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August 18 No Country for Old MenThis is a transcipt of a conversation a bunch of us had about the movie, back in March. My handle here is After4ever. I edited this down quite a bit from the original (http://www.ratebeer.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=87570&whichpage=3). We'd been debating whether the ending was a strong point or a weak point for the film, and then this conversation started:
MrRomero
I had to "rewind" after the credits started rolling and still don’t understand the end. Can someone explain it to me?
Naven
x3.
Ernest
Well, I’ve never read the book nor any critical reviews so don’t have a deeper understanding than my own perception allows.
But the whole movie seems to illustrate how much more depraved and extreme the evil element in humans has become (and Bardem’s character is the embodiment of the pinnacle of that evil). The older generation (Jones’ character and the cop he talks to in the coffee shop after Brolin gets killed) can hardly even fathom it...hence the title of the movie. I think the end is a bleak and pessimistic painting of the future, in both that (A) Bardem gets away (i.e., the evil will go on), and (B) Jones has grown weary and sees relief only in death (his dead father building a fire for him, i.e. the afterlife).
It’s a very similar message that Fargo left me with. As you’ll recall, McDormand sat there with Stormare in her prowler at the end asking why on earth he would do such awful things (for money)...she just can’t wrap her mind around how people can be so evil.
So, both seem to be a kind of a lament on how badly humans have devolved, how sick/desperate/uncaring we’ve become.
At least that’s what these left me with...there’s probably more to it than that, which muzzle or cath could probably talk to more eloquently.
DocLock
My take is that the car crash scene near the end was a way of showing that Chuguhr was not superhuman; he was indeed harmable, so that scene reinforced the scene where he performed surgery on himself. I think the kids on the bikes were intended to provide contrast to the scene where Tommy Lee Jones talks about his retirement and his getting old and his dream of his father.
But the Tommy Lee Jones old age angle leads me to the thing that really pissed me off about this movie. Law enforcement personnel were portrayed as idiotic rubes, and I found it completely unbelievable that Chuguhr could have gotten away with everything he did with even halfway competent police personnel. Also, why didn’t Llewelyn’s wife and the Woody Harrelson character try to run or scream or do anything to try to save their lives, other than just sit there and be shot? If Woody Harrelson had scremed and run down the steps of his hotel, I don’t find it credible that Chuguhr still would have shot him.
Naven
I think the end, intentionally, was somewhat left to the viewers perception. I have read and read online different ideas of how people have viewed the ending, most of which center on the idea (and story name) that the world has become too violent and Tommy Lee Jones character simply cannot stand it. I have also read that people perceive the coin toss as an intregal part of the story (i.e. life is series of risks - a coin flip). I guess my issue with the ending is not so much that a lot was left to interpretation, but that the rest of the movie flowed so well and made perfect sense. If it’s a movie to make you think, great. But, I think they could have made the ending a little less jumbled and more in line with what was happening before it. Also, did none of these towns have ANY police? There was an all out shootout outside the one hotel, which seemed to last a looong time, and not one cop?
after4ever
I found the ending a bit more hopeful than that. It’s been months since I’ve seen it, but I’ll try to explain why.
I thought when TLJ went out to speak out to his uncle, he was saying at first that he felt like the world had gotten to be too much for him. What he heard back was that the world has never been an easy place, whether he noticed it or not before. And that any personal reaction he might have about whether he could handle it was just vanity--and, by extension, would be just frustration in vain.
The fact that he’s resolutely against evil, and disgusted and troubled by it (just like Margie in Fargo) points up that there’s both good and evil in this world. And good essentially outnumbers evil because elected officials (sheriffs are generally not appointed or hired) are resolutely good in both cases--good won the vote.
TLJ is happy in retirement. His wife chides him somehow at breakfast, reminding him that she, as usual, wants to see a good mood out of him that day. Can’t remember what she says, but the implication is that he’s come to some kind of peace in the unspecified time that’s passed since the Chiguhr case and his retirement from law enforcement.
In his placid golden days, he realizes that he’s content to feel the end of his life approaching, and that he’ll get to see his dad on the other side, and that it’ll feel familiar from what he’s seen on earth.
Ultimately, Chigurh rattled him at a fundamental level. How could he not? But he ended up having to accept that life is worth living happily despite the presence of such evil in the world.
One of the most realistic happy endings I’ve seen in a while.
DocLock
I think this is a valid assessment, but I see the ending as a cop out for the TLJ character. Near the beginning of the movie, when TLJ is loading up the horse, his wife asks a series of questions, ending with, "Promise me you won’t hurt anyone", and he replies something like, "Oh, you know I can’t promise you that." So, to me, his retirement at the end seems a bit like he’s pussying out because he’s scared of Chiguhr. The ending could also be viewed as an indictment of the entire US war on drugs, especially in the southwestern US against Latin America; a war we are still losing.
after4ever
Originally posted by DocLock: I see the ending as a cop out for the TLJ character.
Cop out? Why? Was he too young to retire? He looks 65. You can work past 65 in law enforcement, but your pension kicks in strong, and cops’ wives are famous for hustling them out of uniform at the earliest possible date so they can quit worrying. They end up making him the hero. Why would they sell him out by making him spineless? He’s the emotional heart of every scene he’s in, and they seem to really admire and have affection for him. I think all signs point to a planned retirement. They definitely show a lot of willingness to update the Old West symbolism that they scatter through the movie, and I don’t think the lawman who goes down fighting is something they want to reflexively include just because they’re making a 1980s western. So letting him retire and get an honorable discharge (so to speak) feels like part of the plan.
He never backs down from any confrontation with Chigurh, either. Chigurh eludes him. He’s grounded (and underfunded) enough to be realistic about chasing him across multiple jurisdictions. He’s not a hard-on like the federal agent characters are sometimes in these movies (not to mention real life).
DocLock
A fair assessment, I’d say, but one scene still affects me about the TLJ/Chiguhr relationship. When TLJ enters Llewelynn’s trailer and sees the lock bolt has been knocked clean off and thrown into the wood wall so hard as to make a circular mark, I think he realizes then that he wants nothing to do with Chiguhr, and I don’t see any situation where Chiguhr wouldn’t kick his ass. Personally, I think the ending would have been better if TLJ WAS wounded by Chiguhr OR if TLJ wounded Chiguhr and Chiguhr escaped. I’ve also heard theories that the Chiguhr character is a figment of TLJ’s imagination, manifested to ease and rationalize his transition to retirement.
Ernest
Originally posted by after4ever: I thought when TLJ went out to speak out to his uncle, he was saying at first that he felt like the world had gotten to be too much for him. What he heard back was that the world has never been an easy place, whether he noticed it or not before. And that any personal reaction he might have about whether he could handle it was just vanity--and, by extension, would be just frustration in vain.
I guess I saw that scene as only adding to TLJ’s hopelessness in dealing with the evil in the world, but on reflection I think you’re right. And somehow I hadn’t drawn from the ending that TLJ had in fact *already* retired during the closing dialog (since it appeared right after the car crash)...so I felt like he was still wrestling with the prospect of continuing the fight or not. But your reading makes a lot more sense if he was indeed retired already. His wife did say something that implied he now had too much time on his hands, didn’t she? Ernest
Originally posted by DocLock: Personally, I think the ending would have been better if TLJ WAS wounded by Chiguhr OR if TLJ wounded Chiguhr and Chiguhr escaped.
That would have changed TLJ from an observer into a participant, though...TLJ is effectively the narrator/commentator. I also think there’s a great deal more tension in the fact that TLJ is always a step away from the abyss but never directly looks into it. I know I sure didn’t want him to actually confront Bardem/Chigurh in that hotel room at night...a close call (and knowing how close you were) is sometimes more horrific than actual tragedy.
after4ever
Originally posted by DocLock: one scene still affects me about the TLJ/Chiguhr relationship. When TLJ enters Llewelynn’s trailer and sees the lock bolt has been knocked clean off and thrown into the wood wall so hard as to make a circular mark, I think he realizes then that he wants nothing to do with Chiguhr
I definitely didn’t take that much from TLJ’s reaction to the dent from the bolt. I think that was there to do a couple things:
I think TLJ knows he couldn’t hope to *imprison* Chiguhr. He has to take him out. Taking people out is easy, especially for people who can be heavily and armored quite conspicuously in public. Like cops. Building evidence, making a case, and winning a trial are harder. Defending against an inquest for shooting a suspect is also somewhat tricky, though in this particular case that’s the least of their worries. But he never got a clean shot at him. Never even saw him, IIRC.
And this is why his wife wants him to promise not to hurt anyone. He can’t, as a professional lawman, promise that. But in his heart, as a man, he knows he doesn’t want to. Because killing another human being, even with moral and ethical justification intact (and then some), his conscience would never completely recover. Ask my grandfather (if you could) about shooting down Germans in WW2. You never get over taking a life. Never ever ever.
Maybe TLJ’s had to kill someone else in the past, and it weighs on him. Certainly as a sheriff of such long standing he’s had to draw down multiple times, and confronted the possibility. His wife would know what it does to him, even if he never spoke a syllable of it. She doesn’t want him to get hurt, doesn’t want him in danger--and doesn’t want him suffering under the burden of conscience that killing anyone, even Chiguhr, would saddle him with.
That’s why he has a good man. Maybe the best a man can be. He’s morally capable of realizing that Chiguhr has to be killed: Chiguhr transcends even the capacity of the courts and the prisons to protect us from evil. (OT-M: Given my views on capital punishment, this is going some.) And he not only has the courage to draw down and squeeze the trigger to eradicate that evil, but the shrewdness to tactically outwit Chiguhr, presumably, and put himself in a position, safely, for the killshot.
It’s been years since I’ve walked out of a movie in utter shock at how good it is. But this one did it.
after4ever
Originally posted by Ernest: That would have changed TLJ from an observer into a participant, though...TLJ is effectively the narrator/commentator.
This also keeps it from turning into a Final Showdown Between Good and Evil, and shows that these people are just men, bound by circumstance. Chiguhr may or may not be the Purest Embodiment of Evil; he may just be a psycho. But I loved how what got him was totally random--a car wreck that just kinda happened. Reminds you that not everything is planned, in a movie or a life.
BlackForestCO
I’ve enjoyed reading the conversation on the movie so far and agree with a lot of what has been said. You guys seem insightful, so I figured I would throw a question out there for you guys that I have been wondering myself.
What is the significance of Woody Harrelson’s character in the film?
When we are first introduced to him he presents himself as confident and the right man to perform the job, but aside from that we see very little evidence to back up his claims or demeanor.
Is he inserted to provide an obstacle for Chigurh, and when seeing how handily he is disposed of by Chirguh, supposed to confirm the viewers belief that Chirugh is almost non-human? Or is he there just to be another mouthpiece for the films commentary?
after4ever
For me, off the top of my head, Woody does a few important things:
All that said, I don’t know that we would have seen Woody’s character in this movie if there wasn’t such a tradition of hired guns in old Westerns.
And I don’t know whether he was in the book, but I assume he was, ’cause the movie was so faithful to it, from what they say.
Bhops
Besides the functional aspects of his role, he was unprincipled evil, in my opinion, and got squeezed out pretty quick. He has little to no survivability in this fatalistic world. He was kind of the counterpoint, in my opinion to Lewlyn, who was unprincipled good, and at least had a fighting chance. And of course, Tommy Lee Jones and Chigur were principled good and evil. Not that cut and dried perhaps, but those were some parallels I saw. TLJ and Chigurs principles allowed them to at least survive, but not without major damage.
Ernest
Originally posted by after4ever: 1). Echoes the old private bounty hunter theme of the great hollywood westerns (one of many themes resurrected/modernized subtly by this flick).
Yup, which Coens used in Raising Arizona too. I can also see a humor angle to Harrelson’s character (this is the Coen brothers, after all, there WILL be some humor involved), much as was done in The Shining with Scatman’s character...here you have a guy you’re sorta rooting for to sorta help save the day, and WHAM he’s taken out before he even has a chance. I always thought Scatman’s death was funny because Kubrick set it up soooooooo painstakingly...the flight to Denver, the long snowcat ride in the storm. And then it’s all over in a few seconds. When Bardem quietly follows Harrelson up the stairs, I was laughing out loud...you knew it was all over for Woody.
Schroppfy
Originally posted by after4ever: Maybe TLJ’s had to kill someone else in the past, and it weighs on him. Certainly as a sheriff of such long standing he’s had to draw down multiple times, and confronted the possibility.
I only saw the movie once, in the theatre, but I thought there was some extended scene near the beginning where TLJ’s character is talking about not using a gun, and not having to use it...I forget that exposition, but I think it contradicts your thought here - TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration. after4ever
Originally posted by Schroppfy: I thought there was some extended scene near the beginning where TLJ’s character is talking about not using a gun, and not having to use it...I forget that exposition, but I think it contradicts your thought here - TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration?
This sounds familiar. But...even if he’d managed to serve as sheriff all those years without so much as drawing down, he had been packing for all, or much, of that time. Seeing that holster on the utility belt on the coat rack every night would have weighed morally on him and on his wife.
They had to be aware of the moral burden of life or death decisions, no matter how skillfully he had mooted them through good police work all those years.
ryan
Originally posted by Schroppfy: TLJ may actually have never used his gun, although I’m not sure. Does anyone else recall that narration.
You mean this?
after4ever
Originally posted by Bhops: not that cut and dried perhaps, but those were some parallels I saw. TLJ and Chigurs principles allowed them to at least survive, but not without major damage.
