The Horde (Yannick Dahan & Benjamin Rocher, 2009)

Made it considerably less far into this, my second foray into French as the only movies I'm watching. Begins as a cop revenge movie, only to have the police hit squad out for revenge bungle so badly that half of them die in the opening sequence. I presume, once the zombies show up sufficiently, that cops and crooks will have to work together in an attempt to survive. Unfortunately, I only made it twenty minutes into the proceedings. The film showed no flair for tension nor any decent idea of how to shoot a frightening action scene. The first zombie that shows up enters with a flurry of quick cutting and semi-hilariously sped-up footage. Benny Hill meets George Romero. Throw in a little extraneous close-ups of gnawing flesh and you have a film that feels mostly like incompetent pandering. The only halfway interesting character in the film is one of the first to die, and the rest seem to have no personality. This wouldn't be a huge deal, as Assault on Precinct 13, which the film is obviously modeled after, has characters who are closer to archtypes than people. But that movie had John Carpenter. This is probably the most superficial thing I've written for this blog, but there honestly isn't much to say. If one expects a cops vs robbers vs zombies movie to have a lot to say about real human life, one is probably going to be disappointed. I wasn't even expecting that and I still managed to be too quickly bored to contine.

36th Precinct (Olivier Marchal, 2004)

The first in my experiment to watch almost exclusively French movies for the rest of the year (exceptions will be: movies seen in the theatre and when I feel like it). Though, to be fair, I haven't actually even finished it and am not sure that I will. I watched half of it before going out to a late dinner last night and have not yet had the will to resume it. It begins somewhat interestingly -- a kind of mood piece in which the viewer is thrown into a series of scenes that don't quite add up to a story. Police parties, heists, violence, political intrigue. Each scene almost seems to exist for itself, for the emotion it generates and for the piece of law enforcement that it represents. Later on, however, it's difficult to tell if this ambiguity is intentional or simply the result of poor plotting. It seems difficult to believe that the same person who would have intentionally crafted these sequences would have agreed to a scene in which an officer who has just filed for transfer and has X days until he leaves would be shot in slow motion while the main character yells NOOOOOOOOOOOO (or, since it is a French movie, NOOOOOOOOOOONNN).

36th Precinct's about-face is easy enough to pinpoint -- it begins with a disturbing and gratuitous sex scene. Well, disturbing to me anyway. However much I complain about chinless nerds as the new male hetero cinema icons, they still can't beat the French for their fascination with plain old seriously ugly old dudes. Both Gerard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil have wives who seem far too attractive and sexually voracious to be married to such unappealingly glum and work-obsessed men. After this we get a series of home scenes which fill in unnecessary back story elements of each officer's characters and the rest of the movie from there is content to pack on the cliches and sentiment. With over an hour left to go, I am unsure what they could introduce to bring it back from such an edge. Thus I will also be starting to indulge in another experiment: that of quitting while the quitting is good. Too often lately I have made myself suffer through a movie long after I know it won't offer anything to me.

Pitch Black (David Twohy, 2000)

An unsuccessful mish-mash of George Lucas, Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twohy betrays his occasionally keen visual eye -- I actually the movie's burnt orange, overexposed look during the early sun segments -- with nonsensical editing, cutting irregularly between various shots of the same action in a confusing flurry of activity that diminishes, rather than heightens, the tension of an unknown predator hunting them. The film's writing is similarly miserable, relying on tough guy '80s one-liners in place of characterization, often resulting in characters who do things without explicable motivation. This latter problem wouldn't be of great concern in what is, essentially, a retread of Alien if the movie didn't leave such little else to worry about. I value a well-made suspense sequence far more than, as Rosenbaum once put it, modern cinema's "tendency to turn people into garbage," but this movie spends most of its time on jump scares and red herrings before devolving into a completely wasted premise. There are so many cool ways to make a suspense film based on the idea that characters have to stay in the light in order to survive, but nearly all of them are mangled. Exactly how many light-making objects they have is constantly unclear, leaving the loss of one or two less disastrous seeming than it should be; the characters fail time and time again to manage the priority of surviving above petty bickering, making them seem like childish infants; and each individual sequence appears and is gone before the gravity of the situation has time to properly settle in, giving the feeling of very little consequence. This feeling of empty action is heightened by the film's rather glib attitude towards death. I count at least four deaths in the film that we are, at least slightly, encouraged to guffaw at. And this encouragement of laughter, other than being admittedly a little icky, serves to break the tension that the chaos of trying to survive on a hellish alien planet is supposed to instill.

I Wanna Go (Chris Maars Piliero, 2011)

Britney's new video, I Wanna Go, continues in the vein of Hold It Against Me -- taking a song that hints little if at all to her ongoing love/hate relationship with fame, notoriety, the press, her old image -- and meshes it with a video overloading on those elements. Here she and director Piliero craft a pastiche of Old Brit references: skull Mickey Mouse shirt, makeup, hair styling and close-ups reminiscent of Lucky video, a Got Milk? parody, a reference to Crossroads, and likely others that I missed, in an attempt to recontextualize her media breakdowns and burn outs as a combination of pseudo-fuck you rebellion and the pent-up dissonance between the person she feels she is and the person the media/world perceives her as. Somehow the whole thing never quite comes together. As with many pop stars, her acting abilities are relegated mostly to facial expression and anytime she's required to emote with spoken lines, a certain flatness appears inescapable. The oddly literal reference to Half-Baked at the end of the press conference does nothing to enliven the situation.

Her coy stroll through fan groping, indecent exposure and cop seduction is better-handled, but still lacks a certain oomph -- neither filled with the manic, albeit reprehensible, energy of Avril Lavigne being a dick to some dude's girlfriend (whose terrible videos were clearly something of an inspiration for this one) nor an actually sleazy coat of grime that might add character to Britney's well-traveled road of public misperception. This is, I think, the biggest reason the video never quite gets off the ground. Unlike her first video for Femme Fatale, Hold It Against Me, she has retreated back into the mindset of blameless victim, forever at the mercy of a media attempting to twist her words and actions around, rather than the more ambivalent truth of the subject.

The physicality of Britney vs Britney in Hold It Against Me is replaced here with a much tamer fight sequence (full of bad, weightless CGI). If you're going to do a Terminator reference, I suppose paparazzi as unstoppable, bloodthirsty machines is as good a way to do it as any, but there's no real sense of dread or terror that the idea of Terminators are intended to instill. Like most of the other references, it feels like the director is nudging you in the ribs and winking really hard before moving on to the next bit. The Thriller reference is similarly unearned, which is a shame because, upon reflection (and with a little knowledge of Britney's real-life history) it suggests a somewhat tragic parallel with her own brief relationship with paparazzi photographer Adnan Ghalib. If I Wanna Go had stripped down some of the ideas and focused on this push-and-pull relationship, it could have been something darkly confessional and interesting. Instead, like almost everything else, it's a one-off that simplifies, rather than complicates, Britney's ongoing struggle with being Britney Spears -- and trying to figure out who that person even is.

The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011)

I walked into The Hangover Part II with an expectation that I would not like it. While I had not ever seen the first film (I hesitate to call it "original"), I had seen several previews for both. They did not inspire confidence. But, after a frustrating day, sometimes you just want to have two beers and go to a midday showing of a movie you fully expect to not be good. This is the part of the review in which a person might normally admit to being wrong. That all this expectation was for nothing, and it was merely the marketing executives doing what they do (using advertising to make their movies look worse than they are). This is not what happened. The movie advertised, especially the strangely eerie trailer of Ken Jeong and Zach Galifianakis slowly singing to elevator music, make the movie look better than it actually is.

It begins just fine. Whoever was the Assistant Director on this movie, actually, is working his or her ass off (probably his, sadly) to get a real job as a director. Almost all the shots that do not involve any of the principle actors look fantastic. While it is probably not that difficult to go to Thailand and film what is, in essence, a pretty looking travelogue of pseudo-exoticism, AD still kinda nails the hell out of it. And compared to how bland and typically comedy movie-looking the rest of the film is, these throwaway moments are a wonderful change of pace. Even the opening of the post-Hangover wake up in a small Bangkok hotel room, there's a tinge of moody loneliness to all the shots leading up to the actors getting up and doing things.

But, other than that, the movie is more or less worthless. I cannot understand the appeal of Galifianakis' movie persona. His psychotically boorish tendency to make every situation he's in worse for the other "protagonists" is acknowledged at the very beginning of the movie, yet the characters still allow themselves to be guilted into keeping him around. With less exaggeration this could be a plausible storyline, but Galifianakis' character is so obviously mentally ill and in need of serious psychological help that he simply becomes sad and pathetic, rather than humorous. It's impossible to quite be angry with him, because he is clearly incapable of any form of impulse control, yet it also feels weirdly cruel to laugh at anything he does -- malicious, even. It helps that, at least to these ears, his lines and delivery are never funny.

Ken Jeong does battle with Galifianakis for most awful thing about the film, and mostly manages to win with an awful caricature of "ching-chong-y" Chinese stereotypes, speaking in an exaggerated accent that he can't even keep up a decent portion of the time (dropping into a higher-pitched version of his normal English, which is, at least, less offensive if no less obnoxious).

In the film's opening post-Hangover scene, Jeong overdoses on cocaine, has a heart attack and dies. The other characters then decide to stuff his body in an ice chest, rather than attempt to call any authorities or make any serious attempt to revive him. They come to this conclusion so nonchalantly, and with very little moral panicking or indecision, that it makes it immediately impossible to see them as anything but reprehensible human beings, even if three-quarters of the way through the movie it turns out Jeong isn't dead after all. They thought he was, and they reacted in the most self-serving and awful way possible, without even much flinching. And, in the end, that is all that really needs to be said about these characters. We are expected to embrace and relate to them and their plight to discover what, exactly, they did the night before, and yet they are such reprehensible low-lifes, and the movie is so patently unaware of this fact (save Galifianakis, though even he is sympathetic) that it is a movie that has failed as soon as it begins. And its failure continues from there, an almost endless stream of racism, cliches and hatefulness in celebration of exactly the disgusting American tourist entitlement that, say, Hostel satirizes so viciously.

