LIAISONS, WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM?

I think I say this every time a new film from director Stephen Frears comes out, but I really like Stephen Frears a whole lot, even though he's not any kind of a "fashionable" director. The man has a quiet genius for making movies that are altogether right in every wee little detail, and while it is true that he's not much of an auteur - if there's any theme or aesthetic fillip that unites all of his movies, I am entirely unaware of it - he's a gifted craftsman, of the kind that mostly died out after the end of the glory days of the studio system. You can generally rest assured that a Stephen Frears film is going to be perfectly and in all ways as solid and satisfactory as possible.

That mostly holds even when the film is ultimately as flimsy and delicate as Chéri, adapted from the 1920 novel by the French social satirist Colette. It is a charmingly tragic trifle of a movie that reunites Frears with the writer (Christopher Hampton) and one of the stars (Michelle Pfeiffer) of his 1988 Dangerous Liaisons, still the richest and best film of his career. If Chéri fails to hit the heights of that grand old melodrama, it's not for want of mining similar territory (the bedroom games of the idle French) with a similarly lavish attention to period detail; it's just that Chéri is not nearly as ambitious a story, nor made with the same operatic pounding. But for what it is, it's perfectly fine. If I conclude that the film is ultimately a touch on the trivial side, I do not believe that I am accusing it of anything that the filmmakers didn't intend it to be.

The titular character is actually named Fred Peloux (Rupert Friend), the son of one of Belle Époque France's most famous courtesans (Kathy Bates); "Chéri" was the nickname given to him at the age of six by his mother's colleague and pseudo-friend, Léa de Lonval (Pfeiffer). As the film opens, the 19-year-old Chéri has become a disaffected layabout, and Mme Peloux has asked Léa - who fills a role akin to the boy's godmother - to so something to pull him out of his spiral. "Something" turns out to be "start a passionate love affair", which lasts for six years before Chéri's mother announces that she wants to arrange his marriage to the daughter of another former courtesan, a callow thing named Edmée Laure (Felicity Jones). Léa and Chéri rather blithely call off their relationship, but only a few weeks have gone by before both of them realise that they've lost something much dearer than just a fuckbuddy; these two people who have built their whole lives around the idea "never fall in love" have just given up the truest love they've ever known.

There's something a bit depressing about the story when you get right down to it, but there's a certain something keeping Chéri from getting too bogged down in the seriousness of its own story; the arch, ironic narration certainly works to keep us a bit distant from the material, as does Frear's arm's length shooting style, heavy into the long and medium shots. Really, the only thing that doesn't play at dry wit and clinical detachment is Michelle Pfeiffer's marvelous performance as Léa. For a start, the actress is the only person in the film who gets any number of close-ups at all, and she uses them well; allowing us to watch the pain and abandonment in her eyes even as her entire face is smiling with the blandness that only the upper tiers of society can create so perfectly.

Léa really is a marvelous character: old enough to know that she's getting old, but not so old that she "is" old, if you follow me; she's of a certain age, but undeniably lovely and she knows it (it helps that we know it, too: at 51, she's still as gorgeous and desirable as she was 15 years ago, without any obvious hints of surgery). Still, there's an autumnal quality to her affair with Chéri; he is her last young man, at least the last young man she's ever going to possess so completely. Pfeiffer owns every last twist of Léa's character, which keeps dancing towards sadness but always retreating: into self-confidence, petulance, lust, forced contentment. In those few moments where she actually permits herself to drop all pretense and feel the full brunt of her loss, it's a shocking thing, overwhelming the film's carefully-calibrated staginess with messy humanity that the character would just as soon eradicate.

Without that staginess, the movie wouldn't really function properly, although it might be it's a touch too artificial and fussy; not having read the book, I can't honestly comment on its tone. But Chéri the movie has a light wry touch that feels somehow less French than British; naturally, I suppose, since Frears and Hampton are both Brits. There's a stolid quality to everything that doesn't quite exactly fit with the world being presented; it's still a light touch for a fairly light treatment of heavy topics, but the lightness isn't quite as natural and diaphonous, if you will, as it ought to be; it's the lightness of someone inclined towards heaviness trying hard to avoid it. Hence the staginess, an English attempt to recreate the careful shallowness that the French achieve so naturally. This forthright English quality served Frears tremendously well in making his last film, the magnificent The Queen, but along the line he lost sight of the man who created the feathery, acidic Dangerous Liaisons so organically from its very French roots. Something at the edges of Chéri almost suggests that most dreadful exemplar of fussy British mock-art cinema, the Masterpiece Theater school of literary adaptation; Frears is too good at his job to let that happen, but he's never drifted so close.

Certainly, the film is handsome enough to look like a self-conscious period film, probably the most conventional thing I've ever seen shot by Darius Khondji; and the bright, lush score by Alexandre Desplat, though quite good in all particulars, has the feeling of the violin-heavy score that you give to a tony literary prestige picture. None of it enough to make Chéri feel airless, thankfully. It is in fact very airy, brisk and over practically as soon as it starts, a very slick entertainment indeed. But it is a minor work, all told - a well-mounted but ultimately insubstantial look at the nature of love that is more than diverting enough, and constructed very tightly; but without that certain French bite to it, one leaves wondering if there was, indeed, a point to it all.

7/10

MANN'S MEN: COLLATERAL (2004)

Michael Mann rebounded from 2001's slack Ali with a film that - though you might not think it at first - is probably the most experimental and innovative of his career. 2004's Collateral, though in some narrative respects a rather common thing, was one of the few films of the Age of Digital Filmmaking (maybe even the first) in which the use of a digital camera was fully embraced by the director and cinematographers, rather than hidden away in an attempt to make the video look as film-like as possible. God knows I'm no shill for digital photography, but anything can be done right, and it's hard if not impossible to imagine Collateral being as effective if it had been shot on film; its bleak vision of Los Angeles at night could not have been remotely as haunting or grimy without the low-light shooting permitted by video. Even today, five years later, there aren't many films that have used the possibilities of the medium with quite the same imaginative glee - Inland Empire certainly, perhaps Zodiac.

The film's story is quintessentially Mann, making it a bit odd that Mann didn't originate the story, nor does he receive an onscreen writing credit (though it is said that he did extensive re-writing prior to his shoot). The writer of this film is one Stuart Beattie, who concocted the idea as a teenager and developed it into a polished feature form over the years, before co-writing the story for the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and the screenplays for 30 Days of Night and this summer's impending G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. So I guess I'm saying that I think it likely and good that Mann helped to whip the script into shape. Either way, the story focuses on a cab driver, Max (Jamie Foxx), who has spent the last twelve years behind the wheel, all the while promising himself that he's going to get out of this shit pretty soon now, to start his own company running limos. Along the way, Max has developed the ability always useful to a member of a service industry, to make friends with every one of his customers instantly: we see this first when he flirts with Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), a state prosecutor, and manages to get her number without even asking. We see it as well when he picks up a grey-haired man named Vincent (Tom Cruise), who has a likable way about him, but a certain menace that we see before Max does: for he wasn't privy to the very conspiracy-esque bag exchange that Vincent carried off immediately after landing at LAX.

We were right and Max was wrong, something he learns after cutting a deal to be Vincent's driver all night. At their first stop, Max waits patiently for his passenger to come back, when all of a sudden a body falls on his cab, shattering the windshield. Vincent reappears. "I think he's dead", stammers Max. "Good guess," Vincent smoothly replies." "You killed him?" "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." And thus begins one of the decade's better "long night of the soul" type of movies, as Max drives the hitman from one victim to another, growing increasingly paranoid of being caught by the cops or murdered by his fare, slowly building up the inner strength to do something about it.

Once again, we have Michael Mann's fascination with dual protagonists, although I'm certainly asking too much of the word "protagonist" in this context. Max is clearly our lead, Vincent is clearly his antithesis - not the antagonist or villain of the piece, I don't think. Vincent's function in the drama is to demonstrate a kind of life, driven by self-knowledge and confidence, and morality is not really at issue. If there is a moral argument to be made, it is that Vincent pushes Max to become a better man, not because he has to fight to stop this evil killer, but because he will not allow Max to continue dwelling in comforting fantasies about some time in the indefinite future. He forces Max to instead confront the Now, to make choices in the moment that will determine the course of his future instead of deferring constantly. If the one constant of Mann's cinema is that a man with a certain code is placed into a situation where that code is in crisis - and it seems perfectly easy to me to apply that theme to each and every one of his features, from the TV movie The Jericho Mile through the otherwise uncharacteristic period films The Keep and The Last of the Mohicans, all the way up to Ali's story of a man who gives up success for his beliefs - we find in Collateral a variation on that theme that gives it added interest, coming so far into his career: in this movie, we have a man with a code who is a bad man, and a man with no particular code being forced, at long last, to develop such a code.

