anchorman's decision to abandon that convention made for transcendent comedy.

Horrible movie that forever tarnished the cinematic reputation of the Milwaukee Brewers: Mr. 3000. C'mon, man, can't we retroactively get Major League, please?

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind/Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that isn't that great: Million Dollar Baby. At his best, Clint Eastwood movies feel strangely airless and mannered, and the cliche-filled, cartoonishly-dark subject matter of this movie plays to all of Eastwood's worst habits as a director.

Great scene in an otherwise-crummy film: Adrian Brody stabbing Joaquin Phoenix in The Village. When he feels like it, M. Night Shyamalan can control the frame like nobody's business, and that mastery serves him well in an expertly paced, genuinely shocking sequence.

Best dinner-table scene: I Heart Huckabees. This movie is not without it's faults, but it also brims with considerable virtues, the most richly rewarding of which is the clash of ideologies at Richard Jenkins' dinner table. Jason Schwartzman's fervid idealism meets a hostile reaction in the defiant complacency of a family of suburban Christians. What happens when you stand in a meadow at dusk? Nothing and everything.

Most frustratingly great scene: the opening scene in Dawn of the Dead. For all of it's bloody delights, Zack Snyder's remake of the George Romero classic features a number of missed opportunities, none more agonizing than the failure to carry the sense of apocalyptic frenzy that powers the magnificent first ten minutes into the rest of the film.

Best use of Tom Cruise's innate creepiness: Collateral. Seriously, how come more director's don't see that Cruise's laser-eyes and wolf's grin are a natural fit for villainy?

Line of the Year: "America, FUCK YEAH!" --Team America: World Police

2003: Turning Japanese

2009-12-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

1. Kill Bill Volume 1

Before this movie, Quentin Tarantino was, in some ways, underrated as a director. Even his most vocal advocates almost always cited the dialogue or clever remix of filmic tropes of his screenplays (also the two things his detractors usually cite), but his camera-work went largely unremarked upon. Tarantino finally unleashed the full directorial capability with a masterful piece of lean, mean action filmmaking. The story is a typically regurgitated pulp riff on revenge movies, mostly from Tarantino's beloved 1970s, but it's executed with tremendous verve and creativity. You've got the brilliant O-ren anime sequence, a kick-ass RZA score, and, of course, the undisputed champion of 00's-era action scenes, the showdown at the House of Blue Leaves. Leaving aside the delirious and expertly-staged decapitations, the pacing and blocking of that entire sequence are a thing to behold. The long tracking shot of the Bride making her way to the bathroom to get into her murderin' clothes that switches to follow Sofie Fatale headed towards the same bathroom, to the epic calling-out of the O-ren, tension drawn to the breaking point before the first cathartic gusher of blood.

2. Lost in Translation

This is a movie that seems to have dropped off of a lot of people's radar in the past five years, and that's understandable. Not only is the whole thing played in an achingly minor key, but the Orientalism is doubtlessly problematic, and it is really just the petty carping of a couple of supremely overprivileged whiners. Still, there aren't many films in the decade that communicated the alienating vastness of contemporary life as authentically as Lost in Translation. Most of us can't relate to the problems of being a washed-up millionaire actor or a globetrotting trophy wife, but we all know what it's like to walk alone through the streets of an unfamiliar city, or spend a night on the town with friends you know deep down don't really know who you are. Couple that palpable sense of place and theme with an all-world performance by Bill Murray and a central relationship that's genuinely touching without once succumbing to cliche, and you're dealing with a cinematic triumph, mopey shoegazing be damned.

3. City of God

Fernando Meirelles' epic tale of growing up in the drug-ruled midst of Rio's favelas doesn't suffer from a lack of style. City of God contains some of the most memorable, purely-cinematic sequences of the decade. The kinetic, free-for-all sensibility could come off as insensitive to the hyperviolence and poverty of the setting, but it turns out the be exactly the right choice. Because life in the favelas can't be defined solely by drugs and violence: people live there, they fall in love, they dance, they raise families, and Meirelles' film contains the multitude of that experience.

4. American Splendor

The Aughts were truly the Decade of the Schlub. The two most consistently excellent actors of the 00s were Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, and no film encapsulated the essential predicament of the American Schlub like Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's American Splendor. A schlub doesn't have the most brains, and he's certainly not athletic, and he's painfully aware of each and every one of his shortcomings, without possessing the wherewithal to correct them. The triumph of Harvey Pekar is that he can make his own painful inadequacies into art and, miracle of miracles, have people respond to it. It's the ultimate dream of schlubs everywhere, but in the final, aching twist, even that recognition isn't enough to end his torment, just make it bearable. That's the most a schlub can hope for in this life.

5. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

It's the signal film achievement of the decade, so I guess it deserves some appreciation. This is it.

Most completely and totally horrible movie of the decade: God and Generals. That shit will make you sterile. Revolting pro-Confederate historical revisionism, a turgid screenplay, painful over and/or under acting, lifeless (and criminally sanitized) battle scenes, all stretched out to nearly four fucking hours. Without a single redeeming feature. Well, maybe that hilarious "Southern rights for all" song-and-dance number. Apparently the Confederate army didn't bother with "don't ask, don't tell."

Horrible movies that are kind of fantastic: Dreamcatcher and Identity. Both of these movies brim over with fail, and yet have more than enough laugh-out-loud moments to make them worth watching. Most notably, the "gunphone" in Dreamcatcher and the rise of Evil Timmy in Identity.

Image of singular beauty: Andy Goldsworthy throwing a handful of snow into the air, where it holds for a moment before dissipating into the wind in the lyrical documentary Rivers and Tides

Rousing climax from an animated movie that doubles as an allegory for the labor movement: a school of fish versus a fishing net in Finding Nemo. A school of fish caught in a net. If they all swim in different directions, they're doomed. If they all pull in the same direction (with a little help from a neurotic clownfish), they can snap that fucking net right off the beam. Workers of the world, unite!

Unheralded Johnny Depp performance: Once Upon a Time in Mexico. 2003 was the year Jack Sparrow resurrected Johnny Depp's career as a big ticket Hollywood star with an Oscar nominated bit of weirdness, which overshadowed the excellent weirdness of his turn as a loopy CIA agent in Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico. The movie itself is a mess, but every time Depp is on screen, it vibrates with unpredictability. It was Depp's last chance to goof around under the radar.

Comedy sequence that made me laugh until I cried and therefore invalidates any credibility I may have as a film critic: the boxing scene from Bad Santa. Yes, it's five straight minutes of guys (and kids, and midgets) getting punched in the junk. As Bob Saget proved many years ago, the shot the groin is the lowest, cheapest form of comedy. It's also deliriously funny when it's done right, and in Bad Santa, it's done right. Also, I'm not on trial here!

Line of the Year: "Talk to the hand." --Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

2002: "Don't say 'pitch.'"

2009-12-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

1. Adaptation

I remember the exact moment in Adaptation when it went from being a great movie to one of the my all time favorites: the low speed car chase between the Kaufmans and Susan Orlean. This was the moment I realized that, after two acts spent carefully creating rich, interesting characters and struggling with the difficulties of creating truthful art, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze were going to intentionally set fire to the whole construction with an empty Hollywood-style action ending. It's a ballsy move, and it pays off handsomely: not only does it cut the Gordian knot of the how to deal with the tough subject matter, but it's also a point blank indictment of narrative cinema's inherent limitations. Combine that with Nicholas Cage's last known unironically good performance, and you've got the makings of a post-modern triumph that manages to express real emotion while also undermining the Robert McKee screenwriting model.

2. Punch-Drunk Love

After P.T. Anderson followed the sprawling porn industry melodrama Boogie Nights with the even more sprawling Magnolia, you might have wondered if his next movie was going to be a 16 hour miniseries about every citizen in greater Los Angeles. Instead, he radically rebooted, tapping noted man-baby Adam Sandler to take his psychotic infant schtick to a darker, sadder place. This is a romantic comedy that is less about the birth of a relationship than about the forces of alienation, shame, family resentment and fear that make romantic love necessary and beautiful. Best scene: Sandler trying to juggle his pushy sister, his would-be love, his befuddled employees and an extortion-minded phone sex operator, while John Brion's nerve-wracking score jangles in the background. Contrast that with the sweet, weird moment in bed with Sandler and Emily Watson, talking about how much they want to bash in each other's faces, and it makes you feel blessed and strong to have a love in your own life.

3. Bloody Sunday

This is the first of two Paul Greengrass-directed dramas about horrifying real life events to appear on my list, so let's get it over with: I have no truck with people who complain about Greengrass' handheld camera work. If it makes you nauseated, that's one thing, although if you get a tummy ache from watching a fucking movie, I wonder how the hell you can walk to the mailbox without hurling. Anyway, non-stomach-related complaints can all suck it: the Greengrass approach, more than anything, drains historical events (and, in his Bourne films, the spy genre) of their mythic qualities, cutting everything down to a human scale. The "Bloody Sunday" massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland proved to be the opening shots of the IRA insurgency that raged for thirty years, but Greengrass breaks the tragedy down to a series of mistakes and miscommunications, giving everyone involved, from activist MP Ivan Cooper to young Bogside Catholics to the British Paratroopers who carried out the shooting, their moments of quiet humanity.

4. About Schmidt

Warren Schmidt could be a character in Ghost World, maybe sitting alone in a diner booth behind Enid and Rebecca, eating soup and looking out the window at a dry cleaners. The marvel of this movie, Alexander Payne's best to date, is that it channels the same sort of bland, lifeless suburban hellscape as Ghost World, but does so through the eyes of a character who is largely oblivious to it. Jack Nicholson's best "old dude" performance powers the story of a man who knows, deep down, that life has somehow passed him by, but he doesn't quite know how, and more importantly, he can't figure out what to do about it now that he's in post-retirement, widower drift. It's a collection of awkward personal interactions and fumbles towards enlightenment, all topped by one of the best endings of the decade; Ndugu's painting is a disarming bit of pure grace, and the tears that come to Schmidt's eyes are heartbreaking. They're tears of joy for the beauty of the world, and tears of sorrow for all the beauty that he's missed.

5. Full Frontal

Of all of the low budget, digital experiments Steven Soderbergh directed in the 00s between Ocean's movies, Full Frontal is easily the best. Unlike pretty much every other inside-Hollywood movie, Full Frontal goes beyond easy satire of the superficiality and lack of creativity of the industry (although there is plenty of that) and actually engages with the psychological transference by which film directors and writers take the raw material of their own lives and neuroses and put them on the screen. It also features one of the funniest supporting turns of the decade, with Nicky Katt as a struggling actor/pilates instruct playing a yuppie version of Hitler in a play when he isn't complaining to the director that his co-stars don't get him. "You know what, fuck her. And here's why. Number One-anyone who's offended by drinking blood, obviously doesn't drink blood. Number Two-anyone who drinks as much blood as I do knows that it has no effect. Number Three-there is absolutely no scientific connection between drinking a shot of blood a day and being an extraordinary actor. And Number Four-it is impossible to prove Number Three." Big ups to Baron Von Hugecock.

Worst movie that also doubles as an endorsement of serial murder: Frailty

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Time Out. It's on a bunch of best-of-the-decade lists, but this flavor of quiet desperation is a bit too quiet, and not desperate enough.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually kinda sucks: Chicago. Sure, it looks good, and some of the musical sequences are brilliant, but still...it's just a goddamn musical! Seriously!

Movie that makes me wish I had a time machine: Gangs of New York. Give me access to a time machine, and the first thing I'm doing is grabbing a DVD of There Will Be Blood (and a portable player, of course), going back to, say, 1995, finding Martin Scorsese and making him watch it. Afterwards I would say to the man: "Marty, you're going to get Daniel Day-Lewis to star in this Gangs movie you've been trying to get made for the past twenty years. THIS is what he's capable of. For the love of God, don't waste a bunch of screen time with some bullshit teenybopper love story and some pissant kid whining about his dead daddy. You made Goodfellas, ferchrissakes! You know how to build an entire film around an unsympathetic character! Look at There Will Be Blood! This punk kid Anderson stole half your shit to make Boogie Nights, then he took Day-Lewis and made the movie that you COULD have made if you didn't waste precious screentime on weak-ass shit!" Just imagine a cut of Gangs of New York that did away with DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz completely, and focused on Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher. I think my brain melted from the very notion of such concentrated awesomeness.

Scariest scene of the decade: the Brazilian birthday party sequence from Signs. The only time I got goosebumps watching a movie.

Most perverse scene in a Steven Spielberg film: Peter Stormare as the creepy eyeball doctor in Minority Report. With that unhealthy yellow light, Stormare's sleazy demeanor and a disoriented, eyeball-less Tom Cruise, you'd never guess that it was directed by the maestro of childlike wonder.

Best sex scene: the three way in Y Tu Mama Tambien. Alfonso Curon creates such a vibrant atmosphere of in-the-moment pleasure that two dudes kissing doesn't feel "gay" some much as an expression of the complete loss of inhibition.

Line of the Year: "Just look at the greatest Jewish minds ever. Marx, Freud and Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb." --The Believer

2001: Now THAT'S more like it!

2009-12-07T19:03:00.000-08:00

Ah...much better. Now's the time to point out that, officially, the first year of the 21st century was really 2001. So let's just say that the 20th century in film ended with the whimper of dying harp seal, while the 21st started off with the mighty roar of a mildly syphilitic lion.

1. The Royal Tenenbaums

I know that "real" Wes Anderson fans are supposed to like Rushmore the most, and the smart-ass pick is Life Aquatic, but goddamn it, my favorite is still The Royal Tenenbaums. It's the movie that most successfully balanced Anderson's whimsical artificiality with earnest emotional catharsis. Few film moments in the decade packed the richly-earned wallop of Chas Tenenbaum's quivering voice saying "It's been a hard year, Dad." And Anderson's artifice is here at its most rewarding, from the intense detail of that fantastic opening sequence to the funny, sharp digressions sprinkled throughout the film: Dudley Heinsbergen, the disastrous Tenenbaum v. Gandhi tennis match, Pagoda...and, of course, we can't forget Margot Tenenabaum meeting her brother at the gangplank. And this from a guy who generally finds Gwyneth Paltrow about as appealing as red tide poisoning.

2. The Man Who Wasn't There

THE underrated Coen brothers movie. Written off at the time as some kind of half-assed Miller's Crossing, this movie features the Coens at their most empathetic and contemplative. The film noir trappings aren't simply another slick genre goof. The Man Who Wasn't There is an examination of the alienating forces at work in post-war America that made film noir possible, and one man's struggle to define himself in the face of them. Considering the Coen's penchant for deliberately obscure endings, the graceful, elegiac finale of Man is even more impressive.

3. Ghost World

This movie is so deliberately low key, that it ends up getting slept on by a lot of people, but for me, it's one of the most haunting films of the decade. Mostly because of director Terry Zwigoff's absolute mastery of the banal: every detail of his gray little suburb feels lived in and, at the same time, drained of life. That palpable atmosphere makes Enid Coleslaw's fitful attempts at entering an adult world that she can't bring herself to take seriously even more recognizable. Steve Buscemi's Seymour is a creature of pure tragi-comedy, and a perfect encapsulation of the "geek" mentality: he's a person at once invigorated and entrapped by his petty obsessions. As the poor bastard says "Maybe I don't want to meet someone who shares my interests. I hate my interests." Could any other movie have a middle-aged misanthrope have sex with a sexy 18-year-old, and have the viewer end up feeling like the guy is being used?

4. In the Bedroom

Another super low key movie that's easy to forget in the avalanche of films to sift through for the end-of-decade retrospective. It's also a movie chock full of closely-observed moments and visual poetry. The grieving parents in the office of the district attorney charged with prosecuting their son's killer, looking at the pictures on the shelf of the man, his wife and their dogs: the DA doesn't have children, and can't know the parent's pain. That wreath of smoke twisting out of the killer's chest wound, catching the headlights of a nearby car. The breath-taking crack of Sissy Spacek's hand on Marisa Tomei's face.

5. Memento

Christopher Nolan's breakout film, and a marvel of stylistic gimmickry complimenting thematic content. It's easy to focus on the ingenious backward plot structure, that manages to generate genuine suspense even after it begins at the end of the story. But the real triumph of Memento is how it comments on the nature of memory and the necessary human capacity for self-deception, using the structure to underline the point.

Movies that take a giant shit on the Greatest Generation: 2001 saw the release of two awful movies about World War 2. Michael Bay's monstrous Pearl Harbor and the painfully botched retelling of the battle of Stalingrad, Enemies at the Gate. The latter includes one of most hilarious sex scenes in film history, with Jude Law furtively banging Rachel Weisz in a Red Army dugout. The look on her face is priceless: either her vagina is broken, or Jude Law's penis is made out of hornets.

Worst film I've ever seen in the theater: Scary Movie 2. Blame my sister.

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Mullholland Drive. Like most David Lynch movies, I can' appreciate what he's going for, but still not find it terribly engaging. But that lesbian sex scene is definitely a modern classic of film nudity.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: A Beautiful Mind. Goddamn, two in a row, and both starring Russel Crowe, no less! Ron Howard is in the exact middle of the directorial PH scale. He is the cinematic personification of beige.

Credit sequence in a biopic that's so good it makes the rest of the movie superfluous: Ali Too much of Michael Mann's Mohammed Ali biography is disappointing boilerplate, but the very first minutes are a galvanizing array of impressionistic images that build the world of Cassius Clay frame by frame. Sam Cooke rocking a black nightclub. A young Clay jogging down the road, getting bird-dogged by a cop car. Clay's father painting a portrait of an aggressively Caucasian Jesus. It's the sort of approach that's hard to sustain over the course of a whole movie, but that kind of non-linear, musically-edited energy should definitely be a feature of more biographical films.

Best British bad-asses: Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, and Ian Holm in From Hell. I'm on record as saying that Ben Kingsley usually bites it as whatever mannered, stick-up-the-ass yutz he's playing, but he's flat out awesome as psychotic criminal Don Logan. Less funny, but somewhat more terrifying is Ian Holm as Jack the Ripper in the otherwise crummy Hughes brothers movie From Hell. His black-eyed monologue while cutting out a woman's heart conveys the lucid, controlled madness of the character.

Worst British bad-asses: the parade of Brits trying their best to sound like American crackers in Blackhawk Down. It's ridiculous: Ewan MacGregor, Jason Isaacs, Ewen Bremner, Ioan Gruffudd, and the Australians (who are honorary Brits, after all) Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana, all doing some sort of vague, twangy accent for no discernible reason.

Stupidest action scene: the flying bus in Swordfish. Novel! Bold! Retarded!

Line of the Year: "You taste like burger. I don't like you anymore." --Wet Hot American Summer

2000: The decade begins with the whimper of a dying harp seal

2009-12-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

Looking at my trusty 2000 spreadsheet, I'm once again reminded of how inauspiciously the 21st century began, film-wise. If you only had this year to go on, you could make an argument for shutting down Hollywood all together. Shit, Traffic is on my top ten of the year, and I don't even really like that movie. Still, there were one or two truly memorable films from that year, as well as some movies that remain, to this day, stunningly overrated.

Top Five

1. Requiem for a Dream

As a testament to the lameness of 2000, I haven't seen the top film of the year since I saw it in the theater. In the case of Darren Aranosfky's Requiem, though, that's really more of a compliment. Beyond the brutally grim subject matter, the imagery is so vivid and terrible that you can't unsee it, so repeat viewing is really beside the point. It's been nearly a decade since I saw Requiem for a Dream, and when I close my eyes to conjure it, I can still see Ellen Brustyn's carnivorous fridge, Jared Leto's sore-covered arm, and, of course, "ass-to-ass." Film can be the most ephermeral of art forms: film images tend to degrade in your head over time, whereas a piece of music, for example, can haunt your brain for years. Requiem for a Dream is filled with some of the most devastating and indelible pieces of visual poetry, horrible, horrible visual poetry, of the decade.

2. American Psycho

If Mary Harron's American Psycho were just the business card exchange scene, Paul Allen's Huey Lewis-aided death scene, and a bunch of clips from Hee Haw, it would still be among my favorite films of the decade. Thankfully, those gems are surrounded by a bunch more great stuff, starting with Christian Bale's magnificent performance, easily the best of his career. It's hard to believe that the self-important, scowling stiff who glowers his way through blockbuster after blockbuster is the same dude how does that amazing shimmy with the raincoat and ax in this movie. The goofs on 80s superficiality are kind of glib, and the overall theme of Wall Street as a playground for sociopaths seems obvious, but in a country that continues to worship wealth regardless of how it is acquired, and chase status symbols regardless of the cost, American Psycho continues to be trenchant, in addition to being hilarious.

3. Wonder Boys

And now the serious drop off the cliff begins. Wonder Boys is another movie I haven't seen in ages, but have fond memories of, largely due to Michael Douglas's schlubby charisma and a general air of creative paralysis and, eventually, acceptance of limitations and failures, which I tend to respond strongly to in films.

4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Not one of my favorite Coen brothers films, but still pretty good, and it holds up very well when half-watched on TV whilst interneting. Highlights: Stephen Root as the blind, crazy radio station manager, the Wizard of Oz Klan rally, "Ah, George, not the livestock!"

5. Traffic

What did I say about this being a crummy year?

Movie so awful that it's amazing: Battlefield Earth. "Before you could even SPELL YOUR NAME, I was being TAUGHT to CONQUER GALAXIES!!!!" Aaaaand, scene! Star wipe to Barry Pepper in a caveman outfit. It almost makes Scientology worthwhile.

Movie so awful it's just...awful: The Ninth Gate. On paper, this should have been fantastic: Johny Depp, Roman Polanski, Satan worshipers, portals to hell...and yet...hot ass on celluloid without the camp delights of a Battlefield Earth. Could have used some Travolta.

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Almost Famous

Oscar-winning, universally beloved movie that actually sucks out loud: Gladiator. Yes, there's nothing better than an action film with incomprehensible action scenes! Don't we put up with enough of that shit from your brother, Ridley?

Brilliantly-rendered shot from a largely-sucky film: the horse dissection from The Cell

Best action scene: final shoot-out from The Way of the Gun. This is mostly a weak-tea Tarantino ripoff, made even more ridiculous by the attempt to make Ryan Phillippe into a badass, but the climactic shoot-out in a Mexican brothel manages to transcend cliche for a few minutes. No music, no slow motion, just a bunch of tubby hired guns awkwardly absorbing shotgun blasts.

Worst failed provocation: the rape scene from Baise-Moi. I'm sure directors Virginie Despentes and Coralie (just Coralie? Really?) thought that showing real penetration during a rape would shock viewers from their comfortable, titillated voyeurism, but it ends highlighting the artificiality of the enterprise and turns the whole movie from that point on into a numbing, alienated series of cheap shocks. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but if so...who gives a shit?

