Burlesque (2010)

By coincidence, just last night Funny Girl was on TV. There's a scene in that movie where Fannie Brice (Barbra Streisand) is in a big dance number with the Ziegfield Follies. She performs as a singing bride, but she doesn't like the song, so to protest, she appears as a very pregnant singing bride. That risque joke must have prompted an interesting conversation with the censors back in 1968.

Burlesque has two things in common with Funny Girl. Maybe three. One is that it is approximately as risque as Funny Girl, which is to say, surprisingly tame for 2010. The second is that it is very clearly a star vehicle for a legitimate singer, in this case Christina Aguilera. The fashion in movie musicals, of late, is to feature movie stars who are neither singers nor dancers. There is no shortage of perfectly good singers and dancers out there, many of them probably unemployed, so there isn't much reason for an audience to have to put up with iffy singing and awkward dancing in a musical. Third, Burlesque is another iteration of the apparently timeless tale of a gal who rises from obscurity with pluck and tenacity and a nice set of pipes, and becomes a star.

The gal in this case is Ali (Aguilera), a small-town Iowa waitress who buys a one-way ticket to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a singer. After not very much struggle (apparently her dues were pre-paid back in Iowa), she talks her way into a job as a waitress at the Burlesque Lounge, a financially strapped nightclub where scantily-clad dancers bump and grind and lip-synch to songs from other, older musicals. Ali happens to walk in just as Tess (Cher), the proprietess, sings "Welcome to Burlesque." Perfect timing. Tess is about to lose her club to the bank if she can't pay the mortgage. Her ex-husband (Peter Gallagher) tries to talk her into selling the place to Marcus (Eric Dane), a wealthy real estate developer. Tess won't sell, and spends most of the movie wringing her hands and being alternately defiant and in despair (sometimes in song!). Her best friend and stage manager Sean (Stanley Tucci) commiserates, and they exchange wisecracks and hugs just like girlfriends (because Sean is gay, and effectively one of the gals). Any star-is-born story needs both backstage drama and lots of song and dance, and Burlesque has them both. There's also a little side romance between Ali and Jack (Cam Gigandet), the club bartender and a would-be songwriter, and Ali and Marcus. But really, nothing lights up Ali's life like being on stage.

The plot is economical and fuel-efficient, which is to say that if some seemingly random bit of information should come up in conversation, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will prove pivotal later in the movie. Thus, the plot of Burlesque is pretty predictable. Ali will be a star. The Burlesque Lounge will be saved. Love will find a way. Real estate deals will be signed. But originality and surprise are not the point of Burlesque. Writer-director Steve Antin has crafted an old-fashioned take on an old-fashioned musical, with just enough plot to fill the gaps between musical numbers. This would be a bad thing if Aguilera were not a very good singer, but she is. She's an adequate actress and dancer, which is all the movie requires her to be. Cher has two musical numbers in the movie, which is noteworthy because Cher, despite a lengthy singing career, has never been in a musical before. She's exactly the kind of dramatic, power-ballad singer who can be nicely framed by a musical, even one as slight as this. She's also a better actress than you'd know from the clunky plotting and dialogue of Burlesque, and the scenes she shares with Tucci are the most interesting in the movie.

The musical numbers are relatively tame by burlesque standards -- there's a fan dance, sure, and implied nudity, but Burlesque could have been filmed in a fig forest for all the naughty bits it reveals. (The musical numbers run the gamut from intimate to spectacular to physics-defying supersized, but none are set in a fig forest.) The movie's most salacious dance number features a woefully underutilized Alan Cumming (how can you make a musical with Alan Cumming and not put him in every single number?) and a dancer eating a banana. Anyone going to Burlesque hoping for another Showgirls will be sorely disappointed. Not that the world needs another Showgirls -- one was more than sufficient. If you miss Busby Berkeley musicals, on the other hand, Burlesque might be right up your alley. The anachronistic tameness and lingerie-clad sexlessness is sort of charming in a goofy, sparkly, innocuous way.

28Nov2010

The Next Three Days (2010)

There are two reasons to release a new movie against the unstoppable juggernaut that is Harry Potter: you've got a great movie and you're hoping to capitalize on counter-programming and grab the miniscule Potter Resistance audience, or, you've got a movie that's not especially good or marketable, and you're hoping to let it sink into obscurity without attracting too much attention. In the case of The Next Three Days, a jailbreak thriller starring Russell Crowe and directed by Paul Haggis (Crash), it is the latter. Sorry dudes, but I watched your movie.

