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The Social Network

2010-10-04T06:00:00.006-05:00

As The Social Network braves the unpredictable terrain of American theaters, I find myself in the position of having managed not to write anything in nearly two months. Since I started regularly writing again, this has been my longest hiatus, and it's been one that crept up on me like a wary predator. A number of factors have contributed to this drought (the late-summer multiplex doldrums, a re-watching of The Wire, the AL East pennant race, the day-job…), and even as I type this out I hear a voice in the back of my head whispering: "This isn't real yet."

When will I really be a writer? Will it be when I have a reader? In that case, what are my thoughts worth?

The online film critic suffering existential malaise is a hilarious irony, but the dilemma isn't unique to this occupation. The question of whether or not I will be noticed when I start knocking trees down in a forest is one that can apply to much of how we interact with each other these days. At work, I exchange instant messages with co-workers sitting a yard away. This past Saturday night I was at a party where a close friend said she hadn't heard about the event because she missed the Facebook invitation. When I post these words to my blog, are they still mine, or will they belong to the blogosphere? To what extent can I judge my own value by the number of click-throughs I get from Twitter?

I would like to say this is all a lot of juvenile pablum, but it's not, sadly. There are people out there who suggest that The Social Network, a fictionalized retelling of the creation of Facebook, can only be of middling importance. There are people for whom Facebook is merely a toy, a phase, a fad, a trend, something for the younger generation that they cannot understand, a computer game. Rather, Facebook is quickly destroying the foundations of human interaction — and even if we cannot blame Facebook for IMs, text messages or Twitter, we can blame Facebook for making this tripe look 'cool' and getting everyone wrapped up in living their lives online. We may mock or pity those addicted to Second Life, but how are their consciously contrived extensions of id or superego any different than the person who updates their Facebook page several times in a day?

"I used to write letters, I used to sign my name," sings Win Butler on Arcade Fire's new album, The Suburbs. "I used to sleep at night, before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain […] when the lights cut out, I was lost standing in the wilderness downtown." In his book, You Are Not a Gadget, computer scientist Jaron Lainer writes of how we are giving too much value to a hive mentality with no consideration to the loss of the self; what's true and meaningful is verified by wikipedia, which is created by an us, not an I. In a New Yorker profile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's ultimate goal for the site is described as an eventuality in which "users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended," and describes the possibility of turning on your television and receiving a message that 14 friends are watching Entourage. What Zuckerberg has thus far failed to communicate is the virtue of any of this. And by the way, how will the initial recommender know to read his article or visit his restaurant in the first place?

In advertisements for cell phones, humans are now depicted breaking up with girlfriends via text message (which they get to do thanks to cheap rates), ignoring their families, reclining to watch a movie on a public train because they think it's their living room, and finally turning into robots, all without a hint of irony. These scenarios, all of them, are filmed as evidence for why you should buy cell phones. In The Social Network, Napster co-founder and eventual president of Facebook Sean Parker claims, "We lived in fields, we lived in cities, and now we'll live on the internet," right before getting busted for doing a bunch of coke. He worries about the scandal "getting out."

The Social Network is a great movie, nearly perfect. It's funny and slick, brutal when it needs to be and light-hearted when it gets the chance. It's an expertly told story, thanks to the unlikely teamwork of writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher. It's beautiful and moving, and should work as entertainment for anybody inclined to sit down for it. But what makes it great is Sorkin's ability to write hateful and pitiful people with sympathy, which, coupled with Fincher's pervading sense of doom, allows the story to unfold as though it were a movie about the Manhattan Project. These children, these college kids about to change the world, have no idea the havoc they are to wreak. Or, if you aren't interested in that, it's just a great story.

It's all about money, power and sex, of course. Sorkin posits Facebook's inception as the result of a break-up. Zuckerberg unleashes a vengeful blog post that he will never live down; when he tries to apologize, he is told "the internet isn't written in pencil, Mark. It's written in ink." This sounds like a theme line (and it is), but Sorkin is too expert a dramatist to let anything like this hang in the air. He keeps the story pumping, and he'll let us make our own judgments. It's not about changing or not changing the world: it's about getting the girl to notice you, getting the coolest guys to want to be your friend, becoming cool and staying cool. The peak of the relationship between Zuckerberg and his former best friend Eduardo Saverin is shown as the night they get recognized as the creators of Facebook and end up getting blown in adjacent bathroom stalls. It's a high that Zuckerberg chases while Saverin stays down on earth. Zuck traffics in Cool and ends up addicted. Whether you end up feeling sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg will be left up to you. Sorkin and Fincher are merely going to show you how to get there.

But it's simultaneously a tremendous, microcosmic examination of what Facebook has become to so many people. And if I experienced some fleeting disappointment following the movie that it wasn't a more vicious, unilateral attack, this quickly subsided because what I was hoping for was propaganda and what I got was a fable. Mark Zuckerberg is a nerd at best and an asshole at worst; the other characters discuss him like you would a book in English class, arguing about his true nature. What's explicitly clear from the opening scene on is that this kid is socially inept and wants not to be, even as he feels he shouldn't have to work so hard for it. In the process of trying to get cool, he ends up inadvertently reducing everybody in the world to his level. (That they're actually reducing themselves is a whole other matter; we can't really even blame the guy.) Cool is a number, image is a webpage, fashion is a 140-character status and Zuckerberg is our all-knowing, all-seeing God.

The judgments are left to us, as will be the case in any movie with the balls to put its story first and let the audience do some thinking for itself. But the evidence is all there. What are we to make of the fact that Facebook was born from a premium on exclusivity and now everybody and their mother gets to make a page? What of the comparison to Napster, as Sean Parker gets on board behind the site? He brags of how he changed the world, and Saverin corrects him: Napster lost and went broke. But, Parker counters, he changed the music industry forever. This man wants to do to social interaction what he did to he music industry. He wants to live life digitally so that it can be quantified rather than qualified. If five of my friends are watching one thing on TV and six are watching the other, I already have all the information I need to make a decision.

Barring an unlikely revolution, we're gonna be stuck like this for a while, and it makes me wonder what my own or anybody else's individual thoughts are really worth any more. When I put these words on the internet, I'll just be a raindrop in the thought-cloud: the blogosphere loves The Social Network. But don't take my (our) word for it. Get out there and make your own thoughts.

The Kids Are All Right

2010-07-29T11:14:00.005-05:00

Only one of many successes onscreen in The Kids Are All Right is the portrayal of a Hispanic gardener. In even the most highbrow of family dramas, a three-scene throwaway supporting character like Luis might all too easily get left in the realm of the underwritten. This is not to say that Luis, who is accused of having a drug problem after an allergy-induced sneeze, is not a stereotype: in fact, all of the characters here are stereotypes. What writer-director Lisa Cholodenko carries out is the neat trick of imbuing them with a refreshing self-awareness. Luis chuckles at his fate and comes out cleaner than most of the major characters. He just likes the flowers.

Luis is contracted by Jules (Julianne Moore) to assist in her fledgling landscape design business. As half of a middle-aged lesbian couple with two kids, Jules is starting to feel restless after 18 years of motherhood without anything approaching a career. Her partner Nic (Annette Bening) is a doctor, and the one who pays for their lovely house and all the expensive wine they drink.

This feeling of housewife-neglect is just one facet of the couple's simmering malaise: as their two kids struggle with adolescence, a craving for 'normalcy' has eroded the family's foundation. They have an 18-year-old perfect-angel daughter who's just graduated as valedictorian of her high school and a 15-year-old son who needs a father figure. In turn, the two kids go behind their moms' backs to seek out the man whose sperm donation brought them into existence.

The donor is Paul, a naïve man's man with a touch of gray played by Mark Ruffalo. Before getting contacted by the children he didn't know he had, Paul was coasting through life as a successful restaurateur and purveyor of organic produce. He has a lot of casual sex and leaves several buttons undone. If he sounds like a cocksure stereotype of effortless sexuality and a predestined 'no-man-is-an-island' growth arc, he is. His son, upon meeting him, refers to his new father as "kinda into himself."

Jules is a "depressed, middle-aged lesbian", her son Laser (namesake never explained) is a "sensitive jock type", Joni (named after Mitchell) "got all A's and got into every school", Nic is a "control freak" and Paul is a "doer, not a learner". They're all familiar characters. Paul's entrance forces the foursome to reassess their already-fragile union, and what's so fun is watching the awkward friction and identity crises between these five strangers who all want to be a family together.

The movie works through two simple, distinct qualities: the script is tight and funny, full of forward momentum, and the actors are all dynamite. Whenever it seems like Ruffalo is starting to steal the show—Paul's role is to be distractingly charismatic—Cholodenko carefully assigns equal screentime to the other four. It's an ensemble piece where when characters bicker, it's impossible to take sides. We want them to get along.

And then this is where the movie starts surprising. As Paul, despite his own and everyone else's better intentions, starts taking up the mantle of fatherhood—he imparts social advice for his kids and parenting advice for the moms—it becomes clear that these characters have painted themselves into a corner. The inciting incident was born of Laser's desire for paternal normalcy and quickly this idea festers inside the other characters. But there isn't room for three parents in a 'normal' family and somebody is going to have to lose.

It's not long before an overwhelming sadness takes over. Even as the movie is consistently hilarious, mining laughs from awkward discussions of sexuality and from the minutiae of home life, all five gradually become aware that they will be victims of their own desires for self-actualization. The characters win you over by being funny and warm and then screw you by being human. At one point, a character loses control and goes off on a rant about self-absorbed, eco-friendly, organic food-eating stereotypes, even as she orders another bottle of a specific favored wine. There is another winking moment where one of the moms describes lesbian porn as fallacious, because it usually involves two straight actresses faking it.

It's a self-aware picture about self-aware characters going out of their way to fit their circular selves into square spaces. Ultimately moving and incisive in its glances into both middle age and adolescence, The Kids Are All Right is an exquisite, eloquent drama that's as true to itself as it is to its audience. It's an increasingly rare commodity in our self-important arthouse multiplexes — you get the impression everyone on screen would love this movie. The film is an exercise in honesty, and a pure delight.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

James Cameron: A Cinema of CAPS LOCK + A Second Take: Avatar

2010-07-26T12:00:00.002-05:00

Since publishing my original review of its theatrical release, my opinion of Avatar has become informed by two lengthy conversations about the film with friends who didn't like it. I will do my best to represent their viewpoints here.

"It's really just an excuse to do pterodactyls versus helicopters." - James Cameron

The New Yorker ran a profile of James Cameron by Dana Goodyear a few months before Avatar's release last year. A friend named Trevor pulled a quote from this article on my previous review's comment board as telling of Avatar's being a failure, in particular, as an 'anti-war' movie: "I suppose you could say I believe in peace through superior firepower."

I told Trevor at the time that what he should've quoted was Cameron's lengthy discussion of the science and story behind one of the film's battle scenes, which he sums up with: "It's really just an excuse to do pterodactyls versus helicopters."

This is a problem with the film, and it's one that is likely shared in most of Cameron's work: he's such a creative filmmaker—his stories so imaginative—that the 'wow' factor tends to overshadow the more important elements like the story and the characters. This extent to which this is happening on the set or in the teenaged heads of his audience varies from film to film, but it's too bad that even in a movie as thematically complex as Aliens we tend to focus on the badassery and the bloodletting.

Cameron makes really cool movies (or at least, he used to, before he grew a big soft one and started making romances: “Of course, the whole movie ends up being about women, how guys relate to their lovers, mothers—there’s a large female presence [...] I try to do my testosterone movie and it’s a chick flick.”), and a great deal of Avatar's success, even amidst today's jaded, self-aware moviegoing populace, was due to its gimmickry. Photorealistic aliens! Three hours on a planet that feels real! Digital 3D like you've never seen it! Sexy cat people! All the plants and animals have Latin names and the Na'vi speak a real language that he hired some guy to make up!

Like Titanic before it, Avatar was an event movie (already faded from the spotlight—and that much too fast) that people talked about just because everyone else was talking about it. But with the hype machine interested only the gimmicks, it's increasingly difficult to remind ourselves exactly what it was Cameron was trying to do.

See, Cameron's been making and remaking the same Vietnam War movie since the beginning of his career. It was when I stumbled across an archival press interview from the release of Aliens that I realized this. Cameron discussed that his main intention with the sequel was to tell a parable about Vietnam, in which a squad of overqualified, over-armed, over-mechanized soldiers goes into a jungle and gets their collective ass kicked by an allegedly dumb, primitive race that they should've easily pwned onto the next planet. Now, for me, Aliens was always about maternity (and it's about both of these), but it's easy to see that this is the same movie he's been making ever since. Cameron's story is always about man vs. machine or nature vs. human design. The fancy pulse rifle with grenade launcher vs. the Aliens. The humans versus the terminators. The Na'vi archers versus the giant bombers. The Titanic versus the laws of physics.

What's inconsistent throughout his oeuvre, then, is the confusing notion of the 'we'. In that man vs. machine battle that Cameron has extrapolated from the demons of Vietnam, his different films take different sides (possibly because, as an American, Cameron's 'we' was the American military machine). Cameron actually examines this directly in Avatar, as over the course of three hours we witness a gradually shifting allegiance from the protagonist, Jake Sully. From the beginning he is torn between his duty as a marine and his new position as a science officer, and eventually he finds himself at the wrong end of evil Col. Quaritch's clumsy one-liners like "I'd say diplomacy has failed!" and "How's it feel to betray your own race?"

In Avatar, Sully's transformation from human to Na'vi is as much a matter of his 'soul' as it is his physical appearance; by the end of the second act he's already turned down the long-desired reparation of his paralyzed human form. And with the hero's allegiance so turns the audience's, which is one of the more interesting facets of Avatar's story. As heavy-handed as it may be, Cameron holds nothing back in making the human race into the bad guys.

And this is what's fun to trace throughout Cameron's work: in returning to the well of the darker sides of human nature, he seems to waiver back and forth in regards to whether or not he believes there's any hope for us. Says Ripley, upon learning of Burke's deception: "I don't know which species is worse. You don't see [the aliens] fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage." As a species, we may or may not be any better than this race of venomous, acid-blooded killers, and we are absolutely a bunch of assholes when compared to the ethically and environmentally pure Na'vi. In Titanic, our ambition to bend the laws of nature kill more than 1,500 of us. In The Terminator, our technological ambitions take us even further, killing off most of the human race.

Yet, the lesson of that film's sequel turns out to be one of hope, as is also the case in The Abyss. Both Terminator 2 and The Abyss end unequivocally with saccharine messages of hope for our future; from our darkest wars we will emerge cleansed and prepared for a new age of prosperity.

Only with Avatar, though, has Cameron finally given up on humanity—likely the result of the Bush administration further informing his anti-imperialist beliefs already clung to decades after the Vietnam War. Even as the Na'vi shelter the few humans righteous enough to side with them, those are the humble sky-people that studied the alien race, learned their ways, and actually became (in Sully's case, literally) part of them.

But this is not the only way to read Avatar. To quote Kelly from that previous discussion board, "the important thing is that we can pretend we understand them through a billion dollar, 3-hour movie where we literally murder our own guilt with a roomful of other cheering white people."

In a non-internet-based, real-life extrapolation of her argument, Kelly told me that she understood what Cameron was trying to do, and actually was able to get behind it, were it not for Cameron's failure to follow through on his point in the end. To hear Kelly tell it, the way Avatar should've ended is with the humans winning, the Na'vi completely slaughtered and Pandora ravaged for precious unobtanium. Now, here's an ending that would likely have been more difficult for Trevor to deny as being 'anti-war'.

Kelly's idea is potent, and in many ways, she's right. Even though Cameron has shrugged off responsibility for human actions by siding with the aliens, that doesn't absolve humanity of its power or its history, and as clever as the Na'vi are in besting the human military machine, it's still pretty absurd that they don't all get crushed (but again, that's how it went down in Vietnam). This, by the way, was exactly what Cameron was going on about when he started waxing adolescent about helicopters and pterodactyls:

"The idea is that Pandora has such a hot, humid climate, with incredibly powerful magnetic fields, that they can’t use sophisticated energy weapons. A lot of the equipment is retrofitted, from their perspective, because it works on Pandora. So you’ve got vehicles that are more consistent with twentieth-century warfare.” His face was flushed and happy. “It’s all just an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls,” he said.

Whatever, dude. Here's the thing: if you want to be an environmentalist filmmaker and actually stir people into action (a laughable premise, right away), you're giving up way too easily when you let the humans of Avatar give up way too easily. As Kelly puts it, the ending of Avatar is far too easily construed as an apology and an absolution for our long, storied history of military imperialism and murder.

So where does this leave me as I attempt to wrap up my restrospective on the films of James Cameron? Do I believe his visceral, kinetic filmmaking tends to overshadow his ideas? Probably much of the time, though I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. It's definitely not bad in theory, and in the practice of Cameron's films it's probably better this way, as we know all too well what happens when he doesn't shut his characters up and put guns in their hands.

I have to revisit the incidents of the teenagers in the theater during Avatar, shouting "Yeah, get some!" at the screen during the extended battle royale. Though the onus of coaxing an audience out of passivity into analytical thought can never be put solely on the shoulders of the filmmaker, it's a shame that in Cameron's case he so often gets caught up playing with his toys. Avatar becomes, rather than an anti-war treatise, a story of helicopters and pterodactyls. Even as he smacks you over the head with his allegory, it's easy to view the whole thing as an extended playtime.

And yet, when I was a little boy, it was the nuclear detonation from Terminator 2 that gave me recurring nightmares, and I still think of it whenever the topic of nuclear weapons is raised. Where T2 was a hugely successful summer blockbuster with one-liners and set pieces, its staying power for me was a (simple and obvious, but nonetheless true and important) message of peace. Nuclear war is bad. Humans are good, but we created nuclear war. We have to reconcile this with ourselves.

Is there a similar message to be found in Avatar for the boys who went out for it to cheer on the soldiers? Yes, certainly. There's a purity to Cameron's ideas, even as obvious as they always are, that sticks with you and works in concert with the awesomeness of his action. Taken even as dumb action movies, his work sticks with us as we grow up. Perhaps this isn't anywhere more clear than in Titanic, as mawkishly sincere a story of love triumphant as we can hope for and the movie of the decade for so many heartsick middle-schoolers, whether they deny it now or not.

Of course, Cameron's not done yet. There are allegedly two Avatar sequels on the way, and it's always possible that the man with the biggest head in the business can get his head back in the game. Some of his best work so far has been sequel: with the setup out of the way, Cameron's proven he can hit the ground running. And regardless, even mediocre Cameron is thrilling, exciting, ripe for discussion, worthy of our time and money. I'll be there at midnight on opening day.

Inception

2010-07-23T10:00:00.006-05:00

I know it's lazy of me, but this really won't make any sense unless you've seen Inception. Sorry!

There are two ways to read Christopher Nolan's Inception. One is to take the characters on their somewhat-confusing, often-garbled literal word. In this case, the film is the story of a band of extractors carrying off an elegant reverse-heist and winning their leader's passage back onto his homeland.

The other examination of the film, one suggested at several points throughout the runtime (most obviously by the not-really-ambiguous-at-all ambiguous ending) is that the entire film is a dream, orchestrated for the benefit and/or deception of Leonardo DiCaprio's bereaved Dominick Cobb.

With each of these possibilities comes a devastating array of flaws. For as cool as the movie can be in sporadic spurts, it doesn't hold up to any serious investigation.

If the movie is to be taken literally, it is so full of plot-holes, garrulous exposition and spatial incoherence from the micro- to the macro- that it can be described as nothing less than a mess. For example: if a van plowing off a bridge can upset a twice-removed dreamworld with an avalanche (which, by the way, hurts nothing and nobody and in no way sets back our heroes' plot), why does it not distort the gravity of that dream-level in any other continuous way as the van continues its plummet? This can be called nitpicking, but the film is rife with such gaps in logic.

Here is a two-and-a-half-hour movie in which approximately forty-five minutes (a generous estimation) is dedicated to the supremely nifty set-pieces promised by the trailer and by Nolan's previous work¹. The remaining 1:45 is entirely backstory and set-up. Probably the entire first hour of the movie is mired in exposition², which only makes the eventual descent into the dreamworld an ultimately relieving incident. You can hear Millhouse asking: "When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?"

But even with all this set-up, for every tidbit of diegetic logic underlined and set forth as a 'rule', there is a lazy smudge of hokum we are asked to swallow simply because in two-and-a-half-hours Nolan couldn't come up with anything better. If extraction is a profession with so many fascinating rules and how-to's, couldn't we be supplied with a reason or method behind Eames' ability to seamlessly transform into other people within the dreamworld (and he can do this for the sake of both the aware and the unaware). Oh, and Yusuf concocted a sedative that doesn't affect the inner ear? That's all you've got? But it doesn't wake you up if you're rolling down a hill in a big clunky van? Give me a break.

Finally, from a narrative point of view³, the rules that the film does go to such lengths setting up are all instantly expendable. We are presented with several exciting ticking clocks and increasingly dire stakes, but they are all reset at the behest of a poorly-plotted third act. Initially, they have to complete the inception before the van goes off the bridge, otherwise they'll miss the "kick" and they won't wake up. But when they miss this opportunity, Cobb announces that they now have until the van hits the water a good 30 dreamworld-minutes later.

After Saito is shot in level one, we are told that they have to finish the job before he dies or he'll be irretrievably lost in sub-conscious limbo that will destroy his conscious self when they wake up in Los Angeles; later, after Saito 'dies', Cobb simply finds him and rescues him.

We are told over and over how the feeling of falling will wrest you from the next level down, but only in the sub-subconscious dystopia of Cobb's failed marriage will a fall from within the dream wake you up from the level you're in.

Now, in the course of the film, five characters are seen descending into that messy fourth-level state: Cobb and Mal in their flashback, Saito and Fischer when they die in the third level, and Ariadne, with Cobb again, going down to rescue Saito and Fischer. Of these five, only Mal is unable to recover from the shock of regained youth after forty years in the soup. Cobb tells us this is due to his own inception rather than her mind turning to mush.

Saito and Fischer have been sent here by death one level up, and we might fear that to rescue them will only result in that hypothesized insanity once they wake up to reality. Ariadne is, of course an amateur (on the surface) and handles the improvised descent into a stranger's deep subconscious like a professional⁴, hopping right back out once her task is done.

If we are to accept any stakes at all from the meat of the film's story (that is: the carrying-out of the eponymous inception), we have to dread that death in the dream will result in a vegetative coma once woken. Yet we see time and again that this was an idle threat.

And why, by the way, do all five end up in Cobb's limbo world? This is where we come to the second reading of the film:

Every frame of Inception, with the possible exception of the Mal flashbacks⁵, takes place within the head of a character we never see awake⁶. The clues all point to this, from Cobb's refusal to look at his children's faces to the wise old (ethnic!) sage in Yusuf's basement suggesting that the dream-sharers partake in their addiction not to sleep but to be woken up. Who is Cobb to suggest a difference between reality and dreams?

From the repeated suggestions of a dream-sharer's inevitably tenuous grasp on reality to the explicit inability of Cobb to ever actually spin his top (he's always dropping it or pocketing it because he doesn't want to get caught losing his grasp), Inception consistently points to the idea that this whole thing is a dream. If we decide we want to view the film this way, what actually works is that all these plot-holes and all this illogic can be instantly forgiven: it's all a dream, and there are no rules in dreams, no matter how often it might be suggested that there are.

The problem becomes that the film is about something entirely different than the 'first level' story of corporate inception with which we're presented. And lest I sound as though I'm against subtext, let me underline that what sucks is that [one] Nolan is entirely obvious and heavy-handed in regards to this being a story about Cobb losing his wife and, subsequently, his mind, and [two] that story, as it's told here, is derivative and shallow.

Nolan has proved his abilities as a plotter and storyteller, and no matter how much a misstep we might deem Inception to be, I simply can't write it off as the mediocre heist drama it is on the surface. We have to give Nolan at least a little credit: there has to be something more to this movie than meets the eye, and that's why I'm positive that Nolan's 'prestige' here is the not-quite-explicit idea that the entire thing takes place in Cobb's head.

I think Inception is about a man (Cobb) who has lost his mind for one reason or another (probably 40-odd dream-years inside his own subconscious) and who has become—we are never shown this—the vegetable we're warned might be the fate for Saito or Fischer or anybody else. In his comatose nightmare, Cobb longs to be reunited with his family, but because he blames himself for his predicament, he won't let it happen on any level of his reality.

We see this in Cobb's refusal to look at his children, even as they pop up around corners as often as the projection of his demonic wife. And by the way, they do make an appearance once in the film's purported reality: early in the film, Cobb's children call him in his hotel room in Kyoto. How on earth could they find him there but through the twisted logic of a dream?

So Cobb is a sad tomato⁷, and this is where Michael Caine comes in. It's not coincidental that the last human expression seen in the film is Caine's knowing smirk as the camera tilts downward to a cut-to-black off Cobb's spinning totem. Caine's Miles is the man behind the actual inception of this story's title. He partners with Ariadne (and the rest of the ensemble may be projections of Cobb's subconscious or members of Miles' team) to bring the vegetative Cobb some happiness within his eternal dream state. This is why every character, four levels down, shares the dreamworld Cobb created.

You know what? This is kind of a nice idea. Unfortunately, Nolan bogs himself down in endless retellings of Mal's fate and a lot of sci-fi gobbledy-gook that serves only to clash with any actual pathos at the heart of the thing. It reminds me of another big-budget project from a director that didn’t really know where to go after the biggest success of his career.

My prediction is that Inception will go down as Christopher Nolan's Vanilla Sky: a star-filled oddity of premise that goes over or under most heads and runs on a difficult-to-swallow mixture of sentiment and hardcore sci-fi world-building. Despite its flaws, it will earn a devoted following for whom either the emotions or the ideas (occasionally both) work on a personal level, and that cult will hold it up as one of their favorite movies. Ever.

See, I suppose I don't have a problem with liking Inception so much as I have a problem with the idea that it's anywhere near as mindlessly fun or exciting as it purports to be. I like Vanilla Sky and would be like a bully lashing out if I mocked anyone for it. But what I can admit about Vanilla Sky is this: it's hokey and it's over-the-top, it's a good half-hour too long and I can understand why you might end up chuckling at it.

Inception, which is essentially the same story (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses mind, boy goes on dramatic twist-ending nightmare-bender to convince his sleeping mind that he still has her), is easily (from the score alone) twice as self-important as Vanilla Sky, as over-long as Shutter Island, as convoluted as Mullholland Drive, as knowingly-slick as anything Nolan has ever done. For many it's going to strike a chord.

Everyone else will chuckle.

1) And by the way, for as cool as these forty-five cumulative minutes can be, they really only leave more to be desired in-and-of-themselves. Nolan's team constructed an entire rotating hallway in order to depict Joseph Gordon-Levitt leaping from wall to ceiling amidst fisticuffs with subconscious henchmen, and he uses this practical effect in exactly one uncut shot that lasts long enough to register. Mere seconds. Unforgivable. Anybody who ever wants to show a hero doing battle with henchmen in an enclosed space needs to go watch Oldboy. [back]

2) Ellen Page's performance is awful enough to deserve more than a footnote, but I don't really want to bother. It's bad enough that Ariadne is so clumsily-written and contrived an audience surrogate, all "What does this do?" and "How does that work?". But to give this flimsy, hollow role to an actress of Page's meager caliber is just infuriating, especially when she's next to powerhouses like Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [back]

3.) If A.A. Dowd is reading this he might as well give up here and post his comment about how I am a "slave to narrative". [back]

4.) Or rather, she handles it like a bemused starlet confronted with a series of wildly ridiculous interactions and paper-thin 'wow' moments: a "human network", if you will? [back]

5.) The flashbacks, now; not Cobb's memory-based reconstructions or subconscious projections. Obviously, in a film like this it isn't always possible to tell the difference. [back]

6.) This is DiCaprio's Cobb, but since we never see him and the world takes place in his dream, it would be pointless to label him as the same character, with the same appearance and personality. [back]

7.) In New York Magazine, David Edelstein derisively mocked the character's name, referring to Dom Cobb as "dummkopf", which, incidentally, means "stupidhead." Several characters here have winkingly relevant namesakes, the most cloying of which has to be Ariadne, the girl who bestowed Theseus with a ball of yarn to help him navigate the minotaur's labyrinth. Despite being played by the unparalleled Cillian Murphy, Fischer might as well have been called "Cipher". [back]

The Runaways

2010-07-20T06:00:00.001-05:00

Perhaps the reason it’s taken me so long to admit my true feelings for Kristen Stewart is a lingering affection for Panic Room. As soon as that film’s mop-headed tomboy grew up and actually began sexualizing herself, I was rooting for her. I’ve been giving her the benefit of the doubt for years now. After The Runaways, the time has come for me to admit that I just don’t like her.

Retreating into her androgynous shell in an attempt at casual lesbianism, Stewart trades the pained nihilism of a young punk rocker for what just comes off as bored and possibly sleepy. In the course of a decade, she’s been seen awakening the sexualities of Jamie Bell, Adam Brody, Jesse Eisenberg, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner and now Dakota Fanning all by awkwardly futzing with her hair and never looking up from the floor. Whatever her appeal is, I don’t see it and I’m finally ready to write her off.

Stewart and Fanning, both making me nervous in their underwear (and not in the good way), are here being modeled into a girl group by wacko record producer Kim Fowley. Fowley is played in various stages of glam makeup by Michael Shannon, who would be fun to watch if at least there were some scenery for him to chew up, but even when he starts in on his monologues about the girls needing to think with their cocks, the drama is so limp and placid there’s nothing for him to work with.

