To Have and Have Not

If you spell your name Andrei with an "i", were born in the Eastern bloc, and make glacial films in natural settings that often conclude inscrutably, you're going to want a glass of milk, and it also won't be long before everyone is comparing you to Tarkovsky, parsing your allegories, and declaring you a diluted shadow of your country's greatest auteur. While his first two films, The Return and The Banishment, were a promising beginning, Andrei Zvyagintzev has no desire to enter the mausoleum in which his critics have planned to seal him. Instead he is sprinting in the other direction. So almost a year after it shoehorned its way into Cannes and aroused some fervent best actress talk for its star Nadezhda Markina, Zvyagintsev's third offering, Elena, arrives on American screens. And the States is surely where it belongs, for gone are the floating considerations of rippling water and rustling trees - this is money, sex and violence.

The hook of Elena is that Marina is a grandmother in her 60s, not Barbara Stanwyck. She lives more than comfortably in the spacious apartment of her husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), albeit in separate bedrooms. Both have children from previous marriages, and the relationships between the retirees and their far-flung families is the central conflict of the film, beautifully laid out in a sequence near the beginning of the film. After arguing over whether Vladimir will give Elena's unemployed son Sergey (Aleksey Rozin) the money he needs to keep her grandson Sasha from being conscripted, she leaves the house timidly, boards a bus, then a train, and finally travels a dirt path strewn with broken glass pass the cooling towers of a nuclear reactor. The uncharacteristically restrained score from Philip Glass helps mount the tension as Elena winds her way from the top of the pyramid to the bottom.  In this commute we are presented with her tenuous position in the world. Her past is the broken down Soviet apartment block where her son and grandchildren live on top of one another - her present is sterilized luxury of her spouse/benefactor, for whom she is expected to clear table and clean house.

At first blush, it would be easy to peg the class distinctions in play here as an indictment of Putin's Russia, the viciousness of new capitalism hardening Vladimir's heart against his in-laws. However, this is hardly a new or unique scenario. It is a staple of film noir - the bitter old man with more money than he needs. The protagonists of such films are younger, more full of life, ready to take on the world if they just had a little dough. And the thrill for the audience comes in rooting for these attractive young things and their immoral urges. Elena has no such urges to take the money and run to a life of pleasure - at one point Vladimir describes his own daughter as a hedonist and his wife must bashfully ask him the meaning of the word. She has the fatal flaw of those players in the most effective tragedies - acting upon good intentions.

Though she is relegated to three scenes total, the standout of Elena is Vladimir's daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova), who has spurned her father's apparent high standing in society for a life of drugs and alcohol. Lyadova is a classic emaciated Russian brunette, the only glamorous element of this otherwise understated film. Whether Vladimir truly loves Elena may be a matter for some debate, but there is no question he would give his life to Katya, and this is only believable through Lyadova's unaffected charisma and striking looks (at least in the context of the rest of the cast). When she declares the entirety of mankind "subhuman" we can see his heart break, even though he is happy to see her. This exchange may seem to hit the nail too squarely on the head, but the dark turns that follow only serve to confirm Katye's suspicions: we're all flies buzzing around the same pile of shit.

Elena follows the model of many Northern and Eastern European movies of this period; it unfolds in silent, unbroken takes, with characters staring into the middle distance. Zvyagintsev eschews the completely blank slate approach of others famous for this technique like Bela Tarr and Michael Haneke - he give their gazes an object. Sergey spits off his balcony and looks across the disheveled courtyard at another run down building identical to his own. Elena glimpses a dead horse out of a train window. Mostly, however, their eyes rest on televisions, which are almost always heard but never seen directly. Whether cooking shows or football matches or video games, all these characters are reduced to zombies at one point or another. The messages coming across the airwaves are irrelevant, although again a critique of commercialism and modernity can be implied (which sausage tastes the best? We asked these randomly selected participants...) - rather, when all one's financial needs have been secured, what is there besides the tube?

The dreams, allegories and open questions have been put aside - Elena is a potboiler that at least appears to carry a strong and pertinent message. Thankfully, the exact ramifications are left up to us; however, it is important to note the wider one interprets the didacticism of this film the less enjoyable it may become. Let us not simply write this off as another post-Soviet condemnation of capitalism and call it a day. This is a work of meticulous performance by an incredible casted, executed with the utmost precision. These characters are real, no longer stand ins for larger concepts of human psychology. A lot may be made of the opening shot, with its two ominous blackbirds meeting on a tree outside Elena and Vladimir's window, then the rhyming conclusion where they have disappeared. It is indeed Zvyagintsev's one Tarkovskian indulgence, but do refrain from reading too much into it. Maybe they just went south for the winter.

What Gods They Were

Movies are distractions, and comic books are for the obsessed. The former banks on a lack of focus, while the latter demands an ongoing grasp of plot and subplot from issue to issue. A random issue of The Fantastic Four does a lot less for you or I than it does for Comic Book Guy. The only logical way to make us all fanboys is to start at the beginning, and these entry costs, while necessary, have not always been the most enjoyable way to spend Saturday afternoon. Christopher Nolan's take on Batman blossomed in the second movie, when all that Eastern philosophy had disappeared. Whether you took notice or not, Marvel has been pumping out origin stories each of the past five summers to get us to the fun part: Joss Whedon's latest smoothie, The Avengers. 


