Review: Paul

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s close encounter comedy revives the comic adventures of the 1980s.

Geek culture has entered the American mainstream, not from any cultural impetus or because the film and television industries realized the tremendous storytelling potential of its legions of franchises. Rather, money – the fortunes to be made in celebrating and exploiting what was once an outlying, fringe element of society – is too good to pass up. Too, it helps that some of the best comedic minds around right now proudly wave their geek cred.

That crossover continues in glorious scale, and in fact probably makes its grand arrival, with the very funny satire/homage Paul, the funniest American film since last year’s The Other Guys and a career high for several of its creative forces. Not for the faint of sensibilities and especially not for anyone humorless about their purpose driven life, it’s nevertheless bawdy, smart fun for the rest of us.

After years of anticipation, lifelong British geeks and (to quote geek tycoon Kevin Smith) hetero life-mates Graeme (Simon Pegg) and Clive (Nick Frost) embark on a trip across America, beginning with a visit to the San Diego Comic-Con and continuing with a sojourn to the sites of reported extraterrestrial contact throughout the American Southwest. The two are pleasantly astonished by American excess, drinking in the oddities of the alien-themed tourist traps but mostly remaining at a safe distance within their rented RV. Clive, though, is restive after a convention meeting with their favorite science fiction author (Jeffrey Tambor) proves underwhelming.

Driving along a desolate highway at night and fleeing two bullying rednecks (David Koechner and Jesse Plemons), the two witness a black sedan fly crashing off the road. Investigating the wreck, they encounter the ET code-named Paul (voiced by Set Rogen) by his government caretakers. Paul had crashed to Earth decades before, and since then has covertly advised the U.S. military and the American entertainment industry. Now with his knowledge all but exhausted by his top-secret hosts, Paul fears vivisection at the hands of the shadowy “Big Guy” controlling his concealment. He begs for Graeme and Clive’s help in reaching an unspecified destination – “You’ll know it when you see it, guys,” he tells them - before government Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) catches up to him.

At times evoking memories of comic book icon and movie disaster Howard The Duck, Paul is no one’s idea of an enlightened being. Quick to curse and nursing a love for cigarettes, pot, and easy living, he’s nonetheless privy to cosmic secrets that leave mere humans scratching their heads. Able to camouflage himself to his surroundings and to heal minor energies through energy transference, he’s also a stronger personality than his human cohorts, more assured by way of being confident of his place in the universe.

Stopping overnight at the Pearly Gates trailer ranch, the trio picks up an unintentional hostage in Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a creationist and devout Christian immediately at odds with Paul’s very existence. When Paul heals an eye that was damaged during childhood, she resolves to live the most debauched life she can, arguing if there’s no such thing as sin then her behavoir can’t be wrong. “I plan to fornicate a lot!” she tells a smitten Graeme.

The group inches towards their destination while eluding Zoil, Ruth’s bible-thumping father (John Carroll Lynch) and two junior agents (Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio) looking to prove themselves to the Big Guy. A detour to the site of Paul’s arrival on Earth gains them another passenger, the woman (Blythe Danner) who as a girl saved him from the wreckage of the UFO. Paul regrets her involvement, and the social ostracism it caused, and wants to make amends before leaving.

Ultimately the group reaches the site of the alien rendezvous, escaping the agent’s clutches and facing down the Big Guy in a series of surprising twists. (The villain’s identity is meant to be a surprise, so I won’t spoil it here.) A neat epilogue brings the story back around to the Comic-Con, where Clive and Graeme revel in the success Paul’s inspiration has brought them.

Written by Pegg and Frost, the script under the direction of Greg Mottola plays as a more well-rounded and mature effort than the duo’s previous Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and another accomplishment for Mottola following 2009′s deeply underrated Adventureland. Their American costars – Rogen, Wiig, Heder, Bateman – understand the deadpan glee the two bring to their stories, and adjust their performances accordingly. Wiig, probably comedy’s next great leading woman, is alternately melancholy and explosive as the newly- and happily-unsheltered Ruth; Bateman, an odd choice to play a heavy, twists Michael Bluth’s legendary sarcasm to a new pungency. Hader and Lo Truglio perform the least, though their parts are written barely above the level of stock characters.