Comedy sequence that made me laugh until I cried and therefore invalidates any credibility I may have as a film critic: the demon saying "Popeye's chicken is the shizznit" in Little Nicky. I can't defend Little Nicky as a comedy, as a film, as anything other than a painful bag of shitwiches, but that line, said by a snarly hellspawn...it just set me off. I can't explain it, and I certainly can't justify it. All I can say is: comedy is subjective, and I'm not on trial here!

Line of the Year: "You're the man now, dog!"--Finding Forrester

The Aughts in Film

2009-12-07T08:20:00.000-08:00

The decade draws to a close, and every cultural commentator worth an ounce of bandwidth feels the urge to look back and start ranking shit. This includes cultural commentators whose waste of bandwidth is a crime against technology and the very notion of taste. So over the next couple of weeks, I'll be doing a year-by-year retrospective of the films of the expiring decade; the good, the bad, the comically bad and the random but memorable. There probably won't be too many surprises, but since I made a spreadsheet for every year and listed every single movie from a given year that I've seen, it will at least be relatively comprehensive.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-12-02T09:33:00.000-08:00

So it has come to this. Wes Anderson's meticulously staged camera set-ups, whimsically detailed sets, and lush autumnal colors have found their natural expression: a stop motion animated adaption of a Roald Dahl children's book. The results are interesting, if mixed, in that the switch to animation is a natural fit for Anderson's aesthetic, while also undermining some of the emotional elements that makes his best work so memorable. Fantastic Mr. Fox feels like Anderson reaching a crossroads: from here, he'll either move on to a more expansive, penetrating cinematic palette, or continue to construct his delicate and increasingly sterile family dioramas.

If animation is in some ways Wes Anderson's perfect medium, then stop motion animation is even more perfect. The charming, hand-crafted feel of Mr. Fox makes the movie feel like something Max Fischer would have put together in middle school. Intricate set and character design, complete with animal hair that moves with the wind, offer the ultimate expression of Anderson's intensely composed film vision. It always felt like those pesky humans actors and were the thing standing between Wes Anderson and the movies he really wanted to make. Using animal puppets also does the work of justifying a visual fussiness that can feel artificial and lifeless when applied to actual people. In Mr. Fox, cross-sections of farmhouses and whimsical, choreographed heist scenes feel perfectly natural. It's easy to look back at the Wes Anderson filmography and imagine all of his previous characters as claymation figures bouncing around in Technicolor. 111 Archer Avenue is basically a giant dollhouse to being with.

And yet...while the animation makes Anderson's more contrived visual motifs easier to accept, it also ensures that the film can't reach the sort of emotional heights that Anderson, at his best, is capable of. The story is children's-book simple: Mr. Fox (George Clooney, reprising Danny Ocean for the woodland set) gives ups stealing chickens when his wife (Meryl Streep) gets pregnant, but a few years later, the itch comes back, leading to an escalating battle with three sinister farmers who live near Fox's treehouse. Along the way, Mr. Fox bonds with his alienated son (Jason Schwartzman) and comes to terms with his responsibilities as a husband and father. The character interplay echoes one of the themes that have dominated all of Anderson's work: overbearing father figures and the disaffected children left in their wake, but the emotional beats and dialogue are played so broadly that they fail to register with the poignancy of movies like Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums. That's to be expected when dealing with what is ostensibly a kid's movie, but the overdetermined nature of the character arcs call to mind Anderson's last live-action film, The Darjeeling Limited. This suggests that Anderson has told all the stories of upper class family discord he can, and that it's time to move on. That, or he can simply occupy himself with finding new ways to control every centimeter of every frame of his hermetically sealed entertainments.

2012

2009-11-21T16:44:00.000-08:00

California is going to have a gubernatorial election in 2010. Arnold Schwarzenegger, having served two terms, is ineligible for reelection. And yet, somehow, there's a scene in 2012, set in the titular year, where the governor of California calls a press conference, and sure enough, he's a giant dude with a thick Austrian accent. Yes, it's a small goof in an epically long, epically stupid movie riddled with jaw-dropping distortions of physics, astronomy and common sense, but it's emblematic of the slapdash, kitchen sink approach of German schlockmeister Roland Emmerich, or, as I like to think of him, Uwe Boll with a 200 million dollar budget.

Everything, literally everything, about this movie is ridiculous: the premise that the Mayans predicted that the world would end in 2012, the idea that the sun starts emitting "mutated" neutrinos that heat up the earth's core (who knew neutrinos had DNA?), the fact that a movie in which 99.9999% of the world's population dies horribly in volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis spends most of its running time detailing the petty relationship issues of science fiction author John Cusack and his estranged wife and children. And, of course, the continual and downright laughable defiance of basic plausibility. The first two hours of this seemingly endless movie feature three (THREE!) separate instances of an airplane taking off just in time to avoid, in turn, a massive earthquake, a supervolcanic eruption, and a massive cloud of ash. It's all part of Roland Emmerich's mission to film people outrunning the four elemental forces in his movies. First, Air Force One narrowly escapes the incineration of Washington D.C. in Independence Day (fire, natch), then Jake Gyllenhaal outruns a burst of supercold air in The Day After Tomorrow (wind), and now, in 2012, John Cusack's plane takes off just as California splits in half and sinks into the ocean (earth!). For the life of me, I can't figure out why the hell none of these close-call take-offs couldn't have dodged one of the film's many massive tidal waves. I guess Emmerich is adhering to a consistent One Element Per Film rule in order to make it more of a challenge for himself.

Of course, such trifling concerns are beside the point when dealing with a gigantic piece of nihilistic spectacle like this. The only real question worth asking is: is it a reasonably good time? On that score, 2012 delivers, like most Roland Emmerich movies. It's entertaining mostly because of the ridiculousness and the absurdity and the brain-bending continuity errors. Like a buttoned-down Michael Bay, Emmerich makes movies where the majority of the fun is in seeing how far the filmmakers will go to insult your intelligence as a viewer, and how many hundreds of millions of dollars of special effects wizardry they'll spend to do it. In this case, there's plenty of fun to be had, and even though most of the big disaster set-pieces are cribbed from other Emmerich (and James Cameron) movies, there's still a mad grandeur to unleashing every megadeath-causing havoc on the planet's landmarks all at once. As usual, the fact that these spectacles of mayhem are meant to represent the near extinction of the human race, including the horrifying deaths of almost every person (not to mention animal) on earth is given little consideration. Josef Stalin supposedly said, "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic." Roland Emmerich might have added "and six billion deaths is a 65 million dollar opening weekend."

A Serious Man

2009-11-18T17:23:00.001-08:00

About halfway through the Coen brother's new movie, there's a shot of hapless physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) standing in front of his class. He is a tiny figure at the bottom of the frame, nearly consumed by a comically oversized chalkboard covered the obscure equations that constitute the mathematical proof for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. You know the Coens are in the mood to grapple with the absurdity and loneliness of existence when they reference Heisenberg. In A Serious Man, this image encapsulates Gopnik's internal crisis, whose life is rapidly unraveling and who can't figure out why. In the frame, he's practically being crushed by a vast expanse of complex, inscrutable equations, all of which add up to one big question mark. Most of the film consists of Gopnik suffering various travails and his attempting to make sense of what is happening to him. In his struggle, Gopnik has two coping tools at his disposal: his understanding of the explanatory power of science, and his Jewish faith. These are two twin intellectual pillars of Gopnik's life, but once his trials begin, he discovers how shaky they really are. The mystical nature of quantum mechanics undermine any ability to trust conventional cause-and-effect reasoning. Even more troubling to Gopnik, Judaism doesn't offer much in the way of comfort. The film is organized around Gopnik's discussions with three separate rabbis at his synagogue. The rabbis attempt to offer solace, but what they cannot offer is any sort of explanation for Gopnik's plight. Unique among Western religions, Judaism embraces the essential mystery of the universe, which doesn't give Gopnik much comfort when it seems that the universe is conspiring against him.

Superficially, this is the Coen brother's most personal film: it's setting (the Twin cities) and period (the late 1960s) are the setting and period of their childhood, and their protagonist is modeled on their college professor father. But there is little in the way of personal frankness on display here: this is the most intentionally obscure, cerebral Coen movie since Barton Fink. Given the theme of struggling with the unknowable emptiness of existence, it's appropriate, but at the same time it's hard not to feel a sense of deja vu. A Serious Man trodes much of the same ground of not only Barton Fink but also of their vastly underrated Man Who Wasn't There. The only real innovation, and it's admittedly a dozy, is the immersion in Jewish lore and theology. For those interested in Judaism, A Serious Man offers an arresting glimpse into a religion that concentrates much more on the social and traditional than on questions of "belief," and how this stance can leave people in crisis with more questions than answers.

Larry Gopnik joins a small group of Coen protagonists which includes Marge Gunderson, and Ed Crane, who are not appallingly venal and/or stupid. He is heaped with a slew of baffling personal problems, from his wife's bolt-from-the-blue divorce demand to his socially retarded brother's legal troubles to a Schrodingerian Korean student who may (or may not!) be trying to bribe him for a passing grade. His troubles are, of course, played for laughs, but they also offer a platform to explore the spiritual collapse of a person who reaches for a rope to save himself from drowning only to discover that it's made of sand. There's no catharsis and no redemption, just a steady descent to the bottom of the ocean. A Serious Man offers the usual bracing jolt of a Coen brothers movie, but once again, the brothers have opted not to provide much in the way of solace: life is a bewildering minefield of absurdity and humiliation, and nobody, not G-d, not Einstein, and least of all some smart-aleck filmmaker, can make it okay.

On second thought....

2009-11-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

When I saw Inglourious Basterds in August, my initial reaction was mild disappointment. After months of hype, I'd built up a fantasy movie in my head featuring wall-to-wall Nazi-killing courtesy of Brad Pitt and a cadre of bad-ass Jews. and when Basterds turned out to be an altogether more oblique, experimental film, I held it against the movie that my baser urges weren't satisfied. But then, I found that i could not stop thinking about the movie, about Tarantino's bold use of off screen action, long stretches of dialogue, and mostly about the fact that Basterds marked the first Tarantino film to take the director's preoccupation with cinematic history and use it to provide genuine insight. Then, I listened to an interview with noted cinephile and comedic genius Patton Oswalt, who condemned above all the film viewer who rejects a movie just because it doesn't give them exactly what they were expecting going into it. Within a few weeks of thinking and writing and reading about the movie, and I was convinced that Inglourious Basterds marked Tarantino's best movie since Pulp Fiction. Tonight, I watched it again at a dollar theater in a mall (whose sign actually said, in Brutalist block capitals: DOLLAR THEATER) and seeing it again, I have to revise my thoughts further: Inglourious Basterds is definitely Tarantino's best film, period.

The House of the Devil

2009-11-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

Writer-director Ti Law's retro-horror film The House of the Devil plays like the third part of Grindhouse. Actually, it plays like an actual "grindhouse" 80s horror film, as opposed to the mimetic subversions of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. There's no gratuitous nudity and a relative dearth of blood, but The House of the Devil positively drips with period detail and boasts a visual pallet instantly recognizable to anyone who spent sleepless nights during the Reagan administration watching co-eds get slaughtered.

The period detail goes beyond rotary phones and high-waisted jeans; House boasts a plot featuring one of the great boogeymen of the 1980s: the Satanic cult. A young college student looking for rent money takes a one-night, high-profit "babysitting" gig at a scary old house in the country that just so happens to be the base of operations for a family of be-robed Satan worshipers. The vast majority of the film consists of the young woman, played by Jocelin Donahue, walking from room to room in the big, creepy house, accompanied by a needling, pensive score. These long stretches of anticipation work wonderfully at creating suspense as the audience waits...and waits...and waits for something to happen; the waiting never slides into tedium because the sense of imminent, horrifying danger never slackens. Law achieves this effect with all the tools in horror directing kit, voyeuristic shots, as well as extreme low and high angles that highlights Donahue's vulnerability. More interestingly, Law repeatedly holds a shot of an empty room or space after a character has walked out of the frame. That use of negative space puts the viewer further on edge as they wait for something to fill it. Then, the tension explodes in a bloody, hysterical climax that ends with a nice, Twilight Zone-worthy sting.

While The House of the Devil works as a piece of sustained tension and bloody supernatural horror, that doesn't address whether the 80s trappings are strictly necessary. Perhaps not strictly, but there is something about the grimy aesthetic of 80s horror films that gives them a nasty edge that slick, big-budget contemporary horror films simply can't match. Watching underwear models and the third lead from One Tree Hill get chased by a killer on glossy film stock can be entertaining, but it rarely scares. Ti Law and company keep the visuals and constraining reality of 80s horror (a scary old house is a lot scarier when you don't have a cellphone), jettison the ugly misogyny and cheap shocks while pushing a sustained sense of doom to riveting lengths.

The Box

2009-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" is a short, punchy bit of business that consists almost entirely of an intriguing set up and a sad-trombone twist ending. Richard Kelly, the cracked visionary behind Donnie Darko and Southland Tales takes the intriguing set up (a couple can press a mysterious button that will kill someone they don't know and in return they get a briefcase full of cash) and takes it into a typically Kellyesque exploration of free will, altruism, grace, the afterlife and extraterrestrial life. Along the way, the viewers are treated to a bunch of bloody-nosed, creepily staring strangers, foreboding musical cues, and people in tight close-ups reciting semi-obscure spiritual dialogue.

Kelly's philosophical ruminations never amount to much, and they're made taxing by Kelly's failure to settle on any consistent tone. The Box is never scary enough to qualify as a horror movie, and the stakes for the characters aren't clear enough for it to work as a thriller. Really, the only thing it feels like is a Richard Kelly film; he's creating a singular cinematic landscape of oblique conspiracies, unexplained cosmic forces, and terminally befuddled protagonists, all ambling at a sluggish pace towards a surprisingly mellow annihilation. Kelly deserves credit for carving out such a distinct niche, especially one that stubbornly refused to adhere to conventional narrative and genre beats, but at some point, he's going to have to come up with something that offers a cumulative impact more powerful that the gentle sigh that ends The Box

The Last House on the Right

2009-10-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

For all their hatred of communism, American right-wingers tend to have a rather Stalinist view of art. If a film or song or book or television show doesn't ratify their beliefs, it's crap. I understand that the liberal hegemony of the entertainment industry is probably annoying for them, but living in a constant state of outrage over liberal brainwashing in mainstream media must be truly exhausting. It also leads them to write really embarrassing lists of "politically correct" pieces of popular culture, like bloated pile of man-dough John Hawkins did for TownHall.com. Intent on providing his fellow teabaggers with inspiring Halloween viewing, Hawkins has furnished a list of the top ten "conservative" horror films to enjoy during the season of the witch.

Hawkins shows himself to be a cinematic illiterate before he even gets into the list, writing that "there are almost no truly 'conservative' horror flicks." Now, if he means that there aren't a lot of horror films that feature a pointed critique of the estate tax, he's right, but in tone and structure, horror is by far the most reactionary film genre going. Almost every horror film features some terrifying external threat that cannot be reasoned with by pointy-headed intellectuals (or understood by pointy-headed scientists, if it's a supernatural evil), and must be destroyed by the naked and merciless application of violence at the hands of a steely-eyed lawman, a pious virgin, or a man of the cloth. Along the way, drug-users and/or the sexually active suffer painful and deserved deaths. If it weren't for that commie George Romero, Hawkins claim would seem completely incoherent.

Some of the entries are indisputable; pretty much any horror movie with a some variation of the word "exorcism" in the title, like the two Hawkins mentions, The Exorcist and The Exorcism of Emily Rose, can reasonably be construed as "conservative," in that they affirm the existence of Satan and, by extension, God, while also affirming the value of traditional beliefs and values.

A couple of Hawkins' suggestions are downright headscratching. The Fog? Silence of the Lambs? Apparently, there's something inherently conservative about fighting ghost pirates and serial killers. Choosing The Mist seems really odd considering that the main human antagonist is a hysterical holy-roller who whips up religious fervor and hatred in an effort to appease God with a blood sacrifice. Hawkins choses David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone due to it's depiction of "a deranged politician and the man who was willing to stop at nothing to to try to stop him from launching a nuclear war." Let's take the Wayback machine to the mid-80s, do a headcount of politicians and pundits seemingly eager to kickstart World War Three, and see how what party they're from. Hell, the right wing nearly revolted against Reagan for starting arms reduction talks with Gorbachev instead of more mindless nuclear saber rattling. If John Hawkins wants to place a bet that Greg Stilson wasn't a Republican, I'll give him great odds. And yet the real howler is Reanimator. I didn't know that movement conservatives were keen to watch a disembodied zombie head go down on a naked woman strapped to a table.

The schizophrenic attitude of conservatives to the federal government is displayed by two recent movies endorsed by Hawkins, Cloverfield and Quarantine. About Cloverfield Hawkins writes, "the military was in the thick of the action, bravely fighting against the Cloverfield monster and handling the situation the best way they could." Regarding Quarantine, he writes "when zombies infected with super-rabies are trying to kill you and the government shows up, count on them to to stand outside, picking their noses and trying to figure out what to do, while you struggle for survival. It's a timely and true message: Don't count on your government in a crisis." Unless, of course, it's the military, which, for some inscrutable reason known only to the acolytes of Reagan, doesn't count as the government. Bear in mind that the "government" forces in both of these cases react to the crisis in basically the same way: they isolate the affected area and write off everyone still alive within it. The only difference is that the very sight of the gun-toting manly men of the US military give conservatives instawood. It makes you think we could have fully socialized medicine in this country tomorrow if they just had the government-paid doctors wear camoflauge and carry M-4 rifles.

The crown jewel of the list, though, is the last film: The Tripper. I haven't seen this movie, because it's a straight-to-DVD slasher film directed by David Arquette, but according to John Hawkins, it's a GREAT conservative horror movie. Why? Because, in Hawkins' deathless prose, it features the "sweet, sweet joy of watching a guy in a Ronald Reagan mask taking an ax to dirty, drug addled hippies." Hawkins seems aware that the movie is supposed to be a joke at the expense of conservatives, but he doesn't care because the mere sight of a pseudo-Reagan murdering hippies is enough to send in off into a rich, vivid fantasy of bloody vengeance wreaked on those with the temerity to wear their hair too long. Hawkins calls it a "horror" film, but the way he talks about it, The Tripper might best be described as one of the top ten conservative porn films.

Where the Wild Things Are

2009-10-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

When evaluating Spike Jonze's long-awaited film adaptation of the classic Maurice Sendak children's book Where the Wild Things Are, one thing needs to be stipulated from the jump: this is not a kid's movie. It's not that that 'wild things,' which are a nifty combination of Henson-studios designed costumes with CGI facial expressions, are too scary for kids, it's that they're too neurotic. Angst features much more prominently than wild rumpusing because this is a movie about growing up, from the perspective of grown-ups, featuring themes and insights that kids, mired in the same state of hyperactive narcissism as the protagonist, Max, are largely incapable of appreciating.

So, the question becomes: does Where the Wild Things Are work as a movie for adults, about kids? By that metric, Wild Things succeeds brilliantly. Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers mine the scant source material to create an effective allegory about the process of growing up, of recognizing the fragile and finite nature of the world, of discovering self-awareness and empathy. Jonze evokes the overwhelming emotions and exuberance of childhood with a kinetic, low-angle camera and channels the vaugely apocalyptic feeling kids have as they come into awareness of entropy with a crisp, autumnal visual pallete. Most impressively, Jonze and Eggers fill over an hour of screentime with Max cavorting with the Wild Things that manages to have a forward narrative momentum without succumbing to obvious plot mechanics.

The chilly late-fall environment of Max's wild island, with dead trees and dusty arroyos, mirrors the generally cold feeling of the movie itself. Max's relationship with the wild things, led by the mercurial Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), is a constant clash of personalities, with hurt feelings and resentment far outweighing moments of unbridled childlike joy. It's in his vain attempts to rule as King of the Wild Things, who represent different facets of his own hyperactive, frustrated pre-adolescent personality, that Max discovers just how his childish antics appear to the people like his exasperated mother (played by Catherine Keener). The visuals are stunning, the explication of difficult-to-convey notions like empathy and self-awareness is deft, but the film occasionally feels brittle. It's appropriate given the direction Jonze and company have taken the material, but there's something vaguely offputting about a bunch of navel-gazing adults hijacking a children's classic in an effort to examine the fleeting grace of their own childhoods. And yet, a Where the Wild Things Are adaptation aimed squarely at kids would probably have featured more rapping badgers and fart noises, and everyone should be happy that a brilliant piece of children' s literature was spared such a fate. Jonze and Eggers may have rendered Where the Wild Things Are somewhat inaccessible to a generation of children raised on the book, but at least they take Sendak's work seriously enough to engage with it as art, and not an easy way for parents to distract their kids for a few hours.

Paranormal Activity

2009-10-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

As readers of this blog, all six of you, know, I love it when two movies with the same basic premise come out within months of each other. Such occasions allow for an illuminating glimpse at the zeitgeist (ZEITGEIST!) as well as the chance to contrast and compare film techniques and sensibilities. Now, on the heels of Sam Raimi's triumphant return to splatstick horror, Drag Me To Hell, comes another movie about a young woman stalked by a soul-hungry demon while her skeptical boyfriend tries to use science to fathom the unfathomable. Oren Peli's micro-budget scare-fest Paranormal Activity offers a useful contrast with Raimi's movie. Drag Me To Hell relies on a hysterically over-the-top tone and an escalating series of operatic shocks and gross-out gags, while Paranormal Activity uses Blair Witch-style first person video cameras and cheap practical effects. As a consequence, Drag Me To Hell is relentlessly entertaining, frequently hilarious, but never really scary, unlike Paranormal Activity, which creates a mood of gut-churning dread that deepens as the movie progresses, culminating in a series of wrenching, upsetting shocks.

The story is simple: Kate and Micah are an upwardly mobile twentysomething couple in a nice condo in San Diego. They've been experiencing weird sounds at night, so Micah, like a good consumer and media-addict, buys a digital camera to record what happens and examine it. The film alternates between shots of the couple's bedroom at night, with the camera on a tripod recording an escalating series of unnervingly realistic apparitions, and footage of Kate and Micah freaking out and arguing during the day. The arguments have that same true-to-life, improvisational edge as The Blair Witch Project, but the characters never come close to being as unpleasant and inarticulate as those jagoffs. They're relatable and likable and their relationship has a welcome degree of texture. Also, the sterile suburban surroundings and Micah's technofetishism raise the issue of how people raised in a secular world would attempt to deal with forces beyond scientific understanding.

