Stop-Loss (2008)

Writer-director Kimberly Peirce made her first and last movie nine years ago. That was *Boys Don't Cry*, a terrific debut that was timely, issue-driven, nervy, and the kind of movie that sticks with you. Time will tell if Peirce's *Stop-Loss*, which is also poignantly timely and issue-driven, will stick in the national consciousness in the same way. It might, and it might not -- moviegoers have not been beating down the doors for movies about the Iraq War. Maybe our weariness about the seemingly unending war -- now in its fifth year -- or the grim

complexity of our emotional engagement with it, makes sitting through a movie about it just too, too much.

*Stop-Loss* is about the war in Iraq, and also about the war at home, about what happens to soldiers when they return from war. It's a subject much in the news of late, with Iraq vets suffering strikingly high levels of post traumatic stress disorder, and traumatic injury, and encountering a dishearteningly inadequate and mean-spirited government response. PTSD is never explicitly mentioned in *Stop-Loss*, but it's there in the shadows, a spectre that darkens every scene.

The movie starts with faux home videos of a group of soldiers in Tikrit,  Iraq. They're boisterous and profane young lads who sing patriotic pop songs that promise to whup the enemy. Their bravado is soon tested when they are caught in a deadly firefight, ambushed in an alley. The battle scenes are staged with gripping and panicky realism, with an acute sense of how, in a war zone, the ordinary quickly goes all to hell. Some soldiers are killed in that fight, others badly wounded. The survivors are shaken, too, by the deaths of civilians, of children and mothers and grandparents who died in homes that became urban battlefields.

For Staff Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) and his buddy Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum), it's the last battle of their last tour in Iraq. They are relieved to arrive home in Brazos, Texas, where the most dangerous thing they have to shoot at is an empty beer bottle. Their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is on leave -- he lost his best friend in Iraq, and he's going back, filled with anger and a desire for vengeance that gives him a sense of purpose in war, but leaves him adrift and unable to function back home.

Brandon's relief at being home is short-lived. His friends start to fall apart immediately, unable to keep their war experience adequately compartmentalized. Then Brandon finds out that he's been stop-lossed -- his contract is involuntarily extended, and he's being sent back to Iraq. His sense of indignation results in an immediate political awakening of sorts, and in short order he chews out his commanding officer (Timothy Olyphant) and insults the president, gets arrested, escapes, goes AWOL, and hits the road in a beat up car with Michelle (Abbie Cornish), his pal Steve's fiancee, heading for Washington where he hopes to get a little help from his senator.

Peirce and cowriter Mark Richard quickly get bogged down trying to cram a whole lot of ideas and incidents into what ends up being a fairly conventional and predictable road trip movie. Brandon and Michelle are on the road to nowhere, but along the way they drift through episodes of random violence, stay in rundown motels, and encounter other stop-lossed vets on the lam and living in limbo. Brandon wrestles with his war experience, and with an acute dilemma: should he cross over into Canada, and a fugitive's oblivion, or go back to Iraq?

That Brandon remains ideologically confused about the war and his role in it gives his character, and the movie, a measure of authenticity that helps things along when the narrative gets pinched by its compressed timeline. An awful lot -- emphasis on the awful -- happens in just a few days, allowing no time for simmering or slow boiling. The war at home, it seems, is just as explosive and requires the same level of on-the-fly decision-making as the war in Iraq. Or maybe the point is that it just seems that way to the people who experience it on both fronts.

Peirce has a good eye and ear for the raucous rhythm and earthy feel of rural small-town life, and also for the messy confusion of young adulthood. *Stop-Loss* presses home the point that these are very young people lost in the fog of war. They're rash, they're idealistic, they drink too much, they brawl too much, and they lack the breadth and depth of experience with which to make sense -- if there's any sense to be made -- of their situation. It's a recipe for melodrama, and *Stop-Loss* has turbulent melodrama in spades. It's an unsteady, disorderly movie, and every bit as messy, I suppose, as the inner lives of its characters, who must contend with fear, anger, and loss, and sort through a complex welter of conflicting values: love, honor, loyalty, patriotism, friendship, and duty. *Stop-Loss* is an imperfect, compassionate, heartfelt movie about imperfect people stuck in impossible situations, with no good options. The movie isn't polemical, nor does it offer bromides or uplift or feel-good solutions. The message, such as it is, is that we all -- those of us here and those of us over there -- have no choice but to get used to being in a situation that's impossible to get used to.

