Miscellaneous Debris, December 2010 Edition

Closing the year with our roundup of news and observations that didn’t get a full post.

This year ends with a whimper in entertainment, the way most years do. Like too many of the previous years, we doubt 2010 will go down in the books as a particularly rewarding year for film or television, the occasional bright spots like The Social Network and The Fighter, and Terriers notwithstanding. (We’ll have our review of that second film up next week.) There was plenty to dissent about though, including The American and The Girl Who Played With Fire.

As this year shudders to a conclusion and the new one lurks just around the corner (beginning with the date 1-1-11, no less), here’s the news and other items we didn’t get around to blogging about this month. All opinions are our own, of course.

You gross 7.6 million opening weekend. That's how you know.

1. If 2010 concludes the decade, its last month in a sense ought to serve as a closing bell for the comic actors of the late 1990s. Both Jack Black and Owen Wilson had films that flopped this month – Gulliver’s Travels and How Do You Know, respectively – while Ben Stiller’s Meet The Fockers is making money but not fooling anyone about quality.

Ignoring for a moment that all three became paycheck actors years ago, each needs to start taking greater risks with their film choices again. (a couple of qualifiers: Greenberg was too mannered and too self-conscious by half; we’re not sure Black ever took risks.) By way of contrast, Luke Wilson has been quietly making offbeat work for several years now, even if most of his recent films (Middle Men, Henry Poole Is Here) have been neglected by the general public. We hope his contemporaries follow suit.

Surely they can't be serious.

2. The Library of Congress announced its list of 25 inductees into the National Film Registry this week, including no-surprise cultural heavyweights The Empire Strikes Back and Saturday Night Fever but making room for a few dark horses, too. This year’s list of inductees includes  The Exorcist, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Malcolm X. Perhaps the most surprising addition, however, was 1981′s disaster spoof Airplane!

Films included in the registry are preserved for future generations in environmentally controlled vaults. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington selected the movies from a list of 2100 films and short films suggested by the public. The complete list of 2010 inductees can be found here.

Bale in The Fighter

3. Speaking of films and awards, we’ll go ahead and start making our Oscar predictions now: The Social Network for Best Picture and David Fincher for Directing; Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor in The Fighter, Nathalie Portman for Best Actress in Black Swan.

The spirit of this year’s Oscars will no doubt reflect youth and change, with hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway presiding over a ceremony that will likely include potential nominees Jesse Eisenberg, Mila Kunis, Amy Adams, and Ryan Gosling, among others. We’ve said before the torch is overdue to be passed – maybe this year’s ceremony will signify as much.

Oswalt's Wikipedia photo

4. Sooner or later, we think Patton Oswalt’s going to get some kind of Oscar of his own. It’s a strange world, and he’s a very smart guy. We came across his eulogy for geek culture in this month’s issue of Wired and want to pass it along. While we can’t agree with his tastes in all things geek, he’s pretty spot on about where fan culture and subcultures as a whole are heading, and (more importantly) where they need to go. As usual, he’s funny and candid too, rewarding geeks who’ll get his arcane cultural references but not making them necessary for his arguments to work.

5. We’re not sure where Kenneth Branagh’s film version of the Marvel comics hero Thor fits into the overall scheme of “all things geek” – like next year’s Green Lantern, the viking godling come to Earth is a perennial top-of-the-second-tier character. The trailer debuted on the Internet and in theaters this month, just slightly exceeding our fickle expectations.

On the plus side, star Chris Hemsworth seems to have natural leading man chops, and the production design looks like goofy fun in an Excalibur kind of way. On the downside, Nathalie Portman in a superhero movie is the answer to a question nobody asked, and the fight scenes seem suspiciously like standard action movie fare. At worst,  the film can still serve as the warmup to The First Avenger: Captain America, which debuts later that summer.

Thor arrives in theaters nationwide May 6.

