Movie Review: A Single Man (2009)

A Single Man (2009)

Directed By:
Tom Ford

Starring:
Colin Firth: George
Julianne Moore: Charlie
Matthew Goode: Jim
Nicholas Hoult: Kenny

Rating:


I Like Your Style, Dude

A Single Man, fashion designer Tom Ford's first film, is all about appearances. Taking place mostly in an immaculately appointed house in Los Angeles, nothing seems out of place for it's owner, George (Colin Firth), an English ex-pat who teaches English at a small university in California. Nothing seems out of place because he spends most of his time arranging the details of his life to fit the acceptable American narrative; in truth, everything is going to hell.

George has heart problems, dreams of drowning and, worst of all, just lost his lover in a car accident. He finds out over the phone that the family hadn't even planned on informing him, let alone invite him to the funeral, which is a family only affair. George is a gay man, and, having lost his partner, must now move forward in a world where his relationship isn't considered real love. To the world, it may as well have never happened.

George spends the next eight months haunting his home, his office, his classroom. What else can he do? One morning, he puts out an extra suit, writes a few letters, slides open the drawer of his desk, and takes out a revolver. On his way home from work, he buys bullets for the gun. It's obvious what he plans to do, he's even set plans with other people later in the evening so they'll come looking for him when he goes missing.

There's a lot going on that suggests that life for George maybe isn't as miserable as it seems. There's a student in one of his classes, for example, who seems particularly interested in the details of his social life, and not much interested in his girlfriend. There's also the matter of his dinner plans with Charley (Julianne Moore), who is the only person he's talked to about his relationship. She and George used to go out, but nothing came of it. Now that they're both older and still single, she proposes that they try it again.

The dinner scene, probably the most hyped piece of A Single Man outside of Colin Firth's performance as a whole, is just crushing. It's one of the few times that George unleashes his emotions and asserts that what he had with Jim was real. Firth is a real powerhouse there, but, sitting in the theater, I kind of fell in line with the group of people who said that Moore went over-the-top. Not that it brought down the meat of the scene, just that she was too much. Thinking over it a bit, I got why Charley was portrayed the way she was: Single and getting older, Charley is just as depressed about her state of affairs as George is his, and is doing her best to appear fine when, really, she's on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In retrospect, I think Moore was great, but I can understand why one would think otherwise.

There are several other scenes that are similarly great, chief among them coming early in the film, when George is told over the telephone that Jim has died and that he isn't invited to the funeral. The subplot with the student (Nicholas Hoult) just feels undeveloped, which may be no fault of Ford's, but I never really got a feel for Kenny, who does so much to get George's attention, but never gets around to having the truly meaningful conversation with George that is built-up from the beginning. It could be due to the fact that it's the first day where he's had a real interaction with George, after drinks, swimming near-naked in the ocean, and finding a naked picture of a man in George's medicine drawer, I'd expect a little more backbone than that. Ford does a tremendous job of building the anticipation towards this conversation that never happens, but since it never happens, that energy has nowhere to go.

The movie's main flaw may be that it's too subtle. Ford gives us one hell of a timebomb when he sends the likable George off to do his chores on the last day of his life, but you never hear the clock ticking. Sure, there are signs, clues, inklings as to how George is feeling and what George is thinking, but they're so far under the surface that, most times, they're barely a blip on the radar. I'm sure that this is intentional--Firth,who is splendid, wouldn't have been half as good if the script called for him to lash out or weep at every turn--but there's little to no sense of true suspense. The whole thing is on the backburner; either he does it, or he doesn't. I'm willing to believe that's also an issue that could largely be attributed to the source material, and would almost certainly bet that a second viewing would clear things up immensely. Problem is that there are plenty of people, like me, who haven't read the Isherwood novel to know what's really beneath George's surface, and the honest truth is that A Single Man will be lucky if a wide audience gives it a first viewing. While this is certainly a very good movie, it's also a slow-burning period piece that uses a gay relationship as the backdrop for a story about love and loss. That's one hell of a hook, and it got me, but it won't be for everyone.

Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009)

Up in the Air (2009)

Directed By:
Jason Reitman

Starring:
George Clooney: Ryan Bingham
Vera Farmiga: Alex Goran
Anna Kendrick: Natalie Keener
Jason Bateman: Craig Gregory
J.K. Simmons: Bob
Sam Elliott: Maynard Finch
Danny McBride: Jim Miller
Zach Galifianakis: Steve

Rating:


The Dude Abides

Up in the Air isn't relevant to the way we live today in the way you'd expect. While it certainly seems timely that a movie about a guy whose job is to fire people, this movie really doesn't focus on those who suddenly have the crushing burden of unemployment thrust upon them. Up in the Air is a film about the way many people choose to live today--willfully alone and isolated in an era in human history when our ability to connect with other human beings has never been easier.

The rapid transformation of the transportation and telecommunications sectors means two things for Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). Thanks to the airplane and the nature of his job, his home is the airport. His apartment is hardly lived in, and the contents of his life fit comfortably in his suitcase. He lives his job--eats, sleeps, and breathes the recycled air, the carry-on bag, the hotel, car rental and airline gold rewards cards, and the little soaps and shampoos. His bed is in any number of Hilton Hotels, his living room is the first class section of an American Airlines 747, and he wants for nothing more. He measures his worth by the number of frequent flier miles he has, and his only goal is getting to the number he'd like to have.

All of that is suddenly in jeopardy when George comes home to Omaha to find that Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) has devised a new way to fire people: Over the internet. Natalie, a recent college grad, has never fired a person in her whole life, so naturally, her cost-cutting plan is foolproof, as documented on a flowchart that assumes that a person's response to being fired will be dull-eyed resignation. Ryan, who doesn't want to be grounded in Omaha, argues otherwise and is assigned to take Natalie out on the road to see how things are done.

Not only does Natalie learn about the difficulty of firing a person you've never met, she learns a whole lot about Ryan. She looks at his life and considers it lonely, which is a pretty fair assessment. Ryan disagrees. Not only does he talk to plenty of single-serving friends, but he also has a relationship with Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), who lives the same life Alex does: Flying, landing, shuttling off between airport, hotel, and business. Doesn't he want something more than that?

That's the question at the center of the film. While it seems like one that Ryan would have answering, Natalie's unfailing belief in the power of love raises some doubts. He takes a small interest in his sister's wedding, then decides to go. He invites Alex and shows her around his hometown. The two look like they may have found something that works, but neither one is willing to commit.

My favorite epigraph is the one from E.M. Forster's Howards End: "Only Connect." They may be the most important two words he ever wrote--two words that describe the bulk of human existence--a quest to connect and make meaningful relationships with others. Plenty of literature and plenty of movies attest to the importance of human connection--plot is the difficulty that lies in making such a connection matter. Up in the Air is an argument in favor of connection. Ryan Bingham, who gives speeches on the importance of maintaining as few contacts as possible, is an incredibly lonely person. For most of his adult life, he has been on the outside of humanity looking in through the incredibly small window afforded him by firing somebody face-to-face. Being so detached is an asset to his kind of work. He appears to care about a person's plight, but is not particularly moved. It's hard for a person to go on like that forever--even C.F. Kane didn't want to die alone.

Director Jason Reitman deals with Ryan's problem by not treating it like a problem. Ryan isn't depressed because he's alone. He's not constantly putting his heart out there to be crushed. He's a believer in an empty life but makes two incredibly important connections without even realising it. Wisely, Reitman doesn't deal with the question of social media beyond the thought of firing somebody via webcam (the process is first tested, perhaps unwisely, in Detroit) and Natalie being broken-up with via text message. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, blogs, e-mail, and instant messaging allow us to talk to people from around the world instantaneously, but how connected are you to a person you've only talked to online? How connected are you to a classmate that Facebook reminds you to reconnect with? In that context, what is a "friend," and can a person really have 1,000 of them? Ryan wouldn't know--he's a soloist who thrives when it comes to making temporary connections in the flesh. Sure he's kind of a dinosaur, but he has no use for social media because he has no problem with being social.

