Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Harry Potter movies seem hellbent on punishing you for the first half-hour of each sitting, don't they? My fuck, each movie in the series gets some momentum once it gets into act two and the mystery is moving but it has the hardest time depicting what is ostensibly the real world. Every second -- every frame of film -- I have to spend in the company of Harry's hate circus of a family is like torture, and it's such a strange decision to make the opening act of your film so gleefully sadistic. It smacks of poor judgment but more than that, it smacks of lazy writing. There is a story here, and again it's an improvement on the previous one -- in style and tone, in pacing and performance, in aesthetics and plot -- but like every Harry Potter movie, it takes almost an hour to get there, almost an hour before I care in the slightest. For that first hour, I am so close to turning it off that the truth is, my dedication to finish the series and blog about them as I go is the only reason I didn't switch it off and find something less punishing to watch, like maybe Irreversible or Martyrs.

I have to admit it's pretty frustrating that each film follows such a predictable model -- muggle foster family, misery, hijinks, unauthorized magic, escape, diversion, train (or car) ride, up the stairs into school, a couple of pointless classes whose lessons will be shoehorned in later but feel far more interested in showing off pointless new teachers and pointless new magic spells that are all variations on the same idea (wave wand, incant some really ridiculous sounding faux-latin crap, and pow! magic), and during all this every single person seems to be talking like a 1980s video game NPC, doling out morsels of exposition that add up very quickly to whatever this year's big mystery is that Harry's not supposed to know anything about even though it directly involves him and he'll inevitably step in and save the day, and in the end Dumbledore will wander through with his benevolent smile and say that was very good Harry, like that's how he'd had it planned all along. Along the way we'll meet the new Defense of the Dark Arts instructor who will be incontrovertibly linked to the primary mystery of the story in one way or another, and Snape will show up and act sinister (but if you wait long enough, it will turn out he's acting as the good guy, so don't worry about mean old Snape), and by the end the DOTDA teacher will leave. Harry will clash with Draco in some of the most time-wasting, exhaustingly overwrought scenes that don't involve the Dursleys, presumably because the author assumes audiences wouldn't enjoy a story about high school without some half-assed obligatory bullying scenes, and then -- sigh -- there will be a Quidditch match, and eventually Harry'll start acting out, he (or he and his buddies) will sneak out or do something they're not supposed to, get caught, get away with it, talk with Hagrid, uncover some piece of the big mystery, and away they go on their adventures. Ron and Hermione will each have their chances to save Harry's neck before Harry steps up to the plate and hits the grand slam to win the -- oh wait, wrong lame sports metaphor, let's try that again -- before Harry catches the Golden Snitch and invalidates the score to that point. (Honestly, though, the puzzle of "It would take a great wizard to do what we saw happen, Harry" was solved by "I realized I'd already done it, so I just did it again, it was that easy." That's precisely resolution by grandfather-paradox, and that's precisely a crap end to what should have been a tense and moving scene.)

Don't get me wrong. I actually liked Prisoner of Azkaban pretty well -- a lot compared to the low bar set by Sorcerer's Stone and the slightly-less low bar set by Chamber of Secrets. But that enjoyment comes at a price, which is a heftier dose of suspended disbelief than I'm usually comfortable giving. The world is just so illogical, poorly thought out, and weakly motivated, with so many winking nods to the audience and so many moments of shoehorned exposition and rushed growth, it's a task to let go and say, okay, all right, show me what you've got, I'll overlook what I can. For instance, the characters of Lupin and Black are interesting, and Pettigrew too for that matter, but we went from "Sirius Black is the scariest murderer in the history of scary murderers, and he wants to kill Harry Potter" to "Sirius Black is my father's best friend and a wrongfully imprisoned man who's very gentle and kind and not the worse for wear or bitter at all despite twelve years in a scary prison" all in the space of a single David Thewlis-shaped hug, and I couldn't keep up. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the truth behind this second, all-too-easy lie to be revealed, but nope. The all-too-easy was the end of the matter. Likewise, the mystery of Lupin was telegraphed so much -- I mean, assuming the name alone wasn't a giveaway -- that I was sure there was more to it than that, that another layer was going to be revealed to the mystery of the Teacher Who Disappears Every Full Moon And Makes Other Teachers Paranoid About Werewolves, but nope -- thats it. He's just a werewolf. And he's "used to" the shitty treatment he receives, end of story, so even if it's a tiny bit sad we shouldn't dwell on it -- that's the way the world works.

Part of the thing with the story here is it's rather guileless, and I think this plays into my previous comments that the world is surprisingly unimaginative and blandly conceived. Quidditch isn't the only example of a system that could only be conceived by a muggle. A good writer comes up with a neat idea and writes it out completely and is pleased with that; a great writer comes up with a neat idea and then finds a way outside that idea, looks at it from every angle, and has neat ideas about that neat idea. Think of The Minority Report or Asimov's Laws of Robotics (examples that came up earlier today in a conversation with my friend Rex) -- both show us concrete systems, rules of governing the fictional world (precog crime units; laws of robotics) built on conceits of the story (precognitive mutants; sentient robots), but neither story just shows you this world and calls it done. Both then challenge their own systems from a variety of angles and come up with pleasing stories that show imagination and cunning. In the world of Harry Potter, it is sufficient that magic wands and funny words make things happen; the author felt no need to explore these concepts any deeper than that. When Harry goes to a boarding house -- or whatever the hell he goes to, after running away from home and before getting on the train -- it occured to me that, following the triple-decker bus doing it's "squeeze" routine, it would have been really cool to see the hostel/hotel as a series of essentially plywood walls with doors, almost like a maze and less like a corridor, but every door opened into a large, comfortable room -- compression of space within each wall, via magic. That would have been cool. What they had instead were kids pouring tea from a floating teapot (yawn) or waving their hand to make the spoon twirl in their cups on their own (double yawn). There's no imagination applied to the potential of the world Rowling has created, and the world she's created has pretty boundless potential. In a world so amazing, why are things so literal at all? If you can manipulate reality and defy physics, why are you content to show us the "wonder" of a floating teapot?

But I am caught in a critical digression it's hard to escape. Despite everything, this movie worked a good deal better than the others. It's just a kid's movie after all, and if the motivations are more obvious or the twists more predictable, well, remember that no matter how many adults love it it was written for thirteen-year-olds. The guilelessness is appropriate, the directness of the characters, even to an extent the moral black-and-whiteness of it, it does all work for the demographic age we're writing for here. In fact, by that standard, the unorthodox storytelling and grandfather-paradoxic overlap (though done too bluntly and too blasé for my tastes, not to mention just rewarming stale Back to the Future II plot devices) could be considered kind of bold and daring. That the monstrous villain is so readily a friend and that the rat (which, by the way: the rat? okay, whatever... I'll admit: that twist wasn't predictable, but this time I don't mean that as a good thing -- non sequitur storytelling is just another form of deus ex machina, after all) was the real villain in disguise, and that even he was "kind of" innocent because Voldemort is a hard guy to say no to, and the truth is this movie actually has no villain -- all that's different from your average adventure tale for tweens. The villain is of course the looming shadow of the omnipresent never-there Voldemort, but the only real antagonist in Azkaban is rumor, hearsay, and committee. The Hippogriff and Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew/Scabbers and Professor Lupin are all under fire from the same nameless, faceless foe -- the rules or laws that do not always have the facts right but force men to come to a judgment anyway. (Hey, an actual theme that ties together all the action throughout and actually affects the primary and secondary storylines impactfully? My, we have come a long way!)

In a way I wish the Harry Potter movies hadn't been made when and how they were. If the first one was being made today, with the same cast and art design and all that, it might have been made into an HBO or AMC style television series, one where separate episodes could explore the worlds and rules and systems, and characters could be given their proper due, and the overarching mysteries could be given enough time and attention to really have impact. The plotholes or inconsistencies could be ironed out, much like when we adapt Lord of the Rings or Narnia, or Philip K. Dick, or Roald Dahl, or anything ever from one format to another. As is, though, it feels weirdly disjointed, its episodic structure feels more stilted and unsatisfying. In each film we meet a couple of new teachers -- usually exactly one ringer (always obvious; also maybe always a woman? in 2 and 3 it was) and exactly one who ties into the main story. Our "regulars" like McGonnagal and Snape sometimes feel like walk-ons. (I've been watching a lot of 90s Star Trek lately, and occasionally Geordi La Forge will be in a scene for no reason, and he'll have one line that could have been said by anybody, and you realize that this is probably a contractual thing, to make sure everybody has at least one line and picks up a paycheck that week, even if the story doesn't need them; anyway, McGonnagal here and Snape in the last one kind of felt like that to me.) It'd be nice to give the world some breathing space, but it would require someone with stronger skills than Rowling, if I may dare say, to whip the world into a better kind of shape.

Anyway I daydream because I think it'd be a worthwhile endeavor. I see what people like about these, and each one is a significant step up from the last (though I'm warned not to get my hopes up for the 4th? seems like every film in the series needs the apologies and caveats of someone or other -- not a great sign), but I just can't as easily overlook a lot of the silliness and laziness of both plotting and world-building as my friends can, it seems.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Well, the story at least has a lot more plot cohesion here, and in fact for the most part I wasn't bored or irritated in general, though there were an awful lot of suspiciously plot-hole shaped questions I had about the story as we went along. It's also making aims at themes, though I'm not sure to what end, to be honest. So much talk of racial purity and class warfare, but I can't tell you how either of those things factor into the story in a meaningful way. The Malfoys scoff openly at Ron for being poor and Hermione for being common muggle trash, but it's odd because Harry is equal to or superior to them in both categories (I keep wondering why that mountain of gold he inherited in Sorcerer's Stone never comes back up, or why he doesn't help out his struggling friends the Weasleys), and while we are led to believe that perhaps Harry is the direct descendent of Salazar Slytherin (I think I got that right) he turns out to be, apparently, the heir of Godric Gryffindor instead, though Tom Riddle calls his mother a Mudblood (mixed breed). Still, if what Hagrid says is right and nobody's got pure blood, then Harry's as well off racially as any, or better.

