theskulI42 Reviews

The Sparrow (1972)

Subtle political drama from Egypt's greatest filmmaker

[9/10 · 10 August 2011]

We live in a time where more and more cinema is available to more and more people than any other time in history, and yet, some of the all-timers still have yet to get their fair share of the spotlight. Egypt's greatest filmmaker, Youssef Chahine, has to be near the forefront of this group, with a whopping FOUR of his forty-five films currently available through Netflix, a list that doesn't even include his most famous and acclaimed triumph, 1958′s masterful potboiler "Cairo Station". "The Sparrow" is my fourth Chahine, after "Cairo Station", the "Matter of Life & Death" fantasy of "An Egyptian Story" and the fiery parable "The Land", whose passion "The Sparrow" shares, and whose one-dimensional polemic rhetoric The Sparrow transcends.

"The Sparrow" is an ensemble drama of sorts, set during 1967′s Six-Day War between Israel and the United Arab Republic of Egypt. The film followed a young policeman (Salah Kabil) trying to unearth government corruption while dealing with looking for his father, as well as his half-brother (Ali El Scherif), an incendiary journalist and soldier trying to affect change on the homefront while dealing with corruption on his own. Describing it this way makes it seem like more of a simplistic propaganda piece, but the film is nuanced and complex, replete with subplots including a local sheik (Mahmoud El-Meliguy) miffed at his overprotection, the search for a Keyser Soze-like local crimelord, and the strong woman (Mohsena Tewfik) whose residence much of the film revolves around, and who progressively becomes the focus as the climax rises and Gamal Nasser Hussein's Egypt crumbles.

Chahine manages to make the film rousing and patriotic while reigning in the potential for demonizing one-note jingoism (something not easily done considering it revolves around the touchy subject of a war lost not half a decade before). From a storytelling standpoint, Chahine chooses to provide expository information in a series of almost Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness harsh-edits that barges into the mainline in ways that are pretty confusing until you get the hang of them, but it proves valuable in keeping the film moving while filling you in on what needs to be known (useful, considering I know little but the most basic particulars about the Six-Days War). Pretty impeccable from top to bottom, "The Sparrow" is a passionate, personal story told with subtlety and intrigue, vibrant characterization and dramatic economy. Chahine had yet to let me down, and "The Sparrow" just raises him further up.

{Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #7 (of 43) of 1972}

The Flying Man (1962)

An interesting piece of animated brevity

[8/10 · 1 March 2011]

The man behind "Yellow Submarine" (which will have to be watched when I get to 1968) put out this intriguing little short six years earlier, in my big halcyon year of '62. "The Flying Man" is a movie whose structure and plot elude me, except to say that its lack of structure may be the point. The animation is visually stimulating in its childlike fluidity, even more so when left to stand on its own after the jaunty, perhaps encouraging score is abruptly dropped for most of the runtime. If you'd like a plot description, you've come to the wrong film. A man sheds his clothes and begins swimming in mid-air. A dog comes along and attacks his clothes, and the dog's owner attempts to fly but fails, and kicks the dog for his troubles. I don't know if it's a result of the print, but there are several places where the animation becomes so faint it's hard to follow, but there's an intriguing complexity in these seemingly infantile colorings, a spare implication of body leading to a wonderful economy of movement. At 2 1/2 minutes, there's not much to it, but it's a nifty little piece and a nice little bang for the buck.

{Grade: 8/10 (B)}

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Dig it, man. Be cool.

[10/10 · 29 May 2010]

"Normally I sing about teeth and gums, but this album is all love songs" With Syndromes & a Century, Apichatpong Weeresethakul sorta-makes his own version of Tarkovsky's Mirror: a fractured, beautiful, cyclical autobiography in cinema. But Tarkovsky's film was concerned with the whole: inward-facing, but dealing with lost innocence, a desperate search for God and the scope of human existence. Early in on his film, Weeresethakul seems much more interested in the part, the details, the specifics, the ground-level, the things you won't notice unless you stop, look and listen.

From the very first shot, the warm, sensual atmosphere present throughout Tropical Malady is all around us again: the weather is impossibly pristine, the sun is shining, the trees are blowing in the breeze, and everyone is speaking in rich, hushed tones. The fact that this section of the film is mined from the mind of the director's childhood at his parents' practice jibes perfectly with what we see on screen: there's a gentle, nostalgic perfection to these scenes; I'm sure this is how every day is when he thinks back, and the camera, like a child, has a tangible presence in the frequent "adult" discussions, but is generally ignored by the subjects of the gaze as a non-entity. It's as if the young Apichatpong had a camera, and now he's looking part at the conversations he witnessed but didn't understand at the time, filtered through the sweet vibe he gets when he looks back.

The other unexpected thing apparent right off the bat is how amusing the film is. Weeresethakul is secretly, quite possibly, the most approachable "arthouse" director out there, and one of the initial scenes involves the ostensible lead actress Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul) meeting with a chatty monk who relates to her his fear that he has bad chicken-based karma because it comprises a large part of his diet and dreams of breaking chicken's legs, and then tries to hustle her for pain pills. Additionally, the ostensible male lead, Dr. Ple (Arkanae Cherkam) is a dentist-cum-amateur-country-singer, and one of the monks confesses during a cleaning that he once had aspirations to be a DJ and/or comic book store owner (Ple provides the quote at the top) The second half of the film shifts to the present day, transposing the same characters to a stifling, antiseptic modern hospital, and showing the same interactions from a contemporary standpoint: the opening interview between Toey and cheerful medic Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram) is much more curt and nitpicky. The monk is advised to cut back on the chicken not because of bad karma, but bad cholesterol, and the brusque doctor immediately attempts to prescribe medication for the monk's "panic disorder". Meanwhile, the dentist and the younger monk's friendly interaction with the sun shining out the window has been replaced by rows of gleaming plastic machinery and absolute silence (to the point that most of the monk's face is covered in an almost-Cronenbergian hood), with the only conversation involved being instructions to open or close the mouth.

It becomes quickly apparently that Weeresethakul's picture steers much closer to Tarkovsky than previously anticipated. Drifting into peer Tsai Ming-Liang's wheelhouse, his topic of conversation has become urban alienation; the subsequent loss of spirituality comes a loss of humanity. The key sequence comes around here, when the film cuts between achingly lonesome pans of religious statues neglected in small patches of urban foliage, and Dr. Nohng, on his lunch break, walking with a colleague discussing ringtones and leering at co-eds. The rest of the film runs in this vein: an older female doctor pulls liquor out of a prosthetic leg in preparation for an upcoming television appearance; a chakra healing attempt is angrily swatted away by a young patient who has a large tattoo on his neck and no desire to go to school; an intimate moment between Nohng and his significant other turns into a request for him to move with her to an ugly, high-tech "modern" area of town, and a vulgar gawk at his erection; culminating in a breathtaking sensory overload in the final sequence, wrapping up with a gloriously audacious, discordant series of shots that puts his theme in vivid focus.

Social impatience, emotional disconnect, moral malfeasance, all are present in Weeresethakul's view of the present world, but he has done more than scream at the kids to get off his lawn, he's created a treatise on the state of the world: caring is in decline, kindness is in decline, focus is in decline, soul is in decline. I usually roll my eyes when a pundit begins rambling about the "good ol' days", but as a filmmaker, Weeresethakul is tasked with creating his own world, letting us share it, and making us believe it, and with Syndromes & a Century, he's presented us with the trappings of a very familiar modern world, and a hope, a wish, a prayer that maybe, just maybe, by journeying back to his childhood, if not our own, we could carve out a blueprint for how to be a little closer, a little kinder, a little wiser, towards our fellow man.

--Grade: 9.5/10 (A)--

The Music of Chance (1993)

Twisty and brilliant, why no DVD?

[9/10 · 3 June 2009]

"We're gonna build a wall. A monument, really. A monument in the shape of a wall."

The Music of Chance is an example of the reason I do film quests. The film is written by Paul Auster, an author I am most certainly a fan of, but there's really no impetus, no overarching reason for me to seek this movie out. It's decently well-thought-of, but not extremely acclaimed, it stars a few somewhat famous actors (James Spader and Mandy Patinkin) and a handful of That Guy character actors (Charles Durning, , the plot isn't the most intriguing thing of all time, and the film is frustratingly obscure: despite starring several famous people and being well-thought-of, it lacks a DVD in the United States.

As stated, the story doesn't have any instant hooks: a guy picks up a bloodied man in a suit on the side of the road, they get together for a card game against a couple of easy-mark millionaires, and after losing, end up building a wall for them on their estate. But Paul Auster is an author I have read two stories from, and one of the few authors that I actively plan to read more from, simply because he attains an air of enigmatic menace in every word; nothing sinister might be happening, but exact reasoning is unclear, and easy answers are completely absent, and this mystery of the possibly-not-so-benign is incredibly unsettling. Director Phillip Haas has managed to imbue HIS The Music of Chance with the spirit of its author.

The writing, and by extension, the film makes its living on the unsaid, the unconfirmed, the unsure. Everything going on in the story could possibly be innocent, but there's inklings that it might not be, and while nothing is ever stated outright, it always feels like something shady is going on. For instance, the mysterious circumstances and the game of fabrications involved with the initial meeting between Spader and Patinkin, or the fact that once they begin building the wall, a new character arrives to follow them, and we never see the two rich men again. Hell, everything dealing with the "City of the World" that seems to affect and drive so much of the story is Auster incarnate: natural and impressive, but with an air of menace, like a tiny, figurine-based portent of doom. The ending is, of course, indirect and gives anything but clarity. It's circular in nature, and like Haneke's Cache, seems to answer something, but really just sort of raises more questions, and other than the tinge of recognition provides no satisfaction except that it's satisfying in and of itself.

