The Theory of Chaos

Moving Day

2009-09-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

I don't know if anyone is actually checking in here anymore, but since the e-spades and virtual shovels are about to show up and set to work, it seemed worth saying - I have built a new home on the web.

http://www.nicholasthurkettle.com

This means steering the maximum available eyeballs to that address; which means no more fresh posts over here (not that there have been any for over a year), and in the long term, it also means shifting my movie review archive (again).

Thanks for the clicks, the reads, and the thoughtful comments, Blogger-readers. It has been a fruitful step in the evolution.

News You Can Use

2008-04-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

I don't want to self-flatter that my writing has ever been powerful, but I used to feel power in the act of it. I used to see it accomplishing things - winning people over, showing my uniqueness, they were my hammer blows for shaping my future towards my desires.

At some point I just started wondering instead if it will ever make me money again. Everything else has sure felt futile lately. I call upon the words, and they might come out, but they just lay there, unable to make anything happen no matter how much I might want it.

I'm going to take a break from this, see what it does. I obviously need to re-orient myself in the world. Take some walks, take some pictures, be more flesh-and-blood social.

Also, even when I return to blogging, I'm going to stop being a movie critic. I'm going to just let myself be a movie fan for at least a little while. I gave it four years and I'm proud of my output in that time, but if I really intend to re-shape what I'm doing, it has to mean breaking a few old molds. For the record, 10,000 B.C. is air-headed spectacle, Braveheart sanitized for the crowd that likes its violence pretty. 21 has a charming new lead actor and hits all the necessary plot points, but fails to rise above its design. Doomsday is a consciously derivative pastiche that only occasionally achieves a delirious strangeness of its own. Run Fatboy Run is shallow but cruises on the charm and presence of its leads. And CJ7, in spite of the adorable creature at the heart of its plot, is a disappointingly square attempt at Chaplin-esque sentiment from a filmmaker who missed a chance to build on the reputation of his previous films.

Time to sleep, and eat, and face the sunshine. See you on the other side, friends.

And how will I feel about today when I'm 33?

2008-04-07T10:44:00.000-07:00

I looked back through some older movie reviews today, the ones I wrote in 2004/05 when I first started making a habit out of writing up whatever I saw. I'm reviewing 10,000 B.C. right now, and wanted to remember what I had to say about The Day After Tomorrow, and I carried on reminiscing from there. I don't know why this surprised me, since it happens with everything I write, but I feel embarrassed by those reviews now. It's not that they are bad, especially when compared with the ditzy half-assery I used to write in college, but I can see where I've improved, and now to have this available evidence of an earlier developmental stage makes me squirmy inside.

I'm glad it has happened, because I want to keep growing as a writer and a critic, but I feel this irrational urge for whatever talent I have now to retroactively wash over my back catalog. And then when I check in and see that this hasn't happened, I get very disappointed in my past self.

MOVIE REVIEW - Horton Hears a Who!

2008-04-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

Full review behind the jump

Horton Hears a Who!
Directors: Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino
Writers: Screenplay by Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul, based on the book by Dr. Seuss
Producer: Bob Gordon
Featuring the vocal talents of: Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Will Arnett, Seth Rogen, Dan Fogler, Isla Fisher, Jonah Hill, Amy Poehler, Jaime Pressly, Charles Osgood

Galileo was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his finding that the Earth was not the center of the Universe. The legend goes that, after this, he muttered under his breath “And yet it moves”. There was no Horton around to hear him with giant elephant ears, though, so who knows if it ever actually happened?

Both science and religion eventually depend on our belief in things not everyone can see, hear, touch, or understand, even as they seek to explain things that can affect all of us. Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s book Horton Hears a Who! always alluded to these truisms without resorting to one-sided allegory, it was about belief itself.

“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, 100-percent!” So goes the famous line of Horton the pachyderm hero. I remember reading that line as a little boy. To call this adaptation by the hundreds of artists at Fox-based Blue Sky Digital (creators of the Ice Age movies) a “companion piece” to a book entirely written and illustrated by one imaginative man is an outrage against the ratio of involved labor; but it is, in essence, accurate, and a compliment from someone with fond memories of that book.

It is in many respects as bright, cheerful, and gentle as the Dr. Seuss artwork its artists have so lovingly rendered in digital animation, and it does what the best family entertainment does. It acknowledges in its design the thorny complexities of adulthood, the fears and worries and mistakes, and does not encourage children to ignore or deny them, but to surmount them by remembering what is simple, and true, and good. They get their laughs and delights, while adults should admire the loopy visuals and the personality of its voice cast.

It’s a wonder it took the movie business this long to figure out how to approach Dr. Seuss. The psychic scars from manic carnivals like Ron Howard’s live-action How The Grinch Stole Christmas are deep indeed; the filmmakers seemed to think their job was not to entertain children, but to terrify them like the bellowing Santa Claus that kicked Ralphie in the face in A Christmas Story.

That movie starred Jim Carrey covered in yak hair and glue, which is not something anyone really needed to see. He is involved in this piece too, invisible, as the voice of Horton. It’s rather shocking that, given what easy money it is for movie stars these days, he hasn’t voiced an animated character before – it suits his playful agility. This elephant is child-like, curious, distractible, fantasy-prone, but good-hearted and true to his principles. None of his friends in the jungle of Nool are really surprised when he starts claiming that the speck of dust on top of a flower he found actually contains a microscopic civilization. But as the children of the jungle are inspired to seek their own imaginary civilizations, undermining the authority of the imperious Kangaroo (Carol Burnett), her schemes and inquisitions against Horton and his speck become as violent and urgent as that of the Church against Galileo.

We get to see that what he heard is absolutely right; within that speck is the zany Whoville, populated by those bouncy imps, the Whos. They are dedicated to recreation and shun all worry, and while Horton takes on the mission to transport their speck past many hazards and enemies to a safe spot atop Mt. Nool, the Mayor of Whoville (Steve Carrell) naturally has a hard time convincing the populace that their whole world is threatened with doom, because it is being carried around by a giant invisible elephant that speaks only to him.

There are some unnecessary tangents – like an extended sequence parodying imported martial arts cartoons, and a destined-for-anachronism gag referencing the Fox-owned website MySpace – but for the most part the filmmakers satisfy themselves with providing a bright, silly adventure along the lines of the book. Many of Seuss’s graceful curvy lines and whimsical Whoville contraptions are intact and expanded upon, and Whoville’s constantly-celebrating society is given a few deserved tweaks – the Mayor points out that putting the word “Who” in front of dental work does not make it fun.

And in spite of my perennial hobby horse about shunning voice professionals in favor of movie stars, Carrey and Carrell are each able to do fine, evocative work. I like the edge of uncertainty in Carrell’s voice as he tries to process the vulnerability of being a speck on a speck, and I like Isla Fisher’s lisping exuberance as Who scientist Dr. Mary Lou Larue. Arrested Development’s Will Arnett brings Gob-like misplaced confidence and a goofy faux-Russian accent to the role of a vulture whose aspirations to villainy outstrip his competence. And there’s even a strike of counter-intuitive gold, with Seth Rogen voicing Horton’s zippy blue mouse friend Morton. He doesn’t pretend to sound like anyone but Seth Rogen, yet married to the character’s worried visual design there’s a perfect incongruity to it that made me smile.

Ken Duario and Cinco Paul are the screenwriters who adapted this book, and they are to be commended for resisting the urge to work too hard. They neither pander to the children, nor delude themselves into thinking that kids are media-savvy attention-deficit cynics who need loud antics and pop culture gags every three seconds. They, and the rest of the filmmakers, succeed by creating a visually-delightful world, populating it with cute and zestful characters, and sticking to the mission. This is an utterly charming picture, and faithful to its source; maybe not 100-percent, but closer than you’d expect.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Sleuth

2008-04-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

Originally published 10/17/07
Full review behind the jump

Sleuth
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writers: Screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the play by Anthony Shaffer
Producers: Kenneth Branagh, Simon Halfon, Jude Law, Simon Moseley, Marion Pilowsky, Tom Sternberg
Stars: Michael Caine, Jude Law, Walter Plinge, Harold Pinter, Eve Channing

It is often the case that the more complex and sophisticated we fancy ourselves, the more obvious our true simple appetites and savage nature are revealed to one another. At the end of the day, isn’t it possible that we’re just out for money and sex and dominance, and what are money and dominance but means to demonstrate our sex appeal? Call it cynical, but it’s undeniable that dramatizations of this irony, like Sleuth, can be wicked good fun.

The original 1972 film adaptation of Anthony Shaffer’s play featured Lord Laurence Olivier squaring off against the young Michael Caine in a deadly battle of escalating wit and pranks; now, 35 years of savvy later, it is Sir Michael Caine playing the elder to Jude Law, who has already stepped into Caine’s shoes in the re-make of Alfie. For both that reason and the nature of the plot they’re about to dive into, it is, naturally, cheekily, inevitable that someone ask “What’s it all about?”

The film is a facelift, with a new screenplay by Harold Pinter and direction by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh's career as a filmmaker has been a sometimes dizzying, sometimes disastrous, sometimes brilliant dance between theatrical flourish and imposed Hitchcockian montage discipline. He seems to relish not making up his mind what kind of director he wants to be, and that makes this material sort of ideal for him, because the key to putting it on screen is a playfulness that must match the childish malice of its characters. And for awhile the elements come together brilliantly, until they realize they don’t know where to end up now that they’re together.

I’ll try to say as little about the plot as I can. It begins when Andrew Wyke (Caine) – a novelist who has heaps of money and has dined with Her Majesty, invites the young Milo Tindolini (Jude Law) to his mansion. The strapping and confident Milo has been having an affair with Andrew’s wife Marguerite (Eve Channing), so the invitation is something of a surprise to him. Andrew says that he wants to be rid of the unfaithful Marguerite, but the only way to make sure she won’t come back is to see that Milo has the financial means to keep her amused. He doesn’t, but if he were to steal Marguerite’s jewels from Andrew’s safe…

There is much more, of course, layer upon layer of deception and gamesmanship involving guns that may or may not have real bullets in them, a murder which may or may not have happened. Although this is essentially a two-man game, there is a third performance that commands attention, that of a common but sharp-eyed police detective who appears in the picture’s middle and, as British police are famous for doing, notices something funny’s goin’ on ‘round ‘ere. The policeman is played by Walter Plinge, a renowned name on the British stage who is a complete unknown to film audiences, though Broadway devotees may know his American cousin, the great George Spelvin. Plinge, with a grumbling voice and a set of hideous teeth he uses, we suspect, to undermine peoples’ composure, has big shoes to fill, given the unforgettable performance by Alec Cawthorne as Inspector Doppler in the original film, but he carries it off magnificently.

Branagh’s camera is a party to the movie's many deceptions – often peering through security cameras or reflections or eschewing the normal comforts of framing to zoom way in to the faces of Caine, Law, and Plinge, and linger there. One shot on Caine’s ambiguous face waits an agonizing length of time, you can sense Branagh reveling in our need to know what he’s thinking at this all-important moment.

The house is a character unto itself, one so grotesque as to astound. It’s like a cross between an Apple catalog and a modern gallery of horrible art, with sliding walls and a caged elevator and laser-activated gadgets on every surface. Backed by Patrick Doyle's score, which plays like chamber music for sociopaths, one can’t imagine ever being in a good mood in this house. But it is built to contain people who enjoy evil moods more, and is now playing host to two men discovering that being nasty to one another is more fun than anything they’ve done in years, including Marguerite.

And that ends up being the trouble; after each star gets their share of licks in, the movie stops cold, uncertain of where to go. The final “act”, to use theatrical terminology, amounts to a final raising of the stakes, as before, but instead of carrying on the ideas of murder and other criminal endeavors, it aims differently, inwardly, towards the nature of desire at its most mercurial. This is undoubtedly what most inspired Pinter, who has made a career out of constructing deft wordplays that act as a mosquito net barely holding back churning but symbiotic swarms of loathing and need. Is it a bluff? Who is the more vulnerable in this final exchange? While psychologically fascinating, this newly-conceived arc fails to cap off what came before, the movie feels like it’s been caught off the map and is now muddling its way back, albeit cleverly, to the inevitable destination.

This is a story steeped in lies and misdirections. I have even had to misdirect you in this review (comment and I’ll be happy to explain under a spoiler warning). But what is true is that with its gleeful bad intentions and brisk 86-minute running time, Sleuth is like a potent hammer-shot of whiskey. You get a good burn and your head spins, and it doesn’t finish smooth, but you relish having taken it, because sometimes that’s just the animal mood you’re in.

MOVIE REVIEW - In Bruges

2008-04-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Full review behind the jump

In Bruges
Director: Martin McDonagh
Writers: Martin McDonagh
Producers: Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin
Stars: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Clémence Poésy, Peter Dinklage, Eric Godon, Thekla Reuten

A woman standing in the crossfire suggests: “Why don’t you both put your guns down and go home?” And a gunman replies: “Don’t be stupid, this is the shootout!” And In Bruges, an impressive feature debut from writer/director Martin McDonagh, a playwright who won an Academy Award for his short film Six Shooter, thus acknowledges that it knows its genre, the characters that populate it, and the fates outlined for them, and has decided to operate on a different level, one of rhythm and nuance, an almost manic enjoyment of its characters’ commitment to their position within the drama.

Such richness of theme, and language, and timing, is a rare and encouraging thing from a film debut, and I can’t help but think that the 37-year-old McDonagh is representing a generation that came of age with the wisecracking gangsters of Goodfellas and Tarantino movies. They are not so much stock characters anymore as storytelling icons, and he’s not performing juvenile apery, but using them as standardized instruments to make beautiful music with. This is a ripened study of a fantasy world built by his forebears, and exploring it brings out his playful side.

The story concerns itself with two hitmen, the young and fidgety Ray (Colin Farrell) and the older Ken (Brendan Gleeson), who in spite of his profession is somehow gentle and paternal; pious, even. They have been sent by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) to hide out in the Belgian town of Bruges (pronounced “broozh”) after a botched job. They do not know why this twee tourist spot, full of the best-preserved medieval architecture in Europe, has been selected as their purgatory, but Ken is determined to make the best of it. He wants to sightsee and, per instructions, stay near to the phone at their hotel.

Ray has different ideas – he wants to find drink, drugs, and girls, in as much quantity as he can find. At first it’s pitiably comic, his absolute discomfort with the pace of Bruges, his unerring ability to find the deepest hole of trouble in the vicinity, and dive into it with a shovel. But there’s something deeper at work in the tortured boredom on his face; he is suffering because nothing in this town – not the svelte young drug dealer who sort of likes him (Clémence Poésy), not the film shoot featuring a dwarf actor with a sour temper (Peter Dinklage), not even the violent scrapes he lucks into wherever he goes – is drowning out the memory of why he had to come here.

So many movies of this type go no further than to establish – once a character’s gag is understood there’s nothing further to do but pull the trigger. But in spite of its gunplay this is a story that turns not on action, but on the development of a relationship between two people. Such light touches of sympathy in the screenplay, coaxed out by performance, are like a tower built of matchsticks, taking us to a single choice made by a character who is told to do one thing, but instead finds that he cannot, even though he knows what it will cost him to refuse. The movie will succeed or fail based on our belief in that choice, the rest is just machinery.

Propelled by that machinery, each of our three leads becomes a kind of elemental force. Ray’s is rudderless, hedonistic despair, and Farrell immediately becomes many times more interesting, and funny, as an actor when speaking in his natural Irish lilt. Gleeson, the burliest chameleon in the character actor ranks, plays Ken as firm patience, the calming influence. And Fiennes, with a gutter accent and a rat-like cast to his head, gives an unforgettable turn as Harry, whose jagged-toothed smiles barely cover a volcanic temper. He’s given to outbursts of absolute vulgarity and violence, and yet he still has a kind of private moral code; he will shoot people in some circumstances but not others, even if he really wants to, and he even demonstrates a twisted beneficence as he sorts out his criminal business.

In Bruges comes together like fine clockwork, each character acting determinedly according to their nature and damn the consequences. Even minor characters, like a hapless stick-up artist, and a proud hotel manager, are carried into the most appalling circumstances simply by asserting their own identity and principles. It is what makes McDonagh’s picture a comedy in its design, albeit a black and doom-laden one.

It is a complex tone he is weaving – quirk mixed with pathos, tragedy with the absurd. It sees genuine sadness in death, genuine power in thoughts of damnation, and yet shows a virtuoso flair for the ridiculous in its riffs and tangents. They eventually coalesce into a climax which works like a horrific cosmic punchline – the last judgment of the criminal profession descending as squarely and unforgivingly as the giant foot from the credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus; absurd yet still poignant.

Somehow, McDonagh conveys all this utterly to his performers, and films them with a confidence that he is going to find the little bit of magic in them that he is seeking. This is a picture with more than a plot – it has personality.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Darjeeling Limited

2008-04-01T18:05:00.000-07:00

Originally posted 10/17/07
Full review behind the jump

The Darjeeling Limited
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Jason Schwartzman
Producers: Wes Anderon, Scott Rudin, Roman Coppola, Lydia Dean Pilcher
Stars: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Amara Karan, Wallace Wolodarsky, Waris Ahluwalia, Irfan Khan, Barbet Schroeder

After seeing Wes Anderson’s previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I wrote: “I don’t think I saw a great movie, but I saw a great filmmaker figuring out, after facing distractions and temptations and the pitfalls of his rebellious and quirky approach, just how he wanted to proceed with his art.” And I still remember the odd sensation of not-quite loving the film in front of me, but knowing that another movie would come after this one, and I anticipated greatness from it.

I’m joyed to have that anticipation rewarded. The Darjeeling Limited, the latest from one of the most distinctive filmmakers working in Hollywood today, is a movie of great warmth and feeling and life. It casts the artistry and alienation that are Anderson’s trademarks into a journey of almost agonizing heart. The persistent tragedy of Anderson’s characters is that they have extraordinary willpower and imagination, and can stride forth adventurously into the unknown, bring beautiful things into being; can, in fact, do anything they set their minds to, except make people love one another.

It’s this aching desire to create love between people through conscious and grandiose effort, and the underlying truth that love ultimately forges itself where it pleases, and is only felt when surrendered to, that propels the three brothers at the center of Darjeeling. Eventually one of them must shout “I love you too, but I’m going to mace you in the face!” Which sums things up about as well as can be done.

The brothers are Francis (Owen Wilson), who in the wake of their father dying and their mother abandoning them to study at a monastery is working hard to embrace the role of parental figure; Peter (Adrien Brody), who is a kleptomaniac, about to become a father himself, and is suffering ambivalence about all of it; and Jack (Jason Schwartzman), who is trying to funnel all his strong feelings into stories that he insists are not autobiographical, even though their transcription is so accurate that the people he reads his stories to remember being there.

They haven’t seen each other since the day of Dad’s funeral, and Francis has decided that a “spiritual journey” by train across India, with a schedule calibrated by his assistant Brendan (long-time Simpsons writer Wallace Wolodarsky) to provide maximum enlightenment-per-mile, is just the thing for them. And it leads to the sort of rolling catastrophe of surprise, wonder, indignity, and optimism that you see Wes Anderson movies for. I do not know how it is that with every movie he seems to capture color combinations that have never been captured on film before, or scrounge up music of such heartbreaking power that you’ll never have heard before, but I must admire it.

I must also admire producer Scott Rudin, who has in many ways taken in Anderson and protected him from any poachers who might try to chip away at his non-conformity. Rudin has an extraordinary producing resume, putting forth unapologetically commercial fare like The Firm and Ransom, quirky big-budget convention-busters like The Truman Show and Sleepy Hollow, literate independents like The Hours and The Queen, and Team America: World Police, which is a category all its own. He was lampooned by Kevin Spacey in the darkly comic boss-from-hell movie Swimming With Sharks, but the truth is Anderson probably needs someone who is as passionate a movie-lover and as aggressively insane as Rudin is to stand guard on behalf of his fragile, lovely aesthetic.

What makes The Darjeeling Limited arguably my favorite Anderson work is that while there are the familiar brushstrokes – those elegant, almost chivalrous camera movements, the pregnant pauses, a sudden and violent tragedy involving water – the emotion of the piece is never inert. In other pictures he hoards all the naked sincerity inside, winding it up into one brief and potent explosion. Here he keeps the heart beating throughout, and the peaks lose none of their power – this is a story about people driven to near self-destructive madness by their yearnings, but they keep it all cloaked in cool wistfulness, in their deadpan faces and unchanging wardrobes and drastic impulses.

Each of the brothers lugs around several bulky pieces of their father’s monogrammed luggage collection – why do they carry it when they always wear the same thing? Francis has bandages all over his face from a motorcycle accident that left him briefly dead, and, also, might not have been an accident. A train attendant (Amara Karan) asks Jack: “What’s wrong with you?” Jack replies carefully: “Let me think about that. I’ll tell you the next time I see you.” Both know that they will probably never see each other again, and Jack will never be able to think his way out of his problems, but he says it anyway. Anderson recognizes the poignancy of being smart enough to know all this, and still be unable to stop yourself from doing these things.

The vistas of India are still exotic to Western audiences, and are a reminder that the real world creates wonders of a richness and complexity that computers can’t match. And all along the journey are magnificent little performances, like the one by Waris Ahluwalia as a train conductor who cows the brothers like a stern headmaster, or Irfan Khan as a grieving father in a performance with no English words, because none are necessary. Even Anderson stalwarts Bill Murray and Anjelica Huston put in brief turns, where they make themselves affectionately comfortable within the lunacy.

I don’t think I’ve expressed enough just how funny The Darjeeling Limited is, but I think that its humor is not an expression of comedy so much as humanity. Its sense for surprise, its curiosity, and the brotherly love its own brothers seem to be the last to grasp, these prod laughs out of each audience member as if it’s a fireside story told to only them. The wonder of mass intimacy – that’s the essence of cinema, and Wes Anderson has proven his mastery of it.

