WITH LITTLE ELSE TO SEE, I REVISIT THE FEBRUARY RELEASES I MISSED, PART I

Tom Tykwer is a director whose name shouldn't really raise my hopes, thought it always does. The reason it always does is the director's 1998 masterpiece Run Lola Run, one of the finest and most innovative movies of the 1990s. Whereas the reason it shouldn't is that Tykwer hasn't really made anything good since then. In this decade, his best films have been Heaven, a nearly-successful stab at filming one of Krzysztof Kieśloswki's last screenplays, and one of the middle-tier Paris, je t'aime shorts. His worst films have been the fascinating, hugely misguided Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and the just-plain-clumsy The Princess and the Warrior. None of it the stuff that sterling reputations are made of.

Happier I'd been if that thought had come to me before I saw The International, Tykwer's new thriller about a corrupt multi-national bank and the brave INTERPOL agent risking everything to stop it. Then perhaps I wouldn't have been quite so disappointed in the film, which adds a new set of adjectives to Tykwer's lexicon: perfunctory, muddled, dull. There are dashes of style here and there that almost threaten to make the movie halfway worthwhile, but the director seems only a little interested in pursuing anything visually interesting, and not interested at all in helping to prop up Eric Warren Singer's underbaked screenplay, which explains what's going on in sufficient detail that you can imagine the rest, though it does essentially nothing else.

Without giving too much away, there's this fellow named Louis Sallinger (Clive Owen), who joined INTERPOL after a Dark Event In His Past at Scotland Yard. He's working with a New York Assistant DA named Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) to crack the mysterious goings-on of the International Bank of Business and Commerce, one of the largest private banks in the world, with its nefarious fingers in all sorts of Ee-vil Capitalist pies; of particular concern to our heroes is a plot to provide various Middle Eastern countries with limited-range missiles. But no mere weapons seller is this IBBC - their true goal, we learn fairly early, is to create wars in the world so that they can control the debt of the countries involved. As villainous plots go, this one is kind of esoteric, and steepd in vaguely-expressed economic theory that holds up pretty much just so far as you're willing to assume that it is going to have bad ramifications and must be stopped. Really, though, it kind of feels like Singer didn't know himself what the hell is happening:

Step 1: Control Syria and Iran's war debt
Step 2:
Step 3: RULE THE WORLD

That's not really the problem that wrecks The International, though it doesn't help. A much, much bigger flaw is the half-assed way in which Sallinger and Whitmore are presented. Look, we don't go to these kinds of movies for elaborate characterisation, but it's still hard to recall a recent political thriller with this kind of ambition and scope with protagonists as malformed as these. It would be one thing entirely if they were both nothing but ciphers. That could, and has, worked - the plot becomes about the plot itself, and the characters are cogs. Many fine procedurals operate on that principal. And too, the film could work if the characters were fleshed out and given great depth - then the film is a psychological study of how the quest for justice grinds down the just.

Instead of that, we get little pipped-in details that make it seem like Sallinger and Whitmore have very rich, active lives, without actually being rich or active in any way. Whitmore in particular is a completely botched role: I know that she is married, and worries about job security, but she is otherwise a blank slate, and Watts cannot do a damn thing with the character as a result (the latest in an increasing line of wickedly under-written characters for Watts to thrash about inside of fruitlessly). Sallinger, a much larger presence in the film, at least has some definite backstory to him, but it's presented artlessly, and without Owen's smoldering to give the illusion of a personality, the character would have no chance of popping off the page.

I don't blame Tykwer for essentially checking out of this project, easily the most impersonal thing he's ever made. There's one conceptually fantastic action setpiece in the Guggenheim that is fairly exciting, though as it goes on the editing gets a bit too elliptical for its own good and we start to lose track of where characters are in relationship to each other. In addition, there are a solid dozen tremendously striking images scattered thoughout the film, every one of them the same basic type: an establishing shot of an individual dwarfed by some institutional edifice or another. This is unbeatable as a shorthand for the film's theme of faceless entities snuffing out human life, but it is the only particularly enlightening stylistic choice made in the whole of the movie; other than this, Tykwer is content to let the film unspool at an erratic pace (stately and slow except for a few places when allofasudden everythinghappensatonce), using the camera to no effect whatsoever, and if not for the film's unusually long takes (unusual for a thriller in the '00s, I should say), it would be completely undistinguished.

The film's release was miraculously timed: there really hasn't ever been a better moment to tell a story about a bank made up of liquid evil trying to destroy the world in search of greater profits. It is a damnable pity that The International should so thoroughly waste its unique opportunity, then. It is a slack, mirthless film with little or nothing to recommend it besides the evergreen joy of watching Clive Owen be a badass; as far as brainy political thrillers go, however, it's better by far to stick with those which actually have something like a brain, and even more importantly, a beating heart.

5/10

MEN OF GOOD CHEER

Taken on straightforward terms, Fired Up! is disposable teen comedy at its most perfunctory: fitfully amusing if we're being generous, cursed with two unusually unlikable lead actors, needlessly contrived, completely predictable, aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator.

I do not choose to take the film on straightforward terms.

When I watch this film, what I see is not a cardboard PG-13 sex comedy; or rather, I see that and I don't care. Fired Up! is rather a kind of anti-movie, peculiar and terrible in the most garish ways conceivable, closer perhaps to surrealism than legitimate Hollywood narrative cinema. First-time director Will Gluck and first-time writer Freedom Jones haven't just made a crappy cheerleader movie, they've made something that violates tens of rules governing classical filmmaking, not apparently because they are incompetent but because they are simply disinterested. I don't suppose that this was their conscious aim; Nor do I care what their conscious aim might have been. Even if it's by accident, Fired Up! is perhaps the most experimental film released to mainstream American cinemas in months, if not years.

If this happened by accident, I expect it was partially because the film, in its broadest strokes, isn't something that would inspire anyone, be they a brilliant artist or an anonymous hack. The concept is something that feels like it was conceived solely to fill a studio's marketing requirements: it must have elements that appeal to teenage boys and elements that appeal to teenage girls, and it must come in with a PG-13 rating so that those teenage boys and girls can pay to see it. That translates into a film that is equal parts cheerleading wish-fulfillment and horny boys' adventure: best friend jocks Shawn (Nicholas D'Agosto) and Nick (Eric Christian Olsen) are none too excited about football camp this summer, for it means two endless weeks without girls, but when they learn about a cheerleader camp (300 nubile young women, virtually no other males) going on at the same time, they decide that quickly jumping ship from one team to the other guarantees them a sexual paradise like they've never imagined.

See, if I'm Will Gluck and Freedom Jones, I don't "want" to make this movie, though I certainly want the attendant paycheck. But really, nobody expects Fired Up! to be a masterpiece, or particularly enjoyable in any way, so why not have some fun making it? And on a film set, fun is always doing things that are weird or needlessly difficult, rather than using the same damned shot-reverse shot set-up that every American movie has used for the last 90 years. The moment when I was certain that I was watching the result of filmmakers dicking around just because they could comes when Shawn and Nick arrive at camp: the teeming masses of lithe high school girls are presented in a stupidly elaborate exterior Steadicam shot that weaves between clumps of people, up a flight of stairs and back down, rotating something around 450º over a good thirty seconds. There's only one reason for putting a shot like that in a movie like this: because you fucking well can, and you're drunk on the possibilities of a movie set.

Admittedly, much of the film is bog-standard stuff, but there's quite enough in Fired Up! that's much, much more involved than it needs to be, so that nobody could say in truth that Gluck and company were just cranking out the film. And the parts that took a lot of work and creativity - the Steadicam shot, several scene transitions that use extremely well-hidden cuts to suggest impossible continuity of motion, and occasionally just profoundly weird compositions - are tremendously obvious attention-grabbers. No-one with any kind of affinity for formal analysis could conceivably miss some of these tricks, and the most glaring are the kinds of things that give people an affinity for formal analysis in the first place. Gluck's direction doesn't just exist separately from Fired Up!, as is often the case when it appears that a filmmaker is trying to privately amuse himself when given a rote script; his direction actively distracts from the movie, as though he actually had a vendetta against the story and wished to make it disappear.

