The Reticent Camera

One of the pleasures to be found in Sofia Coppola's return to form, Somewhere (2010), might be called the resonances of the reticent camera. In bold contrast to the film-school boys, whose cameras track and swoop and fly all around the place, including through many places that don't exist, Coppola's camera seems to be not just nailed, but lag-bolted into the floor.

The great classical filmmakers, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, all favored a camera mounted on a tripod and set at roughly eye-level. Wilder openly disdained shots "through the fireplace." Hawks specifically sought to make the audience forget that the camera existed. And Ford always knew there was exactly one place to put the camera, creating an often painterly or theatrical composition. The New Wave and its American followers took the camera off the tripod and, to begin with, began running around with it, trying to catch the action as it walked, jogged and sometimes streaked past. People complained about the jittery, sometimes nauseating effect of handheld camera work, so we got the Steadicam and the Skycam and the Louma crane and more and more cheaper and faster ways to move cameras smoothly and effectively, often in the service of telling the story. There is no serious argument that the Steadicam shots in The West Wing convey the dynamism and perpetual workload of leadership of a major world power. It's not a frill -- it's part of the ethos.

The other side of the coin is that these toys are fun to play with. I've been on the set and I know. And I also know how setting them and lighting for them is an incredible time eater, often to produce effects that do not enhance story, setting or any other elements of the film that the audience cares about. So I welcome Sofia Coppola's static camera. Which is not there just for indolence, but to suggest an objectivity, a literal distance from the characters that is instructive, clear, ironic and sometimes downright funny. When you have a static frame, people and things can move in and out of it, instead of being the subject of the camera's relentless pursuit. Instead the camera lays back and says, in effect, "I'll wait for her. She's going to come back." And then she comes back, satisfying the expectation that's been set up and the audience and the camera are co-conspirators, knowing a little bit more about this person than she knows about herself.

So the opening of Somewhere gives us a sports car literally going nowhere, moving in and out of frame because it simply doesn't matter. Why follow the path of a car that has no destination, that will end where it starts? Why not just wait at the starting point and let it come back to you? We have not met the driver, who we will discover is the protagonist, but we already know he is literally aimless.

There is much criticism (mostly by young viewers) that nothing happens in Somewhere. This will be the case if you are the kind of person who has difficulty "reading" other people, their thoughts, moods and feelings, especially by looking at their faces. If you need "stuff" to happen, dramatic revelations, snappy dialogue, Somewhere is going to disappoint you. But if you are sensitive to the movements of the heart, you will recognize the signs of deepening levels of love and trust between father and daughter, especially since the daughter is played by Elle Fanning, who rates as MVP for young actresses in 2010-11.

Rabbit Hole (2010) also employs a somewhat reticent camera, not so much because it is waiting patiently, as in Somewhere, but because the foreground is packed with emotional action. Rabbit Hole demonstrates that the true provenance for the digital RED camera may be the actor-based film which rests on the interplay among faces, an interplay best captured within a single take. With the RED cameras, an operator can be put on each actor, and even another on a master shot. There is no "stock", so the cost of continuing to roll is marginal. Some directors don't even slate between takes, they just ask the actors to do it again without a pause. The result can be a single performance shared among several cameras, with the actors each reacting to exactly the performance you are seeing (as contrasted with having to react to an actor or even a tech sitting off-camera feeding the lines), and perfect, seamless cuts among them.

Digital cameras still do not have the range of high and low light that fine 35mm cameras have, but they are coming close. And they do not have to yield the grainy look they did ten years ago. Look at this warmly lit scene as husband Aaron Eckhart tries to soften the mood between himself and wife Nicole Kidman, both in mourning for a child lost in a random accident eight months earlier:



Note that, as casual and intimate as the scene is, the cameras are still on sticks, the relative sizes and juxtapositions of the characters perfectly conventional. No dollies, no odd angles, no jittery handheld work here, because the director has put the load on the actors and their words.

To this end, Nicole Kidman appears to be a perfect film actor, better to me than a Meryl Streep, who is always putting on a persona, which I can see her taking off at the end of the day. That is not to say that Kidman is a personality actor like Cary Grant, but a character actor without the eyepatch and the limp, like an Ingrid Bergman, who just shows up on screen as the character and nothing else. She is beautiful, but her beauty doesn't feel like a presentation, but simply a trait, like a cowlick or a birthmark (which perhaps it is). Interestingly, as one looks at this clip, Kidman's expressiveness is not centered around the small movements of the eye as is typical on film, but in body posture, tilt of the head, eyebrows, perhaps some widening of the eyelid, all tools of the stage actor.

Here is another example of digital's ability to capture the interplay of two (or more) simultaneous performances. The actors overlap and react easily and naturally. It also represents the film's wit as mother and daughter share the lighter side of losing a child:



The setups are conventional and locked down, leaving ample foreground space for the acting. Stage director John Cameron Mitchell cannily uses the old trick of keeping the actors' hands busy to deflect their attention and the audience's.

This scene does bring out a point I want to share with you. If you have heard of this film or the play, but haven't seen it, you probably think, like I did, that you are going to be pull down into a spiral of grief and conflict. I promise you this -- it won't. And if you go with it all the way to the end--and I can't imagine why you wouldn't--you will feel lightened, relieved, uplifted, especially if you are going through any kind of trial. I don't know a film that does the "life will go on and even get better" think better than this, and the reason points up an interesting contrast between stage and film.

