FEBRUARY 2010 MOVIE PREVIEW

February is a kind of special month for movies, I think. Hold on with me. See, January is a washout. We all know that. If it opens in January, it's shit, end of story. But February, see, every so often, you get really lucky, and something absolutely outstanding opens in February. And I'll tell you what, there's nothing quite as intensely happy as when you're in the middle of absolute nowhere, cinematically, and then along comes something that's actually great and brilliant and all. I much prefer great films in February to any other month of the year. Fingers crossed and knock on wood, there's actually a film this February that I think is going to be pretty amazing, too.

5.2.2010
But that movie doesn't come out yet. First we have to muck through what looks like it might be one of the most awful prestigey movies in history: starring Channing Tatum (a pretty slab of anti-acting), Amanda Seyfried (a talented actress who gets no good parts whatsoever), and directed by Lasse Halström (an epically bad filmmaker), Dear John is also, saints preserve us all, a story about The Days After 9/11. The nicest thing I can think to say is that it's virtually impossible for this movie to be even a quarter as bad as I'm expecting from all of what I just typed.

There's only one other wide release, From Paris with Love, which I am almost excited about: director Pierre Morel's Taken was probably my favorite action movie of 2009. But that starred Liam Neeson as an angry revenge-seeking ass-kicker; the new one is John Travolta, looking his very silliest, with a bald head and a terribly unfortunate goatee.

Speaking of Morel, one of the limited releases this day is District 13: Ultimatum, a sequel to his directorial debut, District 13. And for its other flaws, that film had a mind-blowing opening sequence, so I can get behind that. Other limited releases: Jackie Chan in The Shinjuku Incident, because we love seeing Jackie Chan being old onscreen, and Frozen, which I would cynically describe as "Open Water on a ski lift", but hey, maybe you liked Open Water more than I did.

The desperately flawed Red Riding Trilogy also makes a quick U.S. tour, starting today, if you're interested. I'd suggest you oughtn't be.


12.2.2010
The slate of three wide releases opening this weekend fascinates me. It's a cross-section of three very different kinds of desperation, all mingling together, and it sort of feels like everything is counter-programming to everything else.

The likeliest box-office winner, I'd guess, is The Wolfman, a remake directed by the slick high-concept hack Joe Johnston; I'd also guess it will be the relative best of the three, but all I'm really hoping for is that Anthony Hopkins is every bit as crazed as he seems in the trailer. The other two releases are Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the latest doomed-to-failure attempt to find a new Harry Potter series, and this one even happens to be led by Chris Columbus, the man who got that other franchise off to such a grim start with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Finally, we have another Love Actually clone, this one monolithically titled Valentine's Day: this sounds desperately anonymous, maybe, until you realise how very few movies are actually flat-out named after holidays, and those disproportionally horror pictures. Anyway, it re-teams Garry Marshall with Julia Roberts, if you're the sort of person likely to care about that sort of thing.


19.2.2010
Finally, after a completely inexplicable postponement from October, 2009, comes Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's return to warped psycho-horror-thrillers, almost 20 years after Cape Fear, featuring Leo DiCaprio's Looney Tune version of a Boston accent. Four months of added waiting have only made me more excited about a movie that was already one of the most exciting films of the last quarter of 2009; I can't imagine, with the director involved, that this was some sign of poor quality on the film's part, and I still assume that the Oscar season would have been way more interesting with this film a part of it, but no matter. Better late than never.

So much does everybody obviously agree with me, that the film isn't getting any wide-release competition - though one of the weekend's limited releases happens to be the latest (last?) film by Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer. Cue the hand-wringing about whether it's an immoral act to pay money to see this film or not!


26.2.2009
A nice easy weekend of boring crap to usher us out of the month: the first-ever film directed by, but not written by, Kevin Smith, Cop Out; because clearly, his skills lie more in his direction than his writing, you know? I mean, how much better would Clerks have been with some funny dialogue to match the coruscating visuals? Also, Breck Eisner - Michael Eisner's son, who is plainly getting work for his talent and not his connections - is remaking The Crazies, and as long as that means a nice new Blu-Ray edition of George A. Romero's 1973 original, I am more than happy to keep my mouth shut about the necessity of 1970s horror remakes.

FIVE YEARS AND COUNTING

It's hard to say the exact date when a process begins, but I guess this is as good a day as any other. Today is as close as it comes to a five-year anniversary of when I found out that I had testicular cancer, which had metastasized to my lymph nodes before we caught it. Those interested can find the story, in its essentials, here.

So anyway, this isn't about me asking for attention or love or nothing like that. This is a PSA, my heartfelt plea that you do that self-exam thing that you're supposed to. It's insanely easy: gentlemen, when you are in the shower, just spend a little bit of time feeling your testicles, rolling them between your finger and thumb - gently, of course, they're not golf balls. It's not hard to tell if something is there; indeed, it is heart-stoppingly obvious. You've already got your hand just a couple of inches up from there - don't lie, I'm a man too, I know how it goes in a hot shower - and what's the ten seconds out of your busy life?

And ladies, do the same. I mean, not the "same", but you know... I don't have breasts, so I'll have to flip this one over to the American Cancer Society. Anyway, same deal: it's a minute that could save your life. So do it.

Remember, folks, you're never too young. I was 23. It still gives me pause to think about how easy it would have been to miss 24. Forgive me for being morbid, but this is important stuff.

IF YOU ASK ME, ANY FILM WITH "RUM" IN THE TITLE SHOULD BE ABOUT PIRATES. BUT I GUESS I'M JUST COOLER THAN CLAIRE DENIS.

I would like to make some grand statement about the characteristic aesthetic of French filmmaker Claire Denis, but I cannot do that. Just a couple of days ago, the only one of her films that I'd seen was 2004's The Intruder, and it's brilliant, the kind of movie that makes you want to learn everything you possibly can about a director - except maybe not, because I haven't.

Here's what I do know to be true: 35 Shots of Rum, Denis's 2008 feature only just making its slow way through the U.S. art theaters now, is unmistakably the work of the same woman who made The Intruder, and if I can make any kind of extrapolations about her art from that... ah, but I already said I wouldn't. Still, the temptation to do so is excruciating, because 35 Shots of Rum feels maddeningly opaque in a lot of ways, and it's easy and helpful to cling to any sort of context you can in that sort of situation. "No, no, see that's how a Claire Denis film works," I want to say about the studied lack of clear narrative progression, and the hair-raising peculiarities of the editing, which seems intended to make the flow of the movie as elliptical in its expression as a relative simple plot will allow. But I don't know if that's how a Claire Denis film works. It's how 35 Shots of Rum works, though, and all things considered it works very well, though it stops a few steps short of masterpiece status.

The easiest thing to do is explain what the film is about: 35 Shots of Rum is the study of how a loving family finds itself growing apart, not because the love has run out but because life just keeps nudging its way in between them. Simple enough, right? But the beauty of any great film is not "what" it does but "how" it does it, and therein lies the challenge and triumph of Denis's deliberately unconventional style. The main characters are Lionel (Alex Descas) and Joséphine (Mati Diop, making a luminous acting debut), a father and daughter living in an old apartment complex on the edge of Paris. He's a train operator, she is a university student, and the absence of her mother is at first neither noted nor terribly noteworthy. They live quietly and happily, a simple life that is more functional, perhaps, than tremendously satisfying. Each of them has a potential love affair waiting in the wings: she is pursued by Noé (Grégoire Colin), a slightly older man of unclear means or history (to the viewer, at least), with an old fat cat; while Lionel is under the constant attention of Gabrielle (Nicole Dogué), with whom it seems he had a fling in the past, or maybe Gabrielle wanted them to have had a fling in the past, and still does. That kind of almost but not quite understanding the details of a situation is key to Denis's art.

The point of 35 Shots of Rum, you see, is not in how the plot and situations develop over time, but in how the emotional realities of the moment develop over time. Take, as an example, the relationship between Joséphine and Noé. At the beginning of the film, it seems like there's not only a total lack of romantic history between the two, she's not tremendously receptive to his flirtations. And by the end of the film, that has ceased to be the case, but we aren't privy to most of the mechanics of that process. To say that Denis differs from a standard American-style filmmaker in this is a gross understatement; you can imagine a Hollywood treatment of this material focusing maniacally on the every little twist and turn in Jo and Noé's courtship, both because it is sexy and because it would allow for lots of intense fireworks between father and daughter. But Denis doesn't care about that sort of thing at all: we see only enough of the surrounding universe of 35 Shots of Rum to give a framework to the part of the movie that really matters, the slow deterioration of the family, which is shown in the film to have both a literal meaning and a more sentimentalised, metaphorical one. What matters about Jo and Noé is not that two young people fall in love per se. This sort of cross-sectional approach to the story is tremendously reminiscent of The Intruder, which also depicts events in terms of their emotional meaning rather than their narrative meaning, thought it is far less coherent (and as a result, far more abstractly beautiful) than 35 Shots of Rum.

