It's Halloween, and I'm Not Dead...

...I'm just haunting a different house than I usually do. The typically tireless Nathaniel is taking one of his seasonal siestas from his own blog, so I'm helping to pitch in during his absence. My particular task is to maintain his daily 20:07 feature, for which I have so far pulled images from The Descent, Children of Men, United 93, INLAND EMPIRE, and – in commemoration of StinkyLulu's recent 1940 Supporting Actress Smackdown, which you've hopefully already visited – Rebecca, The Uninvited, and The Grapes of Wrath.

More to come chez Nathaniel, and here at home, too. I can vouchsafe for now that late October has been something of a zombie brigade: movies that are mostly dead but not entirely so. Dan in Real Life hangs itself on an infantile story arc that somehow manages to feel abrupt even though there's nothing else going on for most of the other 98 minutes. At least the movie emanates a rare and engaging vibe of family bustle that nicely pulls against and whistles around the false beats of the story. Reservation Road kills off a child in its first ten minutes but has no better idea of how to recuperate from this crisis than do the parents of the kid in the story. A lot of middle-class agony and New England art direction ensue, and the ending is jaw-droppingly truncated, but that knotted-stomach feeling of committing a titanic error and knowing you won't (and shouldn't) get away with it is convincingly evoked—often enough to count for something, even if the movie's still not very good. Rendition can't decide who or what to be about, finally, and the large cast cycles listlessly in and out of a script that would feel dry and programmatic if it weren't so bizarrely oblique. The movie is not without interest, primarily due to its subject matter, but for some reason, director Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) has cast most of his actors and even some of his crew to play directly against their biggest strengths. This leaves Jake Gyllenhaal cramped and inexpressive, Meryl Streep embarrassingly vague and gormless, and redoubtable cinematographer Dion Beebe (Collateral, In the Cut) culpable for one of the year's most badly underlit movies. Sleuth is as bad as its box-office numbers, which are very, very bad. Director Kenneth Branagh treats the tacit banalities of Anthony Shaffer's play and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's sawdust-and-tinsel original film as though they were sleek subtexts just waiting to be jackhammered home. And I choose my metaphors deliberately. Determinedly diagonal in look without ever once achieving an "edge," the film marks the very definition of "pointless," except insofar as it confirms the overratedness of the play itself.

By far the nicest things I have to say are about Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, a sprawling but evocative documentary about abortion in the United States that eschews deep historical contexts but still approaches the issue from a gratifying diversity of angles and positions; its strongest sequences, including the macabre aftermath of a second-trimester abortion and on-camera interviews with the future assassin of a doctor who performed abortions, rank among the year's most indelible moments. Speaking of indelible, Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire may not qualify on the whole, and if she doesn't stop shooting eyelashes and cheekbones in extreme close-up as arbitrary inserts, I'm going to perform a citizen's arrest. However, for all its basically conservative impulses, the movie bravely occupies some mysterious and illuminating emotional terrains of passive aggression, well-intended exploitation, and the appropriation of nearly defenseless people as prosthetic substitutes for dead lovers and friends. Holding this tricky emotional ecosystem together is Benicio Del Toro, in what looked to me like one of the year's very best performances. I've read that some critics think he's showboaty and unpersuasive, but I loved watching him hover away from rage, away from despair, away from sexual ardor, and away from loutishness—all of which the character as written seems to court. The actor locates himself instead within quieter, gentler, more paralyzed, and dare I say more subtle states of being. He's funny, tetchy, warm, uneasy, charismatic, non-judgmental, and nonetheless unreliable in some way that feels impolite to acknowledge. Male leads in "women's pictures" are a sadly neglected bunch, but Del Toro will make my year-end shortlist without breaking a sweat.

(Photos © 2006 StudioCanal/Asymmetrical Productions; © 2007 New Line Cinema/Anonymous Content; and © 2006 Anonymous Content/2007 ThinkFilm)

Intermission: Elizabeth: Full Throttle

The Chicago Film Festival ended on Wednesday, but I still have six or seven more reviews from that festival in the pipeline. I've been trying to knock them out in the order I saw them, which means that the superb 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, bound for my year-end Top 10 list, should rightfully be next. But I'm going to allow this stinker to cut in the line, because it was easier to get it out of my system right after I saw it, and it makes for lighter Friday reading. Enjoy!

