WATERWORLD – kevin reynolds – 4.1 / 10

Not nearly as bad as its reputation had led me to believe, Waterworld turns out to be little more than Mad Max on water. From the scrounged gasoline to the cobbled together clothes made of leather and burlap to the brown and black color scheme, it’s a wonder that George Miller didn’t sue someone.

That said, Waterworld isn’t nearly as good as the only marginally successful Mad Max mostly because of there are far too many holes in the logic of the film. Firstly, the Deacon (Dennis Hopper in full Apocalypse Now crazy mode) and his “smokers” use the Exxon Valdez oil tanker as their base and the place from which they get the gas for their jet-skis, cars and airplanes. Leaving aside the fact that the Exxon Valdez is no longer called the Valdez and is still in use, the idea that these guys could refine the crude oil on the tanker into the high octane gas they would need for their vehicles is ridiculous. So is the idea that they could learn to fly an airplane and that they could fix anything that goes wrong with it. (And that’s not even mentioning the fact that, somewhere along the line, that plane would have been forced to make an emergency landing and would thus be lost to the sea.) But more importantly, if they had all this equipment and knowledge, why did they lose all history of what happened to the world? They can fly planes but don’t remember what happened to the world?

And then there’s the fact that Costner’s Mariner has a mutation that allows him to breathe underwater. But no one else has a similar mutation or any mutation of any kind. That’s a ridiculous misunderstanding of how evolution works and is a distraction throughout the film (the idea that two gills behind his ears would allow him to breath underwater for any length of time is also suitably laughable).

There’s also a couple other admittedly minor issues that nonetheless distracted me. One is that paper is a highly valued commodity. Why? What use is paper to people that are adrift on the sea? Another is that there are no people on Dryland when the characters in the film finally get there. Really? No one has found this place ever? And at the end of the film, the Deacon has his troops start rowing the Exxon Valdez. There is no way that even ten thousand people rowing in unison could hope to move something as massive as that. Oh, and if the polar ices caps completely melted, sea level would rise a couple hundred feet not the four or five miles required to submerge the entire world.

On the other hand, the film does have a couple moments of intelligence (possibly owing to Joss Whedon’s seven weeks working on the script (seven weeks he described as “hell”)). The most interesting among them being the moment when Mariner and his love interest discuss whether Dryland really exists. The love interest thinks that it does because humans are uneasy at sea. We have hands and feet instead of fins and flippers. That’s an unexpectedly intelligent way to look at things.

21 – robert luketic – 3.9 / 10

Let’s first chronicle the things that 21 gets wrong. It’s predictable, formulaic, overlong and boring. The filmmakers changed the lead Asian character from the book (Bringing Down the House) into a cute white kid with perfectly disheveled hair. The tricks the kids in the film pull on the casinos and the methods they use to beat the system don’t appear as if they would fool a amateur let alone the highly trained security personnel that run Las Vegas casinos. And even though counting cards is not technically illegal and therefore not punishable in any real way (when the kids in the book get caught they even get to keep the money), the movie invents a leg-breaker character who beats on multiple members of the team.

Taken together all of those things add up to one disappointing movie. But what could the filmmakers really have done to make this a satisfying film? If they had made these characters look like their real life counterparts (i.e. not particularly attractive) and rendered what happens to them in convincing detail (rather than oversimplifying everything to the point that a five-year-old could follow it) they would have alienated the very audience they were trying to reach. And a film like this, were it to be made better, would not have found another audience among more discerning moviegoers. Basically, if this film were better, it’s likely that no one would go see it.

That’s an interesting paradox. I can’t think of any other instance in which a film has a worse chance of success if it were made better. Critics and general audiences tend to think that the same can be said about horror films but the reputation and lasting impact of films like Halloween and Psycho disprove that notion. Perhaps this paradox is somewhat true of stupid comedies but there the goal is to be funny and that’s the only relevant criteria. No one making a stupid comedy is trying to make a bad movie, they’re just not trying to make a smart one. The filmmakers behind 21, on the other hand, set out to make a decidedly middlebrow film. That they achieved that goal marks the film as a success. It just so damn odd that you can set out to make a bad film and be rewarded for it.

THE WIRE: SEASON TWO – david simon 8.6 / 10

The central theme of The Wire, the only one that remains consistent across all five seasons, is that of the dysfunction of institutions. No matter how big or small, legal or illegal, all institutions on The Wire are screwed up. The reasons for this are many and varied and are explored in great detail from many different angles. But in the end it almost always comes down to the simple fact that institutions are comprised of (often self-interested) individuals.

These people put themselves and their goals ahead of those of the institutions they ostensibly serve. Some do this because they think they know what’s best (e.g. Detective Jimmy McNulty who constantly goes outside the chain of command because it will serve his case, no matter the effect on the rest of the department). Some do it because they want to get theirs and they don’t care who that screws in the process (e.g. most everyone on The Wire but principally Bill Rawls who couldn’t care less what real world consequences come of his actions as long as his ass is covered). Some do it because they’re just plain incompetent or disinterested, having chosen to serve this particular institution out of necessity, circumstance or just plain boredom (e.g. any number of both dealers and police but particularly D’Angelo Barksdale and Roland Pryzbylewski). But whatever their motivations, the fact that these individuals do not have the interests of the institution foremost in their minds all but guarantees that the institution will be dysfunctional to one degree or another.

Much like the character flaws that make individuals more likeable, it is often these dysfunctions that make an institution appealing. There are countless scenes, for instance, where the dealers and their hangers on talk about ‘the game’ and its various rules. But the rules are constantly in flux because it’s a system defined by individuals and therefore always subject to change. Any system or institution is evolving from one day to the next, never staying the same. It exists in a dialectical relationship between the ideals of the institution, what it was meant to do when it was begun, and the needs and desires of the individuals that populate it.

Because the needs of the people and the goals of the institutions never completely align, it is impossible for anyone in the world of The Wire (and, from the show’s creators’ viewpoint, anyone in the real world as well) to achieve a complete victory. To get what he or she wants, that person will have to subvert to some degree the goals of the institution that they serve. And for the institution to achieve its goals, the desires of most of its members would have to be disregarded. As such, almost every ‘victory’ on The Wire is a hollow one and comes at a cost. This is even spelled out various times throughout the series. Freamon, for instance, tells McNulty near the end of season three that 'the job won’t fill [him] up, won’t make [him] whole' because the goals of the job and the goals of McNulty will never line up perfectly enough to leave them both fulfilled.

This, of course, can be frustrating for the audience. Television viewers have become accustomed to clean victories, especially on police shows. I watched nearly every one of NYPD Blue’s twelve seasons and despite being set in a city where the clearance rate for homicides hovers around fifty percent, I can only remember a handful of episodes in which the detectives didn’t get their man. Thus when, at the end of season two of The Wire, none of the various groups achieve what they had been seeking, it’s very easy for the viewer to be disappointed.

I mean, maybe it would be possible to live with the stevedores’ union being busted up and their dreams of a return to a living wage on the docks being dashed. Maybe it would be possible to live with the death of D’Angelo Barksdale and the disarray into which the Barksdale crew falls. Maybe it would even be possible to live with the detail letting The Greek slip through their fingers because he had made friends with Homeland Security. But all of those things together is hard to stomach. Especially considering the ways in which the various institutions snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, often through little more than incredibly bad luck and poor timing.

But if you look a little closer (which might as well be The Wire’s unwritten tagline), it becomes apparent that those who achieve success in the second season are those whose individual goals and desires line up almost exactly with those of the institution they serve.

The Greeks, for instance, have no lives outside of what they do for money. The two highest up in the organization, Spiros and The Greek, seem to spend every waking moment either at that rundown diner or at some sort of meeting. They have no personal lives to speak of, even laughing at the thought of having significant others. In short, their goals and the goals of the institution they run are almost identical. The only place that they do not line up exactly is in Spiros’s fondness for Nick Sobotka. And even this tiny display of human feeling very nearly results in the whole organization’s ruin.