(Incidentally, this film is a model of stage-to-screen adaptation, especially one done by the playwright. Offstage scenes are brought on stage, long static scenes are broken up into chunks, different characters move the scenes from different places, visual analogs for verbal ideas are often engaged, and a couple of brand new ideas introduced, most memorably the scene in which the husband botches the sale of the house by sharing too much. The economy and precision of what should have be been talky and indulgent is admirable.)

Both versions end with the same speech by the husband, but for a small cut which seemed redundant. (This frequently happens in the transition between stage and film -- it's possible to cut back the words both because a facial expression can substitute for the words and because we are sitting closer to the actors and we hear what they say better, which means they don't have to nail the point home the way they may need to on stage.) The husband makes a prediction of what they will do, the little gathering they will have for family and friends. The point of the speech is the ordinariness of the events he is forecasting. But on film, we can see it, we can see the warmth of the smiles and embraces, the children playing, the calico tablecloth, the food prepared and the food consumed. The beauty of plain ordinary life is there for us to see and we weep in recognition of how good those simple joys are if we will just think about what it might be like to become numb to them, as these parents did.

And the scene ends just as it did on stage, with the couple facing out and holding hands ready for the future, but now, on film, we see the yard and the tablecloth and the remains of the party. On stage, we projected our hope on them. On film, hope is made manifest.

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.

How girls do gross-out comedy

There is nothing much to say cinematically about Bridesmaids (2011), but it may mark an interesting moment in social-cultural history. Obviously, The Hangover is the template, and the looming and immovable date of a wedding provides a strong narrative "clock" that dozens of production executives, producers and screenwriters find irresistible. But whereas the male "get me to the church on time" movie focuses on the zany shenanigans of the men in question, the female version--as one would expect--focuses on the dynamics of the relationship among the women in the wedding party. Bridesmaids is no exception, and the principal plot constitutes a competition between an old friend (Kristen Wiig) and a new (rich) friend (Rose Byrne) for the affection and attention of the bride (Maya Rudolph).

Wiig and her co-writer Annie Mumalo smartly raise the stakes by having Wiig's life (and sanity) circle the drain throughout the movie. In the sequence in question, maid-of-honor Wiig has arranged for a lunch at a questionable looking Brazilian barbeque restaurant prior to a group fitting at a swanky boutique. Although the food is apparently delicious, extraordinary repercussions follow during the fitting as shown in the clip above. What follows is every variety of gastric distress experienced in some very expensive clothing.

From interviews with director Paul Feig and Ms. Mumalo I glean that this sequence was not the original one written for this place in the story. Ms. Wiig had her character getting lost in a long romantic fantasy, which, as described, seems difficult to picture on screen. Producer Judd Apatow insisted that Wiig's character needed to make a large mistake at this point and proposed the food poisoning scenario, although Mesdames Mumalo & Wiig, accepting the idea, wrote the actual sequence.

I'm pretty immune to poop-and-vomit humor, which delights two-year-olds of all ages. And Bridesmaids has the courage of its conviction. It doesn't turn its head (although I turned mine) at the sight of bodily fluids washing over its characters. The film certainly wanted to cash in on the transgressive nature of putting women in the kind of low comedy sequence previously reserved for the boys (not men). We're in the land of Comedy of Discomfort which via programs like The Office has become a dominant subgenre today.

For all the nausea and hysteria and some very funny ad-libs, especially those by Melissa McCarthy, the real power of the sequence comes from the humiliation and embarrassment of these now-well-established characters, rather than the pre-adolescent wonder at the strange things our bodies emit that one finds in the man-boy movies. The centerpiece is the truly perversely lovely image of Maya Rudolph in a gloriously white wedding gown, heading across a city street in search of a functioning bathroom, moving into a crouch as her lower intestine begins (we presume from her face) to betray her, gradually shifting into a Groucho crouch under that voluminous gown, until it is all too late, Nature has triumphed over civilization, and Rudolph collapses near the curb, the disaster having happened -- happily unseen, with Defeat writ large on her crumpled and disappointed face. The juxtaposition of the beautiful fantasy of the princess bride in her unstained whiteness concealing the truth of what exactly our bodies do with food is the kind of Bergsonian incongruity that makes for comedy that is bigger than gross-out jokes and gags, comedy that is real and human and universal and grand for all its pettiness.

Craziest damn movie.

Most of the time a new medium arrives, it does not utterly supplant a predecessor medium, but the roles and functions of the media often get rearranged. Since the arrival of the internet, television--including cable--has completely dispensed with distributing news and facts and has turned all of human existence into a tasteless zoo. When television arrived, radio stopped dealing with narrative, but took over music and breaking news completely, leaving records for collectors and newspapers for obsessives. Television also took over what remained of vaudeville and the variety stage, and those two forms have completely disappeared other than in the completely vestigial form of comedy sketch shows with music acts tossed in to fill time. (Incidentally, those music acts are not there to draw audiences -- music has a much smaller audience than the relatively small audience for hardcore comedy.)

But for awhile, radio proudly carried the banner of vaudeville and variety, albeit with some technological limitations. Although there was a concerted effort to make radio stars into film stars, the only ones who succeeded were Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Jack Benny, the #1 star in radio, had a film career that literally became a joke, at least on Benny's program, and his pretend rival-and-nemesis, Fred Allen, only made a handful of films. But in one case the resulting film did a good job of projecting the trademark Allen mixture of cynicism and insanity. Fred Allen was sort of the David Letterman of his era, a decent and sensible guy who could be made cranky when contemplating the news, celebrities and the machinations of the entertainment business. Best remembered as the man who said that television is called a medium because nothing in it is well done, he once had a character conducting a tour through 30 Rock say, "That man with the moss on him is an NBC vice-president."

