Screen Philadelphia Weekly

The Messenger

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:40:11 PST

We’ve seen the scene in hundreds of war pictures—two Army men in Class A uniform walk up to a house, knock on the door and deliver the worst news imaginable. They’re often played by grave-looking extras, and the camera tends to zero in on grieving widows. Screenwriter Oren Moverman’s troubled but deeply affecting directorial debut, The Messenger, flips the focus. What about these men who are charged with bringing the information? What kind of toll must it take, when your sworn duty is to devastate families, day in and day out?

Grade: B

Director: Oren Moverman

Starring: Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster

Running time: 105 minutes

Ben Foster stars as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery, a decorated Iraq vet wounded in action, reassigned for the last three months of his tour to a Casualty Notification Unit in suburban New Jersey. He’s placed under the tutelage of Woody Harrelson’s Captain Tony Stone, a veteran of the first Gulf War who seems to think he can hide behind his brusque protocols and procedures, but it’s clear after just five minutes in the man’s presence that he’s obviously falling to pieces.

The Messenger does its best to avoid combat-flashbacks, hectoring politics or other such pitfalls of the thus-far  underwhelming genre of Iraq War dramas, narrowing its focus to strict procedures, and all the ways these men attempt to bring a measure of dignity to the most horrible moment of people’s lives. “I used to introduce myself, but I don’t anymore,” explains Harrelson’s character. “This isn’t about me.”

There’s a shaggy, 1970’s character-study vibe to the loosely structured screenplay (which Moverman wrote with Alessandro Camon.) It’s not a film concerned with plot so much as it is about behavior, and truths revealed slowly over time, often in moments of repose.

Foster, who you’ll probably remember as a supporting player devouring scenery in 3:10 To Yuma , Hostage and Alpha Dog , dials it way back here, with remarkable results. Young Montgomery is all coiled reserve, a haunted look in his eyes conveying hints of a backstory we probably don’t want to know. He’s got the bruised, dangerous vulnerability of At Close Range -era Sean Penn, suggesting everything while doing almost nothing.

Harrelson (who is having a hell of a comeback year if you can somehow forget that he’s in 2012 ) is even better. Wearing an oddly trimmed moustache that clashes angrily against his shaved head, Captain Stone lectures and pontificates at great length, seemingly assuming that if he repeats the same lines of bullshit often enough, someday they might magically come true. The first warning bell sounds when he boasts of his AA membership, as I don’t believe anybody has ever seen Woody Harrelson stay sober for an entire movie … or even an afternoon.

The best parts of The Messenger involve a mid-movie road trip, during which Captain Stone tumbles off the wagon in spectacular fashion, and young Montgomery drags him to a fancy-pants engagement party for his  ex-girlfriend-slash-occasional fuck-buddy (Jena Malone—all grown up now, boys). Moverman flirts with some pretty vicious satire in this sequence, as our heroes most loutish, boorish behavior is constantly excused by guilt-ridden civilians who desperately want to be seen as “supporting the troops.” If the film had only stayed on this track, we might have a worthy successor to The Last Detail .

Alas, The Messenger gets too bogged down in a non-starter of a subplot, wherein Foster falls for Samantha Morton’s grieving widow. As always, this singular actresses’ beefy, ethereal presence is never not captivating, but their entire relationship feels false. The real love story here is the one between our two male protagonists, and it’s far more interesting to watch them gradually let their guards down in front of one another, until Harrelson’s eventual breakdown sucks all the oxygen out of the room. 

Brilliant as Woody is, pitfalls abound. Steve Buscemi is far too famous a figure to get away with his deeply distracting cameo, and Moverman is married to an annoyingly rigid set of aesthetic guidelines. Most of The Messenger has been photographed in single-take, hand-held extreme close-ups, pushing into the performances so deeply we barely have room to breathe. (You can count the pores on the actors’ faces.) 

The only wide shot is the closer, a decision that sounds interesting from a film theory standpoint, but limits what this flawed, fascinating movie might have been. ■

Six Emo Vampires

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:46:32 PST

Martin (1977): It’s been a long road from the classic bloodsuckers of urban legend and Universal horror classics to the tomato juice-sipping, noble-intentioned, fanged pansies of the Twilight franchise. But sensitive vampires come in more shades than emo. The teenage-looking protagonist of George A. Romero’s undersung classic only thinks he’s a centuries-old vampire—suffering from neither the drawbacks nor the benefits of the disease.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979): Max Schreck’s Nosferatu in F.W. Murnau’s original was so animalistic his face bore distinctly rat-like features. So does Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s not-quite-remake, but with a major difference: Kinski is all too aware of his disgusting features, spending the film wallowing in self-disgust.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992): As played by Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Frank Langella, the Count was a malicious, seductive gentleman. For his adaptation, Francis Ford Coppola created a new backstory: Gary Oldman’s Dracula pines for his dead wife, whom he believes to be reincarnated in Winona Ryder’s Mina Murray. The real story is their mutual love, torn apart by mean old Van Helsing.

Interview with the Vampire (1994): By focusing primarily on the immortality aspect of vampirism in her 1976 novel, Anne Rice all but invented the brooding vampire, and the film version was all but happy to give us a reluctant bloodsucker in a boring Brad Pitt, played as counterpart to Tom Cruise’s Lestat.