An individual and an organization only ever have completely mutual goals when the individual gives up everything that makes his life worth living, everything that makes him human. Since there are very few individuals willing to give up that much of their lives in service to an organization (and certainly not enough to populate an organization of a decent size), we are left with a world full of corrupt and dysfunctional institutions. For David Simon and Co. it can be no other way. And denying it by having the protagonists of the show achieve victory would, to them, be a lie. And it certainly wouldn’t be the kind of show they want to make.

That said, none of this, no matter how clever, intricate or intellectually rewarding, changes the fact that having the season resolve itself in a not entirely satisfying manner leaves the viewer wanting. It may make the point better to have it all end this way; but the visceral charge of seeing Avon Barksdale’s crew in prison jumpsuits at the end of season one, for instance, is somewhat lacking here. The show is just a little too cerebral for it’s own good in season two. That’s a criticism that rarely gets leveled at a television show and in a perverted way that makes me love The Wire that much more. Plus, the writers manage to find ways, during the next three seasons, to satisfy both head and heart. So if it took them this tiny misstep to figure it out, who am I to complain?

THERE WILL BE BLOOD – paul thomas anderson – 8.1 / 10

I’ve seen There Will Be Blood twice now and am still not entirely sure what to make of it. Obviously the film is operating on two levels, the superficial and the symbolic. And while it’s certain that the film succeeds remarkably on the second level, I can’t quite say that it succeeds completely on the first. It has an awful lot to say about the role of religion and capitalism on the making of modern America and the ways in which power and greed can corrupt. But how the film goes about saying those things is sometimes unnecessarily obtuse, needlessly slow-moving and willfully difficult. These traits, hallmarks of Oscar-baiting epics of year’s past (see: The English Patient, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.) and present (see: Atonement), have led to some critics to hail the film as a masterpiece. But I am starting to think it might all just be camouflage, a way to deflect the audience’s attention away from a subtext that is less dense than it might otherwise appear.

Even still, those shortcomings do not take away from the film’s many transcendent passages. The opening sixteen minutes, for instance, which pass without a word of dialogue, still manage to be as compelling as anything Anderson has yet put to film. The stellar acting of Daniel Day-Lewis and the evocative score by Jonny Greenwood bring the sequence alive and communicate very clearly what kind of man this Daniel Plainview is and what kind of world he inhabits. And when he finally does open his mouth to speak (before a largely unseen roomful of people), Anderson isolates Plainview so completely that he might as well be talking straight to the audience watching in the theater. This is Anderson announcing, for good or ill, that this is the Daniel Plainview story.

But a strange thing happens along the way to telling the story of Daniel Plainview. He goes completely batshit insane. On first viewing, I thought I might have missed something. The film arrived at that violent, horrifying, astonishing ending and I sat up in my chair and thought, “Shit, when did this happen?” I thought I had fundamentally misread this character. I never saw him as a complete monster. Even after the scene that precedes the ending in which he tells his adopted son H.W. that he was an orphan and a “bastard from a basket.” Even then I thought, obviously, that he was an asshole, but I never saw that ending coming. And so I watched the film again with the intention of keeping always in mind that Daniel was a terrible person, the devil incarnate, a man with nothing but darkness in his heart. That way, I thought, if I could see that strain of mad rage in him throughout the film, then his giving in so completely to madness and violence would at least make sense.

But as I watched the film, I saw no evidence of that rage or that insanity in any of the earlier scenes. Plainview would certainly do or say anything to anyone if it served his interests but he never pushed things beyond reason and his actions always seemed logical. And so, when that ending came once again, I was faced with one of two possibilities. The first was that Daniel Plainview had gone completely insane in the fifteen years that had elapsed off screen. And the second was that he had finally earned enough money that he was no longer tethered to society’s ideas of morality and could say or do anything he damn well pleased.

Obviously the first conclusion is easy and boring (and hopefully not what Anderson intended) so I’ll just focus on the second. There’s an old quote, repeated in Overnight, that goes something like, “Money is truth serum. It doesn’t change you, it just reveals the true you to the world.” In the case of Daniel Plainview, there is ample evidence that he hates most people. He even says so to the man he thinks is his brother Henry. And so it makes sense that, once he became rich enough, he would seclude himself on a massive estate and do or say whatever hurtful thing he felt like to whomever he felt like.

But there are a couple of problems with this theory. The first is that there is also ample evidence that despite what Plainview says, he doesn’t really hate everyone and even has something of a desire to be liked by a select few. Prior to the violent outburst that closes the film, Plainview has a few other moments where he loses control of himself and his temper. The first is when Eli Sunday asks for the $5000 that Daniel owes to his church, whereupon Daniel slaps Eli around and rubs his face in the mud. The second is when the Standard Oil man offers to buy him out and he threatens to break into the man’s home and slit his throat. Both of these incidents, while seemingly evidence of Plainview’s mental instability, are precipitated by something that happens to his adopted son H.W. When Plainview shoves Eli in the mud, it is right after his son loses his hearing. And when he threatens to kill the Standard Oil man, it is only after he mentions something about H.W. that Daniel takes offense to. Both of those incidents would seem to indicate that Plainview cares about his son. And if that’s true, the idea that he’s a complete misanthrope no longer makes sense. So maybe the ending of the film isn’t so much Plainview finally expressing his true self or even his deep misanthropy but rather simply a man wanting very badly to hurt someone physically as much as he has been hurt emotionally.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else entirely. The point is, I’ve spent a couple hundred words talking about it and so haven’t had time to focus on the rest of the film. And that, I think, might be the real point because the rest of the film just isn’t that deep. The two hours that come between that bravura opening and that bewildering ending are, despite their laggard pace and meandering discussions of purpose, not all that profound. And I think Anderson knows it. Being the self-aware artist that he is, I think he knew that the dialogue-less opening and the shocking climax would get most of the attention (from both critics and regular folks) and so focused on those to the detriment of the rest of the film.

But let’s take a second to look at that middle of the film which, after all, is most of the movie. For one thing, someone’s going to have to explain to me why it was so long. Why, for instance, does the shot where H.W. returns from the deaf school need to be nearly a minute? The shot opens on the pipeline being built. The camera moves to the right and finds Daniel walking to meet a car that is barely visible on the horizon. H.W. gets out of the car, walks to Daniel then runs away from him. Daniel chases him, catches him and pulls him close despite H.W.’s attempts to slap him.

Now, obviously, the shot is linking the fruition of Plainview’s business with the return of his son. And there are a number of other things going on here as well. Plainview wants his son to witness his greatest triumph. But he also wants his business partners and underlings to see his success as a parent. The audience watches the reunion from a distance to deny them any sense of satisfaction in seeing H.W. return and to make it impossible for them to read either of the characters’ faces while this is happening. And while that’s very compelling and interesting and clearly ripe for discussion, I don’t understand why the shot needs to last for nearly a minute and, further, why there needs to be so much dead time in the shot when people are walking across the field to meet each other. The meaning of the shot is clear within the first fifteen seconds. What is gained by drawing it out for another forty-five?

That shot, to me, is the film (at least the middle two-thirds of it) in microcosm. It has a lot to say and is very pretty to look at but it doesn’t have quite as much going on underneath the surface as it seems to think it does. And it certainly doesn’t have enough to say to justify how long it takes to say it. As someone once said, there just isn’t that much there there. I gave Anderson the benefit of the doubt and assumed there was more going on here than simply a discussion of how religion and capitalism are both easily corruptible and easily bent to serve the will of greedy men. But after two viewings, I’m not sure that there is. Obviously it’s a little more complicated than that reductive reading but not by much.

