TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM

It has mostly been the case that this blog does not trade in the review and analysis of classic films, for any number of good and bad reasons. But a perfect storm of impulses struck me in the last couple of weeks, and thus I find myself launching a new feature that I will play with for a month or two, grow increasingly weary of and eventually abandon: Sunday Classic Movies!

Of course, the first problem with this idea is that I'm launching it on a Monday.

See, I was going to do this last week with a different film, but Thanksgiving and my parents' computer got all up my ass, and then I didn't do it this weekend because I was far too busy playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which is pretty much the best video game in the best video game franchise of all time, which ought to make it the best video game ever, but I can't quite bring myself to say THAT.

Anyway: my first Sunday Classic Movie. No advocacy, just taking a film I saw for the first time recently, and trying to figure out what makes it work the way it does. This will, I hope, be the first of about eight that I'll write until, upset by the time it takes and the pronounced lack of comments, I go back to wishing that Liberality for All starts publishing again because those? were great fun to write about.


The first film made by Krzysztof Kieślowski outside of his native Poland, La double vie de Véronique [The Double Life of Veronique] has only ever been available in fits and starts in the US, until the release of a Criterion Collection DVD two weeks ago. A crying shame, and somewhat suprising given the director's canonisation by the cinephiliac community. But what matters is that it's here, and it's fantastic.

Custom dictates that when one writes about a film - any film, for any reason - one begins with a precis of its story, and this I shall not do. I shall instead begin with what I believe to be the most striking and significant part of the film, and that is the score composed by Zbigniew Preisner. The stunningly comprehensive booklet included in the Criterion set confirms what would have been obvious anyway, that the score and screenplay were more or less composed together. In a way, the film looks forward to Kieślowski's next film, Trois couleurs: Bleu, in which the entire plot, and much of the look of the film are driven forward by the MacGuffin of a Preisner-composed overture. But I shall take a step further: Véronique as a motion picture is wholly subordinate to its score. The story of the film, the look of the film, and the emotional beats of the film, are all there to flesh out what is already present in Preisner's "Concerto in E Minor," composed under his common Kieślowski-film pseudonym of Van den Budenmayer.

I will not embarass myself by trying to coherently describe the music, save to point out that it is highly Romantic and thanks to being in a minor key it's somewhat dark, emotionally. It is a chorale, and these lyrics are from Dante:

"O voi che siete in piccioletta barca,
desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti
dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

"Non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse,
perdento me, rimarreste smarriti.

"L'acqua ch'io prendo già mai non si corse;
Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo,
e nove Muse mi dimostran l'Orse."

(Paradiso II.1-3, 5-9)

The Princeton Dante Project informs us that these lines translate as:

"O you, eager to hear more,
who have followed in your little bark
my ship that singing makes its way,

"Do not set forth upon the deep,
for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.

"The seas I sail were never sailed before.
Minerva fills my sails, Apollo is my guide,
nine Muses point me toward the Bears."

It is worth pointing out that Kieślowski was unaware of the meaning of the words in Preisner's song, and Preisner himself didn't scour the entire Commedia looking for just the right passage; but it is surely not insignificant that he requested a translation before he began work on the composition. The lines are not necessarily important for understanding Véronique (although the line "losing sight of me, you would be lost" is deliciously suggestive in that respect), but they are important for understanding the "Concerto," which is important for understanding the film. I will not expound upon the music any further, being intellectually unable, but I hope that anyone reading this in preparation for the film, or after viewing it, will be able to use these lines to their benefit (they're not all that easy to come by).

So the film and its score, intertwined and inseparable; and what then is the film? In short, it is the story of a young Polish woman (how young we are not told exactly) named Weronika and a young French woman named Véronique, both played by the Swiss actress Irène Jacob and both apparently the same person. A paper could be written solely on the ways in which Kieślowski shows us how they women are identical, but the ones that seem to me the most significant are that both are beautiful singers, with an attachment to the same concerto; both are introduced near the end of a sex act that is found to be emotionally empty but fun and fulfilling nevertheless; both suffer from a heart condition, and this is where the film really gets going: after Weronika sees Véronique, her heart begins to worsen, and she ultimately drops dead of a heart attack in the middle of a performance. Véronique instinctively realises this and immediately retires from singing.

A quick trip through the internet tubes reveals that for a great many people, this puts the film squarely in the realm of fantasy and metaphor. Spend two minutes at the IMDb message boards, and you'll find the phrase "dream logic" used about 15 times. While I will certainly not tell those viewers that they are wrong - and can there be any "wrong" way to love a film? - it doesn't strike me that it's very necessary. Kieślowski, perhaps just being contrary, denied that any of his films contained any metaphor at all, and while I have some problems with that, it doesn't seem unreasonable to take the story of Véronique at face value: two women are remarkably, even impossibly similar, and they apparently have a spiritual connection. Given the stress the film places on coincidence and contrivance (it's largely a matter of luck that Weronika starts singing, that Weronika and Véronique ever lay eyes on each other, and so on and on), it seems entirely appropriate that the central plot conceit should be so unlikely. Much the same thing goes for the seeming metaphors: there is no reason not to assume that the film is drenched in rich symbolism, but it's very hard to argue that it improves as anything other than an intellectual exercise. There is a figure in Dekalog who is self-evidently based on Christ, but as the director once wrote, "I don't know who he is; just a guy who comes and watches us, our lives. He's not very pleased with us." This is not terribly satisfying on the level of plot, but I defy anyone who has seen that series to think upon that quote and not conclude that, somehow, it seems pretty much just about right.

This is the unique genius of Kieślowski and his co-writer, Krzysztof Piesiewicz: their ideas "feel right." It doesn't matter necessarily that anything is realistic or representational, it is that everything in their scripts contributes to the emotional truth of a moment. For Dekalog to work, there must be someone watching. It doesn't matter who. Anything in a Kieślowski that doesn't matter is absent. It doesn't matter whether Weronika and Véronique are in fact the same person, the same soul, or just an extraordinary coincidence. What matters is that their situation exists, and the emotional truths that are revealed about each woman.

What those emotional truths are, I will leave untouched. It is an act of sheer perversity to inform someone how they ought to experience a Kieślowski film. I can say what it is about: it is about Véronique's fear of death, and how she abandons her passion, singing, to save her life. It is thereafter about her relationship with a literal puppetmaster, who proves his love by making two puppets modeled after Véronique (the film's only misstep, if I can even use such a harsh word; although using needlessly literal imagery is not necessarily a sin Kieślowski could always avoid, and thus we have Trois couleurs: Rouge. I do not mean to say that this is always or ever bad, just that it is literal). My own view is that Véronique exchanges happiness for safety, and that from the moment she acknowledges the presence of Destiny (by qutting her singing, she admits that she is destined to die from it), she abandons her own free will. This is seen in the way that she is controlled by her lover/Kieślowski - both have created two women-figures that must do what they dictate - and then how she ultimately abandons her responsibilities and adult life entirely by returning to her father, her father's machines, and her father's trees (all of this in Weronika's father's drawing, as it turns out). The beautiful thing is that your reading might be altogether different, and that is fine; Véronique is nothing if not a Rosarch test.

Music - story - and there is a third strand that makes up Véronique, and just like the music-tail wags the story-dog, so too does Slawomir Idziak's cinematography seemingly take on its own life, as though the script is there merely to explicate the imagery. Idziak worked with Kieślowski in the seventies, and not again until episode five of Dekalog, later expanded into A Short Film About Killing, and he would thereafter shoot all of the director's remaining films Bleu. I mention this primarily because Véronique and Dekalog piec are conscious inversions of each other: the earlier film shot using a green filter to make the already grimy streets of Krakow look positively sick, and the later using a yellow filter to make the world warmer and more comforting. And, it must be said, hazier, and if any element of Véronique is truly dream-like, it would have to be its appearance. The film simply does not look like our world, and while this is good for the story - it makes it easier to believe the fantastic and melodramatic elements of the plot - it is good on its own terms. It supercedes the story, for while the script suggests how youth is a component of Weronika/Véronique's view on the world, the cinematography states it outright. It is, if such a thing can be said, an idealistic-looking film: nothing is grim or gloomy, no matter what is being depicted; everything is fresh and living. Indeed it is the most lively of any Kieślowski film, one of the most lively films of the past twenty years. The absurd and highly un-film-school thought that I had while watching the film is one I shall now share: the camera seems very happy that it is a camera.

I have no resolution; what resolution can there be when discussing a work of open-ended metaphysics and emotion? I will instead offer only one observation: Weronika dies after a crescendo on the word "l'Orse," while the film ends on the same crescendo. You who have seen the film will know if this unlocks everything, or nothing, or if it's just a grand coincidence.

DECEMBER 2006 MOVIE PREVIEW

For a month where the best that Hollywood has to offer is supposed to be spewing forth over the cinematic landscape, this is a simply appalling month. Not since...July?...have I looked forward to so few releases.