I don’t know that I’d call them "principles" so much as a well-reasoned decision to enter the lifestyle before entering it. At least for three of them--Harrelson presumably put forethought into his decision to "enter the field," but I got the impression from one line of dialogue that he had gone from being Special Forces or something to being a gun for hire. So he may have been impulsive about what he was doing. Which I think breaks down to the same denominator you’re proposing: that you don’t take a side at the core of the conflict between good and evil without meaning to. Not if you want to survive it.
bhops
agreed as to your last statement (and that’s a good way of putting it), although by the term "principles" I was borrowing from the terminology used in the movie which describes Chigur as "principled" in his evil... resulting in his killing Llewlyn’s wife at the end, when he didn’t have to, based on a promise to Llwelyn that he would. I look at Llewlyn as essentially a good man that makes some bad decisions (he debated whether or not to take the money, and whether or not to return to the desert to give the dude some water), and Woody’s character as a bad man that makes some good decisions (essentially offered Llewlyn help out of his mess, even offered to give him some money). Because they were not principled, they got run over pretty quickly, but the other two survived, at least they acted consistently with the fatalistic forces the controlled the action in the movie.
after4ever
Shocking bit of trivia from IMDB:
after4ever
So it’s not violence, but innocence, that makes a place inhospitable for old men. They’ve seen too much.
This poem really comes back to what Ed Tom (TLJ) is left with at the end of the movie, and why the ending is so incredibly reassuring and positive. It’s West Texas, or it’s modern times, or it’s all of human life that is unbearable for old men who have seen too much--take your pick. Whichever, Ed Tom is confronting the end of his days. He may yet be 10 or 20 years away, but he knows they’re coming.
After what he’s seen, he knows he can’t live with a light heart and mind, as when he was younger. Every good young person he sees reminds him of this. Kelly Macdonald was so perfectly chosen for the young wife; she’s naive but not stupid. She just shimmers with natural joy in living (when she’s not burdened with fear as she is pretty much throughout the movie). She’s a perfect innocent. But eve with a heart burdened by experience, his dreams don’t haunt him. If he was troubled by the coming end of his days, he might be able to mask it a bit with his poker face, but he could never hide it from his subconscious--from his dreams. His dreams tell him that his father, who taught him much of what he knows of how to live, has found peace. He’s just on ahead up the trail a bit, waiting for him. This means that he’s certain he’ll find the comfort of the familiar when he enters the next life. What he and his father see around them will be the world they’re accustomed to--they’ll be on the same trail. They’ll have followed the same path they’ve chosen for themselves in this life. Heaven, to them, will take shape by the persistence of memory. What they know as the world will continue to be the world, even after passing on. But they’ll be free of the burden of moral responsibility, and painful experience, that they’ve accrued on earth. Ed Tom says "A man would have to put his soul at risk. I’d have to push my chips forward and say ’I’ll be part of this world.’" He’s talking about chasing Chiguhr specifically, but we can take larger meanings. Being part of this world means being scarred by the fight between good and evil. A mistake, let alone fighting for the wrong side, could scar your soul. You hear of at least some Catholic theologians saying that perhaps "heaven is an instant." Not sure how common this is; maybe other faiths say similar things. Perhaps the "infinite" afterlife is all a matter of believing we’ve found a blissful eternity. Certainly the promise of a blissful eternity in many religions is what’s earned by the kept promise of a well-lived life under this mortal coil. Ed Tom faces what’s probably the ultimate evil, at least tangentially, in pursuing Chiguhr. The worst in people for years has come out all the time right in front of him. He’s a cop. But in Chiguhr it’s hard to imagine it being worse--"a crime like this, you can’t take the measure of it." He knows he’s done things right in his handling of the Chiguhr case, though of course he’d like to have done more if he could have. When he accepts the fact that he can’t be the one to decide that the world has gone wrong (after visiting his uncle and heeding his advice), he can relax and be content that he has lived his life well. It’s then that he knows that he can leave this world peacefully and gracefully. With nothing left to worry that he should have done differently, and very likely no more chances to do anything wrong that would always haunt him, he knows that the moment of his death will find him a content man. Being able to accept death without lingering doubts, guilts, anxieties...he can think to himself "it’s time. I accept this." And being able to pass through that moment without struggle, even if there’s nothing on the other side, will give him the same profound calm as an eternity of bliss. Even in an instant, he’ll find his heaven. acrdz
Also, the Woody Harrelson character, what’s the point? The entire movie you’re given nothing about Chigurh, only what you see. Introducing a character that basically serves to provide details about Chigurh seemed cheap. You limit the background of the characters, you make that a central point of the film, but in walks an extra character 1/2 way through the movie and his only real purpose is to give some sort of insight to Chigurh? Was there more of a point to this character in the book? cquiroga
Yeah, I agree here too. I hate sloppy expository dialogue, but especially when it’s tacked on a character who could have been put to much greater thematic use.
cquiroga: Carson Wells might have thought there was more dignity in staring down his death. And the face-to-face confrontation/conversation leading up to his death was not problematic for me. The problem is how they GOT there-- Carson Wells, supposedly some badass hitman in his own right, let the other guy get over on him merely by walking up behind him on the stairs. If there were a more clever, more dramatic one-upmanship that led to Wells’s death, I probably wouldn’t have much problem with Wells’s presence in the film at all.
StFun
The one-upmanship is that Wells checked into the same hotel where the Chigur/Moss shootout had started; where Chigur had already killed the deskclerk just the night before (making the place still a crimescene, presumably with cops still around, and lots of people on alert), and Chigur walks right back into the place without a care to kill Wells. acrdz
Good point. I missed that. bhops
I think Carson fit perfectly within the themes of fatalism, free will and chance that run throughout the movie. He is a self-professed badass, yet for all his bravado, he has no chance of surviving against the fatalistic forces which guide Chigurh. And his death is anticlimatic.... he’s basically runover. Llewelyn’s death basically is the same type of thing.... for all his efforts to survive, he’s gunned down off camera. And that’s the point... none of us really have a chance. Or at least, our chance of survival is essentially a coin flip, regardless of our attempts to avoid our fate.
Even the expository dialogue doesn’t bother me too much... Carson’s description of the world and of events is as much for him as it is for us. He’s survived basically by playing along the currents of these fatalistic forces of good and evil, and he believes that he understands them in his mind. So he is happy to share his explanation of existence to Llewelyn and the audience. He thinks he has it figured out. Yet his knowledge is not enough to save him, and his explanation of things seems childish in hindsight, now that we know it really didn’t amount to shit. He is unprincipled evil, going back to my earlier posts... just as Lleweleyn is unprincipled good. Neither stand a chance, but at least they have some self-awareness of their struggle against fate.
cquiroga
Yeah, so let me clarify a little bit. . . It’s obvious that Wells serves as a counterpoint to Chigurh-- they’re both hitmen, both assigned to the same task, with wildly different styles and ideals that they muse about on their paths of destruction. I like your ideas along the lines of "unprincipled good/evil" and whatnot (although I’m not quite sure about the choice of words, because I think the movie suggests more about the *specific sets* of principles at work in each of these figures of good/evil, and not just the mere notion of whether or not they HAVE underlying principles), but mainly I felt like Wells never really got his due as a character to deserve a firm place in that discussion. It’s all about plausibility-- if he were really a badass, I wish we would have SEEN some evidence of it. If we were allowed to see him sniff out the trail or make a narrow escape or outwit someone else (in other words, do *SOMETHING* that actually illustrates or justifies the bravado and reputation that precedes him within the film world), I would have had a much easier time with his character’s presence. It just feels sloppy, rushed, and implausible without any evidence of his prowess (but obviously he’s not just a bag of hot air, or someone who is a delusionally "self-professed badass" with nothing at all to back it up-- or else he wouldn’t have reached his obvious high standing in his field or wouldn’t have been hired to take up Chigurh’s trail in the first place).
And if Wells were really given his due as an equal to Chigurh in terms of their aptitude as hitmen, the "random chance" encounter (/sucker move) with Chigurh on the staircase would have had a lot more resonance to suggest these themes you mentioned (of the dichotomy of good/evil, principled/unprincipled, and how the forces of nature or fatalism have their way with all of it). As it is, the moment feels like just a big "DUH" for Carson Wells, and really undermines the setup for him as an important figure. KAggie97
The ending was nothing as I expected, but I think it’s more relevant to real life. With that, I mean the good guys don’t always catch the bad guys. The bad guys aren’t superhuman. And life goes on outside of the circle of crime irregardless of how shocked we are when we experience evil or are affected by a news story detailing a heinous crime.
I really liked the movie. I was under the impression that Chigurh was a good guy (for some reason, the previews led me to believe that) but, obviously, I was wrong. Wonderful scenery. And props to the Cohen brothers for actually shooting a movie based in West Texas in West Texas- not a Saguaro to be found in the whole movie!
Bhops
I thought the ending was interesting as to Chigurh..... how not even he is immune to chance and nature, although he does survive. He was built up through the course of the movie as the hand of fate, and then bam, he gets knocked sideways. I wonder what the significance of the interaction with the kids and the shirt was....if anything.
BeerVirgin72
I kind of looked at that whole shirt sequence of just another example of how "Normal" he COULD be. Sharp contrast to what we already know of him at that point. Perhaps the directors way of saying "Hey, I can be any guy you want me to be..." or, another example of how HE (Chigurh) adapts to any situation, and therefore, is the triumphant one here...
Bhops
and also maybe the fact that he treated the kids fairly (gave them money for the shirt) and did no harm to them, shows that he was principled evil, and didn’t just kill for killing’s sake. He acted on principles, albeit evil ones. That’s why he had to kill the wifey.
after4ever
I agree with all the above--he seems like a normal guy if you’re not part of his world and doesn’t decide to make you part of it. Chance takes him down (yeah, they could have cooked up the crash scene a little more freshly), just like chance takes down so many other people in the movie. Ed Tom’s uncle is still so mentally sharp but he’s physically hindered pretty badly, to the point that he lives in a hovel. The guy in the gas station lives--by chance. Llewellyn gets into the whole mess by chance (and by ignoring his common sense). Even Ed Tom wouldn’t have been involved if the county line were drawn differently.
So Chigurh goes down (at least with injury, if not fatally) by a random car wreck...but that randomness doesn’t extend to his harming the kids. They can’t serve him any purpose by dying at his hand, though we sure sit there wondering if they will. They can help him, though, by helping him blend in to his surroundings again.
Carla Jean pleads with Chiguhr. She’s the innocent in the film, I think. She’s not dumb, but she’s untainted by painful experience--naive. At least up until Llewellyn’s leaving, she’s untainted. She says "the coin ain’t got no say. It’s just you." Chiguhr chides her: "the coin got here the same way I did." Poor kid. She thinks random happenstance won’t hurt you, or kill you, because she hasn’t really been an adult part of this world long enough to know that it can. And does.
after4ever
Originally posted by cquiroga: It’s all about plausibility-- if he were really a badass, I wish we would have SEEN some evidence of it.
We talked about this earlier, actually. That would have taken a fair amount of time. Who might he have outwitted? Another, still-less-relevant character? Then you would have been troubled by THAT character’s irrelevance/inconsequentiality. We can take it on faith that he is about as good as he says he is, because important characters (the money man at the head of the syndicate) believe he is from having seen him in action. He’s a part of the world we’re witness to, a known quantity. Besides introducing us to the money man, thereby reassuring us that there is somebody at the head of all this crime (that it’s not all random), he also throws another wrinkle into the pursuit of Chiguhr and Llewellyn. Gives us two guys on each side, all chasing each other, and the money, and the truth. That in turn shows us that not all the bad guys think 100% ill of Llewellyn, which is a powerful message in its way (and goes back to BHops’ point).
Bhops
Originally posted by cquiroga: And if Wells were really given his due as an equal to Chigurh in terms of their aptitude as hitmen, the "random chance" encounter (/sucker move) with Chigurh on the staircase would have had a lot more resonance to suggest these themes you mentioned (of the dichotomy of good/evil, principled/unprincipled, and how the forces of nature or fatalism have their way with all of it). As it is, the moment feels like just a big "DUH" for Carson Wells, and really undermines the setup for him as an important figure.
I agree. Perhaps his character didn’t translate as well onto the screen as it did in the book, but I haven’t read the book so I can’t say for sure. McCarthy may have set up his character more a colorful description of the type of person he was, without much in the way of active examples of his prowess. The movie wasn’t very emotionally pleasing, but I think that was a little bit of the point. There’s no such thing as emotional justice, or justice at all, except for the justice that comes with fate and chance. It is taking me some time to come to terms with some of those issues, because I tend to be lazy and expect the emotional payoff. But I think your point is there was no emotional buildup or buildup of any kind with Wells... and it’s a valid point certainly.
Carson was pretty good at tracking lleweylen to the motel and stuff, and he did notice the briefcase full of money by the river, but those are hardly "badass" qualities...
damn I need to watch this movie again.
StFun
Not sure I agree on the principled evil. He doesn’t kill the kids, but does kill the man with a car and would have killed the gas station owner. Sure, the first guy had something he needs, and the second could have identified the car...but those things can also be said about the kids.
Bhops
I don’t think the concept of principled evil was mine... I think somebody says it in the movie. Principled not so much as in right and wrong, but principled in that he is true to the fatalistic forces of chance that drive and motivate him. He didn’t kill the store clerk on the basis of the coin flip, yet he was compelled to kill the wife because he promised he would.
