AMERICA GOES TO WAR

Here's the crazy thing about Charlie Wilson's War: I liked it, in fact I liked it quite a lot, and all I can think to talk about is its flaws.

The chief among those flaws is probably that it's a film about the history of the United States' intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s and how badly we mangled the post-war maintenance of that country that is a) defanged of any real political content; b) 97 minutes long; c) funny.

"Gosh darn it, this movie is too funny!" is assuredly not a criticism that you come across all that very often, but it is much the case that Charlie Wilson's War could do a bit better shifting between its funny scenes (which are awfully funny indeed, sometimes) and its profound and sobering scenes (which are too long and trite). I'm in no mood to start tossing blame around, but I think the problem is a mismatch between the two very distinct filmmakers at the core of the film: director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who have both done some very fine things in their careers, some not-as-fine things, and neither of whom seems like a natural fit for the other - although Rob Reiner turned out to fit Sorkin's writing like a glove, so who am I to judge?

The film retells the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a Texas Democrat whose genial amorality made him a perfect moderate choice for all sorts of deal-brokering and committee chairs, and thus it was that he found himself on the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, where he had the perfect opportunity to fund a covert CIA operation to move arms from Israel through Pakistan into Afghanistan, to support the mujahadeen against the invading Soviet army.

First: the script. Now, I adore Aaron Sorkin, but he's running up against something here that he's never had to deal with before: honest to God reality. His previous work has all been kind of magically realistic: a fairy-tale sports network in Sports Night, a fairy-tale White House in The American President and The West Wing, and most recently a fairy-tale sketch comedy where the wicked queen and the beautiful princess were the very same born-again Christian stereotype. I love him - even the much-maligned Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, excepting the aforementioned stereotype - but I love about him how much his work is idealised men and women muddling through life with witty dialogue, not real-life people handling real-life crises, and he can't always get his head around it, I think. To be sure, the script simply reeks of studio interference to tone down the hyper-liberal politics, but there are a lot of scenes that play out just to give us information, not to bask in human speechifying. The best parts of the movie are the ones that "do a Sorkin" - people walking down halls as they deliver sentences with 18 clauses - and there just aren't enough of those. Still, it's easy to see what attracted him to the story: Charlie Wilson is a great Sorkin character, a man who is unambiguously corrupt but also has a keen sense of right and wrong and does what's right when he can. That part, at least, works like a charm.

One of the great risks with a Sorkin script, as Studio 60 made clear, is nabbing actors who aren't quite on the right wavelength. Hanks ought to be a great Wilson - they even look similar, filtered through the Hollywood glamor lens - but he's not secure enough in his accent, and he doesn't quite have a handle on Sorkinese patter. The recently-ubiquitous Philip Seymour Hoffman handles himself a great deal better as Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who helps Wilson formulate the strategy to funnel arms. His introductory scene is absolutely the best part of the film, firey dialogue delivered at a million miles a second, and simply hilarious. But he too can't always find the right tone, defaulting to his standard wiseass routine a bit more than fits the character. As for Julia Roberts, she is saddled with one of the worst women Sorkin has ever written, the born-again (I sense a pattern) millionairess Joanne Herring, whose religious hatred of the Soviets leads her to push Wilson towards what she believes to be his destiny. The actress tries, but there's nothing to the role, and it's hard to tell even something as simple as whether or not she's supposed to come across as admirable or unhinged.

Then, there's Mike Nichols, who also isn't on the same wavelength as the script, although he does enough things very well that I'm more than a little inclined to cut him a break. If there's a problem with his direction, it's that he frequently musses up the comedy, but he makes up for it at least a little bit by moving the story along at a bright clip. There's a lot of very fluid camera work in this film, not quite as hectic as Thomas Schlamme's work with the writer, but different rather than worse: you might say the camera is inquisitive, if you like (as I do) anthropomorphising film cameras. The shots are always moving closer, moving around, trying to get a better look, pulling us in. It's some of the most interesting visual work Nichols has done in a long time, and it's nice and brisk. The dramatic moments undo him rather completely, but they are few in number.

See, that's the thing: for all my complaints, this is an awfully fun movie, but it's fun in a passive way; it happens and it's cute as hell and it's over. And I remain a bit skeptical that a film about our first Afghan adventure ought to be fun at all. But it's too easy a movie not to like it, as a diversion rather than a serious work of art, perhaps. Diversions, especially well-crafted diversions - and this is well-crafted, whatever else - have their place. It's a shame that "not Oscar-worthy" has come to mean "shitty" in this film's case, but a lack of depth doesn't mean the film is stupid. It's a sweet movie with a bittersweet finish, and to fault that is sheer crankiness.

7/10

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Obviously, I have no conceivable influence over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But on this, the last day of 2007, I wanted to point out what I think were some of the highest achievements of the year, that aren't getting any attention from the critics' groups, or otherwise won't ever make it to the Oscar nomination stage:

Best Picture
Sarah Polley's Away from Her is a painfully beautiful character piece of absolute gentleness and subtlety, and if there's one thing that Oscar hates, it's subtlety. But for my money, there was no film that moved me more than this all year. What can I say, I like movies that make me cry, and nothing did that better.

Best Director
Brad Bird proved with The Iron Giant and The Incredibles that there's nobody better at telling stories in animation today, but with Ratatouille he established himself as one of the best filmmakers, period. The film is a simply sublime achievement in acting, visual composition, pacing and mise en scène, and those things don't all come together without a strong hand on the wheel. But oh wait, it's a cartoon! So OBVIOUSLY he's not a real director!

Best Actor
Honeydripper was only slightly better than most of John Sayles's anemic late output, but Danny Glover, in the lead role, gave an incandescent performance - I dare say the best of his career. He's one of those completely reliable actors whose career choices (a little Lethal Weapon here, a little Angels in the Outfield there) are exactly what don't bring home the awards, but no matter how bad the script, he's almost always reliable, and when he's on fire like he is here, it's impossible to look away when he's onscreen.

Best Actress
Maybe it's not fair to name Tilda Swinton here, since she's got a better than fair chance at getting a supporting nod for Michael Clayton, but that was just her doing what she does. Whereas in Stephanie Daley, she brought an unendurable level of existential pain as a woman unable to deal with the sad things in the world. Watching her in this film is lacerating, but it's the good kind of lacerating. If there is such a thing.

Best Supporting Actor
Stealing the show in Zodiac was no easy feat, especially with Robert Downey, Jr. in high-intensity mode, but these many months later, Mark Ruffalo still sticks in my mind as Inspector David Toschi, the closest that long, grim epic has to a moral center. Watching him deflate as the case drags on and on is perhaps the most pitiable part of a movie full of human weakness.

Best Supporting Actress
Every actor is at their best when they get to play a purely Ee-vil villain. Especially British actors. And there's no British actor at once so great and yet so unsung as Imelda Staunton. QED her performance in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, as the pink and vicious Dolores Umbridge, must be the best acting of the year. At any rate, it's a performance we'll still remember thirty years down the road. Name one frontrunner who can say the same.

Best Original Screenplay
Somehow, most of the people who loved the hell out of The Squid and the Whale decided that Margot at the Wedding was just too damn mean. Whatever. While it's surely a lesser work, I for one thought that Noah Baumbach's script was just about perfect: heightened dialogue wrapped around human behavior that lay just on the ride side of believable, and the moderately sentimental ending managed to feel earned, not pat.

Best Adapted Screenplay
Everything any biopic has ever done wrong, Matt Greenhalgh's script for Control got right (and it's his feature debut, no less). In a more perfect world, this film would be on the shortlist for half a dozen awards, but the almost bland way that the narrative presents the tortured genius of Ian Curtis is at the center of very nearly everything that the film gets right.

Best Cinematography
John Toll is one of the few working cinematographers with two Oscar wins to his name, so it's hard to feel too bad for him, but Seraphim Falls, the first of the year's surprisingly large slate of westerns, has some of the most exciting outdoor photography of the year, particularly in its mindblowing opening 15 minutes. You could put together a pretty damn great list of cinematography nominees without ever leaving that genre (Deakins, Elswit, Papamichael and Deakins again), but Toll's work has significantly less chance of getting mentioned anywhere outside of this blog post than a very tiny snowball on a very hot day in Hell.

Best Score
I am dead serious when I claim that the No Reservations score is the best thing Philip Glass has done for a movie since Powaqqatsi. Partly it's just the incredible weirdness of it: hearing the usual bubbly tropes of a rom-com score mixed with the unmistakable minimalist repetitions of Mr. "Music in Twelve Parts" himself. But partly- actually, I take that back, the weirdness is justification enough.

Best Documentary
Thanks to the worst shortlist in years, you could pretty easily put together a better list of five than the Academy will end up with, if you only used ineligible films, but I think it's worth reiterating that the absence of The King of Kong tends to suck all the legitimacy out of the category.

MERE OBLIVION

I am not about to ask whether Francis Ford Coppola is actually a good director or just a hack who got lucky a few times in the 1970s. Even his worst films - which, admittedly, well outnumber his best films - are unmistakably the work of a man in possession of overwhelming creativity and skill. So no, I don't think that the generally frustrating quality of his work over the last 25 years or so is proof that he's lost it, or that he never had it to begin with, or of anything other than a remarkable tendency towards overreach.