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The CGI Spanish Armada sinks into the CGI water. That's how this thing ends, or nearly so. Some cuts imply that Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett), unwigged, and therefore more thoughtful and somehow True, observes her country's victory from some sort of castle window, but not long before she seemed to be leading a CGI army on the southern coast of England, and in between she's found a lot of time to stand on her big map of Europe with her palms outstretched and all the royal fans turned on High. So I'm not sure where she actually is. I suspect that Elizabeth does not watch the Armada sink from her castle window, but that she telepathically absorbs their defeat as an Inner Message, in the same way Mariah banged out the words to "Reflections (Care Enough)" at her piano while her boyfriend, across town, wrote the music for the same song in Glitter. Elizabeth is Mariah, and Clive Owen, against every Newtonian law of Stardom Conservation, is somehow Max Beesley, swinging along riggings and diving into the green sea. A horse swims over top of him. Chagall, y'all. The movie has a bit more twisting and turning to do before it actually ends, with Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, coddling a baby in her arms and fading into the glaring whiteness of failed irony. Then she stands on her map again and turns all the fans back on, but this time she fades to black. Some captions prove informative. I didn't write them down, because bringing along a notebook to Elizabeth: The Golden Age would be like bringing along a tape recorder to interview your dog. So, I can only paraphrase: The defeat of the Spanish Armada went down as one of the worst humiliations in Spanish naval history. Seems awfully qualified to me, in the manner of "the fall of the Bastille was one of the largest-scale destructions of a Parisian prison in French history." But there you go. Also: England, under Elizabeth's reign, entered a time of peace and prosperity. Which sounds an awful lot like...a golden age. Tristram Shandy-like, the movie ends just when it's caught itself up to its promised beginning, so perhaps, like Sterne's novel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a crafty metaphysical and rhetorical masterpiece, and its surface appearance as a jewel-toned, bovine, blender-edited, overdressed nightmare of a Wigstock festival is but a clever disguise.

But no, I'm pretty sure that the movie is ridiculous, and that among its endless list of wrong choices and confused agendas, it simply adopted the wrong title. There's a lot of that going around, but let's be generous. Let's close our eyes, think of England, and even though we wouldn't know the first thing about directing or producing or picking the proper lens, and even though we weren't around to feed the composer his Ritalin or to remind Abbie Cornish that she isn't playing a stoner in this movie, let's help where we can and endow Elizabeth: The Golden Age with the title it deserves. I have several suggestions. Click here to read the rest...

Photo © 2007 Universal Pictures/Working Title Films

Chicago Film Festival, Intermission: The Darjeeling Limited

I've had a few second thoughts about yesterday and have wondered if I ought to bump Control up to a B since the early sequences were so strong and the handling of the song score and concert performances so fresh and adept...but then I'm suspicious that I'm just enthusiastic about the music itself, which has caught in my brain all day, and which doesn't a movie make. Possible that I'll inflate the grade later, but not for now.

Meanwhile, speaking of music fans, the most courageous moves Wes Anderson makes in The Darjeeling Limited are to thwart his usual propensity toward wall-to-wall song scores and to throw the word Limited into the title of his film. Movie, know thyself! Anderson's last outing aboard The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou encompassed bigger formal and tonal experiments than this one does, but unfortunately, some of his big stretches—the eruption of brutal violence, the shrill and fluty performance by repertory outsider Cate Blanchett—hindered that film more than they helped. The Darjeeling Limited, like The Life Aquatic, makes another leap in physical setting but neither aspires to nor achieves any real breakthroughs for Anderson's intensely specific and frustratingly dehumanizing style.

Nothing works in the plotline about three brothers half-attempting to solidify their fraternal bonds during a voyage to India, and worse than that, nothing seems designed to work. Anderson, his actors, and his two co-writers (including co-lead Jason Schwartzman) seem passingly aware of the arrogant, colonizing narcissism of the plotline, and both the foibles of the brothers and the pop exaggerations of plot, color, and camerawork invite us to make fun of the enterprise even as the movie undeniably invests itself in the brothers' compulsory neuroses and half-sketched backstories about a dead dad and a fugitive mom. "B) I want us to make this trip a spiritual journey and to seek the unknown and to learn from it," Owen Wilson itinerizes in his self-appointed capacity as docent and chaperone, and while the movie unmistakably underlines his naïve officiousness, Anderson is just as programmatic and just as annoyingly semi-serious about wanting the Brothers Whitman to grow toward each other and toward themselves through an astonishingly arrogant series of quasi-adventures: a railway fling with a cabin stewardess, an unforeseen involvement in the death of an Indian child, an unannounced arrival at the convent their mother now calls home, etc. As usual, Anderson takes on bigger character arcs and denser pre-histories than his flattening style and steady narrative clip are prepared or inclined to make good on. By extension, his actors become mannequins for banal forms of melancholy (mirthful as well as rueful) that are meant to compensate for but finally just advertise the thinness of their roles and, save for the best stretches of Royal Tenenbaums, the immunity to richer emotion that appear more and more inveterate to Anderson's filmmaking style. "You wanna read a short story I wrote in France?" Jason Schwartzman's character asks his brothers over lunch, beneath and within which you can hear Anderson asking his audience, "You wanna see a movie I started rough-drafting when I was in India?"

