SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE PRESERVATION OF RARE BIRDS

If Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much can be identified as the first giallo, it's mostly because of hindsight: it is ground zero for the form, the earliest ending point for most of the tropes that came to define the subgenre. But at the same time, it's notable as much for the ways in which it is unlike other gialli as the ways in which it is like them, something of a hothouse for ideas in which some lines of inquiry were pursued and others ignored; in this it is to the giallo as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is to the slasher film. To continue the metaphor, Bava's 1964 Blood and Black Lace (a colorful mistranslation of Sei donne per l'assassino, or Six Women for the Killer) is the Halloween of gialli: the film that really nailed down almost all of the "rules" for the style, with the understanding that "giallo" is a much less specific category than "slasher", based on mood, style and narrative ingredients rather than a easily-identified narrative structure. But, like Halloween, Blood and Black Lace wasn't the film that made the subgenre explode into a hugely popular phenomenon. That wouldn't happen for another six years.

Tonight, then, we shall consider the Friday the 13th of the gialli.

Having said that, it can be easily argued that the main historical importance of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage isn't its influence over a significant but ultimately obscure subset of mystery thrillers. It was also the directorial debut of a 29-year-old screenwriter named Dario Argento, primarily known for his Westerns at that time (including a story credit on a certain Once Upon a Time in the West), and that same Argento would develop over the following 15 years into perhaps the finest horror filmmaker known to cinema history, before spending the subsequent decades descending further into presumably unintentional self-parody.

But let us not permit foreknowledge of the dire 1998 version of The Phantom of the Opera to stand in the way of appreciating the director's first work, one of the most self-assured debuts of all time, a work so certain in its conception and execution that almost 40 years later I'd still quickly rank it as one of Argento's three finest pictures (alongside 1975's Deep Red and 1977's Suspiria). Though it perhaps lacks the quintessential baroque visual flair upon which the director's fame primarily rests, this is still a top-drawer murder mystery, all the more so given that unlike many gialli, and most of Argento's later films, it's actually pretty easy to follow all the details of the plot by the end, even if the "explanation" still comes down to "psychopaths kill people because they are psychopathic". And there's a perfectly fine compensation for anyone grousing that the fever-dream imagery of a Suspiria or Opera isn't anywhere to be found: in this his first movie, Argento collaborated for the only time with future superstar cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, mere months before he shot the indescribably magnificent The Conformist.

Like a great many gialli - indeed, like The Girl Who Knew Too Much - The Bird with the Crystal Plumage centers on the very unfortunate adventures which befall an American visiting Rome. In this case, our American is a novelist named Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante, an American actor who still works, and still makes Italian films from time to time), who is in Italy to write a manual on bird husbandry with professor Carlo Dover (Renato Romano, under the name "Raf Valenti") - novelists, like character actors, apparently need to take embarrassing jobs in Europe every now and then to pay the bills. The reason for Sam's trip aren't immediately important, though; what matters is that it's his last night in the country, and he's not really in the mood to become the key eyewitness to an extremely confusing murder attempt and therefore be held under direction of the Roman police from boarding his plane. Ah, but the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley - Sam does become the only eyewitness to an attempted stabbing, watching helplessly between electronically-controlled sliding glass doors as a woman struggles with a male figure in a black trenchcoat and black leather gloves on the top floor of a chic art gallery. That woman, Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) is the manager of the gallery, owned by her husband Alberto (Umberto Raho), and they're both very grateful that Sam's intervention saved her life, although they have no idea who would be trying to kill her or why; nor does the inspector in charge, Morosini (Enrico Maria Salerno), though he quickly assumes that it's part of a rash of seemingly unmotivated murders of isolated women that has so far claimed three lives and put Rome into a state of panic. Thus Sam - oh! inquisitive Yankee! - takes it upon himself to mount an amateur investigation, with the reluctant aid of his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall) and Carlo, while trying as hard as he might to remember a certain thing he knows that he saw, but just can't quite call it to memory now that he's in a pinch. "A pinch" meaning, primarily, that a man in a black trenchcoat is following him around the city, trying to kill him.

I think that gives us enough to work with, and I've only brought us about 15 minutes into the film. Certainly, that already shows some of the elements that had become cornerstones of gialli by then, and would become even more entrenched by their presence in this very movie: the black-gloved killer in a stylish trenchcoat, the outsider caught up in a confusing murder investigation (whether an American in Rome or a city-dweller in the country, gialli protagonists share a tendency to live far, far away from wherever it is that they find themselves hunting a murderer), intelligent and well-meaning police who are completely useless. And it boasts some of the trademarks that would crop up again and again in Argento's films: the hero is a writer, and the most important clue to the whole murder is something he has locked inside his memory, unable to consciously recall it. As the investigation proceeds, every clue leads to a dead end or another clue, but for the most part, nobody has figured out anything especially useful right up to the point where the killer is revealed. You could not hope for a more perfect example of a classic giallo except in one important respect: compared to the bloodthirsty films that succeeded it, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a remarkably gore-free movie, even in the Blue Underground DVD and Blu-Ray that restores every known bit of violent footage: there are none of the amazingly esoteric killings with sprawling pools of blood that the genre became infamous for.

I dearly hope that's not a disappointment for anyone; sure, Argento does gore as well as anyone, but he's no one-trick pony, and there are more than enough reasons to admire what he's done in this film without having to resort to his sturdy command of Grand Guignol. This is an immaculately-filmed thriller, with individual moments that fully equal the work of Alfred Hitchcock (Argento's ultimate influence, as he was imitating a Hitchcock imitator). To pluck one moment out that works especially well, though not by any means the single best moment in the film: there comes a time when Sam has been sent on thin grounds to look for help in an old shack. In medium and wide shots, very under-lit, we see him look around to no avail, leading to a brilliant shot of Sam walking away from an open closet door (the camera pointing out from the closet), with his movements dislodging an arm that is attached to a body apparently stuffed in the top of the closet. In one shot, then, we have a close-up of the arm in the foreground, with Sam in the background, and it's both shocking and suspenseful - suspenseful because Sam doesn't notice it. So we get a few more shots of him puttering around, until the scene's corker of a visual climax: the camera moves in close to Sam's body, following him as he walks, stopping when he stops, dead in the middle of the frame, and then he steps to the side - revealing the dead body in the closet. It's immaculate choreography, that's what, and just to make everything all the more creepy, Argento has the actor playing the corpse stare directly in the camera no matter where the camera is located, which gives the altogether eerie feeling that hsi eyes are following us (this is all done in cutting, not camera movement, so the dead man's eyes never literally move).

That is a brilliantly-constructed scene, no two ways about it, and speaks to an innate gift for visual storytelling. Whether that gift was Argento's or Storaro's, I can't ultimately say, but either way, it works perfectly, and it's not an isolated incident.

I mentioned, at least twice, that Bird lacks Argento's more famous visionary style, but this is the sort of thing it has in its place: impeccable moments of suspense, and a genius's use of a roving camera - I cannot say to a certainty, but I think this may have more tracking shots than any other Argento film. The film has a more extensive use of the "killer's POV" shot than I can think of in any earlier film, and some very ambitious POV shots we get, including a "throw the camera out the window" shot that beat's Stanley Kubrick's similar trick in A Clockwork Orange by a year.

Of course, Argento's visionary style was the stuff of impressionistic nightmares, and his first film was still firmly a murder mystery: the overlap between gialli and horror hadn't been made yet, the single element of the genre's ultimate profile that isn't present in Bird. That is to say, there'd have been no space for his horrific imagery, but plenty of room for suspense, in the form of careful editing or tracking shots or anything else. And as murder mysteries go, there isn't much room for improvement; some of his and others' later films might have been more "mature" examples of the same basic material, but Bird has its own kind of elemental perfection that makes it arguable the best introduction anyone could have to the world of the giallo.

Body Count: 5, I'm pretty sure, with three more that we only see in police file photos, but I might have missed one; like I said before, these earlier gialli aren't really body count movies, so the deaths aren't given quite as much narrative prominence as they are in any given slasher.

THE SKY'S THE LIMIT

The wave has broken and rolled back, finally: Up is the first film by Pixar studios in three years that does not fundamentally redefine what animated cinema is capable of achieving in the hands of modern filmmaking's greatest collection of geniuses. It is merely an example of what modern filmmaking's greatest collection of geniuses are capable of doing when they settle down to make a movie using all the skills they've accumulated over the years, and make it as a good a movie as they possibly can, and for right now, let epochal paradigm shifts tend to themselves for a while. It is thus a massive disappointment and unworthy of the Pixar name.

3/10

Okay, that's a slight lie. It's no Ratatouille or WALL·E, but that's an obscene standard to hold any movie to. And compared to the rest of Pixar's output - a tradition of quality that has led just about every human being with the ability to form complete sentences about motion pictures to declare the studio the Most Consistently Brilliant Creator of Art and Entertainment in the World - Up stacks up terrifically well. The new film, written by Pixar workhorse Bob Peterson, who co-directed (whatever that means) under Pete Docter (whose other feature was Monsters, Inc.), is a sweet and gentle fable about an old man who comes to know the pain of losing the woman who has been his constant companion throughout all his life; who thereupon determines to complete the great adventure they never found time to pursue during her life; who is confronted at every turn with signs both obvious and subtle that his old way of living has gone and shall not return; and who finds a reason to continue on in the form of a guileless child whose unthinking good cheer reminds that old man that there is beauty in the simple fact of humanity. Yeah, so just another cartoon romp for the kids.

