OBSERVE & REPORT – jody hill – 5.0 / 10

Having now watched the first season of Jody Hill’s HBO series Eastbound & Down and his second feature film Observe & Report, I’m at a loss as to how anyone can think Hill makes comedies. For the life of me I can’t figure out what anyone could possibly find funny in either the tv show or the film. That’s not to say that both aren’t occasionally entertaining or interesting but I just don’t see how anyone can laugh at the antics of such clearly disturbed human beings as Kenny Powers (Danny McBride’s washed up former pitcher in Eastbound & Down) and Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen’s mall cop in Observe & Report).

Both Kenny and Ronnie are severely unbalanced individuals who routinely treat everyone around them with utter disdain and disregard. And because of that, I find it very hard to laugh with or at them. If anything, I want to get these characters some psychiatric help. Kenny, for all his pomposity and vitriol, is, for the most part, just a harmless blowhard unless you really piss him off. Ronnie, on the other hand, is more than just an asshole, he’s mentally unbalanced and extremely dangerous (as the many people he severely wounds during the course of the film can attest). If Observe & Report had ended with Ronnie going on a mall wide shooting spree I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit surprised.

I guess that’s sort of the point, though. Compared to just about every character Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell have ever played, what Ronnie does in Observe & Report is pretty much par for the course. But the world Ronnie Barnhardt lives in and the people around him are relatively normal, unlike the world and characters of a Sandler or Ferrell film. Behavior that goes uncommented upon in those films really stands out in Observe & Report precisely because everyone around Ronnie is so recognizably normal. Thus the film becomes something of a dissection of what mainstream comedy has become and what and who a mainstream audience will laugh at.

That said, it still doesn’t explain why people would find the film funny. If the point of the film is to examine why audiences find disturbing and dangerous behavior funny, laughing at that behavior implicates you as part of the problem. Hill seems to be suggesting that if you laugh at any of the terrible stuff Ronnie does in Observe & Report (random beatings, date rape, attempted murder, etc.) then you’re missing some vital component of your emotional DNA.

But that makes very little sense to me. Why would someone make a film that’s only real function is to critique and insult its core audience? Is the whole thing an elaborate prank? (i.e. See how I can insult these idiots and still get them to laugh hysterically.) Or does Hill really think this stuff is funny? If it’s the former, then I guess Hill is something of a mad genius. Though why he’d spend so much time and effort to make a movie that his target audience will mostly misinterpret is beyond me. If it’s the latter, then Observe & Report is perhaps the most disturbing mainstream movie ever made.

And the film has no shortage of disturbing material in it. Take, for instance, the scene where Ronnie has vigorous sex with what appears to be a comatose Brandi (Anna Faris) (complete with vomit crusted on her pillow). After a few seconds—presumably to allow the audience to recover from the shock of what they’re seeing—Brandi comes to and yells at Ronnie to keep going before appearing to pass out again. The initial fifteen seconds of the scene, wherein it appears that Ronnie is raping Brandi (and a pretty good argument can be made that even though she wakes up briefly, what Ronnie is doing is still statutory rape) are so deeply horrifying that I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly laugh when Brandi wakes up and commands Ronnie to continue.

But some people in the audience I saw the film with did laugh. And I just don’t know what to make of that. Is Hill trying to see how far he can push the envelope before it becomes too disturbing for anyone to laugh? Or is he saying that there are no boundaries in comedy? Or is he after something much deeper? We can’t, for the most part, help when we laugh. So maybe Hill is using something incredibly disturbing as a punchline in order to get the viewer to question why they’re laughing in the first place.

I’d like to think that’s what he’s going for. But any argument to that effect is seriously undercut by the film’s ending. In it Ronnie finally catches up to the flasher who has been ‘terrorizing’ his mall and promptly shoots the man at point blank range. Then, with gallons of blood covering the floor, everyone begins to applaud. Ronnie then hauls the severely wounded man to his feet and drags him down to the police station where he is greeted with approval for his actions from the cops. By treating Ronnie ultimately as a hero for his violently disturbed behavior, Hill lets the audience completely off the hook. If the rest of the film really is an examination and critique of the man-child idiocy of most mainstream comedy (at least of the Stiller, Sandler, Ferrell variety), ending the film this way allows the audience to leave the theater without having to think much about what they were just laughing at. Since the characters within the film all end up approving of Ronnie’s behavior, the audience is invited to feel the same way about him. If the extremely unsettling things Ronnie did earlier in the film can be ignored by the other characters, then they can just as easily be ignored by the audience. And, again, I’m left wondering what the point of all this was.

An argument could be made that, just like in Taxi Driver (clearly a huge influence on this film), what the audience sees in the last ten minutes only happened that way in Ronnie’s mind. In fact, there is some textual evidence to support the theory that much of what the audience sees in the film didn’t really happen that way. (For instance, Ronnie is the only person still conscious after both the date rape scene and the scene where he severely wounds a group of drug dealers, and therefore he’s the only one who really knows what happened.) But if the ending (or even much of the film) is subjectively told from Ronnie’s perspective, it still has the same effect. The audience is still invited to ignore everything that came before it and view Ronnie as a hero.

I guess the ending could just have been an easy way for Hill to secure major studio backing for Observe & Report. If the film had ended the way it looked like it was going to (with some sort of mass murder), no one would have come near it. But the ending so undercuts everything it seemed like Hill had been trying to say with the first two thirds of the film that it leaves the distinct impression that maybe Hill wasn’t trying to say anything particularly insightful about what we find funny or who we like to laugh at. And if he wasn’t going for that, then he really was trying to get people to laugh at an extremely unbalanced individual beating up a group of teenage skateboarders, knocking out an Arab man just because his skin is brown, assaulting police officers, having sex with an unconscious woman and shooting an unarmed man. The implication that I should be laughing at any of this is probably the most disturbing thing I’ll see in a movie all year.

ADVENTURELAND – greg mottola – 9.4 / 10

Adventureland is a love story. But it’s a realistic love story, not whatever it is that Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant have been passing off as love stories in their romantic comedies all these years. Adventureland is a story about what it actually looks and feels like to fall in love for the first time, not, as we’re used to seeing at the movies, a romanticized story about what we wished it looked and felt like to fall in love. And because of that, I should offer this caveat: we all see love differently. It means something different to all of us. And because of that, your own response to this film will probably vary depending on how much (or how little) you agree with the filmmakers’ ideas about what falling in love is like. Since my own ideas about the subject line up pretty well with those expressed in the film, I found myself enthralled by it. Your mileage may vary.

The fact that I enjoyed Adventureland as much as I did is mildly surprising considering that, before even a single frame of the film had unspooled, it already had several strikes against it. First off, the film is clearly at least semi-autobiographical. There’s just no way Greg Mottola would bother telling this story unless something at least a little similar happened to him. When the filmmaker is that close to the story and when the story in question has been romanticized over twenty years of retellings (though I’m only guessing about that last part), there’s a pretty decent chance that the film will be completely self-serving and unsatisfying. Just think of how many awful ‘passion projects’ there’ve been over the years. From Gangs of New York to The Passion of the Christ, the phrase ‘passion project’ is usually just a euphemism for ‘piece of crap’.

Second, Mottola is coming off the wildly successful Superbad. When a director makes a movie that makes as much money as that one did, they’re pretty much handed the keys to the kingdom and told to go make whatever they want. For the most part, however, this turns out very very poorly. Compounding that, Miramax is releasing the film. This is significant just for the fact of it. When a director makes a hit movie for a studio, the studio does everything they can to keep him there (like giving him $150 million to make Watchmen for instance). So the fact that Columbia isn’t releasing Adventureland leads me to believe that they must have passed on the film. And if they passed on it, that pretty much guarantees the film won’t have broad appeal.

Third, Kristen Stewart is the object of the protagonist / filmmaker stand-in’s romantic attention. Before six months ago I actually quite liked Stewart, mostly because all I’d ever seen of her was her work on the screen. Once she started going out and doing interviews to promote Twilight, it became clear that in real life she is either a complete moron, a drug addict or simply unable to carry on a conversation if it hasn’t been scripted for her. That might be a little unfair but if you’ve seen her appearance on Letterman last year, you know I’m not exaggerating.

Yet somehow, despite everything the film seemed to have stacked against it, I really enjoyed it. Some of that enjoyment might be due to the film hitting a couple of my weak spots. I’m as much a sucker for a good coming of age story as a hopeless romantic is for a good rom com. I’m also a sucker for a film with a great soundtrack. And Adventureland deploys The Cure, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie and Yo La Tengo to great effect. And, perhaps most tellingly, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), the ‘hero’ of the film, looks and sounds about the same as I felt when I was about nineteen years old. (In reality I probably looked and sounded a whole lot different but his character is pretty much exactly how I imagined I appeared to the outside world.) Given all of that, it’d be awfully hard for me to resist the film’s charms.

