The Projectionist

The Incidental Pleasures of Public Enemies, Fedoras Included

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:35:04 -0500

One nice thing about Public Enemies (there are more of them, but not enough) is that Johnny Depp palpably loves being a movie star and loves wearing wide-brim fedoras and long black coats and spats and firing tommy guns at G-men. And I ask you, friends: Who wouldn’t? It’s a happy confluence of actor and role, since Depp’s John Dillinger palpably loves being a gangster and hiding among the people, who regard him as a folk hero. (Without the threat of America’s Most Wanted, Twitter, or Gawker Stalker, the fugitive Dillinger travels the Midwest with relative nonchalance.) Depp also gets to woo a luscious Marion Cotillard (whose attempt at an American accent sinks somewhere in the mid-Atlantic) with a killer comeback — She: Boy, you’re in a hurry. He: If you were looking at what I’m looking at, you’d be in a hurry, too. So smooth. Yes, half his face is sometimes shadowed to suggest that Dillinger has a dark side, but Depp is so jaunty you could easily dub him “Sunny John.”

The movie’s take on Dillinger recalls the ads for the 1973 thriller Charley Varrick: He’s “the last of the independents,” soon to be displaced by coldhearted syndicates with phone banks. The modern world has no place for a robber with such joie de vivre. If director Michael Mann has a moral point of view on Dillinger’s crimes, I couldn’t discern it. His central motif is a halfhearted retread of the one he peddled in Heat: that Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), though on opposite sides, have a code distinct from their respective cohorts. Dillinger doesn’t shoot anyone in cold blood, while cackling Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) grooves on the carnage; Purvis is conscientious and disciplined while fellow cops torture suspects and J. Edgar Hoover (a squat, effeminate Billy Crudup) thinks only of attaining more power. Although the movie jumps back and forth between Dillinger and Purvis, Bale’s dullness kills the parallel in the cradle — he might as well be the stand-in used for setting up the lights while the star snoozes in the trailer.

My hunch is that Mann had little emotional investment in this material, but a huge investment in playing around with his high-def video cameras. The look of Public Enemies is fascinatingly weird. Branches in the foreground in a forest at night are so sharp they’re like etchings on the screen, while the air itself seems thickened, the perspectives shortened. I think this look was better suited to Mann’s Miami Vice, with its druggy, tropical haze, but the shoot-outs here — with their vague distances and limited-vantage camera — work like, uh, gangbusters. There’s an eerie, effective disjunction: The overbright muzzle fire is accompanied by muffled pops — like distant firecrackers — instead of the usual Dolby-ized gun blasts. The high-def video has one distracting downside: You can detect the male actors’ pancake makeup — especially unfortunate in the case of Bale, who now looks as well as acts like a wax dummy.

Public Enemies has lots of incidental pleasures. Cotillard and Stephen Lang as an agent brought in to finish off Dillinger pull off an affecting last scene. Graham’s Baby Face Nelson gets an electrifying comeuppance. The fedoras are fabulous. But it’s only Depp’s sense of fun that keeps the film from congealing on the screen. John Milius’s 1973 Dillinger (starring Warren Oates) had more of a kick — maybe because Milius was so nutty for the guns. But the best rejoinder to Public Enemies is Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video, which I watched again after the singer-dancer’s inevitable, untimely death. It’s a tommy-gun gangster fantasia with a touch of Guys and Dolls, and it’s everything Public Enemies isn’t: madly inventive, genre-bending, a passionate tribute to the artist as outlaw/loner. The video reminds you why the gangster has become an existential hero in pop culture: It’s how he seizes the space. On some level Michael Mann knows that, but he’s paralyzed by his pretentions and specious morality. And he can’t dance.

Trans Fats

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:40:43 -0500

Although it’s endless and eardrum-buckling, the Hasbro-sanctioned toy-tie-in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen will pack them in, because guys all over the world dream of manipulating those amazing parts. And that’s just Megan Fox — there are also those cool robots. Actually, the camera lingers more lovingly on the Fox than the ‘bots, which transform so cartoonishly fast that any pretense of reality is instantly vaporized. Much of the movie is computer-generated hash, weightless even with nonstop BOOMS and METAL GROANS and THUDS. Fox’s jugs, in contrast, have verisimilitude — and heft.

