Movie Review: Aronofsky's The Wrestler Grapples with Rourke's Past

Mickey Rourke's face - puffed, spongy, semi-mobile, is like a relief map of failure in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, a sports drama that struggles semi-successfully to transcend it's genre. To the degree that it succeeds Rourke, Marisa Tomei, and Aronofsky deserve the credit for sharply grounding the film in reality. Likewise, it's shortcomings are again Aronofsky's - who sometimes uses a staple gun when a thumbtack would do (quite literally) and screenwriter Robert Siegel who sometimes flounders against the mechanics of his plot and some clunky dialogue.

Aronofsky tones down the lyrical visual flourishes of The Fountain to shoot in a spare, hand-held fashion. There are some nice flourishes, the best of which is the constant soundtrack of 80s hair metal. When Rourke laments the rise of Kurt Cobain and the 90s, its the sweeping away of his dreams and his status as a cultural force he is railing against. It's heavy meta, if you will.

Early on Tomei recommends Scorsese's The Passion of The Christ to Rourke, jokingly calling his character "The sacrificial Ram." Not surprisingly that's exactly what he is, a piece of meat thrown into a ring as a lightning rod for his fans hopes and rage and passion - even as he slides down the ladder of his chosen profession.

Tomei, is his spiritual doppelganger, a stripper who equals him in bare chested and buttocked screen time. It's a measure of how far she's come that her high school drama class Brooklynese that inexplicable netted an Oscar for My Cousin Vinny is replaced here by an utterly believable Jersey girl. These are both sweet characters who absorb the blows of the world around them and find their power in the spotlight of the stage even as their bodies begin to betray them.

The real pleasure of this film lie in the backstage sequences - seeing the way younger wrestlers respond to Rourke's Randy the Ram, the business of plotting out the rough action that will occur in the ring, the subtle signals the wrestlers give to each other while grappling, all speak to the film's verisimilitude.

Less real are the scenes with Ram's estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood. They both come across fine but the scenes feel sketched out rather than fully fleshed. This is true too of the climax which is designed to place Ram on his metaphorical cross. It feels like a bit too much in a film full of surprising subtlety.

Let me know what you think here, or on Twitter at @nmallin .

Films: Netflix Roundup - What Have I Been Watching?

With my busy eastern media elite schedule I haven't had the time I'd like to give you, my tens of readers, the movie reviews that I've promised. So here are some capsule reviews of what I've been watched over the last few weeks courtesy of Netflix. I've also helpfully added the stars I gave them in my Netflix rating for easy unhindered digestion.


I Want To Live (1958) (3 Stars)

Susan Hayward plays what was once known as a blowzy broad in this early anti-death penalty flick. The first half hour where she goes from one seedy situation to another is great pulpy fun but her hard boiled overacting takes center stage by the more earnest second half. The inside look on how the process works for death row inmates holds some interest but the increasing desperation of her situation begins to seem more comical than tragic as we await the umpteenth call from the gov.


California Split (1974) (5 Stars)

Robert Altman's incisive and tricky buddy film was unappreciated on release but shines as one of his best movies. Elliot Gould is in full sardonically muttering Elliot Gould mold and George Segal is at his best as two inveterate gambling addicts going after the big score. As I got deeper into the characters- and this is a marvelous character study- the resemblance to John Huston's legendary Treasure of the Sierra Madre struck me. Two guys in thrall to a dream of deliverance through riches that becomes the empty pursuit of specie. Though Gould never goes to the extremes that Bogart does in the Huston film he is just as hooked on the chase. A terrific film.


The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) (4 Stars)

Ivan Dixon, who died earlier this year, was best known for his supporting role on TV's Hogan's Heroes. As a director though he made this fascinating and tough gem that subverts the blaxploitation genre and asks some tough political questions. In a set-up that clearly plays on the screens inside the minds of the McCain campaign at this very moment, the film takes the premise of the CIA recruiting blacks to divert scrutiny of their actions. The one guy who makes it through is tough and quiet and happily toils away making copies and doing other low level tasks while soaking up all of the counter insurgency methods the agency was honing overseas. Retiring with honor he goes to Chicago to become - you guessed it - a community organizer. Only he ends up passing his training along to black power advocates and gang members - teaching them to lay off drugs and get started making bombs. This section plays like a cross between Fight Club and Shaft before ending abruptly. Well worth seeing.


Hard Eight (1996)  (4 stars)

This early film from Paul Thomas Anderson has the hallmarks of most of his work - beautiful framing and photography, characters that are more flawed than lovable, and a distinct milieu - in this case the gambling underworld of Las Vegas. Philip Baker Hall, one of Anderson's favorites, is terrific as the father figure card sharp to John C. Reilly. Reilly is more of a problem - he finds everything that's whiny and irritating in a dipshit character. It becomes hard to see why Hall would give two squats about him, even after the later plot machinations grind through. Tipping this into an extra star though is a brilliantly jaded turn by Gwyneth Paltrow - it's perhaps her best performance and very different than what she's typecast as now. Then there's the delicious turn by Samuel L. Jackson as a particularly annoying friend of Reilly's.


Smiley Face (2007) (1 Star)

Anna Faris is an attractive and game comic actress in search of a vehicle to really shine. This ain't it. A stoner comedy full of jump-cuts, every cliched "stoned" POV shot in the book, and a mis-judged central performance that hits one spaced-out note interminably, this is one to skip. What's most shocking is that this sub-par take on the far superior Go was directed by the talented Greg Araki, who should know better. Watch Harold and Kumar instead.

Movie Review: Tati's Playtime Fascinates

Movie Review by Noah Mallin

Jacques Tati gave everything he had to 1967’s Playtime, at the time one of the most expensive movies ever made in France. For his trouble it was a commercial failure and a mixed-bag critically, closing the door on Tati’s reign as the master of postwar French comedy. Seen today on the new Criterion Collection remaster (or as Terry Jones points out, ideally in 70 mm) Playtime emerges as a unique masterpiece. It’s one of those movies that makes you laugh sometimes and you’re not even sure why.