I don't know but that I think the same thing about the writing of Freedom Jones, whose name absolutely must be fake. The Fired Up! screenplay - which may or may not have included copious improv, if the end-credits outtakes are to be believed - has a bizarre ambition that belies the projects barrel-scraping concept, and frankly seems to be the work of a mind with no real relationship to actual human culture. To maintain the PG-13 rating, the film relies upon copious, virtually unending euphemisms and innuendos, none of which are particularly confusing; yet they are all extremely strange. Not funny, not whatsoever: almost all of them are given to Nick, who seems unable to relate to anything in life except in sexual terms, and he is an unendingly grating character, played by Olsen in a wholesale rip-off of Jim Carrey's style of mugging. So the euphemisms are not amusing - but they are mesmerising, both for their creativity and their sheer volume. Then too does Jones indulge in a shocking amount of political name-dropping, and this does not even appear to be in the service of non-existent gags: it's just to add color, or something. It is, at any rate, excitingly random.

So much of the film is just so damn strange! The film's requisite villain, an arrogant college freshman, is associated on the soundtrack exclusively with rock songs composed before his birth, from both the '70s and '80s; this makes no sense whatsoever, but it is a theme which is never dropped or treated with anything but the gravest sincerity. The high school kids are more typically set against current pop songs; but there are many of them, used in strange places. In fact, the soundtrack is very aggressive and loud, to the point where we are very much listening to montages more than watching them. Setting that aside, there's the strange manner of the film's sense of humor, which is not zany and loud (like most modern comedies) nor reflexively bawdy (the rest); bawdiness and loudness are components, but by far the most common tack for the gags in this film to take is that they are befuddling. Not befuddling in the sense, "Why would someone think this is funny?" but in the sense, "What the hell is happening?" And that applies both to the rapid-fire, colorful, completely opaque dialogue as well as the narrative framework itself. If the film is not funny, and it very much is not, I think this is mostly because it is so absurd - bearing in mind that absurdism, in its pure form, has nothing to do with comedy and everything to do with anarchy and nihilism.

I have basically just described a bad comedy, and that is because Fired Up! is a bad comedy, and even a bad film, by any standard yardstick. But its badness is aggressive, anxious: it is not the result of doing things poorly, but of doing things that have no earthly reason to be done whatsoever. Looking over what I've written, I see that I have not communicated, and probably cannot communicate, how much of Fired Up! violates the most basic rules of cinematic storytelling grammar; and for this reason it transfixed me body and soul. The film is a disaster that has chanced its way into being a bold, terrifying experiment, where the idea of "good" or "bad", or even the simpler concepts "works" and "doesn't work" don't really matter. It amazed and delighted me simply by dint of existing so far outside of what actual filmmaking is supposed to look like.

Part of me wishes that every movie were so callously disrespectful to the rules; cinema would be a much more exhilarating artform. We'd also probably all be insane by now.

(no rating)
(4/10 as a teen sex comedy)
(8/10 as an avant-garde antimovie)

1939: EMPIRE DREAMS

"You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din."

When Rudyard Kipling published those words in 1892, the British Empire was in the midst of its greatest glory. This oughtn't come as a new fact to anyone.

I'd much rather not get into the whole "Kipling: indefensibly colonialist/racist or not?" conversation. My sole intent is to remind us all of the author's position as one of the chief chroniclers of the face of Imperial Britain, particularly as it functioned in India, the country of Kipling's birth. In the 1890s, and into the beginning years of the First World War, the empire was a foregone, immutable Thing - not a good thing, not a bad thing, just a fact that defined daily life for hundreds of millions of people, with no apparent end in sight.

Flash forward to 1939. Kipling's "Gunga Din" was not the first nor last poem adapted into a movie, but adapted it was. A project initiated by the grand adventure director Howard Hawks, who was unceremoniously removed in retaliation for the box office disaster that was Bringing Up Baby, the feature Gunga Din ultimately found itself in the capable hands of George Stevens, a director of known rapport with actors and a solid eye for cinema (by this point, he'd already made Swing Time, arguably the finest of all Astaire & Rogers pictures), and while he had never made an action-adventure, he proved quite handy with the form, turning out a finished product that, while probably not as great as whatever Hawks might have done (for the record, he went from Gunga Din to the masterly Only Angels Have Wings), there's still little arguing that it's not one of the better adventure movies from the 1930s.

Doubtlessly, there were many differences between 1892 and 1939 - more, I'd wager, than between 1939 and 2009 - but one in particular matters for us right now. In 1892, the British Empire was the unquestioned dominant force in the world, the mightiest superpower than humankind had known for centuries, if not forever. It was a time of stability, relative peace, and Western supremacy over all other cultures. In 1939, the West was collapsing for the second time in 25 years; Britain herself had never truly recovered from the ravages of the Great War, and the empire was clearly starting to disintegrate. As for Great Britain's vaunted military power, that country had been reduced to hoping like hell that the Hitler would just stay put, and that the Americans would react a little bit faster this time if he didn't.

You've likely figured out where I'm taking this, so I won't stretch it out: in 1939, with the world still wheezing from an incomprehensibly terrible depression and most of the industrial nations starting to openly talk about the possibility of a new war, the film version of Gunga Din was, I think, a deliberate throwback, a perhaps dangerously naïve but entirely well-meant attempt to find some measure of comfort in a romanticised past. And romantic it certainly is, something that Kipling's writing greatly lacks, for all his purported imperialist views. The film's blithe corruption of history, its gung-ho racism and its "boy's own adventure" approach to the British Army are all very present, very problematic, and I think completely explained by assuming that the film was a piece of flat-out, unrepentant nostalgia for people who could recall the Good Aul' Days when Britannia ruled the waves.

The film doesn't follow the poem's fairly vague plot except in minor touches. Nor does it center around the water-bearer Gunga Din (the young Indian man is played by 47-year-old Jewish actor Sam Jaffe in brownface), but around three British soldiers stationed in the Indian countryside: Cutter (Cary Grant), MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) and Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). The last of these men is readying to leave the army, return to England, and open up a tea shop with his fiancée Emmy (Joan Fontaine), something that his comrades - and, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the film itself - view as a patently foolish idea. Nearly the whole first half of the movie centers around the increasing tension between the men over this very issue, with Cutter and MacChesney concocting various schemes to trick Ballantine into staying.

Then comes the second half, in which Cutter and Din, seeking gold, stumble across a remote temple where the long-dead Thuggee cult has been reborn, worshipping the death goddess Kali and preparing to sweep across India and kill all Britons. From here on out, Gunga Din tightens its focus and ramps up its intensity, following our four heroes as they attempt to fight off hundreds of murderous Thuggees all by themselves.

At the end of the opening credits, the producers happily proclaim that their film depicts with perfect accuracy the details of Kali worship. Which isn't the most indefensible statement to make, in the same way that one could argue that Left Behind depicts with perfect accuracy the details of Christianity. That is, every religion has its marginalised crazies. And at any rate, the film makes all the usual mistakes about the Thuggee, who were probably not a religious cult in any real way, and whose mythic nastiness is almost certainly the result of alarmed Englishmen with overheated imaginations.

Such brazen claims are part and parcel of the whole Hollywood beast, of course, so why bother bringing it up? Simply because I think it matters, in this particular case, that the film insists so urgently on creating a false idea of history, and a false idea of Indians themselves (during the time when India's independence movement was really picking up steam). It needs, urgently and completely, to validate the colonial experience of the late 19th Century, not for any nefarious reason but because to a certain slice of humanity, colonialism worked - it was in a very real way the last time that the West had been mostly happy. So if RKO had to make shit up, that's fine. The result was a rosy portrait of a time when everything made sense: hence its archetypal treatment of the quintessentially British leads (Cary Grant in particular never seemed more English than he does in this film), its insistence on praising their every action.

Mind you, I'm not trying to criticise the movie, simply poke at what seems to be to make it tick. I love Gunga Din, for it is well and truly a great action movie, and quite possibly the height of Stevens's ability as a director. After all, the point of the thing, if I'm right about my postcolonial musings, is that we need to be absolutely enthralled by the action and adventure, and damn me if that's not the case. The final assault on the Thuggee, with the help of a convenient troop of Scottish soldiers, is one of the finest battle sequences I've encountered in a sound film up to this era. A boy's own adventure it may be, but a tremendously good one; the film is an obvious influence on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, a significantly weaker film, and the same spirit that infects the best moments of Lucas and Spielberg's series is found all over Gunga Din. There are better adventure films from the '30s, but not many, and as popcorn entertainment goes, Gunga Din is a treasure for anyone who isn't reflexively turned-off by black and white.