I admired this movie. Everything about it. Clooney, Farmiga, and Kendrick are great, as are the actors that appear in smaller parts--Jason Bateman as Ryan's boss, J.K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis as fired employees, Danny McBride as a reluctant groom, and Sam Elliott as a Maynard Finch, whose role in all of this I won't spoil. The script is sly, witty, and doesn't try to draw attention to itself. The firing scenes, with one exception, don't go over the top--the employees reactions, and Natalie's reactions to them, feel organic and don't step wrong. "Organic" is a good word for the whole movie--Reitman avoids standard rom-com-dram conventions to the point that when one pops up, you hardly notice. A lesser director would have found the potential sentiment and schmaltz in Ryan's life, when connecting, which is as hard won as most movies portray it easy, is only schmaltzy and sentimental in retrospect. Great, fresh film making.

Movie Review: The Book of Eli (2010)

The Book of Eli (2010)

Directed By:
The Hughes Brothers

Starring:
Denzel Washington: Eli
Gary Oldman: Carnegie
Mila Kunis: Solara
Ray Stevenson: Redridge
Jennifer Beals: Claudia
Tom Waits: Engineer
Michael Gambon: George

Rating:


Yeah, Well, That's Just Your Opinion, Man

It goes without saying that the book at the center of The Book of Eli is the Bible. room for In the aftermath of a barely described nuclear holy war, every copy of the Bible has been destroyed save one, which is in the possession of Eli (Denzel Washington), a solitary wandering monk type who knows knives, guns, and good music on top of his considerable knowledge of scripture. The land is not kind, yielding little more than the occasional stray cat to eat. As is becoming more and more common in the post-apocalyptic genre, plenty of humans have done one of two things: Hung themselves in a the hero to discover, or turned to cannibalism to allow the hero to butcher them, qualm-free.

Eli gets both of those things out of the way quickly, slaughtering a crew of cannibals who want what’s in his backpack, and then taking the shoes off of a hanging corpse in an abandoned house. The early scene in said abandoned house is a standout. Using a short supply of wet towelettes from KFC, Eli bathes himself while listening to Al Green on a first generation iPod. He looks old and weary. His body is covered with burns. He eats his cat meat alone, preparing for another long day of walking. Like most warrior monks, he wants to do it alone. He does two things with the people who intrude on his path: Kills them, or abandons them. His Bible must go west.

Hoping to recharge his iPod, Eli stumbles into a ramshackle, rusted-out version of every Old West town you’ve ever seen in a movie. The town is run by a despotic old white guy with a rich old white guy’s name. You know that Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is despotic and thus the bad guy because he is first shown reading a biography of Mussolini. You know he’s crazy because he wants the Bible, believing that it’s the key to building more rustic, Old West inspired towns. He believes that people will do whatever he says, so long as it’s in a book that nobody but him can read. Reading is power, after all.

Eli gets into an altercation with a yokel at Carnegie's bar. This leads to a meeting between Eli and Carnegie, which leads to Eli spending the night, which leads to Eli meeting Solara (Mila Kunis), who is an unwilling prostitute. She sees Eli’s book. She tells Carnegie that Eli has the book. When Eli refuses to give the book up, a shootout ensues. When that doesn’t kill Eli (but leaves a number of Carnegie's men dead), a posse is rounded up, loaded into heavily fortified GMCs and sent west in pursuit of Eli. From here, you can guess the following:

• What unexpected follower does the unexpected and follows Eli
• What Eli’s initial reaction to said follower is.
• What ghastly attempted act upon the follower brings the two together.
• Why those nice old people who live out in the wasteland have a trap door, a graveyard, and a substantial store of fresh meat.
• Where the last bastion of humanity is located. (Hint: It’s as ironic as it is iconic.)
• Whether or not Eli’s mission is divinely purposed.
• Whether or not Carnigie is right about the Bible.