Bhops
I agree. Perhaps his character didn’t translate as well onto the screen as it did in the book, but I haven’t read the book so I can’t say for sure. McCarthy may have set up his character more a colorful description of the type of person he was, without much in the way of active examples of his prowess. cquiroga
Yeah, I thought about this, but I haven’t read the book either. It seems a curious omission from a film storytelling standpoint, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this "flimsiness" were due to the change in medium. It kind of gets to an age-old adage about filmmaking-- a big, fundamental rule of thumb for directors is that you should try to *show* something happening rather than just *describe* it. The novel could have had a vivid physical description or psychological dissection of Wells that fit the bill just fine to build him up, and it was omitted in the adaptation because there was no ACTION to film. It then follows that the Coens would have had to depict a new action or add new dialogue to get the same point across (in many adaptations, expository passages from a book are transposed to dialogue for characters, which isn’t necessarily the most elegant way to do it, but could work).
And I think this also gets at why I don’t like just accepting that Carson Wells is badass because "important characters" say he is. It’s just not as effective as showing it somehow so we can get a feel for it first-hand. I don’t care who he outwits or whatever (and there are ways to demonstrate his might without any outwitting at all)-- just by showing SOME cleverness in one form or another, they would gain a lot of ground for me in terms of plausibility (or even if he outwitted an otherwise inconsequential character, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with it, just as I didn’t have a problem with the man at the gas station, or the woman at the trailer park, or any number of other innocent bystanders who were merely there as background foliage and subtle counterpoints in those brief scenarios). But this is all just a small request from lil’ ol’ me. Still a damn good movie.
DYCSoccer17
I don’t need a movie to tell me that society and people are becoming more fucked up with each generation.
allendodd
A point made several times is that things aren’t worse now, most specifically in the conversation between tlj and the old ranger. Also the story told of the ranger being shot on his porch for no reason in ’09. The struggle most fully realized is in the individual’s confrontation with the reality that things have always been bad and getting old and wise to that reality. Evil isn’t just happening to you for the first time. To assume so is vanity and misses the nature of being. If you can find 4ever’s quote of Yeats’ poem that provided the title (somewhere in this thread I think) it says the same thing.
jmikolich
The only question i had/have is How did chugar/chigurh/sp? get picked up in the first place by who seemed like a "bumbling law man" of the old west? mwsf
From the book...
August 04 The Dark KnightBy this point, no matter where you are, it is no longer news to you that they have once again adapted a part of the Batman comic books for the big screen. It should no longer be news to anyone that comic books long ago gave up being satisfied with simplistic, serialized plots centered around one-dimensional heroes and villans with money, power, and damsels at stake. There was a golden age of comic books aimed at the young when the creators occasionally tried to beat that rap, but for the most part, settled for trying to excite the imagination as much as possible by feeding it a steady diet of adventure.
Or at least that was the stereotype of comic books when Frank Miller and others brought more psychological subtlety, disturbing layers of meaning, dimensional character traits, and recognizable humanity to the paned pages in the 80s. Tim Burton found himself motivated to kick off a series of Batman films that buffed everything to his usual high-gothic sheen, careered into a second installment, and then cratered under the campy pastiche of Joel Schumacher's two features. Burton knew he was working in a universe with a long pedigree. For all the resognizable elements of his visual style that felt like pure Burton, he knew he had to successfully land somewhere in the imaginations of millions of Batman fans or his best shot would fizzle. Schumacher swears to this day, evidently, that he's personally a huge Batman fan, but still chose to eroticize Batman and Robin and camp them up like a 60s tv serial. Granted, Batman WAS in fact a 60s tv serial at one point, but that would seem to make it even less likely that re-visiting that period would yield fresh ideas for a 90s Batman movie.
So now we have Christopher Nolan building Batman movies for us. He'd done just a few movies before Batman Begins. He can't have been the only director since Schumacher interested in doing these movies. For some reason, though, his pitch was the one that got picked, and they gave him a hell of a lot of money to work with. All this background stuff is interesting because The Dark Knight is a uniquely successful movie for a few reasons, and those reasons may have a lot to do with the sensibilities of the people in charge.
Burton definitely seemed like a great choice because his imagination always creates entire worlds. Batman had gone through probably dozen evolutions in the comic books, graphic novels, and the tv effort up until that point. He'd been merchandised to the hilt already for at least one generation of kids. Gotham had shape-shifted through a myriad of flavors, each slightly different to the next. It must have seemed like a good idea in 1988 to choose someone who could recognize among those different Gothams (Gotha?) the representations that were worlds complete unto themselves. Burton could certainly do that, and then he'd set about staging an interesting story and the rest would be applause. When his movie arrived in 1989, most of us, if not all of us, thought he had done it. Bruce Wayne was burdened and uncertain; Batman was burdened and uncertain. But each of them had the best of everything available to him, and wanted to do the right thing. Vicki Vale was a little too good to be true, but that could be explained by the fact that she was Kim Basinger in, ahem, top form. Nicholson even seemed like a good choice as The Joker--loud, garish, larger than life. It all seemed big and spectacular. Not recognizably of a world anything like this one, but an acceptable alternate universe where we could go to be told a story we expected to enjoy.
So then they proceeded to tear that down as quickly as they could with the next 3 movies. They made quick work of it. Instead of choosing a mighty visualist to replace a mighty visualist when Burton left the team, they chose a dependable entertainer. Not a director whose work is dependably entertaining, a would-be entertainer whose employers could depend on him to do what they wanted. That would be Joel Schumacher. Each villain became more cartoonish and less dimensional than the last. With every ticket you bought, you moved farther and farther away from the ethical dilemmas (dilemmae?) Bruce Wayne fought through. And farther and farther away from the comment the books have always made about society. By the time it was done, George Clooney was smirking over an armored codpiece and a pair of rubber nipples.
Nolan arrived on the scene as neither a visualist nor an entertainer. His movies have traditionally been about obsession, horrid psychological predicaments, vigilantism, deception, murderers...any fool who'd read the comic books could see that those issues fascinated the creators of Batman, too. So finally they chose someone who wanted to look into the gritty "realities" of the Batman universe and see what there was to plunder for the silver screen. Finally, this thing is starting to work the way it was always supposed to. Those of us who loved Burton's "original" 20 years ago are now mystified as to how we could have been so easily taken in.
Batman Begins did a great job of setting the scene--Bruce Wayne has to purge himself of a lingering mighty rage and guilt before he can even hope to be an effective caped crusader. Christian Bale might or might not be perfect as Wayne and Batman. For my money he's both. But even if his performances could be bested by another actor's work, right from the start in BB he shows he understands so many things about the characters he's playing. Not just that his audience has very passionate and specific expectations about them, but that they have many intriguing paradoxes that he'll have to expose, convincingly, if they're to tell the whole story.
So Bale starts Act 1 by showing us a man who has never had to worry about money, never had to worry about anything that could be fixed by having every conceivable advantage in life. He shows a restrained, inquisitive disposition that suits the character perfectly. But, like all true Bruce Waynes through the years, he's isolated emotionally by his early orphaning, and blames both himself and the criminal underworld for his parents' deaths. Alfred does his best to reassure him this isn't true, of course, but to no avail, and no one else, even Rachel, is really in a position to speak to him about such things. Nolan decides to present Wayne as seeking ninja training, where he hears the memorable guidance that he must let go of the rage and guilt, lest his memory of his parents turn to poison within him. Not a new idea--not even new when it showed up in the comic books--but an early sign that we're in inquisitive hands with BB.
Nolan in many ways is like a Bruce Wayne for the way he landed this project. Not because he could even hope to pay for it as Wayne would have, but because he simply wants to make the world better even if it means tearing things down and alienating people in the process. Many people from the last 4 movies have to endure watching their work ripped out and replaced in a very public way. Nicholson has said he's angry about not even being approached to play The Joker in TDK. And Nolan, like Wayne, seems to feel free to ask only the really interesting questions. How would you really feel if you were a young man in Bruce Wayne's shoes, just past college age, still trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, still unprepared to let go of your fermented grief over your parents? It's clear that Nolan looked for an answer to that question, and that Bale wants it to come to life on screen.
That's what, ultimately, sets these last two movies apart from the earlier Batmans, and from all other superhero movies: Bruce Wayne really is just a man, after all, and that fact has to ring true to the audience. Watching Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger laugh about how ridiculous Bruce Wayne's dinner table was might have seemed like a good idea at the time. It had a light-hearted touch that made the crime-fighting scenes grittier and more interesting by comparison. But they were contrived enough to remind you that this was all just a story, and you were sitting there in the dark watching some stuff happen that was supposed to add up to something in the end.
When Nolan wants to show Bruce Wayne chuckling at the ridiculous opulence of Wayne Manor, he doesn't give us a scene where Wayne shakes his head at overdone furniture in a "room I don't think I've ever been in before." Pretty hacky setup, hacky dialogue, and not a good way to make your protagonist appear commanding or resourceful. When Nolan wants Wayne to establish his sense of detachment from material goods, he has him dispassionatly tell Alfred that he'll tear the place down. Part of his journey in BB is to discover the value in what his forebears have created, and to respect the symbolic nature of Wayne Manor's grandeur. The Manor has still not been rebuilt when we join the action in TDK, though. Bruce Wayne is still something of a homeless man--making do with a grand penthouse apartment, high above the city, and no larger than a football stadium.
BB offered us The Scarecrow. The Scarecrow is the usual mishmash of devious cunning and megalomania, aiming to inflict fear on the masses. The resulting panic and chaos, though, are really all he wants out of life, and that's what makes him different to most of the products cranked out of the Central Villain Services Department. His greatest ambition is to understand the depths of horror in the human mind and to manipulate them; he's very true to his portrayal in the comics this way. Cillian Murphy gives him a mask of glittering Hollywood prettiness that's just the right contrast to the evil deeds he commits. Forget outsized dining room tables. Just cast actors who either express troubling ambiguities in their performances or just by stepping in front of the camera, and you've got the battle half won already.
So Murphy's Scarecrow gives us a complex dilemma in easily digested bits, and accomplishes a fair list of things in the process. He's not really of this world; he's sadistic and nihilistic in ways that still feel like the extremes of imagination even after World War 2 and 9/11. He does have precedent; Hitler, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and countless others all certainly give a Batman writer food for thought at the very least. Bin Laden even parallels the Wayne story, growing up wealthy but choosing a violent, fugitive life because his views demand it. But The Scarecrow? He still seems beyond reality, because Murphy shows him to us up close. We don't have the luxury of Al-Jazeera or decades of history between us and the villain. He's right here in our faces, and, no matter how saddened we might be by the sorry state of peace, love, and understanding in the world today, it's still hard to believe that someone that sadistic could be real.
Murphy, though, makes us think about the fact that each sadist, no matter how extreme, is still to some extent recognizable as human. Our first reaction when we look at sadists like this in the news is to say "no, never! Such things are done by monsters. That may be a person, but not a human being. I'm a human being." In a way it's good that we react this way. It may not be realistic, but it's healthful, if not healthy. Why would we want to accept the fact that someone with the same basic plumbing and parts that we have could exterminate millions, or order fuel-laden jets into the sides of occupied buildings, among all the other atrocities committed around us with such appalling regularity?
There's no practical reason why we should have to confront those possibilities within ourselves. We just won't be doing those things, and that answer is more than good enough for essentially any of us. Living in a world where horrid atrocities happen is our only choice if we want to live in a real world, and it's much easier to wake up in the morning and face the day if we can write off the despots, terrorists, and other megalomaniacs as singularly rare freakish by-products of some awful past we never experienced. It lessens the sickening feeling that it can, and will, happen again. We can't get upset about every mugging, because we know there will be another one, somewhere in the world, before we can get done yelling about the injustice of intimidation and taking things that don't belong to you. Pretty soon we realize we can't afford, emotionally, to get upset about every physical assault. Every rape. Every murder. Every terrorist slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. Every tinpot dictator keeping his people down, every bloody uprising...every ethnic cleansing. We can't afford to cry for them all, because we know none of them is the last.
In a way, this reflexive desire to shield our sanity from reality is what Bob Kane set out to find his way under. 60 years ago he created a character who took it upon himself to rise above the rule of law, rather than subvert it, and through the force of his virtue and his ingenuity, to mete out justice in a way the justice system never could. 20 years ago, we still felt safe, unthreatened. We were attracted more to Bruce Wayne's ingenuity, to his adventures as Batman, than to the complex ethical problems he faced, or the burden he carried of being human under all the gadgets.
Now the world is sadder and wiser. This isn't why these Batman movies are blowing audiences away, and laying siege to history's all-time box-office records. They're just good movies, especially TDK, and more fun to watch. But Nolan has the freedom to embrace a sadism, a perversity, that no other Batman director ever touched. The grit of the tales is now on display for us all to reckon with. Now we know what stakes are on the table, finally. And it's all simultaneously creepier and less crackpot; in many ways both bigger and smaller than what other filmmakers have tried to capture.
In many ways we have Heath Ledger to thank for this. It's not news to anyone that Ledger hit the stratosphere with his work on this film. No serious actor can imagine touching this role for 25 years, minimum. Even if he had lived, what he's done here is far too dimensional and resonant for anyone with a realistic sense of his abilities as a thespian to hope to match. He's probably the best villain in the history of the movies. His Joker is written from the earliest Batman books, from the 40s, from way back when comic book villains didn't have to constantly outdo each other in order to make a name for themselves. Nolan has said repeatedly that they framed this Joker as an absolute, a pure and unmitigated evil with no clear human side or backstory. We never get a sense of who The Joker was before he went crazy, or even hear what his name in real life is. We know he's astonishingly clever, and possessed of the fearlessness that comes from genuinely not caring if you die.
