Cloverfield (2008)

A.k.a. Godzilla vs. the Douchebags.

It's not often that a movie combines so many elements that I love with so many elements that I absolutely hate, but this is one of them. And it's frustrating to see a movie with such potential ruined by a shortage of imagination and lazy and cheap filmmaking choices.

What I like about this movie is the essential concept of a monster movie shot in that Blair Witch/United 93 style, handheld, in real time, without experts or political leaders or the usual puffery. That's why I thought United 93 was the best movie of 2006: because it successfully replicated that feeling of in-the-moment existential terror with an undercurrent of genuine compassion and humanity. Plus, it's just fun to see urban metropolises being destroyed by rampaging monsters, especially ones that look like they came from the imagination of H.P. Lovecraft, and without any real sense of closure or explanation or rationalization.

The downside is that this great concept has been turned to garbage by the filmmakers' insistence on populating the movie with spoiled, whiny, upwardly-mobile idiots whom we meet in an interminable party sequence. Once the monster attack starts, they proceed on a stalker's mission to track down an estranged girlfriend in defiance of all recognizable human behavior. Maybe this could have worked with better screenwriting, casting, performances, and direction, but I feel like the concept is rancid at its core. To go back to my comparison with United 93, or with Children of Men, those are films that succeed because they aren't solely about their principle characters or plot but rather are about the worlds in which they take place, complex universes populated by a breadth of messy, lovable humanity struggling against extreme circumstances. Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams have narrowed their focus to look only at a small, vapid group of people struggling with nothing more interesting than a high school crush.

It's just a pathetic waste of a good idea, made the more annoying by the fact that it's guaranteed to make a lot of money, and our national character gets a little more insular and self-absorbed as a result. There's just nothing genuine about this movie beyond the fanboyish, fetishistic destruction, no sense of real emotion beyond the pretense of a trite 'live every day like it's your last' message. It's a movie made by people with small hearts and smaller minds for an audience interested in sensation unburdened by significance.

PS: I also feel bad for Chris Mulkey, who was apparently considered to be so unrecognizable of an actor that he could be stuck in this movie without being distracting.

4/10

Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

(Another movie I'm late to the table with, but here you go.)

Significance is a dangerous thing, and while it's a necessary component to art, in the wrong quantity it can also be deadly. Charlie Wilson's War, for example. It has, as it's raison d'etre, the goal of providing a partial look at how America helped to support the rise of the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. All well and good, the movie follows an almost classically Hollywood structure in which a rogue is transformed into an idealist and ultimately succeeds in a David vs. Goliath manner against superior forces - in this case, both the Soviet Army and the U.S. government's own sluggishness.

The problem is that, even though this movie is well-written by Aaron Sorkin and expertly performed by a terrific cast, the inherent structure of the final product is designed to ultimately squeeze all the life out of the film in order to deliver the desired message. Charlie Wilson is an interesting character, a colorful, womanizing boozehound who yet manages to get things done out of patriotism, pragmatism, and a subtle idealism. Too bad this movie is just tangentially about him, and primarily about how his triumph in defeating the Soviets was overshadowed by his inability to find funding for foreign aid to Afghanistan after the fall of the Soviet empire. Aaron Sorkin's work seems to have focused on delivering the complex exposition required to make this story make sense and not on real thematic depth or complexity. A more interesting movie would have been about the deeper issues this movie raises about the American national condition, our clumsiness coupled with our idealism, which has been managed successfully by such other movies as The Good Shepherd or Oliver Stone's Nixon.

Anyway, Sorkin delivers some great scenes and dialogue, Hanks is his usual charming self, but Julia Roberts is miscast; her part should have been played by an older character actress. Philip Seymour Hoffman however, is terrific, shining in a supporting role in a way that his lead role in The Savages and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead didn't let him.

In the end this is a smart movie with some good scenes, but watching it I couldn't help but feel the urgency on the part of the filmmakers to rush through the movie in order to arrive at their point, which while worth making, is also not exactly a recipe for lasting art.
6/10

I Am Legend (2007)

I know that everyone saw this last month when the movie made most of its crapload of cash, but I just caught up with it on Sunday.

Basically, it's a good movie, better than I expected from the director of Constantine, except for two major elements: the bland, rubbery CGI monsters and the awkward intrusion of the same deity who so clumsily saved the world from aliens in Signs. The bulk of the movie is a pared-down, gripping creation of a post-human New York City in which the only survivors of a killer virus are Will Smith and his dog. The movie has the good sense to understand that with the right movie star, an audience will be sufficiently gripped to merely watch a character go about their unusual daily routine in extraordinary circumstances, as with Tom Hanks in Cast Away. And like that movie, what's most important in the bulk of I Am Legend is the emotion boiling underneath Will Smith's controlled exterior, the sadness and despair and loneliness. It's good to see a big, expensive Hollywood movie willing to spend most of its time with a single character and his emotions.