More than anything, Paranormal Activity shows how important it is for a horror film to create a sense of palpable reality for it to be truly frightening. The cheap gimmicks that most horror films use to generate tension; an overbearing score, predictable fake-out scares, disorienting camera moves, only serve to disperse tension. They remind the viewer that they're watching a movie, that the people in danger are just actors, that the threat is wholley imaginary. Movies that succeed at creating real moments of unease and fear, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Descent, and now Paranormal Activity, do so by making the audience forget that they're in a movie theater. There's a place in the horror universe for gleeful gore-fests and exercises in blood-camp, but the only way to really scare the shit out of a group of strangers sitting in the dark is by making them feel the fear of the protagonists, and the only way to do that is to make the protagonists, and their world, feel as real to the viewer as the person sitting next to them.

The Invention of Lying

2009-10-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

In many ways, Ricky Gervais' directorial debut is remarkably unassuming. The direction is sit-com flat, the setting is clearly some small town in Manitoba with generous tax credits for filmmakers, and nothing flashy gets in the way of Gervais' extremely inventive comedic premise: a world where people did not possess the ability to tell a lie. For the first hour or so, Lying takes this premise and mines it for bucket after bucket of gold comedy nuggets. Watching people bluntly tell each other exactly what their thinking is endlessly amusing, and the humor becomes even sharper and more satirically pointed when Ricky Gervais' schlubby everyman discovers that he, alone in the world, has the power to say things that aren't true. Gervais uses his new power to gain wealth, fame, and, in the film's most inspired sequence, invent the concept of religion.

It's amazing, then, that a film so seemingly intent on keeping the focus on its comedic premise could feature the single most disastrous, painful, poorly conceived romantic subplot in the history of cinema. The second half of the movie comes to a miserable crawl as Gervais attempts to woo Jennifer Garner, a woman who he dated before his transformation who has bluntly told him that she doesn't find him attractive enough to have a relationship with. The plotting is mind-numbingly familiar (it's spoiling nothing to reveal that at one point, Gervais has to stop a wedding!?!), the scenes of a heart-broken Gervais moping around are glacial and unfunny, and the object of Gervais' affection is a vacuous, superficial void. Her insistence on an attractive mate (so as to create genetically advantageous offspring) is taken to be a manifestation of her unchangeable honesty, but the world of the movie contains intangible qualities such as love and humor, and Gervais' love seems completely unwarranted, especially since she acts more than anything like a lazily-programmed robot. The only reason Gervais could possible want her is that Garner is attractive, and Gervais projects positive qualities onto this person who shows no evidence of possessing them. It's the sort of unthinking misogyny that one would hope an incisive comic mind like Gervais would be immune to. One thing The Invention of Lying teaches us is that the sharpest male mind is no match for Botoxed lips and a tight butt.

Zombieland

2009-10-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

In most zombie movies that don't go directly to DVD, the zombies themselves carry some kind of metaphorical weight. Zombies can stand for burgeoning youth disenchantment, mass consumer culture, or the world's permanent underclass, and that's just in George Romero movies. Even Zack Snyder's vapid remake of Dawn of the Dead had some post-9/11 resonance, with endless hordes of zombies standing in for a seemingly unstoppable flow of worldwide anti-American extremism. Then there's Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland, where the zombies exist almost entirely to provide life lessons to a skittish young nerd played by Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg learns to let go of his fears and embrace love, with pivotal scenes taking place at an amusement park. Zombieland is basically last year's coming-of-age movie Adventureland with zombies instead of 80s rock. Such a description may not sound promising, but Zombieland offers so many clever touches, such a smartly constructed screenplay, and a Jesse Eisenberg-portrayed protagonist who is vastly less annoying. Plus, it's amazing how much one's enjoyment of a film increases when Kristen Stewart is replaced by a gun-toting Woody Harrelson and thousands of ravenous zombies.

Zombieland starts in a post-apocalyptic world where a souped-up version of Mad Cow Disease has rendered most of the world's inhabitants into cannibalistic freaks. An intimate voice-over narration introduces a young college student and his idiosyncratic rules for surviving in the new zombie world order. Along the way, he hooks up with a psycho redneck played by Woody Harrelson who is having entirely too much fun creatively annihilating zombies, and a couple of sisters/con artists played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. Eisenberg is a prototypical awkward fraidy cat in the Michael Cera mold. The zombie apocalypse gives him the chance to shed some of his phobias and hang-ups and take the risk of falling in love.

The whole set-up is remarkably light on zombies for most of the run time, much heavier on comic and romantic interplay between the characters. It's a bold choice that could have backfired horrendously among zombie-crazed genre fans, but it works impressively well. Part of the reason for that is Eisenberg's voice over, which allows for digressions and flash-backs that keep the proceedings kinetic, even in the absence of forward narrative momentum. Also, the snappy repartee is genuinely snappy, thanks to zippy lines and lived-in performances, especially by Woody Harrelson, who perfectly embodies the guy everyone would want by their side in the event of a zombie uprising, even if he's a bit...intense. Keeping the zombies at bay for long periods also means that when swarms of zombies finally do show up for the obligatory bullet-spraying climax, it's a welcome treat, rather than a rote adherence to formula.

Zombieland shows the enduring appeal of the zombie movie: they're basically blank, drooling, bloodthirsty lumps for a filmmaker to mold to their whim. Zom-Rom-Com has proven to be a durable and reliably entertaining subset of the genre.

The Informant!

2009-09-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

Steven Soderbergh is determined to do two things with this movie, an adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald's true-crime story of corporate criminality. First, he wants every natural light source to flare in the camera lens. In that respect, he succeeds; of all of Soderbergh's previous films, The Informant! most resembles his underrated meta-comedy Full Frontal. The effect is only mildly distracting, and serves to emphasize the boardroom and courtroom banality of the film's environment. Soderbergh's other goal, even more audacious, is to build a film around a character who appears in nearly every scene, directly addresses the audience in a voice over narration, but whose motivations and essence remain entirely opaque. Matt Damon's flighty agribusiness executive lies to his bosses, lies to the FBI, lies to his family, and, yes, lies to the audience, and the contours of his interior life are never exposed. It's fascinating to listen to his logical curlicues and flights of fantasy that dominate his inner monologue, especially as they contrast to the low wattage intrigue of price fixing and bugged hotel rooms. However, it doesn't really illuminate anything about the nature of corporate ethics. Instead, it's part of Soderbergh's existentialist effort to explore the futility of human communication.

The Coen Project: The Man Who Wasn't There

2009-09-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

"What kind of man are you?"--Big Dave Brewster

Anyone who says that the Coen brothers are incapable of putting aside irony in favor of earnest emotion need to watch the last scene of The Man Who Wasn't There. This movie is often overlooked. I think a lot of people see the fetishistic devotion to post-war costume and set design, not to mention the plot, thick with noir allusions, and the black-and-white, and write it off as more of the Coens mucking around with their vast tool kit of film references. And of course, there's plenty of that in The Man Who Wasn't There: the hilarious parade of kiddy haircuts, that gorgeous black-and-white photography, Billy Bob Thornton's deadpan narration, Tony Shaloub channeling his Barton Fink character... But all the period trappings can't obscure the fact that the existential struggle of reluctant barber (and murderer) Ed Crane is the most powerful emotional arc that the Coens' have ever created.

Crane finds himself presented with a post-war world where the promise of earthly utopia blares from every billboard. The war is over, the economy's booming, and inventions like dry cleaning and paved driveways. A nuclear bomb has unleashed unfathomable destruction. UFOs have been sighted in New Mexico. High culture is accessible to the masses: even sleepy little Santa Rosa, California has a hotel with suites named after operas! All across the land, transcendence beckons. Meanwhile, Ed Crane, second chair barber at his loud-mouth brother-in-law's shop, looks on in puzzlement and envy. He knows that he's not satisfied, he knows that the dawning of the space age promises wonders to behold, but beyond that, the world is a wearying mystery. So he embarks on a series of disastrous stabs at fulfillment, culminating in his execution in a delightfully old timey electric chair. He's a tragic dummy in the Coen mold, but his pathos is real, and there is never a hint of the brothers' usual mockery; they feel for Ed, they agree with Freddi Reindenschneider that Ed IS "modern man." Ed is Joel, Ed is Ethan, and Ed is every dope out there seduced and befuddled by the promises of understanding and happiness held out by the world around us. A world that fails, at every turn, to reveal its mysteries to even the most ardent seeker.

Gamer

2009-09-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

For the most part, the action genre is a flailing, wheezing beast of suckitude. Most of the great action directors are on the steep downslop of their careers. Walter Hill hasn't made a straight action movie for over a decade. John McTiernan hasn't made a decent movie for nearly twenty years. James Cameron, after making two of the best action films of all time, The Terminator and Aliens, fell victim to George Lucas Disease: becoming so enraptured by emerging special effects technology that paltry considerations like story and character and even visceral impact fall by the wayside. Have you seen the Avatar trailer? Dude's been spanking it so vigorously to the revolutionary 3D digital cameras and whatnot that he has failed to notice that his aliens look like furry's Second Life avatars. And so Michael Bay and his pale imitators rule the action universe, spitting out massively budgeted, soulless monstrosities that hit the same tired beats and adhered to the same loud and dumb aesthetic.

And so it falls to the visionary writer-director team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor to take the action genre into bold new territory. Neveldine and Taylor survey a cultural landscape of poisonous sensory overload and respond with action films that obliterate notions of restraint or coherence. The brilliant Crank films reach heights of surreal delirium, dumping prosaic concerns for plot and character in favor of operatic displays of violence and perversion, pushed to into the realm of the surreal. Crank 2, especially, points to a new wave of action films that embrace the over-the-top frenzied mayhem of video games, where logic and proportion fall sloppy dead and the parameters of good taste and the limitations of physical possibility have been shotgunned in the anus. Neveldine/Taylor movies are perfectly crafted for a generation coming of age with the stream of consciousness bloodletting of Grand Theft Auto.

Their new movie, Gamer, takes the Neveldine/Taylor video game aesthetic from sub-text to text. In a near future, nanotechnology allows video gamers to control actual human beings, either in a Sims-like world of wacky outfits and kinky sex, or in a hellish arena of deadly combat called "Slayers." It's a clever bit of future-casting: if the kids who were brought up watching The Rock went on to play Halo, then the kids who were brought up watching Crank went on to play Slayers. The cleverness somewhat helps make up for the fact that, plot and character wise, Gamer is pretty much identical to The Running Man. Gerard Butler is a wrongly-imprisoned death row inmate, forced to fight for his freedom in the Slayer death matches, which play like live-action sessions of Gears of War. He escapes with the help of a band of revolutionary hackers led by Ludicrous(!), who are out to bring down the techno-genius behind Slayer, a Bill Gates-type played with a nice mix of megalomania and nerdiness by Michael C. Hall. Gamer lacks the audacious one-upsmanship that makes the Crank films so giddily exhilarating, but it definitely ups the ante on surrealism. A climactic dance sequence featuring Hall and a bunch of mind-controlled goons in particular presents itself as a haunting and innovative touch. Unfortunately, there's more screen time devoted to Gerard Butler angsting it up over his family than him puking into gas tanks. Unconvincing emotional elements and recycled plot points are sooooo Michael Bay, guys. Let's get our heads back in the game.

Twelve (Million) Angry Republicans

2009-09-09T20:12:00.000-07:00

In his masterful social history of the 1960s, Nixonland, Rick Perlstein describes the mindset of establishment liberals who ever certain, even in the face of overwhelming polling data, that purehearted George McGovern was going to defeat the criminal, war-mongering butcher Richard Nixon in the '72 election: "It would end like a Henry Fonda movie--something like Twelve Angry Men, where only the jury's prejudices had blinded them from seeing that they were about to condemn an innocent man, and where the liberal's gentle, persistent force of reason had compelled the brutish conservative, by the last reel, to realize the error of his ways."

And so we've entered a national reenactment of Twelve Angry Men, with the defendant being Health Care Reform. For the entire summer, the nation's Teabaggers, Birthers, Deathers, LaRouchies, Crypto-Racists, Zombie-Birchers, Carlists, Silvershirts, Kluxers, Falangists, Minutemen, Pseudo-Libertarians, Know Nothings, Black Helicopters jockeys, Militiamen, Skinheads, and Buchananites have staged a giant, idiotic, reactionary freak-out at town hall meetings around the country. It's like somebody cloned Lee J. Cobb's Juror Number Three and set him loose in front of every cable news camera they could find. The stream of hysteria, ignorance and barely-concealed racism had their desired effect, muddying the waters of the health care debate sufficient that most of your dumbass, disengaged public didn't know whether to shit or wind their watch...or whether the inability to figure out whether to shit or wind their watch would be covered by the public option.

And now, stepping into the breach to turn back the tide of fear-mongering and self-serving misinformation, is Juror Number Eight, Barack Obama, Henry Fonda for the 21st century. With his speech, Obama cut through the bullshit to point out the undeniable truth at the the heart of the problem: the current system is broken. It costs too much, it leaves tens of millions uninsured, and it leaves even the people with insurance precariously balanced on the knife edge of revocation of coverage or lifetime caps. It's a fundamental responsibility of government to provide a basic level of security for its citizens, and its time we accept that.

We know how Twelve Angry Men ended. And we know how the 1972 presidential election ended. Now we're going to get a front-row seat for another edition of this timeless morality play. Will the voice of reason and compassion quiet the voices of avarice and bigotry? Or will the brainless, hate-filled howls of insurance company shills and Medicare-exploiting retired racists win the day? Remembering poor, pure George McGovern, I'm not putting my money on Fonda.

Extract

2009-09-08T20:30:00.000-07:00

From featureless office parks to sad chain restaurants to sterile residential developments, Mike Judge captures the soul-raping banality of the American exurbs like no other. These factory-issue surroundings, with their grinding mediocrity, have a deeply enervating effect on his characters. It's like all that fluorescent light and fake wood paneling are sucking the their life-force out of them right there on camera. This makes Judge's movies pointed critiques of life in the suffocating embrace of runaway sprawl of ugly McMansions and compulsive consumption of useless gizmos and gray-tasting meat. This also means that the characters in Mike Judge movies are so anaesthetised and demoralized by their environment that they can barely be moved to speak complete sentences, let alone express vivid emotions. Judge's zombified protagonists, coupled with his indifferent attitude towards plotting, runs the risks of making his work feel as flat and listless as one of his cubicle-jockies. Office Space, Judge's first directorial effort and a certified cult classic, avoids this pitfall thanks to a set-up painfully familiar to office workers nationwide, and a bevy of colorful supporting characters bristling with quotable dialogue. Judge's new film, Extract, lacks both of those attributes, and as a result, it feels as lifeless as a TGI Friday's waitress at the end of a particularly birthday-intensive shift.

The story, such as it is, concerns the sexual and financial travails of Joel (Jason Bateman), the owner of a food extract company.. Ah, who can't relate the the difficulties inherent in running a chemical plant and commuting to a mini-mansion? Bateman moves from one scenario to another, involving his stoned buddy Ben Affleck, who's actually pretty funny, a comely young con artist (Mila Kunis), and a grievously injured factory hand (Clifton Collins, Jr.). None of the plot strands boast much in the way of plausibility or narrative momentum. Things just sort of happen, and then other things sort of happen, and at the end of the movie, not much interesting, or particularly amusing, has happened, except for one great, surprising turn near the end. It's a fairly accurate depiction of the ennui and mundanity of life in the commuter-zone where people have to get in their SUV's to get a pizza, but that accuracy comes with the price of robbing the characters and plot of zest. It's sort of like a TGI Friday's appetizer platter on film.

The Final Destination

2009-08-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

This has got to be the oddest named sequel in film history. The first one was called Final Destination. The next two were called, fittingly, Final Destination 2 and Final Destination 3. Now, instead of Final Destination 4, we've got THE Final Destination. Who the hell told these jokers that the could just ignore the entire tradition of sequel naming? It would be one thing if they went with something idiotic like FD4, or FD3D (cuz it's in 3-D, get it?). At least there's a precedent for that.

The makers of The Final Destination must've used up all their creativity with the title, because the rest of the movie is as by-the-numbers as possible. Just so ya'll know, I don't have a problem with this. The Final Destination movies are not horror films, no matter how they're categorized on Netflix. They're comedies, and comedies that never fail to deliver. No, the characters aren't funny; they're barely even humans. They don't have jobs or relationships or even names as far as I remember. It's all about the death scenes. The ridiculously complicated Rube Goldberg death contraptions that power these films are essentially blood-soaked slapstick routines; Three Stooges shorts where Moe actually gouges Curley's eyes out. Or, rather, where Moe spills a viscous fluid on the floor, Curly slips on it, and the impact of his heft on the floor makes a gardening shear fall off of a nearby table and into Curley's eye socket. It's sort of a deadpan version of Sam Raimi's splatstick, but this time, it's in 3-D, so the severed heads and billowing plumes of organ meat shoot right out at you. If you're the kind of person who finds decapitations inherently funny, this is your movie. For the record, I am one of those kind of persons. Although I'm also the kind of person who gets pissed off with basic historical illiteracy. At one point, an irascible old dude in a hospital tells his Asian physical therapist: "you know how many of your people I killed in the Korean war?" The Asian responds "I'm Chinese." As though that invalidated the old dude's comment. MOTHERFUCKER, WHO DO YOU THINK KNOCKED MACARTHUR BACK ACROSS THE 38TH PARALLEL?! EVER HEARD OF THE CHOSIN RESERVOIR, FUCKHEAD?

Quentin Tarantino's Invisible Bomb

2009-08-28T22:04:00.000-07:00

Hitchcock defined film suspense as a ticking time bomb. Think of Mrs. Bates’s shadow creeping closer and closer to Janet Leigh as she unsuspectingly showers, Bernard Hermann’s frantic score in the background in Psycho. Think of the zombie hands pulling the woman‘s face ever closer to the jagged piece of wood in Fulci‘s Zombi 2. Think of Jack Torrance walking into Room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. It’s the terrible anticipation of a disastrous event. The disastrous event can come as a surprise to the audience and the protagonist, like the naked woman in Room 237’s bathtub turning into a rotting corpse. The audience can become aware of the horror before the victim does thanks to the omniscient camera, as in the shadow of the knife rising behind Janet Leigh’s oblivious shoulder. Or, as with the eyeball slowly approaching the sharpened splinter, the audience and the unfortunate victim can both know exactly what’s going to happen, with the suspense coming from the agonizingly prolonged anticipation of it all. In every case, the audience is gripped by the terrible curiosity of watching someone move towards calamity. And the operative word is move. Suspense scenes tend to be highly kinetic, powered by physical momentum and usually some kind of tension-producing musical sting.

What you don’t generally find in most suspense films is dialogue. People talking to each other is about the least suspenseful thing you can point a camera at. Conversations usually involve people standing or sitting in one place (unless the conversations were written by Aaron Sorkin), and if people are having a conversation, it also usually means that they’re not in imminent danger of catastrophic death and/or maiming. Now, two people could be having a regular conversation, and in the middle of it, they could be decapitated or set on fire or something, but that’s not suspense, that’s shock. One of many ingenious things about Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is the bold decision to include several extended suspense sequences that include nothing but dialogue, with little in the way of camera trickery or unsettling music to torque the tension-meter.

Take the epic, near-half-hour-long opening sequence in which SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Walz) searches for hidden Jews on the property of a French peasant. It’s a masterpiece of suspense, and it involves almost no actual movement; Landa and the farmer sit at a table, Landa talks to the farmer, and that’s pretty much it. At one point, the camera pans down to reveal to the audience that there are, in fact, a family of Jews hiding under the floorboards, but that’s all there is as far as motion of the frame or within the frame. Instead, Tarantino cuts between two-shots of the pair sitting together, close-ups of Landa, close-ups of the farmer, and close-ups of the various props that Landa fiddles with during the interrogation.

The tension is driven at the onset by the iconic nature of the setup. “Jews hiding from Nazis” is a good shorthand definition of “dangerous situation.” The question: will the Jews be caught, hangs over the scene like a cocked Luger, freighting every gesture and statement from Landa with menace. Tarantino sustains the tension by keeping Landa’s dialogue, and his gestures, consistently genial. The audience doesn’t know at any point if Landa truly suspects that the farmer is hiding Jews, and that uncertainty becomes more and more unbearable as Landa draws out the interview with trivia and bureaucratic formalities. He praises the beauty of the farmer’s daughters, he lauds the deliciousness of the farm’s milk, he goes through a meticulous rundown of the names and ages of the one unaccounted for Jewish family in the area, the Dreyfuses. The audience knows that the Dreyfuses are hiding under the floor, and with that knowledge thick in the air, Tarantino pushes against the grain by making the scene look as mundane as possible. Landa doesn’t just ask the farmer what he knows about the Dreyfuses. He takes out a huge ledger, puts together a comically complicated fountain pen, and writes the information down, with Tarantino cutting to close-ups of Landa’s pen gliding across the page. Visually, these shots are prosaic to the point of humdrum, but nevertheless, every pen stroke is charged with tension because of the danger that the Dreyfuses are in, the uncertainty as to their fate, and the fact that Tarantino goes out of his way to prolong the danger and uncertainty. Landa’s dialogue becomes riveting as the viewer tries to figure out just how much he knows from the words he chooses. Is Landa really at the farm house for a perfunctory visit, or is he toying with the farmer for his own amusement? Landa beings to drop clues as to his real knowledge during a soliloquy about what makes him such an effective hunter of Jews, but once again, Tarantino denies the audience confirmation, allowing the conversation to lead off into tangents that sharpen the tension by prolonging it.

Traditional cinematic suspense is a shot of the timer on a bomb tick down to zero Inglourious Basterds is a series of suspense scenes where the bomb is never shown on screen. The bomb is in the viewer’s head, but there’s no timer indicating how much longer the tension will last. What makes Inglourious Basterds work as a suspense film is that the lack of visual cues that normally let an audience know just how much suspense they’re going to have to endure. Be it the timer on a bomb moving towards zero, or a killer getting closer and closer to an unsuspecting victim, visually oriented suspense scenes have a reasonably predictable termination point. The bomb timer will either hit zero or be defused with a second to spare, the killer will cross that last few feet between him and his victim. Including the farm house scene, Inglourious Basterds features two hugely long, dialogue heavy scenes that are suspenseful because they’re comprised largely of dialogue and because they go on for a long time. The longer the characters talk, the less sure the viewer is of just what’s going to happen and, more importantly, when it’s going to happen. All they have to hold on to are the meandering dialogues of Tarantino’s endlessly coy characters, and a camera that seems determined to focus on only the most inconsequential objects in the room. Critics often dismiss Quentin Tarantino as a serious filmmaker due to his hopelessly juvenile mindset and preoccupation with shallow popular culture. But in Inglourious Basterds Tarantino shows a singular ability to delay his audience easy gratification and to show immense attention to every detail in every scene, from the intricate web of film references woven throughout the dialogue to props like Hans Landa’s ridiculous and disarming calabash pipe. Whether you find these scenes gripping or tedious, one word that would never come to mind is ‘juvenile.’

