Why didn't HAYWIRE make Gina Carrano a star?

Fassbender on his back, but this isn't from Shame.

Steven Soderbergh is probably the most prolific major feature director working today, which has its good and bad points.  Because he is very talented, many of the films he makes will  be very good, or at least will repay the viewer's time.  But because he makes so many films, some of them will have to be sub-par.  And because Soderbergh is willing to experiment, when he swings and misses, he misses hard.

So on the one hand, you have Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brokovich, King of the Hill and Ocean's Eleven.  But you also have Full Frontal, The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble, Solaris and Ocean's Twelve.  And then there's the interesting middle- range films, including The Good German, Che, The Informant! and Contagion -- all films worth seeing, but not going to be in anyone's pantheon.

I suppose Haywire (2011) belongs in that middle class.  It is not without merit, but it clearly doesn't succeed on its own terms, which were to make Gina Carrano, a very successful mixed martial artist, into a movie star.  It was not a feckless task.  Carrano is exciting to watch in a fight, with real flair and personality.  Soderbergh engaged his Limey collaborator, Lem Dobbs to come up with a snappy hard-boiled spy script.  He got actor pals Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum (now starring in Soderbergh's Magic Mike) to agree to be beaten up by a girl on screen.  And Michael Douglas agreed to drop in the way he seems to do these days.  I don't know what else he's got going on, but ol' Mikey's acting appearances all seem to be drive-bys these days.  (Antonio Banderas turns out to be the bad guy, but the film ends just before Gina gets to beat him up.)

So why is Haywire a misfire?  A few possible reasons, plus one essential reason which makes enumerating the others unnecessary.

First, the stakes involved are neither big enough or small enough.  Today in 2012, after almost a century of spies in the movies, there are really only two ways to go with spy stories.  One must threaten the entire existence of the world, a la Bond, or you go the way of LeCarre or a film like The Matador and center it around the existential crisis of the spy.  But Haywire merely documents a routine surveillance and security assignment, coupled with the familiar story of the spy who is framed and must clear himself (see the Bourne films).  So the story itself is unlikely to engage us.

Second, the fights, which are to a film like this what songs and dances are to a musical are not shot or edited well (although they seem to be well staged).  Somebody has to tell Mr. Soderbergh that the experiment is over, that he need not continue to be his own cinematographer, and that he needs to be recommence engaging more talented photographers than himself and thus benefit from their expertise, experience and taste.  He is not a bad cinematographer, but he is not inspired, and some inspiration would be useful here.  Several different tactics are attempted -- long, single take fights, quick, cutty fights, fights shot objectively, fights shot first-person, but none of them are well assisted by the shooting and cutting, and one can't help wish that a Jackie Chan or other expert had been brought in to give the action the impact it should have had.

Third, having robbed Ms. Carrano of her strong suit, that is, her ability to make an impression through her fighting skills, Mr. Soderbergh failed to give her the support she needed to achieve the projection of personality necessary to be a movie star.  Stars come in all varieties, from the most loveable to the creepiest, but the one thing they all have is the ability to virtually emerge through the motion picture screen itself.  When they are doing nothing but listening, they still draw attention and focus and we always feel their characters in their scene.  When Ms. Carrano is not talking or walking or fighting or doing something or other, she virtually disappears.  She is very attractive, but somehow she never suggests that a man would change the course of his life to be with her.

It's hard to describe an absence, but we all know that stars have something in the eye, or just behind the eye.  Some kind of light that regular mortals, like Gina Carrano, simply don't have.  I wish her well, and expect her to be prominent and successful in her own sphere, but Haywire suggests that film is not the place for her.

Found footage losing its way

Actor moves hand, stagehands crush car.  Movie magic!

One might analogize the "found footage" genre in film to the use of Pirandellian effects in theater.  Pirandello was a writer obsessed with the dividing line between artifice and reality, and who liked to use the immediacy of theater to blur the line between the agreed-upon artifice and the uncontrollable aspect of live performance to create a confusion within the audience.  Scenes appear to be spontaneously created or interrupted by the actors or by the characters.  The form is lent an air of verisimilitude and should (if it is working properly) reduce the sensation that the creators are manipulating the story for their own convenience.

But like any convention, you have to set rules and stick to them.  And that's where Chronicle (2012) goes a bit off the rails.  In Cloverfield, for example, the creators are fairly scrupulous about adhering to the geography of the camera's travels and makes ingenious use of the idea that camcorders can over previous recordings in order, which can survive in snippets in order to simulate flashbacks.  (Digital media, by the way, destroy that narrative device, since data is simply wiped without prior artifacts surviving.)

Chronicle sets up the convention that different people can pick up the camera, or even that there are multiple cameras.  But there are a number of shots (I'm thinking especially of the party sequence) in which the camera perspective is completely unexplained and unidentified.  It just was too inconvenient to stick to the rules, so the filmmakers cheat and start presenting third-person points of view -- a complete violation of the genre, and a confession of a lack of faith in the format.

Which goes to the heart of the problem with Chronicle -- the story has no reason to be told in the found footage format, except that is all the rage with the youngsters, most recently in the atrocious Paranormal Activity franchise.  (One notes that something called Chernobyl Diaries didn't even open this year, but sank like a stone within hours of beginning its run.)  The problem is compounded when the more complex effects shots begin, because they start looking slicker and slicker (presumably there wasn't time and money to make them look as fuzzy and funky as they should have) and weaken the illusion that we are looking at home video.

Then the film completely collapses its own premise in the final 20 minutes, when it turns into a garden-variety telekenesis destructo-fest, with transparently effect-y effects going on and on and we are stuck with three repellant characters competing to see who can be least repellant, although no actual heroism or courage is ever displayed.

It's a shame, because the first hour of the film addressed some really interesting moral and ethical issues raised by the entire superhero genre; specifically, how should superpowers be used?  What if we're not as good and pure as Superman, or as driven as Batman?  What if a superhero was just a regular person before (Peter Parker, anyone?)  How do you establish the rules about when to use your powers and when to refrain?  How do you define "using your powers only for good?"  Especially when the powers are in the hands of teenagers, whose heads are filled with a roiling stew of impulses, hormones, idealism, half-digested cynicism, media influences and family history?  That could have been a fine film, but the makers of Chronicle seem to have become intimidated by the Pandora's Box they opened up and reverted to genre slam-bam.

Too bad.

Down in the depths on the 90th floor

No va.  The movie, not the car.

I'm serious:  Tower Heist (2011) should be taught in film school.  It has the worst, clumsiest, most textbook-awful exposition in many, many years.  I mean, there is actually a scene in which the loveable old doorman tells Ben Stiller he is about to retire and he is shore lookin' forward to that there pension, you bet and by golly.  And the guy rased the subject -- it didn't flow out of any previous dialogue or dramatic situation.  It was if he thought, "Oh, crap, I forgot to drop that exposition into this scene.  I better get it in here now."  There are a dozen examples of information dropped like steaming cups of boiling lead over a film that is not very light on its feet to begin with.

Does Eddie Murphy care about anything anymore?  He's not even good at being Eddie Murphy anymore, even as a supporting guest star.  Producers, you can save a lot of money and hire Jay Pharoah to be Eddie Murphy.  Add to that Alan Alda's sweaty incompetence as a villain, and you have an filmgoing experience that resembles going to see a friend in a community theater production and concentrating with all your mind to find things you can mentioned you liked about it.

About Mr. Alda -- we refer to our great movie villains as "the man/woman you love to hate."  The greats -- Basil Rathbone, Alan Rickman, Kevin Spacey, Cruella DeVille all relish their badness, revel in it.  They are unrepentant and unapologetic.  Alda constantly looks sorry for being so mean, and one expects him to follow his wickedest lines with, "I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that.  I've been so stressed lately.  How can I make that up to you?"  It's just not in his enjoyable but fairly narrow range as an actor.  He can be a narcissistic shit, but he just doesn't have that psychic mustache he can twirl.

I'm sure the producers congratulated themselves on not making Gaborey Sidibe the subject of any fat jokes, instead making her a super-competent safe cracker.  Except that she then embarks on a "hilarious" liaison with Eddie Murphy.  Why do I know it's supposed to be "hilarious."  Because she's fat.  And fat people wanting and getting sex is always unquestionably funny, right?   It's not like they're regular people or anything.