So money: Lightyear, Woody

6. We’re reminded of a quote from the late, great Tip O’Neil: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”  Despite the second highest box office gross in history, 2010 will go down as something of a disappointment when compared to initial estimates by industry analysts. Entertainment Weekly‘s Keith Staskiewicz blames the letdown on a summer of disappointing tentpole attractions and an equally weak winter; much of the year’s first quarter, too, was buoyed by the carryover success of Avatar.

Final box office estimates for 2010: 10.55 billion dollars, down slightly from last year’s $10.6 billion. The highest grossing film, by the way, was Toy Story 3 with $415 million in ticket sales.

7. We’ve talked it up it a couple of times already, so we feel a little obligated to mention that Matt Damon’s The Adjustment Bureau is now scheduled for a March 4 release. Based on a short story by Blade Runner author Philip K. Dick and with a supporting cast that includes Emily Blunt, John Slattery and Terence Stamp, the film tells the story of star-crossed lovers engineered to remain apart by a team of reality mechanics, despite their best efforts to come together.

Universal had previously scheduled its release for last September, around the same time as advance promotion for Damon’s ultimately underwhelming Hereafter.  We’re always in the mood for brainy, stylish sci-fi, and the delay is only fueling our expectations.

8. We’ll end the year with the same plea we made last year, to ask everyone to seek and demand better entertainment across the media spectrum – film, television, online, and so on. It seems to us that the general feeling, more and more, is that our culture is on the decline, becoming “schlocky and superficial” (to quote Boston Legal) while focusing increasingly on the regressive and the reductive. But that’s not going to change until we all agree to do something about it.

As a new year’s resolution, swear off the junk of reality television and other “guilty pleasures,” and resolve to see one classic film and read a classic book each month – twelve classic books, twelve classic movies in 2011. We promise you that you’ll feel good about it, and that the old junk will seem so much more meaningless in comparison. If you need a place to start, here’s a list of the American Film Institute’s Greatest 100 Movies.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back in the new year with more reviews and features each week than we had in 2010. Have a great holiday weekend.

- Michael Kabel

Sour Christmas, Part Two

Continuing our list of a dozen movies and TV shows to help you skip the holiday cheer.

“So bolt the door and hit the floor…”

Christmas is just three days away, and we’re still not feeling it.  Just the same, or maybe because of it, here’s the rest of the dozen movies and gone-too-soon television shows that we recommend as smart, funny, honest, and wickedly creative – in other words, everything the holiday season is not.  They’re all available on DVD, and they all make perfect ways to escape from holiday celebrations into something that better fits a sour mood

A couple of days ago we published the first half of the list here, but the total listing remains (as always) in no particular order of importance. Where possible, we’ve included video that was available on YouTube when we looked for it.

Thank You For Smoking (2005) – Smug, blithely amoral tobacco industry lobbyist Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhardt, never better) juggles raising his tween son (Cameron Bright) with romancing a journalist (Katie Holmes) and pitching cigarette product placement into Hollywood films. Opposing him are a yokely U.S. Senator (William H. Macy) and… well, pretty much the entire world.

Writer-director Jason Reitman (Up In The Air) adapts Christopher Buckley’s novel with fierce comic wit and timing, and the leads get a giant boost from a supporting cast full of ringers – Macy, the great J.K. Simmons, Maria Bello, David Koechner, among others. It’s the kind of film that at first you think you shouldn’t laugh at, then admit you can’t help yourself.

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – Struggling, bottom-feeding New York press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) lives at the beck and call of cynical, world-loathing newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Hunsecker, who despises Falco and the whole world besides, can make or break Falco’s clients – and, by extension, Falco too. Hunsecker offers him the chance to get his clients real publicity, but only if Falco will sabotage the jazz guitarist (Martin Milner) currently romancing his sister (Susan Harrison).

