The Chances We Take

Road to Nowhere

2012-02-01T15:12:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-09T00:03:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T17:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo

2011-11-23T17:48:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Descendants

2011-11-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

Matt Harris noted on Grantland.com last week that:

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

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

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

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

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-11-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Skin I Live In

2011-10-27T12:21:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Pulpit #5: Drive

2011-10-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vault #74: Bad Timing

2011-09-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

Contagion

2011-09-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bellflower

2011-08-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-09T18:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

The Vault #73: Last Year at Marienbad

2011-08-09T15:40:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pulpit #4: The Thing From Another World / The Thing

2011-07-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

The first and foremost change made when updating Christian Nyby's sci-fi classic The Thing from Another World (1951) was an elision of the title. John Carpenter's update takes the otherness of the intruder for granted, instead focusing on the thingness. In doing so, The Thing elevates the terror from physical to existential. With a third iteration on the way, being called a prequel (thought still titled The Thing), the franchise will now span some 60 years of film history. Each one says something of its historical context, as well as the status of science fiction.

One of the most famous scenes in B-movie history happens at the end of the first act of The Thing from Another World. A rescue team, comprised of scientists, soldiers and one constitution-thumping reporter (Douglas Spencer) fan out over a sheet of ice, trying to define the boundaries of an unidentified object under the surface. When they stop, forming a circle, and the newsman shouts they've found a flying saucer, everyone in that 1951 audience must have nodded knowingly. Of course The Thing of 1951 had landed on earth in a saucer - everyone knew at that time this was the most logical mode of transportation for an extraterrestrial. There is little shock value here, and even less in the Thing itself - its played by an actor with a bit of makeup augmenting the shape of his skull. The alien is simply a form from outer space, and the quibbling between the factions of science, warfare, and (represented by the journalist) make up the conflict. It's a bit like The Russians Are Coming - everyone knows what an alien is, its just a matter of the course of action once they arrive.

This is appropriate for a peace of Cold-War pulp that close with a warning to "Watch the skies". The message is not to think about the complexity of the enemy, or the subtleties of their motives - rather, whether to welcome him with love, hate, or headlines. Aimed at a larger audience and with a more nuanced view of human psychology, Carpenter breaks down these simple debates. First off, none of the men in the Antarctic research station seem too strong in their convictions. Some might be scientists, some might be ex-soldiers. MacCready (Kurt Russell) is a professional drunk. This makes them all the more susceptible to Carpenter's monster, a deadly virus that can replicate any organism whose blood it comes in contact with. Inexplicably, sled dogs start sprouting tentacles and imitating the dwindling crew as it picks them off one by one.

The Thing from Another World was never meant to scare - it was really just another setting for the fraternal comedy of its producer, Howard Hawks, who explored similar themes of teamwork and male-female relationships in movies like Rio Bravo and Only Angels Have Wings. Carpenter strips away all of these elements, first by using an all-male cast, and second by planting the Thing directly into their blood. In Hawks' universe, everyone can be trusted to work together - in Carpenter's, no one can be taken for their word. When MacCready shoots an innocent man in the head, this is simply the price of doing business. By the early eighties, it was rare to have an ideal protagonist.

If anything, The Thing (1982) does more to capture the McCarthyist paranoia of the 50s than its predecessor. There is no reasoning with a virus, let alone even dialogue. In The Thing From Another World, a character blurts "It wants to eat us!" - this line was replaced with "It wants to be us!" In the former, we are simply livestock, but in the latter, our form, if not our essence, is the ideal shape, at least for life on Earth. And in this very appearance hides the enemy. The moments where the Thing is exposed in the 1982 version are some of the most chilling in the history of film. A man's chest opens like a mouth, complete with teeth - a head opens to swallow another head. These images are pure nightmare, pushing the limits of our imagination, only possible for a being that was less form than force. Each time Carpenter's Thing seems destroyed, a piece of it has cropped up in another organism. Is this a commentary on Reagan's War on Drugs? Will the new version somehow link the body-shifting version of The Thing to terrorism?

It was typical of Eisenhower-Era sci-fi to declare some sort of victory (think The Blob) - The Thing from Another World is no different, with the famous for Spencer's "Keep watching the skies" coda. The original Thing is defeated, but if there are more in the universe, man is certainly their match. Carpenter's Thing, which seems more and more like an metaphor for fear itself, is never fully vanquished. Sure, there is a fiery confrontation that was typical of big-budget sci-fi of the period (The Terminator, Aliens), but given the Thing's ability to regenerate, this cannot be much solace. Russell collapses in the embers of the station, with a compatriot, both preparing to freeze to death. The imperative to "wait here for a little while" is passed from one to the other as much as it is transmitted to us in the theater. The next monster will be along any minute, within or without.

Midnight in Paris

2011-06-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

At first pitch, Midnight in Paris must have seemed like a throwaway idea, a one page doodle conceived for the "Shouts and Murmurs" section of The New Yorker. A Hollywood screenwriter working on a novel about a nostalgia shop finds himself transported back to the Paris of the 1920s, where he hobnobs with the greatest literary and artistic figures of the 20th century. Only Woody Allen could bring this premise to life as both parody and nostalgia, highlighting the absurdity and magic of the situation with equal measure.

During what some have called his recent "revival", which others have bemoaned as The Scarlett Johannsen phase, Woody's films have found a new audience by de-emphasizing the director's trademark autobiographical elements. Midnight in Paris finds Allen back in a comfortable navel-gazing position, although using Owen Wilson' navel is far more pleasing to the eye. Wilson' cornfed charisma brings an earnest reading to some of the classic Allen neuroses, as he talks of chest pains and witch hunts. Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful screenwriter on vacation with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her uber-conservative parents. Gil is loving every second in Paris, which is dramatized in a nearly 4-minute opening sequence of street shots, beginning at dawn and ending late in the evening. He talks of moving there, of drinking in the places where Joyce drank, of finally getting back to "higher" art, namely, his novel in progress. Inez, distracted by a chance meeting with her pretentious ex-lover Paul (a wonderfully obnoxious Michael Sheen), only wants to discuss interior decoration for the couple's new home in Malibu (about as un-Paris as any location imaginable).

Desperate to get away from all this talk of the future and Paul's incessant, misinformed lectures on Rodin, Gil wanders down a dark street late at night, collapsing drunk on a stoop (always a good start for an adventure). An ancient Peugeot drifts before him, and a group of revelers in period dress have whisked him off to a party for Jean Cocteau, complete with Cole Porter on the piano and a chatty Zelda Fitzgerald belting champagne cocktails. Soon Hemingway is asking to box with Gil, and Gertrude Stein is giving him notes on his novel. He even runs into the trio of Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, who are nonchalant about Gil's time-traveling. Of course it all makes sense to them, Gil whines, "you guys are surrealists!"

Whether Gil is hallucinating all this due to a bad batch of escargot is irrelevant - these razor-thin characterizations of long-dead geniuses are not meant as a Bill and Ted-style sendup. Midnight in Paris desperately wants to believe in its own spell - it returns us to the territory as The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which downtrodden Mia Farrow gets to spend a few days with her favorite movie character. It's a common experience to pass through Minnesota and think about Fargo, or visiting Mount Rushmore to remember the climax of North by Northwest. The same goes for the association between Hemingway and bullfights. For Gil, Paris is art, it is creative genius. Paris represents what he longs for, what he cannot get from Inez or his apparent success in Hollywood.

The central conflict of Midnight in Paris is set up by the increasingly annoying Paul, who calls Gil's book a classic example of "Golden Age Thinking", that the previous age must have been better than our own. Allen has certainly been guilty of this in the past, with nostalgic films like Cairo, Radio Days or Zelig. He has also paid homage to Tolstoy in Love and Death, Fellini in Celebrity and Stardust Memories, and Bergman in Husbands and Wives. There is also the obligatory scene in many of his films where a characters emerges bleary-eyed from a repertory theater. Midnight in Paris moves past mere romanticization and into full-blown experience. The jazz-age adventures are enticing, but all of us, including Gil, realize them to be fantasy, unless we accept Faulkner's sentiment: "the past is never dead. It's not even past."

The debate over the Golden Age aside, Midnight in Paris may be Woody Allen taking an inventory of his own career, and holding it up against some of the most revered figures in the history of culture. Gil has produced so many scripts it seems even he has trouble telling them apart - surely there are portions, though not the entirety, of Allen's career that must feel this way for the 77 year old auteur. He has himself said comedy is perpetually forced to sit at the kid's table, yet quietly, has amassed a catalogue of moving films both light and heavy that will stand the test of time. They are what will ultimately secure Allen's legacy in the pantheon of cinema. There are at once moments of brutal honesty and indescribable magic in Midnight in Paris that will make us yearn for Woody when he's gone, and try, fruitlessly, to find his equal.

The Vault #72: Taste of Cherry

2011-06-16T14:19:00.000-07:00

One afternoon in the dusty outskirts of Tehran, Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) searches desperately for someone to assist him in committing suicide. Yet each man he finds recoils at the procedure, which requires them to cover Badii's corpse with dirt, after the man himself has succumb to an overdose of sleeping pills. Badii has already picked out a spot; he has already dug the whole. He lays out his plan three separate times, taking the slow winding route up the hillside to his proposed final resting place. He is undeterred when each man refuses to carry out the plan - he simply keeps looking. There are, after all, many unemployed men wandering the streets at this hour - surely one of them is desperate enough to take the man's offer, and his money.

Here is a man wealthy enough to drive a range rover, who appears in good health, and he wishes to exit this world as quickly as possible. And on top of that, ritualistically - it is after all, only for the sake of Allah that the body be covered at all. This conundrum, that suicide cannot be a truly solo act, forms the entirety of the conflict in Abbas Kiarostami's 1997 Palm D'or winner Taste of Cherry. Badii's drooping face certainly communicates a deep dread, both of his present predicament and the existential one he may face with the end of his existence, but the true nature of either is never truly hashed out. We have no idea why Badii has gotten in his car that day and set out to find a helper - we begin already in the car, the errand already mid-offing.

Taste of Cherry is a revolt against traditional narrative, eschewing motivation and explanation in favor of immediate urgency. Most films attempt to evoke a particular setting, construct a world that the characters inhabit. Kiarostami's camera rarely looks out upon its surroundings; instead it is forever trained on Badii, or his car. While this might go a long way in personalizing his plight, the actual effect is one of an animal in a zoo. The long we look, the more obvious it is that Badii is in a man-made enclosure, his particular terror is one of captivity, one imposed by the film itself.

Italian neorealism, with its nonprofessional actors and improvised plots, was the cinematic equivalent of modernism in literature, introducing a new level of reality and consciousness to the cinema. Filmmakers like Kiarostami, Michael Haneke and Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) have flipped the script, applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to storytelling - the closer we look, the more inscrutable the material becomes. All we can say with certainty about Taste of Cherry is that it explores the value of life, if only on a theoretical level.

Yet at the climax, with Badii awaiting his death in the hole, Kiarostami pulls the rug from beneath us once again - Badii's life is no more an actual human life than Vito Corleone's. The final moments show the film crew recording sound on the same hill, but now everything is in bloom. As one character says earlier in the film, "God gives us different fruits in every season" - now the once desolate hill is verdant, alive, populated by soldiers and camera men. Ershadi is off to the side, having a smoke with some crew members. What preceded may have been depressing, but we must remember, as does Badii, there is always another way of looking at a situation. For example, if not through the camera eye, just behind it.

Super 8

2011-06-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

A group of kids with shaggy haircuts race around Anywhere, USA, on their bikes, one step ahead of a shady government cover-up. Later, an idle vehicle is attacked by someone or something hungry for human flesh. Eventually, the townspeople gather and gaze to the sky as they are bathed in an ethereal blue light. You are not watching Stephen Spielberg's Cecil B. Demille Award clip reel; instead, you've purchased one of the many tickets available for JJ Abrams' Super 8, the most refreshingly unoriginal picture to come out of Hollywood in decades. This isn't just a paean to the old master of children's entertainment, either; Spielberg can be found right there in the credits, listed officially as a producer, unofficially as a "mentor".

Fanboys in certain quarters have been awaiting this film since the first mysterious trailer, which simply showed reflections of mysterious explosions in the lens of the titular recording device. Abrams, known best as the producer of Lost, has made a habit of keeping his projects shrouded in secrecy. In the case of Cloverfield, the emperor had no clothes - this is not the case with Super 8, which is thankfully shot with a dolly-mounted camera and 35mm stock. The need for secrecy is unclear however - anyone who's seen E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind should take the cues early on that an alien is involved, and it probably is misunderstood. Of course, Abrams and Spielberg seem to be pushing their chips to the middle in the hope that no one under 30 has seen or remembers those films.

Joe Lamb and his friends are making a movie (how appropriate), in the anachronistically popular zombie genre. One night, with his best friend and director Charles griping about "production value", the boys and their friends set out to shoot a scene at the town train station, little more than a platform. They are accompanies by Alice, the romantic interest, played by Elle Fanning, poised to upend her sister. As the train comes by, making the scene "real" and "alive", it derails in a deafening series of collisions and explosions. When the boys run, the camera drops to the ground, still running, and possibly (read: does) record invaluable evidence that something mysterious, nay, otherworldly may be afoot.

The general feeling of what follows is pure fun; the small town atmosphere of Spielberg films like Jaws and 1941, filtered through other Spielberg spinoffs like The Goonies and Gremlins. There are a bevy of thin characterizations, from Alice's alcoholic father to a nervous woman in a town-hall meeting worried the Soviets may be to blame. For a while, the kids have a "show must go on" attitude and continue with the filming of the movie, even as the crucial reel is being developed. That is, until people start disappearing and the town is evacuated by the evil military. It's around this point that the 80s kitsch slides to the background and we are reminded Abrams isn't merely making an homage to Spielberg - he is literally making a Spielberg movie. Which means it's time for us to all learn a valuable lesson.

Following Quentin Tarantino's lead, Hollywood has produced a lot of mainstream throwbacks lately. Pineapple Express began as an ironic take on buddy-action movies like 48 Hours and Midnight Run, then descended to actual male bonding and gunfights in the final act. The Expendables took the mirroring one step further, when Sylvester Stallone revisited the muscles and machine guns of his youth. Super 8 is something different - it's hardly self aware at all. One would expect a cameo by Henry Thomas or Richard Dreyfuss, or a movie theatre showing Close Encounters; instead there's a cast of unknown character actors, as though the film is trying to fool future generations. When it most desperately needs to wink at the audience, assure us that it understands its mechanics as the slickest of mimicry, Super 8 refuses.

If for the train-wreck scene alone, Super 8 is Abrams' best work to date. It delivers laughs, thrills and excitement efficiently, and moves along at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, as with the worst of Spielberg's films, the sugar rush wears off long before the credits roll, and the films most "meaningful" moments are deadened by the unshakeable feeling that we've seen this all before. In a year where we are being bombarded with Transformers 3, Pirates of the Carribean 5, Harry Potter 7 and two more Marvel comic book movies, the marketing for Super 8 promised the most innovative and unexpected blockbuster of the summer. Instead, it's the most familiar of them all.

The Vault #71: The Roaring Twenties

2011-06-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Though released in 1939, The Roaring Twenties feels the needs to educate the audience about its setting as though it took place in Ancient Rome. The film opens with newsreel footage, and this motif will continue throughout. Unlike the earlier gangster pictures of the decade, this one take place squarely in the past, and assumes an appropriately novelistic tone - "While our characters rose and fell, so did the rest of the country." This brings the stars, Bogart and Cagney down to our level in some ways - each is just a poor schlub trying to make his way in the world.

Unlike the pre-code films that form gangster canon (Scarface, Little Caesar and The Public Enemy), The Roaring Twenties was not released during Prohibition. Therefore it was divorced from the ongoing war on crime, bereft of didactic slant an cartoonish overstatement. Where Cagney previously appeared cackling and shoving grapefruit where it certainly did not belong, here we find him at first hungry and downtrodden. Eddie is a WWI veteran who gets a job as a cabdriver, which soon has him making "deliveries", which soon has him thrown in jail with fast-talking club owner Panama Smith (Gladys George). Even when he does make some connections and moves up in the world, he remains blissfully ignorant of the harm he may be causing to innocent people.

If it can be said that Cagney has a softer side in The Roaring Twenties, this can be credited to director Raoul Walsh, who to this point had made his name on Westerns and women's films, most famously Sadie Thompson, in which a fallen woman played by Gloria Swanson seeks a fresh start. In his first foray into the gangster genre, he makes sure to keep Cagney well-insulated. He never kills anyone on screen as he rises to power - these duties are left to his war buddy George Hally (Bogart). The earlier gangster films villainized their protagonists so the audience eventually rooted for their downfall. Eddie's comes well before the final reel, in the stock market crash.

To continue the mood of ambivalence, Eddie is torn between to romantic interests: the fiery Panama, and the innocent Jean (Priscilla Lane). A good portion of the first act is spent with Eddie gazing at a picture of Jean dressed as a Turkish dancing girl; he presumes her to be a woman of the world. When he arrives at her home after the war and finds the costume was for a high school play, he tells her to grow up for a few years. He is trapped in a nostalgic whirlpool for the rest of the film, drawn back to an image that never existed, even as the real Jean falls in love with Eddie's straight-laced attorney. All of Eddie's striving and empire-building is for a girl who disappeared long ago - there's more than a whiff of Gatsby in him.

The Roaring Twenties is not a gangster film; rather it is a drama set in the world of the gangster. Cagney doesn't meet his end cackling in a hail of police gunfire (he and Walsh would save that for when they re-teamed on White Heat). He goes down trying to do the right thing for Jean and her family, at the hands of his best friend. The flappers and bathtub gin are distant memories by the end of the film; Eddie dies in a bum's clothes on the steps of a church, Panama the only witness. For all of his deaths, this is Cagney's most famous - perhaps because he is allowed the most dignity in this pieta pose. This is the one instance where the audience is not happy to see him go, the moment he truly feels like an unluckier version of ourselves, a cautionary tale from history rather than a monstrous cartoon of the present.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-05-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

"The most important discovery in the history of human culture," boasts director/narrator/provocateur Werner Herzog of the subject of his latest film. Of course the importance isn't the only debatable point in that statement - the culture and humanity are up for grabs as well. The Chauvet cave in Eastern France is the site of the world's oldest known cave paintings. Whether your focus is art, history or religion, the brief glimpse of these relics offered on screen is a rare treat, especially as it is presented in 3-D. Herzog uses this technology in haunting ways to take us up close to the paintings, across their contours and textures, plumbing the known, and mostly unknown, story of their origins.

It may be Herzog's straightest film to date. Where his films have previously made the mundane eccentric (Encounters at the End of the World, Stroszek) or the eccentric mundane (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser), Cave struggles to place the director's trademark signifiers of sanity or insanity on the ancient artisans. This seems to be the rare subject with which the audience and the filmmakers experience with equal awe. These are not like many neanderthal discoveries - to Herzog the perspective and motion depicted on the cave's rolling surface represents a kind of "proto-cinema". The paintings in Chauvet are clearly the work of homo-sapiens, a term one interview subject notes is a misnomer; what does any of us really know?

