The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie

Clip show,

It’s a clip show,

We’re recycling all your favorite bits.

Clip show,

It’s a clip show,

Where we show you nothing but the hits.

The clip show is the cheapest, most commercial type of tv program there is.  To market a clip show as a movie is just plain crass.  I mean, fine, rip me off with cheap remakes of beloved classics.  Endow favorite characters with new traits that change their nature and the tone of the work.  But just splicing together a bunch of old bits and calling them a movie?  I’d be furious if my kids hadn’t laughed all the way through it.  Ok, I’ll admit it – my wife and I laughed through a fair amount, as well.  “It’s duck season!  Rabbit season!  Rabbit season!  Duck Season!  BLAM!”  never gets old.

Yes, The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie is a clip show, but the clips are amazing.  If your kids aren’t familiar with Loony Toons, here’s a great place to start.  For that matter, here’s a great place to start if you want to familiarize your kids with classical music.  There’s a whole bit that’s essentially one long Leopold Stokowski joke.  There’s an 8-minute riff on ‘The Ring of the Nibelung.’  There’s so much good music here that even if you choose to read on the couch while your kids watch the picture, you’ll groove along on your ears alone.

So yeah, clip shows = cheap cash-ins.  But when you have clips like these, go for it.  The Bugs Bunny / Roadrunner Movie delighted my entire family.

Ichi

Remember Zatoichi, the blind swordsman? You know the guy: 27 films, 112 television episodes, and even a Takashi Miike - directed stage production. He’s a masseur, he’s a swordmaster, and he’s the baddest blind dude in the land.

So, what if he had a protégé, something of an adopted daughter, also blind and a goze (a sort of officially sanctioned, blind itinerant musician)? What if they’ve separated and she’s on a quest to find him? What if she gets caught up in a conflict between bandits and villagers? Oh, and what if the actress who plays her is blessed with remarkable beauty?

What we’re talking about here is a 99% chance of awesomness.  Sadly, welcome to the 1%.

The actress appears never to have handled a sword, and she mustn’t even be a very good dancer, because director Fumihiko Sori never shows us a decent duel. We get succession of closeups, sprays of digital blood, and young Ichi’s strangely clean blade returning to its sheath. That’s it. Sure, other characters battle reasonably well, but the film isn’t entitled Other Characters. It’s entitled Ichi, and I don’t think it’s too much to expect for an actress playing a master swordswoman to be able to actually, y’know, handle a katana. But that’s not all. If the protagonist can’t use a blade, the antagonist can’t use his face to convey things like, oh, actual human emotion. All he can do is snarl and laugh menacingly, while trying to look threatening in costumes so silly Elton John would laugh them off the stage.

Ichi seemed like a sure thing, but they dropped the ball. Fortunately, you have 140 other outings of (a very similar) character to enjoy. Have at it.

Mildred Pierce

Holy smokes, what a great movie!

Joan Crawford plays Mildred Pierce in one of her finest performances.  She’s smart, tough, and driven, with just enough blind spots to make her interesting.  It’s such a fine performance because so much of it is Crawford herself – smart, tough, and driven is woven into her DNA.

Here’s the setup:  there’s been a murder.  Crawford’s a suspect.  The interrogation serves as a framing device, giving Crawford the chance to tell us her story and of the events – all of the events – that led up to a fateful night, gunshots, and a man on the floor.

Crawford’s story?  That of a newly-single mother, determined to give her daughters the finer things that she never had.  Pierce never relents in her drive, reveling in its positive consequences (anything  that’ll make a sidekick of Eve Arden is, by definition, a positive consequence) and blinding herself, at least for as long as she can, to the negatives.

This could be melodramatic stuff and, indeed, Mildred Pierce doesn’t shy from melodrama.  But the cast plays it straight, the movie looks fabulous (NOTE: How much better could we all look if only we had Silver-Age lighting directors to illuminate us?), and I found myself, perhaps for the first time in my life, actually rooting for a Joan Crawford character.