It is left to Matthew Broderick, who has evidently graduated from quirky if adenoidal young leading man to burned-out and/or grumpy adenoidal middle-aged man, but there is no doubt that he is still as deft with a wisecrack as he was on Broadway in Brighton Beach Memoirs back during the Reagan administration.  He should be glad to have been moved from starter to reliever, because he is a natural clean-up man.

Look, if the picture comes on TV on a Friday when you have nothing to do and the alternative is to go around to your wife's sister and choke down her bone-dry carrot cake, watch this movie.  Come to think of it, you still could read a book.  Maybe a book about screenwriting, which the people who made Tower Heist have clearly never done.

Idiot savant or idiot idiot?

This is not a special effect.

Johnny English Reborn (2011) is a perfectly agreeable, if anachronistic slapstick Bond parody.  Given that it is now in home video, if you choose to watch it, it will be merely a matter of adding it to your Netflix queue or dropping a buck at Redbox, and not $28 at the nearby MegaPlex 3000, there is no reason for you not to do so, unless you don't care for laughter or entertainment.

But it IS anachronistic.  How can we keep kidding Bond movies 40 years after the fact?  They are not only no more or less funny than they always were, but Mike Myers has clubbed that particular dead horse beyond recognition, with diminishing returns.  (Yes, I know the leaping-off place is Michael Caine's Harry Palmer character, but believe me, the Myers films are kidding Bond not Palmer.)  And that's not to mention Inspector Clouseau, Maxwell Smart or the hero of the OSS 117 films played by Jean Dujardain.  (We will not discuss Jack E. Leonard as The Fat Spy.)  The woods are full of inept spies.

So decisions must be made.  Clouseau is a supremely confident idiot who sales through adversity, triumphing by bizarre accident.  In the meantime, his ineptitude causes social embarassment for himself and physical harm to others, but rarely harm to himself.  He never becomes self-aware, and none of his gambits work the way he plans for them.  Same for Maxwell Smart, who alternates confidence and sheepish humility for Clouseau's oblivious arrogance.  Dujardin is physically capable--he can even intentionally kill, but he has wandered in from another era, and it is his sexism, racism and thick-witted intransigience that makes the OSS films funny.  The Austin Powers are more cultural send-ups.  Powers is also sexist, but the character's childlike enthusiasm excuses his worst behavior.  But Powers is not inept, just a bit culturally clueless and capable of catching up fast.

But Rowan Atkinson, perhaps the greatest combination of comic gifts -- body, face, voice and writing -- combined in a single person of any person alive, can not get Johnny English to settle on a single joke.  Bring him into a room with dangerous and/or breakable things, and they will go zooming and crashing around, causing financial and physical mayhem.  But minutes later, he can outwit and outfight an opponent using sly and clever tricks and even execute Bond-style witticisms--not vulgar burlesques of them, but actual wisecracks a la mode.  Sometimes he understands the mission, sometimes he doesn't and there is no way of predicting it.

Buster Keaton flirted with this problem. His character was frequently referred to by others as a dimwit or a dunderhead, but he had this fabulous intuitive understanding of the natural universe. Perhaps the movie Buster (not the real man) was the first Asperger's comedian, brilliant within his area of expertise, but lacking the ability to read other human beings, or master their strange social customs.  Somehow he made it all hang together.


Jerry Lewis does not and does not seem to be aware there is a problem.  His basic character has been described as a parody of a juvenile idiot.  But if it is necessary to become brilliant to pull off a momentary gag, Lewis will do it, because nothing is important to him as the gag of the moment, and if it distorts the character or the story, Lewis doesn't care.  His movies have Attention Deficit Disorder, which in turn, weakens the gags, since they are rooted in nothing.  For those of you, who get the reference, Jerry Lewis was the Larry Semon of the 1960s.

Atkinson has no such problem with Mr. Bean.  Mr. Bean is inexplicable, but consistent.  He is a child, but, like Harpo Marx, a child who has been around a little bit and seen some things.  But Johnny English, funny as it is, is always in danger of turning into Thirty-One Gags In Search Of A Movie.
One incidental note -- when did the English decide Gillian Anderson was English?  She's from Chicago, and her English accet is only passable, especially in comparison with a Gwyneth Paltrow or a Jennifer Ehle.  But she's done two Dickens mini-series and now this picture.  There have to be some working actresses in Great Britain between 35 and 55, surely.  Anderson isn't convincing to me as a Yank--what could she sound like to a Brit? 

Revisiting the pre-verbal pleasures of film

The triumphant march of The Artist (2011) through the 2012 award season only highlights what I see as an emerging trend in film around the world, a rediscovery of the delights of the pre-verbal aspects of film. I use the term "pre-verbal" advisedly. Just as a black-and-white film should not be defined as a film which lacks color, a sequence which relies on cinematic tools other than dialogue need not be defined as "silent" or even "non-verbal" which connote that something has been removed.

To a great degree, film speaks to the limbic brain, the center of emotions. The best films are not illustrated scripts, but images (and often sounds) arranged in time so as to suggest cause-and-effect relationships among human events which trigger emotions in the viewer. Movies do not make $200 million and make year-end best lists by having either well-organized data or elegantly artistic designs. We want them to move us, and for that, filmmakers, especially those who have taken the trouble to steep themselves in the canon, have found the Land Before Talk Began.

Hugo (2011), for example, is the first 3D movie in the current post-Avatar wave which is likely to be looked at 50 years from now. (I suspect that Avatar, as good as it was, will retain interest only as a historic landmark, as its technological achievements will soon be surpassed.) Not only does it earn a permanent place as a Scorsese film and as a unique celebration of the great Georges Melies, but it uses the 3D toolkit in an almost indispensible manner in telling its story. At its heart, Hugo is an investigation, a delving into. And whereas 3D films of the 1950s were about things popping out at us in the post-war America of abundance -- paddleballs, hubcaps, breasts -- Avatar taught that 3D is even better at delving inside a world, at entering it in depth and exploring all around it. Thus, Hugo keeps penetrating deeper and deeper into long-held secrets, with an extra overlay of clockwork mechanics which also benefit from the sculptural plasticity leant them by the 3D format. It doesn't hurt when 3D is put to work enhancing the hand-colored exuberance of Melies own work in the delightful finale.

On the other hand, the pre-verbal work of Tree of Life (2011) seems to infuriate more film fans than it delights. This film has been attacked far and wide by the people Lenny Bruce used to call the "whats-it-mean"s; the people who cannot enjoy anything unless it has a clear explanation. These people curl up into a fetal position in the face of the ambiguous, let alone the wholly ineffable. Unless there is a planned program of meaning, like a bad Stanley Kramer movie, they stamp their feet and threaten to turn blue until you bring them The Help. (I didn't mind The Help, but did anyone have the slightest doubt of either its intended message or its eventual outcome at any point?) Tree' s two central characters, son Sean Penn and father Brad Pitt (how I wish there were photos of a family reunion) are both singularly incapable of significant verbal expression. (Reportedly, this only happened to Penn's character during post-production, when his long verbal exegeses were excised.) So the audience must read between the lines, and go back to studying faces, postures and tics in order to "read" the real dialogue beneath the words.

And in a manner recalling the days of Douglas Fairbanks, who appeared to do wonderful stunts because he had a certain energy and grace plus sets designed to his exact physical specifications, Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) delivers some marvelous treats for the eye not limited to falling down the face of a large skyscraper or blowing up part of the Kremlin. My favorite sequence has to be the deranged 3D-pinball-intricacy of Tom Cruise caught in a car elevator system like a malevolent round of Plinko. In fact, to recall MI:GP is strictly to remember the visuals -- there is not one memorable line of dialogue in it -- not even a snappy catchphrase, and I would be willing to bet you could follow the action completely with the sound turned off. Let's try it when the DVD comes out.

Even a film which should qualify as a conventional egghead-arthouse-international-politics movie like Incendies (2011), based on a play about a family torn asunder in the turmoil of the Middle East (are you bored yet?) is brilliantly realized by the filmmaker's decision to hack away at the dialogue original play and substitute the expressions of the actors and a wealth of visual metaphor, not least the film's entire key -- or MacGuffin depending on how you look at it. It even has the courage to play out lengthy scenes in unsubtitled foreign languages, relying on the audience's ability to read the visuals.

