Dan in Real Life Director: Peter Hedges Writers: Pierce Gardner and Peter Hedges Producers: Brad Epstein and Jonathan Shestack Stars: Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche, Dane Cook, Dianne Weist, John Mahoney, Allison Pill, Brittany Robertson, Marlene Lawston
“I think a character in a comedy should not know they’re in a comedy.” -Steve Carell
Steve Carell has a gift I can only describe as the ability to fail to conceal his emotions from us. Time and time again in Dan in Real Life, a breezy but heartfelt comedy, his character, advice columnist Dan Burns, assures everyone around him that he is fine. And yet in his increasingly careless and selfish actions, his loss of grip on the daily demands of his life, and particularly in the anguish that sneaks around the corners of his face, we know that he is far from fine.
Dan is a widower with three daughters, and doesn’t talk much about his wife’s death, and that is key to this performance’s winning indirectness. Because the filmmakers give you just enough raw material to imagine how he needed to pull himself together for the sake of his daughters, and how after a few years that determined decency could end up as this – the patient surrender of a man who has decided that the rest of his life is for other people, not himself. What leaks through, breaking that easy grin, is a man suffering from the realization that he is still alive, and does still want things.
Despite this latent grief, his performance has a loose warmth to it that the movie shares; it is somehow slight about its own seriousness. It will sound like a belittling sort of compliment, but I say it to point out its rarity: this movie is just, plain, nice.
The story unfolds over a weekend get-together for the extended Burns family at a giant old house in New England. Headed by reliable charmers John Mahoney and Dianne Weist, this is a brood that sings together, plays together, and concerns themselves with each others’ problems to a fault. With all the brothers and cousins and wives it can get messy, but it’s in a convincing way, and the persistent togetherness of it has charm. Too many moviegoers would turn their nose up at the thought of watching a family that plans activities together with such gusto – but they do exist.
In the midst of this, Dan is dealing with a potential promotion for his column, and the adolescent heart pangs of his middle daughter, Cara. Cara is played by Brittany Robertson, and in her longing for the dashing Marty (Felipe Dieppa) she embodies with painfully hilarious abandon the desperation of first love. Fathers must go through a moment where they realize that infatuation has permanently altered their relationship with their no-longer-so-little girl, and Carell depicts this rising alarm like a man trying to reason with a geyser.
His family has known him long enough to give him a certain space for his feelings, but when he meets Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore, her sympathies are so directly tuned to his frequency that, the moment where she recognizes the grief he’s carrying, it’s like she’s been struck by a boulder. The line that accompanies this is exactly what it should be: “You don’t have to laugh”, she says, her voice suddenly choking.
The chance encounter that becomes sudden intimacy with a stranger sure looks like a path to new love, but the roadblock here is that Marie is already on her way to the Burns house – as the new paramour of Dan’s brother, Mitch (Dane Cook). Converted stand-up comedian Cook is a performer who clearly has an immense appeal to many, but no one in the movie business has seemingly cracked the code of it yet. He is accurate here without being particularly excellent, his Mitch is a tomcat trying to improve – charming, but still fully-capable of unconscious offenses. In a scene where he’s describing his adoration of Marie, we might be shocked by Dan’s petulant interjections. Later we’ll understand them better, which is a sign that director/co-writer Peter Hedges has given this story a thorough thinking-through and intends for us to pay attention all the way.
The movie jogs through a weekend of secret pleadings, misunderstandings, slammed doors, and the helpless discombobulation of Dan Burns, a man losing control of everything he’s had cinched up inside. It’s Carell’s ability to play these as moments of helpless expression, accidents of the moment, that underlines the movie’s own theme. This stuff never waits for your convenience. Bit by bit, he is expanding audiences’ idea of what he’s capable of as a comic actor, and it’s a pleasure to witness the evolution.
There are so many points at which Dan in Real Life could have turned into a forgettably-gauzy TV movie. Its characters and incidents are common, a little soft even, and yet are woven by the writers into something unexpectedly sturdy. This is not a great movie but it’s a thoroughly good one, right down to the open-hearted original songs by Sondre Lerche. I think it needs someone like Steve Carell at its center, a performer whose best asset is his own deference, his unassuming nature. He’s someone we could meet in real life; someone who, even in watching him screw up, we gain faith that he can navigate this real life, and maybe that means we can, too. How does a movie feel when it does that? It feels nice.
Originally published 8/12/07 Full review behind the jump
1408 Director: Mikael Håfström Writers: Screenplay by Matt Greenberg and Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewksi, based on the short story by Stephen King Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura Stars: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Jasmine Jessica Anthony
I admit to being partial to a good ghost story, because they are technology-proof. These days anyone can punch up something weird in a computer and have it murder some ingénue, or bring in the gore makeup crew for some hip dismemberment. But a good ghost story is the embodiment of some powerful emotional ideas. For one: death does not always end something’s influence on your life. Also: the most powerful kind of evil spirit is the kind that exploits our own weaknesses – our arrogance, our secret pains.
Stephen King has made a great deal of money from understanding the mechanisms of fear. One of my favorite passages in his writing comes from The Shining, as he describes a little boy in a dark pipe, listening to something come rustling towards him through the dead leaves; something unknown, reaching for him with bad intentions. There’s a scene in 1408, based on a more recent short story of King’s, which uses many of the same elements as that creepy scenario. Fewer authors have seen a busier post-“retirement” period than King, save perhaps Isaac Asimov, for whom death itself was barely an impediment to his publishing pace. But King’s latter days have seen him frequently going over familiar ground; at least he’s stealing from his own best work. This movie version of 1408 is a tightly-mounted and highly-competent ghost story which plays like a remix of some of his older hits.
It’s anchored by a harder-than-it-seems performance from John Cusack. In spite of the special effects, the filmmakers are smart enough to realize that the real foundation of this movie is going to be the innate intelligence and sincerity he supplies. For long stretches it is essentially a one-man show, featuring a man as abused by a single room as anyone since Bruce Campbell went up to that cabin in Evil Dead II. His success is the movie’s success, as well as the best argument for how reliable and experienced actors can serve genre movies; and why a good genre movie, like an old-fashioned ghost story, is something no one should be ashamed to enjoy.
He plays Mike Enslin – once a young writer of promise, now a traveling hack churning out cheesy “studies” of haunted houses across America. Why he has developed this spiteful relationship with the afterlife, and whether he indeed wants to find a real connection to the beyond, we will of course discover, because this is one of those movies where it matters that we know who we’re watching.
He receives a mysterious postcard from The Dolphin Hotel in New York, warning him about Room 1408. This is a room with a history that gets more ominous and gruesome the more Enslin reads about it. People go mad there; slit their own throats, gouge out their eyes, leap out windows. It’s said no one lasts more than an hour once they’ve checked in.
The hotel’s manager is Gerald Olin, played excellently by Samuel L. Jackson. He clearly understands that his job in this small role is to warm the crowd up for the big show, and he relishes that duty. Olin is a most capable hotel manager – diplomatic, personable, cultured, proud of his establishment. He even sees to it that Room 1408 gets cleaned, once in awhile, although there are strict rules (maids go in by twos, all doors stay open). He has given up trying to understand the room, he just works to keep it empty. But he sees in Enslin a man for whom every dissuasion just deepens his cocksure resolve.
He doesn’t believe the room is really evil. And we didn’t buy a ticket to watch him get talked out of it.
The room itself has the cookie-cutter bland livability one expects from a hotel suite – Mike makes snide comments into his pocket tape recorder about the paintings. Things start slowly – misbehaving plumbing, a clock radio that keeps switching on, a bed that seems to turn itself down. They don’t stay so subtle long.
What’s refreshing about 1408 is the way you can gradually discern that as malicious as this room is in imprisoning and tormenting Mike (I like the Sartre-esque “You Are Here” fire exit diagram, that shows the room surrounded by nothingness), it does obey certain rules. With spooks like those in the Grudge franchise, which have seemingly limitless abilities to assault their victims, one wonders why they bother creeping them out first. It’s childish. But this room, we think, cannot just murder you any time it feels like. Instead what makes it scary is that it openly intends to drive you to madness and death, and it’s very good at what it does, and it knows everything about you.
The screenplay is brisk enough to keep delivering scares while changing up their type regularly. 1408, that evil room, knows that the way to dismantle your sanity is not to just keep leaping at you, but to zig-zag. Play on the senses, then the nerves, then the memories. Tease with false hope, encourage despair, make you feel small and powerless. In this way, that Stephen King has done so effectively throughout his career, we recognize the universal gestures of abuse and project them against our own imaginations. The ghosts seem real, because the things they exploit in their abuse of us are so very, very real. A good ghost story, which this movie is, makes us both ponder our flaws, and jump in our chairs. I like that in my horror.
Charlie Wilson’s War Director: Mike Nichols Writers: Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by George Crile Producers: Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks Stars: Tom Hanks, Amy Adams, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Om Puri, Ned Beatty, Ken Stott
Aaron Sorkin already knows what a strain it can be to dramatize the paper-pushing and horse-trading of politics, in his gilded TV drama The West Wing he had fictional President Jeb Bartlett quote sociologist Max Weber’s definition of it as “the slow boring of hard boards”. When politics are so subject to the bafflingly unsteady pulse of the electorate, and so opaque when it comes to connecting an action to a tangible result in the lives of the governed, political drama is too-easily subject to dues ex machina nudges in the direction of plot expediency. You can sure claim that such-and-such bit of canny glad-handing caused that bit of good or ill over yonder, but how do you sell it to the audience?
Sorkin is talented enough at this to know that the trick is to elevate the people involved, and let their passion for the system, and the play of their personalities, clear the road for all the legislative wonkery. This makes him the obvious choice to adapt Charlie Wilson’s War, the unlikely-but-true story of a playboy Texas Congressman who, with charm, savvy, and a few budget shenanigans, secretly orchestrated the arming of Afghan rebels in the 1980’s, so they could drive the Soviets out of their country, crippling their feared army and hastening the end of the Cold War. And many of the Sorkin trademarks are here – that peppy stop-and-hit-reset dialogue, those counter-melodic theatrical scenes that so satisfyingly click two seemingly unrelated ideas together in an instant, and his personal favorite theme: the brilliant underachiever and the daffy broad who demands greatness of him.
So why does Charlie Wilson’s War, with a Sorkin script, with the still-puckish Mike Nichols behind the camera, with Tom Hanks attempting the star power equivalent of Total Harmonic Resonance with Julia Roberts in front of it, and with always-exciting talents like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams on drums and bass, somehow fail to pop? It shifts in and out of excellence like a microscope with a loose knob.
I wonder if it starts with Hanks. America’s Most Decent Actor is certainly an unexpected choice to play the Lufkin, Texas Representative known as “Good Time Charlie”, with his fondness for whiskey and women in hot tubs. Every so often Hanks puts this disarming little-boy expression on his face that says “I’m sorry I’m such a rascal, but what are you going to do?” And I rather like that, but his randy side looks more like camouflage than truly-committed licentiousness. Since a running subplot of the picture involves Wilson being named in an investigation into drug use (the prosecutor is some up-and-comer named Giuliani), this rare weak spot in his performance hobbles Sorkin’s attempt to do what I described above and sweeten the politics with personality. Then the subplot itself goes fizzling away, an abandoned dud.
What the picture does do very expertly is track how Wilson, with an advantageous combination of committee seats, and an understanding that his job is to give people what will make them happy, was able to push a few dollars at the Pentagon around and conjure up a secret war, with the help of a philanthropic Texas socialite (Roberts), an abrasive CIA agent (Hoffman), and an office of buxom assistants known, naturally, as “Charlie’s Angels”.
The socialite, ultra-conservative Joanne Herring, has the money to think she can change the world, and the free time to try. She also has a certain tendency to bring the Bible into her pleadings, which is one of two blatant places where Sorkin slots in his most beaten-to-death hobby horse about Christians with theocratic impulses. The movie leaves off-screen the most pivotal thing the real Herring did, which was to slip, coiffed hair and country club clothes included, into occupied Afghanistan with a film crew to document Soviet atrocities. Showing such zealous moxie rather than simply alluding to it might have made it more obvious why a star of Roberts’ stature is hanging around in this movie.
As it is, Wilson has a seemingly-more proactive partner in the CIA agent, Gust Avarkotos, who asserts that he must be good at what he does, because he’s too much of a coarse hothead to have ever been promoted for butt-kissing. Hoffman carries himself like a beat cop who measures everyone the same, no matter what their status, and expects to be lied to, but gets angry about it anyway. I like his explosive temper, and the way he leans back from the table and squints at important people, determined to demonstrate how unimpressed he is. It’s Avarkotos who helps formulate the nuts-and-bolts strategy – what weapons the Afghan rebels need to shoot down Soviet helicopters, and how the US could provide such weapons without it being too obvious where they’re coming from. This will involve getting recalcitrant Senators, paranoid Israelis, and xenophobic Pakistanis to cooperate and take action for a country that doesn’t look, at first glance, to be at the front line of anything. And it’s up to Charlie and his grin to make this all fit together.
The story itself is nothing short of amazing, how in the midst of a hardening bureaucracy full of reasons to take no action, these determined people, with seat-of-their-pants bravado, and the properly-timed use of a belly-dancer, effectively cancelled World War III and turned it into a no-show victory for our side. Anyone who hears that story is bound to think “that would make a hell of a movie.” Charlie Wilson’s War gets the names, dates, and places right, and provides charm and a couple of crackerjack scenes – one with a bottle of Scotch is Sorkin at his multi-tasking best. But the inglorious truth about politics is that even the politicians trying to do good in the world are usually in bland offices, far from the action. This movie has a charismatic hero in that bland office, but it sure leaves me feeling like I’m not getting the whole picture.
