APRIL 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

The weirdest month, between the winter cast-offs and the summer blockbusters, not quite certain whether the films coming out are one or t'other. Hopefully I will be personally better able to keep up with the new month's releases than I was throughout March.

3.4.2009
Things get off to a hopefully strong start with Adventureland, in which the director of the delightful Superbad continues to leverage his adoration of ancient pop culture into coming-of-age sex comedies. The only thing I hold against this new project is the presence of the unforgivable Kristen Stewart, who has been reliably wooden in all sorts of things, but most recently sucked the emulsion off the film stock in Twilight. Beyond that, we non-coasters only get a few limited releases: Sugar, a sports movie of the apparently inspiring bent, about a young Hispanic baseball player, and R.W. Goodwin's Alien Trespass, which is either a parody or a straight-up homage to the cheesy sci-fi thrillers of the 1950s.

Lastly, most importantly, why the fuck didn't they name it 4 Fast 4 Furious?


10.4.2009
Somebody give me a good reason not to be excited for Observe and Report. It stars Seth Rogen and Anna Faris, and it's from the writer-director of The Foot Fist Way, and it's almost certainly going to be the year's superior mall cop picture. Okay, so all of those are plausible reasons not to be excited, and I answered my own question. But hey, it might be fantastic.

You know what won't be fantastic? Hannah Montana: The Movie, which is based on that whole "Miley Cyrus is approximately equal to Hannah Montana" mythology that I have too many years and too many Y chromosomes to ever understand or appreciate.

What might, possibly, be fantastically awful is the live-action Dragonball Evolution, which to judge from the trailer will be a boondoggle of Super Mario Bros.-esque proportions.


17.4.2009
Yet more movies that I should definitely not be excited about, and yet I can't help myself! What is this horrid thing called April, when even a smart young film blogger as I cannot keep from looking forward to what is so obviously going to be a piece of rancid crap as 17 Again? I despise Zac Efron, and I have little use for Matthew Perry, so what is appealing to me about the fact that the one plays the younger version of the other in an atrociously high-concept idea like "Big, but the other way 'round?" God only knows.

I'm also stupidly excited for Crank: High Voltage, given that I really truly do think that the first Crank was a completely successful example of a certain kind of film. Sequels always suck, and Jason Statham sequels are no exception, so I'm sure to be let down. But what kind of man could be let down by the fucking sequel to fucking Crank?

State of Play, meanwhile, will probably be legitimately good - it has a top-drawer cast, anyway - but since all I an think is that it was based on an essentially perfect forebearer, why bother remaking it? This is why I am an essentially messed-up human being.


22.4.2009
Disney says: Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, here is a sample of pretty nature footage with cute animals, and it shall be called Earth, and verily it will be on IMAX for long days to come. Also, it was apparently culled entirely from footage already seen in Planet Earth. So that's pretty cheap.


24.4.2009
You know what I love to hate? Movies that give away every last beat of the story in the trailers. Movies like Obsessed, in which Ali Larter wants to jump Idris Elba's bones, but Idris's wife Beyoncé Knowles won't have it, and she ends up dangling Larter off the edge of a hole that conveniently opens up in the floor of her home. I exepect said dangling happens less than five minutes before the end credits. But maybe I'll be surprised! Maybe this is, indeed, the modern version of no less than Psycho.

Maybe not.

The long-delayed Oscarbait The Soloist finally gets dumped unceremoniously... was that a rude thing to say? Whatever, the trailer makes it look like sheer shit, and Jamie Foxx in a film's cast never augurs particularly well.

There's also a movie called, simply, Fighting; and I say, if you're going to give your film such a primordially simple title as Fighting, it had damn well better be a primordially simple story, and not e.g. a Channing Tatum vehicle. Once again, they don't listen to me. Nobody does. Otherwise, this would be, like "Re-releasing Bergman films on IMAX month", or something not completely awful. The worst thing is that the summer films look unusually bad this year. Hell.

I CLEAN DEAD PEOPLE

Perhaps you would think, from the advertisements (which play up its ties to Little Miss Sunshine), from the presence of Alan Arkin (playing almost exactly the same character he played in Little Miss Sunshine), from the subject matter (the ways that family members both love and hate each other, and the crazy ways they prove it, as in Little Miss Sunshine), and from the word "Sunshine" in its title, that Sunshine Cleaning is a quirkilicious drama-comedy built from leftover parts in the Sundance Labs supply room with an eye to exactly replicating Little Miss Sunshine. Lord knows I did. And it turns out that I wasn't right.

In fact, Sunshine Cleaning would probably benefit from being a bit more slavishly similar to the 2006 Oscar-winning indie, in at least one respect. See, it's not yet another of those apparently mass-produced quirky independent dramadies that we have here, it's a quirky independent drama, with a cheerful attitude and just enough gags to put together a misleading trailer. But it's not really a comedy in any useful sense, by which I mean it's not all that funny. Most of the time, it's honestly a wee bit depressing. And this is where things fall apart. The whole quirky indie movement - "quirkycore", I have decided in this moment I shall call it - certainly does not eschew drama, but for the most part every film in the style - Little Miss Sunshine and Juno are the biggies, but there are plenty of others - has ultimately been primarily funny, and only secondarily about human conflict. Sunshine Cleaning is all about the psychic trauma felt by two sisters, single mother Rose (Amy Adams) and Norah (Emily Blunt), and how they both achieve catharsis through Rose's wonderful business idea, to horn in on the lucrative world of death-scene housecleaning.

"Quirky" "cathartic" and "psychic trauma" turn out to be a poorly-matched set. What is charming or annoying in various degrees in the many films that Sunshine Cleaning copies is flat-out bad here; the film always works at cross-purposes to itself. The tone is too fakey warm and genial to give the dramatic content of the scenes any real heft, and in the end the whole damn thing runs aground on that central flaw. It's likely, I guess, that the filmmakers - first-time screenwriter Megan Holley, and director Christine Jeffs - don't even realise that they've got this problem; I'd imagine that they only ever wanted to make a sweetly bittersweet comedy, and failed to notice that the central conflicts of the film are brutal and borderline tragic.

Moving beyond that major, overwhelming flaw, the rest of the film is kind of messy in a lot of stupid ways. At times, I honestly wanted to blame the editing for getting everything mixed up, though in general there's nothing else wrong with the way the film is cut together, so I can only assume that the problems started with the script. At one point, for example, the sisters and their dad Joe (the aforementioned Arkin) are looking to buy a car for the business, and are directed to an old Econoline van; it is only while looking at the vehicle that they see fit to tell the seller what they're looking for. That's probably not severe enough to be a continuity error, but if you the writer are going to go to the trouble of having a character unnecessarily mention that she needs plenty of space in the back for hauling, why not put it before she's staring into the back of a van that, lo and behold, has plenty of space for hauling? Tiny little moments like that are all over the place, in really frustrating ways. Nobody in the film ever calls to make plans ahead of time, for a start. And we keep learning pertinent information in not quite the order that would make the most sense.

Add to that a few subplots and scenes that go nowhere and do nothing, although their apparent point is to show the tragedies that follow the sisters like magpies, and it's hard to avoid concluding that the people responsible for shaping Sunshine Cleaning into a narrative aren't wholly clear on the concept of narrative. "Things happen and then they learn something" isn't really a story, and having a whimsical conceit like the whole "clean up death scenes" thing can't paper over the fact that there's no progression from point to point. It is a flimsy construct made of recycled parts, and it's neither interesting nor entertaining nor meaningful as a result.

Now it's for the "Yes, but..." part of the review. Sunshine Cleaning is at best an indifferent screenplay executed lazily and sloppily, but the film is still at least kind of watchable. For a start, it has some unusually pleasing cinematography, courtesy of John Toon. I say "cinematography" although it's plainly digital intermediate, but the film has a slightly washed appearance that skews towards the yellow end of things, and Toon isn't afraid to underlight when underlighting is the right thing to do. I'm not used to films like this that are willing to keep away from the finished glossiness of a big studio film but don't fall into the trap of raw ugliness that so many independent films enjoy.

The normal people out there are much likelier to respond to the surpassingly fine performances of Amy Adams and Emily Blunt, two actresses that I've enjoyed for a good long while, both at the top of their respective games. Adams in particular is doing something similar to the chirpy doe-eyed optimist she always does, but with enough bitterness, sexuality and nihilism that performance doesn't feel like she's phoning it in. Blunt, meanwhile, is the same chameleon that she always is; hardly any actresses of her generation evaporate into every role so much that it's hard to remember who's performing, but that's a skill that Blunt has showcased every single time I've watched her. Between them, the two actresses suggest a whole vista of human emotion that the muddled script just kind of gestures towards in a vague way; it's not enough to save Sunshine Cleaning, but it is, maybe, enough that you can see the point they were all driving at.

