Road to Nowhere

It is with no small level of embarrassment I begin to unpack Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere. Dissecting a film about any creative art is always a tricky balancing act between the substance of the plot and the less perceptible but undeniably present subtext. The struggles of a director (Broken Embraces), a writer (Reprise) or the actors involved in production (Certified Copy) each present individual problems when it comes to criticism; Road to Nowhere confounds us with all three.  Like Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, Road to Nowhere begins with a credits sequence for a film-within-a-film - in the first of many dead-end twists, the film is also entitled Road to Nowhere. This is hardly the least distressing puncture of the 4th wall; an actress plays and actress who plays a character that may be the actress herself before a bout of amnesia. Let's move on.

The upper level of reality in Road to Nowhere concerns an independent film production. Mitchell Haven (initials M.H.; played by Tygh Runyan) is adapting a true-crime story about the death of North Carolina politico Rafe Taschen (played by an actor named Cary Stewart; played in real life by Cliff De Young), apparently seduced and swindled by his lover Velma Duran, a femme fatale if there ever was one, played by the fictional b-movie scream queen Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon). After a sequence where Velma witnesses Taschen's supposed suicide Road to Nowhere's hurtles down the first of its many mirrored passages, as we see De Young in a foreign country, as the presumed-dead Taschen, trying to block Graham's casting in the film version of the events. It is more than implied that Graham is the real life Velma Duran, who in "real life" has gone missing. As there are a pair of investigators of the original crime (Dominique Swain and Waylon Payne) acting as technical consultants, it would be extremely dangerous to throw Duran back in their midsts.

Do not be discouraged - all this confusion is easily avoided if we chalk it up to metaphor and focus instead on Haven. His name raises the obvious question of him being Hellman's stand-in. However, more than one critic has refuted this interpretation - Haven's all L.A. operator, manicured fingernails and carefully disheveled hair. He is far from the reclusive Hellman, who had gone three decades since completing a feature film before Nowhere, instead teaching at the California Institute of the Arts. Haven is an ideal - beyond being suave and attractive, when he gushes over the image quality of the Canon 5D camera, one can't help but hear Hellman wishing he had such option when he made counterculture classics like Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter.

There is more than the personal history; as their on-set love affair flourishes, Haven takes the deceptively impressionable Graham on bed-time tour of the cinema, from the screwballs of Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve), to the European masters (here represented by The Seventh Seal) and the Spanish new wave (Spirit of the Beehive). Could Two-Lane Blacktop be the next Criterion title on their list? What this chronology means, leaving off neatly at Hellman's own entrance to the scene, if it means anything, is left to us. When Graham asks Haven how many movies he has seen, he is embarrassed "to say how long [he's] spent in other people's dreams."

In this way Haven may be meant as our surrogate - he is hardly the auteur behind Road to Nowhere. The truth of Graham's identity, the grand scheme executed by the Taschen/Stewart/De Young doppelganger in some foreign location (ensured by a last minute investor in the film) is the latest (and possibly) last dream in which he will be a passive participant. As the truth begins to surface, Runyan takes on the passive look of a David Lynch protagonist, as clueless as the audience as to what is befalling him. The questions abound - how can the same woman have returned to the scene of the crime and shot and entire film before being recognized? Is the film being funded by the money of the very swindle it undertakes to depict? It must be said this was not the sort of material Hellman tackled in his younger days - is this film intentionally opaque or is the old man just lost?

The frames of Road to Nowhere are not hard boundaries - they create dramatic tension without defining narrative structure. There is a truth and a fiction, but we are never meant to be privy to it. We, like Haven, are entranced by Graham/Duran, and upon the credits are still looking for the truth of the real events. No one ever figured out what happened to the "real" Taschen and Duran - this makes telling their story a challenge, one that the ineffectual Haven is no match for. Hellman does a terrific job with his limited budget and cut-rate cast, but does little to solve the mystery. He starts from darkness and chases his own tail. It is a glorious mess.

Meek's Cutoff

A decade ago, low-budget critical darlings were breeding grounds of over-caffeinated camera tricks, pulse-quickening soundtracks and one or two  effusive moments by actors "taking a risk." Wes Anderson furiously and precociously filled Van Morrison's coffers while emptying those of the French New Wave; Darren Aronofsky very nearly succeeded in killing us with a thousand cuts in Pi and Requiem for a Dream; Donnie Darko fused the unholy beast-heads of science fiction and 80s teen comedy into a beautiful, complicated mess. Hollywood was making American Beauty and Magnolia; Another meaningful gimmick was always around the corner. Anderson is working in claymation these days; after Darko, Kelly crashed and burned with Southland Tales. When the backlash began is unclear, but we are now in its full throes; filmmakers, both independent and mainstream, have decided it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all question.

Aronofsky's The Wrestler is a perfect example of the new paradigm - a mute, ambiguous, humanist opera of pregnant pauses and grey skies, Mickey Rourke glowering at the middle in something you might call a performance. Shame, Martha Marcy May Marlene and Take Shelter are also guilty of this subtraction-to-the-point-of-profundity, but the most egregious culprit yet may be Meek's Cutoff, an ostensible period piece about a group of settlers making for Oregon in the year 1845. Not that director Kelly Reichardt seems to care, but the presence of covered wagons, long-loading rifles and wide open spaces has led most to dub it a revisionist wedding, as though that term still held any meaning.

If it lived up to its label, Meek's Cutoff might just be another fun-spoiling reminds of our country's greedy, sexist and racist origins. Three family men, Solomon, Thomas and William (Will Patton, Paul Dano, Neal Huff) have surrendered their fates to the cantankerous Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) who now by mere guesswork drags them around the deserts and grasslands of history's most wide open metaphor. At the outset, they may be lost, but they have no choice but to carry on. The looks of desperate frustration are saved for closeups, and usually in the eyes of the party's women, helmed by Emily (Michelle Williams). Directly transplanted from Reichardt's last movie, Wendy and Lucy, Williams is again cast as a wanderer, although this time still holding on to some grim resolve. In the conflict between Emily and Meek, we find the film's most obvious presentation of an alternative viewpoint into the traditional power dynamics of Western archetypes.

Unfortunately, this confrontation never fully sublimates verbally or physically to the point of fracture. The film seems content to stew in its landscapes, its repressed emotions, and its vague political allegory, conveyed by one character thusly: "this will all be a bad dream soon." A cocksure old blowhard leading our innocent, fragile nation into a desert nightmare? As strong an ideological charge as these images might connote, they ultimately fail to deliver due to lack of backstory and resolution. We join the characters after they have made their life-altering decision to head West in hopes of gold and happiness; the credits roll before we can comprehend the consequences of their well-intentioned mistake. This lack of detail, scatterbrained focus on the ideas and symbols of the larger American story, rob the characters of their humanity, making each more a straw man for a term paper on ante-bellum gender relations. Williams' Emily might as well be named The Intelligent but Powerless Woman, and Greenwood The Foolish Man in Charge.

