Taking Woodstock (2009)

You almost wouldn't know, from Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock, that a music concert happened 40 years ago in Bethel, New York. The movie, based on Elliot Tiber's memoir, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life remains almost entirely on the periphery of that watershed festival. Music is occasionally heard, drifting across fields and forests to reach The El Monaco Motel, a shabby, rundown establishment operated (barely) by the Teichberg family in White Lake, NY. Sonia (Imelda Staunton) and Jake Teichberg (Henry Goodman) are Russian Jews; she's penny-pinching and greedy, chasing off potential customers with unkempt rooms and extra fees for towels. Jake putters around the property -- if he's doing any maintenance, it doesn't much show. Their son Elliot (Demetri Martin) is a closeted interior decorator, forced to move back in with his parents to help them run their motel, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. Elliot is also the president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, and the organizer of an annual arts festival at which the performances consist mainly of records played over the motel loudspeaker.

When the nearby town of Wallkill pulls the permit for a music festival, Elliott gets the grand idea of hosting it himself. He rings up Woodstock Ventures, introduces Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) to dairy farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy, a hoot), and the rest is history. The El Monaco is soon the bustling headquarters of Woodstock Ventures, and within weeks, a steady stream of hippies are making their way to the fabled "Aquarian Exposition." The locals, depicted as a provincial, insular lot, are none to happy about all the visitors -- they practically greet them with pitchforks and torches (although eventually, there are sandwiches).

Somewhere in there, a concert happened. But Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee and written by James Schamus, isn't really about that. It's about Elliot, and his parents, and the intersection of commerce and art, the uneasy alliance of idealism and capitalism. It's mostly about how Elliott gets his groove on, and lets his hair down, and blooms (a little) among the flower children.

Lee directs Taking Woodstock in a decidedly old fashioned way. It pretty much feels like a 1960s movie in its pacing, and looks like one too. Lee captures the mood and look of the festival -- well, the outer rings of the festival -- frequently evoking Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary Woodstock as the movie follows Elliot through hippie-clogged roads and muddy hills. The movie meanders and drifts fairly aimlessly and inconsequentially, an episodic collage (including several scenes rendered in split screen, as in Wadleigh's doc) of groovy and not so groovy stuff going down. Although there are plenty of reminders that something big is going on in the background, Taking Woodstock is a very small film, a breezy, ironic comedy with a little darkness around the edges. It doesn't so much get back to the garden as get lost -- contentedly, it must be said -- in the weeds. Lee and Schamus don't seem to really have a point to make in Taking Woodstock, and so they don't.

Martin, a standup comedian, gives an extremely low key performance -- Elliot is the center of the story, but he's barely there as a character. Maybe that's on purpose -- Elliot doesn't really know who he is, so we don't know him either. The filmmakers want to make something of Elliot's coming out, but Martin is too wan a presence to carry that much narrative and metaphorical weight (there are awkward allusions to the Stonewall riots, which happened only months earlier, and to connections between the Age of Aquarius and the dawning of the gay rights movement). Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a burly, ex-Marine transvestite who wanders into the El Monaco and stays on as director of security, serves as a gay confidant to Elliot. Schreiber plays against stereotype, and makes Vilma a macho man in a pink dress. On the one hand, Schreiber's portrayal is strong and interesting enough to make Vilma substantial and vivid despite the underwritten script. On the other hand, Vilma is not the only potentially interesting character to get pushed to the periphery while the film makes too much of money-grubbing Sonia and anxious Elliot. Others seem to have been left largely on the cutting room floor, like Elliot's pal Billy (Emile Hirsch), a vet who returned from Vietnam burned-out and deeply disturbed. Billy is so sketchy, and is given so little screen time that he seems more cliché than character. Groff makes a strong impression despite relatively little screen time. He portrays promoter Lang as an almost comically calm, angelic creature, a curly-haired hippie knight who travels by helicopter and by horse, and a shrewd capitalist-idealist who rides in and saves the El Monaco, for what its worth, and pulls off one of the more fabled events in recent history.