But what’s most admirable about the film is that it unfailingly chooses to be honest and subtle when, given the somewhat ridiculous setting (a cut rate theme park in the late 1980s), it could very easily have gone for the big laugh or the big romantic gesture. Instead, the film is restrained in a way that is both assured and assuring. The viewer knows early on that although some outrageous things might happen in the film, none of them are going to stretch the bounds of believability. And though James might get himself into some embarrassing situations, these will come from a place of emotional honesty. There’s nothing I hate more than cringe-inducing comedy when it’s completely gratuitous (someone serenading his girlfriend in front of her whole apartment building, for instance) or just trying to get the audience to squirm. But when it comes from an emotionally honest place and feels like something an actual human being might do, what could have been embarrassing becomes instead endearing.

Also, Mottola handles the adults in the film in a really appealing way. In a film like this, centered as it is on the lives of young adults, the parents are most often portrayed as little more than cartoon characters. Typically they're either completely oblivious to what their kids are doing or else they’re preaching at them and sounding completely clueless. Either way, the parents in most movies about teenagers have no real influence on the kids, almost as if their very existence is a nuisance. The parents in Adventureland, on the other hand, have a real impact on their kids’ lives, and not necessarily for the better. Though they're trying their best to impart some kind of wisdom to their offspring, the adults in the film are still trying to figure out their own lives and so have precious little insight to impart to their children. Because of that, the kids have no choice but reject their parents and set out on their own. The underlying message of these relationships is that there is no substitute for personal experience. There is nothing any adult can tell a teenager that will really help them figure out what to do with their lives. They have to make their own mistakes and fumble their way through just as their parents have.

That relationship, so hard to get right on film (mostly because the person writing it, whether teenager or parent, usually can’t avoid taking sides), is nothing compared with the difficulty of convincingly depicting two believable characters falling in love. Most of great love stories end in one of two ways: either the couple spends the whole story dancing around each other, finally getting together at the very end (e.g. Pride and Prejudice) or they’re together for a very short time (i.e. before any real issues can set in) and then broken up forever, usually by the death of one or both of them (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic, etc.). It’s extremely difficult to portray a romantic relationship on screen that is both realistic and still dramatically satisfying. And to do it with a couple that’s barely entered their twenties is almost unheard of. That’s what elevates Adventureland from just a good coming of age story amongst many into something special.

It helps that Kristen Stewart’s Em is pretty much the idealized woman for every guy who ever was (or thought himself to be) a lonely, awkward, nerdy young man who couldn’t figure out who to be or what to do with his life. Her character, especially in her first few scenes, is a sort of idealized version of ‘the one that got away’, that girl that every smart, introverted, artsy boy was secretly in love with but could never get to notice him. Em is smart, fearless and down to earth but also just a tiny bit damaged and in need of ‘saving’. And though at first that characterization is a little cliché, by the end of the film it’s become clear that there’s a lot more to Em than it first appeared and that the only way she’ll ever be ‘saved’ is if she saves herself. Interestingly, that’s usually the message most films like this send about their hero. The girl is usually the prize he earns for figuring out who he really is. In Adventureland, however, there is the very real sense that both Jesse and Em are going to be better together than they would ever be apart.

To get a sense of how remarkable an achievement Adventureland is, think about some of the more beloved movies of the past that attempt to do something similar (i.e. tell a story about a young couple falling in love). Every one that you can name (Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, Cruel Intentions, The Notebook, etc.), are all completely unrealistic. The emotions that the characters express might convincingly mimic real emotion but the situations are ludicrous, the dialogue is filled with long speeches (usually in some sort of public setting) about how one half of the couple feels about the other and the story itself is unfailingly wrapped up in a neat little bow. Even the ancillary characters in those movies usually get some kind of closure to whatever they were dealing with. None of that strikes me as in any way resembling my experience of reality. Those movies mythologize and romanticize young love in a way that almost completely divorces it from reality.

Adventureland, on the other hand, completely demythologizes and deromanticizes its characters' lives, bringing them down to a human level. There’s just no comparison between the films mentioned above and Adventureland where the characters very rarely say the right thing and often say nothing at all, romantic gestures are small and usually go unnoticed, and pronouncements of undying love are uttered through third parties while extremely stoned. That’s a lot closer to how I remember it being when I was twenty, and Adventureland is that much more powerful (to me at least) because of it.

It’s hard to convincingly portray love on screen for so many reasons, not the least of which being that it doesn’t look exactly the same to any two viewers. What one person sees as a completely realistic depiction of love may look to another like utter nonsense. Thus I can only speak for myself when I say this, but to me Adventureland contains probably the truest rendering of what it feels like to be young and in love with the world supposedly at your feet but seeming instead like it’s spinning completely out of control. It evokes a time and a place and a stage of life with such pitch perfect emotional clarity and honesty that at times I was a little embarrassed by how much it affected me. And any film that can peer that deeply into a viewer’s soul is special indeed.

DOWN BY LAW – jim jarmusch – 5.6 / 10

Thank god for the 1.5x fast forward on my DVD player. Without it I would’ve certainly fallen asleep less than ten minutes into this film and either never would’ve bothered to finish it or, if I had, it would’ve taken another three days of watching it in short twenty minute bursts with all the lights on and the computer on my lap to keep me from dozing off when the film became too boring.

Even watched at 1.5x speed (so that it took a little over an hour instead of the full 110 minute running time), the film is still only decent, not exactly the classic its inclusion in the Criterion Collection might lead you to believe it is. And, somehow, incredibly, it’s still slow moving. I just can’t understand why people make films like this. Just what is it that the audience is learning by watching Zack (Tom Waits) slowly put on his boots and then, again slowly, polish them in one long static shot that it couldn’t just as easily have learned in a couple of quick cuts that took a third of the time?

The only thing that happens when you watch a long take like that one is that your mind starts to wander. Your eyes start searching other parts of the frame for something interesting. Sometimes, if you’re really into the film, this might get you thinking more deeply about the characters or the setting or whatever. Other times, and this is what’s more likely to happen with me, it takes you completely out of the film. In moments like that, I find myself thinking about the set decorator and why she chose that specific photo to include on the nightstand or the costumer and why he chose to put the character in those boots. And then, if the shot goes on long enough, my thoughts stray completely away from the film and before I know it I’ve distracted myself to the point of not even noticing what’s happening on the screen anymore.

I guess that doesn’t speak all that well of me as a viewer. Basically I’m saying that I need to be constantly stimulated or else I’m not going to be able to pay attention to your movie. (And there is some truth in that. One of the key benefits of watching a film at 1.5x speed is that you really have be on your toes to hear everything that’s said, which serves to keep you more engaged in the film than you might be otherwise.) But that’s not the whole story. The best I can figure it is that Jarmusch and his ilk (pretty much every European and independent American filmmaker) make movies like this because they like a slow, deliberate, almost elegiac pace. It lends, I guess, a sense of realism and thoughtfulness to both the characters and the films themselves.

But there are plenty of films I love that are very slowly paced (Eyes Wide Shut, The Road to Perdition and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to name three) and during which, at no point, was I ever thinking about what I was going to have for dinner or whether or not I left the bedroom lights on. So it’s not the pace by itself that turns me off to films like this. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s not the pace alone. It’s the slow pace coupled with the ramshackle production values and the loosely scripted dialogue that dooms these sorts of films to mediocrity in my eyes. If I become bored at any point during a film like The Road to Perdition and find my eyes wandering the frame looking at something other than the actors, there are plenty of things still within the world the filmmaker has created to draw my attention. I can examine the spectacular cinematography or the impeccable set design or I can try to puzzle out why exactly this particular shot was chosen and what it’s supposed to symbolize in the context of the larger film. But with something like Down By Law, given that same opportunity, there isn’t much to be gleaned from any of those things. The cinematography is fine but mostly just gets out of the way of the story and all too often succumbs to that handheld faux-documentary crap that typifies so many Indie (TM) films. And the dialogue seems like it might well have been made up on the set the day of the shoot. A closer examination of either of these things (or any other of the many constituent parts that make up any single shot or scene) doesn’t seem like it would be particularly rewarding or illuminating. I don’t think there’s much to be gained by thinking about them overmuch. And so I don’t; and my mind wanders; and then either I’ve missed something that will turn out to be important later on or I’ve fallen asleep.