Additionally, Tom Riddle has apparently hypnotized Ron's sister Ginny and made her write hateful things on the walls about the Mudbloods and seems intent on killing them, until he admits to dropping the ruse as soon as he sees he can lure Potter in instead. He also mentions that he, too, is born of muggle parents, and so I'm just confounded as to what bloodlines have to do with anything here. As Hagrid says himself, it's all "codswallop," but why include it in the story? As a way of building tension around Harry's revealed bloodline? To call into question the whole Slytherin-versus-Griffindor thing and allow us to learn from Dumbledore that Harry pulled a Rogue on some of Voldemort's powers (like confidence and resourcefulness, apparently? or so says Dumbles) during that scar-making attack on him as a baby? The whole repeated theme of who is pure wizard and who is part or all muggle seems bizarre, especially since (as Hermione, Harry, and Voldemort all prove, at least) magical skill seems to have nothing to do with it. Maybe there's some commentary for kids here that racism is a bunch of malarkey, because I'm not seeing the value otherwise. Likewise the moneyed-versus-unmoneyed thing, but that one doesn't come up quite as directly (though it sits one layer behind an awful lot of the story, in things like Dobby, the Yoda-fucked-Jar-Jar-and-look-what-you've-got-now abomination that is apparently the Malfoy's indentured elf servant). So yeah, in short: there does seem to be a smattering of themes here, but I don't know why because they feel arbitrary and poorly integrated into the central story.

As to the plot, it's an awful lot like the first film, though a fair bit tighter. If you accept the Inspector Gadget conceit that the adults are bumblers or somehow "busy" all the time and that the Pennys and Brains of the world have to maintain order and solve the mysteries for them and just generally save the day, then the story works reasonably well. How and why our characters keep being in the right place at the right time seems to work a lot better, even if the number of times they happen to be in the right place at the right time still seems a touch high. Dumbledore and Hagrid fell into and out of peril so rapidly and so arbitrarily I got a little bit of vertigo, but at least the storytellers gave us a reason they weren't around at the story's climax -- though I find it tough to buy that Snape, who seems intent on quietly keeping Potter alive and doing good from the dark side, would risk so much to show up Lockhart by sending the blowhard in alone to fight the monster and save the school. I guess you could argue Snape never expected Lockhart to know where the Chamber was, or that he'd be brave enough to go in if he did (and of course Lockhart wasn't), but it still leaves Snape backing out of active duty and allowing the school to be closed down without even trying to save the day. That hardly sounds like the Snape who chased Quirrell all around the place and thwarted his every scheme against Potter in the background of last year's story. But whatever; the bottom line remains, if you don't stop to wonder what the adults are doing or why, the story moves along a lot better than in The Sorcerer's Stone. Any improvement is good, right?

The only other thing I have to say -- which is true of both films but I had a lot to say about the first one and didn't get around to mentioning this -- is how awful, how terribly fucking awful, the opening scenes of each movie are. Harry's muggle aunt and uncle and their Augustus-Gloot-meets-Veruca-Salt son are so unbearably loathsome that it takes me another ten or fifteen minutes after their departure from the film to start caring about anything. They are drawn so broadly, and are so bland, so unrealistic and unfunny, that in both films (which start depressingly similarly, by the way) I basically don't care anything about the lame adventures on the ride to Hogwarts, and only check back in once things settle down. In Sorcerer's Stone that meant I didn't get into the movie until somewhere around the stairwell confrontation with Malfoy and the Sorting Hat sequence. Here it meant I barely registered the ridiculous and thoroughly unnecessary flying-car ride or pounding they take inside that tree monster thing. I didn't get into the story until Snape catches Ron and Harry and threatens to have them expelled. In each case, the despicable opening scenes keep me at a disdainful distance from the story until about forty minutes in, and make act one a bitter pill indeed. I cannot express to you how much I hate those two, and I know I've seen both Fiona Shaw and Richard Griffiths in other, more respectable roles, but I honestly hope I never have to look at their faces ever again. I'm already recoiling in horror at the mere thought that I have at least five more films that no doubt each open with those two and their stupid, poorly written and poorly conceived comedy-of-hate routines.

Ha. But overall, yes, Chamber of Secrets is a big step up from Sorcerer's Stone. I've made it through the two crummy movies that everyone seems to need to apologize for, and varying reports say the next one, Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban is either the last shitty one or the first good one. I tried to watch it once and just couldn't get engaged -- I wonder if I made it past that forty-minute mark, when the foul taste of the Dursleys has been cleansed off the palate, or not. Soon I'll watch it and let you know.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Now that the series is wrapping up, I promised I'd actually watch the movies through, seriously, critically, with sober adult eyes, and so here I am. I quipped that everyone tells me if I sit through five or six hours of mediocrity I can finally start watching some neat kids films, and that about sums it up the opening movement here, to be honest.

It's a tough thing to start a franchise, especially one so overly developed as Harry Potter. I have talked a lot about the joy of feeling like the world exists beyond the edges of the frame in a film, but I do believe this is an example of taking that concept a little too far. Like the post-Episode I Star Wars series, too much time is given to frivolous explorations of the world around the story. Efforts are made to incorporate it into the plot, such as the extended sequence with the bank... goblins?, wherein Hagrid seeks out a You-Know-What from You-Know-Where for You-Know-Who, but a lot of it feels like a contrivance to show off some fancy wonderful idea for magic locks or goblins that work at banks. Plus, it keeps resulting in our titular hero happening to be in the right place at the right time to see or hear or witness some thing that just happens to be crucial to the overarching mystery of the series, or the backgrounded mystery of this particular film (the film's central plot feels relegated to subplot status, which is trouble). I think Sorcerer's Stone comes off as 40% backstory, 40% world-building, and only 20% actual plot. The plot -- the mystery of the (also titular) whatsit being guarded by the cerberus and what it's for and who is plotting against everyone -- reads like an Encyclopedia Brown or Hardy Boys story to me, with a core mystery that the adults are involved with but conveniently keep allowing the children to get in the way of, only the children keep miraculously solving riddles and eliminating obstacles. At the end it's played off as the hero's-quest Chosen One thing, because Harry is So Special and all that, but along the way Harry's specialness takes a backseat to ordinary pluck (Ron beating the magic chess game; Ron defeating the troll in the ladies' room) and cleverness (Hermione learning who Flamel is; Hermione knowing how to get past the ivy monster thing). It is really, really difficult for me to look at this story and piece together what the adults are up to during all this. What are Dumbledore and McGonagall up to while all this is happening? Why is it important to pull the Stone out of storage and hide it on school grounds? Why did the magic mirror need moving when it did, and why did putting it in the room with the Stone seem like a good idea? Did Dumbledore know Harry and his Scooby Gang would show up, time and again, and if not -- what was he expecting to happen?

Further, it's odd to watch this because Harry looks and acts like such a geek, but he's a rich, popular athlete who isn't very good at his studies (he gets by, but he doesn't excel) and gets out of trouble more than once on account of his ability to play sports so well. He's the jock. Since this story is so clearly and deliberately a going-to-school analog I don't feel this line of thought is inappropriate; it's not just a lark to point it out. It's the point of the story, when you get down to it. It's a story for children about going to school and feeling out of place and finding out you are special, so the nature of that specialness is absolutely tantamount to understanding the story here, seems like -- at least for the first one (we'll see, but it feels like that theme pretty much permeates the whole thing). The point is, Harry looks and acts like the outcast nerd of the school, but almost immediately he is given a massive fortune and a star position on the school sports team. In fact, he seems all poised to befriend the school's other first-year rich, entitled jock, Draco Malfoy, and even the Sorting Hat wants to put him in Malfoy's house, Slytherin -- and house leader Snape is obsessed with protecting him, after all. It certainly seems that, if Harry hadn't bumped into the Weasleys on the terminal platform or hadn't shared a train car with Ron and Hermione along the way, it would have been Harry and Draco as best buds, and who knows how things would have gone. Anyway, Harry doesn't have to work for much apart from bearing the burden of being the wizard Luke Skywalker, and it's a funny message to kids. I guess when you're little and reading adventure stories the message of "be patient, and be yourself, and everything will come up Millhouse" isn't so bad. We'll have to see how the message evolves as the story continues, and Harry (and the audience that he is surrogate for) gets older and more mature.

As to the film itself, well... it's got hokey acting, an aggressively spot-on score, dated CG, and a script that emphasizes expository vignettes over active protagonists or cohesive backstory -- more in love with the whimsy and the mystery than the nuts and bolts of a good story. Every line feels so winking that you never forget you're watching a children's movie. It's forty-two minutes in before Harry makes a decision for himself that affects the story (stand up to Malfoy; defend Ron), and it's just a series of right-place/right-time sequences that channel everything toward a surprisingly easy climax. (The Stone just shows up in Harry's pocket because, as Dumbledore explains, it will only appear to someone who wants it but doesn't want to use it; doesn't that mean that if Harry hadn't shown up at all then Quirrell/Voldemort would have been unable to get near it? Didn't Harry's appearance endanger everything?) Harry's touch kills Quirrell because of love. It's all very easy for him.

