Reviews – Page 17 – Ghost in the Machine

Regarding Harvey. | (And Rick.)

It took awhile to get here, but Gus Van Sant’s timely and vibrant biopic Milk, which I caught on Christmas day, is well worth the wait. In a year that witnessed a former community organizer take his message of hope all the way to the White House, and saw a majority of Californians vote for legislating and invalidating their neighbors’ marriages (my favorite pin: “Can we vote on your marriage now?“), Milk couldn’t feel any more of the moment. (If anything, I wish Milk had come out before the Prop 8 vote, when it might’ve done some good.) Arguably the best film about the realities of politics since Charlie Wilson’s War, Milk is blessed with excellent performances across the board — most notably Sean Penn, James Franco, and Josh Brolin, but also supporting turns by Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, and others. And as a chronicle of a key moment in an ongoing civil rights struggle, Milk also feels like a watershed film of its own in its approach to its gay and lesbian characters. In short, it’s one of the best films of 2008.

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I want to recruit you.” So began the oft-repeated speel of the San Francisco city supervisor and “Mayor of Castro Street,” who, in 1977 and after several attempts, became the first openly gay official elected to office in the US. But, seven years before those heady days, Milk (Sean Penn) was just a 40-year-old insurance man (and Republican, even), living a closeted life of quiet desperation in NYC. After a chance encounter and illicit proposition becomes an impromptu birthday party, Milk and new beau Scott Smith (James Franco) fall in love, talk about starting over, and decide to go West. Life is peaceful there…or is it? Even as Milk’s camera shop in the gay-friendly Castro district becomes a salon of artists, thinkers, and free spirits, bigotry is rampant even in the streets of San Francisco, and the cops at best turn a blind eye to — and at worst actively participate in — antigay violence. No more, says Milk. Taking a page from the ethnic political machines of an earlier century, he organizes Castro’s gays and lesbians into first a protest movement and then an organized voting and boycotting bloc. And when a redistricting plan emphasizing community self-rule in San Francisco is put into effect, Milk becomes an actual, legitimate political wheeler-and-dealer, with all the benefits and aggravations attending. (For more on the man and the movement, see the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, now on Hulu for free.)

But, even as Harvey Milk rises to power in San Fran, a parallel movement stirs amid the churches and suburbs of Orange County. Led by former beauty queen, singer, and orange juice shiller Anita Bryant, the ever-so-Christian “Save Our Children” campaign gathers steam across the nation in its quest to roll back what meager protections gays and lesbians have managed to establish over the years. And when conservative state senator John Briggs (Denis O’Hare, seemingly forever destined to play assholes) brings the fight west in the form of Proposition 6, an initiative that would ban gays and lesbians from public schools, the battle for California is on. And even as Milk becomes the poster boy against Prop 6 and for recognizing gays and lesbians as full citizens and fellow human beings, he has to contend with trouble on the homefront — not only in his personal life (his new boyfriend Jack (Diego Luna) is more than a little erratic) but in his political backyard, where supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin), from the Catholic, working-class district next door, is starting to act increasingly unstable. (But, I guess this is what happens when society is so permissive as to let a man get all hopped up on twinkies.)

Which reminds me: A word of appreciation for Josh Brolin’s work here. Sean Penn is garnering kudos across the board, and a likely Oscar nod, for his portrayal of Milk, and they’re very well-deserved. It’s really an astonishing transformation Penn accomplishes here — not so much because he’s playing someone who’s gay (homosexual), but because he’s playing someone who’s gay (happy).This is the same guy who sulked through Mystic River?) And, while Brolin will likely — and, imho, justifiably in the end — get edged out for Best Supporting Actor by Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight, his work here suggests he’s got some serious chops. At first it seems as if Brolin will just be coasting on his recent Dubya impression — another good-natured, hard-hearted conservative fratboy for the resume. Then, just as you think Brolin’s endangering himself in terms of typecasting, it’s suggested Dan White might also be a deeply repressed closet case. (I tend to find the argument that all frothing-at-the-mouth homophobes are in reality trapped in the closet to be too simplistic by half, but apparently there’s some grounding for it in White’s story. In any case, Brolin underplays it beautifully ) As Milk progresses, we begin to sense other reasons why White is such a strange and ultimately homicidal bird — he’s envious of Harvey, he feels personally screwed over by him, he’s something of a friendless wonder, he’s not the brightest bulb on the tree anyway, he feels trapped by, and powerless before, the authority figures in his life (his wife, his cop buddies, his church). Brolin lets all of this play out without tipping his hand in any one direction. It’s a subtle, complex, and very worthwhile performance, and it’s a testament to the film’s heart that it extends such empathy even to its ostensible antagonist.

Speaking of empathy, this isn’t at all a surprise coming from Gus Van Sant, always a very humanistic director, but it should be noted regardless: When it comes to full recognition of gays and lesbians, Milk laudably practices what it preaches. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia was good for its time, but nowadays (it’s on heavy rotation on AMC) it gives off a distinctly Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? vibe. And, as I said when it came out, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain often seemed “as somber, restrained, and delicate as Kabuki theater.” By contrast, the couples of Milk are passionate — both physically and emotionally — messy, flawed, and alive. Of course, there have been other well-rounded depictions of gays and lesbians in film in the past — in Van Sant’s earlier work, in the films of other gay directors like Todd Haynes, John Cameron Mitchell, and Kimberly Peirce, and in countless others. Still, Milk feels like an event of sorts. Unlike many of its forebears, it’s a mainstream Oscar-caliber movie that just takes its characters’ sexuality at face value and without apology. In that sense, it feels like a film whose time has come.

*****

I said earlier that Dan White was ostensibly the villain of Milk, but that’s not entirely true. Rather, to its credit, the film is pretty bold about pointing the finger where the trouble really lies: at the conservative-minded legions of organized Christendom — or at the very least its right-wing, for-profit flank — who’ve decided that arbitrarily upholding one proscription mentioned in passing in the Old Testament (shellfish, anyone?), and then ruthlessly enforcing it on the backs of their neighbors and co-workers, is more important than upholding the central tenet of the actual teachings of Jesus: “Love one another.” (Along those lines, expect a good bit of “godless liberal Hollywood” bluster from the usual corners if this film gets any Oscar buzz.)

