"The X-Files" and "The Train"

It's not fair to say that the new X-Files movie (variously described as a sequel to the first movie, a bigscreen adaptation of the TV show, and the hopeful beginning for a new franchise) is bad, because that's missing the point. It's actually the worst movie of the year, but more than that - it's one of the worst movies of any year, and joyfully so.

Follow here: the TV show ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the FBI and the aliens and perhaps also the Flukeman. The movie begins with Scully working in a hospital run by Catholics, treating a boy named Christian for an incurable disease. Mulder has been hiding out in a house in the middle of nowhere, cutting out newspaper articles which hint at the fantastical events, and pinning them on the walls, ceiling, and floor of his study. He may be investigating these mysterious events, but that's left vague. He's called back to work for the FBI by a special agent played by Amanda Peet, an actress who's been nearly famous for almost a decade now. (Her partner is played by Xzibit, who shouldn't even keep his day job.)

The reason that he's called back - the reason why the FBI is willing to pardon him for crimes which are left vague in the movie, partially so franchise newcomers won't be confused, but also because those crimes were vague to begin with - is that one of their agents has been abducted in Virginia, and a local man claims to be having visions of said woman. That's it: some guy in Virginia says he's a telepath, and the FBI has no one to turn to but Fox Mulder. Movie, Go!

I should point out that said telepath is a former Catholic priest who's also a convicted pedophile. This is potentially interesting, but the movie obscures his crime behind a PG-13 veil of moral indignation and murky plotting. Everything about the movie is vague. In the middle of the movie, Scully and Mulder are lying in bed together - are they sleeping together, or living together, or what? Their relationship used to be predicated on will-they-or-won't-they; now, it's more like are-they-or-aren't-they, which would be an interesting tone if the creators even realized it existed.

Nothing about this fucking movie makes even shitty sense. People appear randomly in countryside that might be Virginia, in a city that might be Washington DC, and in other settings which all look like Canada. I'm not downing the fact that they shot in Vancouver - in fact, everything that's memorable with the movie has to do with the exteriors, with people walking and driving through gigantic snow drifts. You begin to wonder what could be buried under the snow, and what it might dig up.

The problem is that everything ABOUT this movie is snow. After 90 minutes, I still don't really know much more than I knew from watching the trailer. There's a character who's obviously the villain, because he's played by Leoben from "Battlestar Galactica" and is the kind of guy who hangs around pools and grins at pretty girls while holding his breath under water. Because this is "The X-Files," you're waiting to find out something cool about this guy - is he a ghost? A merman? A werewolf? A Wendigo? None of the above - not even close. The reveal is so anticlimactic as to make you doubt whether this movie actually happened.

How can I put this? No one involved in this movie understands how to write a screenplay or how to film a movie - yet, even worse, no one seems to understand what made "The X-Files" such a great show. There's not one single moment in the entire movie which comes close to capturing the magic of an episode from the show's boom years. There is a strange and utterly non sequitur moment early in the film - Mulder and Scully are back in the FBI Headquarters, and while they stand in the hallway, they notice a picture of George W. Bush. The camera lingers on him, and the theme music - not even the theme music, just the little whistle - sounds on the soundtrack. The camera moves right, and lingers on another picture - that of J. Edgar Hoover.

It's a silly moment - so ambiguous that it's not really offensive to anyone - but it reminds you that the "X-Files" was, above all, a funny show, built less on the two leads' eventual romance than on their simple exasperation with each other. Neither of them were really noble - Mulder was a closet psycho more concerned with proving aliens exist than saving people from them, and Scully was officially trying to get Mulder fired and unofficially trying to talk some sense into him. The movie buys Mulder's argument hook, line, and sinker. It's right there in the title: "I Want To Believe." That's not the theme - that's the whole entire thesis.

Belief is an interesting idea, but the way that the movie plays it is farcical. Part of belief - particularly Christian belief, and particularly Catholic belief, and this movie is so Catholic you'd think the Reformation never happened - comes from faith in something that can't be proved - "Blessed are they who believe and have not seen," the Messiah told Doubting Thomas. Well, in this movie, some random guy manages to track down bodies and limbs buried in the middle of the Virginia/Vancouver Icecap using nothing but vibes; he also cries blood, and does a few other things outside the ken of reality, also. What's not to believe in? The show was mysterious; the movie is just purposefully undefined, and by the end you're demanding a huge twist just as an explanation for why nothing makes any sense.

I was thinking about this awful movie while I watched a movie from the 1960s, "The Train," a trim little actioner by John Frankenheimer which has the distinction (according to Frankenheimer, at least) of being the last action movie filmed in Black and White. (I'm not counting "Sin City," because a) it had color, and b) I remain unconvinced that it's not just a fancy star-ridden screensaver.) "The Train" is not great. It's set towards the end of World War II, and features characters who are French and German, but everyone speaks English, especially Burt Lancaster, who doesn't even bother to affect a French accent in his leading role. The film moves slowly and deliberately - it takes awhile for the central plot to kick in, and even then, you're not totally convinced that you're not watching a B-grade heist movie with a semi-serious theme (towards the middle of the movie, one character even says, "This is the last job.")

Yet "The Train" is a movie - you get absorbed by the shots even when you're watching it on a TV screen, whereas most of the shots in "The X-Files" movie are so dull and rote and chopped together as to make you stare directly the ceiling of the movie theater. There's a weird magic to the way that Frankenheimer shoots actors - it's the black and white, it's the wide angle lenses with deep focus backgrounds, but it's also how effectively he hints at the turbulent emotions going on behind their brows.

