Archive for the ‘2009’ Category

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9.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Kael famously wrote that a great movie is rarely a perfect movie, but Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise is a perfect movie. That’s not showy hyperbole or misplaced ego on my part, if you’ve seen the picture you know exactly what I mean – and it isn’t really even a subjective issue. There isn’t a misplaced scene, there isn’t an “off” line or performance, and there isn’t one moment that is too long or too short. Trouble in Paradise, is, as is widely accepted, a masterpiece.

More young filmmakers need to familiarize themselves with masterpieces such as Trouble in Paradise, as one gets the impression that the contemporary idea of masterpiece has become one of a blunt, unpleasant, clobbering, thematically obvious movie. And romantic comedy directors could certainly stand to brush up on their Lubitsch, as he routinely achieved in seconds what many directors are more than happy to spend minutes upon minutes of pointless exposition establishing. Five minutes into Trouble in Paradise (including that justifiably famous opening, which introduces Venice with a trash collector), we know that our leads, Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) are thieves and that they are perfect for one another – equally matched. A few minutes later we are given – through a brilliant montage of various servants – the thieves’ eventually mark, Madame Colet (Kay Francis), one of those infuriatingly wealthy people blissfully ignorant of the processes of income and outcome that come to dominate many of our adult lives.

Trouble in Paradise has that traditional Lubitsch wit (“From Geneva comes the news that the famous international crook, Gaston Monescu, robbed the peace conference yesterday. He took practically everything except the peace.”), and the performances are somehow screwball, suave, and sexy all at once, but the picture, more importantly, hides a point in broad daylight. It’s another class picture, with the thieves going to work for the Madame, with Gaston, of course, falling for her. Jokes are routinely made of the Madame’s entitlement and myopia (the crooks have to tell Colet she’s been robbed in order for her to notice) but the picture isn’t mean spirited, “points” aren’t scored. The resentment between the have and the have-nots is explored within the boundaries of a peerless romantic fantasy of worlds few of us know populated by people who look as few of us look.

The gentle satire deflates the pomposity, self-congratulation, faux modesty, and moneyed fascism that has come to dominate so many romantic comedies, because Trouble in Paradise is empathetic to real human need, and it lands its final, most significant, point at the end when Gaston realizes that he can’t go on with the Madame, that’s he’s best for that little pickpocket who lifted his prize in the opening minutes. He can’t be with the Madame because she practices a different dishonesty – born of what she sees as the proper backslapping. Gaston sees that the Madame, attractive and charming as she may be, is trapped. And it’s a testament to Lubitsch’s mastery that the reconciliation of Lily and Gaston is succinct, witty, and moving – all in about a minute. These two are meant to have their hands in one another’s pockets.

I know the idea of this month, which I’ve already violated a number of times, didn’t have anything to do with contemporary movies, but I think it would be useful to discuss Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air in the context of one of the best romantic comedies ever made, as it represents almost everything that is wrong in American movies today. What is the most dangerous trend in American movies right now? I think it’s a glamorization of self-pity, an encouragement of self-absorption. More and more frequently, characters, particularly in romantic comedies, are allowed to run roughshod over everyone else, without any kind of examination on the part of the actors or the filmmakers. It’s an extension of how we view movie stars themselves: the awful Duplicity, for example, which has a plot not that dissimilar from Trouble in Paradise, is about nothing other than Julia Roberts and Clive Owen reminding us that they are Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.

Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are said to be two of the most oft-filmed characters in cinema history, but Ebenezer Scrooge might take the lead if you count all of the hypocritical anti-money movies that Hollywood has made, particularly over the last twenty years. The pictures are so prevalent they’re almost unnoticeable – white noise; but they are grotesque and morally skewed. These pictures – The Family Man comes to mind, Sweet Home Alabama is another – tell us that money doesn’t matter; and that the pursuit of it will warp us and divide us from our families. Middle-class people, who are generally portrayed as tasteless, poorly dressed rubes, are contradictorily worshipped as pillars of basic values and little ambition. Rich people are telling us that it’s ok we aren’t rich, because we fools are much luckier to be living forgettable lives unburdened by progress or self-examination. We are free to eat our ribs, and sit on the couch with our wives we secretly loathe (because these movies secretly believe us to be cowards for not being artists) and stew in our blissful ignorance.

Up in the Air follows this model to the letter, and, while you’d think it to be so bad as to be too obvious to be dangerous, it seems that many people, smart people even, seem to be taken in by it. The Scrooge of the movie is, of course, George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a smoothie (what else?) who is always mobile – always in flight – literally up in the air traveling cross country to fire people for companies wishing to dissociate themselves from the down-scale. The picture is fashionably incompetently shot and staged in the Jason Reitman tradition (he also made Thank You for Smoking and Juno) and it would be a forgettable, typical piece of hypocrisy-Americana were it not for a series of dismissal scenes that are said to be played by real unemployed people. These moments are the sort of clumsy bid for “relevance” that’s typical to contemporary movies, and Reitman, a Hollywood baby (Ivan is his father), is even more amazingly ignorant of the basic psychology of loss than you’d suspect. The laid-off people, who, as presented, might as well be perturbed animals in a zoo, are either enraged or sad, and they voice the film’s intentions in neat, pathetic little bites that sound like no one who has ever been fired. I’ve been laid off a number of times in my life, and I’ve seen many others get laid off or fired, and the prevailing mood is not one of sadness or anger, though they are the subtext (non-existent in this picture); the surface is one of feigned cheer and “adjustment”, of mild sucking up, a grasping at straws to maintain connections or maybe even somehow (though you secretly know this to be absurd) salvage some bit of the position or pay. There are few things more demoralizing than having to beg for a job you intensely despise. Reitman is a rich man trying to make a romantic comedy with a current of economic anxiety (a good idea), and he makes the mistake that only a rich person can make: that losing your job builds character and that, most offensively, these people are luckier than the hunky, rich Clooney because the girl he just banged turns out to be married.