Instead, I find myself wondering on the occasion of Coppola's first official film as a director in ten years, Youth Without Youth, if the man might just be insane.

Coppola's last film, The Rainmaker, was a solid although not at all exceptional piece of procedural entertainment, which was enough to make it his best film of the '90s. It was a strangely impersonal film to lead into a decade-long sabbatical, though, and like everyone else, I had hoped that his time off would leave him rejuvenated and fresh to coming roaring back in full power, somewhat like his fellow '70s auteur Robert Altman did in 1992 with The Player, or like Altman did again in 2001 with Gosford Park. Instead, Youth Without Youth feels much more like Coppola's very own Prêt-à-Porter, or if I might jump over to yet another genius from the '70s who fell on hard times and self-parody, this is Coppola's Hollywood Ending, a boondoggle so obnoxious in concept and execution that it's hard to see why a theoretically intelligent filmmaker thought that it might be a good idea to try filming it in the first place.

Based on a story by Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth tells of Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), an elderly Romanian man who is struck by a bolt of lightning at the age of of 70, in 1938. He not only survives a theoretically fatal number of devastating burns and apparent blindness, but he appears, in every test that can be administered, to to have physically reverted to the age of 35 or 40. Under the care of the kindly Professor Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz), Dominic slowly pieces together the ways in which his body has changed, giving him a strange set of mental skills such as telekinesis and the ability to read a book just by touching it. Meanwhile, he dodges the Nazis, who in their way hope to capture him for study, thinking that he might make a good test case in their quest to create the perfect man.

A decade and change later, Dominic is comfortably relocated in Geneva, living and not aging under a series of assumed names. One day in the mountains, he meets a young woman named Veronica, who looks uncannily like Dominic's long-ago fiancée Laura (maybe not so uncanny, as both women are played by the actress Alexandra Maria Lara). That afternoon, Veronica is - no contrivance here - struck by a bolt of lightning, sending her into a mental fugue where she believes herself to be an Indian ascetic priestess from 500 AD, speaking in flawless Sanskrit. No sooner does she come out of that trance and falls in love with Dominic than she begins, every night, to speak in dead languages, moving back in time: Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian. This is a boon for Dominic's research on a book meant to to explore the origins of all human culture, but when Veronica starts to age at an accelerated rate, things get a bit trickier.

Throughout, Dominic is followed by his mirror image. I mean that literally: his reflection is a callous, sneering presence, pushing Dominic into increasingly dark acts to preserve his anonymity and continue his research. If you recall the Gollum/Smeagol argument scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, you have already seen this exact thing only done better.

If this had been presented as a straight-up melodrama, it might just have worked, and for one brief moment it looks like that might even be the case. The opening credits are a typically Coppolaesque (Coppolan?) exercise in neo-classicism, consciously aping the credits style favored in American films from the '30s and '40s, down to the font choice. It's a promise of a similarly stylised feature that remains tragically unfulfilled. Not, dear God, that the film isn't stylised, but its style isn't nearly so gauche as the credits suggest, or as the the narrative requires.

Coppola and his team approach the script like its a religious text, and given the pervasive symbolism, references to Hindu texts, spiritual musing and the like, it might as well be. Every frame has been composed down to the micrometer, usually in very arch and self-important ways - one shot that leaps out for its dramatic overreach consists of Dominic's face in a mirror in the upper left, Laura facing the camera on the right, and a superimposed face of a professor of Asiatic languages (run with it) in the center. It crams a great deal of information into a very dense shot, but the information is kind of...stupid. Almost each and every frame is like that; oh, not with the crackpot Expressionism of a giant floating face, but so clearly Composed! that you can just about hear Coppola standing behind you and whispering the Meaning of Every Weighty Moment. In fact, it might be the one thing the film is good for: training people to unpack the thematic relevance of visuals. Because the themes are not subtle in this film, and the visuals that communicate the themes are not subtle either.

Which is to say, this is a very well-crafted film, but it appears to have been well-crafted by Satan's elves: it is packed to bursting with the most idiotic sort of flim-flam which is treated with the gravest sincerity. Imagine Orson Welles directing an Ed Wood script, or Wagner rewriting the score for Seussical, and you've pretty much nailed it down. That Coppola wrote the script means only that we get to blame him, instead of pity him.

The real perversity is that Tim Roth is fantastic in a role that really doesn't quite qualify as a "character" so much as a "voicepiece for symbolic musings about roses." He doesn't really dwell too much on what it might be like for a 70-year-old to wake up one day as an eternal 40-year-old, but the script doesn't give him room to, and what he does to make the romantic subplots work - for they do not on the page - is magnificent. It's a crying shame that he has this movie around that performance, because it's too painful to watch just for him, career-highlight or not.

The other perversity is that while nothing about Youth Without Youth works for even an instant, nevertheless the whole thing from top to bottom is extremely interesting; boring as it is, mindless as it is, aimless as it is, it's impossible to look away. That's Coppola's skill: making movies that simply leap of the screen and impose themselves upon you. I don't know if he's going to make a great film ever again, but I'm sure he'll make a better one than this, now that it's out of his system. Or maybe not. Either way, this mad wreck is proof of the director's genius even as it's proof of his incredible disregard for art or the audience.

4/10

THE FAMILY THAT STICKS TOGETHER

Sometimes it all comes down to the basics: a simple script with all the frills removed, characters who are not in the least bit hip or witty or clever, brilliant actors to portray them, and a director with enough faith in her material that she never deigns to indulge in flashy stylistic whorls, using the camera like a scalpel instead of a canvas. Viz: Tamara Jenkins's The Savages.

Like all great drama, this is a story about very specific people in a very specific situation: Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) drifts from temp job to temp job in New York City while trying to secure a grant to write her autobiographical plays, all while carrying on the world's saddest affair with a decidedly unattractive - in all senses - married man, Larry (Peter Friedman). In Buffalo, Wendy's brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is busy researching and not writing a comprehensive study of Brecht, despite nobody, including his publisher and himself, finding the idea of another damn Brecht book all that compelling; he also dodges the hints dropped by his girlfriend of three years, Kasia (Cara Seymour), that it might be time for an engagement, if only to prevent her own deportation. Both Savage siblings are entering middle age with an unstated sense of dread that all that they have amounts to a whole lot of nothing.

Into this grimness comes the news that their long-estranged father Lenny (Philip Bosco) is on the cusp of dementia, reeling from the loss of his long-term girlfriend and consequently her home in Sun City, Arizona. After a wholly unpleasant reunion, the children agree that the only way for anyone to survive this situation is if Lenny is put in a nursing home; and thus comes the guilt and fear and occasional burst of long-simmering hatred.

That's all. The bulk of the movie is essentially plotless, and simply consists of watching the Savages each deal with the crap hand they've suddenly been dealt. Generally, it's presented as a comedy, and it surely earns more than its share of genuine laughs, but none of that is enough to keep the bleakness out. As is oftener the case in life than the movies, laughter exists here to stop the tears from coming. It is said that comedy is tragedy plus time; so what is a film that asks us to laugh as a tragedy unfolds? A much braver sort of comedy, and sometimes a pretty uncomfortable and unpleasant one.

The Savages is similar in a great many ways to another film from earlier this year, Away from Her: a film about the process of coping with a family member's crippling age-related illness, more concerned with basic human psychology than twisty storytelling, shot in a minimally intrusive style that privileges the actors. But while Away from Her was specifically about how painful it is to deal with the wasting-away of a loved one, Jenkins's film is the polar opposite: love is a very distant, alien concept to the Savages, not just between parent and children, but between those children and the world around them. Jon visibly trembles with frustration at his inability to love, while Wendy sublimates that inability into flat, neurotic behavior, culminating in a kiss that makes for one of the most awkward moments in any movie this year.

Not every sort of actor could play this type of character without resorting to chest-pounding, but fortunately Linney and Hoffman - and, it turns out, the veteran character actor Bosco - aren't just any actors, and the three performances at the core of The Savages are simply brilliant. Linney especially gives what might well be a career-best performance; her usual trick of acting primarily with her unnervingly blue eyes and a mouth that always looks scared even when she smiles is put to great use here, and she couples that to a physical performance that doesn't seem to exactly coincide with her body, like she's always just forgotten where she is and what she was doing. On top of this, she foregrounds the characters emotional neediness, making clear why a woman like Wendy would bother with a lost cause like Larry: because he was there and he paid attention.

Hoffman is nearly as good, and I hope it's not cruel of me to ponder if the only real problem with the actor is how damn much we're seeing him this holiday season (see also: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Charlie Wilson's War. He's having what you might call a "banner year"). Jon is a much different figure than Wendy, and Hoffman doesn't go for the same kind of vulnerability as Linney, although perhaps surprisingly for an actor typically noted for wrapping a layer of smug irony around himself, he brings a great deal of emotional nakedness to the role, such as in a handful of scenes where he...essentially, he cries, but it's sort of a dry, angry crying. It's a bit shocking, especially from that actor. In the smallest of the lead roles, Bosco doesn't get to be as familiar as the other two, but he leaves an unmistakable mark on the film, oscillating from confusion to rage in tiny little strokes, acting rather a lot like just about every person I've ever met who lived in a nursing home.*

Tamara Jenkins (whose only prior feature, 1998's Slums of Beverly Hills, remains unseen by me) puts a lot of faith in her actors, recognising that if we're not engaged by the characters, no amount of visual razzamatazz is going to draw us in, but that's not to say that the film isn't visually solid; on the contrary, most of the compositions are quite formally elegant and rigidly constructed, adding a sense of inevitability and claustrophobia to the story. Imagine if Wes Anderson directed a movie after everyone he loved died of cancer, and you're most of the way there. There's also a strong use of color throughout the film, which moves from the bright greens and blues of Sun City to the browns and whites and other browns of Buffalo in the winter. The film's rare splashes of color are both cheerful and sad all at once. Which is actually a pretty decent summation of the film as a whole.