Frankenheimer had one of the strangest careers in Hollywood history, but for about two decades there, he was making eye-popping little films with bigtime stars who were neverbetter. Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," Lancaster here, Rock Hudson in "Seconds," Gene Hackman in "French Connection II" - all of these roles are, in one way or another, about men trying to figure themselves out. Sinatra is brainwashed; Rock Hudson is an old man in a young man's body; Hackman is a celebrity cop who turns into a junkie; and, most subtly yet perhaps most effectively, Lancaster in "The Train" is a man who's just trying to do his awful, awful job, and somehow that job turns him into a hero.

Here's the setup - the Nazis are leaving Paris, and one Colonel wants to take the great art of France with him on the titular Train. The opening credits sequence sets the tone perfectly - soldiers arranging boxes with names like "Miro," "Picasso," "Dali," "Renoir," etc. The stakes are simple - that art is the glory of France, and it can't be taken. Not to worry - you don't have to like art to enjoy this movie, since Lancaster, as the rebel leader, definitely doesn't. (He regularly suggests blowing the train up.) The movie wanders around in its opening hour - the Nazis are trying to leave Paris, and Lancaster, as the railway inspector, is trying to delay them long enough so that the Allies can come in and bomb them all to hell.

More things happen - I don't want to go into detail, not because the movie is particularly twisty, but because the tiny aspects of plot are so essential to how this movie becomes what it becomes. More or less just by not being blown up earlier, the train with the art onboard becomes a strange kind of MacGuffin - nobody who's protecting it particularly wants to protect it, and everyone who tries to ends up dead. The person who most appreciates the art is the Nazi Colonel who's willing to kill everyone - even his own men - to keep the art for Germany.

The movie flows along organically, partially because, at the beginning, no one's role is particularly clear. Whereas all of the characters in "The X-Files" feel like mouthpieces for a particular theme, here the characters are normal people in doubly fantastic times - because of the War, which is actually getting worse the closer it gets to the end, and because of the Train, which supposedly holds the glory of France. ("Have you ever seen the paintings?" Lancaster's friend asks him, right before they go off to sacrifice themselves yet again. "When we're finished, I think we should take a look.")

The last twenty minutes of "The Train" are some of the most tense of any movie. And yet, they're desperately slow. Lancaster is hobbling - he's been shot in the movie, and in real life he suffered a knee injury while playing golf. The tension is unbearable. At the end of "The X-Files," Mulder is also hobbling from an injury or two, but I think there's one main difference. In "The Train," we see exactly where Lancaster is - he's climbing over a hillside, and there's a shot that's so wide that you have to watch it two or three times before you notice the tiny little moving Lancaster dot. We can feel every step, because we're there for every step, or at least it feels like it. In "the X-Files,' Mulder emerges from a wreck and then starts runwalking. We cut, and he's somewhere else, doing some more runwalking. At one point, he's attacked by dogs, but the film cuts away from him just as the dogs attack. We cut to inside the evil secret lair, where people hear dogs barking and run outside. There, they find a dog which appears to have two heads, and one of the heads is dead.

It's an intriguing image, but why don't we get to see Mulder fighting the dog? Well, because Mulder needs to magically appear inside at that very moment. Surprise! Christopher Nolan is good at this sort of thing, but he's the exception - and since his characters almost always have secret identities, perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule.

What I'm saying is that there's hardly any magic in any single shot of "The X-Files," and "The Train" is full of magic. Why is that? Why is it that an old slow movie with hardly any memorable characters somehow, in its final moments, turns into one of the greatest standoffs in movie history? Why is it that such a movie can be much more fine-tuned than a movie whose creators have had more than a decade to finesse the character dynamic, to figure out what stories work and what stories wouldn't?

In "The Train," characters rarely talk about anything but how much they want to survive, and the movie somehow feels filled with ideas. In "the X-Files," characters rarely talk about anything but ideas, and the movie somehow feels emptied of everything. Why is that?

"The Dark Knight"

The Dark Knight solves crime. The Dark Knight cures diseases. The Dark Knight prevents sunburn. The Dark Knight investigates Abu Ghraib. The Dark Knight turns bad mofo Staten Island men into geeksturbating incoherent sad-happy undevirginized men. The Dark Knight creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, Encolpio. The Dark Knight was one opening night, on IMAX, in capital letters, for two and a half hours, playing at six AM, for the first time ever, in CAPITAL LETTERS, because you can't say it enough. The Dark Knight fights fascism. The Dark Knight is what you talk about when you're around people you don't know and you need to talk about something. The Dark Knight makes you attractive. The Dark Knight works wonders. Wonders beyond our human ken. The Dark Knight is Christian Bale. He has three voices in the movie. One is a loud whisper, which he uses when he's wearing the mask, except for one little moment, which you only notice when you see it the second time (and yes, you have to see it the second time.) One is the douchebag billionaire voice, which when he uses you remember that he is a british fellow talking American, but it's okay, because every syllable the man named Bruce Wayne uses is so practiced (because every moment he lives he is imagining himself as someone else [because he, a character conceived by two people about 70 years ago, when his name had a hyphen, and the Great Depression was, you know, happening, just so happen to be the very image of a modern man)]. One, the final one, is the voice he uses when he is speaking to someone who knows that both of the above voices are fake - his butler Alfred, usually, and occasionally his galpal Rachel, who is his affair of the heart, who was played by Katie Holmes and is now and forever played by Maggie Gyllenhall, who is too good for this movie (her role is an awful, awfully noticeable downer in this great movie about men trying to do good and thus[ly] betraying everyone they tell themselves they love.) This is the greatest performance Christian Bale has ever had - impressive, when you consider that he also blew your mind in the preview for the new "Terminator" that played before this audio visual global event, and that he was competing with the image of Dr. Manhattan in the trailer for "Watchmen," which, unless that movie is capable of defeating this one in being the greatest ever, will be fundamentally disappointing (because the "Watchmen" trailer is, for some of us, the greatest not-the-actual-thing thing, ever, in all history, of humankind, ever.) And even more impressive, when you consider that Batman is the fifth or sixth lead in "The Dark Knight," which (we all didn't notice until we saw the movie) is a film with "Batman" not even remotely in its title.