The real shame here is that The Darjeeling Limited could have suited and also challenged Anderson's formal and affective idioms so much better, and indeed shows the potential of doing so through the first 20 or 30 minutes. As always, the fine-tuned and filigreed sets and the textured, rectilinear, fluorescent production design are ocular pleasures, but the natty uniforms and delicious wallpapers aboard the Darjeeling Limited train—self-conscious as they already are—also implicitly connote the fetishistic cocoon of comfort and pleasure in which the Whitman boys encase themselves while they only pretend to intersect with a far-removed and, as we know, a greatly suffering culture. Imagine, then, what might have happened, visually and cinematographically, when the Whitmans jettisoned this dollhouse perimeter of Colorforms fantasy and Louis Vuitton comfort and tried to maintain this lacquered, perpendicular worldview among the chaos, the multiplicities, the energies, the shortages and surfeits of India. Anderson had a double-barreled metaphor here in his holster (and designed to a tee by Mark Friedberg) but he never realizes or utilizes it: the film is so lost in its own inflexible style that the Indians' emotions and domestic lives remain totally elided, even when the brothers accept an invitation to a local funeral. Indeed, the film seizes the moment to flashback to the day of their own father's death, rather than let India, any India, even this Playmobile India, actually weave its way into their minds or hearts. Neither the feel nor the look of the film evolve in any impressive way after the three man-children debark their train, and their own peccadilloes and reciprocal resentments stay pretty steady until the hour arrives for their pat quasi-resolutions.

In another promising but missed opportunity for a breakthrough, Anjelica Huston, sprung from that coldly pinched mode of acting to which Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic both bound her, shows up in the last ten minutes of Darjeeling Limited. Here, she's rocking a short, cropped, and very gray hairstyle, and she accuses her director, I think, and not just her pretend-sons, of looking right past her own reality and repeatedly perceiving a thin idealization where she, a real and complicated woman, is standing. Huston's voice, manner, and message during her short appearance all force the film to a new level of self-scrutiny, and it's perfectly symptomatic that, faced with such a steeled, charismatic personality with her own point of view, The Darjeeling Limited can't do anything but hustle to a close. The evidence of talent persists in Anderson's work, but the prognosis of terminal solipsism and emotional dilettantism draws ever fuller support. C–

C Sick

For a week or two now, I've been rejoicing at the prospect of all these Fall movies opening, looking forward to each release with aplomb and a positive predisposition, especially after that late-August and early-September run where I got a big, inspiring lift from almost every trip I took to the cinema: from the acerbic but energetic 2 Days in Paris to the engrossing and nearly profound Deep Water to the urgent and astute No End in Sight to the shrewdly discomfiting and illuminating Day Night Day Night to the clever and inordinately entertaining King of Kong, which I paid to see twice, sparking a contagious audience ovation both times before the thing was even finished.

But speaking of "finished," everything since then has just been so....blah. I feel how monotonous my updates must seem, trapped in this "C" range I can't get out of. So this is just an open letter of good intent: I will be thrilled, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, to credit a movie a little higher, even to tread into B or B– territory for something that won't shake anybody's world but at least delivers craftily or consistently or stylishly on a solid story or rewarding theme. But so far, I just can't do it. Superbad begins with a delicious credit sequence and 20 solid minutes of ornately uproarious dialogue, well-delivered by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, but the belly-laughs turn precipitously to belly-flops once this extraordinarily crappy-looking movie gives itself over for way, way too long to twin plots that aren't interesting and don't work: procuring booze against overfamiliar and arbitrary obstacles, and noodling around with two unfunny cops who never once stake a claim as actual characters. There's a little pick-up toward the end, partly because Martha MacIsaac and especially Emma Stone are so ingratiating (if sadly underutilized and underconceptualized) as the objects of obscure teenage desire, but that long, turgid middle section throws a big, beer-gutted shadow over the whole enterprise. Not superbad, but prettybad, and superdisappointing. C–

3:10 to Yuma and In the Valley of Elah were probably always destined for aesthetic conservatism and middlebrow limitations in theme, but there is no reason for their narratives and character studies to have veered so badly off course. Both films feature strong lead performances, from Russell Crowe in Yuma, and from an arresting but restrained Tommy Lee Jones and an appropriately disillusioned Charlize Theron in Elah. The unusual, intriguing musical score in Yuma and the ragged, enigmatic swatches of embedded video in Elah deserve credit for tugging smartly against the boilerplate plot dynamics and visual lifelessness of both movies. This problem is most aggravating (and surprising) in Yuma, which doesn't even try to draw meaning, vitality, or even a pretty postcard image from the engulfing desert, instead hemming its actors into sallow, unflattering, and relentless close-ups. Worse, Yuma never gets near, much less inside, the head of Christian Bale's protagonist (his blank perf doesn't help), which makes it even harder to understand why Crowe, who rightly thinks he's playing a wily and incorrigible villain, seems only too willing to put Bale's needs and priorities above his own in sequence after sequence, especially the listlessly edited climax. For its part, Elah doesn't just bungle the "mystery" aspects of its script but almost sadistically works against them, leaking tension the way a bullet-blasted tire loses air, threading second-tier characters in and out at random, and selecting a culprit for its head-scratching crime virtually at a whim (despite the character's impressive alibis and lack of persuasive motivation). Elah has to know this resolution doesn't work, and that it lethally neutralizes the whole movie by extension, because Haggis barely films it; we overhear that a shockeroo confession has taken place between scenes, one of many signs that Elah's cutting-room floor is swampier than a trash compactor on the Death Star. Both films: C–

