The Mikado

I surprised myself by procuring and watching this fairly unusual-for-me musical based entirely on a review of Topsy-Turvy that off-handedly suggested Gilbert and Sullivan used The Mikado and the new-to-the-west Japanese culture/world as a screen to openly deride the bureaucratic buffoonery of the government at the time, and since one of the more difficult aspects of my script is governmental buffoonery I gave it a try. It was helpful, I think, mostly because the dialogue and plot is so brilliantly off-kilter absurdist that it's like a proto-Catch-22 in its genius recursive nonsense.

The music is bizarre and operatic and catchy as hell (not a big surprise) and the lyrics seem like they were written by the man who wrote the Thesaurus (also not a big surprise), and both seemed, like I said, outside my typical wheelhouse but fun. But the world of the story... the Japan presented here... what a strange cultural artifact! White people in colorful foam costumes and practically clownish makeup portraying a world as consistent and fantastical as Brazil, only this world was ostensibly "Japan." It's a little like watching anime movies "borrow" from elements of western storytelling or legend and repurpose them into some unidentifiable hodge-podge. Taken as representational of contemporary view of eastern culture, it looks pretty racist at first -- but it doesn't take long before you realize it isn't trying to be representational. It really is setting up a strange and bureaucratically obsessed world. It really is a spiritual ancestor to Brazil. With Gilbert and Sullivan songs. And a convoluted operatic plot.

Really bizarre. Very silly. But a lot of fun.

Meek's Cutoff *

This is seems at first to be a movie just about being there. We've romanticized the old west, and pioneering/exploring/colonizing -- it's the core of American mythology -- and here is a film that makes us live it, in a reasonably straightforward, no-frills, struggle-and-suffer kind of way. We barely know our characters, and what we do know we learn from the outside: any clues to where they came from or where they are headed specifically, or what they hope for when they get there, or why they left behind whatever it is they left behind must be inferred through observing closely a bunch of stoic travelers. In a lot of ways it feels like the film adaptation of the old Oregon Trail game (it opens with three wagons ever so slowly fording a river, after all; though SPOILER nobody dies of dysentery, and nobody shoots more buffalo than they can carry), and that seems appropriate and maybe deliberate. In the game, there is only the bare details of the journey, the facts and figures. Apart from buying supplies and naming your wagon-mates after your classmates, there's no history or character arc to the game, or to the idea of the Oregon Trail.

But as we go, I found that the anonymity and obtuseness, the patience and meticulousness of the story, became meditative. The story's minimalist approach may be perfectly suited to the emptiness of the terrain; the paucity of passion in our bible-quoting, hard-working white european pilgrims; and even the sparseness of their belongings, but I think there's more to it than that. At first there was the opaqueness of the pioneers. Then there was the opaqueness of their hired guide Mr. Meek's motivation and expertise. And then the opaqueness of their captive The Indian. Somehow I felt led down a path without a single line of dialogue directly pointing me there, and I spent most of the movie contemplating how alien the Indian seemed to them, his ways, his beliefs, his language, his motives. Was he helping? Was he leading them in circles, or into a trap? There was a point where I honestly wondered, could be be suffering dementia? What would happen if you met a single Indian, assumed he was representative of the whole, an expert of his land, a survivor, a wise man in touch with a larger world, but everything he said and did was confounding and beyond translation to you -- how would you ever know that you weren't being led by a madman, or a senile fool?

But of course the Indian wasn't the alien here, and I think that's part of the story's point: the pioneers were the aliens, who didn't speak the language, who took for granted that their elaborately developed paradigm was the right and only one to filter the world through. They weren't bad people, not even Meek with his hardness and bluster, or Millie with her paranoid hysteria, or Millie's husband (Paul Dano; I missed his name) with his milquetoast dependence on conflict resolution and capital exchange. But they were intruders. Like the Indian who may or may not have represented his tribe, or all native peoples, the pioneers were just individual well-meaning soles that may or may not have represented America, or all European colonialists.

None of that's very deep, really -- just a list of comparisons and contrasts, I admit -- but it's what I sat and mulled over as the film moved. The ideas of the film weren't complex, but the simplicity of the story and the pace and tone and style all allowed me to relax and experience two worlds simultaneously, to pull the rose-colored glass away from our mythologized history without getting nasty or ugly or liberal-guilty about it, and to wonder what it must have felt like for both sides in such a strange and naive time.

Meek's Cutoff is in my mind kindred spirits with Dead Man and The Proposition, but after emptying out all the commonly held myths and assumptions, Jarmusch fills the void with poetry and gallows humor, and Hillcoat fills it with starkly contrasting beauty and violence. Reichardt keeps the needle steadier; she doesn't indulge in playful extremes or exaggerated experience. Instead she fills it with fly-on-the-wall "realism" and a smartly tight-lipped narrative that trusts the audience to do most of the heavy-lifting. Actually, I'd say each film's hero is a perfect illustration of that film's merit. So it's not as darkly fun as William Blake in Dead Man, or as movingly intense as Charlie Burns in The Proposition, but Meek's Cutoff goes down similar roads, with the same understated elegance and hard-edged grace as Emily Tetherow.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Mission to Mars

This is probably my third time seeing this film, including way back when (all the way back at the dawn of time, in the year 2000) when it played in theaters. I guess I'd basically describe it as equal parts entertaining and underwhelming -- not quite disappointing, and not quite exciting. The script is a bit hokey, with by-the-books dramatics and characterization, clunky exposition and backstories, all that. But the technical details, though simplistic-feeling, also have a real sense of verisimilitude to them. It feels very much like someone excitedly did a lot of really good research into realistic advances in space exploration technology and culture, but maybe hasn't spent a lot of time around real humans. In fact, for all the detail put into space suits and orbital velocities, there is no sense that life continues for any of these characters when the camera's not actively on them. They exist only as elements in this particular story, the perfect combination needed to get from Point A (a disaster involving the first astronauts on Mars, in a curiously but conveniently un-televised event) to Point B (Jim staying behind to accept the Close Encounters-style invitation to explore the cosmos in an alien ship). There is no life beyond the edges of the frame, but within the frame some reasonably exciting stuff does happen.

So -- seriously -- who is a better director for this kind of material than Brian De Palma? Apart from vague similarities to 2001, it's not full of homages to classic cinema (probably somewhere there's a wink or a nod to Hitchcock somewhere in there... right?), but the self-conscious style and the use of movie expectations to keep the story rolling along fits De Palma just fine. There's something exuberantly unambiguous and hamfisted in the storytelling, the emotions, and especially the strange, mildly unearned sentimental montage at the end, and watching this now it's hard to fault it for its obviousness or patness: it's hardly accidental or unconscious. As a story about a man solving a hundred-million-year-old puzzle and earning a chance to join the proto-human Martians somewhere out in the galaxy, it does everything you'd expect it to do, and it does an all right job of it.