It’s really three films in one, the first being an extended riff on modernist architecture as a tool of control. Yes it’s funny, and strange, and off-putting and fascinating and wistful. It’s like being raped by the Seagram’s Building. The mid section takes the anomie into a home patterned on the same show-all principles as the mid-century workplace. It’s the most alienating part of the film as the sound is entirely provided from the outside, as is the perspective. Part three is an elaborate farce set in an ultra-modern restaurant/nightclub – where people play. The external regimentation and behavioral modification imposed by the architectural style of the restaurant is gradually undermined by the increasingly anarchic people who interact with it.

This is heady stuff but it’s often breathtaking. The movie loosely follows a gaggle of American women tourists in group visiting Paris. What they are shown are a series of shopping opportunities in international style settings that could be buildings and hotels anywhere in the world. The “real” Paris is the flower seller on the corner who one woman tries to photograph - only to be foiled by French kids dressed like American greasers, Japanese tourists, and finally a fellow American who wants to take her picture while she’s taking the shot. The poor woman keeps getting puzzling glimpses of Parisian landmarks like the Eiffel Tower reflected in opening doors and advertising posters but she’s trapped with her group in these steel and glass boxes.

Tati’s alter-ego M. Hulot is on hand weaving his way through the film reflected by look-alikes and mistaken for others. Just as the glassy buildings all reflect and refract images into multiples and duplicates Hulot is multiplied and duplicated. His unsuccessful attempt to keep an appointment is marked by elegant chrome and leather chairs that mimic gastrointestinal distress when they are sat on and a stunning vision of cubicle anticipating box-like offices on an open floor as seen from above – the kind of image Terry Gilliam built a career on.

There are other gags that imbed themselves in the cerebellum to be unpacked later – this is an incredibly dense film full of widescreen imagery with very few close-ups and a full busy frames. During Hulot’s visit to his old Army buddies apartment a man undresses obliviously in full view of the street through his windowed wall. We watch him through the glass at the same time we can see his female neighbor through her glass wall staring at her TV in interest. The witty framing makes it looks as if she’s watching her neighbor strip avidly.

The restaurant sequence features several giddy highpoints. A plate glass door shatters but the doorman keeps holding the knob and opening and shutting the “door” for patrons, the air conditioning makes a woman’s skin ripple like silk, a model airplane wilts like a Freudian nightmare.

The cinematography is luscious, as much as Tati is musing over the spaces we create and how they hem us in; he’s also as seduced by the Mies Van Der Rohe style buildings against the sky, the way the lights wink on at dusk, the sleek lobbies and furniture. The colors are steel grays, navy blues, myriad tones of slate – all of which sound like they’ll be flat but they vibrate with the intensity of a shimmering pool. The production design is never over-the-top. The same crested chair backs that look so cool when you first see them in the restaurant end up leaving crest imprints on the backs of men’s jackets. It’s a wonderful sly joke in a world where life was becoming increasingly production designed.

It’s intriguing and perhaps overly determinist to look at the film through the prism of the riots that would rock France and many other countries the following year. Like the patrons in the restaurant who begin to dissemble the architecture to make their own reality and who obediently dance to whatever tempo the band plays society feels like it teeters on the edge by the end of Playtime.

The last, short sequence of vehicles caught in a roundabout, with a carnival like tune playing on the soundtrack and a woman bobbing up and down on a motorcycle like a little girl on a carousel horse is delightful and haunting at the same time. Everything is restored to its manmade orderliness and controlled chaos, all of the machines and buildings and buses are children’s toys, designed by children with the arbitrariness of youth.

Movie Review: Heartburn Inducing Heartbreak Kid

Review by Noah Mallin

The original version of The Heartbreak Kid was an all-American story of Charles Grodin trading up on his honeymoon from Jeannie Berlin to WASP goddess Cybill Shephard. The remake, starring Ben Stiller, is so loath to lay a glove on its leading man that it bends over backwards to try and explain why a guy would do such a rotten thing.

For one thing it’s more of a sideways trade in the new one. Stiller, looking like a constipated greyhound throughout, is cajoled into marrying by a suite of obnoxious types including pre-pubescenet twin boys who taunt him for being a “fag”, Rob Corddry who is too much of a prick to fulfill anyone’s notion of a best friend, and Stiller’s own father, played by Jerry Stiller – his own father.

Stiller the elder is outfitted with a Woody Woodpecker coif that looks like a colony of red dye number 2 was dispatched from the maraschino cherry factory, and a series of overbearing lines regarding “pussy.” His arc hits a stomach churning low in a Las Vegas hot tub with a topless lass whose grotesque huge fake mammaries bob upon the surface like discarded waterwings. Here at least is the root of Stiller the younger's evidently deep fear of all things woman.

He marries Malin Akerman, a gorgeous sunny-smiled blonde. The film then proceeds to use every centimeter of her delectable body as a talisman of fear and subjugation. No orifice is left unexplored in Stiller’s downright abject terror of this bombshell’s frank sexuality.

Watching the overexplicit sex scenes I was torn between the desire to tap Stiller out and take his place and the desire to throw a robe around the game Akerman and declare enough's enough already. I like nudity as much as the next guy but when it’s in the service of a punchline involving Stiller’s disgust at the thought of seeing more of her clitoris we’ve entered a zone that only a trained psychiatric professional can plumb.

The other attempts to make Akerman seem worth ditching – a massively deviated septum, no career ambitions, not the brightest bulb on the string, seem a bit petty and over-designed to draw attention away from the fact that the one with a real problem is Stiller. There is a glimpse of a real movie in the idea that even a va-va-voom looker like Akerman can seem lacking if the chemistry isn’t there – but this is overshadowed by the need to push her into a monstrous characterization that seems badly out of proportion. I felt sorry for the actress and the character.

Stiller instead finds comfort with Michelle Monaghan who is just as fetching as Akerman but in a more tomboy brunette fashion. More importantly she doesn't pressure him for sex. Monaghan generates chemistry all right, but it’s all on her own. She’s the only one who comes out of this mess unscathed but you want to shout at the screen like a horror film “Run run, before it’s too late! The guy can’t deal with a woman’s sexuality!”

It’s fascinating that a movie dedicated to so much graphic loathing of Akerman’s body is able to display so much of it and get an R rating from the MPAA. Were she spreading herself for sensuous pleasure rather than a punchline there’s no doubt this would be a porn, I can only imagine what was left on the cutting-room floor.