Reichardt's unwavering attitude towards her subjects is confirmed by the only true incident of the film, when the party manage to capture a Payute Indian (Rod Rondeaux). Meek wishes to kill the man instantly, while Emily is fiercely opposed. Whether the man is leading them to water or certain death passes for tension throughout the rest of the film, and is of course, the most important of many unanswered questions. What all of these recent internal tableaux have in common is an insistence that the audience do some of the heavy lifting. They require us to write our own ending and beginning, and insist a mealy core is enough to stand for an entire film. You may raise one eyebrow at the end of Meek's Cutoff but the question implicit may be: "is that really the end of the movie?"

Kelly Reichardt is talented, capable of creating mood, atmosphere and drama in a small space, but she is the latest in a line of filmmakers choosing implied profundity over sharp writing, silence over explanation. The end of Meek's Cutoff will be either a disappointment or a riddle; the latter because Reichardt wanted it that way, the former because any answer changes everything that came before. When regarding texts from antiquity, we only deal with what remains. When looking at this film, there seem to be sections missing - one can only assume their inclusion would weaken further and already questionable product.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

There is probably no chore as thankless as directing the easier-to-digest, American adaptation of a recently successful foreign film. The man for the job this time seems to have been chosen by default; who would bring us a serial killer mystery investigated by societal persona non grata other than David Fincher? Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, previously brought to the screen in 2009 by Niels Arden Oplev, seems to be the perfect storm of Fincherian elements. Like his breakthrough Se7en, it takes place in a world sheathed in leather and populated by sociopaths with ink-black pupils. As with Zodiac, the drama lies in the collection of evidence held in archives untouched for years. And the outcast status of its protagonists, along with their intimate relationship to their computers, speaks to the same sort of dissociation from the world seen in The Social Network. Indeed, if there must be an American adaptation of Dragon Tattoo (and clearly there must), David Fincher seems fated to push the boulder up the slope.

Someone is terrorizing Henrik Wanger (Christopher Plummer) and has been for years, sending mementoes of his grandniece, mysteriously murdered in 1967. To "settle his accounts" once and for all he invites disgraced journalist Mikael Blomquist (Daniel Craig)  to his family's private island, where he informs him a Wanger, and only a Wanger, must be responsible for the crime (spoiler alert: one of the nice Nordics is played by Stellan Skarsgaard!). In Stockholm, a more unconventional investigator, the mohawked, bisexual Lisbeth Salander, struggles with a nasty civil servant over the inheritance left by her legal guardian. At the outset, the material speaks very loudly, the two characters violated as personally as possible with respect to their genders; Blomquist has lost his reputation and his livelihood, Salander her privacy and physical safety.

All bad adaptations are alike - they defer to the checklist of demands submitted by those who have read the book rather than pacing the story for the theater audience. Dragon Tattoo takes its place next to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Cider House Rules in this respect, filling its 158-minute running time with jagged edges of detail and red herring characters that do nothing but make us squirm in our seats. In making everything just so with it's printed forebearer, the film keeps Blomquist and Salander in separate boxes for well over an hour.

This is especially detrimental given the way the story has been thematically altered for our democratic sensibilities. Oplev and Larsson before him conceived of Dragon Tattoo as a feminist revenge fantasy - of course in Sweden a serial killer hunting women is slightly more virgin narrative territory than in the States. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood sees it as an unlikely buddy movie / romance; the poor girl just needs a bit of attention from a rough hewn individualist such as Blomquist to "get with the program". Working at cross purposes to this project is another characteristically leaden performance by Daniel Craig - it's far easier to relate to the misanthrope with the stun gun. This iteration of Dragon Tattoo is a meet-cute; not quite Hepburn and Tracy, but we're clearly meant to grin. So much for that subarctic chill.

However, Fincher does not intend to go down without a fight. He makes his presence felt from the outset, in a credit sequence that feels like nothing except liquid asphalt melting the gyrating bodies normally found at the opening of a James Bond film. Its not just the sexual violence that keeps him interested - he's at home whenever there are detailed files to be sifted through and highlighted. Fincher  favors precision and clinical distance over emotional awakening; Dragon Tattoo feels most his own when Mikael and Lisbeth are poring over more old photographs than are found in an Oliver Stone movie. However, there's little to connect the sins and mysteries of the past with the love story in the present. Plummer is magnetic as Wanger, but there's more screen time for Blomquist's numerous romantic and financial entanglements than the haunted patriarch that initiates the events of the story.

This unwavering respect for its source material ultimately renders The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo redux a rote excercise in plot delivery. Fincher has a keen understanding of human nature and a full arsenal of tools to bring those insights to the screen, but its more than a little disappointing to bestow upon him the backhanded compliments usually reserved for Steven Speilberg. The sordid subversions of his early career seem a thing of the past - he's now worked with three Academy award-winning screenwriters in a row. It may be time to admit that while his films have espoused anarchy, nihilism and the dissolution of all human knowledge, he may not be one of the outsiders he often chooses to depict. He's not a pawn in Hollywood's game - but he certainly isn't the one making the moves.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Their are exactly three shots fired in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and they are evenly distributed; one in the beginning punctuates a botched job by the MI-6; the next is used as a scare tactic during an interrogation by their Russian enemy; the last tidies up the sordid little affair, at least for now. Between these, there is little action to go around in Tomas Alfredson's feature adaptation of John Le Carre's 1974 novel. Previously a miniseries starring Sir Alex Guinness, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is far from the fast-paced, action-packed world of James Bond; its characters occupy a higher rung of the intelligence community, and hold a commensurate security clearance. "Right at the top of the Circus", where, to the collective dismay, a Russian mole has been at work for decades.   

After dispatching field agent Prideaux for a meet with a Hungarian who may have the identity of the mole, Control (John Hurt) is murdered. The ministry turn's to Control's familiar Smiley (Gary Oldman) to investigate his office from the outside. The men, dubbed Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Tailor (Ciaran Hinds) and Spy (David Dencik), are, if not Smiley's oldest friends, the only peers one with such considerable power can rely on. Upon learning there is a mole, the recently retired and divorced Smiley is thrust even further into strategic and emotional isolation.

In the past, le Carre's work has lent itself equally to boredom (The Tailor of Panama) and the aesthetic equivalent of a seizure (The Constant Gardener); the subtlety of the material, its focus on emotions over action seems to stymie directors or send them into a stylistic tailspin, desperately seeking a way to pique the interest of the audience. This time, director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) has the cinematic sense to realign the story around Oldman's relationship not to his country, or his compatriots, or even his wife, but rather, to himself. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy bears resemblance to Coppola's introverted classic The Conversation, with just a dash of Michael Corleone. It is said repeatedly that Smiley is one man the Russians have to worry about; perhaps its because he's the only one in the Circus who won't take a drink at the office party.