But that's the damned thing about Up: it glances in the direction of greater melancholy than just about any of the studio's previous films (though Toy Story 2 is certainly a work of deep existential terror), but that doesn't keep it from being staggeringly funny, and yes, a great children's movie in the best way: a simple story, beautiful colors, appealing characters rendered in a soft, toonlike way, and it never so much as thinks of talking down to the audience, or assuming that the kids in the theater will be so restless to watch a septuagenarian widower that the only way to keep them watching is a panoply of noisy comic relief characters and fart jokes. This is not a new truth about Pixar, of course. Everyone knows by now that their movies hit an uncanny sweet spot of adult seriousness and childish fancy; if perhaps that balance has trended a bit towards the adult side of things, Up restores things firmly to the camp where there's something for the grown-ups, something for their kids, and it's not always easy or necessary to figure out the exact point where one becomes the other.

The film tells the story of Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Ed Asner), whose long-deferred journey to the fabled Paradise Falls in South America is finally started one day after the death of his loving wife Ellie with the aid of what seems to be thousands of helium balloons poking out of his chimney, lifting his very house of the ground where he'd been threatened with removal for standing in the way of Progress, in the form of a retail development. Along for the ride, altogether by chance, is Russell (Jordan Nagai), a Wilderness Explorer whose gung-ho enthusiasm for helping the old man and earning his last merit badge is a cover for some unexpectedly deep-seated pain and longing for some affection and human contact of his own. The two voyagers make it South America in short order; the real adventure begins when they trek across a stony plateau and jungle, running across a giant, chocolate-eating bird, a dog named Dug with a collar that lets him speak in English (and the voice of writer and co-director Peterson) without, unfortunately, giving him the requisite intelligence to have anything worth saying. And there's more than that, a great deal more; but Up is a movie that knows very well that the best thing is the trip from here to there, and giving away the details of that trip would therefore be the worst thing I could possibly do.

At a minimum, the story of a house flying to South America on a fleet of helium balloons proves that we're not in the somewhat realistic settings of the last couple of Pixar adventures, and the return to undiluted fantasy and cartoon logic suits the filmmakers very well indeed (it's no accident, I think, that the last Pixar movie which had this kind of joyously unreal imagination was Docter's Monsters, Inc.). In no small measure, the foremost appeal of Up as a work of animation - rather than a narrative - is the delight in seeing wonderful sights, and the movie tips its hand with an extended montage of nameless audience stand-ins who do nothing but gawk in amazement at the sight of all those balloons, casting their colorful shadows across everything, carrying a rickety but once brightly-painted house through the air. It is not the only great gift of animation, but I think it to be the most noble, to show us something that could never possible exist or be believed in the real world, and Up does that as well as the best animators currently working could possibly manage.

And it's for this reason as well that the much-trumpeted Disney Digital 3-D on display - this is Pixar's first 3-D movie, though not at all the last, starting with 3-D reissues of the Toy Story movies this autumn - works, even if the technique isn't as revolutionary as it was in this spring's Coraline, except in a few shots. I cannot say in good faith, indeed, that Up "must" be seen in 3-D, although I also wouldn't say that this is a case, as it so often is, of putting lipstick on a dead and rotting pig. There's no "gimmicky" feel to Up because it's, to my best knowledge, the first 3-D movie without one single "crap flying at the audience" trick: the dimensionality is always and without exception used to deepen the film's settings, to give them richer physicality. At least, in theory; like I said, the shots where the 3-D is actually vital are thin on the ground. But thank God, it's never distracting or annoying.

It is a movie that's very sad & funny & thrilling all at once; the kind of film that is at first sheer entertainment for every second of its fleet running time (it seems that the Pixar experiment with films drifting near two hours is well and truly done, and I can't find it in me to mourn that fact, love Ratatouille though I do), and then only afterwards does the full emotional richness of the thing sit in the back of your mind kicking you until you start to realise how deeply moving it was all along. Up finds the studio in a deliberately minor mode, I suspect, trying to make nothing but a simple, appealing "cartoon" after a few "animated films" and they've succeeded, of course, but a Pixar cartoon is still about as good as movies, the kind that are pleasing and entertaining instead of serious and artsy, can be. Up has the unmissable sheen of magic that divides simple kiddie fare from the true classics, the films that light a tiny fire in the soul of anyone who watches them now and for generations to come.

9.5/10

I know I don't give out half points, but it was making me almost physically sick trying to decide between a 9 (my good sense) and a perfect 10 (the fact that I already can't wait to see it again)

WITH MANY A WINDING TURN

Writer-director Rian Johnson's 2005 debut feature Brick was a marvellous genre experiment, inserting the language, plot and mentality of hard-boiled detective fiction almost unchanged into a high school setting. The film was a wholly successful mash-up, with both sides of the equation seeming all the fresher for the wild new context, and the film, it's hardly controversial to say, is one of the best neo-noirs and high school stories of the decade.

Johnson's follow-up, The Brothers Bloom, is also something of a genre experiment, and it's nowhere near as successful as Brick, partially because it tries on the one hand to branch across too many different styles and on the other because it doesn't do all that much with them. At heart, this is a straightforward con artist adventure, shot through with the aggressive quirky tone of Wes Anderson and his many imitators, set in a timeless environment that is probably meant to be the modern day but feels an awful lot like it's the 1930s and matinee serial adventurers are still combing the globe for excitement and glory. Then, if that's all too easy to make sense of right away, Johnson tosses in a whole bunch of arch literary references, including the most casually unexplicated riff on James Joyce's Ulysses that I can remember.

To begin with the story: the brothers Bloom are Stephen and Bloom (whose name I therefore take to be "Bloom Bloom", in the manner of Nabokovian pedophiles and video game plumbers all throughout history), who tear from one foster home to another, causing all sorts of unpleasantness in their wake. It comes to a point where Stephen notices that Bloom is a lonely, shy sort, and so he comes up with a sort of game to encourage him to come out of his shell; it happens to be a con perpetrated on all the rich kids in town, but it at least encourages Bloom to talk to a girl for the first time, even if he has to pretend to be someone else to do it.

25 years later, Stephen is played by Mark Ruffalo, Bloom by Adrien Brody, and they're still at the con game. In fact, they've become the best con artists in the world, although Bloom is tired of it. He no longer wants to act like another person, but to live a life of his own; and this is something Stephen permits for three months. Then he comes to Bloom with one last con: there's a loopy heiress living in a giant mansion in New Jersey, Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), and if they can make a couple million dollars by bringing her out of her cloistered existence for a few weeks' jaunt around Europe playing spy, who's to be hurt? And almost immediately after that, the plot gets far too complex to bother recapping, though I can safely say that Bloom commits the great sin of falling in love with their mark, though it's hard to say if that was or wasn't Stephen's goal all along.

My God, where to begin with this? The single biggest problem with the film, bar none, is that all of Johnson's best ideas are used up with a solid half-hour to go, which means we get a false finale, a false third act, and the last quarter of the movie taken up by the most blatant sort of padding. But this seems like a mean thing to mention, because the first three quarters are actually pretty good, if a touch fussy. Weirdly fussy, and I'm not sure how exactly to explain it, but my best attempt is to say that it's anti-Wes Anderson. That is, Johnson's style here is clearly based upon Anderson's trademark blend of carefully symmetric frames, '60s and '70s musical cues, and lateral camera movements, but the effect is almost exactly the opposite of how Anderson uses those things. All of the fussiness in The Brothers Bloom, including not just those directorial choices but also some elements of the story structure, which thrives on repeated lines and situations, serves to trap the characters in a cage, something that Anderson and his imitators never seem to to deliberately, though it often happens by accident. In essence, Johnson is using a particular and very carefully created style to indict itself. That's a lot for a movie to bear, and it comes so close to working, until Johnson starts to lapse into laziness (for me, the shift happens when he apparently unironically uses Cat Stevens's "Miles from Nowhere" on the soundtrack).

Elsewhere in the film - all the parts of the movie don't cohere the way you might hope - there is that strange "out of time" quality, and I found it quite pleasing in the main: the scenario feels very '30s, the sets and cars are all '00s, the costumes jump all over but strike me as being anchored in the '60s. This is, I think, Johnson's way of suggesting that a good adventure yarn is timeless. After a fashion, The Brothers Bloom is about itself as a story: hence the way it recklessly blends narrative elements from different periods, the way that the writer-director plays around with clichés, practically begging us to predict where the story is going so that as we watch it go there we can see how it's constructed - oh, and then at the last second, here's a twist. And the story is actually about stories, really: Stephen makes a point of building his cons around literary archetypes, and comes to view the elements of his own life as a chunk of story rather than something he is actually living through - he is one of those rare fictional characters who is quite aware that he is a fictional character, though I doubt strongly that he realises that he's in a movie. Anyhow, that trope is used to really interestingly weird effect in this film, though it's quite hard to explain it.

As a point of comparison, though, Stephen is likely based on Joyce's Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses (much as Bloom is - obviously - Leopold Bloom, the man who finds himself searching for an anchor to re-establish his sense of self, and Penelope is Molly Bloom, herself based on Odysseus's wife Penelope in The Odyssey), who in the author's previous A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man managed to exert a measure of will over the composition of the book he appeared in. I certainly don't think that The Brothers Bloom is thus an adaptation of Joyce in any way, but Johnson's writing suggests a similar level of self-aware artifice, and this I hope explains at least a little bit of why it is interesting, and rather more frustrating.

