“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.”
Showing posts with label Movie Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movie Review. Show all posts
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Reader: B-
I don’t get bored in movies easily. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen so many, or because I tend to fit on some pseudo-intellectual armor before each viewing so that the mere idea of sleeping through a piece of art seems preposterous. Regardless, whatever the reason, it must be revealed that it’s been quite some time before I grew truly, sincerely, authentically restless during a film. However, Stephen Daldry’s The Reader gets the rare honor of having made me truly bored—sleepy, even—as its narrative of secrecies and illicit affairs and ghastly Holocaust-era crimes unspooled in handsome, handsomely anguished scenes.
Years ago (dates are unimportant; they flash upon you on title cards and disappear just as quickly) a boy, Michael Berg (David Kross), was sick on the sidewalk as he came home from school. It was raining, and the lady who lived just past the vomit-covered stoop took pity on him. Pity became affection, and that affection became erotic. Soon sex was involved. (It’s graphic and abundant, but tastefully patterned.) The only thing to distinguish this underage affair from all others was the woman’s propensity for being read aloud to, and for harboring some sort of…something behind her weathered brow.Eventually they drifted apart. There was a sort of stately logic in their romantic dissolution, even as the break-up strives valiantly to be not so: as they came together, so they fell apart—the end.
The present arrives. And now Michael is older (and played by Ralph Fiennes). And he is plagued—as equally plagued by frets and worries and soul-crushing moral quandaries as his lover, long ago, seemed to be.
To spoil the actual plot points would be to ruin The Reader entirely—to dull even its vaguely-sharp nubs down to nothing. No, I’ll merely present the symmetry as an opening salvo of curiosity, allowing your own mind to lead you into a viewing… But I will reveal one thing, and leave you warned with another: first, writer David Hare, adapting from the novel Bernhard Schlink, struggles mightily to communicate valiant notions of survivor’s guilt and moral relativism and other such weighty things but he fails in doing so as he fails in challenging his own aesthetic—as much as his The Hours was a pretty mood piece that went six feet down instead of ten, so is his latest work ostensibly laced-up instead of lacerating; and second, Kate Winslet plays the woman who once figured so prominently in Michael’s life, and her performance finds its own sort of expression even in a movie that gracefully locks her down—but be wary regardless, because The Reader is at worst a yawn-inducing, sentimental bore, and if you stare into her big sad eyes long enough, you’ll be forgiven for thinking “Lifetime Presents…” precedes the title.
Years ago (dates are unimportant; they flash upon you on title cards and disappear just as quickly) a boy, Michael Berg (David Kross), was sick on the sidewalk as he came home from school. It was raining, and the lady who lived just past the vomit-covered stoop took pity on him. Pity became affection, and that affection became erotic. Soon sex was involved. (It’s graphic and abundant, but tastefully patterned.) The only thing to distinguish this underage affair from all others was the woman’s propensity for being read aloud to, and for harboring some sort of…something behind her weathered brow.Eventually they drifted apart. There was a sort of stately logic in their romantic dissolution, even as the break-up strives valiantly to be not so: as they came together, so they fell apart—the end.
The present arrives. And now Michael is older (and played by Ralph Fiennes). And he is plagued—as equally plagued by frets and worries and soul-crushing moral quandaries as his lover, long ago, seemed to be.
To spoil the actual plot points would be to ruin The Reader entirely—to dull even its vaguely-sharp nubs down to nothing. No, I’ll merely present the symmetry as an opening salvo of curiosity, allowing your own mind to lead you into a viewing… But I will reveal one thing, and leave you warned with another: first, writer David Hare, adapting from the novel Bernhard Schlink, struggles mightily to communicate valiant notions of survivor’s guilt and moral relativism and other such weighty things but he fails in doing so as he fails in challenging his own aesthetic—as much as his The Hours was a pretty mood piece that went six feet down instead of ten, so is his latest work ostensibly laced-up instead of lacerating; and second, Kate Winslet plays the woman who once figured so prominently in Michael’s life, and her performance finds its own sort of expression even in a movie that gracefully locks her down—but be wary regardless, because The Reader is at worst a yawn-inducing, sentimental bore, and if you stare into her big sad eyes long enough, you’ll be forgiven for thinking “Lifetime Presents…” precedes the title.
A seamless treat—as swirling, vibrant, and ecstatic an entertainment as the movies are likely to produce this year, Slumdog Millionaire may well be contrived, a confection, but its construction defies artificiality; and what’s more, the film has the further audacity to explore and exploit such an idea. Director Danny Boyle, in great whirling control of a talent long confined to psychological thrillers (Sunshine, 28 Days Later) taps right back into the vein of propulsive zest that ran through his debut, Trainspotting, and his latest work—alternately a fusion of cultures, genres, and cinematic devices—practically jumps to life for it.
There is a coldness somewhere in the manipulation proposed and propagated as the film progresses—a certain need to balk at being asked to produce so many stock emotions at just such stock junctures in the narrative (a mother’s murder, a lover’s dislocation). Regardless, a surface happiness, a glow, subsists throughout. In part due to the pitch-perfect behind-the-camera work (from the aforementioned Boyle, paired nicely with writer Simon Beaufoy, who adapts the novel Q&A into a effortless interweaving of flash-backs and ruminations on things past, to composer A.R. Rahman, who provides the film’s kinetic soundtrack), and also with thanks to the actors (all of whom, through three different ages, and cast in a tricky triangle pattern, give grit to the fairytale), Slumdog Millionaire is triumphant on several levels. And if I love it just a little less than all those who surround me, it’s not without a little trepidation: by credits end, the film gets so good at whipping you into a frenzy of feelings, the lack of true sublimity warrants a slight pause.
Regardless, Dev Patel, as the titular Indian orphan competing on the much-tarter version of what we all watched back here with Regis Philban, is magnetically charming—he acts without appearing to do so; seconds in and the seams of his performance (the accent, the rather-large spectrum of Big Emotions) disappear—Poof! All that remains is a star. One more swirl of color, light, and storytelling delight, and the film itself vanishes—Poof!
All that’s left is joy.
There is a coldness somewhere in the manipulation proposed and propagated as the film progresses—a certain need to balk at being asked to produce so many stock emotions at just such stock junctures in the narrative (a mother’s murder, a lover’s dislocation). Regardless, a surface happiness, a glow, subsists throughout. In part due to the pitch-perfect behind-the-camera work (from the aforementioned Boyle, paired nicely with writer Simon Beaufoy, who adapts the novel Q&A into a effortless interweaving of flash-backs and ruminations on things past, to composer A.R. Rahman, who provides the film’s kinetic soundtrack), and also with thanks to the actors (all of whom, through three different ages, and cast in a tricky triangle pattern, give grit to the fairytale), Slumdog Millionaire is triumphant on several levels. And if I love it just a little less than all those who surround me, it’s not without a little trepidation: by credits end, the film gets so good at whipping you into a frenzy of feelings, the lack of true sublimity warrants a slight pause.
Regardless, Dev Patel, as the titular Indian orphan competing on the much-tarter version of what we all watched back here with Regis Philban, is magnetically charming—he acts without appearing to do so; seconds in and the seams of his performance (the accent, the rather-large spectrum of Big Emotions) disappear—Poof! All that remains is a star. One more swirl of color, light, and storytelling delight, and the film itself vanishes—Poof!
All that’s left is joy.
Milk: A-
I enjoy Milk the less I think about it, and the more time that passes.
I enjoyed Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay immediately, but not wholeheartedly. It finds character definition in voice-over or in the refracted angle of a silver whistle, or in a final weighty glance at a poster for the San Francisco Opera. There are also the conventional methods used to construct a biopic, but they’re tempered by a light touch of flamboyance—of joy. Black peppers his archival footage and ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue with humor, but his plotting, though fleet and framed by the most curiously intriguing of devices, is inelegant.
I enjoyed more what director Gus Van Sant does, as he finally bursts free from years of depressing stylistic tics. The Van Sant in control of Milk is the same Van Sant who wrote and directed the “Le Marais” segment of Paris, je t’aime—a man who finds the vibrancy in a casually poignant sexual life: a sort of anti-Woody Allen in that he sets up casual connections without also chaining them together with psycho-sexual significance. He glides through his story, bouncing from one true story to another in the life of some pretty incredible people. His film stock roughens at times, dating itself even as its ploy for sincerity is effective and the past is allowed to seep into the present. At others he side-steps a moment to brighten up the entire film with grand swoops of fervor—as with the rainbow-colored telephone tree or Danny Elfman’s operatic score. He takes what is a better-than-average script and makes a better-than-average film that sags only occasionally, and charms almost consistently. No longer the downer who freeze-dried Elephant in its own “relevance,” this is a man who finds inspiration in inspiration—and his art resurges, joyfully, for it.
At once I completely applaud the supporting performers of Milk—like Emile Hersch, as political aid Cleve Jones, bustling with nervy charm, or James Franco as Scott Smith—and am a little put-off by them. Of all the elements in Milk, they are the least defined: sure they’re witty little gay men, huddled together and building a rebellious political machine of their own out in the Castro, but that’s all they ever are: a collective. As much as Black and Van Sant find a sort of zeitgeisty way to create and color-in-the-lines of their main character, through group demonstration, or as he stands on a soap box protesting to the masses, the same methods can’t be said to be effective with the surrounding cast. Friends, lovers, allies, all—save Dan White (who Josh Brolin gives a twinkling sort of psychosis all by his repressed-self)—just sort of remain on the sidelines, even as they catapult occasionally to the forefront.