From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Simpsons Movie
Originally published 8/12/07 Full review behind the jump
The Simpsons Movie Director: David Silverman Writers: Screenplay by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, based on the cartoon series created by Matt Groening and developed by Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon Producers: James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Richard Sakai, Mike Scully Featuring the vocal talents of: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Albert Brooks, Marcia Wallace, Tress MacNeille, Pamela Hayden, Russi Taylor, Karl Weirdergott, Maggie Roswell
It’s startling, now, to look back on the first season of The Simpsons on television, with its crude animation and half-developed characters. This is what became one of the most enduring institutions in American popular culture? Back then, the problems the family encountered felt relatively grounded and authentic, and grew out of their lower-middle-class suburban world. Back then, Dan Castellaneta’s vocal performance as family patriarch Homer was little more than a Walter Matthau impersonation, right down to the way he answered the phone (“mmmmMYELLO?”) And back then, small-town schools sought to ban Simpsons T-shirts, because of one on which trouble-making pre-teen hooligan Bart Simpson mouthed the society-threatening phrase “I’m an underachiever and proud of it.”
Both America and The Simpsons have come a long way in 18 years; and it has been a study in how difficult it is for satire to stay ahead of a culture so determined to continue its downward trajectory. But just like Castellaneta’s Homer evolved through his inarticulate exclamations: “Whoo-hoo!”, “Mmmmmm…”, and the immortal “D’oh!” into a fully-realized ambassador of our deliriously anti-intellectual, attention-deficit, gratification-addicted times, the writers of The Simpsons have mastered a kind of fast food satire, which has through persistent smarts and unsparing mockery accumulated in hundreds of single-serving 22-minute chunks to create a moving portrait of American life that will do more to teach future generations about what we were than any sociology text.
In a way, The Simpsons Movie is as accurately-titled an experience at the multiplex as you’ll get this year. It is no more or less than The Simpsons, Matt Groening’s yellow-hued small-town Everyfamily, transitioning their routine to the big screen with all their virtues intact. If I were a lazier man I could end the review right there, because you are going to get what you get on the small-screen in a high-quality Simpsons episode, only with a quadruple-sized running time, some pleasing flourishes of scale made possible by the bigger canvas and budget, and a few choice exploitations of a PG-13 rating. But despite that I was a schoolchild suffering the insidious influence of that Bart Simpson T-shirt during its heyday, I shall not underachieve.
The script is the work of an all-star team of Simpsons writers, many of them veterans of the show’s heyday (encompassing, depending on whom you ask, roughly the third through eighth seasons, give or take), and the gags have a crisp pace and high hit-percentage worthy of that period. You could stand it against any favorite episode.
The story involves Homer creating an environmental catastrophe, which results in the whole town of Springfield being imprisoned inside a giant protective dome by corrupt government bureaucrat Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks). This serves as an elegant springboard into a fast-paced and consistently hilarious examination of just what Springfield, as we’ve come to understand it, is.
This little town, which according to the movie borders “Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky”, and encompasses mountains, lakes, deserts, and the famous Springfield Gorge (they never did clean up that wrecked ambulance), which seems to grow and change layout and geography according to the needs of the ongoing study of humanity like the metropolis in Dark City, is nothing less than the brightly-painted amusement park caricature of our own collected excesses and vices. It is the inevitable end product of the forces that jab alternately at the fear and pleasure centers of our brain and then, while we’re drooling with delight, goes after our wallet and our freedom. It sees us as the fattened chattel of those who profit off giving us things that feel good and are really, really bad for us, like beverage companies and the Republican Party. It is awed by our ability to be outright hostile to good sense (when eternal do-gooder Lisa Simpson urges the town’s leaders to fight the dumping in the perilously-filthy lake, the newspaper headline reads “Annoying Girl Nags Town”).
But The Simpsons would never have staying power if they stooped to pedanticism, they happen to think the products of this culture are too cool and amazing to outright condemn. With all the fervency it mocks it also admires and celebrates; we produce such colors and varieties of madness in this great big country, and The Simpsons loves them all, and still professes a belief that, when it counts, we’ll try to do the right thing. With so many forces squeezing us towards mediocrity, we’ll still try to achieve greatness because that’s the dream we bought and we don’t have buyer’s remorse. As much of an irresponsible boob as Homer can be (and the movie provides him plenty of opportunities), he still loves his family, and will fight heroically through all the static life has injected into his brain to be there for them.
At the end of the day you cannot cut off Springfield with a dome, or leave it as the Simpson family tries to do when Homer is exiled by an angry mob. I think the reason why Homer inspires more angry mobs than any other resident of Springfield is that he is their citizen exemplar, the loudest and most delighted cow in the pasture. He isn’t just another passively-corrupted consumer, he’s enthused about his idiocy. To paraphrase a line from The Lord of the Rings - they love and hate him as they love and hate themselves. America cannot be without Springfield, and Springfield cannot be without Homer Simpson.
The filmmakers show a masterful sense for balance, letting the core family unit and their story hold the momentum of the plot and provide some poignant struggles (the greatest achievement of any American family is to keep working it out day by day), while still cramming two decades’ accumulation of supporting characters and background gags in around them. Merely listing the familiar faces from Springfield’s extended population would take up more space than the “Begat” section in the Book of Genesis, and to quibble over their assorted seconds of allotted screen time is a mug’s game. Everyone will get a moment or two with a favorite character.
I almost wish that The Simpsons had wrapped up its television run years ago – you can sense the exhaustion these days of whipping up new wacky scenarios, wedging in more celebrity guest stars, and fighting for viewer eyeballs against rip-off artists like Family Guy and the perpetual encroachment by the network into their own time with more commercials, more advertising messages and logos scrolling along the bottom of the screen. On the big screen, The Simpsons Movie fairly bursts with a refreshed sense of possibility and freedom. It is Song of Myself in whoopee cushion form, a dazzling roast of America by America, and in aiming its lovingly-poisoned arrows, it’s an over-achiever, and proud of it.
Exhaustive Oscar Talk - Because You Can't Get Enough!
The laziest writers on the Oscar beat woke up Tuesday morning and breathed a sigh of relief. Thank the Maker!, they cried, We get to write the Kevin O’Connell story again! For those of you who don’t know, Kevin O’Connell is a sound mixer who has become the Oscars’ Susan Lucci – this year’s nod for Transformers is his 20th nomination, and he has never won. This prompts a cutesy article every time he gets nominated, and that’s one less chunk of blank page editors the nation over need to worry about.
Because let’s face it, with Tuesday’s Academy Award Nominations announcement, there was a deluge of information, but that’s it for the next month. Other award shows will come and go – less so this year due to the strike – but until we find out who actually wins, just like in our Presidential primaries, there’s nothing to do all day but speculate and gas on and register silly, invariably-wrong predictions.
(And can I just note for the record how decisively the world did NOT end without a Golden Globes celebudrinky-fest this year? Apparently the only people heartbroken to not have the Globes – other than everyone who lost money – were the dingbats on E! and the people who fantasize in their bathroom mirrors about someday being one of the dingbats on E!)
But I think there’s actually quite a lot to learn from reading this particular set of chicken bones. Like – what an amazing year at the movies 2007 turned out to be! Here’s just one example of what I’m talking about:
Since 1936’s Awards, when the Academy settled on five nominees for most major categories, and introduced the Supporting Actor and Actress categories, we’ve had twenty annual slots to confer on actors for the performances we relish. Look at this year’s acting nominees – other than the three nods for Michael Clayton, there’s not another duplicate on the list. Eighteen different movies earned acting nominations, which hasn’t happened – EVER – in Oscar history.
I found two years, 1988 and 1992, in which there were seventeen, but those with long memories will recall that 1992 was regarded as a generational low-point in terms of roles for women. One sure looked like a shoe-in, but it was in The Crying Game (ZING!) For about three years there, they had to scrounge to come up with five roles in each female category – I mean, Holly Hunter was good in The Firm, but Oscar good? And remember who took home the Supporting Actress Award for that fateful year of 1992 – Marisa Tomei. For My Cousin Vinny.
It’s safe to say that those years represented not so much diversity as desperation. By contrast, this year we have amazing performances from all over the spectrum. In first-time nominees Hal Holbrook and Ruby Dee (for Into the Wild and American Gangster, respectively), we have our two oldest acting contenders in history (he’s 82, she’s 83), and Dee is competing with a 13-year old, Atonement’s Saorise Ronan. We have an oil wildcat versus a singing murderer, and a Boston drug dealer versus Bob Dylan. Right before our eyes the hunks of ER and 21 Jump Street have evolved into Oscar perennials. And if Ellen Page wins Best Actress for Juno (and she could well, I’ll do a little uninformed handicapping of my own below), she’d be the youngest Best Actress winner in history, just three days removed from her 21st birthday when it comes time for the Oscar after-parties.
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You might well intuit from the above that I have a kind of Rain Man (Best Picture - 1988) relationship with the Oscars. I haven’t missed a minute of a ceremony since the awards for 1991, when The Silence of the Lambs became only the third movie in history to achieve the coveted Oscar Grand Slam – winning Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay (other two Grand Slammers – 1934’s It Happened One Night and 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). While Oscar and I rarely agree, I love them both as a magnificent suggested-viewing list (an amalgamated Netflix queue from a century’s worth of Hollywood’s best and brightest), and as a Rosetta Stone for reading the culture of the time as well as that culture’s sense of itself.
To put it bluntly, some Oscar-winners age better than others, and I find this endlessly fascinating. The half-silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front, which won for the overlapping period of 1929-30, is still a ghastly evocation of both the power of patriotic zeal and the horror that inevitably results when it is harnessed for the purposes of war.
Set that against the following year’s winner, a cornpone adaptation of Edna Ferber’s sprawling Western Cimarron with every bit of irony or subtext thoroughly squeezed out. Were those easily-bamboozled voters cryogenically-frozen only to be thawed out in time to honor 2001’s fraudulent A Beautiful Mind? And in 1996 Oscar had the kudos equivalent of a drunken one-night-stand, bestowing nine Oscars on The English Patient (including the Oscar for costumes. Costumes?!?!? He’s wearing khakis!) And sure, it’s a pretty hypnotizing piece of beautifully-photographed Heaving Sob, but with the perspective of morning-after contemplation, maybe nine Oscars was a little too extravagant a bit of pillow talk, eh?
There’s one statistic that’s particularly resonant for me this year. While just over 200 different directors have ever been nominated for Oscars, the fraternity of nominated screenwriters contains over 900 members. Part of this is attributable to there being two writing categories to one for direction, and that many writers work in teams, or are re-written by others in the long uphill-boulder-roll known as “script development”.
But I think this additionally reflects the virtues of the eternal competitive churn of screenwriters, who make no friends within the establishment and are always viewed as replaceable, whereas directors often build their own producing entities and are wined, dined, and worshipped. It is a much higher mountain to climb to become an elite director, but once you’re there you can make one turd after another for years before anyone calls you out. A writer’s time at the top has a terrifying uncertainty to it, you’re only as relevant as the last boner you gave a studio exec (in “the biz”, we call this “being good in a room”). This is rough on the monthly budget but it does keep fresh voices emerging. Where would Diablo Cody be if this whole crazy art form didn’t desperately, constantly need great scripts?
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These nominations give me a hell of a lot to smile about, and I’m not the only one. It’s a day of pride for Pixar and Disney, not just because of the five well-deserved nominations for Ratatouille, but because Toy Story 2 co-director Ash Brannon and Tarzan co-director Chris Buck collaborated on the nominated Surf’s Up for Sony. This is a testament to the rich generation of talent that has emerged from Disney and Pixar’s shops and spread throughout the industry.
It was so disheartening to witness the later years of the Eisner regime at Disney, where breadth and ambition were giving way to belt-tightening, canned “sequels”, and the abandonment of the art of hand-drawn animation. It was terrifying to see just how quickly decades of good will and artistic quality could be strip-mined for a few bucks, and I have nothing but the highest hopes for Pixar founder John Lasseter’s new role within the Disney empire, trying to coax the genuine magic back.
The Coen Brothers are happy – not just because four of No Country For Old Men’s eight nominations have the potential to win them statues (their longtime editor, “Roderick Jaynes”, does not actually exist, and is a pseudonym for the brothers themselves); but also because they’re only the third directing team in history to share a nomination. Warren Beatty and Buck Henry split a nod for 1978’s Heaven Can Wait, while Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins won for 1961’s West Side Story. 2003’s City of God had a credited “co-director”, Kátia Lund, but only director Fernando Meirelles was credited on the nomination. The Coens have a considerable chance to be only the second directing team to win, and the first to be related to one another.
And George Clooney is probably happy with his own meticulousness as a filmmaker, which caused his new film as a director, the screwball sports comedy Leatherheads, to be delayed into 2008. With no other project to divide the affection the Academy has for him, more attention could be focused on the deserving Michael Clayton, which features his best acting work to date.
What’s remarkable about Michael Clayton is that even with Clooney starring, and a dynamite script by Tony Gilroy, whose Bourne-fueled box office track record just gets better by the year, the movie still needed outside financing for its modest $25-million budget. It was eventually provided by a Boston real estate developer. The unwillingness of the major studios to invest in anything that does not involve pirates or superheroes is not just an embarrassment, I believe in the long run it will be to their financial detriment, as they sacrifice diversity and forget how to make anything but tentpoles, and the tentpoles they are willing to invest in will cross the point of diminishing returns by becoming too expensive to profit from.
Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Superbad and the new hit Cloverfield were each made for about $20-25-million. That’s a smart grown-up thriller with one of the biggest movie stars in the world, a tragically-epic period piece, a crowd-pleasing teen sex comedy, and an innovative monster movie homage, each creatively satisfying in their own way and all made for roughly the same amount of money. If I ran a small distributor and those were my four pictures for the year, I’d be celebrating a perfect blend of demographic appeal, art, and commerce, all for a combined budget that wouldn’t pay for half of Spider-Man 3.
In fact, let’s equalize those budgets. Say you had the choice to make Spider-Man 3 and nothing else, or to make the four movies I listed above PLUS 1408, 3:10 to Yuma, Hot Fuzz, Into the Wild, Juno, and Sunshine. Which investment do you think protects your financial downside better; you know, in case people don’t want another Spider-Man badly enough to cover that insane budget? Which choice do you think is better for the long-term viability of this art form?
