From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Jarhead

Originally published 11/4/05
Full review behind the jump

Jarhead
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: William Broyles, Jr., based on the book by Anthony Swofford
Producers: Douglas Wick, Lucy Fisher
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Dennis Haysbert, Evan Jones, Brian Geraghty, Laz Alonso, Lucas Black


There’s a greater cost to war than just the body count and the bill for equipments used. To launch a war means to prepare for a war, which means to take thousands upon thousands of ordinary young men and condition them to, as Patton described it, not die for his country, but make the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

It is not ordinary for a man to stay focused on his job as bombs whistle through the air towards him, nor is it ordinary for him to not only accept an order to take someone’s life, but in doing so, hope dearly that he’ll score a perfect head shot and see the fabled “pink mist”. Which is why even a relatively “clean” geopolitical dust-up like 1991’s Desert Storm, where an overwhelming international force drove the Iraqi Army from Kuwait and ground operations lasted only four days, has a permanent impact because you had to ready all those soldiers for the worst, and they don’t just change back.

Jarhead, based on Anthony Swofford’s memoir, is perhaps the first major American motion picture to focus on that cost – and as a result is a curious sort of war movie, one that deals with the frustrating simmer of training, the sense that life-or-death struggle is imminent, and then the conflicted emotions that result when you have to face how your anticipation of the violence had made you yearn for it.

There’s also something about the different wars of each American generation, and the nobility of each cause. The soldiers make the odd clumsy attempt to mouth different sides of the issue, and it doesn’t work because this isn’t really about whether or not the Gulf War came about for the “right” reasons. The point is – it’s a war, and it alters the soldiers equally whether it’s a “good” war or not. Although director Sam Mendes’ beautiful facility with the momentum of classic drama in pictures like American Beauty and Road to Perdition doesn’t apply so well here, he does know what kind of movie he’s trying to make, and the audience is not immune to its own version of what the troops go through. Which makes the movie successful on its terms, but an unusual experience.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford, or “Swoff”, and we catch up with him in Marine basic training. These scenes don’t escape the long shadow of Full Metal Jacket, from the apocalyptic temper of the drill instructor to the fetishizing of the Marine rifle (the same loving ode: “This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine.” makes an appearance.) Swoff seems not without intellect or soul – brief expository grace notes tell of a history of service with the men in his family, and battles with depression among the women. When the DI asks him what he’s doing here, his answer is concise and honest to a fault: “I got lost on the way to college.” For this, he gets his head slammed into a blackboard.

But he shows a degree of pluck and what you might call an incomplete sense of self – he is a vessel into which the most specialized of training can be poured. He is recruited by Marine lifer Sgt. Sykes (Jamie Foxx) to join an elite unit of snipers. Swoff’s partner is to be the enigmatic Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), whose hunger for some self-held ideal of the Marine experience just grows as the story unfolds.

The call to deploy in the Saudi desert comes – but this is not Desert Storm. This is Desert Shield. Within fifteen minutes of touching down Uncle Sam has 5,000 troops assembled, which is impressive, but their job is simply to train and wait in the miserable desert heat. Train and wait, for eight months.

They’re told that Saddam’s Republican Guard contains the fiercest warriors in the known world. They’re told that biological and chemical weapons are to be used indiscriminately, so they should practice putting on this suit and that mask, and please take these experimental pills and sign a waiver to the effect that you’re doing it voluntarily. On the eve of battle they’re massed by a great berm of sand, ordered to dig sleeping holes, and told that death awaits them on the other side. 30,000 casualties are predicted for the first day of combat.

And as the days drag on the anxiety, the lack of knowledge, the restlessness, the repetitiveness of even the most vulgar distractions, the crumbling of relationships back home, all wear on the troops. You’ll feel restless, too, wondering what the movie’s getting up to. It works more as a cinematic argument than an emotional journey, although there’s spots that hit you in the gut; like when Swoff finds himself sitting in a circle of burnt corpses, and it looks for all the world like the one sitting next to him is going to tilt his head up and speak any second now.

All the troops have to help them process experiences like this is The Corps, its code and all its rituals. They watch Apocalypse Now and interact rowdily with the screen like it’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When Robert Duvall strafes the fishing village to the strains of Wagner, they cheer every kill. These are normal young men, they really are.

In fact, at times they look a little too good. Gyllenhaal and Foxx, however they might effectively embody their characters, lack that indefinable edge, they don’t look like they’ve really been kept up nights. They have unerring instincts for where their characters’ heads are at, watch how Swoff must negotiate a sniper mission co-opted by an arrogant officer (Dennis Haysbert) – how he must deal with his own feelings and the more dangerous disappointment of Troy. Sarsgaard’s performance – bottled up except for a few desperate moments like this – is crucial, as it contains the true emotional landscape of the picture. He knocks it out of the park.

This is Mendes’ first feature without the late brilliant cinematographer Conrad Hall. Now he is working with Roger Deakins, no slouch as a substitute (Kundun, all the Coen Bros’ films since Barton Fink). The blinding flat white of the desert is captured well but is not new – the night scenes are better. Once the conflict has begun, and they march through bare moonscapes lit by flaming oil wells, crossing the scorched “Highway of Death”, having petroleum rain from the sky on them, the point need not be spelled out any more – these men are walking through hell. They’ll be out soon alive and intact, thank goodness. But they’ll remember.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - North Country

Originally published 11/2/05
Full review behind the jump

North Country
Director: Niki Caro
Writers: Screenplay by Michael Seitzman, bsed on the book Class Action: The Story of Lois Jensen and the Landmark Case that Changed Sexual Harrassment Law by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy
Producer: Nick Wechsler
Stars: Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek, Sean Bean, Woody Harrelson, Jeremy Renner, Thomas Curtis, Richard Jenkins


It’s an old story, but tragically not old enough that variations on it aren’t still cropping up by the thousands in this country in this century. A man attacks a woman, says she was asking for it and the herd brands her a slut. A man beats his wife, and even though she’s on the floor with a bruised eye and a bleeding lip she’s advised it’s her responsibility to make it right, because a marriage is sacred and if she walks out on it this makes the rending of it her fault.

It’s easy to get angry at the weak, their presence reminds us of our own shame and cowardice in not standing up with them against the strong. And so the herd becomes the accomplices of the abusers, and blames the victims for not accepting their lot quietly. North Country is about strong women who are punished because they are expected to be weak, and have enough at stake in their lives that to fight back would be too dangerous. And you can see the hook now: until one woman…

And this is a story about one woman (Charlize Theron) who is pushed too far and overturns the status quo. She is not a revolutionary, or even a feminist by nature. She just has a simple choice – she can’t go back to the husband that beats her, and she can’t make enough to support her two children as a hairdresser. So she needs to work at the coal mine, because it has the best-paying jobs in town. She wants to do the American Dream right – work hard, play by the rules, and have a decent living as reward. It’s a classic Hollywood story and, in what is an increasing rarity for dramas of substance, it achieves genuine emotion and uplift.

Although “inspired” by the true story of the first class-action lawsuit for sexual harassment, this is a fictional account. The shape is familiar, as are many of the plotlines – a disillusioned lawyer (Woody Harrelson) takes on hopeless case, a father (Richard Jenkins) forgives his daughter for the sins he imagined and seeks his own forgiveness by finally standing up for her. Then there’s the son (Thomas Curtis) who finally finds a strong father figure (Sean Bean), and the spurned ex-boyfriend (Jeremy Renner) who abuses the power of his position in ways that are alternately infantile and ominous. There’s even a fatal disease for one of the major characters to suffer nobly with.

Any one of these plot threads could have been the most numbing of clichés, but director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, a superb movie you must see at once if you haven’t yet) has a fresh eye and fire in her storytelling belly, and she assembles a superb cast to inject immediacy into every moment. She shows an outsider’s fascination for the landscape of the North and the otherworldly machines of the coal mine, and her sense for what to show and when makes it all come alive. A soundtrack built around Bob Dylan songs also sets the tone impeccably. This is the union the movie industry used to get right – the suits block out what story they’d like to see told in the broad strokes, and they trust the creatives to bring it into vibrant being.

This story centers around Josey Aimes (Theron), who has indeed made the final split from her drunk and unemployed husband and must find means to support herself. A Supreme Court ruling has forced the coal mine to accept female job applicants, and old friend Glory (Frances McDormand) tells her about the good money that can be made if she has thick skin. Glory is feisty, has a boyfriend (Bean) who loves her to the bone, and knows how to slap back when insulted. She thinks she’s developing arthritis but she’s not – and she remains feisty enough to take on a larger fight even as her body begins to disintegrate. McDormand wore this same regional accent to immortality in Fargo – here she overcomes the strong memory of that role with equal parts grace and grit.

At the mine, Josey has no idea how thick her skin will need to be. This isn’t just teasing and innuendos, this is ritual humiliation and degradation, advances made with underlying threats. This is waste smeared on the locker room wall. The perpetrators are few, but when a bully relies on his “brothers” to stick up for him, all it takes is a few to make every day at work hell.

Josey doesn’t want to make big trouble, in fact she wants to make it as little trouble as possible. She just wants to work. But when your supervisor threatens to rape you if you don’t “learn the rules”, his supervisor (Xander Berkeley) tells you that there wouldn’t be so many problems if you didn’t sleep around so much (Josey doesn’t have time for such attachments, but rumors have followed her ever since a high school pregnancy whose origin she concealed), and the boss of the company (James Cada) tells you that he’s happy to waive the two-week notice union requirement and let you quit today if you’re so unhappy, where do you turn?

Every version of pain, from daily indignity to the most brutal personal violations, is visited on Josey, and we suffer with her. At times it challenges belief how persistent and specific the abuse is, you wonder how some of these people manage to get any mining done, but the movie notices the good men also in the mine, and it notices their silence.

And though it comes near to hitting those false notes several times it does squarely strike many that feel urgently true; like a painful scene at an ice rink that takes us step by step to a moment where our hero realizes that she looks like white trash to everyone in town, and no one will ever hear her explanation. Sometimes no matter what you do you can’t shatter the false image of you constructed by long years of assumption and judgment.

Charlize Theron is an actress of stunning beauty who tampers down her looks here – she’s still attractive, but more of a Minnesota attractive than a Hollywood attractive. She fits in with the long-neck drinkers. She also gives a hell of a great performance, not the utter transformation of her Academy Award-winning role in the very-indie Monster, but something more like Jodie Foster in The Accused, a studio-sized drama featuring an unsparing portrait of a confused Everywoman in over her head. The result is heartbreak followed by inspiration, and a truly excellent film.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Shopgirl

Originally published 11/1/05
Full review behind the jump

Shopgirl
Director: Anand Tucker
Writer: Steve Martin, based on his novella
Producers: Ashok Amritraj, Jon J. Jashni, Steve Martin
Stars: Claire Danes, Steve Martin, Jason Schwartzman, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras


It’s just right that Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) drives a used blue pickup with a couple of dents. That’s the hand-me-down vehicle your parents give you when you’re moving from Vermont to Los Angeles. Shopgirl, adapted by Steve Martin from his novella of the same name, is charmingly, movingly just right in so many of its details – from the way money affects our interactions with people despite our best intentions, to the fine parsing of language that allows two people in a relationship to each see it in a way that pleases them, and both be wrong.

In this romantic drama the broad strokes might be familiar, but the willingness to paint each of its three leads in shades of gray and allow them to grow rejuvenates what’s familiar and makes the rest magical. Mirabelle is young, beautiful, hoping to establish herself as an artist. She gazes out at the world from the rarely-visited glove counter at Saks Fifth Ave. in Beverly Hills and has $40,000 in student loans she’s paying off at $45 a month. She longs for some kind of connection to close the distance she feels from everyone else – even her apartment is at the end of a peculiar series of stairways she must walk up, then down.

Not too promising at first is Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a stencil artist for a local amp dealer who finds a roundabout way to hit her up for change at the Laundromat. He’s one of those people who totally lacks a mental filter, and whose tragedy is to always find the worst possible moment to reveal he’s thinking about something inappropriate. But in his scattered, clumsy way he’s interested in her, so she’s willing to try him on for size and the awkwardness of their union earns as many cringes as laughs.

This is a clue to how the movie works – nothing happens right the first time, and it’s never the candlelit consummation followed by happily ever after. People screw up, hurt each other, humiliate themselves, and learn from it.

So exit Jeremy to travel cross-country with a rock band, where he listens to motivational CDs from his tour bus bunk. And enter Ray Porter (Steve Martin), who buys a pair of gloves from Mirabelle then tracks down her address and mails them to her. He’s wealthy enough to never really think about what things cost, and works as a “symbolic logician” in the computer field. He looks like he’s given up trying to tell people what that means, or maybe isn’t sure himself.

Ray showers her with gifts and attention, is unfailingly polite and sensitive and patient. He treats her with tenderness and she responds, but is it genuine love for her or the sort of fondness you have for a piece of furniture people are forbidden to put their feet on? Everything in Ray’s two houses seems spotless, and unused. He’s distant and cautious, and tells anyone who will listen that he is using her for sex and amusement when he’s in town and she understands the arrangement. This is caddish and in most movies it would be enough, but in Shopgirl, there’s significant evidence that Ray is lying to himself here. Some instinctive part of him is beginning to love in spite of his efforts to keep her as a prize.

