Matt and Steve's Little Joke: The Informant!

Roughly ten years ago, Russell Crowe was on top of the "serious acting" world. Intense roles in L.A. Confidential, The Insider and A Beautiful Mind garnered him heaps of praise, and an Oscar (he added another for his righteous soldier in Gladiator). Crowe was carrying the flame of Marlon Brando and Robert Deniro before him, making films about societal corruption, corporate greed, and personal demons. Not long after, Crowe would slip into genre pieces like American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma; the serious, brooding roles started to go Christian Bale's way. It is no coincidence that both of these guys turned out to be insufferable human beings.

Taking on the themes of acclaimed dramas Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! has all the plot of a meaningful, socially conscious film, with none of the patience. Playing agri-business whistleblower Mark Whitacre, Matt Damon gained 40 pounds and an off-putting mustache; much like his "Brody" nose in Ocean's 13, this facial characteristic eliminates any chance of us taking him seriously. Whitacre panics one day when the FBI gets involved in a minor matter at his company, Archer Daniels Midland; soon he's spilling the beans about price-fixing and embezzlement. The film is colored by a non-sequitur voiceover running through Whitacre's head; one gets the impression he starts talking to the government just because they will listen.

Now, that might seem like a comedy, but Soderbergh is incapable of making a one note movie. An oddball cast featuring Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, and comics like Patton Oswalt, Tom Papa and Paul F. Tompkins put the film in Coen Brothers territory (think Fargo or Burn After Reading). However, Soderbergh is incapable of making a one-note movie; what starts as Midwestern farce soon becomes unhinged psychological drama. Damon's quirky observations about penguins and the multiple uses of corn give way to paranoia and depression.

That is to say, there are a lot of parallels to Crowe's legitimately brilliant performance in The Insider. However, being a film about high fructose corn syrup and not the villainized tobacco industry, Soderbergh has carte blanche to have all the fun he wants. Sure, there may be a vast corporate conspiracy, but the film shifts its focus to just how crazy/stupid Whitacre was to go near the FBI; he had just as much, if not more to hide than his bosses. Again, tucked away in his Decatur, IL, mcmansion with his doting wife and two kids, one cannot help but chalk up the whole sequence of events to boredom. You may have seen the much-played clip where Damon refers to himself as "Agent 0014 - twice as smart as 007". The audience is well aware this is not the case, but the point is Whitacre's mental state - even making half a million dollars a year, he was hardly happy. There was no excitement.

It would be seen as offensive to portray whistle-blowers like Jeffrey Wigand and Erin Brockovich in this light (Brockovich was many moons ago in the Soderbergh canon). They weren't thrill seekers, titillated by the prospect of participating in a sting operation - they had values, dammit! They were doing the right thing. The Informant! does a great job of making the right thing totally meaningless, of putting the moral dialogue in the mouths of actors best remembered for their roles on Community and Arrested Development. There might be something important, political, and socially conscious to be said about price-fixing in commodity markets; the problem is, it's already been said a dozen times. Doing the same thing over would seem like a TV movie.

So we have this incongruous, stilted little film about an unhinged man who sends his life into a downward spiral, basically just to see what happens. Whether it actually works is still unclear. Once the ball of yarn starts to unravel, the film fails to come to a proper climax. In eschewing convention, even poking fun at it, Soderbergh fails to produce a finished product. Like its subject, The Informant! is the loser-that-could, muttering in the corner, trying its best.

The Vault #51: The Prowler

In the annals of American history, the 1950s enjoy a sparkling reputation. Hollywood tended to focus on widescreen epics and westerns; when it did turn towards domestic disturbance (as in the films of Douglas Sirk or Nick Ray), the pictures were done in high gloss technicolor. Film noir was becoming topical rather than existential (Kiss Me Deadly, Ace in the Hole) and Alfred Hitchcock was painting over everything left behind with pure suspense. In other words, there was very little gray area. Defying those guidelines is Joseph Losey's The Prowler, a grim little domestic drama starring Van Heflin.

