Ballast (2008) trailer

I heard about this film back in May. I don't remember how exactly, but I read something that sent me to IMDb, where I read the synopsis: "A drama set in the Mississippi delta, where one man's suicide affects three people's lives." That, combined with the picture above, sent it to the top of the list of films I had to see at once.
Five months later, the trailer has been made available:

Reconsidering Burn After Reading

I found myself thinking about God the other night, and the universe, and the term, “Third Rock from the Sun” (did that term originate from the John Lithgow television series?). Why is it that people have to anthropomorphize the source of creation? The Sun and the collected detritus that naturally found itself in its orbit is an organic product, something that occurred from an unconscious chain reaction, like the way the wind might knock over a pie sitting on a windowsill. The pie falls on the grass outside and over time is descended upon by a colony of insects that feeds off the seemingly unlimited resources of the pie for years. The insects birth larvae and the larvae never know a life of not existing in the toppled berry mush. Not having any conception of how the pie landed where it did, they invent a figure with a personality, who they give a face and a fabricated back-story, and this Being was responsible for creating the pie. Even if a more pragmatic insect concluded that the wind was responsible for toppling the pie, then the insects would want to anthropomorphize the wind and worship it as if was sentient. The Big Bang, or whatever you want to call the series of natural acceleration of energy and matter that set off a chain reaction that produced the cosmos, is not a conscious entity. It is an unconscious natural phenomenon. If you want to call an unconscious natural force God, so be it, but then it is not a thinking, feeling, caring, opinionated, aware Creator. God is science and vice-versa.

It may seem ludicrous for me to preface a reconsidering of the merits of an essentially minor work of the brothers Coen with a convoluted and probably belabored analogy of the difference between a conscious God and an unconscious god, but it helps me to remember that in all of their films, the universe is indifferent. The good suffer, and the bad do as they wish unnoticed, under an unseeing sky. So, it seems foolish of me, knowing the world of the Coen brothers so well, to suddenly be angry with them for continuing their trend of displaying a worldview they have always displayed. Burn After Reading is irony of the bitterest and cruelest sort: think about it: the impetus for everything that goes wrong is the shallow pursuit of maintaining fit bodies, either as a means to a hotter sex life or in Osborne Cox’s case, well I don’t know exactly why he was at the gym when he lost his CIA “shit.” Why he would take his electronic memoirs with him in his gym bag is a question that can be answered by surrendering that it is an implausible contrivance that must happen or else there would no film (or the Coen Brothers would have to exert more effort in finding better circumstances for superficial body-obsessed types to come into contact with the disc; this reconsideration of the film does not strike its slapdash manner from the record). But, surely, caustic commentary on the depressing culture of Youth, Sex, Bodies that has been eroding the priorities of our nation for a couple decades now is needed more caustic than ever? I think so. And perhaps, though he is the sweetest character of the film, Chad’s appalling murder is not so very pointless after all. Whether the Coens have any pity for poor Chad is not too ambiguous, as they don’t seem to have pity for any of the shallow, murderous, or shallow/murderous buffoons preposterously coming into contact with one another. The film’s poster says all you really need to know about Burn After Reading’s evil sense of humor: one person spies on somebody whose lethalness they are ignorant of, and the lethal person being spied upon, being ignorant of the spying ignorant’s innocuousness, shoots him dead. It’s a hideous misunderstanding. Such things do happen. And the universe doesn’t have an opinion.



The original C+ review

In Anticipation of Religulous: Defending Bill Maher

Larry Charles (above, left) is someone I admired long before he directed the virtually unanimously acclaimed Borat:CLoAfMBGNoK. He was a writer on Seinfeld and directed more than 10 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It made sense that HBO veterans Sacha Baron Cohen and Charles would find themselves collaborating on a film, a film that would go on to become the most critically acclaimed American comedy of the new decade. I really liked Borat quite a bit, and when I stumbled onto this poster:


...sometime last November or thereabouts, I was a little saddened that Charles’s follow-up would be centered around the detestable Bill Maher, who I knew very little about other than the fact that he held hopelessly liberal beliefs, and wore a countenance that radiated smug.

Well, since then I’ve read about and watched a lot more of Maher. After 9/11, when every American who wasn’t crying tears of blood or flying into a fit of vengeful rage at anybody who looked even vaguely Middle-Eastern was formally declared unpatriotic or traitorous, it took massive guts, balls, backbone, whichever body part serves the idiom best, to say what Bill Maher said, on September 17, 2001, a mere six days after the attacks, on his ABC show Politically Incorrect, when speaking to guest Dinesh D’Souza:

D’Souza: Bill, there's another piece of political correctness I want to mention. And, although I think Bush has been doing a great job, one of the themes we hear constantly is that the people who did this are cowards.

