cnewf Reviews

Something in the Air (2012)

tragically empty

[2/10 · 12 June 2013]

The filmmaker clearly lived through this period at about the same age as the characters, so I don't understand why the film is both slow and superficial. The (post) Sixties here is fight the police, shout slogans at a meeting, publish a newspaper, sit in a cafe, do some art, read a book about Mao, meet a girl in the woods and take her clothes off, recite poetry out loud, vandalize your school, have another meeting, go to Italy to meet foreign girls, take their clothes off, make radical films, etc. etc. Except no one is having any fun. Not a single person in this film enjoys anything ever about their free and mobile lives-where unlike now people like them age 20 all seem to have plenty of money. No one even smiles when the see a friend they haven't seen in months -- it's the French parodying the French. I won' to bore you with the reactionary representations of political philosophy, drugs, eastern mysticism, or union politics, all of which are brainlessly dismissed as pointless. The core characters drift as though to be post 1968 meant you lived under a shadow. some kind of paralysis. The exposition of character is weak and many plot threads are just dead ends. Our hero keeps shuffling forward, perhaps as a tribute to a film industry in which he becomes an intern that is even more cynical than the non tribute to 60s politics. Nothing seems to have any meaning--their art, painting, dance, radical filmmaking, relationships, journalism: it's completely wrong to hollow the period out like this.

If you like this period, and like French film as I do, see J'aime regarder les filles from 2011 I think- the only stupid part of that film is its title. Set in 1981, it's a much richer description of what happens with 20 year olds from different sectors of French society collide during the run- up to Mitterand's election.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

recycled Gangnam Trek

[3/10 · 2 June 2013]

I see anything Star Trek as a matter of lifelong habit, and don't mind J.J. Abrams' rich kid versions--as long as I'm not bored while watching them. But I lost interest in this one about half-way through. It is too formulaic not to be predictable, the hyperrealism of the refitted 1960s characters loses its novelty, the randomized emotional shifts become tiring, and the pile up action sequences get too relentless and implausible to be entertaining. There are moments of funny writing, and the total lack of originality is supposed to be a feature not a bug, so I often enjoyed the accents and personality quirks I remember from watching the first series as a kid. But the core group, led by the Boy Kirk, is too frat house to be very interesting, their girl sidekick less important than, say, Storm in the X-Men, and the male friendship issues repetitive and adolescent. Other reviewers have pointed out the CGI overkill, and that the somewhat desperate action sequences are coupled with a general emotional immaturity (one reviewer called it kill-cry-kill-cry). Both are true, and the result is that Abrams has come full circle not so much to the Saturday Matinée 2.0 as created by George Lucas, but to the cartoon, where implausibility and even idiocy are supposed to be part of the fun. One unintentionally hilarious sequence involves the Boy Kirk kicking some machinery until it works, and my movie date pointed out that this is a kind of metaphor for the film itself.

On to the "liberal philosophy" that someone points out is another of the film's direct borrowingsfrom the 1960s version. The movie is wrapped around the Global War on Terror: there's a conflict between using Starfleet for military or for exploratory purposes. You can guess which side the good guys are on. But everything in the film is threat and response to threat. The positions are (1) kill first, because they are coming to kill you, or (2) kill, but only in self defense. In contrast, the 60s show was full of cultural differences, philosophical divergence, emotional incomprehension, and an interesting fact about human life, which is that in many situations that matter most, "you're both right." 1960s Trek focused repeatedly on a situation in which the crew *believes* they face a military threat, but discover that it's not a military threat, and in fact not a threat at all. Seeing a threat turns a complicated counter into a threat, and that deeply militaristic habit of seeing threats becomes the source of the problem. In the current film, we have two positions: GWOT is regrettable (cry) tied to GWOT is inevitable (kill). In the original show, the GWOT frame would have turned out to be a mass delusion, while this film can't really imagine that things are *not* what they appear to be. So there isn't anything really to think about while you're waiting for the overblown action to die down, and by hour 2, I wanted it to stop.

Side Effects (I) (2013)

This movie makes no actual sense

[2/10 · 15 February 2013]

ONE BIG SPOILER HERE

let's start with reviewer Dan Franzens's good summary of the set up: "Emily (Rooney Mara) is a depressive; her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just returned from a stint in prison for insider trading, but she feels anxious and can't sleep. She visits psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes a brand-new drug to help her out when the better-known brands (Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin, etc.) don't seem to break Emily from her ennui. But the drug, as you might have guessed so expertly, does have its side effects.

It turns out - not a spoiler - that Emily has begun to sleepwalk. Well, more than sleepwalk, she does things in her sleep, like cook breakfast and set the table, all in the middle of the night and not remembering a thing the next day. Tragedy strikes while Emily sleeps. Is she the culprit, or is the drug to blame?"

