DVD: Darjeeling Limited

The Anderson train runs out of steam.

In Wes Anderson’s recent The Darjeeling Limited and its short film prologue Hotel Chevalier, the once promising director delivers what’s easily his most disappointing work to date. 

The story centers on three brothers – Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrian Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) – who have not spoken in over a year since their father’s funeral.  When Francis proposes a train voyage across India, Peter and Jack seize the opportunity to run away from their problems: Jack is reeling from a disastrous breakup with his girlfriend (Natalie Portman), while Peter struggles with deep anxiety about impending fatherhood. Little do they realize that Francis is pushing them towards a meeting with their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston), who is herself trying to escape a previous life. The brothers’ journey is fraught with silliness and tragedy, but the film never manages to get over itself enough to come together. 

Co-written by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, both film and short film feature the director’s set of trademarks: a kitschy production design, quirky characters, and a precocious 60′s pop soundtrack. The story also includes the by-now-unsurprising coterie of Anderson veterans, including Bill Murray as (presumably) the brothers’ late father.  So if audiences liked Anderson’s previous works, they should enjoy this too, right?  If only. 

Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums succeeded because of the emotional attachment that the films’ characters earned from the audience.  In Hotel Chevalier and The Darjeeling Limited, Anderson seems preoccupied with perfecting his signature style and less concerned with making the interpersonal relationships resonate.  Of course, Anderson may have intended to forego extensive character development in order to portray the intimate family conflicts as subtly as possible; unfortunately any subtlety is devoured by patronizing symbolism and rigidly stylized costume and set designs. 

Perhaps equally frustrating is Anderson’s unwillingness to resolve or even explore dangling plot threads, which in turn are complicated by the almost complete absence of a climax.  While most directors entrust plot resolution to the viewer’s individual interpretation, even the most experimental filmmakers seldom cloak their works in funny animals and annoyingly cheerful folk music.  And with this film, that evasion of stance is getting annoying. It’s as though Anderson is terrified of getting caught saying Something, and it’s hard to take an insistently whimsical filmmaker seriously.

In a film obsessed with style over substance, the actors themselves ultimately become moving set pieces.  Wilson delivers the most engaging performance, his overbearing enthusiasm hiding deep despair. Sure, it’s remarkably similar to Dignan (his charming dolt from Bottle Rocket), but I for one am glad to see the actor return to form after playing a string of one-dimensional buffoons such as in Drillbit Taylor. Brody and Schwartzman are so deadpan that they’re both unmoving and unmemorable. Portman shows up, gets gratuitously naked and disappears, while Huston basically copies Wilson’s performance (only more quietly). 

If I seem overly harsh, it’s because the enduring quality of Anderson’s first three films demand that the director be held to a high standard.  Even the bloated and disjointed The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou managed to gel, ulimtatley, into a sublime climax.  Ironically, Anderson’s better works all feature one constant that The Life Aquatic and Hotel Chevalier/The Darjeeling Limited lack: Owen Wilson as co-writer.  Given that Drillbit Taylor recently tanked, it’s becoming obvious at this point in their careers just how much Wilson and Anderson need each other.

 - Steve Kabel

The End Of the World Again and Again

 Six Under-sung Science Fiction Films of the 1970s

  

 The future was a lot closer in the 1970s than it seems here in the 21^st Century. Social problems such as overpopulation, environmental cataclysm and nuclear proliferation (lucky that those things are fixed now!) left plenty of Americans jumpy, including and maybe epecially the younger demographics that are always science fiction’s core audience.

Until and even after Star Wars in 1977, sci-fi cinema regularly confronted the social issues of the era, often depicting dystopian – which is fancy scholar talk for “gone straight to hell” – societies where the worst case scenario had already come to pass. (If you’re skeptical that we’re living in a dark time ourselves, consider that the term “worst case scenario” no longer bears elaboration.)

The following half-dozen films lack the lasting notoriety that other films such as Soylent Green and Logan’s Run have enjoyed in the intervening three decades, but they’re still fascinating viewing for any number of reasons – not least of which as a bit of armchair anthropology, looking at the future through the bittersweet prism of the past.

1. Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) A supercomputer that looks charmingly primitive by modern standards is charged with managing NATO’s nuclear arsenals. Except it becomes sentient and starts communicating with its Soviet counterpart. After repeated attempts by foolish humans to disarm the two computers fail, Colossus names himself ruler of the planet and promises to cure society’s ills. “In time,” he tells the nations of the world, “You will come to regard me not only with respect and awe, but with love.” Crazy, totalitarian robot overlord love.

Crazy Poster? Yes. We suspect it inspired half a dozen Rush album covers. Remake? Ron Howard reportedly had plans for one sometime back, but obviously that hasn’t happened yet.

2. The Andromeda Strain (1971): A military satellite returns to Earth carrying an extraterrestrial pathogen that can kill  in seconds. A team of military scientists works in an awesome underground base to contain and cure the disease. The pathogen is eventually neutralized using saltwater from the Pacific Ocean. The film was adapted from a novel by Michael Crichton, the same stickler for scientific authenticity that wrote Jurassic Park.

Crazy poster? Depends on how you feel about hexagons. Remake? A 2008 TV miniseries starred Andrew Braugher, Benjamin Bratt, and Eric McCormack.

3. Z.P.G. (1972):  The title is short for “zero population growth,” a common term in the decade’s discussion about overpopulation. In a future where all births are banned for twenty years, a married couple has a child and must face the wrath of an authoritarian regime. Like 2006′s Children of Men, the film depicts the possibility of a childless society without really exploring its ramifications, and the preponderance of gas masks and home abortion machines is straight-up creepy. Overall, it’s overshadowed by the flashier Logan’s Run (1976), which made the aftermath of overpopulation look like a sexy Epcot Center.

Crazy Poster? Your eyes might throb just looking at it. Remake? Nothing about one on IMDB yet.

4. Silent Running (1972): Centuries from now, the last of Earth’s forests are kept aboard space arks circling the planet Saturn. When botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is ordered to jettison his ship’s cargo and return home, he kills his crew mates and pilots the ship into deep space instead. Confronted with a lifetime of isolation, he destroys himself after saving the last remaining forest. The special effects by legendary SFX master and director Douglas Trumbull still command respect among sci-fi audiences.

Crazy Poster? Not crazy so much as simultaneously literal yet hyperbolic. Remake? With eco-consciousness at all time highs, it’s only a matter of time.

5. Westworld (1973): In the near future, wealthy citizens spend $1,000 a day to fight and have sex with lifelike androids in a vast amusement park. Eventually, the robots turn on their human masters and all Hell breaks loose. Though the film accurately predicted that 21^st Century theme parks would cost a grand a day, it’s hard not to like Yul Brynner as a killer robot gunslinger.

Crazy Poster? Even the robot is sort of in character face, despite having only half a face. Remake? Seems inevitable as a project for Jason Statham or Karl Urban.

6. Damnation Alley (1977): The A-Team’s George Peppard and Airwolf’s Jan Michael Vincent drive a heavily armored SUV across a post-World War III America that includes psychedelic skies and giant scorpions. No shit. A huge budget nevertheless produced B-grade special effects, and postproduction delays forced 20^th Century Fox to instead release another science fiction film it had little confidence in – Star Wars.

Crazy Poster? Only because the large-print copy above the image seems more like a threat than a promise. Remake? Not yet, but Clint Eastwood and Brad Pitt in the lead roles sounds like a license to print money.

In case anyone’s wondering: Zardoz could easily bear inclusion on this list, but it’s so perversely majestic in its own bizarre way that it deserves its own post. Thanks for reading.

-Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Bonnie And Clyde

A modern classic returns for a contemporary audience.

The movie that prefigured the 1970s renaissance in American cinema gets a new DVD treatment this week, a little late for its fortieth anniversary but welcome nonetheless. Bonnie and Clyde was originally hated by its studio, shunned by critics, yet celebrated by a public ready for something to articulate the 1960′s percolating frustration with authority. But its genius has been hijacked ever since, by decades of filmmakers who either missed the point of its violence and pathos or oversimplified them past the point of meaning. Maybe this new restoration can help correct that.

