Wanted

All action movies are, on some level, wish-fullfilment for frustrated young men who really wish they could take a machine gun to work and blow away their boss or chase a bad guy down Mount Everest on rocket-propelled skis. Every man with testosterone flowing in his veins has some sort of desire to see his enemies lay prostrate before him, a busty young wench clinging to his leg...you know, caveman shit. And for the average domesticated American male, the only place to see their fantasies of violent domination come to life is the multiplex. It's usually a harmless form of catharsis, but Wanted takes the notion of action film-as-expression-of-latent-desire to ludicrious, possibly immoral extremes.

Wanted begins with bored office drone James McAvoy going through the soul-crushing routine of his life in a series of sequences that play like clips from Office Space remade by Oliver Stone. In case the viewer has missed all the sledge-hammer subtle hints that McAvoy is an ordinary, regular guy unhappy with his lack of significance, there is some helpful voice over from McAvoy TELLING the viewer how unhappy he is with his regular, ordinariness. Man, it sucks to be a 9 to 5 drone! If only a cat-eyed beauty would show up and whisk him away into a world of highly trained international assassins! Thankfully for our put-upon hero, Angelina Jolie, whose character is paper thin and seems to exist in the film soully as window dressing...grossly thin, heavily tattooed window dressing, shows up, hands him a gun, leads him through a training montage, and sets him loose to blow away the evildoers of Chicago with bending bullets. Now, McAvoy sheds the hangdog look and self-negation of his pathetic cube-dwelling existence. Shooting people from moving cars gives him a drive, purpose and joy for the first time. But there is no need to feel guilty about getting all of this satisfaction from killing: all of his victims have been chosen by the elite "fraternity" of assassins because of their threat to global order. How does the shadowy assassination team pick their targets? In what might be the single stupidest conceit in an action film since the flying bus in Swordfish, only less hilarious.

That's a running theme in Wanted: intensely stupid and ridiculous, but never quite stupid and ridiculous enough to be fun. The action sequences, helmed by Night/Daywatch director Timur Bekmambetov, are competently executed, and feature a few jaw-dropping stunts, but the heavy use of slow-motion and "bullet time" are beyond stale at this point, and the elliptical plot structure constantly blunts the film's momentum.

When the credits roll, the action scenes have failed to make an impression, leaving you only with a sour aftertaste. Not only does Wanted give the audience a delirious taste of vicarious violence, it also sells killing people with stealth and bad-assitude as a guaranteed path to personal satisfaction and validation. By the end of the film, McAvoy's increasingly smug voice-over is practically mocking the audience for not being assassins. It's enough to make you want to take a shower afterwards, and not just because you just spent money to watch a movie featuring a loom that tells the future. I'll repeat that last bit: there's a loom that tells the future in this movie.

Score: 5.6

Masters of Horror: Screwfly Solution

A couple of years ago, I watched Joe Dante's Homecoming, an entry from Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. It was a blistering piece of anti-Iraq war agitprop with zombies. Not scary by any means, and lacking Dante's usual smart-ass wit, but interesting viewing. Now that I'm no longer watching a foreign film a week, I thought I'd watch all of the Master of Horror episodes currently available on DVD. It's a murderer's row of genre directors: Dante, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Takashi Miike, John Landis.... and none of the entries longer than an hour. Sounds like fun to me. The first episode I watched was Dante's second entry in the series, The Screwfly Solution, which concerns a virus that turns men's sexual urges into homicidal urges. As with Homecoming, the episode suffers from a glaringly low budget, a heavy thematic hand, and generally pedestrian direction, but the concept pays off in unnerving ways. Mostly, watching this makes me curious to see what other horror aces do with the limitations and structures of the series.

The Incredile Hulk

It seems that one's opinion of the rebooted Incredible Hulk is inexorably linked to one's opinion of Ang Lee's Hulk of 2003, of which the new version is a sort of quasi-sequel. Folks who thought that Lee's version, with its somber tone and Freudian themes, was a bold, visionary attempt to make a comic book movie into something substantive seem to find this new hulk to a be a much dumber, sadder, less interesting beast. Those who found Lee's version to be a load of ponderous horseshit, on the other hand, welcome a Hulk movie that glories in the spectacle of Hulk smashing things.