Though Tom Cruise got all of the attention in the pre-release marketing and has first billing, the script gives Foxx much more to work with, and he rises to the occasion, becoming yet another person to give a career-best performance in a Michael Mann film (Cruise himself does not; though he makes a good stone-cold bastard, he does not and likely will never surpass his work in Magnolia). Max gets one of the most compelling arcs in any of Mann's films, in fact, going from easy-going but somewhat callow, to terrified and cowardly, to self-assure and active. Maybe it is a stereotypically masculine transformation, but in none of his work does Mann shy from masculinity. At any rate, the Foxx who won an undistinguished Oscar the same year for Ray and has been far too happy playing tough wiseasses in action and war movies since then is like a completely different actor from the man who gives life to Max. It is a subtle and sensitive performance, the kind that it's nearly impossible not to sympathise with, because the actor makes the character seem like such an Everyman.

That said, Max's arc does end up taking the movie straight into the thickets where it gets tangled up for nearly the last quarter of its two-hour running time. When he does finally decide to become a Mann's Man, and stop Vincent from his assassination spree, the film becomes a completely routine '80s-style action thriller. One with its fair share of contrivance, at that; without giving away the ending of a movie still new enough that I think that everyone who will see it someday still hasn't, the movie's climax hinges on a whopper of a coincidence that is given a wholly unconvincing justification. I have heard it said that it is a great thing to begin a story with a coincidence but a terrible thing to end one that way, and while I'm never inclined to notice screenwriting rules very much, this particular film is a strong argument for why that particular rule perhaps has some merit.

But then, there's the other thing I've kept noticing throughout this marathon, that Mann is not terribly interested in plot so much as momentum, and as long as the moments all work individually, that is of greater importance than tying everything off well. For the most part, the moments in Collateral do work individually, although its episodic nature means almost by default that some will work better than others.

Besides, the real point of the movie isn't any of that stuff about characters or manhood or momentum: like Heat, this is primarily a film about Los Angeles, captured wonderfully by cinematographers Paul Cameron (who was let go after a short while, clashing with the director) and Dion Beebe (very much his career-best work) on that video camera that never wants to be anything but a video camera. Collateral simply doesn't look like other movies about night in the city; it is darker and harsher and the texture is altogether different - not sharper, but more pronounced, if that makes sense. If anyone is ever to mount an argument for the superiority of video over film, this movie would of necessity be very near to the center of that argument.

In a career where style and substance never seem that easy to pull apart, Collateral might well be the most stylistically interesting film Mann has yet directed. This led to a certain weakness in the narrative, perhaps, but you can't have everything; and by this point, I think that Mann had stopped entirely having anything he wanted to say as a storyteller; he had maybe reached that point nine full years earlier, with Heat. By this point he was a filmmaker mostly concerned with experimentation in representation and film language, and Collateral is his most successfully sustained experiment in that direction.

ANGRY OLD MAN

The tempting thing would be to make some kind of jokes on the model of "Whatever Works doesn't" and call it a day, but that's a fairly unlovely pun, and besides, however far Woody Allen might fall in any given film from the heights of his greatest work, he deserves more respect than that kind of curt dismissal.

Whatever Works, as has become fairly well-known, was first written in the late 1970s as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, with whom Allen had just co-starred in 1976's The Front; sadly, Mostel's death quickly squelched that idea and Allen shelved the project, moving on to such minor stop-gap measures as Annie Hall and Manhattan. But at some point in the recent past, he found himself without a screenplay when the time came to direct his annual movie for 2009, and so he dusted off the old project, quickly giving it a few cosmetic changes so that you might not notice at first that it's 33 years out of date, and pushed it through production, having found in fellow neurotic misanthropic Jewish comedian Larry David a figure that matched the role's self-righteous unpleasantness and barking condescension.

It doesn't work, though I'm still not certain if Allen or David bears more responsibility for that. For David's part, the thin line separating his persona from Allen's is one that falls on the side of more meanness and anger, and he plays the part accordingly - leaving a character who isn't so mean that he's funny, like in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but who is so mean that he's just not that much fun to watch. It's difficult not to think of Zero playing the same character, giving him that larger-than-life biliousness that made all of his best characters so zingy; honestly, even Allen himself would have been a significant improvement, if only because when he says something scabrous and nasty, he puts a spin on it so that you know it's a joke and not just a really bitter insult.

On the other hand, Allen is the ultimate motivating force behind this screenplay, and it was his choice to present Boris Yellnikoff as a blowhard know-it-all who we're apparently supposed to agree with, at least partially; it's not very easy to tell where Boris is being an egotistical jackass and where he's voicing Allen's honest observations about life and humanity. Either way, Whatever Works approaches the line that's ever-present in Allen's films dividing funny misanthropy from sour misanthropy, and tramples all over it on the way to becoming the writer-director's least enjoyable "comedy" ever. Save for the final few minutes, in which all of the characters reach some manner of important self-awareness and closure, there's nothing at all in the film to keep it from ranking among his most callous and unpleasant films ever.

So, the plot: Boris (David) is an aging New York intellectual, a retired quantum physicist with a genius-level IQ, who has nothing but contempt for everyone else he meets who isn't as smart as he is, calling them names like "moron", "idiot", and "inchworm". One night, he meets a runaway named Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a naïve girl from Mississippi who meets with his instant loathing for her religion and her lack of nihilistic despair. Naturally, they fall in love, and end up getting married, with Boris playing the Casaubon to her Dorothea Brooke, although the literary archetype that Allen specifically and ham-handedly calls out is Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.

After a time, Melodie's mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) shows up, having been separated from her husband; she instantly takes a dislike to the creepy, unhappy old man who's stolen away her daughter, but it only takes a few months in Manhattan for the rest of her red state conservatism to melt away into the life of a bohemian artist. Still, she can't stand Boris, and tries to force Melodie together with a charming Brit named Randy James (Henry Cavill). A while later, Melodie's father John (Ed Begley, Jr.) arrives, and goes through much the same arc as Marietta did.

Woody Allen is not one of those filmmakers who doesn't understand what his movies say about himself and his entire corpus of work, and with a couple more rewrites, Whatever Works could have been a fairly brilliant send-up of so many of his favorite tropes: the fairly gross May-December romance, intellectuals who love to hear themselves talk, the transformative power of New York City on flyover state commoners, the way that his particular variety of atheism marries a crippling fear of death with a certainty that he is on a far higher plane of knowledge than everyone else. Instead, it validates all of them. The repeated refrain of the film is Boris's belief that as much as life sucks, sometimes you can grasp onto something that makes you happy for a bit - you'll die soon enough, but whatever works to make that less of a pressing concern, run with it. But neither he nor the movie he's in seems to honestly believe that, until the final scene; it's pretty clear that we're not supposed to fundamentally disagree with his assessment that Melodie is hopelessly stupid, that religious conservatives are the damnedest fools of all time, that smart people have the hardest time of all, and so on. If we find him a bit unlikable - and I'm certain that Allen intends for us to do so - it's not because his observations are unfair or inaccurate, but because he has the bad taste to insult people to their face repeatedly. It's exactly like the jerk in the line for the movie in Annie Hall running off the mouth about Fellini, being given his own feature film.

My problem isn't that the protagonist isn't likable, of course; nor even, really, that the film mostly agrees with him; my problem is that it just presents all of this as bland fact, and never tries to be very funny or clever. It's just a whining complaint for 92 minutes, a bitchfest for arrogant intellectuals. Allen has made plenty of movies that are very intellectually condescending, but they tend to be at least funny or entertaining. Whatever Works is just hard to watch. I don't like at all to say things like that about Woody Allen, a director and writer I hold in great enough esteem that despite his shaky batting average, I still await every one of his new films with baited breath. I can tell you right now, whatever he releases in 2010 will be one of my most anticipated films of that year. But not because his 2009 film is satisfying on any level.

Just about the only thing in the film that really clicks is the use of direct address throughout, as Boris repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and tells us what's going on - a trick seemingly cribbed from Annie Hall, although it's probably more accurate that Annie Hall cribbed from the original script for Whatever Works. It's a fine bit of meta-humor that starts and ends the film well enough that it doesn't leave you with a particularly bad taste, but there's just not that much of it. And like most Allen films, the jazz soundtrack is pretty well-placed, and thanks to of all random people Harris Savides, the film looks a lot better than Allen films tend to. But this is mostly tiny bits of goodness studded into a field of not-so-good.