Which leaves, I think, just the acting, which is of a generally high quality. Ruffalo doesn't get to do much, oddly; though he has the most peculiar character, most of those peculiarities are of necessity hidden behind a smooth con man's grin. Brody is the best he's been in a long time, as a damaged man who slowly attempts to repair himself. But the film is quite carried away by its women: Weisz, who starts out as an unusually melancholy variation on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl model, and is revealed, layer by layer, to have the most complex set of motivations of anyone in the film, and Rinko Kikuchi as a silent explosives expert who doesn't really have a character at all, but gets to demonstrate a pronounced facility with physical comedy.

The Brothers Bloom is one of those movies. You know, Them. The ones where there's a whole lot of individual things to like, and the movie is nothing more than the sum of its parts, perhaps less than that. But it's fun, at least, and has a discipline of style not often found in the quirkier indie films out there - and I can't tell if this is a parody of those films or one of them, but either way it's quite quirky. I guess I'd say that it's a fine movie to like, although nearly impossible to love. And from the man who gave us the immensely lovable Brick, this is a minor disappointment.

7/10

HISTORY COMES A-DEAD

Warning: though the following review is written about a family-friendly movie, some of the language found herein is very naughty indeed. Please click the "back" button, impressionable young readers!

As far as I'm aware, nobody is actually all that fond of Night at the Museum, a film that rather unnecessarily made over $250 million upon its release during the Christmas season of 2006 to become the second-highest-grossing movie of that year. At any rate, I've never once heard of somebody saying, "That Night at the Museum picture, that was pretty fantastic. I sure did love it, and I am very eager to see it again at the first chance I get." This is as it should be: Night at the Museum is altogether dumb. Not "entertainingly dumb", nor "watchably dumb", nor "reassuringly, comfortingly dumb". It's just a dumb movie, the kind that advertising campaigns convince kids to beg their parents to go see it, the kind that childless adults and teens go to see because apparently everybody else is, so it must be some kind of fun. It is not, maybe, dangerously dumb; I would never seek to call it a vile motion picture. Indeed, its dumbness is somewhat restful, the kind of thing that you go to see, and find your mind drifting to other places, like the bills you have to pay this week, the wonderful dinner you had last night, landscaping design, whether you should ask out that cute girl who looked like she wanted to talk to you after class, and all sorts of other things that are not the movie itself.

That said, it did make a staggering and unexpected $250+ million, and that means that it was going to get a sequel, and if all the moviegoers of America and the world weren't clamoring for another chapter in the story of intrepid museum guard Larry Daley, fuck 'em. Open it on Memorial Day weekend, precede it with a large enough ad campaign, and people will show up whether they want to or not. Which is exactly what seems to have happened.

Now, about that sequel, the crudely-named Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian: it is not restfully dumb. And it is certainly not entertainingly, nor watchably, nor comfortingly dumb. It is atrociously dumb, the kind of bad movie whose badness achieves a kind of rarefied fairy tale wickedness. It is the kind of movie that leaves me feeling that the quality of my life has been lessened: not because I saw the movie, but because the movie exists at all. If this is the state that successful children's entertainment has reached in this country, I fear for the generation of soul-starved vampires that will be coming to power in about 25 years.

Battle of the Smithsonian returns us to the company of Larry, played as before by the increasingly useless Ben Stiller (sure, Tropic Thunder was just last summer, but before that, you have to go all the way back to 2001 and The Royal Tenenbaums). Since we last saw him, Larry has quit his job as night watchman at New York's Museum of Natural History to become a successful paid-programming inventor and pitchman on the Ron Popeil model; his current big hit is a glow-in-the-dark flashlight - not actually a new invention, but let's run with it. In his rare free time, Larry still visits the museum to spend some time with his friends there, the display figures that magically come to life every night thanks to the magic of an ancient Egyptian tablet held by the Pharaoh Akhmenrah. On the day the new movie opens, Larry arrives for the first time in months, to learn that most of the displays are being moved into storage in the federal archives under the Smithsonian, which means that for most of his historical buddies, this will be their last night of life.

Ah, but the thieving monkey Dexter, who caused such mirthless hijinks last time, endeavors to steal the tablet on the way out, and Larry gets an alarmed call one night from the miniature cowboy Jedediah (Owen Wilson), saying that something horrible is happening in Washington. So off he goes, to find that a new mummy has plans for the tablet: a villainous sort named Kahmunrah, played by Hank Azaria with a slight British accent and a heavy lisp that I assume is meant to be an affectionate parody of Boris Karloff, cinema's most famous mummy, but comes across as a pointless, irritating affection that grows old within seconds of its introduction. Kahmunrah has designs on using the tablet to open a gate to the underworld and calling forth an undead army to take over the world.

So Larry has but one night to stop Kahmunrah, and he enlists an all-star cast of historical figures to help him: old friends like Jedediah, the centurion Octavius (Steve Coogan), Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), and new faces like General George Custer (Bill Hader) and Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams). But Kahmunrah has put together a rogues gallery all his own, including Ivan the Terrible (Christopher Guest)*, Al Capone (Jon Bernthal) and Napoleon Bonaparte (Alain Chabat).

As in the previous film, the actual plot is devoured whole by "wouldn't it be cool if" moments: wouldn't it be cool if Larry jumped into that photo of the sailor kissing the girl on V-J day? Wouldn't it be cool if all the exhibits in the Air and Space museum came to life and were flying about all crazy-like? Wouldn't it be cool if famous statues, some of which aren't even located in the United States, let alone the Smithsonian, got up and walked around and talked? The answer tends, in most cases, to be "no, it would be bombastic and pointless". Of course, since Battle of the Smithsonian, like the first Night at the Museum, was directed by Shawn Levy, this isn't at all surprising. Levy, as merciless a hack as American filmmaking has right now, is a filmmaker who will at no point go for a grace note when a blaring trumpet in a flat key will do the the trick.

If the first film made some small feint in the direction of being all pro-museum and learning, in between the extended passages of crazy shit bobbing about in every direction, the new film replaces those tiny moments with a cheerful ignorance of anything and everything historic: from the collection of artworks that are not technically present at the Smithsonian to the hash made of nearly every one of the non-American characters (especially poor Napoleon), and even some of the Americans: no way is Custer going to have a nice conversation with an Indian woman, like we see here. But complaining about the history in this film is like complaining that fish piss in the sea. I just had to get it off of my chest, because it is part of what pushes the film from "unenjoyable" to "foul".

The last little thing there might be to enjoy is the big ensemble, but they're almost all wasted: Azaria on his accent, Guest on being a second-tier villain, Coogan on being separated from everyone else for almost all of his screentime. Jonah Hill gets a sort of cameo where he demonstrates his most annoying tendencies in a back and forth with Stiller that goes on for about twelve hours; Ricky Gervais walks onscreen and delivers a couple of lines in that shrill squeak that he does when he's acting angry, and then heads off the deposit his paycheck in what I pray is the fund for a new BBC sitcom. Adams is probably the most frustrating thing in the movie: her cheerful persona is ratcheted up to unendurable levels as the film's romantic co-lead - yes, the film posits a romance between Larry and Amelia Earhart, and it's just as godawful as it sounds. Worse than that, the screenplay saddles her with a litany of peppy Depression-era euphemisms that are so old-timey, homespun and squeaky-clean, that when she actually says "dammit" in one scene, it's as jarring a profanity as if Mickey Mouse were to refer to Minnie as a filthy cunt.

As for the Jonas Brothers as a trio of pop-singing Cupid statues: the Jonas Brothers are in the film, as pop-singing Cupid statues, and if that doesn't fill you with acidic tears, then damn your eyes.

I cannot imagine how anyone would manage to scrape any entertainment out of this hellish thing at all. Some of the jokes work, a couple of them actually even work really well. And many of the sequences - I can hardly call them "scenes", as they do not follow each other naturally, nor add up to anything cohesive - must have seemed very cool when they were first set to paper. But there's a long path between first draft and the screen, and everything cool in Battle of the Smithsonian has long since been ground under the heel of indifference and sloppiness and hate. This is no kind of fun movie at all: it is a horrid, brainless thing that makes no sense, treats history and our nation's finest museum recklessly, and is no more magical than the sterile pitch meeting where the whole soulless affair was birthed.

2/10

*It does not seem right to me to squander the first and probably the last onscreen pairing of Azaria and Guest in such a shabby way.

DAZE OF FUTURE PASSED

When a young, cash-strapped filmmaker named James Cameron started writing a screenplay about a diner waitress being chased by a murderous cyborg from the future, he probably didn't expect to be launching a durable tent-pole franchise that would last (so far) 25 years past that first movie's debut. But when The Terminator became a massive hit for its relative tiny budget, a sequel became an inevitability. Still, Cameron had the good sense not to flog something to death just because it made him a bit of money, so when, seven years later, he wrote and directed Terminator 2: Judgment Day, he put in an ending that rather strongly argued against any further entries in the series, wrapping up all of the films' conflicts in an elegantly ambiguous bow, and suggesting that the fatalistic determinism which marked those stories had been replaced by an open-ended future dictated instead by free will.

To everyone's credit, it took a long time for anybody to figure out how to fuck that ending up. But figure it out they did, and now we're facing down the latest effort to wreck the legacy of Cameron's magnificent sci-fi action dyad.

