Briefs

Battle For Haditha (Nick Broomfield, 2007)
Hoo boy. Nick Broomfield's ironically titled docudrama about the 2005 Haditha killings follows that fateful day in the lives of the soldiers, the insurgents, and of course, the innocents who were slaughtered by US forces. And it's about as intense as it sounds like it would be. There are problems with the film, like a kind of pathological need to humanize, which leads to certain beats that feel a little rote (like the insurgents casually talking about how if only the US hadn't disbanded the army, they wouldn't be doing this, or the repetition of just how fried the US soldiers are). It's not a great film, but as head into year five of this clusterfuck, it's a necessary one.

The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
The Mist isn't just bad. It's wrong. From Thomas Jane's earnest delivery of the line, "This is no ordinary mist," to the laughably overwrought ending, the movie could not be worse. Seriously. It's like Crash with giant CGI tentacle monsters. Also, if you're going to name your movie The Mist, and try to elicit fear from the uncertainty that comes from not being able to see more than a few feet in front of you, then you might want to hold off for longer than twenty minutes to show the giant CGI tentacle monster. Just a tip.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed (Joshua Safdie, 2008)
Goddammit, this movie is gorgeous. Think Bujalski meets Vivre Sa Vie. I can't believe I just wrote that. Ugh. Who am I? Maybe it's more accurately described as Quiet City's evil twin. No, that's reductive. They are wholly different films. Anyway, all I'm saying is that if you have a chance, please go. I love this movie.

Sleuth (Kenneth Branagh, 2007)
Three words. Gay train wreck.

The New Year Parade (Tom Quinn, 2008)
Divorce, Philly style! Set against the backdrop of the annual Mummers Parade, The New Year Parade chronicles the lives of a couple of South Philadelphia kids whose parents have separated. This is a really sweet movie, and it's homegrown, so they certainly got the Philadelphia accent right.

Lake of Fire (Tony Kaye, 2007)
Doesn't a two-and-a-half hour documentary on the abortion wars of the 90s sound like a good time? What's that? It's also in black-and-white? And there are scenes in which doctors sift through bloody post-abortion detritus? HOLLA!

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
There's a lot to like about this movie, but man is it on-the-nose. We get it. We understand. When it's not hitting us over the head with Casey Affleck's mumbly hero-worship, it's a great movie that evokes the kind of sweaty slow burn of The Deer Hunter. But, as I said, it's all just a little too obvious.

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)
Will Smith really gives his all to this pile. Seriously, he acts the fuck out of it. Unfortunately for him, the movie doesn't hold a candle to previous adaptation The Last Man on Earth... or The Omega Man for that matter. And that movie is terrible.

Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008)
Robert Downey Jr. is a casting coup, yes. And Jeff Bridges is hilarious, if only because his skull is allowed to come out and play. And Jon Favreau is a director who cares about the overuse of CGI (love those Elf practicals). So hooray. But even with all of that going for it, I had a hard time getting into the gadgety-metalhead porn of it all because I was distracted by the way it non-tackled the Iraq war. If only we all had a metal suit that could tell us who the hostiles were and who the civilians were. I get that it's a superhero movie, and that we can't expect a movie about a guy who constructs a super-suit to do anything but be "kick-ass" or to solve our Iraq problem (that's for the guy with the super ears). So let's just chalk it up to the fact that I can't enjoy anything anymore, and that'll be that. Kudos for trying to make a movie about the here and now, I guess (as opposed to say, Superman Returns). And let's face it, this is probably as good as a movie about Iron Man was going to be.

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It has not been a great week. In fact, I'd say that it's been a bad week. But despite everything, I feel pretty good, and that's because I can take comfort in the fact that I am not this guy:

Please help me.

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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

For a filmmaker that sucks as much as Tim Burton sucks, he's sure got a lot of stupendous films under his belt. For every ill-conceived Planet of the Apes remake, there's a Beetlejuice or a Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. For every manic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory misfire, there's the beautifully rendered Corpse Bride or the madcap WTFness of Mars Attacks!. And even Batman, which in no way can be classified as a "success", recognizes the inherent awesome of Michael Keaton and has Jack Nicholson destroying Gotham to the music of Prince. I mean... c'mon. That's just crazy.

And yet for some reason, I've never been able to shake the feeling that Tim Burton just blows. Maybe it's the impenetrable sheen of his macabre production design, a problem that a lot of people seem to have with Wes Anderson (substituting "precious" for "macabre"). Or maybe it's that "Tim Burton" feels more like a brand than an artist, used to sell films like Monkeybone and The Nightmare Before Christmas (garnering the lion's share of the recognition for the latter). "It's Tim Burton, so you know that it's going to be spooky and gross... but in a fun way!" It's a little off-putting.

Or maybe I just hated Sleepy Hollow too much. That's a film that's entirely production design, and fails on just about every other level. "Hollow", indeed. (Zing!)

Which is all a complicated way of saying that I'm not Tim Burton Super-Fan #1. But Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is great. From Johnny Depp's first hateful line spewed forth in "No Place Like London" to the film's perfect final beat, Sweeney Todd is an efficient masterpiece. Burton, whose vice grip on every aspect of the production is often unmistakable on-screen, gives an inordinate amount of control over to the music, where Sondheim twists and leaps his way around the tale of a barber, wrongly imprisoned, back for revenge against those who did him ill. And the result is a film that doesn't feel like it's trying too hard, maybe because of the blending of authorial voices.

And, amazingly, none of it comes at the cost of Burton's recognizable visual tics. He still gets to revel in his love of Victorian bodices and crazy hair.

Helena Bonham Carter acts the shit out of Mrs. Lovett, who owns a pie-shop and takes the newly returned Sweeney under her wing. Alan Rickman is rapetacular as the judge who had Sweeney imprisoned, and Ed Sanders is goddamn adorable as Lovett's spunky young ward. That kid is goin' places.

I like musicals, although I often have a hard time seeing past robotic technicality of Broadway-trained singers. Here, Depp, Carter, and Rickman all sing with voices that are their own; while I'm not naive enough to think that it didn't take a lot of studio manipulation to get them there, their voices don't sound perfect. Depp's is fragile, Carter's is manic and untamed, and Rickman... well he actually sounds kind of great. But these aren't singers, they are actors. They wouldn't be able to perform this on Broadway, but who cares?

It's not perfect; some scenes are inexplicably shot against green screen, and it's distracting. In fact, there's a lot of CGI, and it's not used subtly to buttress the story, but rather calls attention to itself. Jamie Campbell Bower, as the young man who enlists Sweeney's help to win his love, is difficult to watch, if only because he feels like the actor who would be playing that part on stage. But despite these complaints, I'm going to have to reevaluate my "Tim Burton sucks" thing that I have. I know that's what he was waiting for.

Wes Anderson should totally adapt Into The Woods.

A Little Priest

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

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I can't muster much energy in reaction to Noah Baumbach's Margot At The Wedding, which takes the director's previous focus on bourgeoisie malaise to new and unpleasant heights. It provoked a visceral reaction in Armond White though, whose incredibly entertaining review is below.

Self-Punishment:
Noah Baumbach is the Lars Von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons
by Armond White

Noah Bambauch makes it easy to dislike his films. Problem is, he also makes it easy for New York’s media elite to praise them. Start with his style: The Squid and the Whale and Baumbach’s new Margot at the Wedding are two of the decade’s most repellent movies. Visually, both look like mud; their smart-ass, low-budget affectations (shot by high-price cinematographers) bridge lo-fi mumblecore with Conde Nast hipsterism. This anti-aesthetic lays waste to the bromide that nobody sets out to intentionally make a bad movie; Baumbach does. His deliberate ugliness makes him the Lars Von Trier of Brooklyn and the Hamptons.

Baumbach’s characters—picked from New York’s self-punishing literary class—are also repellent. Not since Woody Allen’s Big Apple reign in the 1980s has a filmmaker so shamelessly flattered the professional classes in the guise of exposing them. Baumbach labels their tales with haughty movie titles that are actually New Yorker magazine short-story code, referencing a style of middle-class entitlement and smirk.

Margot at the Wedding is imitation-Salinger, pitting two sisters, novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her artistically floundering older sibling Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who are lifelong cat-fighters. When the sisters reunite for Pauline’s Hamptons marriage to Malcolm (Jack Black), a failed musician, they greet each other with hostile quips about incest, rape, betrayal, loneliness and the inferior mob.

We’ve seen these skittish hateful chicks before, in Woody Allen’s laughable Interiors, but Allen was weaned on the crisis-and-catharsis mode of Ingmar Bergman movies; Baumbauch, the post-Boomer scion of film critics, stays cool. Not sentimental like Allen, or haunted by religious guilt like Bergman, he’s free to be intellectually skeevy. He makes Pauline and Margot reprehensible as a sign of his daring artistic cruelty.

Sure enough, morons think Baumbach’s deep because he wallows in unsightly “truths,” but creatures like Margot and Pauline can be dismissed as dime-store Freud. “What was it about Dad that had us fucking so many guys?” Pauline wonders; and at a public reading of her fiction, Margot pleads for her autobiographical protagonist, “a loathsome character yet we feel a strange sympathy for him.” Both personalities are recognizable—but preferably at distance. Baumbach rubs our noses in their stench through some mixed-up notion that their bad behavior is unconscious and fascinating. But to hear characters brag “I haven’t had that thing yet where you realize you’re not the most important person in the world” or “He’s not ugly, he’s just completely unattractive” is not amusing. It’s a dreary experience.