For the record, I think Ang Lee's Hulk is a goddamn disaster. Yes! I know that he was trying to add symbolic and emotional resonance to a comic book film, but moviemaking isn't the Special Olympics: you don't get credit for trying. Lee's Hulk, like Bryan Singer's Superman Returns failed because the creator failed to appreciate the genre. The Superhero icon is an expansive trope that can accomodate all sorts of musings on culture and psychology, but it's also extremely fragile. If you graft your personal cinematic obsessions onto a comic book character, you'll likely end up crushing it under the weight of your intellectual pretensions. Ang Lee's entire film ouvre is a meditation on repression, and so he turned Bruce Banner into a man struggling with a gamma-radiated Oedipus Complex. Now, that's a bold move, but it's bound to fail if you shoot a film in which the main character periodically turns into a giant green CGI monster with all of the joyless brooding of Brokeback Mountain.


Marvel Studios learned their lesson from that, so they got the dude who directed The Transporter to make a more smash-centric Hulk. But this new Hulk underscores another potential pitfall of the comic book genre: bland proficiency. The new Hulk possesses none of the faults of the Ang Lee version, but neither does it boast any sort of discernable point of view. Maybe effective ass-kicking and artistic vision are mutually exclusive in the comic book film genre, and if so, I guess if I had to have one, it would be effective ass-kicking. Yes, Virginia, I am a Philistine. But I'm going to watch a movie featuring a giant green monster, I'd rather watch him rip a police car in half and use the pieces as boxing gloves than watch Eric Bana look angst-riddled for two hours. Most of this new Hulk film is servicable if not great: Ed Norton is charismatic as the harried Bruce Banner, his inhibited romance with Liv Tyler's Betty Ross carries a bit of heft and the special effects are convincing. A big showdown between the Hulk and Gen. Ross's army unit is marred a bit by some clumsy editing, but the film really earns its keep in the last reel, when the Hulk goes toe to toe in the streets of Harlem with supersoldier Emil Blonsky's mutated Abomination. It's the kind of climax that is too rare in the comic movie universe: an action set piece that highlights everything that is awesome about the iconic
character the film is based around. Hulk smashes, he crashes, he claps his hands and creates a sonic boom, he punches the ground and creates a mini-earthquake, it's all enough to give a guy a nerdgasm. For all the movie snob posturing about the merits of a "cerebral" (read: boring) approach to comic material, there's something to be said for revelling in the mindless but thrilling vulgarity of pulp spectacle.

Score: 7.2

The Happening

Strike Three, M. Night, you're out.

The Happening is easily the worst film of Shyamalan's career. For all of it's jaw-dropping awfulness, Lady in the Water possesses a Herzogian obsession that's gripping to behold. Shyamalan created that film as a monument to his own ego, with a commitment so bold it's impossible not to admire a little. Lady in the Water is Shyamalan's cre de cour to every critic or studio exec with the temerity to doubt his genius. It says: "I WILL cast myself as a writer whose work will save the world! I AM so gifted a storyteller that I can devote half the film's running time to expository dialogue screeched in a Korean accent! I CAN base an entire film around a mythology that I completely made up, and expect the audience to immediately accept it!" The movie is a creation that bespeaks a will to power on the behalf of its maker that's awe inspiring, like the Pyramids or Auschwitz.

The Happening shows none of that lunatic vision: it's just inept. Literally every halfway effective visual in the film is in the commerical, from the chick sticking a hairpin in her neck to all the dudes jumping off of the roof to the guy laying in front of the lawnmower. And most of it's over in the first ten minutes. What's left is an hour and a half of Mark Wahlberg making like Fred Rogers on Methadone, leading his wife Zooey Deschanel and a little girl as they skulk around the Pennsylvania countryside, meeting wildly overacting rural characters and trying to outrun gusts of wind (really). The premise of a mysterious chemical causing people to spontaneously kill themselves is potentially interesting, but Shyamalan fails utterly to do anything interesting with it. Wahlberg and company don't know what's causing the attacks, and neither does the audience, but we do know that if it gets to the main characters, they'll die pretty much instantly, and the movie will be over. Since that can't happen, Shyamalan pads the middle part of the film with pseudo-suspense courtesy of the aforementioned overacting rural characters. Their presence is so transparently one dimensional (provide some sense of dread during part of the movie when here is no real chance that the deadly chemical will reach the protagonists), and their behavior so arbitrary, that they leave no impression at all.