If not sapiens (knowing), what is the appropriate participle? While the choral soundtrack booms against images of ancient hunts and primal conflicts in the animal kingdom, one question overrides all: what, if anything, separates us from the people who made these scratches on the walls some 32,000 years ago? The cave holds no human remains, only the skulls of cave-bear, some seemingly sacrificed at an altar. Is this so different from a church; has evolution slowed to a crawl over the past thirty millenia? Herzog answers this question with an anecdote about an Australian aborigine re-touching a relatively new, but symbolically important piece of rock art. The native didn't claim to be painting himself, but rather the spirits of his ancestors were guiding his brush.

The "proto-cinema" claim coupled with the title marking the zillionth invocation of film as dream and vice versa make Herzog's message plain. Combined with the contemporary technological innovation of three dimensions, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a pseudo-scholarly retelling of the same stories portrayed in the caves. A woman's body is fused with that of a buffalo; an abstract flurry of handprints; a stampede of horses. These images may be from dreams as the director hopes, or they may have been accepted as mythology. We are no more equipped to explain their ultimate meaning than were the original creators. Man may not know, but he will always be able to represent, recreate, and imagine. And after all that, we look upon our creations, and wonder.

Previous Herzog documentary like Encounters and Grizzly Man have seemed at times like provocations, jokes made at the expense of their subjects. Though there are a few moments of levity in the film (one archeologist is revealed to have been a circus performer), mostly the tone has shifted to one of reverence. An epilogue features a pair of radioactive albino alligators, and the everpresent Teutonic tenor suggesting as they stare at each other, they are like man staring at himself, across epochs. Reptile or mammal, any explanation of our existence lies a long way off, likely never to be discovered. Even as the image now has the ability to jump off the screen, we are no closer to understanding.

The Tree of Life

2011-05-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

Introduction of conflict; entanglement of characters; climax; resolution. This is the natural order of narrative filmmaking. It is not common practice to blow the emotional and dramatic powder keg in the opening thirty minutes of a film and spend the next two hours showing us the delicately laid fuse. Of course, it isn't your everyday domestic drama that juxtaposes the death of a child with the Big Bang, the reign of dinosaurs over planet earth, and the eventual heat death of the universe. One event occurs in biological time; the other geological. There are two beings that might consider both events in a single thought: God and Terrence Malick. The reclusive director's fifth film in 38 years, The Tree of Life, offers the pair a forum for debate.

Each Malick film has focused on the arbitrariness of an easily-flipped duality: Guilt/Innocence (Badlands); Love/Hate (Days of Heaven); War/Peace (The Thin Red Line); and Savagery/Civilization (The New World). This time around, the line is not so thin - the fundamental conflict in the film comes between the divine perspective and our own, and is initiated by a passage from the climax of the Book of Job, where God looks down on his skeptical creation and asks: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?". Malick's protagonists have been doomed lovers and misunderstood iconoclasts; yet, to this point, the blame for their tragedy has usually laid within the human realm. This invocation of Job opens the story that follows to cosmic implications.

Asking the difference between God and Man leads to the exploration of a single consciousness, that of Jack (when old, played by Sean Penn; for the bulk of the film appearing behind the sullen gaze of newcomer Hunter McCracken), the oldest son of the O'Brien family. Jack looks back on his early years, from birth to adolescence, in tiny vignettes, often remembering the cruelty of his father (Brad Pitt) and the saintliness of his mother (Jessica Chastain). Rarely is a memory complete; many fade or cut out incomplete. Some are merely the exchange of expression or a flash of playing ball in the backyard with his younger brothers. Many of these are captured with the fish-eye lens of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, whose invasive steadicam gives us the convincing sensation of being a scrambling infant in a roomy four-poster house. The POV pastiche is reminiscent of Gaspar Noe's life-in-a-death-trip Enter the Void; however here illicit sex is merely hinted at with the tearful larceny of a lace slip.

Nor are these events meant to be strictly objective - some capsule reviews that include genre have pegged The Tree of Life as fantasy. Chastain at one points floats above the earth, then appears in a glass coffin a la Sleeping Beauty. Jack floats in his submerged living room, then opens a door and finds himself on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The only thing solid in these remembrances is Pitt's menacing, quarried jawline, jutting forth in a manner that suggests a sequence detailing the evolution of primates may have been left on the cutting room floor. Though it may not be realistic, and human relationships in the director's films rarely are in the truest sense of the word, the mother-father relationship provides a lower inflection of the God-Job duality. Introduced as the way of brutal nature (Pitt) vs. the way of spiritual grace (Chastain), a debate that gets to the core of Malick's scholarly inquiry: moral awakening in view of the existential notion that we are ultimately nothing. The brilliance of McCracken's performance (or Malick and his small battalion of editors' efforts) is that it develops slowly throughout, until we see a boy reaching his teen years with both a knowledge of right and wrong and an understanding for the cold discipline of his father.

A common thread in writings of Heiddeger and of Malick on Heidegger is the notion of man as a discrete being, isolated in nature. This view is largely fed by our perception of right and wrong, and puts us ever at odds with the indifferent universe. Linda longs to "talk to the earth" in Days of Heaven; Private Witt asks, "what's keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?" Humans are in denial that their lives, and ultimately deaths, are the same as volcanoes, and hammerhead sharks waiting for the delicious chum presented in the form of an ailing brontasaurus (yes, really) - they're all part of the glory, each one like the sunflowers seen in one of the closing shots. Those too are temporal.

And so the film closes, Jack, now old, wandering an imagined beach that will be interpreted as everything from a dream to purgatory. Jack's visions have stretched from the beginning of the world to the end, from his happiness to his despair, from the unflinching gaze of god to the blinking fear of a child. No resolution is provided; Malick may be a Christian, but he is hardly the provider of easy answers. As authoritative as this account of existence may seem, our guide is, after all, just another soul on that beach. The magic light on the screen emanates from a bulb in the projection booth; he's still mystifying us.

The Vault #70: The Thin Red Line

2011-05-17T01:38:00.000-07:00

"In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one." - First Sgt. Edward Walsh, The Thin Red Line

Though reports of boos and walkouts have surfaced, there is no question Cannes is buzzing today about only one film: The Tree of Life. The film stars Sean Penn as Brad Pitt's son. It is shot by virtuoso cinematographer Emmaneul Lubezki. It may begin at the dawn of time and include footage of dinosaurs, comets and solar eclipses. Some of it may take place in Jessica Chastain's uterus. The buzz has nothing to do with any of the above curiosities, however. The Tree of Life is the fifth feature from director Terrence Malick, a man coming off of two high-concept failures, who somehow still demands our respect.

Imagine the rattle and hum of the blogosphere if the internet as it is currently configured had existed in 1998, when Malick's third feature, The Thin Red Line, came and went rather quietly from multiplexes. It was his first in 20 years, and every actor big or small wanted to be in the adaptation of James Jones' fictionalization of Guadalcanal. Besides Penn there was John Travolta, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, Jared Leto, and John Cusack. The prestige of the director, the name recognition of the cast, and the status of being a Big Important Hollywood War Epic should have had The Thin Red Line destined for a bushel of Oscars and an automatic bid to every critic's top ten list. Of course, then art had to go rear its ugly head.

Jones' original text focuses on the inner lives of over a dozen grunts and officers making a dangerous frontal attack on Hill 53. Malick's original script layered each of these perspectives equally. He worked with as many as six cameras rolling at once, with almost every actor and extra on set at all times. What might have been a six hour film (that also included Billy Bob Thornton and Mickey Rourke) emerged, despite the star power, centered on relative unknowns Jim Caveizel and Ben Chaplain. Caveizel as Private Witt is the quintessential Malick archetype, a starry-eyed dreamer forced into adversity. Chaplain longs for his wife, his visions of her the only ones in the film not pierced by the smothering greens and blues of the jungle island.

In these two characters we see Malick's universal themes - first, the existence of two worlds, or sides in "this war at the heart of nature" (a concept introduced in the film's opening lines) and, second, the doomed love affair. In Badlands, Days of Heaven and The New World, one character generally carries both burdens. Here, the message is diffuse, and furthermore, Chaplain and Caveizel together may make up only one third of the movie's running time. There is Woody Harrelson's heroic death; there is the battle of wills between Captain Starrels (Elias Koteas) and Colonel Tall (Nolte, in far-and-away the finest performance of his career). Each of these men is given an interior life, each becomes the star of the movie for a moment, and then disappears. This is certainly faithful to Jones' novel, but ultimately muddles the final output.

It certainly does not help matter that audiences saw The Thin Red Line mere months after experiencing the patriotism and pageantry surrounding Saving Private Ryan. That film opened with a 25 minute "realistic" battle sequence that garnered the respect of "The Greatest Generation" then settled down into an all-too-safe justification of World War II. In terms of sustained confusion, anger and fear, I have to imagine The Thin Red Line comes much closer to the actual experience. War is a lot messier than Private Ryan would have us believe - it never ends with one battle, never turns with one mission, never follows a clean narrative line all the way through. SPOILER: when Witt finally loses his life, the manouver is hardly explained - there is always the next enemy position, the next piece of real estate, and if enough men are sent to their deaths, that side will emerge victorious.

The Thin Red Line may be at once Terrence Malick's most Hollywood and least accessible film. Despite focusing on the Second World War, a thematically rich genre and period, it lacks the emotional center and larger historical commentary of his previous and subsequent works. Large sections of it feel more like a collage than a film, and the faithful will always wish the longer version was available. As is, it is a beautiful, if uneven, work of art that re-introduced the mercurial filmmaker to a generation that had all but forgotten him. A necessary step to those dinosaurs that eat Brad Pitt after traveling through time.

The Pulpit #3: They Live

2011-05-13T15:51:00.000-07:00

As his career dwindles down to its last embers, it may be easily lost that John Carpenter was one of the finest directors of his generation. Equal parts Steven Spielberg and George Romero, the filmmaker's most prolific period was comprised of playful genre films like Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing and Escape from New York. It was the Reagan eighties, and everyone was having too much fun to notice that these films all starred Kurt Russell. Though maintaing his trademark grind-house sensibilities, Carpenter's final film of the decade is a far more studied project. Yes, the "Rowdy" Roddy Piper vehicle They Live is a transcendent commentary on the times in which we live.

The barrel-chested (and barrel-armed, and barrel-jawed) Piper plays a curiously coiffured drifter named Nada, who lands in a Los Angeles shanty town looking to work construction. After entertaining the proletarian gripes of fellow day-laborer Frank (Keith David), Nada counters that he believes in America, and eventually everyone will get their chance. The set-up for a modern day Horatio Alger story? Not quite, because it turns out the kind souls running the shelter are also a terrorist cell, plotting to expose society for what it really is. They do this, conveniently, through the distribution of magic sunglasses. Once Nada puts them on, he sees through all of society's subliminal messages, most of which tell people to obey, stay asleep, or consume.

While your realistic-minded satirist might chalk all this negative reinforcement up to an evil corporation or a right-wing political agenda, They Live adds a juicier dimension to Nada's new vision; about half of all human beings are actually aliens, and they're the ones propagating these capitalist messages. The white picket fence and the chicken in every pot are carrots put before us, the horses, prodding us along, keeping us blind to the truth.

Of course "Rowdy" Roddy didn't come here (read: star in this movie) to give an impassioned speech on the floor of the Alien-Robot Senate. He came here to "chew bubble gum and kick ass." You can probably guess what he's fresh out of. From then on, it's a shotgun toting Carpenter action movie, devoid of much social commentary, except the spare moment here or there when we're reminded every promotion at work is done more to keep us quiet than to reward us.

Aliens are selling us shampoo on television. They're railing against the violence in movies (specifically those of Messrs. Romero and Carpenter). And alien Ronald Reagan reminds us, once again, that it's "morning in America". And all the while, the viewer is lapping up a professional wrestler shoot cops and businessmen in a Hollywood movie. There is certainly more than one joke in play in They Live, and the more important one seems to prefigure one asked in the Clinton-era blockbuster The Matrix: if our whole world is a lie, do we want to wake up? In the 80s, this entailed wearing cool sunglasses and killing aliens; in the 90s it meant giving up all the creature comforts and living in a bowels of a post-apocalyptic sewer.

Therein lies the genius of They Live. We may be asleep, and our lives of desperation may be so quiet we are unable to hear our own cries for help; however, is life so significant in the first place that we must find the truth? Carpenter realizes there is a time and place to consider these "big questions" - and a movie starring a professional wrestler certainly isn't it. Piper isn't the sort of performer to wring his hands or furrow his brow like Kevin Costner in Waterworld or Clive Owen in Children of Men, two other end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it films; he simply reloads. There's undeniable excitement in big explosions and flying through plate glass windows - he certainly isn't going to sleep through that.

Broken Embraces

2011-05-04T16:47:00.000-07:00

Broken Embraces finds its auteur Pedro Almodovar in a playfully self-aware mood. There are at least two movies within movies and three characters who consider themselves screenwriters; just about everyone else views themselves as an actor at one point or another. It concludes with the lines "Films are to be finished, even if you do it blindly." Almodovar certainly has his eyes wide open, if only to see the looks on our faces. Yet, post-modernism aside, Broken Embraces is a legitimately touching film about love and regret, with another nested neatly inside of it.

Director Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar) has gone by the name Harry Caine for many years. Yet, when a former producer of his dies, he opens up to his young assistant about a film he once made, a woman he once loved (Penelope Cruz), and the tragedy that befell them both. He is, at this point in his life, blind, now relegated only to typing scenarios, never to look through a camera again. Despite his disability, he is approached by the producer's son Ray X (Ruben Ochandjano) about a new project - however, Ray has things on his mind besides filmmaking. Through flashbacks to the original production (hilariously entitled Women and Suitcases), we get a sense of Ray's agenda and all that Mateo/Harry has lost.

These flashbacks remind us more than a little of Fellini's 8 1/2 (a movie Harry will later mention when running through a list of his DVDs) - Mateo had constructed a fantasy film glorifying the beauty of the producer's mistress Lena (Cruz), with whom he was also having an affair. At the same time, the producer sent Ray as a spy, doing a "documentary" on the production.

The overlapping fictions here create two impressions of Lena - one the abused romantic, the other a conniving gold-digger. Almodovar gives Mateo/Harry's version precedence, but these flashbacks can hardly be viewed with objectivity. The opening scene, set in the grim present, has the blind Harry seducing a beautiful young woman he conned into walking him across the street. Anything we hear and see of the once vivacious and sensual Cruz is from the perspective of a womanizer. It is no coincidence that Ray, shooting on video, a stock more conducive to the ugly truth, is a homosexual (like this film outside the film's actual director); he isn't one to fall for her charms.

Alternating gears between Hitchcock, Fellini and Bunuel, Almodovar is mostly coasting through this tragic love story. Its twists are hardly unpredictable, it's acting and aesthetic no more than what we've come to expect from this filmmaker. It aims to squeak by mostly on references; when Harry asks to hear Jeanne Moreau's voice, his assistant blithely responds, "I don't have her number". The film may generate a knowing grin every once in a while from the cinephiles in the audience, but will probably leave most people groping for the profundity of all of this.

Not to worry - there is not much there to be found. Broken Embraces is just another in the long line of Penelope Cruz vehicles Almodovar feels he owes the world due to her profound beauty and (apparent) prowess as an actress. Although it is quite telling that she admits in the film to having no training or talent whatsoever; she elicits our strongest reactions when in the cheesy comedy within this meaningful drama. In constructing all the shells for this game, Almodovar himself may have forgotten which one holds the treasure.

The Vault #69: Paths of Glory

2011-05-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

Pressured by "politicians and newspapermen" to make headway in The Great War, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) pressures his field commander, General Mireau (George Macready) to execute a nearly impossible attack on the Ant Hill, a German position on the bomb-shelled Western Front. Hungry for promotion and always one to please, Mireau goes ahead with the suicide mission, even while acknowledging the likelihood of over half of his men becoming casualties. When the attack fails, Mireau orders a court marshal with the penalty of death for three soldiers from the regiment. Their defense in the hopelessly rigged proceedings is provided by Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). Those in the second and fourth estates might grimace at the death and destruction in failing to take the ant-hill, but at least the French will not have been called cowards.

Paths of Glory began as a vanity project for its star, but will always be remembered as the first true original from director Stanley Kubrick. After directing the B-noirs Killer's Kiss and The Killing, Kubrick was attached to the project by virtue of his producing partner, James Harris, owning the rights to the story Douglas so desperately wanted to bring to the screen. Though it offered a perfect opportunity for some of Douglas' trademark fiery idealism, it also initiated Kubrick in what would become his signature theme, which one critic has dubbed "the limitations of a rationalized consciousness."

Nothing is as maddeningly rational as the military, and Paths of Glory allows the director to plunge bluntly and economically into the circularity of human logic. It has the pacing and purpose of, well, a court marshall. Yet unlike some of the director's more criticized works, this is a story with a hero, not merely the milling of ants in a farm. Dax is self-aware, unlike the heroes of, say, Barry Lyndon or Dr. Strangelove. He clearly realizes what is going on around him is insane, and the tragedy comes in his inability to stop it.

If there was ever a war we might dub a "Stanley Kubrick War", it was WWI. All subterranean trenches and dust, without a German soldier ever gracing the camera, the front in this film feels more like death row than the tip of a spear in an ongoing campaign. All these men, whether on trial or not, are condemned to die, although one character quips they couldn't possibly be afraid of that, otherwise they'd spend the rest of their lives "in a funk". Until the end, there are basically only two locations - the battlefield where the great unwashed prepare for the reckoning, and the palace where manicured Generals decide what pattern in which to send them off. No home-front, no scenes with family, or flashbacks to before the war. That is, until the end:

Enough has been said about this scene already to fill a book, most of it begrudging that Kubrick did in fact possess a human heart. It has no real narrative purpose in the film; Dax has already gotten his vengeance against General Mireau and spoken his mind to General Broulard. The three soldiers have been executed and the battalion has been ordered back to the front. The only thing left to do (and I suppose the thing which so many of the director's detractors wish he did more often) is to remind us of the human cost, which is done with little more than still photographs of soldiers taking in the young girl's performance. This one image bridges the divide between Germany and France, between man and woman, between brave warriors and scared children, between World War I and all human conflict. And then it's time to move out.

Hanna

2011-05-03T14:51:00.000-07:00

The past decade of War-on-Terror espionage films has ranged from boring (Body of Lies) to explanatory (The Kingdom) to overtly political (Green Zone), with very little room for fun in between. It's enough for one to wax nostalgic for our good friends Boris and Yuri, martinis shaken, never stirred, and any number of romantic European locations riddled with bullets and crawling with quasi-Aryan henchmen. Islam and the Arab World are interesting topics that must be tiptoed around and never made openly camp. That's what makes Joe Wright's Hanna so damn enjoyable - those same toes get shot off in slow motion by a 16 year old girl.

The otherworldly Saoirse Ronan plays Hanna, a freakishly strong and fearless girl living with her father Erik (Eric Bana) in the arctic circle. For the first fifteen minutes, it's unclear what century it is, as the two hunt and spar in the untouched wilderness, living in a hut without electricity fit for Nanook of the North. Erik is training his daughter for something, what is not immediately clear, although she insists she is ready. Reluctantly, he digs up a CB radio and encourages her to flip the switch, warning her "nothing will be the same". Eager to see the world (apparently she has never left the Great White North), Hanna activates the device, which alerts comely CIA agent Marissa Ziegler (Cate Blanchett) of the girl and her father's whereabouts.

From that point forward, it's a blood, guns, bullets and octane situation until the final credits roll. Marissa focuses her attentions on Erik, while sending a group of skinheads after Hanna, who is pursued from a secret CIA installation in Morocco across Spain and France into Germany. Hanna is more than capable of handling these foes however, as is her father. Hanna often feels like a stylistically coherent version of Kill Bill, all bundled up with a propulsive score by The Chemical Brothers. Set piece meets set piece seamlessly, with the minimum number of words used in the exposition. Unlike Tarantino's sprawling two-film "masterpiece", Hanna knows its own purpose - to deliver thrills as economically as possible.

This all might not seem like much, but the attraction of talent like Blanchett and Bana to the project should illustrate the dearth of good genre films being produced in Hollywood these days. No one has to give speeches about state secrecy or man playing god - Bana kicks the living shit out of a few guys, while Blanchett spits her lines in a venomous southern drawl, modeling her character on equal parts Clarisse Starling and Cruella Deville.

Her performance is but one of the cartoonish accoutrements to be found in this film, which essentially amounts to a two hour chase sequence. Hanna is a welcome departure for Wright, who reboots his career nicely after three Oscar-pandering efforts in Pride and Prejudice, The Soloist and Atonement. Those films were not without aesthetic appeal, but the subject matter certainly seemed like a chore for Wright. He now revisits the tracking techniques used in Atonement's lugubrious World-War-Two-in-a-Single-Shot scene to create a a thoroughly exciting bus to subway fight. There, the magnitude of the explosions and destruction evoked Greatest Generation warm and fuzzies without applying in any specific way to the story; here, the stakes are primal and immediate. In the span of two films, Wright has gone from cold architectural frieze to exuberant comic book.

Hanna is a film released in April that is doing pretty well on word of mouth, covering its modest 30 million dollar budget. This is in fact the ideal number for any Hollywood film - enough to get the top talent, but not enough to rely on CGI. The action is often just one character running after another, on a real live street. This action feels more physical than fantasy - it leaves us breathless without thinking about the man hours spent on animation. There's nothing more exhilirating than looking down the barrel of a gun and wondering how you're going to escape. Unless, maybe, you've got your finger on the trigger.

Police, Adjective

2011-04-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

What Hollywood can't do: make a cop movie without guns. There has to be a detective gone rogue, an undercover operative struggling with his allegiances, and at least one seasoned veteran too cynical to care. Brooklyn's Finest was horrible.

On the other side of the Romance language-speaking world, Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is on a fool's errand in Corneliou Porumboiu's Police, Adjective. Nevermind this gun, Cristi also lacks a badge - he might as well be the lackey to a dubious private detective. Freezing, he follows the kid the school, waits around, then examines the cigarette butts left behind for traces of THC. After a meager bowl of soup with some day old bread, it's back to the office to write a detailed report on the day's events. A questionable informant has put Cristi onto the kid, telling him he's distributing to several others in the high school, but after thorough investigation, there's little evidence to support this claim. Nevertheless, Cristi tries his hardest, working tirelessly despite the slogging bureaucracy of post-Cold War Romania to build the case.

In the midst of this slow work, Cristi gets to thinking about the meaning of things, specifically right and wrong. He develops misgivings about ruining a young man for life over a little grass. The mirror-image of the last major Romanian hit, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Porombiou's film isn't an exercise in suspense, but rather meditation. Cristi eats soup. Cristi goes for a beer. Cristi talks to his girlfriend about the lyrics of a pop song. And all the while, the following. And all the while, the paperwork. Only the drab setting reminds us that we're in a world of moral decay - the actions themselves lack any inherent drama or atmosphere.

Fitting then that the grand finale of Police, Adjective consists of Cristi's superior reading out of a dictionary for upwards of three minutes, as the camera stares objectively ahead. Not only is there no room for Cristi's moral hemming and hawing within the state bureaucracy - there's no space for humanity of any kind. As the chief flips from the definition of police (ironically, it's the verb he finds most important) back to the L section where, apparently in all Romance languages, we find law, Cristi is reminded of what he is - not Dirty Harry, just a clerk keeping clean the ledger of the state.

American cop movies exploit what we find immediately interesting about the profession - they get to carry a gun, and they uphold the ideas of right and wrong. Maybe once in a while this does happen, a dashing Michael Douglas comes across a sexy serial killer, or Al Pacino tries to fight city hall. But most of the time, cops are the extras in those films, writing traffic tickets, directing traffic, and occasionally busting some petty drug users down to size. The screenwriters and pulp novelists can romanticize this business all they want, but turn back to the reference book, and it's a lonely guy walking a lonely beat, bored out of his mind and powerless to change the system.

Limitless

2011-04-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

In a move seemed to prepare our stomachs for the roller-coaster ride to follow, Limitless opens with a high speed pan up the face of an endless high-rise, stopping on a well-dressed Edward Morra (Bradley Cooper), about to fling himself from his 8.5 million dollar penthouse's balcony. In the classic "I had it all, but..." formula, it is customary to start at some point in the third act, when the character is facing death or suicide. In Eddie's case, it's both. In a canny voiceover that could only be the conception of a failed writer, Eddie tells us despite having a 4-digit IQ, he must have missed something, because he's about to meet his end. A second later, we're hurled back down to the streets of midtown Manhattan, where the camera takes a sharp left turn and hurtles through about 200 vertiginous zoom-ins that give us the feeling of flying directly into a two dimensional space. Wait, is this movie about drugs?

If any of that reminds you of Fight Club, you're not far off. Limitless is another male-fantasy movie about a sad sack who gets a once in a lifetime opportunity to realize his dreams. Only this time, he isn't schizophrenic. Eddie was once a writer, the only kind of person who can have a shaggy unkempt appearance "without having a drug or alcohol problem" (ha, ha). Despite telling us this, we soon learn he is a recovering addict, and a run-in with a former dealer soon has him hooked on a new drug called NZT, or "the clear". NZT doesn't get you stoned or make you feel good all over, though - it allows you to access 100% of your brain functionality. We all know what that means guys - Eddie's gonna get laid!

Suddenly he has eagle-eye vision, a photographic memory and a better haircut. Eddie finishes his novel in 4 days, then quickly realizes that money=power, which sends him frantically into the world of finance (After a detour to the South of Spain with a group of available young supermodels). He turns 800 dollar into 2.5 million in three weeks, becomes the toast of Wall Street (oh yeah, there's a touch of Wall Street), and is soon rubbing elbows with Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro), a master-of-his-domain type who tries to use Eddie's phenomenal deductive powers to pull off a historic merger.

Writer Leslie Dixon, working from the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn, pulls a nice switch on us - the expectation is that a movie about a prescription drug will eventually lead us to the halls of a shady pharmaceutical company. However, that moment never comes; Eddie's only problems come from people who want more NZT, the drug that makes you a winner. Limitless is a low-budget thriller that arrives in March, when moviegoers aren't looking for moralizing about the beat-to-death concept of Better Living through Chemistry. Eddie lives better, end of story.

So here we have an admitted drug addict falling in love with a whole new high, and we're rooting for him. And that's where the male fantasy aspect of Limitless is so important - director Neil Burger makes us want NZT as much as anyone in the film. In a way, it's more important than the money itself. Even though Eddie very clearly kills a woman and gets away with it, it's no time to cluck our tongues in disapproval. We only wonder: where will he get his next dose? The plot answers maniacally - by drinking it out of a dying man's bloodstream. If that doesn't hit the the nail squarely enough on the head for your liking, a used hypodermic needle lies in frame.

There is no going back to normal for Eddie Morra - he has gone to the very limits of the human mind, stared into the abyss, and smiled. The cheeky epilogue is predictable, but warmly received - he must move on to the next frontier. Unlike Tony Montana, Eddie was not destined to go down in a hail of bullets due to his own hubris. Apparently, the end of his "I had it all, but..." is "soon I would have even more." Basically, if a pill can make you cool, take it.

The Pulpit #2: Red Rock West

2011-03-31T14:10:00.000-07:00

We may look back on the 1970s as the pinnacle of American filmmaking for the simple fact that one could go to one type of movie theater in those days, and see every worthwhile film in wide release. There is no question that the crop of directors that came after this period, whether they be of the crowd-pleasing John McTiernan/James Cameron/Paul Verhoeven set, or the Coen Brothers/Steven Soderbergh/Jim Jarmusch group, were aiming for one audience or the other. They never had the intentions of pleasing both. Some wanted to be as popular as Spielberg and Coppola; others wanted the critical appreciation of Cassavetes and Lynch. In the 30 years since, Hollywood productions have graduated from blockbusters to thermonuclear events, and art-houses have become their own cottage industry collage of ambiguous thrillers, dramedies about dysfunctional ethnic families, and travelogues about quasi-menopausal women enjoying a trip abroad. What we lost was the garbage. To make a western these days, it has to have the razzle dazzle hook of Cowboys and Aliens or the affected coquettishness of the new True Grit. Where's the middle, the un-ironic pulp that filled the back end of so many double features in days past?

There is some small solace to be found in John Dahl's Red Rock West. Mike (Nicolas Cage) is basically a good guy, as the screenwriter shows us early on when he turns down an easy opportunity to rob an unattended gas station. However, as soon as he hits the town of Red Rock, his character is tested when the local sheriff (J.T. Walsh) offers Mike ten thousand dollars to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Of course, Mike's not the man the sheriff was expecting, but he takes the money anyway, mostly so he can buy gas, snacks and a couple of six packs in a gleeful spending spree at a convenience store. However, after an unfortunate accident leaves him without transportation, and Lyle, the real hitman (Dennis Hopper) shows up, Mike has some explaining (and shooting) to do if he wants to get out of Red Rock alive.

When it was made in 1993, Red Rock West had no discernible niche, playing in one art-house before going direct to video. Cage plays a befuddled drifter with a questionable conscience doing wrong in the modern West, but the film does not have the black comedy or inventive narration of Raising Arizona. Hopper is a well-dressed psychotic with a penchant for monologuing, but Dahl isn't about to have him huff oxygen and shout "C'mon baby, do it for Van Goh!" And then there's Boyle, smoky-eyed and otherworldly as ever, a sex object that reminds us more of a spider than a woman.

Where the Coen brothers and Lynch make head fakes towards classic noir, mostly as a source of humor, Dahl follows through. His filmography, which includes films like Rounders, The Last Seduction and Joy Ride, is a treasure trove of works that, if directed by Robert Aldrich or Sam Fuller, and released in 1953, would be considered minor classics. Back then, noir was the best delivery system for sex and violence, but could only do so through the most pointed allusions. What Dahl realizes, given the standards and practices of the 90s, is that he can make something truly titillating without being funny about it. After all, then, as now, this is just a movie about four desperate people, a few bullets, and one big bag of money.

The best proof of this comes in the form of J.T. Walsh, veteran character actor finally given room to shine as the villainous sheriff. Always rational, and slow to anger, Walsh's Wayne might not be the most eye-catching of the four performances, but it is without a doubt the most controlled, considered and appropriate. Sure it's fun to watch Cage and Hopped melt the lens with their histrionic antics. Walsh contents himself with realism, the cool surface of a man playing his very dangerous cards close to his chest. It recalls Louis Calhern's sly attorney in The Asphalt Jungle - not an extraordinarily evil man, just a normal one who'd followed the wrong path.

It is truly a shame a filmmaker like John Dahl has been relegated to television the past few years. His original screenplays have a sensuality and tension all their own, which he brings lovingly, and economically to the screen. He doesn't draw any attention to the apparatus itself, which lets us get all the more easily lost.

Certified Copy

2011-03-15T17:56:00.000-07:00

Forget the Original - Just Get a Good Copy is the subtitle of the controversial book Certified Copy, a treatise on art and authenticity at the center of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, Certified Copy, a treatise on art and authenticity. In the book, the author James Miller (William Shimell), an academic of unspecified expertise, argues that perfect copies of works of art are just as effective and moving as originals, and more transgressively, that the idea of a "true" original is a construction. Did not Da Vinci have La Giocanda pose for the Mona Lisa?

If it's a Socratic dialogue on this topic you came for, that's what you're going to get. No filmmaker living or dead tows the line between philosopher and filmmaker as the Iranian-born Kiarostami, who spent most the 90s crossing the eyes of international audiences (his films are greeted with some reservation in his home country) with reality-confusing films like Close-Up, Through the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry. And he isn't going to stop at a discussion - Miller's claims soon raise the ire of a French expatriate (Juliette Binoche) who owns an antique shop in Tuscany. On their subsequent jaunt through the countryside, the two take up the roles of an old married couple, and the copies, certified or otherwise, begin to multiply at an alarming rate.

The specifics of the illusions within aside, Certified Copy is Kiarostami's first film made in Europe, and it serves as a commentary not only on love, marriage and art, but specifically those subjects as represented in film. Most reviews of this film will mention Rosselini's Voyage in Italy, Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad or Linklater's Before Sunset as thematic touchstones, but this may be missing the point by a wide margin. Those films involve much younger couples than Certified Copy; the audience Kiarostami is turning the tables on this time will be considerably older. The film, which directly challenges the idea of a past and a starting point nonetheless seems more nostalgic than spontaneously romantic. Consider it Under the Tuscan Sun for the post-Derrida crowd.

And therein lies the rabbit hole; each of us wants for Miller and the unnamed woman (called "Elle") to be in love, to be happy together, even if forces unseen make it impossible, and even if those forces are the fact that Miller and Elle are simply characters in a film. Copy is as much Last Year at Marienbad as that film was The Rules of the Game, or Rules was The Merry Wives of Windsor. This is Miller's (and perhaps Kiarostami's) point: it does not matter whether a work is original or not, as long as the copy is good enough. At the same time, the director has challenged himself and his audience at meeting that minimum threshold with the casting of Shimell, an English opera singer, who finds himself David against the goliath of Binoche, one of cinema's greatest living actresses.

Elle always seems more committed to the game; James, ostensibly trying to make it to the train station, is annoyed when playing the role of husband, playfully detached when a perfect stranger. Perhaps he is less willing to play the game, or, being Elle's true husband, finds the whole game immature. What makes Certified Copy stimulating, start to finish, is its uncertainty, a quality that doesn't rely on misinformation or mistaken identity. It's a film about an intellectual exercise wreaking quiet havoc on its participants, culminating in the room where the two did, or just as likely, did not spend their honeymoon. Elle points out the window to some signifier, and James is unable to find it. She prods him, but he must admit his memory has lost some of its luster.

The first question is still unanswered: do they know each other, are they in fact man and wife? But the more important question, so important in fact he's written an entire book on the subject, is: does it matter? She begs him to stay, swoons as a lover on the pure bed linens. He stares into the bathroom mirror, but really out at us, while dusk falls on the vista behind him. At this point, all thoughts of artifice and performance dissolve. The moment is as authentic as we want it to be. Kiatostami leaves us at that.

The Pulpit #1: Robocop

2011-02-23T04:12:00.000-08:00

An unavoidable truth: film production and special effects costing what they do, Hollywood has turned more frequently towards established franchises for their tent-pole pictures. Hulk and Spiderman get unrequested reboots; Harry Potter 7 and The Hobbit get chopped into two movie events, each sure to gross half a billion domestic. As the digitization gets richer however, and the specific details of comic book frames and fantasy novels comes to life on the screen, original screenplays have been forced to play by the same complex mythological rules. We need only look at The Terminator franchise, one of the most economically genius concepts in modern times (trust us, under that ~~foreign body-builder's~~ ~~governor's~~ actor's skin is a titanium exoskeleton) which went from one stoic dude with a gun to a full on apocalypse with cybernetic snakes and nuclear airships, to see how much things have changed. The original hit of the summer, Inception, used these snakes as narrative form, twisting and convulsing for over 150 minutes until the audience left confused and exhausted. Remember three guys in a boat hunting a shark?

Of course Hollywood couldn't sell Jaws to America today, at least not with the expectation of making their money back. What's in the trailer, some shots of Richard Dreyfus looking distressed? It's nice then, with the aid of Netflix instant, to return to a simpler time with a thrill machine like Paul Verhoeven's Robocop. Like The Terminator, it's a high concept science fiction movie executed on a middle of the road budget. Murphy (Peter Weller) is killed by gangsters, and his body is used in the prototype of the "new police officer" engineered by the corporations that runs law enforcement. Soon, however, memories of his human life begin to haunt him, and his search for justice leads him to uncover citywide corruption in a (slightly) futuristic version of Detroit.

The police (still in dress blues) are threatening going on strike. Bad men in expensive suits run the city. Criminals hide out in warehouses and steel mills. Whether Verhoeven is saying the future will be quite recognizable, or his limited budget had to be devoted to make-up and costume effects, the effect is ideal. We aren't distracted by a thousand digital details in the background, as in the disastrous Star Wars reboots. Technology was the window dressing, not the object being sold. Like Die Hard, The French Connection and Shane, Robocop is simply about one good guy with a limited number of bullets.

Science fiction does have its luxuries though - the filmmakers aren't required the head-fake to reality found in earlier genre films. Starship Troopers was about a war that never ends, and the mentality of the soldiers caught in such a struggle - Robocop is the fun of revenge, of taking down the powers that be, of a machine becoming a hero, all in 100 lean minutes. That "fun of revenge" is just fancy talk for giving us what we want - violence and sex, with thin justifications.

Of course there could be more to it; Robocop also touches on the conflict between analog and digital techonology when it comes to waging war. Coming as it did at the end of the Cold War, it hearkens back to the Westerns of the 50s, the ideal of one man making a difference, somewhat lost in the tumultuous 60s and paranoid 70s. It's pure Reagan-era image-making, stone-faced Peter Weller taking down the corporate giant that would have a hind-legged robot meting out justice. The only reason Robocop's gun is not permanently affixed to his hand is so that he may twirl it from time to time. The reckless braggadocio of the act reminds us of John Wayne, but more importantly, of pulling a trigger, somehow much more satisfying than pressing a button. The violence becomes more primal in the final act, as medieval weaponry like blunt objects and knives come back into play.

A statue of Robocop was recently built for the city of Detroit, to be erected in the near future. A movie directed by a Dutchman and shot mostly in Dallas and Toronto embodies the foremost ideals of one of the country's most hard-scrabble towns. Of course, steel or flesh, he is American-made.

The Vault #68: Don't Look Now

2011-02-01T23:29:00.000-08:00

More often than not, movies dealing in the macabre find a few days of their shooting schedule in Italy. The medieval superstitions at the heart of Roman Catholicism pass for suspense in films like The Omen and The Order. Prayers are uttered in Latin, monks wear suspicious hoods, and weathered gargoyles observe all from on high. This is often all too easy for the filmmakers - a few dark churches, and a few whispers about Satan, and suddenly the everyman protagonist finds himself up against a political conspiracy and evil incarnate. And that's just in the first two reels.