Up in the Air has drawn some admiration for the ending, and, yes, it’s less resolved than we are used to (and Reitman has been very forthcoming with praise for himself on this and other matters) from our romantic comedies, but “sad” and “open” are not automatically synonymous with “good” and “reflective of common sense”. Clooney is left at the end, after reaching out to the girl (Vera Farmiga), still rootless, still hunky, still gainfully employed. We’re supposed to gather that he didn’t recognize the charms of his typically boorish family soon enough. This is an insidious, disgusting self-entitlement: Clooney holds everyone at arm’s length for his entire life and we’re to take it as tragedy that he’s rebuffed once. Rejection, doubt, embarrassment, self-loathing, these are traditional ingredients in the romantic stew of our lives, and we continually swallow them for the brief moments that someone looks into our eyes just right, or kisses us just right, or touches our shoulder just right, or leans into us just right, we weather the pain out of hope. Clooney is meant to be taken as damned, as symptomatic of our culture, when he’s just a superstar who has actually undergone a humbling, human, experience; if anything, that is a happy ending, but the movie doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t know anything else either.

Clooney does nearly career best work however, his age is showing more, and he has an unforced gravity that Up in the Air doesn’t earn. Farmiga is sexy and slightly skewed in that fashion that is becoming distinctive of her, and she has a legitimately intimate, hot chemistry with her leading man. You hope these two will one day have the opportunity to work together in a real movie.

Posted in 1932, 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 6 Comments »

Rising Ti

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Horror director Ti West has basically flown this course: 1) releasing a debut picture made with resources so limited you cut it more than a little slack (The Roost), 2) following with a second, somewhat more experimental, picture showing ambition beyond the spilling of guts that still didn’t quite work (Trigger Man) and now 3) the release of two new pictures, both on DVD, that find a strange and promising new sensibility beginning to take form.

The House of the Devil is the more prominent of the two pictures; it was greeted with deservedly the best reviews of West’s career and clarified the design of Trigger Man: long pauses that mimic the pace of real life, amplifying the shock of the violations once they indiscriminately occur, a trick associated with 1970s horror that we also recently saw in The Descent and Wolf Creek among others – but Trigger Man is more committed, in a method that can also, more recently, be associated with “mumblecore”, to literally nothing happening. In Trigger Man, I thought West was primarily interested in inflating a serviceable short movie into a feature with the kind of portentous slowness that increases the odds of critical favor. The House of the Devil loiters quite a bit as well (my brother at one point said “I get it. She’s toodling around the house…”) but there’s a point this time: West gets us on his heroine’s wavelength. When Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) finds herself tied and gagged we don’t impassively look on as we would in the Teen Slaughter of the Week, we cringe for her. When something sudden and appalling happens to Sam’s friend Megan (Greta Gerwig in her first charming performance) we recoil.

This picture owes quite a bit to Donahue, she may not be an actress (can’t tell from here) but she has a tough frailty that wins you over. House of the Devil, purposefully similar to Rosemary’s Baby and a bunch of satanic cult movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, taps a convincing well of financial desperation: everything that happens in the picture springs from that fear that the short-of-money have of everything finally going under. There are haunting touches: canny use of ‘80s music that serves as brief catharsis for the frustrated Samantha, Tom Noonan’s oddly appealing befuddlement that you just know is misdirection but fall for anyway, AJ Bowen’s underplayed psycho, subliminal shots (on loan from The Exorcist) of a monster, a few elegant pans (particularly of the first time we see dead bodies), a pay phone inappropriately ringing, a spot-on retro score that’s touchingly sincere, and a sad, resigned dénouement.

Hesitations? It is stupid, and, once the entire plan has been revealed you wonder why the bad guys let Samantha, yes, toodle, in their house for the better part of an hour, but that’s a large part of the appeal of horror movies in general – we aren’t (hopefully) talking rational fears.

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever is an endlessly re-edited studio project that West disowned that now finds itself, a few years later, straight-to-DVD. It’s junk, but the surprising part is that it’s occasionally funny, occasionally subversive, very, very disgusting junk. The picture follows the flesh-eating virus from the first movie to a high school prom inhabited by unattractive 25 year-old teens that are parodies of the self-absorption that’s inherent to the nothing-counts-except-getting-laid genre. Every kid in this picture is a schmuck or a prick or both, and we watch as they trade or swallow fluids in just about every way a human could think to trade or swallow fluids. The virus is a social leveler – and it tells you something about the picture’s personality that the one guy who could do something about the whole mess turns and runs away.

Posted in 2009, Horror, Reviews | 1 Comment »

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 »

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009)

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

bad20lieutenant20port20of20call20new20orleans20movie20posterI would love to run the credits experiment on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: remove director Werner Herzog’s name, replace with an unknown, maybe, I don’t know, Jaume Collet-Serra (his Orphan, far superior, could’ve used a bit of BL’s critical benefit of the doubt), and recalibrate the press’ response. The picture might get a few positive reviews anyway, it still has enough in the vaguely relevant satire department to register with a number of paid writers: New Orleans post-Katrina, Nic Cage in a consciously wiggy Vampire’s Kiss, apologetic-for-past-paychecks performance, a bad script performed with so straight a face it must be satire, etc. The picture has its moments, but it’s a workshop, not a movie, its talented people playing an on-set game of Mystery Science Theatre 3000: you get the straight-faced version of the lame scene right along with a slightly-off riff on the same lame scene.

