Norah wins the staring contest despite Nick's last-ditch strategy.
Michael Cera has been typecast. For anyone who has followed his brief career, this is not news. It's just a testament to the myopia of casting directors and the dearth of actors that can portray the prototypical American teen in all his awkward glory as effectively as Cera. The titular Nick in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is not a stretch for the young actor. Even if Nick is saddled with the cliches of today's youth centered movies like being in a band (I mean, who isn't?) and driving a vehicle with kitsch cred (what, they couldn't find a Gremlin?) Cera effortlessly slips into the role of Nick. Can he be too far from Cera's real life persona? Nick's Norah is played by the relatively unknown Kat Dennings. She's the girl in high school who can only be fully appreciated in hindsight, unless you're Nick. He knows there's something different about this girl. Norah is drawn to Nick too, even though he's hung up on his ex. Of course, these kids are cagey, and they know they belong together, even if they're not sure why.
It's refreshing that the high school romance drama has been elevated to this. Thanks to geek chic, the nerds are no longer the spectacle wearing next-door neighbor/best friend waiting to be noticed for his/her inner beauty by the football team captain/prom queen, and there's no high school feudal system, the basis for tension during the 80's heyday of teen movies. Screenwriter Lorene Scafaria dispenses with those trappings to give us what is the new template for the youth-centered rom-com. Think When Harry Met Sally but with teenagers and compressed to less than 24 hours. Boy meets girl. Sparks fly. Boy and girl try to screw it up. SPOILER ALERT! Boy and girl get together despite themselves. Certain cinematic youth staples endure with a slight twist: The plot is driven by coincidence but doesn't feel contrived. The villainous ex-girlfriend actually has second thoughts about kicking her old beau to the curb. The main character's sidekicks are all young gay men, and the drunk party girl is a generally good-hearted foil to the film's heroine in between bouts of chewing the scenery.
That scenery is the icing atop Nick and Norah. Director Peter Sollett films it as a valentine to New York City as much as one to budding love. The Big Apple feels quirky, warm, inviting and safe, and this New York, New York might as well be the Modesto, California of American Graffiti. These kids cruise its concrete and glass corridors with ease and without the aid of GPS.
Then there's the music and the ubiquitous playlist of the title. Beyond the synergistic yoking of a surefire bestseller soundtrack, the film is about the ways that music connects people. If there's a heady insight to be had in this breezy film, it's that mutual love of tunes may be the best predictor for a successful relationship. It's a simple premise, but it's a simple film about good-natured kids fighting through their hang-ups and following their bliss. When the sun comes up on Nick and Norah's all nighter, we suspend our cynicism. These two belong together.
Michael Clayton 2: Settling Out of Court
The Coen Brother's maddeningly disjointed Burn After Reading is a message movie. As much as the droll tandem might protest, it is warning to those people with a predilection for insinuating themselves into situations that require expertise and tact that they do not possess, but it plays like another one of their dark screwball comedies.
Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest is the cinematic gold standard for the everyman who is drawn into a web of intrigue based on mistaken identity. Filmmakers have been parroting the conceit ever since. It's a way of connecting the audience to the story. After all, this could happen to you. This film's "heroes" are a pair of strip mall gym employees played by the always excellent Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, who gives a broad comedic performance that turns his beefcake persona on its head. Here they aren't the victims of dangerous machinations that send them meandering aimlessly into harm's way. On the contrary, through a serious of laughable and self-important and self-serving missteps they uncork a chain of catastrophic events when they try to shop around the benign memoirs of a disgruntled ex-CIA employee to the highest bidder so McDormand can afford the plastic surgery that her health insurance will not cover. How the pair come into possession of the CD containing this manuscript is laughable in and of itself, and just as arbitrary as the rest of the plot. It's like the cinematic equivalent of string theory.
The joke is that no one gives a rat's ass about the memoirs except for their author, a seething, cuckolded, scotch-soaked cauldron of male impotency who has reached his breaking point, played by John Malkovich. While it is comical that the film's most menacing character is this ivy-leaguer and former CIA paper-pusher, it's the rest of the self-centered dopes that are far more dangerous. Even the CIA chief who receives periodic updates on the film's surprisingly high body count in the form of hilarious (and tidily matter-of-fact) reports given to him by a subordinate is only interested in saving himself a lot of paperwork. As the credits roll, it's a commentary on the film itself that these intermissions are its most memorable scenes. Maybe the brothers Coen should have just had these two tell us what happened to their little terrarium of morons instead of taking great pains to show us every tic.