So Fowley is a record producer who gets the idea from teenager Joan Jett that an all-jailbait punk band would be a sure win. In one of several ridiculous scenes, Joan approaches the famous producer outside a club on the Sunset Strip to tell him she plays guitar and the deal is made five minutes later; Fowley even remarks that producers don’t go around handing record deals to teenagers outside clubs seconds before he hooks the girl up with a drummer and starts making the band. He assembles the five girls based on their image instead of their talent (fitting that Joan spray paints a homemade Sex Pistols t-shirt) and susses out future hit single “Cherry Bomb” to the tune of Joan hitting the same chord over and over again.

Fanning plays Cherie Currie, who stumbles into the position of front-woman after lying about being able to sing. When we’re introduced to her vocal stylings, she’s lip-syncing a David Bowie song at her high school talent show because she can’t manage more than a feeble whisper into the microphone. When she shows up to audition with Peggy Lee’s “Fever”, she’s booed out of the trailer until Fowley gives her the lyrics to “Cherry Bomb” and makes her suddenly an able vocalist (kind of).

From the way the film plays it, I half expected Shannon’s Fowley to turn out to be a drifter posing as a mogul just to rip the girls off. He sets up rehearsal space for them in a dingy trailer surrounded by animal feces and sends them on a club tour in a big station wagon with a boy who introduces himself as “the roadie”.

And in the same way I don’t buy Fowley as a legitimate record producer, I don’t buy The Runaways of The Runaways as a legitimate rock band. They’re presented here as talentless stereotypes – directionless girls who hang out under the Hollywood Sign drinking booze stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets. Maybe this is what punk rock was supposed to be, but any credibility therein is shot down by the girls’ repeated desires to play huge stadiums and make lots of money.

Writer-director Floria Sigismondi’s lazy style favors montage over scripted scenes in the furthering of the story, resulting in a film ostensibly about the life of a band that recorded five albums but shows them in the studio exactly once. That scene is the one where they break up, of course. The film inadvertently implies that the whole project was a stillborn predecessor to Jett’s later success with “I Love Rock and Roll” and “Bad Reputation,” which get turned up for the end credits.

There are pills that lead to overdose and booze that leads to girl-on-girl make out sessions; there is out-of-focus photography for the drugs and mood lighting for the sex. There are families left behind back home for screaming teenagers outside the club. There’s an argument over Curie’s ‘undeserved’ spotlight as the band’s lead singer – as though none of these girls had ever seen a rock band before (and maybe they hadn’t). This scene particularly recalls the hilarious/heartbreaking Stillwater dissolve in Almost Famous, a dangerous association to draw when your film is little more than a collection of rock ‘n’ roll movie clichés banked on renewing a decades-old scandal of teenaged girls being hot. I’d like to report that this is in some way uniquely or interestingly bad, but like Stewart’s sexless emoting it’s just a lot of boring stuff we’ve been bored by plenty of times in the past.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo [Män som hatar kvinnor]

2010-07-06T06:00:00.004-05:00

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the kind of adaptation that treats its source material as gospel and strays only when absolutely necessary. This is inherently a bad thing: a copy is never as crisp as the original. What keeps the movie coasting is that its source, Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller novel, is plotted so tightly in concert with its thematic density that the complexities of the book squeak through into the relatively graceless cinematic exercise.

The convoluted plot of the 600+ page, two-and-a-half-hour story is difficult to summarize, especially when attempting to limit oneself to a paragraph or two. There are two protagonists: Mikael Blomkvist (celebrity journalist) and Lisbeth Salander (reclusive hacker). The latter is the tattooed eponym, though its worth noting that the Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, translates literally as “Men who hate women.” I suppose this would’ve been more difficult to market, although it’s inarguably the better title given that [one] it’s awesome and [two] Lisbeth’s tattoo is only marginally important in the book and relegated to one or two shots in the film. Men who hate women are what this thing is about.

The two heroes are an unlikely odd couple teamed up in the 21st century to solve the mystery of a teenaged girl who disappeared in 1966. Harriet Vanger vanished from her family’s expansive island estate and was assumed murdered; dragging the river and combing the forest turned up no clues at all. Her uncle finally recruits Blomqvist to solve the case for him; Blomqvist is a reputable sleuth whose legal troubles have left him with a bit of free time. Salander comes along for the ride because — like Harriet — she is a victim of sexual assault and has a mean penchant for revenge.

Don’t cross Lisbeth Salander. This girl takes back the night like a fish takes a bicycle — desperately, with purpose. Several characters — major and minor, all men — attempt to gain influence or control over her throughout the course of the film and they all end up bloodied. She’s fascinating to watch (and to read): antisocial yet insatiably curious, sexually repressed yet sexually voracious, fucked up but fun.

Director Niels Arden Oplev, working with a pair of cinematographers (Jens Fischer and Eric Kress), turns the Swedish countryside into a snowy anti-noir that is as oppressive in its open expanses as Let The Right One In was in its dark forests and unlit corners. He simply doesn’t give himself room to breathe in these gorgeous, rural outcroppings of civilization. It’s the plot that drives the thing, and the first two hours fly by. It’s slick in the way Jason Reitman wishes he could be slick, even through clumsy, poorly constructed montages of clue-hunting.

The doe-eyed innocent nestled in the gnarled branches of a family tree filled with greed, abuse, religious zealotry and Nazism, Harriet Vanger cast a pall over the lifetimes of her entire clan by disappearing. Even the Vangers that wanted to forget never could, thanks to the relentless obsession of Uncle Henrik, bent on avenging the death of his only worthy kin. Salander, only tenuously connected to the investigation, clearly feels a similar kinship with Harriet. Both girls are responsible for the carrying of baggage across generations and for the furthering of demons that must be put to rest before anybody might achieve peace.

Even with the predictable twist, the procedural mystery is a fun ride. All the trappings are here: road-tripping to the police stations of remote hamlets, motion sensing security cameras, a supporting ensemble in which everyone is a suspect, searches on both Google and microfilm.

Where the film finally bogs itself down is in its extended dénouement. Notions and ideas best left implied get explained outright and minor subplots get meticulously tied up just because they were major in the book. It’s amazing how a twenty-minute slog to the end credits can kill a movie.

The thorniness of the ending ultimately reveals not that the thing is too long, but rather that it’s too short; all of the minor elements deserve more than they get, especially Lisbeth’s shady shaky past and Mikael’s legal malaise. This is the kind of novel that deserves, if not a miniseries, at the least the three-hour David Fincher treatment. And since that master is allegedly going to helm the American remake, perhaps Larsson’s stories will soon get the cinematic treatment they’ve earned.

Blog Notes 7/1/10: I Am Love [Io sono l'amore]

2010-07-01T06:00:00.000-05:00

Aw, crap. We're halfway through 2010 already? With a weary sigh, here are some items of note and some promises and predictions for those few avid followers of My Favorite Gum Commercial:

First up, click over to Venus Zine to read my review of Luca Guadagnino's frustrating I Am Love [Io sono l'amore]. And while we're delving into the "arthouse" summer releases, I might as well link back to my review of the brilliant Dogtooth [Kynodontas], which is finally getting a limited theatrical run after playing the festival circuit for so long.

I swear there is one last post regarding James Cameron coming up around the corner. This will be a combined second take on Avatar and a final wrap-up of the CINEMA OF CAPS LOCK project. That Cameron project has taken much, much longer than I ever intended it to, due mostly to my own procrastination and tendency toward distraction. Regardless, I intend to follow it up with another long-form, open-ended Retrospecticus, to be officially announced as soon as the last Cameron post goes live. I will attempt to structure and schedule this one more rigidly so it doesn't take me until 2011 to finish it.

Speaking of open-ended, it's never too late to vote on the first entry of the Dude, Counter-Dude series, in which I spar over Million Dollar Baby with brother-in-arms A.A. Dowd. As of this writing the score is neck-and-neck: four for myself and three for Alex. I think I speak for both of us when I say we encourage you to vote not based on whether or not you liked the movie but on who made the more successful argument.

Finally, go see Toy Story 3. I've had some harsh lessons about hyperbole in film criticism (last year I wrote that the opening of Star Trek would be the best ten minutes of any film in 2009, only to discover the landmark prologue of Up a mere three weeks later), but I honestly don't know that I've ever been floored by a movie quite like this. Part of my reaction is a fifteen-year-deep connection to the characters, but I imagine it takes a special kind of curmudgeon to go unmoved by the third act of the Pixar trilogy's third act. Good stuff. I may have to revisit it at some point under a Severe Spoiler Warning to tackle that ending. Also, if we're lucky, at some point I'm going to have finish this lengthy piece on WALL•E that's been sitting in the drafts since 2009.

Stay tuned!

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010-06-29T06:00:00.004-05:00

The Cusack influence runs deep through Hot Tub Time Machine, a movie that doesn’t even dare you to take it seriously but tries to be “about” something at the same time. John Cusack has discussed his joining the project already in motion and rushed through the green light by MGM, hustling through an uncredited rewrite with director Steve Pink. There are three other names on the script; I imagine they wrote the blow job jokes and the gay panic while Cusack and Pink inflected the pathos and the redemption arcs.

There are two assholes and two wimps; all four are losers and the only thing that connects them is the hazy “past.” Lou (Rob Corddry) brings his old group back together when he drunkenly passes out in his running car and gets put up in a suicide ward. To cheer him up, old friends Nick (Craig Robinson) and Adam (Cusack) bring him out to the old ski resort where they used to hang in the 80s; Adam’s nephew Jacob (Clark Duke) is along for the ride. Nick abandoned his music career for a loveless marriage, Adam’s girlfriend just left him (taking his television, that bitch!) and Jacob lives in Adam’s basement with zero friends and an addiction to Second Life (wink). Their miseries recall Back to the Future (in set up if not in execution) so it’s a good thing that when they hit Kodiak Valley they’ll be given opportunities to right what went wrong in their lives thanks to the magical hot tub.

That this is so obviously the course of the story makes it incredibly frustrating when the film actually tries to explain its way down the straight and narrow. Especially for a film that’s getting made because of its title and will succeed in its target demo through an abundance of ugly men (because it’s funny when they show their asses) and sexy women (because it’s hot when they show their tits), I can’t believe how much exposition there is in this damn thing.

This is a self-aware movie (read: a movie that sports the production values of a YouTube video about a guy sinking awesome trick shots) that features characters who are aware of and reference time travel as we know it from the popular culture. Given all this, it’s somewhat ridiculous that I have to spend a whole hour watching them try to not change anything because they’re afraid of The Butterfly Effect. The story, of course, isn’t what counts here. What counts is that because of that butterfly effect there will be an increased number of blow jobs and fist fights. And I must admit that for the most part, the movie had me laughing. Nobody deadpans like Robinson and Corddry’s macho posturing, even when his pants are off, is hilariously over-the-top. Begrudgingly, I admit that the consequences of their butterfly effect are pretty cleverly executed.

But it’s really too bad, because even for a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine, a reliance on scatological humor is just that. In sending John Cusack back to the 80s to fix his love life (and casting pop-icon-in-the-making Lizzy Caplan opposite him) the film becomes a sorely missed opportunity. By the time the four heroes finally get to the pinch, begin apologizing amongst themselves and acting towards their goals, the movie tries to wrap up a feature’s worth of romantic subplots in the space of about twenty minutes. It doesn’t have time for any of that, but it does have time for Craig Robinson to sing more of The Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started” than I ever needed to hear again.

Yes, that’s the song he chooses to Marty McFly into the hearts of a dance floor that’s never heard trash-hop. 25 years worth of second-chances and you’re banking your fortune on The Black Eyed Peas? I guess I’m not really in this film’s demographic, am I?

Toy Story 3

2010-06-22T06:00:00.005-05:00

There's a flashback midway through Toy Story 2 in which Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl recalls life with her former owner, Emily, who abandoned her under the bed only to rediscover her just in time to send her away in a goodwill donation box. It's heartbreaking, and the new sequel, Toy Story 3, functions as a feature-length, ensemble retelling of this vignette. 11 years after the previous film came out and 15 after the first, Pixar has kept the franchise timeline in sync with our own: our heroic toys are stuck in a box and their owner, Andy, is going away for college. They haven't been played with for years.

The toys end up donated to Sunnyside Daycare, a development that only Woody believes to be a mistake. Everyone else thinks their time has come and looks to the unknown (read: scary) future of drooling toddlers and teethers. Woody must convince his toy compatriots to bust out with him, but if they do, even their existence back home with(out) Andy remains a question mark.

The options presented to the toys are The Attic, The Trash or The Daycare — where they risk getting abused and torn apart. It's heaven, hell or purgatory, and the heavenly option — wherein they earn a special spot on high reserved for special toys — also comes with dust, neglect and sorrow. Andy is never going to be a kid again.

There are religious connotations to the story, though more accurately it’s a spiritual, existential question that drives the toys' plight. The motley band of brothers defines their existence through the love of a human child (their very personalities have grown from the roles foisted upon them by Andy's imagination during playtime), so what happens to their identities when Andy doesn't love them the way he used to? (The film will play with that question in several different ways, from a reorganization of Mr. Potato Head's face to Buzz Lightyear's getting reset en español.)

What's more, the film never questions the main toys' raison d'etre. Several supporting characters do — the leader of the “inmates” at the daycare facility, an aged, strawberry-smelling teddy named Lotso (as in "Lots-o-Huggin' Bear"), remarks during the initial daycare tour that "no owners means no heartbreak." In some ways this retreads the themes covered in Toy Story 2, wherein Woody makes the choice to stay with Andy even though their time together is finite. The villain in that film, Stinky Pete, has the foresight to ask Woody if he thinks Andy is going to bring him along to college.

Toy Story 3 presents Andy's move as the catalyst to the lesson that even though our time here is limited, there are rules that govern our existence and rites of passage that make us stronger for living through them. If we define ourselves by the people we love, we risk losing our very selves when those relationships end. But Toy Story 3 says that's still the only way to live a fulfilled life. It's never preachy, and the spiritual journey the toys undergo is a perfectly-executed crisis of faith and renewal of the self.

And it gets dark. Like, really dark. From the prison-break escape from daycare right on through to the final frame, Toy Story 3 becomes harder and harder to watch. It contains one of the most terrifying sequences I've seen in ages (nice to be reminded, after the doldrums of ostensible "horror" like the schlock Human Centipede or the earnest failure Shutter Island that I'm not actually desensitized to onscreen terror) and I have to question whether the MPAA even watched the thing before they slapped it with a G rating. Even Up got a PG, presumably for the hint of blood.

Two Pixar first-timers helm the film: Lee Unkrich, co-director on Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, makes his debut as lead director while the script comes courtesy of Michael Arndt, who signed up after winning his Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine. That film's mixture of slapstick and brooding shows up again in Toy Story 3 (which is, by the way, hilarious in equal measure to everything else I've discussed), but in the Pixar collective Arndt has found a team of collaborators to help balance out his wilder demons. While the collection of misfits that made up the family at the center of Little Miss Sunshine came across as a bit contrived, the quirks and idiosyncrasies that seem to be Arndt's stock-in-trade work a lot better when applied to a dinosaur, a potato and an astronaut.

Arndt and Unkrich, together with the rest of their team at Pixar, pull out all the stops. In a multiplex flooded with computer animation imitators repackaging and remarketing the lowest common denominator (as it sinks ever lower), Pixar Animation continues upping the stakes, putting its heroes in real danger and making movies not just for children or movies for children of all ages, but movies for people who think and feel. Toy Story 3 is neither as tight as Up nor as ambitious as WALL•E, but it adheres to the emotional core and relentlessly evades painless solutions or easy answers, making it both an immediate classic and a devastating punch in the gut. I don't know the last time I was affected by a movie like this.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

The Book of Eli

2010-06-15T06:00:00.008-05:00

The movie to which The Book of Eli owes its greatest debt turns out not to be Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road or any of the Mad Max films, but rather WALL•E, which is finally and inevitably establishing itself as a benchmark against which all future post-apocalyptic yarns will be measured. Denzel Washington’s Eli is a simpleton, moved to action (programmed, even) by a force he doesn’t really understand to shepherd a MacGuffin from one place to another and save the human race. He even has an old iPod, which he keeps charged with a battery the size of a sandwich. Problem is – and I know Washington can be quite a dish to those so inclined – Eli’s nowhere near as cute as WALL•E was, and not half as fun to watch.

“It’s not a book, it’s a weapon!” shrieks Gary Oldman at his number one, watering at the mouth over the power a slumlord might gain were he to end up proprietor of the sole remaining copy of the Bible. This nifty premise – Eli’s Bible becomes the grail in a post-holy crusade – is the foundation upon which the whole rickety fiasco stands, but directing team Albert and Allen Hughes don’t even begin to tackle the ramifications of it.

Oldman has a few weapons of his own, including rocket launchers, a ridiculous chain gun that hangs out of a truck, and the only remotely interesting one: Mila Kunis’ virginity. In a wasteland where all the characters are mucking about trying to avoid cannibals, Kunis’ Solara somehow still looks like she just stepped out of an American Apparel ad. Everyone else is covered in dust and wearing the boots of dead men, but Solara possesses an un-creasable pair of perfect skin-tight jeans and matching flannel – perfect to keep you warm at night and plus they make your ass look hot at the Grizzly Bear show.

So naturally Solara gets tossed around like so much bartered wood. Oldman owns her because his mistress Jennifer Beals is her vulnerable mom, his henchmen all want to win her body from their boss, the desert scavengers want to rape her and Eli, after declining to trade his booty for hers, decides he’s supposed to protect her. He’s a missionary who normally refuses to intervene when he comes across a biker gang tearing the platties off a poogly devotchka because to step in and save her would be to step off his path to carry out God’s will. But Eli must do as he is told by the Voices in his head and they remind him that hot sidekicks are good for business. It’s the Christian thing to do, after all.

The unsettling thing is that Eli’s quest is ultimately underlined as righteous. The villain’s understanding of the Good Book is, though “evil”, sensible and practical: he wants to jumpstart religiosity amongst the few people left on Earth so that he can control them and become (more) rich and powerful. Eli, on the other hand, hears God (or something) and carries the book where he is told, carefully soaking in its messages along the way. The notion that Eli might be full of it is actually what keeps the movie going as long as it does; when he is finally revealed to have a literally divine power working for him, it’s a little sickening.

It’s the kind of lazy conservatism that would be worth attacking if it weren’t handled so sloppily. This isn’t intended to be a message movie because nobody thought through the implications of the ridiculous twist ending. I could say that I like the notions fostered that the printed word will prove to be pretty important, even to the guy who also has the last iPod, but I don’t know if that’s the message either. It’s really all little more than an excuse to blow shit up.

From Paris With Love

2010-06-08T06:00:00.004-05:00

“Talking isn’t gonna get the job done,” a stern John Travolta reminds his gun-shy protégé as he prepares to confront a suicide bomber and stop the terrorists. This neatly encapsulates the politics of From Paris With Love, a big swinging dick of a movie about how diplomacy is for pansies. Shoot first and you don’t even need to bother with the questions. Jack Bauer, never one to hesitate, would surely send this movie from Sprint™ phone to Facebook™ profile before closing his Netflix™ instant streaming queue.

Director Pierre Morel’s previous American-badass-busting-up-Paris actioner Taken also incurred the wrath of astute movie-watchers who don’t like having conservative politics rammed down their throats like a hand towel in the name of the greater good. That film followed Liam Neeson on a torture spree to save his daughter from human traffickers, another plot that draws an easy comparison to the Fox network’s 24.

Where the seventh season of 24 made a laughable effort to respond to its liberal critics by putting its hero before a Senate committee interrogating him about his tendency to torture, From Paris With Love is a similar thematic extrapolation of its predecessor, giving voice to a young agent who believes in diplomacy (he works at the American Embassy in Paris) before blowing a Pakistani’s brains all over his face and showing him the way of the gun.

That hero is Reese, played by Jonathan Rhys-Myers without a hint of irony from the film in regards to his playing a dull American homophone (that irony is reserved for Travolta, who gets an unforgivable “Royale with Cheese” joke). He manages the accent but can only do so much with lines like “Let’s skip dinner and go straight to dessert.” Thankfully, Reese is pulled away very quickly from his diplomatic paper-shuffling (boring!) and his half-naked girlfriend (saucy!) to chase Travolta’s Charlie Wax all over Paris.

Wax has been partnered with Reese, for whom this world-saving mission is actually a training op. Don’t let that confuse you: it is both a world-saving mission and a training op, which is only one of several frightening elements of the plot. They follow coke-dealers to pimps to French thugs who have been sitting around watching La Haine to the terrorists who are mostly Pakistani and all of them brown except for – not a spoiler if you’ve seen this kind of thing before – Reese’s girlfriend, who was in with the bad guys all along.

We can give Morel a gold star for knowing how to keep this kind of thing moving. He does all he can to prevent you from thinking – it’s one of those gunfight-after-fistfight-after-car-chase deals. Taken even as a straight-forward action movie however, two things are lacking. For one, the action itself is dull and includes the most ineptly shot car chase since – well, since Taken. The main issue through the first two acts, however, is a complete lack of stakes. Where Taken got a leg up on the daddy-daughter pathos (that movie works for me, honestly, because of the birthday party prologue), Paris explicitly glazes over the why’s and the why-we-should-care’s. In order to establish a cover at a brothel, Wax forces a fistful of coke up Reese’s nose and in his ensuing mental haze explains the terrorist plot. Neither we nor Reese are able to understand his blurred speech, which culminates with Reese anxiously muttering “Terrorists!” ...I guess “Terrorists!” is all we need to know in America these days, huh?

It’s that “plot twist” through which the film’s politics come blazing to the forefront, because of course Reese would like to find a diplomatic solution to the whole girlfriend/suicide-bomber thing rather than see her shot in the head. I really try to give this the benefit of the doubt, and I’m marginally impressed with a movie that has the cojones to pick a side, any side, and follow through. But the conclusion to this momentarily interesting conflict is, rest assured, dramatically absurd on top of being politically abhorrent. If you were disgusted by Taken, bring a vomit bag.

Dude, Counter-Dude: Million Dollar Baby (2004)

2010-06-01T06:00:00.012-05:00

This point-counterpoint on Million Dollar Baby is the first entry in a proposed series of opinion-exchanges between myself and A.A. Dowd of Wild Lines. Expect ad hominem attacks, Simpsons references and rampant polysyllabism; inevitably, I will resort to footnotes. This debut took a good two months for us to finish, so there's no telling when the next entry is gonna come along. For now, I won the coin toss and elected to receive.

A.A. Dowd, taking the position in defense of Million Dollar Baby:

Million Dollar Baby is the type of movie Clint Eastwood was born to make. Take that as praise or as ammunition for the case against, but don’t take it lightly. Eastwood, who never met a dead genre he wouldn’t or couldn’t revive, does not sample from the collective cinematic past. He just seems to occupy it. He does not filter his archaic preoccupations through winking irony or fussy fanboy affectation, á la Brian DePalma or Quentin Tarantino. He pays his respects not by meticulously mimicking his heroes, but by making the kind of movies they did. He does not riff. He is no postmodernist. He is a prolific, sturdy craftsman, the sort that would have thrived back when the studio system was still firing on all cylinders. His aw-shucks sincerity and no-nonsense conviction—old-fashioned virtues oft mistaken for flaws—align him with the great working-class poets of Hollywood, the Sam Fullers and Howard Hawkses.

A bona fide 40s or 50s style boxing melodrama, Million Dollar Baby would feel right at home among the rough-and-tumble ring pictures of Mark Robson (Champion and The Harder They Fall) or Robert Wise (Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Set-Up). It walks and talks, it moves, like a lost genre classic. Most of the elements are there, unfiltered and irony-free. The young and hungry fighter, all guts and heart and foolhardy conviction, claws his (her) way up the ranks. An old trainer spars vicariously with his own deferred dreams. The fights get longer, tougher, bloodier. The ringsides get noisier, smokier. Greedy managers and seedy promoters scramble for a piece of the action. The fighters collapse into their respective corners, battered and bruised but begging to get back in there. There is a big fight, and a nasty, cheap-shot cartoon contender.

Cliché? Inherently so, but there is poetry in these stock movements and players. Corny? Only in the way of all great melodrama. Eastwood assembles these spare parts, the gears and pistons of a faded B-movie machine, and invests them with a breadth of emotion uncommon to most contemporary models. Clint’s ethos stretch way back, to the first wave of studio boxing pictures. If Abraham Polonsky’s 1947 Body and Soul jettisoned the nobility of the genre by steeping it in the greed and exploitation of the fight circuit, Clint relocates it in a familiar (but achingly heartfelt) fighter-trainer, father-daughter relationship. The film colors this central conflict in an earnestness that went out of vogue not long after Eastwood started his acting career; to snicker at Frankie and Maggie’s blossoming kinship—the way she wears his defenses down, working her way into his affections, respect conflating with platonic love—is to approach it through a distinctly modern lens. Million Dollar Baby rewards a willful suspension—not just of disbelief, but of the sleek and well-taught cynicism of the post-modern movie.

Todd Detmold, taking the position against the film:

The last of several bear traps laid out for me in the opening paragraphs above is the suggestion that Million Dollar Baby operates on a level so pure and old-fashioned that only a stone-hearted cynic would manage to go unmoved by the thing. And I will happily admit that there are moments – isolated moments – that I didn’t anticipate finding in this film, colored as it was by that first screening, back in the theater in 2004. I snickered through it then, but of course I was at the height of my collegiate superiority, so obviously I would be too cynical to enjoy this. These moments are the ones of quiet: when late at night in a dim and run down gymnasium that effectively houses the souls of our characters, those very same characters shut up and the film becomes transiently beautiful.

I can’t pretend to have seen the majority of Eastwood’s films, but I can stitch together a passing notion of how he operates. He’s well-known for his ‘one take’ ethos. He doesn’t direct a movie so much as put the actors here and the camera there and then move on to the next scene – its only through an instinct weaned upon five decades in the craft that he manages to make those long gauzy nights as poignant as they are. It’s inadvertent pathos by way of antipathy. In my estimation, an Eastwood film is only going to be so good as its script. One can easily credit Unforgiven to David Peoples.

And I credit Million Dollar Baby to the inimitable Paul Haggis. There’s an atmosphere to the film, sure, but Haggis’ story is one of cringe-inducing types and blunt didactic moralizing; a film hoisted on the shoulders of a central actress infusing her stereotype with some humanity only through juxtaposition to the even-worse stereotypes populating the film around her. In a city of ciphers, at least mo cuishle comes with a gender swap.

It’s bad enough the thing stops being the happy-sappy boxing melodrama described above and morphs suddenly into a Lifetime original movie (Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep: The Maggie Fitzgerald Story); it has to include in its box of hammers-as-art an unsympathetic family of fat rednecks, a pair of unsympathetically mean ethnic boxers, a comic-relief twig who’s so unsympathetically stupid to think he can be a boxer… and to top it all off, a badly overcooked paternal surrogacy.

Watching the movie, you think to yourself, “I get it, I get it. Stop, I get it already.” Maggie’s paralysis is plenty pitiful without the bedsores, the clogged arteries and gross bruising, the amputation and the self-glossectomy. She turns into Sideshow Bob walking into six, seven, eight, nine rakes. From the repetition of misery comes levity. What a joke.

A.A. Dowd's rebuttal:

Where exactly in the oeuvre of David “Leviathan” Peoples—author of space age and post-apocalyptic fantasies, mostly—does one detect the quiet grace and desperado gravity of Unforgiven? You’re telling me you attribute that new classic more to a sci-fi scribe-for-hire than to, say, a filmmaker who has dabbled in all shades and shapes of the American oater? A digressive question, perhaps, but one that hints at the fallacy of merely thinking of Eastwood as some sort of anonymous journeyman whose efforts assure nothing more or less than a 1:1 success rate of execution. Hell, I’ve played that card before, too, usually when deriding one of the man’s actual follies, á la fatally stupid junk like Gran Torino. Truth is, Old Squints has fucked up good material before—see Changeling, a wicked-interesting true story that required the razor wit of a Curtis Hanson, not Clint’s usual Old Hollywood fairy dust. But he’s also done tough, lean, classically cathartic wonders with some pretty blasé blueprints.

Case in point: the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby, which is nearly (if not quite) as hoary as you’ve made it out to be. Most of those garish caricatures you checked off come courtesy of hacky Haggis, who plucked them wholesale from F.X. Toole’s ringside and warped them into his usual rouge’s gallery of unreal mouthpieces. They stick out like anachronistic sore thumbs against the director’s dignified digs: the awful scenes with Maggie’s redneck family stink of a finger-wagging class condescension, and Morgan Freeman’s running voice-over makes constantly—and, at times, somewhat oppressively—explicit what might have been better left as subtext. (I think of Jack Lipnick in Barton Fink, chastising the titular scribe for his pretensions, screaming “There's plenty of poetry inside that ring, Fink.”)

Anthony Mackie, Michael Pena, Jay “Danger” Baruchel, and the trailer trash cavalry may have wandered in from one of Haggis’s loony race screeds, but Frankie, Maggie and Eddie sure didn’t. To appreciate Eastwood’s achievement is to distinguish the stereotypes from the affectionate archetypes, the writer’s contributions from the director’s, the fatty appendages from the meat at the center—in other words, to understand how Eastwood has transcended the limitations of his material and made the film his own. The pathos are anything but inadvertent. They're intrinsically linked to what we know about this genre and, especially, this filmmaker.

