State of Play

STATE OF PLAY is a political thriller, a journalism thriller. It begins with two deaths, which lead to more deaths, which lead to two reporters racing against time to uncover the byzantine twists of a story which isn’t what it seems even after they’ve realized that it isn’t what it seems. It’s a good story, well told, with sophistication and surprises; and it makes Washington as exciting as it seemed when I first moved here.

Russell Crowe, who Can Do No Wrong, and Rachel McAdams play reporters from the fictional Washington Globe. He’s an old school, ink-stained bastard of the highest order, and she, well, she writes the blog. Helen Mirren is their publisher, Jeff Daniels is the Minority Whip, and Ben Affleck and Robin Wright Penn are a straying congressman and the wife who stands beside him at the Press Conference of Shame. Why bother telling you this? Because these are high caliber performers, the kind who merit putting a film on the rental queue for their names alone. There are some weaker performances farther down the credits list, but don’t let them pull you out of the story.

For that matter, don’t let the story pull you out of the story. Early on, you may think it’s just another jeremiad against the political punching bag of the day. But give it time. Let a surprising Jason Bateman performance work on you, and see where things go. I think you’ll be pleased.

I understand that STATE OF PLAY is an adaptation of a BBC series with Bill Nighy and Kelly MacDonald, among others, so I’ll end with a question: have you seen it? Should I?

A Dirty Shame

A DIRTY SHAME is a comedy, I think. It isn’t funny, which kind of works against it, but it is outlandish. So if outlandish is your thing, there you are.

It’s a sex addiction farce that centers on sexual practices in which, to the best of my knowledge, no one engages. The sexual practices are supposed to be outlandishly funny, but they’re actually just ridiculous. There are some practices in the film in which people actually engage, but they’re handled with such wide-eyed wonder that it seems like the picture was made by people who’d only read about sex in books. This is the kind of sex comedy an early adolescent may find amusing because he or she doesn’t know any better.

Yes, there’s a heavyhanded lesson about tolerance and, yes, the film does have a sweet, sweet heart, but it failed to pass the first test of the comedy. It failed to bring so much as a smile to my lips.

Maybe next time, Mr. Waters.

The Aura

THE AURA is about a guy, a simple guy, kind of a sap, who gets in way over his head. There’s a girl, of course, and guns, and money. Lots of money.

In other words, it’s a noir picture. It’s also Argentine, which is pretty cool since that makes it the first Argentine noir picture I’ve ever seen. The sap is sufficiently sappish, the girl is sufficiently girlish, and so forth, and the whole thing really catches fire in the last 45 minutes. Problem is, it’s a two hour long picture. Act One takes forever and Act Two takes nearly as long. Act Three, that last 45 minutes, is solid, but even it could have been a bit shorter. Here’s a movie that has all the elements it needs but that could have benefitted from one more, supertight, edit.

It’s that edit that keeps this film from excellence and renders it, instead, to the vault of pretty-goodness. Still, if you like noir, and you’re interested in seeing an Argentine take on the genre, THE AURA ain’t bad.

Words and Music

"Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook" is the soundtrack of heaven. I discovered it in the CD collection of a girl I was dating in 1989. I married the girl and, twenty years later, we still have the CD. So when I heard that there was a Rodgers and Hart biopic and that it was pretty doggone good, into the queue it went. I wanted to learn about these guys and their music.

I learned that the music is good, but it’s really the performer who makes it live.

WORDS AND MUSIC follows the Rodgers and Hart career arc, but it's more a retrospective, with moments of story serving mostly to segue between performances by distinguished artists of the day. But here's the problem: in the hands of wrong people, R&H's music goes from smart and sly classics to dated pop. Lena Horne is great and all, but her rendition of “Lady is a Tramp” in the film just can’t stand up to Ella’s on disc. June Allyson’s “Thou Swell” is a wet noodle compared to Nat King Cole’s in “Live at the Sands.” And don’t even get me started on comparisons with Sinatra.