So, yeah, thank god my DVD player lets me watch movies at 1.5x speed. That way I can get through films like this in one sitting, quickly write up something about it, file it in the ‘seen it’ column and move on to something that I’d rather be watching. That’s pretty silly, I guess, and probably begs the question of why I’m even bothering to watch a film that I’m really not getting anything out of. The answer is that you never know. You never know where the seed for an idea that will grow to become something interesting will come from. You never know if, buried within all this standard Indie (TM) film stuff, there just might be something transcendent. So I watch and hope. And mostly I’m disappointed. But that’s okay. My Netflix queue is long and I’m still (relatively) young.

THE WIRE: SEASON FIVE – david simon – 9.0 / 10

During the first four seasons of The Wire there were two ways in which one could appreciate the show. On the surface there was a highly entertaining, deceptively realistic, often heartbreaking depiction of a collection of fully realized characters within an urban milieu that was unparalleled in the history of television. Underneath that there was a subtext that had something to say about the cause and nature of many of the problems facing our modern society. That The Wire functioned so well whether or not you delved into the Iraq War parallel of season three or thought much about the systemic dysfunction of institutions is what makes the series one of the all time greats. It works equally well as a treatise on modern life in America or simply as a damn fine piece of entertainment.

In season five, however, it becomes a little harder for the viewer to ignore the subtextual points that David Simon and Co. are making. Perhaps this is because the fifth season focuses a lot of its attention (and screen time) on the Baltimore Sun newspaper where, not coincidentally, David Simon worked for twenty years before moving into television. I imagine it was difficult for him to remain objective and evenhanded when dealing with that particular profession considering how displeased he was with the way the industry had changed since he first started working as a reporter. But whatever the reason, the parts of the show featuring the newsroom are often the most strident and heavy handed, featuring some of the more one dimensional characters the series has so far created. (Though it should be noted that even these characters (Templeton, Klebanow, Whiting and the rest) are still more fully fleshed out than most characters on any other show you’d care to name.) It’s very difficult for the audience to enjoy the newsroom scenes without occasionally thinking about what Simon was trying to say about the death of the newspapers and the impact this was having on both the newsroom and the culture in general.

That said, trying too hard to make your point is a very minor failure, maybe even an admirable one. It only stands out like it does because this show had previously been so masterful in submerging what it was trying to say underneath all the surface stuff. Even still, that doesn’t change the fact that what goes on in the newsroom is still pretty interesting. Though in the end it turns out to be one more in the long line of institutions depicted on The Wire as systemically dysfunctional, I found the peculiarities of how the newspapers are screwed up fairly entertaining.

The other major plotline of season five is the fake serial killer Detective McNulty manufactures in order to get the city, basically insolvent because of a school system $54 million in debt, to start paying for police overtime (or, as the cops say repeatedly, ‘real police work’). Though this storyline is, perhaps, a little over the top, the thorny issues it raises are worth the tradeoff. For instance, McNulty, the hero of the first three seasons, was always the one person who refused to play by the rules and was all the more effective because of it, occasionally even achieving something that looked like victory (a rarity on The Wire). He was the one character most viewers identified with and rooted for. But now here he is in season five manufacturing a serial killer to get the money flowing again. More than just simply a question of the ends justifying the means, this storyline raises questions about McNulty as a person and the viewer for rooting for him.

At no point during the entire fake serial killer fiasco do the writers ever let McNulty (or the viewers who might be rooting for him to get away with it) off the hook. Scene after scene shows the unintended collateral damage he’s caused. Whether it’s Kima Greggs interviewing the parents of one of the serial killer’s ‘victims’ or the two dead homeless men strangled by a copycat killer, there’s no way to see what McNulty has done as heroic. And yet, in the end, the people responsible for at least twenty-two murders are brought to justice because of McNulty’s fictional killer. So does that balance the scales? And if it does, does that justify further flouting of the law as long as the goals are admirable and the person going outside the law is righteous enough? Who should get to make that call?

These questions are further addressed in the primary story at the Sun newspaper where Scott Templeton fabricates much of his reportage and is eventually rewarded for it with a Pulitzer. Here is a man doing more or less the same thing as McNulty, going outside the rules to serve his own interests in the pursuance of his goals. And like McNulty, Templeton leaves a trail of collateral damage that negatively impacts many of those around him.

Obviously most viewers will be firmly opposed to what Templeton is doing and probably even openly rooting for the guy to get caught, punished and kicked off the paper. But many of these same viewers are also rooting for McNulty to get away with what he’s done. We can make all the distinctions we want about the relative virtues of each of these characters’ motivations (i.e. brazen self interest vs. self interest in service of a greater good) but cheering one on while rooting against the other is a contradiction that’s impossible to resolve. If you’re comfortable with allowing a man like McNulty to manufacture a serial killer in order to go after a mass murderer, then you can make no argument against allowing a man like Templeton to circumvent the rules for his own gain. If you condemn the one, you must condemn the other. And thus you also allow the killers of twenty two people to walk free.

In the end both Templeton and McNulty’s farces are allowed to stand because the institutions that these men serve cannot afford the blow to their credibility that revealing the truth would entail. And so The Wire, always obsessed with the dysfunction of institutions, ends with two great institutional victories (drugs on the table and a Pulitzer Prize) earned through a complete disregard for everything the institutions are supposed to stand for.

On top of that the writers have layered a parallel between these two stories and the run-up to the Iraq War when our government falsified intelligence in order to get the country behind a war it might not otherwise have pursued. Bunk Mooreland raises this connection explicitly in the penultimate episode when he says to McNulty, ‘It’s like war. Easy to get in, not so easy to get out.’ In the first scene of the season, Bunk has another line with great resonance on this topic: ‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe.’ In comparison to the lies told to us by our government concerning Iraq, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction that supposedly posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens, McNulty making up a serial killer and Templeton fudging a few stories seems incredibly minor.

By drawing this parallel so explicitly, Simon is cutting off potential criticism of the season’s storylines before they begin. To anyone who might look at McNulty kicking debris around at a crime scene then biting a dead body with a set of false teeth and think it was all too over the top and unbelievable, Simon seeks to remind them that our country is fighting a war where thousands of men and women have lost their lives because the people who were supposed to value the public trust they’d been given didn’t. To anyone who might look at Templeton wantonly fabricating quotes, people and eventually whole stories and think this sort of thing can’t really be going on undetected at our newspapers, Simon reminds them that before 2003 no one would have believed our government would tell outright lies to its people during the State of Union. The bigger the lie, the more they believe indeed.

There is also a none too subtle jab at the press, by now more or less universally acknowledged to have fallen down on the job in the lead-up to the war. Perhaps if they hadn’t been chasing prizes or trying to figure out how to ‘do more with less’ after the latest round of buyouts had decimated the staff, the newspapers might have actually investigated some of these false claims the administration was making. Just like, on the show, they might have realized what the death of someone as important to the citizens of Baltimore as Omar or Proposition Joe really meant and would have given them more than half a paragraph buried deep in the back of the paper.

But there’s no one person to blame because it’s not the individuals who are the problem. They are merely the product of the institutions they serve (as Deputy Commissioner for Operations Daniels often asserts). On just about any other show out there and certainly on every one of the dozen or so procedural law enforcement shows that litter the airwaves, it’s always the individual that’s the root of all evil. Once the good guys catch this person or people and put them in prison, order is restored and good triumphs. Victories, in the form of arrests or convictions, are conclusive and meaningful. Not so on The Wire. There the institution is the root of the problem. The individuals matter little. Putting one person or group of people in prison, firing one person or electing another has no real impact on the underlying institution and therefore no hope of having any real effect on the fundamental cause of the problem. One person, no matter how high minded or determined, has no chance, at least in the world of The Wire, of changing the system. Instead that person either becomes changed by the system or is driven out of it.

That’s not to say that the characters on The Wire aren’t fascinating in and of themselves. Their individual personalities and stories are incredibly compelling. But the final ten minutes of season five, and hence of the series itself, clearly shows that, in the view of Simon and Co. at least, the institutions aren’t changed by the people. It’s the other way around. Michael Lee bursts into Vinsen’s rim shop, shotgun blazing, becoming, in the process, the new Omar. Sydnor bitches to Judge Phelan about the bosses in the hopes that the judge will get some traction for his case, becoming, in effect, the new McNulty. Dukie ties off a vein in a darkened alley and cooks up a shot, becoming the new Bubbles. And so on and so on. The faces change but the system doesn’t.