This kind of filmmaking is, to say the least, not for all tastes. Judged by any customary rules of storytelling, 35 Shots of Rum is an incomprehensible train wreck, and all that means is that it shouldn't therefore be judged by customary rules; but not everyone is going to enjoy doing the work to get meaning out of this film (and on the basis of two films, I'm willing to say this much: Claire Denis is a hell of a lot of work). What I find to be a sometimes beautiful study of human relationships might seem so much pretentious flim-flam to you, and I have no real argument against that approach.

By no means is the film a flawless thing: at times its vagueness feels more like the result of a filmmaker who didn't always know precisely what her goals were, rather than the much more aggressive, revelatory opacity of The Intruder. This is especially true of the secondary characters, Noé and Gabrielle, who are significantly more thinly rendered than the leads (Noé especially), yet are given enough emphasis that this thinness is a bit more lazy than it is fascinating and deliberate, and Denis relies on the actors in both cases to do a great deal of the heavy lifting. Justifiably: they both give marvelous performances.

The film also generally lacks a certain poetic flair that might give its narrative vagueness more heft. I shouldn't put it that way. For the most part, the film gets enough mileage out its emotional arc that it seems uncouth to complain about it much at all. But there are at least a couple of moments - one involving the single best use of the Commodores' "Nightshift" that I can imagine, and one which I can't really describe for fear of spoilers, and a third is the final shot - where the film switches into another level so refined and breathtaking that I got a bit cross that the whole movie could have been like that. In the end, the resolutely quotidian nature of the drama and emotions in 35 Shots of Rum makes the film feel just ever so slightly shallow, compared to Denis's ambitions; but if every film about simple, quotidian issues was this daring in its execution, and this intuitive rather than explicit about what we're supposed to feel, world cinema would be in a much healthier place.

8/10

ALAN J. PAKULA: THE DEVIL'S OWN (1997)

By most accounts, the set of Alan J. Pakula's sixteenth and final film as a director was not a happy set. The Devil's Own began life when the up-and-coming new movie star Brad Pitt attached himself to a screenplay about an IRA terrorist who journeys to New York City in 1993 to complete an arms deal, and began seeking about for a director. Pakula was not the first director given the project; the early production history of the film is a knotty and strange thicket of multiple drafts by unconnected writers and several false starts. But it was onto Pakula's shoulders that the project finally fell, and here we begin to see the hints of trouble: there was never another one of the director's films that he began in such ass-backwards terms, with so little personal drive. But this is what happens when a filmmaker has descended from the heights of prestige to the muddy swamps of hackdom.

The multitude of changes made to the story, to say nothing of the general indifference of the production team to making what Pitt had apparently hoped to be a significant and intelligent look at The Troubles led the actor to begin speaking out even while the film was still in production about what a hideous mess it had become. And it probably didn't help the 33-year-old that his co-star, in a much expanded role, was Harrison Ford, still a huge box-office name in 1997, and an actor who'd already worked with Pakula once before, on 1990's Presumed Innocent. Allegedly, the set was filled with tension between the two men as to who would be the focus of the story, and more to the point, the focus of the marketing campaign. That Brad Pitt's Ireland Movie had by fits and starts become Harrison Ford Cop Picture with Brad Pitt was doubtlessly a concern to the young actor, whose outspoken disappointment with the project otherwise feels a touch disingenuous: for truth be told, Pitt is far from the strongest link in this rather flimsy chain.

There are as many small, niggling problems with The Devil's Own as there are grains of sand on the beach, but the single one that the film was never going to recover from is that it presents itself as being about Something Important, whereas in fact it is really about nothing very much at all. Like just about every other American-made movie about the Northern Ireland conflict, the film suffers greatly from a wobbly and confused understanding of the situation in that region, and ultimately the IRA co-protagonist could just as easily have been any randomly invented terrorist with sympathetic aims but morally unacceptable means of pursuing his goals. Certainly, anything insightful or particular about Ireland was removed, piece by piece, re-write by re-write, until the only thing that remains is the confirmation that yes, people in the IRA are by and large Roman Catholic.

Here's the scenario: Frankie McGuire (Pitt) is in America to pay for some missiles and find a way to cart them back to Ireland, and for the duration of his stay, he's living with NYPD officer Tom O'Meara (Ford) and his family, hiding under the name Rory Devaney. Why, precisely, McGuire had to stay with an American family is not made tremendously clear; why that family includes a cop, the profession most likely to be distrustful of a young Irish man who freely admits to his traumatic childhood and hatred of the British, is a matter of shocking contrivance. Anyway, the 106 minute film slips by, and we see McGuire moving about New York, chatting with other IRA moles, angering the arms seller (Treat Williams) by his inexplicable refusal to pay, and generally just biding his time until the the film hits feature length. Meanwhile, O'Meara gets to prove that he's a Good Cop, when he decides to retire rather than support his partner (Rubén Blades), who shot an unarmed man in the back. Finally, about one hour in, the two plots combine when two of the arms dealer's goons break into the O'Mearas' home, and the cop starts sniffing around and finds a massive bag of cash, which instantly tips him off that "Devaney" is hiding something. Cue a cat-and-mouse type of chase around New York that has the merit of not being eyeball-gouging padding, but is for all that no more entertaining than anything else that has gone on before.

I would like it if there was something nice I could say about all of this, but for the most part I can't: it's a staggeringly routine cop picture that feels like it came out in 1987 instead of 1997, tarted up by a well-intentioned, half-baked Irish terrorism angle. The two actors at the center add nothing: Ford just comes out and does that thing he did in movies he didn't care about, where he looks sort of moody and constipated, and Pitt's attempts to find something emotionally true in a character that ends up being written in all sorts of contradictory ways, both pro- and anti-IRA, are monumentally undercut by his desperately wobbly Irish accent. That Pakula had no interest in making this movie is wretchedly obvious: four years after The Pelican Brief had almost been a good Pakula movie, with a properly twisty screenplay, an interesting female protagonist (who was not, alas, matched with an interesting performance), and the director doing producing duty for the last time, The Devil's Own feels like he just desperately wanted a paycheck. It's not incompetently made - given how awfully little happens for two-thirds of the movie, it could have been infinitely more boring than it is, so let's be thankful that Pakula was able to keep the pacing up - but it is absolutely without merit other than sheer ordinariness. I cannot imagine being so hard up for a cop movie, of all things, that I'd want to seek this one out. Such is the way a career ends.

But that's not where I'm going to end. The end of Pakula's career wasn't just the sad whimpering out of the gifted craftsman who had done such fine work in the 1970s and very intermittently thereafter. It was also the last film shot by arguably the finest American cinematographer of them all, Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness. Pakula and Willis had quite the career together: the first movie where Pakula demonstrated himself a genius, Klute, was also the film where Willis went from a nobody working on forgotten projects to the visual genius responsible for such masterpieces of the artform as The Godfather and its sequels, Manhattan, Zelig (for which he received the first of his insultingly small number of Oscar nominations, two - but it's one more nomination than the ASC saw fit to give him), and so on. And while his collaborations with Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen are the stuff of greatness, I think, personally, that his work with Pakula is his most essential, especially in the outstanding pair of paranoia thrillers The Parallax View and All the President's Men, two of the most accomplished, technically innovative works of cinematography of the 1970s.

The Devil's Own is certainly the least of the men's six collaborations, but there is simply no such thing as a Gordon Willis-shot film that doesn't look good, and coming off of Consenting Adults and The Pelican Brief, Pakula's two disastrous collaborations with Stephen Goldblatt, The Devil's Own looks like a master class in shooting a movie. It is perhaps a bit brighter overall than we'd expect a Willis film to be, but the compositions are quite well-chosen, perhaps surprisingly so: for on first glance this appears to be nothing but a bog-standard way of filming a crime drama with lots of close-ups and two-shots. Then you start to notice how aggressively Willis and Pakula use negative space in those close-ups, and the way that the wide shots contrast with the closer shots (the editing by Tom Rolf and Dennis Virkler is also a good deal more delicate and interesting than it seems at first, for it is these two men who largely control the precise pattern by which those wide shots and close shots are contrasted), and it becomes more and more clear that there is a subtle but distinctly effective visual language, simple and without splashy pyrotechnics, that drive the emotional beats of the story far better than the script itself. And that, if anything, is the problem: Willis and Pakula are turning in finely-tuned visual work in service of a story that doesn't deserve it in the slightest.

To hell with it. The film looks good, and it is compellingly, intelligently shot, and I am going to cling to that as a comfort. All the more so since Willis, now 78, has not shot a single frame in the intervening 13 years. The romantic in me likes to think that, since his career effectively began with Pakula, and his greatest triumphs were with Pakula, he has decided that with Pakula's death there is no more need in this world for Gordon Willis cinematography. A pity, but a poetic and beautiful thing. I only wish the two men could have found a more worthy exit than The Devil's Own, but life is not fair like that.

Alan J. Pakula died in a car accident on 19 November, 1998, when another driver hit a metal pipe that flew through the director's windshield and sent him spinning off the road. He was 70 years old.