Yet all of that is for naught. Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, the man who would upset the status quo in the 1970s with his tireless fight for gay rights, is so comfortable in someone else’s skin (and he’s such a competent physical mimic) that even the film’s flaws are built into his performance—he makes even cinematic inconsistencies delightful. Fearlessly fey, but with a cool pragmatic sensibility, Penn’s Milk is at once a stereotype upended, and that same stereotype writ large. Paradoxically, it makes his life, refracted through both sensibilities, all the more rich.
And, too, it makes his death all the sadder. I’m not one to choke up at movies, and I didn’t here, but the heft of Milk is in its persistence, it dogged pursuit of betterment. And in the current climate, couldn’t we all learn a little from Mr. Milk when he said “You’ve got to give ‘em hope”?
I enjoyed Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay immediately, but not wholeheartedly. It finds character definition in voice-over or in the refracted angle of a silver whistle, or in a final weighty glance at a poster for the San Francisco Opera. There are also the conventional methods used to construct a biopic, but they’re tempered by a light touch of flamboyance—of joy. Black peppers his archival footage and ripped-from-the-headlines dialogue with humor, but his plotting, though fleet and framed by the most curiously intriguing of devices, is inelegant.
I enjoyed more what director Gus Van Sant does, as he finally bursts free from years of depressing stylistic tics. The Van Sant in control of Milk is the same Van Sant who wrote and directed the “Le Marais” segment of Paris, je t’aime—a man who finds the vibrancy in a casually poignant sexual life: a sort of anti-Woody Allen in that he sets up casual connections without also chaining them together with psycho-sexual significance. He glides through his story, bouncing from one true story to another in the life of some pretty incredible people. His film stock roughens at times, dating itself even as its ploy for sincerity is effective and the past is allowed to seep into the present. At others he side-steps a moment to brighten up the entire film with grand swoops of fervor—as with the rainbow-colored telephone tree or Danny Elfman’s operatic score. He takes what is a better-than-average script and makes a better-than-average film that sags only occasionally, and charms almost consistently. No longer the downer who freeze-dried Elephant in its own “relevance,” this is a man who finds inspiration in inspiration—and his art resurges, joyfully, for it.
At once I completely applaud the supporting performers of Milk—like Emile Hersch, as political aid Cleve Jones, bustling with nervy charm, or James Franco as Scott Smith—and am a little put-off by them. Of all the elements in Milk, they are the least defined: sure they’re witty little gay men, huddled together and building a rebellious political machine of their own out in the Castro, but that’s all they ever are: a collective. As much as Black and Van Sant find a sort of zeitgeisty way to create and color-in-the-lines of their main character, through group demonstration, or as he stands on a soap box protesting to the masses, the same methods can’t be said to be effective with the surrounding cast. Friends, lovers, allies, all—save Dan White (who Josh Brolin gives a twinkling sort of psychosis all by his repressed-self)—just sort of remain on the sidelines, even as they catapult occasionally to the forefront.
Yet all of that is for naught. Sean Penn, as Harvey Milk, the man who would upset the status quo in the 1970s with his tireless fight for gay rights, is so comfortable in someone else’s skin (and he’s such a competent physical mimic) that even the film’s flaws are built into his performance—he makes even cinematic inconsistencies delightful. Fearlessly fey, but with a cool pragmatic sensibility, Penn’s Milk is at once a stereotype upended, and that same stereotype writ large. Paradoxically, it makes his life, refracted through both sensibilities, all the more rich.
And, too, it makes his death all the sadder. I’m not one to choke up at movies, and I didn’t here, but the heft of Milk is in its persistence, it dogged pursuit of betterment. And in the current climate, couldn’t we all learn a little from Mr. Milk when he said “You’ve got to give ‘em hope”?
Doubt: B
With much symbolic wringing of his hands, writer-director John Patrick Shanley fussily brings his previously Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play Doubt to the screen—and yet the ironic thing is, the transition itself brings about much of the titular emotion. Sure, the central quartet of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis seem qualified enough—but in the opening thirty minutes Streep, that grand dame of accents and method sublimation of self into character, gives a performance of such sheer overheated nonsense (with speech inflections and physical tics that border on rococo) that she threatens to leave the audience laughing, instead of pondering, at the pile of melodramatic entanglements at St. Nicholas’ Catholic School.
Luckily her performance slows and blossoms, minute by minute, into something far more recognizable as derived from quality instead of Quaaludes, and as it softens and comes into focus, so inversely does the narrative—hardening, sharpening, itself. It goes like this: Streep, as Sister Aloysius, suspects her only black student (Joseph Foster II) of having been advanced on inappropriately by Father Flynn (played by Hoffman with a disarming vulnerability); her suspicions are strengthened by the opinions of Sister James (Adams, who is the only of the main four to truly hit the film’s rhythm of comedy and naturalism smothered by an overarching Gothic tragedy). So she launches a campaign to reveal and remove the priest. At one point her quest takes her into contact with the young boy’s mother (who is inhabited by Davis with a force of conviction that lends her every subversive line an extra twist of spiteful, saddening, regret) and their scene together brings the film crackling to life.
Yet here’s the thing: Doubt is an artful enough experiment in unsettling and disturbing an audience’s sympathies and points-of-view—it plants seeds of uncertainty and unease with a literate grace (as with Father Flynn’s beautiful opening sermon). However Shanley is by no means a confident director (his camera stubbornly pulls the viewer’s eye to the most obvious of symbols and visual allegories with a ham-fisted redundancy), and on the whole he elicits merely adequate performances from his A-list cast. Thematically, the film (as the play before it) is concerned chiefly with an atmosphere of hushed paranoia that creeps, with subtlety and much justification, into the mind of the viewer until Doubt itself prevails everywhere. But there is much too much drama—loud, obvious, persistent, emotional—in this drama for that to take place. The movie unsettles, but that emotional integrity comes at the cost of elegant presentation.
“In Ancient Sparta, important matters were decided by who could shout the loudest. Luckily, we are not in Ancient Sparta,” Sister Aloysius says, half-way through. Coming away from the closing-credits, though, Meryl, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Luckily her performance slows and blossoms, minute by minute, into something far more recognizable as derived from quality instead of Quaaludes, and as it softens and comes into focus, so inversely does the narrative—hardening, sharpening, itself. It goes like this: Streep, as Sister Aloysius, suspects her only black student (Joseph Foster II) of having been advanced on inappropriately by Father Flynn (played by Hoffman with a disarming vulnerability); her suspicions are strengthened by the opinions of Sister James (Adams, who is the only of the main four to truly hit the film’s rhythm of comedy and naturalism smothered by an overarching Gothic tragedy). So she launches a campaign to reveal and remove the priest. At one point her quest takes her into contact with the young boy’s mother (who is inhabited by Davis with a force of conviction that lends her every subversive line an extra twist of spiteful, saddening, regret) and their scene together brings the film crackling to life.
Yet here’s the thing: Doubt is an artful enough experiment in unsettling and disturbing an audience’s sympathies and points-of-view—it plants seeds of uncertainty and unease with a literate grace (as with Father Flynn’s beautiful opening sermon). However Shanley is by no means a confident director (his camera stubbornly pulls the viewer’s eye to the most obvious of symbols and visual allegories with a ham-fisted redundancy), and on the whole he elicits merely adequate performances from his A-list cast. Thematically, the film (as the play before it) is concerned chiefly with an atmosphere of hushed paranoia that creeps, with subtlety and much justification, into the mind of the viewer until Doubt itself prevails everywhere. But there is much too much drama—loud, obvious, persistent, emotional—in this drama for that to take place. The movie unsettles, but that emotional integrity comes at the cost of elegant presentation.
“In Ancient Sparta, important matters were decided by who could shout the loudest. Luckily, we are not in Ancient Sparta,” Sister Aloysius says, half-way through. Coming away from the closing-credits, though, Meryl, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Frost/Nixon: B+
Peter Morgan, who wrote Frost/Nixon, may very well be a great writer—a great playwright (he wrote the original play), a great screenwriter (and now the cinematic adaptation), a great dramatist, period. And it’s a curious thing, his greatness, as it comes at no expense to his storytelling. In the combined field of stage and screen that contains such voluble, densely eloquent (or else tersely clever) writers as David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, and Charlie Kaufman, it is most strange indeed to find that talent who finds greatness without talking himself into circles. Morgan does just that; and as an extension of his cleanly witty dialogue, his narratives are similarly created: propulsive, but elegant—minimal, but never spare. Above all, his works are always most entertaining—most thrilling—for the way they link the audience into the character’s struggles for validation, for security, and (most often) for power.
Frost/Nixon, which Ron Howard directs with a casual mastery of internal-external staging, both enlivening and expanding the original’s theatrical dynamics, is no exception. It is, ostensibly, about more than just an interview: it’s also about the lives of the two men who made history some thirty years ago when one, David Frost (Michael Sheen), decided to question the other, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), for nearly thirty hours. Yet their lives are of no real importance, and in cinematic context it fleshes them out none as characters (the fleshing out is all left to their actors, who have an ease and mastery of projection that, one supposes, is only granted after years of performance). So when the interviewing actually begins a little more than an hour in, well, that’s truly when the movie begins too, more—it practically jumps to life, with Howard’s camera volleying back and forth as if watching a tennis match with missiles instead of balls.
