Delmare Reviews

Gardener of Eden (I) (2007)

The Modern Taxi Driver

[6/10 · 18 September 2008]

Adam (Lukas Haas) is a burnout twenty-something living with his parents in Burnoutville, New Jersey. Kicked out of college for paying a prostitute to service him in his dorm-room, he spends his days making sandwiches at a shoddy deli and hanging out with his dead-end friends, who've worked out an elaborate barter system where no one in their circle ever has to pay for anything. Life for Adam, if not bad, is at least comfortably negligible, but things take a turn for the worst when an argument with a co-worker costs him his job. Fed up with his listless behavior, his parents kick him out of the house. Adam gets drunk at the local bar, decides his situation is intolerable, and takes off down the alley vowing to beat up the first person he sees. Lucky for Adam, the first person he sees happens to be a five-time rapist, and an assault that might otherwise have landed him in jail catapults him to the status of a hero, a role he becomes increasingly comfortable with, even after the public loses interest.

You can't knock the premise on this one, nor the casting of Haas, who has the perfect face for the role, nor the stupendous performance of Giovanni Ribisi as Vic, the creepy local drug-dealer, who quickly becomes one of Adam's worst enemies, yet the film suffers from being too in your face with its convictions, always pushing its agenda at the expense of plausibility.

Ever since Taxi Driver, American movies have fascinated themselves with the unlikely superhero, whose obsession with justice leads him or her into vigilantism, into working outside of the box. Within this tradition, Gardener of Eden takes a bold stance, going so far as to suggest that the heroes in our midst are not only inhibited by society, but are flat-out unwanted. I admire the effort, but I'm less impressed by the movie's lack of confidence in our capacity to grasp this concept for ourselves. The dialogue is forced, and the situations often come across feeling contrived or inauthentic, all a by-product of the movie's clumsy and excessive effort to drive its message home.

The Cake Eaters (2007)

Mature, thoughtful drama

[8/10 · 7 September 2008]

In a backwater town in upstate New York, Georgia Kaminski (Kristin Stewart), a teenage girl with a terminal nervous disorder, finds herself torn between the frivolity of her grandmother (Elizabeth Ashley) and overly protective mother who, in the hopes of bringing awareness and humanity to her daughter's disease, takes controversial photos of Georgia in the nude. Several miles away, aspiring musician Guy Kimbrough (Jayce Bartok) returns to the house of estranged father Easy (Bruce Dern) and younger brother Beagle (Aaron Stanford), trying to hide the secret of his failure to make it big. Easy is the town butcher, recently widowed, with secrets of his own, while Beagle, the kid who never left home, has surrendered his life to the care of his father and late mother, and struggles to find an identity of his own. Kaminskis and Kimbroughs conjoin dramatically when Georgia, hoping to find love in her life, and to find it before it's too late, courts the affection of Beagle, whom she meets at an outdoor flea market. The innocent but contentious relationship causes a series of reckonings, as both families are forced to contend with the heaps of emotional baggage that have piled up in their lives.

Masterson keeps it real with this one. The drama is understated, the tension is subtle, and the characters are both distinct and believable. Hats off to Kristin Stewart, who manages to be a dozen things at once – tragic but not pitiful, strong, endearing, funny, unconventionally sexy, and none of the clichés we've grown to associate with any of Hollywood's notorious mental illnesses. Remaining hats to Bruce Dern, a long-time favorite of mine, who keeps a lid on things and never fails to command our respect, even as his character slides deeper into dubious behavior.

In many ways, the film's strengths almost become its undoing. The sustained, understated quality of the storytelling prevents the movie from having any kind of real climax, and the immaculate tension set up in the first hour of the movie never quite pays off in a way I would like. That said, it's still a beautiful film, a capstone of movie-making maturity, and deserves the widest audience possible.

Modern Times (1936)

At the mercy of the machine

[8/10 · 7 September 2008]

It's 1930s America. The unemployment rate is sky high, the strikes are constant, and the unions and police force are in an undeclared state of war. Adrift in the chaos, the Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) wanders in and out of jail, from one short-lived job to another, at the mercy of his nerves and his penchant for explosive accidents. During one of his many run-ins with the cops, he meets up with the gamin (Paulette Goddard) a poor but feisty patron of the streets. In love, in abject poverty, with nothing to hold onto but each other, they struggle to carve out a life for themselves, in spite of the odds and the brutal demands of a slapstick comedy.

Unlike City Lights, my favorite Chaplin film, the screwball moments in Modern Times began to feel extraneous, and had me glancing at my watch, waiting to get back to the meat of the story. I've always loved Chaplin, but loved him for his skill as a director and actor, for his uncanny ability to make beautiful women look natural and unadorned, and for his knack at presenting poignant satire without ever sounding preachy, and not because I find him especially funny. The childish romp through the department sore is whimsical, heartwarming, and more than a little forlorn, but less can be said of the Tramp's accident-prone attempts to aid the master mechanic, which, like many sequences in the movie, feels overdrawn, and a little superficial compared to the weightier material it supplants.

Sometimes I found myself wondering if the film could benefit from a hack job or two, yet it was never irksome enough to get between the movie and its reputation, for indeed, Modern Times is every bit of the classic it's purported to be. Chaplin was a man of great endings, and the ending of Modern Times – first its triumph, then its tragedy – leaves little to be desired. Also great are the opening scenes at the factory, which feel just as creepy today as they must have felt in 1936.

Iron Man (2008)

The best superhero movie of 2008

[8/10 · 29 August 2008]

And no, I'm not one of those people who hated The Dark Knight. I'm just one of those people who liked Iron Man better.

It all plays into that age-old debate about whether or not art should transcend politics. Some say yea, some say nay. Personally, I feel that politics have become such an inextricable part of our daily lives that any movie that feigns indifference ultimately deludes itself. The Joker's ruminations on good and evil and the ethical dilemmas of heroes are fascinating, but they're still predominantly abstract and apolitical. By contrast, Iron Man, in its brooding take on weapons control, terrorism, and the corruptive influence of the First World, is more specific, more relevant, and, in my opinion, significantly gutsier. The Dark Knight spins one hell of a good yarn, one of the best of the year, but in the final analysis, there's nothing especially original in its underlying message – that heroism is relative, and that all souls are crooked. As far as messages go, there's nothing especially original in Iron Man either, but at least it has the fortitude to keep its feet on the ground, to not be another one of those Hollywood blockbusters that distracts its viewers from what's actually happening in the world.

Lucky thing, that's not all the film has going for it. Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Robert Downey Jr. are all perfectly cast in their respective roles, and the dynamic between them - the bookends in particular - is perfect. The Dark Knight and Batman Begins take themselves way too seriously, seeming to forget to the fact that, when all is said in done, their lead character is still a man in a bat suit who drives a campy car. The Iron Man, to its credit, recognizes the inescapable cheesiness that will always exist at the heart of a superhero film, and pokes fun at its own genre, even while keeping its sights on the seriousness of its subject matter.

If I gave the movie an 8 instead of a 9, it's only because I was a little underwhelmed by the final battle sequence, but then again, this movie isn't really about battles, and neither was The Dark Knight. Neither felt the need to capitulate to cheap thrills, which is why both movies, regardless of which film you ultimately endorse, deserve to be remembered among the finest in the genre.