Underneath the zany plot the film actually does present characters with real (albeit skewed) emotions, but the Coen's keep all that messiness at arm's length. For example, McDormand and George Clooney's search for love in all the wrong places could play as a poignant little independent film in another auteur's hands, but the Coens' penchant for high farce in Burn After Reading throws this fledgling relationship atop the ash pile along with everything else. In the end, the film is just an elaborate mousetrap, and as for that commentary on people swimming out of their depth: If you find a CD full of personal files on the locker room floor, just take it to the lost and found.
"Wow! Look how young we look on this old fanclub website."
Looking back, the X-Files television show was a revelation. While amassing a rabid cult following of X-philes without the ubiquity of the today's internets, the show continually delivered the paranoid goods. Shadowy figures trolled dimly-lit parking garages, alleys and construction sites. Small rural communities were plagued by inexplicable occurrences. Seemingly ordinary humans were both the perpetrators and the victims of heinous crimes, and noises outside the house were never "just the wind."
In the center of it all, two flashlight beams pierced through the show's trademark darkness. Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the poster children for emotional stoicism, were the perfect foils for the aliens, ghosts, goblins and mutants they were investigating. While each one placed his or her life in the other's hands week after week and their personal relationship constantly flirted with the limits of professionalism, fans of the show were never given the consummation that would have left them wiping away tears with one hand while reaching for a torch with the other.
As a formerly rabid X-phile, I enjoyed seeing David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (looking more radiant now than ever--the big screen suits her) slip back into the roles of Mulder and Scully in X-Files: I Want to Believe. The deadpan dialogue of their series relationship has now been replaced by a different rapport that belies a history of personal heartache and professional disappointment. From the get-go, this is the allure of I Want to Believe. Mulder and Scully come onto the scene as a pair who have given up and resigned themselves to anonymity, a footnote to a secret history, and the case that brings them back to their old selves is a perfect storm of Mulder and Scully's respective achilles heels: abducted women and crises of religious faith.
Series creator Chris Carter is behind the camera for this long-awaited (and long-overdue) sequel to 1998's X-Files: Fight the Future and he imbues the proceedings with the trademark dread for which the series was famous. On the surface, Carter's script appears to pack less punch than the more memorable episodes in the series, but "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." During the series' run, fans were left panting at the labyrinthine mystery of alien colonization, shady government operatives and what lurked in man's heart of darkness. Now, we can get all of that off the news ticker of our favorite 24-hour news outlet daily. To be sure, the mystery at the center of the new X-Files movie is a ghastly one, but our culture is one that now seems to require (after being force fed) a daily allowance of real life parallels to what once straddled the line between plausible and fantastical, the world of extreme possibilities. As a result, I Want to Believe sometimes plays like a boilerplate police procedural, but there's some wry and welcome humor here intermingled with Carter's grim proceedings and serious theme of tenacity in the face of insurmountable obstacles and spirit-crushing failure.
Even in its failures, the series was rarely dull, and ABC's Lost owes its very existence to Fox's groundbreaking show. The latest movie may prove that we cannot go home again, but at the very least, it is a memo from our not-so-distant past when things like this genuinely scared us. The new revelation of the X-Files is how quaint its investigations into the paranormal now seem. Despite their sometimes maddening inscrutability, what we really cared about was Mulder and Scully. Their search for the truth be damned. We just want to know that these two could find happiness at a kind of crossroads between their own paths to belief. If they want to throw a wolfman in there for good measure, I am okay with that too.
"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!" -Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
The Joker is a charter member and the crown jewel of Batman's famous Rogues Gallery. From his first comic book appearance in 1940, the character has been portrayed as an anarchist with a penchant for impossible heists, an unpredictable M.O. and indiscernible motives. Sure, the motive for stealing a diamond seems obvious enough, but why would a thief have to kill the diamond's owner in the most elaborate fashion as well? As Michael Caine's Alfred opines in The Dark Knight, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
What can be said of the late Heath Ledger's turn as The Clown Prince of Crime that has not already been said? To be sure, it is a miraculous performance, a tour de force even, but the realization of the character owes as much to the screenplay by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan as it does Ledger's acting chops. This Joker is a study in contradictions. He is a gifted criminal mastermind, but he cannot hide his disdain for the scheming of others. He is out to prove something, but he claims to be like a dog chasing a car. He wouldn't know what to do if he caught it. He is a remorseless liar and murderer, but we cannot take our eyes off of him. So, what does that say about us? Much like the Bible's depiction of Satan as a tempter, the Nolan brothers' Joker appeals to our baser instincts. His guile is masked by his frightening charisma and a singular ambition not to rule but to destroy. He is a terrorist whose jihad has no religion. Freed from the constraints of status, money, popularity, honor, identity and just about every other social construct, The Joker can do anything he pleases, but he does have at least two rules: 1. there are no rules and 2. no one is incorruptible.
