Critical Mass

Touch-Phones.Co.Uk: Product Review

2009-07-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Touch-Phones.Co.Uk is not a pretty site. Its design is bland and the only images to speak of are of phones. And yet, forgoing that, the site is very utilitarian: it has three boxes down the left-side of the page that allow a customer to browse the available touch phones in a variety of ways—by make and model, by network, by color—and also prompt the customer to explore many payment options for their phone (Touch Phones pay as you go, contract phones, whatever).

And so it comes to brains over beauty, or vice-versa? And in this instance, I’m inclined to choose brains. Why, exactly? Beyond the function of the site—and what some could argue as the soothing quality of its blandness—it also offers, at the bottom-half of its home page, a pretty fantastic little tool. It has three sliding bars, one after the other, labeled “Monthly Cost,” “Inclusive Texts,” and “Monthly Minutes,” respectively. The customer—one—you—can slide the bar from “doesn’t matter” to “any” to “zero” on all three options, and given a specific combination (say: zero monthly cost, 200 inclusive texts and 1,000 monthly minutes) the gizmo tells you how many of their phones offer those features (in this case: a whopping 17,970). That’s beyond neat, right?—that’s pretty freakin’ sweet.

So you want to buy one of those Samsung Touch Phones, eh? Or better yet, you’re just out looking for Cheap Touch Screen Phones. Well I’m willing to bet you’re not out looking for the prettiest web retailer; but you are looking for a helpful one. Touch-Phones is helpful and offers a lot of little nuggets of info about any prospective phone (e.g., battery life, weight, dimensions, color options, available features like camera) that help it transcend the ordinary and become-in a word—functionary.

MobileFun.Co.Uk: Product Review

2009-05-09T14:49:00.000-07:00

Try going to AT&T’s website to buy a nice Samsung flip phone or some iPhone accessories. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Finished? Noticed anything specific—like how tedious it can get after a while? Buying a phone wasn’t meant to be like pulling teeth, but when you head straight to the manufacturer, sometimes it can feel that way. Enter www.MobileFun.co.uk, a website designed solely for the express purpose of making it easier for you—and you—and you—to buy a phone.

The first thing you notice is the handy toolbar going down the left-side of the screen. Personally, I find it, as a tool, in the face of AT&T’s many-layered menus, to be a fast-paced delight. You can now scroll through the various wares by manufacturer (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc.), by brand (Brodit, PDair), by type (whether it be cases or Bluetooth accessories), or by some larger grouping (like iPhone accessories or electronic gaming systems). On top of that, albeit a tad redundantly, a list of tabs run along the top of the page—“Mobile Accessories,” “Ringtones, Games & Downloads”—that offer another way to access all the site has to offer.

From there, though, the site can get a bit cluttered—yet always only for the sake of offering the visitor more options. Still, there is such thing as “too much,” even when it’s good. To wit, the floating icon in the bottom-right constantly asking for your “Feedback!” only gets annoying when you forget the context; the same goes for icons advertising how you can buy set up a business account as well as all the awards MobileFun has won lately.

All-in-all, though, their website is more than satisfactory. It streamlines shopping for something that has long needed to be streamlined. And if it tries a little too hard in the process—in trying to offer low-priced flip phones and Apple iPhone accessories and Xbox 360s—so what?

Cupid: B-

2009-04-06T07:46:00.001-07:00

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.

Brick: A-

2009-04-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

“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.”

The Reader: B-

2009-04-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Milk: A-

2009-04-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

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”?

Doubt: B

2009-04-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Frost/Nixon: B+

2009-04-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

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.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: B-

2009-04-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

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.

Rachel Getting Married: A

2009-04-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-04-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

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.)

Twilight: B-

2009-04-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Quantum of Solace: B-

2009-04-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

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.)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: B-

2009-04-06T07:14:00.000-07:00

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?”

August: A-

2009-04-06T07:10:00.000-07:00

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+

2009-04-06T07:08:00.000-07:00

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.

The Crying of Lot 49: A

2009-04-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

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.

MoveMe.com: Product Review

2009-03-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

You swore to yourself to never get married. And then you did.

You swore to yourself that your one-bedroom apartment would be enough. And then it wasn’t.

You swore to yourself that you’d never, ever, move away from the city—even to try and find a bigger place. But then you did.

Now what?

You’ve got a tiny apartment full of stuff that needs getting gone; you’ve got a much bigger house that stands empty; you need to get from Point A to Point B. But moving—the moving process—just sounds like such a headache: the packing, the moving, the driving, the shipping, and (above all) the having to constantly worry that some boneheaded mover is going to drop that vase your grandmother gave you. It’s all just so draining.

And then in steps www.moveme.com. And everything is easier.

First off: they’re not just a traditional moving service—it’s more like they collect useful information for anyone who’s looking to move and needs answers to their big questions of When, How, Who. They’ve got useful links to find stuff on removal companies, moving companies, and other tips and tricks for the first-time mover. It helps, too, that the site is tastefully arranged, with as many different options (a search bar, various tabs, and a helpline) presented with minimal clutter. From the homepage forward, the user is pulled in to exploring to their heart’s content until they know everything there is to know about moving, or until they feel completely
comfortable with the process—whichever comes first.

“MoveMe.com: The site that makes moving simple.” That’s a simple endorsement, but a truthful one. Sticking to the old adage that information is power, the UK-based site is powerful indeed, and is more than willing to offer up that power to any-and-all confused users. Click around for a few minutes or a few hours as the need dictates; prepare for an upcoming move that’s weeks off, or do it the night before. Need a removal company? Need ten removal companies? They’ll find it for you, no problem.

So you swore to yourself you’d never, ever, find an easy way to move all of your junk.

And then you did.

Glow-Sticks.Org: Product Review

2009-03-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

The night’s just starting: you’ve just gotten all dressed up and you’re about to head out to a party at a friend’s house. Now, this particular friend had specifically told you not to head to the clubs—that their house, on this night, would have the most intense party around: all the best dancing, the best music, and the best drinks. How could you resist? So here you are ready to head out while the moon is still high and the hour is not sufficiently late for you to pass out on someone’s couch. You’re ready to go…but something is missing. You’ve dodged the clubs for what is supposed to be the most intense, life-changing, mind-shattering night of your life, and there is something a bit off about it. What do you need?

Glow sticks.

Www.glow-sticks.org offers exactly what you need. They’ve got everything—from flashing rave horns to flashing whistles to even flashing sunglasses—that will help light up your nightlife. (No pun intended…ok, a bit of a pun intended.) The vendor’s online boutique is well-designed, without too many tabs or scroll-down menus to bog down the Average Joe just looking for a cool favor to take out to his rave. The site even has a cool flash graphic across the top of every page that, along with its hot-pink font, keeps you in the party mood even when you’re not partying.

So flash-back: you’re standing there in the doorway of your friend’s house. You spent hours preparing for this night—this night that you’ve been told over and over again would be super-fantastic. And yet here you stand, staring, knowing something is wrong. Now, insert a glow-stick, as if from the heavens (come on now, humor me folks), into your hand. And it all clicks into place, doesn’t it? Thanks to glow-sticks.org, your night just got a whole lot better.

Peloop: Product Review

2009-03-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve discussed some sensitive subjects before on this blog: I’ve praised or reviled films about illicit affairs, murder, torture, fornication, cruelty, sadism, abuse, and sexuality perversity. And yet there is one thing I’ve never discussed: penis enlargement. Well, now I’m going to—and I hope you stick around for the conversation. It seems a bit unorthodox, but in my drive to categorize and quantify all facets of media under the sun occasionally product reviews will enter my sphere. I’ve posted a few already, and now I’m posting another: it’s for peloop.com. It’s a website that offers guaranteed effective male enhancement. It won’t let you down.

Now I know exactly what you’re thinking: you’re thinking two things. One: “Why on Earth is this guy writing about this on his blog and why am I reading it?” And two: “Why should I care? I don’t need this.” And now I have an answer to both. One: you’re reading me because I’m compulsively addictive and delightful. And two: you don’t need need this—penis enlargement—but you’re curious. It presents opportunity. You’ve always felt a bit underwhelmed. They say it doesn’t matter, but who knows for sure? And besides, with all that’s going around, who would care if you went in for a little help?

It’s not as expensive as you’d think, and it’s easy, too. Which is why I’m here now, extolling the virtues of peloop.com. It’s male enhancement for everybody that always thought they either didn’t want to consider the option, or thought it was too weird to be worth the effort. News flash: it’s not. In fact, the website even has customer testimonials backing up their claim to success. And now, here I am doing the same. And if you can’t trust people these days…well then, you can’t trust me, right? And I’m always worth trusting.

Perry's: Product Review

2009-03-09T14:19:00.000-07:00

The advantages of owning a computer and a high-speed connection never really cease to amaze me. Beyond the fact that the Internet can provide an endless stream of entertaining videos and music and television (because who actually uses a television anymore anyway?), as well as 24/7 commentary on just about any and every issue, the web also gives you the power to shop, and shop, and shop—and it’s biggest charm (at least for me anyway) is also perhaps its most obvious: no personal contact. There are no lines, no annoying customers to work around, or meddlesome salesmen to coax away from your carefully browsing person—no, none of that. Just you and the things you may want to buy. (There is, of course, that other great benefit of online shopping: pretty great prices.)

Because, as has become apparent, shopping of any kind that doesn’t actually take place in a store is pretty appealing to most people, there are now stores online for everything: books, music, clothing, erotic DVDs…whatever. Even vehicles—especially vehicles (how great is it to be able to pick out that new sports car and not have to shake hands with the oily dealer?), and when it comes to buying vehicles online, http://www.perrys.co.uk/new-cars is the place to be.

Beyond the fact that the website is totally user-friendly—it offers a handy interface on the home page that immediately lets a prospective buyer pull up any car by price range, model, etc.—it also offers helpful tips and insight through its blog: http://www.blog.perrys.cok.uk. They highlight award-winning cars, like the Vauxhall Insignia, as well as great vehicles on a budget, like the Vauxhall Corsa, and even focuses on humanitarian efforts of those occasionally-pesky salesmen (as with this story about a Vauxhall dealer).

All-in-all, Perry’s provides both accessibility and assistance for the first-time car-buyer, as well as the experienced pro—all with nary a hassle in sight. Gotta love the Internet.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: A-

2008-10-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

Filled with Lower-East Side indie music, characters who shuttle back and forth in a stale-banana colored Yugo, and that old "meet cute" device, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist is nonetheless completely, utterly, and excitingly modern. Told in the course of one night, the film is enchanting in its fresh take on all the old tricks—romantic conventions aren't so much trashed as merely discarded in favor for deeper, more vividly domestic (and thereby more sincere) views of our characters. Nick & Norah is a trip, a joy ride, a plug-in-and-let-go existential experience that is, I'm entirely too certain, one of those rarest of cinematic treasures: the once-in-a-decade-or-two romantic comedy that is so clever and bright and new as to not just represent those feelings on screen, but also the feelings of an entire era. What's important, though, isn't how well everything fits into the old, if high-standard, mold. What matters is how refreshingly un- it all can be; the details of courtship and love and life in this city-that-never-sleeps are fleshed out with the deftest of touches, and so their world we visit is also subtly but continually opened up—blossoming right before our eyes.

The boy: Nick (Michael Cera, who's quickly becoming the quietest of indie triumphs). He's a senior in high school, from the suburbs of Jersey, and the only straight member in a very hardcore rock band: The Jerk-Offs. Plus, his girl—Tris (Alexis Dziena)—just kinda, sorta, broke up with him…a while ago. He can't quite get over it (and is, in fact, still sending her mixes from his wounded heart). And then his friends/band-mates, Dev (Rafi Gavron) and Thom (Aaron Yoo), pull out into NYC night-life to play a gig…

The girl: Norah (Kat Dennings). She, too, is a senior (maybe attending Brown in the fall, maybe getting a job), but she's from Englewood, Jewish, and apparently has more influence in the club scene than just about anyone save Jesus. That's why she happens to be in a club one night with her friend Caroline (Ari Gaynor, who—if she's not the heart—is the comedic engine continually at work in the background, churning out consistent laughs) when Nick's band takes the stage…and Nick sees Tris…and Norah needs someone to pose as her boyfriend.

The meet-cute: you already saw coming. But it's the sole conventional element in a staging that prepares us not in the slightest for a very period ("period" being The Now) narrative, filled with subplots about looking for your drunk-buddies, supporting your "uni-boob" with the correct bra, and finding clues as to the location of the super-secret show by the super-cult band Where's Fluffy? Once Nick and Norah have become acquainted, they're far from gaga over the other. (For one, he still finds every moment an opportunity to pump Norah about her frenemy's feelings over the break-up.) But we watch them find that connection, and—as directed by Peter Sollett from a wisely urban script by Lorene Scafaria based on the titular novel—the search is done in just the perfect way: through shared smiles, jokes that went bad half-way through (but it's the attempt that matters, anyway), and moments shared in the oddest of places, made homely and yours through the sheer power of being there. In short, Nick and Norah find each other in Nick & Norah as if they were every teenager in the world, crammed into two symbolic bodies—flirting and bantering and letting silence flow out awkwardly in perfect imitation of the real thing, so as to make it real. There's derivation in the concept, but triumph in its staging.

"I just want to hold your hand," Dev tells Nick, in one of the many inspired moments in the movie, and that same easy-going whimsy of love and lust and everything-in-between just sort of happening carries over to the treatment of the film's every character. Dev and Thom (and the no-name beefy pick-up that starts tagging along with them after The Jerk-Offs' first gig) are gay, but their no one's flamboyant anything, just as Norah is Jewish—but you'd only know it when she brings up one of her favorite philosophies from said religion (which lets Nick put his own funky little, completely sincere spin on it). This is the New York City of the new millennium, and it belongs to these people, the movie tells us, who find life and love in the moments when no one is looking, and everything just comes rushing up to meet you. Say "Hello" and dive right in.

30 Rock: The Complete First Season: B+

2008-10-03T15:53:00.001-07:00

The Rural Juror; "Muffin Top"; dating your distant cousin (accidently); "Vice President of East Coast Television-and-Microwave Programming"; Fat Bitch I & II; The Black Crusaders—this is 30 Rock: Tina Fey's irreducibly insane, incandescently clever show-within-a-show sitcom. Such moments as those above are the reason her show first hit the radar, why it won over critics and (small but fanatical) audiences alike; and it's obvious why: 30 Rock has an admirable spirit of loony iconoclasm, it's a stalwart of left-brain/right-brain/no-brain bubbly wit. Built like the drunken, one-night-stand bastard of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (but far more entertaining) and fleshed out by mind-bogglingly quick zings between the Smart and the Dumb, the High and the Low, Fey's brain-child is a bit like doping up on laughing gas for thirty-minute intervals—the drug hits quick and stays, sizzling pleasantly in the back of your head, driving you to laugh spontaneously, constantly.

That's not to say everything works. A lot doesn't. Or didn't—see, the opening four episodes of Rock seem counterintuitive to what should be happening: they sink steadily downward, becoming almost impishly ridiculous; hollow and quirky: Scrubs Zero. The "Pilot" is more the tasteful precursor, though it too has some bumps. And then "The Aftermath," "Blind Date," and "Jack the Writer" become increasingly, almost imperceptibly, difficult. One can see, in Fey's writing and producing, the thread-bare work of her vision. And then the uptick, and stuff starts shifting for the better.

Leaving objectivity at the door, the concept is this: Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) is the creator and head-writer of The Girlie Show, a mildly-hot sketch show on NBC with a crackpot star (Jane Krakowski). In comes a new executive, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), who recruits fallen-movie-star Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) to boosts the show's ratings. Lemon, already a frazzled career-woman in the greatest of clichéd traditions, now has to contend with her paranoid best-friend being replaced with a loose cannon…and the new boss who really wants to mentor her.

For several reasons, this would never happen. Like, in a million-billion-'till the end of time years never. But with a loopy conceit comes an even loopier product—and 30 Rock delivers pretty uniformly. The punch-lines are written as confessions; the action is sliced up into an ironic mélange; and the cast is such a phenomenal support (excluding Mr. Baldwin, who we'll get to in a moment) as to make even the weakest moments fresh. Even "The Head and the Hair" is infectiously goofy. And "Up All Night," "Cleveland," and "The Fighting Irish" are about all the necessary prove of Rock's crystallization as a comedy fount.

…Now: Alec Baldwin. Frequent-SNL host, movie star, Baldwin Brother—but funny, funny, man? Yes, yes, a 1,000 times yes. Delivering his lines a silken purr, squaring his physical presence into a box of imposing dexterity, and centering even those jokes that fly off the screen, the actor isn't just the heart of the show, but also its breakout show. He does something almost transcendent, and he does it in the context of a lesser, if very loose and very witty show. He makes the impossible possible, and turns the alt-NYC of Fey's world not just into a fanciful place, but also a state-of-mind: where sketch shows can have the name "Girlie" in their title and still air; where NBC is just a subsidiary of the Sheindhart Wig Company; and where in Cleveland, everyone's a model.

Eagle Eye: C

2008-10-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

It's 2008—so why do movies like this keep getting made? We live in an age of hyper-awareness and literacy; and yet, when confronted with the possibility of creating a thriller gussied up as an allegory for our modern-1984 times, director DJ Caruso makes…this? This—Eagle Eye—that is like some dusty-retro relic from yesteryear, dug up and cleaned with spit-shine, then plopped before us as an audience and beamed directly onto our retinas—its mediocrity made "relevant" for a culture now long past being fooled by the old as the new. It's the kind of movie where the enemy is (spoiler!) a giant supercomputer; where the heroes are struggling, pretty, Americans With Issues who still find time to spark some sexual chemistry; and where the government always seems to get in its own way until—everyone together now—the maverick of the bunch realizes the hero is in the right. Sheesh, what is this: Tron?

It isn't as though Eagle Eye is entirely incompetent; and it's in no way not quite a thrill ride. In fact, the first 45-minutes are about as engaging as one could have hoped for. Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is down on his luck, his brother just died, when he begins to receive mysterious phone calls, shipments of terrorist contraband, and money. Soon the FBI is involved, and he's running for his life—the omnipotent Voice on the other end of the line always directing him. Rachel (Michelle Monahan) is in a similar predicament, except that on her end, it's her son the Voice is holding hostage.

What's going on? Who is this "they"? And why are on Earth are such nice-looking young people like Jerry and Rachel being put through so much insanity?

Sad news: the propulsion of the first act runs dry quick, as answers become apparent (the most stultifying of which I've already revealed for you). And without that source of fuel, first you realize how banal the script is. And then you realize how completely and incompetently absurd is the craft presented to you as coherence and entertainment. Yes, stuff blows up and people are thrilled and scared and put in life-or-death situations. But why, exactly? Anyone?

I didn't think so.

Written by John Glenn & Travis Wright, and then Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, Eagle Eye is a hollow trifle—a curio of pop entertainment that seems to have wandered in from a far dustier set. Reportedly, the idea was conceived by executive-producer Steven Spielberg, but in whatever iteration he may have originally seen it, none remains. There is, instead, cliché after disconnected cliché. Even the extraordinarily well-cast actors—among whom, as no one should be shocked to learn, Mr. LaBeouf is the stand-out (his funeral sequence early on is the sole moment that actually reaches out and grabs you)—struggle and stumble under the weight of so much bull. And Mr. Caruso…well, after being given the bigger-budgetary reins after last year's Disturbia, he seems mostly content to let stuff get larger and more impossible, until it all spirals out of control—an '80s plot, meets '90s star-power, layered thick with '00 Michael Bay technical sensibilities. Welcome to the future, folks.

Choke: C+

2008-09-30T04:05:00.001-07:00

Choke is not a Chuck Palahniuk movie. It’s based on one of his books; but that’s the closest the film ever comes to touching, in an audiovisual format, the scabrous sort of satire that Palahniuk pioneered years ago. And worse, even with expert brow-wriggling and –mugging by Sam Rockwell, the complexity and unremitting pain of the original’s prose has all but been steamrolled—rib-tickled into a frenetic comedy of the absurd.

Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.

Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.

Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.

Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.

Subliminal Tapes: Product Review

2008-09-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

We’ve all been there—you’ve got a problem, a bad habit, say, or a nagging character flaw that you just can’t fix. It could be anything: you’re just the tiniest bit overweight; you’ve still got that weird spider phobia; you feel like your soul-mate is out there, but that you just aren’t doing everything you can to find that person—like you’re being held back. There is a solution. Refreshingly, helpfully, someone has come forward with a product that doesn’t just help…it helps you help you. At www.subliminal-tapes-self-improvement, there are a wide variety of options available, and each of them produces results.

“It’s not magic. It’s not bunk. It’s simply mind over matter,” goes the bold claim on the first page that greets you when you click on over. The statement is bold, but refreshing in its truth. In every subliminal tape, there comes packaged with it the power to change your life. And, after use, change it you will. This stuff delivers.

Shopping is no hassle—the website is cleanly and helpfully organized and arrayed—and your tastes are all catered to. Want custom support? You’ve got it? Feel like this stuff is just for you…but don’t have anything but an iPod? That’s what subliminal mp3s are for. Most importantly: if you ever get hesitant—worried this can’t be true, that you’re too special, too you, to have the product work any magic—have no fear; along with their catalog and order information, the website also has links to their testimonials, words from people who made a conscious choice to get help in helping themselves. And they’re better for it.

One last thing: there’s a guarantee. That’s right. Even after all the customer-friendly stuff they’ve got at your fingertips, there’s still a guarantee. So it’s no risk to try it. Go ahead—what’s to lose? At the very least, the subliminal CDs do nothing more than lull you to sleep. But I’m willing to bet that doesn’t happen… In fact, I’d guarantee it.

The Nines: B+

2008-09-20T17:12:00.000-07:00

The Nines has, in reality, little to do with math—save for the omnipresence of its titular number. It is, however, framed by an elegant geometric structure: the narrative being told by three successive short films, each unspooling and spilling into each other as if, instead, they were three concentric circles. This is a movie masquerading as a "tiny" drama with exponentially grand ambitions; a metaphysic puzzle that tickles your heart and brain the bigger, more complex, and more numerous the pieces get. Rarely does meta-filmmaking like this get more authentically, or more hypnotically, engrossing.

Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.

…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.

"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.

Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.

Burn After Reading: B-

2008-09-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

Satire (n): “The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”

What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.

Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.

United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.

Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.

Southland Tales: C

2008-09-13T17:57:00.000-07:00

For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?

The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.

At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.

In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)

It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.

House of Sand and Fog: B

2008-09-07T14:21:00.001-07:00

There's a trap lying in wait once you start to watch House of Sand and Fog—and it has nothing to do with the way your sympathies keep being sliced up between the main characters. No, the real problem is that Vadim Perelman's adaptation of the Andre Dubus III novel hovers vaguely in that maddening cinematic gray area: it's a prestige picture that's firmly middlebrow. Everything works for most of the film, but the real surprise is how unpretentious the whole enterprise can be. Never has an "artful" film that feels so artless felt so engaging.

We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.

Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.

Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?

Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.

This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.

Angels in America: A-

2008-08-31T05:51:00.000-07:00

In a work so over-stuffed with ideas as Tony Kushner's Angels in America—an HBO movie adapted from Kushner's own Pulitzer-prize winning drama that liberally runs up to six hours—what more can there be to say of it except that it stuns: continually, unerringly, stubbornly, until your heart and brain swell and ache with the sheer volume of energy presented on screen. The time is 1985, New York City, and everywhere, in Kushner's world, people fret and dart about, sliced up by their interconnected bonds of disease, love, and politics. AIDS has just begun to ravage the city, and the millennium approaches; as many a character doth proclaim, history itself is opening up—"Anything can happen. Any awful thing."

At the center (and about him do the other elements and characters spin like spokes about a wheel) is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, giving a luminous, ebulliently witty performance bristling with fervor and grace), who has just been diagnosed with the dreaded syndrome…and whose lover of four years, Louis (Ben Shenkman), has just walked out on him because of it—the latter man not being able to handle disease or its deteriorating effects. Alone, save for his friend Belize (Jeffrey Wright, in one of multiple roles, re-defining the stereotype of the ravishing 80s glitter queen by being even more ravishing and delightful), Prior begins to see visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, fluttering and declaiming with hair-raising power) who tells him that he is a prophet. His prophecy? A little irrelevant—save for that Kushner uses the device to probe even the neurosis of the guiding hands in Heaven.

The cast is large, huge even, but portrayed by a handful of principles in multiple roles. Those most important not yet mentioned: Meryl Streep, as the mother of a closeted Mormon (Patrick Wilson) who becomes un- after he falls in with a troubled Louis; Meryl Streep as Ethel Rosenberg, done all up in Kabuki makeup to see Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) off after the homophobe himself dies of AIDS; Pacino, aforementioned, who gives a turn of such startling clarity, eloquence, and stark heartlessness the audience can practically see his career jumpstart before their eyes; Wilson, also aforementioned, who's like Brendan Frasier—from Gods and Monsters—on sensitive-steroids; and Mary-Louise Parker, as Wilson's long suffering wife, Harper.

James Cromwell pops up here and there as Cohn's doctor, and occasionally a wax statue springs to life with a new face, but mostly the same eight individuals keep walking and talking for almost 360 minutes. Their anguish is palpable, and director Mike Nichols—no rookie himself, and a veteran to stage, screen, and stage-to-screen adaptations—frames shots and scenes around their marooning discontent, but the real star is Kushner, who writes speech in no way I've heard before; it's patterned in a way after the rambling Jewish neurosis of Woody Allen, or Allen Ginsburg, but it's also spiked-through with revelation and philosophy.

Kushner would go on to write Steven Spielberg's marvelous 2005 thriller/meditation-on-revenge epic Munich, but in Angels does he most prominently and purely display his gift. Monologues sprout like trees from within each character—organically, and stunningly beautiful; and the fantastical elements that come to eventually power the central narrative are both cooky and believable (aided by Nichols, who aims and succeeds for a tone of cynical hope). Sliced into two three-hour halfs—"Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika"—that have their share of problems, Angels in America is a delectable, miserable, contradictory, exemplary dissection of life on a island, wherein each individual deludes themselves into thinking they are alone, and lonely.

"Perestroika" lags, and grows a bit thematically murky after the clarity and force of "Millennium," but it concludes with a climax of awesome, shattering implication. Confronted by a table of fretting principle angels who implore their prophet to allow himself and his race to "stop moving" in order to allow the world to heal itself Prior doesn't even miss a beat to shake his head in refusal. "Bless me…I want more life." So too, will each viewer after finishing Kushner's masterpiece: more life in this dank, tragic, ecstatic little piece of rock we call Earth.

"There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics," Louis spouts near the end of the first half—and so it may be. But there's also us, humans, vibrant and joyously, messily, alive. Kusher and Nichols, with their cast, make the act of living in this modern century a promise fulfilled.

Bad Education: B+

2008-08-31T05:49:00.000-07:00

In the cinematic universe of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, it is pretty safe to say that a tranvestite with a secret is about as innocuous as bubble-wrapped glass -- and that the suspenseful, erotic/romantic/familial tensions created by such a "dreadful secret" are about as weighty as...well...the air said tranny would breath. Almodóvar doesn't create films, building them scene-by-scene; he envisions them -- full of irony and sass, insolence and sexuality, brash swagger and a delicious visual palette -- and they spring like Athena from the head of Zeus: fully-formed and marvelous. Or so is said. They are tricky things, his movies, and I'd be the first to admit I wasn't completely won over by the auteur by what'd I seen of his work. Yet in Bad Education, his noir-set-on-low-simmer crossed with a meta-critique of the Catholic Church, there's finally a discernible depth and passion to his work. Nothing is static...and nothing, I feel quite validated in saying and still remain spoiler-free, is what it seems.