It seems that Allen would like for us to receive the story as "a guy who thinks he knows everything and is a dick meets people who challenge him enough that he becomes a bit flexible"; the actual arc is "a guy who is a dick meets people who he decides are nice enough that he likes them even though he must at every moment establish his superiority over them, right up to the movie's final line." I'm not asking Woody Allen to suddenly come out of the closet as a humanist, or anything foolish like that, but leavening his acidic nihilism with anything might have been nice. I've probably made this film sound like I hated it more than anything ever, which isn't the case; though it's comfortably in the bottom third of his movies, Allen has done much worse and for the most part the film presents a credible narrative, even if the characters are all a bit too clichéd according to the needs of the author's argument. But I want so badly for his films to all be great, and when one is as tired and mean as this, feeling like a parody of Woody Allen elements more than the genuine article... I get disappointed. All in all, it's a movie that plays fair by its own rules, but it's so hard to endure!

4/10

JULY 2009 MOVIE PREVIEW

I am a crank - I know this, and if you're a regular reader, you probably know this. And I've been left rather bored by a lot of this summer's movies, including one that everybody else loved and one that is raking in godpiles of money even as I type. So it makes me feel word to observe how many of the movies coming out this month are things that I'm actually really excited for.

1.7.2009
Exhibit A, of course is Public Enemies, the movie I was so excited to see that I arranged a month-long marathon on this blog to celebrate it. Hard to say if I'm still as excited, or more excited, or what. But with the wait over in hardly more than a day, I'm feeling pretty good about how I spent my June.

Then there's Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which I'm so not-excited for that I keep forgetting it exists.


3.7.2009
Nia Vardalos, absent for five years, has her second movie in two months, I Hate Valentine's Day, in which she reunites with John Corbett of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, to the cheers of I suspect tens of movie fans across the country.


10.7.2009
Okay, so Brüno could go a hell of a lot of different ways. Like everyone, I loved Borat, but Brüno isn't as good a character to start with, and the trailer is full of moments that look like shit-stirring for its own sake, hold the comedy. And then I hear stories about the content that we don't see in the trailer, and I get excited again. Somebody help me with this: anticipation or dread?

And then I look at the rest of the week and find that Chris Columbus, who I had just assumed was dead or retired to the Caymans, or something, has a new movie, I Love You, Beth Cooper, a stupid-looking teen comedy throwback "long night of the soul" sex comedy. Which will probably therefore be Columbus's best movie ever. And Brüno seems much more exciting.

Limited releases: stylish vampires-with-swords thriller Blood: The Last Vampire, and yes I think I will have a slice. Or, Humpday, a mumblecore gay porno comedy. I'm okay with every part of that except one word. Guess which one? Hint: it's not "gay", "porn" or "comedy".


15.7.2009
I'm still waiting on the summer tentpole movie that I enjoy, but I really honestly do think that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ought to do it. The film series is doing pretty well, it's one of the best books in the series, and the trailer looks gorgeous and creepy.


17.7.2009
No other big release to counter the boy wizard, but (500) Days of Summer, though hampered by a clichéd indie-romance scenario, has the kind of trailer that makes you want to pace back and forth in front of the theater for days until it opens, so you can find out - among other things - why Joseph Gordon-Levitt has an animated bird on his hand.


24.7.2009
It looks like a weekend full of counter-programming, only there's nothing to counter. We've got Orphan, a "scary little girl" movie with a wicked scary trailer, The Ugly Truth, a retrograde romantic comedy starring second-stringers Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, and G-Force, a Bruckheimer-produced action-adventure about sentient guinea pigs.

Oh, holy shit, I just figured out that G-Force is meant to be the E-ticket movie of the weekend. Good fucking Christ.

Limited: Kevin Spacey stars as a celebrity psychiatrist with problems of his own in Shrink, no idea how that could slip into unbearable preachy awfulness, and something called The Answer Man, which appears to have the exact same plot, only a self-help author instead of a psychiatrist.


29.7.2009
No idea why it's getting a Wednesday release, but Adam looks to be made of epic failure: a quirky romantic comedy about a fellow with Asperger's. I would rather use this movie to fuel a cookout than watch it.


31.7.2009
Judd Apatow is back with a movie about a man-child and his buddy who learn to grow up and be adults! Ah, but Funny People has dramatic elements, and will maybe not be as routinely tedious as the Apatow Family Cinema has become in the last two years.

Next up, family sci-fi adventure, and we know how I feel about contemporary family films, Aliens in the Attic; a documentary about dolphin abuse, which I'm sure will be very good, but yay for fun summer films, The Cove; and the irresistibly-named Janky Promoters.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE SCOTTISH PLAY

The golden age of the gialli was not all that long; it can be conveniently be bracketed by two Dario Argento films, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 and Deep Red in 1975. Though examples would occasionally creep out after then - Argento himself has never truly abandoned the giallo style, up to and including his 2009 film titled Giallo - their prominence in the Italian horror industry would be swallowed up by the reign of cannibal movies in the late 1970s, and even more so by the explosion of zombie pictures that began at the dawn of the '80s.

For this reason, we're skipping ahead from last week's 1972 picture all the way to 1987, with the last truly great movie on the giallo model, Argento's Opera - though even taking into account the developments that went on in our 15 year absence, there's quite a lot separating the director's final masterpiece from the main line of '70s gialli. It's partially because Opera, like many '80s gialli, was being made in counterpoint to those other violent mysteries so popular in the decade, the American slasher films - while some Italian filmmakers were content, or even eager, to ape Friday the 13th and its bastard stepchildren in every detail, the good ones, like Argento, tried to change things up rather a lot. It is customary to observe of Argento's Suspiria that it is a horror movie and an art film in nearly equal measure; not so for Opera, which is pretty much an art film through and through, though it be an art film with an unusual number of bloody deaths.

In Opera, the director gave himself over almost completely to the habit that had marked most of his films, especially in the 12 preceding years of his career: the whole movie seems to be nothing more than a delivery system for extraordinary images. For the slasher imitators of the gialli, that's another way of saying "extremely imaginative murder scenes buried in a horrible, slackly-directed narrative", but that's not exactly what Argento is up to in this film. Sure, he films the violent sequences in the most bravura way he can imagine (indeed, one of the most bravura scenes of violence in all the history of cinema is in this movie), but he films everything the same way.

For example, the opening scene: we're on the stage of an Italian opera house (it was filmed in Parma), where a horror film director named Marco (Ian Charleson) is directing a very outrageous production of Verdi's Macbeth, involving a hodgpodge of crazy costumes, over-the-top lighting effects, and real-life ravens. It's this final detail that has especially angered the leading soprano, Mara Czekova, who storms out into the street and promptly gets hit by a car. Straightforward enough, but the way it's put together!... The first image we see is the eye of one of the ravens, reflecting the opera house, not that we can recognise it at first. Almost all of the action of the scene is presented from Mara's point-of view, in a series of fast tracking shots which dart across the stage, jabbing the director and other people in the face, interrupted only by shots of the ravens watching impassively, croaking along with the music (we never do see Mara, in the event, only her leg in a cast in a scene somewhat further on). It's a crazy, wonderful sequence, with the ravens (whose presence at first makes no sense to us whatsoever) providing creepy atmosphere and the saucy choice to have one character spend her entire time in the movie behind the camera lens demonstrating that the name of the game will be stylistic gamesmanship, just for the raw joy of it.

It's not like we really give two shits about the plot anyway, which is already by the end of the first scene little but a redress of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (a novel which Argento redundantly filmed in 1998), in which a talented young understudy, Betty (Cristina Marsillach) is given the chance to become a superstar with the company's diva out of commission. Meanwhile, Betty is being watched by a shadowy figure lurking around the opera house, who kills anyone who gets in his way - and there the novel and the movie fully part ways, given how many characters the shadowy assassin knocks off over the course of the movie, basically everyone that Betty has any kind of contact with whatsoever. She blames the "Macbeth curse" (as did Argento himself, when a great deal of bad luck and tragedy all started afflicting him and the crew during production), but it's got a lot more to do with good old fashioned human psychosis.

As a mystery, Opera is mostly valueless: not because it is easy to guess the murderer, but because it's all but impossible, given that he is pretty arbitrarily revealed only after most of the other named characters are dead. The explanation for his killings is agreeably dumbfounding, involving psychosexual obsession like so many gialli before it - though oddly, none of the ones I've looked at this summer - and while it makes sense in the most literal meaning, that at the end of the movie it is made clear why he does the things he does, it does not make sense in the more broad meaning, that it can be reconciled with actual human behavior or the way the world works.