P.S. The film is rather uniquely preceded by a tie-in short, The Hotel Chevalier, an impeccably-designed 13-minute vignette featuring Jack, an old flame played by Natalie Portman, and a song called "Where Do You Go To My Lovely" by Peter Sarstedt that will stay in your head almost as long as the sense of deep anger and heartbreak that lives in their halting conversation and lust. While it’s not necessary to see to understand the feature, it gives you a context for Jack’s angst and sets-up a rewarding payoff. It was released for free download at the iTunes movie store, but seeing it on the big screen will allow you to notice and appreciate fine detail, like the toothpick that explains so much history.

MOVIE REVIEW - The Bank Job

2008-04-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

Full review behind the jump

The Bank Job
Director: Roger Donaldson
Writers: Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Producers: Charles Roven, Steve Chasman
Stars: Jason Statham, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Campbell Moore, Daniel Mays, James Faulkner, Alki David, Michael Jibson, Georgia Taylor, Richard Lintern, Peter Bowles, Alistair Petrie, Hattie Morahan, Keeley Hawes, Gerard Horan, David Suchet, Peter De Jersey

There’s the kind of cool that flaunts itself, and is transitory. Then there’s the authentic cool, the kind you might miss on first glance but is both self-aware and self-assured, and survives the fickle season to make a lasting impression. The Bank Job is the authentic kind of cool, because while it adopts the slang and dress of working-class England in the 70’s, it knows that what it is actually doing from within that costume is making a true film noir.

It’s about a robbery, and the fate of the robbers. Okay. But fate in a true film noir is about more than who gets caught, who gets shot, and who gets the loot. It’s about doom, an ominous sense that you are headed towards disaster, hypnotized as in a waking nightmare, but cannot stop yourself. The Bank Job stars Jason Statham, normally an action star of crackerjack talents, who relies very little on his fists here, and thus broadens his range. He’s playing a soulful sinner, a man who at some point stops digging his own grave, only to realize that he has passed some dread threshold where it appears to be finishing the digging of its own accord. As in all the best noirs, there’s a woman involved, one who takes no joy from destroying men, but seems to do it everywhere she goes anyway.

The film is intriguingly inspired by true events, although they are events of such an outrageous nature that government intervention has assured no confirmation is possible of what is or isn’t true about the robbery which took place on September 11, 1971. But director Roger Donaldson, who after helming lucrative mediocrities like The Recruit and Dante’s Peak has made an invigorating latter-day break from the Hollywood studio system, knows how to tease the unlikely together with solid storytelling, how to bring out all the flavor in the screenplay by veterans Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (Still Crazy, The Commitments), so that the whole feels wickedly plausible.

Statham plays Terry Leather, who has never robbed a bank before and is trying to lead a less-spotty life than he used to for the sake of his wife (Keeley Hawes) and children. But the daily grind of small lies and shortcuts at his car dealership, the indignity of owing money to petty thugs who like to smash his cars before he can sell them, hardly feels like upright living. He is sorely tempted by that mirage of the big score, one last large sin that would allow him to leave the others behind. That this time the offer comes from Martine (Saffron Burrows) just seals the deal.

Martine is a former model, who briefly dated one of Terry’s mates, but has always sensed something hungry and unrequited between the two of them. She has been presented inside information about a weakness in the safe deposit box vault at the tony Lloyd’s Bank of London, and is offering Terry the chance to assemble a crew of upwardly-mobile semi-professional villains to act on this tidbit. What he doesn’t know is how she came by this information, and what it is in that vault that she needs to access, an item that becomes the hot potato in an exploding carnival of cross-scheming spies, pornographers, black radicals, and Members of Parliament. One of the greatest film noirs, 1947’s Out of the Past, was based on a novel called Build My Gallows High; Statham plays Terry Leather as a man agog at how high he has just realized the gallows are, and how they seem to be growing still by the hour.

But this is a fatalistic movie without being a pessimistic one – those who recognize this distinction will be best positioned to appreciate its quietly-blossoming excellence. There’s verve to its rush towards disaster; I think this is part of its essential Britishness, finding cheek and wit even in mounting grim circumstances. It enjoys the details of the heist: the tunneling, the accidents, the close scrapes with the police. It doles out little morsels of profanity, violence, and coincidence, a trail of sweets that leads us inexorably into a divine muddle where it seems impossible for our underdog thieves to avoid being killed several times over.

This is a movie with quite a gallery of characters, but you think back and realize how expertly it accounts for all their motives and histories. In part this is thanks to casting; Burrows in her sinewy maturity seems sexier than ever, and each supporting actor, whether they are playing crook, cop, psychopath, or stooge, feels precisely matched by face, voice, and posture to their position on the food chain. Grounded in the ancient British tradition of class warfare, and its accompanying slang, a movie like The Bank Job wins us over by taking the form of a chess game, in which the pawns of both sides have staged a trickle-up revolt, tired of being manipulated and sacrificed with no reward for aims they don’t understand. Pawns working together can be dangerous – they have a lot less to lose.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Last Winter

2008-04-01T13:53:00.000-07:00

Originally published September 30, 2007
Full review behind the jump

The Last Winter
Director: Larry Fessenden
Writers: Larry Fessenden & Robert Leaver
Producers: Larry Fessenden, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
Stars: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton, Zach Gilford, Kevin Corrigan, Jamie Harrold, Pato Hoffman, Joanne Shenandoah

The old saying goes that a frog leaping into hot water will leap right back out again; but if you set him in a pan of water and slowly heat it, he’ll sit there and passively, ignorantly, boil to death. I think that’s too-insulting an analogy for the human race and global climate change, since quite a few frogs are hopping and trying to stir their fellow frogs to action, but I do consider it an accurate description of what’s going on in The Last Winter, an unusual horror film for which man’s impact on nature serves as a giant narrative pan in which to slowly raise the temperature on an isolated and very unstable mix of personalities.

It is sometimes too pedantic, and viewers may be frustrated by the lack of clear explanation. But it is quite watchable in how it comes together, co-writer/director Larry Fessenden (Wendigo) does an impressive job of inexorably stoking dread through the smallest gestures, relying largely on our own imaginations to guess anxiously about what he refuses to confirm or define for us. Much like the British fright picture The Descent, this is another movie that adopts the two-fisted approach of dropping characters into an unbearably-pressurized environment and then toying with our perceptions within it. It’s a potent technique.

The setting is Northern Alaska, in the pristine expanse known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Oil companies have been staring at this region with drool on their collective lips for decades; and as this picture begins, one company has finally established a small base from which to explore potential drilling sites. In order to win approval from the government, they agree to go about this exploration in an “environmentally-responsible” manner, which in practice means they have hired Hoffman (James LeGros), a respected ecological researcher, to record and report alarming things, which the company ignores. Then they lean on him to sign papers attesting that whatever they’re doing is environmentally-responsible.

He is immediately at odds with Pollack (Ron Perlman), the head of the exploration group, since Pollack needs to start bringing in equipment, and Hoffman keeps pointing out that he can’t. Further antagonism stems from the fact that Hoffman has replaced Pollack in the bed of the feisty Abby Sellers (Connie Britton). As if it wasn’t difficult enough already to endure the isolation and the cold, and the sheer ominous size of Mother Nature’s presence out here where we have yet to tinker. Fessenden does his best work when he trusts he gravity of his location, beautifully photographed in Iceland, and prowls down the hallways of this pitiful little outpost, showing how small and vulnerable we really are in this place. When we peek in the bedroom window of one of the crew, he’s spending his evenings staring at a poster of a bikini girl sitting on a beach; it acts less like an erotic object than it does a sunlamp.

Perlman’s character has too few notes to play considering his centrality to the narrative. He is either aggressive; or, once in awhile, passive-aggressive. But otherwise Fessenden has an eye for indirect behavior, when not dealing with Pollack he has a solid handle on how to get characters to talk past one another, and reveal their buried worries while trying to fake small talk.

Until the weather cools enough for ice road trucks to safely reach them, there is little for this group of hard-noses to do except drink and get angrier at each other. And the weather is not cooling down, in fact it’s getting warmer. You do not need to be an expert to feel that, when conspicuously non-frozen rain starts pouring down on the North Slope of Alaska in February, something is unsettlingly wrong.

But what is wrong, exactly? Is carbon dioxide long-trapped beneath permafrost escaping into the atmosphere, creating a feedback loop of cataclysmic warming? Is so-called “sour gas” leaking from the ground, affecting peoples’ temperament and rationality? Is it true what the boss’s son Maxwell (Zach Gilford) thinks when he says that the area is haunted by what has been trapped below the ice for tens of thousands of years, now being unleashed by our careless stewardship? And when the crew watches a videotape of one of their own dying a very unpleasant death, do they all see the same thing on that tape?

As arguments, strange behavior, noises and tricks of the light on the horizon, and oddities in the weather, give way to real and indisputable death, we begin to sense that there’s no single logical antagonist at work here. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, everything that could possibly be wrong, is wrong. Journals are decaying from scrupulous observations to apocalyptic scribbles. Equipment is malfunctioning. Someone’s nose won’t stop bleeding. Maxwell won’t eat, and keeps wandering miles away to stare at a lonely white cube that covers an old pipe, dug decades before then sealed without any report on what it found. He stares with a mix of compulsion and awe, as if he has found Pandora’s Box and finally understands why every version of that myth ends the same way.

This microcosm-with-a-moral stuff used to be the province of The Twilight Zone, something this movie knows and graciously acknowledges. The moral is tiresomely thick at times, even giving way to stock footage of our polluting ways. This is unnecessary. One of the most primal feelings we carry is that fight-or-flight radar, that sense that something is very wrong, we don’t know what it is, and it could get us killed. The Last Winter is at its best when it’s pinging the audience's radar from every direction.

MOVIE REVIEW - Vantage Point

2008-03-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Full review behind the jump

Vantage Point
Director: Pete Travis
Writers: Barry L. Levy
Producers: Neal H. Moritz
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Edgar Ramirez, Saïd Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer, Eduardo Noriega, Bruce McGill, Zoe Saldana

So many movies written by eager screenwriters hoist the banner of Rashômon while consistently failing to understand Rashômon. I sometimes wonder if they’ve even seen it. What made Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 breakthrough film memorable was that it exposed our self-deceiving nature. Revisiting a violent confrontation in the woods from the points-of-view of the three participants (one of which is a ghost), each recalls the events differently. But the fourth and final recitation, by an uninterested passer-by, reveals them all to be cowardly, self-flattering liars, even the ghost.

That haunting notion is what you might label the Kurosawa Uncertainty Principle – that in any event that involves our selves, our memories are irrevocably made unreliable. We are doomed, even after this life, to sinful false witness by our own prideful egos.

Vantage Point is not about any of that distressing chimerical truth stuff; it is a conspiracy thriller with a gimmick. It shuttles back and forth in time over the same rough half-hour period, each trip centering in on a different participant in the key events. Its revelations are not soulful but procedural – the liars are the filmmakers, steering us, not very artfully, around the truth until it’s time for the big chase. It is mounted with resourcefulness and polish, and populated with excellent actors, but substantively it amounts to little more than a carnival ride; one that swiftly deposits you back where you began, scarcely enriched for the experience.

The central incident is an anti-terrorism address that was supposed to be delivered by American President Ashton (William Hurt) at a summit of world leaders in Salamanca, Spain. But a shot is fired, commotion erupts, there is an explosion, and the story fragments, each major character there for one piece of the puzzle.

There’s Brooks, the news director (Sigourney Weaver), trying to manage a live broadcast that’s become much more deadly and chaotic than imagined, real news suddenly igniting in front of a team accustomed to broadcasting puffery friendly to the powers-that-be. There’s the genial tourist Howard (Forest Whitaker), wandering the historic city with his camcorder, who befriends a little girl, and thinks he sees a shooter in a window. And there’s Barnes, the veteran Secret Service Agent (Dennis Quaid) who has already taken one bullet for this President, who spots something on a videotape that haunts him.

Naturally the attempted assassination is more than meets the eye, and involves one of those typically convoluted cinematic alliances of dupes and turncoats and good people forced into bad deeds, presided over by a serenely confident evil mastermind who has never learned that simple plans are less likely to go awry. It presents a sturdy opportunity to play one of my oldest movie-going games, wherein I derive the likelihood of a character’s “surprise” involvement in a conspiracy by considering the ratio of their star power to their seemingly incongruous lack of screen time.

Many people are imperiled and/or killed, and many things explode, and there’s an invigorating car chase. There are two quite involving sequences. In one our sympathies are scrambled as we watch a decent-hearted person supremely successful at a horrible mission. That’s an old trick in this genre, but it got that way by being an effective trick.

The other is a nimble stretch where Howard tries to keep up with a police foot pursuit, camcorder in hand as he balances his concern over that little girl with this obsessive sense that, by recording these events, he has become an intrinsic part of them, and cannot miss out on the ending. There’s an opportunity here for the dispassion of videotape and the shaken psychology of an ordinary man suddenly enmeshed in world-shattering drama to produce some conflict around truth, something almost Rashômon-like, say. It doesn’t, but at least it’s energetic as we watch it.

Vantage Point has recycled the lingo of our contemporary circumstances but not the complexity. Pro forma arguments erupt about the consequences of violently overreacting in a world that does not boil down into easy good-and-evil clichés, but that’s a fine dialogue to try and have in a movie where the bad guy might as well dispense with ideology and put on a black hat. Appropriating the War on Terror for such a fundamentally non-serious shoot-‘em-up is arguably a greater insult to the intelligence than claiming lineage to Rashomon, but it’s hardly a new crime for Hollywood – this movie would have and could have been made in the 50’s through the 80’s with scheming Cold Warriors, and all you’d need to change would be the accents.

Perhaps I’m condemning a legitimately competent piece of action programming on the basis of its trappings and its marketing claims. After all, it is successfully fast and slick, and Weaver, Quaid, and especially Whitaker demonstrate excellence within what room they have to maneuver in Barry L. Levy’s script. But the critic must adopt the role of that final witness in Rashômon – the one who, having observed all but participated directly in none, can render final judgment on all pretensions: I know Rashômon, Rashômon is a favorite movie of mine. And this, sir, is no Rashômon.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Resident Evil: Extinction

2008-03-26T14:42:00.000-07:00

Originally published 9/22/07
Full review behind the jump

Resident Evil: Extinction
Director: Russell Mulcahy
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson, based on the video game by Capcom
Producers: Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, Robert Kulzer
Stars: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Ashanti, Christopher Egan, Spencer Locke, Jason O’Mara, Mike Epps

It’s a relief to know I can still be surprised. I walked into Resident Evil: Extinction carrying all the baggage of its two predecessors. These adaptations of the zombie-laced video game franchise were both ugly and moronic; tragic wastes of the killer-doll features of star Milla Jovovich. I was ready to spend 1,000 words artfully tearing this third edition asunder, only bloody chunks of it left to land on my annual “10 Worst” list.

But honesty compels me to state that its “10 Worst” status is no longer a lock. It’s far from a good movie, but it’s an appealing sort of not-good, if you take my meaning. At last it feels cozily wed to its own daftness. There are moments that actually display a genuinely playful idiocy, an ownership of this silly goulash of sinister corporate suits, undead Dobermans, and a heroine who, surrounded by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of ghouls, will still take them on one at a time, with knives. These have always been ridiculous movies, but it’s as if the filmmakers themselves finally got the memo and have stopped trying so hard to look cool.

I don’t know how to account for this sudden outbreak of non-badness from writer/producer Paul W.S. Anderson, who has written all three pictures and directed the first before gallivanting off to ruin other franchises as well. I fear it won’t last past the credits of this one, but at the very least I can report far less people, this time around, will feel like they’ve wasted their money.

Every time we catch up with Alice (Jovovich), the world has gotten much much worse. First the “T-Virus” manufactured by the ruthless Umbrella Corporation infected their underground laboratory, “The Hive”. After that, it spread above-ground to the ill-fated Raccoon City. Now it has essentially consumed humanity, leaving only small roving bands of survivors traveling across a wasteland that even Mad Max would label as being a bit on the bleak side.

Alice, who in addition to her combat machismo has also developed mental powers somewhere on the threshold between a Jedi Knight and Stephen King’s Carrie, travels on a hefty motorcycle, which is unwise in that it ties her to a network of increasingly malfunctioning and empty gas stations. Zombie survival guru Max Brooks recommends the versatile, quiet, and human-powered bicycle as the most effective means of transport in a post zombie-pocalypse world. But in all fairness, BMW probably provides much heftier promotional support than Schwinn.

Some of the other survivors of the previous film have banded together under the leadership of Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) in an armed caravan. No bicycles to be found there, either. And in underground facilities around the world, Umbrella executives hunker down in their labs with more genetic goop (and presumably, a lot of canned food) and try and figure out the strategy for the next fiscal quarter.

All will clash eventually, and what I enjoy about the conflagrations this time is not just their clarity and gushy excess, but their willingness to goof. Director Russell Mulcahy was part of the first generation of music video shooters to break into the feature world, he made the original Highlander as well as the big-budget adaptation of The Shadow, which I think was at that time unjustly-maligned due to severe Baldwin fatigue. It too had a kind of a sly strangeness that crept into scenes just long enough to make you double-take.

Watch the performance by Jason O’Mara in this movie, as Umbrella Chairman Arnold Wexler. His dialogue delivery is inimitably bizarre; both mannered and dripping, like a robot trying to impersonate a soap opera bad guy. Whether this is a tribute to the famously-stilted speech of the original game (“STOP!.....DON’T! OPEN!.....THAT DOOR!”) or it’s O’Mara’s Irish mouth mishandling the American accent, or even if it’s some cunningly intentional bit of manneredness, he comes off like he was choppered in from a David Lynch film.

I see feints in the direction of other movies all over – like Akira and Planet of the Apes. There’s a riff on Hitchcock’s The Birds that posits the question of what happens when crows eat undead flesh. And a laugh-out-loud scene shows what inevitably results when scientists attempt the same domesticating education that produced the endearing zombie Bub in George Romero’s Day of the Dead, only with a much less dedicated student.

The zombies in the Resident Evil picture have been gradually evolving their own identity. They’re a surlier, more vocal bunch than Romero’s, and their faces are inexplicably chunky, like they’ve been dipped in mud, yet the run-of-the-mill ones (an enhanced breed is rolled out as a new Umbrella product) never accelerate beyond the customary old-school lurch, which I approve of. But the human characters are a little different this time around; at long last it’s gotten through to them what’s happening to planet Earth because of this Virus, and there’s less posing and spouting of dim-witted catch phrases. Even Alice is finally letting her husky voice and steely eyes soften once in awhile.

That’s a long way from saying we care about them, or even remember most of their names – one of the refugees calls herself K-Mart (Spencer Locke), which wedges product placement into the collapse of society easily as well as the heroic character “Ford Lincoln Mercury” in Kevin Costner’s The Postman. They, and the zombies who seek to devour them, are still little more than action figures pulled out of the toy-box for an unserious scrap. But it’s that unseriousness which makes Resident Evil: Extinction, unpredictably but decisively, the best movie of its series.

Because I have to remind myself it's not my actual job to review movies for y'all

2008-03-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a short story that scares the giblets out of me. It involves no safety net. It is not funny, not satirical, it has no zombies or robots or hot sex or violence, and it desires to be taken seriously. The language desires to be beautiful. I think I'm pretty good at this whole scratching-on-stone-tablets thing, but to be honest, most of the time I'm noodling, and I'm very aware of it. That may be enough to get me through some daily snark or a jokey script, but it will not suffice for this.

That makes progress much slower and more frustrating, at first. I know how many words I CAN produce at a sitting, and by that simple math I could have this story by dinner tomorrow. I won't. Every sentence must be deliberate, specific, useful, and (hopefully) a little lovely. That's a far different process than what I'm usually doing here, just beating the keys to try and keep up with the whizzing around in my brain.

But what helps is that I can see how it is good for me; to be slow, and measured, to apply real consciousness to each sentence as a unit before I type. Once that notion has broken through the manic static, it soothes, even strengthens. It is writing-while-awake. It is also writing-with-everything-you've-got, and I bet that's what really frightens. Once I unveil that, what about my capabilities is mysterious?

What's most frightening - I sense a chance that this story could be good. I just have to not let it down.

MOVIE REVIEW - Diary of the Dead

2008-03-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

Full review behind the jump

Diary of the Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Writers: George A. Romero
Producers: Art Spigel, Ara Katz, Sam Englebardt, Peter Grunwald
Stars: Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts, Amy Ciupak Lalonde, Joe Dinicol, Scott Wentworth, Philip Riccio, Chris Violette, Tatiana Maslany

I never thought I would see George A. Romero truly misfire on a zombie movie. Not only is he the Godfather of splatter and one of the pioneers of modern independent film, he wrote the Bible on what is the dominant supernatural creature in American pop culture today. There were zombie movies before Romero, even quite excellent ones like the 1943 Val Lewton-produced haunted romance I Walked With a Zombie, and the first known zombie feature, 1932’s Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie. But they were wed to the West Indies mythology of the sleep-walking slave hypnotized by spells and potions. It was Romero, with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, who re-cast them as a relentless virus of consumption, lurching and clawing and eating away at humanity, foot soldiers of an Apocalypse made by our own flaws, wearing our faces.

Even at his previous low point, in the hysterics of 1985’s Day of the Dead, you still had his imagination for blood-and-guts, his knack for oddball characters, and the provocative implications of the “trained” zombie Bub. In movie after movie he consistently demonstrated a voice for contemporary satire, using the threat of flesh-eating ghouls to create not just action and disgust, but scenarios where humanity’s pettiness and willful denial of reality were frequently more destructive than the ghouls themselves. His settings were perfectly-conceived microcosms – the besieged farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, the derelict shopping mall, the government-subsidized cavern base, the feudalized city-fortress of haves and have-nots.