It’s an incredibly cynical worldview but also one for which David Simon and his writers make a very convincing case. It’s sad to think that the Baltimore introduced in the first episode of season one is fundamentally the same Baltimore in the last episode of season five despite the best efforts of many dedicated men and women hoping to make it otherwise. But that sadness is tempered with enough happy endings for the individual characters that it feels just about right. In a world where it’s impossible to change what fundamentally ails the cities of America, it’s nice to know that at least the people we’ve come to know and love over sixty long hours of television ended up better than when they started. It’s the smallest of victories, of course, but it’s also the only kind we were ever going to get. And as much as we might have wished it otherwise, this has to be good enough.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT – dennis iliadis – 7.5 / 10

More of a thought experiment than an actual film, The Last House of the Left is only intermittently successful as a piece of entertainment. Perhaps that’s because it’s a horror film that requires its audience to think. Or maybe that’s because it's impossible to get sucked into the film without rooting for something horribly violent to happen, which, if the viewer has any sort of self-awareness at all, is something they aren’t willing to do. But for whatever reason the film keeps the audience at a bit more of a remove than most horror films, never scaring or exhilarating as the best of the genre can,

That said, the film is very well directed. Take, for instance, a moment early in the film where Mari is getting dressed. The camera lingers over her body, expressly sexualizing her and making the audience (especially the male members of it) think about what she might look like naked. Then, later in the film, when Mari is assaulted and raped, that desire comes back to haunt the viewer. Director Dennis Iliadis gives the audience what they had seemed to want but in a way that makes them question their own desires.

The same holds true for the violence later in the film when Mari’s parents discover that the people they’ve just taken in for the night are the ones who hurt their daughter and begin exacting their revenge. At first, the audience is completely on their side (to the point of cheering during the screening I attended). But Iliadis and Co. don’t allow any of the murders that John (Tony Goldwyn) and Emma (Monica Potter) commit go down simply or easily. There’s no (relatively) clean gunshots or stabbings in the heart. Francis, their first victim, is beaten and stabbed, has his hand stuck in the garbage disposal and is finally hit over the head with a claw hammer.

And during all this, as the level of violence continues to escalate, John and Emma take a moment to pause and look at each other as if to say, “Yes, we really are going to do this.” And that moment implicates the audience as much as it does the characters. This murder is what the audience paid their money to see but, Iliadis is asking, do they really want it if it's going to be this real and gory?

Still, as smart as all this is (though the sexual aspect of it was swiped from The Devil’s Rejects), it’s really only intermittently entertaining. At around the halfway point the course of the film is pretty much set and it’s just a matter of waiting around to see exactly how the remaining baddies are dispatched. (The audience knows, thanks to an admittedly great but nonetheless spoiler filled trailer, that the parents win this battle so the outcome is never in doubt.) And without the suspense of not knowing who’s going to make it out alive, there’s not really enough to fully engage the viewer.

The film seems to end with a few shots of John and Emma taking Mari to the hospital on their boat. I say ‘seems’ because the film then cuts back to some other time (everyone’s in different clothes, facial wounds sustained during the film are not present, etc.) to find John in the garage with one of the bad guy’s lying paralyzed on his workbench, a microwave positioned around his head. And a moment after that the film really ends on a final gross out gag of the bad guy’s head exploding.

That moment, the part of the trailer probably responsible for the presence of half of the people in the theater (and thus half of the film’s box office take), makes absolutely no sense within the context of the film. It comes out of nowhere, after the film is basically over, and all but invalidates everything that came before it. It’s a moment that was plainly added to juice up the trailer and give viewers (at least the ones who hadn’t picked up on the notion that the rest of the film was criticizing their bloodlust) a last, horrifying kill to cheer at.

I’m almost positive that moment was studio mandated (probably after a test screening where all the cards came back saying, 'Give us more blood!'). And because of that I’m reluctant to hold it against Iliadis. Still, it did leave a bad taste in my mouth after what had been a pretty smart, interesting film. It’s the one instance of violence in the entire film that has no real subtext, nothing on its mind beyond the simple fact of the violence itself. It’s gore for gore’s sake is what I’m saying. And the rest of the film had gone to great lengths to show how that sort of attitude towards violence (even of the on screen variety) is stupid at best and dangerous at worst. The whole thing runs completely counter to what the rest of the film had been trying to say and the fact that it’s probably the one thing most people are going to remember about the film is a shame.

DUPLICITY – tony gilroy – 3.9 / 10

It’s pretty difficult to discuss Duplicity in any depth without getting into at least a few of the many reversals and double crosses that litter the film. So, fair warning, spoilers lie ahead.

Judging from his previous film (Michael Clayton) and this one, it’s clear that there are a couple things that Tony Gilroy really likes to put in his films. For instance, he obviously loves showing the audience a seemingly inconsequential moment and then later revealing that there was a lot more going on than it appeared (see: the GPS on the fritz in the beginning of Michael Clayton that, when revisited later, turns out to be due to a bomb that's been planted in the dashboard). And he loves the fake out (or reversal or double cross or, hell, all three at once) (see: the tape recorder reveal at the end of Michael Clayton). Both of these storytelling devices work relatively well provided they aren’t overused and don’t seem to be employed just to screw with the audience for no reason. The relative success of Michael Clayton is a testament to that.

Duplicity, on the other hand, reveals how annoying the fake out, the double cross and the-inconsequential-detail-that-turns-out-to-be-really-important can be when overused for no apparent reason. Is there some reason why, for instance, the chronology of the film is as jumbled as it is other than just to mess with the audience? If there is, I can’t see it. To me it seems like showing Claire (Julia Roberts, playing at being sexy and not quite getting there) and Ray (Clive Owen, a little overmatched by the tongue twisting dialogue) meeting in New York after supposedly not having seen each other in five years before revealing that they actually rehearsed this meeting a hundred times, is just screwing with the audience. I’ll admit that the initial New York scene is enjoyable but it sounds so rehearsed that when it’s revealed that the scene was actually scripted by the characters ahead of time, it comes as no real surprise. Plus, isn’t the point of rehearsing the thing supposed to be that they sound natural?

The film is really little more than an exercise in withholding information from the audience. Gilroy shows the viewer a scene without context that seems kind of cool. Then he shows another one. Then he reveals what was actually going on in that first scene while simultaneously showing something else that seems to make no sense. And then, just when the whole thing is getting pretty annoying, he reveals what’s really going on. Only to have that be revealed as a fake out a few minutes later. Sound like fun? To me it sounds like a filmmaker getting off on playing god with his audience, doling out just enough information to keep them interested but not so much that they ever know what’s really going on.

But the cumulative effect of all this is to make the audience completely distrust the filmmakers and the film itself. Thus when, at the end of the film, it’s revealed that what we’ve seen is not really what was happening, it comes as little surprise. Since Ray and Claire have spent the whole movie going on and on about how you can’t trust anybody, I can’t see how anyone in the audience isn’t anticipating most of the ‘surprise’ fake outs that end the film.

Actually, you know what? I don’t think many people would actually predict the final fake out wherein it’s revealed that Burkett and Randle, the company that Ray and Claire had been trying to steal from, had been playing them the whole time. I don’t know that anyone would see that coming because in a film as light as this there’s no way the audience expects Ray and Claire to lose. Imagine, for example, that Danny Ocean’s band of merry thieves hadn’t gotten away with the loot in Ocean’s 11. Kinda disappointing, right?

In fact, after the final double cross is revealed at the end of Duplicity I was fully expecting that this was just one more fake out and somehow Ray and Claire saw this coming and had something else up their sleeves. But no, they really do lose in the end. And while I’m not the kind of person who needs the ‘heroes’ of the film to win, in a movie like this, where the stakes are so low and the outcome so seemingly predetermined, this final reversal of expectation, rather than feeling revelatory, seems more like a fuck you to the audience. It's a final slap in the face from a filmmaker who’s been lording his ‘genius’ over the audience for the entire film.

THE WIRE: SEASON FOUR – david simon – 9.7 / 10

As great as The Wire unquestionably is, the tone and aesthetics of the show sometimes work to keep the audience at arm’s length. By foregoing most of the standard tools of the television trade that make wringing tears or goosebumps out of the viewer much easier, The Wire has-- by design-- always had an uphill battle when it comes to drawing emotion out of its audience. The show doesn’t use music to heighten the mood. It doesn’t use close-ups to foster audience identification with the characters. It doesn’t use handheld camerawork to heighten the action sequences. It doesn’t use long-winded monologues or dramatic speeches to pontificate on a particular subject or make a point. Basically, The Wire doesn’t use any of the standard tricks of the trade that make forging an emotional connection with the viewer easy. They have to work for it. And because of that, the show cannot hide any of its flaws. If a performance is flat or an action scene boring, it can’t be hid with quick edits or crash zooms or the perfect musical choice.

