Briefly: An Education (2009)

Television is ruining the movies. In a world where cable has tapped into the potential of smart, thoughtful long-form dramatic television, movies can look awfully small. A cop movie would need to be awfully good to compare with The Wire. Cinematic gangsters will never be the same after The Sopranos. And a coming-of-age drama about a woman's place in the changing society of the 1960s like An Education, handsomely made and uniformly well-acted as it is, can't really rate with a show like Mad Men, which is about the very same topic during very same time period. There's only so much you can do with one story and 95 minutes; Mad Men's already produced thirty-plus hours on the subject. Nearly any film's going to look slight in comparison, though An Education does itself no favors by confining most of its running time to the rather predictable relationship between 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) and thirtysomething David (Peter Saarsgard) and epiloguing most of its messy (and, thus, far more interesting) aftershocks. The film's cinematography is as rich as mahogany and the jazzy soundtrack evokes the time and place of London just prior to its swingin' days. But unfair as it may be, as I was watching it, I couldn't stop comparing An Education to Mad Men. One is like the British Cliffs Notes version of the other. Mulligan's gotten a ton of buzz for her performance, and she is convincing (if a bit too old looking) as Jenny, but I was even more enamored with Alfred Molina as her well-meaning but out-of-touch father. His nuanced performance is full of genuine humor and pathos; despite his limited screentime, he creates a complete character. It's like someone you'd see on television.

Briefly: Whatever Works (2009)

The message of Woody Allen's Whatever Works couldn't be clearer. The film's main character, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), comes right out and says it directly to camera at the film's conclusion:

"Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works. And don't kid yourself. Because it's by no means up to your own human ingenuity. A bigger part of your existence is luck, than you'd like to admit.

Boris' philosophy might be a sublime approach to life but it is a dreadful one for filmmaking. As human beings, we should all live and let live, do unto others, and count our blessings. But film directors need to do more than shrug their shoulders, be polite, and leave the ultimate quality of their work to luck. Supposedly based on a screenplay Allen originally wrote back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel, Whatever Works tells the story of how the curmudgeonly Boris learns to live and love again after a bad divorce and a suicide attempt, in large part because of his relationship with a young runaway from the South named Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood). Thematically, Allen's back in Annie Hall territory, with another story of a naive country girl and her instructive relationship with a "sophisticated" Manhattanite. But Annie Hall had a real affection for Annie; Boris, and by extension the movie, treats Melodie with open contempt, calling her, and really anyone who isn't from New York City (including her stereotypical rube parents, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr.), cretins, imbeciles, and morons. David plays himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm with a similar air of superiority, but there he's the butt of the jokes at least as often as the rest of humanity is. In other words, Curb often sides with the viewer; Whatever Works always sides with Boris. Maybe Boris' theory is correct. Maybe Whatever Works doesn't work because of simple bad luck. Or maybe Woody Allen just took an old screenplay out of a drawer, one that wasn't good enough to make back when he wrote it, and hoped some very fine actors would elevate the material.

This Is It (2009)

Before the Clearview Chelsea's 5:30 PM screening of This Is It, the theater ran a coming attraction for 2012 I'd never seen before. The footage was familiar — an assortment of the world's recognizable landmarks obliterated by an assortment of the world's most recognizable natural disasters — but the background music was not. Instead of a traditional musical score, the editors inserted a pop ballad by former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert entitled "Time For Miracles." (To watch this trailer, go here). You or I might take the complete destruction of human society as a great tragedy; with the aid of Lambert's ode to undying love, the trailer treats the cataclysm as an exuberant celebration of the human spirit. Yes, the Mayan apocalypse has brought about the end of the world. But look on the bright side: John Cusack ain't giving up on love.