Movie Review: Stranger Than Fiction - Not So Much

Review by Noah Mallin

Film rarely does justice to literature. Stranger Than Fiction gives it a go and it’s a pleasant, even warm experience in the hands of a fine cast and competent director Marc Forster. What it fails to do is to thrill with the possibility of the written page or indeed the moving picture.

Some critics dismissed this film as Charlie Kaufman lite and it’s easy to see how they came to that conclusion. The set-up – a boring IRS auditor begins to hear his innermost thoughts and his everyday actions narrated by a British woman’s voice who eventually reveals his impending doom – is right up Kaufman’s alley.

The difference is that Kaufman, as in Adaptation, is compulsive about exploring every nook and cranny of implication embedded in his high-concept screenplays – something screenwriter Zach Helm resolutely doesn’t do. To be fair this may never have been their intention – much of the film’s pleasure is in spending time with the cast, giving it an endearing hangout flick quality. To make this work the shaggy dog nature of the story ought to come to the fore as in David O. Russell’s similarly absurdist I Heart Huckabees. Forster takes his premise deadly seriously though, which leaves us with yet another Hollywood film that lectures us on the Importance of Living.

Will Ferrell is curiously button-eyed and doughy as the numbers obsessed auditor – he’s like a glum teddybear. The movie throws him cupid-lipped, tattooed, be-dimpled Maggie Gyllenhaal at her most appealingly fierce and goofbally as his love interest, a baker who refuses to give the government tax money for things she doesn’t believe in. There are a few warm sparks of repartee between these to but the film never gives them the space to get that fire going in a satisfying way. Having thrown them together there just isn’t enough for them to do in the weak screenplay.

Dustin Hoffman has become the go-to guy for off-kilter wisdom of the elders and he comes through as the literature prof recommended by hilariously prim shrink Linda Hunt. Hoffman is terrific to watch, his scenes with Ferrel have a satisfying crackle that never seems to find a place anywhere else in the film. Again a rhythm is established but it gets lost between the plot machinations.

Less successfully is the teaming between Emma Thompson – wonderfully twitchy and tetchy as the author of the book in which Ferrel’s Harold resides – and Queen Latifah as some kind of assistant that feels more like a storytelling device than an actual character.

Forster is still too polished and Hollywood a director to find the weirdness underlying much of the material here. His illustration of Harold’s number mania is cute but also overly familiar – Fight Club and A Beautiful Mind were here first. More importantly, it’s a fussy bit of business that adds nothing to the film – the money and time spent on the effects would have been better used on a third draft of the screenplay. The big emotions that the characters finally reveal feel unearned – especially Thompson's. There isn’t enough struggle against fate from Ferrel (oh to see Spike Jonze at work with this) and Gyllenhaal brings tons of heart to a role that remains resolutely more idea than character.

Still, Stranger Than Fiction is a pleasant enough diversion, nowhere near as serious as it would like to be but not a disastrous mess either. As a trifle it does in a pinch, too bad the title is a tease. A little more strangeness would have done a world of good.

DVD Review: The Savages -- More Flight Than Bite

Review by Noah Mallin

Tamara Jenkins made the charming Slums of Beverly Hills ten years ago – a film that kind of sank without a trace despite some fine performances that include one of Marisa Tomei’s best turns and a typically solid Alan Arkin. Cut to last year and her long awaited follow-up film, the considerably more noticed The Savages. Like Slums, The Savages has an ace cast – could you do any better than Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as siblings? Both films also have strong autobiographical elements so it’s tempting to see the aging father Lenny in The Savages as Arkin’s character in his twilight years, just as the brother and sister duo in her first film have grown to internalize the nomadic dislocations of their childhood.

There is a tonal difference between the two films that is appropriate to the time that’s passed for both the characters and the director. While the travails of a teenage girl in the 70s growing up in a dysfunctional family run by a big-talking loser is played for sweetness, pathos, laughs and a tinge of nostalgia in Slums, the story of two emotionally stunted siblings in the present day dealing with the dilemma of what to do when they have to take care of their rapidly declining father who didn’t take care of them as children is melancholic if sometimes bitterly funny.

The sibling's names - John and Wendy - have a fitting Peter Pan feel and in each of their own ways they live in a neverland of stunted emotions and lives. Though this lacks the acuity of a film like Linney-starrer You Can Count on Me which tackled similar brother-sister issues, the real dilemma of what to do about a parent who not only can't take care of themselves but who weren't there for their kids way back when cuts deep.

It's a sometimes touching film that finds most of it's pleasures in the interplay between the two stars. What undermines it a bit is the episodic nature of the story and an ending that comes off as a bit too pat and unearned. Yet we do come to feel for these two screwed up adults, and laugh with and at them. The Savages is a less than perfect film but like the nursing home they settle on for dear old Dad it has it's own comforts -- if just the enjoyment of seeing Linney goof on Hoffman's ridiculous neckbrace or Hoffman's icy response to Linney's married boyfriend.

So, not a classic and it is a bit of a downer but it's also nice to see an American film that savors the small bits of real life rather than explosions and jump cuts.

Film: The Dark Knight -- BatBush, CheneyFace and Osama Bin Joker

"What the...who left gum on the floor?"

Film Review by Noah Mallin

There are some spoilers ahead so if you're still a Bat-virgin and don't want to know what awaits... don't read!

The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's blockbuster follow-up to 2005's excellent Batman Begins, is perhaps the darkest and strangest film to ever have a Pizza Hut tie-in pizza. In Nolan's hands Batman becomes a tough noir crime story -- if not Godfather II as some critics have suggested its at least the equal of The Departed, The Untouchables or even Reservoir Dogs and packs some of Scorsese's visceral wallop. The Spiderman films are saccharine kid's stuff by comparison.

A great deal of attention has been given to Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker -- a nightmarish romp that leaves Nicholson's version in the camp dust with Cesar Romero's TV portrayal of the role. Ledger is a force unto himself and he elevates every scene he's in. His untimely demise is easily pushed aside by the force of his striking work here. Like Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men (another genre-defying film that The Dark Knight shares some kinship with) , backstory is irrelevant -- The Joker is chaos, pure and simple. His shifting explanations as to how he earned his trademark scars are a clever character development in themselves -- as is the literally lip-smacking relish with which Ledger conveys them.