The Next Three Days (based on the French film Pour Elle) takes about 15 minutes to establish the plot. John and Lara Brennan (Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) are a Pittsburgh couple with a young son. John teaches literature (Don Quixote, to be exact) at a community college; Lara is diabetic, and has an unspecified job, but importantly, she has a furious argument with her boss. The next day, she's arrested for murdering said boss, by bludgeoning her in a parking lot with a fire extinguisher. Slam, bam, three years go by, she's in jail, and all her appeals are exhausted. Did she do it? The evidence is against her: fingerprints, blood stains on her raincoat, the argument, motive and opportunity. John has faith in his wife; she grows despondent in the hoosegow. Thus begins John's transformation from shlubby, tweed-wearing professor to jailbreak mastermind. When Lara is scheduled to be transferred to the penitentiary in three days, John's planning goes into overdrive.

The remainder of the movie is essentially a very detailed guide to how to break your wife out of jail in three days. The internet is a big help: you can apparently watch all kinds of detailed instructional videos about criminal activity on YouTube. John also interviews Damon Pennington (Liam Neeson, in and out of the movie in about ten minutes), an escaped con-turned-author who offers helpful advice about the tricks of the trade, and planning one's escape. Damon cautions John that Pittsburgh, with all those bridges and tunnels, is particularly challenging. If the movie had been set in Tuscon, it would have been a lot shorter. John works out a plan in meticulous detail, with the movie crew tagging along. I'm not saying that The Next Three Days is boring. It's moderately interesting, as a purely procedural movie, but it's also implausible, and since I don't anticipate needing to know how to break someone out of jail, the implausibility factors looms larger. Could a mild-mannered professor break his wife out of the Allegheny County Jail, escape Pittsburgh, and flee the country? Sure, I suppose. Go from a guy who needs to be shown where the bullets go in a gun (has he never watched a movie?) to a guy who can confront street thugs and meth dealers? Errr, I guess so. Can he do it without turning into Russell Crowe, Gladiator? I'm not feeling it. 

And there's the problem with The Next Three Days. It has a modicum of momentum, but no drama. It could be about the physical and psychological transformation of an average Joe into a desperate action hero, but the movie is so caught up in the mechanical details of John's activity that there's no room for anything else. As for Lara, she's practically a nonentity. It's not hard to believe that she's terribly unhappy in jail, but the movie tries, in the eighth inning, to play coy about the matter of her guilt or innocence, without providing the emotional or psychological substance needed to support either certainty or doubt. Everything depends on John's faith in his wife's innocence, but since John is himself an underdeveloped character, that's not a whole lot to go on. Banks and Crowe are both able actors who could create the substrate of character needed to give The Next Three Days some weight and believability, but they're never given the chance. What is it about John's personality that would make him capable of becoming a desperate outlaw? (Can't just be a too careful reading of *Don Quixote*, and the literary parallels there are both obvious and strained.) What is it about Lara that makes it either possible or impossible that she committed a cold-blooded murder?  

In the end, The Next Three Days turns into an action movie, with the requisite high speed chase. A trio of police detectives (Jason Beghe, Aisha Hinds, and Lennie James -- all actors the movie could have used a lot more of) exist to turn the gears and create some momentary speed and peril, but there's nothing particularly plausible about the way they almost instantaneously figure out that the game is afoot. Either the Pittsburgh police department is incredibly efficient, or they operate in a parallel Pittsburgh where time moves at a different pace. The Next Three Days is all about technique and mechanics -- and the movie itself is technically and mechanically sound until the turbo-boosted end, when the engine starts to groan.

21Nov2010

Morning Glory (2010)

Becky Fuller's got spunk. She's got spunk like Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) had spunk. And like the venerable Mary Richards, she's got spunk enough to talk herself into a terrible job as the producer of a terrible television news show. And to stride purposefully and confidently through the streets of the big city, and to leap for joy when she gets the job. Mary threw her hat in the air, but nobody can do that again. Not even ironically, and certainly not in a cheerily bland movie like Morning Glory, which is inspired partly by The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and partly, it seems, by the movie Broadcast News.

So Becky (Rachel McAdams) leaps, and lands her dream (or nightmare) job, producing Daybreak, the IBS network morning show, perennially in fourth place behind those other shows you've heard of, with their chipper co-hosts and cheery weathermen. (Maybe the show would do better if the network didn't have the same name as an unpleasant gastrointestinal disease -- if there's a joke there, the movie doesn't exploit it.) Daybreak has Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) and a revolving door of co-anchors -- the position's current occupant is a pervert named McVee (Ty Burrell). Becky boosts staff morale and wins the respect of her team when she fires McVee on her first day, showing that she's tough and dedicated. Then she has to find a replacement, and through some contractual extortion (see, she's really tough), she lands Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), a legendary, award-winning news anchor who is still fighting the hard news versus fluffy human interest news battle (there's the Broadcast News part). Another producer (Patrick Wilson), who becomes a tepid love interest for Becky, calls Mike the third worst person in the world (a joke that's pretty funny when you know who the first two are). Mike lives up to his reputation as a hard customer, and he is mightily misquemed* at having been shanghaied into a job that he unambiguously thinks is beneath him. He pretty much refuses to do anything except read "real" news stories in a grave, stentorian voice, and glare at his co-anchor.

