As I Lay Thanking

I'm in an infinitely better place than these women—click on the photo if you want to know why—but still, it must be said: I've had a frustratingly flu-like cold since Tuesday, right through Thanksgiving, so at any given moment that I wasn't calling a family member or cooking a holiday dish, I've mostly been splayed out on my red futon, trying to let the seasonal tide of gratitude and life-loving overcome my incipient grouchiness about my raspy throat and my upset stomach. Unable to complete any professional tasks, I tried to think of something lovely I could produce for this site—often a delightful restorative when I'm in low spirits or ill health, even if this tends to make my sentences even longer and my number of typos even more disheartening. And I thought, while I'm feeling so thankful and full-stomached, why not revive my very favorite of my dormant writing projects? Why not seize upon this time to transcribe my feelings of gratitude toward movies I especially adore?



A few of you have noticed that, three years after I began the Favorites countdown, and almost two years after slamming into a brick wall at #34, I've gone back to clean up the graphics, fix some links, and most importantly, rearrange the lists to reflect that it's a new day. Cuz you know some movies I like a bit less than I did three years ago, and some a lot more (which I sometimes only realized by re-watching them for this feature), and some didn't even exist when I started this project, so ghastly has my procrastination been. Here are the old entries for the ten films that dropped off my list when I revised it two months ago. The recalibrated list still has some gaps where new movies will debut to replace the retired ones, or where movies scheduled to drop from my revised Top 100 list (coming in January!) are resurfacing instead on the mutually-exclusive Favorites listing, or where formerly high-ranked Favorites from '05 have slipped to lower rungs. The current and forthcoming #68, for example, would have been #33 when I last checked in, and my purely gratuitous list-maker's panic in the face of this obvious travesty ("But I don't like this more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, I don't!!!") partly explains why it took me so long to resume.



Anyway: such are the holes I'm filling now with new entries, and LOOK: I've got four of 'em already! And what a combo, right? Click on the images, please enjoy, and I hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving, whether or not you live someplace where it made any sense to celebrate it.

A Boy in Trouble

There is nothing clever, euphemistic, or hyperbolic about this admission: I have never been so scared in any movie as I was during the last half-hour or so of INLAND EMPIRE. The rough, scraping atmosphere of dread that permeates the whole film—alleviated but also somehow intensified by the elusive plot and the surreal cutaways to talking rabbits and Locomotion enthusiasts—culminates in a devastating thirty minutes, comprising a terrible death unfolding against an absurd, indifferent conversation between two strangers, and then a vaporizing of the reality/illusion boundary even as the movie purports to reinstate it, and then a preeminently Lynchian prowl around dirty corners in underlit hallways, at the end of which Laura Dern's "character" has a horrific encounter with a grotesque distortion of herself. I was just terrified, by the ambience and psychic logic of these scenes even more than by the action they depicted. Then I walked for ten minutes in the semi-dark, boarded a city bus, and cried most of the way home with my eyes wide open. INLAND EMPIRE made me insane, and intensely bereft. I'm barely more coherent or less bereft as I write this.

I'll have much to say about INLAND EMPIRE in the coming days, weeks, months, but to begin with the most frivolous and inconsequential frame of reference, I sure am glad I waited: the Best of 2006 feature will require some serious reshuffling to accommodate this film. Meanwhile, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu suddenly has a potent rival for its previously uncontested claim as the best movie of the year. A dying man and a woman dismantled now emerge as the king and queen of a morbid, frustrating, but finally surprising year at the movies. Stay tuned...

Curse, Indeed, of the Golden Flower

My friend Bob on Curse of the Golden Flower: "It's a slog, man. Very beautiful colors, but if I wanted to see a bunch of people just walking through a palace, I'd watch The West Wing." Does anyone still need a review?

Oh, why not. I will add (and you thought I was being so nice yesterday!) that a corollary problem to the endless power-walks through the palace of Emperor Ping, which are already more repetitious than the arpeggios in a Philip Glass score, is that Zhang Yimou indulges the tacky, sticky Rainbow Brite explosion of his mise-en-scène but fails entirely to construct a coherent physical space. For a movie that did precious little beyond sinking me into a Day Glo fortress, I wish that Curse had allowed me to know a little something about that fortress. It certainly didn't help that Gong Li—who has given poor, predictable, inexpressive performances in six straight movies now (Zhou Yu's Train, the partial exception of 2046, her lurid segment of Eros, Memoirs of a Geisha, Miami Vice, and now this)—can't assemble or communicate Empress Phoenix's villainy in any but the most banally perverse and overstated ways. Maggie Cheung could swoop through a carnelian castle in Zhang's Hero and hold the screen because that gal is a full-throttle cinema actress, with an ideal face and a subtle but heat-seeking instinct for how to use it. Gong used to give off a comparable vibe, but I think her gifts have coarsened and frozen by now, and she's pushing her way onto the dread Danny Huston List of actors I hate to see cast in anything.