It's to Ledger's eternal credit that he grasped completely the knowledge that these decisions allowed him to rein in The Joker. This is the greatest villain in the history of comic books, as voted by the fans, and he is written here as an absolute representation of evil. But Ledger humanized him, and, with the help of several absolutely perfectly chosen lines of dialogue, made The Joker a realistic madman. Charismatic, but not a demagogue. Cunning, but, like The Scarecrow, without anything a white collar or blue collar worker could ever recognize as ambition. As Alfred puts it, "some men just want to watch the world burn." Clearly, The Joker is profoundly mentally ill, but he has no intellectual deficits, and is high-functioning socially and interpersonally. Yes, of course, he has psychotic and anti-social tendencies in the furthest imaginable extreme, but he's still capable of luring henchmen, hatching plans, leading events on the day, and intelligently interacting with his adversaries. He's just chosen not to go into dictatorship for a living. He's a petty criminal who's capable of anything and fearless enough to try it, which makes him a super-villain in this universe.
Ledger gives him a darting tongue, shifty eyes, posture that follows no set personality or mood, a voice that switches from gurgle to sing-song to nasal to hiss (among other things), and an absolutely shockingly exact sense of timing. Just his pauses and interjections represent dozens of exceptionally precise choices in his performance, but the chromatic emotion he puts on display make it all come to life. He sometimes finds the same flat detachment Anthony Hopkins brought to Hannibal Lecter. He sometimes finds the same eerie, glittering charisma we expect from a Hollywood villain, but The Joker never really knows what he's going to do next. He might try and charm you, but only impulsively, by and large, and in the end he's not organized enough to always be sure of himself. Ledger knows The Joker is actually a little scared of what he's capable of, but doesn't quite understand why. At times, just the way he cocks his head to look at someone make you wince, because he's so all of a piece in this character that any little gesture makes you feel like he might be about to kill somebody.
Ultimately, for all the great work done by so many people in BB and TDK, it's Ledger's sensitivity to the paradoxes in The Joker's psyche that really brings the complexity of the story to life. Most of us can't even name the African dictators who've killed millions upon millions of people in the last 50 years. Most of us are only passingly familiar with the crimes of Milosevic and the other Balkan warlords who wiped out millions more. Most of us look at pictures of Hitler, Bin Laden, and others, fully realizing that we're staring at the heartbeat of evil. But we don't usually carry with that understand a sense that these men actually pulled the trigger very often. We don't picture them wrestling someone to the ground and stabbing them to death. We're conditioned to that behavior among lower-echelon troops; we're used to seeing good guys like James Bond do it. We like to think we're all capable of being warriors if called upon for the right reasons. But we know that "I was just following orders" won't get you aquitted at Nuremberg. We know, somehow, innately maybe, that killing for any reason is a complex proposition and will stack us for the rest of our lives with emotional fallout like nothing we have ever experienced in our lives.
What Batman's creators hope to succeed by doing is showing us villains capable of filling face to face, and capable of mayhem on a grand scale. They don't always explain why. BB and TDK happily accept the two villains who are the most truly nihilistic in the pantheon; The Scarecrow wants fear and chaos. The Joker wants the same thing, without being so preoccupied with the nature of fear. And Ledger not only humanizes a complex villain much beloved of tens of millions of comic book readers, he makes sure to humanize the murderous on both scales. Watching him menace someone with a knife gives you a pit in your stomach like it might be happening to you next. All filmmakers want their story to come to life onscreen, and this group took very seriously the responsibility of making a homicidal maniac appear to walk into the room where you're sitting munching popcorn.
When you see him, this Joker, you don't think "wow, that guy's a freak," the way you react when you see a real maniac in the news. Your mind doesn't instantly attach the label of "Other" (Other from human, that is) to The Joker for some reason, not the way it does to Bin Laden, Hitler, and their ilk. Everyone in the movie calls The Joker a freak. He's wearing makeup that makes him look like a sweaty circus clown on the verge of losing control of himself. And for all the irreality on display, your reaction falls a lot closer to thinking something like "wow, I'm glad that guy's not a part of my world." Maybe this is because you know you're just watching a story; maybe this is because you're watching the work of a singularly gifted group of storytellers. Or maybe this is because when your imagination is free to really confront the bits of good and evil inherent in each of us, it sees each of them as recognizably human, rather than reconciling evil urges to the trash heap of inhumanity.
At the very fundaments of the Batman story, this is what the power of the audience's imagination offers the storyteller that reality can never completely show us. And a well-told tale shows us human nature in a way that human nature on display just can't, because it takes us inside. Bruce Wayne is the most virtuous crime-fighter in the history of storytelling, certainly at the beginning he is. Most fans would argue that the point of Batman ultimately is that for every test of that virtue, it will be some other aspect of Wayne's resourcefulness (if only age and physical ability) that ultimately betray him, and us. But Wayne will most certainly be tested. For all his fervent devotion to abstract ideals, he has few things he cares about in his personal life. Of course, these being comic book stories, peril will find those things.
One of the purest, most complex and exciting scenes (Spoiler Alert) in TDK is Batman's police station confrontation with The Joker. Batman bullies The Joker, edging closer and closer to the edge of control as he tries to find where his friends are held captive. The voice masking in the Batsuit makes his threatening mien seem even more diabolical. Finally, he throws The Joker against a wall, shouting questions at him. The Joker just laughs, smug in the satisfaction that he's gotten to Batman, and collapses, gasping and giggling: "There. Is. Nothing. You can threaten me with." Batman's burden of virtue comes dangerously close to falling away here, and The Joker's contentment at disrupting the natural order of things on even the tiniest scale shows us everything that makes the series so interesting, all in one microcosmic confrontation.
At that point, you've just seen one of the more powerful explosions of anger on screen in years; Bale's Batman is purposeful and certainly not happy-go-lucky, but we're constantly reminded that he's inside a suit worn by a man who generally wants to be liked, even when he's ensuring that he gets his way. Bruce Wayne and Batman both take pains, when they can, to make people feel comfortable around them, to be reasonable, and always to do what's right. Affability is something Bruce Wayne is genuinely concerned about, when he has the luxury of such details in his life. When he's driven finally to charge across the room and make us wonder whether he'll fail to uphold his hard and fast rule of never killing anyone, we certainly believe it, we certainly understand how he got pushed to that point. And we're shaken by it, and afterward, we end up appreciating all the more what a genuine obstacle virtue could be when you're asked to eradicate such malignance.
Across the frame from Batman, The Joker's cackling but oddly vulernable. It's certainly not a new idea, but the closest The Joker ever comes to really respecting anyone is when he faces Batman: no one else has travelled as far as he has down his respective road, even if they couldn't be any more opposed. In the face of Batman's rage, The Joker realizes he is vulnerable, and Ledger puts that in his voice. But he still finds that apathy, that nihilism, that makes The Joker who he is. Later, he begs, under his breath, for Batman to kill him. Batman's down the block and can't hear him. But even when they're face to face in the interrogation room and The Joker can't say anything he doesn't want Batman to hear, you can still plainly feel in Ledger's voice that he doesn't care how vulnerable he is. Because even though he's as suicidal as the next homicidal maniac, he's still committed enough to his principles that he can only be happy if Batman kills him--because Batman will never kill anyone, no matter how evil they are. This suicide by superhero (and under no other circumstances) makes The Joker a villain with a deeply perverted twist, and he even trots out the predictable line about the immovable object and the unstoppable force. But even that canned bit of language feels just right for the moment when it comes, and you realize that for these characters it's about more than winning the game when only one person is allowed to cheat, as with most superhero and cops and robbers movies.
Before he can make what he wants of the world, Batman will have to pull the temple down on his own head for a while. The world can't accept that he's trustworthy to always do the right thing, because they know nothing of him, other than the outcomes of his most famous deeds. Being unable to establish that trust is the price for operating outside the established justice system--and, as The Joker so gleefully points out, deviating from the plan makes people go crazy. Bruce Wayne sets aside most of the rules to become Batman; only human life is inviolable in the ethics behind the symbol he creates with Batman. Honoring the sanctity of human life earned him scorn and ridicule from his ninja masters in BB; it was all that separated him from The Joker in TDK. Next we'll surely see that it's not enough to satisfy the thirst for structure that the average citizen carries around everywhere.
Can we really trust anyone to do the right thing all the time if human life is all they care about? They say, after all, that madness is like gravity...all any of us really requires is a little push and we're sucked into it. Don't people need a guiding system of law in order to stay virtuous, to stay lawful, to stay respectful of the world around them? Isn't each and every one of us stained by the potential capacity to break any rule, even to take a life, if properly provoked?
When was the last time a comic book movie left you with these questions?
I'm gonna make this pencil...disappear. Ta-da! It's gone! December 09 JarheadJarhead isn't an easy movie to get a hold of. They have excellent source material in the form of Anthony Swofford's novel. He brings the events and the milieu of the common Marine soldier to life, and the filmmakers effectively put a camera in front of it all. There's a real feeling of truth to it, that this is how boot camp, and training, and deployment, and combat must be for at least some of the soldiers. Everything that happens feels like the kind of story you might hear later in the evening at a rowdy bar, and you'd hear it from someone who has the tattoos to prove he lived it. Swofford has more than the tattoos, but the movie doesn't have much more than the war stories.
So many war stories start with boot camp, and this is no exception. Boot camp feels strangely derivative and fresh in this film--the assembled recruits and the abuse feel infinitely familiar, but Jake Gyllenhaal seems perplexed by it in a way that somehow feels singular. Basic training, after this, feels new only because Jamie Foxx seems funny and intelligent and capable of being a staff sergeant; usually such a role is cast primarily for a bluff shrewdness alone. Foxx has it, but not only conveys the sense of a man with the job of preparing young men for danger, but a man who enjoys more than a sense of simple, unconsidered duty in his work.
What makes the most pleasant surprise of the film is the convincing emotional consequences of banal events in the lives of the soldiers. Dim witted fistfights that start over nothing feel like the hot-blooded outbursts common to late adolescence; the soldiers constantly test each other in the way very young adult men do. At times, it's actually difficult to follow the movie for all the times you think "if they only knew what they'll know after they've lived through their 20s, they wouldn't be letting themselves be bothered so much by these things about each other."
Ultimately, you have to decide how curious you are about what it must be like sitting around in wartime, agonizingly waiting 90% of the time for the other, horrifying 10% of the time to get over with already. All the sitting around seems to be a point the filmmakers want to get across; the film spends an age waiting for the brief final flourish of combat. The men serve under officers just as overbearing, sarcastic, and eager as they are, only more experienced and charged with greater authority. At times, the officers take pains to scare the soldiers out of their wits, to infuriate them at the enemy, and then to remind them of just how little control they have over their environment. The endless combination of punches--adrenaline and thwart--leave the men hanging in a state of mortal anticipation.
Naturally, the war comes, finally, and it's famously short, as we all remember from the news reports of the day. After months of stripping themselves down to their most animalistic impulses, the men are sent home after hardly any time at all. It's not either spoiling the movie to reveal that the war is short, of course. As the parallels unavoidably make plain, the long-term psychological horrors visited upon Viet Nam veterans await these newly minted combat veterans. Even with so much less time spent fighting and dying hand to hand, veterans of the first Gulf War were as systematically decivilized as any Viet Nam-era recruit. Reclaiming their civility (in all the senses of the word) will be as difficult for them. What awaits the veterans of the second Gulf War may be worse. Their ritual disintegration into killing machines happened for possibly even less of an objective than the war in Viet Nam. December 08 Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of AzkabanIt's been a few years since they really seemed to have their omnipresent way with us, but the Harry Potter books still represent a commercial juggernaut that's almost unique. Combined, the series' sales numbers are only three places behind the Bible. Ahead of the Koran!
Rowling has a lazy way of battering her way through action. Her brilliantly crafted characters find themselves in fantastic situations over and over again, but she gives us more psychological insights into their little tiffs than she does into the courage and forethought required of Harry, Hermione, and Ron to get through the perils they face. Somehow, it doesn't seem like she's doing this out of a desire to gently reassure us that the little day to day troubles we face are more important than defeating the greatest evil we can imagine. It seems like she's just not willing to roll the dice and examine the nature of courage and self-doubt for fear of looking like she doesn't know what she's talking about.
So. When the kids struggle to find a date or get over their self-consciousness around the opposite sex, we read pages and pages of interior monologue. We know everything they're thinking. When they duel their archnemeses, we learn about the interesting attributes of the nemeses, and then we're on to the action and the happy ending.
This is Rowling's biggest weakness. But all 6 books so far are worth reading. Simply put, they're the kind of thing publishers (and who knows who many others) always promise--fun for all ages. You just have to be in the mood to get swept away.
It's too bad for Rowling that her movie adaptations came along at the same as the Lord of the Rings films, which boast easily the most satisfying psychological insights of any fantasty series. Kids seem to start reading each series around the same age (late elementary school or middle school). But the LotR fan tends to grow up still a fan well into adulthood. If the HP fan is still a fan after a few years, it's usually a sheepish confession rather than a defining passion.
What the filmmakers have done with the adaptations of Rowling's books is every bit the commercial goliath that the books represent. Not unlike the LotR films. Films have to pass the same tests the books do to reach these heights of numerical success. Characters must be believable, the scenes have to play, the villains have to make a splash. The central conflicts have to make sense, and there can't be more than a handful of tiny lapses in believability throughout. The priorities of these goals are different here than they would be for a film with serious artistic goals, of course. But with such huge casts and daunting requirements of the special effects department, it's worth thinking about how far they filmmakers get when they put the HP books on the screen.
Without a doubt the best thing about each of these films is the cast. Rowling demands all-British casts for the primary roles, and there's a willing cohesiveness to the ensemble work that seems to require too much modesty from the leads to have an American peer. Without a doubt, there are many amazing ensemble casts in American film, but the heirarchical structure of the roles, given the stardom of so many of the actors, is amazingly precise.