5/10

1939: JOHN AND JOHN

The first image we see of John Wayne, né Marion Morrison, in Stagecoach is inarguably one of the most iconic character introductions in all of cinema. You've probably seen it, even you haven't seen the movie itself (and shame on you, if that's so): some time after the titular vehicle rattles out of an unnamed town in the Arizona Territory, a shot rings out, and the driver brings the coach to a halt. He recognises the shooter as the famous and infamous Ringo Kid. Cut to a wide shot of Ringo loosely holding his gun out to the side (he shot to get their attention, and for no other reason), which quickly dollys to a close-up that fills the screen, a dolly so fast that the camera briefly goes out of focus. It is a shot that screams, in every fiber of its existence, "this fella here is somebody who is going to knock you flat on your ass, because of his sheer fantasticalness."

Okay, so they wouldn't have used that exact phrasing in 1939, but the intention is still the same: ladies and gentlemen, John Wayne - he is awesome. And awesome he would continue to be, in the 37 years before his death proving to be perhaps the greatest movie star in Hollywood history. That's not meant to be a statement one way or the other about his abilities as an actor (which are under-appreciated, though less so in recent years), nor his personality as a man (which is over-appreciated by the wrong people); simply a recognition of the mere fact of his dominance of a certain kind of movie for nearly four decades, and by extension his dominance of movies across the board.

Stagecoach is occasionally called Wayne's first film, or at least his first starring role; and frequently called his first collaboration with director John Ford, with whom the actor would become as inextricably linked as any actor and director ever have been. Neither of these statements are true. However, Stagecoach was the film that launched Wayne rather abruptly into superstardom, and it was his first leading performance for Ford, in a film that did quite a lot to establish what we now understand "John Ford" to mean. With hindsight on our sides, knowing how timeless their collaborations would turn out to be, it's hard not to read that shot as Ford's statement of intention, that with this moment Wayne would be an icon, and Ford himself would be the greatest of all Wayne's directors. It's not likely, of course, for that to be the case in fact, but... it's such a perfect introduction to the two men's work together that we can maybe in this instance be romantic enough to print the legend as fact.

The Ford-Wayne relationship is one of the most commented-upon in the annals of film criticism, and I'd not spend too much time going over it all, if it please you. Let me instead simply assume that we can all agree that something profound happened when the two men worked together; perhaps it wasn't anything to do with that actor's particular presence, but Stagecoach is a particularly special entry in Ford's already lengthy career, which had by then tallied up one Oscar and several more perfectly brilliant works of cinema craftsmanship. Here, I maintain, Ford created his first, perhaps his only, absolutely perfect movie (though I would not also call it his best, therefore). This is the film, let us not forget, which led a young Orson Welles to declare the older director the great American master of cinema, and which he viewed (saith the legend) more than 40 times before shooting Citizen Kane. "The film that inspired Welles while filming Citizen Kane" is no small thing, higher praise than perhaps anything else I could say about it.

With Stagecoach, Ford was given one of his most structurally-perfect screenplays ever, courtesy of his frequent collaborator Dudley Nichols (and allegedly, an uncredited Ben Hecht, maybe the best screenwriter of his generation). It's the kind of script in which every line of dialogue is functional without looking like it, so that even a throwaway moment ends up somehow setting up some element of the plot later on, or explaining something about the characters. More importantly, it's a script with hardly any place for the awkward comedy that often trips up even the best Ford films. Stagecoach is a model of tight storytelling: the opening fifteen minutes set up all of the film's whys, the next 70 minutes push us, with all due speed - and for those whose chief complaint about old movies is that they're slow-moving, well this one is fast - and a final ten minutes that wrap everything up. The scenario is incredibly simple: there are seven passengers and two drivers on a coach driving to Lordsburg, Arizona, under threat of hostile Apache warriors.

In its opening minutes, Stagecoach announces itself unambiguously as exactly the kind of story Ford had already excelled at for two decades: above all other things it's about the conflict between the joyless conservative hypocrites who call themselves "polite society" and the messy, flawed, gloriously human people that polite society would like to see banished from the world. Nearly the first things that happen in the film are that a cheerful and seemingly competent alcoholic doctor (Thomas Mitchell, doing that drunken Irishman thing that he did in pretty much every role) and a smart whore (Claire Trevor) are thrown out of town by a band of unsmiling women. By 1939, Ford had mastered the art of just-so-subtly manipulating camera angles to make sure the audience understood exactly who to root for and who to hiss at, so subtly indeed that it's felt subconsciously. So even if we don't quite know who this Dallas lady is, other than that she's a working girl, we know that we like her a hell of a lot more than the prudes who are kicking her to the curb.

The stagecoach, like Melville's Pequod isn't a conveyance but a framework in which to explore as much of the human condition as the creators could manage to stuff into it. Accordingly, the passengers aren't characters, entirely, they're archetypes: besides the wise whore and the drunk Irish doctor, there's a nervous Easterner who wasn't quite ready for the frontier (the perfectly-named Donald Meek; and his character's name, Peacock, is almost as perfect), a selfish corporate windbag (Berton Churchill), a determined but easily-offended soldier's wife (Louise Platt), and an amoral ex-Confederate (John Carradine, in his career peak). The coach drivers include an optimist who's a touch too stupid to know real fear (Andy Devine) and a crisply professional marshal (George Bancroft). Much of the film consists of little more than putting these disparate people into one situation or another, and watching as they behave according to their natures, or find it within their power to change their nature, as the case may be.

Accordingly, the finest moments in Stagecoach are mostly the small moments of character detail. Sometimes it's the look in Wayne's eyes when he dares Carradine to extend his Southern gentility to the less-reputable woman in the coach; sometimes the way Bancroft ignores Devine, to Devine's endless resignation. One of my particular favorite moments in the whole film is the way Carradine rolls his eyes when Mitchell brags about serving under Abraham Lincoln (a particularly important figure in Ford's cinema). For all that the Western is customarily seen as a genre of action and mythological storytelling, much of what makes Stagecoach an absolute masterpiece is how Ford and Nichols pitch the film as a study of how personality types interact.

Which isn't to say that it's not also a great Western as such; and a greatly significant one in Ford's career. The film stands at the junction between the first phase of his movies, which were so very invested in looking at social interaction while also making ripping good adventures, and the second phase, begun in earnest with 1946's My Darling Clementine, when his films became preoccupied with self-analysis and exploring the division between mythology and truth, and how Ford's own films had perpetuated myth. I'd argue that Wayne's appearance, with his larger-than-life presence and instantly classic appearance, is part of what allowed Ford to launch into this second phase; the actor was so mythological just in his being that he made a suitable hook on which to hang all sorts of deconstructive theory. The other truly important first made in Stagecoach is that it was Ford's first movie shot in Monument Valley, the plains of huge stone edifices scattered throughout the Navajo reservation which became the defining face of The American West in film.

Monument Valley is an inherently unreal place; to shoot a movie there is by necessity to place that movie in a fairy tale realm. This, I think, was the other great step Ford needed to take to become the fully matured version of himself, placing all of his greatest Westerns in this Neverland of giant rocks and rolling vistas. It separates them from any semblance of reality, and a canny director - and Ford was surely that - could work that separation into a chasm, definitively stating, "this is a fiction". Once that's been established, it's impossible to take a story of cowboys and Indians at face value.

Later on, his work in this vein would become quite aggressive (The Searchers, anyone?), but for the first time out, the filmmaker kept things simple. This is what I believe Stagecoach to essentially consist of: a typical John Ford film starts up in a typical movie town, with the usual suspects. Then they go riding off into a place that had never been seen onscreen before, one of the most desolate stretches of gorgeous wilderness on God's earth, and there they are observed by their creator gods like insects under glass. In a way, Stagecoach owes as much to something like Six Characters in Search of an Author as it does to any B-picture with gunslingers in black and white hats; it's a story about what happens when characters are removed from the world and forced to perform sociological experiments for our enjoyment. That's not the whole story, of course - it's still got a mind-blowing chase scene that is one of the finest action setpieces of the 1930s, and the plot resolves as a conventional, although impeccably-crafted, Western melodrama. But then again, John Ford built a career out of blending the esoteric, the formally flawless, and the flat-out entertaining better than most filmmakers would dream of.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

Here's a hypothetical for you: suppose that there is a director who is - fully justifying a much-abused noun - a "visionary". Does that director have the ability to save a film from itself?

