Screen Philadelphia Weekly

Kevin Smith Breaks His Silence

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:37:35 PST

For two hours, Kevin Smith kept me waiting for his phone call. Two hours of his assistant checking in, letting me know he's on a very important conference call, telling me that ol' Silent Bob hasn't forgotten about me. By the time the man himself finally gets on the line, he is refreshingly apologetic about his tardiness. "I'm sorry, Smith says. "Unfortunately, I have corporate masters now."

So, what exactly was he and his "masters" talking about for so long?

Why, they were talking about dicks.

More specifically, A Couple of Dicks, the new movie Smith has directed that's coming out in February. The night before the interview, Smith screened the movie, a buddy cop comedy starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, for an audience, to make sure it's as funny as Smith and his masters believe it to be -- and it was a smashing success. The audience, which included family, friends and contributors to Smith's View Askew Productions Web site, ate it up.

Smith is happy. The studio is happy. Now, there's only one problem:

The title.

Clever and, of course, dirty as Dicks sound, if they go ahead with keeping the title, TV networks may only play ads for the movie after 9 p.m. So, they've been thinking of alternative titles. But none of them are as good as the original. "Nobody can let go of DIcks," he says, before adding, "which sounds very erotic."

After working with longtime idol Willis (anyone who has seen Smith's last Q & A DVD, Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin Smith, knows how much Smith wanted to work with the fellow New Jerseyan again after appearing together in Live Free or Die Hard) and the unpredictable Morgan for three months, Smith is quite ready to give up the title if it means getting this sucker out into theaters.

Smith went through a similar battle a year ago with his last movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Both networks and newspapers refused to give out the full title in ads, just cutting it off at Zack and Miri.

But, for Smith, that was actually the least of his problems regarding that movie's reception.

While the movie, which had Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as down-and-out buddies who make their own skin flick as a get-rich-quick scheme, did get some love from critics (hey, even our own Sean Burns liked it!) and managed to gross a reasonable $31 million, Smith had higher expectations for it.When those expectations weren't met, Smith kind of got in a funk.

"Long story short though," he explains, "was I depressed? No. Was I disappointed? Absolutely. But it wasn't so much about the gross of Zack and Miri, as it was realizing that I couldn't continue being the same Kevin Smith that I've been my whole life, in terms of being a writer. Because I was so disconnected from the source, you know, at this point in my life."

So, there it was: Kevin Smith realizing he wasn't that young up-and-comer from Red Bank who sold off most of his comic-book collection to make his first film, Clerks, fifteen years ago. The man lives in L.A. now. He'll be 40 next year. He's been married to the same woman for a decade. They both have a 10-year-old daughter. Other people pay his bills, for Chrissakes!

He couldn't go on returning to the same format on-screen, of stoners and slackers "sitting around in front of the camera, talking about pussy and Star Wars and shit like that." Especially when Judd Apatow and his crew of ad-libbing man-children have been taking that same formula and spinning comic gold at the box office. (You could say that Zack and Miri was Smith reminding audiences that Smith was Judd Apatow long before Apatow showed up.)

"These dudes do what I used to do and they do it way better than I've ever done it," he admits. "Or, at least, they reach more people doing it. And that's the name of this game. People don't care about who did it first. They care about who does it most profitably."

Thanks to consuming "tons of weed" during this time, Smith came to terms with what he had to do. He knew he had to stop making "blogs as movies," as he calls it. Besides, he has other venues where he could riff on pussy, Star Wars and other Smith concerns: Twitter, his stand-up Q & A gigs (which he'll be doing on Thursday night at Merriam Theater), the "SModcast" he does with longtime producer Scott Mosier on his Web site. (Transcripts of said podcast's most uninhibited moments can be found in Smith's new, aptly titled book, Shooting the Sh*t with Kevin Smith: The Best of SModcast. )

It was time for Smith to get out of his self-pitying, marijuana smoke-filled haze and become a genuine, straight-up, goddamn filmmaker!

Luckily, someone threw Dicks in his lap. An exec over at Warner Bros. thought Dicks would be an ideal project for Smith since the script (which he didn't write; a first for a Smith film) has a "Clerks as cops" vibe. But Smith says he also jumped on it because it's the kind of traditional movie his dad would've appreciated. "If I made this movie," he says, "my father would've been like, 'Oh, you do make movies for a living.'"

While it may seem like longtime indie boy Smith has officially sold out by working with a major studio, he actually has nothing but praise for Warners. "Like, they're the ones taking chances now," he says.

"They're kind of what Miramax was back in the mid-'90s. These are the crazy cats who are like, 'Yeah, let's make Watchmen. Yeah, let's make Where the Wild Things Are. Yeah, let's put fucking Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, let's put Kevin Smith on, like, a buddy cop movie from the '80s.' Didja see Observe and Report? What fucking studio makes that movie? I was like, "Wow, it's insane that a studio would get behind a comedy that out-there."

So, there may be a very chance that Dicks or whatever the hell it may be called come February may be the breakthrough, box office smash Smith has been looking for lately. I just hope he doesn't blow up to the point where he doesn't apologize for being late for phone interviews.

People like Smith when he's making movies about dicks -- not being one.

Kevin Smith 8pm, $39-$66. Merriam Theater.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:56:02 PST

Dozens of half-formed comedic conceits spray like buckshot all over first-time director Grant Heslov’s debut feature, a disappointingly cartoonish adaptation of Jon Ronson’s chillingly funny exposé regarding the madness of military psych-ops. Claiming to be “inspired by,” rather than “based on” Ronson’s stranger-than-fiction investigative work, Peter Straughan’s screenplay stuffs so many fascinating real-life footnotes into such a broad, boringly conventional buddy-flick framework, The Men Who Stare at Goats inadvertently cheapens its own material. 

Ewan McGregor stars as made-up journalist Bob Wilton, a presumably intended audience surrogate who runs off to Iraq after his wife ditches him for his one-armed editor. Seeking to reassert his manhood by reporting under fire, Wilton is stranded in the Green Zone until he meets George Clooney’s odd, mustachioed Lyn Cassady, a former “Jedi Warrior” recently reinstated from a long-disbanded, top secret 1980s Special Forces unit, which covertly trained cadets adept in the paranormal arts. 