Don’t get me wrong: the movie’s ok, particularly if you’re interested in even a fictionalized biopic of Rodgers and Hart. It’s just that nearly every time someone sang, I found myself comparing the performance with that of a better artist. All things considered, I prefer to remember Rodgers and Hart with the help of Fitzgerald and Cole and Sinatra, not the folks behind this picture.

Written on the Wind

Sooner or later, I had to get to Douglas Sirk. This is a director of influence, discussed and referenced decades after his passing. I've been putting him off because he worked in a time (the early Technicolor era) and a genre (melodrama) that doesn't appeal to me. But his work is seen as multilayered, with pulp for the matinee audience and cutting social commentary for the dinner-and-drinks crowd, and any student of the art form has to see him sometime. So what did Douglas Sirk have to say to me?

He had to say that America really, really needed rock 'n roll.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND's surface gloss is one of vapidity. It's shallow, finding joy in glittery handbags and hand blown glassware and gauzes and mind-numbingly plastic choral music - it's trying too hard to buy class, when real class comes from within. But look beneath the polish and you'll find all those old needs and emotions which have colored human drama since we figured out to get a steady supply of food, water, and shelter. You can't live on polish - it's too slippery. You need the grit of humanity, the anger and the love and the biology and all the rest. You need to embrace it, because it's the only way to get any real traction.

That's where rock and roll comes in. America needed it because it needed to put aside the postwar happy face and get back to the hard business of living. It needed Berry to remind it how to dance, Elvis to remind it how to love, The Beatles to rejuvenate it, and The Doors to help it find the dark places of its soul. All these things that Sirk criticizes, all these attitudes he laments, all the silliness he lampoons, they needed rock 'n roll to clean them out and ground America in reality once again.

Sirk had a lot to say. I'm glad I took the time to listen.

The Counterfeiters

THE COUNTERFEITERS (Die Fälscher), is the story of Salomon Smolianoff, a real-life convicted counterfeiter who, with along with other Jewish inmates of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were forced to carry out Operation Bernhard. It's based on the memoirs of Adolf Burger, another prisoner who plays a critical role in the film.

Operation Bernhardt was directed by, and named after, Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer (SS Major) Bernhard Krüger, who set up a team of 142 counterfeiters from inmates at Sachsenhausen concentration camp at first, and then from other camps, especially Auschwitz. Beginning in 1942, the work of engraving the complex printing plates, developing the appropriate rag-based paper with the correct watermarks, and breaking the code to generate valid serial numbers was extremely difficult, but by the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810. The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency. (Wikipedia: Operation Bernhardt)

It's the best history lesson about this particular episode of the War that has been committed to film. Unfortunately, it isn't a particularly gripping film. The picture's framing story tells us that its protagonist will survive, so the next hour and a half is merely an exercise in seeing how he does it. Sure, his conscience evolves. Sure, there are ethical dilemmas about the merits of saving one's own skin versus throwing a wrench into the Nazi war machine. But there isn't much we haven't seen before, and the film never fully captures our imagination.

If you're a history buff, I recommend this THE COUNTERFEITERS for its depiction of Operation Bernhardt. Otherwise, while it's a good film, I wouldn't counsel you to go out of your way for it.

The Lady Eve

The Lady Eve has the wrong title. The title should be Barbara Stanwyck Kicks Ass and Take Name for an Hour and a Half. Well, perhaps that's a bit much. How about Barbara Stanwyck is Better Than You, or Hey Moron, Why Aren't You in Love with Barbara Stanwyck Yet?

Whatever you call it, Preston Sturges's screwball comedy about a naive millionaire and the fraudsters out to fleece him is utterly, delightfully, hilariously brilliant. This is a movie that works spoken, physical, and character-based comedy into every scene, creating laugh-out-loud moments from sophisticated banter, pratfalls, and even simple moments like the unguarded shuffling of a deck of cards or the presentation of a lei.