Unfortunately, eventually the plot has to kick in and the movie gets pretty dumb as it transitions from character drama to action modes. In Richard Matheson's original story, the bad guys were a society of vampires that Robert Neville stalked every night in a quest to restore the normal order of things. Here they're downgraded to a pack of slavering CGI albinos, who not only aren't very interesting, but they're not scary. Attention Hollywood: CGI, especially bad rubbery CGI, is never scary. Actual actors in makeup can be scary (see: the 28 Days/Weeks Later movies) and considering that so much of this movie is given over to photo-realistic CGI effects of ruined New York, it's a shame that they took the 'safe' route when it came to the monster effects.

Meanwhile, on the God front, I know that some people appreciate big mainstream movies with spiritual messages, but come on, people: the screenwriterly contrivances of this movie are pretty cheap, and I'm not a fan of confusing pattern-recognition for the existence of God. After I watched this movie I rewatched my DVD of 2006's Children of Men, which feels like a much more strongly spiritually complex and rewarding look at how we cope with the end of the world. But that was one of the best movies of that year, so it's okay for I Am Legend to be merely a good blockbuster from last year.

I Am Legend: 7/10
Children of Men: 9/10

Best Lists, part 1

I've been putting off writing a year-end list of my favorite movies of the year until I had a chance to catch up with a few more titles, but today seemed like a good day to get the ball rolling a little bit. For starters, here's a list of the ten best old movies that I saw in 2007 that I had never seen before, in chronological order:

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY (1936): This Jean Renoir film is only about 40 minutes long and unavailable on DVD, but it feels like an influential touchstone, a lyrical look at a single day in the summer on a country getaway leavened with an undercurrent of class issues and emotional weight, as only Renoir could manage.

HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO (1944): Preston Sturges could do no wrong and it's amazing that this satire on hero worship was made while the war was still in full swing.

THE BAND WAGON (1953): Not as iconic as its MGM sibling Singin' in the Rain but full of Vincente Minnelli's color and style and featuring an amazing duet between Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.

SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (1955): This is one of Bergman's early, funny films, featuring an earthy farcical love triangle amidst the typical musings on the meaninglessness of life.

JIGOKU (1960): An amazing Japanese horror film virtually screaming to be remade, in which a string of horrible characters are introduced, killed off, and then sent to hell for the movie's last third.

BECKET (1964): Great performances from Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton anchor this medieval drama of friendship and betrayal.

WHITE LINE FEVER (1975): This was the best film to be screened at Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse festival this last March and April, a blue-collar epic of truck driving and interstate corruption packed with entertainment value.

KILLER OF SHEEP (1977): A lyrical, semi-experimental look at a subject the movies typically ignore, an ordinary working-class life. Good stuff.

STROSZEK (1977): Herzog's coming-to-America drama is surreal and grounded at the same time in heartbreak and humor, I can't believe I hadn't seen this one before.

LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (1997): The original version of Rescue Dawn, and a stranger film with a broader scope, including not just Dieter Dengler's Southeast Asian adventures but his life growing up in wartorn Germany and how his life continued in America. As interesting as the same events were dramatized in Rescue Dawn, it was more fascinating to see them narrated by the man they really happened to.

Also, a pair of booby prizes to two notably bad movies I saw this year: SKIDOO (1968), Otto Preminger's acid-trip movie which desperately wants to be counter-cultural but pretty much fails; and ELVES (1990), one of the stranger post-Gremlins monster movies I've seen, featuring Dan Haggerty and a Nazi cabal. Try this on for size:

McCain on Letterman

He's pro-life, corporatist, anti-gay rights, and has all the rest of the standard Republican problems, but this is a good example of why I like John McCain better than his rivals:

The caucuses and primaries

There are many pundits who know much more about all of this than I do, so I'll keep this brief and try not to regurgitate too much of what they're all saying.

My favorite Presidential candidate has been John Edwards, who's pretty much a long-shot at this point, which is too bad. On the plus side, I would be fine to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and I think they'd both be decent, if not ideal, Presidents who would go a long ways towards rebuilding this country's sense of pride and direction after seven years of arrogance and divisiveness. Also, I think the fact that the primary season will continue on at least until the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday races is a good thing - the idea of an early coronation rubs me the wrong way, it certainly didn't help John Kerry four years ago, and I think both Clinton and Obama could use the pressures of a real primary race to improve themselves. Obama, who won his only statewide Illinois race in a cakewalk in 2004, needs more experience in running a national race and more experience in pushing back against attacks and mudslinging. Clinton needs to learn how to present herself in a way that doesn't reinforce her negative qualities. Regarding Hillary's 'choking up' moment the other day, it was probably a good idea - voters who saw it as a calculated performance weren't going to vote for her in the first place, and voters on the fence regarding her personality issues may have been given the nudge they needed to decide it was okay to vote for her after all.

