JANUARY 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

With 2008 come to its dreary end in a massively over-stuffed December, it probably makes sense that 2009 begins with a fairly light slate of the usual program fillers: horrid-looking chick flicks and horror pictures. Why, the first Friday of the year doesn't have any new releases, just a few of the already-released Oscarbaiters poking their heads up outside of New York and Los Angeles.

Anyways, here's to a better year in cinema, although the first month certainly doesn't augur too well...

9.1.2009
When I first saw the trailer for The Uninvited (opening the 30th), I thought, "That is the ultimate bad horror movie title. Two words, the first is 'The', the second begins with 'Un-'. No way does that get topped anytime soon."

The very next trailer I saw was for The Unborn. The moral? Never say "no way".

Don't like shitty possession movies? Thank God that there's a shitty girly movie just for you, Anne Hathaway's extraordinarily ill-timed follow-up to Rachel Getting Married, in which she and BFF Kate Hudson spar over a single calendar day for their long-dreamt of weddings: Bride Wars.

I have no idea what Not Easily Broken is about, but it would almost have to be better than the alternatives.


16.1.2009
The annual "Bad Even By Happy Madison Standards" Happy Madison production for 2009 is Paul Blart: Mall Cop featuring Kevin James in the Chekhovian role of a fat man on a Segway.

Notorious, meanwhile, is not a remake of the beloved Hitchcock Nazi-hunter tale, but a biopic of Biggie Smalls. Hell, it's been a while since the last musical biopic, maybe it will be okay. *cough*

The second horror picture in as many weeks, My Bloody Valentine 3-D would seem to suffer from a poorly-chosen release date, but as it turns out, Valentine's Weekend has a slasher movie of its very own, and one that no amount of counter-programming could hope to overcome. So even if it's a annoying move, it's one that makes sense. I am at any rate pleased to see a 3-D slasher remake, given that it seems like a monumental pairing of two completely awful trends that I can't abide, and given that I've never had a chance to see the genre's standard-bearer, Friday the 13th, Part 3-D in its intended format. Kudos on the ridiculous tagline, too: "Nothing says 'date movie" like a 3-D ride to hell!" Actually, I can think of several things.

Hotel for Dogs is exactly what you think it is.


23.1.2009
Man, have you been waiting for a prequel to the Underworld franchise? Tough shit, because you're getting one anyway: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.

You're also getting another in the inexplicable string of Brendan Fraser adventure movies: Inkheart, a kid's movie about a magic book. And something with the irresistably terrible title Donkey Punch.


30.1.2009
Okay, now we get The Uninvited. Of the two "Un-" movies, I think this one might end up being better. I have no reason at all to believe this.

Plus: New in Town, some kind of dramedy or Grrl power film or something else that I don't know, starring Renée Zellweger's dying career. And Taken, with Liam Neeson as a badass motherfucker who fucks shit up under the guiding hands of Pierre Morel and the Luc Besson School of Badass Motherfucking. It speaks volumes that this is the closest January comes to a movie that I'm legitimately interested in seeing.

MILLER'S TALE

Once upon a time, Frank Miller was among the finest writers in the comics medium; that would be right around 1986, when The Dark Knight Returns was published for the first time, revolutionising the world of superhero literature. In the years that follow, Miller started to slide a bit into weaker and weaker stories, then into self-parody around the midpoint of his decade-long run on Sin City during the 1990s; that slide into self-parody turned into a full-on gallop to embrace self-parody starting more or less with The Dark Knight Strikes Again in 2001, and from this he has never recovered, best indicated, perhaps by his inspired idea to have the Caped Crusader fightin Osama bin Laden in a proposed, yet-uncompleted graphic novel tentatively titled Holy Terror, Batman!

Somewhere in all of that, Robert Rodriguez - a much smarter director than he's usually given credit for, and better than virtually anyone else out there at stretching a tiny budget - took three of the best Sin City stories and turned them into a hypnotic pastiche of film noir and impossible CGI sets. Released in 2005, the high-water mark year for comic book films, the Sin City movie remains a unique beast: taking every shot from the graphic novels and adding only movement, it never feels bound to the page or anything else but the raw untapped potential of cinema in the computer age, and counts as perhaps the only film in the burgeoning green-screen style of filmmaking (think also: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Star Wars: Episode III, or the Miller-derived 300) in which the unreality of computer-animated backdrops adds to, rather than distracts from, the mood and impact of the film as a whole.

Because Rodriguez is such a nice fella, and because he essentially used the Sin City books as his storyboards, he fought to have Miller added as a co-director, even though the writer contributed nothing to the actual on-set directing. Rodriguez's well-meant gesture of generosity (which got him kicked out of the DGA) has now come home to roost, sadly, and Miller has turned his honorific credit into an incipient film career with his adaptation of Will Eisner's 1940s comic strip The Spirit, though with a little bit of luck the cringing awfulness of Miller's film will be enough to prevent him from ever getting to make another. This is bad, bad stuff. It's not just that it's obvious from the train wreck onscreen that Miller hasn't ever truly directed a movie before; it's hard to tell if he's ever even seen a movie before. The Spirit is an epic failure on the Ed Wood model, a result of a man with a thousand ideas, all of them bad, and no talent whatsoever for bringing those ideas to life in front of the camera. I'll say this for it, at least it's never, ever boring.

The Spirit plays like a Greatest Hits compendium of all of Miller's worst habits, the ones that we overlook in his good work and roll our eyes at in his bad work: hellzapoppin' sexism, with every woman in the cast (including Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Paulson and Stana Katic) given to fawning over the oh-so-sexy title hero (Gabriel Macht, who you may know from something, which puts you one up on me) while wearing tight, revealing outfits; self-consciously hard boiled dialogue that veers straight into balls-out silliness, particularly in the endless monologues; violence stylised to the point that you can't tell what the hell is happening; and fever dream imagery that might be cool if it weren't entirely nonsensical, especially the scene where the villainous Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) and his assistant Silken Floss (Johansson) confront the Spirit while dressed as SS officers, standing in front of a giant Hitler portrait. A far cry from Eisner's poppy, noir-in-full-color original, Miller's film is a stylistic cousin to Sin City, with marginally more color (it also uses the green-screen and CGI backgrounds technique, though the technology appears to have regressed).

The end result is absolutely crazy, in ways that I can hardly communicate - the only way to fully ken The Spirit is to see it, and it's so deliriously loopy in its badness that I'd actually recommend you go out and do just that. There's no way to communicate in print how gaudy the Spirit's snarling tough guy dialogue is when Macht delivers it, using a voice that recalls a twelve-year-old playing at Christian Bale's digitally-augmented voice in The Dark Knight, nor can I fully express the mesmerising sight of Jackson at his very hammiest, playing a character with an inexplicable fixation on eggs and egg-related puns, culminating in a left-field rant where he declaims free range chickens because of their horrible brown-shelled ovum.

It all seems like it's meant to be a spoof of the serious, dark comic books and comic book movies, except that Frank Miller has no apparent sense of humor. What little I know for certain about Will Eisner makes me believe he does have such a sense of humor, and maybe this is Miller's attempt at replicating that. He fails, if that's the case: this film's comedy is about as catastrophic as Superman III or Batman & Robin had. Assuming that it is intentional comedy, and not just the side effect of Miller giving in to all of his worst impulses. For without doubt, The Spirit is a prime example of an artist casting off the last traces of discipline and going positively apeshit with all of his pet obsessions. That's what makes it special, really: though it is entirely and irredeemably terrible, it is unmistakably designed to be exactly what it is. These melodramatic performances and garish fight sequences are a perfect fit for the ripe dialogue and gonzo visuals. It's not common these days for a film this unhinged to make it out into the world, with all of its creator's terrible ideas expressed intact, but it has happened with The Spirit. Treasure this, for its like will not come again soon.

But I wonder...maybe I'm being too hard on Miller. As we all know, December is the month for big prestigey movies that the studios want very much to show up on Top 10 lists and win awards. This short-sighted view ignores the other half of things: the Bottom 10 lists, and the Razzies. Could it not be that this is a deliberate attempt to court those votes? If so, I can only say to Mr. Miller: yeoman's work, sir.

1/10

THE WWII MOVIE AS A STAID MUSEUM PIECE

Edward Zwick might be the most consistent director in the history of cinema. His modus operandi: take a little-known but inspiring historical event - failing that, invent one - and falteringly turn it into a lumpy action film lousy with good intentions and lousier with clumsy execution. I honestly feel a bit bad for the man: he obviously means well, but every one of his films I've seen ends up pitched midway between a civics lesson and a crummy '80s flick, with the exception of Legends of the Fall, which is pitched midway between a civics lesson and a crummy Merchant Ivory flick.

Eventully, it was going to happen that Zwick would set his sights on World War II and the Holocaust; and here it is that we have Defiance, based on Nechama Tec's account of the true story of the Bielski brothers, three Belarusian Jews who resisted the Nazi onslaught by founding a society deep in the forests on what is today the Belarus-Poland border. For two years the Bielski Partisans protected an ever-increasing community of Jewish refugees, while occasionally mounting attacks against the encroaching Germany war machine.