City Lights (1931)

Seventy years old and still a powerhouse

[9/10 · 29 August 2008]

The infamous Tramp (Charlie Chaplin) befriends a sightless flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) and vows to cure her blindness. Every penny as poor as the girl is, he embarks on a series of misanthropic adventures that transport him from the center of a boxing ring to the house of an eccentric millionaire (Harry Myers), who shuns the Tramp when sober and treasures his company when drunk. All the while, the flower girl, unable to see his face, mistakes the Tramp for a rich philanthropist, unable to believe that one so destitute could care so deeply for the woes of another.

City Lights joins an embarrassingly long list of films that moved me to tears, though not, perhaps, for the typical reasons. On an absolute level, there's something profoundly touching in the Tramp's devotion to the blind girl, but I found myself even more caught up in what Chaplin seemed to be saying about class. That the rich characters are only capable of empathy when alcohol levels the playing field is only one part of the critique. That the Tramp exists in a moral vacuum, that the needs of others are a constant inspiration for everything he does, that his lack of attachments enables him to come to the rescue not only of the flower girl but of the millionaire himself, whose attempted suicide would have been successful if the Tramp hadn't intervened . . . these are just a few of the reasons for why Chaplin's hobo-protagonist is, ironically, the wealthiest character in the movie. Thematically speaking, it's a well-worn path (the charitable bum versus the miserly aristocrat) yet Chaplin attacks the subject in such a simple, exacting, and unobtrusive way that we forget we've encountered it before. We don't come away feeling like we've swallowed a sermon with characters attached to it. We feel like we've witnessed something fresh and new, something funny and tearful and void of baggage.

Rare is the movie that combines comedy and drama quite so fluently. While farcical sequences often distract from the film in question, Chaplin's slapstick actually underscores the drama, since the more ridiculous the Tramp's situation becomes, the more impressed we are at the lengths he'll go to in the service of his friend. And the performances in the final scene are about as good as any of seen, if only because they work with so little, and still say so much.

The Curse of Lizzie Borden 2: Prom Night (2008 Video)

Literally as bad as it gets

[1/10 · 29 August 2008]

(Not that there's anything to spoil, but I'm disturbed by how many negative comments about this movie have gotten deleted, so I decided to cover my bases. Moving on . . .)

It was late. I was tired. My friend and I were working on a project of some kind or another. We put this on in the background so we'd have something to fill the room's oppressive quiet. Conclusion: better to go with silence.

This isn't the B-rated movie it pretends to be. It's not C-rated. It's not F-rated. It's an insult to ratings. It's an insult to letters.

Yes, the movie has a shoestring budget, but the film's creators and sparse apologists hide behind this detail, and use it to excuse their blunders. This annoys me to no end. First, I have known many a film student who's done tremendously more with tremendously less, and this piece of garbage gives their efforts a bad name. It's a disgrace to every piece of something that ever came out of nothing, and it spreads that bad name through the inexplicable medium of Netflix.

Secondly, you can only blame the budget for so much garbage before the argument starts wearing thin. Sure, special effects will probably look cheesy no matter how hard you try, but when your movie manages to hit every false note in creation, and hits it multiple times, it begins to bespeak a much bigger problem than a mere dearth of dollars and cents.

For me, the worst part of the experience was watching the movie (if you can even call it that) and waiting for the ax-wielding protagonist to pull off a single believable swing. And I'm not trying to come across like a backwoods elitist critiquing the subtleties of technique. I'm talking about tangible proof that anyone involved in the production had ever once in their lives seen a human being swing an ax, in person or on screen. I remember thinking I'd forgive the movie for all its countless offenses if once, just one solitary time, I'd see Lizzie swing the ax without holding the handle at both ends, see her swing it in such a way that her victim got something more serious than a light dent in the center of their foreheads.

Needless to say, it didn't happen, and I still feel sick.

Black Book (2006)

Less breasts, more coherence

[4/10 · 22 August 2008]

Let's play a game: you're a well-known Nazi commander hiding out in the Netherlands, 1945. The country is free and the other Nazis are fleeing the ship like a pack of hydrophobic rats. You're in uniform, and you're carrying a gun, and I guess we accept the fact that you're stupid enough to walk into the middle of a parade of Dutch nationals championing the overthrow of everything you stood for, because you've renounced Nazism and you're trying to save a Jewish woman from harm, and maybe you're naïve enough to think that everyone in the street is magically aware of this. Suddenly, a faceless someone tries to assassinate you and escapes into the throng. What do you do? A. let the guy escape, on the grounds that any attempt to pursue him will invite the attention of thousands of people who want you dead, or B., decide it's a good idea to fire your gun in the air, hoping to clear a path through the crowd, and apparently forgetting that doing so will make you the center of attention of every single person in the square.

Those who picked A are part of that sad minority of moviegoers that expects this film to make a modicum of sense. Sorry to say, you'll be a trifle disappointed.

Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is a young Jewish darling living in the Netherlands during the Second World War. After falling in with a wing of the Dutch Resistance, she uses her fair skin and blonde hair to pass herself off as a gentile. Under the direction of Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), a charismatic resistance leader with secrets of his own, she sleeps her way into the favor of Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch), an oxymoronic Nazi-with-a-heart, whom she intends to assassinate, but eventually adores.

When the movie isn't hitting you overhead with a plot that's shoddy enough for a baby to attack, it's bombarding you with nudity and stylized violence at a level that redefines gratuitous, and if my opening citation is the most offensive example of the story's stupidity, there are plenty of others to go with it.

Take the ill-fated escape of Akkermans, the not-so-surprising villain. The whole plan rests on his ability to successfully play dead in a closed coffin, which strikes me as something of a no-brainer, but is apparently too tricky for the party in question. Akkermans panics at the first sign of trouble, bangs on the roof of the coffin, and shouts, "what's going on up there?" loud enough for the whole vengeful world to hear. And we're supposed to believe this guy? Give me a freaking break.

Speaking more generally, I'm sick and tired of how rarely we encounter movies where the female spy-character relies on some other method beyond sexual seduction. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution was a much better film, but did nothing to break the pattern. Again and again, in spy movies, detective movies, and stories of espionage, male characters rely on their wits and fortitude while the women whore themselves off to gullible sex fiends who frequently steal their hearts. Are we really so backward that even our most respected directors must continually commodify the woman as we know her? And is our situation really so entrenched that I can't even raise these kinds of question without feeling like I'm mowing over finely cut grass? "Yes" to both 1 and 2, and a resounding thumbs down to the movie in question.

Or maybe not quite.

In the last four or five minutes, the film gets unexpectedly mature, perhaps the only reason why I rated it as highly as I did. Had Verhoeven handled the ending the way he'd handled the rest of the movie, Rachel would have shot all her enemies to pieces and walked naked into the sunset, but somehow or other, the filmmakers came to their senses and took the realistic outing. The heroes get their revenge . . . and they're left with nothing but bitterness. There's no sense of redemption, no closure of any kind. This is precisely the kind of ending a war movie needs.

On an added note, The Black Book wisely avoids a tenet all too common in Holocaust films: the assumption that anti-Semitism magically disappeared with the fall of the Third Reich. In Verhoeven's film, the war ends and the hatred keeps thriving. Rachel trades in Nazi persecution for persecution by the gentile Dutch. Like any victim of war, her suffering is timeless, universal. Much like this movie might have been if Verhoeven directed from somewhere above the waist.