Mildred Pierce is just a flat-out terrific picture.  Rumor has it that HBO’s working on a remake, with Kate Winslet in the lead.  While Winslet Can Do No Wrong, she has her work cut out for her.  If the program turns out to be half as good as this film, it’ll be worth watching.

One, Two, Three

I like James Cagney.  I like Billy Wilder.  I like humor that pokes fun at all things German.  So why didn’t One, Two, Three, a Billy Wilder comedy about a Coca-Cola executive in Cold War Berlin work for me?  I think it’s a matter of pitch and pace.

‘Sabre Dance’ plays over the opening credits of One, Two, Three.  Having begun on this manic pace, the film never slows down.  Cagney spends most of the movie yelling at people, the comic foil spends all of his time yelling at people, and everyone’s so busy running around and shouting to the rafters that there’s never a moment to revel in comic silliness.

What a bore.

In a Lonely Place

In a Lonely Place showcases a brilliant Humphrey Bogart performance in a role that amuses, challenges, and delights us – right up to the moment when it conflicts with our modern sensibilities and throws us out of the picture.

Bogart plays Dix Steele (say it fast), a screenwriter who’s on the outs with the studios and the ins with the sauce. When he brings home a good-natured and ambitious young hat-check girl to help him with a project, we think we’re in for a romantic comedy. Bogart’s quite funny in his scenes with her, and he wins us over with his cynicism and wit. But things take a turn for the worse and he’s soon involved in a murder investigation. Did he do it? Maybe he could. Will he work his way out of it? Perhaps. We’re in.

That is, we’re in right up to the moment when a police detective reads his rap sheet. The rap sheet involves beating a girlfriend until he broke her nose and put her in the hospital. I think this is supposed to show his troubled past and his capacity for violence, but we’re still supposed to feel some measure of sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, I have no sympathy for domestic abusers. This led me to change my position from “I hope things work out” to “Screw this guy, and screw anyone who sticks by him.”

So I was lost. The gorgeous cinematography and the first-class performances meant nothing to me. The conflicts and resolutions wasted my time. I didn’t care enough about the character to want to see him exonerated, and I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of his guilt in the murder case to want to see him hanged. I was just plain out.

Perhaps, in its day, In a Lonely Place worked all the way through. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that corporal punishment of one’s spouse was considered a manly duty. Today, however, I look at a man who hits a woman who can’t him back and all I see is a coward and a rat.

I have no time for either.

The Secret of Kells

Ah, what a beautiful film.

The Secret of Kells centers on Brendan, a young monk in Kells, an Irish monastery and fortress against the invading Norsemen.  The abbot cares about one thing: building a wall big enough and strong enough to keep the Norse at bay.  Yes, there’s a scriptorium, but that seems almost an afterthought.  The illustrators there are workingmen.  They await the coming of a true master.

When one arrives, fleeing the Norse who’ve overrun his island monastery and bearing an illuminated manuscript that will one day become the (real life) Book of Kells, Brendan goes right to him.  What, after all, is the point of a monastery that ignores things monastic?

Ok, so there’s your hook.  But the secret of The Secret of Kells lies not in the story but in the presentation.  Its animation feels like illumination, with an overlapping 2-D style reminiscent of Sita Sings The Blues.  It weaves designs of Celtic symbology with Latin influences and brings to life many of the motifs of both.

This is a beautiful, imaginative film – the kind that, as a father, I’ll be able to watch over and over again, seeing new things each time.  If you value quality animation, you’ll love this film.

Red Beard

At first, I thought that Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard could as easily have been entitled ‘Hero Doctors.’ Red Beard is the head of a small charity clinic serving the rural poor in late Tokugawa-Era Japan, just before the Meiji restoration. We see him mostly through the eyes of Dr. Yasumoto, a recent grad on his way up before his exile to this backwater facility, and he is as heroic as can be. He leads his team. He saves lives. He comes up with funding. He does all the things Hero Doctors do.

