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!

Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011)

In some ways a mirror of Jones' earlier film, Moon. While my largest problem with that film was that it spent its first third tricking the audience into thinking it was watching a different movie -- a movie that, for me, felt a little lifeless and dully conceived to begin with, I would say that Source Code's strength is in its premise and beginning. In some ways playing out like a cinematic video game, the main character must solve a mystery in which eight minutes of real time pass before he "dies" and, in video game terms, gets a game over. Then he must try again, but armed with the knowledge he gained on his previous game. In a way it's a little like an action-mystery Groundhog's Day. This, I think, is fine for the length of time that the movie continues its eight-minute, real-time structure. It also manages to subtly introduce ideas about the way we interact with each other, as minor sentence structures alter without even being prompted by any other changes. Unlike Groundhog's Day, in which actors minutely repeat the same lines with the same inflection (whenever possible, I would guess, using the same takes), implying a fatalistic attitude towards our behavior and demeanor on any given day, Source Code uses the impossibility of actors completely mimicking their previous takes to its advantage -- suggesting that any time we speak there are a myriad of ways that sentence could turn out. It gives a nice juxtaposition of freedom and chance when combined with the movie's repetitious structure, as Jake Gyllenhaal, again, unlike Bill Murray, is not the only person who's decisions affect the day. He is not god, tinkering with the lives of playthings for his own bemusement and eventual self-improvement. He's just one guy in a world where everyone's decisions matter.

Unfortunately, this begins to break down about halfway through the movie, as impatience and sentiment get the better of Jones. Soon the rigidity of the eight minute structure is broken down, with quick cuts through time that destroy the world's cohesion. Rather than a delightfully repetitious exercise, we are back to watching a normal mystery. One in which time no longer matters or exists. And this introduction of melodrama and happy endings and swelling orchestral music is unbefitting what begin as a cool, calculated exercise in confusion and tension. On a semi-related side note, how is it that the son of David Bowie is so awful at music? The punchy, force-fed emotional cues of both Moon and Source Code are by far the worst aspects of each movie, as they make what could be poignant and heartfelt into something cheap and saccharine. That is how I feel about the ending, regardless of the many interpretations and plot holes that reveal it to be even weirder and more thoughtless than Jones may have considered.

Office Killer (Cindy Sherman, 1997)

Buries most of its most salient points about women in the office world, the beginning of the end for the print industry and the cutthroat nature of business downsizing in a heap of Freudian psychology by-the-numbers. Not content to suffer the titular character with one or the other, the film chooses both an implication of sexual abuse from the father and an endless stream of repressive scolding from the mother. Some might argue that this is part of the film's existence as a maybe-parody of typical slasher films. Yet despite its moves into dark, and occasionally grotesque, humor, I don't really see this movie as a parody. It feels more like an embrace of genre types as a shorthand to suggest something frightening and inhuman about the corporate world. And when it hits these moments with gusto and strength unburdened by easy pop psychology explanations, it strikes an unexpected chord about the dismantlement of the American job market into the bare minimum of specialized occupations.

What Sherman does get right almost 100% of the time, as expected, is a suffocating visual aesthetic long before the movie veers into the grotesque. The office seems an inescapable labyrinth of tall walls and maze-like walkways. Despite my reservations about Carol Kane's mother as a character, the upstairs-downstairs dynamic is compellingly handled. As a somewhat new fan of Sherman's work, I was definitely excited to see this movie. While I didn't love it as much as the beginning made me think I would, I was not disappointed, either. I'm honestly surprised how much critics hated it. And sad that that hatred probably means Sherman won't make another movie.

Speed Racer (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 2008)

Triumphantly, an action movie that embraces movement in an all-encompassing tribute to friction and gravity. It creates a wonderful movie that lasts 18 minutes long. Then it continues to be a movie for two more hours, sometimes including parts that are good enough to be in that 18 minute movie. Other parts are not. The parts that are not eclipse the parts that are by quite a large quantity, yet these drowsy moments of slippery gloss are not enough to keep the hard, crushing, bouncing, diving, swooping, cheering parts from boggling the eyeballs. When I was talking about movies taking inspiration from video games, this is what I meant. A cavalcade of weighty, beefy CGI race cars hurtling at and through and over and against each other in spinning, exploding, joyous ways.

