Trucker

Dudeman.  Dude man.  Dude, man.  Dude-man.

I’ll never forget flying into Los Angeles International, waiting at the curb, and overhearing a guy begin a sentence with, “Dudeman.”  That’s the moment I knew I was home.

James Mottern, who wrote TRUCKER, gets the California dialect.  When its star, Michelle Monaghan as the titular trucker, begins a sentence with an exasperated “Dudeman,” I’m right there in the California high desert, right there with her, and she’s someone I know.

See, I’m from the pickup trucks and rifle racks part of Southern California.  This film, set in that part of the state, understands the people who live there.  In particular, it understands Monaghan’s character, Diane Ford, realized in a performance that leads me to reevaluate the actress as a serious force.   Ford owns her own rig, owns her own home, spends far too much time doing too much heavy drinking with Nathan Fillion, a married neighbor.  She’s not ready to care for her long since abandoned 11-year-old son, dropped into her lap when his father’s cancer has grown too strong for him.

I know that you think you know where this film is going: Heartwarm City.  But TRUCKER’s more honest than that.  Ford doesn’t blossom into a fairy princess after a few quick lumps.  And her son never has been and never will be a treacly, tow-headed boy.  But these people have got to figure something out, and the film takes them there without betraying them, their milieu, or itself.

TRUCKER’s an honest film, closely observed and carefully made.  It had me at dudeman.

The Informant!

I’ve had it with the films of Stephen Soderbergh. They seem so affected, so aware of their own cleverness. THE INFORMANT!, for example, glides along on this bouncy muzak that makes me feel like the film thinks it’s smarter than the people in it. Since the people in it made suckers out of us, we don’t have to work too hard to close that circle.

THE INFORMANT! tells the quasi-true story of Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon as some sort of goofball moron genius. The film adapts Whitacker’s book about his time as an FBI informant, helping the Bureau build a price-fixing case against agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland while simultaneously embezzling millions and millions of dollars from his employer.

I think it’s going for archly humorous, but it simply comes off as arch. Eventually, it got under my skin, giving me the kind of uncomfortable feeling I associate with observing one person belittle another. Consequently, I distanced myself from the film and merely waited for it to end.

After the disappointments of BUBBLE, OCEAN’S THIRTEEN, and THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, I'm done with this filmmaker. I just don’t see what he brings to the table.

Moon

I hesitate to tell you much about MOON.  It’s a film that parcels out information a little at a time, leaving it to the audience to piece things together.  The film takes place on a mining installation on the far side of the Moon.  Fully automated, the installation requires one man to fix things, to deal with the unexpected, to do the kinds of tasks that only men can do.  The job comes with a three-year contract and, as the film begins, Sam Rockwell has two weeks to go.  Two weeks to go, and he may be losing his mind.

No, this isn’t the Overlook Hotel in space.  Nothing that obvious.  Rather, it’s absorbing, engaging, thought-provoking science fiction.  In fact, it reminds me of a tale out of the Golden age of Science Fiction, like something Philip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov might have written.  Sam Rockwell, quickly climbing the list of my favorite actors, shines.  And the world, the Moon, created here is fully realized and perfect to the last detail.

That’s it: that’s all I think I can say without giving anything away.  If you like science fiction, if you like movies, you must see MOON.  This is an outstanding film.

The Invention of Lying

THE INVENTION OF LYING is both profoundly smug and intellectually dishonest.

It’s profoundly smug because it mocks Judaeo – Christianity while so proud of itself for its cleverness that it fails to see the cheapness and lack of sophistication of its attacks. It’s intellectually dishonest because, like all beauty and the beast stories, it operates on the underlying assumption that it is for the beautiful to judge beastliness.

In the film, Rick Gervais plays a man living in a world in which no one has ever lied. There is no fiction; there is no acting; there is only objective truth. Of course, a world without imagination is a world in which no one could imagine new inventions or scientific theories, but that’s not important right now. The fun part, or at least the part which the film thinks is most fun, is that it’s a world without religion. Because, after all, religions are tissues of lies.

But Gervais invents the lie. He lies to ease the passing of his beloved mother, and people overhear. Those people tell other people and, before you know it, Gervais has written down the ten principles of religion and taped them to the backs of a couple of pizza boxes in a heavy handed mockery of the Ten Commandments. One lie leads to another and to another, and soon the image of Gervais with the Pizza Boxes has transformed into something like a crucifix. Gervais himself is made up to look like Jesus. And we in the audience are expected to laugh at the yahoos simple enough to believe in an invisible man in the sky.

Gervais also lies to attract Jennifer Garner, a woman whom I’m told is beautiful (but I just don’t see it). She’s meant to grow and mature and see that real beauty, real desirability, lies within. But she has no inner beauty. In fact, she has no redeeming qualities of which the movie makes us aware, leading us to believe that Gervais himself sees only the beauty without. This, of course, is the Beauty and the Beast conundrum. Beauty is supposed to see past the beast and perceive the lovely soul within. But the beast sees only the beauty, which puts him in the position of demanding that which he is unwilling to give: loyalty to the soul and not the appearance.

THE INVENTION OF LYING isn’t funny, it isn’t romantic, it isn’t good. In fact, it’s the worst movie I’ve seen since TIMELINE. Pass this one by.