In the acting department, everybody brings their A game: James Spader is absolutely fabulous as the Ratso Rizzo-esquire Jack Pozzi, and from the look to the disposition to the accent, I was really impressed with what he has done with the character. Mandy Patinkin is supposed to be the blank slate; if not the surrogate, he's the anointed protagonist simply because he's on-screen the most, and he's as enigmatic as the rest of 'em. Charles Durning and Joel Grey are a perfect example of how you can get two benign, pleasant-looking men, have them doing sketchy and strange things, and make them seem ominous. Durning gives all his lines like his character rehearsed them for a con, and Joel Grey gives a performance that is cold and threatening by being so vapid and genial. M. Emmet Walsh shows up and also is mysterious and unexplainable, and when other character saunter in like the hooker played by Samantha Mathis, or Walsh's son (Chris Penn), you just start looking for clues and suspecting everybody of something.

And that's what it really comes down to: so much atmosphere for so little action creates a gloriously palpable sense of paranoia and dread. You're not sure what the characters' motives are, just as you're not sure what their ulterior motives are, or if they even have any, but you just feel like you need to be on the lookout, because something unpleasant might go down at any minute, and it might happen to YOU! I've watched the "City of the World" scene four times since I finished the film, and I've noticed new things each time that, once again, seem to answer a question, but instead raise several more. But that's the fun of Paul Auster, that's the fun of absurdism, that's the fun of life. That's the fun of the music of chance, and THAT's the fun of The Music of Chance.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-) / #4 (of 40) of 1993}

Raining in the Mountain (1979)

A sorely-neglected little gem.

[8/10 · 18 May 2009]

Raining on the Mountain is a sorely neglected little gem of a Chinese flick. I would say "kung fu flick", but that's almost wholly untrue. There are several fight scenes (most notably near the climax), but the film seems much more interested in the fluidity and the composition of these scenes than the actual viscera of the bloody mouths and body blows. There's a sort of extravagant economy of motion here: everything is done for the effect, but nothing feels gratuitous or superfluous; it's simply done so well that you breeze through without giving it a thought. A good portion of this film consists of people running, ducking and hiding behind things, but Hu, being behind the pen, behind the camera and apparently behind the editing equipment as well, presents the entire film like a dance, no matter what they're doing.

The plot concerns a number of characters scheming towards two major aims inside a Buddhist monastery: an esquire and a general both looking to obtain a priceless handwritten scroll from their library, using various means (including a faux-concubine and her bandana-clad partner-in-crime) to obtain it. Additionally, the abbot of the monastery is looking for a successor, and several of the monks are attempting to get a good word for their names through less than legitimate means: namely, getting the esquire or the general to put in a good word by assisting them in getting the scroll. The other major plot point involves a former thief (convicted, but claims falsely accused) being hounded by the lieutenant that put him behind bars, and the two of them getting into various scraps, and coming off like wounded children.

The film I was more reminded of (at least in a superficial way) was Miyazaki's The 47 Ronin. Both films have action, but aren't overly concerned with the action so much as with how the action is executed. Neither film is particularly substantial plotwise, but both exert special attention to the minutiae of politicking, and their power comes with how that plot is carried out. Just as Raining on the Mountain is mostly people dodging enough and slinking away, The 47 Ronin is a film that consists mostly of people running into rooms and informing the occupants of exciting things happening outside, and yet, both are captivating because of how they present their wares. While it occasionally grinds to a bit of a halt when it focuses on the abbot appointing, Raining on the Mountain is an evocative, sensual, breathtaking and above all enjoyable film, and with a surprisingly light, fun storyline, a memorable cast of characters, and a thrilling conclusion, it's a film I'd gladly recommend to anybody that can obtain it.

{Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #10 (of 24) of 1979}

Lunacy (2005)

A pal's favorite delivers excellent entertainment.

[9/10 · 9 May 2009]

Ah, to watch the favorite of a friend. It's almost intimidating, is it not? To view a film that is so beloved by an associate, especially someone whose opinion matters to you, you're almost scared to watch for fear of disliking it. Thankfully, I had so such problem with Lunacy, a film that absolutely exceeded my expectations.

The film documents the exploits of Jean, a man who has a continual nightmare about hospital orderlies taking him away in a straitjacket (he is betrayed by his dress shirt, which slinks across the floor and unlatches the handle), and becomes in a sense sponsored by a man referred only to as the Marquis. Jean goes through a hellish few nights with the Marquis, including a black mass, ritual rape and a live burial before being drafted into "preventive therapy", heading to a mental hospital to test two separate approaches: absolute freedom, and strict lockdown punishment. These scenes are intercut with several extended sequences featuring pieces of processed meat dancing, drinking and generally cavorting around as they wish.

If you're not familiar with Svankmajer, the last sentence perhaps elicited a bit of a puzzled stare, but dancing meat is just par for the course for one of the last real surrealists, as he does stop-motion animation like no one else can. Now I've only seen one of his films, Alice, his solid but forgettable retelling of Alice in Wonderland, but this film has restored my faith in the man, as it managed to continually keep my attention throughout and keep me entertained, no less.

The film is listed as a horror film, but I think that definition does the film a bit of a disservice, as there is as much wicked humor and social criticism that just one genre classification is impossible. Svankmajer's film in its early scenes seem to be taking its aim not at his surrealist contemporary Bunuel's favorite target, organized religion, but at a less judgmental variance on the same theme: the idea and definition of morality, as the Marquis, obviously inspired by the man who shared his namesake, while yes, questioning the existence of God, is more questioning the socially accepted norms of what is "right", as our protagonist vacillates between being offended and defending through offence of another early on and it raises a lot of interesting questions.

Of course, the following scenes make that thesis irrelevant in the way you knew and hoped they would, as we move to our second half, where the film looks at the relative success rates of different manner of mental hospital policy, first where the inmates almost literally run the asylum, and the doctor assists them in their crazy games (there's an amusing sequence where the head doctor assists a patient by adjusting the pillow on the pillar he's currently smashing his head into), and the strict punishment policy, which isn't nearly as fun or nearly as interesting, as the new "real" head of the hospital is a bland buzzkill that has a lot of exposition but little of the fire of anyone else.

In the acting department, Pavel Liska does "damaged goods" quite well, but as his character is much of a troubled wet blanket, he's not given much to stand on. As for Jan Triska, the Marquis early on gives a speech damning the existence of God that is the sort of thing familiar to anyone who has ever seen a film questioning religion, but it manages to be convincing and effective, purely on the strength of Triska's wild-eyed performance (although his shrill, glass-shattering laugh does most certainly grate). The fact that he looks remarkably like my upper-classman Honors English teacher (my all-time favorite) also proved a constant source of entertainment.

All in all, it's not exactly going to make my top 10 of all, but considering my opinion going into the film was "I hope I don't hate it", I have to say that this is definitely a pleasant surprise, and an excellent film. Whew.

{Grade: 8.5/10 / #15 (of 60) of 2005}

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Fascinating look at the human experience.

[9/10 · 7 May 2009]

"I know how to do it now. There are nearly thirteen million people in the world, and none of those people is an extra. They're all leads in their own stories. They have to be given their due." Do you remember when you were a kid, or more recently, having to deal with a kid who keeps asking, "And then...?", and you attempt to rationally continue answering their questions? Synecdoche, New York is a lot like that.

Charlie Kaufman has a reputation as being one of the few really distinctive scribes in Hollywood cinema. His scripts for uncoiling, genre-subverting films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation put him in a select group (with guys like David Mamet or Quentin Tarantino, for instance) that could be considered auteurs without ever having to saddle up behind a camera. Well, now Kaufman has taken the helmer's plunge with Synecdoche, New York, a meditation on life, change and the nature of self that mixes the wickedly fatalistic surrealism of Songs from the Second Floor with the playful identity-shattering of something like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

It may be hard for some to believe, but Synecdoche is easily Kaufman's most heartfelt, emotional piece yet, because it delves into the complex contradictions of the human experience the only way it possibly can: through metaphor. Never before have I seen a film that attempted so thoroughly to document and catalogue what it means to be human, to live, to think, to be. The film peers over the edge of existence, and does its best to quantify the record of the lifetime, and every time it peels away a layer, it finds another, altogether different layer underneath. It manages to stay nakedly emotional, almost a direct confession from the soul, as it simultaneously reflects these discrepancies by presenting them completed adorned, couching them in symbols and metaphor that cut much more deeply to the heart of the feeling than a direct, linear path could ever do.

The fact that this deals with someone of an artistic persuasion murkens the water even more thoroughly because it adds the responsibility and the desire to enrich the world, something that is within most people, but is set to the forefront here, and just as Kaufman is trying to get to the nitty-gritty of his own nature, his characters are dealing with their own natures, and how that nature deals with other people's natures, especially when THEY are attempting to reflect your natures, and perhaps even wrestle control over something, but...see? This is what happens when you try to lay Synecdoche, New York out lengthwise. It's like an intestine, and it goes all the way to China. In fact, I'm sort of amazed he even figured out a place to stop (and really, that's only because he died, and really, that's only because he was told to die, and really...

Kaufman's direction is accomplished and sort of off-puttingly perfect for the material. It has a sort of light darkness, a genial gloom, and any other oxymoronic term you can think of that represents a sort of lifelike melding of happy and sad (strikes and gutters, to quote another brilliant screenwriter). Fittingly, his staging is heartfelt and theatrical in its artificiality, and you sometimes lose sight of what is art and what is life, which I'm sure was intentional. The chronology also jumps around quite a bit. Only forward, sure, but inconsistently, and sometimes very abruptly, and I think it sort of symbolizes another facet of life, how some insignificant things seem to linger in the mind substantially longer than more important things, and there's no rhyme or reason to it, but that's how it goes.

The film doesn't need it, since the ethos is at the forefront and the center of the attention, but it has a preposterous, almost dream cast. Hoffman is, as always, a revelation, along with his doppelganger, the supremely underpraised Tom Noonan. s in the lives of many men, the women in Cotard (Hoffman)'s life are the dominant power and focus of the piece, and the feminine cast is absolutely gobsmacking: Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest? I mean, good lord. A film like Songs from the Second Floor blew me away because I understood on a fundamental level, even if I couldn't explain it rationally. Synecdoche, New York goes, appropriately, one step deeper. I couldn't tell you what it all means, couldn't lay it out in a term paper, or make it so I could write out a synopsis on Wikipedia, but I see what he's doing, and I feel it in my soul. I can't explain how these women doing their little tango into his thoughts, floating in and out of his life, but I GET what they represent. Of the ladies, the most interesting, the most useful, the most damaging is not always in the forefront, but just...going through, flowing in, floating out, passing through the camera lens of the person we happen to be following, one of the billions with their own story. It's sort of like...what's that word? Oh yeah. Life.

