FEBRUARY 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

The worst Oscar season in recent memory gave way, perhaps inevitably, to the worst January movie slate since I've been paying attention to such things - and as bad as bad Oscar movies can be, I'm certain we'll agree that bad January movies are much worse.

February seems a touch better, including one movie that is among my top 5 most anticipated for 2009. Still the midwinter doldrums for the most part, but at least it's an upswing.


6.2.2009
Speak of the devil, here's that one movie I'm super-excited about right now: Coraline, adapted by Henry Selick (the man behind Tim Burton's curtain in The Nightmare Before Christmas) from a Neil Gaiman children's book in what looks to be unthinkably sexy 3-D stop motion animation. The one person I know who's seen it claims that it was better than his already-heightened expectations.

Beyond that, you could never tell that it wasn't the sweaty ballsack of the year from the multiplex marquee: Push, a sexycool action movie with hollow young people; He's Just Not That Into You, a romcom with a gigantic cast of stars that most smart people either don't like or aren't familiar with; Fanboys, a long, long-delayed indie movie that may or may not be chopped to hell; and the deep dark evil that is The Pink Panther 2.


13.2.2009
A confession: I am looking forward to the remade Friday the 13th, far more than I can conceivably defend in any sort of logical way. A bit of it has to do with my genuine affection for the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, made by mostly the same crew. A bit of it has to do with my feelings towards the series: you start to fall in love with something you hate that much. I don't know. All I'm saying is, if you see a really hard-core positive review in two weeks' time, please don't think of it as a reflection on my character.

Scarier than that film will have any prayer of being is the fact that most of the films this weekend look at least likely to be decent: the uneven but usually exciting Tom Tykwer has a conspiracy thriller on deck starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts called The International, while the borderline-good director James Gray is releasing an apparent drama for grown-ups, not children who want to play at grown-ups, Two Lovers.

Really, the only obvious clinker looks to be Confessions of a Shopaholic, the latest in the horrid recent spate of "all women are consumer whores!" subgenre.


20.2.2009
Aaaaand... back to your usually-scheduled crap. The latest in the evergreen "all men are sex addicts" subgenre, Fired Up, and a new Tyler Perry movie, Madea Goes to Jail. I can only hope it's a remake of the classic Jim Varney vehicle Ernest Goes to Jail, as that is just about the only thing that would get me into the theater.

(The other thing would be if it were actually Medea Goes to Jail, like I first typed accidentally. Tyler Perry does modern-dress Greek tragedy! Who wouldn't see that?)

The limited-release schedule includes a new adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit directed by Michael Landon, Jr, a documentary about a dead grandma called Must Read After My Death, and a documentary about a wannabe fashion designer titled Eleven Minutes. My money is on the documentaries as being the likeliest to not utterly suck.


27.2.2009
I have been accused of harboring a desire to see Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. The individual making that accusation has been appropriately written out of my will.

No, the big film of the weekend for me is likely to be Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, the first attempt since The Movie That Killed Raul Julia to adapt one of the most popular video game series of the 1990s to film. Video game adaptations, the most ill-fated subgenre in the history of cinema, are a sort of favorite of mine; in the manner that they are favored by all lovers of truly wretched filmmaking, that is.

In limited release, we've got Crossing Over, which appears to be "Crash, but for illegal immigration" and Assassination of a High School President, which has such a great title (no sarcasm) that I've avoided learning anything else about it.

THE ULTIMATE GEEK HIGH CONCEPT

The core concept, "aliens versus vikings" promises all kinds of extravagantly cheesy fun. Unfortunately, Outlander isn't all that much fun, largely because it isn't cheesy. It is, in fact, a motion picture in which the idea of a humanoid alien crash-landing on earth in Norway in 799 A.D. to fight the giant lizard-like beastie that hitched a ride on his ship after killing everyone he loves, with the help of the local Norse warriors, is played completely straight. That is frankly not the movie that I signed up for.

The alien in question is Kainan, played by James Caviezel, the lizard beastie is gigantic piece of nastiness called a Moorwen, and the Norsemen are standard-issue fellows with names like King Rothgar (John Hurt) and Wulfric (Jack Huston). The plot is nothing more or less than "Beowulf with a spaceman", so I hope you'll forgive me if I don't go into it any more.

Co-written by Underworld: Rise of the Lycans scribes Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, the script is nothing better or more innovative than you'd see in any given Sci-Fi channel original, but the film's mid-tier budget honestly manages to save it from that dire fate. In fact, it's actually a pretty glossy, visually appealing affair, directed by McCain (allegedly after a deal with Renny Harlin fell through - thank the good lord for that) without a terribly great amount of distinction, but with a good eye to making the material rise above its mediocre fate. The production design by David Hackl recreates pre-medieval Norway in fine detail, Debra Hanson's costumes are sufficiently lavish and distinctive to stand above the sword-and-sorcery baseline, and the cinematography by Pierre Gill is more than just fine; in fact, Outlander boasts some very wonderful bleached-out visuals and great use of deep nighttime blacks that aren't particularly revolutionary of themselves, but are still satisfying in a way that can't be taken for granted in a cheapo science-fiction adventure like this. And the Moorwen itself is a minor triumph of alien monster design (thanks to Patrick Tatopoulos, the director of - get this - Rise of the Lycans, and the creature designer for the Underworld franchise), with its sharp tentacles and bulldog-from-Hell face, and the cool way it glows red to attract its human prey.

But, good looks are only half of it, and Outlander collapses severely as drama. I'm not sure entirely why that should be the case - no story that's a forthright knock-off of Beowulf can be an entirely unsuccessful heroic epic. There's just a certain something missing that would give the goings-on a bit more heft, depth, meaning, anything. Certainly, the screenwriters attempt to give it some bite by giving Kainan a fairly elaborate backstory involving terraforming and genocide, but the execution isn't so solid as the idea, and this tangent of the story ultimately falls apart like so many convoluted sci-fi subplots before it. In the end, Outlander is really just boring, and I do wish that I could come up with a better word than that; but it's much too serious to succeed at the gaudy spectacle its concept promises, and the narrative simply isn't compelling enough to support that level of seriousness.

This much is at least true: it's well-acted. I was just discussing recently how Jim Caviezel is a better actor than virtually all of the films in which he finds himself acting, and Outlander proudly carries on that tradition. If the backstory works at all, it does so almost exclusively because Caviezel has an appropriately haunted look in his eyes that gives Kainan a gravity entirely unearned by the script. Among the other cast members, John Hurt does his usual thing, the one where he treats a wildly hackneyed role like it was handed down by God for the edification of mankind. It's naught but a barbarian king role, but Hurt plays it with all kinds of proud nobility. Even Sophia Myles, as the requisite love interest and center of an unconvincing love triangle, get in on the act; I daresay it's the best performance I've ever seen her give, one of those anachronistic flinty women who's really more of a man than anybody that always crops up in movies like these, yet in this case she's entirely believable, thanks to an entirely persuasive performance from an actress who hasn't really ever done much of anything to convince the world at large that she's worth the time of day.

So well-acted, so well-crafted; you could almost convince yourself that you were watching a fine movie. But that screenplay, man, it just clangs like a death knell. There's really no rising action to speak of, just one event after another and a series of punctuated false crises that exist solely to keep some kind of tension onscreen before the moment that the big monster comes back into play. They're going to fight over the girl! - wait, no they're not. Another band of vikings is attacking! - nevermind. It's all just a waiting game until they finally go Moorwen-hunting, and without a doubt, the Moorwen-hunting sequence is a rousing bit of cinema, with crazy elaborate sets and a goodly amount of suspense and a well-earned bittersweet ending. But it's too little, too late for a film that manages to squander a seemingly can't-miss idea on a lifeless adventure schematic.

5/10

IN THE REALM OF STORY

Inkheart isn't ultimately a good movie, but it comes much closer than any Brendan Fraser starring vehicle should be able to. Indeed, for a solid thirty minutes, it's a much more than serviceable family-friendly adventure fantasy, and it's only once the plot starts to tie itself in knots trying to avoid ending ahead of time that it becomes impossible to ignore how very slack the whole feature is, in the hands of the competent but highly unimaginative director Iain Softley (of. among others, Backbeat, Hackers, and K-PAX - and how very strange is it that all these films share one guiding hand?).