Mom's House Movie Round-Up

I spent a week at my mom's house, during which time I watched something like a dozen movies. Her TV is set up in a way where huge boxes of glare shine into the center of the screen, making actual enjoyment fairly difficult. As such I mostly tried to watch movies I was vaguely curious about seeing, but suspected I wouldn't like.

In an effort to speed along this blog process and catch up to something close to where I should be with my movie reviews, I've decided to give these dozen movies short shrift and stick them all together in one hastily written post.

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow, 1964)
By default the best adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. None of the three are good, but this one is, I suppose, the least bad. If I'm being honest I sort of hate Vincent Price's theatrical acting in this. I am not familiar enough with his work to know if this is his typical style of acting, or if too long pauses and over-emphasis on the dramatic words of a sentence are simply his forte. In any case, it gave everything a feeling of Masterpiece Theatre, which the grimy desperation of the character needs anything but. The Omega Man must've got the part where the main character becomes a martyr, rather than realizing he's the monster, from this movie. Kinda defeats the whole point of the book.

The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
Lately I've fallen in love with describing certain movies as "cinema wallpaper." It seems a short and easy way of stating that they feel a whole lot like watching nothing. There are things happening on screen, but none of them seem to add up to an experience that is like watching a whole movie. The Box is certainly like that, and, sadly, that's enough to make it Richard Kelly's best movie (based on Donnie Darko and the 20 minutes I was able to get through of Southland Tales). Again, like in DD, he uses period detail without much point -- the film takes place in the '70s, but it could just as well be now (and, for a lot of it, now would make more sense). But, again, I guess nothing beats the low-hanging fruit of Donnie Darko's attempts at '80s satire. It's pretty difficult to even understand why or how this was made.

Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001)
Uses that Matrix rotating camera trick to much greater effect than was ever used in the Matrix. Gave the feeling that, despite the awfulness of Travolta's opening monologue, I might actually be about to watch an interesting movie. Unfortunately it turns out the opening sequence is one of those Begin at the End hooks, and the ensuing flashback to Hugh Jackman as a paroled hacker (quite easily the buffest man to ever be jailed for spending 16 hours a day sitting behind a computer) being enticed back into the life is dull nonsense -- though, at least, breezy, hastily paced nonsense. I didn't hate it, even if all the potential was eventually wasted, and the movie can never decide whether it wants to be a big, outlandish cartoon of an action movie or a gritty, violent down-to-earth action movie with Jackman as a plausible moral center, trapped in a world of chaos and violence.

Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004)
Honestly, I was completely surprised how much I enjoyed this. My general feeling towards Tony Scott is that, despite certain critical opinions, he is in fact even worse than Ridley. This, however, is the most I've enjoyed a movie by either of the two brothers, which I guess puts Tony back in the lead even if Ridley never made a movie I hated as much as True Romance. It is mean and bleak and gross, and wearing its "gritty" Denzel broken down Man of Action heart on its sleeve does it no real favors, but its ultra high contrast music video cinematography is so gorgeous I could watch nearly anything happening to it and be enthralled. Perhaps it speaks to my sense of aesthetic (and how bad it is), but I just plain love looking at this movie and if I could make a movie that looked just like it I would be pleased as punch. Dakota Fanning is pretty good, too.

The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, 2004)
At first looks and feels like a bad attempt to revive '70s paranoia-style filmmaking, with weird deep fisheye cameras and strange zooms. This visual style eventually stopped bothering me, though it never completely gelled with the rest of the movie. Despite these stylistic problems, and Meryl Streep's boring Meryl Streep performance, Demme's attempt to make a big budget movie also be somewhat politically subversive ends up giving it enough oomph to push it into a pretty decent movie. The way it mirrors the hypnotic suggestion of its characters with the rhetoric of television punditry and political speeches to suggest that our entire political system is a broken down mess of mass hypnosis and it doesn't really matter which party you support, as long as everyone is talking the same way about the same things is a pretty unusual (if a mite obvious) outlook for a Hollywood political thriller, even if Demme eventually becomes trapped in offering the audience an easy happy(-ish) ending escape.

Freejack (Geoff Murphy, 1992)
Actually starts like an interesting movie, possibly. Though that is only because I misinterpreted the opening sequence to think it was about something completely different. The opening intercuts Emilio Estevez in a bright, sunny, idyllic, Best Day of My Life scene with a dark Mick Jagger-led post-apocalypse wasteland. The implication at the time, to me, was that Estevez was jacked into some kind of virtual reality world where he relived the positive aspects of his life as an escape from the reality that he was seriously injured or something along those lines. You could go interesting places with a concept like that. Instead it's about how in the future you can snatch people's bodies just before their death and, if you have enough money, transfer your personality into them to live forever -- like some kind of reverse on the Bradbury story Sound of Thunder. Estevez escapes and the movie proceeds from there in a series of poorly executed chase sequences until it eventually ends.

X2: X-Men United (Bryan Singer, 2003)
Still too long, just as I remembered, but otherwise an efficient slice of superhero action movie. Singer is, with little doubt, one of our best living action directors and this movie goes far to demonstrate just what is dull and lacking about the sleepwalking action sequences in Matthew Vaughn's newest X-Men movie. The tension, the sense of place and motion, in the opening action sequence alone would probably make it one of the best American action scenes of the last decade or so. It moves with a steady, pure kinesis that is almost unseen in action movies lately. I also have to admit I appreciate the mutants as metaphor for the struggle for gay rights, and the goofy fun Singer has with it ("have you ever tried... NOT being a mutant" asks a fretful mother) a lot more than I like it as a metaphor for black civil rights ala the new one. Guess I should finally get around to watching Valkyrie and see if it has some glimmers of awesome in and around how awful I expect to find some of it.

X-Men: Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006)
Actually not as awful as I remembered. Kelsey Grammar is a terrible choice for Beast (come on, it's fuckin' Frasier, how did anyone think this wasn't ridiculous), and it mostly skates along without any ideas about anything -- it doesn't, for instance, even attempt to grapple with the idea that despite Magneto hating Nazis he basically wants to be a mutant Hitler. But it does skate along briskly and with a kind of gleeful abandon. No doubt working with the knowledge that this was gonna be the last real X-Men movie, Ratner and screenwriters spare no opportunity to kill off as many main characters as they possibly can. And while this is, in itself, not anything like an inherently good thing, I can find a small amount of pleasure in it compared to the usual way of handling super teams in movies. Cover it with an ecstatic layer of sentimental cheese and you have a movie that, while not at all something good, is at least a joyful and unbridled show of passable mediocrity.

Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001)
I guess this would be kind of the opposite end of a similar sequel spectrum. This is even more unapologetically schlocky than Last Stand, yet it works far less well. The biggest issue is that Joe Johnston is so obviously beholden to Spielberg's work that what he ends up with is merely sticky, oozing Velveeta Spielberg. An indiscernible mess of could-be Spielberg, yet everything about it looks, feels, tastes and smells wrong. Even the music is weird, having been able to successfully license the Jurassic Park theme song -- but not John Williams himself. So we alternate between big, uproarious moments with the (actually pretty annoying) theme, then seque into some not at all good faux-Williams music for the next part. Then the movie will do something completely inexplicable, like try to reprise that first Jurassic Park moment, when you've spent 20 minutes talking about dinosaurs and getting hints of dinosaurs, then you get the big BAM moment when there's a dinosaur... only they do it 3/4ths of the way into this movie, which has already been filled with dinosaurs since the beginning. Why are you trying to replicate (almost exactly) the big majestic moment at a completely ill-fitting time when everyone is trying to run away and not get eaten? While I can understand not liking The Lost World, or probably honestly any of the Jurassic Park movies, do not trust anyone who claims this is better than the second one.

Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
So after all that fake Spielberg I decided to watch a real one, albeit not even close to one of his best. In many ways this is the most conflicted of his movies that I've seen, constantly battling itself between his impulse for humanistic gravity about the future, where America/humanity appeared to be heading in a post-Patriot Act world of security and paranoia -- and a bunch of awful jokes like Tom Cruise chasing his eyeballs down a ramp and Peter Stormare as a doctor blowing snot everywhere. This is definitely Spielberg at his most weirdly unrestrained, apparently literally throwing every idea he can think of into the movie whether good, bad, offensive, childish, interesting or dull. Just a whole big kitchen sink of a movie which, somewhat unfortunately, also happens to have some of the most interesting sci-fi world building that exists in a recent movie -- blending utopic and dystopic ideas into a world that seems like a plausible reality in 20-30 years (Xbox Kinect already offers the ability to control TV menus by moving your hands, and, from what I hear, cars that drive themselves are in a constant state of testing).