Grade: C

Director: Grant Heslov

Starring: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges

Running time: 93 minutes

Believe it or not, that last part is actually true. Former Commanding General of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command Albert Stubblebine wasn’t just a key player in the invasions of Panama and Granada, he was also a nut for parapsychology who famously tried to walk through walls, heading up the kind of clandestine military projects that begged spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller to teach recruits how to stop a pig’s heart with their minds. Stubblebine’s stand-in is here rechristened Hopgood and played by Stephen Lang with way too much wide-eyed jack-assery for such a fascinating figure. 

Same goes for Jeff Bridges, recycling Dude-isms aplenty as a goofball riff on an actual disgruntled Vietnam Vet who returned to the Special Forces after a lengthy New Age vision quest, espousing the utopian ideal of super-soldiers bearing flowers instead of weapons, winning our enemies’ hearts and minds through beams of psychic goodwill—and if all that didn’t work, well, at least they’d be adept in non-lethal combat techniques. 

Clooney spills all this lengthy back-story to McGregor, after they hit the road to Baghdad and suffer mishaps aplenty on a mission that stubbornly remains a mystery. Straughan’s screenplay attempts to work two timelines at once, the herky-jerky structure devoting most of its energy to anecdotes from the early 1980s, only occasionally reminding us that we’re also following these two dudes in Iraq. The air of indecisiveness isn’t helped by the odd choice of allowing McGregor to narrate Clooney’s flashbacks. 

In fact, McGregor narrates every damn minute of The Men Who Stare at Goats , often helpfully over-explaining information that is already visible onscreen, reiterating character motivations time and again, and generally serving as the sort of aural annoyance that Matt Damon’s astonishing voice-over so mercilessly mocked in The Informant! (Also, McGregor needs to stop attempting American accents. It’s just embarrassing.) 

Clooney, however, is sublime. He plays the crackpot, possibly psychic—or maybe just psychotic—Lyn Cassady with the controlled stillness of a Zen master. Matter-of-factly deadpanning outrageous flights of fancy, and only gradually allowing us to see the grim sadness and disappointment behind his eyes. It’s a sly, comic inversion of Clooney’s Oscar-winning Syriana performance, another former true believer whose country let him down.  

Alas, if only anyone else involved shared George’s knack for sly restraint. The Men Who Stare at Goats is just too big for the room. Even scenes that sound great on paper—as when two private military contracting companies accidentally start a firefight at a Baghdad gas station—feel strained and uncomfortably buffonish. Everybody’s mugging when they should’ve just tried acting.  

It’s impossible to watch Clooney kick up a covert op in Iraq again without naturally thinking of David O. Russell’s brilliant Three Kings . Heslov’s film, to its credit, attempts to show how hippy-dippy psych-ops explorations have been perverted into modern-day Gitmo torture techniques, but The Men Who Stare at Goats is too low-stakes and jokey to make the point properly. It needed Three Kings ’ outraged, vigorous sting.

Real satire draws blood. This one just keeps nudging you in the ribs. ■

Six Films That Atone for Past Cinema Sins

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:26:09 PST

North by Northwest (1959): Through the ’50s, Alfred Hitchcock was able to wed increasingly heady ideas to pure genre concerns. But with Vertigo, he went too far. The story took a back seat to the themes and the film was considered a disaster. He responded by making the most thoroughly entertaining film he could squeeze out—or, as we know today, a different kind of masterpiece. 

The Fisher King (1991): With one Heaven’s Gate-esque bomb under his belt (the pricey Baron Munchausen ), Terry Gilliam was improbably given a second chance with this off-kilter redemption saga, which played to some of his indulgences—insanity, fantasy, extreme wide angle lenses—without alienating most of the world. Hell, he even directed an actress (Mercedes Ruehl) to an Oscar. 

The Road Home (1999): During the first half of his career, Zhang Yimou fought off government authorities, who correctly caught his films’ digs at Chinese communist authoritarianism. But starting with this G-rated piffle, in which Zhang Ziyi pines and pines for her estranged would-be lover, the director pulled a 180. Now officials so love his politically harmless films, they even hired him to direct last year’s Olympic ceremony.  

The Pianist (2002): In artistic freefall since the, ahem, incident, Roman Polanski shocked the world by making this thoroughly anonymous Holocaust saga, for which he scored a much-deserved Oscar. And he lived happily ever after. Or something. 

Ocean’s 13 (2007): Ocean’s 11 was Steven Soderbergh seeing what it would be like to make purely pleasurable “entertainment.” Ocean’s 12 was Soderbergh aggressively goofing around. It’s Ocean’s 13 that belatedly plays it safe.  

The Box (2009): “Until I have a theatrical hit, people aren’t going to keep giving me chances,” says Richard Kelly, director of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales .

This Is It

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:34:56 PST

The necrophiliac gravy train continues, as this hastily assembled cash-in cobbles together over 100 hours of poorly shot rehearsal footage from Michael Jackson’s ill-fated final 50-night London stand. Outdoing even that gaudy Staples Center funeral fiasco in terms of sheer for-profit effrontery, This Is It proclaims in a lengthy, sanctimonious opening credit crawl to be “for the fans.” What a happy coincidence then that it’s also a convenient way for these concert promoters to recoup some of the millions they lost when the King of Pop fled this mortal throne shortly before showtime.

As it’s all still just a rehearsal, Jackson ain’t singing much. He insists that he must “conserve his throat,” while some suspiciously sweetened background tracks don’t quite match the lip-sync. Alternating awkwardly between standard and hi-def video in variable aspect ratios, the furious editing of the piece and undeniably contagious power of those old melodies roused a crowd of the faithful to rapturous ovations at the matinee I attended.

Yet the whole thing just made me sad. MJ still had his moves, popping, locking and sometimes defying gravity with a simple glide across the stage. But this last waltz is such a mechanical, over-choreographed spectacle, drowning out the music with precision timed pyrotechnics, onstage bulldozers, 3-D movies, and even a computer-assisted, black and white machine gun battle against Humphrey Bogart.

He also looks awful—spindly and emaciated with distractingly gigantic hands and feet, peering out from behind his omni-present sunglasses with that creepily immobile, nose-less death-mask face. The few times Jackson is actually heard speaking in the movie, he comes off like someone you’d hide from on the subway, unable to articulate a simple request to lower the volume on his headphones without shrieking “There’s a fist in my ear!” Regular communication with fellow human beings was clearly impossible for him by this point.

The last straw for me was during the Jackson Five medley, when this ravaged Skeletor is glimpsed standing before oversized video projections of his much younger self, the soundtrack soaring with some of the most gloriously joyful pop music ever recorded. I don’t know how anyone can watch that beautiful, impossibly gifted young child performing next to the sick, depressing weirdo that he grew up to be and not feel downright heartbroken.