Well the tragedy-SPOILER- is that Emily kills her husband with a kitchen knife while "sleepwalking." Dr. Banks decides it's the side effect of the new corporate antidepressant that has more marketing money than clinical test results behind it. He helps get her a guilty-by- reason-of-insanity and a stint in a psychiatric hospital instead of life in prison for Murder 1. At the same time, his reputation is in tatters for having kept Emily on a not-very-tested drug in spite of some warning symptoms. So he has some incentive to figure out if something else is going on.

Many fairly suspenseful convolutions later, here's what we're expected to believe really happened. Emily was swept off her feet 5 years before by Martin, her dashing, handsome, affectionate, rich hedge fund guy, and she is about to lead the life of a fairy-princess wife in the enchanted money land of Greenwich, CT. But the feds come down on her handsome prince, and he is sent to a country club prison for unspecified white-collar crimes. We know that in real life that never happens, but more ridiculous things are yet to come. In her unhappiness, Emily sees a shrink, Dr. Victoria Siebert, played with adequate professional frostiness by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Emily draws the good doctor into her first lesbian affair, and naturally uses her jailbird husband's trader tricks to make both of them a pile of money. Either Emily has also fallen in love with Dr. Siebert, in which case she will not go back to her husband but instead live happily ever after with her new girlfriend and pile of ill-gotten Wall Street profits, OR she is toying with Dr. Siebert and using her as a trading proxy. Their is no point to this second possibility, and no coherence to the idea that Emily could make a fortune with what she learned over dinner from her jailed trader husband, since Wall Street makes its money on deal opportunities tied strictly to personal and firm-based relationships to which Emily, ensconced in the office-love nest with her psychiatrist girlfriend, has zero access. But possibility 1 is also not the case: Emily displays no affection for Dr. Siebert at any point ever, and stabs her in the back later on-figuratively in this case. But back to the affair itself: we are told that Emily cooked up the idea of Emily killing Martin when he gets back from prison because Emily is mad at him for getting sent to prison right after he had made her into a fairy-princess. Dr. Siebert is complicit in this. But there is no possible upside for Dr. Siebert and plenty of downside: she loves Emily and wants them to be together, so she would encourage Emily to leave Martin and not stir up every law enforcement agency in Manhattan by killing him. So apparently Emily is a homicidal sociopath who wants to kill Martin no matter what, and somehow persuades the calculating, careful Dr. Siebert to go along, which she would clearly never do. In addition, Emily is willing to be arrested, go to trial, and risk being in a psychiatric hospital for years because, why? A normal sociopath would pay someone to whack Martin and be done with it. Then in the end the noble Dr. Banks (Jude Law) persuades Dr. Siebert to keep Emily locked up, even though the former's only interest is being with Emily, and after Emily betrays her for Dr. Banks, Dr. Banks commits Emily to the hospital for all eternity. So it's the version of noir where everybody is basically evil, except that in good noir people retain coherent motives and the ability to pursue their own interests by destroying others in a semi-logical way. Nobody would ever act the way these characters do whether crazy or not. It's too bad.

The Hedgehog (2009)

best kid character in a long time

[9/10 · 15 February 2013]

The main character is a girl who feels trapped in her upper-class, politically important, generally high-strung family and deals with it by filming their every move with a video camera her governmental-minister father gives her, while whispering a merciless voice-over as the camera records. It's great to see a movie about people's secret lives bringing them together, the endless creativity that follows from watching what actually happens, and completely improbable friendships mattering more than anything else. None of the characters ever really leave their various apartments in a big building in a wealthy part of Paris, but quite a lot of ordinary and very entertaining things happen. The film is about people adopting each other across social barriers--but that doesn't quite capture it either. This is the French version of feel-good, which means it stays intellectual while being the opposite of cynical about whether people can connect with each other. I really liked it.

Draquila - L'Italia che trema (2010)

Great film - scandal and drama

[10/10 · 30 November 2010]

This film tells the story of the earthquake that destroyed much of one of Italy's 20 "cities of art" and the cynical, exploitative use of this by Silvio Berlusconi to prop up his sagging popularity. Nobody knows this story in the US or outside of Italy as far as I can tell: it's a mixture of tragedy and real estate development of a kind that explains quite a bit about life in a lot of wealthy countries today. It's very deft - the director is a subtler, much less intrusive version of Michael Moore who is telling a great story of modern Italy and of modern rulers in general. She's quite a well known comedian in Italy, the director of "Viva Zapatero," another classic exposé of power in modern Italy, really a remarkable expression of how the Italian people bounce back no matter how awful their governments. This film is not to be missed!