Curse of the Golden Flower raises a conundrum, both physical and philosophical, of whether matter and energy can go over the top if there's nothing there, no substance or idea, to go over the top of. Heidi, Nina, and Michael could search high and low for Zhang's "taste level" here without ever finding it, and the grim inadequacies of the performances, the script, and the montage aren't so much compensated as they are thrown into greater relief by the gaudy grandiloquence of the colors and the lighting. The images of violence that break through the glassy neon surface of Golden Flower are punishing and fetishistic in that Mel Gibson vein, and when Zhang ties up this whole tale of civil war, incest, royal alienation, and choreographed bloodsport with some mewling, ridiculous ballad about "traces of your smile on a yellowing scroll," the film has either reached the apex of its own absurdity or the nadir of its own expensive emptiness. Probably both. At least the sober and discomfiting nationalism of Hero has loosened up into a friskier, more iconoclastic take on Chinese imperial mythmaking, but Curse hardly reflects the perspective of a mature or self-disciplined filmmaker, and there are too many other movies to see without wasting time on this unseemly bauble. D+

(Image © 2006 Sony Pictures Classics)

Good Movies, but Split Decisions

Three movies in two days, and the best news is that all of them constitute thumbs-up material. But how far up? In all three cases, I'm having a tough time deciding. In ascending order of quality, Dreamgirls earns the peculiar distinction of being an exuberant, performance-centered movie that I enjoyed without really loving any of the performances. Eddie Murphy was best in show for me; his blurring of the lines between energy, mania, arrogance, cowardice, obedience, and defiance amounted to the only truly layered character in the movie. Everyone else had bright spots and major deficits, which is also true of the movie on the whole: yay for the costumes, yikes on the photography, and sympathy for the editor, who flourishes where the film allows her to but flails to make certain sequences and character arcs cohere. (They still don't.) Nonetheless, Dreamgirls is a buoyant couple of hours with just enough weight to avoid pure frivolity, and just enough sense of when to stop forcing the personal-social analogies and just let things go Bump on a glittering stage. The shaky technique, limited acting, and slow-witted direction make it hard to afford the movie more qualitative credit than a B–, but as with Casino Royale and the recently reviewed Devil Wears Prada, I enjoyed the movie more than the grade implies, and a slight bump upward is not out of the question.

As I so often find with Clint Eastwood's movies, Letters from Iwo Jima occupies an uneasy precipice between rigor and conservatism. Its best moments and strongest decisions encourage loyal advocacy of the whole film, even as its missteps offer vivid warnings against a tendency to overrate Eastwood's movies. Often, especially in dialogue-heavy or character-focused scenes, individual shots are so weighed down with rhetorical or emotional intents that the film doesn't breathe as much as you want it to, and even such promising performances as Ken Watanabe's (as Gen. Kuribayashi), Kazunari Ninomiya's (as Saigo, perhaps the greenest soldier, and a virtual co-lead in the film), or Ryo Kase's (as the uncomfortably disciplined Shimizu) become muffled, their relationship to our world or to modern storytelling a bit stilted and antique. Also, someone should convince Eastwood to rethink his propensity toward weak and arbitrary framing devices. Still, Letters from Iwo Jima does more than capture the perspective, largely occluded in American cinema and history, of the Japanese soldiers. The film powerfully and thoughtfully evokes a sitting-duck atmosphere of pre-ordained defeat while nonetheless encompassing a wide variety of tones and formal approaches—lurking menace, wide panoramas, frenetic motion, forward marches, flickering faces, grisly chamber dramas, wistful moments of isolation. Even better, Letters glides elegantly among these registers, instead of flaunting or stumbling over its heterogeneity of pace and mood. The klutzy structural hiccups of Flags of Our Fathers are mostly avoided (and feel all the more perplexing in retrospect), and while I wasn't fully swayed by such key elements as the color palette and the epistolary motif, the film fought its way up, for now, from a B to a B+.

Finally, as ethically ambitious and horribly battle-scarred as Letters from Iwo Jima is, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men has got Eastwood's movie beat on both counts. The long and frequent sequences of ambush, assault, and outright siege are intellectually provocative, and would be even more so if they weren't so viscerally upsetting. I had to force myself to keep watching the screen more times during Children of Men than during any other 2006 release, with the possible exception of Apocalypto. Thankfully, Cuarón's movie has all the integrity that Gibson's sun-dappled snuff film lacks. Indeed, Children of Men is so muscular, kinetic, and adult in its concerns, and so virtuosic in its formal and technical execution, that it's bound to look gargantuan compared to the limping irrelevancies (Stranger than Fiction, Bobby, Curse of the Golden Flower) and the hobbled half-successes (Borat, Pan's Labyrinth, even Dreamgirls) that have filled the plexes of late.

Still, Children of Men has its own seams and riddles to answer for. Does the context and density of the action actually deepen as the film continues, or do we simply behold more grand-scale dioramas of the same recurring ideas? Does the movie's nervy hodgepodge of fascism and anarchy actually make sense, and if the whole world is as scabbed as we are led to believe, what's keeping Danny Huston alive in his gleaming white palace, or Michael Caine protected in his hibernating-activist glade? If we followed the money, or the gasoline, or the coffee, or the still-circulating newspapers, or the prowling tanks, where would they lead? In fact, how is Britain, or even the world, still possible? I ask with a tone of slightly confused skepticism—a skepticism that becomes more curt and disappointed when it confronts some implausible escapes, an ill-placed monologue by a midwife, and the bizarre non-character extended to us by an atypically flat Julianne Moore. Still, so much is bracing and magnificent in Children of Men, a film thrillingly imagined even as it floods itself with despair, that I'm content to persist in my questions and second-guessing, taking them less as signs of muddy artistry than as felicitous products of a smart, complicated movie that deserves smart, complicated consideration. B+? A–? B+? Stay tuned.