Not, unfortunately, in the case of Alex Proyas's Knowing, although in this particular case, there are some caveats. This isn't simply a case of a screenplay that isn't particularly good; think of the films of Baz Luhrmann, or The Fall by Tarsem Singh for an example of a brilliant stylist working with a script that doesn't have a whole lot of substance to it, but able to drag a masterpiece out of it anyway. No, one of the chief problems with Knowing (maybe even the biggest) is that Proyas, who eleven years ago helmed one of the finest of all modern science-fiction pictures with Dark City, completely bought into a screenplay that suffers from a pronounced case of brain rot, such that all of his very best ideas are in service of a story that doesn't come within spitting distance of deserving the effort that the director put forth to execute.

The other caveat is that Knowing is a vehicle for actor Nicolas Cage (in full-on Cage Mode, which I will not further elaborate on, since everyone who's ever seen a sketch comedy knows what I'm talking about), who has well and truly squandered the last tiny bits of respect any thinking person could have for him. Feeling disappointed in a Nic Cage film isn't unlike feeling disappointed in a film directed by Uwe Boll: only an insane person would actually have any expectations for the project in the first place. So the fact that it's a miserable failure is more a validation of the way that things are, rather than standing as any kind of violation of the audience's desire for a great movie.

Knowing is essentially nothing more than an unwanted cross between The Happening and The Number 23, with an unexpected though ultimately not inexplicable dusting of the TV series Lost for flavoring: agnostic MIT cosmologist Jon Koestler (Cage; the character is credited as "John", though at one point we hear his father call him "Jonathan") comes into possession of a fifty-year-old page of numbers written out by a schoolchild, that when correctly decoded provides the date, location and body count of every major global disaster between the Octobers of 1959 and 2009. Armed with this knowledge, Jo(h)n attempts to stop the global catastrophe that may or may not be coming in just a couple of days.

The best defense (appearing most prominently in Roger Ebert's notorious four-star review) is that the film presents a compelling question about how the universe runs: is it predetermined by a hyper-intelligence, or subject to random chance and free will? This reading is based largely on a single scene in which Koestler presents exactly that question to his students, before collapsing in a depressive fit (like Mel Gibson in Signs, Koestler suffered an incredible crisis in faith when his wife died in an apparent accident). But other than that, Knowing comes down very hard and very unambiguously in favor of "predetermined". There's barely a single moment where we're actually invited to believe that everything in the film is the result of sheer chance and coincidence, and throughout, it's quite clear that everything that happens is happening because an outside being - who isn't by any means meant to be the classically-defined "God"- has decided that it needs to happen. It's a bit like the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, which aired the night that Knowing opened, although it's incalculably stupider.

Although I disagree with this central conceit, I could still find Knowing a worthwhile thriller, if only the screenplay weren't such a disaster. Written by a fair hodgepodge of men, Knowing is plagued by erratic story leaps that aren't "plot holes" in the classical sense, but are possibly much worse; for they hinge on characters behaving in ingeniously contrived ways, the only justification for which is "it was in the script." That, plus the usual assortment of dumb and obnoxious screenplay moments, the most obnoxious of which I believe to be Koestler's realisation of what the numbers mean, based on recognising the chain 9/11/01 - easily the most disreputable reference to that terrible date in any film yet made. Running a tight second in the obnoxious race is the revelation of what's going on, late in the film; I won't spoil it, save to say that God or the aliens or whoever has a tremendously cynical view of the worth of the human race.

If I don't spend more time with the screenplay, it's only because it depresses me to do so. I'd imagine that smart people could find all of this compelling and thought-provoking, and I support entirely their right to think that, even while I vehemently disagree. That leaves us with the question I raised up top, though: what of Proyas, and his visionary visions? Well, the mind that gave us the ingenious Brazil-noir-apocalypse mixture of Dark City is fully back in business, after the deeply regrettable I, Robot. Visually, Knowing can stand proudly against any other film in the same style in recent memory. There are moments of incomparable dramatic beauty all throughout the film, taken as abstract singularities, and even some bits here and there that work completely well given their context in the film; the appearences of the men in dark suits stalking Koestler's son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), calling to mind Dark City in all the right ways, always work, even for the viewer who, like myself, has long since checked out of the film's overwrought goings-on. But what I attended to even more were the isolated bits like a balloon floating against a grey sky, or the Children of Men-inflected long take of Koestler working his way through a plane crash, trying to help survivors, or the hypnotic shots of Caleb watching as the forest outside his room burns in a vision. Individually, there are more than enough moments of absolute power in Knowing that a non-speaker of English, watching without subtitles, would probably find the film a flat-out masterpiece.

But oh! the connective tissue is incomprehensibly dreadful! The film is just plain wrong on a story level, contrived and unconvincing and centered on a grumpy Old Testament idea of how we all deserve to die. The handful of slam-bang action setpieces that would have been absolutely earth-shattering fifteen years ago may have been enough to propel the film to the top of the box office charts, but this is no mere bit of explosiony entertainment: it's the worst kind of idiocy, the kind that's wholly invested in its own profundity.

4/10

LAZY BLOGGER SYNDROME

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm not dead, and that I will, I absolutely promise, return to actual blogging soon. Tomorrow, probably, and probably with Knowing. Oh, that zany Nicolas Cage!

MOVIE PEOPLE

I've gotten myself meme'd by Edward Copeland: my ten favorite characters in cinema. Here are the rules.

1) Name 10 film characters that are your favorite and explain why. We aren't talking about the actor who played them. Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes or Bond may be your favorite filmic sight on screen but you may hate the Mel Gibsons, Basil Rathbones or George Lazenbys who've played them. Of course no one's stopping you from mentioning your favorite players if you like.

[The meme's originator, Film Squish, says it's okay to do more than ten, but if I'm going to indulge myself it would be up to 50 or 60 in no time.]

2) Tag 5 more film bloggers when you're done, e-mail them, let 'em in on it, link back.

3) Read their posts and enjoy!

Jesus, this one is hard. I don't have it in me to do ranks; this is by chronology.


Frankenstein's Monster, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein
Okay, so I'm kinda violating one of the rules right off the bat. By limiting myself to just those two movies, I'm implicitly stating that I don't like the character so much as Boris Karloff and James Whale's interpretation thereof. But anyone can see that the Monster in those first two films just isn't quite the same person (so to speak) in the further sequels, or in the dozens of other films based upon Mary Shelley's oft-ripped off book. In the earliest Universal pictures, he's a tragic innocent, only able to articulate in halting words the simplest, and therefore most universal feelings: fear, confusion, anger, and above all, the need for affection.


Phyllis Dietrichson, Double Indemnity
Perhaps the most fatale of all 1940s femmes. Nobody would mistake her for a well-rounded human being, and in a more enlightened age, the rampant misogyny demonstrated by her character (and the entire film noir genre) is the very definition of problematic. But for my money, there's not another one of the many deadly women in cinema who can match Phyllis for sheer seductiveness, especially as embodied by the beautifully icy Barbara Stanwyck. Most noir heroes are obviously pathetic, led on by an unambiguous villainess to their dooms, but it's hard not to see why Walter Neff goes along so willingly, even though he's always aware of the fate ahead of him. Phyllis is pure Code Era sex, and the famous description of her allure - "murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle" - explains why she's just as appealing to the audience as to the dupe who gives up everything for her love.


Waldo Lydecker, Laura
It is perhaps only my stunted imagination that leads me to put two film noir villains from 1944 on the same list of ten. But dammit, Waldo is simply my favorite example of the well-spoken, effete immoralist out there, narrowly nudging out George Sander's venom-spitting theater critic in All About Eve. Once again, we have problematic representation to contend with - played by known homosexual Clifton Webb, he comes across as one of the most straightforward Evil Queers ever - but that shouldn't detract from how much more enjoyable he is than everyone else in the film, surely not by accident. Half again smarter than everyone else he meets, prone to bitchy gossip and withing snark, he's the first pop post-modernist, spiritual father to every blogger ever, and the most modern character in the genre that invented cinematic modernism.


Harry Lime, The Third Man
A magnificent bastard with a perpetual shit-eating grin and the finest monologue in cinema history, Lime is barely onscreen for 15 minutes, but he's still the character that we all remember, largely because his outsized presence is the driving force behind nearly every action in the film. Not an evil man so much as the embodiment of pure selfish vice, Lime represents the id of a generation that came out of one of the most destructive periods in human history, faced with rebuilding an entire world and forced to choose between hard work or just saying "fuck it" to everything outside of the shallowest pleasures of money. Not to mention, it was the role that allowed Orson Welles to give his best performance in a film he didn't direct himself.