Taking Woodstock is an enjoyable little film that only hints at the bigger story. Sometimes, focusing on a small story gives a better sense of large and momentous events -- we can understand the forest better when we pay attention to the individual trees. That was surely the goal in Taking Woodstock, which looks at a single detail (and a potential future question on Jeopardy!) -- What Catskills motel served as HQ for the Woodstock Festival? -- to tell the tale of a generational groundshift. But the focus of Taking Woodstock is a little too tight, and the rest of the picture a little too diffuse. Taking Woodstock tells the little story -- a little story that's quirky and fun and modestly interesting -- but kind of misses the big picture.

31Aug2009

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

In Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino rewrites history (and spelling) because, well, he can. The history in question would be the history of World War II, which we moviegoers have been painfully reliving, with brutal realism, since the war ended, I suppose, but especially since Schindler's List upped the ante on tragical realism in war movies. Tarantino is no tragedian, and neither is he especially a realist, so Inglourious Basterds looks with fresh brutality at man's inhumanity to man, but with a twist. This time, the bad guys get what they deserve, at least on a traditional war movie reading of just deserts, and no one stands on principle when it comes to brutalizing and murderizing Nazis.

Or, as Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) calls them, "Natt-seez." Raine leads a small unit of Jewish-American soldiers who have infiltrated Nazi-occupied France, where they wage a guerilla war on the Third Reich. They work for the OSS, and they enjoy their work. Their specialty is scalping the Nazis they kill, and they kill most every Nazi they find. Tarantino has a reputation (undeserved, if you ask me) as a filmmaker whose movies are gratuitously violent. In reality, more violence is implied than is ever seen in his films -- he's too stylized to be blatant or obvious. For a war movie in which revenge against Nazis is a prominent theme, the depiction of violence is quite restrained inInglourious Basterds -- as usual, more is implied than is shown although what is shown is sometimes gruesome and, not shockingly, rather satisfying.

Inglourious Basterds is steeped, as all of Tarantino's films, in cinematic tradition. The title is taken from Italian director Enzo Castellani's film Inglourious Basterds. Aldo Raine's name is meant to invoke movie star Aldo Ray, who starred in numerous war pictures and B-movies. The Basterds (and the plot) call to mind *The Dirty Dozen*, but the film is as much spaghetti Western as it is war movie. Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), an escaped Jew, owns a Parisian cinema that shows the Third Reich's fave actress-turned-mountaineer-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl's The White Hell of Pitz Palü, a film that is referenced again by undercover operative and suave movie critic (aren't they all?) Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender). Eli Roth, director of the Hostel torture/horror movies, plays a Basterd known as the "Bear Jew," a baseball bat-wielding Southie who enjoys beaning Nazis. (Roth is no better an actor than Tarantino, which is to say, not very good at all, but as Shosanna says, "We French respect directors.") That Parisian cinema is the setting for two separate and complicated plots to assassinate Hitler and key members of the Third Reich, as well as a movie premiere featuring a Joseph Goebbels film starring war hero-turned-actor Frederick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who tries to woo Shosanna.

The story begins on a dairy farm in Nazi-occupied France, where Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogates a farmer he believes is hiding Jews. Landa, an effete, chatty, and astute monster, is nicknamed the "Jew Hunter." He's highly effective at his job, in part because he enjoys it. Waltz unexpectedly and brilliantly dances away with the movie -- his Landa is a Nazi monster like no other: ironic, self-serving, twee, honorable, ingenious (and of course, utterly evil).

Landa is the nemesis of the movie's heroine Shosanna, after he murders her family. Shosanna is an unlikely siren and object of Nazi affection. For Landa, she's the one that got away. Zoller, a monster of a different sort (and a cinephile in his own right), lavishes unwanted attention on her as well. In several instances, Inglourious Basterds twists cinematic tradition, taking qualities that would traditionally be considered virtues in a movie character (resistance, patriotism, killer marksmanship) and provocatively attaching them to Nazis in a way that forces a reconsideration of the so-called virtue. Shosanna is a calculating and vengeful lady in a red dress (and a propagandist filmmaker and would-be mass murderer), but her cause cannot be called unjust (unless one is a Nazi). This is also true of Raine (a.k.a. "Aldo the Apache") and his Basterds, who are brutal and bloodthirsty, but in the service of justice and retribution. Pitt's performance as the fast-talking, hard-boiled Southerner Raine approaches caricature, with a strong undercurrent of dark humor. It's the kind of mannered performance that complements Tarantino's mannered dialogue in a way that really works.

