"Sunshine"

You always want a movie like "Sunshine" to be really, really good. Even in this golden ComicCon age, when even Oscar approves of SF/Fantasy, when half the new shows on network television are about time travel, it's still a rare that Hollywood tends to tread into the strange territory of Realistic Space Travel. You know, the sub-genre (anti-genre,even), epitomized by "2001," where traveling through space is just as strange, transcendant, and boring as it is in real life. It's space travel without all the flashy "Star Wars" stuff - no space battles, no lasers, no technology more ridiculous than artificial gravity. You know, none of the fun stuff.

Perhaps that's overstating a bit. But the people who make these movies always seem to self-consciously set themselves against the "Star Wars" model - we are realistic, and thus, we must be serious, dour, existential. These movies are constructed with such wonderful good intentions, with no thought of ever making money - too artsy for the geek demo, too geeky for the art house. A movie like "Solaris" wears its Big Ideas on its sleeve, but always gets lost in the morass of screensaver perfect space imagery. "Mission to Mars" was even worse.

"Sunshine" makes a decent go of it for awhile. A multi-racial crew of astronauts get sent to reignite the sun - a fun twist, since most science-fiction is about moving further out into the final frontier. There' a nice lowkey chemistry onboard - the actors are playing professionals on a suicide mission, so there's a minimum of interpersonal drama. Nothing you wouldn't find in an office or "The Office." The everpresent sun lurks in the distance, behind darkened solar panels - they're so close, the onboard computer informs us, that even showing 4 % of its actual light capacity would be blinding.

The first half of "Sunshine" play like a better version of Soderbergh's "Solaris." Unfortunately, the second half, after the astronauts track down the first ship sent to the sun that was mysteriously lost, reveals that the filmmakers were actually going for "Event Horizon," that little late-90s gem that reimagined the river of blood from "The Shining" in zero gravity and granted humankind the immortal sight of niceguy Sam Neill clawing hi own eyes out. Bizarrely, for a film that begin in stoned awe of space travel, "Sunshine" turns into a slasher film.

Why Can't Action Movies Be More Like Previews?

I was probably the only person I know who was really disappointed by "300." I have friends who hated it and friends who thought it was just okay, but they were all mostly expecting that - they went in expecting a stupid beefcake action movie, and that, immaculate digital gore and monochrome painted backdrops besides, was basically what they got. There were some big action scenes, most of the cool moments having been given away by the preview: kicking the guy into the pit, crushing the bad guys with corpses, arrows blocking out the sun. Then there were the things the preview didn't show us: the drama.

And such drama! A hunchback scorned! A senate torn asunder by lies! A cherished son decapitated!

Beyond snooze. "300" didn't disappoint me because there was too much action and not enough plot - it disappointed because there was any plot at all. I had a handshake agreement with the "300" preview, which I watched three times daily for months before the movie came out: I would pay 10 dollars, and in return I would get the action movie to end all action movies. The Holiest of Holy Grails: a movie that is actually all action, no stupid dialogue, no boring subplots, just action, action, more action.

Deep down, that's what we're all hoping for when we go see a brainless action movie. It's what I hope for every summer there's a new Michael Bay movie. We all tend to think of Michael Bay movies as being wall-to-wall ridiculous action, but the truth is, its bits and pieces of action punctuated by exposition and kindergarten-crush love dialogue. I would be so happy if studio executives just said, "Listen, Michael, don't bother with talking in your next movie. Just blow shit up in interesting ways, and we'll bankroll it."

The reason why no one has been able to make a good video game movie yet is because video games, by their very nature, are action all the time. It's not necessarily explosions and gunblasting - sometimes its just walking, or, in more recent espionage games, sneaking - but the story of the game is always defined by active behavior. Technically, this makes for relatively good narratives - any basic writing course can tell you that each little thing that happens should move the story forward, however slightly, in tiny baby footsteps towards the ultimate finale. The problem with video game movies, then, isn't that they're too similar to their inspiration; it's that they try to tack on awkward "real" storylines.

