Grindhouse

Some really quick notes about Grindhouse (2007, Robert Rodriguez/Rob Zombie/Edgar Wright/Eli Roth/Quentin Tarantino) [overall: 81; Planet Terror: 66; Death Proof: 87]:

1. All of those complaining that it isn't grindhousey enough to be called Grindhouse: y'all're retarded. No one gives a shit, and more importantly, no one will give a shit in 50 years. It doesn't matter one fuck what it's called; all that matters are the films therein. Todd Haynes fucked up the Sirkian crane shots in Far From Heaven -- boo fucking hoo. Still a fine movie. You want a simulation, go play a computer game.

2. All of those complaining that the dialogue parts of Death Proof are boring: y'all're retarded. All of those complaining about Death Proof in general: y'all're fucking retarded. Recognize.

3. This is the first time I've enjoyed the presence of Jeff Fahey.

4. Rob Zombie, I love you, but put some effort into it next time. This isn't a White Zombie video. It's gotta look like a movie.

5. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what's really shocking: I think I finally understand Eli Roth. He thinks he's a horror director, he's been positioned in the media as a horror director... but he aint a horror director. He's a comedian. More than that, he's the straight guy equivalent of John Waters. This isn't to say that Roth's career -- which, to date, is one long "grosser than gross" joke -- has any kind of subversive quality (that straight guy thing again), simply that, like early Waters, he's out to film shit so disgusting, so offensive, that you simply have to laugh. (There's some pretty sick stuff in Planet Terror, but nothing can top Roth's climactic image in Thanksgiving.) While I don't think I've neccessarily underrated Cabin Fever -- I'm sure it's still crap -- maybe I've approached it, and him, all wrong.

Apologies to those who already figured this shit out.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make For Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

A few short notes on Borat (2006, Larry Charles) [78]:

1. I assumed, after the huge hype, the blockbuster receipts, and the inevitable backlash, that this would never live up to the acclaim and derision. I was very, very wrong. Consistently hilarious -- they had me with "The Running of the Jew".

2. But, as Mike D'Angelo said of A Mighty Wind, there's something to be said for a joke that's been written over an improv. Not that there's anything wrong with Sacha Baron Cohen's improv skills -- how he's able to find just the right (wrong) thing to say and still look like a naif speaks to an incredibly twisted, brilliant mind -- but it's the stuff that's been planned (like the infamous nude wrestling scene) that really kill.

3. And yet -- while the nude wrestling gets all the hosannas, the scene that really stuck with me was the frat boy encounter. Not so much for what they say -- although the bald racism and misogyny is shocking -- but how the filmmakers manage to incorporate the improvised scene into the narrative. (Borat is on a journey to find and wed Pamela Anderson, and the frat boys disabuse him of the notion that she's a virgin.) Charles and Cohen set up a traditional romantic narrative arc -- boy goes after girl on a pedestal -- and let it grind up against the ugly flipside of that, the madonna/whore complex that both supports that narrative and undermines it at the same time. Pretty bracing stuff.

4. Also, this isn't satire. Sorry people. It's just a simple comedy, a road trip not unlike, uh, Road Trip, that just happens to have some modern comedic devices. If you're concerned about "regular folks" ambushed on film, two things: a) Allen Funt, and b) this has more to do with our increasingly mediated culture than any "contempt" on part of the filmmakers. If you don't like it, then make an effort to get rid of MySpace, camera phones, and Bush's warrantless surveillance program. Oh, you can't? Then tough, deal with it.

5. Most Valuable Supporting Player: Ken Davitian. I can only imagine what the conversation at his audition was like.

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (3/4/07 - 3/10/07)

After last week's frenzy of posts, things slow way down as the reality of Laura Mae takes hold. This week, I only have one solo post, a personal history of the Watchmen movie. Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, and I've been watching the progress (and non-progress) of this project for nearly twenty years; now that it looks like Zack Snyder is going to do it for realsies, it seemed like a good opportunity to ponder over the various versions that were never to be.

Also, ScreenGrab ran the Top 10 Most Dangerous Films of All Time; I contributed to the write-up on Orson Welles' It's All True.