For the most part the space- and Mars- and astronaut-related visual effects all look surprisingly good (I'll overlook the wrongness of the zero-G liquids), which makes the weird cartooniness inside the Martian Face structure all the more unusual, and I remember thinking before that this was just another case of You-Never-Should-Have-Put-The-Camera-Inside-The-Ship (to reference Close Encounters of the Third Kind for a second time), but I'm willing to give a tiny bit more leeway here, since it's pretty clearly meant to be some kind of a holographic representation, a CGI simulation in other words, and not a photorealistic depiction of the ancient Martian, or of the Solar System History lesson. Again, with so much of the movieness of this feeling slightly self-conscious, I'm inclined to at least wonder if it wasn't a deliberate choice, letting the alien look less than realistic (it being a film from 2000, when CGI was still coming out of its infancy, doesn't really help support this theory). What it doesn't forgive is the awkward, goofy design of the alien itself. But, whatcha gonna do.

From the perspective of writing reference, though, it was interesting to note how sharply delineated the first act info-dump is, leaping ahead in time (necessarily) and cramming as much conveniently on-the-nose dialogue into each sequence as possible. Again, it's hard to ignore the artificiality of the whole enterprise, the convenience of almost every scene (this unfortunately diminishes an otherwise memorable and dramatically exciting death scene halfway through the film -- you all know which one I mean). Again, the pieces are just too well-suited to the needs of the story, and so at no point do you really get a sense of tough choices being made even when the choices being made would ostensibly be very high-stakes, very difficult decisions.

It's a case of the cart before the horse: they had a story they needed to tell, these guys -- humans get to Mars; on Mars they find a mystery that kills three and strands one; the rescue mission gets to Mars and finds their stranded friend, from whom they learn some key pieces of the story; a challenge is posed, accepted, and met; a deep secret of the universe is revealed; and someone from the party has to be perfectly suited to make a leap of faith. To tell that story, you look at the pieces you need and you fill them out accordingly. That's plot-driven writing. In character-driven writing, you'd set up the mystery and the puzzle, and then put the wrong sorts of people in these situations, and see what they do instead. Maybe the Martian Cyclone-Worm/Spaceship-Invitation Doohickey goes unsolved for fifty more years. I don't know. The point is, this isn't character-driven. And it's okay, but... well, I guess it's clear where my preferences fall.

(Further, the story demands that when the hero leaps off a cliff we don't give too much thought to the logistics or ramifications of that: a single human alone, in some strange alien spaceship, chasing after a very alien race with completely unknown cultural and ideological -- let alone biological -- expectations, needs, or desires... do the proto-human Martian Almond Men want to eat him? study him in a zoo? is he the final step in a hundred-million-year-long experiment in evolution and xenobiology? It seems pretty weird if they just want a single human friend, doesn't it? Compound all that with the fact that this race left Mars before single-cell life on Earth had developed -- I mean, that's a pretty big head start; in the time it took amoebas to become spacefaring hominids, what changes do you think these highly advanced, genetics-mastered spaceworthy Almond Giants have undergone? What exactly is waiting out there for him, best case scenario? It's not like they're going to remember sending out a party invite when they were forced to abandon their home to an asteroid crash. Also, if I'm going to fill this long parenthetical with hole-punching, I can't walk away and not ask: when their lush green Mars was turned into a lifeless husk, why was soaring through space toward a new galaxy a better option than hopping one planet closer to the Sun and populating Earth themselves? It was worthy of their raw genetic material but it wasn't worthy of their cities and culture?)

Anyway, like I said: this story desperately doesn't want to exist beyond the edges of the frame. The characters, the technology, the mystery, and the secret origins of life on Earth. It's like the façades built for those old 1950s westerns: entire towns that were nothing but storefronts and boardwalks, held together on the backside by plywood crossbeams. If you look at it head-on, it's a beautiful, sprawling, detailed frontier town. But if you cock your head to either side and peer around the edges, beneath the surface or into the shadows, you realize how poorly supported and precarious the whole thing is.

Several cautionary tales in all those colorful metaphors, as I return now to working on my script.

Metropolis

I knew I'd never seen Metropolis all the way through, but I thought I'd seen more of it than it turns out I had, so sitting and watching the "Complete" version with all the restored "lost" footage was a real treat. The number of films I could catch reference to here, feeling the impact backwards as it were, was pretty incredible. Several Spielberg films (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Lucas (THX-1138, Star Wars: A New Hope), Gilliam (Brazil most notably) and even more offbeat fare (The Hudsucker Proxy, Joe vs. the Volcano) all come to mind.

The metaphor and visual poetry throughout was pretty great. For one the (explicitly repeated) theme that "The Heart Must Be The Mediator Between The Head And The Hands" played out in pretty interesting ways, although the very end with Freder literally mediating between Head (his father, Joh Fredersen, the Master of Metropolis) and the Hands (the foreman Grot, the Master of the Heart Machine and the ad-hoc leader of the city's workers) was a bit too direct to resonate as much more than an easy way to resolve the characters' stories. Taking the "God" out of the Tower of Babel story and turning it into a stone-cold ideological metaphor of class was pretty cool, especially in the economical way it was handled with so few lines or scenes (the leaders and thinkers who come up with Babel think of the word as an exultation of their own and God's greatness; the workers hired to slave away and die for its construction see the same word not as cry of praise but as a curse of despair; therefore it is as though the men all spoke a different language and could not communicate with each other, and so the Tower of Babel was cursed to remain unfinished).

Actually -- and not surprisingly considering my obsessive focus of late (the reason I haven't been blogging is that I haven't been watching films; the main reason I haven't been watching films is that I've been pushing myself for eight to ten hours a night, writing) -- the way the film most impacted me is the way it threw some elements of my "end of the world romantic black comedy epic" script into sharp relief. The theme of Heart vs Hand vs Head is actually no small part of the story I'm working on, and the way the future is depicted here too is actually kind of relieving (that I could "reference Metropolis" in my depiction of rulers, thinkers, and workers somehow makes that seem at least a tiny bit less daunting -- especially the "rulers," which have been giving me a little trouble). Even the technology of throwing a lever and transferring the identity of Maria into the Machine-Man robot has a pretty clear parallel in the story I'm working on (though, at least right now, I have no intention of making the post-mad-scientist woman turn evil and maniacal).

I already know I'm going to be revisiting this soon for a beat-analysis and writing exercise, because I have a feeling considering the themes and approaches this film takes with its story may have an impact on the telling of my own. Maybe I'll have more insight then, beyond "It does things well, and the story feels similar to my own in unexpected ways." I will say this, though: even by today's standards most of the visual effects and sets look pretty amazing; by 1927 standards they must have blown people's socks off. And the use of film as a medium to tell a story that couldn't be told any other way -- the non-literal, the visual poetry and metaphor, the operatic drama combined with heady modern themes and huge, lush setpieces -- make me wonder about all the later, American films by Fritz Lang I've seen over the years. Did I miss something? They struck me as gorgeous, and well-told, and well-acted and directed, but I don't remember any of the kind of boldness of storytelling that you find here in Scarlet Street or The Big Heat or The Woman in the Window.

