The Hit keeps coming

The Hit (1984) is better than neo-noir. It is neo-proto-noir. Rather than going back to Double Indemnity and Out of the Past for its stylistic references, it has gone straight back to the origin of hard-boiled fiction, all the way to Hemingway. Pretty good for a bunch of lime eaters. It's not unprecedented. Harold Pinter's first full-length play The Birthday Party is like a theatrical variation on Hemingway's The Killers. The film might be said to belong to the non-existent genre of art-house gangster movies (Sexy Beast, Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday might be other candidates.) Director Stephen Frears would go on to make The Grifters, which is the hardest boiled hard-boiled movie ever made, a movie with pure ice in its veins. Then he would make The Queen. Go figure.

The plot: Terence Stamp was an informer. John Hurt is sent to go get him. Tim Roth (in his movie debut) is the driver. They pick him up in Spain to take him to Paris. The only thing missing is for Roth to keep calling Stamp "bright boy." Most of the film is a long drive across the Spanish desert, which makes it feel like one of those American pictures where they're driving across Mexico. The mood is aided by some Eric Clapton and a whole bunch of excellent flamenco.

Why should the Brits be so good at gangster flicks? This is a society that doesn't even have much truck with firearms. (Maybe that's one reason--it's easier in Britain to just hit someone in the face rather than shoot them.) And while The Hit may seem like Tarantino-lite, what separates these mugs from Quentin's fun cartoons is that they do not posture, quote or obsess on pop culture. These are more life-and-death kind of guys, mostly death.

The thing that separates it from ordinary neo-noir is the talk. Or the lack of it. It's not attempting to comment on itself, as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Nobody waxes philosophical at great length. The movie just is. It's so confident it has Fernando Rey in a major role and he doesn't have one audible line in English. Swagger, that's what it is. Not sloppy, loudmouth swagger like John Gotti, but the confidence to just get on with business.

As Stamp says when he knows he is about to die: "It's just a moment. We're here. Then we're not here. We're somewhere else... maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?"

Stooges to the rescue

Though it's not really needed, Meet the Baron (1933) is further proof that the worst films can be made using the combination of the best talent, especially if there is no guidance. Credited writers on this film include Arthur Kober, Norman Krasna, and Herman J. Mankiewicz, all prestigious and successful writers--some even produced on Broadway. The director is Walter Lang, who made good musicals such as State Fair and The King and I and the producer is David O. Selznick of Gone With The Wind fame. Put them together in order to promote a second-tier radio comic, Jack Pearl and his character Baron Munchausen, (who faded from peak popularity within two years of the release of this movie) and you have a 70-minute time-filler whose best moments are provided by naked women (what else?) and The Three Stooges (really).

I am not one of those cases of arrested development who idolizes the Stooges. Sure, I grew up on them, but only because they were on TV during the witching hour after it was too dark to play outside and just before we sat up for dinner. But I never thought their comedy made any sense or was very funny, and have always preferred Laurel and Hardy and even Abbott and Costello as far as teams go.

As I've aged and seen more of their work, especially in support of other performers in feature films, I appreciate the precision and timing of their work as a team. Nobody mentions it, but the Stooges sing together very well--not as a joke, or to exhibit their characters, as L&H do, but as a matter of good music making. Their act, especially in their days with Ted Healy (as in Meet the Baron) was clearly partly improvisational, but they are always tight, picking up cues and moving deftly into place as needed. They were a well-oiled machine, and not as dependent on the silly sound effects devised for them at Columbia Pictures as they would appear to be. Moe in particular is a very skillful anchor man, keeping the act in constant motion, which makes up for the lack of character consistency or narrative logic in their routines. Even Edna May Oliver can smoothly dovetail her snooty old lady act with the Stooges.

By the way, this is the film with the sequence (see below) in which girls sing "Clean As A Whistle" while appearing to be naked behind curtains of water. The number doesn't end (how could it?) because they run out of water and send for the Stooges to solve the problem.



I mean, what are you going to do with a movie that can't even make Jimmy Durante funny?

Coverage

An Everlasting Piece (2000) has the vague whiff of a film produced for tax reasons. It is hard to imagine that it aroused passion in anyone, other than its screenwriter-star, Barry McEvoy, who based it on incidents in his father's life. Director Barry Levinson continues to vie for "Most Erratic Track Record as a Director." Has anyone in our era made such fine films and such bombs side by side? Diner and Sphere? Avalon (a personal favorite) and Man of the Year (unwatchable)? Wag the Dog and Toys (one of the worst EVER)? Let me know if you can think of anyone else who works at such extremes. And some of his most celebrated work (Rain Man) isn't all that good, while lesser-known films (Young Sherlock Holmes) have their rewards.