Certainly, he’s done more this time than put actors here and a camera there. This is one of Eastwood’s most visually dynamic movies. His characters dance in and out of shadows, his camera roving seductively through authentically run-down interiors. And his fight scenes have the sweat, swing and swagger of the genre’s best. With Million Dollar Baby, Clint buries his reputation for meat-and-potato inexpressiveness. More than that, though, he uses the supposed Lifetime movie of a third act to tear down the walls of genre tradition and reveal something deeper, stronger, and more profound behind them. (Like Raging Bull or Fat City, it’s a boxing movie that eventually becomes something much, much more.) Yes, Maggie goes through a hell of an ordeal. These slings and arrows and agonies are to establish a hopeless, no-way-out scenario for her…and to force Frankie to make the kind of sacrifice Eastwood’s iconic tough guys never had to. It’s a genuinely profound subversion of Clint’s masculine killer’s code, “murder” as both an act of devastating self-destruction and selfless love—the empathetic opposite of vigilante justice. Take it from someone who has seen the majority of the guy’s films: Clint’s never been this vulnerable, before or since. Levity my ass.

Todd Detmold's rebuttal:

Q: Where in the oeuvre of David Peoples do I detect the quiet grace and desperado gravity of Unforgiven?

A: Unforgiven¹.

Given our Kael v. Sarris discussions leading up to this point-counterpoint, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that you’re falling into exactly the same trap where Pauline found Andrew. You can lord it above me all you like that you’ve seen more Eastwood movies than me; if I’m required to plod through the entire Dirty Harry series just to figure out what makes Million Dollar Baby worthy of my time, we’ve got a problem.

This is one of the dangers of auteur theory. As soon as a director makes a couple good movies or establishes a persona (and this is even easier for a man who was an actor first), we can judge everything else by those unrelated premises. We end up taking the film not on what it is but on what it is not. Shooting the movie beautifully² doesn’t make it not a poorly-disguised lecture on the pros and cons of euthanasia, nor does Eastwood being vulnerable.

If we must play this game, let’s bring it back to Unforgiven once more (which is, by the way, a pretty damn well-written film). You want to see Eastwood playing a variation on a theme? A sensitive tough guy? You really can’t do much better than this. If Million Dollar Baby is a career benchmark because of its subversion of the Eastwood archetype, what, I ask, does that make Unforgiven? Eastwood has been an old man for a while now, and he had been playing with the same themes in Unforgiven twelve years prior when he rehashed them in Million Dollar Baby. It’s been a good twenty years since Eastwood lost the ability to make a movie where he isn’t an old man. Every role he plays will inadvertently be a commentary on his former self.

Even if we are impressed with Clint’s vulnerability as he opens up to his surrogate daughter, that arc is more than complete by the time she hits the stool. To suggest that the third act somehow transcends the script is dismissive of the deliberate narrative structure. Haggis goes so far out of his way to clumsily weave in Frank’s absent daughter and Maggie’s absent father – as well as, let’s not forget, the anecdote about putting the dog to sleep – there’s no way not to read the film as a harsh and cloying morality tale.

You admit the script is hoary, you admit that the ensemble is composed of stereotypes³. In your opening you say Eastwood doesn’t riff; rather he occupies a classical stage. Yet in your rebuttal you claim he’s futzing with archetypes and ‘tearing down the walls of the genre’. You say he’s a sturdy craftsman who would’ve owned the classical studio system, but then he’s transcending the limitations of his material and making it his own. Which is it, man? If Eastwood really wanted to subvert Haggis’ script and lift it from the muck, he would've had Frank unplug Maggie in the ambulance back from Vegas and saved us all the trouble.

1. You can call him David “Leviathan” Peoples or you can call him David “Twelve Monkeys” Peoples or David “Blade Runner” Peoples. Put your snark aside: surely the man deserves some credit for Unforgiven, no? [back]

2. And there’s something else Eastwood doesn’t deserve all the credit for. [back]

3. Except for the leads: they’re archetypes, allegedly, not stereotypes, and only because of the overly-explicit dignity of age and the twist of gender. If Eastwood is so good at infusing Haggis’ terrible writing with a lot of sincere humanity, why couldn’t he do anything with the other ten major characters? [back]

A.A. Dowd's closing statement:

Before we start willy-nilly evoking the spirit of dearly departed Pauline, let’s get something straight: Kael may have railed and raged against the act of appraising a work chiefly by gleaning the name on the signature line, but she would never, ever deny the importance that a little cinematic context plays in grasping her medium of choice. Nobody who loved Brian DePalma as much as she did possibly could. Kael recognized, as all critics should, that movies play on shared histories, many of them the kind that flicker in the dark and burn their way onto our synapses. Context is what separates Jonathon Rosenbaum from Peter Travers; that tabula rasa school of film criticism is the last refuge of those who don't know their backlots from their badlands.

No, you don’t have to have seen the lion’s share of Eastwood’s work to form an opinion on Million Dollar Baby. But is it so out-there to suggest that a familiarity with his oeuvre could actually benefit one’s understanding of the film? Certainly it might help one see the difference between what Clint The Actor is doing in Baby and what he's doing in Unforgiven. The latter is about violence as inescapable burden––you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and once stoked, that bloodlust hardwires itself into your moral makeup. The former is about the price that comes with strict adherence to rigid masculine codes. Unforgiven takes the Eastwood ethos to their logical endpoint: terrible triumph, but triumph nonetheless. Million Dollar Baby cracks them wide open, re-examines them, and ends up wondering aloud what the hell they're worth. It's summary vs. subversion, lionization vs. critique––how flatly reductive to dismiss them both as mere "sensitive tough guy" routines. (And by the way: how can you know what exactly Clint's doing a "commentary" on, or how well he's doing it, if you haven't seen these iconic back-works? Cultural osmosis? Or are you basing your conclusions on a familiarity with the McGarnagle character from The Simpsons?)

Certainly it takes some kind of willful distortion of screen content to see in the film's backstretch any kind of rhetorical debate on the morality of euthanasia. Beyond one brief conversation with the priest, when does Eastwood toss out talking points? It’s never about whether or not it’s wrong for Frankie to pull that plug. It’s about can he do it. It's about will he. To call the film's dramatic arc complete at the 90 minute mark is to suggest that our man gains absolution the minute he fully accepts his role as surrogate father figure. The real spiritual test, of course, comes later––will Frankie strip his own soul bare to set Maggie's free? Call it cheap or maudlin if you must, but I'm at a loss as to how this protracted internal struggle could be read as superfluous. Did you just shut down when the breathing tube showed up? Did your critical faculties go numb the minute Maggie's body did?

You see contradiction in my various defenses of the film. What I'm trying to convey––perhaps clumsily, but with enthusiasm––is the way great genre cinema can both adhere to template and locate a profound emotional truth at its center. Eastwood earns comparison to his Golden Age heroes by refusing to condescend his material, while simultaneously finding ways to gently bend it into something personal, something reflective of his own concerns. (Fuck it, maybe I am an autuerist.) At the very least, Million Dollar Baby offers one hell of a transgressive first: Hollywood's last standing cowboy, the faded face of masculinity incarnate, weeping openly (and convincingly!) into the camera. Not even David "Unforgiven" Peoples could write that out of the old man.

Todd Detmold's closing statement:

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that this has devolved into a battle of Million Dollar Baby vs. Unforgiven. I'd say both films are both about masculine codes and violence as burden.

Deep down though, it's starting to feel like writer vs. director. We write off David Peoples based on Leviathan, but we forgive Eastwood misstep after misstep. Why? I'd propose it's solely because we're so familiar with him. Eastwood is a living, breathing (barely, it sometimes seems) icon: this is how I'm able to laugh at McGarnagle without watching all fifty-something of the man's films⁴.

He's also a hyphenate, and I think it's risky to elide Eastwood the actor and Eastwood the director. Isn't Gran Torino also about cycles of violence? Isn't Space Cowboys also about aging masculinity? In fact, one of Eastwood's great shortcomings as an actor is that he's always Clint Eastwood. There's nothing he could ever do about it, but at the same time it makes for a cheap subversion of "the Eastwood archetype" if you've got Clint Eastwood.

To me, the sins of Paul Haggis drag Million Dollar Baby down from any heights Eastwood could ever hope to hoist it to, whereas my opposition seems to feel no amount of terrible writing and clumsy moralizing could bog down Eastwood's careful genre exercise.

But here's my last word: the dramatic arc of Million Dollar Baby is complete when Frank gives Maggie her mo cuishle cloak. He keeps the meaning from her (and the audience)⁵ so to jerk some tears in the final minutes, but what of anybody watching who speaks Irish? Whether we can recognize it or not at the time (and, like McGarnagle, you don't even need to know what it means to know what it means), this is the moment where Frank has accepted her as his daughter.

Everything after this is first a victory lap for their success (as boxer/manager and as father/daughter) followed by the overextended paralysis sequence. The connection between Maggie and Frank's real daughter remains hazily drawn and Frank ends up served with the same amount of nothing he began with. Frank's story is about accepting his fatherhood, and for the entire final act of the film he gets beaten down for it through contrived circumstance. I get beaten down, too, and I resent this when it's not earned. Anybody can tear a tongue out, but Paul Haggis can't make it mean something, even with Clint on both sides of the camera.

4. There's a middle ground, by the way, between having seen all and having seen none. Also, The Simpsons isn't Family Guy: you don't need to get the reference to get the joke. [back]

5. "My blood", in case anybody's gotten this far without knowing the film too closely. [back]

Titanic (1997)

2010-05-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

Spoiler Alert: The ship sinks in the end. (...that one never gets old, does it?)

-1-

this is where we first met

I love Titanic unconditionally. I hear a lot of people talk a lot of shit about it and I can see where they're coming from and I just don't care.

In eighth grade I went to see it a record seven times¹. That reel-'em-in formula mixture of romance and adventure worked on me back in middle school in a way no film since has come close to matching. It probably never will be topped, either²; I will never again (we can only hope) live with the same bleeding-hearted, adolescent, martyr-syndrome, romantic hopelessness that I wore around like a badge of honor in middle school. When you're the kind of twerp that daydreams about melodramatic heroism but you're too weird, bespectacled and chubby for any of the girls at school to take notice and you watch Star Wars all the time, an epic story like Titanic is your bread and butter.

Titanic and me? We go back a long way.

-2-
you want to go to a real party?

My age-old stance is that when something in Titanic rings untrue, 99 percent of the time it's the script. I remember when everybody agreed Leonardo DiCaprio was terrible here — he was so mediocre that in a massive Academy Awards sweep he couldn't even get a nomination.

At the same time, though, he certainly struck a chord with the young ladies of the era. Looks alone a great performance do not make, but given his time-and-again proven ability to ugly up and disappear into a role (even a ham-fisted one like the Dooley Ahppointed Feduhruhl Mahshall in Shutter Island), I have to take the side that he knew exactly what he was doing here. It's not that he's been maturing as an actor in his latter years; he's always been mature, even when playing somebody patently not.

Jack Dawson is a myth — or at least, he's mythological. There's no record of him onboard the ship (he won his ticket in a "lucky" hand at poker) or anywhere else in the world and (presumably all of) his drawings went down with the rest of the steerage. Titanic is the ship of dreams to everyone but Rose DeWitt Bukater, and Jack Dawson fills that void. Everything she's not and the polar opposite of everything she hates about her life, the love story works through Jack's casual one-dimensional charm.

Billy Zane's Caledon Hockley is that which Rose hates, which means that when people accuse Zane of overacting, he's actually just countering Leo's androgynous perfection (not an easy task), matching him charisma for charisma. I hem and haw occasionally in polite company when people ask me if I really think Titanic is one of the great movies of all time, but I never hesitate to sing Zane's praises. He's sniveling and dastardly, but he's also certainly a more layered character than Jack. When he opens his safe to discover the drawing of Rose, I really dig that Zane inflects Cal's reaction with a hint of actual heartbreak. He's only ever been the man society made him and he loses out to a resilient gutter rat who society tried its best to cast away. I dig every succeeding beat as Cal spends the rest of the movie vainly trying to buy, shoot and deceive his way off the sinking ship, finally stooping to pretending to be a little girl's father to earn passage onto a lifeboat.

Leo is unfortunately saddled with a good percentage of the film's bad dialogue (he runs neck and neck with Bill Paxton³ for a while, but surpasses him in screentime) as a result of being the paper-thin dream-boy his character has to be. Easily the worst scene in the film is the one set in the Titanic's gymnasium, in which Jack must talk Rose into reversing her (mother's) decision to never see him again.

ROSE: No, Jack, no. I'm engaged. I'm marrying Cal. I love Cal.
JACK: Rose, you're no picnic. All right, you're a spoiled little brat, even ... but under all that you're the most amazing, astounding, wonderful girl — woman — that I've ever known and-
ROSE: Jack, I-
JACK: No, no, let me try and get this out- you're- you're amaz- ...I'm not an idiot. I know how the world works, I've got ten bucks in my pocket, I have nothing to offer you, and I know that. I understand. But I'm too involved now. You jump, I jump, remember? I can't turn away without knowing you'll be all right. That's all that I want.
ROSE: Well I'm fine. I'll be fine. Really.
JACK: Really? I don't think so. They've got you trapped, Rose. And you're gonna die if you don't break free, maybe not right away because you're strong, but sooner or later, that fire that I love about you, Rose? That fire's gonna burn out.
ROSE: It's not up to you to save me, Jack.
JACK: No, it's not. You've got to do that yourself.

This stuff would be impossible to defend if Leonardo DiCaprio didn't sell it so hard. And the greatest defense of his performance is, finally, the fact that it worked on so many legions of teenage girls - exactly the demo Jack is delivering it to in the film.

-3-
never let go

Speaking of Jack being perfect for Rose, she's perfect for him as well. See, in a way, they're both psychopaths. Rose hangs off the edge of a boat not because she wants to jump but because she wants somebody to 'save' her (which is exactly what Jack is talking about in the gym). If Rose was actually going to jump, Jack says to her: "You woulda done it already." She needs a specific kind of attention she doesn't get from Cal and along comes this boy with a serious savior complex. Many have dismissed Jack and Rose's relationship as being too heavy on him telling her what to do and how to live her life, but that's exactly what she's asking for. He teaches her to save herself (and she saves him right back a couple times along the way) — leave it to Cameron to write a scene as poorly as "They've got you trapped!" and still make it be a turning point in the central relationship's arc.

Anybody who's ever dealt with people like this can tell you that relationships like these burn out fast. In fact, there's a lot more to the Romeo and Juliet comparison than you might think. Though not as well written, here is a pair of teenagers who put romance at a premium, even (maybe especially) at the expense of logic, personal well-being and the opinions of their respective communities. They aren't in love with each other so much as they're in love with the idea of each other and so they plunge into it with wild abandon.

That the ship sinks the night they consummate becomes, actually, thematically cross-stitched with their doomed romance. What happens to Rose and Jack, after all, when the ship docks at New York? She's gonna go with him, claims Rose - but given Cal's violent temper, his former-policeman right-hand man and her mother's dependence on their marriage for her social status, it's difficult to imagine her flight not impeded by crewmen, the master-at-arms or the New York City cops.

Jack and Rose would each get the most out of each other if they went separate ways after they leave the ship - Rose by living a full life and not riding side-saddle, Jack by having successfully convinced Rose that life is worth living.

And this is, to me, a beautiful, profound breed of love. It's something that only exists in the vacuum of adolescence and, when you experience it, it sticks with you for the rest of your life, even if the effect it has is one that must be denied or bottled up. You hear people talking about their relationships in high school or middle school and they say, "That doesn't count." We were foolish and naïve and innocent and now, red-faced and taciturn, we pretend to be different, better people. Likely, Rose and Jack would've done the same if they didn't meet the same fate as their Shakespearean predecessors.

This, by the way, is also why my generation has turned against Titanic, a film they went out for in droves at the time. It's an adolescent zeitgeist of which we are now ashamed, as though it were merely a fad like Pogs or the Macarena.

-4-
my heart will go on

I saw this movie seven times in middle school and even then I knew about the power of the audience: each of seven times they loved it. I still remember the gasps, laughter and tears elicited by this film across hundreds upon hundreds of movie-goers in three different Western Massachusetts theaters. I can feel the nervous, erotic tension during Kate's nude scene and I can hear the gentle sobbing of every teenage girl as Leo fails to wake up when the boats come back. This wasn't the kind of audience that hoots and hollers at cheap racism and fast action of the Michael Bay variety.

No, Cameron connects with his audience through a visceral mixture of raw emotion and peerless action. Titanic features one the great setup-and-payoffs in the history of action cinema: Bodine's computer reenactment of the sinking during the prologue. For the uninitiated, Cameron sets up every detail of the Titanic's demise in one hot minute so we know exactly what is going to happen. We just don't know when. This is why little moments like the smokestack's collapse on poor Fabrizio or the infamous "propeller guy" are so dramatically satisfying. Cameron takes a historical event, lays out the beats and then shows it happening to human beings (of arguable dimension).

There was a time when everybody loved this movie. I was there. I can admit I was deluded by the cloudy situations of middle school, but I swear I was not alone.

We all loved it then. But now, for some reason, we're embarrassed. Is it because the film absorbed us and made us vulnerable in a way we weren't quite comfortable with from our mainstream entertainment? It's not a challenging piece of art. Were we all shocked that it moved us with its simplicity? What's happened to Titanic is the quintessential backlash — it is the nature of a thing so massively popular.

Ever since middle school I've been living with this scenario wherein somebody cooler than I gasps, "Whoa, you like Titanic?" and compares me to a teenage girl. I tuck my tail in and stare at the floor, wondering how can I be the only person who loved a 1.8 billion dollar movie that made everyone cry and swept the major awards. Well, you know what, oh you masses of strong-hearted, stable-minded cool kids? Even if it is through something as simple as a connection to my lost youth and innocence, I love this movie with all of my heart and I'm not ashamed to admit it. To be ashamed requires too much effort. The heart will go on and on.

1.) The record was later broken by Monsters, Inc., which still holds it at nine. I had all the showtimes memorized; I would get out of high school Senior year and go catch the three o'clock. [back]

2.) Unless they figure out a way to sell over-priced IMAX tickets to my heart. [back]

3.) Paxton gives the only truly bad performance in the film. In the opening minutes, Brock Lovett (which really sounds like a porn name) delivers an (ostensibly intentional) melodramatic speech into his camcorder about the Titanic's "long journey down from the world above" only to get mocked by portly sub-mate Bodine. His reaction is to put the camera down and continue speaking slowly and melodramatically. Paxton is like a singer without a sense of pitch. [back]

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains

2010-05-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

What follows is a lengthy rant about the unsatisfying conclusion to the twentieth season of Survivor. It'll probably make the most sense if you watched it, but I'm going to include some footnotes for the uninitiated. If you aren't watching Survivor, you're seriously missing out.

"There's a flaw in the game of Survivor," said Russell Hantz in the Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains reunion show this weekend. He's right, though his proposed solution of giving America a percentage of the vote is nonsense. The problem with Survivor - and I say this as a vocal, devout fan of the game - is the decline over the past two seasons in sensible jury votes¹.

Russell is a divisive character. I used to hate him, too, back in the early days of Survivor: Samoa². I can understand why people get mad at him — but anger is irrational and what I can't figure out is the inability to let go of your anger and admit that he is hands-down the best Survivor to ever play the game. It's one thing when you're a television audience — we're an irrational lot and still we've awarded Russell the $100,000 audience vote twice consecutively — but it's another thing when you're playing the game and another thing still when you're a veteran.

In two consecutive games, Russell whipped the competition and landed squarely in the Final Three only to lose the vote from a bitter jury. Obviously, playing to the jury is crucial to any Survivor's strategy. But the point is that they're never going to want to vote for anybody. It's up to the jury to decide who is most deserving of the million-dollar prize. Not who they feel made them look less like a bunch of fools.

But in the past two seasons, this is exactly what happened. And so Sandra Diaz-Twine was crowned the first two-time winner of the game, despite being an unlikable failure from day one to day 39. Here is a 'Sole Survivor' who discussed at Final Tribal that her single mission the entire game was to get Russell voted off. And she couldn't do it. Ever.

Russell played this entire game with a target tattooed on his increasingly-skinny back and out-maneuvered the competition every single time.

Let's examine the incident with Tyson Apostol, who changed his vote at the last minute despite a rock-solid Plan Voodoo³ of Boston Rob Mariano's devising and ended up getting the boot himself. This has been heralded as a dumb move on Tyson's part (and it is), even getting him nominated for the cruelly lame "Dumbest Move in Survivor History" fan vote at the end of the season. But has everyone forgotten that this was entirely Russell's doing? He had an idol and everyone knew it; Boston Rob had a (nearly) fool-proof plan to split the votes three-three for Russell and ally Parvati Shallow⁴, eliminating whichever one of them played Russell's idol.

What did Russell do? He selected Tyson, pulled him aside and got in his head, telling him he was voting for Parvati and Tyson might as well do the same. Tyson made a dumb move, but it was the result of Russell's manipulation. This is an incredible thing that Russell does every single time he's in a bind — using only his wits, he manages to manipulate the competition into acting against their better interests. This is a founding tenet of Survivor strategy⁵.

Russell did the same thing to Danielle DiLorenzo much later in the season. He tried to play her and Parvati off each other, which failed — their alliance was too strong and Russell immediately got caught in the lie. Rather than back down, he blazed ahead with full confidence right into Tribal Council, where he berated Danielle until she broke down in tears and confessed to an unbreakable alliance with Parvati. Russell then called an audible, mouthing "Danielle" at Jerri Manthey, the swing vote that sent Danielle packing.

These are the actions of a born Survivor player. Russell is so good at the game that he made even the Heroes vs. Villains cast of veteran all-stars look like the amateur schlubs of Foa Foa and Galu with which he swept the beach in Season 19. Russell didn't lose the jury vote because he played 'dishonestly'. He lost the jury vote because he bruised the fragile egos of 9 veteran reality TV stars.

Russell doesn't play to assuage the jury — he admits it, and I can admit it, too. His strategy is to convince them that he is the most deserving of the Sole Survivor not through kind words at Final Tribal but through absolute domination through 39 days of game play. Russell's undoing in Survivor: Samoa was that he counted on a jury of amateurs to observe his professional game. His loss in Heroes vs. Villains, it turns out, is the same harsh lesson folded upon itself.

I've written previously about the four types of Survivor contestant⁶. Russell is the quintessential Challenged Self: a man who swore on his first of 78 consecutive days of Survivor that he was the best and would prove it. Prove it he did, and soundly.

The silver lining to Russell's backhanding by the Samoa jury was the knowledge that he would immediately have a one-off shot at revenge. The Heroes vs. Villains season billed itself as one of revenge and redemption. These are returning champions and almost-champions looking to prove what they failed to prove the first (or second) time around. As the seasons were filmed back-to-back, Russell had this one fleeting chance to play again and use his revolutionary cutthroat strategy, unleashing it on an(other) unknowing tribe of castaways.

There's no question that Russell is great at what he does: the problem starts when he reaches the jury and everybody is too pissed off to vote for him to win. My hope — and Russell's — was that the Survivor veterans would see what he was doing and reward him for doing it so damn well. Instead Russell was so much better than the JTs and the Boston Robs of the Survivor Pantheon that the seasoned veterans were actually more upset at him than the cast of Season 19.

Obviously, playing for the jury vote is a huge part of Survivor. The facet of Russell's strategy that sets it apart from the rest of the "villains" is that his grab for jury votes is never borne of false sympathy, flattery or modesty. He tells it like it is: "I'm the best and that's why I deserve it."

The problem with Survivor — not every season, but certainly in these past two and especially in Heroes vs. Villains — is when the jury fails to recognize excellent game play and votes not for the best player but for the one who had the least to do with bruising their egos. This is apparent not solely in their refusal to give Russell a single vote but in the awarding of the million dollars to Sandra over Parvati.

Now, I can't stand Parvati, but I begrudgingly admit that she's an excellent player. I compare her to the New York Yankees: she's evil, but dammit if she's not great at the game. Though Parvati undeniably did some coattail riding off Russell in Heroes vs. Villains (look at her sharing all the idols he found and escaping votes thank to his manipulation) she also did have several big moves of her own. In addition to dominating in challenges, her idol split between Jerri and Sandra was one of the season's great blindsides that nobody saw coming. Not Russell, not Sandra or Jerri, not the Heroes, not the television audience. Russell admitted as much at the reunion show: between Parvati and Sandra, Parvati should've won. All Sandra ever did the entire season was talk about her husband in Afghanistan and fail to get rid of the two more-powerful players. The only reason she made it to the finals was because circumstance consistently brought her to the block last in her dying alliances.

Giving Sandra the million dollars was the action of a cowardly jury. In a 6-3-0 vote, Danielle, Jerri and Benjamin "Coach" Wade voted for Parvati — Danielle because Parvati's hand-holding got her as far as she did and Jerri and Coach because they held on to a modicum of respect for the game Parvati played. In that jury, I have a lingering affection for JT, Amanda Kimmel, Rupert Boneham, Colby Donaldson and maybe even Candice Woodcock and I am so disappointed in them — "heroes" all — for taking the avenue of the reality fame whore, upset because their spotlight got dimmed.

This is not the role of the jury. Making it to the jury on Survivor is an honor all its own, and with it should come a sense of duty to the game. If you get ousted by a player of Russell's caliber, you owe it to that player and you owe it to the game to show some goddamn respect. If Amanda Kimmel and Colby Donaldson and "America's Tribal Council" winner Rupert Boneham can't muster any respect for the game, how am I ever going to get anybody else to?

1.) The jury is the linchpin to the Survivor rules. Every season, with two-or-three finalists, the previous nine-to-twelve cast members "voted off the island" cast the votes for who wins the million dollar prize. This means that if you want to win, you have a Final Tribal Council during which you must convince the people you double-crossed why you deserve the money more than your fellow finalists. [back]

2.) Hantz played consecutively on the last two seasons. After stealing the show and losing the final vote in season 19 (Survivor: Samoa), he was invited back for this most recent one, the all-star Heroes vs. Villains, which was filmed in Samoa immediately after the previous season wrapped. [back]

3.) One of the devices added to the game several seasons in is the Hidden Immunity Idol, which can be discovered any number of ways (usually buried and located by following a series of clues) and may or may not be kept a secret from the other tribe members. The Idol is played at Tribal Council after votes are cast, nullifying any votes for the Survivor who played it and voting out the person with the next highest number (often this person gets the boot with only one or two votes). Russell is a mastermind at locating them, and likes to brag about it. So: when the rest of your tribe knows you have an idol, one way to get rid of you (and/or it) is to execute Plan Voodoo. The outnumbering alliance splits their votes — half for the idol-bearer and the next person they want to get rid of (usually the idol-bearer's ally). If either one of them plays the idol, the other one will get the boot. [back]

4.) Her last name is Shallow. I hate her. [back]

5.) Not only did this move get rid of Tyson, but Russell's speech in handing the idol over to Parvati was deliberately delivered to the pompous Coach, attempting to put the Dragonslayer squarely in Russell's pocket with nothing but flattery and a little talk of "honor". [back]

6.) The four types of Survivor contestant: The Walkabout, The Challenged Self, The Fame Whore and The Crazy. [back]

Babies

2010-05-17T08:00:00.010-05:00

On the surface, Babies is a masterwork of precision. The documentary, following the first year in the life of four human babies, is frame-by-frame exactly what it intends to be — that is, not very much. It offers a slim 80 minutes of footage of babies being cute. If director Thomas Balmes is trying to offer any kind of thesis or perspective, it's nothing more than "babies are cute", illustrated by the similarity of behavior across racial and cultural divides. Without even a hint of narrative (falsely constructed or otherwise), the film plays out like an 80-minute YouTube video. Why should we be taking this seriously?

According to the audience I saw it with, this thing is a laugh riot from start to finish. It recalls the inaugural Springfield Film Festival entry "Man Getting Hit By Football", which would later be remade with George C. Scott to beat out "A Burns For All Seasons" at that year's Academy Awards. It's an uneasy aggregate — a juncture between high and low art that asks nothing of its audience and is applauded for its simplicity. But what really bothers me about Babies is that the film is a stepping stone in our cultural devolution, and a deeply exploitative one at that.

The film plays out like any nature documentary (that's exactly what it is), with the infant hero a rare human subject that will not visibly alter its behavior under the influence of observation. Babies will laugh, cry and fall over whether or not they are being recorded. However, Balmes goes to great lengths to establish a fourth wall to 'protect' them: from the careful excision of the omnipresent parents to the stasis of the camera throughout the running time, we are (mis)lead to believe we are watching them through an inert window. It is as though we somehow deserve to do so - as though we are there with them.

But the fact is, unlike a lizard or a bird, these four will one day become self-aware. How will they feel about being the subject of something like this, having their naked bathtub photos already preserved on DVD and Blu-ray long before they have a chance to bring home a boyfriend or girlfriend? Did this occur to the parents, edited in here as though they are no more aware of the cameras than their children? It's a dazzling stylistic choice: a manipulation of our observation such that we forget we are witnessing this through the middleman of a film crew invasion. If there isn't a camera, the babies aren't being recorded and they're just there being cute. In pursuit of its purity of content — "Babies are cute!" — it omits the necessary facet of a film of this conceit: that babies are people.

We're here laughing at the foibles of strangers, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the white American girl gets the least screen time. To draw up another Simpsons reference, let us recall the incident of Homer watching a Bollywood musical suggested by Apu:

BART: This movie you rented sucks.
HOMER: No it doesn't, it's funny! Their clothes are different from my clothes! Look at what they're wearing!