300

A few short notes on 300 (2007, Zack Snyder) [40]:

1. Fascistic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic... but ridiculously so, so that what should be offensive loops back around into the hilarious. Don't know about you, but I find it hard to take conservative political positions seriously from guys in leather speedos and capes.

2. Unfortunately, while the excesses of Frank Miller's Sin City are redeemed by the (accidental) leap into camp, nothing so alchemical happens here -- 300 remains earthbound. Despite that 90% (or whatever) of the film is CGI, there's never any sense that anything could happen. While Sin City convincingly created a noirish world, this looks like half-naked people wandering in front of matte paintings, proclaiming sub-Shakespearean dialogue. There's no feeling that these shots conspire to create a world; instead, it's like each scene exists in a bubble. You could argue that it accurately replicates reading a comic, each page and frame in isolation from the other, but then I'd ask, why would you want to replicate such a static medium?

3. Haven't read the comic, so I don't know how much can be placed at Miller's doorstep; nevertheless, I've said it before and I'll say it again: he's a terrible, terrible writer. He's the Ulitmate Fanboy in a way -- for him, the Manichean worldview can always be blacker and whiter, and the heroes can never be badass enough. Will the scrappy army of potters and blacksmiths be allowed a bit of dignity as they fight side-by-side with the Warrior Born? Jesus, of course not. What about the hunchback guy, whom we'll call Rudy? He'll pop up again when everyone leasts expects it and help save the day, right? Nope, outcasts need not apply. And this is what makes Miller such a hack: as cliché as it might be for the little guys to beat all odds, there's a reason why it's rock-solid storytelling. Impossible obstacles stacked against a barely-capable protagonist creates audience empathy. If you don't have that -- if all you have are Spartan badasses who can kill any foe, until, for the sake of an ending, they can't anymore -- you're left with arrogant, boring characters.

4. So what does this mean for Snyder's upcoming Watchmen adaptation? I have no fucking idea. It's still difficult to get a reading on Snyder as a director. This is being generous, but he's almost like a throwback to the studio days of the 40s, a journeyman director who gets out of the way of the story he's telling. Which is good news: if he's willing to let all the godawfulness of the 300 source material stand on its own, then presumably he'll let the virtues and pleasures of Watchmen do the same. Except: the journeymen directors of the 40s that we remember and admire, like Ford and Hawks, still managed to leave a personal stamp on the material. I'm not seeing that from Snyder, but maybe we just need some time and distance to gain some perspective.

5. I liked how Xerxes uses armies from all around the world to take out the Spartans, and when that fails, he's not above reaching into the Lord of the Rings and Hellraiser franchises to shore up the numbers. That's a leader who thinks outside the box.

Bonus! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if, as reported, Gerard Butler is cast in the Watchmen movie, he'll be playing Jon Osterman, a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan. They'll do some funky body-scan type-thing on him and make Dr. M a CGI creation, of course, but everything else will be him. Reasoning? Well, he kind of looks like Osterman, and I don't think he has the force of presence required to portray the Comedian. You really need to feel the weight of history on the Comedian, and I can't see Butler getting that across. Now, Doc Manhattan, the guy who starts human, then starts to lose those qualities (along with his clothes) until he's kind of a blue blank slate? That I can see.

(Now watch, they'll make him Nite Owl or something.)

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (2/25/07 - 3/3/07)

A really active week for me, considering baby Laura is only about two weeks old.

This week, I have three YouTube videos with the loose theme of "looking for horror in the wrong places", each with a little bit of commentary: an episode of The Smurfs, a Greg Kihn Band video, and a Sprite commercial. I also found a really cool up-close look at the various media used in Children of Men, and two pieces of news/commentary, one about a possible upcoming Writer's Guild strike, and one about a local (Seattle) controversy surrounding a chopped-up movie review. Finally, there's a short heads-up post about a site that offers public domain movies free for the downloading.

Get readin', y'all.

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (2/18/07 - 2/24/07)

Sorry about the lack of new posts, folks. As you may have heard, I'm writing posts for the film blog ScreenGrab, and getting paid for it to boot. There will be new material here -- I swear on my mother's unoccupied grave. (Ideally, I'll be seeing both Zodiac and The Host in the movie theaters for film very soon.) But, to mark time until that day, I'll be posting weekly roundups of my ScreenGrab posts complete with links, so you won't have to bother with that Ebiri bitch.