Any gamer will tell you that the most annoying thing in video games today are cinemas - animated segments that come between levels and take you out of the game. "Metal Gear Solid 2" ended with some 40 minutes of cinema and only 4 minutes of actual gameplay. All the urgency seeps out of the game, and out of the story. Video Game movies are basically those inter-level cinemas with a real-game sequences phoned in for dramatic effect.

The only movie of the last decade to really get at what a video game feels like - the atmospherics, the confusion, the nonstop action motivating towards the end of the level - is the D-Day sequence from "Saving Private Ryan." Directly imitated by games like "Call of Duty," that sequence nevertheless gets at the central aesthetic of videogames far more profoundly than "Doom," "Mortal Kombat," or any part of the "Resident Evil" series.

END THIS MOVIE

Let's get one thing straight: people who bitch about the ending to the "Lord of the Rings" movies have a disgusting bowl full of smog and maggots where their soul used to be. I can remember being the theater watching "Return of the King" in 2003, marvelling at the sheer scope of the film, at how perfectly Jackson interweaved the epic and the intensely personal. It was that rare circumstance of a filmmaker validated before the film was even out - "Rings" had already gotten him two nominations for Best Director and upped the New Zealand film box office by about a billion percent, so if he wanted to make the damn thing three and a half hours long, well, by all means, Peter. What I felt most of all was something so rare in movies - the desperate hope that it didn't have to end. I could've stood for fifty more endings - god knows that Tolkien provided them.

"Lord of the Rings" gets a pass - because it is an epic, because it captured the imagination of the world for three mesmerizing installments spread out over the years, because nobody - not the fans, not the studio, not the filmmakers who devoted half a decade to it - wanted it to end.

And yet, it started a terrifying trend in blockbuster Hollywood. Movies just don't fucking end anymore. They reach the climax, the point of highest tension, the moment at which, whether the movie is good or just really loud, everyone in the theater is jacked up on a mental high... and then, tension resolved, the movie just slowly slough away. It's not that everything ends happily - we're used to that by now. It's that everything ends really, truly, ridiculously happy, in no uncertain terms, let us explain this to you in bold lettering again and again and again.

Take Spider-Man 3, not a very good movie by any stretch of the imagination, the most disappointing sequel-to-threequel quality differential since "Empire Strikes Back" to "Ewok Treehouse Dance Party." Crappy-Assed Spoiler Alert: Harry "New Goblin" Osborn sacrifices himself to save Peter, secret-service-on-the-president style. Like all men who sacrifice themselves nobly, he manages to keep breathing long enough for Spidey to dispatch Venom and have a tearful exchange with Sandman, who explains that he was only a criminal in order to save his sick daughter. Spidey forgives Sandy for killing his uncle, at which point Sandy blows away. Spidey runs over to dying Harry. Harry: "I'm dying." Spidey and Mary Jane, in unison: "Don't Die, Harry!" Harry: "But I must." Cue tears from everyone except the audience. In the background, the sun rises over New York City. The score swells. And we are not finished.

We're off to a cemetery - remarkable, how much time movie Spider-Man spends at the cemetery - where we see everyone looking sincerely sad for Harry Osborn, certainly the least villainous screen villain since the fat guy with the mustache and the chainmail tank top in "Commando." Not finished. Cue narration from Tobey Maguire. "Whatever comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a choice... its the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what's right." If I wanted the deeper themes of a mundane storyline beat into my skull with deadpan narration, I'd watch "Grey's Anatomy." Hell, even "Grey's Anatomy" has sex and drugs. All Spiderman has is... love.

Which we're reminded of, again, in the last last scene - Spidey goes to see his lady love Mary Jane, singing in a nightclub. They are reunited - not quietly, mind you, but with looks of desperate longing, and a tearful hug. Final fadeout.

Bleh. Remember how Spider-Man 2 ended? Mary Jane in a wedding dress at the doorway, "Go Get 'Em Tiger," Spidey thwipping away? THAT is an ending. You reach the climax - they're together finally! - and then you're through. Ernest Lehman, who wrote the perfect ending for Hitchcock in "North by Northwest," would be so proud. Sure, there were some groaner lines - "I've always been standing in your doorway" - but dammit, the kids had spirit! They talked! And damn, they kissed. Not here. They tastefully hug, and tastefully dance back and forth.

