Prometheus (Sunday, June 10, 2012) (55)

So in 1979, Ridley Scott re-wrote the look, style and tone of scifi movies with his brilliant Alien -- the best movie he has ever made (or ever will). Of course, that film launched a multi-movie franchise, including James Cameron's 1986 sequel, Aliens -- which is arguable better than the first film. 


So now that everyone in Hollywood is totally out of ideas, Ridley is back with Prometheus, a prequel to the earlier franchise. This is a very big and thick scifi movie, filled with all the stuff that the original films didn't have: sex and love, god and existentialist quandaries, near-human robots and power-hungry billionaires. It's all so dumb, clumsy and boring, there's basically nothing good to say about it. 


The film begins with an alien dude standing on the edge of a waterfall. He takes a drink of a mysterious substance and jumps to his death in the falls. This is supposed to mean something or connect for us, but it just seems random and disconnected. We then see a team of scientists, lead by Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discovering how cave paintings from around the world all have a similar constellation in them -- and that that set of stars is in some far-off part of the universe... so they get in a spaceship with a team of "scientists" (funded privately by billionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pierce)) and ride off into the cosmos deeply in love.


As the crew sleeps (because they're traveling at light speed, natch), a humanoid android named David (beautifully acted by Michael Fassbender) takes care of the ship. He styles himself after Peter O'Toole from Lawrence of Arabia and reads all the dreams and memories of the people (because that's deep, you see... an android who wants to be human). 


They land at some planet where they find a big pyramid and decide to go into it -- because as scientists they know that fucking with their study subject is the best way to do research. They realize there's living stuff there and they bring some of it back on to their ship (again - that's the scientific method). The leader of the mission on the ground is some skinny blond lady called Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) who is probably not a robot, though she seems to be one... and also seems to be the daughter of Weyland -- though that is presented in a way that could be sarcastic (and it doesn't really matter... like everything in the movie, it's more about loading the story with informational stuff than really exploring anything). 


Ultimately the aliens, who are probably our forebears, infect the ship and kill all sorts of people in boring ways. We ultimately see the famous phallic-vaginal alien guy from those earlier movies emerge from people's bellies -- three times like the great scenes in those early movies... because once you have a good trick you should do it over and over and over and over.


In most big, heady (or fake heady) movies today almost no clear information is presented, and instead, we are given with lots of texture and information, but no synthesis. I firmly reject the notion that a movie has to be oblique to be worthy of discussion or analysis. Great movies are frequently presented straightforwardly, but it seems that many directors can't just leave well enough alone and have to overly complicate stuff. 


The questions this movie presents about our origins are facile at best. Does god exist? Did he create us? What about aliens? Can a robot be a human? It's all so boring. 


On top of this, there's a really uncomfortable and bizarre element that Elizabeth wears a cross around her neck and several times makes it clear that despite finding out that human existence has more to do with aliens than with a creationist myth, she clutches her totem closer and reaffirms her faith. Why? I dunno. Some upside-down ef-you to athiests and scifi geeks who deny god's existence? It's hard enough to believe that an evolutionary scientist would trust so closely in a Judeo-Chrisitan god -- but then that she reaffirms her faith when shown that it's all bunk is just annoying and dead-ended. What am I supposed to do with that information? Does that make me think about my own faith more? No - it doesn't. 


Most of the problems with the film are in the script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Linelof... of Lost), which is undercooked and banal. We don't need a love story to make us care about people and certainly don't need to see the same gags three times to appreciate them. There's nothing clever or interesting in the film and it all comes off as totally flat and dull. What a disappointment. 


Stars: 1 of 4

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Saturday, June 2, 2012) (52)

Oy vey iz mir. The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel. Oy vey. I'm not sure who was asking for this movie, though it's not at all a surprise that it was made. In an era when we celebrate old people just simply for being old and celebrate brown people just simply for being poor, this movie was bound to come about at some point. John Madden, the sentimentalist who brought you Shakespeare in Love and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, directs what is sure to be his most beloved movie in the years to come. Because it's so nice. Pardon me while I wipe the vomit from my t-shirt.

This ensemble piece has every old actor in London (all of 'em) come together to show us how just because people live around the poverty line in a developing country doesn't mean that they don't have love in their heart (in case we were wondering about that). So a listing of the case would take up six pages here, so I'll just say you have a bunch of cranky or nice Englishfolk over the age of 70 who all decided to move to a hotel that's being advertised online. They all go for different reasons (some of which are totally unclear) and all end up living next to one another in what turns out to be a ramshackle lodging (what a surprise! and - that's so funny!). They slowly help to make their world more nice (because they're white and rich) just as the hotel owner and his mother fight about his future with his girlfriend (hmm - that seems random and disconnected...). Then all the old people find love and happiness or die in peace.

I'm really over this cultural fetishization from a very Western, white point of view. Isn't it nice that white people can visit these places and bring their money and help these people? Isn't it nice that a untouchable warms the cockles of the cold woman's heart? Isn't it wonderful that homosexuality is not a death sentence in a developing nation? The answer to all these questions is, of course "no" in the real world, but in the universe of this soft-focus kingdom, economics and social mores mean nothing. As long as we can pat ourselves on the back when driving out of the multiplex parking lot. We are modern and liberal and understanding and warm to all peoples. Yes we are.

There's no real substance to this film. It's mostly loathsome because of how reluctant it is to offend anyone and how rosy a picture it paints. Yes, India is a land of bright colors... and so what? Does the untouchable's life get better after her brief interaction with the mean white lady? Does the growing service-economy middle class in India really have much more room to grow and does it train its workers in skills that are at all transferable? What sort of security net do most entrepreneurs have in such a place? Clearly this isn't a political movie, but then what is it? A sweet romance? Eh - that's not really that interesting... and not really that romantic or heartfelt.

This is the most maximalist superficiality you might ever seen in a movie. It generally looks good (photography by Ben Davis), but that has more to do with the setting and the wide aperture than anything particularly interesting or more than one would expect. It's just that this movie really is just about the surface of things. Relationships are defined in metonymic terms where one untouchable symbolizes the suffering underclass of society, unable to ever reach the middle class and where one love affair between a black sheep son of rich people and a successful yuppie woman equals the difficult love the white people have for this non-white country. It's all deeply boring and trite and mildly offensive in it's tone-deafness.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

The Five-Year Engagement (Thursday, April 5, 2012) (34)

In the ever-rising tide of adult-themed romantic gross-out comedies comes The Five-Year Engagement, a totally preposterous film with one of the weirdest, most fat-laden stories and scripts I've seen in awhile. There are lots of funny moments (many provided by Jason Segal, who is quietly turning into one this era's most talented comics... er, except for the fact that he co-wrote this screenplay... OK - so let's call him inconsistent...), but much more excess and overly graphic situations, making watching it more of a chore than a joy.