After watching all these men try to score babes and settle scores, I thought a long-delayed trip to the worrisome Becoming Jane might at least offer a refreshing idiomatic contrast. Sadly, the story is as thin as I had heard, the production design and costumes are all exactly what you'd expect, and the presumed link between creative genius and diaristic transcription of one's own experience is a jaw-dropper of an ingrained insult to the film's subject. Say this for Jane, though: unlike the above films, the movie actually improves from a wobbly beginning, as director Julian Jarrold does an unexpectedly sturdy job of evoking the visual coldness and dispassionate hardness of the world in which Jane Austen (or at least this movie's Jane Austen) wrote her incandescent but never entirely optimistic fictions. If the basic story cheapens the author and her gifts, and James McAvoy never seems like a great love (instead of, say, a scrappy playmate), the color palette and orchestration of light temper the rampant romanticization and nostalgic sanctification rather nicely. Now someone just has to teach that cinematographer not to scalp the actors. C

The early-fall documentaries have been as problematic as the fiction films. In the Shadow of the Moon has scored some very generous critical notices, but compared to the urgency and the discursive sophistication of something like No End in Sight—which doesn't just evoke a more timely concern but presents a genuinely fresh take on the war as a massive crisis of Iraqi unemployment and systematic disenfranchisement—In the Shadow of the Moon just turns the camera on while nine retired astronauts offer interesting but unsurprising recollections about their trips into space ("It was really something! It changed my life!"). Neither their level of introspection nor the composited stock footage of lunar landings and cosmic panoramas adds anything new to one's understanding of the space program or to one's most automatic and time-honored visual iconographies. The men relive their memories without the film doing anything to make them our own, much less give us anything substantial to chew on or reconsider. The independently produced Helvetica has a fresher, more surprising subject—the history of a typeface, specifically, this one, which anyone who has filed U.S. tax forms or taken a New York City subway will instantly identify. The world of type designers and graphic artists proves colorful and intriguing for the first 20 minutes, and for that same duration, the film makes a solid case for the ubiquity but also the flexibility of Helvetica script. Unfortunately, someone convinced director Gary Hustwit to make a feature instead of an extended short, which means that Helvetica spirals into ever more redundant interviews with less and less eloquent designers of less and less apparent pedigree. The visual collages of signs and public text aren't always discernibly in Helvetica, to say nothing of ridiculous filler images of sidewalk crowds, coffee cups, and old LP covers. The film tries to play its subject from as many angles as the graphic-design world has tried to play Helvetica, with the analogous result of overexposure and exhausted interest, and the added sin of leaving key questions unanswered and more promising inroads untraveled. Both films: C

Amidst all of these surging C's, I wonder if I'm being slightly harder than I need to be on Neil Jordan's The Brave One and Julie Taymor's Across the Universe. The former at least accommodates some daring camera angles and taut sequences near its beginning, as well as some welcome attempts to trouble the stylistic mandates of realism; the latter yields four or five genuinely stirring images (strawberries nailed to a canvas, bone-white women and ceramic masks floating like genocide victims in gray water), and Taymor at least wants to push cinematic depth of field and risk extremes of figuration and superimposition in ways that James Mangold and Paul Haggis, more comfortably ensconced in the Hollywood system, will never even consider. But, for all that—well, the movies suck. A lot. Precisely as he did in In Dreams, Jordan fails utterly to set rational boundaries around his fairy-tale idioms in The Brave One, winding up with a totally indigestible mix of the overblown, the sadistic, and the unpersuasive. Meanwhile, the script ties itself in contortionist's knots to find ways of jerry-rigging, excusing, and abstracting the Jodie Foster character's outlandish acts of mercenary violence. The actress herself is lost somewhere between repeating all the established tropes of her woman-besieged subgenre and wallowing like some reckless exhibitionist amidst the seamy iconographies of her own troubled star persona: gun-wielding assassins, publicity-shy celebrity, homoerotic clinches with a teenage hooker, butch haircuts, veiled "is she or isn't she" innuendos. You leave the film feeling sorry for Foster but also angry at her, baffled at Neil Jordan, and helpless to explain why actors as good as Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, and Mary Steenburgen can't find a movie that cares remotely about their characters. Across the Universe is less ethically offensive than The Brave One, and for a movie that does almost nothing right, I was surprised at how easy this one was to spend 131 minutes with, hoping that Taymor's capricious visions would actually cohere into something, if only in her next film. As far as this one goes, what can I say? The singing is awful, the songs are shoehorned into generic and disconnected contexts, none of the characters have more than a single facet, entire transitions are palpably missing (how about those steamboat crossings?), and the politics are so ludicrously simplified and self-contradictory they make Rent look like Brecht. Is love all you need, or not? Hard to say, and even harder to sing. Plus, just like The Brave One, Across the Universe has nothing to say to, for, or about black people, but doggone if it can't stop panning to and over them, reminding us that They are Wise™, and also picturesque and sonorous when they grieve. Though this grief sometimes takes the discordant and stupidly opportunistic form of gospel choirs singing "Let It Be." Which still isn't as bad as brand-new acquaintances singing "A Little Help from My Friends" or bewildered-looking actors who a) sing "Dear Prudence" to a girl, named Prudence!, in a locked bathroom, b) float through a thinly Photoshoppy spacetime continuum while doing same, and c) exchange patronizing winks and smiles because Prudence is a total lesbian...which allows Across the Universe to add one more item on its rainbow-brite List of Totally Deep Themes. Both films: D+