It's certainly an interesting story, one that certainly lives up to the advertising campaign's breathless proclamation that it is one of the greatest lost tales of World War II. Already, Zwick has received some flack for fudging his history a bit, but it's hardly akin to what he did in The Last Samurai, still his best film, although that's not really saying very much. Anyway, complaining about the historical inaccuracies of Defiance isn't a terribly rewarding use of one's time and energies, to my mind. Better by far to complain about the film just on its own terms: it's apparently a tribute to the men and women who refused to be simply victimised by the Nazis that presents them as... three hardasses and a whole bunch of mewling victims. The only defiance on display is in the form of the three Bielskis, who have to shepherd a whole lot of whinging stereotypes through the woods, and don't seem particularly keen on doing it. It's sort of like an idiot's version of Schindler's List, only without the historic scope or the great morality play in the heart of the protagonist; Defiance even gets its very own version of the "I could have done more!" speech, at roughly the same point in the narrative. But a tribute to the enduring spirit of the Jewish people? Hardly - in fact, it rather argues to the idea that the Belarusian Jews were content to die like sheep before those noble Bielski boys saved them. Though coming from a filmmaker who apparently didn't think that Blood Diamond was racist, it shouldn't be surprising that what he wanted this movie to mean, and what it did mean are separated by something close to 180 degrees.

As a simple war movie, Defiance is admittedly better than it is as a message picture. Thanks to a team of high-class collaborators - particularly editor Steven Rosenblum, whose journeyman work has enlivened quite a few combat-heavy movies, several of them directed by Zwick - the film does have a few reasonably effective fighting sequences, saving the very best for last: a man-on-tank setpiece that comes terribly close to making us leave the theater convinced that we've just seen a real rousing bit of cinema. The curiously-underappreciated Eduardo Serra shoots most of the film under a grainy blue haze that, for my tastes, counts among the best cinematography of the year: Defiance as a real texture to it, in an age when smoothness and too much digital intermediate define how most Hollywood movies look (there is obviously DI in the film, but it's not as omnipresent and upsetting as is typically the case). I'll say this for Edward Zwick: he's a solid craftsman. Terrible taste in screenplays, and he's not much of a writer himself, but you go to a Zwick film, and you're going to see really fine visuals assembled by talented individuals.

In this particular case, the fine war movie craftsmanship accounts for about 20% of the whole; the rest is given over to the story of the Bielskis and their vengeance-driven quest to save the world. The brothers themselves are a curious problem: played by Daniel Craig (as Tuvia, the eldest), Liev Schreiber (as Zus, the second) and Jamie Bell (as Asael, the youngest), they don't really seem like they're from the same family, or quite the same movie. For Craig's part, I salute that he has taken such measures to avoid being typecast as James Bond, but this is the second time in three years (after Spielberg's Munich) that he's played a Jewish character: and bless his blond head and blue eyes, but he's just not very convincing at it. Which isn't to say that he doesn't play the character alright, although there's not much to Tuvia besides sadness and a dim moral awakening, but there's a fundamental disconnect between who Tuvia is - a man fighting an existential battle because of the people he was born to - and what Craig brings to the table - steel-eyed badassery. Schreiber, the only Jewish actor to play a Bielski, gets a much more interesting character to play (Zus is alone in wishing to do violence against the Germans, instead of merely surviving, and thus runs off to aid the anti-Semitic Red Army), and he makes the most of it: Schreiber's angry interactions with Craig are easily the most dramatically and emotionally compelling moments in the film. Unfortunately, he gets shuttled offscreen for large chunks of the film, and when he's present, he has a tendency to drop his accent. Bell, meanwhile, is pretty and callow, playing a pretty and callow character.

So back to my initial point: Zwick is a terribly consistent filmmaker, and he's done yet again exactly what he always does. Defiance is technically accomplished, formally uninventive, and fumbles its story right from the word go. The Bielskis deserved a better film than this, but so did the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, all the way back in the well-intentioned, fumbled Glory. One day, maybe, Zwick will stop wanting an Oscar so badly, and he'll make a movie that just tells a good story without feeling compelled to learn us all a Very Important Lesson. Until then, we've got another goddamn World War II film this season. Enjoy.

5/10

WHAT IF THEY THREW A NAZI PORNO AND NOBODY CAME?

Little things, insignificant things, can derail a movie. We can pretend to be as serious and objective as we like, but sometimes there's just a tiny flaw that wrecks it all, entirely for matters of personal taste.

In The Reader, there's a scene set in Germany in 1958, in which 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) reads to 35-year-old Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) from Homer's The Odyssey. There are multiple POV shots of the book's first page, and one can clearly see an image of two dolphins in the upper-right corner, as Michael reads the opening lines: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time anda gain off course, once he had plundered / the hallowed heights of Troy." I recognised those dolphins and that particular translation of those lines, because they are from Robert Fagles's 1996 translation of The Odyssey, and I know that because I bought my very own copy of the book when it was still brand new - it was the first time I'd ever read Homer, and the Fagles translation had much the same impact on me that Chapman's translation had on John Keats.

So here I am, watching the movie, and I can't stop myself from wondering why on Earth there's a 1996 English-language translation of The Odyssey in Germany in 1958, and that gets me to wondering why Michael also reads from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterly's Lover, or the standard English translation of Chekhov's Lady with the Dog, or really, why aren't there any classic German books, besides a copy of Rilke's poems that never apparently gets opened? Thus does my suspension of disbelief get packed up and carted away, and I'm so busy being pissy about the misuse of literature that I can hardly even pay attention to the legitmately offensive things about The Reader, such as its happy endorsement of statutory rape, or the way it positions an Auschwitz guard as a tragic heroine.

Of course, the point I'm really trying to make is that if The Reader was effective whatosever, I probably would have been too caught up in the drama to let my mind clamp down on something this unabashedly petty. Because by all means, The Reader is dismally ineffective: as art, as provocation, even as exploitation. That Odyssey scene I was harping about? Winslet and the 18-year-old Kross are both stark naked at the time. When you've got a critic paying more attention to the anachronisms in your mise en scène than the Naked! Kate! Winslet! action, you've gone terribly wrong.

The Reader: an aging German lawyer (Ralph Fiennes) stares outside one overcast morning, and remembers how he once had all kinds of sex with this really hot blonde who like to have him read before they made love. And how a few years later, in law school, he watched as she was tried for war crimes. And then how still a few years later, he started sending her homemade books on tape in prison. Why exactly this requires a flashback from the arbitrarily-chosen year of 1995 is never made even a little bit clear: there's a story involving Michael's grown daughter that doesn't really reflect back on anything in the main plot, but otherwise, the story is over in 1988. Perhaps it's because Fiennes' name appears prominently in the advertising, and they wanted to make sure that he appeared in the first half of the movie. Perhaps because self-important literary adaptations tend to have flashback structures.

Believe it or not, I don't go into movies intending to hate them. A movie has to earn my hate. Stultifying primness is one hell of an efficient way to do that. The Reader is a story of passions: sexual passion in the bedroom, intellectual passion in the courtroom, moral passion in the eyes of a concentration camp survivor. But the supremely British filmmaker Stephen Daldry - who gave us the charming Billy Elliot and the stuffy, pretentious The Hours - will have none of this strange "passion" in his film, in which everything is coldly beautiful and precisely framed, wasting not one but two extremely talented cinematographers, Roger Deakins and Chris Menges, on scene after scene of delicately shadowed, golden-lit Masterpiece Theater crap that just about any cameraman with enough time could have thrown together. This is Coffee Table Cinema: something you pick up and rifle through, enjoy how very lovely and polished it is, and think, all too briefly, about what it putatively means.

Although in the case of The Reader, you're better off never getting to what it means. As yet another in the long line of Holocaust pornography that reached its nadir in this year's execrable Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the film wants very badly to challenge us with burning questions like, "Are all people who do evil things therefore evil people?" but lacks the bloody-mindedness to follow through. We're meant, like young Michael, to fall in love with Hanna's sexual vitality, only to be horrified later on to learn that this sexy woman is responsible for hundreds of deaths, and then to reconcile all that for ourselves: but the film's sex is much too tasteful, even as it is surprisingly explicit, and the moral outrages are studded into the film mechanically. This is the Nazi sexploitation film for your grandma; me, I'd much rather take the uncut smuttiness of something like Salon Kitty, where at least you feel dirty at the end, to something where you don't feel anything at all.

Such spark of life as The Reader enjoys is entirely due to Kate Winslet, who chomps into her role and her accent, and acts every bit the imperious ex-Nazi (she only refers to Michael, dismissively, as "Kid", and snarls mean things just to get a rise out of him). It's a slightly campy performance from an actress not usually given to camp, and it's frankly one of her lesser roles; but at least she brings some heat to it, unlike Fiennes, at his mildewiest in a role that requires him to look tremulously at a lot of different people, or Kross, whose entire characterisation seems to be "I am an eighteen-year-old getting paid good money to rub my naked body against Kate Winslet's naked body", which to his credit actually does work for the first stretch of the film, but when he's called upon to play moral confusion, he's pretty much stuck, with his big eyes and terrifying lack of a chin.

