Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
Hellboy II is loose, confident and surprisingly-purely-delightful: one of those pictures that occasionally threatens to tarnish the bad name of sequels. Essentially, when you really get down to it, the picture is the movie you longed for while watching the original-which was stranded between personal kinks and impersonal obligation to be all things X-Men to all people (inevitably canceling itself out in the process). Hellboy II doesn’t add up to much-the plot alternates between derivative (resurrection, baby, etc, etc) and non-existent. But it’s an empowering movie-nothing. The picture is monster vaudeville-and it has-most importantly-a tasty, easy-going tone. This is sugar on sugar, and I confessed that I loved most every minute of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Some will probably dispute this, but this may be, truly, the picture the Mexican wizard Guillermo Del Toro has always wanted to make-this is the film that drives his hidden, deep down, insecure-gifted-dork’s dreams. The fleeting reference to Bride of Frankenstein isn’t accidental-this picture represents a similar departure in tone from its original, but it even more honestly recalls the difference between Ghostbusters and the more lackadaisical Ghostbusters II. The effects are fine, but Del Toro’s love for movie monsters and comedy bits and characters and throwaway vignettes trumps the requisites of the blockbuster and gets to something more personal and groovy-it’s all fun, no more, possibly less-but you won’t care.
Del Toro’s approach is, after several films, familiar, and it’s become clear that he shares with the old Tim Burton, another obsessive maestro of shadowy creepy-crawlies, a certain weakness: a fundamental inability to weave much in the way of story-his creatures are the entire show. Del Toro’s pictures are, in construction, extremely primitive, episodic and stop and start. Del Toro clearly recognizes this liability and built it into the captivating-anyway Pan’s Labyrinth; he doesn’t have Spielberg’s gift for delirious-seamless plot soars that leave you breathless yet. Del Toro’s pictures never quite take off like we hope from our great fantasies; but they work anyway out of unbridled will and id-out of his illustrator’s brilliance of imagination, out of his ability to forge new monsters out of old and make the costumed man sexy and funky and funny again. Ironically, Del Toro’s most seamless bit of storytelling is probably his least personal, the underrated kung-fu vampire blow-out Blade II.
On paper, Hellboy II is basically Blade II all over again-only warmer- with Del Toro’s character for character’s sake approach softening things. Luke Goss has returned from the Wesley Snipes picture to again assume duties as the villain, and he has essentially the same aim as Prince Nuada that he did as the pallid, heroin chic-ed Nomak in the prior picture-a desire to return his species to the glory that the humans have repeatedly denied them. The Prince is a hunkier, healthier version of Nomak-a Nomak who’s kicked the junk and gone to the gym, and received extremely effective hair care treatment. I can see why Del Toro has returned to Goss-he’s a raspy, unusual, threatening object-and he has a conviction in the material that can’t be faked or laughed off-he wants fairy tale creatures’ rights dammit, and, while Goss is on the screen, you believe little to nothing else. Goss also has chemistry with the other players that might be overlooked, his hatred for Blade and Hellboy registers, and it lends both films a little bit of authentic danger, which they desperately need. (Nuada threatens to kill Abe Sapien at one point, and you, against your knowledge of formula, nearly believe it.)
But, as effective as Goss is, this picture is about the good monsters clowning around and embracing in their inner freak. Del Toro has made a romantic-comedy for the nerds, a rare feel-good outcast fantasy. Many pictures, most Tim Burton and the first Hellboy included, cater to our self-pity bone-our secret fear that the world is rigged against our eccentricities. It’s nice then that The Golden Army drops all of that-it’s saying, whether it even knows it or not, that life goes on and even the ugly have their own pursuits which they even occasionally get to realize. It’s a give and take for everyone kinda picture-everyone gets a moment or two, and most everyone, eventually, wins a love or two. This is a very human, unforced, minor subtext but it gives this new Hellboy a lift.
Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair) are still involved, but now a bit troubled-the blazing French-kiss that ended the first movie has given way to disappointment and confusion. These two, the fire-proof man and his burning, elemental, uncontrollable woman, don’t really have much to do together; they only seem to be at odds because it would be boring if they weren’t. Perlman and Blair give it something, though it may be an unintentional something, I can’t tell. I felt for both characters the way I feel for many character actors who should be getting more work-I had a sympathy that might not have anything to do with the movie I was actually watching (Paul Giamatti has inspired similar reactions). Both characters are more poignant than they have any right to be-but there’s also a spacey humor between them that keeps things afloat and unpretentious-Perlman and Blair may be actors engulfed in makeup and CG, but they have something (which is why you don’t believe they’re drifting) that stirs your inner fantasy of discovering that weird-cute-girl reading the same comics as you.
Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, in outfit, and also filling in for David Hyde-Pierce’s vocals), our endangered fish-man, (he suggests The Creature from the Black Lagoon crossed with an iguana), also finds love in this picture, with Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), Nuada’s identical twin. This conflict isn’t brought to much fruition either, but Abe gets two of my favorite moments in the picture, a meet-cute with the Princess where she questions his name (Abe, in a bit of self-deflation, acknowledges the ridiculousness of it) and a betrayal that, blinded by love and loneliness and heartbreak, he can’t help but make. Abe was unfortunately sidelined in the first film, and his expanded role here underlines what’s so appealingly flim-flammy about this picture. We also have some sort of vaporous creature called Johann Krauss that resides in what appears to be an old deep-sea diving suit, voiced by Seth McFarlane of the television show Family Guy in an inflection that I’m assuming is meant to recall Col. Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. We also have Jeffery Tambor returning, in yet another role that’s been thankfully expanded since the first adventure.
You may think me haphazard, all over the place-highlighting random bits and performances with no particular rhyme or rhythm. This is the primary problem, and appeal, of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The picture doesn’t really fulfill much of anything in the way of conventional adventure payoffs, and the episodes feed into one another awkwardly, but this is one of those films where the flaws and the merits walk side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and you get to a point where you really can’t tell the difference anymore (and you don’t want to). Hellboy II is composed of those little character moments you imagine in between the boring plot scenes of most big movies; it has an airy-just-in-it-for-the-fun quality that many of our expensive entertainments lack; so many of our B-movie four hundred million dollar enterprises are so deadly serious; and so determined by their self-doubting creators to be more than they ever could actually be. Hellboy II knows exactly what it is-it’s imaginative kids playing in the yard right after getting out of a big movie-filling in the gaps, floating on impulse-in love with giddy-crazy nonsense.