And so now I'm left with the best but also the most frustrating of all of these September releases, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Cronenberg's London is more consistent and credible than Jordan's New York City, but Eastern Promises keeps holding itself back from really thinking or feeling its way through the city, opting for anodyne interiors rather than building on the potential of its unique take on London locations. Like The Brave One and Across the Universe, Eastern Promises is dogged at portraying for us a world of ethnic and cultural life that it doesn't seem to know anything about, so that the hoariest clichés of music, dialogue, vocal affectation, and sinister connotation are enlisted to form the movie's amalgamated "Russianness." Steve Knight's shaky script needs Naomi Watts' Anna to find the diary that catalyzes the plot but then never thinks of a single other reason for her to be in the movie, much less to be the second lead. Unsatisfied by Vincent Cassel's heavily insinuated desire for Viggo Mortensen's steely, reticent chauffeur, Knight writes an overstated episode where Cassel forces Mortensen to strip and have sex with a prostitute right where he can observe—thus constituting the most patently absurd scenario of pathetically lurid and dramatically implausible homoerotic longing since Judi Dench danced appallingly in Cate Blanchett's living room. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and composer Howard Score admirably resist repeating their earlier triumphs with Cronenberg, but they both seem to take the new film's edgy/scruffy aesthetic to an ill-advised extreme of crudeness and cliché, and the big finale is as artificial and warped as the one in The Brave One (well, almost).

Still, the reviews have largely been raves. I concede that Mortensen is excellent: he is terse, slithery, intellectually potent, and physically articulate, and best of all, he is morally illegible in a way that often feels remarkably fresh in such a genre-bound entertainment. Unlike Cronenberg (although certainly with Cronenberg's intensive assistance), he has fully risen to the challenge of assaying unworthy material and justifying how a real artist can perceive and realize the potential in a heap of empty contrivance. But the bathhouse interlude you've heard so much about disrupts the style and flow of the piece much too drastically—it's the only scene where Cronenberg comes alive, but his priorities are perplexing and the tonal register, especially regarding the exaggerated violence, is off—and I left the film wondering what to make of that barbershop prologue, wondering whether the dead girl's voiceovers from her diary were exactly necessary, wondering why you'd introduce a huge plot twist ten minutes from the end of your picture and then do nothing at all with this new information, and wondering what in the hell an "eastern promise" could possibly be. Cronenberg always deserves a second shot, and maybe I have underrated Eastern Promises because it so drastically refuses to take shape as any of the multiple movies I would have liked it to be. But my second trip to Spider in 2002 only affirmed that a hamstrung Cronenberg movie still feels hamstrung on the second go-round, and I'm increasingly suspicious that this Promise simply isn't kept. A C+ isn't out of the question, but then I remember that teenaged-screenwriter device of the traumatic miscarriage, and the underlit hospital and the crunchy quality of the curbside London light, and the oogah-boogah way in which the movie keeps trying to scare us with the words "Vory v Zakone", and Armin Mueller-Stahl's way-too-long pause before the words "a diary?", and the creaky coincidence of the right nurse passing the right gurney in the right corridor at the right time, and that animatronic infant, and I wind up back at C.

Dog Meet Dog

Over at the main website, a new full review is posted for Mike White's Year of the Dog, a film that is affecting at moments but baffling and annoying for its surrounding ineptitudes. The best that can be said for it, besides the fact that Molly Shannon's dog Pencil is the cutest actor in modern movies, is that it's leagues better than Alpha Dog, the worst movie of 2007 so far, and—only because it's new this week on DVD—the temporary denizen of the DVD Spotlight. The silver lining here is the enormous incentive that Alpha Dog supplies me to write a new review, stat, so that I can supplant this piece of trash from my own homepage. Yes, it's that bad.

Photo © 2007 Paramount Vantage

'Apocalypto' Now

A commenter rightly observed below that I had skewered Apocalypto without properly articulating my position. I hope this review counts.

Edited to add: My review has been up for less than 24 hours at Rotten Tomatoes, where it is currently receiving a much worse response than the movie is. (Currently Apocalypto is hanging in there with a 63% Fresh rating, with very few precincts reporting, and a significantly lower 40% approval from major print critics.) Note that I'm getting docked all around for writing a long review (guilty) and for invoking Gibson too often (though surely it's fair to scrutinize a filmmaker's history of images and past body of work in light of a new release?). Note also that it took less than a day for somebody to ask, "Are you a Jew?" Creepy.

In Which the Heavens Reveal...

...against every possible fucking odd that you might ever have imagined, that M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water will now close 2006 as only the SECOND most psychotically arrogant, most queasily self-obsessed, most psychically misdirected, and absolute batshit craziest movie of the year. Apocalypto would be monumentally funny, and a boon to drinking-game concocters everywhere, if it weren't so truly horrifying to ponder the cultural factors and the individual mental corruption that have allowed it to exist. Even when the film wants you to laugh—and if you've never heard the ancient Mayan phrase for "He's fucked," you have now—the laughter sticks in your throat, clogged, I hope, by your disgust. The movie finally earns its premonitions of apocalypse, but more for what it is than for anything it shows or says. Full review here. F

(And thank whatever Powers might possibly still Be for the very good thing that is the Free Preview Screening, so that I could know my enemy without paying into his coffers.)

