"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.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
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.)
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