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Stung (Couldn’t Help Myself)

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Casual moviegoers will see The Green Hornet expecting an okay winter time-killer, while the more aggressively cinema-inclined might see it for the possibility of a curious collision of wildly different and distinctive film sensibilities. And, truthfully, the cinema people almost always screw themselves this way – unreasonably hoping that something that looks like a piece of cookie-cutter garbage will surprise because of the talent behind the scenes. Occasionally that rationale is proven to be reasonable – and Robert Altman’s Popeye, Tim Burton’s Batman, and The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer can be said to be examples – but more often than not the sensibilities in question either took the money and ran or were gobbled up somewhere by the studio machine. The Green Hornet is somehow both types of huge commercial action movie at once.

There are two major problems with The Green Hornet: it has absolutely no point beyond commercial concerns, and the wrong sensibility dominates it. Seth Rogen stars as Britt Reid, a slacker in his late twenties (what else?) who is eventually motivated by the death of his chilly father (Tom Wilkinson) to become the titular superhero who will thwart crime by posing as a criminal. (We’ll overlook that this motivation, as presented in this film, makes no sense. I assume this gimmick is an originally more coherent hold-over from prior Hornet incarnations that wasn’t adequately explained here.) The joke is the “eventually” part. The dad is a publisher of a newspaper who dared to question criminal kingpins, while Britt is a drunken, self-pitying douche bag who takes the credit for what is primarily the doings of his sidekick Kato (Jay Chou).

Seth Rogen also co-wrote the script with friend and collaborator Even Goldberg, and these two have approached The Green Hornet in a fashion that’s consistent with their previous scripts for Superbad and Pineapple Express. In fact, The Green Hornet is basically an even louder Pineapple Express with masks, as it is primarily another heterosexual buddy movie/love story about two mismatched oddballs finding themselves while evading bad guys in an adventure that bears closer resemblance to the 1980s and 1990s action pictures than the current heavily computer-generated product being churned out these days (I think there’s even a scene of someone jumping into a dumpster, which seemed to always happen in the buddy cop movies of my youth).

The retro vibe actually helps a little. The bad guy with the amusingly ridiculous name of Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz) is an old-fashioned drug dealer – as opposed to an über-hacker or robot or giant octopus – with old-fashioned plans to dominate the criminal world of Los Angeles. Despite a neat gun with adjustable barrels, Chudnofsky’s weapons are mostly old-fashioned machine guns and bombs and what-have-you, which works fine because few people in this movie have really heard of tracking, or of the internet (except for exposition purposes) and because the good guys’ weapons present equal blasts from the past in the forms of supped-up James Bond cars and gas guns, and so forth.

This nostalgia joined with Rogen’s unmistakably contemporary brand of stoner dude humor occasionally works, and it might’ve even worked better if wasn’t becoming increasingly clear that the actor probably isn’t the comic force of nature that early (supporting) performances implied him to be. To be fair, Rogen is indeed young, and he has a strangely effective purposeful comic mistiming, but I think I’m done with him until he maybe enters his thirties, which might perhaps allow time for him to out-grow his puny preoccupations with not banging chicks, weed, dudes, profanity, weed, dudes, weed, and, finally, dudes. Rogen has received a good number of positive reviews in the past – a few from me – based on the perception that he had some sort of satirical viewpoint of his mostly asshole creations. But Green Hornet makes it abundantly clear that Rogen just thinks being rich and narcissistic is awesome, and it most likely is…for the rich and narcissistic themselves – but it’s hard for a working-class viewer to pay to watch said reverie without feeling just the teensiest bit had. Rogen is trying for a smart-ass superhero movie that wears its absurdity on its sleeve, and this strategy, after the Iron Man pictures, Kick-Ass, and at least a dozen others I’m certainly forgetting, strikes me as being every bit as unoriginal as the more reverent approach. It’s more cowardly too – a license to cash a check without (theoretically) losing hip cred.