One scene in particular fails miserably in its attempt at creating suspense, while at the same time highlighting Shyamalan's complete collapse as a film artist. In a direct reference to Shyamalan's most perfectly rendered piece of suspense filmmaking (the "Brazilian Birthday Party" video from Signs), a woman shows a crowd of onlookers a video someone e-mailed to her iphone (timely!). It's a dude committing suicide by walking into the lion enclosure at the Philadelphia zoo. The fact that this scene completely lacks every single element that made the original sequence from Signs compelling, and that Shyamalan seems to have no clue that it fails to meet these vital criteria, is the most eloquent evidence available that the man needs to find a new career. I suggest Subway sandwich artist.

Score: 1.8

More Blogging! You Know You Crave It!

For a while now I've been thinking about reviving my political blog "Handjobs for Third Stringers," then I decide that I'm too lazy to blog (which is really, really fucking lazy). But the new cover of Newsweek has blown my brain out of my ass with outrage, so I'm bringing 'er back. Stop over and check it out.

2008 DVD Review: The Signal

The Signal is a low budget indie horror film that enjoyed a brief theatrical run earlier this year. It's too bad it didn't receive a wider distribution, because The Signal is easily scarier, wittier, and more heartfelt that about 90% of theatrically released horror films. In the forebodingly named city of Terminus, a mysterious electrical signal suddenly appears on all bands of communication: television, cell phones, land lines, radio. All those exposed to it eventually turn into homicidal maniacs. There's a superficial similarity to a recent Stephen King novel, Cell, but the film's conceit is actually much more rich and interesting. Rather than becoming slathering murder-beasts instantly, as in King's novel, the "crazies" in The Signal slowly become detached from reality, with the nature of their insanity determined by the underlying resentments and jealousies hiding dormant in their psyches. The viewer is never sure if what they're seeing is real, or simply the delusion of the character. The uncertainty is amplified by the fact that the "crazies" reveal themselves slowly: a character who seems at first glance to have avoided crazification, will, over time, reveal themselves to be shithouse nuts.

What makes the film really pop is the fact, while the it features three main characters throughout (a cheating wife, her cuckold husband, and her lover), it's split into three distinct "transmissions" focusing on the point of view of each one. The three segments are helmed by different directors, and have different moods. Transmission one, in which the cheating wife returns home to find her entire apartment building full of murderous crazies, including her husband, is an adrenalized shot of anarchic terror. Transmission two, which finds the cuckold husband, on a quest to find his wife, attending an extremely bizarre new years party, hits a sweet note of lurid violence and deadpan comedy. Transmission three finds the lover questing after the wife, and shifts the mood to hysterical romance in the last-reel-of-28 Days Later tradition. As with most anthology films, the different pieces are a bit uneven in quality (transmission 2 was my favorite, hands down), but the singular plot and group of characters keep it from seeming disjointed. Most impressively, the film squeezes every drop of value from its miniscule budget, although there aren't enough moments of apocalyptic mayhem.(god, I love my apocalyptic mayhem!) I really wish someone would throw 60 or 70 million bucks at these guys so that they could make a sort of sequel/remake, like Robert Rodriquez did with Desperado.

Score: 8.0

MYOFNF...remix!

After two failed attempts to watch a couple of MYOFNF candidates, I've come to the conclusion that my method here, pretty much randomly Netflixing foreign films from the 70s or earlier that I've heard of, is the definition of retarded. I end up watching movies I don't like, the rich veins of films by specific directors get ignored. So, instead of watching any old movie with subtitles once a week, I'm going to go deep into the oeuvre of specific foreign directors who intrigue me. Then, after I've drunk deep of the creative cup of said director, I'll post a detailed overview of their output. Expect updates maybe once a month or so, featuring directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, and Akira Kurosawa. Stay tuned.