We enter on a prominent Madrid filmmaker, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) as he's scouring the tabloid headlines for inspiration for his next project. Soon, a man comes into his office by the name of Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), an old school friend of Enrique's back when they went to school with the priests. Ignacio has brought a book he's written -- "The Visit" -- that explores the implications of his bond with those men of God, both when he was a boy and searching further, into a fictitious present. Enrique is curious about the project (we're told Ignacio was the man's first adolescent crush) but he politely dismisses Ignacio anyway, with a promise to read the manuscript. In the ensuing twenty-or-so minutes, "The Visit" comes to life on screen before us, Ignacio's life after he was molested writ large as he morphs into a junkie drag-queen named Zahara, as a film-within-a-head-within-a-film...and we're finally told Ignacio's side of the story. Or are we?

Crafted within the perfect tone of jaded impossibility, Education's unspooling events are never as certain as they seem. Soon after finishing Ignacio's tale, Enrique meets him and agrees there is a film within the tale to be made. But the director doesn't want his old friend to have the prize role: Zahara? Why? It turns out, possibly, Ignacio could not be Ignacio at all...and in that game of shifting identity, the tale of Ignacio's fate similarly shifts. We see his victimization, but also his flame-out, and the utter -- sympathetic, nearly -- fallibility of the man who attacked him. Told in over-lapping tales after Enrique has begun the movie, that is when the audience gets the whole story.

Almodóvar is up to his usual tricks with Bad Education; he hasn't gone so far as to abandon his core tropes. Drag queens (and their smoky, slurring, affectionate-insulting vernacular) are prominent, as is the graphic sexualization of a fine male specimen (in this case, and rightfully so, Bernal is alternately a snarling queen, a hustler in a blonde wig, and a teenager himself -- swimming nervously in his underwear under the wolfish gaze of Enrique). But the director doesn't entrance his audience with his faux-humor; he doesn't seal us off from the events on screen. And in unbottling the truth of his tale, he has presented to his audience the truth (or some version of it, surely) of the crimes of the Catholic Church.

Two years after Bad Education would come Volver...a complete 180-degrees, because where the former had an all-male cast complete with all-star pathos, Volver was outfitted with similarly nuerotic females, an interwoven clan of superstition. The latter film succeeded not because it shifted backwards for its director, tonally, (though it still did) but because of the fierce huzzah of its star: Penelope Cruz. She lit a fire behind the screen, lending -- if not tension -- then a center to Almodóvar's swirling storm of dead mothers, husbands, and ballad-belting latinas. Similarly, there is a center to Education, but it comes not from the cast (qualified as they are; kudos again to Bernal -- who was equally as exquisite as the sexually-uncertain teenager of Alfonso Cuaron's georgeous travelogue Y Tu Mama Tambien) but rather from the writer-director himself. There's finally more than just mandatory cinematic imaginación. There's pasión to go with it. With just a pinch of that key ingredient, his thriller really thrills; the tragedy in his evocation of the snarling bonds of love and blood actually touches, saddens. And the filmmaker himself, for once, authentically astounds.

Rome: The Complete Second Season: A-

2008-08-31T05:47:00.001-07:00

Ancient world history, re-done with a Sopranos twist...and a dash of Entourage, with just a splash of Dynasty and Dallas. Plus a massive-scale set, for flair. That's Rome -- the HBO drama that views a pivotal period of Ancient Roman civilization from an angle that can only be termed meta-modern: fleshed out as grand soap opera, played out over continents and years, and then spiked through with televisual flourishes reminiscent of the last twenty years of backstabbing prime-time bitchery entertainment, Rome is structured like it was thought-up by someone who watched way too much of all the best stuff to be offered by piquant, overstuffed, sensationally engrossing late-night melodramas. Which it probably was. And then they added the violence...and the sex...and the sandals.

Created by Bruno Heller, John Milius, and William J. Macdonald, the series sees in the chronicling of the fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire an elegant symmetry; spliced almost perfectly in half, season one dealt with Ceasar's (Ciarán Hinds, spread wide majestically on wings of noble megolomania) ascent and subsequent assasination. Season two picks up with the aftermath, and carries on through the civil wars over who would populate the power vacuum all the way to the triumph of Ceasar's great-nephew, Octavian (Max Pirkis, as the younger incarnation, and Simon Woods as the elder). Remember that nod to The Sopranos? It's evident in the ever-prevalent jostling for influence and political stability -- and writ large, magnificently, equally on the Senate Floor as in the villa of Octavian's mother, Atia (Polly Walker, turning in a performance of delicious villainy). What about Dynasty or Dallas? Just as both of those soaps follow a cast of rambunctious, morally unscrupulous people tethered together alternately by blood, marriage, money, scheming, or "affection," so too are the lovers, fighters, politicos, and women of this soap. Their shenanigans just take place 2,000 years previous. Huh.

And where's our dash of Entourage? It so happens that our two protagonists (though I apply the term loosely: Rome has a main cast of dozens, and the camera shares time equally) are Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson), two ex-soldiers in this Ceasar-less world who have found themselves still bound together, by duty and friendship, their bond strengthened and weathered more and more by the demands of a fractured upper-crust. (Late in the season, Vorenus is forced through pride to ally himself with Mark Antony -- portrayed by James Purefoy in a tour de force of debauchary, emotional immaturity, and sincerity -- while Pullo finds an older acquaintance with Octavian leaves him on the opposite side of the void.) They are us, wide-eyed but (somewhat-) noble in a society going to rot.

And we, the audience, are them. Which is probably the biggest success of Rome, even in its second -- shorter -- season. In a cast of top-tier performers, we sympathize and understand each and every one. From Cicero (David Bamber, whose beady eyes are put to fiendishly clever good use), the Senator who successfully plotted against the power bases of both Ceasar and Antony, to the Newsreader (Ian McNeice), who is as good to a narrator/news announcer/adman as a society several millenium ago was going to get, each character who speaks but one word is rich with care and precision; Rome's cast is a Dicken's dream team made flesh, wonderfully.

The first year was better, but only because it was more reliable; we all know the mechanics behind the character arc of Julius Ceasar. The second year was gloomier, more unstable, which translates in some etheral way to not as good -- denser somehow, murky without being wholly satisfying. Head writer Bruno Heller, who wrote eight of season one's twelve eps, isn't nearly as omnipresent, which could explain things. But really, just don't. Revel instead in a grand historical tapestry that interweaves fiction and fact into a memorable, staggeringly inrresistible, drama. Fatefully, Mere Smith (a former Joss Whedon associate, and a major creative force behind the middle years of Angel) contributes two scripts -- and they're two of the sharpest all series. "Deus Impiditio Esuritori Nullus (No God Can Stop a Hungry Man)" is both the penultimate installment, Smith's better of her two efforts, and perhaps one of the two or three best episodes of Rome, ever. It's scrappy, turbulent, sourly witty, and irrevocably authentic. If the real Ancient Rome wasn't this good -- this violent, or sexy, or frighteningly human-sized -- then it should only aspire to be.

Breaking Dawn: B+

2008-08-31T05:45:00.001-07:00

"...Reason and love keep little company together nowadays," goes the William Shakespeare quote that pops up not even a fifth the way through Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn -- and well they still don't, in this final volume of her vampiric romance novels; it's due to this resolute lack of the twining between the heart and the mind that most of what goes right in the novel does, in fact, go right. Compacted into a radical new structure (say what you will, negative or otherwise about Meyer's books, but each and every previous installment has been concieved and molded into the same pattern), the plot in Dawn has as many twists and kinks woven into it as Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse put together and the majority are born from that chasm between desire and pragmatic function, and they take flight beautifully, if slowly at first, until any reader would be hard-pressed not to be entranced.

Where we left our heroine, Bella Swan, was in that place where she always seems pre-emptively perched: a third the way to heartbreak, and three quarters down the road to joy -- such is her predicament as the sole human girl in the entire Western Hemisphere privy to the supernatural world of vampires, werewolves, and the like. This time, the perpetrator of her distress is Jacob Black, a local werewolf who also moonlights as her best friend; he's sad because he loves her and she loves Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vampire who also moonlights as the cause of her euphoria.
Whatever: save the fancy gothic archetypes for another plot...this is pure harlequin, a love triangle. Not for too long though. Meyer, affable and enchanting as she seems in interviews, is also capable of learning and growing as an author; she powers through the problem poised by the unrequited-ness of her characters' affection pretty early on, setting herself up with more formidable obstacles. Like Bella's mortality (she's gotten Edward to swear to turning her into a vampire after their wedding...a day, surprisingly, not too far off). And the issue of her BFF's "imprinting" (e.g., a werewolf thing that lets its user unconsciously find and devote himself to the love of his life).

Stuff starts to hit the fan in quick order, and what's more, the action is sliced up into three sections -- two narrated by Bella, with a bridge by Jacob. I'm going to go out on a limb (don't hate me) and say this: Jacob's POV is far more entertaining (or rather, less annoying) than hearing Bella in all of her...Bellaness. (It isn't her fault though, blame schizophrenia: she's been described by Meyer in these collective four books as, alternately, clumsy, affable, smart, reliable, emotional, caring, mediocre, average, controlled, and stubborn. Yeesh.) Plus, another leg up for Jacob is that through him, we first glimpse the pivotal hinge of the entire novel, and through him is Meyer's greatest trick realized; with her werewolf as a perfect bridge, she see-saws tonally (delightfully so, might I add) throughout Breaking Dawn, from Rosemary's Baby to that sex scene on the beach in The O.C. back to a grandiose action sequence that feels very much like The Battle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.

...Which brings up the most interesting point of all, really: improbable as it may seem, and while always keeping the reader off-kilter with new characters and dire threats at every turn, Meyer has found a way to end her Twilight series happily for all involved. And that's her biggest plus. Her biggest minus is that she does such a superb wrap-up while nary exploring the dark, lushly romantic world she's let pour from her skull. Sales wise, she's the inheritor to J.K. Rowling's throne, but artistically? She has imagination, but no accompanying vision -- there's depth but no richness to the acres of her surrounding white canvas.

I'm quibbling; I'll stop. At the heart of Bella's tale, the primal power its allure, has always been its gooey fairy-tale "Awww," factor. Which I didn't so much love. (Really, though, it was the repetition inherent in Meyer's act of shoving such goo down my throat, that irked me.) What I do love is being guided and tricked, pleased and scared, tensed and saddened -- that's the mark of a true storyteller, folks. And Stephenie Meyer is one, even if she is also a resolute fan of her own coyness. (Sex-less sex scenes? Puh-leaze.) Witty when it gets out of its own way, heartfelt and earnest when it comes to any form of any relationship, unexpectedly creepy -- morbid even -- in all the unexpectedly right places, and perfectly structured from opening preface to final chapter, Breaking Dawn is as apt a title as any for this conclusion. Not because it has much Sun involved (Hello kids! Forks is the Rainy Captial of the U.S.), but because the image is perfect for the career of its creator: huge, meteoric in its ascension, and occasionally brilliant.

The Dark Knight: A-

2008-07-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

"Why. So. Serious?" The Joker (Heath Ledger) croaks out at a mob boss...right before he slits his face open with a knife. It's a violent act coupled with a macabre punchline -- the usual Joker modus operandi -- except that, as re-envisioned by director Christopher Nolan, the exquisitely terrifying villain in The Dark Knight operates by only the most abstract code; his jokes and murders and randoms acts of terror keep cropping up and pulling down on all the bright, shiny people of Gotham City as if they and not the works of our protagonists were the Acts of God. As a morality play, that's the central theme at work in Nolan's second Batman film, and as an Agent of Chaos, the Clown Prince of Crime himself can seem a tad -- how to say this and not sound like a grouchy non-fanboy? -- omnipotent. (Really? He had months of planning to rig all those explosives in all the right places? Really?!) But as an inspired piece of filmmaking trickery, a force of manic cinematic alchemy, that visage of tear-streaked circus makeup and the body it's attached to are a pair not to be triffled at -- barely even in whose direction you would want to snigger. They are relentless, pitch (hell, bruise) black, and thrilling. So is the movie that surrounds them.

From the ashes of a torched Wayne Manor, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, effortlessly making it seem as if Katie Holmes never even existed) have emerged, it seems, victorious over the criminal element in their city. Which thrills Bruce, because as soon as he's finished with this whole "The Batman" business, he can get down to finally marrying his one true love. Rachel is thrilled in a similar way, except she has her eyes on Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the new District Attorney who she is now dating. Oops -- sucks for Mr. Wayne. These are the states in which our characters are left precariously trapped for the majority of Knight, each of them in turn scrabbling to gain ground in an increasingly violent and unstable society. All thanks to The Joker, of course, whose bank-heist opens the film; he's a devil in a cheap purple suit, and he just keeps amping up the fun for his audiences watching at home and in the streets of their own private hell.

Grim, right? Christopher Nolan, and his brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the script with him), have crafted a film teeming with schemes and desperation; double-crosses and last-minute saves; survival laced through with death in the next footstep. Gone are the great, glamorously gothic cityscapes of the Burton films -- but a new hallmark has crept in: a feeling of gnawing, clashing, grasping, tensely mortal mechinations grinding down on the people purporting them. In this new modern era (it's obviously Chicago, and no effort is made to disguise it), the battle our hero has to wage is double-edged: with he swing he takes, the enemy doesn't grow smaller, no -- it grows crazier. When asking his butler (Michael Caine, in a performance of crinkly-faced drollery and skill) how it was he caught his own villains back when he was a civil servant, there was but one piece of advice left to give: "We burned the forest." In The Dark Knight, more so than Batman Begins by probably 100-fold, the spectacle of battle, of such a burning, squeezes its way into almost every other frame, and it can grow to seem, quite honestly, all too tiring and overbearing. A battle for a city's soul should never, ever, take 152 minutes. A showcase for supreme in-front and behind-the-camera talent, on the other hand...

With a raspy boom that shrinks to a velvet whisper without his mask on, Bale returns once more with a performance of admirable versatility. He isn't gifted with the same delicately executed undercurrents of psychology (you'll hate me for saying this, but the Good/Bad, Chaos/Order dichotomy here isn't nearly as personal, and therefore accesible and relevant) as he was in Begins, but his vigilante still morphs back and forth, in each second, from Cause to Effect. He's always saving the city, so the city always needs saving. Sliding both farther to the right and left of him on the moral scale is Dent, and embodying him as Eckhart does, the tragedy that eventually befalls the character has real heft, even as the surrounding players' jaw-boning and philosophizing about his conscience grows weary. Staring both of them in the face, and only rarely cracking a smile (though always seeming to cackle) is The Joker. And Heath Ledger. In what may well prove to be his last screen performance ever, Ledger expanded on the skill he showed in Brokeback Mountain of possessing characters to an impossible, bone-deep degree and he pushes his monster over the edge of mania. His acting (and facial features) lack the careful sculpting of Jack Nicholson's very same clown, but his turn is ferocious in a way Ol' Jack never was. Sucking on his facial scars, prancing or tripping through dark streets and corridors, dolling himself up in a red wig and nurse's outfit, and alternately rasping, screeching, squealing, or grouding out his vowels, Batman's archenemy gives off a magnetism that haunts the film and propels it in equal measure. And when he laughs, his insanity burbling up like rot in the form of demented grunts and giggles, the performance is beyond great: it's transcendant.

Leaving the theater, I couldn't help but notice I had what seemed to be a headache forming in the back of my skull; how curious -- after all, Nolan's film is a Greek Tragedy produced with the nerve-jangling power of talent in its prime. So how could I feel bad? There is no doubting The Dark Knight is a very good film (some would say great, fantastic, a masterpiece...on which I have to subtly disagree) but it's also overwhelming. The plot entangles the audience, and leaves them with a sickening, fascinating, buzz of dread and joy, but it also ties itself into knots in the process; after the fifth double-cross, the seventh surprise killing, and the third coin-flip, it has to be said: the spectacle of this, Batman's sixth outing in twenty years, nearly and almost completely covers the drama that supports it. Almost, but God help us all, not quite. Left behind is, instead, a vision of urban criminality and the vigilantism required to destroy it, as well as the soul-killing steps involved. It's a heady pop vision that is as baroque and unwieldy as it sounds. After all this, my opinion is still almost beside the point: people will trot out in droves to see the movie for the next month regardless. Which is in a way, a blessing. Maybe, now, after leaving the theater of Christopher Nolan's latest success (after all this time, from Memento through Insomnia to The Prestige surely we can all say: he's a man of vision, maybe even magic) they will reach their own conclusion: superhero movies can grow up -- maybe they need to -- and become a work of almost-art, displaying for the world the complexities of Good fighting Evil, becoming it, and then mocking nobility all together.

Gods and Monsters: A

2008-07-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

Like a death rattle do the weighty themes supporting Bill Condon's beautifully rich elegy Gods and Monsters move throughout the film. They aren't self-serious and they move with no unpalatable heft (which is a relief, considering such subjects as lost innocence and the relationship between art and its artist number among the crowd), rather they wrap slowly around the picture, strangling the one man at its center: James Whale (Ian McKellen, turning decorum into, paradoxically, both a pained facade and a ribald comedy) -- the Golden Age director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein and a whole other host of films you've no doubt heard of but never seen. Condon, as writer and director, is the man behind the scenes grappling and managing how exactly the various tendrils of memory and sorrow must seep into the story of Whale's last days of life, and doing so is a tricky prospect. But he pulls it off with fluid grace, inter-cutting the forward momentum with backward -- longing -- glances at the Great War, or the filming of Bride. So great is his achievement that though much of Gods and Monsters is sad, it's never somber.

The audience begins at what are well probably the last few weeks in the life of what was once one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Famous as an auteur of horror (a phrase coined so many decades after his rise and fall that if he heard such attributed to him, Mr. Whale would have probably died laughing) by creating the Frankenstein franchise in the early '30s and then briefly even bigger for things like Showboat, he has retreated into permanent solitude...and that's exactly where, after a brief stay in the hospital, he returns to -- encountering almost immediately the new gardener hired by his maid Hanna (Lynn Redgrave): a Mr. Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser, in perhaps the best onscreen feat of his career, giving vulnerability the perfect mix of naiveté and boyish heartland compassion). Now, James Whale was gay and, well, Clay Boone was a looker; and Whale being who he was -- and in the hands of someone like McKellen and Condon, he was many things: egotist, madman, gentleman, devil, saint, senile -- their paths were bound to cross. It is such an intersection that is at the heart of Gods and Monsters, but it is the heart itself, a study of tragedy brought on at once both by effervescence of the mind and nostalgia eternal, that makes the movie truly great.

During the nearly two hour running time the dynamic between the three stars is on the eternal shift, and mend. At first, after having tepidly posed for one of Whale's paintings, Clay is outwardly disgusted at the older man's sexuality; but then something brings him back. That something is a nearly voracious void in his heart, a curiosity, for the experience and understanding of human life. (Today, I think, we would call it empathy.) And his employer is a near gold-mine of experience -- the man's recounting of both Hollywood and his days as a soldier keep up throughout their first lunches and teas. Hanna herself is not at all amused by these interactions because, though she cares deeply for Mr. Whale, she knows more about his dealings with young men then he would probably care for. She softens though, in her cantankerous and heavily-accented way. (Lynn Redgrave, as the woman behind the voice, gives a performance of perfectly small-sized delights; in one scene, she's a domestic counterpart to McKellen, in another his doting -- if overbearing -- great aunt.) But then Clay and his boss go to a party thrown by a fellow Golden Age director, and then there is a storm, and a return home. And in those run of scenes there is massive heartbreak, understanding, and destruction all compacted and intermingled -- mangling the heart even as the skill of its execution fascinates the mind.

At the very roots of Bill Condon's movie is the hope against hope that a long life will not fade into the recession of a life lived, and the futility of knowing that in realizing that, it already has. Gods and Monsters is as versatile a work of art as its hero was a human being: as a drawing-room drama, the tiny ensemble is superb in its realization; as a biography, the director is remarkable for breathing life into a curiosity, cloaking his eccentricities in the pathos that begot them; and as a mood piece, it is singularly stupendous -- staggering in the subtle emotional damage it wreaks. Wonderful indeed is the movie that views divinity and monstrosity, empathy and isolation, humanity and the rotting power of loss as two sides of the same coin.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army: B+

2008-07-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

There's a revelation about a life beginning near the end of Hellboy II. And just as the first act is getting going there's a running gag about relationships and their various tensions; the same goes for the second act...and the third. And somewhere in there -- a drunken duet serenading and bemoaning star-crossed love with all its joys and sorrows. Such details, so dry and domesticated in their objectivity, must sound odd to anyone who has actually seen the film because, oh yeah, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is just that: a big red brute of a protagonist with shorn-off horns and a cigar hanging out of his mouth. That's writer-director Guillermo del Toro's great big ghoulish joke, though: that each of his spiny, many-legged (and eyed), creepy, crawly creatures is as relatable and worthy of his camera as those All-American comic-book Joes. Spider-Man? Only if he has wings. And scales.

The source material of del Toro's sequel, Mike Mignolia's Dark Horse comic, says that Hellboy and his various compatriots live and work with the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, their sole activity being, as Hellboy's pa so aptly summed up in Hellboy "to bump back" at the creatures that bumped in the night. And so, for the first film, they did. Except the "creatures" were mostly Nazi's...and the occasional assasin fueled by sand. Nothing too extraordinary, really. But freed by financial and critical kudos -- and lauching off from his last film, the lusciously dark, full-blooded, and tragic fairy tale Pan's Labyrinth -- del Toro is more content this second go round to fill the screen, and plot, with any manner of organisms. He harnesses the power of cinema to make his imagination manifest, and the glory of it all is that he does it so well that the conflict between humans and the otherwordly Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) who wants to exterminate them that is the narrative center of The Golden Army whizzes by on the brawny, brainy, synapses of his creativity that burble just below the surface of every sequence.

Nazis weren't the only thing shorn-off as so much dead weight; John Meyers (Rupert Evans), the FBI newbie who "babysat" Hellboy in the first film, has been unceremoniously written out, and his straight-man mugging is briefly missed. Then Jeffrey Tambor, beefing up his role as a bigwig from the last movie, steps foot onto the screen, and his comic timing (honed to a razor sharp point on Arrested Development) quickly makes up for it. So, too, does the rest of the cast in this more lavishly created film make the experience all the richer. Selma Blair, as Hellboy's true love, makes her quasi-acrid exasperation both funny and lethal: the physical manifestation of her pyrokinectic abilities. Doug Jones, the director's consummate performer of wierd, is all the more welcome as the painfully polite and sincere Abe Sapien. And of course, Ron Pearlman, as the devil himself, gives a performance of finely-wrought comedy and grace; he's the clown laughing through a tear or two -- a muscle-head with brains and a heart, too.

In what may prove to be the most successful film yet of his career, Guillermo del Toro playfully (and with great deftness) touches on the truth behind each glam facade; he peers behind the metaphorical make-up and costumes on these otherwordly heroes. But instead of entreating us with their massive pathos, he puckishly points at their hum-drums woes and desires, saying with a big ol' smirk, "See: there can be a summer blockbuster at once visually rich and dramatically quaint." Such a philosophy lends The Golden Army it's occasionally needed heft. But really, most of the time the audience will just be bugging their eyes out -- in one scene at the towering plant god that blossoms into a city-block's worth of foliage; in another at the little old lady who happens to eat cats for funs -- and then giggling at the very things that set their eyes popping. It's a grand trick for a blockbuster that's just rote enough to be irksome, while being just grand enough to make even the Satan himself happy.

WALL-E: A

2008-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

It's a romantic comedy, an action-adventure, a satire, an ecological/post-apocalyptic fable, and a silent movie that blossoms into a space opera about a tiny tin bucket on wheels who is very much alive -- in every sense of the word. He is WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load-Lifter Earth Class), and he's the star of WALL-E (you know, the latest Pixar film that got such massive descriptive space above); and he's also its beeping, chirping, purring, whirring soul. Written and directed by Andrew Stanton, WALL-E is about a robot whose only function is to compact the trash that has covered the Earth -- and it's a job he's been doing for 700 years. But when his tiniest of glitches (he's developed a personality) leads him on an inter-galactic adventure with what just may be the love of his life, well...that's when things really start to get interesting.

This is where, however, I must re-define the word "interesting," because the second half of WALL-E is interesting only in contrast to its first forty-five minutes because it features dialogue -- that's right, the first act of Stanton's film is almost wholly silent -- which is to say it's no more enthralling than it was to start; and no less enthralling than any other masterpiece released by what may well be the single most skilled studio in all of Hollywood.

We open on a rusty city compromised of skyscrapers made of trash, the detritus itself having been stacked by the last remaining robot on the face of the planet: our hero, WALL-E (Ben Burtt, the audio engineer who gave us the bleeps of R2-D2). The intrepid little guy, who looks like a pair of droopy binoculars stacked on an orange rubics-cube, has gone on now alone for quite some time, so he's appropriately lonely, and his appropriately lonely exploits -- he's a sad-sack office drone with no hope of a lunch break -- fill the first thirty minutes. All he has for company is his indestructible cockroach sidekick, an old VHS copy of Hello, Dolly!, and a sleek off-white robot named EVE who may just fall in love with him...or incinerate him. Or both.

This set-up segues flawlessly after another ten or fifteen minutes into a satirical romp aboard the space-station where humans have now lived for nearly a millenia -- the plot now being dominated less by the silent wonders of trash compacting and more with trying to re-instill the urge to live in what are, essentially, a bunch of big technophilic infants. Both acts have their merits, and as previously stated only the second contains any sort of enduring conversation, but for my money what WALL-E does with its opening is pretty bloody brilliant. Silence transfuses the landscape, save for the occasional click-or-clack from our mechanical buddy, but so too does wonder, awe, and beauty. Stanton, who previously helmed the equally exquisite Finding Nemo, strips down the art of cinema in those first thirty minutes to an essence of extreme delicacy, wit, and skill; he turns the comedy of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin into trascendent art.

That same notion of primal passion well-informs the sensibilities of the last hour, as Pixar's most pointed satire -- our mass consumerism will eventually swallow us as we demand more to swallow -- focuses more and more in on the search for home, and for re-birth. But that's just one of the main plots. The other is, of course, the robot love story. And in that, too, silence and its totemic power are key; nary a coherent sentence is formed between EVE and WALL-E but their ardor will, by film's end, bring a lump to your throat.

Seeing the astonishing achievements of this lastest marvel (all the ways it could have veered off course, been then rightly called a "stunt," but didn't), many have called WALL-E Pixar's greatest feat -- and well it may be. Looking back, I'm quickly enamored with Brad Bird's The Incredibles which so perfectly put so many familial, live-action, dramas to shame with less running time and twice as much verve and wit; and, of course, Toy Story and Finding Nemo set milestones for the animation house on the cultural map (all worthily so). But is it true -- Andrew Stanton's film (which he co-wrote with Jim Capobianco) is miraculous, but is it The Miracle? It's a wondrous comedy; a spectacle of synthetic beauty crafted to propel wholly organic universal sentiments; and a romantic adventure plotted with enough engrossing skill to rival anything produced in a live-action arena. There is true cinema magic in the film's workings, truly brilliant purity and heart, so I suppose, in a word, "yes." Or as our protagonist himself would say, "boop."