Appointing himself cinematic enabler to New York’s most obnoxious people, Baumbach makes it obvious that each sister represents one side of his own psyche—just as the parents in Squid and the Whale were embarrassing family self-portraits. He pretends messy Margot and persnickety Pauline are worth our attention because they’re so pathological: They berate each other (and Pauline scolds her androgynous teenage son) fearful that despite advantages of education and money, they’re both really mediocre.

But Margot at the Wedding isn’t a story of neurotics struggling to be loved; it’s an example of Baumbach struggling to validate middlebrow narcissism. He perverts lessons in humanity taught by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and even Wes Anderson, the great visionaries of American family and class warfare. But notice: Baumbach’s sympathy for the devil never extends outside his clan (Pauline’s Hamptons neighbors are depicted as violent weirdos—carnivores!). He domesticates bigotry. The kitchen confrontation between Pauline and Malcolm is a case-in-point: It’s not an ethical, emotional trade-off; each cowardly egotist talks at cross purposes through Baumbach’s smug dialog. He’s always looking for malice and humiliation, as when a rat is discovered at the bottom of the family swimming pool.

Kidman tries making Margot pitiable, but she remains a cold actress. Brave Jennifer Jason Leigh, the finest film actress of the ’90s, gets disgraced. Baumbach not only turns Leigh’s fearlessness into Isabelle Huppert-style masochism, he offends her person with a scene where Pauline shits her panties. And we see it. Baumbach can’t guide us through troubled emotions like O’Neill, Williams and Anderson; he leads us into the shallow end of arrogance, conceit and ugliness. The rat at the bottom of the pool is Baumbach himself.

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Jumper (Doug Liman, 2008)

Jumper is a monumentally stupid movie about a guy with god-like powers who uses them to look cool standing in front of tourist attractions. It's going for the "superheroes without capes" thing that people seem to be into right now, and it succeeds admirably at achieving that misguided objective.

I feel bad for Hayden Christensen, I really do. In role after role, you can see him struggle valiantly under the weight of "words" and "movement". He's trying so hard, acting the hell out of every syllable, but he's never been able to transcend the whiny male model caste into which he was born. Sorry, dude. You are probably a fine human being, but you are a terrible actor. Christensen plays David, whose ability to teleport at will is discovered by the EVIL (he's so EVIL!) Roland Cox (Samuel L. Jackson). Roland is a "Paladin", part of a religious order that kills "Jumpers" because they regard their power as an abomination. So David goes on the run, taking his high school crush Millie (Rachel Bilson) along for the ride... because... umm...

They have sex, presumably only because they are pretty and in Rome and The Fray is playing on the soundtrack, and soon she's mixed up in his crazy teleporters-vs.-people-who-don't-like-teleporters-war. Some things happen, and then the movie is over.

Someone who seems to revel in the inanity of this whole enterprise is Samuel L. Jackson, who is hellbent on joining Christopher Walken as a walking monument to ridiculousness. But he's a lot more fun when he's not winking at the camera, and in Jumper he's too busy being crazy to wink. With white hair and a menacing growl, Jackson brings ten times the inherent watchability that Christensen commands to the screen. And there is this moment, this amazing moment, when he realizes that he's (spoiler, I guess) gotten his comeuppance, and the look on his face is one of the most incredible things I've seen on film for a while. Oh man, is it good.

Between this and 1408, the man's nearly succeeded at cornering the market on completely insane performances in sub-par genre movies. Hell, even his prestige performances (Pulp Fiction, Black Snake Moan) build their respectability on a foundation of trashy crap. Huh. Weird. That probably means something about something.

The director is Doug Liman, who made Swingers, The Bourne Identity (good, but easily the worst of the three), and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (blargh). While I always tried to tell myself that Swingers was about the unsatisfying hollowness of its main characters' affected neo-retro style, it's getting harder and harder to reconcile that line of thinking with his growing catalog. I still like Swingers (bunches), but I think it might have just been intended to look cool. Looking cool seems to be Doug Liman's chief auteurial concern.

There's a directness to Jumper that I liked a lot. Not having been based on an iconic pre-existing property, the film quickly establishes the power, the villain, and the conflict, and we're off. It doesn't get bogged down in superfluous fanboy shout-outs ("They're fighting a Sentinel in the Danger Room!") or ineffective gravitas. That said, Jumper buys into the trendy notion that robbing superheroes of their inherent absurdity, that grounding them in "the real world", is necessary to make them palatable to a 21st century audience. As with Heroes, "As long as they're not wearing masks or capes or underwear on the outside of their pants, the audience will eat whatever shit we feed them," seems to be the rule. But let's be honest, is this movie any less idiotic because it's not called Jumper-Man? The filmmakers seem to think that it is, but I disagree.