Heflin, who most of us remember as the innocent rancher in Shane, is vicious, creepy and all sorts of bad as Webb Garwood, a bored cop. Patrolling his beat one night, he and partner Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) are called to the Gilvray househole, where wife Susan has seen someone creeping about outside. The scene that sets up the whole movie is brilliantly shot from the prowler's point of view - we the audience looking in on the comely Keyes, the voyeur ever present in film noir. As to who is terrorizing her, we never find out - the trouble stirred up when she calls the authorities is far worse. Garwood is no passive pervert; as soon as he lays eyes on the neglected housewife, he hatches a plan. 

What follows seems right out of James M. Cain, with the protagonist getting his hooks into a married woman the only way he can figure - by knocking off her husband. Susan is all too ready to find a loving partner, and when Garwood reveals the two both hail from Indiana, its all the excuse she needs. However, this isn't The Postman Always Rings Twice or Out of the Past; Keyes is a mousey non-entity, not a femme fatale. And Garwood is hardly a down on his luck type; he's pure pyschopath, convinced that everyone is "stealing from the till" - a cop just does it with his gun. Heflin's performance, complete with facial twitches and bipolar mood swings, belies the complex themes Losey embeds in his frequent visual metaphors.

We're used to a story like this going only one way - the lovers doomed and being hunted down by a street-smart detective. The Prowler veers off the tracks of convention when, in large part, Susan and Webb get away with the murder, and buy a little place in scenic Las Vegas. The problems, both for the characters, and the film's social acceptibility upon its release in 1951, arise from Susan's imminent pregnancy, which could throw a wrench in the whole scheme. Late term abortion is hardly spoken of in today's cinema - yet for a stretch in The Prowler, it's the only thing on Garwood's mind. The only solution is escape to a ghost town in the Nevada dessert (again eschewing noir's traditional narrative space of cramped urban squalor, instead making reference to our constructed western pass, when men accomplished everything with aid of firearms).

Garwood is one of those deranged souls, like Travis Bickle or Patrick Batemen, unable to see the appeal of a normal life and, furthermore, unable to fake it. Losey does a good job of putting us in his shoes; old Bud with his shrew of a wife and rock collection seems like a coot - Susan and her husband barely exchange pleasantries. Yet, if everyday life is so revolting to Webb, why use his position as a police officer to steal away the unsuspecting Susan? Like Bud's wife says, "he looks bored"; everyone has to lust after something, even if they don't want it. 

The Vault #50: Downhill Racer

The sports movie: the final frontier of stale cliches like "final frontier". Underdogs, loveable losers and over the hill veterans just trying for one last shot at glory. "You're tearing this team apart!", "Be the ball", etc. At this point, movies about athletics, professional or otherwise, are the last refuge of actors down on their luck. If one becomes a hit, like Miracle, it certainly is not popular among film lovers. You can reference Raging Bull or Bull Durham all you like - those films are not about competition, they're about men who happen to compete (see also Fat City). Given all this, the fact that a decent picture could come out of the world of professional skiing came as something of a surprise.

Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer is not an all-time classic, but it is a great sports movie. While many films focus on teams or players driving towards a championship, Ritchie (who also directed The Bad New Bears) spends time on the "human interest" aspect of sports celebrity - coming from humble roots, dealing with corporate sponsorship, getting a swelled head and suffering career-ending injuries. When a member of the US ski team suffers a nasty crash, young gun Dave Chappelet (Robert Redford) is called in to fill his place. In true sports cinema fashion, the kid's all braun, no brains. He's soon fighting with teammates, bedding down with a mysterious European woman (Camilla Sparv), and doing everything he can to get under the skin of his coach (Gene Hackman). Strangely enough, everything that makes him a bad teammate (and person) makes him a great skier, and an overnight national fixation. Despite the fact that everyone is soon rooting for Dave to succeed, Ritchie hardly presents a sympathetic figure.

