Review // SHUTTER ISLAND - Scorsese tries on spooky

I generally find Madhouse movies pretty boring. The fact that they deal in insanity, hallucination and denial usually means there are no graspable handholds in their stories. You can't trust what your eyes are seeing and you can never trust what the characters are saying, only not in an interesting way like in noir movies. Anything goes in a Madhouse movie and the filmmakers can always plead insanity and get off the hook. Madhouse movies almost always feature the same central character, the seemingly sane man/woman set adrift suddenly from their former world of order and control. They are constantly asking themselves the question, "Am I going crazy?" and the answer is always "yes". There's nothing to figure out. I usually just hold on, discounting everything from the first 2 acts until the lengthy explanation is trotted out--the rare psychological disorder, the split personalities, the dissociative condition that allowed for the plot to leap over its own holes. They all seem to inflate their running times with red-herrings that are meant to distract you along the journey to a destination you always should know is coming.

Shutter Island is no different than other Madhouse movies, but its pedigree tricks you into thinking it will be, and this works against the movie greatly. The disappointment the films final act engenders is directly in proportion to the talent and reputation of those involved. Every moment of the film, with its top-flight production values, lush photography and playfully assured direction seems to be telling you that you're in the hands of a master. So when you're finally delivered into territory that so many b-movie hacks have already journeyed to, it intensifies the letdown. The only difference is that it took much longer to get there, as the films running time seems to echo the expectations of its prestigious package. Scorsese gets the best of everything here, what he does with it ultimately, is retrace the steps of others, instead of blazing a new path.

I've never had a thing for Scorsese. It's not that I don't think he deserves his reputation, its just that none of his movies have connected with me personally the way other films from his peers have. I don't have a favorite Scorsese movie, like I do a DePalma or a Spielberg. Because of this I never bring much personal expectation into a Scorsese movie, and the same was true with Shutter Island. In fact, based on my reactions to the premise and trailer, I came in with low expectations and most of my viewing benefited from that. While I allowed myself to be tricked, I did feel like I was in the hands of a master, and for a time I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Here Scorsese seems to be indulging the film historian in him, playing with old movie conventions and evoking the feel of a bygone era. As soon as the movie begins, a purposely overwrought score pounds on each frame, the same way that old black and white movies tend to open with a blaring musical motif meant to communicate the intended tone. The tone in Shutter Island is dread, and an army of horns bellow while violins trill, working at your nerves before anything actually nerve-wracking has happened yet. This purposefully heavy hand is actually one of the things I liked about the initial tone of the movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffallo play US Marshals assigned to the case of a woman who has gone missing from Shutter Island, a high security mental institution that is so spooky and foreboding that it seems like the worst place to send people wrestling with mental demons. There's hardly any point in describing more about the plot or characters since it's clear, even from the trailer, that they are not to be trusted. The "twist" reveals the true purpose of these elements, which are to distract you from what you suspected (or flat out knew) in the first place. By virtue of the sub-genre (see Madhouse movies) Scorsese is working in here, I already had to ask myself in the first five minutes whether Leo was in fact a US Marshall at all, or just another looney patient. But again, the stature of Scorsese, his bottomless film knowledge and gigantic budget led me to believe that more was at work here. I think I had the same reaction as many, "surely they aren't doing what I think they're going to do?" They did. It's a perplexing decision from a "master" since it affirms audience expectations rather than subverting them. It also renders most of the movie a tedious game that has little or no value after one viewing. To call it a "twist" is practically an insult to twists really. M. Night Shyamalan probably had a shit when he saw it. "That's it?That's their twist?".

Maybe it seems unfair or narrow to focus most of my attention on the twist and its ineffectiveness, but I really think it guts the whole experience. Spending the whole movie telling myself, "nah, they wouldn't be so lame" and then finding out they are really overshadows any of the positives I may have responded to. Perhaps it's that Scorsese, while playing with old movie conventions and dipping into the Madhouse subgenre, was also trying to pay homage, and therefore didn't want to break with tradition. His unsurprising surprise and leaden epilogue filled with backstory and extraneous explanation suggests that he wanted to color inside the lines of the Madhouse movie. But I don't buy it. Even though its clear that Shutter Island is nothing more than a spooky asylum movie, it never fully concedes to this. There are far too many flashbacks to WW2 atrocities and Holocaust death camps to ever mistake this for a straight-up chiller. And when the film spends the final 30 minutes wallowing in the bleak origins of Leo's madness, any fun is sucked out and replaced with dead children, method crying and plenty of screaming to the heavens. The movie always has one foot holding the door open to respectability and it deflates the punch of its borrowed B-movie elements. With all this Oscar-baiting material, its hard to believe that Scorsese was merely shooting for an homage to spooky b-movies.

DiCaprio has spent most of the last decade allowing himself to be miscast, throwing his method weight behind characters his frame can't support. I mostly understand why he makes his choices, smartly avoiding comic book movies and other bullshit. But playing cops, mercenaries and other assorted hard guys just doesn't work for him. He's become a prestige picture player, but he's almost always wrong for the specific roles he takes and his US Marshall/Mental Patient in Shutter Island is no different. It's not that DiCaprio isn't good, he almost always is, its just that it always takes a good 20 minutes or more to get over the Leo-factor and buy him as whatever character he's brooding through. He would be much better suited to model-fucking millionaire playboy roles (one half of The Aviator I suppose) and would do well to stay away from anything that requires him to shout with a gun in his hand.

I generally like when Scorsese strays away from mobsters, violent machismo and New York. The Scorsese movies I like the best (After Hours, King of Comedy, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence) are the ones that break from the styles and subjects that made him a film snob favourite. Shutter Island is Scorsese doing horror-of-the-mind and there isn't even a single Rolling Stones song on the soundtrack. While I think he should be commended for playing outside his comfort zone, the results are underwhelming and fall short of a director who has been given the mantle of a master.

Review // THE CRAZIES - Now this is a little more like it

What do you do if you're responsible for one of the most critically reviled, audience-ignored studio flops of the decade? Well first you keep a low profile for about five years, i.e don't direct any more terrible movies. Then, once people have mostly forgotten about the debacle of your last $130 million mistake, you come back and make a small, focused movie that only costs about as much as your last movie likely lost at the box office. For silver-spoon director Breck Eisner (ex-Disney honcho Michael Eisner is his daddy) this strategy seems to have gotten him out of Hollywood purgatory. But with his IMDB page listing a bunch more big budget remakes on his horizon, only time will tell if Eisner has truly learned from his mistakes (he has the foolish balls to remake John Carpenter's Escape From New York, so probably not).

The mistake in question was Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, but to place all of the blame on Breck Eisner is of course not fair. Paramount was looking to set up a money-machine franchise with McCon based on the 13,000 novels by trashy writer Clive Cussler, featuring his main hero Dirk Pitt. Yes, Eisner was the captain of the sinking ship, but it was Paramount who bankrolled the ill-fated voyage and Paramount who ignored the signs of stormy weather to come. I mean, their iconic hero-to-be was named Dirk Pitt and yet that somehow didn't throw up any red flags. I was one of the few people in North America to see Sahara in the theatre and it was truly awful. Naturally I loved it. When it finished I remember thinking, "wow, this Eisner kid is not going places". Well as it turns out, I should never have bet against the son of an insanely rich Hollywood player. Eisner has returned with The Crazies, his low-ish budget remake of the George Romero ultra-low budget original and it's pretty good for what it is. But mostly I think it stands as a prime example of how studios should proceed in our lean economy as well as how a remake/reboot/re-imagining should be handled if Hollywood remains intent on this creatively bankrupt course of action.

Ogden Marsh is a sleepy farming community with a small population of 1,200 nestled amongst corn fields and long expanses of flat horizon. This is America's heartland, typified in the opening scene by a little league game played on the edges of farmland. The wholesome comfort of this image is turned on its head when a man with a shotgun stalks across the field with murder in his eyes. The towns good-natured Sherrif, David Dutton is forced to shoot and kill the man. Naturally this sudden violent moment reverberates through the town and internally for the sheriff. He doesn't have long to dwell on it though, as another gruesome event shakes the close-knit foundations of the community. A husband traps his wife and son in a closet and then sets fire to the house. When the police arrive, he's casually mowing the lawn. He too is dead-eyed and unresponsive, just like the poor farmer Dutton killed on opening day of baseball season.

