In 2004 there was this show—this little, tiny show about this girl in this town. And she was damaged and jaded and full of so much emotional baggage you could just about see her staggering as she walked—except she was also smart, and beautiful, and funny. Plus, she solved crime. With the help of a sidekick. And a dog.For three years this show went on, struggling against low ratings and viewer apathy and a late-series outbreak of Narrativeitis (common symptoms: desperate guest spots, flashy storylines like serial rape, and harebrained structuring), until it was canceled. In 2007, the world saw the end of Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars.
I talk my way through all of that as a way of better providing the context with which to judge Rob Thomas’ new show, which is actually a reboot of his 1998 romantic-comedy, Cupid. After having proven he’s a television writer-producer with a knack for writing dialogue marked by both wit and angst, the bar has been set awfully high—perhaps too high. Because Cupid, which airs weekly on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC, while pleasing at times, is no Mars. It’s not as original, or as vivid, or as emotionally sincere. It is, instead, broad and rote and a bit sophomoric.
Bobby Cannavale, his caterpillar eyebrows scrunching and un-scrunching in pantomime of comedic timing, plays a man—“Trevor Pierce”—who may or may not be the titular Roman god of love. Sarah Paulson plays the shrink assigned to his case (she’s both monitoring him to make sure he doesn’t “harm” anyone and to do research for her next Dating 101 best-seller). The issue is that Trevor needs to match-up 100 couples before he’s allowed back on Mount Olympus. Problem is, both Sarah and the rest of New York City have a bit of an issue with “true love:” they hate it.
And so they head out, one tsk-tsking after the other. Sparks fly. Laughs are had.
Yet here’s the thing: as much as I wanted to write off Cupid after its first thirty minutes, I was thrown for a loop by its second act. Though the theme is cartoonishly clichéd—Trevor is all for the sizzle and passion, Paulson’s Claire is all for long conversations and deep connection—the stories that act them out give out a pleasant snap. In the pilot, for example, a man (Sean Maguire) flies all the way from Ireland to find a woman he met for twenty minutes. Once in NYC, he hooks up with a journalist (Marguerite Moureau, way better here than in Life as We Know It) to help get the word out to his mystery gal. Things happen, some of which you can guess and some of which you can’t, and the ending comes as a nice twist. The dialogue, for all it lacks in smarts, has more than enough heart.
Now here’s hoping the rest of Cupid could get into shape. Who knows—if that happens, maybe some god, somewhere, really is smiling down on Rob Thomas & Co.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Brick: A-
“I don't know, but whether she scraped or copped or just ran her tab around the world and into her own back, it must have been grand.”
A teenage loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) receives a frantic call from his ex-girlfriend (Emile de Raven): she’s in some sort of trouble—she’s fallen in with the wrong crowd—things are falling on her head, fast, and hard.He begins to sort out the fall-out. Characters are encountered: vixens, vamps, tramps, dopers, druggies, dealers, and pinheads—and each has their niche, their hook, their own particular brand of delirious one-liner. (“You looking to get back into things? I could use you,” purrs one particular Drama Queen—and the chick ain’t kidding: she holds court behind the theatre in a massive dressing room, and her offers come like daggers wrapped in velvet.) Up, up, up the social ladder the kid climbs, until he ends with a bloodbath.
People die.Weary, our hero stands in the mist, waiting for the final clinching moment—the dénouement—that will seal the fates of everyone involved, all the way back to the poor dead girl in the storm drain. And out of the mist, come to answer for it all, and put it all to bed, who could it be but…?
The trick is in the telling and I won’t reveal the final catch of Brick. Three years ago, when I saw the debut of Rian Johnson’s debut film, I was as mesmerized as I was perplexed. Its intricacies confused me as much as the dialogue and style left me overjoyed. And yet now, when revisiting the movie, the haze of its structure and homage to Dashiell Hammett clears, and all becomes clear: just as one-of-several femme fatales sings, “Ah, but pray make no mistake/We’re very wide awake,” the admonishment could seem almost to reach through the screen, as if to say, “He knew it all along—which is part of the fun, the mystery, as much as it is a tragedy.”
A teenage loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) receives a frantic call from his ex-girlfriend (Emile de Raven): she’s in some sort of trouble—she’s fallen in with the wrong crowd—things are falling on her head, fast, and hard.He begins to sort out the fall-out. Characters are encountered: vixens, vamps, tramps, dopers, druggies, dealers, and pinheads—and each has their niche, their hook, their own particular brand of delirious one-liner. (“You looking to get back into things? I could use you,” purrs one particular Drama Queen—and the chick ain’t kidding: she holds court behind the theatre in a massive dressing room, and her offers come like daggers wrapped in velvet.) Up, up, up the social ladder the kid climbs, until he ends with a bloodbath.
People die.Weary, our hero stands in the mist, waiting for the final clinching moment—the dénouement—that will seal the fates of everyone involved, all the way back to the poor dead girl in the storm drain. And out of the mist, come to answer for it all, and put it all to bed, who could it be but…?
The trick is in the telling and I won’t reveal the final catch of Brick. Three years ago, when I saw the debut of Rian Johnson’s debut film, I was as mesmerized as I was perplexed. Its intricacies confused me as much as the dialogue and style left me overjoyed. And yet now, when revisiting the movie, the haze of its structure and homage to Dashiell Hammett clears, and all becomes clear: just as one-of-several femme fatales sings, “Ah, but pray make no mistake/We’re very wide awake,” the admonishment could seem almost to reach through the screen, as if to say, “He knew it all along—which is part of the fun, the mystery, as much as it is a tragedy.”
The Reader: B-
I don’t get bored in movies easily. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many, or because I tend to fit on some pseudo-intellectual armor before each viewing so that the mere idea of sleeping through a piece of art seems preposterous. Regardless, whatever the reason, it must be revealed that it’s been quite some time before I grew truly, sincerely, authentically restless during a film. However, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader gets the rare honor of having made me truly bored—sleepy, even—as its narrative of secrecies and illicit affairs and ghastly Holocaust-era crimes unspooled in handsome, handsomely anguished scenes.
Years ago (dates are unimportant; they flash upon you on title cards and disappear just as quickly) a boy, Michael Berg (David Kross), was sick on the sidewalk as he came home from school. It was raining, and the lady who lived just past the vomit-covered stoop took pity on him. Pity became affection, and that affection became erotic. Soon sex was involved. (It’s graphic and abundant, but tastefully patterned.) The only thing to distinguish this underage affair from all others was the woman’s propensity for being read aloud to, and for harboring some sort of…something behind her weathered brow.Eventually they drifted apart. There was a sort of stately logic in their romantic dissolution, even as the break-up strives valiantly to be not so: as they came together, so they fell apart—the end.
The present arrives. And now Michael is older (and played by Ralph Fiennes). And he is plagued—as equally plagued by frets and worries and soul-crushing moral quandaries as his lover, long ago, seemed to be.
To spoil the actual plot points would be to ruin The Reader entirely—to dull even its vaguely-sharp nubs down to nothing. No, I’ll merely present the symmetry as an opening salvo of curiosity, allowing your own mind to lead you into a viewing… But I will reveal one thing, and leave you warned with another: first, writer David Hare, adapting from the novel Bernhard Schlink, struggles mightily to communicate valiant notions of survivor’s guilt and moral relativism and other such weighty things but he fails in doing so as he fails in challenging his own aesthetic—as much as his The Hours was a pretty mood piece that went six feet down instead of ten, so is his latest work ostensibly laced-up instead of lacerating; and second, Kate Winslet plays the woman who once figured so prominently in Michael’s life, and her performance finds its own sort of expression even in a movie that gracefully locks her down—but be wary regardless, because The Reader is at worst a yawn-inducing, sentimental bore, and if you stare into her big sad eyes long enough, you’ll be forgiven for thinking “Lifetime Presents…” precedes the title.
Years ago (dates are unimportant; they flash upon you on title cards and disappear just as quickly) a boy, Michael Berg (David Kross), was sick on the sidewalk as he came home from school. It was raining, and the lady who lived just past the vomit-covered stoop took pity on him. Pity became affection, and that affection became erotic. Soon sex was involved. (It’s graphic and abundant, but tastefully patterned.) The only thing to distinguish this underage affair from all others was the woman’s propensity for being read aloud to, and for harboring some sort of…something behind her weathered brow.Eventually they drifted apart. There was a sort of stately logic in their romantic dissolution, even as the break-up strives valiantly to be not so: as they came together, so they fell apart—the end.
The present arrives. And now Michael is older (and played by Ralph Fiennes). And he is plagued—as equally plagued by frets and worries and soul-crushing moral quandaries as his lover, long ago, seemed to be.
To spoil the actual plot points would be to ruin The Reader entirely—to dull even its vaguely-sharp nubs down to nothing. No, I’ll merely present the symmetry as an opening salvo of curiosity, allowing your own mind to lead you into a viewing… But I will reveal one thing, and leave you warned with another: first, writer David Hare, adapting from the novel Bernhard Schlink, struggles mightily to communicate valiant notions of survivor’s guilt and moral relativism and other such weighty things but he fails in doing so as he fails in challenging his own aesthetic—as much as his The Hours was a pretty mood piece that went six feet down instead of ten, so is his latest work ostensibly laced-up instead of lacerating; and second, Kate Winslet plays the woman who once figured so prominently in Michael’s life, and her performance finds its own sort of expression even in a movie that gracefully locks her down—but be wary regardless, because The Reader is at worst a yawn-inducing, sentimental bore, and if you stare into her big sad eyes long enough, you’ll be forgiven for thinking “Lifetime Presents…” precedes the title.
A seamless treat—as swirling, vibrant, and ecstatic an entertainment as the movies are likely to produce this year, Slumdog Millionaire may well be contrived, a confection, but its construction defies artificiality; and what’s more, the film has the further audacity to explore and exploit such an idea. Director Danny Boyle, in great whirling control of a talent long confined to psychological thrillers (Sunshine, 28 Days Later) taps right back into the vein of propulsive zest that ran through his debut, Trainspotting, and his latest work—alternately a fusion of cultures, genres, and cinematic devices—practically jumps to life for it.
There is a coldness somewhere in the manipulation proposed and propagated as the film progresses—a certain need to balk at being asked to produce so many stock emotions at just such stock junctures in the narrative (a mother’s murder, a lover’s dislocation). Regardless, a surface happiness, a glow, subsists throughout. In part due to the pitch-perfect behind-the-camera work (from the aforementioned Boyle, paired nicely with writer Simon Beaufoy, who adapts the novel Q&A into a effortless interweaving of flash-backs and ruminations on things past, to composer A.R. Rahman, who provides the film’s kinetic soundtrack), and also with thanks to the actors (all of whom, through three different ages, and cast in a tricky triangle pattern, give grit to the fairytale), Slumdog Millionaire is triumphant on several levels. And if I love it just a little less than all those who surround me, it’s not without a little trepidation: by credits end, the film gets so good at whipping you into a frenzy of feelings, the lack of true sublimity warrants a slight pause.
Regardless, Dev Patel, as the titular Indian orphan competing on the much-tarter version of what we all watched back here with Regis Philban, is magnetically charming—he acts without appearing to do so; seconds in and the seams of his performance (the accent, the rather-large spectrum of Big Emotions) disappear—Poof! All that remains is a star. One more swirl of color, light, and storytelling delight, and the film itself vanishes—Poof!
All that’s left is joy.