It’s nice to see Nic having fun again; I’m somewhat sympathetic to his run of bad action movies, they’re more personal than many acclaimed contemporary performances in that they are clearly the work of a talented man having a mid-life crisis. Cage has as much conviction in his work in Con Air or Knowing as he does in Vampire’s Kiss or Leaving Las Vegas; the poignancy is in everyone else’s knowledge that that conviction is misplaced. In Bad Lieutenant, Cage is in on the joke, and, while there are a few bits in amusingly bad taste – such as a new version of the road-side sexual assault from the Keitel/Ferrara picture – its mostly just predictable, stale, self-amusement. This new picture is a post-modern, hip illustration of Farber’s gimp string: Cage/Herzog will stage 15 uninterrupted minutes of cop procedural that wouldn’t pass muster on Law and Order, and then justify it with a pull of calculated weirdness: a seemingly five minute lizard point of view, a break dancing soul, or a Jennifer Coolidge as a drunk in her worst performance.

There are things to admire: the flooded prison opening, Shea Wigham in a Michael Shannon performance (the real Michael Shannon also appears) and Eva Mendes is funny in a brief, purposefully thankless role, I’ve long suspected that she’s a better actress than her curves or lips will allow. The picture also has a nice way of allowing the worst thing possible in any given scene to actually happen, it parodies that pretend-humanity that most cop-thrillers revel in to excuse their bloodshed. Cage’s cop does whatever he pleases whenever he pleases, flips loyalties whenever it conveniences him, and nothing ever comes from it. The characters are gleefully mercenary and racist, and the equal-opportunity racism (everyone hates everyone) strikes me as more honest and potentially hope-affirming than the labored democracy of pictures like Forrest Gump, Crash, and probably The Blind Side and Precious. As a gangster everyone knows killed someone no one really cares about, Xzibit potentially upstages everyone else in the picture – his disbelief that a white man, let along a cop, would bother to smoke his crack is the closest this Lieutenant comes to being human.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Crime, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Pot Luck

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

sherlock-holmes-movieAs the new badge on the right signifies (or will signify), Paul C. and the gang have invited me back to participate in the Muriels, their online celebration of the prior year of movies; a party that includes other friends and luminaries such as Craig Kennedy, Daniel Getahun, Dennis Cozzalio, and Jim Emerson. The Muriels are a delight and I look forward to participating each year, honored to jump into the mad dash of “catching up” that is familiar to any essentially unpaid blogger.

I generally don’t care for or approve of one or two sentence “quickie” reviews that glibly sum up half a dozen movies in a hundred or so words, but, as I have no intention of devoting several more thousand + word posts to ’09 (time to move on), I figured I’d make a hypocrite of myself. The movies of ‘09 will inspire one, maybe two, more proper longish posts (certainly on This is It, Bright Star and Crazy Heart) and we shall then move on to our current year, which has already offered Fish Tank and a number of promisingly gory revenge thrillers to get to.

One more thing before the bullets that you’ve probably already skipped down to: I find that the month-long sprint rarely significantly changes my reaction to the movie year, though there’s always one picture, one masterpiece worth ten forgettable or mindlessly over-praised movies. In 2008, that exception for me was Mike Leigh’s glorious Happy-Go-Lucky, which would’ve been sung to infinitely annoying hyperbole on BC had I gotten to it in time. Last year, the picture was Jane Campion’s beautiful, bracingly intelligent Bright Star, which I saw in time to celebrate on the Muriels ballot as well as ponder in my next post.

As always, I enjoy this more than I should admit. And here we go:

Sherlock Holmes: not bad, not really much of anything. It’s a post-modern variation of the Butch and Sundance routine: we watch two charming, good looking men flirt, only this time the homosexual subtext is intentional, toyed with. Not really intentional enough though, Sherlock, despite the stars (Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) and the director (Guy Ritchie) and the big sets and dirtier-than-usual period London detail, is primarily just the same-o. A good idea – linking Sherlock’s street brawling to his feats of deduction – goes nowhere, and the picture has a weird similarity in plot (cults, is-or-isn’t-he-for-real magician) to the not usually well-liked Spielberg production Young Sherlock Holmes.

A Perfect Getaway: fits right in with writer-director David Twohy’s series of sturdy, better than you expect, still somewhat unremarkable productions (Pitch Black, Below). This is another endangered tourists-somewhere-they-shouldn’t-be picture, though it has the nice novelty (and unrealized potential black joke) of featuring Americans in a strange land still stalked by Americans. The further you go, the more it’s the same. There’s a good twist here, something that points to a more interesting movie: a dirtier/messier prodding of the resentments between white-collar and blue-collar men. As the nerd with hot wife, Steve Zahn does his best work; he brings to the surface the wiry discontentment that has always given him potential. As the hunk with hot girlfriend and mad survival skills, the usually underrated Timothy Olyphant is just as good: coiled passive-aggressive, bitter. These performances are wasted though, A Perfect Getaway could’ve been a nasty pulp cover of A Knife in the Water, but the last fifteen minutes are terribly rote, leaving it a well-made time killer I still enjoyed.

Food, Inc.: I’ve read Fast Food Nation and parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I was familiar with most of the concerns of Food, Inc. going in. The picture offers two surprises: a. that visual evidence, particularly when it concerns the corn paste and shit-bathed meat that comprises the majority of most American’s diets, is far more persuasive than the written; and, b. the calm, focused, completely condescension-free tone. Food, Inc. could’ve been another exclusionary picture designed for foodies to congratulate themselves, but it instead looks you square in the eye and asks you to understand. This picture is designed to be understood by the masses, designed to affect real, measurable coherent change. That it most likely won’t only contributes to its poignancy. (I say this as someone who drinks enough diet soda per month to fill several swimming pools.)