I have a soft spot for director Michael Bay, probably because the South Park guys wrote a song about how much he sucks while, at the same time, Ridley Scott makes movies that win Academy Awards. They’re not that different. From time to time Bay even shows a better grasp of action than the director of Gladiator. The Island was more exciting than you heard, and the first Transformers had its modest charms. But Transformers 2 is self-parody. I saw the movie in Imax, and it’s a feat to shoot an Egyptian pyramid with the biggest cameras ever created and make you say, “Eh. Whatever.” The man who directed Pearl Harbor now depicts the annihilation of an American aircraft carrier with indifference — for a kick. He has no shame.

The premise? Bad transformers want to obliterate Earth’s sun, and Shia LaBeouf says “It’s not my battle” because he wants to be “normal” and get a college degree. His college is populated with stacked women in micro-miniskirts, which makes me think the extras casting session was the real place to be. Shia changes his tune when he starts spontaneously scrawling alien hieroglyphs, like the guy in A Beautful Mind except with no chance for an Oscar. Meanwhile, alien robots — led by "the Fallen" — hover just outside Earth’s orbit, plotting their revenge for … something. I was never quite sure. You’d need an evolved alien brain to be able to follow the battle scenes. With apologies for my alien-racism, at these speeds all transformers look alike.

Transformers 2 features two squabbling, jive-talking robots that made me think back fondly on Jar Jar Binks. How sad it must be to be one of the talented computer artists who spent months and many millions animating their slapstick fight, which people at my screening watched in dead silence. (My 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, mounted a halfhearted defense: "8-year-olds might like it.") The actors stare dutifully at FX To Be Animated Later, paid too well to show their boredom but unable to show much else. They’re blank slates, their minds wiped clean.

I don’t have much nice to say about Transformers 2, but I’m happy to see my Park Slope neighbor John Turturro get another big paycheck — and he’s very funny given the Drake-and-Josh level of the jokes. There’s a terrific bit with a blonde coed who transforms into a killer-‘bot — but her send-off goes by so fast that the audience doesn’t even have a chance to say, “Yeah! Kill dat bitch!” There’s also a gorgeous effect in which thirteen transformers hurtle down from space into the desert sand — thump thump thump thump — and the colossi slowly rise from the smoke. But then they start blasting and it’s back to video-game weightlessness. I remember in the eighties watching The Howling, in which a man slowly morphed into a werewolf: His flesh quivered and his snout crunched out of his flesh and the bones in his feet cracked and elongated. Why can’t these transformers transform so that we marvel at their metamorphoses? Can’t 200 million dollars buy that much?

Oh well — back to La Fox. The camera first ogles her in short shorts and cowboy boots astride a motorcycle. Later, she wears white pants that appear to have had the air vacuumed out of them for maximum cling, and a plunging blouse that makes her dash from robot projectiles — in slow motion, arms pumping — even more suspenseful. As she emerged from a desert dust storm with her pillowy lips wet and glossy, I was reduced to ga-ga-ga-ga … There’s an old joke about a guy interviewing for a lion-tamer job who watches his female competitor shed her mink to reveal her naked breasts, which the lion contentedly licks. The circus owner says, “Can you do that?” and the guy says, “Can I?!!! Just get that lion out of there!” I feel the same way about Transformers 2. Just get those transformers out of there!

Pop What You Preach!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:34:35 -0500

You can read my brief but pointed review of Food, Inc. here, but there’s something I didn’t have room to say in the mag. Film Forum, one of New York’s (and the country’s) most vital exhibitors — good guys who show good movies that contribute to the social good — would have you and your kids watch Food, Inc. while munching on Orville Redenbacher popcorn. That’s baaad. That's the product made by ConAgra, one of the movie’s several super-villains, named after a guy who never existed and was designed to look like a nerdy Midwestern farmer turned small entrepreneur. Alas, as the movie shows, no corn product is untainted by misplaced government subsidies, but switching to Newman’s Own (organic) would make sense on so many levels. And that goes for the rest of you indie exhibitors!