There's nothing about the film that isn't aesthetically conservative, but that hardly counts as a detriment when a film is this emotionally wracking. All great drama is about specific people in a specific situation, and while The Savages tells what is, I suppose, an essentially common story, it is the very particular humanity of the characters involved that makes it a successful and unique work of art, and ultimately so very easy to relate to. We are not all of us like Wendy or Jon Savage, but their experience is so fully-lived that we have an uncomfortably clear idea of what exactly they must be going through. Fictional or no. That kind of overwhelmingly sympathetic art isn't something to take for granted.

9/10

*Which is actually a considerable number of people; I once worked in a nursing home. Terrifying places, they are.

FINDING LONG-FORGOTTEN GOLD

Three years ago, Jerry Bruckheimer, with his unfailing ability to produce movies that make endless amounts of money without filling any previously unfulfilled need, oversaw National Treasure, a moderately silly, moderately stupid and shockingly enjoyable matinee-style adventure yarn best described as "The Da Vinci Code but with American history."

Bruckheimer being Bruckheimer, it is deeply unsurprising that there is now a sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and it is a little sillier than the original, and a little stupider, and somehow it still manages to be shockingly enjoyable. It's no Indiana Jones or North by Northwest - both obvious inspirations for the tiny army of scenarists and screenwriters - but in all its unabashed goofiness and cheerful, almost crazed disregard for this thing we call "reality," Book of Secrets is just about the breeziest popcorn flick to come out all year, besting by a considerable margin Bruckheimer's last franchise effort, the leaden and overlong Pirates of the Carribbean: At World's End.

Some ill-defined amount of time after the events of National Treasure, Book of Secrets starts off by pushing RESET buttons all over the place: Ben Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) is no longer living with sexy German immigrant/historic documents specialist Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger); Ben's tech-savvy aide Riley (Justin Bartha) has lost all of his money earned in the first film's climax, apparently on the vanity-press run of a well-researched bit of crackpottery purporting to explode governmental conspiracies, and the newly-rehabilitated Gates family name is dragged back into infamy thanks to a mysterious Southern man named Mitch (Ed Harris), who claims to have proof that Ben's ancestor once planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Since this is the kind of movie that it is - the sequel to "The Da Vinci Code but with American history" - Ben quickly decides that the best way to clear his ancestor's name is to use John Wilkes Booth's diary to find the lost city of gold, Cibola; it's best not to dwell on the hows and whys, but this requires quick jaunts to Paris and London, a brief stint in Virginia to capture the President (Bruce Greenwood), and finally a jog 'round Mount Rushmore. Along the way, Ben and company enlist the help of Ben's dad Patrick (Jon Voight, reprising his role from before), and the brand new conflict-generating figure of Ben's mom, the Mesoamerican language specialist Emily Appleton (Helen Mirren).

Lord knows it's hokum, but it's pretty damned entertaining hokum, and there are a lot of small reasons why this ought to be the case. Primarily, I suppose, it's that the film never really pauses to let you reflect on all of its inconsistencies and lapses in logic. Jon Turteltaub is nobody's idea of a major director, with a severely anonymous body of work to this point from 3 Ninjas to Instinct, but he achieves his extraordinarily modest goal as well as anyone could: keep everything moving as quickly as possible but don't let anything seem rushed. There's some dead spaces early on, and a rather significant portion of the plot doesn't actually advance the plot much at all (the titular Book of Secrets doesn't show up for what seems like a full hour), but nothing really lags much. It's a film that rewards settling back and holding all questions until the end of the ride (questions like: why did the Lakota Sioux write in Mesoamerican glyphs?)

Honest compels me to acknowledge that another key to the film's swift, easy tone is the leading man. I've not spared Nic Cage much sympathy in the past, but he hasn't done much to deserve any, with The Wicker Man and Next looming so recently in his past. When the first National Treasure opened, Cage was only two years away from his exceptional work in Adaptation.; here in 2007, he hasn't been much good at all in ages, and his scripts have been worse. So "the best Nicolas Cage film in years" doesn't mean much, but that's exactly what Book of Secrets is: the first film since its predecessor three years ago in which Cage has been at all interesting to watch. Moreover, it's precisely the Caginess of his performance that works in this film's favor: his default mode is affable and goofy and just close enough to cool that you can see it if you squint, and that's exactly the lead performance that this affable and goofy adventure movie needs.

For all it's looseness, Book of Secrets does feel a bit more consciously put-together than National Treasure, like the filmmakers wanted to make certain that everything from the first go-round was in place again, and this leads to some clunkiness where you can almost see the mechanics of the script grinding together: perhaps most obviously in the decision to open with Ben and Abby split up, a clear bid to recapture the romantic tension of the first film (I am fleetingly reminded of The Jewel of the Nile, which played the same card and did so as poorly as it can ever be done). Then there is the rather winding and arbitrary way that the first act sets up the MacGuffin, or the mostly pointless addition of Ben's mother, although no decision which introduces Helen Mirren to a film's cast can rightfully be called "pointless."

Then again, Book of Secrets has significantly better setpieces than the first film, and like the first film there is no sense that they were deliberately toned down to achieve a PG rating. And as is his wont, Bruckheimer proves himself willfully unafraid to spend massive sums of money, and to put every dollar of it on-screen. When the heroes find the city of gold (yeah, like that's actually a spoiler), it's a miracle of fussy production design, even if it doesn't really make a lick of sense.

All in all, there's nothing in this film quite as bizarrely exciting as the notion that the founding fathers deliberately made the eastern seaboard a giant puzzle box, but that doesn't keep the new film from eking out its own charms. They are, by all means, modest charms. But they are real charms anyway. Don't go in expecting a smart film, don't go in expecting craftsmanship like you get from a Steven Spielberg; just go in expecting a bit of silly fun, and you'll be pretty much fine.

6/10

GOD BLESS US EV'RY ONE, INDEED

I have just finished cleaning up what used to be a glass CD shelf (yes, I still all my physical CDs. Even worse? Fully half of them aren't in iTunes). Nothing terrible to report other than a couch newly full of CDs, but it's enough of a frustration to extend my Christmas blogging vacation by another day. When I return: a Nic Cage movie that, for once, isn't so bad that it scours your flesh right off the bone.

GOD BLESS US, EV'RY ONE

Taking a few days off to spend the holidays with family-type peoples. Back on the 26th, and I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas have a happy one, and those who just use it as a convenient four-day weekend get plenty of R&R.

MERRY DEATHMAS: MAY YOUR DAYS BE MERRY AND BRIGHT

Black Christmas (1974, Canada)

The creators: Director Bob Clark, later of the slightly different holiday classic A Christmas Story and the slightly less classic SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2; screenwriter Roy Moore, of (Canadian!) television and the forgotten 1981 film The Last Chase.

The plot: Shortly before Christmas break, the four girls remaining at Pi Kappa Sigma sorority house at an unnamed (Canadian!) university throw one last party for themselves and their boyfriends. The party is interrupted by the sorority's dedicated and incredibly foul-minded prank caller, the Moaner, who may or may not be the same person that has just snuck into the sorority attic via a trellis. The Moaner is briefly shut up by Barb (Margot Kidder), until he hangs up with the threat "I'm going to kill you." First, though, he kills the virginal Clare (Lynne Griffin), whose absences goes unnoticed until her father comes to pick her up the next day. As the local police force, led by Lt. Fuller (John Saxon), the Moaner keeps picking off victims from his attic: lewd house mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman), Barb and Phyllis (Andrea Martin). Leaving only Jess (Olivia Hussey) - whose older boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) has gone a bit apeshit upon the news that she plans to get an abortion, and is now the prime suspect - to find and stop the killer.

Christmas cheer: Minimal. There are trees and songs scattered around, but in every essential, this could take place immediately prior to any random school holiday.

Type of horror: Pure dead-teenagers slasher.

The good: First off, it manages to be something that only one other slasher film - John Carpenter's Halloween - would ever manage to be: legitimately scary, in the Final Girl sequence, which doesn't really make much sense but is still an absolute nail-biter.

Speaking of Halloween, there are more than a few similarities between that film and Black Christmas in both story and technique, and for good reason: Black Christmas was the very first slasher film made in North America, and as such it has a great deal to apologise for, but it still manages to be one of the smartest slasher films, falling into nary a one of the classic slasher pitfalls (illogical behavior, poor characterisations, outré death scenes just for the hell of it). The cast of honest-to-God actors make the most of roles that range from extraordinary fully-written (Kidder as Barb) to a collection of stereotypes (Waldman as Mrs. Mac).