So this is mostly Rogen’s half-assed studio movie, rife with missed opportunities (such as the always welcome, routinely under-used Edward James Olmos as a mentor), which leaves the proper director, the visual wunderkind Michel Gondry, occasionally amusing himself with flourishes such as an admittedly cute montage of villains uniting to kill the hero (the film grammar, otherwise, is distressingly typical). The first scene – a flashback that has the elder Reid expressing his disappointment with Britt while tearing the head off of his superhero figure – is so symbolically charged with the youthful angst that drives comic sales that you assume for a few minutes that the filmmakers have found a way into the material. But they didn’t, and they most likely didn’t try.

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Blood

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

Last month, I wrote a piece for Slant about a Claude Chabrol double-feature that was issued on DVD (which you can find under Elsewhere, if you are so inclined) and included was an interview with the now-deceased giant of French cinema that contained a sentiment expressing pointed distrust of the family unit, which Chabrol’s pictures frequently criticized. I don’t recall the specific quotation, but I believe it had something to do with the family being a “vile, hypocritical institution”. It certainly can be; the disease of the family institution – for many of us, at least – is that we can’t detach ourselves from it as we might from other potentially damaging environments, even if we should, without potential considerable guilt and turmoil. Most of us, under the best of conditions, are helplessly perverted to one degree or another by our family or whatever serves as the family surrogate.

Those who somehow have no surrogates are, of course, perverted by the fact that they have no surrogates (assuming it’s possible to have no surrogate in any context anyway). We are all born into confusion, ambiguity and pain of varying forms – and a loose definition of the family unit is the first, but certainly not last, institution to instill self-consciousness, doubt, and skeletons in the closet. So, understandably, some version of “daddy didn’t love me” lurks in most movies to varying degrees of effectiveness and subtlety (it is the root of arguably the most discussed movie of all time – Citizen Kane) and this intangible phantom regret can be found in all of the pictures discussed below.

Rodrigo García is a director of empathy and generosity – his pictures take their time and allow their characters space to simply occupy space. García is a man refreshingly fascinated with women – his Nine Lives was the rare collection of short films that actually gathered force as it progressed, allowing a number of terrific actors the opportunity to give the kind of work they mostly hadn’t given in years. Mother and Child, García’s newest, is seemingly compartmentalized too, but the stories gradually merge into one cry of despair that ultimately ushers forgiveness and a kind of interior peace.

Annette Bening gives potentially the performance of her career. A terrific actress, Bening has a habit of technical effects that draw attention more to the craftsman than to the context of the character. García builds a hushed (sometimes too hushed) atmosphere that allows Bening, and Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts, to go for quieter effects than any of them are typically accustomed. You probably already know what Bening and Watts are capable of, while Washington may still be a mystery to you. As one of three women affected by a series of adoptions, Washington gives a sexy, vulnerable, quietly desperate performance that haunts you, along with the work of the other actresses, for a time after the picture is over. Need further proof of García’s alchemy with actors? He even shakes Samuel L. Jackson out of his ongoing self-parody.

Jay and Mark Duplass also have a refreshing sensitivity. I originally watched The Puffy Chair because I felt I was supposed to, and was pleasantly surprised by the degree of compassion and casual insight. (A number of short films included on that DVD are also worth visiting.) Their second picture, Baghead, a low-fi indie version of the post-modern slasher film, couldn’t transcend a who-gives-a-damn conceit, but it still had moments that illustrated that Puffy Chair wasn’t a fluke. And now they are back with Cyrus, which was, as widely reported, financed with a considerably higher budget (for them), high profile producers (Ridley and Tony Scott), and real-deal movie stars.

The resulting picture confidently belongs to the Duplass’ in that it sidesteps an unoriginal scenario (two losers fighting over a beautiful woman) to allow the cast the opportunity to improvise moments of greater than expected vulnerability. John C. Reilly, a depressed Joe Schmo who inexplicably finds himself in a relationship with the beautiful Marisa Tomei, doesn’t venture outside his wheelhouse of raw nerves who inadvertently reveal too much of themselves, but he’s still wonderful, especially in a pathetic couch-side confession near the beginning. Tomei has made a career of believably finding men far below her physical form attractive (Joe Pesci, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Reilly) but her character here is clearly damaged; she’s a less sentimental version of what still admittedly constitutes screenwriter wishful thinking. The surprise is Jonah Hill as Tomei’s deranged son, who comes between the pair. Hill is clearly a real actor, and his ability to wring pathos out of bizarre, left-field punchlines meshes well with the Duplass’ gallery of befuddled, well-meaning eccentrics.