★★★
My Blueberry Nights (2008)
My Blueberry Nights, the first Wong Kar-Wai picture to be set in the United States, has been greeted with general indifference-inspiring some to mount a passionate defense of the film as an overlooked achievement. As with many pictures triggering these sorts of varying reactions, Wong’s newest falls somewhere in between. My Blueberry Nights is one of those pictures that most won’t be able to settle into, and that inability may cause its fans to overrate it in understandable retaliation. But this sort of over-reaching, the kind that greets many talented filmmakers’ troubled pictures, actually does the films in question a disservice: further convincing the people not in on it that the fans are hopelessly deluding themselves-and that these people are perhaps talking themselves into the picture’s greatness before they’ve even seen it.
My Blueberry Nights is a daydream even by the standards of its creator. The picture channels, and sustains, that inner melancholic fantasy you entertain when you sit down at a strange bar alone-that possibility, that hope, that you’ll find someone or encounter someone, or get into some sort of adventure, that will shake out those cobwebs of doubt that spin in our heads on a daily basis. My Blueberry Nights is a romantic rhapsody of why we go to bars in the first place, and why we go to movies. With only a few exceptions, the picture is set entirely in bars and cafés, and Wong is clearly drunk on American iconography-the flamboyance and weirdness isn’t plastic or calculated, but powered by a deep, intense movie love. This is why people love Wong Kar-Wai’s pictures. Wong’s films, at their best and even their not-so-best, tap into, and get away with, primal yearnings that normally sink into the maudlin. It takes a daredevil, a magician and a mad talent to pull off what seems to come naturally to Wong; like David Lynch, he is absolutely impossible to imitate without falling splat on your face. Wong’s films are true cinematic fingerprints-for better and worse.
My Blueberry Nights opens with an intoxicating immediacy and lack of clarity. Elizabeth (the singer Norah Jones) walks into Jeremy’s (Jude Law) café one night looking for a lover who left her. Elizabeth is distracted, mysterious, carried away with everything that isn’t in front of her-poetry, her vanished man, and some sort of road trip she is to take (a long way to the other side of the sidewalk). Jeremy is disconcertingly open and kind-explaining to Elizabeth the keys that rest in a bowl on the bar and the pie that always remains as his shift reaches its end. Elizabeth and Jeremy have clearly connected in the most star-struck movie way we can imagine, but Elizabeth longs for the trip that will cleanse her of that now past man.
It’s all as moony as it sounds (starting with the title metaphor) and purposefully searching in a freshman girl’s sort of way (the picture is, when the style has been pruned away, like a novel aimed at young women). Wong succeeds as well as he does through pure, reckless commitment: one smirk and the balloon would pop. Wong seduces us with his usual slow, surreal, dazed visual mastery; and with ellipses that take us from one emotional high to the next with little in the way of standard connective tissue. Throughout her cross-country journey, which includes Memphis and Las Vegas, Elizabeth encounters a number of other lost souls; most memorably David Strathairn as an alcoholic policeman who misses his unfaithful wife (Rachel Weisz). As with everyone else in the movie, Strathairn is asked to play a type, but he imbues that type with something grounded and convincingly bewildered and wannabe numb-he’s the one character hounded by a past hurt that’s just a little more than a vapor-the only character that seems to have graduated from that college lit course from which everyone else in the movie is quoting.
Strathairn’s un-anesthetized longing also brings something out in Norah Jones. Jones wouldn’t appear to be much of actress, and she doesn’t have a strong presence, but the latter is intentional, and she is used cannily by Wong. Jones wisely holds back, and lets everyone else in the movie, and in the theatres, come to her. We see why all the characters take to her so-projecting little, she’s allowed to be whatever they want-the ideal bartender. Jones is a beautiful woman, but in a soft way that encourages that male fantasy of being saved by a beautiful young woman. You see in Jones an ideal, un-forced embodiment of the prototypical female romantic lead. Jones and Strathairn mesh well, they feed on one another’s blank spots-and this lends the picture an element of give and take, of spontaneous release from the lovelorn huffing and puffing. Weisz’s performance is a mistake though, some sort of Southern caricature that’s too broad and mechanical for the empathetic, magical balance that Strathairn and Jones strike up. But Wong is too generous to even totally squander Rachel Weisz, her final moment, a paying of a debt, registers.
The chief appeals of My Blueberry Nights, its modesty, slightness and good temper, eventually irritate. The episode in Vegas near the end, featuring Natalie Portman as a gambler with daddy issues; is tedious and too familiar (Portman’s performance is also every bit as off as Weisz’s) and you begin to resent the film’s airiness, it’s refusal to amount to much of anything. Wong’s prior films could be spacey and were generally unconcerned with traditional narrative propulsion too, but they were driven by a rawer, lived-in something-they have a discord this film sorely needs. 2046, the pseudo-sequel to In the Mood for Love, is considered to be somewhat inferior to that first film, but that’s a misconception. 2046 is more ambitious and daring, and takes off from a jarring change in the Tony Leung Chiu Wai character in between films. This film has no such surprises; Wong’s preoccupation with American archetypes may have distracted him too much. My Blueberry Nights is off-and-on enchanting and memorable, it is some sort of accomplishment after all, but, by the end, we’re left with a desire we hope never to face in our deepest romantic reveries: we want out.
★★★
Chaos Theory & Sex and Death 101 (2008)
The romantic comedy is as strict an endeavor as one is likely to encounter in the theatres. Some people love the genre for that, some hate it, some love it but pretend to hate it, and so on. Critics are normally thought to be warped-over-weight-over-studied-under-secure crones whose bitterness trumps their enjoyment of the romantic comedy; but many of those adjectives have (to an extent) made me an easier sell than I care to admit. And I don’t mean Lubitsch and Capra and McCarey and Wilder and all the others anyone who has attended a 101 film course likes-I mean the movies you’re a little bashful about, the pictures that scratch that lonely itch that haunts (I hope) even the writers possessing the thickest coats of indifference and superiority.