This is not to slight the rest of an excellent cast. Christian Bale continues to find the pleasure in playing a smirking asshole playboy by day and a hard-ass lone avenger at night. Gary Oldman gets substantially more to do in this installment and as always he makes it count. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine both get to put more meat on their character's as well and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a tremendous improvement over Katie Homes' wan perf as Rachel Dawes.

The film is chock full of ideas and surprises, all of which is welcome in a summer which has had its share of better than average poporn flicks (Iron Man and Wall-E come to mind). It's astounding that a debate is now raging in the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic over whether Bush is in fact like Batman is in the film -- fighting a remorseless terrorist and sometimes having to bend the law to do so. Batman is willing to take on the opprobrium of Gotham knowing that he has to operate outside the law to get things done, just as smirking asshole playboy President Bush is a world pariah for breaking a few eggs in making his eggshell-y Iraq omelet.

This argument, which the WSJ seemed to find flattering to Bush, is actually indicative of the low regard some neo-cons have for the Presidency. One of the central points of The Dark Knight is that Batman understands the importance of the law, and that being an unelected vigilante has a different set of responsibilities than being an elected public official. Batman himself chooses which lines to cross and the weight of the responsibility of having no check or balance on him is staggering -- he wants it to end. The Joker becomes his check, the lawless criminal to the lawless vigilante. Andrew Klavan, in writing his editorial betrays the neo-con conception of the white house as an imperial Wayne Industries with no need to answer to anyone. Bush didn't choose to wear the mantle of an outcast, it was thrust on him by a disgusted public.



Which brings us to Aaron Eckhart as District Attorney Harvey Dent. Both Batman and Gordon see Eckhart as a white knight (pun intended) official response to Gotham's lawlessness, a crusading public official who will do the right thing and act as a symbol of the power of the law. Eckhart finds the tinge of self-absorption that powers the man perfectly while also making him genuinely heroic and likable. Like Batman, Eckhart has a code but its a bit more slippery and in the end permeable. His cute coin-flipping trick (both sides have heads so he wins either way) speaks to an underlying my-way-or-the-highway ethos and becomes darker and more sinister as the movie goes on. In the end, this man who has represented hope becomes deformed and twisted by his battle with chaos, turning into a perversion of the steadiness of justice he once upheld, his coin now akin to the one Javier Bardem used to such menacing effect in No Country. Now that sounds like Bush. Only Eckhart starts out likable.

Michael Caine is quoted in this week's Entertainment Weekly as saying, and I'm paraphrasing, Superman is how Americans see themselves and Batman is how the rest of the world sees America. This may be a bit much but there is something to this. Nolan's film stirs up a little bit of everything that has made Americans and the rest of the world so uneasy about the so-called "war on terror"-- Batman uses cellphones to spy on everyone in Gotham to the outrage of Freeman's character, there are a few scenes that explore the limits of torture and a memorable sequence with two boats full of doomed passengers that seems to question the old "attack them over there so they don't come here" doctrine.

For all the polemical bromides Hollywood has tried to get viewers to chew on about the war in Iraq, it may actually be a Summer popcorn film that raises the most questions, and leaves viewers with the most uneasiness.

There are flaws here to be sure. As in Nolan's first bat-outing, some of the editing in the action sequences is overly hyperkinetic. There is a lingering feeling that despite how exciting some of those action sequences are (the one with a semi versus Batman's Tumbler is a doozy) the filmakers want to get back to the scenes with people in them. Indeed, a few more of those scenes would add depth to some of the third act's twists, including Dent's transformation which satisfies thematically but still feels a little underbaked. Granted the movie is two and a half hours and more time with Eckhart could slow down what feels like a well-paced film.

The production values are brilliant, using even more of Chicago to break out of the setbound feel that these films tend to have. Where Spiderman 3 seemed to take place inside a video game with last year's graphics card this has a gut punching realism, particularly in the aerial shots.

It's too early to add this to the pantheon as some critics have already done -- no it's not The Godfather. It is however the best superhero film ever -- with depth, some wit, and a lot of unsettling ideas and images that keep the mind chewing for quite some time afterwards.

Film Review: Wall-E Takes Film to New Heights

Review by Noah Mallin

Notice I said "film" in the headline and not animation. Oh Wall-E, like the rest of Pixar's films is the result of gloriously detailed brilliantly rendered computer animation all right. There are people who loathe animation, who think it's kid's stuff, or that it's not serious. Those people are idiots. OK, I've said it. I'll grant that the likes of Happy Feet, the umpteenth Shrek film, and Kung-Fu Panda have muddied the waters but a film like Wall-E is proof that no medium brings the possibilities inherent in motion pictures to life better than animation. To paraphrase a paraphrase - to hate Wall-E is to hate cinema. It has as much to say about who we are as any of last year's best picture nominees -- it has heart, humor and deep emotional resonance.

The touchstones are Chaplin and Buster Keaton, as you may have surmised from the too-cautious ad campaign. Now include Stanley Kubrick (not just of 2001 but also of Dr. Strangelove), Ridley Scott, a dollop of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, even a pinch of Terry Gilliam to get the real picture of this dark, satirical enchantment of a film.

The plot is simplicity itself -- Earth, in the future, is a wasteland of abandoned cities and garbage piled higher than the skyscrapers. Only two creatures survive -- cockroaches and a lone robot still toiling at it's trash compacting task. Wall-E (for it is he) also has a penchant for odd offbeat finds -- Rubik's cubes, a old videotape of Hello Dolly!, a lightbulb, that he uses to decorate the inside of his shelter. The image of him trundling through the abandoned cityscape strewn with detritus is suffused with melancholia. Watching him as he watches the fuzzy old film is heartbreaking.

His routine is suddenly broken by the arrival of a rocket ship which mysteriously deposits a new robot, a sleek shiny iPod in comparison to Wall-E's dented and pinged lawn mower looks. Her purpose is mysterious but, without using actual words (ok maybe one) we get a clear sense of gender and even of the two robots discovering each other and their unique personalities.

The second half of the film takes an unexpected turn not signaled by the advertising, and I'm loathe to spoil too much. I will say that the human race didn't all die (though there is significant ambiguity over whether they all lived.) Their ancestors' lives are a brutally on-target satire of American-style consumerism. The words "Stay the course" are uttered and despite director Andrew Stanton's denials there are poignant echoes of some very recent leadership failures.