Inglourious Basterds

2009-08-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

The most important thing to remember about Ingloruious Basterds is that it isn't really about the 'inglourious basterds' at all. The exploits of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and his band of Jewish-American nazi-hunters take up about one third of the film's screentime, with none of that time devoted to classic 'guys on a mission' camaraderie. Quentin Tarantino has often called Inglourious Basterds his take on the 'guys on a mission' World War Two film, but it's not representative of the genre. In Tarantino's typically episodic fashion, Inglourious Basterds alternates between the story of Pitt's bloody-thirsty commandos and a young Jewish woman hiding out in occupied Paris and plotting revenge against the Nazis who killed her family. The two narrative strands dovetail at the premiere of a Nazi propaganda film attended by all top echelon of the Nazi party. Along the way, Tarantino skimps on most of the elements that define the 'guys on a mission' genre. He ignores, for the most part, the ambushes and shoot-outs in favor of one 'guys on a mission' trope in particular: the classic "fool or hide from the Gestapo" scene. Inglourious Basterds is basically the scene on the train in The Great Escape when Gordon Jackson and Richard Attenborrough try to get past the Nazi officer with their forged papers, over and over.

Quentin Tarantino is the undisputed master of the cinematic bait and switch. His last three films have been presented as pulpy, kinetic genre riffs, but Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof, and now Inglourious Basterds all proved on inspection to be heavy on dialogue, light on conventionally satisfying action, and fully intent on subverting audience expectations. Death Proof and Basterds in particular are, in many ways, the same movie. Both appear at first glance to pay explicit homage to an exploitation genre, slasher horror and WWII "men on a mission" films respectively. And both torment the audience in exactly the same way, by steadily building tension through long conversational scenarios that test the viewer's patience and capacity to withstand suspense, and then releasing the tension with an act of spectacular violence. The main difference is that Death Proof only uses the shtick twice, while Inglourious Basterds pulls the rubber band back and lets it go repeatedly. That, and the whole "using World War Two and the Holocaust as a sandbox for Tarantino's vulgar shenanigans" thing.

Some people will no doubt be offended by Tarantino's gleeful defiling of history, but they shouldn't b. Ingloruious Basterds isn't about the Second World War or the Holocaust. Even more than the rest of the Tarantino oeuvre, Basterds is a movie about other movies. It's WWII as filtered through the lens of fifty years of film history, with references as diverse as the prototype "men on a mission" film The Dirty Dozen to Jean-Pierre Mellville's examination of the French Resistance Army of Shadows. Hell, the British SAS officer who meets up with the Basterds halfway through the is a professional film critic! But whereas most Tarantino movies are content to exist inside a hermetic world of film reference, Inglorious Basterds actually offers smart observations on the unique cultural power of film as an art form. The fate of the world hangs on a movie premiere, after all, a propaganda film called "Nation's Pride" that Josef Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) sees as the key bolstering the will of the German people in the wake of the D-Day invasion. Meanwhile, the Basterds are content to create their own propaganda of the deed, terrorizing the whole Wehrmacht through their mythic brutality. One of the reasons that there is so little running time devoted to recording the Basterd's exploits is because Tarantino is more interested in showing the fear their exploits kindle among the Germans. Like the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, the Basterd's Nazi killing is left for the audience to imagine, and in imagining, make all the more gruesome.

Since Tarantino doesn't spend much time among the Basterds, there's plenty of time to devote to self-contained episodes of sustained suspense. These individual scenes are expertly crafted, walking the fine line between agonizing tension and agonizing tedium, but because these sequences don't build on one another, they fail to build sufficient momentum to avoid diminishing returns. Eventually, some time in the middle of the second hour or so, the conceit begins to run out of steam, but even at its most exasperating, there's always something on the screen worth looking at. You've got the usual labyrinthine Tarantino dialogue, filled as it is with tossed off asides that take the viewer by surprise with their off-hand depth. There's Tarantino's delightfully restless camera, enlivening even the most interminable exchange. And, of course, there's the ensemble of game performers, with Christoph Walz standing out as a playful, charming sadist in an SS uniform. Walz is getting a great deal of deserved attention for his work here, but that shouldn't overshadow a rollicking piece of character acting by Brad Pitt. Anyone who doesn't enjoy Pitt's rootin,' tootin,' Nazi-scalpin' cracker must be allergic to fun. Pitt is the source of much of the film's humor, which is surprisingly prevalent for a movie featuring a character nicknamed "the Jew Hunter." In the end, any sense of dissatisfaction with Inglorious Basterds is spawned by the repetitive structure, and the wistful sense that nothing Tarantino could put on screen would match the imaginary movie that the premise: "Quentin Tarantino movie about Jewish soldiers scalping Nazis in occupied France" conjures in the imagination.

District 9

2009-08-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

A disabled space ship breaks down over Johannesburg, South Africa, filled with malnourished insectoid aliens. With no way of leaving the planet, the authorities set up refugee camps in the shantytown section of Joburg, where alien-human conflicts emerge almost instantly. The set up seems like a feature-length Twilight Zone episode; sci fi allegory ripe for the transmission of liberal pieties about the evil of apartheid and xenophobia. The pleasant surprise of District 9 is that the social critique is much more cutting and relevant than self-evident pap about how "aliens are people too!" Instead, District 9 writer-director Neil Blomkamp offers a harrowing examination of the fate of surplus populations in an era of post-industrial capitalism.

As District 9 opens, the alien refugees have been living in confined squalor for twenty years, in the shadow of their hovering, immobile spaceship, and conflict with the humans of the city has reached a fever pitch. A corporation has been contracted by the government to evict the aliens from their camp to be relocated to a new facility hundreds of miles from human populations. The human protagonist is a schmucky middle manager charged with overseeing the evictions played by Sharlto Copley. His character, Wikus Van Der Merwe, is an affable dope, happy to carry out management's directives in order to advance his career. That directive: corral the aliens into a desolate wasteland, while at the same time scouring District 9 for alien weapons technology that could be reverse engineered for human use. The scenes of Copley and his machine-gun-toting mercenary comrades conning aliens into signing off on their eviction aren't there to remind the viewer of the horrors of apartheid or anti-immigrant sentiment. They remind the viewer of similar scenes from slum-areas the world over. The aliens, derisively nicknamed "prawns," could be the slumdwellers of Rio or Manila or Mumbai or the real Johannesburg. They're exploited and herded not on the basis of their alien-ness, but due to their utter uselessness to the economic order. The modern world economy is good at creating two things: powerful corporations with transnational power, like the film's fictional Multi-National United, and surplus population. Cities the world over are surrounded by ad hoc communities of people without employment or even the possibility of future employment. The post-industrial order simply has no use for them, except perhaps as organ donors for sickly members of the 'productive' class. One of the preeminent functions of the modern state (and, to an increasing degree, private enterprises like Halliburton and Blackwater) is the management of these populations; keeping them and their squalor and their potential criminality as far away from the centers of commerce and residence and tourism of the world's cities as possible. District 9 puts this phenomenon, and its implications for the future of human rights in an increasingly privatized, profit-driven world, into a startlingly relief, with insights made palatable to a mass audience by the sensational vision of refugee aliens and a light touch with the message-stick.

The first third or so of District 9 is presented as a straight-up documentary, with footage of Copley evicting the prawns from the district interspersed with talking head testimonials from scholars and government officials. The device works like gangbusters, injecting some nice foreshadowing as well as offering straight-up expository dialogue with considerably less awkwardness than is usually found in science fiction films. The hand-held camerawork inside District 9 will probably nauseate the people who tend to complain about the Bourne movies, but it grounds the action in reality, making it instantly easy to suspend disbelief as you watch giant bug-looking aliens get hassled by bureaucrats. During the first act, Blomkamp and company are content to soak up the atmosphere created by the top-notch special effects, letting the parallel with the heavily-policed, frequently bulldozed ghettos of the world speak for itself. The film takes a turn when Copley is exposed to a mysterious alien fluid in one of the shanties which begins warping his DNA and transforming him into one of a prawn. Not only does the political allegory take a back seat to hitting a series of familiar action film plot points, but the documentary conceit is rejected in favor of traditional third-person camera setups. At this point, District 9 morphs along with Copley, from a Star Trek-like ethical rumination to a Star Wars-esque slam-bang action flick. But even as the shootouts and chase scenes rev up, there is still the striking imagery of the human Copley, initially cool but clearly somewhat disgusted by the poverty and filth of the aliens' lives, is slowly immersed into the District, with the audience sharing Copley's journey to identification with the prawns' plight. Not to mention the fact that the second-half descent into action film cliche also features genuinely entertaining, well-staged action scenes that are boosted immeasurably by the liberal use of the alien's weaponry. A shootout is one thing, a shootout with laser rifles that blow people up like hot dogs in a microwave is another, infinitely more awesome, thing altogether. The last third of the film has its faults, from the familiar action elements to some interaction between the main character and one of the aliens that feel inauthentic and forced, as if in an attempt to shoehorn an emotional climax. But none of these issues detract from the ingenuity of the premise, the vitality of the social insight, the thrifty-but-impressive special effects, or the whiz-bang coolness of the action scenes. All of these elements combine to make District 9 the best action movie of the summer. With a 30 million dollar budget, District 9 shows why the long-promised "death of the blockbuster," if it ever actually happens, will be nothing worth mourning.

Superheroism is no laughing matter.

2009-08-14T17:25:00.001-07:00

It's a fact that's easy to forget after dull-as-dishwater turns in the likes of Troy, The Other Boleyn Girl, and the new Time Traveller's Wife, but it's a fact nonetheless: Eric Bana used to be funny. He was a stand-up comedian and TV sketch trouper before his breakout role as notorious Australian criminal Mark "Chopper" Read in Chopper. Bana is an absolute riot in Chopper, playing the part of a violence addict with fearsome charisma and hilarious obliviousness to the costs of his horrible actions. When Bana headbutts his girlfriend and her mother into unconsciousness and says to the knocked-out girlfriend, "look what you did, you upset your mum!" his voice has a childlike earnestness that makes it impossible not to laugh. Film fans had every reason to expect a lot more vibrant, funny performances from Eric Bana after that.

Then he came to Hollywood and became the biggest stiff this side of Christian Bale. Nowadays, a Bana performance involves a shit-ton of glowering, looking anguished and grimacing when he's not glowering. At any given moment on screen, he looks as likely to crack a smile as he is to take a shit on the camera lens.

What the hell happened?

The answer can be found by examining the parallels between Bana and other gifted comic actor who lost his light touch, Michael Keaton. Like Bana, Keaton got his start in show business as a stand-up comedian. After his big break playing the sleazy pimp/undertaker in Night Shift, Keaton built a career as the best comedic actor of the 1980s. We're talking Night Shift, Johnny Dangerously, Mr. Mom, Gung Ho and, to top it all off, Beetlejuice. He made a couple of less-than-stellar comedies in the '90s, but the end of the Reagen-era pretty much meant the end of Michael Keaton as a go-to guy for comedic roles.

What the hell happened? The same thing that turned Eric Bana from a live-wire funny man to an epic stick-in-the-mud: he got turned into a superhero.

You just can't argue with the chronology. Keaton: Gung Ho, Beetlejuice, BATMAN, My Life, Desperate Measures. Bana: Australian sketch comedy shows, Chopper, THE HULK, Troy, Munich. There's something about accepting the burden of iconic superherodom that sucks the joy out of actors. The effect isn't universal. It seems to be more noticeable on actors who had reputations for light entertainment before they donned the colored tights. Val Kilmer has always oscillated between being a stiff and being the loopiest motherfucker on earth, and Batman Forever didn't do a thing to change that. It's just too bad that stiff-ass Val had to show up for that one. George Clooney was still trying to figure out how to act without tipping his head forward in every take when he made Batman and Robin. And Tobey Maguire has always, and will always, be a mopey dink, costume or no. Whatever the mechanism, the responsibility of carrying a multi-million dollar film franchise and embodying a character with deep roots in popular culture just sucks the fun out of actors more used to the lower stakes of comedy. Then, even when they move on to less mythic characters, that ponderous sense of gravity and humorlessness lingers in their work. Playing a superhero, it's the STD of film acting.

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

2009-08-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

In the annals of cinema, 2009 will go down as the Summer of Hasbro. Two of the biggest action tentpole features of the season have been brought to you by a toy company looking the squeeze a few more ducats out of a couple of moribund cartoon/action figure franchises. Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen and GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra are sort of the Goofus and Gallant of toy-based summer movies. Where Transformers is incoherent, defiantly stupid and inexplicably epic in length, GI Joe features a lean, propulsive narrative and well-crafted, cleanly-shot action sequences. And yet, Transformers 2 stands out as a sort of anti-auteurist work: that specific combination of desperate pandering, sweaty, sweaty close-ups and abstract expressionist editing could only come from the fevered crypto-fascist ganglia of Michael Bay. For all of GI Joe's director Stephen Sommers' laudable talent for staging action sequences, he can't hold a candle to Bay at putting his mark on his films.

Still, one shouldn't underestimate the value of generic competence in moviemaking, especially moviemaking involving futuristic supersoldiers fighting ninjas. The whole point of a movie like this is to provide maximum butt-kicking, and Sommers delivers on that count. GI Joe is a string of sleek, kinetic action sequences connected by goofy bits of character development that never go on long enough to become seriously irritating. The performances are generally inoffensive, with even Marlon Waynes failing to nauseate and Channing Tatum managing a sort of lower-wattage Mark Wahlberg casual-badass vibe as "Duke." Duke and his bro Ripcord (Waynes) get waylaid by terrorists while transporting experimental warheads and end up signing on with super-secret world police organization "GI Joe," lead by General Dennis Quaid. Duke, Ripcord, and his new Joe-bros, like Snakes, Breaker, Heavy Duty and sexy genius Scarlett O'hara face off with a bunch of supersoldiers bent on world domination, and Sienna Miller, who you know is evil because she dyed her hair black. The movie culminates in a massive showdown in an underwater bunker that calls to mind a more exciting version of the three-scenes-in-one finale of Phantom Menace.

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra is probably the most well-realized summer action film of the year, and given the fact that summer action films are supposed to be the thing that Hollywood does best, that's an impressive accomplishment. Yet, I weirdly found myself wishing for some of that patented Michael Bay idiocy, because watching a Michael Bay film puts a viewer on the edge of their seat, waiting for the next stunning insult to their intelligence. And for some inexplicable reason, that can be more entertaining that actual entertainment.

In The Loop

2009-08-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

Edmund Burke never really wrote "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," but it's a good line nonetheless. It's also not accurate. Good men doing nothing is integral to the triumph of evil, but it's certainly not all that's necessary. After all, how many "good men," or good women for that matter, are there, really? Not enough to tip the evil/good balance. No, the real key to evil winning the day is the active collaboration of mediocre people. The genuinely malevolent are as rare as the unfailingly virtuous. Most folks are weak-willed and capable of superhuman rationalization in justifying selfish behavior. The run-up to the Iraq war is an instructive example of the phenomenon. There were probably only a handful of truly evil warmongers in the U.S. government. Their efforts were made effective by the busy-bee complicity of legions of government and media folks, none of whom probably had a hard-on for war, but all of whom knew that the success of their careers depended on the success of the war.

British comedian/filmmaker Armando Iannucci dissects this dynamic brilliantly with In The Loop. Tom Hollander stars as an obscure British cabinet minister who, after making a gaffe during a radio interview, becomes a pawn in the battle between bureaucrats seeking to expedite an Anglo-American invasion in the Middle East and bureaucrats trying to slow the march to war. A foul-mouthed Scottish mouthpiece played with ferocious relish by Peter Capaldi, is trying to grease the war skids on behalf of the Prime Minister. Meanwhile a State Department drone played by Mimi Kennedy and James Gandolfini's peacenik Pentagon general try to enlist Hollander in their effort to publicize the powerful case against invasion. The dialogue is a rapid-fire exchange of brilliantly profane zingers and craven self-justifications, as these government middle managers try to square their consciences with their career ambitions. The pathetically small-bore intrigue never threatens to push the film into thriller territory and there aren't enough mistaken identities or slammed doors to qualify as a farce. Instead, In the Loop's interest and humor are propelled by just how plausible the whole sad escapade feels, a sense of reality enhanced by a smartly chosen cinema verite aesthetic. Watching the film, you laugh at the scalding bits of badinage, but you're also laughing to keep from crying at the casual small-mindedness of the characters as they obfuscate their ways to higher pay grades and the deaths of thousands.

Funny People

2009-08-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

When Judd Apatow was a precocious, nerdy teenager, he recorded interviews a number of comedy legends, including Steve Martin, in a search to discover just what it takes to be a comedian. All of that dorky effort has gone to good use, as Apatow's third directorial effort stands as the most thoroughgoing exploration of the comedy mindset put to film. Now, considering that the competition for that title are Punchline and, um, Punchline, that may seem like faint praise, but the degree to which Funny People devotes itself to a close, textured portrayal of the comedy life, from struggling stand-ups to established superstars, is singular. Also singular, Funny People's stubborn failure to adhere to any predictable genre. It's not a romantic comedy, it's not a sex comedy, in fact, it's not really a comedy at all. There are plenty of genuinely funny parts, but most of those are filmed bits of the various characters stand-up. The meat of the film is a sobering assessment of the comedic psyche, with Apatow coming to the conclusion that the bitterness and narcissism that fuel comic genius make it impossible for comedians to ever really be happy with themselves or other people.

The story concerns Adam Sandler, playing a slightly more artistically bankrupt, lonely version of himself, comedy movie star George Simmons and his fight with a life threatening illness. Faced with his own mortality, and the hollowness of his hedonistic celebrity existence, Simmons goes back to his stand-up roots and enlists struggling comedian Seth Rogen as his assistant/joke writer/best friend. Apatow definitely stuffs the film with subplots and extraneous characters and keeps a razor-sharp focus on well-observed details that reveal the crushing depth of Simmons' isolation, as well as the double-edged nature of his comic gift. For guys like Simmons, comedy serves as the ultimate coping mechanism, but the hostility that underlies his humor keeps other people at an agonizing remove. The mood of angst and loss is sustained by a surprisingly expressive soundtrack that eschews cliche and a uniquely effective use of the hoary old character-revealing montage.

In a plot development telegraphed in the trailers, Simmons discovers that his disease is in remission, and decided that the only way to fill the hole at the center of his life is to reunite with his first, lost love, Leslie Mann, even if it means prying her and her two kids away from husband Eric Bana. The last act of the movie is a foray to Mann's Marin County home, and while it's a hit-and-miss segment that blunts some of the film's momentum, it earns points for defying audience expectations.

While all of this is well-shot and insightful, it's not especially funny, but if a viewer goes into Funny People with an eye towards appreciating the sort of filmic traits that comedies generally ignore in a desperate struggle for laughs, there are rewards aplenty to be had. Like other Judd Apatow movies, Funny People is rambling, messy, overstuffed and paced like an Andrei Tarkovsky film, but unlike previous efforts, the stabs at meaning aren't sacrificed in the pursuit of jokery. Instead, the movie plays like a deft character study, with occasional jokes sprinkled throughout like cinematic bon bons.

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a fact that the dreamweavers of Hollywood don't want you to know: you can't outrun an explosion. Most solid high explosives have a velocity of detonation in excess of 4000 meters per second. Meanwhile, Usain Bolt's world record in the 100 meter dash is 9.72 seconds. If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself within the blast radius of a bomb when it detonates, you'll most likely end up being buried in a number of garbage bags. The myth of the escapable explosion is one of many action and war movie cliches Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is bent on demolishing. The most provocative of the film's subversions is the suggestion that war veterans can be traumatized not only by the horrors of combat, but also by war's addictive rush.

The script, by Mark Boal, who embedded with a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, offers a detailed glimpse into the daily routine of bomb defusers, led by adrenaline junkie Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner). Bigelow generally hues to a hyper-realism reminiscent of Paul Greengrass in documenting the alternately nerve-rending and mundane task of neutralizing IEDs and facing off against insurgent snipers. The approach serves to heighten the tension of the moment, and also to keep the characters at a certain remove. As Sergeant James takes greater and greater unnecessary risks in his pursuit of danger, the viewer struggles to figure out what makes him tick. His inscrutability is aided by Renner's mask of offhand machismo and the character's inability or unwillingness to articulate his feelings. When James defuses a bomb or flags down a speeding taxi with only a handgun, there's nary of glimpse of exhilaration or the mild satisfaction on his face. As his exploits become more extreme, his cool stoicism makes more sense. He approaches his job with the same grim, determination as a junkie fixing himself a shot of heroin; the joylessness of someone who has no choice.

At key moments in the film, Bigelow switches from realism to the grammar of action movies: close-ups and dramatic slow motion. The action gimmicks echo the way Sgt. James comes to view his relationship to the war; as a man living inside an action movie. Even after being repeatedly confronted with the sobering consequences of his compulsion to look death in the eye, he is unable to stop courting destruction. He can's stop because, in contrast to his increasingly terrified subordinates played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, he doesn't really think he can die. He's the hero of his own personal action flick, and the most sacrosanct myth of the action canon is that the hero never dies.

The Hurt Locker is the first Iraq war movie to concentrate on the day-to-day reality of fighting the war, and it's also the least ideological. Yet Bigelow's painstaking attention to detail and pungent sense of atmosphere make certain facts about the war jump into harsh relief. One of these is the futile nature of occupation duty. When any civilian is a potential enemy, its impossible to view them as anything other than that. Another is that the sheer totalizing force of life in a war zone has the power to render civilian life absurd, and perhaps, drive a man to seek out war's eternal present tense.

Bruno

2009-07-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sasha Baron Cohen's 2006 provocation Borat was an uproariously funny bit of meanspirited prankery. It was not, contrary to a number of critical raves, a potent satire of American xenophobia. Mostly, it was middle-Americans politely nodding along to the heavily accented ravings of a mustachoied foreign weirdo. With Bruno, Cohen finds the mark and delivers a lacerating expose of American fame-hunger and, most pointedly, homophobia. While Borat consisted largely of Cohen saying outrageously bigoted things and people bascially ignoring him, Bruno features Cohen acting extremely gay and people basically losing their shit because of it. Bruno doesn't reach the audacious comic heights of Borat, partially because the shock value of penis close-ups has lost some of its impact, but the satiric targets are chosen with more precision. When air-headed Austrian fashionista gets a sucession of would-be stage parents to agree to let their infants undergo a series of increasingly dangerous stunts for the chance to be in a photo shoot, you see the sickness of celebrity-obsession in hilarious high definition.

Of course, there is another issue that makes Bruno's critique of homophobia problematic. Sascha Baron Cohen is straight, while his character Bruno traffics in a number of rather retrograde gay stereotypes, including gerbil-abuse. It's like if Cohen made a movie about rascism by dressing in blackface and flashing gang signs. Cohen tries to have his ass-cake and eat it too by alternating between raunchy sight gags about gay sex and pointed zingers about America's uncomfortable relationship with homosexuality. While it's amusing to think about the average Borat-impersonating knucklehead going from laughing at Bruno's fey antics to cringing at the pscyhotic displays of gay panic in the film's climax, there's a tinge of disingeniousness that sours some of the humor.