Chris Columbus mainly puts the novels through their paces for the first two films. Chamber of Secrets stands out from the series mainly for its cleverly rendered CGI elf character, Dobby, who represents the wizard boarding school equivalent of Cassandra, except wracked with far deeper self-loathing. Everyone involved knows they can count on tens of millions of people who adore the characters to come and see the films, so setting up the events as they take place in the book and putting them through their paces seems to satisfy Columbus. The three friends have to pool their intellectual resources, as in the first novel/film, and they remain steadfast in their willingness to operate independently from the faculty.
Columbus steps aside for The Prisoner of Azkaban, though, and the series seems to grant that their audience may be growing older and wiser, despite still holding on to a PG rating. Alfonso Cuaron directed this film, and he's willing to make the visual style much scarier and more energetic than the prior two. His director of photography, Michael Seresin, gives the film a smoother flow, less predictable camera setups, and a much deeper sense of evil and instability afoot around the kids.
Cuaron is willing to leave the audience hanging when it's appropriate--often, Harry and the others aren't sure at first what's happening to them when they have to confront one evil force or another. Unlike Columbus, Cuaron leaves us for some stretches without any more footing than the characters have.
Not knowing what might happen next, and wondering whether it might turn out happily, is the rarest thing in adaptiations of hugely popular children's books. Everyone knows the stories, and everyone knows children's books end happily. How do you make them genuinely uncertain, let alone scary? Getting that done has to be one of the more difficult jobs in filmmaking.
The best of the film is the introduction of some truly unreliable adults. The first two films had some double-crossing villains, but that's standard serial-film cliffhanger fare. Azkaban has Gary Oldman, inspired by the chance to ride the ragged edge of sanity for fresh eyes. He's the prisoner of the title. He's been coming unhinged for a decade and a half at least; at times it wears out its welcome. But when he's at his best, as he has been countless times, he seems to have access to lunacy that's both troublingly familiar and comfortingly alien.
As the chances of his interacting with the kids grows higher, we get more and more nervous for them. As usual, he's at his best in manic confrontations, screaming at an old friend he thought he knew "I would have died! I would have died rather than betray my friends!" It's probably a line that's been said in half a dozen films, but Oldman makes it seem genuinely moving. He's instantly convincing in a state of anguished paranoia. It's hard to imagine whom else they might have thought about auditioning for the part.
As the series goes on, his character, Sirius Black, will come to represent more and more complex territory for Harry to navigate. He's the best thing about this film, which is easily the best of the three produced up to that point. Since it's a series of 7, gathering real momentum by the third film is probably a close call. But they made it. November 24 It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad WorldIt's hard to convey just how huge a waste of intelligence, star power, and effort this movie represents. The cast is unbelievable; even today you recognize a couple dozen people, and a close reading of the credits throws a bunch more familiar names at you. No one's safe, the bit players are famous in this movie, in a lot of cases.
But what a stupid mess. People did the same exact thing 100% better in Rat Race 40 years later. And it's not like Rat Race is a big classic. How did they let all this talent slide? It has to start with Stanley Kramer. He can't take the blame for writing it, but for heaven's sake why did he keep the takes he kept? There had to be funnier readings lying around. It sure doesn't seem like they were short of money, or time, or studio patience. Were they hoping they'd keep it spontanous by just keeping whatever blurted out of people's mouths the first time they rolled camera? They did shoot some scenes dozens of times--stunts and physical bits. Why is virtually every bit of comic dialogue staggeringly unfunny? They had all but a half dozen of the best comic actors who were alive at the time!
What seems to be the most common type of scene (in dialogue readings) is a pair (or more) of people arguing about what they should do next. Everyone's in a hurry; the entire cast is trying to cover ground to find a stash of $350,000. One person blusters away furiously about how he doesn't know why they're still standing around, and the other one responds with some variation on "What are you, some kind of a nut? Will you shut up for a second?" Evidently, this little breech of etiquette was good for howls back in the early 60s--or someone had great faith that it was. Just about everyone in the cast has to play something like those lines at least once.
It's hard to decide who's worst. Ethel Merman is set up as a titanically annoying mother in law; they give her the benefit of every cheap stereotype they can think of and she responds with the shrillest edges of her famous soprano. She gets probably the lion's share of screen time in the film, but she's a one-note character designed to alienate the others and cause conflict...she has the same effect on the audience, unfortunately.
Milton Berle tries for droll and ends up just withering onscreen every time he appears. Sid Caesar evidently wants to come across as loose-limbed and capable of making anything funny; he just plays as a typical nebbish with limited analytical skills and less personality. Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Johnathan Winters, Phil Silvers...all these top-billed names who you've always been told are comic geniuses of another era all come running out and all fall flat on their faces in the most contrived and predictable ways. The most annoying is Dick Shawn, who builds his character around the cheapest, most mean-spirited formulaic bits of beach bum stereotyping he can muster.
But the biggest waste is Spencer Tracy. He really has presence in this movie, but he seems completely ignorant of the fact that he's a talented actor. He just bumbles through his scenes, essentially convincing but adding nothing. His struggles and strife as a put-upon family man are the most embarassing of the many scenes depicting the "emasculation of the American man" at the hands of marriage and home life.
Out of nowhere near the end of the second act comes the lone jolt of energy the movie has to offer: Jim Backus--Jim Backus!--as an alcoholic layabout who obviously has more money than he can ever spend. He's essentially in the movie because someone has to own the flashiest airplane at a private airstrip, and he's been chosen. His Locust Valley Lockjaw line readings and flustered exasperation at Mickey Rooney's unwillingness to mix him an old-fashioned are the funniest parts of the movie by far. He's just doing a Thurston P. Howell riff, but he gives it real energy and seems to want it to stand on its own two legs. Unbelievably, he steals the movie in his two minutes of screen time.
It's a painful stretch to sit through to the end, watching them re-create gags that worked better for Warner Brothers and Bugs Bunny. They constantly stretch for the hammiest, zaniest buffoonery they can think of, and then overplay it after giving it the weakest, most transparent set-up imaginable. It's too bad, given the endless list of comics they had in front of the camera. Kiss Kiss Bang BangShane Black came up with a nice twist on cops and robbers movies with this one; he even manages to blend some Raymond Chandler-like pulpy settings with some modern cynicism and make the mixture feel complete. He splits into two characters the persona of the trusty narrator and the wise-ass private eye. That's probably what makes it feel at a fundamental level to be both familiar and re-told.
We start with plenty of ultra-bored, ultra-detached mutterings in voiceover from Downey. He doesn't even do anything so fourth-wall shattering as addressing the audience as the audience; he kicks off the movie by commenting very literally on the fact that it's a movie and he has a part in it. If you can accept this, you're fairly well hooked from the start.
There's a case to solve; two, in fact. They involve the usual shambles of murder, probably blackmail or extortion, sexual intrigue, and hidden masters who effect action through people who knowingly or unknowingly work for them. What makes it feel like it's not something you've seen a million times is the subtle moral emotional differences in the characters. Downey comes across at first as nothing but a two-bit crook who'd have no compunctions about doing anything that would benefit him. We learn pretty quickly--and entertainingly--that he has very quick emotional reactions to moral dilemmas, even small ones. They're completely convincing, and they don't necessarily define his character just by the fact that he's somewhat moral, but he seems much more realistic for the fact that he has a few scattered morals.
Kilmer makes the private eye interesting because his impatience and sarcasm aren't played for the maximum payload of the tired old hand who's seen it all. He's impatient and annoyed with what's happening around him at the moment when it's appropriate--not with humanity in general, or the sorry state of things entire.
And Michelle Monaghan is a great twist on the women who usually turn up in caper movies. She's not just a warm body to put next to the most charismatic villain; she's not inexplicably glamorous at all times when hard times befall all the men in the cast. She has her own problems, her own lack of willingness to put up with the worst of Downey and Kilmer. She's still charismatic, even through her exasperation, but she doesn't have to accept getting pushed around to pull that off. It's a great role for her, and she does everything it requires of her.
Ultimately, Black isn't out to make your stomach clench when the bad guys draw their guns. It's a comedy. You can be pretty sure it's not going to end in tears, though he does a nice job of making things hairy for people, and keeping the plot skipping ahead in unexpected ways. Probably not a new classic of the caper genre, but anybody who likes the whodunnits and the caper movies should see it. This Gun for HireIt's strange to see today what qualified as a ground-breaking, maybe even timeless classic film noir during World War II. Shoddy dialogue, feeble characterizations, wooden acting, endlessly overplayed scenes that we take for granted in caper films today. But being the first with important new ideas doesn't always mean you're the best. This movie proves that as readily as it proves anything.
All the ingredients are there: great California coast setting (LA and SF). Blackmail. Murder for hire (obviously). Stunning female lead, though not necessarily a femme fatale. Dipshit cop who's just doing his job, albeit with some willingness to put in the OT. But the flimsy scenes shatter anything that feels like a movie.
For instance...when the money man pays off the hit, why is it so publicly--in a cafe, no less? Why is he so obviously recognized, and this is so easily dismissed? Why does he fumble through asking the gunman how murder feels? Why does he ask him in the first place? Well, the answers are all clumsy matters of exposition--it's in public because the guman will later need to know his name. His being recognized is easily dismissed because they don't want you to notice how shoddily they've handled making his name known to the guman.
And he asks the guman how he feels about killing because Alan Ladd represented a new style of screen villain. The new style today looks like a wind-up toy playing back a tape of early rehearsals, but back in the day, it was something. In his obituary (1964), the New York Times said "That the old fashioned motion picture gangster with his ugly face, gaudy cars, and flashy clothes was replaced by a smoother, better looking, and better dressed bad man was largely the work of Mr. Ladd." Must have been unsettling to see someone killing people for money, when you know your wife would probably like to make out with him. Or something. He spends the whole movie with a blank look on his face like his shoes have been killing him all day but he can't take them off and he's just tired of it. That's probably supposed to be world-weariness playing across his face.
There is a goofy low-life chauffeur who works for the money man. He almost seems to understand what's at stake in the events taking place before the camera. Everyone else is playing to the audience in the stagiest way you can imagine. When the chauffeur turns up, you almost wake up for a second. But you spend the rest of the time dazed, watching the recipe be defined for caper films. Reading the list of ingredients is just not the same thing as eating the meal. November 23 Richard Pryor Live in ConcertIf you haven't seen it yet, there's not much to say, and the same applies if you have. It's out on DVD now and everyone with any stomach for dirty jokes and naughty language needs to see it. Period. It's not to be confused with Live on the Sunset Strip, which is really, really funny for about 20-30 minutes.
Richard Pryor Live in Concert is funny for its entire length, which is virtually unheard-of in concert films of even the best stand-up comics. They almost all seem to take a few minutes to speak from the heart, or just run out of material. Richard kept the jokes coming, and they were all good, and they almost all sound like he wrote 'em right that second, and his stage presence prefectly modulates everything he says. All those little details assemble to form something way more than just a comic at his best; he really controls the tempo of the monologue, works in what he sees happening in the crowd in front of him, does impressions that allow him to comment on anything that occurs to him, and ends up with a sustained display of imagination and control that's equal to anything in the performing arts.
It's such a shame to think that's he's gone now. He slowed down a lot as he got sick, of course, so it wasn't unexpected. But watching his best stuff again now makes it so obvious how no one else is quite at his level anymore. That's not a knock on anybody working today. It's just a matter of accepting how rare Pryor was, paying him the compliment he deserves.
In LIC he looks at everything; drugs, arrest, violence, racial tensions, racial stereotypes, family life, dating, facing death; he even does animal impressions that are as funny as most comics' best stuff. Ultimately, it's a guy and a microphone and some funny material; there's not much to learn by describing it. It's better enjoyed than discussed. Just see it. Casino RoyaleThey fixed all the problems with the series. Seriously. Now it's just up to closer scrutiny and time to decide if they introduced any new ones with the latest installment. Best of all is simply that they've cut down on the amount of corniness by something like 99%. Not just the merry quips that Bond and the villains and half the rest of the cast spout. They've finally noticed that they still carry on the tradition of pointlessly contrived stunts, dim-witted excuses for the leading women to disrobe, and ham-handed topical references. They did bungle a product placement this time, but there's no invisible car, no perpetual smirk, no stunt eyebrows, and no fanny-slapping or mushy diction. To say nothing of the dazed look and the pleading with women.
Not to knock the guys who worked hard and got the job done--Brosnan had to resuscitate the franchise when they ran out of texts; Connery set the standard for light-hearted, charming bad behavior for more than just the Bond flicks. Moore soldiered on through some truly god-awful scripts and kept the character more or less intact. Lucky for him, the character mostly consisted of keeping a tight lid on his emotions and carrying off a few decent lines.
It's not that Craig is better than these guys. It's more a matter of addition by subtration. Sure, Brosnan deserved a better send-off than Die Another Day after serving out his contract faithfully, and it's not ipso facto good that he's gone. But they charged him with keeping alive the wry detachment that the character had come to be known for, and he responded dutifully. They give Craig a much, much better deal, and he does the work.
First, his job of work in delivering corny one-liners after kills is nil. About time they got around to that. He scarcely has any goofball one-liners at all, nor does anyone else. He gets bruised; he has to clean up his own blood stains. He carries scars for more than one scene--they even show signs of progressive healing. These things don't make a movie, but the fact that the team decided to pay attention to this stuff after all these years feels like a dessert we've waded through 20 entrees to enjoy.
