Filled with Lower-East Side indie music, characters who shuttle back and forth in a stale-banana colored Yugo, and that old "meet cute" device, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is nonetheless completely, utterly, and excitingly modern. Told in the course of one night, the film is enchanting in its fresh take on all the old tricks—romantic conventions aren't so much trashed as merely discarded in favor for deeper, more vividly domestic (and thereby more sincere) views of our characters. Nick & Norah is a trip, a joy ride, a plug-in-and-let-go existential experience that is, I'm entirely too certain, one of those rarest of cinematic treasures: the once-in-a-decade-or-two romantic comedy that is so clever and bright and new as to not just represent those feelings on screen, but also the feelings of an entire era. What's important, though, isn't how well everything fits into the old, if high-standard, mold. What matters is how refreshingly un- it all can be; the details of courtship and love and life in this city-that-never-sleeps are fleshed out with the deftest of touches, and so their world we visit is also subtly but continually opened up—blossoming right before our eyes.
The boy: Nick (Michael Cera, who's quickly becoming the quietest of indie triumphs). He's a senior in high school, from the suburbs of Jersey, and the only straight member in a very hardcore rock band: The Jerk-Offs. Plus, his girl—Tris (Alexis Dziena)—just kinda, sorta, broke up with him…a while ago. He can't quite get over it (and is, in fact, still sending her mixes from his wounded heart). And then his friends/band-mates, Dev (Rafi Gavron) and Thom (Aaron Yoo), pull out into NYC night-life to play a gig…
The girl: Norah (Kat Dennings). She, too, is a senior (maybe attending Brown in the fall, maybe getting a job), but she's from Englewood, Jewish, and apparently has more influence in the club scene than just about anyone save Jesus. That's why she happens to be in a club one night with her friend Caroline (Ari Gaynor, who—if she's not the heart—is the comedic engine continually at work in the background, churning out consistent laughs) when Nick's band takes the stage…and Nick sees Tris…and Norah needs someone to pose as her boyfriend.
The meet-cute: you already saw coming. But it's the sole conventional element in a staging that prepares us not in the slightest for a very period ("period" being The Now) narrative, filled with subplots about looking for your drunk-buddies, supporting your "uni-boob" with the correct bra, and finding clues as to the location of the super-secret show by the super-cult band Where's Fluffy? Once Nick and Norah have become acquainted, they're far from gaga over the other. (For one, he still finds every moment an opportunity to pump Norah about her frenemy's feelings over the break-up.) But we watch them find that connection, and—as directed by Peter Sollett from a wisely urban script by Lorene Scafaria based on the titular novel—the search is done in just the perfect way: through shared smiles, jokes that went bad half-way through (but it's the attempt that matters, anyway), and moments shared in the oddest of places, made homely and yours through the sheer power of being there. In short, Nick and Norah find each other in Nick & Norah as if they were every teenager in the world, crammed into two symbolic bodies—flirting and bantering and letting silence flow out awkwardly in perfect imitation of the real thing, so as to make it real. There's derivation in the concept, but triumph in its staging.
"I just want to hold your hand," Dev tells Nick, in one of the many inspired moments in the movie, and that same easy-going whimsy of love and lust and everything-in-between just sort of happening carries over to the treatment of the film's every character. Dev and Thom (and the no-name beefy pick-up that starts tagging along with them after The Jerk-Offs' first gig) are gay, but their no one's flamboyant anything, just as Norah is Jewish—but you'd only know it when she brings up one of her favorite philosophies from said religion (which lets Nick put his own funky little, completely sincere spin on it). This is the New York City of the new millennium, and it belongs to these people, the movie tells us, who find life and love in the moments when no one is looking, and everything just comes rushing up to meet you. Say "Hello" and dive right in.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
30 Rock: The Complete First Season: B+
The Rural Juror; "Muffin Top"; dating your distant cousin (accidently); "Vice President of East Coast Television-and-Microwave Programming"; Fat Bitch I & II; The Black Crusaders—this is 30 Rock: Tina Fey's irreducibly insane, incandescently clever show-within-a-show sitcom. Such moments as those above are the reason her show first hit the radar, why it won over critics and (small but fanatical) audiences alike; and it's obvious why: 30 Rock has an admirable spirit of loony iconoclasm, it's a stalwart of left-brain/right-brain/no-brain bubbly wit. Built like the drunken, one-night-stand bastard of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (but far more entertaining) and fleshed out by mind-bogglingly quick zings between the Smart and the Dumb, the High and the Low, Fey's brain-child is a bit like doping up on laughing gas for thirty-minute intervals—the drug hits quick and stays, sizzling pleasantly in the back of your head, driving you to laugh spontaneously, constantly.
That's not to say everything works. A lot doesn't. Or didn't—see, the opening four episodes of Rock seem counterintuitive to what should be happening: they sink steadily downward, becoming almost impishly ridiculous; hollow and quirky: Scrubs Zero. The "Pilot" is more the tasteful precursor, though it too has some bumps. And then "The Aftermath," "Blind Date," and "Jack the Writer" become increasingly, almost imperceptibly, difficult. One can see, in Fey's writing and producing, the thread-bare work of her vision. And then the uptick, and stuff starts shifting for the better.
Leaving objectivity at the door, the concept is this: Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is the creator and head-writer of The Girlie Show, a mildly-hot sketch show on NBC with a crackpot star (Jane Krakowski). In comes a new executive, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), who recruits fallen-movie-star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) to boosts the show's ratings. Lemon, already a frazzled career-woman in the greatest of clichéd traditions, now has to contend with her paranoid best-friend being replaced with a loose cannon…and the new boss who really wants to mentor her.
For several reasons, this would never happen. Like, in a million-billion-'till the end of time years never. But with a loopy conceit comes an even loopier product—and 30 Rock delivers pretty uniformly. The punch-lines are written as confessions; the action is sliced up into an ironic mélange; and the cast is such a phenomenal support (excluding Mr. Baldwin, who we'll get to in a moment) as to make even the weakest moments fresh. Even "The Head and the Hair" is infectiously goofy. And "Up All Night," "Cleveland," and "The Fighting Irish" are about all the necessary prove of Rock's crystallization as a comedy fount.
…Now: Alec Baldwin. Frequent-SNL host, movie star, Baldwin Brother—but funny, funny, man? Yes, yes, a 1,000 times yes. Delivering his lines a silken purr, squaring his physical presence into a box of imposing dexterity, and centering even those jokes that fly off the screen, the actor isn't just the heart of the show, but also its breakout show. He does something almost transcendent, and he does it in the context of a lesser, if very loose and very witty show. He makes the impossible possible, and turns the alt-NYC of Fey's world not just into a fanciful place, but also a state-of-mind: where sketch shows can have the name "Girlie" in their title and still air; where NBC is just a subsidiary of the Sheindhart Wig Company; and where in Cleveland, everyone's a model.
That's not to say everything works. A lot doesn't. Or didn't—see, the opening four episodes of Rock seem counterintuitive to what should be happening: they sink steadily downward, becoming almost impishly ridiculous; hollow and quirky: Scrubs Zero. The "Pilot" is more the tasteful precursor, though it too has some bumps. And then "The Aftermath," "Blind Date," and "Jack the Writer" become increasingly, almost imperceptibly, difficult. One can see, in Fey's writing and producing, the thread-bare work of her vision. And then the uptick, and stuff starts shifting for the better.
Leaving objectivity at the door, the concept is this: Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is the creator and head-writer of The Girlie Show, a mildly-hot sketch show on NBC with a crackpot star (Jane Krakowski). In comes a new executive, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), who recruits fallen-movie-star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) to boosts the show's ratings. Lemon, already a frazzled career-woman in the greatest of clichéd traditions, now has to contend with her paranoid best-friend being replaced with a loose cannon…and the new boss who really wants to mentor her.
For several reasons, this would never happen. Like, in a million-billion-'till the end of time years never. But with a loopy conceit comes an even loopier product—and 30 Rock delivers pretty uniformly. The punch-lines are written as confessions; the action is sliced up into an ironic mélange; and the cast is such a phenomenal support (excluding Mr. Baldwin, who we'll get to in a moment) as to make even the weakest moments fresh. Even "The Head and the Hair" is infectiously goofy. And "Up All Night," "Cleveland," and "The Fighting Irish" are about all the necessary prove of Rock's crystallization as a comedy fount.
…Now: Alec Baldwin. Frequent-SNL host, movie star, Baldwin Brother—but funny, funny, man? Yes, yes, a 1,000 times yes. Delivering his lines a silken purr, squaring his physical presence into a box of imposing dexterity, and centering even those jokes that fly off the screen, the actor isn't just the heart of the show, but also its breakout show. He does something almost transcendent, and he does it in the context of a lesser, if very loose and very witty show. He makes the impossible possible, and turns the alt-NYC of Fey's world not just into a fanciful place, but also a state-of-mind: where sketch shows can have the name "Girlie" in their title and still air; where NBC is just a subsidiary of the Sheindhart Wig Company; and where in Cleveland, everyone's a model.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Eagle Eye: C
It's 2008—so why do movies like this keep getting made? We live in an age of hyper-awareness and literacy; and yet, when confronted with the possibility of creating a thriller gussied up as an allegory for our modern-1984 times, director DJ Caruso makes…this? This—Eagle Eye—that is like some dusty-retro relic from yesteryear, dug up and cleaned with spit-shine, then plopped before us as an audience and beamed directly onto our retinas—its mediocrity made "relevant" for a culture now long past being fooled by the old as the new. It's the kind of movie where the enemy is (spoiler!) a giant supercomputer; where the heroes are struggling, pretty, Americans With Issues who still find time to spark some sexual chemistry; and where the government always seems to get in its own way until—everyone together now—the maverick of the bunch realizes the hero is in the right. Sheesh, what is this: Tron?
It isn't as though Eagle Eye is entirely incompetent; and it's in no way not quite a thrill ride. In fact, the first 45-minutes are about as engaging as one could have hoped for. Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is down on his luck, his brother just died, when he begins to receive mysterious phone calls, shipments of terrorist contraband, and money. Soon the FBI is involved, and he's running for his life—the omnipotent Voice on the other end of the line always directing him. Rachel (Michelle Monahan) is in a similar predicament, except that on her end, it's her son the Voice is holding hostage.
What's going on? Who is this "they"? And why are on Earth are such nice-looking young people like Jerry and Rachel being put through so much insanity?
Sad news: the propulsion of the first act runs dry quick, as answers become apparent (the most stultifying of which I've already revealed for you). And without that source of fuel, first you realize how banal the script is. And then you realize how completely and incompetently absurd is the craft presented to you as coherence and entertainment. Yes, stuff blows up and people are thrilled and scared and put in life-or-death situations. But why, exactly? Anyone?
I didn't think so.
Written by John Glenn & Travis Wright, and then Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, Eagle Eye is a hollow trifle—a curio of pop entertainment that seems to have wandered in from a far dustier set. Reportedly, the idea was conceived by executive-producer Steven Spielberg, but in whatever iteration he may have originally seen it, none remains. There is, instead, cliché after disconnected cliché. Even the extraordinarily well-cast actors—among whom, as no one should be shocked to learn, Mr. LaBeouf is the stand-out (his funeral sequence early on is the sole moment that actually reaches out and grabs you)—struggle and stumble under the weight of so much bull. And Mr. Caruso…well, after being given the bigger-budgetary reins after last year's Disturbia, he seems mostly content to let stuff get larger and more impossible, until it all spirals out of control—an '80s plot, meets '90s star-power, layered thick with '00 Michael Bay technical sensibilities. Welcome to the future, folks.
It isn't as though Eagle Eye is entirely incompetent; and it's in no way not quite a thrill ride. In fact, the first 45-minutes are about as engaging as one could have hoped for. Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is down on his luck, his brother just died, when he begins to receive mysterious phone calls, shipments of terrorist contraband, and money. Soon the FBI is involved, and he's running for his life—the omnipotent Voice on the other end of the line always directing him. Rachel (Michelle Monahan) is in a similar predicament, except that on her end, it's her son the Voice is holding hostage.
What's going on? Who is this "they"? And why are on Earth are such nice-looking young people like Jerry and Rachel being put through so much insanity?
Sad news: the propulsion of the first act runs dry quick, as answers become apparent (the most stultifying of which I've already revealed for you). And without that source of fuel, first you realize how banal the script is. And then you realize how completely and incompetently absurd is the craft presented to you as coherence and entertainment. Yes, stuff blows up and people are thrilled and scared and put in life-or-death situations. But why, exactly? Anyone?
I didn't think so.
Written by John Glenn & Travis Wright, and then Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, Eagle Eye is a hollow trifle—a curio of pop entertainment that seems to have wandered in from a far dustier set. Reportedly, the idea was conceived by executive-producer Steven Spielberg, but in whatever iteration he may have originally seen it, none remains. There is, instead, cliché after disconnected cliché. Even the extraordinarily well-cast actors—among whom, as no one should be shocked to learn, Mr. LaBeouf is the stand-out (his funeral sequence early on is the sole moment that actually reaches out and grabs you)—struggle and stumble under the weight of so much bull. And Mr. Caruso…well, after being given the bigger-budgetary reins after last year's Disturbia, he seems mostly content to let stuff get larger and more impossible, until it all spirals out of control—an '80s plot, meets '90s star-power, layered thick with '00 Michael Bay technical sensibilities. Welcome to the future, folks.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Choke: C+
Choke is not a Chuck Palahniuk movie. It’s based on one of his books; but that’s the closest the film ever comes to touching, in an audiovisual format, the scabrous sort of satire that Palahniuk pioneered years ago. And worse, even with expert brow-wriggling and –mugging by Sam Rockwell, the complexity and unremitting pain of the original’s prose has all but been steamrolled—rib-tickled into a frenetic comedy of the absurd.
Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.
Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.
Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.
Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.
Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.
Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.
Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.
Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Subliminal Tapes: Product Review
We’ve all been there—you’ve got a problem, a bad habit, say, or a nagging character flaw that you just can’t fix. It could be anything: you’re just the tiniest bit overweight; you’ve still got that weird spider phobia; you feel like your soul-mate is out there, but that you just aren’t doing everything you can to find that person—like you’re being held back. There is a solution. Refreshingly, helpfully, someone has come forward with a product that doesn’t just help…it helps you help you. At www.subliminal-tapes-self-improvement, there are a wide variety of options available, and each of them produces results.
“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.
Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.
One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.
“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.
Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.
One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Nines: B+
The Nines has, in reality, little to do with math—save for the omnipresence of its titular number. It is, however, framed by an elegant geometric structure: the narrative being told by three successive short films, each unspooling and spilling into each other as if, instead, they were three concentric circles. This is a movie masquerading as a "tiny" drama with exponentially grand ambitions; a metaphysic puzzle that tickles your heart and brain the bigger, more complex, and more numerous the pieces get. Rarely does meta-filmmaking like this get more authentically, or more hypnotically, engrossing.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Burn After Reading: B-
Satire (n): “The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Southland Tales: C
For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
House of Sand and Fog: B
There's a trap lying in wait once you start to watch House of Sand and Fog—and it has nothing to do with the way your sympathies keep being sliced up between the main characters. No, the real problem is that Vadim Perelman's adaptation of the Andre Dubus III novel hovers vaguely in that maddening cinematic gray area: it's a prestige picture that's firmly middlebrow. Everything works for most of the film, but the real surprise is how unpretentious the whole enterprise can be. Never has an "artful" film that feels so artless felt so engaging.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Angels in America: A-
In a work so over-stuffed with ideas as Tony Kushner's Angels in America—an HBO movie adapted from Kushner's own Pulitzer-prize winning drama that liberally runs up to six hours—what more can there be to say of it except that it stuns: continually, unerringly, stubbornly, until your heart and brain swell and ache with the sheer volume of energy presented on screen. The time is 1985, New York City, and everywhere, in Kushner's world, people fret and dart about, sliced up by their interconnected bonds of disease, love, and politics. AIDS has just begun to ravage the city, and the millennium approaches; as many a character doth proclaim, history itself is opening up—"Anything can happen. Any awful thing."
At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.
The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.
James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.
Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.
"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.
"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.
At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.
The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.
James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.
Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.
"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.
"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.
Bad Education: B+
In the cinematic universe of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, it is pretty safe to say that a tranvestite with a secret is about as innocuous as bubble-wrapped glass -- and that the suspenseful, erotic/romantic/familial tensions created by such a "dreadful secret" are about as weighty as...well...the air said tranny would breath. Almodóvar doesn't create films, building them scene-by-scene; he envisions them -- full of irony and sass, insolence and sexuality, brash swagger and a delicious visual palette -- and they spring like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully-formed and marvelous. Or so is said. They are tricky things, his movies, and I'd be the first to admit I wasn't completely won over by the auteur by what'd I seen of his work. Yet in Bad Education, his noir-set-on-low-simmer crossed with a meta-critique of the Catholic Church, there's finally a discernible depth and passion to his work. Nothing is static...and nothing, I feel quite validated in saying and still remain spoiler-free, is what it seems.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?
Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.
Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.
Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.
Rome: The Complete Second Season: A-
Ancient world history, re-done with a Sopranos twist...and a dash of Entourage, with just a splash of Dynasty and Dallas. Plus a massive-scale set, for flair. That's Rome -- the HBO drama that views a pivotal period of Ancient Roman civilization from an angle that can only be termed meta-modern: fleshed out as grand soap opera, played out over continents and years, and then spiked through with televisual flourishes reminiscent of the last twenty years of backstabbing prime-time bitchery entertainment, Rome is structured like it was thought-up by someone who watched way too much of all the best stuff to be offered by piquant, overstuffed, sensationally engrossing late-night melodramas. Which it probably was. And then they added the violence...and the sex...and the sandals.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.
And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.
And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.
The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.
Breaking Dawn: B+
"...Reason and love keep little company together nowadays," goes the William Shakespeare quote that pops up not even a fifth the way through Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn -- and well they still don't, in this final volume of her vampiric romance novels; it's due to this resolute lack of the twining between the heart and the mind that most of what goes right in the novel does, in fact, go right. Compacted into a radical new structure (say what you will, negative or otherwise about Meyer's books, but each and every previous installment has been concieved and molded into the same pattern), the plot in Dawn has as many twists and kinks woven into it as Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse put together and the majority are born from that chasm between desire and pragmatic function, and they take flight beautifully, if slowly at first, until any reader would be hard-pressed not to be entranced.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).
Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.
...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.
I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
The Dark Knight: A-
"Why. So. Serious?" The Joker (Heath Ledger) croaks out at a mob boss...right before he slits his face open with a knife. It's a violent act coupled with a macabre punchline -- the usual Joker modus operandi -- except that, as re-envisioned by director Christopher Nolan, the exquisitely terrifying villain in The Dark Knight operates by only the most abstract code; his jokes and murders and randoms acts of terror keep cropping up and pulling down on all the bright, shiny people of Gotham City as if they and not the works of our protagonists were the Acts of God. As a morality play, that's the central theme at work in Nolan's second Batman film, and as an Agent of Chaos, the Clown Prince of Crime himself can seem a tad -- how to say this and not sound like a grouchy non-fanboy? -- omnipotent. (Really? He had months of planning to rig all those explosives in all the right places? Really?!) But as an inspired piece of filmmaking trickery, a force of manic cinematic alchemy, that visage of tear-streaked circus makeup and the body it's attached to are a pair not to be triffled at -- barely even in whose direction you would want to snigger. They are relentless, pitch (hell, bruise) black, and thrilling. So is the movie that surrounds them.
From the ashes of a torched Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly making it seem as if Katie Holmes never even existed) have emerged, it seems, victorious over the criminal element in their city. Which thrills Bruce, because as soon as he's finished with this whole "The Batman" business, he can get down to finally marrying his one true love. Rachel is thrilled in a similar way, except she has her eyes on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the new District Attorney who she is now dating. Oops -- sucks for Mr. Wayne. These are the states in which our characters are left precariously trapped for the majority of Knight, each of them in turn scrabbling to gain ground in an increasingly violent and unstable society. All thanks to The Joker, of course, whose bank-heist opens the film; he's a devil in a cheap purple suit, and he just keeps amping up the fun for his audiences watching at home and in the streets of their own private hell.
Grim, right? Christopher Nolan, and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the script with him), have crafted a film teeming with schemes and desperation; double-crosses and last-minute saves; survival laced through with death in the next footstep. Gone are the great, glamorously gothic cityscapes of the Burton films -- but a new hallmark has crept in: a feeling of gnawing, clashing, grasping, tensely mortal mechinations grinding down on the people purporting them. In this new modern era (it's obviously Chicago, and no effort is made to disguise it), the battle our hero has to wage is double-edged: with he swing he takes, the enemy doesn't grow smaller, no -- it grows crazier. When asking his butler (Michael Caine, in a performance of crinkly-faced drollery and skill) how it was he caught his own villains back when he was a civil servant, there was but one piece of advice left to give: "We burned the forest." In The Dark Knight, more so than Batman Begins by probably 100-fold, the spectacle of battle, of such a burning, squeezes its way into almost every other frame, and it can grow to seem, quite honestly, all too tiring and overbearing. A battle for a city's soul should never, ever, take 152 minutes. A showcase for supreme in-front and behind-the-camera talent, on the other hand...
With a raspy boom that shrinks to a velvet whisper without his mask on, Bale returns once more with a performance of admirable versatility. He isn't gifted with the same delicately executed undercurrents of psychology (you'll hate me for saying this, but the Good/Bad, Chaos/Order dichotomy here isn't nearly as personal, and therefore accesible and relevant) as he was in Begins, but his vigilante still morphs back and forth, in each second, from Cause to Effect. He's always saving the city, so the city always needs saving. Sliding both farther to the right and left of him on the moral scale is Dent, and embodying him as Eckhart does, the tragedy that eventually befalls the character has real heft, even as the surrounding players' jaw-boning and philosophizing about his conscience grows weary. Staring both of them in the face, and only rarely cracking a smile (though always seeming to cackle) is The Joker. And Heath Ledger. In what may well prove to be his last screen performance ever, Ledger expanded on the skill he showed in Brokeback Mountain of possessing characters to an impossible, bone-deep degree and he pushes his monster over the edge of mania. His acting (and facial features) lack the careful sculpting of Jack Nicholson's very same clown, but his turn is ferocious in a way Ol' Jack never was. Sucking on his facial scars, prancing or tripping through dark streets and corridors, dolling himself up in a red wig and nurse's outfit, and alternately rasping, screeching, squealing, or grouding out his vowels, Batman's archenemy gives off a magnetism that haunts the film and propels it in equal measure. And when he laughs, his insanity burbling up like rot in the form of demented grunts and giggles, the performance is beyond great: it's transcendant.
Leaving the theater, I couldn't help but notice I had what seemed to be a headache forming in the back of my skull; how curious -- after all, Nolan's film is a Greek Tragedy produced with the nerve-jangling power of talent in its prime. So how could I feel bad? There is no doubting The Dark Knight is a very good film (some would say great, fantastic, a masterpiece...on which I have to subtly disagree) but it's also overwhelming. The plot entangles the audience, and leaves them with a sickening, fascinating, buzz of dread and joy, but it also ties itself into knots in the process; after the fifth double-cross, the seventh surprise killing, and the third coin-flip, it has to be said: the spectacle of this, Batman's sixth outing in twenty years, nearly and almost completely covers the drama that supports it. Almost, but God help us all, not quite. Left behind is, instead, a vision of urban criminality and the vigilantism required to destroy it, as well as the soul-killing steps involved. It's a heady pop vision that is as baroque and unwieldy as it sounds. After all this, my opinion is still almost beside the point: people will trot out in droves to see the movie for the next month regardless. Which is in a way, a blessing. Maybe, now, after leaving the theater of Christopher Nolan's latest success (after all this time, from Memento through Insomnia to The Prestige surely we can all say: he's a man of vision, maybe even magic) they will reach their own conclusion: superhero movies can grow up -- maybe they need to -- and become a work of almost-art, displaying for the world the complexities of Good fighting Evil, becoming it, and then mocking nobility all together.
From the ashes of a torched Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly making it seem as if Katie Holmes never even existed) have emerged, it seems, victorious over the criminal element in their city. Which thrills Bruce, because as soon as he's finished with this whole "The Batman" business, he can get down to finally marrying his one true love. Rachel is thrilled in a similar way, except she has her eyes on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the new District Attorney who she is now dating. Oops -- sucks for Mr. Wayne. These are the states in which our characters are left precariously trapped for the majority of Knight, each of them in turn scrabbling to gain ground in an increasingly violent and unstable society. All thanks to The Joker, of course, whose bank-heist opens the film; he's a devil in a cheap purple suit, and he just keeps amping up the fun for his audiences watching at home and in the streets of their own private hell.
Grim, right? Christopher Nolan, and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the script with him), have crafted a film teeming with schemes and desperation; double-crosses and last-minute saves; survival laced through with death in the next footstep. Gone are the great, glamorously gothic cityscapes of the Burton films -- but a new hallmark has crept in: a feeling of gnawing, clashing, grasping, tensely mortal mechinations grinding down on the people purporting them. In this new modern era (it's obviously Chicago, and no effort is made to disguise it), the battle our hero has to wage is double-edged: with he swing he takes, the enemy doesn't grow smaller, no -- it grows crazier. When asking his butler (Michael Caine, in a performance of crinkly-faced drollery and skill) how it was he caught his own villains back when he was a civil servant, there was but one piece of advice left to give: "We burned the forest." In The Dark Knight, more so than Batman Begins by probably 100-fold, the spectacle of battle, of such a burning, squeezes its way into almost every other frame, and it can grow to seem, quite honestly, all too tiring and overbearing. A battle for a city's soul should never, ever, take 152 minutes. A showcase for supreme in-front and behind-the-camera talent, on the other hand...
With a raspy boom that shrinks to a velvet whisper without his mask on, Bale returns once more with a performance of admirable versatility. He isn't gifted with the same delicately executed undercurrents of psychology (you'll hate me for saying this, but the Good/Bad, Chaos/Order dichotomy here isn't nearly as personal, and therefore accesible and relevant) as he was in Begins, but his vigilante still morphs back and forth, in each second, from Cause to Effect. He's always saving the city, so the city always needs saving. Sliding both farther to the right and left of him on the moral scale is Dent, and embodying him as Eckhart does, the tragedy that eventually befalls the character has real heft, even as the surrounding players' jaw-boning and philosophizing about his conscience grows weary. Staring both of them in the face, and only rarely cracking a smile (though always seeming to cackle) is The Joker. And Heath Ledger. In what may well prove to be his last screen performance ever, Ledger expanded on the skill he showed in Brokeback Mountain of possessing characters to an impossible, bone-deep degree and he pushes his monster over the edge of mania. His acting (and facial features) lack the careful sculpting of Jack Nicholson's very same clown, but his turn is ferocious in a way Ol' Jack never was. Sucking on his facial scars, prancing or tripping through dark streets and corridors, dolling himself up in a red wig and nurse's outfit, and alternately rasping, screeching, squealing, or grouding out his vowels, Batman's archenemy gives off a magnetism that haunts the film and propels it in equal measure. And when he laughs, his insanity burbling up like rot in the form of demented grunts and giggles, the performance is beyond great: it's transcendant.
Leaving the theater, I couldn't help but notice I had what seemed to be a headache forming in the back of my skull; how curious -- after all, Nolan's film is a Greek Tragedy produced with the nerve-jangling power of talent in its prime. So how could I feel bad? There is no doubting The Dark Knight is a very good film (some would say great, fantastic, a masterpiece...on which I have to subtly disagree) but it's also overwhelming. The plot entangles the audience, and leaves them with a sickening, fascinating, buzz of dread and joy, but it also ties itself into knots in the process; after the fifth double-cross, the seventh surprise killing, and the third coin-flip, it has to be said: the spectacle of this, Batman's sixth outing in twenty years, nearly and almost completely covers the drama that supports it. Almost, but God help us all, not quite. Left behind is, instead, a vision of urban criminality and the vigilantism required to destroy it, as well as the soul-killing steps involved. It's a heady pop vision that is as baroque and unwieldy as it sounds. After all this, my opinion is still almost beside the point: people will trot out in droves to see the movie for the next month regardless. Which is in a way, a blessing. Maybe, now, after leaving the theater of Christopher Nolan's latest success (after all this time, from Memento through Insomnia to The Prestige surely we can all say: he's a man of vision, maybe even magic) they will reach their own conclusion: superhero movies can grow up -- maybe they need to -- and become a work of almost-art, displaying for the world the complexities of Good fighting Evil, becoming it, and then mocking nobility all together.
Gods and Monsters: A
Like a death rattle do the weighty themes supporting Bill Condon's beautifully rich elegy Gods and Monsters move throughout the film. They aren't self-serious and they move with no unpalatable heft (which is a relief, considering such subjects as lost innocence and the relationship between art and its artist number among the crowd), rather they wrap slowly around the picture, strangling the one man at its center: James Whale (Ian McKellen, turning decorum into, paradoxically, both a pained facade and a ribald comedy) -- the Golden Age director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein and a whole other host of films you've no doubt heard of but never seen. Condon, as writer and director, is the man behind the scenes grappling and managing how exactly the various tendrils of memory and sorrow must seep into the story of Whale's last days of life, and doing so is a tricky prospect. But he pulls it off with fluid grace, inter-cutting the forward momentum with backward -- longing -- glances at the Great War, or the filming of Bride. So great is his achievement that though much of Gods and Monsters is sad, it's never somber.
The audience begins at what are well probably the last few weeks in the life of what was once one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Famous as an auteur of horror (a phrase coined so many decades after his rise and fall that if he heard such attributed to him, Mr. Whale would have probably died laughing) by creating the Frankenstein franchise in the early '30s and then briefly even bigger for things like Showboat, he has retreated into permanent solitude...and that's exactly where, after a brief stay in the hospital, he returns to -- encountering almost immediately the new gardener hired by his maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave): a Mr. Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser, in perhaps the best onscreen feat of his career, giving vulnerability the perfect mix of naiveté and boyish heartland compassion). Now, James Whale was gay and, well, Clay Boone was a looker; and Whale being who he was -- and in the hands of someone like McKellen and Condon, he was many things: egotist, madman, gentleman, devil, saint, senile -- their paths were bound to cross. It is such an intersection that is at the heart of Gods and Monsters, but it is the heart itself, a study of tragedy brought on at once both by effervescence of the mind and nostalgia eternal, that makes the movie truly great.
During the nearly two hour running time the dynamic between the three stars is on the eternal shift, and mend. At first, after having tepidly posed for one of Whale's paintings, Clay is outwardly disgusted at the older man's sexuality; but then something brings him back. That something is a nearly voracious void in his heart, a curiosity, for the experience and understanding of human life. (Today, I think, we would call it empathy.) And his employer is a near gold-mine of experience -- the man's recounting of both Hollywood and his days as a soldier keep up throughout their first lunches and teas. Hanna herself is not at all amused by these interactions because, though she cares deeply for Mr. Whale, she knows more about his dealings with young men then he would probably care for. She softens though, in her cantankerous and heavily-accented way. (Lynn Redgrave, as the woman behind the voice, gives a performance of perfectly small-sized delights; in one scene, she's a domestic counterpart to McKellen, in another his doting -- if overbearing -- great aunt.) But then Clay and his boss go to a party thrown by a fellow Golden Age director, and then there is a storm, and a return home. And in those run of scenes there is massive heartbreak, understanding, and destruction all compacted and intermingled -- mangling the heart even as the skill of its execution fascinates the mind.
At the very roots of Bill Condon's movie is the hope against hope that a long life will not fade into the recession of a life lived, and the futility of knowing that in realizing that, it already has. Gods and Monsters is as versatile a work of art as its hero was a human being: as a drawing-room drama, the tiny ensemble is superb in its realization; as a biography, the director is remarkable for breathing life into a curiosity, cloaking his eccentricities in the pathos that begot them; and as a mood piece, it is singularly stupendous -- staggering in the subtle emotional damage it wreaks. Wonderful indeed is the movie that views divinity and monstrosity, empathy and isolation, humanity and the rotting power of loss as two sides of the same coin.
The audience begins at what are well probably the last few weeks in the life of what was once one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Famous as an auteur of horror (a phrase coined so many decades after his rise and fall that if he heard such attributed to him, Mr. Whale would have probably died laughing) by creating the Frankenstein franchise in the early '30s and then briefly even bigger for things like Showboat, he has retreated into permanent solitude...and that's exactly where, after a brief stay in the hospital, he returns to -- encountering almost immediately the new gardener hired by his maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave): a Mr. Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser, in perhaps the best onscreen feat of his career, giving vulnerability the perfect mix of naiveté and boyish heartland compassion). Now, James Whale was gay and, well, Clay Boone was a looker; and Whale being who he was -- and in the hands of someone like McKellen and Condon, he was many things: egotist, madman, gentleman, devil, saint, senile -- their paths were bound to cross. It is such an intersection that is at the heart of Gods and Monsters, but it is the heart itself, a study of tragedy brought on at once both by effervescence of the mind and nostalgia eternal, that makes the movie truly great.
During the nearly two hour running time the dynamic between the three stars is on the eternal shift, and mend. At first, after having tepidly posed for one of Whale's paintings, Clay is outwardly disgusted at the older man's sexuality; but then something brings him back. That something is a nearly voracious void in his heart, a curiosity, for the experience and understanding of human life. (Today, I think, we would call it empathy.) And his employer is a near gold-mine of experience -- the man's recounting of both Hollywood and his days as a soldier keep up throughout their first lunches and teas. Hanna herself is not at all amused by these interactions because, though she cares deeply for Mr. Whale, she knows more about his dealings with young men then he would probably care for. She softens though, in her cantankerous and heavily-accented way. (Lynn Redgrave, as the woman behind the voice, gives a performance of perfectly small-sized delights; in one scene, she's a domestic counterpart to McKellen, in another his doting -- if overbearing -- great aunt.) But then Clay and his boss go to a party thrown by a fellow Golden Age director, and then there is a storm, and a return home. And in those run of scenes there is massive heartbreak, understanding, and destruction all compacted and intermingled -- mangling the heart even as the skill of its execution fascinates the mind.
At the very roots of Bill Condon's movie is the hope against hope that a long life will not fade into the recession of a life lived, and the futility of knowing that in realizing that, it already has. Gods and Monsters is as versatile a work of art as its hero was a human being: as a drawing-room drama, the tiny ensemble is superb in its realization; as a biography, the director is remarkable for breathing life into a curiosity, cloaking his eccentricities in the pathos that begot them; and as a mood piece, it is singularly stupendous -- staggering in the subtle emotional damage it wreaks. Wonderful indeed is the movie that views divinity and monstrosity, empathy and isolation, humanity and the rotting power of loss as two sides of the same coin.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army: B+
There's a revelation about a life beginning near the end of Hellboy II. And just as the first act is getting going there's a running gag about relationships and their various tensions; the same goes for the second act...and the third. And somewhere in there -- a drunken duet serenading and bemoaning star-crossed love with all its joys and sorrows. Such details, so dry and domesticated in their objectivity, must sound odd to anyone who has actually seen the film because, oh yeah, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is just that: a big red brute of a protagonist with shorn-off horns and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. That's writer-director Guillermo del Toro's great big ghoulish joke, though: that each of his spiny, many-legged (and eyed), creepy, crawly creatures is as relatable and worthy of his camera as those All-American comic-book Joes. Spider-Man? Only if he has wings. And scales.
The source material of del Toro's sequel, Mike Mignolia's Dark Horse comic, says that Hellboy and his various compatriots live and work with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, their sole activity being, as Hellboy's pa so aptly summed up in Hellboy "to bump back" at the creatures that bumped in the night. And so, for the first film, they did. Except the "creatures" were mostly Nazi's...and the occasional assasin fueled by sand. Nothing too extraordinary, really. But freed by financial and critical kudos -- and lauching off from his last film, the lusciously dark, full-blooded, and tragic fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth -- del Toro is more content this second go round to fill the screen, and plot, with any manner of organisms. He harnesses the power of cinema to make his imagination manifest, and the glory of it all is that he does it so well that the conflict between humans and the otherwordly Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) who wants to exterminate them that is the narrative center of The Golden Army whizzes by on the brawny, brainy, synapses of his creativity that burble just below the surface of every sequence.
Nazis weren't the only thing shorn-off as so much dead weight; John Meyers (Rupert Evans), the FBI newbie who "babysat" Hellboy in the first film, has been unceremoniously written out, and his straight-man mugging is briefly missed. Then Jeffrey Tambor, beefing up his role as a bigwig from the last movie, steps foot onto the screen, and his comic timing (honed to a razor sharp point on Arrested Development) quickly makes up for it. So, too, does the rest of the cast in this more lavishly created film make the experience all the richer. Selma Blair, as Hellboy's true love, makes her quasi-acrid exasperation both funny and lethal: the physical manifestation of her pyrokinectic abilities. Doug Jones, the director's consummate performer of wierd, is all the more welcome as the painfully polite and sincere Abe Sapien. And of course, Ron Pearlman, as the devil himself, gives a performance of finely-wrought comedy and grace; he's the clown laughing through a tear or two -- a muscle-head with brains and a heart, too.
In what may prove to be the most successful film yet of his career, Guillermo del Toro playfully (and with great deftness) touches on the truth behind each glam facade; he peers behind the metaphorical make-up and costumes on these otherwordly heroes. But instead of entreating us with their massive pathos, he puckishly points at their hum-drums woes and desires, saying with a big ol' smirk, "See: there can be a summer blockbuster at once visually rich and dramatically quaint." Such a philosophy lends The Golden Army it's occasionally needed heft. But really, most of the time the audience will just be bugging their eyes out -- in one scene at the towering plant god that blossoms into a city-block's worth of foliage; in another at the little old lady who happens to eat cats for funs -- and then giggling at the very things that set their eyes popping. It's a grand trick for a blockbuster that's just rote enough to be irksome, while being just grand enough to make even the Satan himself happy.
The source material of del Toro's sequel, Mike Mignolia's Dark Horse comic, says that Hellboy and his various compatriots live and work with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, their sole activity being, as Hellboy's pa so aptly summed up in Hellboy "to bump back" at the creatures that bumped in the night. And so, for the first film, they did. Except the "creatures" were mostly Nazi's...and the occasional assasin fueled by sand. Nothing too extraordinary, really. But freed by financial and critical kudos -- and lauching off from his last film, the lusciously dark, full-blooded, and tragic fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth -- del Toro is more content this second go round to fill the screen, and plot, with any manner of organisms. He harnesses the power of cinema to make his imagination manifest, and the glory of it all is that he does it so well that the conflict between humans and the otherwordly Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) who wants to exterminate them that is the narrative center of The Golden Army whizzes by on the brawny, brainy, synapses of his creativity that burble just below the surface of every sequence.
Nazis weren't the only thing shorn-off as so much dead weight; John Meyers (Rupert Evans), the FBI newbie who "babysat" Hellboy in the first film, has been unceremoniously written out, and his straight-man mugging is briefly missed. Then Jeffrey Tambor, beefing up his role as a bigwig from the last movie, steps foot onto the screen, and his comic timing (honed to a razor sharp point on Arrested Development) quickly makes up for it. So, too, does the rest of the cast in this more lavishly created film make the experience all the richer. Selma Blair, as Hellboy's true love, makes her quasi-acrid exasperation both funny and lethal: the physical manifestation of her pyrokinectic abilities. Doug Jones, the director's consummate performer of wierd, is all the more welcome as the painfully polite and sincere Abe Sapien. And of course, Ron Pearlman, as the devil himself, gives a performance of finely-wrought comedy and grace; he's the clown laughing through a tear or two -- a muscle-head with brains and a heart, too.
In what may prove to be the most successful film yet of his career, Guillermo del Toro playfully (and with great deftness) touches on the truth behind each glam facade; he peers behind the metaphorical make-up and costumes on these otherwordly heroes. But instead of entreating us with their massive pathos, he puckishly points at their hum-drums woes and desires, saying with a big ol' smirk, "See: there can be a summer blockbuster at once visually rich and dramatically quaint." Such a philosophy lends The Golden Army it's occasionally needed heft. But really, most of the time the audience will just be bugging their eyes out -- in one scene at the towering plant god that blossoms into a city-block's worth of foliage; in another at the little old lady who happens to eat cats for funs -- and then giggling at the very things that set their eyes popping. It's a grand trick for a blockbuster that's just rote enough to be irksome, while being just grand enough to make even the Satan himself happy.
WALL-E: A
It's a romantic comedy, an action-adventure, a satire, an ecological/post-apocalyptic fable, and a silent movie that blossoms into a space opera about a tiny tin bucket on wheels who is very much alive -- in every sense of the word. He is WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth Class), and he's the star of WALL-E (you know, the latest Pixar film that got such massive descriptive space above); and he's also its beeping, chirping, purring, whirring soul. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, WALL-E is about a robot whose only function is to compact the trash that has covered the Earth -- and it's a job he's been doing for 700 years. But when his tiniest of glitches (he's developed a personality) leads him on an inter-galactic adventure with what just may be the love of his life, well...that's when things really start to get interesting.
This is where, however, I must re-define the word "interesting," because the second half of WALL-E is interesting only in contrast to its first forty-five minutes because it features dialogue -- that's right, the first act of Stanton's film is almost wholly silent -- which is to say it's no more enthralling than it was to start; and no less enthralling than any other masterpiece released by what may well be the single most skilled studio in all of Hollywood.
We open on a rusty city compromised of skyscrapers made of trash, the detritus itself having been stacked by the last remaining robot on the face of the planet: our hero, WALL-E (Ben Burtt, the audio engineer who gave us the bleeps of R2-D2). The intrepid little guy, who looks like a pair of droopy binoculars stacked on an orange rubics-cube, has gone on now alone for quite some time, so he's appropriately lonely, and his appropriately lonely exploits -- he's a sad-sack office drone with no hope of a lunch break -- fill the first thirty minutes. All he has for company is his indestructible cockroach sidekick, an old VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, and a sleek off-white robot named EVE who may just fall in love with him...or incinerate him. Or both.
This set-up segues flawlessly after another ten or fifteen minutes into a satirical romp aboard the space-station where humans have now lived for nearly a millenia -- the plot now being dominated less by the silent wonders of trash compacting and more with trying to re-instill the urge to live in what are, essentially, a bunch of big technophilic infants. Both acts have their merits, and as previously stated only the second contains any sort of enduring conversation, but for my money what WALL-E does with its opening is pretty bloody brilliant. Silence transfuses the landscape, save for the occasional click-or-clack from our mechanical buddy, but so too does wonder, awe, and beauty. Stanton, who previously helmed the equally exquisite Finding Nemo, strips down the art of cinema in those first thirty minutes to an essence of extreme delicacy, wit, and skill; he turns the comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin into trascendent art.
That same notion of primal passion well-informs the sensibilities of the last hour, as Pixar's most pointed satire -- our mass consumerism will eventually swallow us as we demand more to swallow -- focuses more and more in on the search for home, and for re-birth. But that's just one of the main plots. The other is, of course, the robot love story. And in that, too, silence and its totemic power are key; nary a coherent sentence is formed between EVE and WALL-E but their ardor will, by film's end, bring a lump to your throat.
Seeing the astonishing achievements of this lastest marvel (all the ways it could have veered off course, been then rightly called a "stunt," but didn't), many have called WALL-E Pixar's greatest feat -- and well it may be. Looking back, I'm quickly enamored with Brad Bird's The Incredibles which so perfectly put so many familial, live-action, dramas to shame with less running time and twice as much verve and wit; and, of course, Toy Story and Finding Nemo set milestones for the animation house on the cultural map (all worthily so). But is it true -- Andrew Stanton's film (which he co-wrote with Jim Capobianco) is miraculous, but is it The Miracle? It's a wondrous comedy; a spectacle of synthetic beauty crafted to propel wholly organic universal sentiments; and a romantic adventure plotted with enough engrossing skill to rival anything produced in a live-action arena. There is true cinema magic in the film's workings, truly brilliant purity and heart, so I suppose, in a word, "yes." Or as our protagonist himself would say, "boop."
This is where, however, I must re-define the word "interesting," because the second half of WALL-E is interesting only in contrast to its first forty-five minutes because it features dialogue -- that's right, the first act of Stanton's film is almost wholly silent -- which is to say it's no more enthralling than it was to start; and no less enthralling than any other masterpiece released by what may well be the single most skilled studio in all of Hollywood.
We open on a rusty city compromised of skyscrapers made of trash, the detritus itself having been stacked by the last remaining robot on the face of the planet: our hero, WALL-E (Ben Burtt, the audio engineer who gave us the bleeps of R2-D2). The intrepid little guy, who looks like a pair of droopy binoculars stacked on an orange rubics-cube, has gone on now alone for quite some time, so he's appropriately lonely, and his appropriately lonely exploits -- he's a sad-sack office drone with no hope of a lunch break -- fill the first thirty minutes. All he has for company is his indestructible cockroach sidekick, an old VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, and a sleek off-white robot named EVE who may just fall in love with him...or incinerate him. Or both.
This set-up segues flawlessly after another ten or fifteen minutes into a satirical romp aboard the space-station where humans have now lived for nearly a millenia -- the plot now being dominated less by the silent wonders of trash compacting and more with trying to re-instill the urge to live in what are, essentially, a bunch of big technophilic infants. Both acts have their merits, and as previously stated only the second contains any sort of enduring conversation, but for my money what WALL-E does with its opening is pretty bloody brilliant. Silence transfuses the landscape, save for the occasional click-or-clack from our mechanical buddy, but so too does wonder, awe, and beauty. Stanton, who previously helmed the equally exquisite Finding Nemo, strips down the art of cinema in those first thirty minutes to an essence of extreme delicacy, wit, and skill; he turns the comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin into trascendent art.
That same notion of primal passion well-informs the sensibilities of the last hour, as Pixar's most pointed satire -- our mass consumerism will eventually swallow us as we demand more to swallow -- focuses more and more in on the search for home, and for re-birth. But that's just one of the main plots. The other is, of course, the robot love story. And in that, too, silence and its totemic power are key; nary a coherent sentence is formed between EVE and WALL-E but their ardor will, by film's end, bring a lump to your throat.
Seeing the astonishing achievements of this lastest marvel (all the ways it could have veered off course, been then rightly called a "stunt," but didn't), many have called WALL-E Pixar's greatest feat -- and well it may be. Looking back, I'm quickly enamored with Brad Bird's The Incredibles which so perfectly put so many familial, live-action, dramas to shame with less running time and twice as much verve and wit; and, of course, Toy Story and Finding Nemo set milestones for the animation house on the cultural map (all worthily so). But is it true -- Andrew Stanton's film (which he co-wrote with Jim Capobianco) is miraculous, but is it The Miracle? It's a wondrous comedy; a spectacle of synthetic beauty crafted to propel wholly organic universal sentiments; and a romantic adventure plotted with enough engrossing skill to rival anything produced in a live-action arena. There is true cinema magic in the film's workings, truly brilliant purity and heart, so I suppose, in a word, "yes." Or as our protagonist himself would say, "boop."
Life as We Know It: B-
I've been spoiled. All those episodes of Gilmore Girls or Everwood or The O.C. or Once & Again have lulled me into thinking that all groups of teenage friends are eloquent, thougtful, and witty to the nth degree; and, too, all familial units are pierced most frequently not by their continual moral dilemnas, but by their stringent -- poignant -- self-analysis. (Plus, having fallen in love with Roswell, I thought that even teen soaps that weren't a-poppin' with smarts at least had soul, heart.) Life as We Know It's sales pitch (a pitch developed by Gabe Sachs & Jeff Judah based on a book by Melvin Burgess), on the other hand, flew in the face of all of this accrued experience. It was, instead, about a trio of best friends who stuttered and stammered and tripped their way through an extraordinarily hormonally-charged adolescence.
The friends are Dino Whitman (Sean Faris), Ben Connor (Jon Foster, previously of the moody and mature The Door in the Floor), and Jonathan Fields (Chris Lowell, who later perfected the stammering artsy-geek schtick as Piz on the doomed final season of Veronica Mars). And their adolescence is basically the four women they moon over at various times in order to get laid: Jacky (Missy Peregrym), Deborah (Kelly Osbourne...yes, her), Sue (Jessica Lucas), and Ms. Young (Marguerite Moreau)...a teacher at the school the aforementioned six all attend. The boys' horniness is central to many of the show's plots, and sub-, but the narrative tentpoles are mostly cliches: the cheating mom, the student-teacher affair. It's only as Life progresses does some fresh blood circulate into the story's veins.
New as it may be, the blood still feels stale. Because as previously mentioned, Life has none of the verbal intelligence or deep-dish soul of some of the better teenage melodramas. What it has is an attitude at once flukey, layer-deep, and coy; it's perpetually perched on the edge of emotional climax (pun intended), while rarely achieving it. And, looking at the drama from the introspective angle (such an action being especially warranted because Life copies its character asides, it almost seems, from Once & Again...a far better interpersonal drama), its psychic ramifications are best defined as all surface and no substance -- the televisual equivalent of one of Dr. Phil's "morality" lectures.
The cast is fascinating -- Mr. Faris has a sneer in the early episodes that is at once both affected and masking, possessing, a bitter sincerity and pain -- and their chemistry has some nice moments. The same can be said of most of the series, during particular episodes. Each forty-five minute chunk has some good scenes, even occasionally a very good one (Dino's tearful confession to his friends about his mom's infidelity stands out), but there are only a handful of solid episodes -- "Pilot," "Pilot Junior," "A Little Problem," and, ironically, the last two unaired episodes: "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Junk," and "Papa Wheelie."