Directed by Arthur Penn (The Missouri Breaks), the story loosely adapts the true-life adventures of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, two East Texas lovers that robbed banks and became media celebrities during the early years of the Great Depression. Their willingness to draw attention to themselves (“We’re the Barrow gang,” Clyde famously remarks to commence a robbery) and their growing public esteem attract increasing acrimony from law enforcement officials, including an errant Texas Ranger they allow to survive with disastrous consequences.

As a narrative, the film is for better or worse a product of its liberated time. Arranged as a loose assembly of set pieces, its episodic structure works except that several key scenes end before the viewer may be done with them. Penn came to movies after a career directing television, and perhaps as a result several indoor moments have a cramped staginess that begs for space; even an important encounter outside a gas station carries the stuffy confines of a studio. The scenes set outdoors, including a melancholy reunion between Parker and her mother, are lovely but vastly unlike each other, so that their very look contributes to an overall disjointed texture.

Fortunately the performances outgrow their surroundings. Warren Beatty depicts Barrow as a hoodlum with a street preacher’s twinkle in his eye. Faye Dunaway smolders but allows the waitress-turned-criminal Parker gleams of childlike but also womanly tenderness that buoy the storyline’s softer moments. In fact the entire cast demonstrates astonishing range, and it’s also exciting to see costars Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder in two of their earliest performances. Each actor’s very screen identity forms as the film unfolds, as if the movie plots the ensuing courses of their careers.

Penn and producer Beatty were wise in emphasizing the outlaws’ moral distinction between “the laws” and “just folks, like us.” Writers David Newman and Robert Benton (with help from Chinatown scribe Robert Townsend) position the Barrow gang as compassionate anarchists, quick to kill police but just as willing to let a black sharecropper shoot up a foreclosure sign. By connecting their protagonists to the rogue heroes of Warner Brothers’ gangster films from the 1930s and 40s, the writers reintroduced much of what made America love movies during the Depression to a generation coming to share that earlier time’s frustration with inhuman and inhumane institutions. Ironically, Warner Brothers released the film only after Jack Warner initially balked at an early version, presumably because of the graphic violence and startlingly sexual subtexts.

And Bonnie and Clyde unreservedly embodies that rebellious spirit. Police are conniving if not outright treacherous, and possessed of a hivelike mentality. Merchants are cowardly and bankers are reckless or incompetent. Even fathers are abusive and devious. By comparison, sharecroppers and other struggling folk are generous and tolerant. It’s electric to watch, yet sometimes reductive: the uncompromising division between those with authority and the powerless is shown with a simplicity that modern audiences might find facile.

But that same dichotomy affords Barrow, Parker, and their cohorts outsider status while making their tragic glory manageable. Penn masterfully strikes a sense of foreboding again and again, often in haunting grace notes: a young boy falling down a hill to rest limp at Parker’s feet; the benediction of a poor farmer allowed to keep his money. Ultimately the characters rise above their fates through a resigned nerve more redemptive than criminal impulse, finding a bitter humanism in their encroaching fate.

 A pivotal early scene displays the gang’s spirit: “We’re gonna have ourselves a time, boy!” exclaims Barrow’s brother Buck (Hackman), awkwardly trying to prolong a reunion’s good cheer. Moments later, Barrow explains how he mutilated himself to escape a prison work detail but was paroled a week later. “Ain’t life grand?” he remarks with weary nonchalance, as the two go out to confront bleak futures.

- Michael Kabel

DVD Special Features: The newly remastered and remixed version is available in a two-disc Special Edition that also includes additional scenes, several documentaries, and theatrical trailers. The Ultimate Collector’s Edition includes the same features as the Special Edition as well as a reproduction of the 1967 pressbook and a hardcover book of photos.

Review: Drillbit Taylor

Audiences deserve more for their money.

In the new comedy Drillbit Taylor, Owen Wilson plays an affable loser who manages to help redeem the lives of three troubled adolescent boys through an earnestness that’s as glowing and perfect as his exquisite suntan. The character is no new territory for Wilson, to be sure. The film also represents some familiar stomping grounds for producer and current comedy kingpin Judd Apatow, as well as frequent Adam Sandler director Steven Brill. It’s fine that no new ground gets broken, but the execution of the by-the-numbers plot shouldn’t feel so stale. 