31Mar2008

Shutter (2008)

Ah spring, a time of rebirth and renewal, of fresh starts... everywhere except at the autumnal multiplexes, where moldering cinematic afterthoughts go to die, dropping into theatres like so many dead leaves. Spring is the between season for movie releases, a span of time sandwiched between the winter, when Oscar contenders roll out, and the summer megablockbuster season. It is a time of movies like *Shutter*, a remake of a 2004 Thai film also called *Shutter*. A mediocre movie, and yet another remake dredged up from the apparently bottomless pit of barely distinguishable Asian horror films, *Shutter* is the kind of movie that doesn't justify the effort of putting on my glasses.

*Shutter*, by Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai, features the standard J-Horror tropes -- a dark-haired, dark-eyed female spectre haunts people, walking slowly, appearing mysteriously, and alarming her victims with her disheveled hair and unfashionable clothing. The unflattering frock is especially disturbing to Jane Shaw (Rachael Taylor) who, after running over a woman with her car, wonders what she was doing there, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, and more importantly, "why was she dressed like that?" Jane's husband Ben (Joshua Jackson), who was looking at a map at the time of the accident, didn't see the woman in question, and remains skeptical that his newlywed wife saw anything at all.

Ben's a photographer who apparently specializes in obsolete photo technology. He's got an assignment in Japan, where he and Jane settle into an apartment where things go bump in the night. Really. You might think the things going bump in the night routine would be so used up at this point that nobody would dare use it in a non-parody context. But there it is. *Shutter* also prominently features mysteriously flickering lights and that whooshing-whirring-moaning sound that the weary, ticked off, evil undead make. *Shutter* makes use of so many familiar plot devices and even more familiar scare tactics that it practically parodies itself, except that it isn't funny.

When all of Ben's film is ruined by blurry streaks of light, well, that's the last straw. Ben has apparently never heard of Photoshop. Jane quickly discovers that "spirit photography" is to blame for the blurry pictures, and that she and Ben are being haunted by the Kodak moment-ruining, unfashionably dressed woman in the road. The only remaining questions are: Who is she? What does she want? And, who really cares? Jane learns from a spirit photography magazine editor that Polaroids can't be faked, so she takes to carrying around a Polaroid camera hoping to spot the ghost. I wonder if Polaroid considered the implications of the loss of this invaluable ghostbusting tool when they decided last month to stop producing instant film.

*Shutter* is so blandly by-the-numbers that it's difficult to conceive why anyone even bothered to make it. As Jane says, in a moment of insight about the ghost's intentions, "Why all that effort if you don't have something to say?" My thoughts exactly.

24Mar2008

Horton Hears A Who (2008)

It's always good when a movie isn't insufferably bad. *Horton Hears A Who!*, the computer animated retelling of the classic Dr. Seuss tale, isn't insufferably bad like, say, the live action *How The Grinch Stole Christmas* (2000), which also starred Jim Carrey. That's a pretty minimal quality claim, but by *Grinch* standards, *Horton Hears A Who!* isn't bad at all, which just goes to show that if you set the bar low enough, just about anything can pass over it.

Horton, crafted by Blue Sky Animation (*Ice Age*) does better than that, really, and it stays reasonably true to Seuss' story of the compassionate, open-minded pachyderm who saves the world of the Whos. The Whos live in Who-ville, of course, and their entire world is a tiny speck of dust sitting atop a clover blossom under the care and protection of Horton (Carrey), who has the only ears in the Jungle of Nool fine-tuned enough to hear the microscopically wee Whos. Horton's nemesis is a bossy busybody of a kangaroo (Carol Burnett), a moralizing law and order type who would rather commit Who-genocide than admit that, as Horton philosophizes, "a person's a person, no matter how small."

The small people are the ones that *Horton Hears A Who!* is primarily pitched to, although Carrey cannot resist the urge to riff a little and throw a few jokes in for the parental escorts. Carrey's Horton is, to say the least, a good deal more antic and less gentle in his Who stewardship than Seuss' Horton, which is to say that, rather than molding himself to a multigenerationally beloved character, Carrey has seen fit to make the character his own. This is not necessarily a good thing, depending on how much you like Jim Carrey, although Horton falls somewhere in the middle of the most-restrained to least-restrained spectrum of Carrey performances, which still puts it rather more towards the clown end than the calmer, sweeter end where one would expect to find the kindhearted, faithful Horton.

