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Of the two stories told in Pixar's latest, one is interesting and one is silly. Wall-E opens with a long shot from outer space tracking to the surface of Earth. On the way in we see a haze surrounding the planet that turns out to be reams of space junk, discarded satellites, little bits of metal. On the surface all that moves is a small roller-track robot gathering up trash, compressing and stacking it high, real high. The stacks of compressed waste are more numerous and taller than the abandoned skyscrapers. This is Wall-E and he's been at this task for seven hundred years. That's when the last of the humans left leaving Wall-E and his types to clean up. His types have all long since given up their ghosts but Wall-E crushes on. He also collects - lighters, hubcaps, whatever strikes his robot fancy. Part two begins when Wall-E meets up with the humans who left centuries ago. Seems they've been on an extended cruise and have morphed into lounging slugs with their heads buried in video screens. Humans have become rolly polly blobs unable to walk, unwilling to work. Where the post human Earth and Wall-E are rendered in muted tones and appear real, the humans are all technicolor pastels and rendered as cartoon characters. All semblance of complexity and depth disappear the moment the humans come on screen. Is this Pixar's attempt to make this moral tale more palatable by making it more cartoonish? Or did the imagination that delivered Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and Nemo suddenly die? In either event, a truly magnificent film switches off like a light and we're left with the dull glow of a Clutch Cargo cartoon. Peter (Stipe Erceg) and Jan (Daniel Bruhl) break into villas in Berlin, rearrange the furniture and leave behind an accusation, "You have too much money." Jule (Julia Jentsch), Peter's girlfriend moves in with Jan and Peter and immediately takes a dislike to Jan. We know where this is headed. Jan and Peter's protest of bourgeois capitalism is soon complicated by Jule and her debt. Julia Jentsch made The Edukators in 2005, the year before the release of her breakthrough work, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. She is yet another European actress on a par with the best cinema has to offer and she makes The Edukators compelling viewing. Hellboy II: The Golden Army 07.14.08
During the summer of my sixth year I awoke half a dozen times in the middle of the night with a fever of 104 or so. The doctor, also awakened in the middle of the night, had my parents pull out all the stops to get the fever down. Pneumonia would be preferable, they were told, so I was dipped into an ice bath. Twenty years later I read a Time Magazine article associating earlier than actuarial death from natural causes with high fevers in childhood. The first time it happened I remember waking nauseous from a very frightening nightmare. I was walking around inside my brain among huge and terrifying gears, all spinning wildly. They were an awful shade of yellow. I leapt from bed and made a mad dash down the hall to my parents bedroom. My mom says if dad hadn't stuck his arm out I would have crashed the wall at full speed. I hadn't thought about it in decades, until yesterday. It all came back in skin crawling horror as I sat in for Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II. The Golden Army of the title comes to life via a huge swirling mass of dizzying gear crunching. This guy must have had the same dream I had. Near the mid point of Hellboy II our heroes descend under the Brooklyn Bridge to a cleverly hidden Troll Market. A Diagon Alley gone evilly wrong, the Troll Market scenes from Hellboy II are some of the richest, most twisted, frightening and imaginative depictions ever rendered in cinema. It is simply not possible to take in all that del Toro presents in these scenes. The result is an overwhelming sense of wonder and awe, something I thought had been lost in the rush to digitally render scenes only previously attempted in animation. We were introduced to del Toro's fevered (now I get this expression) imagination in The Devil's Backbone, saw it mature in Pan's Labyrinth, and now it bursts forth in all its terrifying glory in Hellboy II. There are some unfortunate aspects to the story. The blatant borrowing of Tolkein's ring saga is not so cleverly rendered as a golden crown divided among elves and men in an age long past. John Hurt all but Gandalf's the young Hellboy in the films opening scene. The ancillary love story between Sapien and Princess Nuala was thin at best. Selma Blair lends much as Hellboy's girl, Liz Sherman while Jeffrey Tambor merely bores again. Not being a fan of the original comic book, my comic book life began with Green Lantern (when I started reading) and ended with the Fantastic Four (when I discovered the library), I was intrigued by the offhand comment about Hellboy's destiny involving the destruction of the human race. When Liz is presented with the choice between Hellboy's continued life (and the inevitable destruction of humanity) or his death (and the alternative extension of humanity) she hesitates for all of a half a second and chooses her beau. Not twenty minutes later, Princess Nuala faces a similar choice with more personal consequences and makes the sacrificial choice. What are Mignola and del Toro telling us here? That elves are our better selves? That we are easily hobbled by Hobbesian choice? The truth is I don't particularly care. Today I saw the future of fantastic film and it isn't in tired reworkings of past classics but in the imagination and execution of the most creative director working in film, Guillermo del Toro. Argentine director Hector Babenco spends two years begging his fellow countryman and author Manuel Puig to sell him the rights to his cult novel, Beijo da Mulher Aranha. Puig, wanting an international production and not Babenco's planned Brazilian feature, won't budge until he learns Burt Lancaster, fresh off his "comeback" in 1980's Atlantic City, wants in. Lancaster has no patience for Leonard Schrader's glacial pace in penning the screenplay and begins his own version. When Lancaster delivers his screenplay Puig and Babenco are in despair. The Hollywood icon has rewritten Beijo and cast himself as the central figure. The book was supposed to be about a struggle between two equals from entirely different political and social worlds suddenly confined together in a backwater prison cell. One, a straight Marxist revolutionary, the other an utterly apolitical aging gay queen. Their struggle with their own prejudices and preconceived notions set against a backdrop of degradation and intrigue has become a gay soap opera starring Burt Lancaster. Beijo da Mulher Aranha is headed back to regional cultdom when a hippie Santa Fe lawyer, a movie junkie from Warhol's Factory and his old Factory buddy, a party girl by the nom de plume Baby Jane, decide to sink a million dollars American into a Brazilian film that no American studio will touch. William Hurt wants the role Lancaster lost, Raul Julia is signed on as the revolutionary and Sonia Braga, just happens to be dying for a small role so she can hang with the crew. The stars that were once swirling about a black hole suddenly align and filming begins in Sao Paulo on Kiss of the Spider Woman. Several inspired creative souls come together to realize a work of real significance. Hurt and Julia agree to work for scale, Schrader delivers a brilliant screenplay, director Babenco gets an old friend and choreographer to help Hurt uncover his feminine side. Sonia Braga has a ball and Hurt and Julia spend endless hours working out their characters, unconstricted by studio demands. Hurt tells us of one Sunday Julia and he show up on the unconstructed set to work on a particular scene. They're at it for hours before they realize the crew, not wanting to interfere, put down their hammers and is watching in rapt tearful silence as the two stars rehearse and rehearse. Everyone associated with this project is in it for all the right reasons. Independent film at its most genuine. The result is an original work of unsurpassed strength and intensity as fresh and moving any film of the past twenty five years. The Boys in the Band AI was warned about this film. It was released almost forty years ago, 1970 to be exact. Hmm, 1970 - The Beatles released Let It be, Simon and Garfunkel gave us A Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Diana Ross claimed Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and The Kinks let us in on Lola's secret. Hollywood gave us Patton, Love Story, Five Easy Pieces, M*A*S*H, Women in Love, and Woodstock. Fellini released Satyricon just to remind us that movies were made outside California. In the world of print Dee Brown appraised us of our treatment of Native Americans in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Germaine