Category: Reviews

Pan’s Labyrinth is not so much a children’s movie. It’s about children, but that’s not really the same thing. Easy mistake, since it’s called a fairy tale and that has certain cultural references for us, but think the original Grimm’s stories.

Which were, admittedly, cautionary. I guess you could take your kid to Pan’s Labyrinth as a cautionary measure against him or her becoming a fascist military officer, but there may be better ways to accomplish that.

Really, though, it’s a fairy tale about the Spanish Civil War. Three acts, three tasks, three parallels to those tasks in the adult world. Ofelia and Mercedes begin by capturing keys; the second task is taking a dagger, mirrored by Mercedes’ knife (and her later use of it). And finally, Ofelia’s choice regarding her brother is precisely Captain Vidal’s choice regarding Ofelia’s mother Carmen — what’s a life worth to you?

Or, perhaps, it’s Mercedes’ choice about Vidal. Hard to say. Is Vidal’s search for information about the rebels likewise a parallel to the quest for the key? Are his torture instruments his dagger? You could read it that way, although I think that’s perhaps a bit more multi-layered than del Toro intended. The pivot point of Ofelia’s brother is enough of a nexus for the parallel quests for me.

On the other hand, I’m perfectly content to assume that the fantasy kingdom is Spain without Franco. Only makes sense.

Pan’s Labyrinth fits in with Labyrinth (sans sentimentality), Heavenly Creatures (sans insanity), and The Great Yokai War (sans Miike). Awesome movie.

Questions came first.

Is it a pale shadow of Infernal Affairs? Will Scorsese have the guts to sail to the wind and let the bleakness blow through him? Will Nicholson be too much? Will DiCaprio be enough? Can Scorsese make it tight enough for us to feel the pain?

Is it Boston?

Yeah, it’s Boston.

The original was a tense, restrained exercise in suspense and pain. It was good, or better than good. The Departed takes the plot — the same lines, in places — and spills it out on a canvas made of Boston’s racial tensions and class divisions. It’s an equal to its predecessor through an alchemical transformation of mood, theme, and locale. William Monahan is from Boston. He was born ten years before me, which means he grew up watching South Boston riot when black kids showed up at their schools. That’s where the movie opens; that’s where it’s from.

Whitey Bulger came from that. You can’t paint with too wide a brush: you can’t say that South Boston was wholly shaped and driven by the fury of 1974. But Bulger built his organization in an environment full of people who thought that the government had abandoned them; that’s what made it easy. And Nicholson’s Frank Costello is Whitey Bulger, palpably and patently, from the opening footage of the riots to the revelations about his methods.

I’ve read criticisms of the 70s soundtrack. They’re missing the point. It’s a movie about the 70s — Costello is 70 years old, and he’s holding on to the glories he once had, and those glories rise inexorably from what happened then. It’s no mistake that one of the pivotal conversations between him and DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is about who thinks he could take over for Costello. That conversation reflects Costello’s impending death, whether that death is by gunshot or natural causes. The question asked through both Costigan and Damon’s Sullivan is whether or not Costello’s shadow is long enough to corrupt the newest generation, but it’s not much of a question. Clearly it can.

Infernal Affairs is about duty versus duty. The Departed is about class and the ties that bind. S. drew this distinction between the movies for me: everyone in Infernal Affairs cares about being a cop. In The Departed, they care about getting ahead. Both Damon and DiCaprio are from the same place, and their different paths lead them back to the same place. South Boston, not the police department, is the axis of this movie.

DiCaprio’s the backbone. As far as I’m concerned, he’s gotten away from his glamor. He bulked up, and he plays Costigan with bursts of sudden unrestrained violence. You don’t doubt him. Damon’s merely good, but he’s just fine. He’s so natural in the role that it’s easy to forget that he’s too good-looking and boyish to be able to play a bad guy.

And man, they push against each other well. Rarely sharing screen space, always sharing head space. Ambition versus despair.

Answers. Scorsese had the guts. It was painful, gaudy, two and a half hours of damaged goods filmed with perfect technique. Nicholson was too much here and there, and there again, but if it hadn’t been for his facial expressions — yes, Jack, we know your grin — he’d have been perfect. The physical presence and the voice were what I wanted.

Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor (DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Wahlberg). Not a prediction, but they’re all of that caliber. Best Editing, of course.

The answers were good. Thanks.

If you look around a little on the Internet, you can find copies of the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s new one hour TV drama. It’s about a weekly sketch comedy show unsurprisingly like Saturday Night Live, with the expected Sorkin-load of interpersonal drama and principles and so on. No Joshua Malina yet, although I expect him to show up in the second season as the remarkably bright yet socially slightly inept wunderkind. (It’s a fair prediction. Come on.)