Mike's still fighting the good fight, even though the battle is pretty much lost. Becky embraces the fluff, she defends the fluff, she thinks the fluff has value. It entertains. It makes people happy. Mike's not happy, and Mike doesn't care if anyone else is happy either. Will perky Becky get crabby Mike on board in time to save Daybreak from cancellation? Will her perkiness rub off on her torpid, ratings-challenged TV show?

Morning Glory accepts that frothy, forgettable, disposable entertainment is not only the norm, both on morning TV and in movies, but that it's just fine. The script by Aline Brosh Michell (The Devil Wears Prada) offers up funny dialogue aplenty for its paper-thin characters, but not much else. Becky is a peppy workaholic, stubbornly devoted to her job. She'll do just about anything for Daybreak. Mike is grumpy and hard-drinking and one mean old SOB who likes to cook eggs. Mike is a dinosaur, and though the movie gives him one last chance to roar and bare his teeth, there are no apologies made here for pushing the kind of fluffy, upbeat entertainment Mike abhors (even though he's the most interesting human interest story in the movie). The rest of the movie's characters have little going on, although the cast is terrific, and make the most of their roles.

Director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) keeps Morning Glory moving at a peppy pace, with lots of bright and insistent pop songs filling in the emotional gaps and leaving no feeling unemphasized. Morning Glory practices what it preaches -- it's a perky movie about the triumph of perkiness. 

*Misqueme means displease. It's an endangered word, a victim of disuse, and the Oxford English Dictionary has begun a campaign to save endangered words from extinction. You can adopt an endangered word by pledging to use it and keep it alive. I've adopted misqueme, so you can expect to see it again in the future. Get your own word at savethewords.org. 

Due Date (2010)

The odd couple road trip is a venerable, oft-repeated movie formula. Come up with a pair of guys who can't get along, find a crazy reason  -- the wackier the better -- for them to be stuck in a car together for thousands of miles, and your work is half done. This is precisely what writer-director Todd Phillips (with three co-writers) does with Due Date. The movie rips off (or pays homage to) Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), and a host of other road movies in telling the tale of an anxious father-to-be and a shlubby wannabe actor on the road from Atlanta to Los Angeles. (Phillips is apparently a fan of the road trip formula, having already made a road trip movie, cleverly called Road Trip. He also directed last year's megahit The Hangover, and specializes in movies about men behaving badly, of which Due Date is also an example.)

Peter Highman (Robert Downey, Jr.) is a tightly-wound architect. His wife (Michelle Monaghan) is about to have a baby, by scheduled C-section (a fact the movie delivers, but never explains). Soon-to-be-pater Peter runs into man-baby Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) at the airport in Atlanta. Actually, Ethan runs into Peter, literally, and takes the door off his limo. This is but the first in a series of unfortunate events that eventuates in both Peter and Ethan being thrown off their flight, and placed on the no-fly list. Peter loses his wallet in the process, and is thus forced to ride with Ethan in a rental car, all the way to Los Angeles. Ethan is heading to Hollywood to meet with an agent. He's an aspiring actor. His aspiration is, primarily, to appear on the sitcom Two and a Half Men. Peter just wants to get home in time for the birth of his first child.

Ethan has a french bulldog named Sonny, and a coffee can containing his father's ashes. He also has "glaucoma," which he "treats" with copious amounts of "medical" marijuana, which he buys from dealers he finds on the internet. He's not a very good driver (which is probably true even when he isn't stoned), he's not very smart, and he's a terrible traveling companion. Among other things, both he and his dog masturbate a lot. In the car. Peter suffers a great deal of physical pain and injury, mental anguish, and legal trouble on the hellish journey, and lashes out at Ethan -- which Ethan completely deserves. All of this is a recipe for male bonding, no?

It has to be, because bonding is the point of the movie road trip. Peter (who isn't so good with kids, it turns out) is stuck with a big man-baby who is every bit as uninformed, self-absorbed, destructive, and oblivious to danger and social mores as the average two year old. This is the sort of character Galifianakis specializes in, and it isn't much of a departure from his character in The Hangover, although that guy both was a baby (figuratively) and carried around an actual baby. Ethan just carries his little self-pleasuring dog around. He is appalling, an oversized character in a clumsy, oversized body -- he's got quirks and personality to burn. At his core, he's innocent -- the damage he does is unwitting and unintentional. Downey's Peter, on the other hand, is an underwritten character whose  personality traits are fussiness about baby names and a tendency to get apoplectic when provoked. He is provoked frequently, of course. Neither of these guys becomes any less, or more, in the course of their odyssey -- they arrive at journey's end much as they were at journey's beginning, although Peter is much the worse for the wear. Much of the appeal of the movie, of course, is that Downey and Galifianakis are opposites in so many ways that they make the incendiary chemistry between Peter and Ethan credible, even if the circumstances of the plot are forced. Both actors are good enough that they even manage to sell (mostly) the warm and fuzzy ending to this buddy comedy.