Greer took us inside the besieged female psyche in The Female Eunuch, Julia Child used liberal doses of wine in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Charles Reich explained the counter-culture in The Greening of America and Alvin Toffler warned us things were moving way too fast in Future Shock. Isn't it odd that in the same year mainstream media strove to catch up with the cultural revolution of the 1960's, an obscure off-off broadway play about six gay men struggled to be heard. We were ready to hear women hated men for making them hate themselves, ready to accept our genocidal treatment of our country's real ancestors, we were still coming to grips with the My-Lai and Kent State massacres, but first time playwright Mart Crowley was told he was crazy to think anyone would produce a play about gay men in New York City. Finally able to get Edward Albee to give a look (his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf had made it all the way to the big screen four years earlier), The Boys in the Band was "workshopped" off off-broadway. Laurence Luckinbill (the bi-sexual Hank) knew they had a hit when only a week into production he saw several hundred gay men lined up for the less than one hundred seats in their tiny workshop theater. It played a year to sold out Broadway audiences. Author Crowley insisted the original Broadway cast reprise their roles in the film. Dominick Dunne agreed to co-produce and the ever ambitious William Friedkin, soon to be famous for the yet unrealized The French Connection and The Exorcist, signed on to direct. The works of Harold Pinter and David Mamet are immediately recognizable for their scintillating dialogue. It is fast and smart but has nothing on Mart Crowley's brilliant work, The Boys in the Band. The only thing dated about this movie is the vibrant colors of the costume and set. We're a bit more muted these days. A shame. The Visitor 05.31.08 A friend asked me a couple of weeks ago if I'd seen The Visitor. No, I said, it looks schmaltzy. Wrong again. The Visitor tells two stories. One is about losing touch with that which made our country what it used to be. Immigrants. The other is about losing touch with our heart. The Happening 06.13.08 Sadly, M. Night Shyamalan's latest scary movie will likely suffer from its pro environment theme. His first R rated film, it is filled with graphic images of people succumbing to some mysterious pathogen that appears to cause self-destructive impulses to run rampant. We know this in the first ten minutes. The balance of the film has Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel struggling to escape the deadly airborne toxins. The film opens with Wahlberg as Mr. Moore, Philadelphia high school science teacher querying his students to proffer an explanation for the sudden disappearance of the honey bee. Shyamalan closes in on Wahlberg's face as he suggests the bees have disappeared from natural causes we can only speculate over. We may never know what exactly caused bee hive collapse syndrome, he says. He's interrupted by the arrival of the vice principal to announce the first "attack" in Central Park in New York. Shyamalan wastes no time in moving us headlong into the terrifying paranoiac atmosphere gripping the population. He doesn't let go until the final credits roll. Superior film making with a charismatic cast and a deeply frightening underlying theme, will the earth revolt against its primary predator? Has it already begun to do so? A bad guy that lives in a cave. A greedy, selfish, arms dealer. A beautiful and pure American gal Friday. A sleazy journalist. Something's missing... Oh yeah! OK everyone, we're missing a cliche, find that dog! Like an old fashioned country/western song, Iron Man really clicks when all the old cliches are in place. Add a Hank Williams to sing it and you've got a hit. The charismatic Robert Downey, Jr. adds a third dimension to the latest comic book story brought to film. As long as he and Gwyneth Paltrow as gal Friday are on screen Iron Man is a delight to watch. Once the metal suits take over, though, Iron Man might as well be Transformers. And had my imagination been crippled by video games and DVDs I would probably have loved it all the way through. I had the great good fortune of being born before video was the primary formative tool of young minds. I had to read or play with blocks and logs to escape my little world. Had I had a hand held flashing, beeping, thumb activated first person shooter game as my introduction to the wider world I too would probably be wildly entertained by a dogfight between a flying metal suit and an F-15 fighter jet. I'm with Ray from In Bruges, Had I grown up on a farm and was retarded I'd probably love Bruges, but I didn't and I'm not, so I don't. The Fall 06.09.08 A Russian remake of the 1981 Bulgarian original Yo Ho Ho. A fairy tale. The Russian remake is set in 1920's Los Angeles where Roy and Alexandria have landed after falling. She from a tree picking fruit, he from a railroad bridge over a river. The opening sequence is the scene immediately after his fall/jump. We see everything in super slow motion as help is summoned and rope tossed. The first of many visually stunning images. The Fall may be about something more important, the redemptive power of love or the sin of suicide or the power of illusion but the energy and focus of the filmmakers seems to be on visual imagery. The beautiful butterfly coral, the orange sand dunes, the sandstone castle all take your breath away. But like postcards of the wine country or National Geographic photo essays, the images can be strikingly beautiful or just striking but the substance is in what the images represent, the laborers who work the vineyards or the children displaced by war. What underlay the magnificent imagery of The Fall is a mystery to me. Clothes were much cooler then. Skinny belts over pleated wool slacks. Polyester was still around the corner. People smoked without shame and drank whiskey like water. Drugstores sold all sorts of awful stuff over the counter and you could tell cars apart. It was that short time frame after we conquered evil and before we recognized it in ourselves. Against this backdrop we meet husband Harry (Chris Cooper), wife Pat (Patricia Clarkson), best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan) and love interest Kay (Rachel McAdams). Harry wants to leave his wife because her love is only manifest in the physical realm, she tells us herself she thinks love is sex and the rest is mere affect. She is devoted to him because he needs her so. Best friend Richard is a charming cad soon smitten by the drop dead gorgeous Kay a tragic widow getting over her war dead husband and only interested in making Harry happy. More than once we hear about the futility of building happiness on the misery of others. Kay can't be happy with Harry if it means breaking Pat's heart, same reason Harry can't be happy with Kay. Pat has her own subterfuge going but she can't make anything of it if it means making Harry miserable. Richard, though, can steal Kay and break Harry's heart because it turns out Harry is planning a mercy killing to break free of Pat. He practices on the family dog, a lovely Irish Setter. Whoa, wait a minute. Is this Blue Velvet? All bright and shiny until we look beneath? Turns out sad widow, dutiful wife, spiritual love seeker and charming cad are homewrecker, adulteress, murderer, betrayer. As those handsome young men put down their combs to load live rounds at the National Guard barracks in Kent and tupperware maven Monsanto was busy working on the mother of all herbicides the rest of us watched as Woodstock gave way to Alatamont and Kennedy morphed into Nixon. Is this the parallel writer/director Ira Sachs was drawing in Married Life? If he were he couldn't have landed better instruments to tell the tale than Chris Cooper and Patricia Clarkson. Two of the most accomplished and subtle actors of their generation, they unfold our intertwined good and evil with invisible effort. Brilliant, painful, thoughtful work. Our myths are our attempt to understand the world around us and our place in it. The Iliad and The Odyssey, among Western civilization's oldest epics (Gilgamesh predates and may have influenced The Odyssey as some passages bear an almost Ambrosian similarity), were committed to paper almost three thousand years ago and had existed for some centuries prior as oral recitations. Homer, an itinerant blind Greek poet, is credited as their author but he likely dictated what had been handed down to him by his forbearers. The Gods play a dominating role in everyone's life and immortality (whether actual or achieved through never ending fame) is a featured thematic element. Humanity has forever been preoccupied with the limitations imposed by death. One of the more recent versions of our wish to transcend death is found in the Scientologist's belief that