Miscellaneous Debris, March 2010 Edition

This has become our most popular feature. Go figure.   

By the time you read this, March 2010 will likely have gone out like a lamb, with April and the full arrival of  spring coming just after it. Not an awful lot happened by way of movies and film in the last month, at least by way of new releases. A couple of films we expected to do better performed poorly at the box office, while others offered mild surprises. The coming months at least promise plenty of popcorn fare, including The Losers, the eagerly awaited Iron Man 2 and, this coming week, the less-eagerly awaited Clash of the Titans reboot.  

The following is just a roundup of news about television and film stuff we didn’t get around to giving the blogging attention the stories probably deserved. There in no particular order, and they’re just our opinions. They may differ from your opinions. That’s okay.   

1. March was noticeable for a couple of releases that we think fell short of  our vague, informal box office expectations. We thought Green Zone would have excited the public more, though Repo Men, which looked to address health care the same way that Soylent Green addressed overpopulation, got the box office cold shoulder we were afraid it might. Green Zone seems a victim of the American movie audience’s continuing aversion to films about Iraq, while Repo Men was simultaneously under- and mis-promoted. Green Zone may also have been perceived, to quote a friend of ours, as The Bourne Redundancy.  

We'd rather stay home.

2. For a while now we’ve had an idle theory that there exists an inverse proportion between the quality of a high-budget, high-concept movie and the degree of saturation which its marketing receives. If this theory is true, we already suspect Date Night may prove one of the worst movies of the year. The omnipresent, profoundly unfunny ads explaining the film’s premise were all over the dial this month, broadcast and cable alike, making us suspect that 20th Century Fox has little faith in its appeal spreading by word of mouth. For our part, we’re weary of stars Steve Carell’s and Tina Fey’s bland, self-congratulatory schticks, and can’t imagine paying to get what we can see, for free, every Thursday night.  

3. Which is not say NBC’s Thursday night lineup is completely without laughs. Over the course of its first season, Community has quickly bloomed into one of the smartest and most daring shows on network TV. Critics fault its humor for being too reliant on cultural references and its own quirkiness; we see those issues as growing pains in a show with the potential to become a classic ensemble comedy along the lines of New Radio or even Cheers. NBC finally renewed it for a second season, several weeks after re-upping the far drearier Parks and Recreation.  

4. FX’s new Justified has garnered rave reviews in just its first couple of episodes, praise with which we’re hard-pressed to disagree. Adapted from an Elmore Leonard short story, the almost flawless pilot established U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens’ (Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood) return to Harlan, Kentucky as punishment for an act that may or may not have been simple vengeance. Fans of Leonard’s complicated characters and wry black humor won’t want to miss the show; neither will fans of old-fashioned, uncomplicated TV-hero drama. It’s great fun, and like Community has the potential to only get better.  

5. In last month’s Miscellaneous Debris we talked about the land war in Asia that was the casting process for The First Avenger: Captain America. Late this month it was announced that familiar comic book movie presence Chris Evans (The Fantastic Four) had finally won the role. An informal sampling of friends and associates (we asked around our local comic book shop) revealed the general mood surrounding the announcement amounted to vague relief. Nothing against Mr. Evans, who’s dependable if not exactly thrilling as an actor, but such long-awaited news ought to elicit more from its target audience than a collective “well, it could’ve been worse.”  

To this day, we're not sure who killed Laura Palmer.

6.  Here’s something to make Gen-X’ers feel their age: Twin Peaks turns twenty years old next week.  As argued in this panegyric from the British Observer website, the 30-episode surreal crime drama subtly revolutionized television drama, moving it away from the superficial episodics of the 80s towards the meatier, more literate fare that’s become the modern bastion of cable television from The Sopranos on down. Some of us were fans back in the day, and some of us still appreciate the never-ending reruns on the Chiller cable network. Nevertheless, the occasional campiness of the plots and acting are starting to show their age, and the early episodes are markedly more cohesive than the show’s troubled second season.  

7. The industry isn’t promoting their release as well as they could, but several studios are quietly issuing some classic and near-classic fare to Blu-Ray at bargain basement rates. We’ve already found the 80s vampire cult favorite Near Dark and the Steve McQueen crime classic The Getaway for less than ten bucks each at the local big box retailers, with similar prices offered on several more films. Though the cumulative Blu-Ray library still has a long way to go before rivaling DVD in depth or quality, putting out such special-interest films at collector’s prices is a huge step in the right direction.  

Here’s the trailer for The Getaway, not so much a preview as a seemingly random assortment of moments from the film:  

  

If you’ve scored your own cheap Blu-Ray find, tell us about it in the comments section below.  

8. Finally, an open plea to our readers: longtime DVD collectors will likely remember the heady days of the early 00′s, when the format’s swift replacing of the VHS medium caused a deluge of titles to appear on retail shelves and in the catalogues of online boutiques alike. Now, many lesser known titles that were given releases back then are going out of print and/or commanding exorbitant prices on eBay and throughout Amazon.com’s gallery of affiliate merchants. If you know of a reputable, dependable e-commerce DVD retailer, please let us know. Particularly, right now we’re looking for Fat City and The Duellists; on a larger level, we’re trying to find a dependable e-commerce merchant with a broad, deep back catalogue. Thanks.  