Dutton and his loyal deputy, Clank are then led into the marshes of the towns name and find a dead military pilot and his downed plane in the water that feeds into the towns drinking supply. Just as the possibility of a viral outbreak crosses Dutton's mind, all hell breaks loose. The military invades Ogden Marsh and begin setting up quarantines, separating husbands from wives and children from parents. Dutton is herded by gas-masked soldiers like all the rest of the citizens, his Sherriff's badge a trinket in the face of terrifying martial law. His pregnant wife Judy, the towns doctor, is ripped from his arms when she is suspected of showing symptoms of the virus. He is forcibly subdued and when he wakes up, he is riding in a cattle-car to an extraction point with other terrified citizens. Dutton has seemingly been delivered to safety along with hundreds of other town residents who don't show any signs of the virus, one that turns it's hosts into murderous "crazies".

From here The Crazies reverses the order of the apocalypse movie, with Dutton breaking back in to the condemned town in order to find his wife, whose symptoms are related to her pregnancy and not the spreading crazyitis. Nothing overly surprising or innovative follows, but The Crazies nevertheless follows a straight and solid path, satisfying most when putting its characters through the wringer of survivalist dread. David and Judy Dutton go through hell, and the actors who play them, Timothy Olyphant and Rhada Mitchell, gamely rise to the challenge of being abused. Timothy Olyphant is always a strong, reliable presence in B entertainment, ably playing both straight-backed heroes and unhinged weirdos. He's one of my favourite character actors working today and I'm always happy to see him get top billing.

In terms of genre entertainment these days, frankly not-fucking-it-up-badly constitutes a win and The Crazies, with its limited budget and smaller scope manages to satisfying more than it irks. The rules of the virus aren't effectively defined and I was disappointed that Eisner opted for creature makeup for his "crazies" as opposed to relying on straight performance, but by the time the Duttons are outrunning a nuclear blast in the cab of a stolen transport truck, you won't really care. The Crazies is just fine. It'll do. What I'm responding to more is the implications of its model, or the example it sets, however slight. Eisner trades the 100 + million budget that sunk him on Sahara for more control and less studio involvement (although this was likely not by choice). He gives up the A-list actor meddling and ego for solid performers with proven track records. Yes, this is a remake, which normally I hate as a general rule. But in the case of The Crazies, it's one of the few remakes that kinda makes sense, seeing as very few people have seen or even heard of Romero's original. It doesn't leave the same bad taste in your mouth like the films that trample over beloved territory or simply update a two year old Swedish film minus the subtitles (I'm looking at you Let Me In or whatever the fuck you're called). It's not much to get excited about, I know, but if the decent box office for The Crazies signals a back-to-basics genre resurgence, I could certainly get behind that.

Review // FROM PARIS WITH LOVE - Wow!

Okay, this is easily one of the worst movies of the year and maybe the worst of Travolta's career. And that's really saying something. Now that there's no question as to how I feel about the quality of the movie, I can talk about all the things that make it great and it's actually all the same things that make it terrible. Confused? I am too. But this is how it is in 2010. Up is down and down is up. Movies have become so terrible that we have no choice but to sift through them to find some semblance of the things we used to crave. And in many cases their badness crosses some uncharted threshold and enters into the avant-garde.

From Paris With Love (great title for an action movie by the way, I can't imagine why it didn't catch on with audiences) makes it nearly impossible to tell whether the filmmakers intentionally went out of their way to make the funniest comedy of the year or are just terrible at their jobs. The "story" of American super spy Charlie Wax (Travolta) who is paired with spy-in-training Johnathan Rhys-Meyers to bring down terrorists in the city of lights is a loose collection of dated shootups and supremely lame jokes that may or may not be winks to an audience who were expected to be stoned. There are many, many WOW moments in the film, but none of them are attributed to cool action choreography or kick-ass set pieces. They're more like "Wow, what the fuck am I looking at?" moments.

For starters, Travolta appears 20 boring minutes into the movie and looks like this:

Wow!

Then he proceeds to kill a shitload of gun-toting waiters in a Chinese food restaurant before making a bunch of racist comments about Asians, which are never addressed by the filmmakers, and instead allowed to stand. Asian racism is the most socially acceptable form of racism in entertainment and From Paris With Love has a ball with this. After killing everyone in the room, sidekick Johnathan Rhys-Meyers asks Travolta if he thinks there's any more. He replies, "At last census-count? About a billion".

Wow!

Then Travolta shoots holes into the ceiling, all of which begin pouring streams of coke. How did he know this was going to happen? What does coke have to do with the under-written terrorist plot? I have no idea. Rhys-Meyers grabs a nearby vase and fills it with the coke and then proceeds to carry it around with him for the next 20 or so minutes, clutching it like a baby as he stumbles bewildered through one lame action scene after another. My wife Jenn asked me why Rhys-Meyers kept bringing the coke vase with him, even when he could have just left it in the car. I had no idea. I still don't.

Wow!

Throughout, Travolta employs an insane Matrix-style Gun-Fu with the aid of burly stuntmen, shaky cam and extremely quick cutting. The puffy, 50+ star dives and flips through action scenes like a super hero with a carb addiction, gleefully killing piles of faceless enemies while lovingly caressing his gun as if it were his life partner. At one point he shoots a man point blank in the face and then sensuously sniffs the gunsmoke before breaking into a rapturous post-coital smile.

Wow!

With From Paris With Love, Travolta is nakedly and desperately (and pathetically) grasping for the iconic cool he luckily achieved in the '90's with Pulp Fiction, a break he then spent 15 years squandering with one shitty movie after another. His role as super agent Charlie Wax once and for all proves that his comeback had absolutely nothing to do with any particular skill or charm of his own, and everything to do with Quentin Tarantino. The really, really bad script for Paris seems tailored and rewritten to appease Travolta's desires to conjure memories of his role as Vincent Vega. Charlie Wax says "mother fucker" a lot, sings to 70's FM pop songs and in one scene babbles on about Star Trek. It's pretty sad stuff, but it becomes crushingly embarrassing when Travolta flashes a shit-eating grin and winks for the audience as he chomps down on a "Royale with cheese" in not one, but two separate scenes.

Wow!

While sucking tremendously as a super killer spy and movie star, Travolta is at least fantastically entertaining in every single scene he's in. His negative attention-seeking performance is a cinematic car crash worthy of some serious rubber-necking. The buddy he's paired with on the other hand, Johnathan Rhys-Meyers, is one of THE worst, if not worst action heroes ever committed to film. The moment you see his thin stubble mustache you want to punch his face until your arm gets tired, and that's before his character devolves into the whining, white-man version of Murtagh to Travolta's gay-bear Riggs. While technically "pretty", Rhys-Meyers has a blank, unlikable face (sorry he does!) and when paired with a terribly underwritten stock character, he becomes a black hole of boredom sucking the rest of the movie toward his petulant core. In the middle of the movie, my wife informed me that Rhys-Meyers has been in and out of rehab for various substances. At the same time, on-screen Rhys-Meyers was being goaded by Travolta into snorting coke from his precious vase while crammed in a packed elevator rising to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I replied to her that he was definitely heading back. After some quick research: Paris opened in February. Rhys-Meyer's checked back into rehab in May.

Wow!

Out of nowhere and completely unexplained, Travolta and Rhys-Meyers (who is still stained with the blood of his first kill) show up to a dinner party at his apartment where his fiancee and her female friend are waiting. Travolta begins flirting with the friend who is of course a paid actress, so she gamely pretends to not be disgusted by his advances, despite the fact that the very sight of him could cause sudden, acute lesbianism. After dinner, with everyone laughing at jokes we didn't hear, the friends cell phone rings and its a wrong number, someone asking for "Rose". Much like his intuition that the Chinese are insulating their ceiling with cocaine, Travolta knows for certain that the friend is a terrorist and shoots her point blank in the head without a word. It really kills the mood of the dinner party.

