Things I do

Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!

2009-10-15T05:42:47Z

Four reasons why Patrick Swayze was a bad-ass

2009-09-18T13:05:31Z

I came late to the late Mr. Swayze's bandwagon, but I have discovered the following reasons to define him as, indeed, a bad-ass:

1. He was always a movie star.
Even when his popularity dipped or when his limited range showed, he could be on screen doing absolutely nothing and you'd still want to look at him doing it, which is the true test of stardom. If you watch TV, you'll notice a lot of TV actors working hard to emote, to push themselves out the screen at you, to constantly be begging for your interest. Swayze never begged.

2. He could never convincingly sound like he was from anywhere besides Houston Texas.

3. He knew how to move.
He did his own chases, fights, dancing, singing, skydiving, and, rather than hire a stunt double, cracked four ribs learning to surf.

4. He took roles that were jokes but never treated them as jokes.
Swayze got some of the goofiest lines of the last 30 years, but they were only immortal because he took them seriously. He would have been epic in an Airplane!-style spoof, like his Red Dawn co-star Charlie Sheen, but he never appeared in one. Which means either he was a consummate professional, which is itself admirable, or he never thought of himself as "above" any character he played. No matter how ridiculous you might be - if you're a philosophy-quoting bouncer, if you fight the apocalypse with a sword and a mullet, if you rob banks to pay for surfing, if you fight Commies in Colorado with an AK47 and a mullet - Swayze would always treat you and your values with respect and dignity. Even his last great turn, as the goofy motivational speaker in Donnie Darko, is more an object of sympathy than derision; the movie may treat his final reveal as a punchline, but he doesn't.

(After cameras stopped rolling was a different matter - his Saturday Night Live appearance was largely a parade of him spoofing the roles that made him famous, from Dirty Square Dancing to a redux of Ghost that concludes with him saying "tell her [Demi Moore] she's a pig, I'm gettin my ass to heaven.")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RajNvJ3bCU&

.

From Wikipedia:
"The film [Point Break]has inspired a piece of cult theater, Point Break Live!, in which the role of Johnny Utah is played by an audience member chosen by popular acclamation after a brief audition. The new 'Keanu' reads all of his (or her) lines from cue-cards for the duration of the show, 'to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting'".[16]

Audition for rock band

2009-09-07T00:53:38Z

Auditioned for a rock band today. I mean a real rock band, not the video game. Via Craigslist and email got in touch with them and heard the music off their MySpace. They rock harder than I typically do but, hey, pitches are pitches. Via email learned that they play in "Drop C" (high-to-low: D-A-F-C-G-C) and that all their guitar and bass parts are virtually identical, so I decided to audition for both positions. I learned two of their songs off the internet. Via email learned guys have been playing for years and are connected in H-Town.

Took Sam Houston to I-10. At low traffic times it's a racetrack. Rehearsal centers are about the scariest buildings on earth. Windowless, soundproof rooms in windowless corridors. Played the two songs I'd learned off the internet on both bass and guitar. Guitar-guy let me video him playing other songs for rehearsal purposes. Drummer guy was cool too. Learned some riffs and noodled. They said I was the best one so far but they had two more bassists later in the week. I said I would keep practicing their songs and showing up for their rehearsals until they found someone they like more than me. Noodled some "Fascination Street" before leaving. Drummer called "Disintegration" a "pretty much flawless record."

Before leaving home, hours earlier, wife and I agreed that the day would only be a failure if they weren't there. An adventure is never a waste of time.

Drove home. Listening to Enigma to gay out after all that hard rock.

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

2009-09-04T03:52:50Z

If you were a boy in the '80s you know that GI Joe action figures were the best toys. I mean the little ones, not the big dolls from the '60s. They were the best not because of any backstory or set-up between hero and villain or any personality that the characters associated with the figures were supposed to have. We ignored all of that stuff and made up our own stories. They were the best because they had relatively realistic joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, waist, and knees, as opposed to Star Wars or Masters of the Universe action figures. They were the best because they were the most flexible. Even if their central rubberband split and you had to replace it with a long, more stretchy rubberband from a kitchen drawer. Even if their little plastic man-tools had a tendency to get broken off.

So we come to the feature film GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which feels like a completely off-the-shelf PG13 action movie. It has no gimmick, no reason to exist, nothing special about it. It's what you get when you take the lowest common denominator of all the other PG13 action movies of the past decade -- all the Marvel, DC, Transformer, whatever -- you take all the shared elements of those films and imagine a bunch of studio heads in suits in a boardroom, going over the calendar and realizing there's an empty weekend in August that needs a tentpole feature. There are explosions, commandos, people typing on laptops real-fast, a lot of LCD readouts, girls with amazing hair in situations that don't call for it, a couple ninjas, CG cartoonery, and a maguffin. And it's blurry, too, the way all of those movies are blurry now.

The X-Men fight commandos. So do The Transformers and everyone else. Now here's a movie with nothing but commandos. There are some fine actors involved but few of them are given anything to work with or allowed to let their personality survive the all the fast cutting. Jonathan Pryce as the President of the United States should be a cause for celebration, but it's not. As the heavies, Christopher Eccleston and Joseph Gordon-Levitt have a few good moments (JGL promises to be one of the best actors of his generation). Channing Tatum makes more of an impression in his one scene at Pretty Boy Floyd in Public Enemies than he does as the lead in GI Joe.

The movie routinely makes no sense. If the Joes are a supersecret government information, why don't they pass on the villain's identity to, say, the President? If the villainess is the hero's ex-girlfriend, why does no one think to not let him be continually put in positions where blowing her brains out would save the day? If the two ninjas (one on each side) are childhood friends, why does no one...but why bother?

The baffling thing is that the director is Stephen Sommers who, with his fine 1998 film The Mummy, pretty much invented the modern PG13 CG-action movie (he also brings the Mummy himself, Arnold Vosloo, in for some fun scenery chewing). Even though he's not in top form, he does allow something of a mood of giddiness to prevail. GI Joe is utter, unremarkable nonsense, but it's energetic nonsense, and I can't hate it. And there's a nifty dissolve from a submarine to a jet that's like something from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

A neat side note: GI Joe is set "in the not so distant future" (yes, those exact words, hooray!), but we get several flashbacks to "five years ago," in which we see our soldiers in various conflicts and various shooting matches in various places. There is no context given for any of these battles, just intertitles like "East Africa." It's like something out of Orwell's 1984: a constant war for constant peace, as if the movie is casually admitted that, in the 21st century, it will be de rigeur for US troops to always be somewhere shooting at brown people.

Thanks for laurel_tx

"FDoS" official selection at 2009 GCFF!! 2009 GCFF canceled!

2009-08-25T16:41:31Z

The First Day of Shooting is an Official Selection for the 2009 Gulf Coast Film + Video Festival! And the 2009 Gulf Coast Film + Video Festival has been CANCELED! So I get the laurels but otherwise I don't need to do SHITE!

Choked down an episode of "True Blood" (2008)

2009-08-25T15:32:09Z

Life is a series compromises and tiny defeats, a continual holding action against giving up on dreams, hairlines, integrity, and the heartbeat itself. Do people like TV because it speaks to our feelings of being compromised adults, because every frame of every second has clearly been shoveled through focus groups and corporate cronies? Because no series has any intention of ending at an artistically appropriate juncture, but instead every episode will be stretched interminably and every season drag on forever and every new season spiral into pointlessness until, like the storyteller Scherezade, its head is chopped off? (Thank you Engines of Our Ingenuity for making the 1001 Arabian Reruns connection for me.)

And why does a TV series suck? Latest theory: because it goes on forever, long past however much its initial idea can sustain it, with no clear end in sight, and without the time and resources to even look good along the way. The most expensive TV shows (Goodfellas: The Series, i.e. The Sorpranos) are $2 million per episode, coming in at $4 million for two hours. The 90 minutes of Good Night and Good Luck were $7 million. Shooting schedules are too short to do more than the same camera setups and chase people around with shaky-cams. No one can mistake 5 minutes of a TV show for 5 minutes of a movie.

It all comes down to run-time and resources. Let's say True Blood is $1 million per episode at 8 episodes a season, or $24 million for its entire run so far. The New World was $30 million dollars for 3 hours. Imagine what True Blood could be with the same resources but only a 3 hour run-time or, heavens, 90 minutes, which is about what I'm guessing its threadbare premise really deserves. It could be shot in parts of Louisiana that don't look like Vancouver, it could have fewer shaky Southern accents, it could get more locations instead of recycling the same ones. It could trim the fat. In viticulture they call it…uh, they call it…they call it something, I forget, but what you do is prune the weak grapes away and leave the strong grapes on the vine, so that they become stronger and tastier.

Not so with TV. No, just like so many of us who stretch 45 minutes of work into a soul-crushing, integrity-compromising 8-hour work day, so too does any given television series never prune and never filter (or at least never seem to). "It gets better after the first episode!" the TV lover protests. While I could counter with "but you wouldn't defend a movie by saying it gets better after the first HOUR!" I feel more compassionate when I think of how there are careers we could do and meaningful experiences we could have if people with power – the gatekeepers – would just give us a chance. We don't have the certification and the degree but, dammit, if you just let me work here for an hour you'd see that I can do the job.

It's because television so often sucks and is mediocre and is an endless compromise that it speaks to us, because we see it not living up to its potential, we see it squandering good themes, we see it toss us lesser ideas that wouldn't pass muster in the leaner artworks of cinema or the standalone novel - and we say, "Yes! That's what life is like!" The substance is immaterial, we respond to the style. In the presence of a David Lynch or a Terrence Malick, we can sense no compromise, no willingness to give up the redbelt, and so how can they speak to our lives of tiny defeats?