Everything he needs to say about sport, and skiing in particular, is revealed in the first (and only) competitive race we see in its entirety. It's in the first 20 minutes of the film, and our hero finishes 4th, but there's hardly an action sequence on celluloid as gripping as the our's first time down the slope on Chappelet's skis. Only a madman would do this, let alone regularly. Every other run seems to end in a crash. Put in the skier's point of view, we can barely breathe, if just in fear for the cameraman's life. There's no music or cutaway shots of worried love interest. Just the mountain, the ice and the speed. And Ritchie doesn't just use this action on the slopes; in the staging area, during training, even when Chappelet makes love, there's an eerie, empty silence.

All of which lends Downhill Racer, despite all its incumbent sports movie cliches, the air of documentary filmmaking. There's not much dialogue (that's not the kind of guy Dave is), even though there may be a lot of story. At 101 minutes, the film feels sawed off, but gracefully so. Spend just a minute with Dave's father and we can get a feel of the Colorado farm our hero grew up on; no need to linger and hear the sad story. Perhaps a shot or two of Hackman lecturing Americans; this gives us the ostensible important of the sport without having to remind us of it later. The film is economical to the point of seeming insubstantial - in the arena of sports dramas, however, this is a welcome change. If not for the climax, it might come and go without another thought.

Of course, there is the ending, after the cocksure Redford has broken the backs of his German and French opponents (little political subtext is given at all - odd for the times). Skiing is a sport without a clear winning moment, where men go one after another, and one moment's glory can turn to defeat with the next man down the course. Beaming in triumph, Chappelet is oblivious that another man is about to break his time. That is, until the terrain breaks that very man. The crashes are omnipresent in Downhill Racer - it is fitting that our hero's victory is in large part due to another man's failure. This aspect is not cliche. Rarely, if ever, does the baseball team win on an unforced error, or the boxer realize the apex of his career due to another's weakness. The fight is not hard for Dave Chappelet - perhaps that is why we don't feel particularly happy or relieved when he wins the gold medal.

In this and only this respect, Downhill Racer is of its time, the turbulent 60s. When Hollywood was making counter-cultural statement with films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, Redford and Hackman were also spending time making a film about an aristocratic sport played by a selfish social-climber. Traditionally, Redford's character, representing America and beating back the hated Germans, would be a hero; through Ritchie's lens, he's a mechanical performer trapped, quite literally, in frigid isolation. By 1969, the Charles Atlas type was out of style. A generation earlier, Chappelet would have been the movie-star ideal; by the release of Downhill Racer, he's an outdated archetype - victorious, lonely and miserable.

No Joke: Observe and Report

Hollywood has a strange way of making the same idea twice in close succession; it might be the product of shared marketing subconscious, or a dire lack of creativity. Armaggedon and Deep Impact; Volcano and Dante's Peak; The Illusionist and The Prestige. The latest example of protagonist redundancy happened in one of the most unlikely settings: the world of mall security. Paul Blart: Mall Cop featured a pudgy, bumbling TV star (Kevin James) and was directed by the man who brought you Next Friday and Daddy Day Care. On the other hand, in the spring of 2009, no man was hotter (box office-wise) than Seth Rogen, who used his considerable clout to bring Jody Hill's Observe and Report to the screen. Directed by Jody Hill (the co-creator of the HBO hit Eastbound and Down), the film barely broke even and was seen as a silly, offensive take-off on the beloved Blart.

If you're looking for antics, fat person jokes and a lot of comical pratfalls, check out Blart. If you want to see one of the strangest, most subversive films of the decade, turn on Observe and Report, a Taxi Driver for the suburban age. Delusional head of mall security Ronnie Barnhardt has two not so hidden desires: first, to bed and wed make-up girl Brandy (Anna Faris); second, to get to carry a gun at work. In his interactions with Brandy, Ronnie comes off as a borderline personality; with respect to the gun, a sociopath with a desperate need to kill. If his victim happens to be a wrong-doer, so be it. When Brandy is targeted by a mall-flasher, and attracts police attention from the flirtatious Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta), Ronnie finally gets his chance with the girl, and a shot at glory.