You can guess at all of that correctly without stumbling upon the film’s GOTCHA revelation, which I won't spoil. As far as the movie's religious bent goes, I suppose it just depends on your disposition. As an apostate, I was pretty much gagging on the scene where Eli teaching Solara how to pray. She can't read, the Bible doesn't exist, and she's never heard of God, but Eli, in the span of about three minutes, makes her pray, thus converting her. The next day, she leads her mom in prayer, which is as necessary to the plot as it is unbelievable. I just can't imagine belief as a switch waiting to be turned on by some guy who grabs your hands and tells you to close your eyes--conversion experiences in the Bible were more hard won than they are here. And because the Hughes Brothers are in such a hurry to get to the next thing, they forget that it ever happened, a decision that works to undermine the whole "Religion is Power/Belief is Hope" thing and lets Solara down as a character. She's painfully one note before and after that scene, resigned to her status as the movie's second most important prop.

All in all, the movie's predictability and unwillingness to go any deeper than the surface of any of its questions doesn’t really take away from the fact that this is a solid, if unspectacular, action piece. Both major shootouts, in the town and at that lonely house, are very well-constructed. Action movie rules are disobeyed in both, which is nice, and the conclusion is not a hailstorm of bullets, which is different. Everything looks bleak and sunburned, yet somehow obviously purposed--an amusement park version of The Road. The performances, particularly Washington’s, Oldman’s, and Tom Waits’ (the engineer who charges Eli’s iPod) are fine, if not particularly nuanced. The problem is that the Hughes Brothers have no sense of pacing and decide that they don’t actually need a proper resolution.

The film actually takes great pains in letting you know that, in the end, nothing was really at stake beyond Carnagie's pride--he and his crew of generic henchmen could have expanded their franchise of Rock Ridges without the good book--which means that things just kind of happen without a cause. The movie goes on, picking up hitchhiking plot elements without intending to properly resolve any of them. And when Solara wanders out on her own with Eli's iPod and machete, I can't tell if it's sequel bait or the screenwriter forgetting that she was utterly useless unless something she had to say was absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And it all goes by so fast! Since when can't we stop to appreciate the apocalypse?

My Year in Music

2009 was a year of great musical events in my life. It was a year that brought me a sense of security and maturity in my taste. What I mean is, 2009 was the year in which the guilty pleasure died. This past year was one where I would gleefully listen to pop radio and be amazed by the quality and depth of the production, if not the lyrics. I make no apologies to anyone for my embrace of both high and low art, and in fact discourage the distinction. 2009 was also a time where my iPod was stolen, on which I had amassed over 5,000 songs that are literally irreplaceable. It reminded me of the transience of life, and I recognized it as payback for most of the music on it having been pirated.

As to the best music of 2009, I can't say. I know that I am supposed to like indie rock made by bearded white Brooklynites; despite the fact that I am white, usually bearded, and hopefully moving to Brooklyn in August, I can't relate. With notable exceptions, I enjoy primarily dance music: hip-hop, electronic stuff, dancehall. In no particular order:

Jay-Z, the Blueprint III



Jay-Z is indisputably the best rapper you will hear on the radio. If you dispute me, you are wrong. I can't remember whether I was listening to Sound Opinions or Sound Check (both highly recommended music shows/podcasts), but I'll paraphrase the host who said "It seems insensitive and idiotic to rap about your possessions in 2009. Especially since Jay-Z is so good at it; he's richer than you'll ever be, and he's got Beyonce. Why do you keep trying?" Not Jay-Z's best album, by any means. However, Jay-Z is an entertainer and I love hearing him on the radio.



Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linxxx...Pt. II



On the other hand, Raekwon is beyond pop. This album is the hip-hop equivalent of Chinese Democracy, gestating for near a decade. It was worth the wait. The Wu steez is immaculate; impenetrable slang laid over smoky, soulful beats. Forget that Kanye West already sampled Elton John, when you hear "Kiss the Ring" it's a revelation.



Soulico, Exotic on the Speaker



These guys deserve an American breakthrough. The Israeli DJs are already seasoned hitmakers out of Tel Aviv for other artists. It is a testament to their boundary-phobic production that Israeli vocalists like the R&B styled Oren Barzilay and Ethiopian-Israeli dancehall crew Axum can share space with U.S. rappers from Del the Funkee Homosapien to Ghostface Killah. Listening to this album in America will make you have almost as much fun as I did while dancing the hot Israeli nights away in May. Here's the title track featuring M.I.A.'s protege Rye Rye.



Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga was 2009. I am too much of a fan to choose one of her songs. As far as I'm concerned, she is a multimedia superstar in the mold of Andy Warhol who makes music so that she has her foot in the door to make you watch her videos and check out her willfully obtuse fashion. Watch Bad Romance again!



Dengue Fever, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong



You'd think Dengue Fever would be gimmicky. They are a bunch of Americans playing and inspired by the rock music of Cambodia from the 1960s, which was itself influenced by American surf and garage rock. Chhom Nimol has an amazingly beautiful voice whether singing in Khmer or English. Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is a documentary that details the band's first Cambodian tour. It really is a spectacle watching people get their music played back to them by Americans. The music had been suppressed by the Khmer Rouge communist government and the original artists were often killed. The movie is one of those affirmations of interconnectedness that's only helped by the bitchin' tunes.



Vybz Kartel featuring Spice, "Ramping Shop"
I include this single song because it was my favorite thing, hands down, about 2009 musically. Here's the version too "dirty" for Jamaican radio. If you wanted Ne-Yo's "Miss Independent" to be transformed into a blistering dancehall reggae soundtrack for babymaking practice, this is the song.



It features one of my favorite current things in music: disgustingly misogynistic lyrics, sung romantically. The best practitioner of this stateside is Akon. One of my other favorites this year was his collaboration with David Guetta, "Sexy Bitch", which features the lines "I'm trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful. Damn girl. Damn, you's a sexy bitch."



The Black Keys, Blakroc



Was rap-rock ever a good idea? Doubtful. Was it due for a revival in 2009? Well...the Black Keys pull it off with Blakroc, their collaboration with rappers like Mos Def, Ludacris, and others. The bluesy sounds of the Black Keys make this nothing like Limp Bizkit or other cargo pants-sporting crews. Check out "Ain't Nothin' Like You (Hoochie Coo)" featuring Mos Def and Jim Jones. If you're like me, it makes you grimace with unadulterated funk.



Have a great year with much more music!

The 11 Best Movies of 2009

I haven't quite figured out when the decade ends, otherwise I'd probably be posting a best-of-the-decade-type list like everybody else. That list, like this one, won't be a top 10. This list isn't a top 10 because I've never done a top 10, and I don't really plan on doing one anytime soon. I'm also not going to list every movie I've seen this year like I did last year, because some movies are better left forgotten. So, in alphabetical order...


Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
While I'm one of those people who often finds Nic Cage more of a nuisance than an actor worth paying any attention to, his unique quirks actually enhance Werner Herzog's film about an asshole cop who quickly becomes a monster after being diagnosed with moderate to severe back pain. Cage rapes, snorts coke, laughs at his own bad jokes, and stares at iguanas with reckless abandon, hardly noticing that his whole world is crashing down around him until everything suddenly, finally seems to be going right for him. A spectacularly shot, superbly acted film. And it's pretty damned funny, to boot.



District 9
Before Paranormal Activity went all viral and made a bunch of money on a small budget, District 9 did the same, building its hype through small glimpses into a world where aliens crash landed in, of all places, South Africa, and were quickly put behind huge fences, given cat food to eat and shacks to live in. The first half is apartheid-allegory-via-clever-concept. The second is one big chase scene. You know something? I'm a sucker for clever, well-executed concepts, awesome looking guns, and long, drawn out chase scenes. District 9 had that in spades, and, of all the movies on this list (with the exception of The Hurt Locker), was the movie that had me gripping the armrests the hardest.



Goodbye Solo
The most moving, personal movie I saw all year. A real shame that almost nobody else did. Goodbye Solo involved a relationship between an African cab driver and a 70-year-old white man who frequented a movie theater in Winston-Salem, N.C. The cabbie, who knows everybody, wants to chat. The old man, who wants to be driven out one-way to Blowing Rock National Park in a few weeks time, doesn't want any attachment to the world beyond his reason for going to the movies. Ramin Bahrani's third film is absolutely poetic, and is the kind of movie I hope benefits from the Academy increasing their nominee pool to ten features.