When a Studio Canal and Working Title combine for a cold-war thriller, the production companies have awards, not dollar signs, in mind. The film's greatest boon is its cast, which take sometimes cliched dialog, including classics like "nothing is what it seems" and "they're going to kill me!" and elevates them to "serious drama" territory. Mark Strong and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Tom Hardy performance are the closest we ever get to Bond; they're the field agents who get honors of cruising through port cities in a Mercedes convertible with a leggy blonde, and facing the live ammunition. Though this is the sexier assignment, Tinker reminds us at every turn that it's the craggy pencil pushers like Hurt and Oldman that are actually safeguarding her Majesty's Royal Empire from danger.

The fullness of each characterization and each performance, no matter how small, keeps us guessing even after the rather predictable revelation. Whether the explanation is satisfying may depend upon your ideology. It's the nature of the conflict; one character wistfully remember fighting the Nazis as "a real war; Englishmen could be proud then." The indefatigable flow of the Circus continues, with a new Control, a new set of enemies, and new directives. The the men shuffling in and out of the freestanding mausoleums that pass as offices may change in appearance and name, but never in purpose. Alfredson frequently frames his characters in these bureaucratic boxes, far from the frontline, where loyalty and motivation are easiest confused.

A war based on territory and weaponry comes to an end, but one in which trust is each combatant's goal can never be fully resolved; the prisoners we take end up being our own men. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a wonderfully understated take on the futility of pinning one's life to service of the government - there are simply too many unfit parts for the machine to work, and the satisfaction one gets must be found in one's private life. Oldman's wry smile upon first being offered the investigation tells us everything we need to know about the life of a spy; he is our opposite, taking his greatest thrills deceit, rather than from genuine human connection. Smiley is not just the best watcher in the unit; he's also the best actor.

A Dangerous Method

It cannot all be about sex, can it? One hopes there is some room for violence. A Dangerous Method is a dramatization of the subtleties of an century-old intellectual disagreement between two bearded academics, so alas, no one's head is going to spontaneously combust. On one side is Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), father of the talking cure, now known as psychoanalysis, who insists all base urges are ultimately sexual. On the other side is his dashing younger colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), whose fascination with mysticism and higher planes of the human spirit threatens to undermine the movement Freud wishes to spark. When a troubled yet nubile patient, Sabina Spierlein (Keira Knightley) enters Jung's clinics, she upends his carefully held notions and eventually drives a chasm between two schools of thought.

The first problem with A Dangerous Method is that is presupposes in its audience some understanding of the Freud. From the outset this suggests if not the correctness, than at least the importance of the Viennese psychoanalyst's work in comparison to his rival's. That David Cronenberg casts Viggo Mortensen, the star pupil of his filmic  universe in recent years, as the droll, bemused Freud further belies the director's sympathies. In a crucial scene, he refuses to impart his dreams to Jung for fear he will "surrender his authority"; Cronenberg seems to desire this surrender even less than the man himself.

All of this is to say the deck, cards of which include basic human needs and evolutionary conditioning, is stacked against Jung. We watch him wriggle uncomfortably as he tries to repress his desires for Sabina, only to end up giving her a vigorous spanking. This in turn fulfills her darkest wishes, namely sexual release through humiliation. Again, though this film is about a debate, it seems decided from the first moment Jung lays eyes on the comely Spierlein. His wife, in reality a brilliant mind in her own right, is portrayed as a depressive housewife; Jung is literally encouraged by another psychoanalyst (the lewd drug addict Otto Gross, played malevolently and to type by Vincent Cassel) towards adultery.

The disappointing aspect of The Dangerous Method is that while it favors eruption over repression, the eruption is very little. Cronenberg's earlier work has been jam-packed with Freudian images, dreams and otherwise; yet the three-chambered uteruses and phallic typewriters are nowhere to be found. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from play "The Talking Cure", sometimes word-for-word, there is rarely any room beyond the dialogue for our thoughts to wander. In this way it feels much more like a daring thesis than a fully realized film. It takes almost the entire length of the film before we realize Spierlein's maturation from mental patient to psychologist is the defining arc of the narrative.

Ironically, Knightley's transformation is so shocking she will probably be criticized for overacting in the earlier scenes, where her movements are all crossed limbs and jutting jaw. In a movie that covers a decade of history, Fassbender's gaze becomes just a shade colder and more disillusioned, while Sabina is seen reborn. That much of this is happens offscreen while Freud and Jung bicker about dreams and "the movement" can be seen as ingeniously understated or missing the point entirely. Her own theories and papers, which suggest a destruction of the self in every sexual act, are more interesting than how much Jung hates his child-bearing wife. It probably hurts her screen time that she is the least famous of the main characters.

Yet the Jung and Freud who so dominate A Dangerous Method seem more like avatars of specific theories than historically grounded representations. Freud makes mention of his and Spierlein's status as Jews - yet there is little discrimination within the safety of one's drawing room or padded cell. It is Jung who dreams of "the blood of Europe" - the Prostestant, always overreaching in Freud's opinion, always trying to fix the unsolvable problem. Though Cronenberg pays lip service to the politics of the times, he clearly views them as thematically irrelevant, an aside from the history rather than the body text itself. A Dangerous Method is not really a study of the times that birthed our most enduring understanding of the human psyche - it is a more general treatise on that psyche itself, in light of those ideas. It does not wish to leave the seclusion of the hearth any more than Freud, and go wandering in the streets of a specific time and place. However, in doing this the film divorces its subject from its setting - a tactic that might go over better if the characters did not bear such recognizable names.

Hugo

"Time hasn't been very kind to old movies," a film professor mournfully remarks, not in a PBS documentary, but in Martin Scorsese's new family film Hugo. The serious fellow, played by a bearded Michael Stuhlbarg, may seem out of place for those expecting Home Alone 4: Paris Train Station, given Hugo's PG rating and whimsical palette. I cannot have been the only one concerned by the announcement, two years ago, that Mr. Scorsese would be spending the foreseeable future working on a film that prominently features a small child being chased by a cruel station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his faithful Doberman. And given that it would be shot in 3-D and involve the owner of a toy store, the probability that Marty had another Taxi Driver in store for us was slim.

Guns are never drawn nor heads subjected to the vise in Hugo - that would be the work of the younger Scorsese, who in recent years has transformed into the referential grand master of The Aviator and Shutter Island, his work focusing as much on preservation as it does on narrative. I had not read the Caldecott award-winning book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, so the actual subject matter took me by some surprise. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living within the walls and clocks of the Montparnasse train station in the 1930s. His father (Jude Law), a clockmaker, having died in an accident, Hugo spends his days stealing parts to repair an automaton, a sort of robot used by magicians in "yore".