UPDATE: A Film Forum rep has responded that the theater will look into the matter and consider its options. Excellent. Drop them a line if you are so inclined. Among its other virtues, Food, Inc. has inspired me to become a film critic/popcorn activist. But I would be remiss if I did not admit to my hypocrisy in one regard: I would be mighty upset if they stopped selling my beloved diet cola, however vile, unhealthful, and politically tainted. So let's not take this too far...

David Carradine: Ode to an Existential Hero

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:18:29 -0500

When we talk about an actor being “hip,” it’s often subjective: He or she embodies what we’re not but on some level long to be. To me, David Carradine was the apogee of hipness: not my favorite actor, not even in the top 50, but my existential hero, and a man who looked like he got laid a lot — a sort of B-movie Jack Nicholson. His vaguely Asian physiognomy made him suited to kung-fu and Zen masters, and his acting had that same alert detachment. You rarely got the sense that his roles cost him emotionally: Unlike his brother, Keith, who has been known to take risks, David had an inviolable sphere of privacy. But he never condescended to his material, even when it was risible, and his amusement was contagious. Like his dad, John, he made his mark in a socially conscious epic (The Grapes of Wrath for the father, Bound for Glory for the son), then settled contentedly into B and C genre pictures. (He never dropped to the D level of his dad, who ended up making scores of movies like Astro Zombies, but he might not have minded that so much: His old man worked until the end, reportedly with no complaints.) David Carradine didn’t seem given to advance planning, career calculation, control. He was the anti–Tom Cruise.

I close my eyes and see him striding through Death Race 2000 wearing a ridiculous cape and a straight face; popping into Mean Streets to get murdered (he’d been crucified in Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha); gamely stepping into Larry Cohen’s giant-bird picture Q at the last minute with little idea of his character and getting by on cool; and, most of all, as one of the Younger brothers (alongside his own brothers, Keith and Robert) in Walter Hill’s The Long Riders, telling Frank James (James Keach) he’s thinking of writing his memoirs and giving a tiny smile when Frank asks for a freebie: “You gotta pay, Frank. [Beat; quietly] You gotta pay.”

I don’t have the expertise to speculate about David Carradine’s death — whether it was suicide, murder, or autoeroticism gone disastrously wrong. I didn’t know him well enough — as I felt I knew Heath Ledger, feverishly perfectionistic, always trying to prove he was more than an amiable slab of Aussie beefcake. No matter how it turns out, I’ll try to think of David Carradine going out like Bill in Kill Bill: quietly accepting the absurdity of his fate, making himself presentable, getting centered, and walking tall into he knows not what.

A Flabby Wolverine, and an Empty Limits of Control

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:52:57 -0500

X-Men Origins: Wolverine stars a buff but much too nice Hugh Jackman as the talon-sprouting future X-Man and Liev Schreiber — preening entertainingly — as his evil, fanged half-brother. The first half-hour moves like a wolf out of hell and makes you think the dire advance word — based on millions watching the leaked work print — was nuts. It’s witty and well staged (if you don’t mind that every time someone so much as breaks into a run it turns into CGI): What do those fanboys want? Then the action shifts to Canada and the bloat creeps in: The twists and double-crosses come too fast to absorb, and Jackman and Schreiber — now at war — impale each other and regenerate so many times that you can’t wait for someone, anyone, actually to die. A little catharsis, please! But few of the main characters bite it for good because, you know, there’s a Marvel franchise to maintain. Wolverine is the lucky one because he ends the picture with amnesia.

It’s unfair to call Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control the emptiest movie ever made, but I wrote that in my notebook as I struggled to stay awake. It’s even more ponderous than his first film, Permanent Vacation, in which a blank young man wandered the East Village meeting hipsters who talked too much. Here it’s a robotic Isaach de Bankole on some kind of diamond-smuggling mission through Spain not reacting to eccentrics Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Gael Garcia Bernal, and oft-naked chatterbox Paz De La Huerta. Finally, Bill Murray shows up as a Dick Cheney type and Bankole turns out to be a supernatural avenger like Forrest Whitaker’s African-American assassin in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of Samurai. Politics, attitude, and anomie. I expect there will be rave reviews and look forward to reading them — I love science fiction.

