In Time

In Time is a workmanlike dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction picture. 

Here’s the story: in a few hundred years, someone figures out how to halt the aging process at 25.  To stop overpopulation, at 25 a one-year counter starts ticking off on the person’s arm.  Once that counter goes to zero, the person drops dead.  As with any economic system, people separate into haves and have-nots.  Everyone seems more or less ok with this, until one man (Justin Timberlake) trips to the fact that the haves are rigging the system.

It’s a neat premise that follows in the grand tradition of science fiction as social commentary and popular entertainment.  Add that Timberlake is a likeable film actor and that both his love interest/accomplice (Amanda Seyfried) and antagonist (Cillian Murphy) know how to hit their marks, and you have a fine picture.

So, what’s the difference between “workmanlike” or “fine” and “good?”  Ambiguity.  Vision.  Creativity.  In Time feels like a low-budget third draft.  It’s all too simple and clear to be actually “good,” and the use of time as a metaphor for money stops being interesting after about ten minutes.  Toss in a future LA whose very best neighborhood appears to be the Wilshire District around 7:00 am on a Sunday and technology that’s only about $100,000 worth of production budget cooler than our own, and you wind up with “workmanlike” and “fine.”

And yet, workmanlike and fine are, well, fine.  I don’t recommend that you go out of your way to see In Time, but if dystopian haves vs. have-nots science fiction is your thing, well, have at it.

Warrior

The poster for Warrior tells you most of what you need to know about the movie.  Two guys who appear to know their way around a hypodermic needle are going to fight.  One of them’s probably the bad guy, and one of them’s probably the good guy.  There’s gonna be a training montage, and someone’s going to look to a woman in the audience for inspiration.

For the most part, you’d be right.  Nevertheless, Warrior steps enough outside that mold to keep itself interesting, and it delivers a fine montage, great fights, and enough of an emotional wallop to choke me up at the end.  See, the fighters are brothers.  With issues.  They bond.  I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

Yes, yes, yes.  We’ve seen a number of the story elements a million times.  And really, how do you do anything new with a shot of supporters back home cheering at their television sets?  But hey, I liked these people all the same.  I cared about them and I cared who won the big fight, and why, and how.  Warrior is a perfectly respectable entry in the “fight movie” catalogue.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a film about the roots of the Great Ape Revolution, is something of a misnomer.  Earth is already the planet of the apes, since we humans fall into that category.  Perhaps a better name might be Rise of the Planet of the Rest of the Apes.

Nevertheless, Rise of the Planet of the Apes does the impossible.  During the film’s climactic man-ape battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, we viewers know that mankind’s only hope is the complete destruction of the apes fighting to get across that bridge.  Nevertheless, we root for the chimps and gorillas and orangutans.  We, the audience, root for the success of our enslavers.

Wow.

Rise does this not only by anthropomorphizing a chimpanzee, but by making the anthropomorphization of said chimpanzee the actual subject of the film’s narrative.  We begin in an African jungle.  The chimp’s mother is captured, dragged away from her tribe, and injected with some kind of super chimp serum.  Later, when the mama chimp gives birth, we bond with her cute li’l offspring.  So does James Franco, who plays a scientist who adopts the infant and raises it like an odd cross between a child and a dog.  As the chimp will soon learn, however, Franco’s family represents the sum total of nice people in the entire universe. 

Here’s the problem: chimps don’t stay cuddly forever.  When they grow up and they get angry, they can kill people.  After our hero chimp, named Caesar (modeled by the talented Andy Serkis), attacks the Francos’ mean neighbor, he’s packed off to a facility for primates (No, not a hockey arena.  This is a facility for higher primates.).  The facility, more prison than sanctuary, becomes Caesar’s crucible: the place where he grows out of his trust for humans and into his role as leader of the ape revolution.  By the time he leads his comrades across that bridge, we’ve seen him endure so much cruelty at the hands of humankind that we really do root for him.  We want him and his comrades to find a better life, to find a way out from under the thumb of their enslavers.  What a wonderful exercise in cognitive dissonance!