Anyway, me and S. watched the pilot the other night. Try and avoid the download that claims to be for an iPod; the sound is not quite synced perfectly with the video. Y’know, it’s Sorkin — there are principled monologues and two of the cast members used to be in a relationship with each other but now have to work together. I don’t think, one show in, you can really know if he’s breaking new ground, but the same old ground is still pretty good.

In particular I like that Sarah Paulson plays a devout fundamentalist Christian who happens to be one of the big three cast members on the show within the show. Sorkin likes discussing religion, and President Bartlet’s Catholicism was always taken seriously. If he can keep that up here, I’ll be intrigued.

The cast has the chance to grow on me. Matthew Perry was really good; Bradley Whitford was pretty good. Timothy Busfield has a regular role as the guy who runs the control room, and he easily distinguishes it from his West Wing role — Whitford had more trouble doing that, which may wind up being a minus. Steven Weber was good as the network chairman, but he’s playing the role a little too young. I kept forgetting he’s supposed to be as important as he is. Amanda Peet has the potential to be the weak link in the cast. Maybe she’ll surprise me.

But yeah, it’s Sorkin, it’s fun. I’ll watch it.

Shane Black wrote Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. That’s a pretty good pedigree. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is his first directorial effort, and it’s sorta Last Action Hero as an semi-indie crime flick. (Warner Brothers distributed it, so not really indie, but you know.)

It’s packed precisely full enough with metasnark. Any more snarkiness, and the schtick would be tiresome. Any less snark, and we might notice that the plot is about as thin as they get. (Which, in all fairness, is no doubt intentional — the whole movie is a deliberate self-referential homage to bad pulp detective novels.) The meta, the breaking of the fourth wall, works because it serves characterization: Robert Downey Jr.’s voice over is not constantly present, and it’s a device to bring his personality to the forefront, so that’s all right.

It’s also more homage, referring back to the Mike Hammer first-person narrative style. Our fictional pulp detective is Johnny Gossamer, which one might well see as the opposite of Mike Hammer, now that I think on it.

I can’t say much about the acting because — well, I suppose I can. Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan nailed their roles, delivered the dialogue with panache, and didn’t try and take over the movie. Which is good, cause the screenplay was the real hero, unsurprisingly. If I had to pick a standout, it’d be Val Kilmer, who bulked up and chewed his way through his role nicely. But they were all good. Oh, and a special bonus point to Corbin Bernsen for reprising his real life as a TV actor. S. pointed out that the movie clip in which a young Corbin Bernsen appears is no doubt an actual clip from an actual Bernsen TV movie, although nobody on IMDB has figured out which one.

My big quibble is that Shane Black made some very odd tonal choices. You’re cruising along with a black comedy, and then all of the sudden it veers into seriously dark not-funny stuff. I couldn’t figure out if he thought the seriously dark stuff was funny, or if he thought he had to ground the movie from time to time, but either way? No. It’s OK to do froth even if it’s your cred-restoring comeback flick. Maybe next time.

And in general, totally worthwhile.

As Neo-Victorian morality dramas go, the superheroics were pretty good. The intrepid examiner of social mores as viewed through the lens of Hollywood blockbusters might wish to keep a running tally of the number of times females are depicted as safer without their powers.

The plot was thin, the acting was fairly vaporous (except for Pyro, who was suitably adolescent), the love triangles were unconvincing, and the ethical dilemmas… Professor Xavier displayed little angst over his hard decision, Wolverine was completely willing to use a weapon he’d been horrified by as soon as an opportunity presented itself, and Iceman was just a jerk. Power’s there to be used, apparently.

Overall, the word “vapid” comes to mind.

Brick was really good. I have to admit I went in expecting a cute gimmick movie — well, not cute. A noir gimmick, but you know what I mean. A movie that existed for the sake of the gimmick: noir high school. This was not what I got.

Yes, it’s a noir flick set at a high school. Strip away the high school and there’s nothing really new here. It’s pitch perfect; Rian Johnson gets the noir thing. The dialogue is tough, the characterizations are good, the fractured spinning loyalties are good. The subtle implications of perversity are good. If you grew the kids up and stuck the thing in Chicago or New York or LA, you’d have a competent but not surprising noir which would eventually show up in some classic noir boxed set or other, and people would say “Hey, it’s nice to see that one on DVD.”