Jerry/"Daphne", Some Like It Hot
Please forgive me for putting two Billy Wilder characters on the list, but the man was a genius writer - I could have done a top 10 without ever leaving his canon, and it would be fairly easy to defend. Anyway, the second and last Wilder creation here is Jack Lemmon's half of a pair of shady musicians in the 1920s who dress as women to escape from the mob. Contrived? Yeah, probably, but it results in the best farce of the last 50 years (exactly 50 years after its release), and a startlingly liberal-for-the-'50s drag role that doesn't just blur gender roles so much as grind the idea of gender into the ground with its heel. Going so subtly that you don't even notice it from horndog enthusiasm at being trapped on a train with a whole mess of trampy blondes to positively giddy delight - and "giddy" is the best conceivable word - at receiving a marriage proposal from an aged millionaire, Jerry's joy at being Daphne showcases how mutable identity - not just sexual - can be; the rest of us still haven't caught up to him. Her. Him.


The samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro
The nameless gunslinger who does what he has to and disappears is an iconic figure in the very American Western genre, but Kurosawa Akira and his frequent actor Mifune Toshiro perfected the trope in a Japanese samurai picture adapted from a Dashiell Hammett detective novel. Mifune's unnamed swordsman (he calls himself "Sanjuro", which simply means "thirty years old", and his family name is taken from the local fauna) is as ruthless and effective and awesomely badass as any of the many figures in the same mold, but where even a supremely talented filmmaker like Sergio Leone allowed that to be the entirety of the character, Kurosawa and Mifune make it clear that he does have a personality and an identity, he's just not going to share it with us. With his cynical sense of humor and strong, if unusual, codes of honor and morality, the samurai obviously has a lot more going on under the surface than your average perfect killer.


Mrs. Robinson, The Graduate
Seeing the film for the first time in high school, I obviously identified most with Ben, the lonely, confused boy looking for himself in the face of idiotic parents and corrupt adults. But every time I've seen it since, I've become more and more aware that, all in all, Ben is a bit of prick and a moron, masking his outrageous laziness with generational anxiety, and cheerfully turning himself into a stalker, no matter how schmoopy his stalking may be. While Mrs. Robinson, brilliantly acted by Anne Bancroft, seems more and more to be the actual tragic center of the story. Consider: she's well into middle age, caught in what is obviously a loveless, sexless marriage. Perhaps unwisely, she allows herself to enter a fling with a sex-starved young man who treats her, for a while at least, as the center of his universe. And then he drops her like a hot potato to chase after her callow daughter, a literal expression of the adult fear of the younger generation taking over despite being entirely unworthy of the task. Sure, she reacts with a bit too much jealousy and bitterness, but the last chance she'll ever have at fulfillment has been taken from her in the least-classy way available. Would you really react differently?


Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels
The man in the battered fedora, having spent the better part of the last 24 hours digging a temple out of the desert sands, flops heavily on his side and stares off into the middle distance. "Snakes," he moans. "Why did it have to be snakes?" That moment exemplifies everything I adore about Indy: he's an extraordinarily weary hero, who somehow manages to survive every damn thing he encounters but not without a healthy amount of complaining and resignation along the way. For all that the Indiana Jones films are unabashed throwbacks to a long-dead B-movie tradition, the man at the center is weirdly contemporary. He may dress like a matinee hero, he performs the actions required of a serial star, but he has an unexpectedly postmodern viewpoint about all of it. And for an indestructible action hero, he gets the shit beat out of him a lot.


Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
The great counterpoint to all of the crap tossed at the Coen brothers, about how they're fundamentally inhuman filmmakers. Jerry (played by William H. Macy as only he could possibly do it) isn't a bad guy, in essence, but he makes one spectacularly bad mistake that compounds when everything that can go wrong does so in the most outlandish way possible, and as a result he's confronted with all of his must humiliating weaknesses and fears. It's bad enough that his father-in-law treats him like an imbecile, but by the time that the kidnappers who he's paying to do his bidding start treating him like a dumb kid, you can't shake the conclusion that this man simply cannot get any breaks. He's the most sympathetic character in the movie, as much as we might not want to admit it, because he's the one who represents all of the failures we don't want to acknowledge. Marge Gunderson may be the hero, but she gets to end the film with her simple worldview basically intact; the last time we see him, Jerry has been reduced to a bawling wreck stretched out on a bed. It's not a pretty picture, but it's a heartbreakingly pathetic one.


Boo, Monsters, Inc.
The cutest character in the history of movies, full stop. Pixar's own WALL·E gives her a stiff run for the money, but he turns into a plucky and resourceful hero, while Boo remains at every moment nothing but a little girl. She's both the audience's best identification point - like her, we are experiencing the world of Monstropolis from an outside perspective, and if the filmmakers are doing their job, we have a similarly wide-eyed perspective - and the point on which all of our anxieties are focused: it's almost reflexive that we want to protect a fragile little innocent like her, even if she's mostly made up of ones and zeroes. Voiced by story artist Rob Gibb's daughter Mary, largely by capturing her random prattle as she played in the recording studio, Boo manages to come across as perhaps the most unforced child character in the movies ever, doing only what comes naturally to a toddler, and triggering that deep mammalian instinct in all of us that absolutely loves a little kid. So yeah, it all basically comes back to: she's just too damn cute.


And now, the trickiest bit: whom do I punish next?
-Neil at The Agitation of the Mind
-Burbanked
-Cinewhore
-Nathaniel at Film Experience
-Glenn at Stale Popcorn

Let this be a lesson to those who would dare to blogroll me.

FRAK

Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: the finale, and what it says about the series as a whole. Since this will be mega-spoilery for people who haven't seen it yet, I'm hiding it in the extended entry.

The little things first: man, that battle between the Galactica and the Cylon colony was sci-fi porn at its very best. I've wondered, on and off, all season - not just this half-season, but all the way back to 2008 - why there was so little in the way of space action. I think we have the answer: to save money and man-hours on the fan-damn-tasticalest battle sequence the show has had in ages. Not since the four-part season three premiere, with the extraordinary moment where Galactica fell into the atmosphere and jumped out, have I been so entirely bowled over by the exorbitant coolness of the show, in that adolescent way that all science fiction fans sometimes find themselves. To see a massive spaceship fucking ram into an even more massive station; that is the stuff of a twelve-year-old boy's dreams.

The construction of the first hour in general was quite impeccable. Written, directed and edited to show exactly what was going on in tiny ways, but only revealing the whole scale of the battle by inches; that was tremendous. The show has always been one of the best-directed on television, and Michael Rymer was always their best director, though I'm often quite partial to Edward James Olmos's work, and I'm hugely excited that he's helming The Plan, the TV movie to come out later this year.

I think that does it for the little things, but only because the big things are so tied up with a whole bunch of tiny moments.

Here, in a nutshell, is both the triumph and the abysmal failure of Battlestar Galactica's final episode. For 72 episodes, a miniseries, and a movie, spread across five-and-a-quarter years, I though that Ron Moore was telling one story. It has now been proven that Ron Moore was telling a different story, in fact, and has seemingly been doing so all along.

We now know, thanks to interviews and podcasts and the like, that when confronted with the final question of resolving all of the show's mythological loose ends in an interesting and compelling way, or resolving the characters' arcs, Moore chose the latter path. This is disappointing to many of us fans, but not at all surprising. At every point in the series' run, when there was a distinction to be made between hard sci-fi (questions of how the universe works, speculative answers to technological questions) and soft sci-fi (watching how people live in an alternate society, unanswered philosophical issues), the writers always broke in favor of soft sci-fi. A lot of people, myself included, put up with this a lot, I think, in the expectation that Moore was saving everything up for the big reveals at the end.

Was that fair? The show never pretended to be anything other than what it was, and after much thought I've concluded that we who pout and complain that the show ended "wrong" perhaps didn't really pay attention for all those years. This is EXACTLY the finale that Battlestar Galactica has always promised: big issues are put aside in favor of characters just managing to survive each individual moment. Lo and behold, that is precisely what the finale was: huge metaphysical questions were raised, and the characters responded with a collective "let's just settle down, because we'll never have a better chance to be happy". Weirdly enough, I feel unfulfilled because the show gave an honest conclusion to almost every character's arc; I wanted death and space opera, and I got people.