The bad: From the first death through the third death, there is not much plot momentum: just a whole slew of obvious red herrings and a lot of people repeating variations on, "Dearie me, there is a killer! We should find him!" Twenty minutes in particular, following Mrs. Mac's death, are just deadly slow. In general, Bob Clark doesn't seem to find any shot that he's not willing to let go on at least a few frames too long. There is an overreliance on POV shots that start out creepy and end up feeling like padding.

Blood: One ethereally beautiful murder scene involving a glass unicorn has some blood, but not much. Beyond that, there's not a hint of the red, red kroovy anywhere to be found.

Boobs: In one scene, a very drunk Barbara is checking out a magazine centerfold. I suppose this probably doesn't count.

Sex=death: Not in the least. The first victim is described as a "professional virgin," and the heroine, in cased you missed it before, is pregnant out of wedlock.

Body count: Six, plus a teen girl that we never see, dead or alive.

Sign it was 1974: It would be easier to list what wasn't a sign that it was 1974. Okay, for starters: the hair, the costumes, the set design, the film stock, the presence of Olivia Hussey and Keir Dullea, and the fact that John Saxon looks like he's ten years old.

Pithy wrap-up: Brilliant, one of the best slashers imaginable, largely because it didn't realise it was a slasher and didn't play by there dumbed-down rules. If this picture doesn't make your skin crawl, it's on too tight! Okay, I stole that last part from the movie's ad campaign. But it is a damn fine horror movie.

It has not a thing to do with Christmas, though.

GOD, THAT'S GOOD

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
His skin was pale and his eye was odd.
He shaved the faces of gentlemen
Who never thereafter were heard of again.
He trod a path that few have trod,
Did Sweeney Todd,
The demon barber of Fleet Street.

I cannot pretend to naturally have the proper critical distance from Tim Burton's undeniably successful film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. We are talking about an adaptation of my very favorite work of American theater, after all, one of my favorite pieces of dramatic music composed in the latter half of the 20th century. Thankfully, it's been two weeks since I saw the film, and time has given me the distance that my brain could not, and I think I'm ready to write a review that won't consist solely of nitpicking.

The differences between the film and the show (and they are many) are bothersome to those of us who know the score by heart, but on the whole they really aren't damaging. There are three ways in which the two versions of Sweeney Todd diverge: first are the true nitpicks, the changes that have no effect other than tweaking the fanboys (minor line rewrites, notes altered, the removal of such disposable elements as the second act "Parlour Songs" number). Then there are the substantive changes which actually make the movie a fundamentally different thing musically and dramatically, but are invisible to anyone not familiar with the show (the re-ordered chronology, significant line rewrites, the butchery of the Beggar Woman's role, the elimination of the love duet "Kiss Me"). Last and rarest are the changes that do indeed make the movie a noticeably lesser work of art.

Chief among these is the elimination of what might be the show's most recognisable number, "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd." I've poked around a bit, and I find that the emerging consensus is that this song's total removal isn't that big a deal because it's not the sort of thing that could be filmed. I find that amazingly wrongheaded. Granted, there's a lot of "Ballad" in the show to go around, and most of the reprises would come across a bit funky in the film as Burton made it, but the main appearances, bookends at the opening and close of the show, turn out to be completely indispensable. I learned something about Sweeney Todd from this film that I never knew about it before: its narrative neither begins nor ends. The ballads just give it the illusion of doing so.

Thus, instead of being eased into the story, after the very cool animated credits we are tossed right onto a boat coming out of the fog, where the young sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower) and the dour Sweeney Todd (Johnny Depp) are coming back to London after a long sea voyage. Anthony is given the honor of introducing all the Burton fans to the extravagantly dense world of Sondheim music with "No Place Like London," which turns out to be an awful opening number. It's been cut to pieces, taking out most of its musical development, and I confess that as a result, for the first eight minutes I thought all my fears about the film were going to be realised: the opening number falls flat and Depp sings it poorly, a crazy CGI-aided swoop through London's grimy streets calls too much attention to itself, and the first recognisably melodic number in the show, "The Worst Pies in London," introducing us to the widowed baker Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) is treated terribly. Bonham Carter's take on Lovett is very much the most subdued take on that character yet attempted, and her opening number is essentially a bit of music hall zaniness tailored to the broadly comic approach favored by the role's creator, Angela Lansbury. The movie Lovett just isn't the kind of woman who would sing "The Worst Pies in London," and that's without mentioning how Burton fumbles it completely in a series of clumsy cuts. Right about now, I would have felt smug if I wasn't so sad.

That's when the miracle happens. Like a light switch flipping, when Mrs. Lovett launches into her second number, "Poor Thing," in which she lays out the back story of the whole show, just about everything fell right into place.

Now that I've caught up to that point in the show, here is the plot: Benjamin Barker was a barber with a beautiful wife, who caught the eye of a pious vulture of the law, Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman). Turpin sent Barker to Australia on a trumped-up charge, sicced his beadle (Timothy Spall) on the lonely woman, raped her, left her to commit suicide, and stole her daughter. 16 years later, Barker has returned as Todd, a gaunt, pale-faced man with a streak of white in his jet-black hair and an urge to revenge himself on humanity. What happened then? Well, that's the play, and he wouldn't want me to give it away. Not Sweeney.

I won't do that anymore.

Tim Burton claims that Sweeney Todd is his favorite musical ever, and I believe him; not only because it should be everyone's favorite musical ever, but also because the story of a homicidal barber that was explicitly conceived by one-third of its creative team as a modern day Grand Guignol piece would have a natural appeal for the notoriously macabre director. And he clearly found the material inspiring: he hasn't made a live-action film so gleefully invested in his typically Gothic visual style and pitch black humor since Sleepy Hollow in 1999, not coincidentally his last live-action film anywhere near this good. Like he did in that film, Burton took his cues from the classic Hammer horror films of the '50s, although Sweeney Todd comes decidedly closer to that model. It's the design that does it, I think: in working for the first time with the genius Dante Ferretti, Burton has toned down the extreme grotesques found in his collaborations with the geniuses Bo Welch and Rick Heinrichs. It's distinctly off-kilter Victorian England that we see in Sweeney Todd, but not a specifically nightmarish one, and it achieves a visual classicism that none of Burton's films have previously aimed for. Whether that's desirable or not is something we must all decide for ourselves. Meanwhile, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, making his first film with Burton is...not so interesting a collaborator as Emmanuel Lubezki was in Sleepy Hollow. The film looks bleak as hell, almost to the point of black-and-white, which is good; but it's not particularly inventive, and tends at times to be too dark just for the sake of being dark.

Classicism seeps out all over the film from the minor details (Depp's hair streak is an obvious reference to Universal's Bride of Frankenstein) to the major strokes (the combination of over-the-top gore and humor so dry it hardly registers is a Hammer trademark). Most of Burton's films have more than a passing familiarity with the long history of horror cinema, but none of them have been such a forthright throwback. It suits him, and it suits the material, which was always pitched a modern-day recreation of the Penny Dreadfuls from the 19th century. Reconceived classicism is at the heart of all things Sweeney, and Burton's references to film history are a clever validation of that tradition.

What's a bit surprising is that the show's noted black humor, which perfectly fits into Burton's skewed worldview, has been largely scaled back. Not that the movie Sweeney isn't funny, but it's much more reserved. I like it - it goes well with the bleak visuals and subdued performances.

Oh, I had to get to the performances eventually, didn't I? I'm going to start out nice: Helena Bonham Carter. Her take on Mrs. Lovett is a vastly different thing than the "standard" performances, Angela Lansbury's cockney vaudevillian and Patti LuPone's sexed-up sociopath. Where both of those actresses were big and imposing, Bonham Carter shrinks into the role. Her Lovett is all whispers and nervous little twitches, seeming much more alarmed than invigorated by the killing that she does so much to encourage. What makes her performance stand out so is the teeny tiny details of physical expression she brings to the role: look for the way she moves her eyes and head when Sweeney storms about. You'll know everything you need to about the character's longing for and fear of the barber in just a few frames of Bonham Carter's gestures.

And now I'm going to be not very nice: Johnny Depp made no sort of impression on me whatsoever. Sweeney, as a character, is largely about the desire for revenge, but there's quite a lot of flexibility within that. Depp's choice is to spent every moment in a bubbling rage, which is, I want to stress, a perfectly valid way to play the role, but it comes across as one-note. Whenever the character can be a little bit playful, Depp goes for glowering instead. It's reasonable, but ultimately it's just not that interesting. The only moment in which I felt really good about his performance was in his first major song, "My Friends," where he sings a love song to his old razors, and makes it feel very much like he's about to start making out with them (it helps that it's the one time in the film that he actually sings well). Otherwise, his performance fails entirely to rise above Lovett's dismissal: "Can't you think of nothing else? Always broodin' away on yer wrongs what happened heaven knows how many years ago." When Depp sings in "Epiphany," the very heart of the show's dramatic arc, "I'm alive at last, and I'm full of joy!" I do not believe him.

