Wednesday, September 26, 2007

To Be or Not To Biel

There are several reasons why the new "Justice League" movie should fail. It's being directed by George Miller, whose last good movie that wasn't about computer generated animals was made before his target demographic was born. It's being co-written by Kieran and Michele Mulroney, a married couple with zip on their IMDB resume besides the fact that Kieran is brother to Dermot, somewhat famous for "My Best Friend's Wedding" and curiously oft-employed. The whole notion of bringing together several major superheroes in one movie sounds like a bad idea - the quality of comic book movies almost always correlates to the number of costumes jockeying for your attention (witness the declining quality of the Batman series through the addition of sidekicks and the pile-up of villains - and the return to greatness when "Begins" swept the deck clean).

Telling a good superteam story is hard even in comic books - juggling the biggest personalities in the history of the medium, arranging a threat so world-beating as to require everyone pitching in. You need to balance quality interaction (because people like seeing how Batman and Superman hang out) with quality interstellar action (because people like seeing what it l0oks like when Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern collectively fuck some serious justice up). You've got to figure out a way to make Green Lantern's power ring, Wonder Woman's golden lasso, and Aquaman being Aquaman look cool.

So there are many things that could sink Justice League. But Jessica Biel isn't one of them.
The news is everywhere: Jessica's looking to play Wonder Woman, probably the most famous comic book character to never have a halfway decent movie made out of her. Part of the problem is that, more than most superheroes, Wonder Woman looks ridiculous in real life - you can shroud Batman in shadows and you can give the X-Men leather uniforms, but Wonder Woman's got a one-piece bikini and red booties - not the most threatening look in the world.

Still, call me crazy, I think Jessica can pull it off. Unlike some of the candidates who were being thrown around during the Joss Whedon era, like Rachel Bilson or Charisma Carpenter, Jessica's got some muscle: if she didn't have such a pretty face, you could believe her as a cop. Fortunately, the point of Wonder Woman is that she's hot AND superstrong. Male fantasy? Sure, but there's a decent amount of rich, albeit mixed, mythology to draw in with the character - she's from an island of women, she gets her powers from the Greek gods, she's a diplomat who seeks peace through violence. There's been a slow Renaissance building in how Wonder Woman is portrayed in comic books. In the last few years, the decades-old "World's Finest" Batman-Superman duo has slowly developed into a trio - Matt Wagner's "Trinity" portrays the three icons as a delicately shifting love-hate continuum - Batman doesn't trust super powers, Wonder Woman doesn't trust men, Superman trusts everybody too much. "Infinite Crisis" was one of those gigantic crossovers you can only understand if you spent your entire childhood reading and memorizing comic books (ie, you know what I'm talking about when I talk about Superboy-Prime killing Pantha while battling the Teen Titans ). Still, the writer, Geoff Johns, produced one of the best portrayals of our favorite Amazon ever - proud, desperate, angry at the world for not understanding her and at herself for not understanding the world.

Wonder Women are everywhere now - you've got Nikki/Jessica on "Heroes," Six on "Battlestar Galactica," the new "Bionic Woman." Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez turned "Grindhouse" into the most violent chick flick ever - except maybe Tarantino's own "Kill Bill," which would have been a shallow exercise in samurai-western post-camp without Uma Thurman playing a deadpan assassin shading into a lover and a mother even as she seeks bloody revenge. Or there's also "The Descent," Neil Marshall's orgy of blood with an all-female cast of daredevil adventurers.

Jessica Biel will be perfect, so long as Miller and the Mulroneys follow a few important rules, as demonstrated by the movies above:

1) Don't try to make her an everygirl. Wonder Woman is a goddess who wears less clothes than a fifth grader and could crush a man with her whatevers. Look to Rodriguez' Cherry Darling in "Grindhouse" - Rose McGowan doesn't emote very much, just plays the role deadpan straight, which holds the movie's focus while there's madcap gore happening all around and upon her. Wonder Woman doesn't need to be a particularly three-dimensional character - a good thing, because Biel is not a particularly three-dimensional actress.

2) Resist the temptation to set her up to fall in love with anyone on the team. She's the only girl in a boy's club. She's a tomboy, really. Don't saddle her with all of the lame speeches - let's not have another Kirsten Dunst-Katie Holmes-Eva Mendes, here.

3) Make her angry. Wonder Woman has always been a difficult character because there's no easy explanation for why she does what she does. Batman lost his parents, Superman lost his planet, Green Lantern works for an intergalactic police force. Wonder Woman comes from paradise to teach people on earth how to get along. This doesn't ever work.

4) If she doesn't have a bigger role than Aquaman, the movie's off.

Friday, September 21, 2007

My New Desktop Wallpaper Has Fixed What Two Doctors and a Doctoral Candidate Could Not

I suffer from tremendous anxiety about nearly everything. I used to just worry about my interaction with other people, but in the last year or so, I've started to worry about existence and to what extent reality is real. There was one month when I couldn't look at the sky, because I would get vertigo and imagine that gravity was giving out (I spent alot of time indoors, and considered padding the ceilings).