We’ll be back next week with more reviews. Thanks for reading.  

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Sherlock Holmes

Scruffy, irresistable re-imagining of the famous sleuth arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Early in Guy Ritchie’s thrilling Sherlock Holmes, there’s a moment when the film slows to a crawl and we get inside the great detective’s (Robert Downey, Jr.) head. As he hides in a darkened recess, Holmes plans how he’ll attack the strongman stalking him, plotting out the ensuing attack with ruthless, clinical precision. When the attack happens, replaying in normal time, it’s no less visceral or exciting for us to watch, even if it’s a foregone conclusion for the characters involved.

The moment more or less sums up Holmes’s byzantine psyche. He’s already figured everything out, and the act of living is just a process of going through the motions. Ably if sometimes wearily assisted by his confidant Dr. Holmes (Jude Law), his day-to-day existence is largely a war of attrition with boredom. Lucky for the film it has Downey in the lead, in a performance that solidifies the total comeback begun in 2007′s Zodiac (another, darker kind of mystery altogether) and continued through the Iron Man franchise. Downey makes this film, saving its rollicking pace and grimy texture from occasional doldrums while giving its iconic main character a human face and heart.

The knotty, fast-paced plot has Holmes and Watson pursuing the occultist killer Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), first ensuring his capture and then attempting to deduce the means with which he seemingly rises from the dead and conducts a new reign of terror on Victorian London. At times aiding and other times hindering their investigation are Holmes’ fiancé Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly), who feels no appreciation for Holmes’ eccentricities; and Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), a grifter and the only woman for whom Holmes has ever shown romantic interest.

The search expands to involve the British parliament, Scotland Yard, a secret cabal of sorcerers, British foreign policy, and the ancient riddle of the Sphinx. Screenwriters Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham, and Simon Kinberg pile details upon clues upon meaningful gestures, building a haystack of details for Holmes to sift through. The script doesn’t expect the audience to keep up, either, as the frequent flashbacks and explanations provided by Holmes and Watson stopgap context and explanation at regular intervals. The doubling back is sometimes welcome: though Ritchie’s trademark dexterity in staging action sequences is here as good as it’s ever been, the film drags sometimes when moving all its characters into place or providing depth to some of the supporting characters. Blackwood in particular is practically a cypher, full of foreboding that seldom solidifies into tangible menace.

Yet the place where the characters move remains fascinating in its vivacity. The London of 1891 is an endless warren of primitive, steam-spewing machinery and clustered rooms, a far cry from the quaint cobblestone and stodgy myopia of innumerable BBC and PBS specials. The city seems a mechanical place, full of its own rumbling energy, entirely believable as the capital of the hell-bent-for-industry 19th Century world. The surroundings are so vibrant they often seem to swallow the characters, reducing their importance to ants in a gritty hill, as Ritchie draws on its size and shadows to give the story both suspense and meaning.

Of the supporting cast, Law is sympathetic as the harried Watson, highlighting the stalwart sidekick’s conflicting urges towards the stability of a real home life and the adventure Holmes offers. McAdams makes Adler confident and sexy without playing to the camera. She’s one of the few mainstream American actresses around right now who can act without looking like she’s acting, and she does well in a part that’s a favorite among Holmes devotees. Ritchie is smart enough to stay out of his cast’s way, letting them ricochet dialogue off one another while keeping the momentum going forward. His direction and choice of scene isn’t perfect – the dog gets too many jokes, the scene with a nude Downey shackled to a headboard comes off asinine – but the overall effect remains bracingly immersive.

It’s tempting to see Downey bending the Holmes character into a variation of the persona started with Zodiac ‘s Paul Avery and continued through Iron Man‘s Tony Stark: the malcontent invariably cursed to be the smartest guy in the room. The similarities across all three performances are numerous, but given the actor’s effortless charisma and ability to communicate a range of emotions with simple gestures (Holmes never seems comfortable sitting down) his strengths play, as they did before, to the character. Diehard purists of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories might take offense at this Holmes’ physicality, but there’s no denying the energy it represents.

Those purists will be either delighted or further annoyed that the already-planned sequel will feature Holmes’s arch nemesis Professor Moriarty. The arch-villain circles this film, too, shading the story’s edges with mysterious evil. Guessing his identity will also serve as a litmus test to distinguish those familiar with Doyle’s cast of characters and those who aren’t: his first appearance makes a suprising revelation that calls for only a little elementary deduction.

- Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release)

DVD Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats

Underrated, melancholy psychic spy comedy arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

From the perspective of our post-ironic, cynical-for-hipness’ sake zeitgeist, the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, which embraced New Age mysticism and vague iterations of Eastern philosophy, seem a little naive and self-indulgent. That’s neither a completely unfair nor inaccurate assessment. Still, before shopping malls sold ankh medallions and Tao t-shirts, millions of Americans spent years looking for something vaster and more powerful inside themselves and the universe around them, sometimes taking strange paths to get there.