Public Enemies

2009-07-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Bryan Burrough's nifty book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI 1933-1934 is filed with fascinating characters and daring capers. John Dillinger, J. Edgar Hoover, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Melvin Purvis, and the underrated criminal mastermind Alvin "Creepy" Karpis. The Kansas City Massacre, Little Bohemia, the Crown Point jail break. A director could make a dozen different movies utilizing different narrative and thematic angles from this material. Judging by the two and half hour running time and the numerous failed digressions, it seems that Michael Mann tried to make all of those movies at the same time. Parts of Public Enemies seem to be about J. Edgar Hoover's clever exploitation of the 30s-era bank robber epidemic to expand the power of the nascent F.B.I. Other parts frame the antics of Dillinger and company as the last gasp of a free-wheeling criminal underworld, soon to be crushed by increasingly organized crime and professionalized law enforcement. Sometimes, the movie's about John Dillinger's relationship to his celebrity, which grew into legend before his very eyes. Most of the time, it seems to be about the love between Dillinger and his devoted girlfriend, Billie Frechette. Mann would have been well-served to pick one these strands with an eye towards creating a cohesive hole. As it stands, the tangential style crowds all of these notions and more to the margins, leaving nothing to fill the center of the frame.

No director has taken to digital cameras with the enthusiasm and skill of Michael Mann, and Public Enemies unsurprisingly benefits from Mann's embrace of the technology. Digital film and handheld cameras give the film an immediacy that is often difficult to achieve in a period piece. The performances are generally solid. Depp's Dillinger is a typical cauldron of brooding charisma, but the movie is so busy that his terse opaquacy never becomes accessible. Marion Cotillard is surprisingly affecting in the usually thankless role of devoted lady friend. Christian Bale's G-Man Melvin Purvis throws around a lot of disapproving glares and affects a Carolina drawl adequately The only guys having any real fun are Stephen Graham in a sadly underdeveloped role as Baby Face Nelson, and Billy Crudup, whose J. Edgar Hoover speaks with that great, extinct accent that olde timey radio announcers used. The story of how Hoover rode the 30s crime wave to power unprecedented for a bureaucrat is a fascinating one, and with Crudup's delightfully idiosyncratic take on the character, its easy to imagine one of the several great movies that Public Enemies could have been.

Instead of any of those movies, Michael Mann's inability to find a consistent point of view leaves us with a competently exectued police procedural. Even with scenes that gesture towards Dillinger's singular place in American criminal history, including one sequence of Dillinger looking at a wall full of newspaper clippings about himself that strongly echoes a similar scene in Mann's similarly unfocused Ali, there isn't much here in the way of insight into the Dillinger phenomenon or the experiences of those Depression-era criminals. Change the character names, turn the Tommy guns into AK-47s and the De Soto's into Honda Accords, and Public Enemies would be an unremarkable tale of cops and robbers.

Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen

2009-07-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

There are certain things you know you're going to see when you watch a Michael Bay movie: slow motion running, sweaty close-ups, gargantuan plot-holes, thundering stupidity, insultingly broad stereotypes, painfully unfunny comic relief, and incoherent action scenes. Pretty much all of those are on glorious display in Transformers 2: The Something of the Something, with one surprising exception. Michael Bay has reigned for years as the worst director of action in Hollywood. His twin obsession with close-ups and rapid cuts typically results in migraine inducing abstractions. The first Transformers is a perfect example of Bay's raging deficiencies as a director, exacerbated by the inherent difficulty of staging fight scenes between nearly-identical piles of CGI scrap metal. Which makes it even more puzzling that the action scenes in Transformers 2 show an unprecedented directorial competence. Instead of filling the screen with inscrutable, spark-shooting chunks of steel, Bay pulls his camera back far enough to see the whole robot while its shooting its laser gun or punching another robot in its metal face. In particular, Bay stages a forest battle between Autobot leader Optimus Prime and a horde of Decepticons with a near-Kubrickian sense of distance and perspective. This newfound restraint reveals an eternal truth that's easy to forget when Bay straps his camera to the head of a marmot: giant robot battles are inherently awesome.

Or course, awesome robot battles take up less than a hour of Transformers 2's interminable two and a half hour running time, which means that most of the time you're not watching two robots punch each other. Instead, the audience is punished with endless scenes of Shia Labeouf sweating all over alleged actress and suspected sentient blow-up doll Megan Fox, inept comedic business staring LaBeouf's oafish parents and/or ebonics-spouting robots, and nonsensical expository dialogue. It's all about what you'd expect from a movie that prominently features Hasbro in the opening credits. The humans and the robots behave with similar complexity and depth of emotion, giving ample opportunity for bathroom and snack breaks. Connoisseurs of bad dialogue and juvenile pandering should stay glued to their seats, though.

While most of Transformers 2 is garden-variety summer dreck, the last half hour reaches ecstatic peaks of illogic, not to mention slow motion running and shouting. All of the half-baked mythology indifferently spewed forth during the first two hours becomes relevant, culminating in a visit to a magical land that could best be described as robot heaven. The very concept of robot heaven is so left-field nuts, not to mention borderline sacrilegious, that it almost redeems the indifferent plotting and perfunctory emotional beats. Coming on the heels for some genuinely rousing robot-on-robot action, it helps raise Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen above the run of awful Michael Bay movies into its own category of awfulness.

The Coen Project: The Big Lebowski

2009-06-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

"The Dude abides..." - The Dude

It feels pointless to comment on The Big Lebowski, which has gone from a critical and commerical failure that disappointed many who loved Fargo to a cultural phenomenon. Books, academic theses, websites have all been devoted to the philosophical underpinnings of this movie. Sufficit to say, Jeffery "The Dude" Lebowski is the Coen brothers alternative model for American male values. Throughout the film, The Dude comes in contact with archtypes of American masculinity, from cowboys to industrialists to a Chandler-esque private detective. In all cases, the narrow-minded acquisitiveness that makes life in the Coen-verse such a bloody fiasco holds no real enticement for the Dude. He has found peace without the drive for money that consumes the Nihilists, or the vain status whoring that turns the Big Lebowski into a cuckolded, criminal fraud. Instead, the Dude simply abides. He finds joy and contentment where he can, expending as little effort as possible and, as a result, leads a relatively charmed life by Coen brothers standards. Sure, his car is slowly destroyed over the course of the film, and he gets roughed up a bit, but he also gets to sleep with Maude and help perpetuate another generation of laid-back wizards of lethargy.

The Coen Project: Fargo

2009-06-12T09:25:00.000-07:00

"So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, ya know? Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it." - Marge Gunderson

The Coens followed up Hudsucker Proxy, their most stiffly formalist work to date, with Fargo, the most humane film in their canon. The humanity of Fargo rests entirely in the character of Brainerd Police Chief Marge Gunderson, who isn't really a "Coen brothers" character at all. She's a tourist in the Coen-verse, someone whose basic decency and intelligence is largely absent in other Coen brothers movies. Marge is a rebuke to any critic who complains that the Coen brothers have nothing but contempt for their characters. They treat Marge with the gentleness and empathy due to someone of her wholesomeness. Most Coen brothers characters are treated with contempt because they are worthy of contempt. The Coens are interested in showing how social forces deform humanity, and the best way to illustrate that is to create deformed humans. And humans don't get much more deformed than the likes of Gaer Grimsrud, Carl Showalter and Jerry Lundegaard. Their dumb lust for money and, in the case of Jerry, the social standing money brings, has turned them into bloody-minded troglodytes. Their lack of humanity is made even starker compared to Marge. The very fact that the Coens created someone like Marge shows that they are not bloodless cynics. They're simply more interested in the sad flailing of people who've absorbed the cutthroat ethos of the American dream than in the humble strivings of good-hearted citizens. And who can blame them? What's more fun, watching Marge and Norm eat Arby's together, or Gaer feeding Carl into the woodchipper?

The Hangover

2009-06-09T12:04:00.001-07:00

For weeks now, commercials have been touting The Hangover as "the breakout comedy hit of the summer!" After a 40 million dollar opening weekend, it looks like that was more than promotional braggadocio. It was an easy prediction to make, though, because The Hangover meets every requirement of past "breakout comedy hits of the summer:" 1. it's about a bunch of bros getting into shenanigans, 2. it's R-rated due to pervasive cursing and the presence of at least one boob and/or wang 3. it features a left field celebrity cameo (in this case, Mike Tyson). In other words, it's perfectly catered to appeal to 18-40 year old white males, the ur-consumers. Making it even easier to tell that The Hangover was going to be a "breakout comedy hit" is that the very term "breakout comedy hit" is a misnomer. "Breakout" suggests that these movies have to struggle for recognition in a sea of similar films. The fact is, that only one or two of these movies are released in a given summer. Every other "comedy" that comes out in wide release in the summer months is either a migraine-inducing CGI-filled bit of calculated whimsy aimed at kids (Night at the Museum, Land of the Lost), a women-skewing romantic comedy (Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, The Proposal) or an "urban" entertainment (anything with Tyler Perry and/or Ice Cube). Because young white males aren't considered a "niche,"movies that try to make young white males laugh are the only ones that get called "comedies" without a prefix, even though they're often just as much slaves to their demographic as any other type of comedy.

And boy-howdy is The Hangover a slave to its demographic. It's the story of three bros waking up from a Las Vegas bender with no memory of the night before trying to find their missing groom-to-be, while dealing with the consequences of their outlandish blackout behavior. Such behavior includes marrying strippers, losing teeth and stealing Mike Tyson's pet tiger. Along the way, there are a bunch of ass and penis related jokes, some exceedingly contrived tazer hijinx and other stuff too pointless and unfunny to bother recounting. The main problem with The Hangover, besides its general air of randomness and predictability (will the sedated tiger wake up in the back of the BMW during the ride to Mike Tyson's house? You bet!) is that the characters are either bland and/or indistinct, or frankly repellent. Bradley Cooper plays a guy named Phil who, in the name of accuracy, should have been named "Vince Vaughn Was Unavailable," is a douchebag, but a completely humorless one. Ed Helms is basically Cameron Fry grown up. He's got a few good comedic moments, but doesn't leave much of an impression. The biggest disappointment is Zach Galifinakis as the bride-to-be's creepy brother. He delivers the only funny dialogue uttered by any of the principle characters, but he doesn't' have a consistent voice: sometimes he seems developmentally disabled, sometimes perverted, sometimes just harmlessly weird. Like the rest of the movie, the characterization is sloppy. Director Todd Philips and company seem content to hit as many Maxim-approved comic set ups as possible, even if the haphazard style blunts the humor and makes it impossible to care what happens next, because the characters are jackasses and nothing they do is going to be funny anyway.

The Coen Project: The Hudsucker Proxy

2009-06-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

"Strictly speaking, I'm never supposed to do this, but do you have a better idea?" - Moses the Clock Man

The Coens followed Barton Fink, which is partially a defense of formalism, with The Hudsucker Proxy, their most formalist exercise to that point. At times, Proxy feels like a parody of a Coen brothers film; ornately filigreed dialogue, deadpan shenanigans, nonexistent or ironic emotional content and smart-aleck mimicry. It's still a tremendously entertaining film, with some of the Coens' most inspired cinematography and wordplay, but at the end it amounts to little more than an extended riff on pre-war screwball comedy, right down to the font of the opening credits. Beyond the catchphrases and enjoyable mannered performances, what really lingers after watching The Hudsucker Proxy is the dread-inducing industrial hellscape of the Hudsucker industries mailroom, which has to stand as one of the most visceral depictions of the dehumanization of industrial relations put to film. Even if it is mostly a joke. You know...for kids.

The Coen Project: Barton Fink

2009-06-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

"I'll show you the life of the mind!" - Charlie Meadows aka Karl "Mad Man" Mundt

Barton Fink is a singular work in the Coen brothers canon. It's their most symbolically oriented movie, and the closest they've ever come to offering an artistic manifesto. The story of Barton Fink, earnest young 'playwright of the common man' who goes to Hollywood to write for the pictures and finds himself in a hell of his own making, doubles as a metaphor for the creative process. The Hollywood studio system, in the person of vulgarian studio head Jack Lipnick and broken, dipsomaniacal screenwriter Bill Mayhew, is shown to be the artistically bankrupt shit-factory we all know it to be, but the real revelation is that Fink, for all of his pretensions to Beauty through Truth, is as creatively crippled as any of the hacks churning out wrestling pictures on the studio back lots.Fink is sort of a stand-in for the type of artist who would disdain the Coens' for what Barton himself calls "empty formalism" and their failure to engage the real world. "It's the stuff of life! Why shouldn't it be the stuff of theater!" Fink thunders! But, of course, he's thundering this at the salt-of-the-earth insurance salesman Charlie Meadows. Yet, when Charlie says "I could tell you stories..." Fink cuts him off to expound more about the virtues of the common man, ignoring the common man sitting right in front of him. He also swims with sexual repression that he cannot honestly confront. When Det. Mastrionotti says "you're a sick fuck, Fink," you get the feeling he's on to something. Beyond Fink's individual shortcomings, the Coens suggest that the essential nature of existence precludes the possibility of art that speaks for anyone other than the artist. Regardless of Fink's commitment to looking outward, he spends the majority of the film in his sticky, dingy hotel room, relating to the other occupants only through the sounds leaking through the walls. In a film chock full of symbolism, the hotel room is the most important bit: it's Fink's head, a claustrophobic space that brooks no contact with the outside, nor can it. Charlie, who moonlights as a head-removing serial killer named Karl "Mad Man" Mundt, is Fink's only confidant, and it's not exactly clear is Charlie isn't a figment of Fink's imagination. Either way, it's certainly clear that Fink's attempt to create art on behalf of others is the height of presumption. As Charlie tells him as his hotel room burns, "You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You're just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here. And you come into my home and complain that I'm making too much noise." Barton Fink is the Coens' rejoinder to all who complain that their films are insular and artificial. All art, for the Coens, is insular and artificial. And why? As Tom Regan said, "nobody know anybody. Not that well."

The Coen Project: Miller's Crossing

2009-06-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

"Nobody knows anybody. Not that well." - Tom Regan

Millers' Crossing is the first Coen brothers film to feature characters with functioning frontal lobes. It takes place in a cuthroat world of gangsters, gun molls and bookies in a Prohibition-era urban jungle. Dunderpates like H.I. McDonnough wouldn't last five minutes before being ground into hamburger. That's because this isn't really the Coen brothers world, it's Dashiell Hammet's, with the brothers using the stereotypes and plot mechanisms of books like The Glass Key and Red Harvest to riff on the genre. With all the colorful dialogue and tough-talking gunsels, a lot of critics praised Miller's Crossing for its craft, but wrote it off as little more than an empty exercise in formalist tomfoolery. That misses the fact that Miller's Crossing, in the characters of Tom Regan and Johnny Casper, offers contrasting approaches to conducting oneself in a lawless universe where wealth and guile are the only things that can keep you alive. Tom Regan operates from the central conviction that the only person worth trusting is oneself, and so has built an ethic of radical self-centeredness. His every decision is made based on maximizing his personal autonomy and avoiding any dangerous connection to other human beings. When his boss, Leo O'Bannion offers to erase his mounting gambling debts with a single phone call, he refused "I'll pay me own way," he says, and he means it. He serves Leo because he chooses to, not because he owes Leo anything. Several times through the course of the movie, Tom is offered easy solutions to his problems; not just the gambling debts, but the continued existence of troublemaking bookie Bernie Birnbaum. Each time, he refuses the out because it would undermine the his personal prerogatives. In the most famous scene in the film, when Tom leads Bernie into the woods, having been ordered by Johnny Casper's goons, Frankie and Tic Tac, to finish the shmatte off himself, Tom saves Bernie's life because Bernie asks him to "look into" his heart. What he finds there isn't compassion for Bernie, it's related to something else Bernie says to him while praying for his life: "they can't make us different people than we are. We're not muscle, Tom!" And it's true. Tom is not a triggerman, and he cannot abide being forced to become one by a crazy dago like Johnny Casper. And so, he risks his life to save Bernie, even though he gladly would have waited in the car while Frankie and Tic Tac killed him. As Verna tells him, "I never met anyone who made being a son of a bitch such a point of pride." In a world where trust can be as deadly than a loaded roscoe, the only armor is ferocious self-regard. Compromising his sense of self or subsuming his will to anyone else will surely end him. Tom's pigheadeness might get him killed, too, but he'll die on his own terms. Johnny Casper, on the other hand, navigates the choppy waters of the underworld with a different sextant: "I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell. Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics." For Johnny Casper, the only way to make sense of an unregulated marketplace of blood and thunder is to hold tight to an ethic of "above board" behavior: straightforward rackets, with no side dealing or doublecrosses because once you start double crossing, where does it end? Casper figures that if he keeps to an ethic of honest thievery, so will those he deals with. He passes up the chance to clip Tom after he fingers Bernie because such a double-cross would just invite more shady dealings. In the end his naive belief that his personal integrity will protect him from the dishonesty of others gets him killed when he believes Tom over his right hand man, Eddie Dane. He backs the wrong horse, because he's got nothing to go on but a gut feeling about which man to trust. It's a mistake Tom Regan would never make, because he operates on the assumption that no one is to be trusted. It's a philosophy that leaves him alone at the end of the film, but grimly and defiantly alive.

Up

2009-06-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it feels like Pixar is conducting an experiment to find the most unconventional children's movie protagonist. After failing to alienate young audiences with a non-verbal robot in Wall-E, they've up the ante with a crotchety old widower in Up. They're almost daring kids to squirm in their seats. And yet, they don't, which is testament to the gold-plated instincts for storytelling that drive every Pixar project. The aforementioned crotchety widower is Carl Fredrickson who decides to honor a promise to his recently deceased wife and travels to a mysterious South American mountain by strapping his house to a giant bundle of helium balloons. Of course, it wouldn't be Pixar without bracing emotional content, so the viewer is introduced to Carl's wife and witnesses a touching, expertly detailed recap of her life...and then her funeral...and Carl sitting heartbroken in their empty house. Guys know how to stick it in and break it off, don't they?

What all this brutal heartstring-pulling does is give Carl's journey with emotional weight and create instant audience identification with a character that a lot of kids might initially find off-puttingly old and cranky. It also gives the movie it's thematic ballast, which is less ambitious than recent Pixar films like Ratatouille and Wall-E. Although the "live-in-the-moment" message is familiar, it's brought across with remarkable subtlety. There's no "too late I realize me children where my real treasure" speech, just a collection of silent, metaphor-heavy moments that must fly over the heads of younger kids. What's impossible to miss is the richly textured animation, made even more rivetting by nifty 3-D effects. There aren't any cheesy gotcha 3-D gimmick shots, but the depths of field make a lot of the action, which takes place at vertiginous altitudes, literally breathtaking. It's a simple story, told with immense detail and a keen eye for both pathos and comedy business, but after the Shakespearean heights reached by recent Pixar efforts, Up can't help but feel like a minor, but still powerful, outing.

Drag Me To Hell

2009-06-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

Since Sam Raimi left the world of horror to make increasingly leaden comic book blockbusters, the American horror film landscape has languished in a tedious rut. In a given year, it's hard to find any major horror release that isn't torture porn, a dire remake of an 80s slasher flick, or a J-horror ripoff. With no Raimi around, to remind people that comedy and horror share the same cinematic DNA, horror filmmaking is an airless, mechanical slog of hitch-gaited waifs and dismembered girls in cutoff T-shirts. Thankfully, Drag Me To Hell marks the triumphant return of Raimi's intoxicating combination of slapstick and scares. The movie is filled with scenes that start off giving the audience a standard-issue horror "jolt," and end by provoking a surprise burst of laughter.

Drag Me To Hell is old school all the way. The basic plot skeleton is exactly the same as The Ring: a women has several days to stop her impending supernatural death by placating a malign spirit, all the while dealing with terrifying portents of her fate. But instead of relying on the oh-so-millennial J-Horror notion of haunted technology, Drag Me To Hell features a plot engine that's been around since the Silent Era: a gypsy curse.

Alison Lohman is adequate as the doomed young woman, an ambitious loan officer who refuses a mortgage extension to a baroquely wizened Gypsy crone (Lorna Raver) who unleashes a goat-horned demon to drag her to heck in three days. Her kewpie doll looks and big, luminous eyes help make for some great reaction shots to Raimi's inspired array of Grand Guignol shock gags, all of which are shot with the same breakneck lurches between deadpan and semi-hysteria that let you know you're in the Raimiverse. After a grim decade of humorless, factory-issue horror films, it's a blast to be back.

The Coen Project: Raising Arizona

2009-05-31T19:09:00.000-07:00

"I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn't easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. I dunno...they say he's a good man, so maybe his advisors are confused." -H.I. McDonnough

Blood Simple's claustrophobic Texas noir introduced moviegoers to the bleak, windswept southwest of the Coen brothers, a place where everyone is "on their own.'" The Coens' second film, 1987's Raising Arizona, broadens the frame to take in Reagan's Sunbelt in all its grotesque wonder. This time, in a live-action Warner Brothers cartoon. Nathan Arizona is a blustery, vest-wearing avatar for the crassly materialist 80s entrepreneurs who fatted themselves on low taxes and vulgar defense spending. The fact that fertility treatment allows his previously barren wife to spit out five healthy baby boys taunts simple trailer folk like ex-con H.I McDonnough and his wife, Ed, who want nothing in life more than a "critter" to share their happiness with. As H.I. says, "we thought it was unfair that some should have so many while others should have so few." And so, Ed and H.I. set about to score one for the vast multitudes left behind by Reaganomics by swiping one of the Arizona quints. But in a distinctly Coen-esque touch, the downtrodden proles are fueled by the same small-minded acquisitiveness as the Arizonas of the world. When H.I. gets Nathan Jr. into the car, he remarks that "I think we got the best one." The Coens aren't interested in a standard Marxist critique of capital distribution, but rather a system of value that prizes status and consumption as the highest of values and touches the minds of everyone, rich or poor. Much of the contempt that the Coens' are accused of harboring for their characters is in fact contempt for a culture that builds cardboard subdivisions where every room in the homes has a television blaring, where every clerk may meet in packing heat, and the lethal services of a Lone Biker of the Apocalypse like Leonard Smalls can be purchased for "what the market will bear."

DVD Roundup: Valkyrie

2009-05-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise was born to play a Nazi. That intensity, that razor-sharp jawline, those fiery, piercing eyes, that flinty, seething voice trembling with conviction. They're the traits that have made him an movie icon. They're also traits that bring to mind dreams of ubermensch and lebensraum and a bunch of other scary German words, spoken by a whippet-thin man in a sharp black uniform and glistening jackboots. Watching Cruise play the blandly heroic Wehrmacht officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who planted a bomb meant to kill Hitler in 1944, you wonder just how creepily effective it would be to see Cruise putting all of that force-ten charisma and certainty behind, say, a death camp commandant. It would be like Denzel Washington in Training Day, but much more disturbing. I know Christoph Walz just won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for playing the jew-hunting SS officer in Tarantino's new movie, but part of me wishes that Mr. OT Level Seven could have found time in his schedule to slip on the swastika in earnest.