The Avengers hearkens back to the star-studded blockbusters of the 1960s, when the Rat Pack stuffed widescreen compositions and half of the bankable stars in Hollywood rode motorcycles / defended freedom while as many Nazis as possible. And that shared, smirking sentiment is no coincidence; with the exception of Captain America, the heroes of The Marvel universe all made their first appearances when Frank and Dino ruled the world. The attitude is best epitomized (and monetized) by the rakish billionaire malcontent Tony Stark (aka Tony Snark, aka Iron Man). Robert Downey Jr. is not only the biggest star in The Avengers; he's also the spirit animal of the entire project. Talk fast, drink heavily, save the day, laugh it off. Repeat until they stop filling the theater.

Stark's mile-a-minute dialogue and lackadaisical demeanor tamp down any possible gravitas with which a movie about the potential destruction of the world might confuse itself. Captain America (Chris Evans), patriot and upstanding individual, is the butt of many jokes for being too much of a straight arrow. The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, this time around) is simply there to promise the smashing of everything at some point for the audience, who gleefully await the pin to be pulled. Also, Samuel L. Jackson wears an eyepatch while commanding  a flying battleship, and Jeremy Renner shoots grenade-tipped arrows.

The one Avenger who's arch-silliness transcends our desire to see him use his powers is Thor, whose backstory also provides the film's antagonist, his half-step-not-actually-related brother Loki. Thor is seven feet tall, has a mane of blonde hair, wears a cape that seems leftover from the costume department of 300. He is played by Chris Hemsworth, the sculpted and hollow Australian model who has here traded in his Down Under accent for the elevated lilt of a Kenneth Branagh production (indeed, his intro-prequel, tactfully entitled Thor, was directed by the world's foremost authority on Shakespeareism-ism). It must be Thor's enemy that the Avengers are pitted against, because Thor could pretty quickly smash and blast to bits any of the baddies from the other Marvel offerings. That's because Thor is an immortal, just like real-mythology Thor! As lazy and stupid as it sounds, it's also honest. We don't even need the transitive property.

In other words, The Avengers have God on their side, which means character development, crises of conscience and Dark Knights of the soul are all unnecessary frills. We came to see Hulk smash, the Captain inspire, and Iron Man deploy the latest capability of his suit to kill a bunch of faceless goons. You came to see fancy special effects crush evil, not a streamlined, screenwriter version of your favorite illustrations. Think about all the emotional turmoil of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker - you could do without it. Having all these guys crowd into one movie eliminates the boredom of emotions and creating three dimensional characters. Who needs a here with a thousand faces when we can have a thousand heroes?

When a new comic book movie comes out, there are usually several articles that manufacture tension between the film's creators and the nebulous "fan-boy" community. I have some doubt as to whether a majority of the actual boys going to see The Avengers will have read the original comics; they're probably as familiar with the tie-in video games Marvel has rolled out with each of the preceding films. However, after its first 30 minutes of "getting the gang back together", The Avengers operates much more like a serial than a film. Our heroes shuffle on and off with their catchphrases and token characteristics, going from one scrape to the next without the straining of "key plot points". Most of these beats that move the film along Whedon reveals as manipulations within his own script almost as soon as they arise. His treatment is flip, disposable, and most importantly, inconsequential. It is summer after all.

People Will Talk

Bernhardt Tiede was a mild-mannered, god-fearing man of the people with a passion for funerals and musical theatre. He had a common touch that made him the most beloved assistant funeral director in Carthage, Texas. He had the common touch/ he remembered where everyone's kids went to college; he lent people large sums of money and never asked to be paid back. On November 16th, 1996, Bernie shot his closest friend and employer, the 81-year-old widow Margorie Nugent, in the back four times. For the next nine months, Bernie kept smiling, kept singing, and continued being the favorite son of Carthage. When Mrs. Nugent's family finally roused law enforcement to look for their estranged matriarch, they found her body tucked into an industrial freezer in her garage, all in one piece. Bernie was still hoping to give her the sendoff she so richly deserved.

When Tiede was convicted to life in prison over a decade ago, Richard Linklater knew immediately he wanted to adapt the events into a film. At the time, however, he claims he had no inkling of who would play the inscrutable Tiede, a borderline religious zealot and do-gooder who seemingly killed the town's richest woman for her money. Linklater, who has switched between broad Hollywood comedies (School of Rock, The Bad News Bears) and independent fare (A Scanner Darkly, Before Sunrise) did not have it in his nature to make a gritty true-crime tale about a calculating killer. For Linklater, Bernie is a story about the headlines, about the conventional wisdom surrounding the crime, and the disconnect between rumor and fact. You see, even with the bullets, the gun, the body, and a confession, pretty much everyone believed Tiede to be innocent. He was just too nice. So the movie is a comedy, and it stars Jack Black.

Following the tendencies of his early Texas-based comedies Slacker and Dazed and Confused, Bernie comes off as much ethnography as narrative, even to a fault. Linklater not only devotes a great deal of screen time to interviews with the real-life residents of Carthage, he even incorporates them into scenes with his top-billed actors. As a result, the scenes between Black and Shirley MacLaine are spaced out, and their relationship never gains the momentum or believability one would expect out of a conventional film. One moment where Mrs. Nugent ominously closes her gates to prevent Bernie's escape stands out as the stuff of sewing circles. There is an overwhelming feeling, especially given our sympathy for Bernie, that Linklater is giving us the legend rather than settling for the ugly truth.

