Perry's: Product Review

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

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

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

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

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist: A-

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

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

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

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

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

30 Rock: The Complete First Season: B+

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

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

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

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

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

Eagle Eye: C

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

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

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

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

I didn't think so.

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

Choke: C+

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

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

Anything? Really? Nothing? Oh.

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

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

Subliminal Tapes: Product Review

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

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

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

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

The Nines: B+

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

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

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

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

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

Burn After Reading: B-

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

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

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

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

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

Southland Tales: C

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

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

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

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

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

House of Sand and Fog: B

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.