Meanwhile, down in Who-ville, the mayor (Steve Carell) has a mopey, uncommunicative emo son named Jo-Jo with whom the father-son bonding just isn't clicking. He's got a city council full of don't-worry-be-happy types to contend with too, and they just don't want to hear that Who-ville is in mortal peril. There are a lot of extraneous characters and a fair amount of fill to *Horton Hears A Who!* -- necessary, perhaps, to pad the movie to its bare bones 88 minute feature length -- but it distracts from the core story and makes the movie drag at times, despite all the frantic goings-on.

Writers Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, along with directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Marino, pack the movie with plenty of narrow escapes and death defying feats of elephantine derring-do. None of the extra characters are particularly filled out, nor are they especially original. There's Morton the mouse (Seth Rogen), Horton's hyperactive rodent sidekick (Why a mouse? Maybe it was a nod to Ganesha and Kroncha.), quirky scientist Dr. Mary Lou LaRue (Isla Fisher), and some odd little kid critters, at least one of whom appears to be a refugee from a Hayao Miyazaki film.

Miyazaki's influence shows up in a send-up of anime stylings during one of the movie's traditional animation interludes (the other being more in the Seuss mold). The computer animation in *Horton Hears A Who!* is diverse, moving from the photorealistic to the Seussian, with Who-ville in particular rendered in a way that's very true to the zany, curvy Seuss aesthetic. For all that's not by the book about *Horton Hears A Who!*, the look of the film -- the architecture and landscapes and character design -- stays true to the good doctor's loopy vision.

It ultimately stays pretty true to Dr. Seuss' message too. While Horton tries to shepherd his miniscule flock to safety, the mean ol' kangaroo rouses the rabble and gets them all terrorized by the free-thinking elephant menace. Seuss wrote Horton in 1954, in the wake of the McCarthy hearings, but the cautionary tale about intolerance and fear-mongering remains, alas, timely and relevant.

17Mar2008

The Bank Job (2008)

*The Bank Job* is one of those "inspired by a true story" movies the lesson of which is that while crime might pay (and rather nicely at that), it could just be more trouble than its worth. The heist in question, the robbery of safe deposit boxes in a London bank, took place in 1971, and was known as the "walkie-talkie robbery" after the bandits' preferred method of communication. The loot, if the film written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais is to be believed, included photographs and documents that would have proved quite embarrassing to quite important people in the British government (and the royal family) if they ever saw the light of day. That they did not makes the whole affair one of those things that didn't happen, and which can't be proven to have been prevented from happening, none of which really matters, except to conspiracy theorists who, if they fixate too much on what didn't happen, will miss most of the good stuff that does happen in *The Bank Job*.

Not that the robbers know about any kinky pictures. They're in it for the cash and jewels after ringleader Terry Leather (Jason Statham), a car repair shop owner with shady connections and a spot of trouble with gangsters, gets a hot tip from Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), an ex-flame (maybe) who knows a guy who knows a guy... Terry and his lads Kevin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Dave (Daniel Mays) bring in a few experts, including con man Guy (James Faulkner) and digging whiz Bambas (Alki David), to dig a tunnel from a deserted luggage shop to the bank vault. Turns out Martine has been put up to the job by a shady character from Britain's security services (Richard Lintern). There are items in the vault belonging to Black Power leader Michael X (aka Michael Abdul Malik, a real life revolutionary figure who hobnobbed with John Lennon). The spooks want Michael X's (Peter De Jersey) stash, but there are also salacious items belonging to an influential madame and one Lew Vogel (David Suchet), the "Soho porn king." Successfully cracking the safe counts as jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire for Terry and the lads -- the cops, the spies, and every unsavory type in London is soon after them and their ill-gotten gains. 

*The Bank Job* is fast-paced and fun, the kind of movie that sets out a whole lot of lines and then, with remarkable efficiency, precision, and thoroughness, reels them all in and ties them together. Director Roger Donaldson keeps the pacing brisk -- time is not on the side of the robbers, who improbably pull off a quick job, and then have to think fast to get themselves out of a major jam. For all its energetic plotting, however, the movie makes time to develop its characters and their quirks, and, more importantly, their very human motives.

