Archive for the ‘2010’ Category

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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, boring 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 will work with some buddies over a few PBRs, but it’s mostly shit in a vacuum that offers the condescension of rich people playing poor.

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.

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

Beautifully Alone

Saturday, September 4th, 2010

The George Clooney project has primarily been an attempt to resurrect the angry, ambitious films of the 1970s, a seemingly magic time when the divide between “pop” and “art” movies was less tangible. Clooney has been partially successful: he only works with the most respected filmmakers (or the occasional promising newcomer), and the resulting pictures are generally well-intentioned and well-crafted, usually some of the best generally mainstream entertainments of whichever year they are released. I say partially successful because the films don’t entirely reside in “right now”, their 1970s nostalgia limits their timeliness and their personality: the movies tend to be more about “weren’t the 1970s movies awesome!” than the climate of today. This is an issue with quite a few of our noteworthy American filmmakers (a notable exception are The Coens, and they began as movie-movie jokers too.)

But the 1970s tunnel vision of our name directors is a hash for another day. I bring it up at all because Clooney’s newest vehicle, The American, exists for the same reasons, and Clooney, to his credit, has basically admitted as much in interviews. The American is a familiar fusion of high art and low genre, a formula art-genre picture. I usually use that term – “art-genre” – dismissively, because I normally sense that the creators of these sorts of pictures are deluding themselves: serving formula disguised as an instantly minted masterpiece. But I don’t get that vibe from The American, I think it knows exactly what it is.

The American is another picture about a lonely assassin rapidly approaching a point in his life that could be described as being over the hill. The assassin, of course, is seen in a botched or troubled situation in the beginning, and this, of course, prompts him to enter into a precarious scenario that is meant to be his last job. The assassin, usually, finds himself comforted by an impossibly beautiful woman, which is more believable than usual because the killer is, himself, either impossibly handsome or impossibly charismatic and debonair, with money, of course, being a non-issue. The American is unavoidably in the school of Le Samourai, and a number of other fatalistic existential noirs where everything is beautifully hopeless.

Clooney, at his most Clooney-ish (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven) is a suave, glamorous bad-boy prankster who gives performances that exude more than a bit of conscious self-satire (which is a roundabout method of self-congratulation). Clooney has been compared to Cary Grant a number of times, but his strategy is more reminiscent of Warren Beatty in that the text of his “star” performances seems to be “yeah, I know I’m a lucky sonofabitch, and I know you love me anyway”. Like Beatty, Clooney likes to occasionally toy with that, to turn everything down to a simmering suggestion where the tampering down of his persona is meant to evoke something more timeless and existential. The American is one of those roles in the tradition of Clooney’s underrated performance in Solaris. Clooney doesn’t do much here that you haven’t seen before, but he’s more confidently open and matter of fact. There’s a great bit, one of Clooney’s career best, when he realizes that his Gorgeous Opportunity for Personal Salvation and Self-Actualization (Violante Placido), a prostitute he’s been seeing as a client, is asking him out for real. Clooney’s half-step, his disbelieving half-swallow, is worth seeing the picture for alone.

The movie, directed by Anton Corbijn (Control), also mercifully spares us most of the clutter inherent in the assassin-on-the-run scenario. The American is about soaking in the Italian countryside and the bodies of the young women; it is also about the minute details of putting a weapon together (which is a refreshing deviation from cliché: Clooney’s last job is one of construction, not on-the-site execution). I have read a few comparisons to Antonioni, but Corbijn isn’t that committed to his character’s state of mind at the expense of plot. Antonioni was a master of an atmosphere that told the real story at hand; Corbijn is very assured with wonderfully (and occasionally extremely) composed shots that let us feel our way around familiar territory.

This picture uses – in the tradition of these lonely hunter movies – gorgeous people, gorgeous scenery, gorgeous clothes, and movie situations as stand-ins for universal loneliness and confusion. Most of us feel the American’s detachment, his depression, his alienation, at least some of the time. This genre blows those feelings up into a vehicle that gives us the ideal embodiment of those frustrations: these troubled, seemingly unearthly, people act out a more exciting version of our tedium and uncertainty. Movie killers aren’t merely bored, they’re trapped in an existence that invites words such as “ennui”; words that sound more than a tad overblown when applied to a lonely Friday of drinking beer and watching cartoons and maybe, after a number of those beers, calling a hook-up you barely knew anyway. Corbijn and Clooney have made a strangely touching movie out of spare parts.