So we come to the pilot of HBO's TrueBlood, which the wife and I watched because, on the spur of the moment, she borrowed the first season DVD from a co-worker. Needless exposition, setting up characters and relationships instead of them actually doing anything, circling the same handful of locations – BORING. Nudity and sex and swearing to no real purpose. Cable shows run 55 minutes an episode as opposed to the network 44 – a figure that leads me to believe that those 11 minutes are comprised mostly of tits and cussing that can be dropped when the show is edited for the same syndicated 11:30 graveyard where once "cutting edge" shows like Sex and the City can be gawked at by us non-cable owners with expressions of "that's what all the fuss was for?!"

The premise of TrueBlood is that, thanks to store-bought synthetic human blood, vampires have full citizenship and are living among us – but they're facing discrimination! Most TV shows are just a recent movie rehashed and the presence of X-Girl Anna Paquin as TrueBlood's lead brings to mind the long-in-the-tooth X-Men movies. Ctrl-F replace "mutant" with "vampire." The vampires are stand-ins for gays-Jews-blacks-whatever, making way for bad puns ("come out of the coffin!") and obvious social commentary and on-the-nose speechifying. My theory is that the purpose of most social commentary is to regurgitate the same ideas, not to introduce anything new to anyone new, but so the same people who already believe the same thing can get a frisson out of thinking they're watching something cutting edge or subversive.

In conclusion, go rent the 1922 Nosferatu, because vampires are way more interesting when they're portrayed as actually not human, instead of just sexy people.

Babel (2006) and Amores Perros (2000)

2009-08-24T00:26:00Z

“And that’s when the CHUDs came after me.” So says Homer Simpson, in describing the final mishap of his disastrous trip to New York City. The same could be said of “Babel,” the solemn and humorless new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores Perros”), in which one disaster after another keeps mounting and mounting for our poor characters, until you expect the Mongols from “Andrei Roublev” to ride in next, swords held high. For lack of any other emotion, I wanted to laugh at the movie’s aura of inevitable catastrophe. At it, not with it.

Extremely well-made, utterly inaccessible, and ultimately boring, “Babel” is about as much work and detail you can put into a movie and still not have it be much good. It’s a fractured narrative about varying catastrophes linked together by one rifle, with episodes taking place in Japan, Mexico, and two in Morocco. I don’t feel like summarizing; maybe I’ll get the IMDb summary in here. Ah, here it is: “Tragedy strikes a married couple on vacation in the Moroccan desert, touching off an interlocking story involving six different families.” The acting is all around very good and the cinematography is lovely.

Is it the new kind of Oscar-bait, a blender of trendy, doom-laden Internet buzz words set to “frappe?” In which “hip” foreign locales (Japan, miscellaneous Middle East) are abuzz with “State Department” and “Homeland Security?” Like TV soaps and the movie “Crash,” new conflicts arise out of thin air every couple of minutes to be viewed (again, like any TV boy soap like “24”) through an endless parade of cameras hand-held nauseatingly by operators who equate “gritty” with “jittery.” This glorified episode of “EastEnders” is held together by a theme of “miscommunication” – substance enough for 90 minutes but hardly 140.

I was expecting to at least have an experience comparable to “Amores Perros.” I admire “Amores Perros” as a grueling-to-watch emotionally charged technical exercise, an exercise in filmmaking bravura, in good acting. Like “Babel,” it follows stories which may or may not connect and may or may not be going in chronological order, focusing only on modern-day Mexico City and not the whole world. Both movies ooze intensity almost as an end in themselves, but I prefer “Amores Perros’” fable atmosphere.

I’d be lying if I said “Amores” made much of a connection to me. It is a strong, energetic, pulsing movie – I’ve no idea what it means or what point it’s trying to make, but I can’t deny the craft that went into it. The overall structure may be a bit “Pulp Fiction” derivative – the lives of people in different social strata may or may not connect through romance and dogs – but that’s okay. It’s sort of there, like a great car that I have no interest in driving. The only other thing I’ve seen by Inarritu is the weakest episode of the BMW shorts “The Hire.” His was the one that got a conscience and all preachy – as if anyone wants to see Clive Owen not being an amoral automaton.

About the only other good thing we could say about “Babel” is when my wife sputtered out, almost in shock, “Is that Gael Garcia Bernal? He’s kind of hot.” And is it just me, or are poverty-line Middle Easterners always put in the same framing?

Finished Thursday, December 14, 2006

Starring Gael Garcia Bernal
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu & written by Guillermo Arriaga

BABEL (** out of ****)
Also starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Adriana Barraza, and Rinko Kikuchi
2006
142 min R

AMORES PERROS (*** out of ****)
(LOVE'S A BITCH)
Also starring Emilio Echevarria, Goya Toledo, and Alvaro Guerro
2000
153 min R

American Splendor (2003)

2009-08-23T23:56:31Z

Saw this back at Landmark River Oaks with the wife, possibly at a pre-release screening. Liked it a lot when I first saw it, but if I saw it again the mixture of fact/fiction/interviews/animation might strike me as too clever. I'd probably still like it though.

“American Splendor” is the wonderful tale of a curmudgeon just a little too crotchety and tightly-wound to face the world, and the clever way in which he learns to deal with it. He is in love with pessimism, with things going wrong, with scowling and complaining, with being old before his time. He scratches his head even when it doesn’t itch. He doesn’t know how to be happy. In short, I think he’s a hell of a guy. And “American Splendor” is a hell of a movie, mixing fact with fiction, re-enactments with documentary-style interviews, and sometimes even live-action with animation.

Life has not been too kind to Our Hero, but we’re never quite sure how responsible he is for the life he hates. Twice divorced, his posture is terrible, his social skills are not top-notch, he’s overweight, his apartment is a sty, and his job as a file clerk has to be mind-numbing. To make things worse, he lives in Cleveland, which has to be the most depressingly gloomy, perpetually overcast, and steel-blackened city in the world, at least the way it’s shot in “American Splendor.” So he turns to art, not as an escape, but as a way to understand his own existence. And not just any art, but comic books, and he eventually gains popularity (or at least notoriety) with his line of semi-autobiographical comic books, which he names “American Splendor.”

He is Harvey Pekar, not a made-up dude, but the real-life creator of “American Splendor” comics. The movie is an examination of his character and his day-to-day battles with everything (mostly himself). When we meet the adult Harvey in 1975 he has just lost his voice, and therefore the power to complain. This, more than the departure of wife no.2, seems to be the last straw, and he must find a new venue to cry out against the world. He is helped into underground comics by the famous cartoonist Roger Crumb, who’s already had his own movie, the aptly-titled “Crumb.” Harvey, who complains that he “cannot even draw a straight line,” begins carving his little stickfigures with an almost angry earnesty that’s nothing short of endearing.

Years later we meet Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis), who is Harvey’s soulmate and becomes his third wife. In many ways their problems are no different than those of every couple, but they are heightened by his sense of melodramatic doom and gloom, and her almost Woody Allen-esque hypochondria. When Harvey finds a lump on his hooty-hoots, it’s almost as if the two of them willed it to be there.

As Pekar, actor Paul Giamatti is slouching, bug-eyed, belly-scratching, and clad in clothes that are as unflattering as they are uncomfortable. His default reaction to just about everything is to curl back his top lip into a grimace. But, in a series of interviews sprinkled throughout the film, we meet the real Harvey Pekar, as well as the real Joyce Brabner, and he casually discusses comics, jazz, himself. What’s amazing about the movie is that, even as we’re reminded again and again that Giamatti is not Pekar—and even as Giamatti breaks character, walks off the set, and has a snack—I still cared about Giamatti’s Pekar and was still carried along by his story. Giamatti’s performance is a triumph of infidelity; watching the real Harvey and the fake Harvey side-by-side, we realize that Giamatti is far from slavish to imitating the real man. His version of Pekar is as much his creation and a full-blooded individual on his own, separate from the real person, just as the comic book version of Harvey must be different than the man who created it.

“American Splendor” is like that, mixing reality, recereations, and different fictions with each other. It’s by no means the first movie to do this; in fact, Jamie Wolf of MSN’s “Slate” does a intriguing comparison of “American Splendor” and “Annie Hall.” Pekar’s infamous trouble with David Letterman is played out in a combination of real footage, with Pekar and Letterman, and new stuff, with Giamatti and a shadowed stand-in. But the movie is even more inventive, and goes so far as including animated sequences in the style of the “American Splendor” comics. What is the purpose of this doubling? Maybe it’s just to reflect how the comic works, in its doubling of real Harvey and comic Harvey.

All along the way, amidst these storytelling tricks by writer-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, we are fascinated by this guy Pekar. He is alternately a superweirdo and an everyman, whose pessimism is both infuriating and hilarious, who is at times a complete original and yet someone we’ve all met before. In his work, he’s always striving for reality, for not selling out, for being true to himself, for not being taken over by any giant company. Yet there are two neat scenes, one in which Joyce urges him to create “Our Cancer Year” so that he can distance himself from his illness, and the other in which she discovers he’s started drinking her brand of tea. In the first instance he finally gives in to the escapism of art, and in the second he’s realized that if you are too “true to yourself,” you alienate other ideas and experiences.

Do you need to know a lot, or anything, about the “American Splendor” comic books to appreciate this movie? Nope. I didn’t know squat about them, but I am now intrigued. The movie provides a good summary of them, mostly in the opening credits. The best recent comic book movies are like this and “Unbreakable,” which don’t simply transport the comic book to the screen, but examine the appeal of comics in general, to both writers and readers. With their, let’s face it, vulgar images, comics are a primal artform, that taps whatever response they are going to get from us quickly and unconsciously. A big winner at the Sundance Film Festival, “American Splendor” is also another success story for the “dramedy,” the combination of comedy and drama, which is rapidly becoming l'arme de choix for serious independent filmmakers—and why not? Everything in life is both funny and serious, even if guys like Harvey Pekar are seemingly unaware of how hilarious their problems can be to the rest of us.