Unfortunately, my debut week only included one post: a new column entitled The Film Buff's Book Shelf, wherein I review Kim Newman's classic (imo) survey of horror film, Nightmare Movies.

So far, this is the only entry in this "series", but I'm working on a piece about Bill Warren's Keep Watching The Skies that should pop up the week of March 11. Keep watching the blog!

The Descent, Silent Hill, The Wicker Man (2006)

I was the only person, it seems, who was underwhelmed by Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers. Yes, it was a pretty nifty werewolf flick considering the low-budget, but in terms of characters, story, etc., it came across as boilerplate as the Aliens-but-with-werewolves descriptor made it sound. (It was no Ginger Snaps. Hell, it wasn't even Ginger Snaps 2.) So despite the hype that preceded The Descent (2006, Neil Marshall) [50], I was skeptical.

And for about 80% of its running time, I was pleasantly surprised. The beginning is a little trying, going through the motions of lead character Sara's backstory trauma that's both shorthand and laborious. (Here's an idea, filmmakers: if, five minutes into your film we jump ahead "one year later", how about starting the actual movie one year later?) But then Marshall introduces his other female characters, and for awhile, it works -- a horror film with plausible (if movie-ish) women at its center, not teenagers or bimbos. Not even a nude scene! (Joe Bob Briggs must be apoplectic.) So, even as our quintet of spelunkers find themselves trapped in an uncharted cave due to the hubris of their leader, even as they find themselves stalked by carnivorous ghost-white mole men, Marshall keeps it low-key, never turning the women into invulnerable action heroes nor panicky headcases. And Marshall demonstrates an increasingly firm grip on suspense and action tropes. The monsters are probably unnecessary, but I was impressed by how genuinely scary Marshall makes them, with nothing more than make-up and camera tricks -- no small feat in our jaded, all-CGI-all-the-time age. Yet, while most have commented on the first reveal of the creatures (and it is well done), for me, the moment when one of the women attempts to bridge a chasm with ropes while hanging from the rocky ceiling by her fingers was the white knuckle scene du jour.

But then, in the last fifteen minutes or so, Marshall manages to lose me, not once, not twice, but thrice. (NOTE: Although anyone who reads my shit knows I'm pretty loose with the spoilers, I'm giving the warning here anyway, cuz these are big ones.) The first time is the resolution of a subplot between Sara and expedition leader Juno. In the beginning of the film, there's a quick shot of Juno and Sara's husband that clearly communicates that, yes, these two are having an affair. Amazingly, this is the only time that Marshall reveals this information, other than a throwaway line of dialogue later on from Juno, where she states that she "lost just as much" in Sara's car accident as Sara.

But then these moments of audience goodwill and respect are overwhelmed by that oft-used lazy bit of screenwriting, the accidental killing. While fighting off the creatures, Juno is surprised by Sara's friend Beth, and Juno accidentally slits Beth's throat. I really hate this bit of storytelling; I'm not sure I've ever seen it used where it felt natural and not like the writer dicking around with the audience. But that's not what lost me. What lost me was the film's insistence on making this killing which was clearly unintentional, some kind of moral referendum on Juno. Yes, she lies about it to the others, but one would think that, with monsters on their heels, it's forgivable. But no, there's a whole tortured sequence of events to bring Sara up to speed on Beth's demise, and Juno is increasingly painted, not as a adventuresome woman who made a mistake, but a villain.

And so what does Sara do when it's just the two of them left, trapped in the dark cave with a horde of monsters coming after them? Why, she slices Juno's leg and leaves her to die, of course. (Because saving it for when they make it out alive through teamwork would be too easy.) Any sympathy for Sara, any admiration for her strength gets tossed right out the window. I really have no conception of what Marshall was thinking with this. It simply isn't supported by anything in the movie, and comes across as audience-pandering bloodlust -- the seducer, the adventuress, the independent woman must die.

Then, to add insult to Juno's unnecessary leg wound, we are treated to Sara's escape from the cave and return to the car... which is a fucking "it was all a dream" fake-out. She's actually still in the cave, and hallucinates that she's with her dead daughter as the mole men howl from the darkness, minutes from their prey. So not only is our female protagonist consumed with jealous, homicidal rage, she's also so mentally weak, so fragile in a stereotypically "feminine" way that she suffers a psychotic break at the moment when the chips are down. Can you imagine an action movie where Schwarzenegger suffers a similar mental breakdown at the moment when he's about to save the girl and kill the villain? So what at first appears to be a action-horror movie with somewhat progressive elements turns out to be the same old shit. Fuck that.