In brief, the film, adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from a children's novel that I've never heard of, though it is apparently quite successful, Inkheart is about Mortimer Folchart (Fraser), a "silvertongue", someone who can draw the characters in a book out into the real world by reading aloud. We meet him shortly before he learns that he possesses this gift; we see him for the second time twelve years later, when he plainly knows enough to be borderline paranoid about his talent; there is clearly an Unfortunate Event in his past, though it takes a while for us and his teenage daughter, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett) to learn precisely what that is.

Yes, "Meggie." For most of the film, I thought I was just mishearing it, or maybe that Fraser was talking funny. Nope, the end credits confirm it. "Meggie". Presumably short for "Megan", although that doesn't justify it one damned bit.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, Mortimer and Meggie find themselves battling Capricorn (Andy Serkis), a villain from the out-of-print novel Inkheart that Mo released once upon a time. Helping, mostly, is Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), another Inkheart character who wants desperately to get back into the novel, and Elinor (Helen Mirren), the aunt of Mo's missing wife, a rare book collector and crazy old lady who wears turbans. Helping out even less is the book's retired author Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent), who exists almost solely to stretch out the film for a wildly unnecessary plot tangent that kicks in after about one hour (by the way, what kind of filmmaker would put Mirren and Broadbent in a film together, and then never use them in the same scene - this is a filmmaker who's no friend of mine).

Here's the thing: Inkheart is nonsensical long before it becomes a problem that it's nonsensical. The central mechanism by which literary characters come to life doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny, and the more we learn about it, the more it's riddled with logical inconsistencies and unanswered questions. The silvertongue magic doesn't just bring characters to life, it actually removes living figures from the world of their book; does this mean that anyone in the world who picks up a copy of that book will find the character missing? It certainly doesn't seem that way, but if the book-reality has any meaning at all, it feels like that should be the case (and it cannot be explained away by saying that they're missing from that particular copy of the book, given how many different versions of Inkheart are seen to exist). For that matter, we learn that Mo can't simply call a character to life; they have to be swapped-out by somebody in the real world. But there's no indication that the content of the books change as a result, even though the swapped individuals remain in the book's world. And to top it all off, the extremely obvious idea that the silvertongue could read from any narrative, even a newly written one, is never floated by any character at any point, even when it would be terrifically useful to introduce a short story with, for instance, Alana the Skeleton Key Fairy; this idea, which occurred to me almost immediately, isn't brought into play until it's time for the "let's use a whopping deus ex machina to resolve everything" climax.

Yet, despite the very real fact of all these plot holes, the film is for a long time quite imaginative and seductive enough that I didn't care to pick at them. Iain Softley may be a hack, but he's not a particularly talentless one, and for a while, Inkheart has a magical touch to it that promises to end in one of the best kiddie fantasies in recent years. The best scene in the film, in which Mo and Meggie drift around an outdoor old book market in Switzerland, as Mo starts to hear the books talking to him, begging to be read, is a small masterpiece, expressing exactly what it is about old books that is so marvelously appealing, and even if the story's ultimate message seems to be, "Hey kids, reading can endanger the lives of you and everyone you love!" there's an undercurrent throughout about just how great books are, with their smells and textures.

The cast is reasonably good, even when they have unplayable material: Fraser gives his best performance since I don't know when, powerfully reminding us that he can be a really appealling everyman hero when he wants to be, while Mirren is customarily delightful in a role that asks her to swan about and be dramatic. The real standout is Bennett, holding her own against a passle of well-known faces and never lapsing into the role's cloying margins, even if she's obviously a couple of years older than the character. No matter how little sense the film makes - and by the end, it makes absolutely no sense at all - the actors always manage to keep it firmly in the realm of the humane. It's a pity that Inkheart descends so deeply into a narrative muddle, and God knows there's no great craftsmanship to keep it interesting to look at while that implosion occurs (though Javier Navarette's score is unexpectedly deep and inventive, not at all the trite adventure music that one would anticipate), because there are moments of absolute wonder to be had. Just not enough to make the film anything more than a painless misfire, when all is said and done.

5/10

TWICE-TOLD TALE

It's hard to say whether Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is more terrible or inessential. Of course, that's something of a false dichotomy - part of the reason it's terrible is because it's so very inessential.

Set many hundreds of years prior to the unlikely, undeserving hit movies Underworld and Underworld: Evolution, Rise of the Lycans tells the story of how those films' central conflict between the hidden nations of vampires and werewolves came into being: with the vampire ruler Viktor (Bill Nighy), who kept the subset of werewolves with the ability to consciously change from wolf to man - the Lycans - as his slave race; and with a Lycan called Lucian (Michael Sheen), who was in love with Viktor's daughter Sonja (Rhona Mitra). The film tells of how Lucian led his people to break their chains and rise up, of how Viktor learned of his daughter's betrayal; and of how Sonja's death became the inciting incident in a centuries-long war between wolf and bat.

If you thing you've heard that story before, it's probably because you have (that, and the fact that it's a wheezy old Romeo-and-Juliet riff). Everything in Rise of the Lycans that matters to the series mythology - certainly, everything that I included in my little précis - was already explained, and in many cases, already shown onscreen, in the first Underworld. Leaving its prequel to twist in the wind with literally nothing to reveal: filling in the edges a little bit, giving some color to a legend, all that nice stuff, but there's not one single line of dialogue or cutaway shot that tells us anything that we didn't already know from the first two films. There's not even the playful Star Wars prequel trick of thoroughly invalidating everything about the established narrative. There's just... I suppose that the mere fact of dramatising events that had only been spoken of before would be appealing for viewers who really enjoyed the backstory of the first two films, but to be perfectly honest, the mindset of a viewer who really enjoys the first two Underworld films is so completely alien to me that I can't begin to imagine what expectations such a person would bring to the prequel.

From my perspective, Rise of the Lycans is, by a generous margin, the worst of the franchise. There was basically one thing that made Underworld whatsoever enjoyable, and that was watching Kate Beckinsale in a leather catsuit working her way through action sequences that baldly, but successfully, aped The Matrix. Save for a tossed-off cameo, there's no Beckinsale in the new film; and it amplifies the trend begun in Evolution of decreasing the frequency and Matrixicity of the action sequences in favor of people in Gothic dress explaining things at length. In this respect, the prequel is what's left when the shallow pleasures of the first two films have been boiled away, leaving only their worst elements behind. It's always been the most peculiar aspect of the franchise that these movies, which are positioned as being empty, stylish entertainment, should be taken up with such a wildly convoluted backstory; I am not an easily confused filmgoer, but I'm only a little ashamed to admit that the Underworld mythos is as baffling to me as anything I've ever seen in a movie. Rise of the Lycans goes quite a way to making that mythos even more confounding than it already was: by the time the credits began to roll, I realised that I have no idea whatsoever how the vampire society presented in this franchise works.

Of course, it's also a characteristic element of the Underworld movies that their treatment of vampires (and werewolves, to a lesser extent) has very little in common with any normal wisdom about what vampires do. This is the franchise, recall, which takes the irresistible hook of "vampires versus werewolves" and gave us an unending series of gun battles. It wouldn't take much tinkering to remove vampirism from the equation altogether; except for their allergy to sunlight, the characters could by and large be any old race of immortals that you like. Rise of the Lycans amps up the absurdity by presenting a clutch of human nobles who are in thrall to the vampire coven; what exactly "in thrall" means in this context is left almost entirely as an exercise for the viewer.

The story and its borderline-incoherent tangents are so wearying that it's hard to even notice how many other things the film does wrong. Director Patrick Tatopoulos, the series' creature designer taking over from Len Wiseman - and what a shock to find myself missing the contributions of Len Wiseman behind the camera - continues to utilise the palette of cobalt blue and slate grey that made the other films such a cold, antiseptic treat to look at, and stakes his own claim by making everything much, much darker: dark enough that at times it's difficult to tell exactly what is happening. Other than that, Wiseman's style (as crabbed and unappealing as it was) has given way to soulless hackwork. This is the work of a techie thrown behind the camera without really knowing what to do there, and not for one second do you forget that fact.

Absent the lovely Beckinsale, an actress who is significantly better than you would think to look at her career, with all its Pearl Harbors and Van Helsings, the acting suffers. Rhona Mitra (looking eerily like Beckinsale, for reasons that are well-supported by the script) seemed ready in Neil Marshall's Doomsday to leap into the forefront of hot chick action stars, but she's completely flat and uninteresting in this role; nor am I willing to completely blame the script. Beckinsale took a character almost exactly as cardboard and, at the very least, turned her into something marginally worth watching; Mitra is nothing but a pretty face and a scowl. As for the two bigger names, paying the price for having associated themselves with the series all the way back in 2003, when neither had the career they do now, the best thing that can be said about Sheen is that he plays the role completely straight, without lapsing into easy campiness; whereas the best thing that can be said about Nighy is that he plays the role with as much campy gusto as you could possibly conceive. They don't seem to belong in the same movie, but insofar as they're the only elements onscreen that I enjoyed watching, I am making the choice not to mind.