It’s a goddamn American tragedy. Let the poor bastard rest in peace. D+

Skin

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:29:11 PST

If you didn’t know that Sandra Laing was a real person you’d swear Skin, the film about her life, was the work of someone like Günter Grass or Jerzy Kosinski—an absurdist with an axe to grind. To wit: Despite being born to two Afrikaners, Laing’s complexion and features were unmistakably black, the result of secret “kaffir” blood somewhere in the family tree. That her parents were pro-Apartheid, even after her birth, is a bitter twist even Rod Serling would have found too out-there.

It’s easy to imagine the mind-melting satire a visionary filmmaker could’ve made with this rich set-up. Instead, Laing got Anthony Fabian, who gives her biopic a sanctimonious, humorless Stanley Kramer spitshine, downplaying the themes so he can instead inform us that, in case you haven’t heard, Apartheid was very, very, very bad.

Introduced as a child (when she’s played by a sunny Ella Ramangwane), Laing is already the subject of ostricization and humiliations. This drives Daddy (Sam Neill) to become a principles-driven, successories-spouting paladin, fighting and raging to change the laws so that racial classification will derive from descent, not appearance. And he succeeds. Except that he’s done nothing for others affected by the horrors of Apartheid, and has also condemned his daughter (played from a teen on by the distractingly too-old Sophie Okonedo, who is 40) to a special kind of hell where she routinely turns off both races.

Skin’s only novel idea is the hero of the first act is the villain of the rest. Neill (and, to a lesser degree, wife/mother Alice Krige) is still a despicable racist, extolling his love for Laing while threatening her black boyfriend with gunfire. From here till the end, Laing flits between worlds, shacking up in a Swaziland shanty only to be expelled and left utterly rootless.

Every one of the tale’s many twists positively drips with irony, but Skin plays so flatly it’s possible director Fabian doesn’t even realize what irony is. It’s the kind of earnest-o-rama where the evil racists are either frigidly indifferent to the black experience or, in the case of Neill, shrill, hissable monsters. Meanwhile the black characters are by and large nobly suffering, including Okonedo, who wears a constant mask of bland inexpression.

That Skin is compelling anyway is a tribute entirely to the freak happenstance of Laing’s life, not any filmmaking prowess, of which there is none. C+

Revanche

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:22:36 PST

Thanks in part to a certain Kevin Costner vehicle, the title of the justly Oscar-nominated Austrian film Revanche remains untranslated. Good—the name means “revenge,” which may lead audiences to mistake it for a blunt, self-important statement on the subject. (And a mere week after the Cro-Magnon pro-revenge Boondock Saints sequel, no less.) But with the title obscured behind another language, viewers are free to let their minds roam, thus embracing the complexities of Götz Spielmann’s intensely introspective drama.

Indeed, while the film takes an unmistakably anti stance on vengeance, the real subject is an unusually chronic strand of ambivalence. Slowly unspooling its story in eerily calm scenes, Revanche begins with Alex, an ex-con (Johannes Krisch) as he successfully convinces his regular Ukrainian prostitute, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), to flee her job and come shack up with him. All that’s needed is a modest, poorly planned-out bank job, the fall-out of which results in Robert (Andreas Lust), an everyman cop, putting one in Potapenko’s head.

Alex, having been masked during the ordeal, follows a guilt-ridden Robert to his country manse, at which point you’d swear he’s sworn revenge—and yet what’s taking so long? Rather than pop a cap and move on, Alex infiltrates Robert’s life—and eventually his wife (Ursula Strauss)—and proceeds to spend most of his time eavesdropping on Robert or intensely and constantly chopping wood. Is he biding his time? Is he moved by Robert’s plunge into severe depression?

Having set up a nail-biter plot, Spielmann lets an indecisiveness that would irk Hamlet—not to mention the terminally ambivalent stars of most Mumblecore opuses—eat up the second half, a transcendently glacial crawl that tests patience even as it grants a genuinely sticky situation its complex due. Meant entirely as a compliment, it’s not hard to see Alex, forever on the brink of a potentially brutal decision, as our writer-director seems as unsure of what Alex will do.

Like its antihero, Revanche spends most of its length stalling for time, all the while allowing the film’s ideas to burrow into our minds, driving us crazy with anticipation. No spoiler to say both Spielmann and Alex find a conclusion that’s satisfying and authentic, making Revanche complete without being tidy. B+

The Fourth Kind

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:16:45 PST

The words “based on a true story” may not exactly inspire confidence in factual accuracy, but at least you know you’re getting some variation of the truth. What the hell is one supposed to take away from “based on the actual case studies”? So sayeth the ads for The Fourth Kind, an alien abduction saga that purports to feature footage that will make your blood run cold, force the hair on the back of your neck to stand up, get cats to meow and so on.

So why not use the “true story” line? Some light Googling reveals the latest viral marketing bonanza. Search for Dr. Abigail Tyler, the woman the film claims lost both husband and daughter to belligerent extra-terrestrials, and you get a couple dicey-looking scholarly papers—published in a nonexistent magazine and reproduced on a site that was registered in August—plus her newish Twitter page. Are actual claims of alien abduction too dull to fuel a creatively marketed would-be blockbuster? If the last prominent alien abduction movie—1993’s Fire in the Sky—is any indication, then the answer is apparently yes.

Not that the film itself doesn’t try its damndest to impersonate verisimilitude anyway. As familiar faces like Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton hold down the reenactments, director Olatunde Osunsanmi constantly cuts—sometimes at the same time via De Palma-esque multiple frames—to the alleged real deal. In these, the “actual” Tyler—ashen, stringy-haired, wobbly-voiced—hauntedly talks of watching aliens gouge her husband as they slept, of watching her daughter be whisked away to a UFO and, most despairingly, of how no authority figure believed her story, despite the presence of questionable (and shrill) video footage. Those mean, ivory tower skeptics didn’t believe her gaping, hole-ridden story, and so now the filmmakers are bringing it to the more discerning minds of multiplex patrons.

Sorry to be a killjoy, but this whole enterprise is pointless. If this tale were true, the filmmakers would be exploiting the crazed ramblings of a clearly psychologically traumatized mental patient, all while forcing the poor woman to relive the incident she’s deluded herself into believing. But if it’s 100% bullshit—and the film only works if we think it’s true—then isn’t it literally nothing more than a calculated lunge for your wallet?