The anthropological approach is not entirely without merit. One old soul gives a lecture on the seven different regions of Texas, complete with diagram and animation, and concludes that Carthage lies in the region "where the south begins". In one interview, a man leaning on a piece of farming equipment calls the people from a town 50 miles away "hillbillies"; including this ironic observation isn't meant to mock its utterer. Bernie is a film as much about backwoods ignorance as it is about the inscrutability of human behavior. Bernie wasn't capable of murder, and the Hatfields/McCoys have always been scum. It's disbelief that sends Linklater into this journalistic wormhole, one that he passes on to us as he leaves the theatre. By limiting the inner life of Tiede and Nugent, we get to keep scratching our heads over this otherwise unexceptional crime. We probably don't want the facts on Jonbenet Ramsey either.

Bernie recovers from its ramble of scattered vignettes and unreliable whispers in the third act thanks to the performance of Matthew McConaughey, as district attorney Danny Buck Davidson. Danny Buck is given the odd task of convincing a jury to convict a man who has already confessed. His strategy is marvelously telling, at once a satire and affirmation of country values; he shows that Bernie was not really an upstanding member of the community but rather an effete elitist who knows the type of wine to pair with fish. The implications of class warfare are enough to turn the overweight jury against anyone, even that nice man that praises Jesus with his every act.

While it might defang the central events of the story by interweaving fact with fiction, Bernie occupies a unique place; it's a mockumentary without the mocking. Linklater and McConaughey have genuinely mixed emotions towards their home state, issues not resolved during the film's running time. The credits even contain a short clip of the actual Tiede in a jump suit giving Black some pointers on his performance. The prisoner smiles and laughs in this silent clip enough to let us know Linklater finally found the right man for the part. Guilt and innocence, morality and redemption are pretty big words, wholly outside the scope of this quirky retelling. It's not one of them big city art pictures.

...And He Is Us.

No one is likely to see The Cabin in the Woods a second time. The movie is a sacrifice of one's dissociative and escapist instincts on the altar of a well-executed gimmick. There is not exactly a twist, but then again, there is not exactly a mystery either. Buying a ticket to this horror-show, you've signed up for sexy young things being murdered, you hope, in creatively disgusting and suggestive ways. While the densest in the audience may foster this illusion for up to 40 minutes, writer Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard lay out our fate without slight of hand; we've walked into an ambush. The chances of being fooled or even intrigued by the paper-thin characters and plot on a return viewing are literally zero.

Five college students from central casting (the good girl, the slut, the stoner, the nerd and the jock) take a camping trip in a fabulously retro RV to a...cabin....in the woods. A weird old gas station attendant tells them they're all going to die, but of course they ignore him, as we all expect them to, because dammit, we came here to smell human flesh on the spit! The early scenes are marvelously shallow and lackadaisical - this is after all, some variety of slasher movie, so why waste any time or effort? You go to a baseball game, you get a hot dog and a beer - the quality of either item does not really matter. Cabin in the Woods can afford this shortcoming because of its other, theoretically groundbreaking, subplot.  

Meta-films tend to focus on the author, their motivations, intentions and struggles in the act of creation. The Cabin in the Woods flips the script and looks out at the audience. The grand metaphors, from passionate sculptor to troubled magician are thrown out the window; Whedon and Goddard are represented on-screen as little more than engineers or actuaries. Under the earth's surface, controlling the scenario with the enthusiasm of accountants during tax season. The cultural lameness of Jenkins and Whitford as our terror's architects suggests our desire to watch flesh ripped from bone may not even be all that cool. These are very boring men doing a very boring job. Are the purveyors of this entertainment being mocked, or the consumers?

When trying to answer this question, the movie runs a bit off the rails. Either the security cameras around the remote cabin are being used for a reality TV show, as one character timelessly quips, or the gore we see is actually happening, keeping some dark force at bay, as the script teases out through a lot of leaden exposition. Jenkins and Whitford refer to upstairs and downstairs, the director and the stage, but stone temples and blood offerings muddle the line between Hollywood commentary and religious satire. The Cabin in the Woods seems headed towards Fellini or even Christopher Guest territory, but then doubles back to give us legitimate chills. As though we'd ever let the poindexters from mission control ever get one over on us again.

Once the kids in the cabin get some wind of what the kids in the audience are already well aware, the film picks up a bit, both in thrills and laughs, only to come to an overly talky climax. To consider it against the film mentioned in most reviews, The Cabin in the Woods does not wink as smoothly at its customer as Scream. Its more screed than narrative, an endless riff on the genre that never spends defining the line at which to suspend our disbelief. The actors on screen are not addressing one another - they're looking through the one-way mirror, fed by our gaze.

Whedon in particular has been a vocal opponent of the torture-porn franchises that have been the recent trend in horror. It is telling that the initial menace visited upon "our heroes" is a family of pain-loving hillbillies with little more detail than the zombie pirates in John Carpenter's The Fog. The Cabin in the Woods calls for a return to normalcy, the days when young, beautiful things were killed for sport, and it didn't exactly matter how. The sadism, the rusty power tools and improvised crucifixions have gone to far; We came to see something die, it doesn't matter how.