It's In The Bag (1945) was made independently, is based on the same story as Mel Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and boasts one of the most insane cast lists of all time. New Yorker humorist Robert Benchley plays a exterminator, Jerry Colonna plays a psychiatrist, horror star John Carradine plays an evil lawyer in top hat, morning coat, striped pants and pince-nez, William Bendix plays a deadly gangster called Bill Bendix, Jack Benny plays himself and at one point the down-and-out Fred Allen joins a quartet of singing waiters comprised of Don Ameche, a fading film star of the 30s, Rudy Vallee, a fading radio star of the late 20s and Victor Moore a faded stage star whose career began at the dawn of the 20th century. This would be akin to a movie in which a washed-up Conan joins a rock band comprised of Steven Tyler, Englebert Humperdinck and Robert Wagner.

This is the kind of movie in which Fred and his wife (played by Binnie Barnes, whom people like me may remember from Abbott & Costello's The Time of their Lives) are told by Jerry Colonna that they need to kill some time, so they should go to a movie. They are told that there is immediate seating for the feature Zombie in the Attic (is this a Val Lewton RKO or a Universal horror picture -- I wonder?). There is in fact no seating, which they learn after taking an elevator to the top balcony which appears to be 16 stories about the screen and squabble and joke with a half-dozen managers about the price of movies and crowding in theaters. Finally, when Fred demand a seat, the manager reaches into his closet and hands Fred one of the five chairs he is looking for according to the scrap of an anecdote that serves as a plot, which you had forgotten about for the last ten minutes.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not any kind of a movie. It is a very funny thing, but it lacks most of the rudiments we expect from cinema, such as story, character, setting or connection to the known universe. It is a craziness like International House, Hellzapoppin' and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break. Given the technological and distribution facts of the day, the craziness had to be shot on film and shown in movie houses, but that doesn't make it a movie. But cinema or not, I wish they still made things like this today. (I can just hear the development executives saying, "but you have to make your hero sympathetic." Fooey.)

Here's the opening of It's In The Bag, startling for 1945, which trades on the old joke of the host telling the radio or TV audience, "We've got a great show for you tonight." We all know that's a lie. The thing is on every week, or sometimes every day. There's no way it could be "great" again tonight, and even if it were "great," how would the host know in advance? It's a crap shoot, let's accept it, and the odds are against. Personally, I never get tired of the "this show is crap" joke, as practiced today on NPR's Car Talk and on Craig Ferguson's show. This version has Fred Allen deconstructing the credit sequence in an extremely post-modern way:

Words words words

The late Woody Allen, the one who wrote and directed Take the Money and Run, Annie Hall and Bullets over Broadway once had as fine an ear for idiomatic American comic dialogue as any of this contemporaries from Sid Caesar University such as Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, etc., etc. Sadly, this enjoyable filmmaker died and someone calling himself Woody Allen is making all-star tax-shelter movies in Europe without scripts, style or indeed any idea for a movie.

Last year this imposter turned out something called You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010) which ostensibly poses the question: Can you predict the future? The answer is no. Any questions?

There is the usual Allen mix of scads of miscast stars (Antonio Banderas plays someone named Greg. Can you imagine Antonio being Greg? Or indeed any Spanish man named Greg?) an old man justifying his romance with an inappropriately younger woman, a failed artist or two, some pointless adulteries, a half-baked criminal act, the fear of discovery of which will drive much of the film, and as has been the case for the last 10 years, a foreign location to make his international investors happy, and because Manhattan is kind of sick of him tying up the streets for his snooze fests.

But his films are not bad for all the usual reasons that films are bad, such as there was no reason to make them or the filmmaker is inept. Neither is true here. Woody Allen has simply stopped writing scripts. He writes down ideas for scripts, with detailed notes of what the lines should be, but seems to have forgotten to write actual dialogue that could be spoken by actors who are trying to create the illusion of a character.

Starting about 10 years ago (that was the year of Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen's uncontested rock-bottom worst movie), instead of writing lines, his characters speak their unconscious intentions, what actors and directors call the subtext of a scene. "I have decided to leave you because you remind me of my lost youth and the impossibility of retrieving my lost youth." "Well, then, I have become an alcoholic due to your emotional abuse and neglect, and am sinking ever further into a morass of self-pity." "Don't blame your terrible decline on me; I am in search of that moving principle that once guided my entire existence." "I'll blame what I like you, because I am the embittered representative of a generation who was lost and lied to."

Mind you, this is not actual dialogue from an Allen film. There's no way I could remember such dreck, and nobody quotes this crap on line. You can't find a Woody Allen quote online any more recent than 1995, the year of Mighty Aphrodite, his last really good movie. But New York feels obligated to support Allen year after year, like making a contribution to the Planetarium. You don't go anymore, but you'd hate to see it gone.

It's not unusual for comedy writers to lose their touch, especially with dialogue. It happened to Billy Wilder and to Blake Edwards. My hypothesis is that once they become Hollywood celebrities, they don't encounter actual humans talking anymore. As William Goldman wrote, "In time they write plays about their agents." And in Woody Allen's case, he profoundly hates being around other human beings, which many might consider a disqualification for writing about them. It's not that he'll be mobbed as a celebrity -- if the portrait of him in Wild Man Blues is to be trusted*, this guy would rather lock himself in a closet with a TV so he can watch the Knicks than do anything, including write and direct movies.

