The Strangers (2008)
The Strangers works for a little while, but it doesn’t get in your bones. The picture may eventually scare you accidentally though, by forcing you (if you’re a critic of some sort anyway) to consider what you’ll do if this run of pastiche horror films continues much longer unabated by even the slightest originality. Recite the weather forecast below the title and the running time? Stocks, perhaps? How much more can be said about the visually competent, or even assured, but hopelessly unimaginative home invasion by masked marauder(s) of vague motivation picture? Funny Games was a crock, but its contempt for its audience gave it a mild pulse. If I had seen The Strangers five years ago, I would have probably been more glass-is-half-full in my approach, but these pictures that are just passable enough to squeak by without offense are beginning to be the most offensive of all.
See the French picture Inside instead. It’s tasteless. It’s uncomfortable. The directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, may have crossed the line, but it’s a home invasion picture that’s artfully made, courts absurdity (stumbling into it often) and goes feeling around in a primal, sticky place of guilt, loss and legitimate, appalling, violation. You watch Inside and wonder how long it’s been bubbling in the back of its creators’ minds. You watch The Strangers and wonder how director Bryan Bertino, who shows talent, could have possibly roused himself, in his debut, to stage yet another picture that works the laughably tired, obligatory based-on-faux-true-events narration device; or that features the typically idiotic marching around the house outside of safety, completely divorced of any tangible, terrestrial reason to do so routine. Or the relentless, one-sided, pounding the heroes of these pictures must always endure, never scoring even a minor win against the villains. Never making one decision that is met with success. Future horror directors: if your picture doesn’t have the courage to stake out its own convictions, misery isn’t uncompromising, it’s tedious.
★★
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
The tangible relief of again seeing a modern action-fantasy through a master filmmaker’s eyes carries us through a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Master shots! A sense of rhythm and pace! Punches that sound like shotgun blasts! The Wilhelm scream! I had forgotten how starved I was for a true escapist picture that feels apart from reality, that isn’t (or doesn’t fancy itself) an auteurist superhero film or a cynical commercial for toys that turn into other toys or whatever other nonsense litters our screens. The title sequence of Crystal Skull is witty and beautiful, and hints at a touch of knowing, sad humor. The object that the Paramount logo always famously fades into is, this time, a groundhog burrow, which promptly gets mowed over by a speeding roadster as Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” plays in place of the familiar John Williams score. It’s the 1950s, twenty years since Indy rode off into the sunset with his father and friends, things have changed, and these first few moments establish that with something resembling grace.
Or graceful, at least, when compared to the desperate, depressing, miscalculated picture that follows. I could delay the inevitable for a few more passages (and did, in the first draft) celebrating Spielberg’s past and present gifts: his peerless, musical sense of play and action and reaction; his organic, nearly supernatural instinct for pure cinema storytelling, his uncanny (see how I struggle to continually produce words for Spielberg’s craft that imply “above normal human capacity”) ability to set-up and pay-off beats in hushed seconds without the slightest hint of strain, but you know all of that already. I could celebrate and/or mourn Harrison Ford, one of the greatest movie stars of all time, a warm, funny, idealized superman Humphrey Bogart for the next generation who lost his way after The Fugitive, but you already know that too. You want to know how good the new Indy Jones movie is, or, if you’ve already seen it, you want to know if it’s okay to feel let down after pretending to like it for a few hours. I’m giving you permission, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the worst Jones movie by far, that’s easy, but this new picture is also the worst Steven Spielberg movie.
There are bits here and there that remind you of Spielberg’s brilliance, that imply a possible struggle within the filmmaker to give a shit about a genre he’s long left behind (we really, in retrospect, should have known that already, after the chilly-scary deconstruction of the genre in the more effective than its generally admitted to be nightmare picture A.I.) but they are few and far between. Crystal Skull does have one legitimately inspired moment that has Jones stumbling into a suburb that happens to be something else entirely. This brief scene conjures that fear of the breakdown of the commonplace that Spielberg can portray so well when in his groove, and it establishes the time and place of the picture effectively, but the rest is a wash. Even the title sequence becomes icky after seeing the entire picture, portraying not sadness and knowing and regret, but contempt (there’s another creepy, tasteless joke in this vein-involving a statue of Marcus Brody, who must have shit Spielberg’s bed after Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Crystal Skull is lazy and misguided and lifeless throughout, with only the occasionally vigorous action sequence (or inspired camera beat) to pull it out of the muck. I would like to be able to say that the script, by David Koepp, the mad libs of hack screenwriters, (with an obvious Lucas influence-this is dead exposition as only that man can deliver), is his usual impersonal, connect the dots mish-mash, except it lacks even his pedestrian ability to connect the dots. The exposition in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the moments that explain to us the nature of the Ark of the Covenant are giddy, moody, but, most importantly, they project not the tedium of reading cue cards (until we can get to the next bit of labored physicality) but a sense of awe.