But the studios let outside investors keep bigger and bigger pieces of the pie in order to have more money to pour into Spider-Man 3. What’s wrong with this picture?
***
Of course, the Oscars aren’t about money, except that it’s the only reason (other than flattering stars and directors) that studios deign to invest in these award-season campaigns. There’s still enough people out there interested in a good movie that the Academy Seal of Approval can measurably boost business.
There are a number of top contenders that I have yet to see, including Atonement, Away From Her, The Savages, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I’m Not There, and others. In the next few weeks I’ll be remedying that as best I can in preparation for my annual 10 Best list, but in the meantime, here are my annual first impressions of the race in the eight most prominent categories.
Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) Atonement Christopher Hampton Away From Her Sarah Polley The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Ronald Harwood No Country For Old Men Joel Coen and Ethan Coen There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson
Early Front-runner: The night’s two heavyweights will have one of their first major showdowns in this category. This is a philosophical divide, whether you consider it the highest art of adaptation to capture the essential spirit of a work while giving it cinematic quality, as the Coen Brothers did with No Country, or simply to create a brilliant script regardless of how little it might resemble the source material, as Paul Thomas Anderson did with Blood. Noting the Academy’s recent tendency to spread the wealth, and the fact that the Coens have previously won writing honors (for Fargo), I’ll give the first-day edge to Anderson, previously nominated without winning for both Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Surprises most often happen when there are two equally-matched favorites threatening a split vote. With that possibility present here, I’d put my cover bet on previous winner Ronald Harwood’s masterful job conceptualizing how to put The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on the screen.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: While much of the positive coverage of Away From Her had noted that it represented actress Sarah Polley’s first time out as a writer/director, her chances of a script nomination had not been highly touted. Actors make up the largest percentage of any profession when it comes to membership within the Academy, and have historically shown a soft spot for one of their own venturing into new creative horizons (see: Mel Gibson’s directing Oscar, Kevin Costner’s directing Oscar, Billy Bob Thornton’s screenwriting Oscar, and those two good-looking kids from Boston named Matt something and Ben somesuch). But with so much competition, Polley’s film will put most of its promotional efforts behind Julie Christie’s acting nomination.
Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen) Juno Diablo Cody Lars and the Real Girl Nancy Oliver Michael Clayton Tony Gilroy Ratatouille Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco The Savages Tamara Jenkins
Early Front-runner: Big Mo is definitely on the side of the quippy, cheery, character-rich work of Juno’s screenwriting rookie Diablo Cody, who has cannily folded her own made-for-talk-show-anecdotes career into part of the movie’s PR. The first round of Juno backlash didn’t get much of a foothold, and Fox’s platform release strategy means its box-office is still peaking; there’s a chance of people re-thinking the intense love for this movie in the next couple of weeks, but not much of a chance.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: Many feared that the creation of the Outstanding Animated Feature award category, while rightly giving some primetime Oscar love to this thriving field, would effectively ghettoize animated features, hobbling their chances in other categories by providing a catchall category for people to dedicate their vote. The script for Ratatouille was exceedingly clever and heartwarming, but even if it was the best of the year, its odds would probably suffer.
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role Cate Blanchett as Jude in I’m Not There Ruby Dee as Mama Lucas in American Gangster Saorise Ronan as Briony Tallis in Atonement Amy Ryan as Helene McReady in Gone Baby Gone Tilda Swinton as Karen Crowder in Michael Clayton
Early Front-runner: It’s the revelation of Amy Ryan versus the veneration of Ruby Dee, with Cate Blanchett’s uncanny drag act preparing to play spoiler. Early money probably looks at Ryan, who has much more screen time than Dee’s brief appearance, and whose tough challenge to our sympathies was the heart of Gone Baby Gone. But with Javier Bardem’s Supporting Actor Oscar all-but guaranteed, shutting out Hal Halbrook, the desire to honor a veteran performer could combine with cumulative respect for Dee’s long career in this nearby category. Add to this that American Gangster is one of the few big studio movies in play, and they were planning to stump big time for the picture, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, and all the rest. So with her co-stars not in the running, there will be a lot of money to devote to a campaign centered around Dee.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: It’s hard to call six nominations an underachievement, but Atonement just doesn’t seem to have caught on Stateside to the extent that had been predicted. Saorise Ronan’s odds of following in Anna Paquin’s tiny footsteps were fairly remote to begin with, and she has much more robust competition than the young Paquin did when she won for 1993’s The Piano.
Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role Casey Affleck as Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust Avarkotos in Charlie Wilson’s War Hal Holbrook as Ron Franz in Into the Wild Tom Wilkinson as Arthur Edens in Michael Clayton
Early Front-runner: I would have argued for Javier Bardem to be running in the Best Actor category: he’s as close to a central character in No Country For Old Men as any of the three leads, and in terms of screen time he easily clears the threshold set by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs. That’s another favorite factoid of the Oscar-obsessed – Hannibal Lecter is only on-screen in that film for seventeen minutes, but so dominated people’s impressions of it that Hopkins won for Best Actor, not Supporting. Anton Chigurh casts just as big a shadow over No Country, will be remembered as one of the Immortal Evils of the screen – and will win the Oscar.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: For the moment it looks as if everyone who is not Javier Bardem is destined to be steamrolled, but with his 2005 win for Capote still fresh in the memory, and the general fizzling of affection for Charlie Wilson’s War, the ever-excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman will be the most steamrolled of all.
Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth in Elizabeth: The Golden Age Julie Christie as Fiona in Away From Her Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose Laura Linney as Wendy Savage in The Savages Ellen Page as Juno McGuff in Juno
Early Front-runner: One of the hardest categories to game. Cotillard’s performance was the first to be talked of as a shoe-in, but she carries the baggage of performing in a foreign language, and that the picture played itself out months ago. Julie Christie, now acting royalty, was the next Sure Thing for the tenderly-received Away From Her. But it’s all going to depend on Oscar’s attention span, because Juno is the Hot New Thing in every way, especially its newborn star Ellen Page. Oscar’s history is to favor young faces in this category, but is the 20-year-old Page’s too new to bump off Christie, who was 24 when she originally won Best Actress for 1965’s Darling? I’ll drape the leader’s jersey on Christie for the moment, but this one’s going down to the final hours.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: All the Blanchett love is going to flow towards her nomination in the Supporting category; I think just about everyone recognizes that this is a party she’s going to be at many, many times in years to come. Meryl Streep, whose ability to scoop up nominations makes her the Jerry Rice of the Oscars, finally has a credible threat to her record.
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role George Clooney as Michael Clayton in Michael Clayton Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood Johnny Depp as Benjamin Barker/Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai in Eastern Promises
Early Front-runner: We get to enjoy Daniel Day-Lewis on-screen roughly once an Olympiad, which tends to make him a front-runner almost before the movie is released. No Country and Blood will each score some big prizes before this night is over with, and this will be one category where the voters don’t have to split hairs between the two. I think that feisty oil man is going to face some stiffer competition from Johnny Depp than anyone’s talking about right now, since Depp is moving into the territory where one gets a “body of work” Oscar just from having been so damn good so many times (and making the studios so much money in the process). But this is Day-Lewis’s race to lose at the moment.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: I used to also include an item called “Surprise Contender”, for that name no one expected to see, but it coincides with the name least likely to win so often that I’ve decided it’s redundant. This category’s surprise contender – Tommy Lee Jones in Paul Haggis’ little-seen In the Valley of Elah - won’t have much time to gain traction with so much competition.
Achievement in Directing Julian Schnabel The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Jason Reitman Juno Tony Gilroy Michael Clayton Joel Coen and Ethan Coen No Country For Old Men Paul Thomas Anderson There Will Be Blood
Early Front-runner: This is going to be the break-point for whether or not Oscar Night turns into a full-fledged Coens Love-in. It’s very possible that the prodigious brothers, who created H.I. McDonough, Marge Gunderson, and The Dude, will finally take this category. But a shared directing credit is so rare, that I think it’s going to be an unpredictable factor, there’s no way to know which direction it will push, but I’m going to lean towards thinking it may help tip the balance in the favor of the less technical but more operatic directing style of P.T. Anderson. If the Academy loved masters of technique so much, Hitchcock would have won (he didn’t). This category and Best Picture have split relatively often in recent years, and I think peoples’ increased comfort with that portends a possible split this year too, which is why I lean Blood in this category and, for Best Picture, well, read below…
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: First-time director Tony Gilroy has surpassed everyone’s expectations with the confident filmic execution of his already-superior screenplay. But when stacked against what each of his fellow nominees brings the table in their respective films, it’s tough to see him coming out on top.
Best Picture of the Year Atonement Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner and Paul Webster Juno Lianne Halfon, Mason Novick and Russell Smith Michael Clayton Sydney Pollack, Jennifer Fox and Kerry Orent No Country For Old Men Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen There Will Be Blood JoAnne Sellar, Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Lupi
Early Front-runner: Taken in isolation, I’d say that There Will Be Blood would have the slight edge, given that we’ve all got oil on the brain these days and there’s an epic dimension to the picture that the Academy has traditionally favored. But in the broader context of the Academy’s pre-disposition for righting old wrongs, I think there’s going to be a lot of sentiment pushing the Coen Brothers’ way. They’ve been on the scene for over two decades now, yet it’s so rare that they make a movie everyone can agree on, and everyone’s agreeing about this one. This is a genuine two-horse race, with No Country taking a slight early lead.
“It’s an Honor Just to be Nominated”: I think that admiration for Juno is going to continue to coalesce around star Ellen Page and screenwriter Diablo Cody. Both will need the strongest possible push to win in their respective packed categories, and the competition in this category and the directing category is simply too much to strategically target. Also, Michael Clayton, by virtue of being a straight-ahead contemporary drama, the product of an original screenplay, and not a box office smash, seemed doomed to under-recognition. Kudos to the Academy hive-mind for shocking it out of potential obscurity, but I think this is as far as it gets.
I've been geeking out over Oscar statistics and trivia all morning, trying to put together my annual rundown/predictions based on the nominees. And you'll still get it, but I can't finish it today, hearing the news about the death of Heath Ledger. He was a talent blossoming before our eyes, and in spite of his Oscar nomination for Brokeback Mountain I believe his best work was still ahead of him, and I had been looking forward to enjoying him on screen for the next thirty years.
Such a waste. Such a terrible waste. Even if they aren't classified as such, I consider almost all drug-related Hollywood deaths to be suicides.
(All this wrestling talk will seem ridiculous to you, I know, but there’s a point to it, I promise –NT)
Wrestlemania VII, one of the annual pay-per-view wrestling spectacles staged by the WWE (then WWF), took place on March 24, 1991, at the height of the first Iraq war (remember, the one that ended?) Ever-cognizant of their audience’s mood, and ever willing to “go there”, the company had incorporated the war, and the chest-thumping U.S.A. Sis-boom-bah! fever it created, into its never-ending soap opera. Company headliner Hulk Hogan, who’d competed in the main event of five of the first six Wrestlemania’s (and made an interfering cameo in the other), would have the top of the ticket, here, too, and needed an opponent that would cast the battle of good v. evil in red, white, and blue.
So events leading up to Wrestlemania conspired to put the championship belt around the waist of Sgt. Slaughter, a military-themed former “face” (aka crowd favorite) who made a genuinely dangerous “heel turn” (becoming a bad guy) by putting on an Iraqi uniform, burning American flags on TV, and praising his good “friend” Saddam Hussein. As a national entertainment phenomenon wrestling was still very, very young, steroid trials and Internet fansites had not yet punctured the illusion of reality wrestlers called “kayfabe”, and many of the oldest and most fervent fans had come to it during its regional mud-show days. They still cared about it as if it was real. Some of them still believed it was.
The mid-to-late 80’s were both the WWE’s glory days and an amazing period of transition, as the characters got more cartoonish and the storylines more convoluted. “Kayfabe” was just about to break down for good. Looking back, I think Sgt. Slaughter knew that he was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth – people in those audiences weren’t just booing him, they wanted him dead. But it’s in the wrestler’s blood to try anything that might get him a good pop from the crowd.
Now that made for a dandy main event, and it drew the largest audience in the history of pay-per-view to that point. But to me (and yes, as a 13-year-old, I was still an avid fan) the highlight of that show came earlier in the evening. To cap a major feud, The Ultimate Warrior and Randy “Macho Man” Savage were fighting in a Career-Ending Match. The loser would (supposedly) hang it up for good. This immediately put an aura of importance around the match, because both of these wrestlers were former world champions and top draws, and that either of them might be finished in the ring was unimaginable.
The Ultimate Warrior was the face in this feud. He looked like a hair-metal rocker and had one of the looniest raps in wrestling history. Listen to this 30-second clip; I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, but back then, the kids loved it:
Now, charitably speaking, his ring technique was not that great. Most of his matches involved him pounding his chest, shaking the ropes, and running around, occasionally running into his opponent and knocking him down. His ability to stay at a Wildman Freakout level of energy burn for long periods was pretty impressive, but his matches weren’t going to have a lot of fine detail to them.
By contrast, Randy Savage may have been the greatest all-around wrestler of all time. He had a well-refined persona, could play both face and heel, talked a great game (that man sold a lot of Slim Jims) and was one of the best ring actors working. I’m never going to win any arm-wrestling matches against grown men, but if I punched Randy Savage in the stomach, he could sell it like I’d blasted him with a shotgun. Nobody could take a beating like him, and that’s the key to pro wrestling – to sell the suffering so people invest in the victory. He and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat worked one of the most dynamic matches in history at Wrestlemania III, but even when he was doing one of those time-killing squash matches on a weekend TV show, you could see him putting all his energy into it, trying to find a little something special to do.