Blood Diamond (2006)

Almost great. So close.

[7/10 · 20 August 2008]

Solomon Vandy (Djimon Honsou) is a local fisherman in 1990s Sierra-Leone, whose son Dia Vandy (Kagiso Kuypers) has been captured by the RUF. Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Rhodesian diamond smuggler coming slowly to terms with the corruptive nature of his enterprise. Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is a maverick American journalist striving to expose the war's atrocities and dodging no punches in doing so. Their lives thrown together by the traumas of the nation, they embark on a harrowing odyssey that takes them from one side of the spectrum to the other, from the war's most rudimentary horrors to the corporate diamond dealers working behind the curtains, Bowen in search of the mother-lode story, Archer in search of the mother-lode diamond, and Vandy in search of his son, whom the rebels have turned into a soldier.

The film dives headfirst into the horrors of the conflict, but does so responsibly, without ever losing its sense of direction. The plot, while bordering on convolution, makes adequate use of all its characters, and manages to address nearly all of the war's most prominent attributes without feeling forced or unnatural.

On a visceral level, the film fares especially well. The battle scenes are superbly shot, the use of color is amazing, and the machine gun fire is so encompassing that it went on rattling in my head a full three hours after I walked out of the theater. Hollywood, in its anti-war persuasion, has a long-standing tradition of removing all the glamour and virtue from the battlefield, but the one thing it hasn't transplanted, at least not measurably, is war itself. The class of conflict we see in Blood Diamond – far from the battlefield, far from the domain of soldiers and trained professionals, and far, even, from the needs and ideals of the people in its shadow – is, for the most part, uncharted territory. In their chaos, brutality, and total lack of redemption, Zwick's battle sequences show us just how low civil conflict can sink, to a greater extent than any other movie I can think of. The scenes depicting the child soldiers and their mental conditioning are of a piece all their own, and can't be praised enough.

Yet for all its merits, there's still something rotten at the heart of the movie, and it has something to do with the dynamic between Archer and Vandy, Archer dominant, Vandy subservient. It's Archer who leads the operation, Archer who makes all the crucial decisions, Archer who saves the day whenever the going gets tough, and Vandy who wanders dutifully behind, distinguishing himself only by his way of his blunders.

And that's just the beginning.

At one point, the two pilgrims express their bewilderment at the savagery and frequency of African conflicts. It's a perfect opportunity to pose questions about the ongoing effects of European colonialism, but Zwick chooses instead to leave the question unanswered, and even goes a little in the opposite direction, suggesting that the African psychology might be inherently violent.

But it's not the implied racism of these details that bothers me so much as their distraction from what the movie should inherently be about – the Sierra Leonians and their struggle for survival. It's their future at stake. Their nation. Their diamonds. Their war. As such, it should be their story that we're focusing on, but instead, we get the story of an outsider, and experience the war from his point-of-view. Danny Archer is, beyond doubt, an interesting figure, and so is Maddy Bowen, if somewhat woodenly portrayed. We definitely want them in the movie, but we want them in supporting roles, not prancing about in the foreground. The core of the story should be Vandy's search for his son, not Archer's search for redemption. Maybe then the film would do a better job of emulating the resilience and fortitude of the African people, and not just the horror and bloodshed that is all too often a feature of their lives.

Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story (2004)

Light-hearted satire

[7/10 · 18 August 2008]

In a good-natured attack on the ever-popular sports biopic, Brant Sersen's Blackballed tells the story of a once-legendary paintball player who commits the game's most capital offense – wiping off a paint-stain to conceal being hit. His memory tarnished, his career in shambles, Dukes attempts the comeback of a lifetime, recruiting a group of youngsters who have always lived in his shadow, fighting for his name, and the name of the sport he loves.

Blackballed isn't exactly award-winning material, but then again, it doesn't pretend to be. Everyone involved with the project is clearly having fun, and no one entertains any delusions about the social impact of their efforts, so I'm not really inclined to be critical. Yes, the movie begins to feel a little self-indulgent at times, but I'm a sucker for the mockumentary genre, and the actors do an excellent job with the deadpan humor. I'm also amused by the purposefully clichéd use of hand-held cameras in the combat sequences, a clear knock against Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, movies that are also self-indulgent, but are much less honest about it.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

Overrated in the extreme

[6/10 · 18 August 2008]

Ben Harper (Peter Graves) steals $10,000 and leaves the money in the keeping of his children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), hoping they might one day find their way out of the economic trauma of the Depression-era South. John knows where the money is hidden, but Harper has sworn him to secrecy, a move John quickly resents when posing preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) comes to town. Powell shared a cell with Harper, who, immediately after hiding the money, was arrested for murder and armed robbery. Ben is executed, and the wicked Powell, released from jail, moves in on Willa (Shelly Winters), Harper's gullible widow, hoping to draw out the secret of the money's location. As tensions mount, it becomes progressively clear that the only hope for the children's salvation rests with regional matriarch and philanthropist Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) who always keeps her doors open for displaced youngsters.

It's not often that I'm stumped by the question of why a classic is a classic, but thanks to Night of the Hunter, I know it's not unthinkable. Yes, the cinematography is amazing, even by the standards of film noir, but the pace is rushed, the plot is a walking disaster, and the characters – if we can call them that – more closely resemble flotsam.

The movie opens with Gish's disembodied head floating on a backdrop of stars, the drifting heads of children listening with rapt attention to her formulaic Bible-talk. Even if we grasp the intended irony of the moment – a dreamy segue into a deadly nightmare – there's no escaping how God-blastedly cheesy the image looks, how it feels more like a presage to Sesame Street or an eighties sit-com than a purportedly moving work of horror. As an intro, it destroys any precedent for subtlety. We're less than a minute into the movie and it's already abundantly clear that our storytellers have absolutely no faith in our ability to figure anything out for ourselves.

The trend continues with the introduction of Harry Powell. Eschewing what could have been a very creepy experience – encountering the dark side of Powell in a slow, subtle, and action-driven manner – Powell hits us over the head with a string of didactic monologues, our occasion for discovery smashed right at the outset. Ben Harper, by contrast, is dispensed with so quickly we're barely aware of his presence. He's a completely wasted opportunity, a perfunctory McGuffin for an even more perfunctory plot. The movie would have been much more powerful if John had gone through the story haunted by the memory of a loving father who died in a desperate act to provide for him. Instead, Harper's only function is to set the story in motion, and as soon as he does this, he disappears from view and from memory.

Willa Harper is even more obnoxious. A pivotal factor in the story, Willa's fanatic devotion to Powell is the main instigation of everything else that follows, but because we never get a sense of who Willa was prior to Powell's arrival, her devotion feels unfounded, her behavior seems unreasonable, and, as a consequence, everything else in the story feels like it's balancing on thin air. Why is this woman so easily brainwashed? Why does Powell consistently come out on top? Every single plot-point is, at best, the product of characters acting mysteriously, and at worst, the product of characters behaving in a manner completely opposed to reason. How an entire town can get swept up in the patently obvious lies of a figure like Powell is beyond me, especially to the extent that they side against their own. There's nothing particularly strategic about Powell's methods, nor is he notably charismatic or even all that bright. He constantly loses his temper, performs actions so rash and brainless you'd expect immediate rejoinder, and holds among his many beliefs the bone-headed conviction that the best way to track down a fugitive is to ride through open country and sing at the top of his lungs. Yet Powell always gets way, because the rest of the universe is too stupid to stop him, and it's precisely this idiocy that drives the story forward, not the heroes, and certainly not the villain.