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By way of an update to my previous post: Friday Night Lights is coming back. Here's hoping that Season Three remembers to not be terrible. Season Two forgot.

Oh man, I'm funny.

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Control (Anton Corbjin, 2007)

The musical biopic has enjoyed such success as a genre only because the filmmaker autobiopic isn't yet a marketable option. So much ego and artistic masturbation is poured into the genre's masterworks, whether it's Taylor Hackford's Ray or last year's love letter to layered appreciation, I'm Not There (Todd Haynes).

OK, to be fair, I haven't seen I'm Not There yet. Maybe it's good.

Anton Corbijn's Control is the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. And for a film about a band that's as consequential as they were, Control is surprisingly tolerable.

Sam Riley is Ian, the unknowable and ultimately doomed genius, while Samantha Morton is his wife Deborah. And that's key. Because while most musical biopics relegate the bedraggled first wife to a supporting role in the first twenty minutes (a trope that Kristin Wiig worked magic with in Walk Hard), Deborah Curtis looms large in Control, larger than Ian at times.

Most of what I know about Joy Division comes from listening to their progeny (Interpol, et al.) and from Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, so I don't come to this with the baggage that some might. But neither does Corbijn, I'd argue, and that's a hell of a feat considering the fact that he directed videos for them. While Joy Division's music is central, of course, it never steals the spotlight from character. In Walk The Line, we get to watch the supposedly history-of-musical-expression-altering moment that Johnny Cash momentously farted out the title song. There's much less of that bullshit here. The music exists, and it is great, but no sequences are built around explicating it, and the film is more concerned with the relationship between Ian and Deborah. The black and white photography is gorgeous, and the film fails to indulge in the "wages of fame" self-pity that's so prevalent these days that it's invisible. Control would almost work if it were complete fiction, a litmus test that should be applied to prevent the next fake memoir debacle.

I say "almost" because there's still that whole romantic doomed artist thing. But when Control veers too close to that brink, Samantha Morton pulls us back. Cause she's just the shit, and her work gives Deborah Curtis the weight that she, and many other put-upon first wives of asshole musicians, richly deserve.

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Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)

Paranoid Park is at once a hollow non-event and a completely entrancing piece of thing. Gus Van Sant's latest meditation on beautiful young people doing awful things or having awful things done to them really had its way with me, much more so than his similarly oblique Elephant.

The pretty boy here is Gabe Nevins, who has a face that's as emotive as a Staples catalog. But that's the whole point. The non-performances that Van Sant is able to coax from his young actors are always much more effective than the alternative, anyway.

Nevins is Alex, a pubescent skateboarder, and a cypher upon whom his parents project the guilt they feel over their divorce, his girlfriend projects her desire to cross the sex barrier, and his little brother projects his need to talk about Napoleon Dynamite. But who is Alex? What does he want? Just to be left alone with his skateboard, it seems. Van Sant cuts around a central traumatic event that Alex is running from. Something unspeakable happened at the skateboard park of the film's title, and Alex becomes even more of a blank slate than he was before as details eke slowly from Van Sant's cubist construction. (I know there's actually an accepted definition of film cubism, and that's not what I'm talking about).

While another director would probably have focused on fleshing out "the skateboard community", the very notion seems antithetical to these boys' existence. It's an idea laughed at when the investigating detective brings it up, and Van Sant does well to avoid that cliché in favor of his main character.

Christopher Doyle, the legendary DP who shot Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love and Van Sant's amazing Psycho remake, might want to think about sticking to the Pacific Northwest, because his work has rarely looked more beautiful. And that's saying something. Or at least I hope it is.

There's a lot of lovely dissonance going on, a tension created between sound and picture that, at one point, called to mind a friend's experience of seeing the last reel of 300 with a different' reel's soundtrack, something that he at first thought was an intentional move to create dialectical perfection before he realized that it was just the theater's incompetence at work. That's just a long way of saying that "the sound was weird". Whereas the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles" in Van Sant's Good Will Hunting strikes a lot of people as cloying, employing the same song here seems like more of a comment on the use of Elliott Smith's "Angeles", and breaks all the momentum that a montage is supposed to be so good at creating. From Billy Swan's "I Can Help" to Nino Rota's Juliet of the Spirits score, the music (and use of sound as a whole, come to think of it) only serves to underscore the unsettling absence of guidance and that informs everything Paranoid Park is about.

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