Ford also appears to be as bored as he’s been for the last several films, having failed to “come back” here as some would have you believe, but Spielberg, like Robert Zemeckis in What Lies Beneath, is canny enough to work around the current Ford persona. Jones’ lack of heartbeat here is moving and thematically apt, he’s been beat down by one too many obscure artifacts, lost one too many important to him. Crystal Skull, aping Last Crusade, is also a family reunion picture, only with Ford now in the Sean Connery role. That is a ripe, original idea for exploration, but that would, again, interfere with Lucas’ inhuman obsession with expositional bric-a-brac.
We should also acknowledge that Spielberg probably hasn’t totally, fearlessly, dived into his own head since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (maybe A.I. too, for both better and worse). The recent Spielberg pictures have much to recommend them, particularly Munich (one of the best films of 2005), War of the Worlds and Minority Report, but they are also uneven and self-conscious, too eager to please, and feed into Spielberg’s desire to be an “important” as well as successful filmmaker. What else could Steven Spielberg possibly have left to prove? In an interview for Minority Report Spielberg said he felt he’d earned the right to make a picture for himself, and I agree, but he appears to say that without actually knowing it. How long can Temple of Doom’s myopic reception be permitted to punish Spielberg, and us? Temple of Doom is imperfect, with an especially mean, juvenile sense of humor (though Crystal Skull makes that humor look positively Lubitschian by comparison) but it’s an exciting, original action picture, one of the most visually assured ever made, with an emotional transition in its hero that subtly holds together (and comments on) the physical beats that run through the picture like a locomotive, but that’s often unacknowledged.
So, lest anyone get offended, we got Last Crusade, which is dull but saved by Sean Connery and Ford’s byplay, and now Crystal Skull, which is dull but saved by nothing. Shia LaBeouf, more watchable than anyone could possibly expect in Transformers last year, again gives his part as much as anyone could given what he’s been handed to work with. LeBeouf and Ford have authentic chemistry, and it could have possibly salvaged a bit of Crystal Skull, but the script continues to strangle them, perhaps like one of those snakes Indy fears so much (and that gets a tip of the cap here that’s embarrassing).
The reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) is the film’s low point though: a crushing, dispiriting letdown that’s about nothing more than cynically “giving the fans what they want.” Allen and Ford look desperate and uncomfortable, two vaudevillians determined to appease the drunken fans so they can shuffle out the side-stage exit. The heat between Allen and Ford has gone, and once again, that, in itself, could have been something had it been acknowledged, but Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is in the business of self-delusion and unoriginality.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a failure, but it’s an undeniably interesting failure that’s poignant unintentionally and, sometimes, in spite of itself. The character of Indiana Jones is too rich, despite the filmmakers’ indifference, for the film not to occasionally carry a whiff of something greater and older. The sight of Indiana Jones, now grandfatherly in appearance, teaching classes in a building where he was once the subject of feverish underage admiration, is unavoidably moving. The sight of Jones snatching his hat, that beloved symbol of irrepressible adventure, from the younger generation is too loaded with movie love, no matter how hard the fanatical Lucas may try to deny us conventional emotional satisfaction. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an embarrassment, but it is, in a strange way, also life affirming. It will take more than the biggest disappointment of the year to tarnish a character that has given us years of pleasure and has very undeniably earned his rest. Spielberg, probably the greatest living pure filmmaker, has certainly earned the legacy he’s apparently terrified of pissing away. Here’s hoping Spielberg one day discovers the inner peace he half-heartedly blesses his hero with here, and again becomes the filmmaker he always has been and can always be.
★★
Speed Racer (2008)
Speed Racer, Larry and Andy Wachowski’s (The Matrix) newest exercise in fuck tha police, fight the power faux-outrage, is another of those pictures, like the new Star Wars movies, or Sin City, or (the God awful) 300, that places actors in settings that have been totally or almost totally rendered by computers. The prior pictures worked to varying degrees (Sin City being the best) but could never conquer the hesitation that you were watching something that was never actually there; unavoidably dulling the excitement, immediacy and, you know, human feeling in the process. These pictures, despite a (sometimes) visual originality and invention, ultimately feel like that steak that gets re-configured through the transporter in the David Cronenberg Fly: they don’t taste right, they don’t understand the flesh.
Speed Racer turns that disconnection on its head, creating a world so gloriously, obviously, flamboyantly deranged in its artifice that it causes the picture to do an emotional loop de loop; achieving something that is a. accidentally, b. subversively, or c. hypocritically poignant. I’m voting b and c. Speed Racer is a legitimate accomplishment: a hallucinatory children’s picture that has an un-paralleled empathy with that sugar freaking, Saturday morning cartoon binging mind state. But, Speed Racer is also unfortunately, (shades of The Matrix) an attack on the multiple forms of suffocating distraction that persist in modern American life that also (and here’s the rub) happens to provide more forms of suffocating distraction than any recent film I can recall.