The Cove: an ideal double-bill with last year’s Man on Wire, both are slick and entertaining at the expense of anything else. The Cove is a now familiar breed of heist documentary where, in this case, we follow several activists’ attempts to end and expose a Japanese island’s corrupt dolphin fishing expeditions. It packs a wallop in a pure emotional sense disconnected from reason or fact – the death of a dolphin, which the camera lingers on in a moment that could be called exploitive (it’s the equivalent of a prosecutor showing you messy murder photos whether they apply or not), is heart-wrenching. The remorse of Richard O’Barry, the lead protestor who feels personal responsibility for having corralled dolphins for the TV-show Flipper, is commanding. But the picture offers no real proof of its two significant points: 1. that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are a species of higher consciousness than previously believed; and 2. that we shouldn’t eat them because they are poisonous to eat and will deform and kill us. Point 2 is landed somewhat more convincingly than Point 1 which, going on this movie, is based on about as much hard fact as John Carpenter’s Starman. As Craig and others have also written, The Cove, beneath the smoke and mirrors, is basically arguing that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are cute.

Away We Go: Director Sam Mendes’ acclaim springs from two wells: 1. the belief that “art” must be laborious, obvious and unpleasant, and 2. that anything anti-American is profound. The anti-American thing particularly serves Mendes, who, as a Brit, serves us picture after picture of pretend peaks under the consumerist shell at the resentment and hypocrisy underneath. Of his pictures – American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road (a waste of a brilliant novel), and now Away We Go – I can only (kinda) recommend Perdition, which is deadly slow and apologetic of its B-movie tropes, but is at least generally well-acted. Think of it this way: if an American filmmaker were as obsessed with another country, and just as routinely stereotyped and just plain-out missed its culture, would they be celebrated?

I digress: Away We Go is potentially Mendes’ worst picture; written by the super-glib Dave Eggers and wife, it lacks even Mendes’ surface talents of mise en scene, as he is trying to ape an American indie style of pointedly little polish for the sake of integrity. But the Mendes method pushes through: this is polished non-polish, which is to say that Away We Go has the embarrassing hip-courting fashionably ugly look of an elderly man wearing tight, intentionally faded torn jeans. The performances, excluding Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels and Jim Gaffigan, are ridiculously over-the-top and self-congratulatory (Allison Janney, whom I normally like, is particularly dreadful): this is another group of rich performers reveling in their superiority of the middle class, who are, once again, generally characterized as confused cowards with little or no variation. One of the worst of ’09.

For an idea of what Mendes always misses, check out Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s artful, funny, occasionally devastating Tokyo Sonata, which plays as a sort of Japanese answer to Laurent Cantet’s also fabulous Time Out. Which means that Sonata is another financial anxiety picture, and Kurosawa keeps the tension simmering by omitting the wish-fulfilling catharsis that an American Beauty or Fight Club revels in: the lead character loses his job, and we cut away before we’re expressively informed of either the firing or the lead’s reaction. A boy yearns for piano lessons, misuses money to purchase them, and we cut away before we can hear him play, in a dispute between father and son, we see the mother frozen in the background – literally stunned – calculating the move that will keep her family from completely disintegrating. We don’t need the fireworks; as the father, Teruyuki Kagawa has this wonderfully expressive corkscrew face that tells us everything: he’s (unintentionally) splintering his family to maintain some desperate absurd understandable sense of pride in the face of being a Director-of-something-or-another-turned-janitor. The picture takes a risky, interesting on paper, left turn into thriller territory at the end that it doesn’t quite pull off, but Tokyo Sonata is mostly amazing, especially because everyone’s pain is treated with respect, and equally.

Lorna’s Silence, the latest from the internationally adored Belgium siblings The Dardennes, isn’t on the level of their Son or Child, but those pictures manage the awesome feat of actually being as good as everyone claims. At their best, The Dardennes manage a challenging, original empathy without resorting to showy hand-standing to ensure we get the universality of their movies. Lorna’s Silence, essentially a thriller with their delicate, minute touch, doesn’t walk as fine a line. The Dardennes lose perspective on their Lorna, we’re invited to sympathize with a fairly tedious creature who (convincingly) shim-shams back and forth, trying to hold on to a bit of morality in a scam that hinges on at least one murder. The performances are, as usual with the Dardennes, wonderful; and there is a great scene between Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) and her prospective mark (Jérémie Renier), a heroine addict, who she sleeps with to keep from relapsing. That moment has the surprise of The Son and The Child. The rest is a well-staged delay of the inevitable, and it is somewhat sentimental.

Posted in 2009, Action, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Fractured, Skewed, Ironic, Moronic Morality

Friday, January 29th, 2010

lovely_bones_poster2Morality in movies is more than occasionally evaded by writers and paying audiences (particularly younger audiences) for fear of seeming out of date and prudish – but it is important, as so many people, whether they care to admit it or not, get their appearances and many behaviors and views from movies and the rapidly all consuming monster known as mass-media in general. But, before, we go further; let’s assure that we’re all on the same page. I don’t by reflex equate bloodshed with immorality or sex of the un-missionary sort with immorality or questionable empathies with immorality. Immorality in the movies is usually something less obvious and more insidious, a devotion to cliché and plot so intense it dwarves basic human common sense. Sex and the City, the TV show, was an occasionally amusing occasionally tedious romantic comedy about money/status’ confusion of gender roles – it kept its heroines in perspective without judging them. Sex and the City, the movie, on the other hand, was a bloated, pandering catastrophe in which we’re invited to sympathize with the star’s money-negotiation of her marriage as somehow symbolic of a deeper, true affection. Like many romantic comedies, the Sex movie was immoral – distorting and perverting need in the mindless pursuit of the usual plot. It is one of the worst American movies I’ve seen in years.