And besides, isn’t Paranormal Activity still playing? D+

The New Year Parade

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:43:42 PDT

Perhaps one day a filmmaker will make a movie that depicts South Philly as fun-loving and fancy-free. Actually, they have: it’s called Strut!, a documentary about the Mummers. But Tom Quinn’s keenly observed The New Year Parade—set among the downcast members of the Mummer’s brethren, the South Philly String Band—isn’t that picture.

That’s not a knock; even the area’s big splashy Hollywood inspirational sports weepie, Invincible, wound up spending over half its length in a dingy bar among hard-drinkin’, hard-smokin’ depressives. The New Year Parade, too, is set among the chronically downcast, but at least that’s less a syndrome of their neighborhood than because of the divorce saga at the film’s center.

Greg Lyons leads a cast of mostly non-pros—the terrific local theater actor Tobias Segal being a glaring exception—as the son of the String Band’s team captain (Andrew Conway), who has recently caught his wife mid-tryst. Lyons, who plays banjo under the father he doesn’t quite like, is mostly able to stand tall amidst the kerfuffle, even acquiring a tryst-turned-girlfriend (Irene Longshore). Meanwhile the split affects his teen sister (Jennifer-Lynn Welsh) in both subtle and decidedly unsubtle ways.

Quinn’s narrative hits many of the expected divorce-drama beats, but he doesn’t hit them with the expected force. Major developments happen off-screen or are simply inferred; when the mother, who has been suspecting forgiveness from her husband, is unexpectedly served divorce papers, her initial reaction is calm, borderline bemused. One jump cut later and she’s quietly bawling, but the cumulative effect remains powerful because of the odd but recognizably human way she processes the shock.

But more often The New Year Parade is obsessed with details far more mundane. Employing a style that teeters on documentary, Quinn combines mumbly improv work from his non-actors with off-hand details, his handheld digital camera endlessly picking up shots that endlessly establish both place and mood. Oftentimes a scene will be made of a battering ram of tiny close-ups or shots of people who just happen to be in the same bar, warehouse or street.

Quinn also shot and edited his feature debut, and The New Year Parade feels written with both the camera and the editing program. True, there are far, far too many music montages, but there’s no denying Quinn’s almost scary budding talent. B

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:36:44 PDT

An initial casualty of post-Columbine cowardice, Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints has become an unlikely video hit in post-9/11 America. There’s something revealing here: As belief in the Bush way of thinking has soured, the stock in Boondocks has skyrocketed, despite bearing a worldview that is thoroughly, boorishly Bush-like.

In the 1999 original and its belated, terribly similar sequel, two good Irish boys (played by charisma vaccuums who’ve barely worked in the interim) announce themselves as Angels of Death and seek to wipe out, in the most badass, post-Tarantino way possible, Boston’s mafioso—but not before going to church and praying to their god. (You know, like good little terrorists.)

Like our former president, Duffy’s worldview is “clear-eyed,” his morality black-and-white: Here is good and here is evil. The issue of vigilante justice is reduced to a simple question of action vs. inaction. In Duffy’s eyes, you’re either for citizens gunning down people in the streets or you’re a pussy or, worse, a queer.

In the four hours of Boondock saga, there’s no drama: Our saintly (though totally assholish) heroes never waver in their mission, never once question that fighting evil with evil is at the very least questionable, never slightly improve their Cro-Magnon vocabulary. And because they barely sustain a couple minor flesh wounds—despite roughly 10,000 fired bullets—what’s the point in watching exactly?

Duffy hasn’t changed in the decade between Boondocks either. As the scandalous story goes, the former (and future?) bartender landed a fairy tale deal with both Harvey Weinsten and Madonna’s Maverick Records (for his band). He blew both spectacularly thanks to his awesomely inflated ego.

And yet Duffy remains Duffy, and Boondock 2 is basically Boondock 1, only with the addition of a minstrelly Mexican comic relief (Clifton Collins, Jr.), Peter Fonda with an Italian accent and hammy Willem Dafoe replaced by hammy Julie Benz, whose show Dexter offers a complex, unsettling view on vigilantism that renders these films even more obviously bullshit. Please let its blowhard filmmaker be stupid enough to piss off the few industry friends he has left. D+

Amelia

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:31:30 PDT

There’s no better way to land an Academy Award than by playing a famous dead person. So the troubled life and times of America’s first female aviator presents a story overflowing with promise. Amelia Earhart was a restless, fascinating character, pioneering her way through gender barriers and breaking all sorts of boundaries with reckless abandon.

Earhart’s tale, familiar to all, begs for an iconoclastic telling—a crazy adventure turning genre formulas and preconceived notions on their heads.

Instead, director Mira Nair has mustered up the safest, most boring movie imaginable. It’s Our Lady Of The Sacred Transcontinental Flight, except duller than one could ever possibly dream, given the source material. The movie feels like one of my old Catholic Catechism books about the lives of the saints, but considerably less interesting.

What an odd accident of fate that an actress of Hilary Swank’s limited range has won two Academy Awards already, and is thus the most esteemed of her generation without displaying even the slightest bit of range. She has exactly one mode for all her roles, a gee-whiz, wide-open sense of tomboy wonder that when, contrasted with impending doom, a la Boys Don’t Cry or Million Dollar Baby, allows a natural pathos to take root. In Amelia, we already know what’s eventually going to happen, so maybe she should try bringing a little texture or excitement to the role besides “aw shucks”?

Swank makes Amelia Earhart dull, which is no small feat given how considerable this American’s life really was. By all accounts, Earheart was a prickly, horny number, carrying on with her husband (Richard Gere in his sad Unfaithful cuckold mode, playing her hubby G.W. Putnam) and Ewan McGregor’s dashing Gene Vidal, thus allowing the movie to stop cold for his toddler son to complain about how much he hates being named “Gore.”

Yeah, it’s that kind of movie where the audience is congratulated and flattered for recognizing futuristic historical signposts, even when they’re planted like landmines.

Swank and Gere are stuck doing false, crazy 1930s movie accents that can’t help but alienate the audience. She always sounds like a bad Katharine Hepburn pull-string doll, and he sounds eerily like what happens whenever TiVo plays your Turner Classic Movies reruns at the wrong speed.

The whole movie reeks of taste—a lot of lavish moving parts buffed and finessed until there isn’t any life left in the thing. Eventually I just wanted Ms. Earhart to go crash her damn plane so I could go home already. D+

Uptown Dreams

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:14:53 PDT

Everybody knows the love-hate relationships mothers and daughters endure. But Manayunk family therapist Jody Miller says things get especially dicey between mothers and their only daughters.  

