Anything for a Pryce.

“He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.“

Sounds like am organizational genius, a master of efficiency…a bit like Lane Pryce, no? Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes gets his arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in veteran character actor Jared Harris. I like it. (FWIW, I still haven’t caught the the Moff’s contemporary Holmes reboot for BBC, but I hear good things.)

The Show Must Go On.

“Freddie Mercury was an awe-inspiring performer, so with Sacha in the starring role coupled with Peter’s screenplay and the support of Queen, we have the perfect combination to tell the real story behind their success.” Sacha Baron Cohen signs up to play Freddie Mercury for Peter Morgan, scribe of The Queen, Frost/Nixon, and The Damned United, in a forthcoming Queen biopic. He’s a bit tall, I guess, but otherwise that’s really solid casting.

Cuts like a Knife.

So…Robert Rodriguez’s Machete. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one, partly because by two weeks later, the movie has already passed its sell-by date. But regardless, a film like this is basically critic-proof anyway: After all, we’re talking about a purposefully cheap-looking, 90-minute Mexploitation flick based on one of the joke trailers from Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse — Does anyone really expect a good film here?

So having said that, I doubt that it will surprise anyone that Machete is more bad-bad than fun-bad, even going in with low expectations (and after libations.) I didn’t have a terrible time watching it, and I guess the movie basically succeeds at what it promised to be — an “ironic,” splatter-filled homage to and/or parody of terrible films of the ’70s. But the whole enterprise still felt really uninspired. In the end, Machete hits its marks, but it definitely doesn’t improve on the 90 seconds we saw of this flick in Grindhouse. (Hopefully we can expect more from Edgar Wright’s Don’t, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, or Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S., once they all get their inevitable day in the sun.)

While Danny Trejo plays the titular badass — a former Federale-turned-illegal-immigrant for whom “day labor” means cleaving through bad guys — with an admirable Lee Marvinish deadpan, a lot of the joking around in Machete involves stunt casting. This includes Steven Seagal as the Big Bad Mexican drug lord (has Seagal ever been in a good movie? Well, Under Siege, maybe), Robert De Niro as a sleazy race-baiting Senator (more on him in a sec), Jeff Fahey as the Karl Rove of Arizona, Lindsay Lohan as a druggy burnout, and the Nash Bridges team of Don Johnson and Cheech Marin as a racist cop and man of the cloth respectively. (Rounding out the cast: Jessica Alba is ludicrous as a INS detective on Machete’s trail, and Michelle Rodriguez once again does her Michelle Rodriguez thing as underground guerrilla leader “She” — inexplicably pronounced “Shee” insteady of “Shay.” Way to step on your own joke there.)

Well, ok, stunt casting is fun. In fact, one of the things I appreciated most about Rodriguez’s half of Grindhouse — Planet Terror — was both Fahey and Michael Biehn kicking around the movie. That being said, “Ha, it’s Robert DeNiro slumming it!” would probably work better as a joke if DeNiro wasn’t constantly, you know, slumming it these days. When he showed up in Meet the Parents ten years ago, it seemed pretty funny. Now, a la late-career Brando, Pacino, or Nicholson, it just seems kinda sad. (And like David Arquette outacting Harvey Keitel in The Grey Zone, Fahey probably gives a better performance than DeNiro does here. Trejo does for sure.)

Similarly, the meta-joke driving Machete — “Look, Robert Rodriguez made an intentionally bad film!” — suffers from the unfortunate fact that, ironically (From Dusk Til Dawn, Planet Terror) or not, Robert Rodriguez pretty much always makes B-movies. Even El Mariachi, the film that first put him on the map in 1992, is rather unmemorable, in my humble opinion. (I mean that literally — I can only remember the last 15 seconds of that flick — the pit bull and motorcycle and whatnot — which is still more than I can say for both Desperado and Once Upon a Time In Mexico.) For me, the one time Rodriguez struck gold was with Sin City, and that was mainly due to the wise, direct pilfering of Frank Miller’s “storyboards” — i.e., the original graphic novels.