Maher: Not true.

D’Souza: Not true. Look at what they did. First of all, you have a whole bunch of guys who are willing to give their life. None of them backed out. All of them slammed themselves into pieces of concrete.

Maher: Exactly.

D’Souza: These are warriors. And we have to realize that the principles of our way of life are in conflict with people in the world. And so -- I mean, I'm all for understanding the sociological causes of this, but we should not blame the victim. Americans shouldn't blame themselves because other people want to bomb them.

Maher: But also, we should -- we have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly. You're right.

Warriors? Eh. Does it really take a brave warrior to overpower a female flight-attendant and then cut the unarmed woman's throat? I think D'Souza may have overstated it, but I understand what he's saying. If this highly-organized and carefully planned operation had been carried out by SEALs with less crude weaponry in a location far, far away from our country, then it would have been an act of heroic military cunning. If our country is attacked, it's terrorism. If we are the aggressors, it's counter-terrorism, understand? It's the same old ethnocentric megalomania and hypocrisy that passes as patriotism and love of country over here in the greatest country in the world (read: has the most money) and as we all learned from Mr. Show, “More Money = Better Than.”

Maher is impartial and looks at the 9/11 attacks objectively. The only ones who have any right to be upset with him and D'Souza for what they said are those who lost loved ones or their homes or were injured. In their cases, irrational bias is perfectly justified.

Maher's show was cancelled not long after this episode aired. He got a new show on HBO in 2003, Real Time with Bill Maher. Again, HBO veterans united, and now we have Religulous.

Maher is as polarizing a national figure as one will find. Jackass, or the biggest balls in the nation? He's said plenty of things that support the former and plenty of things that support the latter. The man essentially demands an opinion. Just one look at a picture of his smug face and snide expression elicits a strong reaction.


Mine used to be that he was a jackass, but now, after watching two of his HBO comedy specials and watching select episodes of Real Time and old episodes of Politically Incorrect, and seeing his unapologetic attitude of contempt for the American public, often saying things so wildly contrarian, that there must be an inkling of calculated offense in them, I’ve decided that the man has balls. Balls in the way Sacha Baron Cohen had balls, stepping into the lion’s den of hostile provincialism and slathering himself in barbecue sauce and offering baiting commentary like so much bloody pork, his whole being a walking bait just begging to brave situations of unthinkable social awkwardness, situations which had me cowering behind my fingers out of embarrassment and discomfort while Cohen boldly, self-destructively charged into the fray. I doubt Maher will come close to that, but from the trailers, it looks like he is very conscious of his director’s previous documentary/social commentary/comedy of manners/assault on propriety/stunt and must do his best to meet its challenge. If anybody’s up to the task, it’s Maher. We shall see on October 3.

Joel & Ethan Coens' Burn After Reading (2008)

If for whatever reason you are looking at this review and have not seen Burn After Reading, DO NOT continue reading.

I repeat: If you have not seen this film, do NOT continue reading.

SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP NOW if you have not seen Burn After Reading. Seriously.

No one is more inclined to defend the Coen Brothers than me. No one, in the face of a flawed or unimpressive work of theirs, is more insistent on finding the silver lining. But this is the hardest it’s ever been to excuse them.

Burn After Reading is pointlessly mean-spirited. When a director is malevolent towards his characters in order to bolster thematic material, that’s wholly understandable, but here, the two most sweet and innocent characters in the film are brutally, glibly murdered, and for what? A laugh. I was shocked when George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, in a hilarious (not to me) misunderstanding, blows Chad’s brains out the back of his head. After that I kind of glazed over for the remainder of the film, which was why I didn’t understand the reasons for Richard Jenkin’s character’s presence in the basement of the house belonging to Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton). His presence leads to another misunderstanding and the brutal murder of Jenkins at the hands of Katie’s soon to be ex-husband, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), whose character was disgruntled at the start of the film, and by the end, a delirious psychotic. My brother, whose attention had not been blunted from shock, told me that Jenkins had been asked by Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) in a scene I had watched but not really absorbed, to find more information on Osborne Cox for reasons too complicated and pointless to explain. The film is simply an exercise for its own sake. It has no reason for being, other than, I guess, the Coens’ fear of their movie-making skills getting rusty if they sit on their laurels for too long? For shits and giggles? I did not giggle when Chad’s brains were blown out the back of his head. He (Brad Pitt) was the most likeable character in the film; dim, yes, but his dimness was endearing, more endearing than the repellent self-absorption of the other characters. McDormand’s character points out that he was a “can-do kind of guy” or something along those lines while everyone else she knew, in reference to Clooney’s character, is “defeated.” Perhaps that's the ironic point, but...