The meandering plot of Inglourious Basterds winds around sufficiently to incorporate numerous war movie tropes, and combines fact and fiction, movie history and world history, and comes to an utterly satisfying and inflammatory (in more ways than one) conclusion in which film itself is the agent of vengeance and correction (in more ways than one). Inglourious Basterds is fanboy cinephile Tarantino's homage to war movies, westerns, and to pre-war German cinema, but with his own postmodern twist: titles, keening spaghetti western music and grinding rock guitar riffs, and occasional narrative interludes featuring the voice of Samuel L. Jackson (discussing -- what else? -- pre-war film stocks). There's more too -- as a film that is essentially about Jewish anger and vengeance for the Holocaust, Inglourious Basterds references the ovens at Auschwitz and the tattooing of inmates, but in irreverent, table-turning fashion.

Depending on how much reverence one demands from films about the war and the Nazi atrocities, and whether one believes such films can (or should) be entertaining, Inglourious Basterds is either a film to be taken very seriously, or not seriously at all. Tarantino likes his B-movies, and likes, too, to elevate B-movie conventions to art. He succeeds better sometimes than others, and like a true contrarian, he succeeds better when he reaches higher, and is more ambitious. Inglourious Basterds is ambitious, irreverent, and accomplished. Like a work of high caliber fanfic, it is related to the war movie's canonical universe, and simultaneously exists outside that universe, offering an alternate ending that satisfies our desires with respect to historical reality and with respect to happy (well, more or less happy) movie endings.

24Aug2009

District 9 (2009)

If movies have taught us anything, it's that we must beware the aliens who will one day visit us (or perhaps, already have visited us), probes and disintegrating ray guns in hand. With the exception of the occasional chocolate addict like E.T., the alien invaders mean us no good.

But what if it's the other way around? What if it is they who ought to fear us? That's the scenario imagined by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp in District 9, in which we humans, with our history of murder, deceit, genocide, medical experimentation, speciesism, racism, and exploitation, are the species the rest of the universe ought to give an intergalactically wide berth.

In a documentary-style opening montage, District 9 lays out an entirely plausible and woeful history in which, some time in the 80s, a massive alien ship appeared, and hovered, apparently stalled, over Johannesburg, South Africa. When impatient humans finally breached the ship, they discovered many malnourished aliens aboard. These "prawns," so called because of their vague resemblance to the crustaceans, were in dire straits, and were eventually settled in a vast refugee camp. That was apparently the end of Earth's humanitarian impulses. The camp, known as district 9, eventually became a slum, a shantytown like so many impoverished, dysfunctional, dangerous third world slums, with millions of aliens segregated from their unwelcoming human neighbors. (Insert Apartheid analogy here.) Decades later, the refugees fall into violence, and scavenging, and are preyed upon by violent Nigerian gangsters who exploit their addiction to cat food.

For reasons that become clear as the story progresses, the prawns are to be resettled in a more remote camp, with the dirty work to be done by MNU (Multi-National United), a vaguely evil corporation engaged in various kinds of vaguely evil doings. The bloke in charge of the resettlement is a mild-mannered, nervous, paper pushing bureaucrat named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), whose father-in-law (Louis Minaar) heads MNU. Wikus gets no respect (and earns none) from either his coworkers, or from prawns. Backed by (mostly white) MNU mercenaries, he heads into the camp to serve eviction notices on the prawn residents. Wikus is like so many ordinary citizens throughout history, members of a privileged class who are actively or passively complicit in the persecution of those deemed Other, or Unclean, or Subhuman. And like a few others, Wikus is forced out of his complacency (and into some kind of heroism) by a clanging cognitive dissonance. For Wikus, an incident occurs during his eviction rounds -- without giving too much away, let's just say it is a truly alienating experience. Things subsequently go terribly wrong, and he discovers, to his horror, just what has really been happening to the prawns at the hands of MNU soldiers and doctors.