(Image © 2006 Touchstone Pictures/Icon Productions)

The Horror... The Horror!

It's not every day that I revisit a movie I disliked as strongly as I did The Hills Have Eyes, but I found three indications that a second screening might be worthwhile: my favorite print critic gave it a favorable and interesting review, and our debates about it haven't ended yet; I felt like I was in bad faith slamming it as a sidebar in my reviews of both The Descent and Lady in the Water without properly articulating my case; and, as I've now tried to explain in my full review, Hills makes too strong an impression both visually and sonically to be dismissed out of hand like typical garbage. I may dislike the film, as in fact I did on second try, but I do think it's a potent provocation and one of the few 2006 releases deserving of extended debate. Pipe in below with your take: between Tim and me, you're bound to find at least one quick ally.

Meanwhile, for someone who loves actresses, I saw precious few of them in my screenings of the past week: the spectacular but remarkably verveless Ben-Hur; the curious jailhouse drama Birdman of Alcatraz; Billy Wilder's ambitious but unpersuasive prison-camp story Stalag 17; and the exciting seaboard adventure Mutiny on the Bounty, which I had the terrific fortune to catch in 35mm projection at the LaSalle Bank Cinema in Chicago, an exhilarating revival house managed and operated by my new/old friend Goatdog and loyally attended by some of the most true-blue movie fanatics I've ever met. Anyway, barely a handful of women in all four movies combined, at least if you discount the Russian female POWs in Stalag 17; I didn't realize that the Third Reich paraded captive women in such glamorous single-file arrangements.

(Image © 2006 Fox Searchlight Pictures, reproduced from the Hills Have Eyes page at OutNow.com.)

Another Day of Reckoning...

...for fans of Julianne Moore. After several non-starters in a row (even if I enjoyed The Forgotten more than most), Juli has another seeming stinkeroo coming down the pike today. It's called Freedomland, it's a two-hour movie culled from a 586-page novel (uh-oh), and the New York Times is already calling it "an early candidate for worst film of the year." Its MetaCritic score is burbling at a low 38—equal to Yours, Mine & Ours, and mere points ahead of Big Momma's House 2 and Underworld: Evolution. Note that even in this production still, Edie Falco and Samuel L. Jackson appear to be consoling Julianne about how bad the movie is, or maybe just about how bad her wig is.

But am I going? Yes. Love make you crazy. Julianne, I hope you're feeling me.

Three Strikes

After a solid September and October, things just weren't going right at the movies this first weekend in November...



Saw II D
In this case, I had no one but myself to blame, and I doubt there is much need for commentary. The shocks on sale in Saw II are mostly of the "What is the world coming to?" variety, both because the grisliness of the scenario and the images is so unremitting and because it turns out that somehow, someway, cowriter-director Darren Lynn Bousman and Saw impresario Leigh Whannell watched Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and, alone among the world's citizens, thought it a great flick. Saw II, proudly opting for Roman numerals, similarly throws a bunch of disposable people into a dank and creepy house and mostly disposes of them. Except for a truly stomach-turning interlude inside a vat full of hypodermics and a gleeful auto-homage to the risible "chase" scene in Saw the Elder, Saw II's putridity takes utter leave of all standing definitions of taste and coherence. The strenuous feints at moralizing—both films' conceit is that the killer is trying to make his victims kick their addictions and value their lives—is unmistakably thin and opportunistic, designed for those audiences who like to relish in sin, voyeurism, and depravity while pretending their own moral elevation. Or for viewers like me who quite insensibly toss money at ventures like this, suspecting full well what I'm asking for and getting exactly that, two- or threefold.



Jarhead C–
Jarhead, meanwhile, appropriates a perfectly viable premise and humiliates audience expectations by staunchly refusing all available avenues. Neither a film of ideas nor a howling screed nor a populist entertainment nor a beefcake calendar nor an oil-black comedy nor a coming-of-age drama nor an action thriller nor a grounded character study, Jarhead emerges only as a pure study in avoidance, bubble-wrapping the themes and emotions at its core in multiple layers of plastic vacuity. For almost an hour, the context of war is a sagging pretext for an irksomely endless series of riffs on alpha-male infantilism. As in Sam Mendes' other films, Jarhead shares the obsessions of its characters—in this case, with masturbation, with women as distant and probably faithless objects, with young men's jockish unease around each other's jockish bodies—and yet stands away from them, making stained-glass images about its themes instead of more fully credible or even audible artistic statements, to say nothing of cogent political statements.