As far as I can tell, the film serves no purpose: it is not entertaining, nor does it add anything to the Underworld legendarium. I guess it's likely that the franchise's fanboys will probably enjoy this chance to see a key moment of the backstory given voice, but really, who wants a world where movies are tailor-made for Underworld fanboys?

2/10

B-FEST SURVIVAL GUIDE

Every winter, Northwestern University of Evanston, Illinois - my alma mater, thank you very much, and one of the few things that makes me proud to say it - plays host to B-Fest, a 24-hour marathon of horrid movies, mostly sci-fi, fantasy and horror, although most years there are a few odds and ends like Cool as Ice.

1939: WILD BLUE YONDER

It can be fairly said that Howard Hawks's ripped-from-real-life adventure story Only Angels Have Wings is one of the most influential films in history, although I haven't personally encountered that argument before.

Here's what the logic looks like: it was the first Hawks film to really make a splash in France - not the first Hawks film to find release in France, of course, but the first one that was a smash hit. A while later, in the middle '50s through the early '60s, the gang at Cahiers du cinéma developed a new theory (or it might be better to say, they codified the rules of a theory that had been fluttering about amorphously since at least the 1920s), based primarily on the work of Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, that the director of a film was the individual most responsible for that film's meaning and overall quality, that it was possible to analyse a director's films largely in terms of how it fit in with his (or rarely, her) pet themes and characteristic style, and that it was therefore best to group films primarily by director. This was the famous and infamous Auteur Theory, and it remains the dominant force in film theory today, although I'm not certain that many of its most enthusiastic practitioners - fanboys - are conscious of it. But it's Auteurism, through and through, and nobody honest could say that they're free of it; we all know or are people who would see every single film that Quentin Tarantino directed, or Wes Anderson, Chris Nolan, David Gordon Green, Tsai Ming-Liang, Werner Herzog, David Fincher, Steven Spielberg - but can you think of a single person who would go see a movie just because Roger Deakins or Robert Richardson shot it? Hell, some of my best friends are cinematographers, and I don't think even they would go see a movie just because Roger Deakins shot it.

So my point: a debased version of Auteur Theory is the dominant mode of Thinking About Cinema right now, there would be no Auteur Theory without a French love of Howard Hawks, and there'd be no French love of Hawks without Only Angels Have Wings. I'm not saying that OAHW "caused" Auteur Theory - there are other directors than Hawks who could have inspired the Cahiers crew to the same conclusions - but in our particular universe, it's certainly a major link in the chain, and as good a place as any to settle down to sing Hawks's praises - and by any definition of the term "director", whether Auteur Theory is true in its most far-reaching and ambitious form, or the director a film is simply a soulless professional whose job it is to make sure everything fits into place correctly, Howard Hawks is without doubt one of the finest directors in the annals of Hollywood.

What makes a Howard Hawks film? The classic answer, the one the French boys gave us back in the '50s, was that he liked studies of male bonding, unafraid to commit fully to the weepy emotionality of that process when it suited him; and that his male-female relationships were marked by excessive sparring, banter and one-upsmanship: the "battle of the sexes" taken exceptionally seriously, although the battles were almost exclusively verbal. What makes Only Angels Have Wings something of a special entry in the Hawks canon is that unlike a great many of his films, which tend to be about men and men or men and women, it clearly explores both of these themes, sometimes in exactly the same moment.

The film takes place in Barranca, Colombia, where a rag-tag aviation company is responsible for carrying mail over the Andes Mountains. We meet this company through the eyes of Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), spending a few hours ashore while her steamer anchors in the port: three hotshot pilots , the addled owner Dutchy (Sig Rumann), cantankerous old flyboy Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell), and the company's manager, Geoff Carter (Cary Grant). Instantly attracted by the freespirited life these pilots lead, and to Geoff - who, being played by Grant, is handsome, witty, and has a beautiful voice - Bonnie stays on when her ship leaves. Geoff doesn't take kindly to that, but there's not much that can be done: the next ship headed her way doesn't show up for another week.

Everything is there: Geoff's paternal/brotherly relationship with Kid, his treatment of the young men under his command, eager to fly no matter how dangerous (Barranca is perpetually fog-shrouded, and the only way over the mountains is a narrow, high pass), and of course the romantic plotline (well, we know that Geoff is going to fall for Bonnie eventually, whether he plans on it or not), which looks back a little to Bringing Up Baby and forward to To Have and Have Not; the latter film in fact owes one of its most memorable lines of dialogue to one of Bonnie's final quips. Since both were directed by Hawks and written by Jules Furthman, it's hard to call this plagiarism; let's stick with "laziness".

And then there are the characteristics of Hawk's filmmaking style: the overlapping dialogue that his films more or less invented, the extensive use of offscreen audio, and his lovingly cluttered frames; Hawks, more than many of his contemporaries, dearly loved to put things in front of his actors. That he was a technically great director is acknowledged, of course, but I think it's worth harping on it for a bit: this was a man who really cared about the use of sound in his movies, in a decade when that wasn't very common. Hawks was not the first American with elaborate soundtracks, but there weren't many besides him to play around with such deeply layered sound effects; space in a Hawks film is defined as much by what we hear as what we see. And of course, one can never say it enough times, so I'll repeat myself: that overlapping dialogue! Even nowadays, when our films are oh-so-realistic, it's kind of weird to encounter people in a movie talking over one another, speaking in half-formed sputters, trying to get a word in edgewise - you know, exactly like people talk. It's part of the director's famously hurried pace - his films aren't "rushed", per se, but dammit if they don't move at a swell clip.

None of this, of course, means that Only Angels Have Wings is a particularly good film, just a typically Hawksian one; but it is good. Extroardinarily so (and in that respect, it is also typically Hawksian). And this is not because Hawks is a great auteur (which he is), but because he was a great studio workhorse. There are not all that many directors who were so extremely good at constructing films (John Ford is one, and now I've fulfilled the mandate of never talking about Hawks without mentioning Ford), and hardly any who were great at that and could hop genres so readily. Hawks made adventure movies, gangster pictures, comedies, Westerns, war movies, and in every single one of those genres, he made at least one film that is widely held to be at or near the very pinnacle of the style. You don't get that way by being just some studio schmuck, and you don't get there by being an auteur (since an auteur, almost by definition, mostly works with one kind of film); you get that way by knowing the right thing to do in every given situation, and doing it.

Only Angels Have Wings is, basically, perfect. I will stand behind that to death. It is formally and structurally perfect. Look to the opening sequence, the way it introduces our setting, Barranca, then brings in Bonnie, fleshes out the setting by adding color (the hotshot pilots) which itself contributes plot and drama; continuing to add color to the wider setting (Barranca) and the smaller setting (the bar where the pilots hang out and, apparently, sleep), introducing person after person with just enough specificity that we'll know them for later when they get filled out, finally introducing our protagonist; and then abruptly move from the accumulation of expository details to perfectly-tuned suspense (a plane in the air; will he land or will he crash?), that is itself expository (since we'll need to know, later, just how dangerous this job is). Information is being puked at us at a fairly alarming clip in the first 30 minutes of this film, and helped by a perfect screenplay that he helped shape (much of the film is based on events he personally witnessed), Hawks manages to make it thrilling and funny instead of lecturing. There's a sort of voodoo to really perfect filmmaking that defies simple analysis like this, or even rigorous formal analysis, and all I can really say is this: watch the film and be amazed, be delighted, be bowled over by its perfection. If you wish, spare a thought every now and then to the framing, the lighting, the editing, the acting, and how none of them could be materially improved. If you can do that for more than a few seconds without being sucked back in to the story, then you are a better scholar than I. And for me, that perfection that defies scrutiny, that is Howard Hawks.

THE YEAR IN MOVIES: 1939

2009 marks the 70th anniversary of American cinema's all-time annus mirabilis, 1939 - the frequently-cited consensus pick for the single finest year of movies that has ever been. Certainly, that's the start of a discussion rather than the end of it, and there are plenty of strong arguments to be made for this or that year as "the best ever" (for myself, especially if non-American films are brought into the equation, I'm a big fan of 1964). But we can all agree, at the very least, that 1939 bore witness to a lot of great movies.

