Movie Mix-Tape: Moments of Dread

The Neverending Story: "We don't even care...whether or not we care..."


28 Days Later: A rage-infected chimp banging its head against the side of its cage. Harder. And Harder.


Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: "Mr. President, we cannot allow a mine shaft gap!"


Audition: A man in a burlap sack, rolling across the floor.


Songs from the Second Floor: The assembled luminaries of a small town stand at the edge of a cliff, waiting patiently for a young girl in her Sunday best to walk over the edge as a sacrifice.


The Seventh Seal: A procession of chained, damned souls slouching across the crest of a distant hill.


Ghost World: A slack-jawed, portly young man in a Starter jacket stands in a video store, staring up at a television screen, slurping away at an inhumanly large cup of soda.


Videodrome: "Death to Videodrome, long live the new flesh."


Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Kevin McCarthy standing in the middle of a busy street, screaming his warning to the sky, while cars pass on obliviously.


Rosemary's Baby: The jolliest bunch of middle-aged Satan worshipers you've ever seen celebrating at a baby shower for their new messiah.

Street Kings

David Ayer is running the best scam in Hollywood. Over the past decade, he has been paid to make the same movie three times. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Training Day, and Dark Blue, and directs the new film Street Kings. In all of these films, a crooked but conscience-ridden decent LA cop confronts an evil superior officer who embodies the corruption of the entire department. Ayer collaborates with neo-noir madman James Ellroy in both Dark Blue and Street Kings. Both films contain many of Ellroy's trademark obsessions, but little of his memorably pungent dialogue.

There's not much at all memorable about Street Kings, which feels like a warmed-over remix of not only all of Ayer's previous films, but pretty much every cop movie made in the past 30 years. There's even a speech ripped off from A Few Good Men in there somewhere.

Keanu Reeves is his usual blockedheaded self in the role of a violent, haunted LAPD detective and member of an elite Vice unit headed by Forest Whitaker, whose ferocious scenery chewing and fantastically cheesy cop moustache make for rare bright spots. When his former partner is killed in a botched liquor store robbery, Reeves' takes to the streets to find the killers. Along the way, he employs the two-fisted, smack-first-ask-questions-later investigatory techniques common to the genre on his way to uncovering secrets that will upend his world, and which the audience has figured out before the end of the first reel.

Steet Kings is crushingly generic in almost every detail. The only points of interest are Whitaker's aforemetioned facial hair (Jay Mohr, playing another member of the Vice unit, sports an impressive porn-stache himself), an the bone-deep cyncism displayed by the filmmakers towards the LAPD at all levels. Every cop in the film is motivated by some combination of mindless aggression, greed and desire for status. The characters snarl at, shoot at and extort each other in pursuit of personal ends, culminating in a final sequence that indicts the entire civic and political structure of the city of Los Angeles. This approach would be much more provocative and interesting if it didn't come swaddled in 90 minutes of retreaded cop movie tropes. If Ayer had slowed down the relentless, vacuous plot machinations in order to soak up some of the atmosphere and culture of the city and its police force, his points might resonate as more than white noise. As it stands, the question that Street Kings poses most acutely is: why watch this thing when the stellar police procedural shows The Wire and The Shield are readily available on DVD?

Straight to DVD Disaster: Day of the Dead

Holy shit. I knew this thing was going to be bad, but I had no idea just how bad.

Day of the Dead, an in-name-only remake of George Romero's original, had been put into production after the successs of Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. It was completed a few years ago, and has been sitting on a shelf since then, until its uncerimonous dumping onto DVD rental shelves this month. I'm surprised they didn't just set fire to the celluloid for the insurance money.

Sporting CGI effects last seen in the first Resident Evil game for Playstation and a script seemingly hammered out by precocious chimps, Day of the Dead is jawdroppingly awful, and not even in an entertaining way. Just sad. No matter what the title says, this isnt't a remake of Day of the Dead, but a remake of Planet Terror done by special ed middle schoolers.

My favorite bit of supergenius thinking on the part of the "filmmakers" was this nugget: since fast moving zombies were awesome in the Dawn of the Dead remake, then SUPERFAST MOVING zombies should be SUPER awesome! For the record, it is decidedly not super awesome. In order to make the zombies appear to move superfast, they speed up the film Benny Hill-style, which doesn't really add to the scare factor so much as cry out for the addition of Yakety Sax to the soundtrack. Someone must have put that together on youtube by now.

2007 Movie Mix Tape Part One:

Grindhouse: zombies exploding against the front fender of a souped up auto wrecker.



There Will Be Blood: Danie Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) gnawing on a hunk of cold steak, staring at Eli Sunday and plotting his vengeance.



Zodiac: the point of view of a moving vehicle, rows of flag-draped suburban homes, 4th of July fireworks crackling in the sky.



Superbad: a cavaclade of cartoon dicks.



Southland Tales: I've got soul, but I'm not a solider...



The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: a locomotive slowing to a halt in front of a barricade manned by Jesse James (Brad Pitt), wreaths of smoke wafting up his legs.



Before the Devil Knows You're Dead: Charles Hanson (Albert Finney) staggering out of his son's hospital room and into a white light that slowly envelopes him.


Hot Fuzz: A minature church steeple meets a human jawbone in...slow..motion!


The Darjeeling Limited: "Champs Elysee," a rolling train, and the green Indian countryside.


No Country For Old Men: A blank morning sky, an empty, stoney field, and tucked into the corner of the screen, a single row of impotent barbed wire.

2007 DVD Review: The Hunting Party

This film is based on an Esquire piece by journalist Scott Anderson called What I Did on my Summer Vacation. It's the true story of a bunch of western journalists who, while hanging out in post-war Sarajevo decided on a lark to try and capture fugutive war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and came surprisingly close to succeeding. There's even a little epilogue at the end of the movie pointing out what sections of the film are based in fact. Those are also the sections of the film that don't suck like a Hoover.

The Hunting Party is an indictment of the entire studio filmmaking process. The source material practically screams out for a film adaptation. But it doesn't have the sort of "arc" and the characters don't fit the models that conventional screenwriting demands. Instead of a bunch of friends getting in over their heads, writer/director Richard Shepard creates protagonists that are recognizable to anyone who has watched more than ten movies in their lives. Richard Gere plays a former TV war correspondent fallen on hard times who reunites with Terrance Howard, his former cameraman who has gone on to better things, but still yearns for the excitement of his war zone days with Gere. They are joined on their quest to capture a fictionalized Karadzic by a green kid fresh from journalism school played by Jesse Eisenberg. Instead of going after Karadzic for the valid reasons of splitting a five million dollar reward and helping bring a war criminal to justice, Shepard invents a ridiculous backstory in order to up the dramatic stakes. You see, during the war Gere fell in love with a Bosnian muslim woman who was murdered by the Karadzic character's militia, WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH GERE'S CHILD! Seriously, the bad guy is a fucking Bosnian Serb war criminal: you know, rape camps, mortar attacks on village markets, Srebrenica? Are those not enough bad acts to make a film villian hatable? It's the Titanic priniciple in action: no matter how many extras get killed by a given war/natural disaster, the audience is only going to care if one of the victims is in love with the main character. All of these elements, the friend dynamic between the two lead characters, the tortured backstory, the ginned-up action sequences, they are all there because Hollywood dogma has determined that you can't have a movie without them. But since pretty much every movie that comes down the pike has these elements, they end up feeling generic and make it harder to appreciate the parts of the film that actually happened. It doesn't take long for the cliches to pile so high that any sense of reality is buried underneath them.

Score: 5.0

MYOFNF #13: The Conformist (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

You know that scene in a lot of art-house type movies where a man meets a woman for the first time, they say maybe three words to each other, and then they're instantly making out? I don't get that.

Anyway, this is a film about a young Fascist in 30s Italy who wants to prove his bona fides to the government by killing his radical college mentor. There's some striking shot composition and a challenging flashback structure, but it left me mostly cold, although I think that may have been the point. The main character is essentially forcing himself to destroy his emotional life as a sacrafice to the state. The problem is that the motivation of his mania for conformity is never really made clear. Then again, I'm the type of dunce who doesn't get it when people who just met start fucking immediately in a non-porn context, so don't go by me.

MYOFNF #12: I am Cuba (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

Ya'll know I'm a big fan of long tracking shots, and this Soviet-Cuban co-production from the early days of the Castro regime is made up almost entirely of long tracking shots, and hypnotically powerful ones at that. What's interesting about this film is that it is a piece of pro-Castro propaganda, but at the same time the vignettes meant to illustrate the injustice of the Batista years are genuinely emotionally involving. Even though Kalatozov's vision is political, he focuses intently on his human subjects. I'm amazed that a movie made by the bloody Soviet Union ten years after the death of Stalin can grasp of how to make a film with a political agenda while still creating moments between people that feel genuine. Yet, every chuckleheaded Hollywood knob who has tackled the Iraq war has ended up creating a bloodless, didactic mess. Hopefully Kimberly Pierce's Stop-Loss will break that trend.