But there's more going on here than that. Kurosawa understands that the laws of cinema dictate that Yasumoto will come to love the clinic and the people it serves. While he spends enough time on that story to create a binding narrative, he seems much more interested in the lives of the rural poor, their victories and losses and the beliefs that govern their world. Red Beard takes many long detours from Yasumoto’s tale to explore his patients’ lives. This gives the (three hour long) film a sense of pace and place, taking the time to immerse us in an entire community, not just the individual challenges faced by one guy.

Toshiro Mifune, surely one of cinema’s greatest talents, plays the eponymous Red Beard with just the right balance of authority and humanity. Yuzo Kayama does a fine job of getting us on the callow Dr. Yasumoto’s side and walking us through his character’s development. The clinic feels like a real clinic, the people like real people (Ok, we have to overcome the fact that some of the bit players were unwilling to get Tokugawa-era haircuts and went for wigs instead, but big deal – these were contract players, and Toho Studios had many concurrent productions running nearly all the time.), and the village, though it must have been a studio, like a real village.

Don’t be put off by Red Beard’s running time. Treat it like a book: watch a couple of chapters a night and enjoy the experience. Time with Akira Kurosawa is always time well spent.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

I giggled like a ninny for nearly the entire running time of OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies.

There are 146 OSS 117 novels.  The series, chronicling the adventures of Franco-American superspy OSS 117, began in 1949, went through three authors, and saw its last published novel in 1992.  The French made seven OSS 117 films from 1964-1970, part of the Eurospy genre that ripped off and riffed on the success of James Bond.  OSS 117 is supercool.  He gets the job done.  He’s so awesome that Ian Fleming essentially ripped off the OSS 117 novels to create 007.

And in 2006’s OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies, he’s a meathead.  A charming meathead, no doubt, but one so delightedly and blindly French (the American part of the character’s heritage doesn’t make it into this adaptation) that he hands out photos of then-president René Coty (the film’s set in the mid-‘50s) to incredulous Egyptians as keepsakes and tokens of his patronizing goodwill.  It’s a one-joke movie, but the picture grooves along on such a fun retro vibe of smug delight in all things French that we can’t help but groove along with it, snigger at 117’s blockheadedness, and generally enjoy a spy caper so outlandish and silly that there’s not much to do but have a great time.

The filmmakers do a wonderful job of creating an era, paying attention to details from the cut of a suit to the proper period footage for the rear-projections in driving sequences.  The move looks and feels like a film made in the early ‘60s, and everything pops in a color process we’re just not used to seeing in a new print.

So not only is the movie funny, it’s technically adept and well made all around.  I look forward to OSS 117: Lost in Rio.

Leaves of Grass

Tim Blake Nelson’s Leaves of Grass is a funny and sad and phenomenal. I enjoyed almost every minute of it, with one glaring exception.

Here’s the setup: Edward Norton plays identical (genius) twins. The protagonist twin got out of rural Oklahoma, dropped his accent, and “made it” as an academic philosopher at Brown University. The other stayed in his hometown, revolutionized hydroponic marijuana cultivation, and became, in the good twin’s words, “a criminal and all-around fuckup.”

As you may imagine, Good Twin hasn’t been ‘round in a very long time.

But events conspire to bring Good Twin back to Oklahoma and, before you know it, you’re in Doc Hollywood territory. Surely, the down home charms of country folk will speak to GT’s soul. Surely, a little twang will find its way back into his voice. Surely, there’s an Oklahoma Dreamgirl just waiting to steal his heart.

And that’s where the film puts a foot wrong. Keri Russel, as the Oklahoma Dreamgirl, doesn’t sell her part. She’s a poet who moved back to the small town because that’s the kind of thing that poets do. But every time she recites, she sounds like a woman reciting poetry and expecting you to dig it because, well, it’s poetry. She’s a poet who talks of passionate living, but brings no passion to her delivery of her life’s work. She yanked me right out of the movie.

But that’s it. That’s the one fly in the ointment. If you can overlook Russel’s performance, you get to enjoy Tim Blake Nelson as a henchman with a heart of gold, Richard Dreyfuss as a bloviating drug kingpin, Susan Sarandon as a mom who thought being a cool mom was all it took, and even The Wire’s Steve Earle as a Very Bad Man.