Watch the way he swings into action when she answers the phone in tears. If you’ve ever known anyone who takes anti-depressants, you’ll recognize with apprehension the moment Mirabelle decides to stop taking them, the effervescence she shows in the next scenes (Danes is perfect in these moments, never forcing or spelling out what’s happening in her head), and this bedridden crash that follows. Again, just right. I think if Ray Porter were as awful as he’s trying to be, he would see her as defective merchandise after this episode and separate himself. That he sticks with her adds only more sadness to later mistreatments.

Suffice it to say that Jeremy eventually re-enters Mirabelle’s world and we reach some resolution about her future potential with Ray. This takes place all over the strange landscape of Los Angeles, which in most movies is the city where you get mugged or addicted to drugs or killed in an earthquake. But Martin and director Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) shows us that L.A. has beauty, too – from the mansions in the hills to the colorful apartments that might as well have “struggling artists welcome” on banners, from eclectic restaurants to hoity-toity art openings in Beverly Hills, where everything seems to glow.

Those familiar with L.A. Story or Martin’s prose work will recognize the mix of precise verbiage and flights of graceful nonsense, and the laughs are plenty. If the movie has any flaw, it’s that sometimes Tucker hangs in too long for an extra laugh or two. The patient and delicate emotional progress of the story is nudged out of rhythm.

Danes is luminous, coming into the full-flower of screen adulthood but with perfectly-calibrated vulnerability. All three leads are excellently observed, and show us not only uncommon depth, but glimpses of real organic lives. What is conveyed when Mirabelle stares across a room at her mother (Frances Conroy) then makes the decision she makes? It’s not important for the movie to be concrete, but since the decision surprises us, we’re inspired to wonder.

And Martin’s generosity as a writer works further down the cast list, too: Bridgette Wilson-Sampras has a hilarious turn as a catty Saks perfume salesman. See how she indicates the emotional intent of what she’s about to say with the way she flips her hair. She can flip it in a lot of different ways. And see how she’s full of perfectly horrible advice for Mirabelle about how to land a man. Mirabelle listens politely and replies that she couldn’t do any of that. When pressed, she explains: “I’m from Vermont”. That’s just right, too.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Saw II

Originally published 10/31/05
Full review behind the jump

Saw II
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Writers: Darren Lynn Bousman, Leigh Whannell
Producers: Mark Burg, Gregg Hoffman, Oren Koules
Stars: Donnie Wahlberg. Tobin Bell, Erik Knudsen, Shawnee Smith, Dina Meyer, Franky G


Saw II carries on the ghoulish chronicling of the exploits of The Jigsaw Killer (Tobin Bell), who claims he’s never killed anyone and if people would simply play the game he’s set up by the “rules”, they’d escape alive. Sure, they didn't ask to play these games, and at the end they may be missing a limb or an eyeball or some flesh they wouldn’t have normally wanted to part with, but they won’t be dead, so no harm no foul, right?

But, reflecting the sloppy thinking of his creators, Jigsaw cheats. His Torquemada-esque scenarios, which he calls bloody altruism designed to make people appreciate life again, are really about creating shocking horror movie plots. They depend on wild coincidence and psychic foreknowledge of how people will think, what they will do in every situation, and down to the exact second, when they will make certain logical leaps or discover important props. Those chilling twist endings he goes to such trouble to set up would never come to pass unless 100 such little things didn’t unfold just so. Really what Jigsaw is saying is: follow your lines in the script, which I clearly have a copy of, and we’re guaranteed to reach that “gotcha” moment I’m herding the audience towards.

Jigsaw’s rather invasive form of carpe diem stems from his own diagnosis with terminal cancer. He uses it as a bullying point – why arrest, why even try to beat information out of him, when he’s already at the outer threshold of pain? This is not the first movie to crassly make poetic hay out of a fatal disease, but there’s an unsettling cockiness to it here.

It does have the drawback, though, of creating diminishing returns in the sequel potential department. So part of the business here, besides another helping of histrionic acting, laughably juvenile police work, and elaborate snuff, is going to be settling how the producers intend to get Saw III into theatres, as well as the inevitable IV, V and VI.

The previous movie centered around two men chained in a grimy industrial bathroom. One, Dr. Gordon, seemed to escape at the end, but if he did, it renders one of this movie’s surprises all-but impossible, and if he didn’t, that sort of scotches Jigsaw’s high-brow claim about not killing anyone by his own hand. But if I stop for every glaring plot hole I’d never find my way to the plot itself.

This time Jigsaw has broadened his ambitions, and constructed an elaborate “game” with eight potential victims locked in a booby-trapped house. A nerve gas is pumping in through the vents that will make them hemorrhage to death in two hours unless they can access one of the many “antidote” syringes hidden in ominous devices in the various rooms. One of the “players” is Amanda (Shawnee Smith), who escaped from the gruesome “bear trap” device in the previous movie and is understandably annoyed that so few people care to rely on her previous experiences. Then again, if they listened to her advice they wouldn’t set off so many of the traps, which is what the fans pay to see anyway.

We open with a police snitch named Michael (Noam Jenkins) finding himself on the wrong side (the inside) of a “Venus Fly Trap Mask” meant to evoke that infamous “bear trap”. Jigsaw has sewn the key up inside Michael’s head, so to save his life he’ll have to cut one of his own eyes out.

Michael’s not so much the prey here – this “game” is designed to attract the attention of temperamental police detective Eric Matthews (Donnie Wahlberg), whose teenage son Daniel (Erik Knudsen) is one of the prisoners in the house. His specialty as a cop seems to be planting evidence and, failing that, physical abuse. When he barges into Jigsaw’s hideout with a SWAT team and sees his son with the other kidnappees on a bank of monitors, he wants to enact every angry cop cliché written all over Jigsaw in the time allotted, even though this is pretty much guaranteed to fail and make him look like a fool.

That’s why this movie is more like Friday the 13th with gadgets added and the virginal heroine removed. All our “heroes” are morally-compromised idiots who roll down the assembly line towards their fate, and Jigsaw is the cool guy with the toys who probably memorized all of Kevin Spacey’s dialogue from Se7en. This is a franchise where the sociopath is going to win every time, and we’re told to enjoy it.

The victims in the house aren’t any more promising than Det. Matthews. There’s muscle-bound hothead Xavier (the empathically over-gesticulating Franky G), whose solemn duty is to do the most ignorant and dangerous thing possible in every situation and yell at or hit anyone who questions him. Then there’s Laura (Beverley Mitchell), whose contribution is to be cowering and helpless, and various other broad-brushed types determined to squabble away their last minutes rather than cooperate.

In a sense this central plot and its deadline offer a stronger sense of story cohesion than the hash of multiple flashbacks and side vignettes that made up the original Saw. The budget has also increased and it’s noticeable onscreen, if all-pervading scuzz can be said to have an extra layer of polish, this movie demonstrates it.

But if you get down to it this movie doesn’t really intend to scare you. Persistent cringing would be a more desired response. It is about one long scene after another where people slowly, excruciatingly author their own mutilation for the dubious hope of maybe not dying at the end. Success or failure depends on the ability of the director to stage these scenes – like a character thrown into a pit of syringes, or another trapped in an oven with a long row of burners lighting one by one towards him – with intensity. Co-writer/Director Darren Lynn Bousman, making his feature debut here, gets the squirming and the shrieking on film effectively, though he fares about as well as his predecessor with keeping moments of unintentional comedy to a minimum (not very well). And there’s still an over-reliance on rapid-fire montages of clips from earlier in the movie, which endeavor to make the explanation of the plot twists seem much more complex than they actually are.

If you’ve read enough of my reviews you’ll know I’m not opposed to pain, violence or gore in and of themselves. But even imaginative examples of those traits alone don’t constitute a movie. It’s barely even the “game” Jigsaw describes it as. It’s easy to win a game when you write all the rules and don’t let anyone else see the game board. People who enjoy Saw II must enjoy games like that, with them in charge, of course.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Weather Man

Originally published 10/28/05
Full review behind the jump

The Weather Man
Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Steve Conrad
Producers: Jason Blumenthal, Steve Tisch, Todd Black
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Peña, Nicholas Hoult, Michael Rispoli


No one wears melancholy like Nicolas Cage. It’s in the eyes a bit, but also in the manic energy we’ve seen him bring to roles over the years. Nothing creates tension on-screen like a performer who we know has 1.21 gigawatts of life going on inside but only a little peephole to feed it through.

In The Weather Man we get to watch him do one of his best variances on the slow-motion freakout. He’s a man who sees everything in life as a source of his misery except for the fact that he’s a miserable human being by his own design. He makes a handsome living faking enthusiasm for a couple of hours a day, but nothing is worth his real passion except petty frustrations and misunderstandings. In this entertaining but not transcendent drama, directed with a bit too much slick and not enough quirk by Gore Verbinski, we see him struggle to become the hero of his own life but come to realize that not everyone can be a hero, and clowns are important, too.

People throw things at Dave Spritz (Nicolas Cage). He’s accepted it as a fact of his life – sometimes it’s milkshakes, sometimes it’s a burrito. Always fast food – he senses there’s meaning there. He’s a recognized face all over Chicago, where he delivers the local weather reports with a pasted-on grin, and each week he advises residents which day will be the “Spritz Nipper” – the coldest day.

His name is fake, and his audience knows it’s fake, and that breeds resentment. In Los Angeles we have weathermen named “Johnny Mountain” and “Dallas Rains”, so I understand this. His real name is Spritzel, and he’s the son of Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine), who is patient and polite and a bit of a genius. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has a way of looking at Dave which is not judgmental or unloving. It’s just that the father seems confused by the way his son’s life has unfolded. Caine’s performance has so much dignity and restraint to it you might miss all the just right moments he’s creating.

He used to play tennis with Jimmy Carter, and in the twilight of his life he’s dealing with a grandson (About a Boy’s Nicholas Hoult) whose drug counselor (Gil Bellows) spends too much out of the office time with him, and a sullen, overweight granddaughter (Gemmenne de la Peña) who gets called “Camel Toe” at school and has a misunderstanding about what that means. And his son gets Big Gulps chucked at him, and he doesn’t even know what a Big Gulp is.

There’s nothing wrong with him as a father except that things have generally worked out for him, and they haven’t worked out for his son, who toils away at night on a lousy spy novel and auditions for a job on the national morning program “Hello America”. Dave thinks working with Bryant Gumbel and making a seven-figure salary will help him undo his divorce. That his wife (Hope Davis) hates everything about him is something he hasn't factored in. He also has an unerring habit of picking the wrong way to try and help his kids, like when he tries to inspire his daughter to finish an ice skating event with him and she tears her MCL.

This is as much as the movie has to offer in the plot department. The script by Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway) is a perceptive meditation on distinctly-American brands of mediocrity and fame, as well as our myths about what will give us satisfaction in our lives. The point is that life is hard and filled with indignities, but our culture teaches us too many ways to shun the hard work and outsource the blame for our unhappiness. On any given day you can end up feeling like Dave Spritz, it’s just that he feels like this every day.

There’s a lot I love about this movie. Cage and Caine are unpredictably well-suited on-screen, the vast difference in energies they deliver as performers helps underscore their gulf as characters. I love the minutiae about archery. I love how often Dave Spritz’s intimates ask him how he’s doing and how quickly and falsely he assures them he’s fine. He breaks this habit at a great moment.

And Chicago is the right town to set it in, the filmmakers do us a great service by genuinely using the city and all its rich parts, rather than just sneaking in a couple of skyline shots and filming in Canada. The snow-dusted breaking ice on the lake looks like bird feathers, and the bricks and towers and jammed one-way streets make the background a real, breathing character. Weather is a major factor of life in Chicago, and the difficulty of accurately predicting it begins to grip Dave Spritz with a panic, because it’s all about wind, and nobody really knows which way it’s going to go.

I don’t have any major complaint against Verbisnki’s handling of this material except that it seems a little too polished. It’s capable and handsome and knows where the jokes are. But his commercial streak (he also directed The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean) keeps his timing too conventional and it exposes the meandering shape of the script. It’s a story about misfits that’s not being observed by a misfit. You can imagine what extra grace notes a Spike Jonze or Alexander Payne might have found. I’ll take the movie that’s been given me, but think that it had bigger potential in it.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Capote

Originally published 10/25/05
Full review behind the jump

Capote
Director: Bennett Miller
Writer: Dan Futterman, based on the book by Gerald Clarke
Producers: Caroline Baron, Michael Ohoven, William Vince
Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Amy Ryan, Mark Pellegrino


“Jack thinks I’m using Perry. He also thinks I fell in love with him in Kansas. How both those things could be true is beyond me.” Of course it is beyond Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to reconcile these motives, both of which happen to be true. The essence of tragedy is that we are blind to the flaws with which we author our own downfall.

How fitting, then, that a man known in all the best crowds for his ability to depict a foible in a pithy toss-off should spell out his own doom with such ease and flair and not even realize it. For the tragedy of Capote, a drama about Capote’s most famous book, is that he, indeed, fell in love with Perry and used him. Without those two contradictory desires, the “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood, which so galvanized the world of literature and shocked Amercia, would never have existed.

Capote was recognized in his life as a titanic man of letters, though he knew it before anyone else did. When the movie opens, most people don’t yet, and he is simply the most entertaining author in New York’s society circle, creating laughs at the best soirees and dropping the right names in the process. His childhood friend and fellow author Nelle Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who will during this drama write a book of some note herself – catches him in the act of bribing a railroad porter to gush about his book in front of her. It’s a peculiar blend of talent with a childlike ego – “I have 94 percent recall of all conversations. I measured myself”, he emphasizes. He was a man who knew great work when he saw it, and he knew instinctively that writing about the murder of the Clutter family would be great work.