Macho Man (then referring to himself as the “Macho King”), rode down to the ring at Wrestlemania VII on a throne with his manager/escort, former women’s champion Sensational Sherri. Now, everyone who’d followed Savage’s career knew that she was not the first woman in his wrestling life – that was his former manager/escort Elizabeth, “The First Lady of Wrestling”. Elizabeth, Savage’s real-life wife during his WWF years, was unique in that she was defined for audiences not by her own actions, but by her loyalty to Savage. Even during his heel days she accompanied him to the ring, held the ring rope open for him, and cheered him on. This gave her an unusual “Stand By Your Man” credibility with fans, and when she disappeared and Savage started parading around with Sherri the angry harpie, it deepened peoples’ loathing of him. As he entered the ring that day, people were throwing things at him. Remember that.
But who did the cameras just happen to find sitting in the audience, watching with concern? That’s right – Elizabeth. Just another little twist to add to the drama as the match began.
This was a heavy one, one of the best The Ultimate Warrior was ever involved in. They wailed away on each other for a good twenty minutes, both looking genuinely exhausted by the end. Sherri interfered frequently, trying to keep her meal ticket on top, and both wrestlers had the chance to inflict their signature “finisher” move on each other, each time to no avail, because that’s how much was at stake.
In the end, The Warrior got the pin, and the crowd roared, and Savage lay, spent, on the canvas. After the Warrior worked the crowd for applause for a couple of minutes, he left the ring, and his theme music faded out. And now Sherri climbed in the ring, spitting and screeching at the loser, tearing at his hair and kicking him for being bested. And then – oh, my droogies – Miss Elizabeth vaulted over the railing, ran up the aisle, and, leaving her usual demure manner aside for a moment, Took Out the Trash, chucking Sherri out of the ring to everyone’s applause.
So now Savage, delirious, still processing the end of his career, comes to his feet, with no idea who’s been hitting him. Elizabeth’s standing there, and (at least in storyline terms), no one knows how long it’s been since he’s seen her. Sherri’s at ringside, howling slander. Elizabeth’s just standing there, quivering, looking at the man she loves. And everyone in that arena is effing captivated, wondering what he’s going to do.
And after milking that agonizing tension just long enough, Savage steps forward and embraces her. His theme music, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, booms out of the speakers, and I shit you not, people are CRYING. This man – a half-hour before they had hated his living guts; and now, because he lost the fight, lost his career, but found his good woman, the waterworks are going.
These two really did love each other then, and Savage, who’d been wrestling a brutal schedule for over a decade, genuinely thought this was his ring farewell. It wasn’t real, but it was real enough for the people who wanted to believe it.
Think about that for a moment. This had transcended its architecture as a fictional sports league where steroid-ed behemoths whanged each other with chairs. Laugh if you want, but this had, in that moment, become the climax of a story about betrayal, and redemption, and love; and because it blended Savage’s performance talents with dramatic anticipation and tension, along with a third-act surprise (wait, who’s that in the audience?!?!), it created real, that’s-what-the-Greeks-called-it catharsis.
Don’t believe me? Check the tape:
Now, wrestlers don’t really know how to retire, so by the end of the year Savage had been “re-instated” and went back to business, but the point is, the audience responded in that moment because they shook off their cynicism and believed.
People want to believe. They starve for it, beg for it. They want to believe in a higher power, they want to believe in UFOs, they want to believe in karmic justice, in our capacity for good, in true love, in virgins in the afterlife. If you can give them that for a couple of hours – if you can stitch together a little poetry and a little music and some tricks of the light that are not real but simply a compelling enough illusion – they will adore you. They will beg for more. And as pro wrestlers, pill salesmen, and Popes all know: they will give you money.
Juno Director: Jason Reitman Writer: Diablo Cody Producers: Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Mason Novick, Russell Smith Stars: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons, Olivia Thirlby
No matter how many thousands of movies I’ve seen in my lifetime, I still have the capacity to be surprised, and I relish it. 2007 has been a splendid year at the movies, and filled with surprises, and to the list of surprises, and of great movies of 2007, I’m overjoyed to add Juno. It is a movie that transcends the preciousness of its style and the quirkiness of its various ingredients to become irresistibly whole, an inviting and human comedy that also contains the best of all surprises in 2007 – star Ellen Page.
Here is a young actress of uncanny honesty and preternatural instincts, who digs up every gem buried in the script by first-timer Diablo Cody and adds a few of her own besides. One of the great pleasures of movie-going is to see a star born before your eyes, and Page, a 20-year old who somehow synthesizes the troubled-girl hip of the young Winona Ryder with the sunny extroversion of the young Meg Ryan, may have won a few underground fans with her role in the thriller Hard Candy, but should catapult to an entirely-new level after this performance.
One can only imagine director Jason Reitman (who previously made the wickedly-smart Thank You For Smoking) watching the dailies of this movie and thanking the Gods of every major and minor religion that he got to play matchmaker for this actress and this role in this script. This is a tricky movie he’s making, a potential booby-trapped house of contradictory characters and provocative subjects laced with dialogue that is sometimes too arch and composed for its own good. But he, Page, and the rest of an impeccable cast venture forth with all love and no fear in telling the story of Juno McGuff.
Juno McGuff (Page) is one of those insufferable indie film names, and for the first five minutes or so of Juno you’ll be all but smacked in the face by some insufferable indie film dialogue, overtly hand-waving palaver of the type that always ties actors’ tongues in knots. But gradually you get to settle down, and watch what Page is doing, how within tiny spaces of behavior she can whip from intelligence to naïveté, from iconoclastic self-assurance to adolescent fear, and suddenly the words seem to relax into their proper rhythm, and let her take over.
The plot concerns the unplanned pregnancy that results from Juno’s first sexual experience, an afternoon whim with her longtime friend Bleeker (Superbad’s Michael Cera) that everyone who knows the two of them already understands was entirely her initiative. He adores her in that paralyzed way shy boys have, while she’s learning her feelings about him at a pace drastically inconsistent with her actions. Cody’s script has a knack for multi-track brains and self-deception in speech, and what’s so lovely about this movie is that Juno McGuff is not an unerring heroine but a girl with reckless impulses and a compulsive attitude towards independence. A girl with, physically and emotionally, much room to grow.
After some deliberation, she decides to carry the baby to birth and give it up for adoption. This means being the talk of her high school for several uninterrupted months, which is like a triple-dog-dare against her belief that she doesn’t care what people think. And it also means finding suitable parents, which she believes she has found in the Loring family.
Mark Loring (Jason Bateman) is a commercial composer and reluctant grown-up who thinks rock stardom is still in the cards, while his wife Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) yearns to be a stay-at-home mother but is missing the crucial element to that job. Garner is on a high-wire here, showing a desperate desire that is sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. One of the best virtues of Juno is that every character is dignified with the chance to surpass our first impression of them, and that’s a double-edged sword for some but especially enriches Vanessa.
The movie observes the resulting havoc of the pregnancy with warmth and wit. Through all the sarcasm and temper, all the misunderstandings, these are characters with an abiding affection for one another, especially for Juno. In most teen movies parents are either in absentia or boobs, but Juno’s father Mac (J.K. Simmons) and step-mother Bren (Allison Janney) get to be clever and understanding and supportive, to have their own lives and opinions, and to know their girl very well for better and for worse. In so many movies about pregnancy the characters seem to be chronic amnesiacs, going into hysterics every other scene as if just realizing what’s going on. In Juno, once the shock wears off and reality swells like Juno’s belly, the pregnancy acts as catalyst, a chance for characters to evolve, and show their true selves, and win our hearts.
Reitman is, with only his second feature, secure enough to not inflict too much of himself into the picture. He brings color and pacing, and an eye for when an actor is creating a little bit of magic, and how he’s not supposed to interfere with that. This is a movie chock full of skips and asides and curlicues of language, they are drips of sweet frosting, and Reitman has already matured to understand that it is not his job to just squeeze those out, he must see to the cake.
This is such a generous movie, such a sweet one. Story-wise it isn’t doing anything new, what makes it so ultimately satisfying is the enthusiasm of a new generation of storytellers. The fresh faces of Juno, in front of and behind the camera, are like teenagers discovering what their bodies are now capable of, and giddily eager to do something with them. In movie-viewing-hours I’m old, Juno makes me feel young again.
Originally published 8/8/07 Full review behind the jump
Sunshine Director: Danny Boyle Writers: Alex Garland Producer: Andrew MacDonald Stars: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Troy Garity, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Mark Strong
I think where people will misjudge Sunshine is to speak of it as a science-fiction film. But in this latest from Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), outer space in the future is merely the setting. In every way that matters, Sunshine is actually a deeply Christian film, and let me explain why.
Since the Sun is what provides us with heat and energy and light and atmosphere and nourishment, you can make a reasonable case that the Sun is a kind of God to us. And if every complex element on the Periodic Table can only be forged in the heat of supernovas, then we are all the stars’ children. As the late Carl Sagan once said: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” So if the world is threatened by the loss of the Sun’s power – the loss of God’s gifts to us – it must be the sons of God that make a sacrifice for our salvation. And the sacrifice will not be a light one.
That is the underlying mechanism of Sunshine, and what gives it a force and awe that carries it over the bumps of a plot that turns out to be about less than meets the eye. While its situational conflicts reach a disappointing ceiling of ingenuity, emotionally it chooses to be about the limits of humanity: what we can be pushed to physically and psychologically; how the unbearable weight of a mission to save one’s whole species can grind on the emotions, and how no one can be unscathed when they’ve looked on the face of God. That is what lifts the film above matters of the flesh to be about something more eternal.
The story concerns the crew of the Icarus II on a mission to “re-ignite” the sun, which has faded enough to plunge the Earth into permanent winter. The ship, a long spire hiding in the shadow of an enormous mirrored shield, is strapped to a city-sized nuclear bomb made up of (I like this detail) all the fissible material left on Earth. If humanity survives, they might be better off without fissible things around. The first Icarus disappeared seven years before and nobody knows why. There will be no Icarus III.
The crew reminds me a lot of that from Ridley Scott’s original Alien, in that they are sweaty, and impatient with each other, and have been in isolation long enough that discipline has given way to a frayed pragmatism. Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) understands that when he gives an order the crew will respond like children told to clean their room, so he has adapted to become a reason-wielding consensus builder. His crew is international, and played by actors who are familiar but not household names – the filmmakers have a canny sense for putting interesting faces into counterintuitive roles. Michelle Yeoh, most famous to the West for action roles in Tomorrow Never Dies and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, here keeps her deadly legs stowed, playing a horticulturalist. She maintains the greenhouse, loves her precious plants, and sees her fellow humans’ survival through the intractable filter of available oxygen and the number of lungs breathing it. It’s a complex yet eminently-believable reversal of empathy and calculation, and Yeoh pulls it off perfectly. Cliff Curtis, a Maori actor who has made chameleon-like use of his dark complexion over the years to play cops and drug dealers and Middle Eastern sheikhs, is the ship’s psychologist, who is studying the impact of their proximity to the Sun and does not seem aware that he is turning into the canary in the coal mine. It is largely his job to convey to the audience the heat of the furnace they are in, the sheer naïve scale of their small bodies and hopes cast against this ball of holy fire so immense that nothing else seems to exist anymore.
And in what emerges as the central role, Irish actor Cillian Murphy (whom Boyle plucked from obscurity to star in 28 Days Later but is most known as Scarecrow from Batman Begins) plays Capa, the physicist; the one who can work the bomb. These are characters in a situation where the normal value of an individual human life has been drastically redefined by the perspective of what’s at stake. But even within the confines of their doom, where one life is so cheap, they understand that the life of the one who works the bomb is a little less cheap. Murphy is blessed with the ability to enthrall an audience from the moment he’s on screen – his divine features and bottomless eyes seem to wear all and hide nothing. If no one ever thinks to cast him as a tormented Jesus reluctantly meeting his destiny, at least he had the chance to play this role, which is a reasonable approximation.
Sunshine is more than the zero-g disaster flick a casual reading of its summary might suggest. Crises that emerge are not capricious outside threats but the tragically-inevitable foul-ups caused by our own imperfections. We must do the job though we are not worthy. Special effects are appropriately state-of-the-art and yet the movie resists the temptation to be impressed by them. Like all the works of man they pale in significance with that glowing Sun; most of the movie’s most memorable images are those that simply regard what the characters are up against.
It encompasses all ranges of suffering; fire and ice, assaults on mind and body, fast merciless deaths and slow unimaginable ones. Visually it moves from the stately to the frenetic with the confidence of the world-class filmmaker Boyle has become; at its best moments it plays like an audacious punk mash-up, the paranoia from John Carpenter’s re-make of The Thing injected into 2001: A Space Odyssey with transcendent results.
It may feel unfamiliar at first, since it does not smirk or condescend or fall prey to the usual gestures of the Michael Bay generation of filmmaking, but that’s not an obstacle for long. The type of storytelling Sunshine draws its power from has been around a couple thousand years longer.
There Will Be Blood Director: Paul Thomas Anderson Writer: screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair Producers: Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lupi, JoAnne Sellar Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor, Ciarán Hinds, Dillon Freasier
For a long time there’s no spoken words, we’re just watching this man – this determined, ingenious man – digging in the Earth. It’s rude and violent work, with pumps and picks and explosives, we see it cause him a broken leg and take the life of a colleague, while on the soundtrack discordant strings whine as if to give voice to the rape of nature. And yet there’s a thrill to watching Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) work, the pure and potent charge of seeing willpower transmute into raw power, wealth and influence.
When Plainview, the self-described “oil man”, finally speaks, it is with a voice coated in liquid confidence. He is not easily shaken, the man who has wrestled with the rocks. He pursues oil like a wolf tracking prey across miles of terrain, and the sureness with which he means to have it is seductive. As the central character of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of one segment of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking early-20th century novel Oil!, Plainview is a mesmerizing figure, an animal of seemingly bottomless hunger who admits that it is not enough that he be sated, he must watch others starve.
Anderson’s film, far and away one of the best of the year, makes you feel like you’re strapped into the conditioning chair from A Clockwork Orange, eyes helplessly pinned open as you watch the savage perversion of ambition into destruction. At first it all seems so exciting, the idea of progress and prosperity, using the bounty of oil to transform a dusty farming community into a bustling town. Peoples’ standards of living improve, most especially Plainview’s. But there’s a dark side to his work that festers and grows, and we watch, transfixed, as it spreads its corruption around him.