Which brings us to that Wal-Mart of spirituality, Rick Warren, who as you all know will be delivering the invocation at Obama’s inauguration this month, and who has said all manner of intemperate things about gays and lesbians (as well as jews, pro-choice voters, and others) in the past, even going so far as to campaign for Prop 8 in California two months ago.

Now, when the Rick Warren pick first came out, I didn’t say anything here for two reasons. One was deeply selfish: That was the week I was finishing up my speechwriting app, and it didn’t seem like the most opportune time to be too critical of the administration around here at GitM. (In the end, it didn’t matter anyway, of course.) More importantly, though, I am — and still partly remain — of the mind that the bigger picture needs to be kept in mind here. If it keeps the right-wing fundies relatively happy and docile, and helps them to buy into the notion of a post-partisan Obama presidency, then Rick Warren can give all the one minute ceremonial speeches he wants, so long as Obama ultimately shows himself a friend to gay and lesbian rights in his presidential actions.

But, there’s a sequence in Milk that brought me around a bit. When Dan White mentions the “issue” of gay rights in one crucial scene, Harvey replies: “These are not issues, Dan. These are our lives we’re fighting for.” And, put that way, the calculus changes. To straight progressive folk such as myself, one can easily — too easily — get to thinking of gay rights as an “issue” among many. But, for gays and lesbians all around the country, this is their lives. And, when considered thusly, the president of these United States — least of all a president who ran and won on a campaign of hope — should not be legitimizing bigotry, such as that continuously expressed by Warren without apology, in any kind of forum, let alone the most portentous and culturally significant inauguration in at least fifty years, perhaps ever.

In an eloquent column last week, the NYT‘s Frank Rich articulated basically where I stand on Obama’s decision at this point: His choice of Warren is “no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history.” Let’s hope that Obama doesn’t follow in the footsteps of the last Democratic president, who very quickly started backpedaling on gay rights once in office, vis a vis “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And, while I’m sure he’s pretty busy these days, the president-elect (apparently a movie buff of sorts) could do worse than spend a few hours to reflect on the story of another community-organizer who believed in the transformative power of hope, who carried the hopes of his constitutents into higher office…and who faced unflinching and unwavering contempt from an irreconcilable opposition once he got there.

My (Vampire) Bodyguard.

If you’re looking for a quality film before the coming holiday deluge (or, if you’re like me, and can pretty much tell from afar that Twilight likely won’t be your bag), look no further than Tomas Alfredson’s taut, eerie vampire flick Let the Right One In, which I caught over last weekend. A Swedish import that combines elements of the age-old vampire mythos with My Girl, My Bodyguard, and Morrissey (hence the title), Let the Right One In moves and feels like a particularly well-crafted Stephen King short story (or perhaps a bleaker version of one of Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish Civil War fairy tales), and definitely makes for a compelling nightmare before Christmas if you’re in the mood for it. Just make sure you’re nice — but not too nice — to any kids you meet along the way to the theater.

As Let the Right One In opens, we find ourselves in a run-down apartment complex in deepest, darkest seventies Sweden, where dreams die hard amid the endless snowdrifts, there’s never enough vodka to go around, and even the very occasional blood-red flower can’t enliven the grim and ubiquitous combination of freezing winter weather and cookie-cutter architecture. Here we meet Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a lonely, preternaturally blonde young lad from a broken home, who spends his days getting picked on by the school bullies and his nights playing with a knife and plotting revenge. It’s on one of these nocturnal escapades that Oskar encounters Eli (Lina Leandersson), a lissome 12-year-old girl (“more or less“) who’s just moved in from parts unknown, on the complex jungle gym. Pleasanties are exchanged, a Rubik’s Cube is passed back and forth, and, by that innocent alchemy of childhood, a strong friendship forms between these two outsiders.

But, as you probably guessed, there is more to Eli than meets the eye, much more. She’s only out at night. She’s astonishingly agile at times. She’s always underdressed for the unforgiving Swedish cold. Oh, and she occasionally dispatches her “father” Hakan (Per Ragnar) to retrieve gallon-buckets of warm human blood from unsuspecting victims. (Hakan’s role — is he really Eli’s dad, or her Renfield, or is he just suffering from [rimshot] “Stockholm Syndrome”? — is never fully spelled out, but the story takes on a darker cast if you go in one particular direction with it.) So, yes, Eli, we discover, is a nightfeeder, a Nosferatu, a vampyrer, as the Svenska say. But, really, when you get right down to it, who is Oskar to judge? Everybody’s got problems.

I don’t want to say too much more about Let the Right One In, as there’s not a lot of story there, to be honest. (In fact, if anything, the movie could’ve benefited from more of a third act — I think most people will expect the jag it takes then to have happened a good hour beforehand.) Where the film really succeeds is as a mood piece. On one hand, like that flower budding in the dead of winter, Let the Right One In tells the story of an impossible friendship blooming in seemingly the deadest of dead-ends. At the same time, bad things seem to happen to anyone — be it Hakan or the woman who survives one desperate attack (two, if you count cats) or the gaggle of alcoholics and losers usually fed upon — caught up in Eli’s wake, so why should Oskar’s fate be any different?

The film is an adaptation of a book by John Ajvide Lindqvist, and at times it feels as naturalistic, character-driven, and hyperliterary an endeavor as In the Bedroom or Little Children. There’s definitely some gore here and there, but as with the best horror stories, Let the Right One In is most frightening in the realm of ideas, and for what it doesn’t ultimately show or explain. (And, while I can’t be entirely sure, I have strong suspicion that it’s considerably more suspenseful — and undoubtedly less hormonal — than the recent Stephenie Meyer adaptation currently in a theater near you.)

Whose Line is It, Anyway?

