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Working-Class Heroes

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Actor/co-writer Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay have a habit of making movies that promise better ones. Anchorman is a broad absurdist comedy with shards of gender resentment; the picture seems to want to blossom into something more ambitious than its’ already-assured status as the next Caddyshack, but it’s ultimately more or less content to color within the lines. Talladega Nights is more clearly split in sensibility; there’s that long, much-discussed Sunday dinner scene with the crass product placements and the shouting and the ridiculous Jesus outbursts; and there’s those occasional intrusions into the film by (pretend) sponsors. Step Brothers is the most rambunctious, insane, and complete of the duo’s projects, but it never quite finds a target or a focus (clearly partially the point) even if it is still one of the better mainstream comedies in the last several years. A movie, I might add, with which I completely missed the point of the first time out.

The general preoccupation of these movies, besides creating varying ever-escalating opportunities for Ferrell and company to blow their tops, is the hostility that men and women tamper down in order to function in society. The point of these pictures is that that hostility is unleashed; Ferrell and his ensembles, relying on considerable improvisation, wallow in the confusion and self-consciousness and self-absorption that consumerist society encourages. This is most apparent in Step Brothers, with the intentionally overt references to the Cheesecake Factory, to Dane Cook, to Bed, Bath and Beyond. The happy ending of Step Brothers, which I initially took to be straight-forward, is, it now seems to me, meant to be ironic. Ferrell and John C. Reilly are delusional losers who, near the end, pick a different delusion in order to function more conventionally in mass society. Yet, every successful character (most memorably Ferrell’s brother’s wife) is painted as deranged and miserable, with a clock ticking over their heads toward the inevitable implosion.

The Other Guys is Ferrell and McKay’s most successfully conventional movie (though Ferrell isn’t officially credited as screenwriter this time). This movie proves that these guys can, from start to finish, make something that looks like a mainstream all-star movie, with three clearly defined acts with action beats that, while not especially memorable, are at least in league with most of what constitutes action these days. The picture is more clearly “blocked”, with more mind paid toward shots looking like shots. There’s less turn-the-camera-on-see-what-we-get spontaneity this time, most of the jokes play as if they were scripted, then rehearsed, then delivered.

Yet again, The Other Guys suggests potential for a movie that doesn’t quite materialize. The picture is initially meant as a parody of buddy cop action movies, a premise that’s, of course, as unoriginal by now as the subject of the parody itself. The Other Guys opens with a predictably loud, hyperbolic chase, with two rowdy badasses (Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock) smashing and grabbing and destroying half the city to bring down what turns out to be minor perps. Most of the first act is awash in promising jokes that don’t quite land their targets. Jackson and The Rock are too obviously posed as fascist hunks, particularly Jackson, who is entirely incapable of a performance these days that isn’t pitched to the rafters of a theater somewhere on one of the outer rings of Saturn. At first, you think that the scale here – the largest McKay has worked on – has mooted the team’s sensibility. Everything is played obvious and too buddy-buddy, including the casting of the supporting cops, which includes that one seemingly senseless, brain dead lug from the terrible tazer scene in The Hangover.

Then Jackson and The Rock leave the picture (in another promising gag that doesn’t quite pay off) and we see that the buddy cop thing is misdirection. The Other Guys are Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg; one a dweeb content with the paperwork (seen as the bitch work), the other a bad boy cop himself disgraced by a screw up (yet another promising joke that doesn’t quite work). These misfits find themselves with a case that could potentially sweep them into the limelight, to the place once occupied by Jackson and the Rock, and it is here that the movie somewhat takes off. The Other Guys is, like the other McKay/Ferrell movies, about repression and barely-checked outrage at the status quo of society, it is about our media addictions, with jokes on the inferiority complex of online writers, the physical discrepancies between people who look like Ferrell (a lot of us) and people who look like Wahlberg (not nearly as many), and the humiliating jobs that supposed bad boy cops have to take on the side (another Bed/Bath reference), among others. The picture, in short, is meant as a parody of the desperation the recent economic collapse has caused, a parody of the fame/regular guy caste system. (It is certainly no coincidence that the villain, played by Steve Coogan, is a Bernie Madoff variation, or that one of the best, most uncomfortable, jokes involves one of his henchmen supposedly killing himself.)

We see what the new found McKay (kinda) polish could build toward: contrast; a picture that opens conventionally and slowly unleashes the old Ferrell madness, which would seem crazier with a normalcy effectively established as counterpoint. Sadly, The Other Guys, a PG-13, never quite goes far enough; you keep counting the great-on-paper jokes that should be allowed to mutate into something more outrageous and thematically complete. Ferrell’s character turns out to be a hidden madman, a great idea that, again, gives the actor contrast, a starting point, a course. Ferrell is a dwarfed regular guy, a regular guy with dimensions of survival and self-preservation and canniness that Wahlberg doesn’t grasp. Ferrell, in a gag that does pay off, has an inexplicably beautiful wife (Eva Mendes), as well as a parade of ex-lovers who aren’t over him. The idea goes with the Jackson/Rock riffs in the beginning, as well as with the businessmen who are screwing everyone over – this is a little guy empowerment thing, a somewhat self-loathing parody of a guy enjoying the baubles of celebrity with nary an explanation (I wish they hadn’t delivered an explanation at all, but that joke works too.) The partners, over the course of the movie, switch places: Ferrell is the sexual aggressor, Wahlberg is the emasculated one with a woman he can’t quite get.

The picture is eventually a tribute to the anonymous working-class, and while that jives with everything that comes before, you wish that Ferrell and McKay hadn’t been so forgiving. You wish that a great sex joke between Mendes and Ferrell, with him screwing her while she’s dressed as her mother, would be allowed to grow wilder and wilder. You wish that Ferrell and Wahlberg’s wonderful performances had been allowed to reach full lunacy. You wish that Michael Keaton, who is every bit as good as you hope as the police captain, had been used in more original ways. You want, after four movies worth of implication, for these guys to throw the pop-cultural hand grenade that they seem to be capable of throwing. The Other Guys, still amusing, at least shows that McKay and Ferrell now know how to dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

The Eclipse is an easy movie to overlook, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it has a modesty that is becoming and ultimately rather poignant. That has a lot to do with Ciarán Hinds and writer-director Conor McPherson’s treatment of him. The Eclipse is one of those movies where a bereaved man mostly performs quiet tasks while being quietly bereaved. The difference between this and any number of “mysterious tragedy long ago” pictures is Hinds’ containment, his refusal to pity himself. Hinds’ character, Michael Farr, lost his wife sometime in the past. He’s also a failed writer working a visiting-writers’ workshop in a small seaside Irish town; which means he also has to weather the casual superiority and entitlement of the visiting writers. Michael doesn’t pull any of the tricks you expect him to: he doesn’t pester the writers to look at his work, he doesn’t hint, he doesn’t cry in his room once he’s all alone at the end of the night in order to assure that we get it. He tends to his work, he tends to his daughter, and you can tell that, to him, his dull sort of bored lack of happiness is a relief from the pronounced unhappiness of his past. You grow to admire Michael, who has moved beyond notions of self-entitlement. He’s bravely parred of expectation.

And that pulls you toward him, you sense that he’s reached a point that deserves reprieve. The picture eventually becomes a kind of ghost story, with Michael seeking a visiting supernatural writer’s advice, and McPherson’s quiet, calm, command of mood takes you in. This is a supernatural picture with a sense of the every day, so the appearances of the ghosts feel like an actual intrusion, which is unusual for most horror films announcing themselves as horror with a capital H. Michael Farr is one of the most purely likeable characters I’ve seen in a movie this year; and, in the irresistible ending, he gets to, as a Peckinpah character once said, “enter his house justified”.