Wonderful film, deserving of every bit of its reputation.

Magnolia

Much like I did to Dr. Strangelove the other night, I actually combed through this film with my thumb on the pause button and wrote down each story beat as I went so I could better analyze the structure of a multi-plotline ensemble film. Of course, Dr. Strangelove is a 90-minute high-concept story with very few scenes, locations, and characters. It has virtually no subplots, just a handful of threads that all tell their part of a single story. By contrast, Magnolia is a 3-hour tapestry of nothing but low-concept subplots (and one big Event), so it actually took a lot more out of me to write it all down.

Two dying fathers suffering the regrets of their earlier dalliances -- both of whom cheated repeatedly and flagrantly on their wives; one who may have/probably did abuse his daughter and the other who abandoned his dying wife and teenage son when the scene got a little too "real" for him. The daughter has become a coked-out wreck who takes home strange men and lives like an angry child, unwilling and unable to let go of her past. The son has become a self-styled exaggeration of the aggressive macho bullshit he saw in his father, a stunted man-boy unwilling and unable to acknowledge the existence of his past. The first father is the host of a popular game show produced by the second father's company. The daughter has a chance encounter with a loser cop on a particularly bad day and the two awkwardly agree to fall in love and help support each other (in a dynamic later explored under different-but-similar circumstances in P.T. Anderson's next film), and although she never reconciles with her father, she at least manages to reconnect with her mother. The son doesn't quite reconcile with his father, but he at least acknowledges through catharsis his father's role in his life and admits to needing him not to die.

On the other side of the spectrum, two damaged boys. One, a former "quiz kid" from the 60s (living in the shadow of his past), now an adult with more neuroses and problems than can easily be counted, who loses his job, drunkenly embarrasses himself in front of the big-dumb-pretty bartender he's in love with, and robs his former employers in order to pay for braces he doesn't need to be somehow closer to the bartender. The other, a current "quiz kid" with no friends other than books (living the past that will overshadow his future?), and already well on his way to his own highly complicated set of neurotic tics and phobic anxieties. In the middle, bridging these distant poles: a shy but compassionate male nurse; a manic and/or bipolar golddigger who's grown a conscience; and the adorable, affable loser cop mentioned before.

The pacing is pretty intense throughout, I realized, and one of the ways it manages to keep so much story going at once is with a surprising number of rapidfire montages, often set to music. That none of it's boring or just feels like spinning plates is testament to a lot of strong characters and stories. That the dialogue could be this stylized and the tension this high for so long (and the emotions and tones so varied from story to story) without ever collapsing or tearing itself apart is again testament to the strength of the story.

At the time this was released, I considered this one of the greatest films I'd seen in the last ten years or so. Now, especially if I compare it to Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, the film comes off a lot more poppy and overpolished than I remembered. It's amazing to return to a massive, unmarketable three-hour film like this -- one that Anderson was only able to make because Boogie Nights was such a huge success, and he struck while the iron was hot -- can come off so commercial feeling, but there it is. As good as Tom Cruise's breakdown scene is (and it's still good), it comes off as the "big Oscar moment" for the "big bankable actor," even if he's playing against type (and yet, playing so perfectly into his own public image). The quirkiness and originality of it (structure, tone, the climactic self-conscious deus ex machina) are all a lot less refined and confident, almost too bombastic and bold -- not refined enough, maybe -- when you look at his next two works.

But Magnolia holds up well. It makes me nostalgic for Aimee Mann songs, makes me love intense/vulnerable Melora Walters, makes me miss dramatic actor John C. Reilly, makes me look back in wonder to an era where nobody's heard of Patton Oswalt, or Philip Seymour Hoffman, or where small cameos by Luis Guzman, Clark Gregg, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Felicity Huffman, and even William Mapother (Ethan from Lost! ...also Tom Cruise's cousin) might go almost unnoticed. And now I have an intricately charted beat-sheet to go through sometime, and see what kind of wisdom I can glean from it, how ensembles can be put together, and how you keep so many engines running all at once without a story falling apart. (Something to look forward to, when it's not four in the morning!)

Make-out with Violence

I don't really know what's the best way to judge this film. On the one hand, if I look at it as the first feature film by a collective of artist friends who've never done this before -- if, that is to say, I view this as a bunch of aspiring students putting together their first major endeavor -- I can admire the very fact of its existence, overlook its many shortcomings, and respect the fact that a cohesive whole with some decent ideas even exists somewhere in there. I can admire the boldness of the idea and the willingness to leave so much out of the story (like how Wendy died, why and/or how she came back, who tied her to a tree and why), both in order to focus on the details that matter and also to leave a surreal mystery at the fringes of the story (the thing is lousy with Twin Peaks homages). If I consider this the way I'd consider a locally made film by friends or peers of mine, I can get a little excited that it comes as close to working as it does.

On the other hand, this film has an awfully big crew, and touts an awfully showy soundtrack (though no big names jump out at me), and has won an awful lot of accolades & audience-choice awards at festivals, and all of that encourages me to treat this film like a grown-up movie, not an aspiring kid making good. But if I view this with the critical eye I use on other films, it's hard to be nearly so kind. The acting is bad -- but bad acting is one thing. Here, the acting just doesn't make sense, which means the directing is what's bad. Tiny moments feel forced and come off with the weirdest energy, casual gestures feel as artificial as if they'd programmed very stoic robots to perform them. Motivations barely exist, and many actions in the story seem taken so the characters can quietly make visual puns or poetic imagery for an unseeing audience (i.e., the camera). Key dramatic (especially tragic) moments and emotional beats are skipped over, and would-be contemplative moments are lingered on lovingly -- which frankly means that the writing is also bad, here. If I were to believe in these people as they are presented in the film, I would assume this community is six people large, all of them are heavily sedated, and suffer from Asperger's sydrome.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't a hatefest for Make-out With Violence -- nothing of the sort. It's just that, all good-intentions and young-punk energy aside, this film stands as everything I'd be terrified my first feature film might be. It's like a parade of wrong choices: from casting to performance to direction to script to photography to camera and lighting choice to tone to jokes to pacing to theme to perspective. Nothing is an unmitigated disaster, but not a single one of those things ever hits spot-on like it wants to (or should, at least). Every single choice looks wrong, in the end, and most of it smacks of a) limitations due to budget concerns, b) a lack of bravery or tenacity with the story/emotional world, and possibly c) the result of direction by committee -- as "the Deagol Brothers" is a self-professed collective and no one member has stepped up to claim the title of writer or director.

So, yeah. I guess Make-out With Violence doesn't work for me, pretty much at all. And it was frustrating to watch (and emotionally unsettling, as I can imagine myself falling into a lot of these traps). But it wasn't miserable, and I don't regret the time I or the filmmakers spent on it. In other words, it's amateur and messy, but it's not the The Green Hornet.