Glad to be able to say decisively that I have a clear #2 film of 2008. All year, it's been WALL-E and everyone else, a masterpiece and a litany of overachieving "good" movies. I might not be ready to slot Synecdoche into my top 300 just yet, but I'm glad to say that little mechanical bastard's finally got some competition.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-) / #2 (of 106) of 2008}

Notorious (2009)

Mediocre recap of a great man.

[5/10 · 7 May 2009]

Notorious is a film that fails to succeed completely because of its inability to cross between cultures. It's too familiar for the people who would actually be interested in seeing it, and it's too inept and poorly-paced to make converts of the sort of people who would need convincing. It has a good number of the same problems that all music biopics do: it's overlong, many of its actors seem to be merely imitating the characters, and it fails to bridge the gap between good, bad and real. Reading reviews of the film after writing this writing, I had to go back an append it for something I noticed: most of the reviewers that have no connection to this genre of music seemed to feel that Biggie came off as a wholly unlikeable individual that the film not only failed to explain to outsiders why he is so loved, but made those in a neutral position shift towards the negative.

Watching the film, I felt it balanced the tone well between the redeeming charm and innate goodness, and the lunkheaded, morally ambiguous badness, but I wonder how much of that is due to my overt familiarity with the artist himself. Being someone who knows the words to almost every song he made, my opinion and familiarity of the man made Notorious a series of cinematic reenactments of events and recordings and stories that I've heard a thousand times. Like someone watching an adaptation of a book they've read hundreds of times, I ended up focusing on the recreation more than the storytelling, so I can understand the reactions based on the difference in point of view.

The Notorious B.I.G. was such a unique, memorable individual that any attempt to emulate or inhabit him would be nothing but an imitation, and the role as essayed by first-timer Jamal Woolard is one of someone who studied really hard trying to learn his specifics, instead of someone who gets the heart of the man. He can ride a track just fine, but in dialogue, his voice sounds more like Shyne than Biggie, which is fitting considering that accusations of being a poor man's Biggie were leveled at Shyne until he took that gun charge for Puffy. Speaking of Puffy, Derek Luke's acting is more of a mockery than an imitation, which is odd considering that Puffy is an executive producer. Then again, it almost balances the fact that Puffy as a character is whitewashed to the point of almost being a guardian angel. He's not seen in much detail, but when he is, it's only to serve as a catalyst to success, a shining beacon of Right. Being essentially a budget production, the rest of the no-name cast is uneven. Praise should go to most of the female actors. Angela Bassett actually does get Voletta Wallace, from her disposition to her accent, Ex-3LW member Naturi Naughton similarly gets Lil' Kim (as well as naked), and Antonique Smith is a dead ringer for Faith Evans. On the other hand, Anthony Mackie zaps 2Pac of all his humanity, and an even more fascinatingly divergent character than Biggie turns into a gibbering, ignorant hooligan, despite Biggie's slack narration about how "complicated" he was. Sean Ringgold makes Suge Knight as a big, threatening man, but fails to recreate Knight's simmering menace, brought to the forefront by his version of the Source Awards clip, one of the most played and infamous moments in the entire beef.

In the end, though, it's the technical aspects that let the film down even more than the acting. The direction is uninspired and mostly observatory, point-and-shoot stuff. The writing is a combination of lack of effort and lack of ideas. Half of the film writes itself since the entire situation is so well-documented, both in the media and by Biggie himself. In fact, the film's biggest weakness is to emulate Biggie's talent for speech and wordplay. Notorious the man, was a great speaker because he had a talent for painting vivid pictorials and bringing humanity into otherwise sketchy situations, while Notorious the movie brings to us a dull narration and a proclivity for awkwardly rounded storytelling (i.e. he finally finds his Meaning of Life minutes before being gunned down) that just makes everything seem blunted (and not the good kind).

The man who famously said he went "from ashy to classy" has been done a disservice by the people who care about him the most. To keep that metaphor, this film needs some damn lotion. If you're interested in the facts of the legendary coast battle that led to the death of "the black Frank White" as well as Tupac Shakur, maybe look into the documentary Biggie & Tupac (which I have not seen) as well as the excellent Tupac: Resurrection (which I have). If you want to know about all the details of Biggie's backstory, just pick up a copy of Biggie's Ready to Die and put it on track 10. Or, go to YouTube and type in "notorious b.i.g. juicy", and you'll be able to see the recreation of the event with Chris Wallace himself in the role of Biggie. Notorious lasts 123 minutes. "Juicy" lasts a twenty-fifth of that length, and is twice the artistic achievement. That track's a 10. Notorious? 'Bout a 5.

{Grade: 5/10 (C) / #1 (of 1) of 2009}

The Women (I) (2008)

A decent film that just can't help but pale in comparison to its original.

[7/10 · 11 February 2009]

George Cukor's 1939 masterpiece The Women is one of my all time favorite films. Diane English's 2008 Women is a mildly diverting chick flick that is less a remake of George Cukor's film and more like Ice, that episode of The X-Files where they did their own version of The Thing. Diane English's film is essentially a Sex & the City episode based on the screenplay for The Women, the basic plot machinations are similar, many of the sets are the same, but it's not the same film. When the first film credited the women under their husband's names (i.e., "Mrs. Stephen Haines" instead of "Mary"), it was being sarcastic. Here, we're introduced to the characters...by their expensive shoe brands.

That's the big shift of the film that weakens its power: where the original mocked its aloof, jittery characters who based their lives around fashion and men (and how much empty nonsense filled their lives), this film, like its contemporary inspiration, wants you to sympathize with them and think of them for two hours as your girlfriends, mmhmm. Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes do okay-decent-I-guess jobs with their antagonistic roles, and does fix the one (less-than-serious) problem that kept driving me nuts with the original film: that both Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford were woefully unattractive. The biggest problem with the Sex & the City replacement characters (which, guess what, there are a core of four of) is that the golden girl of the original's cast, Sylvia, has been taken from the gloriously obnoxious character Rosalind Russell essayed, and turned into a fragile, weeping, less-promiscuous Sam from S&tc, played by Annette Benning.

The film proceeds in this vein, revolving completely about addiction to materialism and obsessive reliance on men, to the point that it almost becomes reverential, and even as a man, I started to get uncomfortable FOR women, who are being taught that pricks are Prada are the only things that women should desire, even if Bette Midler ambles in to tell Ryan to "be selfish" (and smoke a joint) during the wildlife retreat that was the original film's madcap centerpiece (which feels awkward in its placement, very remake-y, anyway). The entire film is about women having to make sacrifices and 'get over' any dalliances by the men, and completely falling apart without that companionship, and it paints the film into its corner during its exhausting hospital finale that ends up being apropos of nothing.

It's hard to focus on the positives, or have a lot to say about it because it's so glaringly inferior to its namesake, but, like the Sex & the City movie, the film does occasionally run into an entertaining sequence, or a worthwhile interaction, or even just a funny line. The cast, which is incredibly stacked, not only Ryan, Bening and Mendes, but Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett Smith, and small roles by not only Midler but Candice Berger, Carrie Fisher, Debi Mazer, and Cloris Leachman, who, as usual, has some stuff that is quite amusing, albeit in an underused capacity, and even with the troublesome subtext, it has several effective, "aww, you guys" hug-and-cry dramedy moments, and, being a full fifty minutes shorter than Sex & the City, I'd say it earns about the same score.

{Grade: 6.5/10 (B-/C+) / #25 (of 97) of 2008}

Lazybones (1925)

Decent, well-made film that takes a weird, disastrous turn late.

[6/10 · 24 January 2009]

My first entry in the sudden Borzage/Murnau double-quest I've been thrust into by receiving the behemoth collection that bears their names was this forgotten 1925 melodrama with the title that sounds like a slapstick comedy: Frank Borzage's Lazybones.

The film concerns a dude named Steve (Buck Jones) that just lays around all the time, and his one activity is fishing, which involves him laying around all the time. Needless to say, he has acquired the nickname "Lazybones". He's sweet on a girl named Agnes (Jane Novak), whose evil mother (Emily Fitzroy) forbids her to go with him, and has arranged a marriage for her abroad student daughter Ruth (Zasu Pitts) with "the local Beau Brummel", Elmer Ballister (William Bailey). But while doin' jacksh-t, Steve runs into Ruth upon her return, with an infant and a story: she married a seaman in secret because she knew her mother wouldn't approve, she had a child, and then he went off to sea, never to return. Steve offers to claim he found the baby in the reeds until Ruth's ready to tell her mother, but when Ruth's mother whips her and threatens to send the child away if Ruth tells anyone, Steve ends up keeping her and raising her himself. From there, the film fast-forwards episodically to the child, named Kit (Virginia Marshall, later Madge Bellamy) as a young girl, as a teenager, and as a young woman in 1917, and Steve finally has to do something, and gets shipped off to war.

The film is a fairly dour affair all around, no one is content, no one is satisfied, no one is happy, and it pretty much stays that way. Their one recurring gag, how every single person that enter's Steve's house, from grandmother on down to adopted daughter, runs into the stubborn gate and yells, "Darn that gate!", isn't really that funny, but it's one of the few moments of lightheartedness in the entire piece, and even then, it's used as a heartbreaking mile-marker motif later in the film when he gets sent off to war. Actually, one into the trenches of Europe, the film turns to outright slapstick as through dumb luck, he becomes a national hero.

But the film takes a weird turn once he returns home from the war that made me sort of lose all sympathy for Steve and sort of soured the dramatic weight of the film: he falls in love with his adopted daughter. Despite the fact that he has raised this girl from the time she was still forming kneecaps, and he has been her singular parental guardian, and yet we're supposed to feel sad when he comes back for war and wants to do things that, had they been related, would have been illegal and are taboo to depict, even now? No thanks. I'm glad this collection is mostly Borzage (only two of the twelve films in the collection are from Murnau), because of the two I've seen (this and Moonrise, I've been pretty much underwhelmed.