Morgan has great fun sizing up and exploring the capabilities of his central, centrally opposed, forces; and his director has great fun in interweaving clips from the “present” to not only date the movie, but give it a sort of reverberated-in-hindsight relevance. So well is the visual and verbal layered together, with such verve and momentum, that what may occasionally seem urbane in Morgan’s script begins to sizzle with life…and the wounded vanities that hide beneath it.
Kudos to Langella and Sheen—who relish their battle by giving perfectly edited-down performances that are adorned neither with flamboyance or melodrama; and who, because of that, give a center to the dramatization spinning about them. It doesn’t have quite the bite, either psychological or social, of Morgan’s The Queen. But Frost/Nixon is a perfect lesson in the essence of nuts-and-bolts storytelling: it speaks (smartly, persuasively) for itself.
Frost/Nixon, which Ron Howard directs with a casual mastery of internal-external staging, both enlivening and expanding the original’s theatrical dynamics, is no exception. It is, ostensibly, about more than just an interview: it’s also about the lives of the two men who made history some thirty years ago when one, David Frost (Michael Sheen), decided to question the other, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), for nearly thirty hours. Yet their lives are of no real importance, and in cinematic context it fleshes them out none as characters (the fleshing out is all left to their actors, who have an ease and mastery of projection that, one supposes, is only granted after years of performance). So when the interviewing actually begins a little more than an hour in, well, that’s truly when the movie begins too, more—it practically jumps to life, with Howard’s camera volleying back and forth as if watching a tennis match with missiles instead of balls.
Morgan has great fun sizing up and exploring the capabilities of his central, centrally opposed, forces; and his director has great fun in interweaving clips from the “present” to not only date the movie, but give it a sort of reverberated-in-hindsight relevance. So well is the visual and verbal layered together, with such verve and momentum, that what may occasionally seem urbane in Morgan’s script begins to sizzle with life…and the wounded vanities that hide beneath it.
Kudos to Langella and Sheen—who relish their battle by giving perfectly edited-down performances that are adorned neither with flamboyance or melodrama; and who, because of that, give a center to the dramatization spinning about them. It doesn’t have quite the bite, either psychological or social, of Morgan’s The Queen. But Frost/Nixon is a perfect lesson in the essence of nuts-and-bolts storytelling: it speaks (smartly, persuasively) for itself.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: B-
Cate Blanchett, one of the screen’s most radiant talents, gives one of the year’s most painfully careful performances—and she is seconded only barely by Brad Pitt who, as a man who is born old and dies young, struggles not with his beautifully-done ageing/de-ageing make-up, but rather with the void of personality that it covers up. Technically, it is a feat of perfectly adequate internalizing. But internalizing is not what is called for—no, not in this David Fincher-directed, Eric Roth-scripted, “epic.” A lazy Southern drawl is all well and good, but if Forrest Gump and its star taught anyone anything, it is that characters so defined and compressed within their disabilities so as to become observers in their own star vehicle are barely characters at all, and are so thereby barely worth watching.
But I digress: Mr. Pitt is pretty enough to look at; Ms. Blanchett, too. They have barely any chemistry, but due to Fincher’s overt technical styling, emotion is nonetheless wrung from their every “wrenching” scene together. We wonder, in the beginning, at the strangest of an old man falling in love with a little girl…only for the situation to be reversed much later on—but we soon forget. Movies like this are not for the mind, but for the heart. And yet the heart is done so little service! Roth’s screenplay frames itself as the tale of a young boy’s journal, now in the possession of an old woman, being read by a middle-aged child, and has yet the further audacity to set the present action during Hurricane Katrina. Yet he also has the audacity to create two quite-lovely sequences, both involving the rhythm and power of time, that are the small-scale delights of love and loss that the overall film could never be. (One wonders, regardless, how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ever became so rounded and tragic a film as this—when it started out as so hardened and whirling a satire as it was.)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed: characters there within go through major emotional upheavals and find themselves, either secretly or with great show, tossing about on a sea of passions—and yet the most minor of characters, so trapped and flat in conception and in physicality, are the ones presented with the most sincerity (to wit: Tilda Swinton, showing up for just a few minutes as an aristocrat suffering from lovelorn dislocation, outpaces her female counterparts easily with grace and elegance in communicating inelegant emotions); and though the theme that hangs over the narrative like a silken funeral shroud is one of haunting existentialism (it assumes both that a life lived backward is one lived in vain and that those loved while living backward are loved only to be lost), no melancholia is rightly present scene-to-scene—worse, more often a finely-preened since of blah, of softly-chewed and finely-spun nonsense, persists. In short the film lives, on screen anyway, for almost three hours—and yet it so rarely feels alive.
But I digress: Mr. Pitt is pretty enough to look at; Ms. Blanchett, too. They have barely any chemistry, but due to Fincher’s overt technical styling, emotion is nonetheless wrung from their every “wrenching” scene together. We wonder, in the beginning, at the strangest of an old man falling in love with a little girl…only for the situation to be reversed much later on—but we soon forget. Movies like this are not for the mind, but for the heart. And yet the heart is done so little service! Roth’s screenplay frames itself as the tale of a young boy’s journal, now in the possession of an old woman, being read by a middle-aged child, and has yet the further audacity to set the present action during Hurricane Katrina. Yet he also has the audacity to create two quite-lovely sequences, both involving the rhythm and power of time, that are the small-scale delights of love and loss that the overall film could never be. (One wonders, regardless, how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story ever became so rounded and tragic a film as this—when it started out as so hardened and whirling a satire as it was.)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a curious case indeed: characters there within go through major emotional upheavals and find themselves, either secretly or with great show, tossing about on a sea of passions—and yet the most minor of characters, so trapped and flat in conception and in physicality, are the ones presented with the most sincerity (to wit: Tilda Swinton, showing up for just a few minutes as an aristocrat suffering from lovelorn dislocation, outpaces her female counterparts easily with grace and elegance in communicating inelegant emotions); and though the theme that hangs over the narrative like a silken funeral shroud is one of haunting existentialism (it assumes both that a life lived backward is one lived in vain and that those loved while living backward are loved only to be lost), no melancholia is rightly present scene-to-scene—worse, more often a finely-preened since of blah, of softly-chewed and finely-spun nonsense, persists. In short the film lives, on screen anyway, for almost three hours—and yet it so rarely feels alive.
Rachel Getting Married: A
Anne Hathaway, eyes popped wide, and with hair slashed in a frazzled bob, gives a wide-awake performance that is the centerpiece of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married—a film not just with clarity and emotional richness, but also a canny perceptiveness into familial politics. Shot by cinematographer Declan Quinn as another of the myriad ShakyCam dramas, the director and his writer Jenny Lumet (who has created perhaps the richest of all of 2008’s intellectual properties) nonetheless transcend an old trick in order to bring to the screen a film of vital curiosity and life. As Kym, the recovering addict come to see her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) get married to Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe), Hathaway may remain trapped in her characteristic speech patterns, but she wires you into her every synaptic urge: you hate her, at first, for crashing the party, and then you begin to understand her and her clawing, nattering self-absorption, and then you hate her a little more. But empathy isn't character-exclusive—so clever in the telling is the film that even the smallest of parts bustles with humanity. And when Debra Winger shows up in a volcanic cameo as the sisters’ mom, the screen practically tears itself apart. The movies are rarely used for such revelation as that on display in Demme’s movie; and even more rarely does it hook the audience so completely onto its wavelength of spare inquisition. The final scenes devolve a bit but it’s a small price to pay for such a viewing experience. Rachel Getting Married isn’t the most aesthetically adventurous film of the year, but it may well be the most exciting—and it tingles with life, love, drama, sisterhood, and everything in between.
Twilight: B-
Girl is born. Parents get divorced. Years pass. Eventually, because mom got re-married and because she feels a little adventurous, girl moves up north, to be with her dad—try “roughing it” for a while. The new school embraces her, fetishistically, but she feels a bit out of place. And then girl meets boy. He’s intriguing: the painfully shy youngest member of a large foster family. He’s also impossibly handsome—an awkward stud. They get off to a rocky start, but then chemistry kicks in and wham! Next thing she knows and the whole family has gathered around for a meet-and-greet. They’re a lot like the boy (i.e. strange to the nth degree), and he’s embarrassed by them, which is cute, but overall everyone is very welcoming…and very, very, pale. And beautiful, like undead models. (Because—oh yeah—the whole clan, boy and all, are vampires. BTW.)
That’s Twilight, in the beginning, stripped to its parabolic essence. The moral is a spry one that’s stood the test of time—true love is wherever you look for it—and the vessel of its deliverance is as zeitgeist-y as one can get living in a post-Anne Rice world. The source material is (of course; like you don’t already know) the work of one Stephenie Meyer, author extraordinaire. It is her first book in this Girl-Boy romance, Twilight that is the foundation for Twilight, and so on one level the movie was already primed to be a success—at least in terms of how well it stacked up against the book. Because though Meyer’s idea had breezy bite, her prose was still more tin than heat in those first few hundred pages. The movie couldn’t be much worse without being a catastrophe: up was the only direction to go. And so in one sense director Catherine Hardwicke has taken that route: her film is no disaster. But in translating the steamy-repressed-teenage love story of one Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falling for one vampiric Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) onto the screen, no greatness is achieved. You’ll swoon, but you’ll cringe, too.