One night in November of 1959, in Holcomb, Kansas, two drifters and petty thieves named Dick Hickock (Mark Pellegrino) and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) invaded the Clutters’ farmhouse and killed them all, execution-style. Capote sees a newspaper article about it, just the thinnest of sidebars, but it touches something in him. He clips it out (the scissors in loud close-up, the book will be a violent act of its own,) and phones his editor at The New Yorker (Bob Balaban), announcing his intention to write an article about it.

Within a day he’s in Holcomb with Nelle – whose mixture of patience and stern, protective paternalism tells us much – and he canvasses the town, recording reactions, probing secrets. He’s at the Christmas table of Sheriff Allen Dewey (Chris Cooper) when a call comes in that the killers have been captured. The Sheriff is made uncomfortable by Capote’s mix of flamboyance and perceptiveness, but Capote has charmed his wife (Amy Ryan) with stories about Humphrey Bogart so he’s become a fixture in the household. And he’s also outside the station when Dick Hickock and Perry Smith are brought in to be jailed pending trial. The moment he locks eyes with Perry Smith, he decides a simple article will never do.

He spends months with the killers, trying to capture them in verbal portrait, trying to pierce not only what they did that night, but why. Maybe that way the world won’t see them as freaks and outcasts but people who steered the wrong way and never turned back. Perry is a peculiar man, the orphaned son of an alcoholic Cherokee woman, yet he takes great care with his speech, uses big words in unusual places then stops to explain them. For Capote, Perry activates some memory of his own sad childhood circumstances. He hires lawyers, calls for appeals and stays of execution. He hopes to keep Perry (and Hickock, if he’s part of the package) alive because without their story, the book is incomplete. And Capote has a sense that this will be an amazing book which will bring him fame and fortune, and why not have that as well if you deserve it?

How this relationship turns and what it costs Capote in the end I’ll leave you to discover. The fates of Perry and Hickock are known and unsurprising, the movie is not so much about the justice meted out to them but how the creation of Capote’s most famous work became a means to exorcise and destroy his hated past, but ended up destroying him in the present. For the last nineteen years of his life following this greatest career triumph he drank, and appeared on talk shows, and started books without finishing them.

The script by actor Dan Futterman and the direction by former commercial helmer Bennett Miller are the essence of great biopic filmmaking – they tell a great story and find a way to telescope the character of this man’s life into these choices he made. Their longtime friend Hoffman is astounding in the role. Astounding is perhaps the wrong word, because what’s most impressive is how quickly you disregard the mimicry. “Capote” was a persona, a carefully-crafted mask. Hoffman offers his technically-perfect replica then also sneaks in so delicately those moments of loneliness and anguish behind that mask. Despite that the movie is about him, his best work is often all-but-invisible.

The supporting cast is equally appropriate to their parts. Keener creates a whole life for Lee without ever overshadowing Hoffman – just compare her sexy single mother in The 40-Year-Old Virgin to this work and ask how many actresses could play both roles in the same year. Then add in her unadorned and unheralded but nevertheless flawless performance as Sean Penn’s partner in The Interpreter, this is an actress of such touch and grace that you never catch her showing you what good acting she’s doing. Collins is excellent, too, as Perry – enigmatic, afraid of himself, yearning to be seen as a man of intellect even as the hangman prepares his noose.

There’s even room in the story for Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood), Truman’s “longtime companion” in a time when such slang was deemed necessary. They act as any couple of some years would where one has a habit of losing himself in work like Capote, and their relationship is tenderly, comfortably one of the most honest you’ll see depicted in any movie. Their love expresses itself not in any clichéd way but in the tiniest of signals and interactions.

The contrast between the towers of Manhattan and the stark horizons of Kansas (actually the equally flat Manitoba) is used to full effect, and makes without forcing the point about In Cold Blood’s impact – it revealed the unfathomable brutality that could explode anywhere, even in this most red-white-and-blue heartland. That title was a winner – but though he bragged about it elsewhere, Capote couldn’t bear to admit to Perry that he came up with it himself. That’s the heart of Capote, one of the year’s best films.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Originally published 10/20/05
Full review behind the jump

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Directors: Nick Park and Steve Box
Writers: Nick Park, Steve Box, Bob Baker and Mark Burton, based on the characters created by Nick Park
Producers: Nick Park, Peter Lord, Claire Jennings, Carla Shelley, David Sproxton
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Peter Kay, Nicholas Smith


The charms of Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit are quite literally handmade – if you look closely you can sometimes see the odd thumbprint on their clay heads where they’ve been sculpted and posed. From their troika of riotous and inventive shorts they now make the leap to feature-length product with all their sublime whimsy and veddy British quirks intact. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a consistently hilarious and almost indecently adorable outing from Aardman Animation, also the makers of Chicken Run. When you fill the screen with little bunnies that thump their furry chests and howl at the moon, you’re just not playing fair.

The relationship between our two heroes is intact in transition. Wallace (Peter Sallis) is a boundlessly-optimistic idiot savant – he loves cheese, is naïve and woolly-headed in his dealings with the outside world, but in his workshop cooks up gadgets that reveal a bottomless supply of imagination, joy, and enthusiasm for gears and levers and big buttons. This time around he’s not only founded a successful pest-control service (called “Anti-Pesto”) that uses the humane, non-lethal BunVac 6000 to suck rabbits out of your vegetable patch, he’s also tinkering with a glass helmet which will suck bad thoughts out of your head.

Gromit is his devoted dog, certainly the more domesticated and self-reliant of the pair; he must work long hours protecting Wallace from his own genius. It brings a consistent smile to my face that the mute Gromit is the most emotionally-expressive creature in these adventures. Dialogue would be superfluous – his worried brow and his ping-pong ball eyes, often rolling skyward in exasperation, tell all.

Their humble little village is abuzz with the approaching Giant Vegetable competition, hosted every year by Lady Campanula Tottington (Helena Bonham Carter), who has thick, bright lipstick around the Aardman trademark wide elliptical mouth, and dresses in uncannily vegetable-like ways. She’s being wooed by the pale and irritable Vincent Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes), who believes that every problem eventually boils down to finding something to shoot.

So Anti-Pesto is working overtime to protect everyone’s over-sized carrots and cabbages from the hordes of burrowing bunnies. And things only get worse when a mysterious creature begins to stalk the town at night, eating everything in sight and leaving devastation in its wake. Reverend Hedges (Nicholas Smith) fulfills the clerical role in fog-shrouded monster stories like this and whips up hysteria about a mythical beast known as the Were-Rabbit.

Naturally he has a thick and ancient book all about Monsters like the Were-Rabbit and how to do away with them. The book’s author, glimpsed in a flash on the cover, is “Claude Savagely”. You can always appreciate a movie that takes the extra time to stick little gags and puns in the corner of the frame for you to discover and treasure, like the sticker on the back of Wallace’s van that reads: “Eat Cheese Now. Ask me how.” It’s a sign you’re in the hands of entertainers who want to share how much fun they’re having with you. Once they’ve won you over like that, you forgive the familiar jokes because they’re done with such zest and timing.

There’s a true balance to inspiration, you can’t choke the audience with delights, but must roll them out at a varied but steadily increasing pace. Wallace and Gromit, true to their shorter adventures, are masters at sustaining this pace right up to an action-packed climax whose many pleasures I dearly wish to talk about, but won’t.

The contrast between our heroes, and the way they can always depend on each other, is key. The Buster Keaton antics of Gromit never wear thin because we can always jump to some daffy wordplay and slapstick from Wallace, or more painfully-cute bunny antics. And in the expansion of their formerly-hermetic world to include a whole town full of eccentrics – Fiennes’ relish-filled reading of Quartermaine deserves both praise and laughter – these two have never had so large a playpen.

On the technical level there’s a definite increase in smoothness and detail, along with a sparing few touches of computer effects. But part of what I like about Wallace and Gromit is that they’re still just a little herky-jerky. What might become crudity due to the limitations of their construction becomes a kind of style, and I live to see Gromit’s peculiar four-footed shuffle and the endearing quality of Wallace’s wide, blank eyes. At first that expression could seem vacant, but its incomprehension of the world is not for lack of ability. It’s just that the playground of his inner fancy is too distracting to take in much else. Except the cheese.

Lady Tottington’s eyes are similar. Maybe that’s why there’s such a spark between the two of them. But they’d never end up together, oh no. Wallace has his partner for life, and as long as they’re together, all’s right with the world.

P.S.: Hopefully it is the same at all theatres, the showing I saw was proceeded by an animated short featuring the penguins from the CGI feature Madagascar. Not having seen the movie that spawned them, I probably didn’t get all the jokes, but it’s a peppy and silly little adventure that not only features the most vicious fluffy dog rendered in digital, but the first instance I’ve ever seen of a penguin regurgitating a stick of dynamite.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Where the Truth Lies

Originally published 10/16/05
Full review behind the jump

Where the Truth Lies
Director: Atom Egoyan
Writer: Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes
Producer: Robert Lantos
Stars: Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman, Rachel Blanchard, Sonja Bennett, Kathryn Winslow, Kristin Adams, Maury Chaykin


I can’t give you any details about the scene where Kevin Bacon does his best acting in Where the Truth Lies. What intrigue the movie offers comes in the form of its central mystery, and the scene in question is the key to understanding it. It’s also the scene that caused the MPAA – which calls its ratings code “voluntary” but serves as more effective censors than any society in the civilized world – to threaten the financial deathblow of an “NC-17” rating. Many newspapers refuse to carry ads for “NC-17” movies and chains like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster refuse to stock them, kowtowing to the nattering boycott threats of a religious minority (both Egoyan and producer Robert Lantos attest to the presence of two clergymen participating “unofficially” in the ratings board’s discussion). The film’s distributors, ThinkFilm, have opted to release it without a rating, which has the same effective result but at least allows them to make some statement.

In any case, cutting the scene would be impossible – writer/director Atom Egoyan filmed it the most effective way possible, in a single wide take. And without seeing it, the power of what is revealed is lost.

But back to Bacon’s acting. He’s survived being the center of the “Six Degrees” movie game and even survived Hollow Man, and has been steadily building and expanding his body of work. He is at this point a reliable professional with range and daring, and awaits only the right alignment of role and visibility to start finally collecting critical kudos. And he does some of his best work in this picture, an adaptation of the novel by Rupert Holmes – he of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” fame. I just wish that this performance, and this principled stand against economic censorship, had come together in a better movie.

When the scene comes you’ll know it. Listen to Bacon’s tone, the way he’s almost scolding. A line has been crossed, one which was never spoken of but in his voice you sense that he was aware of it and its inviolability should have been understood. It’s not pure rage, there’s disappointment involved, too. It says more about this movie’s most compelling aspect than any of the clunky voice-over or flat sleuth work by writer Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman).

She’s a young journalist, it’s 1972 and young journalists are trying out all sorts of things, like inserting themselves into their stories. Hunter Thompson certainly made it look cool. Of course, Hunter Thompson could write, and from every example provided by the movie, Karen O’Connor can’t. If it weren’t for a hidden connection she has with her subjects, it’s unfathomable that a major publisher would hand her this assignment – to co-author the tell-all autobiography of Vince Collins (Colin Firth), the dapper half of the long-split music and comedy duo Collins and Morris (Bacon).

Alison Lohman is a supremely capable and confident young actress, so I can’t answer why she seems so adrift in what needs to be the plot-driving role of the story. Her publishers hope she will finally coax the truth out about a) why Collins and Morris separated 18 years before, and b) what really happened the day the body of Maureen O’Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard) was discovered in their hotel’s bathtub after the completion of their marathon charity show.

Collins was the straight man, Morris the rude goon. On-stage Collins had to save Morris from his own antics, off-stage we learn that when Collins stepped in, it was with scripted lines Morris wrote. Their relationship is one co-dependency built atop another: Morris needed that debonair reserve Collins provided – in his own words, Collins’ affection for him on-stage gave the audience permission to like him, too.

See, Morris is writing his own tell-all, and O’Connor keeps getting sample chapters slipped to her by various means. And then she bumps into Morris on an airplane, and from there I should only say that to be compromised by one of your investigative targets is one thing, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to do so with two seems like carelessness.

There is a great deal of sex in the movie, which is important because it is important to the characters. When Firth and Bacon are together on-screen, the ritzy grandeur of the nightclub 50’s all around them, the complex possibilities of the movie are briefly visible. Their act is convincing enough to take on the road. But we keep returning to O’Connor, behaving in one inexplicable way after another, and then Egoyan (so masterfully delicate with The Sweet Hereafter, almost all thumbs here) ladles on more overwrought music and dull narration like so much gravy.