Chiko (2008)

Watchable But Predictable

[5/10 · 9 November 2008]

The performances are very good, as is each scene taken by itself. The story is completely predictable, including the end, which I also found frankly unbelievable. The whole hodge-podge of conflicted feelings about ethic identity reminded me of "Once Were Warriors," which was about a violent Maori community in New Zealand. At least that movie acknowledged that the male craziness had a partial source in poverty and racism (without excusing it). Chiko doesn't admit much of anything about Germany - the early parts of the film are a kind of "rebels without a cause." At least for me, steeped in the race relations of English-speaking countries plus France, this film self-pathologized Turkish-German males and sensationalized their emotions in a way I didn't find very insightful. But on the level of production and acting, it was at least an 8.

Gomorrah (2008)

Skip the Movie, Read the Book

[3/10 · 7 November 2008]

Roberto Saviano wrote a great book about how the Napoli-area crime "system" was modernizing itself. The System did this by globalizing itself - partnering (unofficially) with major fashion houses, for example, making drug retail more friendly and suburban, and using its military arm to protect its carefully constructed, often brilliantly executed economic interests.

The gangster stuff in the book is entirely the effect of the system - the neocapitalist crime system that operates globally, that ties southern Italy not just to Columbia but to Bulgaria and Romania - you really have to read the book, which is vivid and also comprehensive.

The movie simply disappears The System. None of the causal forces detailed in the book survive. This is the most blatant and inexcusable dumbing down of book into a movie that I've seen in years - inexcusable because the book IS the system and not the sh-thead gangsters.

You don't really need to see the 425th remake of Boyz n the Hood (which was a better movie than this). You don't really need to see another treatment of the "culture of poverty," the "underclass" depicted as aimless sociopaths. This film has as much insight as your average episode of Law and Order, so watch a rerun instead.

I can't believe the book author Saviano gets a writing credit for this dumbness. I hope it was a straight payoff, no work involved.

The book was journalism. This film just makes up whatever it wants. The worst example of this is the butchery of the book's most moving scene, when the boy from the hood who is actually a brilliant couturier, and sews dresses that end up on A-list stars in Hollywood, freaks out when he sees one of his dresses on Angelina Jolie (pointlessly renamed as another famous actress). In the movie Pasquale (who is randomly 20 years older than the book's counterpart), sees the movie's version AFTER he already made the career decision that the Angelina Jolie scene produces in the book, and he has no emotional reaction. Same goes for his relationship to the Chinese workers - a time-consuming, sensationalist escalation of what in the book was a simple and attractive gesture.

Calling All Film Directors: dumb isn't fun. Dumb is boring. Stop it.

Sicko (2007)

Moore's Best Yet

[10/10 · 9 September 2007]

I saw Michael Moore's film Sicko last night at our local theater in Paris. It's quite a great documentary film, maybe his best since Roger and Me. This is a great film because it goes right to the heart of the core problem and vividly shows its human effects. The core problem is the degradation and denial of health treatment for the sake of saving money. The core effect is that people's lives are diminished and destroyed, or simply ended prematurely.

Moore's trademark stunts here are particularly good because they take "reality" as seen on TV and turn it upside down. So we see his Canadian cousins buying insurance to travel to the United States. This nicely inverts the principle of American superiority that has Americans buying insurance to go to Mexico. We see free universal health care on "American soil" - but not for regular citizens, but for the detainees who are getting it partly so they can be force- fed on their hunger strikes. We see a cashier in a British hospital, but he gives out money to people for transportation home rather than raking money in.

The master stroke involves 9/11 rescue workers who can't get health care for conditions induced by their emergency work in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Moore rounds a bunch of them up, and they get on boats in Miami harbor and set off on what looks like Gilligan's three hour cruise. They go to Guantanamo and then to Havana. This nicely inverts the principle of American superiority illustrated by the Cuban boat people yearning to be free in the US. The 9/11 rescue workers are reverse boat people heading for the Cuban doctors and medicines no one will give them in the US.

Moore's "analysis" is in every frame: if you don't keep market logic out of human essentials, you damage and destroy people. Period. That's the analysis. And it is correct.

The other countries - Great Britain, France, Cuba, and of course Canada - are there to show how much better people do when the criterion of care is patient need rather than business revenue. The health outcomes of that philosophy are so much better that that it reminds you of how detached from external reality American business "pragmatism" has become.

Moore asks the great humanist question in the US today: "who are we?" What kind of people are we that we leave people on the sidewalks like trash? Are we monsters? Brainwashed "profits before people" neoliberals walking in lockstep to the obsolete dogmas of the Rupert Murdochs? A people in steady decline and simply afraid - afraid of our own government, as one of the Americans in Paris suggests?