I've seen all 12 of the Coens' previous films, and can read them about as well as one can, and when they have a serious point they want to make, no matter how caustic, they find a subtle way to infuse a little gravity into the tone of the goofball antics (an example being the strangely moving description of H.I.'s dream at the very end of Raising Arizona, or the sober manner in which they consider Norville's preparations for suicide in The Hudsucker Proxy). The only gravity in Burn After Reading are bungled moments of earnestness, such as when McDormand's character sits in her lonely living room after a profoundly unsatisfying date. This shot is framed from a distance, and is lit beautifully, diagonal pale yellow diaphanous folds of light refracted from the moon off the softly flowing drapes in the window reaching across the carpet. The music becomes serious for a moment, as does the film, but it is totally out of place here. Chad's appalling murder, on the other hand, is portrayed as a joke. So is the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins. I know "the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins" sounds funny, but to witness it is not. Frankly, this is a callousness that is beneath them. The Coens transmit an invisible disgust with just such callousness in Fargo when their camera looks upon Carl Showalter's pitiless giggles at Jean Lundegaard's pathetic attempts to run away in the snow with a bag over her head. Now, Joel & Ethan are the ones pitilessly giggling at the poor sap, Chad, as he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with a fountain of gore totally out of character with the effervescent goofiness that has preceded it, point at his horrifying misfortune and snort, 'What a dope.' The last expression on his stupid face is a big 'Whoops, what a pickle! Let me just explain..' smile and then that stupid face gets fired into at point-blank range.

At the end of the movie, two CIA officers congregate to discuss all that has happened. One says to the other, “So what did we learn?” The second one shrugs, and the first officer answers his own question, “Uh, I guess that we shouldn’t let it happen again.” Yeah.


Grade: C+

Tropic Thunder (2008)

After feeling like a jackass for braying a good deal through Step Brothers, I was made to feel even more defensive by my brother when we stepped foot out of the theater and he commented on how obnoxious it all was, how it had mistaken loud for funny. I involuntarily accused him of housing a stick in his posterior, the knee-jerk response to such mirthless reactions. I fear I could receive the very same accusation concerning my reaction to Ben Stiller’s bombastic assault on already thoroughly lampooned Hollywood shortfalls in his fourth undertaking as director, Tropic Thunder.

It didn’t help that I happened to seat myself directly in front of and directly to the right of a pair of howling fellow theatergoers who saw that the film was sharply in need of a running commentary for which only they could provide. And they did so, with capacious regard for the other members of the audience, bestowing such rarefied insights as “What a dumbfuck!” and “That shit’s crazy!” as well as dutifully repeating particular lines from the film that may have been inaudible due to their prior ejaculations, crucial though they might have been. Perhaps a less busy screening might improve my opinion of Tropic Thunder, but that would require a desire to see it a second time, and be assaulted a second time. Even without the refined contributions of the gentlemen behind me, I found the obnoxiousness of Tropic Thunder to fill the glass of my patience to the brim, and then continue on pouring with another hour to go, overflowing the glass, sopping the tablecloth and drenching the floor, which was then slipped on by the film. Tropic Thunder slips on itself, big time. Tom Cruise appears as a furry, bald, gold-chain-wearing creep of a movie producer, and he is hilarious. But then the movie keeps pointing at him and saying, “Funny? Eh? Huh? Huh? Funny!? Am I right?!” Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, a vile man who threatens a woman on the phone with “I will rip your tits off” and who hurls other inventive scatological threats at various underlings, is shown advising Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller)’s agent (Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, it’s him) to embrace the future, and proceeds to lift the gold dollar sign hanging on a chain around his neck, and dangling it, gyrates like a back-up dancer in a rap video. Ben Stiller, apparently being unaware of the advice, “Leave the audience wanting more” has Grossman chain-dangle and dance again at the end of the film, over the credits for Christ’s sake, and shows it and shows it, until not only is it not funny, it’s flat-out embarrassing. But by then, I was too exhausted to be that irritated by it. Exhausting would be the most concise way to describe the feeling of seeing Tropic Thunder.

The film wants to satirize loud, insanely out of control war movies, but I have about as much faith in Stiller as a director as I do Michael Jordan playing baseball. Now using an analogy like that is dated, yes? Jordan played minor league baseball, badly, back in 1994. That’s a lame analogy on my part, but is it as lame as a comedy released in 2008 making fun of Willem Dafoe’s protracted and grandiose death scene from 1986’s Platoon? Yeah, Ben Stiller does that, and it’s probably been something he’s been planning since he was 21. Yes, that scene deserved to be poked fun at, but doing it 22 years later just makes me wonder how fresh and “daring” such a comedy is that would contain such an expired jab. The hype and the word of mouth purported that Tropic Thunder would excoriate and take-no-prisoners in its quest to hand the movie industry its ass. What it does is give the movie industry a noogie.