The sitcom-ready premise follows three high school freshmen more or less interchangeable with the loveable horndogs from Superbad.  Terrorized by the school bully and his beta male, the kids hire alleged bodyguard-to-the-stars Taylor to protect them. A homeless Army deserter content to hang out at the beach, Drillbit initially sees the kids as a cash cow and milks his new job for every cent he can get. But in between inappropriate jokes about gonorrhea, multiple shots of Wilson’s bare ass and a freestyle rap-off , he becomes a surrogate father to the boys while romancing exactly the kind of hot yet inexplicably single teacher (Leslie “Mrs. Apatow” Mann) only found in movies. 

Of course, Drillbit is eventually exposed as a fraud and must overcome all odds to regain lost trust while the boys find self-esteem by standing up to their tormentors. Everything else falls into place, too: The Michael Cera-esque character wins the heart of the girl he’s smitten with, the Jonah Hill and McLovin clones realize that they’re friends after all, Drillbit gets the girl, blah blah blah. You’ve seen it before, and you’ve seen it done better.

Predictably, summer camp humor, pratfalls and sight gags supply much of the comedy. While admittedly there are some funny moments, the bulk of the gags fall flat and fall hard. The always delightful Leslie Mann and Stephen Root as the school principal are both underused. Cameos by David Koechner (how strange would it feel if he actually failed to show up in a modern comedy?) and Adam Baldwin are wasted.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wilson distinguished himself by skillfully inhabiting alternately bleak yet endearing outsiders in minor masterpieces like Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums. Yet his recent lazy willingness to reiterate the Butterscotch Stallion persona again and again (Wedding Crashers, You, Me and Dupree) only solidifies his position as a paycheck movie star as disingenuous as his pal Ben Stiller. And to be fair, perhaps he realizes as much: it’s tempting to wonder if his perpetually bloodshot eyes are an actual character choice or evidence of his recent emotional troubles. 

All of this won’t matter if you heed the film’s tagline and remember that you get what you pay for. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, and at the Saturday matinee I attended most of the audience seemed at least entertained. If nothing else, the film respects its audience enough to avoid the kind of bullshit conclusions so prevalent in modern comedies (for example Brill’s Sandler vehicle Mr. Deeds). The refreshing absence of a gratuitous Will Ferrell cameo is also welcome. But with a story partially credited to 80′s film legend John Hughes, a screenplay co-written by Superbad collaborator Seth Rogen, and starring the potentially brilliant Wilson, moviegoers deserve better. Perhaps another more inspired teaming of Apatow and the red-hot-right-now Rogen can salvage Wilson from his steep, troubled path to mediocrity.

- Steve Kabel

Review: Awake

Great Cast Can’t Rouse First-time Director’s Shaky Script

First-time writer/director Joby Harold’s potboiler Awake boasts an impressive cast and a viscerally frightening concept, but it’s handicapped by a truncated runtime and wavering focus. It sits drowsily between cerebral suspense and disposable youth-oriented horror. The end result is a film ready-made for those vats of DVD’s you see at Wal-Mart.

Hayden Christensen stars as Clay Beresford, the wunderkind chairman of his late father’s business empire. Having suffered a heart attack at 22 and possessing a rare blood type, Clay waits for a donor heart so his doctor/best friend (Terrence Howard) can perform a transplant.  But despite a looming merger with a disreputable Japanese conglomerate, Clay is distracted by his secret engagement to Sam (Jessica Alba), the personal assistant to his creepily possessive mother (Lena Olin).  No sooner does Clay marry Sam against his mother’s wishes then he gets word a donor heart has been found and immediately goes under the knife. 

While in the operating room, Clay suffers from “anesthesia awareness,” a condition where he’s completely immobile yet aware of events and sensations taking place around him.  As he lies helpless on the operating table, Clay realizes that his charmed life is a lie orchestrated by a conspiracy of those he trusts most. And so he must wait for death, powerless but…AWAKE!

Maybe the film would have been better if they stuck with this intriguing if potentially static concept, but Harold’s script maddeningly abandons its ramifications midway through. Unable to accept his helplessness, Clay spontaneously gains the ability to project his consciousness away from his body. There’s no explanation given, except that the opening credits mention over 30,000 people experience anesthesia awareness each year. But such specific data only makes the psychic projection conceit harder to accept. Maybe Clay is stronger in the Force than other patients? The viewer is left to connect the dots.