Have we so little conscience about the sources of our entertainment that we're willing to make a cheap joke out of a goat drinking the baby's bathwater in Mongolia? Calling this a low common denominator doesn't really seem to do justice to the project, as a transcultural simplicity seems to have been Balmes' plan all along. The jokes are cheap, yes: easy, and of little value, but also they ring out as indicators of how little we require in our quest for superiority. We say we are laughing because the babies are cute, but really it's because they are different from us and in their pratfalls we can feel the wisdom of our age — we condescend to canonize them in a clip show with a wisp of relief that our babies, see, they don't have goats drinking out of their tubs.

On the other hand, if we choose not to laugh at the helpless infants, there remains some value in the piece as a great example of how anyone can film anything these days, and anyone will.

Perhaps we don't think about it too deeply because the little red light is ubiquitous now. Millions and millions of babies born to Americans in the past few years have already generated the raw footage necessary to cull together a "documentary" like this, and a sizable percentage of their parents have already done so on YouTube and Facebook. As we pawn off our privacy for the cheap cost of fifteen seconds of internet fame, the value of our children's privacy becomes difficult to calculate. They'll have facebook pages set up in their names before they know how to speak and if their clip on YouTube gets a million hits then, oh, then they've earned their Gerber.

They won't even have a chance to defend themselves.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-12T06:00:00.005-05:00

In many ways the antithesis to the Batman of Christopher Nolan's films, the Tony Stark of Jon Favreau's Iron Man franchise is everything a billionaire playboy should be. Compare him to Christian Bale's somber, sober Bruce Wayne — the men are equals in their respective comic book universes. Both are rich, both are surrounded by beautiful women and fancy gadgets, both lost their fathers at a young age, and both are mortals entering into the superhero game behind sheer chutzpah and a lot of armor. The difference is that Stark immediately shuffles off the onus of secret identity, going public with his superheroism at the first chance he gets. For a rich, fun-loving, womanzing alcoholic sociopath, this actually makes a lot of sense.

Tony Stark is a damn likable guy and he adores the attention, which makes it all the more remarkable how depressing an experience it is to sit through Iron Man 2. The central foundation to the franchise's success is the idiosyncratic narcissism Robert Downey, Jr. brings to the lead role. The actor has more fun with his words than his character does gadgets. So, I'm baffled at the choice to send Stark into a depressed funk through the majority of the runtime, slowly dying due to his worsening condition, drinking more and more heavily and itching from a severe flare-up of Daddy Issues.

The light bulb in his chest is no longer doing its job and several enemies (foreign and domestic) want to either steal or copy the Iron Man weapon-suit. This means the film will climax with a lot of Iron Man-like machines having it out with Stark – just like the last one, except now there's a plurality of evil iron men. I find myself wondering, knowing so little as I do about the Iron Man mythos, if there will ever be any bad guys in this series that aren't iron men trying to steal Tony's thunder.

The plot is incidental, though, really. We're here to watch Downey snark around and to maybe watch stuff blow up, and frankly there's not enough of either. There's a plethora of new characters — some interesting, some not, all rushed on and off the screen, all requisitely sexy — and the process of juggling them while seeing the second act through to the third proves an arduous task for director Favreau and his hired gun screenwriter Justin Theroux. Theroux can pun with the best of them, but I get the impression he didn't have a lot of room to get creative with anything besides wordplay. There are triple agents, lovers' spats, DUI Iron Manning, winking references to other Marvel superheroes, hot chicks, big guns and a cast of stellar underutilized actors, from Clark Gregg and Don Cheadle to supposed “lead” villain Mickey Rourke. Rourke has maybe thirty lines: he's there to look foreign and evil, and I suppose he does get the job done.

Maybe the only actor who does get his due is Sam Rockwell, playing an American arms manufacturer named Justin Hammer with some mean Tony-envy. He tries to build his own suit and he tries to sleep with the same women as Tony. He fails in both cases. Preening and peacocking without any feathers to show and armed with a supply of bizarre, hilarious non-sequiturs courtesy of Theroux, Rockwell manages to steal the film from Downey. This is no small feat, but it’s never something that should've been allowed to happen.

The audience of cheering fanboys gave up their biggest hollers of the night to the trailers for Inception and The Last Airbender and to the post-credit sequence exposing half-of-a-second of imagery promising a future release from Marvel Studios. The entire machine becomes about not what we're watching now but the anticipation of what's coming next. If there's an hour of downtime in the middle of the film, it's okay because we know both good guy and bad guy are working on their Iron Man weapons and will likely finish up around the same time so they can battle. "Iron Man 2 was great," they want us to say. "And it was so cool how there's going to be more." Second verse, same as the first.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

Blog Notes 5/10/10: Please Give

2010-05-10T12:31:00.003-05:00

I'm proud to announce my debut over at Venus Zine, the preeminent publication and website for which I hope to be contributing on an irregular basis. Click through to read my review of Nicole Holofcener's newest, Please Give.

The Tenuous Ultimacy of the Ultimate Edition

2010-05-05T12:00:00.012-05:00

-1-

Though my years-old DVD copy of Terminator 2: Judgment Day is labeled as the "Ultimate Edition", there have been countless successive home video releases of the film, including an "Extreme Edition" and one that arrives in a novelty box shaped like a Terminator's endoskull. A cursory examination of the "special" features reveals these discs are all more-or-less the same.

Three of James Cameron's films have been widely distributed in "special editions" much longer than their respective theatrical releases: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Allegedly Cameron's preferred version, the extended cut of Aliens was released in 1992, the same year as the seminal Director's Cut of Blade Runner. It's funny how even at the birth of the "special home video edition" phenomenon, the term 'director's cut' was being misappropriated.

In his exhaustive tome Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, journalist/author Paul M. Sammon describes the tangled web of miscommunication that transpired between the collaborators working on the Director's Cut of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. At one point, two "Director's Cut"s were in assembly, one on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Scott himself had written some notes out and left the project behind to work on 1492, leaving Warner Bros. and a series of editors and producers in charge of the project.

This fiasco left the door open for yet another cut, the allegedly Final one, which was released theatrically in 2007.

-2-

One of the more egregious fallacies perpetrated on the movie-buying public is the increasingly ubiquitous notion that 'more' equals 'better', which has lead to every other film on the shelves at Best Buy sporting stickers that say things like "Extended!", "Unrated!" and "xx Minutes of Footage too hot/scary/gory for theaters!" They sound like porno buzzwords, which is more-or-less what they are (and it's only barely tangential to bring up that the pornography industry is exactly what we have to thank for every single home video market takeover, from VHS over Betamax up through Blu-ray over HD-DVD).

This leads to the carefully-edited¹theatrical cut of a film becoming devastated by the thoughtless insertion of unnecessary scenes that were originally left on the cutting room floor for a good reason. All too often, this becomes the only version of the film accessible to a collector. One great example of this is the "Unrated Director's Edition" of Miami Vice, which almost any Michael Mann fanatic will tell you travesties the smash-cut club-set opening of the theatrical cut with a lame boat race credits sequence and a spoon-feeding explanation of everything you're about to see in the former version's immersive opening set piece. This is the only version of the film available on Blu-ray.

Of course, even when the various versions of a film are available, the onus is left to the individual to slog through two cuts of a film so that he can decide for himself which is the "better"². You have to really love a movie to be able to put up with something like this; as for myself, there's more-often-than-not another movie that I haven't seen in any iteration that will take priority. For the purposes of my Cameron retrospective on this blog, however, I managed to sit through 289 minutes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 291 minutes of Aliens, and 309 minutes of The Abyss. Were it not for the easy superiority of the Aliens extended cut, I would've found this a deeply resentful task.

Take, for example, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which exists, across three films, in lengths that can run you anywhere between 558 minutes and a superlative 682. I can tell you right now that, having experienced them in their shortest forms, I cannot imagine any future circumstance that would bring me to sit through 11 hours and 22 minutes of that bunk - especially when their creator, Peter Jackson, is on the record suggesting that the extended cuts are for fans only (my phrasing, not his³).

The Abyss' extended cut presents a good example of Jackson's "immerse them in the diegesis" school of editing. While the "killer wave" finale adds a good ten minutes to the runtime, most of the meat that gets added is comprised of small character beats and scene extensions. If you love these characters and you want to go back and watch all of them singing along to the entirety of Linda Ronstadt's "Willin'", here's your chance. But it only serves to make the piece, as a whole, bloated and over-long.

The extra scenes in the longer version of Terminator 2 are downright awful, from the soft-focus daydream sequence featuring a cameo from Michael Biehn to the "Dyson family at home" scene in which Mrs. Dyson talks her workaholic husband into turning off his computer on a Sunday to take his kids to the amusement park. The scene ends with mother, father, son and daughter embracing, shouting "Hooray!"

There are, admittedly, some nifty special effects worked into the extended cut, most notably the trick shot in which the camera peers deep inside the Terminator's metal skull while he looks on from the mirror completely naturally. But a nifty special effect is just that and doesn't make a good movie, no matter what some adolescents tell you. Special effects, increasing in 'awesome'-ness at an exponential rate (or, as the T-800 might say, a geometric rate), are troublesome. One of the stated reasons for cutting The Abyss' tidal wave sequence in the first place was that they lacked the proper amount of technology and money to finish it for the theatrical release. Rather: Cameron worked with what he had, solved problems and turned in a film much tighter than he'd written on paper.

Similarly, Cameron claims that he'd drafted Avatar as early as 1995 but took fifteen years with it because he was waiting for the technology to catch up with his vision. This, from the man who made the swarms of Aliens with just six men in black latex suits.

-3-

George Lucas is the great criminal in terms of constructing movies around special effects rather than the other way around, and yet with every travesty of his original Star Wars trilogy, he pulls the "original vision" card. With the 1997 "Special Edition" theatrical re-releases, Lucas opened a watershed that would engulf his long-awaited prequel trilogy and result in Hayden Christensen getting digitally inserted into Return of the Jedi for the sake of some bastard continuity.

The failure of the prequel trilogy to garner much more than scorn from anyone but the most devoted (read: desperate) of Star Wars fans can be viewed in microcosm during the scene in The Phantom Menace in which Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn provides a scientific explanation of The Force. In an instant, the decades-old notion of an intangible, mysterious divinity that guided (or misguided) our heroes in a galaxy far, far away was made banal by a species of blood parasites.

This scenario is recalled in Jackson's description of the extended cuts of The Lord of the Rings. Only a person very different from me would be interested in seeking out an explanation for how Darth Vader is able to choke people from across the room - it's so much more interesting as an old-time religion, part voodoo and part martial art. Similarly, only a person very different than me is so interested in the Baggins clan that they're willing to sacrifice artistic integrity for the sake of a more-expansive mythos⁴. In most cases, the excised material serves to over-explain or corrupt one-or-more of the film's themes, as in The Phantom Menace⁵, and as in T2's "If we flip this switch in his head the machine can learn to be human" scenario and as in The Abyss' "supposedly benevolent alien intelligence becomes complicit in our cold war theatrics" finale. Perhaps you needed this stuff to think your scriptwriting to its endgame; again, you cut it from the finished product for a reason.

-4-

Aliens provides a notable exception to this trend; for the theatrical release, all mention of Ripley's deceased daughter was excised, robbing her relationship with Newt of a crucial layer. The movie works without it, but it's better with. In the theatrical cut, the arc shared between the two girls becomes concentrated on notions of dreaming (the literal kind) - a mundanity made poignant by the image of a daughter and mother learning to sleep soundly again because they have each other. This is not to say that their surrogacy is vague or incomprehensible in the theatrical cut; rather, the mention of Ripley's daughter is a rare example of Cameron writing a realistic, layered character and not hitting us over the head with her politics or clumsy evolutions. The business of Ripley's daughter is good and deserves to be seen.

The sad fact of the matter is that for every film that is released in its writer's or director's intended form, there are ten that aren't and Aliens (in 1986) and Blade Runner (in 1982) were two of them. Those two films got recut and released in special editions in 1992, and it's telling of the Hollywood machine that it took Blade Runner an extra four years and they still got it wrong; it would take Ridley Scott another 15 to release his definitive version and he still couldn't call it that because the '92 version had become canonized as the "Director's Cut".

Frustratingly, in working for so long at so extraordinary a stature that he was afforded the right to keep editing a big budget Hollywood movie for 25 years, Scott was also allowed to go retroactively reshoot parts of his film, right down to a digital insertion of Joanna Cassidy's head over that of her obvious stunt double. On the DVD release of that "Final" cut, there is a behind-the-scenes featurette in which one of the producers of the reshoots describes the process of organizing the original release's storied errors into "Beloved Flaws" and flaws they could get away with changing. If Scott gets a pass to revisit Blade Runner because of its disastrous production, I say he shreds it when he goes in for horseshit like these reshoots.

This 2007 release is, allegedly, the intended version of Blade Runner, but what happens when Scott decides he likes another actor better than Joanna Cassidy for the role? At this moment in time, with photorealistic Na'vi and a terrifyingly computer-generated thirty-something Arnold Schwarzenegger making appearances in the multiplex last year, the onus lies squarely on the shoulder of the man with the rights to make these kinds of decisions and change or not-change his films.

Any powerful-enough director - Cameron, Lucas, Jackson, Scott, et al. - has today an all-too-easy path to meddle with previous films, and the money-back guarantee of a repackaged DVD makes this kind of thing a no-brainer for the studios and distributors. An extended edition of Avatar is already geared for a theatrical release later this year, and surely we can also count on a follow-up home video release in time for Christmas. So what of the film in the theater, man? What happens to the movie that you spent fifteen years putting together that drew America together in arguments both juvenile and philosophical not four months ago? What happens when George Lucas decides he wants to destroy every copy of the movie that generations grew up on because it doesn't have Hayden Christensen in it?

The community of a theatrical exhibition is being desecrated left and right these days, and in this case it is at the hands of the people in charge. Quit it!, already, with the bigger, badder, meaner DVD re-releases and try getting it right the first time. Put your damn film in the can and move on. The movie is an extant piece of art and once it leaves your hands, it's up to the evolving, mutating audience to judge, decry, revere or refute as they so choose. It's the audience that will breathe life into a film after it's done. If you, the director, never let go of the thing, how can we ever hold on to it? What will your film even be?

1.) We can only hope it's carefully edited. [back]

2.) Or the funnier, or more interesting, or more precise... [back]

3.) Peter Jackson, discussing the extended editions:

"For [The Fellowship of the Ring] we also had certain benchmarks that we wanted to reach in terms of the pacing. We wanted the Hobbits to leave Hobbiton within 25 minutes of the movie's beginning; we wanted them to get to Rivendell by a certain time because we wanted the decision to destroy the ring to be no more than halfway through the movie. There were certain structural things that felt like they were sort of marker posts that we wanted to work with. [...] Also what I like about putting more scenes back in the DVD is the fact that if you dig the movie, if you did like the film, and you want to sort of see more of it, if you want to learn more about who they are and what they are and learn more about their motivations, then there's these scenes that do exist that actually give you that information, that background information. So, it's nice to be able to give people an opportunity to see those if they want to."

In other words, the theatrical cut is paced like a movie should be paced and the home video cut is for die hards with a lot of time on their hands. [back]

4.) At this point, my less-than-popular opinion that the Lord of the Rings films aren't very good is more than evident. To each his own, but I believe my point stands even if you love them. Perhaps: especially if you love them. [back]

5.) I realize I'm here discussing the prequel trilogy - not actually a three-feature series of deleted scenes - as though it is little more than a series of half-baked ideas, afterthoughts and ciphers best left on the cutting room floor. Exactly. [back]

Piranha II: The Spawning (1981) & The Terminator (1984)

2010-05-03T07:00:00.003-05:00

This is supposed to be about honesty, and specifically about confronting the action movies that I loved as a boy through the perspective of what I now humbly refer to as "adulthood". I have to engage in conversation with my younger self and try to figure out what was wrong with him and also what was working out all right. I'm not embarrassed that in the seventh grade I loved Titanic. I might be a little red-in-the-face for liking True Lies as much as I used to (but then, if Cameron's made any single film exclusively for the narrow demographic of male teenagers, it's that one).

I grew up with Cameron's movies, and the fact that, until recently, I had never seen one of them presents something of a conundrum. Cameron took a mulligan on his first feature and now we have to think of him as having two separate and distinct debut features. As a kid I actively sought out all of his work, but somehow (and I was perfectly aware of its existence) Piranha II: The Spawning got left off the list. So what's it like to revisit a beloved first film that you've seen countless times in juxtaposition to an alternate first film that you've never seen at all?

The Terminator is almost always checked as Cameron's first; most people give him the courtesy of reserving Piranha¹ for the punchline or leaving it off the list entirely. His first of three sequels to his name thus far, Piranha is inarguably Cameron's "least good" movie. The story goes that it was another in a line of special effects gigs for Cameron, who took over after the original director departed. It was a promotion and a paycheck and Cameron has since disowned the film.

I think that's too bad.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't conceive of the thing and wasn't allowed in the editing room (another 'citation needed' urban legend tells of Cameron trying to break into the editing suite in Rome and getting ousted by security guards), is there any merit to his film as the juvenilia of a first-timer who would go on to make several of the best action movies ever made? I say there is, especially when compared to Terminator.

Cameron started his career with two movies that can easily be classified as 'horror' films. In respect to the traditional merits of that genre, both are failures; he hasn't been back to the well since. And to be completely honest: I've seen Terminator so many times that its cheese emerges now as more pungent than I'd have thought possible, while there's a novelty to Piranha that I find refreshing. These are surprisingly similar pieces by an audacious young director not yet capable of mixing his Ideas™ with his characters in any graceful fashion.

Now an icon, The Terminator was an out-of-left-field hit, the massive popularity of which far outweighed its overall quality. Though filled with great Ideas™ and cracker-jack suspense, the decades have made it far too easily conflated with its superior sequel. Piranha is little seen yet consistently the butt of jokes - it's actually underrated (albeit not severely so). The films share a hokiness that might be less intentional in Piranha but there's plenty of unintentional humor in Terminator if you're willing to go there in a movie you grew up on.

Take Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese. Cameron and Biehn would team up in three consecutive movies (four if your count his deleted scene from T2) and ultimately The Abyss' Lt. Coffey would merit an Oscar campaign from Twentieth Century Fox. But their formula for a malleable, humanized alpha male wasn't quite perfected yet in The Terminator, saddling Biehn with some really unfortunate turns of phrase. Linda Hamilton, never exactly a high-caliber actor, only helps to bog down the romance between Reese and Sarah Connor. It doesn't take long for the pair to turn into mouth breathers.

SARAH: Kyle... the women in your time. What are they like?
KYLE: Good fighters.
SARAH: That's not what I meant. Was there someone special?
KYLE: Someone...
SARAH: A girl? You know...
KYLE: No. Never.
SARAH: Never? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry ... so much pain.
KYLE: Pain can be controlled. You just disconnect it.
SARAH: So you feel nothing?
KYLE: John Connor gave me a picture of you once. I didn't know why at the time. It was very old. Torn. Faded. You were young like you are now. You seemed just ... a little sad. I used to always wonder what you were thinking at that moment. I memorized every line. Every curve. I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have.

Ouch.²

The Terminator, like Cameron's latter-day successes, works in spite of its bad performances and worse dialogue. A huge factor in making the film a hit was that nobody saw it coming; recycled into the fabric of the popular culture, decades of parody and copying have made it a little worse for the wear.

But there's a great piece of connective tissue between Piranha II and The Terminator: police officer Lance Henriksen. A Cameron repertory player up through the 1998 Martini Ranch music video "Reach"³, Henrisken delivered some of his best character work (in a career full of understated, underrated character work) in Aliens, The Terminator and, yes, Piranha. The fanboy in me has to feel a tingle in my spine during Piranha's sub-Bass opening credits wherein the actor, billed third, shows up in an emphasis-box: "Lance Henriksen as Steve".

In The Terminator, Henriksen plays garrulous Detective Hal Vukovich, teaming up with Paul Winfield's Lieutenant Ed Traxler and Earl Boen's Dr. Silberman to provide the film's only running comic relief⁴. The three men are here to provide comfort to Sarah and protect her from the two crazies (nobody believes they are actually soldiers from the future) out to get her, but of course Silberman leaves his videotape running to allow our heroine to see Kyle shouting about how she's as good as dead. Traxler and Vukovich both get a spare few character beats that stand out in the film: Traxler trying to light a cigarette only to discover he has one already going in his other hand and Vukovich telling stories and showing off scars he received in the line.

They're side characters in the film, but when Traxler gets shot during the Terminator's riveting, wrenching raid on the police station, Cameron pauses long enough to allow Vukovich a fleeting "Ed!" over Traxler's body. This gets me, partially because Henriksen is so adept at infusing melodramatic material with his grizzled, steadfast humanity. Henriksen is real, and he's equally good in Piranha, if not better. He's got the lead here: if the whole thing was made to cash in on Jaws, Henriksen is Chief Brody. Of course, the quantity of screen time here can't match the quality of his minutes in The Terminator, but to Henriksen it's all a wash.

I love how seriously he takes this preposterous scenario. Paternal towards both his son and the resort community he serves and protects, Chief Steve spends the whole film worrying. Like Chief Brody, he's the only one who grasps that anyone's lives are stake throughout most of the running time, even as bodies are piling up. Of course, why would we take this seriously? The mere suggestion of genetically-altered, man-eating piranha that can fly out of the water at you because they have wings is as ridiculous to a beachgoer as it is to a moviegoer.

But part of what I find fascinating is that these movies are, in essence, about the exact same thing - and it's the exact same thing that almost all of Cameron's movies are about: a military designed future-weapon flails out of our limited control and comes back to bite us in the ass⁵. In Aliens and Avatar, we try to gain control of a weapon that isn't ours and in The Abyss and Avatar the non-human intelligence teaches us a lesson about the weapons we desire to wield. The premise of Piranha II is so thematically in line with the rest of Cameron's ouevre, it's almost as if his entire career has been a response to the failure of this C-movie fiasco: "No, no, this is what I am interested in and I will do it better again and again just to show you I was right."

At this point in time, the familiarity of The Terminator works against the film. It's a classic, sure, but can't match Cameron's three follow-ups in terms of cast, suspense, action or theme. Really, the only of Cameron's films that it looks good against is Piranha II, which, since I tend to root for the underdog, only makes me like Piranha all the more. I may or may not ever sit through it again, but I'm glad I've finally seen it once.

1.) The full on-screen title is Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, which I greatly prefer. And in case you're wondering: no, I've never seen and cannot comment on the film's predecessor, though my impression is that they are about as disparate as two films about killer piranha could possibly be. [back]

2.) There probably ought to be several more ellipses in that transcription. [back]

3.) This eight-minute Cameron-helmed music video, stars Aliens cast members Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein and Paul Reiser. In addition, it features Academy Award Winner Kathryn Bigelow as a sexy cowgirl mercenary leading a posse of sexy cowgirl mercenaries, and resurfaced on the internet during the "non-feud" between Cameron and Bigelow that took up too much of this year's award season. It is, to borrow a term from my friend Daniel Gorman, 'essential' viewing. [back]

4.) Silberman is the only one of the three who lives to see Judgment Day; in the sequel, his character is far less exuberant, though he has made his career on the committal of Sarah Connor (as he foreshadows in the first film). Presumably, having walked out of the police station and crossed paths with the machine that would kill almost everyone left in the building, he's been traumatized into humorlessness. [back]

5.) In the case of Piranha's sublimely ridiculous underwater scuba sex cold open, they will bite us in the ass – literally!! [back]

I Thought You Were Dead

2010-04-30T11:05:00.000-05:00

Today at Attic Salt: in addition to the end of Round Two of The Jane Austen Challenge (which I am failing), you can read my review of Pete Nelson's novel I Thought You Were Dead, about an alcoholic and his talking dog. The book is fiction of the "thinly veiled" variety and takes place almost entirely in my hometown, so I might have a few things to say about it.

I Thought You Were Dead by Pete Nelson

Attic Salt: A Literary Blog

The Office: "Secretary's Day"

2010-04-27T06:00:00.004-05:00

In "Secretary's Day", The Office offers up what is easily the best episode of its beleaguered sixth season so far. Here, not one but two recent additions to the ensemble come into their own in big ways. That Ellie Kemper's moppet receptionist Erin could hold an arc all her own is no shocker; what's surprising here is the emergence of Zach Woods' Sabre suit Gabe as a formidable antagonist and lightning bolt for mockery. For a show that's felt wayward for so long now, it's nice to see the new characters developing in ways interesting and funny but also thematically important. The catch is that, if this season has taught us anything, that lesson is to doubt that the creators have anything decent or lasting in mind for their new tricks.

It's easy to confuse the fact that Gabe is a zero with the fact of his role on the show in the first place being worth not much more. The entire Sabre arc is an unbearable misfire, the worst result of which has been the seeming departure of Dunder Mifflin CFO David Foster Wallace, replaced by a mugging Kathy Bates and a terrible cameo from Christian Slater.

But now, left behind to hold court in Scranton while his more-famous boss cavorts down in Tallahassee, Gabe's powerlessness is beginning to reveal itself as interesting.

The Office has always walked a fine line between shit-talking and misanthropy; for an ensemble as closely knit as this, the characters sure do all seem to hate each other. The show is at its worst when, for example, Michael veers away from sympathetic into the realm of the asshole (see this season's "Date Mike" incident). In general, what with all the tearing down of every co-worker in the office (Kelly is an idiot, Toby is pathetic, Kevin is fat, Oscar is gay, Meredith is ugly, Creed is crazy, Ryan is a narcissist, Dwight is a megalomaniac, Angela is a prude), the show succeeds when we believe in these sorry people's ability to co-exist despite their differences.

Dwight, more often than not, is too much of a buffoon to pose any real threat to the show's major protagonists¹ (Jim, Michael, and to a lesser extent, Andy²). The show is relentlessly beholden to the status quo: one of the running gags of the series is that these characters are all so mired in their positions (professional, social) that any real threats will be nullified before too long. The Michael Scott Paper Company got bought out by Dunder Mifflin, Dunder Mifflin got bought out by Sabre, Ryan got arrested for defrauding the DM stockholders and somehow regained his low-man position at the Scranton branch.

Gabe is the newest antagonist, the personification of a completely lame corporation that swooped in to buy Dunder Mifflin solely to manipulate the already-in-place sales infrastructure. In "Secretary's Day", he ends up with his tail between his legs having suspended Jim and Pam only to learn he's not allowed to do that and inadvertently gave them an extra couple of vacation days. This results in Kevin using to him to regain the dignity he lost in the cold open by making a cruel impersonation of Gabe's stuttering managementspeak.

What this reveals is that Sabre will likely prove yet another false governor, and if Gabe is the person that the corporation has marooned to watch over the branch, it will likely result in the Scranton operation going completely off course. The scenario of the Dunder Mifflin Scranton wheels coming off at the impotence and apathy of their new owners would, one might hope, result in sublimely zany antics. And if Gabe is the dweeb frantically running around trying in vain to quell the uprising, I'll be happy to watch.

Already, with less concrete responsibility than they've had in a while, the Scranton workers are primed for some good drama (another thing that's been sorely lacking this season³).

At a business lunch enforced by Andy in his crusade to make this the best Secretary's Day ever, Michael lets it slip that Andy was previously engaged to Angela. This is a source for conflict I hadn't seen coming, and yet it makes perfect sense that Erin would lose her shit over this. She's a pillar of naive innocence; her line that "in the foster house, my hair was my room" might be the best single character moment of the season. Living with her 'brother' and coming off an undercooked will-they-won't-they arc, Erin is a perfect match for Andrew Bernard because of their equal immaturity. I don't think this has been explicitly stated, but it's easy to imagine that hers with Andy was Erin's very first kiss, period. This relationship is uncharted territory and for Andy to have been previously engaged suddenly makes him seem dangerously deceptive.

A criticism of The Office originated by my brother-in-arms A.A. Dowd ⁴ is that it plays season-worthy stories to their completion in a matter of episodes if we're lucky and in a single episode if we're not, as in the role reversal earlier this year in "Manager and Salesman". If the show has any series-long arc at all, it's in Jim's slow transformation into Michael, which has been touched upon more than once but never so directly as it was there. But, by the end of the episode, they'd switched places again and restored an infuriating status quo that we'd managed to avoid through most of the season with Jim acting as co-manager. Continuing at this rate, it's likely that Erin's forgiveness of Andy is right around the corner, though at the very least "Secretary's Day" managed to end before this, making it the first episode in a while that's had me looking forward to what happens next.

Will we be allowed to watch this play out over a longer period of time? The only fresh element left in the show right now, Erin has fast become a favorite among steadfast Office fans. It's already been more than apparent that the writing team is willing to play into this, but "Secretary's Day" is her first true spotlight. And it's actually pretty daring of that same team to risk shifting audience sympathies onto her in this way, as Andy has been the series underdog ever since he got out of anger management.

And what of that stint in mandatory anger management? Until recently, I would never have thought The Office would be the kind of show to allow inconsistencies in its characters, and now I have to hold out hope that this will come back to haunt him. He has so often appeared to be a ticking time bomb; even as I root for Andy, I think that at some point he just has to blow. If there's no tragedy left for the boringly perfect Jim and Pam, perhaps we can mine some from Andy and Erin.