Seeing Peter Dinklage make a too-cool guest spot as a shrink to help Dino sort out his post-divorce aggression issues is just a sore reminder about how far the show hasn't reached, all it hasn't achieved. In its thirteen episodes, the girls are never more than super-good friends and a series of rotating one-notes; and of the guys, Ben is the most rounded, while Jonathan is so badly-developed it's almost grating. "Papa Wheelie" is the name of a trick, I suppose, but the real trick of it -- produced as it was as Life's final show -- is that in its exploration of some surprising moments (having Jonathan finally stand-up for himself against his best friends' continual teasing; Dino's parents' new relationships) it does the unthinkable: it gives a previously sealed-up, mostly souless show soul. And that satisfies even as it dissipates quickly. Sort of like high school.
The friends are Dino Whitman (Sean Faris), Ben Connor (Jon Foster, previously of the moody and mature The Door in the Floor), and Jonathan Fields (Chris Lowell, who later perfected the stammering artsy-geek schtick as Piz on the doomed final season of Veronica Mars). And their adolescence is basically the four women they moon over at various times in order to get laid: Jacky (Missy Peregrym), Deborah (Kelly Osbourne...yes, her), Sue (Jessica Lucas), and Ms. Young (Marguerite Moreau)...a teacher at the school the aforementioned six all attend. The boys' horniness is central to many of the show's plots, and sub-, but the narrative tentpoles are mostly cliches: the cheating mom, the student-teacher affair. It's only as Life progresses does some fresh blood circulate into the story's veins.
New as it may be, the blood still feels stale. Because as previously mentioned, Life has none of the verbal intelligence or deep-dish soul of some of the better teenage melodramas. What it has is an attitude at once flukey, layer-deep, and coy; it's perpetually perched on the edge of emotional climax (pun intended), while rarely achieving it. And, looking at the drama from the introspective angle (such an action being especially warranted because Life copies its character asides, it almost seems, from Once & Again...a far better interpersonal drama), its psychic ramifications are best defined as all surface and no substance -- the televisual equivalent of one of Dr. Phil's "morality" lectures.
The cast is fascinating -- Mr. Faris has a sneer in the early episodes that is at once both affected and masking, possessing, a bitter sincerity and pain -- and their chemistry has some nice moments. The same can be said of most of the series, during particular episodes. Each forty-five minute chunk has some good scenes, even occasionally a very good one (Dino's tearful confession to his friends about his mom's infidelity stands out), but there are only a handful of solid episodes -- "Pilot," "Pilot Junior," "A Little Problem," and, ironically, the last two unaired episodes: "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Junk," and "Papa Wheelie."
Seeing Peter Dinklage make a too-cool guest spot as a shrink to help Dino sort out his post-divorce aggression issues is just a sore reminder about how far the show hasn't reached, all it hasn't achieved. In its thirteen episodes, the girls are never more than super-good friends and a series of rotating one-notes; and of the guys, Ben is the most rounded, while Jonathan is so badly-developed it's almost grating. "Papa Wheelie" is the name of a trick, I suppose, but the real trick of it -- produced as it was as Life's final show -- is that in its exploration of some surprising moments (having Jonathan finally stand-up for himself against his best friends' continual teasing; Dino's parents' new relationships) it does the unthinkable: it gives a previously sealed-up, mostly souless show soul. And that satisfies even as it dissipates quickly. Sort of like high school.
In The Valley of Elah: A
In its searing, straight-faced melancholia, its audacious probing austerity, In the Valley of Elah will ravage and destroy the viewer in a way no other post-Iraq War film has. It's structured as a murder mystery -- and it's filmed, with help from cinematographer Roger Deakins, as the most sparely devastating of piquant true-crimes -- that revolves around one man's (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son (Jonathan Tucker), and what happened to him once he returned from serving a tour of duty in Iraq. The man is Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam vet who gets a call one day from an army base in Texas that his son has gone AWOL. Hank, though, is unconvinced -- or at the very least, confused. And so he drives down himself to take a look. And when the military police and the sheriff's department come across the charred remains of his son's, Mike Deerfield, body, Hank decides to stay on in Texas long enough to find out how his boy came to be in many pieces in a dusty field by a dark road.
That's how the movie unravels; Hank, with help from a local detective (Charlize Theron), pieces together what he can from all available sources. This includes the military at the local base, who all but openly stonewall him at all possible points, and his son's cell phone (which he cleverly steals in one of the more telling scenes of Hank's canny character). The phone itself has been all but destroyed, but he gets a local tech wiz to pull of a few of the remaining videos his son shot while on duty -- it turns out Mike was both a rabid amatuer videographer and photographer of his experiences -- and the pieces of viral data themselves have a herky-jerky, lurid fascination. They're glimpses for the audience into a place that comes to represent, more and more as Hank realizes the truth of his son's murder, the great void of our generation: the place where young men go to die -- or lose themselves.
Paul Haggis has written and directed In the Valley of Elah, and it's a curious move for him. This is the same man, after all, who built up a commercial reputation over the last two decades as a television writer, and then burst on the scene creatively with 2005's Crash -- which was itself a mixture of quaint, hour-long narrative structuring and scathing dialogue. Crash doesn't hold up on subsequent viewings, its talky-niceties are too obvious (and thereby foolishly painful) to any viewer who can see past the clever veil of Haggis' explorative script. But Elah doesn't fall into the same category as his Best Picture winner; more aptly its belongs with Letters from Iwo Jima, Casino Royale, and Million Dollar Baby -- a trio of films he's helped write that far more capably demonstrate the strengths of a balanced, talented auteur. In fact, seeing him take the directing reigns again for the first time since Crash, the audience may at first be taken aback at Elah's tone; it's reticent like nothing the writer-director has done before. But that same stoney quality masks chasms of pain, and Haggis, with Tommy Lee Jones as his star and Atlas (since without Jones, the picture may itself have fallen and rolled away into oblivion), investiages these in a way that leaves equally deep chasms in the audience.
As agents of, and against the mystery, the ensemble is surprisingly well fielded. Jones gives one of the best performances of his very long career, and Theron (no longer wearing ugly-up or playing a universal Woman) is so natural she counter-points her older co-star perfectly. As the soldiers who served with Mike, Jake McLaughlin, Jason Patric, and others are so curiously straight-laced its almost laughable, until their facades are stripped bare, and the audience's laughter curdles into shock.
The mystery takes two hours to solve, and somewhere in there the movie sags against its own sparse style, and one grows antsy. But the last twenty-or-so minutes are some of the most singularly biting I've seen in quite a long while. Maybe ever. The denoument of Elah is intrinsic to the titular story and underlying metaphor: David and Goliath, two combatants both brave and blinded. In Haggis narrative scheme, the focus keeps shifting: who is David -- The soldiers we've so happily sent away? The enemy they face, so happy to fire back? -- and who is Goliath -- America, the country? Or America, the people? And each new interrogative sticks deeper, draws more inquistive blood to the surface. Sure, standing 100 yards away a person could point and declare all of In the Valley of Elah a "stunt," (there's irony to a liberal like Haggis writing from the perspective of a conservative like Hank) but if that same person were to walk closer, look closer, they'd be stunned into silence. And that final image, at once obvious and daring? It won't just silence you, it'll bring you to tears.
That's how the movie unravels; Hank, with help from a local detective (Charlize Theron), pieces together what he can from all available sources. This includes the military at the local base, who all but openly stonewall him at all possible points, and his son's cell phone (which he cleverly steals in one of the more telling scenes of Hank's canny character). The phone itself has been all but destroyed, but he gets a local tech wiz to pull of a few of the remaining videos his son shot while on duty -- it turns out Mike was both a rabid amatuer videographer and photographer of his experiences -- and the pieces of viral data themselves have a herky-jerky, lurid fascination. They're glimpses for the audience into a place that comes to represent, more and more as Hank realizes the truth of his son's murder, the great void of our generation: the place where young men go to die -- or lose themselves.
Paul Haggis has written and directed In the Valley of Elah, and it's a curious move for him. This is the same man, after all, who built up a commercial reputation over the last two decades as a television writer, and then burst on the scene creatively with 2005's Crash -- which was itself a mixture of quaint, hour-long narrative structuring and scathing dialogue. Crash doesn't hold up on subsequent viewings, its talky-niceties are too obvious (and thereby foolishly painful) to any viewer who can see past the clever veil of Haggis' explorative script. But Elah doesn't fall into the same category as his Best Picture winner; more aptly its belongs with Letters from Iwo Jima, Casino Royale, and Million Dollar Baby -- a trio of films he's helped write that far more capably demonstrate the strengths of a balanced, talented auteur. In fact, seeing him take the directing reigns again for the first time since Crash, the audience may at first be taken aback at Elah's tone; it's reticent like nothing the writer-director has done before. But that same stoney quality masks chasms of pain, and Haggis, with Tommy Lee Jones as his star and Atlas (since without Jones, the picture may itself have fallen and rolled away into oblivion), investiages these in a way that leaves equally deep chasms in the audience.
As agents of, and against the mystery, the ensemble is surprisingly well fielded. Jones gives one of the best performances of his very long career, and Theron (no longer wearing ugly-up or playing a universal Woman) is so natural she counter-points her older co-star perfectly. As the soldiers who served with Mike, Jake McLaughlin, Jason Patric, and others are so curiously straight-laced its almost laughable, until their facades are stripped bare, and the audience's laughter curdles into shock.
The mystery takes two hours to solve, and somewhere in there the movie sags against its own sparse style, and one grows antsy. But the last twenty-or-so minutes are some of the most singularly biting I've seen in quite a long while. Maybe ever. The denoument of Elah is intrinsic to the titular story and underlying metaphor: David and Goliath, two combatants both brave and blinded. In Haggis narrative scheme, the focus keeps shifting: who is David -- The soldiers we've so happily sent away? The enemy they face, so happy to fire back? -- and who is Goliath -- America, the country? Or America, the people? And each new interrogative sticks deeper, draws more inquistive blood to the surface. Sure, standing 100 yards away a person could point and declare all of In the Valley of Elah a "stunt," (there's irony to a liberal like Haggis writing from the perspective of a conservative like Hank) but if that same person were to walk closer, look closer, they'd be stunned into silence. And that final image, at once obvious and daring? It won't just silence you, it'll bring you to tears.