Directed and co-written by Nicholas Stoller (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek fame), the movie revolves around Tom (Segal), an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco, who gets engaged to Violet (Emily Blunt). They fully plan to have a timely wedding, until she gets into grad school in Ann Arbor. They move and his life begins to spin out of control after he's unable to get a "respectable" restaurant gig (featuring a fun "A-squared" resto montage, for anyone who went to school or ate dinner there). She thrives and he shrivels and their wedding moves further away. In the meantime his best friend (Chris Pratt) and her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have babies and the world moves along. Just when you think they're gonna figure it out, everything falls apart, possibly irreparably.

Typical of many recent gross-out comedies, the stakes are raised to silly heights as we see the characters behaving ridiculously and see frank pain and embarrassment in every other scene or so. At one point, when Tom freaks out about their pending wedding, he gets drunk and sleeps in the woods in the middle of winter, almost naked. He wakes up with frostbite on one of his toes, which has to be cut off. In another scene, the couple's niece shoots one of Tom's arrows (he's a bow hunter) into Violet's leg -- but just for shits and giggles and no real plot point.

I actually appreciate the frankness of these moments, and the reaction they bring to us in the audience (shock and horror with uncomfortable laughter), but they're especially difficult to endure as they're interspersed with typical RomCom comedy and come generally as surprises. It's all a bit too much for too little pay off.

The real sin of this film, of this script, is that it's just not very efficient and almost every scene goes on about one to four minutes too long, making the whole film feel bloated and cumbersome. The transitions between one bit and another are clumsy and the amount of serious reflective time allotted to each character is too much, making this weirdly heady at times -- not the best tone for a stupid comedy.

This really feels like it was cut down from a script that was probably twice as long, a script with every joke and every set-up the writers could imagine, but then cut it to this overweight 120-some minutes. I think if they had trimmed the script more (like by another 30-40 mintues) they could have had a pretty good movie. Instead we get a weird movie that's not really enjoyable and doesn't move well, despite some honestly funny moments.

Stars: 1 of 4

Arthur (2011) (Tuesday, January 18, 2012) (140)

This new Arthur movie, with Russell Brand, Hellen Mirren and Greta Gerwig, is a remake of the 1981 comedy of the same name with Dudley Moore, John Gielgud and Liza Minnelli. Today we find ourselves in another economic pit and what will make us happier than watching a drunk asshole win by being sober and less of an asshole.

There are a handful of updates or tweaks, but most of the story is the same. Arthur (Brand) is an out-of-control billionaire who does anything and everything he wants to do in New York City. His best friend is his butler Hobson (Mirren), who constantly insults him with a sharp tongue and generally looks after him. He is told he'll lose his money unless he marries Susan (Jennifer Garner), the heiress of another gigantic fortune, partly because she is a proper fit socially and partly because it would be a good business move for his family company.

Just as he's about to settle down against his well, he meets Naomi (Gerwig) who is a middle-class girl from Queens who runs illegal tours of New York (which is almost the same as stealing from Bergdorf Goodman, of course!). He falls head over heels for Naomi because she's honest and smart and has to figure out how to keep his money and win her over.

I like the original film, but I don't love it, yet it's much, much better than this heap. Brand is a total asshole and not appealing at all. Part of the reason the first film works at all is that Moore is charming and generally likable, even in his drunkest. Brand is a lot more juvenile than Moore was, more like a kid with a lot of money than a man who behaves badly.

Mirren is great in this role, though I think it's the ultimate straight-man and it's written well (Gielgud was also great in this role as well). Gerwig is always fabulous, though it's still weird for me to see her all clean and with makeup on as I always think she does better when she's more natural and awkward, less scripted. Her character is less loud and crazy -- because she's not Liza, with all that she brings -- and I think the connection here between Arthur and Naomi is more suggested by the context of the story than shown clearly.

This is a totally recycled film that really has no business being remade. I don't think this adds anything to the original film (which is still pretty funny) and I can't figure out why anyone would want to watch Brand, who is a total hack.

Stars: 1 of 4

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Sunday, December 25, 2011) (128)

So this is this movie based on Jon Foer's much-heralded book. It takes place in the days after September 11, 2001, when young boy Oskar Schell (Oskar with a K because his parents both read Gunter Grass in college) (Thomas Horn) is having difficulty dealing with the fact that his dad, Thomas (Thomas Hanks), was caught on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center and died a lot. Oskar has Aspbergers and is a fucking annoying and weird kid. For some weird reason he seems to be in no sort of therapy, either for his disorder or for the fact that he's a kid whose dad just died in a horrible tragedy. But that's cool... and totally the way Upper West Side Jews relate to the world. Totally.

So he starts snooping through his dad stuff and finds a key in an envelope that has the word "Black" written on it. He decides that this is some sort of posthumous game his dad has arranged for him, so he goes off on a long journey to find this Black person and figure out what the key means by visiting all the people with the name "Black" in New York City. Along the way he meets his long-lost grandfather who no longer speaks ... but we don't know why and never find out... and he meets a black couple in Fort Greene who are getting a divorce, but give a shit about Oskar for no particular reason.

There are so many layers of shit to dig through in this story, let alone the presentation on screen, that it's hard to know where to begin. Why does Oskar have to be on the Asperberger's spectrum? Why does Tom Hanks have a terrible New Yawk accent in some scenes and not in others? (Answer: looping.) Why does the grandfather not speak and why should I care about that? Why would a mother let her sorta special-needsy son walk around without her (even if she scouts the locations first)? (And how on earth does she have time to scout the locations for him?)

To say that Thomas Horn is annoying is like saying that Hitler wasn't fond of Jews. There really aren't words for whatever Horn is in this film. "Repulsive" comes to mind. It's impossible to align with the kid because his way of talking and looking at the world is so precious and otherhumanly that I could only be totally turned off by him. He's a totally concocted persona whose artifice is on display to all. And he carries around a fucking tambourine that somehow soothes his soul (like how watching Judge Wapner soothed Raymond Babbitt) so every time we see him walking around New York (which is about 80% of the film) he's ringing a goddamn tambo. Ugh!