It's difficult for me to come to terms with the idea of car racing being a sport, exactly, I suppose for the reason that, despite the great physical skill and stamina required, the car is the real participant. And, though likely for different reasons, Speed Racer is all too willing to indulge in my distinction between driver and car. Unlike Sucker Punch, which likely could've increased its watchability ten-fold by simply being a 100% animated movie, the faces of drivers are only seen in close-ups, while CG cars bounce and shift and slide in their own cartoon world gloriously divorced from reality. This is the movie I was hoping for when I started to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was insantly bogged down by endless chatter and an awful sense of how to make movies. The Wachowskis, whatever their faults, apparently can actually make movies. And make em good. If only this weren't a flash in the pan in a long and strange career that apparently has them moving away from genre exploration and into that most turgid of film exercises, the hot button political drama.

The world should apologize for this movie's flop at the box office. In the same way that Usher's Love in This Club promises a pop world we are not good enough for, Speed Racer should've ushered in a beautiful new era of action filmmaking. Maybe in some alternate reality Thor and Captain America wouldn't look like awful husks of comic book antiquity, and people everywhere are grooving to delirious ambient space pop. I wanna be in that world so bad.

Tangled (Bryan Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010)

This is, in essence, a remake of The Little Mermaid, only better. It's a literalization of the idea that part of growing up means moving outside your comfort zone and making mistakes and basically floundering around without much help until you figure out how to do things. It's messy and fun, just like this movie! And, unlike The Little Mermaid, Tangled shows a surprising amount of female agency for a Disney movie. Rapunzel's desire to escape her perceived parental entrapment (much more literal here, since the ocean is, uh, actually way bigger than the not ocean) is motivated by curiousity for the outside world and nothing more, whereas Ariel's curiousity is at least in part inspired by her affection for hot dude whose life she saved. Rapunzel also spends much of the movie acting of her own volition, solving her own problems, and, for the most part, helping herself. This is a fairly stark contrast to Ariel, who is mostly helpless without her animal friends and spends much of the movie not even being able to speak -- certainly problematic as a portrait of the supposedly "ideal" woman Disney tries to paint her as.

Now I cannot honestly trumpet Rapunzel as a strong, feminist portrait. She is, in her own somewhat different way, a sensualized idealization along the lines of Ariel or Aladdin's Princess Jasmine. There is also something about the suddenness of the relationship that develops between her and Flynn Rider, which, I suspect, is as abrupt as it is because it is one of the few Disney films in which the love story is not the point. They go from disliking each other to liking each other to maybe being in love far too quickly. If Disney can go this far out on a limb, it would be nice to see them go even further and maybe suggest that it's okay to date someone BEFORE you fall in love with them, rather than the other way around.

It's interesting to note, though, that the promotional material for the movie actually creates a completely false impression of what the movie is. More so than usual, I suppose I should say. Rapunzel is depicted as a mysterious other, showing up first as magic, violent hair defending itself from Flynn Rider's intrusion. She doesn't show up until part way through the trailer, giving the impression (along with the movie's ambiguous title) that the movie is far closer to Aladdin than The Little Mermaid. What was the motivation behind this? Was there some kind of 7-10-year-old focus-testing that showed little boys would refuse to see a Disney movie if they thought it was about a girl, but that little girls had no such qualms about a movie about a boy? Depressingly, that whole sequence of events doesn't seem implausible. But I really wish it did.

Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

The relatively few Iranian films I've seen have all, more or less, been an attempt to address gender relations in Iran, and put forth ideas for more forward-thinking views of women's rights. So it was a surprise that this movie was not about that at all, instead tackling ideas about class stratification in Iran, and the resentment that builds among lower classes due to their poor treatment.

I will go right out on a limb now and say that Abbas Kiarostami still confounds me. While he technically didn't direct this, he did write it. And despite Panahi's usual human, involved, directorial work, it was difficult for me to parse in a way that neither The Accordion nor Offside were. Kiarostami is like the cinematic equivalent to physics, for me. At this point in my life, I just don't have the knowledge base and tools to properly comprehend the information he's trying to give me. I could make some of it out, and the main actor, Hossain Emadeddin, gives a frankly astounding performance, eliciting a world of emotions with small, reluctant gestures. Two sequences stand out immediately for the typically Panahi-like warmth and poignance -- sequences so memorable and effective in their simple pleasures that it makes me want to revisit the movie immediately, as I only understood their effect on me later on, as I thought about it. This is a stark contrast to Offside and The Accordion, two movies so upfront and raw about their emotions as to verge on sentiment, but never quite spill over into it.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, sadly, I don't have much to say about this movie. I enjoyed it a lot, and the emotions still resonate with me when I think about it almost two weeks later, but as for higher understanding you will have to seek someone with a better knowledge base.