Finished October 9, 2003

Starring Paul Giamatti, Harvey Pekar, Hope Davis, Joyce Brabner, Judah Friedlander, Toby Radloff, and James Urbaniak
Directed & written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, from the comic books and graphic novels “American Splendor” and “Our Cancer Year” by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner
2003 R

Public Enemies + Inglourious Basterds (2009)

2009-08-22T17:43:52Z

Unlike books, poetry, sculptures, and all that other stuff, movies exist in time. They give us the "feeling" of time better than any other artform. We can be made to feel time pass quickly, slowly, inevitably, excruciatingly. Even cinema's bastard offspring TV has a time tool that it could uniquely but rarely exploits: the enforced break. Commercial breaks and the weeks between the episodes of TV serials can give us the impression that more time has passed for the characters than really has, or that we have spent more time with them (the time we spend thinking about them between episodes compounding the time we actually spend watching them).

"It's a Wonderful Life" was a flop in theatres but became a classic on TV, where commercial breaks between each of its eras – George Bailey as a kid, as a teenager, when he should have been in college, as a newlywed, as a father, etc. – gives it more of an epic feel, as if George and the Angel Second Class and everyone else are still busy living while we're going to the bathroom. Odd, then, how technologies that allow an entire TV season to be watched commercial-free in one sitting might be robbing them of their epic feel.

But I digress. The vogue in bad American blockbusters right now is to do away with time, to reduce everything to a fractured white noise of plot-pushing fragments. Time doesn't exist in any meaningful, adult way in "Transformers 2." So it's refreshing that the two best movies of 2009 so far take time very seriously, even while approaching it from opposing poles.

"Public Enemies" is from Michael Mann, one of the few directors who actually use the quick-cutting, fragmentary style in an artful way. Time has always been important to his characters, specifically the passing of time, of time getting away, of there not being enough of it. Mann uses his lengthy run-times to this end. In "Heat," Robert De Niro's nightmare is about drowning, which both he and Al Pacino know means he's running out of time. In "Miami Vice," Colin Farrell and Gong Li debate how "time is luck" or "time is like gravity."

With one exception, I don't think Mann has ever used a flashback in any of his films, even in places when a flashback might make sense, like the reconstruction of crime scenes in "Manhunter" or "Heat." Point being: you can't go back. (The exception is the flashback montage that begins "Ali," a sequence so masterful that it's as if Mann said "I'm only gonna do one flashback ever, and it's gonna be great, and then I'm never doing it again." Like a good gambler, he walks away from the table after hitting the jackpot.)

So we come to "Public Enemies," in which John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvyn Purvis (Christian Bale) begin the movie as larger-than-life figures, supermen who make history, extending their masculine codes on the world and people around them, bending it to their will. Dillinger is a new breed of criminal, violent and efficient, who prompts the creation of the FBI, and Purvis is supposed to be the new breed of lawman, described by FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, hilarious) as "clean-cut young men of distinction" (Roger Ebert summarizes Hoover's view of G-men essentially as "crime-fighting accountants").

Yet by the end of the movie they have (like Ali in "Ali") become – or been revealed as – signposts for history, not history's makers. Time leaves Dillinger behind: a daring, violent bank robbery that might take days or weeks for him to plan nets about as much money as the Chicago mafia gets everyday in its rooms of telegraphs and typewriters. The mafia outgrows and betrays him.

"Public Enemies" implies that Purvis, who eventually took his own life, is not Dillinger's ubermensch counterpart like Pacino / De Niro in "Heat," but takes his own life from an inability to find a place for himself in changing times. While certainly a hardass dedicated to "running Dillinger down," he can't decide if he's going to use the scientific or brutal methods Hoover alternately recommends, if he's going to beat suspects like his younger cohorts, or if he's going to be like the older lawmen he brings in from Texas and New Mexico, who are probably ruthless sociopaths in their own right, but have a code about it. (To wit, they'll shoot you through the face, but listen to and carry out your dying wish, too.)

Mann's visual strategy is a camcorder in a time machine. Far from the high gloss of De Palma's fun "The Untouchables," "Public Enemies" is a gritty, grainy, handheld, lived-in world of blown-out light sources and orange skin. We get Edward Hopper locations, sometimes reduced to abstractions by digital grain (a night drive on a forest road is reduced to two blobs or orange cutting through the blackness). No Mann movie since "Ali" has had opening credits; "Public Enemies" hits the ground running with a jailbreak and doesn't stop.

Charges that the movie makes Dillinger "charming" baffle me. Johnny Depp plays him as a sociopath through and through, who loves robbing banks. He loves the challenge, the strategy, the thrill, the risk, and that it takes all his mental and physical resources to do the job right. His famous Robin Hood relationship with the public is, to him, just a means to an end. He may be psychologically unable to care about anyone but himself, and he certainly doesn't care about something as abstract as "the public." When his friends die, he may only be feeling the loss of their company to himself.

Dillinger's in a race with – you got it – time, to live as much life as possible, as hard as possible, as fast as possible. If we like him, it's because he's so motivated, and he's doing the best he can with being crazy. If he'd been born a decade later he would have probably distinguished himself in WWII.

Which brings us to Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." Let's just steal the IMDb summary:

"In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers."

"Inglourious Basterds" expands on the Sergio Leone concept of time, in which the stretching of time makes cinema as experiential as possible. "What" happens is not important, because "what" happens can be summarized and put into words, and if that were all that mattered, reading would be the same as watching. But, perhaps more than any of his movies, "Inglourious Basterds" creates a hyper-reality of this moment that we're in right now (or, rather, the moment his characters are in).

Hitchcock once remarked that every movie is essentially a suspense movie, which is why that was the only genre he worked in. Waiting with baited breath for what you know, what you dread, is going to happen, makes you feel this instant harder, makes you exist in a particular place with particular people, not as a means to an end, and not as part of plot or for a larger thematic concern (Hitchcock and Tarantino have themes – not that you'd notice them while they're happening). It's what the movies do best.

Whereas every Michael Mann movie definitively begins (lately with a hard cut and no titles) and then definitively ends (usually with someone's back to us, be it James Caan, William L. Petersen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, Russell Means, Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, and Stephen Lang), Tarantino's scrambled chronologies make his movies feel like self-contained loops, places where characters are trapped forever.

"Pulp Fiction's" final chronological scene happens in the middle and characters come back to life. If not for a (perhaps misguided) head-bashing at the end of "Death Proof," I do not think we could say which of its two parts came before the other. The emphasis becomes not what causes things to happen, but the moment. And when plot-things happen – heads blown off, Mexican stand-offs resolved, hypodermics jabbed into hearts, an FBI agent running from the dark, heads bashed with baseball bats – they tend to follow the Sergio Leone rule of violence: enormous build-up, followed by quick violence. Tarantino adds more aftermath than Leone though. (This is opposed to Peckinpah-style violence, which is slowed down and fetishized).

In life, we spend very little time making decisions – doing the "plot" – and a lot of time living with decisions already made. Fiction tends to be a huge number of character-defining and character-changing decisions compressed into a short time. After "Inglourious Basterds," the wife and I struggled to remember if any character is shown making a decision, or if all the decisions were made off-screen. The Jewish American commandoes who become the Basterds, killing Nazis in German-occupied France, are told of their mission by Brad Pitt's part-Apache officer. He tells them he needs volunteers, describes his mission, but we never see him ASK them, and we never see them accept. Similarly, when a British general (a deadpan, hilarious cameo) describes a mission for a British lieutenant, the general never asks and the lieutenant never volunteers.

The Jewish resistance fighter who's going to blow up a movie theater full of Nazis announces to her lover that they're going to do it, and they play a typically Tarantino word game of "We're not talking about this – YOU'RE talking about this," revealing that her mind was made up before the conversation even began. The German sniper glorified by every Nazi in Paris becomes famous for killing 300 Americans from a church tower – but what exactly was he doing there to begin with?

Again and again, we see characters acting upon decisions (and deductions and plans) that we've missed. On those rare instances we see someone come to a decision – Goebbels deciding to relocate a crucial movie premiere, a German sergeant refusing to reveal information to the Basterds – the results are disastrous for the decider.

For a 150 minute movie, "Inglourious Basterds" has stunningly few scenes and locations. Each scene is allowed to breathe deeply or to build suspense. Tarantino plays the same trick at least three times, in which some despicable villain (often Christoph Waltz, deserving of his Cannes acting award) knows that someone isn't who he pretends to be, and we know it too, and the man undercover suspects it, too, and the scene is stretched to its limit. We get to know the players not based on their choices or pasts, but entirely on behavior – the moment. We know what's coming. Then the violence erupts, and it's all over in a flash. Except, in one giant, glaring instance, when we only think we know what's coming and what's inevitable…

Here's a thought: despite their vastly different approaches, "Public Enemies" and "Inglourious Basterds" are both Westerns. "Public Enemies," more obviously, is about an outlaw on the frontier of civilization, but also, like so many Westerns before it, from "Stagecoach" to "The Wild Bunch," about the end of that frontier, crushed inevitably by, you guessed it, time. Yet "Inglourious Basterds" too has a marauding Apache and an opening scene that quotes "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," "Once Upon a Time in the West," and "The Searchers."