As a collection of violent dreamscapes, though Opera is one of Argento's most memorable films - and if there's one lesson I hope everyone takes away from Giallo Month at this blog, it's that the reason you watch an Italian horror film, it's for the surreal, dreamlike imagery. The film contains what might well be the most startling and iconic image in all the director's work, as the killer tapes pins underneath Betty's eyes, so that she cannot look away while he sets about butchering people in front of her. It makes no sense on a practical level, of course, made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Marsillach clearly blinks while the pins are on her face without piercing her eyeballs. But this isn't a torture porn, where we're supposed to be terrified or aroused by the sense of impending physical mutilation - it's the movie version of waking up, sweating, from a nightmare, and you can't really remember what it was but there were oh God these pins! And accordingly, the film is shot through with a poetic anti-realism, never once suggesting that you're seeing something that is or could be or has been factual or even representational. The precursors to Opera aren't Psycho and its kin, nor hardly even The Bird with the Crystal Plumage: this film, like Suspiria or Phenomena, traces its ancestry back the disturbing abstractions of Buñuel and Dalí and Un chien andalou.

It is not a flawless film, not that Argento ever made a "flawless" film: the ending scene, especially the final shot, is ridiculous, opening with what looks for all the world like a parody of The Sound of Music and ending with the last survivor, happy to be alive and showing it by hugging grass and flowers. The music in the film is a damn far sight from the great work Argento did with Goblin in the 1970s, heavily referencing out-of-place American metal bands that don't fit well with the action, and fit even worse with the many operatic arias found all about. And if "the music isn't that good" seems like a nitpick, music is one of the key colors in Argento's crayon box - his best movies are all as good as they are in part because of how well he uses the score. I might go so far as to say that it's the soundtrack and that alone that keeps Opera from the very top tier of Argento films; for while it's a great work, certainly, it's not at the level of his best '70s film, to an equal certainty.

But it is nevertheless a memorable and iconic film, the kind that sticks with you for hours and weeks and months after you see it, haunting your sleep. It is the last truly brilliant visionary work in horror, certainly in Western horror, I'd argue; the end not just of the giallo style, and of Italy's reputation for making good, non-tawdry horror, and of Argento's standing as a brilliant filmmaker - though that's quite a few things to all come to an end at one time. Opera was the last film of a mindset only intermittently seen in American and European film any longer, that horror could be great cinema, that adults can enjoy nightmare imagery just the same as kids and teens. There have been good horror movies since 1987, of course, but the grand experiment in terror and violence as art ended here. At least it ended with a surreal, hypnotic bang.

Body Count: Seven people and three ravens, none of which are real, living animals butchered onscreen, happily. There's also a dream sequence killing or three, but it's rather hard to tell what happens, by design.

TEN FOR MONDAY: BOX-OFFICE UNWORTHIES

At this writing, there are 92 films to have crossed the $200 million mark at the U.S. domestic box office, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen coming within a hair's breadth of the five-day record to entrench itself comfortably as massive popular hit, despite being a solid contender for the title of "Worst American Film of the Last Ten Years".

This got me thinking: we all know that dreadful movies make giant sums at the box-office every year, but what are the absolute worst of the worst? Movies that aren't just mediocre and unworthy, but wholly bad? Surely, not too many of those could be out there, right?

Wrong, unfortunately. Here, in ascending order of their box-office take and rank on the domestic all-time list (as of 6/29/2009), are my picks for the ten worst movies ever to break $200 million - Transformers: ROTF excepted, being so brand shiny and new. (Figures from Box Office Mojo).


Mission: Impossible II (2000; $215,409,889, #78)
We can kick around for ages whether the first one is any good, whether the third one is the best, and so forth. But everybody agrees on this: the middle one is just so damn bad, and much the worst of the trilogy, and Exibit A in the prosecution's case that John Woo shouldn't ever make American movies any more. That is doubtlessly why it's the highest-grossing in the franchise by a cool $35 mil.


Alvin and the Chipmunks (2007; $217,326,974, #75)
Damning proof of the out-and-out contempt with which studio executives hold our children. You would never, ever force this kind of object on somebody who you wanted to see grow into a fine adult with a quick, curious mind; you would only show it to somebody who you hoped to turn into a brainless automaton without any ability to judge the value of things whatsoever. Once upon a time, family movies were lavishly-made epics created by some of the most gifted people in the game: The Wizard of Oz, The Thief of Bagdad, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, anything from Disney's Golden Age. Now, CGI anthropomorphs eating their own shit.


The Da Vinci Code (2006; $217,536,138, #73)
Poor Ron Howard; he's got another one on the list. The problem I have with this film is its overwhelming sense of fatigue, as though absolutely nobody wanted to be there making it, not the director, who plainly hadn't the slightest idea how to put together an adventure movie without filling it up with leaden exposition scenes, and surely not Tom Hanks, giving the only truly dreadful, sleepy performance of his career. Dan Brown's torrid brainfart novel is a gripping drama in comparison; the less-popular sequel, Angels & Demons, is an improvement, much as slamming your dick in a car door is an improvement over catching it in a blender.


Rush Hour 2 (2001; $226,164,286, #67, )
Of course, Rush Hour 3 would come along and make it look like a masterpiece. But this one is a classic sequel to a film that sucked in the first place: every shrill gag and idiotically big setpiece is shriller and bigger, and Chris Tucker's journey from loud jackass who was sardonically funny to loud jackass who was a fucking jackass completed itself with a loud clanking noise, somewhere in the back third of this barbaric, asininine collection of script notes from ad men.


How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000; $260,044,825, #41)
The one truly vile movie on this list. It's one thing to take a classic holiday staple and triple its length by adding wobbly, go-nowhere subplots; it's another to take a charming, slender novel and tart it up by tromping on everything delicate on the page and making it live-action in the most heavy-handed, unpleasant way possible. But the Gold Medal in the Shitpile Olympics comes when you do all that in a Christmas movie - a Christmas movie - that functions largely as a paean to the timeless joy and family bonding that comes from wanton product consumption.


The Matrix Reloaded (2003; $281,576,461, #36)
I'm going to let this one stand in for all the many films that raked in pile after pile of money because a very great, fun blockbuster was popular and got a sequel that missed the point entirely of what made the original such a success. So here's to you, Pirates of the Caribbean sequels! and all you Shreks! and third entries in superhero franchises! But most of all, here's to the Wachowski's disastrous misconception that what we all loved about 1999's paradigm-shifting The Matrix were all the bits with people talking.


Independence Day (1996; $306,169,268, #28)
Looking back on it now, I kind of have a certain nostalgia for it: I mean, hell, it used practical effects! And there's a kind of honesty to its narrative dumbness absent from the horribly cynical, test-marketed dross that gets thrown out most summers nowadays. But it is important to remember this doofy sci-fi action flick for what it is: the moment that solidified a trend that had been creeping into being some 20 years at that point, that you could make a movie as awful as you pleased and undemanding audiences would still flock to it as long as you had lots of crap blowing up.


Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001; $317,575,550, #22)
And here's another trend that needs to be shot in the face and killed dead: certain properties are such surefire money-printing machines that you don't need to put a remotely talented person in the director's chair, and if the resulting film makes a beloved fantasy seem as magical and exotic as a jar of talcum powder, well, that didn't hurt the sequels' business any! In my most optimistic moments, I like to think that the gigantic sums of money brought in by The Dark Knight has finished this off, but those moments don't last more than a few seconds at a time.


Transformers (2007; $319,246,193, #20)
Just because the sequel's off-limits doesn't mean I can't still hate the holy shit out of the first one, in which Michael Bay throws shapes and noise at us for two wearying hours, telling a story that passes well beyond incoherence into outright resentment for any viewer who might try to watch it with some scrap of his or her brain left turned on. Ugly, loud, and stupid - a brutal combination.


Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999; $431,088,301, #6)
Some day, it will no longer be fun to beat up on the hopelessly misbegotten start to George Lucas's incredibly underwhelming trilogy of prequels to one of the most beloved film series in history. That day has not yet arrived.

1939: PRINTING THE LEGEND

In a monstrously prolific career spanning over a hundred films across five decades, John Ford produced greater films than Young Mr. Lincoln, but perhaps not a single one that was more perfect or more Fordian: none of the others saw the same combination of the director's fervent love of his country, his cynical humanist view of small-town hypocrisy, his treatment of the Great Man as a reluctant guy just doing the right thing because someone has to, and his passion for the mythology of American history, all playing off of one another in absolute harmony with acutely controlled compositions, camera movements, lighting, and editing, and all of it centered around one of the finest performances ever given by one of Ford's finest leading men, Henry Fonda, in the role that shot him to stardom after a few bit parts in movies here and there, most prominently the male lead in the Bette Davis vehicle Jezebel.