Jarring as the 2012 trailer was, it proved a fitting warm-up for This Is It, a documentary that fashions footage from rehearsals for Michael Jackson's 50 night stand at London's O2 Arena into a approximation of what the final concert would have looked like had Jackson not died following a cardiac arrest on June 25th. The film pauses for intermittent glimpses into the King of Pop's creative process, but it's predominantly a series of musical performances noticeably enhanced by extensive cutting and overdubbing. We might see Jackson and his band on stage performing Thriller, but we hear what sounds like a combination of live performance and studio tracks, maybe even original master recordings in some cases. In finished form, they present an image of Jackson as a tireless, consummate performer. But would our reaction be the same to less polished footage? How much does our interpretation of the sound affect our interpretation of the visual? If a carefully crafted pop melody can make images of global destruction uplifting, can a few carefully crafted audio tracks make an unhealthy man look well?

I don't know. I do know that at times I felt like the movie was trying to convince me Jackson was in better shape that he really was. Certainly he's far skinnier than any of the dancers he's sharing the stage with. Even under a mountain of layers, even in jackets with huge, ridiculous shoulder pads, he looks tiny (as Roger Ebert notes in his review, he's also the only person on stage who's always wearing long sleeves). Near the end of the film, he gives the assembled production a pep talk that is heartfelt but also kind of weirdly rambling; one moment he says they are there to deliver great escapism to the fans and the next he's warning them they all have three years to reverse global warming or the earth will be doomed (Someone call Adam Lambert!).

It's easy to say that Michael Jackson was crazy or sick. But look at what his work asked of him, and consider how you would react in his situation. The This Is It show included a Jackson 5 tribute medley, where Michael would be called upon to sing and dance as he did when he was ten years old. Imagine if you had to sing in public and sound exactly as you did at that age? Jackson is required not just to perform forty year old songs, but to perform them with perfect fidelity; he can't just sing "Thriller," he's got to sing with the signature "Thriller" dance moves and people made up as zombies. We wonder why Jackson stopped making hits, why he creatively stalled out in the mid-90s. How could he move into new artistic areas when he's required to perpetually recreate his past? That sort of pressure to look and sound forever young could drive anyone insane.

Not that director Kenny Ortega pauses for even a second to contemplate the perversity and absurd excesses of the Jackson stage show, and why would he; as the director of the This Is It concert series, he helped invent it. There might have been a truly revealing portrait of Michael Jackson in the raw footage he used to form This Is It, but I imagine the lawyers who ultimately control this material (at least one of whom receives a producer credit on the film) would never allow that to happen. Certainly there are a few tantalizing moments — a few untouched a capella lines here, a cracked joke there — but not many. Jackson is typically seen in wide shots, and often framed from head to toe. That choice ensures we're able to scrutinize his fluid dance steps; it also reflects the way the film always views its subject from a safe distance. The audience never gets too close for his (or his estate's) comfort.

And so we're left to watch and guess. In some ways, that makes the film more interesting; you hang on Jackson's every word and gesture, searching for clues to his true personality, his state of mind, his health, and above all, what his reaction would have been to a project like this documentary? I suspect a perfectionist like Jackson, who we see obsessing over the smallest details in musical arrangements and dance steps, would have hated the idea of giving the public unfettered access to imperfect footage. The fact that This Is It observes Jackson from such a remove, and forces us to consider his performance through a filter of carefully sculpted sound, makes the film both less honest and, paradoxically, truer to Michael's vision. This isn't how it looked and sounded on the stage of the Staples Center in Los Angeles. But this is probably pretty close to how it looked and sounded inside Michael Jackson's very troubled mind.

NOTE: On IFC.com, Vadim Rizov writes about a fascinating companion piece to the 2012 trailer, an Adam Lambert music video that features the musician singing while people all around him run for their lives.

David Spade Would Like To Remind You...

...that he was not in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol.

Yes, there is a guy in the movie who does kind of look like him. But it's not him. No, it's just a random guy who looks exactly like him and whose wardrobe is entirely dayglo.

Yes a random guy who looks exactly like him and whose wardrobe is entirely dayglo and who rides a skateboard as if he's never done it before in his entire life.