When it turns out that one of the shopkeepers he has been stealing from is filmmakers Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), Hugo deftly switches from kiddie adventure to a personal plea from Scorsese himself. The asthmatic child turned national treasure has caught us, quite cleverly, in a campaign to save the cinema. Amidst his 3-D objects flying directly at the screen (none more frightening that the proboscises of Cohen and Kingsley), Scorsese is preaching a deafening gospel about the danger of forgetting the old spectacle when presented with the new one.

That is what makes Selznick's novel so fitting for this stage of both Scorsese's career and film history - studios are rushing into the eras of digital and 3D full steam ahead. Melies himself was the original special effects artist - his background as a magician served him well in this respect. Melies pioneered colorization and stop motion animation, essential building blocks for every CGI shot we see in movies today; today he is largely forgotten, his tricks taken for granted. When Shutter Island landed a release date in the February graveyard, did Scorsese feel that same obsolescence? Hugo has landed him in the busiest moviegoing weekend of the year, with a rating and a target audience that will reach the Harry Potter crowd loud and clear. Here is another orphan hanging out in an enchanted train station, with a regiment of revered British character actors waiting in the wings; yet Hugo also has a point, not just about the world we live in, but the theater where we've come to escape.

This is not to say Scorsese is against 3D - his quotes upon Hugo's release suggest he finds the medium an exciting evolution of the cinema. Yet, like sound and color before it, we cannot think it replaces everything that came before. When you go to see Hugo, two trailers appear before hand: a 3D rendering of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and a 3D rendering of James Cameron's Titanic. Whatever you may think of those films, technological manglings of their original craftsmanship cannot be the best use of Hollywood's time.  In recent years, theaters have been pushing us towards the new gimmick, and forcing us to choose; Hugo reminds us such a decision need not be final. The past and the present must be allowed to exist separately and peacefully, one informing the other while never overshadowing it. It is no coincidence Hugo spends his days behind the faces of enormous clocks, dutifully keeping them on time.

Scorsese keeps true to his recent form by conducting a pageant of references throughout Hugo. A wonderful sequence takes us through Melies' early career in the fashion of a pop-up book, getting the most out of his 3D apparatus and the vampish theatricality of early silent films. Hugo sneaks into a showing of Harold Lloyds' Safety Last! and winds up in a similar predicament hanging off the edge of a building. Trains perpetually rush directly at us out of the screen. Of course there are the smaller moments Scorsese can never resist at this point, homages to Hitchcock, Bergman, Truffaut and countless others. Hugo is the perfect work for Scorsese to undertake at this point in his career, and 3D the perfect medium - he shows us the old and the new on the same screen, not segregated between digital and 35mm. We see the whimsy of the old; the possibilities of the new. The wonders of the past are not dead; they aren't even past.

The Descendants

To qualify everything that is to follow, let me say that I have only seen the George Clooney vehicle The Descendants once. This is usually the case for any movie I review on this site, especially a new release. However with the work of Alexander Payne it bears special note. His films, which tend to travel along solemn narrative byways while only occasionally stop for a quick chuckely, tend to reveal much more when one can drop the pretense of drama altogether and simply focus on the absurd elements. Seeing it as I did in a packed house screening with Payne and the cast waiting in the wings, the crowd was certainly pleased, or at least had some immediate incentive to act that way. As was the case with his last two films, Sideways and About Schmidt, I am sure laughter covered up some of the films most wonderful one-offs and double takes.

Clooney plays Matt King, a modest real-estate lawyer by trade, a woefully out-of-his-depth dad and grieving husband for the purposes of the story, whose wife lies in a terminal coma after a boating accident. Forced to pull on the plug on her as per instructions in her will, He and his daughters Scottie and Alexandera (Amara Miller and Shailene Woodley) must travel to the various islands of Hawaii to inform friends and relatives its time to say goodbye. While this might sound formulaic, at least we have a road movie about a man getting in touch with children he never had time for, et cetera. Where The Descendants gets itself in trouble is the arch-plot: King is also the trustee of a 25,000 acre plot breathtaking wilderness that was first purchased in the 1860s by his ancestors, which is to be sold in a few weeks, the profits divided among all the far flung cousins. An early scene shows various models of hotels and golf courses; this from a director who has previously brought us wine-snobs and student government elections. Glossing over the emotional power of euthanasia and skipping straight to the righteous anger of environmental protection hardly feels like his milieu.

Yet even the signature Alexander Payne touches in The Descendants feel well worn. Alexandra's revelation that King was being cuckolded is all too close to the exact same plot point in About Schmidt, where a widower is confronted with a disturbing yet liberating truth about his dearly departed. Another Payne trademark, the ironic voiceover, here has lost all its edge. Statements like "a family is like an archipelago" seem more like laziness on the part of the writers than the character. Even more damning is the fact that this voiceover all but vanishes early in the second act. Shoddy justification of the setting complete through some black and white photographs (more than a few late-period Wes Anderson flourishes to be found here), Payne and Clooney return to their comfort zones.

Matt Harris noted on Grantland.com last week that: 

"the difference between The Descendants with Clooney and The Descendants with someone else is the difference between a movie you get to see and a movie you don’t." 

It is ironic that the international icon is the film's chief failing. While Clooney is not miscast, certainly does nothing to justify his participation. This is the flip, suave Clooney we have come to expect, stylized by Soderbergh and seasoned by the Coens, the apotheosis of sympathetic indifference, whether comically running in flip flops or showing a rare display of anger at his wife's bedside. It is very easy to pick out which scenes Clooney prepared for, and in which he seems to rest on his laurels. Payne's films have all rested on sad-faced leading performances that grow more complex as they reach a climax. It's hard to look at a man with Clooney's looks and his character's wealth in the same way we saw Matthew Broderick's pathetic history teacher in Election. And as for the sale of the land, well, it is awards season and this is Hollywood - you can probably guess Matt's decision.

With this big a whole running through the center of the film, I am forced to praise the accoutrements. Woodley gives a believable if not likable performance as the older daughter. Robert Forster, Beau Bridges and Matthew Lillard each pack multi-tiered character arcs into a minimum of screen-time. As a way of bucking the cliches of the elegy sub-genre, it is refreshing to not suffer expository flashbacks of a marriage hitting the rocks, and whatever incident that sent Alexandra to a boarding school a plane-ride away from her parents. When I find myself praising my film for NOT making a mistake however, it cannot have been all that enjoyable.