Doctors have several solutions for anxiety, none of them particularly inviting. Meditation, Medication, more sleep, a better diet, less partying, less TV. "Normalize," they always say, like being a twenty-three year old unemployed unsuccessful writer is something I can just switch off. Part of the problem is that I'm supposed to feel anxiety. Good writing doesn't come from relaxation. You don't get good memories from 8 hours of sleep or fruits and vegetables.

I thought I was completely SOL, and was just settling down for a long and unhappy life of Woody Allenesque agoraphobia combined with a deepening Hemingwayesque sense of despaire (and if there is one thing you don't want to esque, it's Hemingway), when, on whim, I google-imaged "Third Man Wallpaper" and came up with this:

And now, whenever I stare at my computer, I always move my documents and web pages and photoshop toolbars toward the right, so whenever I feel like my brain is about to explode, I can look at Orson Welles with his frightened, brilliant, murderous eyes.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Why David Denby Is Wrong About Everything

David Denby is the New Yorker film critic who isn't Anthony Lane. It's usually wrong to dislike somebody you haven't met just because you disagree with their opinions, dislike their writing style, and disdain their continued employment at an otherwise unimpeachable publication. Fortunately, my old film teacher, a German documentarian with a sharp wit and a voice like a thousand cigarette burns, knew Denby and despised him. So I'm a hater-in-law.

Denby's not a bad guy, really; just a man who holds bland opinions, blessed with a bully good pulpit and cursed with the desire to use that pulpit to make an overwrought all-important Point. His latest essay about the modern romantic comedy, "A Fine Romance," hits on something important (the advancing dullness of female characters in movie romance), but dissolves into a fingershake to Judd Apatow. All movie reviews are, in a sense, the critics' roadmaps for how the movie could have been better - "Those who can't, teach," as my uncle Tom, a perpetually disappointed golfer, often says after describing everything wrong with my swing.

But Denby is so particularly humorless in his teaching, and so unconvincing in his grasp of the films themselves. Great film critics offer distinct personalities - Peter Travers at "Rolling Stone" is the caffeinated exciter, Anthony Lane the cocktail party wit, Roger Ebert the bemused raconteur. Denby just kind of whines: on "Knocked Up," he notes, "There's nothing in it that is comparable to the style of the classics - no magic in its settings, no reverberant sense of place..." What he is really saying is that the stoned LA suburbia of "Knocked Up" - painfully realistic, as men of a certain age and aimless temperament can assure you - is less interesting than the old-rich estates of classic comedies like "The Philadelphia Story" or "His Girl Friday." At times like this, Denby seems more like a sociologist reviewing the modern world through the cinema, or worse, a critic who fancies himself an historian of today.

Denby ties in several other movies into his grandiose theory of modern romance - the "slacker-striver" comedy, not exactly the catchiest subgenre title ever designed, ever - but his selections are so all over the map. I don't know of anyone who would describe "Old School," "Big Daddy," or "School of Rock" as romances. They involve romance, but so do "The Maltese Facon" and "Red River." He also throws in plenty of films that were just awful - "Failure to Launch," "You, Me and Dupree," "The Break-Up" - and it seems somewhat unfair to compare them to the absolute best of two earlier eras - "His Girl Friday" and "Annie Hall." And really, Denby just name checks most of the contemporary films - he spends half the piece ragging on Judd Apatow for everything he doesn't do in "Knocked Up."

Odd, because you could argue that the basic concept for "Knocked Up" - starting with sex and moving into love - is entirely original, and indeed, adds a sense of realism to the movie that's completely lacking in those earlier films. True, they had to deal with censorship, and so could only make veiled references to sex. But that's exactly why "Knocked Up" feels so uniquely topical, because it feels nothing at all like those old movies - we get all the awkwardness of the morning after the random hook-up, a scene that would have been unthinkable in the 1930s, which becomes one of the funniest parts of the movie. What Denby is dancing around, really, is that he likes the snappy patter that substituted for onscreen sexuality in those old movies. Denby reminds me a little bit of Uncle Charlie from "Shadow of a Doubt," yearning for a time that he barely even lived through.

True, Katharine Heigl isn't nearly as funny as any of the male characters in the film, but it seems odd to take Judd Apatow to task for ignoring his female characters when he gave his wife, Leslie Mann, such a showstopper of a role - a married mother of two who still likes to go clubbing and flirts shamelessly without any intention of cheating on her husband, who she loves but can no longer connect with. Denby shrugs off Mann's role in the film: "she's not a lover; she represents disillusion" is all that he musters, and that is patently untrue. True, she is disillusioned, but she changes during the movie - reconnecting with her husband, learning to understand if not love her sister's slacker boyfriend. The main storyline of "Knocked Up" is pure storybook romance - it is a fantasy, without thought of abortion, where the one-night stand turns out to be your true love - but like all good fantasies, it is dressed up with considerable reality, of both atmosphere and emotions. But the subplot - the married couple rediscovering each other - feels tremendously true.