I've said it once before, but it bears repeating: this film is goddamn emotionally inert. And that is something that no film about sex and Nazis must ever be. At the very least, it could be objectionable and offensive - I'd hoped it would be offensive, when I first heard the plot - but no, that would interfere with Stephen Daldry's Prestige Machine. Leaving a very pretty provocation that might get the prickly or the elderly worked up, but leaves the rest of us enjoying the dappled light on Winslet's nipples, waiting fruitlessly for the eroticism to kick in.

4/10

COMFORT FOOD CINEMA, or: IT'S LIKE BEFORE SUNRISE, BUT WITH OLD PEOPLE!

There is not one moment in Last Chance Harvey that is remotely surprising, not a single extraordinary shot, not a line of dialogue that resonates in your soul hours after leaving the theater, not even a musical cue that you hum as you walk out. It is by a fair margin and according to every metric the most predictable of all this year's Oscarbait films, and I am including the biopic that opens with a scene explaining where, when, and by whose hand the protagonist is going to be assassinated. But Last Chance Harvey has another thing going for it besides mounds of creativity and originality: it is pleasing. There's a hell of an X factor right there, just being a pleasant movie that holds no surprises, but boasts strong performances by likable actors playing sympathetic characters. What hope has the cynical critic of standing in front of something like that and declaring, "This is lousy"? I like to think that I am not easily manipulated, but I found Last Chance Harvey to be entirely satisfying, and a perfectly worthy use of 100 minutes of my time. There are points in life when it does not do to ask any more of a film than this.

Quickly, the plot: Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) is freshly arrived in London for his daughter's wedding, when he finds that he's been fired from his jingle-writing job that he kind of doesn't like, but goddammit, you need to have a job, right? Oh, and his daughter isn't super-excited to see him, since he has a long history of letting her down and embarrassing her, so she wants her stepdad to give her away at the ceremony. Meanwhile, Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) is sick of being single, sick of going on dates, sick of getting shit from her paranoid mother, and sick of her demeaning job snagging travelers at Heathrow for surveys. Their paths cross in an airport lounge, where Harvey suggests (uncharacteristically, we can assume), that it might be fun to spend the afternoon together. That afternoon turns into an evening at the wedding reception, and then into the following morning, and from there, well I can't give away the whole plot, can I?

But it's unlikely that even a borderline-savvy viewer won't see where things are going pretty much from the get-go. Of course something will happen to keep Harvey from keeping their meeting the following day, and of course Kate will be upset, and of course it will take all sorts of doing to get them back together, where they will conclude that it is much better to face an uncertain future together than an easily-predicted life alone. That's the kind of movie this is.

And I wouldn't have it any other way. Like any other kind of junk food, predestined love stories are nice as long as you don't have too many of them, and Last Chance Harvey pulls ahead of the pack thanks to a couple of secret weapons named Dustin and Emma. Basically, the film has already done all of its work from the moment those two actors appear: they're both effortlessly appealing in pretty much everything, allowing for the fact that every actor in history has a small clutch of dedicated haters. Though I'd assume that for Hoffman and Thompson, there are a lot fewer haters than for most performers. We root for Harvey and Kate simply because of how swell we expect they're going to be based on the thespians involved, which saves the film from having to do too much character-building other than to clarify that they're not total assholes. It's cheap, but it's fair: you couldn't get away with doing this in a film starring, say, Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. There, the filmmakers have to justify that the characters have backstories and deserve our attention. I'm not insane enough to argue that The Wrestler isn't a substantially more durable film than Last Chance Harvey, of course, only that making a movie that asks us to like Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman just because we already like Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman really has no reason to fail. They're objectively likable people.

There's also the fact that writer-director Joel Hopkins isn't a complete idiot. He keeps the film from falling into the most obvious traps for this kind of story, most notably the one where Kate is a pixie woman who rescues Harvey from himself. It's a supremely canny move to introduce the characters separately and not bring them together for close on to a third of the film; we're almost as invested in her arc as we are in his (that "almost" is because, no way around it, Harvey has a more dramatic backstory). Kate and Harvey aren't completely rounded characters, but they're reasonably close, much more than usual for these types of films.

I am unquestionably grading on a curve. Last Chance Harvey is not a masterpiece, nor a great film, not anything but a genial, satisfactory waste of time. But hey, when you're in the mood for that kind of thing, you're in the mood. And besides, it's a bit of a thrill to see Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson get big ol' leading roles for a change: it's been more years than I can immediately count since either of them has had a proper starring role. This film is a fine example of why that's a shame: they're both fun to watch. My Lord, it's refreshing to find a film perfectly enjoyable without feeling like I have to be in love with it!

7/10

TSPDT #570: GET CARTER

For the 52nd and final review in my yearlong journey through the They Shoot Pictures Top 1000, I decided it was time to shake things up a bit. Inscrutable art films and dreary social dramas are all right, but we're going out with a bang: a nasty, occasionally sleazy British gangster picture starring a young Michael Caine at his flintiest, 1971's Get Carter.

Co-produced by the actor after a string of flops had knocked off all the luster that he'd picked up in the mid-'60s, thanks to such films as Zulu, The Ipcress File and Alfie, the story of Jack Carter, a London gangster who travels to Newcastle to investigate the shady circumstances around his brother's death, wasn't just meant to revitalize Caine's sagging career - he and his producing partner Michael Klinger (who took all the on-screen credit) were hoping to give a boost to the very concept of the British gangster picture, which by that point had slipped into stodgy irrelevance, like pretty much all British genre filmmaking around the start of the '70s. It would be a flat-out lie to say that Get Carter reinvented the wheel, but it was the first time that this combination of urban realism and nihilistic violence had been seen in the UK, and it did indeed lead to a whole new generation of crime stories with cockney accents - let all those who've enjoyed Mona Lisa or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Shallow Grave or Sexy Beast, or any of the dozens of other crime films set in Britain's post-industrial decay bow down before Get Carter, without which those films might very plausibly not exist.

Unlike many of its descendants, though, Get Carter is simple, almost brutally so. The story is as straightforward as it could be: Carter wants to find out who killed his brother and why; he does so; he exacts his revenge on those responsible. Even the conspiracy that he uncovers isn't particularly complex, except in the number of similar pasty white British thugs that it involves. There's actually a very beautiful structural elegance to the screenplay, thanks to this utter simplicity: writer Mike Hodges (who also directed) adapted Ted Lewis's novel Jack Returns Home to be a story in two parts, essentially, the first of which gives no indication at all what the second shall be, though the second half follows inexorably from the first. Essentially, the first hour or so of the film gives every indication of being a plotless mood piece: Jack goes to somebody he knows knew of his brother, asks them questions, finds no answers, and leaves. Certainly, it's satisfying just on the level of watching a tough guy maneuver through the rundown shithole that is Newcastle, particularly given how great Caine can play a tough guy, but then the second half comes along, and Carter learns that just about every single person that he's interacted with so far has been lying, or at least heavily misleading him. So back he goes, to each and every one of them, except this time he's extremely pissed. This is a strange and marvelous way to build a story: like Chekhov's dictum of introducing a gun in the first act, this is an hour of guns and an hour of gunshots. Or to use a different image, the first hour is scene after scene of Carter being wound up, and the second hour is him unloading. Viciously.

Hodges, making his cinematic debut after some TV movies that impressed Caine and Klinger to no end, proved to be a flat-out genius for this sort of material, and it's a tremendous shame that he never got to make good on the promise of this film (he came closest with Croupier, the film that put Clive Owen on the map, but everything in between was getting fired from The Omen II and lots of TV work, and the director-proof Flash Gordon). Because Jesus, is his eye for urban action ever strong. I't all but impossible that the films influenced one another, but Get Carter reminds me of nothing more than William Friedkin's The French Connection: slightly over-exposed exterior footage of men running artlessly through dirty streets. There's nothing remotely high-energy or shiny in this film of lowlifes chasing and murdering other lowlifes: there is nowhere for the audience to run and hide, delighting in the stylistic excesses of the film in order to keep the nastiness at bay.

I take it back: there are stylistic excesses, but they're not the kind that your Guy Ritchie or Danny Boyles like to fool around with. What the film does have is fairly adventurous editing by the standards of the early 1970s (on two separate occasions, the film uses a quick series of cuts - close, closer, closest - in place of the de rigeur period-appropriate zoom lens; something we've seen plenty of times before and since, but offhand I can only think of one or two other examples from around the same time), and even more adventurous sound design. Yes, sound design, which is the kind of thing you only tend to notice when it's extremely bad or extremely good. In this case, it's the key to my very favorite scene of the film: Carter has found a reel of film that basically explains everything he needs to know, and the explanation is tremendously upsetting. The scene cuts between him and the woman he's just slept with in the bath (just as he's learning that she's lied to him like everyone else), without a single word of dialogue: instead, the sound of the projector grows slowly louder every time we see Carter, cutting out completely when we see the woman. That horrible rattling projector sound therefore never becomes white noise, but always falls hard on the ear and coupled with Caine's tremendous facial acting, keys us in on exactly how worked up we're supposed to be over this turn of events. It's the midpoint of the film - the single scene upon which the rest of the story pivots - and thanks to a little judicious cutting and aggressive noise, it hits with the impact of a jackhammer to the spine.

