C Sick

For a week or two now, I've been rejoicing at the prospect of all these Fall movies opening, looking forward to each release with aplomb and a positive predisposition, especially after that late-August and early-September run where I got a big, inspiring lift from almost every trip I took to the cinema: from the acerbic but energetic 2 Days in Paris to the engrossing and nearly profound Deep Water to the urgent and astute No End in Sight to the shrewdly discomfiting and illuminating Day Night Day Night to the clever and inordinately entertaining King of Kong, which I paid to see twice, sparking a contagious audience ovation both times before the thing was even finished.

But speaking of "finished," everything since then has just been so....blah. I feel how monotonous my updates must seem, trapped in this "C" range I can't get out of. So this is just an open letter of good intent: I will be thrilled, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, to credit a movie a little higher, even to tread into B or B– territory for something that won't shake anybody's world but at least delivers craftily or consistently or stylishly on a solid story or rewarding theme. But so far, I just can't do it. Superbad begins with a delicious credit sequence and 20 solid minutes of ornately uproarious dialogue, well-delivered by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, but the belly-laughs turn precipitously to belly-flops once this extraordinarily crappy-looking movie gives itself over for way, way too long to twin plots that aren't interesting and don't work: procuring booze against overfamiliar and arbitrary obstacles, and noodling around with two unfunny cops who never once stake a claim as actual characters. There's a little pick-up toward the end, partly because Martha MacIsaac and especially Emma Stone are so ingratiating (if sadly underutilized and underconceptualized) as the objects of obscure teenage desire, but that long, turgid middle section throws a big, beer-gutted shadow over the whole enterprise. Not superbad, but prettybad, and superdisappointing. C–

3:10 to Yuma and In the Valley of Elah were probably always destined for aesthetic conservatism and middlebrow limitations in theme, but there is no reason for their narratives and character studies to have veered so badly off course. Both films feature strong lead performances, from Russell Crowe in Yuma, and from an arresting but restrained Tommy Lee Jones and an appropriately disillusioned Charlize Theron in Elah. The unusual, intriguing musical score in Yuma and the ragged, enigmatic swatches of embedded video in Elah deserve credit for tugging smartly against the boilerplate plot dynamics and visual lifelessness of both movies. This problem is most aggravating (and surprising) in Yuma, which doesn't even try to draw meaning, vitality, or even a pretty postcard image from the engulfing desert, instead hemming its actors into sallow, unflattering, and relentless close-ups. Worse, Yuma never gets near, much less inside, the head of Christian Bale's protagonist (his blank perf doesn't help), which makes it even harder to understand why Crowe, who rightly thinks he's playing a wily and incorrigible villain, seems only too willing to put Bale's needs and priorities above his own in sequence after sequence, especially the listlessly edited climax. For its part, Elah doesn't just bungle the "mystery" aspects of its script but almost sadistically works against them, leaking tension the way a bullet-blasted tire loses air, threading second-tier characters in and out at random, and selecting a culprit for its head-scratching crime virtually at a whim (despite the character's impressive alibis and lack of persuasive motivation). Elah has to know this resolution doesn't work, and that it lethally neutralizes the whole movie by extension, because Haggis barely films it; we overhear that a shockeroo confession has taken place between scenes, one of many signs that Elah's cutting-room floor is swampier than a trash compactor on the Death Star. Both films: C–

After watching all these men try to score babes and settle scores, I thought a long-delayed trip to the worrisome Becoming Jane might at least offer a refreshing idiomatic contrast. Sadly, the story is as thin as I had heard, the production design and costumes are all exactly what you'd expect, and the presumed link between creative genius and diaristic transcription of one's own experience is a jaw-dropper of an ingrained insult to the film's subject. Say this for Jane, though: unlike the above films, the movie actually improves from a wobbly beginning, as director Julian Jarrold does an unexpectedly sturdy job of evoking the visual coldness and dispassionate hardness of the world in which Jane Austen (or at least this movie's Jane Austen) wrote her incandescent but never entirely optimistic fictions. If the basic story cheapens the author and her gifts, and James McAvoy never seems like a great love (instead of, say, a scrappy playmate), the color palette and orchestration of light temper the rampant romanticization and nostalgic sanctification rather nicely. Now someone just has to teach that cinematographer not to scalp the actors. C