Will it speak to you? I don’t know. I do know that Tim Blake Nelson is a serious talent, able to bring rural America to life without trivializing it or condescending to it. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Bad Day at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock is the best western I’ve seen in ages.

It’s the 1950s.  A one-armed man (Spencer Tracy) gets off a train in Black Rock, a dusty town somewhere in the Mojave Desert.  It’s the first time anyone’s gotten off the train in Black Rock for years, and people there don’t cotton to strangers.  Lee Marvin doesn’t like him.  Ernest Borgnine doesn’t like him.  Robert Ryan doesn’t like him.  They invite him to leave.  He declines.  And away we go.

Bad Day at Black Rock succeeds because it’s a slow burn.  It works a quiet tension between Tracy and the people of the town, one that winds more and more tightly as Tracy penetrates to the town’s mysteries, learns just why he’s not wanted.  As the film progresses and we learn more about Tracy and Black Rock, we find ourselves shutting out our world and plunging into its.  The film is so immersive, so fascinating, so tense that we lose track of time.  It’s brilliant.

There’s more going on here than another good thriller, however.  Nevertheless, I’m going to keep mum about it.  If you don’t know Black Rock’s secrets, I don’t want to give you a hint.  If you do, well then, you know.

Ripley's Game

John Malkovich is an absolutely outstanding Tom Ripley in Ripley’s Game.

Thirty, maybe forty years on from the unsure young Tom Ripley of The Talented Mr. Ripley, this Ripley is a man in full. He lives the live to which he aspired in Talented: a fabulous Italian villa, a sophisticated and respected lover, and all the amenities of the arriviste American in Europe. Here’s a man who has long since made peace with his sociopathy. He is who he is, and he won’t cause you any trouble - unless you piss him off.

This Ripley still improvises. He still trusts to Providence. He’s just been doing it so long and been lucky so long that he’s become a master. But he’s still a fraud, and John Malkovich captures this sense of the classy, smooth operator who, in some vague way, is not quite right. We’re never comfortable around Malkovich, and we’re never comfortable around Ripley. Even when he seems to be on our side, we’re pretty sure he’s on his own side and that’s that.

So when he gets down to work and the dominos begin to fall, it’s ever so much wicked fun to watch Ripley be Ripley. Here’s a guy who starts someplace beyond where everyone else stops, a guy so secure and powerful in his sense of self that we can’t help but root for him and glide along with him. If you enjoyed Matt Damon in Talented, I think you’ll love this older, wiser, colder iteration of the character in Ripley’s Game. It’s a great role, Malkovich is great it in it, and Ripley’s Game is a whole lot of wicked fun.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Now we’re talking.

In THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, we meet a man with Locked In Syndrome. A stroke has taken away his ability to move, his ability to speak, his ability to feel. He can communicate by blinking one eye. That’s it.

So how do you make a movie about an immobile mute? You tell the story of his book, which he wrote with the assistance of the world’s most patient woman. She spieled off the letters of the alphabet in most – to – least – common order, and he blinked when she got to the one he needed next. Sometimes she’d leap ahead and guess, and he’d tell her when she guessed correctly by blinking twice for yes and once for no.

Sounds uplifting, right? Well, here’s the thing: Jean-Do (played by Bond Movie Villain Mathieu Amalric) is too self-aware for uplift. He was something of a shit before the stroke that stole his life away, and he realizes that he’s still something of a shit (though a more pathetic shit) after this enormous change. And that, boys and girls, is the difference between world-class cinema and the Hallmark Channel.

His shittiness makes him an interesting character. It makes us wonder how he’ll react in a given situation, either in the current moment or in flashback to an earlier, normal, time in his life. It makes us grieve over some of his choices and glory in others, which leads us to consider our own choices and the ways in which we respond to the challenges, temptations, and duties of life. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY may be about Jean-Do (a real man and former editor of Elle magazine), but it’s also about us.