But with Diary of the Dead, rather than carry on the loose chronology of his four prior zombie pictures, he has attempted to re-launch the plague, and re-invent himself in the process. He has embraced digital filmmaking and the trendiness of viral video. And he has a very good idea, attempting a mixed media pastiche, involving the filmmaking process itself in the action in the way that the cameramen of The Blair Witch Project and the recent Cloverfield found themselves recording their own violent misfortune. But he does not have nearly enough resources, nor, I think, the flexibility as a filmmaker, to survive the trip into this new aesthetic with his bite intact.

Our leads are a group of student filmmakers in the woods, trying to shoot a clichéd mummy movie. The director, Jason Creed (Joshua Close) clearly has higher ambitions, even as he’s impatiently explaining to his mummy Ridley (Phillip Riccio) that he can’t run, and suffering the protests of his leading lady Tracy (Amy Lalonde) about unnecessary topless shots.

Sensational reports trickle in on the radio about the dead rising and attacking the living, and although they don’t know if they believe it’s true, the students and their hard-drinking, pretentious speech-making professor (Scott Wentworth) begin to document their trip back to civilization to find their loved ones. Along the way, they mix in news footage they’ve pulled from the web, of cops shooting attackers that won’t fall down – footage which they later see scrubbed and sanitized for broadcast. The movie is presented to us as the final edited assembly of Jason’s vision – the story of what happened when the dead walked, interspersed with their own struggles to survive long enough to finish it so the world remembers “what really happened”.

This opens up two dangerous traps, and Romero, his customary gruesome playfulness aside, falls into both. Firstly it works against his habits – Romero’s filmmaking background is in editing, and when you are accustomed to finding the emotion of a picture in the editing room, shooting long, single takes like this without close-ups to track the characters’ emotions is bound to leave you at sea. The moods of this picture don’t feel grim or desperate, they feel shallow and insincere.

Late in the picture, when they arrive at Ridley’s parents’ mansion, the picture drastically improves, as Romero has security cameras to cut between and create a rhythm of dread. He also has the benefits of a panic room, a character deep in the creepy throes of the denial crazies, and a superb use for a swimming pool.

Until then the actors just move from location to location, emotions fraying while their numbers are methodically reduced by the ubiquitous undead. They spend time in a hospital, at a compound where a self-made militia is organizing and stockpiling, at a farmhouse where the occupant has both a unique communication method and unusual zombie-fighting techniques, and is the most entertaining character to be found. Between his presence, the climax, and a few inspired zombie kills, hardcore fans will probably piece together enough to not feel too let down.

But he stands out with even more humor, I think, because he’s such a startling contrast to the annoyingly bland central characters. It could be a lack of charisma among the actors, it could be how difficult it is for their personalities to reach the camera lens when their circumstances give us nothing more to do than wait for zombies to pop in, but I think it’s largely half-baked writing. Jason and his partner Debra (Michelle Morgan) have this perpetual argument about what they are doing, about the desensitization that happens when you pick up a camera. It never comes to any conclusion, and it’s certainly a smaller, pettier theme than any Romero’s ghouls have shambled through before.

I mentioned that there are two traps. The second, an unfortunate one, is that with his skimpy budget, he simply does not have the means to fake enough raw material to make the conceit convincing. His patchy little blurps of external media pale in comparison to the grimly witty opening credit montage from the re-make of Dawn of the Dead, which melded staged press conferences and news broadcasts into stock footage of riots and mayhem. Compared to that little masterpiece of montage, in Diary of the Dead you end up asking why, if these filmmakers have access to the collected footage of amateur journalists of the undead from all over the world, does so much of their master project consist of their bickering selves in a Winnebago?

George Romero never intended to spend his life making horror movies, he was simply a smart, technically-resourceful commercial producer who concocted a feature story that he figured could be shot within his means and would probably make his investors their money back. Now his ambitions of format have far outstripped both his resources and the sum substance of his content.

Perhaps it’s finally that he did the job too well over the last two generations. Legions of creative minds have grown up inspired by Night and its sequels – some big names among them have voice cameos as newscasters here, like Wes Craven, Stephen King, Guillermo Del Toro, Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino. And his ghouls have busted out of the medium of film and invaded others, producing brilliant works like Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead; and World War Z, Max Brooks’s epic “oral history” of a fictional worldwide zombie outbreak. The scope and detail of projects like this, having thoroughly imagined the effect of the undead from social, political, ethical, and every other angle, leave this picture looking flimsy and undernourished. The thematic body of zombie work has grown exponentially, while the original author, sadly, has tried to return to the drawing board, but with nothing to say worth saying.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Into the Wild

2008-03-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

Originally posted 9/22/07
Full review behind the jump

Into the Wild
Director: Sean Penn
Writers: screenplay by Sean Penn, based on the book by Jon Krakauer
Producers: Art Linson, Sean Penn, William Pohland
Stars: Emile Hirsch, Vince Vaughn, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker, Hal Holbrook, Kristen Stewart

What a beautiful and perplexing movie this is. I’d call it an uplifting tragedy, or a movie of inspirational sadness. It did not take long for me to decide it was made with incredible artistry and sensitivity, it took me longer to decide whether or not I liked it.

I think, in just about all the ways that matter, Into the Wild reflects the conundrum of its subject, which is a credit to writer/director Sean Penn. Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was the brilliant son of wealthy parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, their faces pinned into the heartbreaking masks of upper-society denial) who, having graduated from Emory University with straight “A”’s and law school on the horizon, suddenly donated his life savings, destroyed his identifying papers, and set out to wander America with a backpack and a water jug. His travels, culminating in an exile in the Alaskan wilderness and pieced together from his journals and interviews with people he encountered by adventurer/author Jon Krakauer, certainly have the beguiling romance of that drop-out impulse in so many of us.

But the keenness of Penn’s observation stops this from being a trite cinematic folk song about anti-societal hoofing. “Freedom” is a tantalizing chimera in this film, because dependence has many forms, and so does happiness; and McCandless, for all his wit and willpower, for all his commitment to his vision and his ability to drop high-minded literary quotations into any circumstance, carries a doom about him because of a lesson he refuses to learn. That is what elevates this film from pastoral preachiness to a profound mix of frustrating and mesmerizing.

Hirsch’s performance is a wonder, not just because of the physical transformation he must undergo as the journey wears on him, but because he is playing a person who defies nearly all our normal standards, and I didn’t doubt him for a moment. His McCandless, who abandons his name for the cheeky nom de hitchhike “Alexander Supertramp”, is a young man with a ravening appetite for “truth”. He loves books and nature (biting into a freshly-picked apple, he launches into a giddy recitation about its flavor), and despises his parents for their anger and lies. And yet as far as he wanders, we see what he cannot – that there is still part of him that is prisoner to this anger.

And as he meets people along the road, many of whom clearly want to pour love into him, we see that he doesn’t know how to let them. Behind his dark eyes and charmingly total enthusiasm, does he have contempt for them, the ones who fall even one inch short of his ruthlessly self-imposed standards for freedom? Watch the way he deflects every effort to reach deeper within him – after awhile you realize it’s not them he’s protecting.

This film is a spectacle of people and places. Spanning dozens of locations, captured with impeccable grace by French cinematographer Eric Gautier, it is an ode to the vastness and variety of America, its fields and woods and deserts and canyons. Enhancing the effect is a moody collection of original songs by Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, that never reach the grunge howl that made his fame but strum along in a meditative ache. To watch the film is to remember that there is still space out there for wanderers, and more of them than we often realize – a happy interlude is spent at “Slab City”, a desert refuge in California where hippies and squatters live off the grid on the remains of an abandoned Marine base.

Some of the people McCandless encounters are their real-life equivalents, while others are actors dropping in for brief essays of performance under Penn’s deft directorial care. The ever-excellent Catherine Keener and non-actor Brian Dierker (earthy and authentic, he was the movie’s kayaking supervisor before he got drafted in front of the camera) play a couple of “rubber tramps” who share their Winnebago with the Supertramp for awhile, and project him into a long-denied hole in their family unit. Vince Vaughn plays a grain harvester with a side business in unauthorized cable boxes, who relishes his life of beers, friends, and hard work, and tries earnestly to convince McCandless that he can’t spend his life “juggling blood and fire”. And in perhaps the sweetest and most devastating of these roving cameos, Hal Halbrook plays a lonely retiree who becomes, in a way, McCandless’s last chance to accept a life in the world of man.

I think people will bring a lot into Into the Wild, and that is largely what they will take out of it. Some will see McCandless as a hero, others an icon, others a naïve squanderer of potential. I personally found him bedeviling, a disappointment of great ideas. He doesn’t seem to see just how much he is surviving off of providence and the charity of others. I think there are more people than we realize who set off on these quixotic walkabouts and we just never hear about them because they wind up starved in a ditch. People selflessly provide McCandless money, food, shelter, affection, work, entertainment, they give him advice on how to use certain tools, and hunt and preserve meat; this is knowledge they attained from hard experience, and he scribbles it down in his notebook as if that’s all the substitute he needs, just more literature to live by.

And what does he give them in return but to swoop through like a self-made prophet, taking and then abandoning, leaving behind only their fantasies of what his appearance in their lives must have meant? I think this defiance of love and contact – his sister (Jena Malone) suffers at home, wondering what she did to deserve being as cut off from knowledge of him as their parents – is as destructive as anything he does. By the end, when his once-athletic physique is almost skeletal, I think it’s that without love, his body had to eat itself. But then there is the end, and a transcendent change that stirred even my skeptical analysis.

What are we to take from all this? Into the Wild is not going to presume to spell it out to you, but if you see this movie, you’re going to feel something big. That the feeling is likely to be different in color but equally strong for so many, makes this a film to note for this year.

Believe it or not, it was 17 YEARS AGO now

2008-03-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

Full post behind the jump

There's a giant, gaping hole in the continuity of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, that has never been adequately spackled, even with the unexpectedly interesting spin-off TV series that recently emerged (River from Firefly as co-ed cyborg=deadly hotness). The first movie took place in 1984, and ended with Sarah Connor pregnant with her future resistance fighter son John. In confirmation of this, when the T-1000 adopts his police officer guise in the beginning of the sequel, the profile on John he accesses lists his date of birth in early 1985. It also lists his age as 10. This dates the movie's setting pretty clearly at 1995. This is a relief, since if it took place in 1991, the year of the movie's release, that would make John only 6 years old, so watching him rip off ATMs, scream around on a motorbike, and demonstrate an audibly-cracking voice would strain credulity even given the limitless hooliganism of These Damned Kids Today.

But here's the rub - the human race's hard deadline for nuclear annihilation is repeatedly given as August 29, 1997. Sarah mentions it in her loony bin ravings, and the T-800 played by Herr Governator Schwarzenegger confirms this when he lays out the history of Cyberdyne, Skynet, and the poor naive genius Miles Dyson. Which means there are but two years of civilization left after the events of the movie we're watching. But in his little speech about Dyson, the T-800 claims that Cyberdyne will start supplying the military with equipment in three years, which would be...1998? The hell?

Rather than try and patch this logical fissure, the makers of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines thought it would be fun to make things even more confusing, by having John claim he was 13 in the events of the prior film. So it took place...after Judgment Day? What?

I know this is a terminal case of Nerdius Sticklerenza I'm showing symptoms of here, but it has always stunned me how something so obvious could have slipped through when so much else about T2 demonstrates an expertly meticulous, even obsessive, attention to detail. I was 13 when it was released, the perfect age to declare it The Greatest Movie Ever Made on first viewing. But now it's aged to movie vintage, today's teenagers have never lived in a world when it, and the digital effects revolution that followed, didn't already exist, which I thought of while re-watching it the other night.

(They also have never lived in a world without Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino impersonators, but that's for another essay.)

The legacy of computer effects is that it made every hack with a desktop think they could be James Cameron. And audiences suffered an awful lot of silliness in the years that followed. For every Jurassic Park there were twenty Spawn-s. Terminator 2 contains less than 50 digitally-manipulated shots. Many contemporary movies barely have any shots that haven't been monkeyed with in cyberspace, especially with the practice of making digital intermediates for color re-balancing, first prominently used in O Brother Where Art Thou and really brought to jaw-dropping primetime in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But in spite of all those intervening years, the visuals of Judgment Day prove remarkably resilient. The memory plays tricks on us - those groundbreaking computer gimmicks, taken all together, amount to less than four minutes of the film's 2-1/4 hours. Producer/Director/co-writer James Cameron, trained as an effects technician at Roger Corman's "school" of low-budget filmmaking, may be known now as a digital pioneer, but T2 is a rich demonstration of how to him, effects are effects, and when it comes to analog, he was a master. So many of the picture's memorable moments are not computer-aided at all, but the work of makeup, robotic puppeteering, miniatures, and old-fashioned opticals. That he knew how to use all these tricks to lighten the load on the envelope-pushing digital work is one of the primary reasons those shots hold up to scrutiny this day.

But it's also because of my eternal little hobby-horse: storytelling. Cameron sensed, intuitively I think, that in the first Terminator he'd hit on the purest and most potent possible distillation of Act One in Hollywood's traditional three-act story structure. Events are perfectly calibrated in that first third to bring the tension to maximum boil at the exact moment that hunter meets prey meets protector. Notice how, if you bring no exterior knowledge into the movie, you don't know for sure what Kyle Reese wants with Sarah Connor until that single explosive moment in the nightclub. His enigma carries the audience along until the action of Act Two takes over.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, Cameron doubled down on his strong structural hand. The first half-hour of T2 is effectively an expensive re-iteration of the original Act One, with the added twist that the T-800 is now the protector; and again, if you pretend to no exterior knowledge, you can appreciate how carefully Cameron actually preserves that surprise until the confrontation at the mall.

But then, instead of the heedless chase of The Terminator, the genius of T2 is that, after its first Act; the second Act, the body of the movie, actually begins with another reprise of this same format. Once again hunter, prey, and Protector gradually converge, only this time with the dramatic irony that Sarah Connor believes she is the protector plotting her escape, while the audience knows that she is in fact the prey once again (the T-1000 intending to murder her and assume her identity to catch John), and the T-800 from her nightmares is now working with her son to save her. Wheels within wheels.

Why this picture always feels like an epic is that, within the overall body of the pursuit of John that starts in the build-up to the mall and climaxes with the freeway chase and the stalk through the steel meel, the central hour/hour-and-a-half is its own three-act movie about John and Sarah's relationship, and our perspective, detached now from Sarah, places our emotional grounding in John's ongoing lesson to the Terminator about the value of humanity. These things don't happen by coincidence - that is the true character arc of the movie, and Sarah, with her plans to murder Dyson, is now an unstable element within the lesson. Our sympathies move from mother to son; she is still his ferocious defender, but he is maturing to take the leadership role that will one day call to him, and the movie dramatizes that passing-of-the-torch.

Cameron is an efficient tube-feeder when it comes to exposition, he primes us to learn first by showing us the T-1000's amazing abilities, then, while our minds have been shocked to a moldable quivering by the sight of it, he quickly lays down the ground-rules - liquid metal, impersonates shapes, no chemicals or moving parts. Our imaginations thus inspired and prepared, we only need one fancy shot here and there and our own enthusiasm for the concept, paired with Robert Patrick's lean-mean-assassinating machine performance, fills in the rest.

It is not the stuff that happens which makes the effects in Terminator 2 immortal, it is the implications behind the stuff, the way it raises the stakes of danger, the way it makes the foe seem more implacable and unconquerable than ever. A little detail that often goes unnoticed in that climactic chase - while the T-1000 is chasing them in the helicopter, he's loading and firing his sub-machine gun at them with two hands; while piloting the 'copter with a third. Making an audience delirious with the question: "How do you beat an S.O.B. that can do THAT?", that, with 50 "effects shots" or 2,000, is how you become remembered.

And P.S. - If you ever wondered why so many Terminators look like Arnold, this goofy deleted scene from Terminator 3 answered the question:

Because really, what is it without the brain-eating?

2008-03-07T12:33:00.001-08:00

I'm working on my review of George Romero's Diary of the Dead, which has me traipsing around Wikipedia reading about the history of zombies in cinema and pop culture, and I come across this gem of a line, from their page on the 1936 picture Revolt of the Zombies:

Although the word "zombie" is in the title of the film, absent is the aggression and brain-eating frequently associated with modern zombies.

And when was the last time you saw a line like that in the Encyclopedia Britannica?

MOVIE REVIEW - Jumper

2008-03-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

Jumper
Director: Doug Liman
Writers: Screenplay by David S. Goyer and Jim Uhls and Simon Kinberg, based on the novel by Steven Gould
Producers: Lucas Foster, Simon Kinberg, Stacy Maes, Jay Sanders
Stars: Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson, Diane Lane, Jamie Bell, Rachel Bilson, Michael Rooker, AnnaSophia Robb, Max Thieriot, Jesse James

Movies don’t often prove their own theme as self-destructively as Jumper does. It reminds me of how the porn industry refers to its dialogue scenes as “fast-forwards”, knowing that the viewer, with the power to skip in their hands, will inevitably use that power to cut to the sex. And then when the sex becomes boring, they will cut to the climax.

As if to convince us to sympathize with its shallow hero and his Amazing Power, it provides characters and dialogue that, when not engaged in special effects-related-activity, are as banal and cliché-ridden as that in porn movies (not that I’ve seen any). And it’s true that after awhile I thought that if I had the power to teleport, and human beings were really this dull and predictable, I’d probably turn into a snotty globe-hopping sybarite too.

But I can’t imagine that the filmmakers put even this much thought into how they were orchestrating their own downfall. The movie is a transparent excuse to play with special effects, which they do with relish. And in the tradition of comic-book spectacle, to some small degree I can allow this, can accept that it’s going to mock plausibility at every turn as it manically riffs on the variables of its premise. But having abandoned the dusty niceties of effective drama, having already fast-forwarded its way to caring about nothing but climax, it feels far less than half-hearted as a movie.

Said hero is David Rice (Hayden Christensen), who as a teenager (Max Thieriot) discovered in a moment of crisis that he could tear little hop-holes in the fabric of space to go anywhere he can envision. Now a young man with a few impossible bank heists under his belt, he plasters his tasteful New York penthouse with pictures of exotic locales, and spends his days leaping among them – bedding women, chasing big waves, and dining on top of the Sphinx. The normal pace of reality is so insufferably boring to him that he teleports to the other end of the sofa when he can’t reach the remote.

Christensen is an actor whose depths go chronically unplumbed. Having admired the tormented sociopathy he etched in Shattered Glass, and conversely bemoaned his blank pettiness in two Star Wars episodes, I can glimpse a mathematical formula taking shape. The more a movie expects him to act through effects rather than across from people, the more it relies on his photogenic bones and muscles rather than any true depth of character, the less talented he comes off. He cannot do what Keanu Reeves did in The Matrix – vanish into a costume and turn into a stylized figure on a digitally-painted canvas. Christensen just plain vanishes. And it takes quite a movie to inspire me to point out under-recognized qualities of Keanu Reeves.

More successful is Jamie Bell in the role of Griffin, a sarcastic and temperamental fellow “Jumper” who warns David to keep a low profile lest he be captured and murdered by The Paladins, one of those ancient secretive orders like the Illuminati or the Elks. Led by the ruthless Roland (Samuel L. Jackson), and with unlimited funding and unchallenged license to wreak public havoc in any nation on Earth (yet remain totally secret), they carry on a divine mission to snuff out these aberrations of Nature. Roland’s point – that this power inevitably corrupts people – feels a lot righter than David’s feeble plea of self-defense: “What if I’m different?” Fine talk from the man who took about a day to discover grand larceny. His argument seems to boil down to I’m too handsome to die.

So he bounds around from country to country, with Roland and his scowling, conspicuously-dressed super-secret minions racking up the frequent flier miles trying to lasso him. Since endangering his own life and the life of his family isn’t enough, David also decides to check in on an unconsummated crush from his youth, hometown friend Millie (Rachel Bilson). Millie is a two-dimensional character, if you consider “pretty” and “nice” to adequately qualify as individual dimensions. David one again proves his heroism by lying to her, lavishing expensive attentions on her with his ill-gotten wealth, and then seducing her.

But now I’m just being picky. The action in Jumper is not about heroism at all, but about the cowardly self-preservation of an unworthy superman. Characters leap from one expensive foreign locale to another, sometimes pulling weapons or vehicles with them, and create little explosions of violence before skipping off to some other latitude and longitude. So much time and painstaking work must have been involved in a movie where so many shots required little poofs of trickery, and these effects do contribute to a bright and dynamic visual palette. The movie looks so crisp and colorful and expensive that it’s bound to seize your attention for a few minutes.

But long-form scrutiny doesn’t suit Jumper; it calls on it to display depth and feeling, which require patience and attention – qualities David Rice threw away a long time ago. It’s as if Jumper was designed not to be paid attention to at all, but to be forever played on a loop in the background of electronics stores, to advertise the resolution of their TVs. It ought to sell a few.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - 3:10 to Yuma

2008-03-06T16:49:00.000-08:00

Originally published 9/14/07
Full review behind the jump

3:10 to Yuma
Director: James Mangold
Writers: Screenplay by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas, based on the short story by Elmore Leonard
Producers: Cathy Konrad
Stars: Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Logan Lerman, Dallas Roberts, Ben Foster, Peter Fonda, Vanessa Shaw, Alan Tudyk, Gretchen Mol

If you watch the end credits of 3:10 to Yuma, you’ll see that the usual titles for support staff have changed. Instead of “Costumer for Mr. Crowe”, it reads “Costumer for Ben Wade”. Instead of “Personal Assistant to Mr. Crowe”, it’s “Personal Assistant to Ben Wade”. What movie star worth his oats wouldn’t want to strap on a gun belt and play a bad-as-hell bandit named Ben Wade? Crowe, whose career demonstrates a canny understanding of where his acting chops can take him and where star charisma takes over, steps into the role of Ben Wade not only with his usual meticulous empathy, but with an added zest, a playful malignance. Out of his glittering eyes and every pore too, he exudes the sense that he loves that this is an old-fashioned Western, and he gets to wear the black hat.