I've said here before that movies about September, 11 are cheap because it's just simply too soon to have any perspective on. I had my own experience that day and I don't care about a fucking annoying kid's experience. What's more insipid here is that the fact that Thomas Schell died that day has nothing to do with the story. It's sentimental shorthand of the most vile variety. All that matters is that he dies - he could have simply chocked on a bagel and lox any other day in history. That would have been random and unfair. This is just manipulative garbage that tries to help understand what Oskar is feeling, but really just sets us spinning in a cycle of "I remember where I was on that day when..." - which really isn't story telling at all.

This is a movie about fathers and sons. Big fucking deal. Yet somehow it became a story about pain in the wake of September 11. It's all nonsense.

Stars: 1 of 4

Margaret (Friday, December 23, 2011) (124)

I first heard of Margaret when it was playing in a theater in New York in September, I read a scathing review of it and spoke to a friend who told me it was terrible, so I avoided it. Then it appeared on a handful of Best of 2011 lists, so I felt like maybe it was the sort of unusual or difficult movie that I frequently like and that it was only rejected because it didn't fit some prescribed genre specifications. When it was briefly re-released in New York I jumped at the chance to see it. Sadly, it is unusual and doesn't fit any genre specifications... and is pretty terrible.

Some quick back story: Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed You Can Count on Me, which I think is great, wrote this film in 2003 and shot it in 2005 (so says Karina Longworth in her rave review of it from the Village Voice). He then took 6 years to cut the film down to under 150 minutes (it's now 149!!). Apparently he just couldn't do it for a long time. Then there were a few law suits about it (he broke a contract, I imagine the producers wanted out or their money back...). Now it's released. And it's really long.

The idea of the film is that it's about a girl, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), who lives on the Upper West Side with her actress mother. Her father lives in LA with his new, younger wife, and she is a bit of a typical, smart, Jewish teenager. She's glib and talks back to adults, she's interested in sex, though generally apprehensive about it, she's precocious because she lives in New York City. At some point she flirts with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who then gets distracted and his and kills a pedestrian.

Feeling guilty about the death, she sets her mind to sue the bus company for the driver's negligence and get money for the pedestrian's family. In the meantime, she flirts constantly with her youngish high school teacher (Matt Damon), has sex with some kid (Kieran Culkin) (I hope they can date sometime so they can be called "Culquin" by the paparazzi!) and becomes friends with a fucking annoying Upper West Side woman who is the friend of the dead lady. There's also a story about her mother who starts dating Jean Reno (who is Colombian in this... whatever) until he dies unexpectedly. The movie is about the lies that surround us on a daily basis and how we have to create stories to manage our lives.

The problem is that there's really no structure to the narrative, it's just a lot of Lisa going around talking to people and making bad decisions. There's no reason huge chunks of this film couldn't have been cut to make it closer to 100 minutes. It's like an abstract painting - sure, sometimes the size and scale of the work is what it's about, but generally a corner of the canvas covered in an abstract design means as much as any other corner, doesn't it? If this film is unbalanced and long and is about how life has no internal logic, then why not make it a shorter version of that? Isn't that what watching movies is about - a director telling you a very specific story?

I found Paquin to be annoying and overdone, mostly struggling through her Paquinese that sounds more southern than New Yawk (and this was made before True Blood was a faint speckle in her Triple-D brassiere). The supporting cast is so chopped up into random half-fragments of scenes that nobody really gets much time to develop or expand on screen. Ruffalo and Damon are pretty good - though they're generally good actors, so that's no surprise.

Mostly this feels like a project that Lonergan started honestly and got too tied up in details, forgetting the basic story he was trying to tell (I'm not sure what that seed was, really). He really just needs a good story/script editor to begin to make it a watchable film. It feels like if he had been asked to start from scratch and rewrite the whole thing, some things would have stayed and some things would have fallen away and we would have been left with a better final film. Instead we have all sorts of random secondary and tertiary stories that really don't mean much, are redundant or confusing.

Stars: 1 of 4

War Horse (Tuesday, December 13, 2011) (115)

I should say right up front that War Horse is probably not a movie for me. I really hate animal movies because I think they're generally overly sentimental and rather thin when it comes to content ("Look - you can see the horsey is scared. I'm scared for him.!"). I also find episodic stories like this one frustrating because the moment you get to know any characters, the story switches to a new set of characters and a new situation. War Horse is a terrible, dumb, empty movie that has a greater level of Spielbergian emotional manipulation that I have seen in a long time, possibly ever. If at any moment you are emotionally ambivalent or unsure of what is going on, the director will come down on you with a sledgehammer to make sure you understand exactly what he's trying to do.

Based on a book by Michael Morpurgo, the story is about a thoroughbred horse named Joey (oh, how sweet - his name is Joey!) who is raised by a young man in England before World War I. There's a whole lot of stuff that happens with nobody believing the horse is worth anything and him almost getting shot. Actually, every person who "owns" him at any point almost gets him shot. This is the horsey torture porn thread of the story. The horse is sold to an officer in the British military who takes him to the Front at the beginning of the Great War, at a time when the Brits thought the war was going to be old-fashionedy with horses and swords and all. Of course the war was not like that, and horses were only used up and then discarded as the war went along. Joey is first stolen by some German deserter boys, then taken to a small strawberry farm and looked after by a French girl, then is stolen back by the German army to pull stuff with. At some point there's "miraculous stuff" that happens.

As much as the film is called "War Horse," there are really only three sequences directly involving the war and fighting, and one of those is very brief. It's more "Around a War Horse." This is basically Forrest Gump with a horse. The moment you get to know and like any particular character or story, it switches to be about something else, with new characters and a new set of rules. Every character falls deeply in love with Joey, though I don't know why. I guess I'm a heartless person, but just showing me a horse with big eyes doesn't make me fall in love with him. I guess I need more content or reasons to fall for him. Well, really, I don't fall in love with movie animals, because I can't interact with them and make any sort of personal connection. I don't go in for anthropomorphizing of animals, and I think that's my problem here. There is no reason why Joey doesn't get killed several times - which I guess is not totally true... the reason he doesn't get killed is because he's the star of the movie and is written that way. He doesn't seem to have any particular traits that help him. Sure he's a fast runner, but so are so many other horses.