The X-Files: I Want To Believe (Chris Carter, 2008)
A ridiculous exercise in combining what would be, even by its standards, a pretty bland episode of the show with a seemingly endless string of kowtowing fanbase appeasement. Mulder and Scully are finally together and doing it as they get roped back into working for the government for One Last Job. Xzibit co-stars as the only black guy, who also happens to be surly, dislikeable and useless. Even late in the movie, when it appears his time for redemption has come, as Scully angrily calls out his masculinity ("if you can't do it, find me someone with the balls who will") instead is just an excuse to bring back Skinner for a worthless cameo and Xzibit never appears in the movie again. Also attempts to mirror the killer with an at first extraneous seeming medical case Scully is working on, where a boy is probably dying from a rare brain disease and an experimental and highly painful treatment has only a very small chance of saving him. The killer, meanwhile, is kidnapping people and sawing them up with the hope of curing his husband's cancer. The question, eventually, appears to be: How far is too far to save someone you love? But then the end completely ignores this connection, as Scully powers on with the treatment. Mercifully, we never find out whether it works, but it still seems completely at odds with what the rest was trying to suggest. Easily the worst movie of the trip, despite Duchovny's charming attempts to rescue it with every scene he's in. (Gillian Anderson is also completely awful, it is little wonder her career has stagnated without the show)

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)
Watched this both because I had not seen it since the theatre, and as a primer for my anticipation of seeing Super 8 when I arrived in Atlanta. That it turned out to be much better than that movie was a surprise, although it is still nothing worth writing home about. The bit of stunt casting that put Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the villain's chair likely won Abrams much of the movie's critical respect, but to me he does nothing but exude a pale, mealy-mouthed narcissist's idea of quiet, direct menace. He's so obviously caught up in trying to be scary without being overtly scary that it ruptures the entire movie's existence. The whole fiasco is a case of Actors Gone wild, as Cruise pulls out all the stops in appearing as Tom Cruise-y as possible at all times, while Billy Crudup tips his hat too early by being oily and shooting furtive glances. The rest of the movie is the usual Abrams celebration of gender roles, with Cruise as the jaded spy who falls in love with a girl because of her innocence and naivete (creepy), then must rescue her when his life, and his mistakes, ensare her. A few of the espionage aspects seem interesting at first, though eventually end in cliche (one particularly elaborate sequence's finale comes down to spilling a drink on someone and then ambushing them in the bathroom). Here's hoping Brad Bird's first foray into live-action can breathe some life into this tired franchise (but, sadly, who's really holding their breath?), as who doesn't love the idea of spies doing cool spy stuff?

Cobra (George Pan Cosmatos, 1986)

Cobra is so vile and complete an embodiment of '70s-'80s fascist vigilante romanticism that it could almost be a parody of these ideals, if not for its complete straight face -- excepting macho-cynical one-liners, of course. A gang of psychotic cultists spouting apocalyptic nihilism are taking over the town and it's up to one cop in a vintage sedan to stop them. His superiors don't understand his brand of no-nonsense, get results, shoot the bad guys police work. A material witness who is also a pretty lady needs his protection and he'll stop at nothing to give it to her. One of the bureaucrats always standing in Cobra's way is secretly working with the cult. Hits every cliche plot nail on the head and lacks both the gorgeously scummy look Don Siegel brought to Dirty Harry, as well as that movie's occasional acknowledgement of/ambivalence towards the titular character's gross methods/outlooks. If this were possible to be taken seriously by anyone, this movie would have made me very angry. Instead, it was just annoyingly icky -- like the sheen of sweat from a muggy summer day spent doing nothing much but writing about terrible movies (hint: today).

Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010)

A telling cultural placeholder -- a fitting affirmation of just how far we haven't come since the '80s. Manages to mix the homophobia, misogyny and racism of yesteryear with all the new ways we've discovered to oppress people in the two decades since. I'd say Craig Robinson ought to be ashamed of himself, but he has already proven himself a man without shame.

The film's premise is, actually, not without potential. Sad sack middle-aged guys trying to relive their glory days accidentally get time-warped back to them. If the film had gone from there to become an indictment of the vanity and privelege of male mid-life crises, as well as an attempt to slap in the face the entire idea of rose-tinted nostalgia for the '80s and all the awful things about that decade, all while embodying the tone and feel of an '80s comedy (the one thing the actual movie does get kinda right), well, that actually sounds like a movie I'd want to see -- a lot. The movie has a banquet of satirical subject matter to work with, and all it ends up with is some jokes about neon and slack-jawed Red Scare jokes that were likely tired before the '80s had ended.

And the actual plot involves none of this premise. Instead, it is the exact opposite. It is about how, hey, now that we're old and we see all those mistakes we made, wouldn't it be great if we could go back to our young, hot, virile bodies, but with the life experience we have now? We would rule EVERYTHING. So it becomes an extended, unfunny exercise in male wish fulfillment. John Cusack, in the present, is reeling from a recent divorce in which his Bitch Ex-Wife(TM) took everything and left him a shallow husk of a man. The solution, in the past, is to meet a "quirky" girl with almost no personality and get her to fall in love with you despite the fact that you are exhibiting personality traits in life with both A) a mopey, recently dumped creep ex-boyfriend and B) a legitimately mentally ill person who believes he is from the future. There is literally no way a young, successful writer for a music magazine would ever be interested in him. Craig Robinson, in the present, is an emasculated cukold too much in love with his wife to confront her about his knowledge of her affair. The solution, in the past, is to call his 9-year-old wife-to-be on the phone and scream obscenities at her until she cries. This move proves so emotionally scarring, that when he returns to the future she would never dream of cheating on him (though, of course, she doesn't know it was him). The entire movie is like this. Men behave in such disgusting, self-serving, completely inhuman ways and are then rewarded. We are supposed to buy into their ending as being a happy one, because, I guess, that the only thing really wrong with the world is that men don't have enough control over it.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is, basically, nonsense. A labored attempt to cross several millenia of generations by introducing the oldest known visual arts to the latest in 3D technology. It's an intriguing idea, but it fails on so many counts that even what is intermittently interesting about it is swallowed up in memory by everything that is botched. The most damning, maybe, is that 3D does not look at all like how we actually perceive the world. An art history professor I discussed the film with said that she did appreciate the 3D in some ways, having looked at quite a number of normal photographs of the art work. I hadn't seen any 2D versions to compare it to, but the strangeness of 3D actually worked against my enjoyment of the pieces -- like the new technology was battling the old art and winning in a big, big way. The most interesting moments, for me, were shots of the caves and surrounding landscape without the paintings in them. The ability of 3D filmmaking to transform something real and palpable into a disorienting, surreal version of itself is the only possibility of 3D that seems honestly worth exploring to this writer. To turn real life into a bizarre theme park ride.

Late in the film Herzog travels to an indoor replication of a tropical jungle to further pontificate on the oldness of alligators and their perceptions of things. From nearly any kind of standpoint it, it's a self-consciously silly aside that, like much of the rest of the film, seems to be Herzog playing up his wacky German persona. Whether this Troy McClure-esque act is a cynical money-grab, playing on America's fondness for goofy foreign caricatures or Herzog actually beginning to buy into his own mythology is difficult to discern. In any event, there's a shot that travels through some leafy palms and opens up into the aquarium that felt so much like the realization of all those goofy early '90s Virtual Reality promises of the future that it made me wish his next project would be a 3D Aguirre revisited trek into the Amazon. Preferably without his voice anywhere near it.

The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a strange mixture of a talking head documentary in which no one seems to be saying the things Herzog wants them to, so he badgers them into answering questions in a weird way, or the pictures of the 3D images. This is where my interest in the movie will veer into the purely subjective and possibly ignorant. I don't really care about the paintings at all. Some were interesting, some less so, but as an artifact of pre-history I was unable to glean any compelling story from their existence. And, as a relative novice in the field of painting, their composition did not strike me in the way it seemed to pound many of my contemporaries. I am a man trapped in the modern(ist) world, and much of my interest in art lies only with its ability to comment on itself and a world I recognize. Without a historical context to attach it to (something that, obviously, can never exist), I find it difficult to feel anything but indifferent about most of it. This is my own personal failing, and something I cannot necessarily hold against the film.

But everything else, especially Herzog's own juvenile and obnoxious pontification on nature and the world are things that, at least from my perspective, are real problems that dampen a once-in-almost-anyone's-lifetime experience. Herzog seems to be fighting a company's desire to turn the film into a more normal, everyday Discovery Channel-esque movie, but this fight makes the film so much more annoying than something along those lines would be. To make matters worse, his narration is mixed so high in the soundtrack that its booming insistence makes his platitudes all the more groan-worthy, given their Voice of God status. In all honesty, I wanted to be much more specific in this section of the review, but two months after the screening I'm having quite a lot of trouble remembering any specific lines. It has all achieved a droning hum of Herzog's accented lisp saying "nature" over and over.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

Paul Verhoeven's 1995 film, Showgirls, was critically and commercially decimated upon its release – reviled for its campy acting and dialogue and almost universally declared one of the worst films of all time. As years passed, and no doubt partially inspired by famous Cahiers du Cinema critic Jacques Rivette's claim that Showgirls was “one of the great American films of the last few years,” (Bonnaud) other critics started to acknowledge that, perhaps, they had overlooked the film. Australian critic Adrian Martin even admitted “I learnt the lesson that Showgirls knew more than I did.” (Martin) It is with very little shame that I admit the same was true of me, upon my first viewing. Despite my fondness for other Verhoeven films, especially Robocop, I was unprepared to accept the level to which Verhoeven would mix sincerity and irony into an ambivalent postmodernist stew of indulgence and critique. I, as so many other viewers did, took the film at its very face value – I called it “fantastically directed kitsch” – and laughed callously at star Elizabeth Berkeley's flailing gesticulations and Gina Gershon's hollow, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Texas accent. What I didn't realize was that I was becoming the exact thing that Showgirls was satirizing – an opportunistic viewer, gazing at the characters depicted on screen and, in my gaze, robbing them of their humanity.

Following mammoth box office successes with Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992), Paul Verhoeven seemed set for a long, successful career in Hollywood. Working with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and given the greenlight by backing studio MGM to explore the recently minted NC-17 rating (designed to replace the older X rating, which in the public's eye had become synonymous with pornography) in a big budgeted drama about Las Vegas show life. The resulting film, Showgirls, grossed only 28 million dollars domestically, compared to its 45 million dollar budget (Box Office Mojo). It won a then-record seven prizes at the Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Scheers vii), including Worst Director and Worst Picture. Eventually its more campy aspects would be embraced in the home video market, earning it 100 million in home video sales and making it one of MGM's top 20 best-selling videos (MGM.com).