1.12.2006
If there's a movie that I'm "excited" to see this weekend (there's not), it would have to be Turistas, if only because it will allow me to bookend my year with mediocre splatter films about Ugly Americans. And this one is gender-nonspecific! Although I'm agnostic as to whether that gives me more or less hope.

Lessee, what else...de facto Passion prequel The Nativity Story? Um, no, not even with Catherine Hardwick directing (and that's just a transparent buzz-grabber, anyway). 10 Items or Less? Nah, when you see enough quirky indie films you learn how to tell the wise & good ones apart from the ones too busy masturbating to their own quirkiness, and a good place to to start looking is the title. National Lampoon's Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj? Christ on a cracker, I think not.

8.12.2006
Mel Gibson is a bad person. Maybe even an evil one. And I'm not hardly an apologist for anti-Semites.

But a fact is still a fact, and the fact is that he's a phenomenal director. I would ask you to consider Braveheart, candidly. Yes, it's a wingnut's dream, and yes, it has a problematic depiction of women and a hateful view of homosexuality. Gently set that to one side, and look at the battle scenes. Tell me honestly that they're not a thousandfold times better than any of the sequences Ridley Scott or Peter Jackson shamelessly copied from them.

And that's why I'm going to see Apocalypto.

Elsewhere: Nancy Meyers spreads her heteronormative filth with The Holiday, which actually does look kind of sweet (and stars Kate Winslet), and this is why she is such a dangerous filmmaker; Edward Zwick continues wasting huge sums of studio money on idiotic colonial-friendly epics with Blood Diamond; and Unaccompanied Minors has an extremely cumbersome title and that makes me cease entirely to care about its content.

15.12.2006
It may be a heartwarming, Oscar-friendly story about rising above adversity and being black, and it may win Will Smith a nomination, but I cannot be the only person whose primary interest in The Pursuit of Happyness is as to whether or not they explain that hideous, deliberate misspelling. I shudder every time I see the poster.

A couple for the kiddies, or the idiotic, or ideally both: a live-action remake of Babe adaptation of Charlotte's Web wastes the proverbial "voice cast of thousands" (Julia Roberts! Steve Buscemi! Oprah! Robert Redford!) on the latest attempt by that foul little imp Dakota Fanning to take over the world; and pitiful little Eragon, which in this crowded season will make about three bucks and vanish, its only triumph to once again tie Jeremy Irons' once-proud name to a crappy fantasy movie about dragons.

20.12.2006
I know I've called a lot of films "the most unnecessary film of 2006," but I think we finally have the objective winner of that title: Rocky Balboa, the long-unawaited sixth film in the never-good boxing franchise. I need to see this in the same way I needed to see Lady in the Water or Beyond the Sea, just to wrap my mind around the sheer egotism and self-indulgence of Sylvester Stallone directing Sylvester Stallone in the triumphant return of Sylvester Stallone's career-making role. And just wait for next year's Rambo IV...

Yeah, and some twerpy-looking kids' movie starring Ben Stiller from one the director of the Pink Panther remake.

22.12.2006
There is no December film I'm looking forward to more than Clint Eastwood's second WWII film in three months, Letters from Iwo Jima, so of course it's not going to be released in Chicago this year (although as much as its release date is getting pushed around, who can say for sure?). But y'all on the coasts get it today. I loved Flags of Our Fathers, and I have always expected this to be the superior film, and I'm so very sorry if I come off like a fanboy. As I said once upon a time, the mere fact of two Hollywood films doing the "companion" route is exciting all by its lonesome.

The second "Good" film of the year: director Robert De Niro takes on the birth of the CIA in The Good Shepherd. Director. Robert. De. Niro. Great cast, but ask me why I'm worried. Being a good director doesn't rub off on you, no matter how many Scorsese films you've been in, and Bobby's best acting days are well behind him.

Also: We Are Marshall, yada yada yada inspiring sports film, directed by McG of all damn people. Peter O'Toole's last best hope for a competitive Oscar, Venus (fair is fair, I think this will actually be a good film; at least it has a good director). And, Zhang Yimou retreats from the low-tech career renaissance of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles with another pretty-looking wuxia bloat-a-thon, Curse of the Golden Flower.

25.12.2006
Ho, ho, ho. I'm going to have to see one of these damn things on Christmas Day (family tradition and all that), and I'm probably angling to make it the third and final "Good" film of the year: Steven Soderbergh's The Good German, an homage to the films and filmmaking styles of 1940s Hollywood, AKA "The Best Period in American Cinema Ever." Soderbergh's films are guaranteed to be interesting, but that is not necessarily a mark of quality. Fingers crossed that it can be as tasty as the trailer.

Alfonso Cuarón is a genius, and that is why I will not prejudge Children of Men based on its loopy premise or loopier trailer (sample line: "Nobody's been happy since women stopped having babies." I paraphrase). I do love how the ads trumpet "the director of Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" right next to each other. Moving along: Dreamgirls, a musical adapted from the Broadway masterpiece that I had never heard of before this film's ad campaign, as directed by the overrated middlebrow auteur Bill Condon, and presumptive Best Picture frontrunner. And a remake of Black Christmas, which I'm honestly kinda excited about. Don't look at me that way!

27.12.2006
I can't imagine the rationale behind opening a film the Wednesday after a Monday holiday, but here you go: Perfume by Tom Tykwer, who I generally like, adapting a novel that none other than Stanley Kubrick called "unfilmable," and when someone like Kubrick calls a book "unfilmable," it might be a good idea to trust him, non? Elsewhere, Judi Dench non-earns her 98th Oscar nomination with the apparently lesbianic soap opera Notes on a Scandal, whose trailer makes it look like a mashup of every idea every other film has ever had.

29.12.2006
Running a tight second behind Letters, the film I'm looking forward to the most has to be Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. Check out the trailer. Goddamn. I said, goddamn that looks nice.

Sienna Miller tries to play an Andy Warhol muse in Factory Girl, and that's kind of an inspired idea in the meta-narrative sense, but the girl can't act, and I've never heard of the director. And rounding out the weekend and the year, a floppy-looking period remake starring Naomi Watts: The Painted Veil.

¡VIVA PEDRO!

I want very badly to call Volver the best film I've seen in 2006, and it might actually be the best film I've seen in 2006, but the problem is that it's simultaneously the worst film by Pedro Almodóvar in almost ten years, and somehow, that manages to quash it.

The bigotry of high expectations.

I don't like to look at the overriding themes of calendar years - it always strikes me as indulgent and wankery - but it strikes me that in 2006, the two most joyful films I've seen, Volver and A Prairie Home Companion, are both explicitly about death. It's not surprising, really; what better way to encourage a life lived in a state of delight than the reminder that it ends? (Certainly, the recent death of APHC director Robert Altman has left me extraordinarily glad that his last film was a celebration of life, rather than a typically cynical exercise in misanthrophy). Of course, Almodóvar hardly needs to be reminded that life his joyful: even when his films treat on rape, abandonment, abuse, murder, you name it, they have always been blissfully and exuberantly cinematic, and this is why we worship him (those of us who do).

What makes Volver special in the context of his recent career is that it is basically a comedy. Todo sobre mi madre, Hable con ella and La mala educación* are all fun and lovely and playful, but they are all tragedies. Even though it is propelled forward by the death of a lovely old woman, involves the wasting cancerous death of a dear friend, and largely concerns the gulf between a woman and her dead mother's ghost, Volver is at all points light and guileless. To leave his recent films is to feel transendence in the beauty of their anguish; to leave this latest is to feel simply happy.

I suppose that this is its "problem" - and I put problem in scare quotes because the film is still something close to a masterpiece - it is not so serious and epic, and therefore it is less cathartic. There is no doubt that it is emotionally rich, but it is also emotionally limited. The morning is that much more beautiful because it follows the night, we are told, and Volver is not so exhaustively wonderful as Almodóvar's immediately preceding works because it does not require so much from its audience.

But how dare I come this far along with only complaints? This is a great film. There are no two ways about it. It is a story about the emotional strength and fortitude of women, the great Almodóvar muse, but never has he made a film so wholly absent any men or masculine viewpoint (and let me be yet another reviewer to point out: La mala educación, his most male-centric film ever is also his darkest; Volver, his most female-centric, is his lightest film in ages). The seeming paradox of a gay man who loves women so deeply has been often noted, but it is simply part of the unbridled love for all things in life that so totally permeates the film.

I don't want to get bogged down in a description of the knotty plot, so quickly: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas) are sisters whose parents died in a fire in their hometown; Agustina (Blanca Portillo) is a woman living in the town, tending to Raimunda and Sole's aunt; Paula (Yohana Cobo) is Raimunda's daughter who stabs her father to death while defending against his rapacious advances; and Irene (Carmen Maura) is the dead mother who stows away in Sole's trunk to resolve some dark issues with her daughters before she can pass.

Heightened reality much?