Brain Storm

The most awe-inspiring special effect on display in Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter is the physical appearance of its star, Michael Shannon's. His otherness is no secret to casting directors - from a bit part in Vanilla Sky to his suburban Asperger's case in Revolutionary Road and on to full blown psychopaths in Boardwalk Empire and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, Shannon's career has burst forward on his unique ability to convince an audience of his insanity. He brings the added terror of body prefabricated for atrocity - his hulking mass and mug would not be out of place on an SS officer or abusive prison guard. Watching Shannon work in any capacity is a delight - add in a diminishing grip on reality, and we're in for a tour-de-force of blank stares, violent seizure and possessed bellowing that prefigure the end of days more convincingly than all the CGI angels or demons money can buy.

Nichols approaches that imposing appearance with a bit more humanity that other directors. In his previous film, Shotgun Stories, Shannon played Son, the de-facto patriarch of one branch on a gnarled family tree. He and his brothers get into a tussle with their delinquent and deceased father's "other" family, and soon find themselves embroiled in a territorial conflict that began before any of them were born. Stories is straightforward Southern gothic; it stands out if only for its unassuming presentation, a confidence in themes and performances that doesn't require a lot of speechifying. Though the small-town atmosphere and home-spun values remain, the end of the world is a much more challenging subject for a minimalist.

The world is attacking Curtis, if only in his dreams. He has visions of looming clouds, of friends and loved ones and even the family dog attacking him unprovoked. At one point a burst of reduced gravity levitates his living room set off the ground, only to smash it to bits. While the path of least resistance in screenwriting is to portray insanity as a mind wrangling with the unthinkable and unknowable, Take Shelter entertains a more concrete, and problematically, political explanation. Signals are given throughout, whether in the doctor's office or the pharmacist's window, the gas pump of the local potluck. Curtis is having visions in his sleep, but his waking hours find him in the slowly sinking suburb of Elyria, Ohio, where one doesn't have to look far for portents of a different kind.

I have doubts as to whether Take Shelter will hold up in ten years, or even five; the conflicts do not seem as much between the characters as they do between Curtis and his lifestyle in these harsh economic times. Shea Wigham and Jessica Chastain are both compelling and believable as Best Friend and Loving Wife, but seen through Curtis' haze they never feel quite three-dimensional. This is not out of the ordinary for a first-person story of mental illness, but Take Shelter makes an effort to resist that categorization - why else make a prohibitively expensive operation for Curtis' deaf daughter such a crucial plot point? Yet if he really is insane, the comment being made is not quite applicable to John Q. Public. Nichols' maddening ambivalence towards his protagonist's true state of mind leaves us in an ideological and narrative no man's land, an all too common trend on the festival circuit these days.

On the other hand, the pointedness of Take Shelter allows for its protagonist to move in a definitive direction in the film's third act. Curtis renovates his tornado shelter and builds himself a misanthropes dream underground where, begrudgingly, the wife and kid are accepted. Once inside however, the metaphor is almost too much to bear. Can "America" just go underground and hide until the "storm" blows over? Nichols ultimately demurs from his own question, providing us with a satisfying climax where Curtis must face the reality that the world is going to keep going, and then switches back to suggest he may have been right all along. The director, with his background in kitchen-sink realism, never figures out if he's making a relevant social commentary or a science fiction movie.

Though Take Shelter may not be a cohesive whole, Nichols sits still long enough in some sequences to give us a moving and believable portrait of a schizophrenic break, and he does so without relying on jarring sound effects or smash cuts. He doesn't have to shake the hamster ball to give us a sense of foreboding. This is a talented director with an eye towards the small quirks of human behavior, here painting on a canvas a larger than his current range. There will, no doubt, in the coming years be more and more vehicles written for Michael Shannon - hopefully Nichols is given the nod on one of them. He always gets the best out of that big lug.

The Annulment

When we talk about Luck, we will inevitably remember the beginning and the end - not the start and finish of the action, but rather the anticipation, reaction and firestorm that occurred on on the small screen, which now refers to the internet. Luck's inception was a furious burst of excitement over the collaboration of David Milch, TV's pre-eminent heroin addict and Shakespeare enthusiast, and Michael Mann, the silver screen's supreme purveyor of stylish masculinity. Luck was a marriage made in the boardroom, in the same fashion of HBO's just-above-average Boardwalk Empire, now stumbling into its third season under the guiding hand of Terrence Winter (The Sopranos) and the tacit approval of Martin Scorsese. Empire is Winter's maiden voyage in the captain's chair, where Milch is a brand name, with a career stretching from Hill Street Blues through the nineties with NYPD Blue to the criminally under appreciated Deadwood; and Mann, himself the producer behind Miami Vice, was to be no silent partner. The announcement of their partnership whet the appetite for what was sure to be the better part of a decade spent on the seedy side of horse racing, a setting that played perfect host to the marginal characters so familiar to Milch, and the grand criminal enterprises that make up the best of Mann's filmography.