And who doesn’t love a Western? Rattling stagecoaches, swinging saloon doors, hostile Apaches, holsters and horses, the campfires, the heroic musical themes that twang and howl underneath wide vistas, bundles of dynamite, the way snow looks dusted across a high desert plain; Westerns are one of the pillars of American cinema. James Mangold is a filmmaker who, much like the genre-straddling Curtis Hanson, is first and foremost a craftsman who never fell out of love with the movies. And in remaking this Western (so faithfully that Halsted Welles, the screenwriter who originally adapted Elmore Leonard’s short story in 1957, shares a credit here) he’s created a movie which is not just a cracking good Western, but a proclamation fit to remind us about how great Westerns are.

Ben Wade’s gang has made a habit out of robbing the railroad’s payroll, to the extent that the railroad company now has to send out a reinforced stage with armed Pinkertons and a Gatling Gun. Wade robs it anyway. Blindingly fast with a pistol – his revolver is nicknamed “The Hand of God” – his true strength lies in the fanatical devotion he inspires in his minions. His right-hand man, the primly-sadistic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), glows with either agony or ecstasy depending on how close he is to the boss.

So when Wade is captured, his sureness that his men will come for him, burning and killing anything that stands in their way, is not something he feels happy or sad about. It is a simple inevitability.

The railroad’s representative, Mr. Butterfield (Dallas Roberts), wants Wade transported to the town of Contention, there to be put on a train bound for Yuma prison so he can be tried and hanged. It’s a two-day trip, and Wade’s gang is likely to be hard after them the entire time, not to mention the threat of Wade himself, always calculating an escape and never hesitating to murder. But for the price of $200, Dan Evans (Christian Bale) joins the posse.

Why is something of a mystery. He’s a good sharpshooter, but he’s hobbled by a shot-off foot, and out here on the frontier he’s just a rancher with a sick young son (Benjamin Petry), debt markers to a land baron neighbor (Lennie Loftin) who wants to drive him off, and a wife (Grethcen Mol) who stopped believing in him long before he failed to keep the thugs from burning the barn down. Other men would have broken, and Evans for sure is bent double already.

He does need the money, maybe it’s that. Or maybe it’s that, when he crossed paths with Wade during a robbery, Evans saw how his older son William (Logan Lerman) lit up on seeing the legendary outlaw, how his eyes sparkled in a way that they never have around his limping, straight-and-narrow father.

But what keeps Evans on this deadly job, and what fascinates Wade about him, is a fierce belief that leads to an argument Evans will not back down from. It’s not an argument that the two give way to in conversation too directly, but they carry it on in choices of action all the way across a hostile countryside, into a climax that’s like the one from High Noon, only with a twist that tilts the odds even more ominously against the hero.

The argument sneaks out when Evans has the chance to take a rich bribe and walk away unscathed, or when he could abandon Wade to some of the many enemies he’s made across the West, or when they dispute over supper whether or not it’s the same thing to shoot an animal as to shoot a man. Because if you accept there is such a thing as a man, higher than an animal, it follows that it’s because man has a choice to be selfless, to be good. And if there are good men, it must mean that there are bad men, and bad men have to get put on the train for prison. The frontier is where this argument needs to happen, because by the time the railroad finishes bringing the civilization in, the argument is settled.

Bale is superb in this role, he needs to be a humbled man with a core of iron, both pathetic enough for the average man to overlook, but passionate enough about his private code for Wade to see him as he is. The relationship that develops between them, the recognition that they stand across an existential gulf that both divides and links them, is something you see more often these days in the scrambled loyalties of a Hong Kong crime picture. But 3:10 to Yuma knows where the movies first made these sorts of icons.

There’s a poise and confidence here that reminds us Hollywood used to put its “A” resources to work for adults. Mangold is not an in-your-face stylist but quietly, capably delivers action, suspense, humor and poignancy with the gusto of a man who’s waited a long time to play with these particular toys. He also, as already demonstrated in his prior picture Walk the Line, understands the value of talent top-to-bottom in the cast ranks, which allows for such treats as Peter Fonda playing a grizzled bounty hunter, and Firefly’s Alan Tudyk as the jumpy Doc Potter.

But in the end, this show is about two men, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, taking each other’s measure as the guns close in and the train approaches. Whether Ben Wade gets on that train will not be so much about whether Dan Evans can physically force him, but about whether he can win that argument. With two actors like this, it’s going to be a formidable one. Both of them know what kind of picture they’re in, and just how to make it mythic all over again.

MOVIE REVIEW - U2 3D

2008-03-06T12:02:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

U2 3D
Directors: Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington
Music Written by: Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton; except Miss Sarajevo, written by Brian Eno, Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton
Producers: Jon Shapiro, Peter Shapiro, Catherine Owens, John Modell; music producer Carl Glanville
Featuring: U2 – Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton

Simply put – I have never seen a 3-D picture like U2-3D. The illusion of three-dimensional imagery is almost invariably a tease without sufficient follow-through, a gimmick that ends up delivering blurry imagery and a few cheap shocks reaching out at you from dull, static set-ups, while the glasses give you a headache.

But here is something different. Here is 3-D of a crispness and depth I’d never imagined possible before. Here is camerawork as dynamic as anything 2-D, and the movie screen re-cast as a true living proscenium, with tangible layers of virtual distance behind it like curtains of light, bodies bouncing en masse so vibrantly I thought the screen was flapping in a wind. This is the promise finally fulfilled – the company responsible for this technological triumph is 3ality Digital Entertainment. With me, at least, they have achieved name-brand credibility in one instant and overwhelming stroke. If I see their name on a future endeavor, look for me in a ticket line.

I want to make the point of craft up-front, so we can proceed to talking about just what is being presented with such groundbreaking expertise. This is a concert film, featuring U2, arguably the biggest rock-and-roll band in the world over the past generation. Notably, it is not the only concert film, or even the only 3-D concert film, presently competing for eyeballs in movie theatres, as any girl between the ages of 6 and 14 can probably inform you. As exhibitors figure out what to do with all these big, expensive screens that now have to compete with our home theatres, and the music industry tries to figure out how to replace the revenue from those gouging CD profit margins consumers are rebelling against, my bet is you’ll see more of this format, and U2, as is their habit, has succeeded in setting the bar high.

The show clocks about 80 minutes, short for a real concert but advantageous because it includes no forgettable opening act, no shuffling around until 45 minutes past the start time, and little-to-no waiting around between songs. The songs make a reasonable journey through the greatest hits of the band’s deep catalog: notably, Mysterious Ways goes unplayed, Beautiful Day is the only representative of the Grammy-winning comeback album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and fans of Zooropa and Pop (I know you’re out there) will be disappointed to note that those albums have been dropped entirely down the memory hole. The band does take time to play Miss Sarajevo from their lesser-known “pen-name” collaboration with Brian Eno, Original Soundtracks 1, with Bono performing a passionate recreation of the vocal solo first recorded by the late Luciano Pavoratti.

Anyone who has winced recently to hear Sting grope scratchily toward his old upper-register on Roxanne will be relieved that Bono’s chops have lost none of their soaring strength. The same goes for his band-mates – U2 has always thrived in the live setting, and the experience shows in Larry Mullen’s crisp, sophisticated drumming, the slippery and subliminal pulse of Adam Clayton’s bass. You especially gain appreciation for just how much melody and texture, more than seems possible from a single musician, comes out of The Edge’s guitar.

The film takes a few numbers to find its groove, it’s most scattered in editing rhythm early on, and also the most thematically indecisive. Unlike Jonathan Demme’s landmark Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, which crafted the band’s add-a-musician structure into a subtle emotional narrative, for its first third U2 3D doesn’t care to tell any story more complex than Once Upon a Time, U2 went to South America and put on a hell of a show.

But then you start to see the peaks of feeling, Bono banging away on a drum with tribal fervor, and the little touches of effect, like the colored letters that cascade down around the band during a grinding rendition of The Fly. You see the band’s world-consciousness folded into the music – Bono, under the surface of rocking out, actually leading a rapturous mass prayer for peace and coexistence.

If the likes of The Rolling Stones and The Who carried the torch of rock-and-roll’s rebellion against conformity for their generation, U2 has taken that torch, stripped away the cynicism and spite, and expanded the ambition of the idea – this is rebellion against the planet’s apathy, despair, and low expectations. It may have taken them an entire generation to reach the point where a band could include readings from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in their show and not look like poseurs, but from Sunday Bloody Sunday on in their career, it’s as if we can now see the twenty-five years of preparation and design that brought us to this moment. When in 2001 they declared “We’re re-applying for the job of biggest band in the world”, they were sincere, because they were ready.

Given this power they have to whip tens of thousands of people into an ecstasy of belief with music, you can almost forgive Bono’s momentary lapses to the Messianism of the moment, like a conspicuously beatific kiss he lays on Clayton. As the show ends and there’s nothing left for him to do but absorb the passion of the crowd he has channeled, he lets out an audible and unconscious “wow”. It’s still rock-and-roll to him.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Halloween

2008-03-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

Originally published 9/13/07
Full review behind the jump

Halloween
Director: Rob Zombie
Writers: Rob Zombie, based on the film written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Producers: Malek Akkad, Andy Gould, Rob Zombie
Stars: Malcolm McDowell, Sheri Moon Zombie, Tyler Mane, Daeg Faerch, William Forsythe, Scout Taylor-Compton, Danielle Harris, Kristina Klebe, Brad Dourif, Hanna Hall, Skyler Gisondo, Jenny Gregg Stewart

“And it occurred to me that if we did a movie about babysitters, it would work, because everybody had either been a babysitter, or been a baby…”
-Producer Irwin Yablans, on the low-budget horror movie idea he pitched to a young filmmaker named John Carpenter

This sounds like the faintest of praise, but Halloween, Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s landmark slasher picture, is quite competent when it’s not being unbearably silly. Zombie is well-versed in all the conventions of the modern blood-letting aesthetic: shaky camera work, screaming naked ingénues, filthy décor, extended death scenes that allow the victims to suffer and weep and beg and bleed out helplessly. Those seeking wounds that gush and breasts that bounce will get their money’s worth.

The trouble is, he’s co-opted the Die Hard of stalk-and-slice, here, and the modern context of a thousand imitators means it’s no longer such a jolt to the darker sides of our imaginations to see a masked madman filleting the nubile. While a previous generation of teen couples might have watched the original and shrieked “don’t go up the stairs!”, conspicuously dateless teens in the row behind me were shouting “You’re dead, dumbass!” Since this genre began to depend on pushing the gruesome shock threshold, its core fans have long since started rooting for the boogeyman. On some level I think Zombie understands this, which is why he’s geared this edition to focus more on the history of the unflappably stab-happy Michael Myers (played as an adult by bulky former pro wrestler Tyler Mane). What I don’t think he understands is why this means he shouldn’t be re-making Halloween.

The original 1978 picture was made on a shoestring budget of $320,000, and as much as half of that went to Panavision cameras and the (then) new Panaglide rig, which allowed Carpenter to play with the weight and depth of empty space in a wide frame, and compose agonizingly long takes where the camera swooped and slid around rooms. The result was a picture that was visually-entrancing, that invited the audience to witness impotently what was lurking in the background unbeknownst to our endangered heroes. It is, in retrospect, amazingly light on gore, and plays instead like the kid brother to Hitchcock’s Psycho, elegantly tightening coils of suspense like bondage knots in between brief explosions of violence.

It also had a star-in-the-making in Jamie Lee Curtis, who built a cunningly complex character out of the smallest of details – a hint of resignation in the voice, her department store loafers, the way she clutched her textbooks. Curtis herself is radiant and outgoing, but what she was able to do as an actress suggested greater depths to the stew of anxiety, sexuality, innocence, and evil that Carpenter was cooking. And her balance of terror and resourcefulness in the film’s climax remains a sacred text for any actress hoping to use this genre to catapult to success.

Her character, Laurie Strode, is played in this version by Scout Taylor-Compton, about whom I have nothing particularly bad to say. She is ripely pretty, and looks fetching in the glasses that were given to her so we would know she is “smart”. She may well be talented, but I had no chance to find out because this remake is not particularly interested in her. It is at least 45 minutes in before we even see her. Instead we get essentially a half-length new movie as preamble, about the 10-year-old Michael Myers and the genesis of his murderous habits.

The best thing Zombie has done here is to find the actor Daeg Faerch to play the young Myers. With the pre-adolescent pudge around his face hardened into a sullen grimace, and those eyes that look through things rather than at them, he does come across like the kind of kid who shouldn’t be left alone with small animals.

If only he didn’t live with such a clownish family. What was spooky about the old Michael Myers was that nothing about his surroundings was unusual – he came from an average house on an average street in an average small town, but for reasons unknown was just born with something missing inside. It’s no coincidence that the unforgettable demons of movie horror – like Dr. Hannibal Lecter before all the sequels and prequels, John Doe from Se7en, like the original Myers, have a large blank space in their biographies; the lack of easy explanation for their existence makes them more unsettling to our sensibilities. Instead Zombie has decided to knock an iconic character off his pedestal and smother him with traumatic childhood clichés – my exact criticism of Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of The Grinch, strangely.

This Michael has an aging stripper mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) and drunken cripple stepfather (William Forsythe) who can scarcely stop screaming obscenities and hurling things at each other in their grimy kitchen long enough to shove Michael off to school to be picked on by bullies. Everyone hates everyone so deeply, and so loudly, it’s like a Harold Pinter play re-written by hobos with the DT’s. I kept waiting for Dr. Phil to appear, offer assistance, and be bludgeoned to death by stepdad’s bowling trophy.

It’s scarcely even a surprise that when Trick-or-Treat night comes along Michael picks up his trademark pale mask and carving knife, we only wonder what took him so long. And then we see an extended and totally pointless stretch of him in a mental institution, where the woolly Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, an appropriately melodramatic replacement for the late Donald Pleasance) tries in all sorts of incompetent ways to unlock Michael’s sociopath tendencies, and then writes a best-selling book about it while Michael makes masks in his cell and waits for the chance to strike again.

And I don’t see how any of that enhances what the heart of Halloween has always been – the stalking of teenagers by a menacing shape in the night, and the fear every female has that she might not be strong enough to fight off a big man who wants to stick something in her. What was once lean and elementally-potent enough for Carpenter to turn into a now-legendary exercise in cinephile style is what Rob Zombie takes for granted, an afterthought on his way to pick up more buckets of blood. When a filmmaker makes such an effort to leave nothing to your imagination, I must conclude it’s because he thinks his is sufficient for all of us. I disagree.

Well, can't say I left empty-handed

2008-03-01T18:47:00.000-08:00

It took just long enough to arrive for me to forget there would be a reason for a big package addressed to me in the mail:

Now, I can wear a permanent reminder of gameshow injustice on my wrist! Huzzah!

MOVIE REVIEW - Atonement

2008-02-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

Atonement
Director: Joe Wright
Writers: Screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan
Producers: Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Webster
Stars: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Saorise Ronan, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn

I’d never fully considered before Atonement how imagining can be a violent act. The internal world of the mind can indeed inflict damage in the real world. The film, based on Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel, has the surfaces of a romance, and a triumphant one at that – it’s rare to see a piece that can incorporate both the splendid and the intimate, the scenic and the sexy. It’s never failed to be understood how imagining can be erotic. But imagination is ultimately more fundamental than love in this picture, and as such it is not going to give you the easy conclusions or comfortable themes of a traditional love story.

I find it no coincidence that three of this year’s five Best Picture Oscar nominees, Atonement along with There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, feature shocks in the final scenes that directly challenge the viewers’ presuppositions, that unveil truths that had been hidden in plain sight on the screen. These are not plot twists in the conventional sense, they are provocative dares against the very nature of narrative finality. We can wish with all our might that some karmic magic will drop every peg in its proper hole and give us the relief of new equilibrium, but this film reminds us with aching poignancy that resolution is illusory, and there’s only one real way for a life to reach “The End”.

We begin at an elegant British country house, and a girl on the brink of adolescence named Briony Tallis (Saorise Ronan). There’s a feverish will in this girl – we can spy it in the way she hammers at her typewriter, composing stories and dramas, and in the way she marches around the house, turning each corner at a determinedly perfect right angle on her mission to distribute her latest opus to the family, the guests, the servants. Does she, with her plainer features, her awkward attempts to integrate with the grown-up world, feel an unspoken spite for her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who is through with her adolescence and in all visible respects a poised, stunningly beautiful young woman? Does that, mixed with her possessive, desperate crush on the gardener’s son Robbie (James McAvoy), create a potion of poisoned thought that has her misinterpreting events she glimpses through windows and around corners?

The screenplay, by Tony- and Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons scribe Christopher Hampton, must deftly play with time and perspective, showing us what Briony sees, then backtracking to replay them from the full perspective of the participants. It is the only way we can understand the strange tension between Cecilia and Robbie, who was born low but has become educated and ambitious thanks to the generosity of his masters. And it shows us how a little girl, head surging with feelings, might tease hints and suppositions and misunderstandings into a narrative that makes all-too shocking sense to her.

And on one fateful weekend she does just that, convincing first herself, then her family, then police, that she has seen something terrible. The tragedy for us is that we can divine both what has actually happened, and the defiant path by which Briony reaches her own conclusion, one that sets everyone’s life in a new direction.

We flash forward into World War II to catch up with the results, and we see the grown-up Briony (Romola Garai), now in training as a war nurse, still battering away at her keyboard, still thinking back to that night. She understands now what she has done, what her imagination has wrought. But can imagination be a healing act as well – as when she plays along with a dying soldier who has mistaken her for his beloved?

Painful real life has intruded, with Cecilia estranged from her family, and with Robbie an enlisted man in France, struggling to find his way to safety as the Nazis fill the continent. He reaches the historic mass evacuation at Dunkirk, and we watch him explore the horrible spectacle of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, stranded on a beach. It’s done in a long unbroken take that ranks among the most accomplished I’ve seen – only as it pulled back to take in the whole picture did I understand its purpose. He is in purgatory, sent there by a lie.

Director Joe Wright broke into feature film from BBC minis with the excellent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and the chief virtues of that picture – sumptuous visuals, red-blooded passion, and keen casting – are each enhanced here. Ronan gives a fiercely-committed performance as the young Briony, while McAvoy graduates to leading man dash, and Knightley embodies the dawning realization of love, and the hunger it creates once realized.

And while the landscapes are grand in front of DP Seamus McGarvey’s camera, it’s the small gestures that move the heart. How potent, how packed with luscious promise, is the moment of a woman lifting her foot out of her high-heeled shoe; how staggering is the sight of a man trying to steady his hand while stirring a cup of tea across from the woman for whom he burns.

Memories gain color and power in the reliving of them. The film of Atonement contains moments that you will relive in your mind, over and over, for their sensuousness, for their sadness, and for the troubling way they avoid any conclusion you could seize on to put them away. This must be the fate of Briony, whose punishment for the richness of her imagination is that it will be fixed on these memories for the rest of her days.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Once

2008-02-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

Originally published 9/8/07
Full review behind the jump

Once
Director: John Carney
Writer: story and screenplay by John Carney, music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová
Producer: Martina Niland
Stars: Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, Bill Hodnett, Danuse Ktrestova

Watching Once, I thought to myself that so many Hollywood movies boil down to beautiful people posing and making faces. The film industry has made such an expert science out of stimulating the twinkle in the eye, extracting the maximum manly resolve from the heroically jutting jaw, that the application of these visible results of feeling does everything it can to counter the hard truth that what these performers are doing is not earning that feeling. Sometimes when the music is swelling and an actress’s eyes are going wobbly with tears, it comes across not so much an inspiration to feeling as a command.

That’s a long way around to a fairly basic idea, but I think what gives an audience an unforgettable experience is when they have the opportunity to discover something which is simple, and genuine. Once tells a boy-meets-girl story with an almost total lack of artifice or inflection, with ordinary-looking people placed in ruddy and unglamorous environments, speaking in the overlapping accidental rhythms of people who have not been given any clever dialogue to say. Its microscopic budget means a low-resolution, shaky, blown-out image and night scenes where the actors’ faces are barely discernible.

But for all those overt rejections of the Hollywood method, Once is a work of extraordinary joy and intimacy, an emotional experience so immediately genuine and accessible that it must be considered one of the best films of the year. Without any of the crutches of fakery, writer/director John Carney is able to focus simply on showing what his boy and girl are doing right before our eyes – making beautiful music, and falling in love.

Glen Hansard, formerly of the Irish band The Frames, plays the boy, a young Dubliner who works in his father’s vacuum repair shop by day and plays guitar on street corners during his off hours. He has a full and yearning voice, a voice that cries with the inevitable sadness of feeling so much, but would not imagine living any other way. Many of his songs are about a love that abandoned him, and the way he obsessively revisits that agony suggests he won’t be over it until he has written enough songs.

Markéta Irglová, Hansard’s musical partner in real life, is the girl, an immigrant from the Czech Republic selling flowers in the street, and stealing into a music shop at lunch time to commune with an unsold piano. Their approach to each other is tentative, spiked with miscommunications, but also somehow helpless. When she asks him to play a song for her, we know his resistance will not last. And we know that when he asks her to sing along, she will, and it will work.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with the patience to simply observe a process the way Once does. We watch Hansard pull out his guitar, check the tuning, page through a notebook to place at the piano, and walk Irglová through the melodies of the song before they begin. Most movies would consider this a dire waste of screen time, but it is so totally authentic, such a clear demonstration of the way these people live with music.