That's All

I would so be fired as Miranda Priestly's assistant. Here's a woman who needs a dozen Hermès scarves to land on her desk in the time it takes to purse her lips, and I can't even spit out a review in less than six months. Another... disappointment. Frankly, the movie's a bit of a disappointment, too, although its bright spots are very bright. One wishes that the director and screenwriter had taken equal care with all of their actors and subplots, and that everything bracing and deft in the opening sequences had survived into the crammed and abbreviated second half. Still, I gotta admit this movie is a hoot, and though nobody quite has me screaming "Oscar!", I have several nice things to say, especially with regard to the three leading ladies, in my new full review.

(Image © 2006 20th Century Fox)

Almost There... Maybe

This damn blog. It still barely works, and only for half-hour intervals every few days, for some mysterious, unspecified reason relating to mandrake roots, bubbling cauldrons, salamanders, FTP entropy, Beta software, and the great black-hole abstraction that is Blogger Tech Support. Those of us on externally-hosted blogs, i.e., Blogger-supported blogs that aren't hosted directly on Blogspot, could not possibly be a lower priority for the obviously overworked and yet patently neglectful and unresponsive staff at Google.

So, do not reel with astonishment if I bag this whole blog in 2007 and institute a major site overhaul at my main site in order to consolidate all of my writing on a domain that I can administer myself, without all the Blogger hocus pocus.

BUT! This, at least, is a start. For the time, please enjoy the now-outdated posts that I wrote four weeks ago, and don't believe anyone, especially Owen Gleiberman, who tells you that Sweet Land is an overlooked masterpiece. It's an agreeable film, and in the modern climate of exhibition, it's a miracle that anyone is seeing it; still, the movie resides firmly in that Tender Mercies tradition of reticent, simple films that mistake quiet for eloquence and natural beauty for artistic communication. C

Meanwhile, DO believe anyone, including Owen Gleiberman, who urges you to take a chance on The Good Shepherd, the exceedingly rare film about ubiquitous duplicity that keeps a tight hold on its tonal register and doesn't pump itself up into too many false climaxes. The treacheries here are constant, profound, and often quite upsetting, but neither the superb screenplay by Eric Roth nor the editing nor the score nor the director limns them with bombast or distracting rhetoric, and both the movie and the characters force themselves to soldier on, almost unflappably, every time another rug is pulled out from underneath them. In a person, as the film so clearly knows, this is called emotional stuntedness, as well as—for a CIA operative, at least—professional necessity. In a film—with this premise and these characters, at least—it's called intelligence and conviction. B+

(Image © 2006 Universal Pictures)

The DVD Wears Prada, and Other Second Dates

The promoters behind the DVD of The Devil Wears Prada have asked me to lend them a little bit of extra publicity, and who am I not to oblige? By all means, rent it. I myself am eager for a second look at Prada, particularly to revisit its best performance—which belongs not to Meryl Streep but to Emily Blunt, as the exasperated assistant who torments Anne Hathaway before they forge a sort of terrorized entente. It's no mystery why Streep feels able and entitled to push Hathaway around and make her work to claim her own starring vehicle, but there's a moment when Blunt asks Hathaway whether she's on her way to some sort of "hideous skirt convention" and I realized that Blunt, without quite hustling her way into the spotlight, was nonetheless staken her own unbashful claim on the movie and getting the maximum zing out of all of her lines fly.

My memory of Prada is that too much of it doesn't zing, or not as often as it should. Simon Baker is especially (and typically) ruinous as a caddish journalist in one of many subplots that the movie doesn't know how to handle, but I'm not even sure the central storyline between Hathaway and Streep really jelled. All the same, I remember having a perfectly zesty time while I was sitting there, and I'm frankly eager just to see the clothes again, so that's why Prada rates on the list of second dates I've lined up for myself in the final, list-preparing weeks of 2006, along with springtime favorites like Clean, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Already, a recent rencontre with The Notorious Bettie Page, a movie I admired rather less than those other three, proved to be an eye-opener: it turns out the film measures up to its sensational lead performance much better than I understood at the time, and it revealed new layers and ironies beneath that patented, chilly, slightly stolid Mary Harron exterior (see also: American Psycho).

Now, to you, the birdie: besides the upcoming holiday releases and compensatory rentals of films you missed in the theater, what are some titles from 2006 that you're curious to test-drive for a second time?

(Image © 2006 20th Century Fox Film Corp.)

'Apocalypto' Now

A commenter rightly observed below that I had skewered Apocalypto without properly articulating my position. I hope this review counts.

Edited to add: My review has been up for less than 24 hours at Rotten Tomatoes, where it is currently receiving a much worse response than the movie is. (Currently Apocalypto is hanging in there with a 63% Fresh rating, with very few precincts reporting, and a significantly lower 40% approval from major print critics.) Note that I'm getting docked all around for writing a long review (guilty) and for invoking Gibson too often (though surely it's fair to scrutinize a filmmaker's history of images and past body of work in light of a new release?). Note also that it took less than a day for somebody to ask, "Are you a Jew?" Creepy.

In Which the Heavens Reveal...

