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.

BLOW OUT – brian de palma – 6.9 / 10

Though it sags as it draws to a close (and really provides no closure on the vast governmental conspiracy at the heart of the story), Blow Out is pretty entertaining through its first half. Since I’m no fan of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up and its mod, sixties, free love, lack of structure bullshit, it gives me some pleasure to watch De Palma turn that film into a straightforward, Hollywood-ized thriller. The idea of turning an arty festival piece into mainstream entertainment is perversely exciting to me.

But, as fun as that is and as big a kick as I get out of it, that still can’t account for the movie’s failings. There’s really just no way for one man to believably take down a huge conspiracy that killed a presidential candidate. That’s one area where Blow Up actually got it right. By not having any real resolution to the story, the filmmakers didn’t have to come up with a believable ending. And, since it was an artsy foreign film anyway, they could have just had the main character get bumped off and nobody would have complained.

De Palma, however, was making his film for a different audience, one that needed to see the hero win. And thus his huge governmental conspiracy turns out to be one rouge agent who went off the reservation so that the hero can kill him and put an end to it. And while that sorta works on its own terms, De Palma couldn’t very well have the hero actually reveal the conspiracy to the world. So he just ends up sad and alone.

That last aspect is something I’ve never understood about conspiracy movies. They always have the hero’s attempt to reveal the whole truth thwarted at the end. And I can’t quite ever figure that out. The people who make these movies trust their audiences to believe that a vast conspiracy could exist since it is, after all, the premise of the film. But they don’t think people will believe that a conspiracy could ever be revealed? Perhaps it’s a comment on the nature of conspiracies. Or maybe it’s a subtle hint that similar conspiracies have taken place many times in our country but none of them have been revealed.

I kinda like that last explanation and it works okay as a thematic reading of the film. But it also renders the film decidedly unsatisfying. Denying the hero the thing he seeks, keeping him from reaching his goal, is no way to satisfy an audience. And because of that, none of these conspiracy movies (Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, Enemy of the State, etc.) ever end up being very satisfying or memorable. I guess I can now add Blow Out to that list.

But Blow Out is worth watching for De Palma’s direction. Though he’s not trying out anything new here (and hence could be accused of phoning it in), all his tricks are on display. In fact, this film acts as a rather neat summation of all the directorial flourishes he developed in the 70's. You’ve got the movie within a movie from Body Double, the split screen from Inferno and Dressed to Kill, the fetishization of the female form from every damn movie he ever made, the disinterested authority figures of Dressed to Kill and the hooker with a heart of gold from five or six of his films.

So, in the end, Blow Out is worth watching if you’re a De Palma fan (though you aren’t likely to pick up on anything new) but you can probably turn it off halfway through and not miss anything.

INDIANA JONES & THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL – steven spielberg – 3.8 / 10

Though it begins with a strange prologue where a bunch of kids in a Ford roadster race a group of GIs, once The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gets going, it’s really really good for about fifteen minutes (maybe even twenty) and threatens to actually be about something. Of course, then the plot proper kicks in and everything goes downhill from there.

I had hoped, knowing a little about this film’s backstory and the idea that Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had rejected George Lucas’s absurd notion that the fourth Indy film should be Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars, that everyone had come to their senses and realized that Indiana Jones hunting alien relics isn’t really the Indiana Jones people wanted to see. Even after the opening sequence that involves some artifacts from the Roswell crash in 1947, I held out hope, thinking that maybe this was a sop to Lucas and the rest of the film would be about something more Indy-esque.

But alas, it was not to be. No, Indiana Jones does indeed go after an alien relic in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not only that, he visits a whole alien city and sees a real life alien and its spaceship. And so the whole thing comes off, to my eyes at least, as a blatant cash grab by a bunch of people that really don’t have any need of that cash. Maybe they just like the attention.

And that’s really too bad because the first twenty minutes of the film show what might have been. In those twenty minutes, there’s a whole bunch of stuff about the Red Scare that swept America in the 50's and how a man like Indiana Jones could get caught up in that. There’s a terrific sequence set in a model town moments before it’s blown apart by a nuclear weapons test. And a wonderfully ominous shot of Indy standing in front of a mushroom cloud as the world as we knew it up until then suddenly changed.