For me the answer appeared in two sequences in France. The first came from a moment when Moore asks a comfortable French couple, so what are your biggest expenses after your mortgage and car payment, and the wife says, "the fish." They then spend some time together, this small French woman and the giant Michigander, peering into her well-stocked fridge. Moore is still wondering what they do with the money they don't spend on $200 office visits and $295 bottles of pills (my own tab for an advance supply of my cholesterol medicine since I was leaving the country and Blue Cross will pay only one month at a time). She says vacations, those are very important. We travel. And she shows Moore tiny bottles of sand she's collected on several continents.

The other sequence involves a French guy in his mid-30s who had moved to the US at 18 but who came back to France when he got cancer. It was all free, he said, and explains how the state-employer partnership assured him 100% of his salary for 3 months of rest and recuperation during his treatments, which he takes in the sun in the south of France. This guy shows Moore pictures of his tanned and smiling self hanging out with friends while the taxpayer foots the bill. Moore expresses surprise, and the guy, with no trace of American defensiveness, says something like, "in three months I went from being a 95 year old man back to this. I had to take care of myself. Now I'm recovered and can carry on, with my life and with my work."

My theory is that French people can expect and demand that everyone pay for everyone's healing as a society because they believe that life is about satisfaction, happiness, pleasure, and well-being. Their food culture is one expression of that, and so is government-funded child care. Another expression is affordable, high-quality health care for all. Life is short, you need to enjoy it, you need to be healthy, so what ELSE, exactly, is it worth spending our money on?

It's this jouissance that the US has lost - the sense of the RIGHT to happiness. We don't expect it for ourselves, so we don't care that the richest companies in the world can take it away from others.

Just a theory, but I do know that the French have much hipper and more beautiful eyeglasses than we do. And their sense of beauty fits together with how much better they treat each other than we do.

Still Life (2006)

The China You Never See

[8/10 · 5 August 2007]

I've seen lots of presentations by businesspeople and academics about Chinese industry, development, social problems, politics, progress, environmental disasters, etc. etc. I've never seen anything like this. It's China on the ground - actually a town about to be submerged by the Three Gorgest Dam project. The title translation of "Three Gorges Good People" is right - these are ordinary folks who endure, persist, help each other out, etc. in a mixed landscape of natural beauty, building, poverty, and destruction that has to be seen to be understood. The story of the dam shapes everybody's life without actually determining or washing them out. Definitely try to see this if you have any interest at all in China today.

Billy Liar (1963)

One of the best "coming of age" movies

[10/10 · 25 July 2007]

The film has a great sequence where Courtenay does voices in his boss's office that may remind you of one of the highlight's of Tom Cruise's career, his underwear dancing-karaoke scene in Risky Business. The whole film is really good - affectionate, compassionate - about Billy Fisher's (Courtenay) gradual slide towards needing to decide whether he really is going to go to London to try to make his advanced powers of imagination into a career, or whether he's going to stay in the small town with this family. His encounters with a big-time producer from London with whom he has corresponded, and the great scenes with his undertaker boss, come from a period when official culture reflected what people still know - that business is often run by inhumane and mentally-limited schmucks who make the world worse, not better, that business is not usually so fricking efficient in spite of its chest-thumping tributes to its virile hatred of waste and slack, that the entertainment business in particular is not obviously the right outlet for a brilliant imagination.

What if it's better to dream at home than write commercial screenplays? Billy Liar can still ask the question.

Girls Town (1996)

Great slice of high school

[9/10 · 2 June 2007]

I accidentally ran into this movie on the Sundance channel and couldn't stop watching it. Menace and danger plus banality and boredom - high school from top to bottom, and nothing that anyone does or says in this really well-acted film is anything other than exactly what a 17-year-old would do or say. Good moments include the teen mom telling off a guy for dogging her one day and accepting his charm offensive the next; the only visible mom having no ability to say any unangry, unjudgemental thing to her tough, suffering daughter; and the ineffective and heartbreaking confrontation with the guy the three friends think drove their fourth friend to suicide. The girls are p_ssed, resentful, revengeful, smart, excited, violent, and together all in on the right scale - an excellent girls' Dazed and Confused that gets a perfect 10 for realness.

The Good Shepherd (2006)

Should Have Been Zombie film

[3/10 · 4 January 2007]

This was a snooze-fest about the empty WASPs who ran an empty US foreign policy. I stayed awake so as not to offend my pal Rebecca who took me to it, and entertained myself by wondering if the film was cleverly thematizing boring emptiness or just being boring and empty without meaning to. Sadly, there were no other signs of cleverness in the film, just ghosts of two decent ideas. One was about the effects of this post-war emptiness at the top of US society -that the deadliness of the US in the Cold War came less from necessary responses to real threats than from our own leaders' emotional exhaustion and intellectual emptiness (the USSR military is described as a sham by one would-be defector our hero Matt Damon has been busy torturing). This idea is like an object in one of the photos the techie spooks analyze that you can infer but never actually see. The second ghost of an idea came from my pal Rebecca, who recalled the film's only good line. Italian mobster Joe Pesci names a few things different US ethnic groups have and then asks the typically silent and inert Damon, "what do you people have"? "We have the United States of America," Damon replies. "The rest of you are just visiting." Rebecca said that this could have been a movie about the CIA as an agent of white supremacy. True, but it was just ghost #2.