2007 DVD Review: Southland Tales

This movie pissed me off. Yeah, I understand that the proper reaction to Richard Kelly's colossal fiasco is supposed to be either bemused admiration for the director's mad vision or unabashed admiration for a misunderstood classic. Fuck that. Richard Kelly doesn't get a free pass to waste millions of dollars and thousands of feet of film just because he's got such a goddamn baroque vision that he can't be bothered to make something coherent or vital. Given the resources and concept at hand, Kelly could have easily made a compelling, provocative film that pointedly confronts the pathologies of American war culture. Instead, we get two and a half hours of muddled turgidity because if it made any sense, it wouldn't be deep, man. Hell, I could even forgive the incoherence if the whole thing weren't so damned leaden. Kelly claims that you've got to watch this thing a bunch of times (and presumably read the massive graphic novel prequel) in order to "get" it, but who would want to slog through most of this stuff again? For a movie that attempts to immerse the viewer in a slightly tweaked reality where nuclear attacks on American soil have turned the country into a sex-crazed, decaying police state, the proceedings are notably joyless. The pacing is slack and disjointed, the actors all seem to be whacked out on thorazine, and even the action scenes limp along like sick dogs. It's a wonder that these zombies can even find the strength to lift a gun, let alone fire one.

This problem is due to the fact that there are two movies here having a subtextual battle royale for the soul of Kelly and the viewer. One movie is a knowingly ridiculous sci-fi parody/satire, sort of a politically-charged Buckeroo Bonzai (when the Rock starts talking about sending monkeys through a tear in the fourth dimension, I was on the lookout for John Lithgow to pop up, yelling about the Overthruster). The other movie is a mopey, abstract metaphysical rumination in the vein of Kelly's first film, Donnie Darko. The two visions clash like Shiites and Sunnis. The intentionally goofy science fiction twists make it impossible to take the existential mutterings seriously, and the lethargic pace and solemn tone drain all of the fun out of the zany fourth dimensional monkey shenangians. Either film could have worked, and that is why watching Southland Tales pissed me off so much: there's a whole lot of potential squandered here. Kelly is attuned to America's cultural sickness like few directors are, and there are frustratingly brief glimpses of the masterpiece that could have been that pop up once a reel or so. Most notably, there's the oft-referenced musical number where Justin Timberlake, as a disfigured Iraq war vet, lip synchs to a Killers song while surrounded by dancing pin-up girls. Most reviews point the scene, either condeming it for being a pointless non sequitur, or praising it for being so unexpected and memorable. It is, indeed, a memorable non sequirtur, but it's also one of the most poignant dramatizations of the mind-space of a damaged Iraq war veteran I've seen since that imperial horrorshow began. Timberlake moves confidently across an arcade, in a sea of shimmying sex kittens, his posture full of bravado and laciviousness, undercut by the blood on his shirt, the lyrics to All These Things That I've Done blaring on the soundtrack, and the haunted look behind his eyes. This moment captures the aggressive drive to assert masculinity that propels young men to prove themselves on the fields of battle, as well as the regret and self-loathing that comes after seeing what really happens there. Kelly seems to think that if he can hit a sweet note every half hour or so, he'll keep the audience from walking out and they'll leave the theater at the very least giving him props for his vision. We can't hold the hamfisted voiceover, the failed thefts from David Lynch, or the deadend plot lines against him: that's the price you pay for basking in the challenging genuis of Richard Kelly. Well, I do hold all the dumb stuff in the movie against him. In fact, I hold the transcendently great moments against him, too: with more disicipline and focus, Kelly could have put together a powerful zeitgeist-channelling classic. Instead, Kelly just threw everything he had against the celluloid and filmed what stuck.

MYOFNF #11: The Wages of Fear (dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

Watching this intense existential suspense film about vagbond ex-patriates in a South American backwater driving highly unstable nitroglycerine through dangerous mountain passes, one thing that jumps out is the brilliant use of sound. While most films made during this period (and most made nowadays, actually) tend to punch up moments of tension with a bombastic or manipulative score, The Wages of Fear creates unbearable tension with no external soundtrack whatsoever. It's amazing that so few filmmakers have figured out what Henri-George Clouzot knew in the early fifties: silence, or the rhythmic beats of nature, heightens tension far more than an artificial musical accompanyment. This film is chock full of rivetting sequences and its definitely one of the most purely entertaining film I've watched for this project, but its also filled with clear-eyed commentary on capitalism, masculinity, and death.

Doomsday

According to the bible, "ye know neither the day nor the hour" when the end shall come. Civilization could perish in the rising sea levels of global warming, the explosion of a supervolcano under Yellowstone park, a bird flu pandemic, and, maybe, just maybe, a zombie uprising. One thing is for certain: if Hollywood is to be believed, whoever survives the apocalypse will be wearing a mohawk an assless chaps. Neil Marshall's Doomsday takes its visual cues from a bevy of earlier, better films about the end of the world. The mascara-wearing biker punks seem to have stepped directly off of the set of a Mad Max sequel, maybe after a stop off with the folks from Escape from New York.

The recycling don't stop with the costumes and set direction. The plot, characters and action set pieces are all lifted wholesale from previous entries in the End Times cinema pantheon. For ease of use, the all cliches have been highlighted. In the near future, Scotland has been quarantined for a generation to prevent the spread of a deadly, highly contagious virus. When the same virus breaks out in London, a hotshot loner cop who plays by her own rules (Rohna Mitra) is ordered by corrupt and untrustworthy government officials to lead a ragtag crew of military misfits into Scotland in search of a cure. Once there, she is captured and tortured by a gang of Sex Pistols concertgoers, and is eventually forced to fight to the death before a crowd of cheering spectators.

Beyond the distractingly derivative formula, there's some annoyingly good stuff in Doomsday: annoying because it makes it impossible to write the movie off completely. Marshall, who directed The Descent, one of the best horror films of the past twenty years, knows how to put together an action sequence that is faced paced while still being coherent. (Michael Bay, take notes) There are moments of deadpan humor and cheekily irreverent gore that stay with you. One scene in particular; a combination barbeque pit/mosh pit celebration put on by the aforementioned Sex Pistols concertgoers, reaches delirious heights of tastlessness and hysteria. The themes of plague, urban overcrowding and government indifference are all off-the-moment, but the movie doesn't stay in one place for long enough for any of these things to really sink in. Instead, the film skips from one uninspired scene to another before ending with an arbritary car chase climax straight out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Doomsday shows a few flashes of the visual deftness that made The Descent an instant classic, but most of the running time wishing Lord Humungus or Master Blaster would show up and kill everybody.

Funny Games

The question that arises while watching Michael Haneke's thriller Funny Games is: why? Not, 'why make a movie about sadistic young home invaders tormenting an upper class family that indicts the audience for watching it and seeks to make the proceedings as repellent as possible?' That's the question that arises while watching Haneke's original German-language version of Funny Games from 1997. This time, the question is: 'why make your English-language film debut with a shot-for-shot remake of your most controversial film?' By way of an answer, I offer two words: George Sluizer.

In 1988, George Sluizer directed a thriller in his native Netherlands called Spoorloos. It's a chilling tale of sociopathology and free will that features one of the most haunting finales in genre film history. It made such an impression on the film community that Hollywood producers threw a bunch of money at Sluizer to make an American remake, 1994's The Vanishing. This film, unlike the original, has an ending that is haunting only for its insulting stupidity. Everything that made the original a memorable experience was obliterated in the name of delivering a "happy" conclusion that would leave audiences mollified. Haneke's remake is a ringing declaration to American film producers and film goers: he ain't going out like that.

Beneath the conventional thriller trappings, Funny Games is about the nature of film representations of violence and the ceaseless demand for it in movies. It was a relevant theme for European audiences in the mid-90s, and its even more pertinent for American film viewers who have made the Saw franchise a cultural phenomenon. Haneke makes his point in the most direct way possible: the vile tormentors turn at several points to face the camera and address the audience, making the viewer an accomplice in the on-screen horrors. The technique is preachy and self-righteous, but it's hard to criticize Haneke too much because of the rigor of his approach and the indelible power of his restrained, elegant shot compositions. Most filmmakers seeking to criticize film violence end up wallowing in hypocrisy by filling the screen with the same bloody images the director decries. Haneke mostly keeps the violence and nudity, you know, the "good stuff," that we as an audience have paid to see, off screen. What he leaves in front of the camera is all of the personal pain, terror and anguish that inevitably accompanies violence in real life, but which is usually left out of film depictions of it. These scenes are hard to watch, but Haneke's refusal to cut away from such moments of distress make them hypnotizing, and shamefully compelling. The viewer finds, to their great unease, that even the nasty aftermath of bloodshed holds its own dark allure. Haneke's strength as a filmmaker is not so much his worldview as his Kubrickian mastery of spaces and framing, which make even his most heavyhanded intellectual experiments, of which Funny Games is surely one, sickly fascinating. Haneke might be a prude, or he might be a visionary, but one way or another his films pack a wallop, and he's here to stay.

2007 DVD Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has all the hallmarks of a 70s-style revisionist western: a langorous pace, moral ambiguity, an emphasis on anti-heroes, and hyper-awareness of the natural world. Also, like most revisionist westerns, it takes as its subject the death of the frontier, but does so in an ingenious fashion. While movies like Heaven's Gate trace the decline of American freedom to the capitalist commodification of western spaces, director Andrew Dominik, working from Ron Hansen's novel, focus on the culture of the West: according to these filmmakers, the West began to die when it started to become self-aware. This point is illustrated by the two main characters. Jesse James (Brad Pitt), the aging folk hero trapped by the expectations of his own legandary exploits, and Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), James' proto-stalker who is obsessed with James while also yearning to take his place. In both cases, the mythology of the western outlaw has overpowered either character's ability to really claim the freedom offered by the expanses of the frontier.