Too many big movies this year suffer from this ending malaise. Sometimes its the weepy "love will conquer all" ending. The latest "Harry Potter" was dark, weird, and terse - the shortest of the movies, made from the longest of the books. Until the endless last few minutes, when Harry telling Ron and Hermione that the greatest power in the world is love. Other times it's the final-narration obvious-juggernaut - see Transformers, with Optimus Prime winking his five hundred brown eyelid as he states that, with humans, there is "more than meets the eye." (The tenth time that particular line comes in the movie - was anyone else hoping that Bay would get 50 Cent to release a rap remix of the cartoon theme?) "300" ends with another big big speech as we see a lot of big big Spartans do a big big charge straight to the screen. Know what would've been an awesome ending? Leonidas' corpse, grinning. Know what's a lame ending? The thirteenth lead from "Lord of the Rings" giving a sub-Crispin's Day speech about saving the world from "mysticism and tyranny."

If "The Maltese Falcon" were made today, Bogart would have a five-minute speech about "the stuff dreams are made of." If "Gone with the Wind" were made today, there'd be another scene at the end of Scarlett finding Rhett and not saying anything, just dancing with him while the scene fades out. Fine, neither of those movies could be made today. What about "Raiders of the Lost Ark?" Good ending, darkly funny, twisty, straight to the point. Indiana Jones makes no speeches. Marion offers to buy him a drink. Ark gets put away in a storehouse. Bam. Or hell, what about Die Hard? "I gotta be here for New Year's!" Genius. Die Hard 4 came close... and yet, right there, at the end, there just had to be that extra little touchy feely line. 'That's why you're the guy," McClane says to nerdy little sidekick, eliciting groans from everyone over 11 in the audience. It's just a little bit too much.

That's the bad things about all these endings, really - they're not bad, they just go a little bit too far. See also: every movie Spielberg's made since "Schindler's List," finding just the right ending and then going for an extra couple minutes: precogs in a warm mountain cabin in "Minority Report," leaves falling on a mysteriouly undestroyed street in Boston in "War of the Worlds," saluting the gravestone in "Saving Private Ryan"... take your pick. Steven. We love your movies. Just end the damn things, already.

"Lost" and Baseball

My dad and I don't have very much in common. Not like there's a Freudian psychodrama or angry-asian-child syndrome; we get along fine, agree about everything political, disagree about nothing cultural, enjoy the same Hemingway books and Broadway musicals. But my dad's from another generation. That's not quite right, though - that makes it sound like it's the 1960s and I'm a longhair high on Bob Dylan and skunk weed. It's like we live in two very different dimensions. My days are spent on and within computers - surfing the internet, downloading music, playing video games, editing video, watching movies with disjointed chronologies and ambiguous narrative realities. I have friendships based entirely on facebook messaging, google chatting, and cell phone texting. There are at least ten web sites that I check once a day, and usually I check more than ten web sites more than once.

My father never learned how to type. He's gotten better, but his emails have a precise, stilted tone - you can tell that he still has to think about each letter, that every sentence is an undertaking. We just got him a new computer. I was his unofficial computer coach - helping him figure out how to open the internet, how to access his word processor. Things that took me a few seconds would take him minutes, if he didn't just get frustrated.

I used to think that I just had a fundamentally different sort of mind. I am devoted to the ever expanding arena of geek-pop culture. I grew up on "Star Wars," I play video games, I read comic books. He never saw the first, doesn't understand the second, and is entirely bemused by the third. A geek, basically. My dad's understanding of pop culture starts and ends with "Doctor Zhivago."

But my dad likes sports. He got TiVo mainly so he could record every hour of Sportscenter he doesn't already watch. In the mornings, when I steal the entertainment section of the newspaper, he's onto the sports. He has opinions about Barry Bonds, about his alma mater's football program. He was the manager of the basketball team in college; he was my baseball and basketball coach several years in a row.