Wow!

There is a single succinct, genuinely hilarious moment in the film that I think proves that director Pierre Morel (Taken, District 13) and French trash mogul Luc Besson are in on the joke of their film, proving that they are laughing with us, instead of us at them. It's a moment that justifies the entire existence of the movie and may in fact elevate it into the realm of brilliant social satire, so evocative and prescient as it is in our bizarre post-9/11 times. The moment, which is really just the utterance of a single loaded word, might go unnoticed however, which is a shame. Travolta and Rhys-Meyers ride in a gas-guzzling American SUV (surely a political statement, as it's the most unlikely of Parisian vehicles) from one confusingly violent encounter to the next. Travolta has once again convinced Rhys-Meyers to sniff some more coke from the vase (another tip that this action movie is not completely on the level) and begins revealing more of his mission, which is not just to kill Asian drug dealers, but to bust a cell of Middle Eastern terrorists. As the drugs pound Rhys-Meyers cortex, the image blurs and swirls and the T-word rings in his ears until his face is blasted with fear and he exclaims "TERRORISTS!". It's fucking hilarious. Travolta reinforces the paranoid notion saying "fuck yes, terrorists. It's always been about terrorists". From here the movie shifts it focus from bashing European decorum and the Chinese, to full-on, shameless demonizing of brown people.

Wow!

The plot is thread bare and exists only to be punctuated with bizarre touches that seem made up on the spot. Stuff like the vase of coke that becomes almost a third character for nearly half the movie, the action scenes that play like Abrahams/Zucker parodies of action scenes from 10 years ago, and basically every fucking creepy look on Travolta's creepazoid face. Maybe my addled brain has just absorbed too many junk movies, but with its tacky Eurotrash style I couldn't tell if Paris was actually being presented as cool, or was a knowing attempt at mocking the over-revved machismo of buddy action films. Either way, wow!

Review // LAW ABIDING CITIZEN - Experimental Trash

This movie is kinda intriguing from a standpoint of structure and formula. It's also putrid and terrible from a standpoint of awful. I definitely wasn't bored, I will say that though.

The story hinges on the oft-used exploitation gimmick, which is of course to kill a man's entire family and then unleash him in a world where the justice system has no hope of matching his furious anguish. I guess that's our world, to be more exact. Gerard Butler, Hollywood's latest laxative flushing the production pipelines, plays an average, loving family man. That's all we're meant to know about his character for the first five minutes of the film before his wife and daughter are brutally raped and murdered before his/our eyes. Flash forward and the more nasty of the two killers is selling out the other in order to plea deal his way out of prison. DA lawyer Jamie Foxx has the unenviable task of informing the moist-eyed Butler of this development. The bad news is that one of the killers will get off with a 10-year slap on the wrist, the good news is that the other will get the death penalty. Foxx tells him that the justice system is flawed and this is the best deal they can get. This struck me as the first of many preposterous plot points. I'm no lawyer, but why would they even need one of the killers to say that the other did it? He isn't informing against the mob, just telling them what they already know. And how could a testimony like that really be trusted or worth anything?

Well as it turns out, Butler doesn't think Foxx's deal is so hot and he also isn't your average family man. And here's where things get briefly interesting. Up until now we're following Butler as our hero. The justice system has failed him. Jaimie Foxx's deal-making lawyer has failed him. He/we are pissed. The movie flashes ahead 10 years and the plea-bargaining killer is walking, while the other poor sap is going under the needle. We already know that the kid getting executed really didn't do it and that he was sold out by his partner. As he faces the witnesses on hand he reiterates this so that we're good and clear on this point. Then the needle goes in and he begins screaming in agony. We know that Butler has rigged the execution to be anything but painless. Suddenly, in this moment the movie can now be watched in one of two very different mindsets.

1. Butler is a hero doing what the broken justice system is unwilling to do.

or

2. Butler is the villain, a psycho killer who is coldly engineering new tragedies in the wake of his own.

Even when Butler is telling the truly culpable killer (the guy that walked) that he's going to slice his penis off with a box cutter, we're still with him, sorta. I mean the guy deserves it, right? But when he brutally poisons the kid who was only guilty of breaking and entering, shit goes from black and white to gray. Just as many people who now view Butler as the villain will go on rooting for him as the hero, maybe more. The interesting part is that's it's down to the viewers personal politics or moral compass to dictate which. Pretty damn interesting for a shitty Grisham-style legal thriller crossed with Death Wish and marinated in Red Bull. That's about as smart or interesting as it gets, though.

Butler's supremely pissed off family man is not content to simply kill the killers and sate his hunger for revenge. No, he has a much bigger goal, which is no less than to "bring the entire justice system down on your head!", the head in particular belonging to Jamie Foxx. Why does Jaimie Foxx deserve to get his head cracked open by a falling justice system? Because he's 2nd billed, don't ask stupid questions. As Foxx is stalked and taunted and everyone surrounding the 10-year old case keep turning up brutally murdered it comes to light that Butler is no mere civilian with a grudge. Butler is basically a black-ops super mega-assassin for the CIA who can kill anyone, anywhere, anytime and there's nothing anyone can do to stop him. Shouldn't a guy who uses murder to topple governments and install puppet regimes already know that the world isn't fair and there's no such thing as justice? This revelation almost kills the central conceit of the film and title. I mean, when Foxx tells him that the the best they can do is 10 years for one killer and death for the other, Butler looks like he's been hit by a train. He's flabbergasted by the inability of the system to serve the wronged. He stammers and feebly objects and all the while glycerin tears well in his eyes. He's like Forest Gump finding out that life is actually a lot more brutal than a box of chocolates. That kind of trusting idealism doesn't exactly square with a guy who happens to be a private contractor murdering for the government. Logic gets a lot more strained from there, but I won't bother ruining the films un-shocking and clumsy twist.

Law Abiding Citizen is by turns brutal, mean and ugly, while also being tired, silly and funny. For those that view Butler as the films villain, Jamie Foxx's slick lawyer serves as a truly pitiful hero. Those that prefer to see Butler as the hero fare a little better in the villain department since the lily-livered liberal Justice System fills those shoes, with Foxx merely representing its smug face. Either way the mild interest generated by this perhaps unintentional experiment in viewer politics wanes in the last half of the movie. I'm not really one to complain about logic when it comes to genre entertainment, so I won't bother poking detailed holes or point out the myriad impossibilities that stack up against the screenwriters not-too-subtle solution for Butler's murdery shenanigans (he is put behind bars early on and yet is still orchestrating clockwork kills). Logic doesn't matter to me in movies, especially movies starring Gerard Butler. What does matter is character logic. Butler is either a wide-eyed innocent or a cynical, ruthless killer. He can't be both. Law Abiding Citizen is either an impressive genre experiment or a tired and particularly strained formula film. It also can't be both.

Review // TWO FOR THE MONEY - Matthew McConaughey. Man. Actor. African Wrestling Champion.

Matthew McConaughey's comedic talents are criminally overlooked. Everyone knows brah has pecs and is widely credited with inventing chill, but few realize just how funny he is, on and off the screen. In terms of Hollywood movie stars, he's one of the few I can stomach as a human being. Along with Nic Cage, McCon is one of the "actors" in the cast of my Fantasy Film (kinda like Fantasy Baseball except for pop culture nerds). I see all of McCon's movies and will tell anyone who'll listen that The Wedding Planner is a delight. Most people think I'm being sarcastic when I rhapsodize about the McCon. He was People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive, surely he doesn't also make great movies? Of course he doesn't, but who does these days? Issues of "great" or even "good" are beside the point. If 2010 has so far taught us anything in terms of entertainment, it's that we must lower our lowered expectations even further, and perhaps look to the not-so-distant or not-much-better past for our entertainment. Like say, 2005's Two For The Money co-starring Al Pacino. In no possible sense is it "good", but it's entertaining in spite of or maybe because of its many failures. McCon is a constant reminder of what we seem to have lost: movie star-driven vapidity, which is surprisingly less offensive than brand-driven vapidity.