There is a coldness somewhere in the manipulation proposed and propagated as the film progresses—a certain need to balk at being asked to produce so many stock emotions at just such stock junctures in the narrative (a mother’s murder, a lover’s dislocation). Regardless, a surface happiness, a glow, subsists throughout. In part due to the pitch-perfect behind-the-camera work (from the aforementioned Boyle, paired nicely with writer Simon Beaufoy, who adapts the novel Q&A into a effortless interweaving of flash-backs and ruminations on things past, to composer A.R. Rahman, who provides the film’s kinetic soundtrack), and also with thanks to the actors (all of whom, through three different ages, and cast in a tricky triangle pattern, give grit to the fairytale), Slumdog Millionaire is triumphant on several levels. And if I love it just a little less than all those who surround me, it’s not without a little trepidation: by credits end, the film gets so good at whipping you into a frenzy of feelings, the lack of true sublimity warrants a slight pause.
Regardless, Dev Patel, as the titular Indian orphan competing on the much-tarter version of what we all watched back here with Regis Philban, is magnetically charming—he acts without appearing to do so; seconds in and the seams of his performance (the accent, the rather-large spectrum of Big Emotions) disappear—Poof! All that remains is a star. One more swirl of color, light, and storytelling delight, and the film itself vanishes—Poof!
All that’s left is joy.
Milk: A-
I enjoy Milk the less I think about it, and the more time that passes.
I enjoyed Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay immediately, but not wholeheartedly. It finds character definition in voice-over or in the refracted angle of a silver whistle, or in a final weighty glance at a poster for the San Francisco Opera. There are also the conventional methods used to construct a biopic, but they’re tempered by a light touch of flamboyance—of joy. Black peppers his archival footage and ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue with humor, but his plotting, though fleet and framed by the most curiously intriguing of devices, is inelegant.
I enjoyed more what director Gus Van Sant does, as he finally bursts free from years of depressing stylistic tics. The Van Sant in control of Milk is the same Van Sant who wrote and directed the “Le Marais” segment of Paris, je t’aime—a man who finds the vibrancy in a casually poignant sexual life: a sort of anti-Woody Allen in that he sets up casual connections without also chaining them together with psycho-sexual significance. He glides through his story, bouncing from one true story to another in the life of some pretty incredible people. His film stock roughens at times, dating itself even as its ploy for sincerity is effective and the past is allowed to seep into the present. At others he side-steps a moment to brighten up the entire film with grand swoops of fervor—as with the rainbow-colored telephone tree or Danny Elfman’s operatic score. He takes what is a better-than-average script and makes a better-than-average film that sags only occasionally, and charms almost consistently. No longer the downer who freeze-dried Elephant in its own “relevance,” this is a man who finds inspiration in inspiration—and his art resurges, joyfully, for it.
At once I completely applaud the supporting performers of Milk—like Emile Hersch, as political aid Cleve Jones, bustling with nervy charm, or James Franco as Scott Smith—and am a little put-off by them. Of all the elements in Milk, they are the least defined: sure they’re witty little gay men, huddled together and building a rebellious political machine of their own out in the Castro, but that’s all they ever are: a collective. As much as Black and Van Sant find a sort of zeitgeisty way to create and color-in-the-lines of their main character, through group demonstration, or as he stands on a soap box protesting to the masses, the same methods can’t be said to be effective with the surrounding cast. Friends, lovers, allies, all—save Dan White (who Josh Brolin gives a twinkling sort of psychosis all by his repressed-self)—just sort of remain on the sidelines, even as they catapult occasionally to the forefront.
Yet all of that is for naught. Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, the man who would upset the status quo in the 1970s with his tireless fight for gay rights, is so comfortable in someone else’s skin (and he’s such a competent physical mimic) that even the film’s flaws are built into his performance—he makes even cinematic inconsistencies delightful. Fearlessly fey, but with a cool pragmatic sensibility, Penn’s Milk is at once a stereotype upended, and that same stereotype writ large. Paradoxically, it makes his life, refracted through both sensibilities, all the more rich.
And, too, it makes his death all the sadder. I’m not one to choke up at movies, and I didn’t here, but the heft of Milk is in its persistence, it dogged pursuit of betterment. And in the current climate, couldn’t we all learn a little from Mr. Milk when he said “You’ve got to give ‘em hope”?
I enjoyed Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay immediately, but not wholeheartedly. It finds character definition in voice-over or in the refracted angle of a silver whistle, or in a final weighty glance at a poster for the San Francisco Opera. There are also the conventional methods used to construct a biopic, but they’re tempered by a light touch of flamboyance—of joy. Black peppers his archival footage and ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue with humor, but his plotting, though fleet and framed by the most curiously intriguing of devices, is inelegant.
I enjoyed more what director Gus Van Sant does, as he finally bursts free from years of depressing stylistic tics. The Van Sant in control of Milk is the same Van Sant who wrote and directed the “Le Marais” segment of Paris, je t’aime—a man who finds the vibrancy in a casually poignant sexual life: a sort of anti-Woody Allen in that he sets up casual connections without also chaining them together with psycho-sexual significance. He glides through his story, bouncing from one true story to another in the life of some pretty incredible people. His film stock roughens at times, dating itself even as its ploy for sincerity is effective and the past is allowed to seep into the present. At others he side-steps a moment to brighten up the entire film with grand swoops of fervor—as with the rainbow-colored telephone tree or Danny Elfman’s operatic score. He takes what is a better-than-average script and makes a better-than-average film that sags only occasionally, and charms almost consistently. No longer the downer who freeze-dried Elephant in its own “relevance,” this is a man who finds inspiration in inspiration—and his art resurges, joyfully, for it.
At once I completely applaud the supporting performers of Milk—like Emile Hersch, as political aid Cleve Jones, bustling with nervy charm, or James Franco as Scott Smith—and am a little put-off by them. Of all the elements in Milk, they are the least defined: sure they’re witty little gay men, huddled together and building a rebellious political machine of their own out in the Castro, but that’s all they ever are: a collective. As much as Black and Van Sant find a sort of zeitgeisty way to create and color-in-the-lines of their main character, through group demonstration, or as he stands on a soap box protesting to the masses, the same methods can’t be said to be effective with the surrounding cast. Friends, lovers, allies, all—save Dan White (who Josh Brolin gives a twinkling sort of psychosis all by his repressed-self)—just sort of remain on the sidelines, even as they catapult occasionally to the forefront.
Yet all of that is for naught. Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, the man who would upset the status quo in the 1970s with his tireless fight for gay rights, is so comfortable in someone else’s skin (and he’s such a competent physical mimic) that even the film’s flaws are built into his performance—he makes even cinematic inconsistencies delightful. Fearlessly fey, but with a cool pragmatic sensibility, Penn’s Milk is at once a stereotype upended, and that same stereotype writ large. Paradoxically, it makes his life, refracted through both sensibilities, all the more rich.
And, too, it makes his death all the sadder. I’m not one to choke up at movies, and I didn’t here, but the heft of Milk is in its persistence, it dogged pursuit of betterment. And in the current climate, couldn’t we all learn a little from Mr. Milk when he said “You’ve got to give ‘em hope”?
Doubt: B
With much symbolic wringing of his hands, writer-director John Patrick Shanley fussily brings his previously Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play Doubt to the screen—and yet the ironic thing is, the transition itself brings about much of the titular emotion. Sure, the central quartet of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis seem qualified enough—but in the opening thirty minutes Streep, that grand dame of accents and method sublimation of self into character, gives a performance of such sheer overheated nonsense (with speech inflections and physical tics that border on rococo) that she threatens to leave the audience laughing, instead of pondering, at the pile of melodramatic entanglements at St. Nicholas’ Catholic School.
Luckily her performance slows and blossoms, minute by minute, into something far more recognizable as derived from quality instead of Quaaludes, and as it softens and comes into focus, so inversely does the narrative—hardening, sharpening, itself. It goes like this: Streep, as Sister Aloysius, suspects her only black student (Joseph Foster II) of having been advanced on inappropriately by Father Flynn (played by Hoffman with a disarming vulnerability); her suspicions are strengthened by the opinions of Sister James (Adams, who is the only of the main four to truly hit the film’s rhythm of comedy and naturalism smothered by an overarching Gothic tragedy). So she launches a campaign to reveal and remove the priest. At one point her quest takes her into contact with the young boy’s mother (who is inhabited by Davis with a force of conviction that lends her every subversive line an extra twist of spiteful, saddening, regret) and their scene together brings the film crackling to life.
Yet here’s the thing: Doubt is an artful enough experiment in unsettling and disturbing an audience’s sympathies and points-of-view—it plants seeds of uncertainty and unease with a literate grace (as with Father Flynn’s beautiful opening sermon). However Shanley is by no means a confident director (his camera stubbornly pulls the viewer’s eye to the most obvious of symbols and visual allegories with a ham-fisted redundancy), and on the whole he elicits merely adequate performances from his A-list cast. Thematically, the film (as the play before it) is concerned chiefly with an atmosphere of hushed paranoia that creeps, with subtlety and much justification, into the mind of the viewer until Doubt itself prevails everywhere. But there is much too much drama—loud, obvious, persistent, emotional—in this drama for that to take place. The movie unsettles, but that emotional integrity comes at the cost of elegant presentation.
“In Ancient Sparta, important matters were decided by who could shout the loudest. Luckily, we are not in Ancient Sparta,” Sister Aloysius says, half-way through. Coming away from the closing-credits, though, Meryl, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Luckily her performance slows and blossoms, minute by minute, into something far more recognizable as derived from quality instead of Quaaludes, and as it softens and comes into focus, so inversely does the narrative—hardening, sharpening, itself. It goes like this: Streep, as Sister Aloysius, suspects her only black student (Joseph Foster II) of having been advanced on inappropriately by Father Flynn (played by Hoffman with a disarming vulnerability); her suspicions are strengthened by the opinions of Sister James (Adams, who is the only of the main four to truly hit the film’s rhythm of comedy and naturalism smothered by an overarching Gothic tragedy). So she launches a campaign to reveal and remove the priest. At one point her quest takes her into contact with the young boy’s mother (who is inhabited by Davis with a force of conviction that lends her every subversive line an extra twist of spiteful, saddening, regret) and their scene together brings the film crackling to life.
Yet here’s the thing: Doubt is an artful enough experiment in unsettling and disturbing an audience’s sympathies and points-of-view—it plants seeds of uncertainty and unease with a literate grace (as with Father Flynn’s beautiful opening sermon). However Shanley is by no means a confident director (his camera stubbornly pulls the viewer’s eye to the most obvious of symbols and visual allegories with a ham-fisted redundancy), and on the whole he elicits merely adequate performances from his A-list cast. Thematically, the film (as the play before it) is concerned chiefly with an atmosphere of hushed paranoia that creeps, with subtlety and much justification, into the mind of the viewer until Doubt itself prevails everywhere. But there is much too much drama—loud, obvious, persistent, emotional—in this drama for that to take place. The movie unsettles, but that emotional integrity comes at the cost of elegant presentation.
“In Ancient Sparta, important matters were decided by who could shout the loudest. Luckily, we are not in Ancient Sparta,” Sister Aloysius says, half-way through. Coming away from the closing-credits, though, Meryl, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Frost/Nixon: B+
Peter Morgan, who wrote Frost/Nixon, may very well be a great writer—a great playwright (he wrote the original play), a great screenwriter (and now the cinematic adaptation), a great dramatist, period. And it’s a curious thing, his greatness, as it comes at no expense to his storytelling. In the combined field of stage and screen that contains such voluble, densely eloquent (or else tersely clever) writers as David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, and Charlie Kaufman, it is most strange indeed to find that talent who finds greatness without talking himself into circles. Morgan does just that; and as an extension of his cleanly witty dialogue, his narratives are similarly created: propulsive, but elegant—minimal, but never spare. Above all, his works are always most entertaining—most thrilling—for the way they link the audience into the character’s struggles for validation, for security, and (most often) for power.