And it shows. And believe, anyone who can still devote any brain cells to following the Knicks... he's done.

(Yes, I know he has a hit in the theaters currently, something about imagining he's in Paris with Hemingway. But from what I hear, it's as stilted as ever--he's just come up with a story that justifies the stiltedness.)
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* And why should it be? Allen seems to have agreed to participate in it just to reassure everyone that it's OK to marry your stepdaughter.

Crazy love, but not crazy enough

A couple of unrelated observations about crazy people in love.

It's Kind Of A Funny Story (2010) seems to be the official demarcation of Zach Galifianakis as a film object. It is not necessary to have a well-written role for him, or something that interesting or unique for him to do. (The height of eccentricity in this movie consists of patients wearing doctor's scrubs - Wow, is that Zany!) No, you simply hire Galifianakis to certify that your film is quirky and offbeat whether or not it actually is. It's a sad degradation of an artist who is dangerously close to leasing out what is valuable about himself to entities who don't appreciate it. Robert Benchley, one of the finest writers of light humor was an alcoholic who couldn't deal with his belief that he had drunk his talent away and spent the last 7 or 8 years of his too-short life appearing in Hollywood movies not worthy of his talent.

Where he is usually a strange and primordial presence in most films, here he gets heartfelt and sincere advice and has a balanced perspective on himself on his illness, confusing ZG with any old actor out of the casting files. I have to assume the man has tax problems.

What's worse, whether he means to or not, the mere presence of Galifianakis pulls the entire film off-balance and away from the sweet if flimsy teen romance that is meant to be the center of gravity. It's as if you cast Robert DeNiro is the kindly man next door. Not only is it a waste of resources, but everybody will be waiting for the moment when that guy next door goes OFF!

The real problem with this movie about crazy people is that it's not crazy. It does, however, have one of the best-ever uses of the "object of reconciliation." This is a hoary old storytelling device, though it usually works very well. There are lots of ways to get there, but in essence you need (a) a rift between two characters; and (b) an object loaded with significance for one of the characters, but not for the other. It is best if the object is obscure and difficult to obtain so that the character for whom the object has no meaning must go through many trials in order to obtain this talismanic thing and then present to the other at the most emotionally critical point. In IKOAFS, the object is Egyptian music which, upon being played during a party on the ward lures the hero's reclusive and depressed roommate from his room. I don't think I ever saw music used as the object and worked like a charm. Unless maybe it was a song from childhood. Rats, it's not unique as I thought. Still worked.



Elling (2001) on the other hand, does involve actually crazy people, much to its merit. It was the number one film ever produced in Norway, which is why me and all my friends rushed out to see it. (Not really.) Also, it won an Academy Award for best foreign language film.

I sought out this film because it is based on a novel which was also the basis of a spectacular Broadway flop in the 2009-10 season. (To be fair, the play was a hit in London, but in a different production). It tells the story of two men completely unequipped to adjust to life on their own being forced to adjust to life on their own. One seems to be somewhere between autistic and OCD and the other is just a plain old-fashioned foole.

And if Elling had been produced in the 1920s or 1930s, they would have just been a pair of fools. But today we give such characters a medical diagnosis and put them in realistic situations and realistically limited options for solving them. This has its rewards in grounding comedy in the plausible and the natural, but it has its drawbacks in closing off the realm of the fantastical, which was available to the great fools such as Laurel & Hardy, Jerry Lewis and Ed Wynn.

But this is not an American film, it is a Northern European film, a world of limited resources and constricted dreams, compared to the mythos of the great American landscape and dreams of freedom, success and escape which lives in every American psyche. So their adventures -- going on a car trip, having a relationship with a woman, maintaining an apartment -- are plausible and relatable, and the film is likable. But this viewer would have liked an over-the-moon adventure (as in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), a little romance, a little poetry.

The diagnosis for both films -- terminal niceness. Could use a dash of real madness.

Frames

Art is abstraction, and each medium has its own set of conventions by which it conducts that abstraction. Some are obvious. Poetry organizes speech into more or less formal patterns, and paradoxically, the most formal patterns are the most popular, i.e., we love verse in regular meter and verse, even if it makes little or no sense, as in the verse of Edward Lear or Dr. Seuss. Whereas many listeners have trouble identifying or appreciating language that more closely approximates natural speech, be it free verse or even very skillful blank verse. (It is my experience that most people cannot readily differentiate verse from prose in Shakespeare without the text in front of them.) Representational painting abstracts the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional object, and abstract painting takes it a step further. Novels and stories organize experience into (more or less) coherent narratives, often with an omniscient narrator. Theater condenses that experience into limited time and space. And music is pure abstraction, simply organizing regular vibrations in forms we recognize as consonant and dissonant, and which over time seem to represent a departure and return.

Students have a hard time recognizing film as packed with convention, especially since Classical film emphasizes concealing convention in the interest of engaging the audience in the narrative. Most people cannot "see" editing, even though it is extremely artificial. No one listens to a conversation by jumping back and forth, standing behind the shoulders of the speakers. It is impossible to see a person leaving a room, and, in a split second, see them entering the adjacent room. But as long as we cut on action, the cuts are "invisible." [I have an exercise by which I have students clap their hands on each cut. Try it in an ordinary over-the-shoulder dialogue sequence and you will be surprised--most of the time--at how frequently the cuts come.] Even the "mockumentary" form preserves most of the rules of classical editing in order to avoid extreme audience discomfort or disorientation.

