The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as fine a mystery as you’re likely to see this year.

A Swedish film, Tattoo follows a rather ragged investigative journalist as he seeks to unravel the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy and beautiful young woman from an isolated island some 40 years before. The girl with the dragon tattoo is a cyber investigator with in interest in the reporter. She finds herself helping him in ways she hadn’t imagined.

That’s about all I want to tell you about the plot. Besides, it’s a mystery – the plot, more or less, takes care of itself. Characters make mysteries interesting, and the characters here, that of the journalist and the girl, are very interesting people.

The journalist has just been convicted of libel, and he faces a healthy jail term in the very near future. The girl is a tightly wound, exceptionally private genius who can do things with computers that only people who don’t know anything about computers think people can do. Neither of them look like movie stars; they don’t even look like people who’d get along with one another. Nevertheless, they make a great team: unafraid of hard work and research, they spend more time detecting than getting in fistfights, which is a nice change of pace from many American mystery films.

I found that I cared about these people. I felt for them in their moments of danger, I cheered for them in their moments of triumph, and I respected them while they were about the hard, tedious work of unraveling a dark and twisted mystery.

This is a well made film, with an unerring sense of pace and place, that wrapped me up and held me in its spell from beginning to end. I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Undisputed III: Redemption

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Undisputed III: Redemption is a great film.  It features a tired premise, uneven acting, and a penchant for Leone zooms that becomes downright distracting.  But it does know how to put together some exceptional fights.

Redemption uses the tired “martial arts tournament” premise to get its performers in the ring.  It mixes the prison tournament’s corruption with a dash of The Defiant Ones to provide some kind of narrative throughline, but its lead performers lack the ability to convey any sense of nuance or humanity.  And those zooms – oy!  I get it!  These are hard men!  Now, move along!

Nevertheless, Undisputed III: Redemption has those fights going for it.  And it’s here, in the ring, where the film excels.  With one glaring exception, the makers of this film cast gifted physical performers.  These men leap, spin, kick, and fall like men on wires, and the fact that there’s nothing between them and the mat but air makes their work all the more impressive.  Director Isaac Florentine understands this, and trusts his performers, coordinators, and choreographers enough to go with long takes that makes it possible for the audience to actually see the rhythm of a given fight, to enjoy the acrobatic skill of the performers, and to admire the clockwork displays that can only come from days and days of careful practice and preparation.  Sure, the film has one notable exception to this: one Mykel Shannon Jenkins, who plays the token American.  Jenkins isn’t a fighter or an acrobat: he’s just a guy in really great shape.  This means that during his fights, the rhythm of the film has to change to one dominated by creative editing.  It pulls us out of the proceedings and drags the film down, but what are you gonna do?

So, there it is: Undisputed III: Redemption, while not a great film, provides phenomenal fight scenes and the chance to see some real pros do some great work.  If you like the genre, you’ll like this film.

A Town Called Panic

Quick – list the number of subtitled foreign films that your four-year-old asks to watch over and over again. That’s right: no English-language track; just subtitles. Of those films, how many can you watch over and over again, finding something new each time?

That’s what I thought.

I took a flyer on A Town Called Panic, a Belgian stop-motion film about the adventures of Cowboy, Indian, and Horse, three painted-lead toys in a world of painted-lead toys. Roger Ebert gave it a good review and it has generated some buzz on the film-related websites I frequent. I thought my kids might enjoy it, but it took us all by surprise when we found that it came in only one language: French. Undaunted, I made a deal: tough it out for the first ten minutes and, if they didn’t like it, I’d mail it back the very next day. Well, they toughed out that first ten minutes. Then the next ten, and the ten after that. They laughed, they talked amongst themselves, they had great fun. Because even though the film has plenty of dialogue, and even though the subtitles were beyond my four-year-old’s ken, it works just as well as a (functional) silent. Everything a four-year-old needs to enjoy the story is right there on the screen, and A Town Called Panic boasts plenty to enjoy. Before I knew it, the film ended and they boys were begging, “Again! Again!”

The film’s world is delightful, creating a place in which Cowboy, Indian, and Horse room together in a great big house. When Cowboy and Indian forget Horse’s birthday, they need to come up something right away. Cowboy thinks he’s got it, but life gets in the way and, before you know it, the adventure is on.