Dying of Laughter (Alex de la Iglesia, 1999)

An interesting, if not quite as successful, dry run for his latest film, The Last Circus. Both deal intensively with the entertainment industry, and a kind of decimation of Spain's humanity brought on by the fascist government. While The Last Circus takes place entirely within the fascist regime, climaxing just as Franco was about to die, this continues from that ending in to the present. Both suggest that Franco's influence continues to be felt in modern Spain, the only difference is literal (in Dying of Laughter) versus figurative (in The Last Circus). The difference between the two comes down to how far de la Iglesia is willing to push the audience. In The Last Circus he pushes them to the brink, then jumps so far into the abyss that there is no hope for escape. Dying of Laughter is a little nicer, only forcing the audience to lean uncomfortably far over the edge.

I'm not quite sure what to say about it, really, that I didn't already say about The Last Circus. The movies are honestly that similar. Both involve a duo of public entertainers who privately despise each other, coveting what the other one can do and what they have before dissolving into hideous, monstrous caricatures of their former selves. Both movies look deep inside the idea of fantasy and come out of it with the conclusion that these fantasies are ugly and hollow and we've lost something humane and real in the process of fooling ourselves.

The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Of all the simplistic movie formulas, I think the sports movie formula is the one I am most likely to fall for, regardless of the film's actual qualities. Somehow, the notions of competition and underdogs and come-from-behind victory resonates with me in a way no other formula I can think of really does. I'm not quite sure what this says about me (psychologically, I worry that it means I can relate to winning more than I can to, say, falling in love -- but I hope that's not the case).

So even though Christian Bale would rank highly among my least favorite working actors, I still went ahead and watched this out of a combination of curiousity at David O. Russell doing such a straightforward genre piece, and my aforementioned sucker-status for a well-crafted sports movie. Well, I wouldn't exactly say it disappointed. It's right there on the line, hovering, depending on how I feel at the given time I think about it, between something I'd tell people I enjoyed and something I'd tell people I almost enjoyed. Wahlberg's sisters are a particular low point, echoing the same women who exist only to be obnoxious and repressive in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love. That Russell wants the audience to cheer when Amy Adams finally has enough and takes it to a couple of them is, uh, pretty icky, to say the least. I've never (well, not never, but at least since reaching cognitive adulthood -- i.e. a year or two ago) really liked the idea of the crowd-pleasing punch, when someone is being so odious and awful that the sympathetic, put-upon character unleashes some violence to the face and then we're supposed to find this cathartic?

But, to my surprise, I found Bale surprisingly tolerable. His scenery chewing Method Acting fits perfectly into the role of Wahlberg's narcissistic, attention-starved older brother. And Wahlberg brings his usual laconic tenderness, making him a plausible foil to the fast-talking, egomaniacal Bale. Melissa Leo and the sisters are the only real problem bogging this down from being a completely enjoyable entry into the canon of middling sports movies. But it's solid enough, and works the working class hero myth in a way that isn't completely obnoxious.

Raw Deal (John Irvin, 1986)

A strange amalgamation of Miami Vice-like style -- a constantly tracking camera, glitzy locations, shimmering glass and towering modernity -- with Arnold. Even in fancy suits his hulking, enormous frame looks completely out of place. Which I guess is something of the point. In the high life world of corruption and murder, who can one trust but the completely ridiculous, Superman embodied that is Arnold Schwarzenegger. But, unfortunately, the film takes this implication at face value, rather than trying to exploit his mythic figure as a satirical statement about ourselves, as Mark L. Lester did a year earlier in Commando. We trust Arnold because he is one of the good guys, and of course anyone who has ever done anything bad to Arnold is one of the bad guys. Unlike most films involving undercover police work, this one is completely uninterested in the moral grey area that can come from working alongside the so-called enemy. Instead, it ends with a rather abrupt and kinetically vacuous shootout, where Arnold gets revenge on all the bad guys by shooting them to pieces, then is rewarded with commendations, his old job back, etc. etc. It's the usual macho cop fantasy storyline, existing in a world where shooting a hundred people has no repercussions.