The search for that usually elusive scratch has something to do with a few of my recent spur-of-the-moment movie choices, two of which were barely released sometime earlier this year: Chaos Theory and Sex and Death 101. Both pictures feature familiar romantic heroes: a neurotic crippled by his neuroses in Chaos, and a cocksman crippled by his cocksmanship in Sex. Both pictures begin surprisingly promisingly, and both fizzle out toward the end (one more so than the other) but both, I’m assuming, provided a little more in the way of personality than Fool’s Gold.
Chaos Theory stars Ryan Reynolds, and it sounds somewhat similar to another Reynolds release this year (Definitely, Maybe-so far unseen by me). Reynolds’ daughter is soon to be married, and her fiancée has doubt about a brief fling she had while they were in time-out. The fiancée wanders into the bar of the hotel and finds Reynolds in the corner, waiting for him with index cards and a story of his own marriage. The flashback their talk details is the majority of Chaos Theory-the tale of a controlling time-maniac who learns to go with karma and trust his beautiful wife, played by the quite beautiful Emily Mortimer.
Before it gets to the usual-the theory of the title if we wish to be cute; Chaos Theory packs a surprising amount of chaos. The surprise of the specific plot wrinkles is half the battle; but the picture allows itself to get messier-without really backing out-than I expected. Ryan Reynolds, who I’ve been rooting for now for some time, comes through in a performance that’s charismatic and human-the mugging is turned on simmer-which allows it to be funnier when it still occasionally surfaces (as with the fiancée in the beginning). Chaos Theory is one of those rare pictures nowadays that’s actually too short (it’s 85 minutes, and doesn’t really have a second act) and there’s a plot hole (the fiancée walks away knowing something we wonder if even the daughter knows) but the film, partially because you actually believe a little of its despair, gets to you. The inevitable wedding at the end works-you feel those gushy things you feel at a friend’s wedding but think you’re above.
Sex and Death 101 thinks its above quite a bit too-it’s been written and directed by Daniel Waters, the wannabe devilish screenwriter of the bafflingly overrated Heathers and the equally underrated Batman Returns. I enjoyed Sex and Death 101 quite a bit more than Heathers-it doesn’t have a ridiculous Jack Nicholson impersonation to wade through; and for an hour it has a refreshing cynicism that appears to be digging into the little cracks of loathing that open up between sexual tyrannosaurs and their mates; but then the picture, like Heathers, buys jarringly and disappointingly into its own bullshit. The picture initially bucks at the ways people rationalize sleeping or not sleeping with or marrying one another-then magically validates those rationalizations.
There’s also an irredeemably ridiculous-bordering on offensive (if it were more effective) subtext: that pussy hounds and serial killers exist on about the same plane of moral awareness-and are curable by the same Oprah intervention. That could be quite astute as a joke of self-actualization as ultimate cleanser of all guilt and responsibility, but it’s played straight (just like the youth pandering slop of the Heathers finale). We can tell Waters senses his problem-because he keeps further and further softening the blow-to the point of the film’s non-existence. One must give Simon Baker credit for effectively embodying a role of near impossible sympathy though; and Winona Ryder, one of the most endearing eccentrics of the 1980s, still has something. Someone needs to let her freak flag fly-and bring weirdness to a genre that desperately needs it.
Chaos Theory: ★★★
Sex and Death 101: ★★½
Shotgun Stories (2008)
It’s a common claim that the American movies made since the 1970s ended have yet to equal that generation’s pictures’ power and unrest and exhilarating defection from conventional form. That statement might err a tad on the broad, but I’m willing to accept the general notion; as well as the complaint that the last few generations of filmmakers have been too much the movie brats-more interested in tipping the hat to past movies than forging a new trail. Many of our best filmmakers today are guilty of this too-there’s too much self-consciousness, too much concern over being considered a great filmmaker. Every frame of most of the critically acclaimed films these days seems designed to telegraph its own brilliance to the audience (I think this was friend and occasional contributor Travis’s issue with No Country for Old Men.) Zodiac, a wonderful movie from last year, still has this insistence: a loaded-I’ve-seen-every-Kubrick-and-Pakula-movie-ever-made-fifty-times-film-geek-fever. That fever worked for Zodiac. It helped unravel Fincher’s Fight Club and Panic Room.
Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is one of the most phenomenal debut films I can immediately recall, and its success derives as much from what Nichols doesn’t do as what he does. (The restraint here, particularly for someone twenty-nine years old, is extraordinary.) There’s no affectation here, no overbearing critic-proof checklist of influences (a friend remarked that soon all critics will have to do is catalogue the old movies to which the new movies allude). Shotgun Stories is a confident picture; a picture so pared down and intuitive that it’s destined itself to under-evaluation. Some people, people used to the anti-violence movies that deliver more porny-come-on bloodshed than the supposedly pro-violence movies (the anti-violence action picture has become the most hypocritical, self-pandering subgenre in American movies) may watch Shotgun Stories, half-bored, and come away thinking they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.
The people who get on the picture’s wavelength may walk away a little dazed, amazed by what they’ve been missing from most movies (as I did). Shotgun Stories captures a festering self-rage born of failure and disappointment and impotence; and never compromises it for one of its ninety minutes. (This may be a true 9/11 picture-if Hal Ashby had been around to make one.) Shotgun Stories has a bit of the distinctly Southern slow-burn intensity of Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade-only with the Sam Shepard gothic turned way down. The Hayes boys, like Karl Childers, or Daniel Plainview or Travis Bickle, turn towards violence as a potential lancing of their boils, but Nichols takes it one step further-he doesn’t get us off. Those other pictures build and build and build-and eventually work themselves up to some startling catharsis. The violence here, almost all of which is entirely off-screen, is awkward, conventionally disappointing, and carrying a brilliant side-effect: this refusal to purge takes us straight into the Hayes’ heads without pyrotechnics as a relief or distraction or convenient object of distance-we’re right by the Hayes’ and plugged into their itchy, disjointed restlessness (watch how Nichols uses the entire screen and how he gets you to dread every oncoming car). This is a rare, mature, infinitely more terrifying variety of suspense.