Monkey Business

Marx Brothers films are always so hard to write anything about. They only work because they're funny, with a kind of savage anarchic wit and seeming utter contempt for convention. The four just make such a well-rounded team, and for all of their seeming randomness their films are always intricately planned, choreographed, and put together. The truth is, as a story it barely makes any sense but as a series of gags (some sight, some puns, some slapstick, some romantic or musical) each segues into the next with a surprisingly natural fluidity. Maybe it's because the overarching story is so haphazard here (a ship ride and castaways somehow leads to getting mixed up with gangsters, making almost a two-part story with some crossover), but here the connecting elements really stood out to me as more worried over and planned out than later films like Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, and A Night at the Opera, where (as I remember it) the seams between each setpiece were more invisible. But that's not all bad: it really makes me realize what consummate professionals these guys were, carefully orchestrating their chaos.

And just like Harpo's harp solo in Opera, Chico gets a piano bit here that's simply a joy to watch. The way his fingers move is like a funny dance. (Harpo also hits the harp again here, for the record.)

I don't have much else to add. Some of the bits were funny, but Duck Soup remains my favorite Marx Brothers film so far. An interesting palate-cleanser after Blue Valentine (though I'm not sure I needed one).

The Maltese Falcon

It's really hard for me not to compare The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. They're two of the most famous detective novels from the golden age of detective novels -- the former by Dashiell Hammett and the latter by Raymond Chandler. (Much has been written comparing these two, though if memory serves they both loved and respected each other immensely: Hammett wrote sharp action in the third person; Chandler wrote quippy dialogue with a first-person narration... beyond that I forget the details of the debate.) They're both also classic detective movies, obviously both starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by two of the greatest (and both somewhat notorious, right?) filmmakers from the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking: Falcon by John Huston and Sleep by Howard Hawks. And they both take really different approaches to the mystery formula.

In each, the hero (Sam Spade here, Philip Marlow in Sleep) is a tough-as-nails, quick-witted detective who improvises boldly as a way of staying one step ahead of the chaos long enough to put together all the pieces of the puzzle. But where Marlowe comes off as fearless and sarcastic, Sam Spade actually comes off a bit like an asshole. It's hard to imagine Marlowe sleeping around with his partner's wife, both of whom he seems to practically loathe, or feeling so apathetic about a friend's death that the only reason he avenges it is because letting people kill detectives isn't good for business. But the hero's relative morality isn't the difference that stands out to me. What stands out to me is the story, and how linear and rational Huston wants to be, and how loose and abstract Hawk is willing to be.

The Maltese Falcon is at every turn concerned with keeping all the details straight as it goes through its labyrinth of twists and turns. The players are all full of useful exposition and the majority of the story is listening to each character lie or change sides back and forth, as everyone vies for the titular macguffin. In The Big Sleep, the details are so fuzzy that even Hawks, Bogart (and Chandler himself, reportedly) weren't sure why each murder took place or who was ultimately responsible. For sheer story and colorful crooks, The Maltese Falcon seems to win out, because each beat in the story makes rational sense and because Greenstreet, Lorre, and Cook are wonderful character actors used brilliantly. For mood and dialogue, though, The Big Sleep weighs out better.

But the final deciding factor for me between these two is the romantic chemistry and the performance of the story's femme fatale. Falcon comes up pretty weak, if you ask me, and although Mary Astor doesn't do the film any favors (she and Bogart are supposed to fall almost instantly in love, but they have no chemistry), it should be pointed out that her character is written pretty sloppily. Still, it's possible a great actress could sell us on the untrustworthy, self-serving backstabber who becomes a damsel-in-distress at the drop of a hat (and a lot of proverbial hats get dropped throughout), but Astor never manages to tie all the lies and pleas and plasticity into a single, satisfying character. On the other hand, The Big Sleep pits Bogart against Lauren friggin' Bacall, who holds her own against Bogey's sardonic wit and always reads as a character with depth and personality and feeling. So, it's not fair.

I still like The Maltese Falcon a lot. Seriously, any time Bogart, Greenstreet, Lorre or Cook have scenes together it's classic stuff; and it's fun to watch Sam Spade make shit up to everyone he talks to and struggle to outpace all the conniving and backstabbing (it's easy to see how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg drew a straight line from the kinds of characters Humphrey Bogart played into the kinds of characters Harrison Ford would play thirty years later, with Han Solo and Indiana Jones both acting very much as Bogart does here). But even though its story makes so much more linear sense than The Big Sleep, there's really no question which of the two I hold more fondness for.

The Matrix Revolutions

So we have a trilogy. Dramatically, part one makes a hero (really, a demi-god) out of an ordinary man and sets him up as the chosen one, ready to save humanity from the insidious Matrix and its nigh-undefeatable dark knights (agents). Betrayal from inside almost ruins everything, but thanks to the stalwart faith of our hero's allies, he is able to rise to the challenge and prove himself powerful indeed. Part two lets our hero return "home" to a hero's welcome, and sends our band of crusaders on a series of mini-quests, each putting them one step closer to goals they only partly understand. It also introduces us to a new (version of a familiar) adversary and while Neo and Morpheus and Trinity are busy fighting level bosses like the Merovingian and his twin albino wraiths, Smith's powers expand and the threat he poses looms larger and larger. Part two ends with our hero Neo meeting the archetypal oracle (who is not the Oracle actually, but the Architect) and learning more about his nature, the nature of the universe, and the dark destiny that lays before him -- after all, the ultimate hero's challenge is to deny one's destiny.

And so we come to Revolutions, part three, in which all the final confrontations occur. The war for Zion is fought, and it's well told, but it's also as close as I need to ever get to a Warhammer 40K movie; Neo confronts his Mentor (in the first film this was Morpheus, but here the role's been usurped by the now misnamed Oracle) and gives the "Ben, why didn't you tell me?" speech; and Smith comes into his own, having grown from evil soldier to evil god in a way that perfectly counterpoints Neo.

The Smith/Neo thing is a nice segue into what I think Revolutions is doing thematically. Seems to me that The Matrix, thematically, is about questioning the given world and exploring the boundaries of what we think of as humanity/society. The Matrix Reloaded passes itself off as exploring the dynamic between causality and freewill and it expands into a more diverse (and possibly muddied) view of agency and sentience. The Matrix Revolutions continues the overarching theme of choice and destiny, and also concerns itself heavily with the idea of balance and dichotomies: an equation has to balance itself out at all times, so the more powerful Neo becomes, the more powerful Smith must become necessarily. (Tangentially, this reminds me of the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode where the computer imbibes Moriarty with superior intelligence, will, and self-awareness because that's the only way he can be a match for Data.)