Frost/Nixon, which Ron Howard directs with a casual mastery of internal-external staging, both enlivening and expanding the original’s theatrical dynamics, is no exception. It is, ostensibly, about more than just an interview: it’s also about the lives of the two men who made history some thirty years ago when one, David Frost (Michael Sheen), decided to question the other, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), for nearly thirty hours. Yet their lives are of no real importance, and in cinematic context it fleshes them out none as characters (the fleshing out is all left to their actors, who have an ease and mastery of projection that, one supposes, is only granted after years of performance). So when the interviewing actually begins a little more than an hour in, well, that’s truly when the movie begins too, more—it practically jumps to life, with Howard’s camera volleying back and forth as if watching a tennis match with missiles instead of balls.
Morgan has great fun sizing up and exploring the capabilities of his central, centrally opposed, forces; and his director has great fun in interweaving clips from the “present” to not only date the movie, but give it a sort of reverberated-in-hindsight relevance. So well is the visual and verbal layered together, with such verve and momentum, that what may occasionally seem urbane in Morgan’s script begins to sizzle with life…and the wounded vanities that hide beneath it.
Kudos to Langella and Sheen—who relish their battle by giving perfectly edited-down performances that are adorned neither with flamboyance or melodrama; and who, because of that, give a center to the dramatization spinning about them. It doesn’t have quite the bite, either psychological or social, of Morgan’s The Queen. But Frost/Nixon is a perfect lesson in the essence of nuts-and-bolts storytelling: it speaks (smartly, persuasively) for itself.
Frost/Nixon, which Ron Howard directs with a casual mastery of internal-external staging, both enlivening and expanding the original’s theatrical dynamics, is no exception. It is, ostensibly, about more than just an interview: it’s also about the lives of the two men who made history some thirty years ago when one, David Frost (Michael Sheen), decided to question the other, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), for nearly thirty hours. Yet their lives are of no real importance, and in cinematic context it fleshes them out none as characters (the fleshing out is all left to their actors, who have an ease and mastery of projection that, one supposes, is only granted after years of performance). So when the interviewing actually begins a little more than an hour in, well, that’s truly when the movie begins too, more—it practically jumps to life, with Howard’s camera volleying back and forth as if watching a tennis match with missiles instead of balls.
Morgan has great fun sizing up and exploring the capabilities of his central, centrally opposed, forces; and his director has great fun in interweaving clips from the “present” to not only date the movie, but give it a sort of reverberated-in-hindsight relevance. So well is the visual and verbal layered together, with such verve and momentum, that what may occasionally seem urbane in Morgan’s script begins to sizzle with life…and the wounded vanities that hide beneath it.
Kudos to Langella and Sheen—who relish their battle by giving perfectly edited-down performances that are adorned neither with flamboyance or melodrama; and who, because of that, give a center to the dramatization spinning about them. It doesn’t have quite the bite, either psychological or social, of Morgan’s The Queen. But Frost/Nixon is a perfect lesson in the essence of nuts-and-bolts storytelling: it speaks (smartly, persuasively) for itself.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: B-
Cate Blanchett, one of the screen’s most radiant talents, gives one of the year’s most painfully careful performances—and she is seconded only barely by Brad Pitt who, as a man who is born old and dies young, struggles not with his beautifully-done ageing/de-ageing make-up, but rather with the void of personality that it covers up. Technically, it is a feat of perfectly adequate internalizing. But internalizing is not what is called for—no, not in this David Fincher-directed, Eric Roth-scripted, “epic.” A lazy Southern drawl is all well and good, but if Forrest Gump and its star taught anyone anything, it is that characters so defined and compressed within their disabilities so as to become observers in their own star vehicle are barely characters at all, and are so thereby barely worth watching.
But I digress: Mr. Pitt is pretty enough to look at; Ms. Blanchett, too. They have barely any chemistry, but due to Fincher’s overt technical styling, emotion is nonetheless wrung from their every “wrenching” scene together. We wonder, in the beginning, at the strangest of an old man falling in love with a little girl…only for the situation to be reversed much later on—but we soon forget. Movies like this are not for the mind, but for the heart. And yet the heart is done so little service! Roth’s screenplay frames itself as the tale of a young boy’s journal, now in the possession of an old woman, being read by a middle-aged child, and has yet the further audacity to set the present action during Hurricane Katrina. Yet he also has the audacity to create two quite-lovely sequences, both involving the rhythm and power of time, that are the small-scale delights of love and loss that the overall film could never be. (One wonders, regardless, how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ever became so rounded and tragic a film as this—when it started out as so hardened and whirling a satire as it was.)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed: characters there within go through major emotional upheavals and find themselves, either secretly or with great show, tossing about on a sea of passions—and yet the most minor of characters, so trapped and flat in conception and in physicality, are the ones presented with the most sincerity (to wit: Tilda Swinton, showing up for just a few minutes as an aristocrat suffering from lovelorn dislocation, outpaces her female counterparts easily with grace and elegance in communicating inelegant emotions); and though the theme that hangs over the narrative like a silken funeral shroud is one of haunting existentialism (it assumes both that a life lived backward is one lived in vain and that those loved while living backward are loved only to be lost), no melancholia is rightly present scene-to-scene—worse, more often a finely-preened since of blah, of softly-chewed and finely-spun nonsense, persists. In short the film lives, on screen anyway, for almost three hours—and yet it so rarely feels alive.
But I digress: Mr. Pitt is pretty enough to look at; Ms. Blanchett, too. They have barely any chemistry, but due to Fincher’s overt technical styling, emotion is nonetheless wrung from their every “wrenching” scene together. We wonder, in the beginning, at the strangest of an old man falling in love with a little girl…only for the situation to be reversed much later on—but we soon forget. Movies like this are not for the mind, but for the heart. And yet the heart is done so little service! Roth’s screenplay frames itself as the tale of a young boy’s journal, now in the possession of an old woman, being read by a middle-aged child, and has yet the further audacity to set the present action during Hurricane Katrina. Yet he also has the audacity to create two quite-lovely sequences, both involving the rhythm and power of time, that are the small-scale delights of love and loss that the overall film could never be. (One wonders, regardless, how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ever became so rounded and tragic a film as this—when it started out as so hardened and whirling a satire as it was.)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed: characters there within go through major emotional upheavals and find themselves, either secretly or with great show, tossing about on a sea of passions—and yet the most minor of characters, so trapped and flat in conception and in physicality, are the ones presented with the most sincerity (to wit: Tilda Swinton, showing up for just a few minutes as an aristocrat suffering from lovelorn dislocation, outpaces her female counterparts easily with grace and elegance in communicating inelegant emotions); and though the theme that hangs over the narrative like a silken funeral shroud is one of haunting existentialism (it assumes both that a life lived backward is one lived in vain and that those loved while living backward are loved only to be lost), no melancholia is rightly present scene-to-scene—worse, more often a finely-preened since of blah, of softly-chewed and finely-spun nonsense, persists. In short the film lives, on screen anyway, for almost three hours—and yet it so rarely feels alive.
Rachel Getting Married: A
Anne Hathaway, eyes popped wide, and with hair slashed in a frazzled bob, gives a wide-awake performance that is the centerpiece of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married—a film not just with clarity and emotional richness, but also a canny perceptiveness into familial politics. Shot by cinematographer Declan Quinn as another of the myriad ShakyCam dramas, the director and his writer Jenny Lumet (who has created perhaps the richest of all of 2008’s intellectual properties) nonetheless transcend an old trick in order to bring to the screen a film of vital curiosity and life. As Kym, the recovering addict come to see her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) get married to Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe), Hathaway may remain trapped in her characteristic speech patterns, but she wires you into her every synaptic urge: you hate her, at first, for crashing the party, and then you begin to understand her and her clawing, nattering self-absorption, and then you hate her a little more. But empathy isn't character-exclusive—so clever in the telling is the film that even the smallest of parts bustles with humanity. And when Debra Winger shows up in a volcanic cameo as the sisters’ mom, the screen practically tears itself apart. The movies are rarely used for such revelation as that on display in Demme’s movie; and even more rarely does it hook the audience so completely onto its wavelength of spare inquisition. The final scenes devolve a bit but it’s a small price to pay for such a viewing experience. Rachel Getting Married isn’t the most aesthetically adventurous film of the year, but it may well be the most exciting—and it tingles with life, love, drama, sisterhood, and everything in between.
The "Best" of 2008.
In a year of change, I’m changing too. Below isn’t the “best of the best,” assigned a number and listed according to preference. Instead, I’ve presented not the “Top 10” in film, or television, or any other media arena—but rather those things that, in the dreary coming weeks of January, will still cause me to look back on the Year That Was, and smile.
The Best Films of 2008:
WALL-E
A wordless procession of images marshaled together in service of re-discovery, of finding the utterly beguiling charms of daily hum-drum life, followed in turn by a zingy satire that’s like Charlie Chaplin in space—and through it all beats a pulse of romanticism and unabashed reverence of pure cinematic creation: WALL-E, writer-director Andrew Stanton’s love-story-adventure-comedy-eco-parable about life then that feels remarkably like now, is all these things and more. It’s everything Pixar Studios has represented in the last twenty years, tied up together in a film that doesn’t just stun you with its visual beauty, but also with its emotional integrity. I’m all for films that talk, talk, talk—but Stanton takes a different approach: he finds the magic in silence, the fascination in the wordless. So when the film, in its second-half, becomes a screwball comedy on a space station, many tune-out, claiming the move as a rote one not worth their time. But they miss the anger in Stanton’s vision—the blistering satire in his work. WALL-E is a robot love story, and its two central robots don’t talk much, but the joy of the movie is the way the architects (of both animation and narrative) over at Pixar don’t settle for something charming but coy and removed. They bring every stitch of their metallic fabrication into reality, and find, among the ruins of a future far away from any of us, life very much like our own.
The Dark Knight
A sumptuous big-screen feast that leaves you only slightly queasy afterwards, Christopher Nolan’s 153-minute The Dark Knight became the zeitgeist movie of the year (and, perhaps, the decade) for a number of reasons—not the least of which was its monstrous box office performance. But underneath all those staggering financial numbers was a simpler fact: the film is wholly, consistently, and perfectly hypnotic…and terrifying. Not only a master class in how to create a near-perfect sequel (take that Sam Raimi!), nor just the vehicle for the year’s greatest performance, this sixth Batman movie in as many years does all the ones previous one better—it leaps forward, to The Now, and dares to underline the caped crusader not only with pathos, but relevance. Forget the stylized design of the Burton films, or the cheeky pastiche of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman and Robin—this is a new kind of comic-book movie: in telling of how Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, with his dynamic rasp still firmly in place) edges closer and closer to madness trying to take out The Joker (Heath Ledger, in a feat of Method Madness so complete, so unshakeable, that it makes you miss the actor behind the make-up all the more), the movie does something, if not original, than excitingly different. It’s dark, and it’s ponderous, and it’s philosophical. It’s manic, and it’s tricky, and it’s thrilling. And it’s too long. But so what? This isn’t a perfect film, but it earns a high spot for the very boldness of its creation. If it’s not the first summer spectacle to leave you thinking as you leave the theatre, nor the first crime-drama produced with dazzling skill, then The Dark Knight may just be the best of both of them, swirled together: a mesmerizing and dark concoction.