Henry Fonda is the millionaire, a child of privilege on the return voyage from a long expedition up the Amazon. He's young, he's clumsy, he's idealistic, and he's so ridiculously, adorably, unstoppably in love that if you, dear reader, don't root for him, then you have an iron heart. Barbara Stanwyck is one of the fraudsters, the pretty girl who specializes in lovestruck rich morons. I've been crushing on Stanwyck since I saw Ball of Fire in 1982, and I've gotta tell you that her performance in this film eclipses even that classic. Stanwyck dominates every moment of The Lady Eve. She steals every scene she's in, and she steals every scene she's not in because even when none of the other characters are talking about her, they're talking about her. Her energy, her charisma, her combination of looks, brains, and balls (There's really no other way to put it: this dame's got big brass Bill the Goat balls.) sells Fonda's slackjawed lovesickness and sells her character's wit and audacity.

Toss in spot-on supporting comic performances from hall of famers Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, and Eric Blore, perfect direction, editing, and scoring, and you have as good a screwball comedy as anyone has ever run through a projector. And, again, Stanwyck. What a performer. What a performance.

What a movie.

The Mutant Chronicles

Where do you go after a movie like 8 1/2? When you've just had a gourmet meal, what do you eat the next time you get hungry?

You go to a genre picture like THE MUTANT CHRONICLES for the same reason you go to McDonald's after that gourmet meal. When you've had a transcendent experience, you need to reset. Otherwise, you won't give perfectly fine but otherwise average fare its due. You'll be measuring it against that masterpiece, and it'll come up short.

And THE MUTANT CHRONICLES is as greasy a burger as you could want after the feast of 8 1/2. It's poorly written, poorly edited, poorly scored, poorly acted, and poorly conceived. It's an uncomfortable mishmash of WWI, zombies, and apocalyptic science fantasy set in a steampunk world that doesn't understand that automatic weapons create more and worse tissue damage in less time than swords. It has lame prophecies, halfhearted fu, and John Malkovich reading his lines from the back of a prop. It's just plain bad in every way, a nice counterpoint to 8 1/2 and a good way to ensure that the subsequent pictures on my Netflix queue get a fair shake.

So, yeah, I'm recommending it, after a fashion. If you spend all your time in the best restaurants, you need to remind your palette what bad tastes like. THE MUTANT CHRONICLES does the trick.

8 1/2

8 1/2 may the best film ever made.

If not, it is the best film about art ever made. Released in 1963, it would have been as relevant in 1889, the year after ROUNDHAY GARDEN SCENE, as it would be if it premiered tomorrow. It's a film that encompasses everything that art is about, or at least is supposed to be about. It's about the tension between truth and fiction, between art and commerce, between awareness and narcissism. And it's about everything that life is about. It's about commitment and betrayal, about memory and currency, reality and fantasy. It's about who we are and who we want to be, about ourselves and our self-constructs. It is, simply put, magnificent. It is the apotheosis of film and the indictment of the thin gruel we, as filmgoers, so regularly accept.

OK, so that's what it looks like when my mind is blown.

But this feels like a film I could see a thousand times. Not only is it a multisensual feast, but it probes, really probes, into the beating heart of life in a way no film I'd previously seen ever has. The photography complements the music complements the finely crafted story complements the performances complements the ideas that form the core of the work. 8 1/2 reveals Fellini at the height of his power, grappling with elemental dilemmas that have confronted man since he became self-aware. Mastroianni is incomparable. Cardinale and Aimée are revelatory. Every single thing about this picture is perfect. My only regret is that I've waited this long to see it.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The Great War was supposed to end all wars. World War II was supposed to finish the job and put a stop to the Hun threat once and for all. Then the Cold War settled in, like a damp winter day, and it was Germany Germany Germany all over again.

This is the world of John le Carré, of George Smiley, of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. It’s always winter here. Disillusionment permeates everything. Spies don’t drive sports cars, win at baccarat, and jump speedboats over islands. In the words of Alec Leamas, the film’s protagonist, “They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.”