Dick Cheney: Scarier than Lon Chaney?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:47:45 -0500

I don't have a movie column in the magazine this week but will post here soon on Wolverine, Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, and a couple of Tribeca Film Fest screenings. Of what I've seen at Tribeca, I recommend the docs Racing Dreams* and Croxley and the Brit satire In the Loop--an absolutely divine dramatization of what has come to be known as the "Downing Street memo." You want to know how intel is "fixed around policy" rather than vice versa? Here it is--paced like a Marx Brothers movie with more f-words than the collected works of David Mamet. Dick Cheney isn't in it, but one of his henchmen is played by David Rasche--I assume he's meant to be David Addington. And speaking of Cheney, here are some thoughts on his place in the pantheon of our culture's supervillains. The list is evolving: By all means e-mail your suggestions to my address at the right.

*CORRECTION: Whoopsie. This was corrected... I originally wrote Racecar Dreams (the credits when I saw it were incomplete) and the title matters since I'm not sure there's a distributor yet. There should be! Actually, I like my Racecar Dreams better even though "racecar" might not officially be a word. It's about kids who are great junior drivers and there's something kid-like about the word "racecar" that is more evocative than "racing." On the other hand, NASCAR probably would think "racecar" is a wussy word.

A Downey Softener

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:50:36 -0500

Saw The Soloist last night (I’ll reserve judgment on the movie for now), and it’s easier to see why Robert Downey Jr. bristled when asked what his character in Tropic Thunder would say about Jamie Foxx’s performance as the brilliant, schizophrenic cellist Nathaniel Ayers — easier to see and easier to excuse.

Not to get all Sartre on you, but actors (especially Method actors) create themselves anew in every role, and if last year Downey was an egomaniacal movie star holding forth on the necessity of going “the full retard,” then this year he’s Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, still struggling every day over how invested he should be in this marvelous, volatile, incurable man. Even to acknowledge “the full retard” in this context must have seemed to Downey disrespectful — not just to Foxx but also to Ayers, Lopez, The Soloist, and his own performance. It would be disrespectful to the mentally disabled men and women who appear in the movie and whom he came to see through Lopez’s eyes.

So what are we left with? Speaking metaphorically and not clinically, a schizophrenic profession in a schizophrenic culture. I still wish Downey had acknowledged the contradictions, but if he could be that playful while promoting The Soloist, he likely wouldn’t be the (great) actor he is.

The Full Douchiness

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:06:45 -0500

I should learn not to be disappointed by stars, the brightest and kindest of whom are still unstable and apt to be pissy when they’re not given due deference, but Robert Downey Jr. has thrown me for a loop. Vulture reprints this exchange from Movieline (welcome back, Stu!) in reference to the notorious “Full Retard” speech from Tropic Thunder:

First Journalist: I’ve got to ask. What do you think [Tropic Thunder Method actor] Lincoln O’Siris would think of Jamie’s performance in this?

Robert Downey Jr.: Next question.

Robert Downey Jr.: By the way I could just say that to all them.

First Journalist: Do you think he’d approve?

Robert Downey Jr.: I have no idea how to even begin answering that question. And by the way — I want to have a good time. I want to have a great time, just that one tied my fucking shoelaces together right off the bat. What else you got?

Now, I am gaga about Downey, having bored my readers and listeners and viewers over the years on the subject of his brilliance in multiple media, but there’s no excuse for this degree of douchiness.

Downey won an Oscar nomination thanks to his delivery of that “Full Retard” speech — which wasn’t just funny but also fundamentally accurate in its assessment of actors' obsessions and the Academy's taste. Even given his sympathy for the subject of The Soloist and his co-star Jamie Foxx, Downey could have handled this with more grace: “Yeah, I knew that would come back to haunt me … that was that character's opinion. But Jamie got to know this guy and really wanted to do him justice and blah blah blah blah … ” Or something. Instead, he took umbrage; he was offended that a journalist would dare to bring up something he had uttered in a movie released less than a year ago.

Downey is a great actor and deserves all kinds of respect for keeping his demons at bay, but there ought to be a rehab center for celebrity self-righteousness.