When people die, the bodies need to be dealth with. When killings occue under circumstances of dubious merit, there are consequences. M gets pissed at Bond. She openly questions his methods; she even threatens him. She takes steps to rein him in. It's a completely different outlook on his actions and his decisions, though he's essentially doing all the same things. Seductions, murders, double-crosses, white-knuckle stunts: all the stuff you expect to see in a Bond flick is there. It's not like they ignore the book. They seem to follow it as closely as they ever have. But the events take place in a world we recognize, and still manage to take us completely out of ourselves because they're obviously things that would just not ever happen to us.
With all due respect to Bernard Lee, he never could have carried off what Dench does in slapping down Bond when he gets out of line. He always seemed to play the character as a cronyist product of the old boys network, who'd reprimand Bond when the situation called for it so that the files would stay in order. Dench presents the character as a real boss who makes things happen, who has real juice within the organization and will unplug people if she has to.
Q branch is gone, too. Gotta miss the old codger. His replacement was an inspired bit of casting, too, and if they'd kept up with the light humor, it would have been great to see him for years to come. Nobody steps into explain how to make the taillights pop open and spray oil, and we don't have to endure any remote-controlled cars, let alone invisible ones. Bond does get a rather too convenient gadget in his Aston Martin, but the scene plays well, so it's fairly forgivable.
It's not like the traditions die--they're more like revitalized. The exotic locations color the whole thing' Africa, the Caribbean, Miami, European resort towns. All the best-loved locations from past Bond films, if you think about it generally like that. And the women are probably as beautiful as ever. They really get to act this time, too; Dench isn't the only one conveying interesting emotions for once. The women are definitely there to allure, but they get to be glamorous and have some distinct personalities this time out. They're not ludicrously miscast for the sake of making it seem like Bond girls can be smart, too. They're not presumed to accept that they're dramatically limited and stuck wandering around in a bathing suit most of the time. They're the kind of sophisticated people who might turn up at a cocktail party anywhere, maybe on either side of the law. It's a nice change. But Martin Campbell and the producers hedged their bets and made sure to cast them for looks, too.
Ultimately, what sets this one apart from the other Bonds is the attention paid to the story. It's not that the story's so much better than any of the others. It's the same overall framework--quite a few bad guys, seemingly most or all of them connected in some way. Bond has to run all over the world to figure it out, and surpass many obstacles on the way. But there's no risk of spoof in something like Austin Powers this time. It's not like the Powers movies made Bond flicks less fun. Everyone always wondered why the villains had to get progressively greedier, progressively more ridiculously megalomaniacal, and never willing to do anything practical to execute Bond.
All that nonsense is ratcheted down this time. Le Chiffre looks like a guy who might be out there somewhere right now, trying to make money however he can. He isn't even particularly in pursuit of some criminal objective. He just wants to get rich, and has no compunction about doing it in whatever way presents itself. They ways that have presented themselves to him at the start of our story just happen to be worth the attention of MI6.
Craig, being given real-world villains to fight in a world with plausible consequences, does what comes naturally. He broods occasionally, but otherwise stays on task. He puts himself (and a platoon of stuntment) through some brutal punishment on the way. He's as in command as anyone has been in playing Bond, but his responses are more compact, and he seems more personally resourceful. He carries through with the character as an accomplished burglar, a well-conditioned athlete, a shrewd judge of character, and a man who can withstand some grueling pain. None of the others put that all in one package. None were asked, really. All those things suit the character better than coming up with a series of new tics to demonstrate Bond's roguish appeal as a playboy, or looking convincing at the wheel of a sports car, or behind the trigger.
Ultimately, what's best about this one--what absolutely puts it at the top of the heap--is the fact that it's actually exciting to watch. The stunts feel touch and go. Outcomes seem uncertain. Part of that comes from the fact that Bond's reputation at MI6 is not presumed to be sterling, as with the other 20 films. But it comes mainly from the fact that they've built scenes and sequences that hold your attention, and would look good in any action film--but feel unique to a Bond film in many of the little touches. And they do it without submarine-eating ships or space shuttles. It's about time. November 17 Thank You for SmokingThank You for Smoking has to be the best social satire in years. Lots of the credit goes to Aaron Eckhardt; finding the right person for the lead role makes or breaks this movie. He has to seem likable and pragmatic, but still willing to do whatever it takes to succeed at his job--and it's a morally repugnant job even on its best days.
Eckhardt really runs the whole movie--it's almost a noir in that his voiceover and his on-camera presence dominate almost every scene. His dialogue drives most of the action (or at least describes it). Without his being effective, there's nothing worth watching happening in this movie. He's funny and smart right from the beginning, and his take on things has some appeal to it, even though by most people's standards he's beyond cynical, almost a true nihilist. He's so completely focused on the success of his employer, though, that he can't possibly be a nihilist. Money and career advancement are what drive him. So he believes in something--just not in anything that revolves around human values.
Maria Bello and David Koechner provice perfect bookends to his performance. Their characters' jobs mirror Eckhardt's, and they show slightly more serious and slightly funnier takes on Eckhardt's performance choices, respectively. Koechner probably can't help but be funny if there's any humor to be found in a part, and Bello is always effortlessly appealing, so using them at least partly to comment on Eckhardt's brilliantly modulated performance makes for a very generous set of choices by them and Jason Reitman. Eckhardt even gets to step back from the 1,00-watt public persona his character has to project. His scenes with Bello and Koechner are when he gets to relax and be himself because he's among his only peers.
Sam Elliott has nothing to do, though he's crucial to the plot. At least the one note his character provides is a little more raggedy than the polished self-reliance he's always being asked to convey. We get to see him in a new way. But you can never miss him when he shows up in a movie, and this one's no exception.
William H Macy is in much the same boat as Elliott--plot-crucial, and a little outside his normal range. He's also completely effective, and he has the good fortune of some of the best lines and visual gags revolving around his character. His troubled, world-weary earnestness and the intelligent energy he always displays are perfect for the role in both its satirical and played-straight aspects.
The genius in the group seems to be Cameron Bright, though. He's as adorable as he should be, but he has that sophistication that's scary in such a young kid. He underplays things perfectly. He can't really turn into a monster under Eckhardt's parenting, but Eckhardt has to be seen in the sway he holds over his home life. He has to be seen to believe in what he does for a living for the whole thing to work. The two of them have to be likable. They have to be recognizably human. And they have to be lured into doing horrible things for money without giving up their basic appeal. It's not an easy thing to do with adult actors, but making it work so well with a kid actor is amazing.
J.K. Simmons and Robert Duvall are also note-perfect as captains of industry. Simmons is all striving bluster, and Duvall is nothing but relaxed, authoritative inveigling. They get tons of funny lines but they never play for big laughs. The temptation must have been huge, so what they end up with in their performances is convincing and a rare treat.
By far the most original creation is what Rob Lowe comes up with as the Hollywood super-agent, though. It doesn't seem like he gets more than a dozen lines, but he's always interesting and everything he says carries a stack of layered meanings. It's hard to know whether he just happened to have the right vibe and the text plays the character for him, or whether he really is that good. Adam Brody steals the whole sequence around Lowe's super-agent character, playing his assitant. It's just as well Reitman didn't ask Lowe to make his few scenes stand up with Brody on-camera with him for more than a few seconds. He lets them each make their mark independent of each other. Brody's just completely hilarious, and out-deadpans everyone in a cast full of brilliant actors playing for the deadpan championship.
The whole thing winds down without sacrificing its outlook on the subject matter at hand, which is the most refreshing thing about it, given that it's essentially a Hollywood big studio project (despite having a spin-off studio logo at the beginning). It's nice to see Hollywood stick to its guns, even when the target's such an easy one. Boyz N The HoodIt's funny how dated this movie seems now, but it's still just as affecting as it ever was. Singleton just worked so hard to make sure that the scenes set in 1984 felt like 1984, and the 91 scenes felt like 91, that they can't help but look like their times today. It's only been 15 years, but it looks like another world through modern eyes.
Maybe the best thing about this movie today is how good Cuba Gooding, Jr. is. His performance is sincere and his readings are all solid. He knows what he's doing, and doesn't overplay anything. You have to wonder what Singleton was telling him, or what people must have started telling him on every movie he's done since this one. He seems to have set aside all the good qualities he showed in BNTH.
Laurence Fishburne does the trick with his performance, too. He often seems to be taking on a persona in his scenes, which can come off as slipshod acting work--but it's really appropriate for the principled single father Singlton's looking to him to convey. He's philosophical, and capable of offering very astute guidance that impresses Tre and his friends. But he's also a fallback parent for Tre, and a young one at that, and he visibly gathers himself when raising Tre requires him to take action or one kind or another. And he's always showing that presence and charisma that sets Fishburne apart from almost everyone else, even in Hollywood. When he's well directed and the role is right for him, you can't take your eyes off him. He's got a gift that few can match.
Ice Cube and Regina King made their debuts here. You can already see their big star personalities coming to life--Singleton showed some foresight casting them, but their talents are pretty obvious already, too. King doesn't have enough to do, and Ice Cube is incredibly raw. But they're both great choices. Cube has some of the biggest lines, and for many he's the most memorable character in the film. His thoughtful moments near the end with Gooding define the film, and the intensity on his face in several key scenes in the third act gives the movie amazing power.
The hardest parts by far to watch are the scenes of escalating gun violence between rival groups of friends. Gang names get thrown around occasionally, but none of the characters--even the villains--are show in any outright way to be gang members, other than that some of them wear red.
It's a shame that Singleton hasn't proved to show his gifts in any other films since this one. Not to the level he reached with this film, anyway. It's definitely a time capsule film--Singleton captures everything about a particular moment in time and leaves it on the screen. Only the best ones can do that...but even they can't do it every time. November 05 NOmeansno at Hell's KitchenNOmeansno finish up their legendary North American tour of '06 tonight at Hell's Kitchen in Tacoma. Last night they played an energetic, sold-out two-hour show there as well.
The Fucking Eagles and Dragged by Horses opened. Neither of them made enough sense to be worth watching. TFE played low and heavy, lots of jammy-feeling sections played fast with just enough structure to still feel like tunes. DBH went for a '60s garage rock sound, complete with hollow-body Fenders, but nobody in the band was really able to sing, their guest vocalist was worse, and they haven't really figured out how to write tunes yet.
As for NMN, the band's still in fine form after months on the road. The P.A. didn't do them any favors; no volume, plenty of distortion. Not really the right recipe for music you actually want to listen to. With earplugs in, it was passable if a little less than walloping. You can't beat watching these guys go about their business--easy-going even after three decades on tour. They come out and sell their own merch; at least Tommy did last night.
Plenty of old tunes still, just like the Seattle show. They opened with I Think You Know, and played tons of tunes from the new one, too, kicking off a series of those right after the first tune. Best of these was probably the second tune of the night, Mr In Between, followed closely by The Hawk Killed the Punk. By the time they hit I Can't Stop Talking, Rob's bass cut out again (shades of the Seattle show). Everyone got disoriented, and we got to hear everyone playing different parts of the tune at the same time. Rob finally grabbed a new bass and it all came back together for the last couple verses and choruses.
This wasn't quite the precision tool of destruction that the Seattle show was, but they played with lots of humor and hit plenty of fast, technical stretches with more than enough energy and rarely dropped a note. They just get better and better as the years go by and the tours pile up.
Not too many other bands can match the way they harness their exuberance and indignation simultaneously in tunes that play hard live and reward multiple listenings with dense ambiguities and clever imagery. It's hard to think of anyone else today making such successful art for the average man who's dismayed by the state of things, fairly literate, and in need of a good cheering up. NOmeansno are kings of their realm, and it's a realm that could use a lot more artists and a lot more work. SleepersWhat a mess. Not to confused with Sleeper, Sleepers is one of Barry Levinson's many pieces of Hollywood hackwork (how this guy is the same guy who created Diner is a bit of a mystery...every other film of his that you see ends up subtracting from the appeal of that movie). Many big names fill the cast, but Levinson directs his own script, and indulges himself way too many cliches over the course of the story.
First, all of the four young actors who play the leads through the first act are good. They all seem to have gotten as much work as they want since this film. Brad Renfro is particularly convincing. Levinson asks the kids to dig probably a little too deep into some nasty anguishes that befall them. It's a tough decision for a director--will the audience really feel their horrific victimizations if we don't see it on their faces? Or is it realistic (or even considerate) to expect that average, healthy, happy 14 year old kids can convey the horrors of the Wilkinson School? We don't spend too long with them in the immediate aftermath, and less during the crimes themselves. It's hard to imagine that working through these performances troubled the actors any more than the film should trouble typical audiences. But Levinson asks the kids to do too much. It doesn't matter, though--we've tuned out from the story long before then.
Bruno Kirby sets the movie back the most in the first act. In the process, he did himself probably the biggest disservice in terms of his career. Looking back on his career now that he's gone, he was usually dramatically interesting, and always funny when he was given the chance. But this movie must have cost him as much as any in terms of breaking through past character actor status within the mainstream. His Mr. Carcaterra is the worst sort of stereotypically tough, abrasive, abusing Noo Yawk father you can imagine seeing on the screen. He seem also to be the main contagion in a weird disease that affects almost everyone for the first two hours of the movie: he talks too fast. Everyone seems to want to talk faster than an ordinary conversation would proceed, so they do, even when they're just having a meal and telling stories that interest them--rapid-fire speech is never used to convey tension or anxiety. If anything, when characters are troubled, they slow down to choke out their words. It's an unusual problem, and it never lapses into unintelligibility, but it's no less severe for being a rare issue.
Plenty of other cliched and hackneyed characters join the ranks: Frank Medrano as Fat Mancho, Vittorio Gassman as King Benny, and, most troublingly of all, Robert De Niro as Father Bobby.