The swooning first. Hardwicke has only been an active filmmaker for the last five years, but in that time she’s churned out one great film (Thirteen), one really good one (Lords of Dogtown), one blah Christmas tale (The Nativity Story) and now this, which falls somewhere in between. Here, though, her style as a director is almost nearly irrelevant—none of her characteristic flourishes (the frantic, thrusting, probing cinematography; the damaged teenagers) are present; Ron Howard or Uwe Boll could be directing, for all it mattered. The one thing she does do right is position her two young stars at the center of her continually spinning cameras. The result is an indelible takeaway image: Edward and Bella, in perpetual close-up, gazing at the other, about to kiss. The other thing she does is in negative, and that’s to get out of the way of her coltish talents. Both Pattinson and Stewart stumble through their scenes, but in ways that come off, somehow, as amicable, and full of passion. It feels like you’re watching awkward hormones connect—as it should.
And now the cringing. Melissa Rosenberg has been working as a TV writer for a while, and she’s been a part of some prestigious stuff. Her work on the first season of The O.C. and Dexter is among my favorite on both shows. Yet here, as the writer of the Twilight screenplay, she mostly stumbles. In transposing the majority of the action of the novel faithfully, mostly what she realizes isn’t some untapped potential, but rather how cheesy all of the stuff Meyer originally wrote can come across. (To wit, the whole Cam Gigandet plotline? A big fat eh.) The one bright side is that she cooks up most of the dialogue herself, and the majority of it is bouncily morbid and angsty. Still there’s no getting around her sincere plotting: it’s trite, and a bit slavish. There’s a host of other little details to make you squirm, but it’s only the expected stuff (special-effects cooked up on a $37 million-dollar budget; Taylor Lautner; lines still intact from the original story).
Yet as a fusion of horror, thriller, drama, supernatural, weirdo comedy, and pulp romance, Twilight can be a tasty cocktail. Sure, like any lukewarm drink, the taste is a bit funky going down; and afterwards you’ll wonder as you set the empty glass back whether the buzz was worth the hangover. The answer is: maybe…perhaps. A little bit. If there’s an adolescent inside you waiting to be star-struck, or a romantic whose never gone away and is always hungry for more, or even a curious cinephile just wanting to see what two strong female talents do with an undoubtedly retro-feminist fable—whatever: pop on by. At the very least Edward Cullen will make you long for a vampire coven of your very own. And at the very best? You’ll thank God or whoever for casting Pattinson in the oh-so-important role—he is, quite frankly, to die for.
That’s Twilight, in the beginning, stripped to its parabolic essence. The moral is a spry one that’s stood the test of time—true love is wherever you look for it—and the vessel of its deliverance is as zeitgeist-y as one can get living in a post-Anne Rice world. The source material is (of course; like you don’t already know) the work of one Stephenie Meyer, author extraordinaire. It is her first book in this Girl-Boy romance, Twilight that is the foundation for Twilight, and so on one level the movie was already primed to be a success—at least in terms of how well it stacked up against the book. Because though Meyer’s idea had breezy bite, her prose was still more tin than heat in those first few hundred pages. The movie couldn’t be much worse without being a catastrophe: up was the only direction to go. And so in one sense director Catherine Hardwicke has taken that route: her film is no disaster. But in translating the steamy-repressed-teenage love story of one Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) falling for one vampiric Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) onto the screen, no greatness is achieved. You’ll swoon, but you’ll cringe, too.
The swooning first. Hardwicke has only been an active filmmaker for the last five years, but in that time she’s churned out one great film (Thirteen), one really good one (Lords of Dogtown), one blah Christmas tale (The Nativity Story) and now this, which falls somewhere in between. Here, though, her style as a director is almost nearly irrelevant—none of her characteristic flourishes (the frantic, thrusting, probing cinematography; the damaged teenagers) are present; Ron Howard or Uwe Boll could be directing, for all it mattered. The one thing she does do right is position her two young stars at the center of her continually spinning cameras. The result is an indelible takeaway image: Edward and Bella, in perpetual close-up, gazing at the other, about to kiss. The other thing she does is in negative, and that’s to get out of the way of her coltish talents. Both Pattinson and Stewart stumble through their scenes, but in ways that come off, somehow, as amicable, and full of passion. It feels like you’re watching awkward hormones connect—as it should.
And now the cringing. Melissa Rosenberg has been working as a TV writer for a while, and she’s been a part of some prestigious stuff. Her work on the first season of The O.C. and Dexter is among my favorite on both shows. Yet here, as the writer of the Twilight screenplay, she mostly stumbles. In transposing the majority of the action of the novel faithfully, mostly what she realizes isn’t some untapped potential, but rather how cheesy all of the stuff Meyer originally wrote can come across. (To wit, the whole Cam Gigandet plotline? A big fat eh.) The one bright side is that she cooks up most of the dialogue herself, and the majority of it is bouncily morbid and angsty. Still there’s no getting around her sincere plotting: it’s trite, and a bit slavish. There’s a host of other little details to make you squirm, but it’s only the expected stuff (special-effects cooked up on a $37 million-dollar budget; Taylor Lautner; lines still intact from the original story).
Yet as a fusion of horror, thriller, drama, supernatural, weirdo comedy, and pulp romance, Twilight can be a tasty cocktail. Sure, like any lukewarm drink, the taste is a bit funky going down; and afterwards you’ll wonder as you set the empty glass back whether the buzz was worth the hangover. The answer is: maybe…perhaps. A little bit. If there’s an adolescent inside you waiting to be star-struck, or a romantic whose never gone away and is always hungry for more, or even a curious cinephile just wanting to see what two strong female talents do with an undoubtedly retro-feminist fable—whatever: pop on by. At the very least Edward Cullen will make you long for a vampire coven of your very own. And at the very best? You’ll thank God or whoever for casting Pattinson in the oh-so-important role—he is, quite frankly, to die for.
Quantum of Solace: B-
It goes like this: I can understand, get behind the idea of, and even triumph the execution of a darker tweak and/or reboot of a franchise. Over the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with (and heavily-argued for the cinematic merit of) films like Batman Begins (which, I’ll boldly say to any Joe or Jane Nobody, was a better movie than The Dark Knight), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (don’t think it’s dark? Wait until the puppets melt in a giant giggly-blaze about twenty minutes in), and Casino Royale. Now we get Royale’s sequel—and it’s something to behold, both as a film, and as an exercise in trying to get one’s school of internal criticism to reckon with a part-two to a reboot that had all the predatory glamour of a lone wolf, and with a main character made into flesh-and-blood, reduced, and revived again with just the barest glimmer of psychic enlightenment. Maybe it’s all intentional, but last time I checked, they were Bond films (all 22 of them) for a reason—but damn if director Marc Forster doesn’t forego many of the series’ trappings in favor of a more visceral, bone-crunching chase film. Just be thankful Jason Bourne doesn’t pop up for a cameo.
It’s important to appreciate what is being done with Quantum of Solace, even if it isn’t entirely too remarkable on its own. This is the first film in the franchise’s 40-year history that is not only a continuation of sorts, but a direct sequel—literally, it picks up minutes after the end of Royale, when Bond (Daniel Craig, cold as ever, and way more haunting by half) kidnapped the man—Mr. White (Jesper Christensen)—he thought responsible for the death of the woman he loved, Vesper (Eva Green, you will be missed). We open on his getaway, shot in the trademark fashion of most opening Bond action sequences: that is, with heightened, utterly thrilling, adrenaline. The chase is hypnotic, and would have stood out had it not ushered in another fifty minutes of chases. See, it turns out that Mr. White is but one of the many high-powered central members of QUANTUM, a worldwide network of villains who “have people everywhere.” (I guess that translates into Bond having to run everywhere?) From that conceit of opaque paranoia and conspiracy are many offshoots, some of which even find 007 fighting MI6. Looking back, it makes sense dramatically (after a fashion), but not really emotionally. I’d argue this is because the super-agent himself is allowed no exhibition for his pain. Not a single line is said of it in the film’s far-weaker first-half—instead, the man just goes around killing people. And killing people. And occasionally running from stuff. Oh, and once-in-awhile, M. (Judi Dench, wonderfully wry as ever, if with fewer good zingers this outing) will pop up, stern wagging-finger at the ready.
Ok, so no martinis are sipped, only one woman is womanized, and at one point Craig clutches a dear friend in a dirty alley, shedding a lone dramatic tear at his passing—clearly this is not the Bond of yesteryear. I get that, it’s no fault of the film, necessarily, merely a mark of evolution. But, overall, I’d argue the evolution is misplaced. Casino Royale was such a sizzling, bravura cocktail because it dared to strip the man of so many gadgets and daring escapes and lovely arm-candy down to just what he was: a hired gun with a fractured soul. And then the film went one step further and gave him a love interest more than his equal. It was something special, Royale, and it was an interesting mistake on the part of writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade to continue in that vein of viewing Bond as damaged goods. The notion still has potency, as when it is finally discussed and explored in Quantum’s last 45-minutes, but the structure of its investigation gets tiresome. Forster, most famous for his boutique-dramas Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, clearly has an inventive streak, and the fight scenes (especially the final one between Bond and Mr. Greene—played with silken, creepy, megalomania by Mathieu Amalric) are hypnotic for their horrifying intimacy. Plus there’s even a decent Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), who I haven’t even gotten, too. And I won’t. Because it all boils down to the man of the hour. I suspect this lesser-translation of an already two-year-old film’s spirit (spun about a plot stuffed with a 90s zeitgeist) has turned off many fans, and newcomers to the series. And so be it. But I’m sticking around. At some point Bond has got to smile, even through his scars, and when that happens, pray it will be the perfect counterpart to film #21: a witty, effortlessly bouncy thriller of bombs-and-Bond-and-boobs. (Not at all like this #22: an effort, a study, an idea worked over—a tragedy where almost no one cries.)