When he can’t cope with what his spirit form witnesses, Clay opts to retreat ever further into damaged memories, until he becomes oblivious to events taking place around his motionless body. Oddly, this brings the script 180 degrees from its original idea. Of course there’s still potential for psychological tension, as he battles his inner demons while his sole true friend fights to save his life; but these internal and external plotlines dovetail into an altogether pat (if admittedly vaguely satisfying) emotional resolution. 

Don’t expect much in the way of closure, either. The denouement is condensed into a short montage narrated by Howard where the audience learns Clay “got his revenge” on those who done him wrong. Rather than take this last chance to explore the toll all his traumatic discoveries would exact, Howard shaves even more runtime, bringing it down to a TV-movie scale 79 minutes. And those minutes all feel rushed, begging the question if the production budget was slashed to secure the expensive talent.

For better or worse the film delivers the thrills it assumes its audience wants.  The scenes of Clay’s reactions to the physical sensation of being cut open are terrifying. Jessica Alba utilizes both the “half-naked” and “wet” sides of her acting skill set. Yet with a cast of pro’s also including Christopher McDonald and Sam Robards, more discerning filmgoers will feel tempted to expect more than lurid brain candy. 

And Christensen. He’s proven in Shattered Glass and Life as a House that, with a good director, he’s wholly capable of giving a quality performance. Unfortunately, Harold’s slipshod direction and tin-eared dialogue would make even George Lucas wince (“Do you think my new heart will love you as much as my old one?”). Of  the whole cast, only Alba seems at ends to make her performance work. Everyone else puts in a day’s work for a day’s pay.

Helmed by a more seasoned director or even co-writer, Awake could have been a compelling reexamination of the themes of isolation and alienation, a high-tech Johnny Get Your Gun.  At least it never hovers over the surgical gore, mostly avoiding the torture porn dreck of the Saw and Hostel films. Considering the success of this winter’s irresistible Jumper, Christensen will no doubt shrug off this misstep. I’m even willing to give Harold the benefit of the doubt: control is often taken away from neophyte directors. Hopefully by his next work, Awake will emerge as either a misstep to an otherwise promising career or a warning sign for audiences of his future works.

 - Steve Kabel

Dahl’s House

 Celebrating five films by a modern noir master

Though he’s eluded the attention surrounding fellow crime auteurs Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino, writer/director John Dahl has for twenty years quietly amassed an impressive body of neo-noir work. With a visual vocabulary drawing heavily from classical noir masters Jacques Tourneur and Otto Preminger, Dahl’s films interpret archetypal noir themes of alienation, disillusionment, and sexual betrayal into a distinctly modern context. Along the way he’s managed to blow up a few of noir’s well-traveled tropes as well, injecting the genre with some much-needed energy.

Kill Me Again (1989) Dahl’s first directing effort stars then-real life couple Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley as a Reno private investigator and the beauty who hires him to fake her death. Michael Madsen, years before Reservoir Dogs and its endless derivatives, focuses his psychotic bad guy persona to a white-hot edge as Whalley’s ex-lover. The plot is ice cream for noir fans: Whalley has the briefcase full of money, Kilmer’s in hock to loan sharks, and Madsen’s closing in on them both across the Nevada desert. The location photography, particularly of Lake Mead, is crisp and lovely, and Reno never looked so charmingly desperate.

Red Rock West (1992) Dahl heads further into the Western frontier in this gritty tale of mistaken identity and disintegrating loyalties. Michael Williams (Nicolas Cage), an oil derrick worker and wounded veteran, comes to Red Rock, Wyoming in search of a promised job. Instead he’s mistaken by a local bigwig (The late, great J.T. Walsh) for the Texas hitman he’s hired to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Williams takes the girl and runs, then must return to town and struggle for the money with Walsh and the actual killer (Dennis Hopper). Double- and triple-crosses fly until the very last seconds. Past constructing the plot, Dahl precisely connects the isolation of the Wyoming badlands with nice-guy Williams’  helplessness to make sense of the treachery surrounding him. The total result is a taut barbed wire of a film, set in a place where even the roof of a desolate roadhouse seems fraught with menace.