Kung Fu Panda: A-
I'm not going to lie, as Kung Fu Panda drew to a close I experienced The Moment. You know the one -- it's the moment in the movie-viewing experience where it hits you that this film is, at that point in time, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, inevitably, that feeling wears off 99.765% of the time. (Personally, only in very rare cases -- e.g., A History of Violence -- has it endured.) But when it hits, it practically forces your face to break out in a massive grin; and when in hit with Panda, my face broke exactly as expected. What's unexpected is the fact that, on paper, the film has no right to do anything to my face whatsoever. (Except maybe to make it pucker, like I was watching Ghost Rider II.)
Surprise is a key element to the movie. It's integral both to the plot, and to its quality. For the former, this involves Po (Jack Black) -- a noodle-making tubby chinese panda -- accidently landing smack-dab in the middle of an uber-important kung-fu tournament (the winner gets to be declared the Dragon Warrior) and then being declared the winner himself. No one perhaps is more shocked than the newly-annointed Warrior himself; no one, that is, but Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the wise ol' martial arts master who would rather have nothing to do with creatures who are more than 65% body fat. So annoyed is Shifu, in fact, that he sets out on a campaign to -- under the guise of "training" Po -- scare him away from kung fu forever. This very twist, which helps lead from the first act of the movie to the second, is also the key to the second facet of surprise that is itself key to Kung Fu Panda.
You see, everytime Po gets beat down, he picks himself right back up; his fanboyishness (which, one imagines, originally prevented him from getting up out of bed and exercising to begin with) lighting an endurable fire underneath him never to quit. He's in awe of Shifu and "The Five" -- Shifu's prized group of students -- and it's that very awe that inspires him to become on of them. Such is the moral at the heart of what is, essentially, a stodgy animated Karate Kid. But the film is also a display of bravura tongue-in-cheek technique -- an epic of sarcastic minimalism. It comes as no surprise then to find the film's writers, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, are veteren King of the Hill scribes.
It comes to light that the Dragon Warrior will have to face down an escaped baddie, Tai Lung (Ian McShane), and can only do so with the Dragon Scroll. Basically, what this means is the last act of the film is mostly action sequences, but their drawn and imagined with such rambunctious, infectious, energy, not a second of it sags or grows repititious. All the more power then to Black, who delivers another one of his rare comedic masterpieces -- his trademark soul-on-the-sleeve scene-stealing -- and Hoffman, who is like Yoda's cranky uncle. True, Kung Fu Panda is a kid's movie, and since it's been developed by Dreamworks, it has none of the inherent sophistication of Pixar, but it's also quick-witted and sly enough, fast-paced and beautifully-colored enough, to satisfy all age groups. (Plus, it's far more satisfying for six bucks than, say, Speed Racer.)
Surprise is a key element to the movie. It's integral both to the plot, and to its quality. For the former, this involves Po (Jack Black) -- a noodle-making tubby chinese panda -- accidently landing smack-dab in the middle of an uber-important kung-fu tournament (the winner gets to be declared the Dragon Warrior) and then being declared the winner himself. No one perhaps is more shocked than the newly-annointed Warrior himself; no one, that is, but Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the wise ol' martial arts master who would rather have nothing to do with creatures who are more than 65% body fat. So annoyed is Shifu, in fact, that he sets out on a campaign to -- under the guise of "training" Po -- scare him away from kung fu forever. This very twist, which helps lead from the first act of the movie to the second, is also the key to the second facet of surprise that is itself key to Kung Fu Panda.
You see, everytime Po gets beat down, he picks himself right back up; his fanboyishness (which, one imagines, originally prevented him from getting up out of bed and exercising to begin with) lighting an endurable fire underneath him never to quit. He's in awe of Shifu and "The Five" -- Shifu's prized group of students -- and it's that very awe that inspires him to become on of them. Such is the moral at the heart of what is, essentially, a stodgy animated Karate Kid. But the film is also a display of bravura tongue-in-cheek technique -- an epic of sarcastic minimalism. It comes as no surprise then to find the film's writers, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, are veteren King of the Hill scribes.
It comes to light that the Dragon Warrior will have to face down an escaped baddie, Tai Lung (Ian McShane), and can only do so with the Dragon Scroll. Basically, what this means is the last act of the film is mostly action sequences, but their drawn and imagined with such rambunctious, infectious, energy, not a second of it sags or grows repititious. All the more power then to Black, who delivers another one of his rare comedic masterpieces -- his trademark soul-on-the-sleeve scene-stealing -- and Hoffman, who is like Yoda's cranky uncle. True, Kung Fu Panda is a kid's movie, and since it's been developed by Dreamworks, it has none of the inherent sophistication of Pixar, but it's also quick-witted and sly enough, fast-paced and beautifully-colored enough, to satisfy all age groups. (Plus, it's far more satisfying for six bucks than, say, Speed Racer.)
Friday, June 6, 2008
Sex and the City: B+
We all recognize them: Charlotte (Kristen Davis), the perkily anal brunette, Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the dirty blonde sex-addict, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the flame-haired ball-busting attorney, and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), that blond again/brown again writer-heroine...in love? The hair colors of the neo-Fab Four, and that last question, are posed as a way of cutting straight to the quick - that is, both the glam artifice represented by the quartet's chic 'dos and that timeless romantic interrogative (He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me...) take center stage in Michael Patrick King's tart, emotionally sweeping, way too satisfying Sex and the City.
King's film, based on the show of the same name that ran on HBO for six years (well, like, duh), is at once both true to the soul of the series, and a very necesary tweak. As an inheritor to Sex's throne, the movie would have to have a few things as a prerequisite, or else though certainly it had been made, they would not come. The requirements: each of the gals had to be back, and I mean actually back, with seperate storylines and everything; the biggest of the storylines from the show had to be carried on through (e.g., Carrie and Big's, the wealthy financier played by Chris Noth, romance, always a plot staple); and each of those fortysomethings had to look good - scratch that, damn good - traipsing up and down and all around New York City. The good news is that each of the three items on the above checklist is satisfied and thus, so is the long-time fan. The even better news is that for those people out in Great Ol' America who actually, you know, like movies, Sex will satisfy you to. Part of the reason is that it sweeps up all the newbies real quick like in the opening sequence, schooling us in whats been going on with who and how according to Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. The even bigger reason though is that King, as writer-director, has the savvy talent to expand the canvas of the girl's emotional landscapes (accordingly the narrative potential follows suit) so that most of what's put on screen is both reliably stylish and quick, but also unexpectedly meaty and unfurling (as it should be, with a running time of about 140 minutes).
It goes like this: four years after the series finale, Carrie and Big are still in love, and still living in seperate apartments (their house hunting opens the film); Miranda and Steve (David Eigenberg) are still married...in Brooklyn; Charlotte and Henry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) are still in perfect familial bliss, even with their adopted chinese daughter; and Samantha is still in L.A. with Smith (Jason Lewis), her sexy matinee idol. From these four romantic set-ups springs a plethora of drama, the largest of it centering around Carrie's marriage to Big. And the aftermath. (Don't worry, no spoilers here!) People are cheated on, knocked up, knocked down, hired, yelled at, cried on, and so forth. It's a messy and generous heart King, as writer and director, has tapped into. But he does it (mostly) with a deft grace, always lacing his rocky terrain of love with wit. Plus, for all those times the girls are breaking down or breaking up (or really, even if they're just standing on a street corner), they look...well...like you'd expect the cast of Sex and the City to look: great, gorgeous, stunning. In Carrie's New York, Fashion is God - and I'd be a liar to say watching them worship it isn't some sort of ocular nirvana.
Still, does one come to a movie to experience, or to take notes for Fashion Week? (On second thought, knowing my audience, don't answer that.) As an experience, Sex is gratifying across the board. As a director, King stages everything according to the cosmopolitan rhythms of his show, but he also lets a little punk-soul moderninity slip through, all for the better of course. And as the four muses of his camera, the cast is as good as their clothes. (Which means if you've been paying attention, they're pretty hot stuff.) Cythia Nixon, as the flintiest of the four, has the claws of a Fury and the brittle facade of an abuse victim, both of which mesh into one high-wire, compulsively wrenching performance. Kim Cattrall, as the vixen-cougar (and oldest) of the bunch, has comic timing to spare. Kristen Davis is the cove, the sole part of the whole with minimum neurosis, and in that her work is almost soothing. And then there is Sarah Jessica Parker (or henceforth, SJP): she's not just the star - she's the soul. And as is necesitated from her to sustain such a picture as this, as an actress, she has never been finer. She's older, more lined with weary, but she's also smarter, and rarely have I seen her unique gift - she makes humor seem the very soul of enlightenment.
Now, though, I have to be a downer. Because for a movie in which so much goes right, a lot of little things go wrong. For example: when Jennifer Hudson shows up as SJP's personal assistant, her resulting presence and "character arc" feel overly delicate at best, and at worst forced. And the Samantha/Smith sequences have poignance by their collective end, but it feels like a throwaway (and is thus roughly a layer too thin). Plus, the climactic wedding veers far too deep into Big. Teary. Melodramatic. Confrontation! (I almost laughed watching it in the theater, seriously.) Really though, I quibble. The script is a thing of delightful intelligence and warmth; and it feels good as an audience to sit back for once and have a film unfold before you for hours like a fat novel or a good seven course meal. In fact, I think Sex and the City is more like a great dinner than we realize: it's got fizz to help it go down quick, an aftertaste of richness and emotional piquance, and once it settles into your gut and heart - a very warm, enjoyable glow.