It's not coincidence that snappy patter still exists in the world of broadcast TV - you can say and show more than in 40s Hollywood, but the medium lends itself more to Hawksian (or even Allenesque) dialogue. Really, all great TV couples - from Sam and Diane to Mulder and Scully to Jim and Pam - undress each other with their words, holding off the moment of actual consummation for as long as possible. Just as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn waited to kiss until just before the credits - just as Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon didn't even kiss, just smiled at each other and played cards - these romances try to juggle chemistry for as long as possible, and usually run out of steam when that teasing chemistry moves into an actual relationship (pray for "the Office.") Really, THESE are the modern romantic comedies. Perhaps it's simply out of Denby's purview as a film critic to notice.

Then again, maybe he's just too much of a nostalgia-elitist ponce to bother turning on his television. Denby recently wrote a fascinating, awful piece about the future of cinema called "Big Pictures." The vehicle recalls Thomas Friedman in its "you are there" inauthenticity - you know what I mean, that tiny personal anecdote which leads the writer to rampant conclusions about the world. "David Denby here, fingers on the pulse of America, reporting to you, live, from the modern age. I'm holding a video iPod and watching 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' and it's making me think a few very deep thoughts..."

The conclusions which Denby reaches are entirely familiar to anyone who has ever taken a film class or read an op-ed by a film critic about the state of modern cinema. The argument, such as it is, runs, "The modern cinema experience is shit. Watching movies on TV is no good, either. Movies are only meant to be seen on the big screen. You can never really understand (insert "2001," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Gone with the Wind," etc) until you've seen it on the big screen."

Denby hits every note. Rosy reminiscence of neighborhood theater leads to sober deconstruction of the urban multiplex; Hollywood used to make movies for adults, and now mostly makes movies for teenage boys; surround-sound systems in your home theater are more distracting than encouraging; etc, etc. Some of Denby's observations are true, but it doesn' t make them any less hackneyed. Really, the one unique thing about this whole essay is that it ends with a vision of hope: that is, the ArcLight theater on Sunset Boulevard, described by Denby with the sort of glowing comments bad critics usually reserve for bad movies: "The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee."

Denby doesn't't mention that tickets to the ArcLight cost more than any other theaters, or that the ArcLight is located in a particularly posh area of posh Hollywood, or that the atmosphere inside caters to yuppies. And it is odd, considering the casual experience that Denby praises from the movie theaters of his youth - "we avoided the stern whiteshoed matrons who patrolled the aisles; sometimes we arrived in the middle of the movie..." - that he concludes on such a happy note of tight regimentation - "All the seats are reserved... The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex." If you think it sounds odd to begin with nostalgia for a more casual theater environment and end with a new hope for ever-more controlled environments, then you are starting to realize why David Denby is wrong about everything.

Essentially, what Denby desires is a kind of Broadway-style aesthetic for movie theaters, which, in Denby's frame of mind, are as much about the environment as the films themselves. For Denby, the extra price is worth it, for the all-important Big Screen. "The small screen takes the emotion out of the landscape," he says. "In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it."

I used to agree with Denby - with all the old guard of film critics and teachers, really. Every time we watched a film in a film class, the professor always expressed a regret that we couldn't watch it on film, that it had to be projected in gloriously unfit DVD. Certainly, there is a true magic to the big screen - one of the best days of my life involved watching "The Third Man" in a tiny theater in Vienna. I would give anything to watch any film by Ennio Morricone, or Stanley Kubrick, or Federico Fellini, on the big screen.

And yet, I would never want to watch them on an iPod video. Whereas I love watching episodes of "30 Rock," or "Lost," over and over again. And that's why I think there's something to be said for the small screen. The basic presumption of Denby and the old guard has always been that the only way to truly enjoy a film is to see it on the big screen. I say, well no duh, you're going to like a film more when it's that big, when it dominates your entire line of sight. You ask me, the real challenge is making a film that still captures your imagination when it's not so all-encompassing. Maybe television, and the iPod video, is just a natural evolution - a way of shrinking movies down to size.

Because let's face it - I get more thrill out of watching a single episode of "The Sopranos" on TV then I get out of the entire filmography of Sergei Eisenstein - including the Odessa Steps sequence. More and more, television seems lovably unfussy in its visuals - "Lost" is beautiful at times, but there's none of the stoney-eyed Mother Nature navel-gazing that you find in Herzog or Malick, which plays so well on the big screen (watching "The New World" was my one true cinematic experience of 2006) and so unconvincingly on the small. "Lost" keeps you interested because of the genius of its writing - the way it juggles the personal and the epic, allegory and comedy, melodrama and realism, pure idiocy and sublime genius has much more in common with "Gone with the Wind" than any movie being made today.