I was also wary about Silent Hill (2006, Christophe Gans) [62], and rightfully so. Horror film? Check. Video game adapatation? Check. Radha Mitchell? Check. (I have no problem with the lovely Ms. Mitchell, but damn, she shows up in a lot of crap.) But for once, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The movie pretty much had me in its opening scene, a search for a sleepwalking little girl that's set in a series of locations that, when taken individually, seem natural enough, but when put together create a wonderful imaginary landscape: an overpass over a tiny creek that's just yards away from a yawning abyss. In other words, danger and madness lie just beyond the safety of the quotidian.

A few minutes later, Mitchell's Rose and her sleepwalking daughter Sharon have a picnic, an awkward scene that feels like it was written in a foreign language and then translated into English. By the time it ended with them falling asleep and then waking up again -- blatantly signifying that what we're about to see is, if not literally a dream, then something with the logic of one -- it dawned on me that, even before the gore arrived, I was watching a big budget, art-directed-within-an-inch-of-its-life Lucio Fulci movie.

So in other words, what follows is only for those with a taste for nonsensical oneiro-horror, like mid-period Argento or the first Phantasm. There's a reason why the town of Silent Hill is stuck in some kind of hellish other dimension, why Rose and Sharon are drawn there, why there's a child named Alessa who looks identical to Sharon, but really, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And as Dread Pirate Steven Carlson points out, when we learn the solution to the central mystery, we belatedly realize that, logically, there's no good reason why Rose should be threatened with bodily harm, which seriously undercuts the horror of the premise.

Yet, while logic flies out the window, I bought into it emotionally, which is the only real requirement for oneiro-horror. (This is what separates your House by the Cemeteries, with its silly scares, from your Phantasms, where the fear of abandonment fuels every moment.) Regardless of the ill-concieved scenes (why is there a secret room behind a painting in a hotel?), the characters, however two-dimensional, are always on-point emotionally. Steve's point doesn't bother me because, while Alessa, the wronged child at the center of Silent Hill (both the movie and the place) needs Rose to exorcize her from her living nightmare, she's also an embodiment of unthinking rage, and she's going to strike at anyone who isn't safe within the church, regardless of their intentions. It's the characters' emotions that shape this world, not any fealty to notions of "correct" screenwriting.

I'll admit that part of my emotional involvement comes from the look of the thing. It's beautiful and evocative, even when showing a bent in half man crawling through a lavatory on his hands, leaving some kind of spreading rust disease in his wake. I particularly liked the shots of Rose driving through the wooded hills, which offer both a storybook quality and the sense of looking at America through a non-native's eyes. And then there's the town itself: shrouded in a fog of ash, cut off at all ends like the cabin in Evil Dead, full of crazy buildings and spaces, way too big for a small town, yet deserted, looking for all the world like a war zone.

(This last bit can't be coincidence. There's some Bush-whacking subtext at work in the film -- Silent Hill's downfall comes about because of a group of puritanical zealots, led by a woman named Christabella, commit a wrongful act -- and bafflingly, even as the town is destroyed, even as they huddle in the comfort of the church as the darkness they've unleashed surges around them, they steadfastly hold onto the belief that they were just and correct. It's doesn't map to Iraq perfectly by any means, but Avary knows exactly what he's doing.)