The vacuousness of the finale is the real disappointment, however. Up until that point the film had handled its action sequences with a certain joyous aplumb. A vehicular chase at a lumber yard early on showed a speed and weightiness that is generally lacking in today's digitally recreated stunts (not all, of course, but it seems like most). And a fist fight in an alley began with some neat tension, exploiting long shadows and a certain ryhthmic, careful pace. So it's too bad to see it all go down the drain for what should be the biggest part, but I suppose gun fights between a bunch of guys and the decidedly not-acrobatic Arnold would be difficult to choreograph in any interesting way, and John Irvin doesn't have Lester's cheeky sense of humor to fall back on. So the movie is a failure, but by no means as big a failure as many others would likely suggest. And the reason for its failure doesn't have much to do with its laughable script (which is quite bad, but I don't know who would expect otherwise).

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2011)

This movie is exactly what it looks like: a series of video game cutscenes without a game attached. A while back I was talking about action movies on a video game forum and I suggested that they could actually do with borrowing some ideas from video games. When Zack Snyder read that comment of mine and then proceeded to make a movie that did just that, I'm not sure he entirely understood what I meant. What I was saying is that action movies are far too padded with dialogue, back story and unnecessary attempts at characterization. What they could use is some stripping down, as many video games have done, so that the viewer can revel in the kinetic pleasures of motion and tension, which film can do exceedingly well, without being bogged down in banality. Unfortunately, Zack Snyder took it to mean throwing a bunch of junk in a blender, pressing "badass" and then showing us the end result. Unfortunately, Snyder makes two fairly egregious errors on his way to presenting Cutscene: The Movie. The first, and slightly less offensive of the two, is that the movie is so joylessly serious. It takes action movie tropes and tries to tie them to a story about female struggles with sexual abuse, then fits this weird stylization to the entire proceedings, which only serves to make this serious undertaking seem ridiculous. There's nothing reclamatory about what he's trying to do here. The women are hollowed out shells of every girl group action trope that exists -- an ugly, brown, fantasy/sci-fi Charlie's Angels, but about how awful rape is, I swear. Okay, maybe that's actually worse than part two, which is that, like 99% of video game cutscenes, the action isn't interesting. It's weightless, lacking anything resembling verve or energy. The girls spin and move through a plasticine world of computer-generated everything, slipping through setpieces like buttered soap. But here games have an advantage. In a game, something is always at stake. There is almost always the possibility of losing. Movies do not have that. So they must make up for that by successfully imparting a feeling of physicality and realness that suggests more outcomes than there are. Sucker Punch cannot do this. Every outcome feels inevitable before it starts.

On a side note, I was surprised to find out this was an "original" idea pitched by Snyder himself. The whole thing certainly feels like the kind of high concept bargain basement comic book writing Hollywood has taken to adapting lately. I would guess that the film's disappointing box office performance will mean that Hollywood won't be as eager to take a chance on more original ideas, when what it should really mean is that they shouldn't be as eager to take a chance on any of Zack Snyder's awful ideas.

The Red Shoes (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)

Aside from the virtuouso titular sequence this movie has far less to recommend than I remembered. A movie I was once proud to call one of my favorites ever (even though I'd only seen it once), it now feels like a series of gorgeous baroque paintings -- prettily lit, sumptuously colored, but a little flat and uninteresting nowadays. (I'm making that observation with little to no art history background, so feel free to call me out if the baroque period is actually awesome and I'm thinking of something else)

Anton Walbrook is more stiff than I'd remembered, and the movie honestly doesn't even quite feel like it gets going until after the titular sequence -- at which point it's almost over. There's something... underdeveloped about the tension that they're trying to convey. The stress and push-and-pull of a woman being forced to choose between the typical life of a domestic wife and the grandiosity of the stage only begins to cohede just as the movie comes to a startlingly abrupt end (I'd remembered the finale, but was surprised to discover it coming -- "oh, it's over already?").

But with all that, the sequence itself is truly a bit of amazing, expressive dancing -- every bit worthy of the praise that's been lavished upon it. And even the parts that are not it, but involve dancing, said dancing always shines in a way few dancing movies can pull off in this day and age. And there is the delightful silkiness of the pictures, that have a warmth and glow and look the soft, lush way that velvet feels. If only the characters, action, dialogue and thematic resolution could keep up, it would still be every bit the masterpiece I remembered it being.