To hear the smart, well thought-out The Men Who Stare At Goats tell it, even the U.S. Army got in on the act, devoting years of research and funding towards building a “New Earth Army” of psychic spies and supersoldiers that could accomplish any number of mystical feats. Based on British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2004 account of the First Earth Battalion’s long and flawed history and directed by Grant Heslov, the film cruises with a zany comic momentum interspersed with flashbacks explaining the Battalion’s sad, doomed history. It’s chiefly a road movie in the desert, starring America’s leading man George Clooney as a Battalion veteran and Ewan McGregor as the hapless, cuckolded reporter following him in hopes of a story as well as other things he seems at a loss to pinpoint.

Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, once the star pupil of Battalion founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a Vietnam veteran who went to investigate the counterculture on behalf of the Army and came back a convert to all its trippy teachings. Cassady was a “Jedi Warrior,” he tells reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor), one of a vanguard of soldiers who would conduct war by embracing peace. The two meet in Kuwait, as Cassady prepares to embark on a “secret” mission into the Iraqi desert. Wilton follows, becoming both straight man, witness, and eventual disciple of Cassady’s eccentric behavior.

The road they follow is tough: the two are kidnapped, blown up, rescued by a trigger-happy American security company, and eventually brought to the base camp for the Army’s current version of psychological warfare. This modern program involves subliminal messages put into music for our own soldiers and torturing detainees with the theme song to Barney the Dinosaur. The camp is directed, it turns out, by fellow New Earth Army veteran Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who years before had selfishly put the whole project on the path to ruin. Django is also present, albeit a drunken and weary version of his former self. As Cassady endures a crisis of faith in his life’s work, Wilton and Django set about “liberating” the camp using huge amounts of LSD.

The film works best when its manic comic momentum carries it forward, effortlessly moving between Cassady’s desert roamings to the Battalion’s salad days and back again. There’s a third-act twist into some potentially dark territory that thankfully never quite materializes, while the final resolution comes across a bit pat and a little too easy. Everything that happens therein is funny enough, as far as drug humor goes, especially involving Spacey’s climactic act of confrontation. As a running gag, telling McGregor – who possibly wishes we’d all forget his participation in the Star Wars prequels – about Jedi warriors is funny in a meta kind of way the first ten times the script does it. After that the laugh factor starts to wane.

But anyone expecting a point to the movie, or a theme, shouldn’t look to the plot but instead to the performances, Clooney’s and Bridges’ in particular. McGregor is a capable straight man to them both, but the two actors inject a feeling both of loss and regret into their roles, playing men who devoted their life to something that may actually have been hogwash all along. Cassady carries a bad secret around with him, and Django has let his faith collapse into despair. It’s tempting, but maybe a little simplistic, to see the present-day Django as Bridges’ beloved Dude Lebowski after eight years of war and terror: nervous, tired, aching for a vanished serenity. He’s not abiding so well after all.

Likewise, Clooney gives his best performance since Syriana in a film that bookends his 1999 Desert Storm adventure Three Kings. Apparently borrowing Dennis Farina’s moustache and stripped down physically to not much more than leathery skin and sad eyes, Cassady is a dying shell of a man whose true motivations for going into the desert are less enlightened than he wants Wilton to believe. What’s left of Cassady, like Django, is a relic of a more optimistic time, and Clooney expresses this with half-completed sentences, almost adolescent self-righteousness, and a patience with Wilton that borders on condescension. Faced with death and despair, his leap of faith towards Django and their lost, futile ambitions becomes a defiance to a world that’s left them both behind.

At least, that’s one interpretation. The obvious symbolism here is of a holy man wandering the desert looking for his teacher, the desert in this case being a combat zone filled with shoot-first countrymen and Iraqi criminals bent on kidnapping. Yet the film’s biggest weakness lies in not bringing those ideas to the surface or fleshing them out as much as they deserve. Heslov moves the script along, possibly too fast to explore the issues raised by those central performances, with a result that’s not everything it could be. That’s a shame. A film that took a closer look at such ideas in a modern American setting would really be something to stare at.

- Michael Kabel

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Note: A previous version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.

Night Flights: March 2010 Edition

Condensed reviews of movies we stayed up too late to watch.

The days are getting longer and we’re not going to bed any earlier. Movie networks like Turner Classic Movies and Fox Movie Channel continue to show stuff that catches our interest, even while the DVR makes watching them way, way too convenient. Movie channels run day and night, which means even the good ones – especially the good ones – sooner or later get down to the off-the-beaten-path works that, more often than not, feel like uncovered treasure. At least, they do for us.

The following are five movies we recorded, stayed up late checking out, and the next day felt both groggy, happy, and guilty all at the same time for indulging ourselves. Any of them rate a blog post of their own, and time willing we’ll get around to giving them the attention they deserve.