“People you love will turn their backs on you. You’ll lose your hair, your teeth, your knife will fall out of its sheath, but you still don’t like to leave before the end of the movie.” Couple that sentiment by Cake with a more famous passage from Shakespeare — “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” — and you’ve got a decently good starting point for approaching Charlie Kaufman’s wildly ambitious, often poignant, occasionally inscrutable, and ultimately somewhat uneven Synecdoche, New York. The film has been garnering breathless raves from some corners (Ebert is a particularly big fan), while other reputable critics have utterly loathed it. I’m closer to the positive camp — I don’t think the movie works at times, and it definitely takes some digressions that don’t cohere with everything else going on (the bizarre Hope Davis and “George C. Scott in Hardcore” tangents, for example)…but so does life, I guess, right?

At its start, we meet our protagonist, playwright Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), near the end of the rope. He’s a struggling, mostly miserable theater director in Schenectady, New York, with an increasingly distant artist wife (Catherine Keener), a distracted. self-promoting therapist (Davis), and a rash of new and rather disturbing health problems. (In short, Hoffman is about as happy in Schenectady as he was in Buffalo.) The only bright spots in his day, basically, are his adorable, inquisitive daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) and his half-hearted flirtations with Claire (Samantha Morton), the buxom girl who runs the box office, and Hazel (Michelle Williams), his lead actress in a youthful reimagining of Death of a Salesman. Depression, thoughts of (and worries about) infidelity, useless bouts of therapy, clinical hypochrondria, dwelling on mortality…If this all is starting to sound like a more expressionistic version of your standard-issue Woody Allen film so far, you’re in the right ballpark, at least for the first forty minutes or so. (And I mean that in the best way possible.)

But then, things get stranger. As Caden’s wife Adele lights off to Germany with Olive in tow, and Caden manages to lock down a MacArthur genius grant for his next project, Synecdoche begins to venture deeper into Kaufman territory. Caden relocates to NYC, manages to negotiate an impossibly-large warehouse as his new theater space, and begins work on his magnum opus, a play that — through hundreds of thespians acting out daily victories and defeats — tries to recreate, and thus comment on, every facet of our quotidian existence. But where does the play stop and life begin? Caden soon finds he needs to cast an actor (Tom Noonan) to play himself directing, as well as actresses to portray the various women in his life. (In a clever bit of casting, Emily Watson ends up playing faux-Morton, which makes perfect sense given that they’re respectively the Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney of indy British cinema.) And, later, when it seems individual identities might be getting in the way of the abstract universalism of the piece, well, maybe it’s time to just recast or rewrite Caden Cotard completely, don’t you think? It’s fine with him, to be honest — He’s gotten pretty damn sick of playing himself anyway.

“I’ve told you before, this is not a play about dating, it’s about death,” argues one character in Synecdoche near its conclusion. Caden demurs. “‘It is a play about dating. It’s not just a play about death. It’s about everything: dating, earth, death, life, family, all that.‘” Well, to be honest, that may be part of the ultimate problem here. Kaufman’s exquisite earlier effort, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is pretty much just a movie about dating (ok, and love, and loss, and memory…but bear with me here), and it’s all the more focused and moving because of it.

By contrast, Synecdoche is kinda all over the place, and gets increasingly sprawling and messy as it goes on. The film is sometimes too clever by half and sometimes needlessly maudlin, and it barely keeps one foot on the ground in any event. Still, I definitely admired the degree of difficulty here, and applaud Kaufman for even attempting to say something profound and meaningful about the human condition, when most films just want me to feel satisfied that all the Act 2 loose ends were cleared up by Act 3. (Wow, those two crazy cats who met-cute in Act 1 got back together? Who woulda thunk it?) In that regard, I’m very glad I saw this movie — even if, as with, say, Primer, I’m pretty sure a lot of what was going on eluded me the first viewing — and I find my thoughts still returning to it several weeks later. While you may find Synecdoche boring and/or bewildering, and you may even end up hating it, I’m willing to bet dollars-to-donuts you haven’t seen a movie like it in quite some time, if ever.

Quantum Mechanics.

Like a resolution dieter in late January, the recently rebooted Bond franchise is starting to lapse back into old habits. Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace, which I finally caught over the Thanksgiving weekend, is probably a better-than-average entrant in the Bond oeuvre, when considered against all the Brosnan and Dalton movies of years past. As a sequel to the promising reset that was Casino Royale, tho’, Quantum feels too rote by half. Daniel Craig is still probably the best Bond to come down the pike since Connery, but the action-heavy, drama-lite Quantum doesn’t really give him enough to do, other than scowl, grimace, and dodge egregious amounts of automatic weapons fire. Meanwhile, the story — credited to too-many-cooks Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade — is both more convoluted and less fun than it needs to be. With the brief exception of Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) treading water in the morally-compromised Dubya-era CIA, Quantum mostly foregoes cloak-and-dagger spy games for 100 minutes of considerably less satisfying Stuff Blowing Up. And, however workmanlike as a run-of-the-mill, mostly nonsensical actioner, Quantum suggests the rebooted franchise may sadly be running out of new ideas sooner rather than later. Take the Bourne out of this Bond, and our man at MI6 is left with very little to hang his hat on.

Things start out promisingly enough, with Bond, maybe half an hour out from when we last saw him, evading black hats at 120mph along scenic stretches of the Italian highway system. (As per the norm, we start in media res.) Then we get the usual hyperstylized credit sequence — bare sand, beautiful women, a strange Jack White/Alicia Keys number which may be a grower — and all seems right in the Bondverse. But, then 007 almost immediately gets involved in a parkour-flavored foot race during the Palio di Siena, one not unlike the several we saw in Casino Royale, and a vague sense of deja vu starts to set in. (This is when arthouse refugee Forster also shows off an overwrought habit, later in evidence at an Austrian production of Tosca, of intercutting his occasionally-inscrutable action sequence with whatever high art or culture is taking place nearby.)

