Sahara
PG-13, 127 m., 2005
Matthew McConaughey (Dirk Pitt), Steve Zahn (Al Giordino), Penelope Cruz (Eva Rojas), Lambert Wilson (Massarde), Glynn Turman (Dr. Hopper), Delroy Lindo (Carl), William H. Macy (Admiral Sandecker), Rainn Wilson (Rudi), Lennie James (General Kazim). Directed by Breck Eisner and produced by Stephanie Austin, Howard Baldwin, Karen Elise Baldwin, and Mace Neufeld. Screenplay by Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, John C. Richards, and James V. Hart, based on the novel by Clive Cussler.
Clive Cussler, who wrote the novel that inspired Sahara, is said to have rejected untold drafts of the screenplay and sued Paramount over this one. One wonders not so much what Cussler would have left out as what else could have gone in. Sahara obviously contains everything that could possibly be included in such a screenplay, and more. It’s like a fire sale at the action movie discount outlet.
Do not assume I mean to be negative. I treasure the movie’s preposterous plot. It’s so completely over the top, it can see reality only in its rearview mirror. What can you say about a movie based on the premise that a Confederate ironclad ship from the Civil War is buried beneath the sands of the Sahara, having ventured there 150 years ago when the region was, obviously, damper than it is now?
Matthew McConaughey plays Dirk Pitt, the movie’s hero, who is searching for the legendary ship. Dirk Pitt. Dirk Pitt. Or Pitt, Dirk. Makes Brad Pitt sound like William Pitt. Dirk has a thing about long-lost ships; readers may recall that he was also the hero of Raise the Titanic (1980), a movie so expensive that its producer, Lord Lew Grade, observed, “It would have been cheaper to lower the ocean.”
Dirk has a sidekick named Al Giordino, played by Steve Zahn in the time-honored Movie Sidekick mode. Was it Walter Huston who explained that movie heroes need sidekicks “because somebody has to do the dance.” You know, the dance where the sidekick throws his hat down on the ground and stomps on it in joy or anger? You can’t have your hero losing his cool like that.
The two men arrive in Africa to find that a dangerous plague is spreading. The plague is being battled by the beautiful Eva Rojas (Penelope Cruz), and it turns out that Dirk and Eva share mutual interests, since if the plague spreads down rivers and “interacts with salt water,” there is a danger that “all ocean life will be destroyed.” Actually, I am not sure why that is only a mutual interest; it’s more of a universal interest, you would think, although General Kazim (Lennie James), the African dictator, and an evil French zillionaire (Lambert Wilson) don’t seem much disturbed. That’s because they’re getting rich in a way I will not reveal, although there is something grimly amusing about converting pollutants into other pollutants.
The movie, directed by Breck Eisner, son of Michael, is essentially a laundry line for absurd but entertaining action sequences. Dirk, Eva, and Al have an amazing series of close calls in the desert, while Admiral Sandecker (ret.) (William H. Macy) keeps in touch with them by radio and remains steadfast in his course, whatever it is. There are chases involving planes, trains, automobiles, helicopters, dune buggies, wind-propelled airplane carcasses, and camels. The heroes somewhat improbably conceal themselves inside a tank car on a train going toward a secret desert plant (improbably, since the car going in that direction should have been full), and then find themselves one of those James Bondian vantage points inside the plant, from where they can observe uniformed clones carrying out obscure tasks.
There is a race against time before everything explodes, of course, and some bizarre science involving directing the sun’s rays, and then what do you suppose turns up? If you slapped yourself up alongside the head and shouted out, “The long-lost Civil War ironclad?” you could not be more correct. Gee, I wonder if its cannons will still fire after this length of time?
I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level, which must mean (I am forced to conclude) in my own dumb way. I perceive that I have supplied mostly a description of what happens in the film, filtered through my own skewed amusement. Does that make this a real review?
Funny you should ask. As it happens, I happened to be glancing at Gore Vidal’s article about the critic Edmund Wilson in a 1993 issue of the New York Review of Books. There Vidal writes: “Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism.” In this case, I think the description itself is the criticism. Yes, I’m almost sure of it.
Sangre de Mi Sangre
NO MPAA RATING, 100 m., 2008
Jorge Adrian Espindola (Pedro), Armando Hernandez (Juan), Jesus Ochoa (Diego), Paola Mendoza (Magda), Eugenio Derbez (Anibal), Israel Hernandez (Ricardo), Leonardo Anzure (Simon). Directed by Christopher Zalla and produced by Benjamin Odell and Per Melita. Screenplay by Zalla.
Sangre de Mi Sangre, the grand jury prize winner at Sundance 2007, gives us wonderful actors struggling in a tangled web of writing. The film is built around two relationships, both touching, both emotionally true. But time after time, we’re brought up short by absolute impossibilities and gaping improbabilities in the story. To give one example: A newly arrived Mexican immigrant struggles to find his father in New York City. All he has is the seventeen-year-old information that the man works in (or perhaps owns) a French restaurant. Working his way through the yellow pages listings of French restaurants, he successfully finds his father. Uh-huh.
Let’s back up to earlier screenplay questions. We meet the hero, Pedro, as he escapes from Mexico by quickly scaling a fence along the U.S. border. Is it that easy to cross? Never mind; waiting on the other side (not miles away, or hidden) is a truck waiting to take immigrants to New York. Wouldn’t U.S. customs patrols notice it, in full view in an urban area? Pedro is hustled inside, the doors are slammed, and the truck begins a 2,500-mile journey that can apparently be survived on half a taco and a small bottle of water. More surprising still is that no effort is made to charge Pedro for the trip. He rides free.
Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espindola) is young, earnest, trusting. On the journey he makes a friend of Juan (Armando Hernandez), and tells him his story: He hopes to find his father in New York and carries a letter to the old man from his mother. When Pedro wakes up at the end of the trip, Juan has already disappeared with the letter.
Juan is enterprising and decides to pose as Pedro; maybe it’s true, as Pedro’s mother claimed, that the father owned the restaurant where he earned money, which he sent home for several years. But why a French restaurant? Using the address on the envelope, Juan easily finds the shabby apartment of old Diego (Jesus Ochoa), who has never seen him and has no desire to acquire a son. But Juan is ingratiating and tells a convincing story; after all, he has read the letter and Diego refuses to.
Meanwhile, the real Pedro wanders the streets, remembering only his father’s street address (still accurate after seventeen years). He enlists Magda, a hard-worn Mexican girl who does drugs, makes a living by her wits and her body, and wants nothing to do with Pedro. They nevertheless become confederates, picking up fifty dollars here or there by performing sex for men who want to watch.
At this point you’re rolling your eyes and wondering how the grand jury at Sundance, or any jury, could have awarded such a story its prize. But you would have missed what makes the film special: the relationships. Juan does such a good job of playing Pedro that he convinces Diego he really is his son. And the real Pedro gets a quick series of lessons in surviving the mean streets and comes to care about (not for) Magda.
The truest of these relationships, paradoxically, is the false one. Jesus Ochoa, a much-honored Mexican actor, creates a heartbreaking performance as Diego, the “old man,” as Juan always calls him. He was once in love in Mexico, left, sent money home, returned, and then (after apparently fathering the real Pedro) returned to New York seventeen years ago. Maybe he told his wife he owned a restaurant, or maybe she lied about that to her son. No matter. He is a dishwasher and vegetable slicer, who earns extra money by sewing artificial roses. He has money stashed away. He is big, burly, very lonely. He comes to care for this “son.” And despite Juan’s deception, Juan comes to care for him—almost, you could say, as a father.
Magda is a tougher case. She does not bestow her affection lightly, nor is the real Pedro attracted to prostitution as a way for them to earn money. But Zalla, the director, does a perceptive, concise job of showing us how Magda lives on the streets and nearly dies. Magda and Pedro are together as a matter of mutual survival.
Pedro, Juan, and Diego have paths that must eventually cross, we think. See for yourself if they do. And try not to ask why the police, planning to break down a door by surprise, would announce their approach with five minutes of sirens. The story’s conclusion is rushed and arbitrary, but so perhaps it has to be. Sangre de Mi Sangre (Blood of My Blood) is a film that stumbles through a maddening screenplay but nevertheless generates true emotional energy.
Saraband
R, 107 m., 2005
Liv Ullmann (Marianne), Erland Josephson (Johan), Borje Ahlstedt (Henrik), Julia Dufvenius (Karin), Gunnel Fred (Martha). Directed by Ingmar Bergman and produced by Pia Ehrnvall. Screenplay by Bergman.
Ingmar Bergman is balancing his accounts and closing out his books. The great director is eighty-seven years old and announced in 1982 that Fanny and Alexander would be his last film. So it was, but he continued to work on the stage and for television, and then he wrote the screenplay for Liv Ullmann’s film Faithless (2000). Now comes his absolutely last work, Saraband, powerfully, painfully honest.
Although you can see the film as it stands, it will have more resonance if you remember Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973). That film starred Ullmann and Erland Josephson as Marianne and Johan, a couple married twenty years earlier and divorced ten years earlier, who meet again in the middle of the night in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Their marriage has failed, their relationship has faded, and yet on this night it is more real than anything else. I wrote in 1973: “They are in middle age now but in the night still fond and frightened lovers holding on for reassurance.”
Now there is no more reassurance to be had. They must be in their eighties now; in real life, Josephson is eighty-two and Ullmann sixty-six. Because Bergman’s films can be seen again and again, and because he believes the human face is the most important subject of the cinema, we are as familiar with these two faces as any we have ever seen. I saw Ullmann for the first time in Bergman’s Persona (1966), which I reviewed seven months after I became a film critic. Now here she is again. When I interviewed her about Faithless at Cannes five years ago, I noted to myself that she had not, like so many actresses, had plastic surgery. She wore her age as proof of having lived, as we all must. Now I see Saraband and the movie is possible because she did not allow a surgeon to give her a face yearning for its younger form.
As the film opens, she is looking through some old photographs. Marianne and Johan had two daughters together, who are now middle-aged. She never sees them; one lives in Australia, and the other has gone mad. She tells us she has not seen Johan for all of those years but now thinks she will go to visit him. We follow her and find that Johan is now living in misery left over from an earlier marriage. He is rich, lives in the country, owns a nearby cottage that is occupied by his sixty-one-year-old son, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt), and Henrik’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Anna—Henrik’s wife, Karin’s mother—has been dead for two years. She is missed because she was needed, as cartilage if nothing else, to keep her husband and daughter from wearing each other down.
They are not Marianne’s problem. But she visits them and witnesses appalling unhappiness. Johan is scornful of his son, who has value in his eyes only as the parent of Karin. Henrik is bitter that his father has money but doles it out reluctantly, to keep his son in constant need and supplication. Karin, who plays the cello, feels trapped because she wants to develop her career in the city and her father possessively hangs onto her (they sleep, Marianne discovers, in the same bed).
The movie is not about the resolution of this plot. It is about the way people persist in creating misery by placing the demands of their egos above the need for happiness—their own happiness and that of those around them. In some sense, Johan and Henrik live in these adjacent houses, in the middle of nowhere, simply so that they can hate each other. If they parted, each would lose a reason for living. Karin is the victim of their pathology.
Oh, but Bergman is sad, as he lives decade after decade on his island of Faro and writes these stories and assembles his old crew, or their children and successors, to film them. His Faithless showed an old filmmaker (working in Bergman’s office, living in Bergman’s house on Bergman’s island). He hires an actress to help him think through a story he wants to write. The actress, who is imaginary, is in fact playing a woman he once loved; their love caused pain to her husband, her child, and even to the director. Now in his old age he is working through it, perhaps trying to make amends. We know from Bergman’s autobiography that the story is loosely based on fact. We know, too, that Ullmann, who is directing it, was also Bergman’s lover and had his daughter.
If Faithless was an attempt to face personal guilt, Saraband is a meditation on the pathology of selfish relationships. It is filled with failed parents: All three adults lack love in their bonds with their children. It is filled with unsettled scores: Now that Henrik is sixty-one, what does it matter that he has never become as successful as his father? The game is over. It is time to enjoy the success of his daughter—a success he will not permit because he fears losing her. When Marianne, a witness to this triangle of resentment, returns to her own life, she returns to even less—to nothing, to photographs.
The overwhelming fact about this movie is its awareness of time. Thirty-two years have passed since Scenes from a Marriage. The years have passed for Bergman, for Ullmann, for Josephson, and for us. Whatever else he is telling us in Saraband, Bergman is telling us that life will end on the terms by which we have lived it. If we are bitter now, we will not be victorious later; we will still be bitter. Here is a movie about people who have lived so long, hell has not been able to wait for them.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic ½
NO MPAA RATING, 70 m., 2005
Sarah Silverman (Herself), La’vin Kiyano (Tough Guy), Laura Silverman (Herself), Bob Odenkirk (Himself), Brian Posehn (Himself), Brody Stevens (Agent). Directed by Liam Lynch and produced by Heidi Herzon, Randy Sosin, and Mark Williams. Screenplay by Sarah Silverman.
Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic is a movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing, and the lack of a parent or adult guardian. There should have been somebody to stand up sadly after the first screening and say: “Sarah, honey, this isn’t the movie you want people to see. Your material needs a lot of work; the musical scenes are deadly, except for the first one. And it looks like it was edited by someone fooling around with iMovie on a borrowed Macintosh.”
Apparently the only person capable of telling Sarah Silverman such things is Sarah Silverman, and she obviously did not. Maybe the scene of her kissing herself in the mirror provides a clue. The result is a film that is going to make it hard to get people to come to the second Sarah Silverman film. Too bad, because Silverman is smart and funny, and she blindsides you with unexpected U-turns. She could be the instrument for abrasive and transgressive humor that would slice through the comedy club crap. But here, she isn’t.
You have seen her before. She started on Saturday Night Live and has been in fifteen movies and a lot of TV shows. She’s tall, brunette, and good-looking, and she says shocking things with the precise enunciation and poise of a girl who was brought up knowing how to make a good impression. The disconnect between what she says and how she says it is part of the effect. If she were crass and vulgar, her material would be insupportable: If you’re going to use cancer, AIDS, and 9/11 as punch lines, you’d better know how to get the permission of the audience. She does it by seeming to be too well-bred to realize what she’s saying. She’s always correcting herself. When she uses the word retards she immediately registers that it’s non-PC and elaborates: “When I say ‘retards,’ I mean they can do anything.”