DIE ENGEL SIND UNTER UNS

There is a conceit whose origination I have never quite been able to track down: "Mythology is religion that nobody practices any more". This little quote has quite a lot of utility, for besides being pithy, it provides an aid and comfort to we atheists and agnostics - give it another few centuries, and schoolchildren will read the foundational texts of Christianity and Islam with much the same literary eye as they now read of Pygmalion and Arachne and Narcissus. As famously observed by Bertrand Russell in Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic? "There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God. I cannot prove that either the Christian God or the Homeric gods do not exist, but I do not think that their existence is an alternative that is sufficiently probable to be worth serious consideration."

Still, you just don't expect to see a movie like Legion, which seems blithely unaware of the fact that Christianity is still a living, breathing religion practiced by billions of people now living in the world; for Legion goes right on ahead and bends the central notion of Christian monotheism just as happily as, say, Clash of the Titans does to the Olympians, and it does so without apparently trying to flip off Christianity whatsoever. In this film, God is an irritable old tyrant who decides to wipe out humanity, but the angel Michael (Paul Bettany) doesn't want any part of this, so he comes to earth and cuts off his wings so that God can't control him, and comes to aid Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), a woman stranded in the Mojave Desert whose unborn baby will be the savior of humanity against God's army of killer angels who possess human bodies and become some sort of zombie demons, this army being led by Michael's brother Gabriel (Kevin Durand). You can go ahead and spend some time squaring that with anything to be found anywhere in any Christian text, and I shall busy myself with daiquiris.

So, "God is evil, but the rebellious angels knows that He will come around if they just don't make with the killing of all humanity." I've spent hours trying to figure out what the hell to make of that, and I can't. It's certainly not a film written by religious people, for it has been my general impression that religious people are not terribly sympathetic to the idea that God is a small-minded warlord, but you can hardly call a film that hinges on the existence of a specifically Christian God to be even slightly atheistic. Basically, this is a film made by and for that particular breed of agnostic who actually believes in God, but wants not to, because they think He's an asshole. Fair enough, every niche needs its entertainment. And thus we end up with a strange mash-up of Woody Allen and George A. Romero, like the world neither asked for nor wanted.

Sorry for harping on the theology, but at least it's weird enough to be interesting, like The Book of Eli, another film currently in theaters. That is true of no other element of Legion, which is pretty much just bad in every way, also like The Book of Eli. The plot is yet another riff on the template provided by The Birds and Night of the Living Dead: a group of people holes up in an isolated building that they secure against the implacable onslaught from outside, and thanks to their own idiocy they die one by one. You can get a lot of mileage from that concept, which is why we have The Birds and Night of the Living Dead. But the screenwriters, Scott Stewart (who also directs) and Peter Schink, respectively a special effects artist and an editor, don't have anything remotely like the training, talent, or the apparent inclination to do anything with this material that is in the least bit entertaining or insightful. It's a peculiar paradox: the film buzzes along much too quickly for me to feel right in calling it "boring", and yet not a damn thing happens. It's stupefyingly talky, interrupted at fairly regular intervals by an attack by the evil zombie angels, who are fended off much too readily for us to believe them as a valid threat.

Certainly, Stewart's background in visual effects promises that the movie is to be nothing but a string of setpieces hung on a terribly unengaging story, and lo and behold, that's exactly what we get. For all the effort put into making the stock characters specific, with all sorts of details both explicit and implied, Legion wastes no time in pursuing them as anything more than routine horror film body count padding, in addition to setting up a central premise that is hamstrung by the fact that we never, ever are given a hint as to the stakes: Michael assures us that it is very important that Charlie's baby is born, but he does not explain why. Apparently he has also seen The Terminator, and trusts that we can connect the dots on our own.

So the story has no real drive beyond a single character asserting without evidence that "this matters", and the characters are plainly beneath the film's notice, leaving some fine actors like Dennis Quaid and Charles S. Dutton to stand around looking visibly embarrassed, and if the film delivered on the nightmare-fuel horror and bad-ass action promised in the ads, this might have almost been excusable. But Legion is made up of countless scenes of talking, of character building that goes nowhere, more talking, some confused exposition, and lots of hopelessly bland cinematography, and then, rarely, is there a brief scene with characters on a roof shooting at the angel zombies. And in these scenes, we also see Stewart's remarkable lack of facility with a camera: for while he cannot and should not be expected to do a fine job building the dramatic [sic] moments in the film, we might hope that he could at least make the action ping, or the violence and horrifying make-up effects sufficiently queasy. He does neither: the scenes of people standing on a roof shooting are just as dull as I've made them sound, and all the blood and hideously deformed human bodies are given very little visual emphasis or emotional weight. There's nothing here but so much painfully flat moments banging up one after the other, in a film about the end of the world with so little inflection that less than a day later, I can hardly remember everything that happened.

And they wonder why Avatar still has the #1 spot, six weeks on.

2/10

TEN FOR MONDAY: ART AND COMMERCE

By the end of business today, Avatar will have passed Titanic to become the highest-grossing film in the history of the world. Sensible people like you and I can certainly be cynical about that milestone, and point out things like "inflation" and "3-D surcharges", but you know who doesn't care? 20th Century Fox.

Anyway, to celebrate this massive orgasm of spending, I have prepared a list of films that, like Avatar, I enjoyed, and, like Avatar, made ungodly pots of money. This list was very difficult to put together.

Ten Great Good Movies To Pass $500 Million at the World-Wide Box-Office*
The companion piece to "Ten Awful Movies to Pass $200 Million at the Domestic Box-Office"

*Not including re-releases.

The Dark Knight (2008, $1,001,921,825, #5)
Wasn't it just a week ago that I said something like, "I feel kind of gross with myself for liking it"? Aye, well, I am large, I contain multitudes. The film still has a good kick to it, even if it's not quite the feline nightwear that it seemed in the first flush of that summer. And there will always be a part of me giddy as a schoolgirl to see something this unapologetically grim do so very well with audiences.


Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009, $$933,959,197, #9)
I couldn't do this list without at least one Harry Potter film. No, I mean, I literally couldn't - it turns out I don't really like box-office hits all that much, who knew? And this one - another holdover from last week's list, and ain't it telling that my "hugely successful films that I like" and "films that I don't like as much as I thought I did" lists have overlap? - remains my favorite of the Potter films: maybe not the strongest screenplay (that honor belongs to Goblet of Fire), but perhaps the best-acted across the board and unquestionably the prettiest.


Jurassic Park (1993, $914,691,118, #13)
There are fewer Spielberg films that crossed the $500 million mark than you'd think. But it is well that the finest director of popcorn movies in history should have a perch on this list, and better still that this perch should be for the film that turned CGI from a tetchy, interesting way to add some creative juice to a film, into a must-have tool for everybody making a film with a price tag north of $30 million. Not that I admire that trend, but when the CGI is used to such perfect effect, you have to respect it. And despite trafficking here in some of his worst habits, Spielberg absolutely knows exactly how to showcase his marvelous digital beasties for maximum awe.


Spider-Man (2002, $821,708,551, #22)
Yeah, I'm the jackass who likes the first one better. A lot of that has to do with the villain (or rather, with Willem Dafoe), some of it has to do with my appreciation that Sam Raimi saw fit to produce a summer tentpole movie shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and not the much more common, dreadfully inelegant 2.35:1. And some of it has to do with primacy: maybe Spider-Man 2 perfected the mold, but Spider-Man got there first, showcasing things that we'd never, ever seen before, and I persist in believing that it was this film, and not X-Men, that proved comic book adaptations could still work as genuinely great crowd-pleasing spectacle.


The Sixth Sense (1999, $672,806,292, #39)
I'm never going to have another shot at putting a film by M. Night Shyamalan on any kind of "good" list again, so let me do it while I can. Remember when he wasn't a flailing ass-clown? It was only a decade ago, but what a torturous decade. Anyway, this is when he was still a boy genius, aping Spielberg and Hitchcock to outstanding effect in the creation of a ghost story that was more moody and creepy than any paranormal horror film had been in years at that point.


Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003, $654,264,015, #41)
Two horrible sequels have dinged its charms a bit, but if you were there when this one was new! There was no reason to expect anything at all from the project, not until several minutes when all of a sudden Johnny Depp sashayed on-screen, becoming one of our biggest movie stars in the blink of an eye and turning a bloated summer programmer into the strangest, zaniest, most deliciously anarchic live-action cartoon of the decade. Amply demonstrates that every now and then, even the most zealous executives can't stamp out the creativity of one determined madman, and thank God for that.


Casino Royale (2006, $594,239,066, #51)
Nothing says "hidebound" like a 44-year-old franchise whose appeal - appeal, mind you - was situated in its sexist playboy fantasies. Never was a reboot more necessary or more impeccably played than for James Bond, of Her Majesty's secret service: Quantum of Solace fucked things up badly, and I can't imagine that anybody is any more excited than I am to hear that Sam Mendes, poet of suburban hellscapes, is taking over for the next one, but workaday action director Martin Campbell, and a trio of writers including the ordinarily dire Paul Haggis, had exactly the right sense of how to play this material for the 21st Century, bringing Bond up to date without leaving too much of his Bondisheness on the floor. It's looking more and more like a one-off masterpiece, but that's better than Die Another Day promised.