The plotting of Due Date is hectic and extravagant, the comedy is uneven but fitfully funny. When it's funny, it's quite funny, though in a nasty, calculatedly outrageous way.

11Nov2010

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

I've grown a bit weary of Woody Allen's films, but no more so, I suspect, than he himself has. There's a real weariness to You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Allen's latest pessimistic epistle about love and marriage and ruin and people behaving badly. Maybe he'd have more fun making a neurotic zombie movie or something, because one gets the sense he's in a rut, and not really enjoying his own movies anymore. It's a rut of his own making -- he's been down this road many a time before.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger follows two couples, one married, one recently divorced. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) ended his long marriage to Helena (Gemma Jones) in a fit of anxiety about his own mortality (aka meeting the Tall Dark Stranger). Alfie takes up with an actress (aka a prostitute) named Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Helena tipples too much and spends a lot of time with a psychic named Cristal (Pauline Collins), who offers her sherry and prognostic succor. Alfie and Helena's daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) is married to Roy (Josh Brolin), a trained doctor who gave up medicine to write novels. Now he's a once-promising novelist in the agonizing throes of failing to live up to his potential. Sally wants to have a family, but she and Roy (who doesn't have a paying job) are financially dependent on her mother. Helena, consequently, feels free to drop in at any time and impart advice (mostly second-hand, from her psychic) and passive-aggressive criticism. Sally works for an art gallery, and has a crush on her charming boss Greg (Antonio Banderas), who is also in an unhappy marriage. Roy, meanwhile, begins a flirtation with Dia (Frieda Pinto), the young, beautiful musicologist who lives across the courtyard and apparently has forgotten how to operate windowshades. 

Allen hasn't appeared in a movie since Scoop (2006), but often, for whatever reason, at least one actor in his movies ends up practically impersonating him. Maybe it's the dialogue, which is, as always, distinctly Allen's, although not, in this case, particularly funny. Banderas and Brolin both, at times, act and talk like Allen in *Tall Dark Stranger*, but so does Watts, which is even weirder. 

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is mostly rather uncomfortable and unpleasant, but not in a good way. Brolin's Roy is angry and whiny, and his flirtation with Dia (who is engaged) is utterly unbelievable. He confesses that's he's been spying on her, which anyone else would find creepy and icky, but she finds it charming enough to  take him to meet her parents and contemplate calling off her marriage. Or maybe she has a thing for unkempt, unemployed peeping Toms. The relationship that does make sense is the one between Alfie and Charmaine -- she finds his money absolutely irresistible, and he wants a trophy wife, and a son. Punch's character is pretty simple: a gold digging dumb blonde who likes working out and nightclubbing. Allen's script doesn't give her a way to be sympathetic or interesting, but that's also true of Hopkins' Alfie, whose motives aren't sufficient to make him more than pathetic. There's even a joke about Viagra at his expense, which shows you how low Allen is willing to go for a laugh (about halfway, as it turns out). The movie is most sympathetic towards Helena, while also mocking her spirtiualist faith in soothsayers and reincarnation and  other wishful thinking  that helps her believe life is meaningful. The annoying narrator (Zak Orth) of the movie starts out by quoting Macbeth (life is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing...") and ends with a verbal shrug of sorts, noting that the secret to Helena's happiness (in case the audience missed it) is her belief in illusions. All the others? Too messed up and too smart (or too dumb) to succeed in matters of the heart. The more desperately they chase happiness, the more it eludes their grasp.

4Nov2010

Hereafter (2010)

As an actor, Clint Eastwood has frequently played characters who have a causal role in shuffling others off this mortal coil. As a director, he seems often to have death on his mind too, so it should come as no surprise that in Hereafter, he contemplates (or is it confronts?) death again. The difference is that Hereafter looks at death from the point of view of survivors, those touched (but not fatally) by death. Eastwood has looked at death from both sides now.