And that, ultimately, is why I can’t quite bring myself to call this film a masterpiece (even Anderson’s best). Interesting it may be. Pretty it may be. Fantastically acted it certainly is. But deeply compelling? I’m not so sure. And symbolically satisfying? Only intermittently. Obviously I’ve written pages and pages about this film so there’s something about it that’s worth discussing. I just don’t know if it warrants much more than what I’ve said here.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN – joel and ethan coen – 9.6 / 10

Easily the Coen brothers best film since Miller’s Crossing (and maybe even better, though only time will tell), there’s not one false note in No Country For Old Men. From the brutal opening sequence, wherein Javier Bardem’s vicious Anton Chigurgh strangles a sheriff’s deputy without the look of placid calm ever leaving his face, to the contemplative closing scene, wherein Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff relates a dream he had about his father that both explains the film’s somewhat obscure title and lays out its themes, No Country For Old Men is a tour de force. There are so many great scenes and moments (the opening voiceover that so perfectly captures the themes and tone of the film (while also featuring pitch perfect colloquialisms, a Coen specialty), the scene at the gas station that’s all the more harrowing because of its ordinariness, etc.) that listing them all would quickly grow tiring.

But more than just great moments, No Country for Old Men has a tonal and thematic cohesiveness to it that's truly remarkable. It might as well have been named Ode to Fatalism because what’s it’s really about is the inevitable fate that awaits all its characters whether they know it not. That theme, present in the subtext of one of the very first shots of the film (a long look down a straight road that leads off into eternity), eventually moves into the foreground, becoming the centerpiece of the film's last two scenes.

In the first half of the film, this theme of destiny and fatalism (man's inability to do anything other what's already been decided for him) are only hinted at. Take that shot of the highway, for instance. Or the scene in which Josh Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss decides against his better judgment (and even his own will) to go back to the scene of the drug deal gone bad that he happened upon earlier that day. But by the end of the film, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is talking openly about the future that awaits him and his powerlessness to do anything to alter it. And Chigurgh, fleeing the scene of his final murder, gets sideswiped, severely damaging both himself and his car, even though the road ahead was clear and he had a green light.

Perhaps most interestingly, the Coens orchestra the copious violence of the film in exactly the opposite way, moving from explicit at the start of the film to implicit at the end. The film opens with two incredibly brutal deaths. And though there are many more deaths to come (Chigurgh kills something like twelve people), what the audience actually sees of these deaths is less and less the further into the story you get. It’s as if the Coens, having planted the hook with the bracing violence of the film's first third, are slowly forcing their audience, by refusing to slake their bloodlust, to contemplate just what it is this violence is meant to communicate. The genius of that plan being that the audience, already on the hook, is very likely to follow them down that rabbit hole.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure this film is for the Coen brothers. But at the same time, it’s easy to see what drew them to the film in the first place (themes of fate and destiny, colloquial dialogue, funny accents, grizzled old men, etc.). But the quantum leap they’ve taken here by shedding their usually juvenile ways bodes well for their future. Here’s hoping they’ve gotten all the Raising Arizonas and Ladykillers out of their system.

THE INVASION – oliver hirschbiegel – 1.0 / 10

Easily the worst of the four films based on the 1956 science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, The Invasion gets absolutely nothing right. Unbelievably stupid to the point of having the main character’s child’s Superman costume have a mask, Hirschbiegel’s film has no insight to offer and nothing to recommend it except for maybe a nifty car chase at the end of the film that was probably directed by the Wachowskis anyway (in a much publicized reshoot) in which, for some reason, one of the pod people hurls a Molotov cocktail at the heroes' fleeing car.

But I guess the actual on screen action was never the interesting part about these films. No, the interesting part was seeing how what makes a “pod person” changes from one film to the next, to see what each new generation views as the height of conformity. And on that level, The Invasion has a couple of interesting, though not exactly earth shattering, things to say, namely that without humanity, the planet would be free of war and strife of all kinds. A couple of scenes in which Nicole Kidman’s Dr. Carol Bennell walks down the now quiet and orderly streets of Washington, D.C. have the right mix of spookiness and awe that the picture strives for and fails to achieve during the rest of its running time.

The biggest difference between this version and the last two, and the one that says the most about the times in which we live has nothing to do with the nature of the pod people. It has to do with the way in which humans become pod people. In each of the last three versions, the humans are replaced with pod versions of themselves. In this version, the humans are merely infected with the pod spores and turned into new versions of themselves. This may have been done to ping off our collective fear of a pandemic in our now globalized world but what it really does is open the door to the creation of a cure that would allow this film, unlike the prior three, to have a completely unearned happy ending. Indeed, this new version of The Body Snatchers takes the easy way out and has everything end perfectly happily.

That fact says more about the times we live in that anything about the pod people or the differences between their society and ours. We need to have a happy ending now. Not because a modern audience can’t take an unhappy ending (especially an earned one, see The Departed for proof of that) but because a modern studio won’t finance a movie like this unless it ends happily. Those responsible for our entertainment have become so spineless that that they can’t even remake a film faithfully if it involves an unhappy ending. It’s an incredibly sad state of affairs and if the film had attempted to focus on this element of pod people behavior, it could really have been something. Oh well, I guess we’ll have another one in a couple decades.

DEAD SILENCE – james wan – 0.3 / 10

Not one character in this entire film does anything that has any basis in logic. As an example of this idiocy, take the opening scene. It involves a young couple spending a night at home in their apartment when they hear a knock on the door. They open it to find a mysterious package that bears the man’s name but no postal markings or return address. But rather than wonder how it got to their doorstep (or, for that matter, being worried that the package contains a bomb), they take it inside and open it up. In the package is a very creepy looking ventriloquist doll that, for some reason, the couple decides to sit on top of their bed. Eventually, of course, the doll comes to life and kills the woman.

The film continues in this vein for a while. Nothing anyone does makes a lick of sense. Even the motivation of the villain is never more than vaguely defined. But only when the film reaches its climax does it get really stupid. That’s the part where it’s revealed that the hero’s father has been turned into a real life ventriloquist doll by his third wife. Just why she’s done this, who she is and what she hopes to get out of it remains unclear. And before you go thinking it’s some kind of metaphor, rest assured that this film is not that smart.

Easily one of the stupidest and most poorly executed big budget horror films (a generally execrable genre to begin with), Dead Silence proves that the complete artistic failure of Saw was no fluke. It also proves that Twisted Pictures was right to can James Wan after that first film and get someone else to direct the sequels. Rarely does a director do so little with so much money. Hell, I watched ten minutes of Stick It this afternoon and that piece of completely disposable entertainment was twice as creative and enjoyable as Dead Silence. Indeed, I’m hard pressed to think of a worse horror film to come down the pike in this new century.

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF – john hughes – 0.2 / 10

At this point in my exploration of the films of John Hughes, it’s comes as no surprise that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is borderline racist and misogynistic. It’s also no surprise that it’s bad. What is surprising is just how awful it is. It’s just flat out terrible in every way. Nothing in it makes the slightest bit of sense. From the unexplained fainting of Ferris the night before the events of the film to the newspaper article about the campaign to save Ferris that appears on the same day that the campaign begins, nothing makes any logical sense.

In fact, I could spend the better part of two pages cataloguing the ridiculous inconsistencies. An abbreviated list would be as follows: Ferris’s sister appears much older than him but attends the same school even though he’s a senior. The same sister appears to attend no classes however, and plays hokey from school with no issues even though Ferris has to perform some ridiculous stunts to do the same. Then there’s the fact that the principal seems to have some sort of authority outside the school since he seems to think that he can punish Ferris for pretending to be sick. Then there’s the fact that Ferris crosses paths with his father on three separate occasions in a city of millions.