Observe and Report might seem like the next Napoleon Dynamite, replete with Latino sidekick and alternative rock montages. These similarities only apply in setting and palette however; the overall picture presented by Hill is of a deranged loner, driven to psychoses and violence as a result of his marginalized position in society. Rogen has his funny moments, and Faris can steal as scene at will, but they are not portraying traditional romantic comedy roles - Ronnie and Brandy are a loser and a drunk, brought together in the film's defining scene, a drugs-and-alcohol-fueled date rape.

The scene, which acts as stimulus for Ronnie believing his life has turned around, drew a lot of criticism and questions from the viewing public. Why was Seth Rogen dragging his comedic pedigree through the muck, to defile Faris in a scene that might prove harrowing in another type of film? Was it okay to laugh with or root for Ronnie after he commits this act? There's still something funny about Ronnie's alcoholic mother and Faris' intoxicated ramblings, as well as Ronnie's long monologues about his fantasy of a righteous killing spree, but has our integrity been compromised? These genuinely troubling issues set against the low-fi hijinks of a shopping mall make for a strange contrast, one that most people rejected.

However, Observe and Report is effective, and in ways that countless other Taxi Driver ripoffs have failed. Films like The Assasination of Richard Nixon and One Hour Photo took themselves far too seriously, awarding themselves Scorsese's trash-choked world-view from the opening frame. They assumed the empty apartments of middle-aged creeps would be moving - films like this come off as empty style. Ronnie isn't some over-dramatized has-been - he's still relatively young, and even has friends and his mother for companionship. He is not so far gone, but he is certainly on his way. Observe and Report, like Taxi Driver, is about a man who goes insane, so insane he views his extreme final act as a way of fitting in with society. That it happens in the suburbs and not the gritty streets of New York might make it all the more shocking.

The important part is we still have a comedy on our hands, albeit one that refuses to play by the rules. its uneven tone and dramatic changes of mood make the 86 minutes fly by. You will laugh, feel guilty and ultimately be amazed this movie saw the light of day at all. Oddest of all, unlike Travis Bickle, Ronnie gets a happy ending of sorts, as strange as that might seem to the audience. His Cybil Shepherd does, unambiguously, climb back into his cab one night and smile. We finally may have a well-adjusted sociopath guarding the local JC Penny.

Oscar 82: The Night They Got It Right

I have a special vitriol for the Academy Awards, yet each year I come back for some reason. Forget the fact that the nominations are usually way off (how does Ralph Fiennes not get a nod for Spider? Or Charlotte Gainsbourg for Antichryst?). There's always one gut-wrenchingly bad decision made by the voters. From my first Oscars in 1996, this almost always happened in the Best Picture category (remember Shakespeare in Love, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, American Beauty and Crash? Awful).

Sure, in the past couple years, with Marty and the Coens finally taking home gold, this trend had begun to swing. It was not until last night, however, that a legitimately great movie won on its own merit, when The Hurt Locker made good my mid-July predictions. Locker wasn't like The Departed or No Country; it wasn't made by a household name. When all the momentum, and most of the prepared material, seemed to be leaning towards Avatar, we got the most pleasant of surprises - a movie with a story and good acting prevailing over the popular. Sure, Jeremy Renner didn't get the statue over the Jeff Bridges sentimentality vote, but whatever, Bridges is a great actor and probably deserved one.

So to break it down sports style, how did Cameron lose? With Titanic and later Return of the King, the academy seemed fine with awarding box office success and overwhelming technical achievement. Ultimately, those movie had Oscar pedigree - there was no anthropomorphic robot suit wielding a knife. Cameron thought he could feed us anything, and with enough money, tell us the least original story imaginable. He ended up with a shiny product with little to no story;  Hollywood's arbiters of taste were unable to make the leap. They made the mistake with Titanic already; they weren't going to be fooled by Cameron's shallow magic twice.