...against every possible fucking odd that you might ever have imagined, that M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water will now close 2006 as only the SECOND most psychotically arrogant, most queasily self-obsessed, most psychically misdirected, and absolute batshit craziest movie of the year. Apocalypto would be monumentally funny, and a boon to drinking-game concocters everywhere, if it weren't so truly horrifying to ponder the cultural factors and the individual mental corruption that have allowed it to exist. Even when the film wants you to laugh—and if you've never heard the ancient Mayan phrase for "He's fucked," you have now—the laughter sticks in your throat, clogged, I hope, by your disgust. The movie finally earns its premonitions of apocalypse, but more for what it is than for anything it shows or says. Full review here. F

(And thank whatever Powers might possibly still Be for the very good thing that is the Free Preview Screening, so that I could know my enemy without paying into his coffers.)

(Image © 2006 Touchstone Pictures/Icon Productions)

At Long Last Love

God bless the ambitious and the brave, who still think in images and ideas instead of effigy and chatter, who risk banality and cliché in search of something communal, who see the invitations in both lightness and darkness, who permit themselves excess in service of something grand, who soldier on without enough money and derive creativity from their own (relative) penury. The Fountain isn't perfect, and its debts are obvious, but it goes a long way toward redeeming the year. More soon, and more here, and here.

The Midwestern Croisette

The 42nd annual Chicago International Film Festival reaches its halfway point today, and glory be, I finally got to participate. I must say, I'm impressed at the range of films and countries represented. Even though a few high-visibility English-language tentpoles like Shortbus, Babel, and The Fountain are holding the festival together, the menu offers generous fictional and non-fictional courses from Latin America, East Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific (read: nearly everywhere except Africa, though I'd also have loved a shot at Inuit breakout Zacharias Kunuk's Journals of Knut Rasmussen). I've actually never attended a film festival before, so yesterday marked my introduction to more than the films themselves: for example, to the way a city's immigrant or second-generation population will turn out in droves for a national export, which will barely cause a blip on the eventual commercial market; or to the exquisite pride that derives from finally deciphering the processes of ticket-buying, schedule coordination, and navigation between theaters. Had I been a little more on top of things, I would have bought a ticket to last night's 11:00pm showing of The Host before it sold out, but now that I've secured my merit badge in demystifying festival bureaucracy, I'll do better next year.

As for the two films I saw—actually one-and-a-half films—I urge you to keep an eye peeled for Syndromes and a Century. Thai sensation Apichatpong Weerasethakul once again weaves an intricate, entrancing enigma out of rhythms, scenes, and techniques so quotidian that many filmmakers would find nothing to observe in them. The opening shot is of tall, thin trees swaying in the wind while the soundtrack hums with the distant echoes of electronic apparatus and media emissions. Gradually these sounds—analogous to Cliff Martinez's minimalist score for Soderbergh's Solaris but even more muffled—give way to a soundtrack of breezes, chirping birds, and buzzing insects, but just as the image finds this more "natural" sonic referent, Syndromes cuts to a close-up of a downcast man, head tilted forward before an antiseptically white background, which instantly undermines the lingering pastoral soundscape. These sorts of editing tricks, subtle discontinuities, and creative mixing and matching with noises, images, subplots, and characters is exactly what Apichatpong excels at, especially because he bends them so deftly in service of character and narrative. The movie, following a typically playful Apichatpong structure, goes on to trace two different stories that begin with the same incident (reprised in slightly altered form halfway through Syndromes' runtime). The first iteration privileges a self-possessed female doctor in a rural hospital, managing a forlorn suitor and a memory of near-love while efficiently dispatching her medical duties to a cantankerous clutch of Buddhist monks and a crop of newly hired doctors. The second iteration aligns itself with one of those new hires, though the hospital is now an austere military facility in a modern city, and hospital business plays out largely in subterranean corridors, supply closets, and blinding white enclosures. Though Syndromes is Apichatpong's most stylistically subdued film to date, it's still an unusually patient and good-natured portrait of rural/urban crossover, of spatial and musical dislocations, of clinical, spiritual, and popular perspectives, of romance and absurdity and barely voiced grief. B+

By contrast, the Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan seems impervious to the pleasures of understatement or quiet implication. I thought that Distant, Ceylan's big festival hit of a few years ago, was an elegantly framed rumination on awfully familiar ideas (estrangement as worldview, familial imposition), enlivened only by rare bursts of humor that the palette, mise-en-scène, and self-serious direction nonetheless worked hard to oppress. Climates, Ceylan's latest effort, which nabbed the FIPRESCI laurel at this year's Cannes festival, struck me as an even more laborious mounting of dismally old saws. The obvious, meticulous deliberation with which Ceylan has framed his images and timed his edits does not conceal the banality of what he produces—marked foreground/background gulfs between alienated lovers, ostentatious and tinny sound elements, protracted close-ups that climax with inexpressive tears. Particularly hard to take was a psychologically complicated scene in which a distraught Bahar (played by Ceylan's own wife, Ebru) seems to attempt a spontaneous murder-suicide while riding a motorbike with her atrabilious lover Isa (Ceylan himself). As the two of them crash on the roadside, the camera captures every untrained, agitated whinge of these non-professional actors, relegating the whole incident into a turgid bout of queasy, inarticulate exhibitionism and eroding every glint of potential in the script. Soon to follow is an endless shot of erotic/violent aggression between Isa and an old flame; again, the performers and the film surely want to be lauded for their "courage" and rigor in realizing such a tempestuous, illegible encounter, but again, the physical vocabulary of both actors radiates a nervous, under-rehearsed improvisation, and the formal presentation offers no needed assist. The unsettling narcissism with which Ceylan films himself and his intimates working hard to render themselves unlikeable and impenetrable feels as pointless and arid as the affective fallacies of heat, chill, snow, shade, and rain imparted by the title and dully realized in the photographic and location choices. About an hour into this thing, sensing no prospect of Ceylan's Climates growing any more hospitable or sustainable, I decided to check the weather outside. Walked out