I remember a time when movie stars had a very specific job to do--which was appearing to be better than us in all things--and them doing this job was essential to our happiness. Tom Cruise was a little king among men. Mel Gibson was a mulleted god who shot people with a twinkle in his eye. What the fuck has happened since then? Our movie stars have been exposed as merely human and perhaps not as beautiful on the inside as they are on the surface. We now regularly see up their skirts and read what they are thinking on a minute-to-minute basis. They have awkward political views which they feel the need to utter in public. They champion ethical and environmental causes and in the process acknowledge that a world exists outside of Hollywood. There is no more mystery as to whether or not they are better than us-- they aren't, just richer. I believe our cultures hopelessness and apocalyptic dread are directly in line with the demystification of our movie stars at the hands of entertainment journalism and the internet. The system used to protect its own, now it turns them out, cuts them down. The balance has been lost and all is not right with the world. But McConaughey harkens back to a simpler time. He is one of the last true movie stars, who in the process of showing us how down-to-earth he is, reveals himself to be floating high above us in the stratosphere--an awesome place we we are never meant to know.

To McCon the actor, characters are simply thinly-veiled versions of himself, and the films he appears in merely advertisements for his own established brand of relaxed virility. To McCon the man, Hollywood is just a way to fund his camping trips and cook-outs, and must never interfere with the endlessly braking wave that is life, a wave meant to be surfed into the arms of chillness. Even McCon's camera-ready body is not the result of some rigorously prescribed training regime, but rather the fruits of his exercise philosophy of "breaking a sweat at least once a day". Sweat can be broken playing Ultimate Frisbee on the beach with his brahs, or simply by throwing heavy stones into the water to see them splash. It's all good. McCon named his son Levi, surely after the jeans that are at once a symbol of American ruggedness and personal comfort. Only this Levi wasn't made in China, no sirree. This Levi was manufactured in the belly of a supermodel, with premium materials provided by McCon himself. It is these aspects of McConaughey's real life persona, always transparent at the core of his disposable ouevre of movies, that have a calming effect on the viewer. In a world where Martin Riggs is angrily demanding to be blown by BitchCuntWhoreGoldDiggers and Maverick is hysterically cataloguing the crimes of psychiatry, McCon is there to tell you to J.K.Livin-- The J is for Just and the K is for Keep.

J.K. Livin is not only McCon's trademarked motto, but the name of his lifestyle website which asks if you want to "Enter Easy" or "Real Easy" (both answers lead to the same place, so don't worry about the choice harshing your buzz). McCon's website has a McConaughey Fact ticker that I once watched for 45 minutes straight without ever seeing a repeat. It informs the weary internet traveler things like:

• He has won 16 water drinking competitions
• He writes poetry and short stories in his free time and is so humble that the never bothers to publish them
• Every year he goes on a 3 week walkabout by himself somewhere in the world
• On one of his walkabouts, he became a wrestling champion in 4 African villages
• His favourite number is 8
  

What's Matt Damon's favourite number, hmm? I'll bet Robert Pattison hasn't even won a single water drinking competition. Brad Pitt would probably much prefer to adopt an African rather than pile drive them into the dirt. No, these "stars" are too busy limping their way through the last gasps of the celebrity-driven film industry while whining about the price of fame. Not, McCon. He's collecting pay checks and writing his own legendary (and hard to spell) name in the sky. He has lived the life of 20 men combined and is too blazed on organic homegrown to care whether you thought Ghost of Girlfriends Past was shit or not.

My favourite McCon story comes from the press junket for Reign of Fire, a movie about a post-apocalyptic world ruled by dragons. He did the junket interview in-character as dragon-killer Denton Van Zan. When the reporter asked him what it was like to film Reign of Fire, McConaughey pretended as if the question was instead "how do you kill a dragon?" and proceeded to burn a hole in the camera with an intense description of the correct degree of sharpness your axe needs to be in order to penetrate the scales of a dragon. For a second, I believed McCon had actually killed a dragon. Hell, I believed that dragons were real. That's a fucking Movie Star!

Okay, Two For The Money. Well, it is terrible.TER-RI-BLE. That's of course not surprising. And yet it was more entertaining than most of the films on pretty much every critics 10 best list from 2005. It was definitely more entertaining than Capote. Way, way more entertaining than Cache. And with the exception of the moment where Jake Gylenhall says "I don't know how to quit you", totally more entertaining than Brokeback Mountain. Crash? Fuck, don't get me started on how much better Two For The Money is than Best Picture winner, Crash. The point is, pound for pound, this little-seen, money-losing Pacino-McCon vehicle provides more of what we actually desire from movies--entertainment-- than all the rest of those precious darlings above. Perhaps it's cynical and jaded to admit that I purposely seek out Hollywood's many failures rather than it's few successes, but it's the truth. I regularly plumb the depths of what the industry has to offer, dumpster diving behind Hollywood's abortion clinic for my reverse-entertainment. 9 times out of 10 I'll rent the DVD with a glowing box quote from Arkansas Web Radio Affiliates, rather than the movie boasting a list of awards and critic raves from publications I've actually heard of. Two For The Money provides exactly what I'm looking for in these masochist garbage raids. It's preposterous, clueless and totally hilarious throughout.

To give you an idea of how much more entertainment Two For The Money provides over say, An Education to pull something out of a hat, look no further than the DVD's Main Menu which had me laughing out loud (LOLing?). The movie hadn't even started yet and already it was funny. That's how badgood it is. Then the movie actually starts and its a retarded mix of machismo and misplaced sentimentality complete with hysterical childhood flashbacks and terrible narration. After that, Pacino shows up and once again reminds you to forget that he was ever considered one of the greatest actors of all time. To say that he chews the scenery is a massive understatement. He fucks it without consent and then chews it up, snorts the crumbs and then looks around wild-eyed for more. The Devil's Advocate with Keanu Reeves is one of my favourite movies from the 90's. In it, Pacino plays, oh, what's his name again? Oh right, SATAN! It's an absolutely hilarious, wild performance where the 5 foot 2 inch Pacino constantly screams for the backrow of the multiplex. I feel like Pacino has been playing a slight variation on his Satan role ever since, and Two For The Money is no different. Almost every one of his scenes contains a ridiculous monologue about the nature of man and vice and Pacino seems to relish every over-sold word.

In Two For The Money, McCon plays a sports-betting expert or something and he goes on a rags-to-riches-to-rags rollercoaster ride with Pacino's amoralist svengali. The transitions back and forth between lean times and salad days are so abrupt that it's impossible to take any of the dramatic implications seriously, especially with Pacino screaming his lines as if they are all fodder for Best Actor nomination clips. The whole movie feels like a series of mistakes strung together with the plot husks of several other movies. The 3rd billed presence of former almost-was Rene Russo confirms that the movie shouldn't even exist. I'm glad it does though. Keep 'em coming, McConaughey.

Review // EDGE OF DARKNESS - The return of mean Mel

[Update, July 17th-- Okay, a lot has changed since I posted this review. Mel got meaner, crazier and racistyer. The phone tapes that have been trickling out day after day featuring him screaming "whore! cunt! golddigger!" have almost certainly ended his career. But what they've also done is enliven and enrich the experience of watching or re-watching practically every Mel Gibson movie. It'll be virtually impossible to see him pointing a gun and screaming at a bad guy without hearing him shouting, "I NEED A WOMAN! NOT A LITTLE GIRL WITH A DYSFUNCTIONAL CUNT!". True, this likely means that the Road Warrior is now forever ruined. But on the bright side, Forever Young is probably watchable now! Also What Women Want just took on an eerie new meaning. Enjoy! -- Onions]

I'm not going to get into this one too deeply since I wrote a rather lengthy thing on the original BBC miniseries this is based on. I will say that I was very excited for this, Mel Gibson's return to shooting people and barking angrily. However, I knew there was very little hope that Edge of Darkness the 2 hour Hollywood movie could in any way top, or even match Edge of Darkness the 6 hour miniseries, and would likely provide few thrills beyond Gibson's macho homecoming.