Soon, Bond is given his marching orders — go to Haiti and unearth the dastardly machinations of the elusive secret society QUANTUM, as currently orchestrated by a lithe, mercurial French “environmentalist,” Dominic Greene (Mathieu Almaric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.) Along the way, 007 — still seeking revenge for the death of Vesper Lynd — encounters Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a lovely Bolivian secret agent also hell-bent on doling out retribution, in her case for the grisly rape and murder of her family. Can Bond evade the goons of QUANTUM and discover their master plan? Will he find a way to avenge Vesper and put his tortured soul to rest? And will these two alluring agents relinquish their respective thirsts for vengeance long enough to partake in 007’s once-favorite extra-curricular activity? (Surprisingly enough, the answer to that last question is no: I guess that might interfere with all the moping.)

Now, obviously some allowances must be made when it comes to plotting in Bond films — In fact, it was probably worse back in the day, when you just had to take the existence of a volcano lair or moon base at face value. Still, even notwithstanding some of the decisions that lead to shoehorned-in action scenes (At one point, Bond and Camille get into a plane basically just so it can get shot down), Quantum of Solace is a bit of a mess. For one, the whole B-plot — Camille versus the Bolivian despot — frankly isn’t all that interesting, and ultimately verges on the exploitative. (Is there a lazier way of fashioning a villain than making him a rapist? It reminds me of Dave Edelstein’s discussion of the dead child epidemic come Oscar time.) For another, characters show up or are created merely to add emotional beats to the story. (See: Mathis from Casino Royale (Giancarlo Gianinni), or poor Agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), who seems to exist only as a forced nod to Goldfinger and an extended comment on the danger of getting to “know” 007 — But, hey, at least Bond slept with somebody.) For yet another, the Big Bad’s ultimate objective comes across as seriously anti-climactic, and owes more to John Huston in Chinatown than the likes of Blofeld and Dr. Evil.

But the main problem with Quantum in the end is that, while a lot of 007’s old fun-loving side is AWOL here, the film itself has still reverted to the bad Bond habit of relying entirely too much on wildly improbable action sequences rather than espionage intrigue or character-driven drama. I can only watch Britain’s finest miraculously avoid so many sheets of semi-automatic gunfire before I begin to check out, and Quantum crosses that dubious threshold well before its midway point. Now, we’re not back in the land of exploding pens and invisible cars yet, thank goodness — the only snazzy technology in evidence here is the iBigBrother set-up used by MI6 to stay in touch with their operatives in the field. Still, I’m beginning to fear that the powers-that-be behind the new Bond are starting to fall back on the wrong traditions in their oeuvre. And Craig’s 007 deserves a better posting than another slew of sorry Brosnan-like sequels.

Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes.

Before we set about picking a new president, some thoughts on the departing one: Oliver Stone’s W, which I saw a few weeks ago and have been negligent in writing about, is a decently enjoyable and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of America’s worst president since James Buchanan. Still, it also seems a film that very few among the electorate were in the mood for right about now: Many lefties, I think, were looking for more red meat from the famously confrontational and controversial Stone, while conservatives were never going to set foot in the theater in the first place. As it is, W seems to have gotten sorta lost in the shuffle…which is too bad, really. It’s a solid-enough biopic, and definitely far better than Stone’s recent misfires, Alexander and World Trade Center. And, while it’s played mostly straight, there are still a few funny satiric jabs interspersed throughout the film. (See, for example, Dubya and the Vulcans getting lost on a dusty Texas hike.) So I’d recommend it…with some misgivings.

As with his underrated take on Nixon, Stone mainly seems to want to understand, and thus humanize, Dubya here — Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his boots, etc. etc. And yet, while I found both the sentiment and the attempt laudable, I also think Stone may have missed the mark a bit here. In making Dubya so congenial (partly the fault of Josh Brolin, I guess, who’s both great and thoroughly likable in the role), and in putting so much emphasis on his daddy issues (more on that in a bit), Stone seems to absolve 43 of more than he should in the end. However oppressive the psychological burden of being a Bush, Dubya was ultimately his own man and his own president, and, lordy, was he a terrible one. However, generous Stone’s impulse in trying to understand Dubya, you can’t just pin all of the incompetence and misdeeds of the past eight years on a lousy, poor-little-rich-boy upbringing.

If you’ve ever read anything about Bush 43, the story goes as you might expect: After a brief intro in Rangers Stadium, we meet President George W. Bush (Brolin) and various advisors in the Oval Office, as they mull over the decision to go to war to Iraq in 2003. (Speaking of which, Cheney seems a bit too Dreyfussian to me, Jeffrey Wright’s Powell is far too heroic, and Toby Jones is too lithe and elfin — and not nearly porcine enough — to capture Karl Rove, but Thandie Newton’s nerdy, scroonchy-faced Condi Rice is both kinda cruel and scarily dead-on.) In any case, soon thereafter we flip back to Junior’s days at Yale, where the young dauphin spends his time drinking, frat-ernizing, and generally upholding the unyoked humor of his idleness. Basically, Dubya — crafty and streetwise, but too often convinced in the infallibility of his “gut” — is a good-natured screw-up of the first order, and he’d be the first to admit it, as he does time and time again to the long-suffering, emotionally reticent if otherwise indulgent “Poppy” (James Cromwell).

Yet, despite failure after failure, this good-timin’ man evenually manages to muster up one great success in his life by wooing a good-hearted woman, the lovely librarian Laura (Elizabeth Banks). And, after a literal come-to-Jesus moment at the age of 40 (that’s right, the bottle let him down), Dubya decides he will follow in Poppy’s footsteps and enter the family business of politics. But, will his parents ever take this prodigal son seriously, particularly as compared to the family’s one great hope, Jeb? And, even if they do, what lengths will Dubya go to alleviate his long-standing psychological issues with his father at this point? Would he, for example, start a war he thinks 41 didn’t finish?