The Hangover
Three men wake up the morning in their palatial Las Vegas hotel suite the night after a bachelor party for their best friend, Doug. They find a chicken, a tiger, a mountain of empty cans and bottles, and a completely trashed room, but no Doug. This year's quote-bomb, The Hangover avoids a lot of lame Vegas pitfalls by focusing more on the characters than the city itself. Not only does that allow Bradley Cooper, long stuck in the asshole boyfriend role, to become a convincing lead, but it gives us Zach Galifianakis, who promises to be the anchor of many future comedies. There should be no holding him down.



The Hurt Locker
Should win the Academy Award for Best Picture, if there's any justice. A so-raw-it-bleeds film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow's near-flawless movie is not only the best of a small number of worthwhile films dealing with the War on Terror, it's also one of the best war movies I've ever seen. Bigelow does not give the viewer a sense of her opinion on the war. Instead, she examines why somebody whose job involves disarming complex bombs would crave working that highly dangerous position. The sad truth is in the title card: War is a drug.



Inglorious Basterds
Another war movie that's not really about the war it depicts, Quentin Tarantino throws out the history book to give us a World War II that's all jacked up on Mountain Dew. Anchored by some tremendous performances (Christoph Waltz's being the stuff of legend) and Tarantino's indomitable love of cinema, Inglorious Basterds proves that not every script that gestates in a dresser drawer for ten years is an idea best left in the drawer.



Moon
Cinematic hard sci-fi at its finest, Duncan Jones' Moon is the story of a man and his computer as they work together to mine the Moon. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the only man on the Moon. His only company is Gertie (Kevin Spacey), a computer that communicates through a disturbingly calm voice and a handful of emoticons. I don't want to spoil a thing when it comes to this movie, which was hardly seen, but it's far less 2001 than you'd think, given the nature of the computer, and leans more towards a question of ethics than of mankind's potential. Rockwell's performance is especially good given that he's working with little more than his set, which is more gorgeous than you'd suspect from a movie with such a tiny budget.



Observe and Report
Sorely overlooked because of a different mall cop movie, Jody Hill's incredibly misanthropic movie is this year's future cult hit. Seth Rogen plays against type as bi-polar anti-hero Ronnie Barnhardt, a Travis Bickle type who lusts after make-up counter clerk Brandi (Anna Ferris, who finally lives up to her hype). Everybody who saw it either loved it or wondered why it was made. I was left crying in my seat.



A Serious Man
Only the Coen Brothers could have made this movie, which takes place in a predominantly Jewish community in 1967 Minnesota, which seems blissfully untouched by the Beatles and the Summer of Love, though its influences are creeping in at the edges. Relentlessly Jewish and unflinchingly Midwestern, this modern day parable is the kind of movie that is lost on nobody. If you haven't had a run-in with the Columbia Record Club, maybe you've quested to get your headphones back from a teacher, or spent a semester avoiding a much larger, much meaner boy. Or maybe you just really like Jefferson Airplane. Or F-Troop. Or had a neighbor who sunbathed nude in her backyard. Or anything, really. This is life at its most cosmically tragic.



Up
It's an animated movie with an 80-year-old protagonist, a Disney movie where a character's death isn't the central, game changing moment, a Pixar film, which should say enough. Pete Doctor's Up is everything an animated movie should be--smart, sophisticated, and unafraid to defy the norms of the genre. In a decade full of Kung Fu Pandas, Bolts and Shrek sequels that shouldn't have been, Pixar has, with one notable exception, churned out nothing but animation that actually means something. Not quite as good as Wall-E, but what is?



Where the Wild Things Are
The more I think about this movie, the more I like it. Before I decided to rank alphabetically, this was almost at the top of the list. There are some movies that just capture a mood or a period in your life, and for me, no other movie captures what childhood felt like so effortlessly. All of the wonder, imagination, sadness, and rage. The times you scream, the times you run away, the times you run back home. It's all here, and it's all gorgeous, from the cinematography to the Wild Things to Karen O's soundtrack.