These issues are brought front and center when film takes its material from another medium. In an adaptation from a novel, the screenwriter must decide how to preserve the authorial voice. (And in very stylish writers, this can be a serious problem.) One must also decide whether to carry over the book's point of view; typically, the film version of a novel with a consistent but passive narrator, a Nick Carraway, will simply take a standard omniscient point of view, and make Nick a pallid character in his own story. In Olden Times, producers of film versions of plays talked about "opening up the play," that is, varying the physical locations so as to provide variety and de-emphasize the stage origins. But as Hitchcock demonstrated on a number of occasions (most notably Rope and Dial M for Murder), often the art of the play was in the way it compressed events into a single time and place, and that compression provided the tension and suspense central to the piece. It would make no sense, for instance to "open up" a play about a hostage situation. (Apropos of absolutely nothing, I DARE somebody, absolutely DARE them to turn Dog Day Afternoon into a musical. It just might work.)

For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf was described by its author, Ntozake Shange, as a "choreopoem," developed in a series of dance workshops; the artistic conventions heaped on top of each other in big slabs. At its center, however, is a cycle of twenty poems, most of which are narrative and reflective; combined, they form a mosaic of a community in the playgoer's mind. Here is one of the best pieces, from a straightforward adaptation of the play for public television:



(The woman in Orange is Alfre Woodard.) The piece works on a central metaphor -- one's sense of self as a collection of things, "stuff" one has accumulated over a lifetime. The act of proclaiming the words, especially before an onscreen or onstage audience, makes the equation of "stuff" with self clear and manifest; thus the mere act of performance lends concreteness to the poetry. Already there is a fusion and mutual support between expressive media.

But we are only looking at the piece at the micro level. For Colored Girls "becomes" a play by virtue of its accumulation of apparently unrelated narratives. The through-line is thematic rather than narrative, more like a song cycle than a musical.

Tyler Perry's adaptation, For Colored Girls (2010) as a theatrical film intended for a general audience chooses to frame the poems in an over-arching narrative. (Whether this is because of the inherent quality of film itself or audience expectation, I leave to wiser analytic minds than my own.) Thus, the film takes on the quality of a musical, with the 14 remaining poems treated as musical numbers. As in a musical, the "trick" is to ease the transition from Perry's inelegant everyday speech to Shange's heightened language. (The very difficulty of that transition is why so many inferior composers such as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Frank Wildhorn try to erase the problem by filling their plays with music from beginning to end, flattening the entire experience into an undifferentiated musical stew.) This requires a general audience to accept poetry, poetry not fitted to the precise situation on screen, and poetry riddled with metaphor in the context of a real story in a real apartment in a real city. Interestingly, in scanning the critical reaction to the film, those transitions to not seem to have been real obstacles for most viewers; certainly there was not the level of complaint one usually sees about musicals ("Where's the orchestra?" ask the aesthetically illiterate. "Same place they are when you're watching Star Wars or Die Hard," I say.)

There is criticism about the storyline itself, the setting, one or two performances or the flatness of Perry's language, but few have balked at the movement from prose to poetry, and I would argue that that is an accomplishment for which Mr. Perry has received insufficient recognition. Hats off for his courage, commercially and aesthetically and the success met in the taking of this artistic risk. Unfortunately, there are few posted clips demonstrating this transition. I would particularly call your attention to a scene in which Phylicia Rashad as Gilda tends to her injured daughter, Tangie (Thandie Newton in some very surprising work) and makes Shange sound like Shakespeare, which makes sense, as Ms. Rashad has substantial Shakespeare experience.

Here's the best I can do, the second poem in the film (the first is expertly woven into the credit sequence) rendered by Loretta Devine. The poem begins with the words, "Without any assistance or guidance from you..."



It's a "number" isn't it? Like a musical.

The other aspect of Perry's adaptation is casting -- an often-overlooked aspect of the process. Devine, Newton, Rashad, Anika Noni Rose and Perry stalwart Kimberly Elise are first-rate. Especially surprising is Macy Gray's solo turn as a philosophical abortionist. Janet Jackson tries valiantly and Whoopi Goldberg seems to be so tuned in to her character's craziness that she appears to be playing the role with aluminum foil tucked into her headgear. But to the extent this film works, a large measure is owing to the skill of his best actors.

Acting is at the heart of Jack Goes Boating (2010) directed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman from a very slight play from a screenplay by the playwright (Robert Glaudini) which barely acknowledges there is any issue at all in adaption. Heightened language is NOT a problem for this piece. The play is evidently jammed into one of those apartments in which the living room, dining room and kitchen are a single unarticulated space, which is handy for theater, but claustrophobic on film. The purpose of this compression seems to have been to precipitate the explosion between the second couple in the story who are played, in a bit of generosity by director Phillip Seymour Hoffman, by the actors who originated the roles on stage, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega. The problem is that the whole scene is far overheated in comparison with the rest of this rather quiet film.

The romance-between-lonely-losers has been enshrined since at least 1955's Marty and not many have improved on that model. And although Hoffman seems to have been intent on transferring the play in as close to its original form, it is at its best when it makes its greatest departures, most notably the casting the Amy Ryan (of Win Win), who has become the go-to gal of independent film this season. In this very awkward set-up first date, the talk seems to have gone to death almost immediately. (Sorry about the ad here.)



And here Hoffman collaborates with both Ryan and some snow to make movie magic.