I picked that scene because, like I said, it's my favorite; but you could do the same with plenty of other moments in Get Carter. It's a ridiculously well-constructed crime thriller. And thanks to Caine's intensity, and Hodges's direct way of shooting and cutting action (credit due, I suppose to cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky and editor John Trumper), Roy Budd's funky and dischordant score, and all the other little things that go to make up a film's mood, it's just the shock to a moribund genre that the producers wanted it to be. Early on, Hodges shows Carter reading Raymond Chandler; a cute misdirect. Because Jack Carter is nothing like a Chandler hero, he's a violent thug who happens to be our protagonist, and whose company is kind of terrifying at points. Get Carter paved the way for generations of savage gangster movies that followed, and its finest triumph may be that it's still more immediate and brutal than almost any of the films that it inspired.

THEY ALL LOOK JUST THE SAME

Revolutionary Road is a bit familiar: a married couple lives in suburban hellscape, and watches with detached horror as their hopes and ambitions are slowly butchered. And it's not just that this is a played-out theme: it's not even the first of Sam Mendes's four films on the idea. It was just nine years ago that he covered almost exactly the same ground in his movie debut, American Beauty. The difference being, that film was generally comic, where this film is altogether serious. Also, it takes place in the 1950s.

Still, there are worse things than familiarity (Ozu made some 50 variations on one plot, after all), and even though we could reasonably wonder if there had to be yet another one of these damned suburban satires, at least Revolutionary Road is a pretty good entry in the field. It's centered around a brace of really marvelous performances, for a start, and of course any film directed by Sam Mendes - shot by Roger Deakins, no less - is going to look absolutely glorious. Then there's the small matter of the script, adapted by somebody named Justin Haythe from the terrifically well-regarded Richard Yates novel that I haven't read myself, and boy oh boy, it doesn't do much to shake my longstanding feeling that Mendes consciously seeks out wimpy screenplays, all the better to show off how fabulously he can frame a shot without the audience getting distracted by annoyances like plot and character.

All right, that was totally an unfair cheap shot. Revolutionary Road has a perfectly good plot with fine characters. It's the story of the Wheelers, April (Kate Winslet) and Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), who met at a party and impressed each other with their aggressively bohemian perspectives on the Meaning of Life, and pledged to always pursue that which is true and beautiful, and managed anyway to get themselves trapped in gross little roles - Frank is a mid-level executive in the marketing department of a monolithic company, April is a housewife - and locked in a perfect little house with a perfect little yard in a subdivision where all the streets have themed names like Independence Drive and Revolutionary Road. Comes a day when April has finally decided that enough is well and truly enough, and she hatches a plan for her, Frank and their children to move to Paris, where Frank spent the best days of his life, to try and regain something like meaning before it's too late. As this is an awards-bait film & must therefore be completely serious and unhumorous, this plan ends up causing more strife than good between the Wheelers - but that is for the movie and not I to describe.

There's something about the story, I can't quite put my finger on it exactly, that works amazingly well. Perhaps it's that Frank and April very nearly save themselves before the midpoint, giving us a solid twenty minutes where the film is actually happy, and thus the screaming and nastiness that inevitably follow have an added bite. There is also something about the screenplay that works amazingly poorly - so poorly that without DiCaprio and Winslet, and Mendes and Deakins, the movie would be wretched instead of pretty good. I refer to the dialogue, which as anyone can tell who saw the trailer is utterly, damningly straightforward: people saying what is going on and what it means in easy, small words, suggesting that the characters themselves know that they're in a domestic drama and want to prove it by verbally identifying what point in the story arc they've reached. I know that sometimes I get a little too enraged against unsubtle storytelling, but there's unsubtle and then there's "come, let me tell you exactly what the film is about so that you don't actually need to think whatsoever." I don't like those kinds of movies.

But aside from that, it's a swell little flick. Winslet and DiCaprio have both portrayed more complex, original characters, but they still commit to their roles, and so even though the Wheelers have the musty scent of stereotype about them, they still feel more like real people than movie people - among the most realistic, sympethetic figures in the year's cinema, in fact. They're surrounded by a game cast, most notably Kathy Bates as the local aging neighbor lady/real estate agent who forces herself into situations where she oughtn't, and Michael Shannon as her crazy son who, like all crazy people in movies about how awful normal life is, actually comes across as more intelligent and correct than anybody else: in fact, by telling Frank and April to shut the fuck up about their incredibly typical fears about conformity and becoming boring, he manages to be the best audience-identification figure in the movie. The only real problem is that Shannon's take on the character, who is easily the third most important in the film, despite his modest screentime, isn't so imaginative.* It works, much as all the supporting performances in the film work, but this is the Kate and Leo show, and a much better showcase for their acting talents than their previous onscreen team-up.

And of course, the whole thing is just a treat to look at. Deakins's 2008 isn't nearly up to his 2007 (in both cases, he shot three films that all came out in a chunk during awards season), but he's still one of the best cinematographers in the business, and the way he lights a plume of cigarette smoke - this is the 1950s, so there's a hell of a lot of it - is enough to justify everything wrong in Revolutionary Road. To say nothing of the care with which he re-creates the soft color palette that shrieks "Mid-century Period Piece!" in every frame.

Plus the director himself, whose eye for a compelling visual just keeps developing with every new film - in this case, filming the cubicles that we've all seen in every film about businessmen made in the last 50 years, and finding something fresh to say with them. The repeated motif of men in suits pouring down the stairs, heading to or from their individual doom, is one of the most satisfying images of the year, both for its resonance within the film and just for how gorgeous the way the bodies in motion have been set up in the frame. It's hard to care about cinema's formal elements at all and not be at least a little bit in love with the film, is what I mean to say.

Still, there's a bit of "lipstick on a pig" syndrome here - the script is ass, no matter how lovely the film that springs from it. So all told, Revolutionary Road is a mixed bag - great performances, perfectly made, and it's a tedious grind. At least it's not like every other Oscar hopeful this year, bending over backwards to hide the director's talent in a haze of generic respectability. No, Sam Mendes is very much the MVP of this film, and he doesn't care who knows it; that's not enough to make the film great, but at least it's more successful than a lot of our recent prestige pictures.

7/10

*In fact, it's exactly how he played a similar character in Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, but this is not going to be a concern for the vast majority of the film's prospective audience.

THE PERFECT END TO A YEAR OF OBNOXIOUSLY UNINSPIRED CINEMA

Tonight, a lump of coal for Christmas. And by God, this disappointment hurt, more than just about any other disappointing movie I've seen in this whole goddamnable year of underachieving cinema. Not that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a particularly bad film - it's resolutely middle-of-the-road, taken all in all - but its failures are spectacularly highlighted by its overwhelming ambition, not to mention the mere fact that director David Fincher happened to be in the unenviable position of following Zodiac, his first flat-out masterpiece, with a film in a foreign genre that he clearly couldn't get a handle on. There were significant problems with the script and casting that might have left the film a bit muddled anyway, but the biggest problem by far is that Fincher obviously does not have an answer to the central questions, what is the movie about, and why was he interested in making it?

Okay, there's a very definite answer to that second question: he was interested because the film allowed him to play with some fan-fucking-tabulous digital toys. I'll not be so condescending as to assume that you've been able to avoid learning what the film (adapted from a lesser F. Scott Fitzgerald short story) is about, but for form's sake: Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button, born in New Orleans on Armistice Day in the body of an eightysomething man, who ages backwards throughout the 20th Century. The practical upshot is that in the first hour of the 159-minute film, Pitt is synthetically aged through what is undoubtedly the most technically advanced makeup in cinema history. Basically - I'm certain this is a gross oversimplification - the actor's face was covered in sensors akin to those used to turn Andy Serkis into Gollum and King Kong, before it was caked in prosthetic wrinkles, so that a team of effects animators could retouch his face to be an undefinable combination of CGI and latex. Following this, his face was superimposed onto the bodies of several actors playing Benjamin's body at various heights.

It works staggeringly well, though it takes a little bit of getting used to seeing Pitt's ancient face on a three-foot tall frame. And it's easy to see why Fincher was enchanted by the storytelling possibilities of the technology, which kept the film mired in post-production for a couple of years (I'd love to find out whether Zodiac was produced in the midst of Benjamin Button; it's feasible at least, and if anyone can point me to the answer, I'd be forever grateful). Except that he maybe wasn't quite so enchanted by the storytelling possibilities of the story itself, which is splashed across the screen in the grandest epic scale, yet suffers from crimped emotional stultification. For a decade-spanning love story, Benjamin Button is wickedly inert.

A significant part of this failure can be laid squarely at the feet of the actors. Pitt, on a hot streak for these past few years, throws himself wholeheartedly into Benjamin in old age (that is, youth), finding exactly what's most interesting about a seven-year-old who looks 80, and doing it without only his voice and eyes - it's customary for actors who are able to rely on their makeup to do all their acting to do exactly that, but Pitt is a joy and delight to behold precisely when he is most unrecogonisable. It is a wicked irony, and perhaps even a deliberate choice that the younger he looks, and the more like his old matinee-idol self (the youth makeup is every bit as convincing, though much less showy, than the aging makeup), the blander his performance. He's never less interesting than when he's a 40-year-old romantic lead, which just so happens to be the central point of the film's whole damn arc. But that still leaves him ahead of his co-star, Cate Blanchett, who plays Benjamin's one true love Daisy (quite the Fitzgeraldean name, that) without distinction - I cannot recall the last time the ordinarily-talented actress was so disengaged from the part she had to play. Besides that, Pitt and Blanchett have a palpable lack of chemistry, leaving the film's romantic story fucked in every orifice.

