Tangled Up in Black.

Sam Raimi’s Spiderman 3, which I saw a week ago, before this recent illness descended in earnest, is — as you likely already know — a disappointment. Both undercooked and overstuffed, it oftens feels like a Sequel-By-Numbers, the creation of a boardroom of comic-book-ignorant Sony suits who sat down and watched the splendid Spiderman 2, brainstormed for two hours about what its main selling points were, and tried to add 20% more of each to Spidey 3. The end result, as Joseph II might say, has too many notes. There occasionally seems to be a decent, heartfelt Sam Raimi Spidey foray struggling to get out in here somewhere, but it’s mostly wrapped up and powerless against the black suit of the corporate bottom line. I highly doubt this film will be the end of Spiderman, after that outrageous opening weekend take, but it does sadly suggest that it may be time for Raimi & co. to escape Spidey’s web and take a break from the franchise.

In true comic-book fashion, Spiderman 3 begins basically where the last installment left off, with Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson (Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, both of whom seem bored) in love, his secret identity out to her. But, just as our friendly neighborhood webslinger begins to contemplate wedding bells in his future, a slew of supervillains rise up to disturb Spidey’s domestic peace: The Green Goblin II (James Franco, putting in his best work of the series), who’s also aware of Spidey’s identity and is out to avenge his father’s death; The Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, good with what he’s given), who’s out to find his daughter some quality affordable health care (good luck! Even fantasy has limits); and, most troubling, Venom (ultimately, Topher Grace, a likable actor that sadly doesn’t work here), an oozing alien symbiote that first draws out Spiderman’s dark side before congealing with his biggest rival at the Daily Bugle, photoshop expert Eddie Brock. Eventually, Spidey must find a way not only to beat back this rogues’ gallery before doom befalls Ms. Watson high above Manhattan, but also come to terms with his darkest impulses, grapple with his deepfelt desire to cut a rug in a jazz club, and make Mary Jane feel important and special despite her withholding secrets from Peter most of the movie for unexplainable reasons. Can he pull it off, Spider-fans?

Maybe so, but the movie sure can’t. If that litany of villains put you in mind of the later installments of the Batman franchise, Batman Forever or Batman and Robin, you’re in the right ballpark. Basically, Raimi has too many balls in the air this time around (I haven’t even mentioned Gwen Stacey, who’s also in here for some reason), and the film just can’t do justice to all of them. The Sandman in particular is given short shrift — much time is devoted to giving him a backstory, but it gets dropped halfway through and never amounts to much. Meanwhile, other important plot points, such as how Spidey’s enemies decide to gang up on him, are handled perfunctorily, apparently to make room for more wet blanket Mary Janeisms or badly-conceived comedy involving J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons). By the end of the film, when Harry Osborne’s butler becomes Basil Exposition and Spiderman runs around without a mask in front of hundreds of cameras, the carelessness taken with this installment of the franchise becomes manifest. Raimi would likely have done better to leave Venom out of this episode and saved him for the next one (and, indeed, circumstantial evidence suggests that Venom was foisted on him by Sony — Raimi wanted the Vulture.) As it is, though, Spiderman 3 is a swing-and-a-miss — not as bad as X3, mind you, but definitely the worst outing thus far in the Spidey franchise. ‘Nuff said.

In a World of Hurt.

“Writing is a way to have a dialogue with yourself. You can never compete with something in the past, in memory. Like some people said, we love what we can’t have. In this world, the end becomes the beginning. It’s very unfair for anyone around him [Tony] in the present, because they can never compete with his imagination or his memory. We love what we can’t have, and we can’t have what we love.”

Since I spent Friday evening watching In the Mood for Love — a tale of a romance-that-almost-was, told in furtive hallway glances — and 2046 — a broader and more diffuse disquisition on love and heartache — back-to-back, here’s an intriguing 2004 interview with director Wong Kar-Wai on how they fit together: “Mood is a chapter in 2046. It’s like 2046 is a big symphony, and Mood is one of its movements.” Maybe so, but I’m glad I saw them as I did. At first Tony Leung’s Chow in 2046, a dissolute, world-weary rake, seemed eons apart from the quiet, somewhat nervous journalist of ITMFL. But the films are clearly meant to be taken as a piece. From its first images (hole, train) to its last (taxi, hole), 2046 dwells on the corrosive consequences for Chow of ITMFL: The memory of Su (Maggie Cheung), bottled up in the tree, is eating Chow alive…hence, the whole otherwise-non sequitur sci-fi subplot (ITMFL told again, by Chow to himself) involving the indecisive android. (Um, the last few sentences make more sense if you’ve seen the films, but only slightly.)

Now I really kinda wished I’d watched Days of Being Wild, the first part of Wong’s trilogy, before these two. But then again, however sumptuously filmed (these movies are absolutely gorgeous to look at), and however tempered by the presence of several stunningly beautiful actresses (Cheung, Zhang Zi Yi, Gong Li, Faye Wong), there’s only so much exquisite melancholy I can take in a given evening. By the end of this extended tale of romance and loss, I had half a mind to just curl up in a ball and drift amid a sea of despond for the rest of the night, lost in the phantom reverie that was both the allure and prison of “2046” in 2046. Even stronger was the urge to light a cigarette and watch the tendrils of smoke slowly writhe and curl through a shaft of light, preferably to the strands of some vintage Nat King Cole. If nothing else, these very worthwhile films suggest, if you’re going to ruminate on old heartaches, you might as well look really good doing it.

The Village Green Preservation Society.