I haven't felt particularly inclined to mention the music in the musical, but I guess I should. First, I'll say without reservation that longtime Sondheim collaborator Jonathan Tunick has turned in a new set of orchestrations which approach the divine. If I didn't have enough reason to grouse about all the song cuts, the fact that I don't get to hear "Kiss Me" done up like this would do it.

The singing, though, is...not good. I know intelligent people are trying to convince themselves that it is good that Depp and Bonham Carter bring a thin, pop sensibility to the songs, but I think there's an awfully large burden of proof there. I'm sympathetic to the idea that an operatic voice is too big for the screen, although I don't agree, but what bothers me is that far too often, the actors don't sing the notes that were written in the score. My ass, that's a performance choice: it's just poor singing, and the worst moments - "Epiphany," "Not While I'm Around," "No Place Like London" - are worse than the best moments - "By the Sea," "My Friends," the first recording I've ever liked of "Green Finch and Linnet Bird" - are good.

The good news is that this is a movie, not a concert recording, and the way the songs are staged covers up a lot of sins. Particular since Bonham Carter - the worst singer in the cast - gives the most arresting performance. Burton's respect for the material is evident in the marvelous work he does staging the songs, whether he faithfully recreates what was obvious in the libretto, as with the "Johanna" trio, or if he invents something wholesale to make the material his own, as in the hilarious "By the Sea," the best moment in the film. The missteps are few indeed: "God That's Good," the great second act opening number, has been so mangled that I'd have been happier to see it cut altogether, and the choice to remove all the choruses leaves "Pirelli's Miracle Elixir" looking awfully strange with its cluster of dead silent shoppers, but those are outlying moments, and not at all typical of the whole.

And now, I've gotten to the end, and what a doozy it is: perhaps the worst moment in any otherwise good film in all of 2007. In the stage version, the show ends with Toby, the orphan boy that Mrs. Lovett takes in, slashing Todd's throat during after the barber has murdered the baker. Shortly thereafter the living members of the cast all burst in to find Toby furiously working the meat grinder where Mrs. Lovett processed Todd's victims into ingredients for meat pies. Rather suddenly, Toby steps forward and begins to sing the final "Ballad of Sweeney Todd." Like I said aaaallll the way up top, that's not really an "ending" - but it tricks us into thinking it is. By contrast, the film ends with Toby slashing Todd's throat, and a fade to black on Todd's body as Sondheim's music winds down. That's it. It's extremely unfulfilling, after the manner of the many '70s horror films that ended the instant the main conflict ended (ending on the very frame, in some cases). It wasn't very satisfying in the '70s, and it's altogether awful here: there's nothing to "release" the audience from the story, and so we shuffle out of the theater with the last shot just kind of hanging there. The movie stops, it doesn't end.

That said, Sweeney Todd is a hell of a thing, flaws and all. It has vision to spare, which is rare enough in the modern cinema, and it was made by a director clearly in love with his material, which is rarer. It is not the definitive version of the musical, but maybe we don't need a definitive version: the film that Burton made, with its blood and bone-dry humor and dark, slimy, Gothic streets, is a whole package that, I confess, is a very good thing on its own, even if it isn't "my" Sweeney Todd. It's Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, and nobody could do it better.

Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd.
He served a dark and a hungry god.
To seek revenge may lead to hell,
But everyone does it, though seldom as well
As Sweeney,
As Sweeney Todd,
The demon barber of Fleet Street.

8/10 (Depp, and Depp alone, kept it from a 9)

THE CHILL OF GHOSTLY SHADOWS

The Kite Runner is everything that I think of when I haughtily trot out the phrase "middlebrow art film". It is based on a popular book that is probably not quite good enough to justify its popularity. It is about Significant Themes That Matter Today. It is not very happy, but traditional morality is safely upheld when all is said and done. It tells the audience what to feel and is never, ever challenging in any way. Most damningly, it is directed by Marc Forster, a name that should strike icy fear into the hearts of all those who love cinema as an art form, and not a bourgeois popular entertainment. So mighty indeed is my instinctive fear of the man and his determinedly anonymous filmmaking style, I think I need to try this again: it is directed by Marc Forster.

The Kite Runner begins in San Francisco in the year 2000, before flashing back to Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970s. Here we meet Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), a spoiled child of wealth, and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of the despised Hazara ethnic group. The two boys are close friends, as close as can be given Amir's nascent classism, and life is all play and kite-flying and vaguely threatening childlike one-upsmanship, until a terrible thing happens that drives Amir to hate all his own cowardice and entitlement that he sees whenever he looks at Hassan.

Jump a few years, to see Amir (now played by Khalid Abdalla) and his father making a life for themselves in California, having fled Afghanistan during the Russian invasion. As such things will happen, Amir falls in love with fellow emigré Soraya (Atossa Leoni) and they wed. Jump a few more years, to 2000 again, as Amir learns that he can finally atone for the terrible things he did to Hassan, but it will require him to return to Afghanistan and confront a past he'd be much happier leaving buried.

Hollywood films being what they are, and Marc Forster being who he is, it didn't really surprise me very much that everything good about the book has been removed from the film, and everything trite and unconvincing in the book has been left as the core of the drama. What Khaled Hosseini's debut novel does best is to function as a sort of diary; particularly in the opening third, detailing Amir and Hassan's day-to-day world. It's easy to reduce it to "oh, it's interesting because it normalises Afghanistan," but that misses the point. It's a study of childhood set in a place very few of us would otherwise know about, but it's far more interesting as psychology than sociology. And all of it gets cut in a headlong rush to move the plot along quickly, shedding all the rich little details of life that made the book fascinating. What the novel does next best is to flesh out the ways in which Amir, at all stages of life, feels crushed under his father's rigid views of masculine behavior, views that don't account for Amir's shyness and anxiety and literary ambitions. Except for a few random lines of dialogue here and there, that all gets cut too.

What stays is the bland central plot, in which a child is crudely used as the symbol of a man's redemption and a cardboard villain who invokes Nazism is trotted out for our self-righteous booing and hissing before he's roundly beaten in a sop to the bloodthirsty. In the meantime, Forster and his screenwriter David Benioff capture all of the notes but none of the melodies of the book: showing us the life of Afghanis pre- and post-diaspora without any sort of context to make them anything other than people in funny clothes spouting banal dialogue.

But the film's chief sin isn't its script. It's chief sin is the expressionless visual language, a brightly shined-up and award-ready adventure in making a movie completely without niceness. There is not a shot nor a transition that isn't the least-imaginative choice at any given moment. This is of course the chief characteristic of Marc Forster's cinema, and yet I think The Kite Runner may be the most graceless film of his career, even after Stranger than Fiction suggested in a stumbling, faltering way that he might have some fledgling idea how to relate the dramatic and the visual. Forster has always dedicated himself to the pursuit of the tastefully neutral, and here is his apotheosis: a potboiler about Middle Eastern identity and politics that looks as flat and fastidious as a student film shot in Griffith Park. It lacks any urgency or heft, and has the emotional resonance of belly button lint.

It wouldn't be right to go without admitting that the one great thing about the movie, Homayoun Ershadi's performance as Amir's father. Ershadi is most famous for his debut film, Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, which proved that he could act; his work in this film, although hampered by the gutting of the character's meanness, is absolutely top-notch work, bringing back some of the imperiousness that the script ignores and engendering a sort of reflexive fear and respect for his patriarchal authority. He gives a great performance in search of a film worthy of his intensity.

As for the rest: boilerplate mediocrity. Forster and Benioff are clearly laboring under the belief that making a film about children learning unhappy truths automatically makes for compelling drama and setting a film in an Islamic country automatically makes for sober-minded political significance. They are wrong. All The Kite Runner proves is that aggressively unexceptional filmmaking skills make for aggressively unexceptional films.

4/10

DEMONS ARE PROWLING EVERYWHERE

Check out my thoughts on the first two adaptations of Matheson's novel here.

The newest adaptation of Richard Matheson's epoch-defining vampire novel I Am Legend has, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few things to recommend it, not least that it's the first to actually take Matheson's title. Which might give you at list a glimmer of hope that it would correspondingly be the first satisfying adaptation, which isn't ultimately the case: hell, the very meaning of the title is ultimately changed beyond recognition-

-but I am getting ahead of myself. Before we get to the end of the film and the revelation of who is a legend and for what reason, there is quite a lot of movie to get through, and for a long time, it's pretty damn good, all in all.

I'd even go so far as to say that it has absolutely the best first act of any of the three films. This has quite a lot to do with the technological advances that allow the filmmakers to create a post-apocalyptic New York, circa 2012, that outdoes anything in The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man, for all the good elements of those films' settings. Here is a city overrun with weeds, herds of deer, and empty, disintegrating cars as far as the eye can see, lacking the uncanny effect of The Omega Man's empty Los Angeles but replacing it with a more horrifying sense of total devastation (along the way, the film's attention to detail even encompasses a few clever Easter eggs, such as the teaser poster in Times Square of Batman vs. Superman, opening on Memorial Day 2010, or the gas station featuring regular unleaded at $6.40 per gallon).