Leaving them aside, Benjamin Button still suffers from Fincher's desire to focus on style over narrative, which might even be forgiveable (he's a great stylist) if only that style was consistent and meaningful. Certain shots in the film are as beautiful as an illustrated storybook, such as the mid-film sequence when Benjamin, then a tugboat crewman, finds himself in the Pacific Theater during World War II. A whole film made up of the diffused CGI cinematography on display in this sequence could have been a masterpiece; but The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has to make do with occasionally brilliant moments erratically distributed throughout a visciously long running time. Magical realism is a tough thing to carry off successfully, and Fincher hasn't enough familiarity with it to commit 100%, leading to moments where the film almost seems ashamed of itself (e.g. any time a hummingbird appears onscreen, this movie's requisite "thematically profound motif"), and moments where we get to be ashamed on its behalf: the godawful framework narrative centered around Hurricane fucking Katrina of all things, is perhaps the worst example of the filmmakers running from an idea until it forced itself on them, leading to a horrible disconnect between What Is Meant To Be and What Is (of course, the fact that framework narratives are inherently evil is a stumbling block as well).

Eric Roth's screenplay isn't necessarily the strongest thing on the block, suffering from fervid metaphors and an uncomfortably nuance-free perspective on modern history, but at least he knows what the story is about: star-crossed lovers intersecting throughout time. It is a story told by a proud Romantic. Fincher, unfortunately, can't make heads or tails of that - this is a man whose two best films were about serial killers, let's not forget. Magical realism, romanticism and the poetic are not his métier, nor are they well-served by his heightened-realist aesthetic. He's palpably uncomfortable telling this story. Though there are many individual moments of the profoundest beauty in Benjamin Button, the film as a whole is a bit emotionally arid, with far too many dead patches in its punishingly extreme length. It's certainly made from nothing but good intentions and ambitions, but the film's a depressing botch: whatever inspiration led the cast and crew to join the project, it didn't end up onscreen. It's the kind of movie where bigness is its own excuse, and the whole thing seems to have been gotten through as an exercise, rather than a work of art.

5/10

THOUGH IT'S BEEN SAID, MANY TIMES, MANY WAYS

To all my readers,

Whatever your personal tradition dictates for this time of year, be it Christmas secular or religious, enjoying a free day off with the family, or going in to work like any other Thursday, thank you for following along with my threadbare little weblog for yet another year. Today I spend with my family; tomorrow I will again attempt to delight and entertain you with my pithy, judgmental opinions on the movies of the day.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

-Tim

CAR MEN

I've wanted to write this for a long time, but there was never a perfect excuse to do it before now.

Clint Eastwood, regarded as something of a master of cinema by most (not all!) traditional media film critics, is generally disdained, even hated, by the great majority of bloggers and other internet-based movie people; this is indeed one of the few issues on which there's a clear distinction between print and internet critics. As a long-time fan of the director - I was on board the "Best Living American Filmmaker" bandwagon before there even was a blogosphere - I've always felt a bit disappointed by that distinction, which I think traces back to the notorious 2004 Oscars, when Eastwood beat the perpetual bridesmaid Martin Scorsese to a Best Director award, having unforgivably done better work directing a superior film. Maybe that's being bigoted against my fellow internet film buffs, who might very well have an actual legitimate reason to dislike the man that isn't based in his admittedly very obvious Oscarbaiting tendencies; at any rate, the Scorsese connection ought to have been wiped clear in 2006, when Marty's tired work on a bland crime drama beat Eastwood's best film ever to the top two awards. But I haven't come here to go on and on about how Scorsese needed to retire in 1990, while Clint has spent the last decade making the most interesting films of his career.

I have come here instead to praise Gran Torino, not perhaps the best of Eastwood's recent films, but a fairly perfect example of all the things that make people like me break out phrases like "the best living American filmmaker" when his name comes up. That is, it's the most typical film he's made during his renaissance that started up in 2003, and therefore an ideal place to mount all sorts of overly-enthusiastic arguments about the director's aesthetic.

This isn't something I've ever seen in print before, but I don't imagine that anybody would violently disagree: Eastwood has spent his entire 37-year career as a director emulating Don Siegel, with whom he made five movies between 1968 and 1979, and to whom he co-dedicated his 1992 masterpiece Unforgiven. Siegel, for the uninitiated, was one of a generation of filmmakers during the 1940s, '50s and '60s who made extremely pulpy films with a brutally simple, direct aesthetic, a group of men who essentially and probably unconsciously applied the literary techniques of Ernest Hemingway to cinema. Such directors are all but extinct in the modern world, with Eastwood the single working representative, to the best of my knowledge, of a tradition that has included the likes of Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher.

Right from the start, Eastwood subscribed to these men's stripped-down style, though not always with great success - for every early Outlaw Josey Wales there's a Firefox. Like many great pulp directors, Eastwood hasn't always selected or been given the best screenplays, and his ability to overcome a weak script is historically uneven. Still, for those whose formal tastes run towards the lean and masculine, nearly all of his films have had some small compensation, no matter how poor the writing. Of late, Eastwood's aesthetic has reached a harsh perfection: in his pair of neo-noirs Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby (neither of which has been fully appreciated in terms of its position relative to the great 1950s film noirs), and in his nihilistically dispassionate World War II dyad Flags of Our Fathers and Letters of Iwo Jima, he has reached a conservative formalist utopia in which theme, narrative and character are all functions of lighting and camera angle. He hit a snag with Changeling, an over-written, visually stuffy period piece-cum-cop thriller, but in Gran Torino the Clint that I grew up with has come roaring back: he's finally married his newly-perfected skills as a visual storyteller to the kind of stories that he's been part of throughout his career as actor and director - "Dirty" Harry Callahan as a hateful retiree, filtered through Tom Stern's unforgiving, monochromatic camera lens.

Gran Torino is the story of a Korean War vet and retired Detroit autoworker named Walt Kowalski, whom we meet at his wife's funeral. Walt is a dick. There's no other way to put. Sure, Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk disguise that fact a bit by contrasting Walt against his even worse family, and by presenting Walt as a comic figure in the early going (All those silly moments in the trailer, which seemed so serious, but everybody laughed at them? Turns out we were supposed to laugh). But it's not possible to see Walt's casual racism against pretty much every ethnic group that can be found in Detriot, and his delight in making fun of a young priest (Christopher Carley) just because he can get away with it, and assume that we're meant to find him at all respectable. Without getting into the details, Walt is forced into a modern multicultural world that he's not really anxious to face when the Hmong family next door is threatened by a local gang, and without meaning to, the old crank takes the teenaged Thao (Bee Vang) under his wing, with the boy and man bonding over icons of masculine identity, like tools, yardwork, and Walt's pristine 1972 Ford Gran Torino.

The film's programmatic depiction of Walt's transition from xenophobe to grudging member of a changing America is hardly subtle, and at times the film lurches into well-intentioned racism itself, particularly in the form of Thao's sister Sue (Ahney Her) - I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out if Sue's didactic, on-the-nose dialogue is the result of poor acting, poor writing, or very canny acting and writing meant to suggest that the young woman is pretending to have a better grasp of her adopted language than is the case; but the fact that I can question this at all doesn't augur in the film's favor. Yet I simply can't get myself very worked up over the gaping flaws in the screenplay, simply because in every other way, Gran Torino feels like a proud throwback to the pulp message pictures of the 1950s; and none of those films were particularly subtle or sensitive. Honestly, Gran Torino feels like Eastwood's most Sam Fuller-y film ever, chiefly in its fetishistic treatment of the Korean War and its ethnographic obsession with an obscure ethnic group. Sure, it's watered-down Fuller, but that's a lot better than no Fuller at all, which is what we get in essentially every other movie that exists these days.

Besides, Eastwood has the directorial chops to justify the comparison, almost. Gran Torino isn't the formal masterpiece that Million Dollar Baby was, but it's impeccably shot and except for a handful of shots that clearly go on for a few frames too long, every single cut seems to serve a purpose. There's an urgency born from necessity when a film is produced quickly: without time to waste on set, every shot has to mean something, else it doesn't justify the set-up time. This is the secret behind some of Fuller's best work of the 1950s, and the fact that Gran Torino had the fastest turnaround time of any Eastwood film this decade shows: it's incredibly lean, the first of the director's films under two hours since 2002's Blood Work.

Before I say goodbye to the film, I would be a fool to ignore the elephant in the room: Eastwood himself plays Walt, and he claims that with this film, he retires from acting. It's not hard to believe him: the film is plainly a goodbye to the Dirty Harry persona that, along with the Man With No Name (who was disposed of in Unforgiven), underlies every other Eastwood character. The performance itself doesn't necessarily rate among the actor's best: Million Dollar Baby had a much better portrait of the artist as an old man, and several of his '90s films showcased a more interesting idea of a man tormented by the violence he has done and must continue to do. But it's a fine farewell, much better than e.g. Woody Allen in Scoop. That Eastwood is a great performer I'm taking as written; of course, like his fellow Western icon John Wayne, there continue to be an (ever-dwindling) number of people who mistake his limited range for a lack of talent, but I'll just let those people find enlightenment themselves.