The Addiction (1995): How serious is Abel Ferrara’s vampire contribution? It opens with My Lai massacre footage. Lili Taylor’s NYU philosophy student is bitten by Annabella Sciorra, and her hunt for blood becomes an unsubtle metaphor for drug addiction.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009): Yes, there are still Underworlds and 30 Days of Nights, but the most popular vampire fiction— Angel, True Blood , this bullshit—features those who’d never dream of harming humans. Man up and chow down, guys.

The Blind Side

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:26:02 PST

“You can’t argue with a true story!” bellowed a colleague and frequent verbal sparring partner after a screening of this seriously unnerving ode to White Privilege, which stars Sandra Bullock, and pushed my outrage buttons in a way like no movie since those Ghetto-bots in Transformers 2 admitted they didn’t know how to read.

I will concede that The Blind Side is, indeed, based on the true story of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher, who lived a downright Dickensian existence of squalor and sadness before being adopted by Leigh Anne Touhy, a sassy, filthy-rich Southern housewife played by a tarted-up Bullock as a pushy know-it-all who looks hot all the time and traipses around town with her abject lack of manners or decorum excused as Leigh Anne “just telling it how it is.”

Look, I have no doubt that Touhy did something great for young Mr. Oher, and I’m sure she’ll be rewarded in heaven for her good deed.

What I object to is that the movie is about nothing more than the coronation and sanctification of Mrs. Leigh Anne Touhy. Oher barely registers as a character in this film—he’s a prop. He has no inner life or story of his own, just an exotic pet adopted by a bored housewife.

Eventually she teaches him how to play football, in the most condescending monosyllabic terms imaginable, and it’s only because she’s instructed the oversized oaf how to “do tricks” that scholarship offers soon start arriving in the mail.

Meanwhile, Bullock channels the most flippant and off-putting qualities as the supporting cast (featuring half of Deadwood, plus Tim McGraw) is required to shake their heads and smile in admiration while she insults them and gloats about what a great person she is for doing all of this.

Inexplicably written and directed by John Lee Hancock, who helmed the fine Dennis Quaid baseball flick The Rookie and penned Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World—one of my favorite movies of the 1990s—The Blind Side is all about how difficult it is to be kind to the disadvantaged, spending far more time focused on the Touhy daughter’s struggle with bullying racist classmates than Oher’s awful crack-damaged childhood traumas.

Turns out I can argue with a true story. Because there are issues of representation at stake here, and The Blind Side isn’t just awful and boring. It’s actively evil. F

2012

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:19:41 PST

Give 2012 a little credit: It doesn’t end with John Cusack and company embracing Jesus before being wiped out by 1s and 0s.

Nor does it, despite the climactic appearance of arks and the occasional muttered scripture, wallow around in Left Behind-esque mumbo jumbo. (We already got enough of all that in the far more repugnant Knowing.)

It doesn’t even really fetishize mass human carnage. Seven billion people may perish over the butt-numbing two and a half hours, but you barely see felled bodies.

It’s all about huge tracts of land tumbling into the earth’s core or rampaging biblical floods, not about the scores of people dying on or under them. Because thinking about genocide on that scale would be massively unpleasant, right?

Okay, niceties over.

Roland Emmerich’s third rogering of the planet is a hard-earned nadir, even as it raises the stakes. It’s not just Independence Day’s aliens or The Day After Tomorrow’s global warming shenanigans, but instead bullshit doomsday postulations. The Mayan calendar, we’re told, ends around 2012. (Actually, it was originally calculated at 2003 but, dammit, we’re still here.) So the world does too, with a sometimes talented cast (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in particular, is trying way too hard) scrambling to get to China, pronounced as the last land mass to sink below ocean level. Science, it seems, has failed to predict an overheating core and resultant shifting crust, accurately foreseen by ancient civilization and street crazies, and only the wealthy, prominent and/or dashing can survive.

Clearly this was intended as the ne plus ultra of disaster movies, but while the film averages either a spectacularly destroyed city or scenic locale per reel, it’s shockingly dull and straight-faced. Excepting Woody Harrelson’s mountain man conspiracy theorists and Zlatko Buric’s oily Russian billionaire, the film lacks the crass one-note caricatures of the genre, leaving us with boring, interchangable screamers with banal problems. (Cusack’s tries to patch things up with ex Amanda Peet, blah blah.)

This setup leads the writers into one creative corner after another. No less than three protracted suspense sequences feature a plane trying to outrace a crumbling runway, while the bleating, endless climax, lasting over two reels, features as its main dramatic apotheosis—wait for it—a stalled gate.

Rarely has the extinction of most of the planet’s population been so meh. D+

Rashomon

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:33:19 PST

Akira Kurosawa has it rough. It wasn’t until his splintered drama Rashomon netted the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival that the West was even aware the East had exportable cinema. And so casual knowledge of classic Japanese cinema has largely remained since, much to the chagrin of certain prickly cinephiles, who rarely miss the opportunity to point out the director’s films were considered by his fellow countrypersons to be, quite pejoratively, too “Western,” and were mostly ignored.

Vast strides have been made to shed light on Kurosawa equals (or betters) such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse and Makasi Kobayashi. But it’s important to remember the gateway masters, which is why the tastemaking Criterion Collection is releasing a vast, pricey 25-film Kurosawa box set for the holidays. That explains the sudden appearance of Rashomon, his first acknowledged “masterwork”—though I prefer Stray Dog, made the previous year.