Yes, this is a movie about Harvey Dent - played awfully by Tommy Lee Jones, and briefly by Billy Fucking Dee Williams, and now perfectly wonderfully endlessly by Aaron Eckhart - who says his own epitaph (which actually happens often in bad movies but here happens quitely in the greatest movie), "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain." And it's also about Morgan Freeman, in a real role ("The Dark Knight" helps us all understand that "Wanted" is dogshit.) But wait, you're forgetting Gary Oldman, who frankly make you cry, with happiness, again, and again. And again. He's so good that you could call the movie Jim Gordon, and it would be the greatest crime sequel since French Connection II. Which it is. Except erase sequel, and crime, and underline greatest, in bold, with gold.

The Dark Knight opens up China to the west. (True.) The Dark Knight has a brief yet immortal scene in Hong Kong. The Dark Knight involves a Hong Kong controversy. Tangentially. Abstractly. It's conversation worthy. Every line in this movie is conversation worthy. There will be discussions about cadence. There will be agonizations over missed chances for The Sequel. (Spoiler alert - the Joker does not die. Spoiler alert - he will live forever.) "There Will be Blood" - and by the way, this movie is utterly that movie with superheroes. What I mean is that you feel the same way watching it. Horrified. Yet laughing, endlessly, horribly (because you're laughing at Armageddon), splendidly (because you laugh about the same jokes twice and thrice and whatever word rhymes with those two that means a billion million), and wonderfully (because this movie makes you believe in movies, and comic books films, and life after death, and fiction.)

The Dark Knight makes critics write the greatest reviews of their lifetimes. Go here. Read this. Read it out loud. Read it on the street. Read it until you memorize every word. Why haven't you seen it? What is going on in your unfortunate head? Why aren't you and I talking about The Dark Knight right now, together, you quoting your favorite line and me quoting mine (no doubt initially being words spoken by Heath Ledger, who is amazing, who is not dead, because he lives on, today, in theaters, not just everywhere but more everywhere than ever before.)

This movie solves problems. This movie examines modernity. This movie recreates situations recognizable from unenjoyable new broadcasts. This movie features news broadcasts. This movie involves Anthony Michael Hall, and Cillian Murphy, and the guy who played Zeus in "Friday." If I tell you he gives the best performance in the whole film, will you believe me? What if I tell you that he's only onscreen for maybe three minutes? And what if I tell you that that means that the same guy who played Prisoner #2 in the third Austin Powers and who voiced a role in that fucking 50 Cent shitfest game has now given the greatest role in the greatest film ever made?

The Dark Knight is it. The Dark Knight makes you cry. The Dark Knight makes you laugh. But only at dirty bad things. The Dark Knight ends perfectly. It does lots of other things perfectly, too. It can't help it. It's the greatest movie ever. Made. Conceived. Performed. Filmed. Edited. Scored (you will love the violins [I insist.]) Released. The Dark Knight is its own industry. The Dark Knight is its own country. The Dark Knight is itself. It's wonderful. It's memorable. It's a sequel. It's the "Chinatown" of superhero movies. It's the "Chinatown" of this decade. It's "Chinatown" with a Bat-cycle. It's "Chinatown." Forget it, Jake, this is Gotham City. Every movie that came before can't compare. Every movie that comes after will try to. They will all fail, and miserably. Because this is it. You can tell. Because you see it twice, and still want to see it. Again. Again. Again. Please.

"Sex and the City" - Season 3

Samantha meets a male version of herself twice in Season 3. At a nightclub, she runs into Tom Reymi, "the male Samantha," who utters the immortal line, "We know the same people, we should go to dinner, blah blah. Wanna fuck?" (Another great Tom Reymi utterance from ten seconds later - "You haven't fucked till you've fucked in the swing.") Later in the season, she meets "Sam Jones," who's not so much a cross-gender duplicate as he is a bizarro-world altar ego: young, obsessive, and virginal. Gender twisting is everywhere in season 3: Carrie briefly gets cast adrift in a subculture of pansexuality (meeting her boyfriend's ex-boyfriend, kissing Alanis Morrissette); Miranda becomes the man in her relationship with Steve, choosing when it starts and when it ends; Charlotte, meanwhile, just becomes a man, for a photo series made up entirely of women dressed up to look like men (she looks remarkably like Orlando Bloom.)

"Sex and the City" always flirted with the weird flimsiness of modern gender - recall, in the very first episode, when Carrie says she wants to have sex "like a man" - and so it's worth pondering a simple question: What is the male version of "Sex and the City?"

The question itself holds a wealth of implicit gender assumptions which the show either broke down or built up, depending on your perspective and which season we're talking about. Is "Sex and the City" really a women's show? People talk dirty and make jokes about things you aren't supposed to make jokes about. There's copius female nudity and at least two or three sex scenes per episode - in fact, all that anyone seems able to talk about is sex and, more to the point, fucking.

From Charlotte: "Don't you ever want to be just pounded hard? Like when the bed is moving all around, and it's all sweaty, your head is knocking the headboard and you feel it might blow off? Dammit, I just really want to be fucked. Just really fucked!"

How is this not a schoolboy fantasy come to life?