Now, from Charlie Sheen choosing between his working-class hero pa and Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, to Mickey and Mallory Knox inflicting the consequences of their childhood/sexual abuse on unsuspecting bystanders in Natural Born Killers, psychologically overdetermined characterization due to daddy issues is usually as omnipresent as mystical shamans in Oliver Stone films. (Or, for the other side of the coin, consider Mother Mary Steenburgen as the Ghost of Quaker Past in Nixon, or Angelina Jolie hissing with snakes in Alexander.) And, by itself, the Poppy-Dubya emphasis doesn’t bother me all that much — Stone is at his best when he’s painting on a broad canvas and laying it on thick, and just as the “cancer on the presidency” that was Watergate lent itself well to the gothic, Fall of the House of Usher look of Nixon, the story of 41 and 43 is an easy target for Henry IV/Henry V-type overtones.

All that being said, can all the colossal mistakes and errors in judgment that have characterized the past eight years really just be attributed to the Dubya family dynamic? Stone tries to mitigate this notion some, I guess, by giving us an imaginary disquisition in the War Room on the World According to Dick Cheney. (It involves oil, Iran, and the embrace of empire.) Still, one mostly gets the sense here that Dubya is a regular, friendly fellow who’s just bitten off more than he can chew in an attempt to please his pop. Such a reading, I think, underplays Dubya’s own arrogance, his close-minded conviction in his own sense of the right, his Ivy League legacy-kid air of entitlement, his sniveling weasliness when caught in a pickle, and his habitual intellectual dishonesty. Put another way, I get the sense the real Dubya is much more of an unlikable jackass than Stone and Brolin make him out to be here, and you can’t just pin all that and Dubya’s constant sucking as president on Pop. I mean, c’mon now, dads don’t get much worse than Darth Vader, but Luke turned out ok (if a bit whiny like the old man.) Eventually, the man must stand — and fall — on his own.

Still, for all its wallowing in Freudian father issues, W does end on an enjoyably bizarre note, with Dubya writhing on the horns of existential crisis. (No wonder he started reading The Stranger.) Has the prodigal son succeeded beyond his father’s wildest dreams in Iraq, or has he forever shrouded the Bush name in ignominy? And how does one handle a situation like the one in Iraq anyway, where, unlike baseball (and bowling), there are no rules? For Dubya, it seems, the story ends at is has for him in most other situations — with him walking away with a smile, not looking back, and leaving someone else to clean up the godawful mess he’s left behind.

Burn, Baby, Burn.

Well, i’ll have to reserve final judgment for several months or years down the line — It’s hard to think of any Coen film that hasn’t improved considerably with age and/or repeat viewings (although I have yet to give The Ladykillers, another spin.) But, for now, the brothers’ larky spy spoof Burn After Reading, which I caught last week, feels right now like medium-grade Coen. (Mind you, saying Burn is middling by Coen standards isn’t a criticism per se — Even medium-grade Coen delivers at several degrees above standard film fare, if you’ve acquired the taste for it.) Burn is nowhere near as funny as, say, The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona, and I actually prefer the much-maligned and underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty. But it does hit at about the level of The Man Who Wasn’t There or The Hudsucker Proxy, and I think it could even grow into O Brother territory one day.

Like Lebowski after Fargo and Barton Fink after their magnum opus, Miller’s Crossing, Burn has that jaunty, drawing-outside-the-lines, devil-may-care ambience to it, which suggests the project was mainly just a mental sorbet of sorts for the brothers after their dour venture into (Cormac) McCarthyism, No Country for Old Men. In any case, I could see the film falling flat to those moviegoers ambivalent to or aggravated by Coenisms. But if, like me, you enjoy panning for hidden gold in their slow-fuse sight gags (among them this time are purple sex cushions, Jamba Juices, and Dermot Mulroney) and relish their penchant for eminently quotable buffoonery (“You too can be a spy, madam“), I suspect you’ll have a decently good time with Burn. There are worse fates in this world than having drunk the Coen Kool-aid.

Just to make sure we’ve all moved on from the dark contours of west Texas nihilism, Burn after Reading is basically goofy from Jump Street: It begins with a ludicrous eye-in-the-sky shot of Planet Earth, eventually zooming down into Langley, VA, that (give or take a few more flashy whip-pans and slo-mos) would seem more at home in a Tony Scott film. Our Great Eye soon settles upon the sacking from the Balkans desk of one Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a veteran CIA analyst with a hair-trigger temper, a cold, cuckolding wife (Tilda Swinton), and — at least by the standards of Mormons — a problem with the sauce. (To his credit, he tends to wait until exactly 5pm, and not a minute later, to commence the day’s boozing — On Mad Men, he’d be a teetotaller.) Determined to exact his revenge on the Bureau for this slight (and perhaps save face before both his wife and aging father, the very definition of silent reproach), Cox commences to penning his “memoirs,” most of which — in the venerable memoir tradition — is a ponderous, self-serving litany of blatant name-dropping. (He fancies himself as one of “Murrow’s Boys” to containment architect George Kennan. I would guess this self-assessment is somewhat inflated.)

But, due to some twists and turns involving divorce proceedings, Cox’s manuscript (in CD form) ends up in the hands of Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), two enterprising, if somewhat clueless, employees at the local athletic center, Hardbodies. Alas, both Linda (blinded by her desire to procure cosmetic surgery and get off the Internet dating train) and Chad, not the brightest bulb on the tree in any event, make the critical mistake of thinking this “raw intelligence” is something somebody might actually be interested in, and thus said gym rats decide to blackmail Cox into paying for return of the CD. And, if that fails, well, they’ll still get theirs by going to the Russians with the data…but, of course, things don’t go exactly according to plan. Throw some X-factors into the equation — say, George Clooney as the paramour of both Mrs. Cox and Linda, a paranoid, lactose-intolerant US marshall who loves three things in this world: kinky sex, a good post-coital run, and quality flooring; or Richard Jenkins as the kindly Orthodox priest turned Hardbodies manager who nurtures a crush for Ms. Litzke from afar — and this proposed blackmail starts to get really, really complicated. It’s no wonder the CIA suits (J.K. Simmons and David Rasche) can’t wrap their heads around it. What are they, rocket scientists?