Did I mention that the film is funny, and the robot love story is utterly charming, and that Fred Willard is in it? Wall-E is the best film of the year so far, which is damning with faint praise indeed. It's more than that though, one of the best of the last decade, a future classic, a triumph of cinematic art. Go see it, and leave the kids at home.

Film Review: Fine Performances All There is to See in ' The Lookout '

Review by Noah Mallin

Screenwriter Scott Frank's debut in the director's chair The Lookout suffers, oddly enough, from a screenplay (by Frank) that isn't as clever as it thinks it is and leisurely editing by Jill Savitt. On the plus side of the ledger are some excellent performances all around, most notably by Joseph Gordon-Levitt who seems just a few roles away from a breakthrough.

Gordon-Levitt plays a self-satisfied high school jock who plows his convertible into a combine through sheer lunkheaded recklessness killing two friends and badly wounding his pretty girlfriend. The accident leaves him with one of those brain injuries beloved by noir screenwriters and rare anywhere else. He has difficulty remembering things and has particular trouble with causality. Jeff Daniels plays the blind man who lives with him in a sort of disabled persons half-way home. Daniels is a welcome presence, finding just the right amount of wryness and concern. Carla Gugino shows up all to briefly as a counselor.

As the film unspools Gordon-Levitt becomes entangled in a far-fetched bank-robbery scheme by creepy Matthew Goode and naively sexy Isla Fisher. It's one of the more interesting underdeveloped points that through the eyes of these characters who remember him from high school, Gordon-Levitt seems like something of a conceited asshole before the unintentional lobotomy.

Unfortunately this turns out to be no Memento despite Gordon-Levitt's habit of labelling things and making notes to himself. Rather it takes on the quality of an afterschool special designed to encourage people who've suffered brain trauma to engage themselves in seedy neo-noir situations as a means of therapy.

The aforementioned editing makes things worse by squelching whatever surprise and tension there is -- the film itself seems to be in a sort of stupor. Here's hoping that Gordon-Levitt, like his character, finds a better class of people to run with next time.

Film Review: Downey Puts The Irony in Iron Man

The ingredients of Iron Man , Jon Favreau's new popcorn flick for fledgling Marvel studios, seem like standard issue superhero stew. On paper it sounds exactly like Batman Begins, or Spider-Man. Big budget film with a quirky cast of over-talented actors explore the origins of a superhero as they discover their hidden powers, learn to harness them and then take on a villain who used to be a mentor. Ho-hum. Except Iron Man proves that as Mick Jagger once warbled, "It's the singer, not the song." The movie is a delightful romp with almost every element perfectly judged, not least of which is tone.

The secret weapon is Robert Downey Jr. who brings his sardonic knowing line readings and wounded eyes to bear on every scene he's in (at least sans maak, which thankfully is a good chunk of them). After winning (CORRECTION: as a commenter pointed out Downey was nominated but did not win) an Oscar for Chaplin, the well documented substance struggles, starring in unsung films like Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang and A Scanner Darkly and being the only thing worth watching in dreck like The Shaggy Dog Downey, like his character Tony Stark, finds redemption here. He's ably joined by a surprisingly likable Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings way more than necessary to the character sketch that is Pepper Potts (!). Her chemistry with Downey is terrific and their scenes crackle with energy. Jeff Bridges shows up bald of pate and hirsute of chin. He seems to be a distant cousin of William Hurt's character in A History of Violence but where Hurt chomps on the scenery and the catering truck for good measure Bridges underplays with a glint in his eyes. Terrence Howard doesn't have a lot to do but he does it all well.

Favraeu imports some political commentary into the genre though it's jumbled by the needs of plot and action. Will the idea that the United States armed the very same Afghans who we are fighting sink in for Americans who have tuned out the string of po-faced Iraq and Afghanistan flicks that have come out over the past two years? Does it matter? When Downey's water-boarded by the Afghan bad guys, are we supposed to connect to our own actions in the so-called War on Terror?

Who cares when Iron Man shows up to show us what a peacekeeping mission is supposed to look like. Save the villagers from the warlords! It's a flashback to when some of us thought that using NATO to quell the fighting and genocide in Bosnia was a blueprint to responsible superpowerdom in the 21st century. But enough politics, I've already given them more thought then the movie does. It hardly matters when you see Downey's chiseled goatee and delightfully louche delivery, or the suited up Iron Man going up against a couple of fighter jets.

The effects are very good and believable for the most part. I had a nice contrast with Marvel's other big film this summer when we were treated to a preview for Ed Norton in The Incredible Hulk. Everything went swimmingly and looked intriguing until the big green guy shows up and he looks just as phony and computer generated (if not more so) as he did in Ang Lee's try at the franchise. Possible mitigating factor: Tim Roth's in it.

Back to Iron Man, it's a hoot to watch Downey live out every man's mid-life crisis fantasy -- car porn galore, supermodel arm candy, a high-tech modern bachelor pad, Gwynyth Paltrow pining for you, and a neat suit that lets you kick ass while doing good. It's a grown-up's regressive playpen and boy, is it fun.

Film Review: Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse Finds The Sweet Spot

Review by Noah Mallin

The title sounds like something from the deep recesses of 70s porn. The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is quite another thing entirely. Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Claire Trevor head the cast of this late 30s dramatic gangster comedy. The three would later end up in the superior Key Largo together directed by Clitterhouse co-writer John Huston.

Unlike Key Largo though this is one of the few gangster pics in which Robinson didn't play a ruthless mug -- that's down to Bogie in a smoldering performance. Instead Robinson is an intellectual doctor with an interest in the physiological effects of criminality. So interested is he that he begins to commit robberies amongst his wealthy friends to study the effect.

While attempting to hock his hot stuff he runs into Claire Trevor, an awfully nice gang queenpin, and gang leader Bogart. Clitterhouse's quick thinking and sharp organizational skills propel him to gang leadership and a place in Trevor's heart, both of which rub Bogie the wrong way.

This is an unusual performance from Robinson, playing an off-kilter upper class man of science. He speaks mellifluously and approaches every situation with calm and reason. Trevor is very good, though after her early scenes she becomes less convincing as a crime overlord. Bogart had played hoods before and was a Warner Brothers go-to guy for the type at this point in his career but the menace and resentment he brings to his role here are first rate.