This is great stuff for a children’s adventure, and A Town Called Panic tells it with just the right combination of whimsy, danger, and flat-out creativity. What a delight.

Broken Embraces

Look, Pedro Almodovar doesn’t make bad movies.  If you have any doubt, just look at the screenshot I’m running with this review: think about that framing, that lighting, that reflection.  Think about how much it tells, how much it suggests, and how much it makes you want – have – need to know.

Almodovar thinks about every act, every scene, every frame.  He puts so much into every aspect of Broken Embraces that we, the audience, dine on a feast of many treasures.  We can enjoy it visually; we can think about how the music deepens and broadens the story; we can lose ourselves in that story; or we can simply fall in love with the characters.  A ticket to an Almodovar film is an invitation to another world, and the world of Broken Embraces fascinates, delights, troubles, entrances.

Here’s the part where I normally tease you into the story, just to help you get a sense of whether you’d find it interesting.  I’m not going to do that here, because I went into the film cold.  I knew nothing about it other than Almodovar’s name, and I enjoyed orienting myself to its tableau, figuring out the relationships as they changed and evolved for myself.  I’ll just stop here, sharing with you that if you want to see how mature, character-based, contemporary filmmaking is done right, Almodovar is your man and Broken Embraces is your film.  Enjoy.

The Losers

Y’know that action movie trope of heroes leaping toward the camera as a fiery explosion lights up the screen behind them? The Losers doesn’t have it. In The Losers, a school bus filled with adorable kids (and the heroes who’ve rescued them) leaps off a (gentle) riverbank while a fiery explosion lights up the screen behind it.

That’s when I knew I was in.

So, what’s this movie about? Oh, c’mon. An evil genius betrays a team of commandos. The commandos exact their revenge. Not only does this represent the plotline of three major releases we’ve seen this summer, it serves as proof positive that evil geniuses need to get out more. If the League of Evil Geniuses ever had movie night, they’d know to never, never ever, betray a team of commandos. This ranks right up there with “Don’t waste time explaining your evil plans to your vanquished foe. Just shoot him.”

Anyway, these commandos call themselves The Losers. So, why should you care about them any more than The A-Team or The Expendables? I don’t know that you should. If you’re this film’s target audience, you’ll see all three films on general principle anyway, just like there are people out there who see every romantic comedy that comes down the pipe. The Losers brings the charismatic team members, the silly jokes, the ‘splosions, and all the rest as competently as any other middle-brow action entertainment out there, and it seems to have a reasonably good time doing it. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen’s Comedian) looks great in a two-piece black suit (Note to self: I need to wear mine more often – ya just can’t go wrong in a two-piece black suit and a good white shirt.) that takes ever-increasing amounts of punishment and comes through it just as well as he does (Note to self: see if they make those suits in Kevlar.). Idris Elba (“The Wire”’s Stringer Bell) makes a fine #2 and comes across as a guy you don’t want to face in a knife fight. Zoe Saldana looks great in underwear, though she could really use a cheeseburger, and I don’t think you’d want to face her in a knife fight, either. Chris Evans, Columbus Short, and Oscar Janeda round out the team creditably well, though many of Evans’s comic beats fall flat (I’m not sure why – the guy has fine timing and seems up for anything – he was a riot in Scott Pilgrim.).

So there you have it. The Losers shows up on time, does its job, and goes home. It’s not the best thing you’ll see this year; but, if you’re in the mood for ‘splosion’s, it will deliver.

Love Me Tonight

Love Me Tonight begins with a marvelous bit of found syncopation, a musical sequence introducing us to morning in Paris through the rhythmic sweepings, nailings, workings, and ambient noises of a city coming alive.  It’s absolutely wonderful, and got me excited for the hour and a half to come.

Then, Maurice Chevalier shows up.

I’ve never been a big Chevalier hater.  In fact, checking his IMDB credits reveals that I hadn’t seen any of his film before now.  But I’ve gotta tell you that, after Love Me Tonight, I don’t understand why this guy was a movie star.  Sure, I can see why he would have been huge in vaudeville: he could sing, he could dance, and his exaggerated French accent would’ve wowed ‘em in music halls across the American hinterland.  On film, however, he exaggerated too much – he too clearly mugged, rather than acted, and he pulled me out of Love Me Tonight again and again and again.