Like a lot of the really popular “foreign films” released before loose European sex became the dominating attraction (notably certain Ingmar Bergman films), Rashomon is a Thesis Film, setting out to prove an inconvenient truth, namely: that truth itself is unknowable, relying as it does on the various whims and prejudices of its entirely too human tellers. The film’s famous structure tells of the same general situation—an ambush, rape and murder performed by a cackling bandit (Toshiro Mifune, natch)—four times from four different perspectives, each one wildly, comically different.

As noted by many Kurosawa detractors, Rashomon spends all its energy pointing out an idea that better filmmakers tend to accept as a given; Kurosawa was really an expert craftsman who thought he was a big thinker, and who could mostly think in big, lumbering thoughts. But he was a heckuva craftsman, as Rashomon—weighty ideas and all—proves.

A sublimely well-made bit of obviousness, it’s gripping because it’s directed with the zeal of a boy’s adventure. Never once risking repetition, Kurosawa gives each story its own energy, and often it’s difficult to tell this serious film apart from such “entertainments” as Seven Samurai or Yojimbo. Now if only a Rashomon resurgence could shed more light on the rarely-seen Hollywood remake—with Paul Newman as the bandit and, in the wraparound story, Edward G. Robinson lecturing a pre-Trek William Shatner—that would be even lovelier. B+

John Krasinski's 'Hideous' Film

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:02:07 PST

John Krasinski’s stock among those who don’t moon over his good looks rose precipitously when a strange credit appeared on his IMDb page. Turns out he had used his clout from The Office and elsewhere to write, direct and act (among a vast ensemble) in an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, a short story collection with no apparent storyline. Krasinski had nearly completed his directorial debut by the time Wallace committed suicide last fall, a tragedy that lends the caustic, monologue-heavy film a bittersweet tinge, particularly given how reverently it treats its source. PW spoke with Krasinski before the film’s Philadelphia debut, somehow never finding the time to ask him about Office spoilers, his Grizzly Adams beard in Away We Go or his dalliances with various Hollywood hotties.

There’s that cliché that what all actors secretly want to do is direct. But I read that you were not one of those people.

No, not at all. In fact, I may not direct again. Who knows? It’s true I never had any deep desire to be a director or even a writer. This book was really the thing that did it for me. I had done a stage reading of it in college, and I wanted people to have the experience that I had of hearing the words out loud and seeing the actors do it. Its the epitome of a passionate project.

What attracted you to the book so much that you’d want to carry it around as a project for so long?

The big thing was that David Foster Wallace had the power to write with this unique perspective of the world. And what he does is he’s able to give you people - especially guys - who you are asked not to judge right away. You’re asked to hold your opinions until you know all the information. And if you come back to the same opinion, that’s fine, but you’ve got to do the work.

A lot of the characters hold these truly abhorrent points of view, but they’ve thought them through so thoroughly.

Exactly. The actor Dominic Cooper plays a character who’s trying to defend the idea that women whov’e been raped or abused, that what happened to them could be a good thing because they’ve lived through it and gained an internal strength that most people don’t have. That’s such an incredibly offensive statement and theory, but [Wallace] delves into it in such a well-written manner and he plays both side of the the fence. He puts it out there as an idea, not some drastic defense of the theory. He holds a discussion about it. By the end you realize he’s been abused himself, so this is his own way with dealing with his past. Human coping mechanisms are so strong they’re about to come up with these wild theories to protect us.

How did you pitch the film to actors or producers, especially considering it’s based on a collection of short stories and not a continuous story?

What I was trying to pitch to the cast, and to the producers too, was my experience in college - basically that I had been part of this project that was inciting and provocative, and that so many people had so much to say about it, which I think is a rarity in movies today. A lot of times things are laid out pretty cut and dry, and this movie is more like an experience, almost. It’s about getting to see the world in a different way, and to have conversations about how you felt. And the fun part is when you disagree with the person who sat right next to you. That’s what really got people excited about the movie.

Were people worried about the content or the fact that it’s more like a cine-essay than a narrative?

I think less than the content people were worried it wouldn’t be linear, that it wouldn’t look like any other movie, and that it was definitely literary. I wanted to keep it literary thing. The idea was I wanted to do it as close the book as I could, and I wanted David Foster Wallace’s language to push through. I didn’t want it to be dumbed-down so everybody could understand it, or take it the place where everyone speaks. I was excited to have people speak in a slightly cerebral, stilted way.

In the book not only is the identity of the interviewer never revealed, he or she never has any lines. Why make her female?

I don’t know why, but right from the first time I read the book I was convinced she was a female. I was convinced she had some hidden agenda to asking guys all these questions. It wouldn’t make sense to be asking question after question if she didn’t have some purpose. And then I actually got to speak to David Foster Wallace. He said, “My idea was to write this book where you know nothing about the lead character, but through all the characters you realize who she is.” And I asked, “Is it a girl?” And he said, “Yeah. I figured she was a girl doing her dissertation at some Ivy League school.” And I said “That’s exactly the screenplay we wrote.” So that was fun to know we were on the same path.

Did you have a tight script you were following, or is this a film found in the editing room?