(Images © 2006 Chicago International Film Festival; © 2006 Kick the Machine/Fortissimo Films; and © 2006 Pyramide Films/Zeitgeist Films)

Unlucky Stars

Watching miscast actors give poor performances is just miserable, because there's nothing you can do for them except watch them wriggle. The experience is particularly dolorous when the performers are estimably better than the current script or picture is allowing them to be, and it's worst of all when they are the kind of honest, committed joes who don't just sleepwalk through a bad movie or an ill-fitting vehicle or a poorly written part, but who instead keep trying to redeem the experience. If they're lucky, like Jodie Foster was in Inside Man, the rest of the film hums along with such confidence and panache, making such roomy allowances for experiment and unexpected silliness, that the failure to bring a character into focus doesn't register all that much. (Plus, having beheld Foster's embattled, nostril-flaring resolve one too many times on screen, I found her loose, daring miscalculations in Inside Man almost a pleasure in themselves.) The early fall, however, has brimmed with less fortunate actors, wrangling in vain with major roles in movies that aren't good enough to compensate for them or to distract our attention. You might have thought that the miscasting and careless directing of actors couldn't get any worse than it did in The Black Dahlia, and—well, maybe you're still right. But these three movies, all of them worse than the addled but unnerving Dahlia, give Brian De Palma and casting directors Lucy Boulting and Johanna Ray a dismal run for their money:

Hollywoodland
Director: Allen Coulter
(Mis)Casting Director: Joanna Colbert
This flat-footed procedural offers a marginal Hollywood malfeasance as some kind of plangently tragic conundrum. The question of who killed George Reeves (Ben Affleck), the star of TV's Superman, gets sieved and re-sieved through the dully interlocking stories of his failure to score better parts, his affair with a studio boss' wife (Diane Lane), and his later relationship with a piranha who doesn't care about him (Robin Tunney). Plus, he has the bad luck to be posthumously investigated by a swaggering, irritating, hotheaded detective, instead of by someone that a movie audience might actually want to spend two hours with. Sadly, there is no ironic resonance in the fact that Adrien Brody has barely less contempt for his part as the detective than Reeves had for his padded-suit Man of Steel. Brody constantly winks that he's way too cool for this shoddily written role, perhaps too cool for the industry as a whole—though he sure looks awfully sincere whenever he spouts one of the script's limping banalities about the loneliness of fame or the distorting power of the newsmedia. Presumably, Brody is only too happy to let Affleck hoard all the big press, which reached a sort of dadaist climax when he won the Best Actor award at Venice in September. I can only assume that Catherine Deneuve and her fellow jurors were bribed (money? gelato? weed?) into seeing something remarkable in Affleck's sad spectacle. The "takes one to know one" thesis behind this casting might sound nervy on paper, but however well the sullied inadequacy of Affleck's career and abilities are meant to rhyme with those of Reeves, we still have his minuscule range, stolid physicality, and inveterate self-regard to contend with. Hollywoodland never makes a case that Reeves' death is worth probing, or even mourning; as on Superman, his humanity is utterly stifled by lousy production values and unrewarding stunts. D–

The Science of Sleep
Director: Michel Gondry
(Mis)Casting Director: Julie Navarro
This antic, inventively disheveled, but egregiously overconceptualized movie wins some points for ultimately defying the goopy winsomeness that keeps threatening to take it over. For a long, long time, the mismatch between the giddy, colorful, through-the-looking-glass romanticism of Gondry's visuals and the flat, ashy mundanity of the central love story feels like a galling error. Ultimately, the film justifies our skepticism in a scene of wormy, exhausted anger that's unlike almost anything else in the movie, but the backloading of the film's intelligence isn't sufficient reward for having made it through 100 minutes of capricious indulgence. Gondry, who also wrote the script, has immersed us too heavily, too often, and with such mismanaged abruptness in the arrested-adolescent projections of his protagonist that I, for one, was too exhausted to make the leap into the film's climactic revelations. Plus, to fill the role of a restive, pouting, sexually repressed manchild, Gondry and Navarro have tapped, of all people, Gael García Bernal, whose handsome charisma, confident comportment, and lithe accessibility to both the audience and his fellow actors all make him woefully wrong for this Pee Wee Herman/Chuck & Buck type. Granted, The Science of Sleep would lack much force of irony or discovery had it typecast the part with more overt maladjustment, but García Bernal looks itchy and effortful throughout. Neither he nor Charlotte Gainsbourg looks remotely at peace inside the clamorous, surrealist set-design. In fact, everyone looks uncertain as to how their writer-director is going to pull all of this chaos and whimsy and distant, thrumming sadness into something architecturally sound and emotionally lucid. Few people could or would make a film like this, but the question remains open whether anyone should—especially with a reigning global sex-symbol toiling so far afield from any of his tonal, psychological, technical, or linguistic comfort zones. C