Move over, Grindhouse, ’cause, lo, here comes the fuzz! (We will say goodbye to flesh and blood.) When Hot Fuzz began by packing no less than five funny cameos of very likable people in its first five minutes, I figured I was in for another good time with the Shaun of the Dead crew. And happily, they didn’t disappoint — this action flick homage-parody by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost is as smart, witty, rousing, and enjoyable as its zombie-laden predecessor. Moreover, unlike Tarantino and Rodriguez’s recent foray into film nostalgia (and, for that matter, Team America: World Police, also an action-parody), Hot Fuzz works at both levels — it’s both a clever send-up of action movie tropes and not a half-bad actioner itself (particularly in its last half-hour.) The proceedings here are all frightfully British, of course — in fact, that’s most of the joke. Hot Fuzz is Die Hard in a Wee Country Village, a bunch of quintessentially American Bruckheimerisms cross-bred with quintessentially droll English understatement. But if that wry sense of humor is your cup of tea (as it is mine), the result is probably the goofiest fun you’ll have had at a movie theater since Borat.

This time around, Simon Pegg is Sergeant Nicholas Angel, the most accomplished and dedicated peace officer on the London police force. (uh, police department, that is — the new protocols state you shouldn’t say force. Sorry about that.) He’s so accomplished, in fact, that he’s making everyone else look bad, and thus his superiors ship him off to the remote country idyll of Sandford, which proudly wears the title of the safest village in England. 9-1-1 is a joke in this town, and it soon seems Angel will spend the remainder of his days busting underage drinkers, chasing wayward swans, and fielding dumb questions from his new partner (Nick Frost), a second-generation lousy cop with an inordinate love for Point Break and Bad Boys II. Of course, if you’ve ever read an Agatha Christie novel, watched an episode of Doctor Who, rented The Prisoner or The Wicker Man, or basically taken in any contemporary tale ever set in a remote English village this side of All Creatures Great and Small, you can guess that things may not be all that they seem. And sure enough, it soon becomes clear that there’s a killer loose in this sleepy little haven, and that Sandford may need Angel’s finely honed police skills after all… (Particularly given that the town elders include Bond, Belloq, Boss Tweed, Jimmy Price, and the Equalizer, among others, so there are more than a few possible prime suspects to go around.)

A lot of the fun of Hot Fuzz comes not only from its smart writing and satiric edge (some of which I can’t discuss without giving away the game, sadly — but you’ll see what I mean) but also from its affectionate spoofing of American action tropes throughout. We have the two partnered cops, of course: the wide-eyed rookie learning the ropes and the grizzled veteran who can’t leave the job at home. But Hot Fuzz also features the ubiquitous Tony Scott quick-edits, the not-very-oblique homoerotic male-bonding subtext, the Michael Bay circular pans, the bad detective mustaches, and, of course, the big guns and bigger explosions. (I don’t remember a shot through the windshield of Pegg and Frost simultaneously screaming, as per the buddy-movie-standard, but I’m guessing it might have been in there too.) What separates Fuzz from the similarly knowing Planet Terror, a movie that was basically all inside-jokiness, is that this film never seems derisive toward its target, really. It lampoons the genre, sure, but it also delivers as a genre exercise. (As did Shaun, now that I think about it…hopefully Edgar Wright will bring a similar balance and panache to the superhero movie with his forthcoming take on Ant-Man.)

A Bit of a Grind.

So, Grindhouse. Frankly, it seems a bit late to post this review. Those limited few who had any interest in this two-director vanity project caught it that first weekend, and it’s completely nose-dived since (so much so that even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now being scaled back to escape a similar fate, as if that were ever going to happen.) But, for completists’ sake, I found Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s homage to the violent, smutty B-movies of yesteryear to be a fun idea at first, but not nearly entertaining enough to merit the three-and-a-half-hour slog. Some of the fake trailers, particularly Rodriguez’s Machete (i.e. the Mexican Shooter) and Edgar Wright’s Don’t, are chuckle-inducing, and there’s a certain goofy relish to be taken in the Z-grade John Carpenterisms of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, if you were ever a late-night Cinemax addict or grindhouse aficionado (I was not the latter — I’m too young for the whole Grindhouse scene, frankly, which may explain why the film bombed so badly. When even cinephiles in their early thirties missed the nostalgia train Rodriguez and Tarantino are serving up, that’s going to seriously eat into your audience figures.) But, otherwise, Grindhouse reminded me more than anything else of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police — a film that started off enjoyably, but ultimately became too much like its object of parody (there, bad action films; in this case, bad ’70’s movies.) And Tarantino’s Death Proof is to my mind just an egregious misfire, but more on that in a bit.

The first half of the Grindhouse bill is Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a sort of John Carpenter meets George Romero zombie flick in which a good-hearted stripper (Charmed‘s Rose McGowan) and her bad-ass trucker ex (Six Feet Under‘s Freddy Rodriguez — let’s hear it for short action stars) must rally a small Texas town against the flesh-devouring zombies in their midst (Said zombies were created by a wayward toxic cloud unleashed by the unholy tandem of Osama Bin Laden and Bruce Willis.) In keeping with the Grindhouse milieu, Planet Terror is, by design, a lousy film — its only upside comes in feeling in on the joke. And I will admit to sorta stupidly enjoying myself through most of Rodriguez’s half of the show, be it due to Josh Brolin’s low-grade Nick Nolte (as an HND poster noted), Rodriguez blasting away on a mini-bike, the CGI-enhanced sloppy edits and film deterioration, or the perfectly cheesy synth score. (And, really, who better to play redneck brothers in a capital-B-movie than Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn? Speaking from a purely fanboy perspective, it was just great to see Hicks/Reese again on the big screen.) In short, Planet Terror is, frankly, kinda awful: I wouldn’t sit through it again, and I can’t even come close to recommending it. But it’s a better bad film than, say, From Dusk Till Dawn, the last time Rodriguez and Tarantino tried this gag, and for its first hour at least I found myself going along reasonably contentedly on the terrible-movie-ride I was promised.

But, then comes Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, which admittedly I’m holding to higher expectations. Rodriguez has shown himself over the years basically to be a prolific and well-meaning hack. But, from Reservoir Dogs — a movie that blew me away as an 18-year-old Blockbuster clerk — to Pulp Fiction, the thrill ride (and soundtrack) of my sophomore year in college, to Jackie Brown, still Tarantino’s most mature and accomplished work, QT seemed like he might be a true auteur, a guy who could recombinate his extensive knowledge of cinema with his sheer passion for movies to create a career’s worth of films for the ages. But, like Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof marks another self-satisfied retreat into Tarantino’s narrowly-defined, solipsistic fanboy universe. To be honest, even though I was bored through much of Kill Bill 1, I never expected him to make a movie this dull.