Some IMDb reviewers have complained about Jolie's performance, among others. I don't think any of the performances are bad as such - Jolie's is technically quite good - but there IS something wrong with the characters and their interactions. The film plays like a group vanity project in which Di Niro and crew put on an extra-long after-dinner skit for their wealthy liberal friends. They know things have gone bad in America, they don't like American foreign policy and all the dirty tricks and killing. But they don't know what went wrong, or why, or what to do about it. They especially don't think that they benefit from any of this killing - that the CIA has been quite handy at giving the U.S., a declining manufacturing and increasingly corrupt power, unfair advantages in the world, advantages that in turn lead to Hollywood and Wall Street's ridiculous wealth. Could part of America's problem be exactly this kind of mental passivity and actual indifference to democracy among the most privileged members of the middle class? Gosh! It raises a question I sometimes blog about on "Middle-Class Death Trips" - did we long ago trade in democracy and camaraderie with the rest of the world for the sake of unearned, coerced global privileges? Just like Damon's character, the movie isn't self-aware enough to ask any such question, and the result is really boring, all the big implications gone missing.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Great, subtle story of liberation from the middle-class

[10/10 · 30 December 2006]

I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine last night and liked is as much as everyone else did. I had a special fondness for what happens to the family, where things start bad and get much better. The father, Richard, is trying to make it as a self-improvement guru by selling his 9 -steps to winning formula. His only idea is that the world has two kinds of people, winners and losers, and the most important thing in life is that you not be a loser. Losing is signified by the other people in the picture: the nation's foremost Proust scholar (with the beard) who has just tried to kill himself over a grad-student love gone wrong, the son who reads Nietzsche, refuses to speak, and wants to fly fighter jets, and above all the grandfather in the background, who snorts heroin, loves porn and sex equally, and swears like the blue-collar stalwart that he is. The mom holds it all together of course, and the 7-year-old daughter, who dreams of being crowned Little Miss Sunshine (not pictured), has unwittingly inherited her dad's desire to leave struggling working-classdom and enter the middle-class of sexpot-princess little Barbie girls.

I will try not to spoil the plot while still saying why this movie came as a huge relief to me. Richard is a schmuck whose desire to be a rich guru make his family angry and miserable and make him powerless himself. But as it turns out he doesn't have to be that way. OK, I'm about to spoil the plot a little bit: Richard turns out to be more like his badass dad than he wants to believe, and so does the Proust scholar, and so does the weirdly mixed Air Force- intellectual son, and this is certainly true of Olive, the true Little Miss Sunshine. There's a lot of comedy extracted from the car troubles of people who can't afford new ones, and the film winds up as a study of class conflict in which, for once in Hollywood, going back to your unselfconscious and impulsive working-class self makes you "win."

I don't mean they win as the solid middle-class defines it, but as soon as Richard - without consciously deciding to - stops trying to rise and just throws himself into the mission of getting Olive to her contest, everything gets better. The movie rejects the classically stupid middle-class assumption that solidarity means reduced efficiency and self-fulfillment. The movie rejects the bourgeois failure to fight: things bump along once Richard and the rest of them just go with the screwed-up van, their lateness, their loser-ness, once they start bending and breaking the middle-class rules. Heroics aren't necessary, just a certain non- intimate acceptance of each other, that things will never be normal, that as people they aren't normal, that they don't have to be normal, and than in non-normalcy there is strength.

This makes Little Miss Sunshine a great parable of the middle-class ceasing to hate itself, embracing its blue-collarness (you'll know what I mean when you see Olive's actual contest dance), and being way way better off. Liberation from middle-class aspiration looks like people pushing a busted van. They have lost first-gear but have finally - to their enormous benefit - they have learned not to miss it.

Plus it's pretty hilarious, with great performances from absolutely everybody. And for why Little Miss Sunshine is so much more illuminating, see my explanation at Middle Class Death-Trips (toodumbtolive.blogspot.com)

Little Children (2006)

very smart about Little Adults, with odd screw-ups

[7/10 · 29 December 2006]

This movie does a wonderful job of representing the undertow of confusion and stuckness that threatens to pull people under. It cuts among interlocking stories that each center on someone who is about to dive down beneath their established life, and for entirely normal, believable reasons. 45 minutes into the film, all the main characters have thrown themselves into the vortex, creating the uneasy fear one feels for people who are about to risk everything they've deliberately built up in order to end a sense of suffocation that is much less concrete than the secure surface of their lives, but somehow more real. This is strong suspense film about that crucial question of whether or not our own happy lives actually make us feel alive.