Want. Now there's a hell of a word. The trick of the finale is that it doesn't actually leave any questions unanswered. It's just that the answer is one I don't really like. "God did it" covers literally every lingering question every fan had about the show, with the caveat that "God" in this case is a superintelligence beyond morality who craves balance in the universe, rather than a moral arbiter or a creator. Science fiction is supposed to come up with better answers than "God", but that just brings us right back to that sticky question that's been part of BSG for years: is it sci-fi, or is sci-fi just the delivery system? We definitively know that it was the latter, and that's unsettling and annoying to a lot of us, but not therefore unfair.

Fact is, the finale was surpassingly fair. Not one single moment was out of sync, logically, with anything we've previously seen, and not one character acted in a way that was inexplicable. There are some weird leaps of faith; I don't suppose for a minute that every last member of the fleet would have willingly stayed on New Earth, given that every ship but Galactica had a functioning FTL drive. But television is about the main characters, and I believed every one of them did what they would have done, even Baltar, whose completed arc reveals him to be, I suspect, the central character of the series.

Ah, but what of that final scene? This is where I find it hard to defend the episode. First things first, the idea that the fleet would turn out to be humanity's forebears is hardly shocking - I called it as a likely possibility all the way back in season 2. Any halfway-seasoned SF fan has already seen this idea, at least a couple of times.

And the implications of the final montage are simply idiotic. The moral of the story, it seems, is that Moore is cautioning us that "all this will happen again": we, in 2009, are creating the same environment that led to so much bloodshed to earlier generations. If it's not immediately obvious why this is an argument in bad faith, let me point out that those earlier generations aren't real. We didn't evolve from a raise of human/robot hybrids who had only learned after decades to put aside their differences, and there is no "this" to be happening again (and no, I can't KNOW that, any more than I can prove the non-existence of a teapot orbiting midway between Mars and Jupiter). So Moore's argument is ultimately a gigantic strawman.

I could have loved the finale if it had but ended with that shot of Adama remembering Roslin, as he sat on the hill.

Because deep down, the glut of essentially unanswered questions doesn't bother me. Two of my favorite long-form narratives ever - not the best, just my favorites - are Gaiman's The Sandman (75 issue comic book series) and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (for a novel, it's really long). Both of those works, Tolkien's especially, are famous and brilliant for their creation of an illusory depth: a world beyond the story we are told. In Tolkien's case, this was because he had several millennia worth of history rattling around in his head, and used allusions to that history to deepen his setting. The same is not true of Gaiman's work, but the effect is the same: by the end of the stories, there are many, many questions about his characters that have no hint of resolution, many things don't make sense, and many events have been referenced that we never learn anything about, save the name. In neither case have I ever seen this as a flaw; it's always been one of the things I've loved most about these stories, in fact, that feeling that I only saw a tiny portion of a rich, sprawling universe. Once the tale is over, there's still a palpable sense that there's so much else out there to know, that nothing has actually ended, and that's ultimately much more satisfying than thinking that an entire world is so compact that it can be compressed into one narrative.

So it is, I guess, with Battlestar Galactica. It wasn't, as it turned out, the story of a universe and a mythological system. It was the story of a couple dozen marvelouslly drawn characters who underwent a very certain crisis. And taken on that level, it's still one of the finest television series ever produced, and its resolution is close to perfect: the characters are done with their crisis, and ready to settle into anonymity. That's not what I wanted, and not what I expected. But since it's what I got, I'm prepared to be satisfied. There aren't many shows that have managed to successfully pull off that trick, when all is said and done.

IT MADE ME FEEL HAPPY AND SAD, ALL AT THE SAME TIME

A Battlestar Galactica series finale open thread, because I expect to be much too emotionally drained afterwords to do anything but stain my keyboard with tears.

My predictions (spoilers up to last week's episode!): they all go to the black hole, and get sucked into the event horizon, traveling back in time to 2019, where Adama becomes Edward James Olmos's character from Blade Runner, and the Cylons are reverse-engineered into Replicants, with Dean Stockwell growing younger and becoming Darryl Hannah. Meanwhile, Starbuck is revealed to be the avatar of the One True Cylon God, actually a computer program written by Gaius Baltar when he came out of the black hole in 30 A.D., where he turns out to be the historic Jesus Christ. President Roslin gets her cancer cured because I will bawl like a five-year-old otherwise.

Actual predictions: Everybody dies, except for Baltar. Who also probably dies.

THE INDIE CORNER, VOL. 13

If I were to simply describe The Path of Torment, you would likely conclude that it is an absolute piece of shit. It shares a great deal with plenty of other microbudget "me and my friends made this" type of movies that frankly are absolute pieces of shit, and typically one can fairly easily judge a homebrew indie based on its most obvious influences - all Tarantino-inflected movies tend to commit the same sins, and The Path of Torment is certainly Tarantino-inflected, along with an assist from Saw, of all regrettable things. But writer-director-star Gary C. Warren, making his first feature, keeps the film from descending into the mire suggested by that mash-up.

The movie opens with its best moment, a roving tracking shot that moves throughout a party, observing the alcohol-infused conversations that crop up in such places. It's a masterpiece of quiet observation, and anyone who has ever spent time with drunk people, especially if they were drunk themselves at the time, would surely recognise the behavior of all the characters: loudly declaiming blatant falsehoods as pearls of wisdom, debating questions about pop culture, looking fervently for somebody to flirt with. Indeed, the camera essentially adopts the point of view of a tipsy individual at just such a party, lurching from one point to another, searching for some group to butt into, and drifting away whenever it becomes boring. The party sequence ends, at least for the moment, when one poor bastard stumbles into the wrong room, and is jumped by a man who garrotes him to death.

Thereafter, we are shown what led up to the party, although it's not immediately obvious that's what's going on. In essence: Ken (Craig Beffa) and Ellen (Dona Ellis) have just moved into the suburbs, and they're throwing a housewarming party to celebrate. A few hours beforehand, two men dressed as Mormon missionaries come to the door, and Ellen lets them in - a bad move, seeing as the one with a deep, raspy voice (Joe Noelker) turns out to have some reason to be angry with the couple, and the wide-eyed one (director Warren himself) is apparently just nuts.

Cue the low-budget torture pornography, as the two men - who aren't actually Mormons, it would seem by this point - levy various physical and emotional punishments on the couple. None of this turns out to be nearly as horrendous as in most such films, first because the production's limitations don't allow for very many elaborate gore effects (and the one exception to this rule proves why it was a good idea), second because we're never even once asked to identify with the torturers - really just the one torturer, played by Warren, for even his accomplice clearly finds him alarmingly unhinged. He's just flat-out crazy, without any indication we're meant to think of him as aught but an unknowable psychopath.

In fact, that character is one of the two things that really elevates The Path of Torment above so many of the films just like it. A lot of the movie is strictly amateur-hour: the production design is laughably thin; the sound, though much clearer than in a lot of indies, sounds a bit tinny and it kind of "floats" on the film - my guess is that a lot of it was awkwardly post-looped; and several of the performers are as clumsy and stiff as you'd ever expect in a film like this. This is particularly damaging in the case of Ellis, on-screen as much as anyone else in the cast: though she's quite natural in the first twenty minutes or so, once the psychos break in she becomes intolerably flat, never reacting to the depravities she's witnessing and suffering with anything but peevish annoyance.

Still, those two things: for one, the shots, allowing for the fact that the movie was made on an obviously dinky camera, and they're cut together quite well (Alejandro Cruz shot the film; the editor was - surprise! - Gary C. Warren). The second thing is the film's approach to the loonier killer, the one played by the director, the one with an overwhelming obsession with television. Criminals riffing on pop-culture is de rigeur nowadays, of course, but Warren's character is something else entirely; at every moment possible and several where it really isn't, he's going on some rant or another about his programs. It's evident that he doesn't even really understand "life that isn't television" anymore, and most of the other characters notice it too - itself a strong break from the bulk of similar movies, where the rest of the cast would just join in on the riffing. This is so over-the-top and inexplicable that it finally becomes apparent that we're actually watching something of a satire, executed through sheer ridiculousness. It's this, at the last, that makes The Path of Torment a kind of special microbudget thriller; it's awareness of how ludicrous microbudget thrillers are, almost by their very nature.

IN MEMORIAM: NATASHA RICHARDSON

11 May, 1963 - 18 March, 2009

This is impossibly sad news. I'm not one to get particularly worked up when a famous person passes away - they're not any more special than the hundreds of people who die of some fatal disease or another in Africa every day - but Natasha Richardson was a particularly special actress, even if she was hardly the most famous or instantly recognisable face to the great majority of filmgoers. Her best work was by most accounts done on the stage; I'm sorry to say that I never had the chance to see her in that environment, and I'm even sorrier to know that I never will now. There were rumors that she and her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, were going to headline a New York revival of A Little Night Music, following up from their concert success a few months ago; now we'll never get to experience what would undoubtedly have been that great triumph, nor any of the other performances the 45-year-old actress might still have had within her.