Everyone in The Expendables tries to enter their house justified. This is a Sylvester Stallone movie, which means there’s a lot of lame self-congratulatory humor disguised as self-deprecation. You know this picture by now: it is a Dirty Dozen animal with a bunch of past-their-prime stars invited back for another round of back-slapping, knife-throwing and gun-firing: in addition to Stallone, there’s Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture and, for relevance, the younger Jason Statham and Jet Li. In an exceptionally lame cameo, there’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

I will be forthcoming: I could only make it through an hour of this thing. If you feel that should disqualify me from weighing in, then I understand and hope you still steer clear of this movie in case you haven’t already checked it out anyway. I am somewhat usually sympathetic to Stallone’s shtick, I admire his clever ability to stay in the game, but The Expendables is one of his worst pictures…ever. (Yes, I’ve seen Cobra.) Dull, ineptly staged, Stallone takes himself too seriously to stage a simple blood bath, he wants you to feel for these cliches, to miss the meat-head, sexist, politically pathetic action movies of the 1980s. There are a few moments that are passable in comparison to the rest of the picture: Rourke gets to do his bit where he rambles on for minutes about nothing in a way that’s ludicrous and still sort of cool. (It’s his version of Brando’s late career nonsense authority.) Statham, the only real actor in a prominent role (Rourke, from what I can tell, is just a walk-on), somehow convinces you that this somehow means something to him. But this picture is the pits, a condescending effort by a rich star to throw red meat to what he sees as his beer-swilling rube audience. The Expendables are faux working-class.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Strands of Need

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on a series of “graphic novels” by Bryan Lee O’Malley, is a romantic comedy set among the contemporary early 20s set, which means its set among the perpetually indecisive. Scott (Michael Cera) plays in a band, crashes with his gay (sexual orientation highlighted because it is – purposefully – the character’s only defining characteristic) roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin), and dilly dallies with a high-school student called Knives (Ellen Wong) who clearly adores him. Scott’s issue is somewhat vague in that you can’t quite tell if he’s stuck, lazy, or playing at some sort of hipster malaise. A little bit of all most likely, but he strikes you as being mostly befuddled, crippled by an especially intense strain of self-absorption. There is nothing he wants, and so he does mostly nothing.

Scott’s saving grace – for him, at least – is that he is a photogenic kind of dork-loser. He isn’t especially physically attractive (Cera’s chin appears to be evaporating – he could be the live-action Chicken Little), but he’s faintly cute in a way that women tend to think of when they say they’re into funny guys, or that they are into “geeks”. Scott is the kind of guy – undemanding, with a vacancy upstairs that gives him an illusion of confidence – that gives girls an illusion of their own originality; they can applaud themselves for not dating a stereotypically attractive or successful man. It’s an extension of the pretend-rebellion you see in people who must behave as artists to compensate for not actually creating art: men-children such as Scott go with (or for) the colored hair and the tattoos and the voices of unceasing disenchantment. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) turns out to be the neon-hair girl literally of Scott’s dreams. She’s an object to pursue, a potential do-over in place of a past ex who has gone on to the sort of successful music career with which Scott pretends to aspire. The picture is about Scott confronting Ramona’s “7 Evil Exes”, with a few of his own exes refusing to be forgotten as well.

The opening is funnier and more knowing than most any youth picture I can recall since Ghost World (which Scott Pilgrim resembles in a number of ways). In between the volleys of verbal bitchery, we see the confusion and loneliness. Scott’s band launches into a primal-stripped number, and the camera pulls back and zooms in at once – a Hitchcock trick – to underscore the vacuum, the hopelessness, of these characters, with the music literally floating toward the sky in self-consciously retro 1980s Nintendo/Atari/arcade graphics that will come to partially define everyone in the picture.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gives you a lift – its a beautifully transporting whirly-gig of a movie. This picture is exhilarating in a specific kind of way: you sense a promising filmmaker beginning to take hold of the medium in a way that is his; you sense his glee at his blossoming powers. The central contradiction is between the method of the movie and the characters themselves (again like Ghost World): the characters are – poignantly- self-pitying and adrift, while the film itself is breathless and ecstatic, an explosion of the various pop culture artifacts these people cherish. This movie is shot, cut and lit like a comic book and a primitive video-game at once, with pop-up facts and word bubbles, and super-powers that aren’t dully over-explained: they just are. Scott Pilgrim uses video-games to conquer the problem that movies have had with depicting how the internet has changed and affected us: surfing the web isn’t cinematic. Here, video-games, physically dynamic and exciting, allow us to see how the internet has influenced youth, how it has merged with pop culture to empower and confuse us.

The director here is Edgar Wright, and this is his third film following Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I have a great affection for those pictures, particularly Hot Fuzz, which somehow mashes the movies of Tony Scott, Bad Boys II, The Wicker Man, and a British comedy of manners into something coherent and original. Shaun of the Dead was well-directed in a somewhat self-effacing way that fit the material, but Hot Fuzz implied formalist ambitions. Hot Fuzz, which calls for an approximation of Tony Scott’s nearly subliminal hyper-stutter style, revealed Wright to have the potential goods of a cinema madman himself. Hot Fuzz doesn’t parody 1990s/2000s action movies; it recreates their occasionally addictive, pompously bombastic sugar-rushes only with visual (and mental) clarity. (It was also pretty damn funny.) Wright, a smash-up artist and gifted mimic, approximates his various sources even more effectively this time out. This picture is a sensory rush reminiscent of De Palma, and, like good De Palma, all the tricks and bits (split screen, animation, etc) mesh into something of one piece. And, again like De Palma, there are satirical implications, such as an early scene (a possible steal from Natural Born Killers) of Scott and Wallace exchanging glib one-liners that’s set to the Seinfeld score and laugh track. The picture, time and again, parodies the idea that TV and the internet have given us of everyone being a star, and, like The Incredibles, it shows what that indiscriminate elevation to celebrity leads to: everyone, once again, being just another number. The internet, revealing every niche to have followings in the thousands, obliterates our illusions of originality. Everyone in Scott Pilgrim is a rock star, a dancer, a warrior, a superhero, and what keeps the film from being a drag is that it understands that all of this sound and fury is still a fucking blast. But a blast with a price; even the picture’s setting, Toronto, is used as a gag for mass anonymity. A reliable, economically feasible, movie stand-in for cities across the world, Toronto is, like Scott and his friends, culturally everything and nothing at once. This movie, some kind of classic, is a true picture for its generation.

Scott Pilgrim is a romantic comedy with a refreshing streak of responsibility, characters who would be quickly discarded for plot convenience in other movies refuse to be forgotten – they get their say and their due. The Thorn in the Heart, Michel Gondry’s newest picture, is similarly empathetic, and it pulls a devastating sleight of hand on you. Michel returns to France to shoot his aunt Suzette telling stories of her marriage to Jean-Guy and of her adventures teaching in various school houses throughout the rural countryside. Suzette is a commanding presence, small and somewhat stooped, but with eyes that are piercing and intelligent. We see right away that Suzette fits the bill of that strict teacher you despised at the time but grow up to adore; the one, as the movies say, who “got through” to you. Suzette is an engaging storyteller, and she isn’t prone to undue sentimentality or to self-congratulation; like any great teacher, she puts you there, and the certain elements – the points – resonate long afterward.

The picture opens with a Gondry dinner. Suzette is telling a story of how Jean-Guy, who is now deceased, acted at a dinner many years ago. The scene is long and doesn’t explicitly inform much of what will follow, but it is possibly the key to the entire movie. Jean-Guy, a work-horse, a giant in the family, is, in a different way, the only equal in Suzette’s sphere, and the story of Suzette and Jean-Guy is really the story of Suzette and their son, Jean-Yves, who we slowly realize has continually disappointed his parents and himself. Jean-Yves, big, strapping, but awkward (he looks a little like the filmmaker Terry Gilliam), hides under long hair and bandannas and layers of clothing. At first, he appears to be an amusing anecdote along the route of mapping Suzette’s teaching experiences (he was a student of hers too), but we see his defensive body language, his hurt. We see how Suzette and Jean-Yves look at one another: quickly, now on to other things.

Michel never admits this, but it is clear, after watching the entirety of The Thorn in the Heart, that the movie was a ruse to unite Suzette and Jean-Yves. This isn’t the situation of popular melodrama, in which one of them is conveniently responsible or clueless. It is clear that a series of casual misunderstandings slowly took hold and became a much larger elephant in the room too difficult to work around. Jean-Yves is different from his parents at every turn: he’s gay, potentially a stifled creative, and the picture doesn’t give you much idea that he’s employed. It is suggested that Jean-Yves’ artistic ambitions may have been similar to Michel’s. It is more than suggested that Suzette always felt a greater affinity for her nephew, the magnificent creative, who didn’t have the masculinity of Jean-Guy or the mental ferocity of Suzette to contend with, Michel could be a whirlwind guest and could then go home. Jean-Yves is mostly “not Jean-Guy” or “not Michel”.