Speed Racer at times literally, exhilaratingly, loses control; particularly in flashbacks to Speed’s (Emile Hirsch) childhood that zone out in a blitz of imagination approximating aesthetic overload that immediately cues us in to at least three or four different movements of heartbreak, disappointment and resentment. The Wachowskis, never visually modest, have an especially nifty trick (of which they’re a bit too enamored) of transitioning with an in-camera wipe that gives us the feeling of watching every plot strand, every character, at exactly the same time (an artful version of channel surfing). I normally don’t give a whit what happens to the characters in these types of pictures, but the Wachowskis somehow nearly play this excess of technique to their emotional advantage. The technique chokes the life out of the picture, but this choking of life is, at least partly, the point (an old race is, tellingly, shown with real cars). This world, this candy-colored anime play-land, isn’t passed off as “movie magic”, its Hell, a kiddie friendly Matrix, a place of commercial enslavement that Speed and family must fight with purity and gusto.
The Wachowskis, it must be said, have also become significantly smoother in weaving their anti-big brother tirades (Warners? Who produces their movies?) into their action. The latter Matrix films were (possibly) a little underrated, but their insistence in continually halting the action for self-righteous, half-baked, college text-book sociology fortune cookies was maddening and self-deceiving. Speed Racer works out its self-hatred and conflict through the action, which explodes onto the racetrack and out of the screen in giddy, poetic bursts of disorientation. The people who have complained of the brothers’ withholding crucial spatial information are missing the point. We aren’t supposed to be on the racetrack; we’re in the characters heads, which happen to be on the race track. The lack of visual context and clarity IS the suspense, we, for once, truly feel the speed.
There’s something else undeniably creepy and insidious going on in Speed Racer though. The picture preaches the usual Luke Skywalker (the final race echoes the first Star Wars film’s climax) follow your own beat sermon, but we can’t help but feel that, by buying into this, we are just buying into exactly what the real life consumerist bad guys (represented here by Roger Allam, effectively channeling Tim Curry) would have us buy into. Speed Racer, like all of the Wachowkis’ work (V for Vendetta being the most offensive) is ultimately audience pandering entertainment, decrying consumerist depersonalization while continuing to pioneer consumerist depersonalization.
Speed Racer brings to mind the one brilliant implication of The Matrix Reloaded, that Neo, our hero, was just another pawn of the Matrix, another program designed to foster a sense of false rebellion in a society that doesn’t want to do anymore than pay lip service to such ideas. The Russian nesting dolls of corruption are a true (and very real) Matrix of our society, as well as the one that the Wachowskis’ films have continually hammered against. But what are these talented filmmakers actually offering us beyond un-challenging self-delusion? Speed Racer’s admirers have called it revolutionary. But what, exactly, is the aim of the film’s supposed revolution? To paraphrase another Jeff Goldblum movie, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. By all means see Speed Racer, it works, it’s exciting, and it has a conflict of interest that may mark it as the most interesting big picture of the summer, but its time we hold the Wachowskis to more than visual button-pushing. They may know the path, but they’ve yet to walk it.
★★★
Redbelt (2008)
You can be forgiven for finding the idea of Redbelt enticing. The notion of filmmaker-playwright David Mamet (a master of a distinct mood of simmering inner macho heat, greed and cruelty) tackling the corrupt world of pay-per-view sports is a promising one. Hell, the notion of Mamet stepping into the action arena at all is cause for an optimistic raise of the eyebrow. Mamet, at his best (it’s admittedly been awhile) spins electric dialogue of peerless musical fuck you aggression that has a redemptive, unexpected grace of timing and structure: haikus of the damned, the innocent and everyone in between. The chance that Mamet might find a syntax equivalent to that of his verbal wizardry seems especially great in the action genre, can’t miss really; both, at their best, relying on the spinning of poetry from aggression.
Redbelt is blessed with the usual Mamet cast: a mixture of the expected (Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon) and the purposefully, ironically out of place (Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer) but the picture, such as it is, rests on the inspired, could’ve been iconic if the picture was up to him casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Ejiofor is playing a movie staple: a principled, centered, humble hero, in this case a jiu-jitsu instructor, who finds himself tempted by vice and compromise following a series of unlikely coincidences and encounters. Ejiofor is minimal and commanding, conjuring the fantasy of a divorced from temptation good guy without looking prudish, no small feat; Mamet apparently getting off, for once, on creating a character of unquestioned, un-ironic purity.
The Mamet fan will be on guard earlier than the casual viewer, we know that a coincidence isn’t merely a coincidence, right? Mamet pictures, particularly the Mamet pictures that firmly reside in the man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, trust no one genre, are a little like feature length versions of that chilling scene that occurs late in the third act of The Game, (which could’ve been a horror riff on early Mamet anyway) when the Michael Douglas character discovers every person he casually encountered throughout the picture eating dinner together in a cafeteria. Everyone is normally in on it, nothing is chance. A panic stricken woman accidentally shooting Ejiofor’s window out, for example, immediately sets the Mamet fan’s truth sensors swirling.
The picture hums and flows in a way that Mamet fans will recognize and probably treasure, for an hour or so anyway. Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna fire mannered Mamet dialogue in a manner only they can. Tim Allen makes a bid for career redemption with a part that ultimately, like much of the movie, proves to be beside the point. Alice Braga is sexy as a woman who immediately arouses suspicion for being a woman in a David Mamet movie. Emily Mortimer continues to make neediness somehow attractive. David Paymer plays (effectively) the same part he’s essentially played his entire career. Mamet’s action, which some have had problems with, is actually the element of the picture that is underrated, coming in clipped, succinct, whizzy bursts that do actually manage to effectively mirror Mamet’s verbal rhythms. It’s the dialogue itself that falters.