Shotgun Stories takes off from its leading man, Michael Shannon, that strange charismatic presence who’s probably best known for his turn opposite Ashley Judd in William Friedkin’s effective Bug. Shannon also nearly, briefly, stole all the other actors’ thunder in last year’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. It was obvious from Bug that Shannon was talented, but I’m not sure I was ready for his Son Hayes, at least not this soon in his emerging film career. Shannon’s discipline shaded a potential one dimensional wacky in Bug, but here he reaches a newer plane of dialed-down ache. Shannon is one of those actors, who can, and it’s nearly impossible to quantify, show you their thought process; he invites you in, as Kael used to say about certain actors. Shannon is handsome in an unconventional-alien way, and he has a way of appearing to be a found object regardless of the context of the film at hand.
Shannon is playing, on paper, a Hollywood favorite-the tortured man of few words with daddy and machismo issues. But it feels, and this is the mark of a major actor, totally new as you’re watching it. This probably has something to do with the picture’s surprising sense of humor. It’s not a humor of superiority, as many pictures set in the South have a habit of indulging in, but a humor of blitzed-bruised humanity. Son and his brothers, Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon), sit on a deserted street corner and one says “this sure is a dead town.” One of the others says it’s like they own it. Another says if he owned it he’d sell it. You laugh at this-but it’s a snowball of a laugh-a little something that gathers weight and force. All of the actors are effective and eerily appropriate for their roles, but it’s Shannon’s Son that unifies the picture. There’s a surprising intelligence and wounded romanticism floating around in Son-both of which remain largely squandered (which is where the rage springs from). As you gather all of this you find yourself authentically, against your instincts, liking Son. (If we wish to continue to belabor the 1970s references, Shannon would appear to be, in one person, both sides of the Al Pacino-John Cazale team-up that occurred in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon. Shannon has Pacino’s disconcerting capacity for ruthlessness and Cazale’s baby-faced vulnerability.)
That snowball, as snowballs are wont to do, continues rolling off course-this is one of those pictures of appalling inevitability. Shotgun Stories, after several vignettes that establish, without hammering, the Hayes’ unspoken, barely-understood-even-by-them misery, finds its proper start at the Hayes’ father’s funeral. The Hayes’ mother tells them he’s died. (I won’t ruin how she tells them, or what time she tells them the funeral is to take place.) And the brothers appear at the funeral to voice what they see as a proper accounting of the father who left them and started an entirely new family-four other young men who also share the Hayes name. What happens at the funeral (it has a shocking gravity-particularly because of Nichols’ and Shannon’s refusal to overplay) rekindles an old hatred between the two Hayes broods.
I don’t want to say too much more. Shotgun Stories is a picture that you need to see devoid of my going over every scene, but the ending (no specifics, at least at this point) must be mentioned. The picture, after clearly setting us up for another fatalistic showdown-again undermines us. Boy, the doughier, least ambitious Hayes, makes a choice at the climax-a leap of faith and love and lasting courage, that punctures the nihilism we brace ourselves (and even partially hope) for. Boy, bucking the tide of man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do perversion that dominates more than just a small town’s way of thinking, makes a leap that leads to a final image of pathetic regret laced with a wee bit of hope. Boy embraces a kinder, truer, male obligation-a plea for a right to lay down the gun or sword or missile; a right to expect something more than has ever before been available. Shotgun Stories also clarified why I think I loved WALL-E so much; after so many we’re-going-to-hell films, it’s braver to point not to the wreckage, but to what should, but probably won’t ever, lay beyond it.
★★★★
Cassandra’s Dream (2008)
It has been a few weeks since I watched Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream, and I didn’t take notes, so please forgive me if I forget which esteemed thinkers were dropped in the name of self-justification; in the service of apologizing for a continued interest in B-movie tropes (Match Point made an in-joke of this tendency). I have a continued interest in B-movie tropes myself, and I probably even share with Allen a certain shame of this preoccupation, but one either has to embrace one’s loves or move on-something we thought Allen had grappled with thirty years ago. Allen’s frequent world, a Godless, corrupt place where amorality reigns and love is illusory, used to be an exhilarating tonic to the false, sun-up platitudes of most mainstream pictures. Woody Allen used to be bracing and frank; he used to be one of sharpest, most virtuosic, just simply funny, deflators of pretense working in the cinema.
Then Allen decided he was supposed to grow (and visually he has), and he, for the most part, became embarrassed of his wild-id. Match Point was heralded as a comeback, and it has a force-but it’s a remake of a not bad but rigged picture that hasn’t held up that well (Crimes and Misdemeanors). Match Point is a more successful picture than Crimes and Misdemeanors, because Allen’s head was at least partially in his crotch while making it, but it’s, thematically, the same-indulging in Allen fashion parade cynicism. Match Point is still novel though-it’s shockingly erotic (Allen again playing your preconceptions of his films against you), with a clever, nasty twist-ending. The performances vary somewhat, but Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Mathew Goode are terrific-shifty, funny, entitled, and greedy, with hair-trigger timing. Match Point is, above everything-a good time, a black exhilaration; Woody Allen perhaps acknowledging his sour-puss predictability and having a little fun with it-indulging his inner Fatal Attraction (without that movie’s loathsome cowardice).
Cassandra’s Dream is consciously similar to Match Point. There’s the same inevitable fatalism, the same fixation on rot in high places, the same noir trappings. But the juice has been dried out-Cassandra’s Dream could be Match Point as jerky. The dialogue is plastic and expository (Myers and Goode covered that up in Match Point, though Johansson had less luck), and the scenes that one expects in these type of films, the scenes that carry the primary dramatic thrust (the murder scenes), have been pointedly omitted. This is not a failure of Allen’s, but clearly part of the design. Cassandra’s Dream isn’t interested in “thrilling” but in reveling in the same state of twitchy, blossoming guilt that faced Martin Landau in Misdemeanors.