The film couldn’t pull this off without selling us on its world, and Rise succeeds through smart casting, brilliant animation, and solid scoring.  The Franco family includes the likeable Franco himself, the also likeable John Lithgow, and the luminous Freida Pinto (of Slumdog Millionaire).  Brian Cox leads Team Evil, with help from Tom Felton and David Hewlett, and all three sell their villainy with gusto.  (They also all happen to be English, which calls into question the seriousness of the flag-less ape threat.)  {Note: If I were a better writer, I could have come up with a better Eddie Izzard callback.  We do what we can with what we’ve got.}  The animation, well, it’s wonderful.  We believe in these apes.  We believe in their weight and momentum and the emotions on their faces.  The music, well, I’m a Patrick Doyle fan and I have been since Henry V.  His score builds the world and fills in emotional beats that animated apes may not have been able to convey on their own. 

In short, not only does Rise of the Planet of the Apes work, it works wonderfully.  This ape found himself rooting for the competition against his better judgment, and he never thought that would happen.

2011 Round-Up

Annual Round-Up: 2011 Edition

I don’t get to see many movies in the theater.  Consequently, I don’t feel that I can write anything approaching a definitive “Best Of” list for 2011.  I can, however, share with you the best films among those I saw, big screen or small.  Here they are.

The Best:

#5.  Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol.  Fast-paced, funny, exotic, and exciting, Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol is everything a spy action-thriller should be.  Its superspies and supervillains are appropriately super, its action sequences are breathtakingly exciting, and the whole thing hangs together with a sense of adventure and fun that had my whole group smiling as we walked out the door.

#4.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II.  The final episode of the Harry Potter series ties it all together.  The story twists often enough to keep us in suspense, the characters get the finales they deserve, and the entire franchise comes out as among the most successful long-form cinematic stories ever told. The Harry Potter films have had their ups and downs, but this one ends the series on a high note.

#3.  Hugo.  A film of technical audacity, Hugo succeeds from its first image, a swooping flyover of a near-fantastical version of Paris.  Its use of 3D technology is assured and masterful, and it tells a touching story while bathing us in aesthetic joy.  This is a delightful, wonderful film, and I can’t wait ‘til my children are old enough to see it for themselves.

#2.  13 Assassins.  Everything a movie should be, 13 Assassins is a perfect film.  It’s a “men on a mission” picture that deserves comparison with The Seven Samurai, with beautifully composed shots, thoughtful editing and sound design, well-realized characters, and gallons and gallons of Kensington Gore.

#1.  The Tree of Life.  Audacious, thoughtful, brilliant, and utterly moving, The Tree of Life is the most philosophically ambitious film I’ve seen since The Fountain.  Meant for big screens and bigger speakers,The Tree of Life is a quiet and introspective film about meditations on the meaning of life.  How does one reconcile “big screens and bigger speakers” with “quiet and introspective?”  Terrence Malick finds a way and in so doing draws his audience into his meditative place.  Of all the new releases we saw this year, this is the one that had my wife and me up talking well past midnight.  Bravo.

The Worst:

#1 and Only:  Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  I had a “Bottom 5 Worst Films” list ready to go.  On further consideration, however, numbers 2-5 were The Magnificent Ambersons compared to Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  This is a rock ‘em sock ‘em robot movie that put my three boys, all hepped up on Twizzlers and soda, to sleep.  I say again: this is a film about battlin’ bots that puts little boys to sleep.  So never mind that the characters are horrid, the story ridiculous, the action sequences incomprehensible, and the entire production put together by people who, apparently, actively hate us.  Transformers: Dark of the Moon is painfully, agonizingly, apocalyptically dull.  Not only is this the worst film I’ve seen this year, it’s the worst film I’ve seen since Transformers.  I’m glad I missed the second one.  I’ll be sure to miss the next.

Drive

Drive is confused.  Nevertheless, it works on the surface and provides an engrossing hour and a half at the movies.

Drive’s core story purports to be the parable of the turtle and the scorpion.  You know the story: Scorpion asks Turtle for a ride across the river.  Turtle says, “No.  When we’re halfway across, you’ll sting me.”  Scorpion replies, “Think about it: if I sting you, we both die.  What would be the point of that?”  Turtle sees Scorpion’s logic and tell him to climb aboard.  Halfway across the river, Scorpion stings Turtle.  As they’re both drowning, Turtle says, “Why did you sting me?”  Scorpion replies, “You knew what I was when you agreed to carry me.”

In the film, Ryan Gosling’s driver wears a satin jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back.  Toward the end of the narrative, he tells one of his adversaries, “If you carry a scorpion, you’re going to get stung” (or something to that effect).  Problem is, his adversaries don’t even know who he is until it’s too late.  The parable doesn’t hold, because Drive’s real point is “don’t mess with scorpions.”