Look, not everyone is going to like Gran Torino. It's undeniably hokey. But all pulp fiction is ultimately a little hokey, and that's usually why the makers of such movies compensate by bringing their A-game behind the camera. I can't make anybody love Eastwood's aesthetic, but for those who do, this is a giant step up from Changeling, and different enough from his great films in the middle of the decade to demonstrate conclusively that old age hasn't led the director into a comfort zone: he continues to find new and sometimes weird ways to challenge himself creatively. Gran Torino may be lopsided, hammy and overdetermined, but those are exactly the reasons I'm compelled to call it a great movie.

9/10

HATH NOT AN IRS AGENT ORGANS, DIMENSIONS, SENSES, AFFECTIONS, PASSIONS?

The producers of the new Will Smith awards-bait vehicle Seven Pounds would like it very, very much if you'd go ahead and think of their film as a mystery, despite the fact that only the most morbidly inattentive viewer could possibly fail to figure out virtually every twist in the story from details supplied in the first five minutes. The viewer accustomed to reading any old bit of text flashed up on screen for more than a few seconds will even have figured out the desperate supplementary twist that the film delivers in the final push to wrap up the story, although I suspect that nobody other than the film's screenwriter Grant Nieporte will understand why this second twist happens. Nor, I think, would that many people anticipate the hero's ultimate fate, but that is not because it is well-hidden within the film, but because it is so godawfully stupid that even if it crosses your mind that the story might be headed that direction, you will probably discard the notion as being far too insane for a major Hollywood production.

Here is the spoiler-free version of what happens, assuming that "spoiler-free" means that anything indicated in the very first scene doesn't count as a spoiler, even if it wrecks the film's oh-so-crafty ad campaign: Ben Thomas (Will Smith) is an IRS agent carrying around a great deal of pain, and he wants to kill himself, but in order to give back to a world which he has taken too much from, he wants to will his organs to strangers who prove themselves deserving and worthy, working from a list of ill people with compatible blood types provided by his childhood best friend, a hopelessly corrupt doctor (Barry Pepper) whose willingness to bend the system while shamelessly violating the Hippocratic Oath is merely one of the scores of creepy-ass details that the filmmakers wish very much that we don't notice too hard.

Other details along the same lines: we're not supposed to be bothered by the particular methods which Ben uses to research the worthiness of his targets, the least offensive of which is his misuse of official IRS databases; the skeevier things involve stalking them in the hospital after visiting hours, calling them at work to harass them, or spying on them in restaurants. Thus will he separate the good people like blind Ezra Turner (Woody Harrelson in what just barely passes the "cameo" threshold) from the bad people like cancer-ridden Stewart Goodman (Tim Kelleher) using criteria like, "Does he yell obscenities at customers?" or "Does he permit old people to sit for days in their own filth?" As his course of stalking brings him to follow Emily Posa (Rosario Dawson), a woman with congenital heart failure, he naturally falls in love - stalking being a beloved synonym for courting in the vocabulary of screenwriters from all walks of life - and of course she falls right back in love with him, after a brief phase of wondering who this terrifying man is who keeps staring at her in the hospital is, just to show she's not easy, y'know. This sends Ben down a tragic path: he has finally found something to give his life meaning, but if he doesn't kill himself and give her his heart, she will die herself. Kidding! Seven Pounds isn't nearly that complex. They just have artfully PG-13 sex that in theory should send this woman who can't stand upright without passing out into cardiac arrest. But that's probably something else that we weren't really supposed to notice.

It's stretching to say that Seven Pounds has the worst screenplay of 2008, or even the worst screenplay in theaters, not while The Day the Earth Stood Still is still in the top 5 at the box office. But it is shockingly bad storytelling, and I haven't even gotten to the Final Twist, which I shan't spoil except to say that the story would proceed exactly the same way without it. You wouldn't even need to cut out the character who explains the twist (which, again, was lying in plain sight for anyone paying attention in two key scenes), or even change that character's motivation in every single scene but the last. Nor have I mentioned the incredibly fucking lame suicide by jellyfish in the bathtub climax. But these are problems that any half-intelligent viewer could pick out; my purpose here is not to explicate, but to warn. Stay away from Seven Pounds, which not even Will Smith's generous charisma can save from Idiot Shoals!

Directed by Gabriele Muccino, the mind behind Smith's last terrible Oscarbait effort, 2006's The Pursuit of Happyness (two years later, and knowing the explanation, I still want to claw my eyes out at that spelling), it's actually kind of amazing how much Seven Pounds has in common with that film. Both are theoretically uplifting films that are completely depressing for nearly all their running time, not just for what happens but for how badly everyone involved misjudges the relative warm fuzziness of each scene; both have endings that everybody in the audience ought to be able to predict from the first scene; both are filmed with a vérité-lite handheld, high-grain style that manages only to make the movie ugly in addition to being depressing (though it might just be my raving hatred of handheld camera talking here). The key difference is that, judging from its stone-cold opening weekend, Seven Pounds will not be continuing Will Smith's chain of $100 million pictures, and while I'm kind of sad - he was our last huge movie star - I also don't want anybody involved in the perpetuation of something as wretched as this to get away unpunished.

3/10

TSPDT #770: THE WIND WILL CARRY US

The leading face in contemporary Iranian cinema, director Abbas Kiarostami can hardly be accused of making accessible, obvious films. Nor does his wonderful 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us even count as his easiest work, though with its inexpressibly dry, absurdist sense of humor, it's possibly his most entertaining, given a flexible definition of "entertaining". It is, at any rate, perhaps the most prototypically Kiarostamian of all his films, with its inscrutably elliptical plot, gorgeous impressionistic photography, and politically-inflected depiction of a subset of Iranian society left in a curious crack between tradition and modernity. I should not speak out of turn, having seen only a taste of the director's work, but in nothing else I'm familiar do all of his concerns - which are therefore the concerns of all Iranian art cinema - come together in such a satisfying, complete whole.

This is what happens in the movie: an engineer (Behzad Dorani) from Tehran journeys to the teeny little village of Siah Dareh, untouched by the advances of the modern world, here defined as roughly the last 200 or 300 years. He brings with him a pair of assistants who we never see and whose work isn't really ever explained; nor is the engineer's presence clarified until late in the film, and even then it's only "clarified" in the sense that learning that Finnegans Wake is about a man dreaming of the course of one night "clarifies" it. We do know that the engineer has a particular interest in the fate of one sick old woman (we never see her either), and while his assistants hide in their room eating strawberries, he criss-crosses from one house to another, meeting the residents of the village and making a friend of a young boy.

Of course, anyone who left the movie with no further thoughts on it than those would certainly not be very happy about wasting two hours on a languid Iranian film with no plot. The pleasures of The Wind Will Carry Us are of a much different kind, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that only intellectually elitist pretentious assholes like myself could love the movie. Certainly, being an intellectually elitist pretentious asshole helps, especially in the film's arid "poetic symbolism" phase: the part of the movie where the engineer who may not be an engineer hangs around waiting for the old woman to die, only to grow frustrated as she gets better, forcing him and his crew to stay in the village in the middle of nowhere for weeks - weeks which are presented in the most elliptical fashion possible, so that when the engineer mentions that it's been two weeks since he's arrived, we're all like "Shit! I thought it was just one day!" and that's when we understand that we've arrived in Beckett Territory. This is the mode of the film in which the man goes to an underground cattle barn for some fresh milk, and in the almost absolute dark recites a poem for the young girl tending the cow, the poem by Iran's most important contemporary female writer, Forough Farrokhzad (herself no stranger to challenging and fascinating movies; she directed a profoundly unnerving documentary short titled The House Is Black in 1963, just a few years before her death); it is from this poem that the film derives its title. Or there's the scene where the frustrated engineer kicks over a tortoise that rights itself and keeps on walking as if nothing had happened. Et cetera.

Symbolism's not quite the right word here: or at least it doesn't feel exactly right. A Crusader playing chess with the incarnation of Death is a symbol. A young woman milking a cow in a pitch-dark cave certainly has its symbolic elements, particularly given Farrokhzad's political significance, but I'd say it feels less like a symbol than a poetic image. That is almost certainly a pointlessly narrow bit of parsing, but I think it's no accident that the film takes its cues from a very imagistic poem (which describes a lover's perception of a dark, windy night), given how the film itself is structured around poetic, rather than narrative lines: image follows image, and the meaning is intuitive but not necessarily so concrete that you feel comfortable saying it out loud, for fear of breaking it.

That, of course, is the mark of a Kiarostami film: the director has said (about this exact movie, in fact), that he only puts about half of the meaning in any given project, and that the rest is created in the head of the viewer. Which is convenient to the critic, since it absolves us of having to "solve" the film - half of what I take from The Wind Will Carry Us is entirely my own, and even if I could communicate that, you could never replicate it.