There’s moments, beautiful moments. A mother (Kathryn Winslow) making a speech about a tree. The way a mobster (Maury Chaykin) wheezes “You like lobster?” Maureen O’Flaherty resting her head on a pillow and, eyes half-closed with sleep, stating her terms. They keep sliding out of view, just another shuffled angle in a movie that never decides how best to approach its subject but treats every attempt with equal pomp. In the end it’s closer to laughable than devastating, and a real shame for the talent assembled. I left thinking that Collins & Morris, and the mysterious Maureen, had the makings of a crackerjack movie, and that the perfect actors were already in place to play them. Too bad you tend to get only one shot at these things.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Flightplan

Originally published 10/8/05
Full review behind the jump

Flightplan
Director: Robert Schwentke
Writers: Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
Producer: Brian Grazer
Stars: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean, Kate Beahan, Erika Christensen


A movie like Flightplan should come with a label which reads: “Be Kind, Don’t Rewind.” The cruelest thing you can do to a movie like this is to consider its plot in reverse once you’ve seen it through to the end. At the least it is ludicrously implausible, dependent on rampant coincidence and psychic foreknowledge of how people will behave. At worst it is plainly impossible.

What dignity the film can muster comes from Jodie Foster, always so fiercely alive and immediate on camera, and Sean Bean, who sees the clear down-the-middle path his role must play and sticks to it even as the story flies apart. The rest of the actors flounder in a talky script which keeps head-faking in promising directions, while German director Robert Schwentke (making his English-language debut) keeps the contraption running as smoothly as you could hope but can’t overcome the story’s fatal flaws.

Foster plays Kyle Pratt, an engineer making a sad trip home to America on a next-generation jumbo jet she helped design. Her daughter Julia (Marlene Lawston) is with her, quiet and preoccupied. In the cargo hold is a coffin which holds husband and father David (John Benjamin Hickey), who fell to his death from the roof of their Berlin apartment last week. At least, Kyle insists he fell.

But as the plane crosses the Atlantic in the dark Kyle wakes from a nap to find Julia missing. She’s not entirely stable to begin with but does her best to hold panic in and methodically search the airplane. When that turns up nothing, she enlists the aid of the flight attendants, and while they’re helpful at first, when a check of the flight manifest shows no Julia Pratt ever boarded the plane, their attitude towards Kyle shifts noticeably.

Bean plays the pilot – who takes Kyle’s plight seriously and tries to keep things calm and according to protocol, putting her in the charge of abrasive Air Marshall Carson (Peter Sarsgaard). But Julia remains unfound. And Kyle’s increasing hysteria sends tension throughout the plane until a new bombshell forces her to face the possible reasons why none of the passengers or crew can remember seeing her daughter.

When we’re stuck on the plane and can watch passengers react in their own way to the evolving situation, Flightplan has some intrigue. It plugs into Kyle’s paranoia – are those two Arab men (Michael Irby, Assaf Cohen) the ones who seemed to be staring into her window last night? Some passengers seem willing to think so and the threat of violence hangs in the air. It also plugs into Kyle’s awareness of her surroundings – this is not a lost mother waiting to be helped but a capable, rational woman suffering a great trauma who knows that she must fight the growing perception that she’s insane, even if it might be true. Foster is playing in much the same range as she did in Panic Room and again shows an uncanny ability to find the hidden dynamics within a genre piece like this.

And I single out Bean because as the truly harebrained nature of the plot begins to reveal itself he doesn’t bend to it. While other characters behave in deliberately odd or suspicious ways, he consistently depicts a professional man who is not without concern but has a whole plane full of people he is responsible for besides Kyle. So no matter where his character ends up in the final analysis, his conviction is the most quietly compelling along the way.

The plane is a mammoth, two-level piece of work, and since the action spreads throughout the lounge, the flight deck, the cargo hold, the restrooms, the avionics chamber and all sorts of other nooks and crannies, director Schwentke has a lot of space to keep the movie from becoming visually stagnant. That Foster’s character has such detailed knowledge of the plane comes in handy in several ways. By comparison with this year’s other woman-in-jeopardy-on-a-plane thriller Red Eye, Schwentke has fewer limitations than Wes Craven had with that piece’s plane sections.

This movie suffers more, then, since Craven’s filmmaking abilities elevated that preposterous story into an effective thrill ride, while Schwentke can only keep things interesting moment by moment. All his clever photographic angles aside – and there are many that don’t call too much attention to themselves – inevitably, you stop to think about what you’re seeing, what the movie is proposing to you. And then the jig’s up.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - In Her Shoes

Originally published 10/7/05
Full review behind the jump

In Her Shoes
Director: Curtis Hanson
Writer: Susannah Grant, based on the novel by Jennifer Weiner
Producers: Ridley Scott, Lisa Ellzey, Curtis Hanson, Carol Fenelson
Stars: Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette, Shirley MacLaine, Mark Feuerstein, Anson Mount, Jerry Adler, Francine Beers, Norman Lloyd, Candice Azzara, Ken Howard


It wouldn’t be effective marketing to say that In Her Shoes, the adaptation of Jennifer Weiner’s novel, is from the director that brought you 8 Mile. But it’s true. Equally true is that you wouldn’t have advertised 8 Mile as being from the director of Wonder Boys. And you might not have predicted the director of all three also made L.A. Confidential.

If I could think of a highest compliment for Curtis Hanson, it’s that he is our most professional filmmaker working, a serious movie-lover who creates movies we in turn love by treating familiar genres with care and attention. We’ve seen many movies where lonely women lament their condition, or talk about their feelings and old family secrets over tea by day and cosmos by night. But you haven’t seen one this good in awhile. By giving his characters the space to become their flawed and full selves, Hanson (working from a tart script by Erin Brockovich scribe Susannah Grant) delivers a movie which is not perhaps as compelling as those other films, but more charming than you might have predicted.

You must dispel the notion that this is a movie about shoes, although they play a role. They line the walls of Rose Feller’s closet, stylish designer shoes for every mood and situation. Rose (Toni Collette) is an attorney in Philadelphia, successful but ground under. When she looks in the mirror she sees only a woman with plain features and a few extra pounds on, so whatever spurs her to buy those shoes, the passion for them dissipates before the occasion arises to actually wear them. That Collette the actress is capable of looking perfectly stunning in films like The Hours, or perfectly blue-collar in The Sixth Sense, or perfectly manic-depressive in About a Boy (with different accents for each) just underlines how her vanity-free, seamless transformations from role to role make her something like the Australian Meryl Streep.

Two guests will join her in her tasteful apartment one night – one wanted and unexpected, one expected but unwanted. First is Jim (Richard Burgi), a handsome partner at her firm who has finally noticed her. Then, as he sleeps and Rose stares at him like he’ll turn into a pumpkin if she takes her eyes away, she gets a phone call and resignedly bundles up to go fetch guest number two.

Maggie (Cameron Diaz) is Rose’s younger sister, an aimless stunner who likes drinking and men and stealing as many of Rose’s shoes as she can. She’s 28 now, has never held a steady job, and her stepmother (Candace Azzara) has just thrown her out of the family home. Rose isn’t eager to offer her couch, but we find out that looking out for her prettier little sister is a habit and burden of long standing.

In the shallow version of this story that would be enough backstory but In Her Shoes delves deeper, and shows what Maggie’s bad habits are fearfully masking. The Cameron Diaz of Charlie’s Angels can handle seductiveness, sprightly energy and booty-shaking on auto-pilot – the role of Maggie calls on something more vulnerable from her, not in the big moments where tears flow or voices rise, but in those moments where she tries to conceal and you can see the flash of desperation and need.

Having the smooth but led-by-his-genitals Jim and the wayward Maggie under one roof doesn’t end well, and the two sisters are driven apart. In their separation they’re finally going to learn things about each other. Rose leaves the firm, accidentally starts a dog-walking career, and navigates a startling new relationship with an ex-colleague (Mark Feuerstein). And Maggie discovers a grandmother who was not unknown but gone so long she’s been forgotten. Ella Hirsch (Shirley Maclaine) lives in a “retirement community for active seniors” in Florida, and when Maggie shows up on her doorstep Ella perceives what’s going on with more clarity than even Maggie; because Ella raised Maggie’s mother, and sees familiar traits that bring up bad memories.

This is the raw material of the movie, and it is not the best means of communicating the movie’s charm. The charm comes in expressions, and gestures – like a sweet battle-of-wills played out over a lamp cord – and in the way Curtis Hanson treats the obsessions with shoes and out-of-the-way restaurants with genuine affection. He lets the characters be who they are and, not without difficulty, find their new happiness. Key to Maggie’s is a friendship she strikes up with a blind man known only as The Professor, played with crisp authority by the 91-year-old Norman Lloyd. Lloyd’s resume is worth a second’s expansion – in his twenties he joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre stage company, he played the villain Frank Fry in Hitchcock’s Saboteur, where he fell from the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and was one of the main directors of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

I bring it up because the relaxed polish of Lloyd is the hallmark of the old Hollywood for which he serves as an effective ambassador. Hanson is unabashedly enthusiastic about the products of the classic studio system, where a working director had to move from genre to genre with ease. For that you needed a pure approach, one that understood the fundamentals of pacing and storytelling, how to get that extra level from your actors, and how to treat your material with dignity no matter what label might be stuck on it. It’s that talent which helps him elevate In Her Shoes into more than just a “chick flick”. Maybe it’s too saccharine in the final analysis to stand with the likes of Terms of Endearment, but when good things happen to the characters, you smile without effort. That’s a success.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - A History of Violence

Originally published 9/30/05
Full review behind the jump

A History of Violence
Director: David Cronenberg
Writer: Screenplay by Josh Olson, based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke
Producers: Chris Bender, J.C. Spink, David Cronenberg
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt, Ashton Holmes, Peter MacNeill

Of all the great performances I’ve seen William Hurt give, I’ve never seen him give one so mesmerizing and bizarre as he gives in A History of Violence, David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of the graphic novel. And that is all I will say on the matter, as it would be criminal to give any detail on who he plays and how he fits into the current events of Tom Stall’s life.

The question of who Tom Stall is and if he will survive these events forms the backbone of this movie, and rather unusually I left the movie not entirely sure I had the complete answer, or whether I even thought the movie was as great as it seemed to be from the confidence of its design and the brilliance of its players. My response is still coalescing, so let’s get on with the review and see if we can’t come to some conclusion.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs Stall’s Diner, the main hangout on the main drag of Millbrook, Indiana. It’s comfortable, easy-going and quiet, a reflection of the owner, who’s married to a beautiful, smart lawyer named Edie (Maria Bello). They have two kids, one (Ashton Holmes) in high school and the other (Heidi Hayes) still in elementary, and the kind of lasting playfulness in their love that requires the kids be sent to spend the night elsewhere every so often. It’s about as ideal a small town life as you could ask for.

That peace and happiness is not so much shattered as unraveled by violence, episodes of terrifying violence that descend on the town of Millbrook like demons coming to collect a debt from Stall for the life he has. Part of the movie’s power is the way that it’s not just one incident which changes everything, it’s how it changes a lot, then triggers another event which changes even more, and time and space is given to track how the members of the Stall family are being affected by each new spilling of blood.

It starts when two very bad men (Stephen McHattie, Greg Berk) come into Tom’s diner. They’re traveling the back roads of America doing horrible deeds, and are only holding back from killing everyone in the joint because first they want the money in the cash register. Something snaps in the non-confrontational Tom and he takes lethal charge of the situation. Cronenberg shoots this action cleanly, showing cause-and-effect without sensation and stopping to note with almost clinical curiosity the various ways a human body can be rendered inoperative. These are some of those chilling makeup effects that don’t look like effects at all.

Tom is hailed as a hero for his efforts, but they also attract the attention of a sinister man named Mr. Fogarty (Ed Harris). He has scar tissue around one blinded eye and his henchmen keep calling him “Mr. Fogarty” with a stylized casualness that suggests you should be very afraid to be hearing that name. And Mr. Fogarty is quite convinced that Tom, all his protestations aside, is actually a guy named Joey from Philadelphia.

Cronenberg’s interest in savage emotions and dreadful possibilities takes command of the screen. What’s most brutal and strange ironically comes across with the most authority, while scenes familiar to us from other movies, like Tom’s son being picked on by a bully (Kyle Schmid) or Tom being harassed on his front lawn by a TV reporter, ring so artificial as to be nearly absurd. It’s jarring enough I have to think there’s something intentional about it, maybe a greater contrast drawn between the clichéd ideal Tom’s living and the macabre spiral of killing he’s being sucked into. I don’t think the choice works.

I thought of great films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, how one act of violence begat another and another and another with unstoppable logic. How by the end so many bodies litter the stage and the survivors look at what they have left and wonder if they can ever again have even a taste of what they had before.

Tom Stall is a great character in a film with many great characters; Mortensen does delicate work. And Maria Bello plays so many notes with such ease – you get to see her as a concerned mother, a sharp and clear-thinking lawyer who stays on top of what’s unfolding, and a wife who still loves and lusts for her husband and demonstrates that lust in two brilliantly contrasting scenes. Harris is delightfully malignant and, as said above, William Hurt – who waits so long to appear you might forget he’s in the movie – may give the best performance of them all.

And it all fits together in the end, and so I’ll say that I think A History of Violence is a great film. Once one domino drops in its plot, the end is inevitable. What comes after the ending is a haunting mystery, because as well as you might think you know Tom Stall and his family, they’ve been through a lot, and that can change a person, you know…

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Separate Lies

Originally published 9/21/05
Full review behind the jump

Separate Lies
Director: Julian Fellows
Writer: Julian Fellows, based on the novel A Way Through the Woods by Nigel Balchin
Producers: Steve Clark-Hall, Christian Colson
Stars: Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson, Rupert Everett, Linda Bassett, John Neville, David Harewood


An extraordinary scene begins when James Manning (Tom Wilkson) walks into his kitchen, sees his wife Anne (Emily Watson) chopping vegetables, and mentions with feigned casualness “I had lunch with Bill Bule today”. Halfway through the conversation, after James has learned something life-altering, he will ask: “Are you going to use that dish?”, which is the wrong question for that moment. Then he learns another life-altering fact, and the scene ends with him vomiting in the garden.