And don't get me started on Quidditch. Actually, do, because Quidditch is an apt microcosm of the problem with the fantasy world being shown here. First, the rules are needlessly complicated; you are basically playing three separate games simultaneously on the same field, and because of the enormous amount of points for winning the third separate game, only one game matters: the Golden Snitch one, which ends the game and almost necessarily determines the winner (you'd have to have a 15-goal/150-point spread for the game not to be decided by whoever catches the Golden Snitch). Secondly, in a world of wizards and magic this game is decidedly unimaginative and literal -- in fact, it could only have been designed by a muggle, whose best idea for a game is to combine existing sports together, put them in the air, and call it good. Third, and worst of all, because first-year players (not named Harry Potter) aren't allowed to play, everything going on for the ten minutes of the Quidditch match is relegated to a bunch of extras as all the characters we've been learning about sit in the stands and gape, at best helping out by interfering when they spot cheaters; plus Potter can only hover above and make shocked and frustrated faces for most of the action, until it's time for him to have one little chase with the buzzing Snitch ball, and when he catches it, despite all the drama we just watched (involving nameless characters we do not know, extras essentially), the game is over and he wins. The rest of it doesn't matter. Like this first story, where a lot of stuff seems to be happening all at once (new school, learning spells, mysterious Stone, Snape's a jerk, Harry's mysterious fame and lineage) but we stay with characters who are ostensibly on (or meant to be on) the sidelines, and then Harry Potter, having done not much more than stand around gaping for the entire story, steps up and does one presumably impossible but surprisingly easy-to-accomplish task, and the rest of it doesn't matter. His one moment outshines everything else, the ups and downs, and the story wraps itself up. In fact, this same theme/structure is repeated one more time, in an even tinier microcosm, as Dumbledore announces the "points" earned by each house, and then proceeds to dole out new points for a last-minute task -- like the score from catching a Snitch -- that nullifies the efforts of the other players (in this case, would-be winners Slytherin) and creates a new winner.

So that's the plot for you. A bunch of stuff, some kids interfering from the sidelines, and then a hero who goes from passive info-dump recipient to one-time derring-doer and eradicates the balance of the game played beforehand. To quote a humorous webpage, Harry Potter could be summed up as "Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right."

Despite this though, the world is intriguing, and the end feels uplifting enough (it's probably that cheating music) that once it's over, it feels at first like a positive experience. I do like the idea of a wizarding school in modern England, and I'm a sucker for a good Joseph Campbell Hero's Quest, for hidden adversaries and epic adventures of good vs. evil, for prophecies and long arcs and growing up with characters. Plus, I'm promised that after the first two (or, depending on who you ask, the first three), the series picks up and gets interesting. I mean, I'll be the judge for myself on that, but the idea of the world, even in its thoughtlessly baroque, questionably paced form, is just intriguing enough that I would like to see what all the fuss is about. I'm actually looking forward to the next one, and the one after that, and seeing where the whole thing goes. So, they certainly didn't excel at winning me over, but they left me wanting more, and there's something to be said for that. It's clearly not a total failure.

I still hate Quidditch, though.

Punch-Drunk Love

It seems fairly well accepted, at least by my circle of friends, that There Will Be Blood is the work of a master, a Great Film, and an almost faultless piece of cinema. But I look at Punch-Drunk Love and I see the same strengths and control and complicated, beautiful emotional power on display here as there. In both films we have a very, very unlikeable hero who we love despite everything, who doesn't play well with others, who runs his own business (and has one trusted employee who overlooks his proclivities), who has a more-than-strained relationship with his family, and who is adversarial with self-serving religious men who exploit the dogma of their faiths. But where There Will Be Blood feels like a confident step into Wellesian or Kubrickian psychological drama... I was about to declare Punch-Drunk Love a response to all the quirky romcoms-for-hipster-dudes like Garden State or the films of Michel Gondry, but it turns out Punch-Drunk Love preceded them all by at least two years. So call it a zeitgeist film, the spirit of the times, the quirky romance turned on its head. Either way, the tone and scope here is quite different from Blood, but both are handled with the same even-handed mastery.

In my estimation, this is about a perfect film. It moves along so fast that you are never bored, and it's so tense with so many things under high pressure that you can't bear the wait for that pressure to release. Each time it finally does, it's both unexpected and fully rewarding. Each scene is a masterpiece of colliding subplots (the exact opposite of Up in the Air, with its compartmentalized storylines; also: today's theme has been men who collect frequent-flyer miles). It is told with the precision of films today that I have focused on so much of late, but with the kind of right-brained subjective reality and filmic poetry that I have been half-lamenting the lack of. For all of its careful camera moves, orchestrated (and subtle) performance cues and strictly structured timing, the story is more abstract than concrete, more irrational than straightforward. I love it.

We watch Barry Egan act like a shy monster, at turns awkward or terrified or violent, and even though he almost never says or does anything that is traditionally pleasant or charming -- he is never comfortable in his skin enough to be nice -- he is one of the most hypnotic and engaging and sympathetic characters in a long time, and that's because we are undeniably living inside Barry's head, hearing the musique concréte soundtrack that clutters his thoughts, whirlwinding through tiny events that feel huge and huge events that feel telescopically far away, right alongside him. Every single moment of joy in the story (a side note: it feels, roughly, like for every positive action in his life there is an equal and simultaneous negative action to correspond; this plays into the "colliding subplots" observation), we are thrilled and cheer him on. Or at least I am and do.

My two favorite romantic comedies of the modern era, if not all time, are undeniably Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and this jagged/polished, cool/tense, manic little gem. I could watch it over and over again. And will.

Up in the Air

The first portion of Up in the Air plays like Fight Club declawed, with a sardonic voiceover using lists of products and concepts to reassure us that our lifestyles based on nihilism and cynicism are thoroughly justified. I know it's based on a novel (and I know the book has a major subplot about Ryan Bingham suffering from cancer, that I can't help but wonder what the movie might have been like with, but in the end I think I like it just fine as-is), and I can't say if the style comes out of the novel or not, but it's hard to imagine this story existing if someone, either Walter Kirn or the screenwriter Sheldon Turner (or maybe Reitman himself, also credited) hadn't seen the Fincher film or read the Palahniuk book. Of course that's just the set-up of the book, and after act one the two tend for the most part to part ways. Where Fight Club goes on to challenge your expectations of anarchy, masculinity, and taking back your agency from a castrative culture, Up in the Air is a challenge to concepts of isolation and casual objectivism and of course, a romantic dramedy about unemployment and getting older, wanting to settle down. Like Juno and Thank You For Smoking, there are themes present but they're pretty unfocused, hitting broad swaths that do not necessarily complement each other, but at least they don't often clash. Reitman, I think, works in thematic subplots more than thematic throughlines. That is to say, sometimes every single scene in a film speaks intelligently to whatever the "theme" or "themes" of a story are, often being about two things at once. Here it feels a little more to me like a sitcom, with an A story, a B story, and a C story, and each plotline has its own intelligent theme and subject matter, but they do not necessarily contribute to each other directly. In Juno this left me feeling like the story was schizophrenic, and began as one thing (a coming-of-age morality tale about a quirky, strong-willed girl and her unexpected pregnancy) and ended as something else (a romcom about picking the right guy and staying with him, dependent on the dull, milquetoast charms of an underplaying Michael Cera in shorty gym shorts). The charm was good but the story felt like two trains colliding. Here the charm is just as good (smarter, wiser, less quirky) and the various plots and themes at least weaved together into more of a single dramatic story.

On a dramatic front, it was fun to look at the characters in this. Anna Kendrick's Natalie kept pushing caricature to the point of breaking, but every time I was on the verge of hating her she'd redeem herself by making interesting choices in performance and character. (An easy example is the moment when she cryingly meets Alex, which is both funny and telling of her character in many ways.) It felt like Natalie had an outer layer of faith in the systems around her (marriage, love, education, her firing-my-videochat system) but that covered an inner core of extreme vulnerability, uncertainty, and doubt bordering on panic. Likewise it felt like Ryan Bingham had an outer layer of cynicism and disdain for those systems, with an inner core of loneliness, regret, and doubt. The inner turmoil and the reversed-polarities of these two made them a nice, if artificial, match-up. (Almost everything about this film feels artificial; you either accept that or you don't.)

The only fault I feel like pointing out here is, on second viewing, it's a lot harder to ever sympathize with Alex, Vera Forgmiga's too-good-to-be-true counterpart for Ryan. As a dark reflection and a worst-case foil for Ryan's emotional and moral states, I get it, but there are a number of times where it becomes clear she's simply living a double life. She may justify it any number of ways, but her no-nonsense strong-woman routine just hides the kind of lying scoundrel men are traditionally considered monsters for being. She's practically the creepy father with a different family in every city he visits. It was good of the movie not to soften that by letting Ryan forgive her entirely (or immediately, anyway; because let's be realistic) but it was odd to breeze over just how bad she was to everyone who loved her in her life. Maybe that's my own personal morals showing through, but for a film about Ryan Bingham's self-examining soul-search to slide right by what felt like a major blow to his self-image -- to have the person you think of as "just like you but with a vagina" revealed as so deceptive (and self-deceptive) seems... well, it feels like in classic films when they'd try to sneak something by the censorship boards, but in reverse. Anyway, something in her character doesn't sit right on second watch, maybe because there aren't enough clues or hints about the nature of her life when the subject comes up, and that paints her as a baldfaced, unabashed liar (worse than a cheater). But for the most part, the film is fun, breezy, but with some dramatic heft and thoughtful stuff going on under the surface. For my money, this is the follow-up I wanted to the very similar Thank You For Smoking. I'll continue considering Juno an aberrant blip on the director's trajectory, until he proves me wrong.