But anyway, I mentioned that there actually is a whole lot of film that works on an entirely other level than this talky ain't-I-smart business: it's a flat-out beautiful movie about a single place. Kiarostami didn't just come up with the village of Siah Dareh from his imagination, he actually took his cameras over there and filmed the very small community, seemingly untouched by time, and cast local residents in most of the background roles. Thus, The Wind Will Carry Us is as much a documentary as anything else, and an especially fascinating one at that. At the end of the day, it's the village that we've learned the most about, more than its residents and more than the alien interloper who comes along, and the cumulative details about life in Siah Dareh never cease to be amazing or amusing or both. Forgive the cliché, but it's a place out of time, where the engineer must drive to the top of a hill outside town in order to get cell phone reception, and where directions are given in relative terms (near the single big tree, above that wall behind the house with a blue roof), rather than absolute. Ultimately, it seems more like a mental state than anything else, and I imagine that the engineer, whoever he is, would tend to agree. Though nothing may happen in The Wind Will Carry Us such that you can really see it, it has a great deal to say about being human in those situations where it would be easiest just to be an neutral object. So much that the film threatens to overload its boundaries: like all Kiarostami films, it's a bit shaggy and messy by the end, with too many ideas stuffed into too little time, but if we're going to start calling that a flaw, then I don't really see why bother with art in the first place.

COMMON CRIMINALS

The buzz on Matteo Garrone's mafia epic Gomorra was more than any movie could really hope to stand up against (Marty Scorsese sez: "Is best mob movie evar!"*), but even if it's no timeless masterpiece, there's still quite a lot to love in its panoramic, ensemble-based view of a Neapolitan crime syndicate, a depiction close enough to reality that the author of Gomorra's source novel was obliged to go into police-arranged hiding, a fact that every single review of this film sees fit to mention.

To the American viewer, whose concept of "mob movies" is fundamentally indistinguishable from The Godfather and its sequels, Scorsese's Goodfellas, Casino and perhaps Mean Streets, and the television series The Sopranos, Garrone's film comes as something of a shock to the system: its POV is stuck firmly on the ground level of the Camorra crime family, and most of the film's 137 minutes follow the day-to-day business of running small deals and managing insignificant corners of a much bigger empire. Here's what I mean: one of the several threads that runs through the film concerns a mob-supported tailor who starts a deal under the table with a rival Chinese gang; early in this storyline we see a quick scene in which the tailor and his mafia contact win a bidding war by offering to produce 800 gowns at €30 each, or €24,000 all told. This figure isn't given much if any weight (the story is much more concerned with the ramifications from the tailor's defection later on), but can you imagine any American crime movie spending a healthy portion of its running time on a plot to make something in the neighborhood of $30,000? That's the whole point of the film, in a nutshell: it's not about the Shakespearean tragedies that afflict the most powerful men in crime, but about the petty deals and forgotten murders that keep the mafia running.

I can't help myself, but do like every other English speaker has done in response to Gomorra, and compare it to that other HBO series, The Wire. As insights go, that's a fairly superficial one, but I think it gives at least some idea of what Garrone's film is like, both in its visual language (lots of hand-held camera work; grainy, cluttered, ugly interiors), and its level of complexity (remember how confusing it was to keep track of all the characters and plotlines for the first couple of episodes that you watched? Well, take that and add cultural differences!), and even its political engagement and desire to explain all the details of an unfathomably gigantic social issue. The fact that it took David Simon 60 hour-long television episodes to examine the drug war and organised corruption in Baltimore, while Garrone hasn't even spent two-and-a-half hours exploring a mafia family that has killed in excess of 4,000 people since the 1970s - one every three days, the movie helpfully tells us in a title card - speaks to the biggest problems that Gomorra suffers from: biting off infinitely more than it can chew, and hoping that the audience can keep up with a torrent of details which are frequently presented as sketches to be filled out later, so as to save time.

That this approach of throwing everything at the wall and praying it sticks works so often in Gomorra as it does is something of a minor miracle. There are some very definite problems with the screenplay's narrative structure (six credited writers couldn't possibly have anything to do with that...), with only a couple of the film's several plotlines boasting anything like "a beginning" or "an ending", as opposed to "the place where we arbitrarily start watching this person", this is somewhat negated by the way that the screenplay - and much more importantly, Garrone's chilly God's-eye-view camera - allow us to soak up the action taking place without always feeling like it must have a dramatic arc, or that each and every detail must make sense the very first time we encounter it. I'm not exactly certain what to compare it to: nothing here looks like it's all that revolutionary, but the particular combination of documentary=like observation mixed with the vaguely nihilistic treatment of the characters like bugs under glass isn't quite like anything else I've seen. Without leaving the Italian film industry, it's sort of like if the Michelangelo Antonioni of the 1960s directed a 1940s Neorealist film.

By all means, this is a hard film to love; the grim subject matter makes sure of that even before the uncomfortably objective perspective comes along and drives the movie straight into Arthouse Land. And the kind of people who would be most inclined to give a mafia film an even break are probably looking for the glitzier style of an American film like De Palma's Scarface, which comes in for some harsh criticism in the form of two young idiots whose romantic infatuation with gangster culture sets them up for exactly what they deserve, in Gomorra's most typical plotline. But Garrone has achieved a certain special something with this film anyway, creating an unusually thought-provoking, annoying, difficult and ultimately unique work that might not be one of the year's best, but is surely among its most interesting.

8/10

*Not actually, but he did have extremely nice things to say about it.

TOP 1000 UPDATE!

The good folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? have released the 2008 update to their supremely essential aggregated 1000 Greatest Films list. You may know it better as "that thing I keep using for film reviews every Sunday." All told, 96 films were added to the list - meaning 96 films were taken away, and unlike some of their past updates, almost all of the 192 films in flux were of reasonably solid quality. At first blush, this is my pick for the five films I'm sorriest to see kicked off the list:

-Rififi (was 578)
-Shock Corridor (was 715)
-The Thin Man (was 761)
-The Ascent (was 875)
-Topsy-Turvy (was 898)

And the five new entries (some of them coming back after a 1 or 2 year absence) that I'm happiest to see:

-Toy Story (483)
-Swing Time (541)
-The Naked Spur (723)
-3 Women (869)
-California Split (968)

For those who care about such things, six of the 51 films I reviewed this year are no longer on the list, in addition to must of the others being re-numbered:

-The Tingler (was 597)
-El Topo (was 688)
-La roue (was 767)
-Quai des Orfèvres (was 869)
-The Ascent (was 875)
-Paris qui dort (was 1000)

But don't feel too bad for me, because this update has brought good news for my status as an edjiccated filmgoer: two days ago, I had only seen 523 of the best films ever made, but that number just jumped up to 530.

Hopefully, there will be a review tonight, but there are some particular scheduling reasons why I can't make any promises. At any rate, my plan for the final two weeks of the year is fairly well-packed with marvels old and new. And a couple sucking holes of disappointment.

STORY OF A DISGRACED POLITICIAN, AND OTHER WHORES

As a director, Ron Howard is wholly in thrall of his scripts. A good story, with good characters, and an appealing structure? That gives us Apollo 13. None of those things? Helloooooo, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! And a whole mess of movies in between of all sorts of varying quality levels, although I feel mostly safe in arguing that generally he finds himself a touch below the middle of the bell curve slightly more often than a touch above it. Though let's be frank: the films of Ron Howard really define the middle of the bell curve, don't they?

Anyway, my point is that Frost/Nixon is Howard's best film since Apollo 13, by a fairly comfortable margin, and that is really just a way of saying, "Peter Morgan is a better writer than Akiva Goldsman, whose Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind is one of the great Oscar travesties of the '00s". And I will happily invite anyone who argues with either clause of that sentence to a fistfight. Still, we weren't talking about that but about Morgan's adaptation of his nifty 2006 play about the famous series of interviews in 1977 between former president and all-around dickhole Richard Nixon and British chat-show host David Frost; the 28 hours filmed during 12 days of interviews would later be cut into four 90-minute segments, the most famous of which was the Watergate episode, in which Frost tried to coerce Nixon into apologising to the American people for his role in the scandal that destroyed our country's faith in honest government for 34 years and counting, while also making the single statement that best describes the quintessential core of Nixonian politics: "Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal" (a line that appears in the play and film, slightly misquoted - the movie fudges a lot, actually).

Morgan's play - and hence his screenplay, which if I recall the play correctly (I've read it, but never seen it performed), is identical in all but a couple specifics - focuses on Frost, played on stage and screen by the greatly underappreciated Michael Sheen (whose last appearance in a Morgan screenplay was as Tony Blair in The Queen), following along as the Barnum-like showman realises, while watching as Nixon (Frank Langella, also a veteran of the stage version) resigns his office and heads to California to burn off his final years in shame, that the now ex-president would make the biggest "get" in TV interview history. Thus does he launch on a years-long hunt to find the gargantuan sum of money he needs to secure Nixon - $600,000 (plus points, but the movie ignores that), the largest amount ever paid to an interview subject at that time - and to finance the actual filming.