But the best movie-movie scenes arise from Jack's swimming lessons. He has promised Connie he will take her boating when the warm weather comes, and imagery flows from that. He imagines Central Park Lake awash in happy boaters. And he imagines himself not swimming, but floating, like a chubby angel in a wet firmament. Most interesting and puzzling is a moment when Jack, waiting for his friend to arrive for the listen, sees an old legless man lowered into the pool. Clearly, this was not a moment in the play. It is curious, undiscussed and unexplained. Is Jack a man without legs, who cannot move without help from others? Is the water there to liberate him and make him independent? Who knows. But that picture made better poetry than all of Mr. Glaudini's rather flat and routine words.

Humor Risk

Wild Target (2010) is rather a standard issue British black comedy, an aesthetic which posits death as the ultimate cosmic joke. Based on a film by French people, who first discovered black comedy and then wrote long boring essays about it quoting Hegel, who, you should know, is not funny at all. But then humor is not funny to the French, or else they would not admire Jerry Lewis, who makes movies that look as if they might be funny, or are planning to be funny in the near future, but somehow never quite get there.

Anyway, Wild Target is rife with stray bullets and inconvenient dead bodies and is funny like a mousse is tasty. Really enjoyable right now, but it just doesn't stay with you. Everybody involved does a good job until some git insists that the story have "an emotional through-line" which is an idea usually confined to Hollywood development executives. So we are meant to care about the heartaches of a middle-aged hitman, and only the fact that the role is played by the estimable Bill Nighy makes it tolerable.

But the worst failure is the failure of nerve over the central joke - we all die - and the compounding joke that our death doesn't matter to anyone, other than a very small core of family and friend. Our death will do nothing to stem the vast tides of life washing over everybody, and our greatest responsibility upon dying is to get the hell out of the way. But those who die in Wild Target are either unknown or of no consequence, which completely vitiates the power of the joke. So all the film earns is a few quick gasps of surprise at the outset, and then it settles into an everyday screwball romantic comedy, surrendering any claims it had to being audacious or unique.

Moreover, the film asks us to accept that being a hired political assassin can be a long-term occupation, handed down from one generation to the next and permitting a quiet upper middle-class existence, which might be intended to increase our identification with the central character, whereas the sheer unreality of the idea has the opposite effect.

Four Lions (2010), on the other hand, dares all and reaps the reward of that risk. Although the principal characters are ethnic Arabs raised and living in London (and don't all Americans love seeing brown and black people with those cute London accents?) they are people with jobs and families and in one case, hopes for his children. They seem to have drifted into jihad in order to find greater purpose in their lives and, most importantly, to form fraternal bonds that root their lives. That is, the film is coated with a surface of political satire, but at its heart it is, as its director describes it "The Hangover with bombs."

Some of the humor follows traditional British verbal satirical tropes, as in the character of Barry, a non-Arab former reactionary who has (mis) read the Koran, converted himself, become radicalized in much the manner of Life of Brian's People's Front of Palestine. Here's Barry making a video:



But, as it must in a comedy about terrorism (those are odd words to type), the joke has to go past words. Here's our first inkling of things to come:



The would-be bomber, Faisal, undergoes some cosmic justice for this insult to the animal kingdom. In fact, this very joke keeps spiraling up and up, finally past the point of humor, which is, ultimately why Four Lions might be called transcendent. It is not afraid of how big a joke it's making, and sees it to its logical conclusion; although not in a joking way. After all, these men do have real lives, real families and real grievances, though they be clueless as to how to address those grievances, both politically and practically. The mock-doc style -- improvisation-type acting (although reportedly there was little real improv on the set), jittery camera work, sharp editing all bolster the film's roots in reality.

Personally, it's a mode I think comedy should always aspire to -- you laugh and laugh and laugh until you are made uneasy about what you've been laughing at. Because laughter is distance, and by implication, cruelty and condescension.

Which is a natural attitude to adopt toward K. Roth Binew, the central character of The Living Wake (2007). This may be the most deliberately eccentric movie of the first decade of the century -- it certainly seems to be aiming for that distinction.* And in pursuit of that goal, the risks it takes are tremendous, the results mixed, but not without some successes.

Binew is a self-proclaimed artist who is about to die of a deliberately vague fairy-tale movie disease and spends his remaining time settling scores and preparing his own send-off. His concept of creativity is to hand-create a terrible morbid story "for children" and then insert the book onto the shelves of the local library, where he delivers the story itself in person:



The film takes place in some odd made-up New Englandy world in which no one lives but the characters in the story (a hallmark of ultra low-budget filmmaking). But whether or not it was an economic necessity, the strange Mr. Binew is deprived of any sort of context. Yes, he is part of a small circle of lunatics, including a bitterly hated rival (played by the immortal Eddie Peppitone) who rides by flinging slices of ham steak to demonstrate his contempt for Binew. The isolation is unnerving. (There is a scene with a psychic that looks as though the shots had been grabbed when the crew discovered an abandoned shack.)

The result is reminiscent of those well-intentioned low-budget film versions of plays such as Godspell or works of the American Film Theater in which film adaptation consists solely of taking the sparsely populated closed universe of the play and putting it against a grand landscape, which only amplifies the artificiality, rather than vitiating it. And if the characters are whimsical or eccentric, then there is almost nothing the film medium can do to lend plausibility or identification to such a narrative. The Living Wake treads the line between a determined piece of outsider humor and a "hey-let's-get-our-crazy-friends-together-and-make-a-movie" ethos.