By and large, the mainstream films of the 1950s aren’t known for their character depth or social commentary, but like Elia Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd (released the same year) Alexander Mackendrick’s film has dozens of barbed comments to make on the media, public image, and moral hypocrisy; consider it Mad Men from the time of Mad Men.

Gone Baby Gone (2007) – Ben Affleck’s directing debut adapts Dennis Lehane’s novel about a pair of romantically attached detectives (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) pulled into helping the search for a young girl kidnapped from a poor neighborhood. But the investigation ends unhappily, and the couple drifts apart. Months later, a second kidnapping raises nagging questions about the first, complicated by police treachery and the girl’s own conniving, possibly complicit mother (the superb Amy Ryan, in an Oscar-nominated performance.)

This was one of the first films SBR reviewed, and it still holds a warm, if dark, place in our film memory. Read our complete review here.

 

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – A film lover’s dream movie, George Roy Hill’s loose, self-assured take on the two real-life train robbers still sets the bar for all things masculine cool. Pursued by a crack team of investigators to the remote hills of Bolivia, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) continue their life of crime even though the stakes are higher and the authorities deadlier. Times’s running out for the two gentlemen bandits, largely because their era of frontier freedom is ending.

In the meantime the pacing is sharp and the performances perfect, as in this following scene where Butch confronts a mutinous member of his Hole In The Wall Gang (Ted Cassidy.)

Point Blank (1967) – You always hear about how the 1960s was a decade of change yet Lee Marvin remained the biggest badass on the planet throughout, as this John Boorman (Deliverance) pseudo-homage to French New Wave proves again and again. Here he’s cast as Walker, a thief and enforcer double-crossed and left for dead by both his partner (John Vernon) and wife (Sharon Acker).

But he recovers, and with help from a mysterious benefactor (Keenan Wynn) begins to take apart the criminal syndicate that his ex-partner now represents. Walker wants revenge and no more, no less than the $93,000 that was his take of their last heist. He’s helped, in her kitten-with-a-whip Sixties way, by his wife’s sister (Angie Dickinson). If any of this sounds familiar, Mel Gibson remade the film with 1999′s much weaker Payback.

Arrested Development (2003) – We’re still parsing out how good this dark comedy actually was, seven years after its debut.  A labyrinth of in-jokes, meta-humor, recurring gags and brilliant character beats formed the structure of the Bluth family’s saga in Orange County, as storylines of infidelity, coming of age, treason, and so much else moved them from episode to interconnected episode.

The show nominally centered on straight-laced son Michael (Jason Bateman, kicking off his career comeback) but included more than a dozen regular and recurring performers including Portia de Rossi, Jeffrey Tambor, Will Arnett, Michael Cera and David Cross. All three seasons are on DVD, and lately IFC has put reruns heavily into its nightly schedule.

Happy holidays. We’ll return once next week, to close out the year with its last installment of Miscellaneous Debris. Be safe on the roads and take care.

-  Michael Kabel  

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Sour Christmas, Part One

Not feeling the holiday spirit? Here’s the first of a dozen movies and TV shows to help you avoid the season.

Spend the holidays with friends.

Bah, humbug. With Christmas finally arriving this weekend, some of us aren’t feeling the holiday spirit, despite all the efforts of the media and our economy to get us in line. Still, the cold weather and ready supply of DVD’s and Blu-Rays, combined with some long, bleak days off from work, make the next week or so a perfect time to catch up on some movie watching.

This week we’ll profile ten great movies and two superb television series, none of which have a damn thing to do with Christmas, New Year’s, or any of the other reasons to “celebrate.” As always, they’re ranked in no order or importance or quality. Where possible we’ve included trailers or other video clips that were available on YouTube when we looked for them.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) – Say what you will about his later films, Guy Ritchie’s debut feature about bratty gangster wannabes hustling the London underworld remains an irresistible whirlwind of style, violence, and swaggering retro cool. The shaggy plot, about a crooked poker game, two vintage musket rifles and a strain of greenhouse grown super-pot, is almost incidental to the brazen energy and gritty atmosphere. The film’s ugly, smart, witty, and honest – all the things Christmas ain’t.