And that’s why it’s the good stuff.

Kingdom of Heaven

In KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, Ridley Scott gives us the evolution of an anachronistic humanist, one who learns not only that selfish, cruel, cowardly greedy, and vile Christians are no match for noble Muslims, but that Christianity and Islam pale in significance next to humanism, which he apparently discovers. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, while posing as a historical epic, is actually a time-travel movie: what would happen if a man with a thoroughly early-21st-century outlook found himself charged with defending 12th-century Jerusalem?

Fine – it’s anachronistic. But is it any good? Well, it is nicely costumed and decorated, the actors generally hit their marks, and it’s always nice to see Jeremy Irons get a big-budget paycheck. But I just couldn’t get past the film’s hamhandedness, it’s chronocentric love of modern ideologies, its near-total lack of shading or complexity in the creation of its characters. This isn’t a movie – it’s a puppet show. What a disappointment.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Ellen Burstyn is an amazing actress.  In ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE, she creates a title character so true to life that I actually forgot I was watching a movie. Alice’s fears, her frustrations, her hopes, and her development are the film; and Burstyn never puts a foot wrong through two full hours of running time.

Honestly, that about sums up my entire reaction to the film.  Harvey Keitel, Kris Kristofferson, and even a young Jodie Foster appear in this early Scorsese film, but they’re already fading in memory next to Burstyn’s extraordinary performance.  In her way, she’s every parent that ever was.  See this film for her, and be glad.

Red Cliff

Wow. John Woo knocks it out of the park with the film he returned to China to make. Red Cliff is fantastic.

With Red Cliff, Woo adapts part of the Chinese epic novel ­Romance of the Three Kingdoms to tell the tale of the Battle of Red Cliff. What’s the Battle of Red Cliff? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Around 200 AD, the Emperor of China had nearly consolidated his hold on the country. Through his general and prime minister, Cao Cao, he’d subjugated all but two of the regional warlords. That’s one way of looking at it – another perspective, that of the film, paints a rapacious prime minister manipulating a young emperor and warring for personal vendetta and personal gain, enslaving all but two noble houses and besmirching the emperor’s good name. Whatever your perspective, the fact remains that the emperor’s forces attacked the armies of Zhou Yu and Sun Quan at Red Cliff, a nearly impregnable redoubt fronted by river and backed by impassable terrain. The battle, fought on land and on water, incorporated every facet of warfare: tactical and strategic thinking, personal bravery, special warfare, technological innovation, information superiority, and plain luck. In short, the Battle of Red Cliff is stuff of which epics are made.

And John Woo is just the man to make it. Woo brought Hong Kong cinema to the world stage (Really, if you haven’t seen Hard Boiled, your life has no meaning.). He came to the US and made action pictures of variable quality, but he’s found his soul again in his native land. Woo knows how to do more than make doves fly: he can direct action, he can make dialogue fascinating, and he can create and convey the unique Chinese-ness of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the people and era he portrays.

One gets the sense that this was something of a Chinese national project: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, perhaps China’s finest film actor (Bullet in the Head, In the Mood for Love, Infernal Affairs (the superior original to Scorsese’s The Departed), 2046, Hero, and many more) plays Zhou Yu. Major Chinese pop star and increasingly respectable young actor Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers, Chungking Express, Returner) plays Zhuge Liange, the strategist who ultimately brings down Cao Cao. Fengyi Zhang (Farewell My Concubine) plays Cao Cao, Chen Chang (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2046) plays Sun Quan, and Vicki Zhao (So Close, perhaps the single greatest movie ever made) convinces us as an unlikely spy who creates perhaps the most interesting way to smuggle information ever. This is the Chinese A-list, brought together by Woo to recreate a moment in Chinese cultural history on par with the West’s siege of Troy.

And this director, these actors, sell every minute of it. Every negotiation, every planning session, every battle, every note sings with the richness of Chinese history and the driving fascination of compelling narrative. Red Cliff is a long, long film, yet I lost track of time while watching it and, when called away, marked the time until I could return to it. Red Cliff is amazing. It’s the best thing John Woo has ever done. I hope he never comes back to America.