Ok, so something got lost between drafts.  Nevertheless, Drive succeeds because it features an interesting lead, supporting characters with surprising subtlety, and a sufficiently complex plot to keep us on our toes until the closing credits.

Ryan Gosling plays Driver, a character similar to Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Le Samourai and George Clooney’s Jack in The American.  An introvert with a gift and a passion for his work, he says little and controls his face and body language.  This makes him a cool, yet blank, slate: a projection screen for the aspirations and/or desires of the audience.  When he notices the disturbingly skinny Carey Mulligan, he toys with making the single greatest mistake a character like him can make: he connects.  You probably think you know where this is going, and you may well be right.  However, it still works because Mulligan’s character isn’t just another damsel to distress.  She’s a fully realized human being, perhaps more fully realized than our protagonist; and so are the people to whom she’s connected, and to whom they’re connected.  Even the villains fascinate us with their back stories and their agendas, a fascination facilitated by remarkably unique, yet effective, casting.

Soon enough, these characters find themselves embroiled in a well-executed story of trust, doubt, and revelation that engages our imagination and helps us forget that we’ve seen this protagonist’s character arc before and we know how it’s going to end. 

The result? Though it’s little mixed up on its central parable, Drive delivers a tale well told in an immersive world.  You could do much, much worse.

Pontypool

Pontypool does great stuff for nearly its entire running time.  It kinda blows it right there at the end, but you’ve got to give this picture credit for how much it gets right.

Stephen McHattie plays Grant Mazzie, a has-been shock jock relegated to reading the school closings listing at a third-rate AM station in the sticks somewhere outside of Ontario.  He has a deep, gravelly voice, perfect for radio; and a tired, weathered face, perfect for film.

Mazzie is settling in at his new gig when the first reports of something very disturbing start trickling in.  There’s a gun battle at a nearby lake.  A mob surrounds a doctor’s office.  People start killing each other in particularly nasty ways.  Everything’s quiet in the church basement where radio station’s studio is tucked away, but it sounds like the end of the world out there.  What’s going on?

Pontypool nails this.  McHattie gives a virtuoso performance as a man going from depressed, angry, and a little drunk to skeptical, worried, then scared.  Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, as his engineer and assistant, respectively, give him people to bounce off, to fight, to work with, but it’s his show.  His reaction to the offscreen threat makes it real, and it shows us how the anticipation of horror can be scarier than horror itself.

It’s at the end there, when the revelations and realizations hit, that Pontypool falls apart.  But right up ‘til then, when it’s all mystery and dread, this movie is fantastic.  Pontypool may be a qualified winner, but it’s a winner nonetheless.

Special Treatment

Isabelle Huppert is an aging prostitute who specializes in fantasy fulfillment for an upscale Parisian clientele.  Bouli Lanners is an aging psychoanalyst who specializes in sitting out of his upscale Parisian patients’ sight lines and saying nearly nothing at all.  Their ennui is palpable, and Special Treatment underlines it with a score that seems to have been written entirely in a minor key and played by a cellist whose dog just died.

Great.  An hour and a half of ennui among the Parisian professional class.  If I wanted 90 minutes of ennui, I’d have lunch with coworkers from my former (office) job.  At least they told jokes.

Yes, the characters’ lives intersect in unexpected ways.  Yes, they grow and develop.  And, yes, Special Treatment does everything it wants to do.  What I wanted it to do, however, was entertain me.  That was not included in the special.

The Guard

I enjoyed The Guard.  I think I’d have enjoyed it more if I were Irish, because the picture’s many jokes seem calibrated for the Irish audience.  Nevertheless, how can anyone object to spending an hour and a half with Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle (CDNW), and Mark Strong?

Gleeson plays a rumpled, pleasantly corrupt local sergeant of the Garde in a village in the Irish countryside.  When FBI special agent Cheadle comes to town to stop a trio of drug smugglers (including the omnipresent Mr. Strong), we get a redemption tale and a fish out of water comedy and a buddy cop movie, all in one.

But why would you want to watch a redemption tale / fish out of water comedy / buddy cop movie, anyway?  Two reasons: #1, you will probably never go to Galloway, Ireland, so this is the closest you’re ever going to get.  #2, the dialogue is so well written and so well performed that you’ll enjoy listening to it for an hour and a half.  You may not laugh out loud (particularly if you aren’t Irish), but you’ll nod and smile and have a pleasant time.