I'm not saying that "Lost" is better than "Citizen Kane." It's just that people who work in TV have to convince you, constantly, to pay attention to them, to ignore innumerable distractions - the eternal propensity for changing the channel, and everything outside of the screen - while the people who worked in the classic days of Hollywood could be certain that, even if they made the worst film ever, people in the theater would, and could, only watch that film. It's like that old Joseph Heller line: "In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane." When you're watching a movie on the big screen, there's nothing else to watch except the movie. When you're watching a TV show, there's a million other things you can watch, not to mention, you know, DO.

It may be that the small screen does not lend itself to true artisty as well as the movies - though certainly there are stretches of "The Sopranos" that bear comparison to Antonioni, (except funnier) and Kubrick (except not so stilted). And yet, that seems beside the point: so much of what Denby is talking about, when he talks about the Big Screen, is a time when movies were THE popular art form. The ArcLight isn't a solution - it's the bourgeois alternative. "I only see film at the ArcLight," you can imagine some asshole saying.

"In a theater, you submit to the screen," Denby says (italics his). "The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it." Like all film speak, this sounds both wonderful and dangerously psychotic. Television, it seems, makes you more of a shared partner - we experience lives and watch them change, as episodes and seasons pass. Why be lost, when you can be with "Lost"?

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Britney Spears Dreams


I find that whenever my dreams come true, bad things end up happening. When it comes to the things that I want more than anything in life - fame, fortune, power, but also smaller things, like a new computer, or a Nintendo Wii, or a particular girl - I tend to think of them in end-of-the-movie terms. Me, walking out of the Apple store, new MacBook Pro in Hand, suddenly shifting into Wes Anderson slow motion while the Kinks play in the background; me and that particular girl, kissing for the first time in the middle of a thunderstorm, or on a beach with fireworks, or in the airport terminal; me, waving to the people of New York City, riding in the back of a convertible with the President of the United States, who in my imagination always looks like Clint Eastwood.

Everybody's got dreams, stuff we want to own or experience. On some base level of our soul, we always think that, when the dream comes true, our life is going to be better. More money will make us more comfortable. An attractive husband or wife will end loneliness, or make sex easier, or stroke our ego, or one of the thousand other reasons why people fall in love.

I'm 22 now - old enough to have had enough naive little dreams come true (and to have stumbled for a moment just now over whether I was 22 or 23), young enough to know that the best and worst hasn't come close to happening yet. So maybe I'm off base here. But whenever one of my real true-life dreams has come true, I always get the strange sensation that it's not enough, or that it's all wrong, that it wasn't supposed to come true this way, or worse, that it wasn't supposed to come true at all - that it was a silly thing to hope for, and a worse thing to happen.

I was in love with a girl for two and a half years and I never knew how to tell her that. Then it all happened, one night at a club - the perfect mix of alcohol and 3 am dancefloor confidence. We made out - inside, outside, on the bus. Everything was, I thought, perfect. It was a peculiar feeling, like history was all over. The life I'd always imagined for myself was starting. It was the Grey Havens, the credits sequence, the happily ever after. It ended a couple months later.

There are very few things I can think of to compare ratio-wise the level and length of expectation to the severe banality of the event itself. There's "Star Wars Episode One," I suppose - it took three viewings, on the big screen, at 1999 prices, to realize that the movie wasn't awesome, wasn't just okay, was bad, so bad that it made me rethink 14 years of watching "Star Wars" and reading "Star Wars" and playing "Star Wars."

Or there's Britney Spears. I was in eighth grade, and one of my friends mentioned her name. It sounded exotic then. I had never even watched MTV before. "Turn it on when you get home," my friend said. "She'll be on there."

You can try to analyze the gender politics of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" - the song, which basically says, "I'll do anything if you'll come back to me" (I read somewhere that the title of the song means either "hit me with your love" or "hit me with the truth," neither of which make the lyric less troubling or less catchy - has any song with such weird subject matter, besides maybe "Semi-Charmed Life," ever gotten so popular among six-year-olds?); the music video, slut-empowerment masquerading as adolescent feminism, or feminism reclaiming teenaged sexuality with exultant authority, or just good old-fashioned Lolita voyeurism (those pigtails! the bare midriff!) Spears was 17 at the time, on the cover of Rolling Stone, laying back on her bed. She's holding a phone (on a cord - how ancient does that already look?), but the way she's staring up at the camera - a bit of surprise, the ghost of a smile curving into her mouth - like she's telling the person on the other line, "I'll call you back":

Don't forget these:


And that's the GAY teletubby.

Almost everyone in my eighth grade class loved Britney. The girls could sing along to the songs, do her dance moves (some of their parents got angry when the school wouldn't let them wear strapless gowns to the graduation party, and I think there was a PTA argument over two piece swimsuits, too.) The guys all loved Britney because we desperately wanted to fuck her before we knew what sex was. I'm reminded of the part in "Total Recall" when Arnold orders his ideal woman: Athletic, Sleazy, and Demure. She's empowered, but she's also sex crazy, but she's also a nice girl - the kind of woman you can take home to mother, after she's worked all day at a high-salaried corporate job, before she does all kinds of pussycat things to you in bed.