“That’s where you’ll see the real dynamics,” says Miller. “They tend to get into very competitive situations, and there are almost always periods when the daughter’s coming of age, especially if she’s successful or has the potential for success, where the mother will feel very threatened.” 

This makes me wonder how bestselling Mt. Airy urban lit novelist Karen Quinones Miller has managed to refrain from strangling her vivacious and talented daughter Camille.  

I’m kidding, of course, since 22-year-old Camille Quinones Miller, who stands 5-feet-nothing and weighs maybe 100 pounds, is so cute it’s hard to imagine anyone assaulting her with anything but a hug. But she’s also an ambitious fledgling movie director who’s likely headed for big things. Yet Camille and Karen get along so swimmingly, you’d think they were a pair of mallards on a glassy lake. “It’s always been me and her against the world,” shrugs Karen, an ex- Inquirer reporter, when asked to explain the tranquility. “Always me and her,” agrees Camille. “Best friends.” 

Camille thinks enough of her best friend that four months after graduating from Clark Atlanta University with a degree in film, she’s made good on a decade-old promise by putting Karen’s 2004 novel Ida B. on the big screen.  

“When Camille was 12, she told me I should start writing books so one day she could turn one into a movie,” recalls Karen, now working on her seventh, An Angry-Assed Black Woman . “That’s how my literary career began. Now she’s made one of my dreams come true. How awesome is that?”  

Camille’s maiden film, Uptown Dreams , is a no-budget indie chronicling day-to-day life inside a high-rise housing project at 128th and Lexington in Harlem, N.Y. It debuted Oct. 16 at the Inquirer Building for about 100 members of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and, uh, me. Now, I’m not going to tell you Uptown Dreams is the best movie I’ve ever seen, or anything like that. To be honest, I thought a couple of the scenes dragged on a bit, and several members of the likeable, nonpaid cast need to discover finesse. But it’s an honest, enthusiastic effort. And I find the film’s subject matter compelling, since I used to be intrigued by the foreboding, stark appearances of long-ago imploded project towers like North Philly’s crime- and drug-ridden Raymond Rosen Homes. 

Karen, a Harlem native who acts in Uptown Dreams and serves as its executive producer, also warms to the subject of housing projects, but for a better reason: she grew up in one. Moreover, she thinks projects get a bad rap, especially in Philadelphia.  

“Here more so than in New York, there’s really a stigma attached to living in the projects, and I didn’t realize that until I moved out of New York,” she says. “I found project living kind of comforting because it’s a community within the community. I’m not denying the bad things that go on there. But in the projects, it was like you had 350 mothers.”  

Multitudinous moms couldn’t keep Karen, now 51, out of teenage trouble, however. She quit school at 13, and while she won’t disclose the specifics of her run-ins with authority (other than to maintain she never sold drugs), she admits to being “on a first-name basis with a lot of police officers.”  

At the urging of a cop, she joined the Navy in 1980, got out in ’85 and moved to Philly in ’87—the year Camille was born—to be closer to her brother, a sailor stationed at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Karen took a secretarial position at the Daily News before catching the journalism bug, graduating from Temple and landing a job at the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot . The Inquirer hired her in 1994, where she stayed for six years.  

In those days, little Camille was a regular presence in the newsroom, although she quickly decided print journalism wasn’t her thing. “I wanted to tell stories without writing,” she says. “I couldn’t stand writing, so I used to wander over to the photojournalism department and hang out with those guys.”  

During her teens, Camille bought her first camera, did freelance newspaper photography and enrolled at Scribe Video Center, a West Philly nonprofit that trains aspiring videographers. She then headed south for college, where she met Spike Lee when he visited Clark Atlanta to screen his 2006 documentary When the  Levees Broke . Camille told Lee he was her favorite filmmaker, and that she aspired to make powerful movies, too.  

“I asked him whether he thought I should go to NYU or UCLA for grad school,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Look, if you want to direct films, you should just go ahead and do your first one. Why waste the money on grad school?’  

“I said, ‘You know what? You’re right.’” 

Camille plans to show Uptown Dreams (uptown dreamsmovie.com) at Utah’s Slamdance Film Festival in January. She hopes a national distributor will pick it up, and that her virgin film will, as they say in the street, blow up. But even if it doesn’t, the young director has at least one adoring fan.

“You always want your kids to do better than you, and I can already see Camille’s going to,” Karen says without a trace of envy. “I couldn’t be more delighted.” ■

Six Gruesome Movie Scenes

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:15:42 PDT

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971): As far back as the eye-slit that opened Salvador Dalì and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou , cinema has used shocks to upset bourgeois standards—or at least get asses in the seats. But even the hardest gorefest has little on Stan Brakhage’s stomach churner. For over a half hour, the avant-gardist’s camera descends into and prowls over a hallowed-out corpse mid-autopsy, dehumanizing the body and making it look like under-explored terrain.

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976): The last film from Pier Paolo Pasolini presents two hours of smiling artistocrats forcing youth into sexual submission. Transplanting the Marquis de Sade to the last days of Mussolini’s Italy for added misery, it’s the kind of masterpiece even fans watch only once. Following the section entitled “The Circle of Shit,” there’s still worse. 

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997): Plagued with cystic fibrosis, whose victims usually die before 20,  Flanagan made it to a good-humored 43, spending his last years using his body for S&M-related performance art. Hammer and nail, meet penis. 

Trouble Every Day (2001): A beautiful, sensual film from Claire Denis, except one thing: The film concerns vampire-cannibals (Béatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo), and each gets a gory munch-down on their sexual partner. 

In My Skin (2002): After suffering a bloody accident, a woman (writer- director Marina de Van) withdraws from life to do little but suck on her flesh wounds and start new ones. Gross—except that de Van portrays her sessions with sensitivity. 

Antichrist (2009): The extreme close-up of genital mutilation is only the Grand Guignol capper. Chaos reigns, indeed. ■

Antichrist

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:50:29 PDT

Half-genius, half-huckster, Danish bad boy Lars von Trier continues to confound. His most arrogant, insane confrontation yet, Antichrist is a film like no other. It’s provocative, sloppy and intellectually  retarded—the entire picture feels like it’s sprung forth from the creator’s id without a second thought as to the consequences.

I’ve tried really hard to hate and dismiss this movie—I even endured it twice—but there’s no hiding from its idiotic power. Antichrist stays with you, even when it’s stupid.