Paul (Greg Mottola, 2011)

Astute audience members will more or less realize the trouble they've got into from the opening -- an ugly, terribly shot ode to Spielberg's E.T. After that there's a momentary spark of hope, as Paul at least proves itself to be the only movie about nerds I've seen that doesn't try to play off semi-malicious "haw haw, nerds" as "affectionate ribbing." The movie shows genuine fondness for the characters and their eccentric interests, rather than the usual have-it-both-ways that often comes off more as condescension than real endearment. Unfortunately, even this "high point" is made ugly by an awkward encounter with a non-American worker and jokes about Pegg and Frost's enthusiasm for aliens (the extraterrestrial kind) making him confused and uncomfortable. Ha ha? Soon the movie embraces all the most boring formulas of the buddy road movie, with titular character demonstrating an Amazing Superpower that nearly everyone should recognize will come in handy during the seemingly dire last act conflict.

Along the way the movie stops to take potshots at just about every easy target, Middle American stereotype one can think of -- from outwardly homophobic and violent rednecks (as opposed to the main characters, who are homophobic in the more polite, good-natured kind of way of us fine, upstanding liberals) to Bible-thumping "wacko" creationists to the usual boring jokes about incompetent government officials. And, unlike Michel Gondry's work in The Green Hornet, Mottola lacks either the skills or the interest to reign in Seth Rogen's occasionally insufferable riffing, leading the movie down long stretches of meandering, unfunny gags. Also there's the icky subplot involving a newly unburdened Christian falling for Simon Pegg's character, with all the man-showing-woman-the-ways-of-the-world baggage that goes with it. I don't know, while I didn't exactly have high hopes for this one, it did manage to let me down in almost every way imaginable. Even Sigourney Weaver is wasted in a thankless role of not funny bossy voice lady. And eventually the movie ends by moving from not-always-clever, but at least somewhat hidden references to a string of line-for-line cribbing that demonstrates a complete descent into creative bankruptcy.

Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995)

There's something about the spectacle of hundreds of people in period clothing all running at each other that CGI still hasn't managed to capture. No amount of modeling, crowd-cloning, or crazy specific detailing seems capable of convincing my eyes that what I'm seeing isn't at least a little bit a put on. Which is mostly fine, except that what these scenes always seem to want is a gravity and power and verisimilitude that convinces people we are actually watching a bunch of dudes about to kill each other. They can't ever just give completely into the idea of it as a fantasy, and their desire to trick us makes the scenes even less powerful than they are. So, that is the benefit of Braveheart. It is, probably, the last movie to show huge groups of people with such a minimal amount of special effects (if any), that it really does look like huge swaths of men charging into one another. It makes the battle scenes believably dirty, violent and like there is something real at stake for the upstart Scotsmen fighting for FREEDOM.

Unfortunately, there's the whole rest of the movie. Having watched this now, Gibson's weirdo beliefs should've been apparent miles away. How did everyone else miss it back then? Gibson and his Scottish cohorts as bristling, masculine ideals of rugged, uncompromising manliness. The king's son as a flustered, gay child who deserves to have his lover thrown out the window and to be cuckolded by the sensitive, yet impassioned, sexually amazing and absolutely 100% not gay William Wallace. Not to mention not-so-subtle ideas that even the most prim, proper and upright of women cannot keep their legs closed for the testosterone-y, probably musky smelling, men of the earth. His strange gender attitudes, homophobia, xenophobia, unbridled emotion, it is all on display here for everyone to see. And it is, in its own insidious way, nearly as ugly as everything we know about the man now.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010)

The only redeeming facet of this movie is that it occasionally has beautiful pictures of a river that remind of the Amazon in Aguirre, only shot on a DSLR. While it never approaches that film's most memorable moments, it does, at least, remind the viewer of just how awe-inspiringly beautiful the lush green jungle river can be. But those moments last perhaps 2 minutes in a 90 minute feature. The rest is a blanket of naively un-self-aware pandering to the converted mixed with yet another sticky representation of people of color as literal aliens. Why is there more than one movie like this? Wouldn't it only take one to convince pretty much anyone that this is actually a TERRIBLE IDEA? Like, no matter how sound your intentions are, this will always come off as condescending and just, like, unspeakably gross. But even if you manage to ignore that, the ham-fisted explications of the theme of aliens as metaphor for Latin-American workers work only as self-congratulation. There's nothing compelling about two of the most boring white people ever conceived uttering lines like, "I thought I'd be happy to be home, but now all I want to do is go back" and depicting America building a giant, Great Wall-like structure to keep the aliens out. Like, ha ha, get it? This is what crazy tea party America will do if you let it! But the aliens, they're actually really beautiful and peaceful and amazing if you get to know them. I don't know, there really isn't anything to say -- except, at least, that Gareth Edwards made a fairly handsome movie for however much the probably low budget was. Too bad about the writing, editing, acting, everything else.