So Chevalier’s a poor but honest tailor (fun side note, if you’re me: Ellermann is a rough German analogue to Tailor, so I was on the guy’s side even if the actor playing him bugged me) who finds himself posing as a count or duke or some such at a chateau in what’s supposed to be the Parisian countryside, but looks an awful lot like Pomona.  The most decadent, decayed fringes of the French aristocracy live in this chateau, people so dissolute and lacking in vitality that I wanted to guillotine the lot of them. 

Among these fossilized aristocrats live two women, Jeanette MacDonald (a princess) and Myrna Loy (a mere countess).  MacDonald’s the love interest and Loy’s the Baxter, and so we discover Love Me Tonight’s second biggest flaw (after the casting of Chevalier): Myrna Loy blows everyone else in the film off the screen.  She plays a bad girl of such spirit, such raw vitality, that she clearly belongs in a whole different movie.  [Come to think of it, I’m reminded of Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise: the movie’s grooving along ok when suddenly this no-kidding Movie Star whom nobody’s ever seen before shows up and steals it out from under everybody, and the audience is left wondering who that kid was.]  So you see, she’s the worst kind of Baxter – she makes the audience think the protagonist is an idiot for not immediately zeroing in on her, as opposed to the weak sauce who’s supposed to capture our hearts.

Will the tailor capture the heart of the princess for no apparent reason?  Sure.  Will we see one jaw-droppingly cool stunt involving a train?  Absolutely.  Will the songs go home with us?  No.  The dancing (This is a musical, after all.)?  What dancing?  I didn’t see a legitimate dance number in the whole picture.

What I saw, sadly, was an hour and a half of a bad film actor pursuing a woman the story gave me no reason to care about, while a no-kidding hot number for the ages waited in the wings.

So pass on Love Me Tonight.  But fear not: I’m a loving kind of guy, and I’m not going to leave you hanging.  Here’s Nat King Cole singing a song I thought would turn up in the movie, but didn’t:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb945jfgW0k

And here’s Myrna Loy being ridiculously awesome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG3NZjRv2nM

You’re welcome, and good night.

Hot Tub Time Machine

The advertising for Hot Tub Time Machine did nothing for me. The picture, about three friends and a tagalong nephew who accidentally return to 1986, seemed like a silly ‘80s sex comedy with middle-aged guys. Unfortunately, I had my fill of silly ‘80s sex comedies by 1986. But Roger Ebert liked it and I still have a soft spot for John Cusack, so I figured I’d spin up the first act and see how things went.

I laughed all the way through to the closing credits.

There’s so much to like about this movie that I don’t know where to begin. Is it with the proper debut of Rob Corddry, whom I loathed in Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story? The vulgar (yet clever) writing and spot-on delivery? The chemistry and timing of the leading cast (Cusack, Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke)? Nice touches like the casting of actors like Crispin Glover and Billy Zabka in hilarious supporting roles? This movie has so much to offer!

Let’s start with Corddry, playing one of the most difficult kinds of roles: the comic jerk. He’s the guy everyone hates, the one who never grew out of the kinds of behaviors that made him barely tolerable back before everyone knew better. Guys like this, they turn out bitter and sad, but Corddry manages to make bitter and sad sympathetic and likeable. He’s the one guy who should never have left the ‘80s, he’s happy as hell to be back, and he gets all the best gags (I don’t want to spoil anything, but one gag still has me chuckling every time I see a soap dispenser.).

The writing epitomizes vulgar-as-funny, as opposed to MacGuyver’s vulgar-as-vulgar. Corddry and Cusack have an exchange that I’d love to describe, but my kids read this blog. Let’s just say that comic vulgarity, played straight by actors who know what they’re doing, has the power to knock me out of my chair. This exchange did just that, and it’s just one setup in a movie full of them. I wish I could buy a copy of this screenplay – I bet it’s even funnier on the page.

The lead cast, well, they each get their moments. Cusack’s takes an ‘uptight guy who needs a Manic Pixie Girlfriend’ role and gives it life and humor. Corddry, well, I already talked about him. CHUD.com’s Devin Faraci likens him to Belushi in Animal House, and he’s not far off. Craig Robinson provides the moral center and some achingly funny moments – I’ve never laughed so hard watching a grown man cry. Clark Duke, well, I think he’s the audience surrogate for the younger demographic, but he’s still wonderful as a guy far more mature, in his way, than his elders.