It was lot in the editing room. Originally I thought a more linear structure would be much easier as a doorway into the material. And as it turned out the linear structure got in the way and ruined how spontaneous and cool his book is. So in the editing room we started breaking it down more, and that’s where it got its prismatic feel.

You talked to David Foster Wallace though never met him in person.

No, we spoke on the phone. We tried to meet twice, but scheduling got in the way. But I did talk to him on the phone and got his blessing, which was very kind of him but also necessary. I don’t think I would have been able to do the movie the way we’ve done it if I had known he was somewhere out there maybe possibly not happy about it.

What was David Foster Wallace like?

He was the most unbelievably gentle person maybe I’ve ever spoken to over the phone. So kind and really warm in the way he spoke, and you knew he was not only doing it to be polite. It was actually something he was very excited about and willing to do.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:53:49 PST

Best known for playing cuddly goofball Jim Halpert on NBC’s 'The Office', John Krasinski is actually a very serious man.

Grade: D+ 

Director: John Krasinski 

Based on short stories by: David Foster Wallace 

Running time: 80 minutes

Well, at least that’s the vibe one gets from his ambitious feature directing debut, an ungainly adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men . A tangled thicket of male self-deception and macho posturing, the movie wrestles with Wallace’s dense verbiage, employing fractured timeline editing techniques, whip-lash inducing tonal shifts, and emphatically dissimilar acting styles. All that’s missing is a point.

As promised by the title, the movie begins with several particularly unappealing gentlemen at a drab desk in front of a cement wall, explaining their sexual peccadilloes and peculiar hangups to an off-screen female interrogator. Ben Shenkman kicks things off by explaining that he can’t stop himself from screaming: “Victory for the forces of Democratic freedom!” every time he reaches orgasm, and the confessions grow less enlightening from there.

The usually appealing Bobby Cannavale offers an odious little monologue about using his disfigured arm to pick up chicks. (He calls it “the asset.”) The Wire ’s Clarke Peters is cut off in the middle of some sort of rant about men who like lotion. Finally realizing that watching character actors sit at a table reading cretinous speeches into the camera isn’t exactly cinema, Krasinski begins layering the slightest wisp of story.

We soon figure out Julianne Nicholson is the interviewer, and this is all for some sort of graduate thesis project about the effects of feminism on men. This talented actress is stuck drifting through the film as a passive observer, though we see a few elliptical flashback snatches of a recent breakup (with handsome Krasinski himself) and get a small sense of her underwhelming academic progress. 

But mostly Nicholson just listens. Everywhere this poor lady tries to go, there’s always a guy or two loudly performing a David Foster Wallace monologue within earshot. Busboys pontificate about what women really want, or two guys next to her at a coffee shop tell tall tales of their sexual conquests. She can’t even walk down the hallway of her apartment building without having to hear Will Arnett carrying on about loneliness to his girlfriend’s locked door across the hall. 

For a bit of spice between the long-winded speechifying, there’s a flurry of cuts to Josh Charles reciting the same canned lines to a bevy of different women in identical locations. Krasinski does his best to try and visualize what’s basically an audiobook, often distractingly allowing his characters to appear in their own anecdotes, wandering through stagey reenactments, narrating all the way. It’s a theatrical conceit that clunks on the big screen. 

Some tension finally emerges within the film’s final third, as Nicholson is reluctant to confront an overzealous young student who just wrote a paper arguing for the virtues of rape and abuse, because at least the victims learn some sort of truth about themselves. It’s a sophomoric, offensive tirade, but one delivered with considerable sting by the British actor Dominic Cooper. It’s also the only time we see our heroine reacting, and for a moment or two there’s almost something resembling drama. 

The feeling is short lived, as one restlessly fidgets through the rest of Brief Interviews wondering what sort of central idea unites all these discordant soliloquies? Men are pigs who secretly hate women? Then where does Frankie Fasion’s epic dissertation about his father’s career as a washroom attendant fit into that thesis? 

Krasinski takes center stage for the final rant, a corker of an infidelity justification involving a hippie granola chick’s encounter with a serial killer, and it’s hard not to shake a sneaking suspicion that he made the whole damn flick just to give himself this monologue. Even worse is that he tanks it—too benign a screen presence to convey the character’s cruelty, often stumbling over the complexities of Wallace’s prose. 

It’s hard to fault a young filmmaker’s lofty goals, and this material would probably kill on stage or as a radio play, but Brief Interviews With Hideous Men doesn’t work at all as a movie. ■

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:43 PST

Four years ago producer Lee Daniels made his directorial debut with Shadowboxer, the kind of lurid, batshit whatzit you recommend to people to prove your popcorn wasn’t laced with acid when you watched it. Such sights include (but are not limited to): a man felled with pool cue up the hoo-ha; a zebra as proof of Scarface-style excess; Joseph Gordon-Levitt dating Mo’Nique; Stephen Dorff’s condomed cock; an obviously blinkered Macy Gray; Cuba Gooding Jr. fucking Helen Mirren to death.

The strange thing about Daniel’s Precious—a breathlessly hyped crowd-pleaser knighted by both Oprah and Tyler Perry—is how little its maker has changed up his game. A tale of mega-misery centered around Precious, a chronically obese, serially raped, illiterate Harlem teen (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), the film is a grimy slog whose scenes often look lit by a single stained, red New Orleans light bulb. Alleged cross-over appeal and forthcoming Oscars aside, it could never be mistaken for the work of Ron Howard. Or even Danny Boyle. (Speaking of: Unlike Slumdog Millionaire, its hack critic-claimed doppelganger, Precious never makes abject poverty look fun.)