The story is transplanted from mid-80's Yorkshire to present day Boston. This is silly for two reasons. One, nuclear power is not quite the hot button issue as it was in the 80's, so the remake skews it a little more toward secret weapons contracts yadda yadda, but it doesn't have quite the same bite as the original. And two, I don't understand why an embattled, fading icon like Gibson would choose to saddle his return to acting with a Boston accent. Of course, I don't get why an embattled, fading icon who has hundreds of millions of Jesus dollars would even want to return to acting, but I will never profess to know the thoughts of rich people. While the last half-decade has seen Mel Gibson become tabloid fodder and a pop culture pariah, he still has the clout to tell workman director Martin Campbell (who is unwisely remaking his own brilliant miniseries) that the movie should take place somewhere that doesn't require a regional accent. It seems that Mel was trying to challenge himself. His Boston accent is obviously a little distracting, but he mostly gets away with it and it recedes into the background, letting the films other shortcomings take center stage. The fact that this movie isn't all that great is not Mel Gibson's fault, so there's that.

Remakes, reboots and re-imaginings have defined Hollywood in the 2000's for better or worse (hint: for worse). What is so striking and maddening about this phenomenon is that in almost every case the remake/reboot/re-imagining is not in any way better or even equal to the original. These films are Hollywood's microwaved leftovers--they have no nutritional value and are often hot on the outside and stone cold in the middle. The motivations for taking on such creatively bankrupt projects becomes even more puzzling and difficult to understand when its the same director remaking his own work. No, Mel Gibson does not kiss the dildo, but that's not the only thing missing from this Edge of Darkness remake. Tons of other powerful elements, interesting plot twists and even super cool set pieces (underground shootout in a nuclear irradiated cave system anyone?) are omitted in order to squeeze down into 2 hours. Campbell had to know from the get-go that this newer version was going to be supremely lacking in comparison to his original. How do you even get out of the bed in the morning and go to work knowing that? Oh yeah, lots of money.

Screenwriter William Monahan, whom by all accounts is high-rolling, Hollywood hot-shit, is here again adapting an original work by somebody else as he did with The Departed. Wanna know what else Monhan's Edge of Darkness re-working shares with The Departed? The last ten minutes consists of everyone getting shot in the head. Getting shot in the head is officially Monhan's signature and with no fewer than 10 projects listed as "in development" on his IMDB page, I would expect a lot more head-shots to come. Okay, I've got all these thin, unlikeable characters hanging around and it's the end of the third act, what should I do? Bingo! Shoot 'em all in the head! That's some gritty shit!

I will say that I was mildly entertained in the moments when Mel is letting his righteous fury bubble to the surface, or directing it outward with bullets. But it wasn't enough to overcome the rest of this remakes laziness. It's a pale, dim reflection of the original. Why the fuck won't Mel Gibson return to Mad Max with George Miller, but he'll do four Lethal Weapons and lukewarm shit like this?

Review // THE LIFE AQUATIC - Sonofabitch I'm sick of these dolphins

Forget Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. The Life Aquatic is Wes Anderson's best movie. Okay, maybe don't forget Rushmore, but still, Aquatic hasn't received the love it deserves. Though, it might have been Anderson's own fault. The Tenenbaum's is fussy and meandering and likely burned a lot of people out with its preciousness. It felt too close to the themes and characters explored in Rushmore and more like the settling in of a comedy "brand" rather than an original vision.

I'm not going to go on and on about Life Aquatic since I already did my Wes Anderson appraisal a few weeks back. I'll say this: it's fucking funny as shit. And light on its feet, lighter and more playful than Tenenbaums which got bogged down in its own cleverness. It's still 100% Anderson quirk and no less precious than his other films, but it's premise is fresh and fun and it delivers perhaps the quintessential Bill Murray performance. Basically, if you're a Bill Murray fan than this film is the heaviest hit of what you crave. His Steve Zissou is a Jacques Cousteau in hard times, a grizzled, tired, pot-head has-been and Murray absolutely kills with some of the funniest, cutting lines of his career.

At one point, Murray utters the line "I hate fathers and I never wanted to be one". On paper, the line could read as very transparent, a screenwriter loading backstory and his own pathos into a phrase that could only be forced out of the mouth of a movie character. But Murray transforms it, makes it both funny and sad and loads it with feeling. His Zissou means it when he says it, but he wishes he didn't. Murray also runs with the straight up jokes. When he says "sonofabitch, I'm sick of these dolphins" I was crying laughing. And later, when every characters is smooshed inside a Beatles-esque submersible, Murray breaks down at the sight of the Jaguar Shark he has been hunting like Ahab--and I cried for real. It's a surprisingly touching and potent moment and the fact that it occurs at the tail end of a fantastical romp is a pleasant sucker punch. Murray's Zissou lost his dearest friend to the shark, but his quest for vengeance has brought him to an entirely different place. Zissou has found and lost a son, come to terms with the state of his legacy and faced down his own mortality. The hands of his companions reach out to comfort him as he absorbs the meaning of the moment and cries. It's a cathartic capper to perhaps the best work of Murray's career.

Some of the hype and crippling expectation has died down around Wes Anderson. Now is the perfect time to see or re-watch The Life Aquatic and appreciate it for the left field masterpiece it is.

Review // MATINEE - Wrong time, wrong place

I wanted to like this movie more than I actually did. I wanted this to be one of the overlooked gems of the 90's, but after seeing it, I now kinda get why it got passed over.

I thought Matinee it was more of a loving, goofy biopic of schlock-meister William Castle, the b-movie producer. Something along the lines of Tim Burton's Ed Wood. It isn't. John Goodman's boisterous movie producer, Lawrence Woolsey is clearing modeled after Castle, but director Joe Dante's focus isn't really telling a showbiz story or a story about the movies and their pioneers. Instead, he tries to gather as many threads of early 60's nostalgia and weave them into a light-hearted time capsule shot through a rose-coloured lens. His weaving skills, and the script are little sloppy though. There are about 2 too many protagonists and the movie sets Goodman up as one of them, but then relegates him to a supporting role, letting a pair of pre-teen boys drive the story forward. By the end of the film you feel like a lot has happened. It breathlessly cycles through a host of characters, moods and gags, but nothing overly substantial remains. It's busy.

It's 1962 in Key West Florida and Lawrence Woolsey is crashing the town with his newest horror film, Mant (about a man fused with an ant through nuclear radiation, of course). He's hoping to scare up a sold out screening and build positive buzz before rolling out the show in other cities. He's brought along his full arsenal of gimmicks too, including joy-buzzer rigged theatre seats, wall-shaking bass speakers and a man in an ant costume to run through the aisles. He's also brought along two of his b-character actors posing as concerned, morally-upright citizens opposed to the screening of the horror film. These two stage mock protests, handing out pamphlets in front of the theatre and arguing that it will corrupt the town's youth with its depravity. This has the intended effect of stoking the fires among the local kids and teenagers who are looking for that next taboo thrill. The pretend picketers are played by Roger Corman alumni Dick Miller (cult film character actor royalty) and director John Sayles, both of whom, like Dante himself, are products of Corman's New World Films stable.

The Mant screening catches the attention of Gene, a teenaged horror-hound and Woolsey fan who lives on the army base. Gene's father has shipped out to sea for some top secret mission. That mission turns out to be the encircling of Cuba and the tense missile crisis that manifested America's nuclear nightmares into 2 weeks of palpable apocalyptic dread. All the adults in Matinee are gripped by fear (all but Woolsey of course). They stock their bomb shelters, clutch their ham radios and watch their children go outside to play like it's the last time they'll ever see them. The kids for the most part pay no attention to the political noise and fear that plays like a hum in the background of their lives. The kids remain kids and their priorities barely shift in the face of oblivion.