The movie begins with 4 faux advertisements: the first a spoof of raunchy, crass rap videos, which has been done already on The Onion, on SNL, on “The Boondocks” and various other [adult swim] cartoons, on Mad TV…; the second a trailer of a dumb action movie with 5 sequels; the third a trailer spoofing The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (2000); the fourth spoofing self-important art-house type period pieces. Only the last one is really inspired. It features Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as two repressed monks casting suggestive looks at one another under a chorus of choir-techno. The title: “Satan’s Alley.” As for satirizing actors that play mentally handicapped roles in order to win Academy Awards, I direct you to the first episode of Extras: Season 1: been there, done that. If you find yourself utterly disengaged from the movie while watching it, just try thinking of where the hand-me-down jokes that are being presented as if they are cutting, razor-sharp attacks on the vanity and wastefulness of the movie industry originated from.

The rest of the movie hits easy targets and is about as funny and clever as a regularly scheduled episode of Saturday Night Live, only with a bigger budget, and more dirty talk. Most of these “inside jokes” had no teeth by the time they showed up on Entourage. I laughed here and there, and there were mitigating factors, but how this got a 72 on Metacritic leads me to believe that in the low standards of August, shooting fish in a barrel is welcomed more than just leaving them alone, even if they’ve already been shot dead.


Grade: C

Step Brothers (2008)

The first 15 minutes of Step Brothers had me sweating up the lenses of my glasses I was laughing so hard. I was laughing so hard and so loud that when I paused to wipe the steam off my glasses, I felt like one of those boorish dolts who bray like asses behind me in the theater during comedies that leave me stone-faced. I guess that makes Step Brothers what is commonly referred to as a “guilty pleasure.”

The man-child has become his own genre and multi-million dollar enterprise, but not because of Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. This is a character that has been around as long as Benjamin Braddock, maybe longer. In Step Brothers, it has been taken to its most grotesque extreme: Will Ferrell, dressed slovenly in pajama bottoms and a long-sleeve YMCA shirt is introduced dumping shredded cheese on Dorito’s corn chips to create makeshift nachos. When the microwave has melted the cheese to his satisfaction, he plops a bowl of chocolate donuts on top of the plate of nachos, grabs a cup containing some sort of blue beverage, and sits down in front of the television in a well-furnished and tastefully decorated living room that clearly would not look the way it looks if he was the sole resident. This is Brennan. He is 39(!) and lives with his mother (Mary Steenburgen), who on her way out to work, checks in on this sloth without pausing to gawk at the shameful absurdity of it, and asks what he’s watching. Brennan, preoccupied with the show, mumbles, “Oh…just the show…with the lady…” He is watching a Jane-Fonda type work-out show. She leaves. He munches on his nachos, wipes his orange fingers off on his pajama pants, and then proceeds to lift the waistband of them, slide the other hand down, to begin the masturbation process (Dale Doback (John C. Reilly), another man-child, later refers to one of the rooms in his Dad’s house as his “office” and “Beat-Laboratory;” because his drum set is in there, perhaps it has two meanings).

Now depending on who you are, you might find all of this shaggy slothfulness wretched and maybe even disturbing (Roger Ebert sure did), but me, I’ll be honest, as a homebody who often finds himself in supine torpor on a couch in front of a television with crumbs on his T-shirt and juiceboxes, soda cans, and wrappers lying on a table nearby, I found this opening moment with Brennan to be rather sadly accurate, and I think most single adult males would: even normally productive ones must find themselves reclining in a sort of mild squalor now and then on the weekends or on holiday.

I used to love Will Ferrell back in 2000 and 2001 when every single breath and gesture from him on any of the various skits in which he was involved on Saturday Night Live had me in hysterics. I thought Anchorman (the first film by Step Brothers director Adam McKay) was pretty goddamn funny, but then Ferrell got overexposed, became a huge movie star and produced one comedy after another, usually revolving the story around some sort of sporting event, that just put him off to me until I actively disliked him. I disliked him going into Step Brothers, but I’m pleased to say he is rather adorable in Step Brothers, as is John C. Reilly, who also has a puppyish pillow-face. These puppy faces of both men are all the funnier when they are being fashioned into mean looks of resentment, as when the two first lay eyes on the other on opposite ends of Dale’s front yard, framed to evoke two dueling gunslingers, except both are dressed like children (Reilly is wearing a Yoda T-shirt), and reluctantly offer hellos. The combination of childish accoutrements with the fully-grown libidos of 40 year old men is an incongruity that often provides laughs, though the film never considers the plausible social commentary of this contradiction.