There’s a scene where they are at a party where everyone takes a turn singing. Scattered across the pushed-together tables are empty beer bottles, dozens of them, and the atmosphere of the party is so warm that you cannot convince me some prop crew emptied those bottles and arranged them photogenically – they got there the natural way. Our street singer’s guitar has a hole in it – I believe it got there the natural way, too.

This movie’s creation of a convincing reality is what gives the leap into song so much power – in one scene the girl steals out in the middle of the night to buy batteries because the CD player the boy leant her to listen to his music has burnt out. We watch her walk home under the streetlamps in a nearly unbroken shot as she puts her headphones on and begins to sing. The life going on around her – kids hanging out, a car parallel parking – is never forced away from the mundane, because if it was then we wouldn’t have this hypnotic embodiment of the way music can transport us into a private world.

In the days after they meet, he begins to change his routine, take steps he’d never allowed himself to consider before when it comes to doing something with his music. The power of meeting someone special is when you don’t know if their appearance made you ready to change you life, or because your readiness to change your life helped you make the connection with them. Things seem to be aligning out of inevitability, coming to a perfect harmony. What makes Once so magical is that all this can be communicated with so little. What words pass between them are often so mumbled and minimal, it is as if they have already pacted to leave certain so obvious things unsaid.

Nick Cave gave a famous lecture on love songs, which you can read here. In it, he argued that no love song can be truly great without containing a dark sadness, an awareness of an almost inevitable loss and loneliness. The love story in Once, woven together by so many love songs, is one we sense might not end in happily ever after; but it does what great love songs do, which is say that we are simple people, and flawed, but we have the chance to touch something now which will lift us above everything that might be sad or ordinary about our lives.

MOVIE REVIEW - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2008-02-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
Director: Julian Schnabel
Writers: Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Jon Kilik
Stars: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Marina Hands, Isaach De Bankolé, Max Von Sydow, Niels Arestrup

In elementary school I learned about both photography and the human eye by making a shoebox camera, letting light enter the dark through a single pinhole. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly merges camera with eye with pinhole, affirming beauty’s power to light up a place of unimaginable darkness and despair – the mind of a man imprisoned in his own skin. With a lead performance that re-writes the definition of an actor’s trust, and virtuoso work from one of modern cinema’s greatest cinematographers, it breathes fresh life into a very old theme about the human spirit and its capacity to overcome tragedy.

It could have been a gimmick movie, it could have been disease-of-the-week treacle. It could have stolen away its lead character’s flawed humanity in a misguided quest for maximum uplift. Instead it transcends, becomes a work of laudatory art as unique as its subject could demand of it; a marriage of sight and thought that challenges our gratitude for the freedom our bodies afford us by dramatically drawing us into the experience of someone who was robbed of that very freedom.

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), called “Jean-Do” by his friends, is on the cool cutting edge of urban cynicism. Editor of the French edition of Elle magazine, he’s used to hanging out with rock stars and models and acting utterly bored by it. Offered an anything-goes contract to write a book, he’s mulling over a modern re-telling of The Count of Monte Cristo, a challenge he ponders casually, like one might think about hammering together a birdhouse for the backyard. He has left the mother of his children (Emmanuelle Seigner), whom he never married, and is lavishing money and attention on a mistress (Marina Hands) even while he talks non-chalantly with her about breaking it off*.

But in a freakish twist of fate, this man in the seeming prime of physical health (his spiritual health is another matter) is struck down without warning or pity. He suffers a stroke, and emerges from a coma into a rare and little-understood condition called “locked-in syndrome”. His mind is as alive and active as it’s ever been, but his body is helpless, entirely paralyzed except for his left eye, which he can move and blink.

The movie throws us right in at his moment of awakening – more than half of the picture is shot from the perspective of that roving, struggling-to-focus eye. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who has worked almost exclusively with director Steven Spielberg over the past 10 years, faces an enormous challenge in plotting a movie’s visual scheme from such a restricted vantage point. But this is intrinsic to the movie’s theme: even if this is all you have left, how beautiful it can be.

What’s extraordinary about the film, directed by painter Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls), is how it subtly re-programs your brain in the act of watching. It has you transfixed by the luscious sight of a woman’s long hair, whipping in the wind. By the time Jean-Do explains that his favorite place to sit at the hospital is in front of the red-and-white lighthouse on the shore, we understand completely, and contemplate the vivid colors, the surfaces and textures, the very quality of the air. The movie even takes you into his fantasies, as he travels to faraway lands, and seduces his nurse.

He is not saintly, and Amalric’s performance of Jean-Do’s inner monologue is incalculably important. He is angry, and sad, and frustrated; all his human appetites still intact, but seemingly no hope of ever enjoying any measurable percentage of them again. But he still has a great wit and playful sense of humor, and we hear him come around to the reality of his situation, even jibe his friends in his thoughts as he watches them struggle to know how to behave around him.

His speech therapist (Marie-Josée Croze) develops a technique that allows him to communicate – she recites the letters of the alphabet, from most commonly-used on down, and he blinks when she reaches the right letter. His first sentence to her, and her reaction to it, is key – it shows us a movie that is sympathetic, but not too sentimental. It does not want to hide the suffering and indignity of his situation. When the camera steps outside him, and we see his limp body being bobbed in a pool by an orderly, or watch his eye dart back and forth while his children play in front of him, we think we can guess what he’s feeling, but that frozen mask of a face reminds us that we can never truly comprehend it. As an actor Amalric must put himself completely in the hands of his director, his fellow actors, and the story being told. None of the usual tricks or distractions are available to him.

Jean-Do takes that old book contract, and decides instead to write about his new life of physical imprisonment. For hours, he will blink, and the patient Claude (Anne Consigny) will transcribe, a whole day devoted to shaping a precious page or two of thoughts. Life takes on an entirely different pace – watch one scene where he confesses a truth that he knows will cause pain. The old him would have dodged, but lying takes too long now.

Ronald Harwood’s screenplay for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is constantly setting up little flashes of truth like that. They would only come across to us if the movie had thoroughly wed us to the experiences of Jean-Dominique Bauby, only if we could understand the seeming paradox: that he could be trapped in the murky, inaccessible silence of his diving bell, but how he comes to learn that inside it all he needs is a little light, and the power of his thoughts, and he is free.

(*The biographical accuracy of Jean-Dominique’s relationship with these two women, as dramatized, has been called into question. this Salon.com article, which contains a few spoilers, lays out the lines of the debate.)

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

2008-02-27T20:45:00.001-08:00

Originally published 9/1/07
Full review behind the jump

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Director: Seth Gordon
Editor: Seth Gordon
Producer: Ed Cunningham
Featuring: Steve Wiebe, Billy Mitchell, Walter Day, Brian Kuh, Steve Sanders

I heard a story once about a behavioral psychologist who was studying a tribe of apes, learning how one ape achieved dominance over the others, how mates were selected, what plots displaced apes might undertake to topple the alpha. Everything changed, the psychologist noted, once she gave the apes names. Their activities suddenly read like the plot summary of a soap opera.

Donkey Kong is not a real ape, but a cartoon made of pixels to resemble an ape. He got his name when legendary game artist Shigeru Miyamoto (the father of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda) opened a Japanese-to-English dictionary and chose words it claimed were synonymous with “Stubborn Animal Gorilla”. This virtual stubborn animal gorilla will chuck barrels and springs and fireballs at you, frustrating and punishing every attempt you make to climb the ladder to reach him. And each time you reach the top, he just grabs your girlfriend and climbs up yet another ladder with her. Unless – unless you reach the level that represents the limits of this legendary 1982 arcade game’s program capacity. On that level, spoken of in reverent whispers as the “Kill Screen”, your on-screen counterpart simply takes a few steps and dies, like victims of the 5-Point Palm Exploding-Heart Technique in Kill Bill.

So the cartoon ape’s philosophy is simple: life’s a bitch, and then you die. And in his electronic world, the big ape always wins. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, is a ragged and dorky but immensely appealing documentary about two men who’ve allowed their lives to be taken over by this implacable, infuriating game; and about how their quest to be the world’s greatest player reveals the way they conduct their lives, and reminds us all too easily of that behavioral study about the apes in the wild, tearing and howling for superiority. Are we apes or men? How we play the game tells us.

As the movie opens the world record for Donkey Kong is well over 800,000 points, and held by Billy Mitchell, the first man in history to achieve a perfect score on Pac-Man. He is the face of Twin Galaxies, the official record-keeping organization for video gaming, and ambassador for a sport whose fans seem to number in the hundreds on a good day. Outside of the arcade world he drives a minivan and owns a buffalo wings restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, but he carries himself with a self-confidence that is mesmerizingly absolute. He favors black shirts and has the long hair of a dark wizard; other gamers speak of him as if he’s a combination of Wilt Chamberlain and Eddie Van Halen. We can sense that the active movers in his world have not only a professional investment in his fame, but a deeper psychological one. They want to be following the right alpha, and what better one than the man with the perfect Pac-Man score?

But Donkey Kong is a game with such an insidious arrangements of variables – its cruelest actions are essentially random but so frustrating that devotees speak of it as a living thing with a malignant will – that a “perfect” score isn’t really possible. So on this game, Mitchell is only as invincible as people believe him to be. And a few years ago, a middle school science teacher named Steve Wiebe looked at Mitchell’s 1982 record and thought “I could beat that.” Little did he know that joystick skill would not be all that’s required of him.

Wiebe’s life has a lot to envy. He is smart and decent, appears good at his job, has a patient wife, two precocious children, and a comfortable house in Redmond, Washington. He was a two-sport star athlete in high school and can play the hell out of the drums and piano. And yet there is a discontent to him, a sense of coming up short in life. He remembers keenly the day he pitched at the state championships, only his arm was worn out and he failed in front of the largest audience of his life. It stings that he got laid off from Boeing, his father’s company, the same day he closed paperwork on his house. He’s doing well enough, but is still haunted by the sense that fate has thwarted his potential.

He sets up a Donkey Kong machine in his garage with a video camera pointed at the screen, and every night he plays. He stares at that screen for hours upon hours – mapping the game’s patterns, training his reactions, cracking its secrets. It’s when he finally blows by Mitchell’s record, scoring over 1,000,000 points, that his life turns upside-down.

Mitchell is one of the people in authority to verify the authenticity of Wiebe’s score, and what results is an agonizing series of inquiries, insinuations, and psychological games. Wiebe undertakes a cross-country odyssey to prove his skills live in arcades - with referees, and Mitchell’s acolytes, watching. Mitchell, meanwhile, adopts an air of aloof unconcern, avoiding direct contact with Wiebe but trying to intimidate from afar. Could he really beat Wiebe head-to-head? If so, why all the mystery and chicanery?

This movie doesn’t necessarily benefit from big-screen exposure, the camerawork (director/editor Seth Gordon shot most of the footage himself) is low-grade and handheld for the most part, and the presentation lacks usual standards of polish. But Gordon is a canny storyteller who has either unearthed or blundered into, likely some combination of both, a fascinating Petri dish of paranoid and desperately competitive personalities in a world many people don’t know exists. Brian Kuh and Steve Sanders, two also-rans on the Donkey Kong scoreboard, are captivating portraits of subsumed egos writhing in the face of an unexpected threat – staring over Wiebe’s shoulder, breathlessly calling reports in to Mitchell, trying so hard to please their master so they can claim table scraps of his glory.

You have a clear hero to root for: Wiebe tries hard, faces setbacks, plays by the rules, refuses to knuckle under to Mitchell’s maneuverings, and even takes time out to go swimming with his kids. And you’ve got a sterling villain in Mitchell, who speaks of himself in the third person and enjoys the will he can exert over the expert gamers he’s whipped into obedience. Where their clashes end I will not reveal, but I will ask you, if you do see this picture, to pay close attention to two scenes where Wiebe calls Mitchell and leaves him voice-mails asking for a head-to-head challenge. The difference between the two phone calls says everything about the way this quest has given Wiebe a purpose; even, strangely, made him more of a man.

The current world-record score for Donkey Kong, according to Twin Galaxies, now stands at 1,050,200. Go there yourself if you want to know who holds it. I must confess that after watching The King of King: A Fistful of Quarters, I fired up an arcade emulator on my computer and spent an hour wrangling with the old stubborn animal gorilla. The best score I managed was 25,600 – but I was sure that I could do better, with just a little more practice…

Honoring Achievements in Motion Picture Excellence...Texas-style

2008-02-24T16:32:00.000-08:00

Well, I’ve got chili on the stove and friends on the way. It’s Texas chili, of course, to be garnished with California avocados, served with a California cabernet, after an appetizer course involving French cheese. It’s in honor of the Texas-set No Country For Old Men, California-based There Will Be Blood, and the French Ratatouille, all of which I hope and expect to see honored with gold statues in a matter of a few hours. Dessert will be Kahlua milkshakes - we will drink each others' milkshakes.

My intent had been to publish my final two reviews of 2007 releases (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Atonement), proceed to my Top 10/Bottom 10 List (which has been made difficult from not having seen 10 truly awful movies last year, I must be slipping), and then round it out with my annual predictions. But, as I’ve said, the chili’s simmering, my friends are near, and of all that I need to post, the predictions are rather time-sensitive, no?

So let’s proceed with those and see what else happens. In honor of my former Theatre Lit. professor, Dr. Richard Hansen, here are my predictions for every category. By his rules, 1st choices are worth 15 points, 2nd choices are worth 10 points, and the goal is to clear 240 points overall. I have a…spotty record of achieving this, but I’ll give it my best.

It should be stated for the record that anything to do with foreign films, documentaries, and short films is an utter shot in the dark for me. You’d think being a Hollywood Insider™ would grant me more knowledge about these categories, but if it does, I have failed to capitalize on it.

You might also note that some of these have shifted from my initial predictions of last month. This could either be me attempting to factor changing realities into my present calculations, or that I want the terrorists to win. You decide.

Best Picture
1. No Country For Old Men
2. Juno

Best Director
1. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country For Old Men
2. Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood

Best Actor
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
2. Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd

Best Actress
1. Ellen Page, Juno
2. Julie Christie, Away From Her

Best Supporting Actor
1. Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men
2. Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild

Best Supporting Actress
1. Ruby Dee, American Gangster
2. Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone

Animated Feature Film
1. Ratatouille
2. Persepolis

Writing – Adapted Screenplay
1. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, No Country For Old Men
2. Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood

Writing – Original Screenplay
1. Diablo Cody, Juno
2. Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton

Art Direction
1. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
2. Atonement

Cinematography
1. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
2. There Will Be Blood

Costume Design
1. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
2. Across the Universe

Documentary Feature
1. Taxi to the Dark Side
2. No End in Sight

Documentary Short
1. Salim Baba
2. Sari’s Mother

Film Editing
1. There Will Be Blood
2. No Country For Old Men

Foreign-Language Film
1. The Counterfeiters
2. 12

Makeup
1. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
2. La Vie en Rose

Music (Original Score)
1. Atonement
2. Michael Clayton

Music (Original Song)
1. “That’s How You Know” from Enchanted
2. “Falling Slowly” from Once

Short Film – Animated
1. Madame Tutli-Putli
2. Peter & the Wolf

Short Film – Live Action
1. Il Supplente
2. At Night

Sound Editing
1. No Country For Old Men
2. Ratatouille

Sound Mixing
1. No Country For Old Men
2. 3:10 to Yuma

Visual Effects
1. Transformers
2. The Golden Compass

MOVIE REVIEW - Cloverfield

2008-02-20T16:16:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

Cloverfield
Director: Matt Reeves
Writer: Drew Goddard
Producers: J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk
Stars: Michael Stahl-David, Jessica Lucas, Lizzy Caplan, Mike Vogel, Odette Yustman, T.J. Miller

Cloverfield understands sensation as well as any movie I’ve seen recently. And it has to, since that is the alpha and the omega of what it has to offer. It is a parade of the primal – shock, terror, dread, confusion, dizzying heights, noises in the dark, and the awe of a threat so massive it obliterates one of the two options in the fight-or-flight response. And in that carnival spook-house way it is a triumph.

It is also a rather brilliantly-conceived technical stunt, marrying the low-grade aesthetic of The Blair Witch Project’s meta-camerawork with the modern ability of digital effects to live in plain sight. We do live in an era where shaky home movies have captured sights beyond anything we would have imagined seeing in the real world, and in exploiting this familiarity with grainy footage of cataclysm, the filmmakers clearly know which buttons to press.

But is there any idea this all is in service of beyond a street-level re-imagining of some very old movie concepts? Could Cloverfield do more than it does? Is it cause to fault it that it could, but doesn’t?

It is all-but-assured by now that you have a general idea of what is wreaking havoc in New York City in this picture, but I’ll try to be artful about it nonetheless, since the movie’s way of teasing you with progressive revelations of detail is one of its strongest thrusts. It’s presented a single piece of catalogued evidence – the contents of a camcorder memory chip found by the U.S. Army “in the area formerly known as Central Park”. That’s a pretty fair sign that Rob’s going-away party isn’t going to end well.

Rob (Michael Stahl-David) is – well, I wish I could tell you more about who Rob is, but he and the other main characters are painted in colors so primary that it scarcely matters they have names. He is a handsome modern urban dweller of the young and scruffy variety, he is on his way to Japan for work, he is pining over his long-time platonic girl-mate Beth (Odette Yustman), who recently cancelled their platonicism. He has a brother (Mike Vogel), the brother has a girlfriend (Jessica Lucas), they have an exasperating goofball buddy named Hud (T.J. Miller) filming the party, and Hud is flirting awkwardly with approachable oddball Marlena (Lizzy Caplan).

That is all ye know about these characters, and all ye need know. When catastrophe strikes, Hud dutifully keeps the camera off himself and on his prettier co-stars as they dash from one terror to the next in the night streets; Rob leading them in a quest to rescue Beth from her battered high-rise. I care about this couple only so much as they both seem attractive, clean, and decent. No matter – Rob’s determination to get to her, and his willingness to put his friends’ lives in peril by letting them tag along on a cross-town hike through a war zone, is what gets us into the action, and that’s what we are here to see.

What we do see is impressively realized; able to produce both creeping disgust in a darkened tunnel (just what is that terrible, chattering sound?) as well as the large-scale disasters like the frequently-marketed image of the decapitated Statue of Liberty. The movie’s cleverest touch shows the New Yorkers, within moments of Lady Liberty’s giant head skidding down their block, shuffling dazedly towards it with their cell phone cameras held in front of them like talismans. In a movie that so thoroughly amalgamates the contemporary visual vocabulary of our real-life mass traumas then does little more than play a game of “I Spy” with them between running and screaming, it is the closest feint towards a statement about our transformation into dulled and desensitized consumers of strife.

Much of the time what hobbles Cloverfield is not its stylistic daring, but its absolutely mechanical approach to everything else. The image may feign rough immediacy but it’s just a façade, behind it this movie is as squared-off as Eastern Bloc architecture. After a few behavior-based laugh moments at the party, character and dialogue in Drew Goddard’s screenplay are effectively sandblasted of all distinguishing details. Our lead group is whittled away in the traditional order, and you could distribute Bingo cards with the collected interjections of Event Movie cliché: “Oh my God!”, “What is THAT?!”, et al.

As persistently unsteady as “Hud” is with the camera, he always manages to get what needs to be in or out of the frame for maximum jolt, it always manages to show just a little bit more of that mythic “Cloverfield” as we near the final reel. Michael Bonvillain, veteran of producer J.J. Abrams’ TV shows like Lost and Alias, is the movie’s cinematographer, and must be commended for how ingeniously he’s able to stage and capture the necessary actions and details of each scene in unrelentingly long takes, with none of the traditional angles and coverage of film grammar.

But these are just the trappings of Cloverfield, the daring new evening gown on a most familiar guest. As flashy as its presentation is (and as nausea-inducing on the big-screen for those of fragile equilibriums), this is still a throwback. A simple and ruthlessly-effective one, but a throwback still. In the end I cannot truly condemn it for that – I don’t imagine that the filmmakers’ ambition exceeded what I’m describing. On their own terms, they have pulled one off.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The 11th Hour

2008-02-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

Originally posted 9/1/07
Full review behind the jump

The 11th Hour
Directors: Nadia Conners and Lelia Conners Petersen
Writers: Nadia Conners and Lelia Conners Petersen
Producers: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chuck Castleberry, Brian Gerber, Leila Conners Petersen
Featuring: narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, full list of featured interviewees available at film’s website

I cannot critique movies based on good intentions, because if I did then The 11th Hour would be the best picture of the year. I honestly believe that the film’s producers, including the Prius-driving, private-jet-eschewing, carbon-offset purchasing megastar/narrator Leonardo DiCaprio, genuinely seek to improve our relationship with the planet we inhabit and the resources we use to survive on it. This goes too for the dozens of interview subjects; these are PhD’s, Nobel laureates, world leaders, authors and scientists and men of the cloth and they all mean terribly well. They are not just out there weeping over the spotted owl, they are keenly aware that the population of the Earth has doubled in the last 45 years, many of the energy sources we use to support this population are finite, costly, and come with terrible side effects, and if we keep unbalancing Nature we run the ominous risk of Nature re-balancing itself, with us no longer in the picture.

As one of the talking heads says: “The planet has all the time in the world. We don’t.” Professor Steven Hawking takes time out from cracking the mysteries of the universe to point out the flimsy range of tolerances that we are able to exist in – such-and-such temperatures, such-and-such mixtures of atmospheric gases, such-and-such volume of clean water and available biomass to consume. Cast in those terms (and his famous computer-aided speaking “voice” serves to underline this cold reality), it feels like a thriving human race and virtual extinction are, in planetary terms, only the smallest nudge apart.