There are pointedly allegorical and political aspects to District 9, but Blomkamp, who co-wrote the screenplay with Terri Tatchell, doesn't get heavy-handed or preachy about the message embedded in his ingenious and fascinating film. Instead, District 9, in the tradition of the best science fiction and horror genre pictures, integrates thought provoking ideas into a smart, suspenseful, darkly humorous, and thoroughly entertaining movie. District 9 is a cracking good and gruesome horror film that morphs into a fast-paced, action-adventure alien-human buddy picture (with cute-ish alien kid thrown in for good measure).

That alien buddy to Wikus is known as Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), a prawn father who is much more than he appears. Christopher's relationship with Wikus is complex, burdened by a history of mistrust, exploitation, and betrayal, as well as a language barrier (the aliens speak in clicks, translated for the viewer in subtitles). The prawns and humans seem to understand each other about equally, which is to say, only partially. But real communication transcends language, and Wikus and Christopher come to an understanding, and find common ground and purpose, a recognition of their mutual (if not superficially obvious) personhood. The cosmic joke of District 9 is that for the prawns, becoming more human is a degrading experience; for Wikus, becoming a mensch requires a thorough alienation from his humanity.

Moon (2009)

Astronaut Sam Bell logs miles on a treadmill, wearing a t-shirt that reads "Wake me when it's quitting time." It's one of many inside jokes and telling clues in Moon, a compact, spare movie about a man on the moon. Sam (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of his three year stint as the sole human occupant of a remote mining operation on the far side of the moon. (Astronomers will quibble because Sam can see Earth from there, which, if I know my astronomy, can't be done from way yonder on the moon.) The station is outfitted with many amusements, but Sam's only companion is GERTY, a roving computer/robot, which speaks in the monotonous, deadpan voice of Kevin Spacey and flashes vaguely inappropriate emoticons on a small screen.

GERTY's kinship with HAL, the homicidal computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is both clear and ambiguous -- GERTY is apparently friendlier than HAL, but the association is meant to raise warning flags. 2001 is also clearly a forebear of Moon, but where the former was ambitious, tedious, intentionally obscure, and, if you ask me, unbearably dull (it's a movie I have less and less patience for every time I see it), Moon is sprightly and engaging, if far less ambitious. (Moon also calls to mind Douglas Trumbull's terrific film *Silent Running*, both in its ecological theme and in its exploration of the isolation of space and the companionship of robots.)

Rather than being weighed down by ponderousness, Moon suffers more from the weightlessness of brevity. There are several interesting and complex ideas explored in Moon, including science fiction mainstays: human cloning, exploitation, personal identity, human and machine consciousness, freedom, mortality, and fatalism. Any one of them would have been enough for a single movie, so none are explored with as much depth as they might have been. Nonetheless, Moon is satisfying and intriguing.

While Sam anticipates leaving the Moon and seeing the wife and child he left behind on Earth, odd things begin to happen. His physical body starts to deteriorate, and a mysterious replacement worker suddenly appears at the mining station. Not much can be said about Sam's replacement that wouldn't give away too much of the plot, but suffice it to say that he is also portrayed by Sam Rockwell, and the two astronauts are less simpatico than might be expected. Rockwell's performance is strange (as usual) and marvelously rich, funny, melancholy, and poignant, as he portrays two men who are both compatriots and rivals, buddies and enemies. Sam and Sam's replacement are forced together by odd (very odd) circumstances, isolation, and deception. They were never supposed to meet, but having met, they're forced to confront deeply disturbing questions about who they are and why they exist.

Moon is directed by Duncan Jones (heretofore, but surely not henceforth best known as the son of David Bowie), from a story conceived by Jones and scripted by Nathan Parker. They've taken a futuristic scenario and pared it down to an essentially human drama, then pared it down even more into a one-person drama about, primarily, identity, and in particular that ol' philosophical headscratcher about the persistence of identity over time: what makes you the same you that you were yesterday, or a week ago, or three years ago, when you started your long, lonely night shift on the far side of the moon?