Plainview travels up and down California with his “boy” H.W. (Dillon Freasier), who is not actually his son but someone he has calculated his own reasons to raise. He finds struggling communities where the black gold is seeping out of the ground, charms them with a speech about his personal expertise, and the self-starting ethic of his little “family business”, promises them water wells and roads and schools, and soon he’s got his trucks pulling in with drilling equipment while the big oil companies are still buying train tickets to come investigate.
It is invigorating, American enterprise, and that could be good enough. But what we see that it is not enough for Plainview, never enough. Dominance is not a means to success for him, dominance is the end itself. We see it in the way he talks to a farmer’s daughter (Sydney McCallister) while the farmer (David Willis) sits nearby, mutely subdued in front of the man who now owns his land. We see it in the way he spites that farmer’s son, a local fire-and-brimstone preacher named Eli Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine’s Paul Dano), who tries to assert his church’s role in the community by offering to bless the pump on its first day of operation. When Plainview watches Sunday’s sermons, full of shouting and quaking, it is not with reverence but grudging appreciation – a man with a great racket recognizing another.
That crackle that happens whenever the nakedly-mercenary Plainview and the opportunistically-pious Sunday share the scene is a testament to the young actor Dano and his ability to hold his ground with one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema. There Will Be Blood is Daniel Day-Lewis’ show, one of his finest performances, and yet it would build no momentum to its shocking conclusion if Dano were not as good as he is, able to embody the ebb and flow of their unspoken war for influence.
It means that we get to see Plainview’s weaknesses come into focus. He does not know how to forgive, only to punish and punish forever. We can see that he will never, ever forget a man who humbles him in the eyes of others even for a second; watch how he scuppers a deal that would set him up in riches for the rest of his days, by threatening to slit the throat of the man on the other side of the table. Is he angry at what the man was implying, or more purely that the man had found anything at all that could make him look bad? Watch as he re-encounters this man later, how his obsessive cruelty makes him pathetic, a man too determined to pick at scabs to consider that it might be better if he let go.
And in spite of his misanthropy he still needs someone – a companion, a disciple, someone to be a permanent admirer rather than competition – and we watch him trade one for another with callous immediacy. I think it’s no coincidence that what makes one companion an improvement on another is the ability to hear that hypnotic, rationalizing voice of his. And watch that tragic moment on a beach at night where Day-Lewis doesn’t even speak, barely even moves his face, but we realize what he has just confirmed about his new companion, and what he intends to do. That we know this from his stillness means the movie has us surely under its spell, and we will believe the ending that has been promised to us.
There Will Be Blood is a rare movie these days in so many ways – for its wide period vistas, its dreadfully methodical pacing, the beautiful grime and fire it shows and the terrifying passions of its central character, who is neither hero nor villain but an amoral and irresistible force of consumption. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love), a mercurial filmmaker of nonetheless undisguised ambition, has made his best film here, a wild cinematic tone poem about a man who hollows his own soul with the same ravening speed that he does the Earth below him.
Originally published July 26, 2007 Full review behind the jump
Rescue Dawn Director: Werner Herzog Writers: Werner Herzog Producers: Elton Brand, Harry Knapp, Steve Marlton Stars: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Abhijati 'Meuk' Jusakul, Kriangsak Ming-olo, Yuttana Muenwaja, Teerawat Mulvilai, Somkuan 'Kuan' Siroon, Chorn Solyda, Saichia Wongwiroj
“Death did not want him.” -Werner Herzog, narrating his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about pilot and former POW Dieter Dengler
It was Jean-Luc Godard who wrote that the best way to criticize a movie was to make another movie. And it was writer/director/documentarian Werner Herzog who said: “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.” Herzog is also known for driving actors to madness and being shot in the middle of interviews, but as I watched Rescue Dawn, an intensely beautiful and uplifting story of survival set in the pre-Tonkin days of the Vietnam War, I remembered Godard’s maxim, and thought: someone has finally answered Full Metal Jacket.
If Stanley Kubrick’s hypnotic mishmash from 1987 saw the Vietnam-era military as a vast machine for the crushing of petty individual humanity in a morally-ambiguous purgatory (which is how Kubrick saw everything, I suppose), then Rescue Dawn overthrows that conceit by spotlighting one man with enough will to resist it. It is a story about a German immigrant of questionable sanity, made by a German immigrant of questionable sanity, which becomes through blood and mud and suffering one of the more stirring celebrations of the American character you might ever see. It is about a man who does not succumb or surrender, but endures terrible experiences with invention, determination, and a kind of quirky faith in the thing he loves that allows him to look beyond the confines of his circumstances. No matter how hard fate may work to squash him, he continues to reassert himself, as if he can convince Death to give up trying.
When Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) was young he watched out his window as planes strafed his village; and rather than run he decided to become a pilot. In a way this was the sign of a lifelong pattern; an urge to master whatever threatens him. He loves flying so much it seems like a talisman, the skills he learned while pursuing it all come to his aid when he needs them most.
Dengler is shot down while flying a secret mission over Laos; and before long is captured by guerillas. When separated from their individual national war machines, when it’s just man-to-man, prisoner to captor, they almost don’t seem to know what to do with each other. The guerillas shout at him, push him around and threaten him, tie him up in the village square, but there’s a nigh-invisible hesitance: they are supposed to hate him, but to look at him they’re not sure why. Maybe it’s because he always meets their gaze – he does not act like a captive.
Eventually he is deposited at a prison camp surrounded by a bamboo fence and miles upon miles of impenetrably thick jungle. Herzog is famous for the way he captures locations and wildlife; and this hot, buzzing, dangerous place with its snakes and giant bugs is a rich playground for his camera, and helps make up for a budget he’s clearly forced to squeeze for every last penny. With this authenticity of environment, you can feel it exerting pressure on prisoners and jailers alike.
Two other Americans are already there: CIA contractor Gene (Jeremy Davies) is convinced that secret negotiations are going to end this geopolitical dust-up any day now (he’s been in over two years), while soldier Duane (Steve Zahn) is so withered by seclusion and hopelessness that he has no fight of his own left, but hungrily borrows some of Dieter’s.
Since first winning the notice of audiences in Saving Private Ryan, Davies has made mumbly paranoia his stock-in-trade; the skeletal physique and Manson hairdo added here look unnervingly appropriate on top of what is not an unusual turn for him. It’s Zahn, normally known for comedy, that truly surprises. His Duane is fearful, passive, almost infantile. Dieter may be here with a plan to escape, but even taking Duane out of the jail might not be enough to save his decaying sanity. There’s a tenderness to their relationship; it’s revealing the way Dieter takes responsibility for Duane without ever treating him as less than a man.
Despite Herzog’s well-cultivated reputation for wildness this is not a difficult movie to watch. It’s a PG-13 movie, much of its violence is implied or viewed indirectly. It’s more interested in the simmering anger as the prisoners make their plans, and the guards realize no more food shipments are coming. It’s interested in the tolls taken on minds, and the details of a prison break in a prison where the only pieces of technology around are the guard’s guns and the prisoners’ chains; where a plan can be built around the procurement of a single nail.
And it’s most interested of all in Dieter Dengler, whom Herzog befriended and made a documentary about before his death, and just what empowered him to resist this ordeal. Even before he’s first put in the prison camp, he’s offered the chance to enjoy a gentler sentence by signing a propaganda statement denouncing the US and its military involvement in Asia. His refusal is automatic, and the reason is not political; he just could never disavow the country that allowed him to fly. There’s a totality to his sense of himself, like he has merged his identity with the thing that he does, and simply does not countenance anything that tries to come between them.
It falls on Christian Bale, who is smart to spend his Batman-earned bankability on projects like this, to embody this peculiar hero and convince us, and there’s an intelligence to his performance that closes the deal. In one scene he’s mistakenly fired upon by an American helicopter, and as he dives for cover he yells at them: “You idiots! You almost killed me!” There’s a precision to the way he articulates this line – it’s as if he’s affronted. Surely, they should have known that he’s not going to die today. It’s not something he has to reassure himself about, he just knows. Either he’s going to be killed or he’s not; “almost” just annoys him. Seeing the conviction Bale creates in moments like that, I was not at all surprised to learn that after the events of Rescue Dawn, one of the most emotionally-satisfying movies of the year, the real Dieter Dengler survived four more plane crashes.
News has just broken of a tentative deal between the studios and the DGA. Details of the deal have yet to emerge.
-If the terms on New Media are lousy, then we stay on strike, and the directors have played bitch again and will be out of work anyway.
-If the terms on New Media are good, it means the studios have caved to us, but their collective egos demanded that they give it up to the directors instead of to us directly, in order to preserve the writers=impossible to work with storyline they've been stroking themselves with. If this is the case, I can tell you that none of us will care looking like assholes, we'll know that it was our willingness to take the bullet that gave the directors the leverage to improve everyone's lot.
Details as I learn them.
Update: United Hollywood has the DGA's official announcement. My reading of it says that there's more than one thing in here to like. Precedent for distributor's gross is huge. I like the jurisdictional language. The promotional streaming windows have me nervous, as does some of the formulas, but far more educated people than I will be poring over these numbers in the next few hours, as I go to a movie followed by a reception. We'll see what the battlefield looks like when I get back.
Gone Baby Gone Director: Ben Affleck Writers: Screenplay by Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane Producers: Ben Affleck, Sean Bailey, Alan Ladd, Jr., Danton Rissner Stars: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver
Since solidifying his grip on stardom in 1997 with roles in Chasing Amy and Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck has appeared in 1998’s Oscar winner for Best Picture, Shakespeare in Love, as well as adolescent fare like Daredevil. He’s worked with directors from Kevin Smith to John Frankenheimer to John Woo. Although his stardom has peaked and waned, and his ratio of good movies to bad has not flattered him, one thing that is now clear is that, while working with all those filmmakers, he was taking notes. Stepping behind the camera for his first time as a director and only second time as a screenwriter, Affleck crafts a mature and confident dramatic thriller in Gone Baby Gone, a debut so staggeringly good as to make us wonder why he’s wasted all this time acting.
He has not played it safe, tackling one of the dense, morally-labyrinthine Boston crime sagas of Dennis Lehane, whose novel Mystic River challenged even a savvy veteran like Clint Eastwood. But Beantown is Affleck’s turf. Crowd scenes in movies often look subtly ridiculous, because professional background actors work hard to make themselves seen. Filling the backgrounds of Gone Baby Gone with real locals gives Affleck an additional layer of natural scenery, you get the feeling that when the camera stopped rolling, these people stayed right on that stoop. This authority of setting Affleck brings is essential in breathing life into this story’s wrenching twists. And he also happens to have a solid in with the perfect lead actor.
This is not just a breakthrough for Ben Affleck, reformed heartthrob, it is as much a revelation for Casey Affleck, sudden leading man escaping his older brother’s shadow. Patrick Kenzie, the private detective Casey Affleck plays, needs to embody a precise mixture of conflicting attitudes: a sense of having outgrown his upbringing but still possessive enough of it to not allow outsiders to judge, confidence in his own abilities tempered by an inborn chip-on-the-shoulder. Kenzie’s opening monologue talks about how it’s the things we don’t choose – like who we are born to and where – that define who we are. Casey Affleck the actor slips into this truth like old clothes, he doesn’t need a map to walk these streets.
Kenzie, partnered with his live-in girlfriend Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), is used to catching deadbeats and bail jumpers. Keeping the neighborhood’s business in the neighborhood is simply what’s done, in his mind. But then he’s hired to work the kidnapping of little girl Amanda McReady (Madeline O’Brien), which will require him to navigate not just the media circus, but a police captain (Morgan Freeman) with painful personal experience in how badly these cases can go awry from the best of intentions. And then there’s the child’s mother.
Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) is not easy to sympathize with, and Ryan the actress asks for none in one of the year’s great supporting performances. Alcoholic, abrasive, delinquent, dishonest, drug-addicted, Helene is a roving hazard who, to this point, has largely treated motherhood as an occasional distraction to her social life. Her tears for the news cameras, and her hogwash story about being at home watching her favorite TV show during the kidnapping, seem part of an unspoken contract between victim and media, that they’ll all cooperate in showing this is as a morally-easy fairy tale with all the stock characters: angelic child, grieving and innocent mother, sinister kidnapper with who-knows-what in store for the child. Kenzie suspects more complexity.
He and Angie work the neighborhood, trying to chip away at the clannish silence. Sometimes they get into trouble because they’re across the table from drug dealers, sometimes it’s just because they’re asking questions in a bar where people don’t like their clean and smart faces. They end up in a partially-honest ad hoc partnership with police detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), a man who has asked himself – what kind of violence and rule-breaking is acceptable when done for the cause of protecting a child? His answer is “anything”.
Lehane’s plot, rendered with confidence in screenplay form by Ben Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard, shows an intimate understanding of the hysteria with which our culture treats children and the dangers they face. The dangers are real, but equally real is the way in which people take license to condemn others and ruin, even end, lives in the name of moral absolutism. Kenzie is a man in a position, time and time again, to ask himself “what is right?” The situations he is in, in his mind, have clear answers, just not easy ones.
Remember what he says at the beginning, remember his attitude about the place he lives and what he does within the community, and you’ll know what choices he will make, how he will reject every simple explanation, why he will proceed beyond the point when all seems resolved, because pride won’t let him leave a lie on the table no matter what it might cost him. This is the wholeness, the consistency, and the excellence of Casey Affleck in this role. Everything about him seems to respond by instinct, from the way his voice subtly changes color depending on if he’s speaking to cop or neighbor, to the way he knows when the situation demands a display of testosterone.