A few years ago, Gondry directed, from Charlie Kaufman’s script, one of the best pictures of the decade in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a picture, I might add, that would make an interesting double-bill with Scott Pilgrim). In that movie his boundless visual imagination was justified and deepened. Since then Gondry’s been – not surprisingly given his free-associative talent – considerably uneven. The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind have their moments, but they’re also irritating and never really take root. The Thorn in the Heart strips Gondry of most of his artifice, and what remains is a stirringly direct honesty and compassion: a true humanity. You respond to Gondry’s generosity: he never exploits his family, he never pries them for juicy moments of heartbreak, most of what I’m describing is slightly off-screen, a ghost. The picture, beautifully shot, boils down to something devastating in its simplicity: the need for communication, for interior atonement, the need to reach beyond yourself. One of Suzette’s final lines (altered slightly to make sense out of context), in reference to Michel, not Jean-Yves, says most of it:

Even when you were a boy we didn’t have to show our claws. With you there are things that I pick up on, that I grasp without feeling the need to make long speeches.

The Thorn in the Heart is a great movie.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Through the Cracks

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

For forty-five minutes, The Runaways is a good rock-n-roll movie. It’s a woman-empowerment picture that holds the empowerment – primarily of Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) of the titular jail-bait rebel-yell act of the 1970s – in proper perspective, recognizing it as a hypocritical, manipulative snow job orchestrated by men, most prominently Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), to get other men off. The picture allows this, but also understands that this sham-catharsis is still, for these girls, very real; and this gives the picture a contradictory pull that isn’t fussily sentimental. The family scenes – the girls are troubled in the usual ways – are stock but that’s intentional and makes sense: the desires that lay below most classic rock songs are stock. Fanning and Stewart are self-conscious performers, and this has limited them in the past, but that is obviously called for in this sort of picture. Stewart isn’t the focus – this is really Currie’s movie – so she isn’t called upon to do much more than she usually does, but this is her most satisfyingly human appearance in a movie since Into the Wild. Fanning is clearly a monster talent, and though she doesn’t get the charged sleazy chaos of the real Currie’s performances – some things can’t be faked – she has a frailty, unstudied (a Fanning first), that draws you in. Michael Shannon gives a classic coked-weird performance; and the scenes of he and the girls creating the signature “Cherry Bomb” have a distinctive magic: the beauty of working your ass off, of trial and error, of the sweat and tedium and calculation. (Most art/rock/writer movies avoid work – Rumpelstiltskin might as well be responsible for the output of most artists as portrayed in the movies). The second half of the picture is less interesting, it’s familiar come-down “what we did wrong” stuff, and it compromises the initial exploitation movie buzz of this thing. As it is though, The Runaways is still recommended.

Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile would make a wonderful double-feature with The Runaways. This doc, just an hour, goes into the making of the Stones’ classic Exile on Main Street. The picture is relatively dense with detail – the tax issues, the French mansion, the travel, the drink, the drugs, the myths – but it’s also lively and reverent without being too reverent. Stones in Exile manages something that should be impossible: it demystifies the album without demystifying it. Let’s try that again: the picture, and it is important that more movies do this, stresses the work that goes into creating anything, just as it stresses the incalculable chance of endeavors such as Exile on Main Street, which appear to be perhaps accidental leaps of faith. That said, the mystery of this album – an exhilarating, heartbreaking hurly-burly genre-bending masterpiece – remains.

The Losers is one of a number of band-of-tough-guys movies out this year. Here’s the secret: they almost always sound more fun than they actually are, because they generally have so many personalities to contend with that they never really get out of Act I and go anywhere. The Losers is thoroughly mediocre in that so-dull-its-relaxing-to-sorta-watch-while-drinking-a-six-pack-with-your-brother way. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a gruff, charismatic sexiness; Idris Elba is wasted in a nothing disgruntled second banana role; Zoe Saldana has a slender/lithe woman-of-dreams sexiness (she’s also better than almost every movie she’s given), while Jason Patric enjoys whatever club in Miami this movie bought him.

Saint John of Las Vegas is so good-intentioned it doesn’t exist, with a number of indie-movie stereotypes hanging around so you feel better about your life. That said, it stars Steve Buscemi, the poet laureate of the broken alcoholic (when will he make a Bukowski movie?), so it isn’t all that bad. Well, it is, but Buscemi is still open, amusing, devastating, memorable, generous – a great actor.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Canned Chaos

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The beginning has an arbitrary intensity. A man – eventually called Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) – washes in from the ocean with just a great crisp suit and gun handily tucked into the back of his pants. The shore is a wasteland littered with huge, strange crumbling skyscrapers that suggest the apocalyptic finale of the original Planet of the Apes. Cobb, understandably disoriented, is scooped up by guards and taken to a Scenic Fortress presided over by a seemingly centuries old Japanese man who recognizes him from a distant – perhaps illusory – past. Cobb spins what appears to be a top, and we flip back to the Encounter That Started It All.

Cobb is revealed to be some sort of dream thief, a pro at a new kind of corporate espionage. Aided by a team (each equipped with obligatory, contrasting “specialty”), Cobb turns his prey’s dreams into videogames, using heist symbols (safes, guards, guns, etc) as means of lifting powerful company secrets. The Japanese man, who turns out to be a tycoon played by the actor Ken Watanabe, is the mark who is actually the manipulator, testing Cobb and his crew for the mission that will entail the majority of the rest of the movie. That mission is to implant an idea, not extract, and that implantation, you might’ve guessed, is called inception.

For about thirty minutes, Inception is the feverish, irrational heist picture you hope it to be, with action sequences that might, at first, be partially incoherent by design. The opening theft is more or less a traditional heist, only with disorienting bursts of glass and fire – disruptions influenced by the “real world”, which might be yet another dream world within a dream world. The writer-director Christopher Nolan has a not-entirely-original yet still potentially fruitful idea: to wed the tangible, traditionally cold tropes of the heist picture, a genre that’s usually impersonal and mechanic, that relies on somewhat tactile dimensions of settings more than most any other genre, with the dream picture, which can, and should, be irrational, chaotic, erotic, and dangerous. The idea invites the releasing of a monster from a Rubik’s Cube.

But this doesn’t play to the director’s strengths. Nolan is a madly talented filmmaker, and his first several pictures – Following, Memento, Insomnia, parts of Batman Begins, The Prestige – are intensely internal. But despite the showiness of his narrative structures, which normally invoke nesting dolls, Nolan isn’t much of a storyteller – the power of his pictures comes from the intensity of his devotion to his characters’ grappling with the uncontrollable, with what is normally their own gnawing guilt. Depicting the control-freak, which is 90 percent of his best movies, Nolan is impressively vivid and pared. But his most recent pictures – the other parts of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and now Inception – have relied more heavily on the dramatization of the chaos that undoes his control freaks, and, in this realm, Nolan is stunningly inadequate, he doesn’t allow the chaos to be chaotic, there isn’t any kind of wild-man contrast. In The Dark Knight, for example, the Joker’s stunts, a few of which were admittedly terrifying, were never allowed to take shape as something illogical and diseased; they all came down to Nolan’s elementary civics lessons on personal responsibility. Nolan can do closed off, rigid – Memento and Insomnia are his best movies (because the ultimate evil in both films is logical to a fault) – but he can’t let go and give in to the free-association that the subject matter of his recent films demands.