The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the bestselling Alice Sebold novel, has an even worse thoughtless stench. The book was a metaphor for disconnection – a young girl divorced from her own body following a brutal attack. Dead, the young girl watches as her family splinters and recovers, from a neverland of her own creation, one that she can not leave until she’s made peace. Jackson’s movie, nearly incoherent if you haven’t read the book, concerns a chase for a bloated serial killer by SNL-style caricatures (most of the performances are embarrassing); it is also, predictably, more concerned with a show-off in-between fantasy world than a family dimension of any conviction. Jackson has a number of neat effects (particularly a giant armada of ships-in-a-bottle) that have nothing to do with anything.

The Lovely Bones is more than a bad movie though; Sebold has direct experience with some of her book’s harshest elements, you feel her walking a tight-rope over a landmine. Jackson sees the rape and murder of a young girl as a kiddie-empowerment fantasy – the tragedy freeing the girl to tralalala amongst the clouds while the family eventually heals by solving the murder (in the movie inexplicably) and having a bubble fight with boozy Susan Sarandon as the grandma.

Before we leave this picture, I would like to address a get-out-of-jail card that a few Lovely Bones admirers are using to excuse its problems: yes, I’ve read the book. And, no, I’m not one of those ninnies who go to the movies for books on tape. The Lovely Bones is, if anything, worse if you haven’t read it. Exposure to the book has little effect on a deal-breaking problem: Jackson is a now privileged wiz-kid who, here, treats appalling violation as a thrill ride joke. Exposure to the book has little effect on the fact that no scene has been thought out in any way other than the visual (one example, and there are dozens, has bad guys rolling a safe across the distance of a football field in the mud to drop it in a sinkhole, it would cheat Jackson of a montage if they drove directly to the sinkhole). The Lovely Bones is the worst movie by a talented director in years, it’s gross.

There are few things less shocking than deliberate, desperate, calculating provocation; and, while Jackson’s picture accidentally infuriated me, Michael Haneke’s most recent testament to inhumanity, The White Ribbon, just bored me. Haneke will never change his or your mind, you either got on board with him a few decades ago and thrill to each new reveling of purposefully kinda-banal cruelty, or you checked a couple out, discovered you got it, and moved on.

I will give Haneke this: The White Ribbon is consistent and not as hypocritical as usual. Funny Games (both versions) decried movie violence as excuse to deliver movie violence. White Ribbon, about a small early 1900s German village in turmoil over a series of random nasty pranks, leaves everything off-screen. The picture, shot in color but de-saturated to give it a more ghostly black and white, has an overbearing, withheld, impotent severity that is at once effectively claustrophobic and intensely stupid. Haneke’s technique is so exactly what middle-class filmgoers claim to hate and fear about “art movies” that you wonder if a larger subversion is actually afoot.

But that’s reaching; the picture is another Haneke art-genre con job (he even links it to the assassination of the Archduke of Austria at the end in a laughable stretch for broader relevance). A preacher ties his son up for masturbating; a doctor screws his daughter and (in the strongest scene) tells his mistress that she disgusts him. Crops are destroyed; a teacher falls in love only to have that love not-quite-resolved so that the picture can maintain its loaded, chic unpleasantness. The children are (probably) carrying out the crimes, which eventually include a maybe accidental, maybe not, murder as a rebellion against a society of repression and…etc, etc, etc. Nothing has any effect, or real point, because nothing is at stake. Haneke’s cynicism undercuts his point: the pranks have no effect on the village, and they reveal nothing, as everything is already disgusting, and everyone already knows it. It’s all super-obvious surface symbolism already. The White Ribbon, like other Haneke pictures, doesn’t earn its point-of-view: it hates and resents the basic human nature that it doesn’t have the skill, or interest, to properly portray – everyone in the picture is a mannequin of reserved, barely checked savagery without any surprise or variance.

There’s an old parlor game that critics play (and all of the masters have practiced it) in which you denounce big, bloated obvious studio and prestige pictures and pick at hidden meanings in small movies that most people have written off as junk. My brother has accused me of this sport more than once – he insists that I engage in a hip “other” point of view. But bloated studio or prestige pictures (Lovely Bones is the former, White Ribbon the latter) are consistently stupid, lifeless, unsurprising, and demoralizing, they reaffirm the snob notion that movies are a secondary art. Gamer is, indeed, junk, but it’s a junk that prods a couple of interesting nerves partially on purpose and partially by accident. And it is better morally adjusted than Lovely Bones or White Ribbon, or An Education for that matter.

Gamer, written and directed by a team credited as Neveldine/Taylor (Crank, Crank 2) is a couple of promising ideas obscured by a really dumb one. The dumb idea – another future Running Man/Most Dangerous Game knockoff – permits people to ignore everything else. Neveldine/Taylor have grown from tedious to promising: Crank 2 was a remake of Crank that began to tap into a satire of current go-go momentum-for-momentum’s sake force and Gamer covers similar territory: points are scored on mindless techno homogenization/dehumanization. That’s nothing too original, but N/T are refining their fragmented action – which essentially plays as a nightmare version of the aesthetic of a particularly garish Nike commercial or music video, with master shots hidden amongst the noise and quick cuts to give you visual context. Much of the bloodshed in Gamer – which involves soldiers (on death row, of course, a convenient out that needs to be discarded) being controlled by video gamers in combat – has a pulse without compromising a dry sarcasm.