Separate Lies, the directing debut of Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellows, is built on these knotty intersections of crushing moral quandary and the keeping up of appearances. It is a movie where a genteel bike ride through the English countryside is jarringly interrupted by speeding car, and where a man wants to accuse someone he hates of murder, but doesn’t want to do it over the phone so he invites him to a posh lunch. It is also the story about how the Mannings can only find some love for each other again when their marriage starts to disintegrate.

Not much is said about how James and Anne first came together but it’s almost beside the point, the life they have now is the one James has made for them. He’s a powerful solicitor, which he always regrets keeps him at the office late, and they have a weekend home in the country where he complains about having to consort with the kind of people who have homes in the country. His is an uneasy satisfaction, where he’s proud of his talent for playing the game of achieving success and status and displaying good taste and virtue, but he thought there was going to be more to it after all that.

Anne can see the importance he’s placed on this and does her best to contribute, but she doesn’t have the knack for it and we can see how it’s gradually unwinding her. It’s almost painful how clumsily transparent her curiosity is in Bill Bule (Rupert Everett), a handsome lout who dresses a bit like Hugh Grant in About A Boy and gives even less of a damn about anything or anyone than Hugh did. After living with impossible expectations for 15 years, someone with no expectations at all would seem fairly exotic.

And then there’s that business with the car crashing into the man on the bike, killing him. He’s the husband of the Mannings’ cleaner/housewoman Maggie (Linda Bassett), and the movie tracks her grief and the unique way she achieves peace with almost no direct indication but perfect confidence.

A police inspector (David Harewood) pokes around asking about Range Rovers with dents in their sides. He’s professional and intelligent, but we can see he’s dealt with wealthy country folks before and is always watchful for the way they can close ranks around the idea that if someone is already dead, why create even more embarrassment by arresting someone for the crime?

Plots about both infidelity and this murder – which ceases to be a mystery and becomes a conspiracy with unlikely participants – unfold during high-powered meetings, garden parties, jaunts to the seaside in Wales, and stays in expensive Paris hotels. It’s almost as if the characters are helpless participants in the exercise of enjoying all this wealth and privilege in the correct way; except for Bule, who does and says whatever he likes and is well past bored with people getting shocked about it. It’s interesting to wonder if anything else in the story would have unfolded the way it did had Bill Bule not insulted the painting hanging above James’ mantel.

As a first-time director Fellows does himself every possible service with a tight screenplay and a reliable cast. Wilkinson is the modern master of tortured domesticity, there’s something about the way he can let out his buttoned-up rage and sound like he’s not used to raising his voice. And Watson is an ideal match for him, scattered and fearful but fierce, under her genteel manners, about being the wife he has cast her to play. Time should also be spared to mention the great John Neville, who plays Bule’s father and gets a remarkable scene where he reveals what he has learned is really important to him through the various ordeals of a long life.

It would be dry to say Separate Lies is a movie about getting your priorities straight, but it is expert in the way it plunges flawed and complicated characters into the kinds of situations where you do discover what really matters to you, and must face what that says about you. Every one of the major characters in this movie does something which is at least criminally dishonest, and in some cases much worse. But they also do things that are human, and further still they all do things which are, in the final analysis, decent, though they may not conform to social contracts. Maybe what’s most impressive (or troubling?) about the film is that, in the end, having seen the worst these people are capable of, we like them more than we did at the beginning.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Tim Burton's Corpse Bride

Originally published 9/20/05
Full review behind the jump

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
Directors: Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Writers: Story and Characters by Tim Burton, Screenplay by John August and Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson
Producers: Tim Burton and Allison Abbate
Featuring the voices of: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Paul Whitehouse, Joanna Lumley, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Jane Horrocks, Danny Elfman

The fairy tale is an enduring story format because it works with those simple broad story tropes that resonate from the moment we start making sense of the world: Life and death. Doing what our parents want or growing into our own desires. The virtues of being poor and in love, and finding the right reason to marry someone. And how our sins always come back to haunt us.

And yet filmmaker Tim Burton seems to be the only storyteller working interested in creating new fairy tales rather than riffing off the old ones. Edward Scissorhands easily counts, as does his previous stop-motion animated feature The Nightmare Before Christmas. In a way it seizes control of the form for the misfits of the world – the popular people can have their glistering towers and flowing-haired princesses, Burton is perfectly content to patch together his stories from bugs and bones. And with Corpse Bride, he delivers yet another charming and gruesome fantasia which is not only a visual feast, but a beautifully simple story about how if we take the time to look at that which frightens us, we might find it’s not so bad after all.

It’s not that we should be in a hurry to die, but young Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), through an unlucky accident, discovers that after you go it’s not so lonely and terrible as you might imagine. His family, newly-rich fish merchants hoping to continue their upward momentum, has arranged his marriage to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), the pale and quiet daughter of the noble Everglot family. Just listen to these names and tell me Burton doesn’t revel in their creation – Victoria’s parents are the scowling and rotund Finnis Everglot (Albert Finney) and the imperious Maudeline (Joanna Lumley), whose hair wouldn’t clear most tunnels. Maudeline is so fearsomely addicted to propriety that when Victoria confesses in a panic that she saw Victor in the embrace of a living corpse, Maudeline replies: “Victor was in your room!? The scandal!”

The Everglots have fallen on hard times, not that they’ll admit it, and need the Van Dorts’ wealth to restore their family name. Victor and Victoria are only just getting to know one another, and kind of like what they see, but family pressures have the spindly, bookish Victor so nervous he keeps blowing his vows at the rehearsal, and flees into the forest to be alone. The absence of a groom with a wedding less than a day away plays right into the plans of Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), who has a superb name and an even better chin, and thinks the Everglots are still rich.

But about that living corpse – fairy tales are driven by fateful coincidence, and in this case Victor is practicing his vows again when suddenly a woman (Helena Bonham Carter) rises from the ground and accepts his ring. There is beauty to her – an ethereal grace in spite of her bluish hue, and the missing skin on an arm and leg, and that eyeball that keeps popping out, and the maggot living in her head who looks and sounds uncannily like Peter Lorre (Enn Reitel). And she’s waited a long time to be married.

The Corpse Bride whisks Victor off to the world of the dead, which is noisy and cheerful and colorful, a stark contrast to the pale and cold world of “breathers”. New arrivals are greeted at a raucous bar/club, where host Bonejangles (composer Danny Elfman, who contributes 5 songs on top of his score) leads a production number which is like the macabre Silly Symphonies classic The Skeleton Dance turned into a showstopping New Orleans cabaret act.

Victor must choose between the promising Victoria and the living world which has so far left him miserable, and the adoring Corpse Bride and the zealous, accommodating dead. And in between we have tragic misunderstandings, the truth about an old murder, a duel, a tall tower filled with dusty books where a wise old skeleton provides potions to resolve your plot difficulties, and all the other stuff we love in our fairy tales. At one point the dead get to plan a wedding themselves, which they do with the same misguided enthusiasm with which the residents of Halloweentown tried to figure out Christmas.

While computer animation is much in vogue and has many qualities (and is used sparingly here to put extra polish on some tricky bits), the weight of these moldable puppets has an appeal of its own. They seem inherently more cinematic because of their physical reality – they actually exist and are being lit and photographed on real sets on soundstages. Those who know The Nightmare Before Chrsitmas well will be justifiably stunned by the advances in stop motion sophistication. Everything from the camera’s freedom of movement and focus to Victor’s piano playing to flying crows to details of water and fabric and fire, there’s unimaginable smoothness and confidence to it all. To see it on the big screen is to treat yourself to the chance to truly admire its craft.

In direct comparison Bride’s story shows a few more rickety parts but also an abundance of gags and timing bits which can only come with greater mastery of the medium. Like Nightmare it has its frightening moments and might not be appropriate for the smallest of children. But behind each dead body is a playful spirit, the spiders have lovely singing voices, and our dogs still remember and love us even after they’ve been reduced to bones. That’s comforting at any age.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Constant Gardener

Originally published 9/13/05
Full review behind the jump

The Constant Gardener
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Writers: Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
Producers: Simon Channing-Williams
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Gerald McSorley, Donald Sumpter, Richard McCabe


I used to work for a company with a “friendly” but off-the-books relationship with a neighboring company that had a large library of material in a scanned database. If my boss announced at a meeting that “we” should study up on a particular text, I would know to go to my computer and fill out a little form on the Internet. That form would go who-knows-where, where it would be printed out and delivered to some other party who’d produce the requested manuscript, then send it on to a delivery person, whose cart would happen by our area on its rounds and drop it off so I could read it.

The Constant Gardener, a strong and compelling intrigue on-screen, is partially about the world where killing is achieved by the same sort of convenient arrangement. By the end one character plaintively and rhetorically asks – “Who has committed murder?”, and the truth is it’s difficult to pin down because the actual task has been so thoroughly delegated. There are a lot of layers between the wealthy, whose accumulation is threatened, and that blue pickup truck with the armed men in back who come round your corner one day. The rich never pulled the trigger, although it’s inarguable that they’re going to fortunately benefit from the regrettable bit of nasty business. How do you avenge a killing arranged by corporate will?

That question leads to what the movie, based on the novel by cynical spy author John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Tailor of Panama), is fundamentally about, and that is the love relationship between the very proper Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), and the very improper Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who will become Mrs. Justin Quayle before her very regrettable death out on a lake in the Kenyan countryside.

Justin Quayle is unfailingly polite and sympathetic at all times. He’s a diplomat to his bones, so habitually seeing someone else’s point of view that when his friend Sandy (Danny Huston) comes to inform him of the discovery of Tessa’s body, Justin’s first response is: “It must have been difficult for you”. Later, when he wants the photographers snapping Tessa’s grave to leave, he thanks them for coming with a voice of choked anguish.

He’s soft by upbringing – we hear diplomacy is the family line – as well as a bit fussy and dull, preferring to keep his nose down in the garden in his spare time and not accustomed to facing problems outside his brief. Ralph Fiennes, consistently proficient in the technique of building a character, adds something else here, too – it’s a kind of innocence, a suggestion that all this time spent dutifully ignoring the problems of the complicated adult world means there’s a part hidden deep inside that never quite grew up.

It rears its head when he meets Tessa, a human-rights activist who poses some hot-tempered questions to him at a lecture and, afterwards, seduces him. Something happens between the two of them – whatever motives brought them to this bed (it’s suggested around the edges of the plot that hers weren’t entirely pure at first), they pass through unconsciously into a new kind of existence, where the roles they play in their very opposite lives suddenly seem like a delightful game, one they can laugh about in this sanctuary. To see Justin Quayle’s eyes light up is to see how important this is to him. She will make the same discovery with time, that whether she knew it or not she needed someone like him – someone who is focused, and dutiful, and as the title indicates, constant.

When he’s dispatched to Africa she insists on coming along and says she doesn’t care in what role. He decides it should be as his wife. Now, at parties with Very Important People, she can make impertinent accusations about the misery their greed and politics spread, and when Justin’s friends ask him to control his wife, he shrugs and answers honestly that he can’t. And he smiles, not that he lets them see it.

Trained to behave, Justin appreciates the presence of misbehavior even if he’s not always sure what Tessa’s doing, touring the countryside with a doctor (Hubert Koundé) so regularly that people are convinced an affair is going on. In fact, it seems no one is convinced the Quayle marriage is a true love match. And then Tessa pieces together something very threatening to the interests of some rich people, and somehow ends up dead.

In a simple thriller we’d expect to see the man chasing down the clues and catching his wife’s killer. But what’s more important in The Constant Gardener, where “the killer” is a sort of abstract concept, is how Justin is doing more than solving a mystery – he’s honoring his grief over the loss of nuisance-making in his life by finally making a nuisance himself. His constancy is devoted now to seeing what Tessa saw – everything she saw.

Director Fernando Meirelles made a splash in world cinema with 2003’s City of God, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. As with that movie we see him intimately interested in the street-level view of life in poverty. In energetic fashion, using wildly-varying color schemes, nervous camerawork, and cutting back and forth between Justin and Tessa’s romance and his post-mortem investigations, he submerges us not only in the rhythm and temper of a Kenya ravaged by disease and poverty, but Justin’s dawning awareness of it all. Before he could only nod with his colleagues about how sad it all was – later, we can tell he’s transformed by the way he processes an argument that, well, those people were going to die anyway, so why not have their deaths create a few jobs for England and help a fellow countryman keep his stock prices up?

Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of the novel is effective though occasionally demagogic, the movie is better when yearning than it is when hectoring. Many of the actors are cast slightly-against type and thus give refreshing performances. Pete Postlethwaite is a vigorous doctor who must mix religion with pragmatism (he demonstrates how drug companies donate expired pills by the thousands, which they will write off and he must incinerate so no one will swallow them), and Donald Sumpter is the friendly and posh Tim Donohue, who doesn’t really bother trying to pretend he’s not a spy but will chuckle modestly when people mention it at parties.

The world Le Carré’s story creates is a gripping and complex one, mixing pharmaceutical giants with rival governments, corruption at all levels, and billions upon billions of dollars that never seem to trickle their way down to the peasants scraping what living they can out of the ground. When so much is at stake it’s no wonder people who create disturbances fall prey to misfortune. Sad, really, but who do you blame?