Probably you’d stick it in LA. I haven’t seen mention of this in any interviews, but the washed out hallucinogenic colors are deeply reminiscent of Point Blank. There’s a chase scene which could be an homage to Lee Marvin’s loud footsteps. It’s fractured in some of the same loopy delirious ways.

However, the core power of the movie would be lost if you did that. The high school is not just a gimmick. The element that kept my gut twisted tight for the majority of the movie was the way in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries the weight of being a noir protagonist.

In the classic noir, the hero is flawed, drawn into situations beyond his ability to cope. Okay. Take that hero and make him a high schooler. There’s no way Gordon-Levitt can carry the weight of what he’s facing. This is a high school kid who’s messed up and isolated anyway; his clear vulnerability and fragility is nearly painful to watch. His fury is palpable in every scene: the way he roughs people up, the way he comes back up off the pavement when he shouldn’t be able to. The movie is a race between his anger and his ability to sustain.

And was it worth it? That’s the noir question.

This here is Spike Lee making the best caper flick he can make with a superb cast, which is pretty good on all fronts. And actually, the cast is a notch better than you’d think, for the following reasons: Denzel Washington does not play Denzel Washington, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is a great actor even if you don’t know who he is. I guess if you do know who he is already, the cast is only half a notch better than you’d think.

Um. Just go see Dirty Pretty Things already. I’ve talked about this before.

So there’s a good cast and there’s a nifty caper. The whole thing is handed to us from the start; when the first thing you see is Clive Owen talking about how the job went, you have a lot of information available. This trend does not end with the first five minutes. I had about 95% of the scheme figured out by the time the final steps were executed, and if I’d been paying close attention I would have had the last five percent. I am so happy to see a movie that plays fair with the audience. Lost, while I love it with a passion, has barely any mystery content at all. It’s all revelations. Inside Man is a puzzle that engages us. Way better that way.

Spike Lee knows how to direct a movie. I had some qualms about the (not unexpected) multi-cultural focus of the first half of the movie; it’s a Spike Lee Joint, so you know what’s coming, and from the first twangy world music hip hop notes of “Chaiyya Chaiyya Bollywood Joint” over the opening credits you know he’s partially just wanting to tell us how rainbow ethnic New York is. Which is both cool and true. But man, it’s a bit of a sledgehammer… and then it kinda vanishes; it’s not what the movie is about. Which is only weird because he goes out of his way to emphasize the theme early.

On the other hand? Such a minor nit to pick. The guy is so good with a camera and so good with his actors, and I’m very glad he pushed Denzel Washington out of his bad-ass self and into this funky twitchy brilliant detective role. It’s great contrast: Clive Owen (and Jodie Foster, at that) are cerebral planners. Denzel Washington is just smart, so smart he can barely keep himself on track, and plenty smart enough to keep up with the other two. Which is a bit of class consciousness in itself, I think. Jodie Foster’s character is Ms. White? Yeah.

Still reading? There are about to be spoilers.

One of the reasons I’m pretty sure the Washington/Owen/Foster dance was in part a classic Spike Owen discussion of race and class is because you can drop Jodie Foster out of the movie without having any effect at all. Which is a pity, cause it’s such a great role and the character is so fascinating. Sadly, she has no effect on the caper, the outcome of the caper, or Denzel Washington’s career. She functions as a gateway for the movie, allowing us a window into the high class New York which would otherwise be invisible to us (and to Washington). Plotwise, she’s less relevant.

She’s still cool. And I walked out of the theater wanting to know more about her above any of the characters; whence that career? Whence that need for control? She and Washington are in some ways two of a kind, possessed of a slew of non-verbal tics and trademarks. Owen’s the contrast when looked at from that angle: cool, controlled, and meticulous. There are a lot of ways to shake the triangle up: gender, race, mannerisms, legalities, class…

It’s a nice three-sided kaleidoscope. It’s a good movie.

A History of Violence is nearly simplistic. This is the American fable of the vigilante. A man’s family is threatened. He takes action, reluctantly. The villains suffer. They refuse to repent. Perhaps the man is tortured. He wins out, and his family is safe.

Or: he wins out, but his family is already dead. “I’m Batman.” “I’m the Punisher.” “I’m Mad Max.”

The alternate is perhaps the easy out from a narrative standpoint. It’s cleaner, not having to manage both a vigilante life and a family life. It’s just as easy to imagine a scenario in which a man’s family is threatened, but not killed; it’s simple to imagine a threat of sufficient magnitude as to generate this sort of violent revenge. We’re heartless crafters of fiction. Kill one member of the family, and leave the rest alive.