Close: (500) Days of Summer, Adventureland, Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Drag Me to Hell, An Education, Funny People, I Love You, Man, Zombieland
Unseen: Too Many to List

Movie Review: Avatar (2009)

Avatar is the work of a man obsessed by detail. James Cameron spent years coming up with Pandora, the planet that our ancestors see as a violent little backwater good for nothing more than the rare fuel that can be found in abundance there, and it shows. This movie, the very definition of an event, is more a showcase for the incredibly impressive special effects than it is a proper blockbuster. After how huge Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was, I’m surprised the country has the patience for two-and-a-half hours of 3D exploration.

The film begins with Earth, in the form of an energy company and the United States Marines, on the verge of war with the Na'vi, a group of indigenous, ten foot tall elves who, our ancestors assert, are highly primitive, as we’re the ones visiting them. Not content with destroying one planet, our bulldozers are set to raze the Na’vi’s forest to get at that precious metal. Lush forests? Exotic animals? They’re what happen to stand between the corporate bigwigs and their huge yearly bonus.
The corporation has made the vital mistake of bringing along a group of scientists. Being curious bastards, as all scientists are, they want to explore the land. Worse, they want to create a bond to the Na’vi. They’re able to do so by means of telepathically controlling bio-genetically engineered Na’vi/human hybrids—the Avatars. Corporal Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic Marine, happens to be brothers with a scientist to whom one of the Avatars belonged. That brother dies unexpectedly, and the keys to the Avatar are tossed to him. He falls asleep in a tube, wakes up, and can walk again.

He is assigned to learn all he can about the Na’vi to bring about the terms of their surrender and relocation, unbeknownst to the team of scientists he is working with. So Jake goes out and explores Pandora, and we walk out into the world with him, and it is good. Really good. We observe the plants. We run from the animals. We meet the natives. Jake is as fascinated by this as any of us would be, his newfound ability to walk becoming secondary to his daily exploration of Pandora. One day, he is separated from the group. He tries to survive a night away from camp and is attacked by dogs (or dog-looking things), only to be rescued by the princess (Zoe Saldana). Though she considers Jake an idiot, he slowly wins her respect, not to mention her love, all while learning the way of the Na'vi.

The movie really is spectacular to behold, but there are times when the story struggles to be worth the effort put into the special effects. A variation on one of the oldest stories in the book, Cameron fails to flesh out the bulk of his characters enough to make the film stand out as a stellar story. The characters are pure stock. The scientists distrust the military, which is full of hardasses who say things like "You're not in Kansas anymore" to a group of fresh fish stepping off the spaceship. The face of the faceless corporation is a snarky, stupid jerk. The hero, disability aside, is good looking, driven, and stiff as a board. Michelle Rodriguez shoots guns and sounds tough, as Michelle Rodriguez is wont to do. The computer generated Na'vi are more convincing than the flesh-and-blood humans. It's no wonder the members of the Avatar program spend more time in a different body than their own.

While I am always impressed with the meticulous nature of James Cameron's work, I couldn't help but think that Avatar could have had a better script for the ten years Cameron spent on it. It's one thing to have a crew of stock characters. It's quite another when the whole movie feels like little more than a retread of every other fish out of water space opera. We're meant to be wowed by what's in front of us, and we are. At times, Avatar made me feel the way I did when I saw Star Wars for the first time--stunned by the details in the visual spectacle. At other times, Avatar made me feel the way I felt the first time I saw any of the Star Wars prequels--impressed, but empty. Jake's mission was to find out how the Na'vi lived, but he, and we, come away without really knowing who
they are and why they matter. There is so much detail at Avatar's surface, but it feels like Cameron just kind of stopped, like it was enough to show how the giant blue elves ran through trees and rode dragons. A real shame, too. Something this good looking really deserved to be more special.