Terminator Salvation represents the first real change to the series formula since it began: where the first two films and the ghastly Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines from 2003 all centered around the chase enjoined when a killer robot traveled to the past to keep John Connor from growing old enough to lead the human resistance against the evil sentient computer program Skynet in the first quarter of the 21st Century. Salvation begins in 2018, when Connor (Christian Bale) has already risen to a position of some prominence within the resistance, and the story of the movie is not at all that of a chase, but rather that of a miserable, grinding war, already years into the fighting with no end in sight. At its most basic level, this is a classic war movie plot: Connor and his team want to infiltrate the enemy base, and there's a man who may be able to help them, but there's good reason to believe that he's a double agent. In this case, the "good reason" is that the man, one Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) was executed for murder in 2003, and has been resurrected as a robot with human organs and flesh, the forerunner to the T-800 series machine played in the first three films by future governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Adding to the fun, Wright met, quite by accident, a teenager who wants to join the resistance, one Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), who Connor knows for a different reason: 11 years later, that same Reese will travel back in time 45 years to impregnate Connor's mother with the future savior of humanity.

It's charming that Salvation is thus both sequel and prequel to the 1984 Terminator, although this is the natural side-effect of an epic, multi-film narrative centered around a looping cycle. This focus on the weird effects of time travel has always been one of the most characteristic traits of the Terminator series, one of the little bits of flavor that serves to separate these films from all the other "implacable killer is hunting the weak protagonist" movies that cropped up like weeds during the '80s and '90s. I think, also, that this is the only element of Salvation that can be rightly called "charming", or any other adjective connoting a positive response; it is in the main a tremendously ugly assault on the senses in which none of the ginormous action sequence carry any real weight because the filmmakers have made absolutely no effort to convince us to give a damn about what's happening.

Directed by the notorious McG, Salvation assumes that since we have (theoretically) watched and rooted for the Connors for three films running, we're inherently anxious to see that John continues his ascent to the messianic role guaranteed him by fate and his initials. That's fine as far as it goes, which isn't far at all: as played by Bale in what is surely the least-charismatic performance of his career, this film's representation of John Connor is an impersonal gung-ho soldier who yells a lot and doesn't seem to have any emotions whatever besides gruff impatience. Worthington's Marcus Wright is a great deal more interesting, as you would expect a resurrected murderer placed into the body of an indestructible machine against his will to be; and yet Worthington also doesn't have much in the way of screen presence, and his biggest acting choice seems to consist of switching between his native Australian accent and the American accent he's taken on for the film at odd intervals.

Instead of characters, McG and friends give us explosions - CGI armies - giant robot planes zooming through canyons! - A roomful of T-800 prototypes! - and to be fair, the film manages to attain the minimum possible threshold of successful "crap is blowing up" setpieces to avoid putting the audience to sleep altogether (though it is powerfully boring for a summer movie, even making X-Men Origins: Wolverine seem wholly dynamic and exciting in comparison). It's PG-13 to the first three film's R-ratings, and that doesn't help; the hectic editing which leaves all of the setpieces incoherent doesn't help either. The biggest problem, though, is that McG isn't apparently making a big ol' summer action movie - he's aiming for a thoughtful and thematically evocative summer movie with some action in it, and he absolutely lacks the skills to succeed at that goal.

It's kind of cutely stupid how he goes about it, though. Did you see Children of Men? Because McG sure as shit did, and his trick for making a post-apocalyptic future action thriller is the rip-off that film's aesthetic in every detail, while managing to completely miss the reasons why Alfonso Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki made it look the way they did. So we have the same almost-monochrome palette (leaning towards greys and browns here, rather than blues), and a smattering of really ambitious tracking shots that carry us all throughout the blown-up and blowing-up sets. All of which adds up to precisely nothing, unfortunately; though I suppose the tracking shots could be defended as "cool" if they weren't so obviously augmented by computer animation. The point remains, that where Children of Men very successfully married its cinematography to its production design and built up a complex and complete vision of the world in which it took place, Terminator Salvation is just fucking ugly.

And yet... it's still a solid step about T3, so one must give it points for that. Cameron's original vision has already been corrupted, and Salvation doesn't add anything worse to that. It thankfully backs down on the tonally-dissonant camp humor that hurt the third film so much. I am straining for other nice things to say, but I think that's pretty much it. This is a crap film, although summer films are capable of being a great deal worse. Is that praise faint enough?
4/10

1939: THIS OLD MAN

The story of an inspirational teacher who causes his (or very seldom, her) charges to understand something new and empowering about the world, is as hoary as any old chestnut out there, and probably for a simple reason: most people who write movies went to school at some point and very likely had a teacher who inspired them to do something, else they would not be movie writers but mechanics or accountants or something like that (I may have also just accidentally figured out why so many of these films are about specifically about inspirational English teachers).

Most of these films are about students, or about the teacher in terms of his relationship with his students, or a particular year in a teacher's life and how he deals with a particular set of students. Rare indeed is the film about a teacher and his career (for most writers did not end up as teachers, for they would not then be writing, in all likelihood), and the most prominent of this narrow field is assuredly the 1939 Best Picture nominee Goodbye, Mr. Chips, or at least its 1969 remake. That later version, starring Peter O'Toole, is a fine thing, and worth seeking out, but it can't hold a candle to the original, starring the largely-forgotten British actor Robert Donat at the peak of his skills, portraying a shy, warm-hearted man from his 20s into his 80s, and doing a fine enough job of it that his fluid transition from youth to age isn't even the most immediately impressive element of his performance.

Donat is Charles Edward Chipping, who arrives at the Brookfield Public School in 1870 to teach Latin to the young boys that will someday run the British Empire. A reserved man who doesn't quite understand how to interact with the young people running around him, he quietly passes a couple of decades in obscurity, until one of his co-workers, Max Staefel (Paul Henreid, wholly unrecognisable as the man who would appear in Casablanca a scant three years later) drags him along on a walking trip to Austria and the Tyrol. There, Chipping meets a lively English tourist much his junior named Kathy Ellis (Greer Garson) when they're both lost on a mountain, and a romance quickly blossoms between the two: she nicknames him "Chips", he proposes marriage, and when they get back to Brookfield, she sets about teaching the teacher how to be a human being, and befriend the young men in his care instead of ordering them about, in the tragically short time they have together before she dies in childbirth. A kinder, gentler Mr. Chips follows, becoming a beloved Brookfield institution and weathering old age and the Great War with equal dignity.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips is by no means a faultless motion picture: for a start, it has remarkably inconsistent internal chronology (Chipping is said to have been with the school for both 58 and 63 years, on what is apparently meant to be the same day, and either of those figures presents difficulties with character ages). And director Sam Wood, though by no means an incompetent - for what it's worth, he directed six films to Best Picture nominations, and was nominated for Best Director for three of those - is simply not a very interesting filmmaker, following the MGM house style without much in the way of deviation, although there are a few moments where he shows something like insight, particularly in the montages that show significant jumps ahead in time (the film takes place largely in four "periods": young Chipping, Chipping and Kathy, Chipping's retirement and the War, and Chipping on the cusp of death), where he does something different every time to suggest that a great deal of history is happening elsewhere; in the first jump particularly, he uses an aggressive series of superimpositions and dissolves that's more than a bit edgy for a prestige picture in 1939.

But no, there is a reason why Sam Wood is not cited among the great studio directors of the '30s, men like Howard Hawks, George Stevens, George Cukor and Leo McCarey. So we must look elsewhere to find the reason that Goodbye, Mr. Chips stays interesting, 70 years later. A big part of it, as I've hinted, is just that Donat is That Damn Good: 33 at the time of filming, he is shockingly credible as an 83-year-old man, although it helps a great deal that Chipping is explicitly defined as the kind of old man who seems a lot younger than he is because of his youthful spirit. Perhaps Donat's Chipping moves a bit fast, and talks a bit too clearly; but this is not meant to be a portrait of dotage and infirmity. At any rate, the makeup - as good as any other old-age makeup from the same time I can think of - does a perfectly fine job of making Chipping seem elderly.

There's much more to Donat's performance than that, though. The arc of Chipping's life isn't that he gets old, after all: it's that he is drawn out of his shell through love, loses that love, and yet continues to live the way his lover taught him. There's a lot of subtle psychology in that brief description, and Donat, one of the few truly subtle actors of the 1930s, hits every note of the complex transformation of stuffy Charles Chipping into grandfatherly Mr. Chips.

The other thing that keeps Goodbye, Mr. Chips as moving today as it was upon its premiere is its fulsome nostalgia; nostalgia that sometimes even lapses into awkward conservatism, it must be confessed. This is a story that recalls with unabashed love the good old Victorian Age, when propriety was the most important thing and nothing was more valuable than uninterrupted tradition. Brookfield is important because it is hundreds of years old; Chips is important because he's been at Brookfield as long as anyone can remember; a public school education is valuable because it teaches things they way they have been for generations. A headmaster is ridiculed by both Chipping and the film for promoting a newer, better way of pronouncing Latin; of course if it's newer it can't be better, is the film's all-but-explicit argument. The film and I don't see eye-to-eye on this, I must admit.