This story of Abraham Lincoln's rise to prominence as a lawyer in the rough Illinois town of Springfield in the 1830s makes its pious, hagiographic intentions towards its subject known almost immediately after it begins: the first shot we see of young Mr. Lincoln is during a rough political campaign in the even rougher New Salem, right after another man has been blustering on righteously about God knows what, in front of an indifferent scattering of viewers. He introduces Lincoln as a great member of the Whig party, and the image cuts from a shot of our friendly blowhard to a shot of a lanky man, stretched out across a chair on the porch, reading a book. He smiles slightly and stands without looking up, then walks down the porch as the camera follows, hesitantly, almost reverentially, afraid perhaps to lead him. The other man steps aside, and Lincoln - for it is of course he, instantly recognisable even if Fonda's make-up seems to consist mostly of Lincoln's haircut (this is the power of a great performance, I ween) - takes up a position in the middle of the porch entry, stumbling a touch as he reaches to lean on the upper beam, making it look like a natural movement. He fumbles with his pockets and looks awkwardly down. "Gentlemen," he begins, and then the scene cuts to a medium shot point straight at his face, from below; the feeling is that the viewer has just settled down to listen close to what he's about to say. "...and fellow citizens," he goes on, and gets awkward again, before continuing with his speech.

John Ford knew from good character introductions, but this is one of his very best: we know instantly, from the hesitant, awed way the camera treats the subject that he is a very special man, yet we know from Fonda's palpable discomfort, and the unflattering light that makes him squint a bit that he's no God on earth, just a simple human being who wants nothing but to be one of the community, an everyday fella. It is more than likely, in fact, that this is precisely the reason that we're meant to find him so awe-inspiring: his man-of-the-earth lack of airs or stuffy refinement. Less than fifteen seconds after we've met Abe Lincoln, we know everything that Ford wants us to think about him, having been primed maybe by growing up with the same stories that Ford grew up with, about Honest Abe, among the simplest and wisest men to ever occupy the White House, a figure of homespun American where Washington or Jefferson is more of an unearthly legend. Lincoln is the famous old president that you could sit with on the river bank, watching the fireflies come out; that is the Lincoln that Ford loves and wants us to love to, and he packs all of that into every gesture of his movie.

Ford's problems - and I'm referring to the man I hold to be the greatest of all American filmmakers, so "problems" should be read in a very relative way - tended in the same direction, year after year and film after film: a notorious love of ethnic stereotype comedy, a slight over-reliance on insert shots (for my taste), and camera movements that serve their own ambition rather than the good of the story. All of these things are absent from Young Mr. Lincoln, while Ford's customary strengths - including his gift for blocking actors and defining space with the edges of the film frame, and suggesting depth of character from the briefest of evidence - are in abundance, making it just about his most strictly disciplined film I can name. If at times that means it lacks the invention of The Informer, the flair of Stagecoach or the operatic scope of later works such as The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, what it has to trump all of them is a confidence of purpose and a unity across all the elements of its creation, a quality that led Sergei Eisenstein to consider it his favorite among Ford's movies (Eisenstein loved him, Orson Welles loved him; it's really just an objective truth that he's an all-time great).

The purpose to which this was all driven was the depiction of mythological Americana, not to give it the imprimatur of fact - Young Mr. Lincoln is as fuzzy and deliberately anti-real as any of his films, I'd even argue - but to allow us to fully breath in the myth in all its glory. Ford loved Lincoln, this is a truth established again and again in his films; he saw in Lincoln a great moment in America's development, not just a man who was a great American. So his Lincoln biopic does not shy away from treating that man as an icon, though he could hardly have been aware of his own iconography in 1837. And this Young Mr. Lincoln is not in the event a celebration of a single one of the man's achievements - the only plot in the movie is a murder case that was invented by screenwriter Lamar Trotti, based upon an event in Lincoln's career from some 20 years later on - but of his character, and what it says about our national character that we elected him, and years later set him up as an example to all as the kind of fair and progressive farmer-philosopher that all Americans should aspire to become.

The closest I can think of is to suggest that Young Mr. Lincoln is something like the Life of the Saint stories that were popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance - not an original observation, I'm afraid, but one that fits better than anything. It is partly an entertainment, partly an instructional, and mostly a fine Romantic narrative about greatness given flesh. There is no doubt that it is hagiography, but it's freakishly effective hagiography. And Ford, I think knowing that he was making the ultimate cinematic representation of his greatest hero, used every last trick he knew and some he didn't, to create a whole-cloth picture of the man that fails in no respect as drama or as cinema, to create a uniquely American parable whose simple patriotism ties it to the time it was made, reeling from a depression and terrified of war, but whose honest emotion and overwhelming affection for the subject leave it absolutely timeless.

TIES THAT BIND

In 2007, noted moviemaking crazyperson Francis Ford Coppola ended a ten-year absence from cinema with Youth Without Youth, a self-indulgent, talky, artsy, pretentious mess of a motion picture. His follow-up, Tetro, is happily... well, I don't know if I should call it a return to form, because who the hell can say what "form" is for the director of Jack and Bram Stoker's Dracula? All I know is that Tetro is maddening and fascinating in a way that only a true artist could possibly manage, and piddling questions like whether or not the film "works" are completely beside the point. It's a challenging and brilliant and ludicrous movie, and that's what matters, much more than what numerical score it gets on a review aggregator. It's very living bit of film from a once-great man literally decades into his "moribund" phase, and for this reason if no other, it justifies itself.

From the most bare-bones summary of the plot, you'd never guess any of this: Benjamin (Alden Ehrenrich), a kid just a few days shy of his 18th birthday, arrives in La Boca, Argentina one night while the cruise ship where he works as waiter is held up for engine repairs, there to visit his long-lost brother Angie, now going under the name Tetro (Vincent Gallo), and Tetro's essentially-a-wife Miranda (Maribel Verdú). Sadly, Tetro has essentially no use for his kid brother at all, nor any member of his family; we learn before too long that this is because he essentially despises all memory of his tyrannic, dream-crushing father, the great conductor Carlo Tetrocini (Klaus Maria Brandauer, as good a choice as anyone to play an ethnic Italian born in Buenos Aires and raised in Berlin). Tetro left home to become a brilliant writer, but his dreams have stalled out and been replaced by something that neither Bennie nor the audience is ever quite able to puzzle out; let it rest at saying that the great opus he was working on before his burnout was a wholly undisguised recapitulation of the petty jealousies that plagued the Tetrocini family in all its branches for years upon years. What happens to this overwrought situation is best left undescribed, not only because it deprives the movie of some of its surprise to give it away, but because so much of the film's incident - from the drag version of Faust to the hot-tub orgy - would seem even sillier to write down than it was to watch it.

First things first: this is plainly a deeply-felt movie for the writer-director (working with his first self-penned original screenplay since The Conversation, 35 years ago). In a very real sense, the film's forthright explosion of familial rivalry and jealousy suggests in no uncertain terms that Coppola feels tremendous guilt over being the most successful and famous member of a large family that includes numerous other well-known film professionals: his children Sofia and Roman have both directed movies, Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman are his nephews, Talia Shire is his sister, and his father Carmine wrote film scores, and this is all without even looking it up. But only Francis will ever bear the distinction of making The Godfather, possibly the most well-regarded American film of the last 50 years, which means that like Carlo Tetrocini, his many artistic relatives are forever doomed to exist primarily in relationship to him. Be honest: no matter how much you liked or hated Lost in Translation, wasn't your first reaction to it, "Huh, Francis Coppola's daughter made a picture that everybody seems to love"?

But not for Coppola père to simply make a melodrama that airs out all the baggage he feels about being more beloved than Sofia would be if she made a hundred Lost in Translations. Tetro is a mad explosion of ideas and conceits and references to other movies, the most obvious being Powell & Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann, a semi-surrealist opera adaptation whose most famously effed-up sequence is both shown in Tetro and later recreated, sort of. But there are also overtones of numerous other filmmakers and films, including Almodóvar, 1950s film noir, and according to Coppola himself, the widescreen films of Kurosawa. It is the kind of grab bag of influences that only a true worshipper of the cinema could ever begin to put together, and there's so much reference to so many movies that have no business being combined in any way that the whole thing takes on the feeling of something completely original. At any rate, if you've ever seen a movie like it, tell me its name, because I'm super-interested.

Besides how steeped he is in film history, Coppola also throws in plenty of invention all his own: the way that the many flashbacks in the film are all shown in desaturated color, windowboxed to a 1.66: aspect ratio (or maybe it's 1.85, I was trying to eyeball it), while the main action is in anamorphic widescreen, black and white, sharp and lit with harsher light than decades of convention have left us thinking plausible. The truly bizarre thing is that the deeply stylised monochrome visuals (I haven't even mentioned the loony camera angles Coppola comes up with) becomes so familiar over the two hours and change that the movie runs that those pedestrian color scenes, shot with what must be a deliberately conservative Hollywood-style cutting pattern, become exotic and weird and inexplicable; one of the first times in my experience that "realistic" footage looks particularly fake and absurd.