Somewhere in the future, someone will make a movie about a tough female national politician similar to Hillary Clinton, and it'll be a thousand times more interesting than Commander in Chief, getting to the unique difficulties faced by powerful and ambitious women and how they're perceived in our modern world, where even Pakistan can have a female leader before America. There's something strange about the fact that a candidate's laugh and cleavage and emotional outbursts get as much attention as what they think of the trade deficit.

On the Republican side, I have mixed feelings. I'm glad to see McCain beat Mitt Romney, who I consider to be an absolute phony who'll say and do anything to win a race, and because McCain is the only Republican running who I have any respect for whatsoever - especially on issues like immigration and torture, and because he's a pragmatist instead of an ideologue. On the other hand, since McCain is probably the most electable Republican in a national race, I'd prefer for the ultimate nominee to be Romney or Huckabee, who should both be more easily beatable.

I'm also glad the focus is finally gone from the fringe candidates like Tancredo, Paul, and Kucinich. I'm not a fan of any of them.

Atonement (2007)

Director Joe Wright is an exuberant young director, but also a firm classicist, and the tension between these two modes is apparent in Atonement, for better and worse. His last film, 2005's Pride & Prejudice, was a literary adaptation rescued from staidness by an infusion of fluid steadicam usage and strong performances. It was a good match between old-fashioned material and a hungry young director.

Now in Atonement, Wright is working with a significantly more complex story from the novel by Ian McEwan, but within a similar genre - the early-20th century costume drama, instead of the 19th century costume drama. Once again, Wright gives his material a jolt of style - a feverish green dress on Keira Knightley, strong and focused cinematography from Seamus McGarvey, and the newest entry in the 'super-cool steadicam shot' contest, a lengthy romp around Dunkirk Beach surveying the assembled British Army preparing to abandon the continent on the eve of the fall of France in 1940 (take that, Alfonso Cuaron!)

The thing is - what exactly does a five-minute steadicam shot of Dunkirk have to do with an adolescent girl's overactive imagination and (later) guilty conscience? While it's a fascinating and technically superb shot, I don't see that the tableaux belongs in this movie, in the same way that the long, unbroken battlefield shots in Children of Men did, to establish the world of that movie. Wright's sense of style serves his movie in other places, especially the delicately lit, sexy-scary love scene between Knightley and James McAvoy that triggers young Briony's feverish imagination. But in other places Wright's sense of proportion, and of serving the story and its themes, are unbalanced.

This leaves us with a good, not great movie that I enjoyed but only up to a point. Add to that the ending (SPOILERS!) which has been made out to be a major plot twist but which seems to me to be fairly minor (it only changes our appreciation of one scene and the dialogue-free epilogue, right?) and we have a movie where Wright did his best but may have been outmatched by his complex source material. That said, I still look forward to his next project because any director who approaches this kind of movie with as much boldness as he has can be excused for falling a little short.

The Carrier (1988)

I have a thing for bad movies. I like to dig around through the VHS bins at video stores for titles I've never heard of that look interesting, to find movies with unexpected images, performances, juxtapositions that other, more well-behaved movies might not feature. Most of the time this means awful viewing experiences like Cannibal Campout, but every so often there'll be a movie that makes the whole process worthwhile, and such a movie is The Carrier.

Apparently shot in Michigan on a super-low budget and released on video in 1988, this one is an oddball gem, a true indie movie with a great premise. In an idyllic small town, apparently set in some idealized Capra-esque past, an outcast young man is attacked one night by a bigfoot-looking monster (what the townspeople casually refer to as "The Black Thing") in his remote shack. The creature infects Jake with a unique disease, to which he is immune: any object he touches is immediately and permanently infected, deadly to the touch. Contact with one of these objects and a person or animal immediately begins to dissolve and melt away. What this means is that fifteen minutes in, an old man is killed by a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Soon the entire town is in a panic as doors, mirrors, mailboxes, and even trees are deadly to the touch.

From this point, the movie develops in allegorical directions, but not in obvious directions. The townspeople wrap themselves in protective layers of plastic and veils, giving the movie a perverse, micro-budget Road Warrior look and perversely hiding most of the cast's faces. The town, isolated and scared, splits into two rival clans who soon are fighting over the newest valuable resource: cats, which are used to test for infectious objects. This means that there's an amazing, completely straight-faced scene where the leader of one of the warring clans, wrapped in garbage bags, screams, "CATS OR DEATH!!!" as a battle cry, and chaos ensues.