Richard Burton is Leamas, Section Chief of MI6’s Berlin bureau. He keeps losing men to Hans-Dieter Mundt, his opposite number in the Stasi. Perhaps it’s time for him to come in from the cold, to take a nice desk job in, say, the Banking Section back at Headquarters. Besides, George Smiley has an idea …

And so begins two hours of weary, bleary, tension. Of technicians who see the world not in shades of gray, but in varying levels of darkness. Of too much alcohol and too much time, of too much conscience or not conscience enough. Richard Burton, at the center of it all, is a world-weary force, a man who has been so long on the job that he can’t even tell if it’s a job any more. He’s magnificent, and the film is a marvel of care and maturity.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD works. It works on every level. I feel weary just thinking about it. I think that’s good.

Mortal Kombat

Recently, a friend asked whether all films I like make me suspend belief. I responded that I hesitate to say that all films I like do one thing or another, but that yes, that’s generally the case.

MORTAL KOMBAT is among the reasons why I hesitated. This film is so poorly acted, so lazily choreographed and shot, so lame in so many ways that it requires an act of conscious will to suspend one’s disbelief for its running time. I love it anyway.

Here’s why: there’s a bit during which Johnny Cage, who is essentially Jean Claude Van Damme, is fighting a villain who can make lizard heads on chains fly from his palms. The fight begins in a beautiful grove, then magically transports to a kickass set that appears to be made of old sailing ship parts, plaster skeletons, cobwebs, and red gel lights. Cage lays down the fu just fine, but then he finds a pullup bar conveniently placed near a platform. He goes on to do a full Tribute to Gymkata, flips onto a platform, then does a nifty jumpkick to the villain’s head. That’s just awesome. Later in the fight, the villain turns into a flaming skeleton, a la GHOST RIDER, which is also awesome. Then Cage finds a way to blow up the flaming skeleton and does a classic “leap away from the rear projection fireball.” Among the debris that comes fluttering down is, you guessed it, an autographed photo of Johnny Cage, inscribed to his “Biggest Fan.” I say that if your biggest fan is a recently exploded flaming skeleton, then your career is going GREAT!

So yeah, it’s lame. Christopher Lambert is a lousy Basil Exposition. Robin Shou spends too much time on his hair. Bridgette Wilson, Talisa Soto, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa are terrible actors. The fu isn’t good enough to merit long takes. But Linden Ashby (as Cage) acquits himself well; the creature design, particularly for the multiarmed warrior Goro, is quite good; the sets and locations are fantastic and beautiful; and the soundtrack is thumpin’.

All things considered, MORTAL KOMBAT is way more fun than it has any right to be.

Hotel for Dogs

HOTEL FOR DOGS is an innocuous, pleasant family entertainment that will have special appeal for the dog lovers in your clan.

Here’s the setup: two kids stumble into a deserted hotel that they convert into a shelter for the neighborhood strays. While this sounds like a recipe for disaster, one of the kids is a brilliant inventor who comes up with a thousand ways to keep the canines entertained, fed, cleaned, and housebroken.

That’s pretty much it. There are jokes and silly villains and your standard three-act structure. There’s even The Great Don Cheadle, who is clearly there to make a movie he thinks his kids will enjoy.

It worked. My kids enjoyed it just fine. What more do you want?

Inglourious Basterds

Lots of people love INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. They say that it’s one of Tarantino’s best films. They say it’s one of the best movies of the year.

It’s the first Tarantino film to really bother me.

The inconsistent tone, bouncing between excruciating suspense and neo-‘70s hip, kept me from settling into its groove. The performances, particularly Pitt’s painfully false Appalachian accent, Christoph Waltz’s affected silliness, and Eli Roth’s jarring presence, never felt organic. And most importantly, Tarantino’s imagining of a unit of Ike’s Army as being more despicable than Al Qaeda in Iraq, coupled with his invitation to root for this unit’s tactics as though being “on our side” made them excusable, felt like a betrayal of the American ideal. I got the feeling that Dick Cheney would have loved this movie.