In honor of this august septuagennial, it's my pleasure to introduce a new series: on the fourth Sunday of every month this year, I'm going to take a look at one of the classic films released during the '39 glut. Perhaps it will give us a chance to revisit some old standbys from a new perspective; maybe it's just a likely excuse to rewatch some great old films. Either way, I'm going to start announcing titles in advance (okay, beginning with February), to encourage all of you my regular readers to re-watch these films right alongside me - or to see them for the first time, if that's the case.

The first entry goes up tonight. The film is the great Howard Hawks's pit-stop in between directing two of the most perfect comedies in Hollywood history: the action-adventure Only Angels Have Wings, itself as close to perfect as nobody's business.

IN WHICH THE BLOGGER IS STILL SICK

So, I didn't get out to see anything today, and I have no keen ideas on what to fill the space with in the absence of a review, so...

Um, yeah.

I have what I think is a really exciting plan for Sunday, though, so check back in then.

Man, being sick sucks.

IF I RAN THE OSCARS

It had been my intention to see a movie today and review it - you know, like I do on this movie review blog of mine. The thing is, I've got a cold that just will not be ignored, and so I'm allowing laziness to be the better part of valor. A quick post, and then to bed!

Anyway, I'm still sore over the Worst Oscar Slate In Years (okay, that's harsh... Best Picture is a trainwreck, and I'm no fan of the Supporting categories, but some of the downticket stuff is pretty great, like Costume Design, Art Direction and Sound Editing - and it's hard to complain about either Actor, save that it's boring), so as my parting shot, and since it doesn't require me to do anything, I herewith present what the Oscars would look like if I were God, and could bend them to my will. Hopefully, tomorrow will bring with my careful chosen musings on Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Or whatever.

(I won't even make you wait for the winners; they're marked with an asterisk).

Best Picture
Burn After Reading
The Fall
Happy-Go-Lucky
My Winnipeg
*WALL-E

Best Director
Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, Burn After Reading
Arnaud Desplechin, A Christmas Tale
Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Flight of the Red Balloon
*Steve McQueen, Hunger
Tarsem Singh, The Fall

Best Actor
Mathieu Amalric, A Christmas Tale
Benicio Del Toro, Che
Colin Farrell, In Bruges
*Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Best Actress
Juliette Binoche, Flight of the Red Balloon
Catherine Deneuve, A Christmas Tale
*Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Kristen Scott Thomas, I’ve Loved You So Long
Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy

Best Supporting Actor
Emile Hirsch, Milk
Bill Irwin, Rachel Getting Married
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
*John Malkovich, Burn After Reading
Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky

Best Supporting Actress
*Hiam Abbass, The Visitor
Hannah Schygulla, The Edge of Heaven
Debra Winger, Rachel Getting Married
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Alexis Zegerman, Happy-Go-Lucky

Best Cast
(The category I'd introduce if I were in charge; the award would go to the casting director, I guess)
*Burn After Reading
A Christmas Tale
Milk
Rachel Getting Married
Synecdoche, New York

Best Original Screenplay
Burn After Reading, by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
A Christmas Tale, by Arnaud Desplechin & Emmanuel Bourdieu
The Edge of Heaven, by Fatih Akin
*In Bruges, by Martin McDonagh
WALL-E, by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Dark Knight, by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Frost/Nixon, by Peter Morgan
*Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Slumdog Millionaire, by Simon Beaufoy
Wendy and Lucy, by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond

Best Animated Feature
Bolt
Chicago 10
Fear(s) of the Dark
Sita Sings the Blues (technically ineligible for anything in the real world)
*WALL-E

Best Foreign Language Film
A Christmas Tale
The Edge of Heaven
*Flight of the Red Balloon
Let the Right One In
Still Life

Best Documentary Feature
Chicago 10
Encounters at the End of the World
Man on Wire
*My Winnipeg
Shine a Light

Best Cinematography
*Che, (Steven Soderbergh [as Peter Andrews])
The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister)
The Fall (Colin Watkinson)
Milk (Harris Savides)
WALL-E (Jeremy Lasky and Danielle Feinberg)

Best Editing
*Burn After Reading (Joel Coen & Ethan Coen [as Roderick Jaynes])
Che (Pablo Zumárraga)
The Dark Knight (Lee Smith)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Michael Kahn)
Rachel Getting Married (Tim Squyres)

Best Production Design
Australia (Catherine Martin)
*The Fall (Ged Clarke)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Stephen Scott)
Rachel Getting Married (Ford Wheeler)
Synecdoche, New York (Mark Friedberg)

Best Costume Design
Australia (Catherine Martin)
The Dark Knight (Lindy Hemming)
The Duchess (Michael O’Connor)
*The Fall (Ishioka Eiko)
Milk (Danny Glicker)

Best Makeup
*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
W.

Best Score
Che (Alberto Iglesias)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Alexandre Desplat)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Gary Yershon)
Synecdoche, New York (Jon Brion)
*WALL-E (Thomas Newman)

Best Visual Effects
*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man

Best Sound Mixing
*Che
Iron Man
Rachel Getting Married
Synecdoche, New York
WALL-E

Best Sound Editing
Che
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Iron Man
Tropic Thunder
*WALL-E

THOUGHTS ON THE 2008 OSCAR NOMINEES

Nominations!

Wow, they sure loved the hell out of The Reader. I'm impressed, though - I knew the Oscars were going to be boring this year, but I didn't realise they were going to be boring and shitty.

The good: Melissa Leo in for Best Actress, Richard Jenkins for Best Actor, In Bruges for Original Screenplay (actually, Original Screenplay as a whole is pretty good), Hellboy II for Makeup

The bad: Sally Hawkins snubbed, The Reader getting Picture and Director, and depriving The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from its rightful spot as my least favorite nominee.

Just plain surprising: Tom Stern in for Best Cinematography for Changeling, only three Best Song nominees & none of them for Bruce Springsteen

This is going to be the worst Oscars in a long, long time.

My predictions: a hideous 29/40 on the Big 8, 68/99 overall (though I actually predicted 101 awards, not expecting Best Song to do that... so maybe better to say 68/101?)

2008 OSCAR NOMINATION PREDICTIONS

At first I wasn't going to do this, but I'm ultimately a sucker for the glitziness of Teh Movies. So here are my predictions for the Oscar nominations tomorrow morning. I have decided to eschew all but a little commentary, mostly on the grounds that I haven't been this bored by the Oscar race in all the years that I've been watching the Oscars. Incidentally, the fact that I'm predicting a 5/5/5 match-up between Picture, Director and Editing makes me want to slice my wrists.

(Last year: I went 32/40 on the Big 8, and 63/99 overall)

TRASH AND BALLYHOO

I just don't know about the 3-D remake of My Bloody Valentine. It is extremely trashy, and it knows it - which is good. It is one of the only slasher movies in well over a decade that isn't mired in self-parody - which is also good. It is dedicated to the idea that over-the-top gore should be the stuff of fun, without sickening the audience in the manner of a torture film - which is best. And yet it is not very good.

Well, duh, of course it's not. It's a slasher movie, and once you've taken the names John Carpenter and Wes Craven out of the equation, the aesthetic pinnacle of the slasher subgenre is still pretty far down on the absolute scale of cinematic quality. And part of me wants to credit My Bloody Valentine for being a pretty good slasher-qua-slashers, although maybe after years of Saw clones and sequels, I'm just starved for an R-rated horror flick that isn't punishingly nihilistic. Half the fun of an '80s slasher movie is bathing in the cheesiness of the whole thing, after all, and however starved for value, content, or mere filmmaking talent the horror genre has been recently, only a few scattered examples can genuinely lay claim to honest cheesiness.

At any rate, My Bloody Valentine gets one thing, indeed the most important thing, completely right: tremendously good gore scenes. And not just good, good in three dimensions! For a young student of the genre who never got the chance to see Friday the 13th, Part 3 in all its 3-D glory back in 1982, My Bloody Valentine is a godsend. No longer do we have to wonder what it must have looked like to see edged weapons and body parts flying towards the screen - now we can enjoy the tawdry spectacle in gloriously sharp Real D. Insofar as that's the draw - and let's be perfectly honest, that is the draw, and nothing else - the film is a masterpiece: director Patrick Lussier knows exactly what we want, and that is why, within the first five minutes of the film, a young man gets a pick to the back of the head that ends up popping his eye towards the camera. Is this honorable filmmaking? No. It is, though, honest.