*The Bank Job* is in its way an old fashioned heist movie, a throwback to the days when minimal planning and a lot of digging in the dirt were all you needed to rob a bank (in movies, anyway). There's nothing smooth, pokerfaced, or *Ocean's 11* about the Terry Leather gang, who owe their success more to dumb luck and desperation than to skill. The duplicity and guile are all on the other side -- these are working class lads who don't own tuxedos, facing off against high-powered men in Savile Row suits. If it's England, there must be a class struggle, and so there is, in the war between Michael X and white Britain, in the testy relations between branches of government, in the give and take between lords and ladies of, shall we say, ill repute, and poking out of the bespoke suit and leather jacket pockets of spooks and crooks. Terry's blokes are a scruffy lot, occupying the lower rungs of British society, but it's a hierarchy of venal blackguards all the way up, and all nicely displayed in *The Bank Job*. 

10Mar2008

Charlie Bartlett (2008)

Add *Charlie Bartlett* to the overcrowded roster of teen misfit dramedies. This one does not especially distinguish itself, although it goes for a quirky, offbeat kind of tone like the far better *Rushmore*, cribs some notes from eighties teen movie king John Hughes, and, with its massively wealthy, ennui-plagued teen hero, and prominent use of a song by Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens), manages to evoke *Harold and Maude*. All of that effort to be like other, popular movies, to be *liked* -- it's just so high school.

Which does, I suppose, make the movie and its exertions to be likable a lot like the title character. Being popular is Charlie Bartlett's primary goal. As the movie begins, Charlie (Anton Yelchin) has been expelled from another in what is apparently a long list of prep schools, this time for manufacturing and selling fake IDs. He's got entrepreneurial zeal, to be sure, and an overdeveloped sense of rebellion to match it. His mother Marilyn (Hope Davis), overmedicated to placid, emotional zombiehood, sends him to the school of last resort, the dreaded public high school. There, Charlie, who still sports a prep school blazer and briefcase, is predictably bullied and treated like an outcast. His family's on-call psychiatrist fixes him right up with a prescription for Ritalin, which Charlie soon realizes has a resale value that far exceeds any possible therapeutic worth. He teams up with school bully Murph (Tyler Hilton) to sell the drug, as well as assorted other psychoactive substances to which he has ready access thanks to his familiarity with psychiatrists who are quick to prescribe a pill for every ill. He sets up a school counseling center in the boy's room too, offering soothing, nonjudgmental words and pharmaceutical remedies for teen angst in all its forms. All of which makes Charlie extremely popular with everyone except Mr. Gardner (Robert Downey, Jr.), the stressed, ineffectual, can't-get-no-respect, alcoholic school principal, who also happens to be the father of Charlie's girlfriend Susan (Kat Dennings).

Downey is at first blush an inspired choice to play the conflicted authority figure in a movie about teen angst and rebellion. He was practically Mister Teen Angst and Rebellion back in the day, the guy every high school principal dreaded, but he's kind of wasted  in *Charlie Bartlett* as the Uncool Yet Secretly Cool Adult Guy. Or something like that. At any rate, his Mr. Gardner is in the thick of things when Charlie's pill-pushing and psychobabble result in a crisis, and then another crisis, and then yet another one. Even medicated teens get the blues.

Written by Gustin Nash and directed by Jon Poll, *Charlie Bartlett* is ultimately fairly bland, predictable, and more self-amused than amusing. The self-medicating adults say things like "there are more important things in life than being popular," to skeptical teens who in no way believe them; kids from broken families get naked, get high, forge unlikely friendships, and work out their problems, sort of. *Charlie Bartlett* had the effect of making me fondly remember better movies of the genre, while being itself almost completely forgettable.

25Feb2008

Definitely Maybe (2008)

A soon-to-be divorced dad has to have The Talk with his 11 year old daughter in the wake of a confusing school sex-ed lesson. Maya (Abigail Breslin) has questions, lots and lots of questions. Her dad Will (Ryan Reynolds) has few easy answers, but the lesson on the fundamentals turns into a lesson on the fundamental messiness not of sex, but of love, as Will weaves a bedtime story about the Three Loves of His Life, one of whom (he won't say which, and the names will be changed) is Maya's mom. 

Interwoven with Will's tale is that of another William, ex-president Clinton, which is an early clue that *Definitely, Maybe* will be a story of great expectations and great disappointment, high ideals and disillusionment, on both the political and personal fronts. There is plenty of uncynical comic sweetness and romance in *Definitely, Maybe*, but writer-director Adam Brooks doses it with enough irresolvably complicated, unsentimental realism to make it all decidedly yet appealingly bittersweet. Happily ever after, Maya already knows, doesn't always happen.