Hereafter, written by Peter Morgan (The Queen), engages in some tentative speculation about the afterlife, but the story, about three lives that intersect, coincidentally, in the aftermath of death, is more concerned with the living. Marie LeLay (Cecile De France) is a French journalist who survives the Indonesian tsunami (chillingly recreated); she has the classic near-death experience -- white light, shadowy figures who beckon her -- as she is submerged by the epic, killer wave. She's haunted by her experience and, like a good reporter, endeavors to dig deeper and find out more. George Lonegan (Matt Damon) has had about enough of the dead -- he's a psychic, apparently the real deal, who communicates with the dead on behalf of the living who long to speak once more with their dearly departed. He considers his "gift" to be a burden. His entrepreneurial (and exploitative) brother (Jay Mohr) tries to talk him into cashing in on his talent, but he'd rather keep a low profile and work in a warehouse. Marcus and Jason are identical twin brothers (played by Frankie and George McLaren). The two boys keep their family together (mum's a mess), and they've got a unique connection to each other that isn't completely severed when one brother is killed.

Eastwood, in his typical, understated way, makes a typically understated movie that's intriguing and moving, although oddly disconnected. Death, of course, comes for us all, and in that we are all connected, all one in the human condition. But that's not much to hang a narrative on, and in the end, Hereafter just kind of runs its course and fades out. It dies a natural, quiet death, so to speak, which is an atypical sort of death in the movies.

Despite the title's intimations of revealing a glimpse of the great beyond, it is scarcely concerned with the afterlife, and more concerned with life. Lacking any particular narrative momentum, the movie instead lingers on moments, on day-in-the-life stuff that happens to the characters. Marie can't focus at work, so she takes a leave of absence to write a book about the life and death of Francois Mitterand that turns into a book about death, and life after it. The movie follows her through a series of vignettes -- business meetings, intimate dinners, conversations. George listens to books on tape -- he's a big fan of Dickens -- and takes an Italian cooking class, where he meets flirty, sweet Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), who gives him a glimpse of what a "normal" life might be like. He is self-protective, seeking to shield himself from the voices of the dead, but it requires him to sometimes be cruel to the living. Shy, lonely Marcus longs to be with his protective brother Jason again, and seeks out a series of charlatans who claim they can communicate with the dead boy. The natural, solemn, sometimes awkward performances by the McLaren brothers takes what might have been maudlin material and makes it clear-eyed and melancholy, but not pitiful. 

The same is true of the rest of the movie. Eastwood deftly avoids the pitfalls of sloppy sentimentality -- a real danger given the subject matter -- and maintains a certain equilibrium, and a cool distance. The movie sympathizes, foremost, with the questioning, the curiosity about death, rather than with the grieving. It takes its lead, it seems, from the dead, who, when George speaks for them at least, are all business. They've got things to say, important messages to convey, but they're not gonna get all weepy and mushy, or waste time (which is odd, since it is presumably timeless there in eternity). Their message for the living: get on with your lives. And that, in the end, is what Hereafter does too -- its a quiet, unassuming, anti-nihilist reflection on living in the face of death, on continuing in spite of the inevitable. In the midst of life, we are in death, so carry on.

28Oct2010

RED (2010)

At 55, Bruce Willis is a little young to be playing a retiree. I thought 70 was the new 60, not the other way around. But no matter. Willis is Frank Moses in RED, and Moses is a retired CIA black ops specialist. Maybe the working lifespan (if not the actual lifespan) of a spook is shorter than average. 

Someone wants to considerably shorten Moses' lifespan in RED. RED is an acronym for "Retired, Extremely Dangerous," which is what Moses proves to be (hey, it's stamped right there on his file -- in red). When several heavily armed men break into his suburban Cleveland home to kill him, Moses comes out of retirement and lays some extremely lethal defensive maneuvers on them. This is not a terrible thing, because it turns out Moses was pretty bored in retirement. The whole attempted assassination thing kinda brightened his day a bit. After dispatching the assassins, he trots off to Kansas City, where he had a tentative date with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a bored federal employee in a pension processing office whom he had been kind of flirting with on the phone. With armed men trying to kill him, he figures he has to kidnap Sarah and take her with him, for her own safety. She grudgingly obliges, and admits that it's not the worst first date she's ever had. What starts out looking like another quirky Mr. Wrong romantic comedy soon morphs into something else -- an AARP buddy action comedy with a little love on the side.

Moses, of course, isn't the only retired assassin out there looking for a little excitement. So it takes little effort to persuade his pals to come in from the pasture and join him in figuring out what's going on and who's responsible. His old buddy Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), who is dying of liver cancer and spending his last days in a retirement home, wants to go out with a bang. (Will the movie oblige him? Who could say no to Morgan Freeman?) Paranoid conspiracy-theorist Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich, dialing up the crazy, even for him) has a conspiracy theory to contribute -- and he's right! Ivan Simonov (Brian Cox) is an old KGB frenemy who is so bored with the tedium of post-Cold War bureaucratic life that he's willing to switch sides. Victoria (Helen Mirren, having a fine old time) has a beautiful waterfront home in Maryland, but she really misses all the killing. Ernest Borgnine, who really is old enough to be retired (but happily, isn't), turns up a few times to wax nostalgic as the CIA's keeper of super-duper secret files.