It’s important to appreciate what is being done with Quantum of Solace, even if it isn’t entirely too remarkable on its own. This is the first film in the franchise’s 40-year history that is not only a continuation of sorts, but a direct sequel—literally, it picks up minutes after the end of Royale, when Bond (Daniel Craig, cold as ever, and way more haunting by half) kidnapped the man—Mr. White (Jesper Christensen)—he thought responsible for the death of the woman he loved, Vesper (Eva Green, you will be missed). We open on his getaway, shot in the trademark fashion of most opening Bond action sequences: that is, with heightened, utterly thrilling, adrenaline. The chase is hypnotic, and would have stood out had it not ushered in another fifty minutes of chases. See, it turns out that Mr. White is but one of the many high-powered central members of QUANTUM, a worldwide network of villains who “have people everywhere.” (I guess that translates into Bond having to run everywhere?) From that conceit of opaque paranoia and conspiracy are many offshoots, some of which even find 007 fighting MI6. Looking back, it makes sense dramatically (after a fashion), but not really emotionally. I’d argue this is because the super-agent himself is allowed no exhibition for his pain. Not a single line is said of it in the film’s far-weaker first-half—instead, the man just goes around killing people. And killing people. And occasionally running from stuff. Oh, and once-in-awhile, M. (Judi Dench, wonderfully wry as ever, if with fewer good zingers this outing) will pop up, stern wagging-finger at the ready.
Ok, so no martinis are sipped, only one woman is womanized, and at one point Craig clutches a dear friend in a dirty alley, shedding a lone dramatic tear at his passing—clearly this is not the Bond of yesteryear. I get that, it’s no fault of the film, necessarily, merely a mark of evolution. But, overall, I’d argue the evolution is misplaced. Casino Royale was such a sizzling, bravura cocktail because it dared to strip the man of so many gadgets and daring escapes and lovely arm-candy down to just what he was: a hired gun with a fractured soul. And then the film went one step further and gave him a love interest more than his equal. It was something special, Royale, and it was an interesting mistake on the part of writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis & Robert Wade to continue in that vein of viewing Bond as damaged goods. The notion still has potency, as when it is finally discussed and explored in Quantum’s last 45-minutes, but the structure of its investigation gets tiresome. Forster, most famous for his boutique-dramas Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland, clearly has an inventive streak, and the fight scenes (especially the final one between Bond and Mr. Greene—played with silken, creepy, megalomania by Mathieu Amalric) are hypnotic for their horrifying intimacy. Plus there’s even a decent Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko), who I haven’t even gotten, too. And I won’t. Because it all boils down to the man of the hour. I suspect this lesser-translation of an already two-year-old film’s spirit (spun about a plot stuffed with a 90s zeitgeist) has turned off many fans, and newcomers to the series. And so be it. But I’m sticking around. At some point Bond has got to smile, even through his scars, and when that happens, pray it will be the perfect counterpart to film #21: a witty, effortlessly bouncy thriller of bombs-and-Bond-and-boobs. (Not at all like this #22: an effort, a study, an idea worked over—a tragedy where almost no one cries.)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: B-
Anytime you dig something up, the fact that it’s still well-preserved, in whatever measure, is applause-worthy—I mean, the corpse, dusty as it must be after years of quiet disintegration into history, can still walk and talk and entertain. That’s pretty cool…for about twenty minutes. Then you want the nice talking corpse to go back and lie down for a nice little sleep, for, like, forever. The dead are so not meant to be raised. Yet, apparently, no one sent that memo to director Steven Spielberg (y’know: that guy hailed as, perhaps, the greatest director of his generation, if not ever) and executive-producer George Lucas (this guy you have to know already)—both of whom have gone off and exhumed Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) for his fourth adventure in as many years: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And guess what? It walks and talks and pleases (insofar as that the story-telling joints don’t creak too badly, the adrenal glands still churn along at an acceptable rate) and—surprise of surprises—somewhere buried deep inside does, in fact, burn a gleam of vitality in one young star trying his darndest to revitalize one very old film series that feels only older as the running time piles on up.
The camera starts out from the air, zooming down, and stays that way: in constant motion. This being one of Spielberg’s action films (one of his two fortes—the other is, of course, the prestige drama: see Schindler’s List, Munich, and Saving Private Ryan), the sequences that are full of motion are full of it—to the bursting point; and it’s perfectly choreographed and shot. And this being an Indiana Jones movie, the scenes that don’t hustle and bustle quickly segue to those that do. Remember now, Lucas first conceived of Dr. Jones and his adventures as a sort of anti-film, way back when: the type of movie that forewent exposition in favor of exhibition—screw plot and lengthy scenes of back-and-forth, how about trying to cram it all into one continuous stream of pratfalls and narrow-escapes—that’d be something to watch. So the audience got Raiders of the Lost Ark, claimed by some to be Spielberg’s most perfect film. Jump ahead two sequels and there’s even a nice walk into the sunset… but what about this? There’s the same spirit in its execution, and the sequences of verve and movement and daring here please pleasantly. But handing over the screenwriting job to David Koepp (after Lucas cooked up the story with Jeff Nathanson) was a grave mistake of subtly upsetting proportions. He reduces the film to a paint-by-the numbers attachment to an earlier, far better, trilogy. In the end, all that action can’t make up for all that effort: too little bang for too much buck.
Speaking of bucks, there is a young one of particular note: Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams, a rough-and-tumble kid who rumbles up in a motorcycle to be Indy’s sidekick. Not only is he the one relevant note played in this heard-it-all-before 122-minute orchestral movement, LaBeouf also gives him a wider breadth of life than anyone else on screen. His mother, Marian (Karen Allen), “Mac” (Ray Winstone), and even overseas greats like Cate Blanchett (as the Soviet Big Bad) and John Hurt are all left going through the motions of a performance that already feels outdated. Sure, they’re feisty and grave and grouchy when all of that is called for, but it’s all surface shimmer—gloss. Even a great Spielbergian hero like Mutt (who is, like all great Spielbergians, just looking for a family) is paid just the bare minimum: lip service. Once you start to throw in the wackier elements of the second act (in the context of a larger plot that sees the good archeologist battling Soviets for control of some really out there paranormal artifacts), and even given the aplomb of the veteran production team, well…there’s only so much that one really-cool image of the doctor scooping up his trademark fedora from the dusty ground can do for a movie. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suffers the worst of all sequels’ fates: even at its best, the effort seems a bit unnecessary—fleeting. And at its worst you just have to grimace for a moment and wonder, “Why?”
The camera starts out from the air, zooming down, and stays that way: in constant motion. This being one of Spielberg’s action films (one of his two fortes—the other is, of course, the prestige drama: see Schindler’s List, Munich, and Saving Private Ryan), the sequences that are full of motion are full of it—to the bursting point; and it’s perfectly choreographed and shot. And this being an Indiana Jones movie, the scenes that don’t hustle and bustle quickly segue to those that do. Remember now, Lucas first conceived of Dr. Jones and his adventures as a sort of anti-film, way back when: the type of movie that forewent exposition in favor of exhibition—screw plot and lengthy scenes of back-and-forth, how about trying to cram it all into one continuous stream of pratfalls and narrow-escapes—that’d be something to watch. So the audience got Raiders of the Lost Ark, claimed by some to be Spielberg’s most perfect film. Jump ahead two sequels and there’s even a nice walk into the sunset… but what about this? There’s the same spirit in its execution, and the sequences of verve and movement and daring here please pleasantly. But handing over the screenwriting job to David Koepp (after Lucas cooked up the story with Jeff Nathanson) was a grave mistake of subtly upsetting proportions. He reduces the film to a paint-by-the numbers attachment to an earlier, far better, trilogy. In the end, all that action can’t make up for all that effort: too little bang for too much buck.
Speaking of bucks, there is a young one of particular note: Shia LaBeouf as Mutt Williams, a rough-and-tumble kid who rumbles up in a motorcycle to be Indy’s sidekick. Not only is he the one relevant note played in this heard-it-all-before 122-minute orchestral movement, LaBeouf also gives him a wider breadth of life than anyone else on screen. His mother, Marian (Karen Allen), “Mac” (Ray Winstone), and even overseas greats like Cate Blanchett (as the Soviet Big Bad) and John Hurt are all left going through the motions of a performance that already feels outdated. Sure, they’re feisty and grave and grouchy when all of that is called for, but it’s all surface shimmer—gloss. Even a great Spielbergian hero like Mutt (who is, like all great Spielbergians, just looking for a family) is paid just the bare minimum: lip service. Once you start to throw in the wackier elements of the second act (in the context of a larger plot that sees the good archeologist battling Soviets for control of some really out there paranormal artifacts), and even given the aplomb of the veteran production team, well…there’s only so much that one really-cool image of the doctor scooping up his trademark fedora from the dusty ground can do for a movie. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull suffers the worst of all sequels’ fates: even at its best, the effort seems a bit unnecessary—fleeting. And at its worst you just have to grimace for a moment and wonder, “Why?”
August: A-
Josh Hartnett has a certain look, a certain pose (some would even go so far as to call it a shallow tic). And, in the past, it hasn't served him all too well. In films like The Black Dahlia or Pearl Harbor, when he tends to pull it out, he just sort of…well…stares off. Into nothing. Yet in Austin Chick's August, a canny and poignant snapshot of a corporate wunderkind flaming out, Hartnett's stare does some glorious things: no longer is it a blank mask. This time around his face—eyebrows drawn across like heavy slashes, eyes in premature saddened down-turn—is the audience's window into a soul only slowly and most fully revealed in quick, dodgy glimpses. And, more, it's also the most fascinating tool of a larger character scrutinized to fascinating, microscopic degree.
