The 25 Best Conservative Films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Awesome Lines from Awful Movies,,,

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


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


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


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


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

Awesome Lines from Awful Movies

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


More to come...suggestions welcome...

The Wrestler

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

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

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

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

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

Doubt

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

My Bloody Valentine 3D

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

Slavin' in the Celluloid Mines

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

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

Frost/Nixon

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

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

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

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

Slumdog Millionaire

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

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

To quote Jay Sherman: "Hatchie-Matchie!"

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

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


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

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

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

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

Milk

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

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

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

Movie Shoot-outs. A Primer

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



Hyper-realism


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


"Ballet of Bullets"

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


Rapidly Edited, Music-Saturated Suckfest

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

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

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

Synecdoche, New York

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

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

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

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

Shitty Action Film Villains Volume One: Raymond Calitri

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

Notes on Cinematic Awesomeness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Go Lucky

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

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

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

Quantum of Solace

In the B.C. (Before Craig) era, James Bond films were cinematic bon-bons. Lightweight, sugar-laden confections without context or consequence. Beautiful women were wooed, gadgets were deployed, bad guys were dispatched with a quip, with the audience safe in the knowledge that the next Bond movie down the pike would have an entirely new set of villains and sexpots and Bond, with a bemused smile on his face, would be there to kick butt, none the worse for wear. The Daniel Craig reboot that began with 2006's Casino Royale and continues with Quantum of Solace brings something new to the Bond franchise: an overriding plot and character arc that stretches from film to film. Quantum picks up within an hour of the end of Casino, with Daniel Craig's Bond seeking vengeance for the death of his love, Vesper Lynd, due to the machinations of an shadowy global conspiracy. This ambitious approach has it's advantages: in two films, Daniel Craig's James Bond has made more of an impression as a multi-dimensional character than Roger Moore's did in seven. The danger of a trilogy, which the Craig Bond films are revealing themselves to be, is that the middle film is usually the weakest.


For all of its slam-bang action, exotic locales and Bond angst, Quantum of Solace is finally unsatisfying, as it sets up an epic confrontation between Bond and a worldwide criminal organization that must be left for the next movie to be dealt with. One hopes that two movies worth of vague suggestions about the nefarious QUANTUM group will eventually pay off, but in Quantum of Solace, all that the audience can look forward to is a plot that is simultaneously overstuffed and thin. There are plenty of globe-trotting action sequences, including a car chase on winding Italian mountain roads, a boat chase in Haiti and an inexplicable showdown in an empty, hydrogen-powered hotel in the middle of the Bolivian desert, but because Bond's enemy is so ill-defined, the stakes are unclear, which makes it hard to invest too heavily in the outcome. It doesn't help that director Marc Forster stages the action with a marked lack of invention, the only exception being a poetic shootout at an opera house that still manages to evoke unwelcome memories of The Godfather Part 3.

Quantum tries to compensate for the lack of a compelling enemy or satisfying plot by focusing on James Bonds' struggle to come to terms with the death of Vesper. Daniel Craig is all coiled intensity and glowering rage, with most of the trademark Bond wit strangled by grief. Bond takes out all this pain on the world, one broken-necked goon at a time. In this film, Bond is absolutely no fun, but his emotional journey is not particularly interesting, either. Like the action scenes, it rings the same familiar tones of a host of other action films. Nothing about the character connects to the rich legacy of "James Bond." This includes the ostensible "Bond girl," Olga Kurylenko, who is far too obsessed with her own personal losses and revenge plans to pay Bond much romantic attention.


After the arc-ridiculousness and nancing-about of Pierce Brosnan, it was clear that the Bond films needed a revamp. Daniel Craig has made a capable, indeed bad-ass Bond, and brings a needed gravity and physical presence to the role. Two movies into his tenure, however, a disturbing trend has emerged. The ambitious plan to deepen the character of James Bond by giving him emotional baggage has, in Quantum of Solace, served to render Bond somewhat generic. The man punching his way across five time zones in this movie could be any number of wronged and broken vengeance-junkies to have graced cinema screens in the past few decades. At some points, he brings to mind the Punisher in a tuxedo instead of Kevlar. "Depth" is thought to be an objectively good thing for a film character to have, but James Bond is somewhat defined by his shallowness, his ironic detachment, his sang froid. Making him into a standard-issue revenge seeker drains him of that electrifying coolness that has made Bond such an indelible figure in popular culture. This grief-stricken James Bond knows how to brood like no other, but he's no longer a guy you'd want to have a vodka martini with. Dude would just bum you out.

Role Models

When deciding on whether to shell out hard-earned (or easily-earned, for that matter) cash to see Role Models, ask yourself one question: do you find the idea of children swearing at adults or vice versa to be inherently hilarious? If the answer is yes, you'll definitely love this movie. If the answer is no...you still might end up liking this movie. I am not usually one to bust a gut over foul-mouthed youngsters (I hate that "Landlord" video), but the way that Bobb'e J. Thompson, who plays Ronnie in Role Models, curses is endlessly chuckle-worthy. He doesn't swear with the cutesy adorable wink that says to the audience I'm a ten-year-old and I'm swearing! Isn't that outrageous? Ronnie swears with total commitment, which is really funny. In that way, Thompson's performance is like Role Models as a whole. It takes a shopworn premise and executes it with memorable verve.


Role Models is a strong bit of evidence that originality is not an essential ingredient to a successful film comedy. The plot is standard issue in every way. Two underachieving schlubs played by Paul Rudd get in trouble with the law and are forced into cour-ordered community service with a Big Brothers-type organization mentoring a couple of friendless outcasts. Rudd is paired with a Live Action Role Playing nerd played by McLovin himself, Christopher Minz-Plasse. Scott must contend with Bobb'e Thompson's hyperactive f-bomb machine. As you might have guessed, the guys bond with the kids, the kids bond with the adults, there is a third act complication, and by the end of the film, everyone has learned something about themselves. If you can't see every plot point coming a mile away, you've probably never seen a movie before. There's even the requisite double montage: an upbeat second act montage of the kids and adults getting closer, and a downbeat third act montage of sadness after the aforementioned complication. What makes Role Models special is that the third act montage features one of the most pants-wettingly funny sight gags in recent film memory.


For all the predictable plot mechanics, Role Models works because of the winning performances and chemistry of the actors. Paul Rudd subverts his usual shaggy charm by playing a bitter failure who projects his self-loathing through withering sarcasm and generalized misanthropy. All of which makes him a perfect foil for Sean William Scott, whose goofy affability is a perfect contrast with Rudd's seething resentment. The real comedy gold is watching them at work: they hawk a sickly green energy drink called Minotaur under the guise of conducting "anti-drunk" assemblies at high schools. No wonder Rudd loses it and crashes their goofy minotaur-shaped SUV into a statue. The dynamic between the leads and their "littles" is just as entertaining, making the by-the-numbers "getting to know you" sequences more fun than they have a right to be. Minz-Plasse's ernest, unironic enjoyment of medevial roleplaying games plays perfectly off of Rudd's ironic detachment, and one of the best parts of the film is watching Rudd's joylessness crumble in the face of unselfconscious fantasy play. Another highlight is the laid-back party boy Sean William Scott connecting with his hyperactive, pint-sized maniac over Kiss lyrics and the best way to subtly ogle the female boob. In a movie this dedicated to letting its characters breath and play off of each other to full comic effect, an original plot is not necessary. The predictable beats don't distract from the smooth transition from comic set-up to comic set-up. You don't want plot trickery, you just want to watch these people be funny.