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.

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.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

UP has spoiled the genre of children’s animation. Where I used to be content with a mildly amusing light show to wow my kids, UP has conditioned me to expect a real, substantial film that will also wow my kids. CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS exists only to wow my kids, so the best I could do was to kind of hum along.

Here’s the idea: a quirky inventor on a small island off America’s East Coast creates a device that turns raindrops into food. Chaos ensues, love happens, we get a few jokes, and everyone learns a Valuable Life Lesson.

That’s it, and it’s fine, but it ain’t UP. There’s nothing in this kids’ film that adults don’t already know, so mom and dad are forced to rely on spectacle to get them through. CLOUDY has plenty of spectacle and it wowed my kids, so I shouldn’t complain.

It isn’t fair, and it isn’t CLOUDY’s fault. But I want another UP.