I’ll take good dialogue and a pleasant time any day of the week.  I’d see The Guard 2 with a smile on my face.

Moneyball

When I heard that Moneyball was in production, I thought it would fail.  How do you take a book about statistical analysis and turn it into a narrative film?

Moneyball succeeds by changing focus from the book.  The book, as I said, is about statistical analysis and uses one team’s experiment with it to educate the reader.  The movie is about Billy Beane, the manager of said team, his journey, and how his grasp of the potential of statistical analysis changed his sport, his team, and his life.

Brad Pitt plays Beane as smart and savvy, yet insecure.  He’s a baseball guy, but he’s so totally a product of his lifelong immersion in the sport that he’s a baseball guy only.  When he spots an influential whiz kid (Jonah Hill) in an opposing manager’s office, he understands the value of a completely different perspective.  It’s a perspective so different that betting on it could cost him his career.  There’s your drama.  There’s your movie. 

Now, I like baseball.  I go to several games per year, I follow the Nationals in the Post, and believe that Marconi invented radio specifically to give the world the magic that is Vin Scully.  But you don’t have to like baseball to like this movie.  You have to like scrappy underdogs, you have to like things that don’t go boom, and you have to like Brad Pitt.  I like all three, and I like this picture.  I want to see it again as soon as I can.  

Tai Chi Master

Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in a wuxia film directed by Yuen Woo-Ping.

If you’re me, those words were all it took to get Tai Chi Master (1993) in your queue.  If you aren’t me and those names don’t ring a bell, let me explain.  Jet Li is a former Chinese national wushu champion and a no-kidding master of two styles of northern Chinese kung fu.  He made his first film in 1982, at the age of 19, and has been working steadily ever since.  His best film, Fearless (2006), combines first-rate action with a retelling of the Buddha’s journey in a manner both ambitious and profoundly successful.  Michelle Yeoh’s background is in ballet and choreography, and she's applied her training to a string of successful martial arts and action films dating from 1984.  While best known in the West for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she’s best known to me for jumping a motorcycle onto the roof of a moving train in Police Story III (alternately titled Supercop), thus making her the only stuntperson in history to upstage Jackie Chan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTv7HXqqqXA

Yuen Woo-ping, the film’s director, has directed and/or choreographed some of the most memorable martial arts films ever made, including Drunkenmaster, the Kill Bill movies, and Kung Fu Hustle.  Folks, this is the A Team.

And the A Team delivers.  With Tai Chi Master, they create not just an action film, but a testament to the remarkable athletic feats we humans are capable of achieving.  Yes, the film relies on wires and hidden trampolines and creative editing to make its characters appear superhuman, but those wires are attached to real people bouncing off real trampolines and making it all look, if not exactly natural, then credible.  I marveled at these performers’ flexibility, speed, endurance, and grace.  I loved how Yuen shot them, I enjoyed the complexity of their choreographed fights, and I lost track of time for the hour and a half it took for Tai Chi Master to tell its story of medieval China.

Jet Li.  Michelle Yeoh.  Yuen Woo-ping.  They’re as good as human beings can be at what they do, and Tai Chi Master showcases them beautifully.  Enjoy.

Contagion

I used to work at a place that did professional wargaming.  Not the kind with little paper chits and 20-sided dice, but the kind in which we got a bunch of smart and capable people in a room, threw them a scenario, and analyzed how they did (or didn’t) work together to deal with the situation.  Contagion feels like a dramatization of one of those wargames.

The scenario: a highly contagious, deadly virus comes out of Macau, borne abroad by several of the thousands of international travelers who pass through in a given week.  It propagates around the world exponentially.  Player #1: you’re an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.  Player #2: you’re the head of the CDC.  Player #3: Homeland security.  Player #4: a suburban city councilwoman at the American center of the epidemic.  Go.

Does it work in the film?  Yeah.  Likeable stars like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Lawrence Fishburne put faces to dilemmas, helping us humanize the scope of the epidemic and empathize with their respective ethical and professional challenges.  The stories weave together fluidly, each informing the others and catching us up in their combined narrative.  The film rockets along and never feels like the dull procedural it could have become.  Contagion challenged and fascinated me, making me feel like I was back in the room of one of those wargames, moving things along and learning from the process.