Sure, women are the stars, but from start to finish, this is a show about men - landing them, screwing them, figuring them out, trying to ignore them, and ultimately loving them. (That's with the noteworthy exception of the strange, flawed, short, boring, yet kind of wonderful Season 5.) In the same episode where Samantha and the world meets Tom Reymi, Carrie is struggling with her conscience - she's cheating on nice-guy Aiden with bad-guy Big. Desperate for a happy ending, she tells Samantha, "You've heard stories about affairs where people realize how great their other relationship is and end it without anyone being the wiser."

Samantha retorts, almost angry, "I don't watch 'Lifetime Television for Women.''"

If this is a "women's show," then you have to point to Quentin Tarantino as the pre-eminent "women's director" of the last decade. Sure, he became famous for two guy's guy art flicks - the all-male cast of "Reservoir Dogs," the testosterone-ridden palookas firing guns and bible verses in "Pulp Fiction" - but "Jackie Brown" is all about Pam Grier, and "Kill Bill" features a cavalcade of strong, albeit twisted, female types (Vivica A. Fox is the suburban mom making war in her kitchen; Lucy Liu is a business woman who rises to the top of the most male-dominated business in the world, the Tokyo Yakuza; Uma Thurman is the knocked-up girl burnt by her ex who seeks vengeance on his new girlfriend and ends up as a mother to his child), and "Death Proof" is basically two episodes of "Sex and the City" plus a twenty-minute car chase.

But the show did become a true cultural phenomenon for women (and an anti-phenomenon for men.) And, in some ways, I think that Season 3 is the last time you can really watch the show as itself and not as its phenomenon - in fact, there's a point in the season where the show explicitly deconstructs its own cultural impact, and I don't know if it ever fully recovers (that would be Matthew McConaughey, playing himself as no one else can, begging Carrie to let him turn her column into a movie.) The first twelve episodes of the season, from the fireman's fashion show through Charlotte's wedding in the show's 42nd installment, represent the absolute peak of the show's powers - after the wedding, the gang flees to Los Angeles, and settles in for three more seasons of diminishing returns.

Truly, this is the Golden Age of "Sex and the City" - after all, this is the beginning of Carrie's relationship with Aidan, and more importantly, the Aidan/Big duality which dominates Carrie's personality and may, in fact, essentially symbolize women's relationship to the male race. When people think about "Sex and the City," I would venture to assume that they aren't thinking about the later seasons, when everyone is in long-term relationships and everyone has health problems and Baryshnikov tries acting; nor, for that matter, are they thinking about the early seasons, when Carrie talked to the camera but almost never mentioned shoes.

All TV shows that last several seasons, especially those which can be said to change the face of television, are really radically different within themselves. Usually, they're at least three different pieces, loosely but obviously divided across the show's run. The first season of "Sopranos" is completely different from the last season of "Sopranos" - the whole visual look of the show has changed into something more noirish, half of the supporting cast is dead, Anthony Jr. is a main character, no one ever has any fun, and Tony has become the villain. "Lost" is also miles away in season 4 than where it was in season 1 - in its primary narrative and thematic concerns, in its main characters (how could the show last so long without Ben?), in the length of its seasons and the level of production design. Even "Entourage," an ode to SoCal decadence, has become radically different in scope - less about Hollywood glamour and more about Hollywood business.

Yet still, we consider a TV show to be a single work, and when we think about the show in abstract, I would argue there is some precise period in the show's history which we consider. And this is it, right here, the vague eternal moment we talk about when we talk about "Sex and the City," the exact point when the show was equally funny and serious, equally about long-term relationships and one-night stands, equally focused on the women's relationship with their men and their relationship with each other. The show was occasionally better, but it was ever quite as perfect again.

This is, after all, the season in which Carrie asks "Are We Sluts?" That question (which is also the title of that great episode) is never quite answered by Carrie, and it's rarely repeated when people talk about the show, which is ironic, since most of the columns which criticize "Sex and the City" (especially ones like this, which draw comparisons or contrasts between the show and the fall of Hillary Clinton) are basically dancing around an answer: Yes You Are.

Are they sluts? That's a loaded word - like bitch or cocktease or whore or the c-word, you can make the argument that, because there's no similar derogatory term for men, the word is patently unfair, and should not be used in reference to anyone. Several vague statistics were thrown around the talkosphere after the Sex and the City Movie came out, to the effect that, although Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte sleep with more men in the show's run than the average American female, they sleep with the exact average amount of men for a New York woman. (Which doesn't really change the question - fundamentalist preachers and investment bankers would argue that that just proves that ALL New York Women are sluts.)

This all brings us back to the question - what is the male version of the show? The usual shorthand is to point to shows about a group of male friends having and talking about sex - "Queer as Folk," "Big Shots," and most specifically, "Entourage." After all, "Entourage" is basically the great American young male wet dream - hanging out, smoking weed, playing video games on a bigscreen projector, getting bottle service in clubs, hooking up with Mandy Moore, and best of all, getting to call it all Work.

Certainly, "Entourage" has been as much an essential Los Angeles monument as "Sex" was for New York; certainly, the interplay of the four friends on that other show seems to mirror the interplay of the four friends on this one. Vince is Carrie, the head of the group and the face of the show, who's also the least interesting character played by the least talented performer; Eric is Miranda, the most realistic character with an actual job and realistic relationship troubles, played with rueful sarcasm by the most subtle and poker-faced actor; Johnny Drama is Charlotte, lovably old-fashioned and lusting for an impossible dream (fame for Drama, true love for Charlotte); Turtle is Samantha, the extreme personification of the show's already extreme treatment of its respective gender (he: chubby, stoned, freeloading, unshaven, talks like he's listened to too much hip-hop; she: thin, fashionable, independent, endlessly sexual, refusing to age past 35.)