Only once does the film seem to lose its comic footing, during an excessively violent chase sequence that sees two characters blown up and another shot in cold blood. Though Pegg and Frost have said the film is an homage to Steven Spielberg (the script is loaded with references to his 1980s films, and even includes a brief but oddly tepid phone conversation between Paul and Spielberg as himself), the influence of other comedy adventures from the decade stays readily apparent. In its occasionally unwieldy fusion of snarky comedy and special effects-driven adventure the film sometimes resembles, probably deliberately, 80s classics including Ghostbusters, Spies Like Us, and Neighbors. (We can easily imagine a 1985 version starring John Candy and Dan Ackroyd as the geeks, with Bill Murray as the voice of Paul.)

Though it’s not necessary, and indeed may only have bogged things down, for as intelligent as the film can sometimes become the absence of explanation or discussion of geek culture – its sources and enduring resistance to mainstream ridicule as well as the passage of time – remains an odd emptiness at the center of Graeme and Clive’s characters. They’re, at heart, intelligent and intrepid men, and their fascination with three-breasted alien women and samurai swords seems at cross-purposes to their capacity for daring. It’s suggested, vaguely, that a life of sci-fi fascination gave them such strengths, but only barely and not enough to resonate through the entire film. 

Still, few modern comedies even try as much at once as Paul, and if there’s not room for everything the filmmakers could have done there’s still quite a lot – including at least a dozen inspired references to all those 80s sci-fi adventures. Listen for them pepper their way through the dialogue, because they demonstrate the affection that fuels the entire movie. You don’t have to catch all of them, but you’ll probably feel closer to the characters if you do.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Fighter

Multiple-Oscar winning performances elevate David O. Russell’s true-life boxer saga to near-modern classic status.

Boxing fascinates filmmakers probably more than any other sport, and the list of great boxing films reads like an honor roll of career-best performances. In the 1940′s Robert Ryan and John Garfield played embattled fighters in, respectively, The Set-Up and Body and Soul. Later, Stacey Keach did arguably his best work in John Huston’s Fat City (1973), and likewise Robert DeNiro’s turn as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980) was probably his masterpiece. Sylvester Stallone, obviously, will be remembered best for Rocky Balboa, if only for the quality of that franchise’s first two installments.

With David O. Russell’s The Fighter Mark Wahlberg joins that mighty company, creating the best performance of his thirty-film career. It’s his bad luck that he’s surrounded by a trio of white-hot co-stars. Oscar winners Christian Bale and Melissa Leo are joined by the increasingly masterful Amy Adams, and while it’s inaccurate to say any of them chew the scenery or steal their scenes, too often they threaten to eclipse Wahlberg’s disciplined and craftsmanlike approach to the true-life part of hardscrabble welterweight Mickey Ward. The movie is too long, and too often loses focus, but in the end the film is all about performance and character anyway, and at worst it never capsizes as a result.

As a story The Fighter goes several rounds with severe structural problems. Much of its first hour is split – unevenly, arrythmically – between Ward’s bleak life of training and paving roads in Lowell, Massachusetts and depicting the descent of Ward’s half-brother Dicky Eklund (Bale) into crack addiction and self-loathing. Eklund was once a fighter himself, even at one time entering the ring with Sugar Ray Leonard, but those days are long behind him, and he knows it. A HBO camera crew follows the brothers, with Eklund bragging of a comeback to the Lowell townspeople. The script (six writers are given credit for screenplay and story) drifts back and forth between the two, illustrating their lives in rust-belt Lowell in all its dreary meanness. As a result the main character is frequently hard to identify – Bale is so forceful, and given so much screen time, that his part strains against supporting character status.

Ward keeps his head down preparing for low-end fights and working to improve his boxing status past “stepping stone” – a fighter that true contenders advance over on their way to a title shot. He’s spun his wheels for years, it seems, thanks to the arrogant incompetence of his mother and manager Alice Eklund (Leo). Alice, blindly favoring Eklund, bungles Ward’s chances again and again; Micky, too loyal by half to his half-brother and mother, follows their flawed guidance.

Things pick up as the HBO crew dogs Eklund’s debauched existence and Ward’s struggle to assert himself as a person, even after a fight with an opponent twenty pounds heavier leaves him half-demolished. Hope arrives in the form of bartender Charlene Fleming (Adams), a woman tough enough to stand up for Ward against his mother. She’s so self-assured, in fact, that you often wonder if perhaps in forsaking his mother for Charlene’s guidance Ward didn’t simply trade one virago for another. It’s a credit to the film, and to Adams, that Charlene is never reduced to the “woman as life-giving force” trope common in underdog stories; she remains a character in her own right throughout, with an individual story that’s worth watching.