The Strangers

Michael Hanekes two versions of Funny Games are both great films, but they both completely fail in their goal. Haneke wanted to make audiences reevaluate their relationship to film violence and, hopefully, never go to a movie looking to be entertained by the suffering of others. I've seen both the German language original AND the English remake in the past six months, and still, there I was, sitting in a theater watching Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler being tormented by home invaders.

The Strangers writer/director Bryan Bertino has a few tricks up his sleeve and at first, they're deeply effective. The use of sound design, for example, with dead-of-night knocks coming against heavy wooden doors, records skipping and ominious footfalls all setting a mood of dread and unease. Also, the strangers themselves, wearing creepy blank masks, seep in and out of the corners of frames, usually while one of the protagonists is looking the other way, their horrible presence a secret between the interloper and the audience. These moves raise gooseflesh the first few times they're used, but they steadily lose power with repetition. Onc the novelty of these gags wears off, you're left with an all-to-familiar catalogue of scares and would-be scares as two young lovers tryto fend off three masked psychos dressed like Decembrists concerte-goers. Too often, Bertino undercuts his most powerful moments with an intrusive, blandly atonal score or has his main characters do insanely counterintuitive things just to keep the action moving forward. Funny Games might fail as a vehicle for shaming people out of enjoying film violence, but it's a smashing success at creating terror by maintaining an oppressive air of reality through long, unbroken takes and a total lack of music. If Bertino could marry some of his more winning stylistic tics to a more auster, Hanekeian approach, he might make a truly disturbing, super-fun horror film. Wouldn't it be a gas if Haneke's efforts to banish sadism from the silver screen ended up perfecting the genre?

Score: 7.5

2007 DVD Review: Charlie Wilson's War

There's a scene in Tim Burton's great film Ed Wood in which Johnny Depp, playing the eponymous filmmaker, sorts through bits of stock footage for use in his masterpiece, Plan 9 From Outer Space. Looking at images of buffalo herds, atomic blasts and army maneuvers, Wood muses that he could make an entire movie out of stock footage if he arranged it in the right order. Ed Wood never did make that found footage masterpiece, but Mike Nichols has picked up the idea in his execrable film Charlie Wilson's War. It seems like at least half of Wilson's running time is taken up by news camera shots of helicopters, mujahideen fighters and refugee columns. The parts of the film that aren't twenty-five year old clips from Nightline are staged with a Woodsian lack of artistry. In particular, the film's only "action" scene, in which Afghan insurgents shoot down a Soviet Hind helicopter with a Stinger missile, could have come straight from Glen or Glenda. Three dudes stand on a hill that's probably somewhere in Griffin Park, fire a rocket launcher, then jump around and celebrate, all intercut with shots from inside the cockpit of the helicopter, and images of the helicopter in flight that seem to be stolen from a different, equally shitty film. Having read part of the book the film is based on, I was all set to slam the movie for glorifying a criminal enterprise; namely, the covert arming and funding of Islamic fundamentalists by the CIA. The film is such a stunningly inept work of moviemaking, though, that the sheer crappiness sucked up all of my outrage. It's not even really a film at all in any recognizable sense. It's not funny, there's no dramatic tension or character development, and nothing approaching a rising action or climax (except for that awful Stinger attack). It's just a collection of woodenly acted, stagey conversations between a never-worse Tom Hanks, a never-worse Julia Roberts (how in the world can a woman from Georgia NOT be able to approximate a Southern accent?), and an awesome-as-always Philip Seymour Hoffman. I'm baffled how this movie got even mixed reviews (not to mention a slew of Golden Globe nominations). Is the combined star power in front of and behind the camera (in addition to Hanks and Robert, Mike Nichols directed from an Aaron Sorkin script) so blinding that most critics didn't notice the absolutely slack, lifeless, witless, uninspired dreck up on the screen?