A combination of better costumes, the universal advent of widescreen and the more serious treatment of dream sequences has led to the consensus opinion that we are in a golden age of television; to go even further, that the truly daring and visionary storytellers of our moment are finding greater expression on TV than they can striving against the weekly and seasonal grind of the box office. Yet, just as in the days of Mary Tyler Moore and St. Elsewhere, most of the so-called masterpieces on the air today are still about the balance of personal and professional life. Tony Soprano is stressed out by his phony construction contracts; Don Draper wants to raise his children but also land a hip new soft drink account; the silverware better be in order before the great ball or someone's getting sacked on Downton Abbey. Ironically, it was Mann, not Milch, who was more suited to execute one of these "men-at-work" type shows with pari-mutuel betting as the backdrop. His protagonists are always focused at the task set in front of them, not the pained consideration of their internal lives. On the other hand, Milch has now crashed three series in a row where "the old west", "surfing" and "horse-racing" were hardly his chief concern - he tends to please the executives in the pitch meeting and the critics in deliberately different ways.

Could the two work together? There were reports that Mann had Milch removed from the set on more than one occasion. The head writer had become known for delivering pages of a scene to his actors just moments before the camera rolled - his practices had to be amended. Mann's trademark visual immediacy, which did for the track what Raging Bull did for the boxing ring, required a bit more notice than Milch was accustomed to. There are many examples of this uneasy balance on Luck, palpable shifts between the atmospheric, wordless camera movements of Mann, that worship shiny surfaces and newly leased vehicles, and the close quarter character work of the show's true creator. One would never expect Mann to spend so much time on the lowly jockeys, or with Walter Smith (Nick Nolte), a broken-down old trainer who drinks beer alone in his trailer and mutters unintelligibly to himself. At the same time, it's hard to imagine it Milch's choice to set one villain's lair on a 150-foot yacht in Marina Del Rey.

Both men downplayed the power struggle behind the camera while making a show obsessively concerned with the concept of control. In the arch plot, Ace Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) is released from jail after being set up by his former business partners. His plan, never fully revealed in Luck's 9-episode run, involved duping his nemesis Smythe (Michael Gambon) into buying a share of the Santa Anita race track. Ace lives in a hotel penthouse and gets driven everywhere by his imposing butler Gus (Dennis Farina, in one of the finest roles of his long career). This unspoken comradery, along with his old stories about Miles Davis identical to those relayed to Tom Cruise in Collateral, puts Ace squarely on the Mann side of the ledger. All the more appropriate that this cinematic tale of revenge was inhabited by such an actor as distinguished as Hoffman, working harder and better here than he had in nearly 20 years.

Meanwhile, Milch concerned himself with the goings-on of the paddock and bleachers. Ruthless trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz) loses a prized horse in a claiming race to a close-knit group of degenerate gamblers (Kevin Dunn, Jason Gedrick, Ian Hart and Richie Coster) and must be the caretaker while these men he deems below him reap the rewards. Elsewhere, feckless agent Joey Rathburn (Richard Kind) squeezes every penny he can out of the transactions he brokers between jockeys, owners and track personnel. This grimy, self-contained world of stoopers going through every trash can looking for a winning ticket, of grown men with hundreds of thousands of dollars sharing motel rooms to be closer to the betting windows, who wear the same clothes every day and eat at the same diner, is Milch doing what he does best. Like Deadwood, the story of a town, and John From Cincinnati, essentially a family saga, Luck was about a single body working as one, essentially in service to and awe of the thoroughbred.

All the characters are beholden to beasts; whether the all powerful Smythe or the flies on the rear of a colt named Mon Gateau. Their limits of control were the last crack of the whip, or the twitching lunge at the finish line. Luck did follow the tradition of the great sports movies, channeling the peaks of the drama into the actual races. Mann's camera raced in front of, alongside and just behind the horses, close enough to become characters in these contests. The complex gambling stakes aside, the emotions on the actors faces always made the import of the race easy to decipher. Every episode turned somewhere between the starting gate and the winner's circle, and authentically conveyed either victory or defeat. All of this was dependent upon the horses, the least conscious players in the drama - which is probably what makes the whole enterprise so thrilling, allows us to convince ourselves it really is a game of chance.

It stands to reason that a show about thoroughbred racing would either sink or swim based on its depiction of the act itself. While Mann went above and beyond the call of duty, his meticulously designed and soundtracked sequences were probably to blame for the show's ultimate cancellation. The high speed running of horses is extremely dangerous to animals whose ankles are thinner than those of humans; it is the case whether they are filmed or not. Given the above I am obviously very disappointed that PETA would make the show the object of its ire given how many horses die at American racetracks on a daily basis, and then simply for the joy of degenerate gamblers and absurdly wealthy owners. That we have spent centuries breeding and perfecting these animals to push them to their physical limits is what makes this sport so compelling. This world is aristocratic, spiritual, cutthroat, byzantine and, ultimately, alien, worthy of so much more than nine episodes. Likewise, The Kentucky Derby is "the greatest two minutes in sports". Then it's gone.

Blood Orgy

Nothing stirs the sympathies quite like a damsel in distress. Even better if she's all alone, without car or telephone, far enough in the woods where no one will find her body. Ever since the first zombie stumbled through a cemetery at dusk to open The Night of the Living Dead, this scenario has been the bread and butter of horror directors. Somewhere along the way things got gussied up with gypsy curses, homicidal dolls, and videotapes that kill you seven days after you watch them. Unfortunately, the more complicated the plot, the longer the drawing-room scene the filmmakers have to include to bring everybody up to speed. Enough of them highfalutin talking words, let's get to the blood and the screaming!

Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) needs money, so she answers a flier looking for a babysitter. When Mr. Ulman (ooh, it's Tom Noonan, bet he's hiding something ya'll!!!) answers the door in a tuxedo that seems to date from the 19th century, she should have the sense to realize this will be no ordinary night of pizza and soap operas. Luckily, she's a stupid college student in a movie about the occult! The House of the Devil opens with a title card relaying public opinion figures in relation to the existence of Satanic cults in the United States. Other than Noonan's uncomfortable shifting and occasional stammer, this text is the only reason we have to fear for Sam's safety at the outset. Oh and her best friend (Greta Gerwig) gets her head blown off by bearded maniac.

No doubt a great deal of the production and marketing of The House of the Devil was designed to connote the grind-house aesthetic that Quentin Tarantino and others have returned to the forefront of popular culture. Its ostensible setting is a nostalgic netherworld somewhere between Watergate and Iran-Contra, when Farrah Fawcett hairdos were mandatory Volvo station wagons were the safest boxes on the road. Its credits employ the same typeface used to connote the cheesy 70s in the film adaptation of Starsky and Hutch; a pizza delivery costs 8 dollars; there are several gags involving how far the cord of a rotary phone will stretch in any given direction. These winks are, however, as far as the mugging goes; the rest of the film bears the precise pacing and shock-cut editing of a work that stands on its own merits.

The separation point is West's complete lack of irony. At some point horror divided between camp (Fright Night; Drag Me To Hell) and gore (Saw; Hostel) - in other words, between things we are not meant to take seriously and things to revolting to take seriously. Either way, these movies fail to scare us in the same way as canonical horror films like Halloween, Repulsion or The Exorcist. Director Ti West hits upon the technique so many gore-mongers have forgotten - delayed gratification. Your typical horror movie starts off with an elaborate first murder that gives us some sense of what the baddies do when they get their hands on our heroine. Why ruin the surprise? The House of the Devil does not reduce the tension this way - we don't dare gawk or giggle as Samantha slips and stumbles around the darkened house with the scream-queen's weapon of choice, the kitchen knife. With each closed door she puts her ear against, the dread thickens - we have the exactly same amount of information as the character on screen, and the same level of terror.

A universal problem across many genres is the tedium of the third act, when all the cards are on the table and we are required to sit in our seats while the protagonist bests each obstacle one-by-one. By keeping us in the dark for so long, the final half hour of The House of the Devil is a sprint to the finish, a breathless, bloody, traumatizing action sequence that contains all the exposition, conflict and resolution West had been withholding. Question and answer come in the same breath, in the midst of running, stabbing and shooting. A demon lives in the attic? And they want to use Samantha's body in a satanic ritual? Those two facts come and go in the matter of two minutes. West is clearly aware of the old and the new; he uses the former to create the atmosphere of a classic, slow-paced spine-tingler, then explodes with the witches teats and blood soaked cloaks of his kitschy contemporaries.

Horror bottomed out with the resurrection of the slasher sometime in the 90s - Scream was trying way to hard to let you know it was in on the joke, and I Know What You Did Last Summer just sucked. Imported imitations like The Grudge and Let Me In didn't quite translate. The House of the Devil pays homage to all those haunted house movies that date back to Vincent Price, without slapping in too many modern stylistic flourished and nightmare-inducing makeup effects. There was something vital in the work of masters of horror like George Romero and John Carpenter, something beyond the bell bottom jeans and long-sleeve T-shirts. Where the resurrected grind house offers harmless fun, West wants to scare the shit out of us, permanently. After all, Satan is no laughing matter.

Money Never Sleeps

"The main character of much of modern cinema and pop-literature - all of pop culture - is a black briefcase full of money. We mostly follow its fate, and the fates of the other characters depend on it."
-Viktor Pelevin

The world would be a better place if we all cut off our hands. They are, after all, the primary actors in most of the crimes we commit against one another. Strangling, stabbing, pulling the trigger - we need wrists, palms, five fingers acting with one mind to sew our evil deeds. Hands and their devilish behaviors are the central motif of Robert Bresson's L'Argent (Money); they pump sewage, they pilfer cigarettes, they thumb longingly through photo albums of nude pictures. Most importantly, they distribute, fondle and count what makes the word go round. The hands are more important than the faces; it is after all our actions that define us, not our emotions. However, there is little room for men and women to break free of the fallen civilization into which they have been born. A hand might just as easily gain sentience and scuttle away from the brain which controls it.

When an upper-class teenager is in a pinch at school, his friend gives him a counterfeited 500 Franc note to pay a debt. He gets change at a camera shop after fooling an unwitting clerk; later, her boss pays a lowly sanitation worker named Yvon (Christian Patey) with the illicit tender. When Yvon lands in hot water with the law, the shop-owner then forces a young employee to perjure himself, teaching the important lesson that lying is acceptable to save one's skin. Yvon is imprisoned, his young wife and child left to fend for themselves. For the first half hour or so, L'Argent dances between the characters impartially - each is as significant or insignificant as the last. The impetus of the drama is entirely centered around the bill. It is not until Yvon is trying to pay at a cafe with the forged currency, that we see even a flicker of recognizable emotion. In that moment, the focal point of society, the "visible god", has turned on him; everything he believed in, namely the contents of his wallet, is a lie.