But what’s most troubling about the film is that Ferris is a giant asshole and his assholishness goes completely unpunished to the point where the consequences of his actions, which are being borne by others, aren’t even glimpsed on screen. His buddy takes the blame for the destroyed Ferrari, but it happens off screen. It’s almost as if, if Ferris can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. That makes a certain kind of sense considering that’s how the self-centered Ferris behaves, but it’s an incredibly reckless message to put into a movie aimed at teenagers.

The more I see of John Hughes’s movies, the less respect I have for those who have some fondness for them. Having never seen them during my youth when they would have had the most impact, I can’t vouch for how strong the pull of nostalgia is. But I cannot imagine how the fact that a person liked a film a decade or two ago can overrule all their critical faculties. There is just nothing redeeming, interesting, funny or insightful in any of these films. They are superficial, unfunny, boring and insipid. And I’m beginning to think that Hughes's disappearance from filmmaking around the start of the 1990s had less to do with him and more to do with everyone figuring out what a no talent hack he really was.

THE BREAKFAST CLUB – john hughes – 7.1 / 10

More or less the defining film of a generation, The Breakfast Club is also the only John Hughes film I’ve yet seen that can maybe pass as decent and inoffensive. The latter characteristic, though, is probably only true because the film doesn’t have any minorities in it.

The Breakfast Club defines a generation because the ‘80s was the last time in which someone could make a film like this and only have white people in it. If it were made today there would be a black hip-hip loving b-boy, a skater / druggie, a smart Asian kid, a misunderstood Hispanic girl and an average Joe white guy. I’ll leave the question of whether the ethnic sameness of the film is a good or bad thing to people who care to write more than a couple hundred words about what I consider to be only a decent film. I only mention it because it’s fascinating to watch a film from the not too distant past that plays so much like a relic from a bygone time. My generation and probably all the ones following it, couldn’t accept such a whitewashed cast in a film that is so clearly meant to speak for a generation. I guess it really shows how much difference there is between generations despite the relative proximity in age.

TRANSFORMERS – michael bay – 2.9 / 10

Whatever derogatory or negative things I or likeminded critics might have said about past Michael Bay films, it was undeniable that the man could direct an action sequence. No matter how racist or misogynist the larger movie was, when things started blowing up and racing around the screen, all critical faculties were momentarily short-circuited and the film became fun and exciting, if only for a fleeting moment.

But a curious thing has happened since the days of Bad Boys and The Rock, Michael Bay became a “better” director. The goal of most good directors is to incorporate the themes and aesthetic concerns of the film as a whole into every scene, thus creating a cohesive work that speaks to something specific about the human condition. (That’s a little overblown but you get the idea.) Good directors do this in every scene. Hack directors do it only once in a while. Michael Bay used to be a hack director, content to fling his racist, anti-feminist, borderline fascist beliefs only in a few keys moments. Thus, while The Rock is mostly garbage, the occasionally decent, subtext-free scene sneaks into the film and provides a respite from the rampant conservative agenda in evidence throughout the rest of the film.

Not so anymore. From Bad Boys II to The Island and now with Transformers, Michael Bay has managed to push his horrific social agenda into every corner of the film, leaving no sequence safe from his barbaric worldview. Take, for instance, the sequence in Transformers in which a Decepticon springs from the desert and attacks the heroic band of US soldiers that survived an earlier attack and are now trying to alert the officers back home to the danger coming their way. A younger Michael Bay might have been content to film a “bitchin’” battle sequence full of slow motion low-angle shots and lights streaming into the camera and call it a day. But the new Michael Bay finds time to insert a horrible, unfunny, racist aside about the foreign workers who, having stolen jobs from Americans, are now too lazy to do those jobs properly.

Leaving aside that this scene sucks all the air out of the larger sequence (thus destroying most of its tension) and is terrible filmmaking besides, the issue of outsourcing is so multi-faceted and difficult that a much better filmmaker than Bay could make a whole film about it and never quite get a handle on it. To think that he could say something meaningful and humorous in a few seconds is the height of Bay’s arrogance. And though he never quite reaches those lofty heights again, each of the action sequences in Transformers is saddled with an equally unfunny and racist or misogynist “joke.”

Though I can’t speak to Bay’s intentions in making this film, it seems likely that the more science fiction aspects of the Transformers were never a big draw for him. And maybe that explains the terribly convoluted and not convincing in the least plot machinations of the film. Maybe it even explains what the hell an Australian analyst character is even doing in the film (since she does nothing more than re-explain to an already overwhelmed audience something they have either already grasped or don’t care about anyway). Either way, Bay clearly has no idea what to do in the scenes where things aren’t blowing up or whizzing around. And that’s bad because this film, more than any other Bay film before it, spends an awful lot of time listening to people and machines yammer away at each other.

And yeah, the giant robots from space talk. And they don’t use speakers; they actually have mouths. And lips. And horribly cliché voices they’ve picked up from TV and the internet.

I understand, of course, that these robots have to do a little explaining to the humans but the extended planning sequence when the Autobots first reveal themselves to the humans is just laughable. They all have cutesy names like Bumblebee and Ratchet and Jazz. And they bicker and tease like a bunch of fourteen year-olds. It’s pathetic really.

To make matters worse, this scene is followed almost immediately by a scene in which the five thirty foot tall robots try to hide from the hero’s parents while they question him about masturbation and peek out the windows to check on the geraniums. The sight of the mighty Autobots crouching under a porch awning while a middle-aged woman takes to her son about his “happy time” is more than my childhood memories can take. Even if the sequence didn’t betray everything that Bay was trying to say about the awesome power of these robots, it would still have betrayed a fond childhood memory. That level of awfulness is a feat to be sure, just one I’d rather not pay money to be subjected to.

From that point on the film completely collapses in on itself. There is no logic (internal or external) to anything that happens. Plotlines are abandoned with no resolution (what happened to the Mountain Dew machine that was turned into a crazy killing robot by the All Spark (ugh) and why did it turn into a killing machine in the first place?). Things happen that make no sense (why can’t Bumblebee, after he loses his legs, transform into a smaller version of himself with legs?). A lot more stuff blows up. Lights shine into the camera lens. People walk towards the camera in slow motion. The end.

TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM – francis ford coppola – 4.8 / 10

It’s somewhat pointless and borderline foolhardy to pyschoanalyze a director through his work. That being said, there have to be some conclusions about Francis Ford Coppola’s state of mind that can be drawn from his work in the 1980s. Tucker: The Man and His Dream is the last in a line of films that sees Coppola retreating into the golden hued remembered (rather than realistic) past to tell a story about families (actual or surrogate) realizing how good they have it and pulling together when the chips are down.

From The Outsiders (and Rumble Fish) to Peggy Sue Got Married, Gardens of Stone and Tucker, every single one of Coppola’s films in the eighties is set in the past. And as you watch each of these films you can’t help feeling that Coppola is retreating into some idealized version of his early life. Added to that, his greatest successes (The Godfather films) were set in the past so it’s likely that he felt comfortable there (and that he didn’t have to try very hard to convince studio executives to back these films).

Making period films exclusively is not in and of itself cause for concern, of course. It’s just that the dark and dangerous undercurrent that runs through his earlier films has been entirely scrubbed clean leaving only the burnished amber glow of a time that only ever existed in people’s memories. Whereas The Godfather was a stylized and somewhat theatrical version of a period in history that, through its stylization, achieves timelessness, Tucker is theatrical and stylized in an artificial way that all but defeats the audience’s attempts at identification with this man and his dream.

More troubling than that, however, is the indication, gleaned from bonus materials and commentary tracks, that Coppola, in his post-70's output, cared as much or more about the atmosphere on set than about the film that he was exposing. All of the DVDs of those 1980s films mentioned above are full of actors talking rapturously about the nurturing atmosphere of a Coppola set. They talk about how wonderful a time they had and how much they learned. It’s as if, after the disaster that was the making of Apocalypse Now, Coppola decided that filmmaking wasn’t worth it if the people involved were going to hate every minute of it.