There are solutions, of course, but The 11th Hour seems torn between its desires to both scare the hell out of us and inspire us with the possibilities of a new relationship with our home. Any good preacher will tell you that you talk about Hell first, then salvation, and writer/directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen have eagerly appropriated that lesson. But in striving to do both jobs as thoroughly as their 93-minute running time allows, their film dashes pell-mell around the planet, trying to tie together mercury pollution and cracking ice shelves and childhood asthma and war in the Middle East into a single thesis about, well…I can’t seem to put it in a single sentence. That’s the problem, really.

The film takes on an almost thudding routine, switching from talking head to nature footage back to DiCaprio, whose presence further muddies things. He doesn’t have the credentials of the interviewees, or the meticulously-credible air with which Al Gore plodded through the evidence in An Inconvenient Truth. He is here as a celebrity spokesperson, and our generation has grown plenty weary and suspicious of them. His presence may sell more tickets, but is it going to be someone from that audience segment that really contributes to the solutions this movie is calling for?

They show intermittent miracles-in-progress, but rarely stop to spend any time appreciating them. We glimpse a beautiful office building built with ascending terraces covered with green plants, and half-a-second later it’s gone; we’ll never know if it’s actually under construction, or how its elements might work harmoniously. We spend two seconds in a dance club which is actually powered by the thermal and kinetic energy released by the people dancing within it. Thought-provoking, but what happens when the DJ switches to Kenny G?

Worse still are the images that have no apparent context. We watch animal carcasses being carved up on an assembly line. We’re an omnivorous species and there’s a lot of us that need to be fed – is the film protesting the meat-eating itself, or the cold efficiency with which we acquire it? Is there anything that could actually be done about that? Or is it hoping to simply press one of our visceral sympathy buttons, like that shot of scientists releasing penguins from crates on a beach so they can trundle to the ocean? Why were they in the crates to begin with? What does that have to do with more efficient roofing?

Nature photography is an art form that has quietly become more astonishing in each passing year – one need only look at the recent BBC-produced miniseries Planet Earth to sample the breathtaking imagery you can get with patience and good equipment these days. By contrast, the vistas of The 11th Hour have an off-the-shelf feel. It’s fond of LA’s smoggy skyline, and swooping shots of the rainforest, but they look grainy and de-saturated, and the filmmakers have neither the time nor the poetry to arrange such sights in a way that ever communicates more than – Earth is beautiful, but bad things are happening.

The film’s most effective moments happen when it manages to stick with one topic and develop it for a few minutes. Author and talk radio host Thom Hartmann builds an effective metaphor about how ancient humans sustained their population solely on the energy the sun put out any given year to provide heat and food for crops, which fed animals which we used for meat and skins, etc. Now, he argues, we’ve learned to tap into fossil fuels, which are effectively “ancient sunlight”, unused and stored beneath our surface. What happens to a population of 6 billion that hasn’t developed alternatives when the ancient sunlight, as it inevitably must, run out? That’s the sort of provocative question The 11th Hour should be asking more of.

I love the message of this movie – that Nature has an inspiring system that lets nothing go to waste and makes the most use of the energy given it. This makes it resilient – it can rally back from just about whatever we throw at it and still bring forth marvels. If we could learn such flexibility then our limits as a species would be beyond dreaming. But there are tipping points, massive melting glaciers, trapped pockets of carbon dioxide, that if triggered could re-set Earth’s equilibrium outside our comfort zone, and the contributors to The 11th Hour are concerned that such tipping points don’t always announce themselves until it’s too late. We could learn a lot about the way we build skyscrapers, transport ourselves from place to place, make consumer goods, and anything else that uses energy from the way Nature cycles eternally through construction, re-absorption, and transformation. Like I said, I cannot grade on heart, because these peoples’ is in the right place. They are optimistic, imaginative, sincere. But this does not save the movie they are participating in from a distressing lack of artistry.

'Scuse me while I whip this out

2008-02-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

The other night I was playing poker with some movie-business types, and one of the other writers at the table expressed shock that I wasn't actually working on any scripts, that I was following strike rules to the letter and didn't have a little spec cooking on the sly. But it's true - I haven't written a page of screenplay since November.

But today, for the first time since then, I clicked on Final Draft, opened a screenplay file...and wrote. It wasn't much, maybe a page-and-a-half (so far; day ain't over yet), but it finally got me to the end of Act One, which is cause for some relief.

And just DOING it felt like having sex again after a long drought. Even if it ain't the best of my life, it sure beats all the jerkin' off I've been doing.

Jesus didn't make it through the Eliminator

2008-02-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

Since I loved American Gladiators growing up, and wanted to see just what the networks were going to weather the strike with, of course I was going to check out the new version. Most of the contenders are garden-variety reality-TV narcissists, struggling to brand themselves in front of primetime eyeballs, but I admit I've developed a TV crush on indomitable soccer mom Monica, who grins, sees this ordeal as the ludicrous game it is, and resists the pressure from all quarters to become a nasty smack-talker crowing about phony glory. Her mix of adrenalized go-getter cheer and ropy dancer's muscles seem poised to make her the ladies' champion.

The one who really fascinates me, though, is Andy, the youth minister who's ripped like Carrot Top. The moment anything goes wrong on his sunny mission to prove to America that Christianity can kick some, you can see the raging, paranoid passive-aggression trying to tear out of that thin smile on his face. I'm almost sad that he got knocked out of the semi-finals, his Jesus power apparently not enough to overcome a scrappy high-school wrestling coach with Roadrunner speed. The true dirty thrill of these new personality-oriented game shows is that we get to watch peoples' carefully-constructed self-images come totally unwound.

And here was the other thing I couldn't help noticing: During one of his interview segments, he said that one of his goals in competing is to teach people that "Christianity really is for everybody!" Can you imagine a primetime network show airing an interview segment where a contestant said that his reason for competing was to teach America that "Islam is for everybody!"

I'm just askin'.

I am NOT going back to work...on Monday, at least

2008-02-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

Word out of New York and Los Angeles is that, despite some last-minute attempts by 20th Century Fox's lawyers to play Calvinball with some minor deal points (way to change that reputation as a petty, money-grubbing bully, Mr. Murdoch!), the membership is solidly behind this proposed deal. I was not able to attend, but don't regret in the slightest what I was doing instead, and it sounds like the standing ovations for our board and negotiating committee did just fine without me.

Instead of immediately lifting the strike as of Monday morning, the board changed their tune out of respect for the membership, allowing us instead to vote as a full body on this matter. This means an extra 48 hours to get the details of the deal disseminated and arrange a vote. In all likelihood, this puts us back to work on Wednesday; and 10 days after that, we have our vote on the actual deal. And barring any nasty surprises, it sounds like it will pass with a healthy margin.

The Oscars will be saved, and maybe without so many months to over-think jokes it might be a bit brisker a show (a guy can dream, right?) A stripped-down pilot season for this fall can be salvaged, and the "Back 9" (the mid-season order of 9 episodes that completes a scripted series' full 22-episode season) for many shows will be thrust back into production. Your talk shows are going to get much funnier again, your soap operas won't be written by scabs, and after a few weeks of madcap crewing-up around town, scripted primetime shows will be back in front of the cameras in about six weeks, and in your homes a month or so later. By late April/early May, TV should be relatively close to what it looked like before the strike hit.

Features will rush back into production, but are likely to still be a little gun-shy pending SAG's deal. Their contract expires at the end of June, and if you thought the writers were able to grind things to a halt, just watch what happens if the studios try screwing with the actors. For the moment, any feature that isn't likely to be in post-production by July will probably avoid going into production. And if the studios are smart rather than simply mean, they'll start negotiating with the actors lickety-split. They played the strongest hand they had, and they lost.

Am I going back to work?

2008-02-09T11:26:00.001-08:00

Full post behind the jump

Contrary to what the papers keep reporting, the strike is NOT over, even though the media has grown bored with it like they grow bored with wars that aren't fun anymore. However, there is a tentative deal that our board is in favor of, and there will be doubtlessly-contentious meetings on both coasts tonight to go over the deal and air a few arguments on both sides.

For those with a perverse interest in this sort of thing, the summary of the major deal points is here; and having looked it over, to the best of my limited knowledge, I'm going to agree with what many are saying: that this is a modest victory for our side, but a victory nonetheless.

First, the bad news: I don't even see the letters "DVD" in there, which means that we gave up trying to stitch up that old wound. That's a heavy pill to swallow, especially for a feature writer like me, but we knew going in that the leadership was ready to trade this if it meant making a big move on the Internet. We had to be ready for this, and DVD revenue is declining while the Internet is growing - didn't anyone notice Steve Jobs' new ultra-thin iMAC doesn't even HAVE a DVD drive? You think he doesn't see the writing on the wall when it comes to downloading content wirelessly? There's a silver lining to this I'll discuss below.

More bad news: We just couldn't manage to kill that free streaming window. While we incrementally improved on what the directors got, and ensured ourselves a percentage share down the road (in the THIRD YEAR OF RE-USE; you know, when the real popularity of a TV show kicks in), those low flat rates for the first two years are still there, and studios will still get to keep every penny of advertising revenue from the first 17 days of a show's life on-line, when most of the viewing takes place. It's obvious that the studios are gambling on ad-supported streaming as THE future of television; because they fought like devils, and gave up a lot of other little morsels, to preserve those 17 days. I have a hunch that they've guessed wrong, but we'll get into that later.

Also: we sacrificed our efforts to unionize reality TV and animation. These are long-time sore spots for our union, and I can only imagine how much more leverage we would have had if we'd been able to shutdown The Apprentice and Project Runway. You thought the primetime schedule had been looking anemic; just try and picture that. But, knowing our leadership, we're not done working this angle, and will resume pressuring the shows on a one-by-one basis. We don't have to wait for three years to make noise on this one.

The final significant problem I see, and this has potential to be incredibly thorny: as in the DGA deal, there's a limbo bar the studios can wriggle under when it comes to original Internet programming. If the budget is under $1,500-per-minute, or $300,000 per program, and the writer(s) is/are not already a Guild member or by some other means a "professional writer", then the Guild has no jurisdiction. No minimums, no pension and health contributions, nada.

I know why the studios want this - in their minds, they're now in direct competition with every teenager who has a youTube page, so they want to be able to put micro-budgeted content out there without always being saddled with Guild minimums. As someone who has thought about making his own short films but wondered if he'd end up being hammered by having to pay SAG minimums out of his own pocket (my pockets ain't that deep), I actually sympathize with this, even though I think the numbers are way too high. Many episodes of basic cable programs are already under $300,000 per episode, and because "uncovered" Internet programming can then be "re-used" on traditional media without any visible guarantee of then having to conform to normal terms, this opens up a huge hole for non-union work on TV. In one sense I applaud it, as it will give a lot of young, non-union writers a way they can get their foot in the door with the studios. The trouble is - once they're in, will the studios try and KEEP them non-union?

What's the nightmare scenario? Let's say I'm a studio that wants to try out a pilot, but isn't sure that it's going to catch on, so I don't want to risk a lot of money. Let's call my show...um....~~quarterlife~~ Bland Young Adults Navel-Gazing. If I keep the budget under $300,000 and tell everyone in earshot - "I'm producing this for the INTERNETS, by Jimbo! The Highway of Tomorrow!", then I can hire a non-union writing staff, work them 80-hour weeks, pay diddledy-squat in benefits, and keep 100% of the ad revenue. And then, a few months later, I can tell everyone in earshot "Why, America LOVES this Bland Young Adults Navel-Gazing business! If only I had another platform, something like a major TV network, to show it on. Wait! I DO!" And then I can just port the show over to my Network, treat it like a new show for the non-Internet-savvy crowd, AND NEVER SHARE A RED CENT WITH ANYONE WHO WORKED ON IT.

I would love to have someone explain to me that it couldn't possibly work that way, but I'm not seeing it.

There are two small comforts here: 1) if the actual budget ever exceeds $300,000 sometime during production/post-production, the Guild's Agreement immediately applies retroactively. A lot of companies are going to squeeze right up to that line, and a lot are going to tumble over it early on. 2) By cutting themselves off from not just Guild talent, but any professional writer (including produced playwrights and published novelists), they will only be getting to play in the shallow end of the talent pool, and every time they find a promising artist there, we'll know about it and be working to put the Union stamp on them. And they'll want it, too, because they'll want the benefits and percentages they get working under our Agreement.

Still, things could be a little Wild West out here for awhile. But that's the effect the Web has.

Now, you're saying - God, this sounds WRETCHED, Nick! Why do you have anything like the cautious optimism you're projecting? First, a general note about strikes:

Strikes are negotiations that harness the emotional volume of a mass organism of pissed-off laborers. Remember that: even with all the signs and chants and invective, it is ALWAYS a negotiation. And in negotiation, no side ever gets everything they ask for, unless you're President Bush beating Congressional Democrats with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution (it's what he thinks it's for. That, and cleaning up BBQ-sauce stains.) So, if you're negotiating for labor, there's no way you can tell 10,000-plus people "This is what we think we can get, but they'll never just agree, so THIS is what we're going to demand, in the hopes that after it's chipped away, we'll be back at what we considered acceptable before. SHHHHHH! Don't tell anyone! It's a super best-friend pinky-swear secret!"

The goal of any negotiation is to trick the other side into revealing the minimum they'll accept, and then bleed them from THAT. So, you give your membership a list. Everything on it seems reasonable, everything on it is certainly deserved. And you say: "We're going in there to GET THIS LIST!" And we go "Huzzah!" and the strike begins.

Pissing off your membership by coming back with less than that initial list is not a bug in this process, it's a feature. Intellectually, I knew this. I also knew that my role in this strike was to say that everything on our list of demands is reasonable, and deserved, and we should get nothing less, and we stand with our leadership to make that happen.

So, that said, here's the good news, and there is quite a bit:

Distributors' gross, distributor's gross, distributor's gross. When I saw those words pop up in the DGA deal, I knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. Hollywood accounting is a finely-honed art of pretending nothing ever makes money around here, as a way of avoiding having to share profits. Don't believe me? Hollywood accountants claim Forrest Gump is still in the red* (*not a joke). Distributor's gross is our protection against that; it means that our share is calculated from all the money that flows in, before any of it gets diverted to other profit participants or cross-collateralized. We were never able to get this on home video or DVD. We've got it for the Internet, and the impact of that can't be undersold.

As for what concerns me most directly, on the feature side of things, Internet rentals and purchases of feature films have a formula that represents a HUGE improvement over home video/DVD. We're set for 1.2% for rentals and ad-supported streaming, and 0.36% for direct sales on the first 50,000, jumping to 0.65% for all sales afterwards. Now those numbers aren't sterling, and they are far short of the traditional 2.5% television re-use formula, but my rough math suggests that this represents a quadrupling of our share compared to home video/DVD. As a feature writer, this deal does a lot to cover my future.

Now remember how I said that all was not dire for TV writers, and that 17-day free window wasn't necessarily the ruin of everything? Here's my theory: at our Strike TV seminar, an expert in web marketing showed us a simple slide depicting the vast disparity in where advertising dollars are being spent compared to where consumer eyeballs are at these days. As I recall, it was something like only 8% of advertising dollars are presently devoted to the web, where Americans in the prime demographics are now spending as much of 34% of their leisure time there.

Advertisers look at that number and think - we should be putting lots more advertising on the web! I look at it and think - The reason people are flocking to the Internet is that they are sick of goddamn advertising.

We've got DVRs now to skip commercials. We wait for TV shows to come on DVD so we can watch them on our own schedule without interruption. We are becoming more active, empowered viewers, and TV has responded by giving us more ambitious serialized stories like in 24 and Heroes. If you have a choice to watch a show, streaming, in five minute chunks with commercials, or to pay a small fee and watch the full-episode at the touch of one button with no buffer lag and no ads, I think the studios are going to be very surprised how many people start choosing to pay rather than continue playing the Hostage Eyeballs game they've been running for decades. Remember how they kept predicting the doom of satellite radio, because no one would pay for commercial-free good music when we could get repetitive garbage with lots of commercials for free? There's signs of revolt brewing in the American consumer, we want to re-negotiate this deal where watching obnoxious ads is how we pay for our entertainment.

And the formulas for TV rental and purchase on-line? They're the same as the feature writers' shares. They actually get a better formula for sell-through after 100,000 purchases. I think that's going to be worth more than a lot of writers are imagining right now.

Maybe that's pie-eyed of me. There's a lot to grumble over in this deal, and I'm sure the grumbling will reach pretty high-volume tonight. To be honest, I'm not sure yet how I would vote on this deal, because I'm not educated enough to understand all the nuances and I want the more-educated people to weigh in.

But what no one can deny is - it's a substantial deal, and we would not have anything near this if we hadn't gone on strike.

I'll let myself smile about that for awhile.

MOVIE REVIEW - In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale

2008-02-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
Director: Uwe Boll
Writers: Screen Story by Jason Rappaport and Dan Stroncak and Doug Taylor, Screenplay by Doug Taylor, based on the video game by Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games
Producers: Shawn Williamson, Dan Clarke, Uwe Boll
Stars: Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Ray Liotta, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, Brian J. White, Claire Forlani, Kristanna Loken

There’s a sense of liberation in watching an Uwe Boll film, and that’s saying something, I suppose. He’s making an apparently-endless string of bad adaptations of mediocre video games (Postal is next), and to watch one of them is to know that no one feels bound by logic, taste, or even the usual aesthetic ground rules of professional filmmaking. We could cut to any angle at any time, we might dash away from important scenes, linger forever in pointless ones, the camera might focus intently on the least important character, tone may shift from grief to goofy with no warning, comically-loud music stings might leap onto the soundtrack with no motivation…The lead characters’ skin tones might even change from reel to reel – that’s how much Uwe Boll refuses to be tied down. I have been aghast and bewildered in every Boll film I’ve seen (and this makes three), but I confess I have never been entirely bored.

His latest, the bulkily-titled In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, contains neither a dungeon nor a siege, but is based on a video game called Dungeon Siege which contained little in the way of story. This movie tells quite a bit of story, two bloated hours of monsters and battles and awkward costumes and magic spells, clanging swords and thundering horses and inconsistent accents. Its budget surpasses that of Boll’s previous filmography all in, and I must admit that for once he seems to be working with a crew that has picked up a camera before. On the one hand, this reduces the damage he’s capable of. On the other hand, it means he really has no one left to blame.

Most surprising to me in all of this is the presence of Jason Statham, our generation’s best guilty-pleasure action star, the man who makes bad movies ridiculous and ridiculous movies good. But beyond some dexterous sword-whanging he can do little to help this picture. One of the most reliable facets of the Uwe Boll aesthetic is to cast “names” who are utterly, clangingly, wrong for their roles. Statham is far more upwardly-mobile, career-wise, than the usual Boll player, and the essence of his appeal is his contemporary growl and swagger. Making him a virtuous peasant in a fantasy epic is like, well, making Ray Liotta a diabolical wizard in a fantasy epic, or Burt Reynolds a stately warrior-king in a fantasy epic. So there you go.

Statham indeed plays the Little Villager with a Big Destiny in some Faraway Land that might be Ancient Vancouver. He calls himself Farmer, since, as his wife (Claire Forlani) explains, he believes that a man’s identity should become one with his work. This is a somewhat workable system in small hamlets, but in a modern city you’d have an awful lot of people answering to the name Muffler Specialist.

His wife is kidnapped (among other atrocities) by the Krugs, which are this movie’s catchall beast-monsters. They look like a six-year-old sculpted all the various evil creatures of The Lord of the Rings in Play-Dough, then smushed them together. Normally they aren’t given to weaponized raids, but they’ve fallen under the command of the wizard Gallian (Liotta), who is plotting to overthrow the King of Ebb (Reynolds), install the King’s fey and loutish drunk of a nephew Fallow (Matthew Lillard) in his stead, and rule the land. Surrounded by cutting-edge* computer effects (*if you’re in 1992), and with his voice comfortably in his Goodfellas cocaine-freakout octave, Liotta is trying to bull through his character’s lack of dimension with sheer crazy volume. He wears his spangly, collared longcoat and silk cravat like he’s at Comic-con, debuting his homemade concept for a new Dr. Who costume, and he’s very, very upset that people are making fun of it.

The movie is angling Gallian and the humble Farmer to a showdown, with intervening battle scenes of interminable length and a great deal of pointless intrigue involving the King’s mage Merick (John Rhys-Davies), Merick’s ambitious-but-naïve daughter Muriella (Leelee Sobieski), and a race of vine-swinging forest people who hate the violent ways of Man and don’t involve themselves in wars, except when they do. The actors soldier through all of it, and I confess a twisted admiration for them for believing that this would somehow make sense after it was all cut together.

Reynolds looks like he has no idea what a single one of his lines means, but that he intends to grimace his way to the end, even when, on the battlefield, he has to give the orders to dispatch his army’s ninjas. Ninjas?, you now ask incredulously…Yes, the Kingdom has exactly six of them, no more and no less, and the way their appearance decisively flings the movie across the threshold into total barking nonsense calls to mind that moment from the 60’s version of Casino Royale where the Indians dropped in by parachute.

One would think Reynolds has enough money socked away by now to not need to do this stuff, to not risk his dignity in a scene where he’s reclining on a pillow, and he shakes his head solemnly while his toupee stays conspicuously still. Not so Matthew Lillard, who gives himself to this trash with unrestrained glee. His performance is a riff on Johnny Depp’s boozy Captain Jack Sparrow, only without the wit, charm, beard, sex appeal, or timing.