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Perhaps too cute, or too slight, or too confectionary a movie to triumph and to treasure—whatever: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a joyous romp that has such a light, heartfelt touch that it does something entirely too rare for a romantic-comedy: it redefines its own genre for a modern audience. It’s a teen break-up/meet-up sweet-and-sour plug-in-and-let-go experience that creeps up and wins you over. Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay, adapted from the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, has charm and wit to spare, but the real behind-the-camera winner is director Peter Sollett, who doesn’t just follow his actors into every nook and cranny of nighttime NYC, he chases them. And the more he does so, the more he—and you, the audience—begin to understand what he’s chasing. The movie fills its cast richly, with ethnicities and sexualities of all types, and pays each of them rich consideration. Rare is the film that doesn’t just lay bare the shallow frivolities of adolescence, but glorifies and deepens them. Nick & Norah isn’t as great a conversation piece as, say, Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, but the talking is second to the atmosphere created. And the world discovered by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings is unlike most anything else seen on a movie screen lately and that’s because the world they find is ours.
Kung-Fu Panda
It was something of a good year for animated films. The genre produced masterpieces, like that aforementioned one about the robot, and several that were, for lack of a better phrase, just really fun. A better example of this than most was Kung-Fu Panda, which was written by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger as a thorough exercise in tongue-in-cheek bravura; what’s more, the directors and their actors—Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, leading a Jack Black as he gives one of his all-too-rare show-stopping soul-on-his-sleeve performances—give actual life to the phrase “tongue-in-cheek bravura:” the animation is fluid, and lightning-fast, and the sarcasm flows about as quickly. The last third devolves into nothing more than a slapstick-y karate bonanza, but it’s conceived and drawn out with such rambunctious energy that you forget to care. If WALL-E taught us of the magic in a single, solitary soul (synthetic or not), then Kung-Fu Panda reminds us all of the capacity for filmmakers to not just draw pretty moving pictures, but to make them funny, too. It’s a simplistic notion (and if the final product didn’t pay such richly humorous dividends on repeated viewings the picture would be all the more blah for holding it center-stage) but here, like its lesser-compatriot Horton Hears a Who, the film holds itself rapt with the possibilities of silliness in animation—and the audience, suddenly, is held rapt too.
Australia
As with all of writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s work, his fifth film in two decades is firmly love it or hate it—and, darn it all, I adored Australia, utterly and with complete abandon. True, it’s a mess of a production, and the narrative feels gangly, overgrown, overworked, and precocious; and, true, the odd mixture of drama, action, and comedy that Luhrmann is trying to pull off never feels more awkward than when he attempts all three at once (which he does quite frequently). But his visual zest remains firmly intact (his cameras swoon with unabashed glee in a mad rush to capture the expansive landscape of his story), and his mad, desirous aesthetic is madly infectious. For the first time (that’s right: Moulin Rouge! doesn’t count), his romance—his soul—connects through the screen with the audience, and so the inherently cheesy nature of this Out of Africa redux is forgiven—lo! Less than forgiven: overlooked entirely as you rush headlong into sweeping sequence after sequence, heart melting, swoon swooning, lips curling, and hands shaking. If for no other reason than that Australia is the perfect argument for why certain movies have to be seen on the big screen, have to be absorbed as they were conceived, without boundaries, without thought to structure, and with but one goal in mind: to shock, awe, and over-stimulate—
Actually, that’s reason enough.
Other Notables Events, Products, and Persons of Greatness:
Love on the Inside: Sugarland
What would seem to be just a good album becomes nearly great in context. Consider: in the last four years the group (once a trio—now a duo, sans the grittier aesthetic of Kristen Hall) has released three collections, with Love on the Inside being their third. And the triumph in it all isn’t just how consistent each piece of work is, but how remarkable the larger body is as a whole because of it. Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles (he plays, she sings; they both write) remain as cleverly mainstream as ever, and if their latest CD lacks an emotional stunner like Enjoy the Ride’s “Stay,” it more than makes up for it with goofy jives like “Steve Earle” and “It Happens.” Plus it happens to have, with “We Run,” what may well be the purest expression of first love all year. That kind of sincerity, which at its best touches naturalism, is all a part of their synergetic brand: a swelling celebration of middle-class humanism.
The Enchantress of Florence: Salmon Rushdie
Perhaps not the best book of the year, but who needs greatness? Rushdie, taking a step away from the heft of his more revered works like Midnight’s Children, instead delivers to us this delightful fable-within-historical fiction, about a wanderer who comes to the court of the powerful Mughal king Akbar with a story to tell (or, just maybe, a lie to spin). Quickly, this incredibly handsome, blonde-haired young man has ingratiated himself into the upper-echelons of Akbar’s capital city as his charm, good looks, and quicksilver tongue enrapture ever-increasing portions of the population. But wait—just what, exactly, is going on? All is revealed, but slowly, as both the wanderer’s story and his tale-to-tell are told, in overlapping, hazy scenes. The characters (none more so than the emperor himself) are warmly, tartly, sketched-in; the dialogue has a breezy-glam intelligence; and the conclusion is bitter-sweet, but the novel as a whole is all the more sumptuous for it: a piquant, delicious, and witty display of men at the height of their powers—of deception, of empire-building, of longing, of violence, and of love.
30 Rock/Pushing Daisies
Both are quirky, lighter-than-air shows—but one happens to be a sitcom, and the other is a murder-mystery-romantic-comedy. And one premiered to minimal viewership, while the other did blockbuster numbers. And one of them just got renewed for a fourth season, as its fan-base steadily increases (kind of like The Office three years ago) while the other was just cancelled. So, ok, 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies have only minimal similarities, but over the first half of the 2008-2009 season (at least in a landscape that was sans Friday Night Lights), they were both celebration-worthy gems.
30 Rock is the better of the two, if only because it benefits ever-more from the steadily increasing artistic strength of executive-producer/head-writer/star Tina Fey (plus it’s also the one of the two that was spared the axe). Fey writes rococo dialogue better than just about anyone except Mitchell Hurwitz, her comedy zings effortlessly from high to low, her guest-spots have Will & Grace-like marquee names, with none of their pandering, and—what’s more—together with her cast (headed by the mercilessly talented Alec Baldwin) she’s made the most winning sitcom of the year by one simple fact: the show is just really funny.
Pushing Daisies has very little of Fey’s profoundly silly wit, but the show, exec-produced by Bryan Fuller, runs on the same absurdly clever wavelength. The atmosphere is lush, confectionary, and in perfect service of the show’s tone: the sour beneath the sweet. Filled with dead people, living people, and dead people who are now living, Daisies tends to feel a bit overcrowded at times, but the ensemble (which expanded nicely in Season Two) is seamless (extra extra kudos go out to Kristen Chenoweth as the waitressing sidekick: if not the heart of the series, she’s definitely the soul). And the writing: is there anything quite like it on network television today—anything quite so rambunctiously literate, voluble, ebullient, or profuse? The conversations go around and around in sardonic circles and if the narratives tend to ramble a bit, it was more a desperate flaw than an irritating one, as the series kept looking for the viewers who evaporated after the Writer’s Strike. They never found them, and after a truncated season, it’s goodbye Daisies. At least there will always be DVD, to help bring you back to life again…and this time, for longer than a minute.
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends: Coldplay
There aren’t any commas in the title of Coldplay’s fourth album—and intentionally so: the label is meant to be read in one pensive moment, as the reader moves from triumph to ruefulness. That’s a lot of tone to pack into just the verbiage, but the English rockers don’t disappoint: all of their pretention is pulled off seamlessly, with producer Brian Eno revitalizing their sound at a perfect intersection in their careers (the CD can be read both as a response to those who deride them as Radiohead-lite, and as a claim to the vacant U2 throne). The sonic stylization is dense, but dexterous, and each song reveals hidden twists and turns upon return visits. “Cemeteries of London,” Life in Technicolor,” (which is the most lush pop-instrumental in quite some time) and “Yes” are all exhilarating, expert creations—the band’s depressing lyricism is counterpointed neatly with out-of-nowhere musical choices like the occasional Eastern interlude. And what of “Violet Hill” and “Viva la Vida”—the latter of which became 2008’s most celebrated rock song? I prefer, ever-so-slightly, “Hill” over its album-mate, but both are indelible for their rich musical and emotional impacts; and, what’s more, they expand the sonic horizon with each swell of Martin’s falsetto, leading the listener more and more to agree with the reflexive labeling by the masses and critics alike: yes, yes—Viva la Vida is, quite simply, sublime.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Joss Whedon: screenwriter, television producer, mad genius—everyone knows those things. But did you also know the mind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer could write a musical? As in both lyrics and music? And that it doesn’t suck…like, at all? Ok, I’ll be honest: I came in with the highest of hopes—this is Joss Whedon after all. Still, the fact that he (along with a mini-writing staff comprised of his brothers and almost-sister-in-law) could whip this little 43-minute masterpiece over the course of the Writer’s Strike and have it still bare all the trademark Whedonesque flourishes…well, that’s something else entirely. The story is reliably anachronistic, the dialogue is whip-smart, and the actors (all of whom can actually sing) are divine, but it’s the music in this mini-musical that is what sticks in your head. “Freeze Ray,” “Penny’s Song,” “Slipping,” and “My Eyes” are perfectly exemplary of the talents of a man television has gone without now for nearly six years: each song is catchy, but on a larger scale it’s also funny, sincere, and a bit poetic. Rejoice those few of you who missed Dr. Horrible’s debut online months ago: the DVD is already being released. And rejoice, too, those of you who caught the production and are keen now for more of its aesthetic: Whedon’s has already hired his cohorts on the musical, Jed Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen, on as part of the writing staff for his next cult-classic-in-the-making—Dollhouse. Fingers crossed it makes me feel nearly as much.
(One last thing: if I should chance upon any of the myriad number of CDs and movies and so forth I have yet to see and categorically judge that is worth noting—it will be noted.)
The Best Films of 2008:
WALL-E
A wordless procession of images marshaled together in service of re-discovery, of finding the utterly beguiling charms of daily hum-drum life, followed in turn by a zingy satire that’s like Charlie Chaplin in space—and through it all beats a pulse of romanticism and unabashed reverence of pure cinematic creation: WALL-E, writer-director Andrew Stanton’s love-story-adventure-comedy-eco-parable about life then that feels remarkably like now, is all these things and more. It’s everything Pixar Studios has represented in the last twenty years, tied up together in a film that doesn’t just stun you with its visual beauty, but also with its emotional integrity. I’m all for films that talk, talk, talk—but Stanton takes a different approach: he finds the magic in silence, the fascination in the wordless. So when the film, in its second-half, becomes a screwball comedy on a space station, many tune-out, claiming the move as a rote one not worth their time. But they miss the anger in Stanton’s vision—the blistering satire in his work. WALL-E is a robot love story, and its two central robots don’t talk much, but the joy of the movie is the way the architects (of both animation and narrative) over at Pixar don’t settle for something charming but coy and removed. They bring every stitch of their metallic fabrication into reality, and find, among the ruins of a future far away from any of us, life very much like our own.