It all starts when Will, full of hope and political zeal, leaves Wisconsin, and his blond college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), to go to New York to work for the Clinton campaign, back in 1992. Some time between Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky, Will meets Summer (Rachel Weisz), a sultry, slightly dangerous would-be writer in love with a much older, crankier journalist (Kevin Kline), and April (Isla Fisher), the apolitical, free-spirited, slightly kooky redhead who collects copies of *Jane Eyre*. Although each woman starts out as an archetype, they are ultimately distinguishable by more than their hair color, and their characters fill out quite nicely, even while Will remains something of a cipher. Breslin (*Little Miss Sunshine*) is the fourth woman in Will's life, and provides a lively counterpoint to Will, keeping his character honest, and preventing him from lapsing into self-pity and blaming. *Definitely, Maybe* is not the kind of movie in which the Wise Child is allowed to be utterly cynical about adult relationships, and so Will's task is to impart his tale of failed romance without shattering his daughter's faith in the possibility of love and romantic bliss. 

Maya's task is to figure out which Miss Right turns out to be Mrs. Mom, but they're all good candidates, and *Definitely, Maybe* is refreshingly unchauvinistic in the way it doesn't turn any of them into harpies or homicidal maniacs. None of them are perfect, but none turns out to be fatally flawed in either, although it is clear that Will doesn't know any of them as well as he should, and that, coupled with uncannily bad timing on his part, makes his path to True Love (at least for a while), fairly strewn with obstacles and underutilized engagement rings.

*Definitely, Maybe* is, for all its sweetness and honesty, a little bland, a little too warm when it could stand a touch more hot and cold. But it's still smart and engaging and truthful enough about the confusing, chancy precariousness of love, with all its hazards and rewards, to count as a refreshing change of pace from what passes for romance and comedy, and romantic comedy, these days.

18Feb2008

Fool's Gold (2008)

It is a well-established fact that the sight of someone being whacked upside the head with a hard object is hilarious. There is probably a scientific explanation for it. Near instant access to repeated viewings of a good head-bonk is the real reason DVDs are so much better than VHS. 

It is my sad duty to report to the scientists of humorous head-whacking that they now have to explain how a movie in which Matthew McConaughey is repeatedly whacked on the noggin is so darned unfunny. *Fool's Gold* not only features numerous head-whacks, with such implements as a cane, a cricket bat, and a shovel, but it also features a crotch-whacking-with-shovel as well. If the head-whacking is the gold standard of whackings, the kibbles-n-bits whacking is the silver standard, and probably only because it is primarily utilized against one half of humanity, and primarily enjoyed by the other half. You can see funny examples of both types of physical abuse in a mere 30 seconds in Justin Timberlake's Pepsi commercial, and I heartily endorse that efficiently hilarious option over *Fool's Gold*.

This screwball comedy (at least I think that's what it's supposed to be) reunites Kate Hudson and McConaughey (*How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days*) who, despite their individual charms and undeniable good looks, are no latter day Kate Hepburn and Cary Grant. (For a superior exemplar of the screwball comedy, see Hepburn and Grant in *Bringing Up Baby*.) The plot of *Fool's Gold* concerns a 300 year old sunken treasure that McConaughey's Finn seeks somewhere in the Caribbean. An exploding boat, an attempt to murder Finn, and eventual rescue by a boatload of rowdy teens all conspire to make him late for his divorce. Not showing up for the divorce is par for the course, according to his ex-wife Tess (Hudson), who announces that she is returning to grad school, apparently to study history. Finn somehow convinces her that it is better to *live* history by finding sunken treasure. This after finding his way onto the yacht where Tess works as a steward for the marvelously wealthy but familially benighted Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland, well-tanned and no doubt enjoying a leisurely tropical vacation). Nigel and his jet-setting bimbo daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena) need some father-daughter time, and decide it would be fun to look for treasure too.

Thrown into this mix are a competing bunch of treasure hunters led by crusty Moe (Ray Winstone), a felonious rapper named Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) who, after bankrolling a previous Finn expedition, now wants in on the action, and Bigg's assorted inept henchmen. Andy Tennant, who directed and cowrote this haphazard movie, throws in a couple of gay chefs too, mostly, I suspect, to make possible a scene late in the movie in which they struggle with a shotgun and scream "I can't cock it!" It's possible that was supposed to be funny too. 