The movie obviously has an uphill battle to climb, with a tiny budget stretched out to cover a pretty ambitious storyline and a shortage of good characterizations. But the movie does have the good sense to play its absurdity with a straight face, as in the above battle scene and throughout. Another web review called it a cross between Twin Peaks and Romero's The Crazies and that's about right. For anyone interested in oddball cinema, it's a must-see. I'll try and capture some images and post them here so everyone can see how weird this little movie is.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

This one deserves its own heading. I was primed to love it and I did, but I was also surprised to find that it was less of a plot-heavy clash over land and oil rights (which the trailer had made it appear) and more of an elliptical character study of Daniel Plainview with emphasis on his personal and family life, in the persons of his son (Dillon Freasier) and half-brother (Kevin J. O'Connor, previously mostly known as the second banana in several Stephen Sommers movies). It's a terrific look at the American self-made millionaire, paranoid and scheming but capable and worthy of respect all the same - what I like to call a 'magnificent bastard' movie. The music by Jonny Greenwood (and assists from Arvo Part and Brahms) is terrific, the cinematography is excellent, and everyone else is saying it so I might as well, too: Daniel Day-Lewis is stunning as Daniel Plainview.

This movie also represents a step forward for Paul Thomas Anderson, too. I recently rewatched Boogie Nights, which I hadn't seen in several years and had always felt some lingering dissatisfaction with. Watching it this time I realized that even though the explicit subject of the movie is the porn industry in the late '70s-early '80s, the implicit subject of the movie is Anderson's own exuberance and joy at being able to make cinema, to play with what Welles called 'the best train set a boy could ever have'. And while I love movies like it, that reflect that Truffautian joy of creation, the problem is that it's a movie that's a little too exuberant for its own good. I love Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love for the same reasons, but they suffer from the same flaw in varying degrees.

In this movie, Anderson has found subject material from a pre-existing source that reflects his own personal thematic interests (the people and history of Southern California, father-son relationships) and also has forced him to hone his abilities like he never has before in the subject of a particular focussed vision, with less flash and frills and more steel underneath). It's a nice step forward and I hope this movie makes a lot of money so we don't have to wait five years for his next movie.

One question: how long did it take people to realize that Paul Dano was actually playing two characters? For me, it wasn't until the dinner scene when Eli jumps at his father. Yes, I know that's 2/3 into the movie. Oh well.
(9/10)

Holiday Review Roundup

I'll probably have more detailed write-ups of some of these but I wanted to end this posting drought with some quick mentions of the last several things I've seen.

Control is well-shot in anamorphic black and white (man, I wish more movies were shot in this format, it looks so good) and very well-acted, especially by Sam Riley as Ian Curtis, but apart from that I wasn't sure what the point of it all was. Perhaps I needed to know more about Joy Division going in and to already have an appreciation of their music and Curtis's talents, but I didn't, and the movie didn't really seem to be designed to educate an outsider like myself (a few years ago, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People left me completely uninvolved too). Take away the music and it's a simple portrait of a young guy who can't cope with professional success and relationship problems and even though Riley does a good job, the story just sort of rambles on without momentum until the obligatory sad ending. Director Anton Corbijn joins the long list of music video directors who are apparently outmatched by the needs of a feature-length narrative. (6/10)

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story isn't a very good movie but it's sporadically funny and it serves the useful purpose of pointing out that, even though they have their virtues, Ray and Walk the Line and their ilk are all kind of full of crap, with their deterministic story arcs and selective amnesia. Unfortunately, Dewey Cox is a one-note character (John C. Reilly's amiable dumb guys are good in small doses, like in Boogie or Talladega Nights, but can't support a whole movie) and Jake Kasdan's directorial abilities are strained to the limit. (5/10)

I'm a Tim Burton fan and while I liked his version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, I didn't love it. It feels rather impersonal, like Burton trying his best merely to be faithful to Sondheim rather than to make the material his own. The moments where there is a successful synthesis, like the "A Little Priest" or "By the Sea" numbers, shine in comparison to the ones that don't. Depp is fine but Helena Bonham Carter's voice is too weak for the material. Big fan of the throat-slashings and corpses landing on their heads, though. (8/10)

The first fifteen minutes of Juno are annoying as hell, the screenwriting equivalent of a Michael Bay movie - Diablo Cody is insecurely demanding that you be entertained by any means necessary, whether you like it or not, and so tosses in "shut your freakin' gob" and "homeskillet" and the hamburger phone. Thankfully after that point the movie settles down and becomes a fairly skillful crowd-pleasing comedy, which I liked for the most part. It's not particularly deep and it has some plot holes, but I think I liked it marginally better than Knocked Up, if for no other reason than because it actually had an inkling as to how the female mind works. (7/10)

More to come soon and Happy New Year's.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

One of the things I love about the modern American incarnation of Christmas is that you don't have to be Christian to enjoy it. It's sufficient to travel somewhere to visit with your family, to enjoy some homecooked meals together and give each other gifts. We could go out to a church if we felt like it (none of us wants to) or we could just stay inside with music playing.

This is why I think that, even though Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July are uniquely American holidays, that Christmas represents something purely American at the same time: the synthesis of disparate traditions into something that can be religious, or secular, spiritual or commercial, all at the same time, presided over by the secular patron saint of the season, Santa Claus, and his archangels Rudolph and Frosty. No other country in the world could have made such great non-religious Christmas movies as It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, or Bad Santa.