Even The Artist itself relies on its pictures uncontaminated with chatter to pull off two of its most telling and moving scenes, as we see each of the major characters fall in love. For Peppy, it is the scene in which she caresses Georges's tailcoat substituting her arm for his in the sleeve, caressing it and speaking with it in a way that would be ludicrous in a "talkie" but is poetic in its silence. Similarly, the dancing scene with its multiple spoiled takes gives us a man who literally cannot let go of a woman in a sequence that could have been irritating had we been compelled to hear the same dialogue and/or music over and over, but which is singularly charming as Georges "breaks down" before our eyes, helpless in his infatuation.

And then there is the very literal pre-verbal developments of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which I had avoided in the theaters because it looked like another lunkheaded CGI-fest, but which is instead a powerful metaphor of colonialism and racism, the only Apes worthy to stand next to the original (and superior to it in my own view). Here the acquisition of language means acquiring power and status, but that does not invalidate the dignity of the apes as they were before language: they always had dignity and strength--the language is merely the instrument that allows them to communicate that to humans. In fact, the downfall of the humans was their inability to read pre-verbal communications. I'm kind of looking forward to the subjugation of the arrogant literates in the next film. And I know that's weird for an English teacher, but then film itself really has no business being taught by an English teacher.

Please don't tell my bosses.

Visible conflict

Perhaps one definitional difference between genre and art is that genre is content with the depiction of conflict and its resolution for its own sake. "Art" could be defined as the reaction to such conflict and its working out, whether the reaction is that of individual characters, a society or both. In such a manner, art can conveniently be built on the foundations of genre, without disturbing it.

The delight and trap for genre pieces is that, being rooted in depictions of the same conflicts being played out in the same way, court a stifling uniformity. (Another perspective would focus on the ceremonial quality of such depictions, especially relevant with films from more ceremonial cultures than our own.) Ip Man 2 (2010) addresses the problem of potential monotony head on and frames its conflict in purely visual terms to an extent that would delight Hitchcock.

The film's conflict is that of East versus West; the theme is local pride among the Chinese of Hong Kong in the teeth of domination by Western colonial powers. The ideas play out in breathtakingly simple form: A boxer named Twister (who should have been called "Crusher" like those brutes in the Bugs Bunny cartoons) has arrived at Sammo Hung's club to box with some other Westerner (whom, we never find out). Instead, he insults Sammo and fights him to the death, leaving the Ip Man (Donnie Yen) to defend the honor of kung fu and Chinese culture in general.



Thus, the East-West conflict is not something merely described, discussed, reacted to, perhaps dramatized in a montage of vignettes. It is palpable and manifest in every frame of the last half of the film. The very mixing of the two styles of boxing makes visible not only differences in culture, but in the aspects of personal character valued by those cultures. The West favors shows of strength, bluster, and overwhelming force; the East favors skill, surprise, and exploiting the opponent's vulnerabilities.

An overheated Hong-Kong Rocky? sure. But cinematic? Textbook case. And it doesn't hurt that Donnie Yen is such a compelling and charismatic performer.

Hard as steel in Pittsburgh. And Cleveland.

This is from the opening sequence of Kill The Irishman (2011), a hard-nosed, hard-boiled, hard-knuckled semi-noir gangster picture set in, of all places Cleveland (because it is based on a true story that happened there). This is not an innovative or surprising movie. It has Paul Sorvino and Vincent D'Onofrio playing Italian mobsters, which is hardly a new idea. (I think you should be able to just buy ready-made clips of Paul Sorvino playing a big mafia don and just paste them into your movie without troubling Mr. Sorvino to come to your set or read your script, which seems hardly necessary in the circumstances.)

Irishman falls solidly in the category of "underdog union stiff who becomes union leader then becomes mad dog gangster who's nice to kids and old ladies." Jimmy Cagney would have been right at home here. But Cagney would also have to acknowledge that Ray Stevenson, who has been a big, solid, completely dependable, yet surprisingly nuanced actor in international film and television projects for a while is, in this film at least, a big fat movie star. He is utterly riveting, and makes all the contradictory parts of the character fit together. (Speaking of big and fat, Val Kilmer is becoming frightening. Doesn't he have any friends or family who will tell him what is happening to him? He is becoming so puffy, he is losing control of the facial muscles required for acting.)

Here's what you need to know about Kill the Irishman: a lot of big guys hit each other in the face hard, and an incredible number of bombs go off. Mostly car bombs (one of which provides Christopher Walken with perhaps his best movie death ever), but at one point the baddies take an entire house out. And as best as I can tell, it's neither a miniature, nor CG. This relatively low-budget movie blows a real house up. Or down, as the case may be. It's worth the price of admission. Other than the lack of nudity, Joe Bob Briggs would LOVE this movie. I appreciate that it stays hard and tough straight to the end. They don't round the edges off the protagonist, Danny Greene, nor even elevate him to a tragic hero. He gets a lot of people blown up until someone blows him up. To me, movie-wise, that's money in the bank.

Speaking of money in the bank, that's on the mind of Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days (2010), who, in one of the best sequences, does not rob a bank. Yes, yes, I know, the movies are filled with scenes of people not robbing banks. But this one is really fine, especially since there is not one word of dialogue about anybody robbing a bank. But his decision, his plan, and his reconsideration of that plan are all conveyed without a word. Bravo, director Paul Haggis, who as a writer, would have been expected to spew words at such an important point, only Mr. Haggis seems to understand how movies work.



No, I don't buy that Pittsburgh community college teacher Crowe can suddenly become a resourceful, lightning-reflexed commando-spy as he rescues his wife from a life sentence for murder. No, the idea that a couple running from the law would take along their 6-year-old child is a bit of a strain. And using Liam Neeson in a single scene to deliver some exposition is both insulting and a waste of natural resources. But the movie goes at a good clip, especially in the second half and Russell Crowe has the movie-star gift of being able to clearly represent what he is thinking without a word or a gesture, which is useful because the story does not give him anyone he can share his plans with (a pretty bold choice in itself). Much of the fun of the first half is just wondering, "what the devil is he doing that for?" and awaiting the pay-off you know, given the iron laws of film narrative, will be coming.

Here's another thing to like: Elizabeth Banks really seems as though she would be worth it. If your choice was whether or not to break the law, risk life and limb and go into permanent exile in order to save say, Sandra Bullock or even Katherine Heigl, from an unjust punishment, you might have to give it some thought. Maybe it's just me (and I don't even care for blondes much), but Elizabeth Banks, who has been such a loyal buddy in all those Judd Apatow movies, seems worth the risk. And I don't think that's a little thing, as movies go.

I do wish the movie had given us a more interesting head cop to chase Crowe, although perhaps casting a star in that role would have been cliche, and, with an ensemble of unknowns one can enjoy the illusion that these somewhat bumbling cops are a long-standing team who really know each other. Brian Dennehy, the tight-lipped father of the tight-lipped Crowe (good thing these actors are not paid by the word), has, unlike the universe, stopped expanding, and now looks ill, for the opposite reason that he used to look ill. Perhaps a completely healthy-looking Dennehy would be disturbing.

Neither film was very successful. I suspect Kill The Irishman didn't get the marketing to overcome the fact that it's star is not yet established as a leading man and the true story it is based on is neither well known, startling or heart-warming. The wrap-up of The Next Three Days was probably unsatisfying for American audiences; it is established that one smart cop has figured out what really happened and that Elizabeth Banks is innocent, but he fails to uncover the exculpatory evidence which is indeed yet to be found and we presume that Crowe, Banks and son will be forever on the run, which is sad-making for most people.

But they are both kick-ass movies that move and keep moving for most of their running times, and better yet, both feature generous authentic helpings of flyover country which is so rarely on display in mainstream American film. Maybe somehow people in the future will figure out that not everything in America happened in New York or Los Angeles.

Two flavors of popcorn

X Men: First Class and Super 8 both aspire to little more than a couple of hours of summer's entertainment, directed primarily at young people interested in comic books, science fiction, horror, monsters, action and other young people. But the two films approach this task with instructively divergent toolkits.

First Class runs 132 minutes, which is the length of a typical James Bond film. That doesn't seem accidental. Like Bond films, there is a super-villain, a glamorous villainess (portrayed by January Jones, who has evidently decided to give up even trying to act), numerous locations usually built in a sleek and sterile style that looked modernistic back in the 1960s (there is a Pentagon set which is a straight lift from Dr. Strangelove), random transitions to far-flung locations and an overall sterility and lack of suspense as to whether the hero will survive. This is partly the inherent handicap of a prequel -- all the important characters must needs survive, and newly-minted characters have about a 50% chance of being Red Shirts. Even worse, the X powers tend toward the really weird and difficult to visualize on film (though not in comics). Poor James McEvoy as Xavier keeps having to put two fingers to his temples and squint like a turbo-charged Kreskin, and Michael Fassbender as Magneto has been compelled, in order to demonstrate he is practicing his magnetic powers, to make bizarre and comical hand and finger gestures which would embarrass a casino lounge magician.

The sterility of the visual vocabulary extends to the entire low-stakes story, emphasized by the pounding, emphatic and pointlessly bombastic music sore by Henry Jackman, who seems determined at this early point in his career that he can write music just as terrible as that written by the likes of James Horner, Alan Silvestri and other musical sausage-grinders.

Still, it's a pleasant time-passer, and you have to like any film that begins with a sleek silver-haired Nazi Kevin Bacon speaking what sounds like impeccable German and shooting the hero's mother in front of him. Christolph Walz would be proud. Sadly, the film never tops that sequence.

Super 8 is no less engineered and calculated, but the template it uses had more authenticity when it was created in the 1980s. As everyone down to your uncle who talks too loud at holiday dinners as noted, Super 8 is Spielberg once removed, with a group of plucky kids from 1979 stumbling into a big adult adventure and fumbling through some coming-of-age moments. Also, there's absent and distracted parents and a location away from the coastal media centers that dominate American storytelling.

It's grittier, less obviously designed (although just as carefully--getting all those late 70s toys must have been quite a job), more based on human foibles and relationships -- parents, friends, budding romance, the desire for adventure. It is, as movie executives like to say, more "relateable." It's the Spielberg spin on Rockwell America, flawed, but allowing love and perseverance to triumph at last.

A closer examination shows that the film has an almost equal debt to the hapless M. Night Shyamalan in its use of phony suspense, red herrings and narrative cul-de-sacs, an overuse of the Val Lewton "bus" (a cheap shock created by a needlessly blunt cut or loud sound cue), a disappointing denouement and more importantly, the central gimmick of the story having no real bearing on the story's meaning.

How many movie monsters have NOT been disappointments when finally seen? The Monster played by Boris Karloff, the Alien in the films of that title and...can't think what else. (I don't even think much of King Kong, who looks like any child's toy gorilla.) And giving a CGI monster a close-up is a sure-fire fail. But more importantly, the title and the first half-hour of the film set up the gimmick that the kids' super 8mm filmmaking will have an important bearing on the film, and as the second act begins we see that the camera will catch some important information which will be revealed at the right time.

Except that it doesn't. It doesn't reveal much, and what it does is found out by a lot of other characters in some other way. So at no time is the super 8 film indispensable -- not to the characters in the film and not to the audience watching the film. It literally has no bearing on the way the story develops. It's as if the filmmakers had never seen a Hitchcock film. If you've got a McGuffin, even if it's not important to the audience, it's important to the people in the movie. In Super 8, the super 8 doesn't even matter.

There's one thing for sure. Elle Fanning is a full-on, flat-out movie star. Even more than Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, this actress barely out of her own childhood has the potential to be one of the most powerful and charismatic film stars of an emerging generation. She does whatever she is asked to do in this film supremely well (and give the film credit for never trying to make her look stupid or silly). But what makes her a star is that she is fascinating doing nothing. Just looking off at the horizon until the director calls "cut." She is much more of a phenomenon than the Big Scary Thing the Air Force is trying to hide.

These kids nowadays sure do like them comic books.

If you don't know why this is funny, you're probably not going to enjoy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010). Obviously, films have been based on comic books since at least the late 1930's (comic books were only invented in the mid-30s; before then, movies were based on newspaper comics like "Li'l Abner" and "Dagwood.") And films have borne the video game influence since at least the first Tron, back during the Reagan administration. But Scott Pilgrim, based on a series of graphic novels about characters who are avid gamers, makes a substantial attempt to incorporate game-style storytelling into the narrative flow of the film. It's not just the sound or energy lines shooting out of Scott's band when they play, or the "Pow" and "Bif" words floating out of the punches -- heck, we had that on the Batman TV show back in 1966. It's the actual use of the ideas of scores and levels embedded in the scenes that feels innovative. Here's the scene in which what had seemed like another alternate indie-romance-comedy with Michael Cera begins to spin out into something quite different.



And they've dropped the tired old joke of the wimpy hero getting the stuffing knocked out of him (which might be why Kick-Ass eventually ran out of gas for all the fun along the way). Moreover, while this set-up -- hero must defeat seven villains sequentially -- sounds limited and formulaic, the screenplay has the good sense to continue working it out in different ways.

But one's reaction to the film is going to depend on one's feelings about its references. I'm not keen on film references to contemporary culture. Robin Williams' self-congratulatory riffs make Aladdin really dated today (William F. Buckley wasn't even hip back then). But Scott Pilgrim is built entirely on sharing a specific private language with its intended audience, and a lot of the criticism online is about it having too much DDR and not enough Halo. The movie keeps saying, "We know movies are for old people, but really, we're one of you -- we're game-playing, comic-book reading kids, too!" And given the professed artificiality in the story-telling; or at least the adoption of more stylized narrative conventions than even film uses, the question is raised, can one be made to care for a character, who is literally a flat image on a page, or a cluster of pixels?

But just as Brecht and Orson Welles and other experimenters in meta- style have proven, a character who is self-aware about his fate and communicates that awareness with the audience can be sympathetic nonetheless. Here, the film has it both ways: it calls attention to the conventions of story-telling and character development, yet lets you feel the triumph inherent in the situation (I'm thinking specifically of what happens at 0:07 of this clip):



It's possible that this is all a narrative dead-end, but I have to admit that in this case, the ride was a great deal of fun.

RED (2010) represents a more straightforward and traditional adaptation of the graphic novel, discarding the conventions which are unique to that form in favor of those shared by comics AND movies. It is pretty much a straight-down-the-middle action comedy of the type that star Willis and free-lance lunatic Mel Gibson used to crank out in the 80s, except that the protagonists have crept into their 60s and the action is pumped up to what used to be called "cartoonish" levels, except here "cartoonish" goes up past 11 to a 13. Most people don't think you need a rocket launcher to dispose of a single human being about 30 or 40 feet away from you. And it turns out not to be a good idea.



Evidently, the source graphic novel was darker and grimmer than this and the producer peddled that idea for a few years before deciding to turn it into a romp. The result is a creative boomerang, medium-wise. Film introduces multiple angles, low key lighting, rapid changes of scene, terse dialogue. Comic books follow suit, but in bright primary colors, especially in the Silver Age. Neo-noir becomes popular with films like Body Heat and L.A. Confidential and comics respond with The Black Knight and Sin City; those products are adapted to film with mixed commercial and aesthetic results. Neo-noir graphic novel RED is unsuccessfully peddled for adaptation, it is eventually transformed into a movie-movie, with no real influence from either the source graphic novel or the comic book as a medium. The principal influence on the film RED is the desire to sell more popcorn.

It does have fun with the archetypes that the cast brings with them. Here is Queen Elizabeth Helen Mirren slipping off the pumps and slipping on the work shoes:



And in a misguided attempt to make the film resemble human life, Bruce Willis is given a love interest half his age (take that Demi!) played by the usually enticing Mary Louise Parker, who in this film seems to think she might win an award if her character exhibits enough brain damage, so as to completely lack common sense. Hence some phony campy byplay with Mary and Helen exchanging girl talk between automated rounds:



Would that they had not tried.

Both films are very fine weekend-evening rentals, both are light as a feather, but the contrast between them in subject matter, style and the seriousness or non-seriousness of life, death and love illustrates a generational split much larger than what kind of comic books people like.

Isolated man

We all know people who can't survive a week or two without getting into a relationship. With Up In The Air last year and now The American (2010), George Clooney seems predisposed to portray men who can't get into any relationship, and are not sure if they want to. Aside from the sexless Western heroes of the 1930s and 1940s, I can't think of a leading man who spends more time avoiding getting entangled with women than the purportedly sexy Clooney. Director Anton Corbijn is best known for his still photos of celebrities, and perhaps it was his intention to simply capitalize on his strengths, because The American often feels more like a slideshow than a movie.

The one-man movie is well-established, perhaps even a mini-genre. There is even a book entitled Cinema of Loneliness. In the last decade we've had I Am Legend, Cast Away, 127 Hours, One Hour Photo and A Single Man. Going back we have Taxi Driver, Blast of Silence and countless Westerns and detective movies. That's not counting all the movies in which only one person in the world, perhaps a child or other outcast, befriends the protagonist.

In the case of The American, Clooney's character goes through the motions of a romance as if he knew it was doomed, and proceeds to (presumably unwittingly) engineer his own destruction. But even if he knew what was coming, it's hard to argue he would do any differently. Like his character in Up In The Air, this man seems to have forgotten to have a life, and to have something--anything, really that he wants to do. It's hard to believe that he wants to get out of his current life and get away, because we're never convinced of his passion of whatever it is he wants to get to. It's an interesting literary idea, but it's a tough pull for cinema, because the central character seems to be without passion of any kind.

A similar issue dogs the cult classic Seconds (1966) directed by John Frankenheimer as an existential horror film. Arthur Hamilton, who has himself transformed into the handsome Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson) is isolated from everyone, including himself.



He is given the identity of an artist without the talent, the passion or the network of influences, teachers, friends, supporters and other persons that most artists need to sustain them. The man starts the story empty and simply inventing an identity for him as an artist (especially an artist who is already successful and has a fancy Malibu home) is a recipe for disaster. This scene illustrates the disaster unfolding, and contains some of Rock Hudson's best work, not that Hudson has a large body of great work. But he seems to respond to this idea of being placed into a hollowed-out shell of a person that he is expected to fill out and respond to it.

Note also the splendid wide-angle hand-held photography of James Wong Howe, who is most celebrated these days for the icy brilliance of his work on Sweet Smell of Success -- both impressive credits for a man in his 60s who had begun as a cameraman in the silent era.

Jack Nicholson's character, Jonathan, in Carnal Knowledge (1971) thinks he wants someone around, preferably someone with female genitalia, but his contempt for other people and especially for other people, which never changes throughout his life, dooms him to a life of solitude. His idea of a relationship seems to be merely a complex form of masturbation. Here he is describing his ideal woman as an inventory of physical attributes. He barely seems human himself:



(Note: The language in this clip may be NSFW or for school.)

As I revisit films of the 70s, films that were first released in my high school and college days that were highly influential on me, my generation and the next generation of filmmakers, so many of them are no longer as shocking and transgressive as they seemed at first. But although Carnal Knowledge shocked many for its graphic language and simulated sex, I don't recall people being as appalled with Jonathan's sociopathology as they should have been and as I am now. The character has the cruelty of a Neil LaBute script, made doubly cruel by the fact that almost no one in the film expresses the horror we feel for this monster, with the exception of Carol Kane in the penultimate slide-show sequence. His only "punishment" for 25 or 30 years of appalling behavior are some transitory bouts of impotence, which might be exactly what he needs to take a time out from his satyrism and get a clear-eyed view of himself. Jonathan is isolated by his own doing, and likely to forever remain so.

Codes and silences

At the very least, The Town (2010) settles the issue: Ben Affleck is a real movie director, not just an actor who takes an occasional flyer behind the lens. Gone, Baby Gone was extremely accomplished, but whether because of its modest scale and star (Affleck's brother Casey) or its downbeat and somewhat ambiguous tone, it did not make a big impression in the film business community. Still, every talented actor probably has one pretty good film in them. Affleck came roaring back with another entry in the evolving sub-genre of films set in Eastern Massachusetts, wrapping his drama of growth, loyalty and betrayal in a hard boiled heist-move coating.

Frankly, the coating is more convincing than the gooey center of the film, which tries to suggest that a career criminal can win the love and loyalty of a Good Woman and then completely quit being a thief. But although that premise is hard to take, Affleck's depiction of what FBI man Jon Hamm's character calls "Irish omerta" is utterly persuasive, especially the strong ties between Affleck's character and that of Jeremy Remmer (Hurt Locker) a probable sociopath who is nonetheless fiercely loyal and, in his own way, trustworthy.

Most impressive is Affleck's handling of an urban car chase midway through the film reminiscent of the best aspects of John Frankenheimer's Ronin. Shot and edited with an economy, lightness and realistic scale that make it more convincing than many more hyperbolic sequences (e.g. The Matrix Reloaded). The light, swift style in which all the crime-action scenes are put together heighten their plausibility, even though the premise of the climactic sequence, an attempted heist of Fenway is prima facie ridiculous.

The economy of the shooting is mirrored in the elliptical dialogue (Affleck is also co-writer of the final shooting script with Aaron Stockard). Here's how we learn of the loyalty of Remmer's character (James) to Affleck's character (Doug):

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
[Beat]
James Coughlin: Whose car are we gonna take?

And later they discuss the big job that could set them for life, either as wealthy men or permanent prisoners:

Doug MacRay: You know if this thing goes right, could be your turn to step away, too.
James Coughlin: Yeah. Sure. What am I gonna do? Dougy, huh? Go down to Margaritaville, drink half a yard and fall off the [bleep]in' bar stools?
Doug MacRay: Do me a favor, the weight of this thing...pack a parachute at least.
James Coughlin: You know the funniest thing about being in prison guys pretending they wanna get out. I can't do any more time, Dougy. So if we get jammed up, we're holding court on the street.

The criminal mastermind in The Town runs a flower shop as a front, as does one of the rival gang leaders in what is often cited as the film that kicked off the gangster film cycle of the early '30s, the romantic Underworld (1927).

Journalist and future screenwriter Ben Hecht concocted a hard-boiled story, is first for the movies, of a gangster's rise coupled with a bit of romantic rivalry, trying to be as true as he could be to the real Chicago gangsters he new personally. Paramount assigned the story to the struggling young Josef von Sternberg, who had established two reputations, one as an efficient technician and "movie doctor" and the other as a visual poet with less interest in narrative than in pictures. Luckily, this was a perfect qualification for a director of silent film, in which the best stories were the simplest ones which could be explored in purely pictorial terms.

Von Sternberg took Hecht's gritty story and made it an operatic love triangle, a competition between two spiritual brothers, one "Rolls Royce", representing Mind, and the other, "Bull" representing Body, for the possession of the sensual yet ethereal woman, evocatively called "Feathers" (and covered in them most of the time). Von Sternberg's reputation rests on his exploration and exploitation of actor's faces, of subtle details of eyes and corners of mouths. But he is also the master of light and shadow and the moving camera. The sequence below begins with what is quite clearly an attempted rape, without showing anything which could seriously disturb a censor.



If you don't want to take the time for this entire clip, start at about 4:00 and see how von Sternberg absorbs the lessons of German cinema in staging and lighting, and how he allows his audience thrill to grotesque violence without showing it directly (yet without cutting away). Then von Sternberg exercises a superb economy, cutting straight from the murder of Buck in his flower ship (just like The Town) to Bull's sentencing; from one kind of justice to another.

One of the toughest things about watching dramatic silent films today can be the long focus on faces which seem to be barely changing. In sound film, a silent reflective moment can be effective, but when all the action is silent, long close-ups can seem really languorous. But von Sternberg keeps the story alive even as we see thought flicker over the characters' faces. I don't know of a silent feature which is so consistently engaging and absorbing, even with its simple characters and symbols. (Look, for instance, at the confetti which covers the floor of the Criminal's Ball like a thick soup of moral squalor.)

But powerful as it is, Underworld doesn't really feel like a true ancestor of those rise-to-the-top gangster films like Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and the original Scarface. (And incidentally, every fan of The Godfather, Wiseguys, the Scarface remake and The Sopranos owe it to themselves to see those primitive antecedents, many sequences of which are still blood-chilling.) Bull Weed is a well-established success at the beginning of the film, and Underworld has more to do with choices and loyalty than about the role of the gangster in society and the manner in which he gathers power, which is at the heart of the 30s cycle.

That trope is, however, central to the latest remake of The Public Enemy, the South African crime epic Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema (released theatrically here in 2010). Although it incorporates real-life story elements such as the collapse of apertheid and the use of rent strike law to acquire title to real estate, the film still feels like a long-distance echo of the old Warner Bros. classics, for which black skin stands in for Irish heritage and cocaine substitutes for illegal booze. The central character even dies of a fatal gun show surrounded by cops exactly like Jimmy Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. All that is needed was for Kunene to gasp out, "Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Lucky?" Jerusalema is even directly derivative of Michael Mann's Heat, as Joburg gangsters imitate one of the key MOs in that film, plowing tractor-trailers into armored trucks.

The one truly original. element is the first half-hour of the film, depicting the future gangsters as clueless and inept youngsters, stealing trucks they don't even know how to drive, and planning to hijack drivers while standing under a sign warning drivers that they are likely to be hijacked in this area. The mix of English, Zulu, Afrikaans and pidgin is also quite interesting and illustrates the slippery social distinctions of the South African criminal world (specifically, the depredations of the refugees from Ghana).

But for all the trappings, the elements of gangster films remain the same: poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, family, loyalty and betrayal. I don't think any of this is going away soon.

Running order

There is not much to be said about a vigorous pot-boiler like Salt (2010). Briskly directed by ultra-professional Phillip Noyce and edited to within an inch of its life by Stuart Baird and John Gilroy, it is a machine designed to relentlessly divert for 95 minutes, and performs its function efficiently. Certainly, much of it doesn't make sense and it makes total hash of Newtonian physics, but that's not what you go to the movies for, is it?

Jolie has already demonstrated on a number of occasions that she is as effective an action film lead as any of her male competitors -- more than most, since Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and that cohort are now eligible for Social Security. So that is hardly breaking news. And the era of CGI has rather spoiled the pleasure we take in big outrageous stunts. Apparently, a number of Jolie's best gags, such as leaping between the tops of moving tractor-trailers was done on location -- with safety lines and precautions -- but done in real places, not a greenscreen stage. Nonetheless, it hardly matters, since we never know if we can believe what we see, and therefore reflexively disbelieve, which is destructive to the entire action film genre.

What CGI can't fake is the performer's natural speed and grace. Here Jolie has it. There is a moment early in the third act (and this film practically announces each act with a flourish of trumpets and tap-dancing usherettes) in which Jolie, now dressed in a flattering white shirt and dress slacks is only required to run down a hall very fast. For me, that was as entertaining as anything in the movie, and not for any salacious reasons. She is fully dressed, and nothing is moving in any sort of suggestive way. She is just flat-out running like an athlete (albeit an athlete who is trying to prevent an international incident) and she looks terrific. An action hero needs a good run. Fairbanks and Flynn had it. Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan run wonderfully. Burt Lancaster ran like a god, as he did almost everything. This harkens back to the simplest atavistic pleasures of motion pictures, being able to study bodies in motion, and it just may trump all the explosions and shoot-outs which so liberally lace a movie-movie like Salt.

That's why I recommend action film fans seek out the series that began with District B13 a.k.a. Banlieue 13, the parkour films from France. Yes, there is a cool near-future narrative frame and there is a political skew that is sadly missing from so many action films. But mostly there are a number of people doing things on film that look as though they are impossible, and yet they are actually executed for the camera, real time, real space.



Now if you are a reasonably sophisticated filmgoer, you will figure that the fight scene which begins at about the 4:00 mark in this clip involves a lot of wire work. I urge you, don't just stream this from Netflix. Get your hands on the disc and look at the special features, which has some camcorder video of the rehearsals of that fight. There are no wires. There are tremendous acrobats and athletes operating at their best.

Perhaps it is not that we crave narrative, but that we are seeking conflict, tension and resolution. Narrative provides that in a safe, comfortable way, but as former hunter-gatherers only lately out of the cave, we are just as happy with physical conflict. A few million women who become grass widows every Sunday afternoon in the fall would probably agree with me.

Bodies in motion

My first exposure to film theory (a sorry excuse for an academic discipline if you ask me) was Theory of Film published in 1960 by Siegfried Kracauer, who was a philosopher, not a film scholar. (I'm not sure film scholars existed in 1960, other than self-proclaimed ones.) Being my first framework for analyzing movies, rather than just taking them in with a dull, open-mouthed stare as I did in younger days (I've learned to close my mouth), I've never really shaken the spectre of Kracauer.

One of his shibboleths was the camera's affinity for actual events. Actual events, be they disasters or dancing, were fundamental to cinema, and the place they part from dramatic theater. (Of course there is vaudeville and circus, where some performers demonstrate actual physical skills, such as juggling, trapeze and animal training, and those things do turn up in the movies.) To that end, film which documents high levels of physical skill feel inherently more cinematic. Perhaps that's why swimmer Esther Williams and skater Sonja Henie could become film stars, without any discernible acting talent. They could do real actual things, and even if you criticized their acting, their clothes or their hair, you couldn't take their real skills away from them.

Which perhaps explains the preponderance of ballet movies, given ballet's minuscule place in our cultural landscape. It's hard to make a ballet movie without a real ballet dancer, who can really do it. (The Turning Point cuts itself off at the knee in my opinion, because they put in real ballet star Baryshnikov, who performs a great solo from "The Prodigal Son" in which he could school Michael Jordan about staying airborne for huge amounts of time. Then the film moves to Anne Bancroft and Leslie Browne and tries to convince you that they are great ballet stars, and frankly that dog won't hunt.) There is always going to be a grounding in reality no matter how crazy a ballet movie gets (and they get pretty crazy). The camera just likes recording that sort of extreme level of skill.

For present day films such as Black Swan (2010), it is now possible to past movie star heads onto great ballet bodies, and although that means we are tinkering with reality, we still have the reality of the dancing that was done, regardless of the head involved or not involved. And it gives director Aronofsky the opportunity to make a film whose meanings and ideas will be expressed in almost exclusively visual terms. Yes, there is dialogue--the modern film audience is not prepared for a dialogue-free film, but this film would be completely comprehensible if about six title cards were substituted for all of the talking. We can hear Nina's mother haranguing her, but her face and movement convey all this is necessary, not to mention the bedroom full of little girl things (which Nina tellingly tries to discard and destroy partway through the movie). Sure, the choreographer tells Nina she must express herself sexually, but I think the scene of him groping her and forcing a kiss on her is far more communicative and expressive. Honestly, if they had had CGI in 1924, Lillian Gish could have done a fine job with this film.

Black Swan is hypnotic and mesmerizing just the way great silent film can be, and great care has been taken not to break the spell. Case in point, we need to see Nina travel from her home to the theater. We see her walking from the back. There follows what is technically a jump cut from city street to stage door area, but since the camera's relationship to Nina remains the same, both in direction of movement and relative size of her image, the transition is virtually seamless -- and suddenly we have gone from home to work without thinking about it. The seamless and unemphatic use of Nina's doppelganger visions follow a simple pattern. The effect is that the warp and woof of the fabric Nina's mind gradually develops a pretty drastic warp, but incrementally throughout the brief period of the story.

I honestly cannot understand why anyone in 2010 or 2011 would find this movie confusing. Aronofsky states what he is about from the very first scene. (I believe most people miss or forget first scenes when they are not part of the narrative continuity that follows immediately. How often have you seen a film which, in its final sequence, harkens back to the first sequence and you hear all around you, people saying, "Oh," clearly having forgotten that first scene and never giving any thought to where it might be headed. Maybe everyone's still digging around in their popcorn bags at that point.) We see a ballet dancer on a bare, empty stage. No set, no context, just dancer and light. The camera is steady and, if not fixed, moving with great smoothness and slickness. Then the perspective changes. The camera is handheld, wobbly and jittery. (As I saw it I was trying to recall if I had EVER seen a ballet sequence shot handheld. Do any of you recall one? Please leave a comment, if so.) The black bird appears, menacing and cruel. The ballerina has become prey. And after some brief, suggestively violent montage, the dream--or nightmare--ends and the film proper begins. But we have been warned -- do not rely on what you see. Do not rely on it to be stable or predictable, and do not rely on it to represent objective reality. "Wake up, folks," says Aronofsky, "you're going to be messed with." And yet many writers on this film profess surprise at being messed with. SPOILER ALERT - The film is not obscure at all, presenting a straightforward, if subjective account of a person undergoing a psychotic break. My wife suggests that the principal character is probably schizophrenic and she points out that she is exactly the right age for such symptoms to appear. Nothing difficult to figure out here.

Second, I cannot understand the complaint that the film is "overdone" that it is "too much." By the same token Phantom of the Opera and Dracula are kinda overwrought, too. Because we are really dealing with a psychological horror film and "over the top" goes with the territory. If someone is shocked because Nina's imagined quills sprout and she turns into a full-fledged black swan in the course of the dance, I cannot imagine what film they thought they were watching. It's a cinch they've never seen Polanski's Repulsion, which I was reminded of when the first rash appeared on Nina's back and which an interview with the screenwriters confirmed was an inspirational source for Black Swan. (And why is Black Swan excessive but the typical Quentin Tarantino bloodbath is "inspired cinema." How is depicting the inner imaginings of a diseased mind more unrealistic and overstated than balletic shoot-out that supposedly represents some sort of objective reality. I think film critics need to learn more about how guns and gun wounds work before they decide what's realistic and not.)

Another surprising revelation from hearing the screenwriters speak is to learn in what detail the film was scripted even before Aronofsky's involvement, and even once he took over the project. It is odd that Arnofsky did not earn a writing credit for his work with the final scriptwriter, because the work of screenwriter and director appear to be seamlessly fused. The direction is burnt into the script and the script scarcely exists independent of its direction. There is no film apart from its visual embodiment (which is as it should be, but is rarely true). I only wish Griffith and Hitchcock could see this film. I don't know if they'd like it, but I'd hope they'd recognize how it is a culmination of what they began.

Jackie Chan doesn't even need CGI to become the physical embodiment of film (in fact, his films which employed CGI are unquestionably his worst work). Many viewers assessing the Coen Brothers' True Grit have tried to make too much of their idea that John Wayne is a "real movie star" whereas Jeff Bridges is not. This is nonsense. John Wayne was simply around so long that it is hard to imagine him as anything but John Wayne, whereas Jeff Bridges is a more protean artist. Over time, people took him for a symbol of what he had portrayed on screen. Wayne was not a hero (other than the personal heroism of battling with cancer, a heroism demonstrated by millions every day); he never served in the armed forces, and was in fact an avid draft-dodger, which is why his career was in good shape in 1945, when many of his former competitors -- James Stewart, Clark Gable, who had gone to fight had to struggle to re-establish themselves. Dick Cavett recently revealed that Wayne was very familiar with the work of ultra-sophisticated and gay theater artist Noel Coward. When Cavett told Woody Allen this, Allen replied, “It reminds you that he’s an actor, not a cowboy.” But he was an actor who made a lot of movies, and a lot in which he played characters with many shared traits.

But while Jackie Chan is a pretty good actor (and a pretty good singer, too) he is far more than that. I would argue that, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton and Fred Astaire, he is a metastar (NOT a megastar), whose physical gift and qualities embody the very idea of motion pictures. They do not need characters, situations or settings. Like the traveling actor who only needs a few planks and an audience, a metastar like Jackie Chan need only step before the camera for cinema to take place.

A modest proof of this can be seen in the remake of The Karate Kid (2010), which Jackie shares with Jaden Smith, who could be a metastar in the making. It cannot really be called a good film. (The very fact that it was entrusted to a director whose credits include Cody Banks and Pink Panther 2 suggests that the people in charge were doing their best to prevent a good film being made.) It inherits the cheesy and illogical series of story events from the original film (which itself was directed by John Avildsen, Master of Cheap Schlock, whose previous film was the excruciating and manipulative Rocky, beloved of gullible rubes everywhere.) Unmotivated and relentless bullying, an unexplained tournament lacking any sort of rules of entry, a popular and respected martial arts teacher driven by sadism, not to mention getting a 12-year-old into peak physical condition in two months, none of this troubles the kind of lazy, sloppy filmmakers who engineer stuff like this. Well, what do you expect from people who use the title Karate Kid to make a film about learning kung fu?

Luckily, they were not in charge of the real training and fighting sequences, and Jackie was. From developing an analog to the famous "wax on, wax off" trope (and check out the special features on the DVD to see how beautifully Jackie does this), to Jackie's opening six-on-one battle, to the very palpable accomplishments of young Mr. Smith in the fighting sequences, due in great part to training under Jackie's direction, Jackie Chan lifts a piece of run-of-the-mill commercial product into a demonstration of the power of capturing human movement on film. That is why he is larger and more important than any film he is in, and why he may never be in a great film. To do so, he would have to be able to put himself at the service of a great filmmaker, to subordinate himself to ideas and visions, and serve a narrative greater than his simple triumph over opposition. It's not Jackie's fault, but I'm not sure that it's possible. Jackie Chan is a great folk artist, and he is best left to continue working on the same film with the same elements over and over, endlessly fiddling with details, like a great naive painter who keeps working on the same still life, or a blues artist working over the same three chords and six melody notes, ringing endless changes from a few small objects and an immense human soul.

Furious improvisation

Improvisation was once a rehearsal tool for actors and directors developing a production of a play. It was never intended to be seen by the audience, being designed to help actors discover aspects of their characters not directly addressed by the script of the play.

It only became a production mode in the US in the late 1950s when, at the same time, the Compass Players and its successors in Chicago and John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke and other filmmakers in New York started assembling scenes improvised by actors based on an agreed-upon storyline into full-length works. These two strands produced some of the most influential actors of the 1960s. From Chicago came Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander and Alan Arkin. From New York came Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands. The Chicago group emphasized variety and the inconsistent, surprising aspects of human nature. Where Chicago went wide, New York went deep, drilling down to the hidden springs of feeling, especially those of loss and pain.

But whereas Compass was intended to be a full-spectrum theater group, presenting classics of world theater and full-length improvisations on contemporary issues, its successor, Second City packaged improvisation as a comedy brand, focusing wholly on short sketches with broad types, running jokes and blackout punchlines. The end became the means, and the basis of not only Saturday Night Live and SCTV, but all the films that sprung from those sources. (The 80s sketch group boom, such as UCB and The State, which are fundamentally writer-driven cooperatives probably trace their ancestry to Monty Python.)

Currently the biggest sub-brand of the Second City brand is the Will Ferrell film, specifically, the Adam McKay-Will Ferrell movie, which also traces its lineage from Blazing Saddles and the other Mel Brooks burlesques. Mel Brooks was the first to bring the sketch mentality to bigtime Hollywood films, by which character consistency, plot development, thematic integrity and good taste are all tossed overboard for the sake of a gag, any gag so long as it gets a laugh. So what if it contradicts other scenes in the movie, so what if it short-circuits the progress of the story. If people will laugh at men farting when they eat beans, who needs a story or characters?

(This scene has always driven me crazy. Why do people find it funny? Back in 1973 there was some humor in breaking a taboo and assaulting the Western genre, which was semi-sacred. Now we've scene routines with the Queen or Grace Kelly farting, so the fart taboo is pretty much exhausted. AndB there's nothing inherently incongruous about farting. Some foods produce more gas in the G.I. tract and press for more and faster relief. Other than puncturing someone's dignity, farting is as hilarious as any other body function. The unrelieved NEED to fart is still funny, the fart itself just a natural event.)

But the Mel Brooks burlesques were written down, with fixed scripts. I'm sure a certain amount of staging and business were worked up on the set, but there was no tradition of wholesale improvisation for that generation of comics, even though they first began work in impromptu resort camp shows. Not until Christopher Guest began his series of films improvised around a scenario that full-on improv made it into the movies.

What the SNL and Ferrell-McKay group brought to movies was called improvisation, but it is really riffing, a time-honored practice of comics who converge on a subject or a situation and come up with alternate set-ups and punchlines. There is even a well-known improv game, often called "Ding" in which a moderator hits a bell and the improviser must substitute a new line for the line he or she just said. At its best, it promotes spontaneity and openness. Abused, as it often is, it turns an actor into a joke machine.