The other breakthrough performance in the movie belongs to Ryan, a two-time Tony nominee (most recently for playing Stella in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire) who has been cutting her teeth on big and small screens for seventeen years, and yet as Helene McCready it’s as if we are seeing her for the first time. She is manically self-destructive, but not incapable of feeling, and cannot be denied her real tears and panic as reality sinks in. Without giving much away, I can say that moral puzzle box Gone Baby Gone is drawing us into would fall apart if Ryan were not as thoroughly excellent as she is.
It’s difficult for me to remember a crime story whose layers are as expertly concealed; that manages to propel you through one shock after another, constantly destroying illusions of the truth in search of the real thing. And it’s equally difficult for me, watching Gone Baby Gone, one of the year’s best films, to remember a story that better illuminates and dramatizes that old saying: once you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them forever.
From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Originally published 7/25/07 Full review behind the jump
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Director: David Yates Writer: Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling Producers: David Heyman, David Barron Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Gary Oldman, Ralph Fiennes, Imelda Staunton, Robert Hardy, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Rickman, Jason Isaacs, Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Evanna Lynch, Katie Leung, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Brendan Gleeson, Helena Bonham Carter, David Thewlis, Matthew Lewis
One of the things I’ve always loved about the Harry Potter series (Full Disclosure: I am caught up on the films but have only read the first two novels), is that despite all the marvelous adventures it describes, it never forgets to stick up for the virtues of good schooling. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry hires the cat-fancying, primly-fascistic Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to take over the oft-vacated post of Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher. With her twin loves for rote memorization and corporal punishment, she’s like the darkly inevitable endgame of the No Child Left Behind program, and armed with truth serums to boot. Starved for real education just when they need it most, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his fellow students do just about the most rebellious thing they can think of – they sneak away to learn on their own.
This dovetails into the other resonant theme of Phoenix: that we start to take on grown-up responsibilities just in time to appreciate how terrifyingly unprepared we are for them. Potter’s fame among magic-users stems from how, as an infant, he survived an attack by the megalomaniacal Lord Voldemort, who murdered his parents along with many others before vanishing. Death and loss have always been present threats to him. But now that Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is indisputably back from the dead, and marshaling his forces for another war against decency, the threat is much bigger than Harry, and encompasses the friends and teachers who have become his new family, as well as the whole world.
That’s the stakes upon arrival at this fifth of seven planned Potter pictures. The stars have grown from pre-adolescents to ambitious young adults, and the stately aura of discovery and wonder that coated the early films like gleaming wax is well-worn off. This, the longest of the books, is stripped down into the shortest yet of the movies, focusing now on straight, urgent plot. After four movies’ worth of darkening skies and ominous portents, Phoenix moves like an express elevator to the blackest depths.
The director, David Yates, is not a safe populist like Chris Columbus (who helmed the first two pictures), nor does he show the vivid artistry of the third movie’s Alfonso Cuaron or the colorful thoroughness of the fourth movie’s Mike Newell. He’s a veteran of BBC miniseries, an excellent shooter who is intentionally not here to impose a voice of his own. We miss that extra layer of delight, but in a sense, Phoenix signals a surrender to the book series’ superior breadth – it can finish the tale at a ripping pace and with the expected production values, but more and more you will glimpse tantalizing hints that there’s more to know and love about these characters as they go whizzing by.
Although Potter saw Voldemort’s re-emergence, and his murder of classmate Cedric Diggory, not everyone is willing to face the reality of it. There’s a struggle for power between Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon, now fully comfortable in his interpretation of the role he took over from the late Richard Harris), and head wizard Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), who along with most of the wizard world is in fierce denial. Umbridge is an agent of Fudge’s, and she is gradually exerting more control both over the school and the behavior of its students. There’s barely enough wall space outside the Great Hall to accommodate all her disciplinary proclamations. Harry knows that the students will soon need to understand the very dangerous spells which get cast when you’re fighting for your life, so he starts conducting secret classes. As always, he’s backed up by best friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), who isn’t so clumsy with his wand as he used to be, and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), who takes to flouting authority with all the studious zeal she normally applies to getting top grades.
Harry's sessions parallel the Order of the Phoenix, another secret society, and one which Harry’s parents once belonged to in the first war with Voldemort. The more he becomes aware of its activities, the more he realizes that the grown-ups who’ve been helping him over the years, like Dumbledore, or dark wizard hunter “Mad-Eye” Moody (Brendan Gleeson), or the earnestly kind Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), or Harry’s encouraging surrogate father, the fugitive Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), have been more coordinated and aware than he’s given them credit for. By glimpsing their secrets, becoming privy to their maneuverings, he’s finally joining the grown-ups table. And not a moment too soon, in his mind; this Harry is temperamental and stubborn, no longer the goggle-eyed kid surprised by everything.
Rowling’s rich imagination has yet to provide anything short of a banquet of whimsies and horrors for these screen adaptations. Voldemort is savage but not stupid, his emotional assault on Harry is insidious as any spell he could cast. We’re learning more about the prior lives of the teachers at Hogwarts, and that it’s possible Harry isn’t the first Potter to have misjudged the socially-maladjusted Professor Snape (Alan Rickman, bringing his usual venomous authority). We’re on a much larger playing field this time, spilling out of Hogwarts into London proper, and we're about to witness just what a duel between proper wizards looks like. And in the midst of it all, Harry is facing not only doubts about his own nature (he wonders just how he and Voldemort can share such a connection), but the perils of dating. No sooner does he enjoy his first kiss, with last year’s crush Cho Chang (Katie Leung), than he develops a compellingly odd kinship with the, herself, compellingly odd Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch, effortlessly spacey).
The script, by Michael Goldenberg, is lean and efficient to suit the movie, although it does lack some of the flourish of Steve Kloves’ work on the rest of the franchise. Every viewer will surely have some quibble over just how much or little more detail they might have desired about something or other. There’s a compact of faith now between viewers and these movies; we must trust that magical objects and spells behave in certain ways simply because that is what has been told to us, there’s precious little time to get into the mechanics of it.
In a way that’s proper, because when you’re first suffering the adult world without a safety net, scary and awful things can happen with the most unforgiving suddenness and lack of explanation, and in this adventure Harry is going to experience a loss so keen it would have shattered his younger self. But he is no longer his younger self – he is inching closer towards becoming the hero this saga has been preparing him to be; and just in time, too, because the game is clearly afoot. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix does nothing to revitalize or reinvent the movie franchise. Instead it is the beginning of what should be an exhilarating sprint to the finish.
The Golden Compass Director: Chris Weitz Writers: Screenplay by Chris Weitz, based on the novel Northern Lights by Philip Pullman Producers: Bill Carraro, Deborah Forte Stars: Nicole Kidman, Dakota Blue Richards, Sam Elliot, Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Jim Carter, Tom Courtenay, Daniel Craig, Ben Walker, Jack Shepherd, Simon McBurney, Derek Jacobi Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Freddie Highmore, Ian McKellen, Ian McShane, Kathy Bates, Kristin Scott Thomas
There are such lovely, lovely words in The Golden Compass. I’ve prepared for this review simply by noting down as many of them as I can: alethiometer, aeronaut, dæmon; and the names: Pantalaimon, Iorek Byrnison, Lyra Belacqua. The language at work in this adaptation of Northern Lights, first of the His Dark Materials trilogy of fantasy novels written by Phillip Pullman, is glorious in its melody. How often does the simple sound of a word ignite the imagination and stir the heart? Admit – even if you don’t know what an “alethiometer” is, you want to know, don’t you?
But it is more than the language which is lovely, it is the thought. This is a story about the hunger for discovery and knowledge, about how tantalizing the universe’s mysteries are, and about facing those mysteries with courage, loyalty to one’s friends, and pluck. Pullman crafts his stories in the humanistic tradition of Asimov, unapologetically celebrating thought and reason as our greatest assets, and the key to our heroine’s triumphs. It is the villains that see questioning and curiosity as a troublesome threat to their authority.
For its language, and ideas, and its visual splendor, The Golden Compass is an enchanting adventure once it really gets in gear. It isn’t that way immediately. In its first half, it looks designed rather than grown, and lacking in confidence about which story thread to grab onto. Because it is not as universally familiar as the Lord of the Rings, whose success studio New Line nakedly hopes to replicate, it has considerable difficulty sorting out what we need to know and catching us up in events while making it known to us. It is hobbled in this by its fear of anyone drawing the parallels evident in Pullman’s work, about what the Magisterium is, and how it rules the population.
What is the Magisterium? What I take from the movie is that they rule much of the human population of their world as an elegant dictatorship, although there are witches in the skies and nomadic Gyptians on the seas free of their dominion. I also take that the notion, proposed by the explorer Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), that there are other worlds parallel to our own, is disturbing enough to the order of things that agents of the Magisterium are attempting to murder him. Which powerful, organized bodies that reminds us of, the ones that might capitalize on the ignorance of people and try to foist restrictive answers to the mysteries of the Beyond, the movie leaves it to us to decide. This robs it of some connective tissue – the book is more specific, and less afraid to speak its mind about such things.
Asriel speculates that an enchanted substance called “Dust” flows from other worlds into theirs, and then into people through their dæmons, talking animals which are both their souls and their lifetime companions. This idea alone is a treasure, that every person can see, talk to, even play with, their inner feelings and wishes and dreams. It also creates whole new categories of fear, because what would you be without your dæmon?
The corollary to this idea is equally inspiring – that the dæmons of children are shapeshifters, able to become any number of animals. Only in adolescence do they harden and become a single animal for the rest of your days. One wonders what Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) went through to freeze her dæmon into a snarling golden monkey.
Young Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), does not know quite who Mrs. Coulter is, but she can sense that this woman is important, and that other grown-ups are wary about her. They are wary enough that they won’t interfere when Mrs. Coulter wants to take Lyra away. Lyra is a ward of a college, a girl of bottomless spirit and inquisitiveness, and spends her days in games with her best friend Roger (Ben Walker) and her still-shifting dæmon Pantalaimon (voiced by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore). The kids outside the university are spreading fearful stories of the Gobblers, who have been snatching children in the night. And there do seem to be less children around these days.
And it is to Lyra, on the eve of her departure, that one of the school’s elders entrusts the last alethiometer: a device powered by Dust that can answer any question you pose it – provided that you understand its symbols. Her possession of this treasure, a single artifact proving that there’s more to the world than the Magisterium claims, and has the potential to reveal what they’re up to, leads to an ever-expanding spectacle of chases and battles and fantastical creatures.
And that’s when The Golden Compass, at every point a visual triumph, truly fulfills its all-around potential, as Lyra travels to the icy north, and meets two characters that are conceived and executed to perfection. One is Lee Scoresby, an aeronaut-for-hire who cruises the skies in a dirigible ship. He is played by Sam Elliot, who comes across as like a cowboy even when he is not, strictly speaking, playing a cowboy. His sparkling conviction about this fantasy grounds it and helps it find its tone.
The other character is Iorek Byrnison, a polar bear from a proud tribe of warriors, who lives in shame because he has been separated from his armor, which in this world is as important to a bear as a human’s dæmon. Byrnison is voiced by the once-and-hopefully-future-Gandalf, Sir Ian McKellen, and the majesty of his voice, the way he tells his tale of woe with self-pitying rage, then regal ferocity, will wet your eyes whenever he speaks. To the point of his appearance I was simply intrigued and admiring; from then forward I was roused, fully invested in his fate, and Lyra’s as well.
Dakota Blue Richards is preternaturally good in a central role that would test any actor, child or adult. She can be bright, and rambunctious, even clever and duplicitous, and yet in moments that flash by you realize that this is still just a little girl, frightened and uncertain, aware that the grown-up world is much larger and more complex than any she’s ever considered before. But she faces it unflinchingly, and that is both the soul of The Golden Compass and its message – that there will always be unknowns that worry and threaten us, and isn’t going to be exciting and grand coming to know them?
Originally published 7/25/07 Full review behind the jump
Knocked Up Director: Judd Apatow Writer: Judd Apatow Producers: Shauna Robertson, Clayton Townsend, Judd Apatow Stars: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segel, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Martin Starr, Charlyne Yi
I like that when Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) go out to dinner, they choose Miceli’s, a restaurant I’ve frequented in Hollywood. It’s the kind of place you go when you want to have an affordable, plentiful meal that still has a touch of grown-up class to it, but without the posturing attitude so many LA restaurants graft on top. Before, when they were still unsure about each other, still trying to put on a front, they went to the Geisha House, which provides reassuring layers of pretension. The fact that they choose Miceli’s shows that their comfort with each other is evolving.
Why am I spending this time talking about restaurants most of you will never patronize? Because I get the feeling that the people involved in making Knocked Up, what you might call a stage-of-life comedy from writer/director Judd Apatow, have been to both of these places in their private lives and know these things about them. I’m bearing witness to the fact that their movie is successful in large measure because it instinctively defers to the real. The filmmakers and actors don’t sand down the material into “accessible” blandness but draw from themselves and their lives to make their work specific and detailed. Its characters dine at places appropriate to their age, budget, and emotional state. Further, they watch the movies we watch (and discuss them irreverently as we do), and waste time the way modern young urban adults waste it. The Hollywood creative community frequently betrays its insularity in its ignorant attempts to observe what “the kids” are up to; but in this and all things, Knocked Up is often agonizingly accurate and witty.
It confirms that American society expects effectively nothing from the 20-somethings of this generation, so the warts and flaws of the protagonists become their own charms. But it also shows the rite of passage of pregnancy, and that it is a terrifying, excruciating, expensive tribulation; but nonetheless, you might not feel truly human and adult until you experience it. The story simply traces the consequences of a one-night stand between Ben and Alison that has an unintended side effect. Alison is a rising star at the E! network who has just been promoted to an on-air position (Kristen Wiig scores repeated laughs as an executive with a chronic case of passive-aggressive sour grapes), and she meets Ben at a club while celebrating with her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann). One thing leads to another, and another, and finally to a drunken and awkward consummation that Ben doesn’t even remember in the morning.