Some reviewers have knocked Clitterhouse for its mix of comedy and drama and its odd conclusion, which must have been perplexing during the Code-era. I found it to be a great deal of fun, not least of which for the performances. The ambiguity in Dr. Clitterhouse's character is quite modern, fascinated by doing wrong and drawn to it -- for purely academic purposes.

Ultimately there are dark byways of the soul that director Anatole Litvak leaves unexplored, but the light froth that remains is enjoyable in and of itself.

Film: Billy Ray's Grasp Exceeds His Reach With Breach

Screenwriter and Director Billy Ray seems to have a thing about the truth. His previous film Shattered Glass looked at the true story of newspaper plagiarist Stephen Glass and his latest, Breach, explores the last few months of freedom for real-life FBI traitor Robert Hanssen. Both films have the same fatal flaw in that Ray is unable to enlighten us as to why these people practice to deceive.

This is exacerbated by the underlying moral tone to the filmmaking -- Ray wants us to know that lying is bad! And yet the main practitioners -- in Breach especially so -- are so much more interesting onscreen than the people whom the audience's sympathies are expected to stay with.

Chris Cooper gives another finely layered performance as Hanssen, a complex man who appeared to love his country with a deep moral fervor, was deeply religious and harshly judgemental of gays, Democrats and women who wear pants. It's a tricky performance , all lizardy eyes and scowling brow. But you also understand how Ryan Philippe's character, tasked with getting dirt on Hanssen, would come to respect him after a time. Anne Archer, as Hanssen's wife, is terrific in the limited screen time she's given, convincing as a sensual deeply spiritual women who perhaps harbors a dark side. I could have watched a whole movie centered on these two, exploring the faces they put on in public and their deeply private contradictions.

Unfortunately Philippe may respect Hanssen but we don't come to respect Philippe, who wears his serious dark hair and level boy scout gaze throughout the film. Too much of the film is spent on his struggle to understand why his superiors want him to investigate this seemingly tight-assed moral guy for pornographic e-mails and his anguish over having to keep his true agenda from his wife. His character is essentially bland and underwritten and Philippe doesn't bring a hell of a lot more to it. It doesn't help that Caroline Dhavernas is so very good in the equally underwritten and cliched role of the wife who doesn't appreciate her husband's secrecy. It's a tiresome cliche to have the goody-goody crimefighter in movie after movie come home to a woman who just doesn't get their goody-goodiness dedication to their job (see American Gangster for an extreme example of this). The movie asks us to celebrate Philippe's resignation from the Bureau as a triumph for truth but in fact it's a cop-out for truthiness.

Laura Linney is on hand as Philippe's superior agent who we are meant to see is a Good Person who has to do Bad Things. She asks callow Philippe if his glimpse into her spouseless catless life is what drove him out of the Agency and though he demurs that's certainly the arithmetic set up by Billy Ray. Philippe essentially resigns because he doesn't ever want to lie to his wife, who is by the film's standards too upstanding to care that it probably would help her not to know what he knows.

Linney's sharp insightful acting rescues what could have been a flat character -- her lines have the force of weariness and resoluteness. Her very aliveness in her role undercuts Philippe's supposed heroism, no matter how hard the screenplay tries to convince us otherwise.

The problem is that it's an inherently unconvincing screenplay. Too often we learn about Hanssen because someone tells us, and then we are given little glimpses over time. In lieu of anything resembling investigation on Philippe's part we get a couple of standard spy scenes of him beating the clock while getting something out of Hanssen's office, or stalling him while others pore over his car. Meanwhile Linney plays the part of Agent Exposition, telling us what we are supposed to take as fact without the film ever showing us and letting it unravel.

This all may be as it played out in real life, but that doesn't mean it makes for a compelling film. Here's the trailer:

Film Review: Atonement -- Britflick in a Blender

Atonement could have been made by no other people than the British, and it's fitting that it won the BAFTA award. Pity that it is so fatally flawed. Essentially the film feels like every British movie cliche in a blender -- cheerfully cynical cockney war buddy, ornate country mansion, class barriers, snotty kids, World War II, etc. etc. Unfortunately no one actually turns the blender on so rather than pureeing this mess into something swallowable it all sits around together without actually congealing.

This is especially sad in that it begins with such promise. The first 45 minutes is the tight little story of a jealous little girl who tells a horrible lie, one which seperates her upper class sister sultry Keira Knightley from hunky lower class scholar James McAvoy. With the woodsy drawing rooms and parlours, proper mustaches and so forth there is a definte Merchant-Ivory-ness to the proceedings but the set-up is suitably engrossing.

No doubt the real heat in the passionate performances by Knightley and McAvoy are a big factor, as is the creepy stare of little Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan. There is enough subtle intrigue from the surrounding players and residual goodwil towards the star-crossed lovers to have propelled this into all sorts of second and third acts.

Which makes the wet squib of Joe Wright's film (and for all I know, the Ian McEwan novel it's based on) all the more shameful. Wright is a talented director as the first part of the film and a bravura 4 and a half minute, one take shot set during the Dunkirk evacuation during World War II attest. The goodwill of the setup is spoilt, first by the war scenes which ultimately lead nowhere, then by a draggy sequence with Romola Garai as a now 18-year old Briony Tallis -- she of the dreadful lie. Garai seems parachuted in from another movie -- her performance is fine but it never connects us with the younger actress nor with the rest of what transpires.

Finally we are really sent down the chute by a too-clever-by-half wrap-up featuring glorious Vanessa Redgrave. The post-modern ending leaves a poor taste in the mouth, feeling like a screenwriter's thematic triumph but a filmgoer's wasted time. The sort of thing attempted in the end has to be handled just right to come off but Wright shows that as tecnically capable as he may be, he just doesn't have the control over this material to make it work. Stranding performances as solid as McAvoy's and as downright excellent as Knightley's in the morass of the second half of this film is nearly unforgivable.

Cinematography by Seamus McGarvey is uniformly excellent as is the Oscar winning score by Dario Marianelli. Atonement gets 2 out of 5 British flags. Sorry guv'nor...



Here's the trailer:

Film Review: Condor Still Soars, Relevant at its Core

Watching Michael Clayton last week gave me a hankering for some of the films that clearly influenced director/screenwriter Tony Gilroy from the 1970s. There's Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky's Network, one of my all-time faves, but I must have seen that 120 times and can easily replay it in my head at will. Then there is All The President's Men, which just happened to be on cable and which duly mesmerized me once again for the final 20 minutes that I caught. It had been years however since I had seen Sydney Pollack's thriller Three Days of the Condor.