Score: 2.0

MYOFNF #20: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (dir. R.W. Fassbinder, 1974)

Before Todd Haynes remixed Douglas Sirk's melodrama All That Heaven Allows, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder transplanted the tale of forbidden love to Germany, in a story about an elderly German woman who marries a much younger Morroccan immigrant. Fassbinder's movie centers on the toll that social ostricism takes on their relationship. What struck me about Fassbinder's approach is how studiously he utilizes film grammar to emphasize the alienation and angst caused by drawing abhorrent stares wherever you go. His main characters are frequently framed within the frame of the shot: by doorways, windows, or railings, to enhance the sense that these people are restrained. The repeated tableau effect creates a Brechtian distance that makes the characters seem to be specimens on display, like butterflys pinned to a cork board for the viewer's persual. It's that very sense of constantly being watched, and judged that makes being a social pariah so painful: it creates a hyper-self consciousness, and a sneaking suspicion that your status as an outsider must stem from some essential otherness. These of course are well trode themes for film, but I've rarely seen them evoked so skillfully.

2008 DVD Review: Rambo

John Rambo is back and he...looks like he's been stung by sixty or seventy bees. Yes, Sly Stallone continues his never ending battle to regain his cinematic relevance by exploiting the success of his earlier franchise, even though he now seems to be wider than he is tall, and looks like someone went upside his head with a two by four. The film compensates for Sly's onrushing senescence by keeping him immobile for most of the run time. He spends the first hour or so glumly piloting a skiff down a river in Burma. In the climactic battle scene, Rambo (who, for the first time in the history of the franchise, keeps his shirt on the whole time) simply stands in the back of a flatbed truck, turning Burmese soldiers into hamburger with a machine gun without breaking a sweat. No hanging from helicopter skids or dangling from trees for this action hero for the AARP set.

To make up for the grindly mopey hero's lack of dynamism, Stallone (who co-wrote and directed!) throws the gore knob to eleven. The evil Burmese troops don't just get shot, they explode like meat pinatas, spraying chunks of appendage and ropes of intestines with each inexplicably gigantic bullet hit. I'll admit that one of my big weaknesses when it comes to action films is outrageously over-the-top bullet hits. Give me a Barret fifty caliber sniper rifle evaporating heads, legs getting chopped off with bullets, and mortar rounds sending cartwheeling spleens into the air, and I'm in grindhouse nirvana. Rambo served up all of the above with gusto. However, this dedication to delivering blood-and-guts makes the film ethically problematic. In addition to making himself viable at the box office again, Stallone's other clear agenda with this movie is to bring attention to the outrages of the Burmese military junta and their campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Karen minority. It's an important topic, but when you stage the massacre of a village full of Karen peasants with the unrestrained hyperviolence of Planet Terror, it ends up trivializing the plight of real people. This is sort of the same problem that Spielberg had with the Krakow ghetto liquidation scene in Schindler's List, but much worse. There's a giddy bloodlust in the sequence that is especially unsettling, especially considering that the military oppression of the Karen people in Burma is something that is happening right now. Who would ever have guessed that noted human rights theorist and auteur Sly Stallone fails at addressing a real humanitarian issue with sensitivity or insight. Still: when Rambo shoots a dude with a heavy maching gun at point blank range and he turns into a geyser of red goo? Awesome!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones was originally conceived by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as a throwback to the pulp heroes of the 1950s that boomers grew up watching in serials and on early television. Funnily enough, Raiders of the Lost Ark became such a cultural touchstone of the 1980s that Harrison Ford's bullwhip and fedora are more likely nowadays to put people in mind of Cabbage Patch Kids and crispy bangs, rather than hula hoops and duck's asses. It's fitting, then, that the new Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull create a theme park version of fifties America that feels like its been lifted from another 80s staple: Back to the Future.

Familiarity is the name of the game in the new Indy movie, and that's by design. Lucas and company are betting on a rich iconography and 27 years of audience good will to sell this thing to the public. It just wouldn't do not to trot out the series' greatest hits. This approach pays off in some moments: the first time Indy cracks his whip or throws one of those patented wild haymakers of his, it delivers old school Indiana Jones thrills. More often, though, it fails miserably. The dreariest attempt at bringing back the spirit of the original films is Karen Allen's return as Marion Ravenwood, Indy's on-again, off-again girlfriend from Raiders. Allen does what she can with the meager role she's stuck with, but the sparkling interplay and lively chemistry that marked Marion's relationship with Indy in Raiders is here rendered shrill, flat and overdetermined by the script. In George Lucas terms, the dynamic in the two films is the difference between the Princess Leia/Han Solo relationship in the original Star Wars trilogy, and the Queen Amidala/Anakin Skywalker relationship in the new one. The lameness of the two characters scenes together can partially be explained by their awkward brevity. Indy's reunion with Marion is one underdeveloped element in a plot stuffed beyond the breaking point with new characters. You've got a Russian dominatrix (Cate Blanchett), a British treasure hunter (Ray Winstone), a mad professor (John Hurt), and a central casting, Wild Ones rebel (Shia Labeouf). It's a classic case of too much not being nearly enough. None of these new characters (including a classic Indy gal pal) get enough screen time to register as more than fonts of expository dialogue.

Of course, none of the character shenanigans carry much weight if Kingdom delivers the bravura action setpieces for which the series is known. Here again, familiarity breeds contempt. Some of the action scenes have bits of the old crispness, ingenious complexity and deft blend of suspense and humor. Even in the most cracking scenes, though, the ghost of ass-kickings past haunt the proceedings. In particular, a truck chase through the Amazon rain forest between Indy and his pals and a half track full of Soviet troops is genuinely rousing, but it recalls the tanks and horses chase from Last Crusade so strongly that it just ends up making you wish you were watching that movie instead (that was a good one, it had Sean Connery!)

One theme that has been featured in all the Indiana Jones films is a sense of awe at the mysteries of the world. Kids growing up in 80s, an era of closed frontiers, were given a glimpse of inconcievable wonders waiting to be discovered in ancient temples and even government warehouses. This spirit of adventure is tempered by a stern warning that there are mysteries and powers too vast and terrible for human understanding. Attempts to master them will always come to face-melting grief. In this respect, Kingdom fits comfortably in the Indy pantheon. The film is bracketed by two similar and similarly jaw-dropping shots of Indiana Jones, miniscule in the foreground, beholding a tremendous cataclysm. The first shot is of an A-bomb test in Nevada. The second, which takes place in the Peruvian jungle, is...something else entirely. These great and terrible displays of power, coupled with Harrion Ford's increasingly weathered, rickety countenance and a plot that sees Indy coerced into service by both sides of the Cold War, suggest a poignant subtext to the movie. They point towards a hero whose time has passed, who is vulnerable in ways he's never been before, tossed about by new, inscrutable forces beyond his ability to control or understand. With a bit of development, it might have made for a commentary on post-war American life, reminiscent of another 50s genre beloved of boomers: film noir. Unfortunately, Spielberg and Lucas take no time to flesh these ideas out in their headlong gallup from chase scene to musty, repurposed chase scene.

Score: 6.0

MYOFNF #19: The Spirit of the Beehive (dir. Victor Erice, 1973)

This is the kind of movie people that love call "hypnotic," and people that hate call "boring." While there are certainly some striking visuals in this film (especially the final shot), for the most part, put me in the "boring" camp. I know: a philistine like me should just stick with Michael Bay if I can't appreciate artistic, plotless meandering with an allegorical subtext. I'm sorry! I like a story in my narrative film! Sue me! All of that said, there is something special in this film. Unlike most films that operate from a kid's point of view, Beehive doesn't sentimentalize childhood or treat it as a parade of traumatic experiences. Instead, the viewer is treated to a singularly haunting and realistic portrayal of the way that children assimilate the concept of death into their imaginations.

MYOFNF #18: The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir, 1939)

Ah, the comedy of manners! A genre I usually have absolutely no use for. Whenever I see be-spatted gentry making eyes at a fair maiden from across the dining room table while the help looks on with bemusement, I reach for my revolver. But this film is notable for the frankness of its sexual politics and its kinetic visual style, both of which seem far ahead of their time.

2007 DVD Review: I'm Not There

Biopics are inherently lame. Not only are their plots hidebound by the known facts of the life of the subject, the time frame of the subject's life insures that the film will be choppy and episodic, with no real momentum built between scenes. Then, there's the crippling inability of the biopic format to answer the question that such films are always asking by their very existence: who is (famous person's name here). This inherent lameness is especially pronounced in biopics about musicians. Visually demonstrating the source of a great musical artist's inspiration, of illustrating the artist's creative process, of showing how the artist's music interacted with the culture around it...the biopic, with its pre-set plot arcs and elliptical structure is singularly incapable of tackling any of these herculean tasks.

So, mad props indeed to filmmaker Todd Haynes, who takes a chainsaw to the very concept of the musical biopic in I'm Not There. His response to the question: "Who is Bob Dylan," would probably be "how can I answer that question if you've got the nerve to ask me?" Haynes' film elides all questions about the quintessence of Bob Dylan the man, or any commitment to a traditional biographical portrait. Instead, Haynes takes as his subject the many artistic persona that Dylan has projected to the world over the years. Hayne's doesn't wan to gain insight into Dylan's psyche or give the viewer a crash course in Dylan's life and influences. Instead, what Haynes is after is something much more unique and interesting: he's using the artistic medium of film in order to represent, in sound and moving image, what it means to experience another artistic medium. The different periods in Dylan's musical career are embodied by different actors, with musical interludes, hallucinations and phantasmagoria that attempt to put the viewer inside a Dylan song, and inside the moment of time when the song was released. A couple of setpieces stand out as particularly sharp: Cate Blanchett's Don't Look Back Dylan emptying an Uzi into the earnest folkies at the Newport Festival, and a white-faced Jim James belting out a mournful rendition of "Going to Acapulco" in a band shell before a crowd of bedraggled Western refugees. The latter scene in particular is a vivid immersion in the apocalyptic paranoia, melancholy, and olde timey theatricality of Dylan's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid era. There might be an inscrutable, grand message here, but the best part of the movie is that there doesn't have to be one for it to be a singular achievement. It's enough to make you forget that Richard Gere is in it.

The film is not always successful: some of the performances verge on parody (and not in a good way...I'm looking at you, Christian Bale) and not every evocation is equally gripping, but the undertaking as a whole is breathtakingly visionary. I'm Not There points the way to a new cinematic approach towards presenting the lives and works of artists, which is a singularly welcome development.

MYOFNF #17: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920)

This is the first, and probably only, silent film of MYOFNF. It's a foundational work of German Expressionism, a profoundly influential filmic style that I don't know nearly enough about. The most striking aspect of this film is the set design, which avoids realistic, or even theatrical renderings of the character's environment. Instead, the interiors and exteriors of buildings are canted at mad angles, chairs and table are vertiginously high, mountain passes appear to be melting. In short, it's the scale and proportion of a dream (or nightmare). Even in a silent film, which suffers from the constraints of the technology available, this approach provokes unease and deepens the horror of a plot that deals with psychic repression and madness.

Iron Man

Robert Downey Jr. is a great actor. It's important to begin any discussion of John Favreau's Iron Man with this fact because the smashing success of the film rests almost entirely on his shoulders. Downey's greatness is tied to the sense of reality that he brings to all of his roles; he may specialize in playing cads, but the cads he plays are invariably smart, engaging, fun to watch, most importantly, they have a whiff of melancholy about them that gives their witticisms and debauched hijinx poignancy. Downey's charisma, humor and pathos have given us Tony Stark, the billionaire playboy inventor/industrialist who becomes Iron Man, and who is something almost entirely unheard of in superhero films: a great character. Other recent screen incarnations of comic book heroes are memorable for their iconic costumes, their superpowers, and if they're lucky, maybe one defining character trait (think Peter Parker's teen angst or Bruce Wayne's brooding obsession). Tony Stark is right in Downey's wheelhouse of smart-ass hedonists, but as the plot unfolds, Downey unveils layers of emotion and conflict that make Iron Man the rare comic book film where the quiet moments are as enthralling as the action setpieces, if not moreso.