Even though Affleck was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor, the movie truly belongs to him. Pitt is excellent as James; he coaxes layers of melancholy, playfulness and savagery out of the part, but when the screen goes black it's Robert Ford who resonates. His pathological need for validation and acknowledgment is a harbinger of our modern sickness of celebrity worship. Afflec fawns and stammers over James whenever they interact, but he also loathes James for occupying the exhalted position he himself craves more than air. It's a powerful performance, and it actually contributes to one of the film's chief weaknesses. The film spends two hours dramatizing the push-pull of adoration and revulsion between the two men before the titular murder occurs. That leaves little more than half an hour to rush through the rest of Robert Ford's life. The coda feels hurried, with intriguing notions of growth, regret and the birth of celebrity culture gestured towards, but mostly left unexplored. It also undercuts the power of an otherwise intensely poignant final scene. Nevertheless, the raw humanity of the performances coupled with a vibrantly lyrical visual pallette makes The Assassination of Jesse James one of the most well crafted and memorable studio films of the last few years.

Score: 8.5

MYOFNF #10: El Topo (dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

This film isn't so much a part of the world cinema canon of greatness, but it is one of the very first "cult" movies, and it's in Spanish, and it's crazy as hell, so I thougt I'd check it out. I'm glad I did. It's the story of a wandering gunslinger in a mystical Old West whose search for meaning leads him to gunfights with shamen and cohabitation with underground mutants.The phrase "they don't make up like they used to" seems intensely appropriate. Every frame pulses with the revolutionary thrust of the late-sixties counterculture. The only person making movies this defiantly abstract is David Lynch, but El Topo has a nakedly earnest philosophical agenda that Lynch, with his willful obscurism, would never display. I don't think anyone could make a film like El Topo today without being mocked into oblivion. Writer-director-star Alejandro Jodorowsky takes notions of spiritual corruption and rebirth, social injustice and redemption, far too seriously for the current climate of ironic detachtment and gentle ennui. Movies nowadays start from the premise that grand cosmic enlightenment is beyond our understanding, and all an artist can do is record the sad foibles of us terminally blinkered humaniods. The only exception that comes to mind is Darron Aronosfsky, whose Jadorowsky-reminiscent 2006 film The Fountain was, in fact, mocked into oblivion. I haven't seen that one yet, or Jadorowsky's follow up to El Topo, The Holy Mountain, but the startingly visual power, potent allegory and, most of all, the sheer uninhibited audacity of the thing has made me eager to check them out. There's something exhilerating about watching a director open his heart and let out a primal scream of existential yearning, with no regard at all for the snickering of the hipsters at the cool kids table.

Diary of the Dead

It's a certifiable tragedy that George A. Romero, creator of the modern zombie genre, can't get a decent budget greenlit in Hollywood. While Michael Bay is given two hundred million dollars to shoot digital robots fighting, then edits the action so aggressively that you can't even tell what's happening, one of the finest horror directors of all time is forced to scrounge for nickels in order to fund his vital, provocative tales of the living dead. More than any other director, George Romero is the man who made horror films relevant. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and his new film, Diary of the Dead are remarkable for their social insight and thunderous gut-level power. Yet, if there is one problem with his films, especially his last two, it's a claustraphobic lack of scope. For this, Romero is much less to blame than the nearsighted bean counters who won't give him the proper finacial backing. His films always hint at a vastly ambitious vision that is constrained by a paltry budget.

Romero's new film ignores the timeline of his earlier zombie films, which posit a chronology of apocalypse in which zombies slowly, from movie to movie, gain control of the earth's surface. Diary of the Dead reboots, with the first corpses rising from the dead in the present day, recorded by the vast array of digital technology of the present day. All of Romero's zombie films have used the living dead as a metaphor to critique contemporary society. For Diary, Romero's target is the age of viral media and the American compulsion to record our every action. In the film, a group of University of Pittsburgh film students find themselves smack in the middle of a zombie rising that threatens to destroy civilization as they know it. While they trek across Pennsylvania in search of safe haven, they also record everything they experience, for upload onto the internet. Like this year's hit Cloverfield, all of the action is shown from the perspective of the protagonist's camera.

As Dawn of the Dead is a commentary on the pathologies of consumer society, and 2004's underrated Land of the Dead deals with issues of political fearmongering and the exploitation of the global south, Diary of the Dead has it's satirical sights set squarely on the Youtube digital media world we inhabit. The film student heroes are far more interested in recording the horrors of zombie armageddon than helping their fellow men, or even each other, survive. Some have criticized the film for its heavy handed approach to the subject matter, with the action periodically interrupted by ponderous voice overs from one of the film students commenting on the anethestizing nature of media and the sick need to witness suffering. Taken in the context of the film, these segments make sense. After all, the whole idea is that the audience is watching a film made by the characters, and one of Romero's many targets of critique is the pretensious narcissism of self-styled artistes like the subjects. Of course they would feel compelled to beat the audience over the head with their shimmering insights into human nature. It's not as though Romero doesn't have a track record of subtle but powerful satire. Almost all of the subversiveness of Dawn of the Dead, for example, comes from shot selection and the ironic juxtaposition of walking corpses shambling through a shopping mall. There's not a leaden speech to be found.

The first-person point of view camera offers another advantage: Diary of the Dead is much scarier than any Romero zombie film since Night. There's a sense of dread and identification with the perspective of the camera operator that makes every blood-thirsty ghoul seem that much more terrifying. For this same reason, Romero's trademark dry humor has a stronger impact as well, and Diary is also his funniest film in years. Because the camera operators are film students wielding expensive equiptment, there's a fluidity and grace to the shots that other movies using a similar approach, like the abovementioned Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, lack. This film is a lot less likely to make someone watching it feel seasick.

As enjoyable as Diary of the Dead is to watch, and as incisive as Romero's insight remains, there are still moments during the film where an audience member can't help but wonder what the man might have done with more money and time. The special effects are mostly convincing, but the canvas Romero paints on is frustratingly small. Won't someone cut this man a check already?

Score: 8.3

MYOFNF #9: Z (dir. Costa-Gavras, 1968)

This film is based on the true story of a 1963 political assassination in Greece that served as sort of a practice run for the right-wing military that eventually overthrew the elected government in 1967. There are a few notable things about this movie, which I dug a great deal. For one, it's a penetrating examination of the psychology and sociology of bureaucracy. Watching the corrupt military officers cover up their involvement in the killing of a pacifist politician with subtle social pressure and straight-forward indoctrination, you get a vivid idea of how these same officers were able to brush aside the civilian government and rule directly. Also, for a film primarily concerned with politics, there is a wounded beating hear in the middle of it. A few poignant scenes with the grieving wife of the slain politician go a long way towards humanizing the proceedings. In these moments, New Wave-inspired flash cutting does a great job of illustrating how memory works; fragments, images, moments from the past flash across our minds prompted by random sights, sounds and smells. For a political thriller, there's an intense attention to human detail going on here. In that respect, Z is a more complete film than a lot of politically-conscious movies from the same era that are less grounded in real events.

In Bruges

Watching the trailer for In Bruges for the first time a few months ago, I was taken back to the halcyon days of the mid-nineties, when every independent filmmaker with a Panaflex and a squib pack was ripping off Quentin Tarantino. It was a time when cinemas and video shelves where chock-a-block with films featuring wise-cracking criminals killing each other to ironically counterpointed pop songs. At the time, I was in my early teens, and like a lot of knuckle-headed violence junkies at that time, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were my cinematic lodestars, so even though these knockoffs were almost universally terrible, I made it my mission to watch them all. These films tended to have ridiculously long titles, like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (Kiefer Sutherland's only trip behind the camera) and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead. These films aped Tarantino's irony-soaked affect and casual violence while failing to reproduce his wit or visual ingenuity. Watching these films was punishing, but in the long run, it was good for me and for the independent film business. It was such overkill that the audience and filmmakers got sick of the whole quip-spewing hitman genre. Of course, it helped that Quentin Tarantino himself went into Stanley Kubrick's one-movie-every-five-years semi seclusion.

When I actually sat down to watch In Bruges, though, the mid-nineties Quentin rip offs were the last thing on my mind. Writer-director Martin McDonagh, an Irish playwright whose short film Six Shooter won an Oscar in 2006, has crafted an antidote to the breezy, cynical treatment of violence that the Tarantino era helped usher in to cinema. Yes, the film is about garralous, funny hitmen, but its approach toward the bruising reality of violence is serious and powerful. McDongagh is sort of the anti-Tarantino: the gangsters in his film don't kill people with a quip and a fast food reference. They have blood on their hands and they can't get it off.

That isn't to say that In Bruges isn't funny: it's often hilarious. Colin Farrell plays a rookie killer hiding out with partner Brendad Gleeson in the eponymous medieval Belgian town after a botched assassination in London. The first reel of the film largely consists of Ferrell chaffing against the constraints of his provincal setting in amusing fashion; he plays the cocky, Tarantino-style smart-arse with convincing aplomb. As the film progresses, Farrell's character begins to deepen as the truth about his London screw up is revealed and guilt begins to gnaw away at his soul. Within a single scene, Farrell swings from charming rogue to angst-wracked basket case. As Farrell slowly loses it amidst the gothic carnivalesque of Bruges, it dawned on me that this was a different type of hitman comedy: one about the psychic toll of violence. The film's power also comes from richly-detailed characters and the nearly surreal setting. All of those spires and flying buttresses and crenellated towers harken back to a pre-modern time in which sin and its repercussions permeated the European worldview. It's a fitting environment for a guilt-plagued killer to come to terms with his actions, his character, and his capacity for change.