Posted in 2010, Crime, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Let the Fish Hit the Fan

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

Piranha is a fairly enjoyable exercise in titties-n-fish that could have been better. It’s another movie that promises moral anarchy only to back-peddle and hedge its bets. And why? The people who spend their money on something called Piranha want their monsters and their body shots and their drunken fondling and their wish-fulfillment and their contrived survival-of-the-fittest scenarios delivered hard and fast and mostly without anything that could be accused of being tactful or tasteful. The picture miscalculates early on. Early bits establish that a rowdy spring break is about to commence at a lake in an otherwise sleepy Arizona community; with a Girls-Gone-Wild wannabe sleaze-maestro (Jerry O’Connell) and his game, well-endowed starlets (Kelly Brook, Riley Steele) descending upon it to make the most of the kind of eager, drunken debauchery that has presumably already made them a little bit of coin. (Not a lot though, this strikes us as a start-up operation.) O’Connell hires a horny local teen – who has already traded suggestive looks with Brook – to take them to a remote part of the lake where they can shoot the girls, well, going wild. Why would a Girls-Gone-Wild guy pay someone to take him away from the action? away from the picture’s raison d’être?

Probably because a mass piranha sex and bloodbath would be too much for the picture’s budget. The best jokes are saved for the last twenty minutes, and they are admittedly pretty impressive. The director, Alexandre Aja, of High Tension and the surprisingly intense remake of The Hills Have Eyes, has a blunt, merciless way of staging violence that marks him as some sort of talent; though he’s probably a talent without any sort of rudder such as reasoning or point of view, he appears to be a strictly B-movie man in a humorlessly nihilistic vein that seems to have become a specialty of French horror filmmakers. Aja brutally punished his heroines in High Tension, he brutally punished the tourists in Hills, and now he brutally punishes the young’uns here for having the gall to drink and drug and fuck. Joe Dante, of the original (and, truthfully, overrated) Piranha, was lighter and cheekier, and he respected his characters enough not to play favorites: the innocents bought it just as regularly as the guilty. There’s a moment in this Piranha where Aja could have played a similar trick: with the party girls and the little tykes shimmying a robe above piranha invested waters, but this scenario plays out just as you would probably guess. The inexplicably derided Eli Roth, who cameos here, managed more interesting, atmospheric duels of sex and guilt in his Hostel movies, and his pictures, at certain moments, were legitimately kinda hot.

P.S. I didn’t see Piranha in 3D, as the ticket price (north of $15.00) struck me as a rather absurd effort in the name of “due diligence”.

Posted in 2010, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »

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 »

Requiem for the Dead

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

By this point, director George Romero is like one of those jam bands from the 1960s that once had cultural prominence that now find themselves playing their hits from bar to cool little outdoor venue, making some cash and having a few beers and just trying to live with the fact that the outrage business doesn’t really sell anymore. The “rebellion” – and Jesus are we grossly overdo for another one – is in retreat. Greed – economic depression, blah, blah, whatever aside – is still good right now, and people don’t give a shit about things that might have made cultural waves thirty years ago. (Even a rudimentary plot these days basically ensures a movie as a Video-on-Demand followed by release in approximately 2.765 theatres.)

So, for that, I can’t work up much anger over the fact that Romero hasn’t made a good, or even particularly competent, movie since maybe Monkey Shines or maybe The Dark Half, both of which had moments. I had to look him up on IMDB to pinpoint his last decent movie, and, looking at Romero’s films, it becomes obvious that he’s enjoying a late-career mini-resurgence: the new Survival of the Dead is his third picture in five years, a major shift from the seven-to-ten years that could sometimes pass between projects. The zombie movie, largely apolitical (of course) these days, owes its godfather a steady gig at least; particularly given that Romero was reportedly/famously screwed out of much of the financial windfall for his first film, and still masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead – still one of the greatest American movies of all time.

Night of the Living Dead is ferociously paced – a mean, angry, despairing, terrifying movie; which is interesting because Romero is otherwise usually a dawdler. Romero is a smart, clever cult filmmaker, and like many smart, clever cult filmmakers he understands the need to turn his limitations into strengths in order to thrive. Romero’s 1970s pictures have a raw, unpolished vitality – many of them (especially Dawn of the Dead) look like comic books with every other panel torn out. The rhythm, the pace, is never especially impressive, but the decay and the outrage eat at you. (Sorry – came naturally.)