Meanwhile, young CIA assassin William Cooper (Karl Urban) is hunting Moses, with a veritable army of heavily armed agents at the ready to wreak havoc. If this sort of thing routinely happens in the CIA, they do a really good job of keeping it quiet. Cooper doesn't know that the anti-Moses conspiracy concerns some long ago dirty business in Guatemala involving the vice president and his puppet master, a powerful defense contractor (Richard Dreyfuss) who bears a passing resemblance to a certain former, snarling vice president with a bad heart (insert joke about him actually having a heart here). That's about as political as RED gets -- the plot is really incidental. The point is simply this: "old" people shooting big guns, blowing things up, and laying a beatin' on young whippersnappers who dare to call them "grandpa." This is kind of how you imagine Clint Eastwood would spend his retirement, if he wasn't so busy making movies.

It is, of course, all in good fun, and RED, based on the comic books created by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, and directed by Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler's Wife) takes a cartoonish approach to the violence, and everything else. The good guys mostly recover from gunshots fairly quickly, the bad guys and their minions mostly get blown to smithereens. It's pretty simple, unsophisticated, zippy, and darkly funny. RED doesn't really have a message, or even much of a point -- there's nothing serious in there about the wisdom and value of elders, although apparently you can't discount experience as a serious advantage in the spy game. Having big guns helps too. And you're never too old to have fun vaporizing your enemies.

Maybe there is a mesage in there after all -- retirement is a drag, so don't despair, all you zoomers who watched your 401(k)s evaporate. You'll be happier if you just keep working.

21Oct2010

Let Me In (2010)

There is a certain anticipatory dread that accompanies the arrival of an American remake of a splendid foreign film. In the case of Let Me In, that dread is warranted, not because this is another sloppy, dumbed down, hyperactive remake, but because it is faithful to the original, a dread-steeped, marrow chilling story of the horrors of prepubescent adolescence.

Let Me In, based on the Swedish Film Let the Right One In (2009), in turn based on John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel, is a kind of vampire love story, but it departs radically from the dominant romantic vampire paradigm of the moment, with its lust, sex and noisy supernatural battles between werewolves and vampires (true of both the teencentric Twilight movies and the hyper-sexy, hyper-violent HBO series True Blood). Let Me In zeroes in on a different variety of pre-teen and pre-sexual anxiety and violence, exploring the rage and terror of bullied, tormented, 12 year old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), whose everday existence is filled with dread even before he meets the vampire girl next door. 

Owen's parents are divorcing, and he's lonely, bored and fearful. It's 1983, in Los Alamos, NM. Reagan is on TV talking about evil empires, and Culture Club and David Bowie are on the radio (and in the movie's soundtrack). Owen lives in a shabby apartment complex with his mother, and spends his evenings killing time in the snowy, bleak courtyard, gorging on Now-and-Later candies. His Now is something he's desperate to escape, but what Later does he anticipate in chilly Reagan-era America? Surely not the arrival of an interesting and mysterious neighbor, a 12 year old girl named Abby (Chloë Grace Moretz), who quickly informs him that they cannot be friends. For Owen, it hardly matters -- he'll take what friendship he can find, even if it's of a strange and tentative kind. Abby, for her part, feels protective of Owen, and he desperately needs a protector, as the bullies who torment him at school become increasingly vicious and predatory.

Abby is pale and peculiar, a barefoot child who looks poorly cared for by her weary, middle-aged guardian (Richard Jenkins). He acts as a procurer, an unwilling serial killer whose task is to find blood for Abby -- she's a vampire -- and thus to keep her hidden from the world. He's not very good at killing, which brings him to the attention of a dogged police detective (Elias Koteas), investigating the recent rash of what he suspects are satanic cult killings.

The film is evocatively dark and shadowy, and the cinematography by Greig Fraser beautifully communicates the isolation, bewilderment and directionlessness of Owen and Abby, two kids who, for different reasons, find themselves uprooted, unmoored, unsettled, and vulnerable. Moretz (Kick-Ass) and Smit-McPhee (The Road) are both hauntingly effective in their depictions of the very specific isolations of Abby and Owen, and their mutual, quietly desperate yearning for non-sexual intimacy and love.