Thus the film that was actually being made ceased to be the sole purpose of a Coppola shoot. The enjoyment of the process by the cast and crew became almost as important as the finished film itself. And thus the finished film became hopelessly compromised.

It’s not necessary that a film set be a tyrannical environment in which all manner of hardship has to be endured for the sake of the finished product. But it is required that, when called for, individual sacrifices in comfort and pleasure be made for the good of the film. Without occasional hardship (overwork, multiple takes in the rain, etc.) the film becomes irretrievably compromised. And that’s what Coppola’s 1980s output is, compromised.

ROAD HOUSE – rowdy herrington – 3.5 / 10

The only enjoyment to be found in the film is derived solely from seeing Patrick Swayze at his Swayze-est. As the best bouncer in the state who also holds a degree in philosophy, Swayze’s character in Road House is the idealized 80's man. And he could only have been played by Patrick Swayze in a rolled up t-shirt and the tightest pair of Jordaches he could find. Unfortunately, once you get past the initial they-can’t-really-be-serious reaction, there’s not much else to hold your attention. It’s amusing for a while but eventually, even Swayze in a pompadour with a shaved chest and oiled up torso, just stops being amusing and starts being sad. And when that happens, there’s just nothing left of to hold your interest. Certainly not the plot or the onscreen action, which is utterly ludicrous. So, if you must watch this film, watch half an hour, have a few laughs then put on Rumble Fish.

THE COTTON CLUB – francis ford coppola – 4.5 / 10

The plot of this film must have sounded really good on paper, concerning as it does the events surrounding some legendary gangsters in Harlem in the 1930s. There’s lots of fights and shoot-outs and sex and yelling. But, for some unknown reason, there’s also lots and lots of tap dancing. Though the tap dancing does eventually relate to the violence, the two separate tones of the film never align to form a coherent story.

Further, many of the scenes in the gangster world are undercut by the terrible performance of Nicholas Cage (his first of many in Coppola’s films). I don’t understand why, when the acting in the Godfather films and in Apocalypse Now and The Conversation is pitch perfect, that the acting in Coppola’s 80's output should be so screechingly awful. I can understand getting lazy in terms of storytelling and direction, choosing easy plot devices and boring camera angles. But how do you suddenly lose your eye for good acting? How can you see what makes a good performance one decade and not be able to see it in the next? That just blows my mind. And unfortunately the chief offender in these films tend to be members of Coppola’s own family. His daughter, so legendarily bad in the third Godfather also torpedoes every scene she is in Peggy Sue Got Married. And Nicholas Cage (Coppola’s nephew) takes three films to figure out that you don’t have to bounce off the walls to get noticed.

But I could forgive all that, really, if the direction of these films wasn’t so very lazy. Whenever possible, Coppola will shoot a scene in one angle (and not in a particularly compelling angle). And if it’s a dialogue scene, it looks as if he just parks a couple cameras on sticks and has the actors do their things. From what little I know about the man, it would seem that the atmosphere on the set and the cast and crew’s experience making the film became more important to him than the finished film itself. Sacrifices must be made to make a good film. People have to work longer hours than they might like, have to perform a difficult scene more than a few times, have to do elaborate technical set-ups to make a good film. But all of those things make the experience less fun for the people involved. So a director has to weigh his choices, make a good film and hurt a few feelings or make a mediocre film and have everyone love you. I guess after Coppola almost killed himself, his crew and his cast making Apocalypse Now, he decided he’d rather everyone have fun and let the film take care of itself. And that’s a damn shame because that’s the easy way out and it robbed cinema of one of its most talented artists.

ONE FROM THE HEART – francis coppola – 3.9 / 10

This is by no means a good film. However, having seen it I wouldn’t hesitate to offer Francis Coppola (as he’s billed here) just about anything else to direct. It’s clear from the first frames of the film that there is someone with real talent behind this film. Almost every scene’s master shot is a winding, circuitous tour de force. And once the couple at the heart of the film splits up, there are glorious transitions between their now separate lives that simultaneously show how close they still are and how distant they've become.

Additionally, the way the sets and tone of the film are constructed create a comprehensive magical realist world unlike anything I’ve seen before. Lights change color and fade away during shots. People burst into song in the middle of the street and everyone joins in. Everything is just magical.

But that bit about bursting into song hints at the film’s major problem, namely that it’s a more or less a musical and I mostly hate musicals. That’s especially true if most of the songs are sung by Tom Waits, a musician I simply cannot stand. Some people find some sort of magic in his gravelly voice but all I hear are nails on a chalkboard.

The music stuff isn’t the only problem with the film, however. The events of the film (a break up and subsequent (completely predictable) reconciliation) are not believable in the least. True, the whole world of the film is unbelievable but the idea that a woman would break up with her boyfriend then, on the same day, meet a guy (who lies to her with the very first words he utters) and go to bed with him and then agree to go to Bora Bora with him the following morning is ludicrous. There’s also the moment where the girl tries to make her boyfriend jealous by saying she wanted to sleep with his ridiculously ugly best friend. And then the guy meets a girl who sees that he’s still in love with his girlfriend but decides to sleep with him anyway.

The reason this stuff ruins the film is because magical realism needs to be grounded in character reality in order to be effective. Take something like Punch-Drunk Love as an example. The only way the more ridiculous elements can work is if they're offset by the realistic interactions between the people involved. This film doesn’t do that and suffers because of it. Overall, though, the film is a showcase for Coppola’s nascent talent. And I guess some other people noticed too because he got to direct The Godfather not too long after this.

THE OUTSIDERS – francis ford coppola – 6.9 / 10

Quite possibly the gayest film ever made, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders concerns the extraordinarily close relationship between a bunch of kids known as greasers who have no parents to speak of. They sleep in the same beds (even spooning!) talking about their hopes for the future and how pretty the sunsets are. They care deeply about each other and do so openly in a way that would never fly these days.

In the documentaries that accompany the film on the DVD release (which is entitled “The Complete Novel” for some reason), everyone talks about how much time and effort the actors put into the process and how great Coppola was in facilitating their performances. From the auditions where all the kids hung out in one room and swapped parts with each other to the weeks they spent taping the scenes from the movie on video before they started filming, everyone is in agreement that this was the most fun, safe and nurturing environment. The thing is, though, that everyone’s performance is laughable. I guess twenty-five years ago people bought the idea that badass kids from the wrong side of the tracks would run around doing cartwheels and back flips and crying at the drop of a hat but that shit don’t fly these days. It’s ridiculous, homoerotic and plain silly.

But I was also thinking as I watched it about the mythologization of juvenile delinquent behavior. How would we feel about this film and book if it were about a bunch of black gangsters?

BUFFALO ’66 – vincent gallo – 4.9 / 10

Vincent Gallo is one charismatic dude. At least, I think he is. I’m not really sure. Everyone seems to treat him as if he is (in his own films anyway) so maybe it’s true. Myself, I don’t see it. I just think he’s a dick. He’s more compelling than your average dick but a dick nonetheless.

Let me briefly recap the film for you: Gallo’s character gets out of prison, kidnaps a girl, forces her to come with him to his parents’ house and pretend she’s his fiancé then abandons her at a hotel while he goes off to kill the place kicker for the Buffalo Bills that cost him a bunch of money ten years ago. Even though he doesn’t end up killing the guy, is there anything in that synopsis that would make you think this was a good and decent person?

And that’s not even taking into account his behavior during all this. He is at best recalcitrant and at worst outright belligerent to his parents and to the girl he kidnapped who, for some reason unbeknownst to me, likes this guy. She likes him even though he kidnapped her and treats her like dirt. To me that doesn’t say something about her character, it says something about how Gallo sees himself. Namely that everyone loves him no matter how he behaves towards them.