The Descendants is the first Payne film that does not announce itself outright as a comedy with slapstick (think Nicholson going shopping in a bathrobe driving a Winnebago, or the adventure to retrieve Thomas Haden Church's engagement ring). However, it relies too often on more obvious laughs, such as a ten year old girl flipping someone the bird. These feel less organic to the material and more like little breaks from the Serious Issues At Hand, like Family and The Environment. In the past, Payne's films have felt improvisational, uncontrolled and natural expressions of ambivalent emotion. It may be the stiffness of Clooney's performance, or the inevitable road to redemption movies seem to follow this time of year, but this movie never has time to meander or wink. The final shot is a return to normalcy; whether this film will get a return on my part is doubtful.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

On a misty early morning in the Catskills, two men build an enclosure to hold livestock. This opening shot would not be so disturbing were the story that follows not told from the perspective of the animal in captivity. The men are acolytes of a cult leader named Patrick (John Hawkes), who ensnares girl after girl with abandonment issues in his flock. What the purpose of the makeshift family is remains unclear, as does a great deal of the background of these characters. We only have the word of Martha, later Marcy May, and occasionally, Marlene (Elizabeth Olsen), to go on and she has, after all, been brainwashed.

It is standard operating procedure for a movie whose protagonist has experienced a mental breakdown to alternate between two different time periods. Martha Marcy May Marlene does not differ in structure from films like Memento and Spider, except that both plotlines occur post break. We never see "Martha", the pre-cult teenager. In one story, she's already one of the girls on the farm; in the other, she struggles to reacclamate to society under the watchful eye of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Through her eyes, her dreams and her memories, it is impossible to get a clear impression of either the past or the present. She is damaged irreparably, but whether that is Patrick's fault, or someone else's, is left largely to the imagination.

Lucy and Martha's relationship that provides the explanation for the latter's willingness to lose herself. One is a tightly wound careerist; the other an absent minded girl tangled in her own mind. This isn't just because one of them has been sharing clothes and a bed with a dozen other drugged housegirls. Writer-director Sean Durkin treat's Patrick's hideaway as just another part of a disturbed person's life - it is not the circumstance, but the psyche that is unsettled. Martha Marcy May Marlene spends its time at the edges of the situation, concerned with root causes.

Of course the objective observer in us will have to ask - just what are Hawkes and company up to? Durkin gets a great deal of unsettling mileage out of one of the film's opening images. The men set around the table eating, while the girls and women wait in the hallway; when the men finish and exit the dining room, the women sit around the same table, more cramped. No one speaks. The 21st century liberal in all of us recoils at the obvious iniquity, and without any animal sacrifice or genital mutilation, we're dead set against whatever Patrick and his cronies have in mind. There are a few more incidents that may make your skin crawl, but from Marcy May's perspective, these may not be any worse than Lucy and Ted's insistence on keeping feet off of furniture and engaging in polite conversation at a cocktail party.

Martha Marcy May Marlene would be nothing without the haunted, volatile performance by Olsen, whose thousand mile stares and sudden rages dictate the mood of any given scene. Even the film's faded Polaroid look mirrors Olson's long eroded personality. There are not any Oscar trolling "I'm losing my mind" scenes - it's long gone. This may be frustrating to some, as Marcy May is so far gone we never get the full picture. Durkin leaves his final shot in mid thought, Martha wandering on.

Whether lyrically incomplete or intentionally frustrating, Martha Marcy May Marlene certainly leaves us wanting from a narrative standpoint. One could go on for longer than the films running time once the credits roll unpacking the film's unanswered questions and unsatisfying, self-contained explanations. At least Durkin has taken us halfway there - in Marlene there is an economy of image and atmosphere that makes what we do see stick with us. The film announced itself six months ago with this haunting trailer - I can't say the whole experience goes much beyond this. The short cut raises feelings of uncommon empathy, curiosity and dread. Unfortunately, the finished product fails to put those back to rest.

The Skin I Live In

The sun slants perfectly across the moorish palaces of "Toledo 2012". Of course none of that Iberian grandeur is to be torn down in the next three months - the reason for the time-stamp lies inside one of the estates. We are rushed surreptitiously through the gates of a clinic called "El Cigarral" to meet Vera (Elena Anaya). She is near anorexic, pure of complexion, and enticingly flexible. From Cigarral being a medical clinic and the fact that Vera cannot leave her well-appointed chamber, the signals are clear: the interior is significantly uglier than what meets the eye. Within seconds of the audience laying eyes on her, Vera attempts suicide with an especially jagged page of Alice Munro. But all's well - soon her captor Dr. Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) returns to the compound and assures her she has the finest skin in the world. Then he offers her some opium.

The Skin I Live In can be found at the unmarked intersection of Pedro Almodovar and body horror.  It is almost always misleading to say a director has truly left his "comfort zone" - rather than moving to a new zip code, he'll usually just build a new house in the old one. There is not as much science fiction in Skin as a single-paragraph blurb mentioning a mad doctor and human experimentation might lead one to believe. Ledgard's early description of face transplants is little more than a red herring - there's no mutant makeup effect that will keep you up at night. What Skin does have is plenty of gender/sexuality confusion, unrequited love and sins of the past - Almodovar's bread, butter and jam.

The last decade or so of the director's work has passed in one multi-colored blur. Characters in some debilitated present look back at their vitals pasts and the moment when things began to go wrong. The protagonists of Talk to Her lie in comas - the doomed couple in Broken Embraces are blind and dead. Almost all of these stories have come with a meta-perspective, films or theatre at their center. The Skin I Live In uses a different sort of controlling personality as the "director" of the plot - Banderas has not been this effectual in years. Once the object of affection of the Almodovar surrogate, now he returns as the creator himself, craggy, deranged, omnipotent.

The parallels continue - things don't go to plan for Ledgard, and The Skin I Live In never quite strikes the right chord. Most of this is due to Almodovar's smug satisfaction with himself - the pretzel structure of the chronology buries some shocking truths deep in the second act, but in doing so makes a melodramatic mess of the third. The central terror of Skin would be enough for a conventional narrative to stay with you long after the credits roll - the trademark histrionics merely muddle the effect, reminding us more of the man backstage than the show in the front of the house.

At least the outre soap opera staging is getting in the way of a decent script this time. Bad Education, Volver and Embraces felt like long passages of the same script. Skin is a film with much less empathy, with an irreversible outcome. It's tragedies are not left to molder in the past - they continue far past the final frame. As sloppy its exposition, as unnecessary some of its gothic imagery, it still works as a horror film and revenge story. It clambers desperately at originality, yet comes back to the age old lesson; no matter how creative a punishment you devise, another's pain won't return what you have lost.  

The Pulpit #5: Drive

For a supposedly low-profile criminal, his appearance is unforgettable. Start at the immaculate cowboy boots fastened by skin-tight selvedge jeans, a bit of European style out of sync with the country he calls home. Working past the belt is his trademark quilted bowling jacket, replete with gold scorpion stitched on the back. It runs in sparkling condition (at the beginning of the film anyhow) to his hands, packed into vintage brown racing gloves. These, too, are leather. And mounted on all of this is the matinee-idol head of Ryan Gosling, whose every twitch and mumble will melt teenage girls in the audience, of which there will be many.