And the touches, well, who doesn’t love Crispin Glover in a time travel comedy or John Cusack in a skiing comedy set in the ‘80s or the introduction of one classic villain of the decade’s cinema with a line made famous by another classic villain? It’s silly, it’s good fun, and it’s remarkably effective in every way.

So, yeah, there’s no way a film entitled Hot Tub Time Machine should be any good. But one of the great things about film is its ability to surprise. This film surprised the heck out of me, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

So put the kids to bed, spin this one up, and have yourself a good time. I sure did.

The Letter

Nighttime on a rubber plantation, Southeastern Malaysia.  Far-off music plays as the camera glides toward the plantation house, an examplar of Pacific colonial architecture with slatted windows and a wide veranda.  You can practically feel the humidity.  You can practically smell the frangipani.

BANG!  A man staggers out of the house and onto the veranda.  A young Bette Davis, gun in hand, follows.  BANG!  BANG!  The man falls to the ground.  BANG!  BANG!  BANG!

And we’re off.

The Letter features Bette Davis in one of her strongest performances: a woman who shoots a man in cold blood and, because of her status relative to his and her confidence in the chumminess of a colonial judiciary, expects to get away with it.  She’s everything her position, and her actions, demands and requires that she be: fragile, tough, honest, devious, innocent, and deadly.  She’s a moving target, a woman who’ll let you think you have her figured out until her best interests dictate otherwise.

James Stephenson plays her ally, her adversary, her attorney, her mirror.  All that Davis hides behind her controlled façade, he emotes through his more studied, yet more forthcoming, visage.  A quick internet search tells me Stephenson earned an Oscar nomination for his performance, and further research shows that this roll kicked his career into overdrive –for one year, because the poor guy died of a heart attack in 1941, just one year after The Letter’s release.

As for the film, well, it has its flaws.  Its mechanisms can seem a bit mechanical, and the style of acting in vogue at the time of its production creates more a sense of big-D Drama than real people facing tough choices.  Nevertheless, it evokes the romance of the colonial Pacific like no other film, Davis and Stephenson earn the ticket price all by themselves, and you may very well keep guessing right up until the final scene. 

The Letter is a winner.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD is a classic. The film has everything you could possibly want: great characters, perfect direction, and thrilling action in the golden age of sail.

The movie, which draws from several of Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the exploits of his fictional Captain Jack Aubrey and his crew, captures the rhythm of life at sea. It captures the tempo of sail, one that may appear langorous to the uninitiated, but involves unending toil and total subjection to the whims of nature. And it captures the nature of leadership through the examples of two midshipmen (one of whom fails) and its captain, a man well on his way to becoming Nelsonian in stature.

I don’t know how this film could get any better. I only wonder why it failed to earn enough money to create a franchise, as I’d love to see the further adventures of Jack Aubrey through two, three, or ten more pictures. As it stands, we have this one picture, and it’s perfect. MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD is a perfect movie.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

I loved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The film is extended adolescent fantasy about a nerdy kid who (a) plays bass guitar in a rock band, (b) is a kung fu master and fearsome swordsman, (c) has super powers, and (d) leaves behind a trail of the broken hearts of improbably attractive young women.  So, y’know, hey, what’s not to love?

Sure, you and I both know that the movies are full of tales of nerdy kids who save the day and win the girl (I have a theory that screenwriters, generally speaking, are a pretty nerdy bunch.  You’re not going to find a whole lot of movies about how the cool kids finally got those damn nerds to quit blowing the curve on the mid-terms.).  The thing that sells Scott Pilgrim, that makes it leap off the screen, is its exuberant storytelling and its ear for music.  Oh, and it’s really, really funny.