Basically, Death Proof examines the fate of two female quartets — one in Austin, one in Tennessee — after they encounter the dark, dangerous, and wheedling persona of one Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, winking back to his Carpenter roots), a homicidal stalker with a “death-proof” car. But, despite its schlocky set-up, Death Proof is way too talky to have ever made much headway in a real grindhouse: The film is mostly comprised of these gangs of four nattering endlessly in unrealistic fashion about boys, music, or whatever else comes to mind, and each and every one of them talks and acts like Quentin Tarantino in wish-fulfillment mode: Amidst the MF and N-bombs, these beautiful gals name-drop movies like Zatoichi and Vanishing Point or esoteric bands like Dave Dee, Dosy, Beaky, Mich & Tich, all the while showing off their sumptuous feet and eventually, of course, kicking ass and taking names. (Yes, we already saw this in Kill Bill. In fact you could argue Tarantino’s cameo as a fiend-rapist who gets his just desserts in Planet Terror is all of Death Proof in a nutshell.) Really, Tarantino’s ear has never been so off. It being a grindhouse/exploitation flick, QT can get away with unrealistic women…but boring is its own problem.

At any rate, as you might guess from the plot, the last half hour or so of Death Proof involves a car chase between Russell and one of the aforementioned quartets, but that isn’t much more interesting than all the interminable chat we’ve already labored through. (Some reviews have pegged this as a bravura moment in car chase cinema — I thought it was dull even compared to recent stuff like The Bourne Supremacy or Ronin, to say nothing of flicks like The French Connection.) There’s one exceptionally haunting scene involving Vanessa Ferlito’s very last encounter with Stuntman Mike that suggests Tarantino might still have a few tricks up his sleeve, if he ever gets his act together some day. But, all in all, Grindhouse suggests more than anything else that he’s still stuck in the Kill Bill rut. What he probably needs to do is try to adapt someone else’s work again, a la Jackie Brown, before indulging in yet another B-movie flight of fancy like the Kill Bills and Death Proof. As it is, Tarantino’s flicks are sadly becoming a bit of a grind.

AARRRRRRGGG!!

Ever since The Matrix came out of nowhere in March of 1999 and proved that genre audiences would pack the seats any time of year, not just in summertime, the February/March comic-book tentpole release has become a staple of the fanboy film calendar (Think Blade II, Constantine, Sin City, V for Vendetta.) This year, as you probably know, the big event was Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300, which has been getting good buzz ever since its Comic-Con test footage and very impressive (and still very watchable) trailer last year. Well, I gotta say, I did everything I could to get all suitably double-Y aggro’ed for Snyder’s trip to Sparta: I went to the midnight IMAX showing with the fanboy nation, had Greek food for dinner (ok, a coincidence) and downed a few beers beforehand, tossed out 600 sit-ups and randomly killed a hobo — but, even then, 300 turned out to be sadly underwhelming. It looks great, no doubt — with its carefully calibrated colors and artfully spurting viscera, it looks even more Frank Millerish than Sin City did, and there are definitely a couple of images that bypass all thought and directly engage the reptilian part of the brain. But, even taken on its own terms, there’re too many groaners and too much filler here, and its attempts to be somber border on the laughable. I suspect 300 will sell a lot of HD-DVD players in the very near future, and for good reason, but it ultimately makes for a better music video than it does a movie.

The story is old, I know, but it goes on (usually in a David Wenham voiceover): In the ancient warrior city-state of Sparta, presided over by the robust, strapping King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), the men are men, the women are women, and those stunted weaklings born without a killer six-pack are picked off at a very early age. But, alas, this militarist utopia finds itself threatened by the global ambitions of the — clearly not manly enough — Persian God-King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who asks only that Leonidas and his people submit to his divine benevolence. Submission? You must be joking. So, while his beautiful Queen (Lena Headley) negotiates with the Spartan Senate in a number of insipid let’s-take-a-meeting scenes straight out of The Phantom Menace, Leonidas takes 300 of his best, least-clad warriors to the Hot Gates, where he and his ilk must fight off — without benefit of armor, mind you — wave after wave of Xerxes’ elite assassins: the fearsome Persian Immortals, known mainly by their grinning demon masks and matching Ahmadinejad windbreakers.

Ok, that gag aside, and despite what you may have heard, there’s really not that much allegorical grist in 300. I mean, you could very easily call out the political and racial subtext of the film: very Anglo-Saxonish looking Greeks beating down evil brown and black folk, in order to defend Spartan freedom(?) against the “mysticism and tyranny” of the Asian hordes. (After all, writer Frank Miller is the same guy who felt it necessary to sic Batman on Al Qaeda.) Or, you could fault 300‘s unabashed reveling in blood, guts, and glory: Faramir won’t shut up in this movie, and yet there’s nothing at all here akin to his opening lines in his last crusade against Men of the East, The Two Towers: “His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there in peace. War will make corpses of us all.”
In short, to say 300 is the anti-Letters from Iwo Jima is an understatement.

But, really, all of that is basically beside the point: the movie is way too shallow to merit any deeper readings. The inimitable, foul-mouthed Neill Cumpston hit the nail on the head: 300 is in essence a video game, with waves of easy-to-dispatch bad-guy mobs punctuated by the occasional mini-boss. And, besides, let’s be honest: All subtexts aside, I came to 300 — and if you saw the trailer, you did too — to chew gum and watch people kick ass, and I’m all out of gum. But, for every adrenaline-firing sequence of Leonidas and co. carving through baddies in slow-motion — one, you’ll know it when you see it, is pitch-perfect Frank Miller — there are several others where the movie just grinds to a halt, and we’re forced to watch Leonidas look angst-ridden or Queen Gargos engage in some cut-rate speechifying about freedom: “Freedom isn’t free,” “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” etc. etc. ad nauseum. (And, alas, poor McNulty gets the shaft again: Dominic West gets a terribly-written, totally unnecessary part as a mustache-twirling politician/diplomat, which should tell you all you need to know about his role here — Like Sparta’s intrepid warriors really need his cut-and-run, Hans Blix pansy-ass screwing things up on the homefront.)