The Seal Wolf (1941): For pedigree, you really can’t do much better than this: Michael Curtiz directs John Garfield, Ida Lupino, and Edward G. Robinson in a big budget adaptation of Jack London’s underrated proto-existentialist novel. Curtiz takes a damp, gritty approach to the doomed voyage of the seal hunting vessel Ghost and its desperate crew, led by manically evil captain Wolf Larsen (Robinson). Garfield plays  a fugitive whose sense of dignity won’t let him kowtow to Larsen’s caprices, while Lupino plays an escaped convict rescued (if that’s the right word) after a shipwreck.

Curtiz nails the foggy menace that surrounds the ship and the souls of its passengers, and Robinson and Garfield both polish their screen intensities to a white-hot edge. You can almost see the acrimonious sparks jumping between them. Also giving memorable, even haunting performances are Gene Lockhart as the ship’s rummy doctor given one last glimmer of redemption and Barry Fitzgerald (The Naked City) as a vile ship’s cook and turncoat informer. Only Alexander Knox disappoints, blandly portraying an author mesmerized by Larsen’s feral intelligence. Ultimately, the film is hampered somewhat by odd transitions and a plot that could stand to linger on its ideas a little longer, but the total result is nonetheless completely satisfying. Curtiz would return to the foggy textures and doomed, redemptive romance in his next effort – Casablanca.

Out of the Fog (1941): Released just three months later, Out of the Fog reteamed Garfield and Lupino while covering much of the same philosophical ground in a vastly different situation. Jonah (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf (John Qualen) are meek, working class Brooklyn drones who escape the drudgery of their day-to-day lives (one’s a tailor, the other a short-order cook) by fishing in Sheepshead Bay from their modest rowboat. Jonah’s daughter Stella (Lupino) dreams of a more exciting life than her impending marriage to a local working stiff (Eddie Albert) promises; those dreams seem briefly close to fruition when she’s romanced by a gangster (Garfield) who’s come to the neighborhood to graft protection money from the local boat owners. Except he’s also extorting money from Jonah and Olaf, forcing the timid men to contemplate killing him to protect Stella and themselves.

Based on a play by Irwin Shaw, the film’s pervasive New Deal flavor of populism – “Ordinary people can love like millionaires or poets,” Jonah tells Stella – today comes across kind of dated and vaguely patronizing. Still, Garfield and Lupino’s chemistry is as sharp here as in The Sea Wolf, and the acting is impeccable all around, especially in the achingly vivid performances by Mitchell and Qualen.

Rebel Without A Cause (1955): It’s a film we’ve heard about all our lives and one we suspect is considered a classic by millions, but we’ll just say we don’t join in that opinion. The narrative wanders, characters are never really fleshed out beyond their positions in the script, and the ending is anything but satisfying or even conclusive. Directed by the semi-notorious Nicholas Ray (In A Lonely Place), the film seems to have something to say but, like its trio of over-indulged protagonists, can’t quite figure out what that is or why it might be worth saying. Maybe that was the point, but we don’t think so.

Nevertheless, it’s almost impossible to watch Dean’s performance - cool, deliberate, odd – and not recognize the influence it played on dozens of leading men that followed him, both immediately after his death and in the next several decades to come. Conversely, Natalie Wood’s blank, spoiled stare and girlish energy don’t suit her emotionally conflicted character, and Sal Mineo’s performance fails to capture the menace that the script suggests lurks just beneath his character’s milquetoast veneer, even while grasping at its confused sexuality. Overall, the film represents an interesting period piece, as far as that goes, but not a work worthy of its lasting popular stature.

Cutter’s Way (1981): If Rebel Without A Cause arrived at the peak of its era, the ennui and dissolution of Cutter’s Way represents the one drink too many at the ”who’s kidding who” party that was 70s American cinema. The trio of outsiders at its center – a gigolo, his bitter Vietnam vet friend and conscience, and the dissolute woman they both love – understand that something’s passing them by, even if, like the angsty teens of Rebel, they’ll be damned if they know what to do about it. Bone (Jeff Bridges ) witnesses the dumping of a dead body after hustling the bored housewives of Santa Barbara high society. When he thinks he recognizes the murderer the next day – one of the community’s most powerful oil tycoons, no less – his buddy Cutter (John Heard) devises a scheme to both blackmail the culprit and turn him in to the cops. Unless you’ve never seen a movie before, you’ve already figured out nothing goes as intended.

In the years since its release the film has borne comparisons to Chinatown, and given the trio of broken people at its center and the suburban California setting, it’s hard not to imagine what Robert Towne would have done with such a premise. Instead, director Ivan Passer leaves too many of the ambiguities in Jeffrey Alan Fiskin’s script (adapted by a novel by Newton Thornburg) unaddressed and unfocused, so that the final result isn’t the masterpiece that its best moments imply it could become. Of the performances, Heard is brilliant as the maimed veteran that understands the fences around the distant mansions are meant to keep him out, while Lisa Eichhorn is positively haunting as his doomed but devoted wife. Bridges, fresh off Heaven’s Gate, here began a flirtation with neo-noir that would last for half the decade (Against All Odds, 8 Million Ways To Die) but has seldom caught his interest since.