Anyway, it's hard to blame a movie for being a security blanket. People needed the modern world to go away; some filmmakers did that with lavish musicals, some did it by regressing to the splendors of a lost era of manliness. Though I think it's telling, when all is said and done, that the film was made by Americans, not British; we who'd ourselves been the first people to put a chink in the empire's armor. For Americans, there was only romance to be had; for the Europeans who'd been watching their several empires fall apart, even the mere reminder of former glories was likely its own kind of sorrow. It's what allows Gunga Din to retain its sweet swashbuckling air: an American, separated from the world by two huge oceans, could sigh and say "oh, for the world to be that much fun again!" while a Briton, staring Europe's decay in the face, could never have that kind of comforting thought. Even escapism has its limits.

SHORT THOUGHTS ON THE 2008 OSCARS

zzz...wha? Oscars? Whatever... hey, great way to make the acting awards take three times as long as they needed to... and those were some lame musical numbers. Yay for Danny Boyle reaction shots. Yay for Kate Winslet's dad whistling to her. Wake me next year if everything doesn't totally suck.

I did 18/24 on my predictions, 7/8 on the Big 8. Best since I've started blogging, tied for third-best ever, I think. Maybe three-way tie for second.

Gawd.

2008 OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS

Something new - having just recently seen the two sets of ten films nominated for this year's Oscars in the categories of Best Animated Short Film and Best Live Action Short Film, I have taken it upon myself to review them, and thereupon debase myself by predicting the winners. (These predictions will be taken up into my earlier Oscar predictions).


BEST SHORT FILM - ANIMATED

"Lavatory - Lovestory"
I wrote a brief review of this film after seeing it at the Chicago International Film Festival, and my thoughts haven't materially changed: "A charming, simple narrative about the lady attendant of a public men's restroom (her job consists of making sure people pay on their way in, and cleaning up when things get too filthy). While this incredibly tedious life grinds along, she dreams of finding romance; but it finds her instead, in the form of mysterious flowers that keep appearing, without any indication of which of the many men who walk past is leaving them there. Not a very ambitious story, but it's absolutely appealing, and the simple cartoon style (it looks a lot like a moving James Thurber drawing) is easy on the eyes." What can I add to that? It's a very clean-looking film that is resolutely unmemorable. Mind-boggling that it got nominated.
7/10

"La maison en petit cubes"
Like I always say: when a 12-minute film seems to drag, you've done something wrong. The plot is fairly simple: an old man fights rising water levels by building one level after another on top of his house. When he drops his favorite pipe into the submerged levels, he dons scuba gear to find it, and passing through one old home after another he reminds himself of the people he has loved and known. That's a fine metaphor and all, but writer-director Katô Kunio doesn't really do anything interesting with it, leaving a film with but two ideas, both of them fully expressed by the midway point. At least the film is tremendously beautiful: done in a very scratchy, obviously hand-hewn style that looks a bit like colored pencil, only much brighter. It's gloriously 2-D, and obviously a labor of love, and it's just a damn shame that it was so repetitive.
7/10

"Oktopadi"
And now, the opposite: a film so brief that it hardly seems to have started when the end credits start to roll. A female octopus is taken from the aquarium she shares with her lover, destined to become someone's dinner; the male responds by chasing the truck carrying her throughout the streets of a Greek seaside town. Thanks to the bright candy-colored setting and characters, the film is a visual charmer, and the peppy story, reminiscent of Tex Avery, is perfectly entertaining in the extremely brief space it occupies. Absolutely disposable, but hopelessly appealing anyway.
8/10

"Presto"
Or as it's better-known, "the Pixar short that played before WALL-E". So pretty much everyone with more than a marginal interest in animation has likely seen it, and presumably loved it. To my mind, it's the best such movie since 2000's "For the Birds": there's very little to it besides being a swell riff on a 1940s Bugs Bunny short (a magician's hungry rabbit causes havoc, in pursuit of a carrot), but since 1940s Bugs Bunny shorts tend to be absolutely perfect, I'm inclined to give the film a pass. Unlike a lot of Pixar's short films, it doesn't obviously raise the bar in any technical sense; it doesn't seem as a lot of them do that the animators were testing out a new trick or practicing new surfaces. It's just a fleet comedy with impeccable timing.
10/10

"This Way Up"
A delightfully sick joke from first-time British directors Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, "This Way Up" follows a father and son pair of morticians as they attempt to deliver a deceased old woman from her home to the cemetery, encountering a great deal of trouble when an errant boulder crushes their hearse, and seemingly every obstacle imaginable crops up along the treacherous road (vultures, swamps, getting the old woman stuck in a tree). The CGI is quite handsome and unlike most of the Pixar/DreamWorks-influenced cartoons that we see these days, and the playfully dark and gothic design makes this arguably the most visually memorable film of the lot. If I have a complaint, it's a tiny one: by the end, the filmmakers have become just the tiniest bit desperate to keep the film gloomy 'n' zany, and it certainly doesn't conclude as well as it begins (though at least their vision of the underworld - I spoil nothing, really - is vibrant and original).
9/10

Who wins the Oscar?
Over the past few years, I've hit upon a pattern: if I have seen more than one nominee prior to the ceremony, it's my least favorite of those I've seen that wins. By that logic, "La maison en petit cubes" shall be crowned victorious come Sunday.


BEST SHORT FILM - LIVE ACTION

"Auf der Strecke"
A fascinating exercise in misdirection and ambiguous storytelling. A Swiss security guard is in love with a woman who works at his store; comes an evening on the train home when he sees her quarrelling with a young man. A few moments later, he watches as the young man is threatened by some bored kids. What happens after is better left to the film itself to explain, since a great deal of the point of the thing is figuring out on one's own exactly why the characters do what they do. Paced to be slow and steady, and altogether low-key in its visuals, "Auf der Strecke" achieves a kind of rarified anti-entertainment - and at 30 minutes, it's awfully long for a "short" - so I wouldn't hold it against anyone who called it boring. But it's a terrific moody character study, and it's a crying shame that so few people are ever going to see it.
8/10

"Manon on the Asphalt"
A real high-concept barnburner, this one: a woman named Manon (Aude Léger) is hit by a car on the streets of Paris. As her life slips away, she recalls - and narrates for us - the people who she has known, and wonders what effect her life and death has had and will have on those people. The sheer bravura of the idea is enough to propel the film through it's wee running time, but I found myself weirdly disengaged from what was happening. Something about the execution is very arch and irritating in its artsiness; it's overwhelmingly French, in that respect. I suppose that the film has something to say about the import of an everday life, and I salute it for that (not all of the nominees end up having anything to say at all). But there's something vaguely clumsy about the way it's put together, and I feel comfortable saying that the best parts of the movie never made it off of the page.
7/10

"New Boy"
Disclosure: I was at Northwestern at the same time as the film's writer-director Steph Green, and I know people who worked on her senior year project. So when I say that "New Boy" is a pretty fine little film, light in touch and well-observed, I am perhaps not as wholly unbiased as I ought to be. The film tells of a young boy from Africa on his first day in a new school in Ireland, where there are bullies and new friends, and teachers who mean well but lack all the patience that might be appropriate. In a lot of ways, the film plays like a ten-minute version of The Class, with the attendant shallowness that suggests. It's breezy and bright, maybe a bit disposable, but at least it's fun to watch, which isn't really true of most of its fellow nominees. My one real complaint is that there's a definite stiffness to several of the compositions, leaving the film a bit claustrophobic in a way that contrasts badly with its genial tone.
7/10

"The Pig"
An absolutely brilliant satire. There's an old man (Henning Moritzen) in the hospital for a minor bit of colon surgery that unexpectedly turns serious when possibly cancerous polyps are found. It'll be a few days of waiting in a hospital room until anything is certain, though, and the man latches on to a painting of a cute smiling pig as his good luck charm while he waits. Unfortunately for him and his luck, his new roommate is a Muslim, and his roommate's son is offended by the pig, demanding that it be taken down. Complications, as they are wont to do, ensue. Inspired, I suspect, by the contretemps a few years ago about those Danish political cartoons depicting Mohammed ("The Pig" is from Denmark), the film is a remarkably sensible snapshot of the struggle between Islam and the West, as well as a tremendously entertaining comedy. Designed perhaps to rankle and provoke rather than provide a nice, balanced argument, but it is the privilege of the artist to upset applecarts.
9/10