This is a very cruel and violent movie, which on its surface would seem like a "family film." Putting aside all the guns that are aimed at Joey for non battle-related reasons, Spielberg has a fascination with disgusting, uncomfortable situations, like the penultimate sequence when Joey runs into no-man's-land and gets rolled up in barbed wire. All I could think about was the endless and cruel beatings in Gibson's loathsome The Passion of the Christ. Is Steven suggesting Joey is Christlike? ("Take these oats, brothers. They are my body.") I don't really see the point in all this. Yes - it's war and war is hell, but it seems like most of the war stuff is much more bland than Spielberg has shown in past films (Saving Private Ryan, Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List), except when it deals directly with Joey, when he gets particularly frank and mean. This is not a movie for kids. (I'd like to thank my mother, here, for showing us The Great Santini when I was about 5. Because it's a movie about dogs. Right - a dog who is shot. Thanks, Mom!)

Spielberg is anything other than subtle in this film. There are loud bangs, open wounds, cuts to what look like tears in the horse's eyes (they're not tears, by the way. I'm not sure horses can cry), and lots of sentimental garbage with drawings and journals of Joey. We are reminded over and over again that the war changed from being about "gentlemen with horses" to being a technological nightmare with trenches, tanks and machine guns (I wish we could come up with a phrase for this war about how it was so big and how it might be the last war because it was so violent and terrible). The final sequence is so over-the-top with digitally enhanced "magic hour" lighting that it's almost painful to watch both from a technical point of view (magic hour is already gorgeous, Steve, you actually don't need to touch it with a computer) and a thematic view (OK, we get it. It's a happy, beautiful, wonderful, sentimental ending).

There is a single wonderful shot in the film, as the British soldiers mount their horses before the first battle of the war. It is reminiscent of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (a film I love) and Malick's The Thin Red Line. I wish that one shot could be excised from the final film here and put on display on a 5-second loop. This would leave War Horse with nothing but garbage... all the easier to send to the soap factory.

Stars: 1 of 4

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Friday, November 25, 2011) (107)

What is there to say about Twilight Part 4 Part 1? It's a movie about vampyres who fuck teens, but only after their married in special Mormon ways. Then it's about how those teens get preggers with monster babies (hello, Rosemary!) who eat them from the inside out. Then there are some werewolves who want to kill the vampyre family because they're really a cult (they are!) and broke the hymen of that teeny girl. Then the teen girl gets all rexy and gray-green-toned. Then one of the wolves decides to fight his brother dawgs because he really likes skinny girls, even tho she's a fang-banger.

Somewhere in there there's a lot of really bad acting. I don't know what you call what K-Stew, R-Patz and Tay-Lau are doing onscreen, but it's ain't acting. They each have reach the bottom of their tanks and are just saying words and looking sweaty. I hope none of them is still doing that stuff in ten years.

Bill Condon has a great inside joke in one scene where people are watching the Bride of Frankenstein, which is a film directed by James Whale, a homosexual and the subject of a biopic he made a few years ago. That split-second moment was the best part of this movie.

Stars: 1 of 4

Your Highness (Sunday, August 28, 2011) (75)

I had big hopes that David Gordon Green, Danny McBride and Ben Best's Your Highness would be much better than the reviews and box office numbers suggested it was. After all, the three of them are best friends with and close associates of Jody Hill, the brilliant creator of Observe and Report and Eastbound and Down (Observe is one of the best films of 2009 and the best comedy of the past decade). Sadly this film is every bit as terrible as one would understand from the hype. It's directionless and one of the most totally random ideas for a movie I've seen in a long time.

By randomness, I mean, of course, that the film is set in some sort of fantasy dungeons and dragons medieval-type world. Fabious (James Franco) is the son of the king and an all around fantastic guy. He is honest and brave and kills dragons and monsters all the time. He returns to his father's castle after a campaign and brings with him his new fiancee, Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel). Thadeus (McBride) is Fabious' ne'er-do-well brother who hangs out, smokes pot and fucks as many young wenches as he can find.

During the wedding of Fabious and Belladonna, bad wizard, Leezer (Justin Theroux... JenAn's babydaddy), comes and kidnaps the bride to take back to his dark castle. The two brothers have to set out with their knights and associates to rescue her, marking the first heroic thing Thadeus has ever done. Along the way he randomly meets Isabel (NatPort), a totally hot woman who also is randomly also seeking to kill Leezer. She joins the gang in their quest.

There isn't really much pot smoking or pot jokes in the film, unlike a past Franco-DGG effort, Pineapple Express (which was also not funny). Clearly the biggest problem here is the script, which is more forced than funny. That the story takes place in this fantasy world is sorta funny (in a stoner way), but random beyond all understanding. Why on earth are they making a stoner knight movie? Nobody was asking for this film (and there's a suggested of a sequel at the end... which will probably never happen).

This has the overall feel of the Evil Dead films - in that it's a monster/fantasy movie that has a very tongue-in-cheek tone to it. Clearly it's not that good (Evil Dead II is a great film). It doesn't feel nearly as self-knowing or self-confident as that film, and much of the awkward humor seems to be from the fact that the actors (particularly Franco) know that what they're doing is stupid and they're laughing at it as they act it (like the worst parts of Seinfeld).

David Gordon Green remains a total mystery to me. He started out his career with some very dark, small dramas that had interesting aesthetic tones and a powerful melancholic sensibility. He has now made two terrible comedies in a row (with his buddies) (although, in fairness, he's directed a few episodes of Eastbound). Where is he going? Has he told all the serious stories he has to tell? I feel like it's somewhat of a shame that he's doing this. I'm sure he's having fun, but it's a weird direction for his oeuvre, n'est-ce pas? Clearly this is a misfire of a film. I just hope it's not the sign of things to come for the people involved in it (almost all of whom I really like).

Stars: 1 of 4

The Help (Tuesday, August 16, 2011) (69)

The Help is a film about piss and shit. One might think that it's a story about empowered women, racism in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, mean-girl bullying or the humanity in every human, but it's really about scatology and urology. At our cores are not good souls that deserve racial and gender equality, rather we are all vessels for our next bowel movement. At least that's what I learned from The Help.

Skeeter (Emma Stone) is a self-possessed white woman in 1964 who just graduated from Ole Miss and has just gotten a job at the Jackson daily newspaper. She goes to her bridge club where she sees all the white girls she went to high school with (and apparently, even though Oxford and Jackson are only a few hours apart, she hasn't seen them for four years, or something). They are all dominated by the ginger hell-bitch Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) whose power comes from her deep faith in segregation and her own whitedom (actually, it's a total mystery why she's the boss as her mother, played wonderfully by Sissy Spacek, seems much more liberal and less bossy than she is).