Grim as the film’s subject matter surely is, I found it to be intellectually and emotionally satisfying.  I walked out thinking, “That’s how it could really play out.  Nice work.”  I haven’t changed my mind, even if I have changed my habits: I’m washing my hands more.

Step Brothers

Step Brothers is a one-joke movie.  Fortunately, it’s a funny joke.

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play 40-ish men who never really matured past the age of, oh, 13.  They live at home and act like children.  When their parents meet, marry, and move in together, they have to learn to get along. 

You could build a funny movie about spoiled kids becoming brothers with child actors, but the hook here is watching schlubby, middle-aged guys exhibit these behaviors.  A couple of kids climbing into a treehouse to hang out and gripe about their goody-two-shoes sibling could be amusing, but watching grown men do it is downright hilarious.

Is it shallow?  Yeah.  Is it formulaic?  Yeah.  Is it funny?  Well, yeah.  Go figure.

Observe and Report

I’m pretty sure Observe and Report is a comedy.  It’s billed as one, and it stars comedian Seth Rogen.  But it isn’t funny.  It’s disturbing.

In the film, Rogen plays a functionally psychotic head of security at a shopping mall.  He’s unstable and violent, but appears to have found a niche in which he can mask the former and occasionally indulge the latter.  Over the course of the film, events disturb his balance and he spirals down into a full-blown psychotic episode.

Observe and Report plays this for laughs, but it isn’t funny.  Rogen’s character is, by turns, pathetic and repulsive.  The people he hurts stay hurt.  The people he intimidates stay afraid.  Nothing about this is good, and nothing ends well.  This is a disturbing, scary, deeply weird film, and nothing at all like what I expected.  Perhaps the joke was on me.

Make Way for Tomorrow

I was on board Make Way for Tomorrow, an American precursor to the superior Tokyo Story, for roughly half the movie.  Then, one of the leads make a decision so stupid that he lost me, killed my disbelief, and tuned me out.  Once that happened, I saw for what it was: a one-note movie that plays its note on a title card before the story even begins. 

Here’s the setup: an older couple (roughly 70, which in the world of this film is absolutely ancient) calls their adult children home.  This is not a happy reunion, however.  They’ve invited them to announce to that they’ve lost their home and need to move in with somebody.  The kids are displeased.

Ok, I know where this is going and so do you: it’s right there in the title.  Besides, you’ve seen King Lear and Tokyo Story (What? You haven’t seen Tokyo Story?  Why are you wasting time reading this blog when you could be doing that?  Go on now, shoo.  I’ll be here when you’re finished.).  You know how this works out.

The rest of the film is, essentially, a slog to the bitter end.  But there’s a moment, about halfway through, when a friend presents the man of the couple an opportunity on a silver platter with a couple of mints and a lovely flower in a little vase.  The man waves away the opportunity because he’s an idiot.  This made me so mad, so incredulous, that I stopped seeing him as a man and started seeing him as a cardboard cutout with “pathetic” scrawled upon it in magic marker.  I wondered why the “opportunity” scene was even included.  And then I was done.

Make Way for Tomorrow is technically competent and decently performed, but it failed to make me believe.  What a disappointment.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life made me glad I sprang for an enormous tv and a good stereo.  I can’t imagine seeing this film on a computer screen.  This film trades on awe, and awe requires big picture and big sound.  I think the studio will put this back in theaters for awards season.  If you don’t have an enormous tv and a good stereo, take advantage of the theater’s setup and see this film properly.

Sean Penn’s a successful architect in his early 50s.  It’s his deceased brother’s birthday.  He goes about his day, but he’s lost in thought, reflecting on his childhood, his brother, his family, and life.  That’s it – that’s the whole story.

But it’s powerful and it’s beautiful and it’s absolutely effective, and it’s so because director Terence Malick captures the perspective of childhood as seen through the lens of recollection.  He uses vignettes and camera angles and selective audio to approximate how children see and adults remember.  He weaves it with a meditation on life, and the meaning of life, that put me in a profound, meditative state and took me on its journey.

I didn’t cry during   The Tree of Life.  I didn’t laugh.  Nothing blew up.  But this film moved me, its marriage of music and imagery touched me, and the experience felt like the most profound time I’ve had at the movies since Woman in the Dunes.