"Spielzeugland"
I am over Holocaust films. That's doubtlessly an insensitive thing to say, but I am not noted for my sensitivity. Anyhow, this is about a little German boy who doesn't understand why the friendly Jewish neighbors and their own little boy are being taken away, so his mommy tells him they're going to Toyland. Which sounds like such fun, that the little boy decides to sneak along when the Jewish neighbors are taken away, leaving his mother to search frantically for him before he gets tossed in a camp. It's dressed up a bit with an oddly-shifted chronological structure that actually does work to ratchet the tension up something powerful, and it's very well shot, indeed - maybe the best-looking of the nominees. But I'm sorry, no film that reminds me of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas gets any kind of recommendation.
6/10

Who wins the Oscar?
The easy route is to assume that WWII is like catnip to voters, and "Spielzeugland" certainly counts as the frontrunner. "Auf der Strecke" is much too hard, and I suspect that "New Boy" is too light (I thought the same thing about last year's winner, though). Let us say that I see a three-way race leaning towards the Nazi picture, because "Manon" is kind of pretentious, while "The Pig" is a bit too thrilled with its own snottiness to be the Right Kind of political movie.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

By turns irritating, confounding, and endlessly fascinating, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir is, at the very least, not the kind of movie that comes along all that often. I can't say that it's unlike any movie you've ever seen before, not knowing what movies you've seen, but it's certainly unlike any movie I've ever seen. At the very least, it treats on its particular topic in a manner completely unfamiliar, and quite effective at the same time.

Writer/director/producer/subject Ari Folman, we learn fairly early, fought in the 1982 siege of Beirut during Israel's war with Lebanon. At the time, he was all of 19 years old, and not particularly well-suited to dealing with the horrors of warfare, particularly the murder of a large number of Palestinians living in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut. Thus did he block those memories once the war was over, and thus for 20 years did he live in a blissful post-traumatic state.

Eventually, his friend Boaz Rein-Buskila came to him with a recurring dream: 26 dogs chasing through the streets of Beirut, bloody revenge on their mind. This dream, and Rein-Buskila's explanation for what it meant in relationship to his own experiences during the war, forced Folman into an uncomfortable realisation: he had no memories whatever of those days, what he did or witnessed. All he had was a brand-new recurring dream of his own: he and two other young men, floating naked in the sea, watching as falling mortars lit up a Beirut apartment building. Intuitively knowing that this dream had something to do with the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Folman explored his lost time in the best manner he, as a filmmaker, knew of: he cast himself and his experiences in the center of an exploratory documentary looking to uncover the truth of September, 1982, with the aid of several other men who were there at the same time, and whose memories weren't so hidden. From start to finish it took Folman four years to complete Waltz with Bashir, and the result is entirely worth his efforts: it is one of the most probing cinematic depictions of what war does to men's minds of which I am aware.

It's important to note what Waltz with Bashir is not: a documentary of the 1982 Lebanon War. It is not pro- or anti-Israeli in relationship to that conflict; nor is it pro- or anti-Palestinian. It isn't even anti-war as such, except insofar as it argues that every war is damaging to the soldiers who fight it, which I can't imagine qualifies as a revolutionary argument.

Instead, the film is about the process of remembering and forgetting, about having the courage to face down whatever demons hide in the dusty corners of one's own mind. Taking the details of the conflict and the massacre as read (which isn't to say that it's confusing to an ignorant Yankee like your humble reviewer; it's fairly easy to grasp enough of what's going on to get by), Waltz with Bashir, if it were a work of fiction, could fairly easily be transplanted to any conflict in recent history. Its focus is almost exclusively on some men who were in the combat zone and didn't like what they saw: not just Folman, but other members of his squad, his bunkmate, and people who seem to lack and personal connection to the filmmaker at all. If we wanted, it would probably be easy and accurate to suggest that the men being interviewed are metaphors for Israel itself, eager to forget its history - both as victim and aggressor - but I don't know that the very real individuals whose stories comprise Waltz with Bashir's narrative would particularly appreciate that.

Only at the very end does the film threaten to tip into political argument, in the film's only live-action sequence (stock footage from 1982), that seems to exist mostly to point out that the events discussed in the film really actually took place, it wasn't just a dramatic conceit. At least, this is my guess. Whatever the case, I found this nifty little ending to be, by far, the most unsuccessful part of the film, simply because it tries so hard in so many ways, to be many things that the rest of the movie is not.

That Waltz with Bashir is animated is not an incidental thing, of course; but I was unprepared for how weirdly effective Folman's use of the medium turned out to be. The film was created using a technology that was essentially invented from scratch; I don't want to get into a whole discussion about animation tech, but the ultimate effect is not unlike the digital rotoscoping in something like Waking Life, though there is not a scrap of rotoscoping to be found in Waltz with Bashir. It's only the appearance that is similar: characters who seem to be made up of disjointed parts floating above the background rather than interacting with the world properly. The character animation on display is exceptionally modular, by which I mean that each part of the body moves independently of all the rest, in a manner that is altogether distracting and eerie. At times, it borders on the outright disgusting, such as when a character shifts his eyeline, and his eyes float, disembodied, across the surface of his face.

To say "this is alienating and disgusting", however, is not the same as saying "this fails", and the peculiar animation in Waltz with Bashir contributes more than just about any other element of the film to the whole matter. A film about the inherent unreliability of memory, which can be erased, invented or nudged seemingly at random; this is a film in which stable reality is itself threatened - reality being nothing but the sum total of all our memories of what has been "real" prior to the present moment. That the film looks so otherworldly and strange, that events play out in a way that looks more like a crude parody of humanity than humanity itself, this is an essential piece of the film's argument. Waltz with Bashir surely does not present a dreamscape, nor can it be rightly called surreal, but the unsettling "off"-ness of the visuals is as clear a sign as anything spoken aloud that everything in this film - everything revealed to be true or learned to be false - is built upon an unsturdy, unreal semblance of history. It is at times unpleasant and grim, and in the final analysis it is extremely wearying to sit through, but it is an altogether powerful work of art, even so.

8/10

OSCARWATCHING

For the past few years, one of the annual pleasures of the Oscar season (and God knows this particular Oscar season needs pleasures) has been Nathaniel R's Oscar Symposium, a collection of some very smart people from around the internet to discuss the year's nominees, and how the relate to everything better that also came out.

This year, I say with the greatest of blushes, that Nathaniel invited me to join him. Along with several other great writers: Ed Gonzalez of Slant, Karina Longworth of Spout, Erik Lundegaard, and Kris Tapley of In Contention. Our retrospective of the sorry state of award-baiting cinema in 2008 kicks off tonight at The Film Experience. Swing on by!

2008 OSCAR PREDICTIONS

It is but one week from tonight that the Oscars will be handed out, though by that point I imagine that only a handful of people will actually care, besides the nominees themselves. But this is not the place for me to complain and whine about the low quality of the Academy's choices this year. This is just the cursory and grumpy predictions for what I expect will win.

Best Picture
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
Will Win/Should Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Alternate: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Obvious, but I do feel like I should defend saying that Slumdog should win: of the five, it's the only one that I'll ever feel inclined to watch a second time, although I'd probably stop for Milk if it were on cable.


Best Director
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Stephen Daldry, The Reader
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon
Gus Van Sant, Milk
Will Win: Danny Boyle
Alternate: David Fincher
Should Win: Gus Van Sant

Fairly obvious again. Boyle, unlike Van Sant and Fincher, didn't see fit to hide his natural style in an obvious go at Academy-baiting, but more importantly, his film is the mondo-super-uber frontrunner. Though for my tastes it was pretty much "Boyle-lite", and if I found Van Sant's work to be much weaker than his recent heights, at least he did a few unusual things here and there.


Best Actor
Richard Jenkins, The Visitor
Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon
Sean Penn, Milk
Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Will Win: Mickey Rourke
Alternate: Sean Penn
Should Win: Richard Jenkins

Easily the hardest to call of the Big Eight. It's a hair's breadth separating two actors who both gave tremendous performances, close to a career-best in each case. I'm running with the Mickey Rourke Comeback Story, especially given that Penn won a scant five years ago.


Fuck You For Snubbing Sally Hawkins, Assholes
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Angelina Jolie, Changeling
Melissa Leo, Frozen River
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Kate Winslet, The Reader
Will Win: Kate Winslet
Alternate: Meryl Streep
Should Win: Melissa Leo

Widely seen as the Kate vs. Meryl showdown, but I don't see it: Streep has lost many times for better performances than Sister Aloysius, and Winslet has all the momentum. I'm a bit sad that her first Oscar should come for such a run-of-the-mill performance (by her altogether exalted standards) in such a bad movie, but there you go. My preference teeters between Hathaway and Leo, but I ultimately find the latter woman to have a more satisfyingly exhausting presence.