Let Me In was written and directed by Matt Reeves, whose last film, Cloverfield, was a hot mess, a tiresome, gimmicky faux home movie about the destruction of New York -- and a handful of stupid, annoying characters -- by monster. Let Me In -- although it makes somewhat more liberal use of special effects than its Swedish predecessor -- is more evocative of the angsty, yearning TV drama Felicity, which Reeves co-created, than Cloverfield. The director's affinity for stories of adolescent intensity and fragility is ideally suited to the eerie, moody Let Me In, a delicately, emotionally haunting horror story that is only incidentally about vampires, and at its heart is about the horrors of being twelve (and even worse, for Abby, forever twelve). Let Me In resists mythologizing vampires and youth -- two things pop culture is perpetually intent on mythologizing and glamorizing -- and in so doing, it is memorably, poignantly chilling.

The Social Network (2010)

          A movie about Facebook sounds, to me, about as interesting as Facebook itself. Which is to say, not very. I'm a bad Facebook friend. I don't obsessively check Facebook to find out what's going on with my "friends." I completely reject the use of the word "friend" as a verb. Once a noun, always a noun, that's my motto. I don't update more than a couple of times a year. Until I saw The Social Network, I had never really thought much about Facebook, but suddenly, I wondered: how the heck does Facebook, a free site, make all those billions of dollars? Turns out it's advertising (how mundane!), and turns out I never even noticed the ads on the right side of my Facebook page. They are either really good ads, subtly worming their ways into my subconscious mind, or they are really bad ads that have utterly failed to attract my notice. (Whatever algorithm Facebook is using to ascertain which ads will make me click is a little off. For instance, I noticed an ad there for Christian Louboutin shoes. While it’s true I wear shoes, and in fact like shoes very much, Christians are several notches above my paygrade. And the heels are way too high for me.)

            The Social Network is no Facebook ad. The movie immediately grabs the attention, with a barrage of dialogue -- penned by Aaron Sorkin -- that's fast, sharp, smart, and combative. The conversation the movie drops into is between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), future billionaire and Facebook founder, and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). They're in a bar, and rat-a-tat-tat, rapid fire words fly across the table -- some of them hurt, some of them are meant to hurt, some of them are just further evidence, for Erica, of Zuckerberg's obsession with status, and his thinly veiled disdain for her lack thereof (she only goes to Boston University, while he's at Harvard). There is always collateral damage when Zuckerberg starts talking. Erica sums up his character in one word. The fight, and the beers he drinks, and his quest for vengeance have Zuckerberg blogging into the night, and then taking it out on every female student at Harvard. He creates a website publicly ranking them all as hot or not. It's mean-spirited, it’s an instant hit, and it crashes the university's computer network.

            A few months later, Facebook is born, but not before Zuckerberg makes a few more enemies. By the end of the story, he'll have made even more, and betrayed his best (and only) friend. The irony, the paradox, the incongruity of the story is that the man who launched millions of online friendships has no friends, no people skills, a level of social ineptitude and insensitivity that's almost pathological. Zuckerberg comes across as the smartest guy in the room, but also the most clueless, someone who, if he cares at all about other people, doesn't (or can't) show it. Eisenberg, who typically plays affable nerds and losers (Adventureland, Zombieland) is anything but affable here -- he plays Zuckerberg as someone who's intensely, competitively brainy, but missing certain essential character traits -- a sense of decency, loyalty, empathy, a conscience, the ability to listen. You know, the sorts of things one would look for in a friend. Confronted with uncomfortable truths, or socially difficult situations, or people he thinks are beneath him (that’s almost everyone), Zuckerberg goes eerily blank, like he's withdrawing into that void in his soul. The Social Network is the story of a man who, pathetically motivated by petty revenge, creates a medium for human beings to connect with one another, and Zuckerberg simultaneously reaches out to and pulls back from human contact, while the movie thoroughly resists trying to make him attractive or sympathetic or even self-aware. Every time he opens his mouth, something awful comes out. The only person who seems to really get Zuckerberg is Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the Napster and Plaxo creator who is a slick, slippery, paranoid Svengali-like business guru to him. Parker manages to insinuate himself into the Facebook fold just in time to cash in.

            The Social Network  is based on Ben Mezrich's book *The Accidental Billionaires*. It interweaves the account of Facebook's beginnings with two depositions for lawsuits against Zuckerberg. His best friend and Facebook co-founder and financier Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is suing him. So are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, playing both as comically perfect creatures -- rich, handsome, athletic Harvard men), who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea when he created Facebook. Cameron and Tyler represent the old elite, born into privilege, hobnobbing with royalty, reeking with class and status. Their adversary represents the new elite, powered by microchips, with the online masses at his back.