Blow-Up

Blow-Up.  It’s a classic, an Antonioni about a man trapped in a listless existence that must’ve seemed cool when he chose to get into it; a man who comes fully, completely alive when he photographs the wrong people at the wrong time and, with his keen eye, sees something he should not have seen.

Look, we’re talking about Antonioni here, so the composition’s phenomenal and the story works.  But that’s not what interested me in viewing Blow-Up.  In a film about a photographer and the photographer’s eye, I found the soundscapes most interesting. 

Blow-Up doesn’t feature a music-as-wallpaper soundscape.  Rather, it opts for ambient noise.  For long stretches, this translates to almost no noise at all, as much of the action takes place inside the photographer’s head.  He thinks, he works, he plays, he thinks some more, and we don’t need symphonic strings to keep us occupies as he’s about it.  There’s enough there for us in the film’s compelling questions: did he see what he thought he saw?  Does it matter?  What does it mean, and what does it mean in the context of his life as we’ve seen it thus far?

Blow-Up trusts itself, its story, and craftsmanship enough to refrain from overwhelming us.  It trusts its audience to keep up, even when there may not appear to be all that much with which to keep up.  It thinks, and works, it plays, it thinks some more, and it expects us to do so, as well.

But does it work?  Well, yes.  Blow-Up pulls us into its world and wraps us up in its central mystery, all while giving the eye plenty to enjoy and the mind plenty to chew.  This Antonioni guy – I think he knew what he was about.

Adam

In Adam, a boy meets a girl.  He loses her.  Maybe he gets her back.  We’ve seen this before.  But this film has an angle.

Adam has Asperger’s syndrome.  Asperger’s is a kind of high-level autism that manifests itself, among other ways, through an inability to intuit the emotions of others.  In fact, the world of social interaction, all those little gestures and words that most people intuitively understand and navigate, mystifies Asperger’s people.  Asperger’s people tend to perseverate on a subject, boring deeply into an area of interest and thinking and talking about it to the exclusion of nearly all else, which can bore the hell out of those without it – and Asperger’s people can’t read the signs of boredom.  Asperger’s people generally don’t lie; they eschew nuance; and there’s something about the unique way their brains are wired that often leads to genius.  Many think Mozart, as well as Edison and Einstein and Doc Brown, had Asperger’s.  My ten-year-old son has Asperger’s. 

Adam’s eponymous protagonist has a more serious case of the syndrome than my son.  Where my son comes across as a particularly bright, though socially awkward and verbose, kid; Adam (as assayed by English actor Hugh Dancy) experiences Asperger’s as a crippling affliction that limits his ability to work, to make friends, to deal with any kind change to his routine and sense of order.  In Dancy’s performance, I saw a magnified version of my son: his perseverations, his struggles with behaviors like smiling and making eye contact, his inability to glide along when the conversation turns to topics he finds uninteresting.

I’m telling you all this to explain why I cannot evaluate Adam as a work of narrative cinema.  The subject matter’s too close to my heart.  The star’s performance evoked too much of my son.  See, I want my boy to find love, to find his place in the world, and I transferred that desire to Adam’s title character.  I was so completely on this guy’s side from nearly the first frame, so happy to see him develop, so heartbroken when he encountered obstacles, so in the moment, that I can only tell you that Dancy nails Asperger’s.  I’m going to recommend this film to my wife, and I’ll recommend it to you if you know someone with Asperger’s (or if you have it, yourself).  Adam may very well be a pedestrian romantic film about an Asperger’s guy and a “normal” girl trying to make a relationship work.  But if the angle speaks to you, you’ll love it.

I did.

A Hard Day's Night

I hated this movie.

There are two kinds of people in this world: Beatles people and Stones people.  I'm a Stones guy.  Nevertheless, I tried to approach the film with an open mind, and it rewarded me with one of the best opening sequences I’ve ever seen: the band members outrunning and outwitting a mob of fans on the streets of London, set to the film’s title song.

