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.