The Coen Project: Blood Simple

2009-05-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

"Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an' down here... you're on your own." -Loren Visser

Blood Simple, the Coen brothers' first film, begins the same way their Oscar winning masterpiece No Country for Old Men does, with shots of desolate Texas prairie overlaid with the voiceover of a grizzled old country boy. In this case, it's private investigator Loren Visser, an amoral sleazeball played with greasy relish by M. Emmet Walsh and the first in a long line of Coen embodiments of inplacable evil. His is the first voice we hear in the Coen brothers' canon, and it vividly articulates a theme that will run through all of their work: people cannot be trusted to overcome their own selfishness and stupidity. As Visser says, "tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, 'n watch him fly." Blood Simple isn't interested in diagnosing the problem, of explaining just why it is that people are such treacherous dogs, just in describing the condition with dry wit and a southern-fried noir sensibility. When cuckolded bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya at his slimiest) fails in a ham-fisted attempt to pick up a girl at a bar, he points out "we don't seem to be...communicating." That goes for everyone in the movie. The plot is entirely powered by people who distrust one another, and, as a result, are incapable of meaingful communication. That goes for Marty and his hired operative Visser, but also for Marty's wife Abbey (Francise McDormand) and her lover Ray (John Getz). When Ray finds Mardy dead, he assumes that Abbey killes him and buries the body. When Abbey claims ignorance, he assumes that she's setting him up for the fall. And when Abbey finds out that Marty's dead, she assumes Ray killed him. All the while, the real killer, Visser, is hovering in the background, trying to cover up his incompetence with more murders. The Coens have their usual slightly contemptuous distance from all the idiocy and distrust, but the question of just why the hell everybody just can't talk to one another without fear of being sold out lingers. In their first film, the Coens establish their love of genre, their amused detachment from the human predicament, and their interest in exploring the faultines of modern life. They would go further towards explaining just why it is we're "on our own" in their next movie, Raising Arizona.

The Coen Brothers: Once More, With Feeling

2009-05-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

The Coen brothers are on the top of the Hollywood mountain. They've got eight Oscars between them, the ability to chose their own projects with complete freedom, they're intimidatingly prolific, makers of several solid-gold modern classics in addition to the most quotable cult sensation since Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Yet.... The Coens are held at arms length by a lot of critics who just can't bring themselves to put the Coens in the pantheon of great American filmmakers. There's no there there, goes the typical complaint. For all their visual acumen and pithy dialogue, the Coens are empty formalists at heart, interested only in playing with genres and snickering behind the camera at their idiotic characters. It's true that the Coens love filming stupid people doing stupid things in a comical and/or blood-soaked manner, but there's more to it than that. The key to finding the 'meaning' in a Coen brothers movie lies in answering the question of why their stupid characters do the stupid things that they do. The Coens' filmography contains a remarkably consistent critique of post-war America. No, they're not particularly interested in the inner lives of their characters, but they're mightily interested in the social order their characters exist within. So over the next couple of weeks, I'll be taking a chronological tour of the Coens' oeuvre, hoping to tease out their worldview, and highlight the conviction and insight that underlies all the deadpan slapstick shenanigans. Tomorrow, we'll start with their 1984 debut Blood Simple.

Terminator Salvation

2009-05-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

The full title of this movie should be Terminator Salvation: Sorry, There's Profit to be Had! Or maybe Terminator Salvation: Ragingly Inessential! Nothing about the Terminator saga cried out for another film, but the brief images of post-apocalyptic robo-combat from the first films are certainly sturdy enough foundation for a guaranteed box office bonanza. On that score, the movie is a moderate success. Watching Hunter Killers and skinless T-800s and human-snatching giant robots with guns for heads blast away on the landscape is pretty neat, and director McG is laudably workmanlike while directing the action scenes. He knows what chumps like Michael Bay have yet to figure out: giant, laser-shooting robots are fun to watch, so it's a good idea to allow the audience to, you know, actually see them by nailing the camera down and resisting the urge to edit everything into a Cubist nightmare.

As for the characters, they don't have much to do but alternate between yelling and glowering. Christian Bale is his usual humorless self as John Connor and Sam Worthington slips between American and Australian accents as a conflicted cyborg. Everyone takes the proceedings very, very seriously, but none of their strenuous emoting amounts to much. The filmmakers are cognisant enough of the broad themes of the other Terminator movies; the nature of free will, the meaning of humanity, to drop in classic lines of dialogue that fans will recognize, but not much more. The ideas are given no room to breath between the rote scenes of robo-combat that, for their impressive special effects and competent staging, are achingly familiar. They even contrive to end the movie in a spark-shooting foundry so similar to the one from the end of T2: Judgement Day that the producers very well could have saved money by reusing the old set.

Star Trek

2009-05-13T09:09:00.000-07:00

Franchise origin stories are inherently unsatisfying for fans of said franchise. People who like, in this case, Star Trek, presumably enjoy the dynamics of the characters and the plot rhythms provided by the never ending mission provided by the Prime Directive. To be sure, there's plenty of fun to be had in seeing how the original Trek crew came together in crisis, but the beats and character interplay that makes the series enduring are, by design, absent.

Director J.J. Abrams is clearly taking the long view here. His aim is to resurrect the moribund Trek brand as a durable, semi-yearly film series and the decision to start with an origin story was made not only to reintroduce the Trek universe to a new generation of film goers, but to demolish the continuity built up over the past forty years. This will allow future entries in the series to develop unfettered by a confining Trek mythology. One hopes that, in the future, Abrams isn't also going to jettison the time-tested Trek plot model of discovery and ethical crisis as he and his writing team did with this movie. Star Trek is basically one long action sequence, with little time given over to the kind of thoughtful, allegorical science fiction that Trek has traditionally been known for. Swap out the characters names and you'd be hard pressed to identify this film with the Trek canon.

The brutally streamlined plot finds a young Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) fighting for command of the U.S.S. Enterprise's maiden voyage as they seek to stop a revenge-crazed Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) from destroying the planets of the Federation with a portable black hole. With no time for serious character interaction or the raising of ethical dilemmas, Star Trek lives or dies on the strength of its action scenes, which are by and large underwhelming. The special effects are flawless, but Abrams doesn't have much of an eye for building a narrative with action. Space battles and phaser shoot-outs are shot in a series of claustrophobic close-ups that deny the audience any sense of proportion or scale, and most of the set-pieces lack a rising action or ringing climax. The exception is a rousing sequence in which Kirk and Sulu (John Cho) skydive onto a giant drilling platform and sword fight with Romulans.That scene works not only because it has a beginning, middle and end, but because the stakes for the characters are clearly defined. Otherwise, a number of the action scenes feel like they exist only to pad the running time or provide missions for the inevitable video game, especially when Kirk is outrunning monsters on a ice planet.

Most of the characters have to rely on their iconic names to provide definition, with so little running time devoted to allowing them to interact. The exceptions are Karl Urban as ship doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy, who chews the scenery in a delightfully Deforrest Kelly-like manner, and Simon Pegg, whose Scotty is broad and jokey, but also a welcome relief after so much intense, two-fisted action. Pine's Kirk has some steel in his spine, but is mostly defined by an off putting fratboy assholishness. Quinto's Spock owns the film emotionally and intellectually. He's the one with the love interest (Zoe Salana's Uhura) and the dead family members to avenge, and Quinto brings a good mixture of gravity and trembling rage to the role, but how many Star Trek vehicles have to revolve around Spock struggling between his devotion to logic and his repressed emotions?

Star Trek ends where you kind of wish it had begun, with Kirk, Bones, Spock, Chekov, Uhura, Sulu and Scotty all at their stations on the Enterprise, ready to "boldly go where no one's gone before." Hopefully future installments will use their new found freedom to make the most of the franchise's potential for big-budget science fiction driven more by ideas than action scenes.

X-Men Orgins: Wolverine

2009-05-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is the inflamed appendix of the Marvel film universe. The back story of Wolverine before this movie was a perfect collection of vague-but-tantalizing details. We know he's Canadian, over one hundred years old, at some point shadowy military types grafted adamantium onto his skeleton, and he's a bad-ass. That's really all you need to know. By trying to milk more box office juice out of the X-Men's most marketable character, Marvel has created a brain-dead slog of a lumpy, shambling narrative, baffling character motivation, and a few passable action scenes. Not to mention one of the most criminally incompetent usages of CGI this side of a Sci-Fi Channel original movie.

The plot is just garbage. The effort put towards even trying to make sense of it enough to offer a coherent recap seems like it could be much better used organizing a sock drawer or chewing on some tin foil. Sufficed to say, the audience is introduced to Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), his homicidal mutant half-brother Victor Creed (Liam Schrieber), a secret government mutant task force headed by the nefarious Major Stryker (Danny Huston), and a first act lifted wholesale from Commando. It's a collection of nonsense and half-sense driven at all times by characters acting without any apparent motivation when they're not leaping to save another character's life just in the nick of time. And fan favorite Gambit shows up just long enough to chuck a couple of explosive playing cards and generally go to waste.

Beyond the general ineptitude and laziness that dominates the approach to plot and character, the real indictment of Wolverine is the fact that it doesn't enrich the audience's understanding of Wolverine or the X-Men universe at all. There's nothing in here that couldn't have been more vividly filled in by your own imagination. With it's ball of tangled, distracting, loose plot threads, Wolverine brings to mind The Phantom Menace more than anything. We can be thankful that there is no equivalent to Jar Jar Binks, but a fully CGI Patrick Stewart is a little too close for comfort.

Adventureland

2009-04-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Adventureland is the kind of movie that lives or dies by its atmosphere. The story, about a recent college graduate(Jesse Eisenberg) saving money for grad school by working at a crummy amusement park and dealing with romantic travails in the late 80s, is stock coming-of-age material, save for some nifty supporting turns by the likes of Martin Starr as a bitter nerdlinger. What makes the movie affecting is how much a given audience member relates to the details; the wall-to-wall 80s rock soundtrack, the meticulous 80s wardrobe, the elegantly decaying park rides and game booths, the bleary late night bull sessions, all painted with a fine camel hair brush. If this stuff sets off a tuning fork of aching recognition in your chest, you'll be enraptured. If you find the protagonist to be a pretentious, dithering nozzle head, then you'll find much less to like.

Shorter Crank 2 Review

2009-04-23T20:03:00.001-07:00

Newest Entry for the 2009 Websters:

Awesome, noun, of or pertaining to the film Crank 2: High Voltage. See picture below.

Crank 2: High Voltage

2009-04-23T12:16:00.001-07:00

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That goes double for movies. Good movies, no matter how different in tone or subject matter, all display a similar set of recognizable traits. Bad movies can suck for a million different reasons. One of the most common causes of film suckiness is the unspoken but all-pervasive assumption that every movie, regardless of genre, must contain the following elements: 1.) a plausible plot 2.) sympathetic, realistic characters and 3.) relationships between said characters that change over the course of the film. Now, most movies need these elements to really grab an audience, but for others, they just get in the way.

Action films, in particular, generally suffer the most when they try to honor this received wisdom. There are a few notable examples of successfully well-rounded actions movies, with Die Hard as the perennial example. Most of the time action filmmakers who try to give their movie a conventional grounding in character end up sucking the life out of their project. That's because creating textured characters with maturing relationships is really, really hard. It's hard to do in any movie. Great screenwriters and directors fail all the time to develop these kind of dynamics in their work. How much harder is it when you're dealing in a genre that is by its very nature a glorified explosion delivery mechanism for thrill-seeking audience members. Most action films are conceived as a series of jaw-dropping special effects set pieces or a high-concept plot, with an small army of nameless script monkeys brought in at the last minute to whip up some character arcs. Some critics think that the awful results of such a process demand that action filmmakers spend more time and energy developing their characters than thinking of things to blow up creatively. Those people fail to see the fact that, in most action movies, character development and realism are unnecessary and counterproductive. A great example would be last year's failed attempt to relaunch The Punisher as a franchise. Punisher: War Zone featured some phenomenally creative and outrageous blood-letting, including Ray Stevenson's Punisher punching through a guy's face and shooting another guy's face clean off with a shotgun while at the same time holding a small child in his arms! Unfortunately, these wicked gimmicks were sandwiched between interminable and painfully awkward scenes of the Punisher questioning his mission and bonding with the same small child he was holding when he shot that one dude's face off. If the lazy certitudes of Screenwriting 101 didn't demand such gestures towards a laughably half-assed idea of 'depth,' Punisher: War Zone would have been a non-stop hoot.

Action is the most visceral and visually-oriented of genres, and the urge to watch an action film is usually the urge to slake some primitive desire to vicariously witness uncanny acts of violence. Now, the above mentioned critics would argue that action sequences only have impact if the audiences cares about the people suffering through them, and to an extent that may be true. In a run-of-the-mill action film without visual flair or any real kinetic ambition, character development is the only way to make the proceedings palatable. But if the action kicks enough ass, if the filmmaker is willing to discard notions of physical probability, good taste and basic human decency, then no one is going to care whether or not a scrappy orphan teaches the main character how to love again.

No action auteurs understand this fact more than the brain trust behind the budding Crank franchise, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. They have buried the putrid corpse of film propriety, creating a Frankenstein's monster of excess and depravity that challenges the audience to follow them into a candy-coated hellscape of cartoonish ultraviolence, all done with a winking self awareness that never gets in the way of a good cranial explosion or cattle prod to the nads. In the process, Neveldine and Taylor have shown the way to a new action film aesthetic where "over-the-top" is just the beginning.

When we last left Jason Statham's Chev Chelios, he had fallen thousands of feet from a helicopter onto the hood of a car in LA, a deadly Chinese poison overtaking his organs. That's where Crank 2 picks up, with a van full of Triad hoods pulling up to Chev's body, scrapping him off the road with a snow shovel, and driving off with his body. Underworld doctors remove his supercharged heart for transplant into a big shot gangster and replace it with a temporary artificial heart to keep him alive while they harvest the rest of his organs. When Chev wakes up and finds out that the next organ on the agenda for removal is his wedding tackle, he commences an hour and a half of nonstop ass-kicking. In order to keep his artificial heart charged, Chev needs to repeatedly zap himself with any electrical current he can find, from tazers, dog training collars and jumper cables, all while trying to find his pumper. You know Crank 2 is going to bring the awesome as soon as the guy with the snow shovel shows up; in a film devoted entirely to topping itself in outrageousness with each new scene, the key to keeping things from becoming monotonous is a keen attention to detail, and at each turn Neveldine and Taylor consistently make the most surprising, outrageous and wickedly clever choices.

From the snow shovel road-peel to a shotgun enema to Corey Haim rocking a world-class mullet, Crank 2 leaves a breadcrumb trail of delightful, audacious coolness-nuggets strewn across the action film landscape. Diminishing returns are usually inevitable in a movie that tries to top itself with every scene, but Crank 2 succeeds by actually topping itself in every scene. You like the scene in the first Crank when Statham has sex with his girlfriend Amy Smart in front of a restaurant full of people? Crank 2 features Staham and Smart having sex on a race track in front of thousands of cheering spectators. As soon as you think that Jason Statham wailing on dudes might start getting old, Neveldine and Taylor stage the next fight as a Toho Studios showdown, complete with a rubber monster Jason Statham and exploding electrical towers. All the while, Jason Statham shows why he is the undisputed king of two-fisted action; his glowering mug radiates world weariness, casual confidence and bottomless rage. This stuff practically demands that you burst out laughing, but not because it's dumb, like the flying bus in Swordfish, but for all the best reasons; because it's surprising, its smart, and it kicks all kinds of ass. Tolstoy's fellow Russian Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "Nothing is more exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity." It's good to finally see action filmmakers who've taken that undeniable truth to heart.

Duplicity

2009-04-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton was the most assured and effective studio debut for a writer-director in recent memory. Clayton examines the moral toll suffered by those who live in the dubious moral universe of big business exigency. Gilroy's new film, Duplicity, once again uses a background of corporate espionage to tell a story of character's going through existential crises, but this time he's playing it for funsies. Instead of a agribusiness giant that sanctions murder and knowingly inflicts Midwestern farmers with cancer, the corporation in question this time around is involved in the lower stakes world of shampoo and face creams. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen play former spooks who team up to steal trade secrets from a cosmetics company run by T0m Wilkinson. It's sort of a low wattage Ocean's Eleven with Gilroy even supplying some of Steven Soderbergh's trademark retro camerawork. The most interesting part of the movie is Roberts' and Owens' relationship, which is based on so many betrayals and doublecrosses that the two are incapable of trusting each other, even as they fall in love. Other than that, the caper plot is somewhat clever without ever really feeling urgent, and it sure doesn't help that Julia Roberts is her usual dull-as-dishwater self, completely incapable of portraying the sort of seductive iciness the part calls for. Her crumminess is made up for by typically good work from Owen and Paul Giamatti as Wilkinson's chief rival. Still, one hopes that Duplicity is a throat-clearing for Gilroy rather than a declaration of intent; the world doesn't really need somebody to direct Ocean's Fourteen if Soderbergh pulls a hammy.

Observe and Report

2009-04-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

With just three projects, cult Sundance comedy The Foot Fist Way, HBO series Eastbound and Down, and the new studio film Observe and Report, director Jody Hill has carved out a niche as the poet laureate of American masculine crisis. His protagonists, like Foot Fist's Fred Simmons and Observe's Ronnie Barnhardt (played by Seth Rogen), are aggressive, unpleasant borderline sociopaths, agonized by the cavernous distance between their self image as powerful men-of-action and the cold, sad reality of their own insignificance. They're men who've wholeheartedly embraced the classic American definition of masculinity and find themselves waiting for society to notice their virility. Hill seems to have made it his mission to bring Susan Faludi's book about late capitalist American male angst, Stiffed, to the big screen in a variety of guises.

Ronnie Barnhardt is the head of security at a suburban mall who finds a reason to live when a flasher beings terrorizing female customers. He takes the opportunity to lead an investigation that quickly devolves into bullying and racial profiling and to woo a drunken cosmetics counter girl played by Anna Faris. He's also bi-polar and, motivated by his newfound purpose, goes off of his medication. Along the way, we watch Ronnie whiplash from public humiliation to ass-kicking triumph, never sure events are real and which are the fever dreams of a isolated, wounded psyche. This approach allows Hill to have it both ways: he gets the audience to cheer shocking acts of violence and anti-social behavior, but the full awfulness of the acts is blunted by the dream-logic at work. It creates a moviegoing experience that is unsettling for a whole variety of reasons as the viewer tries to figure out the filmmaker's attitude towards Ronnie's actions, the other character's attitude towards Ronnie's action, and the viewer' own attitude towards Ronnie's action. The most unsettling aspect of all is what a viewer finds themselves laughing at. The comedy beats are essentially the same sort of humor fodder you see in most mainstream comedy; surprising acts of violence, profanity, bodily fluids, etc, but the context is endlessly disturbing. You find yourself laughing along with the demented power fantasies of a bloody-minded, authoritarian misfit.

Observe and Report works best as a blackly comedic take on the corrosive power of the popular American conception of manhood. This isn't the only reading of the film, and Hill seems to go out of his way to confound interpretation, which adds to the sense of unease one has while watching it, but it's the one most consonant with the rest of Hill's work, and the one that makes it easiest to leave the theater without feeling dirty. The real weak link of Observe and Report is actually Rogen, who just can't emanate the sense of menace that wafts off of Hill's usual leading man, Danny McBride. When Rogen starts yelling at people or flailing around with a nightstick, it seems like he's on the verge of breaking into a good-natured chuckle and saying "just kidding." It's sort of like if Albert Brooks had played Travis Bickle.

Fast! Furious! Eyebrows!

2009-04-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

I've got two theories as to why Fast and Furious had the biggest April box office opening in history last week.

1. Pre-9/11 nostalgia.

Ah, the summer of 2001, a magical time of budget surpluses, dopey-but-harmless joke presidents, and little to no fear of apocalyptic terrorist attacks. It was also a time when a couple of young hotshots with serious drag-racing skills named Vin Diesel and Paul Walker taught us all how to love while committing grand theft auto. A simpler, gentler time. 9-11, pervasive fearmongering, endless war, torture, economic meltdown, The Chronicles of Riddick, Into the Blue and Michelle Rodriguez's DUI arrest later, and America wants the safety and security of the halcyon days before the towers fell. So when we see that the original cast from The Fast and the Furious is back together again, featuring the soothingly prominent eyebrows of Jordana Brewster, and without any bullshit about weird, foreign practices like "Tokyo drifting," we clamored to the cinema in order to relive that last summer of innocence.

2. The Fewer Words, the Better.

For the longest time, conventional Hollywood wisdom held that the key to making sequels enticing to an audience is adding words to the title. That's how you end up contending with exotic terminology like "Tokyo Drift" and "Electric Boogaloo." Now we know that what audiences really crave is simplicity. Don't be surprised if the Transformers sequel, currently called Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen becomes Trannies by the time June rolls around.

I Love You, Man

2009-03-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

The ad campaign for I Love You, Man, pitches it as a font of quotable dialogue; posters and T-shirts trumpet out-of-context phrases like "Sweet, Sweet Hanging" and "Return the Favor" as instant classic movie lines. This is riduclous for a couple of reason, mostly because you can't just declare movie lines "quotable" by advertising them a such, and also because the actual comedy in I Love You, Man is based on the characters failing to find the right words in social situations. Peter Klaven, played to fussy perfection by Paul Rudd, is a freshly engaged LA real estate agent coming to the realization that he has no male friends after years of concentrating on his girlfriends. In his quest to find a best man for his wedding, Peter discovers that he has lost the ability to relate to other men in an intimate way. The funniest parts of the movie are watching Rudd flail his way through a series of humiliating attempts at dude-speak. Rudd draws out the awkward pauses with masterful timing, his facial expression a mixture of humiliation and incredulity at the words coming out of his mouth.