The Fighter has drawn a divisive reaction that seems to center around its acting. The picture is the story of boxer Micky Ward’s unexpected rise in the middle weight ranks in the 1990s, when, as the picture asserts, he was able to unify the warring factions among his family and friends who had differing theories as to how his career should be handled. The story arc is mostly traditional, the texture is not. David O. Russell, the supposedly temperamental wild card who last gave us I Heart Huckabees, and who had a film aborted in between that and this picture, seems to have taken the Fighter assignment in order to prove that he can behave and tell a story that gets a reasonable amount of butts in seats. Russell has accomplished that, and, within the boundaries of conventional mandates, he’s delivered a picture with a number of wooly little tangents and pockets, and with acting that consciously aims to blow the roof off the theater.

Acting that has frequently been dubbed “over the top” has become a hip target, particularly of chic bloggers determined to prove their subtlety detector to their readership. I’m not excluding myself from this tendency in the past, but it should be said that broader acting has its place and context, and The Fighter is one of those films that calls for it. Melissa Leo, as Micky’s manipulative, self-serving mom, and Christian Bale, as his drug-addled show-off, coulda-been-a-contender brother, are supposed to have large personalities that dwarf the contained, self-doubting Micky, who is played by Mark Wahlberg in one of his absolutely strongest, most charismatic performances. Bale has been wooden and bombastic (somehow at the same time) in a number of recent pictures, here he latches onto a Method role that frees him, allowing him to give his best work since the early 2000s. Bale’s performance is musical, ridiculous, commanding, clownish – as it should be. Russell’s direction is focused and direct, and the editing is effectively punchy. The Fighter is an inventive melodrama.

Tiny Furniture is a remarkable debut from the impressively young writer/director/actress Lena Dunham; she takes the beyond-tired college graduate ennui set-up and makes it her own. Having heard that the picture featured Dunham’s successful artist mother Laurie Simmons (the title comes from a conceit of some of Simmons’ art) and model/poet sister Grace as versions of themselves, I braced myself for an “I hate Mom” freak show. The picture is probably treading over real hurts, particularly in an impressive party scene near the end, but Tiny Furniture is also sharply written and directed with a sense of narrative shape and perspective. Parodies centered around Youtube, art-hipster self-absorption and the all-around loneliness of NYC point to a voice that might have a shot at taking on the new generation’s endless capacity for hall-of-mirrors narcissism as fostered by the internet.

Despicable Me is a delightful farce that features Steve Carell’s best work since his under-appreciated turn in Get Smart. I didn’t see the picture in the theater – I thought it was another lame meta-superhero thing. It’s actually about a super-villain called Gru (Carell) who tries to steal the moon to compensate for his mother’s (Julie Andrews!) life-long disinterest in his exploits. Soon, Gru, who was clearly never too cut out for this bad guy business anyway, finds himself distracted by three little girls he adopts, initially in a scheme to get even with another bad guy (Jason Segel), who’s nursing parent issues of his own. It could be too cute, but the animation is striking and beautiful and the gags are inventive in an occasionally intricate fashion that could have been inspired by Tati. The core though is the sad, childish Gru, who simply wants to belong. Everyone in all of these movies shares that wish, because everyone in all theaters do too.

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Love and Theft

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Parents seemed to haunt the cinema of 2010 more than usual, as it seemed that every third picture I saw somehow involved a complicated or fractured or broken relationship between a parent and child. Two of the best pictures I’ve seen this year turn on the theme of a child seeking resolution for a missing father who is either certainly or probably dead, and both feature striking performances by young women who will almost certainly move onto more major things. And there are about ten other interesting pictures – one discussed below – that play with a fractured family dynamic.