And here is where Smith would be an interesting study. As with the general tone of the whole trilogy there's nothing subtle about the philosophical musings in the story, nor anything terribly deep behind it all, but that doesn't make it uninteresting to discuss. There are too many ways in which Smith is truly the anti-Neo ("your negative," the Oracle calls him) for me to get into here. One way I find interesting is that Neo is The One (a message pounded into him and us throughout the series) and Smith becomes The Many, drawing his strength from his multiplicity and multipicability in just the way Neo draws his from standing out, being singular. As Neo's powers expand impossibly to exist outside the Matrix, so too does he draw Smith's influence into the "real world." (While this still strikes me as hard to stomach, and makes me wonder if there's not a sneaky "Matrix-within-a-Matrix" thing going on here, I think it's probably easier to accept the magical realism as the point at which prophecy and spirituality rule over one portion of the story, even while science and logic purportedly rule another -- all things in balance, after all.) As Neo's personality evolves from excitable, angry, and nervous to the serenity of a zen master, Smith follows an inverse trajectory from eerie, unsettling coolness to fury, frustration, and childlike (albeit evil) glee. Like I said, too many ways the two are counterpoints for me to go through them all here.

I have to admit that the big action sequences here, including the war for Zion and both encounters with Smith (on the Logos and in the Matrix) are really thrilling, gorgeous, never-boring sequences that justify the big-dumb-fun of the story for me. For my money, despite a couple of nice sequences the second Matrix movie is hands-down the weakest, and while the first is the only one that really works start-to-finish as an elegant and never-unsatisfying story, the third one is admirable and gives reasonably satisfying closure to the series -- I'm even able, after a few viewings, to overlook the weird Freudian/Christian climax and resolution. It may be a manufactured trilogy, but I still like it well enough.

The Matrix Reloaded

The problem with sequels and manufacturing trilogies out of successful films is that in most cases (see: Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, and definitely The Matrix) the original stood alone so well that it needed no story to continue it. In each case the original bore hints of a deeper, larger world around its edges but it worked best when you left that kind of thing to the imagination and didn't overliteralize the experience. Well, overliteralizing is Reloaded's primary problem, I'd say, and probably the reason most people complained it didn't hold up to the original.

In each and every one of the above examples of serializing standalone science-fiction/fantasy stories, the second installment expands the world by exploring further reaches of the world. The Empire Strikes Back expands the story to bounty hunters, Imperial Armadas, and Jedi training; both the future and an alternate-reality present are explored in Back to the Future II; the savage humans and their proto-"culture" are explored in Beneath the Planet of the Apes; new pirate-mythologies are expanded on in the second Pirates film; and the city of Zion and the nature of the Matrix are explored in The Matrix Reloaded. The problem in each case is you expand the world by making concrete some of the more telling abstractions from the original, and the more literal it becomes the more you open your story up to skepticism. The more time I spend with time travel, or a world with intelligent apes and savage men, or a universe of (space | sea) pirates and (aliens | sea-monsters) and (Jedi knights | magic curses), the more I start to question the validity of it all. I buy wholesale into the Matrix of the first Matrix movie because it's sharp, elegant, and an easy-to-grasp metaphor I haven't seen done (on the big screen) before. But when you open up the world and start talking to me about rogue programs and architects and we actually see the city of Zion and its culture, people, government -- well, the more rules and boundaries you show me, the more I start to question the ramifications of those rules and boundaries. To put it another way: if you show me only a clock face, I am pleased and impressed that the thing tells time so accurately and applaud you on the elegance of your design... but if you open it up and start showing off the gears and clockwork, I might see weak points and inconsistencies, and the magic will be utterly gone.

Further, The Matrix was full of all these fascinating and maudlin monologues unabashedly pontificating on various philosophical themes, and while the dialogue was never "good" in a traditional sense, it was enjoyable on many levels. The Matrix Reloaded, however, seems hellbent on being very direct and straightforward, literal with what is said. Even when philosophy gets discussed, it is in egregiously straightforward (and muddled) ways, as when the Merovingian explains his idea of causality (vs. freewill) by serving a "program" (slice of cake) to a woman which triggers in her an orgasm and somehow convinces her to sneak off to the bathroom (where, we learn two scenes later, she gives him a blowjob). It's confusing and frustrating, but it's not a symbol: he literally does the thing he's saying he could do as an illustration of an idea he lays out in no uncertain terms. It actually feels a lot like someone else wrote a sequel and didn't have the grasp of layered dialogue and visual metaphor that the original creators had. Of course, that's tacitly not the case, and so I'm left to wonder why this film lacks the magic of the first. It's not that it's bad, mind you, it's just too obsessed with continuing a story, and the more poetic, thematically driven elements of the first are set aside to that end. More's the shame, honestly.

Additionally, I can't leave without noting: in each and every one of the above "manufactured trilogy" examples, the story is made darker by putting the characters in more dire straits and ending on a cliffhanger: Han Solo is in carbonite and Luke is a one-armed kid with some shocking family news in Empire; Doc Brown has been thrown back to 1885 and Marty's stranded in the past in Back to the Future; Jack Sparrow throws himself into the massive vagina dentata of the kraken in Pirates; the astronauts set off the nuclear bomb and destroy all life on Earth in Apes; and Neo is told that the prophecy is bunk, Agent Smith has escaped the Matrix, and the sentinels are on their way to finally eradicate all of Zion in Matrix Reloaded. Every time, you explore the nooks and crannies of the world, expand the mythology and cast of characters, and you end on a devastating low-note, anticipating your third installment.

Well, I'll start the third installment, but I doubt I'll finish it tonight. Then again, I predicted I wouldn't finish the second.

The Matrix

This is one of those movies that I've seen too many times over the years. It's also one of those movies that's equal parts mythology and story (if not more mythology than story), and as such it garners instant love and worship from some factors and instant disdain and snobbery from others. The thing is, especially now that I'm viewing it from a bit of a distance, the "bad dialogue" and hammy acting all contribute properly to a story which is precariously (and reasonably successfully, like it or not) balancing heavy-handed (simplistic but resonant) philosophical musings with mind-bending and genre-bending action and suspense.

Inside the Matrix, nearly every line is a metaphor. About the only times in the entire film when someone speaks literally inside the Matrix is when giving commands or orders, and then the dialogue becomes curt, direct, and decidedly barebones. Otherwise, the language isn't just colorful, it's symbolic. Outside the Matrix, dialogue tends to be somewhat reverent, acolytes discussing prophecies and holy lands, leaps of faith and quests to free their brethren. None of this is very deep or subtle, but it sets a strong tone for a lot of brilliantly unsubtle actors to tell a story that does a pretty good job of combining first year existentialism and a beginner's course on Joseph Campbell. Not since Star Wars have so many tropes been used so excitingly.

Jen (my lady) also pointed out the visual motif of the grid (tiled floors, skyscraper windows, rows of monitors), in addition to the visual motif I was focusing on, which is a sharp verticality on an anamorphically-horizontal canvas (the crawl down the inside of the walls, the elevator shaft, the fire escapes). A lot of attention has been given to the look of the film -- arguably too much, by some standards? -- and many shots cleverly and beautifully illustrate the dynamic or import of the scene at hand. An obvious example for me was the famous red-pill/blue-pill sequence: Neo reflected in each of Morpheus's lenses, and beneath him, one hand each. The left hand holding the red pill in the left lens, and the right hand holding the blue pill in the right lens. It's not exactly the way the reflection should look, of course, but it's a reasonable approximation, and a really elegant illustration of the two diverging destinies that lay before Neo: return to the fold or break away from the world and learn the truth. It (along with several other shots throughout, actually) also speaks to the scenes in the third film with the Architect, which is a nice bit of foreshadowing, intentional or not.