I belabor the strengths of past Romero pictures to get at what is missing from the new zombie trilogy: Land, Diary, and Survival of the Dead. The new pictures are unpolished and crude as well, but not in any kind of dirty/funky/subversive ways, they basically look like the blandly-lit made for cable movies that you might flip through on the Sci-Fi Channel or on ABC when it was producing those awful Mick Garris/Stephen King miniseries. In his new pictures, most prominently Survival, Romero is aiming for a lyricism that he doesn’t seem to have the chops for. There are moments: Survival’s silly final image is also rather sad; and Diary had a great capper as well, but mostly these pictures are cheap and clunky; with other potentially great sequences – like the moment in Survival of a guy swimming zombie waters while enemy snipers try to pick him off – lost in point-and-shoot staging and slack editing.

The politics in Survival of the Dead are less coherent, which is frankly a relief as the politics of the new Romero pictures have become relentlessly literal-minded. The new picture has the most promising set-up of the new Romero zombie movies: two rival Irish clans clashing over whether to kill the dead or attempt to make them useful. Yes, this has been done: in Day of the Dead, and a number of imitators sense, but the idea of a human scenario eclipsing the zombies is an appealing one, and it is nice (for a bit) to see Romero trying a low-fi Western on for size. But you soon realize that the zombies don’t mean anything anymore, and they don’t make any metaphorical sense. In the old trilogy, the zombies were primarily the personification of social unease: the tormented have-nots rising up. In the new movies, they are basically homeless people that characters always want to care for: buffoonish and un-threatening (the best kill in Survival is a steal from Dead Calm). The focus is now less on some sort of revolution than on a decent Medicare plan for the dead. This sentimentality, which makes next to no sense (you’re not really sure which clan you’re supposed to root for, and I don’t mean that in a good way), could almost be unintentional self-parody: that Romero himself has mellowed out, and doesn’t really remember what these things meant to him anymore.

All that said, I still like Romero and will continue to await his future films with affection, even his worst have a zest, a pleasure, for movie making that considerably more polished pictures lack. The Romero imitators are all more technically competent than the maestro, but almost all of them – with the exception of Edgar Wright – lack his soul. The Crazies, a well-reviewed remake of Romero’s crudely effective follow-up to Night of the Living Dead, follows the same predictable pattern. It is well-made. Director Breck Eisner has an eye, he keeps things moving, and the picture has a few set-pieces that could’ve come in handy to break up the monotony of Survival of the Dead, especially a nasty pitch-fork encounter in a hospital. But the picture is entirely pointless and apolitical, which should be impossible given the set-up; and the conclusion, which should come with a jolt of anti-authority outrage, is reduced to a fashionable gotcha moment. If Romero had just a tenth of these wiz-kids showmanship he might really do something again. And these kids – and that includes Zach Snyder who made the effective-but-also-pointless Dawn of the Dead cover – might be able to do something if they ever decided to step up and put away daddy’s toys. But that isn’t how this business appears to work; you’re apparently rewarded for competent work by graduating to even larger, more pointless material.

Unrelated aside: Please check my latest review at Slant, which can be found to your right under the Elsewhere column.

Posted in 2010, Horror, Reviews | No Comments »

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 »

Sex Panic

Monday, July 12th, 2010

One of the more effective ways of wriggling out of responsibility for bad behavior is to outwardly atone for it, to admit it, to display remorse, to beat everyone to the punch. This is one of the chief defenses of the bullshitter and the con artist, and they probably more than half the time fool themselves just as well as they do friends and family. It’s a way of expediting forgiveness, which ultimately means these overtures of atonement are more often than not self-serving. A show.

Michael Douglas plays such a bullshitter in the new Solitary Man, which is ultimately just as self-deceiving. The idea is that we watch this character, a variation of the classic Douglas “greed is good, pussy is better” womanizer, as he sinks lower and lower: refuting more optimistic stories of redemption. The character this time is Ben Kalmen, a washed-up-once-great car salesman ruined by a scam that went publicly belly up. He’s short on money and influence, he’s nearing the other side of the hill, and he self-medicates with Dewers and a steady succession of increasingly-dangerous one night stands: some are (kinda, surrogate) relatives, some are friends of family, some have connections that could prove to most unpleasant should they be crossed.

