Kris' movie reviews

Shatnerthon: Loving TJ Hooker. Without Irony.

2010-07-09T22:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I believe in loving something ironically anymore. I used to, and yesterday I saw my third Twilight film in the theater for reasons other than love, but I think that fails the irony test as well. (Don't worry, I didn't pay full price.) I've long been against the concept of a “guilty pleasure,” because pleasure without harming anyone else should be reason enough in itself not to feel guilty. But what's pushed me over the irony line is T.J. Hooker.

I once reassured a friend that I would never, ever fall so far as to watch T.J. Hooker, let alone like it. That is one step too far, I said, even for William Shatner. But you know what?

I love T.J. Hooker. I love it unashamedly, with full knowledge of its flaws and indeed a considerable amount of affection for them. Maybe that is ironic love, as it is figured for some, but I don't find the distinction useful. Or fair.

For those of you who don't know (and probably aren't reading this), T.J. Hooker was an American television program which ran from 1982-1986. It was meant to be an ensemble show about cops-in-training in the fictional Lake City (which looks—gasp!--a lot like Los Angeles) because, supposedly, Shatner wasn't looking to star in another show. (Same thing apparently happened to Boston Legal.) But as things often do with Shatner, fate took over and he became the focal point. He, and rookie cop Vince Romano, played by Adrian Zmed (of Grease 2 awesomeness).

Don't get me wrong: it's a terrible show. It's formulaic, the politics/criminal philosophy/crime-fighting are all problematic, and Shatner's “hair” is very distracting. But the truth is, you need someone like him to anchor a show this bad, because otherwise there's nothing to recommend it. The plots are stupid, the production values rather shoddy (we have a game of looking for the temporary signs the art department has made for various locations and businesses, which look totally pasted-on), and Hooker is always, invariably, right. If the crook is redeemable, he knows by looking. If he's not, he knows that too. No ambiguity. No liberal bleeding-heart crap. Nothing has any bearing on anything that will happen in another episode, crimes are always in the exactly opposite direction than they're traveling, and there's always going to be a cute tag at the end where Hooker gets the jovial jump on Romano yet again!

But see, that's what's so delightful about this show. It's not that it's realistic. It's that it's ridiculous but they're playing it straight and no one seems to think it makes no sense for Shatner to be able to leap onto the hoods of cars, catch airplanes on foot, or run down rapists half his age who work out. He wants it so badly that he always gets it. I think if it weren't Shatner driving it, I'd be bored quickly, but for whatever reason it just makes me laugh. As does the predictable veteran/rookie banter between him and Romano.

And that's the other thing: if it weren't for Adrian Zmed, as much as Shatner, the whole thing might have fallen apart. He's just adorable. He has this amazingly sculpted body, but sort of a goofy-cute face on top of it, and amazingly tall hair. And the scripts let him be both athletic and sort of hapless, so he can show off his great puppy-dog expression. He's a perfect buddy for Hooker. And—moment of even more shallowness--they both have great asses.

Part of the entertainment, for me, is in how bad it is. Is the anticipation: what vehicle will Shatner fight today? How will he get the better of both the crooks and Romano? Who will Hooker touch inappropriately? How many times have I seen the cop car race past the Safeway? By the way, cars? Always explode after flipping over, but only after Hooker's managed to get everyone out.

I started watching out of curiosity and kept watching despite Heather Locklear demonstrating the most incompetent acting I've ever seen. It's oddly charming, strangely addictive, and makes me really sad that only seasons one and two are available on DVD, and one isn't even a full season. (Romano leaves after four, so I'm not really interested in that, either.) It's likely there are hundreds of shows of like quality I'm missing out on, but for me, Shatner's charm (yes, even in his early 50's and with the... hair) makes all the difference. Shatner's having fun with the role. And I find I just can't really hold Hooker's absurdity against him. He fought a school bus, guys. And won.

Shatnerthon: For the People (1965)

2010-07-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

1965 was a busy year for William Shatner. It was the year he starred in a television series about a brash, headstrong young idealist who takes charge and makes impassioned speeches about truth, justice, and the American way. It was the year he filmed the first feature film in Esperanto. Oh, and he also filmed the second pilot for Star Trek.

For the People ran for only thirteen episodes, from January 31st through May 9th. Filmed on location in New York City, it followed the trials of Assistant District Attorney David Koster, a “dedicated man with a single-minded zeal to defend the criminal justice system of the United States of America,” according to Shatner. This was going to be his big break: produced by Herb Brodkin, with socially-conscious scripts, and a starring role in a series after turning down Dr. Kildare and The Defenders. The series, of course, was put opposite Bonanza and died after six months, presumably so that Shatner would be desperate for work and free to do Star Trek in July. (Incubus came in May. Which, frankly, may have heightened said desperation.)

But it's a shame, really, that the show was canceled. I've managed to see about half the episodes, and it makes me wish there were more. I should offer a caveat that I often give a lot of leeway to “things that mean well” which were produced before I was born, even when they sometimes get preachy or cheesy or narratively cop out in favor of the message. No doubt For the People suffers on all these counts, but there's something about its earnestness I appreciate. Judging by the first review on IMDB, it's also what turns some people off, but that makes it even more interesting to me that a show that was produced in 1965 is still irritating people with its liberal politics. To our modern eyes, it feels heavy-handed and probably not as original, but it must have been one of the first programs to deal with these issues.

Each episode's title, it seems, is drawn from actual court cases. “Guilt Shall Not Escape Nor Innocence Suffer” is somewhat unwieldy, and frankly though I've seen it I can't recall which story is. But it gives you some idea. Each week, Koster and his fellow DAs are presented with some sort of conundrum. Whether it's conflict over suspected police brutality and the unlawful procuring of confessions, or the unfairness of the legal system for those who cannot pay, Koster throws himself into his work. Sometimes to a degree which seems either unrealistic or just really obsessive, depending on how forgiving you're feeling. And at times, the narrative leaves him and his office entirely alone, in order to follow criminals (or suspected criminals) through the vagaries of the legal system who are far less compelling or sympathetic than I think the writers intended. It's not difficult to understand why it wasn't a hit, though critics reportedly liked it: It wants to teach you something about the legal system, and it's not necessarily how it works. It's more interested in the ethical and moral conundrums that come with slotting everyone into the same system, and politically, it tends to lean left.

But what I love about the show—and I do love it—is that it feels unusual for something with that sort of intent to even get to that stage of the game. And on top of that, the performances are solid. Shatner is great. He's young, arrogant, well-intentioned, and at 34 (okay, I'm shallow) really gorgeous. And my absolute favorite thing about this show is that it has, I think, one of my favorite married couples in all of fiction. David and Phyllis seem to have been married a few years, so like Nick and Nora Charles you're popping in to a story when most romances have long since ended. It's so unusual to see happily married couples who are both sexy and have problems that I find myself waiting for the scenes at home. Such as David's enthusiastic photography session with a patient but bemused Phyllis, or an entire episode which centers on some poor judgments on David's part which threaten to expose his wife's dark secret. The sort of secret that could ruin his career, despite it being, to our modern eyes, a fairly tame skeleton. David and Phyllis are very much in love, but the tension of his work being all-consuming and hers (she's a concert violinist) being not-quite comprehensible to him is definitely there. I've rarely seen a relationship on tv which feels this fresh and real, not to mention established. And incidentally, Phyllis is played by the gorgeous Jessica Walter, best known now as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development.

I've never been a big fan of procedurals, whether legal/police/medical, but there are always exceptions. And the focus of For the People, while sometimes dragging the narrative and pacing down, makes it unusual, as do the relationships it portrays. As much as I love Denny Crane, it's refreshing to watching something with something to say. And for those with limited experience with Shatner-the-actor, it's nice to watch something with limited potential for mockery. Of course, since it was never released on DVD, it's incredibly difficult to find—but if you do, it's worth taking a look.

Next up: Shatner stars again, only this time, I really should feel guilty about that pleasure.

Le Concert (2009)

2010-05-22T13:44:00.001-07:00

Le Concert is a warmhearted film for music lovers, and judging by the audience reaction at last night’s Seattle International Film Festival screening, I am neither.

The French-Romanian co-production, marketed as a bittersweet east-meets-west comedy and directed by Radu Mihaileanu, concerns a disgraced conductor who thirty years ago made a moral decision which cost him his career. Working as a janitor for the Bolshoi Orchestra, reliving his glory days and fixated on an aborted performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, he intercepts an invitation from the Châtelet Theater in Paris. Determined to finish what he started thirty years ago, he rounds up a rag-tag bunch of Jewish and Gypsy musicians and cons his way to Paris with the help of his endearingly eccentric friends and frenemies.

My problem with the film, was that it asked both too much and too little. It wanted to sell me hard on the humor and heartache, and both the comedy and pathos were, to my sensibilities anyway, unearned. Despite many decent performances, I was turned off by the tone of the film, which wanted me to find them endearing before I had a chance to know them or feel it myself. I also thought the competing comedy/drama elements sat uneasily together, making both feel forced when the story might have gone over better with a more consistent tone. Perhaps a darker comedy, or a drama with light touches, would have worked better than alternating low-brow, clichéd humor with strained melodrama. Further, the “east-meets-west” comedy seemed entirely based on the idea that Russians (or Jews or Gypsies, I’m not sure) are opportunistic, unsophisticated folksy types. My biggest problem, however, was that I was unwilling to suspend my disbelief that a group of players who has not worked together in thirty years and has not rehearsed can triumph on the strength of one man’s dream. And we know that’s where it’s going from the very beginning.

It’s obvious that the film is intended, fully, to appeal on the basis of triumphing on the strength of one man’s dream. So perhaps the fault is not really with the film, but with my watching it. I related far too much to the woman who tells the conductor that it’s a concert, not a therapy session, and he needs to get help. The movie doesn’t think so, and I think the film should appeal to classical music lovers who will appreciate the importance placed on performance and the fact that the concerto is played all the way through. In the end, that wasn’t enough for me.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)

2009-05-15T14:54:00.001-07:00

The first thing I knew about Roman Polanski, before I’d even seen any of his movies (or probably, could remember which ones were his), was that he’d had sex with a teenage girl and fled the country in the 70’s. This is, it seems, his story so far as he has one anymore, and I think it’s probably supplanted Roman Polanski, the man whose pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family in the 60’s. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which originally aired on HBO last year, does two things: it explores the concept of media celebrity as it relates to Polanski’s life, and addresses a legal injustice which, regardless of his crime, seems by all accounts egregious.

The facts, from what I can tell, seem to be undisputed: in 1977, 44 year old Polanski was hired to take photos of young girls for Vogue, and asked one 13 year old’s mother for permission. During the course of the shoot, which took place without other adult supervision, Polanski gave the victim champagne and Quaaludes and had intercourse with her. Polanski, as far as this documentary presents it, never denied that he had done it; indeed, he says in one archival interview at the beginning of the film that he believes all men desire young women. In a plea bargain Polanski pled guilty of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” dismissing the more serious charges. He was then sentenced to a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, deferred so that he might finish his current project. He served 42 days, and shortly left the country, never to return, fearing imprisonment should he do so.

What’s interesting about this film is that it barely touches the issue of what Polanski did, or why. There is certainly background, enough to make one sympathize for the man’s misfortunes (which were considerable) without excusing his behavior. But the film focuses instead on a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the Santa Monica judge, Rittenband, who according to the film was a publicity hound and desperately afraid of losing face in the press. It’s a complicated enough chain of events that it does need a film to explain them, but suffice to say both the defending and prosecuting attorneys agree that the treatment of Polanski was both out of accordance with the treatment of perpetrators of similar crimes in the state at that time, and that finally this treatment ventured into the extra-legal. Which puts a different spin on Polanski’s “flight from justice,” certainly.

The film is well put-together, with archival footage and photos and lots of interviews from almost everyone involved—though there are no modern ones with Polanski himself. Given the ample evidence as to his treatment by the media, it seems no wonder that he would not wish to rehash the whole thing again, at this point. It is also interesting that his crime is neither glossed over nor exploited—for the most part, it is treated as a fact in a story that, however you feel about him, is about something else. That said, it is still a difficult movie because of the subject matter, though the media/legal situation is riveting especially as so much of it is a revelation after all these years. It is also somewhat disconcerting how charming Polanski comes across, and his tragic story combined with his unapologetic pursuit of very young women make him a complicated focal point. It is rare that a man who makes movies is so appropriate a subject for one himself, but if anyone is, Polanski is certainly at the top of that list.

Spartacus (1960)

2009-04-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Most people know the name Spartacus even if they’ve never seen the movie, or the famous “I am Spartacus” scene it’s most identified with. It now stands as a prime example of the epic film, though a flawed one which shows the strain of contradictory aims. It is also a relatively early Stanley Kubrick film, though it shows less of his influence than he would later be able to assert on his work.

The basic storyline, that of rebelling slaves (starting with gladiators-in-training, but swelling from there), is fairly obviously treated by Dalton Trumbo and by the editing of the film itself, and therein lies one of the biggest problems. The rebellion is boring. We are treated to endless montages of poor faces in the crowd, spread liberally through the film whenever there is space for them, and after the first few the audience should be fairly well aware that slavery is bad and that their rebellion is just. What’s unfortunate to the “cause” is that the Roman “bad guys”—Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov—are far more interesting and entertaining than the too-modern and rather pedestrian Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. The best parts of the film are the conversations between Ustinov and Laughton (supposedly scripted by Ustinov himself) whose easygoing hedonism seems genial and harmless. Of course it isn’t, but it’s far more entertaining than Douglas preaching about rights with stilted language and heroically unrealistic lighting.

Likewise the subtleties of Olivier’s performance—scenes of which were famously cut out at the behest of the MPAA because they suggested bisexuality—are far more interesting than the straightforwardness of the Americans. While no one would argue about who ought to have won, there is a problem when the viewer cannot wait to leave the rebel camp and go back to decadent Rome. Though of course the attraction of the ambiguously villainous over the stolidly heroic is not isolated to this movie, and the work that focuses on a “social problem” (and it seems clear to me that Trumbo meant to evoke some time period more contemporary than ancient Rome) is often preachy and dull.

That said, aside from a few modernisms of speech and a dreadfully dated score, the film remains an enjoyable and thoughtful alternative to the big budget action films of the present to which it is related. Looking back, it definitely shows the strain between writer, director, studio, and censor, and is not quite as “tight” and efficient as perhaps it should be. For myself, all of that is entirely overshadowed by Olivier, Laughton and especially Ustinov, whom I fell in love with from his first scene. While this makes it a very enjoyable film, the fact I can so easily take the perverse view indicates that it does not achieve what it was supposed to, at least for this viewer, and if it is a masterpiece it is a decidedly flawed one.

The Wrestler (2008)

2009-04-27T14:38:00.001-07:00

There's something to be said for the pleasure of being surprised by a film, or a book, or even a discussion, about a topic you're not that interested in. It means that the treatment of it, the thought put into it, or the human drama of the situation transcends your own personal likes and dislikes and I, for one, enjoy that sort of surprise. When a film does it with a quiet sort of grace, it's even better.

The Wrestler is Darren Aronofsky's fourth feature film and it achieves the above with simplicity above all else. Just look at the title. A description of the plot doesn't really get across what this movie is about: a pro-wrestler, now fallen on hard times, plots a comeback, befriends a stripper, attempts to get in touch with his adult daughter, and faces the medical consequences of his lifestyle. But that's not the point, because what this movie is about is watching him interact with his world. It doesn't matter what you think about wrestling, because especially in the hands of Mickey Rourke Randy "The Ram" Robinson (not his real name) has an interesting story, worth watching.

It seems to me that Aronofky's chief move here was to direct a movie he hadn't written. While I enjoyed Pi, Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, for different reasons, I sense that in his own hands this story (had he chosen to tell it) would have included far too much explanation and imposed meaning. We would have had to know how Randy got to this point, how he lost his daughter, and what it all amounts to in the grand scheme. Instead, we are only shown these things, and left to figure them out on our own. Parallels between the wrestling ring, the topless bar and the deli counter are there, and unmissable, but no conclusions are drawn for the viewer. Likewise, the film maintains a careful balance between showing the artificiality of wrestling along with the severe physical toll it takes. "Wrestling is fake" is a common refrain, but only half the story. And rarely have I seen violence--the relatively "minor" violence of the "fake" wrestling ring--portrayed with so little glorification and, at the same time, so little exaggeration. Again, nothing is shoved in your face, but it's difficult to watch anyway because it's too simply real.

The one misstep I perceived was in the music, which got too saccharine and manipulative here and there for my taste. This movie is so naturalistic and low key that a swelling score (even if there are electric guitars in there) is overkill. The cinematography walked the line between arty pseudo-documentary and hanging back to let the film tell itself, and I thought it worked well. The acting, too, was good without being showy, and Rourke was perfect.

Though this film didn't necessarily touch me deeply (at the time--I think it will linger, and the more I think about it the more effective it is), I wish there were more like it, with this combination of skill, restraint, and trust in its audience. That trust paid off, if the film's reputation is any indicator, and we could use more well-made, quiet, thoughtful films about pretty much anything.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

2009-03-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

By now, we're all used to the benevolent alien trope. The alien(s) come(s) to Earth, humans are suspicious, do human-type things like try to blow it/them up, and then we learn a valuable lesson about healing the world or at the very least something about friendship and loyalty. (There is, of course, the apathetic version: alien comes to Earth and is corrupted by our culture, but we'll leave that for another time.) Especially after the early 80s, when we seemed to be inundated by them. But in 1951, I can't imagine that a movie like The Day the Earth Stood Still came as anything but a surprise.

Coming shortly after World War II, in the midst of the Korean War, and in the early stages of the Cold War (not to mention the era of McCarthy/HUAC suspicion), The Day the Earth Stood Still showed a different future. The one that would happen if Mutually Assured Destruction were allowed to reach its logical fruition. The story seems familiar enough now that it's hardly a spoiler to say that in it, a man comes to Earth and tells humanity it's on the brink of destroying itself.

Looking back on it 58 years later, a few things strike me. The movie seems simplistic in its world view, both in terms of the dangers that beset humanity and the idea that all we need is to start talking again to ensure peace. It also seems “naive” (or blessedly optimistic, considering your view) about Mr. Carpenter's sudden appearance in the midst of the boarding house family and his easy association with little Bobby; Bobby's mother's boyfriend is jealous, but no one seems to suspect anything strange about a man who offers to watch a stranger's kid—that is, they don't suspect what we do now, watching it. Is that our problem, or theirs?

But what's saddest to me is the knowledge that this movie couldn't be made today. It wasn't, when the remake came out last year (which, for the record, I have not seen, though it has been described to me). One could argue that audiences are more sophisticated now, and in a sense we are—we demand more jargon and no longer accept “it's a powerful nuclear engine” as an explanation for anything, though modern films rarely say more despite their explanations and exposition. But most of this film involves a stranger coming to town, attempting to learn about its people, and talking while touring the D.C. sights. All the violence occurs off-screen. There's a chase that basically entails the army keeping tabs on the movements of a cab and reporting back to HQ. A strange man and a little boy talk about physics and Abe Lincoln.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is not my favorite film, but in this basic scenario, it is the film I want to see: the film about how a literal alien interacts with our culture and navigates his living situation. And then calls on his giant robot. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, despite its “simplicity.” It doesn't rely on adrenaline, and it makes a clear, if apparently obvious, point. Of course, the film started out as a point looking for a story, but I still admire its compactness.

Finally, while I knew the story and the politics going in, I was surprised by the fact that the “message” is so violent. Humanity must change its ways and become peaceful—by threat of force. Which begs the question: is this stance hypocritical, or merely Klaatu's practical way of dealing with an unenlightened species who understands nothing more?

Watchmen (2009)

2009-03-22T12:34:00.001-07:00

I was not in that group of comic book readers blown away by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1986. In fact, by the time I was reading comics and watching movies critically, the bitter, reflective mode of the book had already permeated the superhero ethos, and its revolutionary aspects had been re-integrated into the texts it rebelled against. Even the animated Batman of the early 90's, my own foundational text in this genre, wouldn't have existed without this attitude, even if on the surface it was the stuff of Saturday mornings. When I finally read it a few months ago, it seemed more shocking in its use of pink and bright green than its philosophy, and I suspected the impact had been diluted by everything that had come after, along with my own visual preferences.

I was not, however, prepared for the travesty director Zack Snyder made of it that I saw last night.

However ridiculous (and racist, and homophobic) I found Snyder's 300, most of what I objected to in the film was present in Frank Miller's comic. I didn't like how it looked, either, but shiny computer graphics and faster-than-the-eye-can-see fight sequence editing are something I live with nearly every time I see a modern Hollywood film, and I just sound more curmudgeonly and bitter every year. Watchmen had that, too, and I was prepared. What I was not prepared for was the sheer disconnectedness of the text and the presentation, which impressed itself upon me within minutes.

Is it a spoiler to say that the Zapruder film recreation nestled in the credits was one of the most tasteless things I have ever witnessed, JFK's assassination writ large upon an IMAX screen for the cheapest of shots at one of the main characters? The scene was presented with no more nor less fanfare than the recreation of the famous WWII photo of the sailor kissing the nurse, substituting Silhouette for the sailor (who we can see heading off another direction in the background). What's most astonishing to me is not so much the audacity of the decision as the filmmakers' apparent inability to see the difference between the two appropriations. Both have the same gleeful, detail-oriented “because we can” attitude about them, and even if our emotions are meant to be manipulated in slightly different directions, the intent of both is clearly to titillate.

This lack of thought permeates the entire film, from the soundtrack to the fight sequences. For a film that's about recreating a beloved comic in painstaking detail (when convenient or showy), it's astonishingly unaware of what the comic is about. One would hope, in other words, that the makers of a movie about the depravity of modern society would take some care not to directly contribute to same. Instead, we are simultaneously lectured about standing by and letting violence happen and shown endless slow-motion frames of compound fractures rendered in loving, hyper-real, computer-generated detail. It's pornography, and it's exactly the sort of thing Rorschach would be combating. I'm hardly holding him up as an example to be followed, and neither am I condemning pornography. But they don't belong together, and what is more, I cannot sense the tiniest bit of intelligence behind the decisions that went into the making of this film. There's a fine line between demonstrating your point and subverting it, but Snyder doesn't seem to even admit it exists, let alone have the ability to walk it.

The argument can (and will) be made that Watchmen is just entertainment, and maybe that's a whole different essay. This isn't about violence in the media, however, but rather the direct subversion of a film's text by its presentation. Unless this is done intentionally, it just seems like bad filmmaking. Certainly the soundtrack plays like My First Mixtape, with no comprehension either that anyone has heard of Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan before or that just because a song is cool, it may not be appropriate for any given scene. This is minor compared to my other complaint, of course, but anyone who thinks that Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” is appropriate for the awkward sex it's set to is just not thinking. And all of this together weakens the impact the film ought to have. Watchmen should be entertaining, true. There should be violence and sex. But it shouldn't work against the idea that there is a moral contradictions inherent in the very activity of masked vigilantism.

There were things I liked about the film, but most of those were in the comic, too. I find the characters of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan very compelling, and they were realized well enough by their actors (though I object to the fakey Batman voice of Rorschach—why would he have to disguise his voice if no one knows who he is?--and the bad computer rendering of many of Manhattan's facial expressions). Everyone on screen was, at the very least, very game. The one music cue I enjoyed was a Muzak version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” at an opportune moment, because it was both subtle and ridiculous. But the voyeuristic glee with which the violence was carried out worked against my enjoyment of the movie—call me a fuddy duddy, but I'd have appreciated it more if I could have sensed some condemnation behind, say, the graphic incineration of Vietnamese soldiers instead of an empty “look what we can do.” I do not get the sense that we're supposed to be horrified. Everything is so shiny, and at the same time so removed, that in the end I don't see how the film (with the help of others which have come before) can help but put us in some approximation of Dr. Manhattan's position: unable to relate to these figures as anything but effects, and only theoretically able to appreciate human life as we see it on screen.

Bluebeard's Castle (1964)

2009-03-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

The story of Bluebeard exists in several variations, but usually goes like this: a poor girl gets married off to an ugly (though rich) brute who tells her he can go anywhere in his house/mansion/castle but this one room, and that she must keep this key/egg with her at all times. By the way, he says, I'm going on a trip. The wife, driven by her womanly curiosity, enters the forbidden room to find a bloody abattoir filled with former Mrs. Bluebeards. She drops the key/egg, and to her dismay finds the blood will not wash off, thus alerting Bluebeard upon his return that she has gone against his orders.

This happens a few times until lucky number three, usually a sister of the other two, devises a clever plan to avoid dropping the key/egg or alert some sort of lover or brother of her predicament. This wife is rescued, and sometimes rescues the other wives, who can be sewed back together or pulled out of hell or otherwise recovered. The story is a flip-side of "Beauty and the Beast," where the vicious new husband really is a monster who cannot be redeemed, and where the woman's main attribute, curiosity, gets her into trouble. I suppose the lesson is that marriage is scary for a young girl, and sometimes the vicious beast turns out to be all right—and sometimes he doesn’t.

This basic storyline is more or less absent from Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle and Michael Powell’s 1963 film for German television. This film is very rare, and a few weeks ago I got the opportunity to see the one print that’s available. According to Powell’s wishes, the German opera is presented without translation, and only a few descriptive subtitles cue you in to certain emotions or events. (You can see the first 9 minutes here)

(click "Read More" for the rest, including slight spoilers for a film you probably won't see)

The experience is hard to describe. The film is an hour of visual interpretation of Bluebeard’s seven doors, the only action being that Bluebeard brings his new wife, Judith, home and informs her he has seven doors that she cannot look behind. The "public" part of his castle is filled with abstract sculptures of body parts; the first thing Judith says is that she’s going to bring happiness and light into it. She then proceeds to gain entry into each room, and the opera/movie follows a pattern in which Bluebeard denies her, then relents, she is fascinated by what she sees, and at length somewhat troubled. She keeps seeing blood. On the crown, on the clouds, marring the beauty of the things Bluebeard is showing her.

This, of course, is present in the opera itself, and what Powell’s film does is bring movie technique to a rather stagey production design. The film did not have a lot of money to work with, but what was achieved was a sort of synthesis of film and stage technique; everything we see could have been used on stage, but the camera allows Powell to play with time and point of view. The doors are sometimes represented by monoliths in a room, sometimes by transparent doors with little relation to any actual architecture. The flowers in the garden look to me like lighting gels. The basic unreality of the setting (and the lack of subtitles) allow for a multitude of interpretations; I don’t think anyone in the theater that night saw the same film. Why does Bluebeard show Judith the torture chamber and armory first, and with minimal reluctance, while the lake of tears takes significant prying? Are his wives, behind the last door, really dead? Or do they symbolize the memory of his past loves, as is suggested by his comparing them to dawn and midday? In the end, why can’t they be together? Was Judith too curious, or Bluebeard too reticent? Is any of this real, and if not, whose head are we in?

Unlike the original stories, Bluebeard does not leave his wife alone in the house as a sort of trick. He is present the entire time, and gives in to her demands to see each successive room. He is not a hideous monster—often interpreted in old illustrations as having "Eastern" features—but a strong-looking curly-haired man. It is not even clear whether there is any actual blood, or whether it is Judith’s imagination which coats Bluebeard’s inner life with it. But because the opera is called "Bluebeard’s Castle," anyone watching it with knowledge of the story is going to bring it to bear on what they’re seeing. This, for me, was one of the most interesting aspects of the thing. Because to me, most of it was happening not in real rooms but in the emotional lives of the protagonists. And to do Bluebeard without the dead wives, without the slaughterhouse, performed in large part on the marital bed, brings out so many new elements that I almost don’t know where to begin.

As we’ve seen in the trajectory of stories like Beauty and the Beast and Phantom, there is a movement from fear to sexualization of the Other. This is obviously far too simplistic a notion, but in general the Beast and the Phantom have become more acceptable partners, even in their inhumanity. Bartok/Powell’s Bluebeard does not seem like a monster at all, but a somewhat prickly man who presents a not inconsiderable sexual allure for his new wife. This interpretation seems to put the former bloodiness of the story down to anxiety over sexuality; without that anxiety, there is no need to warn the woman off the appetites of the husband. What was once threatening is now actually attractive. And the fact that Bluebeard can more easily show Judith his torture chamber and armory is in keeping with the abstract threat of the main chamber of his home. He is fine with this perception of him, and Judith is as well. These first rooms are his defenses as well as the basis of his masculine appeal, and it’s telling that he presents them before showing her the treasure and the gardens, and likewise telling that upon seeing the first rooms she only wants more. Of course in the end, she joins his other loves in the room of maybe-he-killed-them-and-maybe-he-didn’t, but the threat here seems more emotional than to life and limb.

And that may represent a very basic shift in society, in terms of what marriage means and what perils await most people in first world countries. It’s not that the original story assumed that many marriages ended in the husband hacking the wife up, but marriages were much more likely to be arranged without the consent of the girl, and life was a lot more difficult. In the early 20th century, when the opera was written, marriage was a choice, a little danger had become alluring, and the consequences were no longer the same.

Let the Right One In (2008)

2009-03-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

[I'm trying something a little different with this one. There are spoilers for this film and Martin and some analysis if you hit "Read more" at the bottom of the post, but hopefully the part that shows bits will offer a decent review for those who wish it. Let me know how it works.]

Let the Right One In cuts right to the heart of this by making the vampire a pre-pubescent girl, it's almost a relief. Finally, a vampire film (with requisite gore) that is unflinchingly not about velvet-drenched sould-searching angst or eternal-youth rockstardom.

Instead, this Swedish film (based on a novel) is about a little boy, Oskar, who slowly befriends his new next-door neighbor, a strange, beautiful creature named Eli. Eli walks barefoot in the snow. Eli does not go to school. Eli lives with an older man who may or may not be related to her, but whose relationship is decidedly not parental. Oskar is bullied at school, and spends most of his time on his own, dreaming of revenge he never takes. As his relationship with Eli progresses, it becomes clear that neither of them really has anyone else, and the secret they share unites them in a world Oskar may or may not be ready to join.

The film is starkly real without sacrificing style (except for some dreadfully unfortunate CG cats I am endeavoring to forget about), and for the most part plays out like a boy-meets-girl story with periodic violence rending the silent, frozen landscape. The contrast here, both visually and thematically, is striking and effective, and it's probably the most interesting vampire movie I've ever seen.