The problem is that Allen would appear to have nothing interesting left to say about guilt-he’s returned to the territory, not out of throbbing concern, but out of neurotic habit. (Guilt is to Allen what The Sorrow and the Pity was to Alvy Singer.) And there’s nothing at stake-Allen’s pessimism tips us off and numbs us from the start-there’s no shock-no slow-dawning horror. (This picture plays like a reaction to Match Point in more ways than one-one can’t help but feel that Allen thought he got his hands too dirty in that picture. It wasn’t high-brow and clean enough for him. Too many dirty thrills-the violence is too immediate and personal-too sickening.) The crime here is a proposition made by a corrupt uncle to his two nephews; that, if carried out, will bail all three of them out of their potential financial ruin. The uncle is Tom Wilkinson; the nephews are Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor. The casting is the reason to see the movie.
Farrell and McGregor aren’t given roles here as substantial as Myers and Goode, but they are nearly as effective, and Allen, wisely, casts counter to our instincts. This gimmick is about the only thing going on in the movie. Farrell is the brother crippled by guilt: he senses their souls’ erosion as they buy into Wilkinson’s chilling self-serving rational. Farrell’s suffering here plays as the other side of his work in In Bruges. Farrell, stranded in most pictures prior to 2008, is beginning to find roles that exploit his contradictory-cocksure-inner-fire. Prior movies couldn’t get past Farrell’s looks-they tried to elevate him to Movie God, only to largely render themselves (and him) forgettable. These new roles also take into account the fact that Farrell is not a very large man, and poignantly exploit that. Farrell twitches and bends and moves franticly back and forth-conveying the weight of something pushing him further and further in. Farrell tests McGregor’s character here, tempting McGregor to consider a direction he didn’t think he had in him, and Farrell’s vulnerability lends the film a hint of that sickening horror that Allen seems desperate to avoid. Farrell makes McGregor, who’s also as good as I’ve seen in years, even better.
Allen’s approach isn’t entirely bogus-the flip, offhand presentation of the murder-for-hire is chilling, and puts us on McGregor’s business-just-business wavelength. The picture’s contrary, elusive stubbornness does have a certain pull-the ending is also a major intentional anti-climax, and, while you feel cheated, there’s a certain random forgettable they-were-just-two-more-guys-with-a-plan hopelessness to it that authentically haunts. But how many times are we supposed to enjoy drinking from this well? Has Allen totally forgotten the happy surprise of the finale of Hannah and Her Sisters? Or, more recently, the wounded, delicate Sweet and Lowdown, the best picture Allen’s made in the last ten years? Cassandra’s Dream is another faux-tragedy, but the real tragedy is watching a Master filmmaker underrate himself.
★★½
WALL-E (2008)
WALL-E is probably what most movie lovers pictured (and hoped for) when Steven Spielberg announced he was going to take on Stanley Kubrick’s long gestating Artificial Intelligence. The possibility of Kubrick’s controlled-chilly-distrustful sensibility mingling with Spielberg’s pop-genius-empathy was too rich for it to be anything other than troubled and disappointing. A.I. is a fascinating picture, and a powerful one-but that power comes partially from the friction of watching a misguided picture try to take hold. A.I. lacked Spielberg’s flair and confidence-it’s yet another of his apologies for being entertaining and profitable for so long; and also, less surprisingly, lacked Kubrick’s dry-comic ambiguity, that charge that comes from his elitist scold-his mastery of the triviality of the damned. A.I. was, in short, a summation of two master filmmakers’ weaknesses. What many of us wanted from A.I., whether it was C.C. (Cinephilically Correct) or not, was for Spielberg to return to the blissful wish-fulfillment fantasies of the late 1970s-early 1980s, to the pictures that had a sense of mystery and fullness-his pop miracles.
WALL-E promises, and just may be, that sort of pop wonder. The picture’s beginning gives us Earth hundreds of years in the future-an Earth that has finally succumbed to our distinctly American self-absorption-magic-bullet-quick-fix-pass-the-buck-supersize-my-fries entitlement. (WALL-E doesn’t acknowledge other national ideologies; this is a purely in-house reaction.) Earth is a tattered shambles: a ruined, still oddly beautiful series of cities of garbage; hopelessly tended to by one remaining robot, Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class), an achingly small little contraption who clearly doesn’t grasp the impossibility of his aim. Wall-E, a love-child of E.T. and Johnny Five, scoops trash up into his belly, cubes it like a miniature crushed car, and spits it out-adding it to a column that will eventually yield yet another skyscraper of debris.
Summer films have become so hectic, so joyless, so overstuffed with incident and McGuffin, that you may find yourself quietly floored by WALL-E, particularly the beginning. The film’s resemblance to Kubrick, even counting the satire of the later acts, is superficial-a few jokes here and there and little more. WALL-E is a lotta Spielberg, a little Chaplin, a little Tati, but I’m shocked, and pleased, to write that the picture most clearly recalls the delicacy, patience and wit of Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedies, particularly The Shop Around the Corner (remade, awfully, as You’ve Got Mail).
This picture approaches the romance that develops between Wall-E and Eve, (Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), a robot monitoring Earth’s progress towards inhabitability (she looks like a storm-trooper crossed with a Mac computer), with a Lubitschian grace and interest in minute gestures that speak volumes. The robots, one a labored little scuttle-bug hundreds of years in age, the other a sleek, armed new thing, play out a variation of the classic situation where a man is hopelessly enthralled with someone leagues above him. Eve, initially thinking Wall-E a menace, fires lasers at him until his gentleness, and complete lack of pretense, win her.