Ben is a full-time slacker who has chosen frat house living without all the hassles of attending college. He lives off a personal injury settlement obtained a few years ago, and with his housemates Jason (Jason Segel), Jay (Jay Baruchel), Jonah (Jonah Hill) and Martin (Martin Starr), the days are for playing pranks, amorphous efforts towards building an erotic website, and turning any found object into a bong.
You’ll note that all these compatriots are played by actors who share their first name – setting up a camera to film the antics of your funny friends is one of the shortest roads available to an obnoxious time at the movies, but Apatow is a cannier talent than most. As the director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin he gave us some of the most accurately-observed shiftless male behavior of any modern comedy. He carries that on here, knowing just how much to let his players indulge in their impulse to tweak and kid one another, and also knowing that it’s plausible a young man’s sense of humor could embrace both farts and Stephen Hawking.
I suppose it’s inevitable that a movie choose sides lest it seize up from efforts at even-handedness, and Knocked Up clearly has much more passion and interest in the male perspective. Ben is an overweight, lazy dork, albeit an earnest one without any malice in him, and yet the ambitious Alison shows a shocking willingness to immediately accept him as a prospective father. We get little sense for the rhythms of her life, dreams, or social circle – we meet a group of generic “friends” once, it’s clear they haven’t spoken to her in months, and then they’re never mentioned again. A universe where no other man even tries to flirt with Katherine Heigl is a strange one, indeed. Within her vague-shimmering glow she’s on the classic writer’s pedestal, a shiksa angel who has materialized to redeem Ben’s motivation-less life.
Where the picture redeems itself is in widely distributing the foul-ups. No character, male or female, escapes their own petty imperfections, and Apatow generously allows them to be irrational, thoughtless, and selfish at inconvenient moments, then explore the consequences with honesty. The increasingly desperate attempts of Debbie’s husband Pete (the ever-reliable Paul Rudd) to carve out the smallest space for manhood in their domestic routine are at once authentic and pitiful and hilarious. Their marriage is both an object of desire and a dire warning to Ben and Alison, who are very unsure how their own lives are going to mesh together. Through this, Apatow, who cut his teeth with the absurd parodies of The Ben Stiller Show but is evolving into a latter-day west coast Woody Allen for the X-Box set, embraces an essential truth: that even the best-matched relationships involve work, agony, and frustration that never ends, it’s the fine-print in that “’till death do us part” contract.
Seth Rogen is an appealing figure to have at the center of this movie; there’s something comfortably careless about him. He doesn’t hide his belly, or the fact that he looks older than he is – this is a movie star who will never be caught on a juice fast or in a Pilates workshop. But he has the charm of a self-awareness which the camera can capture, and a way with dialogue that is precise but never sounds composed. It was Italian neorealist Vittorio De Sica who proposed that every person has one great performance in them, playing themselves. Knocked Up is longer than it needs to be, and never quite solves the problem of making Alison as lovingly detailed as the male characters in its world; but it has Rogen, and those housemate buddies, behaving in a way natural enough to convince me that a) they are essentially playing themselves, and b) in this comedy of painful honesty, that makes them great performances.
I Am Legend Director: Francis Lawrence Writers: Screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, based on the screenplay The Omega Man by John William Corrington & Joyce Corrington, based on the novel by Richard Matheson Producers: Akiva Goldsman, James Lassiter, David Heyman, Neal H. Moritz, Erwin Stoff Stars: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Salli Richardson, Charlie Tahan, Dash Mihok
In a way, once you cast Will Smith, this becomes inevitable. In Richard Matheson’s seminal vampire novel I Am Legend, the lead character fights as much against his own despair and survivor’s guilt as he does against the monsters gathering outside his garlic-strewn door every night. He broods, he drinks too much, he wonders what the whole bloody point of carrying on is when he seems to be the only human left. He even makes sloppy mistakes, like an unforgettable chapter where he forgets to wind his watch and is caught miles from home as the sun sets. Although the genocide is global the scale feels personal – he’s barricaded into a suburban house, and his chief nemesis is his former carpool buddy.
But Smith has too much innate spirit to play that Robert Neville. This is not to knock him – part of the essence of cinema acting is that the camera always sees an inalterable core part of you; unless you’re Daniel Day-Lewis. When an audience watches Will Smith, and sees him being overcome by grief and hopelessness, they know that things are bad on an entirely other scale.
Creating an enormous canvas for what is in long stretches Smith’s captivating one-man show is the triumph of I Am Legend, which in order to make survival a more bombastic affair turns Robert Neville into a rip-abbed military man, and a disease specialist besides. He’s got a faithful dog and a combination townhouse/laboratory/fortress with a well-stocked pantry and a view of Central Park. It’s like a further evolution of the last adaptation, 1971’s The Omega Man, whose screenwriters are credited here; that movie also promoted Charlton Heston to the rank of military scientist. He and Smith’s Neville are far more macho and proactive survivors than the self-doubting loner from Matheson’s prose. They wouldn’t forget to wind their watches.
But even a man with this Neville’s discipline and technological resources has his difficulties. You see it in those mannequins he’s set up to converse with on his daily rounds. You can hear that hint of desperation in that radio signal he broadcasts around the clock, begging survivors to meet him at the port any day at midday. It’s been three years since an experimental anti-cancer “good virus” mutated and spread beyond the test subjects, and the Army explosively “quarantined” Manhattan Island. Loneliness is taking its toll. I’d say it’s his worst enemy, if it weren’t for those hordes of hyperactive bloodsuckers who come streaming out of the walls every dusk. For years Neville has treated them as rabid animals, to be captured and tested in the vain hopes of finding a cure. But there are disturbing signs that they are learning a few things, and that they are aware there’s at least one more meal of human out there somewhere.
This calls upon Smith to be both movie star enough to compel from within such a large-scale fantasy, and also actor enough to activate our empathy. Some of the movie’s most effective surprises are those that remind us how close to the brink his sanity is, how small a nudge would be necessary to permanently hobble his psyche amidst the unbearable pressure of being, maybe, the last human living.
There are some quite nasty paths such a story could tread, and which Matheson took, including one of the all-time great twist endings in horror, the one that explained the title. And in this respect I Am Legend, with a screenplay re-written by Hollywood’s hardest-working dumber-downer Akiva Goldsman (The Da Vinci Code, I, Robot, A Beautiful Mind), is almost insultingly shy about your jugular vein. It knows how to make us vulnerable – a scene that plays out entirely on Smith’s face, while we hear what he is doing below the camera frame, is devastating emotionally, because we don’t need to see it to imagine what it is costing him.
But when it has us, when it really has the chance to become special, it blinks. It takes the easy out. David Mamet says great endings are surprising but inevitable, the filmmakers had just such an ending sitting in their laps in Matheson’s book, but instead chose to do what, I guess, they convinced themselves must happen in an expensive Will Smith movie.
I respected director Francis Lawrence’s visual sense in his previous picture, Constantine, even if the movie itself left me wanting. Once again he is colorful without being garish, dynamic without being dizzying, and with a particular eye for tweaking the ordinary in a way that underlines the very different world of the movie. I Am Legend is often remarkable to take in, both for the way in which it creates the spectacle of an abandoned Manhattan overrun with cornfields and stray lions, and in its comfort with the age-old eeriness of silence. His handling of a scene where Neville must venture into a darkened building – where the audience has little to go on but the tiny beam of his flashlight and his urgent breathing – is truly first-rate spine-tingling stuff. So where’s the killer instinct?
The story goes that Steven Spielberg, while making Jaws, considered altering the final shot of Brody and Hooper swimming safely to shore, zooming further back to reveal a whole sea full of shark fins behind them, converging on the island. That would have been silly, but it showed his head was in the right place – a truly scary movie doesn’t ever entirely let go of your imagination, or make you feel safe. Even in the happiest endings, the unease should remain; you should still be afraid to get in the water. I wish that inside I Am Legend, behind its high-Hollywood production gloss and the expert work of its lead, the same fiendish impulse lurked.
Originally published 7/8/07 Full review behind the jump
Preamble: It’s almost not fair that this movie and I should go through the trauma of a review. I was in dizzying love with the Transformers toys from the moment their colorful, die-cast metal, chunky and manipulatable selves appeared in stores. I own hundreds of them, and they’re not mint in the box, either, but well played-with. I would set them up all over my bedroom and create scenarios of the final showdown between good against evil that took the whole summer to play through. I watched the cartoon series faithfully, I own all 80 issues of the original Marvel comic series. I still love the 1986 animated movie, even though I can now understand the sad trajectory of Orson Welles debuting in Hollywood with Citizen Kane, and ending his life as the voice of a malevolent planet-eating giant robot in a feature-length toy commercial. This is all to say I am too painfully aware of every change this movie makes to the mythology and character and design of those toys I loved. A critic is never truly objective, but must always attempt to ground their reaction in an at least pseudo-objective discussion of technique. In this case, dear reader, I am doing the best I can.
Also, I don’t know if “conflagrative” is actually a word (see below). I’ll let someone else make the ruling on that.
Transformers Director: Michael Bay Writers: story by John Rogers and Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, screenplay by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman, based on Hasbro’s Transformers toys Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Ian Bryce Stars: Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, Rachel Taylor, Anthony Anderson, Jon Voight, John Turturro, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, and featuring the vocal talents of Peter Cullen and Hugo Weaving
One of the unwritten laws of dealing with anything mechanical is the KISS rule – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don’t put in any more moving parts than necessary, because every part – and every point of interaction between parts – is a potential place for things to go wrong. The bigger the machine, the more essential this principle of elegant minimalism becomes.
Visual effects in film have now reached the point where they can finally depict giant robot fights with painstaking realism, and this is something to be celebrated by all the Earth’s geeks; because there is very little in this world – and that includes Borg episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and superhero cross-over comics – which is as cool as a high-quality giant robot fight.
Transformers, the live-action feature debut for the shape-shifting toys once labeled “Robots in Disguise!”, obeys this precept when it comes to plot – it is no more complicated than the following: Giant robots, both Good and Evil, come from outer space in search of Thing. Thing will be bad for humans if Evil giant robots find it. Good giant robots team up with movie stars to get Thing first. Much robot fighting ensues. That simplicity of design allows Transformers to be, in spite of some flaws, a slick, loud, good time at the movies for anyone who relishes explosions or fast cars; or, better still, fast cars that can become giant explosion-causing robots. And it is also, call this faint praise if you want: the best movie Michael Bay has yet made.
Shia LaBeouf is the human star of this movie and he has a difficult task before him. Summer action movie dialogue now requires speed, timing, and the ability to both show ironic distance for the laugh lines but still say “Oh my God!” with sincere breathlessness while staring slack-jawed at special effects which don’t exist yet. LaBeouf handles this with considerable confidence and charm, if he is destined to star alongside the CGI beasts of this generation, we may have some decent entertainment ahead of us. He plays Sam Witwicky, a sharp but socially-hapless high school student who hopes his birthday present car might finally get him in the good graces of classmate Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox, whose perky body is lit and photographed so lusciously I was greatly relieved to see her true age on IMDB).
It turns out the car is too helpful by half, playing on-the-nose mood music and stalling at makeout spots with a precision that hardly seems accidental. And this is because the car is actually Bumblebee, one of the heroic Autobots who need a possession of Sam’s in order to find their way to an artifact called The AllSpark.
You don’t need me spoiling for you what The AllSpark is, what matters is that the treacherous and violent Decepticons are searching for it as well. The battle spreads all over the world. There’s the military base in the Middle East, where Special Forces troops led by Captain Lennox (Josh Duhamel) duel with a robot that burrows through the sand like a scorpion. Then there’s Air Force One, where the President is more interested in snack cakes than the fate of the free world and a stereo that doesn’t seem to belong to anyone unfolds into a pesky little computer hacker. Then there’s the classified government installation below Hoover Dam, where the Secretary of Defense (Jon Voight) learns from a super-secret operative (an effectively droll and obnoxious John Tuturro) about a couple of astounding discoveries that were made underground almost 100 years ago and subsequently covered-up.
It may be that Michael Bay has finally learned, after all these years, that these movies he’s making are ridiculous. Transformers is too long by at least twenty minutes, and reaches the point of overkill when it comes to elaborate sets, extended comic relief sequences, and even the giant robot fights. And yet there’s a looseness to it, a gravitas-free momentum towards the next conflagrative pleasure. It doesn’t seem so arrogant in its size as Armageddon, or snidely-careless with human life as the Bad Boys pictures, or thoroughly-airheaded as Pearl Harbor. It seems to simply enjoy itself for what it is, and that is an accomplishment for Bay.
The Transformers themselves are in blatant violation of the KISS rule of mechanics, and consist of so many moving parts, so many spiky protrusions and turning gears, it’s difficult to get your bearings on their giant frames and find a personality to hang on to. The ingenuity of the original toys were their appeal – you could turn a convincing looking tractor-trailer into the noble Autobot Leader Optimus Prime (voiced, as in the animated series, by the rumbling Peter Cullen) with a few quick flicks of the wrist. It now looks like every transformation requires the coordinated movement of about 100,000 parts. It’s a wonder they don’t fly to pieces any time they try it.
But I can see the purpose to this. The robots are not meant to be the center stage personalities. They are alien, they are strange, and even the good ones are somewhat frightening because of their, well, hugeness. You can tell it’s an effort for most of them to see small, fragile creatures like humans as moral equals worthy of protection. This is likely the influence of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who likes to see stories from the suburban kid’s point-of-view; since - he’s never gone broke in assuming - they’ll be buying most of the tickets.
Transformers is, in its trappings, a fair leap away from its source material, yet it is a successfully-calculated one. It remembers that there is no duty more sacred in this adaptation than to provide space for Transformers to transform, and smash up a few buildings, and carry on their eternal war. The ending is eminently sequel-ready. Let’s hope they carry on with not over-thinking what to do.
New studio negotiating tactic: Run over writer with car
Um, excuse me Mr. Murdoch, I know you and the other moguls were right on the brink of convincing America that you're all swell guys who just want what's best for Hollywood and the human race in general. I may just be a screenwriter swimming in debt, but I've got this feeling that ramming into a "Law & Order" writer with a black SUV while one of your security goons watches without lifting a finger is probably not the next best step in image management.