Foregoing this well-worn territory of spooky sin and bombastic brimstone, Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now misses the forest for the trees in the best possible way. Though John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is restoring an old cathedral and working closely with the archbishop of Venice, he and his wife Laura (Julie Christie) are too pre-occupied to worry about Christ's secret family or the location of the grail. They're on an extended vacation of sorts, trying to forget the death of their daughter Christine; the trip of laughter and forgetting interrupted by a blind psychic Laura encounters in a restaurant bathroom. Supplied with limited information and haunted by a specter in an all to familiar red raincoat, the Baxters are soon scrambling for their sanity as much as their safety.

Normally when dealing with the occult, screenwriters feel the need to include to the one expository scene or character that helps our heroes figure out the mystery, if only partially. Here the wizened priests and psychics seems as clueless as the rest of us. Despite some unnerving cutaways and close-ups of those who may wish the Baxters harm, these short scenes never add up to a larger plot. Writers Allan Scott and Chris Bryant either don't have any such larger intentions, or don't want us privy to them. The second half of the film practically places the audience in Sutherland's head, and his walks down abandoned streets and canals get our pulse pounding just as fast.

Compared to the torture porn and special effects shows we've come to expect from horror movies, Don't Look Now comes off looking like a no-budget indie. All we are given is empty streets at night, the sounds of alarmed footsteps and heavy breathing, for nearly two hours. Roeg has realized what the others have, that ancient, winding streets with a bit of fog create quite a bit of trepidation, but he doesn't feel the need to embellish the canvas Venice provides any further. The child's death provides the emotional hook - even when the characters are doing nothing we understand them to be mourning. What starts as disturbing is allowed to grow naturally into the unsettling, and eventually, the terrifying.

We might compare this film with others of its day, but not horror films. Don't Look Now has the newsreel immediacy of conspiracy films like The Parallax View and The Conversation, with Sutherland the level-headed man of reason drawn closer and closer to madness and revelation. Again, Roeg, Scott and Bryant are in no rush to fill this movie with details. What started as a Daphne Du Maurier short story stays at that scale, its dread and uncertainty stretched to feature length.

About 90 minutes, you start praying for the mystery to go unsolved, for us to slip out of frame with the Baxters just as bewildered and human as we (and they) entered. An explanation from beyond the grave would not only be unrealistic, it would defuse the sheer terror of the preceding film. Thankfully, our reluctant search for the truth is left wanting.

The Vault #67: Caught

2011-02-01T15:55:00.000-08:00

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," wrote Jane Austen. Conversely, and far less romantically, a prospective wife must be in want of a man in possession of a good fortune. This principle presides over the entirety of Max Ophuls' ink-black melodrama Caught, in which a young woman (Barbara Bel Geddes) marries master-of-his-domain Smith Ohlrich (Robert Ryan), and gets far more than she can handle.

American-born directors might have trouble storming the democratic-capitalist castle so brazenly. Ophuls jumps right in with Ms Eames (Bel Geddes) changing her name to Leonora and attending a finishing school; these first moments indicate the final result of a long debate over whether or not to play the long con, although blink and you may miss them. Soon "Leonora" is sashaying through expensive department stores modeling fur coats and rubbing elbows with society's best, smile perpetually plastered across her face. We can see right through her from the start, but who else are we to sympathize with? Ohlrich is no fool - the only reason he marries her, or the only reason Ophuls gives us, is to prove to his psychiatrist that he can. If you came to the drive-in for some popcorn and light necking, your stomach may be beginning to turn.

In the matter of one cut, a year has past and Leonora finds herself abandoned in an endless Long Island mansion, not unlike Kane's second wife (Kane was originally to be based on the millionaire that inspired Ryan's character - Howard Hughes). Her husband is either absent or abusive, and soon he drives her out of the house entirely. She takes a job in Manhattan and soon finds herself in the arms of another well-off man, if not fabulously so, Dr. Quinada (James Mason).

Ophuls was known in Europe for his nineteenth century period pieces, works like La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de..., where courtesans and ladies of the court bounced between princes and dukes. Implicit in those films is that a rigid, aristocratic, social structure allowed for such a low treatment of women. The female protagonists in these films must develop cunning and deception in order to get what they want, which is usually more clothes or a baby, which is really just a long-term way of trapping the man. Transferring those same sorts of chauvinistic instincts to the American scene does not seem as alien as we might hope. In this case, the duke or count in question is no dope; without a royal title to her name, Leonora is, indeed, caught. The degree of cultural separation that always leant an air of satire to Ophuls work has evaporated - this society is our own. The mechanics of the domestic equation are laid bare - the woman is a prize for her looks, the man a prize for his money, the child a prize for the insurance each holds against the other.

There's not even the trace of romance to be found in Caught - a honeymoon is alluded to but never seen. That notion went out the door in the first frame, hovering over the finishing school brochure, guaranteeing students they would bag Prince Charming. After that, the camera prances from tracking shot to tracking shot through the beautiful mansion, around the landscaped pool, through the finest luxuries money can buy. The happy ending doesn't feel tacked on or disingenuous - it's a fitting piece of gallows humor. Leonora Eames gets everything she could have possibly dreamed of, but her dreams didn't involve any lofty ideals. Are the objects of her basest desires even worth having?

The Fighter

2011-01-05T18:33:00.000-08:00

Before the first bout in David O. Russell's The Fighter, Christian Bale repeats over and over, as a mantra, "you're Mickey Ward!" Ostensibly he is informing his half-brother, Mickey Ward (Mark Wahlberg), of his self-worth both as a man and a competitor. He may simply be reminding Wahlberg that cameras are rolling and he is, in fact, portraying a character (mistakes have ben made in some of the New Kid's previous films). Narratively, however, "Mickey Ward" stands for more than just the undersized guy with the red gloves on; he's himself, his reputation, his family, his family's reputation, his town, his town's reputation, and probably something about the New England Patriots (and their reputation).

After Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees, Russell got bogged down on the production of what would have been his fifth film. Nailed, which still lies wanting on some cutting room floor, was about a woman (Jessica Biel) who gets shot in the brain with a nail gun, an injury that causes her to experience unnatural and untimely sexual urges. She goes on a crusade to Washington on behalf of the bizarrely injured but ends up being exploited both in bed and the press by an immoral congressman (Jake Gyllenhaal). After that potent mixture of Christopher Buckley and a monkey-with-a-typewriter ran aground, it was time to go back to work. Boxing and family; there could not possibly be any safer or more well-worn material. The Fighter arrives at awards season, the people's champ biopic, while The King's Speech sulks off to the side in art-houses. It lists Darren Aronofsky as an executive producer, fresh off of de-weirding his own career with The Wrestler (then re-weirding it with Black Swan).

Russell was probably only brought on because Wahlberg trusts him - this was a Markie Mark production all the way. When the creator of Entourage has had free time from getting in shape to play Ward (reportedly for the past five years), he's been paying the bills with several "authentic", Boston movies. The Fighter is the last in a long line of these films that emphasize geographic place over societal status, Hollywood's latest inferiority complex. This time, however, there is a reason for the setting - the truth; at least the film is not some New York cop movie rewritten for Dorchester.

Yes, this is a story of a white, underdog fighter who finally gets a shot at the title, and it has a happy ending, I doubt many critics would call The Fighter uplifting. Russell has done an incredible job of sneaking his subversions in every little crack of celluloid he can find, and ultimately has made a movie where accomplishments in the ring are dwarfed by the problems outside of it (it is very telling that until the end credits, there is not a whiff of the Ward-Gotti fights that made "The Pride of Lowell" so famous). The Fighter opens with HBO shooting a documentary about Dickie Ecklund (Bale), a former contender who may have knocked down Sugar Ray. However, the film crew has no interest in Ecklund as a fighter; only as what he is now - a crackhead. Bale's performance, which starts in the opening frame and carries the otherwise forgettable film to its finish, is as raw and terrifying as anything since Raging Bull. Though it was only the intent of the film-within-the-film, The Fighter ends up being as much a cautionary tale about substance abuse as it is about overcoming adversity to be a champion

The strength of Bale's work, along with the bitter, manipulative turn by Melissa Leo as Ward and Ecklund's mother, elevate the film above other middle-of-the-road sports movies. The choice between one's own good and the good of one's family is a constant struggle for highly paid athletes, and though a better effort by its star might make The Fighter great, at least it gets us thinking.

Though it might have turned pure cheese, Mark Wahlberg's first full-on vanity project has to be considered a mild success. Mickey Ward might not have the tragic arc of Terry Malloy or the inner demons of Jake Lamotta. At the same time, The Fighter is hardly gauzy hagiography in the grand tradition of Cinderella Man - there is a lived in quality, a focus on home movies, natural lighting and the actual locations. Russell eschews the typical uplift of 80-piece orchestra, instead using classic rock and hair-metal to underline the most important moments. It's rare for a movie with the sentence "based on a true story" in the opening titles to actually feel that way. The Fighter delivers on that humble promise.

The Vault #66: The Long Good Friday

2010-12-26T02:50:00.000-08:00

With power comes the illusion of total control, and shortly after that, the impression of oneself as God. When racketeer Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) strolls off the jetway at the beginning of John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, he looks as sharp as Satan himself. Shand has a busy day of campaiging the American Mafia ahead of him, hoping to raise funds for a vast construction project in preparation for London's bid at the 1988 Olympic Games. As he meets one of his lieutenants, he grins with the satisfaction that no one but him knows exactly what is about to happen. Enjoying a decade of peace and counting amongst the city's various underworld factions, Shand rules each and every one benevolently, and the police to boot. As he looks forward to Easter weekend and the more distant future, he only stands to get richer.

When things are going so well, they only direction they can go is down; did I mention it was going to be a long Good Friday? Shand's power is, of course, relative. His arrival at Heathrow happens about five minutes into the film, after the machinery of his downfall has already been put in motion. Soon his right hand man is murdered, and another associate killed in an explosion meant for his mother. Bombs are sent to his casino and restaurant. Harold racks his brain but he's coming up blank; anyone with the moxie to go after him is long dead. He's losing control not only of his city, but of his men. And to make matter worse, the kindly Italian-American faction from the states may be getting cold feet.

Harold must leave his important investor's meeting, transitioning from pseudo-legitimate businessman back to ruthless gangster for a couple of fruitless interrogations. His level-headed moll Victoria (icily portrayed by Helen Mirren) babysits the gangsters while Harold scrambles for answers that don't readily come. Victoria, who brilliantly deadpans a line about playing soccer with Queen Anne, might be more fit to lead Harold's "corporation". This is not the British gangster of Guy Ritchie, all plan and dazzle, or Mike Hodges, stoic and reserved. Hoskins has neither style nor discipline in the lead role, alternatively weeping, slapping and stabbing his way aroung London in total disarray. His weakness is more than visible, it is his defining characteristic; he's Tony Soprano with a Napoleonic complex.

The Long Good Friday is about a street war, yet there is very little violence or direct conflict; it's a film about a power struggle where we barely get a sense of the other side. MacKenzie and scribe Barrie Keefe do a good job visually reminding us of the story of Easter, when Christ was crucified and fought with the Devil in hell for three days. An early victim is lain prone, with stab wounds suggesting the goring on the cross; later, a civilian is found nailed to the ground through his hands. These obvious symbols are not meant to sermonize - it's entirely up to us whether Harold is the messiah or the Antichrist.

Atop his pleasure craft, barking about a "New London" like a New Jerusalem, he certainly is not a pious figure. And when it is finally revealed that his enemies are representatives of the IRA, an amorphous, unbeatable ideological faction, the flames of Harold's hubris are only fanned further. With none of his oldest friends left to dissuade him, he hurtles towards almost certain death, a conflict with hundreds if not thousands of loyal soldiers, defiant as ever.

The Long Good Friday is about a king suddenly deposed, left with only one option: blind, uncontrolled retribution. However, this is not the same old Mob story about masculinity and respect. Hoskins brings a humanity to the role that makes us look past his illegal deeds (what these are, besides gambling, it is never really made clear). They go after his mother, after all; we have to sympathize. And whether Harold Shand thought he was God or the devil, neither view was correct. He was a man trying to make an impression, just like the rest of us.

The Vault #65: Onibaba

2010-12-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

A field of tall grass whips in the wind, beckoning travelers to its idyll. Elsewhere civils wars rage, a horse gives birth to a calf, and a black sun rises, but in this stillness there seems escape. That is, until samurai returning from battle get lost amidst the blowing reeds. Then they are sprung upon by two merciless women (Nobuko Otowa, Jitsoku Yoshimura), and murdered for their valuables. Their bodies are dragged to a sinkhole that yawns ominously from the densest section of foliage. The bones pile up, month after month, year after year, as the women glut themselves with rice and dog-meat, bereft of human contact or hope for the future.

There might be no more effective hell-on-earth scenario than the set-up of Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (Devil-woman), but the veteran screenwriter was only setting the foundation with the hole, the fallen women and the blank landscape. The pair is mother and daughter-in-law, both waiting for the man that connects them to return from fighting. When they are disppointed to be joined only by the man's duplicitous comrade (Kei Sato), a dangerous love triangle emerges that threatens to disrupts the relative healthy murder-for-profit operation the mother has set up for herself. In order to split the young lovers apart, she preys on the young woman's religious superstitions, posing as a demon from another world who looks unkindly on lust.

Japanese period pieces, or jidai-geki, have long been compared with and adapted into American Westerns. Both take place in what is perceived as simpler times, without the complex mechanics of society mitigating the instincts and emotions of the characters. Onibaba reduces the world to three people, fed by a thin trickle of poor souls that fall into their lair. Though minimalist and allegorical, the film never loses its psychological realism, namely that the mother fears for her life and the young just want to copulate.

From a simple base, one can build a more nuanced commentary. Shindo brushes past the murders in a wordless opening sequence - this brutal amorality is hardly his concern. Onibaba is more a film about sexual urges than violent ones; that peasants must resort to killing each other like animals in the jungle is a given of the period. This atmosphere, again, seems to lend itself to genre filmmaking, perhaps something along the lines of a zombie apocalypse. However, couched deep in the past, the mercenary and heartless nature of the women's actions simply reflect a time, as in Sansho the Bailiff, "before light had entered the world."

We quickly go from philisophical debates over the afterlife to full-on thrill-ride, as the daughter fears a demon has come to take her. The final third of Onibaba veers into psychosexual horror on par with the most disturbing we have to offer today. The rationality of everyday life, of the killing for rice, eating the rice, sleeping, than killing again, boils up like a spurned lover. Soon the tall grass has become a field of blades, the sinkhole not just the final resting place of bodies, but also souls.

Though it sways between horror and science-fiction at points, Onibaba remains first and foremost a film that asserts hell is other people, another of the many jidai-geki to transplant 20th century philosophy into medieval times. A nation torn apart by centuries of civil war serves as a fitting allegory for the underworld. A noble word is never said, a good deed never done, and ultimately, no escape is possible.

The Vault #64: Come and See

2010-12-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Americans have not repelled an invasion to their home country since 1812. That is to say, we have not experienced the abject terror of total loss - not just of one's own life, but also the of one's family and home - since war became a meticulous, mechanized destruction of everything in sight. When dealing with the two World Wars, American films are always firmly couched in righteousness, our boys the noble warriors doing the compassionate thing, helping out against Hitler and Hirohito. The madness of war is then always limited to the battle going awry, men dying unnecessarily, or abuse of power against helpless civilians. Away from the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, somewhere in the heartland, each man's beginnings lie unharmed, unthreatened, intact.

All this means is that American films about World War II merely scratch the surface of the horror - those we "saved" had the far more traumatizing and life-changing experience. Elem Klimov's Come and See brilliantly marries one transfiguration, that of the war, with the more universal one, puberty. Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko) is a teenager who gleefully throws his lot in with a group of Byelorussian partisans, only to find everything he once held dear, including his sanity, destroyed.

Many war films play as history first, drama second, giving the audience plenty of context for the particular events depicted. Come and See is set in a fairly obscure corner of the Soviet front - proper Russian troops are never seen. The location of the enemy is largely theoretical until the final act - there are piles of burning bodies and shells dropping from the sky, but those elements do provide more atmosphere than antagonist. Klimov instead focuses on the experience specific to Florya, his personal journey from his boyish wonderment at finding his gun to the paralyzing fear that sweeps him as each of his comrades is killed off.

It is a passive odyssey, as circumstance and coincidence propel Florya on his way, first to an idyllic forest training camp, then back home to find his family butchered, across a nightmarish swamp, and eventually, to a burned hell-scape where the film's final atrocities are committed. The lost look in Kravchenko's eyes parallel the confusion and chaos of the conflict itself. Byelorussian seems to have been destroyed randomly and inconsequentially; Klimov symbolizes this in natural imagery at every turn, here a bird's nest being crushed underfoot, their the twitching eyes of dying livestock.

These images are pointed, never losing sight of their initial intention, which is to terrify children. Klimov makes a grand point about war by avoiding making one - the specific trauma to Florya is much affecting when we look into his eyes alone, shutting out the reactions and emotions of the sea of extras. In a matter of days, Kravchenko appears to age months, yet growing none the wiser. All this is leading the climax, in which this fear and shock is finally channeled into rage, and he first fires the rifle he's carried since the first scene. Florya's first act of retaliation is not against those German officers and soldiers directly responsible, but rather into a picture of Adolph Hitler lying on the ground amidst the debris.

At this point Come and See finally acknowledges the larger historical circumstances, as Nazi propaganda spools in reverse, Stormtroopers marching backwards into Germany, Hitler backing away from a podium, bombs flying back up into planes, the images used in Kurt Vonnegut's immortal anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five. Only we see them now at the crucial moment when Florya has finally learned to hate. His beliefs were incorrect from the beginning. War is not about proving oneself to be a man, or forming personal identity; it is about destroying the other.

True Grit

2010-12-23T12:41:00.000-08:00

From the outset, the Coen Brothers adaptation of Henry Hathaway's True Grit may have been doomed to disappoint. It arrives at Christmas with an oscar-heavy cast and lavish budget. Billboards dot America simply displaying the names of Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin (apparently now a star), underlined with the one word tagline: "Retribution". Photos or still images from the film are unnecessary; this is, after all, a film from the creators of Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Miller's Crossing. The brilliance and originality of this 2010 True Grit antedates its production, or even its script. The notion itself is foolproof. The Coens love genre play; they've never done a Western; it stands to follow any Western they put their hands on will turn to gold, and possibly ascend to the pantheon of American film sometime during the final reel.

What all of that speculation and good will towards the unseen fails to recognize is that True Grit is an adaptation of True Grit, the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Hathaway's Grit is best remembered by filmgoers as the one where Wayne was fat and old, but likely dying, and thusly pried the Best Actor award away from the all-time skin-crawling performance by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. You will wonder at the back of your mind going in: why remake True Grit? The Coens are the toast of Hollywood: they could have chosen any of the small melodramas of Budd Boetticher (The Tall T, Ride Lonesome) or the pyschological labyrinths of Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur, The Man from Laramie). Instead they pick not even and second or third tier Western, but a third or fourth tier John Wayne movie.