But recall, won't you, that this film came out in 1939, a moment in history when it seemed like all the beautiful old ways of European life were about to be changed forever - as indeed they were. Much as the same year's Gunga Din (reviewed) presented an elegiac love letter to a British Empire that was about to fade away, so does Goodbye, Mr. Chips pay tribute to the more domestic elements of an English culture that was under constant threat from looming Nazism - and like Gunga Din, presents a plot in which the same element of British life it was eulogising was under attack. One needn't subscribe to the particulars of Victorian and Edwardian society to agree that it is a sad thing when a way of life comes to an end, and that is clearly what Goodbye, Mr. Chips is documenting - if Chipping is the embodiment of those generations, it bears noticing that the final seconds of the film bear witness to his death.

It's therefore not as much an attempt to pretend that all this wasn't happening as Gunga Din was; it's more like taking an old friend by the hand and saying farewell. Which brings me back to Chipping himself, who becomes someone we like a lot by the end of the movie, whether we especially agree with what he stands for, and whose passing - unmistakably though elliptically expressed - is one of the most genuinely moving deaths of 1930s American cinema. Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a weeper through and through, one aimed at men instead of women, but loss hovers around it constantly. And yet, unlike so many melodramas meant to send the audience to Hell and back (such as Dark Victory, which we looked at last month) this film suggests that death is sometimes kindly and quiet: it takes an old man at the end of a rich life, giving him a chance to truly understand what kind of legacy he leaves behind. A sad ending it might be, but few sad endings indeed have ever been this uplifting.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: VIAGGIO IN ITALIA

At the risk of repeating myself, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho changed everything. Everything. American movies had been inching towards more violence, more sex, more "grown-up" material, if that's the word for it, for quite a while; but Hitch is the one who gave the whole industry a firm shove off the cliff, back in 1960. Now, I'm not trying to say that he single-handedly invented cinematic modernism (Antonioni was quite active at the time), or uncoded references to sex (Bergman had been doing that for ages), but his movie was the first Hollywood A-list production that included those kinds of things, and it was then as it always has been and shall be that as the American film industry goes, so goes world cinema. So: Psycho. The film that created modern movies.

One of the most obvious immediate results of Psycho's great success was a host of imitators that sprung up all throughout the English speaking world: killers with knives and psychosexual hang-ups stabbing their way through an unsuspecting society. To be fair, not all of these films are as slavishly imitative as the others, and in some cases it seems less like the filmmakers were trying to copy Hitchcock so much as take advantage of the new permissiveness he'd ushered in.

Meanwhile...

In Italy, dating back to the pre-WWII period, there was an extraordinarily popular type of cheap paperback mystery novel known as gialli for their distinctive yellow (giallo) covers, a branding device first used by the Mondadori publishing house. The literary giallo didn't have the same connotations as their cinematic cousins: they were really nothing more or less than murder mysteries on the Agatha Christie model, with none of the weird sexual underpinnings or narrative incoherence that came to mark most of the prominent film gialli.

I cannot say for a certainty why it took until the 1960s for some clever Italian filmmaker to adapt the distinct flavor of the gialli to the screen. Doubtlessly, it had something to do with the state of the Italian film industry after 1944, dominated by socially-conscious dramas for many years. During the 1950s, however, Italian filmmakers started breaking into somewhat less artistic directions: comedies and sex-farces like you could find everywhere in the world at that time, things like that. And by the end of the decade, the Italians had branched into the first two B-movie genres that would make the country famous: the pepla, or sword and sandal films, and the famous spaghetti Westerns. It was a time when the Italian industry perfected a skill that would become very important for keeping the studios afloat in the decades to come; it was a time when the Italian filmmakers became history's greatest knock-off artists.

So when Psycho came along and made buckets of money everywhere in the world, Italy was at exactly the right place to jump on board the Hitchcock train, and many Italian psycho killer pictures popped up like mushrooms in the early '60s. But it took until 1963 for one very clever individual to tie together the idea of a mad, knife wielding killer and the robust tradition of the gialli - in retrospect, as natural a marriage as you could imagine, but it still took a first film to make it happen. That first film boasts the unmistakably Hitchcockian title The Girl Who Knew Too Much, and the gifted man who directed and co-wrote it was a certain Mario Bava.

Having by this point worked in nearly every corner of the Italian industry, from Hercules films to Westerns, not to mention good old-fashioned neo-realism, Bava quickly cemented his reputation as a master horror director (he'd already triumphed in that particular genre with 1960's Mask of the Demon, AKA Black Sunday), and though he'd continue to work in everything from crime thrillers to spy movies before his death in 1980, it was a a top-notch director of increasingly horrific gialli that we still remember him today. I say "increasingly horrific" because even though the link between mysteries about psycho killers and straight-up horror cinema seems obvious and unavoidable now - in large part because of the very movies that Bava directly or indirectly inspired - that wasn't the case yet in 1963, and The Girl Who Knew Too Much could no more be accurately called a horror film than a Broadway musical.

As this movie represents a sort of journey of mine to Italy to find the roots of the American slasher film, I find it satisfying that it opens with a shot of an American flying to Rome. Nora Davis (Leticia Román) has been packed off by her folks, we are told by an unseen narrator, to live for a while with her aunt Ethel, apparently in hopes of ironing out the girl's wild tendencies. What those tendencies might be, we're never quite told: but it is apparently considered a dreadful thing indeed that Nora is an avid reader of pulp mystery novels, the kind that have a scantily-clad woman and the word "KNIFE" in giant block letters on the cover, like the one she's reading on the plane when we first meet her.

Nora's Italian vacation gets pretty bad, pretty fast: upon arriving at Ethel's (Chana Coubert) villa, she meets the handsome Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon, an American actor who enjoyed a robust career in European horror for many years, in only his second Italian film), who informs her of her aunt's delicate medical condition and advises her on the proper administration of medicines. All well and good, but when Ethel promptly drops dead that very night, Nora freaks out and flees the house, wandering through the darkened streets of Rome until she's mugged by a man who clubs her on the head. As she tries to regain her sense of balance, woozy as all get-out, she observes a woman (Marta Melocco) with a knife in her back, and a heavy-set bearded man (Giovanni De Benedetto) who seems to have put it there.

The next day, she goes to the cops, who assure her that no such murder took place, and while dragging Marcello around to help her find clues, she comes across Ethel's friend Laura Craven-Torrani (the somewhat legendary Valentina Cortese), a fellow American expatriate who offers her a place to stay for a little while. Nora reluctantly agrees to the offer, after learning that Laura will be out of town for a few days, but trading one big empty house for another doesn't do her nerves much good, nor ours; for we know, as Nora doesn't, that the bearded man she saw with the dead woman is Laura's absent husband, or someone who looks just like him.

I couldn't explain more if I wanted to, because one of the things that The Girl Who Knew Too Much has in common with just about every other giallo you could name it that large passages of the plot make absolutely no damn sense, although almost everything is wrapped up at the end in a more coherent fashion than I'd expected; a couple of plot holes, sure, but nothing movie-breaking. Even the opening scene, in which Nora flirts with a man who proves to be smuggling marijuana, turns out to have some reason for existing, long after I'd assumed that it had no relationship to the rest of the plot.

And at any rate, plot and coherence aren't really so important as atmosphere and style and thrills, and these things The Girl Who Knew Too Much possesses in abundance. Bava was a great director after all, and even when his films make little or no sense - and this happens often - they are still marvelous things to watch. The key to watching Italian thrillers and Italian horror, I've found, is not to care how all of the moments hang together, but to appreciate each moment for how it is constructed and the impression it makes in and of itself. Bava might not have been quite the creator of powerful images that his follower, Dario Argento was (and I'll be attending to the works of Mr. Argento soon enough), but he still knew a thing or two about how to stage a well-lit, or I should say properly-lit scene in which a terrified young woman creeps down a dark hallway, trying to find the source of the voice that is whispering vague threats. For Bava's career began as a cinematographer (he shot many of the films he directed, including this one), and you'd have to search long to find another director of thrillers, mysteries and horror with such a perfect knowledge of how to use shadows to create a particular reaction in the audience in the space of just a couple of frames. It's probably worth mentioning in this context that The Girl Who Knew Too Much was Bava's last black-and-white film, and while his use of color was pretty spectacular in its own right, the atmospheric mileage he got out of contrasting light and dark in monochrome has hardly been equalled in his chosen genre of film.

Now, as the first giallo, this is hardly a typical example of the style. Most of the things that the genre would become known for, such as a black-gloved killer and outrageously violent deaths, are absent. Indeed, Bava's next murder mystery, 1964's Blood and Black Lace (a great movie as well, and one I'm sure I'll review some day), is in most ways a much more "textbook" giallo, and as such it's often called the first one. There's something to that argument; but at the same time, Bava made sure to connect his film with the tradition of pulp novels, so that even if The Girl Who Knew Too Much doesn't look or feel like most of its descendants, it still must be the missing link between the paperbacks and the later movies. There's Nora's own repeated obsession with the American equivalent of the literary gialli, which comes in play when she uses those books to help guide her investigation; there's a great joke made of it at one point, when the narrator drily notes that the crazy string-based trap Nora sets up to protect herself from any intruders would work because the killer wouldn't expect it: the book she took the idea from hadn't been published in Italy. And then, there's the narrator himself: hardly a customary feature of cinematic murder mysteries, but a functional necessity of mystery novels. By using a narrator throughout his movie, I suspect Bava was trying to make the story closer to a novel than a regular film: something we are told, rather than something we are shown. Of course, "show, don't tell" is one of the guiding rules of filmmaking, but in this case I'd turn a blind eye: it's the single best way Bava could make his movie more "literary", and thus bridge a gap that would in short order result in some unabashedly visual mysteries, made by himself and others.