But that’s what makes The Wire a singular artistic achievement. (That’s also probably why it takes the average viewer three or four episodes to really understand what the show is trying to do.) Without all the bells and whistles hiding their faults, just about any other show would, if they were to take the same approach as The Wire, immediately reveal their artistic shortcomings. That The Wire is able to maintain such a high level of both quality and entertainment value without having to resort to these tricks is remarkable and leads to perhaps the most enjoyable television viewing experience out there.

But often that enjoyment is somewhat intellectual, more an enjoyment for the head rather than the heart. Although it’s impressive, even admirable that the show doesn’t have to trick its audience into getting emotionally involved, this approach can put the audience at a bit of remove. For instance, many viewers love characters like Stringer Bell, Bodie Broadus and Omar Little more than perhaps any other characters they’ve seen on television. But unlike on other shows, when these characters meet their tragic ends, The Wire doesn’t play up the moment with slow motion or sad music. The moment isn’t drawn out, giving the audience time to process their death and grieve for it. On The Wire death comes as it does in real life, quickly and randomly. So even though the loss of Bodie or Stringer might sting more than the death of almost any other character on any other show, they are mourned in a different way. There are no tears shed as a somber tune plays on the soundtrack, no lingering tracking shots over the dead body, no goosebumps raised as another character recites a heartfelt homily over their grave.

If I had to guess, I would say that David Simon and Co. chose to do it this way because giving the audience a chance to cry also gives them a chance to get it out of their system. They weep for a few minutes and then forget it ever happened. But done without all the tricks, the loss of these characters lingers, much the way a real life tragedy might.

And make no mistake, the fourth season of The Wire is a tragedy. Primarily concerned with the Baltimore city public school system and the people that make it (not) run, season four introduces the audience, for the first time, to major characters who are just barely in their teens. And by the end of the season, as the stories of Randy Wagstaff, Duquan Weems and Michael Lee begin to draw to a heartbreaking close, The Wire doesn’t pull any punches. The audience can see where these characters are going to end up but is powerless to stop it. There's nothing more tragic, especially when kids are involved, than to know that something horrible is coming and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

Widely hailed as the best season of the show, season four is, I believe, so revered because it’s impossible to forget. The stories of these four kids linger, festering in the back of your mind, popping into your thoughts at random. They have the sort of gut punch emotional power not usually seen on television (not as fiction anyway). And yet these stories are told with The Wire’s trademark realism, making them that much more tragic because of their believability. Any show that can so deeply engage both the head and the heart is a truly remarkable achievement.

WATCHMEN – zack snyder – 3.9 / 10

More than twenty years after it was first published and after almost a dozen different writers and directors attempted to make it and failed, Watchmen finally arrives on the big screen. Like any film based on a popular book, there are two types of potential viewers, those who’ve read the book and those who haven’t. The former are going to be measuring the film against the movie that played in their heads as they read the book and the latter are going to measure the film based solely on what’s up on the screen. Since I’ve read the book a few times (most recently a week ago) I can’t really speak to whether or not the latter group will like this movie (though my suspicion is that they won’t because it’s just too damn silly) but I can say that fans of the graphic novel will probably feel that Snyder and Co. followed the letter of the book but completely missed its spirit.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009) – marcus nispel – 3.5 / 10

Marcus Nispel, who is carving out a strange little niche for himself within the horror genre by remaking some of its most well known films (previously he directed the remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), directs the new Friday the 13th with a workmanlike sensibility. There are a couple nice shots but mostly the film is just the standard slasher flick boilerplate. Thus, to discuss the direction or the lighting or the shot selection would be to spend more time on those subjects than the director did himself.

Instead I’d like to ask why the characters in this film are so shallow and annoying. I guess it’s sort of a staple of the genre that the characters are disposable meat bags but it seems to me that the trend lately has been to make them more annoying than ever before. It’s almost as if the audience is supposed to be rooting for the killer to cut these idiots down.

If you’ve followed Jason through all eleven of the previous films in which he’s appeared (and I pity you if you have), it becomes impossible not to have a little empathy for the guy by the end of it. After all, he only really wanted to be left alone. It’s just that these damn kids keep intruding into his neck of the woods and then proceed to openly do drugs and have sex. And since Jason is basically a child in a massive man’s body, he can't really process what he's seeing, flips out and goes on a murderous rampage. After ten or twelve different iterations of this scenario, the viewer can’t help but at least understand where Jason is coming for. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they want the kids in the films to be killed.

However, it seems like that’s the goal of this new remake of Friday the 13th. All of the kids in the film (except for the two that are clearly destined to live through this mess (to be killed in the inevitable sequel?) are such abhorrent jackasses that even if the viewer isn't actively rooting for them to die their deaths have no real impact.

To my way of thinking, this has a couple of corollary effects, neither of which helps the film in any way. Firstly, since all the characters are such idiots, it makes their deaths more or less meaningless. A scary or suspenseful scene is going to work whether or not the audience cares about the potential victim. But in order for that death to have any weight, in order for it to linger once the body is off the screen, the audience needs to have been wishing the character would live. Since everyone in this film (save the aforementioned brother and sister pair who are the only decent people in sight) is a self-centered dickhead who is either a sex-obsessed creep or just plain stupid, the idea that they might die at the end of any particular scene is of little concern to the audience. And since that’s the case, the only compelling reason to watch the film is just to see how the different characters bite it.

The second (unintended?) consequence of having all the ancillary characters behave as douchebags is that the audience may actually end up rooting for these idiots to get offed. Take, for instance, the jerkwad who cheated on his girlfriend, bitched out his friends multiple times for things he hadn’t told them not to do in the first place, managed to lose his handgun and then talked to it in the hopes that it would suddenly appear to him. For me personally, I was itching to see this guy get hacked to pieces with Jason’s machete. But how is having the viewer wanting to see a character get murdered an effective way to tell a horror story?

If the viewer is indifferent towards the characters, let alone actively rooting against them, it takes a lot of the tension out of the supposedly scary scenes. Why should the audience pay close attention, scanning the frame for the smallest sign of the killer’s presence if they aren’t nervous about whether the character on screen will make it out alive? Horror films, unlike thrillers or mainstream action films, do not have to have their lead characters make it through the film alive. When watching something like Die Hard, for instance, no one in their right mind thinks Bruce Willis is in any real danger (a notion tweaked brilliantly in Live Free or Die Hard which basically saw McClane become an unstoppable killing machine). But in a horror film, you never know. Thus the danger the characters are in from the killer is more real than in most other films. And because of that the suspense can be that much greater, the tension ratcheted up that much higher. But if the audience actually wants the characters to die, well, then the filmmakers have lost one of the most valuable things they had working for them. And so they have to resort to every more obnoxious loud screeches on the soundtrack to make people jump in their seats. There’s a reason the masters of the genre like Hitchcock and Carpenter never had to resort to such nonsense.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if this concept of making the characters so disposable, worthless and downright horrible is limited to the new Friday the 13th. Nor is it even limited to the films of Marcus Nispel. From Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (where all the characters are constantly at each other’s throats despite being the last survivors of the human race) to the Saw films (where not only is everyone a despicable human being, that’s sort of the point of the whole enterprise) it seems that good people aren’t in horror movies much these days. And that baffles me because by doing that the filmmakers are making their jobs that much harder. It’s not easy to elicit a genuine emotional response from an audience and to cripple your film in this way strikes me as remarkably stupid, worthy of something one of the idiot characters that populate these films would do.

THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2008

my list of the ten best films of the year along with a few honorable and dishonorable mentions.

10. PINEAPPLE EXPRESS – david gordon green
There was really no reason to think that David Gordon Green had any business directing a comedy. I guess there might have been a laugh or two in his previous films (George Washington, All the Real Girls and Snow Angels) but he seemed much more interested in making movies that dealt with The Big Questions of Life than in poking fun at 80's action flicks. But I guess anyone that loves movies enough to want to devote their life to making them (ahem) probably loved them from an early age. And if that early age was the 1980's then of course Green would have loved (and seen a hundred times) such nonsense as Red Heat, Cobra and Road House. And seeing how silly those movies look now, the only way to really pay tribute to them is make fun of them.

09. IRON MAN – jon favreau
For my money Favreau gets very little credit for this film being as entertaining as it is. I think the joys of this film owe much more to the wonderful performance by Robert Downey Jr. The best bits in the film aren't the big action sequences (the ridiculous battle sequence that closes the film, for instance, where the big explosion that destroys Iron Monger leaves Iron Man and Pepper totally unharmed) but the small character ones like Downey's Tony Stark making all the reporters sit on the floor before the press conference upon his return from Afghanistan or the way he delivers a line like, "Yeah, I can fly." Without him the movie is just a decent superhero film. With him it's a worldwide phenomenon.

08. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN – tomas alfredson
Certainly among the most original takes on vampires in a long while (and that's saying something when a handful of vampire films are released every year), the genius of Tomas Alfredson's decision to make the vampire a child is that it allows him to focus solely on what is lost when a human being is turned into a vampire. Too often vampire books and movies (Twilight, True Blood) make being a vampire seem like the coolest thing in the world. But the most compelling aspect of the vampire myth, to me anyway, has always been the sense of loss a vampire must feel when they see people all around them doing things that they can no longer do themselves. This film revels in those moments and is all the better for it. Plus, it's the only vampire film I know of that actually shows-- in perhaps the year's most haunting scene-- what happens when a vampire enters a home to which they have not been invited.

07. HORTON HEARS A WHO! – jimmy hayward
I had started to believe that only Pixar could make a "children's movie" that wasn't horribly insulting to adults and / or had a message that wasn't downright offensive (e.g. Shrek's message that ugly people should stick together). Horton Hears a Who! has happily proved me wrong. It's just an all around fun movie that preaches understanding and tolerance for other cultures whether you actually interact with them or not. And on top of that, it's also the first film to come anywhere close to visualizing the joy and irreverence Dr. Seuss so perfectly captured in his books.

06. QUARANTINE – john erick dowdle
Every year sees the release of a half dozen major studio horror films and probably a hundred others that are independently produced. And even though I'm a fan of the genre, I count my blessings if I can find even one that isn't completely derivative of classics like Halloween or so insipid that the only reason the events in the film even happen is that the characters are so stupid that they constantly make the wrong decisions. What a surprise then that Quarantine was as fascinating as it was (especially given the horribly misleading trailer). It's the sort of film (like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield) that purports to be one person with a camera filming something incredible. But unlike those (very bad) films, Quarantine's man with the camera is actually a professional cameraman. Thus his continuing to carry around the camera and record everything that happens makes total sense. That small change alone is enough to make the film worth a viewing (for fans of the genre anyway). But that it's also suspenseful, well acted and well executed makes it one of the year's best.

05. THE WRESTLER – darren aronofsy
Enough ink has been spilled about Mickey Rourke's outstanding performance that I'll only add that he immerses himself in the role with such verisimilitude that I've started to believe that he's probably like that in real life. I wish that Aronofsky had allowed a tiny bit of hope into the last fifteen minutes of the film (having Marisa Tomei's Pam show up at the worst possible moment right at the end strikes me as particularly manipulative because, really, how else could that moment have played out?) but that doesn't negate the power of the first half of the film. Aronofsky and Rourke depict this aging former superstar with such poetic sadness that your heart can't help but break for him.

04. WALL-E – andrew stanton
Much like The Wrestler, Wall-E's pleasures are all in the first half of the film. Once the humans show up the film becomes predictable, shallow and not terribly interesting. But oh, those first forty-five nearly wordless minutes! Wall-E wandering the abandoned earth then discovering and falling in love with EVE are perhaps the saddest moments in any mainstream film this year. That they are also simultaneously some of the most adorable is a testament to just how amazing the creative team at Pixar is.

03. THE DARK KNIGHT – christopher nolan
The true greatness of The Dark Knight lies in the fact that it really didn't need to be very good at all. It was going to be a monster hit if it was merely decent. Nolan and Co. did not need to shoehorn a treatise on life in our depersonalized, take-no-responsibility culture into a big summer popcorn film. In fact, if they were really being smart about it, they wouldn't have done anything of the sort. And yet they did. And in the process they validated legions of fanboys' slavish devotion to the caped crusader. Finally there is a comic book film for which no excuses need to be made. No qualifications like, "It's good for a comic book movie" need to be applied. The Dark Knight is a towering work of art whose themes and subtext run much deeper and richer than most prestige pieces trotted out by the studios at the end of the year in hopes of garnering awards. The Dark Knight is one giant step forward in comic books' fight to be taken seriously as an art form. And it once and for all has made certain that no one any longer thinks of BIFF! POW! and "Holy shark attack, Batman!" when they think about the dark knight.

02. TELL NO ONE – guillaume canet
The ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances has been a staple of thrillers (literary and filmic) for decades if not longer. Hitchcock built an entire career on them. And for one reason or another this is a type of film that is really only popular in America. Perhaps it has something to do with how we like to see ourselves (i.e. anyone can do anything as long as they have the drive and put in the effort). But because this kind of film is so commonplace in America, there usually isn't much reason to see them. You know how the story's going to turn out before the first reel has finished unspooling. But put that genre in the hands of a Frenchman and something wonderful happens. Guillaume Canet has obviously read and watched dozens of thrillers. He internalized them and then, with this film, re-fashioned them for the twenty-first century. There's no car chases through a major city. No hanging off of a national monument. No shootouts in a crowded market. All the action in the film is small, at human scale. And it is all the more affecting and suspenseful for it. It's a reinvention and reinvigoration of the genre. And that's only half the fun. It's also a mystery. And a love story. And, just as the protagonist everyman doesn't have any idea what's around the next corner, the audience is similarly blind. There's no roadmap for this film and in a genre as over used as this one, that's really saying something.

01. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – david fincher
More than simply an investigation of what would happen if youth weren't wasted on the young (though it's certainly that as well), David Fincher's technical marvel of a film attempts to deconstruct what we fear about old age and death and what we celebrate about youth and life. We celebrate the promise of youth while simultaneously lamenting that it can't be properly appreciated until it has been squandered. And we fear death because we have no idea what it holds in store for us until it is too late to do anything about it.

It would seem that a person aging backwards would have been given the perfect gift: being at his wisest just when his body is in its prime. But to Fincher's way of thinking the wisdom of old age is only achieved through the long journey our minds and bodies take together. Without the perspective forced upon us by our weakening and ever-changing physiology we might never gain any wisdom at all.

But perhaps what's most impressive about the film is that outside of all that Big Question stuff Benjamin Button is one hell of an entertaining movie. I could get lost in the craft of the thing for hours. It's so meticulously constructed, so perfectly shot and edited while also maintaining a sense of playfulness and life. Too often movies that are so rigorously created have an artificial museum-like quality. They're often interesting and thought provoking but hardly ever intoxicating and invigorating. That Fincher managed to maintain an exuberant sense of humanity throughout the film is a testament to what these amazing new CG film techniques can do when a truly gifted filmmaker is at the helm.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that twenty years from now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is going to be a landmark film. It's really the first film to so completely incorporate such a large number of computer generated images without any characters having superpowers, casting spells or blowing up buildings. A couple decades from now we'll routinely see actors looking ten years younger on screen than they do in real life. Every film will have at least a few CG sets and backgrounds. And we'll look back at this film as the one where the artistic use of CGI as just another tool in the filmmaker's arsenal (like lighting or costuming) finally came of age.



HONORABLE MENTION:

MILK – gus van sant
It's a well-made film but aside from the terrific lead performance there's nothing about it that makes it different or better than any number of other biopics that come out year after year (from Ray to Walk the Line to A Beautiful Mind).

HANCOCK – peter berg
Admittedly the last third of the film is an unmitigated disaster. But there's enough interesting commentary about race relations in America in the first half of the film to warrant a mention. Don't believe it? Watch the press conference where Hancock agrees to go to jail and instead of Will Smith picture Terrell Owens. And in place of Jason Bateman picture Owens's agent Drew Rosenhaus. Then carry that analogy out over the first half of the film. Suddenly a lot more interesting, isn't it?

THE FALL – tarsem singh
Borrowing liberally from the much superior Pan's Labyrinth, The Fall nonetheless has some truly indelible imagery. It's a lot of sound and fury signifying not very much but, man, is it pretty.



DISHONORABLE MENTION:
(these aren't necessarily the worst films of the year, just the most egregious offenders)

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED – jonathan demme
Like watching the unedited wedding video footage of some boring pretentious couple you've never met.