The opening sequence ends all to quickly, however, and before you know it these guys are talking. Here’s when you know what you’re really in for: bad actors mouthing bad dialogue, with the occasional musical interlude. There’s supposed to be some comedy, but it mostly comes off as mean spirited. There’s supposed to be some semblance of a story, but it’s so simple that I wonder why they even bothered. I think it’s supposed to make us like John, Paul, George, and Ringo, but the quartet come off as spoiled brats who need a good kick in the ass.

Then again, perhaps I’m being unfair. A Hard Day’s Night isn’t a film: it’s a marketing vehicle for the teenaged girl demographic. Since I’m neither teenaged nor a girl, I don’t think there’s any way I could have enjoyed it.

Whatever. All I know is, I’m still not a Beatles guy.

Harry Brown

I think the world of Michael Caine.  From Alfie to Jaws 3: The Revenge to Cider House Rules to Inception, the actor has created a body of work best defined by the word “work.”  Highbrow, lowbrow, and everywhere in between, Caine brings his A game to each role.  I respect that kind of work ethic.  I respect Michael Caine.

So what a pleasure to see Harry Brown, a vigilante thriller starring Caine as one of the best doggone actors ever to pick up a fake Glock and take the fight to the hoodlums blighting his neighborhood.  What a pleasure to watch Caine act the hell out of his character’s loneliness, his pain, his fear, his anger, his resolve.  What a pleasure to find the cop and buddy roles filled by Emily Mortimer (Transsiberian) and David Bradley (Argus Finch in the Harry Potter films).  The professionalism, the integrity Caine and his fellows bring to their roles elevate Harry Brown’s simple vigilante story into a class on how to do a mid-budget thriller.

The film itself?  It feels like a remake of Death Wish.  Violence upon those he loves traumatizes a quiet citizen of a decaying city into bloody action.  That’s really all there is to it and, while it does a fine job of setting a somber tone and commenting on Kids These Days, it’s not what makes this film worthwhile.  Caine, as a hopeless old man whose support network disappears, one by one, until he’s ready to lash out, is what makes this film worthwhile.  He’s sad, he’s hopeless, he’s mad as hell, he’s resolute, and he’s as completely realized a character as you’re likely to see this year.

Harry Brown represents a respectable entry in a respectable body of work.  Well done, Michael Caine.

The Joneses

What a clever premise.  In The Joneses, David Duchovny and Demi Moore play the “father” and “mother” of a “perfect family,” an upscale clan which always has the best of everything: the coolest new cars, the most stylish clothes, the niftiest consumer electronics.

They’re plants.  No, not plant people like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though that would be pretty cool.  It’s just that they aren’t really married.  Their kids aren’t really their kids.  And they don’t really own any of their cool stuff.  They’re stealth marketers, living in a house their company leases and using their good looks, charisma, and subtle salesmanship to become the tastemakers whom the tastemakers follow.  They track their effectiveness in local sales rates of luxury goods, and they compete amongst themselves to put up the best numbers in their demographics.  The locals?  Well, maybe they can afford to keep up, and maybe they can’t.  That’s not the Joneses problem.

Thus does the film (directed and co-written by former ad man Derrick Borte) skewer our consumer and credit culture with bite and wit, reflecting on how much we define ourselves by our stuff and how much we define ourselves by how our stuff stacks up against the neighbors’ stuff.  And I’ve gotta tell ya, it worked.  I wanted The Joneses’ house.  I wanted their cars.  I wanted their clothes and their gadgets and all the rest, even as I knew I was watching a film about how artificial those wants can be.  And when things started going wrong, as the laws of drama dictate they must, I wanted The Joneses to pull through.  Not only did they sell me on their stuff, they sold me on themselves.

The Joneses worked as satire and as drama, and it made me think about my buying habits and the impulses that drive me to purchase some gadget before I pay off my cars.  The Joneses was sharp and could be unkind, but I learned from its insights and recommend it to you.  This is a good film.