The Dark Knight
A sumptuous big-screen feast that leaves you only slightly queasy afterwards, Christopher Nolan’s 153-minute The Dark Knight became the zeitgeist movie of the year (and, perhaps, the decade) for a number of reasons—not the least of which was its monstrous box office performance. But underneath all those staggering financial numbers was a simpler fact: the film is wholly, consistently, and perfectly hypnotic…and terrifying. Not only a master class in how to create a near-perfect sequel (take that Sam Raimi!), nor just the vehicle for the year’s greatest performance, this sixth Batman movie in as many years does all the ones previous one better—it leaps forward, to The Now, and dares to underline the caped crusader not only with pathos, but relevance. Forget the stylized design of the Burton films, or the cheeky pastiche of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman and Robin—this is a new kind of comic-book movie: in telling of how Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, with his dynamic rasp still firmly in place) edges closer and closer to madness trying to take out The Joker (Heath Ledger, in a feat of Method Madness so complete, so unshakeable, that it makes you miss the actor behind the make-up all the more), the movie does something, if not original, than excitingly different. It’s dark, and it’s ponderous, and it’s philosophical. It’s manic, and it’s tricky, and it’s thrilling. And it’s too long. But so what? This isn’t a perfect film, but it earns a high spot for the very boldness of its creation. If it’s not the first summer spectacle to leave you thinking as you leave the theatre, nor the first crime-drama produced with dazzling skill, then The Dark Knight may just be the best of both of them, swirled together: a mesmerizing and dark concoction.
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Perhaps too cute, or too slight, or too confectionary a movie to triumph and to treasure—whatever: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a joyous romp that has such a light, heartfelt touch that it does something entirely too rare for a romantic-comedy: it redefines its own genre for a modern audience. It’s a teen break-up/meet-up sweet-and-sour plug-in-and-let-go experience that creeps up and wins you over. Lorene Scafaria’s screenplay, adapted from the novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, has charm and wit to spare, but the real behind-the-camera winner is director Peter Sollett, who doesn’t just follow his actors into every nook and cranny of nighttime NYC, he chases them. And the more he does so, the more he—and you, the audience—begin to understand what he’s chasing. The movie fills its cast richly, with ethnicities and sexualities of all types, and pays each of them rich consideration. Rare is the film that doesn’t just lay bare the shallow frivolities of adolescence, but glorifies and deepens them. Nick & Norah isn’t as great a conversation piece as, say, Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, but the talking is second to the atmosphere created. And the world discovered by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings is unlike most anything else seen on a movie screen lately and that’s because the world they find is ours.
Kung-Fu Panda
It was something of a good year for animated films. The genre produced masterpieces, like that aforementioned one about the robot, and several that were, for lack of a better phrase, just really fun. A better example of this than most was Kung-Fu Panda, which was written by Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger as a thorough exercise in tongue-in-cheek bravura; what’s more, the directors and their actors—Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, leading a Jack Black as he gives one of his all-too-rare show-stopping soul-on-his-sleeve performances—give actual life to the phrase “tongue-in-cheek bravura:” the animation is fluid, and lightning-fast, and the sarcasm flows about as quickly. The last third devolves into nothing more than a slapstick-y karate bonanza, but it’s conceived and drawn out with such rambunctious energy that you forget to care. If WALL-E taught us of the magic in a single, solitary soul (synthetic or not), then Kung-Fu Panda reminds us all of the capacity for filmmakers to not just draw pretty moving pictures, but to make them funny, too. It’s a simplistic notion (and if the final product didn’t pay such richly humorous dividends on repeated viewings the picture would be all the more blah for holding it center-stage) but here, like its lesser-compatriot Horton Hears a Who, the film holds itself rapt with the possibilities of silliness in animation—and the audience, suddenly, is held rapt too.
Australia
As with all of writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s work, his fifth film in two decades is firmly love it or hate it—and, darn it all, I adored Australia, utterly and with complete abandon. True, it’s a mess of a production, and the narrative feels gangly, overgrown, overworked, and precocious; and, true, the odd mixture of drama, action, and comedy that Luhrmann is trying to pull off never feels more awkward than when he attempts all three at once (which he does quite frequently). But his visual zest remains firmly intact (his cameras swoon with unabashed glee in a mad rush to capture the expansive landscape of his story), and his mad, desirous aesthetic is madly infectious. For the first time (that’s right: Moulin Rouge! doesn’t count), his romance—his soul—connects through the screen with the audience, and so the inherently cheesy nature of this Out of Africa redux is forgiven—lo! Less than forgiven: overlooked entirely as you rush headlong into sweeping sequence after sequence, heart melting, swoon swooning, lips curling, and hands shaking. If for no other reason than that Australia is the perfect argument for why certain movies have to be seen on the big screen, have to be absorbed as they were conceived, without boundaries, without thought to structure, and with but one goal in mind: to shock, awe, and over-stimulate—
Actually, that’s reason enough.
Other Notables Events, Products, and Persons of Greatness:
Love on the Inside: Sugarland
What would seem to be just a good album becomes nearly great in context. Consider: in the last four years the group (once a trio—now a duo, sans the grittier aesthetic of Kristen Hall) has released three collections, with Love on the Inside being their third. And the triumph in it all isn’t just how consistent each piece of work is, but how remarkable the larger body is as a whole because of it. Kristian Bush and Jennifer Nettles (he plays, she sings; they both write) remain as cleverly mainstream as ever, and if their latest CD lacks an emotional stunner like Enjoy the Ride’s “Stay,” it more than makes up for it with goofy jives like “Steve Earle” and “It Happens.” Plus it happens to have, with “We Run,” what may well be the purest expression of first love all year. That kind of sincerity, which at its best touches naturalism, is all a part of their synergetic brand: a swelling celebration of middle-class humanism.
The Enchantress of Florence: Salmon Rushdie
Perhaps not the best book of the year, but who needs greatness? Rushdie, taking a step away from the heft of his more revered works like Midnight’s Children, instead delivers to us this delightful fable-within-historical fiction, about a wanderer who comes to the court of the powerful Mughal king Akbar with a story to tell (or, just maybe, a lie to spin). Quickly, this incredibly handsome, blonde-haired young man has ingratiated himself into the upper-echelons of Akbar’s capital city as his charm, good looks, and quicksilver tongue enrapture ever-increasing portions of the population. But wait—just what, exactly, is going on? All is revealed, but slowly, as both the wanderer’s story and his tale-to-tell are told, in overlapping, hazy scenes. The characters (none more so than the emperor himself) are warmly, tartly, sketched-in; the dialogue has a breezy-glam intelligence; and the conclusion is bitter-sweet, but the novel as a whole is all the more sumptuous for it: a piquant, delicious, and witty display of men at the height of their powers—of deception, of empire-building, of longing, of violence, and of love.
30 Rock/Pushing Daisies
Both are quirky, lighter-than-air shows—but one happens to be a sitcom, and the other is a murder-mystery-romantic-comedy. And one premiered to minimal viewership, while the other did blockbuster numbers. And one of them just got renewed for a fourth season, as its fan-base steadily increases (kind of like The Office three years ago) while the other was just cancelled. So, ok, 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies have only minimal similarities, but over the first half of the 2008-2009 season (at least in a landscape that was sans Friday Night Lights), they were both celebration-worthy gems.
30 Rock is the better of the two, if only because it benefits ever-more from the steadily increasing artistic strength of executive-producer/head-writer/star Tina Fey (plus it’s also the one of the two that was spared the axe). Fey writes rococo dialogue better than just about anyone except Mitchell Hurwitz, her comedy zings effortlessly from high to low, her guest-spots have Will & Grace-like marquee names, with none of their pandering, and—what’s more—together with her cast (headed by the mercilessly talented Alec Baldwin) she’s made the most winning sitcom of the year by one simple fact: the show is just really funny.
Pushing Daisies has very little of Fey’s profoundly silly wit, but the show, exec-produced by Bryan Fuller, runs on the same absurdly clever wavelength. The atmosphere is lush, confectionary, and in perfect service of the show’s tone: the sour beneath the sweet. Filled with dead people, living people, and dead people who are now living, Daisies tends to feel a bit overcrowded at times, but the ensemble (which expanded nicely in Season Two) is seamless (extra extra kudos go out to Kristen Chenoweth as the waitressing sidekick: if not the heart of the series, she’s definitely the soul). And the writing: is there anything quite like it on network television today—anything quite so rambunctiously literate, voluble, ebullient, or profuse? The conversations go around and around in sardonic circles and if the narratives tend to ramble a bit, it was more a desperate flaw than an irritating one, as the series kept looking for the viewers who evaporated after the Writer’s Strike. They never found them, and after a truncated season, it’s goodbye Daisies. At least there will always be DVD, to help bring you back to life again…and this time, for longer than a minute.
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends: Coldplay
There aren’t any commas in the title of Coldplay’s fourth album—and intentionally so: the label is meant to be read in one pensive moment, as the reader moves from triumph to ruefulness. That’s a lot of tone to pack into just the verbiage, but the English rockers don’t disappoint: all of their pretention is pulled off seamlessly, with producer Brian Eno revitalizing their sound at a perfect intersection in their careers (the CD can be read both as a response to those who deride them as Radiohead-lite, and as a claim to the vacant U2 throne). The sonic stylization is dense, but dexterous, and each song reveals hidden twists and turns upon return visits. “Cemeteries of London,” Life in Technicolor,” (which is the most lush pop-instrumental in quite some time) and “Yes” are all exhilarating, expert creations—the band’s depressing lyricism is counterpointed neatly with out-of-nowhere musical choices like the occasional Eastern interlude. And what of “Violet Hill” and “Viva la Vida”—the latter of which became 2008’s most celebrated rock song? I prefer, ever-so-slightly, “Hill” over its album-mate, but both are indelible for their rich musical and emotional impacts; and, what’s more, they expand the sonic horizon with each swell of Martin’s falsetto, leading the listener more and more to agree with the reflexive labeling by the masses and critics alike: yes, yes—Viva la Vida is, quite simply, sublime.
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Joss Whedon: screenwriter, television producer, mad genius—everyone knows those things. But did you also know the mind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer could write a musical? As in both lyrics and music? And that it doesn’t suck…like, at all? Ok, I’ll be honest: I came in with the highest of hopes—this is Joss Whedon after all. Still, the fact that he (along with a mini-writing staff comprised of his brothers and almost-sister-in-law) could whip this little 43-minute masterpiece over the course of the Writer’s Strike and have it still bare all the trademark Whedonesque flourishes…well, that’s something else entirely. The story is reliably anachronistic, the dialogue is whip-smart, and the actors (all of whom can actually sing) are divine, but it’s the music in this mini-musical that is what sticks in your head. “Freeze Ray,” “Penny’s Song,” “Slipping,” and “My Eyes” are perfectly exemplary of the talents of a man television has gone without now for nearly six years: each song is catchy, but on a larger scale it’s also funny, sincere, and a bit poetic. Rejoice those few of you who missed Dr. Horrible’s debut online months ago: the DVD is already being released. And rejoice, too, those of you who caught the production and are keen now for more of its aesthetic: Whedon’s has already hired his cohorts on the musical, Jed Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen, on as part of the writing staff for his next cult-classic-in-the-making—Dollhouse. Fingers crossed it makes me feel nearly as much.
(One last thing: if I should chance upon any of the myriad number of CDs and movies and so forth I have yet to see and categorically judge that is worth noting—it will be noted.)