Now, a caveat: If you find Coen movies to be generally irritating, you’re probably going to loathe this film, and those critics who think the brothers are nothing more than elitist misanthropes (See, for example, Dave Kehr on No Country: “a series of condescending portraits of assorted hicks, who are then brutally murdered for our entertainment“) will have a field day in panning this film. To this line of criticism, I would say two things: First, Burn is assuredly the work of equal-opportunity misanthropes — It’s clearly as ruthless toward Malkovich’s self-centered, Princeton-educated ninny as it is to the good-natured boobs at Hardbodies. (Besides, speaking as someone who burnt out years ago on the Internet dating rigamarole, and who now runs mostly at night, partly to facilitate the Chet-and-his-iPod-type grooving, it’s not like the foibles of Coen’s characters here aren’t at least somewhat universal.)

Second, particularly every time I read the news these days and find not only that I’m honestly expected to take a silly, patently unqualified, score-settling and habitually dishonest fundie like Sarah Palin — a.k.a. an evil Marge Gunderson with the leadership skills of Johnny Caspar (minus his ethical instincts) and the stuck-in-Vietnam worldview of Walter Sobchak — seriously as a potential leader of the Free World, but that close to half of our country is actually enthused by this notion because, well, shucks, she’s “just like us”…well, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that intelligence is relative, and that elitist misanthropy (or misanthropic elitism, if you’d prefer) might just end up being the new black. It’s a Coen world, y’all. They didn’t make the rules, and they — and we — are just living in it.

Thunder Rolls.

When it comes to penning movie reviews around here, I tend to find writing about comedies the most difficult. (See, for example, my original mulligan on Borat.) For one, it’s hard to quantify exactly what makes a picture *funny*, and often what one person finds uproarious, another finds on the wrong side of lame. (Although I’m sure all right-thinking people can agree on the merits of The Big Lebowski.) For another, comedy more than any other genre seems dependent on one’s mood. (Case in point, Anchorman, which I saw in a funk and shrugged at, then caught later on TV and found quite amusing)

All of which is to say that, even more than usual, my thoughts on Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder should be taken with a grain of salt — Actual results may vary. For my part, even though both Stiller and Jack Black were basically doing their usual schtick, and Steve Coogan is pretty much wasted (in more ways than one), I found Thunder to be a decently funny experience last Wednesday. It’s got a bit of the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach, and some jokes — say, Tom Cruise gyrating in a Harvey Weinstein fat suit — end up getting run into the ground through overuse, Austin Powers-style. But, that being said, I had a good time. It helped that I’m a sucker for the sort of Hollywood inside-baseball humor that Thunder endlessly trafficks in. (IMHO, that’s also the only redeemable thing about HBO’s otherwise aggravating Entourage.) And there are elements of it that just appealed to my funny bone — seeing Nick Nolte finally get all Chris Walken up on us, for example, or the funny-’cause-they’re-tired ‘Nam-era ditties (Creedence, Rolling Stone, Buffalo Springfield) interspersed throughout the flick. So, I’m not going to say it was the best film of the year or anything, but as a diverting and amusing morsel of late-summer fare, Tropic Thunder gets the job done…for me anyway.

The story, as you probably know, involves a behind-the-scenes look at an Apocalypse Now-level movie disaster deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia. After a few wry trailers (the funniest and most dead-on being Satan’s Alley, although I’d have hated to be Eddie Murphy during The Fatties 2), we’re introduced to the gang on hand. There’s fading action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, being Stiller), drug-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Black, going for Farley/Belushi and ending up with Black), Aussie thespian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr, weirdly genius), hip-hop phenom Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson, used mainly to cover Downey’s ass), and newbie Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel, late of the Apatow factory), all under the supervision of video director Damien Cockburn (Coogan). Once the film ends up a month behind schedule (three days into filming), the who’s-more-grizzled source material for this ‘Nam picture, Four-Leaf Tayback (Nolte), insists Cockburn bring his bevy of spoiled stars into “the s**t.” Well, things go wrong, of course. And, soon, stranded somewhere near the Laotian border without even a Tivo on hand, this cast of thespians — only some of whom seem to understand the trouble they’re in — must navigate and negotiate their way back to SoCal-style civilization…but not before ticking off the local drug cartel, living out the inexorable men-on-a-mission tropes, and, just possibly, making a decent 80’s-style actioner in the process.

The aspect of Tropic Thunder which *originally* was drawing the most heat is Downey, Jr.’s resurrection of one of Hollywood’s darker stains in its past, blackface. (Controversy has since moved on to the portrayal of mentally handicapped people in the film-within-the-film Simple Jack, which, to my mind, is patently absurd. Watch Forrest Gump or Rain Man again sometime and you should get the point.) At any rate, surprisingly given the poor taste involved in reviving minstrelsy in any form, I thought Downey and the writers actually pulled it off. This is mainly thanks to the incredulity of Jackson’s Alpa Chino to most of Downey’s racist tics, such as reveling in crawfish, gumbo, and the like. All in all, I’d say David Roediger should be proud: Downey and the Tropic Thunder team managed to make their blackface routine a comment about the enduring racist foibles of white people (and the supreme actorly ego of Russell Crowe-type Method men) more than anything else, and thus help to subvert black stereotypes by drawing attention to them. (Of course, one irony here, at least from Spike Lee’s perspective, is that Jackson’s “Alpa Chino/Booty Sweat” act could be construed as even more minstrel-ish than Downey’s role.) In any case, it was a high-wire tightrope act for Downey to pull off, and the fact that his performance has elicited so little controversy suggests how well he pulled it off. (In fact, the five minutes where Downey pretends to be Asian, and pretty much just chop-sockey’s it up rather embarrassingly, illustrates how badly this could’ve gone, and how much we’ve still got to work on.)

Hell is Crowded. So is Hellboy II.