It's very easy to get wrapped up in the cheap, kitschy thrill of seeing viscera jump off the screen and into your lap. Nor is it my desire to belittle the validity of this experience: certainly, I had as much fun as anybody else in the theater, and that was a room filled delighted laughter not to be heard outside a child's birthday party. It is good sometimes to respond to a movie purely as an experience, and if the new 3-D cinema is going to have a future, I remain convinced that at least in the short term, it will be on those terms. You do not engage with a film like this; you are amazed by it. In this we are like those first audiences watching the Lumière brothers' actualités.

But if the imagination and enthusiasm behind the gore effects in My Bloody Valentine 3-D set it in the top tier of slasher movies, the rest of the film is no better than any of them. And there's much more "rest of the film". Revamping the story of a 1981 Canadian slasher that wasn't that distinguished to begin with, My Bloody Valentine sputters to life in an unnecessarily confusing opening sequence that uses newspaper clippings and TV footage to exposit the story of Harry Warden (Rich Walters), a miner in Harmony, Pennsylvania who was the sole survivor of a Valentine's Day mine collapse, taking the expediency of slaughtering the men trapped with him to conserve oxygen (In the original, that wasn't the only thing he did; food gets scarce in a mine, you know. Why this detail wasn't preserved in the remake is beyond my comprehension). One year later to the day, Warden wakes up from a coma, and after murdering a large number of nurses - it's hard to square the number of bodies we see with the figure tossed about later - stomps back off to Tunnel No. 5, where he was once interred, and which is now the setting for a Valentine's Day party that includes just about every young person in Harmony. After a large number of teens are messily dealt with, the cops arrive and Warden gets buried alive again.

The needless, confusing part is that the story hops forward another ten years, to see four of the survivors of that bloody night dealing with their lives: Axel Palmer (Kerr Smith) is the new sheriff, married to Sarah (Jaime King); Axel's old girlfriend Irene (Betsy Rue) is the town slut - I'm sorry, but that's all the film gives us to go on - and Sarah's old boyfriend, Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), has just come back to town to sell the old Hanniger Mine that employs nearly everyone in Harmony. At just the same time, a figure dressed all in miner's gear has started to kill people with a pickaxe. Is it Harry Warden, back from the dead? Or a local, trying to throw a scare into Tom to keep him from selling? Or does it have something to do with Tom and Axel's old rivalry over Sarah? Hint: by the time it occurs, you will have figured it out, although at least the new screenwriters, Todd Farmer (of Jason X infamy!) and Zane Smith, try to make things a bit unpredictable by leaving the door open for the ending from the old film while ultimately going with its opposite.

My complaint isn't that the ending is predictable, really, but that everything is predictable. Or contrived. Like the beginning: the first film all takes place in one year, ten years after Warden's rampage. Is there any good reason why there has to be a fake-out first act in the new film, requiring three separate Warden rampages in 11 years? None that I can imagine, unless it's to add some "drama" to the main characters' lives. Which is its own failure: all of the main characters are in their late 20s, maybe even early 30s, and that's fantastic. But they still act like addle-headed, horny teenagers. The chief appeal of making a horror film with grown-up protagonists is to give the characters a different perspective and different fears (recall The Descent, where the most terrifying thing was the loss of a child), but other than some red herrings in the plot and a scene where Sarah's son is unconvincingly threatened, everything about My Bloody Valentine could just as easily have played out in high school.

I do not mention the plot holes; nor the horribly slack direction whenever gore or flashy 3-D is not present (there's a grocery store chase scene that is shamefully poorly executed). My Bloody Valentine has dynamite effects, but that is the one and only thing it has; everything else is slasher boilerplate, and not even very good - we're talking, like, mid-series Friday the 13th good. The closest I can come to a recommendation is this: if you're going to see it, see it right now in theaters, because without the saving grace of 3-D, there's absolutely nothing whatever worth bothering with here.

4/10

20 JANUARY, 2009

...as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

-Barack Hussein Obama,
44th President of the United States of America

OFCS AWARDS 2008

We've just this evening announced the recipients of our annual awards. Available elsewhere, but dammit, I'm going to post the full list anyway.

There are some of these that I'm really proud of. Particularly Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Best Picture
WALL-E

Best Director
Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight

Best Actor
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler

Best Actress
Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy

Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

Best Supporting Actress
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Best Original Screenplay
WALL-E, by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon

Best Adapted Screenplay
Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Best Documentary
Man On Wire

Best Animated Feature
WALL-E

Best Foreign Language Film
Let the Right One In

Best Cinematography
Wally Pfister, The Dark Knight

Best Original Score
James Newton Howard & Hans Zimmer, The Dark Knight

Best Editing
Chris Dickens, Slumdog Millionaire

Breakthrough Performance
Lina Leandersson, Let the Right One In

Breakthrough Filmmaker
Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In

NONE MORE RED

Name-drop a fella enough, and you start to feel guilty about it. Or in other words, the time has come, the Walrus said, to review a classic Dario Argento film already.

Our volunteer is Deep Red, a 1975 giallo that was one of the director's finest works in genre that made his name. It comes in two different flavors: a 126-minute cut that premiered in Italy and most of Europe, and a 98-minute cut re-edited for the American (and, I believe, British) markets under the title The Hatchet Murders. There are those who would have you believe that the shorter version is the better of the two, being tighter and more focused. I am perfectly happy for those people, but for the rest of us, Argento's original cut is much superior, clearing up a couple of gaping plot holes left by the American edits, substantially increasing our understanding of the main characters, and lightening a fairly grim story with some low-key comic relief. No, it's not as focused, but anyone going into an Argento film looking for focus is going to end up disappointed no matter what.

But forgive me - I haven't even introduced the man yet, and in a review where that was the whole point! Once upon a time, there was a magical place called the Italian film industry, which presented art filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni as its ambassadors to the world, while keeping fiscally afloat on the backs of just about the most shamelessly derivative genre films ever made. The best of the Italian genre directors - men like Sergio Leone in the Western, or Mario Bava in horror - attained an artistic reputation all their own, although the great majority of these films were made anonymously and cheaply, and at a breakneck pace that would shame the Hollywood system of the silent era.

In this environment, Dario Argento got his start writing Westerns in 1967. Having even a modicum of talent meant that you got promoted quickly, and thus in 1970, at 29 years old, Argento wrote and directed a murder mystery called The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. This film was an entry in the supremely popular genre called giallo, after the yellow-backed pulp novels that inspired it; these were hyper-violent, sometimes highly-sexualised whodunnits on the Agatha Christie model, almost always involving mysterious figures wearing trench coats and black gloves whose identity we learn only moments from the film's end; usually, it would be someone we'd already seen, and occasionally, the reveal actually made sense. Ultimately, the gialli would inspire the rise of the American slasher film, which were then copied in Italy, though by the time the Italian slasher films started to crop up, the giallo was all but dormant, in favor of zombie and cannibal movies.

I do not know how successful The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was at the box office, but it was an aesthetic triumph - for those who would admit that a giallo could have any aesthetic whatever - signalling to anyone with eyes to see that for the first time, Bava wasn't the only horror director who also knew how to make a great film. Argento followed this with two more "animal" gialli, a couple of episodes for a TV mystery anthology, and a satiric comedy; and this brings us at last back to 1975 and Deep Red, Argento's finest film up to that point, and the last true giallo he made prior to Suspiria, a supernatural thriller that remains the director's best, and best-known film.

The film is a perfect example of the generic form: Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), a British pianist teaching at a Roman conservatory, has just helped his very drunk friend Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) out of a bar when he hears a scream coming from his building, looking up just in time to see his upstairs neighbor, Helga Ullmann (Macha Méril) getting murdered by a figure with a hatchet; we already know that Helga is psychic, and had discovered the murderer's identity by accident. (Incidentally, that's a great example of how the two cuts of the film differ in small, hugely important ways: after the disorienting, violent credits sequence, the first scene the Americans got to see was Helga giving a lecture; the Italians first saw a brief snippet of Marcus teaching his students. Making the identy of our protagonist much less of a guessing game for them). By the time Marcus gets to her apartment, the killer has escaped, although he notices someone in a trench coat leaving the building when he runs to the window. Over the next few days, Marcus tracks down one clue after another with the help of news reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), probably sleeping with her in the process; and with police superintendent Calcabrini (Eros Pagni) - unlike slashers, gialli are populated by cops, and they're often very competent. Along the way to finding out who really did it, Marcus stumbles across one peculiarity after another: a chipper, unendingly creepy children's song; a haunted house on the outskirts of Rome; an addle-minded old lady who confuses "pianist" with "engineer"; and the drunken ramblings of Carlo, who may or may not have seen the killer.