Since American Beauty was itself about a spiritual and intellectual emptiness at the heart of cosmetic pretense, Mendes' slicksterisms worked just fine; in context, they even fascinated. Jarhead, though, verges much closer to Road to Perdition levels of total irrelevance, ultimately afraid of the last theme standing, which is the possibility that the Gulf War amounted to nothing, a stalled engine both in the global-political domain and in the minds of the soldiers who fought there. This strikes me as a uselessly glib way of conceiving world events or human character, and the film isn't serious about it anyway: Jamie Foxx, giving the most charismatic performance in a terminally underwritten part, has a late-breaking monologue about loving his job that comes from absolutely nowhere in the script except a compulsory instinct to "deepen" itself, and Jake Gyllenhaal has to mumble some last-minute tautologies about being in the desert even when he isn't, and not being there even when he was, and about being the desert, and how we are all still in the desert.

In the literal senses that this is true, Jarhead offers nothing by way of insight. In the historical sense, speaking as the son of a U.S. Army colonel who earned a master's in Middle Eastern history before commanding an artillery batallion in the first Gulf War, this is just as much an inanity. One of the earliest passages in Jarhead the book, reproduced at length here, holds that even the most artistically complex war movies, whatever their ingrained politics, are re-gristed as jingoistic, hormonal fuel for Army recruits, who watch something as jagged as Apocalypse Now and get off on the explosions and ammunitions. Mendes' response to Swofford's anecdote has been to evacuate meaning, message, and care, presuming that they will be lost or peripheral to this audience, and probably to all the audiences who stand to fill Jarhead's coffers. The film is technically proficient, at least in its cinematography, but the cynical and cowardly disservice it does to its own genre and themes eat away at everything passable in it.



Shopgirl F
I would love to report that the old adage about "three times lucky" reversed my moviegoing fortunes, but in fact things came screeching to a truly dispiriting halt with this limp noodle of a film, in which every single thing either goes wrong on its own terms or else is wholly undermined by a framework of truly idiotic page-one decisions. The biggest challenge to making a great movie of Shopgirl would be navigating the tension between the mercenary cynicism of Ray Porter (Steve Martin), who essentially rents a sales girl at Saks Fifth Avenue as a convenient accessory-receptacle whenever he's in LA, and the plangent romanticism with which Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes) misconstrues her effect on Ray, and which causes even Ray to wonder whether he's selling this relationship short. Both characters seem to have internally divided views about what they're up to, but they opt for the paths of least resistance—in his case deception, in hers self-deception, with a thick mortar of sex and materialist reward sealing it all together.

Again, not a bad premise, but director Anand Tucker and over-proud papa Steve Martin, who also wrote the book and adapted the script, deface the script's potential in truly moronic ways. Martin narrates, though the narrating voice doesn't seem to quite be Ray's, since it not only describes itself as "objective" but comments attentively on scenes and entire plotlines that Ray knows nothing about. This structural conceit therefore warps our sense both of Ray and of the narration beyond any recognition: the twee and paternalistic attitude it assumes toward Mirabelle don't match Ray's conduct at all, but nor does it seem like a credible vantage for the film itself to adopt toward her, since it never probes her life or her mind in anything like the promised depth. An elementary ingredient of Shopgirl is a scalpel-sharp demystification of Ray Porter, but the film can't commit to it, implying in such precious, fluffy ways that his is the guiding point-of-view. The ending of the movie, a veritable coloratura of these God's-eye pronouncements from Ray/Martin, is as woefully over-extended as the beginning, where Mirabelle is awkwardly courted by a dull and desperate Jason Schwartzman—stuck in the Giovanni Ribisi role of making the old guy look debonair by comparison. Meanwhile, the camera coddles, flatters, and leers at Claire Danes just as Ray does, positioning her as yet another exquisite delicacy on offer at Saks, and the movie invites all manner of projection onto her wide smiles without really putting anything behind them. Who is this girl? For one scene exactly, this lonelyheart singleton goes to lunch with a pair of inquisitive friends, and you ask, she has friends? Where on earth did they come from? Doesn't the movie kind of belabor the implication that her only companion in life is her cat? Why can't the movie make a decision about how small or not small her social circle really is?

Shots of the Space Needle, of the façade of Danes' apartment, of Martin on his private plane, and of the Los Angeles skyline repeat themselves ad nauseum, "establishing" locations and transitions that are perfectly evident and, perhaps, straining for a kind of environmental poetry that the flat, ill-lit images and the outrageously thick musical score shoot dead at every turn. Words like "Vietnam" stand in for entire, wasted characters like that of Mirabelle's father. Basic matte shots of characters dining against an evening backdrop are jaw-droppingly artificial. Martin proves time and again in close-up that he isn't the kind of actor who survives well outside of dialogue or carefully framed scenarios. Unlike, say, Bill Murray—Lost in Translation really is the imagined Holy Grail for this film's failed efforts—Martin's face gives almost nothing, and for all his handsomeness at 60, the contours of his face aren't inherently interesting at all. He can't act in silence, which this film repeatedly asks him to do. The bouts of sex that account for the lion's share of Ray's interest in Mirabelle and at least some fraction of her involvement with him are coyly elided, cementing the impression that we are never really watching the story that the film insists we are watching, and despite spending two hours with three people, we never really meet anybody. Shopgirl is a story by a man in late middle-age about a twentysomething girl that the film can't understand or even portray without the gauzy, invasive prisms of orchidaceous male fantasy. The end result can only imply more about the creators and their own dreams about this girl-figure than about the girl-figure herself, making the film both embarrassing and frustrating to behold.