See this film.  Soak it in.  When you do, go large.

Green Lantern

I kinda liked Green Lantern.  It struck me as goofy fun.  All the goofy fun in the world, however, can’t mask its profound distastefulness.

Here’s the deal: Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a test pilot with deep-seated insecurities who gets selected to be Flashlight Guy, er, Green Lantern, a space-cop who can use Lantern Power to focus his will into stuff like really big machine guns.  After bilging out of Space Cop Academy, he returns to Earth.  Once home, he’s confronted with Capital E Eeevil, overcomes his insecurities, and saves the day.  On the face of it, this makes for a good time at the movies.  My kindergartner enjoyed it, and I rocked along relatively happily.

But I can’t see how any self-respecting nerd can support Green Lantern.  As played by Ryan Reynolds, Hal Jordan is that jock you probably hated in high school.  He’s good looking and in great shape and has a ridiculously hot girlfriend whom he neglects.  As if that weren’t enough, he has an awesome car, the ability to lose his job without freaking out, and Space Cop powers.  But that’s not so bad.  Here’s the killer: his nemesis is you.  His nemesis is Chess Club Guy, the nerd with the crush on Ridiculously Hot Girl.

{Aside: it just kills me that it always comes back to Ridiculously Hot Girl.  By whining about the fact that he’s invisible to Ridiculously Hot Girl, Chess Club Guy marginalizes all the Chess Club Girls.  In a sense, he’s marginalizing his own analogue and, thus, himself.  I hear you, Evolutionary Scientist Guy: Ridiculous Hotness often comes down to symmetry of feature, perfect averageness, and physical fitness, thus suggesting a good reproductive choice.  Nevertheless, the self-loathing inherent in the envy of the one whom Ridiculously Hot Girl finds attractive strikes me as both unjust and uncomfortable.}

So, what are we supposed to do?  Root for the Alpha Beta over the Tri Lamb?  Cheer Ryan Reynolds because he finally gets in touch with his inner Ted McGinley? Not going to happen.  The best we can do is quiet our misgivings and enjoy the pretty pictures.

And plot our revenge.  Mu ha ha.

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol had me at the opening credits.  I’d forgotten that Brad Bird directed this film, and seeing his name flash on the screen assured me that I was in for a good time.

You see, Brad Bird directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille.  The Incredibles is the greatest superhero movie ever made, and Ratatouille moved me to stand and applaud when its credits rolled, something I’ve done exactly once.  This guy knows what he’s doing and it shows in this, his first live-action feature.

The Mission: Impossible movies imagine what James Bond would be like if he weren’t a sociopath.  Tom Cruise, as secret agent Ethan Hunt, can actually make and sustain friendships, lead people, and present himself as more than a collection of top-shelf stuff he read about in men’s lifestyle magazines.  This gives us an “in” to his character that the 007 movies simply can’t deliver.  This matters, because it overcomes the fact that this spy thriller is just another entry in the “stop a madman out to destroy the world / corner the market on X / extort ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the UN” genre.  We like Ethan in a way that we simply can’t like Bond.  We like his team, which includes recently omnipresent Doctor Who alumnus Simon Pegg.  We like his boss.  By God, we like the Impossible Missions Force, whose self-destructing messaging systems sometimes need a little whack to, y’know, actually self-destruct.  So we’re on board when things get rough.

And rough they get, giving Bird a reason to deliver breathtaking action set-pieces.  I’ve flown over Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower a zillion times, but it took this film to bring home its awesome height.  I’ve been in sandstorms, but the sandstorm here felt more dangerous and more awesome than any I’ve actually experienced.  As a film buff, I’ve seen more stunt fights in industrial settings than I can remember; but I’ve never seen a stunt fight like the one this delivers in its climax.

A friend of mine recently said that Brad Bird should get a Bond film.  I say that Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol is as good as spy action-thrillers get, and better than any Bond film I can readily recall.  Brad Bird hasn’t just raised the bar.  He’s built a better bar, taller and stronger and cooler and just plain more fun than the bars that have gone before.

I can’t praise Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol enough.  Brad Bird knows what he’s doing.

PS  … except for that last scene, which looked like it was filmed on different stock and tied everything up far too neatly.  Hey, people who follow this kind of thing: was this a reshoot thing?  I just don’t understand how you do two hours of excellence, only to go mundane at the wrap.  Thoughts?