This world is the home of the last man on Earth, Robert Neville (Will Smith), and his German Shepherd Sam. Giving Neville a dog to start is one of the writers' smartest changes to the original (and yes, I just called Akiva "Batman & Robin " Goldsman and Mark "Poseidon" Protosevich clever. Forgive me), for it allows him to express himself without falling into the traps that the other two films fell into. Basically, there are three ways to approach a "last man" film: I would argue that the ideal would be to make it silent, as Matheson's novel was (one of the greatest moments in the book is when Neville calls out to a dog, and realises that he hasn't heard his own voice in three years), but barring that the two ways to add human speech are through narration, which failed so badly in the first film, or by having the protagonist speak: when Charlton Heston chatted with corpses and himself in The Omega Man, he came across as a bit batty, but it was Heston-battiness that could forgiven. By giving Neville a flesh-and-blood companion, Goldsman and Protosevich give him the opportunity to speak to himself without straining our credulity overmuch. Of course, this changes the film's take on Neville's isolation, but I'd still say it's the single best change made to the source material in the current adaptation.

For the long opening act of the film, Neville and Sam wander through New York, not hunting the infected as in the previous versions, but simply trying to scrabble together enough to eat and gather DVDs to stave off the boredom. Occasionally Neville interacts with mannequins he has set up to simulate humanity; it's a sad attempt to replicate actual contact with life, and he knows it, but he pushes through anyway just to amuse himself. Ever afternoon, he goes to a pier in the hope of finding other survivors.

It's hard to overemphasise how important Will Smith is to this project. Not something I saw very often. For every bit of 40 minutes, this is a one-man show, lacking much more than a few glimpses of the infected, and for Neville to retain our interest requires a charismatic actor, rather than a necessarily "good" actor. Basically, it's a movie-star role that we have to understand instantly in a few brief strokes, and Smith is one of the last movie stars we have left. Although disinclined to grapple with the tortured depths of his character, he nails this important truth: most of what we know about Neville we learn from looking at him. Smith is comfortable with being looked at, and he is just good enough an actor that Neville's inevitable descent into (deeper) madness feels believable.

The movie starts to falter when it tries to be about anything other than watching Will Smith be the last man alive. For the third film in a row, Neville has been recast as a medical scientist, you see, and the early portion of the plot concerns his experiments, which are technobabble, and his attempts to capture infected humans for his tests, giving us several good views at the film's mysterious villains, and those views are not pleasing. The infected are a combination of actors in make-up and CGI, and they look like video game characters. Come to think of it, they act a lot like video game characters as well, and the film's action setpieces are all abject failures because of it: they don't feel physical, they feel like movie constructions.

The point of no return is a little over halfway through the film, when Neville is trapped by the creatures in a fairly sophisticated snare that is not remotely credible as the work of mindless subhuman animals (in the original draft, Neville blundered into his own trap; if that is the subtext here, it has been buried too far for any extraction to find it). I Am Legend is a golden example of the film that reveals countless plot-holes and inconsistencies if you think about it too much after you see it, but that one is obvious even as you're watching it.

Then, the expected "other last humans on Earth" show up, and the film becomes all of the worst elements of The Omega Man with none of that film's light touch. It's contrived at best, and at the worst it's a mess of the most unimaginative genre tropes you could imagine, mixed with the film's long-delayed embrace of 'splosions. When the final scene hits, an entirely unearned bit of idiotic optimism, I was a little ashamed that I'd enjoyed any part of the film at all.

I think we can identify a pattern: when adaptations of I Am Legend are moody visual pieces that focus on Neville in a post-apocalyptic world, they are brilliant, and none more so than this new film; when they start to be plot-driven pieces about his attempt to save the world, they become strained and ineffective, none more so than... Well, what can you do? The opening act is too magnificent for the terrible ending to wreck it. As popcorn movies go, this one has enough of the good in it to make it watchable, and enough of the bad to make it disposable. Anyway, it's enough to distract you from the December all around.

6/10

YOU'D THINK WE HAD THE PLAGUE

This was to have been Sunday's post, until I ran afoul of the nefarious "short wait" at Netflix. I apologise for the brutality hereby done to the ordinarily clocklike operation of this blog's schedule.

(Do note that the "keep reading" link is below the "labels" links. I don't know why that is, and in future I hope to fix it).

In 1954, one of the most influential horror authors of the 20th century, Richard Matheson, published what is probably his most important and certainly best-known work: the science fiction/horror novella I Am Legend. It is the story of Robert Neville, a white collar man of no particular distinction who finds himself the last living human being after a terrible pandemic, aided by the devastation caused by a hinted-at nuclear conflict, has turned the rest of humanity into nocturnal hunters feeding on mammal blood and capable of surviving death and indeed returning from the dead. In short, they are vampires, and every night they surround Neville's barricaded home and try to kill the last man on earth.

In I Am Legend, Matheson upended the rules for vampire fiction, largely by giving his creatures a rigorously scientific basis: vampirism is caused by a bacteria that increases UV sensitivity, engenders an allergy to garlic, and all sorts of plausibly odd physical reactions that, in an age before modern medical knowledge, would have seemed like the paranormal. This was all communicated to the reader through the figure of Neville, who we first meet about eight months after the pandemic wiped out the population of Los Angeles, including Neville's wife and daughter. He is just an average man, but an average man with far too much time on his hands, and this drives him to spend most of his days working on the only question that still matters to him: what is vampirism and can it be cured? So we follow him as he forms hypotheses, makes wild and ill-informed guesses that he slowly whittles into a working theory, and figures out too late what the symptomology of the disease is, beyond his extremely limited experience on the receiving end of vampiric bloodlust.

I Am Legend is not a flawless book, but it one of the more intelligent examples of its genre. There are three primary ways in which the story is exceptional: first is its rigorous but entirely readable approach to the science of horror, a sea-change in the genre that could only have come in the back half of the 20th century; second is its unwavering focus on Neville's psychology, primarily as it relates to sexual matters (at the book's start, he is obsessed with the vampire women who try to entice him out of his home by, apparently, stripping; by its end, he is essentially a monk, although almost all of his experiments are conducted on female vampires); third and I think most interestingly, and here I am going to spoil the end of the book, so skip to the next paragraph if you'd like, the story suggests that Neville, the last human, has become the legendary monster that vampires have been for so many centuries (thus the title, which only begins to make sense in the second-to-last paragraph. It's brilliant). He is the outsider who stalks and kills the innocents in their sleep, the evil creature of myth - there is a half-vampire society that has been working for a cure and growing increasingly frightened of the invisible killer of the daylight. Without even seeming to try very hard, Matheson tosses the whole book on its head and knocks out the foundations of the notion that some things are monsters and some things are not.

The book has now been filmed in three major incarnations, and knowing the commercial film industry as we do, it shouldn't come as as surprise that these three primary threads are essentially ignored in every one of those adaptations. Which is not to say that the films are all wastes: there is something compelling about every one of them. But those things are decidedly not the things that are compelling in the book.

Tonight I look at the first two adaptations; the third shall be my subject tomorrow.

The first thing to note about The Last Man on Earth, the first successful attempt to film I Am Legend (Hammer Films attempted to adapt the film only a couple of years after the novel was published, but their treatment proved too controversial even for that studio; thus was it passed on to the Italians, those grand producers of quick, inexpensive, smutty horror), is that co-writer Logan Swanson does not in fact exist. "Logan Swanson" was the one-time pseudonym of none other than Richard Matheson himself, hired to adapt his novel before he was gently replaced. So angry was Matheson at the deviations from his original book that he demanded his name be removed from the credits.

There's more than a little irony in Matheson's pique, given that The Last Man on Earth is unquestionably closer to the source than any of the subsequent films. Like the novel, it begins (in 1968, setting the plague the year after the movie's release; the book sets it 20 years down the road) with a man cleaning up the aftermath of what seems to be a violent attack right on his front lawn, loading dead bodies into his truck and driving them out to a giant pit of fire, passing several other bodies along the way. What are they doing there? What has happened to leave Robert Morgan (Vincent Price)-

-yes, they changed his name. No, there was no earthly reason to. I assume that one of the producers had an ex-wife named Neville, or something.

So there's a good long passage where we see Robert Morgan going about his daily business, and it's so close to perfection that I want to cry. Imagine this as a silent film: we see a man walking around, burning corpses, nailing fresh garlic to his front door, securing the barricades on his windows, and so forth, and for a very long time we have no real knowledge of what is going on. Then the first night comes, and Morgan is tormented by zombie vampires, led by his former colleague Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), and that is the first time we hear sound. Isn't that a hell of a bold way to start up a movie? Sort of like Tarkovsky making a cheapie genre flick? Because that's not The Last Man on Earth. This movie instead has a very insistent string-heavy score by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, and virtually constant voiceover in the first twenty minutes. And it's not even good voiceover; it's the most banal possible stuff for a post-apocalypse film, Vincent Price musing things like "I'll get those bodies later," "Good, it's still fresh," and the like. It's still not spelled out for us, but it's incredibly annoying now. I played a little game: watch the first act with the sound turned off. It made the film significantly better.

So far, so much like the novel, too much like the novel in the case of the voiceover. But there are differences, small ones mostly, and they consistently weaken the film: like making Morgan a medical doctor who was previously part of the team trying to develop an antibody to the vampire bacteria. It strips away the lengthy sequence in the book of Neville building his theory about the disease bit by bit, a sequence that was probably unfilmable; but given that the finished film just gives us all the book's scientific conclusions in one thick block of narration, "filmable" wasn't a major consideration in the film's scripting.