While some would argue that its campiness is unintentional – that Verhoeven believed he was making a serious film and accidentally made something hilarious – I would say the truth is much more ambivalent. Showgirls is both kitschy and serious. What other way could there be to depict Las Vegas, a city so cartoonishly surreal and yet so celebrated as a pinnacle of modern American capitalism? The artifice of the performances and dialogue, which are almost all consistent in tone, are an extension of Vegas' existence as a city of smoke and mirrors. Verhoeven claimed his interest is in realism, but he bends the idea that the words “realism” and “realistic” are necessarily interchangeable. Showgirls is not realistic, but to Verhoeven's mind it is realism. What he depicts is an honest summation of his feelings about humanity, especially as it relates to America. As Rivette puts it, “it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy.” (Bonnaud) This is especially apparent in scenes between Elizabeth Berkeley and Gina Gershon. Despite their outwardly obvious and sometimes baffling dialogue (bonding over a childhood love of dog food), they eye each other with a shared sense of distrust tinged with hints of malevolence. Berkeley, especially, uses a form of stripped down acting in which she and the character fuse into one indistinguishable person. Over the course of the film she, just as her character Nomi Malone does, “learns” how to act. Early on she is full of wild fire, throwing herself into every emotion with reckless, occasionally ludicrous, abandon. But after Nomi's ascension to star of the show Goddess, she transforms into a replica of Gershon's Crystal Connors – eyes twinkling with deceit and lustful power.

By choosing a story about strippers, and using a rating intended for Adults Only, Verhoeven is able to extend the metaphor in many different directions. It is a film critiquing the world of cinema, and the unrealistic power fantasies it creates. It is a film critiquing the world of Hollywood, and it's role as a town – like Vegas – that feeds off new life, before eventually spitting it out, chewed and broken. Especially as it pertains to young, hopeful performers. And, of course, it is a critique of the real place, Las Vegas, and the world of strip clubs, prostitution and the sometimes blurry line between the two. In every instance there is a huge gulf between the promised fantasy and the lived reality. This, I suppose, is true even of gambling itself. Gambling, in its own way, is a microcosm of the ways in which rich people offer a hint of The American Dream to the working class, encouraging people to say “what if I win?” and ignore at what cost their small winnings came from.

This is the format with which Verhoeven uses a postmodernist lens to examine the history of the Hollywood musical. Behind the scenes films such as 42nd Street (1933), All About Eve (1950), and A Star is Born (1937, 1954) (Henderson) are the fodder with which Verhoeven assails musicals, and, by extension, film itself, as a morally bankrupt dream factory that has helped create a world like Las Vegas. But, at the same time, Verhoeven is aware of the hypocrisy inherent in this kind of message. He doesn't shy away from an understanding and sympathy with the audience's desire for fantasy. In Total Recall, he was delighted at the audience's relief when main character Doug Quaid, forced to confront whether or not he has been living a dream, decides it isn't a dream and shoots the target of his confusion. The audience wanted to believe so badly that, even though it was a movie, what they were witnessing was real within the context of the movie, that Arnold shooting a man is a cause for celebration and relief from anxiety (Scheers 223). Thus Showgirls is structured to take maximum advantage of the audience's desire for internal consistency and genre formula. Viewers want to root for the main character and root against the bad guy, so Verhoeven pushes hard to make both of those things difficult to do. Malone's dissolution from naïve girl from out of town to cocaine-snorting opportunist stretches the boundaries of audience willingness to sympathize. This combines with Nomi's eventual attempt to reclaim her lost sense of self and fight back, literally “kicking the shit” out of Andrew Carver for the rape of her best friend, being both a fulfillment of audience desire and a cold nod to the reality that a small measure of revenge doesn't balance the world's order. All it does is invite Nomi back into living the fantasy, dooming her to repeat all the decisions she's made. This gives the film a frightening sense of despair, using a mirror effect of the sign post to Vegas in the film's opening shots to the sign post to Los Angeles in the ending, to imply a fatalistic circle of entrapment. The poor and disenfranchised, particularly women, will be locked into roles at the mercy of men for the rest of their lives.

Men are central to much of the concerns of Showgirls and their odious, completely self-serving, behavior throughout the film is evidence of a strong leaning towards feminist theory on Verhoeven's part. Once again toying with notions of film literacy and archetypes, he sets up three familiar “meet-cute” scenarios. The first occurs in the film's first scene, when a drifter in a brown duster picks up Nomi hitchhiking. In a typical film romance, this could be the beginning of a relationship. He's even kind of a jerk – prime material for the “opposites attract” formula Hollywood has been pumping for years in their romantic comedies. By the end of the road trip they are getting along and he even offers to help her get a job at the Riviera, where his uncle is floor manager. He gives her $10 for the slot machine and says he'll be right back. This scenario ends, of course, with him making off with all her worldly possessions and disappearing for almost the entire film. This pattern of men swooping in to Nomi's rescue, only to selfishly backstab her at the earliest convenience, is played out two more times in the film – first with a bartender/dancer James, and then again with creative director of the Stardust Hotel, Zack. Each of these again toy with the audience's expectation for wish fulfillment. Each man appears nice, and would be plausible as the film's romantic interest, but their disregard for her well-being proves a one-way street. The women in the film can only screw over each other and have no real power over the other men, especially the rich ones like Zack. After nearly two hours of being at the mercy of her male handlers, Nomi's small exploitation movie-esque revenge fantasy against pop star Andrew Carver feels hollow and useless. Quite plainly, in a world in which women are prized for their beauty and a man can walk up to a girl down on her luck at the slot machines and ask “Lost all your money? Wanna make some more?” there is almost nothing one can do to escape the institutional oppression that movies help socialize us towards. Even when men mean well, they cannot escape the base nature of their feelings, as when Verhoeven gives pretty much everyone the middle finger by capping a clichéd, heartwarming reunion between Nomi and her previous bosses, Al and Henrietta with Al telling Nomi “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.”

This fatalistic attitude is at the crux of Verhoeven's arguments throughout his career. There's a sense of bleak inevitability to his films, as he acknowledges their existence as representations of people rather than as real human beings – caught as they are in the machinations of a script already written. And then he uses this idea to paint broad strokes about our own nature as people, and the ways in which we seek to serve ourselves at the cost of others. This level of moralizing might be off-putting in the hands of a less skilled director, but Verhoeven cloaks his moral stance in such a pointed satirical gaze that it never comes off as casual nihilism. Instead it elevates Showgirls, and much of the rest of his oeuvre including more recent films like Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000), into an apparently perpetual state of relevance as America marches forward every year with new versions of the same old fantasies to force feed its increasingly class divided youths.

Dellamorte, Dellamore (Michele Soavi, 1994)

A little less than a month later, and the addition of alcohol those 25 days ago when I watched it, and I barely remember anything about this movie, other than I hated it a lot. I seem to remember Rupert Everett as a kind of forlorn cemetery caretaker, pining for a love of his own. Enter an actress who plays multiple characters and, I think, screws him over as each of them? I remember it basically being a movie about how women are the worst and they always ruin guys' lives. It also was not funny at all, except in that trying too hard way that lots of horror "comedies" seem to do. Also had a very film school overachiever look to it, with lots of pseudo-artsy shots that exist mostly for their own sake, rather than what they contribute to or comment on the actions/ideas/themes onscreen. I actually honestly have difficulty understanding the film's appeal as a cult favorite. What does it offer that, well, almost anything can't offer better? This is the worst review I've written in a while. I should've written it right away, as I have nowhere to go with it now. It also has lots of mean-spirited, malicious jokes directed at Everett's assistant, an embodiment of the slow-witted Igor trope.

Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)

Rosenbaum, an ardent Ruiz champion, once described him as one of cinema's "more literary" directors. Perhaps he worded it differently. Maybe he said "most" instead of "more" or simply described him as a literary director. The idea intrigued me, as I have taken steps towards moving away from an idea of a pure cinema -- that the camera's placement and the cutting from one shot to the next is the idea to be held above all others. That a film must first succeed at that before other ideas, themes, explorations should be warranted. It's a little bit of a silly idea. I still like it, especially as it pertains to action films. But it is reductive, when movies are capable of so much beyond those two things. So I went into Time Regained without knowing anything about it, save the idea Rosenbaum planted in my head, and that it would star Catherine Deneuve.

A little over an hour later I walked out, with probably another hour and change left to go. Perhaps if I'd done a little more research, and discovered that it was based on Marcel Proust's most famous novel, the enormous tome Remembrance of Things Past, I might have been more adequately prepared for the movie, its setting, characters and the way it moved through time. I had scarcely heard of the book before I saw the movie, and I continue to be mostly unaware of it save its title and notoriety. But it still might've given me something to hold onto, to help wade through the dense forest of faces, many mustachioed men that I could not tell from one another. A flowing and ebbing tide of names and people, unsure who was supposed to be who or when was supposed to be when. As it was, I had no basis for entry into this film and I could not reasonably justify watching more, as all I felt was a strange bored frustration, unable to access what I was being shown and just feeling sad and alienated. I am partially willing to admit that the fault is my own, or, at least, the movie is not for me. In a way, it's kind of wonderful and admirable that Ruiz was able to make a pretty well-budgeted adaptation of a French novel that is, quite probably, only for the people who have read it.