Now, on to the second one. Though we'll see if we make it to the end.

Modern Times

I think there's actually something lost in our savvy culture where film exists as a fully-formed and nuanced language. Early films have a real pioneering energy, where anything is still possible and any story can be told, in any form. The fact that the vocabulary for visual storytelling was still fairly new allowed people like Keaton and Chaplin, Pabst and Lang, to tell deceptively simple-seeming genre-bending tales built on brand-new archetypes and symbolism without feeling preachy. Modern Times feels like mythology more than narrative, and every event is just as pregnant with layered meaning as in any contemporary film by a modern master, but without any pretense. The result feels a lot more subversive, rather than less subversive, as the dancing singing buffoon in the funny hat and baggy pants who spins around and falls down for our amusement is also the guy sneaking in anti-industrialist, anti-socialist messages, whose charming little comedy reminds us that life gives you breaks, but life also never stops throwing you curve balls, so don't relax for a second. It also suggests that crime isn't done by evil men, that unionizing workforces isn't always in the worker's best interest, and remains heartily skeptical about the value of both industry and populist entertainment. It is very humanist, just a story about little people keeping their chin up in a world busily giving and taking away so fast they can hardly keep up. Fate and fortune are capricious, and all you can control is how you deal with it, and who you hold on to.

That's a lot of message for a comedy about a man who keeps getting stuck inside giant clockwork gears, or rollerskating around the lips of chasms inside a massive department store, or making up gibberish songs to appease a restless dinner theater crowd, or constantly destroying the barely-held-together thing he and his love try and think of as "home," only to have her patiently restore each bit as best she can before he causes another catastrophe. The thing is, I can't even describe Chaplin's setpieces without making them sound heavy with symbolism and metaphor, and if I had a complaint at all it's that there are times it feels like we're just waiting for the next big setpiece to arrive. The time between stunts and numbers are the times where the era's adolescence is most starkly felt -- sure, there's characterization, and to a degree it's satisfying too, but it's never as graceful or as meaningful as when the Tramp is actually doing something. Those moments shine on multiple levels; they have me laughing at the antics of clowns and unpacking the imagery of poets all at once.

Now I want to really sit down and revisit Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, see if I react similarly. After all, there's that famous Coke-vs-Pepsi rivalry, and I've got to pick a side, don't I? I'll get back to you on that.

Ansiktet (The Magician)

This is really a delight to watch, because the themes and philosophical questions come into light early, but the rest of the story is a dense and complicated riddle. What is truth? What is its value? What is magic, or faith in magic? Does it have value, even as a sham? Does the faith people put in a thing give it its true power, and which is more valuable: the faith of the magician or the faith of his audience? Go ahead and replace "magician" with literally any role where one asks for the faith of others.

But The Magician doesn't offer up answers quite as readily as it does questions, partially because it's cleverly playing both sides of the fence. Is there magic, or supernatural forces, or God? Do ghosts haunt us? Do Granny's witch's spells and potions do anything? Does Vogler have any power about him at all? The answer seemed to me to be both yes and no, to all of these questions. (I'm no Bergman scholar, but I know he was obsessed with, among other things, religious faith, and I suspect in some form or other he was a firm believer himself. No matter! Let it never be said he was afraid to dabble in skepticism.)

The best I can say is, this plays out like The Prestige crossed with The Rules of the Game, starring a traveling sideshow act of snake oil salesmen, and taking place in rural Sweden circa 1846. The delineation between the house staff and the upper-crust, and how each is scammed in their own ways, says a lot about the world of the story, the nature of faith and hope, and how it breaks down along class lines. There were many, many great confrontations, monologues, and turnarounds throughout. (I could do better than to point out it "says a lot" or "there were great bits," but this is just a recording of preliminary reactions, and much of it will take more time to digest.) The bit with the fictional love potions -- a collision of cynicism and idealism where both sides colluded to believe, and therefore to produce the supposed effect, was fantastic; both con-man and mark were culpable, as it is with fantasies and faith. For me personally, the actor who is not a ghost but is, who believes he is dying but isn't, who is more successful and convincing as a specter than he ever was as a thespian, was perhaps my favorite embodiment of the questions the film was asking, and there was something haunting in "mute" Volger's way of letting the actor take center stage. The antagonism between Doctors Vergerus and Volger was intense, and sharp, and fascinating -- and only slightly distracting because Gunnar Björnstrand looked shockingly like Kevin Kline with chin scruff in this.

So many layers, and I'm sure I didn't even scratch the surface on my first viewing. This is one disc I'm likely to check out the (Criterion) special features on.

(NOTE: Interestingly, after checking out some of them, I learn that The Magician is seen as a parable about the creative process, about film- and play-directing, about performance, and the relationship between a fickle audience and even fickler critics and the artist himself. All that's super interesting and totally there now that I see it, but I stand by my assessment as well, vis-a-vis faith and magic and truth.)

Monsters

In certain circles, this movie is all the hype. It was made for $15,000 with a crew of two, it's a science fiction post-invasion (sort of) movie shot for next to nothing that wowed people at South by Southwest and supposedly is getting released in theaters later this month. (A link at the bottom will allow you to "rent" it from amazon.com and watch it now, which is what I did.) It's handheld, shaky, with a tight focus and lots of composited creatures in the backgrounds of wide shots, and it's hard not to compare it on a certain level to District 9. The two plots are pretty different but they share similar views of humanity and morality.

On the one hand, this is really enervating, at least as much so as One Too Many Mornings was, or the short that Blomkamp made before District 9, or for that matter Primer or El Mariachi or Slacker, because it shows what you can do with very little money, a little ingenuity and a good premise or story. Rumor has it Timur Bekmambetov is already producing some new epic science fiction film Gareth Edwards is writing and directing. Just think of that! You make a clever, deceptively simple film and you show off that you can frame a shot, write a scene, and direct some actors. You show you can handle action without overdoing it, you can handle romance without overdoing it, and you can keep the pace moving fairly well, and before your little feature film (made for less than the cost of a new car) hits theaters you're scoring deals and could maybe make a second, incredibly bigger film. That's how it can be done. That's inspiring.

On the other hand, as much as I marvel at its economical storytelling and low overhead, Monsters definitely leaves you wanting more. It feels a tad rushed in terms of events, and just a touch more languid than necessary in terms of pacing. It never feels boring, but some of the meditative moments in the jungle and before they leave Mexico felt a wee bit like scene-padding. I wouldn't have a problem with this except the film has roughly twelve or so scenes, that's it. The trek through the Infected Zone took two nights by my count, and one of those was spent wandering on foot and sleeping atop a Chichen Itza-styled pyramid. How did they move so quickly? Why did they move so quickly? The scenes that are there feel lived-in, thought-out, and real. But where the movie kind of shows its budget is in its limited scope of time. Honestly, I just wanted more story. Like, twice as much.