In many ways, while less subtly stylish, George Romero's Martin (1977) is the male companion piece to Let the Right One In. They're both about adolescence--the boy version naturally featuring an older protagonist. Martin's sexual anxiety manifests in a different way than Eli's, and his condition is ambiguous in a different way, and in the end the films are saying quite different things. But they both focus on individual (arrested) development, with vampirism as the diegetic cause of the arrest. What's unique about Martin's situation is that while he may or may not be a vampire, his reasons for thinking/pretending he is seem to be equal parts sexual (assuming his blood drinking falls into the "fetish" category) and a cry for attention (as exemplified by his anonymous late-night radio talk show calls). Martin makes the rape-fantasy aspect of the vampire myth explicit, and also explores the psychological hold the myth has on us for the simple reason that Martin is under its spell as well--whether or not he's a "real" vampire. Whatever that means.

Eli, by contrast, is quite certainly a vampire, though the mythos has a few surprises for us (my favorite being the consequences of entering "uninvited," one of the most effective scenes in the film). And Eli's problem is not, as we've seen before (most explicitly in the film version of Interview with the Vampire and Kirsten Dunst's dolled-up Claudia), that she's a grown up stuck in a child's body. It's that she's eternally adolescent, even if her soul is old and has witnessed things we cannot even imagine.

Two models of vampiric adolescence

What's incredible about this, and what makes the explicitness of the vampire/puberty connection feel not at all overdone or cliched, is that Eli embodies qualities that could be explained by either her years of vampiric indifference to human life and gore or her developmental immaturity. She is like Oskar in her perceptions of right and wrong. Is it because her morality (that which we would call morality, anyway) has decayed, or because it never developed? She's caught eternally in the self-interest of childhood, though on the cusp enough to develop a strong attachment to a boy she sees herself in. It all seems so obvious when you think about it, but it doesn't play that way in the film, and it's refreshing to see the subject treated without kid gloves. The violence is never out of place--it's the reality of Eli's life, which is (not coincidentally) Oskar's fantasy.

Most arrested-development vampire fantasies capture the body at what many might consider its peak: the (sexually mature) teens or early twenties. For obvious reasons, since these are the sort of people we supposedly like to look at, and the stage at which we are told we should arrest our own aging process. Eli is beautiful, yes, but not the way a woman is. She moves a little awkwardly, very clearly still a girl though her prettiness makes this not a little disturbing, both in the pedophilic sense and a more thematic uncanniness. At the same time, her relationship with Oskar is troublesome in the sense that she is much, much older, but less troublesome than it might be because we get the sense that her mind as well as her body is caught at that stage. In a way, Eli can be made to represent not only our anxieties about our own pubescence and adulthood but that transition in others, and our culture's relationship to that body.

What's so compelling about Let the Right One In, along with the general quality of the filmmaking and acting, is that it doesn't shy away from any of these disturbing elements. Nor does it give us any clear answers. It creates a world, much like ours, where vampires are real but most people don't know about them, and then treats it from a child's point of view, with all the horror (and sweetness) that entails. The two children together are incredible, and the only reason I don't want to say that they transcend the words "vampire film" is because I think every horror movie should be saying something about our psychology or society. Perhaps most of them are, but few of them do so with the curious mix of overtness and restraint as this, and few offer so much food for thought.

Great Expectations (1946)

2009-02-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

Not having read the book (horrible English Lit graduate that I am), and with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia firmly upheld as my Favorite Film of all Time, watching his significantly smaller, black and white, decidedly non-epic literary adaptation of Dickens might have seemed a set up for disappointment. In all honestly, I had been disappointed years ago, watching it on a small screen with perhaps more riding on it than was logical. (Note how I avoided any punning with the title.) But last night’s screening at the Seattle Art Museum, part of a pre-epic David Lean series, changed my mind entirely.

Smaller in scale is may have been, but it covers no less territory. Pip’s life is laid out in stark visual terms, the black and white cinematography allowing for an expressionistic landscape as Lean refuses to adhere to a strictly realistic style. The beginning of the film, dealing with Pip’s childhood in the marshes, is especially effective, full of twisted trees and silhouettes that make escaped convicts just another fixture of his world, like the gibbets Pip passes without comment on the way to the graveyard where his parents are buried. Other sequences, such as the fire at Miss Havisham’s and the older Pip’s fever, are more suggested than seen, Lean combining imaginative filmmaking with a trust in our own imaginations to carry us through.

Lean’s greatest asset in a film like this may be his touch with actors, which includes the young Pip and Estella. Anthony Wager, in fact, is so good as Pip (despite having no prior acting experience) that I missed him when he grew into John Mills. Mills is excellent as well, despite being nearly 40 at the time—a fact which is obvious and distracting. Alec Guinness in his first speaking role as Herbert Pocket, at 32, is closer but doesn’t really look it. Nevertheless, he’s charming as Pip’s friend and fellow lodger, though he disappears from the later part of the film without explanation. Jean Simmons’ Estella is preferable to Valerie Hobson’s, but that may be that the part she’s given to play is more fun. And everyone else in the film, from Miss Havisham to Wemmick’s Aged Parent, are characters, not caricatures, no matter how little screen time they’re given or how ridiculous they are. Lean gives them all a sort of dignity.

Above all, Great Expectations is a good story, told well. Pip’s journey is interesting, as are the class navigations that are never fully resolved—though of course all characters must be returned to their proper places by the end of the film. Though, as I said above, I have not read the novel, it does not feel choppy in the watching of it, and my sense is that it’s a good adaptation of the source material, all things considered. I could certainly watch more of Pip and Pocket’s adventures in London together, and I would have been more satisfied with a less rushed ending for Pip and Estella, but what the crowd at the SAM reminded me was that it is still a surprising and enjoyable film, with innovations of its own (beyond its literary merits) to offer.

A Man for All Seasons (1966)

2009-01-17T20:14:00.001-08:00

The main thing I learned from A Man for All Seasons is that a slew of very talented, very interesting people made a film about a talented, interesting person who I find admirable, and yet whose conscience dictated loyalty to something most of us would not agree with—the corrupt Catholic church which at the time faced reforms both inside and out. This actually does not lessen the impact of the script, written by Robert Bolt, which (like Lawrence of Arabia) uses one man's struggle to illuminate the broader themes Bolt was interested in exploring. Like Lawrence, Thomas More is streamlined even if he remains complex, those facts which do not support Bolt's thesis (More as the ultimate man of conscience) stripped from the action. Like Lawrence, he is one man caught in Great Events of History, who rises to the challenge though not without personal cost. (The use (or misuse) of historical figures for a writer's personal aims should probably be addressed elsewhere; for me, it often depends on the particular use and the skill with which it's been accomplished.)

Also like Lawrence..., a fantastic performance is the centerpiece of the film. Paul Scofield, of impeccable reputation perhaps because of his short list of credits, seems born to play this role. He is steady, likable without being overtly attractive, and possessed of an amazing voice. He embodies Bolt's idea of More perfectly, appearing eternally upright and benevolent as the only man to oppose Henry VIII's breaking an entire country away from the Pope on a whim. One cannot imagine this More condemning heretical Lutherans to the stake, but that's not the point; Bolt's themes are anti-authoritarian and pro-conscience, regardless of whether he believed in More's cause. Indeed in the film, More's response to anti-Catholic sentiments in his prospective son-in-law is to forbid him to marry, but not from seeing, his daughter, until he gets his mind right and becomes merely an anti-corruption Catholic.

Bolt's script is witty and to the point. One thing I admire about Bolt's screenplays is how little fat there is in them, though they rarely feel stagy. The supporting players all do a fine job as well, especially Robert Shaw's Henry, who is endearingly ridiculous as the moody, virile, and self-satisfied king. Orson Welles has a cameo as Cardinal Wolsey, looking corrupt and bloated by power; John Hurt appears as the soon-corrupted Richard Rich, and Wendy Hiller as the steadfast Alice More. My major complaint is about the photography itself; for whatever reason, many scenes end with a fade that seems to come too hard on the heels of the last line and draws attention to itself. Otherwise it is uninspired, and the film is of primary interest for its script and acting, both of which are sufficient cause for seeing it. One should, however, be prepared to listen a great deal. With Scofield speaking, I myself did not find that a tall order in the least.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

2009-01-17T10:05:00.001-08:00

Based on the true story of a bank robbery gone bad in 1972 (“30% true” the actual perpetrator, Sonny Wojtowicz claimed), Dog Day Afternoon is, like Network, one of Sidney Lumet's best films an a fine evocation of media paranoia in the 70's. Taking place during one afternoon and evening during a heist-turned-hostage situation, the film unfolds as the heat builds and the would-be robbers, Sonny and Sal, grow more desperate.

This is my favorite of Al Pacino's performances, and it falls before the Pacino-playing-Pacino era. Sonny is a complicated character, a Vietnam vet who can't get a job, a man with a high-running temper who doesn't really seem to want to hurt anyone, a “misfit” who responds surprisingly well to anyone who pays him attention. Early in the film, the head teller turns on him and asks if he had any kind of plan at all, or just did this on a whim. He falls silent, like a chastised boy.

The teller has a point, and illustrates one of the great things about this movie; the characters emerge as their own people, quirky but not too quirky to be believed. I find Sonny's relationship with the police detective assigned to the situation, played by Charles Durning, to be oddly affecting. Sal, played by John Cazale, is also arresting and reminds me what a pity it was he wasn't around longer. These performances are in keeping with the film, as well, which feels very “real” without going too far in the pseudo-documentary direction and thereby drawing attention to itself. The camera movements are many, but not invasive, and the locations and atmosphere consistently depicted. Larger themes are mentioned without being the point of the film, and this nearly real-time event has been used to illustrate the contradictions of one life without seeming to draw any conclusions about it. Sonny is likable even though he's clearly got problems and you probably don't want to be involved with him, and his problems are never traced back to any one aspect of his character or past. (Criticism has been leveled at the film for sensationalizing certain aspects of the case, and while I can see that in the larger context of Hollywood in the 70s, I don't feel that way about the film's text viewed on its own.)

Dog Day Afternoon is a surprising film in the best way; it takes a worn premise and surprises you without throwing you out of its own world. It's neat without being pat, and its topical without being overly self-conscious of that fact. The overall consistency of tone, acting, and camerawork, too, mark it as a classic and it's especially interesting when viewed in conjunction with Network, a more self-conscious treatment of themes touched upon in this film.

The Boys in the Band (1970)

2009-01-08T12:46:00.001-08:00

The problem with a film like The Boys in the Band, William Friedkin's film adaptation of Mart Crowley's hit off-Broadway play about a birthday party of New York City gay men, is that it looks different depending not only on which political stance you take but what year you're looking at it from. It was gay men, after all, who lined up to see it; it was likewise gay activists who railed against it for years because it traffics in every stereotype known to 70's homosexuality: promiscuity, effeminacy, self-hatred, self-medication, and a tendency for every conversation to be about being gay. Revival in the 90's implies that it has been rehabilitated somewhat, but I actually picked it up because of its prominence in the book and documentary The Celluloid Closet which holds it up as an example of how not to portray homosexual characters.

The truth, for me, is a little more complicated. Crowley, a gay man, wrote this script based on his own experiences and dedicated it to two of his friends who inspired characters in the play. The main character, bitter drunk Michael, is admittedly based on him—a very unflattering self-portrait. So an argument can be made, and I think it's a valid one, that the stereotypes exist for a reason, and that what's wrong with The Boys in the Band is not that it's inaccurate in its portrayal of these gay men, but that in 1970 it was the only Hollywood portrayal, not to be remedied for some time, if it has been at all.

As a film, it betrays its roots on the stage in the dialogue and the fact the action mostly takes place in Michael's apartment. But Friedkin is clever enough in his directing that it doesn't look or feel like a play, just sounds like one. The acting is mostly enjoyable as well, and it's refreshing that all of the characters were played by the actors who created them in New York and don't look like movie stars. Some of the stereotypes are, in fact, uncomfortable to watch. But at the same time, they're a sort of historical document, even if they cannot and should not be taken to speak for the entire homosexual experience, in 1970 or any other time. While a great deal of the plot and conversation is about their homosexual experience, it's still a play about specific people with problems many can relate to. The kind of vitriolic self-hatred displayed in the film would be uncomfortable in any context. In the end, I think the The Boys in the Band is neither as bad as its detractors suggest nor amazing on its own merits. Absent its political baggage, it's a decent film, no more nor less. At this point, going on forty years later, it stands as entertaining but primarily of interest to those curious about the portrayal of homosexuality in cinema. In which context, it is indeed a landmark, of sorts, even if no other filmmakers seemed to want to follow it at the time.

And it's not nearly as offensive as Friedkin's 1980 film about gay culture, Cruising.

Compulsion (1959)

2008-12-21T10:25:00.002-08:00

Compulsion, based on the Leopold/Loeb murder case and directed by Richard Fleischer, is a tight little movie whose performances by Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman and Orson Welles elevate it above some less-talented bit players and conventional surroundings. It was the last film Welles made in Hollywood for some years, and though he enters an hour into it, his performance as a Clarence Darrow-inspired lawyer is unforgettable.

Though the film opens and closes like a rather cheap thriller, and offers some fairly uninspired camera work, it is in fact a successful piece of anti-death penalty propaganda and character study. The story concerns the fascinating personalities of two college students, Steiner (Stockwell) and Straus (Dillman), whose particular psychoses ignite only in the presence of one another. Straus is arrogant, spoiled, and whimsical, while Steiner is serious, obsessed with Nietzsche, and desperate for an "intellect" to attach himself to and be led by. Both have genius IQs and neither seems able to fit into the society of their peers, albeit for different reasons. Stockwell is particularly effective here, anticipating Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in his quiet good looks and social anxiety--not to mention the oddly affecting quality of the unreformable who cannot seem to help himself. Interestingly, the film contains a character who embodies a segment of the audience's misplaced sympathy for the man, a sympathy I share despite recognizing the stupidity of it.

The film makes the interesting choice not to show any of the action; the heinous deeds performed by the pair are either off-camera or aborted when we do see them. According to Frank Brady's biography of Welles, this was done to help the anti-death penalty tenor of the film. But watching it, I was entertained by the way the movie doesn't show us what the boys did, but lets us know immediately that they're the culprits. We're watching the fall-out, and propaganda aside it's effective and arguably more interesting than seeing the violence itself. One certainly cannot accuse the filmmakers of sensationalism, at any rate, and it's likely that this film would have been unable to present the deeds in any other light.

In that same vein is Welles' performance as the lawyer brought in to defend Straus and Steiner. Though his physical presence made it impossible for Welles to disguise himself effectively, his performances are varied and nuanced, ranging from hammy (Trouble in the Glen) to blustering (The Long, Hot Summer) to sympathetically corrupted (Touch of Evil), all in one five-year period. In Compulsion, he's subtle, sweaty and unkempt, quietly delivering a masterpiece of oratory that reminded me of his radio performances. There is no trace of bravura in his performance, though it is a bravura performance.

Knowing that there is a trial at the end of the film should be no deterrent to your enjoyment; there is plenty to be surprised by here, even if most of it is lent by the real-world circumstances that have been adopted (and, I am certain, altered). Even so, the film lays them out in a workmanlike fashion, with touches that raise it above that level to add it to the list of movies I'm surprised I hadn't seen before.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

2008-12-21T10:25:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, a film requires a review to make sense of it, or to examine what the reader, and subsequent viewer, ought to get from the film. But in this case, I'm not certain Aguirre needs sense imposed; it's an experience, a nightmare played out in slow motion. You might not even know you're dreaming until you wake up.

From everything I can find, the making of the film was just as bizarre and nightmarish as the film itself. Part of this was due to the volatile relationship between director Werner Herzog and star Klaus Kinski, and part was undoubtedly due to it being shot with some spontaneity on location in the jungle of Peru. The story concerns a splinter group from Gonzalo Pizarro's search for El Dorado, sent off to find supplies and, if possible, the City of Gold itself. Floating down river in a raft, things quickly go awry for the group of soldiers, native slaves, and two women (the mistress of the leader, Ursua, and Aguirre's daughter). Aguirre, though he refrains from taking control in name, moves among the men like some cross between Richard III and Kurtz, hunched and brooding and seemingly arbitrary in his ever-more-grandiose plans. It's unclear whether Aguirre is the wrath of God, or is experiencing it.

The secret to this film, I think, is in how quietly Herzog deals with events and moments that, in another director's hands, would have been show pieces designed to rope in the audience. Herzog never does; the long takes are anti-climactic but add to the sense of realistic unreality. In the meantime, human nature is on full display, as ugly as Herzog can make it. But he does not let us get too involved. The film is cold, distant, and never exploitative. I was astonished by two more things when I saw it: that I had never seen it before, and that it was made in 1972. It's a gorgeously filmed movie, but requires some patience; while it is never boring, it is not Hollywood's romantic historical adventure. Klaus Kinski's bizarre performance is indescribable, and the film hangs together so well that it is indeed an escape, albeit to a place one does not wish to visit. At least not permanently.

Tomorrow is Forever (1946)/Prince of Foxes (1949)

2008-10-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't noticed, I'm on an Orson Welles kick. Here are some less-than-full reviews so I can get this out of my system, and you won't have to suffer as long.

Tomorrow is Forever (1946)
Tomorrow is Forever is a postwar melodrama Martin Guerre-with-a-twist that was apparently designed to make mothers feel better about having let their sons/husbands go off to war. The story concerns Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles, happily married for about two minutes before Welles ships off in a too-tight uniform to fight in WWI. Welles is blown up, and Colbert gets the fateful telegram informing her of his death.

But Welles is not dead--he's laid up in a hospital, his hands non-functional and his face swathed in bandages denoting terrible disfigurement. He won't tell the doctors his name, for the sentimental reason that he does not want to saddle his wife with this wreck of a man.

Twenty years later, on the eve of another war, Colbert is happily married with two sons. Her husband one day brings home an Austrian chemist, who recognizes Colbert right away because she has not aged at all but is apparently unrecognizable as Welles, disfigured as he is by horn-rimmed glasses and a beard. (Incidentally, the age makeup here is probably one of the better technical accomplishments of the film, for he looks a lot like the older Welles but smaller.) He's also sporting a new name and Austrian accent, as well as a tiny blond Natalie Wood--a girl he's adopted after she saw her family killed in front of her. Conflict erupts first as Colbert's son--a young man Welles is mathematically certain is his own, born after his supposed death--demands to be allowed to join the RAF so he can fight the Nazis, and later as Colbert begins to suspect that Welles is Welles.

There's some interesting tension provided almost entirely by Welles' acting as he attempts to connect with his son, who has no idea his father isn't his father. The unequal conversation is somewhat moving, as is Welles' general situation. However, the film also calls for a lot of ridiculous speechifying about the need to let young men make decisions and the duty of and to mothers and Welles' character's absolute refusal to admit he's her husband--aside from stating that if he were such a man, he would not tell her so, because she's happy and has a family and it's all for the best this way. The plot is artificial and melodramatically patriotic, and Colbert gets rather hysterical except for the parts where I found myself wondering why she wasn't reacting more. However, Welles stands out as the only thing worthy or interesting in the picture, and oddly enough the least heavy-handed.

Prince of Foxes (1949)
This is one of several movies Welles acted in (without directing) in Europe in the late 40s, while intermittently filming Othello whenever and wherever he could. As a film, it's rather dull and uninspired and written apparently by random, and to my eyes Tyrone Power is a wooden and altogether inexplicable leading man.

Welles, however, turns in what might be an overly energetic performance except for the fact that 1) he's playing Cesare Borgia and 2) the rest of the film is so boring you're fairly aching for some scenery chewing and lament the bulk of the time he's not on screen. Welles' slightly campy, overtly smarmy, and ultimately totally charming Borgia is exactly why he gets criticized for "hammy" acting, but I see no more appropriate place for it than here. Then again, what a lot of people call "ham" I think should be more rightly considered "charm" in the right hands--early William Shatner, for instance, is not the man of endless parodic ellipses but does twinkle almost manically with delight a good portion of the time. Don't we all know charismatic people like that? Ah well, it's probably the case that what one finds charming, another will find grating, and vice versa.

Borgia is so smoothly, uncomplicatedly, and happily evil that he might be ridiculous, and perhaps he is. But he's also tremendous fun. Welles' performances reads like a man who's doing everything he can to amuse himself--in a better movie, it might detract, but in this one, it at least means there's something amusing us. (This scene is the centerpiece, really--keep watching to the end, it's worth it.) He also looks surprisingly fit in tights.

Radio Plays: Les Miserables, Dracula, A Tale of Two cities, Treasure Island, Rebecca
Welles' radio dramas--directed, acted, and frequently adapted by him--were a staple of late 30's radio. Welles' innovation was to adapt the material as faithfully as possible using a viewpoint character to tell the story--often voiced by himself. The result was an intimate hour of radio theater that did not always get to the heart of the material but always evoked some of its quality. With his Mercury Players around him, Welles' created seamless dramas with innovative use of sound and narrative that he later translated to film technique.

Briefly, I will say that listening to hour-long truncations of the works I am familiar with work better than those I am not, aside from the annoyances created by the leaving out of key plot points (there's a lot of fat to trim in Dracula, for instance, but leaving out the fact that Rebecca was dying in the eponymous work renders the ending nonsensical), but the attempts are admirable. It cannot be easy to reduce A Tale of Two Cities to such a time frame. Welles plays, respectively, narrator/Valjean, Dr. Seward/Dracula, Sydney Carton/Alexandre Manette, older narrator!Jim Hawkins/John Silver, and Maxim de Winter. He does each admirably, and the works in which he appears as multiple people do not suffer from it, for he disguises his voice well enough to get away with it. His Valjean is particularly memorable (the very well done series focuses on the Valjean/Javert angle, cutting most everything else, and featuring a regrettable performance by Welles' then-wife, Virginia Nicholson, as the older Cosette) as is his de Winter, who ought to have been immortalized on film due to his perfect capturing of both the vulnerable and commanding sides of his nature in a way the other three men I've seen (Olivier, Brett and Dance) have not.

Journey Into Fear (1943)

2008-10-22T15:15:00.001-07:00

Journey Into Fear is an odd hodgepodge of a film, a mashup of elements that may have, under different circumstances, coalesced into more than the sum of its parts. As it is, the potential is clear, the elements themselves promising, but the end result is a bad thriller made entertaining through no fault of its actual subject matter. Written by Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, who also starred; directed by Norman Foster, who didn't read the book; and peopled with Citizen Kane veterans and Welles' touches of atmosphere and mood, the film also bears the scars of Production Code interference.

The story, in as much as it matters, describes an American engineer's (Cotten) involuntary entanglement in foreign intrigue. On a brief business trip to Istanbul with his wife, Howard Graham is soon whisked away to a cabaret, where he meets a mysterious dancer (Dolores del Rio, at the time romantically attached to Welles) and is almost murdered. He then finds himself on a whirlwind journey out of the country, prompted by Welles' police chief Haki and not allowed to see his wife. Graham spends most of the rest of the film on a steamer, with eccentric characters all about, any of whom may be the assassin or a double agent, and one of whom is the dancer, Josette. The film ends with a standard climactic chase involving windows and ledges, and is over almost before you can figure out whose side everyone's on.

With a plot like that, the film's overall quality and enjoyment could go either way. In this case, it goes both—as a film, it's too confusing and quite shallow to be good, though as entertainment there is enough to keep one going, as long as one doesn't think too hard. Cotten plays his typical, absolutely clueless American (think Holly Martins from The Third Man, only far less capable or interesting) but the side characters make up for him. Welles' police chief is larger than life and ambiguously helpful. The denizens of the boat are bizarre characters with quirks who feel the need to corner Cotten to tell him about them. And the assassin, a Mr. Banat (I'm not giving anything away, he's viewed in the first scene), never speaks a line yet exudes a peculiar menace. A short, round little man with glasses, at first glance he seems the least dangerous person in the lineup. But he's heralded by a phonograph playing a scratchy old French song, which sets him up in the first scene and then recurs to great effect on the boat. There's also a scene where the camera lingers on him eating dinner across from Cotten, who is now convinced the man is trying to kill him, and it's somehow both absurd and suspenseful. The film is physically very dark, and mostly shot in the low interiors of the steamer, making it a suitably claustrophobic and noirish film, if not pretty.

The problems with the film are not all due to the writers, cast and crew. Many can be traced to sensitive foreign relations during the war and a desire on the part of the studio and the Hays Office (precursor to the MPAA) to remove anything that might be deemed offensive, either sexually or nationalistically, from the film. Names were changed, ethnicities blurred, and in general confusion about who was who reigned to the point where the director admitted to often not knowing what was going on. But even apart from these problems, it plays like a film that was meant to be quick and fun, not anyone's masterpiece or comment on society. As such, it doesn't fail as much as it might have and it's worth it for thriller fans and Welles completists.

Jane Eyre (1944)

2008-09-29T06:57:00.001-07:00

Jane Eyre is not my favorite adaptation of Jane Eyre, nor is it a strictly faithful one. It relies heavily on its “literary” merits, demonstrated by passages of typed exposition that do not actually appear in the novel (though large parts of the dialogue do). Its 96 minutes necessitate gross cutting of major subplots. And at no time does anyone look remotely like they're outside, in England or anywhere else. But there is much to love about this version, and in many respects is beautifully done.

One of the things I love most about it is, unfortunately, one of its chief problems. That is Orson Welles. As Rochester, Welles throws his considerable weight about Thornfield much as he probably did on set, playing the brooding Byronic heartthrob to about 11. It's not that this is a particularly bad way to play Rochester; there's something rather charming about his own awareness of his complete self-absorption and his dramatic flair matches the high-contrast, gothic atmosphere gorgeously provided by the cinematography and Robert Stevenson's direction. The problem, however, is that Welles so completely dominates the film that it should have been called Edward Rochester. Joan Fontaine's saintly Jane, aside from what might be my favorite young Jane and a few flashes of “spirit” early on, is no match for him as far as our attention is concerned. Despite the similarities, I always considered Jane to be a little more interesting in her own right than the second Mrs. DeWinter, whom Fontaine had played a few years before. Her Jane impresses Rochester with her quiet assertiveness in the face of his pouty ill-temper, then has little to do for the rest of the film but moon about after him despite the fact that Welles seems to make it clear in every scene how much contempt he has for his supposed intended, Blanche Ingram, and how much he values the company of his ward's governess.

Considering the lengths the film goes to to insert a male role model into young Jane's life who teaches her what duty means, this is likely neither Welles' nor Fontaine's fault, but merely the result of my looking back from a more egalitarian position at a film which is perfectly content with a relationship in which one party saves the other through her quietness. I am also likely spoiled by the 2006 miniseries whose longer running time allows for more subtlety and whose actors are able to convey a more complex and motivated relationship.

A few other things mar the film: Welles sounds like the jaded middle-aged man Rochester should be, but due to pressure to present the moviegoing public with a leading man, looks all of his 29 years. The narration informing us that Rochester is a nice man and everything will be okay is completely at odds with the operatic shadows and Bernard Herrmann's score, and it feels as though it was inserted for fear the too-short courting period wouldn't earn the relationship we're supposed to see blossoming between them. But long exchanges between them remain intact, Welles and Fontaine perform admirably among some absolutely gorgeous black and white scenery, and overall it is a satisfying movie, albeit probably not as much for the purist.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

2008-09-29T06:55:00.000-07:00

After Citizen Kane failed to reach audiences (for various reasons) in 1941, Orson Welles set out to make an even better film. Thus began the tortured pattern of Welles’ relationship with Hollywood, as he negotiated away final cut, had forty minutes removed without his consent, and was in South America on another project as an upbeat ending was tacked on. The film was The Magificent Ambersons, and as charming and tight a family drama as it remains, one cannot help but wonder what it would have been if it had remained in his hands.

The film concerns the fortunes of the Amberson family, large fish in the small pond of Indianapolis that is getting bigger with every new road and automobile. It takes place in the decades around the turn of the last century, when ladies wore velvet and silk and a foolish, intoxicated mistake on the part of a young man could get him jilted and his girlfriend married off to a more sensible fellow. Cut to years later, when Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotton) returns no longer a foolish young man but a successful automobile manufacturer with attractive young daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter) in tow. Isabel Anderson Minafer (Dolores Costello), her husband Wilbur, and utterly spoiled son George (Tim Holt) are still in town, still Ambersons, and unaware that everything is about to change.

The film’s message about industrialization and the march of progress is decidedly ambiguous, but more to the point are the interpersonal relationshps that are revealed among this old guard family through their renewed relationship with Morgan and his daughter and the diminishment of their importance. And given that at the present time one is looking back at a period film directed in 1941, it’s surprising how delightful, unstilted, and punchy the film is. The dialogue (adapted by Welles from a Booth Tarkington novel) is snappy and delivered in a naturalistic fashion, often overlapping (a particular favorite is George’s frequent disgusted rendering of “oh my gosh!”). The camera moves about the Amberson mansion like another character, frequently in long tracking shots or playing with the characters’ positions through different levels of the house. Welles’ narration (only his voice appears) is sometimes interruptive but generally spot-on, and Agnes Moorehead’s Aunt Fanny is a complex (if shrill) portrait of an unmarried woman past her prime. While some of the technique looks old-fashioned to our eyes, other aspects of the cinematography and directing are arresting and fresh, and overall it’s a neat piece of filmmaking that is, amazingly, unavailable on DVD in this country.

Financial troubles dogged Orson Welles throughout his life, most likely because he was a man who wanted to go his own way yet chose a medium that requires major backing to produce. While no one will ever know if the original cut was better (even he thought it needed some trimming, but RKO took control and all the cut footage was destroyed “to save space” before Welles could get his hands on it) the film as it exists bears the scars in the holes in plot that make some of it hard to follow. Watching it now, it seems clear to me that Welles (as far as movies were concerned) should have lived later, and it's probably a testament to his directing (and Stanley Cortez's cinematography) that even the studio version holds up as well as it does.