But let’s not go nuts. Adapted from a novel that’s somehow even grimmer, the film finds its titular character Precious wallowing in a purgatory with a strong contender for cinema’s worst mom (Mo’Nique, again), before being sufficiently encouraged to enroll in alternate schooling with a kindly teacher (Paula Patton).

If the overall story feels slight, Daniels’ bizarre syntax at least gives the illusion of something new and exciting. As with Shadowboxer, Daniels is a reckless filmmaker, whose own films—unlike the stodgy, comically simplistic ones he’s produced (Monster’s Ball, The Woodsman)—show little care for craft, taste or even sense. Indeed, Daniels’ trick is to hew so close to Sidibe’s Precious it often feels the film was made by the character herself. Her rambling narration is so prevalent it actually interrupts scenes, often while another person is talking. The tone is bipolar, rolling around in utter horror one second, then reveling in moments of stolen joy the next.

The whole enterprise is dicey, but it really only definitively fails whenever Daniels tries to depict her fantasies. It’s true you’ve never seen something quite like Precious, and also true that there’s a scene where you’re not sure who is delivering a more kickass performance: Mo’Nique or an unrecognizable Mariah Carey, as a knowing social worker. But let’s not mistake what is a bit of an unsightly mess for something sui generis. C+

Six Films Based on Unadaptable Books

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:50:20 PST

Lolita (1962): That cinema and literature are two distinctly unique mediums has never scared off filmmakers desperate for an idea. In fact, forget that Stanley Kubrick’s noble take on Lolita concerned pedophilia. How could any filmmaker mimic Vladimir Nabokov’s impossibly lyrical and eloquent prose?

Ulysses (1967): Director Joseph Strick—who later did Henry Miller’s similarly unadaptable Tropic of Cancer —sought to prove that there wasn’t much story in James Joyce’s dense novel. His take features such hair-raising cinematic exploits as Stephen Daldry moping near the sea, Leopold Bloom placing an advertisement and both characters, drunk, miterating in a garden. 

Dune (1984): On page, Frank Herbert’s epic is little but characters explaining their future luddite world. Which is great as something you pore over, not so great when you’ve got more than two hours of sound and image. And yet there are three adaptations—one in the works. The first was a box office fiasco in which David Lynch upchucked odd, bizarro images (e.g., brain-man with a vaginal mouth) but got tangled in endless expository dialogue. 

Time Regained (1999): Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has only attracted films from either of its sides: Swann in Love (1984) took a hilariously banal stab at Volume One , while experimental filmmaker Raoul Ruiz took the opposite approach with Volume Seven , which is so like the book it will immediately lose all but Proust scholars.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull  Story (2005): How best to tackle Laurence Sterne’s work of ur-postmodernism,  itself about its own making? By making a movie about how it’s impossible to adapt? Brilliant. 

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009): In his directorial debut, John Krasinski tries to turn a short story collection by David Foster Wallace into a roaming, monologue-heavy cine-essay on pungent maleness. And almost succeeds! At least these are all single, contained narratives.

Lee Daniels' 'Precious' Moment

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:53:12 PST

Lee Daniels exudes confidence when talking about his latest film, Precious, which finally hits Philly—after opening in select cities across the country last week—this Friday. It’s as if he knows this story about an obese, ugly, dark-skinned teenage girl from the ghetto—whose father repeatedly rapes her—is going to impact the lives of millions.

“That truly was my intention, to change how one perceives incest,” says Daniels. “We see Precious in Philly every day on the El, on the bus, 42nd Street to everywhere. She’s there. She’s with my cousins. She’s deep in my family. She’s everywhere, but we are ignoring her.”  

The film is based on the 1996 urban literary legend Push, a novel by poet Sapphire. Back in the day when girls in the suburbs were reading Judy Blume books, around-the-way girls in the inner-city were passing around Push , a timeless depiction of life in the ghetto: poverty, child abuse, illiteracy, damaged souls ... The adaptation closely parallels the powerful and heart-gripping story of main character Precious, played by newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe, a 350-pound illiterate teenager who’s about to give birth to her second child by her father, all the while enduring verbal, physical and sexual abuse doled out by her mother Mary, played by actress, comedian and talk show host Mo’Nique.  

It’s a story that Daniels, who has been open about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his father while growing up, says he had to tell.  

“When I read it, it ripped me open. It ripped me raw,” he says. Daniels was given the book about 11 years ago by actress Ally Sheedy’s mother, a literary agent in New York City. 

“It left me in a place where my guts were upside down. My mouth was open. Every other page was like, ‘Oh my God this isn’t happening. I’ve got to turn this into a movie.’”   

It’s a beautifully warm Monday in October, a welcome treat considering the long rainy weekend Daniels spent promoting the film. As he makes his way inside the green room at CBS 3 TV, it’s clear the filmmaker—sporting a loosely buttoned beige shirt, blue jeans and brown leather shoes with the laces untied—is recovering from a long night.  

“Networking and attending events is like working,” he says, feeling a little self-conscious about his disheveled appearance. The West Philly native gets comfortable on a black leather couch and immediately gushes about how fabulous Nona Hendryx of the legendary soul music group Labelle looks at age 65.  