Arguably, a movie—a story—about what happened in the summer of 2001, right before 9/11, has never quite been told before. Sure, on paper, the outline of events is eerily similar to a host of other films: meteoric economic rise, and then precipitous crash. (Even reading this now, I can see a far larger application for the true mechanism behind this description: a hero's rise and fall.) But the "dot-com" bubble was something different, in its way, something entirely new; and so too was the environment of commerce it sought to create from the old system. The rules had yet to change, but the game had already switched over—changed in mid-stream by a bunch of 20-and-30-something college grads with dreams and the technological skill to (as Hartnett's character Tom Sterling says in a rather beautiful speech half-way through the movie) "write in a language being created right before our eyes." They had business models and financial projections and were pioneers into an area of exploration so vividly exotic as to win the world over. And then: the metaphorical iceberg. A hole, unexpectedly—sinking, then, followed by disaster. In the early summer of 2001, the world of E collapsed, and we enter into the wreckage a month afterward, when Tom—with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott)—is trying to keep their brainchild from going bankrupt three weeks before its stock starts trading publically.
Written by Howard A. Rodman, the first and most notable thing that August does right is create this world piece-by-piece, in seamless fashion. Directed, at first, by Chick like a sort of hazy, drugs-and-women-and-money-and-all breezy biopic about success and easy living, the transition of tone is nearly translucent, making the later implications all the more surprising and powerful. We begin on the outside, looking in on Tom and his circle of corporate cohorts, snorting a little now and then at how much of a jerk he can be. And then we, the audience, is sucked inward, inexorably, unknowingly, bit-by-bit, until the crisis is viewed from the inside-out. His sense of cornered helplessness, of a financial world that has caught him in a cage the size of cigar box, becomes ours.
In that revelation, cleverly, is packed so much more. In showing the psychic strain of being captain of a sinking ship, we see the captain in his naked entirety—the mirror of his perils and follies reflecting back on him with sharp and objective skill. Amidst the morass of shrinking revenue stream, Tom is struggling with hippie-intellectual parents (Rip Torn and Caroline Lagerfelt) who aren't quite sure what their son does…or are proud of it anyway; plus there's the ex-girlfriend (Naomie Harris) he wants to rekindle things with; and his brother, whose relationship to Tom provides the emotional center of the movie. They're partners, but in a dynamic that is equal about as many times as it is peaceful. Through a perspective efficiently crafted from long-term familial tension, and short-term mega-success, Tom comes to the central revelation of August (in a climactic investors meeting with poignancy that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat and heart simultaneously)—about how, in the end, no bubble burst, no balloon popped. The summer of possibility simply faded into the fall of pragmatism. And a man, played by an actor giving his very best high-wire performance—a cocktail of zest and hurt and charm— was left standing in a strip-club, playing pinball with his brother, slightly wiser now, staring (wistfully now, with a bit of contentment, but still with ambition) at the changing leaves and wondering where the hell all the sunlight went.
W.: C+
It's not that I don't think a movie about the life and times of George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush and our 43rd President, doesn't need to be made—and that one made well, and I mean extremely well: full of perception and curiosity or satire and viciousness, wouldn't on its own merits be some sort of cinematic event (coming as it would not minutes after the shadow of the man had begun to fade) both for skill in structuring and for purporting some sincerity or force of emotion about our current Commander-in-Chief. But W. is not that film; and as much as director Oliver Stone wants us to believe that he is both a curious pragmatist and an outraged satirist, he comes across—really—as neither. Instead he directs this semi-biographical, semi-comedic, semi-tragic film as if from a place I thought Stone didn't even know existed: restraint.
Things start out fine, though, as the director and his writer Stanley Weiser seem to have chosen a certain path from the very beginning: black comedy. We open on a trademark Stoneian symbol of the President standing in an empty ball field (remember now: he used to own The Rangers), arms wide open—embracing the empty stands full of imaginary hoots and complimentary applause. It's a joke, a pot-shot, a jeer at both the lunacy and megalomania of the world's most infamous cowboy. And it works for what it is: the viciousness of the delivery making up for the hollowness of the attack itself. And so then does that tone carry over, through the ensuing scenes as the audience gets a feel for Weiser's structure—how he loops the present Pre-Iraq/Post-9/11 to the past, before "Jr." became "Dubya." Stone's camera darts back and forth, in hazy pointed jags, through the Oval Office and then back to a Yale fraternity hazing, and then back again, already building for the viewer a foundation from which to mock George Bush's (Josh Brolin) every move.
And then it shifts. The angry sarcasm that pools at the feet of those early few scenes dries up quick as the tone morphs from activist comedy to biography. Less and less do we see of those more recent unstable times, and more and more do we see the son as he tangos with his father (James Cromwell) over those post-college days when the alcoholic young man can't seem to find a job—or even keep down a stable way of life. Sounds a bit clichéd, right? It is, and the device is nearly as trite: used to upend the previous platform from bared teeth into open minds—bleh.
But the transition isn't terrible, and that's not the point. Using the rails of Weiser's articulate, cleanly elegant scenes of dialogue as a jumping off point for his more abstract symbolism, the director finds himself unnecessarily entranced with the background of the man he seems only to want to rake over the coals. And that's a big mistake, since as he is pulled in two directions, so is his audience. It doesn't help that the film is overlong at roughly two hours, and that the perfectly adequate presence of a biographer's eye becomes unwelcome as it begins to cloud over with Stone's overreaching. (Did we really need Thandie Newton doing a terrible, terrible, Condie Rice?) There's a big plus in most of his casting—Brolin is an exemplary Bush Jr., shooting past imitation into an ctual, characteristically fascinating, performance—but a big minus in the film itself. Shot, edited, and marketed in just under nine months, W. is exactly the kind of film we don't really need, from exactly the kind of filmmaker we do. He bottles a sizzling subject, and douses him all with water, leaving us to choke on the illusion of smoke and wet ash.
Things start out fine, though, as the director and his writer Stanley Weiser seem to have chosen a certain path from the very beginning: black comedy. We open on a trademark Stoneian symbol of the President standing in an empty ball field (remember now: he used to own The Rangers), arms wide open—embracing the empty stands full of imaginary hoots and complimentary applause. It's a joke, a pot-shot, a jeer at both the lunacy and megalomania of the world's most infamous cowboy. And it works for what it is: the viciousness of the delivery making up for the hollowness of the attack itself. And so then does that tone carry over, through the ensuing scenes as the audience gets a feel for Weiser's structure—how he loops the present Pre-Iraq/Post-9/11 to the past, before "Jr." became "Dubya." Stone's camera darts back and forth, in hazy pointed jags, through the Oval Office and then back to a Yale fraternity hazing, and then back again, already building for the viewer a foundation from which to mock George Bush's (Josh Brolin) every move.
And then it shifts. The angry sarcasm that pools at the feet of those early few scenes dries up quick as the tone morphs from activist comedy to biography. Less and less do we see of those more recent unstable times, and more and more do we see the son as he tangos with his father (James Cromwell) over those post-college days when the alcoholic young man can't seem to find a job—or even keep down a stable way of life. Sounds a bit clichéd, right? It is, and the device is nearly as trite: used to upend the previous platform from bared teeth into open minds—bleh.
But the transition isn't terrible, and that's not the point. Using the rails of Weiser's articulate, cleanly elegant scenes of dialogue as a jumping off point for his more abstract symbolism, the director finds himself unnecessarily entranced with the background of the man he seems only to want to rake over the coals. And that's a big mistake, since as he is pulled in two directions, so is his audience. It doesn't help that the film is overlong at roughly two hours, and that the perfectly adequate presence of a biographer's eye becomes unwelcome as it begins to cloud over with Stone's overreaching. (Did we really need Thandie Newton doing a terrible, terrible, Condie Rice?) There's a big plus in most of his casting—Brolin is an exemplary Bush Jr., shooting past imitation into an ctual, characteristically fascinating, performance—but a big minus in the film itself. Shot, edited, and marketed in just under nine months, W. is exactly the kind of film we don't really need, from exactly the kind of filmmaker we do. He bottles a sizzling subject, and douses him all with water, leaving us to choke on the illusion of smoke and wet ash.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: A-
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Eagle Eye: C
It's 2008—so why do movies like this keep getting made? We live in an age of hyper-awareness and literacy; and yet, when confronted with the possibility of creating a thriller gussied up as an allegory for our modern-1984 times, director DJ Caruso makes…this? This—Eagle Eye—that is like some dusty-retro relic from yesteryear, dug up and cleaned with spit-shine, then plopped before us as an audience and beamed directly onto our retinas—its mediocrity made "relevant" for a culture now long past being fooled by the old as the new. It's the kind of movie where the enemy is (spoiler!) a giant supercomputer; where the heroes are struggling, pretty, Americans With Issues who still find time to spark some sexual chemistry; and where the government always seems to get in its own way until—everyone together now—the maverick of the bunch realizes the hero is in the right. Sheesh, what is this: Tron?