At any rate, it's notoriously hard to define a giallo. It's not a formula quite as much as a mood and a point of view, and if The Girl Who Knew Too Much is a bit breezier than many of its children, it still shares their casual acceptance of metaphysics as a component of medical science, cops who'll believe anything but the hero's eye-witness account, people doing everything they can to find a killer, and are then shocked when they run across the killer. In the next few weeks, I hope to dig up some of these trends when I can find them: in the meanwhile, let me conclude by proposing that The Girl Who Knew Too Much is a gialli like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a slasher: it created the genre, and the rules followed, and thus it's hardly the germinating film's fault if it occasionally ignores those rules.

Body Count: 5-ish. That is, definitely five, at least one of which is very possibly a vision of something that already happened. But, unlike so many films to come in its wake, this just isn't a body count movie. I mean, one of those five was an elderly woman keeling over from illness.

WORKING GIRL

We all know by now that the career of filmmaker Steven Soderbergh breaks into two separate parts: greatly accomplished studio fare that is extremely entertaining, awards-friendly, or both; and the... other ones. Say whatever you like about the other ones, but it is an undeniable fact that they are not thoughtless things - it may in fact be the case that they're too thoughtful for their own good, so conceptually laden that sometimes the filmmaker can be accused of forgetting to put a movie in amongst all of the experimentation. I'm not the one who's going to argue that, mind you. No sir, I am as slavering a Soderbergh fanboy as can be, which I say only so that you know the proper frame for what follows.

See, The Girlfriend Experience is quite unmistakably one of Soderbergh's experiments - he directed, shot (as usual, under the name "Peter Andrews") and edited (under the name "Mary Ann Bernard", also as usual) the thing, so auteurist arguments have more weight here than usual - and by my accounting, a successful one it is too, just as successful in fact as 2002's Full Frontal, though for different reasons entirely (that's another part of the frame I was referring to: yes, I am one of the half-dozen people in the world who would call Full Frontal "successful"*); it is a sort of hodge-pdoge of ideas that the director has noodled around with throughout the last ten years. It is made after the model of Bubble in 2006: shot digitally (GFE on a much higher-quality camera) in a very short period with non-professional actors, quickly finished and released in theaters, on the HDNet cable channel and as a digital download all in the same span. Plot- and production-wise, it's closest to his deeply under-appreciated HBO series K Street from 2003: a mostly-improvised story and screenplay based on the most important issues at the moment of its creation - here, October 2008 - rushed to completion so that when the audience first sees it, those issues are still living. Cinematically, that is, the structure of the thing, how it was put together, how it "feels" as you're watching, the most obvious precursor is The Limey, which like GFE presents a reasonably simple story in a chronological patchwork of events taken all out of order and overlapping with one another, anchored around a single repeating moment whose exact point in the timeline isn't established until the end.

The film's matter is commodification in a time of economic implosion. Commodification of what? Obviously, the human body - the main character is a high-class prostitute and her boyfriend is a personal trainer - but the film's argument seems to be more about commodification per se, and the human body is only the vehicle for the argument, so to speak. But let us return to that. For now, the prostitute heroine of the piece is a young woman named, perhaps, Chelsea, played by Sasha Grey. Over the course of 77 minutes we learn, but not necessarily in this order, that Chelsea is trying to increase her web presence to make sure that prospective clients can find her quickly and easily - a sort of safeguard against the onrushing economic meltdown that seemed, in October of 2008, to be just inches around the corner (and hey! it still does!); that she is giving serious thought to speaking with the proprietor of a site called the Erotic Connoisseur, an escort critic with major influence over the New York escort scene; that she is living with her boyfriend of 18 months, Chris (Chris Santos), who is perfectly aware of her job, though he is okay with it to an uncertain degree.

Sasha Grey is the film's only professional actor, sort of: since turning 18 in 2006, she has starred in a very large number of hardcore pornographic videos - 159 according to the IMDb, although I don't know if the IMDb is quite the porn authority - and it is not insulting to her or the movie she currently appears in that she's exactly a good enough actress to appear in hardcore porn. This is a fact that crops up in every single write-up of The Girlfriend Experience, as it must: not because critics are porno freaks, but because Grey's celebrity is based on the commodification of the human body. Soderbergh didn't cast her because he wanted someone who'd be comfortable in all sorts of humiliating sex scenes (there's no sex, and only vanishing nudity, anywhere in the film), but because he expected the audience to find this fact out before hand and carry that baggage in with us.

That said, the casting of Grey has an important secondary function: since she can't act, and Santos is arguably even worse, they present us with inhumanly flat leads (to call them protagonists is a bit of a stretch). This seems deliberate; at any rate, like in a Kubrick or Bresson or Von Trier film, the flatness of the acting serves the movie well. Grey's unconvincing performance essentially strips Chelsea of anything human at all, leaving us with only a sort of object - not an object in the feminist sense, where Chelsea as sexual being is turned into an object of male control and passion, since none of the men in the film and Chris least of all seem to be effectual in any degree. Rather that she becomes an object of money acquisition and consumption, a figure that has been consciously designed by whatever is left of the personality she came to New York with to appeal to men so that they will give her extremely large sums of cash for physical gratification. If we're going to apply any theoretical framework to this, it would necessarily be a Marxist frame, and I find it odd and kind of hilarious that after the 4.5-hour Che failed to be about politics really at all, Soderbergh's very next film turned out to be just about the most left-wing thing he's ever made.

For the film is about wanting money and the security it brings, and it is Soderbergh's contention that money can indeed buy you happiness, or something like a fabricated version of it: "the girlfriend experience" is escort parlance for a prostitute who acts for a few hours like an emotional companion, someone to chat with, and cuddle, and sit next to in front of the TV, and make out, and probably have sex, although it's not expected. In other words, paying somebody to pretend to be in love with you, which is after all a completely different thing than paying somebody to have sex. The title cuts two ways, though, for "the girlfriend experience" also refers to Chelsea's life, which seems to be altogether emotionally empty, and yet it's plain that she'd like to have whatever it is that long-term relationships are supposed to provide. It's clear that she doesn't really know, and Soderbergh isn't telling. At any rate, her relationship with Chris is seemingly every bit as shallow and acted as her relationships with her clients. But that's her girlfriend experience: not faking love for someone else, but for herself. It's far more nuanced than "all the money in the world won't make you happy", since it's quite clear that whatever Chelsea suffers right now, things would be a whole lot worse if the looming spectre of nationwide economic wipeout came to pass, and she truly had nothing.

The way that Soderbergh puts the film together reflects all of this, kind of; and it's also kind of indulgent cinematic frippery; and in both cases, I wouldn't trade it for anything. For a start, this is a ridiculously lovely, glossy movie, with beautiful HD footage of chic New York places, and Soderbergh's - I'm sorry, Peter Andrews's - camera keeps drifting away from the action at hand to ogle the lovely things all over, or just to make sure we have a good sense of the space that things take place in, and get a good opportunity to think about how damn much it must cost. This is real estate porno with a dedicated purpose, instead of just making us sigh with contented daydreams about having such a nice place. Soderbergh isn't condemning conspicuous consumption, nor praising it; he's just making it clear that it exists and it's not sustainable, but you can understand why people are trying so fucking hard to sustain it, even if the cost is their basic humanity.

As for the structure; the loop-de-loop, borderline incoherent structure. I think it serves basically the same purpose here that it did in The Limey: showing the way that the human brain, in remembering things, hopscotches about without care for nice things like narrative structure. Only GFE is far more willful in its structural radicalism than The Limey ever thought about: where that film followed a very general path from first event to last, the new film doesn't even start to give us clues about where things fit together until about halfway through. I can't ultimately decide how rewarding it is in terms of the movie: does the film's argument about materialism actually benefit from this wholesale assault on the language of cinema? And then I remember that I don't care, because sometimes the point of formal experimentation is formal experimentation, and if Soderbergh is having fun playing around with structure and I'm having fun watching him do it, well, nobody's getting hurt.

The film is not for everyone, boilerplate boilerplate. I'm not going to make any apologies for loving this project: I think that it says very interesting and maybe important things about the state of America around the time of the '08 election, it says them in a cinematically dynamic way, and it's fun in the manner of a Full Frontal or Schizopolis, assuming that we can agree that those things are fun. I do not know if history will judge this an important document of the Times In Which We Live, but it surely seems to me that it captured something vital.

9/10

P.S. Every critic is duty-bound to mention that the escort reviewer, feeling a bit like a parody of Harry Knowles, is played by the great film-blogger Glenn Kenny, thus furthering the film's use of real-life people to explore how the New Economy has altered the way we function in life. I couldn't fit it in the body of the review, but hey, it's Glenn Kenny. The man is a continuing inspiration to us all.

*I also loved Ocean's Twelve. So I'm just a sociopath all 'round.

WAS EVER WOMAN IN THIS HUMOR WOOED?

Holy hell, it's an independent comedy about a sweetly damaged man who falls in love with a prickly woman with a heart of gold, and proceed to show his love for her in the quirkiest ways possible, which is meant to be all super-cute except that it shades into stalking, and even if it didn't the quirky trappings would still be a lot more fucking annoying the funny! Man, doesn't that sound exactly like a movie that hasn't ever been made before?