How does Scott Pilgrim qualify as “exuberant?”  Through love of storytelling itself, through an embrace of fantasy, through a willingness to use every bit of the frame to communicate with the audience, and through a spot-on ability to mine nerd culture (or, more specifically, the unique nerd culture of the psyche of Scott Pilgrim) for everything from easy sight gags to major plot points.  When Scott defeats a foe, the antagonist bursts into a rain of coins like a Lego Star Wars storm trooper.  When he has an emotional breakthrough, bonus points flash above his head.  And when Scott rocks the bass, he goes from shy kid stumbling through a few simple acoustic chords to musical dynamo, conjuring warrior-avatars to rival anything in Guitar Hero’s Star Power mode.  Scott amplifies everything about his world, making it funnier, scarier, deeper, better.  And the film goes right there with him, reveling in its acoustic bubbles and do-overs and classically nerdy fascinations.  It doesn’t draw lines between reality and fantasy because, as Scott experiences the world, those lines don’t exist.  This makes for a visual feast, allowing us to revel in absurdities like The Underground Lair, “Ninja Ninja Revolution,” and an Evil Scott who surprises and delights the observant, even if he doesn’t rock the goatee.

{Holy smokes.  I think I’m talking myself into asserting that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a better movie about the power and majesty of Dream than Inception.  Perhaps that’s a conversation for another day (But there’s certainly an argument to be had about when or if Scott enters the dream state.  I need to see this film again).}

As much as Scott Pilgrim loves storytelling, it loves music.  Music supplies its beating heart, its adrenaline, its sense of belonging to that select group of people who understand, who get the zeitgeist.  When I was Scott’s age, that music came from The Dead Kennedies and X and Social Distortion and Oingo Boingo and Two Fettered Apes.  Today, it’s The Hold Steady, Ekko Galaxie and the Rings of Saturn, Gaslight Anthem, and Adam WarRock.  But the idea is the same, that there’s a whole culture happening that’s more than a subculture – a superculture, better than the pap everyone else is getting and more happening, more fun, just plain better in every way.  To be Scott’s age and in love with such a culture is a wonderful thing, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gets it, relays it, sells it.

This movie is just plain fun, an exciting and satisfying homage to adolescence (for though the film stipulates Scott’s age as 22, he’s clearly an adolescent) and nerd culture.  More interestingly, the film’s an homage to the power of fantasy, to dream and aspiration and desire and all the things that brew inside the head and heart of a young man on the verge of breaking out of himself and mustering the power needed to make one’s mark in the world.  This is the best movie I’ve seen since Un Prophet, it’s certain to make my year-end roundup, and you need to see it on the big screen.  Soon.  Like, now.

Get out of here.  I mean it.  Go to the movies.  You’ll thank me later.

Matchstick Men

In my review of BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I wrote that I was happy to have Nicolas Cage back.

I was wrong. He never left. I just hadn’t been seeing his more interesting stuff.

MATCHSTICK MEN pairs Cage with Sam Rockwell. The two form a conning team, working together to cheat the unwary out of a few hundred dollars here, a couple of thousand dollars there. It’s steady work, not particularly glamorous, but it pays the bills and keeps the pair flying below the radar. Everything’s going fine until Cage rediscovers a long-lost daughter (Alison Lohman).

That’s the hook, but it isn’t the reason to see this film. Nicolas Cage supplies the reason. He delivers a remarkable performance as a master of his trade and a disaster at his life. A bundle of ticks and compulsions, he only seems real when putting on his act. It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s even more fascinating to watch his character develop over the course of the film.

Yes, Sam Rockwell is fine, but it seems director Ridley Scott can’t quite figure out what to do with him. Alison Lohman sells her role as the long-lost daughter, and the always welcome Bruce McGill is every bit as awesome as we’ve come to expect. But Cage walks away with this film. He is something to behold.

Hamlet 2

HAMLET 2 violates so many of my truisms of film that I should hate it.  I love it.

I don’t like dark comedy, yet this film goes very dark.  I don’t like the comedy of embarrassment, yet this film puts its protagonist through an amazing amount of humiliation.  I don’t like blasphemy, yet this film blasphemes so joyously that I can’t get the tune of “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” out of my mind over a week after having seen the film.

Here’s the setup: underfunded, underappreciated, and undertalented, Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) runs a threadbare theater department in a Tucson high school that couldn’t care less.  Inspired by “inspirational teacher” movies and a sad obliviousness to reality as experienced by everyone else on earth, Marschz pushes on with his sorry adaptations of Hollywood films, played to unsympathetic audiences by marginally talented students.  But when his program gets cancelled and all grows dark, Marschz decides to take one last chance on writing and staging his own original musical, “Hamlet 2.”  Yes, he knows that everyone died at the end of Hamlet.  But what if Jesus showed up in a time machine?  Now, we’re on to something!