Everything is so absolutely heightened and artificial here - let us not forget that "Tetro" is one vowel removed from the Spanish word for "theater", and the film's copious references to opera, stagecraft, and symphonic music leave no doubt for the level of hyperdrama that we should expect from it - that you'd almost expect it to offer no kind of human-scaled story, but the characters in Tetro are all pretty fine, and the three lead actors are especially great; Gallo, for one, is suddenly revealed as a master actor, after presenting himself to the world for years now as a self-serving raconteur and dipshit. And just because Tero is higly melodramatic doesn't mean it can't be moving; it is both, and this is what makes it such a pleasure, in some ways.

Oh, yes, there are some flaws: it's a lot too long, the ending is far too pat, the drama frequently makes no damn sense, and the digital photography makes no attempt to hide its glossy video origins, in a scenario begging for real-live film to be used. But somehow, I prefer a Tetro that spins on for a half-hour more than it earns to Tetro that's tight and perfect; because the Tetro we got proves that Coppola still has more ambition than he knows what to do with, and that's not a thought anybody should have had for many years now. The new film isn't by the most enthusiastic, generous terms a masterpiece, but it's so completely interesting and vital that it couldn't possibly be improved, just by being better. Coppola is in magnificently interesting form here, and I would never dare to ask a 70-year-old who has just found the footing of a curious twentysomething art student to change that for anything.

7/10

MANN'S MEN: ALI (2001)

And then the wave rolled back: after The Insider, in all its outsized magnificence, Michael Mann has never again made a film of such caliber. An indication of the state where he career landed itself in the '00s can perhaps be squirreled out of the fact that for his 2001 follow-up (the two-year gap between movies was the shortest wait for a new Mann film since 1983 - perhaps another indication), he took up a project that had been wandering around in development hell for the better part of a decade: a monumental, epic-sized biopic of boxer and activist Muhammad Ali né Cassius Clay, written by Stephen J. Rivele & Christopher Wilkinson, the team responsible for Oliver Stone's Nixon. Mann and his new best buddy Eric Roth picked up the script, shaved it down a bit (it originally spanned Ali's life from childhood into the 1990s and his struggle with Parkinson's), and tailored it a bit more to the themes Mann found especially interesting. And that is how we have Ali, starring Will Smith in the title role, a solidly-crafted film of little particular interest, undone by its ruthlessly standard biopic screenplay.

Even without knowing that the writers also had their fingers in the Nixon pie, that film was already a clear point of reference for how the story plays out in Ali; and whereas Roth's touch was almost totally invisible in The Insider, the later film bears all of his distinctive fingerprints. The problems with Ali's screenplay are not few, but the worst are that, like Nixon, it darts forward from event to event without any sort of context, leaving us to wonder where in time we are; while like Forrest Gump and The Good Shepherd, it is guilty of a very clumsy attempt to marry its narrative to the course of 20th Century history, resulting in a kind of Greatest Hits parade of famous events and people. From Mann, we get only the focus on Ali's code of honor, and how his religious and political beliefs and race activism led him to sacrifice his career as a heavyweight superstar on the altar of protest against the Vietnam War.

Ali's story is one of the great American biographies of the last 100 years, but Ali squanders it by meandering around in search of the angle it wants to take, without ever selecting one: is it to be the story of a man and his beliefs? Or the story of an icon and what he represented? A history of America, 1964-'74, or the history of a man who rose from anonymity to worldwide celebrity? As usual, Mann tinkered with the film quite a lot after its theatrical release, and the director's cut - the only version I've seen - allegedly focuses a great deal more on the political climate of that period than was initially the case. Judging from the generally ambivalent reviews the film received in December 2001, I doubt that leaving it alone would have been much of an improvement.

If I may share a conversation I took part in not that long ago: the first gentleman suggested that Ali was not a tremendously successful movie because Muhammad Ali was not a tremendously interesting person. The second gentleman and myself quickly set him straight: Malcolm X, Vietnam, triumphant black man during the civil rights movement, winning against George Foreman despite being too old to be a proper boxer. "Well," said the first gentleman, "maybe it's just that they didn't do a good job of making that interesting." Precisely. And that pains me to even think, for this should have been a cakewalk of a film for a director with Michael Mann's preoccupations.

It is not the case as it was with L.A. Takedown, that Ali suffers from the director's inattention and indifference, though by the same token, Ali does not boast a surplus of Mannly notes. The opening sequence is without question the most stylistically innovative and challenging part of the whole movie, in which Ali's - then Clay - public boasting about his upcoming match against Sonny Liston (Michael Bennt) is contrasted with his strenuous private training, and then further contrasted with Ali's idol Sam Cooke (David Elliott, in a tiny but marvelous act of mimicry). This is tremendously exciting stuff, worthy of Mann's experiments in cinematic formalism throughout his career: the gliding camera and studio polish of the Sam Cooke moments and the jostling energy of the scenes with Clay surrounded by throngs of reporters and the bleached-out, grainy shots of Clay running, all form a marvelous little snip of cinematic chamber music that makes it seem, briefly, that Ali is going to be Mann's most innovative narrative yet.

Then it goes away - unless you count "disjointed" and "borderline incoherent" as a narrative innovation; me, I'm happier to think of it as the work of a director saddled with an impossible screenplay and not terribly interested in figuring out ways to make it work, when his energies could be spent elsewhere. "Elsewhere" is the fighting sequences (which like all boxing scenes in movies post-1980, owe quite a debt to Raging Bull, though Mann adds more of himself to Scorsese than most filmmakers do), and honestly not much else that I can tell. Though the film is altogether handsome - it had better be, having been shot by Emmanuel Lubezki - it's handsomeness isn't in service of anything. I find myself reflecting on the difference that it describes between Lubezki and Mann's customary cinematographer, Dante Spinotti: Lubezki is much my favorite between the two, but he doesn't gel with the director nearly as well as Spinotti did, and when Spinotti used grain-heavy stock or overexposure or nimble focal tricks, it felt right. When Lubezki does those things, it jars a bit, as those techniques are not a well fit with Lubezki's typically rich imagery.

And so we have a film that is more than competently mounted, with technical wonders to be found all about, but a hollowness just discernible in its core, as though Mann never figured out what it was all supposed to add up to. That wasn't a problem in The Insider, where every moment of the film added to the sense that we were watching real men locked inside a modern myth, and it was something of an anti-problem in Heat, where there was so much stuff being added up together that the movie suffered from pronounced bloat. Ali feels like the first draft of whatever film Mann set out to make, and I think at times I can see the film he had in mind - it's about a man defining himself according to his politics, and letting that definition trump his desire to be successful and famous; but I have to meet Mann much more than halfway to get there. And even so, that doesn't address the fact that unlike every other Mann film, even The Keep, form and content are not all of a piece, here: an idea crops up, is executed, and then just sits there not tying in to anything else.

The saving grace of the film is Will Smith, giving the best performance of his career - can we step back a moment, by the way, and reflect upon how often Mann seems to get career-best performances out of actors, good and bad? And then stop sniffing at him as a "style first" technician? - in a buoyant and angry turn that captures all the myth of Ali without depriving him of humanity in the process. It's a better performance than the movie rewards; it might even be a better performance than the movie requires. I wonder if, absent such a strong, living central performance, it might have been easier to see the film as a series of impressions of Ali's life, and less of a failed conventional biopic. Other than Smith, the cast is not among Mann's strongest, with only an unrecognisable Jon Voight giving a truly great performance as Howard Cosell, here recast as a kind of wise leprechaun, whispering memento mori into Ali's ear at the height of his fame.

It is a disappointing film; that is that. Not the last disappointing film of Mann's career, either, I'm afraid to say. Perhaps he had run out of things to say, between Heat, the story he'd been nurturing since the earliest years of his directorial career, and The Insider, an achievement so complete that nothing could reasonably stack up after it. One can see a great filmmaker trying to break out of Ali, and that is both reassuring, and yet all the more frustrating; but as far as biopics go, at least this one has the spirit of an auteur about it, even if it does not have much in the way of concrete success.

ROBOTS IN DISGUST

I did not like Transformers. I have come to think, in fact, that it is Michael Bay's worst movie ever, just barely noodging out The Island, although it ought to be mentioned that I have not seen Pearl Harbor, and I'm fucking well disinclined to ever go out and see Pearl Harbor. But I was talking about Transformers, a movie that struck me as being loud and stupid and confusing to look, with all the CGI robot characters seeming to be constructed entirely out of six-inch metal shards crammed together in the semblance of a biped, and when one of those robots fought another robot, it frankly looked to me like just a whole bunch of metal bits all wobbling around onscreen at 100 miles an hour. It was a movie that give me no joy whatsoever.