Iron Man (2008, $585,133,287, #56)
A mere 6 years after Spider-Man made the comic book movie sparkle with life, and a damn tidal wave of the things had long since made it seem as though superhero cinema had well and truly run its course as anything but the stuff of shrill idiocy. Let us never stop being grateful, thus, for the unexpected Jon Favreau, who made the subgenre fun again, if only for a brief moment, with the great and abiding aid of Robert Downey, Jr., giving one of the all-time great comic book movie performances. "Dark and edgy" may be the new watchwords in summer entertainment, but Iron Man is a potent reminder that "fun and peppy" can do just fine, thank you very much.


WALL·E (2008, $521,268,237, #66)
There were six Pixar movies eligible for this list; part of me wanted to include all six. But no, I can be good and limit myself to just my favorite, and I don't imagine that anybody really wants to hear me run off the mouth again about how intensely I love this film (the Top 100 of the Decade is just in the wings, recall), so let me just sum up the many reasons why this film own me body and soul by saying, "Dancing: a series of movements involving two partners, where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music".


Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, $519,843,345, #67)
A reminder of the days when a high gross meant something. In this case, it meant that James Cameron is a goddamn ATM, who might indeed spend piles of cash on effects, but it's only so he can give the studio back mountains. Sci-fi action at its best, and even if I will always like The Terminator better, it's hard to knock this one: it has all the flaws of every shitty summer movie to come out in its wake, and yet somehow it suffers from not a single one of them. This is what popcorn cinema looks like when it's made by a true, passionate, enthusiastic genius. He may be an absolute shit, but you can't argue that Cameron doesn't deserve his unprecedented, incomparable success.

I STILL HAVEN'T GOTTEN OVER YOU YET

The subtropical joys of Florida have given way to Chicago, warmer than it should be in January but still damn cold. Yes, I am back home; no, I am not sufficiently recharged; and worry not, posting shall resume tomorrow. I hope everybody had fun with my snips and scraps and Herzog quotes.

WRATH OF GOD

In my absence, here is a game for everyone to play:

Below are fifteen quotes. 10 of these quotes are attributed to famed insane German film director Werner Herzog. Five of them I invented. Your task: correctly identify the five fakes. The answers are at the bottom, behind the spoiler bar.

A. "You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates".

B. "In comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle... we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel."

C. "The vulgarity of language does not bother me as much as the vulgarity of images. People will always... as a culture we needlessly protect our children from violence and sexuality, but we then force them to watch these antiseptic, pedestrian images."

D. "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."

E. "Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film."

F. "So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and... I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against Bonanza and Rawhide, or all these things."

G. "The early Mickey Mouse cartoons, where he is a spritely figure, he is a figure of chaos and invention. I enjoy those cartoons very much. The moment Mickey Mouse became a corporate mascot is when Walt Disney ceased to be anything but a peddler of obscenities."

H. On Klaus Kinski: "Actually his ideas about nature were rather insipid. Mosquitoes were not allowed in his jungle, nor was rain."

I. "I have spent most of my career trying to undo the damage that was done by my teachers in film school."

J. "You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chickens, but they frighten me more than any other animal."

K. "Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts."

L. "I do not like birds. I do not understand people who listen to birds chirping and hear anything other than mindless insipidity."

M. "Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger."

O. "If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe."

N. "Sometimes I think it would have been better if I had been a lion tamer in a circus, or another thing more useful than a film director."

Answers: C, G, I, L, N

DEJA VU

Some of you may recall that in writing my fairly dismissive review of Disney's beloved The Lion King, I indulged in a lengthy anecdote about this one time that I got two custom-made, animation-quality drawings from the great Disney animator Andreas Deja. It had been my intention at that time to post photos of those drawings in short order, as part of my post-Disneython wrap-up, but lacking as I do a digital camera (and so I shall always lack, as long as breath is in my body), I couldn't take photos at first, and so on...

Anyway, this seemed as good a time as any to share with you all my collection. My apologies for the shoddy lighting; I was in a bit of a rush.

THE ANTHROPOMORPHS

As promised, one of those little amusements while I am away - and I'll now admit that I'm at Walt Disney World, as chance would have it, but please don't hold that against me.

Anyway, following the fairly unexpected popularity of my Disneython last autumn, I thought that maybe I could justify posting this, probably the single best paper I ever produced as an undergraduate student (and one of the very last, for what it's worth). It was written for an absolutely wonderful class on the history of animation taught by the great Scott Curtis, who I think I've given his due elsewhere for being the single most influential person in my development as film scholar, but it never hurts to reiterate it.

Modesty forbids me from sharing the grade and attached comment he gave to this paper, though it was quite enthusiastic, although now of course all I can see are the logical flaws and stilted language; it also amuses me to no end that it took me (as I recall) three days to write a 1531-word paper, in these later days when I've found myself capable of cranking out far better essays on the same general topic, that were regularly more than twice as long, one per day for 45 days, and do it without making a demonstrable factual error in the first goddamn paragraph.

Anyway, without further ado, from May, 2004: History of Animation, Paper #3, by Timothy Brayton. I have made no editorial changes whatsoever.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In 1922, Walt Disney and a small group of other animators produced a series of six cartoons under the series name Laugh-O-grams. These films were made under extremely impoverished conditions, and were never released.

In 1927, Walt Disney (no longer doing any animation work himself) led the production of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series of films, for Winkler Productions and Universal Pictures. These films, though not reaching the blockbuster status of Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, or the Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell, were among the more successful animated shorts of that decade.*

The limitations of the early series of films were forced by circumstance, not by stylistic choice. Thus, in some way, it is to be expected that as Disney gained economic stability, his films would change from the limited animation of his earliest films. The style he would ultimately evolve, however, was not borne out of artistic concern, but out of pragmatism; as will be hereafter demonstrated, the differences between his earliest and latest silent films can be seen as an attempt to mimic the dominant successful styles of the day, and thereby make his films more lucrative. This paper will investigate one aspect of his filmmaking found in countless other styles then and now, anthropomorphism, and show how his development in this area was driven by the desire to produce a marketable style.

The fifth of the six Laugh-O-grams, “Puss in Boots” was completed in October 1922. Its main character is a nameless female cat, and a perfect specimen of anthropomorphism; she stands on extremely human hind legs, and walks, talks and gestures like the humans in the film. Seen as an example of pure character design, the cat is rather successful. She is drawn with rounded lines, which suggest an anatomical structure missing from the contemporaneous Felix. In fact, despite her specie, she looks very little like Felix (this will be an important fact once we arrive at Oswald). Importantly, her color scheme is markedly different (white stomach, hands and face, rather than just a white mouth and eyes), and her body shape is much more elliptical – she is proportioned as a human, not as a series of tubes.

The character design is a double-edged sword; for the animation of movement in this film does not match the naturalism found in the characters, and this disconnect tends to make the cat less appealing and more unsettling. Actions are rigid and unbending; the “squash-and-stretch” technique had not been invented yet, and so the softness of form that we associate with that style is necessarily absent from this film. Characters move in segments: as the cat walks, her elbows and legs locked firmly into position, and her limbs simply pivot on her body (which, I hasten to add, is itself unmoving. While her arms and legs swing back and forth, her head and abdomen do not move whatsoever). This derives in part from the means by which the animation was achieved; Disney would draw model sheets, which the animators simply traced over.† Explicable or not, the stiffness with which the characters move, and especially the unblinking, ever-smiling face which we see only in profile or straight on, tend to distract from the effect of the anthropomorphized animal, and instead the character becomes vaguely grotesque.

Five years later, in October 1927, the fifth Oswald vehicle, “The Mechanical Cow,” premiered. Disney’s debt to Felix is overwhelmingly obvious, as he himself was well aware:‡ a totally black figure with only a white face, one of the most common designs of the era, and one that began with Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer. There are virtually no similarities between this rabbit and Disney’s 1922 cat; Oswald is much less angular, both in design and animation. He is comprised entirely of round shapes and soft lines, an effect primarily indebted to the “squash-and-stretch” and “rubber-hose” styles that had come into existence during the intervening five years. Oswald is simply a pile of ovals and circles, which certainly reduces the fidelity with which he is representative of the human form; but by eliminating the well-defined body shape of the cat, Disney achieves a fluidity of movement absent in the earlier cartoon. When the cat walks, the woodenness of the action calls attention to the sharp angles and lines of that character. When Oswald moves, conversely, he is nearly amorphous; there is no consistency in his proportions (he does not stretch, so much as he elongates his arms to reach objects; his legs seemingly lengthen and shorten as he walks). Moreover, his movements are organic: when he turns off an alarm clock, he doesn’t just smash it with a pivoting arm, as the Laugh-O-Gram cat might, he incorporates his entire body into the action, with his arms, torso, face and ears all flexing and stretching as he reaches over. He is a totally flexible character, certainly less representational than the earlier figure, but far more appealing. This appeal is inherent in the softness of the character – we react to the mutability or “squishy” quality of the design.