UPDATE
The Fuller Douchiness. Perhaps I’m so rankled over Downey’s responses because the issue speaks to our culture’s schizophrenia when it comes to bad-taste black comedy. Given all the noise from sundry disability/ethnic/religious groups over Tropic Thunder and the current brouhaha over the so-called date rape in Observe and Report, it seems that American celebrities learn reflexively to distance themselves from their own work — at least when their next project hits the market and it’s in their economic interest to do so. Let’s hope that next year Seth Rogen and Anna Faris won’t respond with outrage to impish questions about Observe and Report when promoting their next films. They shot the scene, they believed in it, and they — like Downey — ought to continue to stand up for its aesthetic, to defend the indefensible in the name of Aristophanes, Voltaire, Jarry, Richard Pryor, South Park, Sarah Silverman ... and the next one who’ll live to push our buttons.

SECOND UPDATE
See my next post for further thoughts.

Notes on The Human Condition

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:49:59 -0500

That headline seems more ambitious than is warranted … Masaki Kobayashi’s ten-hour, six-part epic, The Human Condition (three features with breaks for intermission), has another few days at the Film Forum (it runs through April 16), and you can still commit to the long haul. Yes, it’s worth it, but more for the experience — for the commitment itself — than because Kobayashi’s humanism will rock your world. Chances are if you’re there in the first place you know that occupying foreign lands and abusing the locals is wrong; that killing people you can barely see for reasons you probably don’t agree with is not a design for living; and that struggling to survive while fellow soldiers, women, and children perish around you from starvation will destroy your capacity for empathy and take the ultimate toll on your humanity.

Kobayashi tracks his hero, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), through three phases of his life in the last year of World War II. He’s a humanist, as other characters constantly remind him: “You’re a humanist and your humanist ways will get you nowhere here … ” “Don’t try your humanism on me ... ” etc. In the first film, No Greater Love (1959), he campaigns for more humanist treatment of Chinese prisoners in a Manchurian work camp. This doesn’t work out so well, and after interfering with the executions of prisoners who tried to escape (but only after a few of them have been shot and chucked into a pit), he is torn from his loving wife and shipped (part two, Road to Eternity, 1960) to the front, where there’s little his humanism can do to stop his superiors — as well as nasty veteran soldiers — from brutalizing the new arrivals. In the final part, A Soldier’s Prayer (1961), he and a shrinking band of Japanese soldiers and civilians make their harrowing way through China toward their conquered homeland, his humanism fatally undermined by his abandonment of fellow humans and the necessity of killing Soviet liberators.

Some notes:

1. As storytelling, The Human Condition is repetitive: humanism meets brutal counter-force, counter-force wins the battle, but man (or a man) continues to reach for the ideal — i.e., love — even as his body fails. Yet beat by beat it’s still riveting stuff.

2. Kobayashi likes to use low angle close-ups against stark, godless white skies. You’ll recognize the style from his many foreign imitators.

3. Nakadai is in 95 percent of the film and acts with all his heart. His most strenuous histrionics are in the first section, when he’s still a city-boy college grad with humanist ideals and hasn’t yet been broken in — every inhumanity he witnesses hits him like a blow. Later, his face tanned to leather by all the brutality, he still registers grief, albeit in ways that are more measured: He knows he can’t deplete his strength if he wants to survive. But at what price survival?

4. On the basis of The Human Condition, it is the human condition to slap or be slapped. More people get slapped in this movie than in any other, ever. The Japanese are big slappers. Talk back and you get slapped. Don’t talk back and you get slapped. Try to slip away and you get slapped. The humanist hero slaps no one and eventually gets slapped, but others are slapped more.

5. It must have added insult to injury for Japan to see this portrait of itself even fifteen years after the end of the war. Yet The Human Condition is still, based on what we now know, a whitewash. The Japanese commanders are the villains, but they are not sadists, and the soldiers, tough as they are, commit no atrocities against the Manchurian population. The hero, when forced to kill, does so in sorrow. For those of us who believe that true hell of war — as seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, for a few years in Iraq, and this year in Gaza — is not seeing your buddy blown up beside you but killing in the grip of some inhuman drive for revenge, The Human Condition, alas, falls short.