You could map the next eight years of Britney's in any number of ways - the steady breakdown of her glamour girl exterior, from Judy Garland-in-Oz to Judy-Garland-in-rehab; the slow burn of insanity, from the rumored tryst with Fred Durst through the weekend marriage through K-Fed, the Irish twins, the baldness; the friends she kept, from her teeny-bop Mouseketeers (Justin and Christina, who both turned out to be far more talented) to Paris Hilton's Slutketeer cabal; her declining album sales; her weight gain.

Yet I think it' s best, and most honest, to look at what happened to Britney as a failed love affair - her first, and hopefully her last - with America. Like Humbert Humbert, we wanted her before we were allowed to want her. If you think about all the truly iconic pictures of Spears - that jailbait Rolling Stone cover, her skin-colored VMA outfit (that she stripped off a suit to reveal), and finally, her cover shoot in late 2003 (right as I was starting college), you can see the slow, almost casual undressing - of the girl, of the personality, of our own leering desire to see more, more, more.

Look at that picture though, man. She's not just hot - she's an absolute vision of beauty. Not a girl, not a woman; the moment before the lovers kiss, before the innocence is gone forever. Everything about the picture is airbrushed all to hell - the hair, the skin, the eyes all bear signs of make-up, analog and digital. She was always manufactured - never a good singer, supplied with the finest producers and songwriters and dancers and costumers. She couldn't do anything. She could just be - and no matter how much work went into capturing this one picture, that is Britney Spears, gorgeous flesh and beautiful blood. It's like what Klosterman writes about Pam Anderson - she was completely fake, except that she was real.

This picture was the end, though we didn't realize it then. A couple months later, she kissed Madonna at the VMAs - incredibly hot, true, but did Madonna ever look less interested in a kiss? "Toxic" was a huge hit, but her last. Then came marriages, children, everything.

In eighth grade, we used to joke about how we couldn't wait for Britney to flop, because then she'd have to do porn to get by (there were always rumors that that's what happened to Alicia Silverstone, before the internet made it easy to just check). Really, though, we just wanted to see Britney, naked. She was practically nude already - just a few little inches of cloth separating us from the holiest of holies in that last picture.

Well, we all finally got to see it. Many times. If Britney were a little bit smarter, you can almost imagine her staring America down - "What? Isn't this what you wanted? Haven't I just always done everything you wanted, all the time?"

But Britney's not smart. To read about her actions before, during, and after her horrific "comeback" performance, she's already, at 26, a shell of her former self - wearing clothes that would've looked good on her 4 years, two kids, and a couple dozen white trash pounds ago; acting the diva without the talent to back it up; drinking from lunchtime till the late early morning.

What can you say to a girl that your love, and your lust, ruined? Sorry, Britney. I hope you find some peace in something. We all got it coming.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

"Shoot 'Em Up"

"Shoot 'Em Up" is worth watching just to realize how good "The Bourne Ultimatum" really was. Both movies take the action film to the absolute extreme of megajacked coke-fueled shaky-cam velocity - ludicrous extremes of building hopping, window crashing, gun flailing. Both protagonists are great actors wearing one expression for the whole movie - Clive Owen snarls fire, Matt Damon grimaces blankly. Both of them are playing guys who can use anything to kill anyone. Both movies have probably five times as many cuts as "Lawrence of Arabia," though neither is even half as long.

There was alot of controversy when "The Bourne Ultimatum" came out over the perceived excesses of Paul Greengrass's run'n'gun style: David Bordwell flipped his shit, while Roger Ebert (who dug the movie) had a more thoughtful analysis of what appears to be a burgeoning backlash against what Ebert calls the "shaky-queasy" style of filmmaking.

We are now long past the point when a handheld camera denotes realism - the whole style has been co-opted, successfully, in the service of outlandish B-movie plots on "24," not to mention adding a dash of grittiness to "Battlestar Galactica" that instantly makes everything "Star Trek" (and most things "Star Wars") look unbearably archaic. There's a certain glamour to the use of the handheld camera in modern sitcoms; "Arrested Development" and "The Office" are probably the most visual TV comedies in broadcast history, the former with lush and bright Socal colors, the latter wintry New England flannel-grey. Even video games are getting in on the shaky-chic; "Gears of War" developed the system called the "roadie run," where the angle shifts right behind your character and the screen shakes like the cinematography in "Saving Private Ryan."

So handheld can be overrused, or underrused, ignored or embraced. But I've always found it silly, if not insulting, when people take moral stands against too much cutting. Greengrass used basically the same style to far greater narrative effect in "United 93," one of the more remarkable film experiences of the post 9/11 world. Oliver Stone made a point of not politicizing his own 9/11 movie, but Greengrass did something more difficult: he challenged you to wonder how you could ever politicize the events of the day. "United 93" is not about a national tragedy - it's about a very normal day in the lives of very normal people, which suddenly becomes the end of the world as they will ever know it. We don't even know anyone's name, but we feel like we know them intimately.