So in that spirit, whether you're just sitting around the house or going out to the Chinese restaurant that's open or hanging in church, here's my best to everyone and merry Christmas to all.

The Indiewire Critics Poll

This is one of my favorite year-end lists of the year, the compilation survey that used to appear in the Village Voice but nowadays is handled by Indiewire.com. This is the only critics' circle that matters, as far as I'm concerned: these are some of the smartest writers on film, bunched together with multiple ranked lists, comments, and it's all sponsored by The Bucket List (for your consideration) so they have a sense of humor, too. My favorite bits and pieces that I've noticed so far: crazy Armond White putting I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and The Brave One on his top ten list; Jonathan Rosenbaum choosing Black Book (yay!) and In the Valley of Elah (he should have known better); Southland Tales making it to #3 on Jim Hoberman's list; and the perverse presence on the list of such titles as Norbit, Zoo, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

On Bloggers and Blogging

Warning: this post contains cathartic rants. I've spent a lot of time online for the last few years and as will happen, friction has resulted. I'm no saint - I'm terribly stubborn and have a perverse tendency to insist on contact with some of the worst people online. After a perfect storm this week of online clashes, it felt like a good time to have my own personal say about certain personalities. What's interesting to me are the different personas that people choose to display online, which may or may not be accurate depictions of themselves.

First up is David Poland of Moviecitynews.com. Ever since becoming independent several years ago on his own site, Poland has developed a specific online persona: the uncorruptible White Knight of the entertainment blogosphere. While he serves a useful purpose (certainly the world of journalism can use some self-policing), he has an unfortunate tendency to ride an incredibly high horse, which wouldn't be a big deal if he wasn't also an occasional hypocrite. Today's example: this post, which I would sum up as "I know a secret, but I'm too good to tell you what it is. Have I mentioned how high my ethical standards are lately?" Dude, when you know a secret that you aren't comfortable spreading around, the appropriate thing to do is to just keep your big fat mouth shut, not advertise your self-proclaimed virtue.

Next, Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere. Wells knows that in most respects he's kind of a slug, but he does cling to an aesthetic superiority complex, which combines with a certain low-grade fascism to produce a thuggish critical viewpoint. Wells has a number of irrational hatreds for various filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, which he shamelessly exploits for site traffic on posts like this one. Mostly, though, the strangest thing about Wells is the archaic, affected lingo he likes to use, things like "ayem", "boyo", "hubba-hubba" and so on. He's a living Damon Runyon character.

Poland and Wells both fancy themselves as crusaders for moral and artistic standards in a debased world; fair enough, most of us do. Fighting this crusade like a modern-day Travis Bickle is Daniel Zelter, who trolls Wells's site with a never-ending series of snide posts targeted at those he disagrees with on political and movie-related subjects. It's a rare post from him that isn't about something that he hates, be it Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Weinstein, the Republican Party, the Arclight, living in Los Angeles, or the people who pretend to be his friends (his words, not mine). Zelter is especially frustrating to deal with because of his total lack of any sense of humor or irony. I have to assume that he has some form of Asperger's Syndrome because that's the only way to make sense of his rigid facade of obsessiveness and his total disinterest in social engagement. He also reminds me of my younger brother, except that I knew that, ultimately, my brother was just screwing with me. Zelter, I think, honestly believes all of his crap.

You'd think Hollywood megaproducer Don Murphy would have better things to do than troll movie web sites, and sometimes he does, but sometimes he doesn't. Murphy posted for a long time under the nom de blog "Spam Dooley" and picked a lot of consequence-free fights with pretty much everyone. For reasons unknown to me earlier this year he decided to attack me viciously under his own name, which was curiously honest of him. I did tell him that he was a bad producer who had only made one movie that I thought wasn't essentially garbage (Natural Born Killers, where I suspect he had little control over the final shape of the film), and I'd tell him the same to his face. Murphy's online persona is of a coked-up rageaholic, but I have to assume this is a joke on his end - I find it difficult to believe that someone as full of bile as he appears to be could have any kind of sustainable career in Hollywood. I see Murphy as the human equivalent of a bighorn sheep, ramming head-on into other people in a weird kind of alpha-male struggle for respect.

Last but not least is Hunter Tremayne, who has thankfully vanished for the last several weeks after posing as 'Ian Sinclair', a character from a clearly-horrible play that he wrote. Tremayne's persona is that of an asshole for sport. He delights in bullying people for his own enjoyment, which made it uniquely ironic that he initially went after me for my enjoyment of the Hostel movies. He's probably the single worst person out of this little group, because he has never produced anything of value to anyone else in any of his online conversations. Daniel Zelter is obtuse and ignorant but to his credit he actually thinks of himself as a good, productive person. Tremayne has never had any goal beyond his own giddy enjoyment.