The Dark Knight (2008)

2008-07-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

When it comes right down to it, the superhero as a concept is a troublesome being. Useful when s/he's under control, a benevolent para-law enforcement agent, exercising great responsibility over their great power. But in the end, we're still dealing with a group of people outside the law because there are no laws which can touch them, and precisely there to combat those villains the same laws can't touch either. Superman, for instance, is tolerated because everyone knows he's a boy scout who will do no wrong. But isn't it taking a lot on faith to assume that this godlike being isn't going to figure out that we're all inferior?

The Dark Knight takes a lot on faith as well, but the fact that the film is about the murky relationship between the public good (as dictated by those in the know) and ethics and vigilantism and chaos says a lot. Batman is still the hero, but it is acknowledged that he may be the sort of hero no one can own up to, that may well be morally reprehensible, that may in fact be contributing to the lawless streets of Gotham City. As in the Arkham Asylum graphic novel and the animated series episode which put Batman on trial for creating Arkham's denizens, the film is aware that there's a problem here, even as it shores up Batman's continued necessity in a diseased world.

While he'd most likely disown both, I can't help but observe that Nietzsche inspired both Superman and Hitler.

For a summer action movie, The Dark Knight is pretty self-aware and addresses some tough issues. It's basically action (which it is completely worth taking advantage of the IMAX experience to enjoy) with archetypes, and while it would be nice to have something which could accomplish that with actual characters, I think that's asking a lot of a corporate property summer blockbuster like this. Which is to say, this movie succeeds far more than I felt I had any right to expect from a franchise, and that made swallowing some of its inadequacies a lot easier. There were the requisite technological absurdities (an expansion of the “enhance!” trope you might be familiar with from any number of cop shows), a silly Batman voice, and some far-fetched physical feats. But then there was also (do I even have to say it?) Heath Ledger's Joker.

Praise has already been heaped, and it's well-deserved. This was not a casting decision I'd ever have expected, and Ledger had pleaded his case to director/co-writer Christopher Nolan before the script was even written. This is the scariest Joker I have ever seen (though the effect was not as acute on second viewing) and while it's certainly possible to prefer the more lighthearted incarnations (Mark Hamill's in the Animated Series should be classic) this reinterpretation is an achievement, taking the character to a place that is not only unique but integral to the film. This Joker and Batman are two sides of the same coin, which makes the inclusion of the Harvey Dent plotline, who is both sides of the coin at once, especially relevant. Thematically, the nearly unbelievable self-awareness of the Joker (and his lack of an origin story) culminate in his abuse of Dent.

The Joker's admission that he is an archetype, an agent of chaos, along with Bruce Wayne's inability to define just what the Batman is, leaves the film with an ambiguity that keeps both the legend of the superhero and his troubling ethical legacy intact in a way that, I believe, finally serves the material well. Complaints about its “relentless sadism” and moral deficits miss the point; if you're disturbed by a Batman which admits there's something wrong here, you should probably stick with the fully deputized, establishment, daylight Batman and Robin of the Adam West series. Superheroes are a fantasy which, when translated into the real world, starts to look a lot like fascism.

This movie is not perfect, nor did it change my life. But far more than its predecessor, Batman Begins, it addresses the inherent issues that have always plagued this character, and for that I am overjoyed.

Juno (2007)

2008-06-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

Juno

Like most of my reviews, this one is behind the times. Even more so, I think, because of the critical reception this film got and the accusations of “backlash” one might feel inclined to make towards what I am about to say.

I did not like Juno.

For those who haven't seen the poster, Juno is about the eponymous pregnant teenager (played by Ellen Page) and her decision to keep her baby long enough to give it up for adoption. A lot of talk has circled around whether this makes the film pro-choice or pro-life, and I'm not going to touch that because I don't think that's especially relevant. (I will say, however, that the string of recent “unwanted pregnancy” comedies in which no one seriously entertains the thought of abortion may be telling, but that's an issue for another day.) This is not my problem with the film, even if the ultimate abortion comedy will always be Citizen Ruth.

My problem with the film is that I felt that every single choice made in it, from slangy dialogue to cartoon opening to Cat Power was designed to take every hipster in the audience by the shoulders and say, “This film is for you, buddy. See what I did there? Those Chuck Taylors? That Thundercats reference? Don't you feel validated, now?”

The problem is, none of it was done very well. The references were off, and most of them didn't fit the characters. Apart from everyone talking the same artificial way, they often spoke without getting their facts straight. If Juno is such an old school punk aficionado, why is all the music Belle and Sebastian and Moldy Peaches? Why does a supposedly Japanese comic open on the right? Why in the world would Juno yell “Thundercats are go” when that was the Thunderbirds catchphrase?

It's “Thundercats, HO!” For the record.

Because, you see, you could put me in that nebulous hipster category no one owns up to. I wear Converse and (fake) vintage tees. I have the glasses, and a messenger bag, and every Belle and Sebastian CD, and I got all the references. That was exactly why I felt coddled by this film. People like me, people between the ages of Juno and Mark, are supposed to relate to both of them. Juno's old for her age, and Mark's young, and from that I think we're supposed to feel hip that 1) we can relate to teenagers and 2) yuppie parents can be hip, too.

This isn't to say I don't want films that speak to the ironic pop-culture saturated downwardly mobile geek I know I am. But I want it done right. From what I've read of interviews with the filmmakers, the music, color scheme and accessories were all carefully thought out, which highlights the film's self-conscious indie-incompetence and makes it of a piece with the preponderance of songs on the soundtrack that consist of lists of things sung in a monotone. Is there anyone in this movie who isn't a collection of quirks?

All that aside, and despite the vitriol, I didn't hate Juno. But the things I liked about it—Ellen Page in a hoodie, some of the music including the Belle and Sebastian song that always makes me cry, the curious and often untouched reality of a young girl not understanding her appeal to an older man—were sandwiched between so many appeals to my quirky sensibilities that I felt manipulated. The line is difficult to draw, but I think it lies between genuine characters portrayed with pop-culture savvy and pop-culture savvy (or attempts at such) portrayed as characters. And this might have been moot, had I walked into the film without the burden of Oscar noms weighing on it. As a small film, it would have passed muster as an afternoon's entertainment and provided flares of unexpected delight. But such is hype.

Innocence (2004)

2008-04-18T14:46:00.001-07:00

Rarely has ambiguity been so gorgeous. Innocence is, perhaps predictably, a French film made by people who, not so predictably, like David Lynch. Or at least the visual/sonic atmosphere of David Lynch. The film takes place almost entirely at a mysterious, sylvan school where girls from about 6 years old to puberty are secluded until release, like the butterflies so often evoked. The story, such as it is, opens with a new arrival being delivered in a coffin, greeted by the other girls, and inducted into their color-coded system: in each house, the youngest girl wears the red ribbons, the next youngest orange, and so on up. The adults seem to be there to serve and teach the girls; no punishments are meted, but an enormous stone wall blocks the outside from view.

Viewers expecting all this to coalesce into a narrative will be disappointed. It's more a study, and it might be unbearable if it were not one of the most beautifully photographed and sound designed films I've ever seen. Everything about it is aesthetically perfect, and yet, despite a suggestive quote and Lolita-like photo of a girl's legs on the DVD cover, non-exploitative. I was prepared for the rampant sexualization of the prepubescent girls (remembering Brooke Shields in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby) but amazingly, the camera is merely an observer, not a voyeur. This phenomenon is highlighted during an episode in which the girls are being watched, the contrast striking simply because the audience, for once, is not implicated. The difference is subtle, but plain, and that is an accomplishment in itself.

It's not that the school holds no threat, or that this idyllic life should be read as genuinely utopic. I kept waiting for the secret that would reveal the school for what it was, and while there were dark hints it never happened: the sinister feeling of the woods after dark, the strange concentration of nymph-like, but not nymphet, children, was chilling enough, not because of what lay outside the walls. My conclusion, for the film holds none, is that the state of innocence is sinister in itself, completely apart from what lies in store for the innocent once she is exposed to the real world. Perhaps it is not reality we should fear, but the attractive/creepy connotations of the blithe, childlike state. (I can see many other possibilities here, some more concrete than others, but prefer the reading I mention.)

Whatever it is, unless you are willing to put in two hours for a payoff as unstructured as this, you will not enjoy the film. As narrative, which is what we all expect, it fails entirely and in fact judged on those merits has major structural problems. As a meditation, a visual event, it is breathtaking, and if you are willing to ask something different from your movie watching experience you should attempt to find your own meaning. And let me know.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

2008-02-05T05:47:00.001-08:00

For most of Hollywood's output, the task of director falls to someone perhaps more aptly described as Entertainer, someone whose job it is to string together the elements of story into something a wide audience will enjoy. But There Will Be Blood reminds us of the great joy that can be had when a Director strings together these elements in service of the story first, audience to follow as they will.

I have enjoyed P. T. Anderson's previous films, but a certain perceived self-consciousness in his style kept me removed from them emotionally. Blood is devoid of many of his quirks which, enjoyable as they are, in their absence give this particular film a leaner, more “classic” style. Gone is the huge cast, the interweaving stories, the intertextual popular soundtrack. This is the story of one man, and a sociopath at that, playing unerringly by Daniel Day Lewis. (The one complaint I have about Lewis is that his cinematic reclusiveness, while perhaps refreshing in the sense that he is not overexposed, may in fact have had the same effect by overdetermining his presence in any film he's in.)

The cleanly-told story find parallels in Citizen Kane, Kane's inspiration Hurst, and the story of the West's activities in the Middle East. There's a moment where Plainview (Lewis) sells a small town (whose land is good for virtually nothing but goat-herding and oil) on his schemes by telling them that he's going to bring them education and roads, and I could not help but add “democracy” to his litany. Plainview is also, in a sense, the Devil, a view enforced by what I think is the most significant single shot in the film: a long take of Plainview's face, streaked with oil and blending into the black night behind him, as he watches his own derrick burn. The flames dance in his eyes as he seems to revel in the destruction even as it represents a loss, both financial and personal.

The film, as the above indicates, is beautifully shot. Nothing distracts from the desolate, 100 year old landscape. The soundtrack is bizarre and brilliant, and its seamless construction makes it a pity that, because it is not entirely original music, it cannot get Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead) nominated for an Oscar. The acting, too, is fantastic; Lewis is the obvious one here, but the revelation is Paul Dano as brothers Paul and Eli in a performance so committed and skillful it makes me wonder what the film would have been like without him, as it almost was. There are some child actors who do amazing jobs here as well, especially a baby who, in one long take on a train with Lewis, acts so perfectly I had to wonder if it was a puppet or something.

Like his other films, There Will Be Blood is about people it is difficult, if not impossible, to like, but Anderson pulls it off. I would argue that this one offers what I hope is a new era for him as a director, in which he will continue to succeed at doing this without the quirks which may have mitigated audience reaction in his previous films. It is starker than Magnolia or Boogie Nights, even if it is more beautiful. Films like this are expensive and time consuming to make, which is a pity, since it really makes me wonder what cinema might look like if more actual Directors were involved.

Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

2007-12-22T09:54:00.000-08:00

As one of those people who knows all the words to Sondheim’s 1979 musical, I was certain to hate the movie, even as I secretly hoped for the opposite. I had heard clips of Johnny Depp singing and it had incensed me, and I threw myself into repeated listens to the Len Cariou original cast recording. “Why are they compromising on voice?” I asked anyone who would listen. “It’s a musical!”

Because, as I found out last night, the mechanics of Depp’s vocal cords make no difference when a movie is this beautiful. I hardly noticed the little deficiencies of his and Helena Bonham Carter’s instruments in the thrill of seeing a movie of a musical I loved and loving it, too.

Burton’s London is a comic book inhabited by his personal avatars (Carter and Depp) looking strangely attractive despite their deathly pallor and moral decrepitude. For those who don’t know, Sweeney Todd concerns the return and revenge of a mild-mannered barber turned to bloodthirstiness by the machinations of a lustful judge, who sent him away on a trumped-up charge to gain access to Todd’s wife. He now holds Todd’s daughter, Johanna, in his house, and may have designs on her as well. Todd’s neighbor, Mrs. Lovett (Carter), is an unsuccessful meat pie seller who remembers Todd and aligns herself with him in a scheme to kill the judge and revitalize her pie shop. Oh, and they sing.

For those who fear the musical part, I should inform you that the music and lyrics are significantly darker than anything you’ve seen on screen. It’s not Mary Poppins up here. One song cut from the film includes the line “Lift your razor high, Sweeney/Hear it singing, ‘Yes!’/Sink it in the rosy skin/Of righteousness,” and Burton doesn’t shy from demonstrating what happens when you do so. Gallons of red blood suffuse the dim landscape of blacks, whites and blues. The design rides a fine line between realism and Burton’s characteristic style—very successfully, in my opinion. The supporting cast is excellent, young Johanna resembling a blonde Christina Ricci and Alan Rickman deliciously lecherous as Judge Turpin. Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli the rival barber is outrageously perfect as well.

What works about Sweeney Todd despite my prior reservations is that the actors on screen are arresting, no matter how they sound. The music alone could support worse, and the experience of watching Depp mitigates my problems with his singing. I wouldn’t, couldn’t listen to this soundtrack on its own. But in the course of the film I hardly noticed. Likewise the numerous cut songs, some of them among my favorites—I will allow it in the interest of finally seeing a good movie made of a musical I like. And this is a good movie, surprisingly so in my opinion. And I think that if musical geeks like me can get around our vocal dubiousness, non-musical fans might be able to get over their resistance to people singing their plans to one another. It won’t be all things to all people, but it’s an amazing accomplishment and I, for one, am happy to have been proven wrong.

I Am Legend (2007)

2007-12-21T17:25:00.001-08:00

Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella I Am Legend is one of the best stories I’ve read recently. It concerns the last man in a post-apocalyptic world which has been decimated by a vampire-like infection, but it deals with the details of his extraordinary yet mundane existence in such a gripping fashion I didn’t want it to end. So I was cautious about the new film version. I steeled myself for the changes, and consoled myself with the fact that the trailer looked good, even if it didn’t look like the book. That was fine, I thought. The transfer between mediums can excuse a lot.

The extra background info, for instance, might be a consideration for Hollywood audiences who don’t want to jump right into the post-apocalypse trope. Robert Neville’s dog, Sam(antha), gives Will Smith something to act against, essential if we’re to know him without the benefit of narration. And New York City in ruins is inherently interesting. The film could certainly have Hollywoodized things more than they did. Essentially, we watch a surprisingly good Smith wander around the city with his dog, stuck in an endless loop of video “rentals,” zombie-hunting and a futile search for a cure. He is the only one left, but he cannot give up. Because what else would he do? It is only when someone else does show up that we see how damaged Neville really is; how far apart he has grown from “humanity,” just like the creatures he hunts. What’s entertaining about the film (and book) are the little details of execution; Neville’s daily life, his rituals, the archived television broadcasts and clipped newspaper articles. Though I was disappointed to see that Hairspray is still on Broadway in 2009.

Now, this all sounds like I’m pretty happy with the film. And I was, until about ¾ of the way through. The minute Neville shouts that there is no God, that we did this to ourselves, I knew that the film was going to have to prove him wrong—no mainstream movie in America could get away with that sort of sentiment unpunished. Indeed, the film moves from being understandably updated from the book to being a complete repudiation of Matheson’s essential, and essentially dark, point. Neville is not a legend because he is a beacon of hope to guide humanity into some promised land; he is a legend to the inhuman creatures who seek to wipe him out. Hollywood has, for once, preserved enough of the original to make my sense of betrayal that much greater.

Because for an hour, I thought someone had gotten something right. And that little beacon of hope turned out to be less real than that which Neville offers humanity. It’s almost better when I know they’ve only stolen the title and don’t have to see the travesty.

The Intruder (1962)

2007-12-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

In 1962, b-movie mogul and directorial impresario Roger Corman made a black and white “problem film” about, well... black and white. It is notable for two reasons: it tackled the tricky subject of a small town's reluctant school integration, and it starred one William Shatner.

Yes. That William Shatner.

The “intruder” of the title is double—the “intrusion” of the African American into white society (or at least high school) and the devilish Northerner who comes to rile the townsfolk over what would otherwise be a somewhat uncomfortable non-issue, like a racist Harold Hill. (Interestingly, the film version of The Music Man was released the same year, but it's amazing how blunt and “modern” this one is in comparison.) Shatner arrives with no other apparent motive than to stir additional discord. He is eventually thwarted, not by man's innate goodness but by the unpredictable nature of the mob; the would-be orchestrator becomes the naïve bystander as things hurtle out of control.

But let's cut to the chase, shall we? The only reason you're still reading this—the only reason I watched the movie, which is decent but unremarkable—is to see how Shatner fared, pre-Kirk. Well friends, let me tell you--

He is amazing.

Shatner's craft is finely honed even at this early stage of the game, and his vocal delivery is just fantastic. There are nuances here that denote careful thought and sharp instinct. He's riveting. And he's not Kirk, either; Shatner's an actor, and between this and Kirk it should be obvious that he didn't start playing “himself” until he was forced to by virtue of the public not allowing him to disappear into anyone else. Early Shatner, I'd say up until season 3 of Star Trek, is a marvel and I think he could have been huge as a “serious” actor. The oft-parodied pauses and grimaces aren't absent in his early work, but they're subtle and well-placed. They have weight and meaning. And he's got an animal magnetism which works equally well as the immoral seducer and the wily captain. He's built like an all-American cornfed boy but there's a crafty, almost feminine charm which maybe has to do with him being Canadian. I'm not sure.

I'm on the edge of fangirling here, if I haven't jumped over it already. But I'm not sure I care, after that performance. I am sold. And if you have any curiosity about what “might have been,” if you've ever mocked Shatner, go get this movie. I dare you to laugh.

The Golden Compass (2007)

2007-12-13T13:12:00.000-08:00

I have a bad habit of reading books just before seeing the movies they’re made in to. It’s the perfect formula for disliking something—the comparison is almost never flattering. In the case of The Golden Compass, I hadn’t been blown away by the first book in the trilogy. Even so, the film is a mishmash of prettily illustrated Cliffs Notes; interesting as a companion, but incapable of standing on its own.

In this super-compressed narrative which avoids any hint of subtly, we are informed straightaway of all the exciting things about Philip Pullman’s new world that, in the books, we were forced to learn as we went. There are parallel worlds, and in one particular world, much like ours but without a Hindenburg disaster, humans’ souls are external, animal-shaped daemons. The ruling power of this world, the Magisterium, is concerned about the fact that when children grow up and become dirty and wicked, their daemons “settle” into a particular form; and a mysterious invisible particle called Dust collects around them. At the center of a growing storm is Lyra, an orphan who, as played by Dakota Blue Richards, is the brightest spot in this film. She is worth the whole thing; she’s adorable and yet maintains the requisite hardness the inveterate survivor and liar needs. She’s more likable than in the book, but she has to be, to hold the scattered film together.

Lyra’s adventures are certainly interesting, but they seem haphazard, even for a children’s fantasy epic. Plot points turn up at convenient times, like an engine. We don’t ask how the train got here; we just get on and off at the right stops. And just in case we notice some lack of cohesion to the script, the score is one of the most blatantly manipulative pieces of film music I’ve ever heard. It sounds as if it’s been cobbled together from a hundred previous films via a blueprint for just what heightened emotion we’re supposed to feel when; and most offensively, the Tartar armies are always accompanied by a throat-singing sound, I suppose to heighten their Otherness. And like most primarily-CG films, there are numerous unnecessary “helicopter” shots and expansive camera sweeps. Because they can. The CG itself is fairly good, especially with the main characters, but the background animals couldn’t help but remind me of dogs from the Sims2 computer game in the way they moved.

Incidentally, I had become concerned upon hearing reviews that the film attempted to “secularize” the Magisterium, but I saw little evidence of this on screen. It is clearly a Christian organization; their headquarters, in one town, is clearly a Greek Orthodox Church (which gets smashed to bits). There is no overt naming of the Magisterium as a religious organization, but there is no other explanation for things like the repeated use of the word “heresy.” Controversy about what it’s saying about religion may reign as far as I’m concerned; what I don’t think can be debated is whether it is saying something.

There is definitely an audience who will thrill to the concepts introduced here, which are enthralling. But what is good in the movie is present in the book. That doesn’t make enjoying the movie a bad thing, and there is enough of interest here to make it not a complete waste of time. But regarded as a movie rather than a spectacle, it fails. And there are bigger spectacles out there; albeit none with souls in the form of talking ferrets.

Sunshine (2007)

2007-09-22T20:16:00.001-07:00

If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you’ll have heard me rant about the dearth of decent science fiction film. There are lots of different kinds of science fiction novels; even television is doing okay. But how many movies are about people in extreme situations, rather than natural disasters or big aliens or nifty lasers? I still maintain that 28 Days Later is one of the best science fiction films of recent years, and luckily for me Danny Boyle is back with Sunshine.

It’s more “classically” science fiction, in the sense that I’m not going to get any arguments this time about whether it’s scifi or zombies. The plot is, in fact, almost absurdly simple: seven astronauts and scientists are traveling towards the sun with a payload that (the film remains cleverly vague about the details, which is always better than trying to blind us with lots of jargon) will reignite the dying star and temporarily relieve the permanent winter of the Earth. As always when you put humans in a small space with no chance of rescue, stuff happens. Bad stuff. There’s a failed mission from seven years ago! There’s a fire! There’s human error! And there’s a strange turn towards horror in the last act, which in my opinion was fairly unnecessary.

But that’s not really what you’re watching. What you’re watching is basically a feature-length exploration of Man’s timeless urge to look directly into the sun, despite certain destruction. Eyes abound here, from Cillian Murphy’s icy blues, to the psychologist’s shades surrounded by skin fried from his obsessive observation, to the round heat-shields of the ship itself, designed to stare constantly because blinking or looking away will spell death for the crew.

Of course there’s madness, and there’s a race against time. And it’s all artfully done, with a clear directorial hand. It’s not perfect, but it is impressive. Best of all, it’s thoughtful and entertaining without being obtuse, and the Transformers and War of the Worlds-style summer blockbuster has a viable alternative.

Sicko (2007)

2007-09-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

My biggest problem with Michael Moore Is that I agree with him. In principle. It is one thing to denounce the propaganda of the other side; a much more disagreeable task to have to decry the means being used to further the ends you support.

But perhaps this is where we should be especially vigilant, lest our efforts be put to use against us—are you listening, Mr. Moore?

I thought not.

Sicko is everything the anti-universal healthcare side could wish for. Over the years, Moore has only gotten more anecdotal and polemical with his films until we are faced with two hours of stories told by crying Americans and shiny, bouncy ex-pats taking advantage of their country of choice. It's not that I think he lied, necessary. You don't have to. But he doesn't tell the whole truth, either, or give sources or statistics. The issue of healthcare can stand the harsh light of reality. This is a murky, manipulative film that only provides ammunition against the very position it takes. And Moore's self-congratulatory "man of the people" shtick is wearing thin; cutting to your own reaction shot when an interviewee mentions "educated, confident" Americans, or running a boatload of 9/11 workers to Cuba to give that country some free publicity, is not clever.

This country needs health care reform, and making a film about it is commendable. But we already know it's an issue; what it needs now is a debate. With facts, comparisons, and valid (i.e. systematic and not anecdotal) evidence. How can you sit and listen to a man tell us that true democracy requires an informed populace and then refuse to offer anything approaching a balanced look at the issue? If you don't want us to be stupid, treat us like we're rational people and inform us. Because you're not convincing anyone smart enough to see the holes in your argument, and the people already on your side don't want to be seen next to you.

Hannibal Rising (2007)

2007-06-07T20:57:00.000-07:00

The latest, and hopefully last, of the Hannibal Lecter movies is a triumph of marketing over character. Ever since The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris has made a career of making over his accidentally ambiguous villain, rendered fascinating primarily by Anthony Hopkins’ performance and chemistry with Jodie Foster, into a stale anti-hero. What was a playful subtext in Lambs became ridiculously overt in Hannibal and starkly and uninterestingly un-mythologized in Hannibal Rising.

The film is constructed of moments which tease the audience about the mature killer to come; knowledge, and indeed some amount of worship, is required to make this film make sense. Not that it’s terribly complicated: war scavengers in WWII Lithuania eat his sister and he grows up into a sadistic cannibal. Naturally. Unfortunately, the film only uses this premise as license to be sadistic itself, rather than actually attempt to create a plausible backstory. And perhaps it is impossible, not to mention unadvisable, to try to explain a monster.

And sadistic the film is, not because it deals in cannibalism or revenge or gore, but because it does so gleefully, like Hannibal himself. And perhaps that’s why the film takes him as its hero—if we are to be implicated along with him, we will likewise be exonerated. The movie’s message is that Mankind did this to a boy who grew up to dish it back to Mankind; and the path that Hannibal’s later life follows does nothing to counter this view or tarnish his tragic anti-hero image.

My contention is not that Hannibal is not an interesting character, or is unworthy of our consideration as representative of something we, as a society, find endlessly fascinating. But Hannibal Rising deprives the character of his mystery, and has nothing on the original. It is one thing, after all, to read against the grain and find something attractive or heroic in the bad guy’s subtext, and quite another to take the text and shine all the ambiguity, all the fun of transgressive viewing, out of it. And for “transgressive,” read “fun.”

Hannibal Lecter, the character, is no fan of subtlety when it comes to his crimes. But in his tastes, he is a gourmet, and I can’t help but think he’d hate this movie. Then again, he likes to eat brains, so maybe he shouldn’t be our guide in these things. But it is altogether a different meal from Silence of the Lambs, and the fact that it is meant to be does not, in my opinion, excuse it. I didn’t want Silence of the Lambs Redux, but I’d have been much happier leaving it as my sole entrée into the mind of this particular killer.

Knocked Up (2006)

2007-06-07T18:50:00.001-07:00

I have never wanted to have children. Knocked Up, despite having a trajectory that lends it a sort of family values sheen, only solidified that decision. Because really: if you (hot blonde-type Katherine Heigl with your lucrative onscreen career at E!) accidentally got preggers during a drunken one-night-stand with a jobless pot-smoking overweight sarcastic guy with constant 3-day stubble, wouldn’t you do your damndest to fold him into your family unit?

Of course, it’s a movie, and the guy’s Seth Rogan (from Freaks and Geeks), and even though you know you belong to a different rung of the dating ladder you’re going to give his deadpan sardonic charm a fair shot. Which is what is kind of great about this movie—it doesn’t pretend Rogan’s a heartthrob, but he is the leading man. That, in itself, is enough to make me like the film on principle. Like me, Judd Apatow (who worked with Rogan on the aforementioned show and cast him in The 40 Year Old Virgin) watched him and decided he should be used more. Thanks goodness, too; this movie basically expands on the best bits from Apatow’s previous film—Rogan and friends sitting around bullshitting about pop culture—and leaves out the more predictable humor and societal unease about sexuality.

Which isn’t to say the movie’s not conventional, or edgy, or vulgar, or sweet. It’s all of those things, with a cherry of dubious family stability on top. Abortion’s not really an option, but neither are we told this experiment in cross-clique breeding is going to be successful. The film’s model of marriage—Heigl’s sister and her husband, played by Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann and my personal favorite Paul Rudd—is a tar pit of frustration and mutual mistrust and snark. Both of the parents-to-be make mistakes, but also make compromises. Apatow says he wants to make films that look more or less like real life, and Rogan’s non-acting style perfectly suits it. Romantic comedies are rarely this raw or this funny, and that might be because as in life, romance gets the short end of the stick. Maybe that’s why it’s possible for people to walk away from it with completely opposing designs towards procreation, as many of my female friends prove; you come out with what you brought in, but with your stomach sore from laughing.

300 (2007)

2007-05-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

The tempest in a teapot that has been the critical reaction to 300 has, as yet, been absent my voice. On the basis of the trailers and the graphic novel on which the film is based, I had a sense that it dealt in a philosophy of brutality and stark notions of good and evil. I was cautioned, however, against making my mind up before seeing the entire film. I hope that I went into it, finally, without this review already written in my head; doubtless those who disagree will believe that my conclusions were reached long before the evidence had been gathered.

300 is an ahistorical account of King Leonidas’ last stand against Xerxes and the Persian army. His 300 soldiers, supplemented by other city-states of Greece, seek glory rather than victory; an ideological battle for freedom and the potential represented by nascent Greek culture. These “free men” stand against Xerxes’ army of “slaves,” nevermind that the Greeks were no more above slavery than any other civilization—in fact, the Spartans’ own slaves outnumbered them three to one. They call the Athenians “boy lovers,” though Sparta was no stranger to the sexual mentoring of young men. Above all, the society that Leonidas commands seems like more of a military state topped with corrupt politicians and priests than a precursor to democracy; hardly a model from which cries of freedom ring.

Of course, it is only a movie. And it’s an active one, which recreates the book in great detail. Like Sin City (though aesthetically less pleasing to me), it is a graphic novel brought to life, and that is an interesting achievement. Great care was taken in this process, and that is impressive. To me, the art of the book is far more beautiful than the film managed to be, but that is a matter of personal taste. And while the color palate was acceptable, and the acting decent, I found the film ugly in its clumsy dialogue, awkward political subplot and laughable fake wolf. Without the controversy, I would probably dismiss it out of hand, as neither worth seeing for its brief pleasures or worth arguing about its numerous flaws.

But while it is too silly to take seriously as a socio-political statement about anything, it does not follow that the film should be immune from speculation about what cultural currents run beneath it. And there is much in 300 to worry me; so much so that I can’t understand how it could be missed. Anyone who is not a Spartan—or more specifically, is not Spartan by a very narrow definition of the word—is ugly, black, or effeminately gay (Leonidas is, by the way, Scottish). Those who look like monsters will act like monsters; those who look like Europeans may be worth trusting. Even the argument that Stelios and Astinos’ homosocial bond may be read as homoerotic does not lesson the homophobia inherent in portraying Xerxes as a beautiful and androgynous sexual predator. Homophobia can just as easily operate by informing us which kind of social transactions are acceptable and which are not. It is an old belief that men in homosexual situations are only men as long as they play a “man’s” role.