All of which is to say, it’s hard to figure out in the end if Machete is a deft send-up of a bad movie or just a plain bad movie. (I had the same problem, to a lesser extent, with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.) Like Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I guess Rodriguez may just be pretending to be a hackish director of forgettable, derivative B-movies, but at this point he’s fooled me. (Maybe he should keep them trailer-length.)

Speaking of that original trailer, I’d recommend just watching that for your Machete experience, along with perhaps Machete’s Cinco de Mayo message to Arizona. Given both the virulence and the abject nonsense driving a lot of anti-immigrant hysteria these days, as well as the unfettered cravenness of the right-wing freakshows who most often push it, there was obviously room for some choice satire in this film. But, a few lines here or there aside, Machete is much more interested in playing with Z-grade movie tropes — breasts, blood splatter, and 70’s sound effects, say — than delving into any real political content about the borderlands. Eh, so be it — It’s Machete. It may be a missed opportunity, but it never pretended to be Traffic anyway.

The upshot here: Machete is (to no one’s surprise, I’m sure) eminently missable. But if you’re at all inclined to board this train, the two trailers cover 95% of the good stuff, so save yourself an hour and a half and just watch those. Having gone for the full ride myself, I left the theater with only one thought in my head: I’d just f**ked with the wrong Mexican.

For a Pocket Full of Mumbles.

Mark Wahlberg coulda been a contender, if only brother Christian Bale would start acting professional, in the ridiculously plot-by-numbers trailer for David O’Russell’s The Fighter, also with Amy Adams. Good director, good cast, but this also looks schmaltzy as all Hell.

Strange Trips.

In the teaser bin, superspy Angelina Jolie (again?) gets befuddled traveler Johnny Depp in over his head in the trailer for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Tourist, also with Paul Bettany, Rufus Sewell, Timothy Dalton, and Ralf Moeller. (Not exactly The Lives of Others, is it? And this soon after Salt, Jolie feels like a red flag.)

Meanwhile, Matt Damon sees dead people in the trailer for Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, also with Bryce Dallas Howard, Jay Mohr, Jenifer Lewis, Cecile De France, and Richard Kind. Eh, maybe — This definitely looks like a potential schmaltzfest.

Regrets, He’s Had a Few.

After a busier than anticipated several weeks — sorry, as always, about the quiet ’round here — time to catch up in the review department: First on the docket, Anton Corbijn’s languid, meditative “thriller,” The American. I doubt this slow-moving, verging-on-ponderous film was everyone’s cup of tea — The folks in front of me basically laughed their way through it, and by the overwrought last few scenes I was chuckling along with them. Still, I wouldn’t sit through it again anytime soon, but I still admired The American for several reasons — for its striking travelogue cinematography, for an out-of-his-comfort-zone performance from George Clooney, and, perhaps most notably, for the film’s uncompromising artiness. Say what you will about this movie — it’s not one that panders to studio notes.

If you’ve seen The American by now, you’ll know that, despite the patriotic title and the presence of Clooney, this flick is in fact about as far from American as you get. Rather, it’s an unabashed throwback to European cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. More well-versed critics than I are name-dropping Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film Le Samourai, and, in terms of camerawork and general philosophical approach, we’re definitely not too far from that fixture of college film classes, Michelangelo Antonioni.

So, yeah, if that last sentence didn’t tip you off, The American is arguably the most self-consciously artsy, existential, and Sprockets-y flick to hit the mainstream-multiplex circuit since Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s ludicrous 21 Grams. And, if you don’t roll with its arthouse ambitions, I figure The American will lose you…fast.

The reason being, you really can’t overstate how little happens in this movie. After a deceptively busy opening vignette where Things Go Horribly Wrong in Sweden, mystery man Clooney — he could be an assassin, or just a very good gunsmith (but either way, he’s got undeniable fashion sense) — is forced to cool his heels in an idyllic and self-consciously Old World Italian village, a la Joe Biden’s recent Mexican adventure. (Castel del Monte, to be exact.) There, he’ll amble across the cobblestones, looking pained, mopey, and/or hunted. Occasionally (very occasionally for Clooney — more on that in a bit), he’ll have a clipped and portentous conversation with one of the locals — usually either a priest (Paolo Bonacelli) or a beautiful woman (Thekla Reuten, Violante Placido.) Sometimes, he fiddles, in impressive craftsman-y ways, with the new gun he’s been assigned to build by his handler (Johan Leysen). Then he’ll go back to being pained, mopey, and/or hunted. Spoiler alert: This sums up about 85% of the movie.