But otherwise, what I'm given, I'm pretty pleased with. As I implied above, the acting, the cinematography, the dialogue, the pacing, the action, the romantic chemistry even... it all works. The themes take a little while to get going, but by the end I'm pretty satisfied, and in fact they're so beautifully understated that I don't mind. Also, it's got (idealized) Lovecraft monsters, tentacles in the fog. When this does come to theaters, I think I'd like to go see it -- not all chunky and compressed and chugging on my computer monitor -- and see if it all holds up on the big screen.

Seen as an Amazon.com "Pre-Theatrical Rental."

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

As soon as I heard that David Lynch was executive producing a not-quite-murder-mystery film by Werner Herzog I knew I had to see this. Reports that Michael Shannon was basically channeling Klaus Kinski didn't hurt either. Five minutes into the film, this felt like everything I suspected it would feel like. Herzog's daffy madman-poet approach to filmmaking coupled with Lynch's stagey, distancing line readings and something-dark-under-the-surface suburban milieus, plus Brad Dourif and Grace Zabriskie cameos. But the further in I went, the less in love I was.

There's definitely something interesting and bizarre and watchable here, and the story of what seems to me like a schizophrenic man being consumed by his bent worldview and possible hallucinations is certainly ripe for a Herzog-Lynch team effort. The problem I think lies almost entirely in the script, which goes to pains to lay out a forced structure that feels artificial almost to the point of parody. On the one hand (and especially when viewed as a pairing with Herzog's other film this same year, Bad Lieutenant) this parodic approach might seem intentional, but where it felt so easy and jabbing in Bad Lieutenant here it feels stilted and, frankly, a little boring. The more Chloë Sevigny and Udo Kier's characters doled out conveniently portioned pieces of exposition and backstory on Willem Dafoe's cop the less interested in the story I was.

Actually, the more I think about the layout and the characters -- like the obvious and pointless cuts in location that accompany each return to the interviews in progress, or Michael Seña as the over-eager partner who keeps trying to enact movie clichés about hostage situations -- I'm certain it's meant to be the hostage-movie formula turned upside down. But it doesn't change the fact that the structure became so tinny and artificial that I was frustrated more than engaged. Bad Lieutenant made cop clichés feel loose and wild, fun; My Son, My Son makes them feel stiff, like an overstarched shirt.

Still, the performances are pretty great, and the Herzogian moments many (and the Lynchian ones, too), and that all makes it worth seeing, without question. That it's loosely based on real events is interesting. (Wikipedia has some interesting details about Herzog and screenwriter Herbert Golder meeting with the man Brad McCullum is based on.) But my first impression is that it's more of a curiosity than a great film. Who knows. I do have the sense this one'll stay with me for a while, and I liked Bad Lieutenant significantly more the second time I watched it. Maybe when I return someday and watch it again, I'll fall in love.

Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö / The Match Factory Girl

Following the order of the "Proletariat Trilogy" (only a trilogy in a thematic sense, thankfully), this one builds on the tone of the last two to be sure. The main difference that I see, the thing that separates this from its predecessors, is that Iris (the match factory girl in question) is the only main character in any of the three stories not already hardened by a certain kind of hopeless acceptance (read: surrender). She's still vulnerable, soft, and more to the point victimizable, because she's still full of hope and dreams. Part of what made Shadows in Paradise and Ariel interesting to me was the nonchalant hopelessness of the world, the way the characters had already given up trying, and took things like doors of opportunity opening up only to slam shut in their faces (in both case, due to untimely deaths) as part-and-parcel of what the universe had to offer. Notably in Shadows, within the first ten minutes, Nikander's friend and would-be benefactor says, "I'm not going to die behind the wheel." Nikander asks him, "Then where?" and without the slightest hint of irony or hesitation, he declares, "Behind a desk." There's no hope of avoiding misery and frustration and isolation. There's just choosing what you do in the meantime and how you go out. I think the reason Nikander and Kasurinen are able to find love is because they've accepted this, and so have the women they meet, and the romances are hilariously cold, straightforward, and gloomy. More like two people embracing so as not to freeze to death (so quickly) than two people hoping for any kind of joy from one another.

Iris, though, she hopes for something more. She's young, naive, and believes in love, and for that we watch her get punished by the world. What saves this from being an endlessly cruel story is her third-act turnaround, her (SPOILER) transformation (by failed suicide-by-auto?) from innocent starry-eyed wallflower into black comedy murderess. There's no question this one ups the blackness and the comedy from the last two. And it works, and it's funny -- and it's so streamlined, at 68 minutes long, that it couldn't possibly overstay its welcome. Plus, it helped me think out some "solitary humorous-pathetic" moments for the script I'm working on. Yet personally, I think my favorite of the three lies somewhere between Shadows and Ariel, somewhere closer to humor-from-hopelessness rather than humor-from-the-world's-cruelty. But I still love all three, and don't understand why nobody else knows of this guy. He falls into the same category as Teshigahara and Hong Sang-soo and many others, foreign filmmakers who are underrated (here), all tough to sell people on, but so rewarding once you bother. I guess I'll just keep pushing.

Män som hatar kvinnor / The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo *

Boy, it's telling that the original Swedish title of both the film and the source novel is Men Who Hate Women. I guess the more direct Sweden Is Rapeland just wouldn't have sold enough copies (or movie tickets), huh?

In short, this film is very good, a good ol' mystery story that turns fairly cleverly and pretty smoothly into a serial killer story, with a likable odd-couple as the intrepid detectives. More than one moment in the story felt almost unbearably tense, and the whole "scanning the internet or scouring old logbooks for clues" stuff was never as boring as it might have been. I genuinely liked both the protagonists and enjoyed their tense tete-â-tete, and if the film's final solutions (no Nazi pun intended) felt somewhat obvious from the get-go, the script doesn't punish you by beating you over the head with it. I get the impression they half expected you to beat the characters to the conclusions they come to, and that's okay. It's still about the drama of getting there.

I know this is a world-famous much-hyped novel series right now, and so I assume in all those extra pages they must explain the biggest nagging question the film left me with, which is why the hell did Lisbeth get involved in the case in the first place? She was hired to hack his stuff, she did that, she found him trustworthy, okay, but what drive does a girl this guarded and this dangerous (and borderline self-destructive) have to continue pursuing Mikael's remote-accessed laptop once she's delivered files to her bosses? Then to expose herself to him because she's answered a riddle he hasn't... I mean, I get that part of her just wanted to rub it in his face that she's smarter, but this is more. She puts herself out there like she never has before, and there's got to be some missing scene or chapter or pages that explains this huge bold move to us, right? Because once she's in, I am hooked right alongside her (and him), I can see why you wouldn't let up, but I can find no reason inside the story for her to cross that first threshold, and that really frustrates me.