Give the devil his due: I said of the underwhelming Hellboy in 2004 (which I watched again last week, and remained underwhelmed by) that hopefully, like Bryan Singer and the X-Men series, Guillermo del Toro would be able to work out the kinks in time for the sequel. Well, four years have passed, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army is now upon us. And the verdict? Well, HB-II: TGA is by almost every reckoning a brisker, more confident, and more satisfying movie than its predecessor. (I say “almost” because, with the transition from Nazis and Lovecraft to the World of Warcraft, Hellboy seems slightly out of his milieu this time.) That being said, I felt The Golden Army, while entertaining throughout, didn’t quite cohere for me as a film: It plays more like a sprawling collection of fun ideas, haphazardly strung together, than a movie of a piece. Now, originality goes a long way, and I’ll give del Toro bonus points for really letting his freak flag fly this time ’round. (If nothing else, HB-II occasionally seems like a test FX-reel for The Hobbit.) Still, while I was impressed by the breadth of del Toro’s imagination, I can’t say I ever felt absorbed by it. For whatever reason, and not for lack of trying, Hellboy II: The Golden Army left me reasonably amused and distracted for two hours, and not much else.

The films begins with a stop-motion fairy tale. As a (goofily-designed) preadolescent in 1955, Hellboy was told the tale of the Golden Army, an unstoppable goblin-forged force commanded by an elven king in his war against that teeming, grasping nuisance, humanity. But dismayed by the carnage wrought, said king ultimately decided to sign a truce with humankind — men get the cities, elves get the forests — much to the consternation of his son, Prince Nuada. Cut to the present day: The humans have, as WALL-E foreshadowed, plowed through the forests for their strip malls and parking lots, and thus Nuada (Luke Goss) has returned to fight the ancient war anew.

But, standing in his way, for better or worse, are the motley protectors of humankind, the BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development). Among their number, the kindly, bookish fish-man Abraham Sapien (Doug Jones, not too far removed from Threepio), the powerful pyrokinetic Liz Sheridan (Selma Blair, all blue fire and bedroom eyes), and, of course, Big Red himself, the kitty-loving, cigar-chomping spawn of Lucifer, Hellboy (Ron Perlman, clearly having fun). But, one must ask, in a war between the freaks and the humans, why are Hellboy et al on the side of the latter, particularly when mankind seems to fear and despise their lot? Clearly, the BPRD gang have some considerations to make.

That’s arguably the main thread of Hellboy II, but there’s quite a bit else going on — too much, in fact. Y’see, Hellboy very much wants to take the team public, and he and Liz are having some space issues, and Liz has a secret of her own, and Abe may have met the (elvish) girl of his dreams, and, along with last film’s comic relief (Jeffrey Tambor), there’s a new freak in town, an ectoplasmic German martinet named Johann Krauss (Seth McFarlane, of Family Guy). Oh, and let’s not forget the Troll Market (a showy cantina-style setpiece in the middle going), a (IMHO, strained) Barry Manilow musical number, and even an encounter with the Angel of Death.

Now some might rightly argue that I’m looking the gift hellspawn in the maw here, and that one should just sit back and relish the cornucopia of imaginative riches on display. Fair enough — There are some memorable images throughout (I particularly liked the autumn of the elemental), and this is miles more interesting than, say, The Incredible Hulk. But I still think the movie would’ve been more captivating had it been less episodic. Despite the many innovative ideas on display, The Golden Army — much like Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen — at times feels more like a notebook dump than a movie. (But as I said, if this what it takes for del Toro to clear the mental decks pre-Hobbit, I’m all for it.)

Nevertheless, if Hellboy was too little, and Hellboy II turned out to be too much, I’d still probably be up for a Hellboy 3, several years from now, on the other side of Middle Earth. Particularly if it goes back to plumbing the Cthulhian depths suggested in the original, the third film could end up being juussst riiight.

Frat Club.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me [twice], you can’t get fooled again. A leaden mishmash of The Matrix, Fight Club, and various much-more-entertaining FPS shoot ’em ups, Timur Bekmanbetov’s aggressively dumb and derivative Wanted is what I’d call a total misfire…if it wasn’t totally in keeping with the similarly adrenaline-fueled, barely coherent nonsense that was Night Watch. I haven’t read the source material, although a quick peek at the Wikipedia (and the fact it was penned by Mark Millar) suggests it was probably much more wry and entertaining than this flick turned out to be (and made more sense, given it’s set in a universe with supervillains.)

As it is, however, Wanted plays like Michael Bay’s version of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a hyperbolic, stultifying stupid, aggro-laced paean to the Columbine mentality. Now, I’m all for leave-your-brain-at-the-door actioners, and I could forgive Wanted its video game physics, its cheap-and-easy nihilism, its plagiarism from much better movies, and its intrusive whiteboy angst-metal if the movie actually turned out to be entertaining. But, a few minor setpieces aside (namely the limousine hit, which was everything ths film should’ve been in 60 seconds — perhaps Bekmanbetov should try his hand at videos), Wanted is basically the opposite of fun. Like Night Watch, it’s so bogged down by turgid plotting and long bouts of needless exposition (as well as, in this case, scenes cobbled together from other sources) that the film has no pulse. How bad is it? When a baby started screaming in my theater during the final act (when Morgan Freeman started monologuing yet again in the Fraternity’s library), prompting a yelling match between the disgruntled babyless (“Get that goddamn kid out of here!) and the babied (“F**k you! Babies have rights too!“), I was kinda thankful for, at long last, an entertaining diversion.

As Wanted begins, we are introduced to one Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy, who seemed to have learned his American accent solely from Billy Zabka movies and Sprite commercials.) Gibson is a depressed, obsequious worker drone somewhere in the Great American Cubicle Hive — Chicago, to be precise. He hates his job, he hates his boss, he hates his routine, and his “best” friend is pretty obviously sleeping with his aggravating girlfriend. Gibson is such a capital-L Loser, in fact, that his relatively common name brings up 0 hits on Google. (Sigh…would that were the most ridiculous thing about this movie.) One day, however, he is approached in the local supermarket by “Fox”, an alluring — albeit currently on the wrong side of skinny — minx (Angelina Jolie, trying but clearly bored), who immediately gets him involved in a shoot-out and car chase against a rival killer (Thomas Kretchmann).