For all its metaphysical trappings, this is a very earthy and intimate story about the trust between generations and familial love. We figure out quickly that Irene's reason for returning is her shattered relationship with Raimunda, which is neatly parallaled by and contrasted with the fierce protection Raimunda feels towards Paula. It takes a long time for that to advance, but this is not a sign that the film is boring or slow, rather that it is honest: these are people, and people are scared and tentative. It makes their ultimate and rather predicatble reunion that much sweeter when it occurs. Along the way, Almodóvar fills the screen with short comedic bursts that have little to do with the plot and everything to with showcasing how desperately he loves women in all their glory. It approaches and perhaps even surpasses the treatment of the same theme in All About My Mother. Of course, the cast of Volver made history by receiving a joint award for Best Actress at Cannes, and it's easy to see why: every performance is note-perfect, such that it's impossible to pick out a favorite. I will pause to mention that Cruz is only surprising in the context of her American films; she has long proven herself to be a grand actress in her native Spanish.

The joy in the film does not come solely from the story, but from the bright, energetic look of the film. Of course, Almodóvar has always been a great director of color, and in this film his primary motif is red, appearing in every scene and virtually every shot. Red is easily the most emotionally loaded of all colors, and in Volver it is used to represent everything you could think: passion, love, death, vitality. I find myself thinking of an early scene during a funeral, where the parade of black-clad mourners pass in front of a bright red car without ever obscuring it; sure the imagery is obvious, but since when did "obvious" mean "ineffective"? And as in any Almodóvar film, you could write a thesis about his flawless use of the frame (no living director earns that 2.35:1 aspect ratio so consistently) and camera movement, but doing so would be a good way to turn this threatingly long review into a full-fledged essay, and nobody really needs that. Anyway, I couldn't do it on a single viewing.

A note on the title: "volver" means roughly "coming back," and that has all sorts of meanings both within the film (which I leave as an exercise to the viewer), and without it: Almodóvar's return to lighter material, to the rural villages of his youth, Cruz's return to Spanish film, Maura's return (and how!) to the films of her former director. Almodóvar has always titled his films well, but rarely with such economy of meaning.

And now I will end where the film ends: the final line of dialogue, which I will not spoil, is perfect. So perfect, that when I heard it I thought, "that is going to be the last line of this movie, and when the screen fades to black and I am proven right, I am going to expire of satisfied delight." About 20 seconds later, the screen faded, and I am still alive to type this, so I was not completely correct; but I did sigh, long and happily, and not that anyone cares, but I think there's little doubt that this is the emotionally truest ending of any film this year.

9/10

*Almodóvar's titles are so much nicer in the original Spanish, ¿no es?

PENGUINS UNITED AGAINST THE MAN

According to the invariably-correct Wikipedia, 2006 has borne witness to the highest number of theatrically released animated features in Hollywood's history, and the great majority of those involved sassy CGI animals behaving like humans in obnoxious and unamusing ways. What a relief - and honestly, a thrill - that the final animated film of the year, which does include sassy CGI animals who do act like humans, is neither obnoxious nor unamusing, but is rather at the very top of the pack as both the best cartoon and the best family film of 2006.

And yet, "family film" is hardly the phrase I want to use to describe Happy Feet, the latest film from George Miller, the director of such rosy family fare as Mad Max and Lorenzo's Oil, or perhaps more to the point, the dystopic and sometimes frightening Babe: Pig in the City. Here is a "family film" dealing with sex, social revolution, fundamentalism and in the discordant third act, overfishing in Antarctica.

I really want to get back to that last point, but in its proper place. Let me start by saying that Happy Feet is the kind of movie that can open with emperor penguins singing pop music to each other, and it can treat this with the deathly solemnity of a religious ritual. Because it is religious, after a fashion: in short order, we learn that this act - the singing of "heartsongs" - is a major component of how the penguin world works, how the society can ensure the constant approval of the Great Guin, who in turn rewards them with bountiful harvests.

Anyway, two penguins fall in love and have an egg. During the long winter (a short sequence that is, surprisingly, the only sign that the filmmakers saw March of the Penguins, that and, y'know, all the penguins) the egg undergoes a mishap and the result is Mumble (voiced as a baby by Elizabeth Daily, as an adolescent by Elijah Wood), a penguin who can't sing but loves to tap dance, in a series of performances motion-captured by Savion Glover. This shakes the penguin community to its core, and Mumble is ostracized, and eventually banished, blamed for causing the recent fish shortage.

Now, when you find yourself with a concept like this, you don't have to commit to it fully. But Miller does. Wisely, I think, for it keeps the film from becoming a Dreamworks-style boondoggle of wisecracks and parody. For all that it contains plenty of real humor (make no mistake, it's a comedy), Happy Feet is perfectly serious about its world. This is a story that takes place in an entirely coherent fantasy universe. When penguins start talking like Latino street toughs, or belt out Queen's "Somebody to Love," we believe it because Miller believes it. This is, by a far margin, the most sincere animated film in ages, and infinitely better for it.

The film is the child of many influences, but I think the most prominent is Moulin Rouge, and not just because of Nicole Kidman's breathy and mostly ineffective Marilyn Monroe-inflected performance of momma penguin Norma Jean. Like Baz Luhrmann, Miller uses pop music, nearly wall-to-wall, to create a heightened reality. If anything, Happy Feet uses music better than the earlier film, because its reality is already so heightened. Music is used to anchor the audience, to give us a connection to an alien world while simultaneously underlining its alienness. It might be the best-utilised soundrack of the year.

Given this extraordinarily sincere and full world, Miller does the only thing he can do, which is treat it like an epic. Not just in its running time (almost two hours) nor its scope (it begins and ends with shots of the earth spinning in space), but its scale. It is full of wide spaces and huge vistas, never going for the close-up when an aerial shot is available. I have never seen a CGI film with such a sense of grandness, not even in Pixar's more ambitious efforts (Pixar anyways being a studio more at home with the domestic and intimate). Happy Feet is a film David Lean might have directed if he were an animator. And a penguin fancier.

I said it's not much of a family film, and I stand by that, even though it has some of the ingredients. Which is not to say it's forbiddingly adult: Robin Williams is utterly goofy in two roles (fellow Williams-haters: it's far and away his best performance in any medium since Aladdin), there are plenty of playful action sequences, and there's even a fart joke, although thankfully (surprisingly), only one. But, like the Babe films (the first one scripted by Miller), there is a forthright acknowledgement of the darker side of things, even when that goes to grim and scary places. And it takes an adult perspective to grasp all the nuances of the amazingly subtle script, such as (to pluck one example), the way that the film opens with the Beatles' "Golden Slumbers" and closes with "The End," and how this is not a pop-cultury bit of jokery, but a significant element of the story's development.

And then there's the third act, in which George Miller introduces the little ones to the marvels of anti-globalism. Now, I'm as raving a Chomskyite as you'll ever hope to see, but even I can't see the logic of taking a fable about self-identity and adding a great heap of propaganda against the fishing industy. Is overfishing bad? Hell yes! Is overfishing and its place in the global economy a heavy and confusing topic for a kids' movie? Maybe not if the kids are really fucking smart. It's a completely inappropriate insertion, it makes no sense in the context of the film, and it wastes Andrew Lesnie, an overrated but talented cinematographer, on three minutes of footage of live human beings. If it weren't for the way that Miller and his co-writers used this grotesque alien force to create genuinely exciting setpieces, it would threaten to topple the movie entirely. As it is, it just makes for some dumbfounded conversations on the way out of the theater.

9/10

A BAR TOO HIGH

It's certainly not the case that For Your Consideration is an unfunny movie. Look, there's the poster over there on the left, and longtime readers know that can only mean one thing: "this is worth spending money on."

But it's next to impossible to deny that it's much the weakest of the films by the Christopher Guest Stock Company, the brilliant improvisateurs behind three of the funniest comedies of the last twenty years: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind.

There are at least a couple of obvious reasons why that's the case, but chief among them is Guest & co-writer Eugene Levy's choice of target: the film industry. As we all know, nothing in human history has ever been farther up its own ass than Hollywood, and it's entirely possible that no subject has been satirized in the movies so often as the movies. Guest himself has visited the subject once before, in 1989's The Big Picture, and while For Your Consideration is a significant step up from that drowsy effort, it's still undeniably stale.

The other primary reason that the film doesn't bring the big laughs is that Guest & Co. have never been particularly vicious with their satirical knives, but in this film they are positively gentle. The story (for there is a story; this is no mockumentary, although I tend to doubt that has anything to do with the finished quality) follows two has-been actors (Catherine O'Hare and Harry Shearer) and an indie ingenue (Parker Posey) on the set of a sanitized drama titled Home for Purim, and dealing with an unexpected jolt of Oscar buzz from an anonymous blogger. In a more perfect world, this would be the set-up for positively bloodthirsty mockery: the shallow dreams of terrible performers and the low-brow aims of hack filmmakers practically satirise themselves. But the filmmakers here seem almost...sorry for their subjects, and while I won't call it a case of refusing to bite the hand that feeds them, it's still a pretty gutless treatment of one of the very few segments of humanity that everybody already hates.