Which brings me to the last point: acting, i.o.w. what the devil is everyone smoking? I respect Robert Mitchum a great deal, but his performance as Powell is woefully over-the-top, in-your-face, and not the least bit compelling. Gish is great, but the credits start rolling before she's even gotten her feet on the ground. Shelly Winters is a tremendous actress, and she does her best as Willa, but again, the character is so poorly written that she comes across feeling like a mariner who's been thrown off the edge of a ship, floundering for all she's worth, but no match for the dead-weight of the screenplay, which drags her to the bottom and feels no remorse. Worst of all is Chapin as John, suffering from prolifically delayed reaction time, always lagging at least a second-and-a-half behind whatever he's supposed to be responding to. Expressions of shock and anger seem to come out of nowhere, a clear indication of his being taught to look and act in a particular way at a particular moment without anyone telling him why. I'm not blaming the kid for this. I'm blaming Charles Laughton, who found children so dislikable he dumped them all on Mitchum, who did his best to direct them, but was clearly not up to the punch.

All in all, I'm at a loss as to why this movie continues to garner such widespread acclaim, save the unfortunate reality that the herd mentality of movie criticism discourages any kind of dissension, so we continue trumpeting the virtues of fossils, long after they've outlived their usefulness.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Deserves its reputation . . . almost

[8/10 · 12 August 2008]

In a hopping community, straddling the Mexican-American border, a car bomb explodes on U.S. soil, killing both passengers, and rudely arresting the honeymoon of American tourist Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) and bigwig Mexican police official Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) who witness the explosion from a distance. Someone planted the bomb on the Mexican side of the border, and the car exploded after driving through customs, giving the murder international implications. In order to solve the mystery and avoid any diplomatic complications, Miguel must team up with the infamous Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), whose shady tactics, fiery temper, and disregard for the law make him a genuine force to be reckoned with.

Quinlan is that rare cinematic presence who manages to be thoroughly despicable yet oddly sympathetic at the same precarious moment. You hate the guy – his cruelty, his racism, and his flagrant perversion of legality – yet every iota of contempt finds its match in sympathy. In pity, even. His slow surrender to alcoholism and the rawness of his past keep tugging away at our hear-strings, even as he establishes himself as the one character we most want destroyed. That the duplicity of his tactics eclipses the very mystery he's purportedly solving – who set off the bomb, and why – testifies even further to the uniqueness of his character, and his offbeat function in the narrative. In Quinlan's shoes, Welles commands every scene he's in, but gets plenty of help from Marlene Dietrich – gorgeous as a brunette – and from Joseph Calleia, whose portrayal of Quinlan's meek-mannered sidekick is both memorable and tragic.

Touch of Evil deserves its status as a classic, but I'd feel more comfortable declaring it such were it not for Senior Heston and his supposed portrayal of a Mexican. The actor's refusal to even attempt an accent is more than a trifle annoying, and to make matters worse, the Mexican cast is excellent across the board. Any one of their number would have been a better choice for Vargas, but since they were all relative unknowns, and since Touch of Evil was a Heston movie before it was anything else, we're left with a protagonist we can never accept, an irksome intrusion on an otherwise perfect movie.

WALL·E (2008)

Not Pixar's best, by any stretch of the imagination

[7/10 · 12 August 2008]

It's the future, folks, and once again, life on Earth is a shoddy bit of business. Environmental abuses have destroyed the planet, human beings have spent the last 700 years getting morbidly obese while cruising naively through space in an interstellar ocean liner, and the only sentient entities left on the mother planet are cockroaches (the only apparent life-forms) and Wall-E, a tiny robot whose job it is to clean up trash. He's been doing this for centuries, long past the point where his original mission was abandoned, but without any orders to countermand his initial instructions, he must continue on his course, and does so, dutifully and without complaint.

That is, until the unexpected arrival of Eve, a significantly more advanced robot, who flies in from space and tours the surface of the Earth, apparently looking for life. Glad for the company, Wall-E befriends the newcomer and shares his recent and miraculous discovery: a plant of some kind, growing inside a boot. Subsequent adventures return Eve to the Axiom, the aforementioned ocean liner, with Wall-E in tow. Therein, the two must resolve a dispute between the Captain of the ship, who sees the plant and wants to re-colonize Earth, and Co-Pilot, an automated navigation system that refuses to deviate from ancient instructions labeling Earth life-threatening.

It's a good movie all in all, but it's not good enough, at least not for my taste.

I take my sci-fi seriously. It's a fault of mine, and I willingly admit it. I don't like cute robots, I don't like explosions that are audible in space, and I'm highly annoyed with the overwhelming mass of thinly supported "space fantasy" that's given the genre a light-hearted, superficial, and escapist tone, marginalizing such intellectual literary greats as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and preventing science fiction from ever receiving the respect and recognition it deserves.

Wall-E is certainly better than the average offender. Astonishing visuals, a solid sense of humor, and the good old Pixar charm combine to make it one of the more enjoyable films of the summer. I was especially amused with the Apple references: Wall-E's Macintosh startup sound, the ubiquitous iPod design, the use of MacInTalk for Co-Pilot's voice, et cetera. Like Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and the rest of the Pixar canon, there's a lot of depth to the movie, more than enough to lift it above the shoulders of standard kiddy fair.

Unfortunately, no amount of glamour could distract me from the plethora of unanswered questions that by the end of the movie had piled up higher than Wall-E's towers of junk. Why, for instance, would Wall-E's designers make him capable of empathy, when the tediousness of his job description made any kind of emotion a severe liability? As an emotional creature, how could he spend 700 years performing history's most repetitive task without going insane? Why would a perfunctory probe like Eve come equipped with facial expressions and the capacity for romance? What were the cockroaches feeding on if Earth had been lifeless for seven centuries? What can you make of a robot strong enough to hang onto the outside of a spaceship blasting into orbit but weak enough to get taken out by a handful of shopping carts? Why would the passengers of the Axiom slide down the slope of the deck when the ship clearly created its own gravity and, as such, could assume any number of positions in space without anyone on the inside of the ship ever knowing the difference? And how could a society of obese layabouts with seventy decades of sloth at their backs so quickly warm to the challenge of "re-colonizing Earth?" Sure, it's a G-rated cartoon, and children are the primary audience, and part of me feels like a nit-picking A-hole to even think about getting this technical, but I can't shake the feeling that Stanton could have invested a little more in the way of plausibility without making his movie any less appealing. The kids would still have been happy, the fantasy lovers wouldn't have known the difference, and the small batch of sci-fi curmudgeons like myself could have basked in the certainty that finally a director cared enough about our interests to pitch us a story we believed.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

Haunting, horrific . . . a monster movie in all but the genre

[10/10 · 12 August 2008]

Her father dead and her family bankrupt, 19-year-old Songlian (Gong Li) relents to her stepmother's calls for marriage. She drops out of school and becomes the concubine of Master Chen (Jingwu Ma) a wealthy merchant, who welcomes her into his household, lavishing her with treatment more luxurious than any she has known. Yet luxury, as always, comes with a price, and the three other mistresses in the master's house (Caifei He, Cuifen Cao, and Jin Shuyuan) are less than enthusiastic about the sudden presence of an attractive young rival. To make matters worse, Chen decides, on a daily basis, which of his four concubines will receive his nocturnal patronage. The woman he settles on receives all the services the house has to offer, and the women who come up short are summarily forgotten. Consequently, the women must jockey for position, all vying for the privilege of the titular lanterns, lit outside the house of whatever woman is lucky enough to receive the master's company.