Not only does it quote "The Searchers," it expands on "The Searchers." Framed by the cabin doorway and standing in nature, The Duke was tempted to enter the civilized world, then touched his elbow and rode away, melancholy. In "Inglourious Basterds," the girl is running full tilt from the doorway. Likewise, the movie leaves behind all traces of civilized behavior. All bets are off.

Eli Roth on "Inglourious Basterds:"
"The Cannes premiere felt like we were shooting a scene from the movie. It was like we had one last mission, and the mission was, we were going to infiltrate the 'Inglourious Basterds' premiere. And here's the plan: we were all going to dress up like movie stars, and because Aldo looks the most like a movie star, we'd dress like him and follow him up the red carpet. When he put on his sunglasses, we'd put on our sunglasses. When he took them off and waved, we'd take them off and wave. And that's how we'd sneak into the 'Inglourious Basterds' premiere. And then we'd blow up the fucking theatre."

Anyway, I'm on the 3.5 and 4 star edge with the both of them.

Three noirs: Double Indemnity (1944), Out of the Past (1947), + Touch of Evil (1958)

2009-08-20T19:02:51Z

Great, trashy, doom-and-gloom, can't-win-don't try kind of fun. "Double Indemnity" is the only Billy Wilder movie I really love (sorry, my filmsnob cred sinks). I saw "Touch of Evil" in the theater during it's 50th anniversary re-release, the other two on DVD.

Double Indemnity (1944, 107 min, NR) **** - Directed & co-written by Billy Wilder, starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson.

Two hours of Fred MacMurray referring to Barbara Stanwyck as “baby” with varying degrees of contempt. One of the best movies ever made.

Out of the Past (1947, 97 min, NR, B&W) **** - Directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer.

“Do you know a way to win?” “I know a way to lose slower.” Trashy pulp noir par excellence that puts the jaded, weary cynicism of the noir hero front and center, just behind a heavy veil of cigarette smoke. A former private eye (Mitchum) trying to start a new life is drawn back into the schemes of a femme fatale (Greer) and her grinning gangster boyfriend (Douglas). The labyrinthine plot of murders and doublecrosses is almost unfathomable, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the sleepy, passionless resignation Mitchum uses to respond to the world; he doesn’t believe for a second that he can escape his fate and acts only so he won’t regret not trying later. Priceless and endlessly quotable “can’t win, don’t try” dialogue.

Touch of Evil (1958, 112 min, NR) **** - Directed & written for the screen by Orson Welles, starring Charlton Heston, Welles, and Janet Leigh.

One of the highest, most glorious pieces of trash ever put to film. Welles, the master of shadows, is sometimes credited with making the first proper film noir (“Citizen Kane”) and the last film noir (“Touch of Evil”). Besides its elements of autobiography — Welles’ crooked police captain is a bloated waster who’s never lived up to his early potential — “Touch of Evil” is a pure genre film, brought to greatness 90 per cent by phenomenal camera work and 10 per cent by good acting. The famous opening shot lasts minutes and minutes and follows competing storylines on the same street, one a happy couple and the other a car with a bomb in the trunk, as different music washes in and out. An honest cop fades two crooks in the shadow of an old ferris wheel, leering thugs are shot gigantic from below, unnatural shadows go wild across menacing walls. Story? A play on racial mores of the time, a straight-arrow Mexican cop (yeah, Charlton Heston, genius miscasting) and an ogre of an American police captain (Welles, beneath pounds of padding) compete to solve a bordertown murder. Heston’s blonde bombshell wife (Leigh) gets caught in the middle of dirty cops, honorable crooks, betrayal, and gangs. The definition of atmospheric and the winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

Two sci-fi movies: Event Horizon (1997) and The Forgotten (2004)

2009-08-20T18:55:19Z

Saw "Event Horizon" in the theater with friends. Watched "The Forgotten" on TV with wife, possibly while doing dishes.

Event Horizon (1997, 96 min, R) **1/2 – Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, and Sean Pertwee.

One of those movies you don’t want to recommend but, after a while, you can’t figure a way out of it. Sure, “Event Horizon” is intellectually unsound, squanders a great set-up and first act, and has no denouement, but damned if it isn’t effective. There’s something haunting – as in, you can’t shake it even years later – about a lost spaceship coming out of a black hole possessed and making people gouge out their own eyeballs. Essentially a haunted house film transported to outer space, the crew of one spaceship is sent to investigate what happened to the crew of a long lost spaceship called Event Horizon. Things go bad. You expect a sci-fi explanation but you get a horror explanation instead (SPOILER: the ship went to Hell and brought back friends). “Event Horizon” is effective because stuff jumps out at the right time and damned if the message of “part of the universe is out to get you just to get you” is unsettling. Making you feel creeped out and unsettled is as good a goal for a movie to have as just about anything else. The atmosphere and production design are great – models more than CG, with a haunted spaceship based on Notre Dame cathedral – and the acting is solid, with dialogue that allows the characters to say realistically what they would say in improbable situations. When the captain watches a video of the previous crew’s fate, he announces, not unfairly, “Okay, we’re leaving.”

The Forgotten (2004, 91 min, PG13) **1/2 – Directed by Joseph Ruben, starring Julianne Moore, Dominic West, and Anthony Edwards.

Julianne Moore is always losing her children: “Boogie Nights,” this movie, that one with Samuel L. Jackson, etc. “The Forgotten” is like a feature-length episode of “The X-Files” in which the mother (Moore) of a dead child wakes up one morning to discover that nobody remembers her son but her. With its government-collusion-with-abductions, chases through deserted warehouses, and the brevity of the final conversation, “The Forgotten” doesn’t exactly bring an enormous amount of originality to the potential of its setup. But it gets points for carrying its pro-life message without ramming it down our throats (there’s a pretty clear shot of the pregnant heroine declaring “I have a life inside me;” it doesn’t feel preachy because it feels, crazy as the movie is, scene-appropriate). “The Forgotten” has the clean blue feel of a movie directed by an imported European director (think “Gothika” and “Derailed”), slick but impersonal, and there are even points when I would be just as happy to hear a summary as watch it.

Two Movies from Two Years Ago: American Gangster and The Kingdom (2007)

2009-08-20T18:44:13Z

American Gangster (*** out of ****)

American Gangster (2007, 157 min, R) *** - Directed by Ridley Scott, starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carla Gugino, and Josh Brolin. Ridley Scott at what he does best: a slick, professionally-made entertainment on a wide canvas, completely engaging, albeit a little shallow. “American Gangster” follows real-life drug kingpin Lucas (low-key Denzel) as he builds an empire and real-life cop-turned-prosecutor Roberts (Crowe) as he sets out to bring him down. The movie develops two distinct personalities and sets of values, and smashes them together. Denzel and Sir Ridley portray Lucas as being contained, hard-working, quiet, patient, and, perhaps, more than a little insane in his desire to put things back the way they were supposed to be. He takes “delayed gratification” to a kind of “Count of Monte Cristo” level, in which, after years of toil, he buys a mansion for his mother and has childhood furniture rebuilt from memory. It’s only because this isn’t directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp that the sequence doesn’t come across as obsessive and frightening. Crowe, in the meantime, may be a slob and womanizer, but he’s an emotional ascetic. In the course of the film he gives up the custody battle for his son, he puts the law ahead of his partner and boyhood friends, and finds himself an outcast among corrupt police. Giving up everything that Denzel strives to achieve and rebuild is the cost of justice. The movie’s highpoint, action-wise, comes in a Harlem drug bust in which – a la “Miami Vice” and “The Untouchables” – shotguns prove superior to automatic weapons in close urban quarters. At one point, a dealer tries shooting the police through a door, only to have the bullets bounce back into him.

The Kingdom (**1/2 out of ****)

The Kingdom (2007, 110 min, R) **1/2 (Most of the movie), ***1/2 (Ending gunfight) – Directed by Peter Berg, starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, and Ashraf Barhom. Not so much a commentary on America’s shall-we-say “bumpy” recent relations with the Middle East as a summary. A bomb blows up, American citizens are killed, and heavily-armed Americans go where they are not welcomed, where they don’t understand things, and eventually blow a lot of stuff up, with questionable results. “The Kingdom” compresses things to a terrorist attack on an American compound in Saudi Arabia, with the armed response coming from an FBI team. Once in Saudi Arabia, “The Kingdom” is essentially “Red Heat” all over again, with two police forces from different backgrounds learning to work together, although “Red Heat” gets its point across with more clarity and efficiency. As the lead FBI guy, Jamie Foxx has the Jim Belushi role, and Ashraf Barhom has the Schwarzenegger role; first they don’t get along, then they do. Chris Cooper dispenses wisdom, Jennifer Garner emotes, and Jason Bateman cracks wise. The middle section, of mostly culture clashing, is a little long in the tooth. Still, the gunfight at the end is a thing of beauty, as the combo FBI / Saudi police team machineguns its way through an apartment building. If the FBI had been attacked while driving out of the Saudi airport – skipping the whole middle section – I’d be giving “The Kingdom” a clear recommendation. The only commentary comes at the very end (SPOILERS!) when Foxx reveals that he came to the Middle East to “kill them all;” his confession is mirrored by two Saudi children swearing the same oath.

Two Westerns: 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1973)

2009-08-20T18:40:59Z

3:10 to Yuma
I didn’t get it. You read the summary and you know that the movie’s about the unlikely relationship formed between the outlaw (Russell Crowe) and the honest, penniless farmer (Christian Bale) who escorts him to jail. But, as good as Crowe and Bale are – one brooding and romantic, the other simmering and laconic – I wasn’t feeling it. When each does wild sacrifices for the other, I just didn’t feel that they were properly set up. I also didn’t get it when the bounty hunters were escorting Crowe to jail and, even in chains, he was still able to kill them one-by-one. I understood that, but I didn’t understand why not a single bounty hunter even suggested “why don’t we go ahead and kill this guy and save our lives?” Aside from those two issues, “3:10 to Yuma” is a splendid, direct western, with brutal gunfights and a dreamy-eyed psycho played by Ben Foster, who matches wits with Peter Fonda’s walk-off-a-gunshot-to-the-gut bounty hunter.