Far Fucking Out

Movie Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Inglorious Basterds is a fairy tale, and says so from the opening title card. “Once Upon a Time, in Nazi-occupied France,” there was this group of eight Jewish-American soldiers deep behind enemy lines, whose only mission was to make themselves known to the enemy by killing, scalping, and carving swastikas into enemy foreheads. But that’s neither here nor there. While the movie was (and still is) sold on the basis of Brad Pitt’s performance as Lt. Aldo “The Apache” Raine, there’s a second, much more interesting feature playing at the same time, one that is connected to the movie’s narrative hook by an incredibly narrow strand: One character who happens to put the events of both narratives in motion.

That first feature is where the movie begins, on a dairy farm in rural France. A family is doing its chores when they are visited by an S.S. squad headed by Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who has been given the nickname “Jew Hunter” for his exploits. The scene that plays out between the Nazi and the head of the household is maybe the most engrossing sequence in any movie this year, and it’s just two men talking and smoking their pipes. Of course, when it’s revealed that there are Jews hiding beneath the floorboards, the S.S. storms in and shoots the place up, but the gunfire only serves to transition the viewer from one scene to another—from rural the rural France where a few hiding Jews are casually slaughtered to the rural France where, years later, the Basterds casually slaughter Nazis.

Of course, by 1944, the war in Europe was starting to turn on Hitler, who spent much of his time trying to persuade himself and the citizens of Germany that their setbacks were only temporary, that they’d strike a crushing blow. The Hitler in Inglorious Basterds is frantic and child-like, demanding that his soldiers stop referring to one of the Basterds as the Bear Jew, then enjoying himself at the premiere of “Nation’s Pride,” a new propaganda film starring war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), one of the Nazi’s few bright spots in a rather bleak year.

Zoller, as it turns out, is a cinephile. He adores the cinema belonging to Emmanuelle Mimieux, otherwise known as Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who was the lone Jew to escape Landa in the opening scene. Zoller wants to have “Nation’s Pride” shown at Shosanna’s cinema. More than that, he wants to be with Shosanna, but he is a Nazi and she is a Jew and she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d very much be interested in a uniformed man anyhow. After being interviewed by Joseph Goebbels and screened by Landa himself, the premiere is moved from a much larger theatre to Shosanna’s venue.

Of course, the Allies know this. On the verge of D-Day, they send British film-critic-turned-soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) to meet with the Basterds and rendezvous with Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a German actress-turned-double-agent. It is her job to get Hicox and the Basterds into the premiere of “Nation’s Pride” wearing bombs on their legs, as the whole German high command is scheduled to be in attendance, including Hitler. Meanwhile, Shosanna plans her own revenge, plotting to burn down the theatre with all the Nazis inside. She has a bunch of nitrate film, the means to burn it, and is willing to die to see the job through.

However, there are complications. The rendezvous with von Hammersmark is in a basement. The basement is full of drunken Nazis who are enthralled by the fact that they’re drinking with a famous actress. Zoller will not stop in his pursuit of Shosanna, regardless of how many times she insists that she is uninterested. Beyond that, Hans Landa may be the craftiest Nazi in the room. While he might let Shoshanna slip through his fingers, there’s no way he wouldn’t spot one of the infamous Basterds, were they to be in the same room.

The film is told in five chapters, and is framed around three of them. The opening twenty minutes, our introduction to Hans Landa, is chief among these scenes, and is one of the best I’ve seen this year and this decade. The scene with the Basterds, the Brit, von Hammersmark, and the Nazis in the basement is similarly fantastic, as is all of chapter five, “Revenge of the Giant Face,” where all of the plot points converge into one spectacular mess that leaves us with few survivors.

The movie took Tarrantino ten years to write, and looks every minute to be a labor of love. His dialog is as sharp as ever, and the action, macaroni combat that’s more frenzied than macaroni combat, comes in enough to satisfy anybody who was disappointed by the long wait between the car crashes in Death Proof. Hans Landa and Shosanna Dreyfus are among his very best characters, and Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent are perfect as them. Waltz should walk away with any award he’s nominated for, and Laurent is being unfairly snubbed, though Diane Kruger is up for a Golden Globe for what is easily her best performance to date. This is a big movie, the kind that warrants multiple viewings. There’s so much going on here. Inglorious Basterds kills Hitler, and that's not even the best part.



The Dude Abides