Best Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin, Milk
Robert Downey, Jr., Tropic Thunder
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road
Will Win/Should Win: Heath Ledger
Alternate: Dark Knight fanboys burning down the Kodak

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the Academy for breaking out of their box with RDJ's nomination, even if he was better in Iron Man.


Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, Doubt
Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Viola Davis, Doubt
Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Will Win: Penélope Cruz
Alternate: Viola Davis
Should Win: Marisa Tomei

The "anyone can win it!" category of the evening, except that they can't: Amy Adams has no hope in hell, and I'd be vaguely stunned to hear Henson's name called out, or even Tomei's. Leaving this again a two-way race, almost as hard to call as Best Actor, but I'm going to side lightly with Cruz, both for being the first frontrunner and for residual Volver love.


Best Original Screenplay
Frozen River, by Courtney Hunt
Happy-Go-Lucky, by Mike Leigh
In Bruges, by Martin McDonagh
Milk, by Dustin Lance Black
WALL-E, by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon & Pete Docter
Will Win: Milk
Alternate/Should Win: WALL-E

A better set of films by far than Best Picture, thus fulfilling the age-old curse that the writing categories are where the real best of the year films are to be found. I'm predicting Milk for two reasons: otherwise, I'd be predicting it for no Oscars at all, which is ludicrous; and it is the sole Best Picture nominee. Meaning that for the second year in a row, I'm expecting the award to go to the only film in the batch that I thought was good in spite of its clumsy writing (last year it was Juno). Choosing between Happy-Go-Lucky and WALL-E as my favorite was a hard, hurtful thing.


Best Adapted Screenplay
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by Eric Roth & Robin Swicord
Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley
Frost/Nixon, by Peter Morgan
The Reader, by David Hare
Slumdog Millionaire, by Simon Beaufoy
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Alternate: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Should Win: Frost/Nixon

I'll kill the suspense now: I'm basically assuming a Slumdog sweep, though in some places it's closer than others. This isn't one of the close places. Frost/Nixon is my "should win" only by necessity. Anyway, this was a crappy field in the year at large.


Best Animated Feature
Bolt
Kung Fu Panda
WALL-E
Will Win/Alternate/Should Win: WALL-E

THE lock of the night.


Best Foreign Language Film
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany)
The Class (France)
Departures (Japan)
Revanche (Austria)
Waltz with Bashir (Israel)
Will Win: The Baader Meinhof Complex
Alternate: The Class

I've only seen one of these (The Class, but I'll be seeing Waltz with Bashir before the ceremony), which does kind of make it hard to predict, not knowing what the films are like. I can say to a certainty that the Waltz vs. Class fight that everyone's seeing is the result of those being the only films yet released in America. But this category doesn't work that way.

Whatever the case, my logic is: Waltz is animated, and this is a conservative category; Departures is by all accounts quite hard and alienating, and Revanche is - apparently - an artsy sex picture, and those haven't been in vogue for many years. Of the remaining two, I hear that Baader Meinhof is Important and Timely (it's about terrorism), and I know for a fact that The Class goes out of its way to avoid the handholding and "this is what everything means" moralizing that the category likes. QED.


Best Documentary
The Betrayal – Nerakhoon
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water
Will Win: Trouble the Water
Alternate: Encounters at the End of the World

Popularity doesn't matter in this category if it's not a flat-out blockbuster, which is why I don't buy the Man on Wire buzz - it's an "unserious" movie in a category that tends towards the Very Serious Indeed. Which is why I've been favoring the hand-hewn Katrina doc ever since the nominations were announced; but of late, I've been wondering whether there's a good chance that they'll want to give Werner Herzog an Oscar while they have the chance. Not that he particularly gives a damn, I'd imagine. I'm still leaning Trouble, but not very solidly. Of course, I know nothing about The Betrayal or The Garden, so maybe one of those is obviously the winner, once you've seen all five (and the voters must, in order to vote).


Best Documentary Short
“The Conscience of Nhem En”
“The Final Inch”
“Smile Pinki”
“The Witness from the Balcony of Room 306”
Will Win: "The Conscience of Nhem En"
Alternate: "Smile Pinki"

Hard always, harder still when you don't know what any of them are about. "Conscience" sounds like a very serious drama about some kind of deadly event, while "Smile Pinki" is probably a heartwarming story about a child.


Best Cinematography
Changeling (Tom Stern)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Claudio Miranda)
The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister)
The Reader (Roger Deakins, Chris Menges)
Slumdog Millionaire (Anthony Dod Mantle)
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Alternate: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Should Win: The Dark Knight

I still can't entirely believe that Harris Savides missed out on the best shot for a nomination he'd ever had, with Milk, which I'd argue was better shot than any of the nominees. At any rate, Slumdog is super-flashy, and the movie is obviously well-loved. A tiny part of me thinks that Deakins could win as a career achievement, but to quote a friend, it would be terrible if he got his only Oscar for shooting half of The Reader. Sticking with the Best Picture frontrunners for safety's sake, though without question, Pfister's adventures with IMAX represent the great technical achievement of the category. Congrats to Tom Stern for finally getting nominated on the only one of his collaborations with Eastwood that left me cold.


Best Editing
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall)
The Dark Knight (Lee Smith)
Frost/Nixon (Daniel P. Hall, Mike Hill)
Milk (Elliot Graham)
Slumdog Millionaire (Chris Dickens)
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Alternate/Should Win: The Dark Knight

When in doubt, go for the Best Picture frontrunner, always (not that there's much here that could be considered "doubt"). Though The Bourne Ultimatum proved last year that they're not above rewarding action films with editing that made a lot of people very angry. Frankly, I don't understand how people can complain about the cutting in The Dark Knight being so incoherent - I literally do not comprehend this complaint. Even when someone very smart like Jim Emerson spends many paragraphs explaining it. It's like complaining about the nudity in The Wizard of Oz.


Best Art Direction
Changeling (James J. Murakami, Gary Fettis)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Donald Graham Burt, Victor J. Zolfo)
The Dark Knight (Nathan Crowley, Peter Lando)
The Duchess (Michael Carlin, Rebecca Alleway)
Revolutionary Road (Kristi Zea, Debra Schutt)
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Alternate: The Duchess
Should Win: Changeling

With 13 nominations, Benjamin Button has to win somewhere, and it's around-the-world recreations of the 20th Century is certainly ambitious, but I have a giant feeling of "meh" to all of these nominations. If I feel marginally less "meh" towards Changeling, it's only because I feel the very '20s movies-inflected look of L.A. in the '20s was probably the most visually interesting part of the film.


Best Costume Design
Australia (Catherine Martin)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Jacqueline West)
The Duchess (Michael O’Connor)
Milk (Danny Glicker)
Revolutionary Road (Albert Wolsky)
Will Win/Should Win: The Duchess
Alternate: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Insofar as The Duchess had any purpose, it was to put Keira Knightley in an unending line of giant, gorgeous period costumes. Mission accomplished!


Best Makeup
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Will Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Alternate: The Dark Knight
Should Win: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Hard to say whether they amount of CGI that went into the aging makeup of Benjamin Button himself will be a sticking point, but there were plenty of other cast members who had to be aged the old-fashioned way. Or I guess, the medium-fashioned way, since the old-fashioned way would be to film the actors over a 40-year period, and the film would still be 38 years from release. And that would have been a gift. At any rate, nothing in either movie can hold a candle to the best effects in Hellboy II, some of which I incorrectly assumed must include some digital augmentation just because they were too convincing to be real.


Best Visual Effects
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Will Win/Should Win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Alternate: Iron Man

Assuming that I'm right, that The Dark Knight simply didn't have enough effects, that leaves it a battle between the film with the giant piles of really well-done traditional CGI, and the film with the brand-new, never-before-seen approach to creating digitally-augmented makeup. Whatever its other faults, Benjaming Button is tremendously convincing on that front.


Best Score
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Alexandre Desplat)
Defiance (James Newton Howard)
Milk (Danny Elfman)
Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman)
WALL-E (Thomas Newman)
Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Alternate/Should Win: WALL-E

To my mind, this is Slumdog's weakest category where I'm predicting a win. Thomas Newman has been nominated a great many times, and those of us who like more adventuresome film scores have nowhere else to turn. Benjamin Button is a snug second alternate.