The movie covers an updated version of Cheever territory - the despair beneath the comforts of American suburbia. "Little Children" is better than "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm," and is intelligent about the effects of thwarted desire in the way of Todd Haynes's "Safe." It has the eerie disorientation of "The Swimmerj" It's particularly shrewd about the original source of romantic yearning itself. The film's real "LIttle Children" are the parents from two different families who fall in love with each other. They are the stay-at-home Mom and the Mr. Mom who re-marry each other informally at the neighborhood pool where they spend every summer day taking care of their adorable kids. Together they are as bland as they are in their actual marriage. Their interest in each other doesn't unearth some suppressed power or depth in themselves, which is always the assumption behind the affair. It reflects their mutual wish to recapture the unrestricted experience they associate with childhood - no bar exams, no dissertations to finish, no spouses with budgets or habits of Internet wankfests at the work computer. You can see the affair coming with the first encounter between these two fair-haired parents who are the bored and aimless and also subordinate to their focused and competent spouses in each of their marriages. Unlike the breadwinners, these two are still looking for what they want to do in life. When they seem to find that thing in their daily poolside parenting and then later in their daily sex, they are put by the film into strict parallel with their preschool kids sharing their afternoon naps. It's a nice dream - play and sleep, play and sleep, all feeling unforced and unchangingly attractive, every day happily the same. As if.

The other true thing about the movie is that Sarah and Brad (Winsett and Wilson) resolve to run off together and then chicken out and chicken out accidentally-on-purpose, in ways that allow them to go "home" to their focused, successful spouses who are capable of taking care of them, and yet go home without acknowledging to themselves that this is what they really want. Sarah concocts a panic attack when her child wanders out of her sight for five minutes in the nighttime park where she had gone to meet Brad. Brad interrupts his trip to destiny to fulfill his wannabe skateboarder dreams, injuring his beautiful body and giving himself the perfect excuse never to try anything again. Lots and lots of us finally stand up for ourselves only to take this kind of dive right away, as soon as we decently can. One reason is that we stood up for the wrong thing, even though it took us forever to do so.

So can the problems be overlooked? Well let's inventory them. The movie polarizes straight and sensitive suburbia in a phony way. The other moms are stereotypes of sexual repression, living on the edge of hysteria. When Brad and Sarah first kiss in front of them (on a jokey dare from Sarah), the moms grab up their kids and flee just as the neighborhood moms do later at the pool when the registered sex offender is found swimming around with a mask and snorkel. The same false polarity infects the original marriages: the dominant spouses are so disconnected from their partners that you wonder how they could have been married for even a few weeks: why would a phony, money-grubbing "brander" ever have married a failed English lit PhD student, or vice versa, and why would a smart documentary maker ever marry the pretty but super-dull Brad, whose soul can be filled through the camaraderie of night-league football? In the film's clunkiest moment, Ronnie, the sex offender, has a date with an attractive, clinically-depressed thirtysomething (played well by Jane Adams), bonds with her in a sympathetic, fraternal way, and then as she's praising their conversation in the car starts to jerk off and threaten her like a possessed maniac. The moment destroys the analogy between criminalized and "normal" perversion that had helped to humanize Ronnie (his mother is the film's strongest single character, played brilliantly by Phyllis Somerville). His auto-mutilation at the end just reproduces the suburban sexual hysteria the film supposedly critiques. Equally implausible is that his tormentor, the other unloved man, ex-cop and night-league loser Larry, turns into his rescuer: this is the kind of instant redemption that the basic intelligence of this film would rule out. The problem is the film undermines the quasi-heroic struggles of their flawed main characters - Ronnie, Brad, and Sarah - so that their weak and pathetic ends make the earlier dramas seem unreal in retrospect. If they fold THIS easily, then what were we watching the previous two hours.

The men in this film - ouch. They are useless and dangerous by turns. The women are suffocated and unhappy. The American middle-class comes off badly - spoiled, unfocused, and without the strength to save itself or anybody else. We are, the movie says, the little children of world.

Blood Diamond (2006)

Good - for Hollywood!