‘Why Did You Stop???’ Observe and Report and Denounce

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:31:37 -0500

Well, it turns out that the gun-fetish aspect of Observe and Report hasn’t generated nearly as much debate as the so-called date-rape scene. All involved, we’ve read, should be ashamed, and anyone who endorses the film should recalibrate his or her (but presumably his) moral compass.

My moral compass is just fine, but I’ll concede that many of us gravitate to “extreme comedy” — be it South Park or Eastbound and Down or, for that matter, Lolita — to test that compass and permit it for a time to go haywire. We do so precisely because it is reckless and socially irresponsible, but we (and when I say “we” I exclude sociopaths, as I always do, because art can be dangerous, and just because John Hinckley took the wrong lesson from Taxi Driver doesn’t mean that Taxi Driver wasn’t a great and vital work) don’t conclude that we have license to imitate vile behavior in life.

Some mitigating elements of the scene in question (spoilers to come):

1. These characters are the opposite of role models. Seth Rogen’s Ronnie is certifiable and Anna Faris’s Brandi a zealous lush and druggie who has no qualms about sleeping around.

2. Brandi has consumed superhuman amounts of drugs and alcohol, but this is not, we may infer, unusual. Nor does Ronnie aggressively encourage her to do so.

3. While she is addled in the extreme and would not presumably allow Ronnie to touch her while sober, many of us — men and women — have done things when inebriated that didn’t seem so wise in the morning. Live and learn — or don’t and pay the consequences.

4. Midway through, Ronnie has a pang of conscience and stops grinding away, the cue for writer-director Jody Hill’s explosive reversal: Brandi is not unconscious but at very least semi-conscious and apparently enjoying herself.

If this were real life, would Ronnie be a date-rapist? That’s debatable — I say, all in all, no. But I understand that many women are extremely vulnerable in such situations. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that he is. Because we laugh and gasp at what follows, does that mean we approve? Having seen Ronnie’s actions in a movie, do we now believe that date rape should not be prosecuted — that it is just harmless fun?

Although I have never had such a dilemma in life, usually being the first to pass out, I hope I’d have the decency to walk away from a semi-conscious woman. I hope I also wouldn’t harass a Muslim co-worker, use a Taser on a man who parks next to a loading dock, break into a mall and assault policemen, or triumphantly shoot an unarmed criminal. Although I adore Lolita, I hope I am never tempted to lay a finger on a prepubescent girl. Although I grew up watching The Three Stooges, I shall endeavor never to jam two fingers into someone's eyes or yank anyone by the nose with a ball-pen hammer.

All this might seem crashingly obvious, but at least in this culture it can’t be restated too often that comedy is not safe.

A Real Pistol

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:54:32 -0500

My enthusiastic review of Observe and Report was written shortly before the spate of horrific shootings last week, and all at once it’s an unpropitious time to open a movie teeming with gonzo gun humor. But the film is, if anything, even more relevant — and greater than the sum of its sick jokes. As Taxi Driver was a madhouse travesty of Death Wish with a dash of Dostoevsky (the Underground Man was alive and unwell and living in New York in the seventies, with access to automatic weapons), so Observe and Report is a travesty of Taxi Driver. A loner given to “morbid self-attention” wanders among the drug-addicted masses (now they’re mallrats), obsesses over a blonde who’s out of his league, and finally cracks up, hurling himself into the role of vigilante avenger. Let's all laugh at this savior-in-his-own-mind, uneasy but confident in the knowledge that — this being a comedy — no one will die. And, indeed, it all winds up happily, with heroism, bloody retribution, catharsis, and renewed potency. The movie is a carnival ride through our culture’s love affair with gun violence. You can whoop it up and still feel a little like puking.

My Column Runneth Over

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:41:52 -0500

I ran long in the mag this week on Observe and Report (wildly recommended) and Anvil: The Story of Anvil (a heavy-metal doc that must be seen to be disbelieved), so here are a couple of extra-short reviews of The Escapist and Sugar. Check back for a couple of sentences on the ten-hour The Human Condition (back at the Film Forum for ten days starting April 8), a formidable work that deserves more words than I plan to write (but not that many more).