The "Bourne" movies should just be necessary cash cows for Greengrass - a reflection of the "one for them, one for me" philosophy which led Spielberg to make "War of the Worlds" and "Munich" in the same year - and the sheer level of seriousness, in both style and narrative, seem on the perpetual edge of falling into the depths of ponderousness. The reason that they don't, I think, is because Bourne's story is so simple, and Bourne such a straightforward character, that the story enters into the realm of archetype - not merely Bourne's search for identity, but little plot points like a lost love, or repressed guilt, which come out mainly in "Supremacy" and "Ultimatum," Greengrass's "Bourne" duology. Neither movie spends much time on those emotions - Bourne offers fleeting, elliptical observations about his dead girlfriend, and offers only the most direct monosyllablic sentences regarding his motivations. 'This is where it started. This is where it ends." Played straight, the whole thing would be ludicrous.

Greengrass succeeds precisely because he is a genius of quick cutting, something which, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker (like Michael Davis, director of "Shoot Em Up"), can be awful. Its true, as Bordwell argues, that quick cuts ruin the continuity of acting; there's nothing in "Bourne" that comes close to a single take in "Before Sunset," where much of the pleasure is watching the delicate shades of emotion that move across Ethan Hawke's and Julie Delpy's faces. But the quick-cutting in "Bourne" suggests something even more insidious - that everything is constantly in motion, shifting in jacknife fluidity from banal to explosive. The great set-piece in the "Bourne" trilogy is almost certainly the scene in the London train station, where there isn't very much action, really - a few punches thrown, a single gunshot - but every moment is supercharged with paranoia. Greengrass has a gift for perfect disorder: it is possible to find the subject of each shot, but you have to be quick; fortuntely, Greengrass can focalize everything through his protagonist, so even if the audience has no idea what's happening, they can at least be assured that their man Bourne probably has a plan.

Anyone who doubts that Greengrass has a true gift for the quick cut needs to only watch a few minutes of "Shoot 'Em Up" to understand what truly bad hyperkinetic editing looks like. The cuts always seem to fall at awkward points of dialogue, as if the editor just got bored of a particular shot. The structure is somewhat similar to "Ultimatum" - minimal conversation followed by lengthy action sequences. But Bourne's action scenes follow a classical Hitchcockian suspense line - you're constantly waiting for the bomb to go off, except you don't know where the bomb is, what it looks like, who it's supposed to kill, and if there's even a bomb at all. "Shoot 'Em Up" idea of suspense is to start a scene with one small gun and see just how many bigger guns you can cram into a single set piece. You could say, as many critics have, that the movie is a spoof of itself, that it works because of the sheer momentum of the piece.

Bullshit. You know right from the start that Smith is basically invincible - compare the beginning of "Shoot Em Up," where Smith violates a few dozen laws of physics and kills about ten guys before you even know his name, to the beginning of the "Bourne" series, where Bourne has a couple bullets in his back before you even know his name. The rest of "Shoot Em Up" basically plays off the same episodic storyline - it heightens the visuals (stairs! car crashes! skydiving!) without ever heightening the stakes. I would argue that "Children of Men," another Clive Owen movie where he's trying to protect a special baby, achieves far more momentum with its long takes - it allows you to luxuriate in every moment, of movement, hell, of breathing, while "Shoot Em Up" just keeps whisking you along to the cool stuff.

"Shoot 'Em Up" sucks. That's why I talked about "The Bourne Ultimatum" for the whole review.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

David Fincher, "Zodiac," the class of 99

David Fincher is a member of that generation of director that seemed poised to take over the world in 1999 - the year when the Wachowskis rewrote sci-fi with "The Matrix," PT Anderson delivered the Altman-on-speed "Magnolia," Spike Jonze exploded brains with the mega-meta-mindfuck "Being John Malkovich," David O. Russell lampooned one Iraq war and anticipated another with "Three Kings," Kevin Smith turned his slacker aesthetic into gonzo religious satire in "Dogma," Kimberley Peirce produced "Boys Don't Cry" and made Hilary Swank's career, and M. Night Shyamalan turned "The Sixth Sense," a quiet little cerebral ghost story, into one of the true audience sensations of the decade. Throw in Darren Aronofsky and Chris Nolan, whose "Reqiuem for a Dream" and "Memento" came out in 2000 to inspire a generation of new filmmakers with their hyperactive editing (Aronofsky) and narrative (Memento), and you've got a whole bunch of Next Big Things just waiting to pop.

In 1999, David Fincher delivered "Fight Club." I was 14 - a freshman in high school. I had seen "Seven," and like everyone, had been impressed by it - by the unremitting nihilism, rendered in such beautiful darkness. "Fight Club" was supposed to be an action movie. The preview showed alot of fighting and what looked like a plane crash. I have no idea how I got into the theater - this was a few months after Columbine, remember, and most big theater chains were cracking down on underage moviegoers. The AMC theaters were the worst - at every ticket station they'd posted copies of an ID belonging to Bobby Teenager, that freckle-faced judas narc from Anytown, USA, grinning about all the crappy PG-13 movies he was going to see with his fundamentalist virgin girlfriend. The Century theaters were easier - I forget if we reserved the tickets with credit cards, if I made sure to go with lenient parents, or if the clerks were just more chill.