I would argue that this appeal is one of the two reasons that Disney chose this character model. The other reason, of course, is the overarching specter of Felix, the most successful cartoon character of the pre-Mickey era. Disney had already used this character type, in crafting Julius the cat from the Alice Comedies, and he would use it again in designing his mouse, just as nearly every American animation producer tried to make a Felix clone during the twenties. Mere plagiarism is not the only reason, however; the elements that made Felix himself popular were also behind the successes of Oswald and Mickey, whether Disney consciously pursued them or not. As I suggested before, flexible characters are more appealing than rigid characters. This is artistic, on one level: sharp lines and stiff movement call attention to the drawn-ness of the image, and thus it is harder to sympathize with such animation. But it is also more primal than that: flexible, soft characters appear to possess more tactility; that is to say that they are invested with more physicality. When such a character performs actions that distend and distort their body, although this underscores the degree to which they are unreal, it also calls attention to the “fact” of their body. It is easier to believe that a character who extends his arms to twice their normal length possesses a physical form, than to believe this of a character whose actions are totally rigid because, paradoxically, it forces us to imagine that there is an arm to which this stretching can be done.

This is intimately tied in with merchandising, and this is where I believe that Disney truly saw the desirability of the Felix-model. Famously, Felix was the first animated character with an extensive series of marketing tie-ins, and the same is true of Mickey Mouse to an inconceivably higher degree. In this sense, Mary Pickford merchandise, for example, would be absurd, as Pickford does not call attention to the fact of her physical body. But Felix, who insists on a physicality that he does not possess, is validated by the presence of these items, which are suggested by his stress on his physicality. Plush toys are perhaps the ultimate expression of this representation: they are the embodiment of the cartoon character in his own form (as opposed to his image on another product), and that form is made such that it possesses the same mutability that the cartoon character expresses in his films – one can play “squash-and-stretch” with a plush Felix, but not with a porcelain Felix statue (this is perhaps why Mickey Mouse dolls are the most iconic of all of the hundreds of Mickey Mouse tie-ins that have been marketed). Whether or not he was making the choice deliberately, I believe that Disney was at least subliminally aware of this concept when he embraced the Felix model. If this was his goal, he succeeded – Oswald the Lucky Rabbit became the first Disney-created character to be made into a tie-in, in August 1927.

Merchandising marketability is of course not the only reason why Disney might desire to create an appealing character – there is of course the more central issue of making a character appealing enough that audiences will wish to pay to see him, thus creating a demand for his producer to continue producing his cartoons. The principle is the same, however, in that a soft, round shape is more pleasing to the eye than a sharp hard shape. Whereas the cat in the Laugh-O-Gram was a grotesque, Oswald is much more charming and cute. These are not perhaps the most scholarly of terms, but they effectively suggest the reactions an audience has to the character. Anthropomorphic characters on the Felix/Oswald/Mickey model are appealing, essentially, because they take a familiar shape, and make it cute through its alienation from the model we know. This is counter-intuitive, but it holds: we react positively to seeing a recognizable – but not too recognizable! – human shape suffering absurd indignities. And, as the seventy-five year Disney hegemony has proven, we are more than willing to pay to see such absurdity.

_____
*Russell Merritt & J.B. Kaufman, Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993; pp. 124ff. All references to dates and events are taken from this volume.
†ibid, p. 45.
‡ibid, p. 63ff.

VACATION, ALL I EVER WANTED

My custom is to take a week off after the Chicago International Film Festival. Regular readers will recall that instead, this last year I launched right into the most massively stressful thing I have ever done ever; it involved as I recall researching and writing the equivalent of five to ten MFA theses in the span of 45 days.

Anyway, I'm correcting that now. Right now: I've actually been in Florida since Tuesday, and thanks to the magic of the internets, I was able to set this up to post before I left. In fact, I wrote it on Monday: so I am writing about an event that hasn't happened yet as though it has, and you are reading about it as though it's about to happen soon even though it's halfway over. MY GOD, we live in an amazing age.

The point being, I'm taking a short vacation from blogging, and the next few days will be filled up with some amuse-bouche that I set to go up before I left. When I return, if things go as I hope, I'll be just about ready to start posting my Top 100 of the Decade List, and launch into (sigh) another director retrospective, though I might also put that off until the list-making is completely done. We'll see how well I recharge my batteries this week.

BOOK LEARNIN'

Sometimes DI - digital intermediate, that is, the computer-aided manipulation of film to alter the color balance and saturation of the footage - works pretty well. And sometimes, you see a movie that is so aggressively, stupidly DI'd that you're just like, "Fuck me, that is a lot of DI." Okay, so you probably do not specifically do that, because you are probably not as much of a cinematography geek as I am, and that reflects well on you. But the point I was driving at was that The Book of Eli, a weirdly half-religious adventure story set 30 years after a nuclear conflagration left the United States a burned-out wasteland, has a lot of digital intermediate done very poorly, and it is so specifically terrible-looking that I can well imagine it turning an average person on the street into a raving anti-DI partisan. Or perhaps it is better to call that my hope.

At any rate, the colossal amount of digital post-production, resulting in a film that is very gloomy and underlit, and desaturated to a level virtually unimaginable by normal people - think Tom Stern's work with Clint Eastwood, especially Letters from Iwo Jima, and you are still in fact thinking too colorful, but you are facing in the right direction, with the addition of a lot of steel greys and dusty browns - and the only reason I harp on this is that I can think of very little else to say about The Book of Eli. If there is anything of even the least note about this film, it is that it's been quite a good long while since I can recall a post-apocalyptic film to invent so very little and to rip off the Mad Max movies quite so happily. Devout fans of the genre, of course, have a certain understanding that rip-offs will occur, for the number of post-apocalyptic movies from the early 1980s that are virtually nothing but Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior with different character names can hardly be fathomed by those who haven't witnessed it firsthand. Of course, that was the 1980s, and most of those films were made by Italians. The Book of Eli is not nearly that derivative, but it's far, far more besotted with over-worked tropes than nearly any other post-apocalyptic film of the last decade or so. Which is, I don't know, kind of a notable achievement? It's bad and boring as a result, but it least it has the comfortable badness of familiarity.

In the beginning, a man in a dusty, dark forest shoots an arrow into a scrawny, hairless cat that was sniffing around a human corpse. Which is, to be fair, a nice, efficient way to usher us into the film's universe: "man, there is just no damn food at all in this world, and people have to kill kitty cats just to keep from starving to death in these dusky, post-nuclear woods." The effect is rather spoilt by the way that the arrow, in flight, snaps into slow-motion for a bit, and a bit of dust gets pinged off the arrowhead in some moronically sexy and stylish way, and we all take a good long remember about why The Matrix was ultimately bad for the art of cinema.

This cat-killer ends up being our hero, by the way, a stern, humorless man played by Denzel Washington. Thanks to the title, we can be reasonably sure that his name is Eli, so let's be exceptionally thankful for that title: otherwise, we'd have no name for our protagonist until substantial into the film's second hour. So, Eli is journeying by a drifting, wandering path into the western half of the former United States, on a mission from God: he is bringing a Bible (almost without fail referred to simply as "the book", or "a very special book", or that kind of thing) to a destination that he does not know yet, but God will tell him. In the meanwhile, in a small town in the Southwest, a fellow named Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is trying to rebuild a society like he remembers from before the war, and he wants to find a copy of a Bible to use like the great religious idealogues of old: to control the hearts and minds of the rubes in his care, while his gunmen and monopoly over potable water take care of their bodies. Eventually, of course, Eli and Carnegie come face to face, and so begins a standoff that turns into a chase that turns into a shoot-out and explosion-fest.

There are a few ideas on display here that are reasonably compelling, like the detail that most of the people alive at the time of the war were made blind in the bombing, and that essentially nobody under the age of 30 has any literacy now, or more than the most cursory, halting knowledge of what the world used to be like. Not that the latter, in particular, is a tremendously original notion, but at least we can tell that the world of The Book of Eli was conceived with a certain degree of internal logic. But the few ideas that work cram up uncomfortably with the ideas that don't (we're told that people burned all of the Bibles except this one, as they blamed religion for the war - really? Every last copy of the most in-print book in Western civilization? Not a single zealous holdout gathered together a hidden cache?), and the great majority of the story isn't idea-driven, anyway: it's all about Eli and Carnegie having their duel, with a young woman named Solara (Mila Kunis) as the chief of several pawns in between them, and here is where it really does start to feel like every other retread of the central situation in Mad Max 2. And unfortunately, Carnegie and his henchmen are just a bunch of sand-blasted men in ratty clothes, and not punk drag queens, thus depriving us of the chief joy of such films.