It occurs to me that in talking about the show I want The Office to be, I end up sounding like I'm rooting against the ensemble of characters I've grown to love over the past five years. But this is because that's the show it is. Pam's artistic ambitions have been left by the wayside, as have Jim's intimations of rock stardom or, more realistically, moving to Philadelphia to work for the Inquirer⁵. There was a time that the real 'win' for Jim and Pam was not each other so much as it was getting out of Scranton, and at this point, they've both issued abortive attempts at doing just that. Now with a house and a baby to their name, the only honest, satisfying ending to the series has to be a tragic one, at least for them - the tragedy, at least, will be working at Dunder Mifflin for the rest of their lives and raising a family. The Office owes it to us to reveal the muddy water running beneath their domestic bliss. If the life of Jim and Pam together is perfect, then that's boring, and I'm still watching because I maintain that they aren't perfectly happy. If, however, NBC runs the show into the ground with endless machinations to keep these oblivious jokesters recycled in their jobs, that would be the true tragedy for a show that was once so unflinchingly honest a portrait of the American workplace and the American condition.

1.) See the early third season classic "The Coup", in which Dwight goes behind Michael's back to Jan and makes a not-illegitimate claim that he could run the office better, only to have Jan immediately phone Michael and tell him to gain some control over his employees. The episode ends, as they so often do, with Dwight being put to shame and humiliation in front of a giddy audience of co-workers. [back]

2.) Of course, Dwight did play a more-or-less villainous role in his love triangle with Andy and Angela - but the boys' ultimate reconciliation in response to Angela's treachery only reaffirmed how soft of heart they each are. To be fair, Dwight should really be included on the Protagonist List - this is why his war with Jim is so interesting. [back]

3.) I don't want to knock on Jim and Pam - to this day, the novelty of seeing them happy together has not quite worn off. But we can do better than an accidental baby swap, right? Right? [back]

4.) Dowd's perfect series wrap-up, hypothesized during Pam's pregnancy: "Pam has a miscarriage, Jim and Pam get divorced, Pam goes back to Roy, Michael retires and Jim takes his job." If the writers were at all interested in being true to their show they would come up with something like this. [back]

5.) A beautiful irony that Jim's job security has always been so low because he works for a company that pledges "Endless Paper for a Paperless World" and yet his quiet dream was to be a newspaper man. Jim is old school. [back]

Kick-Ass

2010-04-23T08:30:00.003-05:00

Prior to the feature, as the restless Chicago multiplex audience settled into their seats for Kick-Ass, we were treated to a preview for Edgar Wright’s forthcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The very first shot in the trailer shows Michael Cera glancing awkwardly and lovingly across a crowded room at an impossibly beautiful girl. The world, according to my Kick-Ass audience, has turned on Michael Cera: the groan emitted at the sight of his face was one of boredom and fatigue. “Not another one!”

I found this a fascinating prologue to the experience of Kick-Ass, which (not just because of its explicit reference to the comic book series from which Scott Pilgrim has been adapted), might have been a slog for an audience sick-to-death of the Ceratype. I don’t know if anybody else made the connection; it was the kind of boisterous crowd that had me fearing a sea of cell phones during the movie, but we all ended up engrossed. I’ll be damned if there isn’t an awful lot going on in this thing.

Our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson, presumably because Cera was unavailable due the Pilgrim production) is cut from the same troubled cloth as Nick Twisp, Paulie Bleeker and the imitable George Michael Bluth. In want of either a raison d’etre or his own impossible hottie (ideally both – perhaps they might overlap?), Dave dons a superhero costume bought off the internet and sets out to make the world a better place in the assumed persona of “Kick-Ass”, the real live superhero.

Dave’s journey is only one of several intertwining storylines: there are four other principal leads. Christopher Mintz-Plasse makes a mediocre return as Chris D’Amico, who will become a faux-superhero all his own in the guise of "Red Mist". His father, Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong, making a far better impression here than he did in Sherlock Holmes), is the big boss coke-lord who rules the city.

At first related only indirectly to Dave/Kick-Ass are "Big Daddy" and "Hit Girl", a father-daughter superhero team bent on avenging wrongs done to them in the past by D’Amico. Hit Girl is only seven years old but she curses and kills with the best of them – her father has been raising her with only superheroism in mind. As a novelty, I find her somewhat tiresome. I’ve heard the word “cunt” before and I’ve heard precocious kids swear before; if I’ve never heard a seven-year-old girl say “cunt”, it almost feels like I have.

However, as with much of the film, the novelty isn’t the point, despite what the desperate trailers might've lead us to believe. Barely a comedy and only sporadically an action film, the premise of Kick-Ass is a double-edged sword: the superhero mythos has been dissected and poked to death in the mainstream all to often in the recent past, as have vulgar children, horny male adolescence and daddy issues. The movie lives and dies not by the trenchancy of its ideas but by how gleefully and earnestly it executes them.

Remember how in The Dark Knight all those Batman impersonators keep trying to do their part and end up with their asses handed to them? For much of Kick-Ass’ running time, the film feels like that same story told from the wannabe’s perspective. In the twist on a familiar genre trope, this recalls something like The Baxter or one of Gregory Maguire’s gimmicks. Immediately upon his conception, Kick-Ass becomes embroiled in the actual superhero vs. supervillain plot between Big Daddy and Frank D’Amico.

Unfortunately, this seems to destabilize the film’s founding notion that a skinny adolescent twerp with glasses can alone change the world if he just puts his mind to it. Right up to the end we are being told that Dave has inspired a world full of superheroes, but he wasn't the first and he wasn't even the best. He was just the first to be so clumsy as to end up on YouTube.

In one of several examples of the film negating its own premises, after a first-act discussion of the implausibility of superhumanity due to [one] superpowers being fictional and [two] Bruce Wayne, the mortal exception to the rule, having a lot of expensive gadgets that don’t exist, the characters proceed to equip themselves with [one] ‘plausible’ superpowers and [two] ridiculous gadgetry. And for all the talk of changing the world and inspiring heroism in the everyman, the story of Kick-Ass sure is contained to the small-potatoes drama of one drug lord and one framed cop bent on revenge.

The real pathos of the story belongs to Big Daddy and his daughter, who he has raised to be a fighting machine. He lives to avenge the death of Hit Girl's mother, for which he holds D'Amico responsible (see, it doesn't even really have anything to do with the drugs). That Nicolas Cage’s masked vigilante is a clone of Tim Burton’s Batman must be read as a subliminal 'fuck you' to the producers that failed to let him play Superman for Burton himself all those years ago. When Big Daddy kicks ass for vengeance, it’s a searing testament to what could’ve been, and one of the great thrills of the film is watching Nicolas Cage chew it up in this role. And impressively, Chloë Grace Moretz, as Hit Girl, is more likely to stumble over a naughty word than she is to let Nic Cage upstage her.

That both Kick-Ass and Hit Girl have lost their mothers is never something that comes up between the two of them; this pain is reserved for Hit Girl and Big Daddy. Their family is broken, and living in a cold steel apartment wallpapered with weaponry, waging war is all they know. Their story doesn't have anything to with Kick-Ass until he stumbles into it, and in fact their plans would likely have gone off a lot smoother without our hero's interference.

...which is why Dave/Kick-Ass is such a weird choice for main protagonist given the story that this is. I'm not sure it's the story director Matthew Vaughn quite intended to tell. Vaughn is a great populist filmmaker - his Stardust is one of the underrated, underseen gems of the aughts. But you can feel this story slipping out of his grasp.

It comes down to the stakes: in order to successfully follow the wannabe superhero riding the coattails of the real deal into battle, we must establish specifically why it is that the wannabe is acting so foolish. And returning to the cliché of the double-edged sword, Dave/Kick-Ass becomes too realistically drawn a character with too much going on for me to buy the crazy shit that happens to him in the third act. This is a kid who, in his opening monologue, informs us that his mother recently died and then denies that the film will be about that (which means it has to be, right?). He establishes a connection with a sexy girl (more on this later) and gets a huge self-confidence boost, rendering his heroic alter-ego moot.

But most of all, this is a kid so determined to ignore his own life (and maybe that's the key, right there) that, after coming this close to being dead the first time he tries the superhero act, he decides he's stronger than ever and heads out for more. Dave's initial criminal encounter as Kick-Ass is a hugely successful scene that sets up the danger he's putting himself in, but the film forgets this for the sake of cartoon theatrics and antic set pieces.

But despite its inconsistencies, one theme the film consistently nails is Dave's (or every character's) desire to improve himself through hard-work and determination and actually make himself the person he always wanted to be. Johnson does admirable, nuanced work – when, in his first outing as Kick-Ass that doesn't put him in the hospital, he spits at a gang of thugs that yes, he’d rather die than live in a world where three guys beat up one perfect stranger, he very nearly had me – but his struggle for validation almost seems to mirror the film's. Is dressing up as a superhero any less desperate an act than cuing up Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" to score the scene where the seven-year-old kills thirty henchmen?

One facet of the film that we can't ignore is the relationship between Dave and the object of his affections, Katie. Katie is played by the suddenly-ubiquitous Lyndsy Fonseca, who holds her own in a one-note role both here and in Hot Tub Time Machine; a month ago she was just the daughter on the couch in the beginning of every other episode of How I Met Your Mother. Katie is cute but she’s kind of dumb – an easy love interest, but with a guy like Dave I have to wonder what he continues to see in her after their consummation.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: obviously, Katie is too hot to pay attention to Dave at the beginning of the film. What eventually gets him in the door is Katie’s mistaken supposition that Dave is gay, a role he happily plays if it means he gets to rub tanning lotion on a topless, braless, pantsless Katie.

It's not even the shock and nervous laughter that I have a problem with here (though I could easily call homophobia on my audience if I had the energy); the problem is that Dave putting his hands on Katie under the knowing guise of this fallacy – even if it’s her own dumb fault – is invasive and even a little rapey. Again, the film purports to take place in the real world; what would the real-world reaction be to a teenage male lying and deceiving his way into the bedroom of an unsuspecting, almost-naked girl? And to make matters worse, when Dave finally reveals to Katie both of his secrets (having snuck in her window and scared the bejesus out of her, no less), her shock at his deceit immediately ebbs and she allows Dave into her arms and, explicitly, into her something else.

Which is all well and good for Kick-Ass, whose alter-ego now has something to live for (fucking: it’s always the answer!). Later on, in the midst of a violent situation from which he could easily get killed, Dave muses that he doesn’t want to die because he wants to see what happens on Lost: this got a good laugh out of me, but there we go again. If Lost is all you need to live for, why should I care about your dead mother, your hot girlfriend, your lonesome father or any of your other existential crises with which this film builds it nest? Either Dave is too snarky for Kick-Ass’ ultimate good or the other way around: it’s a lot of really meaty character development stuck between wonder bread.

Aliens (1986) & Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

2010-04-12T06:30:00.013-05:00

This post covers the theatrical cut of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the "Special Edition" of Aliens, as those are the respective versions I find most worthy of discussion. If you want to know more about that, there will soon be an essay on the phenomenon of the "Director's Cut" as marketing ploy.

Severe spoiler warning, by the way; I'm also assuming a passing familiarity with both films. If that doesn't apply, I'd like to suggest you go watch them, as they are both undisputed classics of the genre.

One of the central conflicts in applying the auteurist theory to Cameron's work is the fact that he's devolved into a pretty terrible writer. His structure and plotting are arguably better than ever (how many directors can sell two consecutive three-hour films to such massive audiences?), but the bare bones of character development now leave a lot to be desired. It's difficult to defend a lot of the dialogue in both Titanic and Avatar (though I think there are some diamonds in both roughs). How is it that the man who came up with "I see you" as a catchphrase is also responsible for two of cinema's most indelible mothers?

Almost any cinephile will tell you Cameron's two best films are his two sequels. Though Cameron was (partially) responsible for the genesis of Terminator's plot, both Terminator 2 and Aliens represent great leaps and bounds simply in the way they treat their predecessors as stepping stones en route to wild, unforeseen adventure and philosophy. From Ripley's condemnation of humanity in the midst of an alien attack ("I don't know which race is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.") to the Vietnam-era fallibility of the military machine and from the bonding of a fatherless child with an evil machine to the temporal loopholes through which humanity is given a second chance by the consequence of its own failure, both of these films take our assumptions from their horror gimmick routes and blow them out of the sky.

At the center of all this is a pair of moms.

Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor are as realistically layered as action heroes get. A large part of what makes Aliens and Terminator 2 work as well as they do is the duality of their heroines' motivation. Both women are juggling two sets of high stakes: the future of humanity and the maternal instinct.

For the first half of T2, Sarah Connor is more concerned with protecting her son John than with the forthcoming rise of the machines (and given the quality of that sequel, who can blame her?). The film then takes a mid-point shift along the lines of Full Metal Jacket and WALL•E, wherein the central family unit (Sarah, John and the T-800) has effectively reached safety and might as well call it a day. If we borrow any logic from the first film (and we really shouldn't, but here I go anyway), as long as the T-1000's target doesn't do something stupid like call his grandmother in Big Bear and give her his exact address, they really don't have to worry about getting found and terminated.

But Sarah stumbles upon a secondary (or rather, successive) goal. She's saved her son from the T-1000 and now takes on a duty to save humanity by killing Miles Dyson. Not only does Sarah's frying-pan-into-fire quest to destroy Cyberdyne mirror John's selfless and risky obligation to save his mother from the Pescadero Mental Hospital, it mirrors SkyNet's retroactive abortion plot for world domination. She plays her enemy at its own game, going after its unknowing and innocent creator¹.

When she gets there, John and the T-800 are right behind, but they don't arrive in time to stop her. What saves Miles Dyson's life is his young son standing over his wounded, prone figure shouting "Don't hurt my daddy!". The child's plea for his father's life causes Sarah to collapse in tears, ashamed of her intentions, whereupon her son and his cyborg run in to explain everything and convince Dyson to join them in their third act scheme (this works out pretty well, considering that merely killing Dyson would have done little to slow Cyberdyne's development of the SkyNet technology).

These reversals all hinge around a basic righteousness and this is crucial to the T-800's arc. Mother to son, mother to surrogate father and son to the same, Terminator 2 is all about the lessons we (might choose to) learn from those closest to us. This machine actually serves as an important predecessor to WALL•E; his role as surrogate father is based on his ability to "understand" humanity. It's John who takes it upon himself to teach the T-800 basic human gestures and colloquialisms, triggering the machine's "curiosity" in doing so. John asks the T-800 if he can feel pain; the T-800 asks a tearful John what's wrong with eyes. The T-800 describes his internal damage readout as something that might be analogous to what we call 'pain'; ultimately he sacrifices himself to save human civilization. His final line is the endpoint of this relationship: "I know now why you cry. But it is something I can never do." Damn. I know why I'm crying, too, Lugnuts.

WALL•E and the T-800 also have something in common with Aliens' Bishop. It's a trope familiar in a lot of stories about sentient machines: the drive to become more human and (like humans) more like the 'creator'. Bishop's role in the plot of the sequel operates in great measure as a response to the technophobia-inducing Ash from Alien, who in service to his programming facilitated the murders of everyone on board the Nostromo (except Ripley and Jones, of course). Ash essentially uses the alien in exactly the way the company wants: as a weapon. Alien and The Terminator both introduce us to fearsome machines that in their sequels we must learn to trust.

Forming this trust in Aliens is obviously not going to be easy for Ripley, and Cameron manages to mine suspense from this long after we've built a tenuous trust for the machine, who sympathetically prefers "artificial human" to "synthetic". In the finale, Ripley emerges from the freight elevator with Newt in tow and believes Bishop to have taken off without them, leaving the newly minted mother-daughter unit to die in the reactor explosion. It's only after this last misunderstanding (Bishop picks them up in midair, having lifted off to stay the collapsing deck) that Ripley finally shakes Bishop's hand and tells him he did good. "Really?" he replies, childlike in his need for validation (too bad he's about to get torn in half).

Cameron's choice to bond Bishop to Ripley, that most maternal of ass-kickers (second only to the alien queen, maybe) is a clever detail in the story. It's Ripley's maternity that fuels the pathos of the film; she's got a vengeful streak that blows Sarah Connor's duty to humanity out of the water. What I love about the finale in Aliens is that, after finding surrogate daughter Newt and saving her from the catacomb, Ripley continues deeper into the aliens' hive to firebomb all the eggs - minutes before the whole factory is going up in smoke anyway.

You could choose to think of this as a lapse in logic, but I think it underscores a base desire of Ripley's that will be echoed in Sarah Connor's second-act reversal. Ripley's idea of winning isn't merely staying alive - she could've done that by staying at home and working the loading docks. Ripley has to kill the aliens herself. She wants to destroy the Queen's eggs and tear apart the Queen's womb, and she wants to make the bitch watch while it happens. This is about vengeance, because it was this alien infestation that directly deprived Ripley of a life with her own daughter.

It goes beyond human versus alien. It's mother versus mother.

Of course, for two films that are so easily enduring, so rich in mythology and pathos, T2 and Aliens are also Cameron's two films that were built directly upon a popular established source². Standing as they do on the shoulders of Ridley Scott, Dan O'Bannon and Harlan Ellison³, I wonder if maybe Cameron's later problems can be boiled down to a foolish reliance on his own mind to conjure a layered character. Does Cameron the screenwriter perform his job best when filling in the gaps of a borrowed framework? It's worth considering if you want to plot the evolution of the action movie: not only are Aliens and Terminator 2 two movies that owe direct, specific debts to prequels and predecessors (and succeed partially in feeding off our expectations from the same), they are also in turn two of the most influential, iconic pictures in the genre. What will time do for Avatar?

1.) Interestingly, this also recalls the NTIs' tidal wave gambit in the extended edition of The Abyss: an ostensibly "good" entity defeats its "evil" enemy by sinking to that enemy's level. [back]

2.) There are exceptions here: Piranha II, which doesn't count (more on that later), and True Lies, which is based on a French film called La totale!. If anybody anywhere can get me a copy of that movie, I'll give you twenty dollars cash. [back]

3.) The Terminator was so clearly ripped off from two works by Harlan Ellison that a lawsuit led to every copy of the film ending with a title card acknowledgment. [back]

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

2010-04-02T07:00:00.002-05:00

Today at Attic Salt: A Literary Blog, you can read my thoughts on the new Young Adult novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson, co-authored by YA juggernauts John Green and David Levithan. If you're at all interested in how people still manage to make connections despite the blogs, tweets, iPods and earbuds that stand between us, the book is essential. Read on!

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Attic Salt: A Literary Blog

How To Train Your Dragon

2010-03-30T07:00:00.008-05:00

Refreshingly low on the pop-culture references and fart jokes that have made so many computer-animated films so far below par, DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon arrives with a heaping dose of sentimentality and a cadre of adorable beasts that would make it a huge hit if not for the lame title and even-more-lame marketing campaign that pass it off as just more of the same. The product itself represents a huge leap forward for the studio in the race to be number two behind Pixar.

One major problem with the film (and I’ll try not to extrapolate this into a wider point about where our culture is headed) is the humans. These characters - from their physical design and their dialogue right down to their cutesy names and B-list celebrity voice acting - just aren’t up to snuff. The film attempts a shaky balance between cartoonish and realistic in its design. The characters say "Oh my gods" (because they're Vikings) but also, "This is pretty cool!" (because riding dragons is cool). That it succeeds to the extent that it does despite this is a testament to the power of the story.

The skinny hero is Hiccup; his giant father is a dragon fighter named Stoick who, as though no one looked up “stoic” in a dictionary, shouts and complains constantly about his worthless son. One character suggests Hiccup’s only value would be as a toothpick for the dragons that nightly torment the Vikings’ village. Hiccup’s spindly frame contrasted with that of his spherical father is a nice attempt at a visual gag, but like Hiccup himself, it falls flat.

Sick of being an endless embarrassment, Hiccup is compelled to use his blacksmith apprenticeship to construct a contraption that he hopes will trap a Night Fury, the least-seen and most-feared breed of dragon. Inevitably, he succeeds and inevitably, he can’t bring himself to kill the beast. Instead Hiccup goes back to the shop to create a prosthetic wing to replace the one he damaged and restore the creature’s flight.

Hiccup dubs his pet dragon “Toothless” (his teeth are retractable) and the movie mines its considerable pathos from the ensuing scenes of their blossoming friendship. The twist is that the dragons are little more than overgrown, misunderstood puppies. The dragons, as opposed to the humans, are created with dimension and depth (and not just of the gimmicky, 3D-glasses variety, though some of those effects are admittedly neat). There is an abundance of imagination poured into the creation of a wide variety of dragon breeds, from fire-breathing to hut-crushing; at night the dragons are fearsome and shrouded in black but by day they are quirky in shape and size and wide-eyed such that we, along with Hiccup, will learn to love them. They like fish but detest eel and they love being scratched behind the ears.

How To Train Your Dragon follows a tried-and-true formula; it’s about a boy with a dangerous secret who has to teach his community of ignorant elders the error of their ways. As in E.T. or The Iron Giant, the adults fear what the child knows to be a simple messenger of love (much like the way the adults in the theater treated the film: with ignorance, and paying more attention to their cell phones). Dragon does what it can to ape those classics and where it ultimately fails is in its sense of danger.

There is no analogue to Spielberg’s hazmat-suited spooks or Giant’s communist scare; Dragon meekly strays from putting its protagonist in any palpable danger. Have the filmmakers seen Up? You’re supposed to raise your protagonist’s stakes by putting him in danger, even in a “children’s” movie. Especially in a children’s movie.

This is obvious from the beginning. The film opens with a spectacular dragon-on-viking battle (most of the scenic animation in the film, from the wafting clouds to the rocky outcroppings of the Vikings’ island home, is gorgeous), but we soon realize that while they set the houses on fire and steal all the sheep, the dragons aren’t interested in the humans. Even during the second-act reveal of the Big Bad Boss dragon, we witness a mass-feeding of … sheep, fish, and other animals. There is one major character with a couple of missing limbs, but he is played for laughs. To make matters worse, the dragons’ lack of interest in human flesh actually creates a decent plot hole. The film isn’t interested in inflating any real threat to its heroes. Pete Docter drew blood in the opening minutes of Up and WALL•E lived in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. How To Train Your Dragon makes great strides for populist animation, but with every Pixar success it's harder and harder to catch up.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

Armond White and The Greenberg Problem

2010-03-29T14:30:00.002-05:00

The following piece, like Armond White's notorious review, only barely touches on the film in question. Accordingly, the Spoiler Threat Level is green.

How do you solve a problem like Roger Greenberg? Armond White isn’t interested.

In a fascinating debacle of life imitating art and the journalist becoming his own story, New York Press film critic and NY Film Critics Circle chair Armond White has launched himself into the position of being the most-discussed aspect of Noah Baumbach's new film. It started when White was allegedly "disinvited" from a press screening of Greenberg and an anonymous email began circulating calling for a critical boycott of the film as a response to the (alleged, again) censorship.

Or maybe it started in 1998, when White suggested that Baumbach's mother ought to seek "retroactive abortion" - a quip White has recently tucked between his legs, claiming it's "not a death warrant; its impact is in your inference." Or maybe it started much earlier, when White and Baumbach's mother Georgia Brown (film critic at the Press' opposition Village Voice) had a running feud that culminated on live radio with White, as he so often does, pulling his race card.

Several people have entered the debate, which has been more-or-less put to rest with White's inevitable screed against Baumbach and his films. In his piece at the Press, White posits himself as a lone warrior, a martyr in the futile battle between publicists and critics for free speech. In what he terms the "Greenberg problem", White discusses the rampant isolation of critics from their proper pedestals and throws around accusations of Nazism, fascism and communism.

He's unhinged, and he's losing much of what little cachet he had left as a responsible, intelligent critic. The best response I've read to all this is Walter Chaw's "Armond Hammer" post at the Film Freak Central blog. I agree with Chaw in several respects, most crucially in regard to this notion that if only we had more critics speaking their mind instead of the gospel of the press release - and if we had more respect for criticism as a viable art/science - White wouldn't seem nearly as crazy as he does.

White was responsible for the most high-profile take-down of Precious, something for which I want to hold him in high regard. One man's insane rant is another man's sermon.

But re-reading White's "review" after seeing the film in question - a relatively quiet, simple story to have stirred up all this gunk - it's pretty clear that for all the talk of critical dialogue and free speech, White barely seems to have watched the (admittedly imperfect) film at all. I'd also say that for a writer who so frequently brings up issues of race (White calls J. Hoberman's reprinting of White's own words a "racist lynching by white critics of a black critic"), he's hedging unbearably close to anti-Semitism. In comparing Greenberg to Zelig, he draws a dangerous link between Greenberg's ethnicity (and the character, onscreen, explicitly eschews his Jewish heritage) and his social standing. Also, if I were Armond White, I'd try not to use phrases like "Indian-giver".

Greenberg has, arguably, two protagonists. Ben Stiller is a self-possessed jerk who gets involved with a girl who's unhealthily submissive, both sexually and emotionally. It's a pretty honest portrayal of both types - you'll likely cringe at the way he treats her. I don't think it's incidental that Baumbach opens his story with Greta Gerwig's Florence and doesn't introduce Roger for about fifteen minutes. We're meant to sympathize with both of our very-flawed heroes, but to suggest that the film "coddles" Roger Greenberg is simply inaccurate. Greenberg is an asshole, to be sure, and if there's something I truly admire about Baumbach's films it's his relentless posing of the asshole as the hero through the prism of daring semi-autobiography. To view his work as a whole, you might say Baumbach's thesis is "Assholes are people, too." The challenge of his films, and some (The Squid and the Whale) are more successful at this than others (Margot at the Wedding), is in engendering sympathy for a jerk. To dismiss the entire body of work as a lionization of anti-social behavior and a series of love letters to a bunch of pricks is, well, dismissive.

For White to assert, as he so often has, that Baumbach is himself an asshole ("You look at Noah Baumbach's work, and you see he's an asshole. I would say it to his face.") represents either a totally cross-wired auteurist theory or a trans-generational grudge. Did The New Yorker run a review of a Baumbach film written by a friend and former employer of Baumbach himself? If so, that's probably a conflict of interest and it likely shouldn't have gone to print. But for White to suggest that scenario as a violation of journalistic ethics while at the same time freely admitting to his decades-long grudge with Baumbach's mother seems exposing of a deep hypocrisy.

This all brings me back to a point that Walter Chaw put better and more succinctly. White is a crazy, raving loon and also a crucial member of the critical community. We need more like him and we need more people in intelligent oppostition to him. But in refusing to take the film on its own merits, White is falling on his own sword and letting the publicists win.

Dogtooth [Kynodontas]

2010-03-24T07:00:00.001-05:00

Dogtooth is a fable about a Greek family steered by a grievously misguided - yet, we must admit, loving - patriarch into a clandestine system of games and rules that will inevitably break down in a terrifying manner.

There are two girls and a boy, all fully grown, living with their mother and father on a not-quite-luxurious estate with a finely-groomed lawn and in-ground pool surrounded by fifteen-foot walls and bushes to keep the family in and the outside world out. Nobody is allowed to leave except the father, who holds a desk job at a factory and brings home supplies. These rules are so ingrained that when given the opportunity, the boy will stop at an open gate, touching an invisible boundary with his toes.

The two parents coach the children to fear and misunderstand the world they've never seen and have only heard about. They teach them intentional malapropisms (asked to "pass the telephone" at the dinner table, the mother hands over the salt) and when an airplane flies overhead, they toss a small toy plane in the yard and tell the kids that it fell. A cat is a monstrous animal that will tear you apart with its jaws and talons; the kids are taught to bark on all fours in case one ever shows up.

No one has any names, either. The three children are simply the boy, the older girl and the younger girl. He, she and she.

Framed by the varying perspectives of all five family members, writer-director Giorgos Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Fillipou stir up a remarkable mixture of unmitigated terror and sympathetic innocence. Comparisons to Michael Haneke's exercises in suspense are apt - from pretty much the first frame to the last there is a palpable dread, punctuated (not perforated) by shocking instances of violence. From the increasingly bizarre and supremely abusive games the children are forced to act out to the insidious leak of catalysts from the world outside their fence, Dogtooth is a gripping, provocative ticking clock. It's also the first movie in ages that's actually made me, for one brief moment, involuntarily bring a hand up to block my eyesight because I couldn't bear to watch what was unfolding.

It gets to the point where, as terrible as their lives are, you find yourself almost (almost) rooting for the father's experiments to continue successfully just so the twenty-something-year-old children can be kept safe. This, then, leads you to consider that very primal definition of "safety", which maybe (maybe) results in the kind of twisted logic that led the father and mother to develop their scheme in the first place. If you never let your children leave the house, you never have to worry about them talking to (or having sex with or learning from) anyone you don't want them to. But almost anything can be a weapon of dissent in the right circumstance.

There's room for an allegorical interpretation, but I can't presume to come up with the correct one and it's unnecessary besides. Dogtooth is effective even as a story about something as simple as a father trying to maintain control of his family and watching as an exponential increase in entropy destroys his carefully constructed system and wrests his kin from his hands.

These kids, of course, were lost long ago, as soon as the mother and father began their experiments. There will be no saving anybody here; what could be described as a 'Sopranos ending' is merely a tacit acknowledgment that if any of these characters tries to save themselves or each other, it will only make things worse. It's pretty damn bleak, and it's gonna stick with you.

Green Zone

2010-03-18T15:56:00.000-05:00

Paul Greengrass is the director behind United 93, the first entry in the pantheon of mainstream Hollywood reactions to 9/11. That film was released in spring 2006, written and produced just four years-and-change after the attacks. At the time, there was an uproar. "How can we let Hollywood make movies out of this?" 9/11, we thought at one time or another, marked the death not only of 3,000 people but also of irony and the action movie. How the times have changed.