“She has the body of a 20-year-old,” he jokes of the songstress who has a song on the Precious soundtrack titled “Now That I Know Who I Am.”  

Daniels sets the mood with laughter, but the conversation takes a deep turn as he discusses his journey to bring the story of Precious to the big screen, his toughest critic, and how it feels not to have the support of some African-Americans. He even reveals for the first time that he was sexually abused as a child. A revelation that offers further insight into the director’s penchant for creating dark films like Monster’s Ball , for which actress Halle Berry won an Oscar; The Woodsman , Shadowboxer and Tennessee . The provocative filmmaker tackles sensitive subject matters from interracial relationships and organized crime to pedophilia, child abuse and twisted estranged relationships.

The journey to get Push to the big screen was not an easy one. “It took a long time to get her to trust me to make the film,” says Daniels of Sapphire. The author had concerns that if the adaptation wasn’t done correctly it would change the way people perceived the book.  

“During that time scenes were fermenting in my head because I knew I was going to stalk her down for this if it killed me.” Daniels says the scholar and poet is “a genius, but she’s got a little bit of hot sauce in her.” 

“She’ll use a five-syllable word then bust out with the word ‘nigga,’” laughs Daniels as he fans himself. 

The author finally embraced the idea. “Either that or she was tired of me stalking her,” says Daniels, and from there it was smooth sailing. “I had so many years to understand the story in its DNA.”  

It’s the kind of DNA that is embedded in all of us, even  

Daniels, who recently had to face a repressed childhood memory that forever connects him to Precious. “My therapist said, ‘Lee, your stories are so provocative, were you sexually abused?’ I go, ‘no.’ Then I go, ‘Well, you know I was 12 and this guy who was in his twenties tried something with me.’”  

After his confession, Daniels says his therapist hit him with the news. “She said to me, ‘Lee, you were sexually abused.’ I was like ‘ whoa .’ That was abuse.  

“That was last year and I’m almost 50 years old. I was like, ‘OK, put that on my checklist of things to do,’” he adds, breaking into a hearty laughter.  

With Precious, Daniels does an excellent job of addressing the deep seeded “isms” that people may knowingly or unknowingly possess—a standard trait in his films. The edgy director utilizes the skillful art of “saying something without saying something.”  

The film succeeds at making global connections, and in encouraging viewers to break away from the norm and see Precious as a universal story, not just a black story.  

“I went around the world, Germany, France, and it [the film] just speaks to other people and cultures because there is a little bit of Precious in all of us. White Philadelphians and New Yorkers, I don’t consider to be white. They intermingle with us. They know a lot, so it’s really like the same thing. But, when white people in Oregon were responding to the film, it freaked me out because they don’t see Precious every day.” 

 With controversy comes intense criticism, and given his track record, it’s easy to see why Daniels has had his share of both. Some critics have dismissed Precious as being nothing more than poorsploitation (exploiting the story of what is perceived an urban issue). “Poorsploitation, what’s that mean?” asks Daniels, clearly tickled by the term used to describe his film in a recent PW review. “I don’t know how to respond to that because … it’s a universal story. I’m a black filmmaker so if that makes it poorsploitative because I’m black … then poorsploitation around the house !”  

The novel and film both take place in Harlem with African-American characters, but ironically the novel Push was originally put up as a stage play in London with an all-white cast before Daniels came on board. He admits he wasn’t aware of the full scale of Precious ’ universal impact until he made the film. 

“I told Sapphire, people are responding to this film around the world,” he says, with a trace of a Philly accent.  

She said to me, “Lee, you know we put Precious up as a white play in London ... Precious was white. Mary was white.”  

African-American directors have long been criticized for how they portray blacks in film, and Daniels is no exception. Some members of the black community—and liberal whites—have made it clear they feel Precious makes black people look bad. Indeed, the film delves into some hard-to-take truths: Precious contracts HIV from her father, a reality that’s hard to hide.  

“Black women are dying because everyone wants to pretend to have a certain image,” says Daniels, who visited a gay center in New York while researching the film. “Most of the AIDS patients in this country are black women,” says Daniels. 

The director blames the disconnect between his critics and his work partly on the fact that some African-Americans don’t want to see the truth played out on the big screen. Nevertheless, he refuses to sugar-coat reality.  

“For me to portray and not tell my truth and bring it to the screen would be an injustice to me as a man—forget about a black man, but as a man. I would be lying and black women are dying.” To that end, the filmmaker says, “Yeah, I got your image right here ,” making a hand gesture toward his crotch.  

Daniels already proved he won’t work with those who don’t subscribe to his mission: He fired his last manager for not believing in the film. 

Seeking more truths, Daniels also visited incest survivors, an experience he describes as chilling. “It actually gives me the creeps because they were children and they were innocent … I would have to kill somebody if they did that to my child,” says Daniels, who shares custody of his adopted 13-year-old twins, Clara and Liam—who were abandoned by Daniels’ brother as babies—with his ex-boyfriend Billy Hopkins. 

Surprisingly, the director was most touched by Mo’Nique’s character, Mary, the monstrous mother.  