But the comparison doesn't quite hold. "Sex and the City" focuses its eye closely on every new man who comes into each girls' life, even if it's only to explore one particular detail; the women on "Entourage" are essentially the same hot early-20s model wannabes, except for those rare occasions when they're actually models. The relationships on "Sex and the City" are all about flirtation, where most of the relationships on "Entourage" skip straight to the sex. More generally, "Sex and the City" asks big questions - about gender, about city life, about modern day America - where "Entourage" lives in a zone of blissful ignorance. You could argue that it's precisely these differences that makes it "the male Sex and the City," just as you could argue that those differences make it "The West Coast Sex and the City."

In the middle of the third season of "Sex and the City," the whole gang goes to Los Angeles. They hang out at wild parties and meet famous Hollywood actors playing themselves (Matthew McConaughey) and playing other people (Vince Vaughn as a Hollywood douche, Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Hollywood douchette). Everyone they meet is incredibly good looking. They even go to the Playboy Mansion. Is it any coincidence that this is basically sums up "Entourage?" And it is another coincidence that these are the worst two episodes of the entire series?

Still, beyond the content of the shows, I think they're drastically different in the nature of their evolution. The first season of "Entourage," and especially the second one, is all about lovable decadence - it's not really about anything, and there's never really any major tension (both season finales hint at tension - will the group be broken up? - only to break that tension after a few moments, setting everything back to right.) Oddly enough, as the show become more dramatically intensive - with the ongoing Medellin plotline, with failure for the characters - it became less interesting, as if somehow the whole genius of the show was in its pop escapist vision of a world without consequence. It evolved as a show, but the phenomenon ended.

In Season 3, "Sex and the City" takes a similar move, becoming more dramatically intensive and moving away from the relatively flighty narratives of the first season. Season 3 truly starts to test the nature of the show: Charlotte gets married, the beginning of the end for the show's sexy-singles phase; Samantha and Charlotte quarrel, briefly breaking apart the friendship circle; Samantha gets sick, the first time we've ever seen her demonstrate any real weakness and the first time she ever seems to consider the disadvantages of singlehood; and, most importantly, Carrie sleeps with Big, cheating on Aidan, at the exact moment when everything in her life seems to be perfect.

"Sex and the City" had to evolve to become a true phenomenon, because after Carrie's affair with Big, the show gained an added heft, and a whiff of danger. The glam fashion-show image that tends to be propagated by the media doesn't quite do the show justice; nor, conversely, does the sexual-anthropological-analytical concept (Sex Columnist Debates Modern Female Issues) really get to the core of why the show is a true epic narrative, and not just a fuck-of-the-week. When Carrie sleeps with Big - doing it dirty, first in an elevator, and then in the bedroom, and then lazily smoking tobacco just before the credits roll - she becomes, briefly but effectively, her own show's villain.

This plotline is the show's greatest argument for itself, and also against itself - for once, Carrie's analytical mind (the invisible narrator, the columnist whose columns we never see) is not given the last word. I suspect this is because this is one of the few times that Carrie, or anyone on the show, does something truly dangerous, and sinful, and unforgivable, and yet also touchingly human. This is the first time that Cheating will play a major role in an ongoing plot arc - and considering how little screen time is devoted to Charlotte's dalliance with a gardener and Samantha's uncomfortable top-floor bonus screw with Richard, you could make the argument that this is truly the one Cheating Plot in the show's history. With the Carrie-Aidan-Big plotline, the show didn't just nail modern gender politics - it found a way to question our own preconceptions of the show and the show's initial concept.

I know many people who can't stand Carrie. I can't decide if that's because they don't like her as a character or as a person - that is, if they can't stand her for who she is or for what she does. True, she's a whiner, and so painfully into fashion as to basically ruin her bank account, and in later seasons she's got the most utterly painful habit of talking in cutesy black talk (we get our first taste of this quirk in the season 3 finale, in an exchange with trannie hookers.) All of that is why most men hate her. But she also makes poor decisions, and dates the wrong men, and complains to them without every really solving anything. That's why most women hate her - but only as friends hate friends who do stupid things. In fact, I don't think it's wrong to say that although all the girls on the show make bad decisions often, Carrie makes the worst decisions constantly.

The thing is, Carrie is a writer. Although we never actually get a look at her column, we can extrapolate that it is largely autobiographical. Her voiceover narration often bleeds into the writing; once her book is published, Mr. Big teasingly asks for his own name; at the beginning of season 3, her affair with a politico gets an anonymous tell-all, with the awful title "To Pee or Not to Pee." So she writes about herself and her mistakes constantly, and despite the fact that the end of each show is structured as an epiphany, she essentially learns nothing. She continues to make the same mistakes, in fact, makes even worse mistakes the further she goes (the downward trend from Aidan/Big to greedy ineffectual Berger and finally to the remote Aleksander is fine evidence of that.)

We should not forget that the entirety of "Sex and the City" is set many years after the golden age of these womens' lives. They are no longer in their twenties; it is a long time since sex, or even romance, was something new and unique; their bodies are beginning to fail them, in small ways (cellulite) and in large ways (infertility.) This shines a weird ironic light on all those college girls who idolize "Sex and the City," since the characters on the show hate college girls. (There's a great episode later in the series when Samantha hosts a party for an adolescent socialite who drinks, smokes, and fucks; the result plays like a pre-satire of "Gossip Girl," except played more realistic than anything on that other glam New York show.) The essential themes of "Sex and the City" are loneliness, frustration, confusion, and awkwardness. Girl power!