The adolescent squeals are merely the bi-product of Gosling's involvement. Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is the smartest action film to come out of Hollywood since Miami Vice; which is to say its less action and more film. It is a meticulously designed and acted pulp story, fussed over to the point of suffocation. For this reason, Drive is subject to the same criticism that was leveled at Vice, and previous Michael Mann efforts - that it is more style than substance. Refn would have been wise to give Mann a "godfather" credit in the opening titles - it's become impossibly to watch a neo-noir with a laconic, inscrutable hero without thinking of Heat, Thief or Manhunter.  As in those movies, the position of buttons on a shirt or their choice of sunglasses is far more important than their murky past.

Gosling (referred to simply as "The Driver" in the credits) is a simple man who does one thing: "drive".  Two sorts of people need good wheelmen - criminals and movie directors. So the Driver spends his days on the backlot and his night in the back alleys. The opening sequence is standard to the crime genre - a scheme is pulled off perfectly, at once getting our blood pulsing and proving that our protagonist is one cool cat. As to why someone with a fine day job, or in this case two, as he works on cars for his friend/boss/mentor/father Shannon (Bryan Cranston), would need to risk jail time on the side, its never clear.

Before we're even used to the idea of the Driver as some sort of cold-blooded killer cut from Mann's cloth (or that of his french predecessor, Jean-Pierre Melville), he's become romantically entangled with single-mom Irene (Cary Mulligan). Mulligan's character and performance are where Drive runs into most of its problems. The release of her husband from jail is the catalyst of the plot, but her all-too-indie bob haircut and adorable son, and the Driver's obvious affection for them, make it hard to buy that he was ever such a bad guy to begin with. Once the well-worn second job has run off the tracks, and Gosling is out in the world killing people any way he can that doesnt involve a gun (A hammer, a knife, and of course, the car itself), there is more than enough fun to go around. Ultimately though, Refn is applying the postmodern, alienated tropes of Mann and others to a story with the moralistic spine of a Technicolor. One would think that the troubles of three little people wouldn't amount to a hill of beans to a driver for hire in a neon-and-black L.A. noir - the entire content of Drive runs entirely counter to its form.

Be wise and ignore Mulligan - she muddies what is otherwise a superb thriller. The meat of the film is comprised of The Driver matching wits with various levels of baddie, both verbally and physically, in and out of the car, and never with the camera eye at a safe distance. We're right there with him - this is close-range action in the tradition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Dirty Harry and Point Blank. Here, wisely, Refn eliminates the signs of The Driver being a redeemable character - when those gloves are on, they are proverbially off. The bulk of the budget seems to have been spent on the cast, which besides an avuncular Cranston feature Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman and Christina Hendricks. A car chase ensues on a barren road. Key scenes transpire in an elevator, a pizza parlor and a motel room. Everything resonates more in a vacuum.

Drive has to be the most brazenly commercial film to ever earn best director at Cannes, but that's not to say the jury was wrong. Its a continuation of an unsettling trend; more and more it seems the most American of genres are safer in foreign hands. Following in the footsteps of Orphan (Jaume Collet-Serra) and Predators (Nimrod Antal), Drive sells us our own entertainment from the outside. Masquerading as action director, Refn does a better job than Michael Bay or Chrisopher ever could. Without enough rope to hang himself, fast, fun and didactic beats overblown and overlong every day of the week.

The Vault #74: Bad Timing

The full title is Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, which promises nudity if nothing else. Rather than a lens smeared with vaseline, the lighting is stark. The credits roll over scenes from an art museum; two lovers gaze at different times at the same wall, only with a different painting hanging before them. Tom Waits croons gravelly on the soundtrack, as diagonal beams of light penetrate the space, suggesting knives to the brain of hungover socialite. Though the "timing" will become something of a debate as the plot unfolds, the "bad" elements of this scenario are made clear from the beginning. There is regret, a disconnection between two people in the same room but not together, reflected in the expressions in those Bohemian portraits - this world is out of sync.

Moments later, but months or years in terms of the narrative, we see a speeding ambulance, the man and woman now together inside. Psychoanalyst Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) identifies himself as "just a friend" of the assymetrically named Milena Flaherty (Theresa Russell), but being her last call before an apparent suicide attempt suggests something more. As the ambulance blows through stop lights and around hair pin turns, and Milena's floundering body is transported to an operating table, flashes come from earlier. They meet - they have sex - they take a trip to Morocco - she upsets his work life - he upsets her psychological well being. Each event happens in isolation from the rest of the chronology; no matter where you start, this relationship was doomed from the start.

Roeg referred to his style, which often features bony, lonely, middle-aged men wandering European streets at night, as "Antonioni with humor". A doomed love affair between two ex-pats hiding out in Freud's Vienna certainly carries the Italian's trademark theme of alienation; but the casting of a middle-aged Garfunkel as the lead defangs the gravity of the inquiry. Perhaps Roeg could not find an actor with the appropriately semitic angles in his face, the right amount of neuroses in his line readings, to serve as a postmodern echo of Sigmund Freud, whose picture is often found in the corner of the frame. Perhaps Dustin Hoffman passed on the project. Roeg doesn't want us wholeheartedly consumed with the apparent tragedy on screen - he gives us plenty of time to groove to Waits and The Who, whilst Garfunkel struts in his bell-bottomed pants.

Equally important as Linden, the ostensible protagonist, is Netusil, the investigating officer played by Harvey Keitel, whose nebulous identity and country of origin lend the story a drop of Cold War intrigue. This is compounded in a scene where Linden reports to the American embassy and receives his next "assignment", to create psychological profiles of a couple of persons of interest, one of whom is Milena. Is the mild-mannered academic about to be drawn into a web of international espionage? This eyebrow-raising development gives way to Garfunkel peppering the demure Russell with questions about her not-entirely-desolved marriage to an older Czech gentleman. When the hard nosed Netusil with his mane of flowing black hair suggest that he and the feminine, graceful Linden "are quite alike", is this meant as a joke? A reference to both being politcal operatives for their countries? Shared sexual proclivities? Whatever the answer, it is a beguiling statement to the audience, who might guess all or none of the above.

The couple takes a trip to Morocco, where they are the subject of suspicious gazes. Then they go months without seeing each other. or Or is the long break before the North African vacation? Some time later she makes the fateful call, and he shows up at either 10:30 or 2 am, depending on whose clock you trust. Bad Timing is a cubist painting, each perspective line pointing to a different horizon. However, its ideological slant is not that of Rashomon, where four coherent accounts all add up to a different account. The film never attempts at a reconciliation between cause and effect, action and result, chronology and narrative. Enough films have shown the rise and fall of a tumultuous sexual relationship in this fashion. Bad Timing puts us in the moment rather than after it, with very little space to understand.