What's really striking is that the only important characters are female, and this isn't apparent until well into the film. (The two prominent male characters are given a useless, expositionary subplot; supposedly, Konami, the video game's publisher, on upon reading Avary's first draft, asked, "Where are the men?"). Whereas The Descent uses an all-female cast to give the illusion of something progressive only to indulge in the usual, stereotypical notions of femininity, Avary makes the main characters women in order to bust taboos about motherhood. Motherhood touches all of the main characters: Rose can't have children, so she's adopted Sharon; Dahlia gave birth, out of wedlock, to Alessa; Cybil, the cop that accompanies Rose into Silent Hill, is haunted by a kidnapping case that ended tragically. All of them are willing to go whatever length is necessary to protect their kids. At first blush, this looks like standard-issue sentimentality, especially coupled with the twice-repeated maxim, "to a child, a mother is God", intended to offer something "positive" and "human" in the face of flesh-eating bugs and skin-ripping, pyramid-headed monster men. By the end, however, it's clear that it's this very (reactionary) sentiment that has caused all the horror in the first place, from Rose's monomaniacal urge to help her daughter in any way possible, to Cybil's desire to make sure history doesn't repeat itself, to Christabella's outrage at Dahlia's pregnancy, which, by its very existence, spits in the face of her values. Only Dahlia seems aware of all this, aware of Christabella's blindness and hypocrisy, and aware that she could end the nightmare, but doing so would be to submit to the very value system that she's rejected. Rose takes her place, madly rushing to get Sharon back, never realizing that (with an ending that's a kissing cousin to the ones in Fulci's The Beyond and The House By The Cemetery) motherhood is tantamount to being a prisoner.

A few quick notes about The Wicker Man (2006, Neil LaBute) [36]: 1. This is either a nice bit of snark or the best stealth advertising campaign of 2007. Worked on me, regardless. 2. I'd love to report that LaBute's film has been misunderstood, and that it's a penetrating look at male privilege and gender power relations, but no, it's a misogynist load. I don't know what LaBute is trying to work through, but he aint there yet. 3. I never saw In The Company of Men, nor have I seen any of his theater work, so I don't have this perception of LaBute as a promising talent that's been steadily slipping. My first exposure was Nurse Betty, so he's always been a competent, borderline-hack director. That in mind: Theo Sez it's "almost unwatchable", but the problem is that it's compulsively watchable -- beautiful to look at (good job, location scout!), crisply edited, and, the uneven Cage aside, pretty well-acted, given the material. 4. But, oh, the material. Like Feast, it's a premise that's stuck in a ninety-or-so minute holding pattern, waiting for clearance to land. (Seriously -- I don't get why this story should be any longer than five minutes.) One character is written so poorly that any reasonable human being has to conclude that she is either in on the whole thing or stupid beyond belief. I don't know if it's to LaBute's credit that, with the depth of his loathing, I wasn't sure which was true. 5. Strangely, the YouTube clip above neglects one great laugh-out-loud moment. I won't totally spoil it, but it spins the overused character-suddenly-hit-by-a-vehicle gag into something so absurd, one could drop it into a Scary Movie with no alterations whatsoever.

Ce N'est Pas Une Update

No, nothing new to post yet; not even baby pics. (Laura Mae apparently thinks she's leased a condo in that womb; the kid is severely mistaken.) But! Coming soon is a tripartite review of three "women's pictures", The Descent, Silent Hill, and the 2006 Wicker Man, as well as my Muriel Award ballot, complete with comments that were not submitted, because there was a cat on my lap.

We'll see you in two and two.

Mission: Impossible III, 4, Feast

Here's a surprise: Mission: Impossible III (2006, J.J. Abrams) [76] doesn't suck. After seeing it in the theaters earlier this year, I took another look at it on video, fully ready to demote it from my top ten. It couldn't be better than the solid Casino Royale, could it?

Not only is it better than the Bond, it's even better than I originally thought. No, it's really nothing more than a trifle -- the intense opening promises a grimmer, grittier tale than what's delivered -- but it's a well-crafted one. I suspect an underlying reason why I prefer it over the new 007 is because I can sense the tectonic shifting required to "reinvent" Bond after forty-some years, and, as good as the result is, the strain shows. There's a self-consciousness that can't be avoided, what with the martinis, the cars, the women. Bond is constrained by his past even as they try to reinvent his future. M:I's Ethan Hunt, on the other hand, lacks any historical weight; the only continuity is Tom Cruise's boyish superstardom (and the cunning buisness sense underneath that persona). That, along with having a series of wildly differing directors each time lends the series to reinventing itself each time. (Both David Fincher and Joe Carnahan were attached to M:I 3 at different points; can anyone imagine them being allowed to shoot a James Bond film?)