None of this means that anyone connected with the film was trying to make a political statement. Neither does it mean that the movie should not have been made in whatever manner they chose, or that audiences shouldn’t enjoy it for its visceral appeal. But the bloodthirsty imagery and the heroic golden light bathing the Spartans tells me that we are meant to side with them; meant to consider their cause worthy, their glory earned. We may not be able to say that any film is a concrete philosophical statement; but I don’t see how 300 can be read as free of any troubling social commentary.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

2007-05-23T22:15:00.001-07:00

The third installment in the Spider-Man movie franchise is not the pinnacle of moviemaking. It’s not even the apex of superhero cinema. It’s a film rife with coincidence and absurdly simplistic morality, made by people who want to tell us the world is full of shades of grey but who can’t get over the ease of black and white. So when I tell you I loved it, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t sitting there shrugging my shoulders at its rampant stupidity.

But I loved it.

Let me recap: I hated 1. I thought it was cartoonish and silly. 2, somehow, opened up before me as an exploration of the superhero as normal guy; everything I’ve always wanted from a comic book. I’ve always been far more interested in how the heroes’ alter egos live with themselves than in watching them leap tall buildings in a single bound. The second film was a lovely exposition along that theme, with a tastefully relevant villain.

For the third film, it seems that someone decided that it wasn’t enough to play with Peter and MJ’s relationship; not enough to throw Parker’s darker “black Spider-man” at him; not enough to have Harry-son-of-Green Goblin lose his memory, find it again, and come after Peter multiple times; not enough to include not one but two mutant villains; but they all had to be interconnected somehow in a ridiculous, excuse the expression, web of association and happenstance. Oh, and dancing. The movie asks us to believe far too much in its too long 141 minutes; convenience is par for the course in American comics, but played out monthly it’s probably easier to swallow.

At the same time, I ate every bit, and would have sat for more. Because the things I loved about the second film—the missed opportunities, adolescent selfishness and misunderstanding, growing up and apart from friends; with special powers, of course—they were still there. They were hidden in the new effects (mostly occurring at night, which they’ve finally figured out masks much sin) and the loaded (and sometimes cheesy) script and clumsy moralizing, but this is still a story about a guy trying to figure it all out, with just as much to deal with as most of us. And that’s not typical in Hollywood. As silly and transparent as it is, most movies wouldn’t have a fight scene hinge on the fact that a the hero’s more concerned about not losing the ring he wants to propose to his girl with. And I admire that. I also admire any movie where Bruce Campbell attempts to convince us of his accent by informing us he’s French.

So every time I started to scoff at the movie, and mock its attempts to curry favor with fans, I remembered that this guy had made Army of Darkness, and I sat back again to enjoy the ride. I love Army of Darkness. And in the end, the good humor apparent behind both movies won me over, despite all reason. It’s goofy, contradictory and cheesy, but then, so’s my life. And maybe that’s why I relate to it.

film review index

2007-04-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

Children of Men (2006)

2007-03-29T19:39:00.001-07:00

My husband’s always bugging me about repopulating the Earth after the apocalypse. I mean, the hypothetical “if everyone was dead but us, would you have babies?” I tend to say no, because I figure if we’ve gone that far towards our own destruction, we deserve to die off and let someone else have a chance. Children of Men makes me feel much the same way, but with lots more suspense and a better soundtrack.

It’s 2027, and no one’s been born for 18 years. No one knows why, and in fact it doesn’t really matter—like the other recent post-apocalyptic film set in England, 28 Days Later, the mechanics really aren’t the point. It’s what you do with the situation that matters. At the beginning of the film, Theo is a former activist who isn’t doing anything except drinking black coffee and visiting his friend Jasper (Michael Caine in a Gerry Garcia wig). But animals seem to like him. This of course makes him the ideal man get involved in a plot about babies, since he’s already friend to mankind’s substitute children.

Theo, because of his previous ties to the revolutionary underground, gets mixed up in a tangled political web spun around a young refugee/immigrant named Kee. Who is, miraculously and for no explainable reason, preggers. This is revealed with little Biblical subtlety but great beauty in a barn, the girl covering her breasts in an odd touch of modesty. And that’s sort of the style of the movie; Alfonso Cuaron delivers a fast-paced thriller of a sci-fi movie (which deserves to be a lot longer and more fleshed out) in beautiful, stark detail. Everything about this society indicates a world living backwards. No one bothers to clean up the trash, or prosecute pot-growers, and apparently no new songs have been written since 2003. There is no future, until this baby comes along, and even then it is uncertain. Is the baby a new hope, or merely the banner for revolution?

Cuaron’s movie appears to itself be a sort of banner, because he’s imbued it with so many Iraq War references we might as well be watching the news with better lighting. Prisoners lie in blindfolded rows, hand-held cameras get splattered with blood, and a huge sign over a refugee deportation center proclaims “Homeland Security.”

As a science fiction film, it’s too short and doesn’t go far enough. As a political message, it’s a bit heavy handed and similarly directionless. But as a suspense film with appealing sci-fi and political aspects, it’s very good. It’s beautifully filmed, the soundtrack works well, and the world-building is solid. Just don’t expect any real insight into human nature, or our future.

Shortbus (2006)

2007-03-20T12:06:00.001-07:00

I was suspicious when I heard that John Cameron Mitchell was auditioning "sextras" for his new film, at the time called "The Sex Film Project." He said he wanted to use actual sex, not simulated, in his film. And one had to wonder; how is that not porn?

Well, it's not. "I know it when I see it," and Shortbus is about sex, not about getting off. Sure, it's also about narcissism, but then, isn't a lot of sex? Why, you might well ask, should we be interested in a movie whose basic premise is "let's put actual sex on the screen"?

Maybe because, unlike porn, it's an "actual" movie. In fact, after the first few minutes (which, I believe, are deliberately shocking and set up a counterpoint to the actual themes of the film), I was perfectly comfortable watching this film in mixed company (both of gender and level of acquaintanceship). Because I wasn't watching people trying to be sexy--I was watching people have sex. Strangely, there is a difference, one that made it much less disturbing than simulated soft-core. And what this movie is about is that it's okay, no matter what you're into. And that you, yes you, are a voyeur, so you can't escape anyway.

The story involves the intersection of several people who converge upon Shortbus, the sex club and salon for the "gifted and challenged" of the sexual world. Supposedly based on a real place and time, it's a well-lit, sex-positive venue where no one is pushed but everyone is encouraged. Our primary vehicle here is Sofia, a sex "I prefer couples counselor" therapist who has, despite her job, never had an orgasm! She offers some exceedingly bad therapy and subsequently attempts various techniques for achieving her ultimate goal--all the while protesting that "sex is awesome!" Now, this could very easily have been excruciating to watch. I can imagine some wonky "edgy" comedy with this premise trying to get away with whatever it can. Like American Pie for the Peter Pan Syndrome set. But by making the sex "real," Mitchell's also made it believable. Not everything the characters do is plausible, but the spirit in which the film was made seems to make up for it. There's a gay threesome situation that is by turns really angsty and sweet. There's an old, closeted mayor of NY who frequents Shortbus and counters the claim that by being in the closet, he "didn't do enough" about AIDS. There's an S&M mistress who doesn't have any close connections to people, but who photographs them obsessively and frequently inappropriately.

In the end, when I sit down and think about the actual plot, there's not much to it. And I don't know if I learned anything specific from Sofia's journey. But I feel I did learn a lot about beauty, and bodies, and sex in general. Not to mention having the utter contrast of our media's simultaneously Puritan and pornographic impulses thrown in sharp relief; this movie shows it all, but is neither. And while my feelings about it as a movie are mixed, my reaction to it is as positive as... well, as it wants us to be about sex.

The Full Monty (1997)

2007-03-04T22:18:00.000-08:00

The Full Monty came out ten years ago, and on its anniversary it’s been given a “Fully Exposed,” 2-DVD treatment. At the time it came out, the backlash hit me before the film did, and so I recall being less than impressed. It was probably the utter seriousness with which people approached the film—seriousness I read in the box office and the Oscar noms and everyone talking about it. The hype just couldn’t support a cute film about unemployed, naked steelworkers.

And that one-note joke, flavored with “new” slang we Americans could toss around, made it seem like tourism to me. Trainspotting had already hit, so we knew that we were supposed to like British movies, but this made them cuddly. I got the feeling everyone in the U.S. was taking in the nudity and the language and everything else with the sort of detached superiority which leads (in old novels, anyway) to proclamations of “oh, how quaint!”

Of course, I am now a snob with ten more years’ experience, and am able to enter the film again with reduced expectations and a better understanding of the filmic context. And this time, reminding myself that this was indeed a surprise hit, that the imitators came after, I really did enjoy it. We all know the story by now: out-of-work steelworkers, confronted with financial responsibilities and the popularity of the Chippendales, launch their own, Yorkshire-version male strip show. They’re thin, fat, pasty, old, and uncoordinated, but these plucky lads know how to make the best of things and confront their fears head on! To the film’s credit and my relief, the potential sentimentality is softened by the very real situation these guys are in, and the endearing characters who really do seem to have relationships. It doesn’t ignore the homoerotic aspects of what they’re doing, or the implications to masculinity of both unemployment and public nudity.

The one sour note, somewhat perversely in my opinion, is the score. I know it won an Oscar, but I found it to be far too jaunty. I’m not talking about the soundtrack itself, which was also very popular and is a lot of fun. No, I mean the weird, over-produced harmonica stuff that seems to be constantly telling us, “Hey, I know this is a movie about unemployment, but it’s a happy movie about unemployment!” The script does a fine job of walking the line between comedy and pathos. I don’t need a “lonely” harmonica cheerfully telling me that I shouldn’t be too upset by the goings-on on screen, because this is actually a light-hearted romp. I’m watching middle-aged pasty men strip, after all.

As for the new DVD set, I now know more than I ever needed to about The Full Monty. (Except, strangely enough, why the film is too cowardly to actually show the full monty.) The first disc has utterly pointless “deleted scenes,” which largely consist of alternate takes from various angles. Useful if you need to learn how utterly tedious filmmaking is, but adding nothing to our knowledge of characters or themes. The cast filmographies are nicely done with little interviews interspersed with information about their careers. But the bulk of the info is on the second disc, which has several featurettes (or one long one) that talk about the script, the hiring process, the making and subsequent popularity of the film, and why exactly the studio thought Americans wouldn’t understand the word “stone” as a unit of measure (back on the first disc, you can also watch the movie with its original, UK soundtrack. Seriously). Despite some questionable “artistic” touches in the filming of interviews and things, it’s quite well done, and many more movies deserve this kind of treatment. It’s a demonstration of what DVDs can be used for. I’m not entirely convinced I needed The Full Monty to go all the way, but it’s refreshing to see a little film get this kind of release.

Inland Empire (2006)

2007-02-16T20:43:00.000-08:00

Writing a review of any new David Lynch film is a dodgy prospect, almost as disturbing to contemplate as the film is to watch. In the case of Inland Empire, the task is especially daunting. Any opinion expressed will be too temperate for either camp—this movie, it seems to me, is a love-it-or-leave-it event. Either it makes no sense at all and is really really long, or it’s a masterpiece of an experimental vision.

Unless, of course, you’re eternally equivocal like me and think it’s… interesting.

Inland Empire is like the last half of Mulholland Drive made by someone who’d been re-watching Eraserhead a lot. And surprisingly enough, aside from some absurdities I believe are meant to be funny and/or just weird, it has a more coherent plot than you might expect from that description. The story follows the making of a film, “On High in Blue Tomorrows,” a remake of a Polish film that never got finished due to the murder of its two leads. The current production is also plagued, but this time by altered reality. Characters and actors conflate and overlap; narratives run into each other; sets are indistinguishable from homes. Laura Dern is the film’s through-line, playing several different characters whose exact number is not clear. I have never liked Dern in anything but Citizen Ruth (because what’s not to like about abortion comedy?) but she is amazing in this film. The rest of the cast, likewise, admirably takes on the trial of weaving these tangled threads. And look terrible doing it.

Because this film, in an echo of Eraserhead’s shoestring budget (though without its arresting visual beauty), was filmed in DV on a “midrange,” consumer-model camera. And it looks like it. Blown up to 35mm for theater viewing, every flaw of digital video is obvious. Dark lines appear at edges; faces look harsh and washed-out; everything has that flat, handheld look of really seriously messed up home movies. And while it looks awful, you don’t really notice after a few minutes, and it’s a lovely message for a filmmaker like Lynch to send to the potential filmmakers of the future. Everything looks like it was filmed by some guy who just happened to be on a movie set while the real movie was being filmed. Which is especially odd when you remember that the movie is about movie-making.

As to the experience itself, it has very little in common with any other evening you can get in a conventional theater. It is exhausting, not only due to its 3 hour length but in the sheer nonlinear nightmarish goings-on. People break out into song. Large rabbit furries appear in a (really awful) play. Random Polish people (from that other production) show up and play their scenes. In Polish. Laura Dern looks anguished. A lot. And while there is a certain logic to the plot as a whole, the events themselves are not designed for easy watching. And this makes most people uncomfortable. Still other people see meaning in the experience itself, the sheer inundation of images and feeling. I feel caught between granting too much meaning to it and cynically assuming Lynch means absolutely nothing. In truth, I think it’s somewhere in the middle: the film has an explanation, but it is not possible to fit everything into a coherent tale.

In the end, as far as I’m concerned, Inland Empire just can’t be codified. It’s an unforgettable, uncomfortable experience, and if you like your movies to be cozy and fun, this is not for you. But if you want an adventure, and if you’re willing to sit back and let it come to you and not try too hard to figure it all out, you’ll be rewarded. If, that is, unforgettable, uncomfortable experiences are their own reward.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

2007-02-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

“It's only a word,” Ofelia's mother tells her when instructing her daughter to call her new stepfather “papa.” Of course, nothing is ever “only a word” when it comes to fairy tales, even violent and dark ones like this.

Pan's Labyrinth is the story of a young girl trapped in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Her father is dead, her mother remarried, and she is whisked away to a remote mansion-fortress in the country. She has her books—though mother is somewhat contemptuous of her attachment to children's stories. Ofelia sees bugs as fairies and sees life as a set of puzzles to solve. She becomes caught up in a fantasy world of fauns, secret doors, and giant toads. Only in such dark times would this fantasy seem preferable to reality; she is told that she is a lost princess who must complete certain tasks to be taken back, but there is no guarantee her secret world is any better than this one. It just has to be.

As Ofelia navigates between her secret trials and the uncertain quantity of mother's new husband, the rest of the household divides its loyalties and fights their own fight. Everyone has secrets, and everyone is in danger. The film is dark and violent, though gorgeous, and I wish I had seen some other of Guillermo del Toro's films before seeing this one. I might have been prepared, then, for the fact that he is less interested in exploring the fairy world Ofelia is trying to escape to than the one she's trying to escape from. I was expecting more of the labyrinth—the trailers certainly emphasized these elements—and was caught off guard by the real-world focus of the narrative. In the end, it is difficult to determine what really happened and what didn't. It is Amelie in wartime.

But it is all put together beautifully. Ofelia is wonderful, and the rest of the cast seems to move effortlessly through the strange landscape. The cinematography is brilliant as well; there is some exciting editing using the trunks of trees to hide edits between scenes and everything's awash in a gold-green glow that alternately suggests history and fantasy. The film, indeed, bridges that gap naturally. Everything fits, ugly as it may be. Fairy tales were never benign children's stories, and neither is this.

Stranger than Fiction (2006)

2007-02-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

Uh oh. Someone's written another comedy about writers! Second-only to comedies about filmmaking in its self-indulgence, this genre is an automatic green-light at production companies. Maybe it's because of that “write what you know” thing, or maybe it's an easy way to appear clever. Dating back to the 20's, Hollywood has considered itself the highest form of entertainment rather than the mere purveyor of such. That's how we get movies like Stranger than Fiction.

What's different about this movie is that despite telling a story-with-a-story that's really kind of stupid, it's not as bad (or pretentious) as it could have been. Despite opening with Will Ferrell brushing his teeth.

Why Will Ferrell? It's almost as if Hollywood has decreed that no comedy shall emerge from that sacred space without Will Ferrell. I don't know why this should be, as he's nothing special—I have no quarrel with him aside from his ubiquity, but is he really that much funnier than everyone else? Did someone see Talladega Nights and insist this was the guy to round out Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal? Much to my relief, Ferrell is never conspicuously funny in this film, and maybe that's the point his Will and his agent are trying to make. “Look! I'm not just stupid! Remember that cheerleader on SNL? Well don't!”

Anyway. Harold is a very boring IRS agent who sees everything in numbers and has no life. We get to partake in this with translucent numbers and graphics laid over the film reminiscent of effects used in the South Korean film Please Take My Cat, among others. One day, as Harold is counting his toothbrush strokes, he hears a British lady narrating this activity. He stops. So does she. He starts again. As does she. This continues through the next several days: as Harold goes about his business, he hears it played back at him. What follows is one of those “I'm not crazy!” movies where he discovers, eventually, that someone is actually writing a book about him and is going to kill him off. The character, that is. But if he's the character, doesn't that mean he'll die?

All of this, including an unlikely romance between IRS agent and liberal tax-dodging baker, comes off pretty standard. There aren't many surprises. But I found it very entertaining for a few reasons. Mostly because it was like a less pretentious and more commercial version of I Heart Huckabees, which has a similar existential theme but took itself way seriously while being conspicuously funnier. (And yes, I know I was supposed to like Huckabees. I didn't.) But on top of that, there were little touches here and there which showed that someone had actually written it.

For instance, I liked when Harold decides to start narrating himself. And when he and his love interest, the really attractive Maggie G, are filmed conversing over the weird effect of the middle of a double-length bus, where it accordions in and out and which holds a personal fascination for me. Or when he comes over for dinner and rises to help her with the dishes, only to have her say, “Don't worry about it, I'm only putting them in the sink.” That is natural. That is something people would say to each other. And stuff like that hardly ever makes it into the movies.

Now, the big logical problem I have with the story is that Emma Thompson narrates everything except Harold's discovery that he's a character. So if she knows everything going on in his life, whether she's controlling him or he's controlling her narrative, she should be aware of him screaming at the heavens for her to shut up. Furthermore, without the parts where Harold's screaming at the heavens for her to shut up, it's a really boring story. This would not be a movie if he wasn't aware of his status as a character in it. But we're led to believe she's this brilliant novelist who gets college courses taught about her work. This would imply that this screenplay, too, is as good as her book. Which would actually put her somewhere just above “hack” in the hierarchy of writers. I don't know about you, but for me credibility is lacking. But then, I sometimes forget we're supposed to ignore paradox. What do I want for $3 at the second-run theater?

Actually, this movie is perfect for a second-run theater. Solid value, not too much thought, but satisfying on a weeknight. Come to think of it, my narrator wouldn't have a lot to say about me, either.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

2007-02-02T14:26:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, there lived a queen who had lots of shoes, did almost nothing, and never said “let them eat cake.” Sofia Coppola, who had made a really very good film a few years earlier about people who weren’t doing anything but were still self-aware enough to be kind of worried about it, decided her follow-up would be about this queen, except wait! She’d put early 80’s new-wave songs into the soundtrack, in case we had trouble relating to Kirsten Dunst in a period costume.

Just so you know where I stand on the issue, using “I Want Candy” in any movie is pretty much a cop-out, a gesture as empty as the puffed pastries and shoes the song is used to illustrate. I can’t imagine what I’m supposed to learn by this juxtaposition which is more of a shallow reiteration—is it that Marie Antoinette was a party girl who liked nice things? Amazing! Now, if Coppola had decided that New Order was the perfect commentary on the excesses of the pre-Revolutionary French court, then fine. I can roll with that, but she has to work for it. It doesn’t even seem like she’s making a comment on the early 80’s, as far as I can tell. It might have been cool if she’d used more MTV techniques, or integrated the anachronism in a ballsier fashion, but she didn’t. It just seems tacked-on.

The movie does a good job of showing us the utter otherworldliness of life at Versailles. Antoinette clearly has no idea what goes on outside the palace grounds. Trouble is, neither do we. For a film about someone who was the ultimate victim of class warfare, there’s a shocking lack of class discussion in it. A lot of time is spent not exploring why the king can’t get it up for Dunst, and then pow! the natives are restless, and coming for you! In a way, I suppose we’re as isolated as the royals from the unrest of the people, and that’s valid I suppose. But the absence of intrigue is almost total, and a cursory examination of the wikipedia article on the queen will reveal lots of juicy note-passing and backstabbing that’s apparently hardly worth mentioning. But would have made a more interesting film.

Coppola’s point seems to be that Marie was a hapless victim of national upheaval; irresponsible but oh such fun! But she doesn’t even address the family’s downfall; the first third of the film is an effective and attractive portrayal of a girl forced to “grow up” fast without ever really doing so, and then it dissolves into an eventless evocation of a rather boring life interrupted in time for the credits. Marie Antoinette actually got pretty interesting at this point, which makes the ending a confusing decision on the director’s part.

It’s not so much that there’s anything wrong with the film. It’s more that not much is really satisfyingly right, either. Everyone does well, and it’s pretty, and the soundtrack is fun. But the only way I can call the film successful is if the purpose was to make me feel profoundly indifferent to it. Which pretty much still makes it unsuccessful, I’m afraid.

Rocky Balboa (2006)

2006-12-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

If you’ve read my reviews, or know me in person, you know I’m the kind of person who’s unnecessarily negative about sentimental entertainment. I’d be a cynic, if I wasn’t the kind of person who claims to be one. What I really am is a thwarted idealist who makes fun of movies that most people enjoy.

So when I watched Rocky Balboa the other day, many mockable elements presented themselves to me. And I found myself unable to grasp at any of them. This movie is so innocent, so like its title character, that I refuse to find fault. I was never an adolescent boy, so I missed that essential “Rocky” period, but after this movie I went right back and watched the original. And loved it too.

The (hopefully) final installment in the series finds Rocky alone, his wife dead and his son somewhat estranged. He runs his restaurant, takes care of the people he can, and yearns for some of the fire of his youth. His physicality, despite pushing 60, is not yet spent. Into this mid-life testosterone fog comes the ESPN computer simulation which claims that Rocky Balboa, at his height, would have trounced current heavyweight champ Mason Dixon. You can guess the rest, but it never gets super cheesy, even though you can pick out the lines that should be.

It’s hard to describe why these movies, at least the first and last of the series, work for me where so many Hollywood offerings fall flat. There’s just as much talk of the heart here, just as much underdog pathos, but Rocky makes it believable. It’s clear that Stallone, who wrote and (less successfully) directed this movie, loves these characters and that love comes through so honestly that it makes me love them, too. There are no bad guys in Rocky’s world, and no losers. The important thing about Rocky is that though it’s about the triumph of the underdog, the underdog doesn’t actually have to win. He just has to keep fighting. I’m not saying I’m ready to go be a boxer or my life has been changed in any other way, but I’m more than willing to buy into this guy for a few hours at a time. Very little about uncomplicated feel-goodiness makes me happy, but Rocky Balboa restores my faith in something nice also being fun. Like That Thing You Do, the Rocky movies have a sort of good-natured innocence, despite the sometimes unsavory motives involved, at which I cannot laugh.

Candy (2006)

2006-12-16T15:50:00.001-08:00

Once I saw a movie that taught me that substance abuse was bad, because even when one person starts out pretty social about his addictions, his partner is likely to get drawn in over her head to a point where she can't stop and some latent crazy manifests itself. Then I saw it again, but with prettier people and heroin instead of alcohol. I guess we haven't learned our lesson, have we?

The thing about Days of Wine and Roses is that it was a melodramatic piece about a couple suffering from alcoholism but one of them was Jack Lemmon. So the whole movie you could marvel at him playing a drama. Watching Candy is pretty much the same experience, but grosser, and you can't be amazed that Heath Ledger is greasily attractive or in an inappropriate and doomed relationship. Its sole purpose seems to be to chronicle the senseless descent of a cute couple into squalor, dead babies and bad skin. With good actors like Geoffery Rush along for the ride.

It's quite likely that all these people read the script and said, “Hey, I can send a good message about drugs and do that playing-a-druggie thing,” which is understandably attractive. There is certainly a chance, here, to explore why certain people fall into certain traps, but other than a belated rant from our heroine about how she's been “clenching her fists” for no apparent reason since she was six years old, we have no idea why these people know each other or why they do drugs. So unless the message is simply DON'T DO DRUGS EVER OR YOU WILL END UP LIKE THEM, they've failed to convey anything deeper. And don't we already know drugs are bad?

The film is not without its nice moments. Candy herself is lovely, Heath is intelligible again (I didn't understand a word he said in Brokeback Mountain), and there are some really great cinematic moments. The beginning is probably the best, with some fantastic footage of one of those spinny rides where the floor drops out and you're squished against the wall. It's very pretty, but it's also a METAPHOR, so try to figure that one out.

Overall, it's somewhat prettily done and no one grossly missteps. But it's also pointless in the sense that nothing is revealed and the audience seems meant to derive cathartic enjoyment from the couple's trials. I can see no other rationale for it, much like pretty much everything on daytime television. But this has cuter people.

The Science of Sleep (2006)

2006-12-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

Michel Gondry has finally made a movie that integrates music video with feature film. I don't mean that negatively; only that up until now, Gondry has wedged the absurdist, dream-like sensibilities he explored on MTV into films that had absurdist plots and were written by Charlie Kaufman to include strange, dream-like alternate realities. With Science of Sleep, the dream merges with reality without the clumsy explanation of some metaphysical breakdown required. I'm not entirely certain, by the end, what we're supposed to take away from the film, but it's a lovely exploration of a certain kind of love affair that exists too much, perhaps, in dreams.

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane, a Mexican in France at the behest of his French mother but struggling with both his purpose there and the language. As a result, he frequently resorts to English, and it's lucky for us that the other characters all speak it, too. Garcia Bernal's English is great, and the play between the three languages is one of the pleasures of the light script (written by Gondry as well). Soon after arriving at his mother's empty flat, Stephanie moves in next door. Stephanie's friend Zoe helpfully points out that not only do they have the same name, but S&S are totally alike! For some reason, Stephane doesn't correct the girls' misapprehension that he's friends with the piano movers and does not reveal that he is, in fact, the son of the feared landlady. Thus begins a strange tale of a young man-boy who doesn't seem able to articulate what he wants or even figure out whether he's got it. Stephane never seems to know whether he is dreaming or not, and has wild fantasies that sometimes merge into reality without his knowledge. My slight discomfort with the film comes from not knowing whether we are supposed to find Stephane charmingly whimsical or think he should get some help. I think both are true, but I wondered sometimes what the film's position was.

Because Stephane definitely has a problem. His fantasies are amusing and creative and lead to fantastical inventions in his life and relationships. But the conflict between him and the object of his affection seems to be that he doesn't realize which actions are real and which aren't. He does things he later thinks were dreams. In one instance he stands the girl up because he... thinks she stood him up? For no reason? I don't even know.

Then again, this is a character I have met in real life. Stephane isn't unrealistic in his contradictions. But he is kind of a jerk sometimes. Garcia Bernal does fantastically with him, demonstrating yet again his versatility despite being very pretty. The other actors navigate the ups and downs of the script and language with charm and energy. Gondry fills Stephane's thoughts and dreams with fantastical figures made of cardboard, yarn and stop-motion techniques, some of which may look familiar from, say, a Foo Fighters video. And despite a suspicious poster in the theater which advised, “Close your eyes, Open your heart,” it's not a sappy romantic comedy where two crazy people find acceptance in each other's tenuous hold on reality, contrary to all considerations about how they might actually get on in the real world. The issue of Stephane's behavior is left open. In a fantastic world of imagination, there's a true story here about shy, creative people and how they relate to the world. It raises questions rather than conforms to romantic cliches; and in defying expectations somewhat raises my own in terms of how, and what kind of, difficult relationships are dealt with in the movies.

Superman Returns (2006)

2006-11-27T14:40:00.001-08:00

I entered Superman Returns in the manner of an archivist, fairly certain of what I was going to see but determined, anyway, to catalog its relevance to our culture. To my surprise, I was surprised. I had no idea how much of a dick Superman is. I mean, Dean Cain just seemed like a lovable dork. Tom Welling's too hot, and can't make up his mind about Lex, but he suffers prettily so I overlook that. And Christopher Reeve is dead and was, in life, a nice guy, so I can't say anything bad about him (that's already been done by South Park, and much better than I could). So what's up, Singer? Why is your Superman such an ass? Why is Lex Luthor the only interesting person in this movie? Well, I know that, it's because of Kevin Spacey. But seriously, guys, the credit sequence set me up for a nice exercise in nostalgia (I wore out tapes of I and II, and bow continuously to this day to General Zod) but all I got was Superman the jerkface and lots of really phallic crystals.

Which actually would have been kind of cool if Superman had been gay. Wouldn't it be great if Lex stole Superman's phallic crystals and he's forced to choose between Lex and Lois' new boyfriend, Cyclops? By the way, Singer, that was a good one putting ace dickmaster Marsden in there, thereby setting the usurping boyfriend up for audience hatred, then making him an okay guy. You totally got me, there.

So. Basically, Superman's been away for five years to visit the nonexistent Krypton, which seems pretty arbitrary given the fact that he and Lois seemed to be getting pretty hot and heavy around the time he left. Which he did abruptly, and without telling her. Again, for no explicable reason. That whole “it would hurt too much” is just cowardly. Are we supposed to believe Superman's a coward? Or only when his sex life is on the line?

Once back, he spends most of his time eavesdropping on Lois and Cyclops' conversations with his super hearing, making eyes at Lois' kid, and x-ray-visioning their house to spy on them yet again. He shows up in the kid's room, uninvited and unannounced. He presents bewildered confusion to the notion that Lois might, in the past five years, have taken up with someone else after her boyfriend mysteriously disappears with no indication that he's coming back, let alone whether he even likes her that much. I'm sorry, but eavesdropping with your secret powers (he's dressed as Clark, and Lois ain't any smarter here than she ever is) is not cool. I don't care how much you hate Cyclops.

Not that Brandon Roush emotes much of anything, here. He's pretty, sure, and he looks as nice as one can in a skin-tight bright blue suit with underwear outside it, but so what? As superman, Roush looks like he's been constructed from the same weird rubber stuff his suit is made from. He's just kind of there. The best Supermen make the most of Clark; Clark's the heart of a good Superman, the guy who has to actually live the anonymous life he's chosen for himself. Clark does nothing in this movie but break Lois' stuff and look confusedly at her boyfriend.