Robots in love. It sounds like kitsch, and could be, and, I’m sure, has been. Director Andrew Stanton understands the strength of the premise though, which is that you can go elemental. Robots aren’t human (obviously), and don’t have humans’ quirks and intangible hang-ups, so they can be allowed to stand for pure love without seeming mawkish. (The picture is remarkably, with only a few exceptions, un-cute.) With robots we can believe what we always want to believe in human romances without talking ourselves out of it and breaking the spell. The robots simply are, and that plain subtext-free way of being is allowed to be poetic here. There’s a scene early in Wall-E and Eve’s courtship where Wall-E shows her the various gadgets that he’s kept from the rubbish, unable to let go. We’ve already seen Wall-E’s collection, and his idea of what these objects are, but Eve, of greater power and knowledge, actually understands the use of the some of the knickknacks. She holds a lighter and produces fire; she holds Wall-E’s light bulb and produces light. This is among the most moving scenes in the film, because Stanton and the Pixar team have found, in pop-movie terms, an analogy for how we hope to discover ourselves in our lovers. The opening half of WALL-E is a lean, classical, melancholy daydream-a parable of finding something wonderful amidst an unrelentingly banal nightmare. Wall-E is, really, when it comes down to it, an indomitable working class stiff.
Then the picture takes us to space and to the future humans, who’ve become a surprisingly disgusting parody of our current ravenous addiction to techno-consumerism. At this point, around the halfway mark, WALL-E becomes considerably more conventional-it’s sharp and funny and sprightly, but that first half haunts the second half in a way that isn’t entirely beneficial. The picture is preaching against the ravages of Earth, but you find yourself ironically missing the ravaged Earth (this is somewhat intentional)-and missing the romance that was beautifully unencumbered by plot mechanics. Pixar breaks through in the opening passages, achieving the quiet, nearly existential power they’ve been flirting with for some time (most memorably, until now, in Toy Story 2).
The second half is simply a damn good Pixar movie (I’m risking ingratitude) and perhaps that opening isn’t possible to sustain, but I’m not so sure. There are still many moments even here that come through though: a kiss, a “dance” in space, as well as the humans’ discovery of fleeting, fleshy pleasures. Jeff Garlin eventually turns up as a Captain, and sketches an unexpectedly moving characterization of befuddled loss. And there’s the ending. The ending is a pure, authentic, cleansing, stunner. Wall-E and Eve remind one of the myth of the bumblebee: an insect that isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but, well, does anyway. Wall-E and Eve aren’t supposed to yearn, to care, to crave, but someone-thankfully-forgot to tell them.
★★★½
Be Kind Rewind (2008)
Making movies is one of our society’s real, tangible magics (assuming magic can be real and tangible and still be magic-that might actually completely contradict the definition of the word). For that, everyone, regardless of their level of devotion to the medium, is incapable of not participating in a movie if given the chance. To be in a movie, whether it’s an MGM musical or a handmade backyard epic; is to draw for a golden straw. Be Kind Rewind (taking off, I assume, from the true story of several children who spent their formative years remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot; it was released in some theatres as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation) is a tribute to our need for something otherworldly, and undeniably ours, as we face a society that continues to sink deeper into cooperate-sanctioned-group-fuck. Be Kind Rewind is, yes, a tribute to the imagination, a genre that has a habit of being the least imaginative on the block.
The picture was written and directed by Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and many startling music videos. Your reaction to Gondry’s name is a fair indicator of how far you’ll buy into Be Kind Rewind. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a powerful pop-existential-sci-fi head trip, in part because it wedded Gondry’s inventive, playful, sometimes downright ghostly imagery to something that was authentically wounded and real-the picture was screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s working out of his intellectualized-book-movie-television-influenced view of the battle of the sexes. If two people can’t ever, truly, penetrate one other, give themselves over to one another, trust one another, then how are we not doomed to loneliness? The answer, poignantly, was to drop all pretenses and fencing and scoop those messy tingly things up and hug them and go running down the beach screaming full-tilt like a lunatic. Live; as opposed to cowardly rationalizing your pleasure away. This sounds like “seize the day” treacle, and it easily could have been, but Kaufman’s exploration was moving and human, in part, because he doesn’t play the part of lecturer or even the part of the “great artist”; he’s not hovering above it all, he’s right there in the bar with a drink with the rest of us. (It’s a young Woody Allen-sci-fi movie.)
I go on about Kaufman because, without Kaufman, Gondry is a bit of a problem. Watching The Science of Sleep (and portions of Be Kind Rewind) is akin to being trapped in one of Jim Carrey’s more nightmarish childhood episodes in Eternal. Trapped is most certainly the word. Gondry’s visuals can be wizardly, and they’ve been celebrated as so, but can we also admit that the effects also have a habit of being suffocating and ugly: all self-conscious whimsy with little in the way of human current? Gondry is a clever, intelligent man, and he most likely recognizes his shortcomings as a writer-because he builds those handicaps into his stories. Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind are supposed to be chaotic and amateurish and insufferable! It’s empathy you see.
I just about hated Science of Sleep, primarily because I couldn’t forgive that one, final, dash of kinda reality (it’s really hypocrisy). The ending is a bit like watching a Skinamax movie that suddenly, just as you’re getting to the reason you’ve suffered through the “exposition”, blacks out and morphs into one those sermons they televise on Sunday mornings. I can tell what some of you are thinking: that Science of Sleep’s ending was “uncompromising”. It’s also a cheat. The picture builds and builds towards a great bursting leap of imagination, a romance amongst the construction papered stars, only to reveal the lead to be even more of a self-absorbed, fanatical prick than we suspected. The ending is effective, but it’s also canned, cruel emotion; and the picture preceding that ending isn’t strong enough to support it.
Be Kind Rewind doesn’t cheat us like that-this one is more amiable and plays fair-it’s a mildly better movie that’s much more enjoyable. The picture has its neat, homemade effects, and it has some very likable actors clowning around and that’s about it. The first act is a chore: the cast talks over one another in an effort to establish a screwball tone that never gels, and instead achieves a mild incoherence. Then Jack Black gets magnetized (in a funny bit) and erases all the videotapes of a small mom-and-pop video store in the process, which sends him and video clerk Mos Def scurrying to replace the tapes before the owner, played by Danny Glover, returns.