Like much of the best science fiction, Moon also explores the complex relationship between man and technology, and the ways that our essential nature may be threatened by the improvements and efficiencies of a streamlined, technologically enhanced existence. Moon also explores the possibility that it's the other way around, and we humans will always infect the machine perfection of our creations with our all too human imperfections. Are there some improvements we (or the wes we think we are) may not survive? Or will we instead leave our indelible mark -- our human crud and hair, and wear and tear, our emotionalism and sentimentality, wherever and whenever we go -- like the footprints we left, and the flag we planted on the once pristine lunar surface?

3Aug2009

The Ugly Truth (2009)

The Ugly Truth is another in an apparently endless line of romantic comedies (and I use the term loosely) about a gorgeous, serious, lonely, workaholic, glasses-wearing single woman who desperately wants to meet Mr. Right. Abby (played by the voluptuous Katherine Heigl) is such a control freak that she ranks her dates according to how many of her ten essential criteria they meet. She also prefers tap water to bottled, since bottled water is just tap water with a markup. And The Ugly Truth is just When Harry Met Sally Met Judd Apatow but Forgot to Bring the Funny.

Judd Apatow, purveyor of manboy-centric comedies, is in no way personally responsible for The Ugly Truth. His movies are actually funny. The Ugly Truth is, on the other hand, a failed effort at matchmaking between the venerable chick flick romantic comedy and crude, potty-mouthed bromantic comedies of the Apatow-knockoff sort. Both parties should file for divorce citing irreconcilable differences.

The combatants in this battle of the sexes are Abby, a TV producer, and Mike (Gerard Butler), star of a late night public access show called The Ugly Truth. Back in the day, Mike would have been called a male chauvinist pig, but we'll leave the innocent pigs out of it. Mike's a lout and a blowhard who maintains that all men care about is sex, and that women ought to give up on romance, put on push-up bras, and shut their yaps. Abby disagrees. The two come to blows when Mike is brought on to spice up the ratings of Abby's failing morning talk show. Lo and behold, it works. Apparently the good people of Sacramento want to be yelled at by a big hairy apeman first thing in the morning, because they go for Mike and his Jell-o wrestling bimbos in a big way.

Abby, meanwhile, meets Colin (Eric Winter), a hunky doctor recently arrived in her apartment building, and proceeds to take Mike's advice on how to hook him. Why would a sensible woman accept advice about anything from a knuckle-dragging, butt-slapping dope like Mike? Obviously because they've made a wager: Abby gets the dreamy guy using Mike's method, or Mike quits her TV show. There follow shenanigans involving vibrating underwear, hot dogs and spilled beverages, and Mike-as-Cyrano relaying advice via two-way radio to a frantic and inept Abby. The twist, and I'm sure nobody saw it coming, is that Mike falls for Abby and Abby gets all confused about her feelings for Mike and/or Colin. The usual ad hoc complications and hijinks ensue, leading to dumb and senseless fights and breakups that merely go through the motions of textbook romantic comedy plotting. This is a cinematic battle of the sexes that destroys everything (comedy, romance, joy, hope) and then salts the earth when the fighting is finally over.

The Ugly Truth wanders from one pointless and unbelievable episode to another. There are several quirky supporting characters jumping up and down and vying for screen time with strenuous mugging. Director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) apparently instructed his cast to do everything bigger, louder, and kookier, since that is the general tone of The Ugly Truth. Heigl is particularly effortful in her madcappery, with lots of Cheshire Cat mugging (huge smile, big eyes), while Butler's job is to toss off sexual innuendos and be charmingly uncharming. Thing is, Mike and Abby are both so unhappy and unpleasant and clearly have such good reasons for disliking each other (I couldn't stand either one of them) that there is just no good reason for them to get together, except for the fact that they are two attractive people in close proximity, and because the screenplay (penned by Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith) says so. The Ugly Truth violates the first rule (the only rule, really) of romantic comedy (or romantic anything), which is that the audience has to love those crazy kids and want ever so much for them to fall into each other's arms and live happily ever after. Mike and Abby spread unhappiness wherever they go. They're good for a quickie, or maybe a friends with benefits kinda thing, but happily ever after? No way. They're not even happy now.

Neither was I, watching this movie, which trots out the standard stereotypes about horndogs with hearts of gold, and desperately lonely career gals, and then flogs those dead horses for all they're worth, which isn't much, and certainly isn't the price of admission.