Lois doesn't do much better herself. Call me old-fashioned, but no matter how much trouble Margot Kidder got in, she was feisty and brash. Kate Bosworth contributes fainting and even less curiosity about that whole Clark/Superman thing than usual. She's a reporter, for god's sake. Although, in this universe, her skill seems to be in saying mean things about Superman. Hey, maybe I quality for a Pulitzer!

There is a plot other than Superman being a dick. It's a sort a of re-imagining of the first Reeve film, with a few of the same lines and a similarity of plot that is more entertaining than it sounds. The parallels are amusing to those who catch them, but unimportant if you miss them. It's a sort of a cross between a sequel and a remake, and it's interesting to tease the threads out.

But at the end of the day, although Superman regains control of his phallic crystals, nothing about his dickliness is resolved. He's just as much of an asshole at the end as when he left Lois the first time. This Man of Steel might be for Truth and Justice, but he's sure not for ethics. This movie's ready-made for a sequel, and I can't wait. I hope it involves Lois investigating Superman's multiple alimony checks, which he pays with money laundered through the Kryptonian mafia in Metropolis.

And if you don't believe me, check out SuperDickery.com, who figured this out a long time ago. The evidence speaks for itself.

Pretty Poison (1968)

2006-11-27T14:39:00.001-08:00

Pretty Poison was billed as a teen exploitation flick but plays like a bad thriller—the kind that’s actually kind of fun. It's one of those movies that makes you wonder whether its comic effect is intentional, given how seriously everyone involved seems to be taking it. The story of a troubled young man (played by Anthony “Troubled Young Man” Perkins) who gets involved with a color-guard high school blond (played by Tuesday Weld, whose name sounds like a to-do list at a shipyard—Monday: Rivets. Tuesday: Weld) includes badly planned espionage, heavy handed dialog, tragic-yet-unexplained psychotic pasts, and inappropriate romance. At its opening, we and Tony are warned that fantasies can be dangerous in the real world; he's going out on his own now, away from this “facility,” and he'd better stop with all that imagination stuff.

Well, he doesn't. He also breaks his probation (from his not-jail) for no other apparent reason than to work at a chemical plant instead of the lumber yard, where the dumping of bright red waste into a river fixates him like so much blood. He also fixates on the high school color guard, and Tuesday in particular, to whom he spontaneously presents himself as a CIA agent. The bored little girl believes him, and the two embark on the most inept juvenile crime spree ever. Tony's a great CIA agent until Tuesday's belief in him leads to the discovery that she's even more insane than he is. He makes up stories; she brings them to life, leaving Tony completely paralyzed.

Psychologically, the movie makes no sense. We never really figure out what's wrong with this guy, or even really why we're supposed to believe there is something wrong with him. And the instant metamorphosis from blond cheerleader to raging psychobitch likewise goes unexplained. In fact, the main characters' every action seems inexplicable.

All the same, there is a certain entertainment value. The director's lack of subtlety can be somewhat humorous, and Perkins is always good as the seemingly unwilling and confused baddie. But unlike Psycho, his confusion here is due to sheer ineptitude rather than Norman's split personality. Couldn't we at least have had some men pretending to be doctors explain everything he did in an anti-climactic denouement? Perkins had the unfortunately ability to project adorable psychotic confusion, which got him typecast in crap like this. Unlike the muddy waters of the film's psychological state, however, the lesson is clear: imaginative, intelligent, inept young men are always screwed over by pretty young girls with ambition. Remember, boys: “The world has no place for fantasies.”

Wild in the Streets (1968) and GAS-S-S-S (1970)

2006-11-27T14:38:00.000-08:00

In the late 1960’s, small-time studio American International Pictures became notorious for their exploitation pictures; movies that appealed to the new “youth culture.” Two such, Wild in the Streets and GAS-S-S-S, are included on an MGM “Midnite Movies” DVD release, and despite similar subject matter the juxtaposition displays very different attitudes towards the films’ audience.

Wild in the Streets, the more famous of the two, was made in 1968 and adapted from a short story in which 15-year-olds win the right to vote, vote “old age” out of power, and end up electing a 25-year-old rock star president. 30 means mandatory retirement; 35 internment at LSD concentration camps. The movie is billed as a satire aimed at youngsters; a sort of fantasy in which the newly mobilized young get power. The poster boasts Jim Morrison’s exhortation that “we want the world and we want it now,” and the reputation the film has is as a youth cry to arms.

Watching it, though, reveals a hateful attitudes towards youth that runs contrary to any rebellious image I previously had of the film. The “kids” are ineffectual, write really bad music, and are unable to govern themselves. Youth-in-power doesn’t result in an American utopia but a fascist nightmare. Adults may be opportunistic and ridiculous, but the new wave just seems stupid and unfocused. Their platform has one plank: since the marketing whizzes say the under 25 crowd makes up 52% of the population, we’re the majority. Once held, this majority does nothing but smoke pot, put LSD in the water, and deploy their might to keep adults corralled in acid-flooded camps that have nothing of the groovy communal about them. President Max Frost doesn’t seem to learn anything either, or benefit from his ascendancy; and the end of the film predicts a bitter reprisal.

In sum, this film is a mockery, a sadistic fantasy, of the youth movement’s desires for political voice.

The antidote to this bad-acid trip is on the other side of this disc: the delightful, pop-culture rich, Roger Corman-directed GAS-S-S-S (1970). In a similar scenario, all adults over 25 are simultaneously wiped out by a freak accident, leaving the youngsters to fend for themselves. The premise occurs right at the beginning, without the wading through nonsensical exposition Wild requires. A band of long-hairs travels across the newly-depleted American landscape, encountering exactly what you’d expect if half the population had been wiped out—small bands of power-hungry survivors, just trying to get by. Of course each group represents a different manifestation of power, be it communal, fascist, or just plain thievin’. But at no point does the movie contend that it’s the youth themselves causing the mayhem. This is the system they inherited, and with no law and order and society would break down.

The script is rife with gags of varying degrees of cleverness and crammed full of cultural references. On top of that, it’s just absurdly fun. A shoot out in a junkyard (shades of The Chase?) involves hurling the names of Western stars at each other. Our hero finally deploys “John Wayne,” but regrets it later. “Maybe I coulda winged him with a ‘Clint Eastwood,’” he muses. Edgar Allen Poe shows up on a motorcycle to dispense doom-filled wisdom, proto-goth Leonore riding bitch. One very pregnant character has a bizarre-yet-contagious fixation on “the golden oldies” that supersedes all other thought of survival. (“I can’t bring a child into this world,” she eventually decides, and so remains pregnant.) Fascist loot-and-pillage gangs are run like football teams, complete with cheerleaders, uniforms, and marching band.

While its satire is less barbed (the ending, especially, is rather hopeful and hippie-friendly), GAS-S-S-S is actually a much more rational response to the youth-power sentiments of the time, not to mention a much more appropriate candidate for cultdom. For one thing, it’s a better movie (with far better music, provided by Country Joe and the Fish, than the rock-star-oriented Wild gives us). For another, it doesn’t crudely insult the very demographic it’s marketed for. Wild in the Streets doesn’t live up to its title. GAS-S-S-S, luckily, outstrips its own.

Borat (2006)

2006-11-27T14:37:00.000-08:00

While press, and box office, for Borat has been very good so far, there are critics (and people who don't get paid for their opinions) out there who call the movie offensive, anti-semitic, and (un)humorous at the expense of people who are tricked into exposing themselves as bigots by an ostensible idiot reporting for Kazahkstan.

I have to say that those people really don't get it.

Borat, if you don't know already, is the creation of Sacha Baron Cohen; previously introduced on his HBO series Da Ali G Show. A bigoted, sexist, racist bumpkin, Borat interviews real people in America about issues such as homosexuality, slavery, manners, women drivers, and especially Jews. Baron Cohen has perfected his act to such an degree that by the time his target figures out something's up, it's too late; the release has been signed, the damning comments made. So it's understandable that people who've been caught on tape, and aired across the country, as espousing anti-Muslim, anti-gay views feel betrayed.

But this film's primary target isn't the people Borat ambushes, or even America as a whole. The feminists Borat offends don't come off as idiots. The black kids he meets on the street do their best to help a hapless white guy who wants to figure out their culture. The southern dinner party guests deal kindly with the ignorant sot until he hands his hostess a bag of feces and invites a prostitute over as his date. Even his overweight cohort, though displayed rolling around naked for about ten minutes, comes off mostly as a really good sport.

No, what Borat does is make his audience extremely uncomfortable by confronting us with some unpleasant truths about what we're willing to put up with. These people aren't so much set up and shot down as damned for not doing anything at all. When Borat goes into a store and asks what kind of gun is best for shooting Jews, shouldn't the owner call him on that? When Borat expresses disbelief in the concept of women having their choice whether to engage in sexual activity or not, shouldn't that elicit more than an uncomfortable chuckle?

To my mind, what Baron Cohen does is not in itself racist, sexist, or even anti-American. It's less about what he says and more about the reaction he gets (or doesn't) from the regular people he encounters. For me, this reaction is most clearly encapsulated in two reactions: one from the dinner party guests who, with Borat out of the room, tell each other he's just a little uneducated and shouldn't be long in assimilating; and when the owner of a rodeo tells him he should shave off his mustache to look less “like them.” One could argue that the betrayal felt by these people is a lesson in giving the “other” the benefit of the doubt, but I would argue that it's still an illustration of treating people who don't sound or act like us as something alien.

In the end, though, what's really impressive about this film is its relentlessly upsetting comedy. It bludgeons you with Borat's adventures, made all the more mind-boggling by the mental somersaults you're forced to do to decide what's a “real” encounter and what must be a set-up. To his credit, Baron Cohen seems to have improv'd most of the film, and his ability to stay in character is tremendous. I don't know what he'll do now that he's been irrevocably exposed, but Borat the movie is a hilarious, offensive, and weirdly informative look at the American hunger for media.

Jesus Camp (2006) and Soldiers in the Army of God (2000)

2006-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

At Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, there is a summer bible camp called "Kids on Fire". Children's pastor Becky Fischer leads evangelically-minded children towards a better understanding of God's plan for them, and their duty to Him. This film, shot on a very small budget, follows some of these kids from home to camp to an anti-abortion protest in Washington. And it's extremely disturbing.

I'm always very careful when viewing (and reviewing) documentaries that reinforce my own beliefs. I try to remain suspicious of films where, for example, I go in thinking so-and-so's a nut and then the film portrays them as, well, a nut. So I was skeptical of some of the editing here, until I realized something: Becky Fischer has seen this footage. There is footage of her watching this very documentary--children speaking in tongues and admitting their sins and crying about aborted fetuses--with a huge grin on her face. She knows this is going to bother me, and she's happy about it.

In other words, it's possible to over-apologize for bias.

So I feel justified in saying that the treatment of children in this film sickens me. Over and over we are confronted with images of eight, nine, ten year old children being told not to think for themselves, to be obedient to God's (or, at a pinch, your pastor's) will, and to repent of their many sins. They are led in militaristic dances intended to arouse passion. They parrot rhetoric against "dead churches," the kind where you just sit and pray and don't raise your voice to God. They literally worship a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. They are shown eraser-sized replicas of babies, told that these represent the friends they never had because they were aborted, and submit to having red tape slapped over their mouths as a symbol of protest.

Eight. Nine. Ten years old. Ten year olds do not need to repent of their sins. Eight year old girls do not need to know about abortion. What's amazing about this film is the obvious intelligence and agency of these children and the use to which it's being put. Levi and Heather, especially, are fantastic kids. And they are being shaped, with very little subtlety, into the next generation of preachers and politicians. And while I believe that some of this indoctrination is done "for their own good" in their families' eyes, the film also betrays a sense of mercenary zeal to get these kids on the right side of what the adults think is a war. In the end, though, the movie answered very few of my questions and left me merely outraged and confused. What is behind it? What do they want? What is their reasoning, and how can Fischer place W on the dais and then protest that she is not pushing politics on her kids?

A good companion to this movie is Soldiers in the Army of God, an HBO documentary from 2000 (available on DVD) which follows several known religiously-motivated anti-abortionists in their activities and includes interviews with a convicted murderer of abortion providers. While I certainly came away with a perception of lots of crazy going on in the world, the people themselves were given ample time to explain their views, their actions, and their politics. I understand a lot more about their justification for their actions, and I feel that the radical anti-abortionists portrayed were treated fairly. For me, it was a window onto something I do not understand; much as I hoped Jesus Camp would be. I am by no means equating politically active religious folks with murders—but there are parallels in the films, and they are useful when viewed in conjunction. If you do see the DVD, I recommend reading the original Esquire article and watching the follow-up interview with O'Toole in the bonus features, as they shed even more light on the subject.

The question of religion in this country (the U.S.) is becoming increasingly fraught with complications. While it is doubtful that anything will make the two sides see eye to eye (one mother in Jesus Camp sees the world as "people who love Jesus and people who don't"), it is good to have unbiased filmmakers attempting to inform the public of the conflict's background.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

2006-09-29T10:13:00.000-07:00

My relationship with Brian De Palma, though his films anyway, is a complicated one. So when every critic paid for the job can’t accept that the man who gave us Scarface can’t do better than Black Dahlia, I’m asking why the man who gave us Greetings, Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie can’t do better than The Untouchables.

For my money, he finally has; and with Black Dahlia. Adapted from James Ellroy’s novel, Dahlia puts De Palma through his voyeuristic, campy paces in a way people who wanted another L.A. Confidential (and honestly, who doesn’t?) weren’t expecting. I know I wasn’t. I expected to hate it. Josh Hartnett, who with Aaron Eckhart makes this movie the Battle of the Beady Eyes, as star? Hilary Swank as femme fatale?

The critics’ opinion is that this film is disjointed; that it doesn’t know what it is; that it’s incoherent, laughable, campy, and a big disappointment. Haven’t watched a lot of De Palma over the past year or so, I have to wonder what they’re expecting. I never liked the director until I realized that he’s laughing the whole way. Body Double? Repulsive unless you read it as a dark comedy.

Maybe I should back up and talk about the film a little. Okay. Hartnett is Officer Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, who teams up with Sergeant Lee Blanchard (Eckhart) to share Blanchard’s girl Kay (Scarlett Johansson with ridiculous hair) and the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s mutilated body. There are lots of plots and subplots relating to this tenuous threesome, Blanchard and Bleichert’s somewhat political rise through the ranks, and Blanchard’s rising-yet-hidden obsession with the Black Dahlia murder. Eventually Bucky takes over, his cool reserve boiling over when he gets embroiled in a bizarre family drama involving the Linscotts. It’s the dinner scene where Hilary Swank as the Linscott daughter brings Bucky home and all domestic hell breaks loose that I realized I couldn’t not like this film. This scene is worth the price of admission. It’s hilarious. And I was amused enough to just go with everything else we’re supposed to believe, without trying too hard.

Because yes, it’s convoluted. And you have to take a lot of tangled threads on trust. Do I really think they’ve solved the Dahlia murder? No. It’s ridiculous and the film really falls apart in trying to explain it. I still don’t really understand what they were going for here; but it looks great. De Palma tends to surround himself with people he can trust, and his crew here has many familiar names who do him proud. Not to mention an underused Bill Finley, star of many early De Palma films who appears here as something of an homage to Phantom of the Paradise. There are some other problems as well, such as a plot point that hinges on two people looking alike who really don’t.

A great deal of one’s opinion is based on what’s expected. I think there’s an idea of De Palma at work here that for me was never true; I like this movie because I like De Palma’s roots and I desperately want him to go back to doing comedy. I’m not looking for a retread of the 80’s, when I disliked most of his films. De Palma’s darkness makes you uncertain about his humor; he’s a lot easier to watch if you pick up on the funny. After all, a guy who casts himself as the off-screen director of Betty Short’s screen test, questioning her ability to portray sadness, has to be pretty funny.

The Black Dahlia isn’t a comedy by any means, but I think anyone who goes in expecting something dreadfully serious and “straight” is going to be disappointed. For myself, I had fun. It’s up to the viewer whether that’s good enough or not.

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

2006-09-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

I don’t watch a lot of the kind of movie typically deemed “horror,” mostly because slasher stuff doesn’t gross me out enough to scare me. What’s hidden, however, could very well exist without my knowing it, and is that much scarier. I think that’s why Rosemary’s Baby holds up so well nearly 30 years later; it’s about anxiety and marriage and urban life and childbirth, not about freaks with chainsaws.

The strength of this film is that it asks you to believe one thing—that a cabal of Satanists could impregnate a woman with the son of the Devil—and leaves everything else really really normal. The problem for me with Exorcist-style films (right now I’m recalling with horror of a different kind the recent The Exorcism of Emily Rose) is that they pose what looks like a similar situation but requires constant suspension of disbelief. Here, we have one single act, and some suspicious behavior, and Rosemary’s fear and anxiety are our own.

Of course, it’s to Roman Polanski’s credit that he is a good director to begin with and can carry such a concept in a film with naturalistic dialogue, pedestrian settings and some unusual transitions from scene to scene. It recalls that old debate over genre-films—can “horror” or “scifi” be also “good,” or does a good film by definition transcend genre (leaving those nether-regions to be populated by the B-pictures)?

The actors, also, do a fantastic job. Mia Farrow has to propel everything pretty much on her own, and she succeeds in portraying an intelligent (though tiny) woman who, for whatever reason, is underutilized in the life she’s living. Rosemary needs something to do. The film is just as much about her struggle with unfulfillment and boredom as her painful pregnancy. And isn’t her pregnancy as much about the plight of the married woman who discovers just what her “job” entails as about the devilchild?

If it sounds like I’m making this film out to be just a meditation on the horrors of childbirth from a masculine point of view, I don’t think it’s that simple. But the significance of a conspiracy of older, powerful people holding sway over the lives of the younger and markedly more feminine can’t be denied. Which is why I think the film could have done away with the coda in which she meets the baby—not because I don’t like seeing her reaction, but because the commentary by the cabal is unnecessarily direct. “He has his father’s eyes,” is funny, sure, but there’s no need for a rousing cry of “Hail Satan!” It’s the ambiguity that cements this film in something like real life—hasn’t everyone felt insecure about what they’re bringing into this world?—and an ending more in keeping with that would have satisfied me better.

Up until the end of the film, Rosemary’s Baby plays on the very real horrors of the repressed urban housewife and anyone else who’s been in a remotely similar situation. It creates real dread with no manipulative fuss and some very creative dream sequences. A lot of horror doesn’t age well, because it’s tied to either immediate concerns that fade or are scientifically discounted (atomic power) or to the special effects that are constantly getting better (gore-fest films). It’s doubtful that Rosemary’s Baby will cause unintentional snickers from an audience thirty years from now.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004)

2006-08-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

So. Pretend you’re sitting down at home to watch the must-see British documentary of the year. It’s so controversial, you’re even willing to sit through the commercials. Now pretend you live, not in the United, but the Confederate States of America. And that the documentary is about the history of your great nation.

Oh, you should probably also assume you’re white.

Because this fake-doc is an exercise in alternate universe building. The South was able to convince France and England to come into the Civil War on their side. The Confederacy won. Lincoln went into hiding, Davis became prez, the North was re-introduced to slavery, and Canada became the cultural hotspot of the western world. Leaving lots of really bad actors to play in this doc’s recreation of history, it must be said.

This fascinating idea is presented complete with commercials whose offensiveness rises with each break. Think Aunt Jemima times a million. In between a fake history of subjugation, false science, non-suffrage for women, and the inevitability of the Kennedy assassination in any timeline, we are introduced to a vision of what it would be like to live in this world. Advertising extrapolated from actual products and campaigns now deemed too politically incorrect to even mention. (If you saw Ghost World, you have a clue as to the kind of thing I’m talking about.) And that’s not even including the rampant blackface employed.

This is a tricky film, because there’s a fine line between laughing uncomfortably and turning something off. For my part, I was laughing, and then I was staring open-mouthed, and then I was frantically trying to work out how I felt about their version of history and if it jibed with what I’d extrapolate from their initial premise. Not all of it rings accurate for me, and the film would have been much better served by acting that made me believe the clips of “historical films” and commercials were actually real. But its treatment of racial issues is bold in the extreme, even if, in the end, all you’ve really learned is how offensive this country can be. Some may argue that the film is too offensive itself and be made uncomfortable by the (satirically intended) humorous take on slavery; but it’s also a confrontation with our dark history, and a valiant piece of work.

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

2006-08-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

In 1975, someone decided to anticipate The Road Warrior with Don Johnson (nine years pre-Miami Vice) as a really horny Mel Gibson (which, honestly, I guess he is) and a telepathic sheepdog named Blood standing in for Max’s “Dog.”

Yes. It’s a movie about Don Johnson and a talking dog wandering around the desert looking for sex. And popcorn. Based on a story by Harlan Ellison. And everything you can anticipate about this, good and bad, is probably true. With a premise like this, I almost don’t need to write a review.

This is bad filmmaking at its finest; the kind that really needs to be seen to be believed, and yet is also highly entertaining. The plot meanders, the acting lags, many of the concepts and plot points are unseen, unexplained, or inexplicable (there is a society of people living underground in “Topeka” who march around with a band and wear face paint all day) but there is so much unexpected weirdness that it makes up for everything else. And it’s got just about the best ending you can hope for.

In the end, what’s wrong with this film isn’t so much its budget, or Don Johnson, or talking dogs. I can’t even say that the filmmakers wussed out. They don’t pull their punches, it’s true; but they don’t aim at enough for me to consider this film truly brilliant. This wasteland could have been filled with absurdist satire, rather than sprinkled on top of a rather bland post-nuke landscape; a line like “We could have used her three more times!” needs to be followed up with something more than half an hour of “I’m hungry/horny.” At the same time, though…

There’s a talking dog. And Don Johnson.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

2006-08-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I reviewed Bogdanovich’s Targets, my effusiveness knowing no bounds. You might very well ask why I neglected The Last Picture Show in that review, as it’s clearly the Masterpiece, the work by which all subsequent offerings from Mr. B have suffered.

The answer is: because everyone already knows this.

I loved The Last Picture Show. I loved Sam, and the subtle ways in which the characters revealed themselves over the course of the film, and the cinematography, the lighting, the script, the acting can’t be faulted. Which doesn’t make for a very fun review, does it? The Last Picture Show is so good at what it does, so thorough at what it says, that there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say. I could point out that Texas is really boring, or that the sex isn’t very good but they ain’t got nothin’ else to do, or that Jacy’s going to end up just like her mama, but it’s already been said.

But for those of you who haven’t seen it: Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry, with the help of Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn and Ben Johnson created a searingly dusty portrait of small-town life in the 1950’s. The kind of place where everyone knows what’s going on but no one talks about it, and where escape is illusory because it’s only possible in adultery, the movies, or the military. It’s a perfectly recreated little world, and displays the talents of all involved to their best advantage. It’s also a monument to failure, in that many of the people involved—and the director most of all—never achieved this kind of grace again.

Death Race 2000 (1975)

2006-08-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

I am appalled. There is a movie out there which depicts, in gory B-movie detail, five contestants’ trans-continental race in which the object is to hit as many pedestrians as possible, babies and codgers being worth the most. Women are naked and the value of human life is ruthlessly dismissed.

And I’d never seen it before.

I think the brilliance of this movie is contained in the tongue-in-cheek attitude of it being played almost totally straight. No one’s winking, except maybe Sylvester Stallone, who does a show-stealing turn as an uncouth Chicago gangster stereotype that is so committed you have to love it. Even though I still don’t believe that David Carradine could take him.

The raunchy humor is decidedly dark, as when one driver’s attempts at a three point turn bring her unknowingly ever-closer to a hidden land mine; or when Nero the Hero’s navigator, while directing him towards a picnic, instructs him “if they scatter, go for the baby and the mother”; or when the nurses and doctors of a rest-home facility wheel their contended charges out into the street for “euthanasia day.” This violent attitude is embraced so playfully by the film that it goes beyond gratuity to hilarious. There are so many great quotes I could go on forever, and it’s all wrapped neatly in a low-budget but never shoddy package which includes some very attractive women whose assets are not wasted. And some of the humor is actually kind of witty.

If you have any sense of humor at all, you’ve probably seen it already. But in case you’ve been living in a cave like I have, you have to see this movie.
Unless stuff like this:

offends you.

The Untouchables (1987)

2006-08-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

When Brian De Palma makes a movie, you’ll frequently see it advertised as “from the director of Scarface and The Untouchables.” This is because lots of people think these are his best/most popular movies. And yes, they’re slick, and pretty, and lots of money was spent. But The Untouchables is just about the coldest gangster movie I’ve ever seen. I can’t think of a movie I cared less about the characters in. The bloody, operatic death of a respected or liked character is moving. The bloody, operatic death of a fictional person I don’t care about is, well, just bloody.

You’d think this would be a fairly common complaint, given the team-up of De Palma with scriptwriter David Mamet. I mean, combine the two and you’re pretty much asking for humanoid robot aliens. Don’t get me wrong, I love De Palma—but I like him more when I’m not being asked to like people. Or when, as in his early work, I actually liked his people anyway.

Although the people here should be likable enough. Kevin Costner is still Kevin Costner, but he looks the part. Sean Connery is an Irish cop, but with the worst Irish accent ever. Not that it’s his fault. Asking Connery to replace his lispy brogue with anything is like asking Costner to emote; he’ll do it, but you certainly don’t want to watch. And it’s a very small problem in relation to the character as a whole. For instance, Ness asks him why, if he knows all about bringing down Capone, he’s still a beat cop? And we never find out. Also, he’s a racist. The lousy mick can’t tell the difference between a dago and a wop. Speaking of which, Andy Garcia does a great job as the only Italian in Chicago who’s not a gangster. And you’ll get a glimpse of an early Patricia Clarkson role as Ness’ wife.

But the things these actors are asked to do would stymie anyone. Connery and Costner have a meet-cute when Costner is caught littering. Conversations start with lines like, “Yes, I heard about it.” Connery has to say stuff like “It smells worse than a whorehouse at low tide” and “Here’s your warrant!” PUNCH. Costner, after two hours of bloody carnage, mutters “so much violence.” De Palma juxtaposes little girls praying with Capone bashing skulls in, as if to remind us of the horrible dichotomy of the world we live in. Then he shoots action scenes like horror movies, that don’t even get my adrenaline going enough to be aroused by the violence. Then there’s the famous Battleship Potemkin rip-off, with the baby carriage and all that. To my mind, appropriating a scene from another film in order to make something new of it is one thing. De Palma’s done this before, and brilliantly. But copying something without commentary or addition is just copying, unless you’re in Hollywood, and then it’s homage. Or proof you went to film school.

In the end, this movie’s pretty, with some good soundtrack moments by Ennio Morricone, but it’s not pretty enough for me not to care that I don’t care about anyone in it. I could make a really bad joke playing on appropriateness of the film’s title considering how I feel about it, but what’s t he point?

Targets (1968)

2006-08-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

Where did Peter Bogdanovich go? These days, he comes across as a pretentious movie-geek guy who talks about other peoples’ movies and left his talented wife for Cybill Shepherd. But you know what? He used to make really good movies. Like Targets

You thought I was going to say The Last Picture Show, didn’t you?

Targets was made for Roger Corman with the stipulation that footage from an old Boris Karloff movie had to be used and Boris Karloff had to be in it for the two contracted days he owed Corman. The movie is in fact about an unmotivated shooting spree. Patching these two things together could have been a disaster. What happened instead was a weirdly affecting look at horror in the movies and in life.

Half the story involves “Byron Orlok,” an old-time horror movie star, making a break for retirement while Peter Bogdanovich tries to get him to read a script and falls asleep drunk in his bed. Yes, Bogdanovich cast himself as a director attempting to persuade Boris Karloff to make a film about “the real horror.” I wonder what the script was called? His cinematic enthusiasm is not yet jaded however, and despite the fact he appeared to only require one take from himself, his presence is amusing.

The other plotline follows Bobby Thompson as he procures lots of guns, sits in the dark a lot, and plays with us by aiming at various people with loaded weapons. This is the heart of the movie; the slow descent of a man who is about to snap for no discernable reason. The suspense ratchets up because you know this guy’s going to do something horrible, and yet no one around him can see it. This is admirably accomplished without the use of non-diegetic music. We are left with the sounds that surround him every day; the television, the radio, the news. The lighting, likewise, is very natural. In a dark room, it is dark. Ambient light has a logical source. Cigarettes glow but faces are obscured except when a passing headlight signals the wife’s return. And what will a man with a rifle who smokes in a dark room do when she gets home?

The two parties meet up at a drive in, where we are inundated with Bogdanovich’s adoration for the cinema as well as treated to a climactic finish which explicitly places movies as both cause and solution for violence. All of it is filmed with such care and intelligence that it seems preposterous that movies should have to cost so much these days when intelligent thrills can be dished out on a low budget.

Because the movie does not try to explain Bobby’s behavior, merely recreate the trajectory of this personality in such a way that you can nearly understand it, the movie feels much more insightful than one would expect from something classified as a “B picture.” In the end, Bobby kills because he’s an excellent marksman, and people are the only targets who make the news. This, as Karloff and Bogdanovich discuss, is the real horror.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man (2006)

2006-07-23T11:51:00.000-07:00

There are very few movies that I would unequivocally deter anyone from seeing. Rarely do I consider “crap” to be utterly useless. However, in the case of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, I would advise staying as far away as possible if any of the following apply:
1. You love Leonard Cohen and/or his music
2. You don’t like butchered cover versions of his tunes
3. You hate Leonard Cohen and therefore have no reason to see this movie.

If this sounds harsh, let me lay out my argument concisely, since I have no desire to waste any more of my life talking about this than I have to. The film consists primarily of a tribute concert filmed a few years ago in Sydney. In the course of this concert, Rufus Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, and a bunch of people I’ve never heard of sequentially performed unrehearsed versions of Cohen songs while clearly reading the lyrics off a music stand. Some of them do a decent job (Rufus, particularly, but then he’s also sung these songs on his own albums, and some strange person named Antony has a wonderful voice) but others, like Jarvis, seem severely hampered by a backing band that has not had a chance to acclimate to the individual singers. Most disappointing, perhaps, is Nick Cave, as he is a clear acolyte of Cohen and ought to be able to pull off a decent cover.

The second most prevalent sort of material here is quotes from Wainwright, Cave, and, of all people, Bono. We learn from them that Cohen’s a good songwriter and an influential one. Bono tells us that Cohen’s songs are capable of touching us at multiple stages of life! Rufus is high or something, and Cave is just boring.

The smallest amount of time is devoted to Cohen himself. Given that this was the reason I watched the film in the first place, the fact that the clips used in the trailer were nearly the sum total of what is used in the film itself was disappointing. I had intended to sit through the cover songs for the sake of the man’s own words, but they are pitifully few and very little insight or recollection is provided.

Leonard Cohen is the best songwriter that I know of, one of the only talents I know who simultaneously awakens both my creative spirit and my eternal envy. A film about him, or a tribute concert, are not misguided projects. But a collection of embarrassing performances, poorly-shot interview footage, and a coda involving Cohen lip-synching with U2 is an insult to the man. If you want to know about Cohen, read a book. If you want to hear some decent covers, listen to about half of I’m Your Fan. Most importantly, just dust off your copy of The Songs of Leonard Cohen, because it’s not going to get any better.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

2006-07-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

Thus far, at least eight feature films have been made from stories by Philip K. Dick. Most of them retain very little of what has garnered Dick his devoted readership, and some, like Blade Runner (adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), have been more or less disowned by many fans. In many ways, A Scanner Darkly, based on a 1977 novel by the same name, was the most likely to satisfy readers. Directed by Richard Linklater (Waking Life), who has a demonstrated respect for Dick’s writing, and featuring a perfect performance by Robert Downy Jr as Barris, this could be just what PKD fans were waiting for.

It isn’t.

The novel, about an undercover narcotics agent who becomes a victim of the very “Substance D” he’s trying to trace, is a mind-fuck of impressive magnitude. Bob Arctor is Fred, and Fred is Bob Arctor, but it becomes clear as the book progresses and Bob gets further and further into his role that Fred, who is charged with surveillance of Bob’s house, isn’t aware that he’s watching himself. Peopled with eccentric druggies and their spot-on nonsense dialogue, it’s a memorable read.

It’s a memorable movie, too, and it’s obvious that Linklater’s both read the book and liked it. The rotoscoped animation style, using a process by which real performances are drawn over frame by frame, lends a drug-reality to the world of the film, in that objects seem to come unmoored from their backgrounds and hallucination blends seamlessly with the objective. The “scramble suit” Fred wears to hide his identity and described as a “vague blur” is rendered as a constantly-shifting amalgamation of men, women and children and would have been impossible without animation. The film retains some memorable conversations from the book, such as Bob and his friends attempting to determine what happened to the extra gears on Barris’ 18-speed bike, since they can only count 9. As a portrayal of the drug experience, it does a lot right.

But there’s something missing. The very real loss of perception one experiences from reading the book, and really getting inside Dick/Bob’s head, is not achieved. The plot must be streamlined to make it coherent, and along the way the disorientation so vital to the book’s success gets cut away. At the same time, I truly wonder if anyone who hasn’t read the book will actually get what the movie’s about. So the question becomes, who is this movie for?

The very successful job Robert Downy Jr does is indicative of how this movie could have gone. With this blocky type of animation, acting must either be really subtle and voice-oriented or over the top. Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder are really good at being blank, but that’s not the same as subtle. Everything’s lost when you can’t discern anything from their monotonous delivery or their comic-book faces. Reeves is at his best hanging with his drug-buddies; as Fred, we get no sense of another personality fighting with Bob for supremacy. Perhaps with different casting, Linklater could have done more with the great start he had.

The film’s not a total write off—there are excellent elements, and it’s a great achievement. I wouldn’t warn anyone off seeing it. But if you’re a Dick fan, be prepared to realize the years it took to get this film out weren’t quite worth the wait. If you’re not, see the film for what it is, and please, please pick up one of his books on the way home.

Peeping Tom (1960)

2006-07-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

In 1960 audiences were revolted by a film of such shockingly voyeuristic violence that it created a media outrage. And later on that year, Psycho came out.

Although it’s fallen by the wayside in the fickle memory of the collective cinema, Peeping Tom is so much more modern and disturbing in its implications, and its implication of the audience, than Hitchcock’s contemporary film that it comes across as severely screwed up even now. Imagine being made to identify with Norman Bates for the entire film, knowing straight off he’s the murderer. Now imagine him holding the camera. And that there’s a psychological reason for his behavior that’s not a tacked-on psychiatrist-ex-machina.

I don’t want to completely identify Peeping Tom with Psycho, although I just have—I merely want to illustrate how much more effective the former is at evoking similar themes in a way which is still relevant. The color of the prints has aged poorly, and the psychology is extreme, but the major theme of a man whose demonic need to produce and record the effects of fear by killing women is central to much discussion that still goes on around the issue of watching in the cinema.

The plot is subtly constructed by a screenwriter who was a major figure in WWII code-breaking, and the care taken to reveal new, startling information is shown in the film’s lack of sensational “pow!” moments. Nothing ever jumps out at you. The killer is known from the start. Yet each new piece of information adds to our understanding, and indeed our sympathy, for the protagonist; even as we fervently hope Mark’s young, innocent tenant Helen (Anna Massey) will make it through alive.

Though concerned with a pathological peeping tom and the horrific murders his disorder drives him to, the film is really about the director as filmmaker and us, the audience, as accomplices. Michael Powell, the director, plays Mark’s father in old home footage, with young Mark played by Powell’s son. The layers of watching and being watched compound, as Mark watches Helen watching movies his father made of Mark as a child. Helen’s mother’s blindness adds another complication, as well as an innate distrust of someone who needs to see so deeply and often that he cannot leave the house without his camera. In the end, the negativity of critics may have been due as much to the equating of watching with pathology as to outraged morals. For whatever reason, it’s very unfortunate that this film has been largely ignored since then except by a few “movie brat” directors like Scorsese and De Palma.

Then again, De Palma might not have had a career if people had had access to this gem.

The Plague Dogs (1982)

2006-06-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

Here’s another entry into the Why Hasn’t Everyone Seen This category. From the director (and novelist) of Watership Down, one of my favorite movies and for me one of the greatest achievements in animation, The Plague Dogs is shamefully forgotten.

It’s depressingly easy to figure out why, once you start watching. This is the most disturbing animated film I’ve ever seen. I’m sure there’s Japanese porn that nothing can touch for weirdness, but what is the market for the brutal torture of talking dogs? The film opens with red titles on a black background, with eerie noises and discordant music gradually taking over the rather saccharine early-80’s song presumably commissioned for the film. The sense of unease is simply achieved, and explodes into downright sickness when the credits end and we are thrust into the middle of an “endurance test” involving a Labrador mix in the process of drowning. To which he has subjected repeatedly in the service of scientific curiosity.

This is not a movie for kids. People say that about Watership Down, but I saw it when I was a kid and I’m okay—it’s disturbing but it works out and kids learn something about death along the way. It’s okay. But there is nothing that makes the opening of this film get better. It only gets worse. The dog, and a fox terrier voiced by John Hurt (Hazel the rabbit in the other film) escape, meet a wily fox named the Todd, and spend the entire 85 minutes of the film trying to survive and getting all too realistically emaciated in the attempt.

The problem with this film is that it’s way too good at what it does to be marketable. The narrative follows the dogs, but the voiceovers from news reports, the lab’s scientists trying to keep the incident hush-hush, the military who’s eventually called in, and local farmers let us in on the aspect of the situation the dogs are incapable of understanding—that this is not about them, and never has been. It’s about the sheep they’ve killed, the fear of the townspeople, the experiments that have been kept secret from the public and risk discovery if these dogs are allowed to live.

The other way in which the film succeeds too terribly well is in the design and animation of the animals. Watership Down is a gorgeous movie, and between the two I have never seen animals so non-invasively anthropomorphized. These are rabbits, or dogs, who happen to talk. In all other ways, they move and act like dogs. There’s a love here for the physicality of these animals, a realism so alien to our Disneyfied notions of the animal world that it makes their struggle all the more poignant—I watched this movie with my Labrador mutt and it was all too easy to see him in Rowf.

On a filmmaking level, this movie shows improvement over the previous in its integration of the characters and backgrounds (sometimes jarringly “layered” looking in Watership…) and its innovating camera movement and angles. My only complaint is that the scene transitions always involved an abrupt fade to black which make me expect commercials.

I’m appalled that I’ve never heard of this movie before. It’s a crime that it’s not acclaimed as a masterpiece. But do not see this movie if you cannot take images of animal cruelty. It’s graphic, and the combination of the “distance” lent by animation (which allows our brains to supply as much detail as we like) and the realism of the character designs is horrifically effective. It reduced my partner and I to a sobbing heap on the couch. And we didn’t even cry when Bambi’s mom died.

The Conversation (1974)

2006-06-20T13:19:00.000-07:00

Blow Up is one of my favorite movies—one of those movies that gains prominence in one's mind as somehow more than a movie. It did the same for blossoming young filmmakers in the 1960's, and De Palma's Blow Out is frequently cited as a tribute to Antonioni's film done with sound rather than photography. But Coppola's The Conversation came first, and is both a better film than De Palma's and more true to the spirit of Blow Up.

Made before he'd launched on a career out of playing himself, Gene Hackman plays a soundman who is hired by various parties to confidentially record their conversations. He's the best in the business but his life is a mess—he is intensely paranoid but has nothing to hide and no curiosity about his work. As it turns out, he can't afford any. Just as Antonioni's protagonist sees something he can't confirm in an image he's recorded, Hackman gets trapped by the ambiguity of the spoken word.

Technically, the movie is a marvel of sound engineering. Walter Murch (who did the incredible sound for THX: 1138) is in top form here, and the cinematography is full of empty spaces reflecting the main character's position: my favorite shot is one of his empty loft office, with him shunted off to one side under an industrial-sized lamp.

But the real marvel of the film is the way that Coppola reuses the initial conversation while still finding variety in the camerawork, reaction shots, and angles used. Every iteration brings more information for the viewer, and what could have been a very boring exercise in sound becomes a visual puzzle as well. The melding of the senses is seamless, and Hackman's descent is as well. To the point where many viewers are bored by the film; there are no chase scenes, no dangling out windows, no actual resolution. Because this story isn't about resolution: it's about interpretation and involvement, and Coppola has the sense to step away and let us experience that for ourselves.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

2006-06-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

If you've seen this movie, you probably either live with me or hate it. Wet Hot American Summer came out to no fanfare at all and aside from a few positive blurbs in movie mags disappeared even more quietly. But I have never, and I mean never, laughed so hard in my life. And I mean probably 20 viewings and counting.

The thing is, this movie is incredibly stupid in an insanely smart way. All logic has been abandoned; aside from the set-up of a summer camp run by Janeane Garofalo and assorted members of The State (and The Baxter's Michael Showalter, who co-wrote, with notable turns by David Hyde Pierce and Paul Rudd), there is no reason in anything than happens. Indeed, much of the fun comes from the noticing the intentional lack of continuity, as long scenes transpire in mere minutes according to the time stamps and knitted scarves appear and disappear at random. At one point Pierce hands a huge prop off-screen to no one—and every discarded object makes a glass-breaking sound.

This may not sound like much, but there's verbal idiocy too!

"Oh yeah, there's some kids caught in the obstacle course. I meant to tell you about that yesterday."

"Listen, Henry... " "Please, call me Henry. " "Okay, Henry it is."

"Now we need to make 8 gallons of bug juice by snack hour, do you know where the powder packets are?"
"Yeah. "
"In the pantry, above the sink, right next to my bottle of dick cream. Uh, wait, forget that last part. "
"Did you say dick cream?"
"No! I said next to my... stick... team, you know stick team! Stickball! Go away leave me alone!"

Okay, I could go on for days, and you still wouldn't get the point. There's a talking can of corn. There's a vegan goth girl. There's a training montage. A gay wedding. My point is that there's a fine line between stupidity being, well, stupid, and stupidity being intentional and brilliant. Think "Monty Python" or "Kids in the Hall," but if the last group had made a good movie.

I don't think this film lasted in the theater for more than two minutes, but any DVD that has an optional "extra farts" soundtrack has its own charm. Plus, unless you're a humorless loser, you'll appreciate being in your own living room so that you can dissolve into hysterics in comfort. Oh, and don't neglect the deleted scenes, most of which deserve to be in the movie.

The Odd Couple (1968)

2006-06-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

As time passes and societal mores change, comedy is often one of the casualties. The shock of gross-out humor wears off. In the case of satire, what once seemed prescient can come off as either ridiculously off-base or just true. In other cases, such as The Odd Couple, the film can become funny for completely different reasons.

At the time, while the un-filmed Hollywood was well versed in gay culture, it wasn’t something a comedy would have tackled. I have no evidence to back this up, but my sense is that Neil Simon wasn’t intending to tackle homosexuality in any way with this film—the humor is centered on the utter ridiculousness of two men taking on marital roles in each others’ lives (and the ultimate unnaturalness and inevitable failure of such an attempt). Like Some Like It Hot, which in my opinion treats the subject of gender with less inherent misogyny, they couldn’t have gotten away with jokes about “the marriage being off” if gay marriage had been a remote possibility. But rather than dating the movie—or perhaps along with dating it—this sexless gay marriage is funny in a totally different way than seemed to have been intended.

Because you see, at this point, I find it impossible to watch this movie as anything but an unconsummated affair between two opposites, too locked into their hetero-normative worldview to see what’s really going on. I don’t want to paint a lurid picture of Felix and Oscar in a romantic clinch. But it’s hard to read their physicality, the quarrels that (until the last one) end in abrupt shifts back to companionability, as anything other than a primary relationship. At the time this was funny because it was so silly to see men taking on these roles—the sexual implications were unseen by dint of being impossible. Now the ending, with Felix gone and the line about marriages coming and going but the game going on, feels tacked on and apologetic. Felix and Oscar didn’t work out, not because they’re incompatible roommates, but because they were raised in such a way as to make the true nature of their relationship hidden from them. The tension between them, the protestations that Oscar makes about wanting to get out and have fun—specifically with Felix, not alone—read like sexual frustration. Can you read the following lines, spoken before and during their bowling alley outing, any other way?

“Getting a clear picture on Channel 2 is not my idea of whoopee… Bowling is wonderful exercise, felix, but that's not the kind of relaxation I had in mind. I mean, the night was made for other things.”

“Like what?”

“Like unless I get to touch something soft in the next two weeks, I'm in big trouble.”

“Oh, you mean women?”

“If you want to give it a name, all right, women.”

“That's funny. I haven't thought of women in weeks.”

If you want to give it a name? Look, I know the humor here is in the fact we’re supposed to realize they’re talking like a married couple, which is silly because they’re men. But it’s equally silly, these days, to read this film as anything but a tale of would-be lovers whose wires get crossed somewhere, at the mercy of the imposed sexual roles of the day, who are shoe-horned back into the safe, poker-playing masculine space imposed by the filmmakers. And all this is really to say that despite Simon’s typical treatment of women as necessary irritants, the movie is still classic, still funny, and still relevant. Just, you know, gay.

Dune (1984)

2006-06-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

Disasters are often beautiful. Even when we should pull away, even when we feel guilty for enjoying it on some visceral level, we love watching bridges fall, the Hindenburg crash, the CG Titanic sink while Jack and Rose carry on inconsequentially in front of it. Such is the case with Dune; a film with just about the largest divide between visual and narrative skill I’ve ever seen. Artistically, the design and execution are breathtaking. Unfortunately, so is the writing.

Dune suffers from the all-too-common syndrome of Cult Literary Adaptation, causing massive confusion when the filmmakers attempt to navigate the treacherous waters of keeping the fans happy with certain set-pieces while constructed a condensed but cohesive narrative. At the same time, it has too much exposition. These contradictory impulses result in a film in which certain concepts are imparted multiple times during an interminable first half, while the last half jumps along without any apparent pattern or comprehensible plot. Through it all, the characters’ are drawn by someone who apparently has no social intelligence whatsoever and thinks the audience must have every emotion and motive spoken in voiceover. Why even have actors if their acting will be explained to us? I can see that she’s scared and that you wonder why—you don’t need to tell me, “I wonder what she’s afraid of.”

There is very rarely an excuse for extraneous inner monologue in film. It’s a clumsy device that must make itself essential in some way. In one scene, a character’s speculative inner musing is repeated to us twice by external means. Imagine you’re watching someone about to drink some water. “I wonder if my enemies have poisoned this water,” you hear him think to himself. “They probably have.” He drinks the water.

“Ha ha ha!” the villain cackles as he enters. “You drank the poisoned water I left for you!”

Immediately a voice comes over a loudspeaker. “Do not drink the water,” it intones. “It has been poisoned.”

I’m not exaggerating. Those weren’t the exact words, but it’s that bad.

My objections don’t stop there, however. Underneath the bad writing, there’s an offensive patriarchal consciousness that I don’t think I’m overstating. The women in the film are accessories; even the Reverend Mother we are told is very powerful constantly reiterates that there are places no woman can go, pain no woman can bear, and of course Kyle MacLauchlan is the Boy Wonder who can. Kyle, moreover, was born only because his mother the acolyte and concubine defied her duty to bear only daughters in order to bear a son for the Duke, who won’t even marry her. So far we have a Cult of Women in the service of an Emperor and a Duke, and the production of a son as the highest form of regard a woman can pay her lover. Good. So let’s take them all to a desert planet with huge phallic worms so that this amazing son can walk into a group of natives, tame the giant penis to his will, and act just like every other old white guy in the movie. There doesn’t appear to be any difference between the warring factions, no moral distinction between them. I don’t even know what they’re fighting for, other than for power over this drug-like spice. While we’re at it, let’s throw in a scene of the repulsive Baron Harkonnen ogling an almost-nude Sting, who functions in this film as basically a gorgeous codpiece. This movie is a celebration of the masculine body without regard to any political, moral, or social workings of the characters involved. We side with the pretty ones. With big worms.

What makes this disaster even more tragic is the obvious care that was taken in designing and casting this mess. Some of the actors are amazing, including Brad Dourif, Kenneth McMillan, and an uncredited David Lynch. The transport the Atreides men take to the spice mine might as well be an Elektra-ferry bringing us hot Daddy-figures Patrick Stewart, Jürgen Prochnow, and Max von Sydow. Sting is beautiful, Kyle is pretty, and the women are too (and awesomely scary, in the case of Siân Phillips as the Rev. Mother). And the design of the ships, the palaces, the planet are fantastic. Unfortunately, it makes the pain of watching it all the more acute, because if it was any less beautiful you could walk away.

Art School Confidential (2006)

2006-06-20T13:07:00.000-07:00

Good movies are all alike; every bad movie is bad in its own way. While that doesn’t actually make any sense, what I’m trying to say is that while in my opinion, declaring a movie to be of “good” quality means it’s good to watch, a “bad” movie may be equally entertaining.

You can quibble with my definitions, but such is the case with Art School Confidential, the second collaboration between Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes of Ghost World fame. A muddled mess of genres, motives, and message, the movie follows the rollercoaster career of a first-year Swarthmore drawing and painting student as he navigates a hot drawing model, an unreceptive art world, and John Malkovich. Pretty much everyone’s college experience, right? Along the way, the audience is treated to entertaining stereotypes of art school students and some spot-on in-class discussions about art and theory which are painfully accurate. At the same time, the stereotypes are just the tip of the iceberg of cliché hiding beneath the quirky veneer of the indie-comic names attached to the project. The presence of a certain actor, whose only roles that I’ve ever seen have been psycho-killer or undercover cop or both, does not relieve the situation.

When Ghost World was turned into a movie, the result was different from the comic in the best possible way—it used the comic as a jumping-off point to create something filmic, and the alterations made to the material were all prompted by the new form in which it was being cast. With Art School…, I get the feeling that the comic it was based on was too short to offer Clowes any kind of structure to work around. Although Ghost World the movie was much more streamlined than the book, the movie made sense, as if the medium change forced Clowes to really work at reforming the material. This one feels unconnected, the last act clever but arbitrary. I welcome genre ambiguity, dark comedy, and defied expectations in film. But I also like them to make sense to me in some small way. And this felt wrong.

Nevertheless, I still recommend it. It’s smart, fun, and entertaining. I just didn’t feel like I was watching a movie in the sense of a fully-formed filmic concept—more of a sketch of one with enough great images and arresting shapes to let me forgive the lack of shading.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

2006-06-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

Having seen Good Night and Good Luck in the theater, and very much enjoyed it despite its flaws, I realized George Clooney was actually a director. This was confirmed when I rented his first film and was treated to a movie which actually used the medium to its advantage. I can be pretty snooty, but anyone who directs by some method other than placing the camera in front of a scene and rolling can be my friend any way. It’s sad, but true: I’m a sucker for actual direction.

George Clooney has been infringing on my perception of him as a not-that-pretty pretty boy for about a year now, both on and off screen, and the sheer style of this film has sold me for good. While obviously credit must go to cinematographer (Newton Thomas Sigel) and editor (Stephen Mirrione), it’s impressive that this was the film he made. The flashbacks are presented in muted, postcard-faded images; time passes in the course of one shot by means of main character (and dangerous mind) Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) passing through the scene three times, supposedly in the same take but chronologically quite distant; use of old tv footage is appropriately used as is interview material with the real people involved. All this is in keeping with the frenetic, loopy Charlie Kaufman written story, based on the supposedly true book by the main character. It doesn’t feel jarring or out of place, just colorful.

Which isn’t to say it’s all true. Apart from the game show host/hitman plot we’re supposed to swallow, the film fudges some of its facts. But then again, it’s not a documentary, and it doesn’t really read like one in spite of the “real” segments. If we had any doubts, the arrival of Julia Roberts dispelled them all. What it does read like is a quirky good time by a group of people who knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t do it perfectly. Mr. Clooney has my permission to make more movies.

Match Point (2005)

2006-06-06T17:06:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen's latest movies have not encouraged me to rush out to each new one. But the combination of having revisited some older classics and the decidedly atypical trailer for Match Point were enough to get me to the theater; whatever he's subjected me to lately, Allen deserves my patronage when he tries something new.

Not that there's anything really new about this movie. It tells the tried-and-true tale of adultery, class difference and desperate action. And why not? It's a good story. Even when he's funny, Allen is always dark, so this grim but never heavy film isn't really a deviation for him. Unlike Allen, however, he is nowhere to be found in the characters; there is no Woody-clone to gum up the works with a futile attempt to mimic his trademark nervous patter.

Instead we have an attractive young cast, headed by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johannson, both of whom seem to be popping up everywhere. The rest of the cast is lovely as well, though my egalitarian American soul was a little miffed that my sympathies lay with the moneyed Hewetts rather than the Irish and American upstarts. I thought Meyers acquitted himself well, even as he made himself creepy and pouty (in a way that makes me think he's been rifling through Jude Law's playbook), though Johannson struck me as seeking to remember her lines before uttering each one. She struck me false, and I couldn't buy into her reading of the character. Interestingly enough, fellow viewers had the exact same complaint--but about Meyers. This discrepancy in spectator opinion is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of the film's effectiveness.

This film may not garner the kind of following Allen's dark comedies encouraged in earlier days. But it's a welcome addition to his oeuvre, decadent and fun and dismal, and the central theme of luck vs. skill is followed through to the end, though perhaps without teaching us much of anything. This is entertainment in the loveliest sense--ambiguous, enjoyable, and without pandering to Hollywood's obsession with closure.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

2006-06-06T17:05:00.000-07:00

“What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?”
… “Revenge.”

I’m sure you can hear Bill Murray as the second member of this exchange, even if you haven’t seen the movie. In fact, Murray is the film’s chief asset. He’s at his best when allowed to do something—which is why Broken Flowers disappointed me while I loved Lost in Translation--and here he is given free rein in a world of Wes Anderson’s making.

Anderson has a reputation for dark comedy and sometimes difficult movies. Unfortunately for me, they’re not always difficult in the way I’d want them to be. His films seem shallow despite being populated with people who seem like they ought to have layers—and don’t. It took several years and a repeat viewing for me to like Rushmore, perhaps because I’d altered my expectations. Bright conceits and witty exchanges do not indicate a plot arc which displays similar qualities.

Knowing this, I was able to enter The Life Aquatic with expectations of a splash through a few hours, and I was not disappointed. Except for Bud Cort. I have nothing against Bud Cort. On the contrary, Harold and Maude is one of my favorite movies and he’s adorable in it. Which makes him one of the saddest people to look at today. My brain still refuses to believe it’s him.

Some of the touches Anderson adds are inexplicable to me, such as the brightly colored, obviously fake wildlife the team encounters. But he makes up for it in scenes like the single-take tour of the ship, spanning multiple floors and introducing the ship and her inhabitants as characters. The movie’s funny, but not uproarious, and it’s smart, but rather self-consciously. But that’s okay. By the way, the screenplay was co-written by Noah Baumbach, writer/director of The Squid and the Whale, which is a topic for another review.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004)

2006-06-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

It may be unfair of me to review Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking. Not only did I fall under the spell of Mr. Jeremy Brett in PBS’s previous Holmesian offerings, but I’ve actually read the stories they’re based on.

I’m going to anyway.

You see, the fact that my having read some Sherlock Holmes makes my review biased is a disturbing one. This Holmes, ostensibly set in 1902 Edwardian England, is actually shot forward into modern America. Specifically, Silence of the Lambs-era. In a bid to spark viewer interest in what they must consider a dying property (despite having bothered to do it at all), the production has assumed a PBS viewership made up of paperback-literate couch potatoes who think they’re sophisticated. At least, that’s the explanation I’ve come up with.

Rupert Everett is this outing’s Holmes, whom we first encounter in an opium den. “Oh,” I thought. “They’re ripping off ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip,’” which is one of my favorites and involves Holmes going undercover in an opium den and Watson getting all pissy about it. But no! Holmes is actually an effete, dissolute vampire, subsisting on drugs and coffee and given Everett’s rather pouty reception of the soon-to-be-wed Watson, perhaps missing some other essential protein to his diet he hasn’t gotten daily dose of since Dr. W moved out of Baker Street.

Everett’s not bad. I’m not suffering from Brett withdrawal—he’s dead, and if there’s to be a new Holmes it obviously won’t be him, and I’m not exclusive in my Holmes watching. But he’s a bit too much Rupert, and the plot of this scurvy little tale doesn’t help any. It’s a case of sexual dysfunction, of fetishistic murders of delicate pre-Raphaelite debutantes, of that new “science” called psychology. The solution of this case seems based mostly upon the dubious information Holmes gleans from an abnormal psych textbook Watson’s fiancé, a completely un-Canonical American psychoanalyst with the inexplicable prefix of Mrs.. Holmes, were he to see this, would be appalled on nearly every count.

These touches of the modern third-rate sexual thriller are somewhat understandable, if not excusable. It does beg the question, however, of why making this a Holmes case at all? Is name recognition enough? Because this script was not written for the Holmes fan, or even dabbler. It is so full of copped dialogue from actual stories (or clichéd misquotes) that anyone with a passing familiarity with them would be mightily confused as to why Holmes is suddenly quoting this or that tale, completely out of context. One would expect that these touches of Doyle would be nods to the readers, but if that was the case, why adulterate the source so violently? The whole thing closes with Holmes finding common ground with the obsessed murderer, on the grounds that “it’s an addiction.” Bravo, Holmes, finding your enlightened stoner side so easily. He probably had to in order to avoid dying of boredom, as there certainly isn’t anything here worthy of Holmes’ abilities. Which, come to think of it, we must rely on prior knowledge of the character to accept. Watson fares rather better in the investigative vein here, which was nice to see despite Ian Hart’s suspicious moustache.

I’m not a purist. I accept—nay, encourage—intelligent wranglings of canon. I write fanfic, after all. But to squander an intriguing character on such material is a waste and an insult. Not only to Holmes or Doyle or whoever, but to me, the viewer. As Holmes would say, this is all just “ineffable twaddle,” and he would be dismayed at having his named linked to it.

Casualties of War (1989)

2006-06-06T17:03:00.000-07:00

When I read The Devil’s Candy, about the making of Bonfire of the Vanities, I was struck with a strange sympathy for Brian De Palma. Coming off the failure of his last film, he was dejected, determined, and confused. Casualties of War, he’d said, was one of his most personal films, and he was personally offended it hadn’t found an audience.

I felt for the guy. I mean, it couldn’t be that bad—I’d just watched Bonfire. But watching Casualities of War is about the only method I can think of of making Bonfire look good.

The plot is based on real events and has potential. Michael J Fox, fairly new at this whole Vietnam thing, is assigned to a small group of soldiers headed by Sean Penn. To liven up their scouting mission, Penn suggests they pick up a local girl to bring along. He delivers this plan in a completely non-joking way that nevertheless leaves Fox in shock when he actually nabs a girl from her bed in the middle of the night and makes her accompany them, gagged and barefoot, through miles of jungle.

Now Fox has a dilemma—does he remain loyal to his fellow men? Or does he speak up about what happened?

De Palma tries very hard to make this quite fraught with moral tension. And fails. From the beginning we are treated to a view of the jungle that might as well be my backyard. Filmed on location though it was, the nighttime scenes look lit by stadium lights. De Palma appears to think he’s still directing urban thrillers. Everything’s too smooth, too clean. There is not a hint of the jungle out here; not a whiff of napalm in the morning. He does manage to crib from Browning’s Freaks, however, which is kind of impressive if you like that sort of thing.

But the worst thing about this film is that it doesn’t build up to the abduction, rape, and fallout at all. Suddenly we are intended to feel great tension surrounding this situation, when we have not been led to know these men. What, exactly, is Fox’s problem? He does not know these men, does not owe them his loyalty in the way soldiers with some sort of established bond do. There would appear to be no two ways about it. And the massive hurt and betrayal and angst we are supposed to feel when the girl is taken is so artificially induced as to make a true story seem contrived. That’s how badly this is handled; I was forced to doubt the reality of something that actually happened. Penn’s character is not drawn with any degree of complexity—certainly nothing to help us figure out why he has any caché with anyone when for all we can see he’s just a random asshole. I sense that the audience is supposed to be awed by the realization that “war makes men into animals,” but not only has that been done, it’s been done in Apocalypse Now, which I would much rather have been watching. At least that makes me feel the jungle, the death, the privation and primitivism that alters men’s minds. This movie did not need to be made unless someone had something brilliant and new to say. And no one involved seemed to.

The scenery, most of which I suspect was shot by second-unit director Eric Schwab, is gorgeous, but it does not adequately throw the dirty deeds of the Americans into relief. It’s not enough to let me look past the fact that Michael J Fox is apparently the lone voice of reason in the U.S. Army. Shabbily handled and unsuccessfully manipulative, Casualties of War left me craving Bonfire of the Vanities. Which really takes some doing.

Deliverance (1972)

2006-06-06T17:02:00.000-07:00

My dad used to tell me the story of Deliverance on camping or canoeing trips when I was a kid. It was a stock favorite, along with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the latter heavily influenced by the 1978 version). He’d always change the characters’ names to things like “Al Waysright” and “Nera Corner.”

Apart from his unassailable wit, you’re probably wondering what kind of dad fills his kids’ bedtimes stories with fodder such as this? Well, truth be told, he cut some stuff out. In his story, there were these guys in the woods with green teeth and backwards baseball caps who were somehow vaguely threatening. Even when I finally saw the movie, with his supervision, they fast-forwarded some of it. I think you know what I’m talking about.

So having been inspired by hearing “Dueling Banjos” to rent this film again, I have finally seen all of it. And my feelings are decidedly mixed. And didn’t anyone else realize that there was a guitar in that banjo thing? Not, as the name implies, two banjos?

Actually, this is the best scene in the film, for me. I don’t know where they found these people, but they’re awesome, and the dichotomy between them and the urbanites is well laid out, though not yet sinister. So I can deal with it.

But as the film progresses, its social message becomes extremely murky. What is the lesson? That we should save wild places like these because they’re beautiful? But untamable and therefore don’t try? Or is it that these rural landscapes hold as many terrors as the city? Or is it that city-folk don’t belong here, unless they’re willing to be picked off in a demonstration of manly survival skills? The macho guy gets hurt. The pudgy one gets sodomized. The musician can’t cope at all. And the Midnight Cowboy dude finds hidden machoness within himself.

The movie sets up these venturesome personalities fairly well without much exposition. We can fill in the details, and we probably know each of these guys. But what are we to make of the rural inhabitants? Even the ones who don’t randomly scour the countryside for ugly dudes to molest look inbred and retarded, not to mention really dirty. Even if they can play the banjo. I have a feeling the dinner scene towards the end is meant to redeem the rural folk somewhat, but honestly I couldn’t tell who these people were supposed to represent—though I thought the scene contained some of the best acting in the movie. But the fact remains that I can’t figure out whether to be offended. I don’t know what Dickey or Boorman’s intentions are, and Dickey himself in interviews gives conflicting viewpoints that to me reflect a lack of intent.

This doesn’t take away from the film’s effectiveness; it really is a grueling ordeal to sit through, without too much Hollywoodization of tension of feat of skill from the players. The fact that the actors did their own stunts, paddled their canoes, shot their own bows and all that is respectable and adds immeasurably to the film’s quality and value. But from the opening shots of wilderness being overtaken by civilization, I feel like I’m supposed to be watching something more layered than a survival thriller, and I don’t think I am.

But if you can overlook rampant generalization of an entire region’s people and culture, it’s a harrowing ride.

Rashomon (1950)

2006-06-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

This is one of those films that suffers for its ingenuity, at least as far as later viewers are concerned. That is not to say that the film is any less important/well done/interesting than it was fifty years ago. What it is to say is that at this point, I’ve seen so many reviewers call other things "the Rashomon of _________" that it’s like raising a kid on The Lion King and then letting him find out about this guy named Shakespeare when he gets to high school.

Rashomon is reportedly when we learned that what we saw on screen, with our eyes, could not be trusted. I actually had to think about this really hard before I realized that that is a pretty harsh lesson. I’m a thoroughly post-modern kid; it seems to me I’ve known forever that I can’t trust anything I see, especially if the media’s involved. I never got disillusioned about that, because I was never illusioned. The way politicians’ fallibility doesn’t ever surprise me; I was born way post-Nixon. But think about this: you’ve been watching movies your whole life, movies which do not ask you to interpret what you see on screen. It’s a play. It’s a story played out in compressed time but pretty straightforward. Then you’re asked to watch the same story four times with four different outcomes, and Clue won’t be out for another several decades so you don’t even have that preparation.

That’s pretty disconcerting.

So, much in the way Citizen Kane looks to me now like an amalgamation of stuff other people have done, Rashomon is one of those classics I felt guilty about not having seen but wasn’t astonished by for the reasons I was supposed to be. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the film, and I learned a lot of other things. For instance, Toshiro Mifune is one badass mother. This guy is crazy. And utterly brilliant everywhere I see him; he’s like an animal, a force of nature, one of those prints from Japanese theater come to larger-than-life. I often wonder, watching him, if he would be as entertaining in English. Would it all seem over the top if I could actually understand?

Does it matter?

Visually, the film has a lot to offer as well, as Kurosawa and cinematographer Miyagawa create not only a fantastic rainstorm framing device but a richly shadowed forest (watch the patterns of leaves on Mifune as he rests by a tree), a tracking shot that curves around a woodcutter as he ventures into the woods, a direct shot of the sun, and the beautifully poetic costume-choreography of the medium. I also very much liked the fact that though the film was structured as an interrogation, one never hears the questions—only receives the answers from the participants as they stare out at you from the screen. Despite the familiarity of the narrative, they, and the movie, still have a lot to tell us.

The Apple (1980)

2006-06-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

Popular culture trains us in hyperbole. Everything is the (insert adjective) thing we’ve ever seen! Well I’m here to tell you that I have overcome that particular fault, at least when the blank is filled by the word “worst.” For The Apple is the worst movie ever made. Exclamation point.

I know many people make claims of this kind. But folks, Batman and Robin, Ishtar (actually, I rather liked the first half), and Plan 9 have nothing on this one. This is not a case of a movie “so bad it’s good,” which is a cliché with a lot of truth to it, just not here. This is a movie so bad I almost couldn’t sit still through all 90 minutes of it.

Here’s the gist: it’s 1994, the far future, where people wear costumes I think were recycled for Quantum Leap and listen to disco. A folk-duo from Canada with strangely mutating accents threatens Bim’s supremacy on the charts. Yes, the global music market is dominated by a band/corporation named Bim. This “Bim” is run by a Mr. Boogalow, a demonically ridiculous figure whose absurdity is thrown into sharp realism by the absolutely blinding weirdness of the people he surrounds himself with. He signs the young singers to keep them under his thumb—or tries to. Bibi, the female half, is seduced quicker than a curious rabbit but young Alphie starts hallucinating about an apple someone wants him to take a bite of.

Not only are we subjected to this subtle bit of sledgehammer symbolism, but we get a whole production number involving hellish figures writhing around unattractively with, yes, a huge apple and our heroes in some Adam and Eve costumes. Because this is, you guessed it, a musical. The music all the way through is based around one chord per song and lots of repetition of meaningless phrases. It’s as if someone set out to make a sequel to Rocky Horror Picture Show without all the advantages shown off so ineffectively in Shock Treatment. And a less coherent narrative, if that’s possible.

I’m not even going to bother to tell you what happens next, aside from this: boy mopes around a lot while girl becomes superstar for no real good reason. Girl despairs of seeing him again, although she hasn’t actually attempted to do so. Bim turns out to be in league with the government somehow, but I’m not sure why. Hippies come to the rescue despite their apparent lack of a food source or any kind of spirit of resistance. Then the leader of the hippie guy becomes god, or something, and leads the hippies, including our folk duo, into the sky.

This movie brings to mind a lot of movies that are commonly cited as being not too good but actually are. Josie and the Pussycats is actually a slick, entertaining, and hypocritically honest portrayal of a very similar story. Phantom of the Paradise is a passionate, entertaining, and serio-comic treatment of similar themes. Shock Treatment is actually pretty bad, but had Richard O’Brien’s songs and Jessica Harper’s dancing to prop it up. This has nothing. Do not see this movie. Do not buy it like I did just because it was $2. For $2 you can buy a screwdriver to keep on hand in case someone makes you watch this movie and you need to gouge out your own eyes.

Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story (2005)

2006-06-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

This is my review of the film Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story. As reviewer, it is my job to tell just enough about this film to influence your decision to see it, without ruining your enjoyment of the movie should you, the reader, decide to do so, either in affirmation or rejection of my aforementioned recommendation. This is a difficult task, as might be imagined. For instance, if I tell you how much I enjoyed the scene with the giant prop womb, you will be waiting the entire film for this prop to show up. What if this is the turning point of the whole thing? What if it’s only effective in its shock value? What if the womb is never actually used in the film?

But if, instead, I tell you only that it’s a grand movie and you should see it, how will you know that’s in fact the case? After all, I’ve probably told you to go watch Wet Hot American Summer as well. Or Picnic at Hanging Rock. For that matter, what use is a critic? Am I a lobbyist of sorts, begging for you to recognize the films I deem worthy of your dollar (or 10)? I’m certainly a snob. Who else would deign themselves arbiters of others’ entertainment? I could have any number of agendas here. In the end, what does it matter to me whether you actually like the film I’ve recommended, once I’ve exercised enough power over you to get you to the theater?

It’s a dilemma, for sure, and calls into question this entire practice. Tristram could be a boring costume drama. It could be a domestic farce. It could be a complex meta-movie about the nature of filmmaking, authorship, audience reaction, and narrative in which Steve Coogan plays Tristram, Tristram’s father Walter, and himself. Sometimes simultaneously. The point is, nothing I say here alters any of that. I didn’t make the movie. I’ve nothing invested in it at all, aside from yesterday afternoon and $6 (matinee). Well, and a curiosity about Gillian Anderson. But is she even in the movie? I still don’t know. And I can’t talk about who made it, because I’m confused about that, as well. I certainly don’t know who the star is. Without this knowledge, it would be foolish to write a review.

I refuse.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

2006-06-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

It’s not giving anything away to tell you that Picnic at Hanging Rock concerns the story of three girls who go missing while on a picnic in Victoria, Australia in 1900. This is revealed before the film starts, and in this case the disclosure works. The film is not about what happened to them, or why; nor does it resemble a mystery in the conventional sense. It is, rather, a mystery of mood. It is Wicker Man mixed with Walkabout and left unresolved. And it’s gorgeous.

Peter Weir has a varied resumé, but in this film he has created a timeless portrait of a fictional incident. The residents, one wants to say inmates, of Mme. Appleyard’s school for girls awake on Valentine’s Day to set into motion a series of mannered, fantasy-like events in which they wash their faces in basins full of flowers, create a train of corset-tightening, and one declares to another, “You must learn to love someone other than me.” Girls say things like, “everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place” and “a surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves,” to one another, seemingly unprovoked and rather unrealistically.

But the whole thing, for us, is unrealistic. It made me realize just how different “being a girl” would be if I lived in this film; it is a world I know nothing about, and one which most likely never existed. There are few answers here, not least because this is not a world we know. It looks like something that could be the real world, but it is removed from ours in time, in gauzy slow-motion, in the angelic, magnetic personality that is Miranda but is no one we recognize. Most of the significant relationships are between members of the same gender; aside from the hired help, meaning is found in other girls, other men. Texture is found in the natural phenomena of the ground around the Rock; clouds, ants, parrots, and lizards seem to comment on the futile nature of human activity to transcend mere animal survival.

At the same time, the beauty of the images, of the people and things in them (especially, for me, John Jarrett as the hired man Albert), does transcend survival. There is worth to these images, these simple evocations of a life that may not have existed. The film, while mysterious and sad and hopeless, nevertheless offers hope in the fact of its very existence. Some questions don’t need to be answered, because the search for them is the important thing. Not all viewers will feel this way; especially in this time, answers are a requirement even if they make no sense. But beauty requires no explanation, and neither should this movie.

Jarhead (2005)

2006-06-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

I had not intended to see Jarhead. There was no particular reason not to, but there was no motivating force to make me get there either. Having now seen it, I must say that I feel much the same. At the same time, I think it was important that I see it.

The movie is a welcome addition to the war movie genre. Its over-arcing message is one of ambiguity; for the war, for the effects of war on marines, for the enemy. Unlike most war movies, we may be on a particular side but we're not entirely sure why. We hardly see the enemy, are only told he is evil and must be destroyed. I think, though I haven't the experience to back this up, that it is the most accurate war movie I've ever seen in this regard.

What the movie seems to play with is the memory of other war films. The most passionate moment may be before deployment, when the marines are watching Apocalypse Now, apparently unaware of the fact they aren't supposed to be rooting for the helicopers. And once the war begins and we are shipped with the men to the desert, the movie recalls another desert war epic, Lawrence of Arabia.

"But Kris," you'll say, "*cheesecake* reminds you of Lawrence." Hear me out.

The desert in Lawrence is multi-colored, dynamic, alive with Bedouin, camels, horses, and Omar Sharif. Lawrence falls in love with the desert. He is helping the Arabs fight the Turks, but he is also fighting himself. The movie is his love of the desert and the internal conflict prompted by that love writ large. There is suffering, but there is beauty and romance. There is blood, but there is lemonade, too. There is love and hate and the last thing one sees in Lean's desert is barren apathy.

Jarhead's desert, on the other hand, is dead. It is a lifeless, nearly contourless waste where the sky is the same color as the land and nothing can be differentiated. The only oases are caravans of slaughtered men. The only color, in fact, is provided by the oil fields burning night and day.

And this brings us to the heart of the comparison. Lawrence (in the film) is fighting for the color of the desert, for his passion. The US in Iraq was fighting for oil; the only living thing there. That flame is the only thing worth anything in that land, and Jarhead makes this overt.

But a movie which communicates such apathy to me, as a viewer, inspires nothing like the passion of the Ride of the Valkyries or Lawrence's cries of "no survivors." I especially liked Peter Sarsgaard and Jamie Foxx, but overall Gyllenhaal's Swoff was made to go through too many iterations of the marine experience for them to feel fully motivated. It was as if he was intended to stand in for every marine, and his voice over (especially at the end) did nothing to increase my understanding of him as a person. The movie felt long, and tiring, politically guarded, and in other words much like the war must have been. I would venture that this is a good representation of the Marine experience.

A good movie? Perhaps not. But still worth it.

Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

2006-06-06T16:53:00.000-07:00

I'm a long time fan of Wallace and Gromit (Wallace's penchant for cheese is right up my alley, and Gromit's facial expressions warm my sardonic little heart) and was pretty thrilled about a feature-length film. All in all, the film does not disappoint W&G fans but does retread a fair bit of ground covered in the short films.

Fans and newbies alike are treated to Wallace's inventions-gone-wrong, his eating habits, Gromit's long-suffering yet loyal companionship, unresolved sexual tension between clay figures, and a cute sidekick; all of which elements are present in the previous W&G canon. One unfortunate outcome of this was my frequent feeling that I'd seen this before when it was called A Close Shave, only the sheep were a lot cuter than the rabbits (who looked a bit like pigs). To reinforce this perception of deja vu, the film is liberally sprinkled with references and in-jokes to the previous films.

However, it is unfair to ignore the triumphs of a feature-length film done entirely with stop-motion animation in favor of the shorter, non-theatrical films which came before. Along with Chicken Run, this movie is one of the last remaining animated films (in the western world) not done with computers, a lack I am sorely feeling. I appreciate any attention this art form is given, and art it certainly is. The skill and patience involved are mind-boggling, and the subtleties of rendering these characters and settings amazingly done.

I won't discuss the plot here, which is rather predictable, but I will say that the fingerprints of comic genius lay everywhere. A personal favorite is when Gromit turns on the car stereo to hear the strains of "Bright Eyes" sung by Art Garfunkel, the theme song to Watership Down. Hardly anyone knows this, I think, which made me laugh all the harder. In short, this film is everything one would expect from the W&G folks, but not more than that; if you liked the short films, you'll definitely enjoy it, and if you haven't, you'll enjoy it as well, unless you have some kind of stop-motion phobia. It's a brilliant technical feat, but it's not earth-shattering in the way my experience of watching The Wrong Trousers for the first time was.

Pretty Persuasion (2005)

2006-06-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

f my husband and I have a "must-see" genre, it's the one where teenage girls do inappropriate things. Naturally, Pretty Persuasion was a must, with Evan Rachel Wood (from Thirteen) and a cover which boasts that "the devil wears a gray skirt."

So I have to admit that most of the films which fall into this "genre" are pretty bad. A guilty pleasure most of the time, right? This one's no exception, except most of the pleasure comes in the first half and most of the guilt should rest on the filmmakers for not bothering to follow through a naughty, though (remotely) plausible story with characterization that makes any sense whatsoever.

The set-up is great: there's a racist father; a neglected, very intelligent daughter; a blond best friend in love with first girl's ex; a new Muslim friend; and a teacher whose personal taste make him a prime target for three young students with revenge on their minds. This is all very interesting, as it addresses, for once, that there's something in between teachers being completely unaware of the sexual maturation of their students and teachers taking rampant advantage of them. Mr. Anderson is easy because he's already lusting after his female students; it's up to us to decide how villainous that really is.

The problems with the film start with the tone; I'm at home with black comedy, but there is a little too much swinging between extremes for me to get a handle on where exactly I'm supposed to be in my suspension of disbelief. Everyone does a good job; I especially liked Jane Krakowski as the lesbian reporter, though like everyone else she's lost some weight. Evan Rachel Wood has grown to much resemble Jenna Malone, the previously ubiquitous bad-girl. James Woods is appropriate disgusting, but Ron Livingston (as the teacher) is a little hammy, despite how much I admire him in Office Space. Again, it's the tone that's in question.

The real problem, without which the rest might be overlooked, is that Wood's character's opportunistic naughtiness, which reaches some pretty high levels, is never adequately explained. By the end of the film I felt that the only way a believable motive could possibly be supplied was if they suddenly revealed the girl was an alien. They give her vast reserves of resourcefulness to plot her revenge, but they don't sufficiently give her reason, and we the audience is left a little flat at the end, having to buy into her basic evil instead of a complex set of motivations. Even the school shooting, an obvious parallel running through the movie, is more interesting in its inexplicability. Surely a character with such superior talent should be granted a more interesting motive than schoolgirl jealousy.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

2006-06-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

“From the novel by John le Carré.” Not words calculated to make me go to a movie. That could be due to my snobbishness, or early exposure to Tom Clancy-based films. But then there’s this: “From the director of City of God.” Oh. Okay.

The Constant Gardener is hands-down the smartest espionage thriller I’ve ever seen. I’m rarely patient with suspense films with patently retarded, retreaded premises. I’m tired of the blatant manipulation required to make these things work. When I left the theater after this movie and felt that wave of paranoia coming on, my husband and I said, wait. We should feel this way. If not for ourselves, then for our world.

Fernando Meirelles has taken his personal stake in the way people live when they’re not us, added Ralph Fiennes and some other people, and made an international horror film I can both understand and enjoy. I have no doubt that the kinds of things that happen in this movie happen somewhere all the time; maybe not in such dramatic fashion, but is anyone going to argue that huge drug companies are completely benign, helpful entities? The director spends a lot of time with the people in Africa affected by the actions of these companies and the governments who shield them, and a story which could have been a pointless exercise in “man thinks wife is hiding something. Wife disappears. Husband finds out she was hiding something, but it wasn’t an affair, it was a global conspiracy and he must be a hero!” becomes an actual film.

In too many of these things, the hero(ine) gets involved over his head and suddenly discovers untold survival skills and/or moral indignation. Here, Fiennes is set up from the beginning to grow into the character he becomes: as a proxy lecturer mouthing the self-praise of a higher-ranking diplomat, he encounters a feisty woman who challenges him yet excites his interest and protective instincts. She responds to this, they fall in love, and get married. This is a man who works for The Man, yet is receptive to the Truth when exposed to it. Unfortunately for all involved, some Truths end in marriage and some in death. We are never asked to believe anything of these people that hasn’t been accounted for. And for that, I am thankful. I got a smart, relevant, entertaining film that I don’t have to be a film buff to like. And I can finally say I like one of these thriller things.

OldBoy (2003)

2006-06-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

There was an image in the trailer for Korean import Old Boy that determined I would one day see it: an unkempt, craggy-faced man walks away from a building while, in the background, a man holding a tiny white dog falls from above to land on the top of a car. As he walks towards us and the car alarm goes off, the first man favors us with a small, evil grin.

It took me awhile, but see it I did, and I must say that while as a whole the plot is entirely too convoluted to hold up to any kind of believability, the film is impressive enough for me to ignore that. The set up is this: Oh Dae-Su is a drunk. One night he is snatched from under his friend’s wandering gaze and is subjected to 15 years of imprisonment in a hotel room. After this time, he is set free on the roof, and given 5 days to determine who did this, why, and what he’s going to do about it. What ensues is a revenge tragedy whose solution cannot possibly be as good as its premise, but the premise is so bizarre, and the ways in which the unseen antagonist directs the action so unflinchingly repulsive, that I can’t help but respect the film. The main character, as well, fulfills the promise I detected in that little smile; he is as committed an actor as I’ve ever seen. And this movie took that commitment very seriously.

I can’t talk much about it without giving too much away; the film relies on you being as in the dark as Dae-Su. I will say that the plot took the characters places an American film would have run screaming from, and did it with style. There is violence, and it is graphic, but it’s also completely appropriate for the story. My interest waned as more was revealed, but as I said earlier I’m not sure how any film could live up to that opening. Once all shred of credibility vanished (note to self: if seeking revenge, just kill the dude—20 years is way too long to wait), however, I was kept involved by the sheer ballsiness of the movie. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for daring cinema you can do a lot worse.

Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

2006-06-06T16:48:00.001-07:00

After directing two low budget, critically accepted movies (Greetings and Hi, Mom!), Brian De Palma heeded the siren call of Hollywood and took on the Tommy Smothers vehicle Get to Know Your Rabbit. The only reason to see this film, as far as I can tell, is to gain a better understanding of why he went on to make all the other stuff; which, even if you don’t like it, at least looks like it had a director.

Someone must have thought there was an audience for this film when they greenlit it. It’s more or less disappeared except in the kind of video stores where they group films by director and is therefore “important” in studying the young director’s development. But who decided that a “traditional,” Rock Hunter-like star vehicle about a tap-dancing magician would draw a crowd that would accept the bare breasts and lewd, not particularly funny humor it supplies as a bonus.

Plus, I have no idea who Tommy Smothers is. And I think I’m supposed to, because he sure doesn’t do anything remotely interesting in this movie. He goes from overworked executive to the afore-mentioned tap-dancing magician without really learning anything or telling us anything about him-or-our-selves. Along the way, he meets a cast of unfunny eccentrics, all of whom are variously repulsive except for Katherine Ross, who is dismissed in the credits as “the Terrific Looking Girl” and is way too sexually focused on paperboys to be that entertaining. Who is this hottie who groupies magicians in sequined top hats in dive bars? None of these eccentrics (aside from an over-involved, incompetent boss) actually affects the plot, either.

The “point” of the film, inasmuch as there is one, is predictable and poorly handled. Smothers’ efforts to escape are far too successful, leading to a return to the old pattern. Unfortunately, Smothers’ reaction to that pattern is exactly the same as his first reaction. So he’s learned nothing either. There’s no growth, no point, no satisfaction (good or disturbing) for the audience.

Luckily, De Palma learned something (he had the film taken away from him and the ending re-shot) and went on to do things his own way, which is admirable if not always something I want to see. Better that, though, than this studio tripe dressed up to look “hip.”

Walkabout (1971)

2006-06-06T16:48:00.000-07:00

I am a latecomer to the work of Nicholas Roeg. As a scifi fan, "The Man Who Fell To Earth" was a library discovery a year or so ago and was very much enjoyed. In my quest to "understand" 70's film (an era I was only alive for 8 months of), I saw "Performance" a few months ago. And finally, I saw what I consider his best of the three: "Walkabout".

"Walkabout," as its title suggests, is the story of a trip through the outback. The term generally refers to the journey a young aborigine boy makes which leads to manhood; that holds in this case but with the addition of, and emphasis on, a journey taken by an English brother and sister left in the desert to die.

Eschewing names in favor of presences, the film simultaneously reduces and magnifies everything it touches: a lizard on a rock=the sunrise=the glistening buttocks of the native boy as the girl walks behind him. It is all one, all ordinary, and all grand. And all is beautiful, from the aforementioned scenic considerations to Jenny Aguter in her first naked-in-water role. Though far from her last such, this reviewer must nervously conclude that the 16 year old Aguter has never looked so lovely.

The film, being a Roeg work, does not lack confusion for the viewer. Roeg is clearly attempting to juxtapose civilization with nature, modernity with the aboriginal way of life. He does this in wonderfully unsubtle yet somehow not annoying cuts between our protagonists climbing a tree and local aborigines exploring an abandoned car. To name just one example. Other additions are less informative: I am not sure what to make of the weather balloon party or the static noises which sometimes overwhelm the soundtrack.

This confusion recedes in my memory, however, as soon as it's removed. What is left are a handful of breathtaking images, good writing, and a beautiful girl and boy. There is also an emotional puzzle; the girl remains strangely unmoved by the multiple tragedies which confront her. Like me, her later (married) self remembers only the moments of purity spent with her little brother and the strange, though not-so-strange, boy who saves their lives at great cost to himself.

Rent (2005)

2006-06-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

Where to start? There is so much swirling around my head, and all for a film which I actually don't think is worthy of so much thought. I can see I'll have to get personal.

My confession is this: that as a teenager, which I was when "Rent" debuted on Broadway, I really felt it was a gift to us theater kids; something in which "real" people sang songs the rest of us could hit all the notes of. I related especially to Mark, the only one to fail at hooking up, the one who fears he'll be left alone to observe. I know this opens up a whole other can of worms for those of you who are ignorant of my theater geek past; but for the sake of journalistic integrity it must be known.

"Rent", for those of you who don't know, is a Broadway show that costs as much as a Broadway show usually does about poor people in lower Manhattan who complain about having to pay rent on the huge loft their former roommate owns, do drugs, get aids, and die singing. It is filled with appeals to the bohemian life; in fact, one of the choicest numbers is a list of things which exemplify this spirit (my favorite juxtaposition being "huevos rancheros and Maya Angelou!").

I hadn't thought about "Rent" in a long time until the film came out, almost under my nose. Actually, it went to the second run theaters before I could even decide whether it was worth seeing. $3 meant it was.

The movie prompted two reactions in me, somewhat contradictory ones. First, I was angered that so much of what I loved was left out. I tend to like the "connective tissue" of sung-through musicals; it's not necessarily the songs that get me, but the recitative, the sung-spoken bits which actually reveal plot and character. Rent, on stage, is filled with polyphonic plot-driving. Polyphony always makes me tingle. Most of the songs were still there, but they were simplified, excised of the little touches of character which made me like them. Some of these lines were preserved in dialogue, which is always a little disconcerting for a viewer familiar with the source material.

The other reaction was the solidification of my feeling that all was not right in the land of bohemia. If my advancing age (and wisdom, of course) weren't enough to tell me that "Rent" is a hollow shell of counter-cultural jargon with mass-market appeal, the film would have driven it home for sure. None of the characters seem sincere in their efforts to remain outside the "mainstream." Textually, everyone sells out when there's the least bit of temptation. Are we supposed to be happy that Angel's outfits would be mass-produced by the Gap? Does Mark even struggle with Sarah Silverman's sleazy tabloid offer? The only character who seems to practice what she preaches is Joanne, the lawyer; she's going for what she wants, tells it like it is, and doesn't apologize for it. Everyone else is living a lie. This is only aided by the fact that the song Roger takes a year to write is one of the worst in the show. Mimi should have turned right around and walked back toward that heavenly light.

On top of this, of course, is the fact that this is a counter-culture vehicle driven by Chris Columbus. Need I say more?

The original performers have held up to varying degrees. I've always loved Anthony Rapp as Mark; his voice is pleasantly nasal (to my prejudiced ears) and he's in pretty good shape. Roger looks (and sounds) like someone they hired ten years ago for his looks and not his voice. Angel is still beautiful, whether as man or woman, which is lucky. Jesse L. Martin (Collins) and Taye Diggs (Benny) look and sound great. Maureen, unfortunately, is not someone whom I believe when she says, "every single day/I walk down the street/I hear people say/'Baby's so sweet'". The new additions, Joanne and Mimi (Rosario Dawson, great in "Josie and the Pussycats") are good, but Dawson's gotten really thin.

Overall, the vocal tweaking was annoying, the cuts hampered the flow, and the hypocrisy was both repulsive and apparently unintentional. I had to see it as a follower in a former life; but that book is officially closed now, thanks to Columbus & Co.

Adaptation (2002)

2006-06-06T16:45:00.001-07:00

I have to admit, I felt a little cheated by Adaptation. It wasn't so much that the reality Charlie Kaufman showed us, i.e. the writing of the script, was completely made up. It was that the initial premise, which was wonderfully self-involved and contained so much promise, gives way to inane hi-jinks which pull the film away from what it seems to be about.

What is seems to be about is the identity of the writer. It's a very good meditation on the writer's task, both as regards Susan Orlean (the true-life author of The Orchid Thief whose fictional counterpart is played by Meryl Streep) and Charlie Kaufman (portrayed by Nicolas Cage). It, and here's where the self-indulgence comes is, delves into the process of writing faced with trepidation by Kaufman, confused tenacity by Orlean, and aplomb by Kaufman's (fictional) twin brother (also Cage). Kaufman splits his own identity between these writers and what results is a meta-text on, you guessed it, adaptation.

So far, so good. Cage is funny, though he ought to have been played by Paul Giamatti as that who Cage seems to be modeling. Streep is good as usual, and Chris Cooper is great as the orchid thief himself, John Laroche, who keeps insisting that "I should play me" in the movie. The play between the real and the fictional is great, as Kaufman makes up much of the plot and many characters but bases others on real life with real names. And in the end, his struggle is real and recognizable to writers or others who struggle creatively.

But it falls apart in the final act. When Charlie, who seems to be on a voyage of self-discovery as a writer, finally gets up the courage to meet the woman he's writing about, all probability breaks loose and Kaufman's unable to stuff any of it back into his script. Why a movie about writing requires a chase scene and a drug operation, I have no idea. And that confusion, rather different from the inherent confusion of the premise which is necessary and to the point, makes the film weaker. I wanted to love this film, and for the first hour and a half or so I did. The memory of that final betrayal of my commitment, however, will keep me from seeing it again.

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

2006-06-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've avoided this movie for some time because of its title. Maybe it was linked in my mind with Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," a song I've long had antipathy for. Plus, there was the ill-starred Paris version of a few years ago, which not even Julie Delpy could save.

I'm happy to report that this movie is everything it should be and everything the comments which got me to watch it in the first place promised. It's hilarious, but in a natural, realistic way. "Shawn of the Dead" was a parody of zombie films, but held an element of truth in the oblivion in which the main characters live. "Werewolf" isn't a parody, but it has that same sense of ordinary, goofy people trapped in circumstances they are not prepared for. Much of the plot concerns not the werewolf itself but the consequences of the encounter and the doubt and suspense of its aftermath. Will he become a werewolf too? What will that mean? What should he do if it happens? And why are women suddenly all over him?

The two male leads, David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, share both an unfamiliarity with acting and a very natural friendly chemistry; their ribbing of each other during various otherwise gruesome situations feels real and natural and was a great pleasure to watch. Griffin Dunne, in particular, was very likeable and funny. David Naughton, as more the "straight man" of the pair, was charismatic. Jenny Aguter, as the nurse who takes Naughton home, is attractive and interesting.

I don't want to give too much away for anyone who hasn't seen it, but surely you know one character becomes a werewolf. This transformation is ambitious and well done, much of it on screen instead of between cutaways. Along the way, the plot takes such outragous turns that the audience is kept interested. The humor, far from making this a comedy, makes the horror of the characters' plight all the more realistic and poignant. Nothing is pushed beyond credibility, except for the werewolf stuff which is something of a necessity. Some of the humor is unintentional, however, and may have resulted from the director's fervor in showing too much of the beast.

There are some things which could have been improved. The ending is a little weak. The wolf, as I've implied, becomes rather comical when running. But the joys of this film, from the reticent pub-goers at the "Slaughtered Lamb" to a nightmare-like turn of nudity in the zoo, far outweigh the bad points. I was delighted with this movie, all the more so because I fully expected rampant silliness from the guy who brought us "Animal House"; this movie is justifiably a classic.

King Kong (2005)

2006-06-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

First off, let me say that I did enjoy this movie. It was long, but it was fun. There were some clever references to the original which amused me. But in the end, King Kong is a meta-film riff on the 1933 version similar to the pastiche novels Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts have been devouring ever since Doyle retired the detective for good.

In a sense, this rescued the film for me: the references to Fay doing "a movie for RKO" (King Kong), the dialogue from the first film serving as the dialogue for the film Denham is actually shooting, the writer named Jack Driscoll after the first mate in the original. For the first half of the movie, these touches kept me interested, but Jackson soon gets over-involved in his subject. Oddly, the first half was much the most enjoyable for me.

I believe it's clear from the first film that we are to pity Kong. It's a sympathetic story. Clearly, Peter Jackson felt that way. But his film goes out of its way to make absolutely certain the audience walks away on the gorilla's side. Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow quickly comes to respect what Kong has done for her, although she does absolutely nothing to save him until people actually start shooting. I got the sense that her sympathy was motivated by Jackson's identification rather than anything she was actually feeling herself. I did enjoy seeing her in drag at the beginning, though. Kong has pretty good taste. For the other actors, I don't understand Adrian Brody's appeal but Jack Black, usually the bane of movies he's in, has done a good job lately of reigning himself in or appearing in films (School of Rock) where he's appropriate.

As for the much-touted effects which drench this movie to the point of drowning, I found them uneven. Kong was well done (though is Andy Sirkis the only guy who can act with electrodes attached to his body?), but many of the ocean scenes were obvious blue-screen jobs which I thought could have been better, especially since they had an actual boat. The colors of the film, especially in New York, were simultaneously muted and distinct, and I think this was in order to aid the integration of the computer generated material. Fight scenes went on too long, and the giant bugs included overtly phallic creatures with teeth which I thought were a tad unnecessary. And what did all these enormous carnivores eat when there weren't any people? It's a pretty poorly designed island, diversity-wise.

I liked that many of the racist elements were kept, but in the context of 1933 show-business. However, what are we to make of the islanders as envisioned here, or indeed the ape brought over the sea in chains? These questions remain, despite the "enlightened" attitudes towards "natives." Does it strengthen the film's tragedy (and stave off accusations of slave-analogies) to tell us that Kong is merely the victim of circumstance rather than let us find the pity in our own hearts? Is it really the best move on Ann Darrow's part to avoid all contact with Kong and Denham instead of actively trying to help him? And was it just me, or did Colin Hanks' character have something for Denham?

As a side note, the theater here in Seattle has a large marquee on which is written:
KING KONG
I WISH I KNEW HOW TO QUIT YOU

Ripley's Game (2002)

2006-06-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

Ripley's Game was, in summary, a disappointment. It started out quite well, with John Malkovich snarking his way through a lovely art-forgery heist. And then, just about when Ripley becomes a homicidal fiend (a strange look on Malkovich, to be sure), things sort of go to hell.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare this film to the earlier and bigger-budgeted "The Talented Mr. Ripley", but such a comparison is not only natural but reasonable. I came into the film trusting Malkovich to pull out a performance every bit as good as Matt Damon, an actor I had only really enjoyed in his Ripley incarnation. This trust was justified (though no actor with Ripley's skill at mimicry and reinvention has yet played the role). What was not was that I'd get a film of equal complexity and style. I understand that resources were more scarce here, and that is not the problem. The problem is of plot and character identification. There were too many contrived conveniences without any of the depth or character-driven tension of the former film. The characters, other than Ripley, are flat and poorly acted, and even Ripley does little but react to the rather mundane (for the genre) situation he finds himself in. If Ripley is still alive at Malkovich's age, it is because he doesn't let things like this happen to him. The plot does not hinge on a clever scheme, or a mistake born of hubris, or anything connected to Ripley's interesting and complex psychological makeup. It involves hit men.

There were some wonderful touches here, and as an action romp its adequate. I haven't read the book this is presumably based on, and perhaps the problem is in the source material. But "The Talented Mr. Ripley" gave us a portrait of a conflicted, confused con man whose pathology stemmed from his own identify issues and self-esteem. "Ripley's Game" could have been an equally complex portrait of the same man after that conflict has been eroded by time and hard living, and I have a feeling this was attempted in Ripley's relationship with the hapless innocent he spins into his web. But it falls short, as does the film, from the layered film it could have been to mere suspense-drama. It is telling that my favorite scene was one in which Ripley overhears his neighbor dismiss him as having too much money and too little taste and merely blinks a few times before entering into the fray. The film would have been better served by exploring both this accusation and Ripley's cold reaction.

But then we might not have gotten to watch Malkovich kill pretty much everyone on a train.

Logan's Run (1976)

2006-06-06T16:42:00.000-07:00

This movie has one of the best, most memorable titles ever titled. I say this because I feel as though I've known this movie all my life, although I had no idea what it was about and had not seen it until a few days ago. It's a kinetic, inspiring combination of words. Unfortunately, although "bub" appears nowhere in the script, it does not live up to its name.

The film concerns a future Earth society, culled haphazardly not from Huxley and Orwell but from ripped-off descendants of theirs, where man's primary objective is the pursuit of pleasure until the age of 30, at which time they are killed off spectacularly with the promise of being "reborn". Naturally, questioning the status quo leads to death as well but by butane lighters instead of anti-gravity and fireworks. Michael York, my favorite John the Baptist, plays the title character who, after a (rather short) lifetime of bringing down "runners" as a Sandman, goes on the run himself (cue title). He meets lovely Jessica (Jenny Agutter) by fortunate chance and they get wet together a lot. In water. They eventually meet up with the best character in the movie in the best special effects of the movie and are subjected to some completely irrelevant T.S. Eliot and practice some really bad decision making.

In general, despite some nice matte paintings late in the film, the effects are poor. The Sandmen's (Sandmans'?) weapons are ridiculous, the nightly death-orgy much more costly than it had to be, and the city itself an obvious model. I have nothing at all against models and much prefer them to computer-generated effects, but these come off very badly.

At the same time, there's something very charming about the two leads. I've always liked Michael York and he lends a very respectable air to this bastian of 1970's scifi. I can understand why it's still around and maybe even why I found it on the "staff picks" shelf at my local video store. But I was disappointed; I expected more from something with such a good title and such a "good" reputation. Worth seeing for some of the scenes (including Agutter's outfit), but don't go in with high expectations.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

2006-06-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

I almost thought I'd give this movie a bad review. As I sat in the theater, I enumerated the points against it. Self-indulgent. Cinematographically lacking. Precious. Eccentric lovables drawn together inexhorably through a tangled and fortuitous chain of events.

But I can't.

The fact is, Miranda July's first feature (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) is as charming and silly and pretty as her name. Without shying away from pain, it emphasizes those little tragedies that make up our lives and points out its little victories as well. The moments in this movie are small, personal, strange in the way that things in real life are strange. The eccentricities, though concnetrated, are ones I've never seen before and therefore believe in. For anyone who hasn't seen the film, there is one scene that is worth it for its audacity, the kid involved, and the underlying sweetness. For those of you who have seen it, I'm talking about this: ))<=>((

Accusations of preciousness are not unfounded, I think. But that's a tricky word, and anyway I forgive her, because there's something true in this movie. Something that made me laugh out loud and walk away quietly sad. The performances, except for Richard, are wonderful. The children, especially, acquit themselves brilliantly. The film's made up of tiny moments of life and it's not and Important Film. But it's lovely and worth seeing and it's worth watching July for what happens next. Hopefully she'll get herself a cinematographer and some real film (yes, I'm a snob).

I did have a slight problem with the fact that the main character was a struggling artist whose art I did not like, which always makes for an uncomfortable character/audience relationship. But since July was playing the artist, and she made this film as well, I'll let her off the hook and assume it was intentional.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

2006-06-06T16:40:00.000-07:00

Before it ever came out, Brokeback Mountain was either denigrated or celebrated, depending on the speaker/audience, as "that gay cowboy movie". Now I, for one, have nothing against gay cowboys. I love them. It's a nifty expectation-crossing identity. But honestly, is it all that surprising?

The people I went to see this film with all cried. They cried because it was tragically romantic. Maybe they cried because they were gay. But I didn't. Do you want to know why? It wasn't because I'm not gay. Or because I don't like gay people. It's because I might be immune to sticky romance for its own sake. It's a fine movie, full of beautiful scenery and all that stuff, but honestly a movie with romance at its core won't do it. Now you might well ask why I'm all over Pride and Prejudice or Romeo and Juliet and in response I'll tell you what they have that this movie didn't: words.

Now the screenwriters here did a fine job as well. But in the aforementioned examples, words and their witty usage play a large role in my enjoyment of the piece (which is why Mercutio should have gotten the girl, right?). I will never know half of what these guys wrote, because I could not understand a damn word Heath Ledger said. Maybe he was disguising his Australian accent by being incomprehensible, but it's too bad Marlon Brando's dead because he could have given this kid elocution lessons.

I'm glad there's a "gay" movie out there being sold as a "love story" instead of a "gay movie." There shouldn't be distinctions like that anyway; as if I can't identify with a man or a woman or a lesbian or a dog, for that matter, and need to have a character just like me to relate to. I'm glad someone like Ang Lee took this on, and stars like Gyllenhaal and Ledger put themselves out there. But on the other hand, it feels cautious at the same time. How far "out there" are they really putting themselves? Is there going to be any backlash? And if there isn't, is it because people are accepting homosexuality, or because they're able to reconcile gay, manly cowboys away as being "not the same" as those flashy homos down the street?

The Hours (2002)

2006-06-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Hours is one of those movies which everyone tells you is good. They know this because:
1) It’s based on a book
2) Meryl Streep’s in it, with some other people
and
3) Everyone else says so

Now I’m not intending to trash “The Hours”. It’s a fine piece of work, but the above-mentioned reasons made me reluctant to see it, which is why I only got around to it last night. Having now seen it, I can’t muster up any regret that it took me so long; just a neutral sort of “Hmm. I’m glad I saw that.” What’s odd about this lukewarm response is that the movie itself deals with the overwrought emotions of three different women who are all, to some degree, mentally unstable. There is a current of woe running so strong through this movie that I never felt as if I really knew any of the characters; just the low points of their lives. This is exhausting to watch, and furthermore the mannered, oh-so-pertinent ramblings of depressed people is a bit too much like what I’ve got at home. But when it’s going on around you, at least you have the memory, the knowledge, of the person’s real character. Giving screen time to three connected but separate stories is necessarily going to limit your experience of each to the pinnacle of their emotion, and for me, that lessened my identification with them. When everything everyone says is Significant, it’s hard to feel in the moment rather than in a series of Moments that have been deliberately, and a bit obviously, picked out for you.

That said, I did like the structure of the film. The concept of it, anyway. As I understand it, this is due to the structure of the book, but the filmmakers did achieve a different “look” and color palette for each segment. The performances were fine, but the high key emotion is difficult to buy when it’s in constant supply. With three famous actresses in the lead roles, my cynical movie-person says that it’s mostly a showpiece for their emotive talents. That isn’t to say it’s not worth it; just that it’s a movie which seems to be aching for depth with the broadest possible scope.

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

2006-06-06T16:38:00.001-07:00

It is a shame when one’s experience of something is colored completely by that which has gone before. While this is true for much of life, as we are all shaped by experience, it was especially the case last night as I finally watched “Pride & Prejudice”, not to be confused with “Pride and Prejudice” of 1995 miniseries fame.

I put off seeing it for some time. While hardly a self-described Janite, I’ve made a yearly habit of seeing the A&E Firth-Ehle concoction and even recently converted my husband to the same practice. It is unfair to the new film to compare them. For one thing, nearly five hours is much longer than just over two. Concerns that too much is compressed can hardly be the fault of the filmmakers (although one can fault someone for making it in the first place, that’s a fruitless argument). So I will attempt to confine myself to factors which can reasonably be compared. At the same time, I must avow a deep regard for the previous incarnation, which must color my pronouncements, however I seek to disentangle my review from my love.

I was worried about the casting of Keira Knightly. A renowned beauty, I feared she might be “too pretty” to be Lizzy. She is not, I am happy to say. However, she rarely reaches the twinkling wit I look for in an Elizabeth Bennett, although she acquits herself quite well given how much screen time is actually given to her relationship with Mr. Darcy. The constraints of timing made the entire film seem rather rushed, as if it was necessary to get to the next quirky line or plot point before the last could really sink in. The rest of the cast played their characters for a bit more realism than the mini, Mr. Collins being a bit more pathetic than silly, Mr. Bennett a little more comfortable with his lot in life as the husband of a silly, but not shrilly unbelievable, woman. Even Mary, the unfortunate “spinster in the making” seemed like a reasonable person.

Where I think the film really fails is in its romantic yearnings. Technically and stylistically, this movie is head and waist above the miniseries. For instance, there is lighting and camerawork; something the makers of the mini seem to have forgotten might be a good idea. The movie employs these skills in a desperate attempt to make Darcy and Lizzie fall in love; there are thunderstorms, mists, sunrises, mirrors, all contriving a relationship which, honestly, I couldn’t see between the characters. Part of the problem is the lack of time spent with them, and the film’s decision not to reveal Darcy’s regard until he proposes. Part of it may be blamed on a lack of chemistry between the actors. Part of it, I must admit, might be a hormonal demand for Colin Firth’s piercing, smoldering eyes and Jennifer Ehle’s saucy twinklings back.

But there is a scene which, I feel, exemplifies the contrast between these two films. Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle visit Pemberley while Darcy is supposedly away. In the mini, they encounter a portrait of the young master and marvel at the man captured within it. In the movie, Lizzie walks transfixed through a sculpture garden filled with erotically charged buttocks until she reaches a cold, marble bust of Mr. Darcy, who is declared to be quite handsome. While sex might be introduced more forcefully into this picture, wealth is as well. The marble Mr. Darcy represents sensuality but of a material sort; the sensuality of sculpture as opposed to warm oils and shirts soaked through from impromptu pond-divings. The film’s Mr. Darcy remains cold and aloof when not desperate and pleading, without any of the fire of Firth’s version. This Darcy will not bend, but break; oil paint takes years to dry. And this is just the point; the miniseries has more time to build these relationships and mold these characters. In the movie, they flit by us as mere types whose characters we must determine by what others say of them; and isn’t that just what the book teaches us we shouldn’t do?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

2006-06-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

Narnia: The Franchise™, by any account, is going to suffer the burden of expectation. Already a childhood classic that brings with it the stigma of visualizing what millions of people have already got in their heads, Lord of the Rings fever has infected the undertaking in the womb, producing a first child which makes me undesirous of the union continuing.

The major problem I see in the film is twofold: First, my attempt to retrieve from the movie some semblance of the wonder I felt as a child; and second, the filmmakers’ attempt to imbue the film with enough wonder that it can’t help but outshine our expectations both as readers and as moviegoers. In conjunction, these two factors cannot help but result in disappointment.

I realize that this film, like the books, is directed towards children. Although comparisons must be made to Tolkien’s work, both because of his relationship to Lewis and the filmmaking techniques they share, the books work on a much smaller scale (despite the allegorical elements). And this is why I feel that a smaller scale would have been appropriate for the film. In an attempt to match LOTR for epic scope, a movie in which sound stages alternate with real life with grating obviousness falls flat. At one point, when emerging onto a most impressive ridge, I expected the children to wonder how to get back to Narnia from Middle Earth. An effort to bring home just what danger the Pevensies are running from by depicting a German bomber cockpit and extremely poorly animated bombs made me think I was in the wrong theater. Is this background necessary? Is it an effort to Harry Potterize the children’s plight by emphasizing the starkness of real life? Do we need huge clashing armies, the origins and motives of which are never quite clear?

It is the small things that work in this movie and which should have been emphasized. Everyone’s talking about Georgie Henley’s performance and cuteness and I can’t help but add my voice to the clamor. She, as Lucy or as an actress, is everything I wanted to be when I was eight. There was a little clumsiness in her crying, but on the whole I felt that her reactions were perfectly childlike and real. The animals, while well developed from an anatomical perspective, still suffer, especially in direct sunlight. I was grateful that they looked like animals and not crudely anthropomorphized cartoons. Liam Neeson, however, ought to take some acting lessons from Aslan. And Tilda Swinton as the White Witch was spot on devilish. Her cold, pale face could well be believed to be the cause of eternal winter without Christmas, and I myself might be tempted into taking Turkish Delight from her Method-ridden hands.

Narnia should not suffer comparisons to Middle Earth. These two series are quite different animals, each lovely in its own way with brilliance enough to shine on their own. This film, however, makes the comparison inevitable, and it comes out the lesser. Concentrate on the children, spend less time on sweeping over alien landscapes and make these odd creatures people. Make Tumnus’ ears move and centaurs comprehensible to us. Don’t give us bloodless battles which can’t teach us anything and resurrections which are only there to preach.

Alien (1979)

2006-06-06T16:36:00.000-07:00

Alien is a story of loyalty and survival. It is the story of overcoming adversity without losing one’s humanity. It’s the story of a woman and her cat.

Now, I’ve heard people wax pretentious about the mythological underpinnings of the “Alien Cycle” as they call it. In fact, I heard this tonight at a screening of the film at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. You can say what you want about Josephs Campbell and Conrad, but in my opinion a film “cycle” with no consistency of creatorhood aside from the commendable instinct to include Sigourney Weaver does not merit an over-arcing theory that includes all four films. Granted, myths and fairy tales also have multiple, untraceable creators, but they weren’t created by corporations for financial gain, a consideration I feel has to be taken into account.

But whatever. Alien is a horror movie in space. It’s a very good horror movie in space. Like many horror films, it involves human contact, and conflict with, that which is Other. The alien is “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” While Ripley and the others struggle with the implications of their options—to quarantine, to fight, to preserve the few or attempt to save the many—the alien has no such qualms. In the end, the only person Ripley can save is herself. She is reduced to the amoral status of a creature fighting for its survival, just like the alien. Almost. For Ripley’s fellow-feeling, her humanity, is rescued by her rescue of Jonesy the cat.

And yet the very thing that assures us of Ripley’s humanity, Jones, is another example of the Other. He represents the Other we have taken to our bosom, and yet the unreadable reaction shots as he watches the destruction of Harry Dean Stanton reveal an alien presence among us. The cat is not human; he is not governed by human emotions or capable of expressing them. Watching my own housemate stare at me with unblinking, expressionless green eyes consistently fills me with wonder that this thing, this non-human, this incomprehensible being is sharing my space. We co-exist, and yet we are not like, despite the fact that I have let this alien presence into my home and my heart.

But it is not only that which looks foreign which must be watched. There is an alien on the crew, undetected and working against them; an alien inside assisting the alien outside. So even the visible signs of humanity are not enough.

Subsequent to rescuing Jones and herself, Ripley reveals another side of her humanity—her femaleness. Up to this point, Ripley has no physical womanhood. She is depicted, like much of the crew, as genderless. This is not to imply that real androgyny is being explored, but that any of these characters could switch genders without any alteration to the story. Sigourney Weaver, in particular, is tall and lacks the curves which instantly cry “woman.” When she supposes herself safe, she sheds another layer of protection and becomes, for the first time, a woman in the vulnerable state of partial nudity. When it become clear that this safety is an illusion, she retreats to a heavy, gender-neutral space suit in order to do final battle with the alien. A certain amount of shielding from the vulnerable side of what makes us human is necessary for survival, just as Ripley’s regard for that which is not human makes her even more so.

Inserts (1974)

2006-06-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

At first glance, it's hard to tell why anyone, let alone rising stars Richard Dreyfuss, Veronica Cartwright, and Jessica Harper, wanted to make this film. After all, it's an NC-17, low budget, one-room piece about the porn industry in the 1920's. It requires its actors to be unclothed for much of the proceedings and to recite naughty terms for various body parts to the point of desensitization. The title comes from the practice of filming the close-up bits that go in between the action to suitably titillate the audience. So by common sense, this seems like it should be a prurient, dirty little film of little redeeming value. In actuality, it is a concise treatment of the film industry; a snapshot from one dusty corner that captures the whole.

At the center of the films success is Richard Dreyfuss, a post-American Graffiti pre-Jaws imp with rheumy eyes, stubble, and a nasally cackle I've always found weirdly endearing. As the Boy Wonder, we are given to understand that a brilliant career has been squandered, "realized at an early age," as he says, and he now spends his days in the living room of his mansion: drinking, making porn, and not having sex. He is a casualty of the get-rich-quick days of early film, a "ghost story" to newcomers like Clark Gable (a ghost himself, as he only appears off-screen to offer a nebulous and rejected hope to the Boy Wonder). Although he has turned his back on both art and Hollywood, the Boy is hopelessly entangled in the process of film-making. He cannot escape; and indeed, most of his life (as we perceive it) is accompanied by the sound of a camera running even when he is nowhere near one. And despite this artistic torpor, he can't help but innovate within his chosen field. His financial backer is appalled to see him remove the camera from the tripod to obtain visceral shots of his actors engaged in coitus; the people who watch these movies are looking for one thing, and it's not art. The decline of both his fortunes and his libido are, through the course of the film, revealed to be rooted not in his own lack of ability (mentally or physically) but in something else. We are never privy to what happened to the Boy Wonder, but Dreyfuss' performance is laden with an inertia which precludes any chance of leaving the sordid yet comfortingly miserable existence he's made for himself.

The other characters are not silent about Hollywood, old or new, either. Veronica Cartwright plays the once-legit actress now reduced to heroin addiction and porn; the more pro-actively destructive twin to the Boy Wonder, who is in a process of fading rather than burning out. Bob Hoskins is the financially-minded producer who is conscious only of what he can package and sell to an undiscerning, undifferentiated public, whether it's smut or hamburgers. And Jessica Harper is the lean and hungry would-be star, who manipulates the Boy in her ambition to "make it" at whatever the cost. Her every thought is on show business--who's hot, and how she can be one of them. In fact, the only person in this little group who sees beyond his shallow ambitions is the Boy Wonder; and that's because he doesn't have any.

The movie drags a bit in the last half, where Harper and Dreyfuss trade manipulations, reluctance, and biting retorts without much sense of what their motivations are. But it's a lovely, theatrical script with one-liners galore that make the smutty content seem more than justified. Richard Dreyfuss, on screen all the time, gives a nuanced performance not without his characteristic flare-ups, and the two ladies give brave turns as rather uncharacteristically built objects of lust. Bob Hoskins' American accent is impeccable as always, and Rex the Wonder Dog (the hired meat) is as shallow and stiff as he needs to be. This slice-of-porn world is a perfect microcosm of the collaborative, hustling world of movie-making, and it has nudity. This movie should not have been overlooked all these years.

Shopgirl (2005)

2006-06-06T16:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a phrase I never imagined I would say: I saw the new Steve Martin movie last night. I don’t dislike Steve Martin--I have respect for him as a writer and comedian—but I’ve never really been into the sort of family-friendly, trite comedies he seems to make. I went to “Shopgirl” prepared to be disappointed. Perhaps that contributed to my pleasant surprise, but in any case, I enjoyed this film.

Enjoyment is a subjective thing. When I say I enjoyed it, I don’t necessarily mean it was a romantic romp through a May-December romance and what follows. What I enjoyed, in a squirmy, uncomfortable sort of way, was the fact that Martin took a complicated (and partially true) situation and rendered it like a fairy tale. It was simple and sweet, in the brief sense, but underneath the shorthand there lies a complex knot of emotions and relationships. I especially liked the treatment of Mirabelle’s depression, which was not discussed at any length but described in visual cues and a wonderful sequence where the bustle and hum of Saks 5th Ave becomes too much. I haven’t seen depression depicted in quite this way, with a quiet subjectivity and cues that I immediately understood, and it was refreshing.

I don’t know how disturbing this film was intended to be. Audiences will differ in their opinions on the basic facts of Mirabelle and Ray Porter’s (Martin) relationship, the casual sex, the conventional portrayal of a woman who is basically useless without a man. But this film is not seeking to biograph Mirabelle’s whole life; merely to show us, through her relationships, why this girl is worth notice. As the twisted web of influence spools out (Martin wrote the book, cast himself in a somewhat unsavory role, and hired the real-life girl in question to do the artwork used in the film) I come to the conclusion that it takes guts to tell a story like this, to put yourself on the line in the way Martin has, and I respect him for it. And I like the movie, too.

Broken Flowers (2005)

2006-06-06T16:25:00.000-07:00

Is it possible to like the fact of a movie’s existence without really liking it?

"Broken Flowers" has a lot going for it. It has Bill Murray as a man named Don Johnston and a bunch of Hollywood queens (in the female royalty sense) and a famous director. And nice music and naked teenagers named Lolita. And the best next-door neighbor ever in Winston, whose accented enthusiasm and habit of talking on the phone as he’s entering Murray ’s house are instantly endearing. But there’s something that wouldn’t let me into the film, and the experience was less than satisfying.

It wasn’t the ending, I don’t think. It’s ambiguous; but so is Don's life and the entire quest which makes up the movie’s meager plot. It’s an esoteric “About Schmidt,” “Lost In Translation” gone even stiller. I don’t have a problem with the facts of this. It may be that Bill Murray has been directed further from his trademark deadpan and into merely dead. He suitably portrays a worn man, bereft of life, but as he is the center of the film and nearly every shot it’s hard to take this journey with him. For was is most accurately described as a kind of road movie, this causes difficulties.

There are nice things about this film. Wonderful things. But is it good? I don’t think so; or at least, it wasn’t to me. It was worth it. It was thoughtful. I’m glad it exists and I’m glad I saw it. And I want to give a shout out to the middle-aged women and man who sat behind me in the theater and cackled, the man uttering the immortal critique: “That Murray can make eating carrots funny.” Maybe if I had been that guy, the movie would have been better.

Quadrophenia (1979)

2006-04-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

There is one thing wrong with Quadrophenia. One aspect which keeps it from remaining vital and resonant. And no, it’s not the Vespas. I’m talking about The Who.

I know, I know. They’re THE WHO. Obviously, if Pete Townshend wants to write songs about the now-incomprehensible clash between the Mods and the Rockers, who’s to deny him? I mean, who cares about the Mods and the Rockers when a fight can be touched off with a singing match between “Be-bop ba-lula” and “You Really Got Me”? What, exactly, is the ideological divide here? Can’t all you white working class pop-listening guys get along?

What saves this movie is not The Who singing songs neither of these groups would be listening to, especially since it takes place in 1964, but the filmmaking itself. The film is gorgeous. Drab English skies lower over wet cobblestone streets and cameras spin through p.o.v. pirouettes in alleyways. It lights on protagonist Jimmy’s rebel-without-a-cause face through coffee shop windows and in multiple motorbike mirrors. We may not understand what all the fuss is about, and it may seem obvious that these guys are sublimating their class conflict into pointless antagonism of others in the same boat, but filmgoers have a history of appreciating a young man’s search for meaning in a meaningless world. Even when that lack of meaning seems entirely self-imposed.

Although Jimmy seems to bring a lot of his problems on himself (or at least, we are denied knowledge of some root cause for them), Phil Daniels does an excellent job of making him almost sympathetic. His goofy cuteness goes a long way towards this. Sting has a memorable role with one line as mod idol Ace, and has commented that everyone pretty much played themselves. Combined with the camerawork, this makes for a nice, realistic movie that may not take us many places but definitely paints a picture of a certain class and time. Other than a speech Jimmy’s dad gives in an attempt to justify the title, the only false bit in this piece is Roger Daltry commenting on the action as it happens, as if we’re too stupid to see what’s going on in front of us. How much more effective would that last scene be if we weren’t being told that Jimmy’s tired of the fashion, and of acting tough, and all that? It’s like ending Thelma and Louise with someone shouting “We’re tired of running, yeah, in death we’ll be free, yeah, without any men, together you and me!!”

Hold on. I think I’m on to something here…