Since Iron Man is the first installment of a likely franchise for Marvel's new film production arm, the film is mostly focused on detailing the origin of the Iron Man character. As in the original comic book, genius engineer and arms merchant Tony Stark is captured by a warlord and forced to make a superweapon. Instead, he constructs a metal exoskeleton in order to escape captivity. Once free, he refines the design into the sleek, rocket-boostered suit we know and love. This tale is updated by moving the warlord from Vietnam to Afghanistan, a twist that suggests a layer of political allegory that the film unfortunately never develops. In fact, the actual meat of Iron Man is fairly undercooked, with a few big fight scenes doled out sparingly between muddled plot points, with villains who fail to register. The best that can be said about the action is that it aspires to coherence, unlike the aggressively edited abstract work of Tony Scott or Michael Bay. That Iron Man easily ranks in the top tier of superhero films is a testament to the work of Downey, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's fiesty assistant/love interest Pepper Potts, Terrance Howard as his military running buddy, and Jeff Bridges as his glowering mentor, not to mention a script that treats character interaction as more than just a set up for the next explosion.

Score 8.0

MYOFNF #16: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959)

It's fitting that the first shot of this film is of the entwined bare flesh of two lovers. First of the Holy Trinity of the French New Wave (along with Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Breathless), Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, Mon Amour signaled a shift of emphasis in the film world towards earthy sensuality and personal intimacy. Resnais' film helped usher in an era of naturalistic characters, expressive camera movements, and a "subjective" editing style that reflects the preceptions and memories of the characters. Instead of the traditional role of "building a scene" through editing, the film uses editing to break up continuity, to take the viewer into the mind of the protagonist by cutting abruptly between scenes, jumping back and forth through time, from stock footage to historical reenactments to images from the character's distant past. These sort of tricks are old hat by now, but it's striking to see them used in a film from the fifties, and it serves to highlight the role of the second world war in creating the artistic and psychic headspace of the past sixty years.

2007 DVD Review: The Savages

Tamara Jenkins' film deals point blank with a question that is going to become more and more pressing as the Baby Boom generation makes its relentless march towards senescence: what do adult children do when their parents are no longer able to take care of themselves? Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play a couple of theater people in arrested development trying to deal with the very grown-up task of dealing with their demented, aged father, a man who abandoned them and who they feel little affection towards. Jenkins depicts the grim, desperate situation with a deadpan realism, sort of Alexander Payne minus the whimsy. Hoffman's character is a drama professor writing a book on Bertoldt Brecht, and Brechtian alienation is at the center of both Jenkins' directorial style and Hoffman's method of coping with life. Hoffman's character is a disengaged intellectual, distanced from his own pain and very life, and the experience of dealing with his more emotionally-open, but still stunted, sister, brings up long suppressed feelings, giving the lie to his self-consciously alienated outlook. The film has a similar effect on the viewer: by creating such vivid dipictions of universal family agonies, the audience is forced to reckon with long dormant feelings and memories.

Score: 8.0

MYOFNF #15: Repulsion (dir. Roman Polanski, 1965)

This is the first MYOFNF entry that's in English, but the director is Polish, the lead actress is French, and it takes place in London, so it definitely counts as foreign. It's the story of a fragile young woman living with her sister, slowly going mad over the course of a solitary week. Polanski immerses the viewer in the mindset of his heroine, and the disorienting deluge of hallucinations and crack-ups that the difference between reality, dream and delusion melts away. Interestingly, the creeping sense of madness makes the film less traditionally scarry than it might otherwise be. The first time Catherine Denuve sees a man standing in the corner of her room, it makes your hair stand on end. As you realize that pretty much everything you're seeing exists only in her head, the sense of fear goes away. What doesn't go away is the anxiety provoked by such close and prolonged proximity to madness, culminating in a chilling final image that stays with the viewer long after the screen goes black.