Robert Redford must have been having a paranoid few years with Condor coming out in late 1975 and All The President's Men in 1976. In Condor Redford plays a bookish, if hunky, CIA analyst who spends his time with his head in the clouds solving riddles and fitting arcane clues together for his masters at Langley. He and his fellow analysts work at an elegant New York townhouse in quiet academic splendor.

He's roughly jolted into the more "operational" side of things when his entire unit is brutally eliminated. His escape is by chance, even more so once we realize that his work was the likely catalyst for the hits. The film then goes into classic thriller mode at this point as Redford has to figure out who is after him, why, and how to stop them before it's too late.

The similarities with Michael Clayton aren't so much in the plotting. However Condor director Sydney Pollack has a key acting role in Clayton, and both films expertly use New York City locales to ground their action in time and space.

The real kinship though is in the way in which both films subvert the thriller genre. In both, the central character is a highly specialized tool in the machinery of their organization. They are oblivious to the greater ramifications of what they do, in some sense willfully so. When they are shaken out of this stupor by unexpected events they are forced during the course of both films to re-evaluate their choices and come to terms with the fact that their actions had effects beyond their seeming isolation and may have furthered a destructive agenda. For Clayton its his law firm and the corporate power structure it protects, for Redford in Condor it's the CIA.



Max Von Sydow brilliantly plays Joubert in Condor, a methodical cold-blooded assassin. Eventually we are made to see that Joubert is not so different than Redford is at the beginning of the film -- in a state of willful not-knowingness following and executing (literally) orders because that is what his job is. The ramifications don't register because he won't allow them to. Redford might do his job with his mind and Joubert might do his with a gun but the end result is the same.
There are some minor flaws in Three Days of the Condor. The relationship with Faye Dunaway (who is terrific here) feels a bit forced. Granted Redford is bookish but hunky but the romance feels too often like a screenwriter's conceit rather than an organic occurance. That's also true of Redford's occaisional leaps of logic. Granted he's a brilliant analyst but at times he's so far ahead of the audience that its a bit like watching one of those Star Trek episodes where a planet is about to explode or an alien is about to destroy the ship and someone says "What if we tried tritium nitrate crystals? It just might work!" Finally, the Dave Grusin score has aged rather poorly, feeling altogether too cheesy and 70s compared to the many timeless elements of the film. Pollack has always been a sucker for the "contemporary" score -- witness Grusin's hideous songs from Tootsie. The score made me long for the brilliant reserved stateliness of David Shire's work for All The President's Men.

Condor is still eminently watchable despite all this, and devastatingly contemporary. As Redford untangles the various threads of a conspiracy and sews them back together, he finds himself with a metaphorical sweater that Dick Cheney would wear proudly. And it don't say "World Best Grandpa." There is a grim aptness in the many scenes set in and around the then-new World Trade Center for today's audience.

The path of Redford's character, from self-imposed obliviousness to shocked comprehension is very much a reflection of the path many Americans found themselves on in the 1970s. The crimes of the Nixon adminstration had uncovered a stinking governmental cesspool, one that included rogue intelligence agencies and secret Presidential orders. Now, more than twenty-five years later, has anything changed?

Three Days of The Condor gets four out of five Cheneys:


Here's the trailer:

DVD Review: Hitchcock Mystery Pillories Complacent Brits With The Lady Vanishes

Lockwood, Whitty, and Redgrave

The Lady Vanishes, out now in a typically top-notch new print with loads of extras on Criterion DVD, contains many of the elements that director Alfred Hitchcock would spin into trademarks in later films. There is suspense and intrigue, the question of identity and reality, spies, trick camera shots, a hint of sexual perversity, even a director's cameo.

Yet for those familiar with his better known American films The Lady Vanishes is first and foremost eminently British. The plot, what there is of it, is woefully hole-y and the central conceit is flimsy. Essentially this is an idea that would be remade later on in films like Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.

Fetching young upper-crusty Brit Margaret Lockwood encounters likable dowager Dame May Whitty after getting clunked on the head. Whitty then disappears on board a train with Lockwood. When Lockwood asks if anyone has seen her she's met with shrugged shoulders and denials.

Later Hitchcock films would have stretched out the delicious suspense of identity loss and confusion but there is never any doubt in The Lady Vanishes that Lockwood is being lied to. One of the implausabilities in the plot is that the deception relies on some of the deniers to go along based on reasons of their own that the bad guys could have no knowledge and little expectation of.

They do reinforce a political subtext, one that was only beginning to find favor in the Britain of 1938 in which the film was released. Among the fellow Brits on the train who initially support the contention that Whitty never existed are two prototypically oblivious gentleman who hilariously represent the Blighty equivalent of the ugly American. "What's going on in England?" They want to know. But it's not the political scene they care about it transpires. Rather they want to know the up to the minute cricket scores.

The other members of the Empire who go along with the scheme for their own selfish reasons are an adulterous politician and his mistress. The craven politician would do anything to avoid being embarrassed with a woman who is not his wife, or to avoid a fight.

Hitchcock is saying that the politicians like Neville Chamberlain, aided by self-absorbed citizens who would rather watch cricket than watch Europe burn, were allowing Nazism to spread. For make no mistake, the unnamed Central European country where the action takes place is a stand-in for fascist Europe.

While this description makes The Lady Vanishes sound terribly portentous, it is in fact a frothy, funny mystery romp. Lockwood matches wits with ethno-musicologist (!) bon vivant Michael Redgrave and their chemistry and fast one-liners are charming. Our two cricket fans, Caldicott and Charter, were so popular that they spawned their own film, included on Criterion's two-disc set.

I did mention the sex. There isn't the deep damaged sexual psyches of Hitchcock masterpieces like Rear Window or Vertigo. Instead there is a comically erotic scene of a bellhop bringing a meal up to Lockwood's hotel room where she and her girlfriends are in various states of provocative undress. This is 1938 so there's nothing that would raise a modern eyebrow and yet the loving, fetishtic photography of the scene and the bellman's obvious distress are powerfully sexy. Then there is a scene much later on, where Redgrave and Lockwood are cornered by one of the chief plotters. As they sit at crotch level a bulge suddenly tents at his waistline beneath his overcoat. Of course it's a gun but it's hard to believe Hitchcock wasn't up to his smirking psychological games here.