True Grit *

Now that I've seen it once and read copious reviews and critiques of it (in defense of as well as criticisms against it) it's hard not to remember some of those comments when rewatching it. The thoughts in this review especially stick with me, like pointing out the lack of rich character actors and the flatly unpopulated world around our heroes, and the opinion that the epilogue seems to undo the story.

At first, I felt I agreed entirely with the two comments. For one, the Coens are usually the very best character-actor casters in the business, and every walk-on in every film usually feels distinct and well developed, but here it's hard to deny the dearth of developed bit parts. The auctioner, the funeral man, the bear-headed dentist, the young man shot in the leg, everybody feels a little Coenesque (Coeny?) but nobody feels as fleshed out or gorgeously quirky as the gas station man in No Country For Old Men or the girls telling Marge about the "funny lookin'" guy from Fargo. But then I started to think, maybe (surely!) it's not an oversight: maybe it's to keep the emphasis of the story on Mattie, Rooster, and La Boeuf (and to a lesser extent the antagonists of the story, Ned Pepper and Tom Chaney). Dramatically, it's a road movie about three distinct characters all chasing a man who's done wrong. Dramatically, the interplay between them and the intricate mismatches of their desires drive the story. Thematically, they each have different representative motives for chasing Chaney: Mattie represents direct eye-for-an-eye vengeance; La Bouef represents the law; Rooster Cogburn represents mercenary killing. One hunts for family/personal reasons; one hunts for legal/community reasons; one hunts for the value of the prize. That's oversimplifying, but the dynamic exists whether or not I overcategorize things. The point is, both dramatically and thematically, with such a simple story, it might actually muddy things up and diminish the impact if we gave too much credence to the world around these three. Or anyway, that's a thought.

And then there's the end. [SPOILERS!] I'm really just not sure what to do with it, but to be fair I felt that way about No Country at first, and the only way I got over it was to let go and allow it to be what it is. The "missing reel" ending of No Country For Old Men, in which Llewellyn dies offscreen, demands you accept it without justification, and that feels like part of the message. Similarly, the "quarter century is a long time" denouement to True Grit seems in part to exist specifically to undermine and subvert all or most your assumptions about how "these kinds of stories" are supposed to end. In fact, the tone shift begins earlier, and is much more gradual. I'd have to see it again to say for sure, but I think it happened just after La Boeuf shot Ned Pepper and got brained by Chaney, and just as/before Mattie murders Chaney for killing her father and tumbles backward into the mine shaft. From that point on, the plucky-adventure tone fades away and -- just when you assume the mission is over and the heroes can all rally together, congratulate each other and begin the long journey home -- things get, for lack of a better word, real. The romanticism dissolves and the viscerality and mortality of the old west rears its head. What looks like a solution to her problem (the soldier's desiccated corpse and the shiny knife in his belt) proves much deadlier than expected, as her would-be savior's chest cavity is full of writhing, just waking rattlesnakes. Before Cogburn (almost literally appearing out of nowhere) can save her, transformed from one-eyed drunken oaf into knight in shining armor scaling down into the well (rather than up into the tower), Mattie is bit, and despite efforts to suck out the poison (this itself a visceral and frightening moment that feels like a dash of "realism"), there's nothing to be done.

And so Cogburn abandons La Boeuf on the cliff face, dazed but mostly all right (and this is the last we will see or hear of him; even Old Mattie does not know if he ever came down the mountain alive), and races her pony Little Blackie wildly back toward civilization. The ride is exhaustive, and in order to keep Blackie racing at full speed, ignoring the horse's own failing body, Cogburn stabs him in the flank. This only buys them a little more time, however, and eventually thee horse succumbs and collapses with them on it, and Cogburn is forced to euthanize the animal with a single resounding shot. (Last time I talked about the crucial role guns play in the story; here is another example, the gun as brutal mercy.) Each step of this arduous journey back to civilization is harsher and harder to accept than the step before it, each showing a little more cruelty and coldness in the world. And to top it off, even when Rooster Cogburn carries her in his own arms the rest of the way, collapsing about twenty yards from the door and firing his gun (!!) to wake the inhabitants of the cabin, it wasn't nearly enough. Mattie loses her arm. Cogburn disappears away, to die some twenty-five years later as part of a traveling roadshow parody of the man he and others (like Cole Younger and Frank James) once were. Mattie grows up with the same hard-minded, icewater-cold demeanor, and at some point between fourteen and forty that stops being charming. One-armed and slightly shrewish, she never marries, misses her chance at reconciliation with the men with whom she'd bonded so beautifully, and presumably dies alone. And that's your ending, as unromantic and stark as you can get.

According to the review-link above, this end suits the book because the book is told entirely from Old Mattie's point of view and in essence, part of the story is that the joke is on her, our unreliable narrator. But here we do not know Old Mattie, and the actress is frankly kind of a lump who speaks only two or three short, curt non-voiceovered lines, and so the ending can't help but feel jarring. Again, maybe (surely?) this isn't an oversight or accident. Maybe (surely!) the Coens knew just what they were doing -- in fact, it is hard to imagine otherwise. So I have to assume this conscious de-romaticization and distancing is part of the point here, and that like the "missing reel" in No Country For Old Men, we are absolutely meant to have our assumptions denied and yet our dramatic expectations answered. If you include here the (wonderful) ending of A Serious Man, it's clear with their recent films that the Coens are confident enough in their storytelling that they want to leave you on very unsure footing when you walk away. These are not certain worlds with easily tied-up endings and convenient morality, but neither are they chaotic worlds with unraveling loose-ends and nihilistic moral anarchy. In fact these are carefully messy worlds that reflect just what the Coen Brothers want to reflect from our world.

So I guess the bottom line is, I can't quite dismiss the criticisms people have raised against this film, though maybe I can see some logic behind the choices made. Also, like those raising the criticisms in the first place, I do think this is an undeniably amazing film, but they have set the bar so high with their last two that True Grit can't help but feel simpler, plainer, and more straightforward, even with some of the challenging choices made. It's hard to complain about filmmakers making a couple of movies so good that their follow-up can't quite top it. Maybe it should be said, it was wise of them not to try.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

The Fighter *

It feels fitting that this is the last movie I'll watch in 2010. In a way it's pretty emblematic of this year in American cinema: it's very good, but it's not really great -- and to be fair, like much of what I saw this year, it doesn't seem to be aiming for greatness. It's got really great direction, but the story is so basic and by-the-numbers that it was impossible not to play along in my head. It's perfectly cast, and really well-directed, there's some really nice sound design and editing choices that help the story rise above the ordinary, and some understated but very intentional camerawork that does the same, but for the most part The Fighter is about as straightforward as the film's title. I know I've said this before, but 2010 seems like a year where Hollywood forwent any kind of ambition or pretense toward excellence, and settled for solidly made, workmanlike, unchallenging fare. The reason there's no lock for "Best Picture" for me is because nobody shot for the stars. To follow that metaphor, they all seem to have agreed to aim collectively for a low orbit. Successful but not transcendent. Worth your ten bucks but that's it.

But enough about the state of cinema. The Fighter feels like it's really Christian Bale's story more than Mark Wahlberg's, or rather Micky (Wahlberg) is clearly our protagonist but like a million stories (off the top of my head, think The Great Gatsby), the guy who the action is about is not always the guy the story is about. I think it's the right choice, letting Dicky (Bale) outshine his little brother the hero, as he's the larger than life character here. The cadre of shrill women led by Alice the mother was almost too much for me to bare, but they made a nice tidal force that showed the character of Charlene and especially Micky's father George, and without them to stand as obstacles the story would have collapsed. Still, I'm glad I'm not stuck in a room with them. Yikes.

The story moves a little fast, but it has to, and other than a couple of overly obvious lines (like Charlene telling Micky that his family runs his life -- yeah, okay, we get that by now, thanks) it's a pretty sharp script. Again, everything about this works, but it doesn't even approach a best-of list for me because it's all so plain. Maybe I'm just not into the kitchen-sink drama approach to filmmaking; clearly I want film to be more and do more, to aim higher. Originally I felt my perspective on this year's films felt more or less objectively qualitative, but maybe the trends of the year are just going against my more personal, obviously subjective expectations and desires. I'll have to talk to some of my friends, like my dear roommate Joseph, who appreciates the more down-to-earth storytelling more than I (of late) do. Stuff to think about.

But I stand by my original comment, that 2010 was a year without ambition for Hollywood and American independent cinema. Well, so it goes. Even without greatness, we've had a large number of good films this year, so maybe I should stop complaining. (Yeah, that'll happen.)

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

Toy Story 3

I don't have a lot to add to what I said last time I watched this. I'm impressed again by the economy of the script and how it pays its due to the themes and relationships of the first two films. There isn't a single beat that happens just because it "has to"; everything comes first and foremost out of character.