I’m treading water. Redbelt is competent, never particularly boring, but it doesn’t ever amount to anything, it’s a jack in the box picture, winding, winding, winding, except the jack never pops out of the box. All of one’s hopes for a Mamet sports film (either a serious examination or a thrilling, brutal B movie or something in between) are dashed in the service of a picture that simply blows away, neither good nor bad. Redbelt is Mamet’s House of Cards, the punch-line being that it’s not worth the effort.
★★½
Iron Man (2008)
The human element of a superhero film, particularly the human element of the initial entry in a prospective series (the “origin story”), usually represents the vegetables we have to rid our plate of before getting to the dessert. We watch our normally flat heroes go through the usual paces that sometimes wouldn’t look too out of place in Dawson’s Creek (or whatever the youth show de jour may be), all in the hope that the filmmaker, when he finally gets to why we’re all packed in the theatre to begin with, will wow us with a grand bit of what have you, or, if we’re really lucky, a sublime note of visual poetry.
Iron Man, oddly, and to a certain extent, blessedly, has the opposite problem; for about an hour, the picture, chronicling the normally tedious details of how our everyman becomes a superman, is alive and just a little eccentric; for awhile, the lead, Robert Downey, Jr., walks away with the picture in just the manner the trailer implied. Downey infects Iron Man’s wavelength, its editing even, and lends the picture an aura of drunk, self-loathing, screwball tea-time debauchery that feels practically revelatory for such a normally rigid, spontaneity-free genre. Downey’s Tony Stark, rich, handsome, confident, charismatic, intelligent, isn’t some softie with canned pathos; he’s a superman before being interfered with in a divine manner. The film’s initial wit lies in its reversal of our expectations of the usual mythos. Stark, to become a hero, must inherit a weakness, a humanity that brings him back to the realm of other humans, as opposed to a strength that shoots him up and above all others. Tony Stark couldn’t be a more fitting creation for our turn up the Ipod as the world goes to Hell times; Stark, to find his heart, must first nearly have it blown out of his chest.
It may sound like I’m pouring it on, but Iron Man isn’t too shy with its redemptive theme, the picture is a 1950s atomic paranoia fantasy (the villain even gets to proclaim that “no one’s gonna stand in my way”), crossed with an 1980s gee whiz kids film (Explorers perhaps) multiplied by a healthy dose of the current trend of smothering, impersonal action pictures. Iron Man, tellingly, details the development of the suit with more grace than the development of Stark’s conscience, which snaps on (like one of those lights we spoke of earlier in the week) abruptly at just the right moment, muting Stark’s personality in the process. The picture was directed by the gifted Jon Favreau, the actor who debuted as filmmaker with the small, human, very underrated Made, followed it with the overrated Elf, and then followed that with the also underrated Zathura, a gentle picture that had a memorably surreal storybook beauty about it, informed by a surprisingly convincing current of familial resentment and pain.
Favreau’s pictures are generous and lacking in ego, just the sort of thing the big summer movie business needs. Favreau, working with Downey, tries his best to shake things up in Iron Man, but, after a first hour that pumps us up for an anarchic, funny, reverent but not too reverent superhero picture, perhaps the MASH of the 200 million dollar product placement Happy Meal movies, he can’t help but succumb to the grinding repetition of the requirements of the genre. Favreau’s big robot beats aren’t lacking in awe (Favreau, even at his most audience conscious, is mercifully incapable of Michael Bay’s pornographic impersonality) but the scenes steal and distract from Favreau’s strengths; just as he and Downey convince you that Stark is worth giving a damn about, he goes and turns into a Transformer.
Iron Man has moments though, moments that take it beyond many of the pictures in the genre, and occasionally remind you why you truck out every year with your junk food and brave the lines and the heat for the newest “big thing.” The first action scene in the picture, when Iron Man is still scraps and must escape a cave in Afghanistan, is logical, personal, terrifying, and, for once in one of these pictures, has a bit of context. Iron Man, bent, leaking, screwed up, a walking discarded junk heap of the dead, personifies Stark’s bruised entitlement and startling naiveté. This metal creature is, at first, a haunting creation: he wastes the insurgents with a flame thrower and, for a few minutes, pumps the picture with melancholy, vengeance and relevance.
Two scenes involving Tony’s damaged heart also momentarily imbue the picture with something close to feeling. The first is a figurative love scene between Stark and his long suffering assistant Pepper Potts (a very beautiful, poignant Gwyneth Paltrow), the second is just the opposite: a moment of grand, closed door, pop betrayal that dissolves the minute we cut back to the big bad metal monsters. No robot could be scarier than the bizarre, unlikely sight of Jeff Bridges appearing as a poisonous surrogate father figure, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers and special effects wizards from trying. Iron Man must, of course, have an evil antagonist, a twin sprung from the same well of dubious creation, and so he does, resulting in a fat, kind of goofy looking thing that could be said to be a joke on the Republican “more is better” philosophy but probably isn’t. In 1978, people were assured that they’d believe a man could fly, but would it hurt nowadays for us to be asked believe something besides, or at least in addition to, that? Iron Man needs less iron and more man.