It’s rare to leave a movie thinking that it could only have looked that entirely bad because someone intended it to, but in this case I could imagine Boll looking at the digital matte backgrounds of sprawling castles and rocky cliffs and demanding: “Grayer!, Blurrier!” He’s put a lot of stuff in front of the camera, we spend downright Wagnerian spans of time watching extras wave swords around with Statham in their midst, but to what end? Given that every character in this kingdom can seemingly walk to any other point in the kingdom in a brisk afternoon, how big a plot of dirt is Gallian really thinking to rule, here? The movie doesn’t know, and the movie doesn’t care. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale is content to pour everything it can out of the Generic Fantasy Elements Bucket, and hope that, maybe this time, the mad Uwe Boll will not exercise his uncanny power to inject Stupid into it. Guess what happens?

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Invasion

2008-02-08T16:49:00.001-08:00

Originally posted 8/25/07
Full review behind the jump

The Invasion
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Writer: Dave Kajganich, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney
Producer: Joel Silver
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, Jeremy Northam, Jackson Bond, Jeffrey Wright, Veronica Cartwright, Josef Sommer, Celia Weston, Roger Rees, Eric Benjamin

“Plastic people/Oooooh baby, now you’re such a drag”
-Frank Zappa

I don’t think this is a small point to make – in the classic “B”-movies of 50’s science fiction, you couldn’t cut very much. Film stock meant money, after all, so suspense had to be created, not with jittery montage, but with invention and atmosphere (or by a well-placed theremin on the soundtrack.) It helped to reinforce that the cut is a distancing device, as well, with a tendency to disperse such genre-essential moods as dread and claustrophobia.

Further, for the same monetary reasons, these movies didn’t have stars in them. The real high-wattage marquee names didn’t want anything to do with such kids’ stuff; so again, the movies sank or swam on the potency of their ideas and the wit of their execution.

Nowadays, Hollywood has nearly abandoned every genre save the “B” picture, but contrary to its original aesthetic definition they hurl their biggest stars at them, with giant sacks of money tied ‘round their waists. This regularly produces fascinating misfires like The Invasion. Here is a movie that revives a well-traveled science fiction classic (now being adapted for the fourth time) and takes advantage of all possible modern resources. It can blind you with quick cuts, fill city streets with extras, and command you to bask in the warm radiance of A-list star Nicole Kidman. And all those assets, a critical mass of Hollywood Blockbuster Big Mo, are precisely what end up spoiling it by leveraging the movie away from its core good ideas.

As before this is a story about a nigh-invisible conquest of our planet by alien invaders, who replace us in our sleep with duplicates who can impersonate our behavior, but without the knack for how emotions work. The screenplay by Dave Kajganich has fun with pod-person dialogue which is revealingly just a few inches away from correct. In this iteration, the alien is viral, a pathogen that hitches a ride aboard a crashing space shuttle, and re-writes our DNA while we’re dreaming so we wake up unclouded by feeling, and filled with the desire to spread this sensation to others. Liquid is the preferred method, watch out for anyone who keeps trying to offer you coffee.

This is a great story because it always feels relevant. These days we’ve had to ponder a lot of dark suggestions – that we can free ourselves of the deepest depression, all we have to do is give up our best happiness; that we can keep America safe, all we have to do is give up what makes us Americans. This story posts a flag at the terminus of that nightmare train of thought – we could end all the war and poverty and suffering of humanity; all we have to do is give up what makes us human.

And in a few of its ominous sweeps The Invasion gets this very right. We see how our own ingrained obedience to authority makes us easier prey – infected government officials send vaguely dire warnings about a superflu through the compliant media and the populace lines up for “vaccinations”. Hey, remember all the duct tape we were told to buy? And as Dr. Carol Bennell (Kidman), a therapist, crosses the street to her office, she’s unnerved to see everyone…cooperating. Bus passengers lined up patiently and quietly. Pedestrians making way for one another. No car horns.

One of her patients (Veronica Cartwright) is claiming that her husband is no longer her husband, because he won’t even fight with her. Ever since Alien, when she got blasted in the face by fake blood during an improvised scene and became hysterical, Cartwright has been the go-to actress when you need someone to turn all wobbly on-demand. Appreciate just how much her performance paints a picture for you of what’s going very, very wrong in the world, and you have a glimpse of the way these movies used to have to get it done.

Even new 007 Daniel Craig’s incipient pod of movie stardom is not yet so hardened around him that he can’t crack through it and act. See how much presence and vibrancy he brings to Dr. Bennell’s friend Ben Driscoll; a character which is, on paper, all but thankless, the earnest and decent equivalent of a Ken doll. He’s still going about this as if his job is to create a character and perform him, rather than sell tickets, and I hope he preserves this habit as long as he can.

But it’s Kidman, with her porcelain doll face and a pointless chirpy Southern accent, that eventually capsizes The Invasion. It’s not that she gives a bad performance, it’s that her dreamgirl radiance carries the implied promise of everything being okay in the end. The movie seems hesitant to be too hopeless, to worry us too much about our capacity for annihilation from within.

In a way it has fallen victim to the wrong side of its own theme, finding it preferable to not make us feel too strongly one way or the other. When parables float into view, the movie looks the other way. When it finds a powerful spectacle of despair, it hurries off to a chase scene. It’s one of the puzzlements of Hollywood why anyone would want to spend so much money on a movie and then hope we don’t react too much to it. But too often, instead of being about our insidious undoing as a species, this version of The Invasion is just about a pretty woman with mean people trying to get her. From little movies with big ideas, we’ve arrived at a huge movie which actively shrinks its ambitions.

MOVIE REVIEW - AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem

2008-02-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem
Directors: “The Brothers Strause” – Colin Strause & Greg Strause
Writers: Screenplay by Shane Salerno, based on the Alien characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, and the Predator characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas
Producers: John Davis, Wyck Godfrey, David Giler & Walter Hill
Stars: Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade, Kristen Hager, Ian Whyte, Tom Woodruff, Jr.

Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary defines a “requiem” as a “mass for the dead”, or “a solemn chant (as a dirge) for the repose of the dead”. There’s no small amount of dead in AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem, which is clearly competing for the award of Most Obtuse Title for Anyone Outside the Core Fanbase. But the movie doesn’t seem to care about honoring them, simply giving them company at an anything-but-dirge-like pace. It is not so much for the dead as indifferently with them, killing by the thousands and not feeling particularly much about it.

Of course, a big body count is to be expected when finally giving fans of the Alien franchise what they’ve always fantasized about – a chance to see the acid-bleeding bug beasties set loose on Earth. Plus, you’ve got the wildcard of the Predators, those invisibility-wielding outer-space hunters who will only occasionally, and grudgingly, stop looking at individual humans as trophies. To top it off, as we glimpsed at the end of the first Alien vs. Predator grudge match, thanks to the Alien’s ability to adopt the traits of whatever host it gestates in, we now have a Predator-Alien hybrid (played by frequent Alien-suit wearer Tom Woodruff, Jr.) running loose. This was, logically, the only way left to create something with even more teeth.

This is sci-fi geek jambalaya, and ought not to have to try too hard to entertain within its own relatively-ridiculous idiom. I welcome these slime-dripping creatures with glad familiarity and comfortably-lowered expectations, since the days of filmmakers like Ridley Scott and James Cameron using them as anything more than pop-up monsters is clearly long past. All I ask is that you have enough new ideas to justify a new movie, and that you give me a few human characters to care about as something more than talking chum. Seeing this movie, I wonder if I might still be asking too much.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Two characters are having a grim conversation in a diner about a dead body that was found. The Sheriff (John Ortiz), giving his best that’s-gonna-give-me-nightmares look, chokes out this observation: “He was skinned alive!” Actually, no, we watched him get killed quite dead before he was skinned. But this is a script so incapable of resisting the gravity of cliché that screenwriter Shane Salerno can’t conceive of the word “skinned” not having “alive” come after it.

The story picks up from the previous movie, where the Predators, after the fiery destruction of their Antarctic hunting resort, bring back the body of one of their fallen, which unbeknownst to them has been “impregnated”. You’d think they’d have enough experience with these creatures and what they’re capable of to beknownst things like this by now. Anyway, the new Pred-Alien makes his primetime debut, crashing their ship outside a small town in Colorado – a state which, for Hollywood budgetary purposes, has been permanently relocated to Canada.

The dying Predators send a distress call to their home planet, and a single Predator (7’1” Ian Whyte) swings into action, which calls to mind the legend about how the ancient Spartans would answer calls for assistance by sending one soldier. He hits the ground and sets to work executing Aliens, and dissolving their bodies, along with any other evidence of the goings-on, with a little jar of glowing blue solvent. The Aliens are busily doing what they always do, which is to build hives and variously terrorize, melt, or infect anyone they find – one commendably disgusting new wrinkle shows them learning to use the wombs of pregnant women like we use a microwave oven for popcorn. Since each encounter with the Predator sees him thus more outnumbered, I imagined his wearied posture communicating the thought that he should have brought some friends, or at least a bigger jar.

The local human population is, typically, slow to recognize anything unusual is going on, even when people are showing up skinned-while-dead. So we spend a great deal of time meeting stereotyped characters we already know won’t live long, and who don’t really matter as people anyway, because all we’re really going to see them do is run and scream whilst firing guns. Occupying the heroic role of Handsomest Man in Town is recently-released convict Dallas (Rescue Me’s Steven Pasquale), and I don’t know if Dallas is his first name, last name, or maybe his only name, like “McLovin”.

The other Useful Grownup would be returning Army Officer Kelly O’Brien (24’s Reiko Aylesworth), whose daughter (Ariel Gade) must be protected so we can have a child screaming all the way through to the end. The odds on her mild husband Tim (Sam Trammell) are not so friendly, especially since we’ve got the Handsomest Man in Town around and all.

The second half of the movie indeed contains lots of running, and shooting, and screaming, and new Predator gadgets that slice, dice, and explode – the Predator homeworld must have its own Ron Popeil. The two monsters clash at least as often as Godzilla tussled with Gigan, and if that’s enough for your money, you’ll get what you were looking for. Co-directors Colin and Greg Strause are former visual effects supervisors, and you can sense their boredom with any performer not encased in at least 50 pounds of rubber and latex.

Even if they did care, I don’t think that, with this script, the passion could have been passed onto us, because AVPR presents its human participants with few opportunities to make any real choices. They can fight, praying that the Gods of Hollywood Narrative have deemed it necessary they survive, or die bleeding and whimpering. Who they are as people never legitimately affects the plot, and the fact that no characters in the future-set Alien franchise have any record of such a home-planet outbreak doesn’t bode well for anyone in this little Colorado town. Which is perhaps what qualifies this as a requiem – it is a pronouncement that humans effectively died out of this series a long time ago.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Rush Hour 3

2008-02-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Originally published 8/20/07
Full review behind the jump

Rush Hour 3
Director: Brett Ratner
Writers: Jeff Nathanson, based on characters created by Ross LaManna
Producers: Arthur M. Sarkissian, Roger Birnbaum, Andrew Z. Davis, Jonathan Glickman, Jay Stern
Stars: Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan, Max Von Sydow, Hiroyuki Sanada, Yvan Attal, Youki Kudoh, Noémie Lenoir, Jingchu Zhang

Back when I was but a pup, a 21-year-old college senior writing film reviews for my school paper, the Bradley Scout, I started my review of the first Rush Hour picture by asking how it was possible for the plainly incompetent James Carter (Chris Tucker) to reach the rank of police detective at all, much less at such a young age, not to mention be able to afford to drive an impeccably-detailed Porsche Spider on a cop’s salary. But I recognized that the movie was not actually about police work, or competence, or really anything but a dressed-up series of contrived incidents based around such strange bedfellows as Tucker’s watered-down Eddie Murphy-in-48 Hours shtick and Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan’s human-pinball physical inventiveness.

I’ve come a long way as a movie critic since then, but Rush Hour 3 represents none too much progress for its franchise. Carter is still shallow, hyperactive, cowardly, and an absolute failure as a police officer – when the movie opens he’s been busted down to traffic cop, although why he’s still considered employable at all is beyond me. And the movie, as always, is a ramshackle progression of comic violence scenes hindered by a plot hole so massive it’s a wonder it doesn’t suck the whole movie into its maw.

The plot concerns the hunt for an assassin who has taken a near-fatal shot at Chinese Ambassador Han (Tzi Ma), the old friend of Police Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) whose daughter was kidnapped in the first Hour. It was a sign of this whole franchise’s disposability that I had to reach deep into my memory to recall that was indeed what the fuss was about.

Han was about to reveal a centuries-old secret – the identity of the leadership of the international criminal organization The Triads. If you see this movie (and I’m taking pains to preserve one of its “surprises”) you’ll understand how absurd is the implication that Han had access to this information, and at no point had it preserved anywhere permanent. In the age of cell phone cameras and the ominously-growing Google cache, the Triads’ fabled methods of concealment are so far from foolproof it’s laughable – their identities would be on the Internet in about three minutes.

But this is a movie that discourages thinking. It operates on the level of the 8-foot-tall kung-fu student (Sun Ming Ming) that Carter and Lee end up in brief and comically unsuccessful fisticuffs with. On seeing Carter’s bug-eyed, mosquito-voiced antics, the giant grins and exclaims “Funny black man!” Whatever test screenings the Rush Hour movies have gone through, I think the positive scorecards must have been covered, with no sense of irony, in comments like that.

I’ve been a fan of Jackie Chan’s ever since that same stint as a college movie snob took me to see his first real break-through to American audiences, 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx. Even then he was a little off his physical peak, but his Buster Keaton-inspired comic timing, ingenious choreography, eager-beaver charm and sheer crazy stuntman guts granted him several more years at or near the top of his game. Now he is 53 and, given that he’s abused his body more than two Evel Knievels, that the man can still walk is impressive, but the effects of time on his speed and dexterity are now undeniable. In addition, the quick-cut, close-up heavy American filmmaking style has always done him a disservice, interrupting the almost melodic pacing of his stunt sequences, and time and time again they make the mistake of casting him as the disapproving straight man against the goofy likes of Tucker and Owen Wilson. This is squandering a rare and finite resource, my friends.

Rush Hour 3 doesn’t give Chan much to show off with until its climax, which involves a vigorous sword fight and a chance for him to clamber and leap around the superstructure of the Eiffel Tower. Carter has been studying up on his own kung-fu, which is gladdening, since before he could participate in fights it was a mystery why Lee even bothered to give such an obvious liability a chance to muck up his investigations.

It’s their enduring friendship, though, which provides what few sweet pleasures these movies have. By means which would take too long to explain, Carter at one point must protect a key witness (Noémie Lenoir) from hitmen by instigating a song and dance number with her; only to be joined by Lee (Chan has a thriving pop-music career in his native country). Suddenly it looks a lot more like a love song between the two men, which is more befitting this genre than many of its fans would care to admit. And at one point, as a disagreement has driven them apart, we see each having a lonely meal – Carter orders mu shu pork, and Lee suddenly craves fried chicken and sweet potato pie.

That means of poking at cultural stereotypes with a sort of impish guilelessness points the way towards what a more challenging kind of comedy the Rush Hour pictures could be, but they’re nearly always ready to settle for the easy gag lest you start thinking about what you’ve just spent money on. Director Brett Ratner has directed all three of these pictures, and as we know from filmmakers like Lucas and Spielberg, having a trilogy is, for better or worse, one-stop shopping for people to study your filmmaking values. Ratner’s most consistent quality as a director has nothing to do with style, or voice, or even talent – he’s a breezy mediocrity who’s probably swell at parties and has yet to lose studio money in any egregious amount.

His trademark is that he never fails to hire top-tier technicians and designers (Lalo Schifrin has composed music for this series that is almost appallingly inventive considering what banalities it ends up accompanying on-screen), and then puts them to work without thinking too hard about what story they’re trying to tell, without breaking a sweat trying to unify them towards any creative idea. Rush Hour 3 is, then, another in an unbroken line of quintessential Brett Ratner pictures – all impeccably gift-wrapped empty boxes. I knew that when I was 21 – I still know it today.

MOVIE REVIEW - National Treasure: Book of Secrets

2008-02-06T17:31:00.001-08:00

Full review behind the jump

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Director: Jon Turteltaub
Writers: Story by Gregory Poirier and Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley & Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, Screenplay by “The Wibberleys” (Cormac Wibberley and Marianne Wibberley), based on characters created by Jim Kouf and Oren Aviv & Charles Segars
Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Jon Turteltaub
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger, Jon Voight, Helen Mirren, Ed Harris, Harvey Keitel, Bruce Greenwood, Ty Burrell

This is something I almost never do: see a sequel without seeing the original picture. But I was wandering around Chicago with a friend on a blustery January day, and I’d seen everything else that the warm, inviting multiplex had to offer, and he promised me that there was nothing essential to the first movie that he couldn’t explain to me in sixty seconds.

He turned out to be right, and National Treasure: Book of Secrets (all the hip sequels are using colons and subtitles these days) turns out to be better than getting damp in Chicago snow for two hours. What I mean to say is that it is a success in terms of its own goals, which are to divert you for awhile with a professionally-prepared menu of pitfalls and puzzles and movie stars being charming. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer can knock these things out like Thomas Kinkade does creeks.

It is a movie that has learned exactly two things from Alfred Hitchcock: 1) Mt. Rushmore makes a dilly of a film location, and 2) a movie’s length should be determined by the carrying capacity of the audience’s bladder. Rarely does a movie so precisely avoid wearing out its welcome, probably because rarely is that so near to its grandest ambition.

The adventure features Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage), a treasure hunter whose ability to miraculously tease together arbitrary or just plain made up nuggets of Masonic lore, historical trivia, and ephemera about our founding fathers rivals the famed televised duels of wit between Adam West’s Batman and Frank Gorshin’s Riddler. His job is to discover squirreled-away hoards of gold so massive that they would capsize the world’s economy and likely trigger a few medium-sized wars. Cage is the right movie star for this role, since he has the ability to treat this like it’s a really cool way to spend a weekend.

He gets into his latest mission out of family pride, when a mysterious Southerner named Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris) steps forward with some heirlooms that suggest one of Gates’ ancestors was a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Lincoln. Harris can drip sinister on demand like a fine-tuned espresso machine, but his character’s machinations end up as far less than meets the eye. He’s really only a villain to the extent that somebody’s got to squeeze off a few rounds of ammo and trigger a car chase just to meet quotas.

Gates always understood that his great-umpty-great grandfather’s role in this long-ago story was not to help the plotters, but to destroy the code phrase they had brought to him to decrypt – a pointer leading to the legendary Lost City of Gold, which the rebels hoped to use to finance a few more years of Civil War. So Gates decides that he has no choice but to find that treasure, since if it exists, that must mean his ancestor was innocent. I believe that the website logicalfallacies.info would agree with me in identifying this as an example of “Affirming the Consequent”, since the question of the existence of a City of Gold is no direct means of proving whether or not a dead code-breaker assisted John Wilkes Booth. Maybe in a future sequel, Benjamin Franklin Gates will use the “No True Scotsman” fallacy to prove that the McGuffin can’t capture lions in the Scottish highlands.

Anyway, Gates’s pursuit of the myriad clues leading to the City will logistically demand breaking into the private office of the Queen of England, and kidnapping the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood) in order to get a look at the fabled “Book of Secrets”, which is passed down from one Chief Executive to the next, and contains the answer to every conspiracy crank’s wildest fantasy. Emotionally, it will require that Gates reunite with his on-again, off-again paramour Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger), put up with more chuckles from wisenheimer geek squad sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha), and get his long-divorced parents (Jon Voight and Helen Mirren) talking again.

We get lots of dramatically-whooshing shots of famous international monuments, and elaborate soundstage sets depicting cavernous mazes filled with low-tech but devious traps. There’s lots of peril, and leaping across chasms, and rumbling noises on the soundtrack depicting falling boulders of medium-size, or the coming of thousands of gallons of water. Cage gets to do some James Bond-like skulking around in a tuxedo at the Mount Vernon Estate and in the Library of Congress, invariably avoiding the combined scrutiny of the police, FBI, and Secret Service. Voight and Mirren are fun to watch as a pair of scholars not too old to remember how much their own treasure hunting used to turn them on. The jokes are pretty amusing, and the movie knows when it’s time to move it along.

It takes a lot of money to make a movie like National Treasure: Book of Secrets, not the equivalent of a City of Gold, but certainly a sum that even ten years ago would be reserved only for the most extravagant productions. If there’s art to it, it’s the kind of art that might go into making Nestle’s hot cocoa powder – something that travels well, doesn’t offend in the memory, and provides general satisfaction to as broad a swath of the population as possible. I’ve had some fun at National Treasure’s expense in this review, but I feel not a drop of malice for it. On a cold day in Chicago, something that’s capably generic still warms me up.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Stardust

2008-02-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

Originally published 8/17/07
Full review behind the jump

Stardust
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Writers: Screenplay by Janet Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman
Producers: Matthew Vaughn, Neil Gaiman, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Michael Dreyer
Stars: Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert DeNiro, Mark Strong, Jason Flemying, Sienna Miller, Henry Cavill, Ricky Gervais, Kate Magowan, with a special appearance by Peter O’Toole, and narrated by Sir Ian McKellen

There’s a moment in Stardust so brief you might well miss it, but so perfect you won’t want to. It comes in the climax, as the boyish hero Tristran (Charlie Cox), whom we’ve watched evolve in the course of a grand adventure from doofus to dashing, looks up to see a chandelier on the ceiling, the support rope in one of his hands, and a sword in the other. Before he takes the inevitable action which is like the ordination ritual for young swashbucklers, he seems to check these three items again with a glint of happy disbelief in his eyes, as if to say: “Wow, you mean I get to do this?”

It takes a special kind of actor to pull off a moment like that, because one must be both eager and genuine, committed to the peril of the moment but still vulnerable to an appreciation of, well, just how much silly fun it is to be leaping and fighting and saving endangered damsels. Cox is such an actor, and I suspect with this movie he will etch a permanent place in the romantic speculations of many, many teenage girls.