From there, Gibson is soon initiated into a secret and ancient cabal of assassins known as the Fraternity, led by Morgan Freeman (playing Lawrence Fishburne playing Morpheus) and including members such as The Gunsmith (Common), The Butcher (Konstantin Khabensky), and The Repairman (Marc Warren). Each of these FPS Minibosses, basically, train Gibson in the arts of their order (it seems to involve him needlessly getting his ass kicked a lot) until he’s reached his full potential as a genetic prodigy, and can thus seek out and kill the murderer of his father. But who are these assassins actually killing, and for what purpose? Even total badasses, it seems, aren’t free of the occasional moral quandary.

That’s basically the set-up — If it sounds like you’ve heard variations on this story before, you have. I neglected to mention the scene involving Gibson’s father’s final mission, which [a] plays almost exactly like Trinity’s early shenanigans in The Matrix and [b] first establishes that, here, bullets not only travel for miles but can bend their trajectory in flight. This may sound like a cool idea to some, I guess — for me, it put me right in House of Flying Daggers mode. Once you’ve established something so ridiculous, it’s hard to feel invested in any of the ensuing action sequences. There’s no danger at all if the laws of physics don’t apply — You’re just going to show me what you show me, and that’s that. (I would argue that movies like The Matrix bend these sorts of rules, but don’t break them. Besides, the Wachowskis introduced a higher-level threat with the Agents anyway.) In any case, magically-bending bullets is only one example of the suspension of disbelief required here. Don’t get me started on the Loom, or the Moravian Express, or the Total Miracle Body Bath, or anything else in Wanted. Like Night Watch, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Again, I could have looked all that over if the movie was good fun regardless. But, it’s not. When Wanted isn’t drowning in expository gobbledygook — which is most of the time — it brays at you with idiotic macho posturing. (There’s a reason a Dubya quote came to mind above when writing this — this is a film tailor-made for “windshield cowboys” and tough guy poseurs.) In other words, Wanted is basically Fight Club for the fratboy Nickleback set, without the intellect or sense of irony that made Fincher’s movie one of the best of the ’90’s. Jolie especially does what she can — she’s a star through and through — but she can’t redeem this boring, moronic pile of dren. In other words, folks, Wanted is effing terrible. In the final moments, McAvoy breaks the fourth wall and asks us, “What the f**k have you done lately?” Sadly, I went to see this film.

Computer Love.

WwwaaaLLLLLL-Eeee! In the end, I can’t say I enjoyed it quite as much as Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, and I really, really wish it’d stayed in the melancholy I am Legend/Lars and the Real Girl groove of its first hour, rather than devolving into an Idiocracy-type satire aboard Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic. That being said, Andrew Stanton’s ambitious, impressive WALL-E is definitely in keeping with the high standard we’ve come to expect from the Pixar gang, and in scope and theme alone I’d rate it above recent forays Ratatouille, Cars and Finding Nemo. Part Silent Running-ish environmental parable, part whimsical robot romance (think Bjork, but you know, for kids!), and part trenchant political slapstick (note the Dubyaesque Fred Willard), WALL-E fires on significantly more cylinders throughout than, say, your average Dreamworks animation would even attempt. That the reach of WALL-E‘s ambition ultimately exceeds its grasp in the second hour, when the movie becomes a much more conventional family flick, can’t be held too harshly against the film, I think. I wish WALL-E had stayed Earthbound, in a way, but at least the little guy was reaching for the stars. (In any case, I expect WALL-E has a metal, mortal lock on next year’s Best Animation Oscar.)

Bringing a literal meaning to the term “space opera”, WALL-E begins with — of all things — Michael Crawford of Phantom fame crooning a musical number from Hello, Dolly! (“Put on Your Sunday Clothes“), which we hear while traversing the more scenic localities in our corner of the cosmos. Eventually, the swooping camera keys in on our home planet, except it’s clearly surrounded by more satellite debris than seems atmospherically sanitary. As we come down to Earth, matters are worse: Our beloved Terra has become an arid, dusty wasteland, cluttered with decaying buildings, vacuous advertising, and skyscrapers made of garbage. Enter WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class), a goggle-eyed robot (of the No. 5, Huey, and Vincent persuasion more than Artoo) whose job it is to construct these towers of refuse and who happens to be — along with one solitary cockroach — the lone survivor of our-now abandoned civilization.

Loneliness does funny things to a droid. Over the centuries of isolation, it seems, WALL-E has developed something of a personality — he collects intriguing knick-knacks he finds amidst the trash, repairs himself with pieces of his defunct brethren, and endlessly watches what’s left of a deteriorating VHS copy of Hello Dolly!, honing his song-and-dance routine and his understanding of human rituals of affection in the process. Alas, his skills of courtship go wasted…until, one day, EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) literally drops out of the sky, with a gimongous rocket ship in tow. A sleek, ovate, blue-eyed ingenue with massive destructive capability, EVE is pretty much everything WALL-E might want in a female* companion, and so, naturally, our lonely hero sets about to woo her. But, just when everything seems to be going well, WALL-E offers her a gift from his collection that initiates a higher directive…

This gets us to about forty-five minutes into the film, so we have a ways to go yet. That being said, everything that takes place here on Earth, before WALL-E chases his apparently malfunctioning muse off-world, is far and away the strongest and most affecting parts of the picture. I won’t give away the jag the picture takes in the second half, as it’s kinda funny and worth discovering on one’s own. But as WALL-E becomes more of a traditional Pixar pic in the second hour — idiosyncratic allies are made, for example, and the readily identifiable voices of Jeff Garlin and John Ratzenberger come into play — the movie also loses much of its early magic. I like goofy robot chases as much as the next guy — probably more, in fact (“MmmmmmmMo.“) — but I nonetheless found WALL-E‘s otherwise admirable back-end a bit of a disappointment.

The second half is still entertaining, no doubt, but it misses the simplicity, melancholy, and romance that characterized life for WALL-E up ’till then. I dunno…perhaps the kids were getting restless. Still, after centuries of wandering around by himself, gazing at the stars, the Last Robot on Earth has fallen in love. Did we really need to contrive a second act to top that?