★★★
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Writer-star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a bit more ambitious than the previous Judd Apatow produced or directed odes to unflagging pop-culture enthralled young male self-absorption. The prior films were charged with a bracing, seemingly free form geeks have inherited the world id driven obscenity, laced with an articulation that is at once ironic and celebratory. The heroes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad were the good guys, but they weren’t the PG/PG-13 eunuchs of the 1980s movies getting boxer shorts pulled up their asses by the privileged bullies, they embodied ferocious, empowered, unchecked fuck you will, until, and this is the problem, the pandering sets in, the “we don’t really mean it or want to offend anyone especially the ladies” third act u-turn that finds everyone hooking and growing up on cue, common sense be damned.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has no such third act turn-around, the film is slower and (just a shade) more reflective from the get go. This may be the first of this current wave of Apatow productions that can be accused of self-consciousness, recognizing the last minute efforts of the heroes of Knocked Up and Superbad to be unconvincing. This film has at its center a more sentimental, wounded hero, a man-child who requires more than a five minute montage of images near the end to figure things out. The picture attempts to dramatize Segel’s in and out, some days good, some days bad road to recovery, after being discarded by the titular woman (Kristen Bell, bland).
The usual stereotypes are all accounted for (shrill ambitious woman, obnoxious, more successful new beau, stoner, confidant) but their dimensions aren’t as pat as the prior films. Marshall has a surprising compassion; the characters are largely good, open, looking for connection. It’s this unexpected, across the board fairness that has critics, ridiculously, likening the picture to the work of Preston Sturges.
The film is also, unfortunately, the slowest of the pictures we’ve mentioned. Segel and Stoller were right to question the conventions of the prior films, but in revising those clichés they muted the wild man party camaraderie that gave the earlier pictures their bite, it’s a gremlins movie without the gremlins. The reliable company players, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, etc. are all bland and inert here, their comic impulses adrift. This film takes too much of its mood from the tranquil Hawaiian waters that serve as the backdrop: this picture is truly about as interesting as watching someone else on vacation. Segel and Stoller have made the Apatow third act somewhat more palatable but in doing so they’ve neglected the first two acts entirely, leaving nothing to distract from the please marry and procreate at the appropriate age woman’s picture formula that remains despite their best intentions. The film mistakes striving for maturity for maturity, lacking the characterizations to justify such a slow tempo. Forgetting Sarah Marshall may, ironically, play worse with the folks who are determined to defend it.
The picture still has its moments, primarily because Segel, always the strangest of the Apatow boys to begin with (he suggests Jim Carrey in an earlier Apatow effort, the underrated The Cable Guy) is an appealingly lumpy, unconventional (even for Apatow) leading man. Unlike that force of nature Seth Rogen, or Hill, Segel doesn’t bless his character Peter with confidence in his own obsessions, which include an ambition to stage a more autobiographical than he knows puppet musical of Dracula. The film’s one legitimately original moment takes off from this admirably bizarre conceit: the girl of redemption and second chances (Mila Kunis, more appealing than expected, but has nothing to work with) sets Peter up, without his knowing, to sing a song from his unfinished project. Peter isn’t sure of course, he isn’t sure of anything other than his need to glob onto another woman, but he takes the stage, and wins over the drunk, impatient patrons of the bar with a song of surprising conviction (he even does the sub-Transylvanian thing) that briefly takes over the movie. Peter sheds his self-loathing fully, convincingly, and it’s a wonderful moment.
There are a few other moments that threaten to jump the tracks of formula as well. Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow, Sarah’s new rock star beau, is almost completely unoriginal, save an unexpected kinship with Peter. Peter and Aldous find themselves surfing together, and Peter, unable to deny it any longer, exclaims “God, you’re cool.” It’s a disarming, poignant scene; an emotionally naked moment that the filmmakers refuse to capitalize on.
Moments such as these prove we should be harder on Apatow and his talented camp of hooligans. These guys are too promising to be wasting their and our time replicating the same clichéd rubbish over and over again. The audiences’ taking it doesn’t surprise me, but the critics’ refusal to call foul is disappointing. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is better than most any mainstream young person romantic comedy that will probably come out in the near future, but what’s that saying exactly? It’s time to change the criterion by which we judge these men, time to up the ante, because, at this point, the Apatow guys are treading closer and closer to dangerous waters, to making the sorts of movies they would’ve ridiculed before they were famous.
