2012

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

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

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

A Serious Man

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

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

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

On second thought....

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

The House of the Devil

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

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

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

The Box

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

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

The Last House on the Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Wild Things Are

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

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

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

Paranormal Activity

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

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

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

The Invention of Lying

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

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

Zombieland

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

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

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

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

The Informant!

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

The Coen Project: The Man Who Wasn't There

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

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

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

Gamer

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

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

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

Twelve (Million) Angry Republicans

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

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

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

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

Extract

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

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

The Final Destination

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

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

Quentin Tarantino's Invisible Bomb

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

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

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

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

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

Inglourious Basterds

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

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

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

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

District 9

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

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

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

Superheroism is no laughing matter.

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

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

What the hell happened?

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

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

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