“She is just the worst of the worst,” says Daniels. “I said to Mo’Nique, ‘I don’t want to feel sorry for you, but I want to understand you.’ Through that understanding and her performance I broke down. I started crying. I said ‘wait a minute, am I feeling sorry for her?’ I think I was just sorry for the whole situation because she was someone else’s child. She was a victim of the culture,” says Daniels. “You know the culture is really the system, and we feel strong about it in the film. The system is the ultimate culprit.” 

Mo’Nique’s character brings to light another big issue, one that leaves kids like Precious subject to prey: When Precious was 3 years old, her mother decided to give her relationship with her boyfriend (Precious’ father) priority over her daughter’s well-being. Daniels stops to think about why women choose men over their children.  

“What I suspect is that we all want love. I think that a true mother should put her child before anything. (His voice trails off, as if this question brings up a sensitive emotion in him.) Also it’s not just about love. I find myself really having to take a great balance because my work is so all consuming and I have two kids. They will be neglected because of my work, so it’s not just about lovers, it’s about work ... It’s very hard to put food on the table and put them first.”  

Speaking of maternal matters, Daniels’ mother is a huge Tyler Perry fan, and wishes her son would do movies like the Madea mogul.  

“My mom would say, ‘Ms. Mabel down at the church, she’s like what’s wrong with you? What did I do to you? Why can’t you make movies like Tyler Perry?’”  

I said to her, ‘I think we all have a voice.’” The filmmaker admits his mother directly impacts his movie decisions. “I was in talks with Samuel L. Jackson to play the pedophile in The Woodsman and I got so nervous because she said, ‘If you have a black man playing a pedophile don’t come back in this house!’” Needless to say, Jackson was not offered the role—which was played by another Philly native, Kevin Bacon. “It’s funny how your mother can have an affect on a movie,” laughs Daniels. Fortunately for Daniels his mother is very pleased with Precious , especially since Perry is involved with the project.  

“I did this movie for African-Americans because my mother kept asking why I can’t make movies like Tyler. Now I go, ‘Mom, you like this movie?’ She goes, ‘Tyler Perry is producing it, hell yeah!’” 

With his biggest critic on board, Daniels can sit back and digest the whirlwind that is Precious . The director initially thought that the film, originally titled Push —the title was already taken by Paul McGuigan’s film—would go straight to DVD. He couldn’t have anticipated the film’s mass attraction.  

“When we got into Sundance I was like ‘whoa!’ When we won Sundance, I was like ‘what the fuck !’” All these white people were responding to my movie and I broke down in tears because you realize that this is not a black story. I’m a black filmmaker but this is not a black story,” he says.  

“This Chinese lady came up and held my hand and started crying. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I still can’t deal with it because I made this film for my family and it becomes universal.” 

By mainstream standards the movie is a word-of-mouth success, racking up its fair share of awards since debuting at Sundance last winter. Plus, for months the Oscar buzz has been circling over members of the cast: There’s Mo’Nique for her riveting portrayal of the teen’s mother, whose character Daniels describes as a “trifling cow,” Mariah Carey for her role as Precious’ welfare caseworker, and of course, Sidibe. Push took home top honors at Sundance: Special Jury Prize for Acting (presented to Mo’Nique), the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. While accepting his third award Daniels got the phone call that changed everything.  

“I’m walking down and I’m winning my third award at Sundance. Someone is calling me from an unknown number.  

“So who answers a phone when you’re winning an award?” Daniels asks in a rhetorical fashion. “I’ll tell you who—a broke filmmaker.” Being quite the comedian, he puts his hand to his ear reenacting the telephone call and imitating Oprah’s voice.  

“Lee, its Oprah.” 

“Heyyy! Oprah? Oprah Winfrey?”  

“Yes, Oprah Winfrey.” 

“I’m winning an award.” 

“Well, why are you answering the phone?” she asks. 

Lee recalls with laughter actually pausing after Oprah’s question to think about why he was answering the phone while winning an award. 

“Call me back,” she says. 

“I said, ‘I can’t. It’s an unknown number.’”  

Oprah called back. The rest is history.  

“She came into the picture because she had known of my work. What [Oprah’s endorsement] means to me is that I have two different demographics that ordinarily don’t see my films. Even though I’m African-American, I really speak to an art crowd. I know that and it saddens me,” Daniels says softly. It’s clear that the lack of support from African-Americans stings him. 

Some African-Americans may not have related to the artsy nature of Daniels’ earlier films, but there is no question that Precious , with all the street-cred backing of the book Push , will bring him a new fan base. ■

(Untitled)

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:42 PST

Like its close cousin the fashion world, the art scene—a hermetic, quasi-incestuous and moneyed institution free to wallow in any potential ridiculousness—is an easy target for jokes. Here’s a gag you’ve seen a million places: Someone takes a random, anonymous object—let’s say a thumbtack. They stick it into a gallery wall. Then they call it art. Zing! Take that, conceptual art.

That bit crops up in the seething art satire (Untitled), and it’s every bit as fresh and trenchant as when it turned up, with mild variation, in an episode of 227. But director Jonathan Parker is after something loftier than a mere sitcom—supposedly.

In one corner you have Adam Goldberg as Adrian Jacobs, a brooding, humorless composer of atonal music involving shrieking women and dudes kicking metal cans tied to strings. In the other you have gallery owner Madeleine Gray (Marley Shelton), attracted to such noncommercial art, as well as to that of the aforementioned gag. Somewhere in the middle is Adrian’s brother Josh (Eion Bailey), whose super-bland paintings of warm colors and dots Gray houses in the back room to sell to hotels, solely to finance her own otherwise money-losing business.