Gene has eyes for the school weirdo, Sandra, who gets her politics and distaste for authority from her proto-hippie parents. Then there's Stan, Gene's new friend who is trying to score a date with the school hottie without getting a his ass kicked from her greaser/beat poet ex-boyfriend. All these little threads are cute but very familiar, and the film keeps shifting its focus between them until I was no longer sure who or what the focus was. And all the while I just wanted to spend more time with Goodman's Woolsey. Part huckster, part idealist dreamer, Woolsey is a man with an odd passion. Woolsey will do anything to scare his audiences, whether its electrocuting their asses or turning their nuclear fears against them with fourth wall destroying mushroom clouds. But he's not a sadist. He wants to shake people up and give them the gift of feeling alive. He wants to materialize their worst fears in the darkness of a theatre, and then turn on the lights and show them that everything is okay. Woolsey trades in shock and relief. He's an endearing character and Goodman is a fantastic and ever-reliable character actor, so naturally he makes what few scenes he has with Woolsey jump off the screen. I just wish there were more of him.

All the little storylines culminate in the anticipated matinee screening of Mant and that's where Dante really plays the hysteria of the Cuban missile crisis against the gimmicky goosing and jumpy scares of Woolsey's circus showman approach to movies. It's cute stuff, but I just saw it at the wrong time. At 31, I'm not old enough to appreciate the 60's nostalgia, nor young enough to appreciate the once familiar thrill of escaping to the theatre with your friends. I wish I had seen this in '93 when I was 13 and was myself in love with the magic of movie theatres.

Throughout Matinee, I kept trying to figure out who Dante and Universal Pictures had made this movie for. Was it baby boomers and their fond memories or preteens looking for a PG movie they could see with their friends and cut loose to, like Gene and Stan do with Mant? I think Dante tries to please both, but I'm almost certain he lost the kids. Matinee was likely a disappointment for Dante and Universal when it was released. The title alone probably caused much confusion at multiplexes (why is the matinee playing at 7pm and what in hell is the movie called?) Matinee was clearly a labor of love for Dante (one of my personal favourites), a director who started in B-movies and then made a legitimate career out of lovingly spoofing them. I can see the same impulses for comic chaos that he brought to The Howling and Gremlins. But I just didn't connect with it like I did those other movies. Wrong time, wrong place.

Review // SHERLOCK HOLMES

The biggest surprise about this movie is that its reasons for failing aren't entirely the fault of director Guy Ritchie. Ritchie has been called the British Tarantino, but that's an insult to Tarantino. More accurately, he's the British version of Tarantino imitators, who themselves are a pretty sad bunch. He's the British Joe Carnahan (Smoking Aces). Or actually, Joe Carnahan is the American Guy Ritchie (a guy imitating a guy who imitates guys who imitate Tarantino). Anyway, when a Ritchie-directed Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. got announced it was greeted with a fair bit of internet nerdthusiasm. I didn't know why and suspected that the reason was because none of these people had had the misfortune of seeing some of Ritchies previous movies, like Revolver, Rocknrolla or Swept Away (admittedly I love this one). Sherlock got tepid reviews and made its predictable half-billion so everything looks like it went according to plan and we'll likely see at least one more Sherlock movie in the near future.

Naturally, it's not very good. But like I said, with Ritchie at the helm I was expecting a fucking manic mess. The high profile and budget vs. profit expectations of the Sherlock package likely prompted him to tone down his over-stylized cartoon machismo and turn in something a little less seizure-inducing. The problem though is not Ritchie's restless style, but that the story and Downey's Sherlock himself are a bit of a bore. In fact, the few times the movie perks up from its franchise-building stupor are when Ritchie lets loose. The opening shots of a racing carriage drawn by black horses has a gothic horror feel and a dangerous kineticism that amps you up for an exciting picture, not the languid hour of set-up that follows. An exploding barrels sequence shot in super slow motion looks like a Korn video from 1999, but is a welcome bit of flash and spectacle. These moments are spread far and wide between the painfully un-funny banter of Holmes and Watson (a barely registering Jude Law) and a characteristically half-baked romantic subplot with Rahel McAdams, who seems like she's in another movie, or at least wants to be.

Downey Jr. is likely the envy of Hollywood right now, a comeback star who now owns the keys to two money-gobbling franchises. But in a perfect world, the real Robert Downey Jr. Renaissance would've begun before Iron Man, with Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. If it had, we'd maybe be seeing him in more interesting projects. Instead, audiences over-praised and over-rewarded Iron Man and Downey got the message that he should hunker down in green-screen summer tentpole territory. As it stands, Downey Jr. looks poised to burn out both the goodwill he earned back as well as his charming-madman routine that is now entering its 4th decade. His draw as an actor has always been his truly unhinged energy. You could never really know what he was going to do next and he had/has the ability to make a thin character in a ho-hum movie seem interesting, transforming even familiar scenes with his playful, improvisational style. As much as Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes bank on this quality in him, there really isn't any room for his unplanned, frenetic energy in these huge studio juggernauts. Essentially, these movies are Robert Downey Jr. behaving. Remember him taunting Mike Tyson and getting slapped in the face in Black & White? Those days look to be over. In Iron Man he gets buried in an animated suit and the comic book lore of his character. In Sherlock Holmes it's his British accent and the baggage of literary lineage (who cares if Sherlock knew kung fu in Doyle's books, in 2010 white man kung fu is played out!) 

I get that even a bad blockbuster movie with Robert Downey Jr. is still better than one with say, I don't know, Colin Farrell or somebody like that. But seriously, people need to shut the fuck about Iron Man and wake up to the fact that Tony Stark and Sherlock Holmes are Downey Jr. watered down and neutered. We're no longer getting the real deal and that's a bummer. 

Review // UP IN THE AIR - Come fly the asshole skies

Just being honest, I had it out for this movie before it even began. I really disliked Jason Reitman's last movie Juno and I've also come to dislike his public persona, based on some of the interviews I saw him do during last years awards season. He came off as pretty smug to me. I had a hunch that Up in the Air likely did not deserve awards season love (as meaningless and antithetical to actual quality as that may be) so the cocky way he wore his undeserved title of Voice of a Generation was starting to piss me off. I watched him on a panel with Tarantino, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow and he was practically argumentative with them. Are you fucking kidding me, guy? All three of those filmmakers are self-made icons. Cameron drove trucks and Tarantino worked in a video store. Something tells me Reitman's career came a little easier. Now that I've actually seen Up in the Air, I was right about it being undeserved of the hype, but it's not quite the flaming shit pile that I was hoping it would be. Turns out its just fairly dumb, a little insulting and mostly dull.

George Clooney plays a Clooney-ish character that is nearly impossible to sympathize with, and not just because he's played by George Clooney. His character (I don't remember his name) plays a professional... Firer? A Firing Agent? Downsizer? Elimnator? Basically he plays a guy who gets hired by companies to fire their employees for them. I'm sure this profession exists, but it struck me as a completely ridiculous one. Anyway, he travels around the country firing people for 320 days out of the year, reveling in his life on the road and giddily watching his air miles collect. He loves having no attachments, geographic or emotional, and his greatest ambition is to get some little VIP card from an airline for flying 10 million miles (basically the guy has the carbon footprint of a city-destroying Japanese monster, and of course this is never mentioned). All this and yet somehow the movie keeps positioning him as a figure of sympathy because his life is empty. However, throughout the movie we keep seeing snippets of a lecture he gives on how to empty your life of attachments, droning on about a backpack that we all carry and how its heavy blah blah blah. The guy has clearly made his choices, so why do I have to care? The movie never lets up on it's campaign to make you give a shit about him, employing Pitchfork-approved whisper-folk ballads in the quiet moments when Clooney isn't speaking about his life in writerly metaphors, letting you know that even though he may not yet know it, his life is lacking. Predictably, the man who extols the virtues of living with no attachments, wakes up and finds that he wants to be attached to something.

This kind of interplay between story and subtext, all spelled out in bold, unmistakable letters is indicative of the lack of subtlety at work. At one point, Clooney is saddled with a young hot-shot chick that has cozied up to their boss and is now looking to shake up their business practices. Her last name is Keener (ha). In another scene, Jason Bateman playing the head of the... people-firing-company gives a speech to his troops saying "the economy is fucked. America is in the shitter. This is our time to shine". There's never a moment where you're required to think about what is working behind the scenes of these peoples lives or make connections on your own. It's usually explained by Clooney himself in Don Draper-esque florid monologues. In fact, whenever Clooney speaks it's in profundities that made my eyes roll so violently they got whiplash.