HAMLET 2 goes on to lampoon everything we love about “inspirational teacher” movies, inspirational theaters, high-school drama clubs, and drama in general.  In the process, it delivers achingly funny moments of self-awareness and over-the-top awfulness that, to my surprise, got me chuckling about ten minutes in and kept me laughing all the way ‘til the end credits.

I shouldn’t have loved HAMLET 2, but it does what it does so well that I can’t help it.  Rock me, sexy Jesus!

A Prophet

A PROPHET tells the story of Tahar Rahim, a small-time criminal sentenced to hard time in the French penal system. Rahim doesn’t know how to read. He doesn’t know how to handle himself. He doesn’t even know how to get away with petty crime. But the French penal system will teach him all that, and more.

A PROPHET takes Rahim from petty criminal to major player. In the process, it both illustrates some unintended consequences of even the most humane systems of punishment and rehabilitation. Further, it creates an absorbing, compelling narrative. Like THE GODFATHER, A PROPHET actually gets us to root for the bad guys, hoping their schemes will come to fruition and they will find their way. A PROPHET had me on the edge of my seat for every phase of Rahim’s development, putting my desire for greater justice at odds with my sympathy for a young guy surviving and thriving on wits in a harsh environment.

Everything about this film works. From the performances to the writing to the direction to the attention to the details of crimes and criminality, A PROPHET creates a total world, immerses us in it, and compels us to care about what happens there. It’s powerful stuff, and easily the best film of its type that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Do not miss A PROPHET. It’s one of the best films you’ll see this year.

The Ghost Writer

Ewan MacGregor ghost-writes celebrity autobiographies.  Pierce Brosnan, a former (but recent) British Prime Minister, needs a ghost writer top help him finish his memoirs.  His last ghost writer, you see, turned up dead.  The circumstances were … unusual.

So we find ourselves on windswept Martha’s Vineyard in the cold and unforgiving weeks of late autumn.  There aren’t many people about, but there’s lots of mystery.  And Brosnan is so much what he seems that he can’t possibly be what he seems.  Can he?

Here’s how you do a mystery.  THE GHOST WRITER layers on the foreboding, slathers it with atmosphere, and uses both to complement a finely constructed, well-wrought tale that keeps us engaged from front to back.  We get caught up in MacGregor’s development.  We want to learn what happened to the previous writer.  We want to find out what will happen to the current one.  And we want to get to the heart of the story. 

This is the good stuff.

Clash of the Titans

My kids are going to love CLASH OF THE TITANS as much as I loved the original. Here’s a two-fisted action film set in the mythical world of ancient Greece. It brings as many monsters, as many villains, as many damsels in distress as a young boy could want.

Sam Worthington, the reigning king of green screen acting, plays Perseus. Half-man and half-god, he must save the Greek world from the ravages of Hades, who’s pissed off because he’s being played by Ralph Fiennes and that seems to be what Fiennes is up to these days. In his quest to get the gimrack that’ll help him defeat the whatsit, he fights giant scorpions, gorgons, and all manner of mythical beasts. It’s all great fun, and mom and dad even get to groove on the presence of terrific actors such as Fiennes, Liam Neeson, and Mads Mikkelson.

So, y’know, take CLASH OF THE TITANS in the spirit in which it’s given. This is adventure, straight up with a chaser, and it’s a heck of a lot of fun at the movies. I can’t wait to spin it up on the enormovision for my boys.

The Green Zone

THE GREEN ZONE does so much right that I’m almost willing to forgive it its central flaw.

Director Paul Greengrass, who made the definitive 9/11 movie with UNITED 93, knows how to craft a good thriller.  He knows how to do action and how to keep us in the audience on the ball regarding who’s doing what to whom and why.  Matt Damon, obviously, has established himself as a versatile and capable movie star.  Greg Kinnear, exceptional in a supporting role here, once again shows that he doesn’t get nearly enough respect in his chosen field.  The film clips along briskly and coherently, and it hit all its marks.

But there’s a problem: the film is all about Damon’s character unraveling the mystery of the missing Iraqi WMDs in the immediate aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  And we already know the solution to that one.  To the even marginally aware viewer, how mysterious can this stuff actually be?