Whatever: my friend Ryan and I saw "Fight Club" on opening night. Everything about the movie felt new, then - Ed Norton's weird combination of boredom, sweetness, and sociopathy; the techno-beat soundtrack; the speedy thrust of the story, carried along by Norton's deadpan narration; the trashy-gloss aesthetic, where every bit of dirt and grime looked beautiful. I can remember reading a horrifically negative review by Lisa Schwarzbaum, one of the first film critics I read religiously. It was like she'd seen a totally different movie - she talked about ideas (male disenfranchisement, consumerism, Nazism). What I remember most about the movie was laughing - constantly. It was dark-as-a-black-hole comedy - suicide, drug abuse, castration, and splattered gore - but it was undeniably hilarious.

"Fight Club" didn't make any money in theaters. But its DVD was a megahit, and brought both the movie and the DVD medium into the mainstream. In my opinion, it has not aged well. Like all films about the plight of the upper-middle class white male ("Falling Down" and "American Beauty" among them), it seems irretrievably ancient - a reminder of the time when we had nothing more important to worry about. The look of "Fight Club," that shiny gunmetal bleakness, has been absorbed by TV advertisements. More and more, it strikes me that the perfect time to see the movie is when you're 14. I know plenty of kids who started their own Fight Clubs after seeing the movie - none of them ever became baldheaded anarchists, of course, but as recently as a year ago I was getting into an argument with a pair of fraternity brothers, both very intelligent Stanford students.

"That movie is so spot-on," said Harry, who came from an incredibly wealthy family and often used his father's money to purchase nose candy. "Like, every time you stick your card in the ATM, that's a bit of your soul that the corporations are taking."

I rolled my eyes. "Fight Club" is an undeniably fascinating film because it presents such an adolescent view of adult themes - corporations, manhood, women, even the whole idea of what an "adult movie" should look like (dark, bloody, lots of swears and sexy violence). And it's an undeniably terrible film because it can't decide whether it's a satire or an exhortation. Tyler Durden decries how modern society is feminizing men, delivering his speeches shirtless, perfect six-pack on display - watch the movie with women, and listen to them coo. "Fight Club" presents us with a whole new species of man: the metrosexual misogynist.

If "Fight Club" hasn't aged very well, neither have most of the directors of the class of 1999. Not because they've made especially bad movies. They just haven't made ANY movies. Jonze delivered "Adaptation" in 2002 and nothing since; the same year, PT Anderson made "Punch-Drunk Love," then took 5 years to produce the upcoming "There Will Be Blood." David O. Russell took the same amount of time after "Three Kings" to make "I Heart Huckabees," and rumors of the director's rage problems and general assholity dogged the production. Kimberly Peirce is finally delivering "Stop Loss" 8 years after "Boys Don't Cry." Darren Aronofsky finally delivered "The Fountain" after 6 years of toil.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to take your time with projects. All of the above films were interesting, if not entirely successful - personally, I'd rate "Adaptation" as the only truly great film, with "Punch-Drunk Love" and "I Heart Huckabees" interesting small projects and "The Fountain" one-third awe-inspiring and two-thirds awful. Making more movies isn't necessarily the answer. Kevin Smith took several steps backward from "Dogma," producing the in-jokey cartoon farce "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" and the annoyingly plain "Jersey Girl" before rediscovering a bit of his conversational magic with the overly sweet "Clerks II." The Wachowskis poured all their love into "The Matrix" sequels, to diminishing returns and exploding budgets - remarkable, to think that the original movie cost only $60 million, compared to an combined total of $300 million for the sequels. Like the Wachowskis, Shyalamalan seems to have let overconfidence get the better of him - "Unbreakable" and "Signs" both demonstrate his genius for mixing light comedy with high suspense, and "The Village" is a visual marvel, but it can't hide a horrible script or defend an awful ending, and "Lady in the Water" indicated a Wellesian ego combined with early-Spielberg sincerity - a narcissistic, unwatchable mix.

Of the class of 1999, only Chris Nolan has combined quantity with relative quality - and even he's only managed three films since 2000, the forgotten gem "Insomnia," a twisted thriller of ideas called "The Prestige," and "Batman Begins," probably the finest comic book movie ever made. An impressive list - yet it's worthwhile to consider that, in the same time span, Clint Eastwood (who, in 1999, was hard at work on "Space Cowboys"), directed "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby," and the Iwo Jima duology - films with straightforward narratives, a reserved video style, long-takes, no quick-cut editing. You can't quite call them old-fashioned - "Flags of our Fathers" has a non-linear plot - and you could argue that none of them are perfect, but they're all pretty damned excellent, and all much more watchable than "Huckabees" or "The Fountain."