Life as We Know It: B-

2008-07-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

I've been spoiled. All those episodes of Gilmore Girls or Everwood or The O.C. or Once & Again have lulled me into thinking that all groups of teenage friends are eloquent, thougtful, and witty to the nth degree; and, too, all familial units are pierced most frequently not by their continual moral dilemnas, but by their stringent -- poignant -- self-analysis. (Plus, having fallen in love with Roswell, I thought that even teen soaps that weren't a-poppin' with smarts at least had soul, heart.) Life as We Know It's sales pitch (a pitch developed by Gabe Sachs & Jeff Judah based on a book by Melvin Burgess), on the other hand, flew in the face of all of this accrued experience. It was, instead, about a trio of best friends who stuttered and stammered and tripped their way through an extraordinarily hormonally-charged adolescence.

The friends are Dino Whitman (Sean Faris), Ben Connor (Jon Foster, previously of the moody and mature The Door in the Floor), and Jonathan Fields (Chris Lowell, who later perfected the stammering artsy-geek schtick as Piz on the doomed final season of Veronica Mars). And their adolescence is basically the four women they moon over at various times in order to get laid: Jacky (Missy Peregrym), Deborah (Kelly Osbourne...yes, her), Sue (Jessica Lucas), and Ms. Young (Marguerite Moreau)...a teacher at the school the aforementioned six all attend. The boys' horniness is central to many of the show's plots, and sub-, but the narrative tentpoles are mostly cliches: the cheating mom, the student-teacher affair. It's only as Life progresses does some fresh blood circulate into the story's veins.

New as it may be, the blood still feels stale. Because as previously mentioned, Life has none of the verbal intelligence or deep-dish soul of some of the better teenage melodramas. What it has is an attitude at once flukey, layer-deep, and coy; it's perpetually perched on the edge of emotional climax (pun intended), while rarely achieving it. And, looking at the drama from the introspective angle (such an action being especially warranted because Life copies its character asides, it almost seems, from Once & Again...a far better interpersonal drama), its psychic ramifications are best defined as all surface and no substance -- the televisual equivalent of one of Dr. Phil's "morality" lectures.

The cast is fascinating -- Mr. Faris has a sneer in the early episodes that is at once both affected and masking, possessing, a bitter sincerity and pain -- and their chemistry has some nice moments. The same can be said of most of the series, during particular episodes. Each forty-five minute chunk has some good scenes, even occasionally a very good one (Dino's tearful confession to his friends about his mom's infidelity stands out), but there are only a handful of solid episodes -- "Pilot," "Pilot Junior," "A Little Problem," and, ironically, the last two unaired episodes: "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Junk," and "Papa Wheelie."

Seeing Peter Dinklage make a too-cool guest spot as a shrink to help Dino sort out his post-divorce aggression issues is just a sore reminder about how far the show hasn't reached, all it hasn't achieved. In its thirteen episodes, the girls are never more than super-good friends and a series of rotating one-notes; and of the guys, Ben is the most rounded, while Jonathan is so badly-developed it's almost grating. "Papa Wheelie" is the name of a trick, I suppose, but the real trick of it -- produced as it was as Life's final show -- is that in its exploration of some surprising moments (having Jonathan finally stand-up for himself against his best friends' continual teasing; Dino's parents' new relationships) it does the unthinkable: it gives a previously sealed-up, mostly souless show soul. And that satisfies even as it dissipates quickly. Sort of like high school.

In The Valley of Elah: A

2008-07-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

In its searing, straight-faced melancholia, its audacious probing austerity, In the Valley of Elah will ravage and destroy the viewer in a way no other post-Iraq War film has. It's structured as a murder mystery -- and it's filmed, with help from cinematographer Roger Deakins, as the most sparely devastating of piquant true-crimes -- that revolves around one man's (Tommy Lee Jones) search for his son (Jonathan Tucker), and what happened to him once he returned from serving a tour of duty in Iraq. The man is Hank Deerfield, a Vietnam vet who gets a call one day from an army base in Texas that his son has gone AWOL. Hank, though, is unconvinced -- or at the very least, confused. And so he drives down himself to take a look. And when the military police and the sheriff's department come across the charred remains of his son's, Mike Deerfield, body, Hank decides to stay on in Texas long enough to find out how his boy came to be in many pieces in a dusty field by a dark road.

That's how the movie unravels; Hank, with help from a local detective (Charlize Theron), pieces together what he can from all available sources. This includes the military at the local base, who all but openly stonewall him at all possible points, and his son's cell phone (which he cleverly steals in one of the more telling scenes of Hank's canny character). The phone itself has been all but destroyed, but he gets a local tech wiz to pull of a few of the remaining videos his son shot while on duty -- it turns out Mike was both a rabid amatuer videographer and photographer of his experiences -- and the pieces of viral data themselves have a herky-jerky, lurid fascination. They're glimpses for the audience into a place that comes to represent, more and more as Hank realizes the truth of his son's murder, the great void of our generation: the place where young men go to die -- or lose themselves.

Paul Haggis has written and directed In the Valley of Elah, and it's a curious move for him. This is the same man, after all, who built up a commercial reputation over the last two decades as a television writer, and then burst on the scene creatively with 2005's Crash -- which was itself a mixture of quaint, hour-long narrative structuring and scathing dialogue. Crash doesn't hold up on subsequent viewings, its talky-niceties are too obvious (and thereby foolishly painful) to any viewer who can see past the clever veil of Haggis' explorative script. But Elah doesn't fall into the same category as his Best Picture winner; more aptly its belongs with Letters from Iwo Jima, Casino Royale, and Million Dollar Baby -- a trio of films he's helped write that far more capably demonstrate the strengths of a balanced, talented auteur. In fact, seeing him take the directing reigns again for the first time since Crash, the audience may at first be taken aback at Elah's tone; it's reticent like nothing the writer-director has done before. But that same stoney quality masks chasms of pain, and Haggis, with Tommy Lee Jones as his star and Atlas (since without Jones, the picture may itself have fallen and rolled away into oblivion), investiages these in a way that leaves equally deep chasms in the audience.

As agents of, and against the mystery, the ensemble is surprisingly well fielded. Jones gives one of the best performances of his very long career, and Theron (no longer wearing ugly-up or playing a universal Woman) is so natural she counter-points her older co-star perfectly. As the soldiers who served with Mike, Jake McLaughlin, Jason Patric, and others are so curiously straight-laced its almost laughable, until their facades are stripped bare, and the audience's laughter curdles into shock.

The mystery takes two hours to solve, and somewhere in there the movie sags against its own sparse style, and one grows antsy. But the last twenty-or-so minutes are some of the most singularly biting I've seen in quite a long while. Maybe ever. The denoument of Elah is intrinsic to the titular story and underlying metaphor: David and Goliath, two combatants both brave and blinded. In Haggis narrative scheme, the focus keeps shifting: who is David -- The soldiers we've so happily sent away? The enemy they face, so happy to fire back? -- and who is Goliath -- America, the country? Or America, the people? And each new interrogative sticks deeper, draws more inquistive blood to the surface. Sure, standing 100 yards away a person could point and declare all of In the Valley of Elah a "stunt," (there's irony to a liberal like Haggis writing from the perspective of a conservative like Hank) but if that same person were to walk closer, look closer, they'd be stunned into silence. And that final image, at once obvious and daring? It won't just silence you, it'll bring you to tears.

Kung Fu Panda: A-

2008-07-24T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to lie, as Kung Fu Panda drew to a close I experienced The Moment. You know the one -- it's the moment in the movie-viewing experience where it hits you that this film is, at that point in time, the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, inevitably, that feeling wears off 99.765% of the time. (Personally, only in very rare cases -- e.g., A History of Violence -- has it endured.) But when it hits, it practically forces your face to break out in a massive grin; and when in hit with Panda, my face broke exactly as expected. What's unexpected is the fact that, on paper, the film has no right to do anything to my face whatsoever. (Except maybe to make it pucker, like I was watching Ghost Rider II.)

Surprise is a key element to the movie. It's integral both to the plot, and to its quality. For the former, this involves Po (Jack Black) -- a noodle-making tubby chinese panda -- accidently landing smack-dab in the middle of an uber-important kung-fu tournament (the winner gets to be declared the Dragon Warrior) and then being declared the winner himself. No one perhaps is more shocked than the newly-annointed Warrior himself; no one, that is, but Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the wise ol' martial arts master who would rather have nothing to do with creatures who are more than 65% body fat. So annoyed is Shifu, in fact, that he sets out on a campaign to -- under the guise of "training" Po -- scare him away from kung fu forever. This very twist, which helps lead from the first act of the movie to the second, is also the key to the second facet of surprise that is itself key to Kung Fu Panda.

You see, everytime Po gets beat down, he picks himself right back up; his fanboyishness (which, one imagines, originally prevented him from getting up out of bed and exercising to begin with) lighting an endurable fire underneath him never to quit. He's in awe of Shifu and "The Five" -- Shifu's prized group of students -- and it's that very awe that inspires him to become on of them. Such is the moral at the heart of what is, essentially, a stodgy animated Karate Kid. But the film is also a display of bravura tongue-in-cheek technique -- an epic of sarcastic minimalism. It comes as no surprise then to find the film's writers, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, are veteren King of the Hill scribes.

It comes to light that the Dragon Warrior will have to face down an escaped baddie, Tai Lung (Ian McShane), and can only do so with the Dragon Scroll. Basically, what this means is the last act of the film is mostly action sequences, but their drawn and imagined with such rambunctious, infectious, energy, not a second of it sags or grows repititious. All the more power then to Black, who delivers another one of his rare comedic masterpieces -- his trademark soul-on-the-sleeve scene-stealing -- and Hoffman, who is like Yoda's cranky uncle. True, Kung Fu Panda is a kid's movie, and since it's been developed by Dreamworks, it has none of the inherent sophistication of Pixar, but it's also quick-witted and sly enough, fast-paced and beautifully-colored enough, to satisfy all age groups. (Plus, it's far more satisfying for six bucks than, say, Speed Racer.)

Sex and the City: B+

2008-06-06T12:18:00.000-07:00

We all recognize them: Charlotte (Kristen Davis), the perkily anal brunette, Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the dirty blonde sex-addict, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), the flame-haired ball-busting attorney, and Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), that blond again/brown again writer-heroine...in love? The hair colors of the neo-Fab Four, and that last question, are posed as a way of cutting straight to the quick - that is, both the glam artifice represented by the quartet's chic 'dos and that timeless romantic interrogative (He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me...) take center stage in Michael Patrick King's tart, emotionally sweeping, way too satisfying Sex and the City.

King's film, based on the show of the same name that ran on HBO for six years (well, like, duh), is at once both true to the soul of the series, and a very necesary tweak. As an inheritor to Sex's throne, the movie would have to have a few things as a prerequisite, or else though certainly it had been made, they would not come. The requirements: each of the gals had to be back, and I mean actually back, with seperate storylines and everything; the biggest of the storylines from the show had to be carried on through (e.g., Carrie and Big's, the wealthy financier played by Chris Noth, romance, always a plot staple); and each of those fortysomethings had to look good - scratch that, damn good - traipsing up and down and all around New York City. The good news is that each of the three items on the above checklist is satisfied and thus, so is the long-time fan. The even better news is that for those people out in Great Ol' America who actually, you know, like movies, Sex will satisfy you to. Part of the reason is that it sweeps up all the newbies real quick like in the opening sequence, schooling us in whats been going on with who and how according to Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha. The even bigger reason though is that King, as writer-director, has the savvy talent to expand the canvas of the girl's emotional landscapes (accordingly the narrative potential follows suit) so that most of what's put on screen is both reliably stylish and quick, but also unexpectedly meaty and unfurling (as it should be, with a running time of about 140 minutes).

It goes like this: four years after the series finale, Carrie and Big are still in love, and still living in seperate apartments (their house hunting opens the film); Miranda and Steve (David Eigenberg) are still married...in Brooklyn; Charlotte and Henry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler) are still in perfect familial bliss, even with their adopted chinese daughter; and Samantha is still in L.A. with Smith (Jason Lewis), her sexy matinee idol. From these four romantic set-ups springs a plethora of drama, the largest of it centering around Carrie's marriage to Big. And the aftermath. (Don't worry, no spoilers here!) People are cheated on, knocked up, knocked down, hired, yelled at, cried on, and so forth. It's a messy and generous heart King, as writer and director, has tapped into. But he does it (mostly) with a deft grace, always lacing his rocky terrain of love with wit. Plus, for all those times the girls are breaking down or breaking up (or really, even if they're just standing on a street corner), they look...well...like you'd expect the cast of Sex and the City to look: great, gorgeous, stunning. In Carrie's New York, Fashion is God - and I'd be a liar to say watching them worship it isn't some sort of ocular nirvana.

Still, does one come to a movie to experience, or to take notes for Fashion Week? (On second thought, knowing my audience, don't answer that.) As an experience, Sex is gratifying across the board. As a director, King stages everything according to the cosmopolitan rhythms of his show, but he also lets a little punk-soul moderninity slip through, all for the better of course. And as the four muses of his camera, the cast is as good as their clothes. (Which means if you've been paying attention, they're pretty hot stuff.) Cythia Nixon, as the flintiest of the four, has the claws of a Fury and the brittle facade of an abuse victim, both of which mesh into one high-wire, compulsively wrenching performance. Kim Cattrall, as the vixen-cougar (and oldest) of the bunch, has comic timing to spare. Kristen Davis is the cove, the sole part of the whole with minimum neurosis, and in that her work is almost soothing. And then there is Sarah Jessica Parker (or henceforth, SJP): she's not just the star - she's the soul. And as is necesitated from her to sustain such a picture as this, as an actress, she has never been finer. She's older, more lined with weary, but she's also smarter, and rarely have I seen her unique gift - she makes humor seem the very soul of enlightenment.

Now, though, I have to be a downer. Because for a movie in which so much goes right, a lot of little things go wrong. For example: when Jennifer Hudson shows up as SJP's personal assistant, her resulting presence and "character arc" feel overly delicate at best, and at worst forced. And the Samantha/Smith sequences have poignance by their collective end, but it feels like a throwaway (and is thus roughly a layer too thin). Plus, the climactic wedding veers far too deep into Big. Teary. Melodramatic. Confrontation! (I almost laughed watching it in the theater, seriously.) Really though, I quibble. The script is a thing of delightful intelligence and warmth; and it feels good as an audience to sit back for once and have a film unfold before you for hours like a fat novel or a good seven course meal. In fact, I think Sex and the City is more like a great dinner than we realize: it's got fizz to help it go down quick, an aftertaste of richness and emotional piquance, and once it settles into your gut and heart - a very warm, enjoyable glow.

No Country for Old Men: A-

2008-06-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

There's a scene that occurs in Martin Scorsese's 2006 splatterific The Departed just as it's getting geared up: Matt Damon - wound into infinite coils of paranoia, cunning, and self-loathing - is being stalked through the dark back streets of Boston, and as the seconds tick by he jolts and slips through the darkness with ever-increasing urgency (the camera rollicking right along with him in spasms of uncertainty and dread). The nerve-jangling suspense of that chase scene is bone-deep but it lasts not even a few minutes; that same feeling thrums throughout No Country for Old Men for hours (two and some change, to be precise). Where The Departed subsisted mostly on the snappy bad-cop/good-cop/tired-cop schematics of Scorsese's filmmaking, No Country is intrinsically tied into the sort of neo-gothic-Western Cormac McCarthy has made his bread and butter (no surprise then to find the film is based on one of his books). It's lean and quiet, sprawlingly dark, and (on that rare wry occasion) just really, really, entertaining.

Such facets of quality have been served up by Joel and Ethan Coen which is ironic - or in the case of the Coen brothers: ironically ironic - because Country would have best been made by the two of them about twenty years ago, just right after their breakthough noir Blood Simple. It has a lot of stylistic similarities to Simple: sparse but beautifully expansive aesthetic; recurring episodes of fatal violence. Plus, had it been released in 1988 instead of 2007, it wouldn't have shocked audiences too long used to the ol' Coen style: smugly over-ironized black comedies. As it was, the film did indeed shock them; but after that initial gasp (of uncertainty, maybe even fear) came a few more (of delight, of fascination). And then there were the questions. How did they translate McCarthy's cauterized and searing prose into something like this (through something like the Coen Schtick)? How did they do it after so long away from their masterpiece-making roots (last seen presumably with 1996's Fargo)?

Whatever or however, I'm now a believer. The film, which opens with a Tommy Lee Jones voice-over (always a treat) and goes on to tell the story of how one Texas hunter (Josh Brolin) finds two million dollars and then must run for his life from the guy who wants it back (Javier Bardem, chilling even in his wack-a-do haircut), is so perfectly observed, so fundamentally right in its execution, one wonders whether the brothers shouldn't just go ahead and adapt the whole McCarthy library. Rising to any and all challenges is the cast, bleak and battered every one, of which Bardem and Jones, as the small-town sheriff trying also to track Brolin down, are the exceptional standouts. They wince and straight-face and even (in the case of Jones) twinkle with bare-bones wisdom at all the right moments, with all the right amounts of energy. It takes a certain sort of performer to handle the Coen's dialogue and filmmaking technique. Frances McDormand could do it; and now, apparently, so can the good ol' Texans of No Country for Old Men.

In terms of verbal translation, nothing is lost. What's more, and though I've yet to read the literary source, one imagines a little something is gained as the tale transitions to the silver screen. There is a dash of wry wit biting into the edges of the film, relieving your high adrenaline-levels when you least expect it with morbid laughter. But the laughter is the exception: usually you'll just be gripping the seat cushions. Part of this lies in the nature of the story (i.e., there is something innately dreadful about a psychopath who will just not stop) but the bigger part lies in the talents of the writer-director duo who have so subtly but delightfully re-discovered their gifts. There is not a beat missed throughout the movie, not a shot out of place, and even though the underlying mayhem that served as a catalyst for the plot is a little murky, the resutling mayhem is crystal-clear in its bruise-black insistence. Though No Country seems to start to lurch in its last twenty minutes, never does a viewer get seasick. All credit is therefore due to Joel and Ethan Coen - a pair of anarchic filmmakers who turned down their smiling tongues-in-cheek just to turn up the admiration on their fine, fine legacy.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian: B

2008-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

There's a fascinating bit of symmetrical history running behind-the-scenes of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the likes of which twists lips with its light-fingered and fitting irony. And it is this: sixty years ago, C.S. Lewis was many things - scholar, converted Christian, dabbler in science-fiction - but definitely not a children's author. And then came his Narnia series. By a similar turn, writer-director Andrew Adamson was considered several things before the winter of 2005 - a visual effects supervisor of the mid-to-late '90s, an anarchic force behind the galvnizingly riotous Shrek and its slightly-less-sparkly sequel Shrek 2, and even (in a rare case) a songwriter - but he was most definitely not the sort to undertake the task of adapting Lewis' worthily treasured adventure series that was really an allegory cloaked in twinkling myth. Yet just as the public must have done in the fall of the '40s, so too must we: acquiesce to the notion that not only could one man turn the story of Christ into a cherished bedtime story, but so too could another man turn that same tale into a perfectly adequate and satisfying film.

The story goes like this: siblings Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Poppelwell), Edmund (Skander Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley) have been back in England about a year since their adventures in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when one puff on a magic horn (the air for said puff having been supplied by our titular prince, played in a pouty rustling smolder by Ben Barnes, on the run) sends them right back into the land of Narnia. Except it seems that their one year on accidental hiatus has been 1,300 to their once-kingdom. And in their absence, a substitute royal hierarchy has taken their place - aptly given a menacing label, the Telmarines - and in the absence of the children's light and generosity of spirit, a savagery and oppression has cropped up. The magical inhabitants of Narnia (the talking creatures, the dwarves) have been forced into hidden exile under threat of extinction and the heir to the Telmarine throne, Prince Caspian, has been forced to join them - under threat of murder in his sleep by that scheming and bearded uncle of his (Sergio Castellitto). It seems this time, the tyrant isn't the White Witch, but a mere mortal...and a loss of faith?

The goal seems obvious to any reader: dipose the wrongful king with the oppressed forrest critters. And, rightly, does Peter agree with that sentiment. But Lucy keeps insisting that Aslan (Liam Neeson) is hanging about, though the Narnians insist he abandoned their world when the child-kings did. So the ensuing first 100-minutes are a subtle struggle between Peter and his brother and sisters over exactly what course to take, and when, and with whom to guide them. It's all religous allegory of course, and it played better as prose. But if anything, Adamson is more skilled here than he was in Wardrobe at keeping things shuffling along. There's less quaintness about the creatures, and more clang, bang, BOOM. And the story, seemingly slight as it sometimes seems, is surprisingly robust in hindsight (robust enough, anyway, to fill more than two hours).

Adamson, for all the possibility presented him by his own talents as a gleeful satirist, restrains himself admirably by letting just a few twinges of moderninity slip through. The majority of them that do though, aren't very well pulled off (the Susan-Caspian romance is worse still: it's obvious). Except for one: it happens in the final sequence, a (spoiler!) surprise goodbye party for the Pevensie children as they solemnly trudge back to that dreary place called England. Right before they go it's (unsubtlely) let slip that of the four, only Lucy and Edmund can return. Now, I haven't read Narnia books in a while, but I'm pretty sure this little plot turn was written with more finesse by Lewis. No matter, because as all the pieces start to fall into place for the coming franchise of films a lilting Regina Spektor song fills the screen. The melody has all the quiet but scarily-appropriate 21st-century flair the director so rarely pulled off with Caspian.

Not like the movie needs much flair, anyway. It is modeled after a narrative cooked up decades in the past, after all (though as a consequence the dialogue can seem very much like it was uncomfortably plucked from the '50s). But the cast (which includes, in one breathless cameo, Tilda Swinton), of which Moseley is the brooding standout, makes it mostly work. And the overarching film has all the wonder and entertaining expediancy of any good fantasy blockbuster. Lord of the Rings it ain't, but at its best it is an abashedly stodgy family epic that pleases and moralizes in a more than solid ratio. At its worst, that ratio tips the other way and the continual battles and righteous character exchanges in Caspian lose their quaint sparkle and become a crusade.

King Dork: B+

2008-06-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

Minor Spoiler Alert: King Dork ends with the line, "Saying nothing." It's in reference to one of the more fascinating (and by fascinating, in author Frank Portman's world, it is of course meant odd, clever, mildly sinister, stoned, and suburban) of the book's characters: the hero's, Tom Henderson, best - and only - friend, Sam Hellerman. The final line is mentioned for the sake of irony; because for the majority of Dork, pretty much everything is said - everything, for the sake of Portman's debut novel, subbing in for complex conspiracy theories, pointed satirical versions of modern high school social hierarchies, day-to-day accounts of survival at the bottom of said hierarchies, and endless riffs on pop culture. (Or more specifically: rock and roll, young adult fiction dating back to the 60s, and counter-culture movies - Rosemary's Baby, Caririe - from around those years as well.) Basically, in the world of our eponymous hero, a lot happens, is discovered, is learned, isn't learned, is egregiously assumed, or flees town. Or some combination thereof.

But all that stuff happens later on. In the beginning, really there isn't much to the world Tom Henderson (aka King Dork, Chi-Mo, Henderson-fag, or, most oddly, Sheepie) inhabits. It's just him, Sam Hellerman, Hillmont High School, and their pretty-much-imaginary band (which, in one of the novel's most intelligent gags, changes names every few chapters or so - from "Tennis with Guitars" to "Ray Bradbury's Love Camel" to "Easter Monday" and so on). In retrospect, what comes to be the fluffiest layer to a pretty engaging treat is captured with the usual tropes; and Henderson himself is a sharply cynical, witty young-ancient protagonist. But after more than 100 pages, it all gets tiresome. Scratch that, after about eighteen pages, it begins to wear thin. There is no particular, solitary, fault. Really it's just that, lacking the angsty heft of something like Special Topics in Calamity Physics, all the verbal wunderkid-tricks and clever satire comes to seem a little aimless, angry.

And then Tom finds his dad's old copy of Catcher in the Rye, and everything starts to change. It should be mentioned that Tom despises (at least for the majority of the novel) Rye. He hate hate hate hate hates it. And the idea that such a flagrant object of his contempt can come to hold so many secrets and fodder for, as he would call it, "a pretty flimsy," if not wholly unimportant, "character arc," is a running theme throughout the book: that things aren't always what they seem, but what they truly are isn't all that different from the illusion you originally held. King Dork holds to this notion pretty steadfastly as well. The reader starts out with the idea this is another overpraised, angrily articulate and intermittently entertaining high school melodrama-athon. But then the reader reads about some cryptic scribbled notes in the margins of the Rye Tom discovered - notes written by his dad, who died mysteriously eight years ago, when he was a child - and their perceptions start to shift. Not entirely, granted, but what once seemed to be aimlessly aggressive, even wearying, becomes a mostly rich endeavor about the life of an entirely too smart, entirely too stunted, hero-mensch.

Portman, for his part, is a marvel: he charts the tortures and travails of his too-insane-to-be-real high schol with consistency, unvailing the darker flairs of his murkier conspiracy with near-perfect timing, Plus his character voices, the majority of which are almost always filtered through Tom's bitter sentimentality, are spot-on. What Dork lacks in early motivation (reader-directed, anyway) it makes up for in the end with sharp humor and a jagged compassion that is at once hard-won and winningly gooey. What happened, or didn't, to Tom's dad may be ultimately of little importance. But the journey he starts on because of it means the world, both for what it sincerely reveals about a teenager's life (e.g., that step-parents can be annoying and likable in the same moment; that assistant principles are usually in league with Satan; that twelve-year old little sisters usually only show physical affection when they cry) and for what cliches it overlooks.

Chicago: A

2008-06-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

O.J. Simpson. Now that's a name to raise voices and blood pressures. But it also raises memories - about his infamous trial more than ten years ago, about Johnny Cochran's infamous methods (or antics, depending on which side of the fence you sit on). And for those of us who were more musically-inclined, another memory raised is also of the 1995 Broadway revival of Bob Fosse's Chicago - a quainter, more appealing delight twenty years after the debut of his cynical original staging that transcended the stage and captivated auidences everywhere. Its dissection of the "celebrity criminal" was never so apt, and its numbers never so scorchingly now.

Ok, I stretch (a little).

But still, the revival was an event of sorts. And eight years after it, director Rob Marhsall's film version is no exception. There is no longer any one case to dominate the zeigeist, and make even more relevant the tone of the Kander & Ebb musical, but somehow our now inundated, fractured, media-obsessed consciousness is in even more need of addressing - in even more need of a good dressing down in a fancy dress and a snazzy tune. Accordingly: the story of Roxie Hart's (Renée Zellweger, giving the performance of her career) trial after she kills her lover, and the various charlatans and assorted characters she encounters on "Murderess Row" at the Cook County Jail. Foremost among them are Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones, also hot), a former vaudevillain herself, "Mama" Morton (Queen Latifah), who is both the warden and shadiest person in the prison, and Billy Flynn (Richard Gere), the most in-demand criminal lawyer in Illinois.