The stated purpose was to be a bit more faithful, especially in the casting of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year old girl looking to avenge her father's death. She hires the irascible Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to find the criminal responsible (Brolin) in Indian territory, and soon the two are joined by an upstart texas Ranger by the name of Le Boeuf (Damon). Those looking for that signature Coens quirk will only find it in the early scenes, where Maddie stays at the undertaker's and uses some educated words to outsmart a cotton trader. Once the three hit the trail, we may as well be watching the original True Grit, save some of the flash of the action sequences, which are few and far between.

What made the original True Grit watchable and relevant at all was the relationship between Cogburn and Le Boeuf (there played by by newcomer Glen Campbell, known mostly for his singing voice). One towered over the other, literally larger than the landscape and even entire movie around him. By 1969, Wayne, like Cogburn, was on his last legs, and the world around him was falling into the hands of greenhorns and whippersnappers like Campbell. Here Cogburn and Le Boeuf seem a little more like Butch and Sundance, constantly sniping back and forth. Damon is spectacular, but Bridges' attempts to appear world weary seem forced, and his inebriated phases will only remind audiences of The Dude. Again, it is curious that in choosing to remake a John Wayne movie, the Coens chose one in which Wayne's presence was the featured attraction. They might have been better off storming the castle, re-imagining canonized material like Stagecoach or Rio Bravo, if only to have more versatile material.

Instead the new True Grit focuses on Mattie's perspective, the lamb in the lion's den, no surprise for a movie executive produced by Steven Spielberg. It also traps the film in a PG-13 netherworld, never quite dark or violent enough to feel like a true update of the original. It's a little too cute, and nowhere near facetious enough. True Grit is not a genre spoof in the style of The Man Who Wasn't There or The Hudsucker Proxy. The Coens have made a genuine, straightforward film about frontier justice. It does not suit them.

Joel and Ethan Coen have progressed beyond playing in the corner of the sandbox. Their films are events, and each affords them the opportunity to challenge their now large audience, confronting them with material sensational and outside of the ordinary. True Grit fails to do this at every level, instead delivering yet another Lone-Wolf-and-Cub story about making things right in the wilderness. As a "thoughtful" Western it lacks the thematic punch of Unforgiven, the self-awareness of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or the just plain fun of 3:10 to Yuma. Like The American, another "serious" and "important" Oscar contender, True Grit demands our rapt attention, then has very little to say.

The Vault #63: The Hole

2010-12-11T17:01:00.000-08:00

A prison is a battlefield where violence is discouraged. Some men are institutionalized, perfected for their surroundings, while others object, and search for a way out. Social standing and personal history are largely irrelevant in both places. The overwhelming feeling is masculine, muscular, and eventually, exhilarating. In the way the chaos of war become dangerously fun on celluloid, prison is a game or, at a minimum, a return to middle school, where friendships blossom over the course of an afternoon, and are destroyed just as fast.

Of course, in a French prison, we get all that plus generous helpings of imported sausage and rice pudding. Jacques Becker's Le Trou (The Hole) tells the story of one unit out of many, a tightly-packed cell of four men, who are planning their escape. As they are about to embark upon their plan however, a fifth inmate is transferred in. They must decide if they can trust this newcomer; in other words, they must know if he too faces a fate of long imprisonment, or if his crimes are negligible. Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel) is being tried for attempted murder, but it is clear his account of the facts is far from the truth. Whether he faces a few months or the rest of his life in prison is unclear, but the rest are too eager; they bore full steam ahead.

More accurately, they smash, claw and dig ahead, tunneling further into the bowels of the gothic building, discovering more and more passageways and obstacles lie between them and fresh, free air. The beginning of the project is captured in an unbroken four-minute shot, as each conspirator takes his turn breaking the floor of the cell with a short iron bar. Gravel and plaster fly in every direction; the sound is unbearable. The documentary feeling is palpable; it is only heightened by Becker's use of non-professional actors, including Jean Keraudy in the role of Roland, the mastermind and an actual participant in the events depicted in the film.

Not that Le Trou is entirely procedural or objective. Claude soon becomes bound to his new friends, even expressing his desire to stay in the prison more than return to the outside a fugitive, where everything his feelings of loss would be inescapable. The cell is bright, the conversation spirited. As the passageways to escape grow darker, wetter, more medieval, the hole itself becomes symbolic of the uncertainty and dread each man faces in leaving his warm and relatively safe home in incarceration. Becker ingeniously keeps the other men's pasts blank so we only see these feelings of conflict at play in Claude, the main character. The rest are given over to their task completely, working in shifts to make the final push through concrete, reinforced steel and sewage.

Unity is uncommon in escape films not set in POW camps. Following the model he helped create in Grand Illusion, however, Becker's characters are just as committed to each other as they are their own freedom. When Claude and another inmate finally do peek their head out of a manhole outside the prison, at the very brink of freedom, our instinct is to shout "run! run!". This is after all, a mid-century foreign film - tempting fate is not necessary for it to come calling. Claude and the other man instead crouch, frozen, unable to move, but also enchanted by the early morning light and the innocuous passing taxicab. No matter how important the other three might be to them, who would willingly retreat in to the dark, dirty hole?

Clint Eastwood rides off into the sunset in Escape from Alcatraz, the only memento of his existence a flower, which mocks the warden in its own defiant way. Becker's question might be: what becomes of him? And further, what kind of life is that of a fugitive, alone, on the run in perpetuity? In Le Trou, the escape is not some grand and glorious thing, but rather an unpleasant undertaking, only made bearable by the camaraderie it necessitates. When Claude stands alone at the end of the film, relieved, Roland utters a simple "poor Gaspard". Better to be together under lock and key than alone.

Black Swan

2010-12-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

Darren Aronofsky's last movie was about a performance artist of sorts, a "broken-down piece of meat" clinging to the one thing he did best, getting beat up in public. Unlike Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain before it, The Wrestler was a quiet, stripped-down, depressing short story about faded glory. This may have been a means of lulling us to sleep, for this December marks the return of pin-prick editing and camera set-ups five feet too close for comfort. Because easy postmodernism shows no signs of slowing down, we're still on the stage, only this time with the Lincoln Center Ballet.

Black Swan is Aronofsky's 4th film set in the New York metropolitan area, and the first to deal with the city's cultural upper crust - he's no Woody Allen. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is an obsessive ballerina - scintillating already, right? - chosen to be the lead in the new production of Swan Lake. You know the story - the director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) tells us up front it's been "done to death" - a beautiful white swan can turn into a princess if given the gift of true love, only an evil black swan seduces her prince. The white swan despairs, and leaps to her death. The theatrical twist is that white and black swan are traditionally played by the same dancer. Thomas has serious doubts about Nina's ability to be the erotic, evil swan, but she's the best dancer in the company, so he starts working to loosen her up. If you know what I mean. Do I need to tell you she spends a lot of time staring into mirrors, or that the primary color scheme of the film is black and white?

The vanity commensurate with Nina's rise to stardom soon turns to paranoia, which sends Black Swan into pure genre territory. No to say that it loses its way - the plot and characters of the film are far too stereotypical to assume that a modern-day The Red Shoes was every Aronofsky's intention. There's Barbara Hershey as the Mommie Dearest type, complete with a room full of creepy portraits of her daughter. Then Mila Kunis as the sexy, free-spirited threat to Nina's limelight. Oh, and a black-clad Portman alter ego who shows up at the most inopportune times. Forget protecting her place in the production, by the end of the film Portman is clinging desperately to her individual identity. It's an existential horror movie as much in line with philisophical Persona as the far sillier Suspiria.

The term horror might seem out of place in a movie about a ballerina with one or two screws loose - this is where Aronofsky's relentless style finally makes itself at home. Black Swan takes place at the close quarters we first experienced in Pi - only now, with the perceived threat of violence, when we most want to be able to look around and see what's coming, we are denied. Where The Wrestler put us in the headspace of a man filled with regret, longing and pain, Black Swan shoves us into a phone booth with bulimia, manic depressiveness and defensive rage. The ballet sequences are particularly overwhelming, as the camera dances with her, swimming in and out. Throw in ample measures of Tchaikovsky, and you may feel the need to leave the theatre from time to time.

It might seem like a pointless exercise to retell Swan Lake on Freudian terms with the setting, well, a production of Swan Lake. Watching a young maiden in death throes is much less pleasant on the New York subway, unaccompanied by French horns. The only defense of Black Swan may be as kitsch, or above average body horror. Lesbian titillation aside, there is little pertinent being said about the feminine psyche. It's popcorn entertainment, but at least it comes with a breath-taking performance from Portman. There's always room for another movie about insanity.

The Vault #62: Black Narcissus

2010-10-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

Akira Kurosawa and Howard Hughes have at least one thing in common; they both employed meteorologists full-time on feature productions to tell them when the perfect clouds were approaching. Martin Scorsese once said in an interview that he decided to make Raging Bull in black and white because he couldn't find boxing gloves to match the color they were in the period the film took place. David Fincher made it rain for 3 straight months in southern California while shooting Se7en. It's the unavoidable obstacle of filmmaking - though it is an artistic undertaking, it does not happen on a blank canvas or a motionless piece of clay. The director and his crew are trying to tell a self-contained story, sometimes even create a wholly independent world, and all the while the limits of their control are tested; by actors gaining weight, by budgetary concerns, by acts of God. Of course the eternal human struggle against insurmountable natural obstacles is not just exemplified in the search for the perfect light; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger explore the futility of similar endeavors in Black Narcissus.

The palace at Mopu, known as "The House of Women" for its pre-colonial function, sits high on a Himalayan precipice 8,000 feet above the valley floor. At the behest of the local warlord and his English laiason Mr. Dean (David Farrar, a pre-Thatcher Jon Hamm), the brothel is to become a convent, under the watchful eye of the anti-libidinously named Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr). Religion, colonialism, men, women - the symbolism is deafening even before each white-frocked sister takes her turn ringing the 6 a.m. church bells, literally staring into the abyss. However, Black Narcissus foregoes the obvious thematic concerns of such a situation - Powell and Pressburger aren't concerned with the clash of savagery and civilization at the cultural, geographical or spiritual level. Theirs is an internal, psychological struggle.

Raphael's The School of Athens depicts, among other things, Plato pointing towards the heavens, advocating his philosophy based in forms, while Aristotle looks to the ground, rooting his beliefs in empricial fact. Well, it doesn't get much more real than that chasm. Each nun's reaction to ringing the bell, most notably Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) and her fire-eyed stared, charged by equal parts sexual frustration and morbid fascination, underscore the power of that cliff. These aren't your lifers anyway - the sisters of St. Faith (as the palace is re-christened) renew their vows year to year. This is not a question of being a nun, but of continuing to be a nun - the debate between the Holy Father and the drop is an ongoing one. The presence of the dashing Mr. Dean, and his passive and imagined flirtations with Clodagh and Ruth respectively, only seeks to complicate these matters of faith.

These battles of up and down, outer and inner, appearance versus reality are nothing new to Powell and Pressburger. In I Know Where I'm Going, Wendy Hiller plays a kept woman, instead of by her vow to God, by her engagement to a wealthy Scot. She eschews the long-sought image, not marrying him for reasons of geography, technology and, of course, love. Farrar would reunite with P+P a few years later for The Small Back Room, in which he played a self-destructive alcoholic with the preternatural ability to dismantle bombs (and save England!) under intense pressure. The most famous films from this pair, The Red Shoes, is an epic tragedy in which a poor young girl's life is literally sacrificed for the sake of a particularly moving ballet. So Sister Clodagh sacrifices, repressing all her low impulses, for a higher purpose. It is ironic that all of the inspirational majesty of the setting was created indoors, at Pinewood Studios.

These omnipotent angles, the sweeping vistas, come from nothing but careful execution. Most of the process shots are completed with the very canvases Kurosawa refused to use, with colors Scorsese was so frustrated searching for in nature. And therein lies the experience of Black Narcissus; that of being in a Renaissance painting, but not one that seeks to bring glory to God. Religious fervor is all well and good, but there must also be human prudence and organization mitigating our relationship with the Almighty. There are more than a few pointed close-ups of the indigenous holy man, never leaving his perch on the mountain side, having no effect. In comparison, the sisters of St. Faith seem like they're punching a clock. They may look down, but only from a balcony, not the heavens.

Of course taking the vows of nun asks more of human nature than other vocations. The life these women choose is one of constant belief and duty, or failing that, the upkeep of the appearance of those qualities. At the highest altitude on earth, away from all they have known, they might be tempted to boil over. One such occurrence allows P+P to abandon this rather subtle film in favor of white-knuckle gothic horror. Alfred Hitchcock may have been taking notes on this flashy break in atmosphere, which acts as the exclamation point on an otherwise understated character study. Allow them this one transgression.

Enter the Void

2010-10-06T22:38:00.000-07:00

Perhaps by design, it would be impossible to begin a discussion of Enter the Void without first discussing uber-provocative auteur behind it, Gaspar Noe. Eight years ago, Noe emptied a screening of his second feature film, Irreversible, with nausea inducing ultrasound, dizzying hand-held photography, and the singlemost disturbing rape scene ever put to celluloid. What those particular horrors obscured was otherwise a quite admirable technological achievement; a film told in 10 unbroken shots, with performances and a screenplay that felt so improvised, so natural, the audience could do nothing but look away. The camera stood at eye level, making us a primary character. The Cannes exodus was in many ways a proof of Irreversible's power; we weren't just watching a rape, we were, not so metaphorically, being raped.

Enter the Void is another piece of experiential experimentation, starting from the cacophonous credit sequence. After we recover from that barrage of illegible symbols and letters flickering too fast to read, we are welcomed in the conscious, literally, of the protagonist, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown); we're behind his eyes, hearing both his voice and his thoughts as he prepares for a night on the town. The town, by the way, is Tokyo, but not the one from Lost in Translation. Noe has taken the best (or worst, depending on your POV) parts of Tron, Blade Runner, and Sin City and jammed them all into one undulating nightscape, every conceivable object rimmed by neon light. An American hustler and small-time drug dealer, Oscar has paid for his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) to come live with him in this hell-scape. Unfortunately, but predictably, he's gotten her involved with the wrong kind of people; she strips and pops ecstasy at a sleazy club every night. The important part is that they are family, and all each other has, since the untimely death of their parents in a car accident when the two were still children.

We spend the first 30 minutes in Oscar's head, an unbroken shot (except when he blinks), as he follows his friend Alex to a club called The Void. Alex is, coincidentally, discussing the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Oscar is, coincidentally, tripping on DMT. Much like the lengthy exposition in Inception Just as this technique becomes tiring and you begin to feel queasy, Oscar is shot in the back of the head, in the bathroom of a bar called The Void. And just as Alex has been telling him/us, he/we floats out of his own body and "sees his whole life in a magic mirror". You probably weren't listening to Alex, just as Oscar wasn't; you were both more worried about the vertiginous staircase the two were descending while reincarnation was being explained.

Then it's time for a whirlwind ride through every event that brought us to this point, scord with ambient beats and shot completely with Oscar's silhouetted head in the foreground. This passage is the most cinematic in the film, using the various themes and lasting images as descants, musically weaved into the whole that was the protagonist's psyche and personality. Most prominent is the car accident, the grisly tragedy that fathered the smaller tragedies through The Void. We learn first hand how Oscar got into drugs, how Linda got a little too into Oscar, who betrayed him the night of his death, and why. Here we have the narrative backbone of a nearly three hour film laid out in an associative montage that represents only about a quarter of the total-running time. It's not unlike the logical portion of 2001: A Space Odyssey that we spend with the HAL 9000; it justifies the other passages, but hardly explains them.

It's only after the nostalgic reverie that Noe really starts to stretch his legs and explore the afterlife, sending the spirit-eye of the camera on a fly-over of this nightmare Tokyo. Here Oscar (what's left of him) wanders from his own body back to his sister's apartment, finds Alex hiding from the police in a graveyard. The camera is constantly from above; the ghost's, or god's perspective, and while events follow one another, this passive approach to storytelling makes the whole thing seem more random. Displays of emotion are primal, uncontrolled, tenfold as upsetting as if we were watching a Hollywood drama about someone dying young. The camera flies from scene to scene through light fixtures, open flames, and in one inspired turn of revulsion, an aborted fetus. Maybe if Oscar hadn't been smoking those chemicals, this death-trip wouldn't be so damned pyschedelic.

Gaspar Noe is a filthy sadist. He views human beings as vehicles for chemical highs, rage, titillation and little else. There is not and never will be subtlety in any of his films. What made Irreversible work was its highly stylized feel, and its relatively short time-frame. When trying to encompass an entire life and even human existence, Void falls short of profundity. However, stylistically and aesthetically, few films in the history of cinema can be said to be more daring, more hypnotic and more visceral than Enter the Void. We are sucked into it as we are a painting by Jackson Pollack, attempting to make sense of its movement and message but ultimately knowing such efforts are beside the point. Noe may favor lowlife characters, kinky sex and hallucinogenic visuals a bit too much, but Void does touch meaningfully on the universal mystery of death. Whether our own personal disintegration loops will feature as many neon tentacles, we will soon find out.

The Town

2010-10-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Blame Jennifer Lopez all you like, but the downfall of Ben Affleck was largely due to the actor being miscast in a series of big budget films in which he was supposed to be the lovable everyman. Everything from Armageddon to Forces of Nature presumed the dough-faced Boston native to somehow represent an all-American ideal of "the nice guy". The only problem was nice guys finish last (read: don't sell tickets), and Affleck had difficulty playing characters to whom he could not relate. His performances were dry, boring and too cute. Riskier roles like Shakespeare in Love and Gigli were amusing for unintentional reasons - they would have been better as one-liners on the resume of George Clooney. Where Affleck came from, what he knew in his bones, maybe have had some moral fiber, but was more blue collar and aggressive than the body of his work following Good Will Hunting.

In order to stage his comeback, Affleck needed to return to Boston...behind the camera. Gone Baby Gone was a simple procedural about justice, guilt and remembering where you came from; little more than a Law and Order episode on the Charles River, but in that third element, the remembering, Affleck evoked a peculiar brand of honor and a whole ocean of regional pride few directors could tap into. Beantown is hotter in Hollywood than Jude Law circa 2004 - but Gone Baby Gone didn't do as well as some of the other crime movies lacking the letter "r". This time around, Affleck has forgone the subtle to make a big budget heist picture, a film that advertisements could accurately bill as "Heat meets The Departed".

The Town opens clumsily, with two title cards giving us information that characters might through dialogue, were we not in such a rush to get to the action. First, bank robbery is a family business in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, so much so that the one-square-mile area has produced more robberies than anywhere else in the world. Secondly, that sort of criminal culture ruins lives. Participating in this age-old recidivism is Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck), the leader of a particularly effective crew. Doug's a good guy, you see - he's only in the business because he owes his life to his hot-headed convicted man-slaughterer best friend Jem (Jeremy Renner) and to prove he's a tough guy to his father (Chris Cooper), who's serving five consecutive life sentences. When he begins falling in love with Claire (Rebecca Hall), a hostage the gang picks up on a job but conveniently cannot identify any of them, his loyalties become confused. Thanks to the relentless pursuit of professional haircut and FBI Agent Jon Hamm, Doug's life, both as a free man and a living one, is put in jeopardy.