There are boat chases, jet ski chases, derring-do involving airplanes, underwater fight scenes, harpoonings, stabbings, shootings, and the aforementioned cranial whackings and bits bonkings. Tess and Finn bicker, unconvincingly and pretty much humorlessly -- mostly about how immature and unreliable he is, while he, in his defense, counters that he's carefree! exciting! adventurous! All of which is true, and he also sports a nice, even tan (like almost everyone else in the movie) and is generally soaking wet *and* getting bonked in the head, all of which should add up to a rollicking good time. But still, there's something missing in *Fool's Gold*, a gaping hole that all the sunny tans, bikinis, bimbo and himbo jokes, and suggestions of great sex don't fill. The movie is frantic without being fun or purposeful, like it all started with a list of stunts, and a story was cobbled together around them in no particular order. *Fool's Gold* tells us -- at one point Moe literally says, "Now there's a guy who really loves his wife!" -- that Tess and Finn are still in love without providing any convincing evidence aside from airplane dangling on his part and a certain otherwise inexplicable foolhardiness on hers. It is otherwise inexplicable foolhardiness only because Tess is supposed to be exceptionally smart, which is also something that has to be literally pointed out by other characters, since tangible evidence is lacking.

The cast looks jolly good cavorting in the sand and zipping around the Caribbean, and the sun-soaked tropical locales look mighty inviting here in the dark, cold days of winter. For all that, and its breathlessly frenetic pace, *Fool's Gold* is still boring and tedious. It is an action-romantic comedy that has lots of action, but it is neither romantic nor funny, and apparently no amount of head-whacking can fix that. Although, for the sake of science, I'm willing to let them try.

11Feb2008

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Sinister sounds and chords ringing with foreboding, images of bleak, parched hills, and a title -- There Will Be Blood -- rendered in grim Gothic blackletter, all suggest horror. And there is violence, deep in the earth, where a solitary, single-minded man with a pickax scratches at the rocky belly of the hills. He's looking for silver, and he finds it, though not before the  earth exacts a price. The man, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), will eventually make the ground bleed and ooze liquid gold from deep wounds, clawing his fortune from the soil with his bare hands. The earth gives him a son too, an angel-faced boy, and tenderness and warmth oozes out of the hard, callused man. All this before a word is spoken in There Will Be Blood, a positively brilliant film by Paul Thomas Anderson. 

Set in California at the turn of the century, There Will Be Blood is loosely adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! Has there ever been a more perfect metaphor for moral corruption than sticky, black, dirty crude oil? How perfect is it that this stuff that oozes from the bowels of the earth, from the hot hell beneath our feet, has inspired so much evil? It seeps into every pore of There Will Be Blood -- it is the intoxicating blood of the earth that poisons man's blood, and causes blood to be spilled. Anderson's movie ends in 1927, and has much to say about capitalism and greed (then and now), corruption and exploitation, about fathers and sons, religious zealotry and pious hypocrisy, broken trust, and revenge, and about blood -- the blood of the earth, the blood between family, the blood of the lamb. Anderson has crafted a riveting, intelligent, multi-layered, modern day Citizen Kane in this tale of a tycoon who literally pulled himself up out of the dirt. There Will Be Blood, which Anderson also wrote, is filled with indelible images vibrating with portent and consequence, and carefully chosen words that split open like onions to reveal layers of meaning. The musical score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, with a little help from Brahms and Arvo Pärt, veers from stark, savage minimalism to orchestral grandness -- the score is a work of original art in its own right, enhancing the film's emotional depth and mood, and demanding attention without taking any away from the rest of the film.

Plainview is played with fascinating complexity in a magnificent, mesmerizing, eerie performance by Day-Lewis. Even at his most monstrous, Plainview is an enigmatic and charismatic figure, and though he speaks in a authoritarian and stentorian manner, there is remarkable subtlety in Day-Lewis' performance. You can hear in that voice veiled threats, disdain, triumph, hatred, pride, and love. There's not an ounce of sloth in the hands-on, earthy mogul, but the other sins are well accounted for, seen in the hard glint of the eyes, felt in the aggressive, in-your-face body language, and heard in the long dusty road of a voice lubricated by crude oil and whisky. You can hear in that voice, through bitter, cruel words, the unexpected sound of a black heart breaking. Plainview's son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is the perfect foil, an observant, quiet, gentle boy who stands at his father's right shoulder like his conscience, and is the object of utterly incongruous tenderness. H.W. is his father's moral compass, requiring, as children do, justification and explanation. The father's face, his jaw jutting out and his lower lip lifted in an almost perpetual frown -- the visible marks of his misanthropy -- crinkles and smiles around the boy, until a tragic accident breaks the bond between them, and breaks the magnetic needle that insistently tugged at Plainview's soul. 