{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #6 (of 6) of 1925}

Young America (1932)

An interesting twist on an overdone tale.

[7/10 · 24 January 2009]

Well, I didn't have to wait long to find a Borzage film to grab onto and enjoy. I picked Young America because, at a svelte seventy minutes, it's the shortest film in the collection, but also because I like to keep things fresh, and this is one of the few sound offerings in the package.

The film provides a refreshing and different spin on the usual tales of trouble youths: where most films show them as wayward toughs just looking to rob and steal and start fights, and maybe have them be unconvincingly converted to goodness at the end, our protagonists here, Art Simpson (Tom Conlon) and 'Nutty' Beamish (Ray Borzage), are not bad kids, they're just don't think of the consequences of their actions, and while Art's known as the "worst kid in town", many of their scraps come as a result of attempting to do good, exhibiting "a good deed never goes unpunished." We begin in juvenile court, where the judge (played perfectly by a young, wiry Ralph Bellamy, almost a decade before he would grow tired with Hollywood, getting typecast so thoroughly that it became known as a "Ralph Bellamy type") is sentencing kids to state school and the like, before we're introduced to Art, who stole a car but claimed he was just moving it because it was neat a fire hydrant. From there, he gets into other scrapes (such as getting suspended for a fight after defending a girl he liked from a bully who was harassing her) and when Nutty's grandmother comes down ill and can't afford the medicine, Art and Nutty, trying to do something good but not thinking of the consequences, break in to Jack Doray (Spencer Tracy)'s drug store. Doray is unsympathetic, so flippant and sure of this kid's bad credentials that Bellamy finds himself in contempt of court several times, but his wife Edie (Doris Kenyon) has seen the kids and shares the judge's disposition that it's not punishment but loving support that these children need, and once Art's aunt (Sarah Padden) abandons him and he can begins weeping because he's sure he's going to be put into state school, Edie steps up and decides to adopt him, much to Jack's chagrin.

From there, the film proceeds a little more predictably, with Edie setting up Art with tests of goodness that he ends up failing with good reasons, but because of Jack's negativity about him, he ends up being misunderstood or fleeing, before he inevitably finds a chance to redeem himself and Jack sees the error of his ways. Both the failure of the test and the eventual redemption are over-the-top and outlandish contrived (his young friend inexplicably dies of nothing, and after being kidnapped by robbers he witnessed at Doray's drug store, he crashes their car when they attempt to shoot at Jack, following behind in a police car), but it gets the point across, and the characters are so well-developed, and you want to see it conclude happily that you don't mind how much they cheated to get there.

This film gives me hope for Borzage because, as much ordinary TCM early morning fare that they may be (the packaging and former unavailability make the films seem more rare and special and desirable than they really are), Young America showed that Borzage can make an interesting, entertaining, worthwhile film, and have it be different enough that it's worth putting in the Benemoth Box Set, and personally, I'm really looking forward to seeing what the other eight Borzages have in store.

{Grade: 7.5/10 (B-) / #9 (of 15) of 1932}

Chameleon (I) (1978)

First comment in 3 1/2 years! Great film!

[9/10 · 20 January 2009]

The chameleon of the title is Terry (Robert Glaudini), a dealer of many things illegal and illegitimate, specifically illicit substances and essential bootlegs of works of art. This is where we open the film, as Terry is playing brutal, unmoving thug to a printer, pressuring him to make illegal copies of a limited edition piece, in a fascinatingly rich sequence that has a beautiful sequence when the printer's inks move across the silk, and then once he hangs it, he talks about how good it looks without noticing that it's a gun firing, and then Terry finds the gun the print is based on, points it at the man and tells him he's taking it as collateral, and the printer again doesn't seem to connect the dots. He complains that it's nicely-made and worth money, not that it's being pointed at him, the film almost saying that assigning such a self-important value to art puts it on the same level as the drugs he pushes, robbing the items of their inherent usefulness in a quest for self-worth.

The rest of the films proceeds like this, where we follow our chameleon Terry, as he moves through several varied and different environments; first, he meets an old flame (Ellen Blake) on top of a hill: she gives him a frog, and they jovially reminisce about old times. His demeanor is completely altered from the brute we witnessed before, being sort of innocent and gentle, but this is how he's supposed to be, that is the correct norm, so he does it. He then meets with a society woman who is buying coke off him, and his demeanor once again is altered, he becomes almost catty, speaking at length about vain societal problems (hair loss, social events) as he is sunning himself. His fourth and final meeting is with an artist way out in the desert to does sculptures and has a giant telescope, and with him, he speaks curtly and with an emphasis on drug lingo, as if to present his credentials, but again, seems like a completely different person.

The most interesting scenes, though, come when he is left to his own devices. Like Peter Sellers (whose life story could be affixed this same title), Terry has no personality of his own, he merely knows how to fill his void suitably for any situation. But where Sellers' primary objective was to entertain, Terry is just using and feeding off his clients; these people are sort of detached from reality anyway, and so he manipulates them and speaks their language to get what he can from them; the fascinating thing is that he doesn't use them for any reason other than to have something to keep engaged with. There's an early sequence after he leaves the printer where he plays a tape he recorded himself, just of him listing off an endless run of errands and clients and phone calls he has to make that day. For me, this scene was initially interminable, but the more the film went on, the more I got that it was a key scene: his life is only defined by the deals he's engaged in, and the fact that the tape is damn near endless (and that he spent so much time recording it, and then spent so much time listening to it) shows that he's terrified of having to deal with himself. His second driving sequence is equally interesting (and makes me hate The Brown Bunny's pointless driving sequences even more), because it's another endless monologue that provided the wonderful second quote at the top, and would be funny if it wasn't so sad, as he just keeps talking nonsense at length in place of actual contemplation

The film is almost self-consciously, over-the-top arty in its visual sensibility, with vivid colors and color transitions and hand-held camera-work and obvious symbolism and off-center blocking, and a late scene that works as a sort of trip into the black hole of Terry's identity, a starkly lit, haunting, imminently theatrical monologue where he talks directly to the camera (not to the audience, just speaking out) and then ends up covering himself in bright, rich paint. These affectations are emphasized in a wonderfully uncomfortable, pretentious, endless art show sequence (where Terry spends the entire time exchanging pleasantries and setting up future meetings) juxtaposed with his dehumanized inner monologue (or not; the gorilla thing) give the whole thing an arty-critical film, even as it engages in artiness itself. There's an intriguing late scene that I think puts his thesis out in the open: near the end of the film, Terry returns to the printer's place, and meets a carpenter (i.e., someone that actually contributes something useful to society), who seems embarrassed by the fact that he's "only" a house builder, and seems to deify these artists that aren't giving anything tangible to society (or are, but are stagnating, only to inflate their own self-worth).

The film is just as rambling as Cassavetes' films, but Jost has such a handle on the material that it works so much deeper; it feels more deliberate and less messy. The film is focused, and has a tangible ethos. The film's finale is not so much unexpected as inevitable (with a damning final line), and with a statement to make and a conscious ethos, I really felt like I had gone through an experience. The fact that I wrote so damn much about a film I'd never heard of before today, and has less than five votes on the IMDb, should tell you that much. This was a memorable and fascinating (that's use #4!) cinematic journey that makes me excited and relieved that I grabbed FIVE films from Jon Jost. If any of them are as great as this one, I've got a lot to look forward to.

{Grade: 8.75/10 (A-/B+) / #5 (of 22) of 1978}

The Wonderful Country (1959)

A solid, good-looking film with depth that is just too damn short.

[6/10 · 11 January 2009]

An understated and underseen little character-driven western, The Wonderful Country has a touching melancholy soul, but has a serious, nagging nagging problem with pacing that leaves it feeling undercooked.

The film deals with a man, Martin Brady (Robert Mitchum), who is a native Texan, but long ago fled to Mexico after killing his father's murderer. There, he got in with a dangerous criminal gang led by the Castro brothers, and as the film starts, he is escorting an illegitimate shipment of gold and guns into the small Texas town of Puerto. There, his horse, Legrimas (Spanish for "tears") gets spooked by some tumbleweed and he ends up breaking his leg, not only losing his shipment but becoming stranded in Puerto, where he makes friends and enemies all around town: in the former, German apprentice "Chico" (Max Slaten) and the Major's wife (Julie London, who has a giant face). But when the angry drunk town doctor (Charles McGraw) ends up fatally wounding Chico and Martin has to kill him in self defense, he and Legrimas must flee again, adrift in the emptiness, without a home.

Much of the film's glories hang on the mug of Robert Mitchum, and his performance is virtuoso. In addition to being saddled with a thick faux-Mexican accent (that always threatens to become a distraction but is kept in check), he gets a damaged character that almost wholly internalizes his emotions, and manages to make him understandable. The rest of the supporting cast is a combination of random 'name' actors and forgettable role players, with Pedro Armendariz and Satchel Paige (!) showing up unexpectedly, and Julie London and Gary Merrill giving clipped, underfed performances for likewise roles.

That ends up being the biggest problem with the film: everything feels clipped, rushed, undercooked. In the opening third where he is forced to stay in town, he not only recovers from an apparently serious broken leg in about a dozen minutes of screen time, and when he begins some sort of vague "love affair" with Major Colton's wife, it ends up meaning almost nothing. The summation of their 'relationship' ends up being a couple scenes where she makes eyes at him, then he leaves, then they meet again later, and lay this insane guilt trip on each other and talk about all these bad things that they "did", and...unless I passed out and missed several scenes, talk and glare is all that they did.

The film also gives short shrift to pretty much every character supporting Mitchum. Characters float in, do something, usually one single thing, maybe slightly pivotal, and that action sends Mitchum somewhere else, and then disappears. Even the main relationship they intend to develop (between Brady and his "horse named Tears") gets most of its traction from allusion and assumption that I had to infer myself than any direct action, physical or mental).