Transformers (2007): Friends have suggested we watch Michael Bay’s paean to Turtle Wax more than once, not for the acting, story, or script but rather just to watch “shit blowing up real good.” (We live in the South.) Look, we just gushed about a seventy year old seafaring adventure, so alien robots folding themselves into monster trucks and fighter jets probably isn’t going to naturally pique our curiosity. (On the other hand, we do love comic book movies, so maybe our friends thought the film stood an even chance.)

We promised in our mission statement to judge these kind of movies fairly and without condescension but man, there’s a limit. The film can barely stand up to viewing, let alone serious consideration. It’s an aggressively stupid pile of red state pandering that feels interminable when you’re watching any part of it but the admittedly enthralling fight scenes. They are the movie’s lone strength, but there’s not enough of them strung out along the almost 2 1/2 hour runtime to sustain interest.

What it does have in abundance is limp, broad comedy starring Shia LaBeouf and some actually rather tepid vamping by former-It Girl Megan Fox. The worst part is that we’re told the sequel “isn’t as good.” We can only imagine what that kind of weapons grade anti-quality that must entail.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with – finally – some reviews of current movies and DVD’s, and then another edition of our always-popular Miscellaneous Debris right after that. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance redeems an otherwise bland melodrama.

Though sometimes overshadowed by his iconic turn as Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ career stretches across almost four decades and dozens of accomplished performances. He’s the quintessential American actor’s actor, consistently bringing more to any given part than was written into the script while making each performance distinctly his own. He’s played aliens, serial killers, U.S. Presidents and cattle rustlers, among many other roles, but remained himself throughout. He’s made some bad movies, but he’s never been bad in a movie – an important difference.

For many years Bridges’ lack of Oscar recognition was held not against him but rather as proof of the Academy’s fallibility. “The Oscars aren’t perfect,” the argument went. “Hell, they’ve never given one to Jeff Bridges.” This month, after four previous nominations, he won the statue for his turn as washed-up Country & Western singer Bad Blake in writer-director Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart. He deserves the recognition, even if the film isn’t one of the best in which he’s participated. For that matter, it’s not even very good.

At least the story, and its lead character, play directly to Bridges’ strengths. Once many years ago Blake was a performer with both fame and riches, but those times were long enough ago that now he’s reduced to playing gigs in bowling alleys and multi-night engagements in cheesy storefront bars. Blake endures the deprivation with a kind of threadbare resignation, saving his hostility for angry phone calls to his manager (Paul Herman). “I’m fifty-seven years old and I’m broke,” Blake bellows. He’s angry at his circumstances, mostly because he’s unable to cement a collaboration with former protegé Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a modern C&W star who may be betraying Blake’s lessons of hard-living sincerity for the glitzier artifice of the current music industry. In the meantime Blake roams the Southwest in his battered Suburban, living more or less hand to mouth and from bottle to bottle. “I used to be somebody,” goes one of his songs. “Now I’m somebody else.”

His fortunes improve somewhat when the piano player in a Santa Fe pickup band asks for an interview on behalf of his niece Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Jean’s a single mother, vaguely lonely but devoted to her son Buddy (Jack Nation) and trying to make a living as a reporter. As their romance begins, halting and driven by Blake’s squinty charm, Blake is finally able to make inroads with Sweet, accepting a degrading but lucrative opening slot on Sweet’s tour and writing new songs for Sweet’s next album. 

But Blake is unable to gracefully accept even tentative victories. When a lapse in the sobriety he promised Jean gets Buddy lost in a labyrinthine Houston shopping mall, the romance breaks apart, leaving Blake disconsolate. Aided by longtime friend Wayne (Robert Duvall), he eventually seeks treatment in a rehab clinic before rejoining Sweet on the road. Determined to start his whole life over, he attempts a “look at me now” reconciliation with Jean, but she refuses. The denouement, set sixteen months later, finds Blake sober and prosperous, with a now-married Jean ready to extend forgiveness.

The problem with all these story points is their vacuum-packed dearth of spontaneity. Cooper’s script, based on the 1987 novel by Thomas Cobb, doesn’t follow Blake’s predicament and eventual redemption so much as it lays out a course and bends everything around him to its own dramatic purposes. For a film ostensibly about someone’s life, there’s very little sense of unpredictability, or circumstances beyond the characters’ control. Instead the story moves itself along, each scene building explicitly on the one before. The most telling instance revolves around Buddy’s temporary disappearance in the mall. A riskier script might have it happen for no reason at all, simply an accident that Blake the diminished guardian was powerless to prevent; instead, it’s used as a plot point to propel the script into its third act, getting Blake from point B to point C with as little chance as necessary.

Such lack of nerve applies to the characters, as well. Though a talented actress with a resume full of provocative (if not thought-provoking) films, Gyllenhaal barely manages to get her character raised above the level of plot device. Jean is practically a life-spirit trope as much as an actual personality, all smiles and alluring femininity, with compassion and sex appeal and a cute Southwest cottage full of comfy furniture. The screenplay has her explain her every thought in concise sentences, all of which serve only to clarify the drama unfolding. Farrell’s Sweet is also underwritten, like Jean more of a destination for Blake than a fellow person. Duval, who starred in the similar but far more assured Tender Mercies (written by the great Horton Foote), plays the same “Gus” character you’ve seen him do dozens of times already. His scenes are limited, and they’re fine, but nothing revelatory.

Cooper’s direction is methodical, workmanlike, proficient, with scenes constructed so as to serve the story no more or no less than they need. It’s painting by numbers, if not exactly artistry. Many scenes are saved by T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham’s dusty, winsome score, with the original songs both sounding fresh and defiantly part of the vanished authenticity that Blake doggedly, self-consciously represents. Like Bridges, the composers turn in Oscar-caliber work that was rewarded as such.

Through it all Bridges anchors the movie, and following Blake through the motions is entertaining for as much as the actor invests him with enough texture and nuance to carry the movie on his weathered back. To say the performance breaks new ground for the actor is to overstate the matter – a succinct appraisal might label Blake as “The Fisher Dude.” Nevertheless, there’s an old theory that being great at something means making it look easy, and there’s no denying Bridge’s ease at defining a character whose chief fault may lie in his refusal to ever work too hard. He’s the heart of a movie that’s far from crazy in taking chances.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Up In The Air

Jason Reitman’s almost flawless, award-winning third film arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray today.

The darling of last year’s critic’s awards (if not the Academy), Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air is a hard film not to love for its many intelligent and well crafted components, all of which work to entertain you and make you feel as if you’re seeing something substantial – as most of the time you are. It’s full of charming and relaxed performances from veteran and emerging talent, a carefully structured plot with easily identifiable situations and – and! – it boasts a script with that rarest of Hollywood spectacles: a refusal to treat its audience as if we’re irretrievably stupid. So if the film never quite works out all the ideas it puts forward, you may not entirely mind.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a “termination facilitator” who’s all too happy to jet around the country laying off downsized employees on behalf of their chicken-hearted bosses. It’s dirty work but he doesn’t mind, because the lifestyle of easy, superficial comforts provided by business hotels and frequent flyer amenities allow him freedom from the “baggage” of emotional involvement. He even has a sideline gig as a motivational speaker, giving talks in business-class hotel conference rooms about how to free your “backpack” from what’s weighing you down.

Bingham’s life of happily superficial solitude goes sideways in three directions at once: he begins a casual, no-strings-attached affair with fellow road warrior Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), one based on sex, mutual company, and their enthusiasm for luxury without consequences. Jovial and privileged, they’re both validated by what they feel entitled to, including each other. At work, he finds his way of life threatened by upstart new employee Nathalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a recent college grad who’s sold their boss (Jason Bateman) on converting the layoff business towards video conferencing – effectively firing people over the Internet. Back home, the sister “he barely knows” is getting married, compelling his return to a family that almost doesn’t register on his emotional radar (Reitman’s and collaborator Sheldon Turner’s adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel wears its travel metaphors on its sleeve.)

Bingham copes by taking Keener with him on the road, to show her the benefits of the personal touch when firing lifelong employees. The clash between Bingham the pragmatic, ageing Gen X’er and Keener’s self-confident, vaguely hipsterish youth gives much of the film its dramatic weight but also its humor. When Keener’s fiancé dumps her via text message, her emotional meltdown in a sunny hotel lobby puts the generational contrast into hilarious, if wrenching, detail as Bingham and Goran try to gently persuade her to get used to disappointment in life. It’s a wonderful scene, perfectly played all around and devastating in its accuracy. If you don’t wince and nod at least once watching it, you probably haven’t turned 35 yet.

Only in the last third, when the time comes to both ratchet up the dramatic tension and resolve some of its ideas, do Reitman and the film start to lose their footing. For as little about herself as she puts forth, Goran still isn’t quite what she seems, while Keener may be made of sterner stuff than Bingham first appreciates. Still, neither entirely emerges as characters as fully rounded as Bingham, flaws owing more to the script and screen time than the actors’ performances. The ending and dénouement, where everything rotates back to more or less where it was in the beginning, both works and doesn’t. It works in that giving Bingham or anyone else a pat ending would insult the rest of us struggling with shaky livelihoods. It doesn’t because the ambivalence makes the rest of the film struggle for coherence. You expect the story to lead somewhere, and it does, but exactly where is implied best by the film’s title.

Such problems are smoothed out by fine performances. As suggested in other reviews, Clooney is probably the only actor around who could make us care about a complacently careless jerk like Bingham, giving him anxiety and depth that roil under the glib slick suit exterior. The palpable chemistry between he and Farmiga builds on its own warmth and the characters’ mutual fascination, an odd contrast to the impersonal comfort surrounding them. Kenrdick is confident in her part without being showy, making her tyro character sympathetic while not pitiable or – potentially much worse – cute. Reitman also wisely casts veteran collaborators Bateman and J.K. Simmons in key parts, and elsewhere uses real people to describe their firing experiences.

Smart and mature, as melancholy as a jobless Monday morning, don’t be surprised if Up In The Air is considered a minor classic in the years to come. But don’t wait until then to see it.

- Michael Kabel

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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

We Like Them, We Really Like Them

Our hopes and predictions for the 2010 Academy Awards.