So: my little rant. And now, a shoutout to those online folk who actually are genuinely interested in talking about movies in a productive and ego-free manner: Noah Forrest, Craig Kennedy, Sasha Stone, Christian Divine, Kris Tapley, Luke Y. Thompson, Matt Zoller Seitz and his teammates, "Actionman", "Wrecktum", and more. Even Josh Massey and "Mgmax", whose real name I don't know, are to be commended for their intelligence, taste, and intellectual honesty even though they're Conservatives.

So to you folks: Happy Holidays and thanks for not being assholes and sorry that this post had to exist in the first place (but I feel better).

Sincerely, Jeff McMahon

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I'm trying to cram a lot of work into this week before I go traveling for the holidays and I've hardly seen any new movies. It's annoying.

I enjoyed Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, it's a highly diverting film and well-acted all the way around. It's a good reminder that yes, Marisa Tomei actually deserved her Academy Award for My Cousin Vinny, that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney are acting legends, and a good sign that Ethan Hawke might have finally outgrown the callowness of his youth and turned into a decent character actor. Add in some fun narrative twists and it's a good night at the movies.

The thing is, I can't really join in on the 'one of the best movies of the year' train that the movie's riding to some extent right now, because I found it good but not great.

(SPOILERS) It's your standard noir outline - losers who are brothers (Hoffman and Hawke) try to score a heist but in the process muck it up - with a domestic twist, that the jewelry store they target for a hold-up is owned by their own parents and in the process Mom gets a bullet in the belly and Dad, distraught, tries to figure out who's to blame, only to discover that the culprits are closer than he thinks. Great concept, okay execution. The basic problem is that the premise is crying out for Shakespeare-level dialogue and character development but ultimately we don't really ever find out that much about what Philip Seymour Hoffman's problems are or why he hates his father so much or how it happened that Tomei would be sleeping with Hawks, so that the drama winds up underdeveloped from the get-go. On top of that, while I don't agree with Armond White that Sidney Lumet is a terrible director, I do have to agree with him that the visuals of this movie are fairly undernourished - considering that we're working with such tragic subject matter, a little more chiaroscuro would have helped, I think.

I don't want to give the idea that I disliked the movie, because I did find it entertaining and well-made, but all in all I'd say that I prefer Lumet's last film, the Brechtian courtroom drama Find Me Guilty, as a richer and weirder cinematic journey.

Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Back in 2005, Stephen King named The Squid and the Whale his favorite movie of the year and in the process called Jeff Daniels' character "an ego-driven monster who demonizes and nearly breaks his children's hearts and minds." So now Noah Baumbach gives us Nicole Kidman as the bride of the monster in his funny, abrasive new movie.

Like all great screen monsters, the brilliant thing about Kidman's Margot is that she doesn't think she's a bad person; travelling to her estranged sister's wedding to a cuddly slacker, she does what she does out of a misguided combination of well-meaning affection, obliviousness, and well-educated condescension. It's an excellent performance and a good reminder of why Kidman is such a good actress after so many clunkers. Kidman has always been too much in her own head to be a Hollywood sweetheart, like Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon, but as her career proceeds she might still be a colder Vanessa Redgrave.

Watching Margot at the Wedding is like watching a slow-motion car wreck, with Margot at the wheel (a metaphor that gets literalized towards the end of the movie) Of course, everyone that Margot comes in contact with is teetering on the verge of neurotic collapse to begin with, needing only a brief comment or two to topple. Watching a group of flawed upper-middle-class people bicker and destroy each others' lives might sound like worse torture porn than the Saw movies, but it works because of the strong performances (especially Kidman, Leigh, and Zane Pais as Kidman's son), but more importantly because Baumbach infuses the demolition derby with the kind of wry humor that you can only get from having been in these situations, realizing how awful and absurd it all is to begin with, the knowledge that ties that bind one to their family can just as easily be anchor chains dragging a person down. There's bitter truth in this movie, leavened by the comedy of experience. I liked it a lot.

Southland Tales (2007)

First things first: this movie is a colossal mess, no doubt about it. Performances are uneven, storylines are muddled, and even while paying firm attention, it feels like you've nodded off and missed a reel's worth of exposition and character development. I think it's fair to say that Richard Kelly came down with a big case of beliving-his-own-hypeitis, which has afflicted such filmmakers as the Wachowskis and Shyamalan in recent years.

That said, I enjoyed this as a sort of time capsule for where we are in AD 2007 (or 2005, when the movie was shot) and as a better Philip K. Dick movie than, say, A Scanner Darkly, which I liked but which didn't really capture Dick's trippy, radically destabilized worldview as well as this movie. My vision of cinema is one in which narrative and normal Hollywood production values are less important than ideas and cinematic virtues. I'm fine with a sloppy, crazy movie as long as it delivers emotions and sustains interesting ideas in a visual sense. In other words, I'll take this movie over a sterile mediocrity like Beowulf any time.