The general idea, the subtext the film wants to put forth is the wandering sadness of its protagonist, the 'wonderful country' is meant somewhat sarcastically since, while it is undeniably beautiful, Martin has no home, no place of residence within that wonderful country, and he keeps getting ousted from every comfortable place. The problem is, while he goes back and forth between Mexico and the US several times, each sequence is so short and ends so suddenly that none of them end up having much impact, and had Robert Parrish given his film some time to breath and stretch its dramatic legs, it might have been as memorable and emotional as its tone wanted to be, but at a scant hour and thirty-eight minutes, the film's memory diminishes by the minute, fading from view like a passing highway sign.

{Grade: 6/10 (C+) / #22 (of 33) of 1959}

Dice Rules (1991)

Coming from someone who loves making offensive jokes...

[1/10 · 6 January 2009]

Whoa, this was awful. I felt like I had stumbled into a supremacist rally or something.

It starts with a brainless run of dumb skits where Andrew Dice Clay inexplicably apes Jerry Lewis (and I don't even like Jerry Lewis, so a cheap takeoff from a comic that specializes in tasteless misogyny is not my idea of a good time). After a half hour of torturous abysmal skititude, more difficult to watch than anything in the 4 1/2 hours of La Roue, we finally get to the comedy, which is occasionally amusing but is far too much pure, unadulterated, troublesome and hateful woman-bashing, with a Nuremberg rally cheering him on.

And that's the main issue one would have. Where someone like Stephen Colbert is playing an satirically extreme version of a character he may disagrees with, the audience is in on the joke. They know he's not really an extremist right-winger making crazy statements, they get the wink. Andrew Dice Clay is closer to someone like Larry the Cable Guy, a comedian who plays a character, a redneck, that his background does not compute with (his early performances are more akin to Jay Leno). But where the Cable Guy is merely opportunistically taking the money of redneck people who think he speaks for them, Dice is a bit more worrisome. Where Larry can make a redneck smile when he sees the couch on his lawn, it's hard to shake the idea that that same redneck is going to some home from a Dice Clay show and, y'know, beat his wife.

Now, far be it for me to penalize a performer for the audience he has who doesn't get the joke, but in this case, he's not misunderstood, he's not ignorant of this effect. He's completely, fully aware of what he's doing, of the kind of people he's playing to, and how seriously they take his work. Even the lines that are occasionally amusing, there's always a cringe as you know that some woman is getting punched in the face with every 'ow!" Every shot of the men in the crowd, they're not laughing as much as pumping their fists. Every shot of a woman in the crowd is not one of laughter or genuine amusement, but more like they've got egg on their face, like they can't believe he said that, or that, or that, and they're worried that they're getting kicked in the stomach when they get home as her husband obsessively repeats his nursery rhymes and calls her a pig and a baboon. It's a man who has a fear of women, playing to a crowd that is even more fearful.

It's funny, there's nothing lazier than a Nazi comparison when it's something you don't like, but for once, the comparison is eerily sensible. The crowd is enraptured by a man preaching hate speech, satirical or not, and you know that the predominantly white, male crowd is the kind of people who are given all the chances in the world, but fail because they're idiots, and instead choose to blame every minority they can think of: women, the handicapped, women, the Japanese, women, the sick, women, midgets, and of course, women. So they go, and he validates every irrational fear they have, and he's the embodiment of cool for them, so they listen and repeat everything he says, and you get the feeling that if he told the crowd to assault the women in the audience, and added enough "ow!"s and "bada-bing"s, not a woman would leave the building.

There's a lot of great, genre-bending, taboo-breaking genius comedians, but Andrew Dice Clay, if he is a satirist, has the bad misfortune of being too damn convincing. Every now and then, he says, "don't take this too seriously, it's all a goof", akin to what Eminem occasionally pulls during his fits of rage. But where songs like "Kill You" are akin to Andrew Dice Clay, he makes it very clear that he's putting out his frustrations in song instead of in person, and where he is cartoonishly extreme (for instance, "As the World Turns" begins with him attempting to assault a woman at a laundromat, and ends with her eating his leg and his "go-go gadget..."). Instead, Andrew Dice Clay is just extreme. Eminem, even at his worst, is brilliantly lucid, he is witty, clever, he makes jokes, splendid turns of phrase, and by his second album, was pushing buttons to push buttons, and the only people that got mad were people that missed the joke. Here, the people who missed the joke...are his biggest supporters. The Diceman has no quality in his construction. He has no tact, no skill, and worst, doesn't even tell jokes. He just says "Women make me mad, I hate them, and they're only good for sex." Hardy-har indeed.

Michael Richards was shunned for one random (and completely misunderstood) outburst, said in a fit of pique. Andrew Dice Clay, thankfully, has also been blackballed in the industry, but instead of one random moment of anger, he built an entire career out of it, and by the 20-minute mark, I felt uncomfortable, like I had accidentally tapped into a white power forum.

I bet Kramer is angry.

{Grade: 0/10 (F)}

The Element of Crime (1984)

Fascinating anti-thriller

[9/10 · 24 December 2008]

"Do you believe me? I'm in the middle of Europe screwing a Volkswagen 1200." A brilliantly esoteric pseudo-murder-mystery, The Element of Crime brings to mind the work of Paul Auster, stories like Ghosts and City of Glass. The fact that the entire film is communicated through the hypnosis-induced memories of a former detective leads to a breathtaking heightened reality that makes the film's dreamy visual sensibility irresistible. I don't know if it's thanks to Von Trier or Criterion (who deigned this movie one of the first entries into their Collection), but the print is GORGEOUS, and is damn near impossibly clean for a film made in 1984. Amadeus didn't look this good the day it came out.

Like Auster's masterpieces, the film is technically about a murder, a detective named Fisher (Michael Elphick) returning to Europe from Cairo after a thirteen-year absence, come back to investigate a child killer named Harry Grey, as informed by his mentor Osborne (Esmond Knight), a mysterious prostitute named Kim (Me Me Lai) and antagonistic Chief of Police Kramer (Jerold Wells). He is telling all this from memory to a therapist (Ahmed El Shenawi), and the atmosphere is in kind.

The film is completely shot in a burnt-umber tint, with occasional hints of blue coming through for minor things like police lights, and I can't be exact, but I would be willing to bet that the entire film is shot at nighttime, and at least 90% of it is during a severe rainstorm (Dark City, eat your heart out). It really is the doom-and-gloom special, and it's perfect for maintaining the mood the film is looking to put forth. Like Rose Hobart, it's the combination that makes all the difference. Alone, any of these elements (of crime?! No.) could have been comfortable, even soothing, but in tandem, they're haunting and unsettling, and kept me on the edge even at times when nothing of substance was occurring on screen.

This is not to say that a lot of tangible things DO occur on screen. Anyone coming into The Element of Crime looking for a straightforward detective movie, where he follows the clues and solves the crime, is going to be sorely disappointed. This is why I'm glad I had read City of Glass previously. I realized straight away that this wasn't going to be ordinary or obvious. For Fisher, what originally begins as an investigation very quickly spirals down into a series of bizarre encounters and off-the-wall experiences, and he gets so deep into his desperate search and into his own psyche that he begins to lose his identity, and damn near his capacity for rational thought, and the results are spellbinding.

Of course, considering the director, I should have realized substantially sooner than the start of the film that this wasn't going to be Agatha Christie ordinary. Ol' Lars doesn't do ordinary. Hell, even his most 'commercial' film (his office comedy The Boss of It All) is a long way from starring Will Smith, and his greatest films, like Dogville or Zentropa, are "off" just enough to be unique. I think this is the thing that attracts people who might not be aligned with Von Trier's world view, his cinematic approach, might find themselves lost in an area that they aren't comfortable with. For all you crazy kids who think you might be, give Von Trier's debut film a whirl. Be warned, though: It just might whirl you back.

{Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #11 (of 26) of 1984}

Rose Hobart (1936)

A wonderful little experiment in obsession and deconstruction

[9/10 · 24 December 2008]

A delightful experimental short, Rose Hobart takes a standard, five-year-old jungle flick called East of Borneo, cuts the sound, tints it purple, sets it to a jaunty samba, and disposes with almost anything that doesn't involve the titular actress. Quite possibly the first example of what I guess would be "found film", the cinematic equivalent to Duchamp, the deconstruction or distillation of something benign or otherwise into a completely different work of art.

The entire film is centered around Ms. Hobart, and as Cornell cuts between various sections of the film, sometimes in consecutive shots, it attains this sort of entrancing nonsense logic. She changes setting, she changes clothes, she changes peers, but she's always there, and if you avoid thinking about it exactly the way it is (it's a bunch of scenes spliced together), it becomes anything you want it to become. You can make up your own story, and the insistent aesthetics almost encourages random assumptions as she transcends time and space. Thanks to the purple tint and the delectable languidity the slow-motion affords, the entire enterprise becomes such a haunting dreamscape that even though nothing is really happening, you can't look away.

In this atmosphere, the ubiquitous samba music becomes mysterious, almost foreboding, as it happily bounces a long, a portent of doom for ol' Rose that, considering the film's unique chronology, literally COULD be right around the next corner, and not only would she never know it, but she'd probably be fine again by the time I drew another breath. Like Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son more than three decades later, Rose Hobart opens up a new reality within material that existed for completely different reasons. But if only Tom, Tom knew how to be so concise! The film is only 19 minutes, but it satisfies all, as we are seemingly experiencing things, not out of order, but at all times. For every scene that happens, I'm sure the subsequent and previous ones are happening just as well.

Such is the power of this little piece of something, nothing and everything that a simple hackjob so a guy can focus on some random chick instead of watching the movie she's in can make one feel...damn near omnipotent. Someone get me a copy of Honey with Jessica Alba on the double! Oh wait, I already have it. Oh, that's right. I haven't thought of it yet. Such is this.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-)}

Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989)

A lovely bit of meandering glory.

[9/10 · 19 December 2008]

Women filmmakers have always had a tough go of things. Making even the more ordinary, usual and surefire hits has been a fairly restrictive practice, to the point that when a woman directs a film like American Psycho, there's a novelty factor involved. Coming from a small New York publisher most pointedly called WOMEN IN FILM (and for all of you that go "WHERE'S THE MEN IN FILM MOVEMENT!?", you're the same people that asked why there wasn't a "White Entertainment Television" channel, and you're an idiot), brings us Ulrike Ottinger's Joan of Arc of Mongolia, the kind of film that would never ever be funded with any notability because it has no desire to engage its viewers in the most usual way.

Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in addition to having a fairly lugubrious, awkward title, is an extremely leisurely film. This is a film so unhurried that the plot strand that begat the film's title isn't even referenced until more than an HOUR into the film, not that it necessarily gets started then. The first of the film's three hours takes place entirely on a train, nominally the Transsibberian Railway, and we get an entire crossection of people, from regional expert Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig), to uptight German schoolmarm Mueller-Vohwinkel (Irm Hermann), from a young French girl open to pretty much anything (Ines Sastre) to singers varying from ostentatious Broadway queen Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici) to rotund German cherub Mickey Katz (Peter Kern), as well as the cartoonish, old-school Kalinka sisters, whose primary instrument appears to be the gong.

But they have to leave poor Mickey (as well as an amusingly overzealous Russian soldier) behind as they arrive at his stop, and the rest of the women journey onward on the Transmongolian railway (as fey as Mickey may be, this is girls only), but suddenly (well, "suddenly" comparatively for this film, so, I guess, in a ten-minute sequence), they are held up (by a giant mound of dirt on the tracks) and taken hostage by a Mongolian princess named Ulan Iga (Xu Re Huar) and her hoard for...ill-defined reasons (yes, the film is so mellow in its machinations that it fails to provide reasoning for a forced hostage situation), but the real idea behind it is that it needed to get them here somehow.

From there, the film shifts completely in setting if not in tone, as we journey from the snowy train to the lovely Mongolian landscape for a set of interactions as close to "episodic" as this unfettered narrative unfolds. Where something like Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout matched up members of a modern, "civilized" culture and of members of the less encumbered, more spiritual world to show that they could NOT co-exist, Joan of Arc of Mongolia is here to provide a dissenting opinion. Having one of their numbers be an expert on a subject and a speaker of the Mongolian language is an inspired expositional construct, but it solves an unnecessary problem without any qualms, and other than an amusing scene where a clothesline mistakenly gets the schoolteacher chased by villagers with flaming sticks, they all get along famously.

This geniality is the real charm of the film. There is no manufactured drama, and the only time in the film that does involve an elevated heart rate is done plaintively, almost annoyed that it has to provide an impetus to get from enchanting ramble to graceful stroll. Ulrike Ottinger provides the film with such a gentle touch that it is a joy to behold even as very little is occurring. The film is not deliberate in the way many long, slow films are described. Very little of tangible value occurs during the film, and the film's central quality emanates from it's vagabond heart, it's ability to just sort of wander around, looking at nothing in particular, and keep you interested. The film even provides a splendid little twist in the end, as it's revealed that the Mongolian princess actually lives in the city, and just travels out here for the summertime, making a plea for humanity, against all the naysayers, the cynics and the prejudiced. As a counter to that age old question, "Can't we all just get along?", Joan of Arc of Mongolia provides its two cents: "Sure, why not?" {Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #9 (of 29) of 1989}

Repo Man (1984)

A gloriously demented cult classic.

[9/10 · 15 December 2008]

"Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year!" Well, as they say, "when it rains". After going six months without a single top 300 entry, I have now seen two in a week.

A deliriously demented film that was a cult classic the moment it hit the street, Repo Man is a film so memorable that it's tempting to just start naming off characters and occurrences, but instead, I'm put it in the form of a review: Emilio Estevez plays Otto, a rebellious young punk who in his opening sequence, is getting fired from his job as a stockboy for mouthing off and attacking a coworker. One day, Otto gets unwittingly drafted into helping a man name Bud repossess a car, and from there, everything goes to sh-t. Angry old ladies, skinhead criminals, government agents, alien conspiracies and even crazy rival repo hombres float through as Otto floats through, amused and bemused, and occasionally terrified. Soon, a $20,000 commission comes up on the docket for anyone who can obtain a certain Chevy Malibu. This car becomes the crux of the film, and changes hands several times, including by rival reposessors, criminal thugs, and even his own co-workers.

The film's scenes of repossesion document all the usual risks and dangers of the trade. He gets yelled at, spit on, assaulted and even shot at. He meets tough, cynical co-workers and thanks to one meeting in a repo'd car, even acquires a girlfriend. But if this was all the film presented, it would be a good film, yes, but it would definitely not get the accolades I'm giving it. No, the film has something else up its sleeve, and it is in fact given prominence in the opening scene. Somewhere on the shoulder of the California highway system, a one-eyed man in an eyepatch named J. Frank Parnell is driving the aforementioned Malibu that apparently has something that can...vaporize people in the trunk. Otto becomes very familiar with this car as well as people looking for its occupants before the film reaches its conclusion. On their first meeting, his girlfriend shows him a picture of what is apparently four dead aliens, and he drops her off at the United Fruitcake Organization, which is led by a woman named "Rogersz" with a metal arm. He also has several run-ins with some larcenous acquaintances of his, a group of ruffians who rob and assault several people and places throughout the film, and have some of the film's funniest lines ("Let's go do some crimes!").

Whoops, there I go just listing happenings again. Let's talk about the acting. The young Emilio Estevez (who has been airbrushed to death on the DVD's cover) is great, an ordinary teenager putting on a tough front, and his performance lets us KNOW it's a front, and makes us love him anyway. Harry Dean Stanton made a career out of doing roles like this (and in fact, had a hell of a year in '84, also starring in one of the few films better than this, the masterful Paris, Texas) and provides exactly what you want from him. The rest of the cast is a glorious motley crew of hard-luck character actors, from Sy Richardon, Tom Finnegan and the brilliant Tracey Walter in the repo office, Olivia Barash as the adorable cultist, Jennifer Balgobin, Michael Sandoval and especially Dick Rude as the young punks, and Fox Harris, one of the best weirdos of the '80s, proving his worth here as the one-eyed driver of the Malibu everyone's so interested in.

The film strings itself along by vacillating between these two poles, the grounded real dangers of the repossession trade, and the mysterious supernatural threats pertaining to the government agencies, the extraterrestrial organization, and the car whose contents can decimate a human body, leaving only their smoldering shoes. The direction is fine, the acting is a blast, the pacing is scrumtrilescent, the storyline is whacked in the best way possible, and it's a film I just can't imagine someone with a taste for the absurd who couldn't like Repo Man, and as its 6.8 on the IMDb can attest, I find it sad that people can dislike it at all.

Let's have a moment of silence for White Heat. Repo Man, welcome to the top 300.

{Grade: 9/10 (A-) / #4 (of 25) of 1984 / #264 of all time}

Quantum of Solace (2008)

Wonderful, hungry-erasing thriller.

[8/10 · 30 November 2008]

So there I sit. 7PM, Mountain Standard Time. My Broncos have just won a critical game, upsetting a favored New York team. I have done nothing of use, including a lack of consuming food for sustenance. Suddenly, my father BURSTS in my door, and announces that he's come to pick me up, and we're going to see the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It's the only time my stepmother has to go, and it's a 7:10 show, at a theater a dozen minutes away. As the lights dim and the trailers for Star Trek and Watchmen roll, it hits me: I never actually ate anything, and the troublesome car alarm in my head that triggers a migraine when I don't eat for long periods of time is enacted. Then, the film begins.

My hunger was never an issue again.

While it may not be better than Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace is a fairly glorious expansion on its predecessor, beginning with a thrilling car chase that becomes an even more thrilling foot chase, and from there, almost never lets up or steps wrong. The action scenes are spectacular, the scenes of intrigue clever and satisfying, and the scenes of tenderness as curt as Bond, especially now that they've given him emotional depth, for arguably the first time in the entire series. That the death of Vesper Lynn in the previous film becomes such a plot point in this one is notable when you think back to, for example, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where Bond's girl is killed as they're getting MARRIED, and is almost instantly forgotten. Here, Bond carries this burden with him throughout the film, and pleasantly, instead of making his revenge the focus of the film (something the filmmakers very easily could have done), it becomes more a sort of overarching theme of individual morality, and it was damn refreshing.

In the acting department, Daniel Craig does nothing to spoil his argument for being the best Bond of all. He may not have Connery's charisma, but everything else you could possibly want out of the character, Craig delivers, and I hope he remains Bond for the foreseeable future. The Bond girls, as would be expected dealing with someone as romantically grieving as Bond is, get the short shrift. His relation with Bolivian agent Camille (Olga Kurylenko) is almost wholly platonic, and his bedding of Fields (Gemma Arterton) is far more practical than hormonal. In fact, the woman he gets the closest to is the delightful M (Judi Dench), who has the audience's best interests at heart when dealing with Bond-related issues. On the other side, the producers got a hell of a find in Mathieu Amalric. His demonically wimpy disposition was perfectly balanced in a way I've never seen outside of perhaps Michael Emerson on Lost. Giancarlo Giannini, Jeffrey Wright and David Harbour provide ample characterization on underdeveloped characters, and really, there are no holes.

Marc Foster (Stranger Than Fiction) was perhaps an unusual choice for a brutal action film, but he does an excellent job presenting everything: each new locale gets an exotic, awe-spiring establishing shots, and the editing and camera-work had a delightful clarity to it, solving the main drawback of last year's The Bourne Ultimatum, the epileptic camera obscuring what could otherwise have been quality choreography. Quantum lets you see every impact, so you can really appreciate the skill involved, and even the CGI is integrated flawlessly.

The film isn't perfect. A small handful of scenes go on for too long, and Ms. Fields' appearance seems undersold in comparison to the rest of the film. Also, the grand finale in General Medrano's compound thing is excellent up to a point, but by the time he's having trouble incapacitating one wimpy executive and walking through fire and blowing out walls, suspension of disbelief is being spread a little thin. Luckily, by that point, the film had earned so much good will, it was easy to take it on the chin and move on, especially when the final denouement was so deliciously ruthless. Quantum of Solace is thrilling, wondrously-paced, and almost complete nonstop enjoyment. To be frank, I think the best compliment I can pay it is that it made me forget I hadn't eaten in 24 hours; It extinguished the fires brewing in my head, and that's a hell of an achievement.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta get my ass something to eat.