Twilight: B-
Girl is born. Parents get divorced. Years pass. Eventually, because mom got re-married and because she feels a little adventurous, girl moves up north, to be with her dad—try “roughing it” for a while. The new school embraces her, fetishistically, but she feels a bit out of place. And then girl meets boy. He’s intriguing: the painfully shy youngest member of a large foster family. He’s also impossibly handsome—an awkward stud. They get off to a rocky start, but then chemistry kicks in and wham! Next thing she knows and the whole family has gathered around for a meet-and-greet. They’re a lot like the boy (i.e. strange to the nth degree), and he’s embarrassed by them, which is cute, but overall everyone is very welcoming…and very, very, pale. And beautiful, like undead models. (Because—oh yeah—the whole clan, boy and all, are vampires. BTW.)
That’s Twilight, in the beginning, stripped to its parabolic essence. The moral is a spry one that’s stood the test of time—true love is wherever you look for it—and the vessel of its deliverance is as zeitgeist-y as one can get living in a post-Anne Rice world. The source material is (of course; like you don’t already know) the work of one Stephenie Meyer, author extraordinaire. It is her first book in this Girl-Boy romance, Twilight that is the foundation for Twilight, and so on one level the movie was already primed to be a success—at least in terms of how well it stacked up against the book. Because though Meyer’s idea had breezy bite, her prose was still more tin than heat in those first few hundred pages. The movie couldn’t be much worse without being a catastrophe: up was the only direction to go. And so in one sense director Catherine Hardwicke has taken that route: her film is no disaster. But in translating the steamy-repressed-teenage love story of one Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falling for one vampiric Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) onto the screen, no greatness is achieved. You’ll swoon, but you’ll cringe, too.
The swooning first. Hardwicke has only been an active filmmaker for the last five years, but in that time she’s churned out one great film (Thirteen), one really good one (Lords of Dogtown), one blah Christmas tale (The Nativity Story) and now this, which falls somewhere in between. Here, though, her style as a director is almost nearly irrelevant—none of her characteristic flourishes (the frantic, thrusting, probing cinematography; the damaged teenagers) are present; Ron Howard or Uwe Boll could be directing, for all it mattered. The one thing she does do right is position her two young stars at the center of her continually spinning cameras. The result is an indelible takeaway image: Edward and Bella, in perpetual close-up, gazing at the other, about to kiss. The other thing she does is in negative, and that’s to get out of the way of her coltish talents. Both Pattinson and Stewart stumble through their scenes, but in ways that come off, somehow, as amicable, and full of passion. It feels like you’re watching awkward hormones connect—as it should.
And now the cringing. Melissa Rosenberg has been working as a TV writer for a while, and she’s been a part of some prestigious stuff. Her work on the first season of The O.C. and Dexter is among my favorite on both shows. Yet here, as the writer of the Twilight screenplay, she mostly stumbles. In transposing the majority of the action of the novel faithfully, mostly what she realizes isn’t some untapped potential, but rather how cheesy all of the stuff Meyer originally wrote can come across. (To wit, the whole Cam Gigandet plotline? A big fat eh.) The one bright side is that she cooks up most of the dialogue herself, and the majority of it is bouncily morbid and angsty. Still there’s no getting around her sincere plotting: it’s trite, and a bit slavish. There’s a host of other little details to make you squirm, but it’s only the expected stuff (special-effects cooked up on a $37 million-dollar budget; Taylor Lautner; lines still intact from the original story).
Yet as a fusion of horror, thriller, drama, supernatural, weirdo comedy, and pulp romance, Twilight can be a tasty cocktail. Sure, like any lukewarm drink, the taste is a bit funky going down; and afterwards you’ll wonder as you set the empty glass back whether the buzz was worth the hangover. The answer is: maybe…perhaps. A little bit. If there’s an adolescent inside you waiting to be star-struck, or a romantic whose never gone away and is always hungry for more, or even a curious cinephile just wanting to see what two strong female talents do with an undoubtedly retro-feminist fable—whatever: pop on by. At the very least Edward Cullen will make you long for a vampire coven of your very own. And at the very best? You’ll thank God or whoever for casting Pattinson in the oh-so-important role—he is, quite frankly, to die for.
That’s Twilight, in the beginning, stripped to its parabolic essence. The moral is a spry one that’s stood the test of time—true love is wherever you look for it—and the vessel of its deliverance is as zeitgeist-y as one can get living in a post-Anne Rice world. The source material is (of course; like you don’t already know) the work of one Stephenie Meyer, author extraordinaire. It is her first book in this Girl-Boy romance, Twilight that is the foundation for Twilight, and so on one level the movie was already primed to be a success—at least in terms of how well it stacked up against the book. Because though Meyer’s idea had breezy bite, her prose was still more tin than heat in those first few hundred pages. The movie couldn’t be much worse without being a catastrophe: up was the only direction to go. And so in one sense director Catherine Hardwicke has taken that route: her film is no disaster. But in translating the steamy-repressed-teenage love story of one Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falling for one vampiric Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) onto the screen, no greatness is achieved. You’ll swoon, but you’ll cringe, too.
The swooning first. Hardwicke has only been an active filmmaker for the last five years, but in that time she’s churned out one great film (Thirteen), one really good one (Lords of Dogtown), one blah Christmas tale (The Nativity Story) and now this, which falls somewhere in between. Here, though, her style as a director is almost nearly irrelevant—none of her characteristic flourishes (the frantic, thrusting, probing cinematography; the damaged teenagers) are present; Ron Howard or Uwe Boll could be directing, for all it mattered. The one thing she does do right is position her two young stars at the center of her continually spinning cameras. The result is an indelible takeaway image: Edward and Bella, in perpetual close-up, gazing at the other, about to kiss. The other thing she does is in negative, and that’s to get out of the way of her coltish talents. Both Pattinson and Stewart stumble through their scenes, but in ways that come off, somehow, as amicable, and full of passion. It feels like you’re watching awkward hormones connect—as it should.
And now the cringing. Melissa Rosenberg has been working as a TV writer for a while, and she’s been a part of some prestigious stuff. Her work on the first season of The O.C. and Dexter is among my favorite on both shows. Yet here, as the writer of the Twilight screenplay, she mostly stumbles. In transposing the majority of the action of the novel faithfully, mostly what she realizes isn’t some untapped potential, but rather how cheesy all of the stuff Meyer originally wrote can come across. (To wit, the whole Cam Gigandet plotline? A big fat eh.) The one bright side is that she cooks up most of the dialogue herself, and the majority of it is bouncily morbid and angsty. Still there’s no getting around her sincere plotting: it’s trite, and a bit slavish. There’s a host of other little details to make you squirm, but it’s only the expected stuff (special-effects cooked up on a $37 million-dollar budget; Taylor Lautner; lines still intact from the original story).
Yet as a fusion of horror, thriller, drama, supernatural, weirdo comedy, and pulp romance, Twilight can be a tasty cocktail. Sure, like any lukewarm drink, the taste is a bit funky going down; and afterwards you’ll wonder as you set the empty glass back whether the buzz was worth the hangover. The answer is: maybe…perhaps. A little bit. If there’s an adolescent inside you waiting to be star-struck, or a romantic whose never gone away and is always hungry for more, or even a curious cinephile just wanting to see what two strong female talents do with an undoubtedly retro-feminist fable—whatever: pop on by. At the very least Edward Cullen will make you long for a vampire coven of your very own. And at the very best? You’ll thank God or whoever for casting Pattinson in the oh-so-important role—he is, quite frankly, to die for.
Quantum of Solace: B-
It goes like this: I can understand, get behind the idea of, and even triumph the execution of a darker tweak and/or reboot of a franchise. Over the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with (and heavily-argued for the cinematic merit of) films like Batman Begins (which, I’ll boldly say to any Joe or Jane Nobody, was a better movie than The Dark Knight), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (don’t think it’s dark? Wait until the puppets melt in a giant giggly-blaze about twenty minutes in), and Casino Royale. Now we get Royale’s sequel—and it’s something to behold, both as a film, and as an exercise in trying to get one’s school of internal criticism to reckon with a part-two to a reboot that had all the predatory glamour of a lone wolf, and with a main character made into flesh-and-blood, reduced, and revived again with just the barest glimmer of psychic enlightenment. Maybe it’s all intentional, but last time I checked, they were Bond films (all 22 of them) for a reason—but damn if director Marc Forster doesn’t forego many of the series’ trappings in favor of a more visceral, bone-crunching chase film. Just be thankful Jason Bourne doesn’t pop up for a cameo.
It’s important to appreciate what is being done with Quantum of Solace, even if it isn’t entirely too remarkable on its own. This is the first film in the franchise’s 40-year history that is not only a continuation of sorts, but a direct sequel—literally, it picks up minutes after the end of Royale, when Bond (Daniel Craig, cold as ever, and way more haunting by half) kidnapped the man—Mr. White (Jesper Christensen)—he thought responsible for the death of the woman he loved, Vesper (Eva Green, you will be missed). We open on his getaway, shot in the trademark fashion of most opening Bond action sequences: that is, with heightened, utterly thrilling, adrenaline. The chase is hypnotic, and would have stood out had it not ushered in another fifty minutes of chases. See, it turns out that Mr. White is but one of the many high-powered central members of QUANTUM, a worldwide network of villains who “have people everywhere.” (I guess that translates into Bond having to run everywhere?) From that conceit of opaque paranoia and conspiracy are many offshoots, some of which even find 007 fighting MI6. Looking back, it makes sense dramatically (after a fashion), but not really emotionally. I’d argue this is because the super-agent himself is allowed no exhibition for his pain. Not a single line is said of it in the film’s far-weaker first-half—instead, the man just goes around killing people. And killing people. And occasionally running from stuff. Oh, and once-in-awhile, M. (Judi Dench, wonderfully wry as ever, if with fewer good zingers this outing) will pop up, stern wagging-finger at the ready.
Ok, so no martinis are sipped, only one woman is womanized, and at one point Craig clutches a dear friend in a dirty alley, shedding a lone dramatic tear at his passing—clearly this is not the Bond of yesteryear. I get that, it’s no fault of the film, necessarily, merely a mark of evolution. But, overall, I’d argue the evolution is misplaced. Casino Royale was such a sizzling, bravura cocktail because it dared to strip the man of so many gadgets and daring escapes and lovely arm-candy down to just what he was: a hired gun with a fractured soul. And then the film went one step further and gave him a love interest more than his equal. It was something special, Royale, and it was an interesting mistake on the part of writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade to continue in that vein of viewing Bond as damaged goods. The notion still has potency, as when it is finally discussed and explored in Quantum’s last 45-minutes, but the structure of its investigation gets tiresome. Forster, most famous for his boutique-dramas Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, clearly has an inventive streak, and the fight scenes (especially the final one between Bond and Mr. Greene—played with silken, creepy, megalomania by Mathieu Amalric) are hypnotic for their horrifying intimacy. Plus there’s even a decent Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), who I haven’t even gotten, too. And I won’t. Because it all boils down to the man of the hour. I suspect this lesser-translation of an already two-year-old film’s spirit (spun about a plot stuffed with a 90s zeitgeist) has turned off many fans, and newcomers to the series. And so be it. But I’m sticking around. At some point Bond has got to smile, even through his scars, and when that happens, pray it will be the perfect counterpart to film #21: a witty, effortlessly bouncy thriller of bombs-and-Bond-and-boobs. (Not at all like this #22: an effort, a study, an idea worked over—a tragedy where almost no one cries.)