Unable to replace the tapes (no one, with the exception of the store’s three or four customers, uses them anymore) Mos Def and Jack Black go about remaking the pictures using whatever they have at their disposal. These moments of recreation (or “sweding”), which include Robocop, Ghostbusters, and Driving Miss Daisy, are dizzy and magical; tapping right in, gracefully; to that sense of giddy-play we felt when we first fell for the movies. Be Kind Rewind, in general, has a sense of folksy-silent-1980s movie camaraderie that’s bullshit (it reminded me a little of Spielberg’s Twilight Zone: The Movie segment) but comforting. Gondry (thankfully) ultimately doesn’t have Spielberg’s 1980s heavy-hand here though; his legitimate enchantment with the in-camera effects and gadgets dries that out. Gondry’s inability to stick with a story bails him out too; he’s too preoccupied to get too bogged down in the mechanics of the clichés he’s reveling in. A Ghostbusters alum turns up late inning to halt the homemade movies (which are becoming profitable) and, sighing, I thought, “Oh no, this thing’s going to court.” It doesn’t, because Gondry doesn’t care anymore about that than you do.
You should probably see the picture once. Beyond the sporadic movie scenes, there is also the charming cast. Jack Black and Mos Def are an able team, and not nearly as sentimental as you may be expecting (racial tension is acknowledged). Def and Black have a sing-song give and take, the cool and collected versus the deranged id, they click-it feels right. Melonie Diaz, as a laundry girl the guys recruit, is spunky and sexy, with an off-kilter looniness that’s unforced-this is the girl you wish for in expensive fascist romances. She has a scene with Def, that I won’t ruin, that suggests the flakey-romance we hoped for in Science of Sleep. Mia Farrow also appears in a few scenes (she looks terrific) and reminds us of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which could have very well been another of Gondry’s influences here. Farrow’s voice has gotten even softer and slyer (or maybe I just miss her) and her largely long absence from the movies (she was scarier in The Omen remake than the movie deserved) is a far more effective reminder of the movies’ increasing calculated plasticity than Gondry’s more overt protests. Danny Glover functions as a similarly stirring found object here, though I didn’t much care for his stacked-deck past musician subplot.
Be Kind Rewind is one of those mixed-frustrating pictures that, perhaps unintentionally (though I’m not sure), inspires a guilt-trip. Everything about the picture’s theme is inarguable (maybe too inarguable) so, as a movie fan, you’re going to feel a little hesitant about not enjoying it more. The 1980s kid-movie nostalgia. The anti-cooperate fill in the blank. The love of creation. We’re all in favor of all of those things. But Gondry appears to be conflicted-and insecure. Gondry trusted his inventions too much in Science of Sleep; he doesn’t trust them enough in Be Kind Rewind. This new picture is shapeless and sloppy, sort of boring, it’s a restless unwieldy thing that has little to do in between the movie-making set pieces, so why not devote the film to those set pieces? They illustrate Gondry’s tribute, his point. The rest is just the filler that Def and Black would immediately scrap upon remaking.
★★½
Payday (1973)
Payday is one of those pictures that might play better now than it did in 1973; as a retort to the continued wave of movies that pretend to be about various music stars, or the generic life of a star, but are actually about indulging in our personal wishes to be rich and famous. Payday is the perfect, the only, title for this picture; an acknowledgment of an undercurrent we (or I) nearly always imagine as we (or I) digest all the usual encouragement clichés of most musical movies. Almost Famous, Ray and Walk the Line are a few such movies; downplaying drugged, pilled, boozed-up milieus as utopias of self-actualization, while managing to keep in mind what the screenwriters’ manuals say about “likeable heroes”. The creation of art amidst these inner-outer chaotic lifestyles, or the possibility of achieving some sort of personal redemption with this art, is nearly always left unexplored. And that can nag.
The conflict is that I, to varying degrees, like most of these movies. Almost Famous floats on a wishful thinking cloud. Director Cameron Crowe seems to be acknowledging that, yes, he lived those years with the Allmans and Zeppelin, but what he really always sought was to disappear into a Billy Wilder or Francois Truffaut movie with a girl of his dreams who got him. There’s an unintended heartbreak to that subtext, and Almost Famous has beautiful passages, but it breaks Lester Bangs’ rules, voiced in the movie, to remain “merciless”; and that is both the best and the worst thing about the movie. Ray and Walk the Line are star-vehicles, and the various stars are terrific in an immediate-hold-the-screen kind of way, though a major faux pas remains: that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash somehow managed to inspire the same damn movie. Even Walk Hard, an attempted parody of these pictures, is funny, but just as hypocritical-too in love with its subjects to get to anything else.
Payday is the anything else, and this, alone, justifies its de rigueur for the 1970s glass-half-empty outlook. We need a picture that’s as confidently black as others are white. Don Carpenter, the writer, and Daryl Duke, the director, have an ambivalence towards their characters that packs a genuine force. Little subtle-haunting flourishes of observation bubble up throughout the picture on the sidelines, and they slowly accumulate to something casually devastating. Rip Torn stars as Maury Dan, a wannabe country legend who’s courting success from the fringe. People recognize Maury, and he can get laid just about whenever he wants, but he’s not yet an icon-more like an uncle you really liked at a barbeque once but can’t quite remember. Carpenter and Duke patiently dole out Dan’s nature and identity bit by bit and, about seventy minutes in, we realize that our natural-bred tendency to revere those who stand in the spotlight has been played against us-those bits revealed to be something quite foul.
Rip Torn is intuitive, confident and amazing, lacking any trace of actor editorializing. Torn finds the pleasure, the entitlement, the buzzy, self-hating damage, and still manages to make the bastard likeable and sexy without canceling any of the other shadows out. (Most actors have to compromise in some department somewhere.) This is a musical picture that recognizes that the music springs from the same place as the damage, and that they are undividable-a paradox of creation. Torn’s multi-tiered performance has another effect too: it humanizes the supporting characters (Torn is so effective, so contradictory, that we understand why the others fall for it).