Contagion

A few days into the outbreak that will become a global pandemic in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, a high-ranking Homeland Security official hypothesizes the novel virus may be a weaponized strain of the bird flu. CDC chief Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) dismisses this possibility with the chilling observation: "the birds are already weaponizing it." This unsettling comment, applicable to reality, resonates for the rest of the film. Contagion is hardly a work of science fiction - it's catalysts and contingencies are right around the corner. This is not the world of 28 Days Later... or Outbreak - it is our own, from the civil servants to the stay-at-home dads.

This lack of fantasy only lends to the immediacy of the terror. Suppose an businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracted a virus while on a trip to China, did not show symptoms for 24 or 48 hours, then returned home to Minneapolis, where she and her young son would be dead within the week? The next step in the drama would take place in Atlanta, at the Center for Disease Control, where Dr. Cheever would receive a briefing. The World Health Organization would hold a similar meeting in Geneva (europe represented once again by the ravishing Marion Cotillard) - the two offices might communicate by teleconference. Supposing this woman had brushed up against a Japanese man on vacation, and supposing he had met his seizing end on public transportation, a video might hit the dark corners of the internet, and a mealymouthed blogger in San Francisco might decide to shout conspiracy from the rooftops.

Soderbergh's greatest merit in his career has been his versatility, zig-zagging from ironic comedies (Ocean's 11-13, The Informant!, Schizopolis) and earnest dramas (Che, Erin Brockovich) to offbeat navel-gazing (Full Frontal, sex lies and videotape) and shallow (though worthwhile) excercises in style (Solaris, The Good German, Out of Sight). His aptitude with a variety of genres serves him well in Contagion; its various storylines form one film much more convincingly than, say, the intersecting lines in Traffic. Everyone has the best intentions. Everyone is trying their best to hold society together. And everyone is scared shitless.

One may be expecting the annihilation of the human race to be the ultimate endpoint of this film, but anything so melodramatic would distract from the larger point, which is that misinformation can move significantly faster than any airborne toxin. The wild card in Contagion is Alan Krumwiede, the conspiracy theorist with a megaphone to the ear of cyberspace played by Jude Law. Ten years ago, Krumwiede would have been linking to the patchy video of explosives going off at the base of the Pentagon - now he dishes dirt on Cheever and other officials at the time when the government most desperately needs to be trusted. It is the rare Hollywood film that makes the higher-ups of the military-industrial complex sympathetic figures, but Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns realize the terrifying truth; in the event of global infection, these are the only people we can trust. Wikileaks is good fun, but when it comes to life and death, we have to trust the people with the highest security clearance.

It is a pleasant surprise to see forgotten talents like Law and Fishburne doing quality work in a major motion picture again. This may be more on Soderbergh's account, however, than their individual efforts. Contagion keeps the stock scenes of stadiums filled with hospital beds and perfectly reasonable people rioting and a drugstore to the bare minimum. Instead, the story is strung together through refreshingly small-scale scenes. Matt Damon will be on Oscar shortlists as Paltrow's widower - Cotillard goes through an entire film's worth of emotions in 3 scenes set in a small Chinese village. Though fast-paced and detail driven like David Fincher's recent films Zodiac and The Social Network, there's a lot more humanity to go around in Contagion. It helps when hypothetical millions are dying off to realize the value of each one.  

Even with this rosy view of human nature, normalcy can never be restored fully to a world so overpopulated and interconnected. Contagion takes extraordinary events and forces us to examine the limits of our existing infrastructure and understanding - many of the ills of society revealed by the crisis are already problems in our everyday lives. It's overblown tag-line "don't talk to anyone, don't touch anyone," emphasizes the impossibility of avoiding the calamity. The higher civilization climbs, the closer we are bound to one another physically and electronically, the more crippling such an epidemic becomes, and the more likely we are to be eventually crippled by it.

Bellflower

Evan Glodell is the next great master of the American cinema. Bellflower is a visceral tableaux of dreams raised, hopes crushed, apocalypses internal and external, a drunken, violent argument both for and against the possibility of love between two humans; its argument, laid out in premises charred from without and bloodied within, demands to be heard.  It bears the outsider's perspective of Terrence Malick's Badlands, the emotional maturity of Peter Bogdonavich's The Last Picture Show and the stylistic ingenuity of Citizen Kane. 


In a grimy corner of the San Fernando Valley, Woodrow (writer-director-editor-engineer Glodell himself) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are lost in a boyhood fantasy. Moved out from Wisconsin to pursue a vaguely defined "California Dream", they pass their days scribbling in notebooks and making machinery for the coming end of the world. They aren't religious fanatics by any means - they are preparing, specifically, for the scenario presented in The Road Warrior, and building the Medusa, a fire-breathing muscle car driven by the villain in that film Lord Humongous, a larger than life figure both young men admire shamelessly, and whom "cannot be defied." Also at their disposal are a couple of shotguns, a flamethrower, and plenty of alcohol.

The relative peace of their regressive lifestyle is breached by Milly (Jessie Waxman), a care-free type who takes immediately to Woodrow. That the two meet in a grasshopper-eating contest at a bar serving dishwater-grey beer may be seen as harbingers of the oft-reference armageddon, but who's to notice when love is in the air? At this point Bellflower, which opened in a sea of flames, screeching tires and blood (established in a brilliant 15-second montage) turns on a dime. Woodrow and Milly go on a road trip to Texas in his much less threatening, but no less jerry-rigged Volvo (instead of spitting flame, this one drips bourbon). A third machine is a work throughout, dubbed by Glodell the "Coatwolf II" - it's his camera, a hybrid of several models, delivering images are punctuated by visceral lens flares and rapid shifts in focus within stationary shots.

As these visual techniques underscore that two men preparing for the facticity of a 30-year old Mel Gibson vehicle may not be entirely sane, so does this machinery begin to malfunction once the inevitable heartbreak transpires. Woodrow and Aiden are obsessed with control, with domination, with survival, as are all characters in your typical buddy action flick (or for that matter, those that buy the tickets to such fare). When Milly throws a wrench in their plans, the record does not just skip - it melts, while the turntable explodes. The only answer is rebellion - Woodrow and Aiden react not unlike the unnamed narrator and Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Only instead of credit card companies and capitalist culture, their terrorism is aimed against human relationships, especially those with women.

This has led more than one politically correct critic to suggest that Bellflower is singleminded in its hatred for the female sex, but I think this is to see only half of the film. One does not arrive at disenchantment without enchantment - there is more than enough romantic reverie before Woodrow finds himself peeling rubber, covered in forced tattoos, with a score to settle. There is also the fact that most of the violence in Bellflower's second half is allegorical if not entirely imagined; Lord Humongous does not, in fact, roam the Earth.