{Grade: 8.75/10 (A-/B+) / #2 (of 84) of 2008}

Moulin Rouge! (2001)

A would-be stage delight done a disservice on the screen.

[5/10 · 28 November 2008]

Ah, Moulin Rouge!. The spectacle to end all spectacles, the film that supposedly revived the flagged musical genre. This is the film that presumably, generations down the line, begat Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, a film that is obvious, poorly-acted, one-dimensional, patchwork, and frequently damn silly. It was also a film that was gloriously captivating, thanks to its tremendous visual sensibility, the soaring musical arrangements and the confidence in the material to play it seriously and believe that it would still succeed on its merits. Moulin Rouge! is a film that has so many of the same drawbacks, but fails to support its failings as Taymor did. The film is very, VERY bright and excited, but makes it mistake in thinking that being loud and obnoxious is the same as being vibrant and spectacular.

Even with this, the film's main problem is that it's so goddamn cheeky. It picks songs that they know an audience will giggle about hearing played orchestrally ("Wouldn't it be funny if we had Jim Broadbent sing "Like a Virgin"?" "Ahahaha, genius") and then have every single actor play DIRECTLY TO THE CAMERA, which apparently allows them to throw of all pretence of subtlety and pummel each line into cheap-chuckle submission, with only Ewan McGregor coming out unscathed. Not a single action is taken for the characters' benefit, not a single line is said because it's realistic in context; every single beat is insistently directed straight to the audience's ugly mugs, just to make SURE that they have a good, cheap laugh, or are aware that they're singing another song the audience should know. "REMEMBER THAT ONE?! HO HO, YOU LOVED THAT SONG, WASN'T THAT FUNNY?!" It's only one the nonsense calms down (for instance, during the 'love medley' does the film become anywhere near the sort of subtle, delicate sweetness that makes for a touching love scene.

It's a lot like being on stage, really, and trying to appeal directly to the base, the simple, the Groundlings, if you will, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the only time the film gets any real traction, is when they move the film...to the stage! The audience, the lights, the sound, and especially the improvisation! In fact, this finale is so tremendously rousing that it damn near saves the entire film (and will probably garner it an entire half-point in my score. The fact is, this is a film that would be a spectacular-spectacular theatrical revue, but people, at least, this person, looks for completely different things from the stage and the screen. I was part of a local theatrical production called Everyman, which was a stupid, simplistic story (the kind where characters' personalities are in their names) held up by our director's choice of cheesy, obvious pop songs, but thanks to energy and the buzz amongst the crowd, the show was a rousing success, and many of those famous songs I have come to closely associate with that show. But it would lose everything on the screen, because despite their similarities, they're wholly different mediums, and trying to do something so suited for one in the realm of the other just results in inconsistent, unholy mediocrities like Moulin Rouge!.

{Grade: 5.5/10 (C+/C) / #60 (of 68) of 2001}

The Flesh Eaters (1964)

From top to bottom, far better than it has any right to be.

[8/10 · 23 November 2008]

Calling all B-movie fans, calling all B-movie fans, have I got a gem for you.

Made with zero money, no notable actors and a rookie director who never directed a film again, somehow, The Flesh Eaters warmed my heart by keeping me genuinely engaged throughout. The film concerns harried transport pilot Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders), endlessly hassled by debtors, who agrees to shuttle an unlikeable, drunk diva named Laura Winters (Rita Morley) and her genial assistant Jan (Barbara Wilkin) through harsh weather to a film shoot. Not surprisingly, the plane is forced to make a harsh landing on a desolate island. After running into creepy German scientist Prof. Bartell (Martin Kosleck, making an wonderfully spooky entrance), a skeleton, picked clean to the bone, washes up on the shore. asserts that it was sharks, but there is another menace afoot: flesh-eating bacteria! The film is well-put-together, far, far better than it has any right to be. The effects are simple and effective: bacteria itself has no business being anything but microscopic, and a little bit of overlay in the shimmering water does the trick beautifully. The film is also known as one of the first 'gore' films, coming on the heels of Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast, thought the very first. The opening sequence (which is so identical to the opening hook of Jaws that I wouldn't be surprised if Spielberg stole it) sets the grisly tone right off the bat, and throughout The Flesh Eaters, the gore is ably applied, and would be acceptable in contemporary films as well (as evidenced by the gushing infection that attacks Murdoch's leg). The acting is also uniformly good. Most of the reviews seem to take it for a given that it has bad acting, but taken on its own merits, the actors have much success in crafting believable, three-dimensional characters (Our Hero Grant doesn't always make the right decision, Our Lush Diva Laura feels guilty about drinking and makes attempts to stop, and even Our Villain Bartell has motivations that aren't completely sinister and nonsensical). Really, the only character that comes off as a caricature is Omar (Ray Tudor), a hippie love magnet on a wooden raft that someone ends up floating into shore, narrowly avoiding the eaters (and has his chest eaten through from the inside by drinking some of them, in yet another effectively gnarly sequence).

Carson Davidson's cinematography (in what was, shockingly, also his one and only trip behind the lens) is far better than it has any right to be. Director Jack Curtis, was, hilariously, the voice of Pops in the English dub of Speed Racer. One-and-only-CREDIT Julian Stein's much is effective. The screenplay is by comic book writer Arnold Drake, whose only other film credit is the delightfully-named 50,000 BC (Before Clothing). Jack Curtis's cousin Roy Benson did the special effects and his work never appeared on another screen. Hell, even the production company Vulcan Productions was a one-and-done. In fact, it seems like the only position of any importance behind the camera to have a career that lasted more than the week and a half it took to shoot this film is editor Radley Metzger (pulling double-duty on the sound board, and whose credits are almost wholly porn), also doing fantastic work, as the film is a brisk 87 minutes, breezily-paced without being unfulfilling.

The Flesh Eaters isn't perfect (the less said about it's ludicrous and wholly unnecessary finale, the better), but as a B-movie connoisseur, I've sat through far too many movies where it was obvious that no one involved had any idea what they were doing, and honestly, the more names I click on and find one credit to their names, the more I feel shortchanged. There's so many directors, and writers, and composers, and effects men and production houses that pump out crappy film after crappy film after crappy film, and yet, get to keep making them. But with The Flesh Eaters, it seems like everybody gave their best effort, and called it a day.

If you're being scared away by the fact that it sounds too much like Cabin Fever, don't fret; that film is about as scary as a watermelon. Anyone who considers themselves a fan of trash, of exploitation, or grindhouse fare, you own it to yourself to track down a copy of The Flesh Eaters. The DVD has crisp sound, extra scenes, and a transfer so gloriously clean that Criterion couldn't have done a better job (and considering they occasionally release genre pics, all the work would be done for them!), yet another thing that it has going in its favor despite the fact that it has no right to have it so good.

Damn you, Jack Curtis. You are an enigma of missed opportunities. But alas, you were busy fixing the Mach 5, so I guess the blame for this one rests solely on the shoulders of Racer X. Or Chim-Chim.

{Grade: 8.25/10 (B+/B) / #14 (of 28) of 1964}

Suspiria (1977)

Spectacular eye candy mostly supports plot less giallo.

[8/10 · 13 November 2008]

Ah, the giallo. A subgenre so distinct it gets its own name. The origin is Italian, and the films are characterized by unsettling atmosphere, abrupt audio cuts, insane quick-zooms into random objects, and of course, lots of blood. There are three directors that can be referred to as something of a holy trinity of giallo: the Father, Mario Bava, the Son (Lucio Fulci), and he who must be the Holy Ghost, Dario Argento.

Tonight, I consumed Argento's most famous film, Suspiria, the story of an American ballet dancer coming to study abroad at a prestigious academy in Italy. Almost immediately, strange things start happening. I'd go on, but that's literally all the plot we get. The tip on Argento is that he "puts the 'gore' in 'gorgeous'", and boy does this film ever deliver. The start of this film is not the story (watch the trailer, it has nothing to do with the film whatsoever), but the luscious, dazzling visuals. The opening sequence alone is such a sensory explosion; it has so many striking color schemes clashing with each other and somehow working that set decorators and cinematographers could study it for an entire semester. Almost never is naturalistic light utilized, and every scene is bathed in a different synthetic, supernatural light that the film manages to provide almost nothing of substance and still be extremely disquieting.

Then suddenly a blind man is inexplicably murdered by his dog, and the film downshifts into a simultaneous combination infodump/slasher movie, as the mystery was made clear and the film started endlessly killing off cypherous side characters no one cared about. I was still interested in the film, but it was no longer the rapturous, offputting sensuality the film was pumping out by the gallon earlier on.

Italian horror is one of the few areas of the film universe where I am still sorely lacking, so I'm glad to have seen another, and Suspiria was a clear improvement over my first Argento, his underwhelming, diffusive debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. I've seen the handful of really big, famous, obvious ones now, but oddly enough, the best giallo I've seen BY FAR was the least heralded: Pupi Avati's marvelous The House with the Laughing Windows. So that's my hope for this review: If nothing else, I hope it intrigued you enough to see that excellent, underseen flick. Then, if you like that, maybe you can move on to Suspiria.

But get that one first.

{Grade: 8.25/10 (B+/B) / #10 (of 22) of 1977}

Changeling (2008)

Frustratingly one-dimensional morality play.

[5/10 · 9 November 2008]

Among the most popular types of shows on television are shows about forensic criminology. CSI and all its fictional brethren get the ratings, but for me, the cream of the crop is Forensic Files on the former CourtTV. Since they're relegated to the world of the real, outlandish stories are usually few and far between, and they aren't particularly adept at misdirection (the first person accused is almost never vindicated), and yet, I prefer it over similar shows thanks to excellent pace, presentation and personality, namely the startling delivery of narrator Peter Thomas, a man with a voice that could make children playing hopscotch terrifying. This show continually came to mind throughout the extensive length of Clint Eastwood's Changeling, a film that disappointingly lacks both ghostly red balls and Odo and the Founders.