Still, for all of 300 pacing woes, dialogue groaners, and two-dimensional characters, I have to admit — it does have its occasional moments…usually when it drops all pretense and just lets its “Tonight, we dine in Hell!” freak flag fly. A sinuous oracle in flimsy gauze writhes ecstatically through a soothsaying as if underwater. The God-King Xerxes, his voice booming with inhuman authority (nice job, sound editing guys), rests majestically on his obscenely large throne stairs, making Leonidas an offer he can’t refuse. Persian ships are rent asunder by the stormy wrath of Poseidon, as Greece’s warriors roar with approval in the rain. In these moments, and at others, such as when Xerxes unleashes his menagerie of rhinos and elephants against the 300, or when the Spartans first encounter the Asians’ arcane magick of gunpowder, Zack Snyder’s film settles into a big, dumb, loud, and rousingly enjoyable groove. Alas, 300 can only sustain that intensity for minutes at at time, and for the rest of the run, it’s not so enjoyable. Too bad — I get the sense there’s probably a really amazing half-hour short-film in here somewhere. As it is, 300 feels disappointing, and makes me wonder if Snyder has the wherewithal to do Alan Moore’s The Watchmen justice.

The (Possibly) Good German.

In David Fincher’s Zodiac, well-intentioned cops from different jurisdictions conduct archival sleuthing and the occasional phone trace to track down a cold-blooded killer. But, in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s powerful, humanistic The Lives of Others, the second half of my double-feature last Friday, the bureaucratic machinery of the State grinds into gear for a darker purpose. Here, in the final flower of Erich Honecker’s East Germany, the Stasi keep their eyes and ears on those who would threaten the integrity of the German Democratic Republic, which, sadly, counts as just about everyone. I know very little about this subject, so I can’t vouch for how well van Donnersmarck recreates the rigors of East German life in the 1980s. Still, as an Orwellian parable of secrets and surveillance, The Lives of Others is a very worthwhile film, one strong enough to overcome some perhaps overly cliched moments of awakening by various characters along the way.

When we first meet Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), with his sleek dome, thin ties, and retrofuturistic jacket, he’s training young Stasi cadets in the subtler techniques of interrogation and threatening landladies with the ruin of their children’s future — clearly a right rotten bastard of the first order. Still, there’s something undeniably impressive about the ever watchful Wiesler, a man who’s both cognizant of even the slightest emotional shifts in his prey and committed fully to the ideological aspirations of the Party. Wiesler’s skill and fervor is not lost on party flunky Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), who assigns him to a career-making case of digging up dirt on the roguishly handsome, go-along-to-get-along playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) for a well-connected romantic rival.

But, something — perhaps the sight of Dreyman’s beautiful actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) on stage, perhaps something else — clicks in Wiesler as he conducts his round-the-clock surveillance. And, from the dismal attic above Dreyman’s apartment, Capt. Wiesler soon begins, despite himself, to commit Thoughtcrime. And as Dreyman begins to associate with known subversives and the investigatory noose tightens, Wiesler finds himself increasingly complicit in the machinations of the artists downstairs, so much so that he soon, if he’s not very, very careful, runs the risk of being the Stasi’s next target.

I can see the criticism that The Lives of Others can occasionally be a bit too pat. The distinctions between Wiesler and Dreyman are perhaps a bit overdrawn (Dreyman’s apartment is always suffused with a warm glow, and he and Sieland are invariably surrounded by friends, music, and the finer things in life; meanwhile, Wiesler scurries about the cold, gray machines upstairs, and basically lives like Eleanor Rigby — get a dog, Captain), and there are definitely a few cliche-ridden scenes along the way (for example, one involving the instantly transformative power of Beethoven — you’ll know what i mean.

Still, The Lives of Others is affecting in the details: Dreyman (“Lazlo”) and Sieland (“CMS”) are reduced to abstractions by the Stasi’s surveillance regime, with all the messy, conflicted, and emotion-ridden qualities that make them human drained away. (“They presumably have intercourse,” comments Wiesler dryly in his report after one tender moment.) Conversely, Wiesler’s attempts to break free of his own self-imposed leash and sound even the feeblest of barbaric yawps are moving in their own way, be it his sneaking out a dog-eared copy of Brecht from Dreyman’s shelf or renegotiating his interrogation strategy on an eight-year-old in his elevator.

The Lives of Others ends with a coda that at first seems too long but ultimately sounds just the right note: As Auden memorably put it, There is no such thing as the State, and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. May I, composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.

Sign of the Beast.

More a straightforward police procedural than the type of visually kinetic extravaganza one might expect from the director of Se7en and Fight Club, David Fincher’s Zodiac, which I saw on Friday, is a slow-moving but generally effective film. I confess to having very little interest in the story of the Zodiac killer, or in serial killer movies in general. Still, I found Zodiac to be a somber and engaging character study of the cops, journalists, and suspects caught up in the hunt for San Francisco’s most famous murderer, and a moody meditation on how, as months yield to years without a definitive answer, the long, tiring search for truth comes to haunt and drain their lives away. It may basically play like a seventies throwback Law and Order for most of its run, with occasional flourishes from The Wire, but Zodiac is still a worthwhile film, and one that marks a welcome rebound for Fincher after the relatively uninspired Panic Room. It’s good to see his sign rising once again.