Douglas gives great Douglas in Solitary Man; few actors have his self-awareness or his control. Douglas has never, for my money, been “brilliant”, but then he’s rarely been embarrassing or uninteresting either – his roles are usually somewhat self-congratulatory self-satire – but he’s a wizard with an entendre, and he’s funnier and looser than most ladies’ man actors consciously revisiting potentially semi-biographical material. He has a clipped line reading that snaps that ultimate “fuck off” at whatever his target may happen to be, and he navigates the tricky territory of the comedy of self-pity like the most talented of foot soldiers, his steps are always just right and he never blows up.

But the movie does, it comes down with a bad case of Douglas-worship, and that manifests itself in unoriginality and lazy sexism. The women in Solitary Man – with an exception or two we’ll get to in a minute – are a typically disappointing non-issue, and they fall into two categories of male fantasy: the sexy Mother Earth Den Mothers, here played by Susan Sarandon (of course) and Jenna Fischer, and the sexy, brittle, power-playing vipers, played most prominently by Imogen Poots and a particularly terrible Mary-Louise Parker. The Den Mothers tell Ben he’s troubled, reassure him, slap him on the wrist just enough to satisfy obligations and little more, and the vipers sex Ben up and terrorize him, in order to honor the checks-and-balances of insincere male sexual guilt. It is unthinkable in Solitary Man that the women would be partially responsible in Ben’s escapades, just as it is unthinkable that Sarandon, seemingly in pause until Ben returns to her, might have a fling or two herself, even if she’s the more physically inviting of the two (Sarandon, still gorgeous, still vivid and talented, needs to turn the next round of these condescending stereotype roles down).

The picture has consistently sharp, funny, nasty dialogue, and it flirts with a few implications that could make it more than just another feel-good middle aged movie with delusions of reality. The first is that Douglas, without the implication of wealth, might be out of luck with at least a few of the women, but, as this would compromise the Douglas mystique, isn’t allowed to go anywhere. The second is that Douglas’ self-serving, inhuman, survival of the fittest philosophies are actually correct, more in sync with real life than the nourishing clichés voiced by the conventionally domestic characters on the sideline. This doesn’t go anywhere either, because Solitary Man wants, like most movies, to tell us that we’ve made the right decision to settle down and have children and take a job we despise. It’s another picture telling us its ok that we’re middle class saps, because once-successful people – despite enjoying spoils beyond our imaginations – are more miserable than we could hope to be. (In other words, they’re outdoing us even in self-loathing.) The ending is laughably pandering: is the picture really willing to write off a decade of indulgence and selfishness with a lame medical issue that wouldn’t be out of place in a particularly galling TV movie of the week?

Solitary Man is a crock, but there are two scenes that hint at the better movie directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien let get away from them. Discovering his latest indiscretion with a friend, daughter Fischer tells Douglas that that’s it, he’s consistently damaging the family and he’s out if he doesn’t get help. Douglas, exposed, infuriated, swallows his contempt and tells Fischer that that’s her choice. The bitterness, the hatred for someone you love standing up to you, is real, and this moment is Douglas’ best acting since Wonder Boys. (Fischer is quite good too.) The second moment is near the end, between Douglas and the terrific Olivia Thirlby. He’s black-out loaded at a college party, she’s a girlfriend of a de facto protégé, and their subsequent, inevitable exchange gives the picture a charge of the sexual reality it has otherwise mostly avoided. Douglas, for this one moment, is allowed to be pathetic, ridiculous, and inescapably alone. He’s human.

I Am Love is transporting in its brave ludicrousness. It’s another rich fantasy, but the picture has the good manners to know it and admit to it – to revel in it. Its one of the oldest of old chestnuts: the story of a wife of a powerful man who discovers orgasm upon meeting a wrong-side-of-the-tracks commoner. The rich wife is Tilda Swinton; the commoner Edoardo Gabbriellini, a struggling, apparently brilliant cook, also the best friend of Swinton’s son as well as generally sensitive salt-of-the-land hunk. The picture toys with concerns of loss of identity as result of globalization (there’s a vivid speech by the elder near the beginning, a long moment that concludes the opening sequence) but I Am Love is really a gorgeous melodramatic Italian weepy, with an ending that’s a reverse of many of the put-upon woman martyr movies of the 1940s and 1950s (usually with Joan Crawford). Swinton is intense and startling (as usual), her skin flushes with engulfing desire and heat. The movie gets a little old near the end, it’s all music and catastrophe and hyperbole, but it’s a pretty appealing five course meal…if all the courses were chocolate cake and red wine.

Posted in 2010, Drama, Reviews | 1 Comment »

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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