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Transporter 2

Originally published 9/3/05
Full review behind the jump

The Transporter 2
Director: Louis Leterrier
Writers: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Producers: Luc Besson and Steven Chasman
Stars: Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Katie Nauta, Matthew Modine, Jason Flemying, Keith David, François Berléand, Hunter Clary


In 2002’s The Transporter there was a scene where Frank Martin (Jason Statham), an ex-British Special Forces soldier now in the lucrative field of mercenary high-speed driving, smeared his body in grease and fought a roomful of thugs while standing on bicycle pedals. As their grasping hands slipped impotently off his muscled torso I realized the movie had achieved a sort of Golden Mean of preposterousness. It was so calculatedly absurd it was practically daring you to enjoy it in spite of your better nature. Though the acting was mannered and bizarre and the plot all but incomprehensible, the movie was more fun than it had any right to be.

Something about the combination of driving stunts, fisticuffs and surly demeanor clicked enough with audiences to warrant a sequel, and a well-sponsored one at that. The true sign of The Transporter’s viability as a franchise is how lovingly-photographed the Heineken bottles in Frank Martin’s fridge are; and the ingenious way he uses an iPod and the dashboard computer of an Audi to help save Miami from the spread of a biological doomsday weapon.

If that sounds pretty unlikely to you, be warned that this sequel feels no regrets about all that grease business, and aims to top it if at all possible. In a way, while I can honestly say the makers of The Transporter care more about its plot this time around, I’m not convinced that’s a good thing in this case.

Frank has temporarily left his French countryside home and is slumming it for a month as the personal driver for Jack Billings (Hunter Clary), the young son of the U.S. Government drug czar (Matthew Modine). He ferries the kid to and from school each day, teaches him about the importance of seatbelts, and even discreetly shields the kid from the arguments between Daddy and Mommy (Amber Valletta). Mommy clearly admires Frank's full service attitude.

Then one day Frank takes little Jack to the Doctor’s office for his checkup. When he sees that the receptionist is wearing stiletto heels and a tattoo reading “Death by Bunny” (among other clues), he suspects something’s up, and he bursts in to find two Russian goons in badly-fitting doctor jackets trying to inject Jack with some unsightly green substance.

Despite Frank’s best and most violent efforts Jack is kidnapped, and the movie becomes about his capture as well as the mystery of that syringe, which contains a lethal man-made virus. Like all movie viruses it comes in designer colors – the bug in lime, the cure in violet.

Behind the various dastardly deeds is Gianni (Alessandro Gassman), who doesn’t particularly care about the outcome for his own sake but is acting as a sort of greasy megalomaniac-for-hire. The movie is thus best described as a guns-blazing salute to temps. Gianni’s sidekick/bedmate is the leggy Miss-Death-by-Bunny mentioned above (Kate Nauta) – she seems to get all her clothing from Trashy Lingerie and is certainly one of the more unique-looking villainesses in memory, sort of a cross between Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye and Daryl Hannah’s Pleasurebot in Blade Runner, but without half the acting chops of either, sadly.

Statham’s glowering, grumbling manner helps offset his increasingly ludicrous feats. He doesn’t act smug about all his various triumphs over physics and gravity, it’s more like he’s annoyed that he’s being forced to. Take the scene where he realizes the car he’s driving has a bomb strapped to the undercarriage. A normal person might suggest diving out of the car, but that would mean abandoning the vehicle to its fate. Watch what Frank Martin does instead, and see if you can enjoy it even as you accept its utter impossibility.

The movie even shows a willingness to wink at itself – when Frank’s traditional black suit is torn, he reaches into a trunk full of weaponry and pulls out a cleanly-pressed, vacuum-sealed new suit to change into. And the French policeman (François Berléand), who showed such bemused disbelief at Frank’s antics in the previous film makes a contrived but amusing appearance, where he distracts the local cops by cooking for them.

The brawls as choreographed by Cory Yuen (Jet Li’s frequent collaborator, back from the first movie) show the improvisational delight we’ve seen in many Jackie Chan movies, as Frank makes non-traditional use of such found props as a fire hose, a chandelier and a boat. And one mano-a-mano that happens in a spiraling-out-of-control jet might just be the first chopsockey tribute to Fred Astaire’s dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding.

But as I’ve said above there’s a greater emphasis on the mechanics of the story this time around and the fighting/driving sequences show just a touch less ingenuity. And while there was a gritty appeal in its predecessor’s almost exclusively physical effects and earthbound melees, this time there’s several incidents of laughably amateurish digital animation and some obvious wirework lending Frank some spring in his step.

In the end it just slightly misses achieving that same precious balance the first reached in its best moments. But its lack of pretense, and a willingness to try just about any damned thing it can think of to entertain you, makes The Transporter 2 appealing enough in the end. You can feel secure that, every time the fists start flying or the black Audi drops into gear, the filmmakers will work to earn your money.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Originally published 8/24/05
Full review behind the jump

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Director: Judd Apatow
Writers: Steve Carell and Judd Apatow
Producers: Judd Apatow, Shauna Robertson, Clayton Townsend
Stars: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Elizbaeth Banks, Leslie Mann, Jane Lynch


Steve Carell’s face is like a church service you desperately want to laugh in. This is the most square, sober, white, middlebrow, milquetoast kisser you ever saw. It passes beyond dour and into new dimensions of grave earnest. He should be selling insurance to Mormons. Which is maybe why he doesn’t even have to move to be funny.

That performance-enhanced deadpan has made him a reliable second banana for years, stealing bits out from under Will Ferrell in Anchorman, Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, even Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In that loose-knit troupe of modern comedy stars and filmmakers that’s been dubbed “The Frat Pack” he’s like a member of the “B” squad. The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a chance for he and other supporting “Frat Pack”-ers like Paul Rudd to take their own spotlight, and historically this doesn’t always go well. But he earns his leading man bona fides and delivers us a raunchy and surprisingly sweet-natured sex comedy in the bargain.

His first success is in creating a memorable character for himself. Andy Stitzer (Carell) has indeed passed the big 4-0 without ever knowing a woman in the Biblical sense. It’s not that he’s hideous-looking or has lacked the opportunity, but mishaps and anxieties compounded in such a way over the years as to make him prefer to stop trying.

His whole life is constructed to express a very little bit of himself in a small, protected corner where no one can see – he collects action figures, plays video games, rides his bike to and from work and stays home every night with gadgets and toys that seem lacking in purpose without anyone else around. “Is that the Six-Million-Dollar Man’s boss?” he’s asked in incredulous amazement when someone finally sees his pristine toy shelves.

He has the knowledge and experience to be a great salesman at the electronics store he works at, but stays in the stock room rather than risk interaction. He likes women, he really does, in a confessional moment he blurts out that he respects them so much he never speaks to them.

This is a tricky persona to portray and get us to care about, and the movie acknowledges that a dedicated loner like Andy, were he not so gentle deep down, could be one of those walking time bombs. Certainly the only reason his co-workers invite him to their poker game is because they’ve got an empty chair. But at that game, as he tries to take part in a conversation about the nasty, his ignorance is revealed and his secret comes out.

Their reaction is key – there is a little mockery, but the overall effect is one of endearing Andy to them. They each have their own problems – David (Rudd) is still passive-aggressively mooning over his ex-girlfriend, Jay (Romany Malco) can’t stop cheating on his girl, and Cal (Seth Rogen) sees no value in emotional attachment at all. But because they each remember the nervousness and awkwardness of that time before they enjoyed communion with the fairer sex, they sympathize. They’re all emotionally-arrested dorks, so they can’t help but look at Andy and think “there, but for the grace of God...”.

So they make it their mission to arrange his deflowering, but the message of the movie is that this ultimately means much more than simple intercourse to him. It means growing up and doing something with his life and risking an emotional connection with someone that’s not based on magic tricks or watching Survivor together. So while his pals encourage him to start his training with a series of easy lays – they call it being a “Ho-Runner” – he’s drawn to a single mother (Catherine Keener) who works at a store across the street selling peoples’ inessentials on eBay.

Their courtship is charming – she can sense there’s something delicate about him that needs coaxing out, and she’s been wounded so deeply by relationships that leap into the sack that his hesitance only makes him seem more chivalrous. The parallels between what they can do for each other emotionally and how her job can capitalize on his action figures is obvious but winning nonetheless.

There’s vulgarity and gross-out scenes galore – Andy provides a potent demonstration of the complex hazards of “morning wood” and other bodily processes are drafted into service. Not to mention the gay jokes, racial jokes, and references to the David Caruso movie Jade. It’s noteworthy how benign they can come off, though, due to the orientation of the comedy. Potentially offensive as its material is this is a movie that, deep down, likes its characters, and will not mock or humiliate them just for sport. That difference between this and other movies in which characters are vomited on is subtle but crucial.

Carell developed Andy’s character during his days with Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and you can sense the time and effort he’s put into interacting with the world the way Andy would. He’s the living embodiment of a square peg, many of his laughs come not from exactly what he says, but in the carefully-calibrated way in which what he says and the thought process it indicates exist just a couple of inches to the left of what a more socially-adapted person would say. And given his naturally inert expression and posture it’s a joy watching him blossom – in a drunk scene there’s something hysterical about the way he peels himself out of a bar booth, and by the end he’s – well, I won’t spoil that for you.

Often in a straight-ahead comedy the reviewer’s task is to expand into hundreds of words either “I laughed” or “I didn’t laugh” and attempt the impossible task of explaining why. Comedy does not let itself be wrangled so easily. I can’t say every joke in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” is a winner but I didn’t go for any long stretch without laughing. What I can say is that it’s in the proud tradition of naughty movies made without cynicism or condemnation. It celebrates its prurience but disarms by honestly addressing the related emotions and empowering the people you root for. It’s about sex, but it’s not just about the sex.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Red Eye

Originally published 8/20/05
Full review behind the jump

Red Eye
Director: Wes Craven
Writers: Story by Carl Ellsworth and Dan Foos, Screenplay by Carl Ellsworth
Producers: Chris Bender, Marianne Maddalena
Stars: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Jayma Mays, Loren Lester


For over a generation Wes Craven has worn honors as the “Master of Horror”, from Last House on the Left to The Nightmare on Elm Street to the Scream trilogy. Of course, in the movie business this is sort of like being the best in the world at sawing women in half on stage, everyone agrees it takes skill but few would trust you with “classier” entertainments.

Craven knows his roots, and perhaps to acknowledge them he provides one good old-fashioned game of hide and seek with a knife-wielding madman. But the rest of Red Eye, a more conventional female empowerment thriller, depends not on gore or things leaping from shadows, but on the purer skill he’s honed unnoticed during the assembly of his bloody resume – simple armrest-grabbing tension.

What is it about Cillian Murphy’s eyes? When he burst on the scene in 28 Days Later they were perfectly lost and haunted. They were childlike then as they are now, but in this movie and Batman Begins they widen and glint and reveal a soul unclouded by qualms about how evil its impulses are. This time these eyes are trained on Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams), a lonely young woman catching an overnight flight from Dallas to Miami.

She’s a manager at a luxury hotel, and to Jackson Ripner (Murphy), that makes her just the right woman to do him a small favor. He sits next to her on the plane, makes charming small talk, then idly mentions that if she doesn’t do what he says then her father (Brian Cox) will be killed.

The script’s one act of audacity is to build the center section of the movie around this enclosed environment, challenging Craven to whip tension up when what we’re looking at much of the time is just two people buckled into their seats talking in low voices. This is what most makes Red Eye worth watching, because he rises to the occasion, not only providing economic introductions to other passengers that will be useful to the story – I like how we can see little girl Rebecca (Brittany Oaks) piece together enough of what’s going on to act – but showing sharp instincts for when to cut from Lisa and Ripner out to the wider body of the plane, subtly emphasizing that this nightmare is unfolding in plain sight.

Beyond that the script shows little interest in distinguishing itself – dutifully delivering with no particular finesse clichés like that-trauma-in-my-past-I’ll-overcome-through-this-experience, the news broadcast that sets up the context of the story while never threatening to look like a real news broadcast, and so forth. The movie dashes along at a greyhound-skinny 85 minutes, no time to give more than the flashes of detail we need to get to the next bit of hold-your-breath.

As a vehicle for that the skill of Craven and his leads makes it watchable. Murphy does a masterful job navigating Ripner’s mix of professionalism and petty temper. The subtler and harder job is McAdams’, though. She’s playing a character who’s motivated by a whole host of off-screen events, including the grief of a recent loss, that traumatic event I referred to, and concern for the lives of her father and others, both of which are in her hands in a situation where she can’t seem to have both.

It would be easy to get lost trying to play them all at once. But she stays focused, plays the moment honestly but with glimpses of color to suggest what’s affecting her now – and within the confines of the movie effectively essays a woman doing her desperate best to think clearly and get free of this fearful situation despite all its knotty difficulties. The best example I think we’ve seen of this recently is Jodie Foster in Panic Room, McAdams doesn’t nail it that squarely but delivers enough to make the movie succeed.

Eventually the plane must land and the action becomes more conventional running/leaping/hiding/driving stuff, that’s when the movie’s flaws take more prominence, especially Marco Beltrami’s histrionic musical score. But the climax is a crowd-pleaser and the movie doesn’t overstay its welcome.