You give Inception the benefit of the doubt for about an hour, recognizing that a part of the template of a huge movie is to hold the audience’s hand and make damn sure that they follow along like dutiful consumers, and there are neat little bits and pieces along the way. You recognize that the picture, as conceived, could be the ultimate Christopher Nolan movie: a battle between the id and the ridiculous structures imposed on it by the thieves in a presumptuous effort to tame it. But the picture offers nothing to tame, dreams are used to excuse sloppy randomness. The picture is chaotic in all the wrong ways, beneath the rambling nonsense exposition (which never ends), there’s no meaning to anything. Dreams are an excuse that Nolan has devised to rip-off a wide-ranging list of movies he admires, and to apply his nesting dolls gimmick – which is getting old – to a big action scene that comprises roughly the last fourth of the film. Pictures like Dreamscape, Dark City, The Matrix, Mulholland Dr., Minority Report, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inland Empire, hell, even some of the second-tier Freddy Kruger movies, use dreams as expressions of unease, torment and bottled aggression and longing, they use film forms to grapple with what is essentially formless interior brain heat. Inception stubbornly pigeon-holes dreams as just another series of bluntly staged set-pieces. The huge, meant-to-be-epic ending, four action orgasms for the price of one, has no point, culminating with the film’s biggest unintentional laugh: a ski-battle as the ultimate representation of the inner-most dimension of a man’s…whatever.

***

The film has and will continue to make a lot of money, and, despite my reservations, I can understand why. It reminds me of something that my boss last summer told me as we were watching Terminator: Salvation. I asked him if he was going to see some smaller picture that was playing in our area, and he told me that while he wanted to see it, it wasn’t a “big screen movie”. In other words, that movie didn’t promise, to paraphrase Woody Allen, to delivery the “heavy-osity”. People, and I’m not trying to be snobbish about this, like hyperbole, they like a big, bold, crashing, nut-crunching thing, and this was most of the reason for the success of The Dark Knight. But Nolan has no flair, no panache, no spontaneity, he doesn’t have the sensibility or style for a jaunty genre heist caper doodle. (There’s one tangibly human moment in this movie: when Joseph Gordon-Levitt steals a kiss from Ellen Page.)

Nolan’s specialty is wallowing, and that stands in for everything else that’s missing from his recent movies: he bangs the same percussive notes over and over, and it doesn’t fit with what he’s trying for with Inception, which is meant to be an existential cover of a traditionally more frivolous, stylish picture. But people like this asexual artlessness, because it guarantees an ultimately comfortable numbing effect, no matter how empty it may be – a plastic catharsis. People who go for The Dark Knight and Inception might miss the elegance and snap of similarly-inclined pictures that don’t so readily announce themselves as fully minted masterpieces, such as the underrated remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair (not a mind-bender, but certainly a story of charismatic theft), or Brian De Palma’s wonderful Femme Fatale (a mindbender as heist story, a succesful fusion of what Nolan is trying). People emerge from Nolan’s recent sound and fury spectacles feeling like they’ve really seen something, and without the “its just dumb fun” rationalization that they might use to write themselves off for having paid to see a Michael Bay (the traditional whipping boy) movie.

Nolan gives people “’splosions” with a sprinkle of relevancy fairy dust; he has become an expert at having his cake and eating it too, while failing to develop his initial – and still evident – gifts. Inception is well-performed – something we can generally depend on in a Nolan picture – but the performances are vivid enough to uncover a streak of amorality that’s probably just a result of silliness. Inception makes little mechanical sense, the rules are largely meaningless, and the big images never really gel with anything else (such as the big trailer moment of a city folding in on itself, it prompts us for a dream war that never happens). Nonsense, of course, can be pardonable, especially in a work of flair and zest, but that’s not what Nolan thinks he’s doing. I couldn’t get over the central caper itself, which involves entering the mind of the son of a tycoon (an endearing Cillian Murphy) and turning him against his surrogate father figure so that he will do something that benefits the Japanese power-broker. How is this pardonable as an action of a hero? Yes, DiCaprio is modeled after a long-line of photogenic anti-heroes we root for to escape the confines of our structured, governed, good-mannered lives, but most of these pictures, even the most disreputable, still understand that the actions of the criminals are self-motivated and irresponsible – that we are making a pact with the filmmakers to indulge in a little guilty wish-fulfillment. Nolan is too ridiculously earnest, he thinks he’s making a movie about a broken man’s recovery (another Leo domestic crisis movie, I think I get a free sub with the next one), and so we are meant to take Leo’s crime – a mental violation (one critic called the mission “rape” and he’s not far off) – as some sort of spiritual rebirth, and that absurdity is the whatever that undoes the proverbial whatever that topples the top. I would indulge a bad pun and say that Nolan needs to wake up, but these dreams have been too damn good to him. No need to fix something broken that sells anyway.

Posted in 2010, Action, Reviews, Sci-Fi | 8 Comments »

What We Always Want

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

Most stories, whether they be movies or paintings or print, are stories of people finding their place in the world, or of not finding that place. The Toy Story movies are a remarkable series of mainstream American pictures in that that subtext grows more and more urgent with each entry: more urgent, more original, more powerful. The first Toy Story, as my memory allows, is a fun, streamlined adventure that was basically a tale of sibling rivalry. Toy Story 2 was, particularly in its “to be or not to be…packaged” dilemma, a mortality play – a symbolic story of young people’s first realization that they are destructible. Toy Story 3 bridges the concerns of the first two pictures together: it’s about characters who, understanding their impermanence in this world, need something that allows them to be truest to themselves while they’re here.

Reading myself, it occurs to me that I’m making Toy Story 3 sound like an existential slog, the sort of thing that Woody Allen has been boring us with for decades. This was also my issue with Pixar’s prior Up, which wore its subtext on its sleeve at the expense of invention. In the case of Up, the critics mistook a marvelous opening for an entire picture, and let the sentimentality and dull “old man/kid” scenario slide. Toy Story 3 is basically, in terms of broad story, the same movie as Up: both are “what the hell do we do with the old man” movies that bear a bit of resemblance to Leo McCarey’s heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow. In Toy Story 3 though, the subtext is fleet, organic, allowed to enrich an adventure story that would be functional even without the “grown up” melancholia.

In Toy Story 3, the same amount of time has passed for the characters that has passed for us since the last entry. It is a decade or so later, and Andy is about to go off for college; his toys, which he carelessly refers to as “junk” (one of the more casually devastating scenes in the movie) are ready to be either packed in the attic (likely), taken with Andy (absurd), or donated to a daycare center down the street (very likely). As Mick LaSalle wrote, each possibility carries a parallel that the movie is polite enough to allow us to grasp for ourselves: the attic is pawning you off on a relative who doesn’t really want you, college with Andy is letting your child keep you, the option you really want even if you know you’re secretly putting your child out, and the daycare center is, well, a daycare center, which we generally call “homes”. Death, barely thinkable, is the trash, a possibility that hangs over every turn.

By this point, the Pixar team has convinced us of this world: the inner-relationships among Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Pig, T-Rex, etc, have a specificity and dimension that doesn’t match the best episodes of The Simpsons, but at least comes closer than most contemporary comedies do. The subject matter, of course, has ready made pathos, and there is a sentimentality here that transcends any real world equivalent: the toys are selfless, their happiness defined solely by the happiness of someone who no longer needs them. There’s a chance for parody in this notion, an opportunity to tweak the absurdities we sell ourselves of eternal, selfless devotion, but this picture isn’t interested in that – this is a naked, cleansing desire, free of irony. A desire that is poignant because we recognize it as fantasy. Lotso (Ned Beatty), the best villain the Pixar team has given us, scrambles this devotion reverie a bit. A huge purple teddy bear, Lotso is part corrupt prison warden (much of the movie is a riff on prison escape pictures, with a little horror movie/Sam Fuller Shock Corridor for good measure), part slave trader, part glad-handing southern Senator, all deranged manipulator (one could be cute and say that all of those roles are the same anyway). He’s self-interested fury, a twisted monster born of a casual misunderstanding that broke him. (The tale of that misunderstanding is Pixar’s best five minutes: period.) Toy Story 3 is – occasional broad speed bump notwithstanding – a great movie.