So what does J.J. Abrams bring? Where De Palma brings his setpieces, executed with the soul of a technocrat, and Woo brought, well, his doves, Abrams brings a Spielbergian sense of pop filmmaking to the film. Undoubtedly this is due to Abrams' television history, and while some would hold that against him, it's just what the movie needs -- every character is, if not deep, then sharply and effortlessly defined, the dialogue is snappy (Laurence Fishburne delivers his bon mots with gusto), and each scene is built with a craftman's touch, making its necessary story points and moving on unhurriedly. Not exactly groundbreaking, but this kind of polish, which you see all the time in Hollywood films from the Fifties and earlier, seems more and more rare.

It almost goes without saying that Abrams also brings in Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman's a kind of an insurance policy here; should things veer towards the too-near or the too-cute (and they do, with every good guy character given puppy-dog likability) Hoffman's no-bullshit indie performance style gives the film some seriousness as a counterbalance. (Admittedly, that seriousness is just another checkmarked item on a Hollywood blockbuster to-do list, but it's welcome anyway.) It's an odd sight watching these two actors play their scenes together -- even odder than watching them in Magnolia, or Hoffman vs. Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. Cruise is all about letting his stardom do most of the heavy lifting (and I don't mean that pejoratively), conveying emotion in an acceptable, abstracted shorthand, while Hoffman is about interiority, letting the audience watch him think. The end result isn't sparks; they actually kind of act past each other, or perhaps more accurately, the two approaches are locked in an unbreakable orbit around each other. Fortunately, this is mirrored somewhat in the plot, as Ethan thinks he knows everything he needs to know about Hoffman's Davian, but actually knows very little.

The same day I watched the slick craft of Mission: Impossible III, I also caught 4 (2006, Ilya Khrzhanovsky) [81], which is about as far on the opposite stylistic spectrum you can get without going into Brakhage, et. al. At turns hilarious and horrifying, it's a look at modern day Russia that feels like it's being made up as it goes along. Characters are introduced, then dropped; what seems like an important scene in the overall story turns about to be a footnote. (It's like the anti-Crash or anti-Babel in that regard.) And the style changes radically over two hours, starting with a Roy Andersson-esque opening shot, then sequeing into a somewhat stagy, dialogue-heavy bar scene, then shedding that and becoming a Dardennes Brothers-style existential look at the daily struggles of an extremely poor village outside of Moscow. (And that's really only the tip of the iceberg; The Great Sicinski can break it down for you further.) I can imagine some see this stylistic ADD as waffling or film student excess (it kept me constantly engaged, fwiw), but what Khrzhanovsky is getting at, I think, is that is to really show the reality of 21st Century Russia, one style, whether naturalistic or fantastic or symbolist (or even all in the same shot) can't cut it. And that reality -- capitalism run amok, so crazy that it literally takes bread out of the mouth of its people -- is pretty damn harrowing.

A few quick notes about Feast (2006, John Gulager) [33]: 1. Yes, John Gulager can direct. Thanks to him, the final Project Greenlight looks like a real movie -- you know, a story told in pictures. 2. Unfortunately, it's not a story worth telling. (Conflict of interest/sour grapes alert: My writing partner Martin McClellan and I made the Top 100 in Project Greenlight 3, which you can read about here. We never read the original draft of Feast, though.) The freeze-frame intro gimmick isn't that amusing and the structure is lumpy, with no sense of pacing or build-up. (There's no real logic to how the monsters attack -- I get the sense that they could break in and kill everyone in five minutes if they tried, but they don't simply because there's eighty minutes to fill.) 3. The shock humor doesn't work because there's no wit underneath it. The fate of the biker chick (played by Gulager's real-life girlfriend) is supposed to be edgy or something, but it genuinely offended me, and I'm not easily offended. 4. On the TV show, there was an unsuccessful audience preview, where it was revealed that the knuckleheaded audience wanted to know where the monsters came from, and the filmmakers struggled to come up with an origin scene for re-shoots. Guess what? No origin scene in the final version. Fuck you, test audience. 5. The best thing about the movie is the second to last shot, a long take (remarkable for this particular movie) that's quite funny and wouldn't be out of place in an old Kiarostami flick. I hope that Gulager makes another movie.