117 min, R – Directed by James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster, Gretchen Mol, and Peter Fonda.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Altman has a way of making movies I intellectually recognize as great, yet I feel little personal connection to them. I don’t have anything bad to say about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and I could even argue that it’s Altman’s best movie, but it doesn’t hit me the way a “great” movie should. Maybe after I let it gestate a few years I’ll feel differently. Anyway, Altman’s sepia-tinted anti-Western has held up better than, say, “Little Big Man” because it’s filled with people and not just propaganda. Sure, it overturns Western conventions and myths by showing the frontier as being built by dirty alcoholics and whores instead of noble gunfighters, but the movie has affection for these swine and is a good movie besides that. I also like that the whores and the townsfolk are on equal moral footing throughout; holier-than-thou prostitutes are just as tiring as one-dimensional crack whores. McCabe (Beatty) is a gambler who turns a mining outpost into an actual town. He’s cleverer than everyone else there, but not as clever as Mrs. Miller (Beatty’s girl-of-the-moment Christie), who comes along to run the whorehouse. Eventually the West ends, the way the West always does in Westerns, and the robber barons want McCabe to die with it. But that’s not what interests Altman, as he openly admits in the DVD commentary; he’s more interested in building his own mining town from the ground up, filling it with actors, and making a documentary (practically) of what happens.

121 min, R – Directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonios, and William Devane.

A conversation made of pure awesome

2009-08-18T02:49:05Z

MY MOM: (Complains about how expensive everything is.)

ME: So is there a particular age at which everyone just stops understanding inflation?

MY DAD: It's about 50.

Totally random novel excerpt

2009-08-14T18:36:03Z

I was so messed up I would’ve talked to Lupe. Anyone. But today wasn’t her day at the house. I don’t want Mom to know I smoke so I never smoke in the house but there was no one home so I cracked my bedroom window and put my back to the bed and I smoked. I lay there and smoked while the cat made himself at home by my feet and I thought about what I’d seen and thought about telling Tomas but I wanted to be as straight and square with him for as long as possible. I wanted to hide all the scary me-shit for later.

My room is a mess because I haven’t decided who I want to be. I half-dozed for like a second because there was some Hearts of Space in the CD player and I know I should have minded my real problems but instead I thought about how I should get my room in order so if Tomas is ever over he’ll only see who I am now and not who I was a year ago. There’s kiddy crap like teddy bears and posters of unicorns but it’s next to a Monet reproduction and a movie poster for The Passion of Joan of Arc. My meanswell aunt got all us real cheesy pictures of Jesus and mine’s right next to this Satanic gargoyle that still has the pricetag on. The clothes on the floor and the back of the chair and in a pile at the foot of the bed where sometimes I forget them and they get slept on for three or four days – they’re allblack. It’s only my older clothes – everything that I haven’t acquired in the last year or two – it’s only my older clothes that get in the closet because I never wear them anymore. I went through a lot of like yellows and tans and pinks but I’m through with that now.

I have about – I don’t know – ten billion CDs because Livia left most of hers behind like a purge – with her clothes and books and whatever – so her five billion and my five billion make ten. A lot of them are in the wrong cases and some of them are two per case and a lot of them are just piled on my dresser without cases. I know I know it’s terrible. And of course there are dirty dishes.

A door shut downstairs.

Crap! I put the cigarette out and waved the smoke out the window. Then I looked at my watch. It was too early for anyone to be home but me.

Teddybearcat didn’t flinch until I got off the bed. Which is weird because normally he hears everything.

I was never any good at softball – again where Cecilia excelled and I failed – but I kept the bat. I got it from under the bed and crept down the stairs. With each step I imagined what it would be like to see some stranger, some intruder – someone something – occupying the space of the kitchen or the living room. The outrage of a break-in or theft or attack or – I don’t know – I don’t get outraged because who the fuck am I that when I’m slighted it matters worse than when anyone else suffers the same thing – it just went right out of my mind in favor of the sight of an alien forming in our house – first legs and then a waist and then turning around – and he would have no intents I could comprehend and everything in my life up until that moment would collapse into an inconsequential speck of floating glittery whatever – and none of my stories would matter and the pictures on my notes and all the things I wanted to tell Tomas about God and the environment and how I’ve always wanted to volunteer at a soup kitchen if they still exist – this person who cut through the air and who made the floor and the space and the walls suddenly more real and less like the TV show I always imagined them to be. So my heart was making too much noise for me to know if the floor was creaking under me or not.

It was just Chrissy with a bowl of cereal. I lowered the bat.

The microwave went – ding! – and she took out a mug with a teabag nosing out of it. The mug was too hot so she winced and put it down on the counter and gave her wounded hand a shake before turning her attention back to the cereal. She didn’t look at me even when I addressed her in the voice of condescension which is the older sibling’s eternal perquisite. She’s been taller than me for about a year.

Three movies I love

2009-08-13T20:43:57Z

Amadeus (1984, 160 min theatrical release, 180 min director’s, PG theatrical, R director’s) ****
I'm not sure I've ever heard a serious criticism leveled against "Amadeus" (historical inaccuracy is not a serious criticism) except that it's "middlebrow." Yes, of course it's middlebrow, but it's the most breezy, accessible, and fun 3-hour middlebrow period epic ever! Nary a week goes by when the Mozart laugh doesn't come in handy. I saw this movie for the first time on a Saturday or Sunday in high school, when I'd missed the first few minutes and it was showing on TV spread out over five hours or something. The promos during commercial breaks were clearly (and inaccurately) for a different broadcast of "Amadeus" intended to be divided over two nights.

2004 review

Directed by Milos Forman, starring F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce. Beautiful to watch and beautiful to hear, the life of Mozart is turned into a terrific fable on what it means to possess genius, to lack genius, to appreciate genius in others, and, finally, to know when God has picked someone else. The composer Salieri (Abraham) is first in awe of the vulgar, but infinitely more brilliant Mozart (Hulce), and eventually succumbs to a crippling envy and indignation that causes him to declare war on the younger man. A story for any era, its historical inaccuracies should be ignored. Oscars for Picture, Director, Actor Abraham, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costumes, etc.

Andrei Roublev (1962, B&W, 205 min, NR) ****
The final black-and-white scene had me bawling my fucking eyes out. Hours of Russians and Mongols being casually violent to each other (including that badass bit when a nobleman nonchalantly threatens to run someone down with his horse), and then in the end God proves that mercy is infinitely more powerful than any show of strength. "We'll go to the city and you'll build bells and I'll paint, and what a feast it will be for the people." Love it, love it, love it.

2004 review

Directed & co-written by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Andrei Solonitsyn. Formerly of “Sight & Sound’s Ten Best Movies of All Time,” filmmaker Tarkovsky’s epic is an impossibly ambitious treatise on the duty of the artist: to bring his audience into a closer relationship with God, not through reason and logic, but through great images and sincerity. To this end, Tarkovsky shows medieval Russia through the eyes of a conflicted iconographer during a time when violence was distributed casually and passionlessly. Unreasonably long, yet unreasonably beautiful, the movie is paced like a Latin mass and packed with opportunities for meditation.

Apocalypse Now (1979, 153 min, R) ****
and
Apocalypse Now Redux (2001, 202 min, R) ****
Ah, "Apocalypse Now," once and future and always shall be one of my favorite movies of all time. Did I see it in elementary school, or did I at least wait until I was in junior high or high school? Either way, it was a 4x3 VHS, taped by a friend of my mom off HBO. The teenager in me loves its cheerful nihilism, the boy in me loves the violence, the hippy sissy Catholic in me loves the anti-war message, the wannabe filmmaker in me loves the color, and the part of me that fears I'll droop into a middle-aged sadsack who wants his media as bland as heat-lamp food from Luby's hopes that I'll always get a kick out of its sheer intensity. Jesus, I'm tempted to watch it right now if I didn't have to go to work in an hour-and-a-half. I've long considered the helicopter battle the greatest scene ever filmed because it captures both the beauty and savagery of which human beings are capable.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Robert Duvall. Breathtaking, intense, and disturbing Vietnam War epic, loosely inspired by Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” about a covert agent (Sheen) sent to assassinate a mad colonel (Brando) deep in the jungle. Each man must confront his own, as well as mankind’s, capacity for evil and savagery. Filled with classic images and episodes, including the infamous helicopter attack set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The harrowing and troubled production is documented in the engrossing film “Hearts of Darkness.” Oscars for Sound (the first audience at Cannes actually thought helicopters were flying overhead) and Cinematography, nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Actor, and winner of the Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival.

"Redux" is a revamped and re-edited version of Coppola’s 1979 classic, often considered the finest film about the Vietnam War, offering a different vision of the same film, with 53 additional minutes of footage. The assassin’s (Sheen) journey into the jungle is now not as direct, including tangents into a French plantation and trading fuel for an evening with stranded Playboy Bunnies, and the mad colonel (Brando) is seen in the light. Whether these additions strengthen or weaken the picture is debatable, but seeing the film on the big screen, remastered and with a freshly-dyed print—yes, dye, with the blackest shadows you’ve ever seen and almost Technicolor flames—is an experience not to be missed.