So dig the faithful portrayal of Army culture.  Dig the reconstruction of the chaos in the days after the fall of Baghdad.  Dig the outstanding performances and the craftsmanship and all the rest.  If it’s enough to get you through the fact that you already know the thing this film’s hero is trying to learn, be happy.  It just didn’t work for me.

[NOTE:  The photo accompanying this brief review is not from the film.  It's just a nifty picture I found when I typed "Green Zone" into Bing Image Search.  I couldn't not use it.]

Inception

And then the street just stops and things start exploding, but not real explosions with fireballs and stuff like that, but disintegrations upon disintegrations as the very fabric of the universe comes apart. Yet noone gets hurt and noone seems to notice, except for the ones doing the dreaming and building and destroying the world and trying to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

The girl from JUNO and the guy from “Third Rock” who did that great SNL monologue last season and the dude who played the medium in DRAG ME TO HELL and Cillian Murphy and some underwear model and that Watanabe cat from LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA and even the guy who played the good sergeant in PLATOON jump from one dream to the next, from dreams to dreams within dreams, reality shifting and colliding and rules changing. Some of them work for Leonardo DiCaprio, who has transformed into a Consequential Actor, and DiCaprio works for at least one of them, in a way, and then there’s this French woman whose character is named Mal (which either means Bad or that Christopher Nolan is a Browncoat) and she screws everything up, as French women are known to do, but we can’t know if she’s alive or dead because Nolan has written and directed his film with ambiguity in mind.

In an interview, DiCaprio likened the film to 8½, and I can see what he’s going for, because the last time my bride and I saw 8½, we had to call the sitter for extra time while we went to a café and had coffee and hashed it out again and again and again, as I imagine we will do from time to time until one of us dies. Since this film is more overtly a puzzle, however, I don’t know how much staying power the proposition has because at some point you just say, “Nolan is screwing with us” and leave it at that.

That’s the problem with ambiguity, at least in terms of plot. You, as the audience member, walk out of the film with these amazing images burning in your mind and the story you’ve just experienced coalescing to a digestible narrative, visions and characters and actors and ideas all jumbled together but slowly, as you digest them, smoothing out.

Once things do smooth out, you’re left with a puzzle, but not a thematic puzzle or a character development puzzle. You’re left with an analytic puzzle, trying to put together pieces that have been created to not quite fit. And you feel at bit let down, like there wasn’t as much there as you’d thought.

And you go on and see the next picture or go back to work and the movie subsides into your subconscious and, perhaps, into your dreams. And you think that you’ll try to see it again on the big screen and you may see it on DVD when it hits there and you’re glad you’ve kept up with the zeitgeist but the monologue keeps unspooling and there wasn’t enough there to merit night after night of consideration, nothing like a WOMAN IN THE DUNES that stick with you and reappears in your imagination even when you’re not necessarily even thinking about movies because it’s that damn good.

But you keep coming back to that exploding streetcorner and those cobblestones and chairs breaking into smaller and smaller pieces and you think, “Wow, that’s big-time summer filmmaking” and you think about the fact that even as you dismiss INCEPTION you’re still thinking about it and you respect it enough to try something completely different even though it probably won’t work and hey, maybe you’re wrong.

Maybe you’ve just seen Real Art.

Zombieland

We’ve seen the zombie horror film, the zombie action film, even the zombie romantic comedy.  What’s next?  With ZOMBIELAND, it’s the zombie coming of age film.

I’ve gotta tell ya – I like zombies.  They’re great monsters, defying all logic (How does zombie metabolism work?  What do they eat when they run out of brains?  Why don’t we ever see Harryhausenesque skeleton zombies?  Ok, that last one’s easy – because then they’d be scary skeletons, not zombies.  Work with me here, people.).  Like great monsters, artists can adapt them to nearly any kind of story.  And they’re cheap to make – get a bunch of college kids together, buy ‘em thrift store clothes, cover them in corn starch and licorice (for that dried blood look), and feed ‘em chicken wings and beer for a day, and you’ve got half your cast right there.  And I like coming of age stories.  It’s hard to find one’s place in life, and it’s easy to relate to other who are trying to do so.  Put the two together, and you have a win on concept alone.