My knowledge of the history behind all of this doesn't extend remotely far enough to know how much of the behind-the-scenes wrangling that makes up the first half of the film is true, based on truth, or bald-faced horseshit, but it makes for a great political procedural flick that doesn't quite hit the threshold where it would earn the heftier title of "political thriller". Much is made of the contrast between the playboy showman Frost, and his American research assistants James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell) and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt); they are out for the closure that the American people lost when Nixon resigned and was pardoned - without having been convicted or even indicted, remember - in the first week of Gerald Ford's sad little slip of a presidency. Frost just wants to make a name for himself in the lucrative American television market. On the other side of things, of course, Nixon himself is hoping to restore his image in the eyes of the American people and give one last "fuck you" to the phantom elitists that he railed against his whole life, and blamed for pretty much every bad thing that happened to him.

It is a fairly awe-inspiring scenario, all right, and played by one of the strongest casts of 2008 (also present: Matthew Macfadyen, Rebecca Hall, Kevin Bacon and Toby Jones, the last of these sporting a remarkable and borderline surreal "surly Jewish agent" accent). Langella and Sheen have had a lot of time to perfect their performances, and dammit if it doesn't show: though neither man looks or sounds exactly like their real-life counterpart, each of them has a near-perfect handle their character as a character, which is unarguably the more important goal in general for the actor playing a real person, and exceptionally true in the case of Richard Nixon, who already seems to have been a literary character more than an actual human being who actually sat in the Oval Office and actually did some of the worst things any President ever has (and yet, was more of a liberal in some ways than any of the six men who have succeeded him. Go fig). Langella's Nixon is one of the greatest performances of that oft-played man that we've ever had, a sweaty bully, calculating mind-fucker, and terrified old man who is well aware that the good he wanted to do in life has been ruined by one fatal mistake. It is not a performance that makes Nixon into a particularly sympathetic figure, but it does underline his humanity: it was a human being, not some Greek monster, who did these things that Nixon did and suffered in the wilderness as Nixon suffered.

So far, nothing I've said would be untrue if Frost/Nixon were nothing but a filmed version of the stage play, and it's more than that. There are some massages to the source material that flat-out don't work, by which I'm primarily referring to the distracting "documentary" element of the film in which all the characters other than the titular figures reminisce from the perspective of what seems like at least a few years, and give us some context for what's happening (at least, I don't think this happened in the play, but I wouldn't swear on a stack of Cahiers du cinéma), and distract us terribly. There are certainly movies in which dropping talking heads into the middle of a plot can work - Woody Allen has written at least two of them. But just because something can work does not mean it must work, and Frost/Nixon suffers badly not just because these inserts put the brakes on the action, every single damn time they crop up, but also because they generally inform us only of things we'd already have seen from the rest of the film. Actually, the tendency to say things that are obvious is a somewhat persistent flaw in the screenplay, owing no doubt to its theatrical roots. "Show, don't tell" is probably the cornerstone of all great filmmaking, and either Morgan or Howard - both, probably - have lost sight of that. Of course, it's easy to argue that Howard never had a very great handle on showing, not telling, anywhere in his career, but why get into that here?

*Sigh*...begin with Howard, end with Howard, I suppose. He's just not that interesting a director, and at this point I think it's smartest to assume that he never will be. Oh, he's competent as all hell (though not invariably: Grinch along with The Da Vinci Code and EdTV all lurk menacingly in the dark waters of his CV), and the one thing that you don't get to say is that Frost/Nixon looks like a stage play. Even in the lengthy stretches where there's a lot of talking and little action, the camera movement and editing keep the film popping along urgently. Admittedly, there are a few tricks Howard plays around with, and well - the use of far more close-ups than we're used to in American films, for sure, and during the interview itself he comes up with some clever means to keep both Frost and Nixon in the shot. But it's ultimately a bland exercise: a fine entertainment for a winter night that plays it completely safe and provides virtually nothing except for its two fine central performances that curling up with a copy of the play in front of a crackling fireplace wouldn't do just as well. And - unless your local movie theater is completely full of awesome - it doesn't even have the fireplace!

7/10

KLAATU BARADA FUCK YOU

Ordinarily, I'd say we should all be mortally offended by The Day the Earth Stood Still, director Scott Derrickson's remake of Robert Wise's 1951 masterpiece, one of the very finest of all 1950s American films. We're not supposed to stand for shit like that, or something along those lines. But after wave upon wave of needless remakes spilling over each other before fading into quick obscurity or occasionally - sadly - entrenching themselves in the mind of our impressionable youth as THE version to see, The Day the Earth Stood Still Again is the one that finally broke me. This, as far as I am concerned, ain't no remake. The only thing the two versions of DTESS have in common is the story of an alien race that doesn't like how badly human beings are fucking up everything, leading them to scare us with an intimidating show of force that promises much worse to come if we don't try to fix ourselves. By that standard, the new DTESS is just as much a remake of Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space. Which is an even more appropriate comparison when we observe that DTESS-2 and Plan 9, unlike DTESS-1, are both awful.

After a little apéritif of a scene explaining how the aliens cloned an Indian mountaineer who looks like Keanu Reeves back in 1928, we're quickly thrown into the action as Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), one of the nation's preeminent astrobiologists - naturally, she's introduced by giving her grad students an assignment on the kinds of life we'd expect to find on other planets - is shanghaied by the military to some super-secret base where they're tracking the approach of a stellar object that is plummeting towards Manhattan at a freakish rate. In fact, it is set to crash right in Central Park in a mere 78 minutes. Helen and a host of other experts are flown to the sight, with the assumption that they'll all die any moment, but then the object - a shiny globe apparently made from glowing liquid - eases into a landing that only kills a few dozens bystanders and levels some trees. Anyone who's seen the original knows what comes next: a humanoid shape walks from the object, is immediately shot by the hair-trigger soldiers surrounding the site, and is then immediately followed by a gigantic robot who starts to wreak havoc before the smaller humanoid utters the calming phrase that has become one of the most beloved catch-phrases in cinema history: "Klaatu barada nikto".

Maybe it's not clear from that précis, but my bullshit alarms were well into the red by this point. The group of kidnapped geniuses Helen is basically the exact set of experts you'd want to have ready if a super-advanced alien being landed on earth. But at this point, the object is just a gigantic falling death bomb, ready to wipe out New York City in less than an hour and a half; why, oh why, does anyone think that an astrobiologist is more vital to such a crisis than, say, a giant fucking missile expert? And for that matter, the entire "thrilling" opening with the falling space bomb feint ends up adding nothing whatever to the movie but an additional five minutes of running time.

Random details that add nothing and just distract us will prove something of a recurring motif of David Scarpa's screenplay. Let's just look at some of the biggies: the US government is represented by Secretary (of Defense? It's never actually made clear) Regina Jackson (Kathy Bates), while the President and Vice President are in "undisclosed locations". Not slighting the film it's chance at a little extra 9/11 flavoring on its paint-by-numbers "let's threaten New York" framework, is there any actual reason that she couldn't just be the President? Or take the matter of Helen's stepson Jacob (played by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's son Jaden, a wildly cute child who can't act even a little tiny bit). Jacob resents Helen, what with his dad - her husband - being dead, but I'm not certain that it would have changed matters (read: I'm certain that it wouldn't have changed matters) for Jacob to be her natural son, who happens to blame her for her husband's death. Of course, in reality, there are stepchildren who don't like their widowed stepparents, but in the context of the film it just keeps coming across as a needless bit of dross meant to add a layer of character development that never actually shows up. And for what? To explain why one actor is white and one is black? I don't think America is really that confused at the possibility of a mixed-race individual with dark skin.

Cataloguing all of the plot holes and other script issues could keep us here all night, so let me cut to the chase: the ultimate plot is something vaguely ecological with the alien ambassador Klaatu (Reeves) informing Helen that his people want to destroy all humans because we've made such a shithole out of one of the galaxy's few inhabitable planets. That is why he has brought along a super-awesome armageddobot like Gort, realised in flashy CGI by Weta Digital that looks substantially more like the cutscenes from The Day the Earth Stood Still: The Video Game than the work of a professional studio film in 2008. I won't say what Gort does to nearly end humanity, other than that it is more interesting in conception than execution, and enables some of the most howling gaffes the screenplay makes - if it takes X seconds to disintegrate a truck, it should take much less time to give a single human a bloody nose, is all I'm saying. Also, the Earth's standstill isn't worked into the story with a tenth the elegance that it was in the '51 film, where that was Klaatu's trick to show us how badly he could fuck us all up if you wished; here, it feels like the film was about a week from completion, when somebody realised that the Earth hadn't stood still yet, so they'd better stick something in there to justify the title.

All this bitching about the script, and I haven't even started on the directing, the godawful editing, the flat performances, particularly Connelly, who hasn't been this bad in years; and the almost constant product placement (Microsoft and McDonald's especially hope you have an enjoyable time this holiday watching aliens destroy the planet). But there is one bright light, and it's the last one you'd expect: Keanu Reeves is absolutely perfect for this part. He's playing an alien masquerading in a fake human body, never quite figuring out what these "emotions" are that everyone keeps talking about, but allowing himself to be swayed despite the fact that he himself can feel nothing. In short, the ideal role for the remarkably limited actor, and if one can't say anything else good about this DTESS, at least it has a supremely credible extraterrestrial. It's no wonder that he was the director's first and only choice for all the long years that this project gestated. Now, why anybody let the project gestate for that long without taking it behind the shed and shooting it, I fear we will never be able to say.

3/10