Though it isn't a masterpiece on the level of Hitch's best, The Lady Vanishes is quite fun to watch. It's a solid four out of five Neville Chamberlains:


Here's a clip featuring the abovementioned scene of the poor flummoxed bellman surrounded by those devilish young ladies -- naughty! Note Lockwood's position and that of the champagne bottle, careful getting...er...off that table now Maggie.

Film Review: Clooney, Wilkinson as Looney, Shine in Michael Clayton

Clooney and Wilkinson

Michael Clayton is a thriller that turns the genre inside out to expose something deeper. Like several films this year it toys with and incorporates stylistic and structural tics of 1970s cinema. In some ways it's closest analogue is Alan J. Pakula's 1976 All The President's Men -- strikingly so in the opening shots of expansive, empty nighttime offices -- though Clayton is purely fictional rather than a dramatization of very real and recent events like Pakula's film.

Pakula used the massive edifices of Washington D.C. to dramatize the great machinery of government in comparison to Woodward and Bernstein, while in Clayton the assured director/screenwriter Tony Gilroy uses his shots of New York City to make the same point about Clayton in comparison to corporate America. He's aided by superb cinematography throughout by Robert Elswit who's having a great year, having also photographed the gorgeous There Will Be Blood.

The character of Michael Clayton, played superbly by a never-better George Clooney, could be any of us. A very specialized cog in the corporate machine of his law firm, he's the fixer, the guy who can get things done and erase embarrassing truths outside of the light of day. He may have had dreams at one time of doing something more satisfying but he's been deemed great at what he does and so this is it for him.

His latest clean-up assignment is the firm's chief litigator, played by Tom Wilkinson, a friend of Clayton's and a man with talents and troubles. Wilkinson's portrayal of a man with too much knowledge, both unraveling and awakening from intellectual slumber, is simply stunning.

It's a tipoff that Gilroy has more in mind than a typical thriller that the film essentially starts with Clayton's "Paul on the Road to Damascus" moment, only instead of falling off of his ass he steps out of his Mercedes. It's a great scene, with both Clooney's in-car navigation having failed and his internal moral compass spinning wildly he makes Clayton's confusion and sadness palpable.

Then we are off onto the rest of the tale. The corporate intrigue is only a piece of the puzzle Clayton has to figure out -- the real puzzle is himself. His brothers and his son all play a part in his awakening, just as a farmgirl does for Wilkinson earlier on in the narrative.

The performances are top-notch across the board, with Tilda Swinton winning a BAFTA as an edgy perfectionist corporate ladder climber and Tootsie director Sidney Pollack as the head of Clooney's law firm standing out. Pollack is a clever choice, having directed another 70s reference point for this one, Three Days of The Condor. Pollack shows us the faceless grip of the corporation in a fantastic scene where he lays out the importance of the firm's upcoming merger -- it's very reminiscent of one of Clooney's favorite 70s films Network.

If Pollack is there to show us the ways in which even the man in charge is still just a man in thrall to his company, Swinton is the company. Her skin is nearly translucent, her eyes inky and flat, her whole body and being a medium of corporate branding and survival strategy.

It's a shame that the marketing mavens at Warner Bros. didn't seem to know what to do with Clayton but the academy noms have thankfully given this film a second rollout -- see it while its still in theatres.

Clayton gets 5 out of 5 briefs:

Film Review: American Gangster Milks Nostalgia For Gentleman Thug

"Based on a True Story" says the opening credits of Ridley Scott's gangster opus American Gangster, and as is often the case the facts get mashed around to make a more compelling movie. This is par for the course, but the credits could also have said "Based on films by Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin, not to mention Mervin LeRoy's Little Caesar."

Serpico and The French Connection loom large over the policier aspects of American Gangster. Despite the title, more than half of the movie follows Russell Crowe's character Frank Serpico...er, Richie Roberts, one of a handful of good cops on the force. The Little Caesar part comes in with the story of Frank Lucas, played with graceful charm by Denzel Washington. Washington gives us the gangster as up and coming businessman, the black heroin dealing equivalent of Sam Walton.

Washington is so likable, even while setting a man on fire or blowing a rival's brains out, that like Cagney in Little Caeser the audience's empathy is with the putative bad guy. Crowe lets us see his character's flaws but also his innate goodness, his link with Lucas is his code of ethics. That leaves the rest of law enforcement -- embodied by Josh Brolin's mustache -- as the bad guys.

Brolin's mustache is very good as a very bad cop, and it must be said that the range his mustache has shown this year -- from cheesy early 80's exploitation in Grindhouse to neo-noir Western grit with a Texan twang in No Country For Old Men to his gruff New York bull on the take in Gangster.

But I digress. The anti-authoritarian conceit of the cops as heavies is so very 70s, as is the constancy of footage from Vietnam on the television screen in scene after scene. Though the 'Nam angle has a direct tie-in to the movie's plot the bigger tie-in is clear. We are in an era that, much like the 70s, is marked by deep distrust of public officials and institutions. Like the 70s, this is due in part to an unpopular unwinnable war and a less than forthright President.

So does all of this borrowed stuff add up to anything? It does, namely a sometimes engrossing film that breaks no new ground but is assured in the moves it tries. The two leads are, as always, superb and there are enough small details to flesh the characters out. The pacing is brisk, the action clear.

What keeps this from sticking in the mind longer is not just the familiarity of the themes. Television has done such a great job of exploring complex characters within this milieu -- from The Shield to The Wire to The Sopranos, that the dictates of fitting the sprawling story into a 157 minute running time sacrifices shading and nuance. Beats have to be hit harder, story arcs are compressed, and secondary characters are more cardboardy signifiers than real people.

This is particularly felt in the last act, which feels like a too-pat roll-up of everything that was meticulously set-up earlier in the film. Our two protags take a long time getting together and when they do it's all over before it really has a chance to register. Still, the very last scene is one of the simpler and subtler ones, taking us forward to the early 90s -- a different world with a Public Enemy soundtrack.

American Gangster gets three out of five Serpicos:


Here's the trailer: