The Coen Project: Miller's Crossing

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

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

Up

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

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

Drag Me To Hell

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

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

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

The Coen Project: Raising Arizona

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

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

DVD Roundup: Valkyrie

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

The Coen Project: Blood Simple

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

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

The Coen Brothers: Once More, With Feeling

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

Terminator Salvation

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

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

Star Trek

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

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

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

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

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

X-Men Orgins: Wolverine

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

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

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

Adventureland

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

Shorter Crank 2 Review

Newest Entry for the 2009 Websters:

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

Crank 2: High Voltage

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Duplicity

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

Observe and Report

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

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

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

Fast! Furious! Eyebrows!

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

1. Pre-9/11 nostalgia.

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

2. The Fewer Words, the Better.

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

I Love You, Man

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

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

Let the Right One In

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

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

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

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

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

The Last House on the Left

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

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

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

Watchmen

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


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

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

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