The intrigue begins with Hilly needing to relieve herself, but refusing to do so because Elizabeth, in whose house they're playing, lets her black maid use the toilets rather than having them go outside. This is an affront to Hilly and her asscheeks and she insists that Elizabeth shape up.

As this hubbub is going on, Skeeter, who, Jesuslike, is the only White woman to care about the Black maids, notices that Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) are listening and feeling bad. They don't think their backsides are disgusting and neither does Skeeter (and neither do we, goddammit!).

In need of a story that she can write "from her heart" (let's begin the list of terrible misogynistic cliches that the film highlights rather than criticizes) for her cartoonish New York book publisher, Skeeter arranges with Aibileen and Minny to have them tell her their "stories" about looking after Whitefolk so she can write a book... by which, of course, she's really just going to transcribe (secret: transcription is not the same as writing non-fiction, Miss Skeeter). Skeeter wants to "shake up" the precious Southern society she lives in... though we never really know what drives her (aside from that "she went to college").

Pier Paolo Pasolini used shit and piss a lot in his masterpiece Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. For him it was a symbol of bourgeois tastes, of cultural fascism and of the decline of a great Western tradition. He saw the controlling of a person's basic bodily functions as the most debasing thing one could do to another.

Writer/director Tate Taylor seems interested here in the control part of this equation, but only in the most banal terms. For him, this is a symbol of blind racism, of how white people in this era had crazy notions of safety based on bigotry and how dehumanizing it was for these black maids. Pretty understandable.

But that is possibly the most superficial readings of the Jim Crow South I've ever seen. Black people had their feelings hurt by mean white people? That's insulting. Almost no time is spent discussing lynchings, segregation, terrible living situations for blacks, pay inequalities or racially bigoted laws. Looking at a very basic timeline, one sees that James Meredith entered as a student at Ole Miss when Skeeter was a junior in 1962, so she might have had something to say about her bigoted colleagues at school who harassed him. But no.

It's never really clear that Skeeter is the instigator that she's meant to be. She certainly has a beef with Hilly who she sees as insensitive and overbearing, and clearly has a desire to tell the stories of all the black maids, though that's also personally motivated. She never makes any speeches or comments about how the segregation system is wrong-minded and basically goes with the flow more as a prankster than a revolutionary.

Our hearts are supposed to be warmed by Hilly getting her just desserts (so to speak), but she really only gets embarrassed in our eyes, those of the black maids and a few white women. She still wields tremendous power by the end and her dark ways continue (as does segregation and bigotry in Jackson). There's a weird non-ending to this film, where basically nothing happens and nothing changes. Here we get a re-heated tale of subterfuge and good and evil, but nothing really happens. Black maids continue to get paid pennies for their work, continue to have to use the toilets in the back yards of their employers' homes, continue to live in a world that hates them.

Worse than anything else, the shit and piss here really comes back in act three to be merely a punch-line. So much for racial equality and human decency. But that's really all this film is. This is not a movie about the fight to end racism (like In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or even Remember the Titans). This is a movie that uses the era of major changes in Civil Rights understanding and legislation merely as the wallpaper for telling a "women's story" about women who work (black women) and women who don't work (white women). This would be an interesting Marxist parable, but it's not even that. It's a knitting-circle story that asks few questions and requires even less understanding.

The main lesson here is "all shit stinks the same" - and this film certainly is that.

Stars: 1 of 4

Sarah's Key (Sunday, August 7, 2011) (66)

There have been a handful of thematically and intellectually offensive movies about the Holocaust in recent years: Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Schindler's List, to name just three. We can now add Sarah's Key to that list. All of these films take the already emotionally charged and boldly "good versus evil" elements of Nazis, death camps and murdered children and trivialize them until we get these cumbersome tales so thick with shallow sadness it is hard to breath.

Sarah's Key is so emotionally superficial and sentimental that it makes us feel angry that someone would have so little sense as to make such a work of dreck. The story is utterly forgettable and recycled and has such an accusatory tone that the meta-film, the concept of how the French respond to the Holocaust inside a Holocaust film, becomes more important than the narrative itself. This is a French film in the style of an American Hollywood film. The symbolism is blatant and hackneyed and historical details are pushed aside for manipulative devices. The film is facile to a fault and disgusting in its tone.

Julia (Kristin Scott Thomas) is an American journalist married to a Frenchman and living in Paris where she writes features for a magazine. She and her husband (and their early-teen daughter) are about to movie into his family's apartment in the Marais and are busy renovating and updating it. Meanwhile Julia begins writing a story about the collaborationist French government's arrest and deportation of French Jews in July 1942, known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. (This is indeed a largely unknown atrocity in the history of the Holocaust, one that is not taught often in American schools, at any rate.)

The deeper she gets into the story, the more she finds out about the fact that her husband's family probably moved into their apartment days after the previous tenants (a Jewish family) were sent to their deaths. She discovers that the daughter of that family, Sarah, might have escaped and survived after the war (well, really she just finds that there are no records of her in the Nazi records, so she assumes she survived - whatever). She goes off in search of the girl, who somehow represents the hope of happiness and freedom she is missing in her marriage (or something like that).

The film is told by bouncing back and forth between the present with KST and the past where Jews are rounded up and sent off to their deaths. Most of the time, however, the moments where we jump from the past to the present or from the present backwards seem absolutely arbitrary and more motivated by script structure than by anything thematic or resonant. Most of the transitions happen when the young Sarah, who is trying to escape the Nazis to go find her younger brother who was locked in a closet in the apartment, is in a particularly precarious position - just in case you thought Nazi roundups were all sunshine and daisies.

This tedious manipulation and banality is so omnipresent in the film, it's hard to even single out a specific moment. At one point, when Julia is telling her journalist colleagues what she is uncovering in her research, one of them says, "When you think that such terrible things happened, it really gives you pause." Gee, thanks. I wasn't aware that an anecdote about thousands of people being rounded up and put into a filthy stadium before being sent off to their deaths was sad and terrible. Thanks for making that clear to me.

I have said in the past that nearly all contemporary French films deal with national guilt over the nation's role in the Holocaust, North Africa or other colonial outposts and here we have yet another example. (I should say that this is not a negative thing, but just an observation. Audiard's A Prophet is loosely about North Africa and colonialism, but is brilliant.) What's unusual here (and not unusual in a good way) is that the story is about an American digging into the story rather than a French person. When Julia's family seems to not be interested in the story of their apartment, she gets angry and judges them for their aloofness.