Mostly, it's just a lot of action with Eli and his big damn knife spinning around and chopping people's limbs and heads off, and everything is grey as an autumn sky. There's one early scene that frames the fighting as a flat plane of silhouettes, and this sequence works rather damn well; but otherwise, the directors Allen and Albert Hughes - the twin brothers who last work, almost nine years ago, was the vile From Hell - manage to find the way to provide maximum violent death with minimal grace or artistry. Virtually nothing about their direction does much if anything to raise Gary Whitta's screenplay above the tediously derivative; and they seem largely uninterested in pursuing the script's bizarrely self-contradictory theology (at once both anti-evangelist and pro-fundamentalist, and despite lionising Eli's behavior for most of the running time, it is all of a sudden decided at the end that he lost his way). Add in the absolutely pointless twist at the end that does nothing but wave its hands and shout "woo-hoo, a twist! how fun!" - though it is a fair twist, and one that does not contradict the rest of the movie - and basically, The Book of Eli is naught but a fairly brainless vision of a post-apocalyptic world like several others, with slack action and the ugliest color palette I've seen all year. Okay, this is the first 2010 film I've seen, but you know what I mean.

3/10

IN THE MOUTH OF CUTE, CUTE MADNESS

Occasionally, one stumbles across a movie so pure in its concept and execution that it doesn't seem right at all to try and crack it open, to explain how it works; it's much more tempting to just grab every man, woman and child you stumble across and beg them to please, for the love of God, do whatever it takes to see this film. Unfortunately, the Belgian stop-motion animated feature A Town Called Panic (a very rough rendering of the original French Panique au village, "Panic in the village") is not something that every man, woman and child I stumble across will be able to see: in fact, it is a movie receiving only the most extraordinarily limited of releases in America, while I do believe it has already come and gone in Europe. The good news is that the film is likely to hold up quite well on television viewing, so at the very least consider this my months-in-advance urge that please, for the love of God, rent this movie when it comes out.

Based on a Belgian TV series of the same name from 2000 (though calling it a "series" is being generous: it was a collection of 20 five-minute bumpers aired on one of the country's artier TV stations, and given a fairly comprehensive release in the rest of the world thanks largely to Aardman Animation Studios), Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's movie is a weird, manic adventure set in a rural village, where three friends all live together in a bright yellow house: Cowboy (voiced by Aubier), Indian (Bruce Ellison) and Horse (Patar). And lo and behold, but these three are just exactly what it sounds like: a combination of painted plastic toys, the little 3" tall kind that are unposable and stand on oval bases, and some bright molding clay used for accessories. To call this aesthetic "cheap" is to be polite; it is about as rough and crude as any animation that I have ever personally seen. Though a number of different poses are used for each of the characters, to simulate walking or the like in the rawest way possible, much of the film consists of a stiff, inflexible plastic character moving around a set like-

-Like a kid is just "walking" it around in a playroom, and therein we come to the point. While I don't know if I quite agree with the consensus that A Town Called Panic is a "children's" movie - though any child who grows up watching this sort of thing is going to grow up to become incredibly cool - it is certainly a movie built from a child's perspective of playing with toys. I can't think of a way to express that more clearly. But it's exactly how the film feels, with the great big broad personalities expressed by a rather indispensable team of voice actors (thankfully, Zeitgeist has seen fit to release the film subtitled, rather than dubbed) with a sort of clowny, play-acting quality that feels pretty much exactly like when a kid "speaks" for her toys in caricature of the way adults talk. And too, the personalities of the characters are driven purely by imaginative energy, and not the way the character "ought" to be: there's nothing at all "Cowboy and Indian" about Cowboy and Indian, who are presented as tremendously enthusiastic kids with absolutely no brains whatsoever.

All of that, I fear, paints a picture of the film as some kind of charming, innocent fantasy about silly characters in a rural Neverwhere, and that is absolutely not at all right. As anyone who's seen the shorts know (they're readily available online, though the only English-friendly versions I could find were dubbed, not subtitled), life in this village is a matter of the most free-wheeling absurdity, the kind of surrealism that is so aggressively far removed from anything barely resembling real life that it starts to feel a bit dangerous to watch. I mean that as a compliment. What happens, beginning with Cowboy and Indian's discovery that they missed Horse's birthday, leading them to decide to build him a barbecue pit, and accidentally ordering 50 million bricks to get the job done, and on to all that follows, from Horse's love affair with the local music teacher to the thievery of a family of gill men, follows its own kind of dream logic rather consistently, but it's basically watching insanity spinning out right in front of your very eyes, and the cast's shrieking, manic line deliveries don't help soften that feeling.

This is, incidentally, the reason I don't quite feel right calling A Town Called Panic a children's film, although except for some brief dabs of bad language ("shit" said in English, several religious curses), there's absolutely nothing about it that a kid couldn't handle. Indeed, a kid could probably handle the intense jumps of logic and impossible representational elements of the piece better than an adult, although this particular adult had quite a fun time plugging in and letting the movie's anarchic sensibility hit me over and over again, like an air cannon.

What we have here is an exercise in pure gag logic: though there are continuities of space and character that give the film a nice, solid grounding in the relatable, all that A Town Called Panic is really trying to do is to present 75 solid minutes of non-stop absurd imagery and slapstick, and this it does with absolute success: I can't remember the last time I laughed so long and so hard in a movie. Though it must be said, the experience is so very intense and overwhelming that, after a while, it becomes fatiguing, and I think that even at 75 minutes the movie is perhaps a touch longer than it has to be. What it reminds me of more than anything else is the terribly underappreciated Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters: a flow of pure, unbridled surrealism that is so intensely hilarious for so long that it essentially breaks you. This are awe-inspiring movies; but they are also a commitment of emotion and stamina that is much more demanding on the viewer than you'd expect from a TV-derived cartoon feature.

Let me not mince words: I absolutely loved A Town Called Panic, both for its boundless hilarity and its remarkably idiosyncratic visuals, which for all their defiant crudity are also outstandingly appealing and damn cute (the penguin tank in particular makes me coo with delight just to remember it). But I would also not be inclined to watch A Town Called Panic over and over again, for fear of losing my mind. It's a crazed, magnificent comedy that is more hysterical, in both senses of that word, than any other film I saw from 2009. Not for everybody's tastes, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

9/10

TEN FOR MONDAY: BETTER LEFT TO MEMORY

I'm currently putting together a list of the 100 best movies from 2000-2009, like everybody else has already done; but dammit, the Aughts aren't even cold in their grave, let's wait a teeny bit before starting the lists already. Anyway, you can consider this the first salvo in my Decade-In-Review extravaganza: see, I've been doing this proper-like, and trying to re-watch every single picture I put on my list (and thus has it still taken me this long to get it done). And part of what that has involved is finding that a lot of the movies I thought I really loved, I only mostly like, or even kind of don't like at all. Thus, may I present, in the spirit of admitting that we sometimes can get things really wrong,

Ten Movies from the 2000s that Don't Hold Up for Me Like I Hoped They Would (one per year)

Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2000)
I still like every single thing I ever liked about this one: now I just like it less. Maybe it's the fault of the Wes Anderson Knock-Off machine making this kind of senstive dramedy about a smart, awkward teen whose coming-of-age is set to a cavalcade of old pop music feel much more irritating than insightful, although Almost Famous is a damn sight better than just about all of those films. Maybe it's that Elizabethtown (a film that I actually feel somewhat compelled to defend) has retroactively made all of Crowe's movies seem oppressively cutesy-pie. Either way, what used to seem honest and personal seems just a bit too precious upon review.

In the Bedroom (Todd Field, 2001)
We've all been tricked by outstanding performances into thinking that a decent film is something extraordinary; sometimes that's even enough. Certainly, In the Bedroom is much better than decent, beyond its great slate of actors; Field has a good eye and a great sense of pacing, and the latter especially is vital for such a talky, domestic drama as this one is for the great bulk of its running time. But the plot machinations eventually get just a bit too literary and pre-determined for my taste; this is not a film that is alive and feeling, but tastefully and skillfully preserved.

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)
Polanski is a good director, and sometimes he's even great; but really, this is nothing more than an unusually personal Oscarbait flick, with all the good and bad things that implies, thought it unquestionably slides towards the "very good" end of that scale. Still, for a film I once called the best of the year, I was quite dismayed when I watched it for the first time in over five years, willing myself to see something particularly noble or brilliant in Polanski's effective but mostly uninspired direction, or in an Adrien Brody performance that time, and Brody's later career, have not been remotely kind to.

A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest, 2003)
When it was brand new, I was all ready to declare it even better than Guest's previous improvised mockumentaries, Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. And it's still perfectly funny and smart, but whereas I'll happily start quoting the earlier two at the drop of a hat, I have to really sit and think for a moment before I can remember anything - anything - from the folk rock picture besides the cutely sappy and not really at all comic "Kiss at the End of the Rainbow".

Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
Hip and edgy and indie and all that, and it's never a disappointment to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt acting his best. But really, it's kind of trendy misery for misery's sake, and I'm not tremendously ashamed to admit that I'm a lot less receptive to that nowadays than I was when I was 23 and thought that this was absolutely the most thrilling, nervy thing on two legs.