Food, Inc. (2009)

Whatever horrors Harry Potter might be facing this week, it's nothing compared to the horrors beneath (and in) the food on your plate. Voldemort's got nothing on a pack of Monsanto lawyers. That's the message (well, sort of) of Food, Inc., a disturbing, distressing, and frequently horrifying activist documentary about the big business of food in America.

Directed by Robert Kenner, produced by journalist and author Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), and starring, among others, locavore and real food advocate Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), Food, Inc. looks at the big business of food, and traces how a small handful of multinational corporations came to control the American diet. That control extends from the massive, monocultural fields filled with genetically modified plants, to the industrial food factories where it's all ground up, injected with chemicals, and vacuum-sealed for your convenience. Along the way, Food, Inc. looks at the horrors of meat production, from down on the factory farm to the killing floors of slaughterhouses filled with sick, mistreated animals and exploited, mistreated workers. It reveals how soybean farmers are bullied and terrorized by agrochemical monolith Monsanto, and how the American public is fed and fattened and fairly often subjected to deadly E. coli by a food system subsidized by the US government to guarantee that a bag of potato chips costs less than a bag of actual, unprocessed potatoes. That bright, cheery supermarket? The last link in a chain of food (or what counts as food) production that seems designed to make you sick.

The film is divided into chapters that focus on specific links in the commercial food chain. This results in a film that is wide ranging and ambitious, but perhaps not as in-depth as it ought to be. Since it tackles so many subjects, Food, Inc. is a fine overview of what turns out to be a monstrously huge and systemic problem, a movie about connecting the dots and tracing the problem to its roots in consumer desire, poverty, NAFTA, human evolution, and most of all, corporate greed. Each of the chapters might have been (and should be) a film unto itself, so Food, Inc., in looking at the big picture, must sacrifice a lot of the details. It is a catalogue of horrors (and there are genuine horrors here) more than an in-depth study of them. Still, it is an essential, eye-opening film, and if it's just the first salvo in a food war to come, it's an effective and heartrending one. And the filmmakers definitely intend for Food, Inc. to be a call to arms, comparing the food industry to the tobacco industry.

It's an apt analogy. Food has become an industrial product, and the focus of Food, Inc. is on how consumers are sickened and harmed by all the processed, packaged, cheap and abundant foodstuffs that fill supermarkets and pour through the windows of drive-thrus. It also considers the way that food science has been perverted from the study of nutrition to the development of newer, better ways to turn humans into consumers addicted to cheap crap (literally) on a bun. The movie argues, fairly persuasively, that the corporations that control food production in America abuse and exploit their customers as much as they abuse the poor animals they slaughter by the billions.

Food, Inc., unlike, say, Morgan Spurlock's Supersize Me, is not intended to entertain, but only to edify, to make you consider the stuff (whatever it is) you're putting in your mouth. This is pretty evident when the film's cheeriest subject (and one of its heroes) is farmer Joel Salatin, who likes to extoll the virtues of local, whole food while eviscerating a chicken. At least he's nice to his chickens while they're alive, I guess. Like whole grains and fresh vegetables, Food, Inc. is good for you. But the movie might just make you sick. It might even make you put down that bucket of popcorn (especially if it's dowsed in multiplex "butter") and that beverage full of high fructose corn syrup. On the other hand, if you've been eating the Standard American Diet (yes, it's S.A.D.) you can probably stomach just about anything, and you definitely should see Food, Inc.

Brüno (2009)

Sacha Baron Cohen might be a guerilla satirist, or a provocateur, or a slapstick genius, or all of the above. His comedy is certainly out there on the ledge, although not so much in the targets he chooses to lampoon as in his complete, unwavering commitment to his outlandish characters. Baron Cohen is a practitioner of a kind of extreme candid camera, with a critical difference: he never lets his victims in on the joke. After his last movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, it is hard to believe there are still people out there who can be so readily duped by Baron Cohen, but apparently he found enough of them for Brüno, his latest mock (and mocking) documentary.