A perfect example, I called it, and that's just what it is: hardly any plot to speak of, just one scene after another of a character realising something and either a) not figuring out how it ties into everything else, or b) dying violently. Eventually, everything wraps up fairly neatly, and in this respect, Deep Red is actually exceptional: it's hardly typical that at the end of a giallo we're at all certain of what happened, and ususally the killer's motives are just a matter of fiat: he killed, so he must be a killer. Deep Red actually makes something like sense, although by American or British standards, there's a lot left hanging (for starters, this film is part of the proud Italian tradition of ending the film immediately after the killer is stopped - we barely even see Marcus's reaction for more than a few seconds). It's for this reason that I'd consider nominating this as the best introduction to Argento's work: it's neither his most engaging (Suspiria) nor his prettiest (Opera) film, but it's possibly his most coherent.

The thing about Argento, though - the thing about all gialli, from the best to the worst - is that you're not really there for the plot. You're there for the visions, first and above all. It's the creation of absolutely mesmerising imagery that defines the genre more than anything else, more than black gloves or incoherent plots (the fixation on creating fantastic imagery is sometimes cited as the very reason that gialli tend to be so confusing - the filmmakers didn't actually care about telling a story), and in this respect, Deep Red delivers in spades. Like any good giallo, its most memorably, unsettling images involve death: the image of Helga with glass shards in her neck; the image of a bird impaling itself on a knitting needle; the image of a lizard writing in agony with a hatpin through its body (by the way, animal lovers? Stay away from '70s Italian horror); the image of the killer being killed slowly, inexorably, and accidentally killed.

Insofar as the great Italian horror films are also great cinema - and I'm not comfortable with any definition of "great cinema" that doesn't include Deep Red - it is because of the powerful content of the images themselves, rather than the formalist niceities of how they were put together (I should not, though, shortchange the incredible soundtrack: the construction of audio being a much different creature in Italy before the mid-80s, when there was no sync-sound. This leads to obviously artificial soundscapes full of harsh sound effects that add to the uneasy feeling that the hyper-stylised visuals have begun to create; add in the marvelous jazzy score, with as few jarring techno notes by Argento's band Goblin, and you have one of the most distinct-sounding horror films of the decade). We who love the gialli tend to love them for their iconic nature: I don't know what the hell a dying lizard has to do with the plot of Deep Red or anything else, but I know what it makes me feel to see it, and I know I'll take that shot to my grave. That's the most that any movie can ultimately hope to do: move the viewer so deeply that he or she is fundamentally altered. In his heyday, Argento had the knack for doing that with some regularity, and he rarely ever did it better than here.

GIRLS IN WHITE DRESSES

Apparently, January is now the dumping ground, not only for the worst of the worst horror films and Happy Madison productions, but for enormously retrograde comedies about how every girl in the world wants so very much to have a big fancy wedding. Last year: 27 Dresses. This year: Bride Wars, a paean to friendship and conspicuous consumption that is just simply wrong. On a number of levels.

Since a wee age, Liv (Kate Hudson, who also produced) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) have always wanted the exact same thing: a June wedding at New York's Plaza Hotel. It happens that both women become engaged around the same time, and both contract the services of the city's most desired wedding planner, Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen), who uses her godly powers to get them both slots at that venue a mere three months in advance, three weeks apart. Except that in a hi-larious snafu, some signals get crossed and the girls end up with weddings on the same day at the same time. Cue the outrageous wackiness as these two young ladies turn instantly into the bitterest of foes, with no aim in sight but to make each other's wedding a colossal disaster.

Maybe I'm nothing but a cockeyed optimist, but I can see how that concept turns into a really fine comedy. Really play up the idea that BFFs can turn on each other at the drop of a hat when their long-desired creature comforts are threatened, and you have a really swell dark comedy in the Ruthless People mold, a coal-black celebration of the awful things that people do. Barring that, at the very least there should be a smart, nasty satire of the over-funded wedding industry in America, which has managed to convince so very many intelligent, educated young women that if they don't spend the equivalent of a down payment on a really nice house on one single day that they'll be too stressed to enjoy, they have fundamentally failed in their womanhood. I'd have paid money to see that.

But since I am a 27-year-old male, the movie studios don't really give a damn what I want to see (though it is assumed, I think, that I will be mostly interested in whatever the teenage boys are into). So instead of being any kind of satire about anything, Bride Wars is a big ol' fluffy pile of wish fulfillment. The first warning sign was the PG rating; when you don't even have enough adult content to swing a PG-13, nor the desire to add such content, you've pretty much announced to the world that your movie is as lightweight and breakable as a soap bubble. Thus it is with Bride Wars, which never pursues its characters into any interesting alleyways when it can just as easily be distracted by pretty things, easy signifiers of consumerism, like its 300-year-long scene where Liv and Emma talk about this goddamn Vera Wang wedding gown.

It's tempting to hate on the film all the more for its extravagantly poor timing: there's hardly been a worse time to celebrate the great American sport of buying than now and the past few months. But that's not the filmmaker's fault; besides isn't it true that in the 1930s, people ate up these "glamourous lives of the rich" fantasias by the crateful? Except that a good Depression-era MGM comedy has vitality and wit that couldn't be farther from Bride Wars. Besides, those movies were unabashedly artificial: you didn't go to learn behavior, you went to escape. Escapism is certainly part of Bride Wars, but it's a different flavor: we're expected to agree with the protagonists' musings on how nice it is to have nice things.

But enough of my latent Marxism (which always seems to flare up when I see movies like this). The greater problem with the film is that is just doesn't have any core: take away the pretty women and pretty dresses and pretty wedding gewgaws, and you're not left with a movie at all. Bride Wars is a stillborn comedy at best, with only Bergen and Kristen Johnson able to wring any real humor from their characters at all, in both cases by tapping into the nastiness that the rest of the film seems so eager to keep away from (Johnson's performance especially; she plays a standard issue mean drunk, but she mugs with virtually no shame and provides at least some spark because of it). Hudson and Hathaway are more than useless: trapped to a certain degree by their stock characters (Liv is a control freak! Emma is a doormat!), neither actress does much of anything besides stand in front of the camera and recite lines. This is a disappointment in Hudson's case, as she has proven before to be capable of zingy comedy; it's a tragedy in Hathaway's, given how very recently she proved in Rachel Getting Married that she can be one hell of an actress without sacrificing any of the sweetness that made her so inexplicably popular. I never cared much for her before Rachel, admittedly, but this is still a shocking waste of her time and talents; easily the worst performance I've ever seen her give.

The silver lining - and it is always well to look for the positive in all things - is the director Gary Winick actually seems to have put some vague effort into keeping his unfunny, paint-by-numbers film alive. Nothing here is exactly innovative, but for what the film is - a winter programmer - it's a lot more than the necessary "set up the camera, press record" hackery. I mean, there's some of that, too. But some of the scenes are filmed in unusual, interesting ways, particularly the inevitable "the girls become friends again" moment, which is shot in what would just about pass for avant-garde in this context. On the other hand, I would not go too far in praising Winick, or rather his team of filmmakers: the film also suffers from shockingly bad editing in several places, like it was made in 1916 by people who didn't quite understand this nifty new "continuity editing" system that Griffith and DeMille were all hot and bothered about, but wanted to give it a try anyway.

So basically, it's a wreck: not funny, insulting to both hetero women and hetero men (guys, in this world, are ciphers unless they are jackasses; and the film's treatment of non-hetero people consists of one dude with that marvelous Hollywood "gay people don't have sex" sexuality), socially irresponsible. But by the same token, I don't think it's the worst wreck we'll see all year, and at the very, very worst, it's clear that some people were actually trying. There might not ultimately be anything in the film that counts as "good cinema" besides one of Bergen's early scenes, but it's January, and it could be worse. This could be a horror remake.

4/10

DYBBUK STOPS HERE

I walked inside from one of the most idiotically cold days of the Chicago winter to see a movie whose first shot is of Chicago draped in snow. This I took to be a poor omen for things to come, and lo! I was correct. The Unborn is a colossal failure, the worst film yet by director David S. Goyer, made all the harder to take by the very number of shots and moments that work awesomely well: just enough of them to throw the wilderness of crappiness surrounding them into sharpest relief, and demonstrate that in the hands of a great horror director, this film might have been one of the most memorable and scary films of 2009.