2 random movie reviews from 2004

2009-08-13T20:40:52Z

Amelie (2001, 122 min, PG13) ***1/2
Rented this with the wife, maybe a year or two after it came out, but back when the intense color-filtering thing was still new and still meant something. Really, really like "Amelie," especially the acrobatic filmmaking and the score and Audrey Tautou, but couldn't form a personal connection with the lead couple as a couple.

2004 review

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jenuet, starring Audrey Tautou and Matthieu Kassovitz. The world is filled with magic in this surreal and difficult to describe romantic comedy about coincidences and destiny. A lonely Parisian uses charm, cunning, and sleight-of-hand to bring couples together, but is herself to terrified of the man she loves. Director Jenuet’s (“City of Lost Children”) visual style is deliciously stream-of-consciousness.

Antony and Cleopatra (1974, 162 min, NR) ***
Janet Suzman, who plays Cleopatra, shows up a decade later in "The Singing Detective," which is pretty sweet, and I should talk about it sometime.

2004 review

Directed by Jon Scoffield, starring Richard Johnson, Janet Suzman, and Patrick Stewart. A filmed BBC version of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatrical production is of course too stage-y to be considered great cinema (some of the editing and direction runs the gamut from awkward to heavy-handed). But the performances are more than engaging and the whole thing barrels along quite nicely. Sent to conquer Egypt for Rome, Antony (Johnson) instead becomes enamored with slobbing around, drunk and laid, with Cleopatra (Suzman); in short, he likes the idea of a well-deserved, early retirement. Caesar (Corin Redgrave, in a fine performance that combines the conqueror with the child-like ascetic) thinks otherwise, and Antony’s downfall is his inability to commit to the man’s world of loyalty and violence or the woman’s world of relaxation and pleasure. His attempt at combining these two paradigms is disastrous. The leads play the aged lovers as having been around the block a couple of times; towards the end they forget that they’re on camera and start yelling. (Watch for Antony’s reaction to the news of his wife’s death.) Scene after scene is stolen by Patrick Stewart (once again proving that “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was probably the least interesting of his work) as Antony’s right hand, first an eye-rolling, pleasure-seeking buffoon, then a tragic hero equal to the great man himself. The sets are delightfully minimalist; day and night are determined by the color of the background, hillsides and shores are denoted by inclinations of the stage and faint sound effects, and everything looks as if it’s taking place in a void.

And Tom Waits as Satan

2009-08-12T18:52:52Z

Funny

2009-08-12T15:49:09Z

David Gordon Green: George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004)

2009-08-11T16:35:36Z

I like David Gordon Green. Sometimes he can be a bit precious and sometimes he can take a few whacks at you with the poignant stick, but, as a mumbly Southerner, I like him a lot. His films are slow, lyrical, often not really about anything for long stretches, yet they've always struck me as easy and accessible, not at all scholarly. I can't help thinking that he delivers on the indie promise that a largely-redundant Kevin Smith has failed to live up to. But the two filmmakers really have nothing to do with each other. I don't think he's quite made a great movie yet, or a masterpiece, but he's got one in him, and his body of work is steady. He's currently attached as a writer to a remake of Argento's "Suspiria" -- which couldn't be more awesome -- and his next turn as director might be a fantasy starring James Franco and Zooey Deschanel and co-written by Danny McBride. I haven't seen his "Snow Angels" or the episodes he directed of Danny McBride's washed-up redneck show.

George Washington (2004 review)

George Washington (2000, 89 min, NR) ***1/2 – Directed & written by David Gordon Green, starring Candace Evanofski, Donald Holden, and Paul Schneider. Delightfully rambling, free-form, and beautifully shot movie about a group of preteen friends during the lazy and inexplicably sad days of summer. Instead of a story, writer-director Green introduces us to a group of characters and then lets them go their various ways, sometimes with the loose grit of a documentary, sometimes with the surreal poetry of a dream.

All the Real Girls (2004 review)

All the Real Girls (2003, 108 min, R) ***1/2 - Directed by David Gordon Green, written by Green and Paul Schneider, & photographed by Tim Orr and Adam Stone, starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Patricia Clarkson, Shea Whigham, Danny McBride, Benjamin Mouton, Heather McComb, and Maurice Compte.

“All the Real Girls” is, as the title kind-of sort-of implies, about the extraordinary nature of everything ordinary. It is a panorama of the beautiful and the mundane, of the profound and the vulgar. Gorgeous, jaw-dropping skylines of hills, trees, and brooks cross into run-down factories. A man ponders long and hard the inverse relationship between wealth and happiness while his young friend declares he might grow a beard. Dialogue is slice-of-life, with little mistakes, corrections, and throat-frogs, but it morphs into the poignancy of poetry. A young couple looks over the mountains and wonders about death, only to meet up later with a friend who goes by the name Bust-Ass. “All the Real Girls” is mundane talk mixed with the real meanings behind it, and compares lives usually considered by movies to be inconsequential with mythic, larger-than-life images.

Of course, “All the Real Girls” is a “dram-edy,” two shots of drama and one shot of comedy. Lately critics and audiences alike have been drawn to movies that defy the traditional dichotomy of smiling masks and frowning masks. By showing life as both grave and goofy, and by using characters that are both sympathetic and willing to become caricatures, movies like “American Beauty,” “Gosford Park,” and “Fargo” embrace a more genuine record of human emotions. In comparison, traditional dramas, even good ones like “The Hours” and “Far From Heaven,” sometimes appear stuffy and heavy-handed.

Which brings us to central question of “All the Real Girls:” is it about a mythic, all-powerful love that will last through the ages, or is it simply a first puppy love, a common love, something that happens all the time? I was left wondering, at the end of the film, should this boy and this girl be together? Because the movie straddles that line between the profound and the average, we see the love story both ways, which is the way the lovers must see it. When the movie ended, I wanted Paul and Noel to be together and I thought they had something special. But, as time went by, I began to wonder if they were discovering each other, or if each were just making a self-discovery. As time went by, I began to wonder if they were really right for each other. That’s the way these things feel: for a time, you’re so certain this is the right person. But then, after a while, it doesn’t seem that way so much anymore.

When we first meet Paul (Paul Schneider) and Noel (Zooey Deschenal), they are about to share their first kiss, outside an old, blasted warehouse in a small North Carolina town. He asks her what she’s thinking, and she says she’s thinking about an empty bucket nearby, and how good it makes her feel to be able to share her thoughts with him, however pointless they may be. They appear to be in their early twenties, but the love that grows between them is so innocent, so naïve, that I began to wonder if screenwriters Paul Schneider and David Gordon Greene intended the story to be about adolescents. (Greene, after all, wrote and directed “George Washington,” about a group of children about to enter that age where boys and girls are supposed to be afraid of one another.) They go walking in the woods, they tell stories that kind of go nowhere, they joke about flatulence. The point isn’t what they talk about, but that they can talk to each other, and, even better, they don’t feel like they need talk at all to impress the other.

Paul is a small town Casanova who, without much forethought or even seeming to try, has had his way with just about every girl in the little town. Noel is his best friend’s little sister, who has been away at college during Paul’s exploits, and who returns half-ignorant of his reputation. She thinks she can change him and he wants to be changed, but everyone has doubts. Her brother, for one, but even Paul’s mother (Patricia Clarkson) thinks she sees through him, and the aforementioned Bust-Ass (Danny McBride), also Paul’s friend, seems to be lying in wait. (While “All the Real Girls” visuals can only be appreciated on the big screen, the DVD contains several deliriously funny deleted scenes in which Bust-Ass, had the scenes been left in, would have seriously tilted the movie into a comedy.)

In our modern cynicism these lovers might appear too old for their silly sentiments, for making a tent in the bed, for whispering childishly, for wearing a calculator watch while fooling around. But maybe that’s the point, that these two late bloomers are only now discovering this beauty that has been around them all along. (Most movies aren’t about the beauty already in our lives, but about how the beauty already in our lives can be blown to bits by 2 rogue cops 2 close 2 the edge. That was a cheap shot, I’m sorry.)

Writer-director Greene gives the movie a kind of freestyle that matches the small town’s slow pace. He allows us to wander among the townsfolk and linger in places with people, to watch Paul’s uncle in the playground with his adopted daughter, to listen to Bust-Ass go on and on about his lap guitar, and to, yes, spot StrongBad creator Matt Chapman hanging out on a sofa in a field. We feel enveloped by these people, this season, and these people places. The film often moves so leisurely that for most of the first act we aren’t quite sure if the scenes are even in chronological order.

Green’s style can occasionally hit us over the head with the Poignant Stick. But his film beautifully captures and recreates what often feels like a universal mood. It feels like walking outside after your girlfriend’s just dumped you and thinking how there shouldn’t be such a beautiful sunset when you feel so bummed.

Finished January 21st, 2004

Undertow (2004 review)

Undertow (2004, 107 min, R) ***1/2 – Directed by David Gordon Green & written for the screen by Green, Lingard Jervey, and Joe Conway, from Conway’s novel, with photography by Tim Orr, starring Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Devon Allen, Shiri Appleby, Dermot Mulroney, and Bill McKinney

A homeless girl stands on the edge of a river. She’s probably a drug addict and almost certainly a prostitute. She writes her wish on a piece of paper and slips it into an empty bottle. After tossing the bottle into the river she tells the boy next to her that if it reaches the ocean, her wish will come true. The only way her wish can be stopped, she says, is if the bottle is pulled down.