Score: 8.0

2007 DVD Review: Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach continues his dogged commitment to being the bracing, realist yin to friend and collaborator Wes Anderson's gentle, whimsical yang. Rushmore is a recreation of adolescence from the perspective of adulthood. Moments of pain and growth are ordered and executed with the affection and meticulousness of a Max Fischer production. Nothing stings too bad because Anderson and his audience surrogates are looking backward, and the pain of that time has been softened by time and the knowledge that things turned out alright in the end. Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, on the other hand, is a representation of adolescence in the present tense. All of the powerlessness and confusion and this-problem-is-the-end-of-the-world angst that gets blurred over time is painfully, brutally present. Anderson's carefully staged theatrical shots are replaced by the jogs and pans of a handheld camera. His teenaged protagonists experience desire not in a capital-r Romantic fashion, but with the squirmy, flushed eroticism of burgeoning testosterone levels.

Wes Anderson's next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, deals in a his patented magical, nostalgia-drenched way with the topic of upper class New York family dysfunction. Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding responds with a similar tale, but laces every frame with barbed wire.

When Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son Claude vist her estranged siste Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to attend her wedding to moustachioed slacker Malcolm (Jack Black), a lifetime of resentment, hurt, and mistrust bubble to the surface. Actually, bubble is the wrong word: more like come to a rolling boil. What's remarkable about the film is just how fraught practically every line of dialogue is. Every exchange of wordsreveals facets of the relationship between the characters and unspoken personal history. More painful to watch is the way that language is used as a weapon by all parties, with each interaction a zero-sum battle in which there will always be a winner and a loser. The whole film practically vibrates with versimilitude. It's so real, and the relationships depicted are so poisonous, that the viewer can't help but bring their own memories of familial angst to the proceedings. You're left feeling nauseous, especially since there is so little hope of healing or true reconciliation between these people; their wounds are too deep and picked-over, their character flaws are too intractable. Margot, in particular, is so trapped in a morass of solipism and self-pity that she can't reach out of herself to connect with anyone around her on equal terms. She's sort of a female version of Daniel Plainview: people essentially repulse her, and are only useful to her if she can be certain of her absolute control over them. If her sister, or her husband, or her son attempt to exert any autonomy or to call her out on her terminal narcissism, she wields cutting remarks like Plainview swings a bowling pin.

This film was largely ignored by critics and audiences upon its release last winter, but is not because it isn't great: the level of realism, the vividness of the characters and the richness of the dialogue all place it in the top tier of 2007 releases. I think Margot largely failed to draw raves because it's just too uncomfortable and dark to watch for most people. In some ways, it's darker than Oscar winners and certified downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Those films revel in philosophical bleakness and unflinching examination of evil, but their period trappings and genre plot mechanisms serve to comfort the viewer. As awful as it is to watch Anton Chigurh press his captured bolt gun to someone's forehead, it's not something that most people can relate to their daily lives. Margot at the Wedding, on the other hand, is a portrait of misanthropy and emotional trauma that feels queasily real to anyone who has ever experienced a disasterous family get together. It cuts too close to the bone.

Score: 9.2

MYOFNF #8: 8 1/2 (dir. Frederico Fellini, 1963)

Fellini's hallucinatory semi-autobiographical film is ostensibly about movie making, but it's really about a dude (modeled on Fellini) who can't stay faithful to his wife, and his struggles to find out why and what will make him happy. The backdrop of the film industry offers some rich symbolism and imagery. It certainly illustrates why Fellini was so keen on the carnivalesque: its a pretty close metaphor for a film set. The film contains some of the most gorgeous black and white cinematography I've ever seen, and some of the imaginary set pieces are striking and memorable. I'm still not a huge fan of this style of head-buried-six-feet-up-your-own-ass filmmaking, though.

David Luhrssen: Champion of the Middlebrow

Let's get something straight from the jump: the Oscars are a joke, a ridiculous parade of self-important meat-puppets stroking each other off in a frenzy of ego and delusional granduer. The Academy Awards have as much to do with recognizing excellence in American film as the invasion of Iraq did with creating democracy in the Middle East. Nevertheless, I always find myself getting invested in the nomination process and I inevitably watch the whole turgid mess on Sunday. Partly, I enjoy handicapping the winners in the same way I like fantasy baseball and political prognostication, but I'll admit that I root for my favorite films when they're nominated and am usually somewhat annoyed when they fail to win. Much as I find myself secretly dreaming that a Barack Obama presidency might (just might) lead to a mass political movement for social democratic reform at home and abroad, the hidden, starry-eyed idealist in me hopes that Oscars being awarded to excellent films will result in more people demanding excellence in film. Unlikely? No doubt. But goddamn it, a motherfucker can dream, can't he?

That's why shit like Shepherd Express film critic David Luhrssen's article Embracing the Dark Side: Have the Oscars Left the Public Behind? chaps my ass. In the piece, Luhrssen shits all over what is without a doubt the strongest slate of Best Picture nominees in decades for being too dark and challenging. Instead of downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Luhrssen suggests that the Academy should have nominated American Gangster and Charlie Wilson's War, which he calls "engaging films on important subects, dramatizing reality through memorable storytelling and brought to life by stars that light the screen with charisma." Besides sounding like an Us Weekly review, this article is notable for just how incredibly wrong it is about everything. From the premise to the most basic facts, there's nothing but dumb all the way down to the bedrock here.

To start with, Luhrssen's essential premise: that movies like American Gangster are superior to ones like No Country because they are just as "serious" in their content but are more engaging to a popular audience, is astoundingly wrong. On the merits, No Country is a vastly better film than American Gangster. Luhrssen claims that Gangster has "something to say about the challenges and ambiguities of politics and society while packaging (its) message entertaingly." On the "entertainment" tip, American Gangster has its moments, but the film as a whole is unfocused and riddled with crime film cliche. As for the claims of being a relevant commentary on the contemporary world, the only real stab the film makes for social context is a repeated and insanely lazy trope. Whenever the filmmakers want to illustrate the realities exisiting outside of the world of the film, they show one of the main characters watching television news reports on exactly what they want the audicence to have in mind. It's cheap, easy, and fails to weave the social context into the lives of the characters. Luhrssen also makes the bizarre claim that No Country and Blood are "not entertaining in any normal sense." This kind of shit should be grounds for impeachment. Does this mean that Luhrssen watched Javier Barden and Josh Brolin play cat and mouse in the deserted streets of a Texas border town or Daniel Day-Lewis navigate the thunderous majesty of the Little Boston oil derrick fire and wasn't entertained? If that's true, I honestly don't know what to say to the man. If he did find those scenes entertaining but ended up forgetting about it because the rest of the films bummed him out, I do know what to say to him: you're lame.

My central objection to Luhrssen's premise is his apparently belief that the role of the Academy Awards should be to celebrate the joys of big budget, star-studded period pieces that are embraced by audiences. This has certainly been the MO of the Oscars until recently, and what has it resulted in? A parade of "Academy Award Winning" films that will be forgotten within a decade. Does anyone really think that A Beautiful Mind or Forrest Gump or Crash or Gladiator will live on in the minds of anyone a generation from now who isn't watching them on basic cable at that very second? If we're going to go to the trouble of staging a grindly-long Hollywood circle jerk every year, I say we might as well use the opportunity to expand the horizons of what constitutes a "great" movie. It isn't just production value, star charisma and "grand scope" (whatever the hell that means). It's courage and vision that make films "great", and that's just what this year's "dark" nominees have and what pedestrian shit like American Gangster sorely lacks. Yes, film is a profit-maximizing engine and a popular source of entertainment. But it's also an art form, and art is at its most vital when it challenges the viewer. Challenging films don't tend to win huge audiences, but they do stand the test of time. People remember the films that stick with them, that haunt them like that shot of Tommy Lee Jones' eyes as the screen goes black at the end of No Country. People also remember Oscar winners, if only because it gives them an edge playing Trivial Pursuit. When you look back at those winners in years to come, wouldn't you rather think "damn, that's a great movie, I need to see that again" than "wow, that fucking thing won an Oscar?" Yes, it's meaningless, but in a culture that is obsessed with convienence at all costs, including the destructon of the planet, any current that moves us as a people in the direction of embracing the difficult and the thought-provoking is to be encouraged.

MYOFNF #7: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (dir. Werner Herzog, 1972)

Werner Herzog is considered the foremost auteur of obsessive personalities and Aguirre, is considered the centerpiece of his cinematic vision. Watching the film, I was surprised to notice how little Klaus Kinski's title character registers. This isn't a tightly focuses study of monomania like There Will Be Blood. Herzog's camera spends much less time zooming in on Kinski's rebellious conquistador than it does covering the hostile, wild tangle of Amazonian jungle surrounding him and his band of adventurers. Herzog is conveying to the audience the terrifying vulnerability and giddy freedom that comes with struggling through an untrammeled wilderness. Aguirre's individual psychology is less interesting than the universal reaction to such an environment. It's sort of like what No Country For Old Men would look like if Llewllyn Moss never made it back to the trailer park with his loot, but rather spent the film running around the scrub brush of West Texas.

MYOFNF #6: The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

This movie hits me right where I live in terms of subject matter: the inevitable horror of death and the essential unknowability of god, and some of the imagery, like the train of flagellates, especially that closing shot of the train of shackled, doomed pilgrims being led by to their demise, is striking and memorably. Unfortunately, the arch style and overtly symbolic trappings (Max Von Sydow really does play a chess match against Death, who does, indeed, wear a big-ass black cloak) mute some of the horror. The whole business is a little more buttoned down than I tend to like: most of the sequences felt more like theatrical set-pieces than immersive realities. I understand that this is a general condition of most films made before the mid-60s, and that the Swedes aren't known for their free-wheeling ways, but the austerity undercut the terror of death. How can you fear for the loss of life when life itself seems to consist of a parade of stiff, somber interactions? The real power of the film lies in its refusal to offer the audience, who is just as thirsty as their surrogate, Von Sydow, for absolute knowledge of their fates, any sort of relief from their maddening ignorance.