All the King's Men
Director: Steven Zaillian
(Mis)Casting Director: Avy Kaufman
By its very example, All the King's Men formulates an even more stinging indictment of Hollywood than Hollywoodland does in two hours of direct address. King's Men plays as a veritable autopsy of itself; to watch the movie is to watch it go wrong, to observe the tempting gleam of the film that might have been grow ever dimmer. James Horner's score is so hammering and colossal from the outset that you can foresee how overstated and mechanical the whole damned beast is going to be. One is tempted, retroactively, to cede even more of the success of Zaillian's previous features—Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action—to the subtle, rookie-friendly wisdom of the late Conrad Hall. Sadly, in his stead, cinematographer Pawel Edelman inappropriately mimics the same palette of deep black, burnished golds, and scattered patches of white that made The Pianist both elegant and harrowing, but this look is all wrong for New Orleans, and not nearly complex enough to keep pace with the dense, multi-character plot. Not that Zaillian's script has preserved the plot all that well, either—entire subplots, like the fate of Willie Stark's son, are telegraphed and semaphored without ever reaching their destinations. But the real tragedy of All the King's Men is that its entire cast of luminaries, splashed all over the most self-canonizing preview trailer since Cinderella Man, fall so collectively and humiliatingly on their faces. Jude Law trots out his rendition of the cynical bystander as long as he possibly can; James Gandolfini is amateurish and flat, failing despite his physical heft to plausibly intimidate Sean Penn; Penn himself gives great, deranged stump speeches but falls back repeatedly on old tics in all his other scenes; Mark Ruffalo is milky and hesitant; Patricia Clarkson mines her role for bitter comedy as a way to stand apart from Mercedes McCambridge's long shadow, which fully eclipses her anyway. Worst in show, I'm sorry to say, is Kate Winslet, who doesn't seem to know this admittedly unknowable woman at all, who squats under a succession of terrible wigs, who loses a whole monologue beneath a needlessly overlaid voiceover by Jude Law, and who is lensed again and again through butter-colored scrims and in pools of french vanilla. Having failed to learn her David Gale lesson about staying well away from Southern political dramas, Winslet has only this as a silver lining: Gwyneth Paltrow starred in Hush, Halle Berry in Swordfish, Charlize Theron in The Italian Job, and Reese Witherspoon in Just Like Heaven in the same years they all won their Oscars. The Little Children camp may as well start crossing their fingers. C–

(Image © 2006 Columbia Pictures)

Flowers among the Weeds

For long stretches of Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, virtually nothing blooms. Dante Ferretti's art direction and Jenny Beavan's costumes are never less than consummate, but there's no heart beating inside the film, or rather, it beats in such odd, narrow, unexpected places that you wonder whether the director is even interested in the central content of his film. Ultimately, he is enormously interested, but only if you concede that the four major protagonists and the dented, convoluted adaptation of James Ellroy's plot are not the focal points they appear to be.

Instead, focus your attention on Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short, the "Black Dahlia" herself, and on Fiona Shaw in the third-tier role of Ramona Linscott. Trust me, it won't be hard. In fact, you won't be able to look away. Days later, you may find yourself revisiting this stunted and often foolish film with an almost haunted interest—exactly the sort of gravitational pull on both memory and conscience that the film means to describe, and which, despite being something of a mangled corpse itself, the movie powerfully recreates. Click here for my full review, and by all means, post your comments. This movie exists to be argued about.

(Image © 2006 Universal Pictures)

The Horror... The Horror!

It's not every day that I revisit a movie I disliked as strongly as I did The Hills Have Eyes, but I found three indications that a second screening might be worthwhile: my favorite print critic gave it a favorable and interesting review, and our debates about it haven't ended yet; I felt like I was in bad faith slamming it as a sidebar in my reviews of both The Descent and Lady in the Water without properly articulating my case; and, as I've now tried to explain in my full review, Hills makes too strong an impression both visually and sonically to be dismissed out of hand like typical garbage. I may dislike the film, as in fact I did on second try, but I do think it's a potent provocation and one of the few 2006 releases deserving of extended debate. Pipe in below with your take: between Tim and me, you're bound to find at least one quick ally.

Meanwhile, for someone who loves actresses, I saw precious few of them in my screenings of the past week: the spectacular but remarkably verveless Ben-Hur; the curious jailhouse drama Birdman of Alcatraz; Billy Wilder's ambitious but unpersuasive prison-camp story Stalag 17; and the exciting seaboard adventure Mutiny on the Bounty, which I had the terrific fortune to catch in 35mm projection at the LaSalle Bank Cinema in Chicago, an exhilarating revival house managed and operated by my new/old friend Goatdog and loyally attended by some of the most true-blue movie fanatics I've ever met. Anyway, barely a handful of women in all four movies combined, at least if you discount the Russian female POWs in Stalag 17; I didn't realize that the Third Reich paraded captive women in such glamorous single-file arrangements.

(Image © 2006 Fox Searchlight Pictures, reproduced from the Hills Have Eyes page at OutNow.com.)

Also Hot Off the Press...