TWILIGHT – catherine hardwicke
Basically an apologia for domestic violence, Twilight has probably the most dangerous message for young girls I've ever come across. Just the sight of Bella makes Edward want to attack her. But she's "in love" with him so she completely subsumes her personality to his every desire and whim, taking great care to make sure that she never gets him riled up. That's how a woman living in an abusive relationship behaves. And the idea that legions of young girls believe that's what love looks like is very troubling indeed.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO – kevin smith – 0.9 / 10

Seth Rogen is a very polarizing ‘star’ in today’s Hollywood. Some see him as a much needed shift away from the bland handsomeness of the Matthew McConagheys and Dylan McDermotts who normally populate romantic comedies; a shift to the sort of everyman that dominated the films of the 1970s when people like Donald Sutherland and Gene Hackman ruled the multiplex. Others think that Rogen, with his ugly mug and beer belly and one trick acting style, always plays the same character to increasingly diminishing returns and should spare us all having to see his face forty feet tall on a theater screen.

Personally I’d always been more in the former camp than the latter. From Freaks and Geeks to Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, I’d found him likeable enough and even though I had to admit that he always played the same character, I didn’t mind spending a few hours with him every once in a while. Maybe it’s overexposure or maybe it’s that Zack and Miri is just terribly written, but whatever the reason, Kevin Smith’s latest has given me a strong push into the latter, Rogen-hating camp. But for right now, I’m going to give Rogen the benefit of the doubt and place the blame for the utter failure of Zack and Miri at the feet of Kevin Smith.

And, boy, does he deserve blame for this piece of dogshit. I’ve heard that Harvey Weinstein (whose eponymous company produced and distributed the film) had hopes of seeing this film clear $80 million. I guess he was drinking the Apatow Kool-Aid because this film would be lucky to gross $25 million.

As it is, this film is a pathetic and transparent attempt by Smith to cash in on the Apatow craze. Not that I’m a particularly large fan of Apatow’s films, with the exception, maybe, of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but I don’t think the success of his films owes simply to the fact that they are romantic comedies in gross out disguise. I prefer not to delve too deeply into the Apatow oeuvre and attempt to dissect just what has made them so popular. But if I was going to try and piggyback on his success, I sure as hell would study those films as closely as Shakespearean scholars study the sonnets.

But Smith hasn’t given the Apatow canon even a cursory examination. It’s as if he just figured that his sensibility and Apatow’s were similar enough that he could just borrow a couple of Apatow’s regular players, drop them into his standard plot and assume that audiences would flock. But something is off about Zack and Miri. Despite being occasionally amusing (and often disgusting) and completely conservative in its message (just like Apatow's films), the film just isn’t very much fun. Quite the opposite in fact. And I’m not about to spend any more brainpower and time trying to figure out why it’s such a failure.

THE WIRE: SEASON THREE - david simon - 9.9 / 10

Over the course of its first two seasons The Wire became increasingly concerned with the politics of its fictional but very realistic Baltimore. In season one the politics in question were those of the police department and its draconian adherence to chain of command at the cost of operational efficiency. The second season, while continuing to deal with the politics of the CID division of the BPD, moved to the ports and focused on the criminal lengths to which people in this city felt it necessary to go in order to have their voices heard. Continuing this trend, the third season finds much of its intrigue in the offices of the mayor, the commissioner and various city and state officials.

The creators of The Wire have, with each new season, expanded the size and scope of their fictional Baltimore. And in each new sphere of interest on which they turn their lens, they find people who behave very much like those they've shown in earlier seasons. In season two, for example, they showed how similar the poor and despondent white people of the docks were to the poor and despondent black people of the projects (whom they had already shown in season one to be operating on the same basic, flawed principles as the police who hunt them). Now, in season three, we find the city council, mayoral staff and police commissioner operating in the same underhanded way as all those we've seen in earlier seasons. Further, and this is where the scope of The Wire really begins to pay dividends, the people in each of these supposedly separate and insulated areas turn out to be much more tightly linked than we might suspect. Money, it seems, is the great uniter. And, as Lester Freamon says, when you start following the money, you never know who'll get caught up in the net.

In the first season, the Deputy for Operations (commissioner in the third season) Ervin Burrell, when told that Lt. Daniels's unit was looking into the Barksdales' money, advised strongly against it, going so far as to order the return of $20,000 discovered in the possession of a state senator's driver. Daniels and his unit are shut down early enough in their investigation that they never get to see where that money would have taken them. But in its third season, The Wire shows us the interlocking web of political payouts and backdoor deals that makes the city of Baltimore go 'round. And, as a result, we also see why it's all but impossible for any individual (or even an individual unit like Daniels's MCU) to do anything about it. The corruption is systemic, flowing back and forth between all levels of the city. When corruption is the status quo, reform is all but impossible.

Season three of The Wire directly addresses the futility of reform from its opening scene wherein Mayor Royce detonates the project towers (the location of the worst drug dealing in the city) and announces that sweeping changes will be made in the area. The rest of the season charts the occasionally horrific unintended consequences of this sweeping reform. Before the high-rises came down, the Barksdale crew and Prop Joe's crew were splitting the drug trade in the six towers. Everyone in town knew who owned the towers and no one messed with them. After the towers came down, it was open season on Baltimore's drug corners. Everyone had to fight for new real estate, re-establish themselves in a new part of town. As a result, crews began to war and bodies began to fall. The mayor had promised sweeping changes that would make everyone safer. What he got instead was more murders and an increased visibility for the drug trade.

The demolition of the housing project towers deliberately echoes the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. That event, as horrific and traumatic as it was, was also the perfect opportunity to call for radical change and sweeping reform. But serious reform is an almost impossible task to manage and, perhaps more relevantly, one that is also politically dangerous. Better to make stirring speeches about reform and then go about living life as we always had. As a result almost nothing about the way most Americans live their lives was changed because of 9/11. So too in The Wire's Baltimore. Change, despite Mayor Royce's declarations to the contrary, is just a watchword.

Although nothing much changed for most Americans after 9/11, the leaders of this country used that event to start a couple of wars. One of them was probably justified and maybe even overdue. The other had a tenuous connection at best and can probably be attributed mostly to pride and a false belief in the power and indomitable strength of our more perfect union. Similarly, in the streets of Baltimore, where Barksdale's crew is now forced to compete with all the 'off brand niggas', a war is brewing. And like George W. Bush, who used turbulent times as an excuse for a vainglorious military enterprise, Avon Barksdale chooses to fight for territory rather than take the more prudent course of action suggested by some in his organization (namely Stringer Bell). Rather than appear weak, Barksdale chooses a preemptive strike that is initially successful but soon reveals an opposition much more deeply entrenched than ever imagined (sound familiar?). And it becomes the downfall of the Barksdales' reign much as Bush's Iraq fiasco is proving to be the downfall of his Presidency.

The entire third season of The Wire is, in essence, an extended metaphor for America's misadventures in the Middle East. Take, for instance, the way the Barksdale crew attempts to use the death of Stringer Bell at the hands of Omar and Brother Mouzone to their advantage by blaming the hit on Marlo's crew. Avon and his war time consiglieri Slim Charles know Marlo had nothing to do with Stringer's death in the same way that Bush and Cheney knew that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. But because it's an idea they could use to further their goals, both Avon and Bush allow their supporters to believe the lie. As Slim Charles says, 'We fight on the lie.'

The irony and maybe the genius of this metaphor is that for the characters in The Wire, events on the world stage are more or less irrelevant. In episode ten, when asked by his political consultant paramour whom he voted for in the 2004 Presidential election, Detective Jimmy McNulty says he didn't see much point in choosing between them. On the streets he polices, he doesn't see much interest one way or the other from the federal government and he sees no indication that this might be changing any time soon. To him, and indeed to most of the characters on this show, which well-bred white man becomes the leader of the nation is more or less irrelevant. Of course, had the characters of The Wire been paying attention to the drama and intrigue surrounding the White House the last five years, they would have seen an exact reflection of the same drama that has engulfed their lives.

Each season of The Wire extends the show's reach into different areas of Baltimore. And by the end of each new season, the audience is shown that not only are the people who inhabit each of these areas more or less the same regardless of their financial or political worth, but they are also much more closely connected than even they realize. Their problems are human problems and they don't change just because you wear a badge or hold elected office. The hubris that leads a President to choose preemptive war over sanctions is the same pride that leads the head of a drug dealing crew to choose to fight for corners rather than make the best of what he has. And because of the growing body count and seeming intractability of the war he created needlessly, George W. Bush finds himself politically isolated and exposed. And thus, for Barksdale, the bodies that fall in his war bring the unwelcome attentions of the police that eventually leads to his downfall at their hands. The story's the same no matter whom it's about or what color their skin is. I suppose it's a variation on that old standby there's more that unites us then separates us but damned if it isn't the most genius iteration of that theme that I've ever seen.