To rehash: The first Toy Story movie sets up a world of sentient toys and their relationships to their kids, and challenges its two heroes by having them compete for position of alpha, all while teaching them the nature and value of being a toy (and not a real space ranger, or cowboy, etc.). It's clearly a story about new toys and favorite toys -- that is, it's about a toy's novelty. The second movie considers the nature of toys as collector's items and mass-produced consumer goods, and it challenges and threatens the characters' idea of what they think a toy should be. It's clearly about the middle-stage of a toy's life and about lost toys -- that is, it's about a toy's legacy. And here, in part 3, we explore what happens when toys aren't wanted anymore, we challenge the faith and loyalty toys put in their kids, and we deal with some hard truths about the finite nature of love, youth, fantasy, and devotion. It's clearly about the final stage of a toy's life, retiring, moving on, and being forgotten; it's about the finite lifespan of things, even if those things are cyclical -- and so, if Toy Story is about novelty, and Toy Story 2 is about legacy, then Toy Story 3 is about a toy's mortality.

I put this on after a discussion of how dry the year has been. There's been a good number of good films, but a dearth of great ones. Not many have risen above in that way where I can pretentiously say, "Wow, now this is cinema." What I mean is, not a lot of films feel like they'll be discussed ten years from now. The Social Network maybe, and on a smaller scale films like Winter's Bone and The Ghost Writer. And then there's Scott Pilgrim and, of course, this film -- which led me to say, only half kidding, "Hell, maybe Toy Story 3 really does have a shot at the Best Film Oscar this year." (In truth, I'd put my money on The Social Network, but nothing feels remotely like a lock.) So I watched it again. It's certainly worthy of a nomination, though it feels weird to reward a part-three of anything, even one so goddamn strong. (Though it wouldn't be the first time.) Anyway, it holds up to a second viewing, without question, and actually moves a lot faster than I remembered. In fact, it kept my attention long after when I should have gone to bed.

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)

Of course I like this movie. It's such a poetically humanistic movie, relishing in the small pleasures and tiny magical moments of being alive and human. It's not the first time theology or literature has suggested that angels live in awe and envy of mankind (if memory serves, Neil Gaiman's short story "Murder Mysteries" is one of my favorite explorations of this theme), but here it's done so viscerally and with such straightforward simplicity that you aren't simply told that angels envy us, you're shown how and why. At a remove, the angels aren't burdened with the distractions of being human and see the beauty of it instead, tiny inexplicable moments like a woman closing her umbrella in the rain and allowing herself to get soaked, that the angels here call "spiritual moments." This is a cinematic poem to what's so great about being alive.

It's also a story about being "at a remove" from life, of the importance and value in being more than just an observer of human nature, and getting your hands dirty in the muck and mess of it all. It's not nearly enough to sit back and watch, appreciate, admire, ponder; in Wings of Desire the pleasure of cold hands, smoking and coffee, or kicking up sand outweighs the most poetic thought or seemingly transcendent observation. All art falls victim to this distancing, and is therefore inferior to mere life, to mere living, even to suffering or distraction. It's a lesson I fight with every day myself, to be honest, and so again: of course I love this movie.

There's not much I can say about it, only because there's so many little things I'd love to say about it. Its use of color, light, performance and photography are all brilliant, intricate, and stunning. The editing especially carries the story as we cut from disparate scene to disparate scene or even intercut an unrelated but beautiful image into a moment. When Marion delivers her monologue at the end to Damiel in the same tone and rhythm as the onslaught of inner voices we've heard throughout, we know that what she is saying carries the weight and vulnerability of truth; she is revealing herself completely in this moment, speaking the language of the secret inner self. The interjections to Cassiel, to Peter Falk (!), to Homer lamenting a changed world, are all profound and perfect counterpoints to the main story of Damiel's fall (and his fall for Marion, so to speak).

The movie always stays with me in a million ways, leaving me wondering about life, the universe, and everything, but this time I'm also left with a strange thought: [SPOILER] if Peter Falk fell from grace as an angel twenty or thirty years ago, then who is the grandmother he is thinking about when wandering the wrecked plaza and seeing "the station where all the stations end"?

Robin and the 7 Hoods

Musicals are a funny genre. I guess I did grow up on some, but only a special few, and they were never really my thing. So watching them now, with critical eyes, is interesting. The thing they remind me the most of are Muppet movies, with winkingly hammy performances and an obtuse and circuitous plot that doesn't really reward much inspection. Despite them not being "my thing," they sure are a lot of fun. It's hard to disapprove when everybody is having so much fun. Watch Peter Falk do an Italian crime boss (with the ever-so-Italian name "Guy Gisborne"); watch Bing Crosby roll through a rat-a-tat assault of three-dollar words; watch Sammy Davis, Jr, do a surprisingly funny song and dance routine about loving his guns. It's just a fun world.

To the extent that the plot or themes matter, this is the story of a smalltime hood who becomes a celebrity for giving to charity. Somehow this makes him a more successful hood (the best I can figure is, more people come to his speakeasy and gamble/drink because he gives the proceeds to orphanages and soup kitchens), and this continues to snowball until the jealous mob boss Gisborne and the confusingly devious Marian each want a piece of the action. Considering that crime is the name of the game here, it's hard to see how Gisborne can't win with his 7-to-1 manpower, massive empire -- stolen from Marian's father, Big Jim (a cameo from Edward G. Robinson, no less), though he managed to convince the revenge-hungry Marian that the sheriff was behind it all. Plus, Marian seems to drop the whole "I'll pay you any amount to avenge my father" as soon as Gisborne has the sheriff murdered, even though it sure looked like every crimelord in the city (except Robbo and his "merry men") partook in the murder simultaneously. Once dropped, Marian becomes a conniving mastermind, convincing the weaker willed men around her one by one to front her as she counterfeits money and hides behind Robbo's Robin Hood image.

It's interesting that every (halfway successful) attempt against Robbo is done by using public opinion against him. First he's framed for the Sheriff's murder, but it doesn't stick because Gisborne and his cronies try a little too hard. Then the funny-money gig blows up in his face (even though it was started by Little John and Marian while Robbo was being tried for murder) and again, it's public opinion vs Robin Hood. That's a nice touch.

I'm not sure what to make of the end -- our three main heroes dressed as Salvation Army Santas and ringing bells while Allan A. Dale (heh) runs off with Marian and -- as far as I can tell -- the accompanying fortune. Our plucky sort-of-anti heroes accept their fate with something akin to humility, sing Alan A. Dale's own song "Don't Be A Do-Badder" and carry on. Sure, they're merry men to the end, and Robbo and his men never do any real wrong (except for gambling and liquor, and some destruction of private property and so forth), but what does it mean that the prissy man who runs the orphanage gets the (evil) girl and the (dirty) money, and our relatively upstanding heroes get the shaft? Your guess is as good as mine.

But musicals are fun worlds. Like I said, everybody has fun, and it doesn't quite matter if it makes sense. And now, I'm neglecting a houseful of family on Christmas Eve, so I should get going.

The New World

I know there are significantly longer cuts of this film, but the original DVD release is the only version I have, and the only version I have seen. I also know Terence Malick is somewhat notorious for his shooting and editing style, but I do not know the details of that style well enough to speak with authority. All I can do is judge the film based on the version I've seen, and speak of the pacing and style of what there is, not how it was made or what is missing.

All that is a prelude to saying, despite it's two-plus hour length and feeling of completeness (and pleasanty slow pace), it feels like this film should be about an hour longer, at least. It feels epic in that impossible, Malicky way, and it deals with such a broad swath of history so breezily that it ends up feeling like it wants more. Entire patches of proto-American history, or of Pocahontas's life, whip by in a single shot -- elements as crucial as John Smith's deposition or Pocahontas's pregnancy and childbirth. Rarely does the dialogue carry the story directly, though one beautiful scene between John Smith and Pocahontas in England does a wonderful job of letting the characters finally speak with meaning ("Did you ever find your Indies, John? You will," she says. He looks at her sadly, and after a moment replies, "I may have sailed past them.")

But the real story here is in the subtext, which is rich and could probably be unpacked for ages. Single images convey so much information -- John Rolfe pokes his head out the window of his house to watch "Rebecca" in the field: Rolfe leans out from the security and safety of civilization without ever leaving it, and admires the lady gently taming the wilderness. John Smith spends the majority of his story in shackles of some sort, including the shackles of being President of Jamestown, and has very little agency of his own in the story -- that he does not buckle, that he exercises what little will he has in service of his own heart is telling.

That this story gets away without having any real antagonists is also telling. This is a history without victors and conquereds, and of our three primary male leads (John Smith, John Rolfe, and Chief Powhatan) are all acting out of love, not out of malice, or greed, or jealousy, or possessiveness -- and not coincidentally, all are motivated by believing Pocahontas is the greatest treasure the world's ever seen. Although the backdrop of this story is the pre-infancy of America and the intersection of English colonists and Algonquin "naturals," this is actually the simplest love story of all time -- a love triangle where nobody fights anybody over anything. In fact, so little conflict actually happens (w.r.t. the story's primary plot, the love story) that the entire thing could be boiled down to a simple: She falls in love with suitor 1, but suitor 1 is forced to leave her; he lies and convinces her he's died so she can move on, and she allows herself to be wooed and married by suitor 2; she discovers suitor 1 is still alive and feels conflicted; suitor 2 loves her enough to let her go, and she explores her feelings for suitor 1, discovering that things have changed; she returns to suitor 2 a happier woman. (That's the complicated version! The short version might be as simple as "She has to choose between her first flame and her faithful husband and chooses the faithful husband.")