This feels like director/co-writer Gilles Paquet-Brenner is both a criticizing French society for not being more interested in the history of such a bad event as well as a strange celebration of American tactlessness. Why in the world would a woman shove a painful story down the throats of her family (and then later suggest that she regrets having done it)? When has it ever been acceptable to air dirty family laundry when nobody was asking about it? What's so wrong with people wanting to live naïve lives where they don't dig into the corners of historical events for which they're not guilty? Make no mistake, Julia is an asshole in this story and she is treated like a hero.

Stylistically, Paquet-Brenner treads on the most cliched turf imaginable in film. Just like the "girl in the red dress" in Schindler's List, Sarah's key (a key she used to lock her brother in a hidden closet in their apartment before they were rounded up) becomes some sort of supersymbol that we see over and over again, always with the same superficial effect. Why does it need to be so literal? Don't we understand the pain Sarah and her family feel for their lost brother/son without needing a visual clue to explain it to us? Are we really that stupid that we can't understand the sadness of the murder of a child?

This film is much more of an American-feeling film than a French one. There is no depth to the discussion and seems to move along on a surface level, pulling on heartstrings (like introducing irrelevant other kids, just to kill them off... in case we didn't know that lots of kids died at the hands of the Nazis) rather than anything in our brains (and, yes, the average French movie is smarter than the average American movie... this probably has to do with production volumes as much as anything else).

Somehow Julia's quest, even though it shakes two family's to their foundations (despite nobody in either family ever doing anything offensive), is some sort of righteous experience. It is not, of course. Julia is a sociopath and utterly unaware of the fact that Sarah's story is unremarkable and irrelevant to the lives of contemporary people. Not to say that hidden stories are better, but exposing pain from long ago isn't always worth the trouble (Julia and Paquet-Brenner seem to think it is).

I don't need to be told that the murder of children and innocent people by the Nazis (and their Petainist collaborators) was a bad thing. I learned that lesson a long time ago. This is a case where the truth is so banal that it doesn't really set anyone free, but just makes them frustrated for finding it out - and for finding out in such a trite way.

Stars: 1 of 4

Bad Teacher (Thursday, July 7, 2011) (51)

So Bad Teacher is a movie directed by Jake Kasdan (le fils de Larry) with a highly-praised script written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (whoever they are). It has all the makings of an interesting, dark and biting comedy, something that could possibly be as brilliant and enjoyable as Hesher or Observe and Report. Alas, it is not any of those things - it's totally banal, painfully unfunny and hardly hard-hitting.

Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is a good-looking gold-digger who only hopes to catch a man who can pay for her expensive tastes and buy her a new rack. When she's dumped by her millionaire fiance she sets her sights on a substitute, Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) at the middle school where she's a homeroom teacher. Somehow Scott is a millionaire and a perfect pedagodge. Whatever.

Meanwhile there's a goody-two-shoes teacher, Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch), who wants to be friends with Elizabeth until she finds out her motives and then becomes her enemy, and a gym teacher who lusts after Liz, but isn't hot enough for her (Jason Segal). Liz figures out a way to use her status as a public school teacher to extort money and buy her new tits herself.

The story and dialogue is so broadly written that the jokes come off as mostly dull and moderately uncouth, but never particularly dirty or bitter. At some point, Elizabeth says to a guy "I want to suck your dick like I'm angry at it"... which is a quotable line, but nothing particularly creative or pathetic. It's just broad and blue, meant to make the over-50-set re-adjust in their seats. (The single best line has to do with a guy being called "Faggy Hitler," which is simple, offensive and hilarious... but not overdone.)

I think this story suffers from not knowing what it really aught to be or is. It's not very dirty, but also not at all a "family comedy". It's somewhere in between; neither fish nor foul (fowl). It is a bit too filthy to star Tim Allen or Kevin James, but much too ordinary (and much too complicated, by the way) to be really interesting or exhilarating.

Cameron Diaz is a banal as a comedienne as the manila folder she resembles - mostly we're just forced to watch her because she's a frat-boy's idea of a "hot chick," having never really shown the chops we've always been promised. (Being John Malkovich is very funny, but I give most of the credit for that to Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman.) Beige.

Does there really have to be a happy Hollywood ending in this story? Are we so dumb and boring that we have to see right winning over wrong? Pfffft.

Stars: 1 of 4

Midnight in Paris (Wednesday, June 15, 2011) (45)

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris begins with a five-minute montage of the beautiful sights and parks of Paris. I'm not sure you knew this, but Paris is a very pretty city; there are lots of nice buildings and some lovely parks there. (Strangely, Woody's shots have no people in them... I guess he likes the places more than the people... well, they smell, I guess.) To say this opening is an allusion to the intro to Manhattan, would be to miss the point of this movie.

When basically every scene of a film is taken from one's own oeuvre, they stop being allusions and start being tedious, uninspired, self-promotion. There is nothing fresh in Midnight in Paris, aside from the fact that it's set in Paris and not New York (or London). This is a dull movie with a bizarre, simplistic moral lesson.

Gil, (Owen Wilson) is the Woody character here, is a screenwriter about to marry Inez (Rachel McAdams), a WASP with two super WASPy paretns. They are all on vacation in Paris while Inez's dad finalizes a business deal. Gil, the only cosmopolitan screenwriter in history to have never been to Paris, talks nonstop, mostly about his love for old-timey Paris, when great writers and artists mingled in jazz clubs. One night, when wandering the streets at midnight, he is picked up in an old car and dropped off at a party in the 1920s where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. Somehow Gil is living between the two time periods.

Over the course of several nights he meets basically everyone who was living in Paris at that time, Hemmingway, Picasso, Bunuel, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Tolkas, Josephine Baker and Man Ray (to name just a few). They help him "finish his novel" and come to realize what is really important in his life. During the daylight hours, meanwhile, he goes on field trips with Inez or avoids her as his heart changes regarding.

Gil is basically like every other nebbishy Woody character you've ever seen on screen. There are brief moments where Inez and him meet Paul (Michael Sheen), a guy who she had a crush on in college, an his girlfriend Carol (Nina Arianda). These scenes are pulled almost verbatim from Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody hates Alan Alda and everything he has to say.

I would compliment Wilson on his performance, but it's become so cliche to have a non-Woody actor playing Woody, that I don't think it takes much talent to do - it's basically just an impersonation blessed by the subject (deeper levels of self-obsession). I will say that Arianda is actually really funny and, after seeing her recently on Broadway in Born Yesterday, I can say she really does have something great going for her. She's probably the highlight of the film... and she's in three scenes for about eight minutes.