There is only one truly original element in The Town, and that is Claire, a do-gooder hipster of sorts who volunteers at the local Boys and Girls Club. The tension that arises between Jem and Doug over the latter's relationship with the hostage is less to do with the fact that she can put them all in federal prison and more related to Claire as a symbol of gentrification. One has to think that Affleck has made these last two films in part because he is concerned about this deracination of Boston, not just in real life, but also on the silver screen. There must be two dozen chopper-shots of Bunker Hill and nearby quarries, reminding us, the tourists, what the true face of the city is. The recently completed Tobin Bridge, an architectural gem that mimics European counterparts, appears in several of these scenes; it is telling, however, that when staging a high speed escape, our criminals choose a less aesthetically pleasing route. The same cannot be said for Jack Nicholson in The Departed.

Authenticity and home-town bias aside, the rest of The Town is fairly by the book. Jon Hamm gets a few scenes to act real tough and spit dialogue in an interrogation room. Affleck gets to be torn for a few minutes about whether to leave with Claire or stay with his one-time girlfriend (and more complicatedly, Jem's sister) played by Blake Lively. And oh yeah, some bad-ass heist sequences, none better than the much posterized caper in which the gang dresses as terrifying nuns with automatic machine guns. This scene matches the intensity and reality of Michael Mann or Peter Yates, as they desperately rip through the one-lane streets and T-junctions of the North End. The claustrophobia of this sequence recalls chase scenes set in Europe in Ronin and The Bourne Identity. The pre-Revolutionary layout of Boston's streets are just as ripe for action as San Francisco's steep hills.

All of this is to say that The Town is a very entertaining, if not spectacular, film. As much character and realism as Affleck is able to inject into this rather predictable story, he does not yet have the stylistic acumen or creative freedom from the studio (I am guessing), to make a ho-hum heist picture about Loyalty with a capital "L" be any more than it seems on paper. It does have to be said, however, that he has more than proven himself to be an effective director, especially when it comes to atmosphere and character. Not bad from the star of Armageddon.

The Social Network

2010-10-02T04:19:00.000-07:00

Calling the director of the latest "it" movie the next Stanley Kubrick has become par for the course. Unlike other Mount Rushmore filmmakers like Hitchcock, Kurosawa and Fellini, it is not easy to find traces of Kubrick even in the most highbrow Hollywood output. Perhaps this is because the director of Spartacus, 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut did not follow a particular pattern. His calculating gaze always shifted to a new genre, a different historical period, a new world to conquer almost at random. The same can now be said of David Fincher, whose last four films have trapped Jodie Foster in a 4x6 steel box, documented an unresolved, 20-year police procedural, told the magically realistic epic of a man who ages backwards, and gone to college with the youngest self-made billionaire of all time.

One night, a sexually frustrated nerd named Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) got drunk and created a rudimentary social networking site called Facemash. Maybe he was hoping to get back at his ex girlfriend, or just get her back; maybe he was trying to climb the social ladder at Harvard, to join one of the exclusive final clubs. He ended up accomplishing neither - however, with the prodding of the preppy Winkelvoss twins (Armie Hammer) and the financial backing of his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), within a semester Zuckerberg had launched Facebook, and thus digitized "the entire social experience of college." He still did not have a girlfriend.

I cannot have been the only one relishing the idea of a "Facebook movie", especially in the hands of David Fincher. I played over and over again in my mind the scene in Fight Club, where Edward Norton visualizes the price tags for each item of Danish furniture and houseware, complete with product description and other available colors. Yet, despite the limitless voyeuristic possibilities and the highly misleading trailer, The Social Network avoids screen after screen of unwanted information. For a film referenced for the past 18 months as "the Facebook movie", the film is surprisingly character driven.

That is because, like the film's subject, Fincher has a rather important collaborator. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the sharp, memorable dialogue in films like The American President and A Few Good Men and the TV shows SportsNight and The West Wing has finally leant his wit to some younger, less pretentious characters. Armed with this perfect script, Fincher is freed to create the meticulous performances that pepper even his lesser films. Garfield and Eisenberg both take up nervous, wavering dialects, two upper middle class nobodies suddenly at the forefront of a revolution. And the film is positively stolen by Justin Timberlake, who plays Sean Parker, founder of Napster and soon Zuckerberg's mentor in the world of dotcom startups.

Though Facebook may seem an impossibly trendy and fleeting cultural phenomenon, The Social Network will surely live on long after we can have all this information zapped straight to our brain chips. It's ultimately a film about friendships, class and, most importantly, genius. Not unlike Charles Foster Kane, Zuckerberg wants to be loved on his own terms, and not unlike Charles Foster Kane, this leads to heartbreak, alienation, and litigation. The Winkelvoss twins have had everything handed to them, and Saverin has earned what little he has through business acumen, not pure talent. Though the audience has to admire Zuckerberg, in the way we admire a Mozart, we cannot necessarily empathize. His automaton programming hypnosis, and his positively repulsive interactions with women make him a little like Moses; he has lead the rest of us to the promised land, but he cannot enter.

The film begins and ends with a female assessment of Zuckerberg - one thinks he is an asshole, the other thinks he is just pretending to be. Whether he is or not, there is no question that the idea of Mark Zuckerberg, the one propogated by Facebook, is certainly a more powerful and imposing entity than the real-life poindexter. The Social Network is smart because it does not treat Zuckerberg as some unstoppable and insatiable genius, the way portraits of Bill Gates have done in the past. In many ways, Fincher's films is a satire of meritocracy, where a dishonorably, sniveling slob with rises to the top, hiding behind lines and lines of html. He is safe there, can be whoever he wants to be, and pay off anyone who says different. He invites us to do the same.

I'm Still Here

2010-09-23T01:42:00.000-07:00

It is a blessing that director Casey Affleck cleared one or two things up about his debut feature I'm Still Here upon its release. The most important of these revelations is the fact that, no, star Joaquin Phoenix was not acting in earnest when he announced his retirement from acting and planned foray into hip-hop. That admission by Affleck precludes me from having to write another review of the polarizing mockumentary that tip-toes between believing its excess and criticizing its self-involvement. No, instead the headline is this; Joaquin Phoenix is not crazy, a drug addict, or going to be rapping anytime soon. His newest career is still acting, although now it may be teetering on performance art, as a great deal of his latest character was developed merely in view of the public, if not the camera itself.

Phoenix plays an actor overwhelmed by his fame who retreats inwards to finally discover his true self. That this actor's name is also Joaquin Phoenix and that this retreat happened in front of the media and on one oft-viewed David Letterman interview makes matters all the more confusing. Again, the filmmakers have been abundantly clear; the overweight, bearded, drug-abusing man making Ben Stiller and others extremely uncomfortable is a character, not the real Joaquin Phoenix. One way to tell the I'm Still Here Phoenix from the real one is that the on-screen Zach Galifinakis look-alike is going by JP, which we assume would be his stage name if he ever got the rap career going.

Who can forget Russell Crowe shoving the paparazzi, or Christian Bale's infamous rant against a director of photography who got in his line of sight? The deeper we go with JP, seeing his tantrums over not having marijuana, or his drunken solicitation of women, the more we believe. That was the genius part of the hoax (although don't you dare call it that), that no matter how strange Phoenix's actions became, we at least partially believed them. The public (not the audience) is not surprised when an actor does something outrageous and debauched; it comes with the territory of being young, rich and famous.

Phoenix is young, rich and famous, so what part of JP is method acting and what is simply the realization of a fantasy? Even if we take it "all" as "fake", Phoenix did grow that beard, gain that weight and act flighty at best in public for the better part of a year. He did get on stage in Las Vegas and free-style, until a heckler drew him into a fistfight. I'm Still Here may not have been a true documentary, but it's not a scripted film either. Some of the action is improvised, and therefore some of the behaviors it exposes real. The best of these come from Sean Combs, the hip-hop mogul subjected to JP's beats, who assures him the two are not ready to work together.

Whether it endures or not as a film, I'm Still Here will always be remembered for its unique conception and promotion, which consisted almost entirely of deceiving the media. I cannot help but think that Affleck had an axe to grind in this matter, given the way his brother has been splattered across the tabloids for the last decade plus. While anyone else may go insane in private, when a celebrity does it, both the private and public person must be committed. Though Entertainment Tonight may have had their doubts, their coverage of Phoenix's outlandish behavior did eventually fuel the flames of curiosity, allowing for the wide release of the film. And through them, we believed it as well. Phoenix, or someone like him, could go down a similarly self-destructive path - that verisimilitude makes the film compelling, visceral and, ultimately, praise-worthy.

However, JP must be put to rest - Phoenix is not going out like Kafka's hunger artist, this act defining the rest of his days. I'm Still Here closes with a long tracking shot that follows JP down a river in the middle of the jungle. He sinks lower and lower, his lumbering body growing more tired with each step. Eventually, his tangled locks drop beneath the water, a symbolic death for a symbolic avatar. The screen goes black, marking the end of the mercurial JP and the credits display the name "Joaquin Phoenix", indicating him as the lead actor in this farce. He is, after all, a star.

The Vault #61: David Mamet's Homicide

2010-09-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

Most screenplays by David Mamet are written too sharp and fast to leave the actors room for emotion or subtlety. The plot moves like a bobsled across a thin, polished sheet of ice; never getting too deep, always maintaining impeccable balance. The Woody Allen of con-men, the on-screen Mamet seems more interested in the words than the meaning behind the words. Touching moments happen by accident - the show must go on, and must do so at the greatest possible efficiency. There are, of course, a few exceptions; that one of them is a hard-boiled police procedural is something of a surprise. For once the trickster, the guy working an angle, is not one of the characters in the story - it's the writer-director himself.

In the opening scene of Homicide, a SWAT team bursts into an apartment in an inner city tenement, shooting an innocent man as a wanted one escapes. What these shock troops clad in black evoke will depend upon the viewer. Cut to Robert Gold (Joe Mantegna) smooth-talking hostage negotiator extraordinaire, who is assigned to find the fugitive despite being pushed off the case by the FBI. Now that the case is splashed across the front page, the mayor needs the murder police back on it. However, the put-upon Gold, mocked for his religion, soon finds himself in the midst of a second case; the murder of a grandmother in a convenience store. Oh, she's also Jewish, and her family suspects there's more to the case than meets the eye.

This is a cop movie that marches to the beat of its own drum in an unnamed city (take points away from Se7en), creating two mysteries and paying attention to neither. Unlike other Mamet potboilers like House of Games (where a more collected Mantegna was in absolute control) and The Spanish Prisoner, the objective is not to solve the case but rather observe the effects the case has on the protagonist. Gold become completely engrossed in the possible hate-crime; the black-vs.-jewish political subtext seems to have been a red herring.

Out of a hammy setup with detectives complaining about their hours and pay, Mamet spins a tale with themes straight out of Joseph Conrad; ethnic identity vs. modern cultural role. What's most arresting, and most un-Mamet, is how the two cases, and the two strings pulling on Gold's conscience, never intertwine. This is a triumph against formula, where the same character has to psychologically reconcile two disparate events without the help of coincidence. Doing this, depth and feeling come out of the most cliched and overdone gumshoe scenes:

Here is William H. Macy, representing the traditional, professional, hard-drinking cop, and he cannot possibly understand what Gold has fallen into. We become befuddled ourselves, and what he is investigating becomes more and more interesting, even if the actual link to the case is becoming more tenuous. Without pointing any real fingers or constructing anything concrete, Homicide presents a rather compelling theory about an ongoing war between Zionists and neo-nazis on the streets of America. Now does the opening scene make sense?

The fun isn't over yet; just as soon as he conjures up the rooms filled with propaganda and secret meetings of paramilitary organizations, Mamets whisks it all away with a deus-ex-machina confession. Some of the best movies leave us with the same emotion as the characters on screen - think of our betrayal mimicking Kay Corleone's at the end of The Godfather (we love Michael - why would he lie to us?). The same is true of Homicide - dumbfounded, Mantegna stands in the hallway scratching his head, wondering if his introspection and self-realization was for nothing. Whether is was or not, it's best forgotten. It's only a movie.

Animal Kingdom

2010-09-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, we were treated to a very different kind of organized crime drama in Debra Granik's Winter's Bone. Not only was the Ozark meth scene a fresh subject for the silver screen, but the film chose a unique protagonist, a teenage girl. Terence Malick and Road to Perdition aside, we don't usually see the crime/noir genre from the perspective of children, and Winter's Bone took on characteristics of gothic horror in this light. David Michod uses the same avenues of ignorance and innocence in his his gritty crime drama Animal Kingdom, about a family of bank-robbers meeting their bloody end.

James Frecheville plays Joshua "J" Cody, the youngest member of the nefarious Cody clan. We first see J watching TV next to the corpse of his mother, victim of a heroin overdose. J is disconnected and awkward, just another high school kid trying to balance school work, a girlfriend and a dysfunctional family. Animal Kingdom opens with these well-worn cliches, complete with indie-drone soundtrack and sensitive voiceover. However, as his uncles Craig, Darrin and Pope come into the picture, these elements drop out entirely - J no longer needs to speak for himself, as the calculating though loving voice of matriarch Janine drowns out any previous conscience. It's not a long journey from the couch to the mean streets of Sydney, where things are falling apart; when a Cody family associate is murdered by corrupt police, J soon finds himself accomplice to Pope's revenge plot.

Michod's tightly knit screenplay does not keep us confined to J's perspective - we branch out to other members of the ensemble. As Darrin, Luke Ford delivers a virtuoso performance as a younger sibling reluctantly drawn into murder by his mother and brother. We see the straight life through J's girlfriend Nicky and her family - her overweight father works from home and is more than happy to help J, even when he is on the run. Guy Pearce plays a compassionate detective, constantly working at J, and his relative innocence, to inform on his family. Presiding over all is Janine (Jacki Weaver) a more proactive Livia Soprano, who has no qualms with drug use or murdering witnesses, as long it keeps some semblance of her family out of prison.

All these elements combine for a film that feels not quite complete. It is certainly odd that in a movie about bank robbers (the opening credits feature still photos clipped from security camera footage), we never see a single heist conceived or executed. Like Winter's Bone, J is not at the age where he can plan or comprehend - he simply reacts. His voiceover ends, "I'm here now, doing what I'm doing" - this is not a grand meditation on crime and money and corruption, just a kid in a bad situation.

Ultimately, Animal Kingdom is about making it in the wild (as one painfully unsubtle Pearce monologue informs us, setting up the film's title), and what being an orphan means to moral education. J does eventually teach himself a version of right and wrong, although many people are hurt along the way in his ignorance. After a plodding and sometimes too familiar 90 minutes, Michod closes with a shocking and satisfying act of retribution. While J does not make everything right or gain any control over his life, he does get a release. When you're 18, that's all you can ask for.

The American

2010-09-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

George Clooney is lost in thought. He drives down a darkened, out-of-focus tunnel, only appearing in silhouette as sonorous music bounces off the audience. Having killed two people (why we're never told), he has been sent by his boss (whose identity and affiliation is never revealed) to the Abruzzo, a painfully beautiful region of Italy, to await further instruction. What has the rough, wizened Clooney so befuddled, so speechless? Whether the silver fox's furrowed brow does in fact conceal anything meaningful, or more importantly, whether we care, is the litmus test of Anton Corbijn's The American. Part existential thriller, part Super-Bowl-budgeted cologne commercial, the film lives and dies much more on the audience's investment than on the rather paltry details presented.

Sometimes Jack, sometimes Edward, Clooney is a veteran assassin/munitions expert who may be "losing his touch." We know this not only because his boss says so, but because he is hunted down by some mysterious Swedes in the opening scene. After killing them, and realizing his cover is blown, Jack/Edward kills his girlfriend, who may be a witness, or a double agent, or both. The point is clear - Corbijn has our attention because a beautiful woman has just been killed. Whether this puts the American in the territory of cold-blooded workman films like Le Samourai or The Day of the Jackal is, again, up to you. The sun-scorched setting and mediterranean beauty might recall Antonioni's The Passenger. Later, as Clooney shows off his physique doing chin-ups in a medieval inn, you may be reminded of the monastic life of Travis Bickle. You also may not.

This is all to say that The American tries very, very hard to seem like a serious film. There are three scenes of action, and little amounts to more than a couple of rounds being fired. Clooney is there to ruminate, not kill. His job consists of constructing a weapon; there are many scenes of him working with his hands and improvised tools. The monochromatic poster and nebulous title should have informed you - this is not the fun-loving George Clooney of Ocean's 11 and Out of Sight. Nor is it the man of action Clooney fighting for right in Syriana and Michael Clayton. The American is George Clooney, Man with a capital M, trying to discover his identity and the meaning of life. Did I mention the only two people he opens up to are an old priest and a hooker?

Manny Farber decried the close-up as a shortcut to profundity, a way of making the audience fill-in the blank and feel something when the filmmaker was too lazy to do it themselves. Given 5-10 seconds of silence and a vast expanse of human expression, we will jump to conclusions. This seems to be the game plan of The American from start to finish. We file into the theater, relishing the thought of Clooney roaming Europe in a five thousand dollar suit toting an automatic weapon, and are then confronted with a painstaking zoom into a rural cabin. The deafening silence, the antithetical peace of the scene, immediately shocks us into reassessing our expectations. Cut to Clooney mournfully regarding a glass of scotch, and we've seemingly entered the world of "Art". Has Corbijn done anything mind-blowing? Or have we simply ordered one thing and been served another?

This might be all well and good - Michael Mann has made a career of somewhat aesthetically overblown films about emotionally unavailable men staring plangently into the distance. However, the best of Mann's films eschew plot for noise, substance for style. In this case, screenwriter Rowan Joffe seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. The climax and denouement of The American wastes a great deal of the credit Clooney's dog eyes and Corbijn's sunset landscapes had built up. Like the tongue-in-cheek third act of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, we find ourselves ripped from something ostensibly smart and thrown into the most mainstream, Jason Bourne territory possible.

The American is seductive, especially when we allow it to remind us of the better movies to which it owes its existence; one particularly pregnant scene features Clooney enjoying a night cap in a florescent truck stop straight out of Edward Hopper, while Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West plays on a well-placed television. A famous movie star stuck in the backwaters of a foreign country might seem like a recipe for Oscars and acclaim, but one cannot ignore this film's September 1st release date. Hollywood wanted to make an art film, something for Clooney to put on his "serious" reel. What comes out is pretty, superficially thoughtful, and nowhere near interesting enough for a second viewing.

The Vault #60: Judge Priest

2010-08-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

There is no director that represents the oft-referenced idea of "America" as well as John Ford. That is not to say that the man was a zealot or xenophobe, marching pre-packaged messages before his audience. As iconic as films like The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers are, their messages are hardly patriotic. Ford is far from the jingoism and moist-eyed sentimentality of Frank Capra. To interpret his work thusly would be a grave mistake. The homespun fable Judge Priest might seem cute and folksy, but its scenarios and characters are positioned for the sole purpose of exposing Southern hypocrisy and the contradictions of American myths.