King's film, based on the show of the same name that ran on HBO for six years (well, like, duh), is at once both true to the soul of the series, and a very necesary tweak. As an inheritor to Sex's throne, the movie would have to have a few things as a prerequisite, or else though certainly it had been made, they would not come. The requirements: each of the gals had to be back, and I mean actually back, with seperate storylines and everything; the biggest of the storylines from the show had to be carried on through (e.g., Carrie and Big's, the wealthy financier played by Chris Noth, romance, always a plot staple); and each of those fortysomethings had to look good - scratch that, damn good - traipsing up and down and all around New York City. The good news is that each of the three items on the above checklist is satisfied and thus, so is the long-time fan. The even better news is that for those people out in Great Ol' America who actually, you know, like movies, Sex will satisfy you to. Part of the reason is that it sweeps up all the newbies real quick like in the opening sequence, schooling us in whats been going on with who and how according to Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. The even bigger reason though is that King, as writer-director, has the savvy talent to expand the canvas of the girl's emotional landscapes (accordingly the narrative potential follows suit) so that most of what's put on screen is both reliably stylish and quick, but also unexpectedly meaty and unfurling (as it should be, with a running time of about 140 minutes).
It goes like this: four years after the series finale, Carrie and Big are still in love, and still living in seperate apartments (their house hunting opens the film); Miranda and Steve (David Eigenberg) are still married...in Brooklyn; Charlotte and Henry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) are still in perfect familial bliss, even with their adopted chinese daughter; and Samantha is still in L.A. with Smith (Jason Lewis), her sexy matinee idol. From these four romantic set-ups springs a plethora of drama, the largest of it centering around Carrie's marriage to Big. And the aftermath. (Don't worry, no spoilers here!) People are cheated on, knocked up, knocked down, hired, yelled at, cried on, and so forth. It's a messy and generous heart King, as writer and director, has tapped into. But he does it (mostly) with a deft grace, always lacing his rocky terrain of love with wit. Plus, for all those times the girls are breaking down or breaking up (or really, even if they're just standing on a street corner), they look...well...like you'd expect the cast of Sex and the City to look: great, gorgeous, stunning. In Carrie's New York, Fashion is God - and I'd be a liar to say watching them worship it isn't some sort of ocular nirvana.
Still, does one come to a movie to experience, or to take notes for Fashion Week? (On second thought, knowing my audience, don't answer that.) As an experience, Sex is gratifying across the board. As a director, King stages everything according to the cosmopolitan rhythms of his show, but he also lets a little punk-soul moderninity slip through, all for the better of course. And as the four muses of his camera, the cast is as good as their clothes. (Which means if you've been paying attention, they're pretty hot stuff.) Cythia Nixon, as the flintiest of the four, has the claws of a Fury and the brittle facade of an abuse victim, both of which mesh into one high-wire, compulsively wrenching performance. Kim Cattrall, as the vixen-cougar (and oldest) of the bunch, has comic timing to spare. Kristen Davis is the cove, the sole part of the whole with minimum neurosis, and in that her work is almost soothing. And then there is Sarah Jessica Parker (or henceforth, SJP): she's not just the star - she's the soul. And as is necesitated from her to sustain such a picture as this, as an actress, she has never been finer. She's older, more lined with weary, but she's also smarter, and rarely have I seen her unique gift - she makes humor seem the very soul of enlightenment.
Now, though, I have to be a downer. Because for a movie in which so much goes right, a lot of little things go wrong. For example: when Jennifer Hudson shows up as SJP's personal assistant, her resulting presence and "character arc" feel overly delicate at best, and at worst forced. And the Samantha/Smith sequences have poignance by their collective end, but it feels like a throwaway (and is thus roughly a layer too thin). Plus, the climactic wedding veers far too deep into Big. Teary. Melodramatic. Confrontation! (I almost laughed watching it in the theater, seriously.) Really though, I quibble. The script is a thing of delightful intelligence and warmth; and it feels good as an audience to sit back for once and have a film unfold before you for hours like a fat novel or a good seven course meal. In fact, I think Sex and the City is more like a great dinner than we realize: it's got fizz to help it go down quick, an aftertaste of richness and emotional piquance, and once it settles into your gut and heart - a very warm, enjoyable glow.
No Country for Old Men: A-
There's a scene that occurs in Martin Scorsese's 2006 splatterific The Departed just as it's getting geared up: Matt Damon - wound into infinite coils of paranoia, cunning, and self-loathing - is being stalked through the dark back streets of Boston, and as the seconds tick by he jolts and slips through the darkness with ever-increasing urgency (the camera rollicking right along with him in spasms of uncertainty and dread). The nerve-jangling suspense of that chase scene is bone-deep but it lasts not even a few minutes; that same feeling thrums throughout No Country for Old Men for hours (two and some change, to be precise). Where The Departed subsisted mostly on the snappy bad-cop/good-cop/tired-cop schematics of Scorsese's filmmaking, No Country is intrinsically tied into the sort of neo-gothic-Western Cormac McCarthy has made his bread and butter (no surprise then to find the film is based on one of his books). It's lean and quiet, sprawlingly dark, and (on that rare wry occasion) just really, really, entertaining.
Such facets of quality have been served up by Joel and Ethan Coen which is ironic - or in the case of the Coen brothers: ironically ironic - because Country would have best been made by the two of them about twenty years ago, just right after their breakthough noir Blood Simple. It has a lot of stylistic similarities to Simple: sparse but beautifully expansive aesthetic; recurring episodes of fatal violence. Plus, had it been released in 1988 instead of 2007, it wouldn't have shocked audiences too long used to the ol' Coen style: smugly over-ironized black comedies. As it was, the film did indeed shock them; but after that initial gasp (of uncertainty, maybe even fear) came a few more (of delight, of fascination). And then there were the questions. How did they translate McCarthy's cauterized and searing prose into something like this (through something like the Coen Schtick)? How did they do it after so long away from their masterpiece-making roots (last seen presumably with 1996's Fargo)?
Whatever or however, I'm now a believer. The film, which opens with a Tommy Lee Jones voice-over (always a treat) and goes on to tell the story of how one Texas hunter (Josh Brolin) finds two million dollars and then must run for his life from the guy who wants it back (Javier Bardem, chilling even in his wack-a-do haircut), is so perfectly observed, so fundamentally right in its execution, one wonders whether the brothers shouldn't just go ahead and adapt the whole McCarthy library. Rising to any and all challenges is the cast, bleak and battered every one, of which Bardem and Jones, as the small-town sheriff trying also to track Brolin down, are the exceptional standouts. They wince and straight-face and even (in the case of Jones) twinkle with bare-bones wisdom at all the right moments, with all the right amounts of energy. It takes a certain sort of performer to handle the Coen's dialogue and filmmaking technique. Frances McDormand could do it; and now, apparently, so can the good ol' Texans of No Country for Old Men.
In terms of verbal translation, nothing is lost. What's more, and though I've yet to read the literary source, one imagines a little something is gained as the tale transitions to the silver screen. There is a dash of wry wit biting into the edges of the film, relieving your high adrenaline-levels when you least expect it with morbid laughter. But the laughter is the exception: usually you'll just be gripping the seat cushions. Part of this lies in the nature of the story (i.e., there is something innately dreadful about a psychopath who will just not stop) but the bigger part lies in the talents of the writer-director duo who have so subtly but delightfully re-discovered their gifts. There is not a beat missed throughout the movie, not a shot out of place, and even though the underlying mayhem that served as a catalyst for the plot is a little murky, the resutling mayhem is crystal-clear in its bruise-black insistence. Though No Country seems to start to lurch in its last twenty minutes, never does a viewer get seasick. All credit is therefore due to Joel and Ethan Coen - a pair of anarchic filmmakers who turned down their smiling tongues-in-cheek just to turn up the admiration on their fine, fine legacy.
Such facets of quality have been served up by Joel and Ethan Coen which is ironic - or in the case of the Coen brothers: ironically ironic - because Country would have best been made by the two of them about twenty years ago, just right after their breakthough noir Blood Simple. It has a lot of stylistic similarities to Simple: sparse but beautifully expansive aesthetic; recurring episodes of fatal violence. Plus, had it been released in 1988 instead of 2007, it wouldn't have shocked audiences too long used to the ol' Coen style: smugly over-ironized black comedies. As it was, the film did indeed shock them; but after that initial gasp (of uncertainty, maybe even fear) came a few more (of delight, of fascination). And then there were the questions. How did they translate McCarthy's cauterized and searing prose into something like this (through something like the Coen Schtick)? How did they do it after so long away from their masterpiece-making roots (last seen presumably with 1996's Fargo)?
Whatever or however, I'm now a believer. The film, which opens with a Tommy Lee Jones voice-over (always a treat) and goes on to tell the story of how one Texas hunter (Josh Brolin) finds two million dollars and then must run for his life from the guy who wants it back (Javier Bardem, chilling even in his wack-a-do haircut), is so perfectly observed, so fundamentally right in its execution, one wonders whether the brothers shouldn't just go ahead and adapt the whole McCarthy library. Rising to any and all challenges is the cast, bleak and battered every one, of which Bardem and Jones, as the small-town sheriff trying also to track Brolin down, are the exceptional standouts. They wince and straight-face and even (in the case of Jones) twinkle with bare-bones wisdom at all the right moments, with all the right amounts of energy. It takes a certain sort of performer to handle the Coen's dialogue and filmmaking technique. Frances McDormand could do it; and now, apparently, so can the good ol' Texans of No Country for Old Men.
In terms of verbal translation, nothing is lost. What's more, and though I've yet to read the literary source, one imagines a little something is gained as the tale transitions to the silver screen. There is a dash of wry wit biting into the edges of the film, relieving your high adrenaline-levels when you least expect it with morbid laughter. But the laughter is the exception: usually you'll just be gripping the seat cushions. Part of this lies in the nature of the story (i.e., there is something innately dreadful about a psychopath who will just not stop) but the bigger part lies in the talents of the writer-director duo who have so subtly but delightfully re-discovered their gifts. There is not a beat missed throughout the movie, not a shot out of place, and even though the underlying mayhem that served as a catalyst for the plot is a little murky, the resutling mayhem is crystal-clear in its bruise-black insistence. Though No Country seems to start to lurch in its last twenty minutes, never does a viewer get seasick. All credit is therefore due to Joel and Ethan Coen - a pair of anarchic filmmakers who turned down their smiling tongues-in-cheek just to turn up the admiration on their fine, fine legacy.
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