Oh and Sharon Stone wants you to know that's not her making out with Steve Guttenberg, either.

And now, it's time for another installment of: Bad Product Placement Theater!

On tonight's episode: Leonard Part 6 Starring Bill Cosby, Joe Don Baker, and Coca-Cola as "Coke."





So much care for the product placement; so little care for the screenplay. And now if you'll excuse me, I need to go get some soft drinks and spandex.

Briefly: The Wages of Fear (1953)

Just how intense is The Wages of Fear? This movie didn't just make my palms sweat; it made the soles of my feet sweat too. Either I've got a glandular problem or this is one suspenseful movie. Four desperate Europeans living in South America agree to a suicide mission hauling containers of highly combustible nitroglycerin along 300 miles of unpaved road. If they survive the perilous journey of roads that resemble corrugated metal, hairpin mountain passes, decaying bridges, and lakes of oil, they'll each receive $2,000. In 2008 money, two grand inflates to a little under sixteen thousand, not exactly exorbitant pay for a job that can quite literally blow up in your face. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot's message couldn't be clearer: life is precious, short, and depressingly cheap. Not that you'll have much time to ponder the emptiness of human existence once the men begin their journey, as Clouzot throws one obstacle after another at the drivers, which means one harrowing sequence after another for the audience. The trek to the deliver the nitro runs the final 90 breathless minutes of the two-and-a-half hour film. It's some of the most exquisitely sweaty time you'll ever spend at the movies. Make sure you bring your extra-absorbent footwear.

Fast & Furious (2009)

Fast & Furious may be dumb — no, you know what? Fast & Furious is dumb. But it's entertainingly dumb, like a cat who thinks it can stop a laser pointer if it pounces quickly enough. Some might take a movie to task for being this breathtakingly stupid, but let's give credit where credit's due: it cannot be easy to make something entertaining out of material this thoroughly brainless. This is a movie about two men, one cop and one criminal, who put aside a long-standing grudge to take down a drug trafficker through a strict regimen of street racing and looking very intensely at one another. That we invest at all in such a silly narrative is a credit to director Justin Lin, who compensates for his story's stupidity by treating the movie's title like a filmmaking mantra. Keep things moving fast and furious, so the audience doesn't have time to think about anything else.

The tactic works more often than not, and when it doesn't, it's sort of fun to watch it fail. For instance, in one scene, our heroes join the drug traffickers for a high-speed border crossing, sneaking into the United States via an elaborate series of tunnels hidden beneath the fence dividing Mexico and the U.S. Much is made of the fact that the drivers need to sneak into the tunnel's mouth before the are detected by security cameras. But how did someone build an elaborate, snaking, road race ready system of tunnels beneath said border and said fence and said security cameras without anyone noticing?

Maybe it's just me, but I think there's a certain pleasure to be had in a movie this absurd, where a man might leap across rooftops, dive through a window, and tackle a guy off a building and through the hood of a car just to ask him a question. And that there's even more pleasure to be had in the fact that said individual seems completely uninjured and unfazed by his several story fall onto the hood of a car. If you fell from a great height through the windshield of a Geo Metro wouldn't you need, I don't know, at least three or four seconds to collect yourself? And if you did manage to pull of such a ridiculous stunt without injuring yourself, wouldn't take a minute just to observe how absolutely ridiculous it is that you didn't?