Will Rogers plays Billy Priest, an unmarried, white-suit-wearing old man who presides over a court-room in post-Reconstruction Kentucky. The role is ripe for caricature, and the opening crawl heightens the sense of antique triviality: "The figures in this story are familiar ghosts of my own boyhood. The War between the States was over, but its tragedies and comedies haunted every grown man's mind, and the stories that were swapped took deep root in my memory." From this, and an opening scene which concerns Priest's ruling about his own servant (Stepin Fetchit) stealing a chicken, we are lead to believe Judge Priest cribbed from some unpublished Faulkner scribbling, a tale of a quixotic old man painted in glowing tones, focusing on rural dialect and the details of slow living.

Again, on the surface, Ford does not want to startle the audience. He allows Rogers to joke and ramble on to Fetchit and his uxorious sister, who does not want her son Jerome (Tom Brown) marrying a girl of "questionable origins" (Anita Louise). These origins concern her father, whose identity is unknown until Priest, having partake in a few julips, finds him weeping at his wife's grave. Priest may be old and befuddled, but he knows true love when he sees it, and tries his darnedest to bring the couple together. Unfortunately, the girl's father soon finds himself on trial for assaulting local cad Flem Talley, Jerome's chief competitor for the girl's hand in marriage.

There's more than a little All's Well That Ends Well in the story, but the inescapable elements that make Judge Priest fascinating is its setting in 1890 Kentucky. When it was released in 1940, the time period of Judge Priest would have been very much alive in some viewer's memories. While the film has the nostalgic introduction and Will Rogers charm inviting us to recollect the good old days, certain unfortunate truths of history are laid bare as well. The only two African American speaking parts are relegated to Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel (in one of her unheralded Mammy parts pre-Gone with the Wind), who both serve Priest in the manner of slaves. Sure, Rogers playfully engages Fetchit's greedy and callow nature, and sings along with McDaniel's spirituals, but the subtext is clear; very little has changed from 1861 to 1890, and perhaps even less from 1890 to 1934.

The film climaxes with the consummation of the romance and the release of an innocent man, but both are predicated on the ultimate right and goodness of the Confederacy. A character witness reveals that Jerome's prospective father in law fought valiantly for the South in the war between the states, and thusly deserves his freedom. This also clears up those "questionable origins" - anyone who risked his life for Dixie is by definition an honorable man. The triumph of is celebrated with a minstrel show/parade led by Fetchit. The most recognizable Negro caricature of his generation, little more than Priest's lap dog, is overjoyed at the union of two white people setting out for a future he can never hope to experience.

Though it may seem a light melodrama verging on comedy, Judge Priest is a metaphor for the ideals of the South. Five years later Ford would make Young Mr. Lincoln, another courtroom drama which assumed the victorious moral code of the Civil War was formed some years earlier in small-town Illinois. The earlier film reminds us that across the Ohio River, a different set of values was being cherished and upheld, equally charming, and at the time, equally right. Rogers' insouciant charm and avuncular wit gloss over the tremendous iniquities of southern racism and class warfare. Yet, along with the tremendous character and heroism of Abraham Lincoln, Judge Priest and those like him are also are parts of the American scene.

Lust, Caution

2010-08-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

The specific details of another time and place are usually enough to fill a book, let alone a film. Throwing a melodrama on top usually renders the costumes a convenient layer of gauze draped over a contemporary issue. Consider the cries for freedom in Braveheart or the sanctity of a woman's right to choose in The Cider House Rules. The characters in a period piece tend to be closer to us than the people they depict, parroting back the values of our day, not theirs. On the other hand, get too lost in the details, and the plot disappears, as in Gangs of New York. The degree of difficulty incumbent in the costume drama, coupled with the Oscars' insatiable desire for "high-brow" filmmaking has made Ang Lee one of the most marketable prestige directors of our time.

Lee first broke onto the American film scene with an eminently classy adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, then followed with two more ambitious, but less recognized pictures. The Ice Storm treated 1970s Connecticut like an alien world. Fully encased in pre-Reagan sexual politics and social mores. the ensemble's performances were convincingly of their time, yet more affecting than suburban melodramas like American Beauty. Ride with the Devil was a was, first and foremost, a story about youth and violence, and only coincidentally set during the Civil War; that Film gave us a brief glimpse of Lee's incredible gift for action and suspense. It also, unfortunately, led us to the dull, techonological Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and flat-out awful Hulk.

After another humanist success with Brokeback Mountain, Lee returned to his native China in Lust, Caution. Set in Shanghai and Hong Kong during WWII, Lee keeps the audience close to the action, never losing himself in thousand-extra battle scenes. The action instead follows Wong Chia Chi (Wei Tang), a poor college student who finds herself involved with the resistance. First participating in nationalistic theatre productions, she soon is acting much more important, and dangerous role - that of society wife. Her mission is to lure a government official, Yee (Tony Leung Cheu Wai) to his death.

From the outset, the commitment of an entire resistance cell to kill one midlevel official seems a waste of resources. One failed attempt occupies almost a third of the film's 158-minute running time. The war is always far away, and Yee's actions even farther; is it really worth risking the poor woman's life? The importance of the mission is so secondary, Wong Chia Chi ends up distracted by the fancy dresses, the plush lifestyle and the fake (or real?) love affair. No matter that Yee is a selfish and abusive lover - he's all she knows.

Lust, Caution explodes in violence only once - most of the aggression of the war is dramatized in the NC-17 sex scenes. Here Leung Cheu Wai demonstrates his considerable dark side; the actor known best for his roles in Hero and In the Mood for Love is chilling, yet sympathetic. Again, his identity is perfectly circumscribed by Chia Chi's perception - whether he is deserving of assassination is never made clear. From his rough treatment of our hero, we can only presume. This is not the flashy, commercial sex of Paul Verhoeven, whose Black Book (released in the same year as Lust, Caution) took a similar female espionage premise and made it into an erotic thriller. Sex is not a release for either of these partners - it's a manifestation of psychological wounds.

Lust, Caution was criticized for its glacial pace - a supposedly simple mission takes places over four years. However, this is less a film about the moral politics and strategy of the Chinese resistance, and more a coming-of-age story. Wong Chia Chi is educated as a warrior, but more importantly as a woman, learning to love a man for what he is, rather than what he represents. Lee brings this all to screen with his trademark elegance and economy, evoking the great romance of Dr. Zhivago, but also the helpless predetermination of Barry Lyndon. The tragic conclusion would be inconceivable in a contemporary setting; it mirrors the minimal value put on human life during World War II. The people of an earlier time are recognizable as members of our species, with similar emotions and needs. However, their actions might as well be science fiction.

Half-Price Pulp

2010-08-10T17:34:00.000-07:00

Before the censors let loose the grindhouse and blood washed away any sense of decency the B-movie ever held itself to, there were even smaller, grittier pieces of fiction, two-act works of armchair psychology. With Avatar running close to three hours and even lighter fare like The Other Guys taking 1 hour and 50 minutes, let's step back to earlier times. Two movies in under 2 hours 20 minutes:

There might be no opening more boring than that of Anthony Mann's Strange Impersonation. Nora Goodrich is a pharmaceutical researcher developing a new anesthetic (you probably want to stop reading right now). But an envious assistant and an unfortunate accident later, she's changing her name and running cross country to get identity-morphing plastic surgery. Mann molds an innocuous tale about a career woman and dark coincidence into a stylish thriller, one in which men are powerless and society's darkest impulses are laid bare. It's wonderful to see such a talented director working on such low material, and even more of a thrill when he brushes all he's exposed away with a simple "it was all a dream" coda. Impersonation is a wicked little trick, so briefly twisted and insidious it ends without us fully understanding its import. It comes and goes in a blink, healing like a shallow cut, but the psychic wound lingers long after.

More well-known, but equally bare-bones, is Ida Lupino's The Hitchhiker. Frequently cited as the only film noir ever directed by a woman, it concerns three men trapped in a car, orbiting a single, powerful object; a .22 revolver in the hand of a crazed killer. Remade recently as The Hitcher, replacing the victims with a young couple, Hollywood outsmarted itself by changing the dynamic. And critics who call this film a noir are off-base as well; there's no gray area of sympathy or moral ambiguity when it comes to William Talman's portrayal of the titular maniac. Indeed, The Hitchhiker less resembles those portraits of urban malaise and decay than it does the psychological westerns of Bud Boetticher, the three souls locked in a battle of wills not on horseback, but pummeling through the sands of Baja California in a battered Chevrolet. The film boils down all hard-boiled fiction, prose or film, into one simple rule: all that matters is who's holding the gun, and where they're pointing it.

Worn-Out Genre + Will Ferrell + Gags Beaten to Death = Funny? The Other Guys

2010-08-08T20:29:00.000-07:00

Adam Sandler was one of Saturday Night Live's most original comic talents - as a result, he is barely memorable as a sketch performer. His most enduring material from that show comes from songs he wrote and performed himself on Weekend Update; he would not refine his comic talent to a discernible character until the twin hits of Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. Will Ferrell, on the other hand, was the king of SNL, most famous for his send-up of George W. Bush, and most accurate in his side-splitting impression of Robert Goulet. These were not original characters, but spoofs; it follows then that most of Ferrell's vehicles, from Anchorman to Talladega Nights have been riffs more than wholly original material. Though his most recent and best (read: strange) film was Step Brothers, his latest, The Other Guys, finds the star back in familiar territory.

This time cop movies are the victim of Ferrell's increasingly thin improvisations. He plays a pencil-pushing nerd who loves being chained to a desk, much to the chagrin of his partner played by Mark Wahlberg. Yet after New York's two Shaft/French Connection style supercops fall to their hilarious death, there's a power vacuum that needs to be filled by two new alpha dogs. So off the odd couple go, hot on the tail of financial ne'er do well Steve Coogan. Oh yeah, they're competing for police force supremacy with Rob Riggle (the guy who said "Catalina fucking wine mixer" about a dozen times in Step Brothers) and Damon Wayans, Jr., who as of press time, apparently exists. And their boss is Michael Keaton. Oh, and Anne Heche is in this movie (remember Six Days, Seven Nights? Neither does anyone else).

Outside of that muslin-thin plot, The Other Guys is the interaction of characters who can be summarized in one or two running jokes per person. Attractive women can resist the chubby, oafish Ferrell; Wahlberg at one point shot Derek Jeter; and Keaton can't stop inadvertently quoting TLC songs. Also an old lady describing graphic sexual acts, some jokes that make light of suicide and a whole heap of misogyny. Some of these bits are funny, the first time around. Keaton will receive good notice if only for the impeccable plastic surgery he clearly invested in sometime between his last movie and this one. However, by the time the third act rolls around, we're tired of Wahlberg kicking everyone's ass, and homophobic wisecracks about the fact that Ferrell drives a Prius.

There's been a movement in Hollywood lately to make "ironic", raunchy buddy comedies, ironic in that they are jabs at the original wave of these R-rated action-romps, like Midnight Run and 48 Hours. Pineapple Express was one such imbalanced failure; Robert Downey Jr.'s Due Date may be another. Maybe we have Wet Hot American Summer to blame for this idea that the creakiness of the 80s could somehow be funny anew, but these movie just do not work for these. Robert Deniro and Nick Nolte thought those were serious roles. Although Wahlberg is the best part of The Other Guys, he's clearly in on the joke, and that self-awareness makes it more difficult for us to laugh at him.

The more pressing problem with the action-buddy spoof is that, well, it inevitably has to have some action. These car chases and gunfights are the equivalent of the sappy moments in romcoms - they slow down the laughter and seem out of place. And what's more, the structure slows down the pace of Ferrell's comedy, which feels stuffed into a cop-movie costume that makes it sweaty and uncomfortable. While The Other Guys makes you laugh, it doesn't make you think or feel much of anything, other than to wonder what subgenre Ferrell and collaborator Adam McKay will choose to attack next.

The Vault #59: The Hit

2010-08-06T15:13:00.000-07:00

The mythologized gangsters are never racketeers, bookmakers or tax evaders - such crimes, though worthy of extended prison sentences, are not fodder for melodrama. These must be doomed men, murderers and turncoats whose ticket to the gallows is punched whether found guilty in a court of law or not. They are marked for death from the beginning, and usually fight like a desperate animal against the fate pre-ordained both my common decency and the rigidity of the screenplay. At first, we had the brutish action of classics like Scarface. These disappeared in the noir era, where the protagonist was always ostensibly good, just a victim of circumstance. The cold-blooded gunman emerged in the late 60s not as James Cagney's hothead, but rather a stylish lizard, slithering taciturn from sexing to killing to sexy killing, more pop art than realistic public menace. Nihilism painted over, having become impossibly cool, now became strictly the territory of black comedy, audiences giggling when Tony Sirico jammed the mailman's head into the pizza oven in Goodfellas, or this classic moment from Pulp Fiction:

Tarantino forever made the button-man a subject of sport, not a samurai killer with a code, but an uneducated simpleton with a short fuse. The Sopranos and The Wire aside (both of which found the higher-ups more worthy of pathos than the foot-soldiers), this sophomoric view of organized crime is the one that pervades the culture today, from Guy Ritchie to the Coen Brothers. Though they are sophisticated filmmakers capable of tremendous insight, Miller's Crossing was more than a little cartoonish.

The last film to give the hit-man his due deference was The Hit, which leans more towards philosophical treatise than bullet-riddled potboiler. Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) is a turncoat, a man who sold out his friends for witness protection in the south of Spain. He spends a decade reading books, enjoying wine, transforming from a man of violence to a man of letters, all before the opening credits finish. Wiser, greyer and softer-spoken, Willie is kidnapped by two hitmen, Braddock and Myron (the black eyes of a soulless John Hurt and blonde hair of a teenage Tim Roth) and taken for a trip to Paris, where he will meet his end. Willie does not run, he does not struggle - he is smarter, more contained, more normal than the gangsters we've seen before. His entire life has been in preparation for this fact, and he intends to show grace under pressure.

Coming out of hiding to do one last job is a well-worn cliche that dates back to Out of the Past. In Spain, and with cockney accents, one cannot help but think of Sexy Beast, but The Hit does not ply us with any traditional images of The Good Life, all poolside cocktails and string bikinis. The man in control, Braddock, has none of the wit or libido of Don Logan - he's not there for small talk or to settle a personal score. He's an errand boy sent by grocery clerks, to make Willie do one last thing: die. There are no scores to settle because there are no personal relationships; passing a ruined castle Willie waxes nostalgic on the bygone days of knights and honor. Another cliche is made of Myron, the brash kid who's never hurt a fly in his life, talking big around adults. It's through Myron that we see both Willie and Braddock, the same side of the same coin, resolute and joyless, both using him for their own ends, Willie theoretically trying to escape. Myron finds himself having more in common with the group's hostage (Laura Del Sol), than either of his criminal compatriots. The life of a killer lacks the romance he once imagined - one hasn't the time to enjoy anything. Again, this is nothing new.

Shop-worn ruminations on life and death aside, it is the film Frears constructs around these themes that bursts with originality. Usually, when hitmen meet their prey, things are over in a matter of seconds, minutes at most, a few meaningful glances and bullets exchanged. Here, Willie is forced to stare into the abyss for the entire film. His choice is not to run, but rather to soak up his last hours living on earth. A shady grove next to a waterfall might be his preview of heaven, the fiery plains his entrance to hell. The living can get agitated; Willie is just along for the ride. He won't put up falso bravado or make airs he does not intend to back up - the same is true of Frears' unforgivingly objective camera angles, bereft of the British gangster style previously established by Mike Hodges and Neil Jordan.

Of course, he's not the only one in danger. A small trail of bodies is following Braddock and Myron, and hot on their tail a nameless Spanish policeman, played with limitless gravitas by Fernando Rey (used as a wax statue of a caricature of himself, much like in The French Connection). Like Willie, he takes in the gory scenes with a horrified and numbed aspect. The voice of right and order is silent however; Rey has one intelligible line in the entire film. As in No Country for Old Men, another movie set in the desert that focuses on the banality of evil, there's nothing to be said, or even understood. Violence feeds violence, and it is insatiable.

"It's just a moment. We're here. Then we're not here. We're somewhere else... maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?" Willie imparts these words to Braddock just before the bloody climax, trying to comfort him about his own, and ultimately everyone's, demise. Whether the stately sage believes his own words is up for debate, but those sentiments are certainly true. The Hit dramatizes not only the gangster's inevitable fate, but our own. It acknowledges bad men to still be human beings, a fact which genre films are often all too quick to forget.

The Vault #58: Scarface

2010-07-31T18:16:00.000-07:00

The immediate effect of sound being introduced into movies was the revolution of genre filmmaking. Epic adventures and romances, once visual feasts, were foregone for talky screwball comedy, musicals and rattling shoot-em-ups, both in the form of westerns and gangster pictures. Yet, a quarter of a century later, as Hollywood entered its golden age, the didacticism of Public Enemy and White Heat had all but vanished, replaced by the cool nihilism of film noir, and the urban melodramas favored by the likes of Paddy Chayefsky and Bud Schulberg. The gangster picture, its tropes, technical trademarks and rattling gunplay had disappeared, only to be found later in post-Hitchcock action movies and neo-noir. The movie that bridges the gap from morality play to white-knuckle thrill-ride is Scarface, a masterpiece of economy from Howard Hawks.

After an opening plea to the audience to encourage the government to crack down on organized crime, Hawks lays out the entire world of Scarface and its protagonist, Tony Cromante, in a single shot. The camera starts outside a nightclub, where a blue-collar worker and his son are cleaning the streets; pushing inside, we find a mob boss in the remains of a wild party long ended. He discusses some trivial matters with his lieutenants, then bids them goodnight. Alone, he wanders towards a pay-phone, where a gunman, seen only in silhouette, enters and shoots him down. From the drab, depression-era exterior to the lavish club bedecked in finery, to the shadowy murder scene, we've gotten everything we need to know about Al Capone's Chicago, or at least this rendering of it.

This in-the-moment quality fits perfectly with Cromante, a sociopathic thug who steal, murders and cavorts his way to the top of the underworld without even a whiff of premeditation. Played by Paul Muni with the grace and tact of a wounded animal, Cromante is a little kid killing bugs with a magnifying glass, cackling when he discovers his first Thompson sub-machine gun. When he sees a woman, he pursue her; when face with an adversary, he wipes him out. First seen as a triggerman working for chump change, Cromante and his partner Little Boy (George Raft) rise to the top the way everyone else does in a free market economy - by being willing to do anything to get ahead. Unlike later movies about crime and criminals, there is no psychologizing or explanation - Cromante simply does, and others react. The audience is privy to this story on the basis of its entertainment, not the ostensible message about public responsibility.

Scarface is subversive in its sympathies, making Cromante's endless cycle of violence a sport of sorts, the pursuit by the police another wrinkle in the game. Al Capone was older, fatter, and more coldly calculating than his screen counterpart. Yet, there's no confusing his bloody rampage with the "American Dream", as in clumsy 1983 remake, which draped a hammy Al Pacino in designer suits and luxury automobiles, all inside a lavish tropical compound. There's very little enjoyment of wealth; Tony has to leave a fancy theatre early to take care of a few bad apples. At one point, he shows off his swank new apartment, whose main feature are steel shutters for the windows, a preventative measure for anyone who gets creative with a machine gun. This isn't the glitz power of Cagney and Edward G. Robinson - Tony is more gangster on the run, even in the confines of his own home, a shark that keeps devouring and swimming, never comfortable for an instant.