Of course all of this character building has to lead somewhere. After Eklund heads to jail after a lurid, hare-brained scheme to raise money for Ward’s training the film centers firmly on Ward’s struggle to prepare seriously for the first time in his life, aided not just by Charlene but by his father (Jack McGee) and a local police sergeant (Ward’s real-life trainer Mickey O’Keefe, playing himself.) Eklund stews in prison as Ward climbs the boxing ladder, especially after the HBO special lays bare his drug-wrecked squalor. He leaves prison detoxed and ready to help his half-brother in an upcoming title bout with brutal opponent Shea Neary (Anthony Molinari).

As a fighter Ward is neither prodigy nor hopeless cause, lacking the potential for greatness one might expect from such underdog stories but not suffering from a complete dearth of talent, either. He’s a journeyman, mediocre fighter with easily identifiable flaws and weaknesses in and out of the ring. It’s arguable that Eklund was the more naturally gifted pugilist, but the film avoids any such speculation in favor or this-is-now immediacy, which keeps it from sinking into family melodrama. Wahlberg wisely modulates his performance to show Ward’s plod-through-it attitude, a potent counterpoint to the hot air of Eklund and their mother. Ward walks the walk while Eklund talks the talk, and (almost subtly) wins audience sympathy as a sly result.

To his credit, Russell is canny enough as a director to allow his actors room to move within scenes, zeroing in facial expressions when important but careful to give Bale plenty of room to convey Eklund’s outsized, narcissistic charm. Not for nothing, but the film begins with Bale perched on the edge of a couch, full and center frame, as if ready to pounce on the audience. It’s a fitting image of what’s to come, even if it does help create the “who’s the main character” confusion complained about above. The director sometimes runs into problems knowing when to cut a scene, and when to break away from a shot or trim establishing sequences that don’t earn their keep within the storylines. It’s a small detail, but with so much story to tell everything that’s included ought to carry its weight. The parts that don’t seem especially out of place by comparison.

But like Russell’s earlier Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster, sharp supporting performances help to fill in the gaps created by the bumpy dramaturgy. Besides the practically flawless Leo, veteran character actor McGee creates a warm, almost nurturing presence within the half-brothers’ lives. McGee has made a career of playing characters named “Chief” and “Sarge,” most recently on FX’s Rescue Me. To see him expand his talents in a fully written part is true fun, and rewarding besides. As a whole The Fighter isn’t perfect, but it’s a great film in a year of mediocre ones, and deserves its place among the champions of boxing cinema.

- Michael Kabel

Review: Battle: Los Angeles

Aaron Eckhart leads a platoon of stock characters into an epic clash of genre tropes.

One of the most common interpretations of science-fiction movies is that they represent, in a loosely allegorical way, the tensions and anxieties of their period. War movies, to invoke equally commonplace analysis, serve either to help soothe our anxieties about a conflict currently carrying on or to act as a catharsis for war’s aftermath and resonance. Don’t worry about such matters as subtext or meaning if you go see Battle: Los Angeles, the science fiction war spectacle directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Darkness Falls.) The film is an exercise in spectacle, sp0t-welding the hoariest conventions and clichés from both genres into an uneasy alliance that only sometimes engages beyond the crash-boom level of passive interest.

Aaron Eckhart, who by now ought to be considered among Hollywood’s most versatile actors, plays Marine staff sergeant Michael Nantz, a decorated Iraq War veteran despite his waning physical prime and lurking suspicions among his fellow soldiers regarding his leadership skills. The very day Nantz signs his retirement papers, a meteorite shower off the coast of nearby Los Angeles turns into a siege by a terrifying extraterrestrial force. The aliens move swiftly and decisively, devastating Santa Monica and heading inland towards downtown. Nantz, against his protestations, must lead a platoon to a forward operating base to assist in the city’s defense.

The Marines he leads fit vaguely defined and immediately recognizable character types: the officer’s training school family man on his first mission; the virgin yokel full of aw, shucks naiveté; the easygoing soldier planning his wedding and his smartass buddy. The group is assigned to answer a distress call emanating from a police station inside the city, but must complete the mission before an Air Force bomber squadron launches a full counter-attack against the ground-based alien hostiles.