Don Draper of Mad Men Dale and Brennan are not, but their obscenity-spewing infantilism is often taken to delirious heights of feverish hysterics that left me giddy. The movie has no pretenses about itself and doesn’t stretch the running time to the mind-numbing and wholly unnecessary 2 hour and 30 minutes of Judd Apatow’s second film, Knocked Up. At 90 minutes, Step Brothers does feel a tad long, and it groans under the tiresome obligation of a five act structure with perfunctory crisis, predictable dilemma (Dale and Brennan’s antics drive a wedge into the marriage between Brennan’s mother and Dale’s dad (Richard Jenkins) and they announce that they’ll be divorcing), and routine fixing of the problem by the two incorrigible slackers who must face reality, learn to grow up, try and get their parents back together again, etc. etc. The second half of the movie’s plot mechanics are as rote as a Sandler vehicle hand-me-down. But the vivid depiction of slothfulness is inspired, as is the squinting, slack-jawed stare-downs between Reilly and Ferrell. The attention to little-boy/adolescent male minutiae (their wardrobe, toys, the way Reilly lies under the covers of his bed) is meticulous, and reminiscent of the bric-a-brac in Steve Carell’s apartment in Apatow's first film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (a film I plan on revisiting soon because of my enjoyment of this). Except Steve Carell plays a sweet man-child. Brennan and Dale are pug-faced vulgarians, but their rude behavior is hilarious because it is undercut at every turn by their pajama pants, bed head, and potato chips.


Grade: B-

Batman: The Dark Knight (2008)

In my humble opinion (and I’m no comic-book scholar), the Joker might be the single greatest villain in the paneled world. I love Jack Nicholson’s take on the character, but sorry, it’s not the least bit frightening. Sure, he puts strychnine into make-up, shampoo, and cologne, and drops lethal nerve gas onto Gotham city, but the man himself? He’s little more than an overweight Pan-Caked doofus. He’s entertaining to watch, but the character was served very poorly. The Joker must create the same feeling that, say, Anthony Hopkins did, in The Silence of the Lambs: he’s all feral, ungovernable teeth and nails, and the pane of glass blocking him off from your fingers and toes is the most precious thing in the world to you when you’re standing before him. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I saw the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his sober reimagining of the Batman frachise, Batman Begins (2005), “The only thing we found in his pockets were knives and lint.” Yes!! The Joker, himself, is a flailing knife, and a prodigiously sharpened one, waving back and forth in the air, aiming for no one in particular, but saving no one a slice through the jugular.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) didn’t take the comic book character seriously (whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know) and his two films were silly, tongue-in-cheek affairs much closer to resembling the campy 1966 television series starring Adam West

...than to the hard-edged comics by Frank Miller (1986) (left) or Alan Moore (1988) (right).



Personally I found the Adam West television show to be insufferable. I think Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is irredeemably silly and his Batman (1989) is tolerable because I enjoy watching Nicholson, even though he’s only scary very briefly and the rest of the time prances like a peacock and looks like one of those clowns who show up to children’s birthday parties to fashion balloon animals.

As for Christopher Nolan’s offering of the character, much has been said about Heath Ledger’s Joker, but not all the credit must go to him: 35% of the success must go to the make-up and wardrobe department, for avoiding Nicholson’s flamboyant, camp getup and going with dark purple murderer chic.

The other masterstroke is smudging Ledger’s face paint so that it streaks, splotches, and runs, a deliberate mess which brilliantly radiates the warped sloppy dissonance reverberating in the Joker’s brain cavity.

And of course, there is Ledger himself, who displays a gift for a giggling array of facial tics and ghoulish idiosyncrasies that turn him into a walking magnet. When Ledger enters a room, the air bristles as if receiving an animal that escaped from the zoo; he skips around hostages like a demented jackal, as wild and capricious as a starving wolf. It’s the Joker as plausible mass murderer, which makes him arrestingly, urgently scary.

Even the harshest critics of this film will be hard-pressed to find a boring breath or gesture from Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, a portrayal that makes Jack Nicholson’s look as silly and unthreatening as a Cirque du Soleil mime on a bender.