The Last Seduction (1994) was a smash on the festival circuit and staged a one-film comeback for 80s bad girl Linda Fiorentino. It’s hard, even fourteen years later, to overstate the film’s pitch-black tone. Fiorentino’s fed up career woman Bridget convinces her doctor husband (frequent Dahl cast member Bill Pullman) to sell pharmaceutical cocaine to drug dealers, then absconds with the cash the first time he turns his back. Hiding out in a small town, she names local yuppie Peter Berg her “designated fuck” until she can use him to dodge the private investigator (Bill Nunn) put on her trail. Bridget’s disposals of Nunn and Berg, in which she manipulates race and gender conventions to her own sexually charged ends, are astonishingly diabolical. Yet Dahl and Fiorentino make each twist work through sheer filmmaking bravado, and you can’t help but cheer her wicked ways.

Rounders (1998 ) represented a return to familiar ground for Dahl after the critical and commercial disappointment of 1996′s high-concept Unforgettable. Heading a cast that was a Murderer’s Row of hype for its time, Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a former poker shark, or “rounder,” trying to get through law school while looking out for his ex-con ex-partner (Edward Norton, at the acme of his shifty-eyed smartass persona). Along the way he has to deal with a concerned but worried law professor (Martin Landau) and a confused but concerned girlfriend (Gretchen Mol.)

Unfortunately for the film, Damon is still struggling to coalesce his own screen presence, and Norton is already getting too complacent with his. As a consequence the film often plays like Good Will Hustling. Yet Dahl redeems the often-tepid script by focusing on small moments and expertly staged scenes, and by trusting his supporting cast (including  Johns Malkovich and John Turturro) to add nuance and intensity to Mike’s two worlds.

You Kill Me (2007) Dahl wandered away from noir in recent years, directing 2001′s teen suspense Joy Ride and 2005′s little seen World War II adventure The Great Raid.  But he returned as if he never left with last year’s You Kill Me, a black-as-night noir romantic comedy (you read that right) about an alcoholic hitman (Ben Kingsley) trying to dry up and win the love of a depressed businesswoman (Tea Leoni, never more alluring.)

Set in the contrasting worlds of arty San Francisco – noir’s spiritual home – and frigid Buffalo, NY, the best scenes relish a perverse comic sensibility even as Dahl allows his actors to relax into their parts. A typically ace supporting cast, including Dennis Farina in his best performance since Midnight Run, kicks the conventional noir elements a step above what they might become in lesser hands. Watch for the gorgeous shots of the Golden Gate Bridge midway through, as Dahl pays unabashed homage to the work of French noir progenitor Marcel Carné.

-Michael Kabel

DVD Review: Gone, Baby Gone

Miramax Films – $29.99 List Price

Gone Baby Gone is a stark crime thriller focused on two kidnappings in bitterly blue collar Dorchester, MA, a part of Boston you’ll never see in tourist brochures. Capably directed by Ben Affleck and adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel – which for better or worse I have not read – the film centers around the disappearance of a photogenic blonde child from a mother (Amy Ryan) whose parenting skills fall somewhere between Debbie Reynolds and Debbie Mathers-Briggs. 

As the community explodes into uproar, the girl’s panicking aunt (Amy Madigan) convinces private detectives and romantic partners Patrick Kenzie and Annie Gennaro (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) into supplementing the official police investigation. Of course, no one legitimately involved with the search wants them around – not the stand-up uncle with his own shameful past (Titus Welliver); not the city’s top juvenile cop (Morgan Freeman) who’s lost a child to predators himself; certainly not the hard-boiled cop ordered to assist them (Ed Harris). Through a combination of hubris and naiveté, the detectives’ search ends in failure: failure compounded shortly thereafter by a similar abduction of a young boy. Kenzie continues to pursue the abductors until his search spirals violently out of control, leaving several lives ruined – including his own. 

This purposeful, articulate film is a redemptive effort for Affleck, who may be growing out of the schlock actioners and media overexposure that have plagued him for much of the last decade. As an actor Ben might be a pretty good director, as he nails the sense of place and period convincingly right.  And though much of the film is set in Boston neighborhoods that make The Departed look like Gattaca, the shifts to pastoral settings evoke an almost lyrical beauty that sharply contrasts the concrete desperation of the urban areas. It’s a more nuanced and balanced rendition of Boston than Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (another Lehane novel), certainly helped by Affleck’s native heritage.