If not in the Best Picture category, the Academy usually bends over backward to celebrate the wrong actor for the wrong reasons. Sandra Bullock? While some might find this ridiculous, Sandra Bullock is a beloved actress, and she had a star vehicle. Was it absurd when Julia Roberts won for Erin Brockovich? Not really. They weren't going to give it to Helen Mirren or Meryl Streep again, and the Precious girl was more of a sideshow than anything else. Go Sandy! And oh yeah, Jeff Bridges finally won. Somewhere, Ed Harris is grinding his teeth. Christophe Waltz? Entirely deserving. Monique? Whatever.

So, it's the year of The Hurt Locker. I suppose this was political, given that Bigelow's film was the first remotely watchable account of events in the current Iraq War. However, this marked the rare occasion that the voters could have their cake and eat it too (Deer Hunter style). It might be considered "small" for a Best Picture (let me know next time you hear from Renner, Geraghty or Mackie), but it's a damn good movie, perhaps the first true thriller to ever win the award.

Instead of celebrating over-saturated CGI and James Cameron's massive genius, we get to think about the little action movie that could, the first female director and the one-name oscar winner. Not bad. How long until Inception?

Review - Un Prophete

When we first see Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), he's nothing more than a teenage vagrant, bearded, bruised and hungry. Going to prison has to be something of a comfort to the young man; at least there he'll have food and shelter. For most men, incarceration is stagnation, depression and, decline; for Malik, time served is a springboard to a successful criminal career. Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete is a muted take on Scarface; a young man slowy rises to power, under the watchful, if passive, eye of corrections officers.

Before he can get his bearings in his new surrounding, Malik is approached by the Corsican thugs who run the prison from their well-appointed cells and told he will be the one to murder a snitch named Reyeb. Why? Because, like Reyeb, Malik is a Muslim, and therefore will be afforded a certain amount of trust by the victim. This murder, which is the single most revolting and visceral event in the film, filled with trembling, panting, and spurting blood, marks Malik's point of no return. If he can go face to face with a man and snuff out his life, he has prepared himself to do anything.

From there, the film picks up quite a bit, as Malik falls under the wing of Luciani (an ice-cold Niels Arestup), the reigning mob boss. Soon, Malik is taking furlough days outside the prison (you'll learn a lot of strange things about the French correctional system - plenty of baguettes and eclairs on the inside) to be an errand boy for Luciani, but also to set up a small empire of his own. These little episodes are poignant within the film because we have never seen Malik in the outside world. Staring out of an airplane window or out to sea, he seems uncomfortable and bewildered. Only upon returning to the prison do we feel safe for him.

Audiard has taken the notion of institutionalization far beyond the scope of other prison film. Not only does Malik learn to function best in confinement, he actually has an emotional connection to the place and to the brutal Luciani; they are his home and his family. This is what separates Un Prophete from other crime films: Malik is not a raving sociopath or greedy megalomaniac; he craves safety and security, even to the point of finding comfort in a cell. When money starts piling up from his black market ventures, he uses it to bribe the guards; escape never crosses his mind.

As much as Audiard may take his cues from Scorsese, Melville and Becker, Un Prophete operates on a much more naturalistic level. Its action never feels forced or fast-paced. We spend as much time focused on daily routines, like the work room or the food delivery, as we do on the plot. It's not just set in a prison - the viewer gets the feeling of time passing, and slowly. We're watching characters getting out, others dying off, and, our protagonist growing with age and experience. All the while a thin mustache reminds us of his youth.

Maybe the most unique aspect of Un Prophete is its commentary on contemporary race relations in France. Its refreshing to see a film where Islam is not synonymous with terrorism, where the status quo is overthrown permanently, and where the little guy can get his own piece of the action. Malik is a hero, but an impenetrable one. The look on his face as the film ends might convey confidence, uncertainty or even fear fear at leaving his familiar surroundings. Who knows? A sequel may be in order.