Best Song
From Slumdog Millionaire: “Jai Ho”
From Slumdog Millionaire: “O Saya”
From WALL-E: “Down to Earth”
Will Win: "Jai Ho"
Alternate/Should Win: "Down to Earth"

The Slumdog supporters have obviously consolidated around the great end-credits Bollywood number, and I'm okay with that. Though I distinctly prefer Peter Gabriel to cod-Bollywood in just about every situation you can name. I prefer Bruce Goddamn Springsteen to either of them, but you can't always get what you want.


Best Sound Mixing
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted
Will Win: The Dark Knight
Alternate/Should Win: WALL-E

The sound categories, rather than Makeup, are responsible for this year's "you didn't really make that a nominee?" nominee: Wanted. Anyway, I'm gingerly going with The Dark Knight despite what I consider to be some so-so mixing, simply because the sound categories tend to like action, but not asinine action that nobody saw.


Best Sound Editing
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Slumdog Millionaire
WALL-E
Wanted
Will Win/Should Win: WALL-E
Alternate: The Dark Knight

The category where they usually like LOUD MOVIES, but I can't shake the feeling that WALL-E is the film of all films in history to really drive home what sound effects can do for a movie: in this case, create an entire character. Maybe they'll swap the two sound categories, or give both the The Dark Knight (both to WALL-E would be lovely, but almost beyond imagination). And there's always the possibility of a Slumdog sweep, but they don't typically throw away the sound categories like that.


Best Live-Action Short
“Auf der Strecke”
“Manon on the Asphalt”
“New Boy”
“The Pig”
“Spielzeugland”
Will Win: "Spielzeugland"
Alternate/Should Win: "The Pig"

The easy route is to assume that WWII is like catnip to voters, and "Spielzeugland" certainly counts as the frontrunner. "Auf der Strecke" is much too hard, and I suspect that "New Boy" is too light (I thought the same thing about last year's winner, though). Let us say that I see a three-way race leaning towards the Nazi picture, because "Manon" is kind of pretentious, while "The Pig" is a bit too thrilled with its own snottiness to be the Right Kind of political movie.


Best Animated Short
“Lavatory – Lovestory”
“La maison en petit cubes”
“Oktapodi”
“Presto”
“This Way Up”
Will Win: "La maison en petit cubes"
Alternate/Should Win: "Presto"

Over the past few years, I've hit upon a pattern: if I have seen more than one nominee prior to the ceremony, it's my least favorite of those I've seen that wins. By that logic, "La maison en petit cubes" shall be crowned victorious come Sunday.

THE KINDLY MR. VOORHEES

I had hoped that the new Friday the 13th would be up to the standards set by the same filmmakers' remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - it isn't - and that it would therefore be the finest entry in the Friday the 13th franchise - it isn't that, either. Where Michael Bay's production of the Marcus Nispel-directed TCM was significantly better than it had any reason whatsoever for being, their attempt at F13 is only just about as good as it absolutely has to be. Which is admittedly better than most of the densest sequels in the original run of films could claim.

Some reviewers of this new film, indulging in a kind of manic nostalgia, would have you believe that the biggest problem with Friday '09 is that it betrays the, I don't know, the cheap purity of the '80s films or some such. This is an intriguing approach if only because it is so dreadfully wrong: though some old-school slasher films meet that description just fine, the F13 movies had not a trace of honesty or purity in their bones. From head to tail, the series was desperate and tawdry, the most unashamed lowest-common-denominator cinema of an entire decade. Don't get me wrong, I love the Friday the 13th movies in my own way - even the unforgivable fifth film, A New Beginning, do I love - but not because they are at all good, nor because they wear their cheapness honorably, nor because they are effectively grim and powerful. They are among the gaudiest movies in their whole misbegotten subgenre, and only in flashes do even the best of them approach something like genuine dread.

That said, the biggest problem with the new film does indeed lie in its deviations from the standard template set in the hardiest stone by its predecessors, not because that template is so durable as all that, but because its so inflexible that attempting to smarten up the scenario, as screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (both of Freddy vs. Jason) do, ends with the insurmountable fact that smartness and slasher aren't really two s-words that belong in the same zip code.

We'll return to that. For now, the film itself: the new Friday opens with an exceptionally long pre-title sequence, even for a series given to lengthy openings, in which a group of five kids are going camping in the New Jersey woods. Scratch that, it begins on June 13, 1980, with hectically-cut black-and-white footage of Mrs. Pamela Voorhees (Nana Visitor, forever known to the geek set as Kira Nerys from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) re-enacting the finale of the original Friday in which she recalls how her deformed boy Jason drowned while the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake were preoccupied with screwing. Then we skip ahead 29 years, to find those five young people out in the woods, all of whom are given first names with admirable haste for a slasher movie: Mike (Nick Mennell) and his girlfriend Whitney (Amanda Righetti), Richie (Ben Feldman) and his girlfriend Amanda (America Olivo), and Wade (Jonathan Sadowski), single except for his GPS explaining where exactly they're going. Unbeknownst to everyone else, that "where" turns out to be a giant grove of marijuana bushed happily blooming in the middle of the forest, and Wade and Richie have come with the express purpose of reaping a fortune, nevermind the spooky stories they've all heard about the killer wot stalks these woods.

Ah! that they would have listened, and even more that they had not been engaged in stealing illegal drugs and having premarital sex! For while Whitney and Mike are out exploring the ruins of Camp Crystal Lake, finding an unabandoned house with creepy trinkets and Mrs. Voorhees's mummified head, the others run afoul of a certain man in a burlap bag (Jason is played this time by - quelle surprise - a stuntman, Derek Mears). He slaughters the lot of them in due manner, with Mike and Whitney returning right in time to get caught.

This opening sequence is perfect, in the very particular manner that any Friday the 13th might be perfect. My hope for the film had been that it would be 90 minutes of F13 boilerplate done up by genuinely good filmmakers - and yes, I will defend Marcus Nispel as quite a good director, and criminally under-utilised cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl is greater still. And this hope was wholly requited by those opening 15 or 20 minutes, which are wholly impoverished of imagination, save for the particularly nasty death meted out to Amanda, but are impeccably made even so, with Mears proving as capable a Jason as has ever graced the silver screen - as good a physical actor as Kane Hodder, but not so inexplicably gigantic. The filmmakers approach the matter of this opening with the solemnity of ritual theater, which is all that slasher movies are, really; and for those of us who aren't instantly turned off by the cheerful immorality of the subgenre (nor do I judge those who are), watching Nispel and company rework slasher tropes in a wholly new visual style is as bracing in its own way as it was to see Christopher Nolan make a realistic version of Batman.

That part of the film never, ever goes away, and while the new Jason is therefore not quite like the old Jason, I find that I like him very, very much; I like the way Nispel handles the gore; and I like how very much of the movie plays as a variation on the them of Friday the 13th rather than a simple remake. But problems crop up, and they ultimately come close to wrecking the whole edifice. The plot proper kicks in when Trent (Travis Van Winkle) brings several of his friends to his folks' fancy-ass cabin on Crystal Lake: his stereotypically Final Girl girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker); Lawrence (Arlen Escarpeta), the token black kid; Chewie (Aaron Yoo), who like to drink and be gross; Nolan (Ryan Hansen) and Chelsea (Willa Ford) who are horny and die; and Bree (Julianna Guill), who I swear to God wasn't in the first couple of scenes until she just sort of appears and flashes her eyes and boobs at Trent. Jenna, knowing that she is many tiers of humanity better than everyone else, agrees to go off with Clay (Jared Padalecki) to help find his missing sister - none other than Whitney from the opening sequence, as it happens.

The main part of the film plays like a medley of Part 2, Part 3 and The Final Chapter (AKA Part 4) and this much about it I found agreeable. It bears repeating: as long as the film stays safely within the bounds of revising the ancient elements of the series with newer, better eyes, it's fascinating and even decent. The problem comes when the film starts to bog itself down in the hints of a backstory. This is a more human Jason, which is great during the killing sequences (he seems to be a surmountable threat, and so there's actually a whisper of tension), but strange and weird when it comes to establishing how a grown man with the intelligence of a child lives and kills in the woods around Crystal Lake. I shouldn't wish to bore you all with a point-by-point retelling of all the little things that point to a Jason-myth that we're not entirely privy to, but it's horribly distracting, and not brought to any kind of reasonable conclusion. One of two things ought to have happened: either those hints should have been kept out entirely, leaving the Jason of history, a killer who kills because that is what he does; or that backstory should have been highlighted, used in a meaningful way rather than keep pointing out that, this Jason, there's something about him that's mysterious. I can't help but feel as though the filmmakers didn't exactly want to make a Friday the 13th movie, so they kept dropping hints about a deeper plot than just "teens that fuck, drink, and smoke, they gonna die". Which is fine and all, but it is a Friday the 13th movie, and if you want to reinvent the wheel, reinvent it. Don't just say, "there's a strange wheel deep in the woods", and not expect the audience to be a bit pissed off at how much wheel psychology was left on the cutting-room floor.