That sequence and that shot are so portentous and so loaded with ideas that it takes a really dedicated hack to squander them. And sure enough, George Lucas is up to the task. Over the next bloated hour and a half, the film is overloaded with nonsense about crystal skulls that control minds, psychic Russians, capital-C crazy academics and flesh-eating ants. And the real flaw is that there is just so much talking about nothing that there’s no way for the film to develop any kind of propulsive energy or momentum. Even Spielberg, the master of the old-school chase sequence, can only do so much when between those chases are twenty minutes of people talking about nothing that ends up mattering in any way.

I can’t really say that I’m disappointed with this film because I didn’t expect all that much going in. But the first half hour so raised my hopes that the complete failure of the last two thirds of the film stings that much more. And as the final (completely ridiculous) scene played out, I started to understand those morons on the internet who yelp about George Lucas having raped their childhood because my hopes for this film had been similarly toyed with and then brutalized. Oh well, there’s always the Shia Lebeouf starring sequel to look forward to. (And anyone who doesn’t think we’ll be seeing that film in a few years is giving Lucas and Spielberg an awful lot of credit they have continually proved they do not warrant.)

INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM – steven spielberg – 1.9 / 10

Leaving aside Kate Capshaw’s howlingly anti-feminist portrayal of Willie Scott (as getting into that would enrage me much more than I feel like being enraged right now), the film has myriad problems from start to finish. First of all, what happens to Lao Che, the person who tried to kill Indiana in Shanghai at the start of the film? We never here from him again. Doesn’t he still want Jones dead? There’s no resolution there.

Then Jones, Willie and Short Round (another ridiculously offensive element of the film I’m not going to get into at the moment) end up in India. And when they meet a tribe of villagers, Jones asks for a guide to Delhi. But since he was asleep on the plane that took them into India, how does he know how close they are to Delhi? Maybe Delhi’s a thousand miles away. And why does the chief of the village speak English? Where did he learn it? (That last question is particularly interesting as the behind the scenes featurettes reveal that the actor that portrayed the village chef didn’t really speak English and was feed his lines off camera by Spielberg.)

Then there’s the nonsense with the blood that turns Indy into a crazed Thuggee warrior and the voodoo doll the Maharajah uses to inflict pain on Indiana. Leaving aside the fact that Hinduism (the Maharajah’s supposed religion) has nothing to do with voodoo, what point does all this mystical nonsense serve? The whole thing’s just really racist and completely tone deaf.

And why is this a (unacknowledged) prequel? The events in this film take place a year earlier than those of Raiders of the Lost Ark but for really no purpose. The Last Crusade takes place in 1938 because it has a major piece of the story set in the Republic of Hatay which only existed from 1937 to 1938. But the events of this film could have taken place any time during the 1930s. It’s just a weird, unexplained thing that this film comes before the first one.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN – andrew adamson – 3.9 / 10

This lame second installment of a bound-to-be-lame trilogy, isn’t much worse or better than the lame first film. Without having read the book, it’s hard to ascribe blame for the abovementioned lameness. But based on my reading of the book of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and then seeing the film, I’m going to assume that they followed the book pretty closely and just elongated the action sequences and drama (since both are almost entirely lacking in the book). If that’s the case, then a lot of the blame for the awful thematic elements can be placed at C.S. Lewis’s feet.

And when you get right down to it, C.S. Lewis is just not a very good writer. He earns a little leeway because his books weren’t originally intended for publication but that doesn’t change the fact that they are so poorly plotted that I find it almost impossible to imagine someone reading one of his books now and thinking it would be a good idea to share them with the world.

There’s just an awful lot of stupid things happening in these stories. The most obvious of which is probably the fact that Peter happens to have a flashlight with him when the kids go back to Narnia. If he didn’t, many different things that happen in the film would be impossible. And that would be fine if it were some common item that a person would reasonably have in their school bag. But a flashlight? Why would he have a flashlight?

That sort of ill-considered plotting is present throughout the film. From the fact that Prince Caspian could have just killed the impostor king and declared himself the new ruler (thus negating the last third of the film and preventing thousands of deaths) to the stupid pop song that closes the film, Prince Caspian is rife with half-formed ideas and lame plotting that would certainly have been ironed out had the film not been based on a revered book (which, it should be recalled was originally only intended for the consumption of one specific child).

The most bothersome plot development is when Aslan (the Jesus figure of Narnia) chooses not to reveal himself until the very end because the people no longer believed in him. What kind of petty absentee god punishes his people by allowing thousands of them to die because just because they don’t believe in him? The Christian god, of course. Is that really the message that a big summer movie aimed at children (witness the complete lack of blood in the hundreds of on screen deaths) wants to be sending?

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.