The great cast of (then-) up and coming actors includes Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran and Vinnie Jones, but it’s Lenny McLean who frequently steals the show as mob enforcer Barry the Baptist.

The New World (2005) – Terrence Malick’s fourth feature follows the romance between 17th Century lovers John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as the Virginia colony of Jamestown gets off to a shaky start. Sent on a reconnaissance mission by colony chief Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) to look for trade partners among the area’s “naturals,” Smith is capture by a local tribe and sentenced to death until the chief’s daughter saves him. The two fall in deep – if star-crossed – love.  

Malick uses the setting and time to explore some of his favorite themes – the moral capacities of the human spirit, mankind’s relation and place within nature, individual will against tightening social norms – and creates a tighter story than 1998′s more expansive (and less cohesive) The Thin Red Line. Farrell is somewhat miscast as the fundamentally restless Smith, but Kilcher, Plummer, and Christian Bale are all just about flawless.

Magnolia (1999) – Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, overreaching saga about interconnected Los Angeles lives at the end of the millennium remains amazing a decade later if only for its sheer audacity and scope. Long, complicated, and at times self-indulgent (the film concludes with a biblical “plague”), Anderson nevertheless keeps things moving by keeping small-scale but taut suspense brewing for all his many characters; some storylines resolve tidily and some don’t, but you have to think a while to determine which ones do which.

The ace cast – the names of which read like a Who’s Who of late-90s talent – keep the events from getting too cumbersome or letting Anderson’s reach exceed his grasp (as it has in both of his films since.) All of that and a career-best performance by Tom Cruise, too.

Ruthless People (1986) – For those who want a snarky holiday, this pitch-dark comedy from the creators of Airplane! showcases both Danny DeVito and Bette Midler’s scene-chewing gusto while still remaining a clever comic thriller.

Fashion marketer Sam Stone (DeVito) plans to murder his wife Barbara (Midler) until she’s kidnapped by a hapless couple (Judge Rheinhold and Helen Slater) that Stone cheated out of millions. But Barbara’s an impossible hostage, and Stone’s attempts to negotiate the ransom demands – the better to provoke the kidnappers into killing her – cause a storm of comic mishaps. Ugly, misanthropic, and shrill but quotably funny, it’s the right movie for the day after Christmas.

Night and the City (1950) American grifter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) moves through the post-war London underworld scheming to get out from beneath his employer’s (Francis L. Sullivan) iron grip. Pulled into his tragic plans are his kind girlfriend (Gene Tierney), an ageing champion wrestler (Stanislaus Zbyszko) and his employer’s wife (Googie Withers).

Noir auteur Jules Dassin (Brute Force) adapts Gerald Kersh’s novel by making London’s underbelly both the film’s antagonist and its explanation for the desperation of its inhabitants. Widmark is criminally underrated as a leading man, and he’s at his best here. The downbeat ending remains as haunting as any story put to film.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip (2006) – dismissed as an epic white elephant by critics and media virtually upon its debut, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The West Wing easily holds its own against contemporary Emmy-bait fare like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

When the veteran showrunner (Judd Hirsch) of a Saturday Night Live-like variety show has an on-air meltdown, a newly hired network executive (Amanda Peet) replaces him with the writer-director team (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) fired from the show’s staff several years before. Complicating the teams’ return are the writer’s pious, gorgeous ex-lover (Sarah Paulson) and the wrath of the network chief (Steven Weber) who canned them.

NBC cancelled the big-budget affair after 22 episodes, though lately the DVD box set has reached clearance sale prices. The first half-dozen episodes especially are simply unmissable, as this clip from the pilot illustrates.

We’ll be back later this week with five more films and another late, lamented television series that was long before its time. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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TV Party Tonight! Revisited

As a year of disappointing box office peters out, Generation X remains Hollywood’s favorite target audience.