The early-fall documentaries have been as problematic as the fiction films. In the Shadow of the Moon has scored some very generous critical notices, but compared to the urgency and the discursive sophistication of something like No End in Sight—which doesn't just evoke a more timely concern but presents a genuinely fresh take on the war as a massive crisis of Iraqi unemployment and systematic disenfranchisement—In the Shadow of the Moon just turns the camera on while nine retired astronauts offer interesting but unsurprising recollections about their trips into space ("It was really something! It changed my life!"). Neither their level of introspection nor the composited stock footage of lunar landings and cosmic panoramas adds anything new to one's understanding of the space program or to one's most automatic and time-honored visual iconographies. The men relive their memories without the film doing anything to make them our own, much less give us anything substantial to chew on or reconsider. The independently produced Helvetica has a fresher, more surprising subject—the history of a typeface, specifically, this one, which anyone who has filed U.S. tax forms or taken a New York City subway will instantly identify. The world of type designers and graphic artists proves colorful and intriguing for the first 20 minutes, and for that same duration, the film makes a solid case for the ubiquity but also the flexibility of Helvetica script. Unfortunately, someone convinced director Gary Hustwit to make a feature instead of an extended short, which means that Helvetica spirals into ever more redundant interviews with less and less eloquent designers of less and less apparent pedigree. The visual collages of signs and public text aren't always discernibly in Helvetica, to say nothing of ridiculous filler images of sidewalk crowds, coffee cups, and old LP covers. The film tries to play its subject from as many angles as the graphic-design world has tried to play Helvetica, with the analogous result of overexposure and exhausted interest, and the added sin of leaving key questions unanswered and more promising inroads untraveled. Both films: C

Amidst all of these surging C's, I wonder if I'm being slightly harder than I need to be on Neil Jordan's The Brave One and Julie Taymor's Across the Universe. The former at least accommodates some daring camera angles and taut sequences near its beginning, as well as some welcome attempts to trouble the stylistic mandates of realism; the latter yields four or five genuinely stirring images (strawberries nailed to a canvas, bone-white women and ceramic masks floating like genocide victims in gray water), and Taymor at least wants to push cinematic depth of field and risk extremes of figuration and superimposition in ways that James Mangold and Paul Haggis, more comfortably ensconced in the Hollywood system, will never even consider. But, for all that—well, the movies suck. A lot. Precisely as he did in In Dreams, Jordan fails utterly to set rational boundaries around his fairy-tale idioms in The Brave One, winding up with a totally indigestible mix of the overblown, the sadistic, and the unpersuasive. Meanwhile, the script ties itself in contortionist's knots to find ways of jerry-rigging, excusing, and abstracting the Jodie Foster character's outlandish acts of mercenary violence. The actress herself is lost somewhere between repeating all the established tropes of her woman-besieged subgenre and wallowing like some reckless exhibitionist amidst the seamy iconographies of her own troubled star persona: gun-wielding assassins, publicity-shy celebrity, homoerotic clinches with a teenage hooker, butch haircuts, veiled "is she or isn't she" innuendos. You leave the film feeling sorry for Foster but also angry at her, baffled at Neil Jordan, and helpless to explain why actors as good as Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, and Mary Steenburgen can't find a movie that cares remotely about their characters. Across the Universe is less ethically offensive than The Brave One, and for a movie that does almost nothing right, I was surprised at how easy this one was to spend 131 minutes with, hoping that Taymor's capricious visions would actually cohere into something, if only in her next film. As far as this one goes, what can I say? The singing is awful, the songs are shoehorned into generic and disconnected contexts, none of the characters have more than a single facet, entire transitions are palpably missing (how about those steamboat crossings?), and the politics are so ludicrously simplified and self-contradictory they make Rent look like Brecht. Is love all you need, or not? Hard to say, and even harder to sing. Plus, just like The Brave One, Across the Universe has nothing to say to, for, or about black people, but doggone if it can't stop panning to and over them, reminding us that They are Wise™, and also picturesque and sonorous when they grieve. Though this grief sometimes takes the discordant and stupidly opportunistic form of gospel choirs singing "Let It Be." Which still isn't as bad as brand-new acquaintances singing "A Little Help from My Friends" or bewildered-looking actors who a) sing "Dear Prudence" to a girl, named Prudence!, in a locked bathroom, b) float through a thinly Photoshoppy spacetime continuum while doing same, and c) exchange patronizing winks and smiles because Prudence is a total lesbian...which allows Across the Universe to add one more item on its rainbow-brite List of Totally Deep Themes. Both films: D+