We never really see much of Paris after that opening montage. Most of the film is shot at night and on sound stages. I'm not convinced this is as much the love letter to Paris that many are making it out to be. It's sort of a love letter to the mentally limited who think that the best time is never now, but always in the past.

Assuming Gil comes to the conclusions he comes to after deep reflection (and not actually talking with Hemmingway), it's an admirable thing. But why then does Woody have to frame it in such a banal context? When was the last time you saw a character of Woody's creation have a deep moment of self-reflection or self-anaysis? Why does he have to put the agency for Gil's changes in the hands of others? Why is Gil with Inez in the first place? They seem to have nothing in common.

I've almost totally forgotten this movie already. The narrative is so silly, it could have been written as a children's book, and the lessons to come out of the story, could have been given by anyone with a rooting interest in Gil's happiness. The style is as flaccid as Woody has been in the last two decades. He really should retire and stop wasting our time.

Stars: 1 of 4

Super 8 (Sunday June 12, 2011) (44)

Super 8 is J.J. Abrams' ode to Spielberg movies of the 1970s and 1980s, E.T. most specifically. Unlike those film though, this movie has no charisma from its actors or alien. It has a bunch of explosions and nothing exciting or interesting. It's a weird stealth blockbuster, where the moment you leave the theater, you forget what you just saw.

The title of the film comes from the fact that it is set in 1979 in some small Ohio town where there are a group of kids who are making a zombie movie on a Super 8 camera. The main kid, Joe (Joel Courtney) is the son of the deputy sheriff and he's sad because his mother just died (this background is really just noise, because it has nothing to do with the story). The female star of the movie is Alice (Elle Fanning), the school hottie who Joe has a thing for.

When they're shooting a scene outside, they see a big train crash (which goes on for a Passion-like 10 minutes... like, enough already. We get it. It's loud and explosive). Then there's an alien who goes loose in their town banging into things and stealing people, and then the Air Force comes in and locks down the area. Joe and his friends decided they're gonna find the alien (that the Air Force can't find). I'm already asleep. Wake me when we get to the teary alien farewell.

The major problem here is that we never really know what the hell the alien is and why we should care about it (hint: it's got eight legs... get it!?!). It is more than raising the curiosity or tension - it's just frustrating. All we see is that people are snatched up by a weird tentacle/arm thing (see: the first episode of Lost where the pilot is taken out of the plane by Smokey) and a bunch of stuff is blown up and pushed around. I think it's not until the end of the second act that we get a sense of what the thing looks like, and then it's moving around the whole time (it seems to have the vagina dentata face typical of post-Alien, post-Predator monsters). What's worse, we get the whole story told to us in an audio cassette near the end. So at that point we should all just pack our things and go home.

Worst of all is that Joel Courtney has absolutely no screen appeal and is totally forgettable. I guess it's hard to cast kids, but this one is a dud. Fanning is fine. There is almost no meat in her role, but the does well in the one scene where her character is acting. All of the characters are written so broadly there's not much anywhere for them to dig their teeth into.

Aside from being a movie about an alien monster who wants to go back home, this movie has nothing to do with E.T. and is much closer to Shyamalan's laughable The Happening. It's a loser and more silly than compelling or scary.

Stars: 1 of 4

Film Socialisme (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (42)

I must begin to say that when i started writing this blog two years ago, I never thought i would be able to review and write about a film by Jean-Luc Godard. This is a real treat for me.. Too bad the film is such a dog. Woof.

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme is not an enjoyable experience. It's a lot of frenetic cutting, there is footage from all sorts of cameras, including old-style analogue video, digital, celluloid and camera phones. Most of the film is in French, though we also hear English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Greek... and almost none of it is subtitled. In fact the subtitling seems to be specifically directed by Godard as well and he really only translates the gist of what is being said, so that long dialogues are reduced to several key nouns and adjectives, sometimes compounded into a linguistic gumbo gobbledygook.

It seems that Godard is making a comment on the nature of film to mislead and control and the bourgeois nature of contemporary cinema. This is so banal it's offensive (to say nothing about the bourgeois irony of making a movie that costs money and saying that people with money are out of touch).

There are three distinct parts to the film that have specific themes and styles. The first, takes place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean where you see a bunch of Euros going around on holiday from port to port (North Africa, Spain, Egypt, Greece, Ukraine). There is a mix of documentary stuff and a weird narrative story about a rich business owner and people who don't like him. There is very little here that makes sense other than the general idea of "industrial capitalism is bad". Feh.

The second story, the most traditional in structure, is about a family who owns a gas station in France where there is a documentary crew filming them and they are being compelled to close the pumps. They discuss their lives and feelings. The final part is the most abstract where we go from city to city around the Mediterranean and see how they have changed over the years and the relative highs and lows (and revolutions) in each.

I imagine there are some Big Themes throughout the three parts here, but without a crib sheet it was almost totally opaque. Ever since about 1968 (when the student protests in France affected him politically and aesthetically) Godard has made movies that are more and more non-narrative, abstract and difficult to understand. I guess there's some merit to sitting down and trying to understand the meaning here, but it doesn't really interest me. (This is me saying about contemporary art, "so what? I don't get it.") And I guess that is really what this is. It's an art film, and experimental movie. It's not a narrative story. It has more in common with late Makavajev films like Sweet Movie (a boat that has some revolutionary significance) and Gorilla Bathes at Noon, than Breathless. The symbolism is important. The subtitles are important. The frenetic style is important. It's just that none of it is interesting or easy to watch and enjoy.

Stars: 1 of 4

L'Amour Fou (Friday, May 20, 2011) (33)

L'Amour Fou, or "crazy love", is a documentary ostensibly about the relationship and partnership between Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge. It shows how they met in the late 1950s, fell in love and then worked together for the next 40 years. The film was shot after YSL died in 2008 and just as Berge is about to have all of their belongings crated up and sent to auction in 2009.

The problem with the film is that it's a bunch of information about Yves Saint Laurent, Berge, their art collection, their auction and their relationship, but there is no sensible structure, so we don't know what to make of what we see. On the surface this seems like it could be a bio-doc, or a double bio-doc (a bi-bio-doc?) about who YSL and Berge were and how they created the House of Yves Saint Laurent, what it did and what its legacy is. We actually get only a smattering of history, finding out that they met through YSL's mentor, Christian Dior (although it's not clear how Berge knew him), and set up a new couture house later.