This is why, beginning with season 3, the real "male version" of "Sex and the City" becomes, undoubtedly, "The Sopranos." (Preface: It's true that "Sopranos" had its share of main female characters, but the show was always focused on a man's world. Notice how, whenever a woman tries to stand against the preconceptions of the mob men and of the show itself, the male hierarchy forces her back in - Adriana gets killed, Melfi gets raped first by a man and then by the system, Carmela tries to divorce Tony but gets trapped by him at every turn. Even Angie Bonpensiero gets absorbed - in season 2, she's talking about leaving her deadbeat husband; by season 6, she's "one of the boys.")

On one level, the two shows shared a basic thematic characteristic - they were all about analysis, and specifically, a pointed analysis of modern gender roles. "The Sopranos," for most of its run, got its main power and focus from the scenes between Tony Soprano and his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi. Their ongoing dialogue put everything else on the show under microscopic examination - Tony's relationships, Tony's work, Tony's self-image, Tony's dreams. Those scenes were the gateway towards the show's dissection of modern America, and you can learn nearly everything you have to know about contemporary manhood from six and a half seasons of "The Sopranos." In season 1, Tony wonders, "What happened to Gary Cooper?" as he considers the sad state of his own medicated, manic depressive generation; by season 6, he's admitting, "I hate my son," when he considers the overstimulated, intellectually undernourished, lazy generation represented by his son.

True, Carrie only goes to see a psychiatrist once, but I would argue that, where Tony requires a a (female) psychiatrist as a medium in order to examine himself, Carrie needs only her Apple Computer. Those scenes of her, alone in her room smoking a cigarette, while Narrator-Carrie rhapsodizes on the soundtrack, serve the same function as the Dr. Melfi scenes - they take you, briefly, one step back from the show, into the MST3K-style audience, to consider, well, what it all means.

The two shows come to radically different conclusions about "what it all means," but they follow remarkable similar avenues for getting there. Both shows improved throughout their entire run, until a certain point (probably season 5 of "Sex" and season 6 of "Sopranos") where the shows became steadily more intelligent but also steadily darker, and weirder, and much less fun. Season 6 of Sopranos features an endless amount of funerals; by the end of the show, there's scarcely anyone left of the old gang. Similarly, by the end of "Sex and the City," the show has morphed completely from a show about single women to a show about women in relationships (two are even married!)

This is a natural progression, and for TV it is a decidedly modern one (nothing ever really changed in 20 years of "Gunsmoke"), but it also makes both shows far more difficult to like. Just as it's easier to enjoy "Sex" when it's all glam and one-night stands, it's easier to like "Sopranos" when it's all guns and fights and drugs. Yet the endings of "Sex" and "Sopranos" could not be more different - the modern-fairy-tale ending of Big and Carrie is miles removed from the ambiguous, bleak ending of "Sopranos" (which isn't, technically, an ending at all.)

Of course, there's an important difference between "Sopranos" and "Sex and the City," although I think it may say more about the difference between women and men than between the two shows' styles. Tony's analysis on "Sopranos" circles endlessly around his parents - first his mother's horrible emotional abuse, and then his father's even more horrible moral abuse. It's an openly Catholic notion - sins of the father, original sin, dicks dicks dicks. So much weight is given on the show to where people have come from - the interlocking family relations match the importance of "family" in the real-life and movie mob.

On "Sex," conversely, Carrie only mentions her father once. It's in season 4, when she starts working at Vogue, and reveals to a man her father's age that her dad left when she was only 5. This is thrown out at the end of season 4, and I've read at least on review that calls this as a left-field revelation, but it's not handled that way, really.

After 7 seasons of the show, it's remarkable how little we know about any of the girls and their lives before 1999. Miranda's mom dies so quickly that they didn't even hire an actress to play her; we never catch a whiff of Charlotte's or Samantha's parents (perhaps they were born at the beginning of the creation and split in two, yin and yang, slut and prom queen.) We get occasional tidbits of background - Samantha lost her virginity when she was 12, Charlotte was in Kappa Kappa Gamma and rode horses- but those tidbits merely confirm what we'd already expected.

What I'm saying is that, for these characters, for their lives in New York, their past simply doesn't matter. This is a show with its focus entirely on the present; and it is also a show with a profound understanding of its own bullshit. It is telling, I think, that Carrie decides that going to a psychiatrist is not for her after one episode, EVEN THOUGH her psychiatrist was right; comparatively, Tony Soprano spends seven years hating psychiatry, often leaving or threatening to leave (or threatening his psychiatrist), before finally pleading, when Melfi kicks him out, "We're making progress!"

So perhaps when we are talking about the show's feminine quality, we are talking about it's uniquely feminine strength - the way in which disappointments are conquered, and sins are forgiven, and cancer itself fades away over the coffee table with friends.

And so perhaps the "male version" of "Sex and the City" is a show with the exact opposite quality - uniquely male weakness - in which the sins of the past, and particularly the sins commissioned by parents upon their children, are revisited over and over again in the present, with the implication that the future will never be any better. Whereas "Sex and the City" has the quality of constantly starting over - a new column, a new man, a new chance to find love, a new apartment in the Meatpacking district, a new marriage for Charlotte, new shoes for Carrie, a new guest appearance by Miranda's Steve - this other show would have the quality of endless repetition, of fighting the same battles. Like "Sex," this show would also be essentially analytical, attempting to discover some essential "truth" (with any number of tertiary truths along the way) - but unlike on "Sex," where the women are ultimately as confused as ever, this show would focus, fetishistically, like Oedipus, on the search for that truth, and it would keep going, no matter that every new answer resulted in a hundred other questions.