There are two games in Gamer that allow people to control other real people in a heightened setting. Slayers, the soldier combat thing that plays as a modernized, less self-righteous version of the stuff in Gladiator, and Society, which is Sims with real people and the stereotypically druggy-sleazy id/mood familiar to viewers of Crank. Slayers is well staged but the same-old, while Society has potential, you wish that was the full movie. There’s a moment in Gamer that’s chilling: of the tortured chiseled hunk champion of Slayers (Gerard Butler, who doesn’t deserve to be on death row, of course) breaking into Society and finding his wife controlled by a (ridiculously) obese greaseball from somewhere in the internet fairy-world. Butler’s increasing desperation as the grease ball mindlessly parrots the wife’s affection is the stuff of a major contemporary horror picture.

Another scene that conceptually flirts with brilliance: the moment the worlds of Society and Slayers collide as we know they must: with gory shoot outs puncturing (and revealing) the sexual violence of this virtual Island of the Lost Toys, with neon blood splattering in a rave, as others dance on in their self-enclosed bubbles of light. A week later, I can recall these and a few other bits in Gamer with clarity, while the horrors of White Ribbon fade as a session of church I wished I’d skipped.

Posted in 2009, Action, Drama, Fantasy, Reviews | 1 Comment »

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

lyingThe Invention of Lying read beautifully on the page, an appealingly modest tribute to the bullshit and delusion we need to get through each casual defeat; on the screen, however, the picture is an indifferent botch. Ricky Gervais’ comedy always threatens to tumble into self-absorption, self-loathing, and condescending faux-modesty, but his timing, and ironic compassion (and the fact that he’s pretty damn funny) usually redeem it. The Invention of Lying, which Gervais co-wrote and co-directed in addition to headlining, is a tribute though, a big gimmick designed to tell that world that it really loves Ricky beneath his portly frame and snub nose, both of which are repeated punchlines. Invention of Lying is basically the comedian’s Barbara Streisand movie.

The premise, that no lying, humoring, fiction, or pretense of any form exist, is neat but quickly becomes tedious and flawed as the “truth” of this picture is a predictable stand-up comic’s truth: that everyone will always say the worst thing imaginable (as bad as PG-13 will allow that is). The Invention of Lying can be broken down into two or three alternating scenes: a good looking person dwarfs Ricky, a bad looking person tells Ricky he wants to die, two good looking people revel in their pleasure of being good looking. The truth is that Gervais clearly agrees that bad looking people are always miserable and less socially adept than good looking people, and he is celebrating himself as having crossed over into the Promised Land with his fame and considerable talent. The party is accented with a number of celebrity cameos and guest performances that have little to do with the picture: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Tina Fey, Rob Lowe, etc. (A few of these bits are vivid – Hoffman gives a fuller impression of pain in ten seconds than Gervais does in 100 minutes, and Jonah Hill goes farther with his melancholia than you’d expect.)

It has a few nice little quips, but the cast is so (touchingly) in awe of Gervais that nothing is at stake; and nothing means much of anything. The picture isn’t badly directed, it isn’t directed at all – ugly, no pace, no shape, no rhythm. The Invention of Lying would be a forgettable vanity project if it didn’t turn into an unoriginal religion parody in its last third. As an agnostic, I’m sympathetic to the picture’s aim, but Gervais doesn’t quite land the one scene that tries to empathize with our need for pretend governing beliefs (as an illusion of structure in the midst of death); instead its just hip distance. For Gervais in movies, see the vastly superior, sadly underrated Ghost Town.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | No Comments »

Broken Embraces (2009)

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

broken1The pretend democratizing of superstars (twitters, blogs, Facebook, what-have-you) has only rubbed the gulf in privilege between the wealthy/famous and the rest of us in our faces. There’s condescension in so many superstars’ insistence in being “every day” or “average” – it only further establishes how much many of them have forgotten what true everyday (meaning the middle class) is; or are merely saying whatever is convenient to appear appropriately modest. This hypocrisy tarnishes the illusion of movies, diminishing the pleasure of so many major superstar movies, these stars, to further waterproof their ego, must revel in their normality and expose their banality – perverting our rights to have illusions about them. In many superstar pictures these days (the dreadful Duplicity comes to mind) you can’t help but think of the deals and the Us Magazine covers, and what Owen’s and Roberts’ agents must have had to haggle over to get everyone in the same room. There’s no magic in many of these pictures, only calculation – and self-congratulation. There’s always been calculation, of course, but many of the old stars were at least polite enough to admit, or allow us to believe, that they were gods.

It’s sometimes difficult to explain why just pretty good movies appeal to us so, but this over-publicized cultural rot at least partially explains the immense relief of the recent Penélope Cruz/Pedro Almodóvar collaborations – Volver and now Broken Embraces (there are others, but these most embody my point). In Volver, Almodóvar seemed to be consciously taking Cruz back from the mediocre American pictures that dwarfed her gentle frame, and that made her appear to be another not-quite-fed international starlet with problems speaking English. For Volver, Almodóvar gave Cruz a fake butt, not just as a stunt, but to curve her out, plump her up, bring her closer to the ground as his idealized Earth mother. Almodóvar feasted on Cruz’s curves but not in a distastefully leering way. Pedro Almodóvar – once the flamboyant bad boy with several NC-17s under his belt – has gone relatively straight, but not out of a conscious concession to anything – his pictures have evolved into older man’s movies, less intense, more resigned, more amused, but – in the spirit of many older men – they appreciate the flesh that youth take for granted.

I liked Volver, didn’t love it, you do miss a bit of Almodóvar’s friction, energy and wild man id/glee, as he has probably grown too comfortable to produce really amazing emotionally combustible movies (Broken Embraces lacks the force and originality of De Palma’s in some ways similar Femme Fatale). Great for Almodóvar; it suggests an inner peace and confidence, still, good for us, only in a different way. Broken Embraces is another Almodóvar tribute to Cruz, and this one, mostly unlike Volver, has been fashioned with a number of the director’s past preoccupations in mind: it’s a kinda thriller (Almodóvar’s Hitchcock/ De Palma influences have a way of being cancelled out by his women’s picture tendencies) with crippled artists at the mercy of the divide between art and life. The picture is a reflexive wall of movies and movies-within-movies.