Medrano is the resident Greek Chorus, spouting hysterical warnings and sidewalk-fried pearls of tough neighborhood wisdom. He strikes the same notes with the boys in every ineraction, even as they age more than 15 years through the course of the film.
Gassman does his best to behave like the capo di tutti capi of neighborhood thugs, but Levinson makes the utterly mystifying choice of having him tend bar and chop vegetables throughout the film in order to convey a sense of influence. He's clearly too much under the sway of Goodfellas in every choice he makes for the depiction of Benny. It's too bad that he never stops to consider whether Scorsese's choices for that film had to do with spending scenes upon scenes with each character in addition to showing them in the middle of banal daily life.
De Niro gets short shrift in a huge way, as well--cheap ironies permeate his character, the tough, up-from-the-streets parish priest in a rough NYC neighborhood. He smokes, he talks to colorful characters, he talks to the kids like anyone else from the neighborhood would talk to them, he threatens people, he turns out to have done a little time himself when he was a teenager. It's any number of De Niro characters, this time with a backwards collar on. Levinson left him out in the cold in terms of what the character should have been, and all De Niro can do is muster up a troubled compassion and an ominous disciplinarian's admonishments.
Shining through the poor cast of actors who've been set adrift. Michael Ballhaus shoots them and everything else with a really inspired low-light, rainy-day gloom. His nighttime work rolls right into the daylight hours scenes. He really seems to have a plan--not that it's an easy virtue to spot in this film. Some of the camera setups are inexcusable, but they feel contrived and overly clever, and it's easy to give in to the temptation to assume they're Levinson's mistakes. Ballhaus finds all kinds of moody atmosphere everywhere in and out of the city, and his sparkling sunny-day idylls early in the first act don't even look out of place as things get nastier and nastier. That said, his darker work later in the film is by far the most inspired.
Kevin Bacon comes up with some nice ratty desperation as the small man with a badge, guarding the inmates at Wilkinson. He owes Levinson one, really, after the success of Diner a decade and a half earlier. Not because Levinson succeeded there in spite of Bacon, just for old time's sake. He does his part for many of the few really emotionally convincing scenes in the film. He's always understated, in virtually all of his films, but he always finds the heart of the character and he's always convincing, rarely missing a line. He's a sort of Morgan Freeman that way.
Horrible things unfold there at Wilkinson, and the less said about Levinson's obvious hope that the gravity of the events will lend weight to the film, the better. Things don't start well, with the utterly derivate voice over script, the painfully obvious scenes that take forever to reach their predictable points, and the dozen or more characters on permanent loan from a hundred other films. But when genuinely awful things start happening to the boys and the movie start to walk the line between being an R-rated film and a PG-13 after school special about the naughtiest things adults can do, the reality of the material being way beyond the filmmakers is almost too much to watch.
What's especially annoying is how much screen time Levinson spends on subplots that exist only for the briefest of payoffs near the end. The football game between the inmates and the guards is the worst example, but not the only one. By the time King Benny meets Wendell Pierce's Little Caesar late in the third act, you've given up, but it's a harsh reminder of how much time Levinson's willing to invest in cleaning up loose ends. It's easily the most disappointing scene in the film. It starts out ploddingly and self-consciously cinematographically enough, but then you think Levinson's finally learned some subtlety and restraint. This time maybe he'll trust his audience to pick up crucial information in simple lines of dialogue and closely guarded looks on the faces of his actors. Real power starts to crackle between Pierce and Gassman...and then Gassman gets up to walk away and has to read several lines that unravel all the good of the scene. The rest of the scene seems to have been shot almost separately, certainly in a different camera set-up. You worry whether Levinson had himself one good scene out of the whole 147 minutes but then lost his nerve and went back to pick up the shots at the end, just to keep it all of a piece with the rest of the thing.
But it's not like that one good scene could have saved the third act. For all the power Dustin Hoffman can bring to a role, he's at his stuttering, distracting worst here. He fumbles through his work as Danny Snyder; Snyder should be beat down and bumbling, but Hoffman just makes him scatterbrained and hesitant. Levinson no doubt could not find the courage to overrule his star. Hoffman seems to want to make Snyder a man of keen observation, some intellect, and wry sense of humor. What these things have to do with the character is a myestery.
Nothing about the last half hour of the film makes any sense, really. Many young bucks of 90s Hollywood finally make their appearances, and other than Brad Pitt, they seem willing to suffer through the prolonged coda with us. Pitt makes a sincere effort to brood under the weight of the decisions his characters faces...all of which, unfortunately, he's faced before he appears onscreen.
All of the cheap plot unfoldings of the third act play for a huge emotional wallop, but Levinson takes it upon himself to prolong them with out-of-nowhere dashes of suspense. What purpose this serves can't be determined; it makes you wonder how long Levinson makes his kids (or grandkids) sit around with their eyes closed before they get to open their birthday presents. October 26 The StingDear old dad loves to refer to The Sting as "probably the best movie movie ever made." It's hard to argue. Entertaining characters, interesting scenes, genuine drama, sharp humor, and plenty of moments that leave you rooting for things to turn out OK for the ones you like. It's exactly what a big hollywood production is supposed to give you, and it's the simple test that fails well over 90% of movies, leaving each of us with a few dozen movie movies we really love. Out of the thousands they make, and the hundreds we each see in our lives.
Newman and Redford kind of stood on a perfect crossroads when they made this one and Butch and Sundance. They were products of the Hollywood glamor machine, perfect cogs for that matinee idol apparatus that cranked out the essence of personal appeal. Maybe more than anyone in their position at the time, they understood that they needed to do grittier work to keep working on interesting projects in the 70s, and they tended to choose well enough often enough to stay on top. They always chose roles that let them maintain their eagle scout credentials, by and large. But they played rascals and outsiders willingly. Just principled outsiders in movies where the good guys usually won in some way or another (there's the Eagle Scout angle). Today, in retrospect, they seem infinitely more interesting than the rest of the old studio players who tried for a place at the table in the auteur renaissance that Hollywood permitted itself for a few years there in the late Viet Nam era. Maybe not quite as interesting as the best the auteur period had to offer, but they come with the pretty bow of bona fide Hollywood glamor bespangling them, and who doesn't like that inspired Hollywood spectacle when it's at its best?
And, god, Robert Shaw helps them along in this one. Old Hollywood partying hearty with the new breed, without a doubt. He's funny-scary in a way that presages Christopher Walken, though his are the shoulders of giants on which Walken stood. he's menacing, foppish, powerful, dangerous, never dull, and individualistic enough to make a stock character fresh. He even gets a tag line: his "...ya follow?" is a nice gift from the filmmakers to make him memorable to the average audience. Newman flipping him lip, and Redford wheedling him: they each get to show different sides of their characters with him as the foil, and he's incredibly generous to them, while still playing a convincing warlord. In a way, the restraint required of him makes his turn the more difficult.
Newman and Redford get to go nuts, though. Newman's work is quite a bit more fluid. He gets a great "verite" entrance, lots of belligerent yammering to play with, and then segues perfectly into the role of the dapper guru among con men. It all flows. Redford's best ideas tend to grind scenes to halts, paradoxically enough. His wincing grimace when he has to tell Luther he gambled his share of the take from a con stutters one of the better genuinely emotional scenes, but it feels right. You just really notice it. Same thing when he plays the young buck unsure of himself at the feet of the troubled master in his first scene with Newman. His twitches and fidgets feel right, but they're in slow motion compared to the compactness of Newman's work. Still, they're tiny quibbles--it's just fun noting in a harmless way that even the big shots were learning the ropes once upon a time.
They really knew how to put together a supporting cast bask in the day. Eileen Brennan is the charming but businesslike madame, and she never plays the obvious tough cookie or hooker with a heart of gold. She's just shrewd and flamboyant. Charles Durning does a fairly uninventive turn as the plainclothes detective on the fringes of the action, but he never hits a wrong note. Ray Walston has a beatuifully distinct presence about him that's perfect when used in a small dose like the one here; you can appreciate why so many strong personalities were kept around the studio lots back then. They fill out the sound of the cast in ways that today's actors never quite do. Harold Gould rounds out the retinue of would-be gangster/would-be fops in the crew, but plenty of other bit players do great work with their few lines and few scenes.
The research for this one is the period-piece complement to the modern remake of Ocean's Eleven. Setting up the way con men live, the way they talk, how they pass the time, characterizing life outside the law, finding a mark, and figuring out how to take him down--these are scriptwriting pleasures to be envied. Create a world and then set huge events in motion. George Roy Hill and David Ward concerned themselves with decks of cards, revolvers, steam trains, and horse races, all turning on a plot concerning a telegraph wire. It's every bit as exciting and funny as the newer movie, but modern times demand motion sensors, cameras, lasers, remote control vehicles...you get the idea. It's just the business that ornaments the story, though, and the crews of con men that come togethe define both pictures.
What's great about The Sting is how tightly contained the story is. Small things set perpetually larger events into action. As small retributions spur greater retaliations this way and that, more and more double crosses enter the picture, and your allegiances are continually tested. It's probably the classic caper movie; even with the flourish of great caper movies in the last 15 years, in many ways, this one's still ahead by a nose. Just like Blue Note in the third. October 25 The DepartedOne great triumph of The Departed is that within a few minutes, you're already rooting for just about everyone on screen to get a bullet in the face, or worse. Scorsese does his level best to make sure that a bullet in the face is not, in fact, the worst that anyone gets, and he throws in a few bullets in the face just for the sake of comparison.
You think the man has lost his mind in the first ten minutes. God, what an awful stretch of film he puts together to lead you up to the title frame. While we're on the subject...what's with including a title frame? Does he understand that consciously that he needs to hurry up and start making a better film? Does he want to draw a line in the sand to reassure us that he knows what's gone before is fairly well a waste of our time?
After we sit down, we see Nicholson strutting around in silhouette (so's he can play a younger version of himself, you see), leering horribly, uttering pronouncements, off-handedly running the neighborhood. Hell yes you've seen it before; Scorses himself did this very montage infinitely better in Goodfellas with exactly the same intent, in exactly the same way. What's the matter with him? Nobody could think of a better way to set this up than for him to cannibalize his best, most timeless work?
Who is this William Monahan? Dude who wrote Kingdom of Heaven? That's his recommendation for handling the tens of millions of dollars worth of cast entrusted to this production? How in the world is this guy supposed to be a good bet to play all the resplendent personalities crammed into the dramatis personae to meld well together? Sure, it's Scorses's job, too, and he was clearly outside of his mind when he took a fine character actor like Mark Wahlberg, and a fine likeness of sarcastic toughness like Lt Dignam and thought "Aha! Here's a match made in heaven!"
Wahlberg does his best, but his innate earnestness just makes the bluntness and hackiness of Dignam's dialogue all the more grating. You hear the same old cop movie cliches spewing out, adjusted slightly for inflation, and want to like them, and want to like him, but there's just no hope of a chemical bond there.
He's the first real scene we see, too. That's not doing Wahlberg any favors. Everything else until then is montage, a set-up for an "I told you so" Scorses will shove in our face later on. Young men in rough neighborhoods, and the criminals who love them for the next generation they want to mold. Young men in the police academy. Young men getting the same shaft--as actors--that their elders are getting: cheesy, predictable renderings of crude, lowbrow stereotypes. Sure, it seems real enough; it's hard to argue with the stereotypes in their natural habitat--competitiveness, homphobia, posturing. You've seen it all before in a million cops and robbers movies, and you've seen it all before in real life. By the time we might be tempted to wonder whether such boorishness and churlishness is redeemed in the person of this lowlife with a heart of gold, or that cop who wants to do one good thing, or another merry cutout from central scripting doing his thing...someone finally gets a shot glass shattered against his temple.
And thank god for that shot glass. Scorses seems to grasp that violence is the resolution of the chord in his composition. If nothing else, it saves us from having to sit and wonder about this movie. We can sit back and let the mayhem begin. That's without doubt the way to enjoy it. Scorses has never been blessed with the absolute best dialogue. Usually quotable to some degree, usually fairly realistic in a rough, down the corner way. But never clever or insightful, just valid and well formed and ready to withstand repeat viewings in case the movie ends up bearing them, too. This movie's no exception. Explosions of violence or other disintegrating tensions always feel right: the timing, the rhythms of individual characters or many characters together, even the sound design--those sound like real guns! Those sound like real knuckles breaking! Skulls, too! Hey! Those sounded like real brains splatting against the wall!
But the dialogue? Meh. There's perfectly overcooked, and then there's reveling in the overcooked to go with the ham, and this one's definitely on the side of overcooked. It doesn't help that some crucial character setups go askew. But you don't really care, because watching to see who'll get beat up or shot is really the point.
That's when things get lively, when guns are drawn, or when fists are clenched. Everyone's blowing up at everyone. Martin Sheen takes his lumps--Willard's a long way from the jungle here, but all the obsession with who's a rat makes you wonder how they resisted the temptation to pay homage to his classic line about Charlie sitting in the bush eating rats and rice. Alec Baldwin slugs a few people, and generally confirms the suspicion that he was cast on the strength of his work in Glengarry Glen Ross. He gets maybe the funniest line in the movie, too. Nicholson does a fine job ot screwing up the proceedings by acting too much like Jack Nicholson, but he still indulges himself with a few poorly timed screwball antics. At least he gets yelled at and insulted convincingly. Ray Winstone is a fine henchman with nothing much new to say on the matter (shudder to think of what he must've brought that was left on the cutting room floor).
Probably the most fun in genuine emotional drama between characters comes in the interaction between Damon and Vera Farmiga. He's the perpetual middle class man on the make, battering her with flustery wit and chit chat until his nerves calm down. He's funny, though, and clearly having a ball with the dialogue. Fortunately for her, she gets scenes with other people in the movie, too, and her reactions to the changes another character endures are especially convincing.