The International Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, the Law of Armed Conflict, they all exist for good reasons. They exist because of the all too human tendency to see outrages committed by “Team Us” as permissible and even commendable, particularly because “Team Them” has it coming. The reality, of course, is that combatants aren’t masterminds. Often, they’re just guys who got drafted, or who thought that signing up would be a good idea, or who were faced with the choice of putting on a uniform and maybe getting shot or refusing to wear one and definitely getting shot. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSes ignorance of or contempt for these laws and traditions, its glorification of brutality, was just too much for me to stomach.

Now, there are some great things about this movie. Tarantino crafts an image with smoke and light that may be one of the great shots of movie history. There’s some wonderful misdirection and a refreshing willingness to defy some rules of storytelling economy.

But I just couldn’t get past the film’s ideology. It felt deeply, profoundly wrong. It felt un-American. It really bothered me.

Sense and Sensibility

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY is just plain great. Emma Thompson penned the adaptation and Ang Lee directed it, which is pretty much everything you need to know right there. But take a look at this cast: Thompson, Alan Rickman, and Kate Winslet, all of whom Can Do No Wrong, in the three primary roles; Tom Wilkinson, Hugh Grant, Imelda Staunton, and Hugh Laurie among the supporting players. Patrick Doyle pulled down an Oscar nomination for the music. Thompson won an Academy Award for her writing, and the picture garnered further nominations for Thompson’s and Winslet’s acting, plus nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, and Best Picture (it lost to THE ENGLISH PATIENT).

Ok, but you knew this was a good movie. I knew it was a good movie: I recall loving it upon its initial release. Seeing it again, however, I was struck by just how good Thompson is in it. Don’t get me wrong: Winslet and Rickman are literally great, but Thompson does so much with her part, conveys such a deep and rich personality beneath her character’s practiced decorum, that she makes herself a marvel to behold.

While watching the film, it occurred to me that Winslet is now old enough to play the Thompson role. Then it occurred to me that Winslet seems to be growing up to be Emma Thompson. A person could do much worse.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

I remember seeing THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION when I was a kid. I remember liking it and have always had a special place for it even as I've grown fuzzy on the details of what it's actually about. By the time I fired this film up again last week, all I had to go on was a general feeling of goodwill, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy shirt, and John Lithgow hamming it up. How would the film stand up to adult eyes?

Quite well, I'm happy to report. BUCKAROO BANZAI is that most difficult of creations: whimsy, pure and simple, that avoids being overcome by itself. The film lines up Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and Clancy Brown on one side and John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, and Vincent Schiavelli on the other, tosses a Maguffin between them, and then gets silly. It layers sight gags over character gags over situational gags, keeps the villains just villainous enough to serve as foils for the heroes, and generally invites its audience to sit back, grin, tap its feet, and groove along.

I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I can't wait to see it again in another twenty-five years.

Adventureland

ADVENTURELAND is a coming of age story about a guy who really really wants to be played by Michael Cera. The would-be Cera takes a job in an amusement park and has your standard coming-of-age experiences, and everything pretty much rolls along as you'd expect.

This isn't a film with big laughs or big ideas or big anything. It's just a story about a guy living through an important episode in his life. It has the feel of a fond memory, one that retains some of the prickly bits even if it has taken on a nostalgic sheen. I wouldn't go out of my way for it, but I was stuck in coach and there it was and it made two hours roll by.

I Love You, Man

I LOVE YOU, MAN, is a romantic comedy about two men. Yes, it's about two heterosexual men, but that doesn't stop it from hewing to the romantic comedy formula. That's part of its charm: this movie knows exactly what it's doing, exactly how it's subverting convention, and it's having great fun doing it.

Oh, and it's funny. Really, really funny. Laugh out loud funny.

Paul Rudd's a guy who has always gotten along better with women than men. That's a problem because, when it's time to get married, he has no close male friend - no best man. A normal guy would just choose a relative, but pay no attention to these technicalities: we're setting up a romantic comedy here! Desperate for a friend, Rudd has a meet-cute with Jason Segel (who wrote and starred in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, one of the few films that actually occupies space on my DVD rack) and asks him out on a man-date.