So that’s one of her lines. It would be a cheap shot for me to quote a dozen more and do her act here in the review. Better to stand back and see why she’s funny but the movie doesn’t work. The first problem is with timing. None of her riffs go on long enough to build. She gets a laugh, and then another one, maybe a third, and then she starts in a different direction. We want her to keep on, piling one offense on top of another. We want to see her on a roll.
That’s in the concert documentary parts of the movie. She stands on a stage and does the material and there are cuts to the audience, but curiously not much of a connection; it doesn’t seem to be this audience at this performance, but a generic audience. Then she cuts away from the doc stuff to little sketches. The first one, in which her sister (Laura Silverman) and her friend (Brian Posehn) brag about their recent accomplishments, is funny because she perfectly plays someone who has never accomplished anything and never will, and lies about it. Then we see her in a car, singing a song about getting a job and doing a show, and then she does a show. Fair enough.
But what’s with the scene where she entertains the old folks at her grandma’s rest home by singing a song telling them they will all die soon? She is rescued by the apparent oblivion of the old folks, who seem so disconnected she could be working in blue screen. Then there’s the scene where she angrily shakes the corpse of her grandmother in its casket. Here is a bulletin from the real world: Something like that is not intrinsically funny. Yes, you can probably find a way to set it up and write it to make it funny, but to simply do it, just plain do it, is pathetic. The audience, which has been laughing, grows watchful and sad.
To discuss the film’s editing rhythm is to suggest it has one. There are artless and abrupt cuts between different kinds of material. She’s on the stage, and then she’s at the nursing home. There is a way to make that transition, but it doesn’t involve a cut that feels like she was interrupted in the middle of something. And the ending comes abruptly, without any kind of acceleration and triumph in the material. Her act feels cut off at the knees. The running time, seventy minutes including end credits, is interesting, since if you subtract the offstage scenes that means we see less of her than a live audience would.
Now if Silverman had been ungifted or her material had lacked all humor, I would maybe not have bothered with a review. Why kick a movie when it’s down? But she has a real talent, and she is sometimes very funny in a way that is particularly her own. Now she needs to work with a writer (not to provide the material but to shape and pace it), and a director who can build a scene, and an editor who can get her out of it, and a producer who can provide wise counsel.
On the basis of this movie, it will be her first exposure as a filmmaker to anyone like that.
Savage Grace ½
NO MPAA RATING, 97 m., 2008
Julianne Moore (Barbara Daly), Stephen Dillane (Brooks Baekeland), Eddie Redmayne (Tony Baekeland), Elena Anaya (Blanca), Unax Ugalde (Jake), Hugh Dancy (Sam Green). Directed by Tom Kalin and produced by Iker Monfort, Katie Roumel, Pamela Koffler, and Christine Vachon. Screenplay by Howard Rodman, based on the book by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson.
When a movie’s story ends and words appear on the screen telling us what happened then, they are sometimes inspirational, sometimes triumphant, sometimes sad. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen an outcome more pathetic than the one described at the end of Savage Grace. They describe the ultimate destiny of Tony Baekeland, whose misfortune it was to be the heir of a great fortune. His fate is all the more appalling because it hardly seems inevitable. He is a very disturbed young man, as who might not be after the life he led? But life took him to tragic extremes.
The movie tells the true story of the marriage of Barbara Daly (Julianne Moore) and Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane), who glittered erratically in the social circles of the 1940s through the 1960s. Brooks’s grandfather invented Bakelite, used in everything, we learn, from cooking utensils to nuclear bombs. By the third generation the fortune has produced Brooks, a vapid clotheshorse who nevertheless perhaps deserves better than a wife who is all pose and attitude, all brittle facade, deeply rotten inside. Their son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne), who narrates much of the story, is raised as her coddled darling but feels little real love from either parent and grows into a narcissistic, hedonistic, inverted basket case.
Oh, but they all look so elegant! They know how to dress and how to behave (and misbehave) in the high society watering holes of New York (1950s), Paris (1960s), Majorca and London (into the 1970s). They are known everywhere, loved nowhere, except for a few hangers-on like Sam (Hugh Dancy), a gay “walker” who accompanies Barbara after Brooks has left.
It’s not simply that Brooks has left. He left with Blanca (Elena Anaya), the Spanish beauty Tony brought home from the beach one day, only to watch his father seduce her from right under his nose. Tony is of indeterminate sexuality from the beginning and now tilts over into homosexuality, with such friends as Jake (Unax Ugalde), a pot-smoking beach creature. Sam, an art dealer, is also in the mix, and indeed mother, son, and walker all end up in bed together.
The tone of the film is set by Julianne Moore, in what I suppose must be described as a fine performance, although she has little enough to work with. Barbara was so shallow. She was all clothes and hair and endless cigarettes, and conversation that was never really adequate for the level she was aiming for. She also had a nasty habit of saying rude things to break up social events, and you can hardly blame Brooks for leaving—although he, too, was so lacking in ordinary human qualities.
Decadence, of course, is the word to describe this world, but nothing really prepares us for its final descent. I will not describe what happens at the end, except to say nothing has really prepared us for it. It’s hard to take. Very hard. And then those stark white letters on the black background.
This is the first film in fifteen years by Tom Kalin, who made Swoon in 1992. That was about another famous scandal, the murder of Bobby Franks by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold Jr. Both films are about protagonists without ordinary moral values; they find the unacceptable to be thinkable, even a pleasure. Or a compulsion.
But what we miss in the film is insight into Barbara and Brooks and Tony. In his letters and diaries, Tony makes a great effort toward understanding his life but doesn’t come up with much. Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story and, it must be said, the film about it.
The Savages ½
R, 113 m., 2007
Laura Linney (Wendy Savage), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jon Savage), Philip Bosco (Lenny Savage), Gbenga Akinnagbe (Jimmy), Peter Friedman (Larry). Directed by Tamara Jenkins and produced by Anne Carey, Ted Hope, and Erica Westheimer. Screenplay by Jenkins.
The Savages seems a curious movie to be opening four days before Christmas, but maybe not: Christmas Day itself is said to be the top moviegoing day of the year, as families (a) seek something they can do together without having to talk, or (b) use them as an excuse to escape from the house. Not all holidays are by Norman Rockwell, and maybe some grown children will enjoy this touching, humorous film about an elderly father whose time has come to leave his “retirement community” and move into “assisted living” (which my Aunt Mary referred to as “assisted dying”).
Wendy and Jon Savage (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) are sister and brother, she living in New York City, he living in Buffalo, she an aspiring playwright, he a professor and author of books about the theater. They are smart, articulate, and knowledgeable about drama, attributes that do them no good at all when they get a call from Sun City that their dad, Lenny (Philip Bosco), has started to write on the wall with his excrement.
After some reluctance, mostly on Jon’s part, they fly to Arizona and find their dad shacked up with Doris, a girlfriend his age. I was reminded of a friend of mine whose eighty-five-year-old dad discovered Viagra and insisted on calling his son with daily reports on his sex life. My friend pleaded with him to spare the details. There are some things children desperately do not want to know. Doris spares them the occasion for such reports, however, by suddenly passing away, and Jon and Wendy decide to move their father to Buffalo so he will be close to them. He is a hostile curmudgeon who probably moved to Arizona in the first place to get away from them, but now he’s in no position to resist.
Writer-director Tamara Jenkins (Slums of Beverly Hills) doesn’t sentimentalize this material; quite the opposite. Lenny remains Lenny to the best of his ability, which means a short temper, a foul vocabulary, and a constant state of irritation. We gather that he was not a joy to grow up with; indeed, the scars still borne by his children are such that they refer to their childhoods only obliquely. Whatever the relationship between their parents was like, it has left them unable to form liaisons of their own; Wendy is having a joyless affair with a married man, and Jon has a Polish girlfriend he refuses to marry even if it would save her from deportation back to Poland. That he weeps over his inability shows that he is aware of his emotional scars and fears to heal them.
There is a genre of movies set in old-folks’ homes that resemble sitcoms, including colorful characters, lots of one-liners, and a pecking order. The nursing home they find for Lenny in Buffalo is the next step after such a place. It is essentially run by the caregivers who treat their clients something like misbehaving children. One who seems to care is a Nigerian immigrant named Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), who sympathizes with Jon and Wendy and shares lore about caring for the aged. Kristen Thomson played a similar character in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her—the experienced nurse who knows what the family has gone through and will go through.
A movie like this depends on nuance and performance if it is not to descend entirely into soap opera. Jenkins knows that and is quietly insistent that we observe little moments and dropped words and exchanged glances. The resettling of Jon and Wendy’s father causes the resettling of their own lives and forces them to examine memories they hoped were buried. Both Linney and Hoffman are so specific in creating these characters that we see them as people, not elements in a plot. Hoffman in particular shows how many disguises he has within his seemingly immutable presence; would you know it is the same actor here and in two other films this season, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War?
The Savages confronts a day that may come in all of our lives. Two days, actually, the first when we are younger, the second when we are older. Ballad of Narayama, a great Japanese film, is about a community that decides when a person has outlived any usefulness and leaves that person on the mountain to die. It seems cruel, but even the dying seem to think it appropriate. Better than to have been healthy and strong once, and reduced to writing on the walls.
Saving Shiloh ½
PG, 90 m., 2006
Scott Wilson (Judd Travers), Jason Dolley (Marty Preston), Gerald McRaney (Ray Preston), Ann Dowd (Louise Preston), Kyle Chavarria (Dara Lynn Preston), Taylor Momsen (Samantha Wallace), Liberty Smith (Becky Preston). Directed by Sandy Tung and produced by Carl Borack and Dale Rosenbloom. Screenplay by Rosenbloom, based on the novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.
Saving Shiloh is the third and final Shiloh film, and fully as worthy as the others. It’s a family film that deals with real problems and teaches real values, and yet is exciting and entertaining. We come to really care about the young boy Marty, his family and friends, and the ominous presence of their neighbor Judd. Marty, now played by Jason Dolley, has grown up during the series and does some wise thinking in this film.
All three films are based on much-loved novels by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and the tension in all three centers on the neighbor, Judd (Scott Wilson), who has a drinking problem, gets in fights, wrecks his car, and as before seems to have no occupation except for shooting squirrels in the trees around his cabin. Wilson plays the character full-bore, not as a villain in a family film, but as a complex and wounded person, earnestly trying to change.
Marty believes in him. His father, Ray (Gerald McRaney), has known Judd most of his life and disliked him until recently. His change of heart came in the first film, after Marty rescued the abused dog Shiloh from Judd, made him his own, and in the process broke into Judd’s isolation for the first time. By this third film, Marty has won Judd’s confidence to such a degree that the man shares a painful memory of his own father: “Sometimes he beat me when he was sad. Sometimes he beat me when he was happy. Sometimes he was just happy to beat me.”
Judd becomes the suspect when a local man disappears after the two men get in a bar fight. Judd is suspected again in a series of thefts. Marty believes in him, and his dad backs him up: Judd is a troubled man, but not a thief and certainly not a killer. Local gossip is quick to blame Judd for everything that goes wrong, but Marty’s teacher focuses on the principle that a man is innocent until proven guilty, and Marty puts that into practice. Judd still keeps his dogs chained, but Marty learns from the local vet that chained dogs are unhappy and mean and tells Judd he and his dad will help fence in his yard. In this and other ways, Marty stands true.
All of this may sound too much like an After School Special, so I should add that Marty, his best friend, Samantha (Taylor Momsen), and his sisters, Dara Lynn (Kyle Chavarria) and Becky (Liberty Smith), live ordinary kid lives, have ordinary kid days, fool around, and bring us lots of smiles. His dad and mom (Ann Dowd) are loving and supportive, and that’s rare when so many movie parents are wrongheaded or missing.
It’s commendable, too, that in this film, growing old and dying are treated respectfully; there’s a visit to the grave of Samantha’s grandfather Doc Wallace, and a visit to the nursing home where Marty’s grandmother is slipping into Alzheimer’s. Saving Shiloh doesn’t overplay its lessons on life, but it contains them, and they give it values many family movies simply ignore. Carl Borack produced and Dale Rosenbloom directed the first film; they coproduced Shiloh 2: Shiloh Season (1999) and Saving Shiloh, both directed by Sandy Tung.
As for melodrama, there is some business involving the thieves that is fairly exciting but also fairly unbelievable. And a climactic scene where Dara Lynn slips off a bridge into the river, and Marty and Shiloh dive in to save her. The film nicely modulates the danger, making it scary but not traumatizing. Everyone involved with this film obviously had respect for the family audiences they are aiming at, and it’s surprising how moving the film is, and how wise, while still just seeming to be about a boy and his dog, his family, and the mean man next door who isn’t so mean if you get to know him.
Schultze Gets the Blues ½
PG, 114 m., 2005
Horst Krause (Schultze), Harald Warmbrunn (Jurgen), Karl Fred Muller (Manfred), Ursula Schucht (Jurgen’s Wife), Hannelore ScHilbert (Manfred’s Wife), Wolfgang Boos (Gatekeeper), Leo Fischer (Head of Music Club), Loni Frank (Schultze’s Mother). Directed by Michael Schorr and produced by Jens Korner. Screenplay by Schorr.
Do they have salt mines in Germany? Or is Schultze’s job simply a symbol of a lifetime of thankless toil? Day after day he ventures down into the salt mine until, with a shock, he and three friends are forced to retire. There is a little party at the beer hall, his coworkers singing a lugubrious song of farewell, and Schultze is a retired man. Not married, he passes his days in the sad enjoyment of unwanted freedom. Sometimes he contemplates his retirement present, a lamp made from large block of crystallized salt with a bulb inside. If it ever falls into other hands, will its new owners think to lick it?
Schultze (Horst Krause) is a bulky, stolid, unlovely man who wipes the dust from his garden gnomes, spends as much time as possible napping on his sofa, visits his mother in a nursing home, plays the accordion at a polka club, and plays chess at a club where the level of play is not too high; one should not reach retirement age as a chess player still arguing over applications of the “touch-move” rule. He gets around town on his bicycle, dealing with the delays caused by a rail crossing guard who is distracted by the study of alchemy.
One night Schultze’s world changes forever. On the radio he hears zydeco music from Louisiana. I was reminded of Genghis Blues, the 1999 film where a blind musician in San Francisco, Paul Pena, hears Tuva throat-singing over the radio, teaches it to himself, and travels to the Republic of Tuva for the annual competition. Schultze becomes a man possessed. He takes up his accordion, begins to pump through a tired song he has played a thousand times, and then gradually increases the tempo and turns up the heat until he is playing, well, zydeco polka.
That is not an impossible musical genre. David Golia, a friend of mine from San Francisco, leads a polka band that explores what he sees as the underlying connection between polka, rock, and Mexican and Brazilian music. It’s not all about beer barrels.
Schultze now becomes a man obsessed. His lonely life is filled with fantasies of far-off bayous. He gets a cookbook and prepares jambalaya on his kitchen stove. His polka club listens to his zydeco arrangements and votes to send him to a German music festival in the town’s sister city in Texas—not so much to honor him, we suspect, as to get him out of town.
Schultze is not much of a traveler, and speaks perhaps a dozen words of English. Unlike the travelers in many movies, he doesn’t magically learn many more. The Texas festival does not nurture his inner man, and he does what any sensible person in Schultze’s position would do, which is to purchase a boat and set off across the Gulf and into the waterways of Louisiana.
What may not be clear in my description is that Schultze Gets the Blues is not entirely, or even mostly, a comedy, even though it has passages of droll, deadpan humor. It is essentially the record of a man who sets himself into motion and is amazed by the results. I was reminded of Aki Kaurismaki’s The Man without a Past (2002), the story of a man whose amnesia frees him to begin an altogether different life. The film has also been compared with About Schmidt (2002), although Schmidt was a madcap compared to Schultze.
Schultze is not an object of fun, but a focus of loneliness and need, a man who discovers too late that he made no plans for his free time and is deeply bored by his life. His American journey is not travel but exploration—not of a new land, but of his own possibilities. He suddenly realizes that he, Schultze, can move from one continent to another, can medicate his blues with Louisiana hot sauce, and play music that sends his accordion on crazy trills of joy.
He does not, during his journey, meet a soul mate, fall in love, become discovered on American Idol, or do anything else than live his new life. He meets people easily because he is so manifestly friendly and harmless, but finds it hard to form relationships because of his handful of words. No matter. We suspect it was the same for him even in Germany, and now he wanders where every single thing he sees is new to his eyes.
The writer and director, Michael Schorr, is making his first film but has the confidence and simplicity of someone who has been making films forever. Unlike many first-timers, he isn’t trying to see how much of his genius one film can contain. He begins, I think, not with burning ambition, but with a simple love and concern for Schultze. He creates the character, watches him asleep on the sofa, and then follows a few steps behind as Schultze backs away from the dead-end of retirement. He begins his journey with a single step, as we know all journeys must begin, and arrives at last on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, where not all journeys end, and where Schultze must be as surprised as his director to find himself.
Self-Medicated
R, 107 m., 2007
Diane Venora (Louise Eriksen), Michael Bowen (Dan Jones), Greg Germann (Keith McCauley), Monty Lapica (Andrew Eriksen), Kristina Anapau (Nicole), Matthew Carey (Aaron), William Stanford Davis (Gabe). Directed by Monty Lapica and produced by Tommy Bell and Lapica. Screenplay by Lapica.
The opening scene in Monty Lapica’s Self-Medicated is a particularly chilling exercise in antisocial behavior. A car filled with out-of-control teenagers cruises the Strip in Las Vegas, shooting at tourists with paint guns. This is the sort of behavior, like using laser pointers illegally, that you hope doesn’t leak out to numbskulls at large. One of the kids is Andrew (played by Lapica himself), who is usually high on street drugs, allegedly because he mourns the death of his beloved father.
As most drug counselors will advise you, drug abuse has to be seen separately from the “problems” that “inspire” it. The majority of drunks and druggies use today because they used yesterday, and that’s why they will use again tomorrow. I remember a guy in O’Rourke’s who said he was drinking “because it’s Christmas.” Informed that he had missed the mark by three days, he said, “OK, then, I’m drinking because it isn’t Christmas.”
Whatever his reasons, Andrew is out of control. He has walked out of school, he hates his pill-addicted mom (Diane Venora), and she can’t get it together to really talk to him, let alone help him. So she makes a call and attendants from a “treatment center” pounce on him in the middle of the night and haul him away. This is staging an intervention big-time.
The film, said to be somewhat autobiographical, is critical both of Andrew and his treatment. Unlike portrayals you may have seen of the wise and useful Betty Ford or Hazelden centers, this (fictional) outfit in St. George, Utah, treats its patients as prisoners, adopts a good cop/bad cop counseling regime, and apparently plans to send patients to American Samoa to complete their “recovery” as forced labor. I am not making this up; it’s inspired, I understand, by an actual treatment center, since shut down, although not the one Lapica attended.
The facility is more realistically portrayed than the one depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but this is a docudrama, not a fable. Andrew comes up against a counselor named Dan (Michael Bowen), who apparently loathes druggies and thinks his disgust will cure them. Another counselor named Keith (Greg Germann) has a kinder, gentler approach, but if Andrew hated school, it’s nothing to how he feels about this place. As he checks in, he’s already mentally escaping.
The title is a little misleading. Andrew and his mother are self-medicators, yes (her drugs are prescribed, but a middle-aged woman can often make that happen). But Andrew is also, in a way, self-treating. Alcoholics Anonymous, the most effective means of staying clean and sober, talks about “hitting bottom,” and Self-Medicated plays like the story of Andrew throwing himself at the bottom and sticking. Eventually, if he’s not entirely around the bend, a light will dawn.
Helping him see the light is Gabe, a man who lives on the streets (William Stanford Davis). From the man who has been there, who has nothing and therefore nothing to lose, Andrew senses he is gaining insights without any motive or spin. The same strength sits at the center of an AA meeting, where everyone is in the same boat and there is no captain.
On the basis of this film, Monty Lapica, at twenty-four, has a career ahead of him as a director, an actor, or both. He also has a life ahead of him, which the film does a great deal to make clear.
The Sentinel
PG-13, 105 m., 2006
Michael Douglas (Pete Garrison), Kiefer Sutherland (David Breckinridge), Eva Longoria (Jill Marin), Kim Basinger (Sarah Ballentine), Martin Donovan (William Montrose), David Rasche (President Ballentine). Directed by Clark Johnson and produced by Michael Douglas, Marcy Drogin, and Arnon Milchan. Screenplay by George Nolfi, based on the novel by Gerald Petievich.
Michael Douglas is a skilled actor who often works within a narrow range, as he does in The Sentinel. Once again, he’s a skilled professional who finds himself with problems on two fronts: the romantic and the criminal. Half of his movies, more or less, have involved that formula; the others show a wide variety, as in Wonder Boys, Traffic, Falling Down, and The War of the Roses. I might object when I see him wearing a suit and tie and juggling adultery and danger, but you know what? He’s good at it.
In The Sentinel, he is a Secret Service agent named Pete Garrison, who in 1981 took a bullet during the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and is still guarding the president twenty-five years later. The movie doesn’t identify President Ballentine (David Rasche) as belonging to either major party, although somehow his wife, Sarah (Kim Basinger), looks to me like a Democrat. She also looks like a dish and is having a passionate affair with, yes, Agent Garrison.
As the movie opens, another agent is shot dead after telling Garrison he wanted to talk to him. Did he know something about an assassination attempt? Garrison thinks so after meeting with a seedy informer who tells him there is a mole in the Secret Service—a turncoat agent on the White House detail who will set up the president for assassination. That this informer would know the secrets involved in this particular conspiracy seems unlikely, but then Clay Shaw never seemed like a likely suspect either, maybe because he wasn’t one.
Without describing too many plot details, I can say that every agent assigned to the Office of the President is required to take a lie detector test and that only Garrison flunks. We know why: Asked if he has done anything to endanger the president, he naturally thinks of what he has done to endanger the president’s marriage, and the needle redlines. That makes him a suspect and brings him into the crosshairs of David Breckinridge (Kiefer Sutherland), an ace investigator who used to be Garrison’s best friend until, uh, Garrison apparently had an affair with his wife.
With the entire Secret Service looking for him, Garrison busts loose, goes underground, and uses all of his skills as an agent to stay free while trying to contact his informer and single-handedly stop the plot to kill the president. A deadline is approaching because Ballentine is scheduled to attend a summit in Toronto, where he might be a prime target. Since the presidential helicopter was shot down by a rocket while leaving Camp David a few days earlier (not with the president on board), and since the service knows it has a traitor, you might think the wise decision would be to skip Toronto and stay at home, maybe in a panic room. But no: Ballentine goes to Toronto, along with Garrison, Breckinridge, Sarah, the terrorists, and everybody else in the plot.
The Sentinel involves a scenario that is unlikely, I hope. But it’s told efficiently and with lots of those little details that make movies like this seem more expert than they probably are. (Did you know that agents are trained to disengage the safety lock on their handguns as they draw them, instead of after, as cops do?) The Douglas character does a lot of quick thinking, and Sutherland is brisk, cold, and efficient as a super-sleuth. Eva Longoria plays Jill, his new assistant, whom he prefers to a veteran agent because she’s still fresh and hasn’t been worn down by the job. I was able to spot the mole almost the first time he (or she) appears on the screen by employing the Law of Economy of Characters, but his (or her) identity is essentially beside the point.
There comes a point in The Sentinel, as there did in Harrison Ford’s Firewall, when you wonder how a guy in his early sixties can run indefinitely, survive all kinds of risky stunts, hold his own in a fight, and stay three steps ahead of the young guys in his strategy. You wonder, and then you stop wondering, because hey, it’s a movie. As I so wisely wrote about the Ford movie, “Nobody can do anything they do in thrillers anyway, so why should there be an age limit on accomplishing the impossible?”
This is the second theatrical feature (after S.W.A.T.) directed by Clark Johnson, an actor who has also done a lot of work on television, mostly on shows that would be useful preparation, such as Homicide, Law & Order, The West Wing, and The Shield. Have I seen movies like The Sentinel before? Yes, and I hope to see them again. At a time when American audiences seem grateful for the opportunity to drool at mindless horror trash, it is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers still are being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives, and clean shirts.
Separate Lies
R, 87 m., 2005
Emily Watson (Anne Manning), Tom Wilkinson (James Manning), Rupert Everett (William Bule), Hermione Norris (Priscilla), John Warnaby (Simon), Linda Bassett (Maggie), John Neville (Lord Rawston), David Harewood (Inspector Marshall). Directed by Julian Fellowes and produced by Steve Clark-Hall and Christian Colson. Screenplay by Fellowes, based on a novel by Nigel Balchin.
Is that what you say when a man dies? How inconvenient?
—The Third Man
Separate Lies opens with an event so sudden it is over before it can be registered; only later do we discover that a man was knocked from his bicycle by a speeding car, which didn’t pause. The man was killed. It happened on a lane near the country home of a London lawyer, on the afternoon he and his wife invited some neighbors for drinks. The dead man was the husband of their housekeeper.
The movie is not so much about the solution to this crime as about the ethics involved in taking responsibility. If you can, should you get away with murder? What if you did not intend to kill—what if it was an accident? The man is dead. Should you be made to suffer? Many people have one answer to these questions when a stranger is involved, and another when it touches them personally. Not even a hanging judge wants to hang.
Separate Lies stars Tom Wilkinson as James Manning, the lawyer, and Emily Watson as Anne, his wife. Their marriage seems happy enough. He’s one of those lawyers who specialize in making powerful clients more powerful. When it comes to matters of right and wrong, he likes to think of himself as inflexible. His wife is accommodating and dutiful and likes the life they lead, the house in London, the Buckinghamshire hideaway.
In the village, a remembered face has reappeared. This is William Bule (Rupert Everett), son of a leading local family, recently returned from America, indolent and insinuating as he plays cricket on the village green. He catches Anne’s eye, and it is because of him, really, that she tells her husband they should have neighbors over for drinks.
Everett plays Bule as a man detached and arrogant, dismissive of conventional values, attractive to women because he doesn’t seem to care how they feel about him one way or the other. James Manning, on the other hand, is serious and responsible, and we catch glimpses of the idealistic undergraduate. Wilkinson, who often plays ordinary men, here emerges as a sleek London figure, no stranger to the shirtmakers of Jermyn Street; he has the impatience of a man who is always having to explain things to people who do not have his standards. Anne maybe one of those people; perfect as she seems, she feels she never quite comes up to his mark.
Now there is the matter of the dead body in the grass beside the lane. There was a witness, as it happens: Maggie (Linda Bassett), whose husband was killed. She saw the car and might be able to identify it. Or perhaps not. Maggie knows William Bule, too; she worked for his family until she was dismissed. It was Anne who gave her a new start in the village. When the police constable comes around, he will want to talk to all of these people, not because they are suspects but because they might (as the British so carefully word it) be able to assist the police in their inquiries. Certainly Anne is not under suspicion: “One person not driving to a party,” her husband observes, “is surely the hostess.”
The unfolding of the plot I will leave for you to discover. The story, based on a 1950 novel by Nigel Balchin titled A Way Through the Wood, could as easily have been told by Agatha Christie, if the focus is on the whodunit aspects, or by Georges Simenon, if we know the whodunit but want to know how they feel about it, and how their feelings change as they discover more details. The movie’s director, Julian Fellowes, takes the Simenon approach, although some of his moments of revelation could take place in an Agatha Christie drawing room where a word or two rotates a crime into a new dimension.
Fellowes, who has worked mostly as an actor, won an Academy Award with his screenplay for Altman’s Gosford Park (2001). There, as here, he is fascinated by the way class lingers on in Britain after its time has allegedly passed, how fierce loyalties and resentments are exchanged between upstairs and downstairs. The way he handles James and Anne is a case study in British manners: There is the sharp outburst, to be sure, and even the f-word, used for effect by a person who doesn’t talk that way. But there’s none of the screaming and weeping and acting-out of American domestic drama; James and Anne would rather be reasonable than be in love because there’s less chance for embarrassment that way. At one point, when a possibility is suggested, James curtly replies: “I’m afraid that’s a little too Jerry Springer for me.”
Separate Lies reminded me of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. Its characters are above reproach—from themselves. Others deserve justice, but we deserve compassion and understanding. This is hypocrisy, but so what? Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. Separate Lies is only seemingly about the portioning of blame. It is actually about the burden of guilt, which some can carry so easily, while for others it is intolerable.
September Dawn no stars
R, 111 m., 2007
Jon Voight (Jacob Samuelson), Trent Ford (Jonathan Samuelson), Tamara Hope (Emily Hudson), Jon Gries (John D. Lee), Taylor Handley (Micah Samuelson), Lolita Davidovich (Nancy Dunlap), Dean Cain (Joseph Smith), Terence Stamp (Brigham Young). Directed by Christopher Cain and produced by Cain, Scott Duthie, and Kevin Matossian. Screenplay by Carole Whang Schutter and Cain.
On September 11, 1857, at the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a group of fanatic Mormons attacked and slaughtered a wagon train of about 120 settlers passing through Utah on their way to California. Can we all agree that the date has no significance? No, we cannot, because September Dawn is at pains to point out that on another September 11, another massacre took place, again spawned by religion.
But hold on. Where did I get that word “fanatic”? In my opinion, when anybody believes their religion gives them the right to kill other people, they are fanatics. Aren’t there enough secular reasons for war? But there is no shortage of such religions, or such people. The innocent, open-faced Christians on the wagon train were able to consider settling California, after all, because some of their coreligionists participated in or benefited from the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans.
Were there fanatics among those who ran the Salem Witch Trials or the Inquisition or the Crusades? Or the Holocaust? No shortage of them. Organized religion has been used to justify most of the organized killing in our human history. It’s an inescapable fact, especially if you consider the Nazis and communists as cults led by secular gods. When your god inspires you to murder someone who worships god in a different way or under another name, you’re barking up the wrong god. Football teams praying before a game reduce the same process to absurdity: What god worthy of the name cares which team wins?
The vast majority of the members of all religions, I believe and would argue, don’t want to kill anybody. They want to love and care for their families, find decent work that sustains life and comfort, live in peace, and get along with their neighbors. It is a deviant streak in some humans, I suspect, that drives them toward self-righteous violence and uses religion as a convenient alibi.
That is true, wouldn’t you agree, about Mormons, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on? No, not all of you would agree, because every time I let slip the opinion that most Muslims are peaceful and nonviolent, for example, I receive the most extraordinary hate mail from those assuring me they are not. And in a Muslim land, let a newspaper express the opinion that most Christians and Jews are peaceful and nonviolent, and that newspaper office is likely to be burned down. The worst among us speak for the best.
Which brings us back to September 11, 1857, when a crazy Mormon zealot named Bishop Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight) ordered the massacre of the visiting wagon train after first sending his spokesman, John D. Lee (Jon Gries), to lie that if they disarmed, they would be granted safe passage. Whether the leader of his church, Brigham Young (Terence Stamp), approved of this action is a matter of much controversy, denied by the church, claimed by September Dawn.
What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is. Two theories have clustered around it: (1) It is anti-Mormon propaganda in order to muddy the waters around the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, or (2) it is not about Mormons at all, but an allegory about the 9/11/01 terrorists. Take your choice. The problem with allegories is that you can plug them in anywhere. No doubt the film would have great impact in Darfur.
My opinion is that there isn’t anything to be gained in telling this story in this way. It generates bad feelings on all sides, and at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, it underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be “gentiles.” The Mormons are presented in no better light than Nazis and Japanese were in Hollywood’s World War II films. Wasn’t there a more thoughtful and insightful way to consider this historical event? Or how about a different event altogether? What about the Donner Party? They may have been cannibals, but at least they were nondenominational.
If there is a concealed blessing, it is that the film is so bad. Jon Voight, that gifted and versatile actor, is here given the most ludicrous and unplayable role of his career, and a goofy beard to go along with it. Terence Stamp, as Brigham Young, comes across as the kind of man you’d find at the back of a cave in a Cormac McCarthy novel. The Christians are so scrubbed and sunny they could have been teleported in time from the Lawrence Welk program.
And isn’t it sickening that the plot stirs in some sugar by giving us what can only be described as a horse whisperer? This movie needs human whisperers. And giving us a romance between the bishop’s son and a pretty gentile girl? And another son of the bishop who dresses up like an Indian and goes batty at the scent of blood? And real Native Americans who assist the Mormons in their killing, no doubt thinking, well, we can get around to the Mormons later? I am trying as hard as I can to imagine the audience for this movie. Every time I make any progress, it scares me.
Serenity
PG-13, 119 m., 2005
Nathan Fillion (Malcolm Reynolds), Gina Torres (Zoe Warren), Adam Baldwin (Jayne), Alan Tudyk (Wash Washburn), Jewel Staite (Kaylee), Morena Baccarin (Inara), Summer Glau (River Tam), Sean Maher (Simon), Ron Glass (Shepherd Book), Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Operative). Directed by Joss Whedon and produced by Barry Mendel. Screenplay by Whedon.
The thrill of a fistfight in a movie was altered for me forever the day I visited a set and watched the sound men beating the hell out of a Naugahyde sofa with Ping-Pong paddles. There was a moment in Serenity when I remembered that moment—no, not during a fistfight, but during a battle in interplanetary space. There are so many spacecraft, so large, so close together, it looks as if collision is a greater danger than enemy fire. Imagine spaceships in a demo derby.
As the battle continued and the heroes were hurled about inside their own spaceship, which at times looked curiously like the interior of a loading dock, I made a note: “More banging than in your average space movie.” Then something shifted inside my ears and I somehow knew I was hearing sound men, pounding the hell out of garbage can lids, sheets of steel, and big piles of pots and pans.
I say this not with disapproval, but with affection. Serenity is an old-fashioned space opera and differs from a horse opera mostly in that it involves space, not horses. It takes place in a solar system of a dozen terraformed planets and “hundreds of moons,” and there is a war going on between the Alliance, which runs things and wants everybody to be happy, and a group of rebels who begin to make disturbing discoveries. As the film opens, a psychic named River Tam (Summer Glau) is rescued from Alliance mind-washers by her brother, Simon (Sean Maher), and then we learn that River was unwisely exhibited to a roomful of important Alliance parliamentarians. Because she can read minds, she knows their secrets.
River and Simon are soon enough allied with a team of freelance smugglers on a banged-up old ship named Serenity. Malcolm (Nathan Fillion) is the captain, and his crew includes the pilot, Wash (Alan Tudyk), his wife, Zoe (Gina Torres), the engineer, Kaylee (Jewel Staite), and the tough guy, Jayne (Adam Baldwin). On their trail is the most competent and feared of the Alliance’s agents, the Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
Science fiction fans will recognize the plot line and most of the characters from a short-lived Fox series named Firefly, which (I learn in a letter from Stephen McNeil of Sydney, Nova Scotia) was canceled in midseason, but not before the episodes were carelessly shown out of proper order. What a crock, especially considering that Joss Whedon, the TV series’ author (and writer-director of Serenity), earlier created Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and so deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Serenity is made of dubious but energetic special effects, breathless velocity, much imagination, some sly verbal wit, and a little political satire. Turns out the Alliance was simply trying to bring contentment to its crowded planetary system by distracting its inhabitants from their problems and making them feel like they had a life. River is in possession of a secret about this process that the Alliance would do anything to suppress. Like Brave New World and 1984, the movie plays like a critique of contemporary society, with the Alliance as Big Brother, enemy of discontent. But as River observes, “Some people don’t like to be meddled with.”
Some of the dialogue sounds futuristic, some sounds nineteenth century, and some sounds deliberately kooky. (Captain Mal: “Do you want to run this ship?” Discontented crew member: “Yes.” Mal: “Well, you can’t.”) There are also unanticipated scenes of real impact, including a planet where—but see for yourself. I’m not sure the movie would have much appeal for non-sci-fi fans, but it has the rough edges and brawny energy of a good yarn, and it was made by and for people who can’t get enough of this stuff. You know who you are.
Sex and the City
R, 145 m., 2008
Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie Bradshaw), Kim Cattrall (Samantha Jones), Kristin Davis (Charlotte York), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda Hobbes), Chris Noth (Mr. Big), Jennifer Hudson (Louise), Candice Bergen (Enid Frick), David Eigenberg (Steve Brady), Evan Handler (Harry Goldenblatt), Jason Lewis (Smith Jerrod). Directed by Michael Patrick King and produced by King, Sarah Jessica Parker, John Melfi, and Darren Star. Screenplay by King, based on the novel by Candace Bushnell and the TV series.
I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn’t much like most of the characters, and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: “Her forties is the greatest age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”
That line might not reverberate with audience members who don’t know who Diane Arbus was. But what about me, who doesn’t reverberate with the names on designer labels? There’s a montage of wedding dresses by world-famous designers. I was lucky I knew who Vivienne Westwood was, and that’s because she used to be the girlfriend of the Sex Pistols’ manager.
The movie continues the stories of the four heroines of the popular HBO series, which would occasionally cause me to pause in my channel surfing. They are older but no wiser, and all facing some kind of a romantic crossroads. New Line has begged critics not to reveal plot secrets, which is all right with me, because I would rather have fun with plot details. I guess I can safely say: Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is in the tenth year of her relationship with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) when they sort of decide to buy a penthouse they name “Heaven on Fifth Avenue.” Publicist Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has moved to Los Angeles, where her client Smith (Jason Lewis) has become a daytime TV star. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and her husband, Harry (Evan Handler), have adopted a Chinese daughter. And Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is in a crisis with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg).
What with one thing and another, dramatic developments cause the four women to join each other at a luxurious Mexican resort, where two scenes take place that left me polishing my pencils to write this review. The girls go sunbathing in crotch-hugging swim-suits, and Miranda is ridiculed for the luxuriant growth of her pubic hair. How luxuriant? One of her pals describes it as the National Forest, and there’s a shot of the offending proliferation that popped the Smith Brothers right into my head.
A little later, Charlotte develops a tragic case of turista and has a noisy accident right there in her pants. This is a key moment, because Carrie has been so depressed she has wondered if she will ever laugh again. Her friends say that will happen when something really, really funny happens. When Charlotte overflows, Carrie and the others burst into helpless laughter. Something really, really funny has finally happened! How about you? Would you think that was really, really funny?
Sex and the City was famous for its frankness, and we expect similar frankness in the movie. We get it, but each frank moment comes wrapped in its own package and seems to stand alone from the story. That includes (1) a side shot of a penis, (2) sex in positions other than the missionary, and (3) Samantha’s dog, which is a compulsive masturbator. I would be reminded of the immortal canine punch line (“because he can”), but Samantha’s dog is a female. “She’s been fixed,” says the pet lady, “but she hasn’t lost the urge.” Samantha can identify with that. The dog gets friendly with every pillow, stuffed animal, ottoman, and towel, and here’s the funny thing, she ravishes them male-doggy-style. I went to AskJeeves.com and typed in “How do female dogs masturbate?” and did not get a satisfactory answer, although it would seem to be: “Just like all dogs do, but not how male dogs also do.”
On to Mr. Big, the wealthy tycoon and victim of two unhappy marriages, who has been blissfully living in sin with Carrie for ten years. I will supply no progress report on their bliss. But what about Mr. Big himself? As played by Chris Noth, he’s so unreal he verges on the surreal. He’s handsome in the Rock Hudson and Victor Mature tradition, and has a low, preternaturally calm voice that delivers stock reassurances and banal clichés right on time. He’s so … passive. He stands there (or lies there) as if consciously posing as The Ideal Lover. But he’s … kinda slow. Square. Colorless. Notice how, when an old friend shouts rude things about him at an important dinner, he hardly seems to hear them, or to know he’s having dinner.
The warmest and most human character in the movie is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her twenties and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature. She still believes in True Love, is hired as Carrie’s assistant, and pays her own salary on the first day by telling her about a Netflix of designer labels (I guess after you wear the shoes, you send them back). Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.
All of this goes on for nearly two and a half hours, through New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, and other bonding holidays. The movie needs a Thanksgiving bailout opportunity. But this is probably the exact Sex and the City film that fans of the TV series are lusting for. I know some nurses who are going to smuggle flasks of cosmopolitans into the theater on opening night and have a Gal Party. “Do you think that’s a good idea?” one of them asked me. “Two flasks,” I said.
The Shaggy Dog
PG, 98 m., 2006
Tim Allen (Dave Douglas), Kristin Davis (Rebecca Douglas), Spencer Breslin (Josh Douglas), Zena Grey (Carly Douglas), Robert Downey Jr. (Dr. Kozak), Danny Glover (Ken Hollister), Jane Curtin (Judge Whittaker), Shawn Pyfrom (Trey). Directed by Brian Robbins and produced by Tim Allen and David Hoberman. Screenplay by Cormac Wibberley, Marianne Wibberley, Geoff Rodkey, Jack Amiel, and Michael Begler.
This is surely one of the fundamental laws of fiction: When a man and a dog change bodies, it is funnier to see the man act like a dog than to see the dog act like a man. As Dr. Johnson observed so long ago, when a dog stands on its hind legs, “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” A dog standing on its hind legs is considerably less convincing than a man on all fours, especially when he lifts his leg near a fire hydrant.
In The Shaggy Dog, Tim Allen plays an assistant DA prosecuting a case involving the use of laboratory animals. He is bitten by a three-hundred-year-old dog from Tibet that has been stolen from a monastery. The dog is destined to be used in the DNA research of a scummy longevity researcher in the form of Robert Downey Jr., who plays, as he does so well, a man whose agenda seems not merely buried but decomposing.
There is a special-effects shot of the dog’s DNA racing into Allen’s veins. The dog DNA looks like lots of little dogs. I suppose we should be relieved that the human DNA doesn’t look like a lot of little Tim Allens, although the concept of dog DNA being taken for a walk by human DNA is intriguing.
Allen’s rebellious daughter, Carly (Zena Grey), is filled with animal rights fervor after her social studies teacher is accused of setting a fire at a lab where animals were being mistreated. Dave is the prosecutor but finds his courtroom duties increasingly hard to perform as he transmutes into a dog. I think he is supposed to have become the clone of the dog from Tibet, although perhaps he has simply become a new but similar dog. He doesn’t go through puppy stage, however, so perhaps he was simply occupied by the other dog, although then does that still leave the original dog behind? Are laws of the conservation of matter involved here? I have extraordinary difficulty in reasoning through the details of plots that are preposterous on principle.
Although he becomes a dog, Dave retains his own mind and tries to behave like a dad would. When Carly gets too friendly with her boyfriend, Trey (Shawn Pyfrom), he jumps on the bed between them. And on his wedding anniversary, as his wife waits forlornly at a table for two in a restaurant, he appears outside the window, wagging his tail, with a bouquet in his teeth. His family is extraordinarily obtuse, I must say, in not quickly realizing that the shaggy dog is their father. How many clues do you need?
For that matter, is the shaggy dog occupied only by a human mind, or by a human mind and a canine mind fighting it out for space? If a human mind, why doesn’t the dog need to learn from scratch how to bark, jump, scratch, and fetch? If a canine mind, why does it turn up for the wedding anniversary when so many attractive girl dogs are easily found? Certainly their sexual tastes must be at variance. These are silly questions but might have been promising avenues for the plot to explore.
It says something for Robert Downey Jr. that in a movie where a man becomes a dog, Downey creates the weirdest character. With tics and jerks and strange verbal sorties and a tuft of hair that seems electrified, he plays a scientist who is mad on his good days. To put this man on the witness stand is a foolhardy act by Allen and his boss (Danny Glover), but we are grateful to him, because Downey is entertaining. Maybe they have the wrong actor in the lead. Downey, playing the dog, would have run through a repertory of every canine shtick in Best in Show. Even in this movie, you should see him fetch.
At the end of the film, Allen (as the dog) is standing on his hind legs (not well, but one is surprised) and hugging his wife when suddenly he turns back into her husband, and what happens then? The hug continues because, yes, this is the happy ending! Ladies, if a dog turned into your husband while you were hugging it, would you scream? Dial 911? Tell him to roll over and play dead? There is an age above which this movie is unnecessary, and it may be in the low double digits. All through The Shaggy Dog, I kept remembering a classic headline in the Onion: “Millions of dog owners demand to know: Who’s a good boy?” That headline doesn’t have anything to do with this movie, but what does?
She’s the Man
PG-13, 105 m., 2006
Amanda Bynes (Viola), Channing Tatum (Duke), Laura Ramsey (Olivia), Vinnie Jones (Coach Dinklage), Robert Hoffman (Justin), Alex Breckenridge (Monique), David Cross (Principal Gold), Julie Hagerty (Daphne), James Kirk (Sebastian). Directed by Andy Fickman and produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Jack Leslie, and Ewan Leslie. Screenplay by Ewan Leslie, Jack Leslie, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith, based on Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare.
I didn’t for one second believe the plot of She’s the Man, but I did believe for the entire movie that Amanda Bynes was lovable. She plays a girl who pretends to be a boy in order to play soccer. That this story is recycled from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is something I report right here at the top so that we can work together to put it out of our minds.
Bynes plays Viola, the twin sister of Sebastian (James Kirk), who at the start of the movie conveniently sneaks away to London for two weeks without telling anybody. This is much easier on Viola than the Shakespeare version, in which she fears her brother has perished at sea. But I will not mention Shakespeare again. Viola is the star of the girls’ soccer team at Cornwall Prep, a school that seems to have enough money to supply every girl with her own soccer team. She thinks she’s good enough to play for the boys’ team, but her hopes are scorned, so she takes advantage of Sebastian’s absence to take his place at nearby Illyria Prep, named after the country in Shakespeare’s play. There she tries out for the soccer team.
Can Bynes convincingly play a boy? Of course not. She plays a cute tomboy with short hair who keeps forgetting to talk low and then nervously clears her throat and talks like she’s on the phone to the school office: “Viola is sick today, and this is her mother speaking.” Can she play soccer and live with a male roommate and take showers and not be exposed as a girl? Of course not, but at least the movie doesn’t make a big deal out of it; she has a few close calls, and thinks fast. When the coach (Vinnie Jones) announces a practice game between shirts and skins, she offers compelling reasons why she should be a shirt.
Viola/Sebastian’s roommate at Illyria is Duke, no doubt inspired by Duke Orsino in Shakespeare. But enough about Shakespeare. Duke seems attracted to Olivia (Laura Ramsey), but Olivia is attracted to Sebastian/Viola, who gets a crush on Duke because he speaks with such sensitivity about women even when having a private conversation with her, or him. Duke is played by Channing Tatum, who sounds as if he should be the child of Carol Channing and Tatum O’Neal, which in this movie might be possible, although in real life he was born in Cullman, Alabama.
Tatum is twenty-five, a little old to play a high school kid, but Bynes at nineteen is convincing, and her poise, under the circumstances, is extraordinary. The movie develops interlocking romantic triangles and adds some funny supporting characters, including David Cross as the headmaster, whose exuberance is as boundless as his baldness. Her mother, played by Julie Hagerty, dreams of the day when her little girl will come out as a debutante; while being coached as a deb, Viola is advised to “chew like you have a secret.” Does she ever.
Of Bynes let us say that she is sunny and plucky and somehow finds a way to play her impossible role without clearing her throat more than six or eight times. More important, we like her. She first won a following with her show on Nickelodeon, and was funny in Big Fat Liar (2002), but in this role, as Shakespeare might say, she achieves greatness, or maybe she has it thrust upon her. The movie is good-natured and silly, and at the end there is a big soccer game between Illyria and Cornwall during which both Viola and the real Sebastian are able to offer proof of their genders, although when the PG-13 rating cites “nudity,” I am compelled to report that the movie includes none of the naughty bits. As a famous playwright once wrote in Twelfth Night, “Wherefore are those things hid?”
Shine a Light
PG-13, 122 m., 2008
Featuring Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Charlie Watts, Buddy Guy, Christina Aguilera, Jack White, and Bill Clinton. A documentary directed by Martin Scorsese and produced by Steve Bing, Michael Cohl, Zane Weiner, and Victoria Pearman.
Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light may be the most intimate documentary ever made about a live rock ‘n’ roll concert. Certainly it has the best coverage of the performances onstage. Working with cinematographer Robert Richardson, Scorsese deployed a team of nine other cinematographers, all of them Oscar winners or nominees, to essentially blanket a live September 2006 Rolling Stones concert at the smallish Beacon Theater in New York. The result is startling immediacy, a merging of image and music, edited in step with the performance.
In the brief black-and-white footage opening the film, we see Scorsese drawing up shot charts to diagram the order of the songs, the order of the solos, and who would be where on the stage. This was the same breakdown approach he used with his documentary The Last Waltz (1978), which he hoped would enable him to call his shots through the earpieces of the cameramen, as directors of live TV did in the early days. The challenge this time was that Mick Jagger toyed with the song list in endless indecision; we look over his shoulder at titles scratched out and penciled back in, and hear him mention casually that of course the whole set might be changed on the spot. Apparently after playing together for forty-five years, the Stones communicate their running order telepathically.
This movie is where Scorsese came in. I remember visiting him in the postproduction loft for Woodstock in 1970, where he was part of a team led by Thelma Schoonmaker that was combining footage from multiple cameras into a split-screen approach that could show as many as three or four images at once. But the footage they had to work with was captured on the run, while The Last Waltz had a shot map and outline, at least in Scorsese’s mind. Shine a Light combines his foreknowledge with the versatility of great cinematographers so that it essentially seems to have a camera in the right place at the right time for every element of the performance.
It helped, too, that the Stones’ songs had been absorbed by Scorsese into his very being. “Let me put it this way,” he said in a revealing August 2007 interview with Craig McLean of the London Observer. “Between ’63 and ’70, those seven years, the music that they made I found myself gravitating to. I would listen to it a great deal. And ultimately, that fueled movies like Mean Streets and later pictures of mine, Raging Bull to a certain extent, and certainly GoodFellas and Casino and other pictures over the years.”
Mentioning that he had not seen the Stones in concert until late 1969, he said the music itself was ingrained: “The actual visualization of sequences and scenes in Mean Streets comes from a lot of their music, of living with their music and listening to it. Not just the songs I use in the film. No, it’s about the tone and the mood of their music, their attitude…. I just kept listening to it. Then I kept imagining scenes in movies. And interpreting. It’s not just imagining a scene of a tracking shot around a person’s face or a car scene. It really was [taking] events and incidents in my own life that I was trying to interpret into filmmaking, to a story, a narrative. And it seemed that those songs inspired me to do that. To find a way to put those stories on film. So the debt is incalculable. I don’t know what to say. In my mind, I did this film forty years ago. It just happened to get around to being filmed right now.”
The result is one of the most engaged documentaries you could imagine. The cameras do not simply regard the performances; in a sense, the cameras are performers, too, in the way shots are cut together by Scorsese and his editor, David Tedeschi. Even in their sixties, the Stones are the most physical and exuberant of bands. Compared to them, watching the movements of many new young bands on Leno, Letterman, and SNL is like watching jerky marionettes. Jagger has never used the mechanical moves employed by many lead singers; he is a dancer and an acrobat and a conductor, too, who uses his body to conduct the audience. In counterpoint, Keith Richards and Ron Wood are loose-limbed and angular, like way-cool backup dancers. Richards in particular seems to defy gravity as he leans so far over; there’s a moment in rehearsal when he tells Scorsese he wants to show him something, and leans down to show that you can see the mallet of Charlie Watts’s bass drum, visible as it hits the front drumhead. “I can see that because I’m down there,” he explains.
The unmistakable fact is that the Stones love performing. Watch Ron lean an arm on Keith’s shoulder during one shared riff. Watch the droll hints of irony, pleasure, and quizzical reaction shots, which so subtly move across their seemingly passive faces. Notice that Keith smokes onstage not simply to be smoking, but to use the smoke cloud, brilliant in the spotlights, as a performance element. He knows what he’s doing. And then see it all brought together and tied tight in the remarkably acrobatic choreography of Jagger’s performance. I’ve seen the Stones in Chicago in venues as large as the United Center and as small as the Double Door, but I’ve never experienced them this way, because the cameras are as privileged as the performers onstage.
And the music? What do I have to say about the music? What is there left to say about the music? In that interview, Scorsese said, ‘“Sympathy for the Devil’ became this score for our lives. It was everywhere at that time; it was being played on the radio. When ‘Satisfaction’ starts, the authority of the guitar riff that begins it is something that became anthemic.” I think there is nothing useful for me to say about the music except that if you have been interested enough to read this far, you already know all about it, and all I can usefully describe is the experience of seeing it in this film.
Shoot ’Em Up ½
R, 93 m., 2007
Clive Owen (Mr. Smith), Paul Giamatti (Mr. Hertz), Monica Bellucci (DQ), Daniel Pilon (Senator Rutledge). Directed by Michael Davis and produced by Rick Benattar, Susan Montford, and Don Murphy. Screenplay by Davis.
I don’t need a lot of research to be confident in stating that never before have I seen a movie open with the hero delivering a baby during a gun battle, severing the umbilical cord with a gunshot, and then killing a villain by penetrating his brain with a raw carrot. Yes, a carrot will do that in this movie. It will do a lot of things.
Shoot ’Em Up, written and directed by the gung-ho Michael Davis, is the most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I’ve seen since, oh, Sin City, which in comparison was a chamber drama. That I liked Shoot ’Em Up is a consequence of a critical quirk I sometimes notice: I may disapprove of a movie for going too far and yet have a sneaky regard for a movie that goes much, much farther than merely too far. This one goes so far, if you even want to get that far, you have to start halfway there, which means you have to be a connoisseur of the hard-boiled action genre and its seriocomic subdivision (or subbasement).
The film opens in one of those grimy cityscapes where a little graffiti might brighten things up. A man with a ten o’clock shadow (Clive Owen) sits on a bench eating a carrot. A pregnant woman is chased past him by men intent on murdering her. “Bloody hell,” says the man, a phrase I find so much more elegant than, “What the foosball underwater clockmaker kitchen,” if you enjoy creating acronyms. He defends the woman in a hail of gunfire, while delivering her baby, ramming the carrot into his victim’s cranium, and finding himself on the run with an infant in his arms, which is how Owen spent much of Children of Men, also with people shooting at him, so you could say he looks right at home.
The Owen character is named Mr. Smith. The leader of his enemies is Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti). No Mr. Brown around anywhere, but Tarantino seems to hover over the action like a guardian skycam. I am not sure why Mr. Smith is so capable during acts of violence, but it may be because Owen practiced up while he was being considered for the role of James Bond. Yes, that might explain the scene where he continues a gun battle while jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
That was probably one of the scenes Michael Davis drew by hand, thousands of drawings to give the illusion of animation when he made his pitch to the studio. This is a determined guy. I remember ten years ago he wanted me to see his Eight Days a Week at the Slamdance film festival. I was covering Sundance, which is itself three full-time jobs, but he kept after me, ominously brandishing a carrot. I made the trek uphill in the snow to a hotel lobby where his film was being shown and found a spot on a sofa. And the movie was a wonderful comedy about a kid so in love with a girl that he sets up camp and lives in her front yard a whole summer before she finally agrees to go out with him. So there’s your auteur theory at work: Davis likes movies about men who will go to any lengths for a woman.
Comedy is a tricky genre to give an unknown indie his start, however, so Davis switched to the usual indie port of entry, horror, making among others a movie about roadkill that wants to kill you. That’s the kind of movie you want to back up and run over again.
Shoot ’Em Up will become, I suspect, some kind of legend in the murky depths of extreme action. What elevates it from the depraved to the deserving is a sense of style, a sense of warped humor, and the acting. Clive Owen brings what credibility there could possibly be to his character, and makes us believe it as much as we possibly can (not much, in both cases, but points for effort). Paul Giamatti, Hollywood’s favorite nerd, is surprisingly, teeth-gnashingly evil. And Monica Bellucci is DQ, the hooker with the heart of gold, who becomes Mr. Smith’s partner and the baby’s surrogate mother. I thought and thought about what “DQ” could possibly stand for, and finally had my eureka moment: Dairy Queen.
The plot (two words that should be followed by a hollow laugh) involves Mr. Hertz being hired by Senator Rutledge (Daniel Pilon), political party unspecified, who is running for president but learns he is dying and can only be saved by the bone marrow of infants. In the old days, when political campaigns didn’t run so long, there would have been no time to impregnate surrogate volunteers and harvest their offspring, another argument against the extended presidential campaign season.
Man, am I gonna get mail from people who hate this picture. I’ll fall back on my stock defense: Did I, or did I not, accurately describe the film? You have been informed. Now eat your carrots.
Shopgirl 1/2
R, 116 m., 2005
Steve Martin (Ray Porter), Claire Danes (Mirabelle Butterfield), Jason Schwartzman (Jeremy), Bridgette Wilson-Sampras (Lisa Cramer), Sam Bottoms (Dan Butterfield), Frances Conroy (Catherine Butterfield), Rebecca Pidgeon (Christie Richards), Gina Doctor (Del Rey). Directed by Anand Tucker and produced by Ashok Amritraj, Jon J. Jashni, and Steve Martin. Screenplay by Martin, based on his novella.
One of the things you cannot do in this life is impose conditions on love. Another impossibility is to expect another’s heart to accommodate your own desires and needs. You may think that cleverness, power, or money will work on your behalf, but eventually you will end up feeling the way you really feel, and so will the other person, and there is no argument more useless than the one that begins with the words, “But I thought we had an agreement.”
Shopgirl is a tender and perceptive film that argues these truths. It is about an older man named Ray Porter, a millionaire, who sees a young woman named Mirabelle Butterfield standing behind the glove counter at Saks and desires her. He goes through the motions of buying some gloves. Perhaps the gray? “I prefer the black,” she says, and so he buys the black, and that night on her doorstep she finds the gloves, neatly gift-wrapped and with a note inside: “Will you have dinner with me? Ray Porter.”
Now compare the elegance of this approach with the other man who desires her company. This is Jeremy, who is about her age in years but about twelve in knowledge about the ways of women. You do not honk your horn on a first date and expect the woman to hurry out to your car. You do not pretend you want only to people-watch until she agrees to buy her own ticket to the movies. You do not attempt one of those dreadful snuffling blind approaches to a kiss, the kind where the girl doesn’t know if you’re trying to kiss her or maybe you just got something caught in your throat while staring at her breasts. I’ve been around a long time and, young men, if there is one thing I know, it is that the only way to kiss a girl for the first time is to look like you want to and intend to, and move in fast enough to seem eager but slow enough to give her a chance to say, “So anyway…” and look up as if she’s trying to remember your name.
All of these things and more are known to Ray Porter (Steve Martin). Yes, he is thirty-five years older than Mirabelle (Claire Danes), but we’re not talking marriage here; we’re talking about a relationship based on shared assumptions and friendly sex, plus a lot of Ray Porter’s money, which he is spending not to purchase Mirabelle but simply to provide himself with a woman who dresses, dines, and travels up to his standards. Watch him get shifty when she suggests he stay at her place one night.
“I made myself perfectly clear,” he assures his psychiatrist. He is not seeking marriage. He does not want a long-term commitment. Yes, he wants sex, but Mirabelle is not necessary to satisfy that desire, which is so easily solved by a single man of Ray’s age and wealth. Mirabelle is necessary because she is young, smart, entertaining, unattached, and there. She is good company. She is a person of character.
Perhaps he shops for her at Saks because anyone working there will understand the finer things and spend a lot of time thinking about the customers who can so easily afford them. He makes the parameters of their relationship perfectly clear, as if he were a surveyor and she a vacant lot. When he says it gives him pleasure to be able to provide her with nice things, it is the truth: He has so much money that cost is irrelevant, and she looks so good wearing that dress, dining in that restaurant, sitting on that airplane.
Mirabelle understands all of these things and accepts them. That’s the deal. The Saks job is a dead end, and she wants to work as an artist. She would be wary if Ray came after her with love and sincerity in his eyes. Is she technically a prostitute, since the money all flows in her direction while the sex flows both ways? Not at all. For Ray to spend money is exactly the same thing as for her to receive it. It is of no importance except that it makes their lives together possible.
Now about Jeremy. You know guys who are like him. When he accumulates enough empty pizza boxes, he stacks them up and has himself an end table. Doing the laundry involves sniffing for the most passable T-shirt. He is an artist, too. His art involves stenciling the boxes that amplifiers come in. As his muse, Mirabelle may inspire him to design a new typeface. Shortly after they meet, he conveniently leaves town on an extended road trip with a rock band, which is led by a musician who gets him started on self-help books. He needs a lot of all kinds of help.
No, the movie is not about how Mirabelle realizes that Ray is a phony and Jeremy, for all his faults, is lovable. Ray is not a phony. He really is exactly the man he seems to be, God help him. Jeremy is lovable like a puppy that you are delighted belongs to somebody else. What happens at the end is not tidy like in most romantic comedies, but bittersweet and objective. “I guess I have to choose whether to be miserable now, or miserable later,” Mirabelle says. There is an argument to be made for both choices, but when all is said and done she will not be the most miserable person in the movie.
Should I write about the performances, the writing, and the direction? I already have. I just did. That’s what you’re reading. These are the thoughts they inspired. What thoughts they inspire in you may be entirely otherwise. You may think Ray is a rat, Mirabelle is a victim, and Jeremy cleans up well. If that’s what you think, go back and read the first paragraph again, and save yourself some trouble.
Shotgun Stories
PG-13, 92 m., 2008
Michael Shannon (Son Hayes), Douglas Ligon (Boy Hayes), Barlow Jacobs (Kid Hayes), Michael Abbott Jr. (Cleaman Hayes), Travis Smith (Mark Hayes), Lynnsee Provence (Stephen Hayes), David Rhodes (John Hayes), Natalie Canerday (Nicole Hayes), Glenda Pannell (Annie Hayes). Directed by Jeff Nichols and produced by David Gordon Green, Lisa Muskat, and Nichols. Screenplay by Nichols.
Jeff Nichols’s Shotgun Stories is shaped and told like a revenge tragedy, but it offers an unexpected choice: The hero of the film does not believe the future is doomed by the past. If it were, most of the key characters would be dead by the end, an outcome that seems almost inevitable. Here is a tense and sorrowful film where common sense struggles with blood lust.
The movie takes place in a “dead-ass town” where three brothers exist. “Hang out” is the only term for what they do. They were named Son, Kid, and Boy by an alcoholic father and, in Son’s words, “a hateful woman.” Son (Michael Shannon) sprinkles the feed at a local fish farm and loses all his money trying to perfect a “system” he thinks can beat the local casino. His wife has just walked out, taking their son. His brother Kid (Barlow Jacobs) would like to get married, but “I worry about taking care of her. I mean, I don’t have a truck. I don’t have a house. I sleep in a damn tent.” The youngest, Boy (Douglas Ligon), lives in his van and is struggling to beat the heat by persuading a home air conditioner to run off his cigarette lighter.
If this sounds like the setup for a redneck joke, it isn’t. The brothers are quiet, lonely, still suffering from abusive childhoods. And consider the remarkable scene where their mother knocks on the door to tell them their father, now married to another woman and with four more sons, has died.
“When’s the funeral?” Son asks.
“You can find out in the newspaper.”
“You going?”
“No.”
Son, Kid, and Boy attend. Since abandoning them, their father had sobered up in rehab, found Jesus, and started a prosperous middle-class family. Now Son chooses to say a few words over the coffin before spitting on it, and a fight breaks out. This fight will escalate into a blood feud in which lives are lost and blood is shed, and yet the enemies are so unprepared that after one buys a shotgun in a pawn shop, he has to be shown how to assemble and load it.
The film is by no means entirely grim and implacable. There are moments of quiet humor, as when Boy finally figures out a way to run the air conditioner off his car battery, and rigs it to blow at him on a river bank and to run a blender for his margaritas. Annie (Glenda Pannell) is fed up with Son’s gambling habit but is a gentle woman who loves him. Son himself has hopes for his own son and wants to break the cycle of violence. So does the oldest son of the other family, although the dead father seems to have done a better job of raising those boys than the first three.
Jeff Nichols, the writer and director, is working in the same world where David Gordon Green sets his films; indeed, Green is a co-producer of this film, which uses his cinematographer, Adam Stone. The photography, of course, is wide-screen; these people live surrounded by distant horizons, the vista broken only by the occasional tree or broken-down tractor. Like Green, Nichols uses sleight of hand to sneak in plot details; Shotgun Stories uses the most subtle dialogue I can imagine to reveal, by implication, that Boy has, or had, an African-American wife, or girlfriend.
This film has literally been saved by the festival circuit. After being rejected by major distributors, it found a home in smaller festivals, where word of mouth propelled it into its current wider release. It has qualities that may not come out in a trailer or in an ad, but that sink in when you have the experience of seeing it. Few films are so observant about how we relate with one another. Few as sympathetic.
The film is as spare as the landscape. Classical drama comes condensed to a harshness: “You raised us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.” In a movie where so much violence obviously takes place, we actually see very little of it. Nichols sidesteps the problem of the intrinsic interest of violence by looking away from it and focusing on its effect. We don’t get to know the second family very well, but Son, Kid, and Boy are closed up within their melancholy. Although some orange flowers and gentle music try to do their work at the end, we can only hope Son finds the life he desires for his own son.
Shrek the Third ½
PG, 92 m., 2007
With the voices of: Mike Myers (Shrek), Eddie Murphy (Donkey), Cameron Diaz (Princess Fiona), Antonio Banderas (Puss in Boots), John Cleese (King Harold), Julie Andrews (Queen Lillian), Rupert Everett (Prince Charming), Eric Idle (Merlin), Justin Timberlake (Artie). Directed by Chris Miller and produced by Aron Warner. Screenplay by Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, and Jon Zack, inspired by the book by William Steig.
Shrek the Third is a damped-down return to the kingdom of Far Far Away, lacking the comic energy of the first brilliant film and not measuring up to the second. From the thrills of dragon slaying and damsel rescuing, Shrek’s challenges have been reduced to a career decision: Should he become the king?
The movie is as visually enchanting as the first two in the series, and the big green ogre (voice by Mike Myers) is as gentle and lovable, but the movie settles for action that it trusts is funny, instead of aiming for comedy itself. Another peculiarity is that the plot will probably not be engaging for younger audience members, who understand dragons but don’t care that heavy lies the head that wears a crown. Shrek spends too much time in lachrymose conversation with his bride, Fiona (Cameron Diaz), and pondering the challenge of fatherhood, and not enough time being an ogre.
Indeed, Shrek is the only character in the movie who makes a big deal about his ogrehood. The king and queen (John Cleese and Julie Andrews) have long since embraced their son-in-law, and on his deathbed the frog king reveals that Shrek is an heir to the throne—one of two, including the feckless Artie (Justin Timberlake). Shrek demurs, preferring life back in the swamp in what Fiona describes as his “vermin-filled shack.”
Why would Fiona, raised as a princess, accept life in such a dreary mire of despond? Recall from Shrek (2001) that she was a conventional princess only by day and became an ogre after nightfall. When Shrek’s kiss rescued her from marriage to Lord Farquaad, she became an ogre full-time. Before that she was a human, I guess, although her father was a frog. Interspecies reproduction is so common in Far Far Away that it makes irrelevant such questions as whether Kermit and Miss Piggy ever had sex. Remember that the dragon and Donkey fell in love in the first film. For someone like me who has never understood how birds and snakes do it, thoughts of their marital adventures boggle the mind.
Back again this time are the two supporting stars from the earlier films, Donkey (Eddie Murphy) and Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas). But they’re reduced to being friends and traveling partners and are never really “foregrounded.” At one point, magically, they switch bodies and talk in each other’s voices, but that’s what it amounts to: They talk in each other’s voices. Such a thing is not intrinsically funny, unless it is plot- or character-driven. Little really depends on it or comes from it, except for a weak little sight gag at the end. Since Murphy’s vocal riffs and improvisations have been so inspired earlier in the series, we want more of him this time, not less.
Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, and Puss have to sail to the land of Worcestershire to find Artie, and they encounter Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), who is reduced from princehood to (in an opening scene) performing in dinner theater. Fairly arbitrary developments produce a team of heroines (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) who are sort of Charlie’s Angels, I guess, although they provide the movie with too many characters and not enough for them to do. In the first film, they were a sly DreamWorks dig at Disney and were dumped as obsolete in Shrek’s private swamp.
Indeed, the movie practices such economy of characters that the Gingerbread Man and the Three Blind Mice turn up again—unwanted, if you ask me. What’s the use of three blind mice if you can’t see them run? And although I have been trained to accept talking animals, living pastries fail to engage me.
I learn from Variety that there will be a fourth Shrek and a Broadway musical, and I hope both turn for their inspiration to the original Shrek. That film did so much with the outsider status of an ogre and Shrek’s painful uncertainties about his role in non-ogre society. It involved intolerance and prejudice and courage, and had real stakes. And it was funny and had great action scenes, like Shrek’s rescue of Fiona. Now everybody in the land of Far Far Away acts as if we (and they) have seen the first two films.
The movie’s a pleasure to watch for its skilled animation. But it lacks truly interesting challenges. It makes the mistake of thinking slapstick action is funny for its own sake, a mistake made by a lot of Saturday-morning TV cartoons. True, characters zooming and bouncing around are easy to write because no creative invention is required to set them in motion. But so what?
Shut Up and Sing ½
R, 99 m., 2006
Featuring the Dixie Chicks (Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines, Emily Robison) and Simon Renshaw. A documentary directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck and produced by David Cassidy, Claude Davies, Kopple, and Peck.
Maybe Natalie Maines’s real problem was with her timing. On March 10, 2003, in the first days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, she told a London audience, “I’m ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” It took two weeks for that wisecrack to make it back home, but then it unleashed a perfect storm: Her group, the Dixie Chicks, had been the most popular female singing group in history, but suddenly disappeared from the playlists of virtually every country radio station in the land. Their number-one single, “Traveling Soldier,” dropped 47 percent in sales in one week. Many of their fans were vocal in their opinion that she should not have an opinion. Not long after, George W. Bush staged his premature “Mission Accomplished” photo-op.
As it happens, Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck were filming that London concert as part of a proposed film on the Chicks’ world tour. Kopple usually chooses weightier subject matter, as with her Harlan County, USA doc about a miners’ strike, but this was to be a film mostly about music. They stayed aboard to record one of the most revealing episodes in the history of country music, and Shut Up and Sing tells the story of how the Dixie Chicks and their manager dealt with the rage of some (not all) of their fans.
Political dissent has an honorable history in country music, just as freedom of speech is the bedrock of our American freedoms, but tell that to the people threatening boycotts of country stations or issuing anonymous death threats against the Dixie Chicks. They’re for freedom of speech as long as they agree with what’s being said. But listen to Johnny Cash defending the blacklisted Pete Seeger as “the best patriot I know.” Or consider these lyrics by John Prine, the best songwriter in modern country history:
Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore;
It’s already overcrowded by their dirty little war;
And Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason for…
Or the heartbreak of the great Prine song beginning:
Sam Stone, came home, from the conflict overseas,
With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back…
Of course Prine’s songs were about Vietnam, a war that impacted differently because of the draft. Iraq is being fought largely by a volunteer army, if you can call being a National Guardsman in your third tour of duty volunteering. And in those earliest days, the administration was predicting a pacified, peaceful, and democratic Iraq in months if not weeks. As Bush’s approval rating has plummeted, the Dixie Chicks have slowly won their way back toward acceptance, and this documentary is a fascinating record of their journey.
Kopple and Peck seem to have free access to the Chicks, backstage and behind closed doors, and we hear them in frank discussions with their manager, Simon Renshaw, about the devastation of their careers. At first, a stunned Maines tries to rationalize: She was just kidding, it was a throwaway line, she supports our troops but not the president’s invasion. It becomes clear that Chicks fans are not big on nuance and have zero tolerance for dissent.
Or do they? Were the nation’s country stations gutless in caving in to the threats of boycott? Was there not one with the courage to play the most popular country group in the land? On their first American tour after the debacle, the Chicks sell out every arena, are cheered in standing ovations, and are embraced in Greenville, South Carolina, on the very day of “Mission Accomplished.” At one concert, Maines tells the audience it’s OK to boo: “We believe in freedom of speech. So let’s stop right now for fifteen seconds of booing.” All she hears are cheers.
The documentary shows what a tight-knit group the Chicks are. Banjo player Emily Robison and fiddler Martie Maguire, sisters who brought in Maines as lead singer, had no idea what Maines was going to say that day in London, but they stand behind her without question. There’s no complaining, just shell-shock.
During the course of 2003 to 2006, Robison and Maguire have babies (Emily has twins) after agonizing fertility procedures. They write and record Taking the Long Way, a new album in which, far from apologizing, Maines sings “Not Ready to Make Nice.” It is some of their best work, freeing them from the confines of country, but the album doesn’t sell like their earlier work. Discussing lagging CD and concert sales, they decide to be honest about it. It becomes clear that their careers are less important to them than, for want of a better word, their sisterhood.
The documentary shows an ugly side of the right-wing intimidation they face. Among all of the self-anointed patriots who picket them, there is apparently not a glimmer of a notion of what freedom of speech means. Their opponents live in an Orwellian world in which others are granted only the freedom to agree. Heard in sound bites, seen with hate slogans on signs and T-shirts, they are not a pretty picture.
And there are the chilling backstage preparations for a Dallas concert before which they have received a death threat. To be willing to stand unprotected in front of thousands of people and sing your songs despite such a threat takes courage, and it is a brave defense of American values, although their critics cannot see it that way. Shut Up and Sing tells the story of three young women whose belief in America is bred in the bone, and it shames their critics.
As for Natalie Maines’s timing, maybe she simply made the mistake of being premature. The country music demographic group is bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of Iraq, with its National Guardsmen husbands, wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters absent, wounded, or dead. They are paying a heavy price for a war started on lies, and are perhaps not as angry these days at Natalie for speaking truthfully.
Sicko ½
PG-13, 124 m., 2007
A documentary directed by Michael Moore and produced by Moore and Meghan O’Hara. Screenplay by Moore.
If you heard the story, you remember it. A woman bled to death in an emergency room while her husband and a bystander both called 911 to report she was being ignored. They were ignored. She was already in the ER, wasn’t she?
Her death came too late to be included in Sicko, Michael Moore’s litany of horrors about the American health-care system, which is run for profit, and insurance companies, who pay bonuses to employees who are successful in denying coverage or claims.
But wait a minute. I saw the movie almost a year to the day after a carotid artery burst after surgery and I came within a breath of death. I spent the next year at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and the Pritikin Longevity Center, and I still require the daily care of a nurse.
I mention this to indicate I am pretty deeply involved in the health-care system. In each and every case, without exception, I have been cared for by doctors who are kind, patient, painstaking, and expert, and by nurses who are skilled, wise, and tireless. My insurance has covered a small fortune in claims. My wife and I have also paid large sums from our own savings.
So I have only one complaint, and it is this: Every American should be as fortunate as I have been. As Moore makes clear in his film, some fifty million Americans have no insurance and no way to get it. Many of the insured discover their policies are worthless after insurance investigators reel off an endless list of conditions and procedures that are not covered, or discover “preexisting conditions” the patients “should” have known about. One woman, unconscious when she is put into an ambulance, is billed for the trip because her insurer says it was not preauthorized. How could she get authorization when she was out cold on the pavement?
We also learn a lot about drug companies and HMOs in the film. It is an item of faith in some circles that drug companies need their profits to finance research and development. Out of a dollar of profit, what percentage would you guess goes to R&D, and what percentage goes to advertising and promotion, multimillion-dollar executive salaries, corporate jets, palatial headquarters, bonuses, and stockholders?
Moore plays 1971 tapes from the Oval Office as Nixon discusses the original Kaiser plan for an HMO. “It’s for profit,” Nixon says admiringly. Have you ever understood exactly what benefit it is that an HMO provides, while it stands between you and the medical care system and acts as a toll bridge? Do its profits not depend on supplying as little health care as possible, at the lowest possible price?
Moore visits the countries of Canada, England, France, and Cuba, all of which have (1) universal health care, and (2) a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than America. In France, he drives with one of the many doctors kept on full-time house-call duty. Of course we have heard all about “socialized medicine,” which among many evils denies you freedom of choice of hospitals and doctors. Hold on: That’s the free-enterprise HMO system.
Moore sails to Cuba with three boatloads of sick people, some of them 9/11 volunteers who have been denied care for respiratory and other problems because they were—well, volunteers. Unlike firemen and policemen, they had no business being there, I guess. One woman is on $1,000-a-month disability, and needs $240 a month for her inhaler medication. Moore’s gimmick (he always has one, but this one is dramatic) is to take her to a Cuban hospital where she finds that her $120 medication costs 5 cents in Cuba. At least that R&D money is helping Cubans.
Moore’s original purpose in sailing south was to seek medical care for his passengers at the Guantanamo Bay prison base. He is turned away, of course, but not before observing that accused al-Qaeda terrorists get better (free) medical attention than 9/11 volunteers.
It’s a different Michael Moore in Sicko. He still wears the baseball cap, but he’s onscreen less, not so cocky, not going for so many laughs. He simply tells one story after another about Americans who are sick, dying, or dead because we have an undemocratic, profit-gouging health-care system. Moore’s films usually make conservatives angry. This one is likely to strike home with anyone, left or right, who has had serious illness in the family. Conservative governments in Canada, England, and France all support universal health care; America is the only developed nation without it.
Yes, nitpickers can find fault with any attack on our system. There are four health-care lobbyists for every congressman. But there’s room for irony when the owner of an anti-Moore Web site can’t afford to maintain it when his wife gets sick. And room for tears, when a claims investigator for an insurance company tells Congress she knows she was her company’s instrument for denying clients care they needed that might have saved their lives.
R, 125 m., 2006
Radha Mitchell (Rose DaSilva), Sean Bean (Chris DaSilva), Laurie Holden (Cybil Bennett), Deborah Kara Unger (Dahlia Gillespie), Kim Coates (Officer Gucci), Tanya Allen (Anna), Alice Krige (Christabella), Jodell Ferland (Sharon DaSilva). Directed by Christophe Gans and produced by Don Carmody and Samuel Hadida. Screenplay by Roger Avary.
I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw Silent Hill. They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn’t have a clue. They said, “You’re supposed to be a movie critic, aren’t you?” I said, “Supposed to be. But we work mostly with movies.” “Yeah,” said the girl in the Harley T-shirt. “I guess this was like a video game that you, like, had to play in order to, like, understand the movie.”
I guess. I was out in Boulder, Colorado, the week before on a panel about video games and whether they can be art, and a lot of the students said they were really looking forward to Silent Hill because it’s one of the best games, and they read on the Internet that the movie was supposed to live up to the game. That was all speculation, of course, because Sony Pictures declined to preview the film for anybody, perhaps because they were concerned it would not live up to the game, or because they were afraid it would. When I told one student that the movie was not being previewed, there was real pain on his face, as if he had personally been devalued.
Not only can I not describe the plot of this movie, but I have a feeling the last scene reverses half of what I thought I knew (or didn’t know). What I can say is that it’s an incredibly good-looking film. The director, Christophe Gans, uses graphics and special effects and computers and grainy, scratchy film stock and surrealistic images, and makes Silent Hill look more like an experimental art film than a horror film—except for the horror, of course. The visuals are terrific; credit also to cinematographer Dan Laustsen, production designer Carol Spier, and the art, set, and costume artists. But what are we to make of dialogue such as I will now describe?
A group of undead citizens of the ghost town of Silent Hill have gathered for some witch-burning. The town was abandoned thirty years ago because of the fumes from mine fires, which still smolder beneath the surface. Gray ash falls like rain. “Something terrible happened here,” a character says perceptively. The townspeople pile wood on a bonfire in the center of an abandoned church and tie an alleged witch to a ladder, which is then lowered over the flames until the victim’s skin gets extra crispy. Next up: little Sharon (Jodell Ferland), the daughter of the heroine, Rose (Radha Mitchell). She is tied to the ladder and prepared to be lowered and roasted, when her mother bursts into the church and cries out, and I quote, “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s gonna be okay!”
The people who live in Silent Hill are dead, I guess. Some of them glow like old embers on a fire, which is not a sign of life. They live in abandoned buildings and in the mines and in a Smoke and Flame Factory, which you will recall from my Little Movie Glossary is a factorylike location of uncertain purpose that generates a lot of smoke and flames. Also sharing their space are ratlike little CGI insects, who scurry around thinking they look a lot scarier than they do.
Rose has come here with her daughter, Sharon, because the girl has taken to sleepwalking at night and standing on the edge of high cliffs while saying “Silent Hill” in her sleep. Obviously the correct treatment is to take her to the abandoned town itself. Rose and Sharon race off in the night, pursued by Rose’s husband (Sean Bean) and a motorcycle cop (Laurie Holden) who is dressed like a leather mistress. The usual zombielike little girl turns up in the headlights, there is a crash, and then everybody wanders through the town for two hours while the art direction looks great. I especially liked the snakelike wires at the end that held people suspended in midair. I also liked it when Johnny Cash sang “Ring of Fire” on the sound track, since if there was ever a movie in need of a song about a ring of fire, this is that film.
Now here’s a funny thing. Although I did not understand the story, I would have appreciated a great deal less explanation. All through the movie, characters are pausing to offer arcane backstories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations. They talk and talk, and somehow their words do not light up any synapses in my brain, if my brain has synapses and they’re supposed to light up, and if it doesn’t and they’re not, then they still don’t make any sense.
Perhaps those who have played the game will understand the movie and enjoy it. Speaking of synapses, another member of that panel discussion at Boulder was Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center and an author whose book Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light makes you think that if anyone could understand Silent Hill, he could.
Dr. Shlain made the most interesting comment on the panel. He said they took some four- and five-year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched the children’s brain activity with real-time monitors. “At first, when they were figuring out the games,” he said, “the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.” Walking out after Silent Hill, I thought of that lonely pilot light, and I understood why I failed to understand the movie. My damn brain lit up too much.
Silk
R, 110 m., 2007
Keira Knightley (Helene Joncour), Michael Pitt (Herve Joncour), Koji Yakusho (Local Overlord), Alfred Molina (Baldabiou), Mark Rendall (Ludovic), Sei Ashina (The Mistress). Directed by Francois Girard and produced by Niv Fichman, Nadine Luque, Domenico Procacci, and Sonoko Sakai. Screenplay by Girard and Michael Golding, based on a novel by Alessandro Baricco.
Silk is a languid, too languid, story of romantic regrets, mostly ours, because romance is expected to carry the film without explaining it. It is told as a mournful flashback, narrated by a man who has been in love with two women, or maybe it was one all the time. He is a young Frenchman as his story begins circa 1860, who falls in love with a local girl, marries her, and then is sent to Japan and falls in love again.
The Frenchman is named Herve, played by Michael Pitt as the passive, soft-spoken plaything of every circumstance he falls into. His complaint seems to be that his life has happened to him. His wife is Helene (Keira Knightley), whom he truly loves, and who truly loves him, but cannot give him a child, although this plays less like a tragedy than just one of those things.
His father is a rich businessman, perhaps the mayor (I could not be sure), who takes the counsel of an entrepreneur, or maybe his employee (I could not be sure), named Baldabiou (Alfred Molina) that they revive the local silk mills. All goes well until disease attacks the silkworms. Then Baldabiou decides to send Herve to Japan to obtain uncontaminated silkworm eggs.
This journey, by carriage, train, ship, caravan, and horseback, takes him to a small Japanese village where the fearsome man in charge (Koji Yakusho) sizes him up, agrees to sell him eggs, and introduces him, in a way, to his beautiful mistress (Sei Ashina). Their eyes meet, and something happens between them, or Herve is sure it does. He returns to France and his wife with the eggs, which make them all rich. But he is obsessed by thoughts of the woman, and that inspires two more trips to Japan and certain undercurrents in his marriage to the wife he still loves.
There are some mysteries in the storytelling, a central one being the night he is told by a Dutch trader that the mistress “is not what she seems.” How so? “She is not Japanese.” Then what is she? The IMDb has no doubts, reporting that she is “European,” which she is certainly not. My guess is Korean or Chinese, but since the question remains unanswered, one wonders why it was introduced. (Find out on the IMDb, which will correct this error the moment they learn about it.)
Another mystery is how long silkworm eggs can survive during a journey back to France, since their fortunes seem to have no relationship to the nature of the journeys. But never mind. Herve’s problem is, when he’s not with the one he loves, he loves the one he’s with, and is sincere about that at all times.
Our problem, on the other hand, is that we don’t care. Michael Pitt almost whispers his way through the film, reveals not passion but damp-eyed self-pity, and (given the language barrier) has no reason to be in love with the Japanese woman except for the movie’s blatant exoticism, which argues: Why would you be satisfied with a high-spirited, beautiful wife like Helene, who shares jolly tumbles in the sack, when you could have a Japanese woman who kneels submissively before you, takes forever to serve you tea, looks soulfully into your eyes, speaks not a word, and touches you only once (although we know that, not Herve, who is blindfolded at the time).
There are additional unforgivable plot elements that I dare not reveal, meant to be much more stirring than, under the circumstances, they can possibly be. And a piano score that weeps under many a scene. And a lot of beautiful photography. And then everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.
The Simpsons Movie
PG-13, 86 m., 2007
With the voices of: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, and A. Brooks. Directed by David Silverman and produced by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, AI Jean, Richard Sakai, and Mike Scully. Screenplay by Brooks, Groening, Jean, Scully, Ian Maxstone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti.
The Simpsons are fairly surprised to find themselves in a movie; they can’t believe “anyone would pay to see what we did on TV for free.” But I suspect a lot of people will. Here is a feature-length version of what Time magazine, no less, called “the 20th century’s best television series.” That may say more about Time magazine and the twentieth century than it does about the Simpsons, but never mind: The movie is funny, sassy, and intelligent in that moronic Simpsons way.
There is a plot, sort of, involving Homer’s role in polluting the lake in Springfield, which calls down the wrath of the federal bureaucracy and leads to dire consequences for his fellow citizens. The Simpsons’ guilt is counterbalanced by poor, idealistic Lisa, who goes door-to-door collecting signatures for her environmental crusade, only to get every door slammed in her face. One house even flees.
This story allows room for the sorts of political asides the Simpsons are famous for; not broadsides, but sideswipes. When the feds finally succeed at something in the movie, they’re as surprised as everybody else.
For me, the three biggest laughs in the movie (I won’t spoil them) were a plug for the Fox network, a skateboarding sequence inspired by Austin Powers, and a unique way to go fishing. Those, and the peculiar everyday lives of the closely knit Simpsons, fill in the gaps in the plot, along with a devout neighbor who, considering what Homer puts in his mailbox, is more sinned against than sinning.
The movie sets some kind of record by crediting no less than eleven writers (James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxstone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti). That’s not the usual case of endless tinkering, but an example of devotion; Variety says all eleven produced episodes for the TV show at one time or another. The genius of the series is that it has tapped some of the best offbeat comic talent instead of settling for the TV animation groove. Consider James L. Brooks and voice talent A. (for Albert) Brooks. These people work outside the box.
I’m not generally a fan of movies spun off from TV animation. The Flintstones and Ninja Turtles moved me only marginally. But there’s something about the Simpsons that’s radical and simple at the same time, subversive and good-hearted, offensive without really meaning to be. It’s a nice balancing act. And it finally settles the controversy over what state Springfield is in; it is bordered, we learn, by Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky. So you can figure it out right there.
If The Simpsons is indeed the best television series of one hundred years (almost half of them, to be sure, without television), I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to visit the Internet Movie Database and discover that the movie has been voted the 166th best film of all time, seven places above The Grapes of Wrath and ten ahead of Gone with the Wind.
That’s all the more remarkable because it was first screened for critics on July 24, has had no sneak previews I’ve heard about, and got 81.4 percent perfect “10” votes. Only 4.5 percent voted “9.” That’s funny, since you’d think more people would consider it really good but not great. Do you suppose somehow the ballot box got stuffed by Simpsons fans who didn’t even need to see the movie to know it was a masterpiece? D’oh.
Sin City
R, 126 m., 2005
Bruce Willis (Hartigan), Jessica Alba (Nancy), Rosario Dawson (Gail), Benicio Del Toro (Jackie Boy), Clive Owen (Dwight), Mickey Rourke (Marv), Brittany Murphy (Shellie), Nick Stahl (Yellow Bastard), Alexis Bledel (Becky), Devon Aoki (Miho), Jaime King (Goldie), Frank Miller (Priest), Powers Boothe (Senator Roark), Michael Clarke Duncan (Manute), Carla Gugino (Lucille). Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, and Quentin Tarantino and produced by Elizabeth Avellan, Miller, and Rodriguez. Screenplay by Rodriguez and Miller.
If film noir was not a genre but a hard man on mean streets with a lost lovely in his heart and a gat in his gut, his nightmares would look like Sin City. The movie by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller plays like a convention at the movie museum in Quentin Tarantino’s subconscious. A-list action stars rub shoulders with snaky villains and sexy wenches in a city where the streets are always wet, the cars are ragtops, and everybody smokes. It’s a black-and-white world, except for blood that is red, eyes that are green, hair that is blond, and the Yellow Bastard.
This isn’t an adaptation of a comic book; it’s like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map.
The movie is not about narrative but about style. It internalizes the harsh world of the Frank Miller Sin City comic books and processes it through computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid costumes, and dialogue that chops at the language of noir. The actors are mined for the archetypes they contain; Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen, and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. We get not so much their presence as their essence; the movie is not about what the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest dreams.
On the movie’s Web site there’s a slide show juxtaposing the original drawings of Frank Miller with the actors playing the characters, and then with the actors transported by effects into the visual world of graphic novels. Some of the stills from the film look so much like frames of the comic book as to make no difference. And there’s a narration that plays like the captions at the top of the frame, setting the stage and expressing a stark, existential worldview.
Rodriguez has been aiming toward Sin City for years. I remember him leaping out of his chair and bouncing around a hotel room, pantomiming himself filming Spy Kids 2 with a digital camera and editing it on a computer. The future! he told me. This is the future! You don’t wait six hours for a scene to be lighted. You want a light over here, you grab a light and put it over here. You want a nuclear submarine, you make one out of thin air and put your characters into it.
I held back, wondering if perhaps the spy kids would have been better served if the films had not been such a manic demonstration of his method. But never mind; the first two Spy Kids were exuberant fun (Spy Kids 3-D sucked, in great part because of the 3-D). Then came his Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), and I wrote it was “more interested in the moment, in great shots, in surprises and ironic reversals and close-ups of sweaty faces, than in a coherent story.” Yes, but it worked.
And now Rodriguez has found narrative discipline in the last place you might expect, by choosing to follow the Miller comic books almost literally. A graphic artist has no time or room for drifting. Every frame contributes, and the story marches from page to page in vivid action snapshots. Sin City could easily have looked as good as it does and still been a mess, if it were not for the energy of Miller’s storytelling, which is not the standard chronological account of events, but more like a tabloid murder illuminated by flashbulbs.
The movie is based on three of the Sin City stories, each more or less self-contained. That’s wise, because at this velocity a two-hour, one-story narrative would begin to pant before it got to the finish line. One story involves Bruce Willis as a battered old cop at war with a pedophile (Nick Stahl). One has Mickey Rourke waking up next to a dead hooker (Jaime King). One has a good guy (Clive Owen) and a wacko cop (Benicio Del Toro) disturbing the delicate balance of power negotiated between the police and the leader of the city’s hookers (Rosario Dawson), who despite her profession moonlights as Owen’s lover. Underneath everything is a deeper layer of corruption, involving a senator (Powers Boothe), whose son is not only the pedophile but also the Yellow Bastard.
We know the Bastard is yellow because the movie paints him yellow, just as the comic book did; it was a masterstroke for Miller to find a compromise between the cost of full-color reproduction and the economy of two-color pages; red, green, and blue also make their way into the frames. Actually, I can’t even assume Miller went the two-color route for purposes of economy, because it’s an effective artistic decision.
There are other vivid characters in the movie, which does not have leads so much as actors who dominate the foreground and then move on. In a movie that uses nudity as if the 1970s had survived, Rosario Dawson’s stripper is a fierce dominatrix, Carla Gugino shows more skin than she could in Maxim, and Devon Aoki employs a flying guillotine that was borrowed no doubt from a circa-1970 Hong Kong exploiter.
Rodriguez codirected, photographed, and edited the movie, collaborated on the music and screenplay, and is coproducer. Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino are credited as codirectors, Miller because his comic books essentially act as storyboards, which Rodriguez follows with ferocity, Tarantino because he directed one brief scene on a day when Rodriguez was determined to wean him away from celluloid and lure him over to the dark side of digital. (It’s the scene in the car with Owen and Del Toro, who has a pistol stuck in his head.) Tarantino also contributed something to the culture of the film, which follows his influential Pulp Fiction in its recycling of pop archetypes and its circular story structure. The language of the film, both dialogue and narration, owes much to the hard-boiled pulp novelists of the 1950s.
Which brings us, finally, to the question of the movie’s period. Skylines suggest the movie is set today. The cars range from the late 1930s to the 1950s. The costumes are from the trench coat and g-string era. I don’t think Sin City really has a period, because it doesn’t really tell a story set in time and space. It’s a visualization of the pulp noir imagination, uncompromising and extreme. Yes, and brilliant.
Sir! No Sir!
NO MPAA RATING, 85 m., 2006
Narrated by Troy Garity and featuring Edward Asner, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Terry Whitmore, Donald Duncan, Howard Levy, Oliver Hirsch, Susan Schnall, Randy Rowland, Louis Font, Dave Cline, Bill Short, Dave Blalock, Greg Payton, Darnell Summers, Michael Wong, Terry Whitmore, Joe Bangert, Richard Boyle, Jerry Lembcke, Terry Iverson, Tom Bernard, and Keith Mather. A documentary written and directed by David Zeiger and produced by Evangeline Griego, Aaron Zarrow, and Zeiger.
Quick question: When Jane Fonda was on her “FTA” concert tour during the Vietnam era, who was in her audience? The quick answer from most people probably would be “antiwar hippies, left-wingers, and draft-dodgers.” The correct answer would be: American troops on active duty, many of them in uniform.
Sir! No Sir! is a documentary about an almost-forgotten fact of the Vietnam era: Antiwar sentiment among U.S. troops grew into a problem for the Pentagon. The film claims bombing was used toward the end of the war because the military leadership wondered, frankly, if some of their ground troops would obey orders to attack. It’s also said there were a few Air Force B-52 crews that refused to bomb North Vietnam. And in San Diego, sailors on an aircraft carrier tried to promote a local vote on whether their ship should be allowed to sail for Vietnam. One of the disenchanted veterans, although he is never mentioned in the film, was John Kerry, who first was decorated for valor and later became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and testified before Congress.
After the turning point of the Tet offensive in 1968, troop morale ebbed lower, the war seemed lost, and a protest movement encompassed active duty troops, coffeehouses near bases in America, underground GI newspapers, and a modern “underground railway” that helped soldiers desert and move to Canada. According to Pentagon figures, there were some 500,000 desertions during the Vietnam years.
The film has been written and directed by David Zeiger, who worked in an antiwar coffeehouse near Fort Hood, Texas. In a narration spoken by Troy Garity, the son of Fonda and Tom Hayden, his film says, “The memory has been changed.” The GI antiwar movement has disappeared from common knowledge, and a famous factoid from the period claims returning wounded veterans were spit on by “hippies” as they landed at American airports. According to the film, that is an urban legend, publicized in the film Rambo II: First Blood.
When we reviewed Sir! No Sir! on Ebert & Roeper, we cited the film’s questions about the spitting story. There is a book on the subject, The Spitting Image by Jerry Lembcke, whose research failed to find a single documented instance of such an event occurring in real life. I received many e-mails, however, from those who claimed knowledge of such incidents. The story persists, and true or false it is part of a general eagerness to blame our loss in Vietnam on domestic protesters while ignoring the substantial antiwar sentiment among troops in the field.
Parallels with the war in Iraq are obvious. One big difference is that the Vietnam-era forces largely were supplied by the draft, while our Iraq troops are either career soldiers or National Guard troops, some of them on their second or third tour of duty. The Vietnam-era draft not only generated antiwar sentiment among those of draft age but also supplied the army with soldiers who did not go very cheerfully into uniform. The willingness of today’s National Guardsmen to continue in combat is courageous and admirable but cannot be expected to last indefinitely, and the political cost of returning to the draft system would be incalculable.
A group of recent documentaries has highlighted a conflict between information and “disinformation,” that Orwellian term for attempts to rewrite history. The archetype of “Hanoi Jane” has been used to obscure the fact that Fonda appeared before about sixty thousand GIs who apparently agreed with her. The Swift Boat Veterans incredibly tried to deny John Kerry’s patriotism. The global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth is being attacked by a TV ad campaign, underwritten by energy companies, which extols the benefits of carbon dioxide.
No doubt Sir! No Sir! will inspire impassioned rebuttals. No doubt it is not an impartial film, not with Fonda’s son as its narrator. What cannot be denied is the newsreel footage of uniformed troops in antiwar protests, of Fonda’s uniformed audiences at “FTA” concerts, of headlines citing Pentagon concern about troop morale, the “fragging” of officers, the breakdown of discipline, and the unwillingness of increasing numbers of soldiers to fight a war they had started to believe was wrong.