So far, at least on my watch, the British horror import The Descent is the best mainstream release of the summer. If you scare easily, or even semi-easily, and you wish to avoid those sensations, I suppose you should stay away... but I really want to encourage people to take the plunge! Read my full review here. Also: The Night Listener is much less effective than The Descent, but just when you're ready to brush it off, it maintains a subtle claim on your emotions.

(Image © 2005, 2006 Celador Films/Pathé Distribution)

A Small World After All

Having heard from a little birdie that ModFab and Nathaniel were able to join forces last week for a Manhattan screening of Little Miss Sunshine, StinkyLulu and I decided that fair was fair, and we staged our own Second City secret rendezvous at a morning matinée of the same movie. Reader, it tickles me to report that Stinky is just as warm, witty, and movie-geeked in person as he is on the blog, and I was reminded all over again that making http://friends and then befriending them all over again in person is one of the most delicious pleasures of web life...even when you realize, "I could name this man's five favorite actresses in ranked order, but I'm not exactly positive where he lives."

As for Little Miss Sunshine, it's the kind of modest, yukky, well-acted, road-traveling American indie that elevates itself by insisting on character notes where a lesser movie would settle for punchlines...but then deflates a little whenever it makes the opposite choice. One scene begins with an unexpected death that was played impressively straight, brilliantly concentrating all of its slapstick impulses into the single exclamation "Linda!" But then, before you know it, a corpse is being tipped out a hospital window in a desperately farcical set-piece almost as unwelcome as the comatose kidnapping in Just Like Heaven. The whole movie is a sine wave—up, down, up, down—and if its peppy finish offers a winning tribute to the worn-down and halfway absurd American family, it's also the most visually slack passage in the movie, with the least convincing background players. Thank goodness all the main actors stay on their toes, and they keep us there, too. Fans of Toni Collette, so reliably inventive with all her little bits of business, will delight in the knowledge that despite being saddled much too often with the disapproving line "Richard!", she squeezes some cigarette acting, luggage acting, Sprite acting, pencil acting, and popsicle acting into the first fifteen minutes alone. She's still, in a swerve no one saw coming in Muriel's Wedding or Emma or Velvet Goldmine, one of the most convincing moms in the movies. Finally, a few extra props to costume designer Nancy Steiner, who knows exactly what each of the Hoovers would wear, and why, and in exactly what aisle of Target they found it. B–

P.S. Considering how StinkyLulu hails from the same state as the Hoover clan, and realizing that I've now met all of the ModFab 6 except for that dismayingly distant Antipodean, par3182, I led myself inexorably to these thoughts: six ModFab apprentices, six Hoovers. Two gals, four fellas in each, plus an Australian. Is Little Miss Sunshine secretly the Rosetta Stone of our dormant but fabulous sextet of culture wags? Is that why this movie keeps magically drawing us together? Dr. S and Melissa, is there any chance of you catching this flick in tandem? And, in the now obvious set of analogies, who is who? A hint: clearly ModFab himself is the Little Miss Sunshine of the title, the unseen beauty whom the rest of us find ourselves chasing, even hoping to be. After that, it gets harder, especially since any. one. of. us. could be the "Superfreak"—though I personally have a hunch that she lives in Ohio.

Image © 2006 Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe...

...to go back in the water, M. Night Shyamalan drops a narf into the pool. But before I go on to ridicule and castigate this movie completely, say this for it: after seven long months since King Kong, and after a summer of virtual silence even on this blog (blame the move, and the heat, and the lack of much to see), I finally wrote a full-length review for my once-bubbling website. So, even if the only reason I can only possibly thank Shyamalan for getting me back on the movie-reviewing train is that his movie was so goddamn awful I had to write it out of my system... M. Night, your narf has moved me. Thanks for the inspiration, if not for the memories.

More briefly, for those of you who are still trolling the multiplexes for a hot ticket, here are some dispatches from my other pathbreaking excursions into the New World of Chicago movie theaters. (A sotto voce aside to Goatdog, whose delicious-and-not-just-cuz-we-agree review of Lady in the Water is here: I'll be down at LaSalle Bank soon!)

The Road to Guantánamo B+
Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross stunned the Berlin Film Festival and copped the Best Director prize with this concise and searing picture, which might rightly be described as a travelogue of the War on Terror. Appearing as themselves in tightly framed, neutrally photographed interviews are Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed, and Shafiq Rasul, three Pakistani-born English lads who were seized as suspected terrorists in Afghanistan in 2001 and then detained for two torturous years in the U.S.-operated Camp Delta and Camp X-Ray facilities at Guantánamo Bay. Intercut with the on-camera testimonies of the "Tipton Three" are narrative restagings of their story, with nonprofessional actors both re-enacting and rounding out the dizzy, almost impromptu trip from the U.K. to Pakistan and then to a blood-chilling vision of a bomb-struck, chaotic Afghanistan. The conception doesn't work perfectly; the interview subjects gloss or withhold important information, probably to leave room for the fictionalized version to stand on its own, but it doesn't quite. The actors aren't given enough freedom or distance from the persons they are playing to fully emerge as personas in their own right, and somewhere between the "docu" and "drama" planes of the picture, some major questions and specifics get occluded. Still, the film is muscular, persuasive, and necessary without being exploitative. As in all of his recent films, but especially in the seminal In This World, Winterbottom captures the nervous, dust-streaked placelessness of our age as well as the stories and horrors unique to specific locations. Despite the superimposed captions and geographical markers, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Cuba all appear as interchangeable, dehydrated zones of threat and disquiet, where no one quite seems to know how to get from A to B. Over and over, people hop onto trucks and buses without checking where they're headed, and while such behavior makes sense at each moment, the larger ethical metaphor is suitably sobering. Guantánamo itself is not just an emblem of deliberate martial cruelty—though the movie captures that cruelty more forthrightly and powerfully than any other recent release has had the gumption to do—but an almost inevitable outgrowth of a world where maps, histories, and identities have all been subsumed beneath hasty political fictions.