Or look at Steven Spielberg, who, between 2001 and 2005, produced "AI," "Minority Report," "Catch Me If You Can," "The Terminal," "War of the Worlds," and "Munich" - six movies in as many years, with "Catch" opening six months after "Report," the same time between "Munich" and "War." Every one of these films carries Spielberg's distinctive mark; all of them after "AI" seem intensely concerned with the post-9/11 world, most directly "War of the Worlds," which imagines suburban as a destroyed bizarro-Iraq (corpses in a river, whole cities levelled, Tom Cruise covered in ash that used to be people), and "Munich," which analyzes the birth of modern terrorism ("We kill for peace.")

Maybe it's wrong to compare young directors working mainly in independent filmmaking with Spielberg, who can do practically anything he wants in Hollywood. But you could just as easily look at the emergence of the Mexican trio - Inarritu, Cuaron, and del Toro - all of whom have worked within and without Hollywood without losing a bit of their distinctive filmmaking edge, all of whom are taking provocative forward leaps in form.

So where does this leave David Fincher? He took three years to make "Panic Room" - an interesting film, focused through Jodie Foster's particular brand of maternal badassity. Yet you almost felt like Fincher was using a thin story to show off the most visual tricks conceivable - the camera moved through windows, down stairwells, into door locks and through teacups. (Fincher was one of the first directors to utilize digital effects for non-sci-fi movies). Then nothing, until now.

Most critics who liked "Zodiac" tended to focus on how much different the film was stylistically from those earlier films - you'll finds words like "subdued," "classical," and "near-documentary realism" in positive reviews of the film (meanwhile, David Thomson accuses Fincher of losing his energy.) Yet it seems to me that "Zodiac" is Fincher's most idiosyncratic movie to date. Jake Gyllenhaal, the film's nominal lead, seems like the seventh or eighth supporting lead until 90 minutes in; Robert Downey Jr., playing the film's flashiest character, barely appears in the last hour. The plot covers over 20 years without any time tricks, skipping ahead weeks, months, and years with all the unstructured irregularity of real life. "Seven" had a relatively classical structure of rising action, horrors building upon horrors to a final climax. "Zodiac" begins with one horror after the other - three murder sequences in the first half hour - then spends the rest of its running time soberly investigating and meditating on those acts of violence.

It's true that Fincher's camera doesn't swoop-swoop as much as it did in "Fight Club" and "Panic Room" - though there are plenty of scenes which you can only imagine coming from Fincher, like the time-lapse shot of the Transamerica Pyramid being built, or the way the camera stares directly into the actors' faces when the police interview an incredibly suspicious suspect. And it's true that Fincher eschews the cut-slash-boom editing style in favor of longer takes.

Yet those longer takes don't so much create "realism" as constantly question reality - a paranoid aesthetic which fits perfectly into a film about discovering a truth that can't be found. In an early scene, a couple laze by a lake in broad summer daylight; suddenly, a man appears behind them, wearing a comical costume with a black KKK hood over his head, holding a gun. The scene moves delicately between fear and farce - the Zodiac, if that is who he is, looks foolish, and so we (and the characters) are unsure how seriously to take the scene. It's like something out of Bunuel. Fincher reminds us what real suspense is - compare this little wonder to the torture scenes from the "Hostel" series, which begin with horror and spiral down from there.

Most critics have compared the film to the no-nonsense thrillers of the 70s like "All the Presidents' Men." Certainly, there is that same pokerfaced approach - we learn just a little about the characters lives, just enough to see how the real story, the Zodiac mystery, destroys them all. But I think the better comparison is to Spielberg's "Munich," which has a similarly fascinating genre-tripping narrative - beginning as an anti-terrorist thriller; devolving, with the passage of time, into paranoia and suspicion. The protagonists of both films begin to suspect death around every corner - and Fincher is far more talented at balancing the humor of unlikely suspicion ("There's no way he's the Zodiac!") with the terror of possibility ("But if he is, should I really follow him into his poorly-lit basement?").

Simply put, "Zodiac" wanders in tone and plot - encompassing pinpoint observations about 70s San Francisco, the media, Hollywood, journalism, pre-digital bureaucracy - all while following a delicate through line of remorseless chronology. It becomes, finally, a tragedy of time passing - with years wasting away before your eyes. Colorful drunks become drug-addicted wrecks, double-puffing on oxygen tanks and cigarette butts; new love turns into another failed marriage; people grow old, go gray, get drunk, and die. Gyllenhaal becomes the main character only by process of elimination - everybody else moves on or moves out.

How much more radical can you get - a thriller about the search for identity, where the main character, who consumes every scene, is a construct of the fertile imagination of every other character onscreen. Lots of people could be the Zodiac - Fincher seems to arrive at a conclusion, but so do alot of other people in the film. In its combination of open-endedness and precision, its fascinating depiction of intractable bureaucracy, "Zodiac" has more in common with HBO's "The Wire" than anything in theaters right now. Alone among the class of 99, Fincher has produced a film that confirms all his early promise - mixing classic styles with modern technology (the film was shot on Hi-def video), recombining old genres into new, almost postmodern narratives. "Zodiac" might just be the quietest great film in years.