It isn't as though Eagle Eye is entirely incompetent; and it's in no way not quite a thrill ride. In fact, the first 45-minutes are about as engaging as one could have hoped for. Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is down on his luck, his brother just died, when he begins to receive mysterious phone calls, shipments of terrorist contraband, and money. Soon the FBI is involved, and he's running for his life—the omnipotent Voice on the other end of the line always directing him. Rachel (Michelle Monahan) is in a similar predicament, except that on her end, it's her son the Voice is holding hostage.
What's going on? Who is this "they"? And why are on Earth are such nice-looking young people like Jerry and Rachel being put through so much insanity?
Sad news: the propulsion of the first act runs dry quick, as answers become apparent (the most stultifying of which I've already revealed for you). And without that source of fuel, first you realize how banal the script is. And then you realize how completely and incompetently absurd is the craft presented to you as coherence and entertainment. Yes, stuff blows up and people are thrilled and scared and put in life-or-death situations. But why, exactly? Anyone?
I didn't think so.
Written by John Glenn & Travis Wright, and then Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, Eagle Eye is a hollow trifle—a curio of pop entertainment that seems to have wandered in from a far dustier set. Reportedly, the idea was conceived by executive-producer Steven Spielberg, but in whatever iteration he may have originally seen it, none remains. There is, instead, cliché after disconnected cliché. Even the extraordinarily well-cast actors—among whom, as no one should be shocked to learn, Mr. LaBeouf is the stand-out (his funeral sequence early on is the sole moment that actually reaches out and grabs you)—struggle and stumble under the weight of so much bull. And Mr. Caruso…well, after being given the bigger-budgetary reins after last year's Disturbia, he seems mostly content to let stuff get larger and more impossible, until it all spirals out of control—an '80s plot, meets '90s star-power, layered thick with '00 Michael Bay technical sensibilities. Welcome to the future, folks.
It isn't as though Eagle Eye is entirely incompetent; and it's in no way not quite a thrill ride. In fact, the first 45-minutes are about as engaging as one could have hoped for. Jerry (Shia LaBeouf) is down on his luck, his brother just died, when he begins to receive mysterious phone calls, shipments of terrorist contraband, and money. Soon the FBI is involved, and he's running for his life—the omnipotent Voice on the other end of the line always directing him. Rachel (Michelle Monahan) is in a similar predicament, except that on her end, it's her son the Voice is holding hostage.
What's going on? Who is this "they"? And why are on Earth are such nice-looking young people like Jerry and Rachel being put through so much insanity?
Sad news: the propulsion of the first act runs dry quick, as answers become apparent (the most stultifying of which I've already revealed for you). And without that source of fuel, first you realize how banal the script is. And then you realize how completely and incompetently absurd is the craft presented to you as coherence and entertainment. Yes, stuff blows up and people are thrilled and scared and put in life-or-death situations. But why, exactly? Anyone?
I didn't think so.
Written by John Glenn & Travis Wright, and then Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, Eagle Eye is a hollow trifle—a curio of pop entertainment that seems to have wandered in from a far dustier set. Reportedly, the idea was conceived by executive-producer Steven Spielberg, but in whatever iteration he may have originally seen it, none remains. There is, instead, cliché after disconnected cliché. Even the extraordinarily well-cast actors—among whom, as no one should be shocked to learn, Mr. LaBeouf is the stand-out (his funeral sequence early on is the sole moment that actually reaches out and grabs you)—struggle and stumble under the weight of so much bull. And Mr. Caruso…well, after being given the bigger-budgetary reins after last year's Disturbia, he seems mostly content to let stuff get larger and more impossible, until it all spirals out of control—an '80s plot, meets '90s star-power, layered thick with '00 Michael Bay technical sensibilities. Welcome to the future, folks.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Choke: C+
Choke is not a Chuck Palahniuk movie. It’s based on one of his books; but that’s the closest the film ever comes to touching, in an audiovisual format, the scabrous sort of satire that Palahniuk pioneered years ago. And worse, even with expert brow-wriggling and –mugging by Sam Rockwell, the complexity and unremitting pain of the original’s prose has all but been steamrolled—rib-tickled into a frenetic comedy of the absurd.
Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.
Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.
Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.
Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.
Take a step back, though: let’s pretend then that you hadn’t read the cult classic that inspired first-time writer-director Clark Gregg’s project. Now, re-watch the film; let’s argue, for the sake of argument, that the source material—of knowledge of the novel’s premier devastation—taints the movie adapted from it. And…Go.
Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.
Turns outs that Choke isn’t lightweight because of the book; it just so happens that previous information can highlight how dark it could have been. After all, when you’re dealing with the self-help-self-destruct story of sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) who runs a restaurant con in which he “chokes” on food in order to be saved (the savior, accordingly feeling connected to Victor, continues to send him money thereafter) and help pay his demented mother’s (Anjelica Huston, looking for all that she tries like the wrong woman in the wrong part) medical bills, well, you’ve got some pretty dark stuff. Dark and riotous—at least in the hands of a skilled, fleet humorist: someone who isn’t afraid to push a joke into tragedy, to stun laughter back down into your throat. Chuck Palahniuk was such a man. And more, he could find—and went looking for—the mania at the root of Victor’s very very very twisted life. He didn’t always succeed, but he created an indelible satiric vision in the process. Gregg has no such luck.
Blame, perhaps, his lack of experience. The veteran actor has only made one movie: this one. And before its production, it’s reported that he worked on the script for six years. Six—you think somewhere in that time he may have grown a little nervous, taken a step back and restructured the uncomfortable into the tamely insane? That said, don’t mistake me; Choke is insane, a bit, and it’ll make you giggle with some of its more finely-crafted sequences (the best part of the whole movie, and its one, ironically, that was almost wholly intact from the source material, is the fake-rape), but it has no weight, no dimension, no darkness or heft. It’s the equivalent of cotton candy comedy: a tastefully sour delight wrapped around a barely-there chewy center. Call it Chuck Palahniuk Lite.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
The Nines: B+
The Nines has, in reality, little to do with math—save for the omnipresence of its titular number. It is, however, framed by an elegant geometric structure: the narrative being told by three successive short films, each unspooling and spilling into each other as if, instead, they were three concentric circles. This is a movie masquerading as a "tiny" drama with exponentially grand ambitions; a metaphysic puzzle that tickles your heart and brain the bigger, more complex, and more numerous the pieces get. Rarely does meta-filmmaking like this get more authentically, or more hypnotically, engrossing.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Drawing from TMZ, his own life, Lost, and his own life some more, writer-director John August creates a bold and confident cocktail of adrenaline and mystery—a 99-minute (get it: 99 minutes…ooh, creepy) drama about three different men played by one man, stuck between six different women, played by just two. The man is Ryan Reynolds (y'know: Van Wilder? No? Well, ok, but he's talented. Really) and he plays, one after the other, an actor under house arrest, a hot-shot young writer-producer, and a stranded videogame designer. The women are Melissa McCarthy and Hope Davis and who they play never really strays—though, once, McCarthy does place herself…and it's as nifty as it sounds—Davis is always a manipulator with an agenda perfectly hidden by an even-more-perfectly manicured persona, while McCarthy is always Reynolds muse or rescuer or voice of reason. Sitting on his shoulders, metaphorically, the latter is the angel, and the former is the devil with blonde bangs.
…Except that August is a far trickier auteur than he lets on. In each of the short films (starting with "The Prisoner," and then "Reality Television," and then finally "Knowing") the director toys and tricks his audience with fleet ingenuity—imbuing his otherwise middle-of-the-road dialogue with a tone of creeping horror and revelation. Objectively, though, not each of the three slices of his larger head-scratching pie is created equal. "The Prisoner" is alluring but scattered; full of wacked-out images that aren't nearly as entrancing as one originally perceives. "Reality Television," though, is a 30-minute little kick of behind-the-stages fun. In telling of how Gavin (that'd be Reynolds, with Tina Fey-glasses) struggles and manipulates in an attempt to get his show on the air—the big issue is his star: Melissa McCarthy, playing Melissa McCarthy—The Nines gets a much-needed jolt of droll incisiveness, while still ending with a kicker of an image that haunts you all the way down to the third act.
"Knowing" is ostensibly the pilot Gavin made in the second act (and it feels, cleverly, like prime-time television all the way down to its high-class color palette), about a man who loses his family. At this point in the overall scheme, though, the perspective is flipped. No one really is who they seem—least of all our hero. And that sort of instability suits the movie in general, especially when August finally gets his big reveal…and earns his every gasp of shock and surprise. Let me just say: it goes big. I mean big. Like, cosmically big. But, pleasurably, too, can I say it's not a stretch. And it works.
Nothing this intimate could be this good without a great cast; and in most sense, Reynolds and his women (with, on occasion, Elle Fanning as a mute little girl. Who. Knows. Too. Much) are. McCarthy flips through the channels of her brain—bubbly, vulnerable, sincere, funny—with charming dexterity. And Davis gives characteristic shades of gray to a femme fatale who, in the end, is always who she seemed. Reynolds, though, is the real treat. On the surface, he's a National Lampoon's frat boy matured into an A-list hunk, but he exploits his charm to find a gritty callow desperation beneath it. As the maestro floating above them all, John August coolly pulls and tugs on their puppet strings—making for a thrilling show. Ultimately, the pleasure in The Nines bubbles down to its small-scale jabs and quicksilver changes, the beauty of its craft, whether than the occasional opaqueness of its presentation. This is one puzzle that's devilishly accessible—an exercise in illusion that gives way, time after time, to more illusion until, finally, the real thing. And, truly, it is.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Burn After Reading: B-
Satire (n): “The use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
What the Coen brothers—Ethan and Joel—have done in their latest film, Burn After Reading, isn’t quite satire; but it looks so much like the real thing the illusion almost sticks. Almost. Together the filmmaking duo skewer a wide variety of comedic tropes (from silly Princeton graduates, to alcoholic ex-spies, to silly gym workers sporting even sillier pompadour haircuts) and arrange the jabs and zingers in such a way as to approximate the shape of a blistering satire, but not the feel of one. Look above—see that definition of “satire” there? In telling the story of how Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt, amiably rocking an even more amiable, buffoonish, and entertaining persona) discover the misplaced notes of a former CIA-agent (John Malkovich, entering ever scene as if from a far better film), the Coens cram a lot of “funny business” (irony, sarcasm) on screen, but they also surround the audience in such a thick layer of smug ridicule as to render irrelevant anything pointed therein useful to be said.