MYOFNF #5: The 400 Blows (dir. Francois Truffaut, 1959)

I normally don't like movies that feature child protagonists: they're either really precocious and hyper-verbal and therefore unrealistic, or they're realitically monosyllabic and therefore boring. The teen protagonist of Truffaut's first film, Antoine Doinel, strikes just the right mixture of sullen stoicism and bright-eyed youthful enthusiasm. Watching this film, it's easy to see how Truffaut almost single-handley jumpstarted the French New Wave with it: the subject matter and especially the strong directorial vision behind the camera radically break from the conventions of filmmaking until that point. Not only was it revolutionary to film a movie entirely from the point of view of a child, but Truffaut's camera work fully embraces that point of view. This film ushered in the era of the auteur with restless camera movement and nakedly autobiographical content that strongly announces the director's point of view. It's hard to imagine many of the films of the past forty years that have dealt with the pain and confusion of growing up being made the same way without the powerful example of The 400 Blows.

2007 DVD Review: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Your first reaction while watching this movie is, "wow, what a bunch of dorks." That sentiment doesn't totally go away by the end of the film, but it is tempered by the knowledge that Donkey Kong scores may be inconsequential in the big picture, but we don't live our lives in the big picture. People find day-to-day meaning by finding something they can do, no matter how objectively meaningless it is, and focusing on doing that thing well. By the end of the movie, you're totally rooting for hapless nerd (and failed baseball player/musician) Steve Weibe to get the highest ever score in Donkey Kong. And you're rooting for reigning champ and giant douchenozzle Bill Mitchell to get herpes or something.

Score: 8.0

MYOFNF #4: Weekend (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1967)

I can hear the howls of outrage from film snobs tear across the internets. "Weekend? You're diving into Godard and you start with Weekend? That's from his late-60s crazy Maoist phase! Why not Breathless? Why not Band of Outsiders? You suck, internet-based movie douche!" Yes, yes, I'm well aware that Godard's most revered films are his earliest ones, but having read a little about Weekend, I have to say it interested me more than a lot of the other options. There's a long-ass tracking shot (one of my favorite things in film) and hand-handed leftist agitprop. I'll get to Breathless later.

This is the first film I've watched during this project that really hit me in the gut. Godard is saying, in no uncertain terms, that western consumer society is dying, that cinema is dying, and that the only thing that will come afterwards is a hellish, blackened terrain of cannibalism and inhumanity. He obliterates every rule of narrative storytelling, breaking the fourth wall, grinding the film to a halt to allow characters to spout Marxist rhetoric for minutes on end, almost daring the viewer to stop watching. Godard is telling the audience that every cheap thrill they yearn to experience at the movies is trite and meaningless and the very format of narrative cinema an enabler of exploitation. Then, there are stunning scenes of visceral power, especially that amazing tracking shot of a massive traffic jam in the French countryside. It all feels incredibly dated and vitally relevant at the same time. Obviously, the political and artistic gotterdamerung that Godard envisioned hasn't happened yet. Still, watching the scenes of frantic, greed-crazed middle class boors mindlessly crashing their cars into each other it's hard not to think of the petrol-stinking corridors of America's exurbs. It's like an arthouse Deathrace 2000. Watching Weekend makes me want to watch those early, classic Godard films, but it also, perversly makes me want to watch the supposedly unwatchable early-70s left wing propaganda he made. Clearly, Godard was going through some sort of artistic and political crisis during the making of this movie, and watching someone with a clear genius for film technique try to smash the very notion of film in order to satisfy his raging urge to smash capitalism is exhilerating.

Michael Clayton

If There Will Be Blood sports the best closing scene of 2007, then Michael Clayton certainly takes the gold for best film opener. Over images of the darkened offices of powerhouse Manhattan law firm Kenner Bach and Ledeen, a voice spins a manic monologue recounting his crisis of conscience as a litigator for the same firm. The viewer takes in the sleek, immaculate, cold rooms as they are being cleaned by anonymous janitorial staff while the urgent, near whispering voice speaks of the revolting horrors that are perpetrated when those rooms are occupied. The speech comes to a frantic climax as the image cuts from an empty conference room to one bustling with dozens of lawyers rushing to and from, presumably carrying out the same evils that the voice had moments before been so forcefully lamenting. The scene grabs you immediately, suggesting that the prestigious amenities that are the rewards for toiling for a powerful corporate entity can become a claustrophobic prison for those who begin to question the morality of their work.


C.S. Lewis once wrote that most of the world’s evil is generated “in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice." Tony Gilroy’s elegant, powerful directorial debut asks the question: how do these well-manicured men at the heart of bureaucratic wickedness live with themselves? He asks this question through a plot about corporate conspiracies that recall the post-Watergate paranoid cinema of The Parallax View and Silkwood, but Gilroy is less interested in plot mechanics than in the close observation of people who struggle to define their humanity while trapped in the gears of an inhuman system.


George Clooney stars as the title character, a fixer for Kenner Bach and Ledeen who specializes in helping the firm’s rich and powerful clients get out of personal legal difficulties. In his own words, he’s a “janitor,” a vastly better paid version of the men who vacuum the firm’s office floors at night. He is charged with the task of smoothing things out when Tom Wilkinson (the man behind the opening monologue), either suffers a nervous breakdown or experiences a moment of moral clarity, depending on the perspective. Wilkinson has been the lead defense counsel in a class action law suit against an agribusiness giant accused of poisoning hundreds of small farmers across the Midwest. Then, one day, he strips naked during a deposition and professes his love for one of the main plaintiffs. Clooney’s Clayton is brought in reassure the client, and to get Wilkinson back on the team. He is a man who has accepted his place in the corporate food chain by focusing on satisfying family obligations and distracting himself from his doubts with compulsive gambling. When Wilkinson suddenly questioning all of the underlying realities of their line of work, it forces Clooney to take a penetrating look at how what he does for a living impacts who he is as a person. The film takes place largely in chilly corporate environments: glass fronted office buildings, plush offices, the interiors of luxury sedans. Meanwhile, the camera focuses on the eyes of the people trapped in these spaces.


Tilda Swinton plays the closest thing the film has to a villain, the in-house counsel for the poison-spewing corporation, but even her character struggles under the weight of expectations and the necessity of keeping up appearances. Gilroy illustrates her unspoken terror by cutting between scenes of her confident public presentations to stockholders and interviewers and the panicky rituals of preparation she goes through in her sterile hotel room that precede these presentations. She compulsively practices her speeches in front of the mirror, eyes silently screaming. It’s no accident that the pantyhose she dons before one big meeting are control tops. Swinton is the mastermind of the conspiracy that propels the film’s plot, but the real bad guy is a faceless corporate machinery that essentially bribes people into ignoring their consciences.
Even with the shadowy corporation carrying out murders and surveillance, there isn’t much conventional suspense in Michael Clayton. The drama lies in watching the self-loathing tear these characters apart and waiting to see how they attempt to reconcile the demands of their humanity with the demands of their livelihood. Swinton and Clooney make this struggle compelling by presenting subtle gestures that suggest the turmoil of their minds. Clooney in particular is fantastic: his character keeps his feelings extremely close to the vest in his dialogue, but his wounded eyes tell another story. Only Wilkinson is allowed to bust loose and swing for the fences in a theatrical turn reminiscent of Peter Finch’s Howard Beale from Network. That’s as it should be: because he is no longer at constant war with himself, suppressing his ethical instincts out of greed and facile self-justification, he has the freedom to be fully human.

Score: 9.0

Atonement

There is a scene halfway through Atonement that encapsulates a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the film as a whole. It’s a five minute long tracking shot of a trio of dazed soldiers walking along the beach at Dunkirk before the British evacuation. The camera glides along, capturing carnivelesque scenes of surreal apocalypse, a menagerie of war-crazed humanity, without a single cut It’s a jaw-dropping set piece, gripping and expertly choreographed. And it doesn’t really work. While the shot itself is an astonishing technical achievement, the impact is undercut by an overbearing, generic orchestral score similar to one you’ve probably heard in hundreds of period romance and war films. Also undermining the impact is the fact that, like most of the scenes in the film’s fragmented second half, it doesn’t seem relevant to that which comes before or after.


The first half is another story. For its opening hour, Atonement is a model of narrative economy, insight and empathy. On a hot summer day on an English country estate in the mid-thirties, a wealthy aristocrat Cecilia (Kira Knightley) and groundskeeper Robbie (James McAvoy) confront the long-simmering romantic feelings they’ve been harboring for each other. Meanwhile, Knightley’s precocious, literary-minded sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) stumbles onto the couple in a romantic clinch and makes a decision that causes irrevocable harm to everyone involved. The entire sequence is compelling. It’s propelled forward by deft editing that conveys depths of emotions and entire personal histories without a word of dialogue and a percussive score anchored by the jarring report of Briony’s Smith Corona.


Unfortunately, the film cannot maintain the momentum or focus of these scenes. The film jumps forward four years, when Robbie has been conscripted into the British Expeditionary Force in France and a remorseful Briony avoids entering Cambridge in order to do penance for her transgression as a military nurse in London. At this point, the film alternates between hallucinatory scenes that carry serious lyrical power, and surprisingly cliché romantic iconography. None of the scenes gel in relation to one another, with this disharmony culminating in an abrupt twist ending that negates much of what came before it. The twist reveals that the film is not really about the enduring power of love, but rather the enduring power of storytelling. It turns out that the real interest of the filmmakers, and presumably novelist Ian McEwan, upon whose novel the film is based, is the way that people tell themselves narratives in order to organize and give meaning to their lives, as well as the damage (and kindness) that can be done when people try to impose their imaginary narratives on those around them. This means that a lot of the more formulaic romance film moments have less to do with the relationships of the characters than in our fantasy notions of idealized romance. Still, the meta-fictional gloss doesn’t make it feel any less eye-rollingly familiar when Robbie runs behind Cecilia’s bus as it drives away, with violins swelling on the soundtrack.