My own Natasha Richardson story: my first exposure to her was the 1998 cast recording of the Cabaret revival in which she played Sally Bowles, and even on CD I was keenly aware that she was doing things that I'd have never thought could be done with that role. I've seen her in films since then, good and not so good, and there was never once a time where she wasn't the best part of the project, always electrifying, sexy, charming, smart.

Acting has suffered a great loss today, to say nothing of Ms. Richardson's family, as impressive a collection of famous performers as you could put together: her mother Vanessa, of course, and her aunt Lynn Redgrave; her sister Joely Richardson, and her husband Liam Neeson, as well as their two children. My thoughts and sincerest condolences, however feeble, go out to all of them.

THE ART OF VENGEANCE

The tidal wave of '70s and '80s genre film remakes that started up in the early years of this decade has produced works of wildly varying quality, from indefensibly wretched (The Hitcher) to no better than absolutely necessary (The Hills Have Eyes) to unexpectedly good (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The only watermark yet to hit was one that I, at least, never really expected to see passed, but here we have a new version of The Last House on the Left that is not just a good horror movie - rare enough nowadays - but markedly better than the original.

Or shall I say, rather, the second original. Wes Craven's 1972 directorial debut was an admitted, though uncredited remake of, get this, an Ingmar Bergman movie, 1960's The Virgin Spring. Other than the obvious debt Hostel owes to Of a Thousand Delights, this makes Last House the only modern splatter film with roots in the 1960's European arthouse, which is likely because most splatter fans have probably never heard of Bergman - or Europe - while most Bergman fans probably regard splatter movies as a genre only slightly less infamous than kiddie porn snuff films. Logically, you'd expect that it would be exactly the opposite, that horror directors would be hellbent on raiding art films for plots, secure in the knowledge that their target audience would have no clue of the wanton thievery going on. It should not take that much imagination to turn The Seventh Seal into a hard-R gorefest.

In all cases, the plot involves the maiden daughter of loving, protective parents who runs afoul of some vicious locals who savagely rape her, leaving her for dead in the woods. When a storm forces the evil men to seek shelter, the only place they can find on short notice is the parents' home, where they act just strange enough that the parents realise something very wrong is going on; from there it's not too hard for them to deduce what happened. Outraged to their very core, these good and moral people then take bloody revenge on the men. The only really substantial difference between the new film and its predecessors is that the daughter is not actually killed in this case; her death was the very point of the spiritually transcendent Virgin Spring, while Craven used it mostly as a means to hammer away at the audience with the unremitting nastiness that has made his film one of the most notorious works of brutality in cinema history. I cannot come up with any explanation for the change other than the modern vogue for "safe" horror, though the new Last House is quite savage enough whether the girl lives or no.

The 1972 film unquestionably earns its wicked reputation, and it is certainly one of the most influential works in the development of all the hyper-nihilistic horror that followed. It is also not very good, thought it lays all the foundations for Craven's next film and perhaps his best, the original Hills Have Eyes. The problem with Last House is that it's not entirely sure how brutal it wants to be: some moments, especially the rape sequence, are almost indefensibly savage, yet they bunch up against what's just about the most idiotic comic relief in splatter history, in the form of two bumbling cops. Later films in the '70s would plumb the psychic scars of post-Vietnam America with terrifying intensity, but Craven's film is just clumsily cruel.

The chief change in the new version is that director Dennis Iliadis and writers Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth aren't making a Grand Guignol flick, like Craven arguably was doing in '72 and the legions of torture pornographers are clearly doing to this day. First and above all, their film is about the dear cost of violence. The opening scene of the film features our main killer, Krug (Garrett Dillahunt - and if his presence isn't enough of a tip-off that the film has a bit more brain than your average thriller, I can't think of what would be) escaping from a police car with the aid of his thuggish hangers-on, and strangling the cop who'd been snarking at him. This is one of the least glamorous deaths in a gore movie in recent memory, mostly because strangling is an essentially bloodless form of murder; it's also just about the most sickening to watch.

That's it for a while, as the film switches over to the Collingwoods, just arrived at their backwoods cabin for a vacation: dad John (Tony Goldwyn), mom Emma (Monica Potter) and teenager Mari (Sara Paxton). Actual characters are rare enough in a horror film that I always get a thrill when they appear, and the Collingwoods are some of the most fleshed-out protagonists in any film like this from the last decade. They have a dead son, Ben; they have quietly implied marital problems that seem to go beyond the obvious "we have a dead kid" blues. The film takes some care to make us understand who these people are before throwing them into the bowels of Hell: and they are not unlike us.

This focus pays dividends in the rape sequence, which is much less tawdry than the original, and much more harrowing. For the most part, the camera focuses always on Mari's face, sometimes cutting to the killers' hands on her body; it's much less focused on the savagery of the act than on the girls' psychological torment. It helps that Paxton (doing her own stunts) is absolutely convincing in every frame, and the result of all this is one of the most nightmarishly powerful moments of movie violence I've seen in a while.

The justification for this kind of thing is wildly subjective, as art always ought to be: my oft-repeated position is that a touch of hideously unpleasant brutality is good for the movies. It's easy to become complacent in the face of violence; we hear of death and rape and murder and torture in the world, and it seems very matter-of-fact. Anytime a film can rub the viewer's nose in the reality of those things, and make them seem incredibly horrible and not at all cool, I'm absolutely all for it. The new Last House does that tremendously well.

Then comes the ending. Which is done very well, by all means; when the film is good, it is very good, and when it is bad, it's still good enough. But from almost exactly the moment that John and Emma figure out who their new houseguests are, the film takes a precipitous tumble from the rawness of the middle sequence, and becomes a typical, though technically accomplished revenge thriller. For the most part, it's clear that the killings take a lot out of the Collingwoods, physically and emotionally, and I cheer the movie that understands that actually snuffing the life out of a human body isn't meant to be a stylish affair. At the same time, the film clearly wants us to get a vicarious kick out of seeing our heroes take matters into their own hands. It's a rough blend at times, and it implodes in the very climax of the movie: the final death is an outlandish, idotic sop to the bloodthirsty that I won't spoil, though the film's trailer already gave it away. It's the one completely sour note in a movie that has already gone a touch off-key in the endgame.

Still, there's no denying that Last House is a remarkably un-fun horror movie, much likelier to make the audience feel sick than to clap and laugh. That is praise, I assure you: any film that wants to traffic in human depravity has an obligation to make you feel it. And oh, yes, I did feel it.

7/10

TECHNICAL ISSUES

UPDATE: Okay, it's fixed. And the worst case was a touch worse than I expected, inasmuch as it's "Monday morning" and not "Sunday". Back to regular blogging tomorrow.

My computer has decided that it doesn't really like being a computer right at the moment, and has decided not to do anything when I turn it on. This has an obvious impact on my ability to successfully blog.

But all is not lost! I know exactly what the fix is, though I can't really do anything with that knowledge 'til the weekend. If I get a chance to bum some more internet time between now and then, my planned reviews will still happen, but I wouldn't like to make promises I can't keep. So the worst case scenario is that I'll be silent until Sunday.

Rather, the worst case scenario is that I drop dead seconds after hitting "publish", but we're going to stick with the situation at hand. No posts until Sunday.

WHY WATCH THE WATCHMEN?

That Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's epochal 1986 comic book miniseries Watchmen would not survive a translation to cinema intact was an inevitability: it is far too long for even the most indulgent running time, and too much of its impact come from formal elements unique to the comic medium.

Taking that as read, the question about Zack Snyder's new movie adaptation of the book is neither "Does this film triumph because of its fidelity to the source material?" nor "Does this film fail because of its departures from the source material?", though these seem to be the primary criteria for the fanboy armies that brought Watchmen to an impressive but still somehow underwhelming $55 million opening weekend. To my mind, the better questions are, "Does this film, in its film-ness, approximate the feeling and meaning of the book?" and the even simpler, "If the book didn't exist, would this be a good film?" My answer for both of these questions is "No, not really", although I'll freely admit that on both counts it's far, far better than I would ever have expected from the "visionary" director of the godawful 300 (and the shockingly decent remake of Dawn of the Dead, but that feels like a different lifetime by now).