I won’t bother with the narrative, it doesn’t really matter; it’s a smooth, leisurely hodge-podge of love triangles and the usual Vertigo/1950s noir references that have become obligatory in movie-or-life reality tugs-of-war. Instead, I would like to recall to you three moments where the Almodóvar/Cruz mojo particularly crystallizes.

The first is the first proper scene, possibly the best in the movie, in which our hero, currently called Harry Caine (he will, of course, have another identity as well), a writer in his 50s, now blind, asks a beautiful young woman to read to him. They’ve clearly just met, and the young woman reads to Harry items that will come to inform the plot later on. The beautiful woman reads to Harry and eventually asks him what else he wants to hear. He tells her that he wants to know about her – her eyes, her hair, her clothes, her breasts – and we see the woman in a series of intense close ups that suggests greatness of feeling and desire, and we see the woman respond to Harry, a crisp, well-maintained man for his age, as he experiences her breasts with his hands which leads to an afternoon on the couch. Almodóvar – unlike mostly asexual American movies – allows the characters to enjoy touching one another (a scene in his Live Flesh of a character hungrily going down on his wife has never left me) – we can feel the pores in the gorgeous woman’s skin as Harry takes her in. This scene has little to do with the plot, and everything to do with the story, which basically boils down to an old but necessarily oft-repeated moral: drink your milk while you can.

The second scene, partially featured in the trailer, has Cruz shooting a movie for another incarnation of Harry Caine, posing in front of a dressing room mirror in a series of wigs that are cheekily, affectionately meant to conjure icons of the past, especially Audrey Hepburn. This is cute and gives Cruz a moment of play amongst her scenes of anguish as she squirms between two dominating men throughout the picture, and also cements Almodóvar’s intensity of feeling for his star: he’s, without irony, promoting Cruz to the pantheon. (It’s a less obsessive Lynch trick, though Lynch always mixes a little post-modernism in.) This business could be silly or laughable, but Cruz, who gives a memorable playful/intense martyr performance, rises to the occasion – she fills Audrey’s shoes and creates an endearingly awkward siren of her own. (The awkwardness lets her be human, but doesn’t ever pretend that she’s anything less than a glorious movie fantasy.)

The third scene, a few images, has a mourning Harry (underplayed, poignantly , by Lluís Homar) reaching at a screen he can’t see that projects the last images of a loved one’s life – the images slowed down in movie/memory reverie. I’ve read a few complaints that this moment, the most memorable image in the picture, is a steal from a Godard picture that I haven’t seen. No matter, Almodóvar builds to it beautifully and it completes his Embrace – a poem to the quiet, taken-for-granted salvation of the pretend.

Posted in 2009, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Impersonators

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

welles-3Me and Orson Welles lacks that snide undertone that can be found in even some of Richard Linklater’s best movies, it’s one of his most pleasurable pictures: a criss-crossing of two well-established numbers, the “putting on a show” and the “day a gifted boy tastes real-life for the first time”. Its formula, but formula gives Linklater a chart, a destination, and room to give each moment that contained, fully-felt, none-too-rushed quality that he developed in his earlier pictures. The script, by Vincent and Holly Palmo, helps too: the requisite coming of age moments are light and charming and none-too-obtrusive, giving the brilliant Christian McKay (as Welles) room to shoot sparks that we generally find in more original movies.

Orson Welles, professional genius and legend, is one of those roles that can straight-jacket performers, its too tempting to retrospectively fawn. (I enjoyed Liev Schreiber’s attempt even if I never for one moment thought of him as Orson Welles.) McKay manages something destined to be taken somewhat for granted: he gives an eerily precise impersonation that’s an actual performance. This Orson, this madly talented young man feasting on idolatry and flesh and everything else, is also a full, contradictory human haunted and driven by not-quite-tangibles that would eventually contribute to his professional undoing (as opposed to most of us, who’re undone quietly). Inside Me and Orson Welles, this formula picture, is one of the least sentimental portraits of a legend I’ve seen that also happens to be entirely without judgment. Linklater’s pacing and McKay’s flamboyancy and wit (it’s meta-flamboyancy – flamboyancy as a comment on the smoke and mirrors behind said flamboyancy) give this Welles flesh and blood. There are two or three special moments, particularly Welles with his Mark Antony (Ben Chaplin, also better than ever) before their first show, a sketch of a director as nurse hen – his ego giving him the strength of an understanding human being even if it’s only just a means to an end.

Julia, written and directed by Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels), is one of those occasional shock waves that rewards dozens of underwhelming movies, and, for sure, the advertising promises another fashionably drab movie about the miseries of the grotesque working class. Julia (Tilda Swinton) is a fall-down drunk, barely employed, who gets involved in a kidnapping scheme that spirals wildly out of control, with episodes that play like a drunk’s most paranoid fears of retribution. The charms of Swinton’s unconventionally sexy intangible ice bird routine are generally lost on me, but she’s a revelation here: paunchy, paler than ever, make-up smeared in believably unflattering morning-after embarrassments, Swinton is direct, subtle, pared down, and funny in a desperate, sideways way that strikes me as far truer than Iñárritu’s condescending banalities. Swinton shows us notes other than “miserable”, “self-absorbed”, and “poor”; her Julia is smarter beyond even her knowledge (her vocabulary tips us off to that) and the originality of the picture is that her (unforgivable) indiscretions free her to become the person that everyone preaches to her to become. Julia is the most twisted redemption fable since Head On.