One can see the attraction of the material for Levinson-- the protagonists are two man-boys (or is it boyos?) who stumble over a business opportunity which puts them in opposition to the prevailing authorities. As a Catholic and Protestant working together, they arouse suspicion both from the British military and the IRA, both of whom are potential antagonists and, as it turns out, potential customers.

But the two parts of the film--baldness and armed religious conflict--never gel into a cohesive unity, and come apart like a toupee whose sticky tape has worn out. And the inherent grimness of the setting edge the film into tastelessness, into which it falls on a fairly regular basis. Not to mention the Anglo-Irish propensity for scenes of redundant squabbling--don't we all have enough pointless arguments in our lives to not have to put up with them in real life? And there seems to be an assumption that, given much of the audience will be Irish, they will necessarily be drunk; therefore important plot points must be pronounced three times in a row very slowly. I'm not kidding. The idea that the two wig salesman will shave their heads to demonstrate the quality of their hair pieces is repeated THREE TIMES IN A ROW SLOWLY.

Or maybe it was just that the editor was drunk.

Actually, it's not...

It's Complicated (2009) appears to have been written and directed by Sonoma-Williams and dedicated to the proposition that 60-year-old women are likely to own successful businesses (which they don't have to spend any time running), have their children attend prestigious colleges without wondering how to pay for them, and have two well-heeled men chasing after them. And they say men have sick fantasies. (Yes, I know Meryl is supposed to be in her 50's, but I went to her high school and I know how old she is.) Writer-director Nancy Meyers continues to prove that she is the economy brand of the Nora Ephron franchise, with her characters suffering from mild body issues in place of Ephron's character's full-blown neuroses.

The film is pleasant, but no more and the only really remarkable thing about it is the skill and detail of Meryl Streep's acting, skill and detail she no longer applies to her celebrated character roles in films like Doubt and Julie & Julia. The latter have degenerated into vaudeville turns of tics and mannerisms. Streep's performance in Complicated is full of small realistic touches which are not in the service of a joke or a plot point, but simple pure characterization, revealing a character's insecurities, self-deprecation or indecision. Nonetheless, she is far less likely to be nominated for a piece like this than she is for playing an obvious gargoyle like in Devil Wears Prada.

John Krasinski is the film's secret weapon in the inconsequential role of the daughter's fiancee. Away We Go, which featured his best leading role so far, and was one of the best films of 2009--a film which gives you faith in the future of movies, virtually disappeared from everyone's mind by the time award season came around. Someday someone is going to realize that he is our new Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon and Tom Hanks and his goofy charm is going to drive some major films in years to come.

Needs brains

I don't know a lot about zombie films, but Night of the Living Dead is much funnier than Shaun of the Dead. So is Schindler's List, for that matter.

The classic George Romero zombie film is limited to begin with (which is what made 28 Days Later such a breath of fresh air). You can run away from them (easy) or shoot them in the head (easy if you have a gun). You can also hit them with a shovel, but that yields mixed results. It's really just sort of a stalling action.

Shaun of the Dead runs into a dead end as soon as possible and just stays there. A pity, because it starts off with a clever visual-satirical note as we see typical Londoners on their way to work, looking as if they had already become zombies. The point is made lightly, but it is never built upon, or even returned to. The film briefly enjoys the talents of Bill Nighy, but he dies too soon to save the film, and soon it devolves into a bunch of people screaming at each other about what they should do next. The English seem to think this is funny. It started back with Genevieve in 1953, which is celebrated as one of those little British gems of the 50s, but in fact is mind-numbingly tedious, since it consists almost entire of squabbling.

I'll give you that an argument can be funny. It can be a witty argument, or even stupid, as in the Monty Python "Argument Clinic" sketch. But when it is circular, with everyone talking at cross-purposes, not responding to each other but shouting endlessly past each other--well, it's no fun in real life and it's worse to find it in an entertainment.

I sought out the film because I really enjoyed the first two-thirds of Zombieland so much. But the humans in Zombieland are smart and competent and confident, and their mistakes are interesting and surprising, and their methods of overcoming the mistakes ingenious and witty in their own way. The characters in Shaun are yobbos from start to finish, never clever and never funny. It is the product of the over-elevation of the sketch comedy group which has been the plague of comedy in this decade, in which 7-minute ideas are played out for 102 minutes.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Another flawed father

The fleet tempo at which The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) begins reminds me of nothing so much as Truffaut's narration in Jules and Jim. It says: "We're not going to fool around with excessive explanations, background and sentiment. Let's get right to the facts you need to know."

The result is a film not exclusively for adults, but should only be seen by children if they are accompanied by their adults. Like most Wes Anderson movies, Mr. Fox is about a complicated family in which bright but damaged children learn from the mistakes of the adults around them. George Clooney's Mr. Fox joins the pantheon with Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou of flawed but loveable father figures. The brisk casual delivery is a welcome contrast from the overemphatic acting found in so much animation, especially stop motion, which everyone seems to think needs "help" in order to get over.

One of the lessons of The Simpsons was that animation can provide a greater density of information than live action because of the speed with which characters can move, speak, change locations, initiate and terminate actions. Unlike us clunky humans with our real-world bodies dealing with gravity and friction, animated characters can act as quickly as thought itself. This permits them to try and fail more rapidly, and failure has less serious consequences, especially for characters like Wile E. Coyote, who has an impressive ability to heal himself.

I had to confess I was skeptical that a director of conventional films, like Wes Anderson, could put more of a mark on an animated film than its animation director (Tim Burton is an obvious exception, but that is because of his visual design skills which dominate Nightmare Before Christmas more than the movement and performances). But I was wrong. Mr. Fox is much more like other Anderson films than it is like other animated films. Still, it is pretty family-friendly, especially if your kids are sharp to begin with. (I especially like the all-purpose deleted expletive "cuss", as in "I can't stand that cussing guy." Very useful.)

With its lack of songs, excessive moralizing and inane slapstick, it is the least boring animated film in a long, long time. And it still has a good lesson. You can make mistakes and survive them. And love keeps families together. OK, it's not brilliant, but the moral of Hamlet is "make up your mind," so let's agree that moral lessons aren't important to the quality of a work. But it will help justify letting children watch this cartoon with you.

Stress points

Seeing the fine Danish film Brødre (2004) made me feel depressed about Jim Sheridan's career status that he felt compelled to take on such a pointless exercise as directing the American scene-for-scene remake Brothers. One measure of the level of misfire is list some of the differences between the two films:

1. In Brødre, the officer brother briefs his men on their mission and assures them it is acceptable to be afraid.

2. Brødre has scenes and dialogue which explain why and how the younger brother was in prison and his feelings about what he did and who he hurt.

3. In Brødre, the protagonist truly gets to know the man he feels to compelled to kill later.

4. Connie Nielsen and Ulrich Thomsen are simply more believable as the parents of two young girls than Natalie Portman and Tobey Maguire, who still look they just came back from the prom. Not their fault, but...

5. Brødre makes it clear that the father's breakdown has to do with the stress and guilt over what he did in the war than it has to do with sexual jealousy. That is just a premise. In the remake, Maguire's outburst, driven as it seems to be by jealousy makes even less sense because Gyllenhall and Portman have very little chemistry between them.

6. Since Denmark hasn't much of a film industry, the children don't seem so much like professional actors.

7. Brødre has a clear visual design, with some hypnotic transitions using a thrumming music score and a montage of different types of blue eyes. (I guess there are some brown-eyed Danes, but you couldn't prove it from this film.)

The entire American version feels as though it were lurching from plot point to plot point without any real conviction, because what we have is a copy. As Brødre clearly comes from the writer and director's hearts, it is real and honest and truly felt; whereas Brothers feels as though it is going through the motions. Jim Sheridan has made wonderfully honest personal films himself, and he has no more business remaking Brødre than Marc Forster should be remaking In America.

The strange thing is that, given the difficult painful story told in Brødre and Brothers, the original feels more hopeful, more resolved, with more possibility of recovering a decent future, than the remake which starts "down" and stays down.

Why is Iron Man 2 so unsatisfying?

1. Tony Stark is a jerk. Supposedly he learns and grows over the course of the movie and stops being a jerk. I didn't notice that part. Jerk through and through.

2. I don't care whether he keeps the Iron Man suit or gives it away to the government. Don't care. Never told why I should care.

3. Superpowers which belong to a suit, not a person, are stupid. Jackie Chan proved that in spades in a much cheaper movie which was deliberately aimed at undemanding children.

4. Pepper is annoying. Why does she act like an annoying ex-gf when she hasn't ever real been a gf? And who wants a gf who acts the 3rd-grade teacher you didn't like?

5. No threat to us walking-around people. The whole picture revolves around a pissing match between two jerks, Tony and the character played by Sam Rockwell. Superheroes are supposed to save us, the people, not maintain their stock price.

6. Only one slightly interesting action scene, the heavily effect-ridden martial arts sequence with Scarlett and her double. The stutter-frame technique made me worry that I was having a stroke.

7. Fights between two guys in super suits are arbitrary and boring. Plus, nobody goes eyeball-to-eyeball. So...nothing.

8. Other than pointing the camera at Vince Vaughn's face, Jon Favreau has no talent for visual humor whatsoever. Can't stage, can't time it, can't shoot it, and mostly forgets to include it. Unless you find yards of broken glass and plaster hilarious.

9. They forgot to give Don Cheadle a character. Or was he trying to portray Ralph Ellison's Invisible (Black) Man?

10. Mickey Rourke. That's it. Mickey ugly-damned-deformed-burn-victim Rourke. Yecch. And his Russian accent sucks. And what the hell is that thing on his upper lip? And why does it change from shot to shot?

Clearly, if you want an actor who can play an obnoxious jerk who transforms into a charming rogue, you hire Robert Downey, Jr. one of the greatest actors in the world today. But then you give him something interesting and decent to do. His biggest accomplishment: saving his own life with Science. Again, no involvement for the audience. No threat to the world at large, no stakes for anyone in the audience, except for which millionaire to root for.

In the mood I'm in, I only want to see movies where millionaires die slowly. After torture.

Iron Man: Not super. Not a hero. Next!

Warming up in the bullpen

Lee Daniels has two great assets as a director, a poetic, at times spellbinding visual sense and an awe-inspiring rolodex. Daniels is famous today (and deserves to be) for Precious. Shadowboxer (2006), his first feature release has a marvelous assurance for such a strange film, beginning with its completely odd cast.

Daniels first made his mark as a producer, most notably of Monster's Ball, which leads one to wonder if his knack for offbeat casting is not opportunistic. One would not ordinarily think of Helen Mirren as a hitman as she plays in Shadowboxer, but would think of her for the role for which she was cast in Precious, an acid-tongued social worker. Except that Mirren wasn't available, so Daniels cast Mariah Carey. He seems to have a crazy, fling-it-against-the-wall attitude toward casting which so far has paid off.

Mirren's consort is Cuba Gooding, Jr. Their doctor (to patch them up from assassination-related injuries) is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and his girl friend, called "Precious" is played by Mo'Nique. The ease with which these actors, who presumably all share Daniels as a mutual friend belies the awkwardness of the gathering. The whole thing is bound with a dream-like visual style, linked by close-ups of eyes and bound together with an eclectic score by Mario Grigorov (although I also detected some Piazzolla tangos as well).

The story is preposterous, but has a truth of a fable. I don't know about anyone else, but seeing Shadowboxer, I would have given him the money to make Precious. IMDb lists his future projects as including something called Selma as well as Miss Saigon. I'd like to see those.

Picture this

One way of increasing your chances of making a good movie: point your camera at Armin Mueller-Stahl. There is a category of actor such including Raimu, Humphrey Bogart, Jean Gabin, Toshiro Mifune, Anna Magnani, Gary Cooper, who project their presence, their essence, even when completely in repose. You'll notice a preponderance of non-English-speaking actors in this list, because they are not dependent on dialogue to convey meaning and feeling. As demonstrated in Avalon, and Music Box and Eastern Promises, Mueller-Stahl belongs in that category.

Local Color (2008) is intended to be the Karate Kid of painting. The reportedly autobiographical script by director George Gallo evidently lured Mueller-Stahl out of retirement, possibly because of his own devotion to painting. He's given a great deal of talking to do, and a lot of it is claptrap about the nature of or the meaning of art. There are a lot of cheap shots at abstract expressionists, as though their art was false.

Let's think about how "real" and "natural" representational art is. Representational art requires that the eye examine a flat piece of canvas with colored oil on it, decipher those colors spread on a flat surface and figure out a comparison to real-world three-dimensional objects. Other animals can't do that, because representational art requires the interpretation of signs and symbols. Abstract expressionism requires no interpretation. It's a bunch of sploshes--you like or you don't. But you don't have to decide whether they look like a tree. That's an intellectual construct.

The fact is, the only completely direct and natural art is music, which does not attempt to represent anything and does not use symbols or signals. Each form of music has conventions, but that is a way of dealing with infinite choice. Every other form of music has to pass through the thinking part of the brain on the way to the feeling. Music goes straight to feeling. Was and is the greatest art.

Back to film. The good news is that digital cinematography has reached the point that the colors in the film are very well represented, although I would recommend a large-format widescreen display, because one is called on to see all the colors within the object--which is the definition of "local color." Clever, heh?

Tied up and down

It's hard to believe that Serious Moonlight (2009) was written as an original screenplay, because its physical and emotional landscape has the cramped feeling of a low-grade off-Broadway play. It's not just that it's in one room, it's that it harps on one note. What do you make of a film which has one of its two major characters duct-taped to a toilet for three-quarters of its running time? The whole film seems to have been duct-taped to a toilet.

There is a place for minimalist cinema. Hitchcock and Chaplin both engaged in this--Chaplin in One A.M., a solo turn and Hitchcock in Lifeboat and Rope, which have restricted settings and techniques. Often, the only way to adapt a play which is about confinement is to preserve that confinement, such as Extremities, Dial M for Murder or Wait Until Dark.

This story, which starts as one type of hostage story and then seems to turn into another, has no irrefutable reason that it takes place in the bathroom, and the idea that one character has been trussed up in such a way that he may relieve himself at any time (although not clean himself afterward) makes the whole thing thoroughly repellent.

It's a shame, because the new-model Meg Ryan, as seen in films such as In The Cut and The Deal, burnt but not bitter, angrier and more ironic than her younger self, is quite engaging. And the more recent Tim Hutton, with the swagger and confidence of the man that he is today, as contrasted with the boy we remember from Ordinary People (which, after all, was 30 years ago) is also good company. But though the script by the late Adrienne Shelley (Waitress) has quirks and twists, none of them make the film pleasant or funny.

Which leaves one to wonder whether Shelley directing her own work could have retrieved it from the brink.

Mystery or puzzle?

Mystery Street (1950) is a film noir set-up with a documentary procedural resolution. The film begins with the best noir credentials: low-key lighting, seedy settings, a woman who's no better than she should be, a hapless fall guy who's briefly fingered for a crime he didn't commit, and John Alton behind the camera to certify the film's noir cred. One image which appears early in the story is virtually iconic: a killer whose face is unseen begins to remove his female victim's body from the car in which he has shot her. Another car starts to come around the bend--we see its headlights start to sweep around. The killer picks up the woman's limp body and drapes it around himself as if they were in the throes of passion. Sex and death are always intertwined in film noir, but rarely so literally. In a moment, that body is hoisted over the killer's shoulders and the victim's lovely arms sway as he carries her off in a virtual pas de deux of death.

Then the film begins another strain which was popular with crime film of the postwar era, the Louis deRochement-location shot-documentary-style procedural. We are treated to Boston backgrounds (which are kind of fun to see 60 years later), a Harvard professor introducing us to the concept of a forensic lab and Ricardo Montalban as an eager-beaver cop, without any noir ambiguities, or even any backstory (except that he comes from a Portuguese neighborhood, hence his Mexican accent).

Even though this material echoes present-day television programming, some of it must have been startling to a 1950 audience, such as the unflinching display of partial skeletal material. And there is a terrifically chilling image as the technicians project an image of the skull they have found behind the pictures of possible victims for identification purposes. Then comes the moment (pictured at right) when the skull lines up perfectly with Jan Sterling's face and we have not only put a name to the victim, but seeing death in life quite literally.

Curiously, much of the plot turns around a man who is wrongly accused and the wife who wants to see him exonerated. But the film turns its back on him early on (and the wife, who is the nominal lead only enters the film after the halfway point and only has a few scenes and not any major emotional ones) in favor of the investigation. It is almost as if the film is saying, 'This is MGM. We're not going to roll around in miserly like those grubby little RKO and independent movies. We're going to show that the police are good and hard-working and well-meaning and will find the truth." As is usual, films that best serve their audience in their own time are the least likely to find a foothold in posterity.