The glacial pace of The American aside: If all of this sounds like it could be maddeningly pretentious…well, it kinda is, and, worse, there are hoary cliches strewn about everywhere like spent bullet casings. We’ve got an oh-so-sage priest harboring a few secrets of his own. We’ve got a stunning hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold, one who falls for the protagonist despite his bad behavior. (Interesting film fact: The actress, Placido, is the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, a.k.a. Michael Corleone’s doomed Sicilian bride Apollonia in The Godfather. Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday…) And the last reel is so wildly over-the-top in its high-school existentialism that it verges on self-parody. One half-expects a fade to black-and-white and a “FIN” title card to close out the film.

For what it’s worth, The American — much more so than Corbijn’s first movie, Control (#45 of the Oughts) — also feels rooted in Corbijn’s music video work over the years. As someone with a fondness for Strange, Corbijn’s Depeche Mode mini-movie circa 1988 (a.k.a the Music for the Masses era), it was hard not to think of “Behind the Wheel” (see: femmes fatale and Old World moxy) and “Never Let Me Down Again” (every time Clooney chats up the priest) throughout The American. (For that matter, the scenes in the bordello are lit up like Corbijn’s photo shoot for “Policy of Truth” — Yes, I grew up taking my Mode seriously.)

So why did I end up appreciating The American regardless? Well, a lot of the credit has to go to Clooney. Sure, he’s stepped away from his usual fast-talking, charming-rogue persona before, most notably in Michael Clayton (where the usual charm offensive never helps him) and Syriana (where he gained a paunch and came off, as Stephanie Zacharek memorably put it, like a “depressed circus bear.”)

But, here, Clooney has gone wayyy out on a limb and stripped himself of his usual glib, “Dr. Ross” persona almost completely. “The American” isn’t charming. Heck, he barely even speaks. And so Clooney must construct this twitchy, haunted character without the benefit of his usual toolbox, and, to his credit, he gets it done. It’s an impressive star turn by one of the only honest-to-goodness movie stars of his generation. And, despite the many ways this movie could (and arguably does) go wrong, The American is another feather in Clooney’s cap, and doesn’t interrupt the rather remarkable string of quality films he’s been involved with. Just next time, let’s ease up on the woe-is-me pop existentialism, ok Mister Butterfly?

He tried to warn us.

“In my practice, I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind…All of us – a little bit – we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.” Veteran character actor Kevin McCarthy, best known for his starring role in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1914-2010.

Salt-n-Tepid.

So, after writing movie reviews here the past several years, I have come to discover there’s only one real downside to the enterprise. Every so often, I happen to catch a movie that’s so by-the-numbers and pedestrian that it sorta stops GitM dead. I mean, an unmitigated stinker like Southland Tales or Gods and Generals can be as easy to write about as a good film. And even an annoyingly botched flick like Alice in Wonderland can compel a few paragraphs of copy, out of sheer annoyance if nothing else.

But then you get a bland, summer-movie-for-summer-movie’s-sake like Phillip Noyce’s ludicrous espionage thriller Salt, and the site grinds to a halt. Salt isn’t out-and-out terrible or anything. It’s just so perfunctory, so lazy and lackluster in its storytelling, that even commenting on it one way or the other seems like more than the movie deserves. (FWIW, this is the second half of the Kids are All Right double-header I mentioned a week ago.) Probably the most interesting thing I can say about Salt, other than that its Anna Chapman meets Terror Babies, Cold War-hangover plotting could be ripped from the headlines of right-wing nightmare, is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and preposterous at the same time. [Major spoilers to follow, but if you haven’t seen it by now…don’t.]