The plot is standard issue romantic comedy boilerplate with a man-tastic twist. Rudd struggles to find a male friend in a series of humorous montages, starts a tentative friendship with blunt-talking slacker Jason Segal, and, of course, this creates conflict between Rudd and his fiancee Rashida Jones. It's all played in a minor key: the emotional conflicts are muted and there is little in the way of drama. The extremely low stakes are to the film's advantage, because the plot itself is familiar in the extreme, and keeping the proceedings low-key keeps the focus away from the contrived scenario and on the easy, authentic interplay between the characters. Writer-director John Hamburg, veteran of amiable but unambitious comedies like Meet the Parents, has constructed a shambling, unfocused chuckle-fest that annoys when it tries to do any kind of heavy plot lifting, but enchants when the actors are given room to take conversations into absurd territory. There's been some criticism of the post-Apatow tendency of film comedies to compensate for underdeveloped scripts with indiscriminate improvisation, and when the actors don't have the chops. or the director doesn't trust them to create memorable character moments on the fly, improv-heavy comedies can be a sloppy, brutal chore. The presence of ace improvisers like Rudd, Segal and Jones, not to mention ringer supporting actors like Human Giant's Rob Huebel and Reno 911's Thomas Lennon, guarantee laughs. Great performances only go so far, however. What makes I Love You, Man memorable is the way it evokes a real and really painful facet of adult life; the increasingly difficulty of making new friends as you get older.

Let the Right One In

2009-03-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

Call it the Armageddon/Deep Impact phenomenon. Or the Tombstone/Wyatt Earp phenomenon. Or the Dante's Peak/Volcano phenomenon. Whichever your preferred example, you know what I'm referring to: the semi-annual fluke occurrence in which two movies with essentially the same plot are released within the same year. Over the years, it seems like the types of movies involved in this type of scheduling voodoo have changed. They've gone from high concept (An Asteroid/Comet is on a collision-course with earth and only Bruce Willis/Robert Duvall can stop it!) to puzzlingly obscure. I thought this trend had reached it's apotheosis when the startlingly close release dates of Capote and Infamous showed that there was a deep cultural yearning for film biographies of Truman Capote that I'd never noticed before. Not to mention our mid-2000s craze for movies about Victorian magicians.

Truman Capote is an asteroid on a collision course with a volcano compared to the latest case of cinematic parallel construction. 2008 saw the release of two, count 'em two adaptations of young adult novels about confused kids falling in love with vampires. The high-profile one was Catherine Hardwick's film version of the first entry in a hugely popular book series by Stephanie Meyer, Twilight, which is coming out on DVD and which will see legions of squealing tween girls bum-rushing the nation's retail outlets this weekend. Twilight is a huge hit, both as a book and as a film, because of its use of the Romantic vampire archetype. The classic vampire attack from Stoker onward, in which a broodingly attractive man visits a sleeping young woman in her room and sinks his fangs into her throat, is a thinly veiled sex act, and since the Victorian era, writers and filmmakers have taken advantage of this fact to titillate audiences without scandalizing them. Nowadays, with audiences more jaded than ever, Stephanie Meyer wisely zeroed in on the one constituency that still needs their racy material sublimated. The inherent sensuality of the vampiric allows Meyer and Hardwick to tap into the budding sex drive of millions of teenage girls who are discovering lust, but are still threatened by overt sexuality. So Twilight presents a sexy, virtuous vampire who abstains from premarital sex and drinking human blood, but his carnal appetites for his human beloved are there for all to see, and for all the Hannah Montana set to chastely pant over.

Let the Right One In, directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted from a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (brace yourself: it's Swedish), hones in on another facet of the vampire mythos that can prove seductive to a young person; the power vampires hold over life and death. Just as puberty brings strange and threatening feelings of sexual awareness, it also brings a growing understanding of a teenager's essential powerlessness. Powerlessness breeds frustration and, in the surging torrent of pubescent hormones, aggression. An invincible, death dealing bloodsucker makes for a satisfying fantasy role model.

The film reverses the usual gender dynamic of the vampire romance, with twelve year old Oscar (Kare Hedebrant) developing a friendship with a strange young girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson) living in his apartment complex. She doesn't attend school, never comes out during the day, and sends her father out to drain the blood from hapless fellow Swedes for her feedings. Oscar is a friendless child of divorce, subject to constant bullying at his school, and his budding attraction to Eli is driven less by sexual urges than a growing attraction to her strength and potential for violent action.

Let the Right One In is a spiritual heir to the classic 1973 Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive. Both are restrained, elegantly composed films that examine how children process the concept of death through the allegorical intervention of a mythical monster. Beehives' Frankenstein monster never makes his presence known as blood-splatteringly as the young vampire in Right One, Eli comes into Oscar's life for the first time while he's stabbing a tree, imagining that it's one of his tormentors, as though his murderous desires had willed her into being. From here, the film takes a series of dark and challenging turns, guided at all times by a positively Scandinavian directorial austerity that makes the explosions of violence extra jarring and gives the developing relationship between the two young, murder-minded lovers plenty of room to germinate. The deadpan style pays off most impressively during a closing sequence that consummates the bond between the young boy and the immortal blood-sucker. It also raises unsettling questions about the very nature of the universally treacherous path we all take towards adulthood, and how we come to choose our loves and fulfill our desires.

The Last House on the Left

2009-03-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

There are few delights in life greater than the enjoyment of violence with a clear conscience. Most people have a part of them that yearns to cut a person in half with a band saw, or see someone cut in half with a band saw, but we'd never actually do it. However, if we had a chance to cut a really, really bad guy in half with a band saw, that's a different story. You'd be ridding the world of an evildoer and damn, check out that arterial spray! Movies like The Last House on the Left indulge the audience's desire to watch human bodies suffer horrific damage while still feeling personally virtuous.

The Last House on the Left is the latest vapid, glossy remake of a 70s horror film directed by a eurotrash commercial and music video auteur, in this case Greek helmer Dennis Iliadas. Unlike Marcus Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this movie is not a desecration of a classic. Wes Craven's 1972 original was a drive-in sensation, mostly because its insanely amateurish execution made some of the violence seem unnervingly realistic. Watching it today, after thirty years of ever-intensifying film violence, the original film plays like a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring (which it is), mixed with Reefer Madness and a bit of Home Alone in the third act, all executed with comic ineptitude. The remake's crime is not ruining the legacy of a cinematic triumph, but of grinding out a by-the-numbers hackathon with no greater ambition than providing gross-out gags, and still failing to clear that very low bar.

The plot is pretty much identical to the original: a young woman leaves her upscale family's lake house to hang out with a friend, the friend takes her to buy pot from people who turn out to be a band of murderous drifters, said drifters torture and leave them for dead before unknowingly seeking shelter a the home of the young woman's parents. The parents find out who they have in their house and set out seeking blood-drenched revenge. All of the violence and torture is meant to titillate, with the torture of the innocent girls serving the added purpose of making the audience's enjoyment of their tormentor's deaths that much more unambiguously pleasurable to watch. The majority of the action is uninspired even by the low standards of the genre, but the whole dismal spectacle is nearly redeemed by a deliriously over-the-top ending that provides the film's only real surprise, and hints at a different direction Iladias and company could have gone. As it stands, The Last House on the Left, devoid as it is of anything remotely scary, relies entirely on violence to hold the viewer's attention, but still manages to pull punches and go down like cinematic oatmeal.

Watchmen

2009-03-06T20:22:00.000-08:00

Of the three studio films directed by Zach Snyder, two of them, 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake and now Watchmen, peak with the credit sequence. Watchmen's showstopper opening consists of a series of slow motion tableaux that recount an alternative history of post-war America in which costumed superheroes are not merely comic book fodder, but real people who dramatically shape the fate of the world. The set-ups reproduce storyboard frames from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Gibbons on which the film is based. It's a nifty bit of filmmaking that highlights Snyder's strengths; a maniacal attention to detail and brazen theatricality. This skill set makes for a Watchmen adaptation that hews closely to the source material in the most superficial ways; the plot, characters and action scenes are reproduced with a fanboy's adoring commitment. For fans of the comic, the film offers the giddy delight of seeing iconic superheroes burst into towering, Technicolor life and Moore's vivid alternative version of America is exactingly recreated. Moviegoers with no familiarity or loyalty to the graphic novel will be less rewarded by seeing characters like the Comedian and Silk Spectre brought to cinematic life, since Watchmen novices bring with them no affection for these figures. Even without Watchmen knowledge, the provocative themes of Moore's story and Snyder's bone-crunching aesthetic still make for a kinetic, thrilling theatrical experience.

Snyder's strict fidelity to the source material means that Alan Moore's thematic deconstruction of the superhero concept makes it to the screen more or less intact. Unfortunately, while Zach Snyder clearly adores the Watchmen universe and has a keen eye for empty spectacle, he is also profoundly vapid. Every frame shows loving devotion to glossy detail, but just as clearly every frame shows the authorship of a director who has clearly not thought through the implications of the material he's working with. While most of Moore's plot and characters, as well as his keen dissection of the superhero psyche and the psyche of a culture that creates superheroes, are faithfully reproduced in the film, it's a stilted, flat reproduction that lacks the graphic novel's density of reference and symbolism. The film is strong whenever Snyder can rely on the world created by Moore to provide a strong template. In those areas where the graphic novel offers little guidance, for example in the performances of the lead actors or in the choice of soundtrack, Snyder fails miserably. For all the blood and thunder of Snyder's epic approach, there is never the sense of an active mind engaging the material, just a drive to mimic the comic's iconography with maximum visceral impact. It's like watching a parrot tell a joke: he can say all the words in the right order, but you can tell he doesn't get the punchline.

The actors all look remarkably like their comic book counterparts, and a few, notably Jackie Earl Haley as the psychotic vigilante Rorschach and Billy Crudup as the god-like Dr. Manhattan, create vivid, memorable interpretations of their characters. In some cases, Snyder's search for actors who could bring David Gibbons' artwork to life left him casting people who look great in their costumes, but ruin everything when they open their mouths. Matthew Goode, playing the super-genius industrialist Adrian Veidt who moonlights as superhero Ozymandias, looks the part, but his performance is a train wreck that undermines much of Watchmen's plot tension and dramatic weight. It's a mistake made inevitable by the filmmaker's commitment to mimicry over active interpretation There are memorable set-pieces, but no real narrative flow, bravura images but no depth of feeling.

For all of Watchmen's failings as a fully realized drama, there's no denying the enduring power of Moore's world and seeing it recreated in light and sound is a treat. The real issue that keeps Watchmen from transcendence, more than Zach Snyder's lunkheadedness, is a matter of timing. Watchmen originally appeared as a twelve issue comic book series in 1986. At the time, it, along with other revisionist comics of the era like Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, revolutionized the way people looked at superheroes. After Watchmen, a character who chose, of their own free will, to don a cape and tights to fight crime, was under immediate suspicion of mental illness. Moore identified caped heroism as a pathology, and ever since, comic books have existed in a state of hyper self awareness. During the twenty years it took for Watchmen to make it to theatres, the character flaws that Moore helped introduce into the granite-jawed world of superhero comics have become required in films as well. Crippling neuroses are now as essential to cinematic superheroes as utility belts and alter egos. Coming out half a year after Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, Watchmen feels like an unnecessary punctuation mark. None of that means that it isn't fun to watch a giant blue dude turn bad guys inside out. It totally is.

The 25 Best Conservative Films

2009-02-17T21:09:00.000-08:00

The Stalinist goonsquad at the National Review has put together a list of the top 25 conservative films of all time. This is hilarious for all kinds of reasons. For one, it shows the passive-aggressive relationship that conservatives have with popular culture. They feign deep disdain for the entertainment industry, but at they same time they shamelessly kiss the ass of any actor or director who they believe to be on their side. They're jealous of the fact that most creative types are liberal, and secretly wish that they could hang out with the likes of George Clooney and bitch about the estate tax. So you have the sorry spectacle of right wing culture warriors championing any piece of popular culture that they think ratifies their world view. They do this even if a good film in question could only be considered"conservative" if you squint real hard and tilt your head to one side, or if an indisputably conservative film could only be considered "good" if you hit yourself in a face with a 2X4 a couple of times.

Here's a look at some of the more interesting films on the list.

1. The Lives of Others (2007): I'll admit that I haven't seen this film, but by all accounts its a great one. The degree to which it counts as "conservative" depends on whether you consider the message "the East German secret police were bad" to be an exclusively conservative one.

2. The Incredibles (2004): They've got a point here. As much fun and as clever as this movie is, it really does play as a Children's Theater production of Atlas Shrugged.

4. Forrest Gump (1994): A choice like this leaves me wondering if conservatives aren't so eager to see their views projected on the silver screen that it blinds them to every other consideration. Not only is Forrest Gump an awful, seeping load of soporific awfulness, it seems to be an open insult to the very notion of conservatism. Do the right-wingers who champion this film not realize that the protagonist who embodies the virtues that they champion, who served in Vietnam, ignored the self-indulgent protest movements and hedonistic self-destruction of the 60s and 70s, and became a successful entrepreneur in the Reagan era, is a FUCKING RETARD!?!? If I thought for a minute that Robert Zemeckis is capable of irony of any kind, I'd think he was intentionally mocking these people.

5. 300 (2007): Seriously? Apparently all a film has to do to qualify as a "great" conservative film is to 1. espouse a conservative ( in this case, flat-out fascist) view and 2. be popular. For all the visual audacity, 300 is crushingly stupid, heavy handed and testosterone-poisoned. Also, in case I forgot to mention EXPLICITLY FASCIST.

6. Groundhog Day (1993): I know that National Review nepotism-case and serial dullard Jonah Goldberg champions this movie as a signal statement of conservative ideals, and I guess that's a defensible view. Goldberg and company point to the fact that Bill Murray is drawn over the course of his ordeal to classic, community minded virtues. One could point out that there is nothing necessarily conservative about this, and that, in fact, modern conservatism embraces the sort of mindless acquisitiveness that Murray turns away from and that in an era of hyper-capitalism the sort of community-mindedness that the film champions is deeply leftist. One could also point out that the real goal that Murray strives for throughout the movie is fucking Andie Macdowell.

8. Juno (2007): Apparently, any film in which a pregnancy is carried to term counts as conservative.

10. Ghostbusters (1984): I love me some Ghostbusters. And there's no doubting that it is a time capsule of Reagan-era reaction. I'm okay with this because, unlike some people, I don't judge art by a political standard. Although, it is worth pointing out that christian conservatives can't be too comfortable with the notion that our world is ruled by pan-dimensional pagan deities who can be vanquished with science, but not Jesus.

12. Dark Knight (2008): It's nice to know that a movie that intentionally muddies the ideological and moral waters its characters swim in with the express motive of unsettling the audience can be seen as an unambiguous endorsement of illegal surveillance and torture if you are desperate to have your views affirmed by Hollywood. And if you drink enough paint thinner.

15. Red Dawn (1984): Re-tarded. The idea of the U.S. being occupied by a bunch of Cubans is Cold War paranoia of Birchian proportions. Then you've got the fact that the movie itself is plodding, poorly acted and flat. And, of course, the hilarious irony that one of the signal achievements of conservative film is a celebration of insurgency. Do you think that Iraqi guerrillas watch pirated Betamax editions of Red Dawn before they go out and set IEDs to blow up the foreign invaders? What's "wolverines" in Arabic?

23. United 93 (2006): It's good to know that in addition to pregnancy, all depictions of the Events of 9/11 are inherently conservative. I'm waiting for the National Review to start championing Uwe Boll's Postal in the near future.

More Awesome Lines from Awful Movies,,,

2009-02-03T22:41:00.000-08:00

"I think World War Two just started." -- Pearl Harbor

"Thomas Jefferson once shot a man on the White House lawn for treason." --Swordfish

"Whores don't get a second chance." -- Identity

"I'm your great white hunter for this trip, though I happen to be black." -- Congo

"Wait, iron pen. The ink does not describe what was in the pen, it describes what was penned. It was iron, it was firm. It was mineral, no, no, no, no. It was firm, it was adamant. It was resolved...it was resolved. 'Mr. Matlack can't offend.' Timothy Matlack was the official scribe of the Continental Congress. Calligrapher, not writer. And to make sure he could not offend the map, it was put on the back of a resolution that was transcribed, a resolution that 55 men signed. The Declaration of Independence." -- National Treasure

Awesome Lines from Awful Movies

2009-02-02T21:18:00.001-08:00

"That's a duck, not a dick," --The Long Kiss Goodnight

"Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a goddamned sexual Tyrannosaur, just like me." --Predator

"It's a free country...or it will be someday." --The Patriot

"It's not difficult to surmise how Nathan here feels about killing guards and my own proclivities are well-known and oft-lamented facts of penal lore." --Con Air

"Killing me won't bring back your goddamn honey!" --The Wicker Man (2006)

"Before you could even spell your name, I was being taught to conquer galaxies." --Battlefield Earth

"I'm a pimp... and pimps don't commit suicide." --Southland Tales

More to come...suggestions welcome...

The Wrestler

2009-02-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Martin Amis published a collection of critical writings called "The War Against Cliche," and while I find Amis to be mostly a wank-job, that phrase points at the job description for all critics worth their salt; warriors in the battle against cliche in all its forms. Cliched sentiment and narrative murders films. As soon as you as an audience member think "oh, I recognize that!" during a scene in a movie, you might as well walk right out of the theater. The suspense and uncertainty that gives film its singular emotional intensity as an art form evaporates; you know what's going to happen. Go get some milk dudes, sneak into a different theater in the multiplex, and try again.
But there are exceptions.

Occasionally, you'll have a filmmaker take it upon themselves to embrace shopworn cinematic tropes for the express purpose of making them vibrate with energy just to show how badass they are. Darren Aronofsky is one such cocky bastard.

There is not a single plot point in The Wrestler that isn't telegraphed well ahead of time. There isn't a single character who couldn't have been ordered directly from the Stock Character warehouse with no modification. In fact, the film conforms to so many failiar scenarios and recognizable characters that it seems perversely intentional on the part of Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert Siegel. They throw down the gauntlet; challenging the audience to endure scenes of miserabilism and humiliation they've seen hundreds of times before, confident in the knowledge that they have infused every warmed-over element with a richly textured humanism and a string of insights that make all of the cliches relevant. They cut open cliches to expose the beating heart within.

Mickey Rourke is central to the vitality of a film so shot through with the familiar. Some of the power of Rourke's performance comes from the knowledge an audience member brings to the movie about his fall from grace and redemption. But even if you go into the movie thinking that Mickey Rourke is a new fangled brand of tractor, it's impossible not to feel the rawness of Rourke's emotional vulnerability. He bleeds right off the screen. And on the screen. A lot. One of the preeminent subjects of the movie is the human body; its joys, its exploitation, its inevitable decline. Aronofsky films wrestling matches and strip shows with brutal frankness.

The other element in The Wrestler that elevates the cliches is Aronofsky's rapt attention to detail. He glories in the soul-crushing mundanities of strip-mall/strip-club nowhereseville, as well as the specific pathos and grace of the small time wrestling subculture. Aronofsky's unblinking camera captures insights into the deadly allure of performance and self-mythology, reaching a high point of analytic incisiveness in a scene where Rourke's washed up pro wrestler turns his job at a deli counter into an opportunity to do a little of what "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair would call "stylin' and profilin'." With all of this rich context and wisdom, the cliches begin to feel less like lazy contrivances than the heart-breaking inevitability of Greek tragedy. Call it The Greco-Roman Wrestler.

Doubt

2009-01-24T20:27:00.002-08:00

A lot of reviews of this movie criticized director John Patrick Shanley's penchant for tilted cameras and dramatic angles, arguing that in his effort to make the film adaptation of his Tony-winning play more cinematic Shanley overdoes it with self-consiciously "movie-like" shots. To me, it felt exactly right. When I think of the Catholic Church, for some phantom reason, the images in my head; stained glass, swinging mitres, big jeweled hats, are ominously looming and canted. Shanley really nails the stiffness, oppression and self-denial of institutional life in general and Catholic school life in particular. I was all set to doush Meryl Streep with Haterade, as I tend to find her a bit of a brittle showboat, but her Bronx accent and myriad grimaces worked for a character straining at the seams with repression and self-abnegation. Phillip Seymour Hoffman brings serious heat as a shady priest, and Amy Adams puts her relentless cheefulness to good use, although I still want to see her play a child-murderer or a meth-addict or something.

My Bloody Valentine 3D

2009-01-21T21:04:00.000-08:00

So Obama is president now, and he's supposedly "sprung into action" with executive orders closing Guantanamo and banning torture as well as meeting with the joint chiefs to plan Iraq withdrawl. Big Whoop. The man still hasn't addressed the most pressing issue in America: passing a law that requires all super shitty remakes of regularly shitty 70s and 80s horror films to be shot in 3D. That shit right there is change we can believe in.

Slavin' in the Celluloid Mines

2009-01-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

The 2008 movie year has been the let-down of all let-downs.

Sure, the summer movie season was probably the best of all time. I'd stack Iron Man, Wall-E and The Dark Knight against any three films from any summer release slate since Steven Spielberg first dropped the hot, sticky load of blockbuster into George Lucas' gaping maw. But the offerings since September have been fucking grim. Except for Rachel Getting Married, everything has reeked of mediocrity. And Rachel Getting Married loses points for reminding me of the superior Margot at the Wedding from last year, and for the entire, face-shatteringly great movie year that was 2007. Even the movies I haven't gotten around the seeing feel like they're going to be brutal slogs. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher or not, looks like Big Fish II: The Suckening. Revolutionary Road gives off a distinct vibe of Little Children remade on the set of Mad Men. The only movie that I'm even midly excited about seeing is The Wrestler, and even that makes me nervous, what with the stunt casting and indie-approved miseribalism. Of course, I should hold off judgement on these things until I see them, but it doesn't help that two of the most heralded recent releases, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, were exactly as middlebrow and tepid as I was fearing beforehand. The most fun I've had in a theater since Dark Knight was Frost/Nixon, and that's just because my favorite thing in the world is watching Richard Nixon (or someone playing him) bellow about the damn hippies. Here's hoping that at least one of these flicks bucks my dim expectations. If not, I'll just have to sit around waiting for Watchmen to come out.

Frost/Nixon

2009-01-05T21:21:00.000-08:00

In 1977, British TV presenter David Frost sat down for twelve hours of interviews with former President Richard Nixon. It was Nixon's first public interrogation since his resignation three years earlier. The interviews were a television sensation and remain a high point in the history of presidential journalism. Thirty years later, the interviews have lost a good deal of their pop culture relevance, raising the question of why anyone watching a movie in 2008 should care about them.

The task of making a little-remembered series of television interviews meaningful in the contemporary world falls to reliably mediocre director Ron Howard. He makes it work by keeping a tight focus on the two elements that defined the source material: Peter Morgan's Tony-winning play and the rich, lived-in performances of the two leads, who also starred together on Broadway. Frank Langella's Nixon is the best silver screen iteration of our bile-soaked 37th president since Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor. Both of those performances channel Nixon's volcanic rage as well as his crippling insecurity. Langella deserves even more credit for taking the risk of imitating Nixon's gruff, iconic voice. Grounding a demanding role like this with an impersonation easily could have slipped into broad parody, but Langella's extreme focus and effortlessly authentic body language give his Nixon a powerful vitality. Michael Sheen is given the difficult task of making an impression opposite Langella as the somewhat more reserved, less operatically twisted David Frost. Sheen gets the job done by gently revealing layer after layer of the guarded personality of Frost, a glad-handing schmoozer and former comedian whose career depends on "nailing," in Stephen Colbert's words, Nixon on the issue of Watergate. The talk show host wears a boyish grin that hides his terror and status anxiety. As the interview preparations slowly go haywire and Nixon proves unflappable in the early going, Sheen's facade begins to crack.