Chicago is a satire, and a very smart one at that; and it can occasionally veer into poignance and drama. But first and always it is a musical (and one originally concieved, choreographed, co-written, and directed by Bob Fosse), and to that end there are more than a handful of numbers. I'm told that on stage, the songs were vaudeville acts that propulsed the plot, but on the screen Rob Marshall's angle is to have them presented as fantastic products of Roxie's day-dreaming side (narrated by the silken tones of Taye Diggs, of course). However they go down, the end result is the same. That is to say: no matter where or when the show-opening "All That Jazz," or "Funny Honey" or "Nowadays" or "Roxie" or "When You're Good to Mama" were being belted, they'd still be fantastic.

It is a remarkably adroit screenplay by Bill Condon - who would later put his many talents to good use fashioning a film version of Dreamgirls - that strips the actual spoken dialogue down to its most fundamental and miraculous necesities. And it is a remarkable job by Marshall for reinterpreting Fosse's famously dense dance steps for a modern age hungering for retro-whatever. (Kudos to him as well for bathing each scene in a seperate neon, therefore constantly demanding our attention.) And above both of them lord the cast (which also includes John C. Reilly as Roxie's hapless hubby, Amos) who tear and claw through their roles with such vicious, deliriously entertaining pastiche the audience can only sit back and gape. Remember O.J. Simpson both before and after viewing Chicago. Do it beforehand to check your own mindset before strapping in for a glitzy, unabashedly and acridly glamorous musical. Do it after to re-assess the acute accuracy of a movie based on a musical based on a play based on events nearly 100 years old. There is a prophetic power to what drives Marshall's film: a coy, lean, and greedy pulse that mocks itself and taunts the audience for loving it. Whatever. You don't need to puzzle through Chicago, you merely need to laugh at it and then laugh at yourself for doing so.

L.A. Confidential: A

2008-06-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

In Los Angeles, in the 50s, there was in fact a magazine named Confidential. It specialized in breathless exposes of crime, and drugs, and sex...all with beautiful, photo-friendly, victims of course. It was the periodical of its day, but it also suffered a fate now no tabloid would ever allow itself to be ensnared it: the lawsuit. And as quickly as Confidential came around, so it left. But its influence is markedly apparent on many things, not the least of which is Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, and not the least because its look and feel promise a seething underworld caper, and then deliver in full.

Phsyically the magazine shows up in the movie as Hush-Hush, the rag published by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) - a sleazy and snobby man in the vein of most DeVito characters who delivers the opening monologue of the film in a tone of acrid capriciousness - but spiritually, the tone of that real-life pre-tabloid hovers over and inspires Hanson's picture; it induces us, teases us, into the gray area between all great This-or-Thats: morality, ethical behavior, image, reality, romance - to L.A. Confidential it might all just come with a disclaimer: "Subject to Change." Yet in the exploration of that moral and emotional twilight that the period dwelt in, the director (and his co-screenwriter, Brian Helgeland) teases out not just a great film noir, but also a compelling character study with attractive noir underpinings. At most times, in fact, they intermingle, fighting over thematic prominence on the screen. This is a film dedicated to the period atmosphere, but not to the actual period: we as the audience are treated to all the neccessary 50s trappings (the Jazz, the cars) without being condescended to them.

The nature of such entertainment - what allows the watcher to relish the details as yet another contemporary/period twist - springs directly from the work being done. L.A. Confidential is based on a novel by James Ellroy (whose work inspired 2006's far more lackluster The Black Dahlia), an author whose work came decades after the literary noir renaissance yet still managed to live up to Chandler and the like. His secret, and its a secret that transposes itself easily over the film as well, is in his sardonic tribute and deconstruction of the pulpy noir. Ellroy can look back and see Los Angeles for the monolith of corruption it was, but also find an inner well of self-deprecation. (This was the City of Angels at a time when such celestial beings were probably off vacationing in Seattle.)

As a filmmaker, Curtis Hanson uses that as his starting point - indeed, its mark is all over the opening sequence - only to then build on and flesh out that idea. He and Helgeland condense the original's famously thick plot without once losing sight of their main characters. In telling the story of how three cops - Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), Bud White (Russell Crowe), and Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) - become embroiled in a series of mob hits and random massacres that never seem to add up, L.A. Confidential never loses its audience in turn to each turn of the characters, as they guide themselves along the poorly-lit and twisty corridor of The Plot. Each man starts out as a corrupt lout, or a careerist prick, or some combination of the two. But by film's end, as in all good film noirs, there is a measure of appropriate redemption. And during film's journey, as in all good film noirs, there is more than an appropriate measure of wit, sex, sleaze, and bullets flying into skulls.

As the man who would later direct the flirty, flinty, chick flick In Her Shoes, the half-baked Lucky You, and the up-from-the-streets rab fable (that made a movie star out of Eminem) 8 Mile, Hanson shows a striking aptitude for bending steamy period convention to his talented hand. In my mind, the best example of this isn't in his translation of the story (it still occasionally loses a viewer or two along the way) but in the character he's created as the femme fatale: Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a high-class prostitute with an eerie resemblence to Veronica Lake. Lynn, as both a woman and a character, is remarkable in that she alone sees her motivations for what they are throughout the film; and Basinger, both as a woman and an actress, is remarkable for what she does with that weary belief in herself: she twists each word of her dialogue into a sexy come-on that echoes years of ache - and as she finishes speaking, her lips perpetually turn-up at the ends in some mockery of ironic foreplay. Its a delightful, finely-wrought performance. And she stands at the forefront of the cast, who does great work themselves. Together, they keep the narrative gears in motion, and the deeply entertaining film they're acting in, well, deeply entertaining. L.A. Confidential is almost tonally flawless (though, as much as it gave me a guilty thrill, the whole "Bud White & Ed Exley: Best Friends Forever!" ending gave me some pause), and, at 138-minutes, extraordinarily satisfying. It demands your full attention while watching, so as not to miss one solitary rich detail, but it then rewards that attention double throughout.

Rent: A-

2008-06-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

It was panned by critics; and it was a tepid box office hit, at best. Yet when Rent came out in 2005, brought from the stage to the screen by director Chris Columbus and with a script by The Perks of Being a Wallflower's Stephen Chbosky, I fell in love. Hard. I melted at the cascading melody of "Seasons of Love." I leapt at the brassy defiance of "Take Me Or Leave Me." And "La Vie Boheme"? There are not words. Yet, three years later - with the DVD and soundtrack collection on endless roatation in both my head, stereo, and television - I'd never seen the original. I adored Jonathan Larson's music, and was in ever increasing rapt fixation with Columbus' film, but I had yet to sit myself down in a theatre seat and experience Rent: The Musical.

No longer. Last night, a mere four rows from the stage, I watched the original, the two hour-ish rock opera, in all its big, messy, brilliant glory. And as much as I was floored by my first experience with "Another Day," or "Out Tonight," I was equally astounded here - albeit in a curiously different manner.

As a film, Rent turned musical expression into a form of musical protest: each duet was really a layered, soaring argument of the sexes, the heart, and the mind - with the cast alternately fighting each other, The System, themselves. It leapt from the opening aria of the aforementioned "Love," straight into the gritty urban protest of "Rent," and then on to the sexy on-again/off-again dating/break-up duets of "Light My Candle" and "Tango: Maureen," and then finally ending the first act with another protest - "Over the Moon" - only to end right back where it started, with "Seasons of Love."

As a musical production, however, Rent is nowhere near as sophisticated, as (odd as it seems) cohesively linear. Its a rock opera, and it ably takes up that genre's tendency for complex compositions to another level. And as an energetic production, I doubt it has an equal. But an irritating side-note of these two attributes is that for the majority of the first act, and some of the second, the individual numbers get a little lost in the chaos. To wit, of all the major numbers in the first hour and a half, only "Tango: Maureen," "Over the Moon," and "One Song Glory" really pop. Everything else (like, sadly, "Out Tonight," or "Rent") merely registers as more great, almost generic, music in a night filled with the stuff.

Yet take heart. Because the nearly goofy vibe that permeates this production, orchaestrated undoubtably by director Michael Greif, gives way to the tragedy and poignancy that resonates through Rent's second act, and more of those songs connect (most notably "Goodbye Love"). Columbus did a wise re-structuring in his film version, and the music that he did cut away shows up as dialogue in Chbosky's script. (This is a clever move, and it can work, but in turning the "Voice Mail" numbers into spoken word, something inevitably is lost...namely, Alexi Darling.) It is such that, there is more individual connection on screen than on stage. But why then did I come away feeling that the original opera is better than the film musical? The answer lies in a crucial performance currency that Rent possesses in spades (ironic, considering the characters are so poor, plagued by the titular bill): that is, a rambling and propulsive zest.

For example, a chunk of the show's score is in about a dozen group or chorus numbers ("Christmas Bells," "We're Okay") that lack much narrative-driven purpose. But they work anyway. In fact, and as previously hinted, some of them work very well indeed ("Voice Mail 1-5"). Why? Because the night's cast, including two Idol alums (Anwar Robinson as Tom Collins and Heinz Winckler as Roger), is so utterly dedicated to the power of their work. They make the unruly sprawl of their fictionalized lives a joyeous entertainment. More than that, Rent does improve over its film adaptation. Most notably, the documentarian conceit that Mark (Jed Resnick) represents actually works on the stage, his character frequently breaking the fourth wall as a meta-narrator.

Listening as I am now to the film soundtrack, its easy to acquiesce to the idea that the movie is a cleaner and more powerful version. Yet such a notion denies those who think it the opportunity to indulge in the opera; and doing that would be a crucially tragic mistake. Because as Rent: The Musical closes, its principal characters all gathered for the closing "Finale," not only have they enraptured the audience, they've filled them with happiness. With ecstasy.

Vanity Fair: C+

2008-06-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

Late in William Makepeace Thackeray's 19-century satirical epic Vanity Fair, after Rebecca "Becky" Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) has re-emerged once more into the societal fabric of upper-middle class Europe, she charms her way out of poverty and into the graces of her former friend (and suddenly weatlthy widow) Amelia (Romola Garai) with a hilariously articulate "history" of all her past wrongs and set-backs. The intended joke from Thackeray is a layered, complex one: in some sense, we balk at the ludicrousness of her schemes of self-justifications; on another we are to laughably sneer at the hypocrisy of Amelia's heartfelt embrace of her wayward friend the moment she finds Becky has undergone any sort of "struggle"; and on another, we are to chide ourselves for wanting in some small way to see this cunning, avaricious woman succeed. Yet nowhere was it intended for Becky Sharp's madly overripe, desperate personal histories to be taken for truth, or for any prospective audience to retrospectively label Ms. Sharp, through the lens of all her "heartaches," an empowered feminist, or worse, heroine. But that is exactly what happens in the modern, Mira Nair-directed and Julian Fellowes-written, screen version of Vanity Fair.

It is a massive mistake for such a task to be undertaken, the results of which will be expounded on below, but foremost among the follies is that the original version of Becky Sharp is a fascinating, compulsively likeable character. Vanity Fair is famously subtitled "The Novel Without a Hero," and while some claim Amelia as the exception to such a rule, very few could be tricked in finding traditional Victorian merits of heroic behavior with Becky Sharp. In her very quest to be a lady, a figure of society, she should be applauded, especially as she so connives in public for the very same things her more dainty compatriots scheme for in private. In her reckoning, "I must be my own mama," and set up not only a profitable marriage, with money to spare, but a niche in the best halls of London all her own. In the novel, what then ensues is 800 pages of her quest for just these things, and her presence on the pages is a beneficial, two-sided, thing: on one hand she is our entrance into the glamorous balls and soirees and scandals of London society (since presumably both she and the reader are outsiders), and on the other she is the perfect satiric subject - heedless and intelligent, cold and "warm," perpetually searching for something she occasionally posesses (only to throw it away looking for something better). She is a complex, fiery, indelible creation. At the time of the novel's publishing, there were none who were her equal.

As a film's hero, however, she has obvious cinematic progenitors. Her DNA can be traced all the way back through Elle Woods, a previous Witherspoon creation who was far more suited to her own movie, and up to Scarlet O' Hara. As an O' Hara-descendant though Becky is a disgrace, as is the film for dampening her fun (and our's at watching her) in pursuit of a period-piece with feminist underpinings. The following applies mostly to our "heroine," but also to the film itself: where Ms. O' Hara sought after her heart's desires in measure with her material needs, Rebecca Sharp merely seeks her true love until she doesn't; she is a (supposedly) winning, relatable, plucky governess-turned-soldier's wife who quite spontaneously begins scheming after a man she barely knows, as well as his place in society. The grinding gears of the plot are heard most loudly here, no thanks to Fellowes watered-down adaptation, but at least the audience will thank the change of pace. Watching another minute of Witherspoon parading about, tossing out her one-liners like some British Veronica Mars, as she valiantly tries to make ends meet in a man's world would have been intolerable. And so is the final result of the picture.

William Makepeace Thackery wrote a rambunctious, sprawling attack on Napoleonic British society that was by turns pointedly witty, sentimental, and pointedly witty about its own sentimentality. Mira Nair directed a sprawling saga about finding your place in the world with The Namesake. And Julian Fellowes created a breathlessly arch, sardonic British period-mystery with Gosford Park. So what is keeping the latter two from adapting a sprawling, witty, saga from the former's novel? I'm not quite sure what stopped them, but I imagine whatever compelled them to continue headlong with their production - a movie that oafishly attempts to meld modern feminism with Thackeray's tale - must have been very witless and dull indeed.

"I had thought her a mere social climber, but I see now she is a mountaineer," quips Amelia's mother, Mrs. Sedley (Deborah Findlay) regarding her daughter's on-again off-again friend. It is one of the few delightful bon mots worthy of the original that Fellowes thinks up, but it serves the watcher in hindsight only to remind them what a dull mountaineer Nair and Witherspoon have concocted. For the most part they have a great cast surrounding them (Rome's James Purefoy is pretty winning as Rawdon Crawley, a gambler both entranced and then redeemed through his marriage with Becky), but in watering down and re-imagining the original literary property, they serve not only to confuse and anger those looking to see tribute being payed, but also to confound any audience new to Fair's world; I mean, if Becky Sharp was really such an empowered and sensible woman, what on Earth would she want to do with a world like that?

The Ruins: B

2008-06-06T12:05:00.000-07:00

The slasher film, wherein a group of impossibly good-looking and impossibly young actors and actressess are systematically slaughtered by a ruthless serial killer for a Reason (i.e. You accidently killed my relative! You're my food supply! You look good when you scream!), is pretty laughable in the modern age of Hollywood cinema. Other sub-genres of horror have either done systemic slaughtering better (The Descent) or with far more jumpy-fright-humor (Hostel); yet "the slasher film" persists. Why? In 2006, a novel by Scott Smith came out that declared asking such a question null-in-void. In fact, The Ruins made such a game of cat-and-mouse an extraordinarily chilling, artful affair; the incisive psychodrama of his previous novel A Simple Plan, coupling nicely with a goretastic horror fable (the moral lesson being watch where you vacation) pulled straight from Little Shop of Horrors. On the page, as a 21st-century "slasher film" (one where the killer isn't so much angry as green...and leafy), The Ruins was a triumph. But how would it far on screen, where audiences are treated every month to another bold and disquieting torture-porno-slasher-horror-gore-phantasia? Honestly? Pretty well, if a trifle obvious and restrained.

The story: Amy (Jena Malone) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) are two best friends vacationing in Cancun with their respective boyfriends, Jeff (Jonathan Tucker) and Eric (Shawn Ashmore) when the group decides to go with their new German friend Mathias (Joe Anderson) to a Mayan ruin to track down Mathias' brother Henrich. Once there, they discover some things not entirely to their liking (read: fatal), and must attempt to survive not only the sentient vines thirsting for their blood, but also their own poisonous and volatile group dynamic. The additions to the story - as additions must inevitably be made to anything, living or inanimate, that flies to L.A. - are curious, if forgivable. One: a creepy, 30-second prologue that lets the former-reader in on the plights of Henrich and his archeologist girlfriend. Two: a subtly re-vamped quintet, with character-specific personalities and plights tweaked and swapped in an attempt to maximize auidence interest. (Though, surely, having Eric still fall victim to the vines represents no obvious deficiency over having Stacy be the riddled sad-sack?) And three: a compacted plot structure with a radically different ending.

Of all of these changes, only two of the three fall flat - and only sparingly. The first is the second, which poses a problem only insofar that it deadens the cutting edge of Smith's (who wrote the script himself) observation, once so scalding on the page. There, cocooned with the group amidst hundreds of pages, the trvialities and spats nestled in any relationship became fascinating chemicals which we as readers got to see boil and explode into an ever-deadlier cocktail. As a film, there is hardly enough time to treat this point with enough longevity and respect, and so Smith shortens and quickens the most necesary parts of his investigation into group-survival into a useful, if somewhat muddled, creep-out. (To wit, no matter who was originally the victim, seeing Stacy stand on sun-blasted rock as she flays herself alive is a startlingly powerful image.) And the second is the third, which irks me only because it softens and brightens the delightfully sour original ending for a final sequence that isn't necesarily romanticized (it isn't as though they all survive), so much as it is improbable according to the book's original schematics.

But that's the thing: director Carter Smith and writer Scott B. Smith tweak the literary property just barely here and there, creating alternately discord and terror. As a director, Carter Smith adheres well to the genres tropes of gore and suspenseful scores (that leap and tear at you in all the right places); and Scott Smith retains enough of the terror of his novel to make this a successful slasher-film-update, but where has all the bleakness gone? Especially after noticing what powerful performances Malone, Ramsey, Ashmore, and Tucker give, it's difficult not to have wanted more of the pages' trademark high-brow dread heaped upon them, if only to see what delightful ways they squirm beneath it. Still, The Ruins is no clunker, not exactly. It has more vitality than most Watch-the-Teens-Die! films, if only because it retains maybe half of the book's psychoanalytical bent, and more pedigree and talent than one expects. Anyone who has read the book will be scared and dissapointed in (mostly) equal measure. Anyone else will just be scared.

Horton Hears a Who: A-

2008-06-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

In Horton Hears a Who, the story is simple. Horton (Jim Carrey) is an elephant in the Jungle of Nool. One day, as he's heading out for a morning swim, a small speck floats by (how the speck came to be there opens the film, in a gorgeously animated sequence), and Horton, well, hears a Who calling for help on the speck. Actually, he hears a small squeak, but it's enough for him - a compassionate, imaginative creature - to realize there must be a whole city on that tiny mote and that they need to be saved. Thus, 87 minutes must follow as we watch the elephant struggle to bring the speck (placed securely on a purple dandelion flower-thing) to a safe place atop a faraway mountain. There are only a few small problems, and they reside with the Sour Kangaroo (Carol Burnett) and her posse of oddly surbanite-esque close-minded followers, who believe that believing in a speck with life is tantamount to anarachy, and so plot to thwart Horton at every turn.

The moral's benign. Because, obviously, Horton succeeds in saving Who-ville (A town which would later pop up in an earlier live-action adaptation of a Dr. Suess classic, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, with far less pizazz.) But the fact that he does so, and proves to the entire jungle that "a person's a person, no matter how small," powers this animated gem, giving it a healthy dose of winning schmaltz to go with its ADD-influenced, self-effacing, sly wit. But just who are the engines powering the characteristics that so power Horton to success? Why the cast and crew, of course! Directors Jimmy Hayward & Steve Martino seem, on paper, far more capable of making a good movie than writers Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul; after all, the former pair have either had a hand in great Pixar films (Finding Nemo) or comedy masterpieces (Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail), while the latter couple has to their name the screenplay to Bubble Boy. Eww. But no matter the reason, however odd it sounds, the quartet blend seamlessly, working in equal measure to create a fizzy spring treat.

The characters are crazy. When you get right down to it, stripping away the pretty-awesome, reverentially-Suess-y animation, you've got a hellzapoppin comedy starring Steve Carrell, as the Who-ville mayor, and Jim Carrey. The evidence to this is there staring you in the face the entire running-time: the patented-Carrey mannerisms (e.g. vocal impersonations, crazy physical ticks even a personified elephant would rarely want to attempt), the wacky second-bananas (Katie, voice intermittently by Joey King, is a whole spectacle by herself), the screwball plot. And as such a comedy, Horton would have succeeded just fine. But as an animated film (courtesy of animation house Blue Sky, the group behind the Ice Age flicks), it's even better. Why? Perhaps because the characters are so crazy, and their voice actors take their tics and personalities so sincerely over-the-top, hitting every punchline. Or maybe it's the script, which pops and crackles with a modern sensibility about reviving a beloved-classic to any audience, age or gender. Or maybe it's a mixture of both being tossed into one frame and slathered with gorgeous CGI.

The result? Divine. It sounds cliche, and inevitably you'll realize it is, but seeing Horton Hears a Who, you'll laugh, you'll be moved, and you'll wonder how on earth a studio that isn't Pixar could make a flick that's wholly animated wholly not-suck. It isn't on the same level of Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, in terms of cohesive storytelling vision (because, let's face it, the structure here is slender no matter how you beef it up with subplots). But Horton has a charming sense of its own self-deprecation (used most hilariously in service of spoofing its own multi-media format), several punchlines any comedy would die to have, and two or three (or four) performances from two or three (or four) great actors that elevate a moral fable into a great romp, and a perfect heir to the Suess throne. Now when can we expect their take on Oh, the Places You'll Go!?

Firefly: The Complete Series: A-

2008-06-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

Buffy wasn't yet all there. And Angel certainly had a long way to go. Firefly: The Complete Series, however, was a fully-formed beauty almost from the word "Go." It's surprising, when one looks back, to realize that Joss Whedon's sci-fi/western action-drama is nearly perfect - especially when that same viewer also realizes that his other two television shows (the aforementioned Buffy and Angel, one a horror-film twist, the other a noir-tribute) took many more episodes before they became great. But all Firefly needed was one nearly-mediocre two-hour pilot to set itself up, and then it shot off into the stars, blasting away all expectation. All of the expected Whedon tropes are here - narratives that quirk ironically half-way through; layered episode titles; a rich, talented ensemble cast; an over-arching plot that questions the moral structure of human beings; and dialogue that bounces, zings, zaps, and screwballs sincerely through all manner of wit and heartache - but they're all far more polished at the starting gate, and the result is an immensely entertaining, sadly short-lived, space opera.

The strongest aspect of the show, as with all Mutant Enemy productions, remains the writing. And the strongest aspect of that aspect is the dialogue. It lumbers about in "Serenity," the two-hour pilot, and "Heart of Gold," the penultimate episode, is nearly as bad, but from "The Train Job," up through and past "Gold," Whedon & Co.'s words are madly, shockingly, gleefully intelligent; they practically rub their smarts and sass in your face. More so, when a step back is taken for a sad or touching moment, it actually rings true. There must be a slight change to be noted there, because even in Angel, sentiment was a clumsy thing. Perhaps it is but a mere symptom of the ease creator Whedon has with his third, and as of yet last, show. He doesn't spend nearly any time reiterating themes or character flaws, but rather lets the inventive, oddly rich, creation at his fingertips spread and soar.

And this is what the audience finds: in the 26th-century, humans inhabit a completely new star system, spread out over hundreds of moons, with a pair of "core worlds" at the center. It's very much the Old West, outsized over thousands of light years. Another twist: the political and socioeconomic structure of the worlds is dominated by the Alliance, a massive government complex controlled by the last two superpowers: China and the United States (accordingly, every character is fluent in Mandarin and English, and their conversations flow between the two, to fizzy effect). Sounds pretty tame, if a little 1984, right? One problem: some years ago, the Alliance felt itself sufficiently strong enough to reign in and "re-civilize" the outlying moons. However, the outlying moons felt their independence was too precious to be given up so easily - thus, a civil war: the Browncoats versus the Alliance. The Alliance won, and now, some years later, we are introduced to Captian Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), a cynical ex-Browncoat, and his crew - among them, a doctor (Sean Maher) and his fugitive sister (Summer Glau) - as they rove the various worlds looking for work as smugglers aboard their ship Serenity (class: Firefly).

The various jobs they accrue make-up episode-by-episode story, but at its heart Firefly is an exploration of the crewmembers, and the life they have had to make for themselves admist a contradictory society, wherein one-half is civilized, and the other is very "futuristic Wyatt Earp." Episodes like "Ariel," in which Serenity's crew has to break-in to a hospital on a core world, and "The Message," weave the various big-picture narrative elements together with ease and mastery. And "The Train Job," "Shindig," "Trash," and "Safe," are perfectly insular, and perfectly satisfying. Above all of them sits "Objects in Space," the series finale written-and-directed by Joss Whedon, which is, odd as it sounds, most easily summed up as an existential exploration of the crew as they attempt to fend off a psychic, psychotic, bounty hunter (Richard Brooks). What makes "Objects" so brilliant, perhaps one of the best episodes for television Whedon has ever written, is how the expected - witty conversations, thrilling heroics - is suplemented by the completely new.

And what makes Firefly so brilliant, at least for the majority of the time, is how each of these different strengths are united and tied together into one supreme package. Both Buffy and Angel would go on to be better shows, but for what it was, when it was, for the time period it was aired, Firefly was an epic character study; a funny, funky, cool action-adventure; and a drama with a studied and truthful atmosphere. If I knew how to say "This is yet another achievement on Mutant Enemy's Crown of Awesome" in Mandarin, after watching all fourteen of these episodes, I probably would.

Leatherheads: B-

2008-06-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

I like George Clooney. The ever-present smirk (that never comes across like he bought it in the same place W. bought his); the salt-and-pepper hair he's had since he was twenty; the affability of his countenance - all of it. Physically, Mr. Clooney is a wonder. Oh, and career-wise he is too...I guess. I mean, on one hand you've got Michael Clayton and the Ocean's films to his credit as a visceral hero, too cool or moral to come out on bottom. But then on your other hand you've got Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck that are, while not bad movies, a little like high-value cough syrup: they both taste awful, no matter the sky-high nutritional value after the fact. As an actor, I'll assume he's given more to the first two films than the second pair, reports to the contrary. Yet as a director, his sensibilities (excluding Confession of a Dangerous Mind, but I'll chalk that up to whiz-kind writer Charlie Kaufman) have always been toward the staunchly nostalgic and politically active fare. So what is the end result for Leatherheads, a too-long comedy about the "When I was a kid..." days of pro-football? It mixes Fun, Relatable Actor Clooney with Pining, Retrospective Director Clooney, and not always in equal measure. Well, I somewhat happily report, the film works just enough to be an entertainment, if still not enough to be occasionally not a bore.

There is yet another trend in the work of George Clooney that applies here; and that is the apparent regression in his work time-wise. Consider: Confessions was a 70s period-thriller, while Good Night was a 50s newsroom drama, and now Leatherheads: a 20s-set screwball-romance-action-drama-comedy about how Rules ruined the Game. I wonder what his next film will be? A bio-pic of Woodrow Wilson, with Ben Kingsley or Anthony Stewart Head appropriately squinty as the man himself, and a script by Aaron Sorkin? Regardless of the actual time period of the film, the Clooney Twinkle still shines through to a modern audience for the majority of the movie, his comedic mugging (which is nothing like the quicksilver timing he used in Ocean's Eleven, mind you) in full genial effect. And the plot itself - all about Dodge Connelly's (George Clooney) fading Duluth Bulldogs, and how they recruit star college player Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) who is being chased by a cynical reporter, Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger ) - can rumble and ramble for scenes on end quite agreeably. And then the plot has to go somewhere, and stuff starts shifting unagreeably. One has only Clooney's perceived ill-skill with the rhythms of comedy to blame for the crankily-shifting gears of his picture.