Raise the Red Lantern – a genuine masterpiece – bears the fruit of the planet's last three-strip Technicolor lab, located in Shanghai, and you can't so much as glance at the screen without noticing the difference. Lanterns dangle from the eves of the buildings and burn with lavish brilliance. The brightly clad protagonists leap from the backdrop of drab-colored stones. The lights of the houses glisten in the intermittent blizzards of oncoming winter. Every single frame in the entire movie is enough to make the mouth water, yet for all its deliciousness, it's never the beauty of what we're looking at that holds our attention so much as the ambiguity of that which remains off-screen. We never see the entrance to Master Chen's massive, sprawling compound, nor do we get a clear idea of its size, its layout, or its exact population. It appears to have no limits, expanding outward to infinity, encompassing all of China. Becoming China. Master Chen, for his part, is something of an enigma. At no point in the film do we get a clear look at his face. He's more concept than creature, inseparable from the oppressive rules of his house, from the dictums of tradition, from Chinese society at large.

For China, the 1920s was a time of collision, between ancient traditions and the rumbling of modernity, between entrenched patriarchy and the almost teasing suggestion that women might begin taking stock in their fortunes. The protagonists of Lantern, and Songlian in particular, bear the brunt of this clash. Caught between the promise of freedom and the reality of servitude, they can only find power in the privileges of the house, and yet the more they exploit these privileges, the more the privileges control them.

Yimou goes to great lengths to remind us of this fact, jerking us back and forth between long shots and close-ups, from beginning to end. Long shots create an almost Kubrickean sense of emptiness, dwelling on vast, impersonal spaces in which characters seem to vanish against their will. Close-ups zero in on all the incidental details that make up the daily routine – the foot massages and the preparation of the afternoon meals – all facets of the unassailable dead weight of tradition. Editing the film in this way makes us feel like there's no relief from the prison, regardless of our perspective, regardless of where we're at in relation to the subject at hand. Even the sound effects begin to feel like wardens. The clack of the foot massage, the eerie rush of the lanterns getting blown out in the morning, the periodic voice of the compound crier, announcing where the lanterns are to be lit, and who will receive the privileges that go with it . . . all of it creates an incessant sense of continuum. An unbroken cycle. A pursuer that never gets tired.

I could go on and on with my praise, but doing so would be insult to the strength of Yimou's storytelling. Watch it, love it, and ask yourself why the devil they don't make movies like this all the time.

Straw Dogs (1971)

A riveting and eerily plausible thriller

[9/10 · 29 July 2008]

With the help of a research grant, timid astrophysicist David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) travels to England with British wife Amy (Susan George.) Hoping to escape the violent protests of Vietnam-era America, the two settle down in Amy's hometown, a tiny village in Cornwall, where less-than-friendly locals take it upon themselves to make their lives a living hell.

There's a list a mile long of all the things that work in this movie, but the single biggest contributor is Peckinpah's refusal to cut corners.

Many a movie that bills itself on the basis of its climax forgets that crescendos are a privilege and not a right; that they must be earned, that they must be paid for. Do the Right Thing, great though it is, never fully invests itself in the question of why this particular hot day is the catalyst for disaster when so many other hot days have come and gone without incident. While the climax might conceivably develop from the events depicted, an abundance of unanswered questions leaves it feeling more like writer's convenience, and less like natural construction.

With Straw Dogs, the outcome is both possible and inevitable, and Peckinpah has us convinced of that fact within the first ten minutes of the running time. In ten minutes flat, we have the perfect storm of troubled marriages, the Sumners just passionate enough to excite the ire of a former lover, and just defunct enough to preclude the kind of unity they need to stand strong. We have a town in shambles, where the lawman is impotent and the closest approximation to a moral authority is an ill-tempered drunkard whose son is a rapist. We have a band of hooligan locals, tied to the married couple by a rubber stamp construction job (a garage that's never finished) and led by Amy's one-time Charlie Venner (Del Henney) who get their kicks out of exploiting David's apparent lack of virility and drive a wedge into the already fraught relationship in the hopes of getting Amy alone. We have unanimous contempt for the American outsider, and shame for the English woman who lowered herself by marrying him. We have a town madman whom the entire village is clamoring to kill, along with whoever else gets in their way, and last but not least, we have the ubiquitous glass of whiskey to push people past the breaking point when every other aggravating factor fails, all this rendered naturally and believably in the first ten minutes of the film. The rest of the movie is one big bi-product, the story flowing from A to B to C, each plot point a direct consequence of the one preceding it, everything building steadily and irrevocably to one of the most horrific and well-earned climaxes in cinematic history.

Hoffman's performance as the high-strung astrophysicist edging closer and closer to the brink is one of the best of his career, if only because of its subtlety, its slow transformation. Susan George is, in some ways, even stronger than Hoffman. A boiling pot of rage and frustration, her character is truly heart wrenching, especially in the latter half of the film, as she struggles to rise above her morbid abuse. Best of all, the two actors behave as if they were actually married to each other, assuming all the tricks and gestures and mannerisms of that extreme, almost destructive level of physical comfort, something we rarely see in Hollywood matrimony.

Straw Dogs is a spectacular film and a terrific western, adhering, as it does, to nearly ever convention of the genre. In the final analysis, David Sumner is just another gunman goaded into a showdown. The Scottish bagpipes at the apex of the movie, not unlike the horns that start playing whenever the gunslinger steps out of the saloon, drone away in haunting irony as David moves across the room, trance-like, his latent savagery shaking its way into wakefulness. With expert care, with every note true, Peckinpah frees the western from its moorings in 19th-century America and transports it to England, betraying both the timelessness of violence and – unfortunately – its international character.

Infernal Affairs (2002)

The overshadowed original

[8/10 · 25 July 2008]

Chan Wing-Yan, a devoted cop, goes undercover. His objective: to find the mole who's been leaking police proceedings to Hon Sam, the veritable emperor of the Hong Kong underworld. Lau Kin-Ming, Hon Sam's right-hand man, infiltrates the police department, hoping to blow the lid off the mysterious fink who always tips off the authorities right when the stakes are highest. The moles, of course, are one and the other, and as each mole's pursuit leads him closer to his counterpart, the odds wind down for a bloodless conclusion.

The Departed, Scorsese's Oscar-winning remake, was mistakenly announced at the 79th Academy Awards as the adaptation of a Japanese movie, a harsh example of how marginalized Andrew Lau' original had already become. I loved The Departed, and I'm the first to admit it. While perhaps the better film from the standpoint of editing, writing, and narrative complexity, its strengths are less the product of artistic clairvoyance and more the perks inevitably included in the writing of a second draft; the perks that come from approaching the work of another artist and, with the benefits of hindsight and a modicum of distance, making a tweak here and a tweak there and pushing the story to a subsequent level of excellence.

To be sure, the original has it downsides. The flashbacks are annoying, the music is cheesy, and the melodramatic deaths of Wong and Wing-Yan are vastly inferior to the heart-stopping abruptness of corresponding fatalities in Departed, but so many of the moments that made Scorsese's film great – the cell phone motif, the intro, the spectacular finale of mole vs. mole – are modeled so closely on the original that "adaptation" starts to feel like an understatement.