Grade: C+

Director: Lars von Trier 

Starring: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte  Gainsbourg 

Running time: 109 minutes

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as “He,” and “She,” respectively. They’re first glimpsed having sex to Handel in black and white super slo-mo (complete with pornographic penetration shots) in the shower, not noticing as their toddler pulls a Clapton Junior and plummets out a five-story window to his death. 

But their grieving is short-lived. All extras at the funeral find their faces blurred like unsuspecting folks who wandered into a reality television program, so that von Trier can narrow the focus down to “He” and “She” alone. 

“She” is in bed for a month before “He” finally intervenes. He’s a professional therapist and thus, feels free to toss out her meds and embark on a more drastic, behavioral modification program. He’s also a condescending twat of a shrink, exercising this sick power over his wife in a way that can’t be good—especially since “She” keeps ripping off her drawers and masturbating vigorously just to spite him! 

So Antichrist ’s battle of wills carries on, with Dafoe’s “reasonable, rational man” speaking in dull therapy lingo while his wild, crazy and not-quite-of-this-Earth wife ain’t really buying it. In this uncompromising, deeply ugly oasis, Dafoe meets all sorts of unnatural disasters, until one Fantastic Mister Fox shows up, chowing down on his own innards and muttering aloud: “Chaos reigns!” 

There’s a hallucinatory chill to   Antichrist , when von Trier fixates on the deafening sounds of acorns hitting a tin roof as the harbinger of abortions and miscarriages, or when he concludes that nature itself is not a warm and welcoming thing but rather a chilly, ugly animal. The circle of life is a tangled thick of merciless greens, eating over the complacent. 

As shot by phenomenal cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Antichrist ’s exteriors are all sickly pale-scapes stinking of dead forest rot. Amusingly nicknamed “Eden,” this garden is ugly as fuck. Photographed at infinitesimal shutter speeds, the film catches these two actors’ expressions at their most vulnerable. 

Which is to say, holy shit. Antichrist goes there and then some, pushing the boundaries of genital mutilation in its third act to a point where you think somebody probably should have been arrested. Dafoe and Gainsbourg are too real … too good—the first time around I thought this was all really happening, and wanted somebody to call the police. 

At one point Dafoe starts violently banging Gainsbourg against a tree stump, and as their rhythm picks up we see a den of shrieking corpses spawning up from around the old roots to join in—disembodied limbs reaching out of the ground. The vision is tacky, awful and comes from a nightmare very genuine and scary. 

It gets worse, and even grosser. Sadly we only discover late in the film that “She’s” been working on a thesis called “Gynocide,” which doesn’t just rip off the “all work and no play” bit from The Shining , but also trivializes Antichrist ’s more thoughtful moments, until it finally becomes a movie about a mad slasher who pulverizes genitals.  

Not that it isn’t terrifying. (And frankly, kids, there’s stuff here you never, ever want to see.) But Antichrist , particularly in its final moments, settles for so much less than it probably should have been. 

The sicko punchline falls flat, slamming too neatly into a thesis where the rest of the movie felt so strangely unhinged. Still, Antichrist has been bothering me for months, even if I can’t quite get on board with it … yet. ■

Where The Wild Things Are

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:56 PDT

What stays with you is the sadness. There’s an almost unbearable undertow of melancholy in director Spike Jonze’s awkward, arty adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, that is entirely unexpected.

Grade: A-  

Director: Spike Jonze  

Running time: 101 minutes 

Based on the book by: Maurice Sendak 

Philly connection: Peep Maurice Sendak’s personal collection at the Rosenbach  Museum & Library.

As you’ve probably heard by now, this ain’t your average cookie-cutter kid’s flick, and I can already picture the furious soccer moms demanding refunds for their traumatized offspring in multiplex lobbies across the land.  

Shot three years ago, the movie has been plagued by rumors of post-production woes and freaked-out studio executives. The suits had every right to be worried, as Jonze’s film is both magical and strange. It’s an extraordinarily subjective experience, burrowing so deeply into its child hero’s perspective that the movie works something like a Rorschach test for viewers. Some are left completely cold, others in tears. Count me in the latter camp. 

Drawing out Sendak’s nine sentences to feature length, Jonze and his co- screenwriter Dave Eggers begin by sketching the unhappy world of young Max (Max Records) with admirable swiftness and clarity. In just a handful of choice moments we put together that Dad is nowhere to be found and Mom (Catherine Keener) is completely overwhelmed. His aloof big sister’s friends tend to take rough-housing a bit too far, and nobody seems to display the appropriate level of respect or admiration for Max’s awesome snow fort. He’s a lonely, angry child, and after throwing a temper tantrum to try and disrupt his Mom’s date with Mark Ruffalo, Max retreats into his imagination. 

After a perilous sea voyage, he discovers a vast forest populated by giant muppets with wide eyes and runny noses. Designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop with facials expressions augmented by seamless computer animation, these Wild Things are towering furry, and often very funny beasts. Max, still wearing his wolf pajamas, quite accidentally becomes their king, spinning tall tales of viking slaughters and “a loneliness shield” that will make all their sadness go away. 

Obviously each creature represents an aspect of Max’s home life, but Jonze and Eggers wisely don’t dwell on the psycho-analysis, and instead let the animals speak for themselves. Their simple, often silly talk manages to encompass the gamut of childhood anxieties, with petty jealousies and temper tantrums always circling back around to a gnawing fear of abandonment that haunts the movie’s core.  

James Gandolfini lends his voice to Carol, the largest and neediest of the bunch, who suffers from some pretty severe mood swings. It’s a bravura performance, almost like a compendium of Tony Soprano’s most babyish hissy fits. Lauren Ambrose voices the elusive KW with a droll valley girl sneer, and Chris Cooper does some bone-dry deadpan as a hawk-like fellow named Douglas. 

The film’s early scenes are riffed on and replayed in this fantastical setting. There are wild rumpuses, dirt-clod fights aplenty, and another awesome fort. But the catch this time around is that King Max also has to be the parent, too. The idyll is his coming of age—he’s learning that actions have consequences. Even in this fantasy world, when you break stuff, it stays broken. 

Where the Wild Things Are has a roughness and texture that’s foreign to most family films. Shot with handheld cameras in rugged, outdoor locations, there’s nothing glossy about it at all. These big furry beasts are about as far as you can get from smooth CGI creations, and there’s a marvelously unpolished clumsiness to their movements. Jonze and his cinematographer, Lance Acord, favor low angles, better to lock us into Max’s perspective, always looking up at this strange new world. 