One of the great things about writing is that you can use it to explain away weird things. Say, for example, you have an anecdote about going to a particular website. Now, for most people telling this anecdote, they'd never get to the end, because their audience would be too busy exclaiming "Wait, what website were you on? Why the hell were you on that website to begin with?"
(Pause)
So I'm on the homepage for the U.S. Atomic Clock (Because I'm writing a novel). And I think bureaucra-speak is one of the humor treasures of the English language, so when their "About this Service" page leads off with "This public service is cooperatively provided by the two time agencies of the United States...", I'm already getting the giggles, since I doubt any of those muddy third-world countries even have ONE time agency, much less two. !Viva Democracy!
But the absolute highlight of the page is the bottom, where they provide an e-mail address for people with questions or comments. Leaving aside the number of drunk college students who probably e-mail them asking "What time is it?", you wouldn't think too many people would need detailed trouble-shooting with the flow of time. But right there after the address, it says: "However, due to the volume of email we receive, we cannot always respond to each one individually."
I'm almost desperate with the urge to e-mail them and ask "How many e-mails do you actually get, and what in the world are they about?" They would probably think I'm either crazy or just mocking them. But then I'd reply...
Superbad Director: Greg Mottola Writers: Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg Producers: Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson Stars: Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Bill Hader, Seth Rogen, Martha MacIssac, Emma Stone, Aviva, Joe LoTruglio, Kevin Corrigan
(*The cut reviewed here is the “Unrated” version available on DVD. I gather the differences are superficial at best.)
Superbad understands that the two most primal impulses in the teenage boy are 1) have sex, and 2) don’t get in trouble. In playing to both those qualities it finds the formula for teen sex romp immortality, in that it keeps consummation and raunch omni-present as cruel but irresistible lures to its characters, yet is as good-hearted and inelegantly earnest as a homemade Valentine. It improves upon previous genre standard-bearer American Pie in that it doesn’t view its characters as types to be pegged in their respective storylines, but rather as unique, peculiar young adults figuring out who they are from within the din of their hormones.
From overcrowded parties to the timeless quest to obtain booze (Name that movie: “I lost my I.D…in a flood.”), it is not doing anything new under the sun, but the cumulative result has a winsome freshness. Major credit is due to both the casting and the writing, producers Judd Apatow and Shauna Robertson have assembled a creative talent pool with an unusually-low level of Hollywood-artificial pollution. These people are gifted, very funny, and still genuine enough to put this very simple idea over.
The script, an autobiographical effort by high school pals Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Seth, still in his mid 20’s, was originally set to play himself), is, naturally, about Seth (Jonah) and Evan (Michael Cera), joined-at-the-hip friends facing graduation, and the trauma of different colleges. Everyone realizes how devastating this will be to them except themselves. This is an important principle, because movies can be about vulgar things, and still work, when at their heart they’re celebrating something positive, like the love between pals. Watch how the friendship gradually becomes more fundamental to the plot than the sex – this is not an accident of design. Producer Apatow, through this film and his own directorial efforts Knocked Up and The Forty Year Old Virgin, is cornering the market on the virtues of bud-dom, and reinvigorating mainstream American film comedy in the process.
Seth, overweight and under-filtered in his speech, is direct in his sexual goals – he considers high school to be practice time for the legitimate carnal adventures of college. He doesn’t want to be under-trained, and has set his sights on Jules (Emma Stone), with whom he enjoys a good rapport but who he is convinced would never consider him without considerable liquid assistance. See how this reflects more on his own self-esteem than any judgment of her and you have a hint at how this movie wins you over.
Evan, meanwhile, is trying to reconcile his chivalrous leanings with his most ungentlemanly desire for his friend Becca (Martha MacIssac), who seems confused that he’s not picking up the signals she’s broadcasting on all available frequencies. All are set to converge on a party at Jules’ place, and it is the guys’ mission to provide the drinks.
This puts them in an alliance of necessity with their sometime friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has just acquired a fake ID with the dubious pseudonym “McLovin”. Mintz-Plasse, plucked out of high school for his first professional acting role, steals this movie as thoroughly as it can be stolen. His still-breaking voice, his noodle physique, the way he mishandles street patois – McLovin is a dweeb right down to his DNA, and he never stops being one, and yet he somehow emerges in our eyes as cool. We want good things to happen for him because he never apologizes for being himself.
He spends a long tangent riding along with two of the least confidence-inspiring police officers ever seen on-screen (Rogen and Bill Hader), and their adventures in shoddy law enforcement are like a giddy and charmed playdate between three people who believe that being a grown-up is just a pointless conspiracy in pretending certain things aren’t actually fun. The inspired audacity of that plotline is a source of constant surprises.
This is a longer movie than most would have made it, it doesn’t mind letting riffs play out past their usual deadline, or hanging around somewhere to see if there’s more to be milked from it. Sometimes this leads to a gold strike, like in an extended examination of an odd hobby of Seth’s (watch it extended further into the end credits), whereas in other scenes you can feel the actors running out of new things to say. The production end is ragged as well, photographed in cheap digital which comes off even worse during the night half of the picture.
But a certain cheap messiness feels as necessary to Superbad as the unconventional faces of its cast. Michael Cera effortlessly embodies an intelligent young man who is perplexed to the point of terror by hazards of social interaction (see Juno for another charming variation he can put on this routine), while the girls that he and Hill pursue have a rare accessibility about them. They’re beautiful, but they have their original noses and normal-sized chests. They don’t look like they’ve got an army of hairdressers and fashion designers poised off camera for them.
This is a movie about people who don’t hide their imperfections, and that’s one of the aspects of sex that almost never gets talked about but can end up being one of the best things about it. Surpassing the fantasy for the unique pleasures of actually pairing your flaws with someone else’s and finding a match is part of the rite-of-passage Superbad celebrates very, very well.
Originally published 7/8/07 Full review behind the jump
Ratatouille Director: Brad Bird Writers: Screenplay by Brad Bird, based on an original story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco, and Brad Bird, with additional story material by Kathy Greenberg and Emily Cook Producer: Brad Lewis Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Patton Oswalt, Ian Holm, Lou Romano, Brian Dennehy, Peter Sohn, Peter O’Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo
Oh, this movie just feels so good. Think of the best meals of your life, the fully-rounded experiences so of a piece with themselves from starting course to dessert that you wouldn’t change one plate arrangement, wouldn’t subtract one drop of cream. Ratatouille is about great food, but it also is great food. The ingredients are familiar, but that’s what a great chef can do – take some eggs, a little butter and flour, and suddenly flood your senses to joyful weeping.
And this movie is in the care of a most excellent chef. Brad Bird is one of the great filmmakers working today, both The Iron Giant and The Incredibles are as moving and inventive as the day they came out, and I think I even recognize the silhouette of his long-ago creation Family Dog in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it cameo. There is something irrepressible in all his work – he loves dreamers and enthusiasts and goodness, and what’s more he loves every second he gets to spend entertaining you with his stories about them.
His work here extends a winning streak for Pixar Animation Studios which is now quite without precedent in the history of feature animation. It has been twelve years since Toy Story, and to this day, each of the eight features they have produced has been a critical and commercial success, and among the best movies animated or not for its given year. Ratatouille is no exception. For years naysayers have predicted a serving of humble pie for Pixar, asking what child would be interested in a story about fish on Australia’s barrier reef, or a nostalgic look back at Old Route 66. I heard the same snooty whispers leading up to this picture – who cares about a rat that wants to cook haute cuisine? Where they always get it wrong about Pixar is that it’s not about the subject matter, it’s about the love the filmmakers have for it, which they convey with consummate and infectious technique. And it’s about the characters they create within these wondrous, alien spaces that are somehow immediately familiar to us. We love the story about the fish, or the cars, and now the rat, because they loved it first and had to tell us about it.
The rat in question is Remy (Patton Oswalt), and his super-developed taste buds do not conform well to the garbage-scavenging rat lifestyle. He idolizes a legendary chef named Gusteau (Brad Garrett), whose restaurant was once the toast of Paris, and who believed (as he titled his cookbook), that “Anyone Can Cook”.
So it is only natural what Remy is inspired to do when circumstances conspire to deposit him in the heart of Paris at Gusteau’s own restaurant. It has fallen on hard times – Gusteau is dead, his former sous chef Skinner (a magnificently conniving Ian Holm) pimps out his old boss’ name to sell frozen burritos, and what was once a five-star experience has been demoted to three, mostly due to the poisoned pen of food critic Anton Ego.
Ego, an intimidating specter with a coffin-shaped office, is voiced by the legendary Peter O’Toole in a miniature tour-de-force that calls on every square-foot of resonance and flourish of acting craft his fifty years of experience can summon. Just listening to the force of personality he can coat every vowel in is worth the price of admission. But he is not simply a villain – neither Pixar nor Bird has cause to hold such grudges against critics, and the more we see of Ego, the more we see the cumulative disappointment of his senses, the constantly-frustrated yearning to be swept away. In this, the critic is actually the closet romantic, whose cynicism is only given power because we perceive it as a drum-skin tautly stretched over a well of true, bottomless love that’s crying to be set free again.
Remy makes common cause with Linguini (Lou Romano), an earnest but hapless garbage boy who has no cooking talent, but can be puppeteered to produce delights. Linguini gets the credit, and his life goes on the upswing. He’s looking better in the eyes of passionate fellow chef Colette (Janeane Garofalo). Gusteau’s gains notice again. Skinner suspects a plan to humiliate and supplant him. Throw in Remy’s family, which believes the world of human-rodent interaction inevitably ends at poison and traps, and you have a finely-prepared stew of conflicts with ripe potential for betrayals and surprise reversals.
And it all unfolds in an artist’s rendering of Paris that could hang in a museum. I’ve suspected in Pixar’s last couple of features that they now have the capacity to produce work which is by all human discernment, photorealistic. Look at some of the backgrounds here, and the way the mist hovers off the River Seine, and ask if Paris has ever looked more alive and more beautiful on-screen than it has here. The characters, too, are works of art in their own way. Linguini’s exaggerated nose and worried eyes seem appropriated from the young cyclist hero of the French delight Triplets of Belleville, and Skinner looks like a Picasso study of an angry man wrenched into paranoid, wretched life. Bird goes beyond the animator’s classic proscenium, carefully simulating the focal depths of a real camera to enrich the emotionalism of the scene, or setting the perspective free to travel with a rat scurrying among the pipes and crevices of a house, peeking in at lives along the way.
In defending the critic’s art, Anton Ego writes “The New needs friends.”, and I imagine the founders of Pixar hoped and prayed to inspire such friendship when they first introduced the world to the possibilities of a feature film animated entirely by computers. They’ve become an institution since then, master traditionalists, even, and place an unusual stamp in the end credits that declares the picture “100% animated”, not the product of performance-capture or any other shortcut. Even as they accept the mantle of standard-bearers for their art form, they’re not resting, but still hoping to make magic within it, still hoping to move the Anton Egos of the world along with all the rest. Ratatouille is another all-around triumph, and something no critic, or audience member, should have trouble embracing, and relishing.
P.S. As is frequently the case now with animated features, Ratatouille is preceded by an animated short. In this case, it’s the Oscar-nominated and impeccably-paced Lifted, written and directed by legendary sound maestro Gary Rydstrom. In it he gets to provide a hilarious cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a driving test, and demonstrate the comedic power not only of pain, but of the well-timed pause and our innate sympathy for someone who’s just trying to do a good job in a universe that seems designed to frustrate him. It also puts a front-and-center spotlight on one of Rydstrom’s signatures, the most famous sound effect in movie history, the Wilhelm Scream.
United Artists to Announce Interim Agreement with WGA This is unconfirmed, but Nikki Finke has a pretty uncanny track record when it comes to strike rumors, and she wouldn't run with something like this without solid sourcing.
The Guild's "divide and conquer" strategy has caused no small amount of contention, I can tell you. Are we weakening our position by allowing a trickle of content back out into the marketplace? Are we pitting TV writers against screenwriters? Why can't the company I'M working with get an agreement, and preferably nobody else?
But the truth is, these agreements prove that a) our terms our reasonable, and b) we are perfectly capable of making a deal if someone actually joins us at the table to make one. The AMPTP's absence from negotiations only gets more conspicuous, and the proposals these individual companies accept only seem more safe and sane, with each targeted contract.
I understand that we can't give a deal to just anyone. In spite of their amusing scraping and begging I have no problem with denying the Golden Globes a waiver, or putting up a "black tie" picket line for their ceremony, or graciously accepting the Screen Actors Guild's encouragement to its members to honor the line and not give NBC famous faces to dazzle their audience with. Let's not pretend the Golden Globes - voted on by a tiny, closed, ethically-challenged clique of foreign "journalists" who may or may not actually write anything - have ever had any critical merit. They exist because the "Hollywood Foreign Press" loves sucking up to movie stars, and is willing to foot the bill for an open bar. And we get to watch the zany antics of Big Stars boozing it up. I won't deny it's good television when it works, but you're not going to convince me it's worth giving NBC a ratings freebie when we've already got them sweating about Leno and Conan's weakened, writer-less shows.
Once we struck a deal with David Letterman's company, the question was "who's next"? We wanted a big scalp. The rumor for a long time was Lionsgate, whose DVD pipeline needs an enormous amount of product. But what makes better sense than United Artists, which was founded by artists like D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin, who were sick of being kicked around by the studios? They're still forming their new identity under the producing partnership of Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise, and being able to ramp up production while the rest of the town plays solitaire 'till dawn with a deck of 51 puts them in a pretty sweet place.
And like I said, it proves that what we are asking for will not bring any company to ruin. And now we've proven it on both the TV and feature side.
And I wonder if United Artists might want to read my script...
Movie reviews, travel photos, tales from Hollywood, and general snark. A haven for geekiness, because the Internet really hasn't blazed that trail yet. An emoticon-free zone. An exploration towards an understanding of our effed-up and beautiful universe. With root beer.