The place for the characters of Get Him to the Greek is a place – traditional to the work of producer Judd Apatow – of understanding with a good looking woman or famous person or both handy to inflate your sense of yourself as someone who can readily hang with hot and/or famous people. The picture, written and directed by Nicholas Stoller of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is a spinoff of that earlier film. The amusingly named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), the reformed rock star last seen banging Sarah Marshall, is now quite resolutely off-the-wagon: shooting up and wallowing in one night stands and elaborately logical justifications of self-pity. His savior is Jonah Hill, a green (Green is his name even), idealistic record company employee recruited to rope Snow into a 10 year anniversary concert meant to boost sales of a flagging library of titles.

The picture is the funniest and most purely appealing movie from the Apatow factory since the nearly-demonic Superbad. The Apatow-ian leisure with scenes, which is normally a polite way of saying that someone could stand to cut footage for the sake of the movie and not friends’ screen time, actually serves this picture: the ease sets Greek apart from recent impersonal amateur-hour smashes like The Hangover. Hill and Brand are both terrific. Hill’s live-action Cartman shtick was wearing him out quickly, in this role he rolls with the vulnerability that’s always implied but rarely explored. Hill, young as he is, is almost shockingly in touch with his physicality – he knows, frankly, what his considerable weight needs to accomplish for him any given scene. In Superbad, Hill played an intolerable blowhard overcompensating for a belly he knew people found, at best, unappetizing. Hill is playing a different, more poignant, fat boy here: someone imprisoned by their weight, a wallflower who discounts himself before anyone else has the chance. Hill is a promising actor, and he’s ready to break free from Apatow, who limits his performers with his beyond-tiresome adherence to condescending geek-empowerment bullshit. Get Him to the Greek repeatedly tells us that Brand must reign in his addictive, self-destructive tendencies without ever holding the mirror to Hill, a young man who clearly, at probably nearly four hundred pounds, has addiction issues of his own. This is part Apatow snow-jobbing, part grander society snow-jobbing, which pretends that weight problems are a different sort of addiction best handled by various meaningless generalities spoken to abide by something vaguely defined as “politically correct”. Hill gives a real performance here. Hollywood, give him a real character.

I can’t tell if Brand is an actor or a found object, but he at least proves that he’s an interesting found object, he gives Aldous strands of eccentricity and purposefully showy displays of self-loathing that struck me as fairly real, or at least real as defined by crap like Entertainment Tonight. But, Brand is also compromised by the canned feel-good TV movie stuff that made the Apatow-directed Funny People long and false and weird. Get Him to the Greek is basically a faster, funnier remake of Funny People: it is about the intense hope that a celebrity finds you cool, and, by the picture’s rationale, makes you a better person. That’s incredibly suspect, dangerous (and typical) stuff for movies to tell us. Get Him to the Greek is well-performed and funny, and Stoller has potential – its pretty good total bullshit, and, like most things, it won’t hurt you as long as you understand what it is.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Reviews | No Comments »

Fun with Genre

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Been awhile hasn’t it? It annoys me when people I follow on the internet disappear only to waste their reappearance elaborating on said disappearance. In that spirit, let’s get back to it.

A few weeks ago I caught up with Martin Campbell’s American remake of his own British miniseries, Edge of Darkness, which is probably most notable for being Mel Gibson’s first starring vehicle since Signs, which was, of course, before that drunken escapade that led people to read more into the themes that tend to dominate the actor/director’s work than before. I was curious about Edge of Darkness (though evidently not curious enough to pay for it) for primarily two reasons: the return of Gibson, and the return of Campbell, who last gave us Casino Royale, one of the better Bond pictures.

I haven’t seen the original Edge of Darkness, which is several hours long, so I’m afraid that I will have to refrain from citing the various subtleties that have hit the road. I’m assuming the original picture had more to do with widespread government corruption and less to do with righteous Gibson vengeance. The new Edge is a return to familiar terrain for the actor: something awful happens, and we follow Gibson as he seeks to right things in- and externally. The external is the usual stuff – a big office is covering up nasty things having to do with big weapons – but the internal makes this Edge of Darkness marginally interesting.

I’m sad to see Gibson become another pop-filler joke – he’s a terrific actor and an increasingly more promising director. Gibson has had to avenge countless characters over the course of his three decade career, and I can’t recall one time that his performance – no matter how shoddy the rest of the picture – felt phony. Gibson is a maestro with barely contained rage: he lets you see the checks and balances that he has to (barely) uphold in his struggle to project even the faintest illusion of sanity in order to fulfill the blood lust at hand. Gibson has a primal, irony-free, immediacy as an actor – he has a control of what should and shouldn’t bleed through to the surface of his skin.

The rest of this picture is just ok. Campbell is an unpretentious, competent director, what many would call a “journeyman”, and so he does unpretentious, competent work here as always. That can be a relief from so many pompous genre pictures with delusions of auteur grandeur, but the impersonality can also be nagging. Campbell stages a few very effective sticky-shocking deaths, but the reason to see the picture is for another top-shelf Gibson portrait of soul-sickness.

From Paris with Love is the most recent picture from the Luc Besson factory. Besson is an occasionally effective, if overrated, director in his own right; as a producer, he seems to be good for roughly one crisp, refreshingly efficient feature a year. Pierre Morel, of last year’s very good Taken, is the director this time, overseeing John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as they knock around the titular city in the effort to thwart a barely-defined terrorist plot to do…something. The real point – a steal from Training Day – is whether or not Travolta’s fuck-it-all hedonism is actually for the good of mankind. I’ll give it away because it’s the funniest joke of the movie: Travolta has been essentially asked to give the typical “Travolta bad guy” performance – a hyper-coked, buggy, wannabe catch-phrase spouting mad man – as a good guy. It’s a simple gimmick that gives the picture energy and inspires Travolta’s most purely appealing performance since becoming a cartoon sometime in the late 1990s. From Paris with Love doesn’t have Taken’s urgency, there’s no way it could with these deliberately besides-the-point circumstances, but it’s quite a bit of fun, and Morel is an ace with seemingly stream-of-conscience action.

Splice is a picture with good intentions that goes nowhere; you struggle to like it because it’s clearly interested in being a good movie, but there isn’t any blood in it, everything is too neatly planned and diagrammed to create theoretically challenging “conflict”. The picture is a variation on Frankenstein, of course, updated to the age of genetic curiosity and anxiety. There are two scientists (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, both excellent) creating some sort of chicken mutant that rapidly grows to look a lot like a hot French chick. Genetic mutants are nothing new, director Vincenzo Natali’s (most famously of Cube) more ambitious tack is to use the creature as a stand-in for the various hypocrisies and compromises necessary to live anything that is said to be called a family life.

For Polley, the creature is a child she can control, a way for science to trump the abuse she herself has suffered. Like any parent, mad scientist or not, Polley is oblivious to something obvious to most everyone else: determined not to be her mother, she becomes her mother. For Brody, the creature, as it grows, changes roles. At first it’s an annoying pet, an embodiment of Polley’s remote stubbornness; later, it’s a kind of forbidden fruit, a revenge fuck, as well as a trip back to a time when Polley’s obsessions were more in sync with his own (the creature, partially human, has Polley’s DNA). This all sounds more interesting on paper than in execution, Splice should ratchet the intensity as it progresses. The picture should, like the Cronenberg Fly (which it explicitly quotes a number of times) shrink and shrink in focus until the claustrophobia of everyone’s obsessions explodes. That never happens, the ending is a bust, and the promising slow-build of the opening is compromised. Natali is too tasteful for his own good.

Posted in 2010, Action, Crime, Horror, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Twisted Up

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

I’ve long suspected that audiences aren’t as sensation-‘splosion happy as both movie producers and they themselves presume them to be. Pauline Kael once wrote that the movies were so bad they didn’t attract audiences so much as inherit them, and I can’t for the life of me find someone who, to use recent examples, actually liked Transformers 2 or G.I. Joe or any number of other similarly-minded movies. Audiences go to these pictures to be in on Monday’s watercooler, and because the media saturation is so overwhelming that many of them – those who don’t read fifteen different critics, and who don’t maintain their own blog – presume those pictures to be the only ones playing, to be the only ones “worth seeing on the big screen”. It’s a pointlessly unpleasant chicken/egg circle jerk: audiences pay to see mindless, derivative, deadly dull formula movies because the producers essentially pay them to; and the producers make mindless, derivative, deadly dull formula movies because the audiences pay them to.