United 93 was one of the more fascinating moviegoing experiences I've had in my lifetime: I saw it in a very sold out house on opening night in Columbus, Ohio.

One of the remarkable things about United 93 is Greengrass' humanization of the four terrorists. He doesn't condone their actions, but he doesn't condemn them either. This is, partially, due to his shaky-cam aesthetic - getting into the heads of his characters just isn't his thing. He directs action movies. He was the perfect hired gun for the two Bourne sequels.

Now Columbus is, generally, a pretty liberal town. But that opening night crowd was, understandably, not interested in Ahmed al-Haznawi hesitating in the airplane bathroom while assembling the bomb. When the passengers ultimately rushed the terrorists in the cockpit, everyone started cheering and clapping. With conviction. But the heroism of the passengers onboard United 93 was not the point of that movie.

I'm remembering all this now because Green Zone is Greengrass' follow-up to the non-fiction scenario of United 93. Both films take a beginning and an end that are based on true events and connect them with speculative "inspired by" fictions. In Green Zone, the ending is the revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But where Greengrass inadvertently mined pathos from the doomed characters in United 93, he's here more interested in straight-forward action/thriller heroics. And boy, does he fall on his face.

There are two big problems with the premise of the film. One is that its major statement is that we went to war under false pretenses - this will inevitably still rile some folks, but to this viewer it's nothing new. Two - and this is the big one, because even a well-constructed thriller with lame politics is better than a poorly-constructed thriller I "agree" with - is when that big reveal comes half an hour in.

The bulk of the running time doesn't involve Matt Damon discovering that the WMD-threat was a lie. It's about him trying to prove it. But even this goal proves unnecessary. Why go through several impressively-staged gun-fights and a kidnapping just to get the guy who can tell the press the truth when you can just tell the press yourself? Here, the press is personified by Amy Ryan, and Damon was already in her hotel room once (not for anything saucy, though that might've at least made the scene interesting).

In the end, it's a lot of ado over nothing, appropriately described early in the film when one character refers to Iraq as "full of anarchy". These guys are running around trying to find someone they don't need to prove something doesn't exist. It's dramatically inert even as I'm politically aligned with the filmmakers, leaving me with nobody to root for even if I wanted to. It's like watching a porn where the guy can't get it up. Whatever, I got the point anyway.

Remember Me

2010-03-15T06:14:00.003-05:00

Most of the reviews written exclusively for this site are written for people who have already seen the films discussed. I created the Spoiler Threat Advisory System because I know that "people who have seen Valentine's Day" probably very rarely describes my readership; review by review, it's a professional imperative to warn you if reading what I write might spoil the movie in any real way.

The STAS varies in usefulness from film to film. There are movies like Avatar that are essentially spoiler-proof in their inherent predictability and there are movies like Shutter Island, which spoils itself. In the internet age, as we become overly conscious of "spoilers", we start to think of movies as living or dying by their plot twists (Thanks, M. Night). The problem with Remember Me is that it defies what have become our conventions for how we discuss movies we haven't seen.

I can tell you something about Remember Me that will make you want to go watch it. But part of what makes the experience of watching it so jaw-dropping is not knowing what's coming. So I don't want you to find out.

Three of my friends had already heard about the film's ending not only without having seen the thing but before opening day. This didn't seem like too big a deal to them, however, as what had been spoiled was just the new Robert Pattinson vehicle; they weren't going to see it, anyway. If I wasn't close friends with a Pattinson-fanatic, I might've skipped it, too.

A lot of people aren't going to see Remember Me but a lot of them are going to tear the movie down anyway because of the ending. I think that's as cheap on our part as the movie is in its ending, if not more so. Calling it 'good' or 'bad' doesn't even come into it; this movie, by prank, hubris or earnest failure, earns our discussion.

So: if you haven't seen Remember Me and you've managed to escape hearing about it, do yourself a favor. Stop reading now, get off the internet, don't talk to anybody and go watch the movie. If you have any interest in that special purity of the moviegoing experience, you'll thank me later. Regardless of the movie's quality (or lack thereof), this is a unique piece the likes of which I've really never seen.

With all this in mind, I am now raising the Spoiler Alert Level to red.

So here's a movie that we dismiss without seeing because we've already seen it a hundred times. A dark, brooding rebel courts a blonde goody-two-shoes, they bond over common daddy issues and his moppet little sister, there is some fighting and some reconciliation and then everyone works out their issues and lives happily ever after. Remember Me, however, places its hero at his moment of catharsis and resulting peace in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 and then kills him in the attack. Spoiler and Security Threat Levels will both be red after Remember Me.

What I'm interested in is an in-depth investigation into the film's production. One companion of mine - who'd already heard about the ending before seeing it - described the finale as an afterthought, tagged on to the story to give it a punch and rouse the rabble. Watching the film, this feels like exactly the case, but I find myself desperate to give the film the benefit of the doubt.

We come back to that age-old question: "What were they thinking?" In the case of Remember Me - which in one single scene provides the highest WTF-were-they-thinking quotient of any movie since ... maybe Southland Tales - there are two possible answers. One is that this was an earnest attempt at telling a 9/11 story - we've already had several of them and this is just another angle. The other, as my friend suggested, is that the ending is a manipulative slap in the face. Part of me wonders if we're reacting to this the same way we did to the attacks themselves and that the movie successfully recreates the feelings of shock and anger so many people had back in 2001.

Now, the film opens with a prologue in 1991, in which Emilie de Ravin's character, as a little girl, witnesses her mother's (Martha Plimpton, in an inexplicable cameo) murder on an elevated MTA platform. The World Trade Center towers loom in the background of the scene, which is followed by a title card reading, "ten years later". De Ravin's Ally is introduced as an adult ten minutes on in a classroom she shares unknowingly with Pattinson's Tyler. The class is having a discussion about "recent terrorist attacks".

Given the final-moments reveal of the actual date, this is clearly a deliberate mislead. Does this classroom scene qualify as Shyamalan-esque trickery, Remember Me's equivalent of Olivia Williams not talking at dinner? Because here's the thing: as a savvy film watcher, I took these parcels of information and leapt to the inaccurate assumption that the events of the film were taking place in the aftermath of the attacks. This lead directly to my misinterpretation of pretty much the entire bulk of the story.

"What a bizarre idea," I thought, "to follow around these self-absorbed assholes so concerned with their own drama in post-9/11 New York City." It actually makes for an interesting premise: what must it have been like to live in New York City and not lose anyone in the attacks but still have a great personal tragedy to deal with?

Part of my fallacy was to assume that this was an indirect 9/11 story, rather than an explicit one. Almost every film about New York City made since 9/11 has been, in one way or another, a response to those attacks; viewed as a cultural (rather than political) milestone, we can trace the evolution of our coping mechanism in NYC-set films. For several years a filmmaker would have to make a choice whether or not to mention 9/11 explicitly in even the most innocuous of romantic comedies. When a film now ignores it, you can see us 'forgetting' in a way our bumper stickers claimed we never would.

Almost as a response to this trend, I viewed Remember Me as a coolly weird little movie about New Yorkers who didn't care about 9/11 - and in a way I was right, because within the melodrama of the romance, it hadn't happened yet. Nevertheless, the film is dripping in tragedy and loss, much of it overwritten and much of it not. It was easy to watch the film as being about 9/11 even as it never brought it up.

Several different moments elicited collective gasps from Team Edward in the theater - the final one, in fact, was not nearly so loud as the reaction to Tyler's sister Caroline's surprise haircut. It's an almost profoundly silly film, scoring the folly of youth with Sigur Rós while fairly effectively demonstrating the generational divides between Tyler, his father and his much-younger sister, all of whom believe, at one point or another, that the others just cannot understand their pain.

In fact, the dynamic between these three carries the film in a way that I have to describe as surprisingly unterrible. Pattinson and father Pierce Brosnan have one particularly over-the-top blowout in the latter's conference room (turns out they were at the World Trade Center! The whole time!) that really ought to boil over into absurdity but reveals both men, Pattinson especially, as able actors capable of rising above the pablum. Ruby Jerins, as Caroline, steals the show: she's too young to process the pain she's in and she's getting used as a tether ball for two (of three, come to think of it) father figures in constant battle to show each other up. Jerins' quiet dignity, taken apart from the film as a whole, is something to behold.

In the same way that Remember Me confounds expectations by giving the lead dreamboat a precocious little sister who isn't obnoxious, it gives him an evil corporate father who turns out to be a relatively decent guy. Now, obviously, a lot of this is the result of playing the Low Expectations Game, but I really want to give this movie some points [one] for having the rebellious hero learn that his father loves him and his sister and is trying as hard as he can and [two] for having the hero forgive his father's failures.

And it's at that moment, sitting in his father's office watching a screensaver slideshow of pictures of him and his family, that Tyler's newfound peace is destroyed by his father's office being at the World Trade Center and the date being September 11, 2001.

Fighting my impulse to write this off as a mad grab for pathos and an exploitative, offensive one at that, I'm fascinated by the fact that this movie wraps itself up with an entirely tidy, happy ending immediately prior to the 9/11 attacks. Given that the reveal of the date is inarguably set up as a plot twist - something we're not supposed to have seen coming - are we intended to view the previous two hours as incidental? Or are we intended to take the characters' arcs as a how-to on coping with tragedy as lead-up to the greatest tragedy of the decade we just laid to rest? Is this what Tyler's roommate is referring to when he accuses Tyler of nihilism?

As I previously suggested, could the whole thing be an elaborate experiment to recreate the feelings of horror we experienced on 9/11? "What does it all even mean anymore?" The only way, after all, to make a 9/11 movie and nail that specific emotion is to not let anybody know it's coming. Especially don't let on in any of the marketing or promotion that your movie is even in any way a period film.

But to set out to hit that note is cheap or easy at best and cruel or offensive at worst. There are plenty of people out there you don't have to trick into being moved by 9/11.

Does it even matter? There aren't any rules about what we should or shouldn't adapt into our popular entertainments; if you look at the amount of tasteless co-optations of actual human tragedy in our theaters, this is actually one of the less offensive ones. For example, we can be thankful that director Allen Coulter has the grace to film this ending with a lot of ash but zero shots of the actual attack.

Still, we should be aiming for something more than "less offensive than Precious". And for as angry as Remember Me is going to make people, I wonder that nobody involved in the production saw this coming. Can you imagine the reaction from an audience-member who lost somebody on 9/11 unknowingly walking into this movie, which uses the shock of terrorist attack to withdraw tears for Robert Pattinson? And what of the 14-year-olds comprising Team Edward, five years old in 2001, walking away from this in tears like they'd just seen Titanic?

Regardless, artists will continue drawing inspiration from 9/11 for decades, and there's nothing you can do about it if you wanted to. I don't believe in the idea that Remember Me shouldn't be about what it's about, I just believe that it mostly fails at doing so with anything resembling honor. Rules are meant to be broken and if I say You Can't Successfully Turn 9/11 Into A Plot Twist, somebody like Quentin Tarantino will come along and do just that. In the meantime, what could've been a successful B-level romantic vehicle for an actor stuck in association to the creepiest of terrible roles becomes something far more emotionally invasive than anything Stephanie Meyer could ever hope to put her name on. What an epic misfire.

The Last Station & The Ghost Writer

2010-03-10T17:00:00.002-06:00

I know approximately as much about the social and economic philosophies of Leo Tolstoy coming out of The Last Station as I did going in (read: not very much). The film opens with a title card quoting Tolstoy: "Everything I understand, I understand only because of love." Now, the only halfway-viable defense of Twilight I've heard is that its love-conquers-all message is timeless, beautiful and irrefutable; I suppose we could look at The Last Station as a Twilight for the geriatric costume drama set. Nothing much matters here except that love is a pervasive, binding force or some such nonsense. Do with this what you will, but when the first act proves to be a lighthearted sex comedy, I find it decidedly refreshing. When the whole thing inevitably devolves into a protracted death knell, it's then only marginally disappointing.

Both The Last Station and The Ghost Writer follow meek protagonists navigating the epic dramas of larger-than-life political figures to whom they are only tenuously connected.

Here, professional supporting lead James McAvoy is Valentin, recruited as private secretary to Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) just in time to witness the dissolution of the writer's marriage, the scramble to control his estate and, in a single scene that seems to last the better part of an hour, the death of the writer himself.

At first barely interested in politics, writer-director Michael Hoffman stays true to the perspective of his inactive hero. Valentin is quickly (and against his will) cast as a quadruple agent answering first to Vladimir (Paul Giamatti, trying to wrest control over Tolstoy's valuable intellectual property); then to the Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren, trying to provide for her kids rather than the people of Russia); then to Tolstoy himself (dying and attempting to impart some wisdom upon Valentin-as-next-generation); finally to Tolstoyan commune worker Masha (Kerry Condon, who just wants to fuck).

So: sex, money, family or wisdom? As a farce, this thing flies through its first half with a surprising levity. There is a lot of grandstanding from all the Oscar nominees, and McAvoy's able straight-manning keeps the circus grounded. In his dalliance with Masha, he goes from anxious celibacy to premature ejaculation in about as much time as it would take a Freshman under the bleachers at the homecoming game.

Bearing witness to the arguments over Tolstoy's estate, Valentin is seen and not heard - an audience surrogate, sure, but in the same way a silent jury for the contested legacy. What's fun isn't watching Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer shout at each other: it's watching them play up their opera for Valentin's sake as if to convince his "common man" of their own side's righteousness.

The picture runs out of steam, though, right as Tolstoy does. There's an interesting moment where, as Tolstoy is finally resigned to putting his signature on Vladimir's contract, it is discovered that nobody has a pen¹ - nobody, that is except for our hero Valentin. Finally, he gets to play a role, and a rather important one at that. Obviously, by withholding his pen, Valentin will effectively halt the endowment of Tolstoy's work to Vladimir's scheming business pursuits and save the day for Sofya.

But he doesn't.

This, I suppose, is where the movie takes a sharp turn towards the political by offering the plebe the agency to affect the dispersion of Tolstoy's teachings. Unfortunately, the film has done little up to this point to convince me that this is for the best and, more importantly, Valentin himself had seemed to have been siding with Sofya the whole time. Around this same point, Valentin confesses his true love for Masha - a decidedly adolescent concern, I think, given his previous celibacy.

This crux of the story takes place about halfway through, after which there is another smackdown between the elderly couple that results, somehow, in Sofya trying to drown herself and Tolstoy getting on a train so he can go die of pneumonia in peace. From this point on the picture runs on fumes as Valentin scrambles to reunite the elderly couple before its too late while also trying to cling to Masha. It's a harsh tonal shift. I'm never as wrapped up in the emotions of these wackos as Hoffman seems to want me to be, especially after laughing at them for the first hour.

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer arrives quietly shrouded in the negative publicity of the director's recent arrest and extradition on a decades-old statutory rape charge². I'd eschew even mentioning this had Polanski not turned in a political thriller that easily reads as - at least in part - a plea of innocence. Or a plea of irrelevance, at least. This one has a definite political message, and it's summed up two-thirds of the way in by Ewan McGregor: "It's all bollocks, anyway."

MacGregor's hero goes unnamed. Like Valentin, he is hired because of his malleability into the inner circle of a controversial leader and tasked with writing down secrets. His charge is ghostwriting the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan); he is replacing a previous employee who washed up on a beach. Simultaneously investigating both Lang's alleged war crimes and his predecessor's death, The Ghost stumbles upon an intricate conspiracy involving all kinds of governmental branches and shadowy intrigue.

One key to The Ghost Writer's success is its Hitchcockian sense of humor. 'Hitchcockian' is a word that gets bandied about a lot³, but all too often we forget how funny ol' Hitch was. A dark sense of humor reminiscent of North by Northwest hangs over The Ghost Writer, keeping us giggling as The Ghost encounters creepy strangers and is tailed by faceless henchman. His predecessor was killed for digging into this very same mess, and Polanski maintains the tension with deflating one-liners. "You can't drown two bloody ghost writers. You're not kittens." He's in so far over is head that for the bulk of the running time it feels like every single character, major and minor alike, might somehow have it in for him.

The film works on several levels. As a mystery, it's tightly plotted, shot and cut with surgical precision. As political screed, it's downright nifty, sticking a pin in the overdone subject matter by hanging onto a protagonist who doesn't care about politics and exposes, ultimately, the power-mongering of the government operatives to be a facile charade. As Lang is being called to trial for war crimes in England, he's hiding out in an American sanctuary made of glass.

As a personal statement, Polanski drops only the barest hints at his own problems - just enough to ring true as a plea of not guilty by reason of decades-old relevance, the legal entanglement of spotlight-grubbing lawyers and the contagions of American cultural imperialism. It functions as an apology if you want it to: a tacile acknowledgment of crimes long-ago forgiven and a cry for a second chance. Lang is trying to write his memoirs but nobody seems interested in his side of the story; he works with a ghostwriter because he can't atone for himself.

If he ends up in jail for the rest of his life, at least he got to turn out one last masterpiece.

1.) This seems unlikely, given that everyone in the movie is constantly scratching away in their Moleskines. [back]

2.) I certainly don't want to sound like I approve of Polanski's alleged crimes, but this is a judgment best left to our justice system. I also cannot pretend to broach the level of scrutiny the case deserves; rather, I suggest finding Jeffrey Toobin's late '09 article for The New Yorker, "The Celebrity Defense". [back]

3.) ...most recently in regards to a certain other prestige thriller about a dude on an island during a storm getting in over his head... [back]

The Marriage Ref: "Pilot"

2010-03-01T15:28:00.004-06:00

An ill-conceived, poorly-executed disaster any way you look at it, NBC's sorry attempt at a post-Tonight Show-fiasco tent pole The Marriage Ref is exactly the kind of programming that gives "Reality TV" a bad name.

Divided into two segments, the pilot episode presents a pair of ridiculous, made-for-Prime-Time marital spats for the judgment of a self-worshiping "celebrity" panel.

First up is Danielle Ridolfi, whose husband Kevin reacts to the death of his 14-year-old Boston Terrier by having the animal stuffed and mounted. This might actually be an interesting conflict if the producers dug into the trauma of loss, but instead they cut together creepy shots of the "sleeping" animal with a lot of hamming from Danielle, who never liked the dog anyway. Following the Ridolfis are Greg and Dianah Hunter, who argue over whether or not Greg should install a stripper pole in the bedroom so he can encourage Dianah to give him a private show.

Both couples act out their tiffs in front of the cameras, but as they are clearly being filmed single-camera and in glorious HD, their rejoinders come off as (obviously) false and staged. In addition, the disagreements chosen for this pilot are supremely weird and creepy, produced for an easy siding-with-the-wife in both cases. Wouldn't this format work better as a stage for debate and empathy? The show will live and die by its audience's understanding of both sides of an argument. Nobody needs a Marriage Ref to tell you that if Dianah doesn't want to dance on a stripper pole for her husband, she's not going to and shouldn't be expected to. Kelly Ripa, believe it or not, makes the one trenchant observation of the whole half-hour in pointing out that Greg might be trying in earnest to spice up their sex life, but this gets tossed out rather than considered or explored.

The panel here is made up of Alec Baldwin, Kelly Ripa and Jerry Seinfeld, exposing finally just how much of the genius behind Seinfeld must be attributable to Larry David if this is the best he could come up with after more than ten years' vacation from the network. The meat of the show is dedicated to the threesome exchanging pre-scripted one-liners with emcee/referee/charisma vacuum Tom Papa and laughing at each others' terrible jokes.

You know you're in trouble when a full minute of the pilot's slim twenty-five is dedicated to replaying 'favorite' lines from the couples' arguments, on top of the quotations already recited by the anxious panel.

If memory serves, this scheme was presented with a more successfully prurient dedication on MTV's The Blame Game in the late '90s. That show put warring exes on opposite sides of a judge and let the studio audience "Jury of Your Peers" vote for who was responsible for the relationship's dissolve. The court-of-law format, complete with "lawyers" defending each sides' case, was both more entertaining and actually made or a more intelligent, right-vs-wrong debate on the issues presented. The Marriage Ref's lazy premise, with a lazy baseball-game animated opening and a lazy Marv Albert as the announcer, feels undercooked, underdeveloped and desperate. Unfunny, uninteresting and more apathetic than pathetic, I don't see this one lasting into next season.

The Crazies

2010-02-26T11:20:00.001-06:00

Breck Eisner now has two high-profile features under his belt, and both might make you pause before you raise your tap water. His underrated Sahara followed a ragtag group of vigilantes taking down an African warlord and a French businessman who'd teamed up to poison the Niger river with a lot of toxic waste (the generic kind, green and sludgy, leaking out of big tin cans). In remaking George A. Romero's The Crazies, Eisner brings the toxins to the sleepy hamlet of Ogden Marsh, IA, in the form of a downed military plane that accidentally lets a biological weapon into the reservoir.

The stuff was engineered, says one government official in a bulletproof vest, "to destabilize a population."

And that it does, right away, as the first contaminated "crazy" wanders onto the high school baseball field on opening day with a shotgun only to get plugged in the head by the Sheriff. As a banner slung over Main Street announces, Ogden Marsh is to baseball as Dillon is to football on Friday Night Lights. Everyone in town is present to witness the violent death, including the star pitcher who will, sadly, never get his chance to make it to state.

But before too many people can register their scorn at Sheriff Dutton's itchy trigger finger (he does get smacked across the face by patient zero's wife), more bodies start piling up and a lot of soldiers run in for a town-wide reenactment of Quarantine.

Comparison's to Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead are apt. A premium is placed on forward momentum at the expense of a lot of exposition. This can be a difficult trick to pull off. If you think about it too much, the entire film is one big plot hole. But at least I'm not thinking about this stuff during the movie for once. The thing really moves, and I'm putting Eisner into the category of studio journeymen from whom I'll be excited to see more.

Eisner is especially adept at keeping his players in character - however slim the characters may be - in the midst of the action. Since he's not going to slow things down or let them breathe, the character beats come within the set pieces and it works like a charm. Timothy Olyphant's charismatic Sheriff Dutton may be a lawman, but in the scope of this story he's more of an everyman, with a sidekick in his Deputy and a motivation in his pregnant wife, played by Radha Mitchell. When another character suggests that trying to save his wife might get him killed, he replies, "Tell you what. Don't ask me why I can't leave without my wife and I won't ask you why you can."

Since Pitch Black this kind of smart genre exercise has been Mitchell's bread and butter. She brings a determination and dignity to the proceedings, never a shrill damsel in distress. Together, Mitchell and Olyphant make for a unit I enjoy rooting for. A sublimely ridiculous centerpiece that traps our heroes in a car wash is so much more successful than it has any right to be; ditto a bit featuring a runaway bone saw.

However, the thing that fascinates me about The Crazies is that, according to this New York Times article, this is supposed to be subversive "socially progressive cinema". One production partner is Participant Media, a firm that prides itself on releasing exclusively product with some form of social mandate, be it studio narrative like The Crazies or documentaries like Food, Inc. and An Inconvenient Truth. While this strikes me as a particularly nifty concept for a movie studio, I think it's funny that this is supposed to pass as socially progressive cinema. I suppose that says more about our country than it does the film itself; do we really need the story of a small town ruined by freak accident and an unfeeling military arm to incite advocacy for a federal chemical-security act?

On the other hand, Eisner thankfully knows his place as the director of a genre piece. If the intention of the moneylenders is to advance political policy, they were smart to hire a guy that would turn in a movie that's scary on its own terms rather than theirs. It's easy to imagine this plan turning out a self-important proselytizer. The Crazies fails as propaganda, and that's a good thing.

Shutter Island

2010-02-23T11:24:00.002-06:00

"You're a rat in a maze," hisses Jackie Earle Haley, now Hollywood's go-to character actor when you need someone to garble their dialogue and look like a freak for ten minutes. I'm not sure if what he means is that Leonardo DiCaprio's Bostonian Fed-uh-ruhl Mahh-shull is the victim of a scientific experiment or if he's just going to end up with a lot of cheese.

Haley's George Noyce and DiCaprio's Teddy Daniels are meeting (in Haley's only scene) on opposite sides of a rusty grid of bars that hold Noyce prisoner on Shutter Island, a labyrinthine mental hospital - equal parts Overlook Hotel and Shawshank Prison - that gives its name to Martin Scorsese's new prestige horror film. Daniels has been called in to investigate the disappearance of one of Shutter Island's patients (Ben Kingsley's Dr. Cawley prefers they not be referred to as prisoners), a homicidal woman named Rachel Solando who vanished overnight from within her locked, guarded cell.

From the start, it's apparent that nothing is as it seems and everyone involved may or may not be lying.

And just in case the thundering hurricane, the creepy deranged inmates and the menacing heartbeat of the "modern classical" song score aren't signifiers enough that something will be hitting the fan in a big way, there's a whole convoluted ensemble of terrific actors cast as inessential characters whose only purpose is to deliver expository jargon as a means to an ending.

There are two cops in charge (a warden and a deputy warden), two head psychiatrists, two terrifying inmates from Daniels' past. Daniels brought a partner along making two Marshalls to bandy theories back and forth, and he also brought along the baggage from two separate traumas. There are even two Rachel Solando's¹, and when the big twist comes out, it gets explained twice, not counting the trailer or the first twenty minutes of the feature, during which you might've already figured things out on your own.

So let's have a quick talk about the economy of a story.

Picture Laeta Kalogridis, the crack typist who wrote Oliver Stone's Alexander, at his computer working up his screenplay adaptation of Dennis Lehane's mystery novel Shutter Island. In blocking out his story, he's so far stuck to the book pretty faithfully, but remember that the word for what he's creating is "adaptation". In my dictionary under "adapt", I could show him another word: "modify."

A smart writer would've taken most - if not all - of those doubles and cut one half of them right out. This story is an unwieldy mess. When it's time to deliver exposition, you can practically smell the toner of the Xerox machine Kalogridis must've used to transfer novel to film.

If you haven't already figured out the twist by the time Shutter Island reaches its climax, don't worry. Not only will Ben Kingsley explain everything that you've seen beat by beat (he even has a dry erase board with I-swear-to-God anagrams), once he's finished there's going to be a handy ten-minute flashback to show you the finished puzzle Kingsley has just described.

During this climax as well as several other expository stretches, as the story ground to a halt for ten or so minutes, I found myself wondering what it might've been that attracted Scorsese to this project in the first place.

Because the fact is: I'm of two minds about Shutter Island. For all its flaws the movie is an aesthetic marvel, with several flat-out gorgeous dream sequences and the kind of lush photography and production design you only get to sink your teeth into on the too-rare occasion that a master filmmaker such as Scorsese deigns to make a lowly genre film. Reteaming with occasional cinematographer Robert Richardson and perennial editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese crafts a film that, even as each hint to the final twist drops to the floor with a thunk, is sporadically absorbing and often a good deal of fun. Occasionally, the film even manages to mine a sense of dread and a hint of terror. I might add that the girl behind me in the theater would disagree that the film is frightening only on occasion; it was clearly working for her, as every drop of blood and unlit corner elicited a shriek.

Clearly, Scorsese's interest in this puzzle lies in the pieces rather than the finally assembled picture, which is beneath him, you and me. I almost believe he selected the project simply to have some fun; the tricks he employs in the name of a straight-up horror are many. There are reverse shots, brooding negative space, a surprising amount of CGI and even a good old fashion jump scare. Did he simply feel the need to get this stuff out of his system in an appropriate story? It's a terrible storm to weather for the characters and a two-and-a-half-hour psychodrama for us, but for Scorsese it almost feels like a day at the beach.

1.) So you don't have to click over to the IMDb, here are the actors who play all these characters: Ted Levine and John Carroll Lynch as the warden and deputy, Kingsley and Max von Sydow as the shrinks, Haley and Elias Koteas as the creepy dudes, Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer as Rachel Solando and Mark Ruffalo as the partner. With the exception of Kingsley and Ruffalo, all of them are given one or two scenes only and nothing to do.[back]

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

The Abyss (1989)

2010-02-22T14:52:00.002-06:00

-1-

run silent, run deep

The Abyss and I go back a long way. I owned it twice on VHS (theatrical edition pan-and-scan followed by special-edition letterbox¹) and recall that it was one of the first movies I had to replace on DVD. I'd say it was one of the first action movies I remember really enthralling me, but to be honest, I can't even remember the first time I saw it. The Abyss has simply always been there, looking back into me.

It was likely my mom who introduced me to The Abyss². She always had a thing for naval action (there's a joke to be made there, but I'm not gonna be the one), in particular the 'Submarine In Peril'. I saw Das Boot long before I had any grasp on the history of WWII, and I remember several screenings of The Hunt For Red October. The Abyss, indeed, was PG-13 and so made for regular family-friendly viewing.

The funny thing about an old friend is that you can lose touch. For all the times I watched The Abyss as a kid, I can't remember the last time I sat down with it. One of the challenges of my James Cameron retrospective is to confront my 14-year-old self and try to recognize crap when I see it, even if it's beloved crap. To be completely honest, I almost didn't want to watch this movie again. It's among Cameron's least-discussed works, and what if it was terrible? To turn my back on The Abyss and leave it in my childhood would be heartbreaking.

Thankfully, I feel I can justify my deep-seeded love for this silly film.

For the uninitiated: The Abyss begins with the mysterious sinking of a US Navy nuclear submarine and follows the grizzled crew of a nearby underwater oil rig as they are recruited to aid in the rescue mission. From there a hurricane, some Cold War Russophobia, a psycho Navy SEAL and a miles-deep alien intelligence form the basis for what is formulaically a pretty standard beat-by-beat action movie; Cameron's skill as a conjurer of set piece and suspense combined with his passion for the deep blue, however, make for a uniquely exciting genre mosaic.