FBI Agent Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) wouldn't. That's because he's a cop on the edge. He's a loose cannon! He eats ridiculous leaps off of buildings onto cars for breakfast! A few years earlier, O'Conner went undercover in the Los Angeles street racing scene but, like every undercover cop in every movie about undercover cops, he started to forget which side he was really on. Most of his moral confusion stemmed from his man-crush on the gang's leader, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), a gear-slash-meathead who charmed O'Conner with his large muscles, intense scowl, and penchant for saying things that sound profound but aren't (i.e. "I live my life a quarter mile at a time"). O'Conner couldn't bear to cage such a free spirit, so he let him flee at the end of the first film rather than arrest him. For this fourth Fast & Furious, the first sequel to featuring both Walker and Diesel, bromance fills the air once again when Toretto returns to town to settle a score that conveniently dovetails with O'Conner's latest case.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you Paul Walker and Vin Diesel are good actors because, frankly, that would even more ridiculous an argument than Fast & Furious is a movie. But I will sit here and tell you that something about these two marginal screen presences makes them work well together. I can't really recommend anything either has done separately (unless you count The Iron Giant where Diesel put his robotic delivery to good use playing, what else, a robot) but the two have an undeniable buddy action movie chemistry. Maybe it's the fact that they're both pretty crummy; it isn't a case of one terrific actor blowing away one mediocre one and throwing the power dynamics in scenes out of whack. Walker and Diesel both work at the same level of dudely gruffness, and even if the story's silly, they never play it that way. Neither one ever acts like they're too good or too smart for the material, and given the material that's saying something. If it were up to me, I'd make Diesel and Walker an regular onscreen duo like Martin and Lewis or Hepburn and Tracy. Every three years, they have to make an action movie together. Given their box office track records apart, I don't think they'd put much of a fight.

You could argue that Fast & Furious is a blatant rehash of the first film, and I suspect Lin and his collaborators would agree. After two inferior sequels that tried to spice up the franchise's formula with new locations and new characters, they quite intentionally went back to their roots. But they did more than just recycle the characters and basic storyline, they managed to credibly recreate the dopey charm of the original, which, let's remember, wasn't exactly the most cerebral action movie to begin with. Theater fans welcome a revival of a popular Broadway show. Why can't we look at Fast & Furious the same way? It's the show we previously enjoyed spruced up with some new arrangements and cutting-edge stagecraft that wasn't available to the original. Entertaining, dumb, fast, and furious.

Pandorum (2009)

As a follow-up to my Paul W.S. Anderson article, I ventured out to see Pandorum, the latest film to be released under his Impact Pictures shingle. Anderson is the producer with his long-time partner Jeremy Bolt, with the directorial duties handed off to German newcomer Christian Alvart. In many ways the film plays like a remake of Event Horizon, as a skeleton crew investigates mysterious doings on an abandoned spacecraft. With a demonstrably smaller budget, Pandorum is more cloistered, far darker, and quite possibly superior to its model.

Offering the requisite suffocating spaces of an Anderson production, it opens with Cpl. Bower (Ben Foster) waking up in a locked hyper-sleep chamber (see above). He's seen in an overhead close-up, his head peering skyward as he frantically tears out the tubes joining him to the wall. It is the first of a series of cramped spaces that Bower must navigate while suffering from amnesia. Alvart utlilizes the overhead close-up later on in an intestinal, tube-filled air vent, emphasizing the repetitive, almost circular nature of his progress. Every time Bower successfully navigates a space, there is another, more elaborately daunting one to take its place. It's a film of frustrated progress, where Bower's goals keep narrowing along with the setting.

Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid, with a fine beard) keeps him grounded at the start. Waking up hours after Bower, he takes the role of communicator, manning the control room to direct Bower's path through the bowels of the ship to the reactor which has to be reset. With his holographic maps and comm devices, Payton is the anchor to a concrete reality, one in which Bower is slowly losing grip on as he goes further down the (mutated) rabbit hole.

Both men suffer from memory loss, and the script doles out their back-story in a slow expository drip. As their minds return to them, the space madness sets in (Pandorum!), their pasts not something either man wish to revisit. It's a clever structure, and Alvart keeps the ooze flowing in between revelations. Foster and Quaid offer up solid turns of wounded nobility and crusty professionalism, respectively, until the nihilistic plot twists threaten to turn their rugged determinism into hysterical self-destruction. It's a sleek, nasty, and highly effective piece of work.