A response to the typical summer movie has been a specific wave of mixed-up summer movie: those made by talented directors wishing to make more money, but who’re trying, half-heartedly, to maintain their own personality and make the pictures their own. The “personality” portions of these movies usually constitute collections of frivolous touches of weirdness or a pronounced, strained attempt to imbue the broad obligations of the enterprise with some sort of “deeper meaning”. This trend – which is sort of the summer movie embodiment of Farber’s “gimp string” – probably goes further back in various permutations, but, for me, a primary starting point in this new sorta-blockbuster/sorta-intimate-movie movie is Tim Burton, who, in the 1980s, made a string of personal, idiosyncratic movies that happened to make a lot of money. One of them, you may remember, was a superhero movie. Ironically enough, Burton himself is now a practitioner of this self-deceiving fad, making not Tim Burton movies, but “Tim Burton” movies for those who want a blockbuster with the vague vogue that comes with being able to say you like a Tim Burton movie. Beyond the current Burton, there are numerous examples across all genres, but, in an attempt to maintain focus, we will limit it to the superhero picture, with the first two X-Men pictures, Superman Returns, The Dark Knight, Watchmen and Kick-Ass coming easily to mind.

The Iron Man pictures follow suit (couldn’t help myself): the first one was a partial relief for two reasons: it didn’t take itself too seriously, and it had a very appealing who-gives-a-shit performance by Robert Downey, Jr., who gave the movie, at its best, a lively screwball energy that felt new, because so many people had forgotten that entertainments weren’t always so dependent on white-noise. Iron Man, despite a somewhat tasteless subtext of morally unsullied American global domination, was mostly pointedly disinterested in being anything other than a picture with billionaires waking up with supernaturally beautiful women and suiting up in huge, clunky robots and punching it out. The picture is a comedy, and director Jon Favreau, who once made the funny and human Made, had the sense to insert a number of little “bits” to distinguish it, such as the guys partying in Iron Man’s jet. There is a third less explicit reason for the first Iron Man’s success: it was read as a symbolic “welcome back” for Downey, Jr – his character’s glowing white orb heart could’ve been taken, intuitively, as symbol of Downey reining his in personal impulses in.

We’ve acclimated to Downey’s success by now though: we’ve had the excellent Tropic Thunder; a dull Sherlock Holmes; and even, with The Soloist, the obligatorily naked post-blockbuster lunge for Oscar. By now, we can be forgiven for perhaps hoping that Downey return to the business of making real movies – which is why Iron Man 2, a second chapter in absolutely every way you expect it to be, seems anemic. Of course, there’s another girl, of course there’re more bad guys, and of course there are bigger bursts of bloodless violence every bit as boring as they were the first time out.

Favreau, to cover up his essentially by-the-book fantasy, again injects bits, such as a long party that turns into a drunken fight between Iron Man and a character eventually called War Machine (Don Cheadle) with purposefully inappropriate party music bracketing everything in quote marks. On its own, its one of the more original scenes in the movie, but it feels desperate, you can tell this isn’t where the picture needs, or really wants, to go. Sam Rockwell, as the other bad guy, reprises his Charlie’s Angels shtick with a quick little near break-dance as he tastes his public’s adoration. It’s nifty, but it doesn’t fit the character we’re given. Scarlett Johansson is game and certainly gorgeous enough, but she’s one of a thousand references tossed in to please those who would see the picture regardless of quality.

If Iron Man was read as a symbolic victory lap for Downey, then director Jon Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux would’ve been on stronger, more personal, more interesting ground to shape Iron Man 2 as a tribute to Mickey Rourke, here clearly enjoying a deserved paycheck job after good work in The Wrestler. Iron Man 2 toys with that idea (flirting with material borrowed from Dark Knight), as a self-absorbed hero’s thoughtless actions have once again wrought a more destructive monster bent on calling out his hypocrisy.

Rourke, bless him, has a hunger that’s impossible to fake and he occasionally shakes the picture out of its glib, this-is-a-bash-absolutely-nothing-counts backslapping. Downey’s Tony Stark is so plastic and self-satisfied, his character so unavoidably conjoined with our idea of the actor himself, that we latch onto Rourke in Downey’s place (this movie is the superhero equivalent to Rocky III); he’s the new once-banished bad boy with a potential second chance. Iron Man 2’s conflict, such as it is, is that Rourke’s character, eventually called Whiplash, is driven to punish the Starke family for corrupt American dealings superficially meant to recall current global-political anxiety. The scenario is predictable, but, with two so potent leading men at the ready, it could still potentially tap into a more original notion ripe for satirical exploration: our uneasy fascination with/resent of celebrities. But Whiplash is basically a guest-spot, and it tells you something about the filmmakers’ priorities that the big Rourke/Downey face-off is an afterthought – it would’ve interfered with yet another army of rampaging droids.

Posted in 2010, Action, Reviews | No Comments »

Role Playing

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

I saw Kick-Ass last week and am just now writing about it because a. my work ethic is, best case, spotty, and b. the picture was bad in ways so irritatingly typical I got angry every time I sat down to think about it. The picture, co-adapted (with Jane Goldman) and directed by Matthew Vaughn, is another superhero movie where a wimp discovers something beyond himself and gets the ludicrously sexy girl-next-door (I’m always in the wrong neighborhoods, it seems) and stops the ludicrously obvious bad guy in the bargain.

Kick-Ass’s theoretical catch is that it’s a satire of the wish-fulfillment clichés of superhero movies, particularly (randomly) of Spiderman (which strikes me as odd, as those pictures are as accomplished and reputable as any in this current glut), and that it will treat the superhero fantasy as it would play out in a “real world” of actual consequences. The dweeb-hero (Aaron Johnson), who eventually dons a ski-suit and comes to call himself the title, is unusually unappealing and self-absorbed. The picture makes no bones about his motivation, which is to get laid and famous. In theory (again, that word) that’s promising, as the recognition of the tunnel-vision of nerds is something that the superpowers movie desperately needs, but the first act of this picture, the act that really goes to pains ensuring we dislike Kick-Ass, is unwatchable in its flippancy (the hero’s mom dying is an, unfunny, joke) with blunt, tedious profanity that’s meant to shock us for being uttered by kids and good guys. And it is shocking, for people unfamiliar with Paper Moon, South Park, Takashi Miike, hundreds of other movies, or actual comic books. The violence isn’t more “real”, it’s simply more unpleasant. We see Kick-Ass bleed, we see Kick-Ass have unsentimental, horny sex, but he still lives, and he stills enjoys all the unlikely, in the end sentimental, desserts of the typical superhero movie. Kick-Ass is a superhero movie, not for nerds or casual audiences, but for those insecure folk who want the same entertainment along with edification for consuming something “subversive” and “dangerous” and “artistic”.

Kick-Ass encounters a pair of other, more legit, superheroes – Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) – who’re after a Mob Boss (Mark Strong) for reasons that are surprisingly typical given all the pretense of irony. The picture perks up with the intro of these characters. We assume that the subversion we’ve heard of might refer to Kick-Ass’s realization that he’s just a cocooned, privileged, media-fed zombie, and that other people have real problems. We also assume, briefly, that Kick-Ass will be brutally dispatched of, and that the picture might jarringly switch gears to characters who have prepared and suffered more – but, no, the entire point of the picture is to rip-off, by my approximate count, every high body-count movie since at least De Palma’s remake of Scarface (for those keeping score at home, I also counted True Lies, Kill Bill, and The Professional among the “homage”). Treating a superhero as if he’s in the real world apparently means that he has to settle for an armed-to-the-gills rocket pack over self-propelled flight. Some have called Kick-Ass smart, some have been righteously indignant, they’re both wrong: it’s just another apathy wallow in the recent tradition of Observe and Report and The Hangover. Cage, Strong and Moretz are admittedly three reasons to see it (Cage is incapable of insincerity, God bless him), but three isn’t, in this case, enough reasons. Note to filmmakers: acknowledging a cliché is not the same as transcending it.