In other words, The New World is a meditation on the politics of staking claim to another's property (land, wife). The wife realizes, after some deliberation, that the newer claimant is the proper one, though she dies when she leaves her original love behind. The land, we know, after much "deliberation" of sorts, will remain in the hands of its new claimant as well, and perhaps it too dies when it leaves its original love (the "naturals") behind. But Pocahontas assures her husband that all things pass, and because they leave behind a child who lives all is well. Is it crazy to wonder if Malick is suggesting that yes, it's tragic that America went from the hands of its natives into the hands of colonists and takers, but all eras must pass, and because America's children live on, all is well?

Food for thought, which Malick films are beautifully, resplendently, amazingly full of.

Black Swan *

Upon second viewing, I'm really left with the same impression as from my first viewing, only heightened: the same antsiness or impatience with certain repeated beats, the same detachment and distance from what's going on and who it's happening to. It occurs to me, in fact, that my emphasis on the precision of the storytelling (which led me to think on precision in filmmaking in general) comes right out of the story's themes -- how could I not come away pondering the dichotomy between precise attempts at dramatic "perfection" and the looser, "losing oneself" naturality that must be achieved to really "transcend"? It's right there in the text.

And in that sense, I think Black Swan plays out like the most direct metaphor for artist-versus-art Aronofsky has laid out yet. Just as how everybody read Inception as a manifesto for Nolan's approach to filmmaking, this might be an analogy for Aronofsky's style, and maybe Nina Sayers is an analog for how Aronofsky sees himself. The majority of his fims are precise, philosophically rich, clinically well-produced films about characters either struggling to or struggling not to let go. If the line is drawn between control and imprecision, Darren Aronofsky clearly (and accurately) places himself firmly as one on the controlled camp, though he seems to look longingly across the divide. He acknowledges that the best of the best are the times when the two sides come together impossibly, and he seems to yearn almost desperately to find that place himself. But like the Coens, both Andersons (master P.T. and hipster Wes), Nolan and Fincher and others, he isn't known for letting go. The argument makes me want to revisit The Fountain, which feels to me like it might be his boldest move toward letting go and losing himself to a story that's more poetry than prose, but I haven't seen it in years and I can't say I'm not tainting my memory by trying to place it as a fascinating outlier among his works.

Black Swan holds up for a second viewing, but for me it still feels a little too arm's-length, too deliberate and tightly plotted, and Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassell -- though they all give really good performances -- never rise above feeling like performances. In fact, the whole film reminds me of a Sean Penn or Daniel Day Lewis performance: a profound impersonation of every tic and subtle gesture that's just a little too spot-on and accurate, and comes off as calculated rather than organic and real. Most Coen Brothers films strike me like this to varying degrees (and I love and respect them, and Aronofsky, and Day Lewis and Penn, quite a lot, so bear that in mind as I lay down the critical hammer here), but it's always the ones that feel like more and less than mere performance that for me will stand out and rise above. Black Swan isn't quite that for me. It's too perfect.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.

TRON: Legacy *

What worked about TRON: Legacy: For one, the mythology is strong, interesting, dynamic. It's a pretty good evolution of the world. For another, the themes and philosophy are generally strong, in that there are themes and philosophy and they suit the story and, for the most part, the story takes pains to (very lightly) explore them as it goes. For a third, the aesthetic of the world takes a little getting used to (3D is notoriously dimmer than the glasses-free 2D, and for this story to rely on so much endless black with shimmery glass and white neon challenges that a little) but once you do it's pretty good. The world is built well and feels consistent, lived-in, and larger than just the scenes we're given.

What didn't work about TRON: Legacy: In a word, the script. The script does not work. It's like someone took a lot of work structuring your classic hero's journey and building up the protagonists and antagonists on interesting paths, made sure all the beats made sense, and then handed the script to a tenth grader. The characters do just what is needed to keep the story moving but about half of their actions lack any cohesive motivation (most notably [SPOILER] the surprise reveal of TRON and his reversal from bad guy to good guy). The pacing and plot itself stumbles about as often as not and more than once fails to stick a landing (like the weird Ziggy Stardust-Merovingian sequence and the "light-jet" fight). And the dialogue... oh good lord, what dialogue. I can sum up what's wrong with the script with the following exchange, between Quorra (a program, curious about the real world) and Sam Flynn (a user), as they discuss a sunset:

Quorra: "What's it like?"
Sam: "The sun?"
Quorra nods.
Sam: "I've never had to describe it before." (He thinks. The music is soft, thoughtful. They lean close together -- an intimate moment, as he shares his world with her.) "Warm. Radiant. uh... beautiful."
She is clearly moved by this poetic description.
(end of scene.)

It really smacks of an early draft, with placeholder dialogue that nobody ever went back to spruce up. This kind of flimsy exchange is peppered throughout the story, whenever a good kicker of a line or bit of clever back-and-forth is meant to advance the characters or story. It is painfully obvious that nobody even tried.

So on the plus side, we have mythology, theme, and world; on the minus side, dialogue, plot, and characterization. So in fact, TRON: Legacy is actually a perfect sequel to the original. TRON wasn't exactly a perfect film either, in fact. The original was full of heady, exciting concepts I hadn't seen explored much before, like the user-program/god-man parallels and the idea of an infectious self-awareness spreading from Flynn's interruption of business-as-usual in the computer world. The sequel, too, is full of heady, exciting concepts I haven't seen explored much before, like spontaneously self-aware, functionless programs sprouting up inside the Grid, or the strange dynamic between Clu and Flynn. But neither film even tries to go anywhere with these ideas, preferring instead fight sequences, chases, shoot-outs, and shouty confrontations. It's really surprising how much like my reaction to the first TRON film my reaction to this one is. And in that light, though this film is far from perfect, it's kind of hard to fault it much. And so I'm left with: I'm glad I saw it. But I'm not in love. I'm not even sure if I liked it much or not.

Two closing thoughts: One, there's a weird fake-out where Cillian Murphy shows up at the beginning playing the son of David Warner's Ed Dillinger, the villain from TRON, which is a total waste of both Murphy and the legacy of Dillinger (I'd have absolutely loved to see David Warner show up again, in some capacity) since it went nowhere. He sat in a board meeting, proved himself a genius at computers and spoke with an authority that shut up a panicked room, and then never appeared again. (I suppose in retrospect that he is a plant for a third TRON film, which... whatever... but I'd much rather have seen the return of David Warner.)

And lastly: I miss the Bit. It didn't make any more or less sense than anything else; they should have brought it back. Or brought in a Byte, with 16 different possible opinions and no more.

It's been a weak year, overall, for new films. Plenty of very good ones, plenty of "good enough" ones, not much I've seen this year makes me sit up and say, "Oh my god, this is real cinema," the way I have in years past. I think Winter's Bone is the standout on that list.

Seen at the AMC Century City 15, in 3-D.

The Proposition

There's a point in the movie when Samuel asks Arthur what a misanthrope is. "Is that what we are?" he asks. "Good lord, no," says the brutal, savage, monstrous killer Arthur Burns. "We're a family." It's not terribly subtle, but there's a reason this story can get away with that kind of handholding; there's a reason we are made to see so plainly the contrast between the bandits with the poets' souls and the more cold-hearted citizenry (and especially Eden Fletcher and the British soldiers under Stanley's command). We get it, the civilizers are uncivilized and the rogues are the ones quoting poetry and admiring sunsets. It's not like that reverse-dichotomy hasn't been explored before, is it?

But Nick Cave and John Hillcoat are doing two things here that justify this (in addition to the usual stuff like gripping performances, stunning photography and tightly scripted action). One, they're showing us a world where savagery is beauty, and where violence is poetry -- and not just in a hyperbolic sense. It makes you really feel it, as if it's perfectly rational that a man's head being blown off, or a sudden spear through the chest, are elegant things to behold.

And then there's the end, the reminder that these poet's souls we've been admiring, the seductive legend of a man Arthur Burns and his creepy-charismatic follower Samuel and the rest, who admire nature and live as a family and only want to be left alone, truly are as savage and monstrous and evil as their reputations suggest. The casual, business-as-usual invasion of the Stanleys' Christmas dinner leaves no doubt in your mind who the bad guys are.

But they do make such wonderful, complicated villains. One of my favorite telling lines is Arthur's, when Charlie has a gun to his head. Arthur has just delivered a non-killing (or slowly killing) stab to poor, racist (and oddly-named) Jellon Lamb, and Charlie cocks his pistol at his brother's head. Without even turning, Arthur says in a weary voice, "Why can't you ever just stop me?" I think Arthur is the monster he is because Charlie is his conscience, and in fact Charlie spends the entire film in an almost Hamlet-like fit of indecision, unable to act even though he knows he eventually must. If Charlie can't stop Arthur, then Arthur simply must keep going, keep pushing, keep on being the monster he is. It's not exactly, I think, that he wants to be caught, or stopped, or punished; it's that he wants to find the threshold he cannot cross, or the line that Charlie (his conscience) can't let him step over. He finds it, eventually, in the end, I suppose, but by then so much damage is done, and who's to blame for all we've seen here? "You never should have left us, Charlie," Arthur tells him early on. "We're a family."

Many stories are only as good as their villains. The Proposition has countless strengths beyond just the one, but it doesn't hurt how fascinating a character Arthur Burns is.