It’s not a perfect film, but I doubt a movie so raw and deeply felt ever could be. Even if the energy flags at times, Jonze has tapped into something almost primal here. Without ever coming out and overstating it, Where the Wild Things Are taps such a rich vein of divorced-kid,  absent-daddy issues, Steven Spielberg will be jealous. ■

Six Filmmakers Who’d Have Made "Where the Wild Things Are" Better

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:41:55 PDT

Jane Campion: According to a recent New York Times Magazine profile, Spike Jonze is so infantile, one of his friend’s kids thought he was a kid, too. Which is why it’s so improbable that his Maurice Sendak adaptation is forced and only hypothetically devastating. (In the words of William Hurt in A History of Violence , how do you fuck that up?) There must be someone who could have nailed its mix of feral joy and bottomless, end-of-childhood sadness. Perhaps Jane Campion, who’d bring both her unique visuals and bizarre sense of humor. And maybe Harvey Keitel’s penis.

Claire Denis: Fans of Jonze’s Wild Things are emboldened that it’s a pricey studio picture that’s mostly plotless. But if Warner Bros. really wanted to delve into the ether they’d have hired this French sensualist, whose films ( Trouble Every Day, Friday Night ) boast sensual textures, a certain melancholy and a narrative allusiveness that borders on maddening.

Michel Gondry: Or they could’ve hired Jonze’s bastard doppelganger, also a childlike naïf who’s worked for Charlie Kaufman and does a better job segueing from whimsy to the pits of despair. 

Terrence Malick: Now that he’s working again, the once-elusive Malick is perhaps too old to connect with the source’s childishness. But man, oh man, would he have brought the lyricism, making a film with a wafer-thin plot thrilling by the considerable power of his editing. 

Olivier Assayas: This French great’s last film was Summer Hours , which bid a quietly upsetting farewell to childhood, all while concentrating solely on adults. Just imagine the tears he’d elicit if he made a sad childhood film with actual children. 

Pixar: John Lasseter, before he was Pixar’s head honcho, chose Sendak’s book for a short film to test out then-nascent computer animation. They’re an obvious choice, but Pixar can do almost anything, even make a ’toon about cars tolerable. ■

An Education

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:43:09 PDT

Newcomer Carey Mulligan stars as a 16-year-old who falls under the sway of Peter Sarsgaard’s thirty-something hepcat in post-war Britain. Adapted by Nick Hornby from Lynn Barber’s memoir, An Education looks back upon statutory rape as a rite of passage, and it’s a testament to fine performances that the film only feels icky in retrospect.

Mulligan musters memories of Audrey Hepburn, drinking in jazz clubs and every other symbol of sophistication that Sarsgaard’s predatory rake lavishes upon her. He’s so smooth her parents (played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) don’t just consent to the affair—they seem to fall in love, too. But will Jenny’s dream of attending Oxford get hijacked by this beau and his creepy bedroom baby-talk?

Directed by Lone Scherfig, An Education certainly means well, positioning Mulligan’s Jenny as a woman brighter and more promising than the possibilities offered by her era. Her futures are summed up in either Olivia Williams’ stern, sexless schoolmarm or Rosamund Pike’s glamorous, dim-bulb arm candy. Sarsgaard’s world of nightclubs, classical music and high fashion is rendered in lavish colors, sharply contrasting the rainy palate of Jenny’s boring prep school and dreary home life.

But something about the movie still feels false. There’s nobody better than Hornby at dissecting the way people define themselves through their tastes, but in other respects his screenplay is too fussy and neat for its own good. This is a middlebrow view of what must have been a messy affair. Scherfig keeps everything humming along at room temperature; with even the betrayals and recriminations occurring at a genteel pitch, as if everyone’s afraid to raise their voices.

Hornby’s novels always cut so close to the bone, it’s shocking how content An Education is to skate along the surface. C

The Damned United

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:43:09 PDT

The frequent pairing of playwright/screenwriter Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen—The Deal, The Queen, Frost-Nixonand now The Damned United—is unbalanced. Morgan writes self-satisfied scripts, borderline offensive in how much empathy they grant real-life monsters while Sheen shows up and acts his heart out. It’d be a bum deal if the scripts didn’t ritualistically (and justly) earn the actor awards. He’ll likely nab a few more trophies for his ferociously playful turn in Morgan’s The Damned United as notorious and highly successful football manager Brian Clough, a man so cocky he attracted the attention of no less than Muhammad Ali.

We open not during Clough’s legendary runs for Derby County or Nottingham Forest (the latter during which he netted back-to-back European Cup wins), but his aborted stint at Leeds United. Arriving at his new job having previously attacked his new players in interviews—not to mention replacing the much beloved Don Revie (Colm Meaney)—Clough watches as one of England’s top outfits plummets. As the bloodbath ensues, the script cuts back to his name-making triumphs, limning the evolution of a successful asshead.

Having previously played second fiddle to Helen Mirren and Frank Langella, Sheen gets front and center, and it’s easy to read The Damned United as a glorified present from Morgan to his collaborator. Sheen has at it: He digs into his broad Manchester accent, creating a larger-than-life character.

Watching him is a hoot. Alas, it’s not a one-man show; there’s still Morgan’s script to deal with. As with The Queen and Frost-Nixon, Morgan’s take on Clough isn’t black-and-white. But where The Queen was complex, nimbly finding humanity in Elizabeth but not letting the institution of which she’s a part off the hook, Frost-Nixon was complex, teetering on incoherent, ultimately offering apologies for both its slacker-opportunist “journalist” and its ethics-impaired former prez.

The Damned United is more like the latter: Clough is a total fucking prick, but he gets results! The drama winds up framed around Clough apologizing to his dejected right-hand man (Timothy Spall), at which point, as far as the script is concerned, Clough is free to conquer the world, unencumbered by his pathologies. Nuts to that. C

Bronson

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:43:09 PDT

Biopics are, by nature, reductionist—forced to whiddle entire messy, disorganized lives into tidy, readymade narratives. And yet no film has been quite as willfully reductionist as Bronson, which chronicles the life of the Briton-born Michael Peterson. Sentenced to seven years for a minor stick-up, Peterson—who eventually changed his name to Charles Bronson for extra attention-nabbing—has spent the majority of his life behind bars, and the majority of those in solitary confinement due to endless fights, kidnappings and riots that amplified his sentence to absurd lengths.