With the exception of his marvelous Sweet Hereafter, I generally find Atom Egoyan’s films a bit of a chore to get through (admittedly I only see one of roughly every three). Egoyan’s pictures are mostly well-meaning, well-acted, unconvincing, and boring as all get out – he’s a talented and intelligent man who seems to care too much, and who seems to think his stories through too much – they generally aren’t pictures but term papers. I will take this sort of movie over a fraud like Kick-Ass every time, but one can’t help but picture the pictures that could be if Egoyan tapped his inner bad boy a little, let go a little. I didn’t expect much from his newest, Chloe, a remake of a French film unseen by me, but I went because I was curious to see Julianne Moore again (I’ve been skipping her pictures as of late) and I was curious as to how a romantic liaison between her and Amanda Seyfried would play. Yes, I was curious for the reasons a straight guy is curious, but I was also interested in their chemistry, it is such a marvelously weird pairing, and I was also interested to see how the aggressively earnest Egoyan would do with an erotic thriller, especially after the not-very-good-but-enjoyable Where the Truth Lies.

For an hour, Chloe works pretty smashingly. Egoyan seems to be reveling in the role of an art-house director merely telling a story. Chloe is a woman’s thriller, and, like Unfaithful, or Orphan, it is rooted entirely in the anxiety of its central female character – and everything that happens, little or outlandish, is an extension of that anxiety, which is brought about over the woman’s guilt over two things: her feelings of inadequacy, and her evolving sexual desires, which are changing because of her feelings of inadequacy. You don’t “buy” a number of things that happen in Chloe (Seyfried’s prostitute is way too attractive to offer curbside service for one) just as you don’t “buy” anything much that actually happens in Orphan. But Seyfried makes sense as a corrective to Moore’s feelings of doubt. Moore feels old, she feels that she’s getting plainer as her husband (Liam Neeson) grows sexier, and in Seyfried she sees two things: redemption of her own flesh, and a chance to fuck her husband again as they first did, which are basically one in the same anyway. Moore suspects Neeson of sleeping around, and so, by being complicit in his adultery, she becomes a player in his life again.

This isn’t subtext but text. Chloe is a well-paced series of appealingly quick, blunt scenes: Neeson flirting with girls in front of Moore, their son having obvious sex almost in front of Moore (the plot eventually comes to encompass this sexual anxiety as well – of the son’s newfound sexual drive), Moore propositioning Seyfried to test Neeson, Seyfried’s own manipulations, etc. Egoyan’s patience and care pay off here: his considerable empathy toward Moore’s misery makes the picture hot, because we’re in her head as her fantasy life is gradually realized; and the big humdinger scene with Moore and Seyfried getting it on is as moving as it erotic. Seyfried, of course, becomes preoccupied with Moore, which is the logical progression if we are to take this as an older woman’s fantasy: her internal weighing of the pros and cons, of everything that can happen.

And then the picture goes to Hell in a fashion that recalls Malle’s Damage. I have a challenge for directors making pictures with sex/family themes: end one, just once, without killing anyone. Just as Chloe has drawn all of its players in, just as we are in Egoyan’s hand, ready for the explosion, for the redefining of everyone’s role in the family, the picture writes itself out of a corner with the age-old death-that-makes-everything-better. It’s, as it always, a disappointing cheat.

Still see it. This is Moore’s best work since The End of the Affair, she’s movingly bare (the picture could almost be seen as a conscious reaction to the last decade of dour, dull Moore roles) and Neeson, in a (purposefully) underwritten role, still has that gravity, that wonderful way with implication. Seyfried is out of her element here, she’s a little light for the role, but that works in the picture’s psychological favor – you feel this is the prostitute that Moore would yearn for.

Posted in 2010, Action, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

2.

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

The Untouchables is one of those happy accidents where two interesting talents, looking for a paycheck, actually did pretty damn great work. The idea of the picture, an update of who-knows-how-many-books and the popular TV show, is simple: Treasury Officer Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) wants to destroy Al Capone’s (Robert DeNiro) murderous criminal empire, and Al Capone wants to kill Ness and his crew of “untouchables” for wanting to destroy his criminal empire. It’s an easy bullet-riddled good guys versus bad guys story, and the talents in question – screenwriter David Mamet and director Brian De Palma – were already very well established, and had proven themselves more than capable of such an assignment; they could clock in, clock out, deposit the check, and begin work on the next Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Blow Out in relative comfort.

And, unless I’m dramatically misunderstanding or misreading something, that’s about how The Untouchables was received (even Pauline Kael, one of De Palma’s most fevered admirers, more or less called it a well-executed doodle). And, let’s be clear – that’s obviously how the picture was intended – as well-orchestrated formula. But intention and execution, as we know, can, and usually are, different, particularly in major personalities or talents, which Mamet and De Palma certainly are.

The constraints of the assignment – must be big, macho, exciting – inspires Mamet especially to do some of his best work. Playing to people who couldn’t give a whit about his theatrical rep, Mamet is forced to write real dialogue – as he did in The Verdict – in place of that clipped, mannered profane rat-tat for which he is so known; and that frees Mamet’s invention – this picture still plays to his ideas of the world being a battleground for the most debased and powerful, but it also forces him, in the bond of the untouchables and in Ness’ earnest anguish over breaking the law – to play broad and conventional – to write audience pleasing beats. One of the best moments in Mamet’s career is a violent, disturbingly funny exchange in a hideout after a gunfight where Ness’ right-hand, the gruff, basically disgraced Irish flat-foot Malone (Sean Connery) blows the head off a corpse to intimidate a hood (who doesn’t know the victim is already dead) into giving up pertinent knowledge; this moment has Mamet’s aggression, but it forces him to wear his ambitions a little lighter on his sleeve. And it’s scarier (and more truthful) than anything in Perversity.

De Palma is a greater artist than Mamet, so he’s risking greater handicap with The Untouchables, and, yes, the picture lacks the sophisticated parody/satire dimensions of his Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out; but this also frees De Palma, as it did in The Fury, to create a world that reflects visually what is sometimes awkwardly spelled out in the scripts he writes for himself. The Untouchables has a sinister night-time tone that keeps you off-balance, preventing the picture from being another gung-ho revenge fantasy: we sense our heroes – as we do in certain Lang, and as Christopher Nolan was desperate to make you sense in The Dark Knight – dipping into another world, one that’s chaotic, violent and morally corrosive. This is spelled out literally early on, when Malone stops Ness before they break down a door into their first successful liquor raid: there’s no turning back.

Playing on just the surface, De Palma goes almost as far as he does in some of his more free-associative dream horror pictures. The Untouchables plays as a horror picture itself – elegant action beats (the famous Odessa Steps quotation basically upstages John Woo’s entire subsequent career) are jarringly interrupted with garish, extreme violence that forces the viewer to take the picture as more than rah-rah. Ennio Morricone’s score, overbearing in a way that ultimately works for the picture, teases you with a conventional “up” theme only to twist it for the frequent murders.

The surface allows De Palma blunt, cruel jokes: the juxtaposition of Capone’s proclamation that murder is bad business with the obligatory murder of a child to justify vengeance; the later juxtaposition of Malone’s prolonged murder (which is established with virtuoso peeper tracking shots borrowed from basically every movie De Palma made beforehand) with Capone’s weeping at an opera. Over and over again, whether purposeful or not, De Palma and Mamet drive home a point that’s mature for most gangster pictures: that the law of the time is just the law of the time, and that violent irreversible acts are committed to serve mere burps in legal procedure and popular taste.

As an action picture, The Untouchables is brutally efficient, occasionally brilliant: Malone’s death, with a bloody, ragged Connery crawling across his glass splinted floor, has a marvelously tactile physicality – you feel each of Malone’s tortured drags. The murder of another Untouchable (Charles Martin Smith, the nerd in American Graffiti, and a nerd in Starman) in an elevator is clipped and matter of fact, with an emotionally overwhelming final close up of Martin’s face before facing oblivion.