The film deals with a telephone operator in 1927 whose son goes missing, and is the victim of a police cover-up when they return a boy that isn't her own, and attempt to discredit her as crazy. When creating a film based upon a true story, you always run the risk that the story will be overly familiar to some audience members (I made it a point to avoid any and all details so as not to spoil it for myself), so, as stated, it comes down to pace, presentation and personality, and the film only partly succeeds. The opening jaunt through town in 1927 was wonderful in its feelings of the ordinary, the mundane; it's just life, and it was lovingly created. But this feeling quickly wore off, and the film soon became ordinary itself, the visuals becoming a drab non-issue. As for the other two P's, the film failed on all counts. Angelina Jolie turned on the wailing histrionics almost immediately, and her delivery and emotion ran false throughout (also, I was never, ever able to see the character, all I saw was Angelina). John Malkovich sleepwalked through his sparse character, with Jeffrey Donovan bringing up the abominable rear (the Lucky Charms leprechaun is a most believable Irish man).

Pertaining to pace, one look at the film's length should tell you all you need to know. Eastwood gives it a sort of three-act structure, none of which ring anything but contrived. In the first, Jolie screams MY SON MY SON MY SON and all the one-dimensional villains scream YOU'RE CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY, in the second, it's the same story, except she's in a mental hospital. The third becomes a sort of double court drama, and features not only its one moment of intrigue, but exacerbates exactly why this film doesn't work as a whole. Eastwood's cowboy origins show through in the characterization, as not a single character in the entire film is given an even two-dimensional shade. Jolie is so idealized I'm surprised her character wasn't sacrificed so she could float to heaven. In her presence, every other character becomes undershown. Malkovich is but a plot machination to spring her from the pen, and S.S. Hahn breezes in, has a righteous, and did I mention pro bono shoutdown. On the flipside, Chief Davis and J.J. Jones are so single-mindedly ignorant that Bud White would have whipped their asses on the spot, and Gordon Northcott is so preposterously, snivelingly evil that I'm amazed they allowed him to avoid a lengthy mustache for him to twirl.

Northcott's eventual denouement is all the more frustrating considering the film's one fleeting moment of worthwhile commentary: the convicted murderer's speech about how he had been railroaded, and never given a chance by a single person in the courtroom save for Jolie, who had never badmouthed him to the press, and never made any sort of announcement of judgment towards him. This comment made me confront my own feelings, as I too had convicted this man right off the bat, ignoring his every plea, rationalizing every claim he made as a falsehood, after having spent an entire film with a woman who was the victim of the exact same treatment. Unfortunately, this was but fleeting as the very next segment turns him into a blithely uncooperative kvetch, subsequently confirming his guilt in a scene so plainly obvious that it's not even treated as a surprise.

Changeling seems to have inclinations to not only win a lot of Oscars (and don't think I didn't make a joke during the film's credits about how we should have gone to see It Happened One Night at the Royal instead), but to be mentioned in the same breath as other legendary neo-noirish looks at the seedy side of old Los Angeles like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, but those films were brilliantly scripted, breathlessly paced, and had characters that, if perhaps leaning one way or another, were all real people with real feelings and real motivations, and despite the fact that Changeling is based on a true story, none of the characters ever rang true for more than a moment, and I was a step ahead at every opportunity. I can tear up at the drop of the hat, a sucker especially for court dramatics, but even Matthew Harrison Brady was a man first, and "she wasn't thrown in, she was escorted"? Not even E.K. Hornbeck could be that heartless.

{Grade: 5/10 (C) / #51 (of 80) of 2008}

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

A gross overcorrection in tone provides the same result.

[5/10 · 7 November 2008]

Well, here we are, in possibly the most unique situation in film history: a film that is simultaneously a remake, a sequel, a new adaptation, an adaptation functioning as a sequel, a sequel functioning as a remake, and you could add the word "pseudo" to everything in the paragraph.

'The Incredible Hulk', as it stands, exists because of the film it precedes, Ang Lee's oft-criticized 'Hulk', a film that had the gall to take a comic book hero whose main characteristic is that he smashes things, and give him a backstory and character development, in an attempt to add some depth to the usual action movie histrionics. Unfortunately, he failed miserably, as there is both too much chatter and worse, almost all of it is the same sort of generic, familiar pap that all comic book films have. It wasn't any smarter or more intellectual than the other films of its ilk, it just wanted you to think it was because it treated what most entries use as montages as the main action, and the action scenes as short punctuation in between blocks of text.

Needless to say, the mainstream, people who hate dialogue-heavy films when they DO possess intelligence and depth, hated this pseudo-intellectual, hideously over-directed nonsense, and Marvel realized if they wanted to continue, they were going to have to do a reboot. Unfortunately, when they rebooted, the filmmakers (and presumably their backers) panicked, and overcompensated the other way, removing any and all traces of character development, and merely making it a string of action sequences, with a bland throw-in romance that isn't developed past base. The opening sequence is actually surprisingly well-done, but once they begin to chase him, I felt my attention start to wane, and the film never regained the goodwill I felt for it early.

In the acting department, Edward Norton is certainly a step up from Eric Bana, but he's given much of the same bland platitudes, without much of the overabundance of whining that Bana had to slog through, so really, although Bana's effect on me was certainly negative, it's more to speak of than Norton's effect on me, which was almost wholly negligible, because a good actor can only be a good actor if you actually give him worthwhile material, and it's just not here. Liv Tyler is just as much a useless wet blanket as Jennifer Connelly was half a decade ago, but Jennifer Connelly was far more attractive, so I guess that's a downgrade? Speaking of downgrades, the one person that really was fully-formed, refreshingly realistic and well-acted in 'Hulk' was Sam Elliott as General Ross. It was really neat to see him play someone who wasn't just the usual Military Man who is just constantly yelling to shoot clip after clip after clip into the hero, and it was too bad to see him get stuck in such a lame flick. Well, William Hurt takes over the role here, and sadly, he has been turned into exactly the sort of ineffectual, gung-ho, bullet-abuser that it was refreshing to see Elliott go away from, and he also fades without any impact. In supporting roles, Tim Roth and Tim Blake Nelson are solid in smaller roles, but other than a few choice lines here and there, aren't really given anything to really unleash a character from.

The film's action climax and its extra final scene tie it inseparably with this spring's 'Iron Man', another film that was critically and commercially acclaimed, and underwhelmed me with its laziness and mediocrity. 'Iron Man', though, at least had a charismatic centerpiece character, and although I grew completely tired of his shtick by the end of that film, it was still a positive point to hang its hat on. This film has no such centerpiece, despite the presence of a better actor, and suffers for it.

Also, the fact that that film had the same sort of 'gathering and joining up' final scene means without question that these are all leading up to a movie sometime in the future which may very well be the biggest comic book movie ever made. I can only hope that by then, they took the time to craft realistic, thought-out characters, an original storyline, and yet, still realize that at the end of the day, we'd all like, not just explosions, not just exposition, but a balanced diet of depth AND destruction, and when that happens, you'll have your comic book masterpiece, something that 'The Incredible Hulk' surely ain't.

{Grade: 5/10 (C) / #45 (of 79) of 2008}

Snow Angels (I) (2007)

Dourly predictable monotony.

[4/10 · 12 October 2008]

"Were you f-cking her when I called you?" "What? No! She's *fat*." There are a lot of bridges to other recent material to be found on the surface of Snow Angels. Director David Gordon Green also helmed the ganja giggler Pineapple Express, Michael Angarano was just as blank-faced and dumb-looking as the token White Hope in The Forbidden Kingdom, Olivia Thirlby was the massive weak link in last year's best film Juno, and Sam Rockwell was just in the very Sam Rockwellian Choke. Plus, I always confuse Kate Beckinsale with Liv Tyler, if that counts. But it's thematically where the most notable bridge is crossed, bringing to mind two films from opposite ends of the quality spectrum: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams and Todd Field's Little Children.

Both are incredibly dour weepers that have essentially ensemble casts intermingling with one another in unexpected ways that will invariably end in brutal depression for the viewer, just like Snow Angels. All three of these films deal with sex, relationships, murder, tragedy and born-again Christianity, and all three are incredibly melodramatic. Shockingly, only the thoroughly mediocre Inarritu realized that his story, played straightforward and straight through, would be a laughable artificial dirge, and instead edited it into spiraling obfuscation, revealing its plot points gradually for maximum efficiency. On the flipside, Little Children was a tired and obvious suburban satire that used children overridingly like cheap ploys to force the tears, and descended into banality because its sourpuss mood set a pall from which the film never recovered. Snow Angels is a bit more realistic with its setting, but that same blanket of bitter inevitability spoils absolutely any effectiveness this feel could have brought forth, and turns the film into a monotonous waiting game, staring down your watch until The Tragedies begin occurring.

What makes this especially frustrating is that I know Gordon Green CAN do exactly the sort of downbeat lyrical realism he was aiming for. George Washington is a gorgeous and enveloping masterpiece that features a familiar plot elevated to a gorgeous glory. Snow Angels has not a single shred of anything approaching this feeling. Kate Beckinsale doesn't feel like she exists in this film, Sam Rockwell has a thankless cardboard derivation of Benicio Del Toro's 21 Grams character, and speaking of thankless, Amy Sedaris and Nicky Katt have the closest thing to interesting reality in the film, and even they get dipped in the film's dirty spittoon.

The film is wall-to-wall plodding coincidences, featuring damaged relationships all around, with a generic and forgettable teenage romance thrown into the middle, starring the unceasingly bland Angarano and the adorable but useless Thirlby. It's just as obvious and predictable as the rest of the film, but at least it's sort of pleasant, and doesn't involve anywhere NEAR as much eye-rolling. Oh yes, my poor little eyes, they have not had to sit through this much painful rolling since I got a Crystal Skull smashed over my head. Then Griffin Dunne shows up, and I realize the film can't even maintain THAT story's good will.

Goddamnit, Sam Rockwell as a lead, plus Amy Sedaris, Griffin Dunne and Nicky Katt supporting? Come on, D-double-G, how could you? How could you waste the two of them in something that isn't a brilliantly wicked black comedy? Put Tom Noonan in more than a glorified cameo and you've got a cast that is begging for a film full of dark, mocking goodness. But no, we get this wasteful, predictable, watch-shattering monotony, and there is no darkness, no goodness; That just leaves the mocking.

{Grade: 4/10 (C-) / #60 (of 77) of 2008}