And there's your setup. The rest of the movie puts its characters (played by, among others, Jane Curtin, J.K. Simmons, and Andy Samberg) through the gears of the romantic comedy machine, which really serves only as a chassis on which to hang joke after joke after joke. The jokes are funny and well played, and this film kept me laughing from the opening to the closing credits.

I'm not going to write that I loved it, man. But I just did. I feel cheap.

Duplicity

Universal Pictures let DUPLICITY down. The studio clearly didn't know how to market the movie, going with advertising that hammered on the theme of "sexy sexy sexy." Yeah, well, we have the Internet now. We don't need to go to the movies for sexy. The marketing theme should have been "story story story."

Clive Owen is a Bond manque (as usual) who seduces Julia Roberts at an embassy party in swinging Dubai. She drugs him, steals some documents out of his briefcase, and disappears. That's the opening credits, and that's your setup for a charming spy vs. spy story that's a touch THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR and a touch ADAM'S RIB. Writer/Director Tony Gilroy knows how to create mature, enjoyable dialogue and situations, and he knows which actors to keep in check and which to let run. There are some supporting players here whom you will know but who didn't make the marketing the effort, and they flat-out steal the show. In fact, days later, I'm still chuckling at one of them.

DUPLICITY isn't laugh-out-loud funny, and it does cheat a bit at the end, but it's clever, it's fun, and it's a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. Throw it on while folding laundry and your chores will be over before you know it.

Marnie

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

MARNIE is the film about a poor, helpless felon who needs a repulsively self-satisfied man to trap her, rape her, and control every aspect of her existence until he cures her through the power of his manly will. It’s like THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, but in this version, both combatants are horrid criminals. Marnie’s signature line is, “Oh, Mark. I don’t want to go to jail. I’d rather stay with you.” That, kids, is romance.

The film stars Tippi Hendren as a woman who is so disconnected from her true self that she appears more blonde automoton than an actual human being. Or perhaps that’s just Hendren’s acting technique. Sean Connery plays the repulsive, sadistic rapist as, basically, Sean Connery (Interesting side note: his character, Mark, is from Pennsylvania, yet he has a Scottish accent. His father has an English accent. So much for the Pennsylvania Dutch!). These people have never been less interesting.

Alfred Hitchcock directed MARNIE, yet the film has all the polish of a poorly made rerun from Sunday Night at the Movies. Between the annoying use of red filters to show Marnie’s near-total paralysis at the sight of the color red (Really, what does this woman do when she menstruates? Curl up in a corner and scream for four days?) and its ridiculously amateurish in-n-out zooming at a moment of moral crisis, one can only forgive Hitch by assuming that he was on heavy psychotropic drugs throughout the process of making this movie and give him a pass.

Some people love MARNIE. But hey, some people love balut. I don’t ever need another go at either.

Watchmen

The print version of WATCHMEN always struck me as Reagan-era sour grapes hippie bullshit. Sure, it was famous for its deconstruction of the superhero comic, but I don’t care about superhero comics, never having collected ‘em as a kid. So I was wary of the filmed version of the story. After G.W. Bush’s parody of conservatism and THE INCREDIBLES’ brilliant study of the superhero genre, what did WATCHMEN, in any form, have to offer?

Not much, really. It’s still hippie bullshit and its “post-heroism heroes” conceit has nearly become a genre staple. But y’know what? It’s really good hippie bullshit, and it’s really good genre criticism. It looks great, hits its marks, and moves right along, and it does something the print version doesn’t: it actually makes me care about Rorschach and the Night Owl and Sally Jupiter and all the rest. The reveals feel less forced. The characters feel more organic. The political and artistic commentary works as part of a unified whole.

Had this film been released ten years ago, it may have been revolutionary. It’s too late for that, politically or artistically, but WATCHMEN is still a good story well told. Peace out, bro.