Notes from Underground

So, while Nick's Flick Picks has been in another two-week hibernation, plenty has been going on above ground. In the Glass Half Full category, Tom DeLay finally got indicted, Lynndie England got sent to prison, Rita din't wreak what Katrina wrought, and residents of New Orleans started making their way back home. As for the Glass Half Empty, many of those same New Orleanians got sent back out again, Rita was bad enough for what it was (and only augurs the gloomy future of global weather), Cindy Sheehan got arrested outside the White House, John Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice, and reports are running wild that Bush's top contender for the open Rehnquist slot is Lord Voldemort.

In local Trinity news, two weekends ago, as Wesleyan started pulling ahead of us at a home-field soccer match, a loud clutch of Trinity undergrads began taunting Wesleyan athletes, fans, and fellow Trinity students as "fags" and "homos." So, no, that chill you're feeling in the air isn't just the autumn weather. Thankfully, in the Newtonian universe of Equal and Opposite Reactions, this truly disgraceful incident has sparked campus conversation about homophobia, public letters and Campus Conduct indictments from both the Dean's and President's offices, and a rally tonight called "Don't Commit It, Don't Permit It." In an extremely mature and impressive move, one of the targeted Trinity students published an open letter to the campus citing not the homophobic taunters but the silent majority of deniers and tongue-cluckers as the real problem.... Real change happens when compassionate people act on their outrage rather than commiserate about it in private, so tonight's rally and the very public, very concerted response to this flare-up marks a huge change in Trinity's social life, and I'll be thrilled to go.

Meanwhile, at the movies—you knew I was getting there!—September combined still more extremes, including the two best movies I've seen in 2004 as well as the absolute worst (paging Mr. Gilliam). Here's a September recap, in partial compensation for the recent paucity of reviews. Keep checking back over the course of the weekend for updates!

And yes, if you do the math, 18 movies in 30 days means I was in a movie theater 3 out of every 5 days in September. Welcome, all over again, to my world.

The Brothers Grimm F
Ever heard of saving the best for last? Now let's try dispensing with the worst first. It's not that absolutely everything fails in The Brothers Grimm: Heath Ledger saves many of his own scenes with a kooky, Depp-in-Pirates delivery, and occasionally the film coughs up a decent if slightly mean-spirited image, like Monica Bellucci's glassy face shattering into shards. Still, the vortex of suckage is enormous, and it swallows the whole enterprise, even the stuff that works. The hiring and firing of key technical talent during production is plainly visible in the schizophrenic switches in light and palette, which are nothing to write home about even in the individual set-ups. Costume changes seem to happen mid-scene, Lena Headey seems stuffed with sawdust as the Amazonian pseudo-love-interest, and the overall narrative lacks any kind of clarity or motivation. Dozens of millions of dollars down the toilet, ten of which were mine.

The Constant Gardener C
A rather stentorian exercise in stating the obvious, Fernando Meirelles' political epic is also rather less than the sum of its schizoid parts. For a while, it's easy to resent the pasty romance between Fiennes and Weisz while the gears of corporate machination start (read: keep) grinding away at the developing world. At some point, largely due to Weisz's thistly and exciting demystification of her somewhat preciously conceived character, the romantic strain gets a helluva lot more interesting. But around the same time, the multinational plot boils down to the usual suspects of isolated baddies, both believable (Nighy) and intolerable (Huston). Frenetic editing and slick direction dissolve the ligaments of the film's political as well as its emotional arguments. The finale still works pretty well, but it's the film, not just the protagonist, that finds itself feeling a little weary and overspent.

Corpse Bride B
A macabre little delight that manages the durably difficult task of squatting its hero between two romantic options and making them both quite appealing. Deft voice work from Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson helps make the worm-ridden Corpse Bride and the moon-faced Victoria such endearing creatures, but the film is already plenty endearing with its cheerfully Guignol mood, its terrific verbal zingers ("Little Miss Living," grouses the Corpse Bride, "with her rosy cheeks and her beating heart!"), and its hilariously elongated character designs—Victoria's mother with her towering, knobby upsweep is a stand-out in all senses. The songs feel a little wispy, and the film eventually feels the same, nailing the coffin shut after only 77 minutes, but it's a merry dose of early-autumn fun so long as it lasts.

The Exorcism of Emily Rose B–
A film that I enjoyed probably more than I had reason to. As I try to articulate in my full-length review, Emily Rose's variable quality in narrative and technical terms has a weird and surely inadvertent way of clearing space for its thematic centerpiece, which is a surprisingly involving standoff between faith and doubt, explored in legal as well as theological contexts that harmonize in darkly fascinating ways. Sure the plot is full of holes, but spiffy actors like Laura Linney and Campbell Scott help to plug a lot of them, and the B-grade thrills of arbitrary auto-crashes and diabolical body-contortions carry their own weight. Both a guilty pleasure and an anatomy of guilt, The Exorcism of Emily Rose has dry runs of pure, risible silliness until it snaps awake at more than reasonable intervals with some real frights and honest questions.