Too many films capture the subjectivity on one side of love or the other, the warmth of companionship, the depression of loneliness. Rarely is a film honest about both -  Bellflower is that film. This is not a story that relegates it strongest symbols to dream sequences or parables. Here is a motorcycle on an open road - there is a mushroom cloud. The world of Bellflower is three-dimensional, jagged, and currently in the process of exploding - the experience will be a little more than some viewers can accept. The emotions on display will strain both the hearts and stomachs of the audience. No tragedy is ever literally the end of the world, but this one feels awful close.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

By today's standards, the original Planet of the Apes would make for a very boring summer blockbuster. A spaceship crashes off screen - men are hunted by apes on horseback, but caught to quickly for a full-blown action sequence. Eventually, Charlton Heston is put on existential trial by a group of orangutans who seem convinced he is less than entirely human (hold your jokes). Some compassionate chimpanzees help him escape, and eventually he finds out that you no longer need to book ferry reservations months in advance to climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty. That Planet of the Apes was released right at the dawn of big budget special effects (1968, the same year as 2001) - just as conceptual movies about man's extinction were replaced by shiny children's movies. Mashing those two styles together would give you roughly what Tim Burton gave us in 2001 - a disastrously underdeveloped movie with monkey war scenes popping out at strange angles.

20th Century Fox's latest attempt to get the franchise back on its legs is Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which essentially takes Heston's character in the original only (PLOT TWIST), this time he's an ape! Despite what you may have heard, James Franco does not play the main character of the film (the theory is already out there that his role was reduced after he ruined the Oscars telecast). If you sat through the first 20 minutes of Deep Blue Sea, you know the only way to cure Alzheimer's is to make a dangerously strong animal super smart by expanding parts of their brains with experimental drugs. Franco is the chief researcher, and after one thrilling experiment gone bad, he adopts the last surviving chimp (played masterfully through motion capture by Andy Serkis), names him Caesar, and raises him as a human child for nearly a decade.

Serkis and his animators are masterful, and Caesar may be the best performance of the summer. His childhood and moral awakening are cute, funny, endearing, human in every way. After he attacks a stranger who was threatening an adoptive family member, he is taken to a primate shelter run by the simian-as-ever Brian Cox. The movie then goes to full Shawshank mode, as Caesar learns to fit in, and eventually hatches a plot for escape, all while teaching (and medicating) his fellow prisoners. This plot-line culminates in a thrilling escape and rampage through San Francisco and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Rise is no philisophical meditation - it knows that we know how strong chimpanzees are, it knows how scary the prospect of them being smart can be, and it exploits both with great results.

The problems with Rise begin at the end, which feels more like the middle of some new trilogy that is about to be sprung on us. Sure, Rise runs feature length because Franco gets to argue with his evil boss (David Oyelowo) about genetic testing, and then canoodle with Freida Pinto. The limited action we see is great - why pretend this movie is about scientific ethics? The movie feels so much more alive when we're in the world of the chimps, by the time the final confrontation comes, it becomes hard to find a real villain to root against. None of the other characters seem important enough to be a real antagonist. In a series where many of the individual chapters have ended with terrifying global and historical implications, Rise seems small scale. The "big twist" is idiotically shoved between title cards in the end credits - half of the theater is literally already out the door.

But oh that motion capture really is breathtaking. Really makes you want to see vast armies of apes taking out tons of humans across the globe, with the president negotiating with one and then getting crushed by his unbelievable strong....well, Summer 2013 maybe.

The Vault #73: Last Year at Marienbad

For the next ninety minutes, 12 months or however many consecutive lifetimes it takes, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) will ask A (Delphine Seyrig) if she remembers him. A does not. He will remind her of their meet-cute at a statue of Emperor Charles in a garden so manicured it seems to be a backdrop, perhaps even mimicking a  drawing that hangs inside the lavish European hotel where the two are staying. This similarity is no coincidence - this reflection is one of many that allows Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad to alternate between romantic fable and nebulous metafilm.

The French New Wave is almost universally regarded as the tipping point of cinema history, the moment at which the medium shifted from the beauty of modernism to the jagged edges of postmodernism. The tone of cinema changed entirely, largely from optimistic to pessimistic - on one side you have Fellini, Kurosawa and Howard Hawks; afterward Pasolini, Imamura and Scorsese. If, as Godard claimed, the camera mechanism had conspired to conceal the truth, now it laid those realities all too bare. Marienbad is a film in knowing conflict with itself, an impressionistic experiment that takes place in the most classic of settings. We are in familiar surrounding, a grand old hotel as seen in the finest high society films like The Awful Truth or The Rules of the Game; the plot itself, nearly unintelligible.

X undertakes only two actions - he recalls, through flashbacks, his memories of his first meeting with A; and he repeatedly plays a game with A's intended, X, each time losing on the final turn. The memories are as alien to A as the game is to audiences - we do know that X is not succeeding with either. It will soon be noted by both X and A that the memories may be dreams, and dreams so structured as to defy our expectations of actual dreams. Extras rarely stir in the background, and only speak when spoken to. The statues in the garden seem to levitate above the rest of the grounds. Scenes are shot entirely through reflections, then through reflections of reflections, as X seems to be drifting further from his purpose, which of course, is never completely revealed.

Many of the cinematic signifiers used in the New Wave, from Jean-Paul Belmondo's noir-chic in Breathless to Truffaut's many surrogates escaping to the local movie theater, were used as shorthand to familiarize the viewer with the setting of the film. This is not the case in Marienbad, where old and new are not only in disagreement, they literally don't recognize each other. A may be a ghost, A may be an identical twin, X may remember A from a dream - the rest of the internet will give you more than enough interpretations of the mobius strip that forms Marienbad's plot. One thing is certain - Resnais does not wish for this film to seem merely a continuation; it sees the past as an other, an enemy. It demands to be seen on its own terms, refuses to be part of a larger romantic narrative, just like A herself.

That opacity is less likely the work of Resnais and more likely from the mind of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the first-time screenwriter of Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet was well-known at the time as the progenitor of the so-called "new novel", which eschewed time, place and character. His work is a direct challenge to traditional and ever modern literary styles of the time. The expressions on the statues in the garden might be as important as those on the actors in a given scene - it is as much the whim of the audience as it is the director or the author. Surely there are shortcomings when adapting this sort of writing to the screen - live action cannot help but being representational in one way or another.

As per its postmodern perfection, it will be impossible to experience Last Year at Marienbad the same way twice. Different bits of overlapping dialogue will gain levels of significance; certain scenes will seem more clearly figments of one or more character's imagination; you may even find yourself spawning another "ironclad" interpretation of the endless competition between X and M. It is the most classic precursor one will find to the later works of David Lynch, all dead ends, high camp and impossible riddles. Yet it holds us with aplomb in its murmuring, mystical grasp. We will return again and again, this time with a firm conviction to solve to the mystery, because more likely than not, we were never there.