And seriously, I think the ratio of Nazis, serial rapists, or Nazi-serial-rapist/serial-killers to nice guys in this movie is about 2:1 or maybe even 3:1. I enjoyed that Women Getting Revenge never overshadowed the interpersonal drama stuff or the main whodunnit plot, but there was a certain theme of Men Are Monsters here that felt, frankly, disappointingly one-sided. Never once were we given a deeper motive for any of the monstrosities against women except "it feels good." (SPOILER) The religious/Nazi thing was even dismissed by all but the dead father. Men simply do these things because those men are "evil," and that's less terrifying and more didactic than this film deserves.

I did, though, quite like some of the thematic repetitions throughout, like the unfortunate nature of a "photographic memory" and Lisbeth's inability to forget the minutest detail of the things she'd suffered through (echoed back to her as she videotapes her own brutal rape). And I enjoyed that Lisbeth was shown as still capable, in her own guarded way, of loving -- both physically and emotionally -- despite the trauma she'd suffered through. Often with rape-victim movies and especially with rape-victim movies where the rapists are depicted as un-nuanced forces of evil, the victim's suffering permeates every facet of their being in a way that leaves no room for character or color. Here it shades her, but she still feels like a developed and three-dimensional human being, and that goes a long way toward redeeming the story's flatness of the villains for me. In fact, I would have loved to spend more time in the conflicted and contradictory psychology of the title character, in light of where she's been, who she is now, and the kind of future Mikael's stability and quiet acceptance seems to be offering her. I found that more enthralling than the actual murder investigation, but then again like I said, it seemed clear to me from the get-go that Harriet was still alive -- and besides, I've always gone more for character than for plot, if push comes to shove.


Seen at the Laurelhurst Theater.

Monsters, Inc.

Since Pixar is about to launch a series of (sigh) sequels, and after (big sigh) Cars 2 is about to be Monsters, Inc. 2, I figured I'd give the first one another chance as my relax-don't-think movie of the night. It stands up pretty well on second viewing. Sure, it's a pretty straightforward kid's film with a lot of action, but all of the action revolves around the themes and the sci-fi-ish advancement of the world's technology, and it's fast-paced without ever losing sight of those story elements. It's actually kind of fun to see how we use, for example, Celia's outrage at Mike to "accidentally" give information to Randall to advance the plot (now the villain knows who has the kid and he can start threatening them directly, leading to our first major confrontation). It all moves along very conveniently, yes, so that no moment feels wasted, but it comes out of the characters and what they want from each other. Sometimes it's nice to watch a smart movie for children because it tends to be a little more direct, obvious even, and easy to pick apart, but so long as the story keeps firing on all cylinders there's nothing wrong with that.

As to a sequel, well, the "changed world" at the end of Monsters, Inc. seems to be a solid conclusion, but the film is pretty rich thematically and the emotional core of these characters is solid enough that I could see Pixar doing to this film what they did with Toy Story 2, both expanding and exploring the world, the characters, and the themes. It certainly promises a more interesting and watchable film than the sequel they'll be spitting out between now and Monsters, Inc. 2's release.

Honestly... is anybody anywhere interested in a Cars sequel? Ugh.

Micmacs à tire-larigot (Micmacs)

I don't have a lot to say about this film, since it's more about whimsy than it is about story. The story is: a bunch of inventive and impossibly quirky characters with nouns for names and infinite resources decide semi-spontaneously to enact a kind of strange Rube-Goldbergian psychic revenge on the arms dealers whose products twice ruined our hero's life. The whimsy, on the other hand, is near infinite, and although a little heavy at times (it's Jeunet; you ought to know what to expect), it absolutely excels at pushing its story forward with little or no dialogue, and it's got a silent movie (or a Tati movie) charm that makes the screenwriter-schoolmarm inside me sit down and shut up long enough to enjoy the movie for what it is. To put it another way: if you think you're going to love this movie you're probably right; if you think you're sick of whimsy and quirk and you're going to hate this movie you're probably right; if you're a little bit on the fence but truly willing to give the benefit of the doubt here, as I was, you'll probably enjoy this. As I did.

All I really want to add is, Jeunet is a master at casting. Even the one-scene roles like heavies and characters in the quick one-shot flashback vignettes have the most fascinating faces, expressive to the point of rubbery. Dominique Pinon (a favorite of mine for his over-expressive face and vaguely Belmondoan features) is in good company here. Both the younger girls in this, the Calculator and the Contortionist, were adorable enough that I couldn't stop watching them (Oh those quirky French girls!), but every single face in this film is as perfect and amusing as can be. The casting and performance style goes a long way toward selling the not-quite-surreal, just-kind-of-off-kilter world of our story. I think my favorite scene? Early on, our hero Bazil is too proud to accept the free food from a shelter, and so he and the woman handing it out have a quick wordless exchange in which he assures her, no he's not hungry like these poor saps, he's merely waiting at the taxi stand -- but of course the taxi shows up and he has to then pretend to get in. It's a great silent-movie moment, practically straight out of Chaplin, and it set me up for exactly what to expect from the rest of the film.

Okay, I managed to say something after all. Big surprise, I know.

MacGruber *

There is a quote on the poster above, used everywhere for this film in fact, which if I'm not mistaken is a pull from the review written by a friend of mine, that calls MacGruber "the best SNL movie since Wayne's World." I'd say that about sums it up perfectly. If only that bar weren't so low. The film is fun and watchable -- I only laughed out loud a couple of brief times myself, but I'm a bit reserved when it comes to comedies; I don't mean to be, I just am -- but the aesthetic of the film actually made me a little uncomfortable. Like, it did a pretty great job of hitting what I felt it was aiming for, but I didn't like what it was aiming for, personally. In all truth, the humor made me grimace as often as laugh.

The film is smart enough to take itself very, very seriously, to never pull that Mel Brooks trick of winking to the audience (it works beautifully when Mel Brooks did it, but it wouldn't have worked here). I liked that. It knew what you expected to happen and it subverted it in ways you didn't expect, even when you expected your expectation to be subverted (if that makes sense). In short, even though I kept thinking, "this is really well done," I couldn't help but feel kind of bad for Ryan Phillipe, Powers Booth and Val Kilmer for being in this movie... and that's sort of not a good sign.

Anyway, the bottom line is, I pretty much liked it -- but if I'd been seeing a lot of really amazing Hollywood films (and comedies especially) lately, I'd probably just call this weak and silly and that'd be it. Since I haven't seen a lot of great Hollywood films lately -- in fact I only went to see this because nothing else was playing -- I can't help but grade on a curve here.

It's sad. Is that where we're at? Is that the state of film in 2010? If Hollywood makes it we start awarding the mediocre (with my dollars, at least), because it's better than the rest of the shit? Is this an A-for-Effort world we're living in? I think it might be. And that's depressing.

Seen at the Lloyd Center Cinema.