The biggest differences come at the end, when the last man on Earth meets the last woman, a nervous young lady named Ruth (Franca Bettoia). The way this plays out, and the way that Morgan learns that he's been killing the wrong sorts of vampires, are much more visual than the way the book had it, and at the same moment much less suspenseful. The end comes rather fast, with most of the film's plot occurring in the last 30 minutes. It's rather structurally warped, actually: the second act is largely taken up with a long flashback that mercifully saves us from the voiceover, although it also presents as bland facts things that the book treated as mysteries. Then the third act falls over itself in an attempt to wrap things up quickly.

Where the film fails as a narrative - and it fails rather mightily in places - it succeeds as a mood piece. Director Sidney Salkow's career was relentlessly unnoteworthy - a lot of TV westerns in the decade running up to this film - and nothing about The Last Man on Earth suggests that he was some kind of lost master of the horror genre, but within its extremely modest scope it does quite a few things very nicely. In particular, the interiors are all both bland and claustrophobic, not "threatening" so much as "suffocating," and it's in this way that the true agony of being the last man on Earth is made clear to us. The mores of the times meant that the meat of Matheson's novel - the sickness Morgan/Neville feels at killing people that turns into a sort of banal workaday mindset, and the psychosexual anguish he feels every time he sees a woman - had to be cut out, and Salkow does a good enough job at latching onto what remains: the frustration at feeling trapped inside the same four walls for all time, hearing the muffled taunts of Death just outside.

The few scenes that are played for scares work, particularly the film and novel's emotional centerpiece, in which Robert's wife, dead in the plague, comes back for him. The film has to be less explicit, but it makes up for this in a truly excellent use of sound, the woman's cries of "let me in" just barely audible over the wind. Throughout, the use of lighting calls to mind the Universal films of the '30s and from thence the German films of the '20s, and while nothing is all that frightening about them, they're surely very brooding and Gothic.

All in all, though, it's Price's film. He's not an actor who hardly ever comes across as subtle, and I almost can't bring myself to say it about him; but it's true. Even with all the purple lines of narration, he never drifts into his customary broadness, and the simple way he carries his body, constantly slumped over, with massive, craggy bags under his eyes, brings out the constant weariness of Morgan's life far more than all the overly-expository dialogue in the world could ever hope. The few times that he does lash out, it's the rich and plummy tones that we know and love from the actor, but something much nastier and animalistic - fitting the film's idea that Morgan, in trying to retain his human-ness, has been forced to renounce his humanity. It's Prices' great performance, close to the best in his career, that pushes the movie from decent horror for the day to being a straight-up classic.

A quintessential product of the early 1970s and the characteristic sci-fi of the era, the one thing that you can't say about 1971's The Omega Man is that it tries too hard to hew to the book. Except for the central concept - and that only vaguely - this film has essentially nothing in common with Matheson's novel: as scripted by John & Joyce Carrington (later to write Battle for the Planet of the Apes and Martin Scorsese's studio debut, the kind of awful Boxcar Bertha) this is the story of Robert Neville, given his name back and played now by Charlton Heston, who lives in a nice LA loft packed to the gills with decorations and luxuries. By day he hunts for clothes and cars, and treats himself to private screenings of Woodstock, apparently the only film playing in Los Angeles at the time of the plague in 1975 (the year being another reversion to the source material not found in the Price movie). By night he stares out his window at the rest of "mankind": robed technophobic cultists with rotting flesh led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), anxious to kill the last of the "people of the wheel" as they call the humans still using the technology that permitted the bio-warfare which caused their half-dead state. They have a particularly strong hatred for Neville, as he was a military chemist back in the times when there was an American military, and he received the only dose of a highly experimental treatment for the disease, leaving him immune to its effects.

The fact that The Omega Man goes so very far afield from the novel is at least part of what makes it a reasonably successful entry in the typically dubious post-apocalypse genre that was so prevalent in the '70s. The other part is Heston, who on paper seems like he'd be woefully wrong for the part, excepting that all of his usual weaknesses, primarily his square-jawed inability to emote, are benefits to this film's vision of Neville. He's not tormented and alone, so much as he is a wiseass, befitting a tone that is significantly less dark than Matheson's source novel. It is a breezy film about the death of mankind in a way that only the '70s could have provided us, and it requires a breezy sort of last man. In other words, if Price had spent his days watching Woodstock over and over, it would have wrecked the mood of the film past repair, but when Heston does it, my only question is why he'd bother with a damn hippie movie like that.

I don't mean to suggest that The Omega Man is some kind of end-times laff riot; indeed, it's much more serious than I Am Legend/The Last Man on Earth, in that where those are experimentations in narrative points of view and genre expectations, this film is a Christ allegory. The source material already had the vague idea that Neville's blood held the key to saving humanity; but that idea is much expanded on here, Neville is asked point-blank by a little girl if he is God, and the final shot is, let us say, crucifabulous. The '70s were just awesome like that: you could blend Big Themes with funkiness, and nobody minded much. Although I can't imagine that even when it was new, people didn't have a big problem with the garish, pop-inflected score that pretty much undermines everything whenever it is playing.

At heart, I think that Heston's presence has more to do with it than anything. Price, no question, is a hambone, but Heston is kitschy. (Was that the case in 1971? I have no idea. I can only call them as I see them from 35+ years on). He makes any film a little creakier and more old-timey, adding just that tiny soupçon of over-the-top manliness to make things seem much more heightened and silly.

And yet (you had to know that I was going to trot out an "and yet"), The Omega Man is hardly a silly movie. It's quite nihilistic, more so than the Logan's Runs and Soylent Greens that were to come, and for this I credit the amazing production design of the film - although it's probably not right to call it "production design," given that it's just the city of Los Angeles playing itself. Director Boris Sagal (a man with an even less distinguished career than Sidney Salkow's) hit upon an idea of almost unimaginable simplicity, one so brilliant that Danny Boyle stole it outright when directing his spiritual remake 28 Days Later some three decades in the future: shooting the big city early on weekend mornings gives you a great many chances to film streets and plazas and stores that are literally empty of human life. LA is a scary and lonely place when it's vacant, and the film makes great use of that. Abandoned cars and lifeless bodies are everywhere, and where The Last Man on Earth mostly contented itself to show a man trapped in an oppressive suburban home, The Omega Man gets most of its effect from showing the city - the pinnacle of human beings milling about and getting in each other's way - without a trace of life.

That's enough to make the film close on to a masterpiece, but the mise en scène can't overcome the rather awkward kinks in the plot. The hooded crazies aren't terrible in concept, and Anthony Zerbe brings a frightening intensity that contrsts nicely to Heston, but sacrificing the cannibalism angle takes a lot of the threat out of their villainy, and the albino makeup effects are not all that convincing. That's nothing on the development where the film wholly abandons Matheson, introducing Neville to a group of survivalists led by the vaguely defined Lisa (Rosalind Cash) and pre-med student Dutch (Paul Koslo). The inevitable love subplot that crops up between Lisa and Neville is too self-conscious in its nifty early-'70s race politicking, and even if it weren't, the very concept of a love story tends to imbalance the idea that Neville is besieged. It's the clearest example of the film's great problem: there just isn't enough danger here, and Neville seems perfectly content with his life just the way it is, the ultimate bachelor's existence in a city that is his for the taking.

There's just no urgency here, which is honestly not a fatal flaw. But it is a flaw, and it keeps the film from hitting the nightmarish heights of the book or the much smaller bad dream hills of The Last Man on Earth. Basically, instead of exploring man's role in a post-apocalyptic world, it is a fun movie with some serious ideas. That's not bad, but it keeps the film from transcending itself. It adds a sense of play to Matheson's framework, and thereby crowds out the most unsettling elements of his writing, the elements that made it a masterpiece in the first place.

'TIS A ROW DOW DIDDLE DOW DEE

The English language only has so much flexibility to it, and I do not think that the words exist to express just how deeply unsettling it is to see remarkably authentic-looking computer generated cartoon chipmunks interacting with live actors in a real-world setting. It's the Uncanny Valley on steroids: from the neck down, these are essentially photorealistic figures, from the neck up they have unnaturally expressive faces, and we get to see them crawling all over Jason Lee and David Cross.

As I said, I don't have the words to explain how distressing this is, so let me instead share a .gif of the King of Hearts stabbing himself in the head:

All things considered, Alvin and the Chipmunks isn't actually that bad. Not "stabbies bad," at any rate. Hell, there are a few gags sprinkled across the film that are actually sort of funny, in a vaguely debased way. And insofar as anyone actually desires to see unpleasantly realistic CGI chipmunks have conversations with Jason Lee and David Cross, the animation is extremely technically proficient, which is surely more than I, for one, expected as a possibility.

So it's not that bad. It's just kind of gross and upsetting. Not the content, I don't mean (there are the requisite kid movie fart & shit jokes, but they are very few in number), but just the experience of sitting there in the dark and watching the damn thing. I felt wrong about watching it: not morally wrong, and not chagrined about spending the money, more like the kind of wrong that you feel after eating Taco Bell or drinking cheap gin. The film left me with a feeling of unease, and the sensation that I'd just spend 90 minutes rubbing citric acid into my eyeballs with a toothbrush. Emily Dickinson once defined art as the physical feeling that the top of her head had been taken off; Alvin and the Chipmunks feels physically like having warm gelatin drizzled in your ear.