There's hardly a single complaint that I can make about the film that couldn't be easily laid against the films of Mario Bava, Dario Argento, or the J-horror masters, after all, and we all agree ("we all" who like horror in the first place) that those movies are all great. It's only the directors' visionary imagery that saves their generally incomprehensible scripts from the dustbin of cinematic history. Sadly for The Unborn, Goyer is not a visionary filmmaker; in fact, of all the cinéastes in America, he is one of the very worst, relative to the esteem in which his name is held. For some reason, because he co-wrote the screenplays to Dark City and Batman Begins and the scenario for The Dark Knight, his name is some kind of talisman; despite the absence of anything else remotely like a good movie in his résumé, which veers drunkenly from Demonic Toys to The Crow: City of Angels to Jumper, with directorial pit-stops for Blade: Trinity and The Invisible. The most terrifying thing about The Unborn is nothing onscreen; it's that Goyer has managed to top himself - or maybe that would be, bottom himself out - with the worst film he's ever directed (I haven't seen everything he's written, though I imagine that The Unborn is at least a smidgen better than Kickboxer 2).

The first scene of the unborn comes powerful close to working, and here is what happens: a young woman whose name, we will learn, is Casey (Odette Yustman, who you might remember from Cloverfield, or perhaps like me, you just can't get over how her name sounds like she ought to be a ballerina/spy), runs through a park in Chicago in the dead of winter (and as the quarter-inch-thick ice on the inside of my windows can attest, the dead of a Chicago winter is pretty fucking dead). She comes upon a blue glove in the middle of the path and stops; when she looks for its owner, she notices a little boy watching her, wearing one blue glove. He runs into the woods, and when Casey looks again, there is a dog wearing a mask staring at her with undoggishly blue eyes. Going into the woods, she spots the mask, apparently stuck in the dirt, and when she digs in the dirt, she finds a jar containing a human fetus, and it opens its eyes to look at her, and she wakes up.

Maybe describing it in words doesn't make it work as well as it did onscreen. Whatever, this opening flipped my shit: the shot of the dog in the mask looked, admittedly, quite stupid, but everything else was moody and creepy and wonderful; even the obvious button to the fetus in the jar shot (my exact thought process: "And... the fetus opens its eyes. Wait. And... the fetus opens its eyes. Wait. An- HOLY SHIT THE FETUS JUST OPENED ITS EYES THAT IS THE CREEPIEST THING EVER!"). The fact that it's virtually silent, not even any score, helps a lot, although not in a way that you'd notice at first; it's just that the dialogue and score are two of the worst things in the movie, so their absence can't help but make it better.

Anyway, Casey wakes up and the plot instantly kicks over into the most hopelessly routine ghost story conceivable, which basically consists of Casey's suicide mother and long-lost grandmother (Jane Alexander, who doesn't seem to realise that she's slumming) who tells her about the dybbuk - a disembodied spirit in Jewish folklore - that has haunted their families all these many years, and how if she does not stop it, it shall possess her body and kill everyone she loves, so time for a Jewish exorcism, which is apparently different from a Christian exorcism, but you'd never be able to tell from how it was filmed - the requisite papers blowing all around, people getting thrown against walls, and lights shorting out are all in attendance. Just about the only thing you haven't seen here before is Grandma Sofi's explanation for how the dybbuk first took hold in their family line: apparently, it's because of when her brother died in Auschwitz during Mengele's experiments, and came back, and she had to kill her brother's body, and so forth. Did you miss it? I'll go back: the film's plot hinges on Josef Mengele's twin experiments in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I didn't know that you could Godwin a shitty horror movie, but then, I am not David S. Goyer.

Issues of taste aside, the film's story is not so much plagued by plot holes as it is constructed out of them, not unlike an especially lacy variety of Swiss cheese. My favorite is that the grandmother makes a big deal about how Casey has to find this one particular rabbi (Gary Oldman, who doesn't seem to care that he's slumming) who is an expert on this book about stopping dybbuks, but when she meets him, he's never heard of the book, and doesn't know how to exorcise a dybbuk, not that he believes in them anyway (runner-up: on three occasions, that same rabbi tells her that the exorcism won't work if she doesn't truly believe that she is possessed, which obviously, being a young 21st century gal, she doesn't; despite the fact that he doesn't believe whereas she is absolutely 100% convinced before she ever even meets him).

This is where my whole "Goyer≠Argento" argument was leading: like the best Italian or Japanese horror, The Unborn absolutely collapses as a script, before the actors or anybody even got to take a look at it. Traditionally, that's turned into a benefit, something that just makes the film's world that much crazier and harder to comprehend - but it takes some real hardcore visual super-amazingness to make it work. Goyer is a visual hack, whose work all looks exactly like every other PG-13 horror film in history, and his only idea as a horror director is the hoary old jump scare. You know: the creepy little boy ghost is certainly going to jump out at the heroine from that corner as soon as she backs into it, so... there he is! If there were a director who didn't know how to put together a halfway effective jump scare, we should have to shoot him just on principle, and to prevent him from contaminating the gene pool. But that's not where I was going: Goyer's idea of "scary" is nothing short of barbarism, nothing like the poetically surreal horror images that usually serve to turn a script like this into a movie that's genuinely frightening.

Other than that, you've got nothing but Yustman as a cipher heroine, shuttled from one dark and scary room to another and making no impression upon us other than that she looks a bit like young Jennifer Connelly. No characters we care about, no striking visuals to linger in the mind, nothing to justify the film's existence in any way. The Ides of January are come.

3/10

HOOKER WITH A HEART OF GOLD - THE EARLY YEARS

Street Angel was Frank Borzage's 1928 follow-up to his masterful 7th Heaven; but it honestly feels much more like his follow-up to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise. The earlier films were of course produced concurrently, and while 7th Heaven has some distinct sympathies with Murnau's style, it's got nothing on Street Angel, which was produced after Sunrise was completed, at a time when William Fox was actively encouraging ("requiring" is probably too strong a word) his directors to look to that movie as the apex of the cinematic arts. So it's not really all that surprising that Borzage and his crew (most importantly, DP Ernest Palmer and art director Harry Oliver) would find themselves mimicking Sunrise fearlessly, incorporating some shots that straddle the line between "influenced by" and "stealing from".

The result is a film that draws from the finest elements of two extraordinary movies, and ends up falling short of both of them. Certainly, Street Angel is a good movie, even a great movie, but it lacks the awesome cohesiveness of Borzage's previous film. If I had to put it in words, I'd say that Street Angel is full of exceptional camerawork and imagery that aren't there because they're necessary, but because Friedrich had done them so well already. This feeling is aggravated a bit by a certain stylistic imbalance within the film itself; it's split down the middle between the proto poetic realism that Borzage had enjoyed such success with, and straight-up German Expressionism. By the end, Street Angel has settled firmly on the side of Expressionism, to its benefit: the last thirty minutes of the film are by far its most successful. Until then, we're treated to the curious spectacle of a well-made movie that can't quite decide exactly what kind of movie it would like to be.

Set in Naples, sometime in the 1920s, Street Angel follows the tragic case of Angela (Janet Gaynor), whose sick mother will surely die without medicine. Lacking money, Angela reluctantly turns to prostitution, one of the town's most successful industries; but when her innocence and disgust for the work leaves her unable to make money turning tricks, she tries to steal some food, and is caught red-handed. For the crime of "robbery while soliciting", she is sentenced to one year in the workhouses. Thankfully, the Neapolitan police are unusually bad, and she escapes in mere hours to find that her mother has already died. With nothing left to keep her in Naples, she hides from the cops with the help of a circus troupe, and leaves the city.

Angela becomes a tightrope walker, and a damned good one. One day during the circus's travels, she meets a wandering painter named Gino (Charles Farrell), for whom she instantly develops the kind of hatred that really means she loves him. A little while later, an accident leaves her unable to continue her work, leaving her free to end up with Gino to start a household, and to inspire him to create his greatest paintings using her as his angelic model. Unfortunately, there comes a time when he wants to go to Naples, where a painter of his talents can find real success, and Angela, not wanting to tell him that she's a wanted fugitive in that city and certainly not wanting to tell him why, goes along. In short order, she's been apprehended, he finds out that she's a thieving whore, and he spends a year trying to banish her from his mind while she spends the same year looking to a bright future with him as the only thing sustaining her throughout her imprisonment.