Score: 7.9

MYOFNF #2-3: The Bicycle Thief (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948) Stray Dog (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1949)

These two landmarks of post-war world cinema have a lot in common. They both offer up textured sociological examinations of two defeated nations in the aftermath of World War Two. They both feature desperate young protagonists searching hostile city streets for items that have been stolen from them. Um, they're both in black and white?

Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief is a ground-level portrait of desperation and powerlessness in post-war Rome. The plot, a newly hired poster-hanger has his bike stolen, and tries to find it, serves mainly to give the viewer a glimpse of life on the edges of survival in the shadow of the Second World War. Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog also spends some time in the gutters and flophouses of post-war Tokyo, but the story of a young homicide detective trying to recover his stolen sidearm is put in the service of a surprisingly western rumination on fate. Kurosawa's film is essentially a film noir commentary on the social displacement and anxiety caused by the war, coupled with a strongly existentialist worldview. De Sica, on the other hand, is more interested in documenting the corrosive effect that poverty has on the human spirit. They're both interesting glimpses into the traumatic hellbroth of the post-war world and the radically altered social and spiritual climate that people found themselves navigating.

Next Up: Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend.

2007 DVD Review: The Ten

You know those guys from The State who made Wet Hot American Summer. You know how hilarious that movie was? Well, they made another one, and it's not as funny as the first one, but its still pretty funny. It's a series of ten short films based on the ten commandments...for some reason. What distinguishes the film is its complete, total, extreme devotion to absurdism. As soon as you think you've seen the most ridiculous thing, another, wildly more ridiculous thing happens. Not all, or even most, of the jokes work, but even the jokes that aren't funny are admirable for their mad vision. Highlights: Oliver Platt as a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator pretending to be the father of a pair of black twins, a cartoon animal orgy, and a busload of children dying of radiation poisoning while lifesaving CAT scan machines lie hoarded in a pair of locked suburban homes. Winona Ryder fucking a ventriloquist's dummy, while kind of hot, is not actually funny. It's a vignette movie, and as with most vignette movies, it's uneven.

Score: 7.5

Cloverfield

Cloverfield is a monster movie for the twenty-first century. There's the recreation of 9-11 iconography-the collapsing buildings, the crowds running from plums of smoke, I wonder what it must have felt like to watch this thing in NYC- and well as the wholesale embrace of digital technology. Not only is the entire film shot from the perspective of the digital camcorder of a New Yorker fleeing a monster attack, but the filmmakers smartly acknowledge the degree to which documenting our every move has become an unthinking habit. When the head of the Statue of Liberty comes bouncing down Spring Street, people are taking pictures of it with their cell phones before it even stops spinning. This awareness of the place of digital technology in our culture gives the film contemporary relevance. While past generations experienced historic events through print, or. more recently, television images, modern history is largely seen through the grainy lenses of digital camera and viewed on the internet. Recognizing the compulsive need to record our surroundings on film, and also the growing roll of amateur footage in shaping our relationship to catastrophe also goes a long way towards making the film's central conceit, that someone would keep their camera running during a giant monster attack, seem plausible. It also neutralizes the accusations of crass exploitation made by those who are uncomfortable with the 9-11 imagery: since 9-11 is the defining media event of this generation, any cinematic portrayal of mass terror will inevitably reference it.

Cloverfield can also lay claim to the mantle of the first 21st century monster movie due to its savvy use of the internet. Yes, there is of course the inevitable, and tiring, online hype and "viral marketing" fuckfest, but more interesting is the way that internet has been used as a secondary platform for the continuation of the film itself. All of the inevitably disappointing and awkward exposition that most films of this ilk are obligated to grind to a halt in order to deliver, has here been completly excised and placed on-line. If you really want to know why a giant monster is trashing New York City, there are plenty of websites to consult for the answer. Meanwhile, the film itself can dispense with the clunky scene where some government scientist stops the action all together for ten minutes to let the audience know what is going on. Not only does this model allow for tasty viral marketing opportunties, it also ends up streamlining the film for maximum efficiency of awesomeness.

And yes, friends, Cloverfield is pretty awesome. The verite style creates a sense of identification with the protagonists that most monster movies fail to achieve. Usually, when a giant creature destroys a city, there are tons of crane and helicopter shots that make the viewer identify more with the monster than with the tiny, scurrying humans running beneath its feet. That approach can look good, but it isn't that scary. Conversely, keeping the camera in the hands of one of those scurrying humans, looking up to get a glimpse of the massive, terrifying creature twenty stories above, can't help but leave the viewer feeling vicarious vulnerability and fear. The initial scenes of the creature attacking are sheer terror, as is a later scene in a darkened subway tunnel that ranks in my personal pantheon of unnerving film sequences. The characters are thinly sketched, but that doesn't really matter in the context: the real protagonist isn't on screen: it's the viewer. The character holding the camera, yuppie chucklehead "Hud," is only there to provide some humorous commentary. He's essentially Duke Nuke'em, but instead of spouting ripped off Bruce Campbell catchphrases, he's spitting some surprisingly funny, realistic comic relief. Like a first-person video game, the viewer fills the void at the center of the screen with their own persona. This approach worked to an extent in Blair Witch Project, but is more fruitfully applied here. Since there is an actual budget that allows for some pretty kick ass special effects, there's more to look at than three stammering improv class drop-outs walking in circles for an hour before something interesting happens.

For all of the visceral thrills on display, though, I was left, as I usually am while watching an apocalyptic horror movie, wanting to spend more time with the harried, gun-toting military grunts than with the dazed, largely useless civilians. Rather than leaving me unsatisfied, though, it really just left me hankering for more. Let's get some sequels in the pipe, pronto!

Score: 8.4

MYOFNF #1: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1972)

My first foreign classic of the year is Luis Bunuel's piece of deadpan absurdism. It's a series of largely plotless vignettes about five content upper class French drug dealers (and one crooked South American diplomat) trying to have dinner together while constantly being interrupted by complications of escalating weirdness. It's genuinely funny, the satire of upper class mores cutting. The characters don't really stand out as individuals, but that's the point: their monumental complacency has melted their personalities into oblivion. The only way they can continue to live comfortably while surrounded by such madness and cruelty is to keep their concerns and conversations as banal as possible. You can't live that way for long without it sandblasting the features right off of your personality. Bunuel directs with a mixture of elegant tracking shots and flat-footed stationary shots, and while there isn't a lot of emotional impact, there are several stricking tableau that prove substantially haunting: like the dinner guests finding themselves suddenly on a stage before booing audience members, and the recurring scene of the companions trudging silently down a country road, without a destination in sight.

American film it clearly influenced: early Steven Soderbergh, particularly Schizopolis.

Next: a double dose of post-war tumult and budding existentialism from Japan and Italy, a couple of countries that got their asses kicked: Akira Kurasowa's Stray Dog and Vittoria De Sica's The Bicycle Thief.

2007 DVD Review: 3:10 To Yuma

Many of the most well-regarded films of this past year dealt in some way with the images of the American frontier and man's* reaction to it. You had your neo-noir Western (No Country for Old Men), your revisionist Western (The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford), your West-as -metaphor-for-emotional-isolation Western (There Will Be Blood) and your West-as-metaphor-for-emotional-isolation-but-also-personal-liberation Western (Into the Wild). For all this wilderness and westy-ness, though, there was only one square-jawed, straight-shooting, old school Western released all year, James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma. This movie has a hell of a Western pedigree: it's a remake of a classic Glenn Ford film, which in turn was based on an Elmore Leonard short story. (Leonard was a very successful Western writer before he traded in sagebrush for city streets) Mangold does a good job of groking how Leonard uses dialogue to convey character and allow characters to size each other up. He's aided by Russell Crowe at his most rakish playing the bad-but-not-evil guy and Christian Bale projecting his usual glowering intensity as a struggling rancher who agrees to help escort Crowe to a prison train while being dogged by Crowe's gang of bandit pals. The film is made interesting by the way it handles one of the central questions of all Western films: how is order maintained in an environment with little enforceable law? The traditional answer of straightforward Westerns has been: through the rigorous maintenance of personal codes of conduct that transcend legality. 3:10 to Yuma echoes this consensus, but at the same time, the film takes pains to dissect just how and why these codes are transmitted and adhered to. The film also shows the essential madness at the core of these codes and the danger that they pose to those who insist upon adhering to them. At the same time, however, the film glows with respect for those with the courage to keep such codes, even in the face of certain death. The action elements of the film are pretty mediocre: the shootouts are competently portrayed, but the filmmakers seem too eager to keep the bullets flying. Action set-pieces pop up with mechanical regularity, and often without any rational justification. It's a shame, because the performances and dialogue are strong enough to hold attention in absence of constant leather slapping. In that way too, 3:10 to Yuma brands itself proudly as a four-square, no bullshit Western, if one with a bit more self-awareness than most.

Score: 7.6

* No, I'm not being sexist: all of these movies are sausage-fests.