Take, for example, Leatherheads' most prominent feature in a cinematic landscape now frequently home to the Summer Blockbuster: rat-a-tat, his-and-hers dialogue. Take, for an example of this example, the brief exchange:

Lexie: I'll live-
Dodge: Alone!

Now imagine their split-second verbal baton passes are accompanied by a (mostly pleasing and) cheeky score of Randy Newman's composing, and that Clooney's camera practically zings! between his stars and you have the atmosphere of Heads...when it works. When it doesn't, I'm afraid very little of writers Duncan Brantley & Rick Reilly's dialogue is screwball so much as it is obvious, annoying, and loud. Add in a pinch of needless romantic intrigue - i.e. Lexie has to cozy up to Carter to find the truth beneath his "too-perfect" war record, while she's simultaneously falling for Dodge - and a final football game that's like a mixture of the climax of Any Given Sunday and the water-wheel scene from Dead Man's Chest (that is, endless, and barely engaging/entertaining), and you've got the movie, pretty much in full.

Do I begrudge George Clooney for continuing to take on projects most of his contemporary hyphenated Hollywood stars would shy away from? I'll admit, it's difficult, especially as he keeps making them function in some partiality on screen. But the more I consider Leatherheads, whose structure and comedy are saved only by the grace of its stars, the more the sinking notion begins to dawn on me: perhaps the Clooney Twinkle is fading a little, dilipidated as it is from being trotted out so much to shows like these. Accordingly, a plea: stop screwing around, Mr. Director/Star-of-the-Universe, and get back to the roles that make us love you so; you, know: the ones where you're either drop-dead cool or drop-dead dramatic. Not stuff like this, where your talents and pretty mug are hermetically-sealed in a two-hour time-capsule of naeive nostalgia and hit-or-miss laughs.

August Rush: C-

2008-06-06T11:58:00.001-07:00

Music in a visual medium is a tricky thing; it can be over-used or underwhelming: a club to browbeat audiences or a barely noticed whisper in the background. Yet, it should never be seen as an ineffable, stifling presence. It should lilt and flow, or stirke and tear asunder, or soothe and placate, or sadden and wrench. It should not, I repeat should not, be a key plot piece in an endlessly trite, long-winded exploration of music in the service of Been There, Done That. Director Kirsten Sheridan and writers Nick Castle & James V. Hart pillage through great masters of their respective forms like Charles Dickens (for the occasional Oliver Twist twist) for a fairy tale that is short on fairy - that is, wondrous, emotional connection - and long on tale - that is, snail-paced discourse and voice-over that rarely even comes together within itself.

August Rush has a fascinating beginning, and it almost tricks you into believing the magical, improbable, conceit at its heart will win out in yours. This is not to be the case. Sheridan fills the screen with music and soft lighting, an attempt to transform the everyday into the same realm of music and existence that Evan Taylor (Freddie Highmore, sucked dry and plastered into a stick-figure role) must live in. The opening scene, in which Evan "conducts" the winds through a field of grass, does nearly that. And then the story starts, and stuff starts falling flat. First there is a one-night stand between Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Lyla (Keri Russell), that ends in tears and angst...and a baby, given up for secret adoption by Lyla's father (William Sadler, way more wamrly paternal in Roswell). And then there is the aftermath, in which we the audience are asked to believe that such a sweet night as the one shared by the Irish lad and his lassie could warrant such goopy melodrama as this. I'm not buying it, and neither should you.

Or, if you feel for some strange reason so compelled, Rush makes that an up-hill battle. Performances bend and transmogrify before your very eyes (Highmore himself is the perfect, irritating example, and Robin Williams, as a modern-day Fagin, falls not far behind) into sickening caricature, and the narrative keeps turning tricks that are both wildly sentimental and not even vaguely related to reality. (Are we really to believe that Evan, stage-name "August Rush," beat out all the other child prodigies to suddenly be enrolled in Juliard? Oh right, the movie doesn't mention them.) What's more, the tone is endlessly condescending: a cousin to the cloying self-help nonsense of The Martian Child. In both cases a hard-knock lad with possibly extraordinary abilities teaches the surrounding adults the merits of just letting him do his own thing - regardless of mental, emotional, or physical well-being. Bah!

But I digress. Kirsten Sheridan is the daughter of Jim Sheridan, a director famed for his up-from-the-streets sensibilities turned masterful storytelling. In the latter's case, the quirks and kinks of the human condition are not fodder for a treachly flame, but a rarity and testament all their own. In the former's mind, surely it is the opposite: cute kids must become Cute Kids, all must be resolved happily (if suddenly), and common sense must inevitably be strangled by its loopy second-cousin Hysterial Sentiment. There is heart here, admittedly, but also a subtle brand of cynicism that balks at the modern notion of social etiquette, etc. "No," August Rush screams, "do not mock or hate our cute and cuddly little man. Rather, adore him for his triumph and compassion." Well if this is what his compassion looks like, displayed in a leaky fable like this, then no thank you.

White Oleander: B

2008-04-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Michelle Pfeiffer plays a great bitch. In such films as Hairspray and Stardust, the actress has shown her indomitable skill as a live-action, modern, Cruella de Vil. And in Batman Returns and White Oleander, she expanded her range portraying a pair of women who subvert all experience, fitting each conflict into their own respective hot-boxes of feminine empowerment. For Batman, that meant Pfeiffer had to bend to the freaky-Goth-maestro Tim Burton as light-S&M vixen Catwoman; for Oleander, she wears nothing as flattering as a leather-corset, and wields nothing as intimidating as a 20-foot whip, yet her character Ingrid Magnussen is a harrowing villain. Or, at least, she should have been; she even was, for a time, in Janet Finch’s novel on which Peter Kosminksy’s film is based. But on screen, with cheekbones that could cut glass and a stare that freezes blood, the audience is repeatedly begged to sympathize, to understand her, as mother/murderer. Surrounded by Finch’s florid, venomously entrancing prose, the reader was never so belittled; and the fact that they are now is just the flash-point for everything tidy and Hallmark about a literary adaptation that merely stings where it should have scalded.

But the movie isn’t necessarily about Ingrid, not really. On both page and screen, the narrative bildungsroman centers on her daughter, Astrid (Alison Lohman), forced to go through a cycle of foster homes after her mother commits first-degree murder. Again, part of the ugly, unruly sprawl of the novel is cleaned up, shined for the film. The first home Astrid is sent to is still the abode of Starr (Robin Wright Penn), and she still falls into a sexual tryst with Starr’s live-in boyfriend Ray (Cole Hauser); but now Starr is perkier, oddly more wholesome as a white-trash Desperate Housewife. And Ray is no longer the schlub that plays a major-role in Astrid’s brief sexual oddyssey - he’s a blue-collar hunk. This sensibility extends past Starr’s home and on toward the other foster-parents Astrid finds herself in the care of. Tellingly, writer Mary Agnes Donoghue leaves out Amelia Ramos, the upper-crust business woman who maintains a disciplined home of foster-girls/slaves whom she regularly starves. Perhaps she assumed we couldn’t take the viciousness of our heroine’s plight, but part of the pull of the book is in the continuing blossoms of cruelty and beauty Astrid regularly encounters - a cunning metaphor perpetually tied together by the recurring image of the White Oleander.

The plot-structure (even though it axes two of the homes Astrid lives in) remains faithful, a skill the director employed to similar solid effect in his adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. And just as there, Kosminsky uses cut-away shots of the landscape (in this case, the hot Santa Ana winds blowing through the trees) to communicate internal turmoil. But he still stumbles, here as there, no matter the number of great actresses he employs. Donoghue’s script is a distillation - an admirable one, too - that occasionally lapses into reduction. The relationship between the beautiful aesthete who calls herself Ingrid and her daughter is nowhere near as soulfully strained as it was in Finch’s book; instead it becomes a series of tearful confrontations/therapy sessions. And the series of bumps and obstacles Astrid overcomes or is overcome by to discover her individual self are lineated and romanticized (e.g. her relationship with fellow foster Paul Trout) when they shouldn’t be. The complex overlapping leaves and deadly blooms that marked Oleander the book are pruned back into a pretty, affecting, and pretty tame movie.

Alison Lohman is a near revelation: willowy and resilient, observant and intelligent. And grand kudos are in order for each of the willing women who embody the various emotionally cracked/destroyed/manipulative/insecure characters who flit in and out of Astrid’s life. Formerly mentioned were Pfeiffer and Penn, but there’s also Renée Zellweger, Svetlana Efremova, and Amy Aquino - each portraying with virtuoso skill their intermeshing personalities that come together to school their collective charge on such Big Themes as her place in life, womahood, and child-parent relationships. But one still gets the nagging thought that the writer and director don’t really so much care about all of these things, so much as rather or not we connect with Ingrid. In the book, that was hard to do, and we weren’t exactly pressured into it. But the film almost demands such an act from its audience; and the strain nearly overwhelms the delicate, lyrical, occasionally profound, mostly-average film sheltered beneath.

Stop-Loss: B+

2008-04-06T07:10:00.001-07:00

In Flags of our Fathers, a so-so movie made from a good book, the ghosts of war haunt the film’s heroes much as they do the modern-day American men at the center of Stop-Loss. Except in Flags, director Clint Eastwood turns the phobias, tension, and stress arising when domesticity and government-condoned killing clash into little more than an affection, a quirk (even worse, the "ethnic" hero is the one who is worst suffering). In Kimberly Pierce’s far more raw Stop-Loss, the pathos doesn’t just hover in the background, quietly awaiting its turn to take center stage and steer a plot point or character in a particular direction; instead, it burbles just beneath the surface of every frame, a seductive and tyrannical undertow lurking at the heels of every man (and woman) on screen. And occasionally that undertow can become a flash flood, drowning the unsuspecting soldiers-on-leave whom Pierce makes the subject of her camera. It’s her way of saying that warfare doesn’t live in nightmares, it lives in the soldiers who created them - digging deep into their pores, their bloodstreams, and their psyches - gutting most everything else. The process of this realization comes slowly, unspooling over 113 minutes, but as it does, it strikes, surprises and saddens you.

In the vein of this central intention, Stop-Loss is one of the most affecting dramas I’ve seen in quite a while, and a most affecting drama, period. Using the lives of Brandon King (Ryan Phillipe), his best friend Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Steve’s fiancee Michelle (Abbie Cornish) as her expansive blank canvas, director and co-writer Pierce attempts to cram in most everything she wants to say about the current Iraq War utilizing a MacGuffan plot device (that ultimately goes absolutely nowhere) onto one movie screen. It doesn’t always work. But its efforts and expansive vision are admirable. It searches and wonders at the nature and cost of modern battle, and how that cost would inevitably warp those who are willing to pay it. For the majority of the film that doesn’t focus on Brandon’s attempt to get out of his military contract loop-hole (e.g. he’s been discharged and then, woops!, he’s beeing sent back for another tour as per the "stop-loss" clause of his agreement to the Army), we are witness to how small-town Texans come to re-adjust and re-know the boys they shipped overseas five years ago.

As a filmmaker, Kimberly Pierce has lost none of the clarity of her direction, but as a writer, she’s gotten a little rusty. As previously stated, her central conflict is a cheap one: only half-fulfilled. And her dialogue can spiral into an over-heated mess (Exhibit A: a climactic confrontation in a cemetery near the end). But the script (co-written by Mark Richard) isn’t a complete clunker, or even totally hit-or-miss; it’s a mess, but it’s effective and, on one or two choice occasions, ripely poetic. Still, it’s Kimberly Pierce the director who drives the film. This is only her second film, and it swerves past the curse of the "Sophomore Slump" with finesse, but its been heavily-influenced by her debut (and breakthrough): Boys Don’t Cry. In that movie, her gifts of expressive non-expression and ability to empathize with the rough Texas heart helped create a stunning work. In Stop-Loss they attempt much the same, and succeed only partially.

Maybe it is because so much was attempted with one movie. Sure, there is a lot going on in any given scene, and by the end there are arguably two completely different main storylines occuring simultaneously, but Stop-Loss is only one movie, and can only do so much. Ironically, when Pierce tries to weave it all together, she does: for the first half of the movie, she interweaves the domestic dramas with jumpy home-made videos of the boys’ tour (accompanied by the frenetic beats of "Bodies" by Drowning Pool, etc.) and the result is verite excellence. More often than not though, there are no such chance bridges between the gaps of the film’s many different sub-genres. Over the course of two hours, a viewer would not be wrong in labeling Stop-Loss as any (or all) of the following: a melodrama, a character study, a war film, a message movie, or a lax semi-thriller. Needless to say, the house can get pretty crowded when all these different elements start screaming at once.

For the most part, silence is maintained and embraced. The camera zooms in close on the strained and stark faces of the cast, letting their grimaces do most of the talking. It’s an admirable technique, and one of the few consistently solid aspects of the movie. Together with cinematographer Chris Menges, Pierce makes her work a propulsive entertainment, even as it starts to leap lurchingly around in the closing twenty minutes. Even when it leaps though, the movie still affects the audience. In two particular scenes, ham-fisted dialogue goes hand-in-hand with sincerity, creating a whip-lash effect that rebukes the mind but wounds the heart. Such is an overarching theme of Stop-Loss though, painful as it is to admit. (This is a movie, after all, I’ve waited quite some time to love.) In this study of post-war soldiers-turned-civilians, a lot of things slip through the cracks, and Pierce’s righteousness can sometimes get in the way of her own talent. Yet still Ryan Phillippe and his merry (or not so-) band of cohorts trudge on, their wrenching struggles a continuing testament to the toll of mass violence, and the power of this uniquely spectacular failure. Is Stop-Loss a messy, ambitious, over-reaching drama (that starts great but ends soddenly)? Probably. Does it scald, touch, and stir you? Absolutely.

Margot at the Wedding: A-

2008-03-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

In Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, we aren’t just asked to be fascinated by Nicole Kidman’s emotional nakedness as the ugliest of emotional manipulators, but to be riveted by it. No small task, in theory. The titular character, Margot, is a towering persona; precariously pre-possessed but owner of a tongue sharp enough to cut diamonds, and an ego to match. She’s like Jeff Daniels, the lunatic-dragon from Baumbach’s last film The Squid and the Whale, meets statuesque beauty meets literary-genius pretension. As a character, it’s a hefty feat to pull off, and yet Kidman, stripped bare of most of the armaments most top-dollar movie stars demand these days, is pure unvarnished glory as a sister who comes, with her son (Zane Pais), to her estranged sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to "support her," while really all she entends is a mess.

While there, what a mess she does create. For starters, she sets her sights on dressing down Pauline’s fiance Malcolm (Jack Black), an apathetic schlub who’s appealing by the sheer fact of his nuerotic-less agenda; in comparison to Margot’s kin, he’s downright sane. But problems she does find with him, and as a skilled short-story writer, Margot effectively manuevers in seeds of doubt about the courtship with as few lines (or rather, put-downs) as necesary. From there she succeeds in creating a mess of her own life, albeit more or less on her own terms. When she came to her sister’s wedding, she left behind her husband, but it wasn’t from sheer lack of interest (although, invariably with someone of her persona, that must occasionally arise). No, rather Margot has a lover, Dick (Ciaran Hinds), whom she’s quite interested in keeping...and passionately making love to. Thus, no husband. But things do get out, and in a family where the most common communication is a lacerating cocktail of accusations, withering observation, and passive-aggression, Margot inevitably must confront, in her own way, the price of her sleeping-around.

Both of these events, both of which are mostly strung-out for the majority of Wedding, propel what plot there is, but just as in Whale, far more of the attraction of the movie comes from the devastatingly intelligent manner in which Baumbach, as writer-director, probes the darkest crevices of relationships. The way in which he does so - both as a sparsely beautiful filmmaker (he turns the East Coast into a sprawling, decaying, weedy, and expansive forest-beach) and a writer of no small talents - innately challenges the viewer; the sting of his characters’ words strike the audience as much as the peoples of his fiction. Yet from that pain, he pulls no small amount of catharsis. And to create that pain, he whips up no small amount of great dialogue. In fact, on more than two or three occasions, there are conversations in Wedding that are so delightfully written you want to bottle them up for later. If ever there was a screenwriter who could turn speaking into an intricate rhythm of silence and sarcasm, it’s Baumbach, and his skillfully dry wit offsets the uncomfortable nature of his project.

And when I say uncomfortable, I mean it with a capital U. The camera crams in on the ugliness, the pain, and the dramatic confrontations when two very different people are thrown together for an extended period of time. But it isn’t just two incompatible people, our director is saying, it’s two sisters - and by their very definition, they love and hate in equal measure. This bedrock conceit is a tad difficult to swallow, but seeing as how it is central to such a beautifully wry portrait of characters simmering with nuerosis (rather than the far shallower, reverse philosophy), I’ll go along with it. And seeing as how this may just be Noah Baumbach’s most affecting film yet - and one that surely cements him among other great American writer-directors who specialize in the pitter-patter of talky psycho-drama (e.g. Richard Linklater, or more aptly: Woody Allen) - you may be inclined to take the journey as well. It’s a painful one, and it ends abruptly (if not as traumatically as Whale), but it is measured and observed in lovingly stringest doses that scald and delight in equal measure. Much as Pauline and Margot do each other.

New Moon: B

2008-03-25T15:17:00.000-07:00

There are two fundamental notions at work in New Moon that have, in the past, grounded two very different genres of pop culture. The first is the age-old adage that love can come in the most unexpected of places - the saying itself being the obvious harbinger of the romance novel - while the second is that eerily unclassifiable theory of the banality of evil - obviously the surface emblems of such wide-ranging works as American Psycho and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Together, the two flavors intermingle to varying degrees in New Moon, the story of Isabella "Bella" Swan’s love for a baroque and occasionally sullen family of vampires in small-town Forks, Washington. It needs to be mentioned that previous, far better written, mainstays of English literature have approximated the gothic overtone of star-crossed love (Wuthering Heights, Romeo & Juliet) but this second book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series isn’t out to turn doomed love into a soaring, tragic metaphor - when it says it’s a "love story with bite," it means it. Literally.

Moon is, in so many obvious (and some very subtle) ways an improvement over Twilight. For starters, the affectations of a young writer attempting to capture an even younger world (rural high school) are dropped the majority of the time within the pages of the sequel - thankfully allowing a little more of Meyer’s bottled creation to sprawl and breathe. Also, and building upon the just previously-mentioned new amenity, the author brings in practically another whole dozen characters to give her dreary little town life. Yet, one wonders, why would Meyers need anyone to replace Edward Cullen - the youngest of the vampire clan and Bella’s professed true love? After all, both she and her heroine spends hundreds of pages oozing over his perfection, so why only seek to distract the reader from him? The answer is tied into directly what makes Moon a better book, both stylistically and conceptually: the Cullens, fascinating as they are, are removed from the equations. Well...from Forks, anyway.

See, Edward constantly worries about Bella’s safety within his household, and around his brothers and sisters (who all have big, old-fashioned names like Jasper, Rosalie, and Emmett). So when her eighteenth birthday party at the Cullen mansion spirals terribly out of control, he and the rest of his relatives leave town - to save the damsel in distress. See there, though, that’s the catch: in Meyers bewitching post-modern way, Bella would rather risk life & limb than be seperated from her soul mate. She is, though. And the subsequent 300+ pages of aftermath and turmoil give New Moon a healthy jolt. The occasionally oppresive repititions of the young romance at Twilight’s heart aren’t given time to blossom here - angst and heartache do instead - and the empty hole left by our entrancing supernatural family is filled by a couple of surprise guests. After some tricky manuevering, Stephenie Meyers guides her vision into an unforseen twist that’s so catchy, the reader almost forgets the pain of Edward’s absence.

Almost. That’s the second catch, and what will go on to power the final two volumes of the Bella-Edward love story. Since he is so tied to her, and since she is eventually so tied to certain people who despise him, when he returns, certain things do not go well. And though the expected last 100-pages of climax (Meyers does, if anything, structure her books in obsessively predictable patterns) have nothing to do with this animosity - and all to do with a vampiric "royal family" - the aftermath is all but fauning over it. This I can understand. After all, the saving grace of the series is that the muffled, lush, gothic atmosphere of Twilight was finally given room to take (some) flight in its follow-up - the sucess of which is due entirely to Bella’s emerging emotional conflicts between the Cullens, her own mortality, and...well...another pack of super-interesting creatures. So I can completely get behind any attempt by the author to play-up our hero’s turmoil. In fact I welcome it: turning away from these books is difficult to do, but I feel so much better afterwards when they’re actually of measurable, consistent, quality.

The O.C.: The Complete Fourth Season: B+

2008-03-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

In The O.C. nothing is what it seems. For the first season, that meant that creator Josh Schwartz’s soap-drama about a wealthy Newport Beach family who decides to adopt a street vagrant named Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie) was more intelligent and slyly entrancing than the generation of teen-oriented primtime shows - Beverly Hills, 90210 or Melrose Place - that had preceded it. It was entertaining, sincere, and witty where the viewer had only expected shallow mush. In the second season, this blossom of novelity turned fetid and mediocre; the arch over-lapping storylines (all of which inevitably found a main character the subject of some "salacious" or salacious lie or secret or misdeed) turned pulpy and madly over-imagined. Yet even that was lost for the third year: along with that faint glimmer of freshman glory went all semblance of a cohesive vision; the same set of second bananas that had trounced around, albeit glumly, Newport for season two were replaced by a veritable revolving door of tramps, schemers, businessman, and the like. But - surprise, surprise! - all that has changed. With Josh Schwartz back behind the wheel, The O.C.: The Complete Fourth Season has regained the largest share of its original sprightly bounce that is ever likely to occur.

When I say sprightly though, I don’t necesarily mean in a happy-go-lucky way. A huge plus for Schwartz and his team of writers is in a re-invigorated dramatic bent to the series. Its an easy thing to re-claim considering the last season ended with Marissa’s (Mischa Barton - she will not be missed) death in Ryan’s arms. Launching off from that comes "The Avengers," the season premiere, which finds each remaining member of the Cohen and Cooper families coping with life after the accident and high school. For some, the dislocation of long-distance relationships and dead-end summer jobs extending into the fall has stilted their personalities; others have taken the freedom as a re-ignition for a passion they never thought existed. And still others grapple with their grief by figuring out a way to actually grapple. Namely with Volchok (Cam Gigandet). For Seth (Adam Brody), Summer (Rachel Bilson), Ryan, and Julie (Melinda Clarke) respectively (among associated other parents and relatives), life seems a little different from where they had expected. But fear not! Come the next few episodes, the mad-antic highjinks of the gang will eventually re-ensnare them all...much to my delight.

Still, the dramatic subtleties don’t dissapear overnight, and seeing those first few episodes thrum with repression, betrayal, and depression - all embodied skillfully in the countenances of Clarke and McKenzie - gave off a satisfaction not felt since the first season finale. But eventually all good things come to an end, and this stands true even for The O.C. Except, the good persists. From "The Gringos" on towards "The Summer Bummer," the high-absurdist soap-factor skyrockets to levels of unimiginable glee. Thanks to the return of Taylor Townsend (Autumn Reeser, a geeky-comic vixen), Newport is again a place to party and have a good time. Bravo as well to the writing and the fellow cast. For the former, is there any greater proof of the resurgance of talent than witnessing "The Cold Turkey"’s dexterous balancing-act mixing tragedy and mania? For the latter, well, all I can say is watching the new Fab Four (that’s right: it’s Taylor-Ryan time) gives off a delirious, entertaining, charge.

So does most of The O.C. for its final season. Sure, there are a few flat spots ("The Metamorphosis") and just because a show can recognize that it has a tendency to wrap up plots in miliseconds doesn’t mean it gets a free pass on subsequent attempts to do so. But Josh Schwartz, who writes approximately a quarter of these sixteen episodes, keeps thing in fine form, never once lapsing too long into the dreck I’d become grudgingly accustomed to. What’s more, there are episodes that satisfy past the purely cerebral. The aforementioned season-openig arc are has a slow-burn pathos; and the penultimate "The Night Moves" isn’t just one of the most intricately suspenseful and riveting episodes of the whole series, but also writer Stephanie Savage’s best work. The surprise boils down to how, on not so infrequent occasions, the perfectly adequate fizz can give way to a deeper layer. Not only is the funny perfectly affected for this fourth season from the first, but so too is the underlying subtexts.

Of course, in the end, The O.C. is all about the soap. And there is plenty of crazy melodrama to sample (Chris Pratt, delightfully, as Che anyone?). Yet over ninety-two episodes and nearly five years, the audience has come to care about the Cohen family, and their affections are given due respect over the season. All the relationships that have been dragged out and showcased from Day One are finally resolved, with series finale "The End’s Not Near, It’s Here," and the flirty possibilities lately introduced aren’t entirely extinguished. For a writing-producing duo that would later move on to the far sillier Chuck and the far grittier, if less wholesome, Gossip Girl, to see them deliver on all the talent promised from those first twenty-seven episodes is, if not a dream come true, than a zany-fun experience that often leaves you laughing and touched, nary a Very Special Episode in sight. Say Welcome, or Goodbye, to The O.C. bitch.

Roswell: The Complete First Season: B

2008-03-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

There are aliens in Roswell, New Mexico; and they come in the form of good-looking young actors. Oh, and while there they encounter an equally pretty group of human friends to bond and couple with. Such interactions can't happen however - what with the two groups being from two very different sides of the tracks - but we all know how young passion can be. And we certainly all know how zealous the FBI (and their shadowy secret projects) can be when its got ahold of a very interesting trail that may lead straight to our beautifully sweet "illegals." Such values are at the heart of Roswell: The Complete First Season; but just as Jason Behr, Brendan Fehr, and Katherine Heigl (!) mask certain depths as Max Evans, Michael Guerin, and Isabel Evans respectively, so too does Roswell. There are numerous moments of contrived soapiness created straight from the previously mentioned formula, but who's to say such contrivances are always awful - or that a sweet-souled little sci-fic teen-drama isn't allowed some improbabilities? Miraculously, the critic and the fan in me both agree that Roswell is worth the effort.

One element to reward a viewer's patience is in the occasional clever subversion of a central theme: how being part-alien can fuel the standard teenage angsts. Another is in, guiltily, watching these interesting teens come together and intertwine; which fuels directly into the pleasure of seeing creator Jason Katims (who pulled the idea from a young-adult novel series) work his hypnotically pure tone - something he would perfect all the more seven years later as show-runner for Friday Night Lights, which is like Roswell with less cliches...and UFOs.

If Katim's abilities as a writer aren't as developed or honed as he would later display for Lights, they have an admirable honesty and depth of compassion. Being sucked into the story of how Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby) and her two friends, Maria (Majandra Delfino) and Alex (Colin Hanks), cope with the knowledge that three of their fellow students - the aforementioned Evans siblings and Michael - are from another planet is a nearly effortless experience. And then later watching as the two groups come to intermingle can occasionally reach a nearly (albeit cheaply) euphoric high. This is the type of hour-long drama that would rather spend the majority of its first season investigatng the romantic and platonic implications of the two groups' match-up before sufficiently amping up the sci-fi suspense. Which is ok: because seeing how Liz & Max (the typical, anguishedly-thwarted pair), or Michael & Maria (a romance of atypical chemistry: a Seth & Summer before their time), or even Alex & Isabel (a surprisingly grounded relationship) eventually come together can be refreshingly entertaining; each couple having its own unique rhythm seperate and as a part of the collective six as a whole.