So Clooney loves business travel and living out of a suitcase (what kind of masochist actually enjoys air travel post 9/11?) and in narration he waxes poetic on the joys of life on the road. But his high-flying existence is threatened when the aforementioned Keener devises a plan to save the people-firing-company tons of money and streamline their practices. Her plan, get this, is to use video chats to fire people instead of flying the likes of Clooney all over the country. This is her big idea. Wait, firing people over Skype would be cheaper? No fucking shit lady! But Clooney punches holes in her plan and so Bateman sends the two on the road so that he can show her the ropes in order to see if her genius solution can fit the practicalities of their business. At this point the movie acts like a duller version of a Buddy Cop movie with Clooney the seasoned pro rolling his eyes at everything from his young partners luggage choice to her first year psyche ideas on how to break incredibly bad news to total strangers.

This inter-generational Buddy Cop element is just one of several plot husks that are jumbled together to form Up in the Air. Another is the previously mentioned character study of a soulless corporate hatchet man discovering his own loneliness. Neither of these storylines is particularly interesting, so to spice things up, there is a Rom-Com thread that ties into both. Vera Farmiga plays the female version of Clooney, a sexy business exec who also loves flying the friendly skies, staying in hotels and racking up air miles. At one point she tells Clooney in her husky, mannish voice to think of her as "you, only with a vagina". It's a terrifying image. Clooney and Farmiga cross paths on the road and develop a fling that gets staged in various cities across the country, coordinating their schedules to meet for fuck sessions. When not screwing, the couple try to one-up each other with their knowledge of the road-warrior lifestyle, emptying our their wallets of VIP hotel passes and teasingly arguing over which car rental company has the best fleet. These two are the Adam and Eve of corporate America, rootless assholes whose identities are tied up with their meaningless jobs and who are actively and gleefully trying to destroy the notion of community in their quest to create a new frontier for the Individual. Almost every exchange between Clooney and female-Clooney is barely tolerable. In another predictable twist, Clooney begins to realize that Farmiga could be the "one", a woman worth filling his backpack up for.

The backpack is the metaphorical object at the heart of the lectures Clooney gives to bored conference rooms in hotels from Las Vegas to St. Louis. Apparently we all carry a metaphorical backpack that is filled with our attachments to our place in the world and the people in our lives, and this backpack hurts our metaphorical shoulders. Clooney is arguing that we should empty this backpack until it's so light that we barely feel it, and only then can we be truly content with ourselves. The argument, that we shouldn't be connected through community or love, is so absurd and ripe for a dramatic reversal that it tries your patience as soon as its introduced. I kept thinking, "does fictional Clooney really believe that the movie gods aren't going to strip him of this belief in the Third Act?" This inevitable reversal comes at one of his own backpack lectures no less. Reitman wisely decides against a Jimmy Stewart-esque oration on why he's been wrong to carry around an empty backpack. Instead, Clooney takes the stage and has a facial epiphany, realizing he's been wrong all along and then running off silently to chase down his love (more flying). Yeah, no shit you've been wrong. Duh! Clooney flies to Chicago and winds up on the doorstep of Farmiga, and in yet another completely predictable and un-shocking twist, she's married with a family, and we are again supposed sympathize with his sorrow and betrayal.

You know who we are not made to feel sympathy or sorrow for? All the people Clooney is firing in the movie. They are corporate cattle off to slaughter and Reitman makes token, empty gestures to them. Employing non-actors and shooting them in docu-style one-shots, these economic casualties are merely human props used to set the stage for Clooney's emotional awakening. The purpose of these scenes is not to make any sort of statement on corporate nihilism or explore the human toll of a broken economic system. Instead, these scenes are used to illustrate the terrible loneliness and disconnection of Clooney's character. How awful it must be for a man to be perpetually "up in the air" only touching down to shatter peoples lives. This I think is the movies greatest crime. The American economy is collapsing, greed has pushed the marketplace into untenable positions and it's the average, loyal employee who bears the cost. And yet the movie has almost nothing to say about this. How do you miss a target that big? When Clooney is told that one of the women his protege fired ended up killing herself, this news has no meaning beyond how it is absorbed by Clooney. The world is in economic turmoil, thousands of people are losing their jobs and yet this movie, a movie about a guy who fires people for a living, has nothing to say about it. In a backwards way, Up in the Air does become a definitive cultural statement on the worlds economic crisis, only not intentionally. It's self-absorption and focus on individual, rather than collective values is exactly the mindset that wrought the mess the world is now struggling to recover from.

Review // THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX - A Cussin' great film

The Fantastic Mr. Fox almost single handedly redeems an industry that seems hellbent on rubbing our noses in shit. There is so much invention, joy and creative energy in every single frame of this frame-by-frame movie that you can't help but drop your guard almost immediately, allowing your cynicism and bitterness towards Hollywood to get chipped away with humanity (foxmanity?) and humour. This is what we used to expect from the movies: magic. I hate to bring up a tired argument, but it's so rare that CGI can achieve the level of wonder that Fox does with puppets, cotton balls and sweat. In the 20 + years since we handed over special effects to computers, you can count the number of CGI movie miracles on one hand.

All this talk of magic is not to say that Fox is some wide-eyed ode to childhood innocence, far from it. The story has an edge, its characters are flawed, they have vices--they drink and smoke and die. But this edgy quality is certainly not out of place or overwhelming. Director Wes Anderson is not injecting darkness or premonitions of adulthood into a family picture, he's simply restoring what has been eroded away by the Happy Meal Toy approach to children's entertainment. Traditionally, children's fiction has always used darkness and morbidity to wrap morality lessons in the gore and goop that kids love. The Brothers Grimm stories are as brutal as anything in a Nightmare on Elm Street, only with more social relevance. Beloved author, Roald Dahl seemed like the 20th Century's answer to the Brothers Grimm, a writer who delighted in giving kids exactly what they wanted, while weaving in a blueprint for how to behave in a society addicted to shortcuts. No child that finishes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory wants to be Augustus Gloop. They delight in the comeuppance of Violet Beauregarde and aspire to the quiet empathy of Charlie. Dahl crafted modern fables about manners and civility that never shied away from turning a mirror to the ugly side of humanity. His work seems a natural fit for bringing the edge back to kids movies and Wes Anderson uses his Fantastic Mr. Fox as a jumping off point for tackling some grown-up sized issues in a beautiful package that puts nearly all other animated movies to shame.

Roald Dahl is the perfect ingredient for a classic children's film. It's director Wes Anderson that seems like the wild card here, but that's only before considering his other films and perhaps his strongest directorial imprint: meticulousness. I saw Anderson's first movie Bottle Rocket in the theatre when it first came out and it left a lasting impression on me. The glut of Mexican Standoffs audiences had to suffer through during indiedom's Tarantino craze of the 90's made the airy silliness of Bottle Rocket the perfect antidote to all the macho posturing. However, Anderson and Bottle Rocket would've been forgotten if the movie had just been about fools trying at crime (did Palookaville or Safe Men spawn auteur's?) It was the sadness of the characters and their earnest yearning to find their niche in the universe that grounded the antics in emotional relevancy. Anderson's next film Rushmore drew on the same ingredients, but coupled it with a stunningly assured hand and an irresistible main character (the revitalization of Bill Murray didn't hurt either), creating an instant classic and announcing him as a distinct voice in cinema.

Anderson's next film, The Royal Tennenbaums felt like a movie made by someone who had just spent the last two years reading about his own genius. I didn't dig it. A formula seemed to be settling in: classic rock, vintage costumes, font-fetish title cards. Every detail of every shot seemed fussed over and characters seemed to be less than the sum of their precious names and outfits. Next came The Life Aquatic, and it's absurdist adventure comedy allowed Anderson to follow his art direction whims even further. I didn't make it through Anderson's last one The Darjeeling Limited (although I plan to tackle it again). I was just so distracted by all the characters accoutrement's that the story never took root for me. I kept considering Adrien Brody's sunglasses, but not his character. I wondered where Anderson had hunted down Jason Schwartzman's pants, but not why his characters were on a train voyage. I finally just shut the movie off. I wasn't in the mood, and sometimes mood is everything.