6/10

Reviews in this series
Friday the 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
Friday the 13th, Part 2 (Miner, 1981)
Friday the 13th, Part 3 (Miner, 1982)
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984)
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985)
Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives (McLoughlin, 1986)
Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood (Buechler, 1988)
Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Hedden, 1989)
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (Marcus, 1993)
Jason X (Isaac, 2001)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
Friday the 13th (Nispel, 2009)

DARK SARCASM IN THE CLASSROOM

In Laurent Cantet's The Class (Entre les murs, or "Between the Walls" in the original French), there is a Parisian teacher named François who wants very badly to help his students become the smartest and best people they can be. Those students - 14 and 15-year-olds from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds - do not trust his definition of "smart" and "good", viewing him as nothing better than an outstretched figure of conformist society, determined to fashion them into drones.

If this were any other film - I shall not even say, "if this were an American film", as well-intentioned clichés know no nation - the story would end after the teacher had finally broken through with the students and led at least one of them into an epiphany of self-discovery. Everyone involved would be filled with the spirits of education, knowledge and inspiration (except, perhaps, the crusty old member of the administration who just doesn't understand the teacher's new methods). But The Class isn't any other film; adapted from his own book by François Bégaudeau (who also stars, as the teacher who shares his name), itself based upon his experiences as an educator, the film presents a much more dour, non-ponies-and-rainbows vision of what a well-intentioned teacher with a classroom full of bright kids who don't trust him can hope to achieve, and that's why at the end of the film the marvel isn't that François has taught these rough-and-tumble kids about truth and beauty, but that he hasn't screamed worse obscenities at more of them.

The most immediately apparent fact about The Class is its aggressively unpolished, pseudo-documentary aesthetic. You know the one, you've seen it plenty of times: lots of handheld camerawork, grainy footage, that sort of thing. So no, The Class wins no awards for imagination, although I'd be strongly tempted to claim that no film in the last few years has utilised this well-trod visual style to greater effect.

See, the remarkable thing about The Class, and part of what makes it feel so documentary-like, is how the entire thing plays out as little more than a series of fly-on-the-wall observations. There is, eventually, something like a plot, but for nearly all of its running time, the film simply perches in one of three places (François's classroom, or the office and lounge where the teachers commiserate and plan strategy), watches what happens, and then another scene begins. It is one of the most compulsively observant movies in recent memory, functioning mostly as a document of how one place functions over the course of nine months. If it has only the semblance of an arc, that is because events in life generally do not have much of a narrative to them until we look at them later on and pick out the bits that contributed to an overall forward movement. True, François is noticeably more tired at the end of the year than he was at the beginning; it is likely that is more tired than he was the year prior, and will be more tired still in the year to come. That's not a character arc, that's called "aging".

Driving him along his slow path to the grave as a man uncertain that he's achieved anything is one of the strongest casts ever to portray a high-school class. Working with Cantet, Bégaudeau, and co-writer Robin Campillo, the young people in the film - most of whom share the names of the students they play - workshopped their characters over the course of an actual school year, while the film was shot in the actual school where they actually go to study. It's a mistake to assume that this makes the film more "real" - by no account were the kids playing themselves - but it does make everything extraordinarily "lived-in": where most movie kids are The Reader, The Clown, The Jock, The Slut, and so on, the kids in The Class are people, instantly differentiated not because of the shorthand used to describe them, but because they are not the same as one another. And that is both the cause and result of a film that makes its subject the close study of human beings in a closed environment.

It could be said that the film has several meanings, and they are not all mutually compatible. Perhaps The Class is a tribute to beleaguered teachers all over the world who just want to do good by crude students who are too hormonal and impatient to give a damn about learning. Perhaps a sympathetic nod to all adolescents who want so much more than to repeat the existence of the higher generation. Being a French movie and all, perhaps it's a metaphor for how the white power structure attempts to "Frenchify" the many immigrants from hundreds of cultures flooding into that country.

I do hope my rhetoric was sufficiently leading: it's very much a film about all of those things, and yet I think the most satisfying way to watch it - at least the only one that doesn't instantly reduce the film to the role of sociopolitical position paper - is for the sheer human drama involved. All the people in The Class make foolish mistakes and have moments of righteous indignation; and whatever the film's ultimate conflict, everything is based in the tremendously universal problem when two people with different priorities and vocabularies fail to communicate with each other.

The Class won the 2008 Palme d'Or at Cannes, the first French film in 21 years to do so; but it hardly took the prize out of some embarrassed national desire to reclaim arguably the most prestigious award in cinema.* This is a remarkable motion picture, mostly without incident but bursting with messy humanity; its surface simplicity belies a great wealth of finely-tuned ideas about people and our actions that is rarely flattering, but always perfectly truthful.

9/10

*Though it is not, by my estimation, the best film in competition; not even the best French film. Indeed, several of the film I have seen from the 2008 Official Selection are quite extraordinarily good.

THE EYES OF A CHILD

2009 is just barely a month old, but I'm already prepared to call it a better year for movies than 2008. After only 37 days, we've been gifted with the year's first masterpiece; at the very least, it's much superior to all five films currently jockeying for the 2008 Best Picture Oscar.

The film is the stop-motion animated Coraline, adapted by writer-director Henry Selick from a marvelous 2002 children's book by Neil Gaiman. It is a straightforward, elementally simple fairy tale: a young girl named Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) moves far away from everything comfortable and familiar because of her emotionally distant parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), and as she explores the rickety old house where she now lives, she discovers a doorway to another world, where everything is much happier and more colorful, and where an alternate set of parents, identical to the ones she left behind except for having black buttons in place of their eyes, dote on her and give her everything she wants. Eventually, Coraline finds that life in the other house hides a dark secret, and that her endlessly loving Other Mother is really the Beldam (a typically Gaiman contraction of "belle dame sans merci"), who preys on the life force of lonely children.

In its original form, the story was one of the most characteristic things Gaiman ever wrote, an update of ancient storytelling formulas to a modern setting, that never sacrifices the essential timelessness of the material. It's therefore greatly to Selick's credit that his adaptation never feels beholden to Gaiman's novella, that it thrives as a film entirely on its own merits. In some ways, the film is even an improvement on the book; if my memory serves (I haven't read Coraline since it was new, seven years ago), Gaiman only presented Coraline making one trip to the other world before she figures out that something dark is happening, where Selick delays that revelation to her third trip; three being a traditionally important number for magical happenings in fairy tales. In some other ways, the movie is a bit retrograde, such as the addition of a young boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.) to help Coraline at the end, apparently a sop to the received wisdom that male children won't respond to stories with female protagonists. But all of that is mostly irrelevant: Coraline-the-movie is a great work unto itself, largely because of how perfectly Selick translates the story into cinematic terms.

The director's most famous work is The Nightmare Before Christmas, usually associated with Tim Burton even though that man had very little to do with the film itself; I hope and expect that Coraline will serve to remind us all of Selick's very important contributions to that project, particularly given that most of what made Nightmare a great film is present to an even greater degree in the newer project. There's the simple but very real pleasure of simply watching great - no, better than great - stop-motion animation, arguably the most labor-intensive form of filmmaking in existence. Between these two films and the mid-'90s adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, Selick has firmly established himself as an absolutely brilliant director of stop-motion, having assembled a team of animators strong enough to make even the groundbreaking solo work of Ray Harryhausen seem decent at best. Coraline is almost without question the most technically accomplished stop-motion in cinema history, and the extraordinary touchability of the exquisite animation puppets and the sets is all the proof I need that there are some things that CGI simply cannot do. No-one has yet made a computer-animated cartoon with such tactility as we see on display here; there is not one moment where Coraline's world does not feel entirely real, for the simple fact that it is real, and this gives the film a deep appeal that even the best CG, such as Pixar's Ratatouille and WALL-E, altogether lack.