Major facts about YSL, like how he popularized (or invented?) pret-a-porter lines and pant-suits, are alluded to in passing, but never really underlined. There are a few interviews with a few women who worked with them, but they're never identified and their recollections are trivial.

Bizarrely we see a lot of footage of art handlers packing up works of art and sending them to New York, then London and then to Paris for the auction of their stuff. There seems to be a fake poignant moment when Berge is watching their stuff be sold for gigantic prices (a total of $484 million ...in the midst of the worst economy in recent memory) and his face is somewhere between sad because he's giving up his stuff and happy because he's making so much money with it. This doesn't really lead to anything and we don't really know enough about his relationship with the art to know how he feels.

I can't say this movie teaches you much about YSL, Berge or the auction of their stuff. It's a prefect example of how documentaries need a script or an outline in order to make sense. This doesn't seem to have either and as a result we bounce from one house to another (it seems that they had three homes together, in Paris, Marrakesh and Normandy), from one time period to another and from one anecdote about collecting art to another. We never learn what motivated YSL in his designs, what motivated Berge to be a fastidious manager, how they worked together while loving one another, why they collected the art they collected and how they came to purchase it all. We sometimes get the suggestion of answers to a lot of these things, but nothing direct or specific.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Beaver (Friday, May 6, 2011) (28)

I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).

The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.

Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.

At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.

It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.

One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.

Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?

Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Robber (Tuesday, April 26, 2011) (25)

I hate movies that open with titles saying that they are based on true events. Most things that happen to most people are really dull and mundane and the idea of something being "ripped from the headlines" is overstated. After all, film is a creative art and something that has many hands touching it. A representation of a real event is no more real than a fantasy film of other wolds and unknown sciences. I see such caveats as a shield beneath which bad writers and directors generally hide. It's easy for someone to say, "well, you didn't like that section, but that's how it really happened, so you can't complain." This is stupid. Regardless of the genesis of a story, it has to be compelling and interesting to viewers. The Robber is based on a true story, but is neither compelling nor interesting. It's one of the dullest films I've seen in awhile and totally unoriginal.

This true story is about Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), who is serving time in jail for a botched bank robbery and is also an avid runner and marathoner. When he gets out of jail he begins training as a runner and stealing cars and robbing banks. He surprises everyone by winning the Vienna Marathon as an amateur (not one of those guys who starts ahead of the pack) and then goes off an robs another bank.

He continues to train and rob banks (and carjack people to get getaway vehicles). He moves in with a social worker who he knows from the past and they begin a torrid affair. She catches on to his dealings but loves him so much that she helps him get away (several times). If he's caught, he escapes... and, of course, he's really good at running away from cops (get it?!).

This film is very... Austrian. It's absolutely humorless, there's a very clinical, cold sex scene (the social worker girlfriend, played by Franziska Weisz is actually quite comely), it plods along with no twists or surprises, it has no score and aside from a washed-out palette, it has no flashy visual/optical techniques. Writer/director Benjamin Heisenberg actually has one very nice shot as he shows the beginning of an ultramarathon from a great distance. All you see is a small village in darkness in the middle of the night, and slowly a line of headlamps the runners are wearing coming up the road.

Lust is good, but the character is barely two-dimensional. He has only two interests in life: running and bank robbing. He seems compelled to rob banks the way an alcoholic is compelled to drink. It's something he does and he doesn't really look to stop doing it. He never shows remorse or guilt, gets upset with the girl when she discovers him and bolts. There's nothing in this film to grab a hold of. The story is so dispassionate that it's hard to feel anything for any of the characters really.

I've always thought of movies about thieves to be some of the most fun and romantic. Bresson's Pickpocket, Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven are all fun to watch (and learn from) and simple, beautiful love stories (well, less so with O11, but there's that thing between Clooney and Roberts). This is not really a romance at all - it's just an unfeeling look at what one guy did at some point in time in Austria. You would get more emotion out of a newspaper article about the guy.

It's a totally boring, cold story that doesn't give any perspective into a greater human context, let alone Johannes's character. This film is a binary sketch of some events that once happened. Who cares?

Stars: 1 of 4

The Lincoln Lawyer (Sunday, March 20, 2011) (17)

On paper The Lincoln Lawyer seems like a great film noir in the grandest Hollywood sense, but it is executed so poorly it just comes off as a really terrible film.

Mick Haller is the eponymous advocate, who gets his name because he rides around Los Angeles in a Lincoln Town Car (seriously - that's all the name means). It seems he has an office (at least he has an assistant), but he never spends time there. Instead he rides around town going from one court house to another and from one client to another. He has a driver, apparently because his license was suspended at some point in the past, but he has his license back now and still uses the driver mostly - except for the middle act when the guy is mysteriously not around. Whatever.

He's sent to meet with a rich-boy client, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), who is being charged with assaulting a girl who turns out to be a prostitute. Roulet says he didn't do it, and his story is very convincing, however when Mick gets to digging - or gets his investigator, Frank (William H. Macy), to dig - they find that he's not the boy scout he seems to be. Mick's ex-wife, Maggie (Marisa Tomei) is a district attorney (of course) and they get into fights about their daughter, have sex now and again and share confidential information with one another. That's just what exes do, dontcha know.

I really appreciate how much of an ode to Hollywood noir this really is, with silly, random gunfights, views of obscure parts of Los Angeles and rich boys getting into trouble for their bad habits that involve unseemly elements of town, but the script here (written by John Romano, based on a book by Michael Connelly), aside from the basic plot points is really terrible. The dialogue sounds like it was written for a teenybopper soap opera and the story is so inert, it's no surprise when twists come or when characters flip.

There's absolutely no style to be found at all, as most of it takes place in daylight (that's an interesting update of noir if there's no way to get interesting shadows and lighting that gave the genre its name) and in a shity Town Car from the 1980s. Oh yeah - the stupid car that inspired the title is a late-model Town Car - because somehow Mick wouldn't care to buy a new car or something. Why not call it the Mercedes Lawyer or the Land Rover Lawyer? Is the American auto industry in such shape that this guy's heap would be its salvation?

Most of the acting here is terrible, but the actors aren't really working with any good lines. It seems much more like a high school drama club performance of a noir than any real movie with professional players. It's really badly directed (by Brad Furman). I guess this film serves the purpose of how to make a bad film noir with only bad choices. Film students can dissect each scene looking at what Furman does and lean how to do the opposite. That would probably make a pretty good movie!

Stars: 1 of 4