Here's an example of the home movie sort of whimsey that the film not only lapses into, but is virtually built on:



Yes it's funny, but it's theatrical, and sketch-oriented, rather than being a sustainable arc of character-based satire. The Living Wake is funny, but perhaps it should not be watched in a single sitting. Broken up into 10 or 15 minute chunks, this might be one of the funniest films of its decade.

Like it or not, you can't deny it's brave, and for that it deserves more praise than the cautious faux-noir humor of a Wild Target.
__________
* The film is available on both Hulu and Netflix streaming, so you can easily test my assertions against your own assessment.

April is National Poetry Month...

...so celebrate by seeing Howl (2010) -- but NOT IN YOUR CLASSROOM. The movie, like the poem is most definitely NSFS or W, but it is the best film I've ever seen to enter into a poem and inhabit it. Frankly, I can't think of another that even tries.

This clip, which is from YouTube, and therefore IS safe for work (though probably blocked at school), is nicely representative of the film. It begins with James Franco as Ginsberg talking first about himself, and then about his creative process, admitting that the sense and meaning of a given verse is not readily apparent even to him at first, that the meanings and patterns emerge as the poem develops, or after it is finished, or maybe not even after that. Those are clearly for the audience, not for the artist, who, at his best, is in direct contact with his subconscious.

Then the clip moves to one of the wonderful animated segments which form a contrapuntal interpretation of the poem. As you see, they do not directly illustrate the words, but run in parallel with them, and frequently illuminate them. For me, the animation lends a cohesion that is difficult to find in the poem at first hearing. Some might argue that they are limiting, but it is not necessary to watch this animation to enjoy the poem "Howl." You can walk always walk away from the film and pick up a book and read the poem. Meanwhile this film is out there to entice skittish filmgoers into the strange and familiar universe of "Howl."



For the sake of the general audience, the film takes the form of a courtroom drama, based on a criminal charge of obscenity lodged against the poem. the filmmakers have promised that all the dialogue in the film is documented. In the court, they are taken from transcripts; otherwise they are taken from letters, memoirs and interviews. The conservative Republican judge evidently had no real difficulty in dismissing the charges, especially since the prosecutor seemed to want to turn the proceedings into a hearing on the literary merits of the poem, i.e., it should be banned because it is dirty AND bad.

But the movie is not meant to be biographical or even purely documentary in nature. Its principal thrust seems to be to convey the energy and excitement of "Howl" as a work. It is a bit like those symphonies that are based on a novel, or a painting of a mThe yth, or a song about a painting. It is art celebrating art, but that does not make it derivative, except in the most literal since. The film Howl might not be as original as its source poem, but it is an independent, original piece of art, and for me anyway, got me engaged about modern free verse poetry all over again.

It reminded me somewhat of Seraphine (2009), another story of an artist, this one a naive, outsider artist in France in the early 20th century, whose visions seemed to arrive directly from another planet without the artist's intercession.

The artist was an uneducated scrubwoman who, without any apparent outside stimulus or encouragement, began scrounging natural materials to make paint from and flat surfaces to paint on, to record the complex and baroque visions she had based on visual motifs taken from the natural world. She painted plants and flowers yes, but plants and flowers with an Escher-like paradoxically unnatural naturalness never seen in the real world. She ascribed the visions to the guiding hand of her guardian angel. She was discovered by a painter-collector-dealer, had a brief vogue, yet continued working and developing regardless of the size or prestige of her audience. She was as happy painting for her friends and neighbors as for the international art cognescenti.

In this clip, Seraphine reveals some of her larger, more complex canvases to trusted friends. At this point the film starts to climb inside her work, as though despairing of ever getting insider her head. (Please forgive the ad up front, the clip is worth it. And do yourself a favor and expand the video to the full screen.)



This film is far more of a character portrait than Howl, which is perverse, given that Seraphine is far less articulate and far more unfathomable than Allen Ginsberg. But like Howl, the net result of the film is a view of the world as if from inside the art. It's worth the trip.

The Year of Melissa Leo?

Nobody was very surprised when Melissa Leo won the Academy Award earlier this year for playing a maternal shrew in The Fighter. But would you be surprised to learn that she turned in two completely different performances in other features released in 2010?

In Welcome to the Rileys (2010), Leo plays Lois, a timid housewife who has become frightened and agoraphobic over guilt surrounding her teenage daughter's death. Over the course of the film, Lois who slowly overcomes her fears and returns to the world of the living. Not only this woman nothing like the harridan in The Fighter, but Leo delivers a master class in physical acting. In the clip I wish I could show you, Lois has arrived in New Orleans where her husband Doug (James Gandolfini) appears to have shacked up with a 17-year-old stripper, Mallory (Kristen Stewart). What she doesn't know yet is that Doug has taken it on himself to parent this lost child, not sleep with her. They quarrel in the street and Doug hands her the car keys and tells her to go back to their home in Indiana in which she had trapped herself.

There follows a wordless 60 seconds or so in which the camera steps back, almost across the street to observe Lois preparing herself to meet this urchin, wringing her wrist, touching at her collar, fiddling with her purse, but what you see is not a grab-bag of actor fidgeting, but a woman making a decision and making up her mind to carry it out. Everyone studying acting or directing needs to see it.

Couldn't find that clip, but here is a good scene of bonding between Lois and Mallory, as you can see Melissa Leo listening to and participating in this conversation, while another tape, a tape of a happy life she lost, is playing in her head. It's called subtext, kids, and nobody makes it palpable better than Ms. Leo. In any case, it's a world away from the ferocious virago of The Fighter.