Those victims include Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who was unwittingly cast in a Brüno sex tape. It's easy enough to feel sorry for the seemingly mild-mannered Paul until he starts screaming "queer!" at Brüno. Not that Brüno hasn't been called worse. Brüno (Baron Cohen) is a flamboyantly gay, über-haughty, scandal-prone Austrian fashionista TV host. To call Brüno flamboyant is something of an understatement, but our language lacks a more apt phrase, perhaps because our species lacks actual specimens as flamboyant as Brüno. Exuberant? Colorful? Flashy? Bizarre? Peacocks might have a word for it. The minimalist plot of the movie has Brüno banished from the fashion world after an incident involving a velcro suit, and so he makes his way to Hollywood to find fame and fortune. Mostly fame. A lovestruck assistant named Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) follows him. This plot is nearly identical to the plot of Borat, and the movie does not stray from the Borat path very much, except that where Borat was a sexist, racist, dopey, horny, hairy Kazakh, Brüno is a hypersexual, dopey, smooth-skinned Austrian. Indeed, the main difference is that Brüno is better groomed.

No doubt because Hollywood provides few targets for him, Brüno, who always refers to himself in the third person, takes his umlaut and makes haste to the same places where Borat found his victims: the American South. There he gets a rise out of a daytime TV talk show audience, a trio of macho hunters, a couple of ministers who attempt to "cure" his homosexuality, and, most dangerously, a rabidly anti-gay wrestling audience. These are pretty easy targets -- they practically bring their own pitchforks. Brüno also attempts to broker a peace agreement in the Middle East in set-ups that reveal less about his targets (who are unfailingly polite), and more about his own colossal vacuousness.

What's the point of all this? There's a legitimate question as to whether Baron Cohen, by presenting a character that is so stereotypically gay, is not reinforcing homophobic stereotypes. In some sense, Baron Cohen gets to have it both ways (or at least, he insists on having it both ways). He does indeed perpetuate gay stereotypes among those who, quite clearly, already believe the stereotypes. Is that actually reinforcing those stereotypes? Anyone else is given permission to laugh at the ignorant buffoons, because Brüno is such an extreme character that (we tell ourselves) only an idiot wouldn't see through the ruse. Brüno is also every bit as ignorant, bigoted, and dim as the people he spoofs, and he is on the receiving end of a fair amount of (apparently genuine) verbal and physical abuse, which we can enjoy with a clear conscience. What makes any of it work is less that Baron Cohen has created a believable character, and more that he never, ever breaks character, no matter how absurd, grotesque, and dangerous the situation (adding to the physical danger is that Brüno is naked quite a lot -- this movie earns its R rating the hard way).

The movie is quite funny. The humor is frequently puerile -- a lot of dildos are involved, as well as assorted household implements put to novel and, er, unhygienic use. The satire is sometimes pointed -- celebrities who accessorize with adopted babies, and verging-on-abusive stage parents are mocked, as are attention-seeking fame whores (such as Brüno himself). The general point is to expose (or is it exploit?) prejudice and then wring laughs out of it. There's a certain mean-spiritedness to Baron Cohen's dope-slapping con job that is attenuated by the willingness of his unwitting marks to go the extra mile to behave badly and glory in their own bigotry, hypocrisy, and intolerance. Baron Cohen is also an equal opportunity offender -- the laughs are meant to be uncomfortable, even for those in the know. He assumes a certain closeted, faux-liberal, homophobic squeamishness in his audience. In its goofy, in-your-face, politically incorrect way, Brüno makes a case for tolerance just by making a mockery of intolerance. This is the rhetorical equivalent of throwing Molotov cocktails for peace -- there might be more effective and intellectually consistent tactics, but none with the same potential for slapstick hilarity.

Public Enemies (2009)

The country is in the grip of an economic depression. Banks have lost fortunes. Criminals run amok, with sharp-dressed men preying on the weaknesses of financial institutions. Inept Feds are seemingly helpless to combat the crime wave. The Bernard Madoff story? There will, no doubt be movies made about Madoff's crimes, but Public Enemies looks back, with a small measure of ambivalent admiration, at the life and crimes of John Dillinger. Madoff is unlikely to be treated as kindly by history.