[7/10 · 10 December 2006]

This is classic Hollywood "dual-use" - tell a popular story to send a serious message. The idea is that you can use formula elements to get a huge audience who then learns uncomfortable things. You can tell the truth about the world and make enormous amounts of box office - no conflict there, right? The movie takes on big issues like child soldiers, diamond wars, failed states, kids with chopped-off hands, random slaughter of villagers, millions of refugees. It has excellent Hollywood production values - the action scenes dip you into terrifying violence and stir you around. The lead performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Djiman Hounsou are wonderful. DiCaprio's character, an ex-military diamond smuggler, is interesting and complex. But there are limits to dual-use strategy. The white hero has a love interest, an implausibly beautiful American journalist who tries to flirt her way into a scoop and then implausibly toughens up. In a Hollywood film individuals always have to be able to make a difference and not just save their own skin, so Solomon Vandy's search for his family is juxtaposed with the more ridiculous, self-flattering story of a journalist taking on the world-wide diamond trade. Finally, there's Hollywood's compulsory narcissism, which means that it can't explain why control of diamond fields requires rebel posses to massacre innocent villagers, or imagine African solutions to anything. There's a weird racism floating through all the sympathy for African victims, so that the rebel army scenes are shot Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style with gun-toting children dancing insanely around roaring fires in bloody compounds in an unwitting repeat of old Western stereotypes of bloodthirsty African savages. In Hollywood dual-use, structural problems are suppressed in favor of lone villains with a long reach, so that it is impossible to imagine, for example, that there may be a problem with capitalism itself, which has done so little good for so long for Africa. It all leads to a consumer boycott, the ultimate middle-class American political gesture - to not shop for one thing we want! It's true that Americans aren't interested in wearing "conflict diamonds" dug by one-handed African slave children. It's true that Hollywood does not exist in order to refute naive business books like "The World Is Flat." But putting a little more African thought and society in place of American journalists might have made the movie's hope for the future at least half as convincing as its blood-soaked action.

Clearcut (1991)

a very relevant masterpiece

[10/10 · 18 November 2006]

The ten-star folks before me have it right: this is a must-see movie. It goes to the psychological heart of the political paralysis of Western societies today, and to their willingness to pay no attention to whom they screw over, only to wake up surprised that it has all gone wrong. Peter the Toronto cause lawyer is a great image of the white progressive who supports Native causes without actually siding with them, and the film beautifully illustrates what happens when he loses his power to exist in this in-between position. "Deb" is right that the core statement is "you dreamed anger, and your anger is real." If you are angry about how, in Peter's immortal words, "the world has turned to sh-t," will letting your anger emerge then allow you to act, or encourage you to let the usual others act for you? What are you doing, if your anger is real? I will stop before I give anything away, and will end with a plea to the distributor to release this important film in DVD, and drop the VHS price below CA$55.00.

Out of Reach (2004 Video)

not up to its potential

[5/10 · 21 October 2006]

Steven Seagal picks good topics and he takes good positions on them, but this film is like most of his others in failing on the level of craft. I don't know why this keeps happening to someone whose martial arts experience obviously taught him about the importance of precise execution and continuous refinement, but in any case this film is sloppy. Sometimes it's as simple as parallel action whose locations aren't clear, or too-familiar action scenes, or very slow staging of the obvious, like the initial seizure of the children. More importantly, it's careless or shallow thinking about the characters and their relationship to each other: the villains are pure psychopaths, the kids are pure innocence, the trafficking is simple kidnapping from a crooked orphanage - nothing beyond the matinée B-movie level of white/black hats is made concrete. There's something stubborn and unnecessary about Seagal staying on this mediocre level.

Opal Dream (2006)

a quieter and deeper Full Monty

[9/10 · 18 July 2006]

This is quite a good film about a sun-scorched prospector town and family members whose dreams and imaginary worlds drive each other nuts. It's deeper than the director's best-known film, The Full Monty, though the topic is similar: the struggles of working-class folks to stay closer to their dreams than they are to their failures. The depiction of the town dynamics seemed to me as flawless as the individual performances, and as someone who comes from a family with shall we say a non-standard member, I was impressed with the film's ability to produce a familiar emotional mix of exasperation, devotion, and desire for a truly imaginative cure for the main problem. The movie delivers on this last point. It would be wrong to see this as a chick flick, because as in The Full Monty the cast and crew are interested in men who try to figure out how to resolve conflicts and fix disasters without using anger and force, and who pretty much succeed. British and Commonwealth film is generally better than American at avoiding stereotypes of blue-collar masculinity and this is a particularly good and heart- warming example. The boy in the picture, who has to figure out what to do about his dad and his sister, is one of the great kids of recent film history.