That's probably too many metaphors (and all of them food-related!), but necessary, I think, for communicating the very distinct way that the film just plain feels wrong. My reaction was visceral and essentially irrational. That said, let us try to rationalise it out.

Alvin and the Chipmunks retells the origin story of the classic dreadful cartoon and novelty music act: three chipmunk siblings, Alvin, Simon and Theodore (voiced, respectively, by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jess McCartney; and what business the film has spending the money on vaguely-known actors in roles famous for the degree to which they are manipulated past recognition, is totally beyond me) are living a life of ease and peace in a fir tree somewhere in California, storing nuts and singing a capella versions of crappy pop songs (Daniel Powter's "Bad Day," if you must know). Their home is cut down to serve as the Christmas tree in the lobby of a gargantuan, impersonal music label, which at that very moment is spitting out the mangled body of Dave Seville (Jason Lee, of Chasing Amy and The Incredibles), who has just spectacularly failed to impress his old college buddy Ian (David Cross, of Mr. Show and Arrested Development). Contrivance brings Dave and the chipmunks together, where after a series of deeply unimaginative cartoon-style shenanigans that read as the world's worst rip-off of the "little Bruce Campells" scene in Army of Darkness, Dave writes a Christmas song for the chipmunks (yeah, it's "Christmas Don't Be Late"), Ian turns it into a smash hit, the chipmunks become superstars and we are treated to a wholly standard anti-music industry fable.

Good films have been made from worse plots. Wait, that's a complete lie. Anyway, the chief horror of the film isn't the boilerplate script, which has its charming moments, but in the way it all looks. Which is just damn creepy. I don't want to keep harping on it. But by the time Cross kisses one of the 'munks on the cheek (damn me if I can remember which one), I had long since ceased finding this particular film's blend of animation and reality anything other than the stuff of nightmares.

Other than the flesh-crawling CG, there's not much in the film either good or ill. The story is a giant blank slate, simply happening all over without any sort of personality to it; and why do we think this is good for children? Are they meant to be such indiscriminate consumer whores that they cannot desire cleverness and intelligence? Although to be fair, in crafting an story devoid of any affect other than the desire to make money, the film is an honorable continuation of the cartoon series it was based upon.

Meanwhile, Cross and Lee don't embarrass themselves too badly, largely because neither one seems to be in the film at all. In particular, I was struck by how Cross's first appearance, heavy-lidded and reciting his lines without inflection, seemed to be the product either of a sleepwalker or a monumentally pot-addled mind. It's surely limiting of me to assume that it couldn't have been both at the same time.

That the film is basically empty should be no surprise: director Tim Hill is a veteran of Garfield 2 and sadly, Muppets from Space. In other words, his metier is to make the most soulless possible commercial objects. And he has succeeded wildly in that goal with Alvin and the Chipmunks, a film that oscillates arbitrarily between disgusting and boring. Apparently, that is all that Hollywood thinks young people deserve these days. And given that they ate this up to the tune of a $45 million opening weekend, apparently Hollywood is correct.

3/10

BIRTHDAY (I WOULD LIKE YOU TO DANCE)

Yet another 365 days have gone by without my death. Therefore, you should shower me with love and presents. Or something.

WHEN A GIRL'S EMERGENT, PROBABLY IT'S URGENT YOU DEFER TO HER GENTILITY

Full disclosure: I walked into Juno not expecting to like it very much. I was going to see right through its too-hip vernacular and faux-clever pop culture reference points, I was. And then I was going to write a review about how terribly pedestrian the whole thing felt.

This isn't that review, because I was wrong to expect all of that. Juno is a good movie. Perhaps even a very good movie. Along the way, it also proves me wrong about the talents of Bright Young Thing Ellen Page, whom everybody but me liked in Hard Candy, nobody liked or even noticed in X-Men: The Last Stand, and who is now being widely - and I daresay rightfully - bandied about as a potential Oscar nominee.

Juno is the latest in 2007's oddly robust string of movies about pregnancy. It opens with high-school junior Juno MacGuff (Page) learning that she is heavy with child, as they say, standing in the world's most unconvincingly-written convenience store. In all honesty, the opening came very close to validating my close-minded preconception: Juno and the clerk (Rainn Wilson) trade simple awful quips as she steels herself to tell all of the people that need to know: her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), her other best friend and baby daddy Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), her father (J.K. Simmons) and her step-mother Bren (Allison Janney).

For the first twenty minutes, give or take, the film teeters on the edge of bearable. Juno and her peers speak in a confounding invented argot that is meant, I think, to sound like real teenagerspeak, but almost every line clangs along with the unmistakable tones of a first-time screenwriter. That screenwriter is Diablo Cody née Brook Busey-Hunt, a woman whose life story is frankly amazing, and would threaten to overwhelm the movie if I recapped it here. Google her. Anyway, for a goodly chunk of the movie, Cody's writing seems to be altogether clever without being the least bit smart (a regular feature of hipster indie comedies in these post-Wes Anderson days), full of references to pop-culture ephemera from the '70s and '80s that disguises itself as sly and obscure when really it's just warm nostalgia for the generational cohort born from 1975-85, and slang words that I am almost certain are not actual slang (if any of my high-school aged readers can verify that "wizard" is now used as an adjective, a synonym for "cool," I'd be grateful). Either way, it comes off like nadsat by way of The O.C.

Then something interesting happens: after a brief fling with the idea of abortion that comes off as infinitely more believable than anything in Knocked Up, Juno decides to adopt a couple to adopt her baby, and she settles on the charming suburban yuppies Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). This is the first step on a path that will ultimately lead to Juno becoming a little more grown-up with a better understanding of what life is like, and at about this time, the cloying slang which had until now been so pervasive simply stops, as surely as though a faucet had been turned off. Suddenly Juno begins talking like a normal person, with only a few lapses into over-precious dialogue (the truly unfortunate line "Thundercats are go!"* comes at a particularly awful moment, casting a distinct pall over the film's climax). I am certain that Cody didn't mean for it to happen this way, but I went from pretty much hating Juno to finding her mostly sympathetic if abrasive, all because of her abandonment of conspicuously "written" dialogue.

As it moves along, away from artifice into character study, Juno becomes very sweet and genial. This is a shockingly rare indie comedy in that there is not a single character of any importance that we end up hating. Even Vanessa and Mark, who both suffer from crippling personality deficits (and in Mark's case, a seeming taste for young flesh, if you know what I mean) ultimately seem flawed without being despicable; some very bad things are done but they aren't hard to understand or even find a bit sympathetic (I mean that Mark flirts with Juno, and it's fucking creepy. I'm not sure if any of that was the intent).

The characters are so completely human because of the top-notch cast inhabiting them, I suspect: some, like Cera and Simmons, are so consistently good at what they do that we expect nothing less (I assume nobody will hold it against me if I suggest that Cera gives the film's most appealing performance), some, like Bateman and Janney, are good enough often enough that when they are this good, it's not amazing so much as it is comforting: "oh, Jason Bateman, I do love watching you." Garner is a standout in the supporting cast, having done precious little to establish herself as any kind of great actress, and in what I'm happy to call the role of her career, she turns a stock figure - type-A yuppie supermommy - into a frankly beautiful tragic figure. Truth be told, I'd have watched a whole movie of Vanessa and Mark in all their emotionally stunted glory, but in the film as it stands they are a wonderful catalyst for Juno's arc. This is her movie through and through, of course, every character existing only in relation to her, and Page is extremely good in the role. Not the be-all of acting, I'm a little leery of joining the chorus proclaiming her the great actress of her generation. But she rises above the dialogue when it is clumsy, nestles into the role when it is subtle, and makes for the most exceptional movie teen in many a year.

Like so many comedies, Juno is not anxious to do anything too smart behind the camera: director Jason Reitman proved in his last project, Thank You For Smoking, that he has great comic timing, a deft hand at shepherding actors, and no eye whatsoever for the camera, and those skills all come to bear in his sophomore effort, which aims a little lower than that satire and hits its target accordingly. Some of the compositions are a little too "just so," including a final shot that really could have ended about half-way through, and the music choices are soullessly hip (this is at least partially Cody's fault: when you name drop the Stooges and Sonic Youth, these things happen, and I am dumbfounded by a scene that suggests that Mott the Hoople's wonderful but decidedly overplayed "All the Young Dudes" is somehow a lost classic). But Reitman is clearly not trying to be a supremely cunning directing with this project, he just wants to get it right. He succeeds, along with the rest of the creative team. Juno has modest aspirations and it fulfills them, and is probably the sweetest and most human film in the current landscape of oh-so-serious prestige events.

8/10

*I think this is a misquote: I watched Thundercats in my single-digit years, and I absolutely cannot recall this being a catchphrase. What I do know is that there was a perfectly dreadful puppet series from the '60s called Thunderbirds Are GO! - a half-memory conflated into a mantra, perhaps? At any rate, a Google search for "Thundercats are go" doesn't reveal any primary sources.