This leaves Infernal operating on two levels, first forcing the virgin viewer to step back and re-evaluate Departed as translation rather than re-make, then standing apart from its successor, drawing us in, letting us dwell on all the scenes that still feel original, scenes Scorsese chose to abandon.

Perhaps the strongest of these moments sees the moles meeting one another in a pawnshop, Chan-Ying working the store, Kin-Ying shopping for speakers, the two sitting down together to enjoy an epoch of quiet respite, neither aware of the other's identity. Later on – with Scorsese selling out for the zero-sum game, all parties dead or dying – Lau takes a more thought-provoking exit, allowing Kin-Ying to survive the final showdown, leaving the viewer to ponder questions of guilt and atonement, to wonder how long it will take before Ying's demons catch up with him.

Both Leung and Lau give strong performances, and weighty assistance from the supporting cast fills out the edges of this explosively original film. I'm left hoping that Infernal Affairs will win out in the long run, and stand outside of Scorsese's shadow. Failing that, I hope subsequent billings for The Departed will at least give Hong Kong its due, and leave off thanking Japan.

Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (2007)

Weak on writing, but gorgeous to watch

[7/10 · 25 July 2008]

The first installment of a prospective trilogy, Mongol chronicles the early life of Temudjin, from his childhood on the Asian steppe to his ascension to Khan in 1206.

The performances are passable – with special thanks to Honglei Sun, with an engaging turn as Temudjin's long-time friend and ally Jamukha – but the film has a rushed quality to it that is predominantly the fault of the screenplay. We jump too quickly from one scene to the next, the tension is constantly disrupted, and the characters are, for the most part, one-dimensional, void of quirks and personal histories and any of the other qualities that might make them relatable. I'm not asking for anything fancy: theirs was a tribal culture constantly engaged in the act of survival, and any philosophical rants or emotive confessionals would feel forced and inorganic, but none of that pardons the film for the simple crime of not giving its characters enough to do. The needs of the plot seem to dictate their actions, rather than the needs of the characters driving the plot.

The biggest casualty, as always, is the love story. Ironically enough, Temudjin and Borte generate the most chemistry when they meet as children, Borte commanding him – with a freeness of spirit that gets less and less visible as the movie progresses – to pick her as his bride. Unfortunately, their subsequent romance is more about desperate rescues and long-winded goodbyes than it is the simple moments of intimacy that make a relationship believable.

That said, the cinematography is tremendous and the costumes top-notch, and the casting department deserves a couple extra bushels of brownie points for picking actors who – unlike many a Hollywood ensemble – look like they could actually survive the conditions they supposedly inhabit. The combat scenes are captivating and cleverly shot, and despite the inevitable comparison to such battle-heavy epics as Lord of the Rings and Gladiator, Bodrov keeps a handle on things, never letting any of the battles run beyond the five minute mark, endowing the film with an element of realism and restraint where many of the other so-called epics go completely over the top. True, the movie relies a bit more heavily on CGI than I would prefer, but the Mongolian landscape, the real star of the show, is so gorgeous, so demanding, so jaw-droppingly authentic that we quickly forget our visual grievances and get lost in the rudimentary act of watching.

A pity we can never lose ourselves completely.

Badlands (1973)

Malick's first and finest

[9/10 · 15 July 2008]

By 1973, "Bonnie and Clyde" had already set the tone for what quickly became one of Hollywood's favorite scenarios: the anti-social lovebirds who take to the road and leave a string of corpses in their wake. If "Badlands" stands out from this tradition (and it does – tremendously so) it's thanks to Malick's selective appropriation of the strong points of the genre, and his careful avoidance of the rest. He spins his yarn with a constant eye for realism and restraint, exploiting neither the romance of the story nor its underlying violence, his primary concern the subtle interplay of the characters' psychologies.

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), a social burnout running garbage in Fort Dupre, South Dakota, strikes up a friendship with Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), an oddball teen living in the shadow of a cruel and domineering father (Warren Oates). As the season progresses, Kit bouncing from one dead-end job to another, the two outcasts meet in secret and gradually fall in love – or the closest thing to love their passionless demeanors can muster. The father's eventual discovery provokes a confrontation, at which point Kit calmly draws a gun and shoots to kill. Her father dead and her future uncertain, Holly chooses not to report Kit to the police, embarking instead for the open road and the life of the fugitive, Kit at the wheel, Holly riding shotgun, no one asking questions, and the bodies left to rot.

Again, it's Malick's restraint that makes this film a masterpiece. Despite its obvious greatness, "Bonnie and Clyde" seems to be in a race with itself to see how many graphic fatalities it can accumulate in a two-hour period, while the killings in "Badlands" are sparse, predominantly bloodless, and, as a consequence, much more disturbing. When Clyde kills his first innocent victim, we are more preoccupied with the sickening sight of blood on the windshield than we are with Clyde's guilt. In contrast, Kit shoots Holly's father and the man seems almost to slumber, clearing the way for Holly's eerily subdued response: "Daddy . . . Daddy . . . are you going to be okay?" The violent acts in "Bonnie and Clyde" upstage the thoughts and feelings of the characters that partake in them. The killings in "Badlands" act like subtle attractors, underscoring the chilling sense of detachment that pervades the movie from beginning to end.

Screen writing merits get substantial help from the breathtaking cinematography, and from the tremendous performances of Sheen and Spacek, which, like the script they enliven, are wondrously subtle, artfully restrained. Indeed, if any aspect of the movie borders on the overblown, it's the heavy use of voice-over narration, which is almost an act of subtlety in disguise: we get so caught up in the rhythm of Holly's easy-going, matter-of-fact exposition that we forget about all the things she's not telling us, like why she condones Kit's violence, or why she follows him into the middle of nowhere, or why she spends her days happily enjoying the affections of the very man who murdered her father. The dispassionate observer who allows one atrocity after another to go unpunished, Holly brings out a side of humanity at once reprehensible and profoundly mysterious, and yet, in another testament to Malick's writing ability, we never get the sense that she's symbolic of that tendency. Her character is far too vividly rendered to be representative of anything other than itself, in the same way the movie strives not to preach or to educate or to allegorize but to tell a story in the smoothest, richest, most unpretentious manner possible.

With George Tipton's haunting score rounding out the mixture, "Badlands" is easily one of the best films of the early 70s, and remains poignant to this day.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Not nearly as good as it could have been

[6/10 · 12 April 2007]

The premise is interesting, the acting is good, the subject matter is extremely important and more than a little malnourished in Hollywood cinema, the characters are engaging, the camera pulls it weight . . . in short, there's a lot that's working with this movie, but unfortunately, it isn't quite enough to lift it above the ravages of mediocrity.

Chief among the offenses is the fact that the entire story relies on an ill-defined protagonist, Wiesler of the Stasi, a man introduced to us as the epitome of the heartless bureaucratic killing machine who ends up capitulating to sentiment. The film tries to justify this shift by stripping Wiesler's mission of legitimacy a quarter of the way through the film: Christa-Marie (CM), one of the subjects of the investigation, is having an illicit affair with Bruno Hempf, Wiesler's superior and the authorizer of the operation. Hempf hopes to imprison Dreyman, the boyfriend of CM and Wiesler's primary subject, with no higher aim than ridding himself of a romantic rival.