There are a handful of things, of course, that almost sink³ the project.

-2-
the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming

Most painful is the vein of righteous environmentalism that, in the Cameron oeuvre, begins here and runs straight through to Avatar. I can appreciate that the tree-hugging preachiness of the latter has made more than a few people wince; is it easier to swallow if set amidst the real-world nuclear paranoia of the Cold War? I suppose that's up to you. I'll say this, however: it'll be a long time before Avatar is dated. The Abyss dated itself in just a few years - although ironically, I'm pretty sure that every single mention of the actual Soviet Union was cut from the theatrical release (more on this later).

It's also worth noting that for all the anti-Russian sentiment on display here, Cameron was careful to give his heroes a more well-rounded take on the war - they don't hate Russians, they're just afraid of dying in a nuclear explosion. It falls on Coffey, Michael Beihn's crazy SEAL Lieutenant, to saddle the actual bigotry. In fact, it's Coffey's Cold War paranoia that drives the conflict of the film - there are at no point in the film any actual Russians, good or bad. Coffey, a personification of spiraling fear and distrust, is the film's only true antagonist.

After a close encounter with the Non-Terrestrial Intelligence, Lindsey tells Bud, "We all see what we want to see. Coffey looks and he sees Russians. He sees hate and fear. You have to look with better eyes than that." In addition to being one of Cameron's great potent quotables, this is a very tidy "theme!" line and also a fair summation of the very paranoia that's gotten the crew into this mess. It was the association of "Russian" with "hate and fear" that drove America down the rabbit hole. The Abyss functions, much like Avatar, as a plea that the human race look at the world (Earth or Pandora) with better eyes than it historically has.

-3-

20,000 leagues under the sea

In mixing all his nerdy fetishes, Cameron here tests his audience's suspension of disbelief more so than in any of his other features⁴. Rather than anchor his sci-fi trappings in a future setting, he presents them as elements of our real world; further, he deftly maneuvers between blatant fiction and edge-of-science experimental fact. Several technologies in the film are even specifically denoted by the characters as "experimental", right down the main setting of the underwater rig.

Get this: fluid-breathing is a one-hundred percent real, successfully tested medical practice, dating back well before the film was made. In the film, the scene with Beany the rat submerged against his will in the "fluorocarbon emulsion" was shot without effects. Six rats breathed liquid in front of the camera and they all lived.

At the time, however, it had never been tested on a human (it has since, I think, been successfully used on premature babies, though Wikipedia's article admittedly "contains too much jargon"). Bud's final act liquid oxygen dive remains a scientifically possible but entirely fictional adventure.

Twenty years later, that un-doctored shot of the rat breathing liquid is still difficult to take seriously, even though I know it's not an effect. Then on top of all this, Cameron has the gall to throw in aliens.

Now, the nerd in me loves this stuff. Not until Avatar, which functions really well as a kind of "Cameron's Greatest Hits", would Cameron ratchet up the nerd-quotient so high (and The Abyss's NTIs share a trait with the Pandorans in their biological commune with their natural environment). As far as I'm concerned, if Cameron had wanted to write in some ray guns it might've only been cooler, and he'd probably be the guy to make such a thing plausible.

But I have to admit I can see how someone might get turned off by the quality (and quantity) of fancy technologies on display.

-4-
up periscope, down periscope

As I've alluded, there are two versions of The Abyss. Just in case some of you were frustrated by the running times of Titanic and Avatar, take some solace in the fact that there was once a simpler time when even James Cameron would cut half an hour from a three-hour opus.

And according to James Cameron, James Cameron had final cut. After a lengthy dialogue with the studio heads and a couple rounds of test screenings, Cameron edited his three-hour Abyss down to 2:20. He later replaced the omitted footage for laserdisc and VHS release, and, at least for the duration of my adolescence, this became the definitive version of the film.

Remarkably, most of what's missing from the theatrical release are spare character beats, and together the two versions play like a textbook on how to trim around the edges of an overlong story. While it's always nice to see a new exchange within an ensemble of interesting characters, it doesn't necessarily add to the forward momentum. According to the DVD's text commentary, most of these cuts were made "for timing", and rightly so.

The big selling point for the special edition, however, was the notorious "killer wave" sequence. You'd think it would be difficult to cut a "Giant Tidal Waves Threaten Humanity" storyline from a film's climax and have the whole thing still make sense, but here you go. And as a special effects-loving teenager, boy did I love this fancy decoration.

Unfortunately, this is a piece of my past I am going to have to leave behind. In the extended cut, the NTIs unleash a system of giant tidal waves and freeze them poised over America's and Russia's coasts. In the theatrical edition, the NTIs wordlessly express their disapproval of nuclear weapons and then save our heroes, telling them to pass along their message. Not only is the tidal wave scene an unnecessary and overlong reiteration of a point already made, but by threatening humanity with aqua-destruction, the NTIs become complicit in the very same cold war which they are trying to end. It's antithetical to the point of the film and, frankly, I'm surprised Cameron ever wrote it.

-5-

men without women

Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's introduction as Lindsey Brigman is a pair of heels clicking their way out of a helicopter, scored by a minor character's description of her as "the queen bitch of the universe." This is a cute nod to Aliens but also the beginning of a disturbing trend in which Lindsey's bitchiness is consistently referenced but never shown. Everyone on the rig grimaces at her presence yet she is "bitchy" only insofar as she is strong, willful and female.

My impulse is to judge against Cameron in this instance. Though True Lies is a low point in several respects, it reveals that he isn't immune to using "bitch" as a one-dimensional label. And introducing Lindsey in this manner, in a scene where the epithet has no lightning rod, reeks of an underlying misogyny.

However, I think setting the protagonist ensemble against Lindsey is a circumstance crucial to the launch of her character's arc. The fact is, everyone hates her because on the brig, they serve Bud and she broke Bud's heart. After Lindsey makes contact with the NTIs, her need to convince the crew of the both the aliens' existence and their benevolence parallels her journey back into their good graces. She forces them to look with better eyes.

Lindsey is called a bitch again later in the film by Bud himself, but at this point the circumstances have changed. In the aftermath of a submersible chase (like a car chase but with, you know, submersibles), Lindsey drowns in the ice cold ocean water and the crew attempt to revive her. Is there any greater resuscitation scene in cinema than this one, in which Bud literally slaps Lindsey back to life? Not a lot of actors can handle a lot of yelling and screaming without overdoing it, but Ed Harris (himself the victim of an unfortunate "Noooo!" just minutes earlier) is at the top of his game here.

"Come on, breathe, baby. Goddammit breathe!" he implores after everyone else has given up. He erupts: "Goddammit you bitch you never backed away from anything in your life now fight!" Smacking her across the face, as if the tension of their marriage is the better tool than the defibrillator for jump-starting her frozen body, he brings her back.

Here, "bitch" is used explicitly as a reference to Lindsey's strength of character. Is Cameron allowed to casually reclaim misogynist vulgarity (even as he gives it back again five years later in True Lies)? As a believer in the flexibility of language, I'd like to say yes, but as a critic wary of misogyny in popular entertainments, I'm not so sure.

Immediately after Bud brings Lindsey back to life, she saves him from his near-death experience. While Bud is the hero of the film, she serves as both his foil and his motivator, and their relationship is probably the most romantically complex Cameron has yet achieved⁵.

I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here. As drawn, it's realistic that this dramatis personae would throw names at Lindsey the way they do. If the deckhand wants to call her a bitch, it says more about him than about her. At the very least, Lindsey is not a one-dimensional character worthy of the title.

-6-

below

The length of my own piece now mirrors Cameron's own bloated story, and I've likely revealed my nerd self a bit more than I'd intended on this site. But the Cameron retrospective is necessarily a personal project, and I cannot issue any disclaimers.

The fact is, even as I recognize that this is one of his sillier films (and it's not coincidental that this is his one previous work that Avatar most closely resembles), I love it completely. The silliness is ultimately endearing, with the strength of the cast, the structure and the formula all in support. The Abyss might not be Cameron's greatest⁶, but it sure is a nail-biter if you let yourself in. And I guarantee it goes down smoother than Avatar.

1.) Remember those nifty black clamshell VHS cases in which FOX packaged their letterboxed product? Ah, the good old days.[back]

2.) To my dear mother, avid reader who has commendably refrained from commenting so far on the blog: now's your chance. Do you remember introducing me to this movie?[back]

3.) There I go again.[back]

4.) Well, maybe not Pirhana, but that barely counts.[back]

5.) This isn't saying much, but it's saying something.[back]

6.) Is this the qualifier of an Apologist?[back]

This is the third entry in an open-ended series looking back at the work of James Cameron. I promise to start getting these up at a rate faster than one per month.

A Second Take: A Single Man

2010-02-18T11:48:00.017-06:00

Not long ago, one of my reviews engendered the uniquely wrathful, accusatory breed of reader comments that really make you think twice. In response to my dismissal of A Single Man, I was called flippant, self-congratulatory, and ignorant of theme, structure and symbol. I defended my stance as best I could against a pair of philosophers intent on the idea that Tom Ford's film is a "meditation on existential despair," "paralleling an entire life" from an "awakening" to "rebirth".

I am a staunch believer in the idea that even a film you hated might be given a second chance. Though the piece itself will be the same, the viewer, his mood, his baggage and the venue may all affect it one way or the other. Thus I was compelled to watch A Single Man for a second time.

And you know what? I liked it less.

But at least I came away with what a little more ammunition to defend my opinion. This is not intended as a personal attack against those moved by the film; it's merely a defense of my own self against the criticism that the movie flew so far over my head that I sank to "decorate [my] review with the broadest possible descriptions of the story and categorical, but unsupported, criticisms, some of which are ad hominem attacks on the director."

I admit: I was a bit glib.

So here, under a Code Red Spoiler Threat and without an 800-word limit, I would like to take another pass at analysis of the film's failures.

Let's begin with this idea that A Single Man is structured as a feature length version of the Riddle of the Sphinx, in which George Falconer's single remaining day parallels the entire life of a man from birth to rebirth. I'm perfectly willing to accept his dip in the ocean with the chiseled young Kenny Potter as a "rebirth" - especially given that he almost drowns and must be pulled out as if from the womb. However: while the film adheres to a basic unity of time, it is lazily perforated by several flashbacks of dubious worth. If George is "born" in the morning simply by waking up and going through a meticulous (and well-designed) routine to create "the perfect George" and then dies ironically at the end of the day, the weight of this movement escapes me. I also fail to see how the film's episodic midsection informs any of this. In addition, I might add that the film violates one of the fundamental tenets of dramatic temporal unity in setting the events eight full months after Jim's death: there's no inciting incident. Why is George finally suicidal now, today?

Speaking of those flashbacks, there are three involving George's deceased lover Jim and one in which George gets the phone call informing him of the fatal accident. Two of these are blatantly expository - though the phone call scene at least comes early enough in the film that I haven't yet tired of Firth's tireless emoting. The other two, depicting first a night at home with a pair of books between the two lovers and second their first meeting sixteen years prior, serve no purpose whatsoever except to remind us (had we only forgotten) that the two men were very much in love and that Jim's death is really really sad.

The most useful of these flashbacks is the other exposition, in which George and Jim (in black and white for no damn reason at all except, I guess, to match that steamy nude candid) discuss Charley. George's words about her here - explaining that he loves her dearly but only as a friend even though yes, they did once sleep together back in London - go a long way towards setting us up for the big showdown at Charley's house later in the evening.

The psychological blue-balling that occurs between Charley and George in their single substantive scene together is by far the most interesting dynamic in the film but it serves only to drain me of my sympathy for the film's one necessarily sympathetic character. Here's this guy who's been in a committed relationship for sixteen years and he still has this girl on a string from before that relationship even started? The only word for Charley's reliance upon George is 'pitiful', and the only word for his dependence on her steadfast support is 'cruel'. Charley cracks a joke about her vagina having "lovely breath"; George cracks a joke that she might try her hand at lesbianism. You could make a whole movie about a fascinating, fucked up relationship like this, but here it's just an episode and an imprecisely executed one, at that.

"If you're not happy being a woman, stop acting like one," George tells Charley. It's funny how completely unaware of each other's true selves these two are after however many decades they've been BFFs. This harks back to the film's recurring motif of "invisibility", a theme so overwrought, overexposed and over-discussed that I really can't make heads nor tails of what it's supposed to mean. "Life is tough," maybe, or something like that.

Early on, we get to witness one scene of George at work, teaching Huxley to his class. He begins the discussion by asking how the title (After Many A Summer Dies The Swan) relates to the piece. We hear part of a response from one of his students ("It doesn't. It's about a guy who's afraid of death...") before the film cuts away into George's head for another butt-tastic drowning fantasia. When we are, along with George, jolted back to reality, it is by the classroom erupting into laughter; but it's not clear what they're laughing at. You think for a second they're getting a kick out of George lapsing into daydream, but then the 'discussion' continues unabated - were they just laughing at the joker who didn't understand the title? Another student quotes a line from the book and extrapolates that perhaps Huxley was an anti-Semite, to which George responds that no, he wasn't, and that maybe they should "put Huxley aside for a minute." He says, "I can see I've lost you."

That's it? No kidding, Professor. When I stated in my original review that the film fails to make any use of the weighty texts its characters are seen ignoring, this is what I'm talking about.

From here, George goes off on a monologue about how "fear is being used as a tool for manipulation in our society" and how the scariest minorities are the invisibles. I don't happen to have a transcript of this, but I think it's telling that everyone in the class looks terribly confused except for Kenny in the angora sweater, who just looks hot and bothered. He chases George out of the class to ask why he doesn't always talk to them like that, to which George replies, "I didn't think it went over very well."

Oh, now we're getting to the meat of the thing, because Kenny tails George all the way to the campus store (or rather, George tails Kenny, as it turns out) where he offers to buy him a pencil sharpener. The little plastic utensils are available in red, yellow and blue. Kenny offers George his choice. When George selects yellow, the following exchange occurs (dialogue not verbatim, but I'm trying my best):

KENNY: I would've thought you'd pick blue.
GEORGE: Why's that?
KENNY: Blue is spiritual.
GEORGE: What makes you think I'm spiritual?
KENNY: I don't know, sir. What does red stand for?
GEORGE: Oh, lots of things. Rage, lust...

The meaning of George's yellow goes unstated, but I'm guessing yellow here symbolizes horseshit. Later that night, after being followed to the same bar where he met Jim sixteen years ago, George and Kenny continue their nails-on-a-chalkboard flirtation. Kenny talks about how little he understands the world, how he feels invisible, and about his desire to grow up, and George talks about how he's actually gotten "sillier and sillier" and Kenny suggests they go jump in the ocean. Later still, after their prolonged game of sexual chicken has come to a bizarre, drunken end¹, George VOs about his rare moment of clarity, during which he watches an owl² take flight from a branch, waxes nostalgic about the beauty of the world and passes out dead to the sound of a ticking clock.³

Obviously, for all the talk about invisibility, with the big-eyed Psycho poster and the fogged up mirrors in Charley's apartment, this is a movie keen on being about how people see each other and themselves. George and Jim lived in a glass house and every single character is aware of their lifestyle, even as Jim snickers, "Drapes, old man." So the idea, then, with his final moment of clarity, is that George was somehow blind his whole life, or invisible to himself, or deeply afraid of himself? Is he afraid merely after Jim's death? According to his opening monologue, George was always disgusted with Jim's optimism.

Another funny thing that strikes me is that, after taking several minutes of my time to get dressed and put his face on, everyone George encounters tells him that he doesn't look very good. What's changed today? (Right, the suicide attempt has been scheduled but why?) Is the idea that everybody could see George for who he is except for George himself? In that case, why do we have to listen to him pontificate on the matter for an hour and a half before he comes up with anything philosophically viable? There's a decent arc hidden in this mess: man blinded by fear of self achieves peace, then dies. But I was told by one of the film's vocal defenders that there is nothing ironic about the ending.

Finally, in a weird alterna-verse that looks like 1960s Los Angeles but is filled with humanoids who do nothing but complain about how nobody sees them or understands them, you'd think at some point this collection of ciphers would wake up and take a goddamn look around.

I admit it: I'm confused. You've lost me, professor Falconer.

1.) Surely Ford's implication in this scene is not that Kenny drugs George and fucks him while he's passed out, but it's almost too easy to read it that way: all day Kenny has been throwing himself at him, offering drugs, companionship and physical intimacy, and George has been playing it cool. Finally George tells Kenny to get them both another beer, and after sipping the open container Kenny hands him, his vision goes fuzzy and he passes out in his easy chair ... only to wake up later in bed in the next room with a satisfied Kenny dozing on the couch holding George's gun under the blanket.[back]

2.) What does the goddamn owl symbolize? I vote, again, for a big nothing.[back]

3.) A ticking clock. It ticks louder and louder and then stops. Really fucking epic moviemaking, this.[back]

I am introducing a new, sporadically recurring feature on My Favorite Gum Commercial. It will be known as "A Second Take," and I will produce one whenever someone convinces me I might've missed something. Argue at me (please) and, time permitting, I will go give any given piece another shot with your comments in mind.

Edge of Darkness

2010-02-16T15:08:00.012-06:00

Easily the best movie at the multiplex right now, Martin Campbell’s remake of his own 1985 British mini-series Edge of Darkness goes down smooth but gives you a bit of cork to gnaw on along the way. Why is this being dumped in the late-winter next to The Wolfman and Valentine’s Day? In his first major vehicle since Signs in 2002, Gibson seems bent on revenge not only for the murder of his character’s daughter but for whatever it was that killed his career. That he spends most of the film hunched over in a dank trench coat that might as well be made of shame is only one layer of the joke. As Michael Ian Black would say, Mel Gibson must have terrible PR.

Gibson plays Boston Police Detective Tommy Craven, whose grown daughter Emma is gunned down on his front porch. What begins as a formulaic revenge thriller quickly spirals outward into a massive political paranoia yarn full of corporate sleaze, government cover-ups and crooked cops. But it never devolves into cat-and-mouse hijinks; rather, the bad guys are clearly delineated from the good by the end of the first act and the rest of the film is just one understated moment of quiet after the next where Gibson and his Shakespearean ensemble try to figure out what the point of it all is.

Examining a crime scene that may or may not involve his Emma’s killer, a fellow cop offers that Craven is acting pretty calm for a guy in his position. He replies, “It doesn’t do me any good not to be.” Later, threatening a lawyer only tangentially related to the conspirators, Craven warns the suit to do what he says or risk upsetting a man with nothing to lose.

Already aged to the point where flipping a table and pinning a crony takes his wind out for the whole five minutes of the resulting interrogation, Craven really doesn’t have anything to live for except to dig as deep as he can into the mysteries of his daughter’s death. What makes the character work is his slow realization that solving his daughter’s murder is nothing compared to what it might’ve been to know her in life; there’s a hauntedness to Craven’s memories of her. Throughout the film, some ethereal or psychological part of Emma speaks to her father in short, monosyllabic sentences. These half-hearted attempts on the part of Craven’s broken psyche to keep her alive are juxtaposed with sporadic flashbacks – all of which take place when she was an adorable little girl. There are a couple holes here (Emma’s mother and adolescence, namely), and their void stings.

The key to the film is Ray Wintsone’s Jedburgh, a high-ranking spook who lives in DC, has a thick British accent and tends to pop out of nowhere with a gun, a cigar or a glass of warm booze (or all three). Jedburgh is the other ghost haunting Craven. He’s a man of barely-defined profession who is clearly sent to kill our hero but instead sets him on the path to uncover the big fish. Jedburgh’s reversal (coming early in the film, again, so it can marinate) may be little more than a mid-life crisis of conscious from a middle-aged career hitman, but it’s also the film’s thematic foundation.

Jack Bennett, Danny Houston’s ur-sleazy private-sector weapons-developing CEO, also pauses to ask Craven about the loss of his daughter. Bennett, the bad guy, has spent his life creating something made to kill people he doesn’t know. Jedburgh has spent his life killing people for money. They can see in Craven’s eyes that all he ever did was create a little girl and that they took her away. In a movie obsessed with mortality, here are three men with nothing substantial to live for. Talk about darkness. Is there an essential goodness to Craven that Jedburgh sees through to? As a homicide detective, are the two men some kind of photo-negative image of each other? It requires some unpacking.

Purportedly an action movie, Edge of Darkness features exactly one car wreck, zero explosions and several scenes where guns get aimed and not fired. The tightness of the script impressed me: it’s a rare movie with no extraneous scenes or characters that lets drama occur between men in a room. The story moves with their choices. Not only is it a Michael Clayton-esque political thriller tuned to our modern dilemmas (and not only did it predict a Republican Massachusetts Senator), it has the courage to play a game out between its characters rather than extrapolate a lot of nonsense about globo-terrorism. It may be about a government conspiracy, but that’s all anybody needs to know. What counts is what it means to a father.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

Julie & Julia

2010-02-15T12:00:00.002-06:00

About two-thirds into through Julie & Julia, Julie and Eric Powell are sitting on the couch watching Dan Ackroyd's "French Chef" sketch from Saturday Night Live. The film pauses its forward momentum to show us a good two minutes of the bit; in addition, we get to watch the Powells reveling in a delightful send-up of the culinary icon they love so much.

It's Julia Child, of course, who is the subject of the Powells', of Ackroyd's and of the film's adoration (remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). And for the skinny half of the film that isn't following Julie Powell down her road to flash-in-the-pan¹ celebrity in the early aughts, we get to watch Meryl Streep fill Child's heels in the middle of the 20th century.

The inclusion of Ackroyd's bit strikes me as an acknowledgment that the "character" of Julia Child as seen in the film cannot compare to a very real person that millions of people grew up with and loved. What Streep is doing here isn't acting - it's sketch comedy. In the same way that Julie Powell, with nothing better to do, set about recreating all 563 recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Meryl Streep is here recreating a larger-than-life figure. We see Fred Armisen doing the same thing to Barack Obama every week on SNL. This is a movie about impersonations.

As the film begins, Julie Powell is working at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, wasting away in a cubicle as a sounding board for the city-full of people who need to dial a number and complain that the plans for Ground Zero aren't sufficiently sensitive to the memories of a loved one. This job stinks, as you can imagine, and plus she's underpaid and has basically nothing to live for except cooking, ignoring her poor cat and emasculating her poor husband.

Fortunately, this is 2002 and Powell can still get on the internet while the getting's good. She brainstorms a scheme to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about them in the course of one calendar year. Through her blog, Powell earns a book deal, achieves an unexpected celebrity among people who care about blogs and gets a movie made out of her life.²

I've been making a conscious effort to eschew cynicism recently but it's difficult to feel a lot of joy for Powell and her success. There's really nothing special offered here from Powell or 'The Julie/Julia Project'. The point of Child's seminal cookbook, after all, was that anyone can cook, even "servantless Americans". What Powell does in this story is capture lightning in a bottle, the same way OK Go did with their video for "Here It Goes Again". A much better writer could tackle the same project in an even smaller kitchen, but it was the novelty of the internet that made Powell famous, and that novelty is a thing of the past.

There's one beat in which Child breaks down in tears because her sister is immediately pregnant right after her wedding - but this five seconds is all the movie devotes to the tragedy of Child's childlessness. This turns out to be a good thing, because what Nora Ephron actually does really well is comedy. This is something I was surprised to find myself reminded of (especially after Bewitched) but damn if this movie isn't sporadically hilarious. Child was such a character that Ephron and Streep have no choice but to allow themselves some fun (plus Stanley Tucci makes for a decent straight man).

Ultimately it's Ephron's lack of focus that actually keeps the thing cooking³. Rather than get bogged down in familial drama and saccharine challenged-marriage arcs (and she comes frighteningly close more than once), Ephron keeps things moving with setpieces like "Julie has to boil live lobsters" and "Julie's boss discovers her blog", all juxtaposed with "Julia chops a ton of onions" and "Julia can't get a book deal even though she's Julia Child! Wink!"

So I find myself resenting that Powell placed herself on a pedestal and that Ephron came along to reinforce it. But the film is, consequentially, architecturally fascinating: despite the cutesy end-title acknowledgement that "Powell has had a movie made out of her life," even her own self-made story was too skimpy to support itself. Ephron had to create a mash-up. The film announces in its opening that it is "based on two true stories" (and I hate that cloying shit) but really it's the lazily drawn parallels between the two women's lives that make either story remotely interesting. Taken on her own, Powell really isn't worth much. It's her impersonation that's fascinating.

1.) No pun intended, I swear.[back]

2.) I do love a good fantasy.[back]

3.) Okay, that one I intended.[back]

Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T09:36:00.011-06:00

...unless you're an idiot or a homophobe, in which case:

Valentine's Day is about a lot of white people running around Los Angeles on Valentine's Day making fools of themselves in various degrees of undress. Jessica Biel is playing a woman who can't get laid, so right there you know there's going to be an issue of artistic license. The main couple in the ensemble (the one that gets the most screentime, at least) is made of BFFs Jennifer Garner and Ashton Kutcher, who will run parallel arcs of waking up in love, getting their hearts broken and realizing true love for their best friend all in one magical day.

It's completely disposable, and recycled at that. Nobody really cares about this shit, even the people who go to see it. The film is to Hallmark cards what Transformers is to action figures.

But it's worth taking at least a moment to consider the audience I saw this movie with, in a half-full auditorium in one of Chicago's larger multiplexes. I want specifically to record the audience's reaction to the gay characters in the film. Rather than go completely ignored, homosexuality is here reduced to a punchline and a plot twist. There is a "token" gay couple, but we don't know who they are until the final-minutes montage connecting all the people we didn't know were connected (Spoiler Alert: they're all connected! Love actually is all around!).

Let me set this up for you: halfway through the film, a celebrated NFL quarterback (Eric Dane) reveals himself to be gay. If you're paying any attention at all, you know Bradley Cooper, who spends most of his time on a plane to LA next to Julia Roberts, is his lover. Apparently, nobody in the theater I was in was paying any attention.

So the dreamy quarterback has fallen asleep all alone on the couch with nobody to love him on Valentine's Day. In the background, we see a man come in and approach him. He hands him a flower and then kneels down to reveal himself as: Bradley Cooper!

At this point, the theater erupted. There were shocked gasps and nervous laughter. It was loud. This was the most reaction the movie had gotten out of its audience¹. There were girls "oooh"-ing and dudes "ohhh"-ing. The whole thing probably only lasted a few seconds, but it felt like several minutes. I was temporarily engulfed in a maelstrom of gay panic.

I want to ascribe this to the audience's apathy - that the scene was successfully functioning as plot twist rather than panic button. But there was a palpable rancor there. I'm sure not everyone in the theater was upset or offended but their knee-jerk emissions certainly revealed a few true colors.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, to me or anyone else, I suppose, that Valentine's Day would fail to treat treat homosexuality with any more substance or nuance or sensitivity than it does heterosexuality (or hispanics, or blacks, or blonde white girls, for that matter). I know I was raised in a liberal community and that everyone is different and for a lot of people, the notion of Gays in the Mainstream is just plain shocking, especially when it's played by the hunky dudes from Grey's Anatomy and The Hangover. But come on, America.

By the way, Dane and Cooper don't get a kiss. Everyone else gets a kiss, even Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel. And it's nice that interracial kissing is finally okay, but do we have to wait another forty years before the gay panic subsides? Man, what a drag.

1.) Second-biggest reaction: giggling from schoolgirls in response to Taylor Lautner's line about being uncomfortable taking off his shirt in public.[back]

In Defense of Auto-Tune

2010-02-11T10:06:00.000-06:00

I like what Neko Case had to say about auto-tune back in a 2006 interview with Pitchfork:

"When I hear auto-tune on somebody's voice, I don't take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you'll hear a little bit of auto-tune and you're like, 'You're too fucking good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don't you know what that means?' It's not an effect like people try to say, it's for people like Shania Twain who can't sing. Yet there they are, all over the radio, jizzing saccharine all over you. It's a horrible sound and it's like, 'Shania, spend an extra hour in the studio and you'll hit the note and it'll sound fine. Just work on it, it's not like making a burger!' "

It's pretty silly (and patently obvious) to use auto-tune to send your voice to a pitch it can't naturally hit. But as the device has increased in popularity (among artists, at least, if not listeners), it's showing up more and more as the "effect" that Case brushes off. Also, I don't think the notion of auto-tune-as-crutch is what people dislike. People just don't like the way it sounds. Not since commercial radio separated country from rock (allowing in the calculated twang of contemporary "Wal-Mart" country music) has a sub-genre of pop been so widely rejected based on an aural aesthetic preference.

The thing is, nobody's pretending that Ke$ha sings her way through "Tik Tok". It's worth comparing the single to a live take; given the recent tendency for even good bands to sound terrible in television studios, I'd say Ke$ha is holding her own here a lot better than you might expect.

Live, the song just sounds different. Auto-tune, in this current evolutionary state of Club/Dance music, is not the crutch that it would be for Shania Twain. There's no masquerade to the auto-tune on singles like "Tik Tok", Jay Sean's "Down", or Jason DeRulo's "Whatcha Say"; it's part of the production.

These songs are all catchy if you have an ear for that kind of thing. This phenomenon dates back to the early aughts, when artists like Missy Elliot and Britney Spears were launching massive singles that operated on a completely different plane than their respective vocal talents. Not only were "Work It" and "Toxic" fantastic jams, they had hooks with which it was impossible to sing along. Even if you hated these songs, you had to breathe a sigh of relief that you'd never, ever hear them at a karaoke bar (and if you did, it would honestly have to be pretty entertaining).

Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak is an entire album of auto-tune. This may or may not be an example of auto-tune crutching; it's doubtful that Kanye could've recorded this mournful album (and sung on all the tracks) using just his natural voice. But rather than fake it, Kanye leans on it hard: auto-tune is the sonic foundation for the entire album and likely also the reason why so many haters hated. On 808s auto-tune becomes like Peter Frampton's guitar or Julian Casablancas' vocoder. It's just a filter used to give the voice a weird sound. In essence, auto-tune is really no different than a guitar pedal.

In addition, the auto-tune becomes a part of Kanye's statement with 808s, a piece of Phil Collins-esque synth-rock melancholia the likes of which we hadn't heard in the mainstream for ages. Kanye is openly dealing with some pretty tough shit in the wake of a bad break-up and his mother's death, and he consequently transforms himself into a kind of machine that can process emotions like software. On lead single "Love Lockdown," he 'sings' of a "system overload" and a "secret code" he needs to keep love locked down, and on standout track "Robocop" he compares his lover's paranoia to a cyborg from the movies. The album is thematically wrapped up in the bonus track "Pinocchio Story", a live freestyle in which Kanye compares his quest to "keep it real, boy" in the midst of fame and fortune with the marionette's desire to "be a real boy", only he has "no Gepetto to guide me". The auto-tune adds a layer of sorrow to Kanye's malaise (lacking on that live track). It's almost like a defense mechanism to keep his manhood solid and steely even as he opens his wounds for public consumption.

The mechanized self is there in other, more innocuous auto-tune hits, as well. Ke$ha, in the chorus of her hit, compares herself to a clock that won't stop tik-tok-ing until the sun comes up.

I think Jay-Z has a point in drawing "a line in the sand" on the Kanye-produced "D.O.A" ('death of auto-tune'). He seems to be saying enough is enough, but he's not denying the effect's place in music. Like any device, it can be (and maybe is being) over-used. But let's not write it off completely. The sound might be around for a while, and we don't want to have sounded like Decca when someone like Kanye West uses it to paint a masterpiece.

The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film (or, why we need to stop worrying and ignore the award shows)

2010-02-09T23:19:00.005-06:00

Here are the the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rules for eligibility in the "Animated Feature" category:

"An animated feature film is defined as a motion picture with a running time of at least 70 minutes, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the picture’s running time."

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shenanigans!

Let's just take a minute and pull this little piece of bureaucracy apart bit by bit. Taking the category as a given, I'd like to examine this "eligibility" nonsense. In the nine year period since the creation of the category, the rules have already been revised once specifically to preclude the consideration of increasingly common CGI/live action mixtures like King Kong or The Lord of the Rings. But even in their current incarnation, Avatar fits the bill.

Avatar is over seventy minutes long (certainly!). A significant number of the major characters therein are animated ('significant' is one of those legally malleable terms, but, you know, whatever) and computer animation easily 'figures in' more than 75 percent of the running time. As for this "frame-by-frame" business, I admit I'm not sure what that means. Wikipedia seems to think it would refer to stop-motion or cel animation, but since the great majority of AMPAS animated nominees are computer animated, that's not the case.

So why isn't Avatar in the running for Animated Feature? For many of the same reasons that it's nominated for Best Picture (read: it's technologically mind-blowing), it should be considered for the Animated category. It was largely conceived, "photographed" and assembled using the exact same techniques as many of the films we consider "animated", yet nobody thinks of Avatar as an "animated" movie. Two previous winners in the category have integrated live action photography into animated worlds (Wall-E and Happy Feet) and at least one previous nominee (Monster House) was made using motion-capture. Ghettoizing these films becomes more illogical with each advance of the technology.

Where do we draw the line? The insufficiency of the AMPAS rules underlines the absurdity of this category's existence.

The official word was that the category was created to give animated films a chance at an Oscar every year. This is a nice effort. Not only is it akin to the Foreign Language category that has allowed only two¹ foreign language productions into the main race in the past twenty years, it would also be akin to a Best Performance By a Black Actor category or a Best Song Featuring the Alto Saxophone. Why not separate categories for Best Animated Feature (Computer) and Best Animated Feature (Hand-made)? Would that be any more arbitrary?

The Animated Feature category is a ghetto which allows the AMPAS to throw a statue at Pixar every year without risking their credibility by offering Pixar a chance in the main category. Why are these films kept separate? Animated films are not found in the Best Picture race because they are considered to be "for kids" and thus "lesser than" or "beneath" other films. Consider how often have you heard someone say the following phrase: "Boy, [this year's Pixar film] was really good for a cartoon."

This is why we don't think of Avatar as an animated film. Too much of the movie-watching populace equates "animated" with "for the kids". Even though animation is a medium and not a genre, and even though there are plenty of animated films strictly for adults (which don't get considered in the AMPAS category, by the way, and get fucked over even by the organizations ostensibly in place to support them), too many people blindly label this category as "best of the movies that were beneath me."

The Pixar movies, with arguable exception, are not really good kids movies; they're really good movies, period. Putting them up against the Shrek's and the Jimmy Neutron's every year is insulting enough.

But this year it's a whole new bag of infuriating.

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this year's race

Without even having seen two of the five nominees, I'll say that the Animated Feature category has a greater percentage of interesting, challenging films than the ten-wide Best Picture race; The Princess and the Frog is really the odd one out here². That The Secret of Kells got nominated is truly incredible: nobody outside of the nominating committee has seen it but it also didn't have any kind of campaign, meaning (one might surmise) it must actually be pretty decent. On top of this there is Up, Coraline, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, all of which are the efforts of sincere auteurs making the most they can within a ghettoized medium. I wasn't crazy about Fox and appreciate arguments of less-than-perfection regarding all three; they remain, at least, qualitatively beautiful and fascinating.³

Getting back to why specifically this year's Academy Awards are under my skin: the nomination of Up for Best Picture (only the second animated film ever⁴ in that category and first since the introduction of the animated category) is an implicit apology for not nominating Wall-E last year after every body and their mother agreed it deserved the recognition.

“Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize,” says Sid Ganis, AMPAS president in the official press release announcing the category's expansion. He talks a lot about 'going back to their roots' as well, but really this is about Wall-E - and, to a lesser extent, The Dark Knight - showing up as rare favorites among both critics and audiences that everyone would've liked to see recognized on the Academy stage. Nominating Up for Best Picture is a lot like giving Russell Crowe an award for Gladiator the year after snubbing him for The Insider. This is what the Academy does: it apologizes. For mistakes, for the lack of quality roles for any other type of actor besides white men, for giving awards to Crash.

If the process actually worked the way it was supposed to, the AMPAS wouldn't have to deal with controversies such as these. If it wasn't a popularity contest, Reese Witherspoon doesn't win for Walk the Line. If everyone didn't just vote for their friends, Crash doesn't win. If Academy members actually [step one] watched movies, [step two] voted for the good ones instead of the pat-on-the-back, white-guilt, Nazis-are-bad, sexual-liberation-for-your-grandmother slop, and [step three] ignored the massive political campaigns waged by the studios, we wouldn't need to expand to ten nominees just to "squeeze in" (Ganis' phrase) an animated movie for good measure.

The bloggers were all a-twitter about the rare feeling of having four-to-five nominees that they actually liked this year (Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Up, A Serious Man, Avatar and/or District 9 all have support among at least some of the people who actually watch movies). If the Academy had any balls, the five nominations would come from that (all-American) list (of really popular movies) and we wouldn't have to bother with the rest of the swill. Can you imagine the ratings for an Oscar telecast with five Best Picture nominees that are all from that list?

I love Up more than most people I know. I'm happy to see it get noticed; I'm happy to see notice get it noticed. But this nomination is just an arbitration within a mess of arbitration. This ten-nominee line-up is the Academy's way of saying "see, we support lots of different movies" while still ponying up airtime for the award bait. They're having their cake and eating it too and there are still people who look to this unbearable fiasco as a voice for What Good Movies Are. "We'll nominate Up! We'll squeeze it in. But the Oscar's still gonna go to the movie with the best campaign."

I've been irrationally upset by the Academy Awards for years now. Never have I felt so condescended to.

1.) Il Postino and Life is Beautiful. You might also include the American production Letters From Iwo Jima; the intricacies through which the Foreign Language rules omit films from consideration would consume an entire other essay. But as a footnote to a footnote, can you believe this exists? Holy hell, when does it stop?[back]

2.) Full disclosure: haven't seen it, probably shouldn't be talking about it. I don't want to make presumptions about it being an actual example of standard kiddie fare or the opposite of that. I think my point stands, regardless.[back]

3.) Neil Gaiman, discussing Coraline, says "In my experience, Coraline is so much more scary for adults. Adults are watching a film about a child in danger, kids are watching a film about somebody brave doing something cool." Why would anyone want to ignore a story with such a fascinating duality of audience perspective? Oh, right: because it's for kids.[back]

4.) The other was Beauty and the Beast. By the way, do you know who the most awarded person in Oscar history is? Nobody is even close to Walt Disney's record twenty-six Oscars. That number doesn't include the seven miniature Oscars given in recognition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field".[back]

Grizzly Man (2005) & Survivor

2010-02-05T10:59:00.000-06:00

In a rare bit of synchronicity, I finally caught up with Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man about a month and a half ago, just as the nineteenth season of Survivor was wrapping itself up. This was one of the best seasons that show has ever put out, and I must ramp up my crusade to get people to watch it. Viewing Grizzly Man for the first time, I was bemused by how much the lauded documentary has in common with the television show that some pundits say destroyed the medium.

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the grizzly man in his elements

Most of the footage in Grizzly Man is of the 'found' variety, recovered from the tapes left behind by preservationist Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell, having spent thirteen consecutive summers camping in the Katmai National Park amongst the native grizzly bear population, was ultimately killed and eaten in October of 2003. Herzog cuts Treadwell's tapes together into an essay that begins as something resembling the nature documentary Treadwell himself might've one day assembled but quickly transforms into a parodic eulogy to a crazy weirdo who essentially feeds himself to the bears in order to escape human society.

The parts of the film that aren't shot by Treadwell involve testimonials from the people that knew him closely, reconstructing both his life and the circumstances behind his ~~grizzly~~ grisly death. Delving into what made him the man he became, Herzog doesn't shy away from Treadwell's episodes with drug addiction, his failed career as an actor (allegedly he was a runner-up for Woody Harrelson's role on Cheers) or his inability to form many true friendships outside of the preservationist community.

One of the fundamental mysteries of Treadwell's existence is the extent to which he was retreating into nature because he loved the bears so much or rather because he felt cast out of the humanity into which he was born. Herzog edits down the tapes and tapes of monologues left behind so to show Treadwell repeatedly proclaiming his love for the animals (the bears, a fox, a dead bee that turns out to have been merely dozing) in a progression to the point where it almost sounds like Treadwell is trying to convince himself as well as his audience. Treadwell often appears to forget that he's recording a monologue for a nature documentary and devolves into manic anger (this is hammered home by Herzog's use of multiple takes of the same speeches). Treadwell's mood swings are now the stuff of legend.

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the four types of survivors

There are four categories into which any Survivor contestant can be reasonably placed:

1.) The Walkabout
My favorite Walkabout is Jessica "Sugar" Kiper from Gabon (and not just because she's cute). Sugar claimed to have gone on the show to reconcile herself to the recent loss of her father and spent several consecutive trips to Exile Island weeping in a hammock. The Walkabout is on Survivor because it's a (relatively) easy way to get an all-expense paid trip to an exotic location with the opportunity to live off the land away from civilization. As a bonus, there's little actual risk because of the medical team hanging around in the bushes (although it's worth pointing out that the frequency with which we see that medical team called in can be pretty scary).

2.) The Challenged Self
Either The Challenged Self or The Fame Whore is the most common type of survivor. The Challenged Self, for one reason or another, has entered the game because he or she needs to prove they can win it. Russell Hantz is probably the most honest (in confessional) example of this we've seen. He stated outright in the first episode of season nineteen that he was just here to show everyone he can play Survivor better than anyone else (and he was almost right).

These survivors often use phrases like "I have something to prove" or "I just wanted to see if I could make it". Their motives can be financial (put your kids in college, buy your wife that salon she's always dreamed of, put yourself through college) or self-interested. The Challenged Self is playing Survivor because he thinks he can win the game. They've seen Survivor before and thought, "I could beat those assholes." The Challenged Self is here to compete.

Take Bob Crowley, for example: a high school physics teacher who just wanted money for his kids' tuition. He was beloved on and off the island. The only time he double-crossed another survivor, he quickly repented for his cruelty (and everyone bought it, including me). His decency carried him a long way on the show; his popularity among viewers won him an extra hundred grand in the Sprint-sponsored fan-favorite contest that ends each season (this in addition to winning the million dollar grand prize).

3.) The Fame Whore
You go on the reality show that started it all, you get a lifetime of endorsement deals, shopping mall appearances, ten-dollar signed glossies and Playboy spreads.

Jerri Manthey owned the Fame Whore title, tearing up the show in the second season's Australian Outback. Manthey's inevitable expulsion was one of the series' great moments not because of the vote itself but because everyone had grown to hate her so much. If Survivor created reality television, Manthey created the "reality star". She's like The Beatles to pop music: Snooki and the Situation, Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and all the rest of them owe their careers to Jerri Manthey and her sensationalist "reality" performance art. (This may or may not be a good thing; it's certainly culturally relevant.)

I should point out that on occasion the fame whore isn't all that bad. In the sixteenth season, the initial tribes were composed of "Fans vs. Favorites", one an all-star tribe of former players and the other all die hard Survivor fans. A fair number of Survivor contestants are just there because they love the show and want to be a part of it.

4.) The Crazy
When the Survivor casting team lands a great Crazy, it's beautiful. Look at Coach from Tocantins. Here's a pathological liar who self-identifies as an Alpha Male but fails spectacularly at anything physical. He's a man who goes by "Coach" but was fired from his job as a women's soccer coach because he lied to his superiors about going on Survivor, telling them he was only going to be gone a week. Coach practices an ancient Martial art called "Chong Ran", claiming that "if you do a Google search for it you won't find it; it's only passed down verbally." When he made it to the "Loved Ones" episode, the loved one he chose to visit him halfway around the world was ... his assistant coach.

The Crazy is so thrilling to watch; this is also where I begin to feel slightly dirty about the show. The Fame Whores know what they're getting themselves into, but with The Crazy it's impossible to tell. Regardless, a good Crazy usually makes it really deep into the game (Coach came in fifth, Samoa's Shambo came in sixth out of a larger, twenty-player pool) and even as this is because their competitors don't consider them a real threat, I do find it hard to feel sorry for the Crazies. The thing with a Survivor Crazy is not that we think they're insane so much as they seem to be operating on some alternate plane of existence. We just can't understand what's going on in their heads.

-3-

so why should anyone care?

Watching Grizzly Man at the height of one of Survivor's finest seasons, the comparison was easy.

Here's the thing: Timothy Treadwell would've fit into all four of those categories. He was deeply invested in forging a commune with nature (walkabout); he believed that he could successfully integrate into Grizzly Bear society (challenged self); he lived his life in front of a camera after failing to make it as an actor (fame whore); finally, he was kind of nuts (crazy).

If Treadwell had somehow made it onto Survivor, not only would he still be alive today but he might've found a place for himself in America. In the game, he would've easily made it to the top five. His essential survival skills were second-to-none and he was crazy enough that he would've struck that Shambo/Coach chord that would've allowed his competitors to keep him around because he wouldn't have been a threat to win. He could've become an actual celebrity, just as he always wanted. He could've potentially satisfied the demons that drove him into the wilderness to never be heard from again.

Survivor becomes a proving ground for people (and honest or deceptive, they are all real people) who, for one reason or another, feel they need to gamble on an abnormal existence. Treadwell gave his life in the name of creating a false self within a false society.

Survivor may have launched the "alternative programming" phenomenon that may or may not be destroying our culture, but it lives on because it transcends that same genre of television. To continue my Beatles analogy: we wouldn't have Nickelback today if it weren't for the road paved by The Beatles, but we don't hold Chad Kroeger against John Lennon, do we?

What fascinates me about the show is the experience of watching these four types fight against each other in a battle of wits. This is rat-in-a-maze, human-condition storytelling, and plenty exciting.

If you watch feature-length documentaries in your valiant pursuit of an informed intelligence, you can't make a blanket dismissal of reality TV. What you have to do is watch Survivor with a conscience. Should we feel sorry for Coach, rather than blindly hate on him for being obnoxious? Maybe. It's up to you. But these people are putting their lives (socially if not corporally) on the line specifically to be judged. This is exactly what Timothy Treadwell set out to do by engaging with and assimilating into a society of grizzly bears for over a decade.

The only thing that really sets Treadwell apart from a Survivor contestant is that he put himself in the way of actual harm and consequently, he's the one that's dead.

In Herzog's film, a mysterious beat is dedicated to Amie, Treadwell's girlfriend and companion up to the moment they both died. She was filmed on the expedition only twice, her face obscured in both shots. Herzog shows us these two clips juxtaposed with a handheld shot of Treadwell that she herself must've shot. The only other evidence of her presence in the wilderness is on the audio recording of the couple's death, to which we are gracefully spared exposure.

What we do see is Herzog himself, his face obscured, listening to the recording as Treadwell's ex-girlfriend Jewel plays it back for him on the very camera that sat by with its lens cap on as the explorers were torn apart. Herzog narrates what he hears for a brief minute then asks that the recording be turned off and, he urges, destroyed. "It will be the elephant in the room all your life," he tells the tape's guardian.

Amie's lack of presence on the tapes despite accompanying Treadwell on significant portions of his expeditions only underlines the extent to which Treadwell was there for the camera as much as the bears. For those poor souls that thrust themselves upon a CBS audience, this kind of voyeurism is a similar given. Like Treadwell, they know the cameras are always running, but even still there will be lapses in sincerity and performances that reveal deeper truths of character underneath the lies.

It's up to the audience, then, to tell the stuff from the stuff. We just have to watch.

The new season of Survivor begins Thursday, February 11th. This twentieth season fulfills host Jeff Probst's contract; the show may not be around that much longer.

You might say my objective with this piece is to get the kind of people who found meaning in Grizzly Man to watch Survivor, and maybe also to turn a couple Survivor fans onto Herzog. I know I have a tendency to err on the side of flippancy, so I'd like to state that no disrespect is intended towards any of the people discussed (except maybe that bitch Jerri Manthey).

35 Shots of Rum [35 Rhums]

2010-02-02T14:13:00.002-06:00

It feels like a funeral, which is ironic given that it ends with a wedding.

The central characters mixed up in Claire Denis' taciturn drama each have something to mourn: a parent vanished (or dead), a lover whose attentions have waned, a young daughter on the verge of growing up and away. Remarkable in a sparseness of information juxtaposed with a richness of detail, 35 Shots of Rum is the kind of movie for which critics' buzz-phrases like "slice of life" and "mood piece" ought to be reserved.

There are four main characters here, but I think the key to unlocking them has to be underdog secondary man René, who has only three or four scenes. All of them are crucial. When we meet him, René is retiring from a career working the transit rails with Lionel (arguably the ensemble's main character). His departure from the life he knew recalls Brooks' parole arc in The Shawshank Redemption: say what you will about the glamor of the job, it's all he knows or needs. He proceeds to wander about town like a ghost, showing up as if out of nowhere to ride the line with Lionel. "I don't want this life," he whispers of his impending 'freedom', his new iPod - a retirement gift - dangling from his ears like an albatross.

It's probably René's depression that spurs Lionel to consider the atrophying lives around him. He lives in an aging apartment complex with his daughter Joséphine. His neighbors are Gabrielle and Noé, who have their own complex, deep-seeded feelings for Lionel and Jo.

Everyone in the foursome wants something better for the others than what they themselves have to offer. But to consider that you aren't good enough for a person you love can feel like an admission of inferiority.

There's a really stunning set piece in the middle of the film. The four neighbors, en route to a concert when the car breaks down, end up taking shelter from the storm in a sleepy cafe. The owner, about to close up for the night before the love quadrangle walks in the door and starts ordering rum and kebabs, turns on some music and lets the party take its course. This leads to Lionel dancing with his old flame and his grown-up daughter, passing the lover off for the younger, curvier bartender and the latter off to the swarthy neighbor.

Moving to the sound of The Commodores' "Nightshift" (the re-appropriation of which here rivals something like "Goodbye Stranger" in Magnolia), Noé and Joséphine are as if betrothed by proximity. The reluctance on display is palpable. Whatever their past (and Denis will parcel out only less than we need to know), these two are the binding that must keep the family together after it's fallen apart. It's difficult to tell if their love is sincere or if its just a show for their parents. Lionel drives the trains, Gabrielle drives a taxi; everyone is on a course to start a new chapter in their lives, but in order to do so they have to end the old ones.

35 Shots of Rum is about the evolution of families, the circle of life and the sting of saying goodbye. These lonesome people want to change their fates for the better but first must suffer the long-simmering pain of letting go. It's a solemn eulogy to lifetimes gone by, eloquently spoken with a hopefulness for the future.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!

True Lies (1994)

2010-01-29T10:16:00.021-06:00

True Lies is the odd one out in Cameron's filmography in several ways, not the least of which is its mediocrity. Excepting his sequels, it's his only film that's not original material: it's a remake, allegedly, of La totale!, a French comedy thriller from '91 that, so far as I can tell, is unavailable in the States. (Even Facets and Odd Obsession were stumped.)

True Lies feels poised on the brink of obscurity. At least for being a Cameron film, at the time the most expensive movie ever made, and by all accounts a financial success, there has been no home video release since the non-enhanced DVD of '99, which sports nothing in the way of behind-the-curtain info. Even Wikipedia and IMDb are lacking in True Lies' raison d'etre.

One interesting trivia on both those sites is the mention of a sequel that was written but shelved after 9/11. Watching the film for (probably) the first time since then, it's easy to see why nobody wanted to revisit it, even if that only meant recording a commentary track.

Upon release, the film was protested by several groups, inlcuding the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. If you think the good v. evil dynamics in Avatar are insubstantial, you should take a look at the bumbling terrorist darkies on display in True Lies. It's a funny thing about Cameron that it takes a towering allegory that verges on laughable for him to say something relevant about the state of our world; when he makes something in a real world setting (another trait that makes Lies unique within his oeuvre) he falls flat on his face.

But the biggest problem with True Lies may be the farcical nature of the story. Cameron just doesn't know how to direct comedy. His already-thin characterizations swerve headlong into stereotypes and you end up with a product that is fiercely misogynist and anti-Arab. I certainly wish I could get my hands on a copy of La totale! so that I might discern what in True Lies was Cameron's own invention.

Compare the catfight between Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere) inside a runaway limo on a bridge in the Florida Keys to the climactic battle between Ripley and the Queen in Aliens, arguably the best girl-on-girl showdown in film history. Granted, Ellen Ripley was not Cameron's own creation, but her maternalism sure was¹ ; Cameron poses two mothers fighting over the same baby (again, that's how pathos works). In True Lies however, it's just two seventh-graders slapping at each other and shrieking over what might as well have been which one of them gets to dance with the cute boy. When Ripley calls the Queen a bitch, it cuts. It becomes iconic, quotable. Something for clip shows from now until the rest of time. When Juno calls Helen a bitch, it's because that's how bitches talk, and it's only the precursor to a lot more shrieking.

Later it's Schwarzenegger's Harry, not Helen, who will fight for their daughter. Helen is, of course, just a housewife. But if the arc of the film is about the healing of their soured marriage via the excitement of danger, then perhaps she deserves a moment or two of her own. The coda indeed reveals that they have become married spies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, yet the only evidence we've seen of Helen's abilities in this arena are knocking out Juno Skinner and accidentally killing about twenty terrorists by dropping an uzi down a flight of stairs. Why not actually have her secret spy husband teach her some things and then let Helen save the day? That would've been at least slightly progressive.

Instead, True Lies is a decayed paean to the kind of machismo antics that give action movies a bad name. An ill-conceived jihad farce and his only film to cast Schwarzenegger as a regular American with a grasp of the English language, I really do wonder what Cameron was going for here. I think the answer must lie in the shot of Harry and Helen sharing a kiss as one of the nukes detonates.

That enduring image - maybe the only one in the film² - is some kind of genius. For all the sweaty terrorists tripping over themselves, you wonder if Cameron is actually grasping at some kind of statement about the power of love and family over war and destruction. The Taskers' daughter Dana (Eliza Dushku, age 14!) is awkwardly roped into the plot for the final showdown between Harry and the big bad boss, who has discovered the existence of a daughter to kidnap and leverage. Ironically, Dana does more to save America than her mom does in swiping the ignition key while Aziz is trying record another one of his righteous monologues, and she does so without a second thought and at the first opportunity she gets. This family is knitted close by the nuclear threat to their safety, a loveless marriage made Rockwellian from the proximity to danger, romantic in its goofiness even as I roll my eyes.

1.) Ripley was originally conceived as genderless. In fact, all the characters in Dan O'Bannon's screenplay for Alien were cast without reference to gender. Tom Skerritt had come out to audition first for the character that went to Sigourney Weaver. [back]

2.) Somewhat disturbing - though not surprising, I suppose - is the number of photoshop collages cobbled together from Curtis' striptease available just by doing a Google image search for "true lies". [back]

This is the second part of an open-ended series in which I intend to revisit the work of James Cameron. Click here to read my review of AVATAR.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) & The Unnamed

2010-01-28T19:19:00.014-06:00

Over at Attic Salt, I compare the two books I just read: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. The two novels are surprisingly similar thematically, but vastly different in terms of their respective authors' abilities to wield the written word. Click through for the literary smackdown, exclusively at Attic Salt.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger & The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris

Attic Salt: A Literary Blog

Crazy Heart

2010-01-26T09:20:00.006-06:00

In the first minutes of Crazy Heart, a charismatic old troubadour pulls off the highway, stops his truck in a sleepy bowling alley parking lot and emerges holding a jug containing about a gallon of urine, which he empties onto the asphalt. Perhaps the deep golden color is intended as foreshadowing: that's the piss of an alcoholic. I simply thought it was a hilarious way to open a movie.
  
Unfortunately, that's about where the film's accidental sense of humor runs out of steam.  

Crazy Heart is the story of a washed up singer-songwriter who descends into alcoholism then descends some more and finally descends some more. The Wrestler-style pathetic helplessness of Bad Blake (not his given name) is so relentless that by the time the film gets around to redemption it's not the third act but the fifth or the sixth. The film runs just shy of two hours, into which are crammed pants-less vomiting, a drunken car wreck, a lost child, a desperate one-night-stand, squirm-inducing surrogate parenthood and more bottles of whiskey than I care to count.

  Jeff Bridges is the man behind Bad, and like Clooney in Up in the Air, his star-power (charisma, celebrity, raw talent, what have you) is the only reason there's any conversation to be had about the film at all. Crazy Heart does have some good music (courtesy of T-Bone Burnett and a cast of collaborators) and Bridges has implied that it was the opportunity to shred his acoustic axe that hooked him to the role in the first place. But the film framing all the singing is meandering and overlong, the product of a first-time writer-director who hasn’t learned too much about editing or structure.

Leave it to Bridges to shoulder the hot mess like a champion. He shows up with all his guns blazing, disappearing behind several pounds of beer gut and a lot of messy gray hair, issuing his slurred charm in every direction. You can see why Maggie Gyllenhaal's Jean likes him so much.  Jean and Bad end up spending more than a little time together. Bridges is thirty years Gyllenhaal's senior and he looks it; their relationship is built on an Electra complex that is certainly creepy and the film never manages to conjure any hint of faith in their ability to unite as adults can, either through love or merely for the sake of her kid.

For Jean, Bad becomes some kind of last best hope that her son might have a man in his life. To Bad, however, she’s a rare fan who shows interest in him professionally (she’s a journalist) as opposed to sexually. Bad has grown tired of the lifer fans throwing themselves at him in dive bars and bowling alleys; Jean doesn’t air a vested interest in Bad’s singer-songwriter notoriety. The first time she meets him, she asks him his real name. In the hands of two good actors, it’s an interesting relationship for a beat or two.

Of course, Bad belongs on the road, even with a beat-up truck and a busted leg. In another almost-interesting setup, Bad must get back to shadowing the tour of Tommy Sweet, a younger, sexier singer who learned the trade from Bad and has made millions of dollars recording and performing Bad’s songs. Bad talks about Sweet like a foil that will be his undoing, but when he finally shows up, the most affecting thing about him is the actor cast in the role (not giving up that one in case anybody’s lucky enough to be in the dark).

I suppose alcoholics and outsiders can be tedious and so we might as well call it a halfway-honest portrait. Of course, the point where Bad bottoms out and makes his crucial decision to sober up is about as blurrily defined as his syntax. The parade of bad decisions is so poorly put together and episodic in construction that when he finally wakes up in his underwear and submits to rehabilitation it seems to come out of nowhere. It’s a reversal especially lazy in construction for being a supposed crux in the story.

If the Golden Globe and the SAG Award are any indication, Kate Winslet will be handing Bridges an Oscar in a little over a month. This Academy Award will be of the 'unofficial lifetime achievement' variety, bestowed upon beloved sexagenarians that have been nominated four times already without a win. As Bridges himself quipped in his acceptance speech at the Globes, "You're really screwing up my under-appreciated status, here." As for successful Oscar campaigns that earn fallacious merit, I suppose there are far worse things that can happen on Oscar Night than to recognize Jeff Bridges.

This review appeared in a slightly different form in The Montague Reporter. Support your print media while you still can!