I try not to play the "what the movie should have been" game, but this is a case of a film with a shocking number of wasted ideas. The creation of a mock-intellectual Oscar worthy film a la the Marc Fosters and Bill Condons of the world? Fantastic idea, but why then present us with the bizaare Home for Purim and the completely unbelievable collection of random directorial stereotypes, Jay Berman (played by Guest)? What the hell causes someone to cast Ricky Gervais (as a studio exec not terribly far removed from David Brent) and use him in only two short scenes? What's present is certainly amusing, but it's always just around the corner from flat-out hilarious, and the film never quite gets that extra push. The humor is often more of the "hey, that was funny" variety than something you actually laugh at, if you follow me.

Enough of this dismal post-mortem for a film that doesn't deserve it. It's still a Christopher Guest film, and still comprised of his extraordinarily talented stable of actors, and that counts for a great deal. The standout is perhaps Catherine O'Hare, given the biggest and meatiest role, and she plays her character as a pathetic loser who is an object of both sympathy and derision simultaneously, no mean feat. It is one of the delightful ironies of the world that her performance is generating some Oscar buzz itself, and I long to see a For Your Consideration "For Your Consideration" ad. Imagine the cascading meta!

As is usual for these films, the best performances tend to be the small ones: the afore-mentioned Gervais is typically wonderful, and Jennifer Coolidge stands out more than usual as the airheaded producer. I don't know entirely what to make of Ed Begley, Jr's turn as a gay New Age makeup artist, other than to say that it is hysterical. Fred Willard and Jane Lynch are perhaps the highlight of the film, starring in a horrifyingly perfect parody of the Access Hollywood/E! Network gossip "news" shows that are probably more responsible than anything else for ruining Americans' ability to watch films (a close second in the "horrifyingly perfect" race: Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock as utterly idiotic Ebert & Roeper clones).

I was entertained more often than not, even if nothing came within swiping distance of Willard's free-form rants in Best in Show or Guest's immortal line "you people are bastard people!" from Guffman. But I can imagine, ten years hence, people sniffing that nothing in this or that comedy compares to O'Hara's hideous post-surgery grin or Coolidge's suggestion that the marketing take a "cannibal movie" angle. Because it is funny, it's just not "funny ha-ha," you know?

7/10

GOBBLE!

Normal posting will resume once I grow sufficiently sick of having this at the top of my blog.

HAVE NO FEAR, BOND IS HERE

It's a wonderful thing to have ludicrously heightened expectations, and then to see them surpassed. I give you Casino Royale, the best James Bond film since the '60s, starring Daniel Craig as the best James Bond since Sean Connery.

British spy thrillers aren't for everyone, and if the notion of a really top-drawer Bond film doesn't set your heart a-racing, you may as well stop reading. Because for all the many things that Casino Royale does fantastically, it never seeks to rise above its franchise, preferring instead to perfect it. It's certainly the best action film of the year, but for the sizable portion of the audience that can't abide action films, I will not pretend that it's an art film hiding in genre clothes.

As we all know by now, it's an origin story: the tale of how MI6 spy James Bond is promoted to the elite rank of 00-Agent in the British Secret Service; and his first assignment, a poker tournament where he must bankrupt Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), a terrorist financier. What it's not is a male fantasy, like so many of the films preceding it: this Bond is not an elegant GQ model, and he doesn't have fancy toys, and if he's irresistible to women, it's not because of his charm but because of his almost violent raw sexuality. He is a thug, a "blunt instrument" as his superior (quoting creator Ian Fleming) informs him.

Casino Royale is the punk rock version of James Bond. It strips away the bombastic accretion of CGI and idiotic whimsy (invisible car, anyone?) that the series has been wallowing in for years, and returns the concept to its rawest form: a man paid by his government to kill people. If that makes the film sound nasty, that's what it is. It's not the most violent film in the series, but it is certainly the most brutal, and alongside On Her Majesty's Secret Service, it's probably the most depressing.

I don't want to make it seem like it's a slog. On the contrary, precisely because it's so unsparing, it's the most visceral Bond film - hell, action film period - in ages. Watching Pierce Brosnan surf in front of a CGI wave, one can only think, "hey, it's a CGI wave." Compare that to the first major set piece in Casino Royale, wherein Craig chases a gunrunner through a construction site on foot. First off, when was the last time a Bond film had a chase scene on foot? More importantly, everything onscreen is real: the jumping across rooftops, the climbing on cranes in midair, watching Bond generally clomp around with far less grace than action heroes are usually permitted (the scene that stands prominent in my mind: Bond's quarry darts around a sheetrock wall, while Craig bursts right on through it). It's inelegant and bestial and extraordinarily real, and it's the sort of sequence where you can't breathe or blink.

The realness pervades the film: the villain isn't monstrous or mutated, and his ee-vil death trap is shockingly low-key (and disturbing - it's a scene taken directly from the book, and that was already bothersome, but to actually see it...let's just call Casino Royale the best cinematic argument against torture that has ever been made and call it a day); the Bond Girl, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) isn't absurdly sexual or obnoxiously quippy, she's just a sexy accountant. I could go on, but you see the point: everything has been scaled way back, as far back as the relatively quiet Dr. No or From Russia with Love, and this is a prime example of less being more.

The director, Martin Campbell, has worked in the series before, shepherding a one-film renaissance with Brosnan's role debut in GoldenEye. And while that film was well-made, this one is far better. For all that the film has the series' longest running time at 144 minutes, much of that taken up by lengthy poker-playing scenes, there is hardly a flabby or flat moment anywhere. It is one of the most constantly tense of all Bond movies, up until its (fantastic) final line. Would that I could explain how this was effected! But in the theater, I was a fanboy, and fanboys do not pay attention to directorial niceties.

Is there moral complexity? No. Is there any sort of theme at all? Kind of, a fixation on how men turn into animals, but given the presence of script doctor Paul Haggis, it's not at all surprising how unsubtly this is showcased (that said, this is just about the finest work of his career). In fact, for reasons of "art" there's no real reason to see Casino Royale at all. But it is breathtakingly cinematic, and very thrilling, and as much pure fun to watch as anything I've seen this year.

9/10

REQUIEM

Robert Bernard Altman

20 February, 1925 - 20 November, 2006

"What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending."

A HAIRY SITUATION (GET THAT? "HAIRY?" HAHA, I PUN. I HATE MYSELF).

Nothing in the world of cinema is more godforsaken than the biopic, a genre that has probably produced few masterpieces than any other - I could probably name more great slasher films than great biopics. But of course it's not the case that they can't be good, just that they usually aren't.

The new collaboration from director Steven Shainberg and writer Erin Cressida Wilson, their first since Secretary, is just such a good biopic, and this is for a very simple reason that is revealed in the film's full title: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. That is, this is a true story that has been almost completely fabricated.

The side effect (some would call it "unfortunate") is that Fur does not end up telling us anything about the real Arbus, or her art, or her place in the world. (Full disclosure: as recently as one month ago, I didn't know who Arbus was, and outside of a couple of hours spent Googling images, I have absolutely no knowledge of her work). By which account, it's not really a biopic at all, but some sort of hybridized real-world fantasy, a world of monsters and mythic symbolism in 1950s' New York.

There has been a shockingly hostile critical reception to the film, and almost all of seems to revolve around the same small number of complaints: the film is insufficiently accurate, the character psychology makes no sense, the narrative metaphors are too obvious and clumsy. These all miss the mark completely, being that they are all marks against the film's script, and with all requisite apologies to Ms. Wilson, this is not a film for which the neatness of its writing has a whole lot to do with its final appearance. Fur is a film about tone and mood and mise-en-scène, that useful phrase film theorists use when they're not quite certain what they're thinking about. In this case, Shainberg, cinematographer Bill Pope (who worked with Sam Raimi on the not-dissimilar Darkman) and the fantastically-named production designer Amy Danger have created a singularly Gothic version of the 1950s. Not in the Tim Burton sense of weird lines and colors, but in the David Lynch sense of dirtiness, shadows, and a general sense that things are only perfectly normal when you're looking straight at them.

The plot is even somewhat Lynchian, in its mashing of banality with the grotesque: Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is the daughter of wealth, the wife of a middlebrow photographer, and quite dissatisfied with her life. One day she meets Lionel, (Robert Downey, Jr.) a man covered in hair head to foot in hair, who introduces her to a world of physical and sexual freaks. Because she is much more comfortable with them than with her family, she starts taking photographs of abnormal people. That is an A->B->F progression, and part of the reason why, admittedly, the script is not the reason to see the film. Another good reason is the plodding literalness of its metaphors: the fur of the title refers to both the authentic freak Lionel and the shallow, fake people who wear Diane's father's fur coats; Diane's journey is compared explicitly with Alice in Wonderland. And the film does itself no favors whatsoever with a bracingly twee pair of title cards explaining how it's a heavily fictionalized account of events, using the most irritatingly elevated language imaginable.