But, having said that, what little I could access cinematically told me that I needed access to anything else to get something out of it. The cinema, as one might expect from a director labeled "literary," was a mostly dull series of stiff shots broken up by mostly silly surrealist touches. And I mean silly as in ridiculous, rather than whimsical. Mostly they have a touch of whimsy, but are too clumsily handled to come off as charming. A prime example would be a scene in which a young Marcel enters a room. Across the room is an older man, and between them the floor is scattered with men's hats, like a landmine. It's a strong image, that perhaps suggests the impending war and likens it to adulthood. But then Marcel begins to make his way through the hat field by walking rigidly towards a hat, pausing, and then hopping over it in an exceptionally mannered fashion. This pushes it too far, trying to achieve a dreamlike state that is, I would guess, unlike dreams almost anybody has. It is too arch, too self-conscious and robs it of whatever power it had before. The similarly shifting furniture, gliding back and forth across the floor, is more contrivance than cute. Though a sequence in which a man appears to rise up off a ballroom floor seamlessly is nice, and unexpected. I guess this suggests that Ruiz through all his ideas at the cinematic canvas, hoping that some would work well enough to offset the ones that didn't. For Rosenbaum, and maybe others, they did. For me, not as much.

I haven't given the film a rating, being that I feel uncomfortable assigning it a negative number simply because I walked out of it. I wasn't prepared to give it a decent shot. And, even if I had been, it is in all likelihood a movie that is not for me, given that the chances of me reading a 4300 page book ever in my lifetime, no matter how good it is, are completely unlikely.

Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

For many years, even as I understood more strongly what he was doing to undermine the very genres he was inhabiting, I still maintained that Robocop was my favorite Verhoeven film. Despite my propensity to abandon nostalgia, I had grown up with Robocop. It helped that it was one of the few films from my youth that, upon adult reflection, is still actually good. But I think there's a reason for my holding onto it that demonstrates an adolescence of taste and need for cinema to be a certain thing that I had always expected it to be. That is to say, I wanted it to be grounded in a level of reality and, for want of a better word, sentiment about its world and characters. Despite its more satirical and incisive political elements, Robocop still takes its story more-or-less seriously. Its view of a man who becomes a robot and interest in the loss of human psyche to machinery/technology is one based in pathos. And, in a lot of ways, this is what makes the movie more limiting than Verhoeven's later American films. It is about a man and, despite some hints of ambivalence, his triumph at the end is a real triumph. This is a stark contrast to Verhoeven's very next feature, Total Recall, in which none of the characters represent real people so much as postmodern representations of film iconography and the ending triumph is a lampoon of action film wish fulfillment/escapism.

I find it a little hard to say that a movie that cares about its characters as real people, and wants the audience to care about them, somehow makes it worse than other movies that don't do this. Fortunately, I guess, Robocop is still a good movie, even if I will no longer call it my favorite (or, perhaps, even include it in my top 5 Verhoevens). Made on a relatively small budget, it says some surprising things about privatization and American corporate fascism -- surprising mostly for their context in the still Red world of Ronald Reagan (and, soon, Bush, Sr.). I suppose its context as a sci-fi film and its low budget were the only things that allowed this fairly clear anti-Red message to get through. Or, to be a little more bleak about it, perhaps corporations already realized that they could be made easy scapegoats for the world's ills without affecting their bottom line. While there were no doubt earlier examples, I suspect they were less successful, so in some ways Robocop can be seen as the precursor to the modern action/thriller formula, in which corporate greed threatens to destroy a lone man or woman just trying to make it in the world. Especially in television, in which a huge number of modern sci-fi/action show made in the last 10 years has some elusive, privately backed "Company" as its big boogey man (Heroes, Alias, Lost, Dollhouse, others). I suppose the way it justifies it is the way capitalism justifies everything, that is not All Companies that are evil, greedy, shameless abusers of human rights, but rather This Specific Company. In a way, I am sad to say, even Robocop plays a little fast and loose with its intentions. The older, real head of OCP is seen as mostly genial and unaware of the machinations of his head underling, and the film's main villain, Dick Jones. And, despite the ambivalence of transforming a human into a robot crime fighting machine, the movie does imply that Robocop is making things safer and better.

This, I guess, would be the main reason that Verhoeven's attachment to Murphy/Robo as a character makes this a lesser film than his later works. Because we are supposed to like him, and see him as the good guy, in a way it means we must endorse his methods, which mostly involve violent abuse of criminals and a willingness to ignore the way socio-economic factors affect crime. These are ideas that are vaguely hinted at throughout the film, but Verhoeven mostly skirts them in favor of less pointed attacks on Jones and the other ruthless executives. I will say, however, that the way he ties Jones to Kurtwood Smith's wonderfully slimy Clarence J. Boddicker, and the implication that moving up the criminal ladder really isn't so far from moving up the corporate one (in that they both involve a willingness to be heartlessly opportunistic) is, of course, fairly obvious, but Verhoeven isn't out to hit you over the head too hard with it. And its observation that Detroit would become a gutted urban wasteland seems frighteningly prescient (though my history is a little stiff, perhaps it was apparent even by 1987 that the American automobile was going to lose the race badly).

The ending, too, is surprising and, sadly, completely implausible in a modern action movie. It ends on exactly the note it should, without wearing out its welcome with an unnecessary epilogue about Robocop returning to the streets and having come to terms with his existence as part man, part robot. I guess it's strange to contemplate the '80s, which are often held aloft as the worst decade in American history, in terms of social and political progress -- and to yet even see that the films being made in that era take wild chances that would be unheard of in a modern Hollywood picture. I guess bemoaning the fate of Hollywood is another boring standard of the critical world, but here I am. The main reason is, likely, that it's difficult for me to put my finger on what it is about Robocop that is so interesting to me, still. I mean, there are the obvious factors, like that it moves efficiently and still looks fantastic. There's the mirroring elevator scenes with Miguel Ferrer that, while obvious, that still have a disturbing casualness to them. Honestly I wish I'd written this two weeks ago when I first watched the movie. Now, it feels like there's something missing from my brain that I wanted to say about it.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Michael Bay, 2009)

I have a difficult time defending Michael Bay, sometimes even to myself. There is so much wrong with his movies from an ideological perspective that it often threatens to overwhelm the qualities that are good about them. Other things that bother me less, like the consistently poor quality of his scripts on a dialogue level, seem to define the critical reception of his films. I think this, in a way, is what inspires me to defend him on certain levels. I think that analyzing what are, primarily, action movies, based on the relatively thin context filmmakers provide as an excuse for that action is only relevant if the filmmakers clearly wish it so. Something that aspires to be a more cerebral, more "intellectual" piece of genre filmmaking is worth looking at for what it attempts to do. The recent Anton Corbijn film, The American, stripped of all context save its three action scenes, would be a pretty effectively tense action movie. It would also be about 8 minutes long. The rest of the film has pretenses of elevating the action thriller to a realm of philosophical discourse and, in these aspirations, it fails mightily. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen never threatens to be anywhere close to an intellectual pursuit. It dodges and flees any notions of wit and self-reflection. It is, however, an occasionally beautiful and balletic action film. And, because it has no higher aspirations than that, I feel it should be judged mostly on these facets. Having said that, it is also worth exploring the ideological ramifications of much of what Michael Bay takes for granted in his pursuit of adolescent satisfaction. These, I feel are issues that could easily be avoided and, even if he does not encourage you to consider them, are still worth considering for what they say about Bay as a filmmaker and, perhaps, us as a culture. But even these are much different than the dialogue and plot, which are the main things reviewers seem to latch onto in dismissing his works (and, by extension, his abilities as a craftsman). Perhaps reviewers are just as guilty of taking what is problematic about his films for granted as he does.

So it is, with a strange sense of regret, that I must admit I did not enjoy Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, with anywhere near the pleasure I did upon my first two viewings. The very first time, in the theatre, I fell into the crowded mess of conceits that bloated the film to 2.5 hours long as a symptom of Bay's generosity. I believe he believes he only wants to make movies that make people happy. There were so many movies he would like to make, that he ended up stuffing them all into one movie as a way to give people everything. Comedy, drama, romance, action, suspense -- the things people sometimes insist they want to see all of in a movie. So we have a strange military scenario, with meddlesome Washington administrators getting in the way of Real Heroes trying to fight terrorists with a college comedy about a freshman trying to cope with an expanding world and maintain a long distance relationship and then thrown in the middle is a plot about robots fighting each other and someone trying to destroy the planet. Because of Bay's skill at rapid pacing, the movie's expansive overreaching and mixy-matchy-ness went down smoothly, and I appreciated his gusto and willingness to look silly by giving far more than was probably necessary. The second viewing was not as fond, though I still appreciated much of what I did previously. Now, perhaps my eyes are less tightened by fandom for Armond White and a desire to defend Bay for his formal qualities (which are considerable) at the expense of everything else. I see what people are saying when they complain about his unabashed conservatism. I see the weird, and frankly ridiculous and gross, ways Bay has likened Decepticons to underground terrorist cells. And the flat, personality-less Fox who exists as teenage boy titillation and nothing else. The movie clearly assumes that girls are never going to watch it, ever. Unlike many people, I have no problem with Shia LeBouf. His rat-tat-tat stream of neurotic pseudo-geek consciousness does, at least, feel like a cartoon version of a possibly real person. But what do they have in common? It falls into the same poisonous trap that John Hughes spent much of his career suggesting, that nerdy guys deserve to date girls because the guys are sweet and caring and the girls they deserve to date are the "hot" popular girls, because they're the girls "all guys" want to date. The women are reduced to objects and it's really just strange that this continues to be un-addressed and is continually gaining popularity. Is this an accurate reflection of what women want -- that the ideal woman continues to be thin and popular and pretty, but the ideal man is now a neurotic guy with no chin? Is this a terrified mass exodus of the female population for something Ben Affleck, former hearthrob and symbol of all that is chiseled and chinful did?