Miami Vice, L'Intrus, V for Vendetta

Remember the Colin Farrell who stole scenes from Tom Cruise in Minority Report? What happened to that guy? He doesn't show up in Miami Vice (2006, Michael Mann) [38], but then, that's really the least of the film's problems. Ostensibly based on the TV show (which I never saw), the feature version is so bland, so lacking in distinction, it may as well be called Drug Bust!. We know the Mann m.o.: men who define themselves by their work, who have to define themselves that way because the world they live in is slippery, amorphous, and only they can bring meaning to it, while the whole package is delivered with operatic brio. This was best demonstrated by Heat, where his Dostoevskyian universe felt grounded in everyday banal reality, the grand philosophical crises of cops and robbers undercut, as in the famous robbery sequence, by the dull clack-clack-clack of gunfire.

But where Heat had actual characters to organize this worldview around, here he has department store mannequins named Sonny and Rico, and the drama required to bring his m.o. in focus is replaced by hot air and testosterone. Most scenes are standard issue my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours confrontations between our undercover heroes and drug lords, whose trust they want to earn. But there never feels like there's anything at stake. There's a middle-section romance between Sonny and Gong Li's assistant drug lord or whatever she's supposed to be, and we're expected to care because... why? They have hot monkey sex? All that's left is the visuals, which have been bafflingly heralded in most quarters. At the risk of sounding like A----- W----, I can't help but think this approval boils down to "Oooh, pink sky! I've seen that in real life!"

While there's nothing wrong with appreciating Miami Vice as a series of abstract images, it doesn't really hold up, because there's still an underlying reliance on Hollywood conventions of structure and closure. Had Mann really jumped in with both feet, Drug Bust! could've looked a bit like L'Intrus (The Intruder) (2006, Claire Denis) [70], a spy tale at turns haunting and frustrating. The story, as far as I can tell, is about Louis, an old man living in Switzerland, who is actually a Russian spy. His heart is going out on him, so he retires and arranges to have a heart transplant and, with a new lease on life, attempts to regain ahold of the past that slipped away from him while he was a spy. I think. The film is fragmented and impressionistic, so that summary is possibly full of errors -- and I've seen it twice.

(I want to pause to note that the first time I saw it was in a theater, and near the end, there was a projection problem, and the image started to darken, very slowly, over the course of ten minutes. Despite this, I was always enthralled, and if Louis' problem had been glaucoma, I'd never even known there was something wrong.)

Still, the plot is somewhat secondary. It's the succession of images that enthrall: a baby's smiling face, a dog chewing on a human heart, the black ocean, the oppressive weight and hugeness of a steam ship contrasted with floating ribbons dispersed in its honor. Between this and the monolithic score by the Tindersticks, the film creates a wonderfully oneiric mood, where the distinction between reality, memory, and dream dissolve. Yet this is also the source of my frustrations; at times, it's so cryptic, that it can feel like the movie is drifting off without you. The ending is particularly irritating -- no summation, no resolution, it just disperses the way it floated in. (Does this make me a hypocrite w/r/t my problems with Miami Vice? Then so be it.)

However, the emotional journey of Louis is never less than clear. Despite the occasional obfuscations, we discover just how isolated this old spy is, how pathetic his attempts are to engage with life again, not realizing that, despite his money, his connections, and his new heart, he is no longer the one in control. Louis returns to Tahiti to find the son he believes he has from a past affair (while essentially ignoring the one he has in Switzerland), and the people there play a trick on him. I can't decide if this trick is cruel or hopeful, but it definitely comes out of pity.

A few quick notes about V for Vendetta (2006, James McTeigue) [57]: 1. No, not as good as the comic. 2. Yes, it's been dumbed down, most egregiously in presenting V as an uncomplicated hero, where Moore always viewed him with some suspicion. 3. The direction is pretty clumsy -- repeating Evey's childhood trauma in the present, with the same exact camera setups comes across as comical, and the hectic opening, cramming too much in fifteen minutes, makes the film feel shallower than it actually is. 4. However, a few moments make their way from the comic more-or-less unchanged, like Evey's interrogation, Valerie's letter, and V's confrontation with the doctor, and the movie is stronger for it. 5. Still, I was shocked by how moved I was by the final sequence, invented for the film, where the army of Vs take off their masks, and some are revealed to be characters who had died earlier -- the one moment of fanciful unreality in a film that takes itself way too seriously.