And again, all that means is: ignore the script. The imagery is so hallucinatory, and the acting (Kidman's primarily, although everyone shows it to some degree) is so curiously detached and flat (in a good way) that the whole thing begins to feel extraordinarily impressionistic and dreamlike. It's form following content, through and through: as Diane slips farther and farther into her strange fantasy world, the film become more and more hazy and disjointed. What's interesting is not the terribly banal observation that Alice in Wonderland applies to Diane, it's that Fur is a sort of sensory rabbit hole for the audience. Is it a grand story? Not at all. But it is a visionary one,* and it bears repeating that for all we think of it as a storytelling medium, the only requirement inherent to Cinema is that it be a visual marvel. Fur is marvelous, and then some.

8/10

*To crib a word from the film's ad campaign, that annoyed the hell out of me until I finally saw it.

THE DAYS OF MIRACLE AND WONDER

(Don't care about video games? Well...be that way).

As Saturday turned to Sunday, I stood in line with 31 other mostly male, mostly white, mostly twentysomethings, for the privilege of picking up a pre-ordered Nintendo Wii. It was wholly worth the midnight line and the one-year wait preceding.

Does anyone not know about the Wii? Nintendo, seeking to regain some of the market share it lost to the mighty Sony Playstation, has opted to sit out the graphics war for this console generation, in favor of gameplay. And to that end, they have designed the most brilliant advance in video game contollers since some forward-thinking individual first you could have buttons and joysticks on the same arcade game: a wireless, motion-sensitive remote pointer. It could have been a boondoggle of a gimmick; but it is not. Oh, how it is not.

I'll get to gameplay in a moment, but first indulge me in a bit of rapture over how delicate and tiny everything is: everything is so delicate and tiny! The system is the size of a trade paperback, the remote is smaller than my hand from wrist to fingertip. It is like a fairy-designed video game. The nunchuck, a peripheral that plugs into the remote, is so light that it hardly seems credible it has electronics at all, let alone a motion sensor. And the sleek whitness of everything makes this, bar none, the best-looking video game console I've ever seen.

As to the games: so far, I've only played three (in what I can only call a mortall sin of omission, I have not yet opened my copy of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz). Of these, the pack-in Wii Sports is the only weak title, and even then it suffers only for being what it was meant to be: a shallow introduction to the controller, the game that would make this the system your grandmother could play.* Of the five sports included, only two - Golf and Boxing - are simply bad. Baseball suffers from a lack of depth (you pitch, or you hit), but it's a little addictive even so. Tennis is a good simulation: the remote is about the right weight for a light tennis racket, and swinging it back and forth feels natural in a way that e.g. swinging the remote like a bat seems "wrong." The standout is Bowling, by far: you swing the remote like a ball, but as it is somewhere around 1/40 of the weight, it's much easier and hence fun. You will not believe that you can put a spin on a plastic remote until you try it.

A much more exciting demonstration of the controller can be found in Rayman Raving Rabbids, a French game starring one of the most annoying characters to ever have a series of platformers. Luckily, the new game is not a platformer, but a collection of mini-games: Mario Party without the dross of being a boardgame simulation. The game was redesigned from the ground up to take the fullest advantage of the new controls, and thus we find hugely imaginative games such as using the nunchuck to pump up a firehouse of carrot juice which you aim with the remote, or drumming along to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" to kill bunnies. Even the ideas that seem a bit more obvious - raising the controls in both hands to operate a handcart, spinning a cow around on a chain (yes, I said "more obvious"; no, I don't know why) - are executed flawlessly. This is the game to break out when friends come over to see this strange new Wii.

Of course, the Big Deal for anyone who knows anyone about the system is The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the most anticipated launch title in Nintendo history and maybe the industry as a whole. Speaking as a longtime worshipper of the Zelda series, I had high expectations, and they were well-surpassed. To begin with, it's beautiful: although the Wii is not much more powerful than a Gamecube (and the other games I've played reflect that), Zelda looks far better than I ever imagined that system capable of - rather amazing considering that it was designed for the Gamecube. It is certainly not so eye-popping as an average XBox 360 title, but the designers use the limitations of the hardware to create a painterly masterpiece.

The game itself is beyond my dreams, to such a degree that I don't really feel qualified to comment on it just yet. It's vast: after more than eight hours, I only managed to get about 15-18% into the game. Maybe less, it's hard to tell. After my epic battle with The Wind Waker (which luckily took place during college & therefore my fifteen hour days, lack of eating and bathing, and fitful sleeping for a week were not permanently damaging, even though I have literally no memory of that time), I was expecting to be amazed at the game's scope; but at a point when I'd be almost through some of the earliest games in the series, I haven't even encountered the main plot yet. It's huge in the most exciting way possible.

And it's perfectly adapted to the Wii. After only a short time with the remote, I can hardly imagine how I could ever go back to using a button to swing a sword or aim a bow; this is the control scheme that 3-D Zelda has been waiting for since 1998. There is only one complaint, and it is not very large: the remote has a built-in speaker, and it is used a great deal in this game, and it sounds awful. In fact, when I was trying to think of what bleeping electronic gizmo sounds as bad as the remote speaker, I couldn't come up with anything. Maybe those novelty talking cards, but probably not even that.

I've spent 30 minutes writing this, which is 30 minutes that I haven't been playing, and that is a bad thing. Not as bad as the thick file of "to review" movies that I want to cover before Thanksgiving...ah, the responsibilities of my busy life.

*I hope to confirm this at Thanksgiving.

THE FIRST GOOD FILM OF 2006

From the advertisements and concept, I expected A Good Year, in which Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe push themselves far outside of their comfort zones, to be a tepid romantic drama. That would have been a fairly mediocre film. It also would have been better than the film that they actually made.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world now has a Scott/Crowe romantic fucking comedy.

In a perverse way, watching Scott direct rom-com and watching Crowe act it is kind of thrilling: it's not merely that they are not in their "zone," so much as they don't actually seem to understand what comedy is. There are moments that are recognizably, undeniably "gags," but they are not remotely funny. This is a film in which that staple of stoopid humor, the dog urinating on a man's shoe, is shot with the solemn intensity of a funeral in a Dreyer film. Another moment witnesses a small European car driving around a roundabout in a sped-up frame rate that is meant to be hilarious, but the effect is horrifying. I was as sad watching that scene as I think I have ever been while watching a movie. It is like seeing the world's worst and most hateful clown.

Part of the reason for the depth of this unfunniness is, ironically, the only thing in the film as it stands that makes it bearable. And that is that A Good Year is based on a book by a Provence tour pimp named Peter Mayle, whose books consist of non-fiction about the French wine country and novels which weld meaningless plots onto celebrations of the French wine country. Which bleeds into A Good Year in the form of some of the most balls-out perfect scenery you will ever see in a motion picture. The French countryside, like the American Southwest or New Zealand, is impossible to ruin on film, but that does not mean that a gifted cinematographer cannot make it look unacceptably beautiful, and in this case we have Philippe Le Sourd to thank for the most postcard-lovely movie of 2006.

With the good thing out of the way, I might as well address the bad things, and they are many...Crowe plays Max Skinner, a venal asshole who trades stock in London. When Max's beloved Uncle Henry (Albert Finney, wasted in a glorified cameo) dies, Max inherits the old man's estate and vineyards. Upon travelling, he meets the most gorgeous woman in France (Marion Cotillard), eats good food, relaxes, wants for nothing, and plans to sell the whole shebang to the first bidder, because he is an Ee-vil Capitalist. But wait! What's that on the horizon? Why, could it be love come to turn Max's head and teach him that it's not that the place doesn't suit his life, it's "Your life that doesn't suit this place."*

Thus Max goes along on his utterly predictable redemption, while Scott films flirtation scenes like he's making a documentary about Auschwitz. It's not merely that his touch is not light: it is more ponderous and airless than any of his films, from the bloody fields of Gladiator to the nightmarish filthy hole of his last good film, Blade Runner. Comedy is a serious business, we are told, but never has it been this clear that the director had an unpleasant time doing his job. To say nothing of Crowe, hardly a comedian, whose only apparent motivation for being here is to apologise to the world for certain phone-throwing proclivities. But his attempts at roguish playful charm are horrible to witness, and frankly make us long for the wanton immoral violence of his real life. I have probably seen comedies and comic actors which are less funny than this, but never, ever for the reason that the filmmakers are apparently clinically depressed.

When I see movies that I know are going to be bad, it's usually because I'm wearing my filmmaker hat, not my cinephile hat. In other words, I learn what not to do. And in this case, I learned a whole lot:
-Don't make a movie based on a travel guide author's novel.
-Don't cast homicidal Aussies as romantic leads.
-Don't watch Night and Fog the day before you shoot the dog-pissing scene.
-Don't make poor Harry Nilsson turn over in his grave by using his songs as the metaphoric signifier of your hero's nostalgia.
-Don't think that jokes about people getting bitten by scorpions get funnier because they are repeated four times.
-People with French accents are not automatically funny.
-People with Indian accents are not automatically funny.
-Australians with English accents are definitely not automatically funny.
-For the love of God and His little angels, when the only thing that's remotely good about your film is the scenery, don't keep cutting to London in a rainstorm.