Marie Antoinette (2006)

Gidget Goes to Versailles

[4/10 · 26 May 2006]

and when she gets there, she gets bored, gossips, reads Rousseau, and has beach-blanket pot parties in Amadeus outfits. I did like the music, there is one inspired masked ball and a good "watch the sun rise" scene - the strength of this film is its connection to high school culture, seen through the eyes of a sweet, utterly conventional and finally boring teenage girl, projected from the California suburbs onto 18th century France. This is obviously also the film's weakness: this movie is a beautiful, expensive still life that knows nothing at all about French history, Europe, the Revolution, the Bourbons, how the ancien regime worked, how incompetent wars and not Marie Antoinette's Imelda-Marcos-like shoe fetish ran up the debt, about the conflict in North America with England and Spain, about how leading members of French government actually had brains - the films displays a nitwit, decadent, wig-loving, golden-furniture France as though seen by a France-hater in the Bush administration. As my brother pointed out, the movie also blew the subject of a potentially great movie, which is Marie Antoinette's inspired, sometimes brilliant defense of herself at her later trial. Trying to learn about what happened to the French court from this film is like trying to learn about American corporate culture by watching J.R Ewing's 30 second business deals at the Cattlemen's Club on Dallas. Well sure, politics wasn't the subject of the movie, but why is the "chick stuff" buried in diamonds and champagne? That makes these women seem way less tough and intelligent than they actually were in the bloody contact sport of French court politics. As an American watching this in Paris I was struck by the film's lack of historical, political, and cultural sophistication, in which Dunst is in every single frame and it's all one gigantic royal slumber party until the peasants show up in an illiterate wordless mass baying for bread and blood and shaking their satanic harvesting tools. Ouch: The film makes the most sense as a weird allegory of Hollywood inbreeding.

Lord of War (2005)

come on, tell an actual story will you?

[6/10 · 28 January 2006]

OK look, this movie gets an A for its bold moral stand: it is AGAINST gun running that KILLS PEOPLE! Especially poor African people who have been royally screwed by warlords and their tireless posses of sadistic killers. I was waiting for the audience member who would cheer the AK loving crazed son of a dictator using starving refugees for target practice, but to my surprise, nobody did. Score one for finding a topic on which EVERYONE will agree with you - random death in pointless wars fueled by amoral arms dealers is bad.

But would you like to know why a single one of these countless wars starts or continues? Or about the big business of arms trading, i.e. legal companies and not one guy working out of storage container under a bridge? You won't learn anything about these things in this film. What you will learn is the Hollywood lesson that moral feeling is the important thing. And the American political lesson: you are either for it or against it, so why have facts, geopolitics, economics, connect people to motives (besides money, drugs, and hookers), or any of that boring crap that explains how things actually work?? You will also learn the following: Africans are either victims, looters, or mindless killers; African leaders are mindless killers; Africans die because their leaders are mindless killers (oh yes, with First World guns); African dictators's sons like gold chains, gold-plated AKs, gold watches, local Ho's in Dallas cheerleaders outfits, and mindless killing; Africa has lots of local Ho's who like to watch people being mindlessly killed; the top international arms dealers ride in their own planes to deliver the goods to Sierra Leone or wherever; former communist generals will sell billions in lethal arms to whomever for a Rolls and a VCR

and so on. I'm not being too nice about this film, which is on an important topic, has a good cast and many good moments. Plus parts of the film offer a descent into hell that has some real power. But the film accepts that the average audience consists of political children who don't know about the arms trade or that the US government is a world leader in it. Therefore the film illustrates this fact rather than telling a story that would analyze this fact. The filmmakers make the usual mistake of assuming no one will watch a movie that doesn't eliminate all complexity in favor of a story about one or more movie stars acting normal in abnormal situations and talking about it. Oddly enough, this comes off as more didactic rather than less, since the lessons don't flow from the missing complex structure but from the stars' reciprocal speeches. Too bad.

Umoregi (2005)

it's about bringing dream-time to life

[9/10 · 7 January 2006]

this movie is not addressing the level of your brain that drives a car and checks your watch while you're watching this film. It's not about some other world either. It's about small town folks who do what they do and make things out of paper and paint and tell stories and walk into the woods, and then ordinarily magical things happen to them, or are done by them, which is the same thing. The French title, translated, is the Forgotten Forest, and it's OK if you feel a little sleepy while you're watching it, since that might help you remember things you've forgotten. It's really quite a beautiful film, and it sees things that take some time to see. It's great in the same way that a slow bow-march on the street is great. It's the film version of a swim protest, except that it doesn't protest at all.

Hero (2002)

beautiful pro-imperial dumbness

[11 November 2003]

It's really beautiful, and makes the Matrix boys look like the kids they are. But what is this movie actually saying? Try this: rather than fighting murderous, expansionist emperors, would-be heros should realize that all the emperor wants is peace. As in the past, China will reunite the "seven kingdoms" under one great father for the good of all.

Since when did the tradition that brought us a really good Western about the Qin dynasty, Ashes of Time, degenerate into this pro-imperial dumbness?