Watchmen, for the benefit of those happy few who have been disconnected from all media for the last few months, is a story about the death of superheroes, which in Moore's original conception was not something worth lamenting.* Specifically, it is about the Minutemen (renamed the Watchmen for the movie, since people no longer understand metaphorical titles), a group of costumed heroes dating back to the 1940s that had a mostly fresh cast in the 1970s, when legislation was passed making costumed heroics illegal. The story begins in 1986, when Eddie Blake, A.K.A. The Comedian, a superhero in the government's employ, is brutally killed, and the rest of the old Minutemen realise that someone is hunting them down.

This was all bracing, original stuff when Moore and Gibbons first hatched it, although films like The Incredibles and comic book events like the Marvel Universe Civil War have taken away a bit of its thunder now. What still sets Watchmen-the-book apart from its followers is that Moore made no attempt to hide his lack of respect for the heroic figures he presented. The 1986 edition of the Minutemen includes virtually nothing but failed fuck-ups: in life, The Comedian was a brutal bully, while the surviving members include Dan "Nite Owl" Dreiberg, an overweight, milquetoast trust fund kid who fights crime in a costume out of something like a sexual kink; Rorschach, a right-wing sociopath whose idea of justice is frighteningly vengeful; Laurie "Silk Specter" Jupiter, a non-entity who only took up the job because her mom made her; Adrian "Ozymandias" Veidt, a smart rich prick with a touch of insanity to him; and Jon Osterman, a physicist who was destroyed in an accident in the '50s and turned into Dr. Manhattan, a walking nuclear reaction able to reassemble molecules at will and see all moments in time at once, but divorced from nearly every human emotion as a result.

When Snyder was announced as director, I had one concern that outweighed everything else: that his take on the material was going to focus on its awesomeness, and as a result, these pathetic and/or horrible figures were going to be reshaped according to an adolescent's idea of what Watchmen entailed. In the book, the characters are all unambiguous anti-heroes, except for those whom are frightfully ineffectual; the movie does not appear to know what the word "antihero" means.

And this is where we get to the point where I gave up on hoping for "Watchmen-the-book The Movie", and accepted that I'd be watching Zack Snyder's Watchmen on its own terms if I wanted to get anything out of it all, however much shallower than the original material that would be. And in patches, this approach works. I know that some people regard 300 as a great action movie, and I'm super-happy for them, but for me it was basically a train wreck. So it's a good surprise to see that Snyder can, in fact stage an action setpiece when he has to, and the opening scene in Watchmen, a fight between The Comedian and a shadowy assailant, is pretty tremendously well-done. This is followed, almost immediately, by what very nearly could be my favorite single passage of the film, the opening credits sequence, which traces the history of the Minutemen since WWII, in 3-D tableaux. It's not actually a new trick for credit sequences, but it's still fresher than anything to follow; the only gaping flaw is the use of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", but let us return to that.

After the opening, the film quickly rushes into 300 and Sin City territory: adapt a comic book by recreating it with panel-by-panel accuracy. Look, I loved Sin City, but the appeal of this idea is long since rotted away, and the film Watchmen frequently chokes on its own fidelity, a mummified version of the original story. This includes its use of the book's story structure; something of a fool's gambit, given that the book was originally twelve issues, and still reads as twelve very formally separate chapters. This has the most profound negative impact on the movie during Dr. Manhattan's flashback to his creation: this is one of the highlights of the book, jumping decades in between panels over the course of 24 pages, but in the more fluid environment of the cinema, this sequence grinds the story to a dead halt, and is probably the chief reason that the film feels like every one of its 163 minutes.

Such slavish devotion to the comic leaves only a little room for any director to express much personality, but Snyder grabs each chance he gets, and occasionally the results are much better than I would ever have assumed possible. In particular, his well-documented love of speed ramping (movement slows down and speeds up and goes back to normal all in one shot) isn't altogether dreadful here, like it was in 300; I can think of three or four places where it actually worked to give a moment more "oomph" rather than, to paraphrase the director, "giving us more time to watch as one dude kicks another dude in the face". Which sentiment reveals just about all that one needs to know about Snyder's approach to violence in the cinema (and indeed, parts of the movie are a bit violence porny, and that is a problem to me thought not a surprise, your mileage may vary).

There are still a lot of amateur-hour mistakes in the direction, though: if three or four of the speed ramps work, that leaves 20 or 25 that don't work. His love of violence I just mentioned; and then there is the jaw-dropping use of music, easily the worst single aspect of the film. The Dylan song is merely mis-used and a bit overreaching, but then he goes and uses Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" in a funeral scene, forgetting that that song is inextricably linked to another movie; he plucks some of Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi score for Dr. Manhattan's sojourn on Mars, apparently thinking that one esoteric thought piece is the same as another; and in the worst moment of the film by far - and possibly the worst movie moment so far in all of 2009 - he sets a crudely-staged sex scene to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", observing neither that this is an altogether overused song, nor that the moment which results is soul-despairing. This is a sex scene that makes even the notorious climax (if you will) of Spielberg's Munich look sober-minded and well-executed.

About the cast I have said little because there is little to say. The one genuinely good performance, I think, is given by Jackie Earle Haley as Rorshach; Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Eddie Blake are fine, and probably no better than they need to be; Billy Crudup, in full CGI motion capture, makes a credible Dr. Manhattan, though at all times I was heavily distracted by the comically massive blue penis that Snyder saw fit to graft onto the character. Matthew Goode's Adrian Veidt is a bad performance, for reasons that I think have to do with his and the director's take on the character (he sounds - and looks - kind of like Faye Dunaway), while Malin Akerman as Sally Jupiter is the only flat-out horrible performer, reciting lines with a wooden intensity that recalls community theater auditions.

I suspect that Watchmen the movie is doomed to speedy obscurity. It seems like a big deal now because so many people wanted it to be a big deal, but in a year or two, when the novelty is gone and it becomes apparent that there's really nothing to the movie at all - even 300 was more of a watershed, as a technical work - it will be consigned to the footnotes of history. It is not nearly so bad as it could have been, but except for a few huge missteps (oh, God, that "Hallelujah" sex scene) it's not much of anything else: it does not illuminate the comic book, it does not particularly work as its own creature, but in neither case is it an epic failure. It's just kind of there, and if it weren't for its enormous pedigree, I think that there is where it would wither and die.

5/10

*Not that long ago, though long enough that I cannot recall who said it, I saw this extremely apt description of Moore's superhero worldview versus Frank Miller's: Miller believes that the world is a suckhole of depravity and viciousness, and it takes a superhero just as vicious to keep the innocents safe, while Moore believes that the world is very flawed but ultimately decent, and that people would probably be able to figure out everything for ourselves if those damned superheroes didn't keep mucking things up.

CIMMFEST: PUNCHING THE CLOWN

The question, "Does the world need another satire of the L.A. entertainment industry?" has a swift, unambiguous answer: no. But that's clearly not stopping anyone from making them, so the best we can hope for is that more of the things should be as genuinely funny as Punching the Clown, an absurd look at how a promising singer-songwriter is bitchslapped by the idiocies that face him during a short stay in Los Angels, hoping to make his big break.

Henry Phillips is a mock folk singer; by which I mean, he is a legitimate but sarcastic folk singer whose songs satirise the kind of earnest soul-bearing music that typifies acoustic singer-songwriter folk. Songs like "The Bitch Song"(he wonders why this girl turned into such a bitch, given that her childhood was actually pretty decent) and "Fresh Out of Blues" (he catalogues all the good things in his life that have left him unable to sing the blues). Working with his frequent collaborator Gregori Viens, Phillips wrote a film for himself, in which he plays a mock folk singer named Henry Phillips, and one presumes - hopes, rather - that it's a heavily fictionalised version of the man's actual life. It's sort of very much like HBO's sitcom Flight of the Conchords, except that the humor in Punching the Clown is more farcical than cringey and awkward. Hey, there's room for both.

"Farcical", but the film is rather more laconic than we'd expect from that label. Phillips is a touch heavy-lidded and mumbly in the film, with a voice that cracks with cigarettes and liquor, and the movie follows suit: a low-budge indie, in other words, that reaches for comic surrealism rather than setting up shop in its own navel. It works, happily, albeit with the proviso that not everyone likes the same kind of humor, et cetera. All I know is that I truly enjoyed the combination of Phillips's low-energy presence - it's hard to say that he's a good actor, but he's fun to watch as a variant of himself - with the increasingly contrived situations that unravel around him. It's a clash of comic modes that doesn't even really play like a clash until you sit back and think about it later; that's how well it works.