In fairness to Management, the stalkery bits don't come off quite as obnoxious as they usually do in movies where some screenwriter demonstrates his (it's always a "him") inability to imagine psychologically healthy courtship rituals, because the characters actually call attention to them: "Stop following me" and "You're insane" and "This is stalking" says Sue (Jennifer Aniston) to Mike (Steve Zahn) at numerous points, and yet she never actually takes real steps to stop him from doing what he's doing. This reads to Mike, and to audience, as her way of indicating that she is actually attracted to him, but she's also scared a little bit of letting her guard down and permitting him to enter her carefully regimented life. So yes, it's still a cliché, but not a morally outrageous cliché.

Management is the story of what happens when a sad man-child who works as the night manager of his parents' Arizona motel falls in love at first sight with one of the guests, awkwardly tries to seduce her - in the most innocent way, of course - in her room, pursues her to Baltimore, goes home, and then pursues her to Aberdeen, Washington, where she has gone to marry an ex-punk yogurt mogul who raises attack dogs. I kind of hated it a bit. If the film is to work at all, it is going to work because of Zahn's off-kilter, slightly inhuman earnestness; because of Aniston's girl-next-door attractiveness and ability to deliver a sarcastic line that sounds almost sincere; because Margo Martindale and Fred Ward, in small roles as Mike's parents, are such naturally gifted character actors; because the soundtrack choices are canny and modern without tipping to far into smug hipness; but at no point because of the script. Written by Stephen Belber (here making his directorial debut), Management presents characters whose behavior is the behavior of grotesques; there is no connection drawn between what happens on the page and what is recognisably human.

The closest thing the movie has to a saving grace is indeed Steve Zahn, who's natural presence is weird enough that he makes the behavior plausible; but it remains the case now as ever, that if Steve Zahn is a film's primary point of identification for the audience, that is a film in grave trouble. I'm not looking to repeat the idiotic canard that only movies with relatable characters are worthwhile; obviously there are plenty of great films and great comedies especially where there's not a single relatable moment depicted onscreen. In other words, I don't suppose that anyone has ever watched His Girl Friday and left saying, "I undoubtedly found something of myself in those characters, and relate to them thoroughly." But Management is not His Girl Friday. It is a film that is full of quiet little moments that leave no doubt whatsoever that we're meant to find Mike and Sue's experiences to be tender and touching. And they're just not tender and touching people: she is a typically underwritten woman in a genre where women are more apt to be functional elements than legitimate characters, and he is a cartoon monster. The peculiar and especially alienating thing about this particular movie is that it feels somewhat like the Napoleon Dynamite-derived line of indie film in which we laugh because the characters are such awful, inferior beings, and yet everything about the plot, and indeed how the plot is presented, suggests that Belber expects us to root for the characters to find love and happiness. I don't like to draw dichotomies, but I don't see any way to resolve that, on the one hand, this is a cringe-based comedy about idiots, and on the other hand, this is a sweet date movie.

I'm certain that Belber never even thought about this being a potential trap for his movie, so debased is the modern indie comedy. Of course the protagonist is a buffoonish caricature, and of course everyone does marvelously idiosyncratic things at all moments, like play giant electric keyboards or work for the company that provides ugly artwork to hotels! I mean, isn't that hi-lariously quirky? The ugly artwork at hotels! Get it?

No, I do not get it, but I gave up a long time ago that I would ever again get the humor of this kind of movie. If this is anyone else's cup of tea, I wish them the joy of it. In the meantime, I am going to sit and quietly lament that Management was so happy to waste a fine bittersweet romantic turn by Aniston (an actress who's always at her best in wee little movies like this one), and keep Zahn (a fine actor when he sets his mind to it; viz) slumming in the thankless realm of roles that demand of him only that he be absolutely zany and elfin. I lament even more the fact that Management had the rare chance of being a successful romantic comedy about people in their 40s, if only it hadn't jumped so quickly into the quirky thickets. Most of all, I think, I lament the fact that the producers of this movie aw fit to pay for not one, but two New Pornographers songs, which are then used in such a whorish way as to provide fake emotional resonance for a movie that doesn't do a damned thing to earn any proper emotion on its own.

4/10

WHAT THEY DID FOR LOVE

The venerable, awards-laden Broadway musical A Chorus Line was already adapted into a famously terrible film by Richard Attenborough in 1985; we've had to wait for the recent documentary Every Little Step by James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo to get a cinematic treatment of the material that actually gets to the heart of why the thing worked in the first place. And I say that as one who's never been entirely convinced of the conventional wisdom that the thing did work in the first place, which means that for my money, Every Little Step is actually the first time that the story has ever been completely successful anywhere.

A Chorus Line was developed in the mid-'70s by director/choreographer Michael Bennett from a series of long recorded sessions he held discussing life and the theater with a group of barely-employed Broadway dancers. Written by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, with lyrics by Edward Kleban and music by Marvin Hamlisch, the show was a tribute to the hundreds of hopeful performers who spent their existence hoping to land just one part in the background of some show, doomed to never achieve stardom, but simply to spend a little bit of time dancing their hearts out onstage. The point being, of course, that these people, though not as famous as the headliners, still had passions and rich lives, and their stories deserved the telling as much as anyone.

The original production ran for a gobsmacking 15 years, ending in 1990. Every Little Step is the story of the revival that opened in 2006, although it includes generous amounts of footage from the time of the original production, and recaps in fairly satisfying detail the history of how the show came into existence. But far more of the films is given over to that terrible nightmare known as the casting process, from the first moments of the open call, all the way to the lucky men and women who made it to opening night, a group of 17 persons culled from over 3000 in bits and pieces over a nerve-wracking eight-months.

In this, Every Little Step is an unusually meta documentary: it is about how hopeful souls were slowly weeded out to play onstage, a group of hopeful souls weeded out to perform onstage. This is a quality inherent to A Chorus Line in the first place, of course, that its creation should mirror its narrative, and one of the things that vaguely bothers me about the show is that it doesn't see fit to foreground, or really even acknowledge that fact. But these are not issues best brought up in this review. The film, in essence, is a document of how people are chosen for the honor of appearing in a Broadway show, and the fact that the show in question is also that same kind of document is a convenience.

It's worth pointing out, that we live in a world where the wrangling involved in getting 3000 people cut down to 17 isn't a completely arcane process; it's the basis for American Idol, the most popular television series in the United States, which I'm afraid means that on any given week, more people are watching a heavily-bastardised version of the casting process than have encountered any version of A Chorus Line in the more than 30 years of existence. God knows that AI and Every Little Step aren't really trying to fill the same niche, but it's hard to avoid noticing that the film tends to paint the figures it ends up focusing the most time on in the same broad colors that most reality TV shows do; the same broad colors that A Chorus Line actually traffics in, for that matter, and one of the biggest problems with Every Little Step on a conceptual level is that the real-life people are generally defined as being quite like whatever character in the show they're trying to play.

This quibbling aside, Every Little Step is a marvelous procedural. That's the only word I can think of to describe it, really. Ultimately, our point of view is never with the various dancers auditioning, but with the panel responsible for choosing among them: director Bob Avian, Hamlisch, Baayork Lee (a member of the original cast), and a handful of others. We stand over their shoulders, as it were, watching them make the hard decisions and agonizing when they can't find anyone who really fits the role properly. This reaches a sort of absurd peak near the end, when one actress who absolutely killed in the first auditions can't quite find the same place during the final callbacks; the way the film is structured, we don't so much feel sympathy with her as share in the producers' disappointment that she's not as good as she used to be.

The film's insider view of the casting process is a bit like watching sausages getting made, but it's fascinating. Because of the multi-tiered structure - tying us to the producers trying their hardest to make certain that Bennett's original vision is honored, and also to the dozens of young actors who we see in snips and snatches, and whose personal anonymity turns them into a collective Spirit of Unemployed Broadway - Every Little Step provides what seems to be a definitive picture of how people end up in shows, made from the trenches for people who have no idea what casting looks like - and in this, too, it seems a bit more appealing to me than the insider-friendly A Chorus Line always felt. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't tell a story that's brand new, particularly given the decades-old history of backstage movies, but it still tells the story well.

7/10

AND YOUR BROTHER TOO

The Coens, the Wachowskis, the Dardennes, the Quays. Filmmaker brothers tend to come in matched sets, working together at all times. Yet it is eminently clear in Carlos Cuarón's debut feature as a director that he is not receiving any tips or aid from his famous sibling Alfonso, although that man did serve as his producer; and although it doesn't seem likely that Carlos is bound for the same heights that Alfonso, his Rudo y Cursi is nonetheless the work of a fine and talented artist, who I expect shall have a long career as a maker of solid, if not hugely significant, movies.

Reuniting Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the stars of Alfonso Cuarón's 2001 artistic breakthrough Y tu mamá también (co-written by the two Cuaróns) is the story of two half-brothers, Tato and Beto, living with their mother and extended family in a dodgy hole somewhere in rural Mexico. The men have very different lives, for all that; Beto has a wife named Toña (Adriana Paz) who's growing increasingly impatient with his unchecked gambling problem, while Tato has no responsibilites whatever, and a pipe dream of moving to the United States and becoming a pop music star. It seems that the only real overlap in their lives is soccer (or football, or fútbol, whatever the hell it's best to call it - I'm a damned American writer, I can't help it), and one afternoon they're out playing in the local dirt field when they're spotted by a talent agent who goes by the name Baton (Guillermo Francella), who figures that despite their age, these two fellows have a real gift for the game. He takes Tato back to Mexico City with him, but it's not long before Tato has whined enough that he drags Beto up as well, and the brothers surprisingly become two of the best players Mexico has: Tato, nicknamed "Cursi" (which, I gather, is a slang word meaning something like "charming"), is Rookie of the Year and one of the best scorers in the league, while Beto, or "Rudo" ("violent"?), proves to be an unassailable goalie.