At least for the first half, all three are one-note jokes—pretentious, delusional caracatures that fit in well with the rest of the gallery of grotesques, including Vinnie Jones as an artist trading in tarted-up animal cadavers. At some point, however, Parker decided Adrian, while still apparently silly because he thinks kicked cans constitute music (whatta boob!), was the true hero, and Gray the arch-villainness. In (Untitled)’s view, it’s a case of a pure artist briefly seduced by mean old profiteers, who wouldn’t know “real” art if it bit them on the ass, which is no doubt encased in an unsensible outfit.

Deep within (Untitled) lies an insightful critique of the way art appreciation sometimes fails to go beyond the superficial, be the works worthy or not-so-worthy. Whatever nuanced exploration gets muddled and subsequently squashed by the kind of barndoor broad, witless satire that wrecked the similarly tiresome Art School Confidential. Perhaps all gallery owners really are parasitic phonies, but that doesn’t excuse the hateful, potentially vengeful reductionism of Gray’s character, so evidently evil she owns a tree of designer glasses that, of course, aren’t prescription, and she dresses in either noisy clothing or Sarah Lawrence tees. After awhile you stop pondering “But is it art?” (an asinine question the film naturally brokers) and instead wonder if conceptual art ran over Parker’s dog or something. C-

The Maid

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:43 PST

Picture it: a wealthy bourgeois family in Chile. Their longtime live-in housekeeper.

The usual result of a coupling like this is a dig at the upper class, particularly given the chasmic class gap in its home nation. And yet Sebastiàn Silva’s very funny The Maid, while hardly approving of its well-off characters, is one of the few films to take aim on the long-suffering staff or at least not paint them as a noble salt-of-the-earth type.

To wit: Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is a miserable, painkiller-addicted malcontent, whose constant expression after 20-plus years of living with the same household is a pissy scowl. Introduced blithely ignoring her employers’ cheerful calls to come to the living room to celebrate her own 41st birthday, Raquel is both one of the family and still an outsider—held to some semblance of employer-employee ritual but basically free to be as unpleasant as she wishes.

As her work starts to slip (and after playing petty mind games with the teenaged daughter), she’s informed she’s overworked enough to require an assistant. So displeased is Raquel that, to retain her power within the household, she childishly taunts and tortures a revolving door cast of new servants, including locking them outside and, in one case, subjecting them to a full-on smackdown.

There’s only one way this could go: redemption, specifically at the hands of a maid (Mariana Loyola) who proves not so easy to push around. To its credit, Raquel’s Journey to Becoming a Better Person isn’t quite as definitive as you’d think, and relatively painless to boot.

It helps that our lead has been perfectly cast. Without ever crossing the line into outright unlikable, Saavedra brings us a character who suffers, genuinely, movingly, from very real class discomfort but who actively repels our pity. Her Raquel will not be condescended to with pathos for the working (wo)man, freeing her to explore and augment her character’s hilarious dark streak.

She wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Japanese director Shohei Imamura—a filmmaker who made a career out of depicting the horrors inflicted upon lower classes while dispelling the cliche of them as more “real” than regular people. As a whole The Maid itself isn’t quite as good as Imamura, but crafting a mighty strong protagonist is a good place to start one’s promising career as any. B

The Box

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:43 PST

If an elegantly dressed Frank Langella turned up on your doorstep, missing half of his face, would you really let him in the house? That’s only the beginning of the questions one asks after enduring The Box, Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly’s equally incoherent follow-up to his spectacularly terrible 2006 film Southland Tales.

Based on a Richard Matheson short story that was adapted into a memorable Twilight Zone episode in the 1980s, The Box has a terrific premise. (Step one, cut a hole in the box. No wait, that’s something else.) A mysterious stranger shows up with what looks like a game show buzzer. If you push the button you receive a million dollars in cash, but somebody you don’t know dies. Do you push the button and take the money? Everybody dies, right? And it’s not like you know the person.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden try on a couple of hilarious Southern accents as a struggling married couple presented with this dilemma by a disfigured, even creepier than usual Frank Langella. It’s a simple question of morality, but alas Richard Kelly doesn’t believe in simplicity, and his cardboard characters don’t seem to wrestle much with the ethics. Always taking the path of most resistance on the way to his stories’ unwieldy endings, Kelly stretches a perfectly good 22-minute television episode out to two hours with an insane barrage of red herrings and metaphysical sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Much as his dreadful director’s cut undid Donnie Darko’s crucial sense of mystery, Kelly tries and tries to explain the secrets of The Box, talking in circles, making even less sense with every revelation.

There’s much ado about the National Security Agency snooping around NASA’s new Martian radio camera. Creepy waiters suffer curious nosebleeds, and the babysitter lives at a hotel where the pool is a portal to another dimension. There’s a library full of clones with towers of water promising salvation. I believe Langella’s being controlled by a sentient bolt of lightening, and all of this has something to do with Cameron Diaz’s disfigured foot, although I still have no idea what.

As in Darko, Kelly has a knack for creating ominous, foreboding moods. But to what end? By the time The Box gets around to its preordained conclusion, we’ve been dragged around several universes worth of half-baked digressions that go nowhere. This isn’t scary, it’s just annoying. D

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+