Enter The Batman. Many have given Christian Bale's performance as the titular hero short shrift in the wake of Ledger's scene-chewing Joker. If there was ever any doubt that Bale's Bruce Wayne and Batman are the definitive take on the character, he obliterates it here by effortlessly gliding between each facet of the character's persona. Batman arrives on the scene in The Dark Knight as a fully realized character thanks to 2005's Batman Begins, but here Bale adroitly plays Bruce Wayne as a thunderstruck and conflicted witness to the ethical dilemma that his alter ego has wrought while his Batman is more confident, thus solidifying the notion that Bruce Wayne is the mask that Batman must wear.
For all the bravado of our two protagonists, Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent, Maggie Gylenhaal's Rachel Dawes, Gary Olman's Jim Gordon, Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox, and Michael Caine's Alfred Pennyworth comprise a supporting cast that helps drive the plot. Actors of this caliber don't take roles that call for them to stand around and react to the actions of the homicidal maniac and billionaire playboy/industrialist/vigilante types, and while enough can't be said about this dream ensemble, it is Eckhart's Dent that gives the film its true heart. From his own foreshadowing to the end credits, his character's arc borders on Greek tragedy while still managing to prove relatable. It is another credit to Nolan's script and sure-handed direction.
As for Nolan, he has yet to make a bad movie. Even the least of his efforts, Insomnia, was better than an American remake of a Norwegian thriller had any right to be. Here he has transcended the source material and elevated childhood pulp fantasies to the stuff that celluloid dreams are made of. It is a truly astounding feat to turn a super-hero story into a densely layered crime saga, especially when one considers that this is only Nolan's fourth film since his festival favorite and first truly commercial film Memento unspooled in 2000. While Nolan eschews the stylist predilections of most young directors, his films are like swiss watches. His debts to craftsmen like Michael Mann, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin are manifest in his overriding trust in the intelligence of his audience and his desire to make even the most fantastic feats of derring-do believable in the world he has created. In "The Dark Knight" Nolan has given us a film that engages on many different levels, and by extension he has appealed to the broadest of audiences without pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Now two weeks into its record-breaking release, the cultural phenomena that is The Dark Knight strikes at the heart of one of the great issues of the modern world. As society becomes more sophisticated, villains like The Joker become more frightening. More is at stake. People have more to lose if anarchy is allowed to reign, and diplomacy, for all it can do, can't save humanity from the greatest evils that threaten it. Batman is no diplomat, and failed diplomacy has made his existence necessary. His justice is messy, but the incorruptible and principled hero deserves a place in the world of Gotham and perhaps our own.
Can you spot the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassador?
Try to imagine a new-age version of The Matrix, the seminal end-of-the-millennium fable about the future of humanity and technology. The problem with "Wanted" is that we've seen these go-for-broke high-wire acts before, and while CGI-enhanced feats of derring-do fail to deliver the same way they did in 1999, there's still some dazzle in watching seemingly ordinary schmoes bend the laws of physics. Unlike The Matrix, the world of Wanted is real (for lack of a better term). No one's dodging bullets here. Bullets are dodging people... and cars... and buildings.
Wanted is yet another summer of 2008 movie entry based on a graphic novel, and while it seems that movies based on exaggerated 4-color pulp characters might be reaching critical mass, it seems that Hollywood has not yet begun to pillage the resource that is the comic medium. As Wanted creator Mark Millar puts it, "Hollywood eats up ideas quickly, but comics come up with 300 new ideas a month." Unless you spend some of your free time keeping up with the formerly underground world of comics and their big brother graphic novels, you might not know that two of the finer movies made this century were also based on comic books. If you could name Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, then go to the head of the class. I would have also accepted American Splendor and Ghost World, but neither one of those movies really resonated with me. No points for V for Vendetta or Sin City. Too easy. From Hell, the Hughes' brothers adaptation of Alan Moore's retelling of the Jack the Ripper legend, is automatically disqualified because no turn-of-the-century prostitute would look like Heather Graham. But I digress.