And whereas "Sex" is set in the modern city - New York in the new millenium, with a truly infinite array of relationships to form and social circles to navigate - this male "Sex" would strip down its worldview to primordial society, away from the thousand distractions. A world where men can be men, where the individual reigns supreme, where everyone starts out equally and can become King. Unlike "Sex," there would be considerable eye candy - in fact, the eye candy would be the protagonists - but also unlike "Sex," there would be precious little actual Sex. Just as "Sex" evolves, in its run, from focusing on the women's relationships with men to focusing on their relationships with each other, this other would would steadily focus in on its male characters, and their fathers, and the games they play with each other.

At the very beginning of season 3, Carrie and friends stare at Manhattan from the Staten Island Ferry. Someone says, "Who would've thought that an island that tiny would be big enough to hold all of our old boyfriends?"

Is "Lost" the male version of "Sex and the City?"

"Wanted"

I know more about movies than almost everyone I have ever met. This is the result of a combination: an essentially type-A personality with essentially type-Z fascinations. On that fateful day in late 1997, had I perhaps picked up a copy of "Genetics Today" instead of "Entertainment Weekly," I would probably be at a second-tier (yet up-and-coming) Med School right now. I know the complete cast of films I've never seen - hell, I know every other film each member of the cast has been in. I can list every film by every director working in Hollywood today. I know which screenwriters doctored which films (as a rule of thumb - it's almost always Scott Frank or John August, unless it's a Spielberg film, when it's usually Tom Stoppard.) My knowledge of film history and film style is nearly unparalleled, which means I try not to talk about movies with anyone but my closest friends.

I can remember once, years ago, my brother and I were trying to find a movie that we could watch with some family friends. We had been talking for months about watching "The Manchurian Candidate," a film classic which was not at any of our local Blockbusters. When I found it, naturally I proposed renting it. Uh-uh, said my wise elder , who gave me the best advice ever: "People don't like the movies we choose." I'm not sure if he meant "we" as in him and me (because of our distinctive taste), or "we" as in people who actually enjoy black-and-white paranoid dark-comic thrillers featuring Frank Sinatra and the naked chick from Psycho, but of course he was absolutely right. I believe we rented "The Messenger" instead, a horrible film which was at least recently horrible, whereas "The Manchurian Candidate" was anciently good.

In an effort not to appear overly conceited (if not outright geekish), I always check myself when I talk to non-film people, which is in itself overly conceited, but I always like to see how people react to movies when they didn't grow up reading film reviews or spend years studying film form. And they're less likely to be honest if I spout off a soliloquy (like the one I'm about to text-spout here.)

Such a situation has occurred recently in my discussion with normals about "Wanted," the bloodier and less philosophical remake of "The Matrix" which claims to star Angelina Jolie but actually features her in a supporting role with hardly any dialogue, save for one extended speech in which she obliquely describes her tragic past. I suppose that this speech gives her character more "depth," but considering that the rest of the role is practically wordless, it actually makes her completely uninteresting. Perhaps without even meaning to, her role in the film evokes other great star turns with little dialogue, like Mel Gibson in "Mad Max" or Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful of Dollars."

Of course, both Max and the Man With No Name had fairly straightforward goals (respectively, get the oil and get the money), whereas Angelina Jolie's Fox (she's either named after Fox McCloud in "Starfox" or the character Fox in the fictional TV show in Kelly Link's short masterwork "Magic for Beginners) is such a cipher that she could basically do anything at any time without surprise. At one point, she kisses her costar, James McAvoy, but the kiss comes so completely out of nowhere - there's been no sexual tension, no real flirtation, so it's never clear whether she's actually attracted to him (unlikely), or whether she's just kissing him to make him look like a badass in front of his cheating ex-girlfriend, currently screaming at him. In which case you have to ask, why is this movie trying so hard to make James McAvoy look cool?

Several normals have told me that "Wanted" is stylish - some of the more academic among them even note that, although the movie wasn't great, the director is clearly talented and has a "style" - but really, not a single thing happens in "Wanted" that's genuinely "stylish," unless you conceive style as a random throwing-together of tiny little raw ideas conceived by an ADD-ridden seventh grader in the first throes of his self-sexual revolution.

For instance: there's a scene early in the movie where a guy gets his head blown off by a sniper bullet. The bullet pauses, then suddenly reverses in slow motion. Yes, this is cool, but what high schooler with a camera hasn't thought of this: "Dude! Wouldn't it be cool if you're staring at the guy, and suddenly, a bullet EXPLODES through his forehead, and then ALMOST hits the camera, but then it suddenly goes to reverse slow motion, SUPER SUPER SLOW so you can see him BLINK when the BULLET ENTERS HIS HEAD!"

Really, the problem with this scene is that it doesn't go far enough. Why couldn't it suddenly shift into forward-and-even-slower motion, perhaps with a close-up on the bullet, so we can see it migrate its way through skin and bone and brain and bone and eye? Why not then shift into reverse again, even slower now, and back and forth like a tidal wave? Really, when you show a guy getting shot through the head twice, essentially giving yourself your own instant replay, why not show it three times, five times, ten times?

There are two moments of genius in this movie which hint, I think, at the tone that it's going for - puckish nihilism - and neither of them involve violence, although both involve the threat of violence, which is a much more interesting thing. Early in the movie, an Indian woman with a red bindi dot on her forehead is sitting at a table, and suddenly another red dot, from a sniper rifle, lines up with the one on her forehead. Hilarious, and dirty, and so wrong. Later in the movie - in fact, almost the entire movie later - Morgan Freeman will say the word "Motherfucker." Again, genius.