There Will Be Blood is a fable of American capitalism, captured at a pivotal moment of appetite and discovery. It's the kind of story that, in decades past, was the subject of heroic movies, movies in which the conquest of people and the planet were considered admirable, even if the conquerors were less than perfect specimens of humanity. In a thousand small ways, the moral of that story has changed. There Will Be Blood is premised on the idea that avarice and competitiveness are so ingrained in our national soul that it corrupts every relationship and every person, including the shifty, spooky, evangelical preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who vexes Plainview and haunts his schemes, and who is every bit as ambitious, covetous, and rapacious as the businessman. The story is set in the past, but the film is rooted in the present, informed by modern wars, land grabs, and treacheries inspired now (as then) by the lust for oil, informed by the insidious entanglements of piety, prophets, and profit, and piety for profit. Yet for all its epic and provocative themes, for all the expansiveness of a story that spans three decades, There Will Be Blood remains strikingly, captivatingly intimate, an exciting, visionary, perfect movie told in small, bold, devastating strokes. I haven't stopped thinking about There Will Be Blood since I saw it, and I can't think of a thing that's wrong with it.

4Feb2008

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2008)

When a friend visits Jean-Dominique Bauby in his hospital room, he relays the latest gossip from Paris: "Jean-Dominique is a vegetable." Bauby wonders what sort of vegetable he has become: "A carrot? A pickle?" His friend doesn't hear these floral ponderings, but from the view inside Bauby's head, it's clear that he's anything but a spud. Which is not to say he isn't in a pickle. Bauby was once the editor of French Elle magazine, but in his early forties, he suffered a massive stroke that left him with a rare condition known as "locked-in syndrome." It is aptly if cruelly named -- his mind, as active as ever, is like a caged bird, trapped within an immobile, completely paralyzed body. He is able to blink his eyes, which becomes his only means of communicating with the outside world.

Specifically, he has a left eyelid. To prevent infection, his right eye is sewn shut in a gruesome scene early in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the glorious and unflinching film based on Bauby's memoir Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. The scene is especially blood-curdling because, like much of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it is seen from within, from the point of view of the owner of that unlucky eye. Director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood lock the viewer of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly into Bauby's small prison, looking out through the same small window, with only Bauby's overactive mind as companion. But what a funny, lively, imaginative companion he turns out to be. And he has lovely visitors: his patient, doting ex Celine (Emmanuelle Siegner), the mother of his three children and a woman who clearly still loves him; his speech therapist Henriette (Marie-Josee Croze), and eventually, Claude (Anne Consigny), the assistant who takes the dictation of his left eye and helps him write his book. It is some time in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly before the film escapes the perspective of that liminal eye, and gives us a full view of Bauby and the world outside his mind.

That world is greatly diminished, but it was once quite full. Bauby was (and in his mind at least remains) an unapologetic sybarite, enjoying a life of glamour, good food, fast cars, and beautiful women. The butterfly is Bauby's metaphor for his airy, flitting, high-flying mind -- a mind that is astonishingly liberated by the loss of its earthly container, and all those earthly pleasures. It would be trite to describe The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as a film about the human spirit triumphing over adversity. More accurately, it is about the soul breaking free of its constraints -- constraints imposed from without and within. As Bauby comes to see, he is not the only person imprisoned by circumstance, or an unwilling body, or by self-forged shackles, nor is his current state entirely new -- it's different from his old life, but not less free.

The butterfly is an apt metaphor for Schnabel's film, with the filmmaker finding his own freedom in Bauby's imaginative flights of fancy. Even when he is at his most self-pitying, Bauby's words are comical, witty, ironic, and poignant, roaming freely across the full range of human emotion and human experience, free-associating through memory and desire, fantasy and invention. The richness of his inner life makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a film that is not, ultimately, sad or depressing, but rather wise, lyrical, moving, and joyful. In giving substance and reality to the wanderings of the mind's eye, Schnabel, working with the ingenious cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, creates a visual world rich in metaphor and spirit, looping freely through time and space, unconstrained by the fetters of plot and straightforward narrative. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is, not surprisingly, dreamlike in its logic as it weaves a tangle of neuronal threads, knots, and loose ends into a vibrant, shimmering, luminous cloth of transcendent and subtle beauty.