Hugo

In the first ten minutes of Hugo, Martin Scorsese delivers a breathtaking flight above the wintry streets of beautiful Paris, through the crowds at a downtown railway station, and into the very workings of the beautiful clocks that keep the people in the station on time.  Further, he introduces the ragamuffin boy Hugo, our hero, wins our sympathy for him, and dazzles us with the beauty of his photography and vision.

And then he gives us the opening credits.  Basically, the first ten minutes of Hugo is Martin Scorsese saying, “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the best there is.”

He’s right, of course.  He is the best there is, and he uses his mastery of his craft to tell us a story (of the plucky young Hugo and his adventures in the railway station), experiment with and expand 3D technology, and proclaim his love for film, both aesthetically and technically.

He’s aided by the kind of cast a Scorsese can command: Christopher Lee as a bookshop owner who reveals hidden depths, Sacha Baron Cohen as the Station Inspector, Emily Mortimer as the flower vendor who’s the glint in his eye, and Jude Law as, in a sense, the soul of the picture.  And that’s just the supporting cast!  In the lead, we find the remarkable young Asa Butterfield as the titular Hugo, Chloë Grace Moretz (whom I’m beginning to see as the next Jodie Foster) as an educated young girl who yearns for adventure, and Sir Ben Kingsley in one of his most evocative roles since Death and the Maiden.

Right around here, I usually summarize the plot to help you decided whether the story’s for you.  Not this time.  The story’s good, and it’ll capture your imagination, but Hugo is for you simply because it’s beautiful.  It provokes a feeling of aesthetic wonder, a joy that mankind is capable of creating such visions and experiences, a shared delight in the possibilities of film as a medium.  I loved Hugo and consider it among the best films of the year.  I think you’ll love it, too.

Hulk

When the climax of your superhero movie comes down to two guys talking on a darkened stage, you know you have something special.

In The Hulk, Ang Lee has created a film that replicates the feeling of reading a comic book.  Its compositions deliberately recall the printed page.  Its wipes and transitions suggest the exuberance of a penciller in creative ecstasy.  Its villain kill qualifies among the top three villain kills of all time.

And yet, all that seems almost beside the point.  The Hulk is a film about emotions and their repression, and nothing engenders so much of both as family.  Bruce Banner’s family is about as dysfunctional as it gets, and he has coped with the ensuing trauma through repression and emotional distance.  As played by the extraordinary Eric Bana, he’s a coiled spring.  When he finally releases, when he lets go, it’s as chaotic and cathartic as an argument at Christmastime.

Ok, so hang on: is this a movie about an uptight guy who learns to get in touch with his emotions, or is it a movie about a giant green monster who breaks stuff?  I understand your confusion: I think audiences went in looking for the latter and felt similarly confused when confronted with the former.  But don’t get angry (I don’t think I’d like you when you’re angry): just dig The Hulk for what it is – a movie about an uptight guy who learns to get in touch with his emotions by turning into a giant green monster and breaking stuff.  By the time you get to those two guys on that darkened stage, you’ll have grooved on both tracks long enough to feel at home.  And when of those two guys literally starts chewing the scenery, you’ll be ready.

Alien

Oh, Alien is so good.

Here’s a movie that takes its time in the setup, and it pays huge dividends in the second and third acts.  When the crew members of the space cargo ship Nostromo awaken to a distress call from an alien world, we get to know them.  We get to know their ship and its layout.  These things matter, because the Nostromo’s world is one that has been lived in for quite some time, and we need to feel that it’s commonplace, that these are ordinary Joes doing an ordinary job.

Because when Hell breaks loose, we’ve become keyed up and ready.  When people start dying, we know who they are and have become invested in their fates.  When the alien’s acid blood starts eating through decking, we know what that means and can figure just how close the ship is coming to catastrophic hull breach.

This leads me to wonder: why is this so hard?  Why do so many filmmakers not seem to understand that the key to narrative film, even genre-type horror and science fiction, lies in the characters and their environment?  If we don’t believe in the characters and their world, we won’t believe in their predicaments or their heroism.  If we don’t believe in the characters, all we have is light and sound. 

Alien believes in its characters, and it makes us believe.  That’s what makes the film so effective, so scary, to this very day.  When many of the films we know have passed out of memory, audiences will still watch Alien.  If they’re smart, so will filmmakers.  This film has much to teach them.