Wanted has little in common with the grounded tales of fathers, husbands and their families in Road to Perdition and A History of Violence. In fact, the less you dwell on Wanted the better off you'll be. You see, there's a centuries-old clan of weavers who are really genetically-predisposed assassins that take their orders from fabric knitted by a magic loom that commands a large and otherwise vacant room in a crumbling warehouse. By translating strand positions into binary code and converting the code to names, this ancient society has mercilessly and without reason (other than the magic loom told them to) knocked off thousands of people over the years. Fine. Since we're bending the laws of physics, I can go along with this too.
I suppose the most amazing thing about Wanted is that some real actors signed up for this high-gloss hokum. James McAvoy, coming off critically lauded roles in The Last King of Scotland and Atonement, plays the ordinary guy stumbling toward his violent destiny with more skill than the script warrants, and Academy award winners Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman seem to be enjoying their turns as two veteran assassins, Sloan and Fox. However, the latter two casting decisions feel like narrative shorthand. Oh look, Freeman is the savvy father/mentor figure and Jolie plays the badass chick who likes cars, guns and knives. I would compare this turn to her lead role in Tomb Raider if Fox didn't make Lara Croft look like a Jane Austen heroine. Jolie has always been able to do more with fewer lines than most, and she is reportedly responsible for the laconic spin on the source material. I'd like to think she's just adhering to the adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."
I could have justified no review of this movie based on that adage alone, but there is something of value here. Like The Incredible Hulk, this film doesn't pretend to be much more than the vehicle for stylish and often thrilling action set pieces. While a movie that aims low and hits its target does not great cinema make, it is often better than the alternatives.
"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. Seriously, it's not you. It's me."
Ang Lee's 2003 take on the jolly green giant was an ambitious misfire. It didn't help that the screenplay gave Bruce Banner ridiculously unnecessary daddy issues and that Eric Bana's Dr. Banner and Jennifer Connelly's Betty Ross were more Affleck and Lopez than Tracy and Hepburn. While you had to applaud Lee's high brow gumption, the whole thing played against the gamma-irradiated creature's central appeal as a raging Hyde to Banner's pursued and persecuted Jekyll. Even the Hulk's CGI realization didn't inspire awe.
This new Hulk makes Lee's Hulk look like Gumby in a toupee. He's rendered here as a dirty-green, veiny, stubbled, mop-top of a monster, and several clever filmmaking techniques and story elements keep this CGI incarnation from sticking out like a sore thumb against real backgrounds. Banner's alter ego is either partially shrouded in darkness, enveloped in smoke, obscured by atmospheric disturbances like sonic waves or heat refraction, set against groves of trees and overcast skies, or charging through neon-lit streets at night. It's a smart move because a seven-foot, green guy is always going to look a little off in a normal environment, so why not minimize the effect?
The main feat in this film is that despite its fast-paced bombast, the characters are actually well-developed. Exposition is taken care of in the opening credits, and director Louis Letterier's show-don't-tell technique of characterization works. We don't need a complicated mythology about a scientist who turns into a green behemoth when he gets angry, or scared, or distressed, or gassy. Here the Hulk is a given. He's a nuisance that a humble, unassuming man like Banner could do without and a terror to anyone who wants to control his power but can't, but we know all that. Now let's get on with it.
Scuttlebutt was that Edward Norton, who plays the good Dr. Banner this time around, wanted more of the substance he had infused into Zack Penn's screenplay. What serious actor wouldn't. No one wants to play second fiddle to a character with one line (You can probably guess what it is.), but Marvel had already been down that road and was determined to give the fans of the comic book what they wanted the first time around: less talk, more smash. Suffice it to say, there's a whole lot of smashing going on.
Norton and his supporting cast of Liv Tyler, William Hurt and Tim Roth take on their roles with one-note motivations and no delusions of making Oscar acceptance speeches next year, but let's all sit back and appreciate that for a moment: the joys of a B-monster movie done well and without pretension.
"Talk to the hand."
Iron Man is a hi-tech, shiny gadget of a movie, which is convenient because it’s about a guy who’s into hi-tech, shiny gadgets. Like any good gadget it does its job so efficiently that it’s difficult to find a fault in it of any consequence. Each component plays a role and each output is a result of previous input. While this doesn’t make for compelling movie-making, you have to appreciate the finely-tuned product of R&D that is Iron Man.
Now, hold the iPhone!
While Iron Man is not a daring movie by any stretch, there is a component in its schematic that keeps it from being a strictly 1’s and 0’s affair. The “unconventional” casting of Robert Downey Jr. as the billionaire playboy Tony Stark is a stroke of genius. Downey's career and personal arcs are the stuff of Hollywood legend, and his roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Zodiac, A Scanner Darkly, and Good Night and Good Luck are evidence that his most recent comeback is for real. His turn in Iron Man puts him in the club for actors with interesting and unorthodox resumes who finally got their shot at blockbuster fame with Johnny Depp, and Downey doesn't waste the opportunity. From his first appearance on screen, every piece of bad boy baggage is right there with him. He's not the guy you love to hate. He's the guy you hate to love.