The Escapist. There’s something crepuscular about the Scottish-born Brian Cox: His soul is twilit, eerily shrouded. He made a subdued and mysterious Hannibal Lecter (the screen’s first) in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, and he’s stunningly effective in Rupert Wyatt’s fractured but intense prison thriller, The Escapist, as Frank, a con determined to break out and save the life of his drug-addicted daughter. Wyatt goes in for some fancy cinematic footwork along the way, and the ending — let’s call it “ambrosial” — will have you either groaning or sniffling (or both at once). But as Wyatt cuts back and forth between Frank’s team’s grueling underground getaway and the planning that precedes it, Cox becomes, in all senses, a man stumbling groggily from darkness into the light.

Sugar. Or, the perils of being earnest. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) go subtly but exasperatingly wrong in this humanist sports saga, which takes us from the Dominican Republic, where boys dream of making it as baseball players in the U.S., to the Iowa fields of dreams where the protagonist, Miguel, nicknamed Sugar (Algenis Perez Soto), gets tested in a Single A park run by the Kansas City Royals. Sugar is engaging as who-knew? journalism (the kindly but single-mindedly pro-team old Iowa couple that puts Miguel up is a howl), but it’s all so evenly paced, so noncommittally neutral, that the holes swallow the movie. Again and again I wanted to yell to Miguel, “Learn English!” — and not because I’m Lou Dobbs and think that immigrants should master the language straight off the boat (or bus), but because the lack is almost never openly addressed. The treatment is so respectful it’s patronizing, with Miguel’s central decision about his life (no spoiler here) a puzzlement. The camera is on Sugar the whole time, but the faux-documentary approach keeps him out of reach in all the ways that really matter.

The View From My Windshield

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 14:38:26 -0500

Very much on the sidelines, I’ve waited a couple of weeks to write anything about my pal A.O. Scott’s passionate and wide-ranging New York Times Magazine essay heralding a “Neo-Neorealism” — a piece undermined, I think, by its immodest headline, which Richard Brody had a jolly time dismantling in a New Yorker blog post. Brody, his ire roused, scored points when it came to A.O.’s lack of rigor in defining neorealism, which in its postwar Italian incarnation was a specific (and short-lived) aesthetic. (When I am tempted to create new labels or invoke old ones, I find useful such constructions as: “noir-ish,” verité-like,” and, in this case, “quasi dialectical neo-realism-esque.”). Brody had me until, out of left field, he lauded David Fincher and Clint Eastwood, and so aligned himself with a particular species of formalist critic with whom I have too many differences to enumerate. But his writing is valuable and I hope to read more of it.

My differences with A.O. have a different foundation. I remember my first visit to the Sundance festival in the late eighties, which at the time was dominated by the extinct production entity American Playhouse. Its earnest, regionally based, Redford-esque humanism was dubbed “deadbeat realism,” and a film called Stacking came in for special ridicule — not because it was that bad, but because its feminist epiphanies were triggered amid bales of Midwestern hay. What pretty much killed off deadbeat realism was (a) the general mediocrity of the films and (b) the commercial breakthroughs of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino.

The new brand of deadbeat realism is clearly informed by the longeurs of Iranian cinema, but once you get past the arty mannerisms it's just as reductive as its predecessors. Ballast is an example of what I call windshield realism, in which the camera stares out through a smudged car window (sometimes the wipers are going) as the barren landscape goes by — meant to convey the barrenness of the working-class characters’ lives. This should not be confused with stalled windshield realism, which defined the plight of Wendy in Wendy and Lucy; windshield transcendentalism, which Gus Van Sant employed in the endless overture to Gerry; or windshield blowhard egotism, which you’ll find in Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny. (The most compelling aspect of Gallo’s drive is the number of insects that splatter against the glass … one can pass the time counting every new splotch.) Although much of Goodbye, Solo is set in a moving vehicle, I’d like to exempt Ramin Bahrani from the windshield realism genre — partly because his camera rests on the faces of the passengers. Bahrani’s Man Push Cart suffered from Rosetta envy (the Dardennes, as A.O. points out, are another strong influence), and the fatalism smacked of anti-capitalist self-pity. But Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo are more ambiguous and open-ended.