All these problems and more (the twins -- siiiiigh, the twins) begin to dissipate from memory, though, the moment Optimus Prime goes crashing through a forest, sliding along the hillside, flipping and twisting in a dance of mechanical violence. There's a fluidity to the pleasure of these moments, and their brutality is tempered by their existence as fictional constructs made of machinery (in the movie) and computer-generated images (in reality). The separation from anything resembling real-life creates a detachment that allows torn off limbs and exploding faces to exist as a pure kinetic pleasure, delightful for the ways in which they move and conflict with each other. I have no idea if this detachment presents any problematic implications in the long run, but for the short term I am willing to accept them as an effective substitute to pretending real human beings are disposable (the way much of the rest of the movie does, as countless infantry die without any explanation as to why they are even there to begin with). I don't know, Michael Bay, why can't the whole movie be super robot battle ballet. I would like that movie a lot. Instead I like these parts a lot, and the rest of the movie kind of not a lot.

Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

There's a certain, somewhat admirable quality to Fast Five. In an IM the other day Reuben asked me whether it was 5x as fast as the previous ones. While it may have been a glib joke, the answer, somewhat surprisingly, is yes it is. If the original The Fast & the Furious was Rob Cohen's often hammy and awkward love letter to the burgeoning Los Angeles street car scene, reveling in car porn of all facets (construction, movement, destruction) then by now the series has stripped itself of all that social context and, other than a few sleek rides, much of the car porn in order to transform itself into what hackneyed TV blurbs call "a non-stop thrill ride." Gone is much of the characterization, using slivers of hyper-sentimental platitudes as emotional and relational placeholders. The entirety of the script has been boiled down to that one infamous scene from the first film, when Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto describes the events that landed him in jail, then repeated throughout the film so that nearly every scene with dialogue is a variation on that motif. Platitudes, almost laughably earnest delivery, seriousness. The other characters, notably Tyrese Gibson, show up to try to (fuel) inject the movie with some fun and laughter, but it mostly gets lost in the neck-deep syrup of Diesel and protege Paul Walker.

The purpose for all this condensation, and what I consider admirable about the film, is so the filmmakers could stuff more explosions and action sequences into the movie. I have long been a proponent of the idea that an action movie does not require characterization or political stance in order to be successful. Because a movie is a series of images supplanted to the screen, the interplay of these images through composition and editing can certainly be compelling on their own, and without the need for explicit motivation and character development (the best music videos are a prime example, reveling in their status as visual/audio kinesis). One person wants something, the other person wants to stop them from getting it. A filmmaker, quite honestly, never needs a more compelling conflict than that if they have the skill to put together a great sequence.

The only problem with Justin Lin, despite his returning the series to mostly real crashes and explosions, rather than the overreliance on CGI that has plagued it since 2 Fast 2 Furious, is that he doesn't have the knack. Many of the action sequences feel like watching nothing. There's no reason two cars dragging a flipping, moving, crashing giant steel safe down a road shouldn't be a fantastic action sequence. It's a pretty ingenius conception on its own, so it would almost suggest that even a midlevel hack could pull it off with a bit of panache. And Lin almost does. Despite the fact that it is never quite exciting, it is memorable for its uniqueness, and the sheer amount of creative destruction the safe wreaks as it slides and tumbles down freeways and through crowded metro streets.

Add to this the increase in action apparently means an equal or greater increase in beefy testosterone, as perpetually sweaty Dwayne Johnson faces off with Diesel in two separate Rocky-esque fisticuff showdowns that simultaneously feel a little gross and parodic while also being the closest to a compelling action sequence the movie has. I suppose one reason is that it manages to convey the feeling that something is at stake. The rest of the sequences lack a feeling of improvisation, of mistakes and re-calculation. Even when, narratively, things go wrong, it still feels like, cinematically, everything is going according to plan. There's no push and pull. No feeling that one side has the upper hand, now the other is going to take it back. This, I think, could've partially overcome the fact that Lin fails to make the camera part of the action. Set-ups are rudimentary and cuts seem below the level of utilitarian. The best I can say, I guess, is that it never relies on quick pans and shakiness to obscure, rather than show, the action.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

In addition to what I wrote previously, I would say my second viewing of Uncle Boonmee definitely helped to solidify the feeling of ongoing class tension and resentment going on in Thailand. However, it does so without mean-spirited self-righteousness. Despite their classist attitudes, both Uncle Boonmee and Auntie Jen feel like compassionately realized characters. Weerasethakul understands their biases, even if he does not accept them, and works hard to demonstrate that having these attitudes does not make you not a human being. Because of the strict structure of the Thai government, much of what he has to say must be veiled in metaphor, or hinted at obliquely through small patches of dialogue.

There are two mirroring sequences, one of a Thai princess and the other of a modern-day Buddhist monk, in which the characters remove the social and cultural signifiers of their status and are then reborn as normal people. These suggest, to me, Weerasethakul's desire, which is in stark contrast to much of the Thai cinema I've seen, to embrace modernity and a new set of values. But, surprisingly, he does this while still maintaining a connection to Thai roots and avoiding romanticizing (or villifying) metropolitan areas like Bangkok. He recognizes the strength and beauty of the forests and rural areas of his country, while still being willing to question the way traditional values have been twisted to create a controlling government. A flashback evocative of both 2001 and La Jetee suggests a future where those who disagree with the government are made to disappear, their lives projected onto a flickering screen until they are forgotten. Upon first viewing, I was baffled by this long sequence and what he was suggesting. Now, on contemplation and another viewing, it seems obvious he is talking specifically about censorship of film and media. The way those who disagree are forced to hide their stories and ideas in the media world, but can even then only put them in when they are obscured almost beyond recognition.

But even these struggles are not the main thrust of the film. Merely one facet of a movie that also meditates on the nature of mortality. The title, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, suggests concepts about Buddhist reincarnation. This much is true, as we do see Uncle Boonmee's life first as a cow, then as the aforementioned Thai princess. Other past lives are hinted at. But more than just this more expected (and, for what it is, literal) definition of past lives, the film also recognizes that our memories are, in a way, our past lives -- that within our brain are millions of past lives, almost like movies, and we can recall the ways in which we have changed and progressed. This, I think, is part of what encapsulates what is great about the movie: something so simple attains a kind of revelatory status, merely by being shown in a way that hasn't been before. Long, unbroken, almost actionless takes reflect the presumed feelings that, when one knows he/she is approaching the end of his/her life, each moment seems memorable and worthy of consideration -- that there is no more time to move fleetingly through life. Because it takes its time, these moments are also memorable to the viewer, sticking out long after other, faster and less careful, films are forgotten. Honey, dialysis, dinner, all these words (and likely more that I can't think of at the moment) suggest moments of a life that is rendered unforgettable, regardless of its fiction, by the power Weerasethakul invests in it.

There is also, in a way, a sense of tension and dread about the movie. While I think he is completely uninterested in the idea, many aspects show that Weerasethakul is capable of making an extremely taut and terrifying horror/suspense film. That he melds these easily and casually with the many other aspects of his filmmaking is a testament to his skill and craft. The film transitions gracefully from hazy, dreamlike idyll to a kind of haunting, unexpected tension. He could take a place next to (Kiyoshi) Kurosawa as a master of spellbinding, uncomfortable exercises in modern life examination. But Weerasethakul is more sardonic, more bemused by modern living than the clearly frightened and offput Kurosawa (who is not without a sardonic himself, it should be mentioned). Perhaps it comes from the difference in their upbringing. The stereotypes about the two countries are wildly different, with Thai people known for their friendly easy-going nature, while Japan is more notorious for a kind of polite rigidity. In any case, the two are probably not worth spending all this time comparing, but they do share a small spat of similarity I thought it worth noting. And, as always, I am never quite sure how to end these things. This is good enough, I suppose.

The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements & John Musker, 2009)

Based on this film and last year's Tangled, Disney appears to be making a fairly earnest step towards grappling with their problematic past and setting out new, less conservative, values for the children of today. If Tangled was a coming-of-age remake of The Little Mermaid, in which personal growth and independence were the main goals, with romance pared down to a sidenote, rather than the main impetus behind her desire for a new life, then The Princess and the Frog is an attempt to revise the Disney formula to acknowledge things like class differences and privilege, and the way that getting what you want may not be as easy for you as it seems for others. These bigger, messier, more difficult problems to tackle result, predictably, in a less successful distancing from the Disney of the past.

The first, of course, is the main character being Disney's first black lead heroine. It would be remiss not to call this a fairly major step in Disney's path towards something approaching The Right Direction. But as many problems as are addressed, even more seem to arise. The love interest, Prince Naveen, being a major concern. His race is, as far as I can tell, completely indeterminable. He hails from a made-up country, Maldonia, and speaks with a vaguely french accent and has dark-ish skin, which seems to suggest he would be from one of the African countries colonized by France. But his facial features otherwise look like any old Disney Prince Charming. Nothing, save his darker hair and skin, would at all suggest African descent. More strangely, it almost ignores all issues of race. If everyone in the movie were white, and Tiana was simply poor rather than poor and black, not much about the movie would change. Despite taking place in the South in the '20s, only one person says anything derogatory about her, and what he says could be construed as class-related as much as race. Her best friend is white, and while she is seen as an exemplar of rich, white privelege, this only serves to make their friendship even more nonsensical. It is, disappointingly, still ferrying in fantastical, revisionist history. This is all not to mention one of the more glaring eyesores, that of casting a voodoo witch doctor as the primary villain. Which is something of a shame, because a lot of the animation revolving around the demons and long, ominous shadows is legitimately frightening, especially if I'd been a little kid when I saw it.