Her role in Conviction (2010) is smaller, but the Charlie Chan rule applies, whereby an important actor is never in an insignificant role, even if they only appear briefly early in the film. (The Charlie Chan rule stipulates that the best known character actor is always the murderer, no matter the clues. Its corollary is that important actors have important functions in the film. Often it means that they will be back later in the film, when their true significance is revealed.) In this scene, Leo makes the initial arrest of Sam Rockwell's character. You can see this is nothing like Lois, and even with an East Massachusetts accent, this is an entirely different person from the one she plays in The Fighter. (In fact, the accent itself is different from the one used in The Fighter.)



Turns out the character has her own demons and secrets, despite being a minor part of the story, and that's why you need a Melissa Leo in a role with only four or five short scenes.

That's three utterly different characters with three different affects all released in a single calendar year. And none of them resemble her work in Frozen River or her neurotic and driven detective in the late lamented and completely wonderful television series Homicide.

(As for the rest of Conviction, it is a perfectly straightforward television-film-based-on-a-true-story. It is directed by actor Tony Goldwyn, so it is almost entirely actor oriented, and anyone who has attended law school and most people who follow appellate cases in the news will be unsurprised by any of the plot developments. The best description of such a film is "worthy.")

The problem with "secret weapon" actors like Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson, Frances McDormand and J.K. Simmons is that they stop being secret. Some become less effective -- it is arguable that James Gandolfini will never shake Tony Soprano. But many of them go merrily along, either assisting or stealing films outright. And some, such as Kevin Spacey, William H Macy, Steve Buscemi, Tony Shalhoub and Tilda Swinton become stars in their own strange galaxy, occasionally visiting the Land of Regular People, and then returning to where the rest of us live. Hooray.

Just Cause or "jus' cuz"

2010 saw two new entries in what I might call the "pre-gunpowder conflict" genre. Centurion (2010) is one of those all-CGI-all-the-time epics that allows one to gouge and maim characters with mad abandon and without angering the actors' unions. The real problem is that if you like this sort of thing, you can get it right in the comfort of your own home torture chamber and abbatoir, courtesy of the Spartacus series on Starz (also on DVD and Netflix streaming).

But aside from its lack of uniqueness (coupled with lack of originality or quality performance, either in technical or non-technical categories), the truly fatal aspect of Centurion is that it tries to make Roman centurions into heroes.

William Goldman says nobody knows anything and there may not be any rules in art, but still I say: UNWANTED INVADERS ARE NEVER THE HEROES. Not even if all their friends are killed, not even if they're helpless and unarmed and turned into quarry for an implacable killing machine, who is part of the native troops. Natives = good; invaders = bad. Maybe this wasn't true back in the 1930s and 1940s when we thought the British Empire was cool, but those days are long gone. I don't care if the invaders are played by the offspring of George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- Invaders Are Bad. So when the Picts pronounce a death sentence on the Romans, we don't say, "Oh goodness, how will those poor Romans get out of there?" We say, "Good, die you miserable arrogant Romans." And don't forget, Romans were played by snooty English actors all through the 50s and 60s while Americans played the denizens of Palestine or whatever the local area was, so we were conditioned -- Romans are cruel, greedy and jerks. And when they're invading -- Hey, remember when the British tried to invade in 1775-6? Remember how much we liked that? And nowadays Brits don't even like Brits.

Centurion was doomed before the first camera turned. A terrible idea terribly executed.

Robin Hood (2010) was dead on arrival, but for slightly different reasons. It's not a bad movie, but it's Not A Robin Hood Movie. What's a Robin Hood movie? Oh, you know -- trickery, derring-do, thumbing the nose and cocking a snoot at entrenched power. Robin Hood is the proto-American Tax Rebel. He is clever, he is crafty. He tricks the Sheriff and his foolish henchmen, woos the Maid Marian, uses disguises, subterfuges and generally outwits power. What's more, he uses what he gets to help people who really need it -- honest, hard-working folk who have been sucked dry by the powers that be and need a little leg-up to keep their heads above water. What red-blooded Murkin doesn't love that story? I think this is an area where most of us can agree -- the guy who Sticks It To The Man and Does Justice is Awesome.

But somebody let a bunch of Brits and Ozzies make a Robin Hood movie and They Don't Get It. This is particularly appalling in the case of the Ozzie in Question, as he is Mr. Rebel, the Gladiator Who Will Not Take Crap From Anybody, Russell Crowe. I assume he did this picture because he owed somebody money. Maybe it was a tax problem. (That would be appropriate. But NOT ironic, OK?)

Because 3/4s of this movie is an attempt at an origin story, and an establishment-oriented one at that. First, our hero is an archer for the king, then things go wrong, he assumes the identity of some nobleman, pretends to be married to Cate Blanchett and all the time everyone is running around with big crossbows and swords and maces and nobody is hiding in a tree, ambushing a nobleman, pulling off some big switcheroo. It's all big battle scenes and something about some traitor who's working for France, so the big climactic battle is all about defending England against France, and like I say, where are the people rebelling against the nobility? That's Robin Hood!

Look, you make all the medieval strategy and battle movies you want, but DON'T CALL THEM "ROBIN HOOD." Honestly, I find it impossible to critique this movie -- it's the usual Ridley Scott, the CGI has gotten a lot better since Gladiator and if you like movies where guys wear armor, have greasy beards and say "Aye" a lot, this is the picture for you.

But me, I'm sticking with Douglas Fairbanks and Erroll Flynn. Heck, they know how to have fun, which Russell Crowe NEVER does.

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.