My Year of Foreign Non-Flops

Nathan Rabin, one of the stable of excellent film critics at the Onion AV Club, is just wrapping up a project that he began last January (just around the time that I started this here bolge) called My Year of Flops. Twice a week, Mr. Rabin has been watching films that failed commerically and critically upon their release and reevaluating them. It's been some of the funniest, most insightful pop cultural writing I've read in a while, and, of course, it pisses me off that I don't write that well, and that I didn't think of the idea first. What I'm going to do instead is something that will probably be much less interesting to readers, but hopefully pretty edifying to me. I like to think of myself as a movie fan, and as far as modern American cinema is concerned, I'm reasonably well versed. Like most everyone, there are huge chunks of film history, films from different eras, of different genres, etc, that I'm hopelessly ignorant of. While my biggest deficiency is probably movies from before 1960 (they're like Victorian novels: I just can't get into them), the deficiency that bothers me the most is definitely my lack of modern foreign film knowledge. Sure, I know the titles and, in many cases, the basic plot synopsis and artistic points of view, of a whole lot of seminal foreign films, but I haven't actually sat down and watched most of them. I don't usually go for New Year's resolutions, but this year I'm making one that I will stick with: I'm going to watch a different classic of world cinema every week for the next year and post my reactions here. Like Mssr. Rabin's project, there will be no rhyme or reason to the selections: whatever pops up next in my Netflix queue. Coming soon: Luis Bunuel's 1972 masterpiece The Discree Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Why start with this one? Well, I've heard it's really great, and the title is pretty neat. We'll see how that works out. Expect in the immediate future some Kurosawa, Herzog, Truffaut, Fellini, Godard, Rossollini, and, to mix things up, Alejandro Jadorowsky. Hopefully, a year from now I will be at least 52 times more pretensious.

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Spoilers!

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood deals with epic themes and settings: the emergence of modern American capitalism and religion on the wide-open California oil fields of the early twentieth century. What's remarkable about the film's approach is that these issues are largely pushed to the periphery of the frame. At the center of the frame, for nearly every shot in the this two and a half hour film are Daniel Day-Lewis's piercing, fiery eyes. The film is monomanically focused on the character of oil baron Daniel Plainview.

This is a radical departure for Anderson. His films tend to feature large casts of characters, all struggling to overcome their personal weaknesses and traumatic pasts and forge real connections with each other. There Will Be Blood never takes the focus off of Plainview, and his character arc is one of raging misanthropy and a repeated turning away from human trust and companionship. The viewer gets a long and harrowing view of the rocky outcroppings of Plainview's burning mind. Although larger issues of class, capitalism and culture are kept in the background, the film does offer a critique of capitalism that comes from a unique angle. While a character like Charles Foster Kane begins Citizen Kane as a young idealist who has his humanity sapped from him by his isolating wealth and growing power, Plainview starts out the film as an isolated, vengeful misanthrope, and it becomes apparent throughout the course of the film that he has sought out wealth and power explicitly to allow him to dominate those around him. Also, we see that his world-encompassing mistrust and contempt serve him very well in his frantic grasp for wealth.

The result is one of the most vivid and terrifying depictions of human misanthropy in film history. Jonny Greenwood's dissonant score suggests the demonic, and Anderson's camera captures stark shots of desolate California brush and an oil fire belching forth from the earth like a portal to hell with a grace and restraint his previous films have lacked. In the end, though, the film is mesmerizing because Day-Lewis is mesmerizing: it might be the most sustained, powerful performance I've ever seen. He is in almost every shot, and your eyes are drawn inexorably towards him, but at the same time the character is so closed off that he seems almost alien: his bizarre, mid-Atlantic accent certainly adds to that perception. What sense of the character the viewer does come away from is to be found in Plainview's relationship with his adopted son H.W. and his long-lost brother Henry. In these relationships, we see the constant battle within Plainview between his accumulated hatred of humanity and his real yearning for human connection. Now, whether that yearning is born out of an authentic desire for compansionship or a need to conform to the expectations of civil society is never made clear. It's just one of the many quandaries of the character that are left unanswered. After all, Daniel Plainview is a man who "doesn't care to explain" himself.

For all of Day-Lewis's bravura mastery of his role and Anderson's elegant set piece direction the film would not be nearly as haunting or powerful were it not for the brilliant, audacious and perfectly over-the-top final scene, in which the full flower of Plainview's rage and hatred come to bloom. In this scene, the damage that he has carelessly wrought on those around him, until now only hinted at, is made chillingly manifest. Plainview, rich and old and retired from the field of capitalist combat, has just disowned the son who provides him with his only tether to the human family. He is lying unconscious before a half eaten meal on the beautiful parquet floor of his mansion's personal bowling alley. He is in every respect a broken, deracinated husk of his former leonine self. Then, Eli Sunday, his old nemesis, comes into the room with a business proposition. What follows is a cinematic transformation as vivid, riveting and illuminating as any I've ever witnessed. As Plainview reveals himself to be the master of the situation and Eli realizesthe vulnerability of his position, Plainview grows monstrous before us, filling with vigor, rage and sadistic joy as the will to live drains out of Eli. Here we find Plainview in his moment of ultimate triumph: destroying another human being emotionally, spiritually and, in a act that is surely the happiest moment of Plainview's life, physically. This is where we find the only real use that Plainview has for the human race: they are his fuel. To vanquish people, to destroy them, to grind them beneath his heel is what sustains Daniel Plainview. It's the real reason behind his obsession with accumulating wealth and power: the better to eat you with, my dear. And, as befits a gentlemen of leasure, he calls for his butler to take away the remants of his meal when he's finished.

Score: 9.9

2007 DVD Review: Shoot 'Em Up

Hey, Joe Carnahan, you know that movie you directed that came out in 2007? The one that seemed to promise balls-to-the-wall guns blazing action with hordes of hitmen blowing each other to hell for two hours? Y'know, Smokin' Aces? Well, I'm sure you don't need me to remind you that it sucked, and the few inspired action setpieces were spread extremely thin across ninety minutes of convoluted, pointless plot machinations and ludicriously extraneous character development. It's too bad you couldn't taken notes on the other action film released in '07 with an apostrophe in the title.

Yes, Shoot 'Em Up is everything Smokin' Aces tried and failed miserably to accomplish: namely, an action film that embraces everything that is ridiculous, awesome, and ridiculously awesome about action films, and cranks the whole mess up to eleven. Some have complained that all the BANG BANG BANG of this movie grows monotonous, but I disagree. Director Mark Davis does a great job of setting up a jaw-dropping piece of ballistic slapstick, then topping it in the next scene. It certainly doesn't hurt that Clive Owen is in his element as the hyper-efficient but cranky hero and Paul Giammatti's glorious scenery chewing makes a strong case that he should play the heavy in every single action film made from this point. Shoot 'Em Up is one of those strange hybrid films that seeks to both parody action tropes and glory in them. In at least one respect, it's more successful at this than another film of this type, Hot Fuzz. Now, in total, Hot Fuzz is a vastly superior film than Shoot 'Em Up, but for all of Hot Fuzz's brilliance, there really wasn't much actual action ass-kicking until the end. Shoot 'Em Up is essentially one long, escalatingly cartoonish gunfight, in which every death is rendered cool by the sheer inventiveness of the death, and the accompanying silliness.

One other note: just as CGI creatues are still too fakey to carry a film, CGI blood jets just aren't ready for prime time. Every film I've seen that features CGI blood is the lesser for it: as soon as that weirdly dark, pixel-rich splash hits the screen, the viewer is transported from a richly detailed cinematic realm to Castle Wolfenstein.

Score: 7.8

Juno

This film walks a tight rope between honest sentiment and self-conscious preciousness from start to finish, but it never falls off. Throughout the movie, I felt myself alternately connecting to the characters and annoyed by a surfeit of cutsey affectation, but never enough of either of those things to completely give myself over to the movie, or to reject it. Ellen Page's title character, while funny and charming, isn't really recognizably human. When the film really works, it's due to the relationship between yuppie adopting parents Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner: their interactions have the ring of truth, and the film does a smart job of undermining the audience's expectations of them. Bateman's character, in particular, is surprising and heartbreakingly human. He also provides a cautionary glimpse of what life looks like when you never let go of your youthful fixation on being "cool." It's a view that has a profound (if overly pat) effect on Juno, which goes a long way towards justifying some of the movie's more overbearing moments of glibness.

Score: 7.9

Two Days, Two Crummy Movies

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

This movie certainly had its funny moments (the sequence with the faux-Beatles played by Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman and Justin Long being paramount), but in the end there just aren't enough laughs. This is the third film of the year from comedy god Judd Apatow and its easily the worst. I think the reason this failed is because parody is an inherently absurd genre, and Apatow just isn't built for comedic absurdism. His best work is totally grounded in real human dynamics and situations and, as a result, Walk Hark tries too much to inject pathos into the proceedings, but as soon as you've introduced the absurd elements of film parody, it reduces the impact of any sort of character depth or interaction. If Adam McKay, an Apatow collaborator, director of Anchorman and Talladega Nights, and the foremost practioner of absurd comedy in Hollywood had made this film, it would have been a riot.

Score: 6.0

Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem

Goddamn it, this shit shouldn't be so hard! The platonic ideal of a predator fighting an alien is inherently awesome, and yet, in two straight films, made by two different production teams, professional filmmakers have managed to fuck it up beyond redemption. Why do they keep insisting on spending the majority of the film with boring, lame human characters? Motherfucker, it's not called Aliens Vs. Predator Vs. Annoying Douchbags. And when are they going to hire somebody who can shoot a fucking alien fighting a predator and make it remotely possible to tell what the fuck is going on? I know that it's easier to hide special effects gimmicks if you shoot a scene in a cave or a sewer, but howsabout someone sit down with a fucking slide rule and figure out how to show these fuckers fight in less that complete darkness?! The shit of it is, if they do another one, I'll definitely watch it.