There are positives, of course. The comic relief is less unbearable than it has been lately, with Disney -- better than Tangled, even, on many occasions. And the increase in female agency displayed in Tangled is still avaialable here, as the ending feels more like two people working together towards a goal than a poor girl, held back by the rich and greedy, being saved by a wealthy and wonderful prince (ala Cinderella). And, despite many problems with it, I have to admit the song and dance number Almost There, with its blatant rip-off of the paintings of Aaron Douglas, echoes the hopefulness and majesty of those paintings pretty well (though, again, it fails to address the fact that, despite his optimism, things have improved for black people in America at a far slower increment than I think he was hoping for). Speaking of the music, it is much catchier and along the lines of the Disney heyday of the late '80s/early '90s (not quite as memorable, but far less bland and forgettable than the mess Tangled has going on). And the best friend is far less villainized than, say, the stepsisters in Cinderella. Honestly, she would almost be a better choice for a main character and the idea of her coming to terms with her own rich, white privelege.

Honestly, I don't quite know what to say about it. I want to applaud the people at Disney for making a more concerted effort and, at least, it is smart enough not to go too far into the overly familiar, pretending that everything is all good so it's cool if I say something weird and a little racist cause we're all friends here (see: Easy A, lots of TV lately). But all the other stuff still weighs too heavily, and I think we're not gonna get anywhere as long as they keep resorting to exotic and "geographically related" villains. Keith David's witch doctor is certainly no less an icky caricature of all the stereotypes about voodoo than Jafar was of Middle Eastern mysticism on Aladdin.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Chris Columbus, 2002)

Like the first movie, this plays like a bad clip show rather than a fully formulated movie. Scenes transition awkwardly from one to the other, never giving the feeling that they exist as real places in time for a group of friends in school. School itself is relegated to an almost non-entity, as the big mystery eventually takes hold. For being 2.5 hours, this is a film in which it never feels like enough has happened. In one sense, this is a good thing, as the laborious Draco Malfoy red herring only takes a few minutes to sort itself out -- whereas it consumes a huge chunk of the source book's length. The rest of the time, however, it results in something wholly inorganic and, mostly, boring. Chris Columbus is not a very good filmmaker and, for once, the dislike for him that caused me to skip out on these first two movies for so long turned out to be correct (though my reasoning for disliking him would've been something about him being generic and making "sappy movies," so let's not give young Basil too much credit).

I suppose calling him generic is accurate. He has very few visual ideas, for certain, as this movie is filled with moments of creepiness and/or strange realization that are accompanied by the camera slowly tracking in while rotating left and right (I guess, to suggest the discombobulation?). The films have none of the luster, the grand celebration and strange mystique that I imagine Hogwarts having for students. I guess that applies to everything -- nothing ever feels like it's on their level, nor is it on the adult level. Even when compared to Columbus' own meager Home Alone, it lacks a revelry in the stars' penchance for impish mischief. Everything is so sterile and stately and reverent. One need point to nothing besides Richard Harris' portrait of Dumbledore for exactly what is wrong with the series. His Dumbledore has all of the soft-spoken, approachable, yet dignified of a perfect Dumbledore, yet lacks any convincing humanity to make him seem like more than Masterpiece Theatre. Every attempt at the bemused goofines demonstrated in the book feels too self-conscious and wink-y. I guess that sums the whole thing up in a word: rigid. Everyone is apparently so afraid of making an unsuccessful movie that they forget how to do anything (except make creepy animatronic Mandrakes -- the stuff of nightmares those faces are).

Let's take, for a specific moment, the spiders. The climax of this scene was completely nonsensical to begin with, yet the movie finds a way to compound it by having it take place in a tightly packed thicket, to which the entrance looks almost exactly big enough for a car to fit through. It's like Columbus wanted to let everyone who'd read the book know right away, without any doubt, "don't worry -- we are gonna keep this awful scene exactly how you remember it."

On the plus side, Kenneth Brannagh somehow manages to be the best thing about the movie (surely for the first time in his career (zing)), using his tendency for theatrical acting to his advantage by turning the dial up ever so slightly into something that almost plays like a keen self-parody. Even Alan Rickman, previously the only person in Sorceror's Stone who didn't appear to be attending a funeral, is clearly a man who showed up for a few days to cash a paycheck and move on. Strangely, the trio of heroes managed to become worse actors in the space between first and second film. Or, perhaps, it was shuttled out so quickly that the creators didn't have time to properly mold every line reading. In either event, the children have never been even partway good since. How critics gag at the Twilight gang, yet suspend disbelief for Grint's hollowed out comic timing is, I suppose, evidence of a lot of theories: that people would rather see someone who looks like they are reading off a teleprompter than Stewart's tic-y willingness to risk absurdity, that suspension of disbelief is more malleable when castles and magic are involved (see: Orlando Bloom ever having a career), or the obvious idea that the source material's reputation gives it a boost when it comes to what is and is not questioned.

This is far more words than this movie probably deserves. I think I have a problem with conclusions in my reviews. I'd prefer to just stop when I have no more I feel like I want to say, yet I'm trying to practice writing semi-plausible essays instead of critical word-vomit.

Dhoom (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2004)

I will have far less to say about Dhoom than I will the other two movies I have written about today. This is built on a combination of the fact that it is far less interesting, and that I have already expended most of my writerly energies on the other two articles. Dhoom is, in its own way, an embodiment of adolescent machismo. A super cop faces off against a super criminal in an increasingly outrageous pissing contest about who is more intelligent, manly and awesome. Occasionally, this results in satisfying moments of ridiculous, music video-esque action sequences. At other times, it results in long, unbearably dull verbal one-upmanship, or the threat to at some point in the future one-up the other. A lot of the dialogue in this movie is based on John Abraham, the villain, and Abhishek Bachchan, the hero, telling each other how much better they are than the other. The rest is Bachchan and Uday Chopra exchanging buddy cop cliches, as Chopra, far more buff and good-looking than his awful haircut and endless biker headbands give him credit for, provides comic relief as the guy who falls in love with women immediately, but never manages to snag one (until the end).

Having already seen the sequel, Dhoom 2, which is an upgrade in almost every way, this was an unexpectedly flat experience. Aside from the few sequences mentioned above, one of which involves a motorboat being dragged along a freeway by a speeding truck, there really wasn't much going for it. Most of the dance sequences feel like turn-of-the-century MTV, with extended (and mostly boring) synchronized moves. There's very little fire or chemistry between any of the characters as they dance, resulting in something that is competent, but uninvolving. Since dancing is one of my favorite things to watch in a movie, I was surprised to find myself zoning out. Other than a car mechanic in the rain bit, I actually can barely remember what the other dance sequences were (only a day after watching it). I don't know, there really isn't much to say. It is a movie built completely on the idea of style over substance, in which all the substance is owed to other famous action movies, such as Michael Mann's Heat (and a weird Casablanca reference at the end). But, in this case, the style isn't exciting or ridiculous enough to hold much attention.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

*Note: If you have not seen it and have the capability to, I heartily recommend watching Certified Copy before reading this. It is an astounding piece of filmmaking and deserves as much of your money as you can give it. Also herein lie spoilers*

After seeing Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives earlier this year, I quite honestly thought that I was unlikely to see a better movie for the remaining 10 months. Instead it took only two months (to the day!) to see Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. In the interest of being fully upfront about things, I have never seen an Abbas Kiarostami movie before. I have seen parts of his very literal examination of the nature of watching movies, and the fabrication of that experience, Shirin, and I have seen the movie he scripted for Jafar Panahi, Crimson Gold. As I stated in my entry on that movie, Abbas Kiarostami quite honestly confounds me. What I had seen, up until now, seemed too far above the level of film viewing I am capable of. The layers, the examinations, the insight and patience required of me to get what he was going for, was too much. As a result I did not enjoy those movies as much as I could conceive a more intelligent viewer doing. This is not the case for me and Certified Copy. I am not sure if he was simply being pandering, and creating a movie that is more universally accessible, or if there was something more ambiguous going on and for whatever reason, on that night, at that time, I was ready to get what Kiarostami wanted to give me. I'll go with the former, though, cause I honestly almost skipped the movie in favor of watching the Portland Trail Blazers' opening playoff game. Despite a feeling of lethargy and reluctance about a two hour, possibly confounding work by a director I have consistently avoided out of fear of boredom and being exposed as not a very good film watcher, here Certified Copy was to give me an experience fairly close to life-altering. At least, as life-altering as a movie honestly can be.

It begins with a shot that I didn't think it capable of topping. In a maybe nod to John Cage, the opening credits play out over a single shot of an empty podium with two microphones and a copy of a book (which shares the movie's title) setting on it. Kiarostami is a little more generous than Cage, however, supplying a murmur of manufactured background noise to insinuate the presence of an audience within the movie, as opposed to just us. But the conflating of the two, in-movie audience and real movie audience, is what seemed so startling and caused me to think the movie could not get any better. Impatient Portlanders began whispering to their partners, glasses and plateware clinked, backsides shifted in seats, and instead of distracting me from the magic of immersion as these things usually do, it aided in the process. The movie and the real world were, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.

Soon, however, this revelation eluded me. Even though I'd noticed it right away, I started going back into normal movie mode. I worried about the precociousness of Binoche's son. I was bothered by the banality and seeming self-awareness of much of the dialogue. I concerned myself with typical movie-going complaints like plausibility. I was, as usual with my experiences with Kiarostami, missing the point. Certified Copy does not exist as a narrative in any fashion. Like I suggested earlier today in my entry on Total Recall (the two movies share some striking similarities), I believe the movie works best if you forget about thinking whether this interpretation or that interpretation of the movie is "right." The fact of the matter, I would suggest, is that none of them are. There is no right, because the story exists as an exploration of genre and performance and emotions/ideas we get from watching movies. It is a deconstruction of the romantic comedy film genre that moves so far into abstraction that it ends up encompassing huge, expansive ideas about life and love and marriage and the nature of being a human being who is alive. And all this snuck up on me so slyly, so invisibly, that it wasn't until the final scenes that I even realized for sure I was watching a masterpiece.