This isn't incidental, nor purely for the animation junkies in the audience; since the film's story hinges entirely on Coraline being quickly seduced by the marvels she finds in the world behind the wall, it makes the fantasy that much more effective if we in the audience are seduced just as quickly. Selick and his animators achieve this, both because of the physical quality of their work and the imaginative spectacles they create. Nightmare already proved that Selick is a wonderful fantasist, but it's got nothing on even the middling parts of Coraline, which presents a created world that can stand alongside the finest ever put to film. If I gush, then let me gush, but I find it hard to watch the movie and not conclude that Selick is one of the greatest visionaries in contemporary cinema; every character and location in Coraline is a revelation.

And if all this weren't enough to set the film head and shoulders above any other family fantasy in recent memory, the overwhelming sense of creepiness would be. It's an easy thing for grown-ups to forget, but kids love scary stuff, especially when everything turns out fine in the end. Selick surely knows from creepy, and Coraline far outdoes his previous work in providing unmitigated nightmare fuel, even from an adult perspective: the climax, involving a skeletal spider woman in a shocking high-contrast web is one of the most genuinely unnerving things I've seen in a theater this decade. But it's not all grand statements of children's horror that make the film unsettling and creepy; one of the scenes that freaked me out the most consists of nothing but happy little mice dancing around, in a lower frame-rate than anything else has been animated in the whole movie. The jerky result is an effective early sign that something is wrong in this happy fantasy world.

Having said all that, there's one last thing that gives the film a final push into outright perfection. Coraline is the film I've been awaiting for a long time: it is a 3-D movie in which the dimensional effects aren't just a gimmick, but a vital component of the whole thing. For all that we've been told over and over again that the appeal of 3-D is the way it adds realistic depth to a film, I find it wonderfully ironic that its first truly artistic use should be so blatantly unrealistic. Without getting into the technicals of the whole thing (they're amazing, though), Coraline has two very different depths: in the "real-world" scenes, everything is much flatter than it is in the "other world" scenes, and this difference, though hardly subtle, is absorbed almost subliminally. The point, of course, is that the other world is a magical, fantastic place, much more spectacular than drab reality; so why ot depict it using the most spectacular gimmick available to the modern filmmaker? I'm simplifying mightily; the key here is that Coraline is the first 3-D film I've ever seen that does not seem to exist largely as a distributor for cheap trickery. It is the film that proves Jeff Katzenberg and James Cameron right, that 3-D is a useful storytelling tool; it is the new medium's À nous la liberté,* its Wizard of Oz,† its Yojimbo.‡

For this reason, I find myself completely unable to recommend or even think about the film in anything but its intended 3-D format. Trying to think of Coraline flat is like trying to think of Gone with the Wind in black-and-white, or a silent Meet Me in St. Louis. The story and tremendous craftsmanship are all the same, but something is lost; something that makes this film seem like one of the great cinematic revolutions of my lifetime. By all means, there's enough to the film without 3-D to make it a tremendous fantasy, and one of the best films I've seen in months; but if you have the opportunity to see it in its intended glory, that makes it absolutely essential viewing.

10/10

*The first film to fully exploit sound.
†Color.
‡Anamorphic widescreen.

COP KILLER

For a grimy crime B-film released in 1948 to no more fanfare than any other film noir programmer, He Walked by Night has quite a remarkable family tree. Without this film and its docudrama-style boots on the ground approach to storytelling, which so impressed co-star Jack Webb, there would of a certainty be no Dragnet, and without that seminal 1950s cop show, there would likely be no Law & Order or CSI, nor any of the many procedurally-oriented movies and TV shows that have cropped up in the last 60 years. It's not a particularly brave stretch to claim that He Walked by Night established what has since become the dominant template for crime dramas and cop stories from every country and numerous media, making it arguably the most influential noir in history.

There's more to it than just providing the basis for literally hundreds of police procedurals, though; He Walked by Night also enjoys the distinction of being one of the most nasty-minded, brutal dramas in a genre noted for - practically defined by - its overwhelming nihilism. It's not so easy to trace its particular influence along those lines, but it seems to me at least that its emphasis on pointless, extreme violence has sympathetic echoes in many other films throughout history that might not seem to be obvious descendants; but I'll return to this later.

Here are the facts of the matter: in 1946, a disturbed WWII vet named Erwin Walker - "Machine Gun" Walker to an unfriendly history - absconded with some Army weaponry and committed a series of burglaries to finance an invention he hoped would bring about an end to war. Using his training before the war as a police dispatcher, Walker managed to stay ahead of the LAPD for months, ultimately killing an officer named Loren Roosevelt in June. A few months later, he was apprehended, and sentenced to execution; the subsequent events are fascinating in themselves, but beyond the scope of a mere movie review.

The story was irresistible as a pulp narrative, and shortly after Walker's conviction, the now-forgotten B-movie distributor Eagle-Lion Films turned it into a crime picture that would seem lurid except that most of the facts had hardly even been tweaked: Walker was now named Roy Martin, he kills a significantly greater number of cops, and his motivations aren't quite the same, but the story is mostly the same: an ex-dispatcher who can monitor the police frequencies stays ahead of them and commits one perfect crime after another for months. Excuse the pun, but that's a killer story, and in hindsight it would have been stranger for the film not to have been made.

He Walked by Night is presented by writers Crane Wilbur and John C. Higgins as a story of The Real Los Angeles, starting from the very first moment as a stern narrator (Reed Hadley) introduces the film in language that would be largely copied for Dragnet's famous opening (it's also a bit reminiscent of Jules Dassin's The Naked City, released in the same year). It hardly takes any longer to see that the film's two directors, Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann (how much of the film the great Mann directed, and why he left the project, are facts lost to history) are fully prepared to honor that idea: virtually from the first shot, the film takes place on L.A. streets lit and shot with the staunch realism of a Dogme 95 project. It's horribly trite to say that a film has "documentary-like" qualities, but it wasn't in 1948, and when He Walked by Night was first released, its unadorned visuals, courtesy of the great cinematographer John Alton (a veteran of most genres you could think to name, though noir and Westerns were his stock in trade), must have seemed revolutionary and hideously plausible. More than any other 1940s film I can think of, from anywhere in the world, He Walked by Night has an almost touchable sense of place. These are dirty and wet streets, and every spot of trash and puddle of water is captured with living intensity. The film's climax in the Los Angeles storm sewers is nothing but a masterpiece of location photography, every bit equalling the following year's The Third Man, which bears more than a slight resemblance in setting and content, though I see no reason to suppose that Carol Reed was copying, or had even seen, the American crime drama.

Yet as great as Werker and Mann's combined talents were, and as singularly important as evocative visuals are in film noir, the film's script and story are just as unique, possibly more. The curious thing that sets He Walked by Night apart from virtually every other police movie I am aware of up to that point is its odd narrative POV. Usually - not exclusively, but usually - a film of this sort will pick one policeman or detective and follow him, and an edgy film will contrast the cop with the killer in equal measure. But He Walked by Night is unusually obsessed with Roy Martin's perspective, leaving the cops to exist as a sort of overall force, rather than a collection of individuals. Despite the fine performances by actors such as Scott Brady and Roy Roberts as the men investigating the crime, I found myself often getting the police characters confused, or at least finding them sufficiently similar that it didn't seem exceptionally important to keep track. But Martin, now he's a memorable figure! Played to perfection by Richard Basehart, in only his third motion picture, and the role that set him on the role to stardom, Martin is one of the great criminal monsters of film noir. The writers and Basehart portray him as basically explicable, but unknowable: the way he casually and violently murders a policeman in the film's opening moments is a truly exceptional introduction to the character, and our first impression that something evil hides just inside his skull is only reinforced the more time we spend with him.

The focus on Martin is the key to what makes He Walked by Night such an especially gloomy work in a genre that made its name in casual viciousness; it is as clear an example as I can name of the rule that film noir describes a universe in which terrible things occur because they might. It is, simply put, a completely nihilistic film, in which the villain's death doesn't seem to have set one thing right; and for this reason it reminds me of such films as David Fincher's Se7en and Zodiac still more than the procedurals which it obviously influenced. For a 61-year-old film to possess that kind of brutal power is shocking, almost as shocking as when it was new, I'd wager, and while He Walked by Night has been copied a literally uncountable number of times in the years since it was made, few indeed of those clones leave the viewer so shaken and unnerved by what they've just witnessed.