These genre potboilers aren’t nearly as easy as Craven makes it look in Red Eye – he takes shaky material and elevates it into brisk entertainment. Perhaps it’s too late for a legitimate second act to his career outside of the horror ghetto, but it’s indicative of talent his fans have long been aware of even if the rest of the world hasn’t noticed before. One thing you can say about a guy who saws women in half: he knows how to work a crowd.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Great Raid

Originally published 8/16/05
Full review behind the jump

The Great Raid
Director: John Dahl
Writers: Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, based on the books The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William B. Breuer and Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides
Producers: Marty Katz, Lawrence Bender
Stars: Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Martin Csokas, Robert Mammone, Max Martini, Cesar Montano


I’ve lamented in the past about the relative dearth of “B”-movies in modern Hollywood – the movie business seems to believe it’s wasting everyone’s time if they don’t spend $100 Million. There’s always the comedies, horror movies, and “prestige” pictures where no dime is spent when a penny could put something on screen in its place, but I’m talking about a different animal, one I admit is harder to define.

I do know a “B” movie when I see it, and in its best moments The Great Raid is a “B” movie: unpretentious, professional, devoted to its genre and willing to make creative use of limited resources. For comparison in the field of World War II movies – Patton is an “A” picture for the scope of its story, Saving Private Ryan is an “A” picture for the spectacle and artistic ambitions of its makers. The Great Raid finds more familiar company with overlooked eye-level fare like Battleground with Van Johnson. Although it’s not without unnecessary flab and flourish, at heart it tells a good story and does it with clarity and gutty simplicity.

We open with a history lesson about America’s lurching entrance into World War II after Pearl Harbor and the painful decision to deal with Hitler in Europe first. This essentially condemned tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers to Japanese capture and the legendary brutality of the Bataan Death March. Three years later, Nazi power is fading and Allied forces are pushing forward in the Pacific as well. The Japanese would rather incinerate their prisoners than let them be freed, so any approach by American forces is potentially a death sentence for any POW’s who’ve managed to survive three years of starvation and torture (not to mention the feeling that they were abandoned by their countrymen).

The only thing to be done is launch a daring rescue attempt ahead of the main body of the army, and this movie dramatizes the raid on Cabanatuan prison; it makes for a corking story which has the advantage of being true in most of its best details. In a period of 5 days a group of Army Rangers with thorough training but little to no combat experience conceived and executed a jailbreak in the face of some rather incredible odds – what success their efforts met with I’ll lead you to discover on your own.

We pursue three story threads. The main thrust is the Rangers, with a decisive but distant commander in Lt. Col. Mucci (Benjamin Bratt). He entrusts Stanford ROTC grad Captain Prince (James Franco) to map out and lead the raid, probably because the bookish Prince is the only one who will dare argue with him.

Inside the camp the prisoners, fighting malaria and digging graves for their friends, debate rumors of MacArthur’s advance and the wisdom of escape attempts in the face of their increasingly vicious guards. So weakened and used to punishment are they that when they wake up one day to find all of the Japanese leaving, they stay and wait for more to replace them rather than risk providing an excuse to be shot. Their ostensible leader is Major Gibson (Joseph Fiennes), who barely has the strength to stand but moons quietly over a woman on the outside.

She’s not so far away as other soldiers’ sweethearts; she’s Margaret Utinsky (Connie Nielsen), a nurse working with the Filipino underground to smuggle medicine into the camps, constantly in fear of having her cell of friends discovered. She pines equally for Gibson, though they’ve never admitted their affections for each other.

This storyline feels the most false, and the simple explanation is that it is false, Major Gibson is a composite character and Utinsky’s real-life heroics were motivated by something deeper than not wanting to leave a good man behind. She takes no active role in the raid and thus seems less useful as anything but demographic bait as the movie progresses. Fiennes, very good in costume pieces like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love, seems pointlessly miscast as a grimy G.I. here, he comes off less iron-willed than he does mopey.

The movie is most confident charting the progress of the raid. Bratt makes for a capable screen commander, giving us a glimpse into a quirky motivational style that’s part paternal and part cult-of-personality. His troops creep through the wilderness in broad daylight, not even able to bring helmets because of the noise they make, knowing that at the end of this journey is a quiet crawl across 800 yards of open grass towards an armed encampment that has three times their numbers in soldiers plus a couple of tanks.

Director John Dahl, who’s proudly made a career in “B” pictures with thrillers like Joy Ride and noir twisters like The Last Seduction, stages the raid with utmost confidence, letting you see geographically exactly what the soldiers intend to accomplish. The action is not as visceral or bloody as is the modern trend; it’s almost clinical, more focused on the general strategic sweep of the mission. But Dahl finds time for little clips of brilliance like showing how painfully long 200 yards is when it’s the main road of a prison camp and you have to run to the other end with a bazooka. Also a moment where a soldier tosses a grenade to take out a bunker, gets shot, and goes back to toss another grenade.

To its credit the movie also spotlights the essential role played by Filipino guerillas, who had previously considered the difficulties of moving 500 sick and wounded men to safety, and could be used cleverly to fend off Japanese reinforcements because the Japanese always attack Filipinos straight on – “they don’t respect us enough as soldiers” to use flanking maneuvers, says guerilla leader Pajota (Cesar Montano).

That quality straight-ahead storytelling like this gets lumped with the awkward love story shows a clash of intentions. Utinsky’s activities point towards a larger tapestry about the Philippines and its crucial role in the Pacific Theatre not only militarily, but in the actions of its people. But The Great Raid has not been made with the resources of such an epic, which leads to poorly-scripted patch job scenes trying to exposit the bigger picture for us. Rebels fear a final killing sweep by the Japanese – “we have evidence of their war crimes!” someone declares for the audience’s benefit. Then there’s the scene where two soldiers brought to town to load food for the camp discuss the history of Gibson’s affections for Margaret. That the younger soldier could be a prisoner for three years and not have gotten wind of this until now is unlikely, that he uses his energy to get all the soap opera details instead of saving it to load sacks is what truly makes the scene clang.

An “A” movie would have had the space to set up this romance without resorting to such clumsy shortcuts. A “B” movie wouldn’t have wasted time on it at all. In the final analysis The Great Raid’s flaws are most obvious when it’s trapped between the two, its virtues most apparent when it embraces its natural shape.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Aristocrats

Originally posted 8/4/05
Full review behind the jump

The Aristocrats
Directors: Paul Provenza, Penn Jillette
Editors: Paul Provenza, Emery Emery
Producer: Peter Adam Golden
Featuring: Approximately 100 comedians, actors and writers including George Carlin, Robin Williams, Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Idle, Jason Alexander, Phyllis Diller, Penn & Teller, Hank Azaria, Steven Wright, Billy Connolly, Jon Stewart, Tim Conway, Whoopi Goldberg, Andy Dick, Eddie Izzard, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Richard Jeni, Bob Saget, Dave Thomas, Kevin Nealon, Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, The Amazing Jonathan, Carrot Top, Martin Mull, Larry Miller, Taylor Negron, Emo Phillips, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kevin Pollak, Sarah Silverman, The Smothers Brothers, Jeffrey Ross, Rip Taylor, Bruce Vilanch, Chris Rock, Rita Rudner, Don Rickles, Andy Richter, Paul Reiser, Dana Gould, Dom Irrera, Carrie Fisher, Lewis Black, Cathy Ladman


In music there’s a chord structure called the “12-bar blues”. You play four measures in the base chord (aka the tonic), two measures in a chord built on the fourth note of the base scale (aka the subdominant), two more measures on the tonic, one measure built on the fifth note (aka the dominant), one more measure of subdominant, then back to the tonic for the final two measures. 12 measures, 3 chords. Repeat and improvise over until finished.

If that’s gobbledy-gook to you, think of theme from the old Batman TV series, which is a 12-bar blues with vocalists singing “Bat-maaaaan!” on the note that corresponds with each chord. It’s certainly not the earliest example but it’s the easiest to remember.

This is the structure for literally thousands of blues, jazz, rock and pop songs, from Rock Around the Clock to Jump, Jive and Wail to I Feel Good – all of them, stripped to their essence, are the Batman theme. The 12-bar blues is a simple but rock-solid format which creates a space for a performer to carve out an identity for themselves.

In The Aristocrats, a comedy film spliced together from hundreds of hours of interviews shot by comedian Paul Provenza and comedy magician Penn Jillette, we learn the equivalent of the 12-bar blues for filthy jokes. It’s a simple structure – a short introduction, a disgusting middle, then the two-word punchline: “The Aristocrats”. Anyone can learn the joke in seconds, the key is what you do with that middle section.

For decades, back as far as the Vaudeville era, it would seem, “The Aristocrats” has served as a sort of Mason’s handshake for professional comedians, it’s what they entertained each other with backstage. The odd thing about it is that the punchline isn’t very funny. The key to the joke is how that punchline provides you a space to dredge up the most absolutely, jaw-droppingly vulgar ideas you can for that middle section.

This might seem like not much material to build a feature film out of, by five minutes in you’ve learned all you’re going to learn about the joke itself. But in a way this parallels the joke’s audacity – comedians challenge themselves to make that middle section ever longer and more vile without losing their audience. It becomes a contest of endurance, timing and imagination, and the joke is never told the same way twice.

The movie doesn’t have far to go beyond exploring some of the seemingly limitless variations of the joke. There’s short versions, detailed versions, an animated version, a version in mime, a version told while juggling fire, and the inevitable version performed while impersonating Christopher Walken. There’s a debate about whether another word might be funnier than “Aristocrats”, like “Sophisticates” or “Debonairres”. There’s an impressive piece of footage where Gilbert Gottfried reels out the joke in a moment of desperation to save a Friar’s Roast being taped during a period where people were having a hard time laughing.

And so the movie can drag, and the performers’ rhythms are sometimes sabotaged by sloppy over-editing, but the concept is ultimately sustained by a constant influx of invention. Another out-loud laugh is never more than two minutes away. One comedian after another tells the joke, expands on it, disassembles it, pushes it to its utter disgusting limits and beyond. Each has their own take on what makes it work, but part of the magic is no one knows its origins. If “The Aristocrats” didn’t exist, comedy would have had to invent it.

Because the purpose of the joke is to offend and comedians from so many different eras are featured, we get a kind of cross-section of what subjects have violated America’s tastes over the years. We also, and the comedians freely admit this, get a peek at the psyche of the performer, and what the most evil thing they can perceive of is. You’ll never look at Bob Saget the same way on those Full House re-runs.

The roster of names featured is nearly as long as the number of taboos shattered – the movie is unrated presumably because it left the review board dead. You see some faces long gone from the spotlight – Martin Mull tells a side-splitting iteration that offends three major religions in a very short time. And you see some people whose faces you don’t often see, like long-time Simpsons writer Jay Kogen or the editorial staff of The Onion.

There’s a lot of laughter, both on screen and off – you get very familiar with Jillette’s booming chortle. It’s a kind of fraternal appreciation for something shared. But beneath their dismissal of its simplicity or its anti-climactic punchline you sense something deeper, that this naughty joke is important. Rumors are whispered of punishing marathon tellings of “The Aristocrats” unfolding at Chevy Chase’s house – and you start to get that mastering it is a kind of initiation, a necessary rite to prove your manhood (or womanhood, some brilliant comediennes are on-hand to provide female perspective).

It’s because it’s so bare structurally. Because the punchline is a fizzle. When you tell this joke, all these performers are saying without saying, the judgment is no longer on the material, it’s on you. And as an audience member, the judgment is on what you’re able to stomach the performer saying. If you can stomach The Aristocrats, you’re in for very little meaning or catharsis, but a lot of laughs.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Me and You and Everyone We Know

Originally published 8/3/05
Full review behind the jump

Me and You and Everyone We Know
Director: Miranda July
Writer: Miranda July
Producer: Gina Kwon
Stars: John Hawkes, Miranda July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Carlie Westerman, Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend, Hector Elias, Tracy Wright


The characters of Me and You and Everyone We Know don’t live in our world, but one which they’ve willed into existence for themselves. It’s a world where teenage girls develop strict and serious rules for a contest they want a disbelieving neighbor boy to judge, and where a father decides the best way to demonstrate love for his kids is to light himself on fire.

It’s odd and precious, sometimes maddeningly oblique and others enviably, touchingly direct. It has moments of the kind of beauty Keats wrote about, like the last minutes of life for a goldfish taken before its time but not alone in its passing, or the instant where a character realizes who that person sharing the park bench with them really is, and how the means by which they arrived here make perfect sense.

To make a connection in this world takes a kind of bending of vision – so you can show you appreciate the machinery behind someone else’s madness. Love in this world comes in that moment you realize someone else is insane in ways you can grasp and do something with.

Our most important connection happens in the shoe section of a department store. Richard (John Hawkes) is a recently-separated salesman fitting a pair of sneakers for an elderly gentleman (Hector Elias). The gentleman is accompanied by Christine (Miranda July), an Elder Cab driver whose job is not only to transport but take those extra steps to cater to senior citizens’ needs, including that for company. She’s a struggling artist who makes videos of still pictures with plaintive narration behind them, and can never find comfortable shoes because they all scratch her low ankles. Richard sees her ankles and unexpectedly blurts “You think you deserve the pain but you don’t.”

And this is the nature of the movie, in which an ensemble of characters variously burst forth with instinctive hope for connection than retreat behind private, seemingly arbitrary protective walls, exposing and hiding helplessly. The children are solemn, dedicating themselves to individual obsessions, and the adults are fearful and confused, because they’ve been doing the same for a long time now without anyone else understanding, and wonder if anyone ever will.