But when I did the whole movie just clicked. Suddenly I realized the level to which Kiarostami had been manipulating me, and it made me feel great. It felt like a metaphorical actualization of the best things about Hitchcock's work, slowly and steadily feeding small pieces of information and working the audience over with a precision that comes from a mastery of craft. Long sequences feel natural, occasionally raw, possibly even improvised, but the camera's moving, long, unbroken takes would suggest a carefully studied dance of speech and movement. This ambiguity gets at the crux of the argument -- that everything in life is a kind of performance. Many of our lines in life are scripted in a way, prefashioned by social expectations and years of rehearsing being yourself. One of the reasons I think I enjoyed the movie so much is that it is not trying to layer its ideas in ambiguity and misdirection, choosing instead to highlight very obviously what it is about, and leave the viewer to relish in the myriad ways he explores them.

This, I think, provides the explanation as to why, once Binoche begins to pretend she and Shimmel are married they suddenly are. Once Shimmel apologizes for being unable to speak Italian, saying he only studied French in school, suddenly he can speak and understand French. Film, by its very nature is a copy. It transmits a recording of "reality" via a process that only works by manipulating our senses. Yet because it comes as close as any reproduction yet can to simulating a real world, we have come to expect certain things of it when we engage with it. This is where notions of plausibility and verisimilitude come from and our desire for them. I once spoke with someone about movies who insisted that the very first thing a movie must do to be successful is establish plausibility. If he couldn't buy into the idea that the characters, their actions, their locations, existed in a world that he could believe in, then, to him, the movie had already failed. I should note, quickly, that the world it existed in did not have to be our own, but it did have to have rules and parameters that made it its own. I wonder what he would have thought of this movie, which goes out of its way to smash these notions of plausibility, to deny the viewer the comforts of formula and relational cohesion. Of course, I personally believe it only succeeds because of this abandonment -- that what is accomplished would've been lessened had Kiarostami used more traditional narrative techniques.

There is so much more I'd like to talk about this movie, about the way it transforms the camera into a mirror, and we watch as the characters regard themselves through how we see them. Are they good-looking? Are they satisfactorilay put together? Do we desire them, or to be them? Or, in a melodramatic argument at a restaurant, the camera alternately becomes each of the two characters, so that Shimmel's frustration and Binoche's discontent are expressed to us, rather than each other. And though the dialogue has the ring of cliche, existing in a world of movies in which thousands of movie couples have fought over dinner at restaurants, the layers Kiarostami has enveloped over these proceedings manage to make it both distinctively fake and performative, but also brimming with poignance and empathy. That, I guess, sums up the whole movie, and is a decent enough way to end this. I would like to write more, but 1300 words is a lot and I must admit I am out of breath. Anyway, my #1 movie of the decade so far (haw haw).

Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)

Total Recall is, somehow, even better than I remembered it. I would argue against the idea that the death of the psychologist marks the film's turning point, and at that time Arnold is now trapped inside Rekall and the rest of the film is his paranoid/fantastical delusion dream world. It is very nearly plausible, except the film is not strictly told from his point of view. If we are operating on the assumption that everything is implanted memories then it doesn't really make sense for him to remember things he was not there for. But more than this, I think this argument is somewhat irrelevant. Whether what we're seeing is "really happening" or "all part of a dream' within the context of a film in which none of it actually happened seems a little like an exercise in missing the point. Maybe it makes more sense in a movie that takes its narrative more seriously, but as far as I'm concerned Verhoeven is using everything in the movie metaphorically, so that there is never any need for us to put it together or make sense of it in a real-world context.

Instead we should look at it from the obvious set-up of a movie that embodies the format of an escapist sci-fi action film for the express purpose of pointing out how silly escapist action films are. In doing so it captures much of the duality inherent in this exercise, alternating seductive glimpses of power fantasy and then attacks that seduction with a series of layer-peeling reveals that expose the fantasy for what it is. The film opens with a dream that segues into sexy pillow banter between Arnold Schwarzenegger, the '80s paragon of manliness, and Sharon Stone, the coy yet caring and devoted blonde wife, and culminating in an unseen sex scene with Stone saying, "I'll give you something to dream about." Later Arnold visits Rekall and is asked to supply attractive attributes for his ideal woman. He picks a woman more or less like the wife he already has, only brunette instead of blonde -- perhaps a winking nod to the cliche about the grass being greener, as his ideal woman is different only on a superficial level. By the end of the movie he has traded one girl for the other under the pretense that one's love is real, and the other's is a manipulation. Yet we never know any more about the brunette than her original qualities, while Stone has much more depth and far more closely resembles a real person. An early breakfast argument between her and Schwarzenegger feels like a stage-y movie marital disagreement, yet is plausibly grounded compared to the melodramatic slapping and life-and-death of his interactions with Rachel Ticotin. The point I guess is that everything is a little bit fake, so it doesn't really matter whether some of it is Really Fake and some is only Kinda Fake.

More jokes abound involving the idea of tourism and vacation as an inconvenient hassle and that, if given the chance, most people would probably rather remember a good vacation than risk taking a real bad one. This also raises ideas about the nature of memory, as well as our tendency to gloss over negative experiences when it comes to visits to other places. There is an expectation that we will have a good time and so that's what we convince ourselves. That's not exactly revelatory or anything, but the jokes are cleverly spiked in and the movie wouldn't have quite the same punch without them.

Finally, the movie treads similar ground to Robocop (although, I'd say, more successfully), in its anti-'80s indictment of privatization and the idea that it can only lead to exploitation. It also goes down a hilarious rabbit hole of paranoia and distrust, finally ending with the joke that Schwarzenegger cannot even trust himself. As punctuation to an era of vastly shifting political alliances and some of the more heated Cold War panicks, with Reagan introducing all kinds of new ways for America to be jingoistic and xenophobic, it's a pretty fantastic final touch.

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

Hanna is either a high concept gimmick as an excuse for an action movie, or else an action movie as an excuse for Joe Wright to revel in high concept gimmickry. I'm not entirely sure which, but I suppose I would lean towards the latter. The action sequences are only intermittently interesting (most of the movie's midsection is relentlessly dull in this aspect), while the emotional cues are all infused with the kind of overwrought E-M-O-T-I-O-N that can only come from someone who sincerely believes he/she is saying something of great worth about the human condition. It stinks of Art, I guess you could say.

Unfortunately, that something he's saying about the human condition either isn't there, or is so poorly extracted from the material that the end result is the same. There's a heaviness of emotion and an attempt to examine the idea of growing up in seclusion and being thrust upon a strange, alien, oddly shaped world. But what does that say that isn't fairly obvious? If the message is that we shouldn't raise our kids in the wilderness and teach them nothing that doesn't come from a book, well, I would expect that by putting that message in a movie you are already preaching to converted. If it is an attempt to say something larger about the process of raising children and forcing yourself to let them grow up and experience the world, and Wright has chosen to tell this story via a fairytale action movie metaphor about a homicidal teenage girl, well this narrative concept has abstracted the idea to such a great length that it no longer has any real-world relevance. Wright attempts to fill this void of meaning with a highly touted Chemical Brothers score mixed way, way into the forefront, as if the throbbing electronic beats can somehow pound the poignance into you. The highly stylized camerawork is similarly overbearing and insistent, assaulting the viewer's eyes with visual cliches at a rapid-fire clip (a sun-dappled Hanna hangs her head out a car window, hair blowing slowly and wonderously in the wind; Bana dispatches a group of assailants in a whirling Scorsese meets Oldboy single-take set piece).

Worse, like Kick-Ass, it never makes any attempts to address Bana's systematic destruction of a girl's childhood for the sake of a mostly-empty vendetta. While it does a better job than that movie about questioning his tactics, it never once questions his motives. The audience is expected to take it as a given that if Bana had tried to raise her in a normal life somewhere, anywhere, in the world, that the all-encompassing arms of the CIA would eventually find them and kill them. This seems a very curious leap to ask, and is far less plausible than the idea that Bana's character is simply a psychopath. And, going further down the rabbit hole, the audience is never asked to reflect upon Hanna's path of destruction, which results in the deaths of numerous military and government personnel, but also a fairly large number of civilians. While she is not directly responsible for the latter deaths, it is somewhat difficult not to hold it against her, especially in moments where she fights a few guys, then proceeds to run away, leaving her innocent benefactors to whatever fate they're destined for. This seems weird, especially since it runs against the only idea Wright semi-coherently manages to state over Hanna's inflated 113 minute running time -- that, despite whatever we may convince ourselves, empathy does come more naturally than not-empathy, and there is a short little window from the time we are self-involved children to the time we are self-involved adults when we don't know how to not be empathetic. I don't know that I'm 100% on board with this idea, yet it's fairly clearly there -- only to be shaken apart by aforementioned Hanna totally manhandling the hell out of some dudes then inexplicably running away.

Also, can we all just acknowledge that Cate Blanchett is an awful impersonation of an actor at this point? She's like the world's most serious little kid playing dress up -- throwing on all kinds of wigs and accents and somehow making that whimsical idea an exercise in joyless austerity. Regardless of project, her acting tone always consists of the same theatrical demand for recognition. You're not gonna get an Oscar nomination for this one, I'm afraid, so can we please just stop pretending you're performing brain surgery on the Dalai Lama.

Now that I'm finally caught up on these, I'm going to try to start writing longer(-winded) pieces that deal with more specifics than I've previously been doing. I think it's good exercise to mix in both the thematic overview and the more surface-level examination, plus I'll only have to write one or two a day so I think I can then pour all the words I would've written on 3-5 of these trying to catch up into one movie I've seen recently and remember well enough to write more specifically about!