Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron

HELLBOY ANIMATED: BLOOD AND IRON just isn't as much fun as SWORD OF STORMS.

B&I puts the Hellboy gang in a haunted house that's just been purchased by a Richard Branson -esque character. Before you know it, they're in the middle of a vampire and ghost story that's too gory for the kids and too familiar for the adults. Tack on a third act that recreates and truncates the Hellboy-Hecate storyline from the comics, but doesn't feel organic to the vampire/ghost story, and you have a wholly unsatisfying experience.

Color me underwhelmed.

An Inconvenient Truth

If you like watching people preach to the converted, you'll love AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Al Gore, at his pedantic, self-satisfied best, delivers his well-honed global warming presentation to an audience that hangs on his every word. Gore's presentation combines data, images, and even a Matt Groening video in its efforts to convince -well, by the looks of things, people who need no convincing. He uses straw man arguments to dismiss "critics" (You can practically see the quotation marks he puts around the word.), he milks the current administration for easy laughs (not that that's hard to do), and he generally plays to his base.

This is fine, particularly if you're his base, but then the movie can't help but get us into Gore's personal life, or at least whichever aspects of his personal life he chooses to exploit for the purposes of the film. There are plenty of shots of Apple board member Gore working with determination at his Apple computer, looking pensively into his Apple computer, and just generally promoting the Apple brand. There's Gore sitting down with "cutting edge," as he describes them, (fully vetted) representatives of the PRC, home of some of the world's most polluted cities, talking about their solutions. There's Gore navigating the backstage labyrinth, causing me to hope, for just a moment, that he'd stop and ask someone for directions. Oh, it was horrible.

If I had to boil AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH down to just one word, that word would be "Insufferable." I went into this movie feeling neutral about Gore and generally sympathetic toward his cause. I came out of it actively disliking the man and neutral toward his cause. This film's success is a mystery to me.

Shortbus

SHORTBUS plants its flag in the first ten minutes. This is a movie about sexuality, discovery, and human relationships, and it takes the sexuality part of that equation very seriously. In the first ten minutes, we meet the film's main characters as they participate in various sex acts, and the film is pretty much as graphic as can be. These people aren't simulating their sex acts: SHORTBUS isn't pornography, but the only difference between these parts of the movie and pornography is attitude. If you're ok with that, and you're willing to go along for the ride, you're in for an excellent picture. If not, well, I understand.

Sometimes, I'll write that I respect a film more than I like it. This usually happens with pictures whose reach exceeds their grasp: I appreciate the reach, even if things didn't quite work out. SHORTBUS is a film that I both respect and like: it innovates, it tries new things, it seeks to push the boundaries of its art form, and it succeeds. Additionally, it succeeds in crafting a number of compelling, interweaving storylines that catch us up in the lives of its people and, perhaps, teach us a little about ourselves.

SHORTBUS sold me early on. In that first ten minutes, two of the people we view are in the throes of energetic, creative, loving sex. When compared with the emptiness that infuses the other vignettes, these people are doing all right. As they bask in the afterglow, the woman (Sook-Yin Lee) says, "I feel sorry for people who don't have what we have." The woman, a sex therapist, goes on to confide the problem of one of her clients: the woman has been faking her orgasms. "I told her to keep on doing it," the therapist goes on. "It's a valid method of buying time for the relationship." The man's (Raphael Baker) expression goes from one of contentment to intense insecurity. "Is she talking about herself?" he seems to be thinking. It was a deft touch, and extraordinarily well played, and it's when I knew that SHORTBUS wasn't going to be some exploitative artistic wankery. It was going to be a movie about real emotions and real relationships, and it was going to approach them from a mature viewpoint.

Plenty of movies explore relationships, and some do it well. What sets SHORTBUS apart is its approach to sexuality. This movie takes a real chance in depicting actual sex in the way that it does. It's one thing to cut to an exterior shot of the train entering a tunnel; it's quite another to stay in the railway car; warts, excretions, and all. By taking a chance on the audience's toleration of unusual movie experiences, the film gets to explore actual human sexuality in interesting, layered, and thought-provoking ways. As is the case with any excellent movie, all the elements of SHORTBUS work together to give the audience greater understanding of the characters and advance the narrative. It's a gimmick, I suppose, but no more a gimmick than using stuffed animals and cellophane to explore the subconscious.

This is one of those movies you can't watch on the Metro and you can't watch until the kids are deeply asleep. If you can make the time, and if you're willing to overcome the discomfort the film may make you feel, SHORTBUS is well worth the effort.

The World's Fastest Indian

In THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN, Anthony Hopkins plays an eccentric Kiwi engineering genius. He lives in a shack and tinkers with his motorcycle, and he eventually decides to head to the U.S., where he plans to take his bike the Bonneville Salt Flats for the speed trials. Once in the U.S., he meets a variety of colorful and harmless characters, makes some friends, sets some records, and generally has a delightful time.

And that's the problem with THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN: it's basically a movie about a nice fellow having a delightful time. There's no real conflict (at least nothing that can't be cleared up in no time), no real character development, no real anything. Now, I like Anthony Hopkins, but not enough to justify a whole movie without a compelling dramatic throughline.

What a disappointment.

The Science of Sleep

I respected THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP more than I liked it. Michel Gondry's film takes real chances, both narratively and visually, and it dares to deviate from formulas. Unfortunately, it does so in service to a story that I didn't find compelling.

I thought Gael Garcia Bernal's character was insane and potentially dangerous. Consequently, I did not root for him to get together with Charlotte Gainsbourg's Stephanie. Rather, I rooted for Stephanie to get as far away as she could as quickly as she could. Such is not the path to audience immersion in what is, of a sort, a love story.

Nevertheless, I respected Gondry's willingness to shift in and out of conscious experience almost at whim, and his faith in the audience's ability to follow along. I enjoyed the animation and the sensibilities of the fantasy world. I bought the performances and agree with Dash in his assertion that Bernal is developing into a "performer of admirable range."

Respecting a film isn't the same as liking it, however. You can't always have it all.

Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut

The worst thing about DONNIE DARKO is the plot. Unfortunately, plotting is what the director's cut is all about.

In its original form, DONNIE DARKO is so impenetrable that it inspires its audiences to think of it almost as a tone poem while they try to piece together the clues scattered throughout its narrative. This worked for me, as I drew more from the film's evocation of adolescence than I did its confusing storyline.

The director's cut, on the other hand, adds a few scenes and some intertitles that take this strange meditation on puberty and turns it into a rather humdrum science fiction piece about time travel. The intertitles have an added, unpleasant effect: by demonstrating that Donnie is not psychotic, they eliminate the sole source of the original version's dramatic tension.

Directors commonly moan when studio "suits" come in and demand changes to their vision. In this case, the suits were right.