It is, stacked next to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, pure cinema embodied, a work of art unparalleled.

Because, sweet baby Jesus and all the baby apostles, Revenge of the Fallen is just complete asshattery. In my darkest morbidity, I don't think I have ever imagined that a $200 million summer tent pole film could possibly be so awful. A wretched comedy about uninteresting human beings plays out, interrupted at frequent intervals by scenes of gigantic machines walloping the living crap out of one another for arbitrary reasons, while grossly busy visual effects that look far more like a cartoon than something meant to be integrated with live action footage scream across the screen with reckless, mind-numbing abandon. Meanwhile a needlessly complex and recklessly trite plot taps out, one scene after another, with the oozing slowness of the last drop of molasses creeping down the side of a jar. It is, unfathomably, a movie that is at once so chaotic that the only way to deal with it is to shrink back in the theater chair and let it roar out its guttering violence, and so boring that it almost begs you to fall asleep at the interminable passages of the two teenage protagonists making schmoopy faces at each other.

The film opens in 17,000 BC, which is a coincidence indeed, given that it is roughly 17,000 years long - although I find that all the official documentation claims that it's 149 minutes. Perhaps, but they are the longest 149 minutes that I have experienced. Out 1 rushes by like a TV sitcom in comparison. Whatever the case, in 17,000 BC we learn that '30s-style "ooga booga" type African tribespeople have a fondness for hunting tigers (in Africa?) in a series of one-second shots that fade up from black and fade back down to black, a pointless stylistic quirk that put the film on my bad side pretty much from the second it started. We also learn that they don't have much ability to fight off the 30-foot robots who've set up some kind of giant death machine in their desert, but what exactly those robots are doing there, and how it happened that they didn't go ahead and make the whole human race extinct in a couple of days back at that time, is something that we won't learn for a while. A really long while.

The action skips back to the present, where Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), whom you perhaps recall was the savior of the human race two years ago when the evil Decepticons and the noble Autobots turned Los Angeles into a war zone. Sam is headed off to college on the east coast, eager to become a normal kid after his damaging experiences in '07, even if that means trying to do the whole long-distance thing with his ridiculously hot gear-head girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox). But things aren't so easy for him, after her accidentally activates a tiny shard of the MacGuffin Box from the last movie, and turns all of the appliances in his folks' house into teeny little Decepticons. This quickly-solved problem is only the first of many nightmares facing Sam as he becomes the center of a Decepticon quest to revive the ancient evil leader known as The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd). This quest takes Sam from Washington, D.C. to Egypt, all along the way getting shot at by some very big anthropomorphic machines and rescued by some other anthropomorphic machines, the CGI cast of the new film more than tripling the modest 14 Transformers seen in the original.

Also along the way, Sam is followed by a litany of godawful comic moments, from when his mom (Julie White) accidentally eats a pot brownie about 30 seconds after arriving at his school, and proceeds to tell anyone who'll listen about how he lost his virginity; to the old reformed Decepticon Jetfire (Mark Ryan) who pads about with musty old man shtick and tosses plot holes out like a Pez dispenser; to the slapsticky business centered around former U.S. special operative Simmons (John Turturro, returning for what I hope to God was a hefty paycheck) and Sam's hacker roommate Leo (Ramon Rodriguez), possibly the most played-out character in the film - he'd have stunk of cliché in a 1993 episode of The X-Files. And then there's what is destined to be the most notorious moment in a film of notorious moments, when the little RC car Decepticon that Mikaela has been training to be a good guy starts humping her foot.

Although perhaps I overspeak; the Autobot twins, Mudflap (Reno Wilson) and Skids (Tom Kenny), mindbogglingly racist stereotypes of gangsta tropes given robot car form, seem to be destined for some healthy notoriety of their own.

Careening madly to its abrupt end, the film makes a celebration out of destroying the Great Pyramid of Giza, as though it were just a tinkertoy prop; countless human lives are lost with no more acknowledgment than a warning to the Autobots that they almost got found out on their Shanghai trip. Compared to all of this, Bay's customary misogyny, present here as in the last by a series of porny, objectifying shots of Fox that make her look like the product being hawked in a tequila commercial, is downright comforting.

The film is also ugly as shit, filmed by some anonymous bloke named Ben Seresin with incomprehensible levels of film grain, and the aforementioned CGI that is so shiny it drifts right out of "realism" and into "world's costliest video game" territory. At least, thank all the pretty angels, in this film when the Transformers transform, you can sometimes tell that how it works mechanically, rather than it just looking like metallic shapes melting into car form. Small favors make the world go 'round.

If, somehow, you can get past all of this, I defy you to jump the film's last hurdle: the scenes of robot-on-robot-violence that are the film's single raison d'être, though numerous, make up a surprisingly modest proportion of the film's 917 462 149 minutes, and the rest of the movie is either horrible comedy (as a general thing, if the last film was an action movie with lots of terrible comic relief, this is more like a terrible comedy that is sometimes given over to action scenes), or the damnably bad love story drama between Sam and Mikaela, hinging on the fact that she's put out that he won't use the word "love". And thus it is that a solid hour of a 2.5 hour movie, right in the middle, when it needs to build all the momentum it can muster, is a punishing grind; and thus can 2.5 hours seem twice that.

I do not merely dislike Transformers 2. I feel like I have been betrayed - betrayed by the very same Cinema to whom I have sacrificed so much of my time and emotion and spirit, the Cinema that I treasure more dearly and passionately than ever one person felt towards another, the Cinema that has over the years become the chief joy and driving force of my life. The Cinema, my lover, permitted this atrocity to be made, and I have seen my lover in the most abysmal act of violation. This movie is heinous, shrieking and ugly and tedious and soft-headed, not even giving the thin comfort of being hilariously bad.

Here is a fact to ice over the soul: there will, of a certainty, be a Transformers 3. The end of this film and the ticket sales it will surely enjoy guarantee this. At least we can cling to the comfort that Transformers 3 will be better than Revenge of the Fallen. I had the same hopes going into this one, of course, but here's how I know that I'm right going into 2012: any film worse than Revenge of the Fallen could probably not be legally screened under the strictures of the Geneva Convention.

1/10

MARRIAGE - A TISSUE OF DECEIT, HATRED, BRIBERY, AND BLACKMAIL

For a woefully unconvincing summertime romantic comedy, The Proposal is not without a certain ramshackle, rickety old charm, like an abandoned barn out in the middle of a field somewhere deep in the plains states where every October, some entrepreneur sets up shop charging too much for pumpkins and the world's saddest hayride. That is to say, the movie does not succeed according any halfway reasonable matrix, but it has a certain dozy sweetness thanks largely to its lead actors that means that as far as wretchedly predictable unfunny comedies that reinforce stagnant heteronormativity go, it's a fairly painless way to pass a couple hours, come a summer afternoon.

Directed by Anne Fletcher, a choreographer by trade whose last go round in the big seat was the dire 27 Dresses, The Proposal spins a similarly retrograde tale that just doesn't seem for a second like an actual woman could possibly have been responsible for it, so hideously sexist is it in every turn. But hey, women need paychecks too, and if Fletcher can make a career by selling out her gender, more power to her. In the film, Sandra Bullock plays Margaret Tate, a powerful professional woman, which in the context of movies like this of course means that she's a stone-cold harridan who feels no sort of human emotion and orders her underlings around like a general sending nameless soldiers off to die in the trenches. Chief among those underlings is Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds), her executive assistant at Colden Books in New York City.

Margaret, we soon learn, is a native Canadian whose work visa to America is just about to expire, and since she was too busy being a ruthless bitch - that is to say, an effective businesswoman - to file the necessary papers, she's about to be deported. Unless, that is, she can prove to the INS that she's happily engaged to be married, and in a moment of desperation she threatens Andrew into posing as her fiancé, which means that they need to go together, posing as a couple, to the small Alaska town that his family effectively owns to celebrate his grandma's (Betty White) 90th birthday. There, Margaret meets his sweet mom (Mary Steenburgen) and emotionally distant dad (Craig T. Nelson, with the most unfortunate hair of his career), reminds herself about the magnificent joys of familial love, lost to her since her parents died when she was 16, and dodges the inquiries of dogged INS hatchet man Gilbertson (Denis O'Hare). I suspect that you maybe, while reading the preceding two paragraphs, thought to yourself, "At some point, does Margaret not find herself developing feelings for Andrew, and he for her? And thus she is ready to call the fraud off, but he resists, and things end with them finally confessing their love for one another and preparing to marry, not out of convenience but true affection?" If you did indeed think this, you may now give yourself a cookie. You are as clever as first-time screenwriter Peter Chiarelli.