Now for the complaints. Casey Affleck’s three interminable monologues serve no purpose other than as acting showcases. That’s a shame, because as he demonstrates both here and in the unfarily overlooked The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he’s definitely got the acting chops in the Affleck family. Unfortunately, the speeches plod along with the same earnest but overreaching swagger found in Acting 101 workshops. If the film wasn’t directed by his brother they might not be so egregious, but they’re speed bumps to the story nevertheless.

Yet, the rest of the cast is superb. Michelle Monaghan, who bears a striking resemblance to frequent Ben Affleck costar Liv Tyler, is heartbreaking as the film’s moral center. Morgan Freeman is, well, Morgan Freeman, but he’s at least playing something besides Unshakable Voice of Decency. I’m still not sold on Amy Ryan’s performance as Oscar caliber, but then again Ruby Dee was nominated for American Gangster and she had like, what, four lines? 80s character actress Amy Madigan, barely seen in recent years (overlooking as I prefer to do the odious Path to 9/11) is as effective as ever.

More frustrating, though, is the predictability of the climax. I was willing to forgive the twist because its aftermath is so ably portrayed. And like too many twists, it will inevitably polarize viewers who either support or condemn Kenzie’s actions in the film’s final minutes.  Viewers have to come to their own decision, but a film that’s so sure of itself in so many other ways could do so much better.

Speaking of which, Ben Affleck deserves credit for the film’s sober portrayal of violence as something horrible, vulgar, and shameful. What a leap from acting in paycheck-nabbing claptrap like Reindeer Games, Armageddon, and… well, Paycheck. Strange that with one movie both Affleck brothers arrive by going home again. Beantown can feel proud.

- Steve Kabel

Disc Highlights: Extended ending; deleted scenes;  commentary from Ben Affleck and co-screenwriter Aaron Stockard; featurettes on casting the film and on Ben Affleck’s return to Boston.

Justice League: The New Frontier

Warner Bros – $24.99 List Price

Based on animator Darwyn Cooke’s award winning 2003 comics miniseries, the latest straight-to-DVD release from DC Comics sometimes plays like a highlight reel of the books’ Atomic Age story and setting. But fans won’t care while they’re watching, because when it’s going the film gets pretty much everything right.

While it’s fair to say the running time could be much longer, the essentials are all present and the pace rarely lags – at just 75 minutes, the storypretty much never gets the chance. The book’s first chapter, which serves largely as a prologue, has been dropped; other scenes are sharply condensed. It certainly helps if you’ve read the source material – but that’s the case with any film adaptation, no matter from what media. New Frontier is a translation, and a much better one than DC’s last DTV release, Superman: Doomsday – or even for that matter the live-action Superman Returns. Newcomers should definitely pay attention to the opening credits montage, as the swirl of striking images set the stage for what’s to come.

Without spoiling too much of the intricate plot, the story is as much nostalgia for the 1950s (revered as The Silver Age by comics fans) as it is a mythologizing of Cold War paranoia and the search for (superheroic) moral identity. A new generation of heroes come of age and struggle, along with their antecedents – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman - to define themselves in a morally opaque era. The principal antagonist is foreboding enough to understand as a metaphor for the period’s paranoid isolationism itself, and the climactic battle is (literally, for the heroes,) mind-boggling yet redemptive. Along the way there are covert missions to Mars, Korean War dogfights, doomsday cults, and a snowstorm over Las Vegas. As jet pilot Ace Morgan would say, it’s a “pure rugged” ride. And like producer Bruce Timm’s previous Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, there are no rest stops. Viewer attention is mandatory.

Cooke’s depictions of DC Comics mainstays are lovingly transferred to the screen and remain as crisp as a new dime. Second- and third- string heroes like Martian Manhunter and Adam Strange are lovingly reframed into the zoom-whoosh Space Race era that was their real-life inspiration. And for modern audiences, at a time when DC’s most familiar characters struggle with years of business and creative mismanagement, the entire package serves as comforting restoration, a time capsule of familiar icons burnished to former glory.