★★½
In Bruges (2008)
We’ve seen so many bad hitman movies, either of the junk videogame (take your pick) or boring, self-conscious pretend its a metaphor for something to disguise its emptiness variety (Road to Perdition) that it’s forgivable that audiences would greet In Bruges, the writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, with hesitation. In Bruges has the appearance of yet another of those pulp pictures in denial, a film that mistakes under-known location and stars for something higher than the usual business. We expect suffocating art-direction, reaching, false, over-literate dialogue, we expect to be lulled to sleep, with even worse self-gratifying conversation over dinner to follow.
In Bruges, thankfully, plays those frustrations against the audience, reaching for the next, providing we haven’t gotten there already, level of post-modernism: the post-modernist post-modernist thriller, the B movie that scores points on the B movie that pretends to score points on the B movie in hopes of being an A movie. The picture isn’t really about anything, and it has a rigid cross the T’s, dot the i’s irony that tips one off to McDonagh’s theatre background, but it’s also appealingly woolly and squirrelly, you know where it’s ultimately going, but you never know where each individual divorced from the narrative scene is headed. McDonagh takes several stock in the genre moments (the meet cute, the jealous boyfriend, the hit, the final standoff) and shakes them up and lets them loose in directions that are wilder and less polite than usual. In Bruges, in short, reminds you of why you fell for genre movies to begin with, before the inevitable repetition born of seeing too many of them set in.
The film concerns two hitmen of the traditional contrast: Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is older, experienced, worn down, respectful, doughier; Ray (Colin Farrell) is young, inexperienced, electric, sexy, buzzing all over the place. The two have just completed a job that has given them unexpected trouble and, at their boss Harry’s (Ralph Fiennes) insistence, have fled to Bruges (in Belgium) where they are to lie low until Harry contacts them. Ken, distrusting of what the Bruges trip may or may not mean, takes the city in stride and appreciates what’s in front of him while it’s in front of him; Ray, a canny gloss on Farrell’s backstage infamy, is an impatient wild man with an open disdain for Bruges, for quiet, for anything that doesn’t involve forward movement toward a buzz or a lay (he’s, to borrow Woody Allen’s reasoning from Annie Hall, a shark, only of the party variety).
The pair’s bickering, over tourism, drinking, and fucking, constitutes the entirety of the picture’s first act, and a large portion of the second: its an Odd Couple scenario, a gifted writer’s opportunity to, in addition to the genre tweaking listed above, riff on the glib self-congratulation that can be a part of sight seeing, or seeing an art film that primarily concerns itself with sight seeing. We’ve be down the bad guy ironically concerned with frivolous things highway before (Tarantino has made it practically kabuki by now) but McDonagh’s dialogue has a non-sequitur strangeness that’s intensely enjoyable, and the performances are terrific.
Brendan Gleeson is ideal for the kind of tonal tightropes that McDonagh has him walk here; as he’s a contradiction of the best sense himself. Gleeson is big, intimidating, a “tough guy” with a jolting vulnerability that’s informed by a precise intelligence and awareness. Gleeson imbues In Bruges with a pathos that, surprisingly (and this is a testament to the picture’s mood ring tonal durability) doesn’t overwhelm it; his big, open face softens and grounds the picture.
Farrell, a good actor who continually traps himself playing troubled artists’ idea of the Icon, is revelatory here: the fleeting charge of his supporting performance in Minority Report topped and sustained for the entirety of this picture. Farrell’s Ray is trickier than initial appearances may reveal: he’s entrusted to carry both the film’s “morality” and comic charge, no mean feat, but Farrell lets go, it’s a rare self-amused performance that’s audience inclusive. Farrell zigzags his eyes, twists himself in knots, punches people out, and dares everyone, including us, to reign him in. It’s a testament to McDonagh and Farell’s will that Ray, above it all, remains likable.
The picture’s final third is the only portion that carries a whiff of obligation. The Harry character, while funny and well timed by Fiennes, is derivative, warmed over Ben Kingsley from Sexy Beast. McDonagh’s imagination also disappointingly fails him, after initial promise, in the girl department. Ray’s relationship with a sexy drug dealer, Chloë (Clémence Poésy), is, at first, reckless and subversive of the usual googly eyes enchantment (they bring out the worst in each other as opposed to the expected opposite) but, by the end, the girl is just the girl, wincing at the appropriate moments. One expects something to happen with this young lady with the quick fingers and aloof come hither smile: a betrayal, a violent defense, a desertion, anything, but McDonagh doesn’t commit, the picture goes a little soft and tries life affirmation on for size instead, perhaps, like Ray, to atone for the horrible act of violence that occurs early in the picture.
Truthfully though, sentimentality might just be the ultimate subversion here, hard to tell with this corkscrew of a picture. I’m trying to be polite and not reveal too much, but the Farrell character would be the villain in most films, and you may feel guilty for cheering his survival a few hours after the lights have gone up and you’ve had time to consider what he actually did. I can’t tell if McDonagh has managed a supremely moral or just the opposite feat with that, but I applaud the ambition and discomfort. In Bruges is, essentially, just a trick, but it’s a memorable trick, an occasionally nasty movie with a little moxie.