Points to the pair, though, for still being able to score the biggest talent in town; at this point, they’re turning into the neo-hip-Woody Allen: scoring high-class talent for projects not even deserving half that caliber. In Reading you’ve got the aforementioned McDormand, Pitt, and Malkovich, plus George Clooney and Tilda Swinton (who play a couple of married, harried, suburbanites engaged in a love affair devoid of pretty much any affection)—appropriately, the cast mug and shoot-off their lines with all necessary zest. In fact, you wouldn’t be mistaken in, after having finished your viewing experience, longing for the Coens to have constructed a higher quality project around their actors. Because it isn’t the cast (uniformly game, from the biggest role to the smallest, ironically played by even big names, like J.K. Simmons) or, really, the concept; it’s the presentation.
United, for the second time, Ethan and Joel now co-write and co-direct. Famously, last year, this new synergy brought them—rightfully—heaps of praise for No Country for Old Men. But whereas there, the brothers seemed to have found a soul mate in Cormac McCarthy (like, one imagines, a pair of sharks find a well-preserved antique saw to sharpen their teeth on), here they create from their purest of whimsies. Accordingly, throughout the entire 95-minutes, Burn After Reading is presented on the exterior as a straight-laced thriller, full of foreboding African drums and the like. But we know better—those sly Coen kids! We’re in on the joke; oh what fun! Except…not really. Seemingly over-satisfied with just the merest intimation of cleverness in making a caper that doubles back on itself as a farce of the highest-level of incompetence, the filmmakers leave the audience stumbling around in an over-sanitized comedy of manners—sans identifiable characters or intoxicatingly silly situations. They start going, but never quite go far enough; towing the ledge, but never even letting one toe slip over.
Still, I laughed. Ok, let me be more specific: I giggled a lot. (Belly laughs are just not in the cards, folks.) Because beneath all the shallowness, once you can dig past the one-and-a-half dimensions of craft that are presented as three full ones, Burn After Reading can be a not-half-bad romp: full of intricate exchanges, structured engagingly, and—let’s just face it—filmed with the firmest of tongues-in-cheek. Maybe, then, the expectations are let down two-fold. Having seen what they can do with the bleakest of terrific cinematic dramas, as well as with the most finely-imagined of ingeniously witty murder-mysteries (Fargo, of course…speaking of, for anyone who wants to see Frances McDormand be really, really great in a Coen film, rent this), why then do we as an audience get this? Burn After Reading is a barrel of laughs that’s only half-full—a joke dipped in irony, wrapped-up in pretention, and then surrounded by air quotes.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Southland Tales: C
For some unknowable reason, two years ago, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales captured the cultural zeitgeist—or, rather, some form of it. It was the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and Kelly’s film was premiering there, for the first time. Ever. Plus, it was a hot ticket: the follow-up to his first film Donnie Darko—a movie that captured both critics and a cult following. Turns out that this second movie, though, got no such happy welcoming; it was, frankly, critically decimated and accordingly blew up a whole storm of negative media (which in its way has a sick fascination, now that the film is available to the masses on DVD). Each and every one of us can now go home and answer for ourselves the question: was it really all that bad?
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
The answer, I can most objectively report, is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Kelly—who wrote, directed, and produced this sprawling 144-minute tale—sinks so far into his delusions that he not only loses the audience, it would seem as if he loses himself, too. In this cross-cutting story of various inhabitants of Venice Beach, there isn’t even one frame that has a coherent value in a larger scheme of things. Characters walk, run, and shoot at each other. And, on paper, the world they inhabit would seem to give their actions an extra dimension of propulsive satirical weight. (In Tales, for our “amusement”…or to “inform” us…or something, Kelly creates a post-apocalyptic world in which terrorism has run so rampant as to mutate the American government into some Orwellian cast-off in order to combat it). But nothing ever quite works. No, let me clarify: nothing ever quite makes sense.
At the center of the whole thing is Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac movie star with ties to a Republican politician currently running for President. Spinning around him are Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar looking a bit like she’s wandered onto the wrong set), a porn star struggling to diversify her business model, Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a police officer who may or may not have a twin brother who may or may not control the fate of the entire world, and Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake, narrating in a Southern accent so undeniably hollow it about drives your ears to jump right off your head). Each of them, at one point or another, ends up propelling the interests of the two opposing organizations at the heart of the film’s plot: USIDent—a massive informational complex manned by the government to spy on any and every one—and the Neo-Marxist movement, which even in the “near-future” is still pretty much like it always was. But it’s not like it matters, anyway. Though things keep being plotted and intended and re-organized and revealed, the story never clears up.
In fact, Kelly shuffles through so many styles in his filmmaking, so quickly, you may experience a bit of nausea. Alternately, he’s making a science fiction epic, a parody of said epic, a black comedy, a Crash-style drama set in Lower California, and a musical. (About that last one: at one point in Tales, Justin Timberlake goes on a drug trip, and in such a stupor, Kelly stages a sequence crafted around The Killer’s “All The Things I’ve Done,” starting with their ecstatic bridge (you know the one: I’ve got soul/But I’m not a soldier…) and it’s the most powerful moment of the entire movie.)
It would seem as though the director has some schizophrenia, and it would seem as though it seeps into the movie itself. Most nagging of all, though, is that he has a real knack for pulling you through, hook-line-and-sinker, minute-by-minute. Never once, really, was I bored. Just irritated—even, when, in the last hour, the movie seems to cop from some sub-par Mulholland Drive and become about characters writing a movie that’s real but set in the past (since, shocker!, they’re all from the future). You want to know the real truth at the heart of Southland Tales? It isn’t that our world could devolve into a big, demoralizing blob. No, it’s that, in this day and age, someone can still perform a truly aggravating magic trick: Richard Kelly will, in a no time, make your whole day disappear—his movie along with it.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
House of Sand and Fog: B
There's a trap lying in wait once you start to watch House of Sand and Fog—and it has nothing to do with the way your sympathies keep being sliced up between the main characters. No, the real problem is that Vadim Perelman's adaptation of the Andre Dubus III novel hovers vaguely in that maddening cinematic gray area: it's a prestige picture that's firmly middlebrow. Everything works for most of the film, but the real surprise is how unpretentious the whole enterprise can be. Never has an "artful" film that feels so artless felt so engaging.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
We open on a screen filled with the swirling fog of San Francisco—cut to an ambulance, a house in the background, and a woman who looks like an angel who threw herself from heaven (that'd be Jennifer Connelly, who's like the poor-man's Kate Winslet)—then cut back to who used to live in the house, and then who lived in it after them, and so on. Perelman takes a rote-thriller conceit (at least on paper)—save the homestead from the immigrants!—and structures it like a tragedy in domestic miniature.
Turns out that woman, named Kathy Nicolo, lived alone on a bungalow by the sea, her husband having left some months before, hiding from the family she no longer possesses the emotional strength to face. The house is less her place of rest than her cave in which she's perpetually hibernating. But the county evicts her on some obscure technicality that later proves to be false; but not before an Iranian family, headed by the ex-Col. Behrani (Ben Kingsley, his eyes wide as mirrors, fogged by years of toil), has scooped up the auctioned-off property. What a nightmare for Kathy, even more so because it seems Behrani is intent on selling off the house for quadruple what he paid for it.
Wait! This isn't right! Where's Steven Segal when you need him, to come crashing through the
living room window and drive away those damn terrorists?
Wait! This isn't right either! Much as the two titular substances shift and squirm, entrapping and entrancing in alternate measure, so does Perelman's film (which he directed, produced, and co-wrote). Turns out Behrani's been driven away by the new regime after the Shah was ousted, and he sees in the house both a gateway to more prosperity—there's a great moment early on when you realize ever since he moved to America, he's been slowly and irrevocably going broke—and a chance to reflect back on happier days when he himself owned a bungalow—this time on the Caspian Sea.
This is how House spirals out for more than two hours: two souls flitting around for a spot to rest, fighting over their mutual property. To complicate the formula is a lover of Kathy's—a damaged cop, ironically named Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard)—and the Colonel's wife, Nadereh (Shoreh Aghdashloo), both of whom add layers of tension and heartache. In its best moments, the family and the woman whose house they're living in play off of each other in a cleverly painful pattern of distrust and dislocation, but the overarching themes are a tad too obvious. Perelman fills the screen with beautiful images of light and movement, and his cast—especially Connelly—performs minor feats of miraculous achievement but in its final act, things start hitting the fan with a wet thwack. Looking up from the screen as the end credits roll, it hits you: what was grippingly small and prestige-less grew painfully large and "tragic," completely upsetting the delicate emotional balance that kept the audience so unbalanced to start with. In the end, this House crumbles.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