Will Ferrell is a talented performer. He is far more effective than, say Jim Carrey, in what might be called "serious comedy" such as Stranger Than Fiction or Melinda or Melinda. But his "friends" like Mr. McKay keep pushing him into shallow waters and forcing him to stay there. The man is capable of a Dr. Strangelove or a Network, and he is in danger of turning into Eddie Murphy. The day you see him show up in a fat suit will be his expiration date.

That said, The Other Guys represents a considerable improvement over the mild-chuckle inducing Talladega Nights (Although - can we declare a moratorium on overweight middle-aged guys in tighty whities? Yecch) and the abominable Step Brothers. Having Mark Wahlberg aboard helps, as he is neither an improviser nor especially silly. In fact the film adheres to its story so closely that it doesn't give Steve Coogan a chance to be funny, which falls in the category of a waste of a precious resource. And the story turns out to be an extremely plodding police procedural, even though it is decorated with silly ideas, like Will Ferrell being sexually irresistible. Soon it even forgets to make fun of the super-violent buddy super-cop movies that is the essential premise of the movie and finally it has no target and the wispiest sketches of characters. It is neither an actual movie nor an effective comment on a movie. Oh, it's a reasonable time-passer, but I can't imagine anyone hauling this out in 30 years to show their kids what a great comedy is.

The Duplass Brothers make far more productive and organic use of improvisation, born out of extreme humility. (This may be the humility borne of great arrogance, but it's humility nonetheless.) Simply put, they have literally NO pride of authorship when it comes to dialogue. They work out character, situations, scenes, structure, but do not consider themselves as good at creating dialogue as actors on their feet can be. So they write dialogue, but they tell their actors not to bother following it to closely. Instead, dialogue develops and evolves out of rehearsal and repetition, like jazz players working off the "I Got Rhythm" changes. You still have to play the chords, or you will be in discord with the other players, but you're free to work out your own melody. And in the rehearsal process -- and even during shooting -- the Duplasses are unafraid to completely invert the intention or the action of the scene if they feel what they initially created doesn't work. This makes financiers and distributors nervous, but it is a very effective method of storytelling and if everyone is prepared for it, very successful.

Cyrus (2010) demonstrates emphatically that this system does not rely on amateur or semi-amateur actors like Mark Duplass or Greta Gerwig to work. Instead, professionals like John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei lend a crispness, clarity and sense of purpose to the film and enhance the energy and drive. They know how to get to the point of a scene, and even with variations and decorations, keep that purpose solidly in mind. I found the film so effective that the ugly greasy slug often identified as Jonah Hill was not too nauseating, except insofar as his character was meant to be. (Although the American people need to put their foot down. Mr. Hill must not take his pants off in the movies anymore AT ALL. He has abused the privilege. Do any of you know a Congressperson or Senator who can do something about this?)

It's questionable whether this script could be pulled off at all with anything less than top-level actors. Not that there's a weakness in the script, but I can't see an amateur walking that fine line between psychopathy and comedy that Jonah Hill is called upon to do here. Or that anyone with such a lumpy face and bad hair could be as plausible leading man as the sweet and funny John C. Reilly. Or that any non-pro actress could simulate loving devotion with something like Jonah Hill. Believe me, that takes real acting.

The camerawork is still rudimentary. The film features Catherine Keener, queen if indie movies, so you know that it's still a little movie, even if a studio is involved. The story still moves in fits and starts, static for a long time, then shifting into overdrive. But whereas a writer can sit and think that a girl could endear herself to a man by starting to dance to the inane pop tune which he is trying to compel the whole party to dance to, it takes a Marisa Tomei to know how to do that, to be light and funny and spirited and yet terribly seductive. And the people who nominate people for awards are going to have to stop overlooking John C. Reilly. His gallery of characters is as fecund and diverse as Paul Giamatti or Phillip Seymour Hoffman, yet he is always taken for granted by the nominators, though not be filmmakers who know how extraordinary his range is. Is there another actor alive who could be equally at home in Magnolia and Walk Hard?

In a project like this, improv becomes a tool for actor-writer-director collaboration and for a greater naturalness in performance. (I hate those super-written lines that become staples of movie trailers, often announcing the theme. Much as I admire The King's Speech, the line, "I have a voice" is one of the worst motivated and baldly obvious lines in it, clearly emanating from the omniscient author and not the character, yet the line is plastered all over the commercials and trailers, incidentally demolishing the effect of the scene it's in when audiences come to see the movie.) Instead of gladiatorial combat, as in the world of Adam McKay and Judd Apatow, improv is put to its original purpose, arriving at the truth lurking just below the words of scripts. A kind of meta-writing. If Cyrus is an example of the Duplasses "selling out" and working in the studio system, I hope they do a lot more of it.

Let Lisbeth Be Lisbeth

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009) provides a good argument for the American industrial method of film development and production. No American filmmaker (and we will see the proof of this as the American re-makes start to come out next year) would tolerate a film with so many foregone conclusions and so little suspense, even given one's natural expectations in a melodramatic mystery series.

Moreover, the Swedes have a touching faith in a government's goodwill and competence in the investigation of a rogue intelligence squad. (And I'm a progressive.) Sure, there are some bad guys hiding the crimes of the Soviet defector the recruited 40 years ago, but there is a whole gang of young, vigorous well-financed government investigators ready to take them down. If there was an American film (as it will be soon), the next thing would be the call from the shadowy senator or captain of industry speaking to an unseen official, telling them to shut that investigation down. Then the idealistic crimefighters would have to go rogue, pursuing the bad guys outside of the blessing of the law. But remember, this is Sweden, so ***SPOILER*** the good guys win without any opposition.

Then there's Lisbeth's trial and hearing. The bad guys have accusations and false dignity. Lisbeth and her lawyer have mountains of incriminating evidence against the bad guy so -- surprise -- they win.

Worst of all, Lisbeth is reduced to a passive object for most of the movie, and only gets decked out in full Salander-goth rig about 1-1/2 hours into a 2-1/2 hour movie. And she gets into her full leather-and-razor-blades gear in order to...go to court. It makes no sense -- in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, she proved herself an excellent and dogged investigator. How come she's not put to work to investigate her own case? Worst of all, the key to the whole case is discovered by a minor character called Plague, who is completely unnecessary and redundant in the narrative. There's nothing Plague does that could not have plausibly done by Lisbeth. (I hope the American remake writer reads this!) Overall, the hard-won improvements of the second installment over the first, especially in making Lisbeth the center of the action, and the person who can resolve her own problems and questions, has been dealt away by a rather flabby and inefficient approach to suspense.

There is an action sequence, which comes in the oddest place, at the end of the movie after most of the story is over. It's somewhat satisfying, but we've already seen Lisbeth vindicated, so it is really no more than an amusing coda.

I presume most of this narrative lumpiness comes from the source novels. Larsson has the strangest procedure as a writer of suspense and action. Usually the protagonist makes a clear plan toward his goals, then turns a corner and complications and problems stretch out into a seeming abyss before them. But Larsson reverses that. When you can see a long and difficult path of difficult complications and obstacles on the way to the goal, Larsson suddenly shuts that down. How will Lisbeth escape the clutches of her homicidal father, who is only a few doors down in the same hospital? One envisions a complex sequence of cat-and-mouse as father evades the rather thin defenses of the Swedish security forces. But no, some guy we've never met before comes and shoots the old man in the head, then shoots himself and we're left saying --wait...is this story over now? Nope, because Larsson has a deep sack of stuff from out of nowhere that he continues to reach into.

Clearly Larsson never took an American playwrighting or screenwriting course, in which 3rd act threats must be made evident in the 1st act, and every little character detail pays off, e.g., the hero's hobby of whittling, as we saw in the second scene of the movie, means that he will whittle a way out of his predicament in the second-to-the-last scene. Americans write movies the way Indians live off the bison -- every little scrap is used. This is why, although Europeans are producing more and more commercial blockbusters, at least on their own continent, those hits have to be rewritten and remade here. (The exception here is Jean-Luc Besson, who clearly has studied mainstream American filmmaking with passion and insight.) It's not just the language of the words, it's the entire language of narrative which must be adjusted for American expectations.