Everything else in "Wanted" is little more than schoolboy masochism. McAvoy is playing the Keanu Reeves role - he's a wage slave who suddenly finds out he's special, because he has the ability to "bend" bullets. Also, his heart can beat really fast. But mainly, he can bend bullets. (This whole "bending" thing is cool the first hundred times they do it and endlessly lame forever after, at which point you're shocked by the restraint the Wachowski Brothers showed in "The Matrix" - their bullets might have gone slow, but they always went straight.) He's welcomed into "The Fraternity," a team of assassins who, (we are told in an opening text, and again later by Morgan Freeman, and yet again later by a few other characters), was founded by a guild of Weavers hundreds of years ago. Weavers, sure, what the fuck.

Anyways, McAvoy needs to be taught assassinhood, and for the next half hour, he is "taught." The teaching method is fairly simple: beat him up, stab him, throw him off of a train, shoot him, break his fingers and toes backward, and generally knock him out. Yup, it's a subtle re-enactment of "The Passion of the Christ," except everytime he gets knocked unconscious, he wakes up in a glue-ish Bacta Tank which completely heals his wounds and gets him ready for more punishment.

So, just to recap, this is a movie which, in its first hour, shows A) one person getting killed over and over again, and B) another person getting beaten up over and over again. Naturally, this regimen of ass-kicking turns McAvoy into a gun-wielding, bullet-bending, muscle-cut badass, ready to hunt down his father's killer.

There follows two of the most ridiculous scenes in movie history, although one is kind of fun. The one that isn't fun is the scene where Morgan Freeman, as the kindly head assassin, explains to McAvoy how things work in "The Fraternity." Bear with wikipedia here: "Once he has completed his training, Wesley [that's McAvoy] is given orders to kill people from the Loom of Fate, a cloth spinning machine that gives the names of the targets through a binary code hidden in the weaving of the threads, a process which Wesley initially finds suspicious."

I love that last phrase, "a process which Wesley initially finds suspicious." What if a group of Plumbers had founded the Fraternity of Assassins, and they were given orders to kill by throwing certain types of feces (bald eagle, vestal virgin, hobo turtle) against a white wall and converting the resulting images to binary. Would Wesley find such a process "suspicious?"

Anyways, since the "Loom of Fate" scene essentially announces that, in the world of "Wanted," black is white and kangaroos have wings, the scene in which Jolie drives a car into a train (right before the train falls down a canyon but fortunately the car with Jolie and McAvoy inside gets happily jammed between cliff faces) plays like a subtle comedown. Watching the train action scene in "Wanted," I was reminded of the train action scene in "Mission: Impossible" and the train action scene in "The Train," which is actually a movielength train action scene, now that I think about it. Then I started thinking about the train flirtation scenes in "North by Northwest" and "Before Sunrise." Then I realized that it's completely impossible to do a bad scene onboard a train. I think it's because it has the same claustrophobia and sense of high-speed danger as airplanes, but without the annoying crammed feeling and with much more interesting scenery outside the window.

However, there follows another huge action scene, which can't help but be a comedown after you've seen a train fall down a canyon. This is the first reason why, I would argue, "Wanted," even at its best (which is never very good), lacks style - everyone knows you should save your best for last.

The last action sequence features a long scene, in which McAvoy runs through a weaving facility in slow motion and kills a few dozen people, picking up guns along the way. I tried to figure out why this scene was so much less effective than a similar scene in "Commando." After all, McAvoy is a much better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. More abstractly, haven't action movies gotten better since then? In "Commando," Arnold basically throws around a bunch of grenades, fires two machine guns, and famously chops off one guy's arm with an axe. In "Wanted," McAvoy executes several moves taken from various forms of kung fu and ballet, and uses all kinds of different guns. Whereas "Commando" is one-note, this scene in "Wanted" would seem to be well-designed.

Except it isn't, because the whole thing is cut to fucking hell. Which is when I realized the problem: the director of "Wanted" can only conceive of style as something he (and his puppet editor) can create, so his "stylish" scenes are basically scenes constructed entirely in tiny little bits that are meant to make the characters cool. Note that I said "characters," because "Wanted" doesn't really make the "actors" look cool. Though I'm sure McAvoy trained long and hard for this movie, he isn't a natural athlete, he isn't a kung fu star, he doesn't know how to fire two guns at once, and he certainly can't execute a Wall-Jumping Backwards Dragon Kick, so really, the scene is designed to HIDE McAvoy as much as possible.

Think of it this way: every cool movement that McAvoy makes is usually split into four shots. This means that there were four different takes of McAvoy doing that movement, and in each of those takes, 75% of the footage was McAvoy looking like a funny little Irish kid trying to be Jet Li. But 25 % of the footage, he actually LOOKED a bit like Jet Li, so if we mash all those tiny percentages together, we get 100, right?

Because the director of "Wanted" has no real concept of onscreen choreography, the overall effect of watching an action sequence from the film is a queasy headache and an urge to destroy humanity to save humanity. Compare this film to "Wall-E," a film which I loved but found a bit flawed until I saw "Wanted" and then realized that it might actually be my favorite movie all year. What's great about Pixar is that there's always a very vivid sense of onscreen space. True, that space is a completely imaginary digital composition, but once you've started watching any Pixar film, you get absorbed in the world onscreen. Places in Pixar movies feel like Places - Wall-E's shack, or the Toys in their playroom, or the Dentist's office in "Finding Nemo," or the family home in "The Incredibles."

The "style" of wanted is every style: slow-motion! fast-motion! shaky closeups! operatic slow-motion special effects leaps-across-buildings! bloodbloodbloodblood! If the "style" of "Wanted" were clothes, it would be made fun of in Vice Magazine.