“Undertow” is an unabashed Southern Gothic, that is, a melodrama that combines gritty rural realism with fairy tale plotting. Despite being set in the 1970s, we still think of Faulkner when we meet a family that seems no less than cursed. The man and his two sons toil day after day in a vast, dilapidated farm house, under the weird and watchful eyes of the dead wife in a painting, while rumors of stolen gold float around. Lonely men smoke packs and packs of cigarettes not for pleasure but “to help them forget.” Two grown brothers (Josh Lucas and Dermot Mulroney) are still uneasy about a wound from long ago. Two young brothers (Jamie Bell and Devon Allen) are on the run from an ex-convict uncle through impossibly green woods. Both pairs of siblings seem doomed by poverty and fate to repeat history; the boys are set to re-enact the lives of their elders. In describing where the gold came from, the father of the young boys unwittingly outlines their lot: they wait for centuries empty-handed on the edge of the Styx. When we watch a boy throw a rock through a girl’s window and flee barefoot from her shotgun-wielding father, we know the gods destined this family for tragedy long ago.

Yet “Undertow” does not feel like a melodrama, because director and co-screenwriter David Gordon Green (“George Washington,” “All the Real Girls”) is in love with dilapidation. He never lets the fairy tale overpower the grit. He is in love with junkyards and rusty fishing boats and corrugated metal and creaky old houses that could use a good rummage sale. All his settings are run-down and feel genuinely lived-in, as if the battered walls contain generations of secrets instead of the slightest resale value. Green shows us pig farming at its most muddy, he shows us a naked family too poor to bathe anywhere besides a well, he shows us churches that need to be painted. We see greasy hair and cars that won’t start and cracked mirrors under years of dust.

There is a long sequence in which the elder of the two boys (Jamie Bell) on the run keeps trying to get a job and keeps getting rejected, while the alternately diabolical and bumbling uncle is two steps behind. The episodes pile on and we wonder if there are too many of them—so many stores built of rotting wood, so many dusty dirt roads, so many greasy faces, so many colloquialisms from one-scene cameos—until we realize that “Undertow” is Green’s ambivalent ode to poverty. All his movies have been set in economically depressed areas, yet he regards those places and those people as no better or worse than their wealthier (and always unseen) neighbors. He sees dignity in all people and beauty in all places, and he avoids the temptation of Dickens and Horatio Alger to show poverty as being worthwhile only if you end the book rich again. Green has no Romantic, Byronic illusions of the poor being superhuman examples for the rest of us; they are human to him, some good and some bad, but all limited by resources and education.

Green further keeps the melodrama in check not just by setting “Undertow” in the 1970s but by making it his tribute to the American cinema-verité of the time. The movie has the rambling, almost-documentary feel of “Badlands,” “Deliverance,” “Easy Rider,” or “The Rain People,” helped in no small part by cinematographer Tim Orr’s heavily orange-and-green textures. Several freeze frames look like faded photographs, or some forgotten ‘70s flick, in need of digital remastering, that you might catch on Saturday afternoon TV. Add to this Green’s already obtuse storytelling style—he’s much more interested in soaking us with dreamy, memory-style images than hammering home some kind of plot—and the fairy tale might go right past you.

(Green’s ear for flaky, shooting-the-breeze dialogue is still hard at work, although not as ferocious as in “All the Real Girls.” When the younger brother asks “was mom pretty?” don’t expect the typical movie response of “mom was like an angel.”)

British actor Jamie Bell, who was the lead in “Billy Elliot” and “Nicholas Nickleby’s” stumbling sidekick Smike, has completely Southern-ized himself for his role as a teenager on the run. Lank, barefoot, in work pants and a tee-shirt, his gangly limbs at right angles as he flees through the woods—he is the picture of the laconic teenager. He seems born with a baseball cap on and understands the mystery of when to wear it low over the eyes or backwards at the end of the day. Bell’s Chris exemplifies the smart kid with limited options; we’re kept guessing about what he thinks and feels, even to the end, even with his brother in tow. “Undertow’s” other stand-out performance is from Dermot Mulroney as the boys’ sad-eyed but resilient widower father. In another life he could have been a philosopher or a monk. Instead, he sits alone with his pipe, his wish pulled down long before ever reaching the sea. (Like so many other good-looking actors whose aspirations to become leading men never quite materialized, Mulroney is quietly proving his chops in films like this and “Lovely and Amazing.”)

I would not be surprised if someone were to say that the journey of the boys is the journey of the New South from dank isolation, caught in repeating generations of lawlessness and mistrust, toward modernity. Some bottles are still afloat, some are not. In everything Green does, he seems fearless about tangents, about symbolism, about telling his stories obtusely, about letting us soak up atmosphere and images. Not everything he does seems quite functional or ready to fit together, but we admire his willingness to cast his net wide.

Finished November 15th, 2004

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (2009)

2009-08-11T15:55:10Z

Oh, it's tempting, in its final accounting, to semi-dismiss Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" as "an above-average Iraq shakycam movie." You know, with the unsteady handheld camerawork, the quick-cutting, the liberal use of out-of-focus shots, and that video look, either achieved through digitally-tricking out filmstock, or just using video.

Have there been a lot of Iraq shakycam movies, like De Palma's "Redacted? Or is it just that ALL Iraq movies have been shakycam? Even the faux-, semi-, and pre-Iraq movies, like "United 93," "Babel," "Transformers," "Blackhawk Down," and the "Blackhawk Down" section of "Attack of the Clones" look this way.

But I guess that feels right in the public imagination. Because embedded photographers in WWII Europe used black-and-white film, WWII Europe movies are in b&w (even "Saving Private Ryan" is largely desaturated). Their counterparts in the Pacific theater had color film, though, so Allies vs. Japan movies are usually in color.

In a delicious irony that I honestly don't resent, my short film "The First Day of Shooting" has been turned away from film festivals precisely because it has the handheld, shaky, out-of-focus look that established professionals like Bigelow and Michael Mann spend piles of money to achieve. So you can always spot a cheap movie because it's trying to look expensive and an expensive movie because it's trying to look cheap. I love it.

Anyway, "The Hurt Locker" follows a US soldier (Jeremy Renner) who defuses bombs, and the two other team members who go with him (Anthony Mackie and, I dunno, some other guy). The movie posits that, contrary to Robert E. Lee's declaration that soldiers hate war, no, some soldiers love it. Maybe "love" isn't the right word, but certainly Renner's defuser finds it vastly fulfilling. The brilliance of casting Renner is that he is, at core, a character actor, whose IMDb page is probably littered with "Sergeant," "Corporal," "Sergeant," "Officer," and "Sergeant."

Renner's solder is a little imbalanced but he's not presented as an aberration, the way a movie star might. If there's work that you're good at, is challenging, and you find exciting, what's not to enjoy? During a brief, very static return to civilian life, Renner is bored by cleaning gutters and grocery shopping. ("Ketchup? Catsup? Ketchup? Or Catsup?") With so little at stake – no life of his own to risk, no lives of others to save – what difference does anything make to him now?

Director Bigelow will probably always be best known for her totally radical pairing of Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in the cult classic "Point Break," about the bank-robbing surfers. I must admit, I love that movie, probably because of a clarity of motivation similar to "The Hurt Locker's:" because of the Zen spirituality of surfing, "Point Break" can be likened to a bunch of heavily-armed monks coming down from the mountain to rob a grocery store so they can have something to eat between prayers and reading.

There ain't much politics in "The Hurt Locker" for a couple reasons. First, the movie works more on a personal level than on a political one, which I find more interesting anyway. We live in a funny culture in which we think by eliminating pain, discomfort, exertion, danger, and social interaction, we'll be happy, when it is in fact all those things that give life meaning. It's not our fault; all technological improvements have been moving us toward that.

Sealed in climate-controlled computer rooms, downloading movies and music for hours, exploring an internet whose largest effect on our lives is to make us feel insignificant, only getting up to drive somewhere and get food that's bad for us, only getting up again to drive and pay money somewhere to exercise (why not just walk to where the food is?).

We pat ourselves on the back for never having to reach our full potential, as if the deathbed statement "I could have done more if I wanted it" is supposed to make us feel good instead of having squandered our lives. The Aussie bounty hunters the bomb squad runs into have no illusions of queen and country. I wanted to see a movie about them, too.

The other reason there isn't much politics in "The Hurt Locker" is that policy is the last thing on the minds of these men under fire. Similarly, because they only speak English, they view every Iraqi observing them as either a threat or a potential threat. Anything beyond that would be outside their point-of-view and would cheapen "The Hurt Locker's" visceral effect. Similarly, there's not much plot arc to the movie besides the bomb squad defusing one bomb after another. If there's any connection between one bomb and another, that's for someone higher up in the chain-of-command to know about. At one point a gunman takes some shots at our guys. Other soldiers chase after him. Whether they catch him or not is never revealed.

I have a working theory that it is subtlety that ultimate decides our opinion of a movie. If a movie (or novel, or whatever) is too obvious we feel insulted and bored or we're getting a sermon. If a movie is too opaque we get irritated and frustrated. Yet what is oblique to someone is, due to personal experience or consumption of art, obvious to someone else. So I was bothered when some politics were stuck in the mouth of "The Hurt Locker's" third team member, whose dialogue consists of a few too many on-the-nose statements. But maybe I've seen so many movies that I don’t need the structure his comments give "The Hurt Locker."

Which brings us back to the shakycam. Bigelow has crafted some incredible, tense setpieces, and does some good work by changing up the visual rhythms with stretches of stationary cameras and slower cutting. But part of me wishes she had found another, more original visual method. Maybe I see too many movies.

Another nightmare-inducing Daft Punk video

2009-08-05T04:12:47Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwRlt1XyOg0

Books I'm reading

2009-07-17T14:42:50Z

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The movie with Burt Lancaster is playing at the end of August at the fine arts museum, so I'm going to try to have the book read by then.