Sooner or later, inevitably, this too will be a movie.

Towards the end of the 1980s there was a popular saying about the 60s that if you could remember that decade then you weren’t really there. It was meant both as a half-subtle reference to the era’s heady drug culture and a wry comment on the insincere nostalgia that became widespread as the Baby Boomers reached middle age. There’s no similar saying about the 80s yet, though two decades since its conclusion Hollywood continually returns to the decade’s nostalgia well again and again. For better or worse, you don’t have to remember the 80s because in many ways they’ve never truly ended.

Today one of the year’s biggest-scale action films debuts on DVD after middling box office last summer, though its relative failure possibly only underscores the concept’s small-screen foundation. The A-Team premiered around the middle of the 80s, the point which was arguably the most 80s-est segment of the era. Fondly remembered if not critically appreciated by members of Generation X, the TV series had a certain lowbrow charm thanks to the chemistry of its cast members (including a slumming George Peppard and an overachieving Mr. T) that didn’t translate as charmingly into what was basically a routine Hollywood action piece with A-minus list stars and an arsenal of CGI explosions. (On a larger level, in fact the phrase “fondly remembered if not critically appreciated” describes the bulk of Gen X’s cultural heritage.)

Probably Hollywood recognizes that the concepts and premises of many of the decade’s most enduring or best-remembered properties then lacked the technology to maximize their potential. Certainly this is true of Transformers, the mid-80s toy line and accompanying cartoon series that took on an entirely new second life, for better and worse, once combined with the CGI wizardry and narrative buffoonery of Michael Bay. The inevitable third installment of the franchise is set to premiere next July, featuring the fan-favorite Decepticon villain Shockwave in a prominent role. Similarly Disney no doubt has high hopes for this weekend’s Tron: Legacy. a sequel to the 1982 adventure that relied on computer graphics that today seem as primitive as the cave paintings of Lascaux. Against such practical matters the lure of Gen X nostalgia may seem only a welcome bonus, a way to reach young and ageing audiences at the same time.

Still, some updates and adaptations run into trouble when they stray too far from what the original property’s fanbase recognizes as loyal or true to the original. Last year’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra made money for Paramount Pictures but won few fans, with a lukewarm reception at best from the comic- and toy-collecting communities who ought to have comprised its profit base. Aside from a few and far between cosmetic similarities in costume design, the film didn’t look true to the 80s toy line and cartoon, taking instead a high-tech, glossy approach that contradicted the original’s somewhat gritty texture. A cursory search of IMDB shows no announced plans for a sequel.

The dog has an eyepatch. Awesome.

Getting past toy lines and comic books, the DVD and Blu-Ray markets have found a steady steam of income by releasing the decade’s television series in reasonably priced collections. With most of the era’s landmark series already at least partially collected, as well as some of its most critically dubious, many of the more obscure or less successful series have emerged over the last couple of years. The perfect example may be ABC’s Tales of the Gold Monkey, a 1930s-set adventure series that ran for just a single season following the 1982 juggernaut success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Though calling the series a “cult favorite” may exaggerate, it’s nevertheless fondly remembered for its location photography and colorful characters, and notable for a dearth of syndicated rerun offerings. Finding such shows on DVD obviously allows thirty-something (a term coined in the 80s, by the television industry) Gen X’ers – a generation taught to revere their discarded pop culture – the chance to revisit something dimly remembered, and to evaluate it all over again.

Though not Gen X enough for the movies, Dallas still ran for fourteen seasons.