The best scene in the movie belongs in the classic De Palma meta-scratch-book: a sophisticated reprise and thematic reversal of the opening chase in Vertigo. Ness, pursuing Capone’s right-hand Nitti (Billy Drago), resists a murderous urge to plug him as he dangles from the side of building (the images are near, as I remember them, quotes of the Hitchcock shots), pulling him up to safety so he can arrest him and follow all of the procedure that everyone on both sides of the law has mocked throughout the entire film. At this point, through another Hitchcock device (a matchbook), Ness already knows that Nitti killed Malone, but is swallowing it. Nitti’s sneering parody of Ness’ virtues (“he died like a stuck Irish pig”) brings Ness to what the picture (indicative of Mamet) associates as “truth”: that Nitti won’t be punished unless he’s killed outside of a rigged standard of law (this is verbally reaffirmed in most everything Malone says, including his oft-quoted recitation of “the Chicago Way”). That theory is reductive and morally debatable at best, but De Palma’s obsessive need to push it to the breaking point is electrifying, and it brings out new dimensions in Costner who, until this point, has been doing an endearing, somewhat thankless, Gary Cooper routine. Ness, broken, throws the animal (Drago is a tantalizing object in this picture, an even thinner, more reptilian Henry Silva) off the roof, leading to two chillingly mercenary punch-lines (“did he sound like that?”, “he’s in the car”).

The Untouchables has its off moments (you miss De Palma’s parody in the Ness family scenes) and the ending, in order to be “happy”, intentionally misinterprets a great final Mamet joke: a reporter asks Ness if he’s heard the rumor that prohibition might be repealed, and what he were to do if it would be. Ness’s reply, that he’d have a drink, is played as the final grace note of a movie in which all the bad guys are where they should be – but it contradicts the darker, subterranean truths of the picture – that these people, like countless in history, ultimately died for nothing. The Untouchables anticipates the more literal expressionism (I know) that would fully emerge in De Palma’s Casualties of War; flaws aside, it’s a nearly classic gangster picture. (Far superior to De Palma’s overbearing, retrospectively overrated Scarface.)

Posted in 1987, Action, Crime, Reviews | 3 Comments »

Keeping It Real

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

The lean/mean pretense-free thriller has been so out of fashion for so long that I was suspicious of Surrogates for its running time alone: surely the picture couldn’t have arrived at 89 minutes on purpose – there must’ve been heavy studio fiddling afoot, implying another lifeless, impersonal big money movie catastrophe with an abbreviated or barely existent third-act (or first or second for that matter). Such is the relief of Surrogates that, not only is the picture a sleek, confident, one-presumes intentional 80-some minutes, it is also that rare big money genre picture that you wish were longer. Why couldn’t Transformers, which is gleefully up to absolutely nothing for the better part of three hours, have traded running times with Surrogates, which has a high-concept so suggestive its just about destined not to live up to it?

Surrogates is refreshing for the same reason it’s limited: its efficiency, while appreciated, also squashes its personality and expression, which could and should have been ample given the premise, which is similar to certain Philip K. Dick, the movie Minority Report (yes, it too, is based on Dick, but it is certainly not the same animal), and the recent Gamer. Dick had his brilliant, occasionally moving paranoia of loss of identity, Minority Report had Spielberg’s peerless intensity of movement, and Gamer had its creators’ delirious love of/contempt for trash as satirical weapon. Surrogates has a dependably pared older-man Bruce Willis performance, a few creepy moments that hint at the greater picture that might have been, and a few sharp, succinct action beats that don’t even really belong with the rest of the movie.

The premise, taken from a comic book, is another reaction to our mutating media addictions. Surrogates are approximately life-like mannequins that we control from our homes, so we can remain presumably safe from outside danger, and live vicariously through an extension that lacks our physical deficiencies. We can have the sex, looks and physical prowess that we always resent ourselves for lacking.

This premise is wrapped around a stock murder mystery similar to pictures like L.A. Confidential and, again, Minority Report: where cooperations turn out to be eating one another alive as we pay the price. The murder, of a bigwig’s son, you’ll have worked out before the end of the first act. This would be acceptable as necessary for structure if less emphasis were placed on the murder; if it were used as a path to more specific and original riffs, but that isn’t, disappointingly, especially the case. The most obvious metaphor is mostly ignored: that the surrogates represent our best shot at assuming the identities of the celebrities we follow and resent in roughly equal measures. The picture particularly misses this subtext with the subplot between Willis’ cop and his wife, played as a surrogate by the appropriately icy, impersonally attractive Rosamund Pike. You assume the filmmakers are ahead, or least in step, with you in the casting of Pike alone: always gorgeous, always a non-entity on the screen, Pike represents the ideal we shouldn’t have of ourselves. We wait for the real wife, cocooned in a room that Willis tries, unsuccessfully, to reach throughout the picture, to be revealed as a more vulnerable, soulful actress. But it’s just Pike in not-that-great old age make-up – a pivotal moment almost dashed, if it weren’t for Willis.

The picture should also, with such a silly yet dead-on premise, be funnier: it seems unaware of the potential that can be had from Willis’ surrogate’s uncanny resemblance to Bruce Willis in his more ridiculous, blatantly pretend-hair performances (such as Color of Night). Surrogates fails to play on the differences and similarities between humans and surrogates in general, and it also, for the most part, neglects the liberating aspects of the surrogates, why this device would be so tempting to hide behind.

The other huge overwhelming “miss” of Surrogates is its impossible-to-fathom assumption that everyone would have a surrogate, which is harder to believe than the existence of the devices themselves. Not everyone could possibly afford a surrogate (I make allowances to afford coffee) and this resentment, yet another illustration of the widening gulf between haves and have-nots, would be an influence on the anti-Surrogate movement, here represented by Ving Rhames in a part clearly meant to recall Bob Marley and Che Guevara. The anti-Surrogate movement is the most pathetically imagined part of the movie, as it relies on the usual grass-roots underdog of the future world clichés (living in voluntary poverty, big speeches, etc.)

This has the tone of a pan, but, limitations aside, I liked the picture. Surrogates occasionally has the inventiveness and intensity of director Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown, and it has wonderfully suggestive little bits, such as a method of executing the surrogates that blows their eyes out of their heads, killing the human users in the process. This special effect, achieved with a bunch of lights so that the picture can keep a PG-13, registers as more of a violation than most of the typical blood and guts we see in a typical R. An image near the end of the picture – of surrogates suddenly dropping dead – has the implicative dread that Cameron Crowe was aiming for in the opening of Vanilla Sky. But the most haunting effect has Willis trying to reach his wife through her manufactured creature, and, upon angering her, watching as her surrogate freezes in a look of terrifying…accommodation. If someone had used their head, this movie could’ve been this decade’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

It Might Get Loud has an irresistible premise: of past and present guitarists wandering around and eventually meeting up and discussing the electric guitar and jamming. The guitarists have been shrewdly chosen: Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, The Edge of U2, and Jack White of The White Stripes. Chances are you’re interested in at least one of those men (and for those keeping score at home: I love Zeppelin and White, can largely take or leave U2), and, if you don’t, chances still favor you wondering what the hell they might trigger in one another. The picture, directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has a wonderfully wooly, restless, follow-these-guys-around spirit, but it disappointingly treats their meeting as an excuse to follow them separately as they wax, to largely banal degrees, on their own muses. Writers, regardless of level of craft, tend to know one thing: the most boring question you can ask a writer or artist pertains to their influences, because they don’t really know, and if they do, the answer is so intensely personal and abstract it’s entirely meaningless to anyone else. Natural conflicts in these guitarists’ sensibilities (The Edge continually tinkers with technological amplifications of his sound while White tries harder and harder to restrict and challenge and par himself down) aren’t allowed to develop, and the picture takes a good hour and change to get to these guys properly playing together. It Might Get Loud is still worth watching for the musicians’ guarded-yet-vulnerable presences (Page has an appealing, effortless Wise Master vibe that anchors the picture, White has an endearingly focused, intent apprentice stare, The Edge is surprisingly approachable) but you’re left wanting more of the little eccentricities such as White’s revealing of the motivation behind his band’s elementary, primary color shtick (to add a defensive coat of irony in case people ridiculed a white boy playing essentially bluesy, “black” music). Surrogates and It Might Get Loud reveal themselves to have a surprising commonality: they both distrust “the man” while undervaluing their endearing alternatives.

Posted in 2009, Action, Documentary, Reviews | 4 Comments »

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