A Scanner Darkly B–
The best news about A Scanner Darkly is that is isn't as restive and driftless as Waking Life, Richard Linklater's last foray into rotoscope animation and the Big Questions of Existence. The animation effects here are engaging in their impressionism without smothering the pulse of the film's characters or standing in the way of any trajectory from scene to scene. Speaking of trajectory, Scanner also charts a solid balance between conveying the particulars of its own paranoid, Philip K. Dick-derived story and miming the atomized dispersal of a doomed, drugged-out personality. Motivations, relationships, even the confidence that one is who one thinks one is: they all fray over the course of A Scanner Darkly, and without being quite so distastefully show-offy in its formal devices as Requiem for a Dream—you take the film's look for granted after a while—the film succeeds as a movie about drugs that addicts as well as total non-users will probably recognize and understand. But, the down side? For all of its ambitions and technical complexity, and for all the apt reasoning behind its storytelling decisions, the narrative of A Scanner Darkly is never particularly engrossing. I was never glad I was watching it, or even very appreciative of the fact that it was made. Reeves, Ryder, and Harrelson all bespeak their customary limits as actors, especially in a story as complex as this one, but even the nimble Robert Downey Jr. can't transcend a tale where "dystopian" futures, sinister corporations, and an undercover narc turning into his own target all feel like overly recycled tropes. One admires Dick's prescience in seeing all of this coming, but the world has so deeply corroborated the tones and even the details of his visions that they now feel a tad redundant, and maybe even clichéd.

Two Drifters (aka Odete) B+
Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues joins Shyamalan at the fable-spinning table, but unlike Lady in the Water, Two Drifters is about something, it has a plucky and consistent sense of humor about itself, and both its characters and their secrets are allowed to exceed the grasp of the director-screenwriter. When Pedro (João Carreira) dies, he is grieved extravagantly by three people: his lonely mother Teresa (Teresa Madruga); Rui (Nuno Gil), his boyfriend of one year, though no one in the family appears to know about him; and Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira), a young and tempestuous gal who lives downstairs in Pedro's apartment building, and who in fact never knew Pedro while he was alive. Rui, whose bereavement has a powerful basis in adoration as well as guilt, can't summon the energy to do anything. By explicit contrast, Odete, whose link to Pedro is either mystical, insane, or non-existent (or all three), finds it all too easy to sculpt a bold new life in his memory: leaping atop his coffin during his funeral, tending to the gravesite, claiming him as the father of her unborn baby, though she may not even be pregnant. As a piece of Iberian queer cinema, Two Drifters fuses the seductive and disturbing metaphysics of Talk to Her with the frank, tacky energy of Law of Desire; not for nothing is "Pedro" the name of the ghost haunting the movie. And yet, Rodrigues navigates kitsch in very different ways. Unlike what we see in many of Almodóvar's women, there is nothing cozy or romantic about Odete's peccadilloes—she's a bit of a crocodile, like Gael García Bernal or Fele Martínez in Bad Education—and the lighting often has a purposefully garish, almost incriminating look, as in Fassbinder. Despite some imperfect conceptions and story patches that don't work, Two Drifters is an arresting and lucid study of how gay men and straight women often compete for the same objects of lust, the same velvety nostalgias for a certain vision of love.

Images © 2006 Warner Bros. Pictures; © 2006 FilmFour/Revolution Films; © 2006 Warner Independent Pictures; and © 2005, 2006 Rosa Filmes/Strand Releasing.

Another Day of Reckoning...

...for fans of Julianne Moore. After several non-starters in a row (even if I enjoyed The Forgotten more than most), Juli has another seeming stinkeroo coming down the pike today. It's called Freedomland, it's a two-hour movie culled from a 586-page novel (uh-oh), and the New York Times is already calling it "an early candidate for worst film of the year." Its MetaCritic score is burbling at a low 38—equal to Yours, Mine & Ours, and mere points ahead of Big Momma's House 2 and Underworld: Evolution. Note that even in this production still, Edie Falco and Samuel L. Jackson appear to be consoling Julianne about how bad the movie is, or maybe just about how bad her wig is.

But am I going? Yes. Love make you crazy. Julianne, I hope you're feeling me.

Let them hear New Wave!

Dr. S beat even Daily GreenCine in bringing the new teaser trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette to my attention. If you've ever held a Virgin Suicides-meets-Barry Lyndon theme party at your house, you are way ahead of this movie. Otherwise, you probably aren't.

I was among the agnostics about Coppola's Lost in Translation, but I admit, the sheer unexpectedness of this trailer and the info that Judy Davis and Aurore Clément are both in the cast have really piqued my interest. The only person I feel for is Norma Shearer, who really acquits herself quite well in the 1938 version, but she sure is about to look awfully stodgy.