A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
The first time I saw it, I noticed, but did not particularly care, that it suffered from a rather shocking structural flaw: it wants to be a character study and investigation of the social effects of violence, but it also makes a big mystery out of hiding the most important single element of the protagonist's character, the part that specifically hinges on how violence has or has not shaped his personality. Upon review, that's all I could pay attention to: not that the sex scenes and the violence (and the point where they overlap) aren't exquisitely well-produced, and the film as a whole is a fair masterpiece of craft, but I surely can't be the only one who finds it to be something of a car-wreck of storytelling?

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
It benefited, for me at least, by being the first del Toro film I'd ever seen, and its rich nightmare imagery knocked my socks off before I realised that was just his regular M.O., bettered, for my tastes, in the criminally underrated Hellboy II: The Golden Army. It also suffers from a screenplay that doesn't really come together at the end: for a much more satisfying, coherent dark fantasy set against the Spanish Civil War, I unhesitatingly prefer his earlier The Devil's Backbone.

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
The Festival Effect in full bloom: what seems stunning and inventive and overpowering in the middle of an overcrowded slate of art films can seem a bit helplessly mannered in the light of day. There is nothing to recommend this film but its absolutely stunning cinematography and hypnotically slow pacing, and however good those things might work in a crowded movie theater (intensely well), I got very, very antsy watching this for the second time on my television.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
I'm happy to blame this one entirely on the rabid fanboys who would just as soon slit your face as bear the suggestion that this might not be e.g. one of the 10 best movies in the history of the art form. As far as I'm concerned, it still does a lot of things right, but at the same time I feel kind of gross with myself for liking it.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009)
Really? I gave it a 9/10? Was I like, high, or something? Or was I just really that hard-up for admittedly gorgeous cinematography this past summer?

BAD COP, WORSE COPS

There's no satiric genre filmmaking like Italian satiric genre filmmaking, as I've always said. Or at least, as I've always meant to have said. At any rate, I offer as proof of this notion a snotty poliziesco ("police film") from the underseen social satirist Elio Petri, one of those Italian films with an outstanding chunky, fun title, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. An official selection title at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and the winner of that year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film (proving once again that the Academy used to be a lot more interesting than it is now), you can tell just from the film's awards pedigree that it has a bit more to it than is immediately obvious from a surface-level reading of the narrative: in an unnamed Italian city, an unnamed police department head (Gian Maria Volonté), newly promoted from the homicide squad to political containment, murders his lover (Florinda Bolkan), secure in the knowledge that he knows exactly how his former colleagues are going to investigate the crime.

Let's not mince words: it's a pretty great surface-level narrative, if you're a fan of Bad Cop dramas simply for the sake of it (and if you're not, then by God why aren't you?). I have only a little background in polizieschi and poliziotteschi, but on the evidence of this one film, it would appear that the Italian filmmakers of the '60s and '70s did cop films just as well as they did murder mysteries and sex farces: pretty damn well, and with much more attention to aesthetic niceties and intelligent screenwriting than the bulk of their counterparts in American filmmaking at the same time.

But Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion - I should probably cut that down to Investigation of a Citizen, or even just Investigation..., but it's so much fun to type out! - is about much more than its surface; I cannot in fact imagine the viewer so morbidly inattentive as to fail to notice what's going on underneath, given how urgently the film insists on its own subtext (at which point we might well argue that it has ceased to be subtext). For this is not really a murder thriller, as I briefly assumed it might be from the opening five minutes or so; it is a full-throated, pitch-black comic assault on Italian police corruption. Despite the title, our policeman (who is, naturally, the citizen in question) never comes under any sort of investigation whatsoever, despite having gone out of his way to leave clues in the form of bloody shoe prints, a thread from his tie, and fingerprints on just about every surface he can find.

Why does he do this? Ah, but that is the chief mystery of Investigation of a Citizen, and I should not want to give it all away. Let it suffice to say that by the midway point, roughly, we start to understand that his entire plan is something of a dare to his former colleagues: can you possible ignore such a mountain of evidence if it all points to a seemingly impossible solution? Would you willingly subvert the course of justice to protect a respected, powerful man? Maybe that's not even quite the nature of the dare, though. It seems just as likely that the investigating cops are so certain, down at the core of their being, that this man could not possibly have murdered this woman, that something deep and subconscious compels them to ignore all the proof of that fact. That, in essence, the need built into the Italian psyche for hierarchy and authority is so absolute that it is completely impossible to even consider the possibility that someone in a position of authority might be culpable for some crime. This is the reading I favor, for it well-supported by the film's last scene; its best scene, too, although I am not at all going to to give it away, outside of praising its absurd, through-the-looking-glass plot machinations, and the bloody wit with which Petri and his co-writer Ugo Pirro attack the upper echelons of the Italian police.

The final scene is just the capstone to a movie that has already made quite a lot of sport of policemen abusing their power: the protagonist doesn't just use his position to facilitate his murder of an irritating, clingy girlfriend (who he only met because of his position, for that matter; while their kinky sexual play is informed largely by his erotic fixation on the dead women he inspects), but to torment his former colleagues and to trump up charges against the politically undesirable - it's at times easy to forget, but one of the key elements of the story is that this soulless cop is actually in charge of quelling dissent from Communists, the Far Right, and homosexuals, among other socially disruptive groups, and by all means Petri makes good mileage from contrasting the bullying conservative mentality of this political ops team with the main character's willfully immoral behavior, even if it's a bit on the obvious side (but who ever said that satire couldn't be obvious?).

Outside of its very engaging message movie politics - in America, where our message movies are all fairly bland, warm and fuzzy things, it's hard to keep in mind how thrilling it can be to watch artists flouting an actual, honest-to-God repressive, demi-authoritarian government - Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is just a damn good movie, period. I have been previously unfamiliar with Petri's work, but other than a certain tendency to let the movie lose some of its energy and propulsion in the middle, when we're mostly just watching the protagonist wandering through his daily life, the film is directed with a brutal efficiency that adds considerably to the satire: most of the scenes have a sort BOOM!-and-done pacing that drives each moment's satirical point home like a dagger to the heart. It's a film that, in its better moments, doesn't give us time to stop and think, or catch our breath, but just fight to keep up with the quickly shifting locales and perspectives. It could seem rushed, but it doesn't: it's just a means of demonstrating the cruel, impersonal speed with which this particular bureaucracy punishes those it deems wicked.

Given the talented pool of cinematographers working in Italy in those days, it's not surprise at all that the film is also immaculately composed and shot; but Luigi Kuveiller isn't just any talented cinematographer. Like most Italian film professionals, he switched recklessly between genres, and his work in the famed gialli field (hyper-violent murder mysteries) included A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Lucio Fulci's best-looking film, and Deep Red, arguably Dario Argento's best-looking film (which is to say, it's pretty fucking good-looking either way). The poliziesco didn't allow for the same visually creative insanity as the gialli, but Investigation of a Citizen is still a fantastically well-composed movie, with some truly inspired close-ups and an opening murder/sex scene that is put together about as well as such a thing could be (thanks also to the fine cutting by Ruggero Mastroianni, an editor of no small merits himself).

Best in show honors, though, go in my estimation to two men: first begin Gian Maria Volonté, who appeared in just about every kind of movie that Italians were making in that period, and who gives here one of the absolute best performances that I have seen in any Italian film from the 1970s: he's sly, wicked, and implies much about the protagonist's motivations that turns out to be vital for a proper understanding of how the story works. At the end, when he finally has his inevitable breakdown, what could be screaming and melodramatic is instead... screaming and melodramatic, but in absolutely the best possible way. The other key figure in the movie is Ennio Morricone, one of the most overworked and hugely reliable composers in the history of cinema (for what it's worth, he's in my top 3 of all time, alongside Michel Legrand and fellow Italian Nino Rota. So now you know that). For Investigation of a Citizen, he supplies only a single piece of music, that gets repeated perhaps six or seven times in the movies 112 minutes, but it is phenomenal: I can't think of a better adjective than "sproingy" to describe it, a sort of bouncy melody in a minor key (if I am not mistaken, and I well might be) with a good deal of comic energy - it's the sort of music you'd expect to hear in a particularly slapsticky Looney Tunes short about cannibalism. More than anything else in the movie, it sets the tone immediately and irrevocably, that no matter how serious the subject matter of the film - murder and police corruption - the attitude towards that subject will always be sly and sarcastic, more of a wicked piss-taking than anything else. And lo! that is exactly what Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion proves to be, one of the most sardonic, brilliant satires of its era.

CANON-MAKING

For those who follow such things, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? has published the latest version of its annually-updated and hugely useful list of the 1000 best films of all time. This year's update includes a massive influx of films from the '00s, and some of the films that were cut off to make room didn't at all deserve it, but that's consensus for you.

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that folks were aware. I know not everybody follows it as obsessively as I do.