So who's left? DiCaprio. It's like the gifts from Boy's Life and Gilbert Grape are finally coming to the surface again. He's very good--coherent, all of a piece; convincing. He even gets to show a little bit of that Romeo wildness under pressure, though in greater variety here. Scorsese's clearly been most especially generous to him with the variety of scenes he has to play, and DiCaprio rewards him with lots of magnetic closeups, twitchy body language, bursts of sadism, and well-modulated internal strife.
If only they'd cut some of the chaff out of those 149 minutes, or put the care into the chaff that they put into crafting Corrigan for DiCaprio, this would be quite a film today. As it stands, just when it dawns on you that you can't wait to see what happens--almost the precise instant that you realize you have no clue how things will end--they chump out and hand you another stock bit from central scripting. So close. So close to being maybe the best cops and robbers movie ever made, the opening montage notwithstanding. October 23 Defending the right to free speech (sigh)Talking lately about how far Mel Gibson has fallen served as a reminder of a letter to the editor I wrote a couple years ago. It seems not just silly now, but maybe misguided or even heinously apologistic. In any case, he has the right to say what he wants to say in a movie. Not that I've seen it.
What he says during a drunk stop, well, it's a shame, and we probably are a little more interested than we need to be, and not always in the right ways. October 22 O Brother, Where Art Thou?Recovering from a stiff back, it may not surprise you to learn, means sitting in front of the tube when you're not reading. Or sleeping, from the muscle relaxants. Watching the tube should mostly mean getting up and putting in movies, but this week, it only meant putting in O Brother, Where Are Thou?
Netflix tried sending Birth of a Nation, and, bless dear old D.W. Griffith's heart, it's pretty hard to imagine watching this movie all the way through and not earning college credit for it. After half an hour it was pretty clearly not getting the job done. The GF tried offering This Gun for Hire as an anniversary present, and a thoughtful present it was--there at the top of the "Priority" list in the movies wish list at Amazon and all.
But, man--you watch Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake pretending to act. Lake is one of those rare humans who you can truly say is perfectly beautiful, but that doesn't make anyone dramatically interesting in and of itself. She certainly vouchsafes for that. And Alan Ladd is one of those rare humans who you can truly say is willing to unironically impersonate Humphrey Bogart for an entire picture...even though he possesses none of the key elements of Bogey's charisma.
We made it about 20 minutes into that one. No doubt we'll have to try again, or at least I will, and not just because it was such a nice present. It's groundbreaking, a real historical landmark, and it shows an older California, less spoiled, and in glorious black and white.
So. O Brother. This week's entertainment duties fall to it. Even after multiple viewings it still holds up. The Coens bring their usual ultra-complete characters to the mix, and the story's interesting and unpredictable, as always. They have a wonderful (and very difficult to characterize) way of taking their stories through unexpected twists and turns while making sure everything that happens feels like it flows with perfect logic from one end to the other. This movie's no exception, though, as they proudly announce in the opening credits, it's "Based upon The Odyssey by Homer." They even give him a screen credit! Who says Hollywood lacks affinity for the really meaningful stories?
George Clooney gets so much of the credit. He hits each line carefully, navigating the oddly formal rhythms that the Coens lay out for him even in his briefest comments. Everett is a fast talker, but Clooney plays him as a man who wants to be seen as thoughtful, even as something of a guru to the men who flee the chain gang with him (Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro). Turturro gets a lot to do with a character that's little more than a hayseed, as Everett reminds him from time to time. Nelson's timing is off, though. He hits exactly the right notes to make Delmar play off the other two, but he doesn't seem to love the dopey facial expressions he uses for the character, and he holds them too long, like he doesn't know where to go next. Whenever he gets the last line before a pause or the end of a scene, the silence just boils in a way that's always out of place. Taken in stride, though, his readings always hit the mark and give the other actors something fun to work with.
Holly Hunter gets to play a character that she does as well as any actor in Hollywood does anything: she's a thoughtful, formal woman who's concerned with propriety and making a good impression...but she can't help herself from getting excited about something (in this case, Clooney). Certain people were born to play certain moments in the evolution of certain characters, and Holly Hunter was born to play the first flickers and squirms of enthusiasm--especially when the enthusiasm in question is a romantic spark. She's good at countless other things, but she's played bursts of fresh ardor for pathos, for humor, and for infectious glee. And she always steals the movie--or comes close--doing it.
John Goodman brings the same snare drum snap to his fast talker that Clooney does, and their dialogue together even points this out. Their joy and relaxation in their scenes together stand out, but even Goodman, for all his amazing gifts, can't overshadow Charles Durning. It's hard to remember when Durning has been better. Rambunctious, blustering, domineering, insulting: he's the perfect satire of a power politician from the pre-TV age. He'll be suddenly struck by sincerity at times, placing his hand over his heart or beseeching his constituency, but he's speaking more from the heart when he's kidding around (especially dancing with the Soggy Bottom Boys). And he's at his most earnest when he's browbeating his staff or his son. He gets more comic milage out of a cigar and one baleful glare than many actors can get out of a page of dialogue.
In the interviews that come with the bonus features on the DVD, Ethan Coen says that they always set out to make "movies with real stories and real characters, and not movies about a guy with an Uzi and a fancy car, and the movie's really about the Uzi and the fancy car." When the biggest distraction from the dialogue and the events is Everett's obsession with hair gel, you know they've found their mark, and it's nowhere near the fancy car. October 16 The GameIt's almost comical how much of a sucker I am for this movie--over and over I watch it. By myself, with friends, with family, and every time I get completely wrapped up in the story and really feel the ending when the sparks fly and everyone figures out just where they stand. It's not like David Fincher is really the next big thing to hit directing. He's fine, Fight Club really was clever. But he doesn't really seem to have the ability to do a heck of a lot for the long term, no matter what you think of Se7en. It's just not enough movies. It's not that he's awful; he's creative and he brings it home without a doubt. It's just that you shouldn't feel like he or anyone else can make a Game anytime they feel like it. This is a special movie...maybe not one of the greatest of all time, but certainly exceptional.
Michael Douglas is perfectly cast. It's not like he's learned how to convey emotional complexity, or even emotional simplicity. That's not the point. He's cast as someone who's always completey in command of any situation, and who got that way by maintaining absolute control over his emotions. Eventually, the facaded begins to crumble, and he has to reveal deeper and deeper frustration, betrayal, and rage. Douglas seems to know exactly where to go for each and every turn. Sean Penn matches him step for step, but he's not really called on to do anything exceptionally creative, and he doesn't steal the spotlight.
Deborah Kara Unger has a beautifully subdued control in every scene, and repeated viewings make her performance more and more approrpriate each time. Peter Donat, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and James Rebhorn each do subtly inventive things with their sentry turns as movers and shakers in Douglas' world.
Interestingly, the pleasures of this movie all hang with the twists of the plot, and it's a potboiler that rewards repeated viewings every bit as much as the first sitting. Not too many movies earn such a description.
Special mention has to go to the incredibly lush sets--San Francisco never looked so luxurious. And few movies have ever made you want to be as incredibly rich as the central characters as desperately as this one does. October 08 Fearless (Huo Yuan Jia)They finally made a Rocky for the fall of the Qing dynasty. Now we can all relax. Jet Li steps in as the Tianjin Stallion. There's grace here within the careful formality of turn-of-the-last-century Chine, and heart-pounding excitement in the fight scenes. The excitement is genuinely visceral and emotional, just as in the first Rocky. We also get training sequences, entourages, tests of family loyalty, and charismatic opponents.
It's something of a shame that so much of the material between bouts in the early going is so clumsy. Behind the lurching plot, there's a true story that's a great historical inspiration, they say, for generations of Chinese. That knowledge we take on faith--at least most of us do. In an American theater, we note that Balboa's morning jog through the train yards and up the museum steps has been replaced by meticulous repetition of forms in gorgeously balanced courtyards and resplendent rice paddies.
It's wrenching to think of the pressures on Huo Yuan Jia as he loses his money, his family, and the confidence that he's running his academy the right way. It's equally wrenching to see how reflexively the script presents these events. Even the death of Huo's daughter feels like the product of some hard work by the cinematographer, and desultory efforts by everyone else.
Oh, the fights, though. Yuen Woo-Ping always seems to find fresh visual language for combat, and he does it again here. The wire work is obvious at some points, but in the whimsical and pleasing way that the best Asian martial arts films have of reassuring you that the filmic flow of the fight is more important than the enforcement of the laws of gravity on the set. Beautiful sets explode into kindling and powder as sanctioned and unsanctioned fights whirl here and there.
Everything about the fights is carefully considered. Gorgeous calligraphed death waivers signal the beginning of sanctioned fights. Huo collects them on the wall of his study after his victories. Raised platforms set the boundary of the ring--several stories high, in one case. Jet Li is endlessly balletic in his leaps and flips and spins.
As the final and most important series of bouts transpire, Huo's quest for honor and civility in confrontation supercedes the fight choreography. It's surprisingly effective, even as tired a plot cliche as it is by now. Cartoonish Balboa overtones give way to notions of a William Wallace-like figure struggling for the finish he wants on his own terms. October 07 Albert Haynesworth crossed whose line?Albert Haynesworth has had a heck of a week. He's a defensive tackle for the Titans, the pro football team in Tennessee. Last Sunday, 10/1, he kicked off an opponent's helmet and raked the guy's forehead with his cleats. Is this wrong? Certainly. Is it beyond the rules of the game, beyond the pale of anyone's code of conduct, beyond what's acceptable even in a violent pursuit like pro football? Of course it is. He should be forbidden to play for a while, he should be publicly rebuked, he should forfeit some salary. All of this has happened.
The NFL, the sanctioning body that oversees Haynewsworth's employer and all of their opponents, suspended him from employment for 5 games. He will lose 5/17ths of his annual salary as part of this punishment. There has never been a harsher penalty levied against a player for on-field behavior. It's appropriate.
After the game, Jeff Fisher, Tennessee's head coach and Haynesworth's principal supervisor in the professional world, sprinted across the field to apologize to the opposing head coach for Haynesworth's conduct. Is this appropriate? Absolutely.
Still later after the game, Haynesworth say in front of his locker looking shell shocked. Right after the incident, cameras caught him looking outraged, defiant, and highly primed for more close physical combat. Contrast this with the post-game interview, where he stayed composed but admitted to feeling like he shamed himself, his sport, and his family name. His eyes welled up when he said it dawned on him that his kids saw their father on tv doing something shameful. It's more than safe to say that the gravity of the situation has occurred to him. He knew he was facing a loss in pay, he knew he was facing a suspension. He knew he was facing public rebuke.
Suspension and loss in pay have now been meted out. The public rebuke, though, seems to be snowballing. The Titans, Haynesworth's employer, are said to be investigating ways they can legally cut him. They don't want him around anymore. He's violent, they figure, an animal, maybe, unable to control himself. They don't like the thought of paying a man to lose control of himself on Sunday afternoons. Fans of the Titans, fans of the Cowboys (employers of the injured opponent), fans of the NFL in general seem to be calling by a fair majority for punishments at least this severe.
People want Haynesworth out of football.
People don't know what they're saying. Or they don't want to admit it.
They're saying that violence in football is unacceptable when it does not give their team an advantage and when it happens in full view of the fans. Look at the long-serving veterans in their retirement. Al Toon, hit so hard in the head so many times that he couldn't remember his own kids' names 5 years after he retired. Joe Jacoby, who can't sit comfortably, ever. Period. Countless more with the same problems. Countless hundreds who can barely walk around without help from a cane, or crutches, or a wheelchair. Kurt Marsh, who five years after he left the game couldn't walk around at all, really, because he had to cut off one of his feet.
Sure, the pay's great.
But these guys put themselves through this for our entertainment. There'd be no lofty salaries if there weren't people buying tickets or watching on tv, and advertisers buying time and space to access their eyeballs. We watch Kurt Marsh's foot decomposing Sunday after Sunday. We just don't SEE it. We watch Al Toon's brain eroding Sunday after Sunday. We just don't SEE it. We clap and cheer and exhort the lads to victory, and then we forget about what they've sacrificed when they've played their last snap.
Do you really think these guys end up so battered and reduced because they're out to tickle each other to fits on that field? When you see a pileup over a loose football, you don't want to know what's happening underneath. Eye-gouging is just the start. Knuckles twisted between ribs. Testicles twisted--intentionally!--in someone's fist. To say nothing of the claustrophobia and the hundreds of pounds making it hard to breathe.
Next time you see a defensive tackle--like Albert Haynesworth--leaping to block a pass, check to see whether offensive linemen punch him in the stomach. That's why you don't see defensive linemen swatting down every pass, despite being tall enough to do it every time. Next time you see a defensive lineman crash through the offensive line, check to see whether he "swims" his arm over the lineman's shoulder and lands a punch on the man's kidney on the way by. "I'll bet he's pissing blood this morning," defensive linemen can be heard to say the day after the game. You think a couple dozen kidney punches a day don't add up over the course of a career?
You can't regulate all this violence. You can regulate coaches putting bounties on opposing QBs; you can regulate intentional shots at the head or the knee or other "soft bits." But you can't regulate all the wrestling and hidden assaults. You can't regulate the impact of open field tackles.
Evidently, though, you can regulate what happens after the whistle, and not only that, you can ask for more after the regulation has been observed. Albert Haynesworth was outside his mind for a moment last Sunday, there's no question of that.
But next time you hear someone saying "that kind of violence has no place in this game," reassure yourself that they must be talking about tennis. |
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