Once again, Borzage proved himself exceptionally adept at turning a musty potboiler into rich human drama, aided considerably by his great leads. Their chemistry isn't quite so perfect as it was in 7th Heaven, though their individual performances are: Farrell probably gives a stronger performance her than in that film, in fact, particularly in the later stages when he's convinced that Angela has betrayed him. And if Gaynor isn't operating on quite the same superhuman level that she did in 7th Heaven and Sunrise, somewhat due to a script that give her less demanding emotions to work with, it's still not hard to see why she was cited for all three films in receiving the first-ever Best Actress Oscar. The core of the story may be simple to the point of inanity - a guy thinks the woman he loves is bad, but she is not - but Gaynor and Farrell are both impossibly alive in their roles, giving the kind of tremendously human melodramatic performances that could only exist for a few years late in the silent era.

But everything else... I'm not quite sure what to say. The easiest thing is to praise the definitive turn towards Expressionism that the film takes once Angela has been captured by the police for the second time, and we see the workhouse as a monstrous steaming dungeons of shadows and sharp edges; Gino's lonely life as a painter with passionless affairs is represented with flat and bleak compositions; and the lover's reunion, which first erupts in violence before returning to affection, is shown in a foggy sequence that oozes atmospheric mise en scène, while also boasting some of the finest construction of any scene I can think of in the 1920s; it is easily the best single sequence I have seen in any of Borzage's films.

Until that point, though, the film struggles a bit to find an identity. Everything involving Angela's relationship with her poverty and the police chasing her is shown using Expressionist tricks like gigantic shadows and forced-perspective angles; once she arrives with the circus and falls in love with Gino, things start to adopt a look of pastoral realism. I understand the theoretical point behind all of this, but I'm not entirely certain that it works as Borzage intended: the poetic style that made 7th Heaven a masterpiece almost seems like an accident or a mistake in this film. Expressionism, perhaps, is too strong a style to mix with more normal modes of filmmaking, unless it be as a dream sequence or surreal interlude. Murnau made this clash work in Sunrise, arguably, but then again there's not much in that film that isn't Expressionist; and Murnau was a towering genius, whereas Borzage is simply an extraordinarily gifted filmmaker. At any rate, the central sequences, involving Angela and Gino's blossoming love and Gino's rise to artistic prominence, rely a bit more on the actors' natural appeal and less on the skills behind the camera than ws the case in 7th Heaven, and this cannot help but make the film a bit less impressive than its forebear.

On the other hand, what am I really saying here? I joked with a friend recently that he shouldn't get too excited about 7th Heaven, because it wasn't as good as Sunrise (like anything could be); and the more I write, the more I realise that my argument is coming down to "Street Angel isn't as good as 7th Heaven" - like I really expected it to be. It's still top-drawer filmmaking, with characteristically bold tracking shots and a roiling melodrama that hits upon more human truths than most movies even aim for. It's just not one of the defining films of its era, and if that's a disappointment, it's only because the masterpieces of 1927 have apparently spoiled me for all other movies.

THE SHOOTISTS

If the 2007 Brazilian cops-and-druglords flick Elite Squad got any kind of U.S. release, I completely missed it. But if it didn't, I imagine it's not going to, at least not to judge from the Region 1 DVD that got released in October, something I learned completely by accident a little while ago. Maybe it's not completely within this blog's mission statement to take on a home video release (and a nearly three-month old one, at that!) the weather's bad enough in Chicago that I felt justified in pushing Bride Wars back one more day, because hell, the Berlinale judges can't be wrong, can they?

Actually, they can. I've not seen every one of the films in competition at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, but Elite Squad is assuredly not the best of the ones that I have: certainly not next to Happy-Go-Lucky, Sparrow and There Will Be Blood (though by the same token, it's at least the equal to I've Loved You So Long and a huge step up from Elegy). Maybe it's just one of those things where the institutional collective mind of the Berlinale was making up for the fact that it had never been given the chance to give an award to City of God, one of the defining films of the '00s. Because God dammit, is Elite Squad ever anxious to remind you of City of God. It comes by this urge honestly: Rio de Janeiro is no less a craphole now than it was in 2002, and the social need for films dealing with Rio's crapholiness has not lessened. Plus, the two films share a screenwriter. But being an honest rip-off does not guarantee being a successful rip-off, and Elite Squad suffers from a lazy style and a screenplay of sometimes uncertain moral position, and neither of these things bodes terribly well. In the end, the film is a satisfactory enough cop movie, but not one that I think people will still be name checking six years hence.

First things first: by "uncertain moral position", I do not mean that the film is bad because it presents a fascist police force as a desirable thing. Dirty Harry presented a fascist police force as a good thing, and it's a fucking awesome movie.* The problem I have with Elite Squad is that it presents a fascist police force - make that, a fascist police supergroup - as being the only thing that can possibly cure the rampaging crime in Rio, and then it never makes up its mind whether those fascist cops are people we ought to be rooting for or not. "Sure," the movie says, "they get results, but aren't they kind of shitty, mean people anyway?" I don't like being spoon-fed more than anybody, but there's a difference between ambiguity and not making up your mind, and if Elite Squad is supposed to be a moral puzzle, it is a failure. Nothing about the movie itself, other than how uncomfortable it makes us to watch it, suggest that this is a morality play. And for all I know, in Brazil this doesn't play as uncomfortable - maybe every man, woman and child who saw it in its native country was unabashedly cheering for the police as folk heroes. But outside of Brazil, it asks questions that it absolutely refuses to follow up on. Now, being a formalist, that doesn't bother me all that much, but it's a problem given what the film wants to be: unmistakably, this is a Social Message picture.

The Social Message in question is about Brazil's largest city, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. In 1997, the BOPE (the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, a super-tough subset of the military police) is tearing through the seedy underbelly of Rio, looking to knock some pegs out from under the city's toughest drug empires in the most downtrodden favelas (something not quite as rough as a shantytown, but not nearly as nice as a slum) before the arrival of Pope John Paul II to the city. While this is happening, a particular BOPE captain named Nascimento (Wagner Moura) is looking to replace himself from one of the new trainees just plucked from the police force for some excruciating training to see if they have what it takes to be BOPE: Neto (Caio Junqueria) and Matias (André Ramiro). Nascimento has a particularly urgent desire to retire into a nice, safe, civilian's life as quickly as possible: he's well on his way to fatherhood, and he's not terribly keen to have his wife and child living in the constant fear that he'll end up dead. As for Neto and Matias, they both have their own hopes and dreams that will either be empowered or crushed by what happens to them as a result of their association with BOPE; it's all somewhat complex (not insurmountably so), and deeply linked to how everything inevitably goes pear-shaped.

If you didn't see the message there, I don't know that I blame you: it's not part of the plot, so much as it's raised up out of the mise en scène. Like City of God before it, Elite Squad is a documentary look at the favelas and what life is like there as much as anything else, something of a cry for help to the world outside to see this merciless squalor and do something about it (for my tastes, neither film meets this goal nearly as well as the City of God spin-off TV series, City of Men; but in this, TV has a native advantage over cinema). On that count, I suppose it works just fine, although its plot hinders it somewhat in that regard: City of God is kind of "ground up" from the inhabitants of those wretched quarters, while Elite Squad is first a police procedural, with its social commentary squeaked in on the sidelines.

Ultimately, this works against Elite Squad's effectiveness as more than a simple, none too memorable entertainment (albeit a particularly bloody, off-putting entertainment it is). It's not a completely perfect procedural, either: a needlessly confusing flashback structure makes it hard to figure out exactly who knows who for the first hour of the film, until it catches up with itself at the midway point. And director José Padilha, responsible for the well-regarded documentary Bus 174, which I have not seen, doesn't help the story along all that well; he tends to shoot everything in that gritty, grainy, neon-lit, hand-held post-Bourne style - you know, that one - and this gives most of the scenes a uniform look that makes it somewhat difficult just to figure out where in space we are at any one moment. Style is clearly more important to the director than the narrative; not something I feel terribly bothered by, except that the story is so very aware of its desire to educate.

But all things considered, there's nothing really wrong with the film except its inability to separate itself from the pack. Ultimately, it's a high-energy crimefighting caper with lots of explosions and violence, and if this is the mindset one enters before watching the movie, one will probably find it passably diverting. No, it's not as smart as it wants to be, but there's nothing bad about that; only that there's a lingering aftertaste of all the seriousness that the film wanted to impress upon us, that comes across as one too many overly violent scenes, one too many talky cop passages. It's entertaining, but not too entertaining, because somehow, it seems like it's not meant to be entertaining at all.

6/10

*Which hasn't stopped Clint Eastwood from spending the rest of his career apologising for it, beginning with its first sequel, Magnum Force, all the way up to his brand-new Gran Torino.