π (Pi)

Recently I was discussing the fact that three of the biggest films this year were by Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, and David Fincher (Black Swan, Inception, and The Social Network respectively), and that all three feel like excessively precise films -- like or hate the films, they're undeniably works by masters of their medium, with a tight, confident grip and control over every aspect of production, from the tiniest of details to the grandest of overarching themes. But their expert precision can be as much a burden as it is a strength. In the 70s people complained that the Hollywood New Wave was the first generation of filmmakers who'd graduated from film school, who'd studied nothing except the language of film, and that for all their intelligence and technical wizardry, their films were more about film than about life -- they were at one remove from the subjects. Well this is clearly the generation of filmmakers raised in the shadow of that previous generation; second-gen film students arguably twice removed. Following consciously in the footsteps of Spielberg, Scorsese, Kubrick, Welles, et al, there's a decided lack of looseness to their work. There is almost no improvisation, or randomness, or organic give-and-take. These are artists telling stories from the mind, not from the heart.

As much as I really liked The Social Network and Black Swan, and mostly liked Inception, they had a coldness to them. But so do the best works of P.T. Anderson, the Coens, Wes Anderson (!!), David O. Russell, Jim Jarmusch. It seems to be the trend, this bent toward precision and control. And for the record, I'm not against it. I just named some of my favorite big-name American filmmakers. But it does feel like a one-sided argument.

Pi (much easier to type than its greek-letter numerical title) is an argument for the other side. Imprecise, shot guerilla-style on grainy film, somewhat unhinged and never locking down what it's even about. It feels (now) like the bridge between Eraserhead and Primer. One foot deep into impressionistic psychodrama and one foot deep into the obsessiveness of science and math. It's also obviously a precursor for many or most the elements in Requiem for a Dream -- a film where Aronofsky tried out his hand at precise control before loosening up (a little) for the more abstract The Fountain. I wonder sometimes if the poor performance of The Fountain is what pushed him back in the other direction, toward the more linear and... cerebral is pointedly the wrong word here, but let's say controlled storytelling of The Wrestler and Black Swan.

Aronofsky's always been obsessed with obsession (which is maybe why being at one remove from his subjects comes so naturally), telling stories of characters losing themselves to their passions, or their weaknesses, or (often) simultaneously both. Pi is such an impressively audacious, confident first step, even if (partly because) it's a messy, overly abstract, slightly pedantic piece of madman poetry, a deceptively simple story told from a bent, subjective view that should be offputting but never is. Max Cohen is never unlikable, possibly because his weaknesses are so profound and prevalent, because for all his super-genius and arrogance he is pitifully human. It's a good touch, and there's a lesson in writing a strong protagonist here. He has specific objectives, specific obstacles, identifiable and (sort of) relatable weaknesses, and he's doing cool stuff that maybe we all (a generation of geeks and thinkers) daydream about doing. It's not a perfect film, but it's almost a perfect first film.

Nashville

An impromptu online back-and-forth between a couple of friends about our favorite Robert Altman films (The Long Goodbye and McCabe and Mrs. Miller top my list, but it's a big list) led me to realize I'd never seen Nashville in its entirety. I've seen so many Altman films that I knew just what to expect, of course -- and it's hard not to now see echoes of this throughout a lot of his later films, most especially A Prairie Home Companion, which almost feels like the wiser, calmer, existential counterpart of Nashville.

It's interesting to know that Robert Altman works from other people's scripts; I can't help but wonder how it looked on the page, and how it'd have come out in someone else's hands. (Inferior to this, I'm sure, but still.) It's not just the overlapping dialogue and long takes of deceptively loose camerawork, it's the way scenes unfold as though there's no real point to them. The way he crowds everyone into a single scene and then lets them sort of meander about, blather at each other, or just generally fail to make their points clear. Sometimes that's the point of the character (like Geraldine Chaplin's cringe-inducing BBC reporter) but often it's just sort of the Altman way, a not-too-exaggerated reflection of how people talk when cameras aren't rolling. Scenes just roll around, get to a point eventually or sometimes don't, and then we cut to the next one. I'm not saying that scenes lack a distinct (and layered) reason for being, but the specifics of the scene are often a lot less specific than we're used to seeing in cinema.

The film itself is the intersection of fame and commerce and art (and politics and ego and dread), and nobody and nothing gets off unscathed by the proceedings. Just about everyone in town has the humble dream of making it as a country-music star. In fact so many people have that dream that it becomes oppressive, the endless sea of starry-eyed hope and attention-starved ambition. There are the exploiters and the exploited, the guileless and the savvy, the winners and the losers, and they all revolve in this uneasy orbit together, occasionally colliding -- or, to belabor a weak metaphor, at least altering each other's trajectories with their magnetic pulls. A couple of "real life movie stars" (Julie Christie and Elliott Gould) appear as themselves, and they have no idea who these country stars everyone worships even are; likewise these country stars are only marginally aware of the movie stars. Nashville, we are told, is its own little cosmos. (How's that for driving that metaphor all the way home?)

Additionally, I saw in the credits that all the country-western songs throughout were written by the performers who sang them (except Henry Gibson, whose songs were expected to be universally loved, and so he had some help from the composer). Keith Carradine's in particular struck me as surprisingly solid, and the end of the film wouldn't have worked without the stilted, uncomfortable performance of "It Don't Worry Me" eventually finding its footing and spreading out into a frightened crowd, proving to the world that "this is Nashville, not Dallas." Country music isn't my thing, but the songs here were clearly what made the movie (and, to be more cynical, what made the movie two hours and forty minutes long), and they are charismatic and down-homey and honest feeling, and they don't feel whipped together just to get the job done. Credit to the performers who wrote them, because like I said, I just don't think all of the intricate and clever plotting and complex characterizations would have held together without them.

Now can someone explain to me Jeff Goldblum's character?

It's All About Love

Once upon a time I tried to write a script based on a series of unrelated dreams. I thought it might be nice to just let them fold over each other, let some kind of extremely loose narrative structure develop organically out of whatever came of the experiment. It never got very far, but I sometimes wonder if I will ever again pick it up, try again to make something of it. I'm always tempted, curious enough to keep the idea "alive" in some far-backburner of my mind. I know it would be a sort of surreal, Buñuelian thing at best, but I always wonder.

I read that Vinterberg called this film not "apocalyptic science fiction," but "a dream," and frankly that's a more satisfying way to read this. It's too somnambulatory to work as a science fiction drama, but as a dream, it almost works -- almost. The truth is, It's All About Love is more of a cautionary example than anything else. If I ever did return to that crazy conglomeration of dreams, this might be a best-case scenario of how it might turn out. A critic called it "like Kubrick without the talent," but I'd say it's more like Lynch without cohesion, or clarity, or something -- without quite so much courage of conviction.

The story shifts its narrative direction roughly every ten to fifteen minutes exactly like a dream, and as you might expect some chapters work a lot better than others. The problem mostly lies in trying to connect each chapter to the previous in a meaningful, even if nonliteral, way. I'm frankly not sure you could. There are quite a lot of elements here that are nice (and every single shot is gorgeously photographed), but what they add up to is hard to pin down. I'm pretty sure most people would hate this film -- at best maybe call it an interesting failure. For my money, it's a fascinating piece of work that I'm glad (and frankly surprised) exists, but I don't love it, by any stretch.

The Wild Bunch

I watched this back-to-back as a western double feature with a screener of the Coens' True Grit, and that may have colored my approach here. They certainly have a lot in common. (And full disclosure: I've seen the first half of this several times, but this was the first time that circumstances have allowed me to view the film in its entirety.) Of course the big deal about this film is its depiction of violence as visceral and gruesome, and impactful on the world of the story, not just there to titillate or excite you. Children fill the edges of almost every fight scene, witnessing, sometimes in shock, sometimes in joy and awe. Innocents are mowed down by the law enforcement men (the railroad agents and their hired guns; the junta military) and only mourned by the titular band of robbers, who seem to understand a tacit "soldiers-vs-civilians" attitude toward killing that nobody else does -- though even that is thrown out the window more than once in the story, as violence has a tendency to spread like wildfire and rarely ends well.

There's also of course the same bleak tone at the ending as True Grit, though here much more pronounced and poignant: nearly everyone we are led to care about dies at the end of the film in what is sort of like a hero's massacre and also sort of like a poorly thought out, hollowly pyrrhic victory.

...I'm going to be honest with you here. I wrote a lot more about the bleak ending. Then I wrote a whole long thing about the constant raucous laughter throughout, about how they "party hard," comparing the Wild Bunch gang to vikings and conquistadors. I commented about how they are always laughing at someone else's (one of their own's) misfortune or humiliation. I said all sorts of clever things about how the other characters in the story lacked the moral core that our anti-heroes had. But Safari logged me out of blogspot without warning me, and when I went to hit "post," it was all lost. No amount of hitting "back" resurrected all my work, and I don't feel like doing it all again. (What you're looking at here is the last draft before it fucked me. Thanks, Safari.)

And then I ended with the following, which I had saved in my copy/paste clipboard:

It's a little overlong and meanders in the middle, and it hits a lot of the same notes repeatedly -- which worked, but also wore on me. So while it's not my favorite Pekinpah film (maybe Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia?) or my favorite "revisionist western" (maybe McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, if that counts? or an Eastwood like Pale Rider, Unforgiven or Josey Wales), it's still undeniably a great film, and I'm really glad I finally saw it all the way through.