If I haven’t made it clear, I think this kind of debate — and the boldness of the A.O. Scott essay that inspired it — is something we need more of. Too few critics (myself included) put themselves out this way, preoccupied as we are with pronouncing on the many dishes served up to us week after week.

Oh, Frak

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:18:55 -0500

Well, that will teach me to make extravagant pronouncements before the final curtain comes down.

She was a ghost …

Mouthy Ones: J & K

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:27:29 -0500

My review of Duplicity starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen won't be out until Monday so I've dumped it here on the odd chance you're thinking of going this weekend and can't live without my wise counsel. [Whoopsie! No sooner did I post this then my column magically appeared... Oh, well, it's cyberspace. No trees died.] Meanwhile, there is so much to say about a certain major actress... the one with the clown mouth that's almost as wide as her face... the one who lights up this and every other galaxy... the one with the nail-hard exterior and tremulous soul. Not Julia, dummy. Katie Sackhoff. TV isn't my bailiwick but the prospective loss of Sackoff--and Kara Thrace--has already turned my brown eyes blue. Actually, hazel. But I'm wearing blue. Ta-Nehisi Coates might have publicly thrown in the towel but Battlestar Galactica really is all that; it was worth fighting our way through some bewildering thickets (religious, political, philosophical, jurisprudential) to come to this, an epic of humanity in extremis. I'll say goodbye with a catch in my throat to all the actors and their characters, but the absence of Katee (and Michael Hogan's virtuosically growly Colonel Tigh) will leave a black hole in my inner universe.

On to Duplicity:

So much of a movie’s appeal comes down to whether you enjoy staring at the actors’ faces for a couple of hours. In Goodbye, Solo (see review in Monday’s issue), there are two tantalizing, unfamiliar ones—new maps to pore over. But the face of Julia Roberts in the pretzel-plotted corporate espionage thriller Duplicity holds surprises, too. Roberts took a break after her less-than-stellar Broadway debut, and she’s now more drawn, which means her mouth is proportionately larger, which means she’s closing in on Heath Ledger-Joker territory. But she’s still nice to look at. She’s starting to bleed in the mind’s eye into Kyra Sedgwick, who played her sister in My Best Friend’s Wedding and whose face has, conversely, softened with age. Roberts’s features are tense, but that works for the role of Claire (ironic name alert), a corporate counterspy who might or might not be playing fellow agent Ray (Clive Owen) for a chump. If this were a Mamet movie, you’d have no doubt Claire will turn out to be a whore with her eye on the mother lode, but writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) is the most romantic of conspiracy theorists. Maybe Owens’s charms (he’s wolfish yet needy) have actually gotten to her.

Duplicity is deeply shallow—cheap reversals all the way down. But it’s a passably amusing brainteaser. At its center are rival corporations with CEOs played by Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, who have a crazy hatred for each other and want to steal each other’s secrets. Claire and Ray ostensibly work for Giamatti, the shadier and more repulsive, but they have side machinations of their own. The question of why—apart from their good looks—we should root for them hangs in the air; they’re thoroughly immoral. But Gilroy resolves that issue satisfactorily. As he proved in Michael Clayton, he knows how to write a final scene. He knows how to write an opener, too. It’s in the middle that things get laborious.

Duplicity is certainly busy. Gilroy tarts it up with multiple gliding split screens (they work better on 24), and James Newton Howard’s brassy score gives the illusion of momentum even when the frames are inert. Gilroy does loop-de-loops with the syntax. There’s an overture in which Ray seduces Claire—or has Claire seduced Ray into seducing her? Then it’s five years later. Then it’s two years earlier. Then it’s next week, then last week, then three minutes from now, then ten thousand years on when the robots have taken over. Michael J. Fox flies by in a DeLorean. After a flurry of climactic flashbacks, we finally take in the whole puzzle picture. The last shot of Roberts and Owen is what we’ve waited two hours to see. Gilroy knows that after all the whiz-bang convolutions, it still comes down to a look on a movie star’s face…