Now, it must be admitted that the film's satirical targets are fairly broad and you've probably seen most of the jokes before: haha, record company execs abuse their secretaries, agents are fast-talking and absent-minded, people in Los Angeles are weird shallow hipsters, gags that aim for that level. If you can live with the fact that Punching the Clown doesn't have anything new to say about the music industry, the fact remains that it plays those old gags fairly well, thanks to a unusually solid cast for an indie movie (that is, I suppose, the beauty of shooting low-budget in L.A., as opposed to everywhere else: the omnipresence of out-of-work professional actors). It's familiar and funny, and it's best, I've found, not to argue with funny.

Besides, the movies true purpose isn't to mock L.A. so much as it is to provide more exposure for Phillips's songs, and they are quite good; a few are laugh-out-loud hilarious, if you'll pardon the cliché. I'd not like to give away the punchlines, so instead I'll just point you all to Phillips's website, and acknowledge that the film has done its work already, in a very small way: it's won him at least one new fan. None of this stuff, musically or cinematically, is going to set the world on fire, of course, but it's still a damn good time.

Punching the Clown screens at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E Washington on Saturday, March 7, at 6:00 PM

CIMMFEST: AGILE, MOBILE, HOSTILE

Agile, Mobile, Hostile: A Year with Andre Williams is one of those documentaries where it seems that the filmmakers approached their subject and started filming with one idea in mind, until real life intervened, and forced them into something much stranger and more uncomfortable and better than they'd originally planned. This is a double good thing in this case; the film that Agile, Mobile, Hostile started as was interesting, certainly, but not nearly deep enough to support a whole feature-length running time, while the film it became is a sometimes beautiful cinematic depiction of human fragility.

Andre Williams is a musician and songwriter whose particular genre cannot be nailed down; he has worked in R&B, in soul, in blues, and in some kind of angry variant of blues that feels equally indebted to punk and rap, though it predates either. He's a greatly influential figure whose name has been almost completely lost to history, despite penning the iconic "Shake Your Tail Feather" amongst other works. He was also a drug addict for many years, sinking so far into the pursuit of his habit that he ended up homeless and begging for money on the Randolph Street bridge in downtown Chicago.

I do not know what filmmakers Tricia Todd & Eric Matthies went looking for when they first decided to make a film about Williams; perhaps just the delight in interviewing a man whose life had been endlessly interesting, though full of suffering; perhaps it was the appeal of Williams himself, a foul-mouthed, unabashedly sexual old blues man who seems to lack any sort of filter between his brain and his mouth. Perhaps - though I doubt it - they expected their story to develop in the exact way it did.

During the year that Todd and Matthies followed him, Williams had something of a bottoming-out with his alcoholism, and thereupon dedicated himself to getting cleaned up, and back on his feet. And this is where Agile, Mobile, Hostile goes from being a simple documentary about a troubled man comme une autre, to being a fairly brilliant documentary about the human experience. Williams's path to recovery is not a movie-easy one; and by the end of the film, it's hard to say with any certainty that he has "succeeded". Which is exactly the point: we all want to better ourselves, but it's damnably hard to do that, and Williams is ultimately just one more lost soul whose life ought to have been much better than it was, given his achievements, but chance, prejudice and poor choices scuttled all that.

Though Agile, Mobile, Hostile is not an inspirational movie by design, it's somehow inspiring anyway. We are given what amounts to a vignette of a man's life at the moment he wrestles with his darker angels ans rises, if not triumphant or unscathed, at least alive and ready to keep fighting. It is a study of human endurance, centered on the figure of an unjustly forgotten bluesman; it is thus both a deliberate attempt to correct the historic record and a document of a man's attempt to reset his on personal history. It is a modest indie film, perhaps, but it is stuffed with humanity, and sympathy.

Agile, Mobile Hostile screens at the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival at St. Paul's Cultural Center, 2215 W North Ave. on Saturday, March 7, at 5:00 PM

WATCHING SOMEBODY ELSE NOT PLAYING A VIDEO GAME

You'd expect one thing out of a movie with the words "street" and "fighter" in the title, and one of the greatest failures of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li is how very little fighting actually goes on in its modestly convoluted plot about a young woman getting her revenge on a murderous Irish real-estate investor. Though to be fair, it does in fact feature more street fighting than 1994's Street Fighter, and this might be the only thing I have to say in favor of the new film over its predecessor.

Both films, as you likely know if you're even vaguely interested in either of them, are based upon the tremendously successful Street Fighter games produced by Capcom. Both of them are also incredibly bad adaptations, even by the standard of video game movies. I don't honestly understand how difficult it can possibly be to write a screenplay for a fighting game movie: there's an underground tournament happening somewhere in southeast Asia, several people show up to take part, some of them are revealed over the course of the week or however long to have vengeful motives on the tournament's promoter. Good God, if Paul W.S. Anderson could do that right, in the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie, anyone with basic literacy ought to be able to do it.

But no, in Legend of Chun-Li (adapted by one Justin Marks), we get no tournament of any kind, indeed nothing so much as a cameo from any of the dozen or so classic Street Fighter characters: we get a boilerplate "orphan out for revenge" plot that would function identically in every possible respect save the character names if you cut out the video game entirely. I'll not bore you with the details, but in essence, there's this talented pianist/martial arts fancier named Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) whose father was kidnapped many years ago for unknown reasons by a vicious man named Bison (Neal McDonough). Bison is an international criminal who, when we catch up with him in the present, has just overthrown the crimelord of Bangkok. His objective? Something something massive profits for razing the slums. Anyway, after her mom dies of cancer, Chun-Li travels to Bangkok and trains with the martial arts master Gen (Robin Shou), before finally confronting Bison and his lackeys over a MacGuffin that doesn't really follow any particular kind of story logic, but then, it is a MacGuffin after all.

I shall cut to the chase: this is a wildly functional crappy action movie in nearly all respects, with a particularly grinding screenplay. The whole "Bison buys up the slums" plotline is a classic example of a screenwriting having the bones of a political idea (bad people want to exploit the poor), but not enough practical knowledge of the system he's describing to make sense of it all (anyone who's seen the film and can explain how exactly Shadaloo - no longer a crime syndicate, but an investment group - is going to make all that money, let me know). And of course there are the usual sprinkling of absurdities, my favorite of which is probably the unanswered question of why, if Bison's Irish missionary parents died when he was a baby, leaving him in a Thai orphanage, does he speak with a rich Irish brogue?

Only in two respects does Legend of Chun-Li completely collapse. The first of these is Kristin Kreuk, of TV's Smallville, giving one of the most listless performances I have ever seen onscreen. Watching the trailers, it always seemed odd that Kreuk was never really present, nor did she ever speak; I wondered if that spoke to a reduced role in the film. HAH! The opposite, in fact, thanks in no small part to one of the most unnecessary voice-overs in a long time (one of those "because of what you just saw - which I'll describe in full - I had to go to this place that you're about to see" deals), giving us just about all the Kreuk we can handle. The real reason she wasn't in the advertisements, it turns out, is because she was apparently deceased for the entirety of the shoot, boasting one expression, one tone of voice, and only the most unexceptional ability to fake martial arts moves before her double steps in.

The other truly horrid element of the film is the pair of fumbling cops out to stop Bison on their own: INTERPOL agent Charlie Nash (Chris Klein) and Bangkok police detective Maya Sunee (Moon Bloodgood). The "pair of cops working toward the same goal as the protagonist, but poorly" subplot has a long history, and it's nearly always the worst part of whatever film it features in; and yet the adventures of Charlie and Maya is exceptionally awful, as bad as the trope has been since its anti-heyday in the 1980s. This is mostly due to Chris Klein, who actually manages to save Kreuk from being the worst member of the cast. His performance is all oil and slimy charm, as though Nash were a globetrotting crime-fighting, car insurance salesman. Rarely do the movies present us with a putative hero so instantly repellent as this figure, whose very first moments in the film consist of leering at his new partner's ass. Thank all good things in the universe that the cops weren't also the comic relief, for that would have been more than my soul could have handled.

The worst part about the film? It's just bad. The first Street Fighter, with a dying Raul Julia and Jean-Claude Van Damme failing utterly to sound remotely like an American, is a marvelous bit of campy fun, the kind of mid-'90s silly action picture that's goofy and idiotic and a breeze to watch (it's almost the equal of another famously wrong-headed video game adaptation, the bad-acid-trip marvel that is Super Mario Bros.). Legend of Chun-Li is just a boring, bad action movie - which, to be fair, means that it's one of the best video game adaptations ever made. Still, I can't imagine that anyone could get any legitimate kind of joy from this slog of a movie, which at 97 minutes feels twice as long, and can't even manage a full martial arts scene that's worth a damn.

3/10