And so now I'm left with the best but also the most frustrating of all of these September releases, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Cronenberg's London is more consistent and credible than Jordan's New York City, but Eastern Promises keeps holding itself back from really thinking or feeling its way through the city, opting for anodyne interiors rather than building on the potential of its unique take on London locations. Like The Brave One and Across the Universe, Eastern Promises is dogged at portraying for us a world of ethnic and cultural life that it doesn't seem to know anything about, so that the hoariest clichés of music, dialogue, vocal affectation, and sinister connotation are enlisted to form the movie's amalgamated "Russianness." Steve Knight's shaky script needs Naomi Watts' Anna to find the diary that catalyzes the plot but then never thinks of a single other reason for her to be in the movie, much less to be the second lead. Unsatisfied by Vincent Cassel's heavily insinuated desire for Viggo Mortensen's steely, reticent chauffeur, Knight writes an overstated episode where Cassel forces Mortensen to strip and have sex with a prostitute right where he can observe—thus constituting the most patently absurd scenario of pathetically lurid and dramatically implausible homoerotic longing since Judi Dench danced appallingly in Cate Blanchett's living room. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and composer Howard Score admirably resist repeating their earlier triumphs with Cronenberg, but they both seem to take the new film's edgy/scruffy aesthetic to an ill-advised extreme of crudeness and cliché, and the big finale is as artificial and warped as the one in The Brave One (well, almost).

Still, the reviews have largely been raves. I concede that Mortensen is excellent: he is terse, slithery, intellectually potent, and physically articulate, and best of all, he is morally illegible in a way that often feels remarkably fresh in such a genre-bound entertainment. Unlike Cronenberg (although certainly with Cronenberg's intensive assistance), he has fully risen to the challenge of assaying unworthy material and justifying how a real artist can perceive and realize the potential in a heap of empty contrivance. But the bathhouse interlude you've heard so much about disrupts the style and flow of the piece much too drastically—it's the only scene where Cronenberg comes alive, but his priorities are perplexing and the tonal register, especially regarding the exaggerated violence, is off—and I left the film wondering what to make of that barbershop prologue, wondering whether the dead girl's voiceovers from her diary were exactly necessary, wondering why you'd introduce a huge plot twist ten minutes from the end of your picture and then do nothing at all with this new information, and wondering what in the hell an "eastern promise" could possibly be. Cronenberg always deserves a second shot, and maybe I have underrated Eastern Promises because it so drastically refuses to take shape as any of the multiple movies I would have liked it to be. But my second trip to Spider in 2002 only affirmed that a hamstrung Cronenberg movie still feels hamstrung on the second go-round, and I'm increasingly suspicious that this Promise simply isn't kept. A C+ isn't out of the question, but then I remember that teenaged-screenwriter device of the traumatic miscarriage, and the underlit hospital and the crunchy quality of the curbside London light, and the oogah-boogah way in which the movie keeps trying to scare us with the words "Vory v Zakone", and Armin Mueller-Stahl's way-too-long pause before the words "a diary?", and the creaky coincidence of the right nurse passing the right gurney in the right corridor at the right time, and that animatronic infant, and I wind up back at C.