View all my reviews >>

Harry Potter 6 and the Whoever with the Whatchacallit (2009)

2009-07-16T15:16:39Z

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is either the best "Harry Potter" film or not even good. I'm not sure which. An improvement over the largely pointless "Harry Potter 5" – don't expect me to remember what the hell they're all called – "Harry Potter 6" plays more like a series of episodes and vignettes than an actual movie. Aside from a few bits and pieces of child actors going "ooh" and "aah" over disposable special effects sequences – hangovers from earlier installments in the series – there are really no bad scenes to "Harry Potter 6." But it somehow feels less than the sum of its parts. Like "4" and "5," "6" has some trouble reconciling the "evil conspiracy plot" with the "teenage angst anecdotes."

Visually "Harry Potter 6" is the most interesting, or at least equal to Cuaron's "Harry Potter 3," with – dear God! – jump cuts, a montage, and some genuinely lyrical camera movements. The "evil plot" hasn't been this visually interesting for 2 movies; I like the hushed, hypnotic quality of good boy wizard Harry trailing evil boy wizard Draco up and down the long corridors of their magic school, like a pubescent "Last Year at Marienbad." We watch Draco pull a curtain from a magic cabinet about 4 times in the course of the film, and each time it's nearly identical, like a refrain, like a ritual.

I like the use of the magic memory potion too. Even if it's narratively lazy, it's visually exciting, and cuts out lots of Harry having to glean snatches of conversation overheard from across a wide stone corridor (that's gotten old). The sequence in which Harry's (largely uninteresting) love interest hides a book from him is done with such weird confidence that you think any moment her eyes will turn black, her voice will drop an octave, and she'll turn into a werewolf or something. I'm not sure it's intentional, but it might be one of the first times the series has generated genuine suspense.

ADDED LATER: Oh yeah, and the impromptu spider funeral is brilliant.

The teen romance stuff works well, too, because they're puppy-love problems are universal. Pauline Kael once decried "The Breakfast Club" as "teenage stereotypes complaining about how everyone treats them as teenage stereotypes," but I think that's what's given the movie such legs – it's the Club's realization of their ordinariness that keeps viewers coming back. "The Graduate" is great because Dustin Hoffman's character IS destined to work in plastics.

The teens in "Harry Potter" may have magic powers and go to school in a castle, but that only heightens their banal romantic problems. "Realistic" movies about teenagers almost always feel wrong, but the heightened ones – like "Marie Antoinette" and "The New World" – feel right.

But these incidents don't really add up. The teen romance stuff goes on too long, like a laundry list of things to get done. The footchase through the tall grass is beautiful yet there's no change in the characters afterwards. I don't think any Potter film has made clear to what degree the studentry at Hogwarts feels threatened from day to day, even though parts of the school are routinely obliterated every semester. "Harry Potter 6" could easily be nudged into David Lynch territory, in which everyone stumbles around in a dreamy stupor, struggling to remember what happened just a few moments ago in the previous scene, but failing. Now THAT would be a cool idea of how evil magic forces could attack.

(For the record, a novel I've tried writing about 6 times begins with a medieval kingdom falling under a spell that causes everything to become so sleepy and unfocused that plants themselves start to droop and no one can concentrate or get anything done.)

Blockbuster Hollywood seems to have a genuine problem with the simple art of pulling its stories together. All the "Lord of the Rings," "Pirates of the Caribbean," Michael Bay, and "Transformers" movies are about twice as long as they need to be. Maybe that's the point. I was always disappointed by how short rollercoaster rides are, but no modern blockbuster fan ever need feel that way. You slap down your money and you get your 2.5 hours in another reality, even if it's rambling and has some deadends.

I could make a broadside about how the modern summer blockbuster is geared toward a generation of moviegoers raised on religious TV watching, on watching TV on DVDs in multi-hour chunks, and how they're used to filler, repetition, deadends, inessential anecdotes, and stuff being spelled out. You could argue that because "Goodfellas The Series" (aka "The Sopranos") is roughly 34 times as long as "Goodfellas The Movie," it has more to say about the gangster lifestyle, but don't fool yourself into thinking it has 34 times as much to say.

But truth be told my only complaint about the recent "Public Enemies" (which I'll be reviewing after I see it again on Saturday) is not that the characters seem to lack pasts, motivations, or depth, but that it's not 15 or 20 minutes longer: I wanted more step-by-step procedure of planning bank robberies, of being in banks while they were robbed, of shooting it out with cops, and of catching crooks. Even at 143 minutes, I wasn't done spending time in Michael Mann's camcorder-in-a-time-machine vision of the Great Depression.

Huh? Oh, right, "Harry Potter 6." Yeah, I feel affectionately toward it, but I haven't made up my mind if I can recommend it.

All the Pretty Horses (film) (2000)

2009-07-15T15:49:47Z

The ranch way of life is dying in West Texas. Some men still wear Stetsons, carry revolvers, and ride horses. But the land is being fenced off, sold, taken over, and the independent farmers—like the Native Americans before them—are being shoved off in favor of a braver new world. John Grady Cole is still in high school when his grandfather dies and his mother sells the family land. But rather than go quietly into a world of pressed pants, automobiles, and indoor life, he and his best friend Lacey Rawlins decide to ride into Mexico, to find work as cowhands.

So begins “All the Pretty Horses,” based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, brought to the screen by director Billy Bob Thornton, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Sling Blade,” and Ted Tally, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Red Dragon.” Tales of young men striking out on their own for fortune and glory are in no danger of becoming a dead genre. Indeed, many elements of “All the Pretty Horses” are familiar: they find and lose the promised land, John Grady falls in love with the wrong woman, he and Rawlins fall in with dangerous company, and their loyalty is tested by bouts with corrupt law enforcers in Mexico. But unlike many tales that fall into the category of bildungsroman, the boys from “All the Pretty Horses” are striking out not to embrace the future, but to chase a fleeting past. Both the film and book become an allegory for the breaking of boys into men.

John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, both sixteen in the novel, are played by older boys Matt Damon and Henry Thomas. Their relationship is not one of witty banter or clever bickering, but the clipped conversation of young men who have known one another since boyhood. Rawlins is clearly the beta male of the duo, although neither of them will ever admit it. The dangerous company that leads to bloodshed is an even younger boy, who meets them on the road to Mexico, riding a too-impressive horse that they can’t help thinking is stolen. The boy is played by Lucas Black, who made a big splash in “Sling Blade,” and his recklessness with his horse gets John Grady and Rawlins into trouble even after they appear to be rid of him. The promised land is a giant ranch that has been in the same family for one hundred seventy years, where the two young men find work breaking horses. The wrong woman (Penelope Cruz), who captures John Grady’s heart, is the daughter of the land baron (Ruben Blades) who takes the boys in.

Despite succeeding in “Good Will Hunting,” “Dogma,” and an arguably great performance in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” New England pretty-boy Matt Damon is at first an unlikely choice to play John Grady Cole. He adopts a slow Texan drawl just fine, and some of us just can’t help being pretty boys; some who have read McCarthy’s novel might have envisioned a harder, more grizzly young man, but remember, he’s a sixteen-year-old in 1949, and when I was sixteen I don’t think I was shaving yet. The test of being John Grady is in his attitude. In many of his roles, Damon has a tendency to idle like an old Chevy, often with a chip on his shoulder, in need of approval, or out to make a point. In “All the Pretty Horses” he has subverted that tendency in order to keep his performance faithful to McCarthy’s novel. John Grady is a man of true self-confidence, not the artificial kind, and is modest, polite, speaks his mind, fails often but is always willing to admit when he is mistaken.

If he weren’t modest, or if there were no obstacle he couldn’t handle, then the movie might be unbearable. But John Grady is never smug or cocky, and is the kind of man other men are willing to follow. What’s more is that he lives by a code to stick by his friends; he is not just loyal to Rawlins but to troublemaker Lucas Black as well. He understands that true friendship means staying with your friends even when they do something stupid, and even when they have no one to blame for their hardships but themselves. John Grady’s grim gravity applies to love as well as friendship, and when things start to fall apart between him and the boss’s daughter, he treats her and her culture honorably, not selfishly. To him, right, wrong, and the truth are all bigger than human lives and happiness; you’ll see what I mean in the movie. “All the Pretty Horses” tests John Grady’s fidelity to his code, and is a richer movie because he is not completely successful.

Cinematographer Barry Markowitz, who has worked with Thornton on “Sling Blade” and “Daddy and Them,” is true to the old Westerns of John Ford, and gives us wide, sweeping vistas of cloud, sky, and countryside, with mountains and valleys and cacti as far as the eye can see. Screenwriter Ted Tally has kept much of the novel’s laconic Texanisms, and portrays love as an unavoidable, unreasonable force of nature. McCarthy’s novel contains many elements that could not be squeezed into a two-hour feature, including a long tangent about Mexican revolutionaries, many details of cowboy and vaquero life, and the long, repetitive silences inherent in traveling for days on horseback. The book also explores the nearly mystical relationship between a horse and its rider, and the symbolism between the breaking of wild horses and the breaking of John Grady is more explicit. But, despite a few instances early on that look like Marlboro ads, Thornton’s film is a direct reflection of McCarthy’s tone: John Grady’s story is not so much a high adventure as an elegy for a passing era. “All the Pretty Horses” is technically a Western, but the Wild West is gone, leaving no place for the young men who might have thrived in it.

Finished March 30, 2003

Starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Blades, Lucas Black, Miriam Colon, Sam Shepard, Bruce Dern, Robert Patrick, and Julio Oscar Mechoso
Directed by Billy Bob Thornton & written for the screen by Ted Tally, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy
2000 PG13.