Tony Cromante is not a true-crime facsimile, or didactic cautionary tale - he's an action hero, a hell-bent type along the lines of Mad Max or John McClane. When his world does finally crumble, he doesn't cry like Robinson at the end of Little Caesar or evoke the pathos of Cagney in The Roaring 20s or Public Enemy. Muni only becomes more cagey, more ferocious, more excited to empty his clip. The fortress of his apartment was just a pretext - all the while he craved the showdown, the violent climax. There's no remorse, either for Tony or us, as he bleeds out in the gutter. We had our fun.

Winter's Bone

2010-07-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

The nature of the film industry has relegated rural America to a symbolic representation of itself. Coastal elites retire to the back country only to make some larger political point about the country as a whole. Small-town poverty is far less compelling than urban decay, if only for its less compelling visual elements. While films like The Deer Hunter and Harlan County, PA made heroes of the heartland, they did so to score political points. White trash are never just allowed to be white trash - they are forced to stand for something more, and usually come off as cartoonish or pathetic. Debra Granik's Winter's Bone avoids these cliches, instead revealing a compelling narrative set in an undiscovered country. A double-winner at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Winter's Bone brings a regional familiarity and genuine soul that proves why small, smart independents remain indispensable to American film.

Jennifer Lawrence plays Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old girl saddled with caring for her two younger siblings and catatonic mother. When the Sheriff (Garrett Dillahunt) informs her that her dad Jessup has skipped out on his bond, the meager existence eked out by the Dollys is threatened. Her family and home hanging in the balance, Ree must find her father, dead or alive. She sets out on foot across a landscape last seen in John Hillcoat's adaptation of The Road; burned out cars dot decaying forests, while weeds over take derelict houses.

Ree journeys to see her kin, members of a back-woods organized crime family responsible for a whole lot of methamphetamine production. No one can tell her about Jessup because doing so would be a kind of snitching. Her uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) does Ree physical harm upon her first inquiry, so that she does not get into deeper trouble. A slightly older, more honorable villain than the rest of his family, Teardrop does not seem to care who killed his brother; the greater enemy is the law. We are used to movie gangsters having an implicit code of silence for a reason; they are protecting a vast, illicit fortune. In the decrepit Ozarks, wealth seems measured in the condition of one's pickup truck. The crime depicted in Winter's Bone is more about preserving one's individualism than it is about creating an empire. From shooting ranges to home-made drug labs, the Dollys are not interested in buying into the American Dream, but rather keeping away from it, and it away from them.

Earlier this year, Julian Nirtzberg's documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia caused quiet a controversy; it's depiction of the drug-addicted, sex-crazed, welfare-exploiting White family bordered on a mean-spirited minstrel show. The audience was encouraged through music cues and out-of-context interviews to laugh at the ignorance and self-destructiveness of Appalachian degenerates. Granik walks a much finer line; well aware of the chasm between her film's subject and audience, she holds characters close to the camera, with minimal dialogue, their humanity emanating from their facial expressions and depressing surroundings rather than forced caricature and incident. Anyone watching, from Arkansas to Paris, can see this is a film about a young girl, beset by obstacles, attempting to do the right thing.

Though set in a fallen world of thugs and drug-dealers, Winter's Bone avoids the all-too-familiar mechanics of crime and noir films, spending more time on the moral education Ree imparts her siblings than the finer points of the plot. The Dollys, lead by grandfather Big Milton, do have a complex criminal code (one of the principles being that men shall not beat women; only women shall), but neither this nor answering the mystery of Jessup's disappearance are Granik's chief concern. The focus is on Ree and those kids, whom she expertly shelters from the realities of the world.

Lawrence is the spiritual center of the film, but it is Hawkes who helps us understand the mentality of the hillbilly meth addict, and the peculiar blend of rebelliousness and honor that govern his world. At first terrifying, Hawkes eventually opens the character up, and we realize beyond the loose word family thrown around by the Dollys, at least some of them are not beyond true emotional connection. His hands shaking, bag of meth in hand, he evokes our sympathy as much as the so-called "innocent" protagonist. Ree may be the most virtuous Dolly deserving of rescue, but she was not the only one born into this - the important part is that the family stay close, no matter who or what that family is. Winter's Bone does not deliver our heroes from unhappiness, but it does keep them together, holding on for dear life.

The Vault #57: The Wrong Man

2010-07-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

In the opening shot of The Wrong Man, Alfred Hitchcock steps into a glaring spotlight, casting a dramatic shadow across the screen. His face obscured, the master of suspense assures us that everything that follows is closely based on actual events, and that the resulting film is more twisted than even the most fantastic of his fictions. As we fade into the film proper, a block of text again reminds us that The Wrong Man is a true story. The point sufficiently underlined, Hitchcock starts us down a less-than-fully-realistic spiral of guilt and terror.

There is the veneer of truth, at least to begin with. Ever-earnest Henry Fonda plays Manny Balastrero, an Italian-America bass player who ekes out a meager living at Manhattan's swanky Stork Club, in order to care for his wife (Vera Miles) and two sons. The first fifteen minutes show a committed family man, navigating the chiaroscuro subways and all-night diners of New York City; the same settings as a fatalistic noir, but without a doomed sinner as our focal point. When asked if he ever drinks or dances at the club, Manny laughs; such excess is way above his income bracket. The setup is decidedly quiet for a this period of Hitchcock; Fonda is much softer, kinder than the voyeuristic playboys portrayed by Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. This gentility makes him weak when conflict arises, in the form of false accusations that Balastrero is a robber who has been terrorizing his Queens neighborhood for months.

In the long tradition of paranoid prisoners stretching from The Trial to Shutter Island, Manny soon finds himself in a cell for reasons he can hardly comprehend. He's going on trial for crimes we can hardly believe he's committed, and the debt piling up puts him and his family in an even more dire position. The Wrong Man has just as much stylization as it needs, which is to say not a great deal; we're wrapt up enough in whether we believe Manny at his word. As convincing as Fonda is as an innocent man, in a film from the master of suspense, we always expect the other shoe to drop. In the meantime, as the domesticity crumbles around her, Miles is overcome with more paranoia than her husband. Guilt is a character in The Wrong Man as much as fear is in Vertigo.

All as a result of a string of robberies we never see, Hitchcock gets tremendous mileage out of a dialogue-heavy courtroom drama. Whether Manny is guilty or not, much of the second half of the film focuses on the consequences of that possibility. Miles sanity begins to slip; Manny prepares to say goodbye to his children. The seed of all this torment is so frustratingly simple - Hitchcock conveys beautifully the ability of our lives to change in an instant. Suspicion, we learn, is a powerful force. No Cold War message lies open for easy interpretation; any implication that the audience has something to hide along with Manny is outside the film's purview. However, as with Shutter Island, if you experience feelings of guilt, you may have some monsters, somewhere, even if not the ones you find yourself on trial for.

The core of the film is Miles, upon whom the accusations take their greatest toll. Loyal housewife turned ranting Lady MacBeth, her eventual committal to an asylum marks the greatest damage done by the charges leveled against Balastrero. The loving wife and mother is one of the iconic images of the 1950s, if not many of Hitchcock's films of the period. Here, finally focusing on a relatively stable domestic situation, the directors finds much dysfunction. Though an epilogue assures us she eventually regained her wits, the final acted moments we get from Miles give us no such comfort.

These blocks of text, which bracket The Wrong Man like explanatory paragraphs in a police report, do well to sanitize the film, much like the psychiatrist's monologue at the end of Psycho. Like that film, however, Hitch's rationalization and recuperation feels forced, shoving disturbing aspects of the American psyche under the rug, if only just slightly. The Wrong Man reveals something dark and sinister, then wishes it away with some happy music and some end titles. We cannot do the same.

Total Destruction to Your Mind

2010-07-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

Let us first dispense with the obvious. Movies are lies (at 24 frames per second). Movies are magic. Magic is illusion. Dreams are illusions. Illusions are lies. Movies are dreams. Inception is movie about creating dreams. And dreams within dreams. All these come under the umbrella dream that is the seventh film from director Christopher Nolan.

The premise: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) are hired by business tycoon Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea deep in the subconscious of Saito's rival Fischer (Cillian Murphy). In order to do this, Cobb and his team must construct levels of reality to be accessed as dreams within dreams, the deepest of which will reveal Fischer's weakness and allow Cobb to manipulate his target. Unfortunately, Cobb has some demons in his own subconscious, and the deeper he wades into the dream world, the more they manifest themselves, and in dangerous ways. At the heart of Inception is the nature of reality. Period.

Two hundred million dollars might seem a pittance to get to the heart of this question, but Nolan has plumbed these depths at a fortieth of the cost. Like Memento, Inception is the story of a man coping with the death of his wife, and hiding in constructed worlds to avoid admitting she is gone. Sure, each level of reality has a lot more polish than Leonard Shelby's stolen Jaguar and twice-booked motel rooms, but essentially, both films are about self-made labyrinths. Cobb's however serves a purpose beyond self-gratification: satisfy Saito and he may see his family again (or may not, ask Nolan). Memento isn't the only Nolan film called to mind; Inception functions as a collage of his entire filmography to date. Here's the sage advice of Michael Caine, there's the wonderfully choreographed gunfight out of The Dark Knight.

Cobb is the maker of worlds, the deceiver, and ultimately, the cold center of a film that, while mind-blowing, leaves us wanting. Dreams within dreams is a cool idea, especially when each one is a new lavish action set-piece, but what is Nolan's goal with this film? To confuse the audience as to what is real and what's imagined? That's not a very high bar to set, especially for him. To baffle us all with city-rolling special effects? Again, 200 mil goes a long way. Inception is an expensive parlor trick from the master of them, but we come away from the final stomach punch twist saying: who cares?

This sense comes from the fact that despite the upper-case ORIGINALITY practically wafting off this picture, we've seen quite a bit of it before. Though audiences are jumping out of their seats at the final cut to black to pronounce Nolan the next Kubrick, he is quite a ways off (his by the book 2001 reference may be read as a paying of dues). As cool as Joe Gordon Levitt looks crawling around like a spider in a gravity-free environment, more than a few people will be reminded of The Matrix, a reality bending sci-fi picture now a decade old. And the dream-within-dream-within-dream sequence seems cut from an old James Bond film.

Inception is a triumph then in the cutting room, where all the threads of this rather flat story (it centers on corporate espionage, for crying out loud) are woven together into a frock far prettier than its materials. Sure, it is a marvel of screenwriting and editing to weave together four (or five, or six, or...) levels of reality at once into a cohesive thriller. There is no question you will have to sort a few things out to even begin to understand it, but Nolan's academic exercise veers so far away from reality we have to ask ourselves whether such pondering is worth it. Inception comes off as an over-budgeted NYU film school project, or a flashy, less confusing version of Primer. Without Leonardo DiCaprio and an orgy of folding buildings, it would be a flavor of the week, or more likely a cautionary tale to ambitious youngsters about how to not fling themes rights in the audience's face. Mesmerizing in the moment, but utterly shabby when one begins to unpack it in the moments after the "big reveal". If not The Matrix, then perhaps the Fight Club for those who hit puberty after 9/11.

[Note: Spoilers appear after symbolic imagery]

SECONDARY SPOILER ALERT: So what was with that ending anyway? Two directions we can go, 1) the top is still spinning, so the entire film has been a dream, or 2) the top is about to topple and Nolan is merely toying with us. Since the latter seems something of an insult, does Inception negate its entire relevance in the final moment? If Inception is, in its entirety a dream (that collapsing corridor in the Mumbasa chase scene certainly supports this theory), than who is having the dream? With his slicked back hair and not quite sexy stubble, Cobb might be a stand-in for Nolan himself - is this too obvious? I don't think so.

However, let's backtrack. Leo's totem seemed to originate in Limbo, where Mal kept it in her holy of holies. So it isn't his totem? It is? Where does it first exist? Nolan's insistence on flipping over the chess board of his film in the final seconds suggests a need to be profound at the end of a film that has lacked such moments. Nolan loves his toys, from the polaroids in Memento to the bouncing ball in The Prestige; however here the top is just a top, and whether dream or real, spins indifferently, with no reference to the outside world. Cool-looking, aloof and really drawn out; the movie in a nutshell.

Not on Pandora: Predators

2010-07-12T09:42:00.001-07:00

The setup is pure pulp: a ragtag group of murderers, soldiers for hire and desperate sinners are los in a deadly wilderness, forced to rely on one another for survival. The concept is nothing new; the audience will gleefully watch the group get whittled down one by one, until our main characters have their final confrontation. If this film were set on earth, it might have been directed by Anthony Mann; however, it is not. Nimrod Antal's Predators brings order to a franchise with simple formulae, and in doing so delivers one of the most successful reboots in recent memory.

Of course, "best reboot" might not be much of a compliment, especially when we look back on the other recent Ahnuld-without-Ahnuld franchise continuation, Terminator Salvation. Salvation destroyed the small-scale tension and methodical pursuit of the franchise, instead blowing it out with Transformers-like killbots, a swaggerlicious performance by Christian Bale, and more high-concept, hard to explain mythology than the matrix. Character, plot and legitimate thrills were all sacrificed for a post-apocalyptic "look", merely a ripoff of Mad Max and other films of that ilk. Salvation was an update, an unpleasant reminder that while in 1984 a blockbuster could just be one mean robot hunting a woman across modern day Los Angeles, in 2009, the audience demanded swarms of robots, stupid twists and a couple of talentless super models gumming up the works.

Antal intends no such modern retelling of the Predator story, which is to begin with, razor-thin. Instead of a cohesive unit of Marines ambushed in the Guatemalan jungle, eight strangers awake in free fall, plummeting into the murky jungle of an alien planet. Four soldiers from countries with checkered diplomacy (the U.S., Russia, Somalia and Israel) two gangsters (one Mexican, the other Japanese) a death-row inmate and Topher Grace; already we've got more diversity and possible internal turmoil than original director John McTiernan ever dreamed of. At first assuming they are a part of a behavioral experiment, the prey soon realize they are being hunted and must team up to defeat an otherworldly enemy.

Taking Predator away from earth might be an irresistible temptation to some to introduce us to an alien civilization, or introduce a series of details unimportant to those who came to see some all-american ass-kicking. A sequence where the humans are attacked by a group of hunting animals recalls the plethora of new breeds marched across the screen in Avatar; only here, each moment of CGI (and there are only a few) serves a specific purpose. Mostly, the jungle looks like earth, and the plants look like plants. Antal and producer Robert Rodriguez understand what makes Predator great - they do not add one unnecessary bell or whistle. Even the super cheesy heat vision is still there.

Oddly enough for a mid-budget sci-fi actioner, one of Predators' greatest strengths is its cast, presided over by the largely unconvincing Adrien Brody (the comeback started in Splice continues). His lack of presence (call him the anti-Bale) allows for each of those condemned to the game preserve to have their juicy moment. Brody might be a recognizable face, but he is by no means a star, and willfully cedes moments to the other malcontents, most humorously Walton Goggins as the serial rapist/murderer. The film's most entrancing and surprising piece of acting comes from cameo by Laurence Fishburne, who channels fat Orson Welles in his portrayal of a long-time survivor of the planet.

Characters aside, we just bought these tickets to see man kick some predator butt, and boy does he. From the hurtling-through-mid-air opening to the jungle-burning conclusion, Predators wastes not a second on answering questions or developing backstory. Yet when Brody and his remaining companion arrive at the coda alive, surrounded by rotting meat and cinders, they are by no means saved. Predators ends on a wonderfully ambiguous down note, and a new hunt begins.

The Kids Are Cold-Blooded Killers

2010-07-07T20:17:00.002-07:00

This might be a still from your average teen movie, where kids cruise around listening to top 40 hits and getting into trouble when parties get out of hand. Little Miss Popular might be looking for Mr. Right and the lone male outsider might be looking for a way to fit in. She and he would find each other by the third act, perhaps thanks to their unconventional friends, or an amazing road trip. However, this was taken from Bully, the second film by Larry Clark (Kids), so no happy ending or harmless hijinx lie ahead for those ravers in the convertible. It's not the world of Britney Spears and bubblegum - rather, shallow nihilism and ignorant destruction.

Marty (Brad Renfro) is a high-school dropout, a loser with a pretty face under the thumb of his best friend / pimp Bobby (Nick Stahl). When Marty starts dating the feisty Lisa (Rachel Miner), she and her friends decide to put Bobby's abusive behavior to and end once and for all, by killing him. They enlist a host of unnecessary accomplices from Lisa's a "professional" hitman (Leo Fitzpatrick, who makes a living playing young men on the margins of society, in Kids and on The Wire) to a pair of sex crazed drug addicts (Bijou Philips and Michael Pitt). Fitzpatrick's presence aside, this seems like the cast of a very promising dramedy about growing up. Clark instead lets Bully unfold as the darkest of comedies, as one youth after another lets themself get drawn, mostly at Lisa's urging, into deeper and deeper trouble. Their doom is inevitable; the only natural response to their stupidity and the thoughtless brutality they inflict upon Bobby is nervous laughter.

Clark will probably always be better known for Kids, his barebones verite look at HIV in the inner city. The film one makes after becoming a hot property can be the trickiest - Bully takes his trademark no frills look at drugs and sex among the young and combines it with more mainstream genre filmmaking. Part noir, part midnight movie, Bully is not hard to watch like Kids - the principals seem less like animals in a zoo and more like people to whom the audience can actually relate. Like the action genre, films aimed at teens with characters still in high school rarely ring true. Transferring those adolescent concerns into the true-crime world is a compelling feat, and certainly not one that translates to box office success.

A few years later, Nick Cassevetes built upon Clark's film with Alpha Dog, another true story of teenage murderers, this time with the added element of class. The victim this time, oddly enough, is the hitman himself, Frankie (Justin Timberlake). After kidnapping the younger brother of a deadbeat who owes his friend Johnny Truelove (Emil Hirsch) money, Frankie bonds with the still innocent kid, only to find out he has to kill his new friend. Johnny, the real villain of the story, doesn't have to get his hands dirty - he's too rich for that. Where Bully reminded us of the "true story" aspect only in the end titles, Alpha Dog is constantly displaying witness names and numbers, as well as cutaway interview conducted after the fact. Where Bully went from feel good sex comedy to fatalistic noir, Alpha Dog takes it further into mockumentary, the sheltered world of Clueless and Can't Hardly Wait pushed closer and closer to the real.

What these two films both do is complicate and explore the bully-prey relationship. The blonde, muscled jerk with the money and the posse has been a teen-movie staple for decades, but not until these two films has the archetype been explored for all its pitch-black possibilities. In both cases, the bully comes from a better upbringing than his familiars, and has a future the others do not. In a Western, he might be the merciless landowner. What makes Bully and Alpha Dog a more compelling take on the master-slave relationship is that we are used to thinking of high school in rosy terms. Anything can be forgiven at that age - or so we think.

The teen movie, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High to the present, has been a hollow, materialistic world, and though satirized (as in Heathers), has rarely been entirely deconstructed. Clark and Cassevetes decided to treat the characters as people, not just beautiful objects. And like American Psycho and The Wild Bunch before them, these films challenge our initial impressions of , and reveal the haphazard violence and commonplace evil underneath.