28Jan2008

Cloverfield (2008)

The copy-and-paste feature of the personal computer is brilliantly useful and, unlike so many things about personal computers, an actual timesaver. It must have saved Drew Goddard, the screenwriter of Cloverfield, a whole hell of a lot of tedious typing, since the screenplay of said movie amounts to about 75 pages of people screaming "Oh my God!" over and over and over and over (movie critics can use copy-and-paste too). Goddard would have had to type those words thousands of times had he been using an actual typewriter, and he might have realized it wasn't worth the effort. Just imagine Orson Welles typing "Oh My God" 10,000 times in Citizen Kane. There would be no "Rosebud," and we would be all the poorer for it. We can perhaps count ourselves lucky that Welles didn't have a PC, and unlucky that so many screenwriters now do.

Cloverfield is a faux home movie about the destruction of New York by scary monster. You know how the perfect YouTube video is about three minutes long? Anything longer than that and the mind begins to wander from the cute frolicking kittens and the humiliating Japanese game shows, and even Jersey grrrl Chunky Pam starts to lose her lustre. Cloverfield takes that YouTube post-reality, post-verite, post-Blair Witch penchant for self-documentation/aggrandizement and turns it into a (barely) feature length monster movie in which the video camera-wielding twenty-somethings are so dull, featureless, and stupid that you'll be relieved to see that a monster is annihilating Manhattan with great efficiency, and will get to them forthwith.

Not that you'll see all that much of that monster. Uber-producer J.J. Abrams (Lost) likes to keep his scary beasts obscure. When it does finally show itself, the Thing That Ate New York is a kind of Geigeresque reptilian critter, a glossy, high-tech, depsychologized Godzilla without the big dino's rubber soul. But back up about an hour and it turns out that the thing that really kills in Cloverfield is boredom, and specifically, a lifeless going away party for Rob (Michael Stahl-David), who is departing for a job in Japan. The party is hosted by Rob's brother Jason (Mike Vogel) and Jason's significant other Lily (Jessica Lucas). They are all mildly attractive in a more or less indistinguishable way. The lackwit behind the video camera is Rob's pal Hud (T.J. Miller), who is at first a reluctant videographer, but later embraces the role with such enthusiasm that he manages to keep on shooting (at eye level, no less) even while frantically running from the monster, while traversing the rooftops of crumbling skyscrapers, while... you get the picture. If only he could have stopped screaming "Oh my God!" while shooting his end of the world video for posterity, and had the presence of mind to say something intelligent by way of narration. It must be said, however, that Hud's screaming is no less interesting than anything anyone else has to say in Cloverfield.

The monster is indiscriminate in killing the no-name cast, which is a small mercy of Cloverfield. The characters are both vapid and obtuse, which is, as always, a winning combination in motion picture entertainment. While the city crumbles around them in a massive cloud of dust tackily reminiscent of 9/11, Rob and his pals decide to buck the trend, and common sense, and head uptown to rescue Rob's ex-girlfriend, who is, according to her cell phone message, grievously wounded and trapped in her high-rise apartment. Why Rob's friends and a random hanger-on from the party decide to follow their brainless leader on his quest for something like redemption and/or true love is anybody's guess, but clearly these young adults don't have the sense to know when it's time to get the hell out of Dodge. Thanks to Hud's mad documentary skilz, the rest of us get to tag along too. "People will want to see what happened," Hud says. Well, actually, maybe not.

  Aside from the vaguely realized YouTube-gen, everybody's-a-celebrity-and/or-papparazzi idea -- the movie's only laugh comes when Lady Liberty's head rolls down the street and everybody whips out a cell phone camera to capture the moment -- Cloverfield is basically a little exercise in coupling high-tech special effects with faux low-tech camera technique. Director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Michael Bonvillain keep the camera moving and jiggling constantly, which is necessary to maintain the film's home movie conceit, but also rather tiresome. Cloverfield clocks in at a mere 84 minutes, which would ordinarily be quite economical, except that there's only about 20 minutes worth of plot here, and virtually no dialogue (discounting the repetitive screaming). By YouTube standards, it's about 81 minutes too long.

21Jan2008