3/10

*That a verbatim line of dialogue from Marc Klein's helpless screenplay, and I'm sad to report that it's far from being the worst.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH

The short version: Babel is a punishingly long movie.

This is not an easy thing for me to say. I adored Amores Perros, director Alejandro González Iñárritu's first collaboration with writer Guillermo Arriaga, and while I had problems with their second film, 21 Grams, I still enjoyed it and recognised it as the product of one of the Americas' most inspired stylists.

None of that in Babel. It's a blustery misfire with a severely overrated sense of its own importance - perhaps the most truly pretentious film of the year, by the strict definition of that word - and it's time-skipping structure has at long last turned Arriaga and González Iñárritu into self-parodists.

Easily the most frustrating aspect of the film is that its sin is not, as is so often the case (even in these filmmakers' prior collaborations), that it allows style to trump meaning. In fact, Babel suffers from the exact oppostite problem: while it is ostensibly about communication in the modern world, that theme apparently seemed insufficiently ambitious, and so the scenarists decided that this would be a story about...everything.

"Everything" is a big word, but justified here. As the plot winds its way through, it touches on communication, family, international politics, religion, morality, sex, civilisation, cultural imperialism, the destruction of nature, historicity. It's no discredit to the writer and director that they couldn't keep all of this in line. It's impossible to keep all of that in line, and it is the filmmakers' fault that they had the unmatched hubris of trying.

This, believe it or not, is the "short" version of the plot, smoothed into chronological consistency: two Morroccan boys take potshots at a tourist bus with their father's new rifle, inadvertently hitting an American woman travelling with her husband after the SIDS-related death of their third child. As the Americans find refuge in a small village and desperately seek medical help, a process complicated by the US government's bass-ackward views on the Muslim world, the boys try mightily to hide their role in the shooting. The American man calls his Hispanic nanny back in California to beg her to stay with the children, the same day as her son's wedding in Mexico; with no other options, she takes them with her, and on the return trip things go poorly because of her drunken nephew. A little while later, a deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl frustrated at being a virgin learns that the police are seeking her father, who has a connection to the rifle used in the shooting.

Frankly, it's a chore to watch, and you get the distinct feeling that it was a chore to direct; and while I hate to harsh on anyone for too much artistic ambition, the fact is that González Iñárritu is too busy making sure that everything happens in the proper order to do anything slightly interesting. After the radical stylistic invention of his first two films, this isn't merely a letdown; it makes the admitted craftsmanship of Babel seem downright insulting. It's in no way a "bad" film, but it's in no way "interesting" or "good" either, and that's unacceptable for this director.

There can be no surer proof of that than this: I found the look of the film so unexceptional - competent and pretty, but unexceptional - that I found myself wondering why González Iñárritu had stopped working with longtime collaborator and cinematographic genius Rodrigo Prieto. Imagine my embarassment when I saw in the credits that Prieto shot the film. Scratch that - imagine Prieto's embarassment at shooting something so totally devoid of the brilliance that I have found in every one of his prior films. Again, not "bad" - and the scenes in Japan are, I admit, very well-shot indeed - but just kind of...there. You can't fuck up the desert, but you can go above and beyond, and Prieto seems content to not fuck up.

"Boring" is a word that teenager use, but it's also a good English word and frankly, it's the only one that describes Babel properly: the story keeps unspooling (every line, just about, is dedicated to advancing plot; you snooze, you lose) but it's too much work to keep up for little or no reward; it's not very interesting to look at; the phenomenal cast (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael García Bernal, Adriana Barraza) are lost in their under-characterized roles (although Kikuchi Rinko, as schoolgirl Chieko, manages to rise above the fray).

It's not all flat: Stephen Mirrione and his long-time assistant Douglas Crise do a fine, even heroic work in the editing room, keeping the threads separate and transitioning between them cleanly and coherently. And Gustavo Santaolalla's score is a minimalist triumph, incorporating geographic thematic elements without ever drifting into exoticism. You know you wanted to like a film more than you did when you're reduced to calling the editing "heroic."

Were I feeling expansive, I might praise the film for its form and content matching so neatly: a story of miscommunication being told in such a poorly-expressed way. But that would be a stupid thing to say. Not to mention that, if not for the title and the advertising, I might never have realized that Babel was "about" communication, when that thread seems to be one of a great many. Which leads me to the horrifying thought: the trailer for this film demonstrates the theme far better than the feature itself. It's not news that the ad can be better than the movie, but I think that customarily applies to Will Ferrell vehicles, not 2.5 hour art films.

5/10

YOU KNOW WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS? ANOTHER ESSAY ABOUT RICHARD DAWKINS

Updated for clarity: despite the oppobrium leveled against Dawkins by his critics, there is no sense in which he hates Christians or other religious people. What he hates is the instituion of religion, and supestitious beliefs which keep people in fear and ignorance who might otherwise be happy. And it is important to note: Dawkins himself denies that religion is "the root of all evil." It is one of the causes of human misery, and by Dawkins' account a primary cause; but it is not the only cause.

The time for writing about The God Delusion was a month ago, but time and money conspired to keep from reading it until this past weekend. So even though I doubt that I have anything to say, I'm going to say it anyway.

We're all familiar with the book, right? If not, here's a precis: Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and almost certainly the world's most important atheist, has written a book of armchair philosophy that seeks to be the manifesto of contemporary naturalism. There is quite literally no aspect of religious belief or practice that Dawkins does not address, attack with logic and science, and thereby eviscerate.

It should be no surprise that I loved the book, but that's not to say that it's perfect; indeed, there are two overriding flaws throughout the book, one significant and one minor. The significant flaw is one of tone: Dawkins claims that he is writing for believers, but the book smacks of preaching to the choir. I'm certainly not going to join in the chorus of naysayers declaiming him for being too mean: on the contrary, I think the great sin of modern atheism is that most of us aren't nearly mean enough. But I can't really imagine anyone being convinced by this book for the simple reason that I can't imagine most people reading more than a few pages. The ideal reader, I suppose, is the fresh skeptic, the "fence-sitting agnostic" to use Dawkins' phrase, who hasn't quite committed to atheism, but is looking for a reason to do so.

The second flaw is one Dawkins confesses to, and that is that his grand manifesto of anti-religion is in practice only anti-Christian. This is, we are told, because Dawkins is most familiar with the Christian God, and he expects the same of his audience; implicitly the reader is invited to apply the practices of the book to any supernatural order of thinking, and it seems unsporting to put much emphasis on this.

Anyone who has spent much time in atheist circles, including Dawkins' previous books, will likely recognise most of the arguments presented: there aren't that many scientific arguments against the probability of God, and any decent naturalist could come up with several on his or her own. What makes The God Delusion such a delight to read is how endlessly articulate and often funny Richard Dawkins is. No surprise to anyone who has read The Blind Watchmaker or The Ancestor's Tale (this latter is perhaps the most personally inspiring book I've ever read). As the author makes clear in his largely rhetorical final chapter, this is because scientific atheism is a source of endless joy and even comfort for him; this is why The God Delusion is extremely accessible and readable in a way that a "proper" philosophical treatment rarely is.

I will not go through the entire book, but instead focus on two chapters, one weak and one quite strong. "Why There Is Almost Certainly No God" is, I think, the weakest link of the entire book, not because it is inaccurate but because it is redundant. The rest of the book is largely concerned with the ramifications of a Godless world, and why such a thing is desirable; it is in this chapter that he takes dead aim at the Thing Itself. When I say it is redundant, I mean that Dawkins-the-biologist seems unwilling to bend too far from his comfort zone - that is, evolutionary argument against a personal God - and when he does so it is with considerably less passion and wit than the book shows elsewhere. Because of this, he tends to overstate the evolutionary argument, begging the question: if it fails to convince the reader the first time, will it really work the third time? Again, this is not to say that his argument fails or is illogical; just that the writing in this chapter is of a considerably lower quality than elsewhere.

The far reverse side are the chapters on "What's Wrong with Religion? Why Be So Hostile?" and "Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion." In the current climate of political correctness and tolerance, these are much the most important chapters in the book, even as they are the chapters that leave Dawkins open to being targeted as an athiest fundie, as on a recent (disappointing) episode of South Park. Do I think that it will change anyone's mind? I'm not sure. What I think it might do is turn "soft" atheists into "militant" atheists, and I can't see how that is a bad thing.

Dawkins arguments are straightforward and unassailable: the majority of awful things that humans do to each other spring, at some remove, from religion. And in the seven pages that, in my opinion, completely justify the book as a whole, he explores how religious moderates - the people whom we are told to embrace as allies - are ultimately enablers for people who blow up buildings, kill doctors, and tell children to hate other children. I cannot do the argument service in this space, but I found it compelling and a little heartbreaking.