He is in more ways than usual the face of Stardust, because like him the movie is pretty and a bit shaggy, clumsy in a few steps but ultimately winning because it is sincere, funny, and good-hearted. On behalf of my generation I’ll state that I still prefer its spiritual cousin The Princess Bride, but this movie is going to have its champions in that debate, and they won’t be empty-handed for worthy arguments.

Stardust is one of the first stories to reach the screen from the notoriously difficult-to-adapt Neil Gaiman. One of the finest fantasy authors of this or any generation, his business card might as well read “Have Imagination. Will Travel.” It is co-written and directed by Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn. Vaughn, formerly Guy Ritchie’s producer, became a director quite by accident, and it seems to shield him from any self-seriousness.

As expensive as this movie appears – and as an experienced producer he’ll be able to tell you just how expensive – as a director he seems free to understand that the point of this endeavor is to just keep it moving forward, and along the way have a laugh, better yet a lot of laughs, and smiles, and rollicking thrills. From a construction standpoint it’s refreshingly loose-screwed; and it’s delivered with cheeky relish, plus an eminently British appreciation of understatement and suggestive asides. And from flying pirate ships to a spectral Greek Chorus of maimed ghosts to one of the more inventive sword fights of recent memory (involving a corpse effectively used as a marionette), it is thoroughly a tribute to both the ecstatic and macabre joys of imagining.

In the corner of England in the mid-19th century, the small village of Wall is so-named because of the ancient wall that divides it from the magical Kingdom of Stormhold, a country that looks pieced together from all the greatest landscapes of Europe. The wall is guarded, although not so robustly that a determined person couldn’t cross it. The unstated implication is that most people just aren’t curious enough about magic to try.

But Tristran, rather recklessly, is. A shooting star fell to the ground on the other side of the wall, and he pledges to retrieve it as a gesture of love for the town’s prize bachelorette, the far-above-his-station Victoria (Sienna Miller). His willingness to risk life and limb for a star, she calculates, is potentially enough of an improvement on her snooty fiancée (Henry Cavill) and his pledge to go to Ipswich for an engagement ring. She grants Tristran one week to return with the star and win her hand.

Of course, in the land of Stormhold they understand what stars really are, and so Tristran isn’t the only one in pursuit. The sons of the ailing King (the frail Peter O’Toole, in a brief but rippingly good appearance) are competing to retrieve the star to prove their worthiness to inherit the throne. There used to be seven sons, but since murder and betrayal are the family way their numbers are dwindling with alarming speed. And then there’s the witch Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), an ancient crone who wants to use the star’s heart to sustain her youth and beauty.

Stars have hearts? Yes – they do, because in Stormhold a falling star takes the form of a person, in this case that of Yvaine (Claire Danes), who has a young visage but old wisdom, gained from generations of shining down on the lives of men and women. When she’s joyful she glows, an effect that grows more heartwarming every time it is deployed.

It’s expected that British actors will have the native ability to approach material like this with the proper zest – their tradition of family entertainment teaches them to never look down on a good yarn. What is a pleasant surprise is to see the movie stars from this side of the Atlantic that are equally game. Pfeiffer is a most capable supernatural vamp, and Robert DeNiro comes swooping out of the clouds in his dirigible pirate ship as lightning salesman Captain Shakespeare, a role that gets more thoroughly, addictively ridiculous by the minute.

Like many great fantasy stories, the plot of a young man showing his wits and virtues and discovering his true destiny is but a clothesline on which to hang the author’s colorful and demented whims. With its abundant swinging swords and enchantments, Stardust will be the introduction to many for Neil Gaiman’s expansive creative gifts, and it’s as broadly-appealing as you can get; exciting, funny, and cute as all get-out. Really, put a good blade in this kid Cox’s hands, and it’s just about irresistible.

MOVIE REVIEW - Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2008-02-06T15:12:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Screenplay by John Logan, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, based on the musical of the same name by Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics) and Hugh Wheeler (book), based on the play The String of Pearls by Christopher Bond
Producers: Richard D. Zanuck, Laurie MacDonald, John Logan
Stars: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jamie Campbell Bower, Laura Michelle Kelly, Jayne Wisener, Ed Sanders

What an exquisite darkness there is in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. To see this movie on the big screen is to see things done with blacks and the deepest grays that hardly seem possible. Stephen Sondheim’s legendary musical, based on the 19th-century folk serial killer of British “penny dreadfuls”, has always brought a (literally) juicy relish to its tragedy; hurtling us, with the force of its wit, down a relentless conveyor belt through murder, mutilation and cannibalism. Yet it is not enough just to throw that red meat on a plate and present it to us. You need to make that darkness beautiful.

Thankfully, the musical so frightening to adapt that it has sat for nearly three decades outside the Hollywood fortress, crying for entrance, is enough to really rouse the passions of Tim Burton; surely the most consistently quirky director allowed to play with large budgets. His movies always have dazzles for the eyes, and cock-eyed sympathies to appeal to our inner misfit, yet you don’t always sense his own heart in it. He approaches story with a mystified air – not always understanding it, just determined to film it well. But you can tell when he’s found something that excites him – it’s usually when Johnny Depp ends up in front of the camera.

The collaboration between Burton and Depp, now on its sixth film, is one of the most enriching director-actor relationships in Hollywood history, right up there with John Ford and John Wayne, and Woody Allen and himself. The two give focus to each others’ best habits – not restraining their excesses, but giving them a mutually-inspiring frame in which to operate. And, set loose in the fetid splendor of Sondheim’s melodic slaughterhouse, they achieve one of their grandest triumphs.

With the bleached skin, shocked-out hair, and blade comfortably in hand, Depp’s Todd may look superficially like Edward Scissorhands’ singing evil twin, but this is not the childlike puppet yearning to be understood. Edward wondered, Todd seethes – his eyes are a portal into obsessive, volcanic malice.

Once he was young and happy, back when he was called Benjamin Barker, a barber with a beautiful wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) and a beautiful baby daughter. But the corrupted Judge Turpin (syrupy Alan Rickman), who barely finishes sighing over a lost soul he condemns to the gallows before waving the next one in, wanted the beautiful wife for himself, and had Barker shanghaied away on false charges. The wife poisoned herself, and Turpin took the daughter Johanna as his ward; and now that she’s flowered into a young woman (Jayne Wisener), he’s practically brimming over with ideas on how she should properly reward his hospitality. Barker, in his new identity as Todd, intends to set up his old barbershop, and use his legendary skills to woo the Judge in for a long-deserved shave.

He finds an ally in Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the owner of the meat pie shop downstairs, a woman who keeps hoping that Todd will notice her long enough to get those hints she keeps dropping about the price of meat “these days”. She looks like she wasn’t born into this squalor but grew organically out of it like the roaches that scuttle on her countertops. Yet she has her own twisted fantasies of happiness; one of the movie’s funniest interludes has her dreaming of a seaside holiday with Mr. Todd, who endures it exactly as you might predict.

Todd and Lovett, partners in pale misanthropy, remind us that Burton has always been more at home with the grotesque. His caricatures, like the clownish huckster Signor Pirelli (Sacha Baron Cohen) and the Judge’s toadly minion Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall) are given such loving detail, so many piquant flourishes within their nastiness. By contrast, the ingénues in this opera, the grown-up Johanna, with her impossibly-lilting voice, and a blushing sailor lad named, of course, Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), look by their very prettiness to be the true caricatures, spiteful intrusions of gee-whiz fancy onto the killing floor. It was Sondheim’s impish intent to have us chuckling at their naïveté while awaiting the next fountain of blood – in Burton, whose expensive sci-fi prank Mars Attacks! was conspicuously Mars-biased, this streak of devilishness finds a perfect partner.

The role of Todd is one of the great baritone parts in modern musical theater, and Depp decidedly lacks the cavernous voice purists may crave. Yet attention to the unique speech rhythms he creates for each of his characters confirms that Depp, though not an amazing singer, is an undeniable vocal artist, enough to sculpt the lyrics to the purpose of providing his own emotional instrument for the orchestra. And it should be noted just what a challenge it is to give a performance like this on-screen at all these days, given modern shooting styles. Think about what a balancing act it is: to be iconically larger-than-life with the camera close enough to see your pores. Think about how much inner fury you must channel, while having the expertise of technique to make it all coherent within itself; how much trust you must have in the filmmakers and fellow cast members that they’re not going to leave you hanging out there, but fill in the canvas as boldly as you’ve occupied its center. Let go your preconceptions about vocal octaves, Johnny Depp in this role is screen acting at its finest.

Also at its finest in Sweeney Todd is the design work: Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography lulls you into a false monochrome, hypnotizing you in advance of scarlet geysers gracefully erupting, while Dante Ferretti’s sets and Colleen Atwood’s costumes build an eye-popping Dickensian slum filled with shadows and dust. It is so vividly black and tactile that I would have rather seen this in 3-D than Beowulf, although the theatre managers may have needed to provide buckets for such a screening.

This is a world as fully-realized as any that has ever featured in a Tim Burton film. I see this as no coincidence. Just as Sweeney Todd’s homicidal pessimism makes such a profitable fit with Mrs. Lovett’s need for fresh meat, the cesspit artistry of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street gives Burton and Depp the inspiration to make their most poisoned cinematic Valentine.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Bourne Ultimatum

2008-02-06T14:49:00.000-08:00

Originally published 8/12/07
Full review behind the jump

The Bourne Ultimatum
Director: Paul Greengrass
Writers: Screen Story by Tony Gilroy, Screenplay by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum
Producers: Patrick Crowley, Frank Marshall, Paul L. Sandberg
Stars: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez

Maybe I’m not the only one that remembers this – in those awful, numbing, fearful days after September 11, 2001, a strange suggestion was making its way through our geopolitical discourse. This happened, it went, because we hold back. These terrorist groups require people to commit murder as an initiation – if we had just given our undercover operatives the right to kill in those circumstances, we could have prevented this tragedy.

It was a ludicrous contention, and as the hard facts emerged it became clear that we had all the information we needed, the people in charge just weren’t organized or vigilant enough about this threat to see what the information meant and act on it. But ever since, our society seems gripped in variations on the same desperate self-examination; whether our freedoms make us weak, and whether what we need in order to be safe are to unquestioningly trust not evidence, but the judgment of a few wise men “brave” enough to be ruthless to whomever they deem an enemy.

I say all this because in The Bourne Ultimatum, there is no real enemy beyond our own dangerous flirtation with power. It shows that when you can take the power of life or death over someone just by speaking the phrase “We have an imminent threat!”, that power corrupts absolutely, and according to human nature the inevitable result is using that power to preserve power, civilians snatched from the street on a whiff of suspicion, and assassinations mistakenly targeting the innocent. Watch what happens to a newspaper reporter (Paddy Considine) whose crime is daring to be good at his job. Sometimes entertainment is the Trojan Horse for some urgent anti-establishment sentiments, and director Paul Greengrass, who not only directed the ripping second episode in the Bourne franchise – The Bourne Supremacy – but the overpowering September 11th memorial docudrama United 93, has shaped this perpetual motion thrill machine so it has a sneaky contemporary moral: competence will always trump ruthlessness. It’s what keeps Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) alive.

Bourne, you’ll remember, was the CIA-groomed assassin who choked on a mission, fell into the ocean, and ended up with amnesia. Since then, his life essentially a blank slate he wants to re-draw with goodness, he has been swiftly circling the globe, using his company-honed intel training and deadly reflexes to learn who turned him into this killing machine, and why they won’t leave him alone. In this chapter he finally returns to American soil and to the place that “created” him, but not after causing no small amount of mayhem in Europe and Northern Africa.

Greengrass, I think, has the greatest sense of geography of any filmmaker working right now. I say that not in the traditional map-reading sense, but in the way that he can cinematically occupy a three-dimensional space so we know where all the characters are in relation to one another even at the height of an action sequence. The visual grammar of The Bourne Ultimatum is the equivalent of slam poetry, percussive, virtuoso and utterly without a net. Establishing shots are in short supply. Messy handheld camera moves envelop us in crowded terminals and bustling streets, has us trying to peer around corners to follow our leads as the chase continues.

Yet we’re never really lost. One especially accomplished sequence set in Tangier has a chase proceed on street-level, rooftops, and the apartment buildings between them simultaneously; with the principals dashing up and down staircases and leaping through windows across alleys trying to get to each others’ levels with impeccable momentum. You might remember the famed St. Paddy’s Day Parade sequence in The Fugitive, an essentially improvised chase filmed with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones running into the middle of a real-life event. This movie creates the sensation of that kind of chaos in every scene.

In addition, it carries on a franchise trademark of supplying a supremely-capable supporting cast to play off the wary conviction Matt Damon is so good at. David Strathairn plays Noah Vosen, the latest intelligence-community bureaucrat preaching the need to do terrible things to protect America, and pulling all the levers at his disposal trying to stop Bourne from, well, letting America know what is being done in the name of protecting them. Strathairn plays Vosen not as a snarling paranoid, but a tetchy egotist with way too much authority; I like the studiedly boring way he orders his “heart-healthy omelet” at breakfast. His dry corruption, the way he has quietly determined himself so necessary to our safety that an attack on him is an attack on “America”, to be responded to with every weapon and no restraint, is a source of mounting horror to Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), the CIA executive who had a brush with Bourne in the prior film which has her questioning the morality of her work.

What the antagonists of these movies eventually fear every time is not Bourne himself but what he represents – the desire to shine a light on our secrets, to question the actions people are taking in our name and demand proof that those actions are justified and in our interest. He represents self-examination, which carries with it the threat of discovering we haven’t always done the right thing. At one point Bourne freezes a would-be assassin (Edgar Ramirez) just by asking “Do you even know why you’re supposed to kill me?” It’s such an obvious question, which is why it’s so dangerous to the Noah Vosens of the world, who don’t want us asking any questions.

If you look at what Paul Greengrass has physically assembled for The Bourne Ultimatum you have more than enough to recommend. It provides the envelope-pushing action of a James Bond picture with the layers-within-layers cynicism characteristic of Bourne creator Robert Ludlum. It is, simply by those criteria, cracking good entertainment. But when you let the movie soak in, have what Hitchcock called your “icebox moment”, when you’re home, getting something from the fridge, and thinking idly about what you’ve just seen, you’ll be absorbing that this summer blockbuster is saying the radically sensible things we’ve been needing to say for some time now. I think, if I had to chose between James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Jack Bauer to protect me, I’d take Bourne.

Why they play the game

2008-02-03T21:26:00.000-08:00

I often recall the first Super Bowl win of the Brady-Belichick Patriots dynasty, when they broke tradition by choosing to be introduced as a team, rather than one superstar at a time. When Brady was just the backup thrust into the spotlight by a freak early-season injury suffered by Drew Bledsoe. When they were the underdogs standing in the way of 2-time League MVP Kurt Warner, League MVP Marshall Faulk, and the would-be dynasty of the St. Louis Rams.

The Patriots won that game as they have so many since; delicately, almost invisibly taking the other team's strengths apart piece-by-piece, making no mistakes of their own, and winning not with highlight-reel plays, but methodical, confident execution. Brady, the kid riding the pine back in September, won the MVP, which came with a new Cadillac SUV, and as it was pointed out to him, he exclaimed with disbelief - "That's my car?!?!" I remember saying - he looks like he could really use a new car.

The humility of it charmed. The team spirit inspired. The world-shocking upset, cemented on a calm, clinical fourth-quarter drive for a field goal, was a legend.

These days Brady isn't the kid who's thrilled to get a new car, he's the official Man Crush of every sports fan in America, Superman on turf; the guy who breaks NFL records by day and sleeps on a bed made of supermodels at night. Bill Belichick is no longer the overlooked football genius getting his due, he's become the NFL's Bond Villain, the megalomaniacal Dr. Hoodie, scheming and scowling, sending out fraudulent injury reports and blowing off the "Spygate" videotaping scandal with a growling non-apology apology that Dick Cheney would find cold.

And tonight, in front of the world, as they sulked their way to the locker room with one second still on the clock, the once humble, now arrogant Patriots became the black sheep of sports: Sore Losers.

And the New York Giants became great.

I saw the Patriots-Giants game that closed the regular season during my trip to Chicago, and I remember saying to my friends how shocked I was at how hard they were playing. Playoff seedings were set, so these two teams had literally nothing at stake if they won or lost, save the Patriots' shot at finally telling the '72 Dolphins where to stick those champagne corks. The Giants were fixed for a Wild Card berth, facing road games against the strongest collection of teams the NFC has assembled this decade; and they were tired, and they were injured, and you know what they decided? They decided that if you're on the field, you're trying to win.

The Giants lost that game, but won a lot of pride and respect, and made the Patriots look human, and beatable. Eli Manning had a breakthrough, ripping off four touchdowns and finally clicking with the biggest and strongest receiving corps in the league.

And through the playoffs, week after week, they just kept putting it all together. Ferocious running. Vicious, unrelenting defense. Manning finding a coolness and tenacity that has finally given him his own identity, separate from his field general brother. Those (literally) Giant receivers putting the big hurt on secondaries. They were playing as a team.

Today, both teams were introduced as groups rather than individuals, but I noticed a key difference. As the Patriots sauntered down the tunnel, ready for destiny, Tom Brady walked front and center - the only one without his helmet on. Was it an unintended gesture? Or was Tom Brady just too used to his beautiful mug being out in front of this football machine?

I sensed weakness; I sensed pride that could goeth before a fall. And make no mistake - pride did in the Patriots today.

When facing a great quarterback, the formula has always been simple - keep him off the field as long as you can, and make his life miserable when he's on the field. The Giants achieved both, ripping off bruisingly-long drives that gassed the Patriots' defense and kept His Handsomeness on his butt. And he spent more time than he's used to on his butt on offense, too; I've never seen the Patriots' vaunted offensive line blown up so thoroughly and so regularly. Every Giant out there practically had their turn in the backfield. Brady spent so much time in the dirt I wondered how in the hell his uniform stayed so clean, and if they had spare ones and a steam cleaner handy on the sidelines so he could always look his prettiest. And Brady - as he's known to do - got rattled. He lost his composure, and he ignored his own weakness.

His throwing stance was clearly off, because any deep throw he let go went sailing far off target. Remember that he broke Phil Simms' completion percentage record just last month - this is a lethal sharpshooter on a normal day. But whether it was that weak ankle or his own safety clock going haywire from the Giants' pressure, he threw more bad deep balls than I've ever seen from him in an important game.

He did throw one great deep ball, a jaw-droppingly good one that might have kept the game alive in the final seconds. All Randy Moss had to do was - as Keyshawn Johnson pointed out in ESPN's postgame - jump for the damn ball. Moss was double-covered, and tight, but he had both the height and the athleticism to make that catch - if he jumps. But you know what else happens if he jumps? He gets tackled, the Patriots take a time out, kick a field goal to tie it, and go to overtime. Moss was thinking touchdown. Moss wanted to catch it in stride and run all the way to Valhalla. So the Giants' Corey Webster jumped, batted the ball away, and the fat lady cleared her throat. You always go high to catch in coverage - basic football.

Some of the best Giants plays weren't magical at all - they were straight-up, basic football, executed impeccably under impossible pressure against The Team of the Decade. On many defensive plays, the pressure didn't come from some Byzantine blitz formation, but their four guys beating the Patriots' five. The winning touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress was single coverage, a basic slant-and-go route. All Burress had to do was take a step, juke right, run for the far corner and catch history, with no Patriot near him. When Eli Manning had his own Elway-helicopter-spin play, slipping out of enemy hands for that unbelievable bailout throw to David Tyree's helmet, it was, once again, football 101 - Quarterback: Keep looking down the field. Receiver: Stay in the play, help your quarterback by getting open. Referee: Don't on your life blow an early whistle for some namby-pamby "quarterback in the grasp" call.

Straight, real football. The Giants played it, the Giants won with it, and took one of the best Super Bowls I have ever, or will ever, see.

(*This post has been edited since that pitcher of margaritas wore off.)

MOVIE REVIEW - Dan in Real Life

2008-01-31T16:24:00.001-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - 1408

2008-01-31T15:56:00.000-08:00

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.

MOVIE REVIEW - Charlie Wilson's War

2008-01-31T13:55:00.001-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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

2008-01-31T13:30:00.001-08:00

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!

2008-01-24T20:05:00.000-08:00

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.

***

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?

***

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.

Postponement

2008-01-22T14:21:00.000-08:00

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.

Obsessed? Sure am!

2008-01-22T06:07:00.000-08:00

I'm going back to bed now, but just so's you know I was watching live, the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture are:

Atonement (6 overall)
Juno (4 overall)
Michael Clayton (7 overall)
No Country For Old Men (8 overall)
There Will Be Blood (8 overall)

I'll have much, much more to say on the major categories later. Full list here in the meantime.

What I Do For a Living

2008-01-21T16:53:00.000-08:00

(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.

People don’t buy movies. They rent belief.

MOVIE REVIEW - Juno

2008-01-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Sunshine

2008-01-19T17:59:00.001-08:00

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.

MOVIE REVIEW - There Will Be Blood

2008-01-19T10:48:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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.

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Rescue Dawn

2008-01-19T10:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Hoo boy, here we go (UPDATED)

2008-01-17T14:12:00.001-08:00

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.

MOVIE REVIEW - Gone Baby Gone

2008-01-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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

2008-01-17T12:58:00.000-08:00

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.

MOVIE REVIEW - The Golden Compass

2008-01-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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?

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Knocked Up

2008-01-11T16:55:00.001-08:00

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.

MOVIE REVIEW - I Am Legend

2008-01-10T21:46:00.000-08:00

Full review behind the jump

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.