If you asked me what I thought of the Coen Brothers ten years ago, I would’ve told you that they’re an intelligent, talented team who make pictures that are sometimes wonderful and that are sometimes suffocated by their own cleverness. In other words, I would’ve given you the rap that’s typical to the person who admires them with a bit of suspicion that they’re somehow holding something out on us. What a difference time can make. Whatever the Coens were holding back – and I think the issue was that they seemingly tended to throw in gags and bits simply to prove that they were capable of inventing them – they have more than offered in the last five or six years with a run of films that eclipses in prolificacy, consistency, subtlety, and pure old-fashioned damn film craft any American filmmaker currently working. The visible construction that nagged earlier Coen works, and that seems to nag virtually every American director of note working today, has been shed.

True Grit, obviously a remake of the not-bad, not-great earlier movie that won John Wayne his Oscar, follows this tradition. I’ve read a few writers that have (sometimes even admiringly) characterized this new Coen picture as a fun genre piece, basically saying that it’s a well-earned opportunity for the directors to screw around in the Wild West and make money while their next big exploration of the symbolic end of the world percolates in their heads. That tells you that the Coens have grown more confident – their preoccupations arise naturally from the story, which speaks for itself, and which is imbued with every bit as much “meaning” (a troublesome word) as No Country for Old Men or A Serious Man. (People seemed to miss the point of the superb Burn after Reading, because that was fleet with its “meaning” as well.)

True Grit still concerns Rooster Cogburn, who is still a drunk, debauched, overweight, one-eyed U.S Marshall roped into helping a girl, Mattie, whose father has been killed by another drunk who has high-tailed to somewhere in the dangerous Choctaw terrain with a gang led by a rather grotesque something called Lucky Ned Pepper. Cogburn is still even played by a modern legend, in this case Jeff Bridges, who gives the role a magnetically dirtier interpretation that accomplishes two things: he “modernizes” the role with details and texture more appropriate to this age of Deadwood, while still knowingly playing into the mythical cool of Jeff Bridges. This is a funnier (though similar) performance than Bridge’s work in Crazy Heart, as this performance is less rigidly determined to achieve iconography (which means that Bridges achieves iconography).

Mattie is played by Hailee Steinfeld in a performance of tough generosity that rises to the Coens’ refusal to condescend to her as many child actors are in many films. The dialogue, quite a bit of which I’ve heard is taken from the Charles Portis novel (unread by me), is lean, revealing and often poetic (it sounds like the sort of indicative period specific-yet-stylized conversation that the Coens would create themselves) and Steinfeld speaks it with a grace and unfussy over-compensating defensiveness that is often quite moving. The casting informs the subtext: Steinfeld is mixing it up with larger than life personalities – Bridges, Matt Damon as Texas Ranger LaBeouf, Josh Brolin as the drunk and ultimately pathetic murderer Chaney – which reflects the character’s struggle to attain some measure of dignity as well as a confirmation that the world is fair; that killers can be brought to justice and that wrongs can be righted.

Damon gives career-best caliber work here (I wish more directors understood that he’s more interesting and varied when asked to be at least vaguely funny) and he and Steinfeld share the picture’s best scene, which is also one of the best moments to play out in a Coen picture. The band has suffered several demoralizing set-backs in their attempt to nab Chaney, including Rooster’s booze-addled resignation, and LaBeouf, memorably proclaiming that he’s “diminished”, faces Mattie with the admission that this pursuit isn’t winnable. Mattie and LaBeouf reach a plane of understanding – a moment of beauty among a number of moments of considerable disappointment – that charges the picture’s final third with a pulse of melancholic humanity that’s every bit the equal of No Country for Old Men, only without McCarthy’s labored last of the doomed good men moralizing. True Grit, of course, is impeccably made in a formal sense by the Coens’ usual collaborators (composer Carter Burwell and cinematographer Roger Deakins outdo themselves – again). This movie looks a lot to me like a classic – it’s an ideal example of brilliant filmmakers working in the pop form without “diminishing” themselves, without treating us like fools. The picture brings to the forefront what has always been the filmmakers’ chief concern: that human decency is the ultimate gift in this existence of distressing, baffling impermanence.

It seemed to be the year of parents and – more excitingly – fabulous ensembles: True Grit, Winter’s Bone, The Kids Are All Right, Wild Grass, Cyrus, Mother and Child. Let’s briefly talk about Winter’s Bone and The Kids Are All Right, and table a few of the others for a piece to happen in hopefully a few days.