Fortunately, ZOMBIELAND works not just in concept, but execution.  Jesse Eisenberg (also known as Michael Cera’s Michael Cera), desperately needs to find his place in the world.  Yeah, he needs to find his place in a world filled with zombies, but still.  He needs a role model, a girl friend, and someone to look up to him.  Can he do it?  Well, will college kids work for chicken wings and beer?  There you go.  The story bops along from one episode to the next, maintaining its sardonic sense of humor and its joy of zombie smashing throughout.  It never stops being fun, it never stops having fun, and it never ceases to entertain.

Yeah, SHAUN OF THE DEAD covered much of the same territory and, frankly, did much of it better.  But ZOMBIELAND does fine.  If you like zombies and you like coming of age stories, you’re sure to like ZOMBIELAND.

Salt

SALT is the best American escapist fantasy spy thriller I’ve seen since THE BOURNE IDENTITY.

The best spy thrillers I’ve seen since THE BOURNE IDENTITY are ARMY OF SHADOWS (about the French Resistance), BODY OF LIES (Iraq), BLACK BOOK (Dutch Resistance), and FLAME AND CITRON (Danish Resistance), but they were entirely different animals. They were about plausible people doing heroic things in tough situations, while SALT is about superhuman people doing heroic things in tough situations.

Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a superhuman CIA agent whom the world has passed by. She’s a Cold Warrior, a fluent Russian speaker and #2 in the covert side of CIA’s Russia Section (You know she’s important because she shares a cubicle with #1. That’s government work for ya.), but the Cold War’s been over for a long time. What’s left? Ferreting secrets out of the North Koreans (Here’s the supersecret debrief on DPRK: its government is not acting in the best interests of its people. And it has nukes.)? But then a Russian defector walks into her supposedly secret office building, accuses her of being a Russian mole, and the game is on.

Strap in for an hour and fifteen minutes of stunts, chases, gunfights, and stuff blowing up real good. It’s well-done work, mostly practical and perfectly choreographed, anchored with a tough yet ambivalent Jolie performance that keeps us guessing as to her real allegiance. Add fine supporting performances by the reliably excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor and Liev Schreiber and a script with plenty of twists and turns, and you’re in for a good time at the movies.

I didn’t even want to see this picture – it started half an hour before INCEPTION and my wife and I were pressed for time – but SALT showed me a great time at the movies. Color me very pleasantly surprised.

Beer Wars

BEER WARS begins with a confessional: the writer, director, and star tells us (I paraphrase), “I ran Mike’s Hard Lemonade (Slogan: Helping high school girls get pregnant since 1999!) until I got tired of corporate bullshit.  Then I quit and tried my hand at venture capital, living in an ashram, and basically screwing around on my cushion of money.  I got bored after a while and decided to make this documentary about how evil big companies don’t roll over and let little companies eat their lunch.  Share my post-hippie, comfortably wealthy outrage.”

Well, la de da.

The rest of us work for a living, lady.  So excuse me if I don’t share your anger at Wal Mart (selling good stuff at low prices to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it), Microsoft (revolutionizing humanity’s relationship with information), and Anheuser Busch (Slogan: helping high school boys work up the courage to hit on high school girls since 1852!).

Watching this film, I felt like I’d just been cornered at a cocktail party by the most loathsome person within three city blocks.  Not only was her manifest self-fascination repulsive, her scattershot approach to her subject matter prevented her from building a coherent, compelling case.

Her thesis goes as follows:  Gigantic beer companies, in cahoots with legally sanctioned distributers, conspire to keep smaller companies from reducing their market share.  Ok, this could be interesting.  Make the case that monopolistic behavior is stunting entrepreneurship and call me to arms.  Dilettante filmmaker Anat Baron kills the interest, however, by wasting my time with the story of an entrepreneur flogging a poorly conceived and ultimately unappealing brand of beer (The hook: it has caffeine!  What about tasting good?).  She’d have done much better by focusing all her attention on Sam Calagione, who doesn’t get nearly enough screen time.  Calagione runs Dogfish Head Brewing Company, and he has two things going for him: he’s charismatic and he makes great beer.  I’d have learned more, and been more entertained, by following this guy around for a year.  Wanna show me how megabreweries, with armies of lawyers and harems of politicians, keep the little guy down?  Don’t squawk it at me: just let me watch it unfold as Calagione fights his legal, commercial, and political battles against steep odds.  Stay focused: that’s how you’ll entertain and inform me.

Or just sail around the world or something – whatever self-satisfied rich people do.  I don’t want to hear about it.