One connecting thread to the more successful Gen X adaptations comes in part from the youthful appeal that each original property enjoyed. The most common remakes and updates come from shows and films that appealed to the 80s’ youth, a demographic now circling 40 but holding significantly more spending power than the era’s grown-ups, who are today retiring. The A-Team, like Knight Rider, the original V and other shows of the Brandon Tartikoff era at NBC, was marketed to adults but in reality enjoyed primarily by older children and younger teens. (I am focusing on Tartikoff because the lion’s share of shows associated with the decade were developed during his tenure as NBC head of entertainment programming.) Like The Karate Kid, a much greater box office success last summer, such series were aimed at teens but also absorbed by their slightly younger siblings who encountered their reruns on multiple cable channels. Both The A-Team and The Karate Kid were modernized and brought to theatres with comparative ease, while the far more successful – and older-skewing – 80s soap Dallas has had its film adaptation languishing in development for years.

There are plenty of other 80s shows to update first.

Eventually, the cycle of Gen X dotage will probably yield to the next era in pop culture, with the films and television series of the 1990s – a decade itself waterlogged with too much nostalgia – getting the update treatment. If the prospect of a Baywatch movie seems strange, we may as a public not be quite removed enough in time from its heyday to feel ready for their return. (How could we, when David Hasselhoff refuses to go away?) Remakes of shows still fresh in the public’s mind tend not to fare so well – witness the recent underperformances of the Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place reboots - while shows that are fondly if not quite clearly remembered continue to get remade – CBS’s Hawaii Five-O is as much a hit as any new offering in this dreary fall season. At a time when all four major networks desperately need a Next Big Thing and as the reality TV genre continues to show its age, the networks should remember to keep patience.  As viewers, we’re probably most receptive if we can forget a little before we begin to remember.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Despicable Me

Surprisingly charming animated comedy available on DVD and Blu-Ray next Tuesday, December 14.

For better or worse, Steve Carell is the face of American comedy right now, so an animated feature starring his voice was probably inevitable. Despicable Me, in which The Office star plays a somewhat bumbling, somewhat self-sabotaguing administrator with a heart of butterscotch, doesn’t ask Carell to step too far out of his Michael Scott safe zone. Nevertheless, it’s often a warmer and more affecting drama than you might expect, thanks to the earnestness of its supporting characters and – yes – the undeniable comic charm of those bumbling, busybody minions.

Carell voices Gru, a middle-ranks supervillain whose best days of evil may be behind him. Lethargic and slow to motivate his assistant Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and army of minions towards a grand evil project, he’s nevertheless resentful when a younger, more aggressive villain named Vector (Jason Segel) steals one of the Great Pyramids of Giza – a crime for which he sometimes gets the credit/blame. But when Gru and the minions steal a shrink ray Gru needs for his big project, Vector steals it from them, crippling the project. Gru is already in trouble with his creditors at the Bank of Evil and, desperate to get the shrink ray back, adopts three orphan girls to help him infiltrate Vector’s suburban fortress.

Of course, the girls’ affection and innocence help to warm Gru’s heart, giving him the self-confidence he needs to begin his long-dreamt plan to capture the moon. But work on that project conflicts with giving the girls the attention they need, resulting in some predictable family dynamics and misunderstandings that can seem, at times, sitcommish in their simplicity.

But that may be besides the point. It’s sort of unfair to expect any originality from the premise, or to chastise the filmmakers for not deviating from the plotline almost all of us have seen before. And to its credit the film never indulges in schlock value for the sake of moving Gru’s character towards accepting the girls. Quite the opposite. A gag involving an Iron Maiden torture device skirts the borders of good taste, as does a couple of dangling plot threads involving the orphanage and its mean-spirited director (Kristen Wiig.) The ending, showcasing yet another group dance scene, comes close to leaving a saccharine aftertaste but thankfully doesn’t last long enough to cause such damage.

The film works best in small moments that gather momentum into running gags or else dare you to notice them once: one of the ostensibly male minions dons a wig and dress and then, for reasons unexplained, continues to wear them for the rest of the plot; the doorway placard to the Bank of Evil carries the subtitle “formerly Lehman Brothers;” a weightless minion’s bliss grows as he floats out of Earth’s atmosphere. The moments are small, and don’t completely compensate for the scenes elsewhere that putter along or outright stall – and there are too many of those for the film to really be very good – but while they’re onscreen they’re potently effective.