The important thing to bear in mind is that Dawkins, despite the stereotype, is not an angry person preaching violence, he is sad that the world has ceded so much authority to such a dubious authority. It is not an eliminationist text, but one that hopes to raise consciousness. Dawkins has no hate for theists, only pity, and while this may be "smug" (for some strange reason, this is the new catch-all slur against smart people), it is a far cry from the cries of "deranged!' that seem to dog the author. Does the book preach to the choir? Yes, maybe. But every embattled minority needs its manifesto, and the atheist community is lucky that our was written by such an undeniably erudite man as Richard Dawkins. Despite a few imperfect moments, The God Manifesto receives my unqualified recommendation to any unbeliever, or anyone sympathetic enough to want to know how our minds work, and why.

WHAT KAUFMAN HATH WROUGHT

A week on, I still have the Post-Election Warm Fuzzies, and I've been spending considerably more time thinking about politics than reading and writing about them, and for that, I apologise.

The newest vehicle for the "comic" "talents" of "actor" Will Ferrell is fitfully amusing, much smarter in concept than execution, emotionally thin, and blessed by performances that make the characters seem much fuller than they actually are. It is, in other words, the finest picture of his career.

It's not Ferrell's career that I found myself thinking of while watching Stranger than Fiction, though, it was director Marc Forster, the Oscar-nominated hack who brought us the dramatically overrated Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland. He's not really an auteur in any useful sense of that word - there are no unifying themes across his films, nor does he really possess a consistent visual style - but it's still remarkable how comfortably this latest project fits next to the others: it's aggressively middle-brow, stylish without being even slightly imaginative, and way too focused on stopping everything dead in its tracks to make sure we pay attention to the A-C-T-I-N-G (which is actually a good deal better here than his previous work, for reasons that I'll get to). It's a smart film for dim people: it's exactly the sort of movie I would have loved when I was fifteen and was at least a little bit picky, but before I actually knew what makes a film good.

The screenplay by Zach Helm reads like a film student who wants to be the next Charlie Kaufman - naw, even better! He wants Charlie Kaufman to want to be him! - and thus it's no surprise that it's his first feature: Harold Crick (Ferrell) is a tax auditor who starts to hear an authorial voice narrating his life; this voice belongs to Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), a reclusive novelist with writer's block who doesn't know how to kill the protagonist of her new book Death and Taxes, about an auditor named...Harold Crick. And thanks to a sentence starting "Little did he know..." Harold-in-reality is quite aware that he is soon going to die. This was thrilling and innovative when Luigi Pirandello first did it 85 years ago, but everything old is new again, and all that, and probably most people who will pay money for a Will Ferrell movie are not intimately familiar with Six Characters in Search of an Author.

"He who lives by the story, so also shall he die by the story," and even though I hate to pick every nit of a film's plot (the cinema is a storytelling medium only by accident and habit), for a film so self-satisfied with it's awesomely meta script, that seems to be the only way to go about it. Now, I'm going to be fair, and admit that I liked a good 45 minutes of the film. It wasn't bust-a-nut-laughing funny, but I caught myself laughing steadily, occasionally out loud. This isn't just due to Helm's admittedly good dialogue, but also because of two rock-solid performances: Thompson, proving that she can be a tart bitch just as well as she can be a nurturing mother; and Dustin Hoffman as a literary professor, being as loopy and fun as he has been for years, acting in a different and better film than Will Ferrell, with whom he shares all of his scenes.

The problem is that the film is desperately illogical. I don't mean the concept is illogical - it is, but I buy it. A while ago,* I wrote a review where among other things I made the argument that a film establishes its own reality, and what matters is never its fidelity to realism, but how well it maintains its internal logic. Stranger than Fiction fails to do that altogether, and in a film with such a specific fantasy element, that is a fatal misstep. At first it's only tiny things: Queen Latifah plays a woman named Penny, who has been assigned by the publisher to help Karen sort out her ideas. It's a pointless role structurally, and confusing - do publishers actually assign "inspiration coaches," and if so, how many did Thomas Pynchon kill and eat?

As the film progresses, the gaps become bigger and deeper: did Harold Crick exist before Karen Eiffel started writing? How come the book doesn't mention that he visits psychiatrists and literary professors, but does depict the scene where he tries to speak to his author? If he knows that he is going to die, but the narrator calls him "unknowing," doesn't that mean he's not the same as the character any longer, and he can escape his fate? Why does everyone call Karen a genius when her prose sounds so clunky? Contrast this to the film that started this whole "mindfuck comedy" subgenre, Being John Malkovich: the rules there are well-expressed and consistent, and it almost seems like Charlie Kaufman is exposing what happens, rather than inventing it ("oh, so that's what happens if he enters his own portal!"). Stranger than Fiction raises all sorts of dazzling questions, but it doesn't realize it raises them, and so they go unanswered, even when it seems like they should drive the plot in a very different way than it ends up going.

This would be bad enough, but around the one-hour mark, the film just stops being funny. There is one grand reason for this: Karen Eiffel writes a redemptive woman into Harold's life, and Maggie Gyllenhaal steps in as the audit victim Harold falls for. She's a fine actor, but the role is not fine, not at all, and the two lovers have no chemisty together (but, with whom could Ferrell truly have chemistry? And men don't count). The romance sucks all the air out of the story and leaves a rather awful film in its wake.

But hey! It's no Talladega Nights.

6/10

*For what it's worth, this was also the source of what remains my favorite phrase in this blog's history, all these long months later: "The universe of On the Waterfront is one in which Hoboken dockworkers are held to exist."

I LIKE. VERY NICE.

About time for me to get back to what you all really want, I suppose. Assuming that what you want is film reviews.

The short version: yes, Borat really is as funny as you've been led to believe. I'm not going to explain why, becuase I think there are jokes that should be left unspoiled that have already been spoiled by just about every review of the film that exists.

The long version is a bit tricky, and doesn't have to do with what goes on in the film so much as with what the film is.

If you somehow didn't manage to know the film, whose full title is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which I quote in full this one time because I really enjoy typing it out, is cenetered around the "Borat" character created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen for Da Ali G Show. Like all of Cohen's repertoire, Borat was a persona the comedian would adopt to interview subjects who were unaware that he is really an actor.

In the film, Borat is sent by his native Kazakhstan to film a documentary on American culture, to bring back some idea of the civilized west to the stone-aged former Soviet republic. The "documentary" consists of Borat wandering from vignette to vignette, acting hugely inappropriately and causing general discomfort to the people he met. Along the way, a plot involving Pamela Anderson creeps in.

You don't have to go very far to find people comparing Borat to Jackass or Punk'd. I'd like very badly to claim that those comparisons are indefensible, but they're not, really. Assuming that you're willing to ignore tone and intent. Borat, after all, is a satire, and being British it is an extraordinarily mean-spirited one. I don't want that to come off as a complaint; the unmitigated nastiness of the film is precisely why it works more than just a run-of-the-mill "gotcha!" comedy. Cohen and company are out to expose the hypocrisy of Americans (and not just the red states, mind you), and that's not something to take lightly.

That's all very obvious, and judgments of how honest the satire is, who comes off the worst, and whether it's too stagey, they're all ten-a-penny. If you've seen the film, you already know it's a satire, and if you haven't, I'm not going to pick apart every gag to see how it ticks because that's just not fair.

What's interesting to me is how Borat implicates its audience. It's a very voyeuristic, even pornographic film, and if Cohen is being cruel to his victims, it's very hard to deny that we who laugh are doing the same thing. Why do we find it funny? It would be easy to call it our sense of intellectual superiority, but I don't think that's quite it.

Here's a story that seems unconnected, but isn't: the company I work for recently hosted a seminar for a group of executives from across the Middle East. Now, I didn't get a chance to interact with them, but one my coworkers who did shared an anecdote. Apparently, during a day trip into Chicago, the executives and my coworker found themselves window-shopping along Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile. One of the men, seeing the stores and buildings and all that, exclaimed, "It's just like Beirut!"

My gut reaction, and that of my coworkers, was disbelief. Beirut looks like downtown Chicago? But...Chicago is American! And Beirut is, like, the desert!

Borat has come under fire for its representation of Kazakhstanis, and for its depiction of that country, which is largely illiterate, pre-electrical, and in all ways as backwards as it can be, and all of this is hysterical. That is point 1. Borat mines most of its satire from people who are too thick to realize that Cohen's outlandish caricature of a Eurasian is fake, and they bend over backwards to accomodate the Exotic Ways of this Strange Foreigner. That is point 2.

Myself and my coworkers, well-intentioned liberals all, were shocked that Beirut has the infrastructure of a First World city, including one among us who has family in Israel and who travels to the Middle East every year. That is point 3.

The joke in Borat isn't just on the rubes in Alabama who don't recognise a British-born Jew when they see one; it's on the audience. Laughing at the antics of a cartoon Kazakhstani is fine, and laughing at people who don't get that he's a cartoon is also fine, but when you're laughing at them simultaneously? That takes satire and puts it somewhere that I didn't even know exists. The line between laughint at Borat and laughing with Cohen is a thin one, and as the film progresses we find ourselves on both sides of that line. And when we're on one side, we are exactly the same as the people that we're laughing at on the other side.