After the first of many impressive establishing shots of San Francisco, set to some spooky post-psychedelic pop ditty of the era, Zodiac begins on July 4th, 1969, with what feels like both a classic urban legend and a recipe for disaster — two young people flirting and fumbling at a dark and abandoned Lover’s Lane. Only this story is true, and soon enough, the Zodiac has struck for the second time, leaving one dead and another terribly wounded in his wake. Showing a penchant for publicity that will make him a household name in the Bay Area over the next few years, the Zodiac sends both boastful and encoded message to several major newspapers. These pique the interest of — among others — a hard-drinking, hard-living writer on the cop beat (Robert Downey, Jr.), a nebbishy cartoonist with a knack for puzzles (Jake Gyllenhaal, playing the author of the book on which the film is based), and two peace officers (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards) assigned to track down this preening sociopath before he strikes again. For the next few years, we follow each of these fellows as they attempt to pin down the identity of the elusive killer: negotiating bureaucratic snafus, parsing encrypted texts, and, yes, hitting the archives like good, little researchers. But the trail of the Zodiac exacts a heavy toll, and as the Age of Aquarius fades into the Reagan era, each of these men leave the decade scarred by their quest, some irreparably. And still, somewhere out there, the Zodiac lurks…

Its opening moments notwithstanding, most of Zodiac is concerned not with nasty serial killer exploits (although there are a few, such as a jarring afternoon picnic at the lake) but the ugly mechanics of the cops and journalists’ search, with all its circumstantial theorizing and bureaucratic gear-grinding. Some of this stuff, such as the memory-holes that arise between overlapping jurisdictions of various Bay Area law enforcement bureaus, would probably seem fresher if you’ve never watched The Wire, where police mismanagement and careerism is a central staple. (That being said, likable character actors like Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, and Zach Grenier spice up these scenes considerably.) But, other facets of the hunt still resonate, such as how multiple explanations pile up for a given clue with no real way to determine the correct one. The Zodiac’s symbol…is it a cross-hair, or was it stolen from a watch company, or is it the countdown from the opening of a film reel? Each answer seems like it must be the definitive one at different times, and, for the participants in this haunted search, the shifting interpretations grow increasingly maddening. The film is kind enough to give the audience something of a sense of closure at the end, but Zodiac is most intriguing when it leaves all doors open, and lets its characters get thrown about in the bruising wind that ensues.

2006 (Finally) in Film.

Well, there are still a number of flicks I haven’t yet seen — David Lynch’s Inland Empire, for example, which I hope to hit up this weekend. But as the Oscar nods were announced today, and as the few remaining forlorn Christmas trees are finally being picked up off the sidewalk, now seems the last appropriate time to crank out my much belated end-of-2006 film list (originally put off to give me time to make up for my New Zealand sojourn.) To be honest, I might’ve written this list a few weeks earlier, had it not happened that I ended up seeing the best film of 2005 in mid-January of last year, thus rendering the 2005 list almost immediately obsolescent. But, we’ll get to that — As it stands, 2006 was a decent year in movies (in fact a better year in film than it was in life, the midterms notwithstanding), with a crop of memorable genre flicks and a few surprisingly worthy comebacks. And, for what it’s worth, I thought the best film released in 2006 was…

Top 20 Films of 2006

[2000/2001/2002/2003/2004/2005]

1. United 93: A movie I originally had no interest in seeing, Paul Greengrass’s harrowing docudrama of the fourth flight on September 11 captured the visceral shock of that dark day without once veering into exploitation or sentimentality (the latter the curse of Oliver Stone’s much inferior World Trade Center.) While 9/11 films of the future might offer more perspective on the origins and politics of those horrible hours, it’s hard to imagine a more gripping or humane film emerging anytime soon about the day’s immediate events. A tragic triumph, United 93 is an unforgettable piece of filmmaking.

[1.] The New World (2005): A movie which seemed to divide audiences strongly, Terence Malick’s The New World was, to my mind, a masterpiece. I found it transporting in ways films seldom are these days, and Jamestown a much richer canvas for Malick’s unique gifts than, say, Guadalcanal. As the director’s best reimagining yet of the fall of Eden, The New World marvelously captured the stark beauty and sublime strangeness of two worlds — be they empires, enemies, or lovers — colliding, before any middle ground can be established. For its languid images of Virginia woodlands as much as moments like Wes Studi awestruck by the rigid dominion over nature inherent in English gardens, The New World goes down as a much-overlooked cinematic marvel, and (sorry, Syriana) the best film of 2005.

2. Letters from Iwo Jima: Having thought less of Flags of our Fathers and the woeful Million Dollar Baby than most people, I was almost completely thrown by the dismal grandeur and relentless gloom of Eastwood’s work here. To some extent the Unforgiven of war movies, Iwo Jima is a bleakly rendered siege film that trafficks in few of the usual tropes of the genre. (Don’t worry — I suspect we’ll get those in spades in two months in 300.) Instead of glorious Alamo-style platitudes, we’re left only with the sight of young men — all avowed enemies of America, no less — swallowed up and crushed in the maelstrom of modern combat. From Ken Watanabe’s commanding performance as a captain going down with the ship to Eastwood’s melancholy score, Letters works to reveal one fundamental, haunting truth: Tyrants may be toppled, nations may be liberated, and Pvt. Ryans may be saved, but even “good wars” are ultimately Hell on earth for those expected to do the fighting.

3. Children of Men: In the weeks since I first saw this film, my irritation with the last fifteen minutes or so has diminished, and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men has emerged for what it is — one of the most resonant “near-future” dystopias to come down the pike in a very long while, perhaps since (the still significantly better) Brazil. Crammed with excellent performances by Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor and others, Children is perhaps a loosely-connected grab bag of contemporary anxieties and afflictions (terrorism, detainment camps, pharmaceutical ads, celebrity culture). But it’s assuredly an effective one, with some of the most memorable and naturalistic combat footage seen in several years to boot. I just wished they’d called that ship something else…

4. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: True, the frighteningly talented Sasha Baron Cohen spends a lot of time in this movie shooting fish in a barrel, and I wish he’d spent a little more time eviscerating subtler flaws in the American character than just knuckle-dragging racists and fratboy sexists. Still, the journeys of Borat Sagdiyev through the Bible Buckle and beyond made for far and away the funniest movie of the year. Verry nice.