I realized something one evening when I was having an excitable conversation with my friend Carlos. Carlos had just finished rewatching the season 3 finale of "Lost," and he had all kinds of theories that he wanted to swap - who is Jacob, what the hatch really was, the flash forwards, etc. This got us talking about next season. I had just been to ComicCon so I had some inside information. We were making predictions and bets about story points, trying to figure out who'd be the next to die, anticipating possible surprises the writers had in store for us.

Something clicked. This is exactly the way my dad talks to his friends about baseball. There's a new season starting, with new players in the midst (the people on the boat). The managers have announced a dynamic new strategy geared to bringing the franchise back to its original glory while moving it forward in an entirely new direction (flashforwards). They've trimmed some of the fat off the lineup (bye bye, Charlie) and brought back an old favorite to shore up the infield (hi hi, Michael!)

My dad and I talk exactly the same way about to very different things.

"D'you see the show/game last night?"

Joseph Cotten's Splendid Sadness

"Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them." - Joseph Cotten

Joseph Cotten is the great American actor. You can learn everything you ever need to know about this country in the twentieth century by watching Cotten in "Citizen Kane," aging from youthful idealism to alcoholic cynicism to miserly witticism; in "Shadow of a Doubt," everyone's favorite serial killing uncle; and in "The Third Man," the innocent abroad in a postwar Europe he can't understand, adrift in a murky sea of unforgivable ambiguity. Cotten's Holly Martins is that true rarity - the clueless hero - and the real thrill of the film is not watching him learn the truth about his oldest friend, about Vienna, about the world he thought he understood; it's the ever-dawning realization, played out on Cotten's subtle shrinking smirk, that he will never understand his friend, Vienna, or the world, no matter how much he learns.

You could see Cotten playing a fine Gatsby. Though Cotten's face seems made to smile, there is always something sad, or angry, or desperate behind his grin. In "Shadow of a Doubt," it's the mask he wears to hide the quiet mania - "Good Old Uncle Charlie," as everyone calls him, a role he plays in between bouts of widow murder. In "The Third Man," when he goes to visit Anna one night, she giggles, "You're drunk!" "Yes," he slurs, in Cotten's genteel southern accent, "Sorry." Another actor might have made it a joke, but Cotten makes the line apologetic, self-deprecating, sounding not at all like a scoundrel - he can't help himself. Cotten inevitably falls in love with things he can't have or doesn't understand - with Welles in "Citizen Kane" and "The Third Man," with women in "Magnificent Ambersons" and "Third Man," - but just like Gatsby, he never quite gives up, long after the dream is already behind him.

Or you could just as easily see Cotten playing a grand Nick Carroway - for isn't Carroway the all-american second banana, recalling for our benefit the most magnificent failure of a man he ever met? What better role for Cotten, tethered inextricably to the legend of Orson Welles. The first time you see "The Third Man," you wait for Welles - for that light-out-the-window entrance, for the cuckoo clock speech, for the desperate chase through the sewers. Welles gives the film its flash - but the more you watch the movie, the more you notice Cotten. It's remarkable to watch the man's face in the ferris wheel scene - while Welles soliloquizes, Cotten says almost nothing, but you can sense a lifetime of crushed dreams in his sad eyes - Harry Lime is his best friend. Holly has idolized him, flown to Vienna for him, chased his girl, chased his murderers. And now, Holly knows the truth. Harry Lime is, simply, evil - something Holly only knows from his awful little western novels.

Can't you see Cotten as Carroway, and Welles as Gatsby - Carroway, carried away by the mad dreams of this strange and outlandish man, and Gatsby, spending a lifetime trying to turn himself into the man he wishes he could be? That is, after all, their exact dynamic in "Citizen Kane" - Cotten watches Welles with such longing in those early scenes, it's hard not to laugh today. Yet half a century on, it's Cotten who proves the most effective performer - not the Dreamer but his acolyte.