The voice talent is qualified and well suited to their parts. Lucy Lawless voices Wonder Woman exactly as any Xena fan imagines she might. Neil Patrick Harris has fun playing the Flash, and the always-dependable Miguel Ferrer shines as the tormented Martian Manhunter. One exception is Angel and Bones star David Boreanaz as Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Though Boreanaz will probably never be accused of overacting, his vaugely disinterested line reading of a crucial role is disappointing.

Finally, cheers to the animators for transcribing the book’s coda almost verbatim from the page, as President Kennedy’s titular “New Frontier” speech plays in voice-over to a stirring montage. Watch for a brief cameo by Lex Luthor as the industrialist chief of an Exxon-like polluter. It’s the book – and movie’s – sense of social resonance in a thumbnail.

Look too for visual references to the just-around-the-corner Civil Rights Movement as well as the Doomsday Clock that warned of nuclear war for much of the 60s and 70s. Throughout, new heroes emerge and join forces in ever greater numbers. It’s a genuinely moving sequence, one that plays to the very reasons so many adults treasure their superheroes. To quote Jimmy Olsen at the book’s conclusion, “Here they come now! It’s going to be okay!”

 - Michael Kabel

Disc Highlights: Disc 1 of the two-disc set includes separate commentaries by both Cooke and Timm and the animators ; the second disc contains three outstanding episodes of the Justice League Unlimited animated series.

We Tend To Disagree

“Trash has given us an appetite for art.” – Pauline Kael

With respect to the venerable Miss Kael, when it comes to film it’s getting harder to trust some critics to know the difference. We’d like to present an alternative to that.

The waning public trust of film criticism

Has this happened to you? You go to a film because of the ecstatic reviews bestowed by critics usually trusted to keep their heads. Two hours (or however long) later, you walk out of the theatre feeling as if you’ve wasted your time.

Why is there a “masterpiece” in theatres every year or so now? Why does each fall season bring another “triumph” of cinema? Not all films are bad, and not all films are great. Very few are good. Most are mediocre, and the mainstream press judges most capably. But more and more some films are given special dispensation because of a distinct set of factors, and that leniency threatens the credibility of film criticism as a worthwhile and respected effort.

Pedigree is not a mandate for rave reviews.

We feel there is a growing tendency to overvalue many films according to pedigree, or (worse) by the force of their marketing. If a film insists upon its greatness, many critics often fall in lockstep to validate that claim. We feel this should not be so, and have started this blog to offer a counterpoint to the clamor of those bandwagons.

Perhaps the most obvious recent example of this dubious trend is P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, a film that all but includes subtitles reminding the audience they’re observing brilliance. Critics tripped on themselves to praise it, with precious few dissenting voices, leaving a bewildered public to spend their money in good faith. There Will Be Blood is not a bad film, but it is not a good one either, and its habit of insisting upon itself is no more valid or self-actualizing than The Office’s Michael Scott “declaring” bankruptcy at the top of his lungs. For what it’s worth, we believe in Anderson as a filmmaker – enough to call bullshit when he releases such a flawed work.

We’re going to be honest above all else here, and fair. No one is going to Sundance, no one is getting a press kit full of swag. We live in small cities in the South and work other jobs.

The advent of big budget B-movies

Our hero.

Bruce Campbell, who is certainly an expert on such matters, said there are no more true B-movies because the best B-movie ideas now get the A-movie budgets. We think he has a point, but we’re movie fans and we appreciate this shift in spending. Hell, we welcome it.

An affection, on the part of their makers, for some forms of genre have elevated many films otherwise dismissed as genre trash to something that, if not art themselves, are at least very good genre fiction (analogous to a very good cheeseburger, which is sometimes more enticing than the finest steak.) These are the crime, comic book, science fiction, and horror movies currently bombarding theatres in unprecedented numbers. They’re a part of the film landscape, and they’re worth taking seriously. We’re going to review them and we’re going to review them seriously and without condescension.

Stick with us.

Hit ALT-Z on your keyboard now. This blog will regularly premiere new content, and we’ll be offering other features and attractions as they occur to us, several in the next few weeks. Of course we welcome your comments and feedback. We’re going to scream, and we hope you scream back.

Thanks,

Michael Kabel

Publisher, Screaming Blue Reviews