This revelation – and Wiesler's disgust upon discovering it – offers adequate justification for the aging operative's loss of enthusiasm for his mission. Unfortunately, it offers no justification whatsoever for why he continues protecting Dreyman after the struggling writer actually involves himself in rebellious, anti-Governmental activities. We're left to assume that the predator fell in love with the prey, a difficult supposition, since up until this point, it's not clear that Wiesler is capable of any kind of feeling. In the opening scene, he drives a suspect to hysteria in order to obtain a trivial lead. He reports one of his students to the police because the student used the word "inhuman" to describe the Stasi's practices. He terrorizes Dreyman's neighbor into silence by threatening to interfere with her daughter's education. He chastises a co-worker repeatedly for showing up four minutes late to his shift. In short, there is nothing in Wiesler's character that suggests he is anything other than a man who lives by the book, thinks by the book, and tortures by the book, and all of his allegiances go toward the law.

Why, then, does he take pity on Dreyman? Why does he rescind on his upbringing? Why is this particular mission any different from the hundreds of others that preceded it, aside from the dubious activities of the bigwig who authorized it? If Wiesler is cracking under the pressure of his duty, why don't we see evidence of it beforehand? What separates Wiesler from his peers, who show no sign of compassion whatsoever?

Any film that relies on leaps of faith doesn't pass as art in my book. It's not believable, and it's not compelling.

Add to the equation the heavy-handed editing, the obnoxiously emotive music, and the occasional corny line ("and to think that men like you once ran a country") and you arrive at a movie that, like so many others before it, compromised its chances for greatness and stalled out blandly with "decent."

300 (2006)

Racist, nationalistic crap

[2/10 · 24 March 2007]

Don't miss the latest attraction! For ten dollars apiece (or nine, or seven, or whatever else the nearest overpriced theater charges you) you can watch the enlightened West triumph over the savage and demonic East. You can rise from your seats and scream out your adulation while the divinely endowed white conquerors hold fast against the encroaching Asian tide, saving the world from a legacy of barbarism, preserving the common good, and upholding reason in the face of corruptive eastern mysticism. You can take part in a rare and wondrous opportunity, complete with popcorn and soda, while your hard-earned dollars serve the master propagandists of Hollywood whose ongoing efforts keep the creepy ethnic and racial Other back where it belongs – in the dark, frightening universe that lurks on the far side of Greece.

That's right. I'm talking about "300," the popularity of which is yet another testimony to the woeful lack of objectivity on the part of the modern moviegoer. The film not only oversimplifies, exploits, and capitalizes on a pivotal event in world history, an act of supreme disrespect both to the Greeks and the Persians who took part in it, but also manipulates history to glorify the Greeks at the expense of their enemy, simultaneously glorifying the contemporary West at the expense of Everything Else.

Historically speaking, the Spartans were successful largely because their knowledge of the terrain exceeded that of the Persians, and because they were able to work geography to their advantage and never give up ground. In the movie, they keep on winning because . . . well, they're Spartans! They can charge into a crowd that outnumbers them an ostensible million to one, sustain a nominal amount of casualties, and reward themselves with a towering colossus of enemy corpses that promptly becomes a bonfire. Because there's not even the slightest explanation offered for how they manage this feat, we're forced to assume they win only because they're divinely ordained to do so. Fate (and/or God) wants the Spartans to be the best of the best, so it endows them with invincibility and lays the Persians to waste.

This a disgusting approach to the subject, both thematically, and in terms of the narration. Narration-wise, it eliminates suspense and destroys our ability to get invested in the characters. After all, why should we fret over a hero when we know he's always going to win? The playwrights of King Leonidas' era would have laughed this farce right off the stage (assuming it made it to the stage in the first place.)

Thematically speaking, the tactic is even more offensive. It postulates that the West will triumph over the East – indeed, that it is destined to do so – and will triumph no matter the odds. An opportune time for this message, don't you think? Especially considering the so- called leader of the West is now in the midst of a showdown with . . . huh, that's funny: Iran. Formerly known as Persia. If I were a thinking organism, I might actually consider a connection.

And by the way, did anyone notice that the Persians are not just Persian but also African, Arabic, and East Asian? That nearly every racial group that isn't white, regardless of its historical affiliation with Persia, or lack thereof, is placed on the enemy side and made to fall like cattle?

And since we're on the subject of not-so-subtle subtext, did anyone notice the fact that Xerxes' private collection of monstrosities included a lesbian couple or two? Gee! I hope I wasn't dreaming that. Since Snyder already ran the gauntlet of racist ethnocentrism, I'd really hate it if he failed to make a stab at homosexuality, another evil the noble Spartans should readily eliminate from the Earth.

This is a horrible movie, horrible in every way. Even if you strip away the shockingly racist, prejudiced, and nationalistic undertones, the film remains, at best, abysmal to the point of nausea. The tone doesn't fluctuate once in any of those infinitely protracted 117 minutes, leaving us to flounder in an endless bloodbath that all starts feeling the same mid-way through the first act. The music is over the top and inconsistent, sometimes symphonic, sometimes rock-based, but always cheesy and frequently counter-productive. The voice- over narration is uncalled for and distracting. The CGI wolf at the beginning looks terrible. So do the elephants and rhinoceros, which are dispensed with far too quickly to be anything other than an anti-climactic and extraneous plot detail. The colors are ugly. The kinetics are ugly. Xerxes is ridiculous enough to be laughable.

My only hope is that our children will forgive us for this cinematic disaster, because it's clear that our ancestors won't.

Little Children (2006)

Takes "dramedy" to new levels

[9/10 · 21 March 2007]

Fresh, witty, agonizing, original . . . another one of those gut-punching comedy-drama hybrids that manages to tell a more riveting story than either genre could aspire to on its own. Kate Winslet is magnificent. So is Jack Earle Haley. The cinematography is strong but unobtrusive. The music is sparse but compelling. The characters are original. The setting is realistic, almost terrifying in its quiet, hypocritical condescension.

Best of all is the screenplay, which makes use of an ambiguous, third-person voice-over to goad the viewer into a kind of reversed-psychology. We resent the fact that we're sitting alone in the dark listening to a faceless presence connect the dots, and so (as if to prove to ourselves that we're capable of our own deductions) we find ourselves paying closer attention. Only then do we realize the full extent of the film's objective: the deconstruction of so-called adulthood, packaged in the ironic medium of a bedtime story. By the end of the movie, the children are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong, and the storytelling medium, by its very nature, situates us in their POV. We watch, with youthful perspective, as the desperate adults become increasingly childlike. We love them as children might love, judge them as children might judge, forgive them as children forgive.

"Little Children" is a spectacular movie, but one that falls a couple inches short of perfect, thanks to the screenplay's focused attempt to bill Sarah as a homely housewife. Though consistent with the novel's portrayal of the character, Winslet's almost unanimously lauded beauty makes it a tough pill to swallow. The movie would have faired better had the screenwriters accepted her attractiveness and built the story around her social awkwardness, rather than her lack of physical self-esteem.

The Call of Cthulhu (2005)

A misunderstood masterpiece

[9/10 · 16 March 2007]

I'm not sure what I find more painful: the reviewers who slam this film because of its "lousy CGI" or those who are perceptive enough to recognize the complete absence of computer- generated imagery but find that absence problematic, backward, and somehow substandard.