Harry Lime, an American who makes big money from selling shit medication to foreigners, could be any corporate CEO, building sweatshops in Asia, cutting pharmaceutical deals in Africa, undercutting stockholders. In Harry Lime, we see Enron; in Harry Lime, we see the sort of politicians that lead us to Vietnam, to Iraq, to My Lai, to Abu Ghraib. All they are is little dots, Holly. Would you care if they died? Perhaps we respond more to Cotten now because we have all been mugged by men like Harry Lime, and the bitter modern life they have created.

Or perhaps we simply don't quite believe in great men - at least, not as much as we used to. Orson Welles is an interesting performer - his acting never gets enough credit, so willing to explore the grotesqueries of humanity; few performers have done so much with make-up, besides maybe Boris Karloff. And yet, you never quite feel empathy for Welles onscreen - no surprise that his best acting roles ("Kane," "The Third Man," "Touch of Evil") depend on his characters' mystery. Whereas Cotten is all empathy - when he grins, you cannot help but like him; when he drinks, often to excess, you cannot help but love his tortured soul.

Like few other movies, "The Third Man" rewards repeated viewings - not because you learn more on each watching, but because you truly come to understand what a useless protagonist is Holly Martins. He immediately dislikes Major Calloway, the one man in town who never tells him a lie, out of childhood loyalty and some misplace anti-authoritarian bend - you can tell Holly fancies himself a renegade American in Vienna, and the first time you see "The Third Man," that is what he seems. You can see the film beind made that way - the wry, plucky American boy teaches the English coppers what-for while beating back the Russians - and Holly's decision to "investigate" proves that he's probably seen a few Humphrey Bogart movies.

As a detective, though, Holly's not particularly effective. There are revelations throughout the film, but the only piece of knowledge Holly himself procures is the existence of "a Third Man." Oh, he discovers that Harry was wrapped up with bad people - confirming everything Calloway tells him at the start. As a lover, Holly's even worse - chasing after his dead friend's girl, he tells her, "Can't you see I've fallen in love with you?" with that same old Joseph Cotten grin, at once joking and not joking. It takes you a couple viewings to realize - Anna never shows a spark of interest in Holly. That's why that last shot is so perfect - there's Holly, still thinking he just might get the girl, and Anna, just trying to get away from this silly, stupid man.

Cotten could play more than just sadness - in "Shadow of a Doubt," he's the all-American sociopath. With his family, he is the consummate uncle - a bachelor, beloved by all who meet him, quick with the wit. He shares a bond with his niece that borders on the unseemly - certainly, there's more heat between the two of them than between the niece and her nominal love interest. But Cotten's real depravity is chronal - like Percy Grimm, he was born too late for himself. Dreaming of a better time, borne back ceaselessly into the past, he takes out his aggression on merry widows, women living off the wealth of their dead husbands. There's a sexual subtext - isn't there always? - but the great thing about Cotten's performance is how simply he modulates between insanity and familial gentility.

It's interesting how, in "Ambersons," Cotten plays exactly the man he hates in "Shadow of a Doubt" - an industrialist, a new rich, destroying the old world of old money, riding his automobile through town. "Ambersons" is a difficult film to grasp - at times, particularly in its first half, more beautiful and perfect even than "Kane," and just as often marred by studio interference and lost footage - and one imagines a version where Cotten's character is not so irrepressibly swell. Yet "Ambersons" provides the perfect prologue for the Cotten trifecta - Cotten creates the 20th century, and then, in "Kane, "The Third Man," and "Shadow of a Doubt," lives to regret it.

Cotten combines everything great about the Old Hollywood stars - Jimmy Stewarts aw-shucks nice-guy demeanor, Bogart's cynical romance, Cary Grant's charm. At times - particularly at his most vampiric in "Shadow of a Doubt" - his stone face almost resembles Buster Keaton. Cotten never had such grand success, but then, he never suffered for work. Unlike Welles, he worked steadily and happily. He was married for thirty years to one woman; when she died, he married another within a year, and lives with her until his death at the ripe old Jed Leland age of 89. His life story is not the stuff of great Hollywood legend. But like the man said: Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, The Third Man. Throw in "Ambersons" as an appetizer and his little cameo in "Touch of Evil" as dessert. What else do you need out of movies?