The smashed box office records of Avatar notwithstanding, 2009 isn’t likely to go down in anybody’s books as a year to remember. The movie industry itself finds itself in a weird period, with theatre attendance slightly up while DVD sales take a sharp downward turn. The implied message is that people were more willing to watch their choice of movie than they were to keep it. Is that a comment on the quality of current films versus years previous, or a reflection of public expectations regarding the films themselves? Maybe.

The Academy Awards, the once and still-ostensible benchmark of film excellence, finds itself at odds with itself this year as well. Years of criticism for elitism and popular irrelevance finally went answered in 2009, as the Academy capitulated by opening the Best Picture category up to ten nominees. And some of the films on that ballot, frankly, have little business being there.  The following are our predictions, observations, and ideas about the winners and nominees in some of the larger categories. We admit that we are usually aggressively, epically wrong in our predictions.

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published: Up In The Air; An Education; Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire; District 9; In The Loop. Our choice: Up In The Air What we think will win: Up In The Air. Everybody loved Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s translation of Walter Kirn’s novel, but it’s essentially a prestige picture at heart, and the Academy’s trying to go cold turkey on awarding such films the Best Picture statue. Saluting the script may offer a means of splitting the difference between snubbing it and giving it the big award.

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen: The Hurt Locker; Inglorious Basterds; The Messenger; Up; A Serious Man. Our choice: The Hurt Locker What we think will win: The Hurt Locker. While Mark Boal’s script has drawn criticism from military personnel for its depiction of the war in Iraq, its recent win at the Writer’s Guild of America awards (along with Up In The Air, which won in its category) helps its chances of being the ceremony’s big winner, especially if – like Up In the Air again – it loses in the Best Picture category.

Best Achievement in Cinematography: Mauro Fiore, Avatar; Christian Berger, The White Ribbon; Bruno Delbonnel, Harry Potter and Half-Blood Prince; Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker; Robert Richardson, Inglorious Basterds. Our choice: Christian Berger Who we think will win: Mauro Fiore. Berger’s gorgeous black and white color palette does a lot of the heavy lifting in selling the disquiet of Michael Haneke’s latest meditation on violence. Nevertheless, we think this is the year of Avatar, including not least of which for recognition of its formidable visual achievements.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role: Penelope Cruz for Nine; Anna Kendrick for Up In The Air; Vera Farmiga for Up In The Air; Mo’Nique for Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire; Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart. Our choice: Vera Farmiga Who we think will win: Anna Kendrick. That’s damning praise, since we suspect a win could hurt Kendrick’s career in much the same way that the later efforts of previous upstart winners Anna Paquin, Mira Sorvino, and Jennifer Hudson all seemed manacled by their victories. It would be a shame if that happened to Kendrick, who showed real potential as George Clooney’s Gen-Y sidekick and antagonist. And we’re not sure why Farmiga isn’t in the Best Actress category.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role: Matt Damon for Invictus; Christopher Waltz for Inglorious Basterds; Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones; Christopher Plummer for The Last Station; Woody Harrelson for The Messenger. Our choice: Stanley Tucci Who we think will win: Christopher Waltz. We’ve been fans of Tucci’s for years, at least since Big Night back in 1996. It’s past time he gets some official recognition (and directs another film, while we’re on the subject.) The many flaws of Basterds notwithstanding, Waltz’s performance as Nazi ”Jew hunter” Hans Landa has met with virtually unanimous critical praise, and there’s no reason that won’t translate into an Academy victory.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side; Helen Mirren for The Last Station; Carey Mulligan for An Education; Gabourey Sidibe for Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire; Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia. Our choice: Sidibe Who we think will win: Streep. Of all the categories, this one seems the widest open; still, we’d rate Bullock’s and Mulligan’s chances as the most remote. And we maintain our suspicion that Streep’s name is pre-programmed into the Academy’s ballot template. They fill in the name of her movie for any given year.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart; George Clooney for Up In The Air; Colin Firth for A Single Man; Morgan Freeman for Invictus; Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker. Our choice: Bridges Who we think will win: Bridges, as his Golden Globes win indicates. This is the great actor’s fifth nomination, having previously lost Best Supporting Actor to Ben Johnson, Robert DeNiro and Benicio Del Toro and the Best Actor statue to F. Murray Abraham. Renner’s a long shot, but shouldn’t be counted completely out, either.

Best Achievement in Directing: Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker; James Cameron for Avatar; Lee Daniels for Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire; Jason Reitman for Up In The Air; Quentin Tarantino for Inglorious Basterds. Our choice: Reitman Who we think will win: Bigelow. It’s a minutiae of Academy trivia, but is this the first time a divorced couple has gone head to head in a category? Cameron could likely lose to ex-wife Bigelow if Academy voters split the two big awards between their respective films. And vice versa. Still and all, Reitman’s film adroitly captured the zeitgeist on a relatively small budget – no mean feat.