The alternate is certainly more common. It’s almost a binary choice. Either your family is alive, and you are not a vigilante, or your family is dead, and you are. Vigilante is not crime-fighter: Starman had his father, and many heroes had their spouses. Superman had his adoptive parents, and later his wife. It’s the violence which seems incompatible with normal relations.

Batman violates the norm, and that’s part of what makes him interesting in skilled hands. He works toward family in his inept, halting way. Batgirl. Another Batgirl. Robins. A love/hate relationship with the Huntress.

Cronenberg violates the norm. It’s a really simple story, and it’s told really simply. Also: unflinching. It’s possible to believe that there won’t be blood until, oh, five minutes into the movie. After that there’s no doubt. It’s the simple story of what happens when violence meets a relatively normal family; yes, Tom Stall has a past, but that’s just the trick by which he has a capacity for violence (and by which violence comes to him).

Well. And it’s the necessary tweak which enables the story to rise from two-dimensional comics or film and move into verisimilitude. Which, after all, is the point of the movie. In an odd sort of a way, it’s Cool World without the bad acting. What would it be like, to be a cartoon character in our world?

Tom Stall finds out that it’s difficult. Maybe untenable. You can interpret the ending as you wish; the propulsive thrust of the film scatters into a million pieces around that dinner table. The family falls apart. The family rebuilds. The family is never the same. The narrative arc runs from the unspeakable simplicity of the choice two thugs make at a motel to the shattering range of choices the Stalls have in the end.

Shattering worlds. That’s the Cronenberg trademark, isn’t it? This is no eXistenZ, with a million overlapping frames. It is, though, a movie about leaving one reality and entering another. Tom left his criminal world behind before the movie begins; later, he leaves his family life behind. The transitions are just as acute as anything Cronenberg’s ever done.

The other Cronenberg trademark is the search for intimacy. All Cronenberg protagonists want to make connections. (Many of them fail.) “Maybe the next one, darling… Maybe the next one…” Tom and his wife want to preserve their connection, which is just as interesting from another direction. There’s the sex, which goes from fantasy to harsh reality over the course of two scenes. There’s the ability, or lack thereof, to talk. It’s a match with the rest of Cronenberg’s work.

Speaking of connections: one of the unanswered questions, at the end, is the nature of Tom’s connection to his son. I’m left wondering; will Jack’s new found capacity for violence bring him closer to Tom? Will it be a reminder of the reality Tom’s fleeing? Unanswered.

I didn’t see enough movies last year, but this one was my favorite.

You can do worse than the lurid fantasy worlds of Games Workshop when it comes to novels. I blame it on Britain; like 2000 AD comics, Games Workshop’s Black Library seems happy to allow authors to indulge their hallucinogenic whimseys as long as the canon is consistent. And the canon is a fever-dream to start with, so you’ve got a rather fertile base for excess. What more can one ask of RPG novels?

Start with The Vampire Genevieve, by the estimable Jack Yeovil. At home, he’s Kim Newman. This weighy paperback is a compliation of all his Genevieve novels, and they’re grim gloomy romps with a wicked sense of humor. In the introduction, he notes that he wanted to write a book about what happened to the heroes of a fantasy epic afterwards. Tasty and moody and even a little wistful in the descriptions of the decrepit assassin-dancer and the fat old bandit king.

You could also check out his Dark Future books; I believe only Demon Download is in print. It’s not as good, but wow, that’s a post-apocalypse United States to be reckoned with. GW released Dark Future as a competitor to Car Wars, back in the day, so it’s a ruined US in the Warhammer timeline. Expect spiky crawly Chaos. Also expect mad Mormons, Vatican black ops, and very fast heavily armed cars. The later books also have Elvis. Like I said, not as well-written, but palpably insane.

Stuart Moore has a new Dark Future book out: American Meat. I’m only halfway through, but it’s lovable. You know Stuart Moore as the chief editor of Vertigo Comics for a number of years. It’s hard to tell if someone’s a great writer from one of these; I can say I’m enjoying it. Who doesn’t like robot monkeys and vegetarian biker gangs? I dunno why GW is putting out more Dark Future books but I’m kinda guiltily glad they are.

Final nod goes to Honour of the Grave, by Robin Laws. Not at all bad, and it’s the first of a series, which is a plus for me when it comes to popcorn reading. There’s always something really measured and intellectual about his prose, which is an odd framework for a pulp dark fantasy novel, but it’s Warhammer so it works pretty well all in all. And hey, cool heroine. Not enough fantasy novels about graverobbers.