It’s important to appreciate what is being done with Quantum of Solace, even if it isn’t entirely too remarkable on its own. This is the first film in the franchise’s 40-year history that is not only a continuation of sorts, but a direct sequel—literally, it picks up minutes after the end of Royale, when Bond (Daniel Craig, cold as ever, and way more haunting by half) kidnapped the man—Mr. White (Jesper Christensen)—he thought responsible for the death of the woman he loved, Vesper (Eva Green, you will be missed). We open on his getaway, shot in the trademark fashion of most opening Bond action sequences: that is, with heightened, utterly thrilling, adrenaline. The chase is hypnotic, and would have stood out had it not ushered in another fifty minutes of chases. See, it turns out that Mr. White is but one of the many high-powered central members of QUANTUM, a worldwide network of villains who “have people everywhere.” (I guess that translates into Bond having to run everywhere?) From that conceit of opaque paranoia and conspiracy are many offshoots, some of which even find 007 fighting MI6. Looking back, it makes sense dramatically (after a fashion), but not really emotionally. I’d argue this is because the super-agent himself is allowed no exhibition for his pain. Not a single line is said of it in the film’s far-weaker first-half—instead, the man just goes around killing people. And killing people. And occasionally running from stuff. Oh, and once-in-awhile, M. (Judi Dench, wonderfully wry as ever, if with fewer good zingers this outing) will pop up, stern wagging-finger at the ready.
Ok, so no martinis are sipped, only one woman is womanized, and at one point Craig clutches a dear friend in a dirty alley, shedding a lone dramatic tear at his passing—clearly this is not the Bond of yesteryear. I get that, it’s no fault of the film, necessarily, merely a mark of evolution. But, overall, I’d argue the evolution is misplaced. Casino Royale was such a sizzling, bravura cocktail because it dared to strip the man of so many gadgets and daring escapes and lovely arm-candy down to just what he was: a hired gun with a fractured soul. And then the film went one step further and gave him a love interest more than his equal. It was something special, Royale, and it was an interesting mistake on the part of writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade to continue in that vein of viewing Bond as damaged goods. The notion still has potency, as when it is finally discussed and explored in Quantum’s last 45-minutes, but the structure of its investigation gets tiresome. Forster, most famous for his boutique-dramas Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, clearly has an inventive streak, and the fight scenes (especially the final one between Bond and Mr. Greene—played with silken, creepy, megalomania by Mathieu Amalric) are hypnotic for their horrifying intimacy. Plus there’s even a decent Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), who I haven’t even gotten, too. And I won’t. Because it all boils down to the man of the hour. I suspect this lesser-translation of an already two-year-old film’s spirit (spun about a plot stuffed with a 90s zeitgeist) has turned off many fans, and newcomers to the series. And so be it. But I’m sticking around. At some point Bond has got to smile, even through his scars, and when that happens, pray it will be the perfect counterpart to film #21: a witty, effortlessly bouncy thriller of bombs-and-Bond-and-boobs. (Not at all like this #22: an effort, a study, an idea worked over—a tragedy where almost no one cries.)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: B-
Anytime you dig something up, the fact that it’s still well-preserved, in whatever measure, is applause-worthy—I mean, the corpse, dusty as it must be after years of quiet disintegration into history, can still walk and talk and entertain. That’s pretty cool…for about twenty minutes. Then you want the nice talking corpse to go back and lie down for a nice little sleep, for, like, forever. The dead are so not meant to be raised. Yet, apparently, no one sent that memo to director Steven Spielberg (y’know: that guy hailed as, perhaps, the greatest director of his generation, if not ever) and executive-producer George Lucas (this guy you have to know already)—both of whom have gone off and exhumed Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) for his fourth adventure in as many years: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And guess what? It walks and talks and pleases (insofar as that the story-telling joints don’t creak too badly, the adrenal glands still churn along at an acceptable rate) and—surprise of surprises—somewhere buried deep inside does, in fact, burn a gleam of vitality in one young star trying his darndest to revitalize one very old film series that feels only older as the running time piles on up.
The camera starts out from the air, zooming down, and stays that way: in constant motion. This being one of Spielberg’s action films (one of his two fortes—the other is, of course, the prestige drama: see Schindler’s List, Munich, and Saving Private Ryan), the sequences that are full of motion are full of it—to the bursting point; and it’s perfectly choreographed and shot. And this being an Indiana Jones movie, the scenes that don’t hustle and bustle quickly segue to those that do. Remember now, Lucas first conceived of Dr. Jones and his adventures as a sort of anti-film, way back when: the type of movie that forewent exposition in favor of exhibition—screw plot and lengthy scenes of back-and-forth, how about trying to cram it all into one continuous stream of pratfalls and narrow-escapes—that’d be something to watch. So the audience got Raiders of the Lost Ark, claimed by some to be Spielberg’s most perfect film. Jump ahead two sequels and there’s even a nice walk into the sunset… but what about this? There’s the same spirit in its execution, and the sequences of verve and movement and daring here please pleasantly. But handing over the screenwriting job to David Koepp (after Lucas cooked up the story with Jeff Nathanson) was a grave mistake of subtly upsetting proportions. He reduces the film to a paint-by-the numbers attachment to an earlier, far better, trilogy. In the end, all that action can’t make up for all that effort: too little bang for too much buck.
Speaking of bucks, there is a young one of particular note: Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams, a rough-and-tumble kid who rumbles up in a motorcycle to be Indy’s sidekick. Not only is he the one relevant note played in this heard-it-all-before 122-minute orchestral movement, LaBeouf also gives him a wider breadth of life than anyone else on screen. His mother, Marian (Karen Allen), “Mac” (Ray Winstone), and even overseas greats like Cate Blanchett (as the Soviet Big Bad) and John Hurt are all left going through the motions of a performance that already feels outdated. Sure, they’re feisty and grave and grouchy when all of that is called for, but it’s all surface shimmer—gloss. Even a great Spielbergian hero like Mutt (who is, like all great Spielbergians, just looking for a family) is paid just the bare minimum: lip service. Once you start to throw in the wackier elements of the second act (in the context of a larger plot that sees the good archeologist battling Soviets for control of some really out there paranormal artifacts), and even given the aplomb of the veteran production team, well…there’s only so much that one really-cool image of the doctor scooping up his trademark fedora from the dusty ground can do for a movie. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suffers the worst of all sequels’ fates: even at its best, the effort seems a bit unnecessary—fleeting. And at its worst you just have to grimace for a moment and wonder, “Why?”
The camera starts out from the air, zooming down, and stays that way: in constant motion. This being one of Spielberg’s action films (one of his two fortes—the other is, of course, the prestige drama: see Schindler’s List, Munich, and Saving Private Ryan), the sequences that are full of motion are full of it—to the bursting point; and it’s perfectly choreographed and shot. And this being an Indiana Jones movie, the scenes that don’t hustle and bustle quickly segue to those that do. Remember now, Lucas first conceived of Dr. Jones and his adventures as a sort of anti-film, way back when: the type of movie that forewent exposition in favor of exhibition—screw plot and lengthy scenes of back-and-forth, how about trying to cram it all into one continuous stream of pratfalls and narrow-escapes—that’d be something to watch. So the audience got Raiders of the Lost Ark, claimed by some to be Spielberg’s most perfect film. Jump ahead two sequels and there’s even a nice walk into the sunset… but what about this? There’s the same spirit in its execution, and the sequences of verve and movement and daring here please pleasantly. But handing over the screenwriting job to David Koepp (after Lucas cooked up the story with Jeff Nathanson) was a grave mistake of subtly upsetting proportions. He reduces the film to a paint-by-the numbers attachment to an earlier, far better, trilogy. In the end, all that action can’t make up for all that effort: too little bang for too much buck.
Speaking of bucks, there is a young one of particular note: Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams, a rough-and-tumble kid who rumbles up in a motorcycle to be Indy’s sidekick. Not only is he the one relevant note played in this heard-it-all-before 122-minute orchestral movement, LaBeouf also gives him a wider breadth of life than anyone else on screen. His mother, Marian (Karen Allen), “Mac” (Ray Winstone), and even overseas greats like Cate Blanchett (as the Soviet Big Bad) and John Hurt are all left going through the motions of a performance that already feels outdated. Sure, they’re feisty and grave and grouchy when all of that is called for, but it’s all surface shimmer—gloss. Even a great Spielbergian hero like Mutt (who is, like all great Spielbergians, just looking for a family) is paid just the bare minimum: lip service. Once you start to throw in the wackier elements of the second act (in the context of a larger plot that sees the good archeologist battling Soviets for control of some really out there paranormal artifacts), and even given the aplomb of the veteran production team, well…there’s only so much that one really-cool image of the doctor scooping up his trademark fedora from the dusty ground can do for a movie. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suffers the worst of all sequels’ fates: even at its best, the effort seems a bit unnecessary—fleeting. And at its worst you just have to grimace for a moment and wonder, “Why?”
August: A-
Josh Hartnett has a certain look, a certain pose (some would even go so far as to call it a shallow tic). And, in the past, it hasn't served him all too well. In films like The Black Dahlia or Pearl Harbor, when he tends to pull it out, he just sort of…well…stares off. Into nothing. Yet in Austin Chick's August, a canny and poignant snapshot of a corporate wunderkind flaming out, Hartnett's stare does some glorious things: no longer is it a blank mask. This time around his face—eyebrows drawn across like heavy slashes, eyes in premature saddened down-turn—is the audience's window into a soul only slowly and most fully revealed in quick, dodgy glimpses. And, more, it's also the most fascinating tool of a larger character scrutinized to fascinating, microscopic degree.
Arguably, a movie—a story—about what happened in the summer of 2001, right before 9/11, has never quite been told before. Sure, on paper, the outline of events is eerily similar to a host of other films: meteoric economic rise, and then precipitous crash. (Even reading this now, I can see a far larger application for the true mechanism behind this description: a hero's rise and fall.) But the "dot-com" bubble was something different, in its way, something entirely new; and so too was the environment of commerce it sought to create from the old system. The rules had yet to change, but the game had already switched over—changed in mid-stream by a bunch of 20-and-30-something college grads with dreams and the technological skill to (as Hartnett's character Tom Sterling says in a rather beautiful speech half-way through the movie) "write in a language being created right before our eyes." They had business models and financial projections and were pioneers into an area of exploration so vividly exotic as to win the world over. And then: the metaphorical iceberg. A hole, unexpectedly—sinking, then, followed by disaster. In the early summer of 2001, the world of E collapsed, and we enter into the wreckage a month afterward, when Tom—with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott)—is trying to keep their brainchild from going bankrupt three weeks before its stock starts trading publically.
Written by Howard A. Rodman, the first and most notable thing that August does right is create this world piece-by-piece, in seamless fashion. Directed, at first, by Chick like a sort of hazy, drugs-and-women-and-money-and-all breezy biopic about success and easy living, the transition of tone is nearly translucent, making the later implications all the more surprising and powerful. We begin on the outside, looking in on Tom and his circle of corporate cohorts, snorting a little now and then at how much of a jerk he can be. And then we, the audience, is sucked inward, inexorably, unknowingly, bit-by-bit, until the crisis is viewed from the inside-out. His sense of cornered helplessness, of a financial world that has caught him in a cage the size of cigar box, becomes ours.