★★★½
The Ruins (2008)
This probably won’t strike many as too logical, but watching The Ruins brought me back to the 1980s, a time where there were, in addition to a bounty of slasher pictures, little biological curiosity horror films that always gave me nightmares (not that I would admit that to my parents, these movies were a hard enough sell as is). Biological curiosity movies are those monster movies where the human screws with a harder to describe than usual monster (you can’t just throw an ape or dinosaur label at these nasties) and turns into said monster themselves. The Ruins particularly reminded me of a strange, disturbing at the time film called Leviathan, where an underwater crew headed by Peter Weller drank ancient, drugged vodka and turned into fish men whose malleable, intangible design seemed, to me at least, to represent a mild theft of Chris Walas’ work on the Cronenberg Fly.
And again this might not seem too logical, because no one turns into anything in The Ruins, the young people of this film get off just a little easier comparatively. But The Ruins is similarly blunt and artless; lean and unpleasant in execution. Audiences who tire of the horror film for kids approach can at least be assuaged by that fact; the victims of The Ruins die, and quite hard. And the monster, while not capable of transferring his (or her, if you wish to be polite) identity to others, is invasive in other, at times unsettling, ways. The film, at its best, taps into one of those primal pressure points that can inspire sweat and insecurity at night: a festering something under the skin: the fear that you might pick up an unheard of malady while strolling through the woods one day.
On its own terms, The Ruins works, unfortunately though, I’ve read the book, so I’m inclined to introduce my own terms to the negotiations. The book and the script were written by Scott B. Smith of A Simple Plan, and in the book it was clear that Smith was trying to instill in the horror genre a bit of the character that made Plan so potent. The book built slowly, artfully, to a group disintegration that was unusually convincing for the genre. While they tend to be weak on characterization, the film of The Ruins could have used a bit of the slow wind of Carpenter’s The Thing or The Descent. The director here, Carter Smith, is choppy and matter of fact, intent on getting us atop the titular structure as fast as editing will allow. The misdirection of the book is still accounted for but considerably less elegant. The book leads us to believe that a Predator is about, only to sucker punch us with something more frighteningly banal, the film tips its hat a little early.
The characters, embodied by Jena Malone, Jonathan Tucker, Shawn Ashmore, and Laura Ramsey, remain surprisingly unsentimental though, and it’s in this department that the film scores its modest points. The most haunting death in the book, a self-mutilation, remains unshakably icky, but one can’t help but feel that it’s in the service of not too much. I don’t normally play the often unfair, generally irritating “but this isn’t like in the novel” game, but The Ruins was clearly conceived in cinematic terms to begin with, and promised a pop thriller that could’ve been in line with Jaws or The Silence of the Lambs, instead we got something closer to Jaws 2 (though better than that); not bad, scratches the itch, but that’s partially my issue with the film, there’s no itch left to ponder at night, when the things should really be eating at you.
★★½
Stop-Loss (2008)
Stop-Loss, regardless of whatever else needs to be said, has a terrific first act. Director Kimberly Peirce captures an intangible, free floating battle scarred anxiety that’s legitimate and fully felt. Peirce, as a few other critics have also noted, has a knack for wrestling a certain compromised caged animal masculinity on the screen. The Iraq veterans of Stop-Loss return to America after an ambush, and find themselves doing anything to purge that restless trigger fever that’s ping ponging within them like a ricocheting bullet. They fire guns, get hammered, get laid, and wake up the next morning without the slightest hint as to what to do next.
Peirce’s previous film was Boys Don’t Cry, and that picture had a staggering intensity, detailing a senseless, awful murder, but Peirce, and this is the mark of a major artist, didn’t let her outrage trump her empathy; her killers were allowed to be broken and confused, the killing feeling less about the victim than about some sort of blood passage that no one on either side understood. Boys Don’t Cry is an emotionally rounded, stunning picture, in league with the great true-life murder accounts, within spitting distance of In Cold Blood. Stop-Loss, at its best, details a similar, almost as convincing, emotional dislocation.
Peirce doesn’t hold the momentum in this new picture though, after about a half an hour, the titular inciting incident kicks in and brings with it a familiar formula; a melodrama that hits all the usual marks of the frustrated soldier without a cause. Brandon (Ryan Phillipe) learns that he is to return to Iraq after completing his contract anyway due to a stop-loss clause that allows for the military to extend soldiers’ contracts in a time of war. Brandon is accomplished, good looking, certainly “All American” but something snaps in him. He argues that, officially, we’re not in a time of war. The argument escalates with frightening speed, and Brandon soon finds himself on the lam, considering crossing the border to evade duty and as well as returning to the possibility that he might kill more innocent people in the name of said duty.
So, yes, Stop-Loss turns into a road picture, as well as a veteran coming to terms with the war picture, though the film both to its benefit and detriment, turns out to be less about the Iraq war than War in general. The film hinges on a conflict that’s admirably gray. Brandon’s actions are understandable, to a point, but they are also self-absorbed, and Peirce doesn’t let us forget that. Brandon’s actions take a toll on his fellow soldiers, most notably Steve (Channing Tatum) and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who feel as lost as he does and need their friend, their leader’s, support. Brandon argues that the stop-loss clause is a backdoor draft, but that comparison isn’t fair, the clause is, after all, in the contract he willingly signed.