At worst, Anderson's fussy attention to detail can pull you right out of the picture and make you feel like you're watching a moving catalogue of stuff he thinks is cool. At best, these details build a world that is at once recognizable and yet fanciful--a lush, alternate reality constructed of objects and artifacts pulled from dusty corners of our shared memory. While I never would've made the connection on my own, Anderson's meticulous eye is a perfect fit for stop-motion animation in general. The very art form is about subtly manipulating objects in a static image and Anderson loves an intricately designed one-shot. In stop-motion, detail is everything and fussiness is a prerequisite. Fox is stunning in this regard. The world feels lived in and its characters inhabit it with an ease that doesn't keep you looking for the animators hand. They give true performances with character and comedy coming out of the unique movements and mannerisms of each puppet. This isn't a technical breakthrough of any kind. Nearly everything about Fox's execution could have been accomplished 50 years ago. It's more of a marvel of artistic expression and dedication in the face of technological shortcuts brought on by CGI. The beauty and wonder of Fox looks much more difficult to achieve than that of your average Pixar movie, but it's also more satisfying. Many of the films most stunning sequences are achieved in a single static shot, with characters moving throughout the frame. This is a constraint of the stop-motion process, it's simply easier to lock the camera off and manipulate the puppets. But it leads to ingenious creative flourishes and is immediately striking in an era when most sequences are relentlessly spliced together out of hundreds of shots taken from every conceivable angle.

Fox announces itself as a Wes Anderson movie from its first frame: A copy of Dahl's book is opened to the first page, it's spine bearing a white library sticker with card catalog code. Only Anderson would include such a detail that at first seems like a precious frill. But it's actually a dirty trick. The sight of the library sticker unlocks a forgotten cache of childhood memories--trips to the library, the thrill of books and the thrill of opening a Dahl book itself. You fall in love with the movie and it's barely begun. But fussiness and a detailed eye aren't the only qualities Anderson brings over from his other career as a director of oddball dramedy. The same deadpan humour is present here, as well as familiar emotional conflicts that distinguished him as the preeminent chronicler of the lovable losers plight.

Mr. Fox is a dapper, charming and slightly roguish fox of the woods. Naturally he is voiced by George Clooney. Mr.Fox long ago gave up the thrill of chicken-killing in order to settle down and raise a family with Mrs. Fox (voiced by Meryl Streep). He has taken a respectable job as a newspaper man and is looking to move his family out of their hole and into better digs in a tree hollow. However, his move above ground has ulterior motives. Just in sight of the Fox family's idyllic new home are three of the biggest industrial farms in all the land, belonging to the three meanest farmers, Bunce, Bean and Boggis. Mr. Fox is going through a midlife crisis of sorts. He loves his family and enjoys the reasonable amount of respectability newspaper work gives him in the community. But Mr. Fox has been ignoring his true nature, denying himself the one thing that makes him vital: stealing from farmers (I love that industrial farmers are the villain of the film). He could go down to the local market and buy his chickens frozen like everyone else, but Fox loves the thrill of the hunt and a chicken neck between his teeth. Mr. Fox loves to prove his superior intellect in the planning an execution of a good chicken-thieving. And that is just what he does with the dim-witted Possum as his sidekick, knocking over Bunce, Bean and Boggins in turn. Mr. Fox is rejuvenated and feels alive for the first time in a long while. But he has made 3 very dangerous enemies in the farmers and they band together their considerable resources to get revenge. Bunce, Bean and Boggins declare war on Mr. Fox and drive him and the whole community of animals under ground and on the run.

Mr. Fox makes a mess of things. He ignores his lawyer's (Murray) advice and buys a home close to the ruthless farmers. He ignores his promise to his wife to stop chicken-thieving. He doesn't notice that his oddball son, Ash is desperate for his approval and instead heaps it on his visiting nephew, Kristofferson. He is a clever trickster and an excellent thief, but the details of his household and the trampled feelings of his friends and loved ones eludes him. In a key scene, as the animals gather around a bountiful feast of the farmers stolen goods, Fox cuts off the toast of his friend and lawyer, Badger to give his own speech. He says that the silver lining in their current troubles with the murderous farmers is that the animals have been made to rely on each other and rediscover their communal roots. Fox says "to be thankful and aware of

each other. I’m going to say it again. Aware." This as the farmers prepare to flood the underground tunnels with Boggins' sweet apple cider. Fox of course has not been aware of the impact his selfishness has had on those around him. It only starts to sink in when his wife tells him that she loves him, but should never have married him.

It's these kinds of explorations, along with Fox and Ash's father-son strain that distinguish The Fantastic Mr. Fox from the kids movie crowd. Many sons sitting through this movie will wonder if they are living up to the image of their father. Many of us truly are oblivious to the feelings of others as we follow our selfish pursuits in a society where this is encouraged and facilitated at every turn. These simple cautions for children and parents alike is in many ways far more relevant than the over-sized themes of the Pixar ilk, where parents are dying, obesity consumes humanity or childless couples face crushed dreams and death. The problems explored in Fox seem surmountable if our hearts and will align.

Together with Henry Selick's excellent Coraline and Spike Jonze's brilliant Where the Wild things Are, darkness and relevance have been returned to children's entertainment. These 3 movies made 2009 look like a full-on revitalization was underway. Of course, I'm also likely talking about the three lowest grossing family films of the year. But the films that made more money, the CGI Pixar-wannabe shit that Dreamworks put out for instance, will not stand the test of time, while these movies will stick in viewers minds and appreciate in value. The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a classic.

Review // THE INFORMANT - Bad movie or just a bad mood?

Since starting this blog, I now find myself watching movies with a little notebook and pen sitting on the couch beside me. I obsessively scribble down notes, thoughts and even questions I want to know the answers to. The whole reason for pursuing this blog (that something like 4 people occasionally read) was not obviously to reach an audience or change anyones opinions, but to record my thoughts on film and to facilitate a (hopefully) deeper viewing experience. This blog is more like a journal and a personal mission to try to watch and think about movies in a deeper way, instead of just using them as medication against the boredom of routine.

Sometimes I write pages and pages of notes during the course of a movie. Other times I only jot down several thoughts that form the basis of a little conversation I have with myself on these screens. But by the time Steven Soderbergh's latest The Informant had finished, the notebook page I had reserved for it was completely empty. I had no questions. I had no burning thoughts that I didn't want to forget. The movie just played in front of my eyes for two hours and never penetrated any deeper. I don't know why that is. I don't think its a bad movie. In fact, it might even be a good one. The whole experience of watching it was just... off.

I guess what I'm trying to acknowledge is that movies and art in general are certainly not static things, or more precisely, our perception of them isn't. Your opinion on a piece of art or storytelling is more a comment on that time and place, a summation of your own mood and state of mind. Movies obviously mean different things to different people, but can also mean different things at different times to the same person. I think people more readily accept this idea when it comes to music as opposed to film and narrative storytelling. Many people will say that they didn't "get" jazz or blues until they got older. But when it comes to movies, people tend to talk about them in definitive terms.

With this in mind, my view of The Informant is based on a weird, hazy funk of a viewing. The movie never took hold with me. Even as I write this, I've incorrectly written the title several times and had to correct. I called it The Insider (a Michael Mann film) and The Inside Man (a Spike Lee film). I kept feeling like I was watching a foreign movie badly dubbed or a heavily edited version where key scenes or bits of dialogue had been excised leaving me to play catch-up in a story that was clearly not intended to obfuscate. I mean it's obviously about the deception of it's main character, but it's not a puzzle of a movie meant to deceive audiences. Audiences are meant to cringe as they watch an odd little man with severe personality defects lie and steal his way into a battle with a many-headed governmental beast. For whatever reason, I never became invested enough to cringe. I kept thinking of the movie's poster and the way it defaces it's heartthrob movie star's image with ironic schlubbiness. Since nothing else was sinking in for me, I wondered if the movie existed to give Matt Damon a bad mustache and if that stunt alone is enough to get a movie made these days. I feel crappy about that, I really do. I feel like I failed you, The Informant.