This film, while it has some interesting camera angles and compelling asides (not to mention a downright thrilling climax), ends up being little more than one man’s extended love letter to himself. It takes a bold, brave artist to put himself in his own film. It takes a fearless artist to make the character he plays in the film unsympathetic and unlikable. And it takes a borderline delusional one to have everyone therein love him. And that, my friends, is Vincent Gallo of Bufflao '66, brave, fearless and delusional.

CLICK – frank coraci – 1.0 / 10

Leave it to Adam Sandler and his band of merry men to take what could have been an interesting concept and turn it into an excuse to make dick and fart jokes (literally dick and fart jokes and more than a few sex jokes as well). By making this into as broad a comedy as possible, they turn Click into nothing more than another high concept comedy in which the world contorts itself around in increasing unbelievable ways at the inconvenience of countless other people just so some privileged white guy (usually an architect) can learn to appreciate his life (that is already far better than 99 percent of the rest of the people on the planet). Huzzah.

It’s the same plot that we’ve seen in Sandler’s own Spanglish as well as Bruce Almighty and the recent Breaking and Entering. I guess it’s easier to just make a film like countless others (especially if it’s a proven money maker) but it sucks when they take what could have been a good concept for a serious minded movie and run it straight into the ground.

The most egregious error the filmmakers indulge in here is in making the universal remote ruin Michael’s life in a completely nonsensical and ridiculous way. They have to have things go wrong, of course, since this is that sort of film, but the way they do it is just silly. It involves the remote learning Michael’s “preferences” and then fast forwarding through every future occurrence of something he’s fast forwarded through once (fights with his wife and showers, for instance). Eventually he’s skipping so much of his life that he’s very near the end of it.

The problem with all that, besides the obvious fact that remotes don’t learn preferences and that, even if they did, there would have to be some sort of override control, is that it makes the device the scapegoat. Sure it’s reflecting Michael’s initial choices but after that he’s fighting the remote the whole time. Thus, when Michael is given a second chance at the end of the film (in that tired cop out to end all cop outs: it was all a dream), he really hadn’t changed all that much. Rather than learning to appreciate the little things in life, it’s far more believable that he would just have learned to distrust creepy men with strange haircuts who talk like Christopher Walken.

Add to this nonsense the fact that Michael is, for some reason, a huge dick to a neighbor’s kid (named O’Doyle in a reference to Sandler’s earlier and much funnier though no less puerile Billy Madison) and you get a very disturbing portrait of the man Sandler is playing here. This despite the fact that he’s certainly become aware of his critics’ descriptions of his man-child characters as monsters (witness his attempt to rehab his image in Spanglish and Reign Over Me). He and his band of cohorts are just not smart enough to realize that making Michael a “family man” does not absolve him of his sins. That’s far too subtle a concept to grasp for these Neanderthals. And as long as the filmgoing public at large doesn’t catch on anytime soon, I guess we’ll be stuck with an endless parade of these grinning assholes like Michael. Once again, huzzah.

DIRTY DANCING – emile ardolino – 4.3 / 10

I was halfway into this movie before I figured out that it was set in the 1950s (and really, I’m still not entirely sure). So poorly is the past recreated in the film that I just thought Patrick Swayze’s dance instructor was driving an old car because he wanted to be like James Dean. Though how a guy in tights with a penchant for twirling could think himself James Dean, I don’t know.

Anyway, the plot of the film revolves around the two-- possibly three-- week vacation a rich Jewish family from New York takes in the Catskills. It’s interesting to watch from the modern perspective where the idea of a rich successful doctor taking the better part of a month off to hang out and learn to dance and golf in the mountains is laughable. It’s like summer camp for grown-ups. Indeed, the resort in which the film is set and the archetypal characters that populate the film remind me so much of the same era’s slasher flicks that I half expected someone to get violently assaulted. The aesthetics are so similar, in fact, that I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the film was directed by a slasher film veteran. (Alas, it wasn’t.)

Don’t get me wrong, the film is bad. It’s just bad in a more interesting way than most other bad films. For instance, although it’s central love plot is never in much doubt, the obstacles that are thrown up between Swayze’s character and Jennifer Grey’s are a lot more interesting and serious than the contrived nonsense of something like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days or The Wedding Planner.

I also find it curious that this sort of straightforward romantic movie is hardly ever seen anymore. Considering the runaway success of this film and the minor classic status it's attained over the years (and that women still make up fifty percent of the filmgoing public), it seems strange that the only place you can find romance these days is in a romantic comedy or absolute dreck like The Holiday or Something’s Gotta Give. Or it could just be that I’m watching this film from a far enough remove that I can’t quite poke as many holes in it as I might otherwise.

SIXTEEN CANDLES – john hughes – 3.3 / 10

I was reading an article in Time the other day that was talking about the aging Baby Boomer population. It mentioned in passing that Generations X and Y are, if anything, prematurely nostalgic which, in my experience, is absolutely true. I guess there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself except for the fact that they (or is it we?) are nostalgic for racist, misogynist crap like Sixteen Candles.

It’s bad enough that the whole plot of the film revolves around a young girl’s desire to be wanted by a man but the Long Duck Dong subplot is so abhorrent as to be unforgivable. The only thing the film has going for it is that it’s one of those so bad it’s good movies. Even the most blockheaded lunk notices the rampant racism that finds Dong’s every appearance accompanied by a gong on the soundtrack. And with the racism so obvious, you can’t help but be tickled by it, though, it should be said that you’re laughing not at the film but at the idea that someone would think this was funny. I mean, how did they ever get away with that? I guess you laugh because there’s just no other response to something this ridiculous.

DOMINO – tony scott – 2.4 / 10

What must it be like on the set of Tony Scott film? The behind the scenes documentary on the DVD release of this film indicates that Scott routinely has five or six cameras shooting at any given time. But the logistics of that must be a total nightmare. How do the actors know where to look? How does the DP light for six cameras? Are all the operators told to just shake the shit out of their cameras and zoom in and out at random intervals? And the editor, christ, he must want to shoot himself in the head.

The thing is, even if the film turned out to be good (which Domino really really isn’t), could Scott realistically take credit for its artistic success? I mean, there’s no way he’s sitting on set watching six monitors so there’s no way he’s even seeing all the footage he’s getting. (Dailies must be a fun little surprise for him.) Of course, he guides the overall artistic vision for the film but it seems overly generous to think of him as an auteur despite the fact that his films have a very unique and distinctive look.

I guess what I’m saying is that with so much chaos swirling around and so many cameras shooting on so many different film stocks with so much crazy movement and quick cutting, what could possibly be the artistic thought behind the film? The only thing effectively conveyed by all this nonsense is a feeling of sensory overload and that things are moving very quickly. But that’s really all.

GRINDHOUSE: PLANET TERROR – robert rodriguez – 3 / 10 DEATH PROOF – quentin tarantino – 7.0 / 10

The first thing I want to talk about, to get that out of the way, is the fake trailers that play before and between the two films that comprise Grindhouse. I guess the idea for the trailers makes sense on a superficial level. And without thinking about it very much, I was excited to see them. But as they unspooled in front of me, I began to realize just how terrible an idea they were. The problem is that they serve no purpose. A trailer is supposed to get the viewer excited to see the film advertised (since they are, after all, advertisements) but since everyone watching this film knows that these trailers advertise nonexistent films, no one is going to want to see the film. Obviously the directors making these trailers were aware of that, so instead of making a trailer that would get people excited about a nonexistent film, they went for humor instead. But if the fake trailers are funny they are not fulfilling the role of trailers and thus become a new thing altogether. In other words, the fake trailers are pretty much a failure as trailers and are thus just short films that comment archly on trailers which, to me, is not very interesting.