Dillinger was once known as Public Enemy Number One, and as portrayed by Johnny Depp, he was a suave, smart, courtly criminal who was savvy about maintaining his public image. He robbed banks, which made him a Robin Hood of sorts to Depression era Americans who didn't mind seeing the robber barons robbed for a change. The press made him a celebrity, along with other gangsters of the time, like Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde, some of whom also turn up in Public Enemies.

The movie opens in 1933 with a bold, efficiently choreographed jailbreak in which Dillinger busts his gang out of the Indiana State Pen. One man diverges from the plan, another is killed. Dillinger, it is immediately apparent, is loyal to his friends, but also unforgiving and ruthless. A little more is learned about Dillinger in the film, but not a lot -- he himself sums up his life in only a few sentences when seducing girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). Public Enemies follows a year in the life of John Dillinger -- the last, eventful year of a brief but eventful life, and one in which his celebrity status grew and the law closed in. There's not much more offered about Dillinger -- this is not a movie interested in digging into his childhood, or exploring his innermost thoughts, or in sentimentalizing and romanticizing him. Public Enemies is less interested in a psychological portrait than in looking at elements of a bigger, cultural picture: the cult of celebrity (especially criminal celebrity), the erosion of civil liberties in the name of law enforcement, tabloid journalism, and our enduring fascination with the gangsters of the thirties, about whom so many movies have been made.

Public Enemies is unlike any other film made about the gangsters of the period. Directed by Michael Mann, whose influence on modern crime films is substantial, it is artistically ambitious and serious, violent and dark, and ambivalent about romanticizing both criminals -- even the Dillingers and Robin Hoods -- and crimefighters. Mann shot Public Enemies in high-def digital video, which gives the movie a sharp, sometimes cold look that corresponds to its crisply clear-eyed, meticulous nature. Cinematographer Dante Spinotti gradually and subtly turns the lights down on the film, and, as Dillinger's life grows increasingly dark, and his prospects dim, so too does the movie. Depp offers a correspondingly low-watt performance in which Dillinger's charisma and charm are present, but there is ambivalence about the costs associated with his career and lifestyle. Dillinger appears to be cold, calculating and violent because his job requires it, and he loves his job. He is his job, in a certain sense, which makes Dillinger, in his odd way, an exemplar of the midwestern work ethic.

Public Enemies has perhaps more to say about law enforcement than about lawbreaking, and there the movie, written by Mann with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, is less ambivalent. G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) heads the FBI task force gunning for Dillinger, and participates in the formation of a new, more professional FBI, one that uses scientific methods to catch criminals. While Dillinger was winning hearts and minds with his bank robberies, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), dreaming of a New Model Army, attempted his own public relations campaign, which meant stopping criminals like Dillinger by any means necessary. Hoover is vaguely credited in the film with ushering in an age of ruthlessness in law enforcement, and an interpretive looseness with law and liberty that, we can safely say, persists to this day. Purvis himself is ambivalent (perhaps tormented) about some of the means used, such as tactics that in these euphemistic times might be called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Bale is an interesting choice for the role, which, in a far less flashy way, mirrors his role as Batman -- both are violent, ruthless, questionable and questioning crimefighters. Like Dillinger, Purvis is at bottom a cold realist, and determined to get the job done. But as with Dillinger, Public Enemies does not spend much time looking into the soul of the G-man.

So what is Public Enemies about? In some ways, it is as much about gangster movies as it is about gangsters and G-men. Dillinger watched a Clark Gable gangster movie called *Manhattan Melodrama* on the last night of his life. Public Enemies is no melodrama -- it's fairly stripped of sentiment and sensation, with unhammy performances and unstagy, matter-of-fact, fast and frantic, bullets-flying-everywhere action. It's a movie driven by brutal, unsentimental fact more than legend. It pulls the audience back, repeatedly, from any habit or impulse to glamorize or sentimentalize criminals, crimefighters, and violence. It is not a movie of deep feeling, and so, it is not a movie that leaves one feeling much. But in some ways, that emotional detachment is also what it is about. It's a detachment that serves as a palate cleanser, to make it possible to rethink, in a more intellectual way, the simplistic cops and robbers model of moviemaking and mythmaking.