However, like Batman Begins, the story is often tediously by the numbers, and Nolan persists in his underwhelming artistry, being merely functional as a director rather than the virtuoso showstopper that jubilant fans seem to be confusing with the performance of an actor that deserved a much greater film to surround it. The film is 2 hours and 35 minutes, and it feels like it. It took about an hour and a half for me to actually start to care. Part of this comes from the fact that the Joker only makes two or three all too brief appearances during the First Act, one of which has him threatening a powerful gangster with a forcible widening of the mouth via knife blade. The Joker tells a macabre little story to the man about his abusive upbringing all the while holding the knife to the corner of the man’s mouth. The anticipation builds for a bizarre face mutilation, a demonstration of the mysterious Joker’s sadistic glee, and, and, there’s a loud noise of some sort, and the man falls dead. What? Did he stab him? Did he slice his throat? Did one of the Joker’s thugs shoot the man dead? Nolan fumbles this moment so badly that it practically invalidates the entire scene. There are many inept choices made by the director throughout the film. He shoots one or two action scenes rather competently, but others are just close-ups of blurs. You’d think by now Nolan would have learned to be liberal with the establishing shots and concerned with delivering coherent fight sequences. He has improved since Batman Begins, though, as seen during a spectacular long-distance shot of an 18-wheeler exploding from the base and catapulting vertically through the air. The action scenes are moderately thrilling when they are done well, two especially. The first is an awesome chase of a police van through a tunnel by a truck housing the Joker’s henchmen. The awesomeness comes in when the speeding truck pulls up alongside the van, and a side compartment of the truck opens to reveal the Joker himself, who proceeds to fire at the van with a fully automatic machine pistol, a shotgun, and finally, a bazooka.

He does most of this while giggling.

The second occurs just after the 18-wheeler has landed upside down at the end of a Gotham City street which has been turned into an impromptu war zone by the Joker. He pulls himself out of the 18-wheeler, and walks into cars driving in his direction, firing a submachine gun at them to clear his path. At the opposite end of the street is Batman on his Batpod. The urban mayhem and the street duel are shot very well so as to accentuate the city buildings towering around the Joker and Batman, as if to underline the power these two men have over the city, reminding us that the one who wins the city is the one who doesn’t back down.


A game of chicken commences as Batman speeds his Batpod towards the Joker, who refuses to move, inviting the collision. Of course Batman must swerve out of the way of the madman, and the motorcycle skids and crashes. This is basically the showdown to end all showdowns. As Joker says later, “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”

The reason the film appears to reach such newfound heights is the way the Joker character has unleashed everyone’s inhibitions about what’s safe or not. Hearing negative reviews criticizing the film for being, among other things, “sadistic,” was reassuring. I wanted my Joker served up hideous, uncompromising, as twisted as possible.

Unfortunately, hyperbolic reports of uber-darkness inflated my conception of what was to come. The murder and mayhem Nolan serves up is considerably less transgressive than what I wanted: Joker blows some shit up, cold-bloodedly guns down some henchmen, threatens people with malevolent behavior, nothing unusually envelope-pushing. A major character is killed in an explosion, but my reaction was more akin to, “Didn’t expect that person to die. Huh.” than, “Truly Gotham city, nay, the world seems to now be shrouded in pitiless tragedy! This is R-rated levels of cynicism and brutality!” These cries of sadism are coming from some really soft film reviewers. The most freakish, subversive thing is an instance where Nolan has the Joker dress up in a nurse’s outfit.

The only thing the film does that could be considered really upsetting to anyone older than maybe 12 is to show the Joker videotaping himself with a duct-taped hostage and then cackling madly while we hear cries of distress or pain from the hostage and then the video feed cuts to static.

About the scene with the nurse’s outfit, Nolan did impress with his managing a wide shot of the Joker (in nurse’s outfit) ambling out of a hospital (evacuated to preserve the children’s tears) as it erupts into fireballs behind him. Within the same single take, the Joker turns to his handiwork and I held my breath that Ledger wouldn’t fuck anything up for fear that all those very expensive detonations and freshly exploded building would have been wasted, or that Nolan would have to abandon his desired edit-free shot. Thankfully, Ledger is a consummate pro and the already impressive sequence is made even more impressive by virtue of its being a virtuoso long take.

I’ll probably see it again simply to revel in Ledger’s maniacal performance, a performance which is too entertaining and too iconic to merit anything less than a posthumous Academy Award.



Grade: B+

The Red-Band Trailer for Joel & Ethan Coens' newest film Burn After Reading

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

It took me a while to write this because if I’d written it any sooner, my frustration and anger would have inevitably resulted in exaggerated negativity. But to claim that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was mediocre or unsatisfying does not come close to explaining the utter demoralization and betrayal, yes, betrayal, that I felt when it ended. I’ve read many other reviews and opinions on it and most range from “Better than Temple of Doom" (I’d like to strangle those people) to “vaguely unsatisfying, but what’d you expect?? you Indy fans are impossible to please lol!” Other reviews have blamed the fans for bugging Spielberg to do another and then when he finally did, they chastised the unhappy fans for “biting the hand that feeds them.” Well, the first time I heard about a potential fourth film back in 1998 or 1999, I prayed the idea would be aborted. And it was aborted, but unfortunately, the abortion had a fedora put on top of it and was filmed and then shown worldwide to millions of people, some who take the Indiana Jones trilogy too seriously, like me.