Julia (like Head On) is powerful because it, without pulling thematic strings, puts us on the same emotional plane as people we would normally deeply loathe. We accept Julia’s violations as distortion of something that’s undeniably universally human. Oscar bait pretends to do this all the time, but Julia lacks convenient filters of morality. When Julia runs over an innocent person and grabs a child and tosses him in the trunk, we cringe and flinch partially out of disapproval and partially because we want her to get away with it – we, and this confliction will bother people, respect her self-awareness and utility for survival. The picture has two amazing moments: a bonding between Julia and the child that has a disquietingly sexual undertone (Swinton has never been as beautiful), and a finale, a moment of enlightenment, of cathartic, ironic power. Swinton isn’t phoning prestige in here, she means it, and she is clearly one of our major actresses.

Every Little Step isn’t terribly revealing in a nut/bolts of production sense, but it reaffirms something folks (including me) take far too much for granted: the courage and commitment of even marginal performers we never meet or know, or of those who never even acquire the priviledge of calling themselves “performer”. I’m writing this piece comfortably from a little coffee/wine cove with beautiful women and sweet smells and tastes. The stars of Every Little Step are stretching and starving and toning and audtioning and practicing, practicing, practicing, for a shot at the latest production of A Chorus Line. The parallel of the subject matter of the show and its real-life aspiring performers is highlighted with audio recordings of creator Michael Bennett colloborating with tortured people who would inspire the characters the current actors are auditioning to become. The picture is minor but moving and human.

Posted in 2009, Documentary, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

More Fun and Money: The Hangover, Next Day Air (2009)

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

the-hangoverTodd Phillips’ movies – including Road Trip and Old School – are smug, unoriginal and tone deaf (he’s particularly awkward with profanity) but they at least used to get in and get out. Phillips’ indifference to visuals, a typical point-and-shoot mainstream comedy style that eschews any possibility for the cinematic, kept Road Trip and Old School quick and scrappy; they aren’t any good, and even their fans wouldn’t try to convince you otherwise (the admirers will give you a variation of that most half-hearted and irritating of cop-outs “I just like to have fun at the movies”, it baffles them that some of us might find good movies fun), but his pictures cannily flip their apathy into self-awareness, which is how most schlock gets by these days anyway (even Phillips’ now traditional cameo appearance contributes to his pictures’ “ah, fuck it” flippancy). Phillips has made several movies now though, and he’s acquired the basic surface mechanics of filmmaking: The Hangover, visually, is his surest and most confident movie, and that confidence chokes the life right out of it, it’s just another big comedy, the (not bad) trailer literally giving you the entire picture in two minutes.

In The Hangover, Hunk (Bradley Cooper), Dweeb (Ed Helms) and Fat Loser (Zach Galifianakis) misplace their friend, Mild-Mannered Audience Surrogate (Justin Bartha) after a night of partying and drugging in Vegas to celebrate Surrogate’s impending marriage to Concerned Gorgeous Object (Helms having already nabbed Improbably Attractive Castrating Shrew). The fellas wake up remembering nothing, and scramble about the city in a series of misadventures to put everything back together again. There’s a nugget of a great idea here: a comedy concerned with, for once, the ramifications of all the hedonistic destruction that most party movies mindlessly celebrate, but Phillips can’t get anything to come together, his pace sags, and every scene feels disconnected from every other – the movie is literally pointless – and the happy ending would be a cheat if you hadn’t seen coming as you initially sat down.

Mike Epps has a bit role as a drug dealer in The Hangover, and he delivers exactly the jokes you expect, in exactly the way you’ve seen him in a dozen movies you’ve already forgotten. But Epps’ drug dealer, and everyone around him, is allowed more in Next Day Air, director Benny Boom’s forceful, sleek and supremely enjoyable black comedy. The situation is typical: a variety of competing parties (most famously including Epps, Mos Def, and Donald Faison) get roped into, either by greed or accident, a misunderstanding of escalating violence, a cross-fired search for lost and stolen drugs. I’ve heard Next Day Air compared (unfavorably) to the Friday series, but that’s only because both feature Epps and predominately black casts. Next Day Air, in its intricately revealing dialogue and refreshing lack of fat or pretense, more closely resembles a good Elmore Leonard novel. It’s this year’s Stuck – a ridiculously overlooked genre movie more alive than most of the over-hyped crap we’re told by the Golden Globes to see.

Like good Leonard, Next Day Air establishes a convincing network of regular and periphery characters – it establishes a community – and Blair Cobbs’ script subtly and swiftly keys you into the various conflicting and contrasting loyalties and allegiances. The humor springs from a core idea that could also be taken from Leonard: that the characters are at their most ironically beautiful, their most pure, their most alive, at the height of their animal entitlement and avarice. The cast, including a number of people that I believe I’m seeing for the first time, are uniformly outstanding, particularly Yasmin Deliz (her timing is so crack she transcends being cast as “the sassy girl”) and Omari Hardwick as the amusingly named, misleadingly cunning Shavoo.

The picture gets you in on its one-day-in-the-life, one-thing-after-another brainwave; so much so that the climax is authentically jarring, especially as it corkscrews into a somewhat happy ending. The most interesting thing going on in Next Day Air though is that the condescending faux-morality of most money chase movies is pointedly missing (its even satirized) and replaced by the more practical/vicious survival instincts of those in need (or at least in need of more); and Boom’s staging is, particularly for a first picture, unusually spry, spare and energetic; that it somehow manages to be all those things at once is testament to the picture’s appeal. This is also, wouldn’t you know it, fun. The recklessness of The Hangover is a put-on while the recklessness of Next Day Air is human.

Posted in 2009, Action, Comedy, Reviews | 1 Comment »

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