Ah, but that would all be too happy, too soon, so we in the audience are hardly surprised when Beto turns to cocaine and gambling in a big way; while Tato hooks up with a golddigging TV star girlfriend (Jessica Mas), and uses his new sports fame to become a hopeless novelty singer, performing a godawful Spanish-language cover of "I Want You To Want Me" in a music video where he is dressed like a more flamboyant member of the Village People, and in all this hubbub kind of forgets to keep playing football worth a damn. Things become increasingly bad for them both, but to say more would be to give away the finalé.

The best thing I can say about Carlos Cuarón is this: having selected for himself a powerfully clichéd scenario, he still manages to make it fresh and entertaining for nearly all of the movie's running time. You can predict in the broadest strokes where the plot is going for a good hour before it gets there, but - and this is always the important part - you don't care, because Cuarón directs everything, especially the football matches, with an unobtrusively brisk hand, while letting his two hugely charismatic stars go to town.

I mean, duh. It should be obvious to anyone who's seen Y tu mamá también, or most of the things the two actors have appeared in individually, that García Bernal and Luna are the two big draws here. It's hard to say how interesting Tato and Beto would be, left to their own devices, but that's not an issue we have to confront: they are embodied by two utterly wonderful performers who dig into everything the screenplay offers them and then some. The brothers' relationship is vaguely affectionate and hugely competitive, and Cuarón has thus given his actors a great many colorful and imaginative insults to hurl at one another, and this is plainly something the actors enjoy doing. And they're no worse when they're alone: Luna plays up Beto's short temper and raging personality with something weirdly like charm, for a frankly nasty character, while García Bernal fearlessly jumps into Tato's humiliating cluelessness, and makes it both funny and not a little sad.

Meanwhile, Baton narrates the whole thing as a cross between a fable and an E! True Hollywood Story, and Francella proves to be just as gifted in front of the camera as his two co-stars; he comes across like a wicked but delightful uncle who always gets you into trouble just for the hell of it, but then always convinces you that it was a great joke. He's a dangerous character, kind of, but far too playful to seem that way.

As long as Rudo y Cursi stays in this mode of lighthearted meanness, poking fun at the brothers' inability to handle all the fame and money that get dumped on them, it's a pretty satisfying, if not terribly original movie. And the ending doesn't precisely go bad - the final scene is a perfect button for the rest of the plot, and the anticipated showdown on the field between the two, on opposing teams, ends in pretty much the best way it could. But there is a weirdness that happens, when all of sudden things get Very Serious, and the mob comes into play. And of course, the mob finding its way into a sports movie isn't all that shocking. It just doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the picture very well.

So be it. I still had a good time watching Rudo y Cursi, and its almost but not quite satire of celebrity culture and unnecessary wealth. The whole affair is a bit on the nice & normal side, but Cuarón is a talented man, and he keeps things from dragging when they get too familiar. This isn't much more than a pleasant sports comedy and family drama hybrid, but it's surely entertaining. The very model of a summertime arthouse flick, you might say.

7/10

VENGEANCE IS MINE

In 1934, the spectacularly gifted Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang became one of a great many European filmmakers to emigrate to the United States, hoping to avoid a, shall we say, politically sensitive climate growing in Germany at the time. A Catholic with Jewish heritage from his mother's side of the family, Lang wasn't necessarily all that high on the Nazi hit list; according to a long-beloved and possibly apocryphal rumor, he was even offered a position by Joseph Goebbels overseeing the state-run UFA studio, essentially making him the chief cinematic propagandist for the German government.

Of course, Lang still had something to fear: at the same meeting where he was maybe offered that job, he was informed that his new film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was going to be banned for inciting disorder (its highly critical treatment of a charismatic crime lord was likely seen - correctly - as a metaphor for Hitler and the rise of Nazism), and on top of his previous work, M (a highly critical treatment of mob rule and the presence of wicked murderers amongst nice people, that has often been seen as a metaphor for &c.), the climate for a filmmaker of Lang's inclinations would not long have stayed all that comfortable. And thus it came to be that he fled Germany for France, where he made Liliom in 1934; and from thence to America, where he learned, among other things, that even a spectacularly gifted filmmaker couldn't always get his way in the face of studio executives with an eye unerringly trained to the box office.

When Lang finally signed with MGM and made his first feature in Hollywood, 1936's Fury, the result found exactly the sweet spot where popular success met critical acclaim, without sacrificing an inch of the director's distinct personal vision (okay, just one inch: the sappy final shots of the movie were added at the studio's insistence). A far grimmer movie than the delicious sudsy norm for MGM - well-known as the studio that you went to for opulent literary adaptations and glitzy tales of the rich - Fury was nevertheless enough of a hit to send its leading man, Spencer Tracy, rocketing to the A-list after six years toiling in the trenches, while also unequivocally proclaiming itself the work of the same man who'd directed M. The film is, in no uncertain terms, about the tremendous danger of mob rule, and the horrible things that can happen when everyday citizens decide that getting rid of whatever convenient scapegoat can be plausibly blamed for their problems is of far greater importance than niceties like justice and due process. The film's message (and it is absolutely framed as a message picture) is resonant far beyond the moment of its creation, speaking even to our modern-day political reality, but stepping back to 1936, and remembering the man who directed and co-wrote, it becomes quite clear that this, too, is a not-so-hidden attack on the rise of Fascism throughout the world.

Tracy plays Joe Wilson, a workaday mechanic very much in love with a young woman named Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney). When she moves out west for a job and to be near her parents, he stays back in Chicago, idling away the days until he can follow her and get married, and for the first ten minutes, this all feels like a very typical MGM story of young lovers, and the American Dream - typical but for the unusually expressive visuals, maybe, but you can't take the German Expressionist out of the boy, even if you take the boy out of Germany.

Ah, but things change on the day that Joe, driving to meet Katherine, stops in a little town in some unnamed state that has just been rocked by a kidnapping ring. It just so happens that Joe meets the vague description of one of the kidnappers, and he has the pronounced misfortune to have just received a $5 bill in change with a serial number matching one of the marked bills from the ransom, and on the basis of this circumstantial evidence, he is arrested, and the chain of rumors has made it clear within hours to everyone in town that the kidnapper is sitting in the local jail, and the Powers That Be aren't taking immediate steps to punish the living shit out of him. So it's that very night that a full-scale riot like you usually only see in a Universal Frankenstein movie storms the prison, sets it on fire, and apparently burns Joe to death.

Better for them that they'd waited to double-check that last bit. Joe lives, and he is mightily pissed - so much so, he concocts a scheme to have as many of the rioters tried (and executed) for murder on account of taking part in a lynch mob. That they didn't actually lynch him is cold comfort, as I suppose it would be to anyone who'd spent several hours in a tiny cell expecting a rabid mob to tear him apart piece by piece.

There's a very distinct sense in which Fury feels a little bit like a plate of vegetables: remember, boys and girls, it is Very Bad and Quite Un-American to lynch people. Even if they were bad, everyone has the right to equal representation under the law. Tracy even gets an immensely purple monologue at the end to all those effect, saved largely because everyone involved in the film's production is 100% sincere about everything onscreen, and Tracy's noble humanism gland hadn't really started producing yet, so that he's less a disappointed moralist than a mad-as-hell bastard driven to rotten cynicism by the failure of the country he'd loved. Either way, Fury is never as much of a harangue as so many message films throughout history, largely because of a good cast, and because Fritz Lang is, by any yardstick, a cinematic genius. Fury never lets you forget that it's a Lang film, and while it isn't much of a showcase for what might be his most instantly-recognisable visual trope - by which I mean, the rigid geometry of his sets and the camera's position within them - there's no doubting who was responsible for the imagery (Lang was particularly lucky to get a crackerjack cinematographer, one Joseph Ruttenberg, who was a great craftsman who never let his personality outweigh his directors'). There are many shots of characters looking directly into - or rather, through - the camera lens, a technique Lang had been using at least since 1922's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, and a nice display of sinuous tracking shots, the most characteristic of which (that is, the one time the film really stresses the physical geometry of the location) is a POV shot from the enraged mob marching to the jail, arcing around the steps of the building and rendering the armed men standing to defend it as implacable statues.

When all is said and done, Fury is probably best thought of as a minor entry in Lang's CV - but Lang's career is one of the strongest in cinema history, and "minor Lang" is no kind of insult whatever. It augured well for his subsequent 20-year stint in America (a stretch which produced at least a few masterpieces including The Big Heat, one of the greatest of all films noirs), while also being a pretty fine bit of American filmmaking on its own, international in its concerns but dedicated to a vision of Main Street, USA that wouldn't have seemed out of place in a film that John Ford made at an especially angry time in his life. And it has one of the most remarkable scenes in any '30s crime drama I've ever seen, in which the power of the cinema itself literally saves the day. So, "minor"? Still a pretty great movie.