At this point, the film takes a sharp turn. The other character largely disappear - they have made a clean getaway and return to their daily routines. The perjurer turns to a life of crime and finds himself in the same jail, briefly. Largely, however, Bresson slips into his old habit of making a contemporary Christ figure out of Yvon. Tragedy befalls him beyond simple incarceration. It would be easy to see L'Argent as just another red fable about the world turning on the working man. However, Marxism usually walks hand in hand with utopian vision. There is no place for those dreams in the world Yvon inhabits. In this world the church is a place to hatch a scheme, and falling to one's knees in prayer is more than a sign of weakness - it is one of stupidity.

L'Argent is the bleak endpoint of Bresson's career; 82 at the time of its release, it represented the filmmaker's final surrender to the world that had so disappointed him. It eschews the grim-yet-redeemable view of humanity seen in earlier films like Diary of a Country Priest and Au Hasard Balthazar. Return to the hands: they are done hugging, petting, doing all the creative, compassionate and divine acts the director had fussed over in the past. Now they grip the wheel of a getaway car during a robbery; they swing an axe; they scrub furiously at one another to eliminate evidence. In Pickpocket, the protagonist undergoes a moral crisis akin to Raskolnikov, eventually turning himself in - no matter how hard he tries, he cannot escape the existence of right and wrong. By 1983, Bresson has lost faith in such reassuring institutions - the only certainty, the only thing of value, the only thing worth killing and being killed for, is cash.

Bresson's films are universally noteworthy for the coolness of their acting. He would have the players recite their lines time after time after time until they had lost all trace of inflection or tone in their readings. These deadened, earnest performances have never been more fitting to Bresson's subject matter than they are in L'Argent, where every character's pat acceptance of the system is a shocking reflection of our complacency in an identical system. As radical, violent and upsetting as the later stages of this film become, it never once seems implausible. Of course that fact makes the denouement all the more devastating.

What The Rules of the Game did for love and Citizen Kane did for power, L'Argent does for money, and one could certainly argue this last is far more important than the first two. It motivates every action we undertake, puts those idle hands to work at acquiring it, saving it, converting it to fleeting pleasures. Nothing is worth more than it and it defines the worth of everything else. Once Yvon take that lesson to hart, the demise of decency and civility is instantaneous. L'Argent lays bare the truth - we have built our world on this foundation, where it and only it is held holy. And like any deity money is inhuman, unfeeling, and unmerciful.

The Last Good Fight

Are we ashamed of our Rambo roots? The days of the last honest man on earth, ages 25-49, with unlimited ammunition and a fair length of rope are a distant memory at the multiplex. Low budget delights like Armored and Crank fill the tiny cracks in the action genre while huge bricks like Transformers and X-Men act as tentpoles. Our conscience has gotten the best of us in the Age of Austerity - we can't watch a red-blooded American male go on a killing spree with the same unadulterated glee. Those types of movies have been farmed out to Anglophone asskickers like Jason Statham and Guy Pearce. Yet for any one of these hand-to-hand gut busters to gain traction at the box office, its poster will invariably read: "Liam Neeson".

It serves to note at this juncture that Liam Neeson is very good actor. Many very good actors before him, when reaching a certain status and age, have turned to the fast buck of the summer thriller; what makes Neeson different is this perceived "selling out" to "provide for his family" has made him a bigger star now than at any other period of his 30 year career. Taken, Unknown, The A-Team, Clash of the Titans and even a small role in Paul Haggis' The Next Three Days have delivered a very clear message; no more Mr. Nice Schindler. The Neesploitation cottage industry has run through its share of enemies foreign and domestic; that latest iteration turns towards the meatiest of 9th grade English composition topics - man vs. nature.

The Grey is the story of Ottway (Neeson), a laconic, troubled sniper who protects the employees of an Alaskan oil company from the local wildlife. When a plane crash drops him a few less-than-capable cronies in the middle of an Arctic hunting ground, Ottway is the only man with the stones large enough to kill every last one of you motherfuckers - I mean the wolves of course. So off they tromp into the woods, the number starting at seven souls and slowly dwindling. At some point, the men themselves display animal tendencies! At another point, Neeson is unnecessarily declared the alpha. Thanks for the reminder guys, but in my pocket is currently a ticket to a Liam Neeson movie.

One would not expect the major shortcomings of The Grey to be a lack of action sequences, yet each film brings fresh shocks to the system. Director Joe Carnahan (most recently of Smokin Aces and The A Team) sees merit in long, moody speeches and carefully edited flashbacks of Ottway's past, and leaves the wolf-killing portions of the festivities curiously short on screen time. One overworked descant involved a verse by Ottway's father, which concludes dramatically, "live and die on this day." These stabs at profundity fall short of solving the questions raised in Moby Dick, but they certainly lend The Grey a bit more gravitas than Neeson's other recent efforts. Which is to say it comes off  as Gladiator 2: Gladiating with Wolves. Neeson bitterly intones of his dear old dad, "the asshole felt [poetry] rounded him off."