5. The Prestige: I originally had this in Children of Men‘s spot, as there are few films I enjoyed as much this year as Christopher Nolan’s sinister sleight-of hand. But, even after bouncing Children up for degree of difficulty, that should take nothing away from The Prestige, a seamlessly made genre film about the rivalries and perils of turn-of-the-century prestidigitation. (There seems to be a back-and-forth between fans of this film and The Illusionist, which I sorta saw on a plane in December. Without sound (which, obviously, is no way to see a movie), Illusionist seemed like an implausible love story set to a tempo of anguished Paul Giamatti reaction shots. In any case, I prefer my magic shows dark and with a twist.) Throw in extended cameos by David Bowie and Andy Serkis — both of which help to mitigate the Johansson factor — and The Prestige was the purest cinematic treat this year for the fanboy nation. Christian Bale in particular does top-notch work here, and I’m very much looking forward to he and Nolan’s run-in with Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.

6. The Fountain: Darren Aronofsky’s elegiac ode to mortality and devotion was perhaps the most unfairly maligned movie of the year. (In a perfect world, roughly half of the extravagant praise going to Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth would have been lavished on this film.) Clearly a heartfelt and deeply personal labor of love, The Fountain — admittedly clunky in his first half hour — was a visually memorable tone poem that reminds us that all things — perhaps especially the most beautiful — are finite, so treasure them while you can.

7. The Queen: A movie I shied away from when it first came out, The Queen is a canny look at contemporary politics anchored by Helen Mirren’s sterling performance as the fastidious, reserved, and ever-so-slightly downcast monarch in question. (Michael Sheen’s Tony Blair is no slouch either.) In fact, The Queen is the type of movie I wish we saw more often: a small, tightly focused film about a very specific moment in recent history. Indeed, between this and United 93, 2006 proved to be a good year for smart and affecting depictions of the very recent past — let’s hope the trend continues through the rest of the oughts.

8. Inside Man: The needless Jodie Foster subplot notwithstanding, Spike Lee’s Inside Man was a fun, expertly-made crime procedural, as good in its own way as the much more heavily-touted Departed. It was also, without wearing it on its sleeve, the film Crash should have been — a savvy look at contemporary race relations that showed there are many more varied and interesting interactions between people of different ethnicities than simply “crashing” into each other. (But perhaps that’s how y’all roll over in car-culture LA.) At any rate, Inside Man is a rousing New York-centric cops-and-robbers pic in the manner of Dog Day Afternoon or The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three, and it’s definitely one of the more enjoyable movie experiences of the year.

9. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party: Speaking of enjoyable New York-centric movie experiences, Dave Chappelle and Michel Gondry’s block party last year felt like a breath of pure spring air after a long, cold, lonely winter — time to kick off the sweaters and parkas and get to groovin’ with your neighbors. With performances by some of the most innovative and inspired players in current hip-hop (Kanye, Mos Def, The Roots, The Fugees, Erykah Badu), and presided over by the impish, unsinkable Chappelle, Block Party was one of the best concert films in recent memory, and simply more fun than you can shake a stick at.

10. Casino Royale: Bond is back! Thanks to Daniel Craig’s portrayal of 007 as a blunt, glitched-up human being rather than a Casanova Superspy, and a script that eschewed the UV laser pens and time-release exploding cufflinks of Bonds past for more hard-boiled and gritty fodder, Casino Royale felt straight from the pen of Ian Fleming, and newer and more exciting than any 007 movie in decades.

11. The Departed: A very good movie brimming over with quality acting (notably Damon and Di Caprio) and support work — from Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone, and others — Scorsese’s The Departed also felt a bit too derivative of its splendid source material, Infernal Affairs, to merit the top ten. And then there’s the Jack problem: An egregiously over-the-top Nicholson chews so much scenery here that it’s a wonder there’s any of downtown Boston left standing. But, despite these flaws, The Departed is well worth seeing, and if it finally gets Scorsese his Best Director Oscar (despite Greengrass deserving it), it won’t be too much of an outrage.

[11.] Toto The Hero (1991): Also sidelined out of this top twenty on account of its release date, Jaco Von Dormael’s Toto the Hero — Terry Gilliam’s choice of screening for an IFC Movie Night early in October — is definitely one for the Netflix queue, particularly if you’re a fan of Gilliam’s oeuvre. It’s a bizarre coming-of-age/going-of-age tale that includes thoughts of envy, murder, incest, and despair, all the while remaining somehow whimsical and fantastical at its core. (And, trust me: As with Ary Borroso’s “Brazil“, you’ll be left humming Charles Trenet’s “Boum” to yourself long after the movie is over.)

12. Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: I guess this is where I should be writing something brief and scintillating about Michael Winterbottom’s metanarrative version of Laurence Sterne’s famous novel, one which gives Steve Coogan — and the less well-known Rob Brydon — a superlative chance to work their unique brand of comedic mojo. But I’m growing distracted and Berk has that pleading “I-want-to-go-out, are-you-done-yet” look and Kevin’s still only on Number 12 of a list that, for all intent and purposes, is three weeks late and will be read by all of eight people anyway. (But don’t tell him that — In fact, I shouldn’t even talk about him behind his back.) So, perhaps we’ll come back to this later…it’s definitely a review worth writing (again), if I could just figure out how to start.

13. Miami Vice: Michael Mann’s moody reimagining of the TV show that made him famous isn’t necessarily his best work, but it was one of the more unique and absorbing movies of the summer, and one that lingers in the memory long after much of the year’s fluffier and more traditional films have evaporated. Dr. Johnson (and Hunter Thompson) once wrote that “He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” I guess that’s what Crockett and Tubbs are going for with the nightclubs and needle boats.

14. CSA: The Confederate States of America: I wish I were in the land of cotton…or have we been there all along? Kevin Wilmott’s alternate history of a victorious Confederate America is a savvy and hilarious send-up of history documentaries and a sharp-witted, sharp-elbowed piece of satire with truths to tell about the shadow of slavery in our past. With any luck, CSA will rise again on the DVD circuit.