There’s never really much doubt how the film is going to end, but Peirce’s first act builds considerable good will, and she’s too canny to ever totally squander it; the speech laden war picture clichés are side stepped (occasionally) in appealingly live wire ways. One of my favorite moments in the film, and probably one of the most truthful to pop up in this wave of Iraq pictures, happens about half-way in. Brandon is getting loaded at a dive with Steve’s girlfriend, who’s driving him to speak to a senator, and, as he’s about to launch into one of those self-righteous indignant speeches of which characters in these movies have a habit of launching into, she cuts him off, and says, simply, “let’s just get drunk.” There is nothing in In the Valley of Elah to rival those words.
There is nothing in any of the Iraq films that I’ve seen that rivals Brandon’s encounter in with Rico (Victor Rasuk), a soldier nursing severe injuries from the opening ambush who still maintains an air of (perhaps blind) let’s go over there and fuck them up patriotism. Rico does curls with his remaining arm, and sniffs the air for the beautiful woman he can tell Brandon has brought with him. Rasuk was memorable in Lords of Dogtown, but his practicality and optimism are devastating here, and has the odd effect of further discrediting our hero, who, after this episode, feels like a self-pitying prick. One of Rasuk’s final lines, about getting killed so his family can obtain legal residence in the U.S., should feel editorial, but there’s no shaking off his gleeful matter of fact delusion.
Stop-Loss’s biggest problem may be that Peirce has seemingly chosen the least interesting soldier in the squad to focus on. Phillipe is fine, delivering perhaps his strongest, most convincing lead performance after floundering in Breach last year, but it’s his friends that continue to haunt. Tommy and Steve are clichés (one is the unquestioning straight arrow, the other an alcoholic with a relationship and stability problem) but Tatum and Levitt, like Rasuk, get under the skin and play against expectations: they are quieter, livelier, more self-loathing and screwed up than the movies usually allow them to be. After two pictures it’s clear that Peirce is marvelous with actors, and she’s equally confident playing in the usually vanilla true life wannabe profound sandbox, she finds the humanity in old notes and conventions, and shakes them up and reminds us why we listened to them so much to begin with. Stop-Loss is a minor, messy, admirable, appealing movie; an old-fashioned curiosity of war picture that has the good manners to be an engaging story.
★★★
The Bank Job (2008)
The Bank Job more or less does the job; particularly during the first half, which plays like a smuttier, more politically charged Rififi. The film has an appealing, cynical texture of just another thing for the dollar erotic manipulation. For the opening fifty minutes or so, one can be forgiven for mistakenly feeling that director Roger Donaldson and screenwriters Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement have cooked up something as entertaining as Donaldson’s best film, No Way Out.
The film, possibly by necessity, peters out in the middle though, splintering and becoming more and more convoluted at a time when the story should be landing its vicious punch lines, ultimately lacking the fatalistic bloody charge of the great heist pictures. Stir that with an obvious lack of originality and you’ve got a firm, no real problem “not bad” picture, though it tells you something about its impact that I’m struggling now, just a few days after seeing it, to remember how the damn thing ends.
The plot’s bouncing back and forth from one wronged party to another structure (like a less annoying Guy Ritchie movie) may tempt you to spend the remaining running time pondering why the film’s stars, Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows, haven’t made a larger impact on the Hollywood movie. They both have the inarguable stuff, lending The Bank Job a juice that it doesn’t have the common sense to really run with. Statham has been appearing in disreputable little genre pictures for some time, and it tells you something about his appeal that I’ve seen most all of them. Statham has that impossible to fake no bullshit I was probably a bouncer before getting into acting as a lark authority of a true old school star bad ass, imbuing even the dumbest of situations and dialogue with a wonderful grit and resignation. I wouldn’t suggest watching the dreadful London, even for him, but Statham’s presence occasionally allows you to forget that picture’s banality and unpleasantness.
I’m sorry to admit that I did largely forget about Burrows since catching her in Deep Blue Sea (I missed her Figgis pictures), though I remember her resurfacing last year in Reign Over Me and lending a thankless male masturbatory fantasy a palpable vulnerable danger, we feel as if director Mike Binder is cutting away from a decent erotic thriller in favor of yet another one of Adam Sandler’s attempts to prove that he can play the castrated frat boy just as well as the psychotic one. That movie is awful; one of the more irritating I caught last year, but Burrows’ impression is lasting. And, if I may be allowed one male indulgence, she is incredibly, nearly supernaturally, beautiful. One would rob a bank, a yacht, perhaps even the White House, to curry favor with this woman.
It would also be unfortunate to forget David Suchet’s performance as a porn king, one of the more dangerous people the titular heist pisses off, though it’s a mark of the film’s disappointing lack of focus that the extent of his rampage is unclear. One may accuse me of being intolerant of ambiguity, but occasionally cluttered filmmaking has to be called cluttered filmmaking. The Bank Job is a decent night at the movies, but that’s kinda the problem, decent should be the last word to occur to one when describing a heist film.
★★★
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