ALAN J. PAKULA: THE PELICAN BRIEF (1993)

In a certain sense, we should be grateful for The Pelican Brief, because of the very particular case study it offers in the changing face of filmmaking: not just in the context of Alan J. Pakula's career, but in the difference between the 1970s and the 1990s more generally. For The Pelican Brief recalls Pakula's All the President's Men, released 17 years earlier; nay, it does not "recall" the earlier film so much as it is stunningly eager to remind us that the same man directed both, a man who had at one point been perhaps the greatest master of paranoia thrillers in American cinema. I should hesitate only slightly in proclaiming them the two most similar films in Pakula's career - if not in the particulars of narrative, then absolutely in terms of mood, tension, and the overall view of the world presented by the piece. You could barely hope to find a better pair of movies to compare, really, and it's something of a relief to see Pakula returned so firmly to the métier of his two greatest works (that's All the President's Men and The Parallax View) after stumbling around aimlessly throughout the 1980s, and having spent the 1990s to that point (this was 1993) making degraded copies of his best works in Presumed Innocent and Consenting Adults.

But now we must confront an ugly fact, that while The Pelican Brief might indeed recall the glories of All the President's Men, it does so without being anywhere nearly as good as All the President's Men; and if I would still call it one of Pakula's very best films since the end of the 1970s, that says far more about the decline of his career than anything else. There are by my count three hideous flaws that counterbalance nearly everything good about the film - and make no mistake, there is good about the film. It is the first movie in many years where the director's presence can really be felt in some of the compositions, and there is one scene in which the two lead characters are in a car that we know to be rigged with a bomb, and Pakula's handling of the camera during the business of "he's going to start the ignition - no he's not - yes he is" is so deft that you're about ready to claw your kneecaps off from the tension, even though the scene is, by any logical reading, a bit silly. But yes, three hideous flaws, that very nearly threaten to tip an otherwise fine and wholly engaging paranoia thriller like they just weren't making anymore in 1993 (and look around you: they still aren't) right into the shitter. If I still tend to like The Pelican Brief, it is only by the thinnest of margins, and largely because it is not Consenting Adults.

I could do this in any order, but convention holds that I discuss the story first, and the monumental, gaping problem at its center - not a plot hole, though like most thrillers, plenty of people have found plenty of holes here, and not all of them are equally valid criticisms. So to begin with, The Pelican Brief is adapted by Pakula (his fourth and last screenplay credit) from a John Grisham novel, and it came rather early in the curious boom of Grisham movies of the 1990s - making, arguably, the last and least time that Pakula functioned as an unassuming bellwether for the new trend in cinema (even better: the only earlier Grisham film, The Firm, was directed by Sydney Pollack, who has always seemed to be the less talented alt-Pakula, at least to me). I am no fan of Grisham's work; I have not read The Pelican Brief, but I am content to blame its worst structural problem on the source material, for the particular nature of this flaw seems to be indebted to trashy beach novel convention. But at any rate, here is what happens-

A mysterious man (Stanley Tucci) kills two SCOTUS justices, for no reason that anyone can immediately determine: they were not ideologically close, and the more conservative was inches away from death while the more liberal was the newest appointee to that body. Naturally, this becomes the cause célèbre among the media, legal thinkers, and the like: and there is one particular young woman, a Tulane law student named Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts, insanely young), who sets herself to forming a theory of her own, asking the question that she hasn't seen anyone else ask, "What did these men have in common?" Eventually she comes up with a possible solution that seems absolutely preposterous to her, but just for fun she hands it over to her professor and lover, Tom Callahan (Sam Shepard), and he hands it to his buddy in the FBI, Gavin Vereek (John Heard), and he hands it to his boss, Director Voyles (James B. Sikking), and from there it gets to the President of the United States himself (Robert Culp), whose response is to ask the head of the CIA (William Atherton) to make sure the whole thing gets disappeared. Which is a disproportionate response to a theory that even the theorist finds to be laughably far-fetched, don't you think? Though Darby is a lot less convinced that it's so far-fetched when Tom dies in a car bomb.

In the meantime, a reporter for the Washington Herald (changed from the Post, and here we start to go from "this is generically akin to All the President's Men" to "this is a damned remake of All the President's Men"), Gray Grantham (Denzel Washington) has been pursuing the story himself, with a mystery source calling himself Garcia (Jake Weber) prodding the reporter towards whatever truth Darby has apparently dug up. She is by this point certain that she's a target for murder, and she makes contact with Gray; after some amount of paranoid wrangling, they get together in New York, and she tells him her theory. This happens almost exactly at the midway point of the movie, incidentally; the second half follows as Darby and Gray hustle across the Eastern Seaboard trying to find enough documentary proof for her theory that he can publish it in his august paper of record.

Did you spot the flaw? Maybe not, because I was just synopsising, so perhaps you just assumed I didn't mention it. But that point, midway through, where Darby tells Gray her theory? Here's the thing - we don't know what the theory is yet. We find out very soon thereafter, mind you: he plays the tape of her statement, and I'll leave it as a surprise for the viewer (it is, by the way, kind of silly and implausible) almost immediately after their interview is done. But the point remains that for over half of the movie, we don't know what Darby - the protagonist - has discovered that is so terrifying and unlikely and true. And that is one hell of a tricky wire to navigate, the protagonist who is smarter than the audience in what is being pitched as a mystery thriller. Look at All the President's Men: within the context of the movie, we are pretty much always exactly in step with Woodward and Bernstein, although of course every single viewer in 1976 knew exactly what they were going to discover. It's a good, solid way to build a mystery: it binds our POV nice and tight to the main characters, and gets us quite engaged with their process as the story unfurls. But The Pelican Brief is just a cocktease: it is not just keeping us in the dark but telling us flat-out that it's keeping us in the dark, and asking us to sympathise with a heroine who knows exactly why she's being chased, even though all we know is that she has found "The Truth" - whatever the hell that might be. It makes it kind of impossible to engage with Darby when we're aware that she's a step ahead of us. Gray makes for a much better main character, but he's not really very present until just after the midway point, which is exactly when we understand Darby's plight and can better sympathise with her. So all around, the film gets a lot better at the midway point.

I promised three flaws. That was one. The second is much easier to describe: The Pelican Brief is utterly, obnoxiously visually plain. This was predestined the moment that Pakula teamed up for the second time with Stephen Goldblatt, his Consenting Adults cinematographer - leastways, it was if you agree with me that Consenting Adults had to that point been the director's most visually undistinguished movie. The Pelican Brief probably tops it, though: while Pakula's blocking is significantly better than it was in the last film, and the use of camera angles is generally more thoughtful (there is a return to the long-forgotten "Pakula Shot" - an extreme wide angle of two people engaged in some significant piece of business - and some very nicely-executed bird's-eye-view shots), the images are nonetheless inordinately flat, with absolutely functional use of focal depth, and perfunctory, uninflected lighting: it's not just that it looks boring, it looks so boring that it damn well hurts. It is so boring that it makes you want to sleep and not have to keep looking at it.

The third flaw: Julia Roberts. Okay, so back in the day I was one of those reflexively anti-Roberts people, but I have grown some sense since then (her extremely fruitful relationship with Steven Soderbergh helped that process a lot). But I still think it demonstrably true that she isn't a natural actress. A natural movie star, without a doubt. But it takes some doing to coax a good performance out of her, and in this stage of her career, nobody had really figured out how to do that yet (if you say Pretty Woman, I will cut you. I will fucking cut you over the internet), although Pakula, always a good director of actors, did his best. The result is sort of a nearly-good performance that keeps stranding itself a little bit too readily in Doe-Eyed Ingénue Land, although maybe I am just at this late date stunned to see Roberts when she was practically a little kid. But whatever causes it, I find that too much of her performance is at a '30s movie register of "bigness" at odds with every other element of the movie. And even the good parts of her performance feel like her absolute best impersonation of how Holly Hunter would play the role with a Midwestern accent.

So in the face of those crippling flaws, what can the film offer us that is good? Well, even when we don't know what's going on, it's a nicely high-momentum thriller that keeps going too quickly for us to stop and notice the smaller plot contrivances, and like I said, there are a few particular setpieces where Pakula seems to have woken up for the first time in 15 years and remembered how exactly you're supposed to make a movie.

It's the right mood for the filmmaker, that's what does it. Maybe no-one, and almost certainly no American, has ever surpassed Pakula for creating a tone of sheer paranoia through camera perspective and editing, always keeping us trapped in a bubble with the main character, who is constantly aware of the number of ways that somebody else might be about to kill them. And of course, like his classic paranoia trilogy, The Pelican Brief posits a world in which everyone is out to secure their own measure of power at the expense of absolutely everyone else, meaning that the universe itself is out to get the characters. If the 1993 film doesn't match the heights of, say, The Parallax View in creating that kind of world, I guess it's largely because it is lousy with problems. But you can see the shape of what it should look like; and that's at least some compensation. Even this late into unrecoverable mediocrity, Pakula could remember what it meant to be a great filmmaker; it is both touching and frustrating that The Pelican Brief should come so close to being good without quite finding a way out of its own Hollywood-bound inconsequence.