True Grit

It's always extremely difficult for me to unpack a Coen Brothers film after only a single viewing, and even though this one follows a slightly more linear and direct storyline than many of theirs (possibly owing to its adaptation from a western novel), it still unwinds at a pleasantly unpredictable pace. Mattie Ross is constantly offering up legal advice or threatening legal action, bringing the promise and threat of sterile civilization into the obviously wild Indian Territories. This is met with a variety of reactions, but primarily one of grim acceptance. Nobody scoffs at her, nobody once tells her how ridiculous it sounds to offer an outlaw the name of a good lawyer in a cabin in the deep woods as he faces a Mexican standoff with an ornery and trigger-happy U.S. Marshall. Lucky Ned Pepper is one of many men for whom a lawyer may do precious good; he tells her "I don't need a lawyer, I need a judge." The introduction to the character and M.O. of Rooster Cogburn is through a court hearing. The story is clearly concerned with the intersection of law and lawlessness, and even goes so far as to have Texas Ranger La Boeuf and Mattie discuss the latin terminology for a crime that is "illegal because it is wrong" versus "illegal because of our customs and mores."

Another recurring motif is the use of guns. Of course first and foremost as weapons, and nearly every time a gun goes off it has an impact, either as a shocking burst of instant death (at close quarters) or as a deceptively ineffectual way of putting down an enemy (from a distance): missing when firing is a repeating theme in this story. But guns aren't just weapons in True Grit, but also modes of communication, devices of warning, or even tools for scaring off natural predators like buzzards. The number of times a gunshot is used to communicate at great distances or to signal for help adds a new layer of potency and utility to the already strongly symbolic item.

Also, there is something in the end that I need to spend more time with. [SPOILERS!] What does it mean that La Boeuf never returns (despite some well-played sexual tension between him and Mattie)? What does it mean that Mattie lost her hand, spends her days as a one-armed unmarried seamstress, on her way to full-on crone status? And what does it mean that after it was all over, she missed reconnecting with Rooster by a mere three days, and was left to simply describe everything she'd been through as "adventures"? Does it mean it was all for naught? That revenge ruined her life and never left her, and drove apart the three comrades who had worked together to accomplish it? I am sure I'll have more thoughts when I've seen it more than the one time. It comes out around Christmas, and I know I'll be seeing it then, so it won't be long. But one viewing is never enough to get your head around a film by Coen Brothers.

El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)

After badmouthing this film so resolutely, I felt I had to return to it and give it a fair shake. After all, Pan's Labyrinth is the "spiritual sequel" to The Devil's Backbone, something Del Toro claims in the commentary track but something I (and I think most people) picked up immediately on first viewing of this.

For the most part I agree with my diatribe, that Del Toro is like (probably) every other fantasy or sci-fi director out there, and he is at his best when given a box he has to creatively think his way out of, rather than when he is given every tool in the chest and a limitless sandbox to build a world into. Pan's isn't as bad as I made it sound -- it's incredibly watchable, and exciting and fun and emotional -- but it's not really about much. What does our protagonist want? To escape the miserable world of reality. What stands in her way? Not nothing, exactly, but surprisingly little. The various complications of the adult world (here exemplified by fascists and rebels in 1944 Spain, though honestly couldn't this story work in almost any time, place, and circumstance?) and her own short-sighted hubris, I guess. Does she get what she wants? She does, by dying (an interesting choice, to be sure) and letting her soul wake up as a princess of the Underworld.

Meanwhile, there's the second story going on here, which actually I'm pretty sure gets more screen time: the drama of Captain Vidal and his troops versus the rebels in the woods and his treasonous house-staff. The problem here is they might as well be cartoon characters, they're all so two-dimensional and obvious. The parts are all well performed, but nobody's given much to work with. Vidal is a tyrant and a true clock-watching fascist through and through; the mother is a foolishly good-hearted woman too desperate to see the dangerous man right in front of her for what he really is; the maid and the doctor are your standard-issue double-agent freedom fighters, sneaking supplies from under Vidal's nose out to the rebels; and the rebels are a mostly faceless group of guerillas with sharp-shooters, wounded men and a loving brother among them, who somehow win in the end against all odds (in a major power switch we mostly pass over in favor of chasing Vidal and Ofelia through the hedge maze). None of these roles have much in the way of contradictions or unexpected quirks to their characters; none of them seem to offer much to the tapestry of the story.

Vidal's obsession with having an heir is his Achilles' heel in the war with the woodsmen (in his own words, his "pride" is his weakness), and his savage disinterest in Ofelia's mother's well-being actually aids Ofelia in her quest to escape reality by severing her singular meaningful tie with it. With Mom out of the way, there's almost no reason to mourn the child's passing -- which is to say, if her goal is "to escape reality and become a fairy princess" and she gets there without any real sacrifice, you end the film with the sense that not much was at stake for her. She didn't lose anything (that she hadn't already lost) in order to gain this new thing, and the victory feels cheaper for it. Further, she didn't even make the choice herself. Aside from protecting her infant brother from Vidal, the decision to "shed innocent blood" wasn't a conscious step on her part, and although the Underworld King and Queen claim she completed the final test by shedding her own blood rather than an innocent's, she didn't even put herself in front of the bullet; Vidal's (badassedly off-hand) murdering of Ofelia was a total shock to us and to her, and only happened by good fortune to satisfy the final quest to get the fairy princess back into fairyland.

I'll admit, I think analyzing the story this way is missing the point of the kind of fairy tale being told here. The thing is I can't help it. I watch a film and I read its story and look for meaning, and layers in that meaning. That's what I do. Pan's Labyrinth plays out like a uniquely dark (though perhaps a little too novel-for-its-own-sake) wish-fulfillment story. Little girl is born into a bad life, someone comes along and promises her something better, she perseveres in the face of various obstacles and is granted, in a twisted sort of way, her wildest desire. It's Cinderella. But a little more time spent on fleshing out the dimensions of the characters or tying the various stories together a little more would have gone a long way in taking a gorgeous piece of escapism and making it the masterpiece that Devil's Backbone was. This is more like its prettier, lesser shadow than it is a spiritual sequel, in my eyes. More polish, but less presence.

127 Hours *

I worked in a bookstore when this book came out, and even though I didn't read every book on the shelf it was surprisingly easy to stay abreast of not just the gist but the plots of most books that came through. Somehow, some combination of hearsay, reviews, articles, customer comments and the collective unconscious of everybody reading something added up to having a good working knowledge of a lot of books. Between a Rock and a Hard Place was too gruesome and popular not to know about (though I somehow got it in my head that Aron Ralston had to dismantle his camera to find something sharp enough to [SPOILER] cut his arm off with). Anyway it was a well known story in popular culture, "that story of the one guy who got his arm caught in the rocks and had to cut it off to get out of the canyon alive."

So it's impossible to know how I'd feel about this film if that hadn't been "spoiled" for me. It feels from the beginning like everything's building up to an obvious conclusion, what with the obstacle being "your arm is trapped beneath a boulder" and the objective is "get out of the canyon alive." For much of the story, whether or not it was working, I couldn't shake the fact that we were waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop. It was a nice touch that he tried early and gave up, but even if you didn't know how it ended, what other option is there? From a purely dramatic standpoint, any rescue from another source would eliminate the necessity of the story being so tightly focused on the one and only real character: the story would have to be their story as well, because they would make the choice at the story's climax and our hero would just have gotten lucky. Anyway, I digress. The point is, this is one of those stories where you can't escape the inevitability of your resolution, and so to an extent the story becomes a dreadful waiting game; your audience is anxious for maybe all the wrong reasons.

To its credit, the film is never boring and almost never feels like it's just spinning plates (a little toward the end with the couch of family & friends smiling blandly at the trapped Aron, and with the child's eerie presence during The Scene). It doesn't lean too heavily on flashbacks, and more importantly it doesn't do it in bland conventional ways. For my taste Danny Boyle is too much of a music video director for the kind of visceral story this is, and the rock music and triptych-effect and not-quite-Oliver-Stone framing and cutting diminishes the experience almost as much as it enhances it. The cutting itself is actually very strong, and the shots are always very pretty, but the stylization and short-attention-span mania made things a little too palatable. I should have been dying in my seat as he snaps his bones and saws through his nerves, but instead I was merely cringing. (Credit where it's due: the sound design for those moments, and throughout, was very effective.) Don't get me wrong, this isn't an easy movie I'm quite ready to sit through again (and I mean that in a good way), but it wasn't nearly as difficult as I imagine it could be, and anything less than grueling feels like it sells the ordeal short. (To that end, I'm also surprised at how short the film is and how fast it's paced. It doesn't feel interminable at all, which is directly counter to the experience of our character, and that again strikes me as trying to make palatable what should be an [enjoyably] unpalatable experience.)

Franco's great throughout, though. I'd never seen Freaks and Geeks, and the first time I saw him was as Harry Osborn in the first Spider-Man movie. I distinctly remember saying afterward, whoever played Green Goblin's son was too good for such a small role, and I was looking forward to seeing the Hobgoblin show up in the sequel. He's an actor that never quite steals a scene but tends to shine just a little bit brighter than whoever else is in the room. Here, of all things, I could imagine his career following the chameleon-like trajectory of Johnny Depp's, but maybe with a little more sense of humor and a little less of that Daniel Day-Lewis/Sean Penn/Johnny Depp impersonation-style externalized performance. (Again, I digress.) The point is, he's very good.

Bottom line, 127 Hours totally works. It delivers what it promises, and it's not easy to sit through. But the style of it kind of watered down the tension for me, and the pacing made over five days trapped beneath a rock feel icky but deceptively bearable.

Seen at the Regal Fox Tower.