A similar problem afflicts Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double feature, Planet Terror. Though he does a much better job of mimicking the experience of seeing a cheap movie in a cheap theater in the 1970s than Tarantino does, there’s a disconnect here between the aesthetic of the film and the substance. Sure it looks like it was shot on 16mm film and had been through the wringer a thousand times (there are hairs and burns and all manner of scratches flickering across the screen) but at the same time there’s so much that is clearly computer generated in the film that the whole thing shakes out as the very definition of disingenuous. To have the film look like it was a legitimate grindhouse picture but then to have clearly spent millions to make it that way makes the film almost impossible to like.

The very first scene, for instance, is of Rose McGowan’s Cherry Darling stripping (or go-go dancing which is, apparently, different). This scene infuriates for a number of reasons. First, McGowan remains clothed throughout. Now I’m not looking to be prurient or to see McGowan naked (really, I’m not that interested) but to make all this hay about the fact that this is a throwback to the boobs and blood splatter pictures of the 70's and then not show any boobs just makes no sense. (Couple this scene with a moment later in the film in which a sex scene “burns up” and the film jumps ahead ten minutes and you get a pretty clear picture of just how Puritanical and un-grindhouse Rodriguez is when it comes to sex). Second, anyone who has seen any commercials or trailers for the film has seen the moment wherein McGowan receives a prosthetic leg machine gun. But in that first go-go dancing scene, she clearly has both her legs intact. So, right from the get go it’s clear that there’s going to be an awful lot of CG work in the film to make it look like she only has one leg. (If this had been a real grindhouse picture, Cherry would have been played by a woman with one leg who would have had a pretty bad prosthesis the whole first half of the movie.) Thus it’s clear from pretty much the first minute of the film that Rodriguez is going to be faithful only to the superficial aspects of a grindhouse picture and not at all to the spirit of the thing. It’s no surprise then that he completely fails to absorb the audience into his nonsensical, meandering zombie picture.

Tarantino on the other hand, clearly set out to be more loyal to the spirit of the grindhouse than to the aesthetics of it (though he does a pretty decent job in that regard as well). Rather than try to make a film that looked like it was being shown in a cheap theater in the 1970s, Tarantino made a film to which the modern audience would respond the same way he did as a kid in that 1970s theater. Basically he chose the much harder path and got a lot closer to success than Rodriguez.

His half of the double feature, Death Proof, concerns a serial killer named Stuntman Mike (played wonderfully by Kurt Russell) who uses his invincible car to kill helpless women. The film is basically two terrific action set pieces separated by two extended conversations between groups of female friends. Though the lack of action for the first forty minutes of the film strikes me as not quite representative of the grindhouse aesthetic, when the action does come, it is fantastic and brutal and damn entertaining. It is also noticeably free of CG work and uses only techniques that would have been available to a filmmaker in the 1970s. Thus, even though from all appearances Tarantino approached his half of the film with a completely different goal than Rodriguez (to be inspired by rather than just imitate the exploitation films of the 1970s), he actually gets a lot closer to making a believable grindhouse flick.

Still, the lengthy dialogue scenes in the film continue the worrying trend Tarantino’s been on since he and Roger Avary parted ways after Pulp Fiction. Whereas he used to be content to have only a scene or two be entirely about his free associative pop culture ramblings (with the other scenes having this mixed in, of course, but not being the exclusive purpose of the scenes), he’s now making films that, anytime anyone opens their mouth, all that’s coming out is ephemera. Take away every last bit of dialogue from Death Proof, for instance, and you don’t lose much of the pleasure of watching the film. Indeed, it's probably increased since you don’t have to wait forty minutes in between action scenes.

I’m not saying that these long rambling conversations are boring because they aren’t. They just aren’t about anything. They exist outside of and apart from the rest of the film and are completely unconnected to the violence that surrounds them. Maybe that’s the point, but the whole enterprise has the same sort of feeling as when, in the end of the second volume of Kill Bill, the whole picture grinds to halt so Bill can talk about Superman for a while. What I’m saying, I guess, is that Tarantino’s banal insights into pop culture and relationships, etc. are just not interesting enough for their own sake. They need to be tied into a larger narrative or it becomes just Tarantino showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of the ephemera of modern life. And while that might have been interesting enough to sustain my interest in his work for a while, I’m starting to grow weary of it. And judging by other reviews of this film, I might not be the only one.

That’s the thing, really. Tarantino makes Tarantino films. He is not capable of doing anything else. Even when he assigns himself the task of mimicking another style of filmmaking, he can’t help but pour his own sensibility into the film and turn it into something uniquely his own. Indeed, he is of that rare breed of filmmakers who present a sui generis aesthetic to the world. The problem is that even though his aesthetic and worldview are completely unique and unlike anything anyone else is doing, there’s no escaping the fact that it is still more of the same in film after film. And I, for one, find the bloom to be off this particular rose. What was lively and intoxicating five films ago is now becoming commonplace and predictable. It’s almost as if Tarantino’s become a genre unto himself. There are worse things, I guess, than being completely unique in the same way film after film. But I had expected more from the video store wunderkind and patron saint of film geeks.

BLOOD DIAMOND – edward zwick – 3.9 / 10

In Blood Diamond, Edward Zwick, director of such previous white guilt epics as Glory and The Last Samurai, sends yet another white person into a foreign land to learn something about himself. The white person in question this time is Leonardo DiCaprio (in a truly outstanding, possibly career best performance and easily the best thing about the film) as Danny Archer, a former mercenary turned diamond smuggler. The tempest into which he is sent is the Sierra Leonean civil war of the late 1990s. And the lesson he has to learn, surprise surprise, is to appreciate life in all its bounteous splendor. The only question is how many dark skinned people are going to have to die before Danny figures that out.

I don’t want to be so cynical as to assume that Americans, particularly white middle-class ones, won’t watch a film with a mostly black (or foreign) cast. But I gotta think that even if it wasn’t Zwick’s idea from the start, somewhere along the line in the development of this very expensive film, someone would have made him put some white people in it just to make sure they showed up in the theaters. I don’t know whether Zwick was coaxed into making this concession (exhibits A and B: Glory and The Last Samurai, seem to indicate otherwise) but I understand it. It makes a certain awful kind of business sense. And when you get right down to it, that could even be forgiven if Blood Diamond had turned out to be compelling and interesting. But it isn’t.

It’s not compelling because, despite having an obvious message (diamonds reach our wedding fingers on the broken backs and spilled blood of the world’s exploited indigenous peoples) Zwick and Co. aren’t quite sure how to sell it. Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly, woefully out of her depth), a reporter who’s ventured into Africa to uncover the “truth” about the diamond trade, is obviously the filmmakers’ avatar for their belated activism. She’s the lone voice crying in the wilderness about the exploitation of the people and the ignorance of the selfish uncaring Americans back home. But a few scenes after making that speech, she’s snapping pictures of war ravaged bodies and grief stricken faces to publish in her magazine. How is that any less exploitative than what the diamond smugglers are doing? At least Danny has no pretenses about just what it is he’s doing there at the asshole end of the world.

It’s exactly that sense of conflicted purpose and misplaced anger that so muddies the film. And just when the politics become so convoluted that the whole thing is threatening to collapse under its own self-serious weight, gunfire erupts and something explodes. The camera shakes and blood and dirt splatter the lens as bullets rip through the air. But this, unfortunately, is the other major problem with Blood Diamond; namely that Zwick and Co. want the film to be a big bad piece of slam bang entertainment as well as a political message movie. So mixed in with all the hand wringing about the evils of the diamond trade are car chases and shoot outs in the streets as Danny and Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, also fantastic and deserving of that Supporting Actor Oscar nod) travel the country in search of Solomon’s captive family and eventually to the hiding place of a rare pink diamond. But the big action setpieces and the complicated geopolitical maneuvering are never a perfect fit. The action seems to come out of nowhere and to exist for no other reason than that twenty minutes had passed without something exploding. It’s violence for violence’s sake is what I’m saying and it contradicts the whole point of Maddy’s (read: the filmmakers’) meandering speechifying that violence with no point is about as horrible a thing as people can do to each other.