GET SMART – peter segal – 7.0 / 10

Despite a few scenes of stupid humor better suited to Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey, Get Smart is, for the most part, pretty clever. Take for instance how they get around the problem of Anne Hathaway and Steve Carrell’s obvious and distracting difference in age. Hathaway’s Agent 99 explains that she had to have massive plastic surgery to reconstruct her face when her cover was blown and before she went under the knife she asked the surgeons to take a few years off as well. Her ‘real’ age in the film is closer to the mid-forties like Carrell. And then, instead of just leaving it at that, the film continues to talk about how 99 should hurry up and have kids because her uterus is drying out. So even if this was simply a dodge to explain lopsided casting, the film had the good sense to embrace it and make jokes about it throughout the film.

Additionally, the overall theme of the film is stated by Carrell’s Max early in the film when, while delivering an intelligence briefing, he tells the gathered agents to always remember that the people they are trying to stop might be terrorists but they are also people too. And later in the film, when Max and 99 encounter a seemingly unstoppable mountain of a man, it is Max’s knowledge of the man’s problems with his wife that leads to a détente and Max and 99’s eventual escape. In fact, the only thing that really decides the fate of Siegfried, the man baddie in the film, is that the huge terrorist decides he likes Max better than Siegfried.

While that’s not the deepest or most insightful message ever, it is certainly one worth reiterating and certainly not one I expected to find in what has mostly been billed as a stupid comedy along the lines of You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.

WANTED – timur bekmambetov – 4.5 / 10

Anyone walking into a theater, paying their ten bucks and sitting down to watch Wanted knows that there’s not going to be anything subtle or terribly deep going on there. But I still don’t think that theoretical filmgoer is going to be very satisfied.

Yeah, the action is suitably over the top and entertaining in an I-can’t-believe-what-they-just-did sort of way but the film is hardly the nonstop action thrill ride that the trailers were promising. It takes a long time for the action to get going and once it does there are often long lulls in which nothing much of interest happens.

A lot of the failings of Wanted can be traced to the formulaic nature of the film and the complete predictability of its central mystery. Had they switched the actors playing the man who was supposed to be Wes’s (James McAvoy’s) dad and the man who really is his father, the reveal of this switcheroo might not have been so predictable. But, even if the actors had been switched, there’s just no getting around the film’s plot by arithmetic. Take the slow-mo action ballet of The Matrix, add an unbearably cool mentor with a secret (Angelina Jolie, interestingly playing the Brad Pitt part) teaching a office drone how to be cool a la Fight Club, tack on the ending of The Empire Strikes Back and viola, you get Wanted.

But the biggest failure of the film is that it never comes to grips with its own convoluted logic. A thousand years ago a secret society of weavers got together and decided to become assassins. Though the film never comes out and says it, these weavers must have figured out some way of making a mystical loom that weaves the names of targets in binary code. And all these generations later, the loom is still spitting out the names of people that the descendants of this secret society are supposed to murder. Oh, and somewhere along the way these people figured out how to curve bullets and developed super speed and agility and the ability to see in slow motion.

Actually, I really don’t have much of problem with that backstory. What I have a problem with is that it’s implemented in such a shoddy, haphazard way. It’s never explained why, if Wes had his powers all along, he never used them before. Yeah, he says that he misunderstood them to be panic attacks, but when he’s put into a stressful situation by Sloan (Morgan Freeman) and Fox (Angelina Jolie) he is immediately able to use his powers. It’s ridiculous to think that he never found himself in such a situation before and, if he had, he would have discovered these powers long ago. Plus, you would think a group of people like this would have been keeping a close eye on Wes his whole life lest he inadvertently reveal that super-powered people exist.

And then there’s the ending. Bekmambetov and his writers went out of their way to justify why Fox would kill herself and the rest of the secret society. She so completely believes in the powers of the mystical loom (because of what happened in her childhood) that when her name comes up she has no choice but to follow its directive. That said, Sloan’s name also came up on the loom. As did the names of every other assassin in the secret society. So, unless Fox’s name came up first (which seems unlikely since the only reason everyone’s name would have come up is because Sloan had them disregarding the targets given by the loom), the only reason she was ‘bad’ and needed killing was because of something Sloan did. So she killed herself totally out of blind loyalty to a mystical machine she doesn’t quite comprehend. And, despite the writers' contortions to make that work, I just can’t believe she would do that. I can’t believe someone would kill themselves that easily. Maybe kill the other assassins, but themselves? I don’t think so.

So, yeah, the action sequences are pretty nifty. But everything else in Wanted is either stupid or nonsensical. And since the action isn’t groundbreaking and only accounts for about a quarter of the film, there really isn’t much reason to see Wanted, except maybe to be able to trainspot the even lamer future action sequences that will rip off the two or three original parts of Wanted.

WALL-E – andrew stanton – 7.9 / 10

Possibly the cutest thing ever put on film, Wall-E, the character and the film itself, is delightful and enchanting. At least for the first half of the film anyway, when Wall-E is delighting in the detritus of a no longer earthbound humanity, hanging with his cockroach pal and flirting with the hot tempered EVE. Even after the film moves into outer space, it maintains a lot of its charm.

What ultimately sinks the second half of the film and stops it from rising to the heights of previous Pixar masterpieces like The Incredibles and Ratatouille is its complete predictability. From the moment the robots aboard the Axiom (the ship the humans have called home for the last seven hundred years) stop the captain from returning his human cargo to Earth, there’s no doubt where the story is going to take us, even down to what roles Wall-E and EVE are going to play in the drama. And, if you really thought about it, you could even predict the final grace note with the cockroach.

None of that is to say that the film doesn’t work. It works fine. It just turns into a fairly standard kid flick in its last act rather than transcending that genre ghetto and becoming something truly amazing. I think that's why a film like Ratatouille still astounds. Even ten minutes from the end of that film, I had no idea how it was going to turn out beyond a vague sense that everything would be okay. It’s final twists and turns were so unexpected and so satisfying that the film suddenly became something much more than its parts.

Wall-E, on the other hand, starts out that way (i.e. unpredictable and completely engrossing) but finishes in pretty predictable fashion. Take, for instance, the final scenes between EVE and a newly rebuilt Wall-E who no longer remembers who he is. Can there possibly be anyone in the theater older than three who doesn’t know how that’s going to turn out? And while Stanton and his team handle it well enough, there’s just no way I can be very invested in watching it unfold.

THE STRANGERS – bryan bertino – 5.5 / 10

The word on the street about this film is that it’s really well directed but in the end shakes out to be a lot of pretty pictures signifying nothing. I’m not so sure that I agree with the well-directed assessment but I certainly agree that it’s about absolutely nothing. The first tip off that there’s not much in this movie’s head is the random statistics that open the film (something about there being a couple million violent crimes in the United States each year) in a transparent attempt to lend some kind of unearned gravity to the proceedings that are about to follow.

After that the film does exactly what you’d expect given the trailers and advertising. Two people are tormented by a masked group of teenagers for the entire film. There’s very little attempt at character development and no plot other than, “let’s get out of here!” And that strategy betrays a fatal misunderstanding of what people are looking for in a horror film.

Basically there are two types of people that want to see a horror film. The first is in it for cheap thrills, a little naked flesh and lots of blood. The second is looking for some kind of allegorical meaning that underpins the events of the film. Obviously there’s a little bleed over between the groups but those are pretty much the only reasons to see the film.

That being the case, what is the thought process behind making a movie like The Strangers? There’s no nudity and very little gore until the very end. Since there are only two main characters and three bad guys, there really can’t be any deaths until the last act of the film. And, most troubling for someone like me, there’s nothing going on here besides a couple people getting stalked for no reason. When Liv Tyler’s character asks why the bad guys are doing this, one of them responds simply, “Because you were home.”

That line also makes it clear that The Strangers owes an unacknowledged debt to the French film Them whose antagonists, when questioned, also say they are doing it because the couple was home. But even though The Strangers is loosely based on Them, Bertino has discarded everything that was interesting about the French original (perhaps because this film is not actually a remake of that one but just a rip off of it). Gone is the creepy and interesting prologue. Gone is the team of teenagers tormenting the couple, replaced instead by three people so that none of them will die. And gone is the terrifically horrifying ending of the French original that played up the fact that the bad guys were kids and raised all sorts of sticky questions in the process.

Also, just as an aside, Bertino gets points off for stealing from another French film called Inside that has a scene where a would-be hero is killed by the protagonist in a tragic case of mistaken identity. But just as he screwed up the "borrowed" elements of Them, Bertino also screwed up the scene he swiped from Inside. It’s the least believable moment of the film as well as simultaneously being the most predictable. How that combination could lead other critics, who should also have seen Inside and Them, to label this guy as some kind of virtuoso director is beyond me.