            Sorkin's script is a great one -- it crackles with intelligence, wit, emotion, and psychological insight. Director David Fincher, drawn as always to dark material, creates an intensely heady, brainy modern-day tragedy that hits on Shakepearean themes of friendship and betrayal, human frailty, ruthlessness, power and ambition, loneliness. The Social Network builds momentum as it moves through the astonishingly meteoric rise (there's yet to be a fall) of Facebook's fortunes. Fincher toggles back and forth between a dark and oppressive Harvard (it's never looked so gloomy on film, all shadowy and cold) and brightly lit corporate offices where Zuckerberg faces his accusers and their lawyers. How to make an interesting movie about words, computer code, ideas, cloud relationships? Fincher and Sorkin do it, first by capturing the thrill of creativity and genius as a small cadre of visionary computer hackers conquer the world with one really simple, really big idea, and then by creating an uncomfortably close, disquieting account of the casualties, of the real, flesh and blood friends who get slaughtered. The movie tells a particular version of the Facebook origin story (a fictional one, according to Facebook, Inc.), and it's utterly fascinating, hurtling through the details of how the biggest club in the world (one in 14 humans are members) got started in a dark, angry dorm room at Harvard University. The Social Network is a digital age morality tale, a tale of cruelty, betrayal, triumph. We see daily the maliciousness and viciousness of mobs cloaked in the anonymity of bits and bytes. The Social Network suggests that the callousness was a kind of original sin, written into the code by the creators. They unleashed a monster, the evil twin of the webtopian unifier of humanity. Zuckerberg didn’t create the monster; he just created a new place for it to hide in plain sight, surrounded by friends.

07Oct2010

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole (2010)

It can be a great distraction to have read the book when you see a movie adaptation, and I don't often do it. But the youngster and I have read Kathryn Lasky's fine Guardians of Ga'Hoole: The Capture, the first book in a 15 volume series about an heroic young barn owl named Soren. The first three books have been adapted into the animated movie Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. The movie is sufficiently different from the books that it's best judged on its own terms -- the characters have the same names, but the story is stripped of much of its psychological depth and horror, to make for a zippier, streamlined adventure movie that ends with an epic, violent battle. The first book is dark and bleak, but hopeful, with a sophisticated socio-political theme. The tone of the movie is quite different. It is still frequently dark and menacing, but considerably simpler, and the timeline far shorter, so as to pack three book's worth of story into a 90 minute film.

Soren (voiced by Jim Sturgess) is a young barn owlet who lives with his parents, his older brother Kludd (Ryan Kwanten), and his adorable fluffball of a baby sister Eglantine (Adrienne DeFaria). One day, Soren and Kludd fall from the family's tree, and are kidnapped by patrols from St. Aegolius Academy for Orphaned Owls. They're taken to a barren canyon, where they and hundreds of owlets of many species are held captive and "moon-blinked," a form of brainwashing, and forced to work. St. Aggie's is a concentration camp for the Pure Ones, evil owls with a delusions of superiority bent on destroying all the inferior owl kingdoms. Kludd sides with his captors, but Soren and a tiny Elf owl named Gylfie (Emily Barclay) escape and seek help from the legendary Guardians, a mythical band of noble protector owls said to live in a vast Ga'Hoole tree. Their traveling companions are a snooty, singing grey owl named Twilight (Anthony LaPaglia), and goofy burrowing owl Digger (David Wenham). Kids who like knock-knock jokes will think Digger's a hoot.

Legend of the Guardians is beautifully and vibrantly animated, and creates a really nice, immersive, bird's-eye-view sense of flight with its effective use of 3-D. The characters (most with Australian accents and mostly voiced by Aussie actors) are nicely expressive, although they've got more visual depth than psychological depth. Excellent CG animation is the rule rather than the exception these days, so the visual quality of the movie alone is not enough to recommend it. On the other hand, the CG *Roadrunner* cartoon short that precedes the movie is pretty comprehensively lousy and artistically pointless. It looks like a poorly rendered video game. (I've never been a fan of that pesky bird anyway.) 

Director Zack Snyder has a strong and original visual style, as demonstrated in 300 and Watchmen (although both of those movies, which blended live actors and CG, looked a lot better than they were, taken as a whole). Legend of the Guardians is Snyder's first fully animated movie, and it exhibits some of the director's stylistic flourishes, including ample use of slow motion, and an emphasis on bold action over conceptual or symbolic content. The story as told in Legend of the Guardians moves briskly, motivated more by plot than ideas -- older and more sophisticated youngsters with a sense of history might appreciate the political subtext, but it is not particularly prominent or important in the progress of the story, so younger viewers will have no trouble keeping up, and will be charmed by the heroic characters and funny sidekicks. The movie doesn't particularly dwell on the emotional impact of the rather distressing developments in Soren's young life, and regularly lightens things up with humorous interludes. The drawn-out climax, however, while not visibly bloody, is violent enough to warrant parental caution.

26Sep 2010