With powerhouse actors and a witty, insightful script to work with, Ron Howard acquits himself nicely by staying out of the way, keeping his camerawork unobtrusive, blending docudrama and well-timed close-ups. He lets the material speak for itself, and it has some interesting things to say. Besides offering a subtle but penetrating evocation of Nixon's world-annihilating neuroses, Morgan's script emphasizes the role of television in forging collective memory. The Nixon/Frost interviews might be a cultural footnote now, but they helped define Richard Nixon for a generation of Americans. If David Frost had not been equal to the task of forcing Nixon to confront the magnitude of the Watergate crimes, a president whose contempt for the constitution beggar belief may well have won a public rehabilitation with potentially disastrous consequences for American political life. Watergate was a mass of confusing details and droning congressional hearings. What made it stick to Nixon, in the end, was the squirming, tortured contrition he showed to David Frost's unblinking cameras.

Television, Frost/Nixon shows, may trivialize, but it also reveals like no other medium. Richard Nixon's political image was largely defined by the glistening of his sweaty upper lip under TV lights. One one level, this was profoundly unfair, but considering Nixon's apocalyptic resentment, inability to connect on a human level with pretty much anyone, and his pathological untruthfulness, those shiny little beads of perspiration were in many ways all one needed to know about what kind of president the man was.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-01-02T21:44:00.000-08:00

There is an early scene in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire that sums up the director's approach to the material. As a rampaging Hindu mob tears through a Muslim slum in Mumbai, one of the attackers yells out the following line, which is helpfully rendered in an English subtitle: "They're Muslim! Get them!" Now, one would assume that a club-wielding rioter crazed with religious and nationalistic hatred would 1.) know that the people he was setting on fire were not Hindus like him, and 2.) would need no verbal inducement to "get them," since he's already wielding a club and all. It's a small detail, but it speak to a distinctly remedial air that wafts off of every frame of Slumdog Millionaire. Even though the film is based on a novel by Indian writer Vikas Swarup, it still feels for a lot of the running time like a Travel Channel show about Indian slum life without the aw-shucks Caucasian host.

The film unfolds as a series of flashbacks as Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) a Mumbai slum kid, explains to torture-happy police officers how he came within one correct answer of winning the grand prize on India's version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, answering questions that stump doctors and lawyers. Each question connects, in a conveniently chronological fashion, to experiences in Jamal's life that that gave him the knowledge to answer them. These vignettes tell the story of Jamal's life growing up in on the Mumbai mean streets and his relationship with his brother Salim and Latika, the love of his life. The plot is basically 21st Century Dickens, complete with chance reunions, mysterious benefactors, and even an honest-to-goodness sinister orphanage. Unfortunately, the characters lack Dickens vividness. "Protagonist," "Brother of Protagonist", "Love Interest of Protagonist", and "Game Show Host" are all the characterization the audience can hope to expect. A mechanistic plot and thin characters, coupled with a bevy of montages and the general diffusion created by the flashback structure, ensure that nothing in Slumdog Millionaire can stand out as distinctive or interesting in the blur of action. Boyle reaches for dizzying heights of Romance, but never bothers to make a case that the romance between Jamal and Latika is worth caring about . It certainly doesn't help that the lovers spend the majority of the film apart. It also doesn't help that many of the film's plot contrivances are explained as the intervention of Destiny. Not only does this minimize the suspense regarding the fate of the lovers, it creates a burden of momentousness that the romance can't bear. What is presented as transcendent love comes across as a naked plot engine and a lazy way to explain the stray deaus ex machina. No amount of vividly filmed squalor or bright-eyed urchins can overcome the burden of an unengaging love story, an overly determined plot and a sometimes patronizing tone.

To quote Jay Sherman: "Hatchie-Matchie!"

2008-12-17T22:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a frequent topic of conversation among my friends ever since we saw, and had our balls thoroughly waxed by, The Dark Knight: how the hell do you follow that? How do you even equal, let alone top, a superhero movie that is now widely considered to be the alpha and omega of the genre? The answer, according to imdb.com, is to cast Eddie Murphy as the Riddler, Shia LaBeouf as Robin, and Rachel Weiz as Catwoman.

I'll wait for everyone to finish vomiting into their mouths.

Once you've swallowed your chunder, I hope you come around to the realization I did: this is actually brilliant. In fact, it's the only possible way to follow up The Dark Knight. Instead of dealing with the impossible-to-meet expecations set by Knight, Christopher Nolan and company are making a completely different type of movie. You expand the Batman universe, embrace the richness of life, revel in the fact that Gotham isn't just a city of corruption and despair, but of humor and love as well. You make sort of a demarcation line between the paranoia and cynicism of the Bush era and the hopeful humanism of the Obama era.

Now, there's no guarantee that this will work, but I have faith that the Nolans can make a looser, funnier Batman film that doesn't devolve into Schumacher-style leaden camp. The LaBeouf casting is really the warning sign: that little shit does not need to be in every tentpole franchise. Leave something for Jesse Bradford or somebody.

Shitty Action Film Villains Volume Three: General Francis X. Humel

2008-12-16T19:55:00.000-08:00

Pretty much the only rule of film villainy more important than "the villain can't be a glorified henchman" is this one: "the villain can't be less bad-ass than his henchmen." In The Rock, Ed Harris' rogue Marine recon officer hijacks a bunch of VX nerve gas and takes San Francisco hostage unless he gets a shit-ton of money from the government. It's a decent start, until we find out that Humel wants the money to go to the families of soldiers who died under his command...and that he's actually bluffing and has no intention of gassing Frisco. Meanwhile, his accomplishes, lead by Tony Todd, are very much willing to kill half of the people in the Bay Area, because they aim to get paid! So the supposed villain of the piece ends up getting lit up by his own flunkies because he won't launch his missiles. Some might call this a pleasantly rich characterization for an action film. Since this movie was directed by Michael Bay, I'm just going to call it lame. Also, dude's named after a line of adorable porcelain figurines. 'nuff said.

Milk

2008-12-13T19:50:00.000-08:00

Every scene in a traditional narrative film serves a purpose for the audience. This purpose may be to move the plot forward, or provide insight into a character's motivation or create atmosphere, but the mark of a really good movie is the degree to which this purpose is invisible to the viewer. You absorb the meaning of the scene through osmosis, certainty kept at bay by unpredictability inherent in watching a movie for the first time. One of the major weaknesses of the biopic as a genre is the fact that the purpose of each scene is almost always obvious from the jump. Actually watching the scene is beside the point, as soon as you know that you're watching the scene where, say, our protagonist learns how to play the instrument that will lead him to glory, or when he makes the fateful decision to run for office. If a quality movie is flesh and bone, then biopics are X-rays, nothing but bones on film.

Gus Van Sant has made a string of defiantly non-conventional films in the past ten years, from Gerry to Last Days, films that privilege mood and mundane detail over plot pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, Van Sant fails to bring this sensibility to bear on his new film about assassinated gay rights icon Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Instead, Van Sant offers up a large slice of formulaic, telegraphed biopic action. Sean Penn serves up a textured, affecting performance, but his character is given little in the way of an interior life. He is defined by his commitment to gay equality, and even the attempts to detail his relationships with boyfriends James Franco and Diego Luna come across as half-hearted gestures towards dimensions that are never investigated. Van Sant sandwiches scenes dramatizing the high points of Milk's political career; his first, unsuccessful run for the Board, his third, successful one, his campaign against Anita Bryant's attempt to ban gay teachers from California public schools, between bits of contemporary news footage. This roots Milk in a specific time and place, but also blunts the film's momentum, as does a framing device that finds Harvey Milk dictating his life story into a tape recorder. Not only does the narrative purpose of each individual scene announce itself instantly, but these scenes fail to build onto one another to create a cumulative effect. That's another common problem with biopics in general and another area where Milk fails to distinguish itself from the pack. Most biopics feature a bunch of disconnected vignettes of obvious intent that never cohere. Milk is no different, marked only by some strong performances and a few nicely naturalistic sequences. Penn in particular is brilliant. His face is usually a fist of angst and rage, but here he effortlessly assumes the skin of an affable, engagingly humane figure.

But Milk is being embraced by critics as one of the year's best films, not to mention a vitally important film, coming out in the aftermath of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Part of this because the very conventions that make Milk an exceedingly generic piece of biographical filmmaking are what also make it compelling. This is the first big, sweeping biopic about a gay activist. It's the gay Gandhi, or X, a cinematic validation of the gay rights struggle, with all the attendant airless self-seriousness. You know you've made real progress as an oppressed minority in America when you get your own big-budget encomium to a fallen martyr. So Milk's conventionality and overwrought reach for historical significance make it a celebration of the mainstreaming of the gay community.

Movie Shoot-outs. A Primer

2008-12-10T22:26:00.001-08:00

The two most common things people in movies do to each other is kiss and kill. When they kill, they tend to use guns, that most charismatic of murder weapons, and nothing is more charismatic on film than a bunch of people with guns trying to kill one another at the same time. So, if you want to make sure people watch your movie, you could do worse than throw in a few shoot-outs. This raises the question: how do you film your shoot-out? Filmmakers have offered several models to choose from.

Hyper-realism

Michael Mann's Heat is usually cited as the apotheosis of realistic film shoot-outs, and there's a reason for that. The throw-down between Robert De Niro's bank robbers and Al Pacino's LAPD in downtown L.A. is striking in its comittment to a flat, unaffected sound design and crisp editing. It doesn't hurt that a few years after Heat came out, a couple of bank robbers lit up an LA neighborhood and the news footage was almost indistinguishable from the movie. Still, Heat does not, in fact, feature the apotheosis of the hyper-realistic shootouts. Towards the end of the scene, there's a some close-ups of Pacino that make audience identification a bit too intense to qualifiy as hyper-realism. That honor goes to the climax of Christopher McQuarrie's Way of the Gun, a mind-bendingly pretensious bit of late-90s Tarantino thievery starring Ryan Philippe at his most un-interesting. The only thing to recommend it is that final shoot-out, which is notable for its studied distance and super methodical blocking; the bad guys even use the Weaver stance, for god's sake.

"Ballet of Bullets"

Nowadays, shootouts that feature gushing blood spurts and bodies flying through the air in super slow motion are synonymous with John Woo and his goddamn doves. The style was pioneered by cowboy philosopher Sam Peckinpah, specifically his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch. That was a revolutionary film; the apocalyptic final shoot-out between William Holden's gang and pretty much the entire Mexican army was a sharp break with the strong tradition of bloodless gunplay in Hollywood horse operas. The style has been so overused by now, particularly by motherfuckers from Hong Kong, that the returns have diminished drastically. At this point, the only way to make it interesting is to ratchet up the ultraviolence to stratospheric heights. And yet, it's been over a decade since Chow Yun Fat shot up a hospital full of pregnant women and old folks in Hard Boiled, and nobody has come close.

Rapidly Edited, Music-Saturated Suckfest

If you've seen the ungoldy bad shootout at the end of Enemy of the State, then you've seen the absolute worst this style of shootout direction has to offer. The Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley, are the supreme acolytles of this awful, obvious and migraine-inducing way of doing business. As in most cinematic matters, Ridley is slightly more compotent than his special needs bro. It's also the default style of pretty much every mediocre to bad former commerical director who makes action films, from the braindead likes of 3000 Miles to Graceland to the equally braindead but guility pleasureable Smokin' Aces.

Shitty Action Film Villains Volume Two: Dr. Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow

2008-12-09T21:20:00.000-08:00

All comic book movie fans kneel before the majestic awesomeness of Christopher Nolan. Dude took an iconic character who had been turned into a weak camp punchline by cinematic arch-douche Joel Schumacher and almost singlehandedly made him compelling and relevant. Big ups. Still, there is one serious gripe to be had with Mr. Nolan concerning his newjack Batman films, and that is the horrific wasting of Scarecrow as a villain. Not only did Nolan commit the cardinal sin of making a kick-ass bad guy into a glorified henchman, he didn't even let Dr. Crane bust out his whole horse-riding, sack-cloth-wearing shtick until the very end of the movie, and then only for one scene. At the end of that scene, it bears mentioning, this terrifying conjurer of nightmares is felled by a tazer-shot from Katie Holmes. No movie villain of any kind, not to mention no Batman villain of Scarecrow's stature, should be dispatched with the sort of weapon that a middle-aged secretary carries in her purse. He should also not be taken out by the goddamn girlfriend of the hero. What, Bruce Wayne's squash partner wasn't available to dose him with pepper spray? It's a shame, because not only is Scarecrow a pretty neat villain in the Batman canon, but Cillian Murphy's creepy blue eyes and bemused smirk give him a real presence that is never exploited to the fullest. Good thing Nolan learned his lesson.

Synecdoche, New York

2008-12-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

Charlie Kaufman’s produced screenplays, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, have been centered on the question of how people tell stories to each other and themselves. His directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York seeks to answer the deeper of why we tell stories in the first place. His answer has a lot to do with the defining characteristic of humanity; the consciousness of our death. The knowledge that we’re all going to die sets the parameters of our existence, fuels all of our darkest fears, and sends us scurrying about for semblances of comfort and meaning wherever they can be found. For Kaufman, any hope for solace comes in the act of artistic creation.

Synecdoche, New York is focused laze-like on the mind of Schenectady, New York theater director Caden Cotard played with lethal empathy by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a clear surrogate for the filmmaker. Cotard is plagued by mysterious ailments and a creeping decrepitude that mirror Kaufman’s own well-known hypochondria as well as the inevitable physical decline in store for us all. To distract from his illnesses and to reassure himself that his life has meaning and weight, Cotard sets about writing, casting and rehearsing a massive theatrical performance, staged in a giant warehouse that incorporates every experience in his life, from his failed marriage to artist Catherine Keener to a series of romantic failures with a string of women including box office ticket taker Samantha Morton and actress Michelle Williams.

The film serves to take the top off of Charlie Kaufman’s creative machinery and expose the gears for all to see. As Kotard struggles to make sense of his life (and death) by directing actors in dramatic reconstructions of scenes from his life, the audiences sees how and why this particular artist, and perhaps all artists, can turn pain into creative expression.

Though this movie boasts the same sort of post-modern high concept as his previous scripts, it doesn’t feature the conventional plot structure that made those films more satisfying as straightforward entertainments. Instead, Synecdoche, New York operates on the dream logic of a David Lynch film. Like Lynch, Kaufman seeks to give the audience the experience of being inside his head, but rather than present them with the images of his nightmares as Lynch does, Kaufman shows them the fuel of his nightmares, namely fear of death and obscurity and the bitter memories of anguish endured and inflicted. This approach, with its abundance of absurdity, symbolism, philosophical tangents and studious lack of narrative drive, makes Synecdoche, New York a hard film to love. However, it’s downright impossible not to be moved by its brutal frankness, trenchant insight, and superhuman ambition.

Shitty Action Film Villains Volume One: Raymond Calitri

2008-12-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

The Nicholas Cage remake of Gone in 60 Seconds is an awful movie, a Jerry Bruckheimer production directed by one of his sub-Bay minions with all the sweaty bathos and sterile action you'd expect. The only thing memorable about the film besides Angelina Jolie's blonde dreadlocks is the noteworthy lameness of the bad guy. Christopher Eccleston plays Raymond Calitri, the murderous head of an international car theft ring. The problem isn't really Eccleston, who is can convey serious menace, as he did in 28 Days Later and Shallow Grave. The problem is the stunningly lame way that the filmmakers (to loosely apply the word) decide to define Calitri. His "hook" is that...he really likes wood. There's a jaw-dropping scene in which Eccleston gives a whole schpeil about the cleanliness and elegance of wood as a building material in between threatening to kill Cage's younger brother. It's pretty much the only bit of character development Calitri gets and it stands out for the arbitrary stupidity, the naked flailing on the part of hack screenwriters to give their cardboard cutouts something to say. I imagine the room full of script doctors trying to figure out how to make their bad guy stand out as unique, getting bored, turning on the television and seeing a Full House rerun. Dave Coulier and his woodchuck puppet provided the muse of raw poetry that day.

Notes on Cinematic Awesomeness

2008-12-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

The highest achievement of cinema, in my estimation, is the provocation of visceral emotional response. I'm not talking about cheap gross outs or easy scares, but reactions provoked by films that create a sense of reality that makes the characters and scenario absolutely real for the viewer in a lightning bolt moment. I'm also a big fan of genre subversion, because the use of cliche tropes are filmic death and should be mocked into oblivion.

There is another cinematic delight of mine, something that gets me pumping my fist in delirious joy in the middle of a crowded movie theater: awesomeness. This isn't the same as a "guilty pleasure" or "so bad it's good." Awesomeness is a triumph of film craft, rather than art. Bad movies can have awesome parts, but the awesome parts cannot themselves be bad. Awesomeness is also without redeeming artistic or thematic value of any kind. Awesomeness is totally visual, and relies on the sort of high priced production design and special effects that only Hollywood films can manage, so it's rare to find in a genuinely challenging and/or non-commercial movie.

Awesomeness is a cinematic spectacle of singular destruction. It can be property destruction or physical destruction, but it must be unique, it must be audacious, and it must be executed with verve and verisimilitude. Unless all of these criteria are met, you just don't have awesomeness. There's a scene in George Romero's Land of the Dead that is textbook awesome: a soldier pulls the pin on a grenade, before he can throw it, a zombie chops his arm off with a cleaver, then chops his leg off. The soldier then falls onto his severed limb, which still holds the live grenade. He is then blown into several distinct pieces that fly across the screen. Awesome. There is another scene in Land of the Dead that attempts awesomeness, but fails. A zombie gets the drop on a soldier, who is relieved to see that it doesn't have a head. Then, the head which is actually attached to the body by a thin string of gristle, pops forward and takes a bit out of the soldier's arm. Now, the inventiveness of this scene means it could have been awesome, but the head is rendered in cartoonishly crude CGI. Zombie movies in general are chock-a-block with awesomeness, because they usually include a whole lot of creative damage done to the human body.

Explosions are generally not awesome, because they are so generic. You've seen one, you've seen them all. Car crashes are rarely awesome because they're usually shot in such a predictable series of quick cuts and overlaid with hysterical musical dubbing. The car crash/mass murder in Death-Proof is indescribably awesome, because it's a dizzying combination of singluar physical damage AND singular property damage. In fact, Quentin Tarantino is probably the most prolific generator of awesomeness currently operating. Marvin getting shot in the face in the middle of a conversation in Pulp Fiction? Awesome. Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs getting lit up by Tim Roth with about fifteen shots to the chest when you thought Roth was unconscious? Awesome. Pretty much the entirety of Kill Bill Volume 1? Awesome. Uma Thurman stepping on Daryl Hannah's freshly-plucked eyeball in Volume 2? Awesome. Remember, awesome is not the same as good, and a lot of Tarantino's awesomeness is tied in to his emotional and intellectual vapidity. It takes a certain childishness to take up the intensely powerful medium of film and use it to creatively replicate the severing of limbs and the implosion of heads.

Michael Haneke does not approve of awesomeness. In fact, he might be the least awesome filmmaker currently working. Him or Ang Lee. That doesn't mean I don't like Haneke's work. He makes some of the most intellectually engaging films out there. (Ang Lee on the other hand, produces thorazine on celluloid) In fact, there is another cinematic phenomenon that gives me a shiver is a similar if less fist-pumping way as awesomeness: anti-awesomeness.

Anti-awesomeness is when a filmmaker deliberately denies the audience a visceral thrill in such a way that makes them aware of their perhaps subconsious craving for the spectacular and asks where such feelings come from. Haneke is a master of anti-awesomeness. The final scene of David Fincher's Zodiac is a triump of anti-awesomeness.

To exhalt in awesomeness is to revel in the aesthetics of the consequence free world of graphic mayhem that movies create. Anti-awesomeness is the pointed reminder that our desire to watch the world and the human body smashed into soggy pieces comes from a sinister place. There is a magnetic beauty to a showering cascade of organ meat. We can reassure ourselves that we only find it beautiful because we know it's fake, but why the hell do we think it's beautiful in the first place? Any answer I would give would have something to do with my dreams of apocalypse, and I do appreciate filmmakers who challenge such dysfunctional narcissism. That doesn't mean I won't keep seeking out an orchestral arrangement of cartwheeling limbs. Anti-awesomeness is penance, twelve rosaries and six hail marys to purify the soul between evicerations.

Happy Go Lucky

2008-11-24T10:23:00.001-08:00

The pop culture wizards at the Onion AV Club have coined a term for a ubiquitous film character they call the "manic pixie dream girl." She is an irrepressible, carefree dervish of energy and vitality who invariably blows into the life of a dull stick-in-the-mud and awakens him to life's possiblilites. Examples included Natalie Portman in Garden State, Jennifer Aniston in Along Came Polly and Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown. To a one they are beautiful, "wacky" in a wholesome and totally non-psychotic way, and are defined completely by their need to provide life lessons for the protagonist.

The character Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in Mike Leigh's new film Happy Go Lucky could potentially serve as the Platonic ideal of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She's a relentlessly upbeat kindergarten teacher who has a compulsive need to emotionally engage with every person she meets. The wisp of a plot also calls to mind other films about grumpy men and the two dimensional quirk-factories who love them. Poppy takes driving lessons from a pathologically surly instructor played by Eddie Marsan who goes from loathing her constant chatter and unfailing pep to falling in love with her. What distinguishes Happy Go Lucky from the films of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl variety, and what makes it an ingenious critique of the genre is the fact that Hawkins doesn't blow into Marsan's life. Hawkins is the main character, and the audience is introduced to her bitter driving teacher at the same time that she is. This is a crucial shit that takes a shopworn premise into unexpected, rich new directions.

Hawkins' Sally is not a walking, talking device for the spiritual enrichment of a man. She's a walking, talking person, whose commitment to maintaining a cheerful attitude and reaching out to the people she meets are character traits that grow out of her personality organically. The film is composed largely of a series of interactions between Hawkins' sunny disposition and a parade of bitter, closed-off, wounded, or flat out insane people who are alternately befuddled, amused, enchanted and enraged by her. The reactions that Hawkins' provokes are another aspect of the film that challenges viewer expectations. No one is magically cured of their unhappiness by being around Hawkins. They interact with her the way that people tend to interact with strangers whose behavior confounds social norms, or whose outlook challenges their preconceived notions. These failures to connect serve to isolate Hawkins for the audience as a unique person, and to place her actions and mindset in the a existential context. She doesn't laugh and dance and smile at strangers to make the world a better place. She does it because it makes her life livable.