Predictable, because Salt is so clearly the type of movie that wants to blow your mind that a second-act “twist” — think No Way Out — is well nigh inevitable. (But even when it happens, the filmmakers don’t have the guts to follow through: Angelina Jolie’s character can’t just be undercover. She’s deep, deep undercover.) And predictable because, sorta like Peter Sarsgaard skulking around in Knight & Day a few weeks ago, anybody who’s vaguely into movies will know Liev Schrieber isn’t taking the role of Government Functionary #2 unless there’s some scenery to chew into at some point. (It may not be his fault, but Schrieber has become William Hurtish to the extreme to me — just a hambone waiting to happen.)

And yet, Salt is preposterous. Because, even though you kinda see the big turns coming in all their ridiculous glory, Salt still does not make a lick of sense. As the trailers indicate, Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent who is forced to go on the run from her bosses (Schrieber and a wasted Chiwetel Ejiofor) after a KGB defector (Daniel Olbrychski) outs her as a Russian spy. This mostly involves a lot of running and hiding and hair-dye and whatnot. (Shoplifting too. Here’s your drinking game to make Salt palatable whenever it hits cable — Drink every time Jolie ganks something.)

And, as I’ve already alluded, at a certain point in the middle going, Agent Salt [Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler] switches teams. (You can figure this out even if you’re a touch slow, or you’re watching on a plane without sound or something, because Jolie starts vamping it up like Natasha from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, and even starts wearing a Russian hat as a signifier.) So, ok, edgy second-act twist, I guess…except the whole getting-outed-by-the-KGB-guy plot at the very beginning now doesn’t make any sense at all. (You could argue he was “activating” her — but he could’ve done that with a phone call.) Multiply this sort of nonsense by three acts, and you end up with a mild fiasco by the final reel.

But that makes Salt sound more howlingly terrible than it in fact is. Phillip Noyce has made some very good movies in his day (The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence), and he’s nothing if not competent. But his action sequences are just that: competent, middling, and kind of a bore. In terms of actioners, Noyce previously made the two Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movies, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and it’s probably not a positive sign for the shenanigans here that in neither film is the most memorable scene an action sequence. (In Games, it’s Ryan watching the video-gamey US counter-strike on the bad guy’s base from the Pentagon. In Danger, it’s Ryan playing cat-and-mouse on the PC with the bureaucratic bad guy next door.)

Here’s, there’s some passable stunt work, to be sure. But Salt is one of those action movies where the geography and physics seem completely random. (And I don’t just mean the rail-thin Jolie knocking out gimongous cops and robbers cold with one roundhouse punch — They mostly get around that with karate chops and such.) Salt is in downtown DC, then a highway overpass, then a full-on highway, then back in DC. She’s ten feet above the bad guys on an elevator…no, she’s five minutes behind them, in some random hallway we didn’t see before…no, I’m sorry, she’s right behind them again, because the big door is closing and she just makes it through. One gets no sense of danger or of propulsion when Jolie just seems to be teleporting around to accommodate the needs of the script.

As for Jolie herself, well she’s a movie star, and better than the film probably deserves. But, when you get to thinking on it, that’s pretty much always Jolie’s m.o., isn’t it? From Alexander to Mr. & Mrs. Smith to the Tomb Raiders to The Bone Collector (also a Noyce picture) to Wanted, Jolie tends to be the most impressive thing about otherwise terrible films. It’s a neat trick, sure, but at a certain point, you would think it’d be time to exercise a little more quality control, right?

Salt isn’t the worst film of Angelina Jolie’s career or anything, nor is it the worst film of the summer, but it is a lowest-common-denominator, assembly-line entertainment that ends up being both drab and absurd. My advice is save your money, comrades. We may have a hard winter ahead of us yet.

Way Down in the Hole.

As real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston, James Franco is a carefree daredevil who’s gotten himself in a tight spot in the new trailer for Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. Um…ok. Striking cinematography as usual, but, in turning this disarming tale into a full-length movie, it’s hard to see how Boyle will improve on a film like Touching the Void.

Modern Family.