And as a group, they certainly have obstacles. For the narrative elements of Roswell that must inevitably stare-down the long barrel of Serialized Drama, there is luckily a happy answer to be found. Katims and his writers create a nutty little town out of Roswell, NM - but also one in which, when stuff starts hitting the fan, you aren't quite sure where to turn. Do you look toward Ms. Topolsky (Julie Benz, before she was Angel's delectably amoral vamp-lover Darla), a nosy "guidance counselor"? Or the local sheriff (William Sadler), whose alliances and ambiguities never seem to cease? Can you even trust yourself or your closest friends and family, with whom you share a history none of you know anything about? These are the sporadically-introduced, introspective quandries facing the sextet over the season, and most of the time (from "Crazy" up through "The White Room") the suspenseful arcs work. And for those that don't, you always have the good-natured relationship aspect ("Heat Wave," "The Balance," "Independence Day,"). Heck, once in a while they even intersect to fascinating effect ("Blood Brother," "Into the Woods").

But, and more than once in a while, the viewer realizes that there are problems in Roswell not so easy to spot; and it sure isn't the aliens. Nor could it quite be the actors (who are a rough, but able, group). Perhaps it is the sheer overload of heart occasionally on display (the friendships in this show are, to my guilty pleasure, hyper-protective and hyper-caring versions of their real selves); or maybe its that bits and pieces of the story can be discarded or picked up at random (i.e. Alex's band, or Max's boss) or maybe its that neither half of the show is permanently welded together: the sci-fi mystery is never as tight as it should be, and the character-driven drama could sprawl just a tad more. Maybe it's a bit of all of these that makes one realize that no matter how hyper-addictive an experience it is episode-to-episode, there is a level past which Roswell's unique blend cannot reach, cannot grow.

The season finale, "Destiny," ends on a curiously desolate note - taking, in my eyes, the Romeo & Juliet influences much too far - that would seem to set-up havoc for all the fragile, and beguilingly sincere, emotional connections we've spent 22 episodes watching and discovering. If this is the case, I can only hope it is for some conclusion, or some twining together, of the mystery with the soap; because if there is one thing we learn from Roswell it's that Teenage Alienation can actually be, you know, Alienation. And if there is one thing Roswell should learn from me, it's that such discovery is central to why I love it so: for its smart exploration of life in a brave new world...that may not just be high school.

Angel: The Complete Fifth Season: B+

2008-03-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Joss Whedon has been quoted in interviews with the sentiment that the fifth season of Angel, just behind season three, is his favorite of the five years the show was on the air. It's easy to see why too: of all five years, Angel: The Complete Fifth Season has the most of each of the program's unique and far-flung elements; you've the mini-arcs of story first used in year two, the flawless jocularity of seasons three and four, and the nifty introduction of a whole new plot setup (a la the first season, because it - if anything - was new). Along with all of these is also the patented Angel atmosphere: claustrophobically gothic, a little screwball, ultimately poignant (but only in the service of tragedy), and with very nice production values. As such it's easy to see why series co-creator Whedon, that rapier wit-storyteller, adores this final installment in Angel's (David Boreanaz) quest for atonement. But is such worship deserved? Are these last 22 episodes some of the best Mutant Enemy ever produced? Not quite, but if Angel doesn't go out with a bang, at least it didn't sink to a whimper.

The hallmark of this season is that Angel Investigations, the constant home base for our rag-tag bunch of witty demon hunters, has been shut down. Permanently. Instead, the whole gang has been transplanted over to Wolfram & Hart (think The Exorcist with lawyers)...and given complete control of it. The idea of Angel as CEO was revealed in "Home," the fourth season finale, as Lilah (Stephanie Romanov) told the group that the Senior Partners - the group of super-planar demons that created W&H and who are, presumably, plotting the Apocalypse - were done with L.A. and, what's more, they wanted to reward Angel for having ended world peace by killing Jasmine (Gina Torres), a "Power That Was" (aka Goddess) who descended from the heavens to create a utopian slave state. To many's surprise, he agreed; the reprecussions of his decision (affecting some we have yet to know about) are the focus of season five.

Don't think that this means season five would follow much the same wholly-serialized pattern of storytelling that the masterfully entertaining fourth season did. No, in fact their newfound control of the hugely powerful law firm serves more as backdrop, dramatic and comedic foil, than Big Bad. Many episodes ("Life of the Party," "Just Rewards") follow the same design as season one: Monster of the Week re-done in the 21st century, and more nicely stylized. What makes Angel transcend such dissapointing backtracking is in the way the new sets of W&H make most episodes thrum with low-key dread, indecison (this tone is set by the season premiere, "Conviction," written and directed with crackerjack precision by Joss Whedon). The old-AI team aren't quite sure why they've been bestowed with such sudden power and money; and the addition of a few new supporting players, and the return of one or two old ones, keep them continually off-balance.

This anguish fuels straight into a motif I'm not quite sure I've found well-suited to be worn long-term by Angel: the tragedy, the suddeness, of death. But don't misunderstand; in "You're Welcome," (written and directed by newbie showrunner/long-time staff writer David Fury) "A Whole in the World," (again, written and directed by Joss Whedon) and "Shells," (written and directed by Steven S. DeKnight, who burst onto the scene as a major creative force behind last year's outrageously clever plot) the immediacy and skill with which death is manuevered into Angel's inner circle can bring a viewer to tears. Oddly enough, to counter-act that, are two of the series' most pricelessly funny episodes: "Smile Time" - in which, famously, our hero is turned into a felt puppet. Literally. - and "Harm's Way," a delightful showcase for new castmate Mercedes McNabb's deft timing as Harmony, Angel's secretary-vampire who subverts her soulessness by the sheer superficiality of her personality.

All these different elements, revealed in the beginning and now espoused at above, would never work if not for the cast. Boreanaz, along with J. August Richards (as newly-brilliant legal eagle Gunn), Alexis Denisof (Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, a bitterly indelible presence), and Amy Acker (grown into her own, killed, and then reborn in a year-long showstopper of a performance) make each new twist and turn - each one somehow cheaper, more incapsulated, than the last - felt and enthralling. Sure, one realizes that some of the Big Moments of the year (Cordelia's last episode; Fred's "infection") never reach fruition and reaction from the team - I would have loved a funeral, or even some group-mourning - but the season isn't completely devoid of serial drama...just a little lighter.

And generally this leaner look would favor Angel - as it did with season three - but there are definitely more down moments than I'd like, especially after the high that was year four. Instead, and much to my surprise, is this compact turn-of-events; a 22-episode roller coaster that obviously needed an additional year to sprawl and grow in depth. Such squeezing in then results in these little cracks, flaws, but the unique creations far outweigh the handful of dissapointments. Namely, Illyria (Amy Acker), a paranoid ancient demon-god, is worth every moment of Lindsey's (Christian Kane) speechifying. It's an odd thing to come to the end - depicted in series finale "Not Fade Away," characteristically remarkble from co-writers and directors Joss Whedon and Jeffrey Bell - and look back on all the quips and moments of horror; and how well at times that cocktail worked. In the end, Whedon's creation will stand as a fascinating five-year look at how forgiveness figures into a fluid moral compass, and how that in turn works into a richer and wider tapestry of good and evil. If that sounds heavy, Mutant Enemy never made it feel so. And Angel: The Complete Fifth Season did it one better; they made it interesting, once or twice heartfelt, startlingly funny, respectably finished, and true to the core truth of the series: redemption ends the moment you do, so never stop fighting.

Oscar Predictions.

2008-03-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

A show of hands please: who thought it wasn't coming? Ok, well - pipe down; if you've noticed that my perennial list of predictions and commentaries as award season goes into full-overdrive has been absent, blame only the WGA (or rather, the far more culpable producers) for making this early blur of Globes, SAG's, and little gold men even more limp and pointless...or worse, empty. Still, the strike is ended and I've done most of my pre-Oscar viewing. As such, I present who I predict will win what of the Big Eight awards, and more importantly: who should.

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Best Adapted Screenplay

Who Will Win: Joel & Ethan Coen are pretty much guaranteed another win here (it'll likely be their third or fourth of the evening) for No Country for Old Men but if the Academy waxes sentimental (or whatever the hell P.T. Anderson feels when he makes a movie) they could pull an upset by showering the love on Away from Her, Atonement, or There Will Be Blood.

Who Should Win: Christopher Hampton does admirably with Ian McEwan's devastating novel, scripting a film with almost exactly his same shard of heartbreak nestled in the center. But it's the movie stripped of nearly all sentiment that has me behind it: Mr. Anderson gives his early 20th-century schemers and crooks vicious dramatic oomph; what more could you ask?

Best Original Screenplay

Who Will Win: Diablo Cody is just a milimeter away from "shoe-in"...

Who Should Win: And rightly so; her Juno is a stunner: quick-witted but ultimately grounded in a revelatory modern compassion. For such a novice, her script has all the skill of a master.

Best Supporting Actor

Who Will Win: This is another category dominated by only one contender: Javier Bardem for his bone-chilling portrayal of a uniquely McCarthyian sociopath in Country. Far be it from the Academy to slow his winning streak (though, they do so love the geriatrics: a surprise win from Hal Holbrook, much like last year's victory for Alan Arkin, isn't out of the question).

Who Should Win: I'll admit it: I'm pre-disposed to Tom Wilkinson for his deftly graceful embodiment of a Champion of Sleaze seeing the light in Michael Clayton - seeing as how it was one of my favorite movies of the year - but such adoration doesn't make me blind. When Bardem picks up his Oscar, I'll cheer like the rest of 'em.

Best Supporting Actress

Who Will Win: Cate Blanchett faces a conundrum: she pulled away early from the starting gate as the clear favorite in the Supporting category for her acidically witty and frazzled Bob Dylan in I'm Not There; thus her reprisal of Elizabeth I got nil attention (though she still picked up a nod in Best Actress land). Now she'll have to duke it out with Tilda Swinton, as Clayton's nuerotic in-house counsel, for the prize. Who will emerge victorious? Lately the bets are on Swinton, but I'll still side with an old horse: my pick is Blanchett.

Who Should Win: I've long admired both Swinton and Blanchett and this year saw some of the best in their respective careers: the former all captivating collapse and insecurity; the latter all wounded genius. So, seeing as how I tend to wax generous in the week leading up to the big show, I'll compromise: either deserves the win.

Best Actor

Who Will Win: Daniel Day-Lewis, a famously "methodical" (that's putting it lightly) actor, is all the rage as the chief villain/hero of Blood. And history shows that monoliths such as he, having won nearly all the early-season awards, rarely stumble at the finish line.

Who Should Win: It's a year of easy picks for the Oscars - what with Cody, Bardem, and now Day-Lewis as both fan and critical favorites; and I count myself among both of the latter groups. I loved Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's sweepingly dark Sweeney Todd and my George Clooney-worship, for his lead in Clayton, knows no bounds. But I calls 'em how I sees 'em, and the craggy-voiced legend-in-the-making that is Daniel Day-Lewis clearly deserves the mother of all recognition for his startling performance as a man pulled inexorably into the dark tides of his own ambition.

Best Actress

Who Will Win: Julie Christie, long absent from the nominee list, has been gathering steam ever since her film, Away from Her, premiered last fall. Lately though she's been facing stiff competition: both Marion Cotillard, as Edith Piaf, and Ellen Page, as the titular character in Juno, will give her a good run come Feb. 24th. Still, it's doubtful the Academy will overlook a comeback of such poignant scale; they'll go with Christie.

Who Should Win: Page was the central piece of a very good puzzle in Juno, and I'm sure Laura Linney - in The Savages - and Cate Blanchett - in her second go round as Elizabeth I - turned in reliably solid work, but for me it will always be Cotillard: a sprightly French actress who didn't just embody Piaf, that famously fiery sparrow-diva, she possessed her.

Best Director

Who Will Win: Again, the Coen brothers have always been on Oscar's radar, and they've proven that when they concoct just the right amount of box-office and rave reviews (see: 1996's Fargo), they'll come out big on award night. Still, they've never been recognized for their directing and this year it'll be just another thing that will be recognized with their bloody neo-Western Country. That means that industry standard Paul Thomas Anderson, always a bridesmaid and never a bride, will go home empty; as will upstarts Jason Reitman, Tony Gilroy, and Julian Schnabel.

Who Should Win: Gilroy deserves accolades for making Clayton such a silky surprise: seductive and articulate; and Reitman was the third part of that golden trifecta in Juno that reaped such big returns. The big fight though is between Anderson and Joel & Ethan Coen. Truly, all three dive right into their work; and to all three, their filmographies stand as testaments to the wonders of 21st-century writing-directing. But if a better man (or men) must be chosen, then it's the Coen's, for turning a 180 with their latest film - a stark and desolate landscape - and never hitting a false note.

Best Picture

Who Will Win: Of the five - Juno, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There WIll Be Blood, and Michael Clayton - each will reap something from the night's festivities...except Atonement; which is a shame because, though it has been positioned as a classic contender in a year that's anything but, the film has a true emotional wallop and its pedigree does good (or even great) work throughout. But enough of my laments; the only film that even comes close to nearing Country - a major player and winner in everything award-wise these last months - in hopes of a Best Picture win would be Juno and something tells me that the older voters of the Academy will favor the Cormac McCarthy adaptation over Diablo Cody's mad-cap dialogue.

Who Should Win: It's undeniable: 2007 was a dark year and its reflected in most of the nominees. Does that tempt me to favor the fifth, "lighter", film? Absolutely, but I also can't deny the that the four other films, while depressing and/or tragic, are also some great specimens. Thusly I choose There Will Be Blood as my favorite of the bunch. In P.T. Anderson's exploration of the trials of a devil-mogul, he employed some great actors (Day-Lewis, Paul Dano) in a thunderously unforgettable movie. The first viewing is like hypnotism tinged with dread; fascinating and inescapable.

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Well, there it is folks: who will and who should have been crowned victorious in the Kodak Theatre. Agree? Disagree? Let me hear why. Until then I'll be prepping my now-obligatory commentary on the events of the evening; something I'm sure my readers relish.

See you February 24th.

Jumper: C

2008-03-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

Jumper is mindless, but it isn't mindless fun. That's a unique distinction that needs to be made because, over the course of 89 minutes, Doug Liman's latest film - marked very little by any sucessful cheeky wit (as seen in previous of his works: Swingers or Go or The O.C.) - continues to tease the viewer with what could have been; however it does so in such a vague, middling way that even that lust to see more will wane in audiences. What remains is one eye-poppingly constructed bore - mildly entertaining, but barely even there.

A hallmark of this treading-water style is obvious from the very first frame. We listen in on the (laughably unintentionally) disconnected voice-over of our hero, David Rice (Hayden Christensen), as he fills us in on his abilities to jump anywhere and everywhere in the span of a breath ("Paris...Egypt...the NBA Finals, courtside of course, and all before lunch," he quips). Moving away from that he attempts a limp "origin story" of how he first discovered his jumping abilities. The tale is rote on the surface, and worse, one can see the plot mechanics a mile before they even begin turning. That, coupled with the prologue-y speech, is purely emblematic of Liman's new style (first glimpsed in the second-half of Mr. and Mrs. Smith): to overload the audience from the word go; stuffing us with ever-increasingly less satisfying filler, junk.

But one could argue that not all of the film is so mediocre. Indeed, the effects sequences are exuberantly conceived, but they are served to no purpose, to no plot. The main narrative thread was concocted mainly from David S. Goyer, the co-writer of Batman Begins - a far more astute look at a loner with scary "leaps" of ambition. But then he worked with Christopher Nolan, a master of psychology (and better, solid entertainment) in the film medium; here his partner is Jim Uhls, he of Fight Club fame. Enough said. But even if the story was fully realized enough to merit the technical wonders, it couldn't sustain them. In fact, few movies imaginable could use so much mindless swoosh! and poof! before running out of breath and collapsing. So if the great ones wouldn't have been able to do it, guess what Jumper does? You guessed it: it pulls that whole DOA trick.

I wax optimistic though. There are perhaps one or two bright spots. Foremost is the length; then comes Rachel Bilson (that soulful ditz from The O.C.) who makes her indecision (and, heck, lack of character) sparkle. And third is Jamie Bell who, as Griffin - a daredevil fellow jumper - has all the fun that David should be having. Too bad Liman and Goyer leave him stranded in Bosnia...

Which brings me to the numerous dark spots. Foremost among them is the half-baked (and this I truly, really, mean) plot - full of at least two dozen loose ends - and all the elements that entails: character, purpose, audience interest. Such slap-dash work then leads to the mis-use, and mis-casting, of greats like Samuel L. Jackson who, as the head of the antagonistic "Paladin" cult out to cleanse Jumpers from the Earth, does just about all he can with a character who isn't even one-dimensional, he's one-line (and not even a good one, mind you). Finally in my list of complaints is the director himself, who should have had the sense to realize Jumper needed shaping up, or simply ditched the project all together. Instead we get this late-winter dud; a sci-fi adventure with a pathetically undershaped "mythos" (necesary to any enjoyable alternate, sci-fi, universe). Remember what I said about the whole thing being a "bore"? I'll add onto that: Jumper is the screen version of a still-life - lushly rendered in beautiful lighting with great technical skill, but lifeless and static. Pretty ironic for a film all about the ability to move, right?

Angel: The Complete Fourth Season: A

2008-03-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

It's not like I didn't think Angel had it in him; it's just...well...can this fourth season, this exemplary showcase for a daringly cohesive dramatic serial, really be the same show that once spun an entire episode from the pronounciation of the word "Shanshu"? The answer, it seems, is yes. And who am I to quibble when the end result is this: a thrilling drama with spiky jolts of comedy to keep you on your toes? After having viewed all 22 episodes (and in one marathon week-long sitting, too!) all I really know is this: I must be one big Angel addict, or Angel must be one heck of a show. Or both.

Narratively speaking, it doesn't pull any punches; the tag-line for the penultimate year might have been "Things Fall Apart: How to Structure a Fiendishly Clever Plot in Concentric Circles."
Everything kicks off with "Deep Down", the first of the season openers not to have been written by series creators Joss Whedon or David Greenwalt. The thought of whom then sets me on a rant full of pleasant surprise: it seems most of the Angel writing-producing staff was shuffled around this season. Greenwalt and Tim Minear are credited solely as Consulting Producers and Minear and Mere Smith, both of whom were some of the most prolific and talented of the staff writers, contribute a measley total of four eps this year; shockingly though, this fourth season was actually better without them - the new scribes (Steven S. DeKnight, Elizabeth Craft & Sarah Fain) are as gifted as any I've seen. Anywho, back to the original programming: with the season premiere firmly in place, the Angel Investigations team attempts to rebuild after Angel's (David Boreanaz, a better vamp with each season) dunk in the ocean and Cordelia's (Charisma Carpenter) ascendence to God-status. They need not look hard for long - the pieces practically start falling in their laps. Yet it may not portend all happiness and joy; just after the whole gang comes tentatively back together, they run smack up against The Beast (Vladimir Kulich).

This monolith of misery runs the gamut from invincible to apocalyptic but he's only the first in a series of whammies. His arc gives way to one even more surprising and then that falls back to reveal a third - the final of the season - that has got to be one of Joss Whedon's most cleverly constructed. And all along each installment crackles with dramatic power, each one rife more and more with mystery and suspense. Indeed, look no further than "Calvalry" or "Shiny Happy People" for just indications of plotlines that keep throwing you for a loop. Or, failing that, "Supersymmetry" and "Home" (the season finale, a one-night-only engagement by writer-director Tim Minear that has a sharpened, heart-in-your-throat, final sequence) are perfect examples of two stand-alone stories that hold their own in this serialized universe. But if you still need something to hit the spot "Spin the Bottle" and "Ground State" are just about the wittiest things you'll view.

Am I making my point? If what was so extraordinary about Angel's third season was its newly-found restraint and balance, than the wallop of a shock in its fourth year is the way that Angel keeps pushing the envelope, luring the audience into a plot as dense and tricky as any possible - full of villians and crossed schemes. Sprightly as ever, and all the more happy to oblidge the increasingly sadistic writers (and thus, the masochistic auidence) is the cast. Though Charisma Carpenter is, I'm almost certain, present on screen in true character for about 0.07 seconds of the year, she does perfect with what she has. And Vincent Kartheiser is a freak-puppet genius: he floats above and drowns below his emotions. Of the rest, Alexis Denisof, as Wesley (that most sardonically bitter of rogue hunters), and Amy Acker, as Fred, are standouts. But that doesn't mean the rest of Angel: The Complete Fourth Season doesn't shine. Or that such brilliance (in both meanings of the word) doesn't bode well for the final season, because - God help me - I'm addicted and I can't wait to find out.

There Will Be Blood: A

2008-03-09T06:56:00.000-07:00

There is actually very little of the titular red substance in There Will Be Blood, but that shouldn't trick you into believing that there aren't bashings, squishings, shootings, oomphings, and just a whole general host of violent actions to be found in Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film; a movie with structure and design clearly shaped by a title so foreboding and blunt. Yet if the movie lacks any spurting of substance (it is by no means an early American Sweeney Todd) it also possesses in spades everything else Anderson - that madly gifted, madly showy writer-director of Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love - needs to craft an enterprising story about an enterprising man (Daniel Day-Lewis, drowning, spectacularly, in his own ambition) every bit as enthralling and ruthless as he is.

Still, the audience begins knowing very little about Day-Lewis, here named Daniel Plainview. In fact the catch of Blood is our general realizations of his character. How, in essence, the sequence that opens the film - the one that finds Plainview dragging himself up from a dank mining hole after a hard fall - finds itself replayed throughout the movie: that same ol' recurring theme of American ingenuity...only here, it gets the P.T. Anderson treatment, complete with a bold dramatic voice and revolutionary design.

And design is key to an audience's understanding of the dark themes pulsing behind the screen. Key among such elements is Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead member who composed an entire body of original music for the story. The music he created is much of the reason I tossed around the word "revolutionary" so early in my review: the score leaps from the screen from the first second - a sharp wail that eventually directs the audience and its hero to the hills, to oil. From there, and after we are witness to the slow descent of the newly-made baron (who, with his adopted son H.W. - the naturally grounded Dillon Freasier - goes about scooping up land like candy), the music begins to possess a twinge of melancholia; the trademark rising aural tides that portended such disaster recede: that disaster has arrived.

But oh how it is captured on film! Anderson, abandoning everything I thought he had as a visionary stylist, has discovered in himself a new layer of his prowess; he crafts a meticulous, epic character study that finds at its core the pulsating heart of Greed, and the ways it corrupts all men (it would come as no surprise then to mention now that Blood was modeled on Upton Sinclair's Oil!). Taking center stage to hold the responsibility for communicating such rich material are Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, as Plainview's archnemesis: a faith healer named Eli Sunday. The the two of them do battle over the course of two-and-a-half hours, leaving the viewer gasping after the continuous string of overwhelmingly poignant (and beautiful) scenes. This is a movie, as is quite obvious, made from the very same dirt our tycoon spends his life digging up: rough and masking unseen glimmers of brilliance.

Ultimately the praise of the film must be spread over a number of people. The cast, of which Freasier, Dano, and Lewis are standouts, does extraordinarily well by their time period and their community - creating a world from minimal dialogue. The composer, Mr. Greenwood, must be renowned for his creation of such a wall of sound that I have rarely heard: it is the perfect companion to the driving plot. Which leads to Paul Thomas Anderson, who has written and directed with a furious passion; his words leap from the actors' mouths and his camera (aided by cinematographer Robert Elswit) is a stark and breath-taking observer. Missing the turns of fancy or ostentatious shows of imagination and technical skill that can be found in his earlier work, There Will Be Blood is still a stunner of a parred-down epic: bruising, dark, and - as only the title could alude to - all about the struggles between men, God, and nature. Come prepared for a fight.

Sunshine: B

2008-02-02T12:53:00.000-08:00

Danny Boyle's Sunshine isn't nearly as terrifying as his 2002 smash 28 Days Later, but it burrows just as deeply inside your head. The film is driven by a mission to re-ignite the sun, which has become a dying star in a 50-year-away future; the mission is driven by a team of eight astronauts and scientists - a menagerie of genders and mindsets that become all the more dynamic, all the more unsettlingly fluid, the longer the group is in space. And they've been in space for 16 months. They weren't the first however; that would be the Icarus I (they are, appropriately, Icarus II): an eerily similar mission set out on seven years ago. It is precisely this mission, and the crosspiece of people and cultures that inhabit the ship, that become the narrative focus of Sunshine, but its thematic focus is what...well...shines.

Displayed through a lens composed alternately of character-driven and visually-driven scenes, the intricate interplay of light and shadow, morality and mortality, and God verus Mankind, stands as Danny Boyle's most memorable achievement with his latest film. The other assorted attributes of the film (most of the following, actually, created by scribe Alex Garland) - including the individual team members, the story as a cohesive vision, etc. - are less involved and less involving. It is such that, together these wildly varying (in quality, as well as tone) elements come together only just so. And it is such that the wildly varying fans of the differing genres to be mined here (science fiction, suspense, thriller, drama) come together also just so; united in a fragile bond of awe for this optically stunning, psycologically transfixing, irritatingly aloof movie.

Now that I've hinted at length of the nooks and crannies, let us get down to business. Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his crew, who man a long space-station like ship with a bulbous Sun-simulating shield at one end, are beginning to crack up. Not only do they obviously face the duress of saving all of mankind, but the temptation to more and more succumb to the manufactured tempermants of their self-created world (not to mention the omnipresent aura of a fascinatingly addictive sun) can only be held off for so long. Plus, so it becomes apparent before the first 30-minutes are up, they may need to stop off and rescue the long-lost Icarus I if ever they even want to make it to the sun to deliver their bomb (nicknamed the "payload", an island-sized bomb created and manned by Robert Capa, embodied with weary and willowy grace by Cillian Murphy). Every minute it seems their mission expands to encompass more and more the phrase "above and beyond the call of duty."

The products of such a volatile situational cocktail as the one described above are the eminent subjects of director Boyle's camera and Garland's script (which also features Chris Evans, in a nicely dramatic turnabout, as the ship's engineer). They capture the fistfights that break out; the dubiously moral calls that have to be made; and the noble (and not so noble) fights for survival and command that ensue when the Icarus' mission is turned all twisty by that crazy Icarus I pit-stop. Suffice to say, the grueling possibilities of a stir-crazy crew are played out with finely-calibrated skill and owe more to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris than to more recent sci-fi save-the-Earth muck like Armaggedon and The Core.

Yet if that was all their was to Sunshine - such well-crafted psycho-exmination - than why the so-so rating? My explanation goes to the heart of the matter (and so is inevitable to this film): the duly-followed scenarios of depression and mania and Sun-worship that ensue on-board can only carry a viewer so far. I was left frequently dreaming that their had been a little more meat on the skeletal character structure of the film (disregarding the actors' fine work therein) so that each tense encounter cut a little deeper, felt a little less Sci-Fi and a little more I-Don't-Want-Them-to-Die. Still, Danny Boyle continually reaches into his deceptively large visual bag-o'-tricks to find some mesmerizing new way to capture a chase scene or a view of the sun at full blast; and each new time I was struck shocked - all thoughts of convoluted plots and mediocre pacing erased - at the gravity of the film, of their mission. So, in that the filmmaking team succeeds: they suck the audience into the atmosphere, dread, and fatalism of the astronauts' last-ditch effort, leaving you a little stir-crazy yourself in the process.