So what the hell is going on here? It's basically an apocalyptic vision of American life in our times: paranoid, obsessed with celebrity, skeptical of authority, ravenous for something meaningful and authentic amidst our current postmodern hall of mirrors. Ironically for Conservatives who can't get beyond the Bush-bashing in this movie, it's a movie with a heartfelt Messianic yearning, with a magical tattoo of the weeping Christ that appears on Dwayne "Don't call me The Rock" Johnson's back at the climax, a character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar named "Krysta Now", and an ending that seems to leave the future of the world in a transfigured, apocalyptic state.

All of this is to say that, whenever you can, it's a must-see. It's a movie in which a lonely Homeland Security worker demands to give a blowjob at gunpoint to the movie star played by Johnson; in which a car commercial shows SVUs fucking like beasts; in which Justin Timberlake delivers the ultimate music video performance of The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done"; in which Amy Poehler is hilarious as always as a pretentious Marxist terrorist wannabe; in which Rebekah Del Rio sings the national anthem in a reference to Mulholland Drive; and in which Nora Dunn tells John Larroquette, "No one rocks the cock like Cyndi Pinziki" after tasering him. How can you not want to see this movie?

No Country for Old Men (2007)

As requested, here's an entry for the critics' darling that seems like the current front-runner for Best Picture. I've seen it once, a few weeks ago, and liked it quite a bit - it's just about perfect in terms of suspense, performances, cinematography, the dialogue is sharp without being too self-conscious as the Coens have done from time to time, etc.

I don't know what I really think about the ending - I need to see it a second time to make sure. Thematically it certainly makes sense that the movie is bookended by Tommy Lee Jones talking about how he perceives law and order in his corner of the world and how people have changed over time. That said, the abruptness of the climax (or anticlimax if you prefer) is indeed a speed bump, a major seam that may work better in theory and in intellectual terms than in emotional, movie-watching terms. I guess what I'm saying is that it's one thing for the ending to 'make sense' but in addition it's best if the ending also feels proportional and organic to what has come before, integrated seamlessly in Aristotelian terms to the movie as a whole. A truly great film shouldn't need elaborate intellectual justifications to make sense, and I need to verify if No Country for Old Men is a truly great movie or only a very good one.

The other thing I want to talk about is one of my favorite sections of the movie, and one which also serves as the movie in a microcosm - the scene in which Josh Brolin outruns and outswims the dog. I like this a lot because it's suspenseful and it's funny at the same time - a lesser movie would have had the chasing dog be some kind of hellhound, an evil doberman or something that we're meant to be afraid of. The Coens, instead, chose a pit bull, and a pretty friendly-looking one at that - it's a good dog that just happens to have the job of chasing down those people its master deems in need of chasing. The incongruity and the dog's single-minded pursuit gives the chase an extra dimension, and the dog is just doing what it's supposed to do the same way that Anton Chigurh or Llewelyn Moss find themselves programmed into a collision course after their initial actions.

The Canterbury Tales (1972)

I haven't actually watched this Pasolini movie but I really want to after seeing this clip from its conclusion - it's insane! I'm pretty sure Pasolini himself appears at the very end as the guy closing the book. (Not safe for work.)

UPDATE 7:25 pm: Well, it was nice while it lasted but Youtube took the clip down, not surprising since it involved a demon literally pooping out bishops and friars in close-up.


Courtesy of New York Magazine's Vulture blog about "The Ten Most Anti-Christian Movies of All Time", for this year's War on Christmas I guess.

Saw IV (2007)

This is very much after-the-fact, but the lateness of this review reflects that I simply had no desire to see this movie and only did so because I could as part of, shall we say, a 2-for-1 situation (a review of Southland Tales will be up soon). Nonetheless, I saw this out of a sense of duty to have an informed opinion about the most lucrative horror franchise right now, and also to have an excuse to rant about how much I hate these movies.

The original Saw was okay, a decent locked-room dramatic situation for the most part. It was mildly enjoyable except for some obnoxiously trendy music video-style editing and Cary Elwes' terrible performance. But when the baton was passed to first-time director Darren Bousman with Saw II, everything went downhill fast. The first movie had established the character of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), an engineering genius and victim of terminal cancer on a mission to teach the world something about the value of life. Fine and good as a gimmick in the first movie, but Bousman's direction was to foreground Jigsaw and make him the center of his movies as a sort of world-weary antihero. Interesting concept, but Bousman lacked the imagination, moral compass, and directorial chops to pull it off.