Still in catch-up mode on the movie front, so this past weekend I saw two flicks that have been making the rounds for awhile now. The first, and by far the better of the two, was Lisa Cholodenko’s well-observed situation dramedy The Kids are All Right — a smart, tautly-written family portrait that for at least its first two-thirds (before the inevitable recriminations pile up and all the characters start to vent at each other endlessly) is decently good fun.

Like I’ve said of movies like The Station Agent and You Kill Me in year’s past, Kids is unabashed indie-tainment, the type of small-bore, character-driven film that IFC or The Sundance Channel will no doubt be running into the ground six months from now. So, no, it’s not really the type of film anyone needs to rush out and see on the Big Screen, per se. Still, it is a well-made, well-acted picture, and not half bad as counter-programming if you’re looking for a grown-up, television-y alternative to the usual summer movie mayhem.

If nothing else, The Kids are All Right gives the promising Mia Wasikowska a peg to hang her hat on in 2010 after the thoroughly atrocious Alice in Wonderland. As Joni, an eighteen-year-old on the verge of leaving the family nest for college, she and her brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) impressively hold their own with their two, thespian A-lister moms, Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules). Taken together, this foursome is a 21st century nuclear family just like any other (a point which the movie perhaps overly belabors at first) — controlling oenophile Nic can’t leave work at work, flighty, hippie-ish Jules feels taken-for-granted, Joni’s chafing under the maternal yoke, and Laser has lousy choice in friends — until the two kids decide, out of curiosity, to get in touch with their biological father, a.k.a. their moms’ sperm donor.

That would be Paul (Mark Ruffalo, who I find more palatable now that he’s less over-exposed), a charming if self-satisfied local restauranteur who needed some easy money way back when and has scarcely taken on any more responsibilities since. Still, Joni digs his insouciance and his motorcycle-riding ways, and Laser likes him ok too, even if Dad’s not quite what he was expecting, and so Paul slowly becomes integrated into Nic and Jules’ household. Too integrated, for Nic’s taste — Perhaps slightly paranoid even on the best of days, she starts to feel pushed out of the way as the materfamilias, and after awhile, for very good reason.

And so the family tension crackles and pops, as per films of this genre. For the most part, the writing here (by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg) is admirably subtle and character-driven — the problems that emerge seem natural outgrowths of these particular people’s traits. Still, I have to confess the film lost me a bit in its final act, as the winds of marital strife blow in earnest, and everybody keeps yelling at everybody else. This isn’t to say it’s not well-done (although one of the main characters does seem to drop out of the story rather perfunctorily), only that watching people clearly in love writhe in pain, and/or waiting for second act bygones to get bygonned, as they pretty obviously will, becomes unengaging to me after awhile.

As a sidenote, which I doubt will affect y’all’s enjoyment of this movie one way or the other, I’ll also admit to feeling some distance from these characters throughout the entire story — not because of the non-traditional (yet universally applicable) marriage at the movie’s heart, but because the action, locale, and characters here are so…Californian. Nothing against the Bear Flag Republic — I’ve got great friends out there and from there, and, as Biggie says: Great place to visit. But, as someone who grew up in the South and has lived on the East Coast for decades, I always feel a bit like Alvy Singer or Roger Greenberg while on the Left Coast — ever-so-slightly not among my people.

And, what with the locavores and the wine-enthusiasm and the car culture and the emphasis on landscaping and the skater rats and the sandals and all the “Right On”!s, Kids is as California suburbs as Mystic River is Boston, or, for that matter, Larry Clark’s Kids is N.Y.C. It’s to the film’s credit that it possesses such a strong sense of place, I guess. But as a processed-food-eating, beer-enthusiast, carless renter of the East Coast persuasion, at times The Kids are All Right seemed as much of an exercise in local color as the Appalachia of Winter’s Bone.

This is merely a quibble, of course, and probably speaks less well of me than the movie. In any event, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right is certainly All Right, and probably a good bit better. It’s a reasonably compelling dramedy that’s precise in its details and laugh-out-loud funny at times. If you’re in the mood for a slightly Lifetime-ish family drama this summer, you could do much worse. And, if you were to wait until it ends up on Netflix a few months hence instead, well that’d be all right too. Right on.