The picture opens on Torn singing a song (“She’s Only a Country Girl”) during a gig, and the free-wheeling camera allows us to find him for ourselves as we also sift through the various band members, fans, hangers-on, and ladies, all destined to remain on the periphery. In a few largely dialogue-free minutes, the film establishes the world completely and organically (in league with some Altman). The dialogue, to echo the Melvin and Howard post, occasionally strives for poetry, but it’s the poetry of the cynical (the poetry of the people who hold a drink with a cigarette butt floating in it) and it works without compromising the airy, natural vibe of the picture. Trying to get a girl in bed, one of the guys exclaims, “Girl, you came here on purpose, and this here is the purpose!”
The picture isn’t a civics lesson. The encounters in Payday, even at their worst, are staged with vitality and humor. Power-plays are made over Dr. Peppers and sandwiches with or without mayo. Leagues of disgust are revealed in how hastily someone discards a piece of bubblegum. Some of the episodes (in a disc jockey’s office, or, over a dog, or, later, a woman, who is abandoned for exploding into inconvenient hurt) have that occasionally-out-of-nowhere strange tang of the real. Everyone in the cast registers. Ahna Capri, as the blonde woman left on the road, is allowed a simultaneous pain and hypocrisy: you’re repulsed by and for her in equal measures. Cliff Emmich’s disquietingly obliging driver, Michael C. Gwynne’s manager, who treats a murder as just another misstep to be sidestepped, etc., etc. By the end, Maury Dan and crew have attained something that few of these types of pictures manage: a true untidy-monster-grace.
George Carlin.
George Carlin was one of those people who inspired you to wonder “If we just listened to a little of what this guy’s saying….” Nah, I guess the world’s meant to end either way. I’m tired of reading legends’ obituaries every week.
Melvin and Howard (1980)
Capturing impotence is tricky business in the movies; as to do so is to court unintended flaccidity of narrative. Ask the overrated Carnal Knowledge or the underrated The Weather Man. There’s the issue of getting tied up in something overtly schematic; of choking the life out of your picture with a can’t-win-against-the-big-guy thesis that, regardless of validity, feels rigged and self-pitying. Melvin and Howard, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Bo Goldman’s film of a middling man stuck in indentured servitude to the myth of the “American Dream”, trumps the poor man card with repetition. Melvin Dummar’s (Paul Le Mat) failure isn’t the climax or a shock or a tragedy, it’s a constant, dependable, infuriating, comforting, given; a diaper this baby, truly, doesn’t want to outgrow. Melvin fails so often that it becomes a source of low-electric comedy; we get used to it, accept it, and move on to something of greater interest: the nature-the necessity-the ironic heroism-the sheer adventure-of delusion, specifically the very American delusion that we’re all going to one day “make it”. (We’re a country of Don Quixotes.) Melvin and Howard attains an uncompromised, compassionate, softly-melancholic-screwball tone; yet another picture that revels in Demme’s equal opportunity humanity; his belief in a flake’s unalienable right to be a flake.
The picture has a fixed lottery ending, the “American Dream” revealed yet again to be a piece of cheese that keeps the hamster’s wheel perpetually turning, but, unlike most pictures, Demme earns his pathos because he doesn’t try too hard. The warm lighting and shooting of the picture contributes, gracefully, to the energy of the characters’ defeat. (Demme favors a particular kind of loving dolly in on the characters that probably inspired certain shots in Boogie Nights.) The picture’s matter of factitude about Melvin’s eventual understanding that the courts will never accept Howard Hughes’ (Jason Robards) will is heartbreaking. Melvin, the puffy man-boy who squanders every opportunity he gets in the continued effort to quench various immediate thirsts sprung from feelings of inadequacy, grows up (kinda maybe) at the end of Melvin and Howard. Melvin drives off; appreciating his elusive night ride with the eccentric, near mythical Hughes for what it was and opting, one hopes, to move on and live his life.
Paul Le Mat is one of many actors that I wish we could’ve seen more from. Maybe it’s because his persona is so specific, so effective in certain molds, that unimaginative studio executives felt little could be done with him. Le Mat’s turn in American Graffiti is broad and sort of magical (how director George Lucas, with Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, Wolfman Jack, Candy Clarke, Charles Martin Smith, etc, manages to keep cutting to the aggressively boring Cindy Williams-Ron Howard pairing is beyond me, but that’s for another day). Le Mat brings that same blobby lack of definition to Melvin and Howard, but, again as in American Graffiti, he keeps surprising you, with sharp, off-kilter timing that keeps his character from slipping into the maudlin. Watch Melvin watch his favorite game show, bragging that he always picks the right door; this could easily too openly telegraph his pathetic disposition, too aggressively tug at the heart strings, but Le Mat dials down, without making a show of even dialing down. Le Mat appears to be, and maybe was, a found object.
Le Mat and Demme’s visions of this picture’s ungainly comedy of need are simpatico; and Mary Steenburgen is right there too; she’s, in my memory, never been better. Steenburgen, as Melvin’s eventual ex-wife, answers the phone in the middle of the night when Melvin calls to tell her of the inheritance, we see another man in the dark, his arm over her, but her face, in seconds, conjures that love that probably now itches like a phantom limb. Watch Steenburgen, a little girl who plays at being a sex kitten in a strip club, say (as if it requires no further explanation) that she likes to dance. Steenburgen is also given the dialogue that most consciously strives for poetry, and she assures that it reaches it. Fed up with Melvin (again), she says something to him in French as she leaves (again). Melvin asks about it, she says she always dreamed of being a French interpreter; he reminds her that she doesn’t speak French, she replies, through near tears, “That’s why it’s a dream.”
It’s a given that Jason Robards must disappear early on in Melvin and Howard, but his alienation haunts the picture. Robards exudes that specialty of his, a gruff disconnected man’s man intelligence that masks a surprisingly deep well of vulnerability. Melvin picks Howard up from the desert, where Howard has been sleeping after crashing his bike for an unspecified amount of time, and Melvin needles haggard, homeless-looking Howard into singing a song with him. Howard’s gradual, tentative opening up to this new, strange man is convincing and wonderful; an ideal movie fantasy of transcendent friendship and kindness. Demme confidently sells something here that’s harder to buy than a dinosaur reborn; or flying people, or whatever the physics compromise de jour may be: that we’re in this together.
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