Best Motion Picture of the Year: Avatar; The Bind Side; District 9; An Education; The Hurt Locker; Inglorious Basterds; Precious: Based On The Novel Push by Sapphire; A Serious Man; Up; Up In The Air. Our choice: Up In the Air Who we think will win:  Avatar. Our comments listed just above about Up In The Air‘s achievements notwithstanding, the Academy loves a winner, and it loves James Cameron. Avatar has both, and it’s the populist choice besides. Of the rest of the nominees, we’re unsure what the Academy saw in District 9 and Pixar’s disappointing Up to merit their inclusion in competition.

Our congratulations to the winners and our condolences to those who don’t get the statue. We’ll be back next week.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Cinema: The Last American Hero

The based-on-true story of Junior Johnson, bootlegger turned NASCAR champion.

Though overshadowed somewhat by the crime films and disaster spectacles that dominated the box office of the era, American cinema in the 1970s also celebrated the working class with a more or less unprecedented degree of realism. Using on-location sets and naturalist lighting, the films shot in the “real world” looked the part: full of dirt, drab colors, and no-frills cinematography meant to emphasize the believability of their settings. Just the same, they often attempted to construct heroism out of their subject matter, finding outsized but nevertheless actual people with which to center their stories.

1973′s The Last American Hero doggedly follows that blueprint, basing its heady events on the life of Robert Glenn “Junior” Johnson, Jr. The son of a North Carolina bootlegger who learned to drive by smuggling moonshine down from the Wilkes County hills, Johnson became one of NASCAR’s earliest champions in the 1950s and 60s, a time when stock car racing was still mainly an amusement of the hinterlands. Loosely based on a series of Esquire articles by Tom Wolfe (who gave Johnson’s story its grandiloquent name), the film moves the events to the present time of the early 70s, as the sport was just emerging as a lucrative business and the cars’ drivers began to enjoy a heady celebrity.

Jeff Bridges stars as the slightly-renamed Elroy ”Junior” Jackson, an almost unflappably cocky youth who smuggles the high-grade moonshine whiskey made by his father (Art Lund) and brother (Gary Busey). When Junior runs a police blockade by impersonating a patrol car, the local authorities are quick to arrest Elroy Sr. and destroy the family still. Meeting with his imprisoned father and their family lawyer, Junior hears the older men discuss how to get Elroy Sr. better amenities during his upcoming incarceration through bribery and kickbacks, and what such niceties will cost. Determined to help his father survive a jail stint that’s essentially his fault, Junior sets out to make the three thousand dollars the lawyer claims his father will need.

He starts on the demolition derby circuit but quickly moves up to stock car racing, bullying the local promoter (Ned Beatty) into prompt cash payouts and better starting positions. Moving up to the NASCAR circuit, he finds an easygoing romance with a racetrack receptionist (Valerie Perrine) while squaring off with the race circuit’s hard-partying alpha dogs (William Smith and Ernie F. Orsatti). Junior’s shell of confidence, even arrogance, remain at almost Ayn Randian levels even when his car cracks up or when Perrine’s good-time girl is revealed as the village bicycle. Alone in the world and in new surroudings, Junior fakes his way through the hard parts of his new surroundings while staying upbeat through force of will. Along the way he starts driving for former champion Burton Colt (Ed Lauter), whose repeated attempts to bring Junior under his control embody the tempation towards conformity constantly facing the young racer. (Colt fails, of course, as such characters always do in movies.)

The film works best not during the chase scenes, which are exciting enough (likely more so for their time), but rather during the quieter family moments when Junior interacts with his family, particularly his father. Bridges and Lund’s scenes together are muted, intense, yet effectively nuanced with equal parts affection, respect, and also distance. They’re completely believable, as is Junior’s testy, contentious relationship with brother Wayne. They’re the kind of siblings who show their affection through constant antagonism, and the actors capture that dynamic without resorting to shouting scenes or melodramatic posing. Also effective is Geraldine Fitzgerald as their mother, a woman worn down by making herself comfortable with choices made by others, usually men.

All of which should add up to something more than it does – and that you’ll want it to. Director Lamont Johnson understands the story as a whole but falls just short of making the film’s scenes come together and realize their collective potential. There’s a sense watching the film that you’re seeing something like a lost classic, steeped as it is in well-tuned performances and gripping action sequences. But that sense doesn’t last long after the film concludes, partly because of some problems in the plot but also from Johnson’s injudicious dramaturgy. Several scenes apparently intended to build character, such as a long monologue given by Perrine, never quite deliver the impact they should or reinforce the plot as much as possible thanks to slack pacing or odd rhtyhms. Bridges is excellent (has he ever given a bad performance?), oscillating between bravado and timidity, and the supporting cast is especially spot-on. Yet there’s overall a feeling of something missing, a larger idea or point that would bring everything into better focus.

Still, the film is enjoyable as much for its multiple levels of historic value. They don’t race cars like they used to, and they don’t make films like this anymore either. NASCAR fans will possibly enjoy seeing the sport go through some awkward growing pains, while fans of the era’s populist cinema can enjoy it for its poor-but-proud production values and cocky, gritty sense of place and tone. Not a classic film, but for those audiences it’s one not to be missed all the same.

- Michael Kabel

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