Programmatic though it be, and mired in unforgivable stereotyping about put-upon good guys and wicked femmes, there are still moments of undisguised pleasure to be found in The Proposal, and a healthy number of them are thanks entirely to Sandra Bullock, which is not something I care to admit. Though I care even less to admit that Ryan Reynolds proves most of the rest. It is the case, try to deny it though I might, that the two of them are pretty charismatic when they want to be, and they actually have remarkably great chemistry (especially in the early scenes when they get all of the angry, hatey banter, which works much better for them than the soulful banter later on that signifies "these people are falling in wuv"). I realised something with this film that I think I should have already known, which is that Bullock actually has some damn fine comedic skills, with pitch-perfect timing and a good talent for under-reacting, and I would kind of like to see her get a good screenplay one of these days, because I think she might rock it. Reynolds isn't in her league, naturally, but he continues the amazing run of 2009 films where he isn't ball-shatteringly annoying every time he opens his mouth, and in a role that doesn't require him to be much else than charming in a sweet way, he surpasses the minimum required.

It would not do to fail mentioning, of course, that both Bullock and Reynolds have extremely fine bodies to look at unclothed, and there is a particular scene that invites - begs! - us to spend several minutes doing just that thing.

Nor would it do to fail mentioning that Betty White is plainly enjoying herself, playing an old lady with a naughty twinkle who perhaps remembers, once upon a time, that she was Sue Ann Nivens. White does not appear unclothed, and this fact does not count as as a particular disappointment

Is it a particularly likable, funny movie? No, of course not. It is a generic construct that privileges comfort and reliability over humor, and hinges on the completely unbelievable scenario that after three years of an emotionally vacuous boss/secretary relationship, it would take a scant 72 hours for Margaret and Andrew to fall in love (the "going on vacation to meet the parents of the man she is blackmailing into helping her defraud the U.S. government" bit I am willing to permit, since bitching about a film's core conceit always strikes me as a touch petty). But it is not punishing - it does not of its nature violate any unspoken contract that we as viewers make with cinema as a whole. This is not something that could be said about 27 Dresses. No, there's even a certain dim sweetness to The Proposal that helps it to go down quickly and painlessly, entertaining and funny in a sort of pallid way. I guess I'm saying, romantic comedies in this decade have been a great deal worse, and at the very least, The Proposal has the very real spark between the Bullock and Reynolds to keep it afloat at nearly every turn. If that's nothing to base a recommendation on, neither is it something to sneeze at.

5/10

MANN'S MEN: THE INSIDER (1999)

Even as Heat was hot of the presses, Michael Mann was already gearing up for his next project: it was in late 1995 that an professional acquaintance of his named Lowell Bergman, an investigating reporter for 60 Minutes, was caught up in a nasty bit of business concerning a former Big Tobacco executive gone whistleblower, and the heavily redacted version of his story which the CBS legal team insisted be aired in place of the actual interview that Mike Wallace had conducted with said whistleblower. Between the airing of the edited story in November and the airing of the complete interview in February of '96, Mann had approached Bergman about the possibility of turning the story into a movie.

Even so, it took until late 1999 for that movie to finally reach theaters, the longest gap yet between any of Mann's projects. I cannot say what the filmmaker did in all that time (production started in 1998), but whatever it was, it was time well spent. For the resultant film, The Insider, is a miracle - the notoriously precise filmmaker's most carefully assembled movie yet, in which not a single shot could be improved in either lighting or framing; nor is there even a single cut that could be moved by so much as a frame without damaging the exactitude of its placement. For the first time in 18 years, since his very first theatrical feature, Mann had on his hands a stone masterpiece. And if I yet conisder that debut, Thief, to be my favorite of Mann's films, it is only by the slimmest of margins, and at least in part because of the romantic fact that it was his first; for by all means, The Insider is of that rarest of cinematic pantheons, a motion picture that is, in all essentials, perfect.

It has, to begin with, the finest cast Mann ever put together: Al Pacino in the last restrained and truly great performance of his career before he transmogrified into a great hock of cured ham in the '00s plays Lowell Bergman; Russell Crowe, still piping hot after his breakthrough in L.A. Confidential, gives by far the best performance of his career as Jeffrey Wigand, the whistleblower; Christopher Plummer is absolutely magnificent and completely unrecognisable as Mike Wallace; and filling in the gaps are brilliant character actors from Philip Baker Hall to Michael Gambon, Gina Gershon to Bruce McGill.

The story is structured, more or less, into two parts with an introduction and an epilogue. The first half of the movie centers around Wigand, and his ambivalence about speaking on the record against Brown & Williamson, his former employers; as they make increasingly threatening gestures towards him and his family, his resolve to stick it to them where it hurts becomes stronger and stronger, although his choice to speak with Wallace and serve as witness in a Mississippi legal proceeding ends up costing him greatly. The second half switches over to Bergman and the situation that arises when the CBS lawyers calculate the possible cost of a lawsuit from Brown & Williamson, as Bergman finds himself the One Good Journalist standing against the system, even watching his friend and mentor Mike Wallace caving in to pressure.

It is a narrative that is mythologically true more than it is factually accurate, perhaps; the exact details of what happened behind locked doors will never be known to the rest of us, but Wallace certainly did not hesitate to slam Bergman and the movie for misrepresenting his actions during that time. Still, what is the point of factual accuracy, I ask. The truth of what happened is ultimately less important than the fact that it happened at all, and however it came to pass that Wigand spoke against the avaricious behavior of Big Tobacco, what matters is that he at long last did.

By reducing the story to such simplified, and maybe untrue, framework, Mann has given it the quality of a fable, with the moral, "It is hard to do the right thing without support; but it is necessary to do it anyway." Nowhere in his career does Mann's pet theme of a man's code of behavior coming into conflict with his reality shine more brilliantly than here. His twin protagonists and their struggles are the finest, most immediately gripping subjects he has ever tackled in a story; men who are both extremely personal and at the same time archetypes for an entire stratum of American manhood.

The screenplay is, generally speaking, Mann's best - impossibly, given that he co-wrote it with Eric Roth, the mercenary behind clusterfucks like Forrest Gump and The Postman. The two-part structure is unexpected, but quite elegantly carried off, transition from one lead to the other so quickly and smoothly that you hardly realise what's happened. And even the fact of having two leads is done with a certain grace: Wigand and Bergman's individual arcs inform one another even better than the cop-and-thief dualities do in L.A. Takedown and Heat, where he had already done quite a fine job of managing two protagonists in a way that was compelling and rewarding.

The comparison between Heat and The Insider is in most ways an informative one. By all means, Heat was made by a man who knew exactly what he wanted, and how to get it. The Insider is, nevertheless, an improvement in every way. As controlled as Heat may have been - and it is an exceptionally tight example of the director's discipline - The Insider altogether implies a far stronger, surer hand guiding the proceedings; it is a film that could only be made by a director at the height of his powers who knew to a certainty that he was, indeed, at the height of his powers; the work of a self-confident master.

Mann's confidence would appear to have rubbed off on Dante Spinotti, working with the director for the fourth consecutive feature and reaching his own career apotheosis. If I am correct in my musing that every Mann film in the last several years has been at some level an experiment, The Insider's most innovative touch is the way that focal depth and light are used throughout, controlling what we are able or inclined to look at, and at what time we are able to look at it, aggressive and never once even slightly off-key. There are focus racks in this film that gave me shudders up the back of my spine, so unexpected and yet perfectly attuned to the emotional needs of that moment in the story were they. Do I reveal myself as a snob, or a techie geek, or just a very weird person by saying that? Then let me so reveal myself, for the control over focal depth that Mann and Spinotti exhibit in The Insider , and what it does for the story, forces me to pull out the biggest and most serious adjective in my Critic's Bag O' Adjectives: Wellesian. The Insider is a thoroughly Wellesian motion picture. I have said it, I shall not seek to unsay it.

If one could pick but a single film and call it the culmination of all Mann's skills, preoccupations and talents, it would be this. His mythic treatment of masculinity had never been so elemental (odd, that it should be in his first film based entirely upon historical events), his treatment of procedure never before so engaged with tiny details (for example the marvelous opening scene of Bergman in Iran: serves little narrative purpose, but as a perfect microcosm of how he functions in his job, and it this that shall define him for the rest of the film), his imagery never before so steady-handed and precise. "Perfect" I said before; well, I like to think that I don't hand "perfect" out easily, but when it's earned, it is earned. In every respect save, maybe, factual, The Insider is as perfect as any American movie from the high-water mark year of contemporary cinema that was 1999.