Downey might even be too good to play this role. Once Stark suits up as Iron Man, you miss the little cad immediately, but director Jon Favreau (in what is probably the wisest decision he's ever made or will ever make as a filmmaker) gives us an under the helmet point of view so we don't lose Downey's performance during the CG mayhem. After all, we've seen super heroes fly around before, but has there ever been a comic book-based movie when the penultimate moment of the hero suiting up for the first time to kick some ass would have been a letdown?
The rest of the cast cruises in Downey's wake. Even Jeff Bridges' bald head and Santa Claus beard can't steal the spotlight when Downey's on screen. Gwyneth Paltrow (as much as I hate to admit it) is serviceable in her role as a Stark's gal Friday, and I have to say it was more than a little refreshing to have a female character not screaming her lungs out when confronted by a dangerous and overpowering villain. Paltrow's Pepper Potts acts like she has other places to be and this guy is screwing up her itinerary. She's no nonsense... like this movie.
"Have your knife ready, kiddo. If that groundhog pops up again, I want you to gut him. Groundhogs is good eatin'."
The moment I knew we were in trouble was when a CG groundhog popped out of the Nevada desert not once, not twice but thrice in the first twenty minutes of the long-awaited fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise.
While this could be considered a minor quibble and an insignificant blight on an otherwise generally pleasant bit of escapist cinema, the groundhog is actually representative of a major fault in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's a useless bit of tomfoolery, a contrivance that does nothing to propel the adventure of the man in the fedora, but it's also more than that.
George Lucas and his Northern California Skywalker Ranch empire have changed the face of movies. It was Lucas' pioneering spirit that led to the advent and refinement of computer generated imagery (CGI) and the ability to put things on film that had never been possible before. In Lucas' and other's hands, that technology has now been horribly mutated into a tool for the vain and a surrogate for narrative deficiencies. It's a means to its own gee whiz end that has all but squandered the good will Lucas earned from his early career's low-tech success.
While Lucas was giving us Jar Jar Binks, his partner, Steven Spielberg was making better use of the advances in special effects. From the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park to the tripods in War of the Worlds, Spielberg's judicious use of special effects as a plot development and mood enhancing tool have almost always been pitch perfect. Unfortunately, Lucas' fingerprints are all over The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the overstuffed computer effects that would be more at home in a story about hobbits and iron men than one about a globe-trotting, rough-and-tumble archaeologist give the movie an anachronistic high gloss resulting in an Indiana Jones adventure that looks and feels like the Tomb Raiders and National Treasures that it inspired.
As a movie, IJATKOTCS (I now refuse to write it all out) is not without its nostalgic kicks. Seeing Ford don the fedora and crack the whip again is a delight, and Karen Allen appears to be having a blast reprising her Marian Ravenwood role (She can't stop grinning.). Also, the red route lines that traverse sepia toned maps while our hero travels and John Williams' classic soundtrack fire neural pathways that serve to remind us that this is Indiana Jones, dammit, but in the the end, those feelings of nostalgia are outweighed by a muddled and foolish plot (Indy is actually trying to return something rather than find it. Wait, someone already found it and returned it so Indy needs to find it again and take it somewhere else?). I can forgive a muddled plot. This is Indiana Jones after all. As for the suspension of disbelief required for the story's more ridiculous bird walks, if you can't handle that, stay home and watch the History Channel. For Indy, I can forgive a lot, but the movie's greatest offense can best be summed up by an episode that occurred in my home a few days after seeing the movie.
My wife and I were watching a PBS special on the history of Las Vegas. There was a segment of the documentary that dealt with the nuclear testing that was taking place in the Nevada desert in the 1950's and how visitors to Vegas would watch mushroom clouds ascend over the horizon in between hands of blackjack. Jamye interjected that this was her favorite part of the new Indiana Jones movie. I was puzzled. I had no idea what she was talking about. After a few moments I remembered one of the movie's big action set pieces involving Indy, a nuclear testing sight and an old refrigerator, but the sad point had been made. An Indiana Jones adventure was guilty of the biggest sin imaginable. Like most movies of the past ten years, it was destined to be forgettable.
Norah wins the staring contest despite Nick's last-ditch strategy.