Cloverfield: B+

2008-02-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Something has taken over. Something - some wunderkind maestro of our pop-addled times - is accomplishing astonishing feats where none were thought workable before. As you may or may not (ok, may) have already guessed, this "Something" I'm referring to isn't the roving, homicidal creature of Matt Reeve's Cloverfield, but rather the film's producer: J.J. Abrams - he of the golden touch in genres as wide-ranging as the interpersonal tension of college drama Felicity or that mysterious box-locked-within-a-riddle-tied-up-in-a-safe called Lost. Abrams, the writer-director of M:I 3 and creator of a host of hit television shows, has a unique pop aesthetic - unique because it constantly changes: he broke in big writing the script to 1998's ridiculously bombastic Armageddon and leapt from their to the intimate (and critically adored) Felicity; from that he produced the murky spy drama Alias, the show that launched Jennifer Garner, and went on to be at the center of a slew of films and shows (most recently the Star Trek-reboot and the upcoming Fringe for t.v) as the latest demi-god/producer in Hollywood.

Abrams is obviously multi-faceted, but it was nonetheless a shocker to witness the birthing process of his latest gem Cloverfield, the story of Manhattan twentysomethings trying to survive a monster attack, as it was a process shrouded in secrecy and revealed, at last, with a rapid flourish and a quick shove onstage. But regardless (or because of) his methods, the film works; Reeves ShakyCam gimmickry (e.g. the film is shot entirely from the POV of one of the yuppies - T.J. Miller - attempting to survive the attack) and Drew Goddard's script give this tense, enthralling beaut real breath...by stealing all the audience's.

We begin with Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) filming the house of a friend he's currently staying with; the camera shifts then to his bed, with his latest conquest, Beth (Odette Yustman), flirtatiously situated inside. They exchange some pithy banter and then plan the ensuing day (the idea of a Coney Island visit is tossed around). Suddenly,the film cuts out and then back in on a harried couple - Lily (Jessica Lucas) and Jason (Mike Vogel), Rob's brother - preparing for a surprise gowing-away party for Rob (apparently he's been given a VP job in Tokyo). The couple exchange dialogue in much the same manner as Rob and Beth and right after their finished, so too does the film cut out again; see a pattern?

You should, because Cloverfield, a ferociously well-structured entertainment, is all about shifting patterns - how the camera systematically cuts in and out of the action, back and forth over several different events - and the semi-brilliant way Reeves and Goddard subvert them in service of a classic big-scale Monster Movie gone contemporary and small-scale. Part of this downsizing can be seen in the oddly unmemorable characters now at the forefront of the action. Each is played with grungy grace by grungy non-actors and each has their own stream-lined quarks and punchlines; such a blase center as this quartet (or quintet, depending on the scene) may seem to weaken the film, but remember that bit about subversion? As the movie goes on, terror and torment stacking up - a move stolen silently from the master, Steven Speilberg, in his War of the Worlds days - the twentysomethingnothings become somebodies, so much so that by the end (a well-tempered pastiche of bleakness and sentimental irony) I was tempted even to label Cloverfield "heartfelt".

But foremost on the film's list of attributes isn't its heart (or the lack thereof on its sleeve), but rather its willing-and-readiness to shock and entertain. From perhaps the twentieth of these bite-sized 85-minutes, when the Godzilla/Alien thing first appears, the movie taunts and teases with the best of them: scaring you with things that leap from dark places; unsettling you with the untimely deaths of cheeky and well-liked characters; and portraying the destruction of a city from within the annals of 21st-century relationships. That's a lot of stuff skitering around the edges of a movie proclaimed to be such popcorn-blockbuster material, but it never underperforms or overreaches. Instead, guided by Abrams, Reeves, and Goddard (whose script keeps turning tricks I never saw coming), Cloverfield becomes as multi-talented as its producer; satisfying on levels a movie about a Big Creepy shouldn't be able, and making me jump during a movie about a bunch of Friends and Lovers when I have no right to. Sounds schizophrenic? Try oodles of thrilling, intense, fun.

Angel: The Complete Third Season: A-

2008-02-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

I suppose the biggest surprise of Angel's third season isn't in its newly-minted dramatic grace; or its stronger-than-ever wit (sharpened, more so every episode, on pop culture and the ebb-and-flow of conversation); or even the now constantly prevalent talent of its actors. No, the big jaw-dropper of a shock that is to be discovered in this third round of exploits from Angel Investigations is how well all the aforementioned elements come together. This isn't the gawky first year, wherein Angel (David Boreanaz) went parading through somewhat entertaining storylines bantering with a somewhat entertaining supporting cast; and neither is it last season, where the first signs of maturity (and, as well, the pain of growth spurts) first popped up in darker and more extended serial narratives while characters began to bend and sway beyond the expected. This is Angel: The Complete Third Season, a slice of television pleasure that is more plausibly - thrillingly - dramatic, more dynamically written, and more consistently funny than any year previous.

Part of the credit should go to Joss Whedon and his team of writers. More aptly, though, it should go to David Greenwalt and his team of writers. Certainly both men should share the adoration (both did jointly create the show, spun from Whedon's masterwork Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but it's more obvious with each year that both men did not dedicate the same level of energy. In that contest, Greenwalt is the clear winner; and the episodes he's written - from "Heartthrob" to "Offspring" to "Tomorrow" - are ranked among the season's best. Yet the trend of his continuing, and growing, strength as a writer-director extends beyond just he: each of Mutant Enemy's (the production company Whedon started to foster his pop-crazed ambitions; think the modern-day Factory with less pan-sexual shenanigans) scribes contributed at least one great work to the season, and some (Tim Minear, Mere Smith) even gave more. Such perserverance and advancement shows in every densely-plotted detail of Angel & Co's latest bumpy ride through demon-infested L.A. Among their growing concerns: Darla's pregnant, Wesley's (Alexis Denisof) cracking up, Cordelia's (Charisma Carpenter) visions are becoming more and more visceral - in every sense of the word - and Angel himself is working through grief over Buffy's death.

These obstacles may seem steep, but they are used in beautiful service of Angel's central theme: the price and redemption of consequences. Each new struggle molds and re-tweaks our beloved team, and only in the best ways. Gone is Mopey Angel from the middle of season two - he's now downright jocular in brooding; gone too (eventually) is Watered-Down Wesley, he's been replaced by a demon hunter (let's call him, finally, Watcher Wesley) far more capable (and darkly witty) than anything I'd yet expected. Cordelia (blessed, blessed Ms. Carpenter: an actress of quicksilver comedic and dramtic timing) blossoms into a figure of true radiance - literally - but also one beyond her normal superficiality; her visions have helped her transcend humanity (again, literally) and Angel, with such a leading lady, is lucky indeed. And Fred (Amy Acker), the wacky physicist the gang rescued from Pylea late last season, eventually blossoms as well into much-needed goofy relief.

Yet this relief is short-lived in the scheme of things. Each new day (and episode) brings new twists and turns for our heroes: one episode, a new character; another, a new power. This more lean, bolt-tightened storytelling benefits the overall season magnificently - erasing most of the inconsistencies that plagued the show for most of its first two seasons. Aiding, as well, is the show's more witty wit. Sterling examples include the season finale, "Birthday", and "Carpe Noctem". Noticing how well the two elements compliment each other here reminds the viewer just how out-of-whack the dynamic could occasionaly be in the early years - some stories tipping too far into hokeyness while others strained into stony-faced denial - and just how well its been perfected now. I once said that, possibly, Angel was just the show to get all hot and bothered about; well, now's the time, commence the celebration: Angel has arrived.

La Vie en Rose: B+

2008-02-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

The best thing I can say about La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan's madly overripe fantasia of a biopic about Edith Piaf, is that Marion Cotillard - the actress embodying "The Little Sparrow of Paris" - makes all the swirling, impressionistic passion at Rose's core work; the flip-side of that same coin (and what can occasionally make Dahan's film a semi-frustrating mess) is that events, characters, and chronology never seem to quite link up. The story of Piaf, a slight women who peaked quickly as the most mighty of songbirds in the '40s and '50s, is reduced from an epic examination of emotional ruin to a story of three seperate characters - Young Edith, Famous Edith, and Old Edith.

But, again, each is portrayed by Cotillard at her most virtuostic and, aside from that, Olivier Dahan, as writer-director, has an ability to stage singular scenes of impact and grace; together, the two talents make Piaf's life a felt presence in the audience. They turn her tale of uplift - from the streets; from a brothel; from her parents at varying intervals of childhood - and souful ruin into a film worthy of reciprocating Piaf's unforgettable nature: cascading, crushing, fanatically romantic, and mournful.

Each of these sentiments are revealed and flurished during different periods of the film; what connects them is a technique Dahan displays throughout the movie: a bizarrely, and ill-advisedly, utilized time-leap (from upstart to Diva, from Diva to cripple). But what makes them powerful, memorable, instead of isolated and stale, is in the strength of the director's staging. For example: about half-way through the film there is a fantastic scene where Madame Piaf, newly minted as the latest musical diva, strolls through her lush and massive apartment barking orders - the camera following her in swooping, grand takes - and you can practically feel her haughty delight at her new station in life.

Another magnificent feat is the final sequence, wherein three monumental events of Piaf's life - her final interview, on the shore's of France; her final performance, where she debuted the definatly introspective "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" (translation: No, I Have No Regrets); and her final night, where she spills her heart to her live-in nurse, a smile of contentment accompanying her revelations - are spliced together, creating a swirling cocktail of heartache, defiance, and joy.

This trifecta, I think, is at the core of La Vie en Rose. The flaw with such truth is that these emotions weren't all there is to a singer who was declared throughout her career as the "Soul of Paris" (and who's voice could crush mountains); and the people and connections she made in real life were never meant to be so trivialized and mashed together into such an unmemorable tangle of names and faces. Still, she was at her root a women where passion and tragedy became one; where her very nature is cemented in sadness becoming radiant and happiness becoming grief. Olivier Dahan and Marion Cotillard strive their hardest to capture this elusive and messy personality and triumphantly they suceed.

The Secret History: A-

2008-02-02T12:47:00.000-08:00

Comparisons need apply between Donna Tartt's debut 1992 novel The Secret History and Marisha Pessl's debut 2006 novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Both feature, most obviously, the same central character structure: an outsider (in Pessl's case, driven by her intellectual superiority, while in Tartt's, financial inferiority) is driven into a romanticized friendship with a close-knit group of precocious young adults and mentored by a glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) teacher of some glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) subject; Pessl chose the far more blithe and witty target of film - an area of study rife with options for her razor-sharp pen - while Tartt chooses Classics (the study of Ancient Greece: language, literature, politics, religous rituals and all), a more gothically enamored choice and one that immediately sets a clear dichotomy between her more grave, more psychological, thriller and Pessl's shinier, swifter-moving, twist.

Still, the unnerving similarities do persist. Both plots eventually deal with murder and both eventually, more or less, turn a sharply-toned eye onto it's own protagonists - striving, and achieving to two wildly different degrees, for an air of moral ambiguity. And, too, both Tartt and Pessl's prose glitters on various occasions with the sheer transcendant light of its erudite capability. As it were, after a thorough early preview of the book (I'd plowed through 200 of the 550 pages), I still found the connections between the two too obvious to pass up; I was all ready to declare Physics a subtle - and silent - deconstruction of History's grave, suspenseful, pretension.

But, and after much thoughtful and slowly-paced narrative and interaction, I came to determine that The Secret History is a far more focused and chilling dissection of the discrepancies between Intellectualism and Romanticism; that is, the many differences caused when the world of six sparklingly Hampden college students is forced to collide with a world dark, and squirming, with conspiracy and betrayal and wrenching introspection.

And it all began with Dionysus.

When Richard Pappin discovers a small Northeastern elite college - the aforementioned Hampden - and subsequently is indoctrinated into a small clique of Greek fanatics (among them: wintery intellecutal Henry; broadly charismatic and callow Bunny; grandly dramatic, and gay, Francis; and the twins - Charles and Camilla - a pair of introverted and "compassionate" humans among such scholars), he is intertwined in a conspiracy to cover the mess created when Henry & Co. try to re-create the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, god of wine and sex. Richard, also the narrator, lets us in on the conspiracy from the first page - when he reveals their murder of Bunny - but much of the novel is spent on the slow build-up of tensions that created such a horrific fiasco and the immediate here-after: how an act affects Richard's new group of friends and himself.

Does it sound slow? Then it is; Tartt has a masterful sense of plot construction (she reveals her hair-line fractures of character and twist with maximum arch drama) but none for pacing and only a modicum of it for characters (though the entire group has more individuality than Ms. Pesshl mustered for the "Bluebloods"). Still, History has a slow-burn chill that seeps into you and - in the daring final 100 pages of never-ending climax - finally grabs and shakes you to the core. The epilogue has a jolting clinical style but this debut has a cutting clarity of purpose and confidence that, when it was finally revealed, hit me like a blast of cold, steely, well-written and textured talent. Bravo.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: B

2008-02-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

The power of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has always been in its devastating richness of emotion; how well her pens captures the tormented love between Catherine Earnshaw (Juliette Binoche) and Heathcliffe (Ralph Fiennes) on the high, cold Moors. Brontë, a resident of the English Moors herself, also knows a little of the isolated treachery, depression, and (in some twisted, delightful way) wit that lives there too and as one works their way through the complicated and thrilling prose, the story of the Heights becomes a tale for the ages; dark, sad, and completely unforgettable - one of the better books I've read in these last years.

Yet the catch, too, of Brontë's only novel is in its complication. Forget for a moment even the least of a filmmaker's worries - that rotating-narrators technique the author so skillfully deployed - and there are still at least a dozen other snags in any adaptation's plans-to-the-screen; namely, the entire second generation spawned between the blighted machinations of Heathcliffe and Cathy - a group of people who are the predominant focus of the book's latter half and without whom (as the hallowed 1939 film version, one I found somehow not morose enough, demonstrated so well) the book's continuing edgy drama and woe goes a little...flat.

Well, no such troubles will hound this British (finally!) interpretation of one crackling, sprawling, wicked opera of the soul. In the case of director Peter Kosminsky and writer Ann Devlin, almost no trouble exists in this sense: they pack in as many of the plot's minute details as they can; and, through the use of a ghostly-whisper narration (provided by the author herself, and played with a great chill of a voice by Sinéad O'Connor), they attain the majority of Brontë's broad - and tragically humane - emotional specturm. The result, as I've spent so much time dodging, is one of the better Heights adaptations I have ever seen, the best in fact.

Still, it is a testament to the depth of the source material that even through all the clever shortcuts (thank goodness for circumventing those awful Linton-Cathy scenes!) and expose-in-voice-over (thank goodness for giving us just the right amount of Hindley, Ms. Brontë!), this version loses something in translation. Perhaps it is that it fails to fully fathom the sick dichomoties between Catherine and Heathcliffe - though it faithfully captures the most startlingly dramatic scenes surrounding them well enough. Or maybe it's that a previous traveler to the author's more desolate original world, full of cockney-spewing, pious butlers and righteous maids is jarred by re-visiting and somehow slimmer population on screen; though kudos are in order to Kosminsky for capturing, through muted quick-cut seconds of Moor, the jagged physical and mental landscapes of the character's minds.

In fact, that's perhaps the best thing I can say - and it is what makes this movie, above all other attempts, the most full even as it doesn't fully realize to stand up itself. Binoche and Fiennes do solid work with their polymorphic characters against Devlin's utterly true-to-the-standard screenplay (FYI: loved that it snatches whole speeches from the book) and the supporting cast, not introduced until the last 25 minutes or so, live up to those final remorseful minutes with stoic passion. It is that stoic passion, after all, that Emily Brontë tapped and subverted in her high, austere cadences for a truly sweeping tragedy; and it is that same stoic passion that these British filmmakers live up to with some admirable regard - capturing, if not the true richness of her creation, than at least a more lively (and emotionally powerful) impression of it than Laurence Olivier's scowls.

Juno: A-

2008-02-02T12:44:00.000-08:00

It started with a film festival. Juno, a little indie from a rather well-known director (Jason Reitman, director of 2005's uproariously sharp Thank You For Smoking) and a rather provocative first-time screenwriter (Diablo Cody, who spent a year as a stripper just to...well...try it out), exploded onto Sundance - inspiring just the sort of rave reviews and warm obsession marked by last year's Little Miss Sunshine; comparisons between the two carry over from that though: both begin with a coyly ironic title sequence (though, to be fair, Juno's is a tad more colorful and less precious) and both would seem to flaunt their precocious "empathy" in their respective audience's faces. That is where the similarities end, however. As last year's Indie Rave became less human, and more relatably askew (ending, in two strange twists, with a the theft of a dead body and one odd strip tease), Juno does just the opposite; it pounces early on the opportunity to astound watchers with its hyper-articulate banter and then slows down to actually become, to my ever-growing surprise, a very good movie.

Don't think however that the ancestry of 1,000 little dark comedies about the travails of teenage life don't pulse in the lifeblood of Cody's script; or that the performances of Ellen Page (as the title character) and Co. don't perch on the line between cute-sy and true. No, I make no claims that Juno doesn't seem to be just like everything else - just that, given roughly forty-five minutes or so, it becomes so much more.

But what we begin with doesn't seem to inidicate this. We're given the postmodernly-feminist story of a hip teenager (Page) who gets pregnant with her best friend (Michael Cera) through a rather apathetic turn of events (read: she was bored, he was horny). The tricks are in the telling. First: Juno decides to give up the baby for adoption, realizing immediately that she can't handle it but that she would like someone who could. Second: the old adage that everyone laughs to keep from crying serves writer Cody deceptively well as she subtlely and masterfully steers the story of this adoption to two surburban yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) into an area of beguiling grace. Third: that grace has no better magnet than Juno - and the actress who plays her. And fourth: Reitman and company work double-time, driven constantly by such a blithely and perfectly constructed creation as the script, to make every laugh hit hard and every tear and dramatic reveal do twice as much.

If my also rather blithe and fast-paced review doesn't do Juno justice it isn't for lack of trying, or astoundment. I came expecting the laughs inherent in any precocious production as this. What knocked me down, and touched me afterward, was the surprising level of depth that there is here. Juno MacGuff is a character all right - and so are her parents, friends, and assorted other compatriots - but the satisfying truth at the core of this strikingly-made picture is that she never shifts from teenage girl to "teenage girl"; the indie quirks one looks for all day during their viewing will never materialize and finally I can see why: Juno isn't just Girl Gets Pregnant, it's girl has baby...and gives it away.

Best of 2007*.

2008-02-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

The box office rebounded – mightily! – in a year replete with box office giants seemingly every month; but that doesn't mean the year was wanting for quality – heck, occasionally even some of those giants managed to be good. The multiplex was host to a whole slew of brilliant, and brilliantly experimental, films (I'm Not There, Fay Grim), a couple of vastly entertaining jaunts (The Bourne Ultimatum, Knocked Up), and one or two examples of just exactly what it means when a genre is re-invigorated by the very best it has to offer (Sicko, Zodiac, Michael Clayton). Also of note were the other media arenas: television and music (and books I imagine – though, sadly, this year I won't be able to exclude the best from this latter category; thank my non-forward-thinking literary instincts for that) were both vessels for some incredible stuff this year. Just what exactly do I mean? Read on, dear reader, and discover for yourself.

The Top 10 Movies of 2007:

1. I'm Not There

Who but one of our country's most talented experimental filmmakers could take such a bold leap as this? Todd Haynes gambled big when he followed up his worthily adored Far From Heaven – already a deep-thought meditation on the nature of '50s soap-operas – with I'm Not There, a film somehow even more complex…and somehow even slightly more rewarding (if only for your brain, and not your heart). Haynes' film follows six esteemed actors (and then a few, not so much) as they interpret six different figments of legendary folk musician Bob Dylan during six different periods of his life; all the while, several times more than that number of his songs are playing – serving as elegy and poignant reminder all along (think of these melodies as the exclamation point at the end of Haynes two-hour long statement "Dylan was a genius!"). Filmed with even more of the clever period intricacies than the director did for Heaven, written with all of Haynes plain yet addictive spiritual obsession (here, too, he cribs dialogue from actual Dylan interviews and press conferences), and acted by some Hollywood men and women giving their all (Cate Blanchett, decked out in a frazzled mini-afro and slurry cutting delivery, especially stands out), I'm Not There is a head-trip of a bio-pick; a journey into the deep recesses of a mythic-man's creation and existence. And what do we discover after having taken the journey? Not a huge grasp on Bob Dylan's history, for sure, but nothing less than a new-found level of admiration for the heart, hurt, and soul that goes into the creation of Self; and the visionary power music that pours from said Self can attain.

2. Hairspray

If it's not as satirically relevant as Chicago was or as show-stopping as Dreamgirls occasionally could be, then Hairspray is more entertaining than both previous Broadway-to-film adaptations combined (plus, it boasts a more complex transition cycle, going from John Waters-comedy to stage then back again in this Adam Shankman-directed ode to the glorious powers of a good groove). Though it follows a girl on a serious quest – one Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) trying to end Baltimore segregation – and boasts a Serious Message, Hairspray is no more heavy than the warmest, most soothing breeze; a fitting comparison too, since the choreography (hello final number!), musical numbers (hello "Mrs. Baltimore Crabs"!), and performances (hello John Travolta – a shockingly, delightfully, lithe performer – in drag!) nourish the heart and soul, leaving a viewer shaking with joy as the credits roll by.

3. Knocked Up

Judd Apatow, that blessedly-gifted purveyor of all things geeky and witty, had his biggest year yet; what with Superbad, Rock Hard (a film yet untested, but hey – I predict good things for it), and of course, his breakout about one rudderless man-child (Seth Rogen) who gets a beaut (Katherine Heigl) pregnant: Knocked Up. It isn't just because it's a nearly flawless comedy – from perhaps the third scene or so, every punch line and performance begins to crackle – or that it's also yet another showcase for writer-director Apatow's vastly underrated talents as an empathetic humanist – if nothing else, his study of Paul Rudd's marriage to Leslie Mann should definitely stifle the groans from the back of the theater – Knocked Up is great because it's a perfectly modern blend of both; wise yet grungy, fast-paced silliness while being emotionally mature, and heart-warming without being saccharine. So utterly lovable I had to see it twice in the same weekend.

4. Michael Clayton

George Clooney began his career in a stressful workplace, the life-or-death arena of ER, and as of late this paragon of glamorous movie-stardom has been enjoying a renaissance of dramatic performances: from his perfectly enjoyable, perfectly square Good Night, and Good Luck to that movie where he lost a finger-nail (Syriana), and now Michael Clayton – Tony Gilroy's tightly controlled, quiet yet unnerving, John Grisham-meets-talent study of sophisticated corporate malfeasance. Clooney speaks in the wounding, seductively articulate words of Gilroy's script in scenes with actors giving the performances of their respective years (Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton), and working through a story that doubles-back on itself – watched all the time by a ghostly, subtle camera – with sudden unseen cleverness. Michael Clayton may seem on the outside a studiously normal corporate-legal thriller, but everything from Wilkinson's mad attorney to Clooney's own bedraggled mug caught in a world progressively yuckier seeks to unsettle and captivate the viewer, and succeeds.

5. Waitress

As sweet-yet-tart as the pies the titular character – played with a brazen, beautiful, litany of emotions by Keri Russell – crafts in those exquisitely wry overhead shots, Waitress is, in outline, a fairy-tale structured like a sitcom. Yet that description gives away nothing of the sort of refreshing, sprightly, and funny awakening-of-the-soul material writer-director-actor Adrienne Shelly summons for this, her tragically final film. She casts some comedic greats (Andy Griffith, still wielding that twinkle in his eye like a pro) to support her funnier (and, ok, more rote) material; and crafts the dramatic subtexts to her plot (Russell is bearing the baby of her psychologically-abusive husband, a creature that makes her none too happy, and is involved with the town OB-GYN) with a finesse that, given time, would surely have blossomed. If nothing else, at least in Waitress that skill allows the blossoming of another kindred soul: Russell – and oh, what a marvelous event to witness.

6. Zodiac

A classically crafted true-crime film, surely director David Fincher's best, that is also one of the year's most sprawling, intricate, and factually minute. It's the type of movie that follows three men – Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) – obsessed with the Zodiac Killer during his spree of the late '60s and early '70s but also the type that has the frame of mind to keep the cameras rolling on into the later decades, capturing each man's own struggle with that Great Unsolved Mystery; the sly joke is that these later years would behold the Age of Information and the birth of the very technology that made catching Zodiac thirty years ago impossible, and so utterly haunting. Fincher himself employs none of the ghastly overheatedness that pervaded Panic Room nor any of the gimmicky gritty atmosphere of Se7en (except perhaps in those later Gyllenhaal scenes); instead he utilizes a beautifully simple style, full of lush photography and home to James Vanderbilt's clever script, that gives the mystery of Zodiac room to breathe, and the viewer room to be haunted.

7. The Bourne Ultimatum

There's a reason director Paul Greengrass has made it onto my year-end list for two years running, and it has a little something to do with the way Greengrass took a seemingly rote franchise and re-invigorated – in the process re-invigorating critics bemoaning the popcorn-thriller and audiences bemoaning the un-amusing thriller. Certainly, after the director was done carving up the screen with his signature (and breathlessly genius) shaky camera work and quick-cut editing, The Bourne Ultimatum was neither dumb nor boring; and as a final installment of a nearly-great trilogy of chase films, it delivered entirely and completely for its two-hour running time. Also of note: the filmmaker's prodigious skill at making bland conceits thrilling experiences (as last year's United 93 was); Tony Gilroy's blossoming talents with the ever more complicated narrative; and the cast's steely determinations, of which David Straithairn was the cold-hearted stand-out.

8. Fay Grim

A crucially, and critically, misunderstood gem; writer-director Hal Hartley's bizarre mash-up of tangled-noir romance and satirical craftsmanship swept me along with its wacky camera angles and so-sly-it-isn't-but-still-is wink at every film convention Hartley himself was simultaneously paying tribute to and terrorizing. The plot: Fay Grim (Parker Posey, a delectably frazzled siren) must discover some secrets for some government for her imprisoned brother (James Urbaniak) to help her wayward son (Liam Aiken). Along the way terrorists are encountered, mad-men with slick charms are taken prisoner by said terrorists, and friendships are re-kindled (again, the terrorists). If it all sounds too zany, too "cutesy-indie", my discovery runs counter to that: Fay Grim is a delight of deadpan comedy (kudos to the marvelously game cast), a skilled twist on the twistiest of genres, and in the end, a film I could actually care about. To me, perhaps even more than Juno (which I haven't had the pleasure to see yet), it may be the year's Great Indie Film; treasure it.

9. Sicko

Michael Moore it seems, just like good wine or cheese, can only get better with age – oh, and more crafty and heart-wrenching too. In his screwball-outrage attack on American health insurance, politicized documentarian Moore summons all his vast powers of zany black humor and graceful splicing to produce a work that will leave the audience needing a doctor; that is, sickened and hurt at the diseased bureaucracy America lets prevail everyday on its own doorstep. Yet the true up-lift of Sicko isn't in the incendiary way Moore destroys the healthcare industry, it's in his contemplative and logical final thesis – that if other, "lesser" nations have found plausible alternatives (e.g. Britain, France, Canada, and Cuba), then why can't we? – and the catharsis he allows himself, a wiser and more thoughtful filmmaker, and the audience to draw from that.

10. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

The ironic contradiction at the heart of Sweeney Todd is that, usually, a very good movie begets some level of enjoyment (hey, even The Departed, with its brain-busting climax, thrilled me) in its audience; Todd, yet another stage-adaptation (this time, by Gothic maestro Tim Burton – a vastly underrated director), does occasionally delight – the sweepingly cynical "A Little Priest"; the minuscule opener "No Place Like London" – but so much more of its charge comes from the tragic melodrama at the core of the film. Namely, there's a murderous barber (Johnny Depp, in grand emotive form) out for revenge against a conniving judge (Alan Rickman, trilled to his own sarcastic baritone) who gets involved with a cannibalistic, pragmatic pie-maker (Helena Bonham Carter…who can act!) while slashing the throats of his own customers. It is, obviously, violent, disturbing, and tragic stuff; and the biggest surprise isn't that Burton & Co. manage to (mostly) pull off Sondheim's deepest-black production, it's that the talent involved – from the actors, to the director (finally, perhaps, getting wide-scale award recognition), to the legendary composer/lyricist himself (who wrote some of his most operatic, heart-rending, and bleakly funny material for Sweeney) – deliver the top of their game. The result can only be this final product, a film to chill and shake you.

The Top Two Television Shows of 2007:

1. 30 Rock

Like being plugged into a line of pure laughing gas for thirty minutes a week, 30 Rock – Tina Fey's improbably enjoyable sitcom about the travails behind a hit sketch show – leaves one feeling giddy and a little unsteady ("Can a sitcom really be making me feel this happy?!") but nonetheless helplessly addicted. Alec Baldwin, as NBC executive Jack Donaghy, stands alone as his own hit of pure glee; and definite, minutes-long applause are in order for the sheer amount of high-wire witty, silly, energy that is packed behind each minute of Rock by Fey and her writers. How nice it is to sit one night a week on a couch with friends or family or a nice cup of tea and laugh, pure and simple, along with a show that can laugh at itself.

2. Friday Night Lights

Sure, it bogged itself down for nearly all of this first-part of the season's run with an uncouth storyline about an attempted-rape-turned-murder while also bogging down two of its most beloved characters – Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) and Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons); and sure, I'll give you that Friday Night Lights' secret weapon (or one of them at least), that of intimate and heartfelt character interaction between friends (Landry and golden-boy QB1 best friend Matt Saracen – an anguished, if newly underused, Zach Gilford) and family (Kyle Chandler, as Coach Taylor, with Connie Britton, as his delightfully real wife), was nary given a chance to shine these last episodes. And, ok, it wasn't as quintessentially stirring as its first season; but Lights – though it had entire episodes that rang false, and a few too many odd character turns – still retained its awe-inspiring power to shake a viewer, to shake me, and leave one breathless at its unique brand of power: to transcend its confinement, and give life – nay, soul – to its very own small-town discontent. More flawed than I like, but still more gracefully true than most everything else airing.

The Top Two CD's of 2007:

1. Lily Allen: Alright, Still

Though it became a rave-sensation late last year as a British import, Lily Allen's debut album was officially released stateside in January (making it to my list just under the wire, thank goodness) and just as blogs the Internet over went crazy last winter at Allen's cutting, hip-hop influenced lyrics and musical fusions, twice that many came to adore here over these last seasons. Alright, Still is a spiky debut, teetering (in theory) on precociousness, and Allen is by no means a vocal goddess; but she is a talented singer-songwriter and her affinity for warping and curving all manner of musical styles to fit her decidedly unique, and sassy, aesthetic serves her delectably well. Put on "Smile" when you feel self-righteousness; "LDN" for when you're feeling worldly; "Alfie" when you hate to love your family; "Not Big" and "Friend of Mine" for when romance has you down; and Alright, Still when you need to be reminded what true, melodic, smart and catchy talent looks like.

2. Miranda Lambert: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Who says there can't be a great country album this year – one of the best in fact? Quite a lot of people, it seems; and so it has always been for Miranda Lambert, whose debut in 2005 was snubbed by country radio but still became a hit. But, if nothing else, Lambert's album proves that her pre-emptive snub by – gasp! – elitist country fans was a huge mistake. On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend the once dreamy-eyed romantic ("Me and Charlie Talking") goes wistful, introspective, fiery, and oh so harmonic. Her second album is a concept album about the concept of small-town romance and the women it affects, and it does the astounding (and, to me, unthinkable): it makes neo-feminism sexy. Lambert, who co-wrote the majority of the songs, views these gals through a multi-faceted prism, be it angry vigilantism (the opener, "Gunpowder and Lead"), sarcastic observance ("Famous in a Small Town"), or (most consistently) the twin nature of wishful pining: regret and desire (lust?). Yet in her hands, these last two feelings go through a re-birth, a cauterization of the heart and are re-born into a catalyst of open-hearted loaner freedom (the Patty Griffin cover "Getting Ready"). Still, she can wax sadly truthful, and two of her best songs – "More Like Her" (an ambiguous and knotty rumination on a love triangle) and "Desperation" (which features the year's most melancholic, powerful refrain: Complicated words slippin' off your tongue and ain't one of them the truth/ I'm still desperate for you) – finally prove it without a doubt: she isn't just this year's Country Best, she may be its best for years to come.

*Note: my list, obviously, has its flaws. I haven't seen half the stuff that is currently setting the award-season abuzz (e.g. Atonement, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, etc.), and I can only watch and listen to so much music and television (plus: I don't get HBO, Showtime, and other more prestigious channels with more prestigious fare). I will eventually get to all of this stuff and you will surely know if I've overlooked something. Until then, this is all I have; tell me what I did wrong.

I'm Not There: A

2008-02-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

In one of many deep-dish symbolic explosions in Todd Haynes' rapturously inventive biopic I'm Not There, Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) - photographed in graniest black & white - rattles off the six key secrets to master when in hiding...all while images of Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett), Billy (Richard Gere), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Woodie (Marcus Carl Franklin) go rattling by; each actor interpreting their figment of legendary musician Bob Dylan interpreting the particular secret revealed as the camera slows on their performance (while, simultaneously, Whishaw himself pulls off a similar feat). If it sounds too conceptual to work, the intoxicating surprise is that it does - thanks in no small part to Haynes himself, whose artistic sleight-of-hand allows numerous more occasions such as these to illuminate a film about a man persistently casting shadows.

Such is the texture of the film though: it searches and it rhapsodizes with a luminous visual mastery; it haunts and occasionally it saddens; and every so often it stuns you with the very transcendent rightness such a gifted director as this one can pull off when he, say, situates an identity-exploring journalist in the middle of late-60's Dylan performing "Ballad of a Thin Man".
These last moments of epiphany occur only a handful of times in such well-formed, piercing doses (such as when Billy gazes over an empty valley, ruminating on this-or-that War that may have inspired his dormant protesting; or when Jude Quinn gazes at Jesus on the cross and, with just the slightest touch of deepest depression, slurs out "Do some of your early stuff!") but instead of seeming as a flaw, these work as the highest points in a never-ending stream of conscious; the sort of stunning, sharp, inquisitive work the greatest documentarians aspire to and (apparently) only someone as willing to bend the rules of fiction, reality, "reality", and the poetic English language as Todd Haynes could have achieved. The result is a magnificent high for cineastes and Dylan-lovers alike.

Still sound sort of like homework to you casual viewers? Well then let me start at the beginning, with Woodie. Embodied by Franklin with a natural grace and humor, his segments serve as the foundation for the early minutes of the film, as we hear his story - grave and intriguing. First he was talented, then he was a failed carnie, then he hobo'ed, then he fell, was saved, was saddened, and hobo'ed again. Did I mention he was only eleven? And black? Again, if Haynes' sheer audacity sounds laughable, his dramatic conceit never strays from his intended vision and the work of this early Woody Guthrie groupie - "The Fake" as the film's narrator says - gives a reasoned flavor to the later, more theatrical incarnations of this once most modest of troubadors.

Flash forward (or rather, around - since the film would rather splice its characters together in a narrative circle than a chronological line) to Jack (Christian Bale), a NYC activist seemingly sprung from all the wholesome potential of Woodie himself; then it's over to Robbie, the movie star of a '65 film about Jack's rise to stardom in the folk movement; then we're back to Arthur, as he stares into the camera, answering questions from a disembodied voice, with a gaze that matches his words: calmly disaffected, sincerly insincere, and true in only the way that Dylan himself was. From Arthur we leap to Jude Quinn as he premieres his greatest artistic leap: going from acoustic to electric, and the fall-out from fans that necesitates. That collapse gives insight into another - the slow destruction of Robbie's marriage to Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg); and from the drained voice-over of Legdger we are introduced to Billy, an outlaw holed up in a dying town full of circus workers always playing dress-up (need I spell out the allegory there?).

If my verbose description gives you a sense of the heady connections that I'm Not There lyricizes then more power to you, but if not then the film more than compensates (with Haynes serving up with the same sort of intensity he brought to Far From Heaven five years ago). It weaves a mosaic, a kaleidoscope dream, a fantasia of personality, an intricate dance of delusion & illusion, and an elusively sad composite work on the most prolific poet of our time; most grandly of all though, it accomplishes this all on a level of deeply satisfying power and magnetism. I could no less look away than I suspect Dylan could from creating himself more than these seven times over.

Which is all kind of the point right? As a musician, Bob Dylan certainly inspires the film, sets it aflame with passion even, but as a person? Some may be tempted to call the lack of articulate verbal explanation in I'm Not There "opaque" but I disagree: the mesmerizing currents of personality that are evoked in these 135-minutes more than answer any questions because they eliminate the need for them. See, Todd Haynes may have set out to create a rumination on the life & times of Bob Dylan, but he came away with far more; what he's created may lack the same sensational flow of emotion that graced Heaven but it's satisfying in almost every other way. It floats on the raspy visions of the folk legend's music; it savors the work of its own muses (Blanchett, wrapped up in a private breakdown, gives a great, fizzy, prophetic performance); and, above all, it treasures its audience - never losing a virgin to the ways of the music world, or an audiophile new to film.

It sermonizes with passion, zeal, and terrifyingly good directorial skill. It illuminates by layers the creation of a creation; the man created from a myth. And it beckons us all on for the ride, to dive into the flow - the visionary, holy, "meaninglessness" of Dylan's images - and discover Dylan as Dylan has always discovered himself. It is truly a journey worth taking.

The Golden Compass: A-

2008-02-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

To those who keep complaining about the theological subtext of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (of which The Golden Compass is the first installment), I steadfastly reply: get over yourselves; have some fun. Ok, sure, if you're on the lookout for some menacing "God isn't real!" lecture lurking within the pages of Pullman's (an avowed atheist/agnostic) prose, you might pick up crumbs within this first book; but those crumbs are far out weighed by the author's neat prose, brilliant use of perspective, subversive imagination, and dry wit. And certainly for myself (an avowed reader/critic), all these elements add up to one fun time.

But, of course, let's start with the controversial stuff. First off, what it amounts to in Compass is very little considering the brouhaha surrounding the soon-released film adaptation; sure there is a vast, powerful Church in this other world (one vaguely resembling our own, minus roughly a century or so and plus a lot of panache) that seems almost entirely malevolent; sure, too, the main character asks at one point (in refernce to Adam & Eve) "Yes, but wasn't that all just a sort of fairy tale?" But beyond that, very little else.

So what truly remains in these 400-pages beyond an antagonistic Church and a doubtful protagonist? The real workings of a real fantasist. Pullman, previously the purveyour of more contemporary young adult fiction, loses himself and the reader in a clever, subtle, re-working of our world. The new additions include daemons - the physical manifestion of a person's soul (aka, a sort of familiar that takes various shapes depending on personality) - witches, talking polar bears, and experimental theology. This last bit is surely the author's most daring step, and it pays off big in the first novel. As it seems in Lyra's (our hero) world, the Church pre-emptively captured the scientific lightning that was about to strike with the Renaissance by aligning themselves with all these new-fangled "elementary particles" (read: atoms), etc. As such, all scientific discoveries flow through the Church, and their doctrines in turn reflect the glory of science as the Glory of God. As a critical reader, I couldn't have been more delighted at this invention. As a mere human, prone to lose oneself in their books, I fell quite in love with the shadowy mysteries of this vast beauracracy (no longer headed by a Pope, mind you, but re-worked into the Magisterium, a lose working group of "councils, commitees, and the like").

So what mysteries do they portend? Well, the coming of Dust for one - a substance that attaches to a child once they hit puberty, and the cause of much concern for the "all-knowing" Church. Another puzzle they bring is the blossoming of Lyra's destiny - and how she is to "end destiny". Sound impossible? Not so when you have a compass-like alethiometer that sees the answer, if you can see the question; an armored guard of a bear named Iorek; a gyptian consort who lead you to the far North to rescue kidnapped children and father's alike; and a daemon who'd follow you to another world.

Which, in some canny sense, Lyra is. See, by quietly playing up a child's sense of wonder and dread, then intermingling it with Lyra's street-urchin skill, Pullman keeps the reader tethered to a world that unfolds with all the blazing new passion as Lyra herself experiences. Another bonus? It allows quick, surprising turns of plot and character to manifest in barely a pages' time (due again to Lyra's undoubtedly weak grasp of "truth" in her world's time of so-called "high political tension"). It is quite the clever stroke to create such a perspective for the reader; and more lithe still to never have it feel claustrophobic or improbable.

One great benefit against this last thought is in the characters created to populate Lyra's Earth: there is Mrs. Coulter - a charming manipulator, Lord Asriel - a prideful explorer and Lyra's uncle, John Faa - the absurdly wise king of the gyptians, and Serafina Pekkala - a seemingly ageless witch queen who still loves her human savior of 40-years. As is obvious, these are fascinating creations and more fascinating still because we can hardly guess what they truly want, or who they are (a surprising betrayal near book's end will have you recast your entire alleigances). Due to this, and among various other attributes, one must invariably draw the conclusion: The Golden Compass is conceived as fantasia, but cast in a cold, diamond-hard die giving it both the inventions to support dis-belief, and the suspenseful desire to do just the opposite (I dare anyone not to be swept into a desperate thrist for discovery when it comes to the mysteries of Dust, the Aurora, and the Magisterium). Who'd have guessed all of it would come from a "non-believer"?

Michael Clayton: A

2007-11-01T15:24:00.000-07:00

In films as varied as The 40-Year Old Virgin, Rent, and Four Weddings and a Funeral has my faith been restored in filmmaking. With the former, it was in the giddy delight of a great low-down joke done right; in the latter, the sparkling joy to be gleaned when one is successfully fooled into feeling as though they are listening in on the wittiest Group of Friends ever. Well, and I say this in no uncertain, hands-shaky-with-relief, terms: Michael Clayton has restored my belief in the very sizzle of a film that pivots not on bullets or bravado, but on pure bravura technique; something remarkable that transforms the story of one New York City fixer (George Clooney) into a truly thrilling work - the thrills derived therein from the art to be viewed on screen, and the adrenaline to be sampled in your blood stream nearly every minute of the running time.

Tony Gilroy, the writer of the Bourne franchise, amazes. Here is a filmmaker who I was pretty sure could serve up a tasty cocktail of escapism, but when it came to his talents at crafting a crackling drama, I was less certain. After all, how could the tricky plotting of a super-spy (replete with obligatory, every-10-minute showdowns,) translate into a reputable movie, unfettered by popcorn junkies or Michael Bay trailers? The answer it seems, is very well. Gilroy, writing with a simmering, hard-boiled ear, threads Michael Clayton out over 120 minutes worth of shattered nerve endings and splintered timelines (a trick he no doubt picked up from his Matt Damon days). His camera moves with silky subtlely, doubling back on itself at critical plot junctures to give the audience a healthy wrench of surprise. And his narrative instincts create such a vivid world of suited-up, nuerotic corporate dealings that it's as if John Grisham were made flesh...and finally given a Brain and a Heart.

Of course, John Grisham could only ever hope to imagine a story as intriguing as this one - a plot spinning about the monumental, and monumentally important, class-action suit against UNorth, a pesticide company that's knocking off its customers with carcinogenic product. Litigating for the company is Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a brilliant attorney who spontaneously goes nuts (his most rapturous-insane monologue opens the film). To prevent the loss of millions (not to mention a reputation and the thought of more billable hours), Edens firm brings in their resident "janitor" - Clayton - to settle things down, reign in Edens, and prevent the client from bolting. The client itself isn't all that happy with the firm's plan, so their in-house counsel (Tilda Swinton) hires two deeply unsettling thugs to keep tabs on Clayton's operation, all the while ready to press the Big Red Button should she feel out of control (which her character does frequently, a paragon of coiled insecurity). And Clayton himself? Well, he's just a weary, working scrooge whose got a kid (Austin Williams) and a mortage to pay (or sell-off, should he need to fend off his addict-brother's loan sharks).

If, all-in-all, Michael Clayton really does sound like the greatest thing Grisham never wrote, then you have yet to witness one milisecond of Tony Gilroy's spiky, disturbing, entertaining, cynical, and edgily articulate film; heck, even those opening scenes don't do it justice, since the true trick of the director's skills doesn't emerge until much later in the game. But it is a blossoming worth sticking around for and Clooney (together with his admirably classy, seedy, co-stars) will make your viewing experience worth while. He is, remember, everything about Clayton that Clayton despises - gussied up, "fickle", truly charming - and yet the actor is also everything about the film that is great: razor-sharp and unforgettable.

Friday Night Lights: The Complete First Season: A

2007-11-01T15:22:00.000-07:00

What if they made a great television drama and nobody watched? What if said drama was bolstered throughout its premiere year by rabid praise and die-hard fans and still nobody watched? What if said drama was renewed, along other lesser-known yet more-beloved shows, for another promising year on the air and still no one appeared to view it? Such is the predicament of Friday Night Lights - the profoud, exquisite expose of small-town life that was spun from Peter Berg's 2004 film of the same name (Berg himself brought the concept to the silver screen and he sticks around to exec-produce, as well as write-direct the pilot). But what, ultimately, is the failing of Lights? By all accounts it struggles to find a hearty, a steady, audience; so how can it be that a program with such a negligible fan base be such a critic-winner? Simple: FNL is brilliant. Period.

The series begins much as the film did. It sets up the standard players (though perhaps in a far more crisp, interesting fashion) and then unrolls the standard plot devices: we've got Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) as struggling QB2 under Jason Street (Scott Porter) - the golden boy of high school football - and their coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), not to mention "Smash" Williams (Gaius Charles) - the cocky runningback - and Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) - the half-drunk fullback. It's a team primed for victory (and not without a healthy dose of pathos)- but also one destined for collapse. Street incurs a tragic accident and whoosh the cards all fall down. With that loose thread, it all begins to unravel and re-thread; the eventual emerging picture? A story told over a multitude of perspectives, refracted through a dozen different townspeople, over a seaons worth of episodes, about one town with one hope, dying slowly.

Yet in that death, rebirth? The quick-change early episodes launch off from the pilot's obvious mechanisms and briskly build a head of steam. Saracen nervously takes the plate as the new QB1; Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) and Tim manuever around a wounded Street; Coach Taylor manuevers around a wounded constituency (not the least of which includes the resident honcho-car-dealer and the mayor); his family takes slow root in a new town; Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) takes slow root in an old town; Smash takes a fast route to a new world; and we as an audience are taken along for the ride - one filled to bursting point with pin-point honesty, as true and delicate as all real life and as just as hard to resist.

But, of course, (and as I mentioned to start with) people have. Why? It isn't as though the soap-tropes that would seem to thrive here do, quite the opposite. Or that the cast of Texan men and women are strangled by their own "cliches", because they aren't. No, it is none of these. Could it be instead though that FNL, a football drama that wielded a razor-edge of catharsis for the everyday, simply was too much for its viewers? That is a tough idea to swallow, and one I'm inclined to not particularly trust, but what alternatives are there? Becuase I'm certainly not going to stand around believing the people simply will not view such excellence.

Still worried about that "excellence" bit I've gone on about though? Then look no further to the multi-episode arcs on racism, or sexual abuse, or steroid use, or the War in Iraq for confirmation that Lights, among its more theatrical breathen, is a vision of savy logic and character development - as curious as a wandering documentarian (a notion aided by the shaky camera work - a crafy trick) with twice as much perception and cunning intellect. It helps though that the show is gifted with such a team of writers, foremost of whom is Jason Katims and David Hudgins. Also worth mentioning? The series' phenomenal, phenomenal, cast - old and young actors, veterans and newcomers, who create marvelous, aching performances.

Now close your eyes for a minute and imagine what would happen if such perfectly realized creations all lived together in one town. What do you see - because I know what I see: it's an epiphany, a miracle about one small town struggling, hoping, praying, and living for those bright game nights. Its name is Friday Night Lights and there is nothing like it anywhere else on television today. Savor it.

Dirty Sexy Money: B+

2007-11-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

The crazy, fascinating family at the center of Dirty Sexy Money is quite the small-scale economy of disfunction: they have bags, and bags, and bags, and bags, and bags of money yet hardly seem to work - together or apart; each member fighting against the other, each fighting against themselves. Such is the compelling, and most prominent feature, of ABC's new Wednesday night soap-opera. But look past the flat summations scattered throughout print ads and reviews - Dirty Sexy Money sends-up its own roots by embracing them, and manages to be way more purely entertaining than that other adult drama of the night (though, to be fair, Bionic Woman doesn't have the bolster of such a sparkling, joyously shallow cast). Concieved in an age of arch reverse irony in a visual arena too often cluttered with high concept, low delivery creations, here is something to be lauded, and failing that, at least enjoyed a whole heck of a lot; a show about a large family of eccentric, ridiculously wealthy people who never once manage to make you want to be them (and they even have yachts!) but also never once make you want to stop watching them.

Created by Craig Wright, a veteran of both Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters, his final product gets a rare, and rather astonishing, blessing: it is gifted with some of the salacious wit of the former without losing a bit of the hair-pin plot turns of the former. On a scale of critical respectability, there's a sort of lucky pre-destiny in this match-up between a man who trafficked in both the moral, dramatic, absurdities of death as well as the plain ol' absurdities of a drunken Sally Fields and this great big messy production. The end result? A world where lawyer Nick George (Peter Krause) gets sucked back into the world of the Darlings when his father, their long-time family lawyer, dies mysteriously.

Except, he doesn't actually voluntarily re-enter the orbit of a clan that, in his eyes, destroyed his father - he's sort of bribed by the sort of brilliant Donald Sutherland, as familial patriarch Tripp Darling. The scene in which this occurs is pulled off with nothing less than oodles of sly pinache by both actors facing off at opposite ends of a desk - one armed with a rascally, "naieve", smile of benevolence; the other, two exasperated eyebrows and a polished, high-caliber style. This miniature delight (one of several in the pilot episode) doesn't quite encaptulate all that there is to love about Money (as that would take perhaps several, long, slightly shoddy Lifetime films) but it jolts the viewer, entertains them, intrigues them; and in a world where one is either shocked, awed, stimulated, or cajoled by all manner of reality-sweatshop-medical-drama-comedy-musical-casino-mocku-detective-mentaries, to witness a show that promises only what it can deliver - a heap of campy wit and triumphant performances with just a hint of mystery (for spice) - is a true delight.

What perhaps isn't a delight? That cynical idea that nips about the show - the idea that it may start to repeat itself. Now, one may wonder: how can a show, complete with now less than eight main characters, run out of story? The same way it can provide such pleasure: by constantly throwing new stuff, no matter how implausible, in the way of New York's craziest group of relatives. Still, I have hope. This is a show exec-produced by Greg Berlanti, after all - the man that steered Everwood past all manner of schmaltzy potholes. Let's hope he does the same here. Because I'd hate to see what a boozed up Jill Clayburgh, or a cheating William Baldwin, or a sexy Natalia Zea, or a clueless Samaire Armstrong, or a strung-out Seth Gabel, or a wound-up Glenn Fitzgerald, or - heaven forbid - warm and calculating Donald Sutherland would do if their city-wide party were to get bumpy...er.

Gossip Girl: B

2007-11-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

"You're nobody until you're talked about."

One wonders whether or not Josh Schwartz, that whiz-kid maestro behind the best years of The O.C., realized the inherent irony involved when he - a witty television scribe famous for his one-man magic trick: turning "teenage life" into teenage life - took on the job of adapting a young adult book series concerned with the very last thing those Cally kids would have been: gossip, and lots of it. Yet the end result doesn't have a split personality - there are no Seth Cohens struggling to burst the fabric of cloistered, gritty Upper East Side gossip-queens and rich-kid cricles; if anything Schwartz and co-creator Stephanie Savage (another O.C. alum) give Gossip Girl a breezy irreverence otherwise lacking in the ubiquitous viral ad campaigns - replete with air-brushed faces and an implicit malevolence wrapped around the show's tag-line (with which I started this review). But more wisely, they also give the series premiere (and, a viewer hopes, the subsequent episodes) a fast-pace - all the better with which to deliver their throwaway lines and surprisingly good performances.

The titular "Gossip Girl" (Kristen Bell) serves as both narrator of the show and magnate for all of its many secrets, strained tensions, and storylines past, future, and present. Who cares? More importantly, and all the more courageously given the sheer burden of back-story needing to be expounded on, Ms. Ex-Veronica Mars gives our guide to the cliques and pariahs of Manhattan a delightful snarl; she delivers her observations and updates ("Melanie91 reports that...") with pin-point blase glee - all the better to keep a show not exactly founded on new ideas pumping with hot blood, and viewer interest (and joy, since Bell has managed to find such enjoyable work so quickly after her untimely demise on Mars).

This isn't to suggest that viewer interest won't be kept by the trials of one miss Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) when she returns from a year of mysterious exile (a grand entrance our Girl relishes, obviously). Sure her "struggles" are watchable, and more than once fun (the pilot script, by Schwartz & Savage, has a bite of entitled wit), but far more interesting to me are what will happen to those rocked by the waves she creates by her re-entry: Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester), her "BFF", and Co. Already in this first hour there is substantial material, and juice-packed at that: Blair's desparate, wire-thin veneer of vanity and security; the frog-to-princes(or princess) tales of siblings Dan and Jenny Humphrey (Penn Badgley and Taylor Momsen); the back story on Serena's departure.

With such a wad of story though there comes a certain, heavy, commitment in viewing. And though the thought of pursuing such "frivolity" for an entire season can occasionally weigh on a person's soul (you can only take so much of Chuck Bass, trust me) the viewing experience is counter-balanced nicely with cast's alert, lively work and the promise of more carb-lite nothing (and by "nothing" I do mean solid quality t.v.) on Wednesday nights. If this all sounds alittle iffy - the thought of watching more rich kids struggle through their "issues" while listening to but more smarm, sass, and Justin Timberlake-via-soundtrack - while paradoxically being slightly addictive - I'd come back just to here more of Blake Lively's repartee (a clear-eyed alcoholic problem-child on the networks is, after all, so hard to find these days) - I'm sure that our anonymous, eponymous mistress of the blogosphere wouldn't have it any other way..and come around in a few more episodes, and I just might have to agree.