What does differentiate The Grey from other survivalist fare has been hinted at in some reviews by comparing it to John Carpenter's The Thing, another movie with an all-male cast up Shit Creek in sub-zero temperatures. Most of the brilliance of that film is held in the nebulous design of the villain, a Lovecraftian alien/virus that imitates the appearance of men it has eaten. There's nothing mysterious about 6 feet of live wolf and 6 inches of sharp teeth. And lord knows, Kurt Russell's drunken, sombrero-wearing hippie protagonist would never beseech God as brazenly (or as eloquently) as does Ottway in the film's closing movements. However, The Thing and The Grey do share a lack of recuperation; no one is walking back to "normal" life, and neither man nor nature can be declared the victor.

Mel Gibson became a liability - this, above all, is why I presume Liam Neeson has been cast into his sometime regrettable roles. Despite his eccentricities, Gibson was a more recognizable face in the gun-toting badass crowd. He was short, charismatic, funny. Neeson replaces those traits with a wraith-like six-foot-four-inch frame, a menacing determination, and the world-weariness of a man well-on in his sixth decade. We won't see him in any buddy movies. Neeson slips into whatever fray he enters alone, and exits as such. There is no more ceremony of family, country or morality. There is the thing which needs to be killed, and the man that will do the killing.

Tender Trio

The warrior Jeff McCloud sidles out of the arena, broken. He wanders down a road that could lead anywhere, and settles briefly atop a fence he’s known since before he can remember. The object of his wistful gaze is a modest shack in Quaint Hollow, U.S.A. He creeps closer, drops to his knees and, eventually, his stomach, returning to his very own primordial ooze, uncovering a time capsule undisturbed for decades. He grins like a little kid as he finds his old six-gun still secured under the porch. His legs might not work, his pockets might be empty, he might not have a friend in the world, but the house stands yet, and proof of his existence still lingers.

Nicholas Ray’s glacial exposition in the opening sequence of The Lusty Men (1952) is crucial to all that will follow. Every sentiment that registers across Robert Mitchum’s face will serve to confuse his character's motivations later. The empty grandstands, once filled with spectators calling McCloud’s name; the farm-house all but falling down; the gun that finally satisfies him.  The one item that is conspicuously absent, at least to the 1950s audience, is female companionship. The good Lord will provide soon enough. Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and his wife Louise (Susan Hayward) express an interest in buying the McCloud place as well. Unfortunately they don't have the funds; where else to win them, but the back of a bucking bronc? McCloud agrees to coach Merritt, but he may have more than one eye on Louise.

There are two well-worn movie tropes at play in The Lusty Men: first, men trying to kill each other/themselves over a pile of money/a woman; and second, men trying to kill each other/themselves because that's what makes them happy in and of itself. Kennedy was often cast as conniving, duplicitous characters; in this film he starts pure at heart is eventually corrupted, chasing the thrill of bull-riding, forgetting about the homestead. Meanwhile, also against type, the ever self-destructive Mitchum longs for the peace and quiet of a few hundred head of cattle and a warm meal come sundown. They're ships passing in the night, Kennedy's earnest determination and Mitchum's affected nihilism, veering respectively away from and towards the strong-willed Hayward. 

In the Howard Hawks classic, Only Angels Have Wings, Cary Grant plays a charismatic leader of a group of pilots that deliver the mail over a perilous rout in the Andes. His love interest, Jean Arthur, admires him for his courage but wishes he would spend a little more time with his feet on the ground. There's much laughter, camaraderie both male and female, and a level of excitement that makes the viewer pine for this kind of existence. Ray's film might be considered a negative projection of Angels - the jovial Grant replaced with the stone-hearted Mitchum, the inspirational poetry of flying supplanted by riding a thousand pounds of ground chuck in a muddy pit. In making this switch, the female role changes drastically. Hayward's Louise Merritt is the only reasonable person in the entire film, and ultimately is the one who must take decisive action. These men are thinking with their you-know-whats, which might explain the title. 

As it balances these oftentimes heavy themes of security vs freedom, and as McCloud decides to give it one more go-around in the ring, Ray never gives us insight to his characters' true feelings. One minute they pursue one end, the next they scuttle their efforts in hopes of something entirely counterproductive. There is a great deal of prize-winning followed by an incommensurate amount of illegal gambling. To the viewer, the money seems like the whole point - to the men themselves, obviously not. The Lusty Men might be one of the greatest sports movies of all time, for it emphasizes one of the truths the genre often fails to acknowledge: the object of the game is entirely different for those in the arena than those watching from the stands. 

The ambivalence of McCloud is perfectly embodied in Mitchum's performance, and mirrors our own feelings about the actor. In a Mitchum movie, we are generally presented with conflicting feelings about whether to love this guy or try to kill him as quickly as possible. Most of his great roles opt for the latter eventually. Mitchum was a black-eyed jungle cat that walked among us, a force so obviously erotic but so intensely uncaring that he was a danger to the public good. The attraction to him is much like the attraction to rodeo itself - we want to see something beautiful and terrible happen at exactly the same time. Eventually though, the riders get hurt, the bulls get gored, and everyone returns to ranching as usual. In the end, Mitchum must be destroyed.

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.