Winter’s Bone would make an interesting double-bill with True Grit. Both pictures are concerned with the same story and even the same theme. Winter’s Bone is also about a young woman who must rally considerable courage for survival, though Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) admittedly finds herself in more severe circumstances than Mattie. Ree is a seventeen year-old living seemingly deep in the harsh, cold Ozarks who cares for her mentally incapable mother and younger siblings. The father is gone, which soon causes a problem as he’s put the house up for a bail bond in order to promptly disappear. The father – a meth manufacturer with a habit of angering local people who shouldn’t be angered – is almost certainly dead; and few in the community indulge any pretenses otherwise. But, without proof, Ree and her family are homeless, and their already fragile domestic existence will collapse. To find her father Ree must navigate the Ozark meth community, many of whom are relatives, which pulls her into an underworld that director Debra Granik elevates to the level of myth.

I feel compelled to offer the qualification that many other admirers of Winter’s Bone have offered: it isn’t Frozen River, or any other number of pictures that rub your face in liberal poverty guilt. This picture offers surprising beauty among the damaged faces and barren landscapes. Winter’s Bone follows a girl willing to die for a slight consideration that, for her, means everything. The story is also, as Craig Kennedy recently wrote, surprisingly “movie-movie” in that it updates situations familiar to noir – the tortured anti-hero, the forbidden world, the dark secrets – to a contemporary social situation without a lot of deadly dull meta nonsense like overhead shots of twirling fans or dames crossing their legs with red high heels. Lawrence is as good as you’ve heard; she digs down, suppressing all of the vulnerability that her character would, in fact, need to suppress. The rest of the cast is equally superb, particularly Dale Dickey as a vicious/ambiguous Mother Hen and John Hawkes as an uncle endangered by Ree’s prodding. Dickey and Hawkes convey a tricky emotional truth that most movies fumble: the love that can be hidden in particularly domestic violence. (Both beat the shit out of Ree for reasons that we loathe but understand.) This picture also builds to two of the great scenes of last year: the eventual arrival of the villain is terrifyingly understated, and Ree’s ultimate discovery has the macabre purifying catharsis of a good Southern gothic story.

The Kids Are All Right is engagingly written and performed, but the last third mildly killed it for me. Annette Bening gives a quiet, funny, nervous performance as a rigid, professional, potentially alcoholic wife and mother who finds her family hijacked by her children’s sperm donor, a hunky, painfully hip organic farmer and restaurant owner played by the just-as-good-in-his-way Mark Ruffalo. Bening’s wife is played by Julianne Moore, and she is the prototypical, continually unemployed free spirit who gravitates toward Ruffalo’s somewhat aloof self-absorption. Moore makes an error common to many of us: she mistakes desperation for a Zen fulfillment. The picture becomes a kind of pentagon of love and misunderstanding, and it might have been a very diverting film if the talented co-writer/director Lisa Cholodenko hadn’t tied it up so neatly in an ending that rigidly evens all of the ledgers. Her Laurel Canyon, taken with similar themes of familial obligation, was more open and mysterious. The last twenty-five minutes – with the big speeches and pat resolutions – is the reason smarty critics have called The Kids Are All Right a glorified sitcom. And they’re not entirely wrong.

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

The Dash, Vol. 1

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

December is the month of people making lists of things, and I won’t pretend that I don’t enjoy, to an extent, such lists. What I don’t enjoy – however – is the structure that can essentially force amateurs such as myself into seemingly consuming most of the year’s pictures in six-ish weeks while months such as February, March, and the summer, for a different reason, remain essentially barren, with the interesting releases of those times reserved nearly solely for the critics to discuss among themselves. But, this is a soapbox, I assume, for another day, if at all. So I will once again indulge a number of short, short reviews to keep up, and to keep me from disappearing for the site for weeks at a time as I write for others while seeing as many pics as possible.

Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) is a conventional, engaging portrait of the titular singer most famously associated with the song that would help to make the picture Midnight Cowboy a legend. This doc is clearly star-struck, but Nilsson is still allowed to emerge as a troubled, conflicting personality who was – in the tradition of the gifted artist – seemingly most preoccupied with his own self-destruction. Nilsson’s music is generously used to fuel the narrative, and much of it is every bit as beautiful as director John Scheinfeld thinks it is.

Unstoppable is Tony Scott’s best movie in years because the material fits an approach that the filmmaker is determined to beat into the ground no matter what the project at hand may be. The picture is about working-class machismo (typically overplayed by Scott) and a train going vroom vroom and it’s about filters and camera pans that exist to assuage Scott’s fear of people simply conferring with one another. Unstoppable is lean and fairly likeable though, if a bit dull. Chris Pine, recently of Star Trek, does an admirable job opposite headliner Denzel Washington, compelling the latter to give a somewhat looser performance than usual. Rosario Dawson is gorgeous as someone who reads the exposition.

Fair Game is a potential Oscar-bait whistle blower intrigue movie that’s more interested in being a genre thriller, and I mean that as a compliment – the thriller mechanics allow the political outrage to emerge more naturally. Naomi Watts is Valerie Plame, a real CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the press by the White House in 2003 in an effort to discredit her connected husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) for writing a New York Times op-ed piece that rightfully claimed the intelligence compiled for Iraq to have been manipulated to justify a war that was going to happen anyway. Watts and Penn have an understated, convincing chemistry, both are great, particularly Penn, who hasn’t been this good in years. The picture is blunt – the bad guys are “bad guys” in the most obviously movie short-hand way – but it is the sort of “adult” entertainment that people always claim to miss from earlier decades only to promptly ignore when push comes to shove. Doug Liman – of Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, and, ahem, Jumper – is once again a director to watch.

127 Hours is Danny Boyle’s best picture; his visual hyperbole, which usually reveals a galling, showy insincerity, fits this true-life story of Aron Ralston (James Franco), a climber who got himself stuck in a Utah canyon when a boulder tumbled, pinning his arm. Facing a dead-end, dying, Aron retreats into himself – allowing Boyle to fashion a beautiful, exhilarating pop movie about a young man’s reckoning with his self-absorption. The movie tricks – the harshly bright colors, the hallucinations, the product placements, the camera gymnastics – have a point here. Boyle, a Brit, has made a definitively American picture about the confusion of sensory overload, of having everything and nothing at your fingertips.

Robin Hood is supposed to be a prequel of some sorts to the widely known legend of the archer who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, etc, but it’s really a remake – occasionally down to specific beats – of director Ridley Scott and actor Russell Crowe’s most popular collaboration, Gladiator. How many pompous, bloated, barely coherent movies do Alien and Blade Runner buy one? We may never know the exact number. Russell Crowe is a great actor and an absorbing presence, but he’s become one of the more boring, predictable once-great actors in the current cinema.

Yes, Love and Other Drugs is mostly useless as an examination of the rise of Viagra and the corrupt deals brokered between the doctors and the salesmen for the big pharmaceutical companies in the 1990s. The picture is also – save one vivid scene – equally flaccid as any kind of exploration of the pain facing those afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. But the picture is primarily a romantic comedy, with a dash of the sick loved one formula that’s worked since the invention of movies for a bit of extra ready-made poignancy. And, as a romantic comedy, Love and Other Drugs is surprisingly intimate and well-acted, sexy, and, yes, moving. The picture is mostly concerned with something that has nothing to do with the topicality it courts as window dressing: the absolute astonishment someone who hates themselves can face when encountering another who just might be in love with them.

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Mad Men

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

There are Robert Rodriguez movies where the exuberance and inventiveness and laziness and indifference to coherence gel into something amusingly off-the-rails (Desperado, Planet Terror); and then there are the movies where the alchemy is less rewarding: the result occasionally amusing, insufferably pleased with its cuteness, and ultimately redundant, and annoyingly pointless (some of From Dusk Til Dawn, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and any of his kids movies). Machete, curiously co-directed with frequent editor Ethan Maniquis, is a bit of both, essentially a mid-tier Rodriguez picture.