15. The Science of Sleep: Not as good or as universally applicable as his Eternal Sunshine (the best film of 2004), Michel Gondry’s dreamlike, unabashedly romantic The Science of Sleep is still a worthy inquiry into matters of the (broken) heart. What is it about new love that is so intoxicating? And why do the significant others in our mind continue to haunt us so, even when they bear such little relation to the people they initially represented? Science doesn’t answer these crucial questions (how can it?), but it does acutely diagnose the condition. When it comes to relationships, Sleep suggests, all we have to do — sometimes all we can do, despite ourselves — is dream.

16. Rocky Balboa: Rocky! Rocky! Rocky! I’m as surprised as anyone that Sly’s sixth outing as Philadelphia’s prized pugilist made the top twenty. But, as formulaic as it is, Rocky Balboa delivered the goods like a Ivan Drago right cross. Ultimately not quite as enjoyable as Bond’s return to the service, Rocky Balboa still made for a commendable final round for the Italian Stallion. And, if nothing else, he went down fighting.

17. Pan’s Labyrinth: A fantasy-horror flick occurring simultaneously within a Spanish Civil War film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth ultimately felt to me like less than the sum of its parts. But if the plaudits it’s receiving help to mainstream other genre movies in critics’ eyes in the future, I’m all for it. It’s an ok movie, no doubt, but if you’re looking for to see one quality supernatural-historical tale of twentieth-century Spain, rent del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone instead.

18. Little Miss Sunshine: Another film which I think is being way overpraised, Little Miss Sunshine is still a moderately enjoyable evening at the movies. It felt overscripted and television-ish to me, and I wish it was as way over yonder in the minor key as it pretends to be, but Sunshine is nevertheless a cute little IFC-style family film, and one that does have a pretty funny payoff at the end.

19. The Last King of Scotland: I just wrote on this one yesterday, so my impressions haven’t changed much. Still, Forrest Whitaker’s jovial and fearsome Idi Amin, and an almost-equally-good performance by James McAvoy as the dissolute young Scot who unwittingly becomes his minion, makes The Last King of Scotland worth seeing, if you can bear its grisly third act.

20. Thank You for Smoking: It showed flashes of promise, and it was all there on paper, in the form of Chris Buckley’s book. But Smoking, alas, never really lives up to its potential. What Smoking needed was the misanthropic jolt and sense of purpose of 2005’s Lord of War, a much more successful muckraking satire, to my mind. But Smoking, like its protagonist, just wants to be liked, and never truly commits to its agenda. Still, pleasant enough, if you don’t consider the opportunity cost.

Most Disappointing: All the King’s Men, X3: The Last Stand — Both, unfortunately, terrible.

Worth a Rental: A Scanner Darkly, Brick, Cache, Cars, Curse of the Golden Flower, Glory Road, The History Boys, Marie Antoinette, Match Point (2005), V for Vendetta, Why We Fight

Don’t Bother: Bobby, Crash (2005), The Da Vinci Code, Flags of our Fathers, The Good German, The Good Shepherd, Mission: Impossible: III, Night Watch (2004), Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Men’s Chest, Poseidon, Scoop, Superman Returns, The Wicker Man, World Trade Center

Best Actor: Clive Owen, Children of Men; Forrest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland; Ken Watanabe, Letters from Iwo Jima
Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen; Q’Orianka Kilcher, The New World
Best Supporting Actor: Mark Wahlberg, The Departed; Michael Caine, Children of Men/The Prestige
Best Supporting Actress: Pam Farris, Children of Men; Vera Farmiga, The Departed; Maribel Verdu, Pan’s Labyrinth

Unseen: Apocalypto, Babel, Blood Diamond, Catch a Fire, Clerks II, The Descent, The Devil Wears Prada, Dreamgirls, Fast Food Nation, Hollywoodland, An Inconvenient Truth, Infamous, Inland Empire, Jackass Number Two, Jet Li’s Fearless, Lassie, Little Children, Notes from a Scandal, The Notorious Betty Page, A Prairie Home Companion, The Pursuit of Happyness, Running With Scissors, Sherrybaby, Shortbus, Stranger than Fiction, Tideland, Venus, Volver, Wordplay

2007: The list isn’t looking all that great, to be honest. But, perhaps we’ll find some gems in here…: 300, 3:10 To Yuma, Beowulf, Black Snake Moan, The Bourne Ultimatum, FF2, The Golden Age: Elizabeth II, The Golden Compass, Grindhouse, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hot Fuzz, I Am Legend, Live Free or Die Hard, Ocean’s Thirteen, PotC3, The Simpsons Movie, Smokin’ Aces, Spiderman 3, Stardust, The Transformers, Zodiac.

Hearts in the Highlands.

All the King’s Men by way of Heart of Darkness (and more than a dash of Hotel Rwanda), Kevin MacDonald’s The Last King of Scotland is a harrowing portrait of the scampish, fun-loving, paranoid, and genocidal Idi Amin, former president/warlord of Uganda, and a moderately engaging cautionary tale about the dangers of seeking to find oneself in a place one doesn’t belong. Somewhat clunkily assembled (despite being co-written by Peter Morgan, screenwriter of The Queen) and suffering from a third act that, like its protagonist, gets lost somewhere amidst its downward trajectory, The Last King of Scotland is a film mostly redeemed by excellent performances — notably Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as our (anti-)hero, but also Gillian Anderson, Simon McBurney, and others in supporting roles. It wasn’t quite as good as I was hoping or expecting, but it’s definitely worth a rental — for Whitaker if for nothing else — if you can handle the increasingly graphic carnage of the film’s final hour.

As the film begins, it’s 1970, and (the fictional) Nicholas Gerrigan (James McAvoy of The Chronicles of Narnia) is a recently-minted doctor and young, debaucherous Scotsman looking for a life less suffocating than the one on the plate before him, taking over the family practice. Choosing Uganda more or less at random (he spins a globe to choose his fate, but not without first exercising some veto power), Gerrigan soon finds himself one of two doctors on hand in an overworked clinic deep in the African hinterlands, where the only fun to be had is making flagrant passes at his colleague’s do-gooder wife (Gillian Anderson).