All of that is not to say that there isn’t the occasional compelling moment in the film. The handful of scenes concerning Solomon’s captive son Dia, for instance, hint at the film that might have been. Kidnapped by the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.), Dia is brainwashed into thinking his parents are dead and then drugged into a stupor until he becomes an unthinking instrument of death. This being a big budget Hollywood spectacular and all, there is little doubt that Dia will eventually be reunited with his father and once again become the future of his country. But along the way, and almost in spite of itself, his becomes the most powerful story in Blood Diamond. His journey from untapped promise to wasted potential and back is the hoped for resolution to the mess that is most of war torn Africa. And thus Dia becomes something of a metaphor for the entire continent. Within him is the promise of a different future, but also the danger of endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past, an idea that is made all the more poignant by the fact that even today child armies continue to roam the jungles of Africa.

As the film draws to a close near the two and a half hour mark, the images of Dia killing innocent, helpless villagers are the only ones that linger, especially considering the somewhat self-defeating titles that close the film by describing the “Kimberley Process” that has, since the time in which the film takes place, supposedly ended the sale of conflict diamonds. Maybe that was tacked on as a sop to the diamond industry. Maybe it’s there to guard against potential lawsuits. Or maybe it’s there because it’s true. Whatever the reason, the contradictory note on which the movie ends is fitting for a film that never really figures out what it wants to say.

And maybe that’s how it should be. Because it’s a tricky quagmire, Africa is, and the filmmakers do not escape it unscathed. However, they do at least seem to be aware of the hopelessness of their plight. “This is Africa” (or just “T.I.A”) is an oft-repeated phrase throughout the film; the idea being that there is no explanation, no logic and no rules to explain what’s going on over there. I applaud their attempt to try to say something about Africa and to try to shine a light on a too-often dim part of the world. But good intentions are not nearly enough, especially when the finished product is so inconsistent, on the one hand bending over backwards to be self-congratulatory and on the other completely misunderstanding what it was actually saying.

300 - zack snyder - 5.5 / 10

For all its digital fire and brimstone and the lip service it pays to the Spartan warrior ethic and code of honorable death, it’s a damn shame that at its core 300 turns out to be so staunchly conservative and puritanical, its warrior heroes dying with cries for their wives and children on their lips. And what’s truly baffling here is that that stuff isn’t in the graphic novel upon which this film is based (neither is the ridiculous legislative maneuvering going on back in Sparta but that’s another matter I’ll get to later) and it certainly isn’t historically accurate. Now I’m no advocate of being a slave to the written source or even to history. But when changes are made recklessly and wantonly, all you get is a very conflicted message.

BLACK SNAKE MOAN – craig brewer – 5.5 / 10

Although it may be faint praise to say it, Black Snake Moan is better than I thought it was going to be. Considering it was written and directed by Craig Brewer (the man behind the pretty weak and borderline racist Hustle & Flow) and concerns a nymphomaniac being chained to a radiator by a dude named Lazarus (who, gasp, comes back to “life” over the course of the film), you’d think it would be pretty much the silliest film ever. But it isn’t, I swear.

I say that even though Brewer and everyone involved in this film did no research whatsoever about nymphomania. Not that I did either but I highly doubt that nymphomania manifests itself as an unscratchable itch that prompts those suffering from it to tear off their clothing and tackle the nearest male (as Christina Ricci does in this film). And I say that even though Ricci wears $200 Citizens of Humanity cut-offs but can’t afford to buy herself dinner.

What’s good about the film is that it so completely believes in its lunatic concept that, for a while (at least until an overmatched Justin Timberlake enters the picture), the audience is caught up in it. It gets the down home, good ol’ boy feel of the Deep South just right and its early characterizations are dead on. This carries the film across the somewhat ludicrous idea that someone could cure another of their “wickedness” by chaining them to a radiator. You just kind of go with it.

The problem comes after the “wickedness” has been cured and Ricci’s boyfriend (played by the aforementioned Mr. Timberlake) returns from Iraq, or more accurately, the boot camp he was kicked out of for the anxiety he gets when confronted with loud noises. Never minding the fact that it’s pretty unlikely that a person would get debilitating anxiety from loud noises and then want to enlist in the Army, the last thing the film needs is another person with some deep-seated mental hurdle to clear. It already has Samuel L. Jackson’s scarred and wounded Lazarus and Ricci’s crazed nymphomaniac.

So, in the third act of the film, we’ve now got that to deal with. And quite frankly, JT is not up to the job. Yes, his role is weak and a lot of what he’s called on to do is silly, but so is what Ricci and Jackson are asked to do and the audience buys into their roles. Timberlake just isn’t able to make us buy into his affliction the way the film needs us to.

I don’t want to lay the blame for this film’s failures at the feet of Justin Timberlake; it’s not his film to carry after all. And maybe the failure of the third act isn’t his fault at all. Maybe there’s just no way a ridiculous film like this could end up satisfactorily. But whatever the reason, the simple fact is that the whole film collapses like a house of cards in its last half hour. It has a completely unearned uplifting ending in which every character is happily paired off with another as if, no matter the damage and pain you cause, if you repent you’ll find happiness. It’s a very Christian message and a bizarrely conservative one coming from a film that toys with hardcore sexual depravity and the darkest anxiety.

THE NEW WORLD – terrence malick – 5.5 / 10

Terrence Malick is the definition of an auteur. He is also exhibit number one in why the auteur theory is not the be all and end all of film criticism. For though each of his films is clearly and distinctly his own, they all more or less fail in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t matter if the film is about soldiers in World War II or criminals in the 1950s Midwest or John Smith and Pocahontas, every Malick film is going to be exactly the same: lots of shots of nature and sun-dappled trees and grass as the characters look longingly at each other and speak in breathlessly whispered voiceover on the soundtrack.

The New World is more of the same from Malick. However, that being said, it is probably the most entertaining of his films. Despite it’s dreadfully slow pace (another Malick trademark) it doesn't go on and on without end or direction (like The Thin Red Line). It has a clear narrative with lives at stake and as such has some compelling moments of action and drama. And the story it tells, though well known, is nonetheless interesting.

Moreover, it is undeniable that Malick has a keen visual sense. There are plenty of breathtaking shots in this film. And he does a good job of conveying the wonder with which the Englishmen see the New World and, similarly, with which Pocahontas sees England. Both worlds are so lush and vibrant as to be like paradise.

But none of that takes away from the fact that, like all other Terrence Malick movies before it, The New World is dreadfully boring for long stretches. True there are moments of action and moments in which the plot is developing quickly. But those are clearly not the moments that Malick is interested in. No, he’d rather spend twenty minutes with Pocahontas and John Smith cavorting in the fields as the sun sets behind them and their voices speak about ridiculously pretentious nonsense in hushed voiceover. And that’s all well and good but it’s boring as hell. And those voiceovers, Christ, a grown man writes that nonsense and grown men are supposed to be entertained by it? I’d have been embarrassed to have written that in high school. And if someone had chanced to come upon it, I think I would have died of shame. To put it out there for all the world to see is just ridiculous, borderline laughable.

I’m really curious to know what this film looked like when it was in script form. I wonder how many pages it was. And I wonder if it made any sense. I can’t even tell what happened at the end of the film. Does Pocahontas die? Or does she return to the New World with John Smith? I can’t tell.

In the end, I guess the film is as good as your tolerance for meandering though good-looking asides about the romance of the world and the romance between two people. If you like this kind of stuff, The New World is for you. If you don’t, steer well clear.