Rodriguez once had a shot at being more than a ridiculously prolific self-referential B-movie hotshot. El Mariachi, despite famously costing virtually nothing, is disciplined and intense, a sweaty little genre cheapie that anyone should be proud of; and Roadracers, the Showtime made-for-TV movie that saw Rodriguez tending to frivolities such as tone and performance, is potentially even better. Rodriguez is clearly capable of more, but he’s wily enough to have established a career and reputation where his shoot-first-write-never aesthetic is generally cheered.

This tongue-in-cheekiness cancels Machete – a spin-off of the justifiably popular fake trailer that appeared in Grindhouse a few years ago – out. Rodriguez is aiming for a mythic quality here; a modern Mexican equivalent of the blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s, but that doesn’t mesh with the self-conscious jokes and intentional ineptitude. Pictures like Shaft or Coffy weren’t shot through a filter of irony; the crudeness was a necessity (like El Mariachi) not fashion statement, and the hunger and fury were unshakably real.

Rodriguez mostly wastes a great camera subject in Danny Trejo, a real ex-con and longtime character actor who exudes a natural, weathered, compelling authority. The set-up is promising: Trejo’s Machete is a Mexican day laborer, once a federale who was screwed over by the law in cahoots with a prominent drug dealer (Steven Seagal), who finds himself forced to assassinate a corrupt Texas senator (Robert De Niro) for shady dealings on the U.S./Mexican border. There are a few of the expected double-crosses, and so Machete is on the run, snuffing out the responsible parties still pursuing him. In films such as Heat and Sherrybaby, Trejo has revealed himself to be more than a presence; he has gravity and soul, an instinct for what he offers and what he’s doing. But Rodriguez can’t get beyond the most obvious smirky tough-guy banalities. Machete doesn’t register as an icon, because the character, or the larger issues of Mexican exploitation and government hypocrisy, clearly mean nothing beyond the money shots.

Which might still work is the money shots were especially memorable. The action, though, is mostly rhythm-less, a step back from the exuberant low-fi stagings in Desperado, or even in the underrated Planet Terror. The script, such as it is, is one of Rodriguez’s worst: there are about three bad guys and three hot chicks too many, and so they all take turns exchanging the same dull exposition. Rodriguez can be funny, and this picture is no exception: the mock promotional ads for the senator have a satirical zing, and certain roles deliver (Shea Whigham, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, and especially Jeff Fahey). But there are just as many dud roles (Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Alba, De Niro, Seagal) and so the pleasurable bits and pieces don’t add up to anything; you begin to resent the unending circle jerkiness of it all. Many of the movies informing Machete had an underlying need, real sweat, a tension created from desperation and limitation, that sometimes allowed for a subtext greater than the sum of their parts. Machete is off-and-on fun, and will work with some buddies over a few PBRs, but it also exists in a self-referential vacuum that limits the exhilaration.

Harry Brown is another revenge picture with an aging killer that owes its existence to ancient cliches, but there’s a difference. The director, Daniel Barber, lends the stale material a grimy intensity, particularly in a legitimately great sequence where the titular character (Michael Caine) pretends to buy guns to initiate his inevitable rampage against a gang of heroin dealers who killed his last friend. The scene is obviously meant to be taken as Harry’s descent to Hell, and Barber plays the scene much longer than we expect: he extends, extends, extends, until the tension is nearly unbearable, we know this old man among diseased ghouls is pressing his luck. The scene erupts in (effectively abrupt) violence, and builds to a verbal punchline with Harry scolding his prey as he finishes him over collapsed marijuana plants. In most vigilante pictures, this would be a laugh-out-loud red meat zinger, here it only adds to the depravity.

Michael Caine has been a legend for so long that praise doesn’t really mean anything in regards to his work anymore, but, trust me, he’s good here: wounded, damaged, sick with rage and heartache and impotence. But Caine doesn’t deny Harry his charisma, the magnetic qualities; this isn’t a labored eye-an-for-an-eye bit rife with self-pity. The picture is ultimately a disappointment because it doesn’t stray far enough from what David Edelstein calls its fascist/reactionary tendencies, and the ending is a dud, but Barber, unlike Rodriguez, at least gives his legend his due, allows him his dignity.

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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 »

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