As you can surmise, there’s not much story to fuel a traditional two-hours-and-change award gobbler. A 90-minute art film? Well, that’s another story. This summer, Il Divo, concerning crooked Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, floated by with a single cinema-friendly insight into its subject. So, too, does Bronson, which argues that its anti-hero is a twisted kind of performance artist, whose canvas is his life and whose brush is ultraviolence.

Fully embodied in a ferocious turn by Tom Hardy, Bronson is either brawling madly, or waiting to brawl madly. One of the first scenes shows him, naked and greased up, in a barely-lit cage, working himself up before an army of armed guards storms in.

Also like Il Divo, Bronson boasts a striking figure, physically.

Super-ripped, with a bald head and an endless, hilarious handlebar mustache, Hardy resembles a demented circus strongman. A social retard in his brief stint between sentences, he’s happily autonomous and always “on.”

But at least ll Divo offered facts. Bronson offers almost none. Its middle section is mostly fiction. It exists in a vaccuum and decades pass while Bronson never ages.

How Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (the Pusher trilogy) pads this out to feature length is simple: arresting filmmaking. He changes styles, cutting from proper scenes to Bronson on a stage, reciting monologues in gawdy make-up, at times suggesting Chopper, another darkly comic paean to a psychopath that boasts a starmaking lead performance. The idea is to capture how Bronson sees himself, and in doing so, Refn challenges both the biopic and the idea of what defines an artist. B+

Art & Copy

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:43:09 PDT

The latest from documentarian Doug Pray (Scratch, Surfwise) takes an, um, original stance on the subject of advertising. It’s not an evil and manipulative pox on humanity but instead an art form, worthy of genuflection and fawning documentaries. That, at least, is the opinion of the horde of the designers who serve as the film’s talking heads. And since Pray hasn’t bothered to get many naysayers to add levity, who’s to point out that they’re all wrong?

Art & Copy isn’t useless. Sitting down with the trade’s biggest practitioners, Pray reveals details on the history and the methods. The film serves as a worthy footnote to Mad Men, finding the tipping point when ads began to consume our everyday and revealing shifting trends.

But when it comes time to judge from an ethical standpoint, Art & Copy is comically feeble, too enamored with its subjects to do anything but swallow the Kool-Aid. On the subject of art, interviewees ritualistically point out that archaic ads, including those drawn by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec for the Moulin Rouge, often wind up in art museums. Fine. But advertising from the ’50s on is an entirely different beast, and while there’s artistry to, say, the eye-poppingly monochromatic iPod ads, their aesthetics are dwarfed by their sinister m.o.: making money by silencing people’s rational instincts.

Pray’s subjects have a rehearsed answer for that: They point out how horrified they are by the “Morning in America” spots that helped re-elect Reagan—ads so fantasy-America they reportedly made even the Gipper himself wince. It’s here that Pray could’ve asked how their work is in any way less repugnant and, of course, he doesn’t. If the rather immodest claims made by these ad guys are to be believed, these are the most diabolical puppet masters the world has seen. Pray sporadically throws in terrifying factoids about how much is spent on advertising or the price tag of an ad on American Idol, but he’s too awed by his subjects’ skills. C-

A Serious Man

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:28:04 PDT

There’s an old saying: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. But if you want to shut him up, just ask a question. 

Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man grapples with massive cosmic mysteries on a deceptively mundane stage. It’s a film about the silence of God, seething with profound existential panic, viewed through a hilariously cracked prism of everyday minutiae. 

Set in a Minneapolis suburb, circa 1967, the film stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor and human doormat whose entire life abruptly begins to crumble, proceeding from bad to worse with the kind of snowballing intensity and one-thing-after-another momentum that the Coens typically apply to their crime pictures. 

Larry’s bratty son is always smoking weed when he should be prepping for his bar mitzvah, while his daughter sneaks twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, saving up for a nose job. His disturbingly odd brother Arthur (the great Richard Kind) sleeps on the couch, draining pus from a cyst on his neck while scribbling mathematical equations into a tattered notebook. The scary redneck next door is trying to bully his way over the property line, and he’s got a cryptic Korean student who seems to think he can bribe his way into a passing grade. The head of the tenure committee keeps hovering around his office, making vague mention of anonymous letters accusing Larry of moral turpitude.

Grade: A 

Director: Ethan and Joel Coen 

Starring: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick 

Running time: 105 minutes 

Other films by the Coen brothers: Burn After Reading ; No Country for Old Men ; Paris, je t’aime; The Big Lebowski ; Fargo

But these are minor indignities compared to what follows. The first bombshell arrives when Mrs. Gopnick (Sari Lennick) announces that she’s leaving him for Sy Ableman, a community leader and all-around mensch played with grandiose, patronizing zest by Fred Melamed. Exiled to the “eminently habitable” Jolly Roger Motel (sharing a room with Arthur, no less), Larry collapses into a massive spiritual crisis.

Is this all just a test of faith? What is Hashem trying to tell him? Larry’s search for celestial explanation leads him up the hierarchy of local rabbis, in a series of agonizingly funny counseling sessions and rambling parables that remain stubbornly unresolved. Are Professor Gopnick’s epic misfortunes merely accidents of a chaotic universe, or are they all part of a deity’s master plan so complex and mysterious we mortals couldn’t even begin to understand it? And really, how much comfort can either answer provide when your wife is sleeping with Sy Ableman?

As always, the Coens are dismissed in some circles as snickering, nihilistic yuksters who get off tormenting their characters. Yes, the movie is indeed mercilessly funny, and it’s easy to see how the filmmakers’ consummate control of their craft might strike some as Kubrickian in its icy precision. But such a reading willfully ignores A Serious Man ’s open-ended, questioning structure. 

The film begins with an ancient Yiddish fable about a wandering rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) who makes a deliberately ambiguous exit, and the door to divine intervention remains left open just a crack. There are two ways of seeing the film’s haunting final sequence. On one hand it could be just another shit-luck disaster in a sad life that’s full of them. But the timing of certain events suggests, ever so slightly, that our previously passive-to-a-fault Larry just might be being punished for a reason. 

There’s a lot to chew on here, hefty themes visualized in that droll, classically out-sized Coen fashion. My favorite touch is a towering wall of blackboards, every inch filled with Larry’s frantic mathematical attempts to prove the Uncertainty Principle. “Even if you don’t understand this, you will be responsible for it on the midterm,” he notes, inadvertently summing up the character’s central philosophical conundrum. 

Perhaps the only sage advice arrives early, from an imposing Korean gangster discussing an unrelated topic, instructing Larry to “accept the mystery.” At the end of the day, do any of us really have any other choice than to do just that? ■