many/all of us carry with us a hundred thousand year old life force of alien beings (Thetans) long ago trapped in our mortal frames. I'm a little fuzzy on the details (hard not to be) but it seems through multiple sessions on a lie detector, one can "clear" oneself of the negating forces surrounding our ancient life force and, I guess, attain immortality. One of the more common versions of our quest for immortality involves a mediator/hero who "conquers" death on our behalf and who will, if allegiance is sworn, usher us into an eternal life of light, lyre, and harp. Another guarantees an eternity with two score perpetually refreshing virgins accessed (by males only it seems) by dying while killing others. The other side of the world subsists on a more subtle reincarnation process repeated ad infinitum. For those of us still enamored of the dictates of science, these ancient myths are less and less relevant to our daily lives. Science, though, does little to help us understand how we should approach our sentient existence. In the absence of a set of instructions (golden plates [Mormon], stone tablets [Judeo/Christian], book length dictation [Islam], sitting under a tree epiphany [Bhuddism]) we find ourselves alone with our conscience, struggling to know how we should act and why. If these ancient myths no longer guide our moral compass, where are we to look for help? Like every field of endeavor with which I am familiar, whether music, politics, athletics, painting, architecture, fiction or film, only the tiniest percentage of output rises to the level of greatness and transcendence. In transcending the limitations of their particular mode of expression they can illuminate a path for us. Never the path as zealots would have it, but a path. And not to some imaginary Nirvana but merely a path from relative darkness to relative light. Beethoven and The Beatles, Socrates and Lincoln, Owens and Jordan, DaVinci and Goya, Wright and Pei, James and Updike, Truffaut and Kazan can teach us about ourselves, illuminate an ideal, even bridge the chasm between what we experience and what we hope. Into this chasm leaps Helen Hunt in her directorial debut, Then She Found Me, and furiously works to build a bridge between what is her life and that for which she desperately hopes. From an Alice Arlen screenplay (she also penned the electric Silkwood and the underseen but brilliant The Weight of Water) Then She Found Me pushes star-crossed grade school teacher April Epner (Hunt) from one catastrophe to another. A glimmer of light appears from time to time and is quickly extinguished. Sometimes quite dark, often painful and occasionally hilarious, Then She Found Me addresses loss, love, and dysfunction directly and intelligently. As all genuine forms of expression should, it informs and enlightens without pretense to an objective truth. Nothing gets blown up, there are no car chases, and the bad guys are within us, living alongside the longing to know, the struggle to overcome our baser selves even as the awareness dawns that no help comes forth from those hills to which we lift our eyes. It would appear one of our more accomplished dramatists has joined the Allen school of film making. The Allen school of film making and the Karl Rove school of politics share a common theme, find a rut and live there. Mamet's rut is repetitive dialog atop an unimaginably complex narrative. I'm sure they talk like Mamet writes somewhere. Brooklyn maybe or Broadway. When I first heard it, in Mamet's Heist, it seemed dense and fresh. Now it just sounds thick and artificial. When the same actors (Ricky Jay, wife Rebecca Pigeon, Joe Mantegna) reappear with the same verbal tics from the last film and everybody is double crossing everybody, including the audience, the only intelligent act remaining is to tally up the unresolved plot points. Who was Emily Mortimer talking to when she was lost in the rain searching for an off market pharmacy? What was the scrip and who needed the pills? What was Tim Allen's role in the deception? Was stiffing the security guard cop part of the scam? Why were we introduced to Chiwetel Ejiofor's military background and then not told what it was? What did Ejiofor say that got him slapped by Mortimer? Why did the belt holder give up his belt to the guy that beat the guy he said he would give it to if he were beaten by him? See what I mean? You can't even ask the questions without doubling back on yourself. Constructing a three dimensional chess game would, I think, be easier than deconstructing this latest Mamet tour de convolute. Beats Speed Racer, I guess. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day 03.12.08 The sad little movie that tried too hard. Someone (director Bharat Nalluri or screenwriters David Magee and Simon Beaufoy) was clearly on way too much coffee or Adderall when they saw their first 40's romantic comedy. Trying to replicate their experience, they cleared the top five minutes in and never looked back. Amy Adams is brilliant but she's no Kate Hepburn and love her though I might, Frances McDormand is no Myrna Loy. It didn't help that we failed to cast a male lead with sufficient gravitas to hold the frantic Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams) in focus. I was worn out by the end of the first reel. Do they still use reels? Smart People 04.11.08 Everyone but Thomas Haden Church appeared to be playing against type. Ellen Page was a buttoned-up Republican, Dennis Quaid a pot-bellied elitist, and Sarah Jessica Parker an up-tight doctor. Having used the terms buttoned-up, up-tight, and elitist to describe three of the four main characters in Smart People, the mechanism for character reversal is clearer now than when I was in the theater. And just in case the reversals to come were not sufficiently defined, we were serenaded at critical junctures by a soundtrack with "will you love me," and "I know I've hurt you" as first line intros to clunky folk ballads. Smart People was apparently made with Dumb People in mind. Most of these characters weren't anyone you'd want to spend five minutes with except for the pot smoker and then only if one were partaking. It's hard to feel anything for the snob/slob professor, harder still to like the neo-con daughter. I felt more for Transformer's Optimus Prime than these pitiful souls. Doomsday 03.15.08 I hope no one I know saw me seeing this one. When I read it borrowed heavily from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome I almost didn't go. But I did. Almost walked out when the car chase started but I didn't. Note please the other titles penned by writer/director Neil Marshall - The Descent, Dog Soldiers, Combat, and Killing Time. The quintessential guy film. Babes, rock and roll, car chases, gore, evil government. Evil government? Most macho guys are Republicans aren't they? How did evil government work its way in there? The hero in these testosterone treats usually works for the government, right? A cop or army guy bucking the wimpy bureaucrats to save humanity to be sure but the government itself is honorable. Not here. Doomsday is the story of Scotland being sealed off from the UK so the virus doesn't escape. I couldn't help thinking of our Mexican wall when I saw the thirty foot armored wall across Scotland being welded shut. Mexicans equals deadly virus? Surely not intentional but then one wouldn't have to cast far to hook some ugly symbol of our times. Witness the Bentley stored away in a bomb shelter. Reminds me of the guy I met outside the camera store. Wanted to know about the Prius. Told me he bought a BMW something or other but doesn't drive it. He just wanted it. Sixty thousand so it can sit in a garage. I gave my last five to the homeless woman outside the pharmacy last night. That makes me better, right? I'm having trouble staying on point but then I don't have a lot to say about this sort of pandering filmmaking. I bought a ticket, though. And I stopped by the ATM to replenish my cash after I gave the old woman my last. This pig outside the camera store and me - we're the same guy really. Coasting along in the top percentile with cars and cash and judgments for others. Shutter 03.21.08 If you can tell me what makes this film different or better than any of the half dozen other films with slinky pale Japanese girls stop actioning their way from the land of the dead to the land of the living you're a better man than I. Yet two more Americans travel to Japan to encounter the restless spirit of yet another innocent Japanese girl unable to cross over to the land of her ancestors because someone did her wrong. Maybe we have a theme here. Americans poison the well of Japanese innocence and pay the ultimate price. The ultimate price is to have some dead girl's ghost crawl up them in bed and scare us half to death. But the Americans as poisoners, now there is a theme worth exploring. Could it be that our decision to wrench Japan from its thousand year history and remake it as a competitive capitalist economic power doesn't sit well with some Japanese? Have they lined themselves up on the Axis of Evil? Do they hate not just freedom but profit as well? What did we ever do to the Japanese? After all, didn't they launch an unprovoked attack on us? Ever since we began making the world "safe for democracy" back in the early part of the Twentieth Century, American foreigh policy has held firm to the tenet that to be like us, or to at least do what we tell you, is the only safe bet. Open your markets to us or the World Bank won't answer when you call. America's superpower status has been used to bludgeon the rest of the world into American clones or puppets. We could have elected to feed the hungry or house the homeless. But there isn't that much money in those propositions. The Bank Job 03.18.08 When Martine (Saffron Burrows) approaches Terry Leather (Jason Statham) with a plan to rob a major London bank, Terry is taken aback. We may be known for the occasional skullduggery, he says, but rob a bank? Skullduggery? Is this a pirate film? Statham's delivvery of lines like this one made The Bank Job, an otherwise overreaching story, entirely entertaining. Jason Statham is one of a kind. Harking back to the great leading men of Hollywood's heyday, Statham is charismatic, charming, and exceedingly funny. Who wouldn't want this guy on their side? His machismo is never ugly, even when he's yards over the top (Chevy Chelios in Crank comes to mind) or playing the bad guy. The Bank Job is an imagining of the circumstances surrounding some compromisiing photos of a British Royal and a mysterious bank robbery that disappeared from London papers days after it splashed onto the front page. The Bank Job is well made, fast paced, and clever. Stop-Loss 04.05.08 Only about one in five American soldiers would fire their weapons directly at Axis soldiers during World War II. That percentage rose little during Korea and Vietnam. The military needed to come to grips with their charge's profound reluctance to take life. They did. Something close to ninety percent of our soldiers will now pull the trigger. It takes some pretty intense training to overcome this primal prohibition. We've got it and it's used to great effectiveness on the young people volunteering to fight for their country. Young people who once assumed their leaders cared about their fate. The same leaders who dropped them into a battlefield without lines of demarcation, fighting soldiers without uniforms, battling a population they were told would welcome them as liberators. The Ruins 04.05.08 The first to die was the foreigner who spoke no English, then the foreigner who spoke some English. He was followed by the boyfriend who initiated sex and close on his heels his willing girlfriend. The medical student sacrificed himself so his bookish girlfriend could live. The mindless, languageless villagers arrayed around the base of the pyramid preventing escape were bad enough but the man-eating bouganvilla with a cruel streak was the piece de resistance. With its evil stamen it could imitate the sound of a cell phone or even a whiny girlfriend. With its powereful stamen it could drag off pieces of and even whole people. If only they hadn't left the safety of their resort hotel. Ah well. Vantage Point 03.08.08 The couple behind me starting murmuring when the clock rewound the fourth time. We see the assassination and the bomb from several (six?) vantage points. Once we're through the technical wizardry, the car chase begins. Once the car chase ends, the hero gets the thanks of a grateful nation. And we're done. Terrorists are everywhere now, I hear they're remaking Gone With the Wind as an Afghanistanian saga between the Taliban (Rebels) and the 10th Mountain (Yankees). Let's see, Rhett/Osama is Clive Owen and Jennifer Garner is Scarlett/Benazir Bhutto. Yes, I know Benazir is Pakistani not Afghan but why should this film be any different than The Kingdom or any of the other half dozen "terrorist" dramas of the last few years. If you want to explore the current war you have to get HBO or Sundance and find any of the painful documentaries about what this war and our new army is doing to our soldiers. Head injuries, filthy VA hospitals, homeless PTSD victims, and amputees don't sell tickets. Jamie Foxx and Dennis Quaid do. Tidy endings help too. Always happy to see a grateful nation thanking some guy for saving the day. If you've been to the theater in the past two months or watch a lot of TV you've seen ads for In Bruges. Ralph Feinnes (Harry) smashing a phone to bits, Colin Farrell (Ray) remarking on how boring Bruges is or telling some overweights they can't make it up the windy stairs, or a cute hotel proprietor telling the boys they must be crazy. Looks like one madcap movie, packed with laughs. You may not have seen the scene where Ray accidentally puts a bullet in the forehead of a little boy in church. Ray picks up the note the dead boy had brought with him, "for being mad, for being bad at math, for being sad," his confessional crimp notes. Unbearably sad. This is five minutes in. Although In Bruges is, in fact, loaded with funny scenes, the film revolves around Ray's attempt to live with what he's done. Colin Farrell continues to impress in offbeat roles (see Cassandra's Dream), Ralph Feinnes, Brendan Gleeson and Thekla Reuten and Clemence Poesy make up a flawless cast. It looked so silly I wasn't sure I wanted to go until I noticed the director, Martin McDonagh. I downloaded 2005 Academy Award short film winner (the only other work by Martin McDonagh) titled Six Shooter. In Bruges' Brendan Gleeson appears along with a brilliant Irish actor Ruaidhri Conroy. Six Shooter is about a young matricidal murderer, a couple whose child just died and a man whose wife just died. And it's also very funny. I've played Conroy's monologue for a half dozen people and then told them not to watch the whole film. Don't see this film for a laugh. You will, but it isn't a funny movie. It is profoundly sad. Like reading Charles Ferguson's No End In Sight expecting to glean an understanding of how things could have gone so wrong and ending up crying for a country's people. The movie is billed as a comprehensive look at the Bush administration's conduct in Iraq. It is that but underneath it is about the heartless and unconscionable damage done to a population of already traumatized people. The shame of being an American these days is almost too much to bear. Under the Same Moon 03.28.08 For reasons I don't fully understand we have become a nation of immigrants fearful of immigrants. To think 911 was a contributing factor requires believing the terrorists arrived at Logan, Dulles, and Newark airports that morning not by airline from Germany but on foot from the banks of the Rio Grande. In much the same way the invasion of Iraq was obfuscated by the evildoers as related to 911, the anti-immigrationists would have us believe "sealing the borders" will somehow help prevent future terrorist attacks. Of course, the only border we are busy sealing is the one that separates us from Mexico. The Canadian border (5,000 miles long versus the 1,800 mile Mexican border) must be a less likely crossing point for those that would do us harm. The border that gets the fence is the one allowing Mexicans, Hondurans, Colombians, and El Salvadorians to enter. Remember the Alamo!?! Oh, that's right, that was us taking part of Mexico for ourselves. Jumper 02.22.08 It isn't often we're there at the moment an actor's career careens into the ditch. I hope to one day learn that Hayden Christensen is a bad person. Otherwise this is just too sad. The moment came when Hayden agreed to appear in yet another unimaginably bad film with Samuel L. Jackson. These two seem more like guys in a TV commercial for the Copa Cabana Acting School who confess they aren't actually actors but play actors in the movies. The film tries to make sociopaths into people with whom we can empathise. Write for yourself David S. Goyer. Screenwriter Goyer has brought us not one, not two, but three Blade films, and if you order now, he'll throw in ten episodes of a Blade television series. Jamie Bell (we last saw him in Billy Elliot) and Diane Lane kept me from walking out. The digital effects are thicker than flies in this pseudo sci-fi film and almost as annoying. What with Hayden jumping to the frig, jumping across the couch to grab the remote and jumping to the umbrella stand we weren't as impressed as we should have been by the London double-decker bus or the Coliseum altercation. Director Doug Liman also appears to be on a downward spiral, from 1999's Go to Mr. & Mrs. Smith to WB's O.C. this fellow is right in tune with Hayden and Samuel L. Since a sequel is clearly in the offing maybe they can all jump right to the last ditch of the Eighth Circle of Hell where they can impersonate real actors for all eternity.
He's trying to get me to see Funny Games, a remake of the German original by the same director, this time starring Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, a film I had grouped in the torture porn category -
On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 3:06 AM, I reply:
He responds:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 9:48 AM, I write:
On Mar 26, 2008, at 2:39 PM, he replies:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:08 PM, I answer:
He writes
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 7:45 AM
He concludes: Cassandra's Dream 01.19.08 Watching Colin Farrell play a conflicted weakling was worth seeing Woody Allen remake his last two films. Scoop and Match Point are slick crime dramas that remind us crime is bad, male-female pairings are train wrecks waiting to happen, and what else? Oh yes, beautiful young ingenues are beautiful young ingenues. I guess if I could make any movie I wanted I too might tend to fall into the tried and true and cast about for the hottest young thing available. Except I would be too self-conscious about how pathetic I would seem. But seeing an artists' work through the lens of their personal life is a corrupt way of experiencing the work. A criminal shame it is that Van Gogh was diminished when I read his surreal stars were a function of glaucoma. Should Riefenstahl's Triumph of Will be dismissed because it painted an heroic Aryran culture? Well, maybe. No, wait a minute, that's just wrong. The work is the work. Maybe it's interesting to know where it came from but did Michelangelo have to be a Roman Catholic to make the Pieta? He could have been a Scientologist and the Pieta would still be the Pieta. National Treasure: The Book of Secrets 12.26.07 What a waste. I stayed until the story careened into The Book of Secrets, passed down from President to President and containing all the secrets of the world. Like the 18 minute gap in the Nixon tapes (like we need to know anything else about that paranoid criminal) and the location of the ancient lost Mayan City of Gold. Lord Have Mercy, as if George W. wouldn't be selling it on e-bay the moment he leaves office. A too long car chase almost drove me from the theater and I stayed as long as I could but even Ed Harris couldn't rescue this mission. I should have known when a Goofy cartoon was shown prior to the film's start.
Imagine you attend a lecture about the evils of pornography and featured in the lecture are little snippets of pornographic films. Or a documentary about roadside bombs that includes a section describing, in detail, how to construct one. I gave some thought to walking out of this movie about the mindless addiction to sick and twisted internet displays. Featured prominently in director Gregory Hoblit's film are particularly graphic scenes of innocent people being tortured to death over the internet. So, here we are, paying money to watch horrific films of torture within a film decrying the amoral masses willing to watch horrific films of torture. Is this a dirty trick? A test? Or something darker? Is the filmmaker attempting to legitimize his pandering to the fans of torture porn? The Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse films may have slowed the torture porn sub-genre and we can only hope Mr. Hoblit et. al. is trying for one last gasp. What made this particularly sad is the large number of older folks in the theater, drawn, no doubt, by Diane Lane. Most of them likely fell in love with her in 1979's A Little Romance. What a dreadful bookend this may make for them to Lane's storied career. It's official. Cate Blanchett can play absolutely anybody. I've always thought so and the proof is in her channeling the Dylan from DA Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Richard Gere, and Marcus Carl Franklin each take a time or shade from Dylan's life and Todd Haynes imagines the rest. Much of what we see actually happened, including Pete Seeger having to be restrained from taking an axe to the sound cables to stop the electric Dylan from despoiling the Newport Folk Festival, and much is imagined. Richard Gere and the Riddle Missouri sequence were a bit of a stretch for me but then I never did figure out what the leather cup in Desolation Row was about. The film is challenging, entertaining and different but without Cate Blanchett it would be much less of any of these things. Charlotte Gainsbourg was a huge surprise and wonderful as was Juliannne Moore as a sold out Joan Baez (not that she has, much is imagined don't you know). The film began with Stuck Inside of Mobile which sets the mood perfectly for what follows. The only sad part was all the old people in the theater. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 12.29.07 The artist in Julian Schnabel is clearly apparent in this brilliantly painful film. Beautiful cinematography perfectly framed competed with the incredible story of Elle editor Jean-Do Bauby. Bauby suffered a stroke leaving him completely paralyzed. By winking his eye at the letter he wants to select from the alphabet read to him by an assistant he composed the book upon which the film is based. Max von Sydow is devastating as Bauby's father, Marie-Josee Croze the speech therapist presents one of those rare perfect moments in film as she reacts to Bauby's initial spelling effort, and Emmanuelle Seigner is perfect as the mother of Bauby's children. The real story here is the real story, though, this vital playboy of a journalist persevering to tell us his story from inside his Diving Bell of a body. Can this please make me less whiny? I certainly didn't expect to laugh as much as I did. Charlie Wilson's War is hugely funny, filled with brilliant one-liners and four actors at the top of their game, Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Julia Roberts. Incredibly based on a true story of a wealthy Houston socialite, a party animal US Congressman and a disgruntled CIA case officer who team up to arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The audience was composed entirely of old people and the theater was nearly full. Odd. Mike Nichols directs an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. Sorkin was responsible for A Few Good Men, The American President, Sports Night, and The West Wing so the enormously clever script should have come as no surprise. Nor should have Hoffman's brilliance, Adam's blinding charm or Hank's sure-footedness. I'm told Ms. Roberts channeled Joanne Herring perfectly. Emily Blunt sneaks in almost unnoticed but that would be impossible. Never read any of the books on which this is based. Having read the Tolkein trilogy early on I eschewed all other fantasy fiction as pale imitation. Someone convinced me to read The Narnia Chronicles and I devoured them. But then eschewed all fantasy fiction as pale imitation. And then Harry Potter... Yet I pity those peers stuck in the "classic rock" syndrome of the 60's for whom Moby Grape represents the Grail. Without KTRU and i-Tunes I too would likely be stuck with the music of my youth and never known the pleasure of Secret Machines, Beirut and the Silversun Pickups. The New York Times Book Review doesn't serve the same function as Rice University's radio station. It should, but then the editors are likely way less cool than the music gurus at Rice. The big controversy of the film is Hollywood's stripping the anti-religious themes from the book and replacing them with anti-authority ones. Personally I think we have a lot more to lose from the voice of authority than the voice of religion. Yes, yes they are often one and the same and no government critic is likely to suffer the fate of Sinead O'Connor who ripped up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and said "Fight the Power." She was concerned about the church's anti-birth control stance and the result it visits on countless millions of women. Poverty, abuse and disease were better choices to the soon-to-be-saint of a Pope than a condom or a pill. How anyone can be so crazy as to presume to have a better channel to a god and then use that "authority" to control the fate of hundreds of millions of people is something I hope I never understand. But I digress. The money folks at the studio were so afraid of a fundamentalist backlash that they would only spend two hundred million dollars making a movie if they could be reasonably certain it wouldn't offend what's left of the Christian right. A real shame for everyone involved. I thought I would have trouble with the whole soul living in an animal buddy thing and I did find myself wondering how the people kept from stepping on all those little creatures flitting about but then I guess you get used to it. I did and was soon worried more about Lyra Belaqua (Dakota Blue Richards, surely not her real name, won the role in a ten thousand strong casting call in England) than an errant foot. She holds The Golden Compass (an inerrant truth telling device much like a TV Evangelist) and the Magisterium is out to get it, and her. They send a deliciously wicked Nicole Kidman and her time on screen is, as one would expect, the high point of the film. Everyone else is just acting but she functions on some other level. A level occupied by Samantha Morton, Meryl Streep, Benicio Del Toro, and very few others. Lots of adventure, tons of great actors (Derek Jacobi, Tom Courtney, etc. etc.) and a gazillion sub plots. This sanitized series will be with us for some time to come. They better sign Nicole to the sequel. Belonging to the category of horror film that has given rise to such classics as The Exorcist and The Devil's Backbone, The Orphange is scary in a sticky way. Not normally afraid of the dark, there are times when I rush back to bed and pull the covers up. Light helps, but turning on the light is giving in to an irrational fear. Scurrying back to bed from a darkened kitchen is not something I've done in a while but I expect I will in the next few nights. The Orphanage is the story of Laura (the incomparable Belen Rueda), an orphan who buys the orphanage where she spent her happy childhood and reopens it as a home for a small number of disabled children. Before she can make that happen, though, her own adopted son falls under the spell of an orphanage that appears to hold more secrets than Laura remembers. The Spanish coast makes for some beautiful cinematography and the old home is magnificent but the camera is wholly entranced, as are we, by Ms. Rueda. An exceptional story helps as does a guest appearance by Geraldine Chaplin but this film belongs to Belen Rueda, an extraordinary talent. First came the classics of Shelley and Stoker followed quickly by Poe, HP Lovecraft made a brief appearance, science fiction had an extended run when The Bomb made ants, lizards, and even rabbits huge, Stephen King dominated for two decades, and lately it's been the Japanese. We've been remaking their scary movies for years now. One Missed Call is a remake of Chakushin Ari, The Grudge was originally Ju-on, Dark Water was Honogurai Mizu, and The Ring, Rasen. We've seen the Japanese before in the original Godzilla and a horde of flying monsters that followed but the recent imports have focused on ubiquitous electronica. The latest, One Missed Call, has a cell phone as the instrument of terror. You get a call from recently deceased friend time stamped two days hence. You always miss the call and the voice mail is way scary. There are two more Japanese sequels to One Missed Call and enough loose ends in the US version that we can expect to see Two Missed Calls and maybe even Three Missed Calls. Jumping out of the dark was held to a minimum, thank goodness, I hate that adrenalin rush. The fast-forward, chopped-up, moving towards you hooded creature appears yet again, another borrowing from the Japanese. Part time LA disc jockey Shannyn Sossamon (A Knight's Tale) and Edward Burns (indie film maker and actor) pair as the leads. It helps. Standing outside the nursing home to which they have just committed their estranged father Lenny (Philip Bosco), Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) not kindly tells sister Wendy (Laura Linney) that yes, they all smell the same, and yes, this is where people go to die, and yes, it is horrible. It is horrible. We have become so disconnected from each other that we readily accept the proposition that the answer to aged parents is to consign them to a ward where strangers will care for them while they waste away and die. Unless you are very wealthy, though, you must first strip them of everything they own so they qualify for government assistance. The pathetic attempt to store away something for their old age, a piece of property, a savings account, some stock, must all be divested. It's quite legal, even encouraged. Once accomplished, reapply and they'll be taken in by the local home for the destitute and dying. There's a good chance that once there they'll lose their watch and any nice furnishings you might supply, but you'll be free to go to work every day or care for the kids that will one day turn you out. A post-apocalyptic world where mainly men remain. Alpha-male assertiveness dominates, everything heard is derided, civility collapses, small bands swagger, idle conversation is loud and punctuated by forced, chopping laughter. My seat back is regularly thumped by passers by and not an "excuse me" is to be heard. This is the theater I sidle into to see Cloverfield. The film begins with a video test signal over a Property of the Department of Defense background. The video was found in "sector 477, formerly known as Central Park," we are told and it begins with some guy filming his girlfriend's apartment. It's her dad's actually and from the view it must be one of those cool towers you see advertised in The New Yorker. I'm likely the only one in this particular crowd making that connection as my theater mates probably prefer picture magazines. But enough about testosterone overload. Except the guy making the video is eventually asked by his sister to collect testimonials at his brother's going away party. He turns the camera over to his idiot best friend who tends to focus on pretty girls to the amusement of the theater audience. During the party a huge thump occurs and everyone rushes down to the street to see what's up. The head of the statue of liberty comes flying into the street where they stand and we're off to the races. The next hour is a testimony to The Blair Witch Project with a bloated budget. It is very exciting and I loved nearly every minute. After all, I am a guy. By the way, during the movie, two or three guys made their way to the bathroom past my aisle seat. They were most courteous, whispering excuse me and sorry each time. Could I be wrong again? Before the Devil Knows You're Dead 11.22.07 Still more evidence that a superior cast does not, in itself, make a movie. Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, Bryan F. O'Byrne and Ethan Hawke make for an imposing lineup. They are all brilliant, of course, and O'Byrne, Hawke and Hoffman stand out. The story, though, starts out dark and turns black. None of the characters engender any sympathy from us, though, except maybe Ms. Tomei. Her character is so sketchy, though, one wonders if director Sydney Lumet is a misogynist. A previous film, The Verdict, had Charlotte Rampling getting punched out by Paul Newman. His 1957 film, 12 Angry Men, doesn't have a woman in it. Not the point I suppose but then we have to search for one in Before the Devil Knows. Dismally depressing work with only flashes of acting brilliance to redeem it. Not enough. "This years Little Miss Sunshine" someone said. Except no one is a heroin addict, no one is a suicidal Proust scholar and no one teaches the female lead to dance suggestively. In fact, every one is fairly normal. Ellen Page is Juno, a sixteen-year-old unexpectedly pregnant. Her best friend, Leah (Olivia Thirlby), suggests the Penny Saver for the adoptive parent search and she meets Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). Her dad (J.K. Simmons) and step-mom (Allison Janney) are supportive but the baby's dad (Michael Cera) is a bit disengaged. Rainn Wilson has a cameo as a store clerk. Diablo Cody wrote this enormously smart, touching and funny work and Ellen Page was an inspired choice for the lead. Page's role in the difficult and intense Hard Candy was a precocious teen at the dark end of the spectrum from the Juno with whom we fall hopelessly in love. Mad at Mark at one point she tells him she "bought another Sonic Youth album and it was just noise!" Exactly. There are so many exactly moments in Juno I googled author Diablo Cody and found she's written a book, Candy Girl: A Year In the Life of an Accidental Stripper. Apparently she decided to take up stripping as a hobby. Just in case you were thinking offbeat is a creation of the movies... The title comes from a line Robert Redford (Professor Wisdom-War Hero-Protestor) uses to disdainfully describe the present war as "lambs leading lions" or "lions leading lambs." I really can't remember but what it meant was the people ordering others to die are worthless scumbags and the people doing the dying are heroes. As if it weren't always so. World War I generals sat back and ordered countless waves of young men to pointless deaths in a trench warfare made obsolete by machine guns. Early on, Peter Berg (he directed The Kingdom) quotes Clausewitz to his charges; Plato and Socrates make an appearance, as do Lincoln and Kennedy. Lions for Lambs veritably drips with names and philosophy. I guess Robert Redford and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan (he wrote The Kingdom that Berg directed) want to give a fair and balanced presentation. Mainly they use a caring (he tears up in one scene) Tom Cruise as Senator Fascist to present the argument for continued traditional war against an untraditional enemy. The incomparable Meryl Streep is Reporter Jaded, who almost falls for the "new strategy," but then recognizes the same old thinking that wasted nearly sixty thousand young men in Vietnam. She eventually sells out and helps Senator Fascist sell the "new strategy" that we get to see is stillborn. We see that through the bungled effort to "take the high ground" in Afghanistan that craters two of Professor Good Guys former students that enlisted to give credibility to their belief that engagement at home would be a good thing. They also wanted to avoid debt and have Uncle Sam pay for college. This film is so busy giving both sides to every issue I'm surprised we don't get to see little baby blips of the Al Qaeda soldiers daddy blips on the drone's infra-red camera. But then I'm so cynical these days that even Redford's whole-hearted effort to protest the idiocy that passes for our leadership seems a pointless excersize. It is certainly heavy handed. I thought In the Valley of Elah was a much smarter and more damning anti-war film. That we need smart anti-war films is the real tragedy, though. When I see people driving around with W The President and Bush-Cheney bumper stickers I am reminded of just how stupid most people are. The naive version of me would have expected anyone with an ounce of shame to be out in the middle of the night desperately trying to scrape off any reminder that they once thought this criminal government of ours was good for anything but making the rich richer. But then maybe that's what they are saying to us. That is all that they care about. Maybe Bush and his criminal cronies don't care about any of this. Maybe they just want to make the rich richer. They certainly act like that's all they care about. Tax breaks that give millionaires a $168,000 break while the working class gets $45 back. A prescription drug bill that prevents negotiation for lower drug costs. A city in ruins about which we do nothing - New Orleans, not Baghdad. Lambs leading Lions, Lions leading Lambs, Criminals leading Criminally Negligent. Whatever... Paul Thomas Anderson - I hated Magnolia , loved Punch-Drunk Love, loved the first half of There Will Be Blood and hated the second half. Daniel Day Lewis is, of course, a phenomenon. He too, though, seemed to lose something in the post explosion half of the film. Paul Dano arrived on the set on a Thursday with a role of a couple dozen lines and was immediately asked by Anderson to play Eli Sunday, the only other major character in the film. Shooting started Monday. Imagine you have three days to prepare for a role opposite arguably the most prepared method actor of his generation. I'd have run for the hills. He didn't and he was brilliant. But the film comes unhinged when Plainfield's (Daniel Day-Lewis) son is deafened in an oilfield accident. He hands the boy off to an assistant (Ciaran Hinds, who has been in everything since HBO's Rome) and stays to watch the well burn all night and into the next day. When the fire is extinguished by an early version of Red Adair he retires to his hut to hold and comfort the boy. I was reminded of Sissy Spacek in Crimes of the Heart offering a glass of tea to the husband she just shot. In Crimes it was funny, in an Anderson film it tries to pass for depth of character, I suppose, but is comes off as disingenuous. I spent the next half hour trying to get a grip on the character and eventually failed. And so the film fails. In spite of shattering performances by Dano and Day-Lewis. Amy Adams has been a favorite since Junebug. There is a charming story of her Junebug co-star encouraging her when Adams felt she would never gain a wider success and getting in an "I told you so" when Adams was nominated for Best Supporting. Now she gets star turn in Disney's cartoon/musical/fantasy along with Patrick Dempsey and Susan Sarandon. Dempsey went through a much more serious period of self-doubt and emerged intact while Sarandon has to be one of the more grounded superstars around. Must have been an entirely healthy experience for all involved. Certainly was for the audience. Seeing this film immediately after Before the Devil Knows You're Dead did make the positive aspects of Enchanted stand in starker relief than they might have. Enchanted is ultimately all about Amy Adams, though, as it is impossible to imagine any other actress able to imbue her character with the sincerity and charm necessary to pull off the construct. Pull it off she does and I could watch again and again, as I have Adams' scene from Junebug when she first meets her new sister-in-law. It is a moment of pure perfection in acting. The story is a mix of Snow White andd Cinderella and we can't help but lament the disappearnce of the Disney imagination. It's all been a rehash since Walt left in much the same way Apple will likely brown when Jobs leaves and America died forty-four years ago.
I watched about fifteen minutes of this from the wings last week and then saw the film in its entirety last night. I would have not gone back after my fifteen stolen minutes. Big mistake. Like opening a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel in the middle, reading a page or two and pronouncing it uninteresting. Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Javier Bardem were magnificent as Fermina and Florentino, Benjamin Bratt may never equal his performance in Pinero but he was believable as Dr. Urbino. John Leguizamo sounded like Marlon Brando doing Brooklyn. Leguizamo does seem to be enormously gifted but does he have to try so hard? Even a Will Smith feature needs a science advisor, or at least a science fiction advisor or even a (un)reality checker. As anyone alert to film is aware, the new Will Smith film is about a virus gone awry decimating everyone except Will and some spooky looking evil monsters. I'm not spoiling anything for you if I point out Dr./Colonel Robert Neville's conclusion early on that the virus has robbed the infected of the last vestiges of humanity. They want to bite, kill and eat anyone lucky enough to be immune. They must not taste good to each other, though, because they only want to eat Dr./Col. Neville. They also seem capable of some rather sophisticated trapping skills. So, are they robbed of humanity or not? They even seem to have a leader. Dr./Col. Neville does a few things that don't make a lot of sense, like telling these creatures who have dropped all semblance of humanity including language - they just croak and scream - that he's trying to save them. It doesn't take much to drop the suspension of disbelief in any film but particularly a science fiction/end time thriller. I Am Legend inadvertently lifts the curtain through some sloppy dialogue versus plot errors as well as more than one weird act from the Doc/Colonel. Courageously, no effort is made to make Smith cute or charming and he still lights up the screen. Sad coincidence to the Michael Vick story surfaces and is hard to watch but that will fade over time. The title - isn't that what the satan character says is his name in the Bible or The Exorcist? If so, no connection is made to that reference. The organized and purposeful evil creatures, Neville's occasional odd behavior and finally, the disinformation of the title make me wonder if anyone looks over director Francis Lawrence's shoulder. Someone should. After all, he comes to feature films on the heels (or hips) of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears. Warner Brothers should have assigned a mentor. August Rush is very sweet, Highmore was wonderful (originally seen in Finding Neverland) Because she's jealous, because she's young, because she's "fanciful," because she doesn't really know the difference or the import of a lie, Briony Tallis has her big sister Cecelia's boyfriend Robby sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Robby is an imminently noble young chap, Cecelia an imminently passionate young woman, and Briony is, well, an awful wretch of a self-absorbed tyke. She spends her life trying to atone for her lie and at the end of it pens her 21st novel finally telling the truth and setting the record straight. But she doesn't, even then, tell the whole truth. Truth would have been a better title for the book and the film but then who would have allowed themselves to be seen reading a book titled "Truth?" Against all odds, Keira Knightly (Cecelia) seems to be developing into a fine actress. I say against all odds because it seems the really beautiful have an uphill battle in film. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt come to mind as actors about whom people say, with no small note of surprise, "...he was really quite good." James McAvoy is superior as Robby and Vanessa Redgrave finishes the film as an aging Briony. Atonement is a beautiful film, sometimes painfully so. One particularly long tracking shot of the beach at Dunkirk comes to mind. As do several underwater scenes. Water is nearly a character in Atonement but it never serves to oblate, only to baptize, christen, and, finally, as extreme unction. The original meaning of atone was to reconcile. The meaning has evolved over time from make one to make good. I once told a young charge that the worst thing one could do in a relationship is lie. I don't think one can ever be reconciled to a liar. Once trust is broken, repair is impossible. Patch maybe, but in a way that allows the patch to remain forever visible. Briony spends her life trying to atone for her lie. But the damage is done and can never be undone. Atonement, then, may be more about coming to terms with self. And perhaps that is the point. I'll let you know if I ever do. Hitman 11.21.07 Car pulls up in the rain. Teletype across the bottom of the screen spells out London, and then a hyphen and then England. Uh, London is in England, yes, are you thinking I don't know that? Later we see Moscow followed by a hyphen and then Russia. Whoa, somebody decided to add the country to London and England. I don't mind that the target audience for this film is early teen boys. The Russian sex slave dressed in mini skirts or less might appeal to a broader audience but making sure I get that London is in England means these guys think their audience is dim. Well, at least I won't miss any plot points. The voice over tells us there is an organization so secret it's known only as "the organization." They do have a logo, though, some sort of red mashed up scimitar or something and they put it on their laptops, their secret listening device boxes, their luggage. They bar code their primary product on the back of the skull. And they all shave their heads so the bar code is clearly visible. No one asks about it, though. Interesting. I mean if I saw somebody with a bar code tattooed to the back of their skull I'd probably aim a laser wand at it and see what the fat content is or whatever. But then the bar code is probably embedded with some really super secret stuff like the unit's identity. Which, by the way, we learn is "number 47." So why not just tattoo "47?" Shows what I know about super secret stuff, huh? But then I'm supposed to be fourteen, interested in skate boarding and Hannah Montana. OK, I can do this. Stop thinking and just wait for shit to get blowed up.
The most interesting thing about this film, besides seeing Emily Blunt again and Juliette Binoche jealous (I've never seen that as I recall and it was delightful), was the little clique of teens in the front row. Waiting for the film to start I watched the one hundred plus folks dribble in with a preponderance of old people, some date couples and then about ten teens. They split up on the first two rows. Three of them acted up throughout, fake laughing at the funny scenes, fake crying at the poignant ones, and silent at the heavy dialogued ones. I almost pitched my empty water bottle at them. Someone did launch a cube of ice that nearly missed the old lady sitting by me and clanged into the rail. They stayed in their seats after the film (how stupid can you be) so I had a chance to speak with them. Speak may be an exaggeration. I quietly dressed them down in colorful language only to notice they were really, really, young. They seemed so shocked that someone would speak to them like I did. Guess their parents gave up long ago. Things We Lost In The Fire 10.25.07 Addiction and loss. What better way to spend an evening? Halle Berry, in a welcome respite from her Gothika/Catwoman career threatening work, returns to the drama that last brought her an award for best actress. Benicio Del Toro couldn't make a bad movie if he wanted to. She plays Audrey Burke, bereft widow to Del Toro's slipping/recovering heroin addict. He was her dead husband's friend since childhood and surfaces when she remembers to invite him to the funeral. The rest is a ballet of exquisite pain, sadness, and hope as they navigate their way through their shared and individual grief. We meet Del Toro high and listening to the Velvet Underground's Sister Jane. He slips the headphones off when he hears the knock at the door. Sadly, the Velvet Underground slip to the background. I'm reading Oliver Sack's latest, Musicophilia, and keep hoping he'll talk about music and the brain. Instead he recants an endless stream of cases of people with musical hallucinations. At least through Chapter Five. I can almost see him at his desk with a big stack of medical files, lifting the salient points from each, coupling them with some sweet anecdote and hammering away at his keyboard, stoked on coffee. But I digress. As always. Maybe I'll write him a letter and ask about physiological underpinnings of digression in thought. I can see it now, patient JohnS was unable to keep a stream of thought going for more than three minutes. His efforts would be sidelined the same way the bubbling brook where he played as a child of Bosnian gypsies is sidelined from the deep Neretua as it tumbles toward the Adriatic... No Country for Old Men 11.16.07 I drove to work in a thick fog. I've been going a different way lately, one that takes me off of the hideously ugly interstate and onto surface streets. Some of those streets traverse a neighborhood that killers favor for dumping dead bodies. Once through it, though, I take a six lane surface street through what we call mixed-use neighborhoods. Mixed use means anything goes and that's the way most of this city developed. Churches next to nail parlors next to strip clubs next to homes. Good for business, horrible for the people. Almost to the office and it was still dark, very foggy, and I see what looks like the moon through the mist. How beautiful, I think. As I draw near colors become visible and I see I'm looking at a Burger King logo one hundred feet in the air, glowing for all the world to see. I stepped into a Burger King over the weekend for the first time in many years. I was taking a friend to see his father, my friend wanted coffee and wasn't particular about its source. I looked at the menu over the ordering counter. I'm sure there wasn't a thing up there under 1,500 calories. That, by the way, is more than half the daily allotment for most people and that's before the sixty-four ounce soda and giant fries or whatever. While on the way my friend and I lamented the deterioration in proper manners that seems to have gripped young people in the west. he lives in Bali these days and says the children there are universally respectful and appropriate in their behaviors. He and I, we agreed, were much that way as young people despite what might have been in our hearts or politics. I say it's because all the institutions are corrupt and broken. The church is obsessed with sex when it isn't preying on innocents, the schools have all but collapsed as vouchers and private schools complete the movement back to segregation, elections are hijacked by dumping voters off rolls and getting the reactionary Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes while we have begun to wage wars on people who never attacked us. But I digress. Margot at the Wedding 12.29.07 Well of course it's by the same guy who did The Squid and the Whale. Noah Baumbach infuses Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) with so many neuroses one wonders if he isn't maybe the illegitimate son of Woody Allen. Margot at the Wedding was my first choice today but when I arrived at the theater they told me the first showing wasn't, "on account of we're switching something out for the closing." One of three theaters in this city showing something other than mainstream film will close New Years Eve. So I raced across town to catch the first showing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. When I got to this theater it wasn't on the marquee so I bought a ticket to Kite Runner. I'm sure it's a fine film but I read the book and can't see it translating well. The Taliban are likely to be featured and all we need is some more anti-Muslim propaganda. Not that anyone need go far to make the Taliban look bad. The problem is most people see Taliban and think Muslim. Just like most see Joel Osteen and think Christian. God wants you to be happy and successful. That's why he sent the flood, why he showered his most faithful servant Job with every affliction imaginable, why he killed Moses off before he could get to the Promised Land and why he gave up his son to torture and death while sparing a philandering Abraham's son in a test of loyalty. So you can realize your full potential in the marketplace of feeling good. But I digress. Ever engage in a conversation with someone that seemed on your wavelength and suddenly they say something so awful/weird/inappropriate that all you can think of is how did I get here? "You know those panhandlers make more than you and I do" or some such madness. When it happens in a Ridley Scott film it is so disorienting as to make one wonder if he checked out and had an apprentice finish. Like the difference between the scar on my neck and the ones across my midsection. The one in the neck is barely noticeable (or so I'd like to think), the result of high quality surgery, but the abdominal cross stitching, clearly the interns learning sewing up flesh, were so overdone that the scar tissue grew around them in little tubular ridges. Not to be gruesome, but I was equivalently jolted by the crashing halt to the narrative and resulting stilted thirty minutes with Frank (the American Gangster) suddenly working closely with the cop who brought him to justice. Until then, American gangster was a riveting drama with any number of possible options. And then it became Court TV. Dull, pandering and stupid. Coffee cup slid back and forth between two great actors as if it had meaning. What a waste of acting talent. Michael Clayton 10.13.07 Ah, integrity. How rare. Almost as rare as Tilda Swinton. We see her early on in a sweat in a bathroom stall. Whenever she appears on screen I sit up straight lest I miss something. She always delivers. This time she reaches inside her blouse and rubs her sweaty armpit. Exactly the sort of thing one would do but never let anyone see. I was dumbstruck. But, back to integrity. George Clooney cracked a rib recently in a motorcycle accident and some of the hospital nursing staff where he was treated apparently dug through his file and passed around phone numbers of family. To which Clooney says he hopes no one gets suspended. He once got in the face of a director giving a grip a hard time. And now he's off to try to get us to do something about Darfur. My goodness. The movie. Director Tony Gilroy, of a half dozen sterling scripts in recent memory, directs for the first time and who could tell. I thought Michael Mann must be behind the camera until the credits rolled. Brilliant in every way, Michael Clayton is a don't miss. In The Valley of Elah 09.23.07 Paul Haggis may be the most gifted screenwriter working in Hollywood. He penned and directed this anti-war film without once making an anti-war claim. His misdirection takes into the investigation of a stateside murder of an Army vet of Iraq. Tommy Lee Jones turns in yet another profoundly moving portrayal of an ordinary man in torment. He gives life to all our torment over this stupid, endless war. Fly all flags upside down until this nightmare is over. |