Picked Flicks #83: Monster & Boys Don't Cry

Let's talk a little about audiences. I saw Boys Don't Cry twice in the theater, first with my friend Irene at the Landmark Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco, with a solemnly respectful and, by the looks of things, an overwhelmingly gay-male audience. That theater was so quiet, not just moved but able to be moved by what we were watching, that the full textures of the movie really announced themselves: the droning hum of the convenience mart where Brandon meets a blitzed Lana and steals her a ring; the poignant halts and barely-quelled vibrato in Hilary Swank's voice whenever Brandon tastes a second of happiness; the portentous rushes of air beneath the abstract cut-aways to the neon, accelerated skylines of the Nebraska night. The emotional arc of the movie relies on a series of nocturnal rendezvous between Brandon and Lana, where the film encases both characters within their own coronas of light, a centimeter or so of human vibrance that looks as though it would be warm to any touch. But these are also Orpheic patinas, the gleam of someone remembered, evanescent. Brandon will die, and the Lana who lives will never again be the Lana who was. For this to resonate, the audience must have empathy, a willingness to cradle not just the romance but the precarious, even reckless adolescence of Brandon and indeed of all the characters, even those who violate our hope and our trust, along with everything else they violate.

Sadly, but revealingly, the film was tested on just these grounds when I saw it again, five months later, in a campus theater filled with high-school students taking summer courses. I expected nervous energy and even tittering as the novel concept of transgender identity came calling for their attention, but I did not expect outright laughter, even when Brandon was accosted and denuded, even when he was raped, even when he and his friendly protector were shot. I came home with my partner and cried for an hour in his apartment, feeling Brandon's tragedy in a new way: not just as a cold-blooded killing, but as a reflection of a frightened, juvenile, and titanically self-indulgent refusal of difference by millions of people who would rather be anything—chortlers, debasers, murderers—than be questioners, carers, students of life. (You are old enough, when a summer-school student, to be a mature witness to violence, to arbitrate the right and wrong, at the very least, in a scene of slaughter.) Brandon's story is obviously both of these stories. The different ways in which both screenings were painful speak to the complexes of pain, the different kinds of moorlessness, rejection, and endangerment that he encountered within himself but also from the outside, from others. A major strength of Boys Don't Cry is that it draws as much righteous authority from a skeptical audience as from a compassionate one. My belief in lots of things shook that night, but not my belief in the movie.

There's a lot of Boys Don't Cry in Monster: an actress undergoing extreme cosmetic rearrangement, a jukeboxy color palette, a first date in a roller-skating rink that cuts to a passionate first kiss, a young life of petty crime that hits a ghastly apotheosis in murder, though this time, the same character walks every side of the moral line. I saw Monster three times in the theater, the second and third time scrunched into a single day; its content, both visually and psychologically, is so gruesome that this shouldn't be possible, but beyond the practical reasons for seeing the movie this way, I was both relieved and frankly fascinated, maybe even a little troubled, at how Monster arrested the skittish impulses in its audience. The teenagers at the AMC Empire who peeled the foil from their Manhattan hot-dogs during the opening scenes, who answered their cell-phones and cat-called at Selby's advances toward Aileen, were literally caught with their mouths open when Aileen is first abducted, then brutalized, then released into a split-second chance at revenge that yawns ever after into a furious career of one-on-one terrorism. I swear I heard a pin drop that didn't even drop in our theater, even during the boldly purple love scene. (Tommy James and the Shondells cut right to the heart of Aileen's cataclysmically misplaced romanticism.)