Score: 3.0

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I don't really think that I'm qualified to review this movie, seeing as how I've never seen the musical it's based on, or any Steven Sondheim musical, for that matter. I've seen (and been annoyed by) enough musicals to observe that Sweeney Todd isn't usual: the songs weave in and out of the film without defined endings and the staging is intensely claustrophobic: there are no dance numbers, no moments when newsboys and passersby drop what they're doing and start belting one out. Most of the songs are sung in small rooms by one or, at most, two people. That doesn't jibe with other musicals I've seen, but I don't know if that's an original component of the Sondheim theatrical show, or a Burton invention. Ah, hell, I'm out of my depths, here, man. I'll just say that I usually find musicals annoying and ridiculous, but I found this one less annoying and ridiculous than most, although I still have a hard time connecting emotionally to characters who inexplicably burst into song.

Score: 7.7

Subjectivity and Criticism: Why Bother?

This fall saw the release of two crime dramas from venerated directors: David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and the Coen Brother's No Country For Old Men. My wife and I saw both of them during their respective theatrical releases and recently, as we hashed over our favorite films of the year, I discovered something that surprised me and led my to question the very validity of the notion of film criticism. Both Carolyn and I liked each these two films, but we loved different ones. I found Eastern Promises to be a well-crafted but slight genre entry, while I was absolutely blown away by No Country. Conversely, Carolyn admired the craft and execution of No Country but was more deeply affected by Eastern Promises. What intrigued me about our differing responses to these two movies was that they didn't really have anything to do with the quality of the films. We didn't argue the technical merits of one film over the other, rather, our difference came down to divergent emotional responses to the material. I walked out of Eastern Promises unmoved, while No Country left me shivering. Carolyn had the opposite reaction. It turns out the Naomi Watts character, who I sort of wrote off as a wasted part (if I recall correctly, I said that all Watts had to do in the movie was "sweat the Morten-dong"), stuck with Carolyn, especially her emotional arc, which I largely overlooked. Watt's character isn't just seeking justice for the dead Russian girl who sets the plot in motion, she's resolving feelings of grief and guilt for her stillborn child, and struggling with an attraction to a man who terrifies and excites her. I'll admit, I noticed that stuff while I was watching the movie, but it didn't leave much of an impression. No Country, on the other hand, she called a "guy's movie." As much as I love this movie, I certainly can't disagree with that assessement; it's a diagnosis that helps explain why the film was less powerful for Carolyn. If all that stuff with Naomi Watts left me cold, why would Tommy Lee Jones mourning his lost virility be any more evocative for her?

This all raises the question: if our gender is that determinative of our emotional response to art, how the hell are we supposed to make meaningful judgements of films other than "I liked it"? I'm left thinking that the only thing that can be analyzed with any sort of objectivity are the technical aspects of a film: as I said, we both thought that each of these films was very well made and engaging. The elements that push a movie from "good" to "great" are almost entirely personal: your reaction is largely going to be determined by your age, race, gender, and life experience. At the end of the day, whether a film "speaks" to you or not often depends on what you're listening for. So, I guess the reason I'm making this largely-obvious point is because I want to know if there is a case for the opposite view: that craft is not the only thing about film that can be objectively analyzed; that you can measure the effectiveness of things like character relatability, thematic resonance and emotional impact. Right now, no such answers are forthcoming, but I'll certainly keep thinking about it.

I Am Legend

I really wanted to like this movie, and for the first forty minutes or so, I did. The haunting shots of post-apocalyptic Manhattan and the persistent focus on the day -to-day realities of a man dealing with lonliness, loss, and vampiric hordes are compelling. For a would be blockbuster, this film insists on slowing down and closely observing details that most big action flicks miss. Unfortunately, even though the film has a surprisingly interesting artistic point of view, the script is helluva weak. I don't mind a film like this skimping on the action if all the quiet scenes are building on each other towards something. However, in I Am Legend, the character building scenes don't actually build on each other, and they end up leading to a flat, infuriatingly dumb "Signs"-style ending. It certainly doesn't help that the CGI plague victims who menace Will Smith throughout the movie have that patented CGI shininess to them that makes them look like World of Warcraft avatars. Gollum aside, CGI has just not yet reached the point where it can be used in such large doses without seeming really, really fake.

And, as with most post-apocalyptic films, I end up spending a lot of time wishing that the movie were set during the deadly plague, not after. Some of the best parts of the film are the flashbacks to Will Smith's family trying to evacutate Manhattan as it's being quarantined. After the last of those scenes ended, I kept hoping that there would be more. Look, Hollywood, I know tha it's difficult to set a film during the apocalpyse because it doesn't fit with your precious three act structures and your Robert McKee character arcs, but c'mon, already! Get on the damn ball and make that shit happen!

Score: 6.9

No Country For Old Men: Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers

****WARNING! FOLLOWING POST MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS, PEANUTS!!!****


I just finished reading Corman McCarthy's book No Country for Old Men and it only increases my awe at the Coen brothers' accomplishment. They have taken the most potent plot elements, exchanges of dialogue, and themes from the book, thrown them onto the screen with the technical panache they are know for, while leaving behind McCarthy's excessive philosophizing and meandering. To use a metaphor from the classic film Monster Squad, they melt down the raw silver of McCarthy's prose and shape it into a hollow tip bullet, perfect for killing werewolves.

One of the big things aiding the Coens was their choice of material. Unlike writers like Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, who utilize the narrative voice to communiate a lot of the psychological and philosophical themes of their works, Cormac McCarthy, in this novel, at least, lets the characters and plot mechanics express the themes. This means that the work is perfect for translation to film: it's just a job of putting the action and dialogue up there on the screen. If that's all the Coens' had done, they probably would have made a good movie. What makes No Country a great movie is their incisive editing and reshaping of the material to create maximum visceral impact. In fact, they seem to have more faith in the potency of McCarthy's tale than the author himself does.

In his attempt to write a novel focusing on the existential horror of ordinary folks staring into an abyss of idiot fate and human cruelty, McCarthy laid out a tale that obliterated the expectations of the reader. He starts with one of the most cliche of all crime thriller plots: regular joe stumbles across large sum of money (or drugs), criminals pursue him in order to regain it. There have been literally* jillions of books and movies made utitlizing this premise, from Charley Varrick to True Romance, and it carries with it certain expectations, mainly that it will end in a climactic show down between the regular joe and some avatar of criminality. McCarthy fills these roles with the vivid, compelling characters of Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh, and sets them on a collision course...and then he has a bunch of nondescript Mexicans kill the protagonist before he can have his showdown with Chigurh...and only two thirds of the way through the book. This ingenious subversion of audience expectations is the most effective representation of McCarthy's theme, and the Coens smartly keep it intact. Even more smartly, they trust their mastery of film craft to convey this theme without resorting to the didactic dialogue that plagues too much of the book. Although at least eighty percent of the dialogue in the film is drawn verbatim from the book, most of the character exchanges last much longer in the book, and to the detriment of the characters, themes and narrative momentum. The laconic cowboy aphorisms of that pepper the movie are compelling and witty in small doses, but tend to induce reader fatigue after pages and pages of the same clipped, obtuse rhythms. More importantly, the prolonged disquitations turn the character of Chigurh, who, in the form of Javier Bardem, ranks in the top echelon of film bad guys, into a grumpy freshman philosophy student, not a being of pure will and a symbol of implacible, unreasonable death.

Take the scene, early on in both the film and the book, when Chigurh has a conversation with a hapless gas station attendant. As the two characters talk, it becomes clear that Chigurh is deciding whether or not he is going to kill the attendant. To that end, he asks the attendant to call a coin toss. When his guess of "heads" turns out to be correct, Chigurh allows him to live, and gives the attendant the quarter, telling him that it's his "lucky" quarter. In the film, when the attendant tries to put the quarter in his pocket, Chigugh tells them not to, because in his pocket the coin will lose its specialness, become "just a coin...which it is" in Chigurh's words. It's a film scene of unbearable suspense, and that last line echoes in the viewer's head long after it has been spoken. Those few words contain a universe of meaning; that coin, like the attendants life, is extraordinary and unique...and, at the same time, completely anonymous and mundane, depending on who is beholding it.

Contrast the way the Coens' end this scene with the way the scene ends in McCarthy's book. Most of the dialogue is identical, but when the attendant tries to put the "lucky" quarter in his pocket, Chigurh doesn't respond by telling him to put it "anywhere not your pocket, where it will get mixed up with the others and become just a coin...which it is." Instead, he says:

"Anything can be an instrument. Small things. Things you wouldn't even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it?"

Saying shit like this, Chigurh should be holding a goddamn baton of french bread, not a compressed-air cattle stungun. There's no way that a mini-monologue like that could stick with you. There's too much stuff there, too much abstract rumination, all of it stripping the mystery and terror away from a character who never leaps off of the page the way that he does off of the screen. In the end, I just think that the Coens trusted the plot structure and characters to convey the apocalyptic dread and desolation that McCarthy was striving for, while McCarthy himself felt compelled to overdetermine the themes by hammering them home in conversation after conversation. It's understandable, in a way. The sort of terror and sense of vulnerability McCarthy is going for is much easier to convey cinematically than in prose. He probably felt the need to lard Chigurh's murder spree with soliloquies because he didn't have the chilly intensity of Javier Bardem's coal-black eyes to help bring out the darkness.


*okay, not literally