In that revelation, cleverly, is packed so much more. In showing the psychic strain of being captain of a sinking ship, we see the captain in his naked entirety—the mirror of his perils and follies reflecting back on him with sharp and objective skill. Amidst the morass of shrinking revenue stream, Tom is struggling with hippie-intellectual parents (Rip Torn and Caroline Lagerfelt) who aren't quite sure what their son does…or are proud of it anyway; plus there's the ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) he wants to rekindle things with; and his brother, whose relationship to Tom provides the emotional center of the movie. They're partners, but in a dynamic that is equal about as many times as it is peaceful. Through a perspective efficiently crafted from long-term familial tension, and short-term mega-success, Tom comes to the central revelation of August (in a climactic investors meeting with poignancy that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat and heart simultaneously)—about how, in the end, no bubble burst, no balloon popped. The summer of possibility simply faded into the fall of pragmatism. And a man, played by an actor giving his very best high-wire performance—a cocktail of zest and hurt and charm— was left standing in a strip-club, playing pinball with his brother, slightly wiser now, staring (wistfully now, with a bit of contentment, but still with ambition) at the changing leaves and wondering where the hell all the sunlight went.
W.: C+
It's not that I don't think a movie about the life and times of George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush and our 43rd President, doesn't need to be made—and that one made well, and I mean extremely well: full of perception and curiosity or satire and viciousness, wouldn't on its own merits be some sort of cinematic event (coming as it would not minutes after the shadow of the man had begun to fade) both for skill in structuring and for purporting some sincerity or force of emotion about our current Commander-in-Chief. But W. is not that film; and as much as director Oliver Stone wants us to believe that he is both a curious pragmatist and an outraged satirist, he comes across—really—as neither. Instead he directs this semi-biographical, semi-comedic, semi-tragic film as if from a place I thought Stone didn't even know existed: restraint.
Things start out fine, though, as the director and his writer Stanley Weiser seem to have chosen a certain path from the very beginning: black comedy. We open on a trademark Stoneian symbol of the President standing in an empty ball field (remember now: he used to own The Rangers), arms wide open—embracing the empty stands full of imaginary hoots and complimentary applause. It's a joke, a pot-shot, a jeer at both the lunacy and megalomania of the world's most infamous cowboy. And it works for what it is: the viciousness of the delivery making up for the hollowness of the attack itself. And so then does that tone carry over, through the ensuing scenes as the audience gets a feel for Weiser's structure—how he loops the present Pre-Iraq/Post-9/11 to the past, before "Jr." became "Dubya." Stone's camera darts back and forth, in hazy pointed jags, through the Oval Office and then back to a Yale fraternity hazing, and then back again, already building for the viewer a foundation from which to mock George Bush's (Josh Brolin) every move.
And then it shifts. The angry sarcasm that pools at the feet of those early few scenes dries up quick as the tone morphs from activist comedy to biography. Less and less do we see of those more recent unstable times, and more and more do we see the son as he tangos with his father (James Cromwell) over those post-college days when the alcoholic young man can't seem to find a job—or even keep down a stable way of life. Sounds a bit clichéd, right? It is, and the device is nearly as trite: used to upend the previous platform from bared teeth into open minds—bleh.
But the transition isn't terrible, and that's not the point. Using the rails of Weiser's articulate, cleanly elegant scenes of dialogue as a jumping off point for his more abstract symbolism, the director finds himself unnecessarily entranced with the background of the man he seems only to want to rake over the coals. And that's a big mistake, since as he is pulled in two directions, so is his audience. It doesn't help that the film is overlong at roughly two hours, and that the perfectly adequate presence of a biographer's eye becomes unwelcome as it begins to cloud over with Stone's overreaching. (Did we really need Thandie Newton doing a terrible, terrible, Condie Rice?) There's a big plus in most of his casting—Brolin is an exemplary Bush Jr., shooting past imitation into an ctual, characteristically fascinating, performance—but a big minus in the film itself. Shot, edited, and marketed in just under nine months, W. is exactly the kind of film we don't really need, from exactly the kind of filmmaker we do. He bottles a sizzling subject, and douses him all with water, leaving us to choke on the illusion of smoke and wet ash.
Things start out fine, though, as the director and his writer Stanley Weiser seem to have chosen a certain path from the very beginning: black comedy. We open on a trademark Stoneian symbol of the President standing in an empty ball field (remember now: he used to own The Rangers), arms wide open—embracing the empty stands full of imaginary hoots and complimentary applause. It's a joke, a pot-shot, a jeer at both the lunacy and megalomania of the world's most infamous cowboy. And it works for what it is: the viciousness of the delivery making up for the hollowness of the attack itself. And so then does that tone carry over, through the ensuing scenes as the audience gets a feel for Weiser's structure—how he loops the present Pre-Iraq/Post-9/11 to the past, before "Jr." became "Dubya." Stone's camera darts back and forth, in hazy pointed jags, through the Oval Office and then back to a Yale fraternity hazing, and then back again, already building for the viewer a foundation from which to mock George Bush's (Josh Brolin) every move.
And then it shifts. The angry sarcasm that pools at the feet of those early few scenes dries up quick as the tone morphs from activist comedy to biography. Less and less do we see of those more recent unstable times, and more and more do we see the son as he tangos with his father (James Cromwell) over those post-college days when the alcoholic young man can't seem to find a job—or even keep down a stable way of life. Sounds a bit clichéd, right? It is, and the device is nearly as trite: used to upend the previous platform from bared teeth into open minds—bleh.
But the transition isn't terrible, and that's not the point. Using the rails of Weiser's articulate, cleanly elegant scenes of dialogue as a jumping off point for his more abstract symbolism, the director finds himself unnecessarily entranced with the background of the man he seems only to want to rake over the coals. And that's a big mistake, since as he is pulled in two directions, so is his audience. It doesn't help that the film is overlong at roughly two hours, and that the perfectly adequate presence of a biographer's eye becomes unwelcome as it begins to cloud over with Stone's overreaching. (Did we really need Thandie Newton doing a terrible, terrible, Condie Rice?) There's a big plus in most of his casting—Brolin is an exemplary Bush Jr., shooting past imitation into an ctual, characteristically fascinating, performance—but a big minus in the film itself. Shot, edited, and marketed in just under nine months, W. is exactly the kind of film we don't really need, from exactly the kind of filmmaker we do. He bottles a sizzling subject, and douses him all with water, leaving us to choke on the illusion of smoke and wet ash.
The Crying of Lot 49: A
I took three months out of my life to wade through Against The Day, and then re-enlisted the very next winter to battle through V., and then Mason & Dixon. And somewhere in there I distinctly re-call getting lost amidst the tangles of Vineland, only to pull myself back out halfway through. I’m a fan of Thomas Pynchon—but I can also recognize a critical fact about him: it’s not necessarily that he’s under-appreciated (those who dismiss his intense postmodernism and knack for writing baroque sentences that span paragraphs aren’t lazy, contrary to the belief of some), but rather that he’s over-wrought. In his a-novel-once-or-twice-every-decade work ethic, there appears time and again the tendency to overwrite, coating the pieces of what are undoubtedly brilliant works with layers of dense academia and imagination that are, at their best, nearly as fulfilling…but that can be, at their worst, more off-putting than some sick love-child of Proust and Joyce. It is then that I, from this unique perspective of a fan in a semi-masochistic love/hate relationship with the author, report that his 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49 is—all at the same time—his most accessible work, his most piquantly engrossing, and his best.
The period from which Lot 49 emerged was a strange one, in the timeline of Pynchon’s work. It came three years after the publication of his debut novel V., a work justly praised for its dense blending of wit, dramatic meta-construction, and archly-grave sociopolitical commentary, and—reportedly—was released at the very same time the author was putting together the beginning pieces of his most adored novel: Gravity’s Rainbow. So, then, could a reader come to this story of Oedipa Mass’ accidental uncovering of a global postal conspiracy and expect to find intermittent touches of the works that came both before and after? Well, I can’t quite speak to the latter—I have yet to build up the mental stamina for another 700-page trek into Pynchonland—but as to the former: definitely not. Sure, the usually flourishes that mark even his most casual output are seen in both stories (e.g., characters with exceedingly silly names, made-up songs that leap into and out of the central narrative spontaneously) but there the similarities end. V. is a difficult, fascinating mess of a novel; something great was it not so opaque nearly 70% of the time. The Crying of Lot 49 is something else entirely—a mystery compounded by elements of suspense and lurking doom, and written with that rarest of Pynchonisms: clarity of purpose.
In just the 150 pages afforded him between the book’s front and back covers, Pynchon writes something that does so much with so little as to make you, in hindsight (if you’ve had the pain/pleasure), regret the nearly 1000 you spent with the dozens of characters in Against the Day. He’s concise and satirical and stark and descriptive and fanciful and, above all else, entirely certain in what direction the book will lead his readers. Mrs. Mass’ journey is one of tension and self-revelation (she begins as an executor for her old lover’s will, and ends up tracking down the agents for a mysterious continent-spanning cabal), but the author himself seems to have gone through a brief journey (if only to slide back into old ways by the ‘90s). The prose is full of such a grand order of symbolic imagination as to be staggering (a third the way through, the main characters attend the performance of some made-up Jacobean tragedy, and for the next twenty-or-so pages, the entire performance is brought to life, act-by-act, from scratch), were it not so compulsively readable. And if you ever get tired, nestled between every page are the usual wisecracks and inane witticisms, just to remind you: even at his tamest, Thomas Pynchon still sees the American novel as his personal playground. And when he has fun—as he does transcendently, madly, deeply, here—so does the reader.
The period from which Lot 49 emerged was a strange one, in the timeline of Pynchon’s work. It came three years after the publication of his debut novel V., a work justly praised for its dense blending of wit, dramatic meta-construction, and archly-grave sociopolitical commentary, and—reportedly—was released at the very same time the author was putting together the beginning pieces of his most adored novel: Gravity’s Rainbow. So, then, could a reader come to this story of Oedipa Mass’ accidental uncovering of a global postal conspiracy and expect to find intermittent touches of the works that came both before and after? Well, I can’t quite speak to the latter—I have yet to build up the mental stamina for another 700-page trek into Pynchonland—but as to the former: definitely not. Sure, the usually flourishes that mark even his most casual output are seen in both stories (e.g., characters with exceedingly silly names, made-up songs that leap into and out of the central narrative spontaneously) but there the similarities end. V. is a difficult, fascinating mess of a novel; something great was it not so opaque nearly 70% of the time. The Crying of Lot 49 is something else entirely—a mystery compounded by elements of suspense and lurking doom, and written with that rarest of Pynchonisms: clarity of purpose.
In just the 150 pages afforded him between the book’s front and back covers, Pynchon writes something that does so much with so little as to make you, in hindsight (if you’ve had the pain/pleasure), regret the nearly 1000 you spent with the dozens of characters in Against the Day. He’s concise and satirical and stark and descriptive and fanciful and, above all else, entirely certain in what direction the book will lead his readers. Mrs. Mass’ journey is one of tension and self-revelation (she begins as an executor for her old lover’s will, and ends up tracking down the agents for a mysterious continent-spanning cabal), but the author himself seems to have gone through a brief journey (if only to slide back into old ways by the ‘90s). The prose is full of such a grand order of symbolic imagination as to be staggering (a third the way through, the main characters attend the performance of some made-up Jacobean tragedy, and for the next twenty-or-so pages, the entire performance is brought to life, act-by-act, from scratch), were it not so compulsively readable. And if you ever get tired, nestled between every page are the usual wisecracks and inane witticisms, just to remind you: even at his tamest, Thomas Pynchon still sees the American novel as his personal playground. And when he has fun—as he does transcendently, madly, deeply, here—so does the reader.
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