Regarding the voice talent, many of the characters often seem to be trying to sound like someone else. Carell’s Gru voice, all slurred words and blocky diction, recalls Christopher Walken’s Saturday Night Live character The Continental. The minions, cute as they are visually, sometimes sound like the Jawas of Star Wars and at other times like Gremlins; sometimes they just sound like toy robots. Wiig gives the evil matron Miss Hattie all of Paula Dean’s exaggerated Southern drawl: a weird choice, yet somehow an effective one. The three child actors voicing the girls do their job well, even if the bulk of their dialogue is strictly unchallenging stock.

The film is, like so many aspiring blockbusters of the moment, also available in 3-D, and the many shots that pander to this new technology are not always as egregious as they could be. Sometimes they are, however, which for 2-D audiences might prove distracting. In fact, the story is just as entertaining in 2-D, as the comic potential exists without the gimmick and by and large realizes its promise. A sequel is already underway, but in the meantime this first adventure is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. Far from despicable, it’s a welcome and endearing surprise.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Inception

Unconvincing leads and too many script problems bring a rude awakening to Christopher Nolan’s latest thriller.

Inception (available December 7 in a variety of gift-ready DVD and Blu-Ray editions) will amaze you only as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, and it requires your more or less unqualified complicity to really work even as you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s reportedly worked for a decade on its script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, Inception is neither a misstep nor a leap forward, but something in-between and something less than its antecedents.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who it’s said severely punishes unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind so much as planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea – is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also spectacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention; maybe it wasn’t.

More troubling is Nolan’s in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is exceptional, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, November 2010 Edition

Our semi-monthly roundup of news and observations that didn’t get a full post the rest of the month.

The days are short, the lines to see Harry Potter are long, and the studios’ prestige pictures debut in just a few weeks. It’s autumn, though it feels like winter already, and the holidays are breathing down all our necks. What’s this mean for movies? It means it’s the best time of the year to go see movies.

At the end of every month or so we collect all the news items that we wanted to discuss on the blog but never got the chance, thanks to a time crunch or lack of space or scheduling or any of a dozen other reasons. They’re included below.

Nielsen in Forbidden Planet (1956), his second film appearance

1. First and foremost, we want to extend our sympathies to the family and friends of Leslie Nielsen, who passed away November 28 following complications from pneumonia. Originally the epitome of Cold War era lantern-jawed seriousness, Nielsen later found universal acclaim subverting his straight arrow image in satires including Airplane! and the Naked Gun trilogy, in which his deadpan delivery made every ridiculous statement believable. To pay him tribute one way: probably everyone on Earth named Shirley knows Nielsen’s name. He was 84 years old.

2. We were also saddened to learn of the passing, just one day later, of director Irwin Kerschner, whose film credits include Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back but also Return of a Man Called Horse, The Eyes of Laura Mars, and the James Bond feature Never Say Never Again. When Kershner asked why George Lucas had selected him to direct the immediate follow-up to the initial Star Wars film, Lucas replied, “You know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you’re not Hollywood.” Family members say he died at his Los Angeles home after a long illness.

Oscarbait: The Great Emancipator

3. Daniel Day-Lewis will reportedly play Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s long-simmering biopic about the nation’s 16th President, a role that for years was connected to Liam Neeson. Honestly, it’s tough to imagine the hammy, everything up-front style Day-Lewis relished using in overheated claptrap like Nine and There Will Be Blood doing justice to the man who steered America through its greatest crisis, or conveying the limitless dignity of his legend. We do imagine an Oscar highlight reel-friendly clip of Day-Lewis bellowing ”E-man-ci-PAY-tion!” however, and that depresses us already.

And we would rather look at Hathaway than Baldwin any day of the week.