Swank and Theron will always have careers because of these two movies, but there was a nasty, credulous undertone to the contemporary reception of Theron's work, and even more to reviews of her movie. Probably for that reason, while I am deeply admiring of both films, I am actively protective of Monster. Easily among the best biopics in over a decade, to the extent that they illumiante the lives of real people, they each ask us to see in their protagonists some image of ourselves, and this is a much tougher request to honor in Monster. Brandon Teena is a rebel-hero with illicit habits and terrible luck; Aileen Wuornos is a catastrophe with a phone number and an address, though even these change from day to day. Her will is equally consuming in its benign and its lethal actions. Theron, in her robust embodiment, barely preserves her balance while striding through her unimaginable life—just watch how Aileen rides a bicycle or runs from a car-wreck. Here, as in Nick Broomfield's haunting documentaries, looking into Aileen's eyes and trying to find the person behind them is like looking into a faucet in hopes of seeing the water. That Monster can tell a reasonable facsimile of her story, revealing her dilemmas while keeping her so frighteningly opaque, and that we still can see the value and the relevance of her profoundly shameful case...what could be a taller order? (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Two Halloween Tricks

Despite the bad luck associated with Halloween, I thought I'd be in for at least one treat in today's double feature. But, no. Both films have their merits, but in recompense, they expect you to put up with quite a lot—too much, I think.



North Country C
Niki Caro's Whale Rider was an involving tale with an affecting central performance, and it refreshingly abstained from cutesying up its young protagonist or overtly repackaging its regional idiom and cultural values for purposes of export. The big exception to that rule, however, was the over-insistence on sexism as a social axiom. As the immediate debate over Pai's eligibility for cultural leadership slides into a broad-based indictment of male chauvinism, you would never know that Maori culture is one of the most matrilineal and woman-positive in the world, and that most modern Maori women need not imagine that their best chances for self-expression lie in waiting for Grandpa to leave the kitchen so you can take the piss out of him in private.

North Country, Caro's follow-up film, at least admits its class-action interest in gender inequality as a categorical social ill, and in the wintry hinterlands of Minnesota, the charge sticks pretty persuasively—persuasively enough, in fact, that you wonder why Caro won't let social and narrative structures speak for themselves. Instead, she milks far, far too many scenes for a much more obvious and superficial quotient of sexual blamecasting. The film's allegiance to a cause trumps its allegiance to itself at countless turns, and while the human drama crackles in some compelling moments—a public accusation of adultery at a hockey game, a supervisor's meeting where union representative Frances McDormand finagles what she wants, a nightmarish incident involving a portable toilet—much of the rest feels sternly and unconfidently schematic. Richard Jenkins, a bonus in anything, gets a powerful scene at a microphone that can't help remind us how much Caro likes to make her characters cry in front of assemblies. Theron, McDormand, and cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) do the best work to keep North Country within reasonably textured parameters of human experience, but the movie is scored all wrong, and the thematic trajectory from sexual harassment to sexual assault is so awkwardly structured that it dulls both arguments instead of fortifying the linkage between them. Meanwhile, Caro shoots and edits her coverage shots of the mines like she did the whales in her first film, as a massive and inveterate fact, implying a strangely ambivalent worldview in which some things can (and must!) be fixed, while others simply Are.



Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit C+
I thought North Country might misstep, and so I purposely planned to see Wallace & Gromit afterward, sure as I was that Aardman Studios had delivered the goods. Unfortunately, this is one party at which I'm the appointed churl, since I got barely a moment's real enjoyment out of Wallace & Gromit, which seemed just as cluttered but also as listless as Aardman's earlier feature-length disappointment, Chicken Run. My respect for the movie is just that—respect—but I was amazed at how soon I was wishing it would end, and I actually had a better time at North Country. As in so many animated features, and perhaps this is becoming a prejudice of my own, the punctilious detail and overfilled images in Wallace & Gromit quickly seemed like ends in themselves, hung around a story with no urgency, even as short-form suspense. I love how expressive Gromit can be, and Lady Tottington gets some memorably daft lines like, "In my view, the killing of fluffy animals is never justified!" But I'm terminally bored by all of Wallace's hodgepodge gizmos and inventions, and—in total contrast to the entrancing shorts, especially The Wrong Trousers—I feel much the same about the two Aardman features: sure, this is what you made, and it must not have been easy, but then why did you bother? Corpse Bride's wittier character designs and stripped-down narrative brought a whimsical quality to that movie that the manic and plotty Were-Rabbit really needs in order to seem like more than the fetish of talented puppet-masters having a grand day in at the studio.