One has to look no further than the M&M ad featuring an anthropomorphized M&M version of Indiana Jones to know just how completely Steven Spielberg has been absorbed into the George Lucas merchandising whore machine. In an introduction to Temple of Doom, Spielberg actually refers to Lucas as his “best friend.” Spielberg, a seemingly discerning and talented filmmaker, counts the man responsible for the Star Wars prequels as his best friend.

The Star Wars prequels were Star Wars in name, but were lifeless, soulless shiny corpses propped up for no higher purpose than profit. That, and a has-been’s desperate, pathetic attempts at reclaiming cultural relevancy; George Lucas directed exactly 0 movies between 1977 and 1999. He had nothing, no ideas, no imagination, no wit, nothing except a giant tank of embalming fluid. Episodes 1, 2, and 3 were cadavers from point A to point Z, cadavers dripping with shiny preservative balms and spicy oils to disguise the putrefaction. They didn’t fool anybody. These costly husks of celluloid appear to be loathed by the majority of the people who witnessed them, and I imagine even the apologists’ numbers will dwindle as the years go by.

Steven Spielberg, seeing the defilement of popular cinema by this man

...his best friend, thought it would be a good idea to look to this same man as his muse, collaborator, and confidante in resurrecting another beloved movie franchise. Clearly Spielberg, unlike everyone else, did not feel dubious, or even slightly skeptical about how good Episodes 1 – 3 were.

Now we have this, this hollow, thoughtless, careless shedded skin of a movie, a worldwide billboard advertising Steven Spielberg's indifference to his own greatest character. Spielberg’s apathy is clear in every frame. He doesn't give a solitary shit and instead of the usual Spielbergian wonder, he brings as much enthusiasm as a kid absent-mindedly completing a homework assignment.

Even The Lost World, the relatively substanceless sequel to Jurassic Park had excitement, suspense, effort put into it. It was exciting. I was excited only twice during Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first time when Indiana Jones finds himself in a household with ‘50s décor populated by mannequins and discovers that he’s in the middle of an artificial neighborhood about to be decimated by an atomic bomb testing, and the second when Cate Blanchett squeezes both of a sitting Harrison Ford’s knees, imagining for a moment that those were my knees.

The atomic bomb sequence is weird because Indiana Jones, in his trademark outfit, is such a funny anachronism in the fabricated suburbia of the dummy neighborhood on the testing site. But it is this very oddness that gives it the appearance of imagination, as opposed to the rest of the film, which is as lifeless, dull, and uninspired as The Mummy Returns. It is unspeakably depressing that Spielberg has cranked out a rip-off of a movie that rips off the original which he made. The Mummy has more dazzle than this. The Phantom has more conviction.

This franchise should have been cremated when it died in 1989. Lucas and Spielberg are not filmmakers, not visionaries, not directors any longer; they are grave robbers, necrophiles, and whores.



Grade: F

The 2.5 Movies I Actually Want To See This Summer, Part 2: June

Here's the trailers of the crap coming out in June with my biting analysis following them:

June 6

You Don't Mess With the Zohan



I can never hate Adam Sandler no matter how many abysmal pieces of shit he inflicts on the movie-going public. The reason: Punch-Drunk Love.

I really, really should hate him though, and can't say I blame those who do after a decade of utter refuse. Calling his comedy vehicles from 1998 until now "refuse" is actually insulting to discarded rubbish. So I was determined to watch this trailer and hate it: I would not laugh, I would not smile, the corners of my mouth would not even twitch...and dammit, when he pinches the crying little boy's shoulder to render him unconscious, I goddamn chuckled. Damn you my chuckle!

I chuckled a couple more times just because of the sheer silliness of it and I liked seeing Shelley Berman, the old comedian who plays Larry's dad on Curb...but I'm sure this will still suck. And it's pretty obvious that Sandler is either homaging or straight ripping-off Sacha Baron Cohen. And that title is indefensible.

But Emmanuelle Chriqui is in it. I like her, but not really because she's particularly talented or interesting. She looks nice in a black bandana though.