4. Speaking of the Academy Awards, the news that comparatively younger stars James Franco and Anne Hathaway will host the 2011 ceremony caused a minor kerfuffle last week, with some speculating their selection was a blatant grab by AMPAS at the coveted Gen-Y demographic. We think their selection is a good idea, but not for that reason. Hollywood is desperately in need of new blood at its vanguard right now, and Hathaway and Franco are both movie stars in the classical sense, full of elegance and poise. Recent, more mature hosts including Hugh Jackman and Chris Rock have failed to resonate with any audience, and last year’s Steve Martin-Alec Baldwin pairing felt winded and stale. It’s time for something new.

5. As we’ve mentioned once or twice before, the term “turkey” to refer to a box office dud actually springs from a Hollywood practice of the 1940s, when films with little studio confidence received a late-November release date. The studios imagined no one wanted to go the movies if they could spend time with family instead – obviously, times change. This November has a seen a rain of turkeys (yeah, we’re WKRP In Cincinnati fans, too) all over the box office, including Burlesque, Morning Glory, and perhaps especially The Next Three Days. There’s no way of pinpointing why that last film has underperformed, though there are any number of reasons – Russell Crowe’s waning star power, a crowded release calendar, and almost nonexistent word of mouth; actually, substitute Cher or Harrison Ford for Crowe and the same theories apply to the other two films as well. Whatever, watch as all three are used as more ammunition for the tired “adults don’t go to the movies anymore” sermon that goes around the Web every few months.

6. The trailer to Green Lantern debuted this past month, giving audiences their first look at Ryan Reynolds as the hero who’s become DC Comics’ most profitable franchise after Batman and Superman. If the Martin Campbell-directed film is anything like the scattershot trailer below, fans may find themselves in for an epic disappointment. Besides the obviously derivative setups and unconvincing CGI, the preview suffers from a wandering tone and flat romantic tension and jokes. Is the film going to play the concept straight? Is it meant to be camp? It’s hard to tell one way or the other, but what’s on-screen looks awkward and a little self-conscious, as if the cast and crew had little confidence in the story’s concepts. Here’s hoping they’ve got it figured out.

Is it a good sign or bad that the trailer wastes about ten frames before showing Reynolds in his underwear? Probably a bad one.

Does whatever a spider can: Garfield

7. Meanwhile the Spider-Man reboot continues to take shape as the first superhero indie film. Following the hiring of (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb and rising star Andrew Garfield (The Social Network) to lead, recent casting announcements have included Denis Leary as a NYPD captain, Campbell Scott as Peter Parker’s father and Martin Sheen as Parker’s beloved Uncle Ben. Leary, Scott, and Sheen probably collectively appeared in half the indie cinema of the 90s; additional casting includes former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Julianne Nicholson, who’s appeared in indie films including Flannel Pajamas and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for more than a decade. Emma Stone (Easy A) also appears as Parker’s love interest.

What's in a name? Raymond-James, Logue

8. Finally, we want to end the month with an appeal to NBC and FX to save two very good freshman shows that haven’t received the ratings they deserved. The Event started strong in the Nielsens but has fallen off sharply, but we believe that downturn is only temporary as casual viewers tune out and the show builds a loyal following. Finely acted with frequent moments of tangible suspense and an intriguing overarching story, the show lives up to the quality implied by its Lost-meets-24 premise, and deserves some patience from NBC.

The quality of FX’s Terriers, meanwhile, has built on its strong start, with the last two or three episodes of its just-concluded season giving Mad Men a run for its superb money. The whole world knows that the show’s marketing was a misfire last summer – dogs know it – but that shouldn’t kill the drama’s chances to become something even better in a second season. FX  is expected to make a decision next week.

Good news for the show’s fans: its irresistible theme song, “Gunfight Epiphany,” is now available for download on iTunes.

We’ll be back next week, trying to convince you not to rent or download Inception. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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