And it's not just that we're all bigots. Remember above, I mentioned the film's cruelty...it's not just cruel to the people in the film. It's painful and embarassing and squirmy for the audience. We are just as uncomfortable - more, probably - as anyone in the film. As Cohen skewers the idiots onscreen, the very smart people in the dark go through a kind of self-inflicted emotional torture. We don't identify with the onscreen victims, we are the victims. That's why I like the idea that larger parts of the film were staged than is obvious: it makes the whole thing a giant brainfuck, an excercise in tweaking the audience, making us confront what we think and what we know, and what kind of people are we for laughing at these poor innocent idiots, when we know that we're smarter, and yet we're basically acting just like them...frankly, it's one of the most exhilirating attacks on the audience I've ever seen, an assault on par with the work of Lynch, Haneke or Kubrick. It's the nastiest film of 2006, and I could not mean that in a nicer way.

10/10

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING

Let us recap:

-The Democrats took the house in what is either a rout, or a great goddamn big rout, depending on who you listen to.

-Control of the Senate rests on two races that the Democrats have already won, pending recounts.

-Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy is the chief reason this had happened, and for all those like me who have at times felt less than enthusiasm for the man, let this serve as the final proof that he is one of the finest and most noble of all Dems.

Other people are going to do a much better job of exploring what this all means and why it's important than I possibly could; I'm just here for the ride, and what a hell of a ride it has been. A week ago, I wouldn't have hoped for results like these. A year ago, I couldn't have dreamed of them.

I'm not going to launch into any messy introspection. This is a day for celebration and joy. We got our country back. Congratulations.

THE GRAND MESS OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

I was planning on writing a movie review tonight, but I've been distracted by certain midterm elections. You all know where to go for news on that front (MyDD, Kos). I will say that watching Paul Begala and Bill Bennett argue over whether or not it is fair to call Rush Limbaugh a "fat gasbag" makes for some fine, fine television.

GO VOTE

Here's why.

A CGI CARTOON ABOUT ANIMALS. NO, NOT THAT ONE, THE OTHER ONE. NO, THE OTHER ONE.

I don't recall the last time I encountered a movie with so many sold-out screenings as Borat: et cetera, and I wasn't part of any of them, because "Fandango isn't necessary." I lucked out with my back-up, thankfully, and a film that I hadn't really been looking forward to turned out to be one of the funniest films I've seen all year.

I give you: Flushed Away, the third Aardman Animation feature released through Dreamworks, and the first to be wholly computer-animated. If you think I have some very strong thoughts on that matter, congratulations on your keen insight, but I will hold those thoughts for later.

Let me instead begin with the script. It's not quite up to the lofty heights set by Aardman's Chicken Run and especially Wallace & Gromit, but it's still funnier than any of the many, many, many, many animated films that littered the cinematic landscape this year. I wish I could insert some profound Theory of Everything Comedic, but I can't. It's just that there's a bent British sense of humour running through everything, and a recognition of the fact that kids are resilient little bastards who don't need everything to be safe and pre-processed.

The plot is pure boilerplate, though: Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman) is a posh pet mouse who finds his home overrun by a fat sewer rat, yada yada yada, Roddy is flushed down the toilet where he has to help the lovely boat captain Rita (Kate Winslet) protect an underground rat metropolis from the ee-vil Toad (Ian McKellan, operating in what I can only call high dudgeon). Lessons are learned, the friendless Roddy learns that people are the bestest, etc.

It is perhaps the most Americanized, and certainly the most Dreamworks-ey of the three Aardman features, which is to say that it is full of cultural references and pop music; but through the proper filter even these banes of the post-modern animated film can be turned into a benefit. This is largely because most of the meta-jokes are put into the mouths of a collection of singing slugs that follow Roddy for no apparent reason than to torment him like a slimy Greek chorus. It's all very brilliant, not for any reason I can put into words, but trust me: when slugs sing "Don't Worry Be Happy," it is hilarious & good.

Much like Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, and much unlike, say, Shark Tale, Flushed Away has a cast of famous actors not because they are famous but because they are good for their roles. I wouldn't have guessed that Hugh Jackman even had a voice, but it is perfectly matched to the role of a tony mouse. I need hardly mention that McKellan makes for a grand villain, with Bill Nighy, Andy Serkis and Jean Reno all providing wonderful backup (it's amazing, by the way, how much an animated rat that looks nothing like Bill Nighy can have Billy Nighy's body language). It's never distracting, because in every case it's a performance, and not a celebrity check-cashing.

Now then: the animation. Let me be the first to admit that there is no conceiveable way that this film could have been made using stop-motion animation. There is water in nearly every scene, and that can only be done in hand-drawn or computer animation. So the alternative to a CGI Flushed Away is no Flushed Away at all, and that would be a sad thing.

But that doesn't mean I have to like CGI, and it doesn't mean that the Aardman house style doesn't lose a bit in translation. The animators do a good job of keeping the traditional huge teeth and glassy eyes, and Aardman uses a wonderful software program to crappify the animation - to make it jerkier and rougher than normal, so that it actually looks hand-made - but there's still something off. It's still smooth and round and fluid, and in a film whose primary appeal is how much coarser it is than the hypercommercial sterility of its Dreamworks stablemates, I find myself longing for a coarser animation style to go right along with the script.

But I can't judge the movie I want, only the movie I saw, and on that level, Flushed Away is fantastic. If there were no such thing as stop-motion animation I imagine I might say something hyperbolic like, "this is the best animated film of 2006!"* Certainly, in a year devoid of comedy, it's one of the funniest films, animated or not, and that is something to be extremely grateful for.

8/10

*Then I would remember the neon-lit scene from Cars, become embarrassed & erase the paragraph.

MY ONE AND ONLY MIDTERM ELECTIONS POST

(Blogging is a habit that, once abandoned, proves far too difficult to resume.)

Many people with more acumen, time and access than I have fully covered every aspect of the 2006 elections, and I am proud to share space in Blogtopia with them. There's little left to imagine besides how large our margin of victory in the House, and whether the Senate will split 50-48-2 or 49-49-2 and giving Joe Lieberman far too much power; but even so this is one of the great election seasons of my lifetime, and even though I haven't yet commented on it here, it's not for lack of interest and love of the process. But the time has come, and I will contribute the only thing I can: thoughts on the Illinois gubernatorial race.

For the both of you still reading, my thanks.

It's not news that Governor Rod Blagojevich's administration has been fraught with corruption and scandal, nor is it surprising - this is Illinois, after all. But I know I'm not the only one who has been let down by his utter failure to capitalize on the opportunity of restoring dignity and respect for the rule of law in the wake of the nightmarish George Ryan. Polls show him leading Judy Baar Topinka, but not by much, and while I have no wish to see a Republican in control of my state, I can't say that he doesn't deserve it.

Here is my private dilemma: there is a third candidate, Rich Whitney of the Green Party, and I'm sorely tempted to vote for him. He has lately been polling at around10%, not enough to throw the election to Topinka, 2000-style, but enough to make the Democrats sweat. The thing is, I'm a Democrat. Like many other young people, I had a passionate affair with Ralph Nader in mid-2000, but like all summer flings it was just a passing fancy, and I happily cast my vote for Al Gore.*

When the progressive grassroots spurned the Greens, I joined in. And despite my sympathy to many, if not all of the Green program, I was and am a proud advocate of the idea that the only hope for progressives is to reform the Democratic Party from within. In the eight years since Nader ensured Bush's victory, I have not swayed from this belief, until this moment.

We live in a two-party country. It has not always been the case, and it will perhaps not be the case forever, but right now that is the reality and it must be...I was going to say, "respected." Let us instead go with "tolerated." And at this moment in history, when our country is being served to oligopolistic corporations and scavenged by the Religious Right, fealty to the "correct" party is something of a moral obligation. Standing for your principles is no way to repeal torture legislation.

The Green Party is a punchline, a pathetic collection of losers. I have to pause and wonder: what happens if a Green candidate really pulls in 10% of a vote, any vote? The Greens are still losers, but are they still pathetic? I cn't explain why, but somehow I find that idea troubling - today Illinois, tomorrow America! And if there is really a progressive grassroots party with strong support, that can only mean an unending series of Y2K Floridas.

I hesitate to call the Greens an embarassment to progressive activism, but it's hard to think of them any other way - starry-eyed idealists who lose elections that we can't afford to lose. I know the same can be said about the Democrats, without the starry-eyed part, or the idealism; but we can all feel the change in the weather. This is an important election, our first chance to rebrand and rebuild the Democratic Party, and I want to be a part of that.

Realistically, I know that my one vote is not going to hand Topinka the election; it is not going to kill the progressive movement for decades to come; it is not going to lead to the Green Renaissance. But my vote is my vote, and I will always know for the rest of my life that I voted for Whitney in 2006. I can't let voting my conscience weigh on my conscience that way. I have not decided - I will probably not decide until I am in the booth on Tuesday, my finger hovering over the touch screen. No matter what I choose, I won't be proud of the outcome.

Anyway, that's where I stand.

*And, FSM-willing, hope to do the same in 2008.