Fate rescues Gerrigan from his ennui, however, in the form of a traffic accident — one which brings him to the attention of Uganda’s new leader, the Scotland-adoring Idi Amin (Whitaker). Soon thereafter, Gerrigan has been made Amin’s personal doctor and “closest advisor,” meaning he spends a lot of time dissolute by the pool, unwittingly (and soon deliberately) oblivious to the bloody machinations holding Amin’s regime in power. That is, until his own somewhat-inadvertent complicity in a murder — as well as some really poor life decisions — force Gerrigan to confront the monstrosities laid before him. This place is a prison, he soon discovers, and these people very clearly aren’t his friends.

As it almost had to be, The Last King of Scotland is most enjoyable in its first hour, as Gerrigan is slowly seduced by the life Amin offers him, and all the sultry pleasures therein included. When it all turns on him, and Gerrigan discovers the heavy price of his fool’s paradise, the film quickly descends into a hell that’s not only hard to watch (one grisly scene brought back unsettling childhood memories of watching…I think it was A Man Called Horse — you’ll know it when you see it) but also somewhat repetitive. How many slo-mo shots of a druggy and/or horrified Gerrigan set to acid-rock do we really need here? Moreover, the film telegraphs one of the good doctor’s key indiscretions for far too long — at least forty minutes is spent simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak.

That being said, Forrest Whitaker’s performance here makes up for a lot of mistakes. (Seeing the clearly quiet-natured Whitaker’s shellshocked acceptance speech at the Globes last weekend made his work here seem all the more surprising and impressive.) The Willie Stark last year’s All the King’s Men desperately needed, Whitaker commands the camera in every scene he’s in — His Amin is all the more horrifying because he’s basically an overgrown boy, all appetite and no restraint. In every scene, you can sense him lumbering somewhere on the border between childish glee and murderous rage, and we never know where the axe will fall…only that, when it does, it’s not going to be pretty.

Muddled in their Intent.

I never caught the source material while it was on Broadway, so I can’t compare it to the play. But, while I found Nicholas Hytner’s film of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys to be a thoughtful and decently engaging piece of work, it makes for a somewhat unnatural and theatrical evening of cinema. The ideas in (the) play are obviously intriguing and worthy of contemplation, but — with several performances better suited for the back rows than the big screen (most notably Clive Merrison as a schoolmaster out of Monty Python) and a gaggle of bon mot-spouting teenagers that, at least in my own personal and teaching experience, act in no way at all like teenagers — The History Boys often felt forced to me. It’s a worthy piece of pedagogy, I suppose, and I’m almost positive it must work better on Broadway. But, overall, I thought it trafficked in archetypes more than it does in real-world, flesh-and-blood characters — more fiction than history, I’d say — and this close to the action, its faults are harder to hide.

As iconic cuts by New Order and The Smiths tip off in the opening moments, The History Boys takes place in the early 1980’s — 1983 Sheffield, to be exact. But don’t let “Blue Monday” and “This Charming Man” fool you: our story in fact takes place in a boys’ preparatory school, one — references to W.H. Auden and Brief Encounter notwithstanding — seemingly hermetically sealed from the outside world at large. Here in this academic biodome, several young lads, having done exceedingly well on their A-levels, now prep for the grueling college application process, in the particular hopes of getting into Oxford and Cambridge.

To aid them in this arduous process are two history professors dueling for their impressionable minds…and bodies: In the relativist corner, Professor Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a sharp, young, and assured (if closeted) new hiree dedicated to promoting the ironies and contingencies of history. Meanwhile, over in the knowledge-for-its-own-sake department rests Professor Hector (Richard Griffiths, the soul of the film.) Orwell looming over his shoulder (the two agree on the debasement of “worrrrds“), Hector is a grotesque but endearing fellow who one might call avuncular, were it not for his rather unfortunate penchant for fondling his students’ genitals. Shrugging off these occasional gropes (far more sanguinely than seems realistic, IMHO), the history boys perform poetry, film scenes, and cabaret tunes for the latter and develop streaks of contrarian skepticism for the former, all the while learning a thing or two not only about life and history, but of the Achilles’ Heels of their esteemed teachers.

In a nutshell, the basic problem I had with The History Boys is this: A decade ago, a friend of mine once described a mutual acquaintance as “the ideal twenty-two-year-old…in the eyes of a fifty-five-year old.” Well, this movie’s got a whole pack of ’em. All of the young actors here are decent enough — if a bit broad, cinematically speaking — with Samuel Barnett (as Posner, a boy trapped in the very special hell that is an unrequited teenage crush) and Dominic Cooper (as Dakin, a young man increasingly hopped up on Nietzsche and the power of his own burgeoning sexuality) given the most to do. But, as they effortlessly spin forth witticisms at the most opportune moments and gather around the piano without even a trace of cynicism or irony (“the shackles of youth,” as the line goes) about them, they all seemed very, very improbable to me…and that’s even notwithstanding their handling of the aforementioned sexual misdeeds. (Full disclosure: I have much the same problem with Whit Stillman films.)

Yet, once you take it as inherently fanciful and somewhat missuited for the big screen, there are still elements to enjoy in Boys, including a number of thoughtful disquisitions on the uses and practices of history as a discipline: for example, on contingency, commemoration, and the rise of a more gender-balanced understanding of the past (the latter memorably delivered by Frances De La Tour, who, while excellent here as a jaded prof, still unfortunately kept reminding me of Madame Maxime.) Admittedly, these digressions do seem shoehorned in at times — and brought back memories of fading historiography seminars — but they still offer some keen grist for the philosophical mill. (That being said, I somehow suspect that the teaching of history is a less sexually charged discipline than as seen here, where it’s rife with more suppressed longing than the Catholic priesthood. But perhaps I haven’t been at it long enough.)