Jigsaw is obviously an extension of both Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs (the serial killer-as-guru, smarter than everyone else and with no qualms about playing by his own rules) and John Smith in Seven (on a mission to punish those he deems in need of moral rectitude via gruesome torture). Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about how much he hates the serial-killer-as-moral-authority trend specifically as it appears in both Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men; I don't think he's right about either of those movies but I think his argument applies well to Bousman's Jigsaw. The point of Seven was to watch how Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are changed via their confrontation with a sociopath; it's a film about characters under stress with the 'seven deadly sins' gimmick merely the macguffin for the rest of the plot. The point of Saw II-IV, on the other hand, is to watch characters jump through Jigsaw's hoops, only to discover at the end that nobody is capable of living up to his 'moral standards'. Where Fincher and the Coens are interesting in asking questions about morality and our place in the world, Bousman has the balls to speak, via Jigsaw, as a patronizing and childish moral authority. The characters and their moral issues have become the macguffins, and the sullen, insistent gore has become the point.

Now, gore for gore's sake isn't necessarily a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned - it's one of the primary reasons to watch a movie like Dead Alive or Dawn of the Dead. The problem with Bousman's filmmaking is twofold: his insistence on making his movies so humorless, so utterly intent on 'scaring' his audience in a drab, grim manner that I can only call pretentious and hollow; and his utter incompetence at filmmaking. All three of his Saw movies feature terrible acting and annoying cinematography and editing. Craft matters, and it's bizarre that Bousman apparently considers himself to be a horror movie fan, because you wouldn't know it from looking at his work - his movies appear to be made by an aging hack intent on trying to appeal to a youth audience through camera and editing gimmicks.

So that's the deal with the franchise in general; Saw IV in particular stands as the worst of the series so far, thanks to a bizarre insistence on trying to cram in plotlines and characters from all four movies and a bewildering narrative that I couldn't make heads or tails of by the end - I suppose patient attention and multiple viewings of the previous movies would clear some of this up, but I just didn't care why Angus Macfadyen from Saw III was suddenly reappearing or how the multiple flashbacks pieced together.

So what makes the difference between Bousman's movies and Eli Roth's movies, which I'm a fan of? The basic answer would have to be mastery of tone and, believe it or not, restraint. Bousman's movies are thudding, obvious, and deadly serious, while Roth knows how to shoft moods from terror to comedy to absurdity. The most chilling moment in Hostel Part II is a scene involving the kids in the woods and how they turn on each other ; it's simple, quiet, Hitchcockian, and has no counterpart in the Saw sequels. You can tell just by watching Bousman's movies that he doesn't know what he's doing, and more importantly, he doesn't really care.

The Worst of the Worst

There was a discussion over at Hollywood Elsewhere from Jeff Wells (who has admitted previously that when he watches a bad movie he falls into a regressive fugue state, moaning and curling into a fetal ball to the discomfort of those seated around him) on the subject of really bad movies, and it led me to think about really bad movies. We're all familiar with 'so bad they're good' movies, the films of Chuck Norris in the '80s or Ed Wood in the '50s where the absurdities are so intense as make the experience fun and enjoyable, just not necessarily as the filmmakers intended.

On the other hand are movies so bad they're bad - movies that are so badly made that there's no response from the audience but bored dejection, depression, and annoyance, movies worse than even the worst studio-produced piece of garbage, which at least can be guaranteed to be semi-competent. I've encountered many of these while seeking out the next Gymkata or Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, so maybe it's time to share.

The worst movie I've seen this year was Severe Visibility, a dire political film in the mold of JFK from director-actor Paul Cross, who I knew from an '80s figure skating movie called Ice Pawn. Obviously troubled by 9/11 conspiracy theories and 'documentaries' like Loose Change (I'm not a fan), Mr. Cross directed a talky, disheartening thriller about an Army officer who was in the Pentagon on 9/11 who begins to suspect there's more to the official story. Imagine your favorite disjointed internet conspiracy blog, then stick bad actors into it and sit there quietly for 90 minutes.

I'm a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there were some movies even they couldn't salvage. The nadir of those was probably Red Zone Cuba, a ramshackle mid-'60s anti-Castro adventure movie from the mind of Coleman Francis, who mysteriously was able to make three cheap movies. Of course 'adventure' is misleading because nothing really happens in this movie - we're given a bunch of blurry images of men wandering through California scrubland standing in for Cuba, there's a brief glimpse of someone who may or may not be an actor playing Castro, and I think someone gets shot. I've watched this one three times and I really couldn't tell you what happens in it. To its credit, it does feature John Carradine singing the title song.

The worst of the worst, for me these days, is something called Psyched by the 4-D Witch, from the early '70s, when you could book a movie into theaters as long as you had a semblance of a story and some naked boobs. Barely even categorizable as a movie, Psyched features a voiceover telling the story of a young woman's sexual awakening thanks to the intervention of the ghost of an ancestor, the titular witch. This accompanies a string of random images of young women and trippy LSD colors and probably some stock footage and leader and whatever would get the film long enough to be called a 'feature'. It's pretty much the least watchable movie I've ever seen. When you're the bottom half of a double feature with Monster A-Go Go, you're in bad shape.

Anybody else?