Richard shares custody of his two sons, the teenager Peter (Miles Thompson) and the six-year-old Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). At one point he asks them if he looks okay, that if he were some stranger and not their father they’d judge that he looks in good health. The trouble is, he’s actually their father, and has no elaborate ritual or philosophy to help him fulfill that duty, so the children fend for themselves and forge some highly unusual friendships as they do.

Christine wants her work exhibited in a museum for contemporary art, but is stymied by Nancy (Tracy Wright), an exhibit director who mistrusts anyone naïve enough to try and get their work shown by walking into the museum with it. Nancy is lonely, looks as if she’s struggling to be the person she thinks her job requires her to be, so she spins ludicrous theories about e-mail’s popularity and wonders whether a sculptor stole her coffee mug to make art out of.

Then there’s Richard’s neighbor and co-worker Andrew (Brad William Henke), who calls the bluff of some teasing teenage girls (Natasha Slayton, Najarra Townsend). They call his bluff right back, and soon all three of them are nervously wondering just how far this thing can go and if any of them is capable of stopping it.

It’s not for everyone, the lengths to which this movie will tap experimentally at our taboos, but there’s something strangely and disarmingly innocent about it. The more perilous it gets the more safe you ironically feel. The movie weaves some gossamer barrier around itself and around pain – after the above-mentioned father has succeeded in igniting himself he doesn’t scream but instead stares at his burning hand, perplexed.

Nor is it for everyone how anecdotally it proceeds – the acting is mannered but always appropriate to the purpose and the movie’s technical accomplishments are slightly shoestring but effective enough, so if it seems in this review as if I’m often left to simply list events and characters it’s because it’s near impossible to describe its charms without their contexts. And these contexts are at once absurdly complex and arbitrary but somehow graced with the perfection of accident.

Behavior in this movie is presented without judgment or need to explain itself; there’s something in the way Peter goes from making his bed with crisp military corners to letting it hang sloppily out, it’s left to us to decide what it means for him. And there’s something daring about the way in which 10-year-old Sylvie (Carlie Westerman) is the most precocious, well-spoken and forward thinking movie child you’ll ever see, but instead of becoming tiresome she wins us over with the clarity of her vision and her right choice about who to share it with.

Writer-director-star Miranda July is a performance artist herself and it gives an authentic intensity to the scenes where we watch Christine fumble towards her creative achievements – more admirably, she’s not presented as a genius but given room to mess up, be frustrated and improve. She’s made a film that sometimes feels like an extended coffeehouse open mic bit, where the artist can’t help explaining what it all means as they go. Me and You and Everyone We Know is about that sort of poetic will, but more still, about the joy in seeing it’s actually reached someone else. It’s the rarity of actual artistic communication which it celebrates, and how this is love, and also beauty, which makes its pontificating go down easier. When you can walk down the street with a stranger, tell them that the street represents their life together, and have them pick up the metaphor and expand on it exactly and with a playful smile, you’ve found something special. This is a special movie.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Wedding Crashers

Originally published 7/26/05
Full review behind the jump

Wedding Crashers
Director: David Dobkin
Writers: Steve Faber & Bob Fisher
Producers: Peter Abrams, Robert L. Levy, Andrew Panay
Stars: Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Christopher Walken, Rachel McAdams, Isla Fisher, Jane Seymour, Bradley Cooper


Here is a movie with more ideas than it knows what to do with. Wedding Crashers is an explosion of plot strands, a comedy of spinning plates sustained for longer than you would have expected by the indefatigable efforts of its stars. While in the end they cannot close the deal and settle for a lumpy, meandering third act and a rather half-hearted climax of obligations, their commitment to the material makes this more surprising, and more winning, than your average studio romantic comedy.

It helps to have people who can talk. While too often movies seem populated by pretty people who can barely speak in coherent phrases – much less sell the idea that they understand them – Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, playing best friends John and Jeremy, speak in torrents and enjoy it. You get the impression that their job mediating divorce cases is merely a hobby that gives them the space to indulge in their favorite activity – talking to each other. In both cases we have an actor who understands that the pacing and inflection of a line can oftentimes be funnier than the words themselves, and that speaking more slowly to make sure the audience understands is not funny at all.

It can border on exhausting, since neither is a natural straight man there’s little to temper any excesses. But this is a story of excess, centered around perhaps the most excessive event in our culture – the wedding.

John and Jeremy love weddings. They love the food, they love the way the band almost always gets around to playing Shout and they really love the bottomless supply of hormonally-charged bridesmaids. Without enough legitimate wedding invites to sate their appetite, they’ve made an elaborate recreation (complete with as many by-laws as the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition) out of forging identities and insinuating themselves into the weddings of strangers.

Jeremy forgives these shallow pleasures by saying that they’re young and foolish and entitled. But it’s gradually sinking in for John that, as he tells Jeremy, they’re not really that young anymore.

Still, new nuptials offer new challenges, and Jeremy sells John on “crashing” the excessively tasteful wedding of Christina Cleary (Jenny Alden), one of the three very comely daughters of a Treasury Secretary and rumored Presidential candidate (Christopher Walken). These daughters are so broadly appealing they even come in blond (Alden), brunette (Rachel MacAdams), and redhead (Isla Fisher). John fixates on brunette Claire, who is kind-hearted, cares about the environment and is engaged to a political scion and all-around jerkoff with the fantastic name Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper). As in many romcoms he must work overtime to prove he’s an unsuitable fiancée; every scene adds one more to the list of negative attributes, like he’s trying to top himself each time out – boorish, over-competitive, malicious, short-tempered, vain, sexist, unfaithful, etc.

Jeremy, meanwhile, sets his sights on the bright-eyed young redhead Gloria (Isla Fisher), who seems to embody that old adage about how when the Gods want to punish us, they give us what we want. She latches on to Jeremy and invites both crashers out to the Cleary mansion for a weekend of yachting and quail hunting and other stuffy rich New England pleasures – she sells her father on it by holding her breath and stamping her feet. John sees this as a golden opportunity to work further on Claire, Jeremy grows increasingly alarmed by the adorable, sing-songy obsession Gloria’s developing.

It takes a real high-wire balancing of kittenish playfulness and maniacal devotion to knock a veteran swinger like Vince Vaughn off his stride; and Fisher, like Allyson Hannigan in the first American Pie, is this movie’s secret weapon and best asset. The evolution of their relationship is in all ways much more fun than Wilson and McAdams, who must play the square and familiar courtship where he finally gets through to her, she has doubts, his secret is revealed, and you can fill in the rest.

But the long middle section can’t resist piling on the quirks. One would think having Christopher Walken as the father of the house would be obstacle enough; he’s strangely underutilized, except in one laugh-out-loud scene that’s too difficult to describe, but requires he studiously ignore damning details in the bedroom Jeremy’s sleeping in.

Anyway, on top of that we have the gay artist son Todd (Keir O’Donnell), who hunches up like Renfield and feels oppressed by everyone. Then there’s Cleary’s salacious wife Kathleen (Jane Seymour), who really wants to get John’s opinion on her recent cosmetic enhancements. And the matriarch of the family, Grandma Mary (Ellen Albertini Dow), who like all old women in comedies is expected to shout and cuss and say bawdy things.

And then we have a high-profile cameo that pops in near the end, part of the evolving fraternity of performers who’ve dominated screen comedy in the last five years. It says a lot about his rising star that all he needs to do is walk on camera in a bathrobe and the audience cheers.

Director David Dobkin (Clay Pigeons, Shanghai Knights) doesn’t always calculate his set-ups in the best way, relying too often on close-ups when delicate interaction is so key to the humor, but the commitment of his actors overcomes his rather flat visual approach. To his credit, he proves you can still get comic mileage out of a gray and dignified man turning to you with a disgusted look on his face.

Once it comes time to try and gather up all the material it’s introduced Wedding Crashers falters and starts chucking subplots overboard in a bailing bucket. But with the state of film comedy these days it’s tough to fault a movie for having too much inspiration. What survives unscathed, including its essential “R” rating, is raunchy and effective comedy, and two stars who make it possible to enjoy just hearing them speak it.

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From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Island

Originally published 7/22/05
Full review behind the jump

The Island
Director: Michael Bay
Writers: Story by Caspian Treadwell-Owen, Screenplay by Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci and Caspian Treadwell-Owen
Producers: Michael Bay, Ian Bryce, Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, Djimon Hounsou, Sean Bean, Steve Buscemi, Michael Clarke Duncan


In Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s extraordinary pre-Lord of the Rings true crime film about two New Zealand schoolgirls who murdered one of their mothers, the ending revealed that a condition of the girls’ sentence was that they never meet again. Their proximity created some sympathetic vibration, activated some latent madness which made them killers. Apart they could be harmless.

I wonder now if the same arrangement could be struck for producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay. For while their collaborations have been gaseous abominations to a film (think Armageddon and Pearl Harbor), separate from their union Jerry Bruckheimer as shown himself capable of making solid entertainment. And now, with The Island, God help me I never thought I’d write these words, Michael Bay has made a good movie.

I won’t call it a masterpiece, there’s only so far down this road I can tread with open eyes. I doubt I'll ever own the DVD. But in terms of pacing, clarity of storytelling and sympathy with its characters, The Island is far and away Bay’s best work since that "Aaron Burr" milk commercial, and an exciting enough way to spend a couple of hours if you’re in the mood for an unchallenging science-fiction thriller.

I say “unchallenging” because the movie never uses the implications of its conceit as more than a trigger for chases, fights, special effects and the odd joke here and there. This is not condemnable in and of itself, because under the guiding hand of not the bombastic enabler Bruckheimer but able eye-level producers Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald (Gladiator, Road to Perdition, most of Steven Spielberg’s recent output), for once Bay loosens his grip just the crucial little bit on the pretense that he’s making some cinematic passion play, and relaxes to enjoy the pure kinetics of it.

Most of the advertising for this movie has already given the game away, but on the off, off, off-chance you’ve slipped in unawares I’ll try to preserve the nasty surprise awaiting our heroes. Sometime in future, Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan MacGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are residents of a secure facility where the last survivors of a planet-wide contagion are supposedly protected. They wear identical white pajamas, exercise regularly, do as they’re told, and wait in hopes that when the next “Lottery” is drawn, theirs will be the name picked to go to The Island, a tropical paradise representing the last pristine environment on the surface.

Bay shows commendable patience setting up Lincoln and Jordan’s world and its rhythms: The nannyish computer system which scans your urine and can order changes in your diet if too much sodium shows up. The “proximity alert” which causes black-suited guards to come rushing over if a male and female spend too much time touching. Residents drink Aquafina and unwind over a futuristic holographic X-Box – one wonders why they’d need brand names in a world where all their activities are dictated to them, but this is a summer movie so you expect a little Happy Meal pimping with your action.

Needless to say, what they think’s going on isn’t quite what’s really going on; and because of an unauthorized friendship with a tech supervisor who enjoys the odd rebellion (Steve Buscemi), Lincoln learns just enough to whisk Jordan away from a dreadful fate.

At this point the movie becomes a protracted chase, in structure and look the movie owes much to Minority Report, right down to little miniaturized computers that scuttle like bugs and do very uncomfortable things with your eyes. In charge of the chasing is a mercenary named Laurent (Djimon Hounsou), who’s a fearsome badass, but his work is crippled by the fact that he can only walk in slow motion.

Yes, at this point some of Bay’s penchant for wretched excess shows itself; but unlike his past extravaganzas I didn’t feel like my skull was being relentlessly pummeled with “excitement”. The casting of McGregor and Johansson is key, both are true talents who can hold our concern for their plight even against so large a canvas of special effects. Other parts are filled well too, from Michael Clarke Duncan in a small role as a fellow Lottery “winner” to Buscemi and Hounsou. Sean Bean plays a doctor named Merrick who is central to all of this, and as an actor of long experience in movies of this size he knows exactly what is expected of him.

The movie has a beautiful, colorful look; it’s photographed by Mauro Fiore, a protégé of the great Janusz Kaminski (Spielberg’s sole D.P. since Schindler’s List) who’s building an impressive resume of his own in recent years. Instead of the over-keyed let’s-make-everything-look-like-a-Chevy-commercial look Bay has favored in the past, there’s a shocking contrast between the cool and clinical world of white jumpsuits and the over-saturated color of the movie’s second half. Nigel Phelps’ production design is a useful ally in this as well.

At times it’s over-designed – why are doctor’s offices in the future always these high-ceilinged caverns with diagonal walls and stainless steel everywhere? Where’s the diplomas and paperwork and jar of tongue depressors? And at times it’s too cutesy – we are told that the inhabitants of this Center are only educated to the level of 15-year-olds, so they all act a little petty and surly and are thus indistinguishable from the grown-up heroes of Bay’s previous pictures. And after providing us with a perfectly respectable climax, the movie tacks on another which not only feels too truncated by itself for the size of its ambitions, it makes the movie end up feeling too long.

As I’ve said it’s no masterpiece, but it is an entertaining ride. It doesn’t pull any tricks you haven’t seen before, but makes a sincere effort to play fair by its own rules. I hope I’m not grading on a curve, because it might cost me my cynical cinephile membership badge to give a positive review to a Michael Bay movie. But with The Island he’s taken a clear step in the right direction as a filmmaker, and you should encourage that sort of thing.

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