June 13

The Happening



Mark Wahlberg + sweater vest = plausible high school science teacher. This must have been M. Night Shyamalan's reasoning and as we know, Mr. Shyamalan's reasoning is not good. I love Unbreakable, thought Signs was mostly dogshit, and hated The Village at the time, but saw it recently on television where there was no hype or build-up and since I knew the whole "creatures in the woods" ruse was a red herring designed to exploit eager horror fans into watching a weak social commentary on the ills of modern society, didn't feel the rage I felt when being hoodwinked in the movie theater. I have a bad feeling from the absolute nothing happening in this trailer that there will be an equally underwhelming explanation for why all these actors are running around with looks of apprehension on their faces, accompanied by misleading suspense music. The original movie title was "The Green Effect" which means Shyamalan is utilizing the recent environmental panic for some sort of inevitably moronic malevolent force. Here's the more intriguing Teaser:



There is an effective moment there that carries echoes of the sights we witnessed of people throwing themselves from the World Trade Center on September 11.

But I wouldn't trust Shyamalan to deliver the goods.

The Incredible Hulk



Don't care, don't care, don...is that William Hurt's voice? Not sure. Is that Tim Roth? Eh, that's not enoug...that is William Hurt! Eh, he was in Vantage Point too. Ooh there's two big steroid monsters this time! Well, throw in Sandman, Venom, Hobgoblin, some T-Rexes with laser beams attached to their foreheads, maybe a few flying sharks, and a 90-foot-tall Hitler, and I'm in.

June 20

The Love Guru



Enough, Mike Myers. Enough.

June 27

Wall-E



I actually want to see this. I bet the first half will maintain the minimal dialogue (which I will enjoy immensely) and then the second half will just be tedious (which I will find tedious). But yeah, I think Wall-E is likable - he reminds me of the Jawas for some reason, and I love Jawas.



Wanted



That shot of James McAvoy holding a gun in each hand, arms outstretched, firing both weapons at the same time - that image was just breathtaking. Have we ever seen such a thing in a darkened movie theater before?

But seriously, plot-wise, this is a rehash of a recycled doodling of a copy of a cliche. You could go out and buy tickets to see this or you could just light $25 on fire.


The 2.5 Movies I Actually Want To See This Summer, Part 1: May

The 2.5 Movies I Actually Want To See This Summer, Part 1: May

Over at the A.V. Club there is a feature which was posted recently titled Say Goodbye To The Blockbuster: The A.V. Club's Summer Movie Preview. It is divided into two parts, Part 1 being posted yesterday, and Part 2 being posted today. They are as indifferent to the Summer Movie Lineup as I am, which is hard to do, considering that I don't feel like seeing anything in theaters come Summer Movie Season. Most action movies bore me, even if the hero is wearing a nifty, elaborate superhero costume. Sex comedies are fine, but I'm not too keen on spending $15.99 on frivolity. Some people go see movies strictly because of frivolity, but I don't watch films merely to be entertained. I love entertainment as much as the next person but I'm usually only entertained if my mind is being engaged. Yeah, I'm one of those.

Anyway, so here's my lackadaisical analysis of the crap you'll be wasting your money on the next four months:

May 2

Iron Man



Looks aight, pretty aight I gotta say, mostly due to Robert Downey Jr. It puzzles me because if that level of smugness was coming from anybody else, I'd want to punch him in the face. Yet Downey's is humorous. Maybe it's the deadpan comic timing. Oh yeah, and Explosions!! Flying! WHOOOOOSSHHHH!!! Rocket packs!! I might be willing to put it on my Netflix queue come October.

May 9

Speed Racer



"Cool Beans"? No doubt Diablo Cody was responsible for inspiring that.

"Racing's the only thing I know how to do and I gotta do something." Well it's good that the very thing that must be done to save the day involves racing.

The ideal audience for this is people who like shiny things.

May 16

The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian



You didn't actually watch that whole thing, did you? If indifference were pennies, then I would have enough pennies to buy Peter Jackson a 30-acre Manor in the Netherlands. Thanks Mr. Jackson. Without your trail blazing, we would not have this, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, and The Bridge to Terabithia, and The Golden Compass, and the next 1,478,635,209 fantasy fiction novel movie adaptations.

May 23

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull



Well, I didn't feel the wave of nostalgia I was expecting, and don't share the sentiment of a guy over at the A.V. Club who posted that watching it made him feel like he was 14 again. Shia Lebouf doesn't help. His presence just hammers home the reminder that this new Indiana Jones is conforming to the 21st century. Indiana Jones doesn't conform to the 21st Century, the 21st Century conforms to Indiana Jones! Either way, I'll be seeing this out of obligation and fanboy hope. Please, please, please don't let me down, Steve.

May 30

Sex and the City: The Movie

I don't think I need to show a trailer for this. If you're a fan of the show, you'll see it. Otherwise, you don't care. Also, shoes.

The Strangers

There are two trailers, the long one and the Teaser. The Teaser is better, so I'll show that one.



Come on. This looks pretty good. Loved the slideshow of the houses with the Ink Spots' 1939 recording "If I Didn't Care." So creepy.

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