To the first demographic, I repeat myself: "The Call of Cthulhu" does not feature CGI of any kind. The monster at the end was actually a puppet. The stormy ocean consisted of a suspended blanket with air jets beneath it. Congratulations on your discerning eye.

To the second gaggle of art bashers, there's a reason the filmmakers chose to bypass the computer in the making of this movie, and it actually had nothing to do with a low budget, the quick and easy assumption. When introducing "Cthulhu" at the Avignon Film Festival in New York City in November of 2006 – an event that I had the good fortune of attending – director Andrew Leman gave us the brief history of the film and explained how several attempts to bring the story to the screen in the late twenties and early thirties ultimately ended in failure. In honor of those blunted attempts, and as a tribute to the man behind the words, Leman chose to produce this movie as it might have been done in 1926, the year the story was written. The film appears in black and white, without sound, and using only those technologies that would have been available to directors of the silent era, hence the puppets, the stop-motion animation, the obviously simulated lightning, and the absence of the modern filmmaker's beloved CGI. "I'd like to think we've created something that Lovecraft could have seen and appreciated," said Leman, in so many words. "As filmmakers, I think it's the best tribute we can give him."

If this was the goal, then the endeavor succeeded enormously. "Cthulhu" is a stunning homage to silent cinema that has the added bonus of being coupled with a modern sensibility, one that approaches the story's ethnic and racial undertones with the respect they deserve, and avoids the sour notes that would inevitably have sounded had the tale met celluloid in the twenties as planned.

The movie's silent nature adds further dimension to the project by strengthening the audience's interpretative license. Viewers, in the absence of sound, are forced to develop their own visions of much of the phenomena depicted in the film, reminiscent of Lovecraft's open-ended writing style that allowed readers to find their own, personal relationship with the material and the nightmares therein.

That being said, I'm willing to concede that the film, in spite of its fidelity to silent cinema, does not follow the story as closely as it could have. However, as previously stressed, there is enough of an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of Lovecraft and the world that surrounded him that a reasonable viewer should have little trouble forgiving what is, compared to your average Hollywood adaptation, hardly a travesty.

As for the complaint that Leman and company are a pack of nerds . . . well, I can make no excuse for that, except to say that a nerd once discovered something called F=MA, and though Leman is, for obvious reasons, not exactly a Newtonian, the product of his vision is compelling enough for us not to condemn him solely on the basis of his persona.

So please, Lovers of All Things Digital, do us a favor and stop bashing things that you haven't taken the time to research properly. That way you won't turn off potential fans to remarkable and unique works of art.

Fidel (2001)

Sickeningly biased and uninformative film

[3/10 · 2 February 2007]

I am the first to admit that conventional understandings of Fidel Castro in the United States are skewed. Popular ideologies demonize his government, and communism in general. I believe that the true story of the Cuban Revolution, including the part where United States and its beloved trade embargo enter the picture and wreak havoc on all levels of Cuban society, should be made available to each and every one of us, along with all of the other parcels of world history that loudmouths in the American media have grossly oversimplified for the sake of a political agenda. Castro is not what he is typically understood to be, and I'm in favor of any film, book, or discourse that seeks to change that fact.

What I'm less fond of is starry-eyed hero-worship masquerading as reportage, especially when it has an obvious political agenda of its own.

"Fidel" is not a great work by any stretch of the imagination, something the objective viewer becomes aware of very quickly. Bravo, for example, spends more time reminiscing over Fidel's attempts to make amends with Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis than she does covering the Crisis itself. In fact, if one were to chart out the film and graph what kinds of material get X amount of screen time, the movie would reveal its true nature –a happy-go-lucky Castro home video, where it is more acceptable to have lengthy sections dealing with the dictator's choice of clothing and his relationship with cigars than it is to discuss the Cuban Diaspora and of any of the numerous other controversies that occurred during Castro's reign; a video where not a word is spoken of Castro's political purges, except to say that there were a couple of trials after the revolution regarding Batista's supporters that were "demonized" by the U.S. media; a home video where nothing is said about the suppression of free speech, public dissent, and religious expression; where the narration briefly mentions the so-called U.S. abduction of thousands of Cuban children without explaining when, why, or – most importantly – how this took place . . . a video where, best of all, the word "communist" doesn't appear once in all of ninety minutes, except in an oddball moment where Castro describes himself as a "Fidelist," giving me the distinct impression that Bravo is afraid of turning off certain audience members with the use of stigmatic expressions, a somewhat cowardly act that undermines her intended blast against the hegemonic United States of America.

Yet what the film does say is even more offensive than what it avoids. The Cuban exiles in Miami are dismissed in a sentence or two as a bunch of crock-pots who suck it up to the U.S. media and spread lies about Castro because of personal vendettas (true for some of them, perhaps, but certainly not for all.) The movie makes no attempt to explain why they might feel that way, and never returns to them again. Stupider still, when discussing Cuba's involvement with the Angolan Civil War, Bravo makes the vague assertion that Castro's defeat of the South African-backed UNITA led to the collapse of Apartheid. While I'm certainly willing to concede a connection between those two events, I expect a documentary – supposedly a product of research and analysis – to avoid falling victim to the most common analytical inequity: wedding correlation with causation. Even if we do concede this connection, an important question remains: how much of Apartheid's collapse was Cuba's contribution, and how much resulted from the MPLA at large? Unfounded statements are not acceptable in a documentary, especially when the language of the film makes no attempt whatsoever at disguising them.

Admittedly, "Fidel" is not without a couple of high-points, namely the quality of the footage and Bravo's obvious fluency with editing, yet these strengths serve to make the end product even more excruciating by beating into our heads how great this movie could have been had biases not compromised its integrity. Not to mention the fact that every good shot comes with three or four others ranging from needless to pathetic: Fidel hunting with Khrushchev, Fidel blowing out birthday candles, or (my favorite) Fidel posing and smiling with Hollywood stars, a sequence that was doubtless included in the hopes of stoking American sentiment.

And how about the fact that only five or six people are interviewed in the entire course of the film, and most of their statements are obviously taken out of context? How about the scarcity of Cuban perspective – that is, the perspective of Cubans who don't know Castro personally and aren't die-hard fans – that runs rampant throughout the entire film? The faults are too numerous to name.

"Fidel" is, in effect, no different from America's politically driven bashing of those who stand in the way of its agenda. It simply hails from the opposite end of the spectrum: the glowing "I love you," versus the Anglican damnation. A sad, sad excuse for a movie.

P.S. To the reviewer who said that leftists will probably love this film, I'm as left as they come, and I agree with you: it's garbage.

Volver (I) (2006)

Engaging but disjointed film

[7/10 · 15 January 2007]

Despite its gorgeous collection of images and a cast whose performances are tremendous across the board, Volver suffers from a reckless and haphazard plot. Almodóvar has a tendency to treat his plot points as if he were a Roman aristocrat in a vomitorium, throwing stuff at us that makes little or no sense within the emotional context of the film, and frequently fails to plane up with our previous understanding of the characters. This is particularly true with the inciting incident, and with the revelation at the movie's conclusion; moments that give birth to the unassailable "what?", "why?", and "why didn't . . .?" and leave us fending for ourselves in our attempts to put details in their proper places. While the plot always succeeds in engaging the viewer, it compromises our ability to treat the film with the seriousness it would otherwise deserve.