Nantz and his met set off towards the police station, encountering several ambushes along their route. To the credit of the movie’s realism, the enemy soldiers are not unrealistically hard to kill or malevolent in their strategy. Like the Marines, their movements are orderly, disciplined, and goal-oriented. The Marines, largely outgunned (the aliens shoot giant tracer-fire projectiles) and outmaneuvered, fight on despite dwindling numbers and a growing sense of panic. A rendezvous with an Army group allows them to add an Air Force intelligence analyst (Michelle Rodriguez) who provides important expository details for the remainder of the plot.

Once at the police station they find the survivors: a kindly local resident (Michael Pena) and his son; a veterinarian (Bridget Moynahan) and her cherubic niece. The squad captures an alien soldier, finding its weak spot (“Aim to the right of where its heart should be!”) by stabbing it repeatedly. As the aliens storm the police station the squad and their evacuees escape by hot-wiring a city bus, leading to a firefight atop a freeway overpass that becomes the film’s most exciting set piece.

Borrowing from the traditions of both its genres, the film has a rigidly episodic structure, with characterization and character interaction acting as the paste that holds the different fight scenes together. Screenwriter Christopher Bertolini (The General’s Daughter) builds the action sequences one atop another, so that the tension builds for the characters even if our concern for them does not. Many of the Marines die, including several wounded during a helicopter crash that anyone who saw last year’s undervalued The Losers will see coming well in advance.

The film’s last third, maybe more than any other action movie of recent years, makes for a spectacular (if probably wholly inaccurate) recruitment pitch for the Marine Corps itself. Given the opportunity to withdraw to safety behind friendly lines, Nantz and his men resolve to find and destroy the alien command center buried deep within the city’s sewer system. It’s explained halfway through the story, via televised exposition, that the aliens feed themselves and fuel their war machine with water. Earth has the most liquid water in our solar system, making us a target. As movie logic goes, that’s not bad.

The climactic firefight, in which the Marines employ their hard-won tactical knowledge while calling in a missile strike against the base, makes for the most suspenseful part of the story; it’s also the part with the most convincing special effects. For whatever griping about clichés that are readily apparent elsewhere, that the script uses the missile strike scenario in favor of more hackneyed story devices – Nantz or one of the others taking a bag of explosives on a suicide run, someone makes a last-second, lucky shot with a rocket launcher, et cetera -  helps elevate the entire film away from the mire of formula that seems always at the feet of each new plot development. 

As for the performances, Eckhart gives Nantz more dimension than the character as written probably deserves, shading him with determination, regret, and at times a self-destruct impulse that fuels one of the better action pieces. (Until it’s punctuated with creaky dialogue like “that’s some real John Wayne shit, man!”) Pena, playing an everyman who’s not as helpless as the Marines expect, overachieves in his stock part. As for the two women, Moynahan has seldom had much to do in her previous roles except look handsome; a capable character actress nevertheless, here she manages to be appealing and convincing even when covered in with an inch-thick layer of dust. Rodriguez, though still too quick to deploy the scowl that bogged down so much of Lost‘s second season, has a conviction here that was seldom seen in that series.

Finally, concept artist Paul Gerrard deserves notice for his work designing the alien military, giving their machines and weapons both a unified look but also an unusual complexity. The invaders have their own military organization and internal logic, with officers appearing different from foot soldiers and machinery bearing a distinct – if creepy – functionality. The aliens themselves are exotic looking without seeming overly elaborate or egregiously unsettling. Even their body parts show a kind of thoughtful design. If only the rest of the film, especially its characterization, demonstrated that much consideration.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Next Three Days

Russell Crowe stars but Elizabeth Banks stuns in Paul Haggis’ uneven melodrama.

For whatever comment it makes on the current state of American movies, The Next Three Days deserves at least some credit for offering a story to adult audiences that doesn’t include a mysterious disease, contrived family dynamics, or a twist ending that warps the characters’ motivations into a post-ironic jumble. Though the film isn’t perfect – it’s too sluggish in its first half and too scattered in its second – it’s intermittently entertaining and at times, sometimes despite itself, riveting in its suspense and character exploration. Strictly as a rental, it’s a good use of your money.

The setup is almost irresistible for fans of the pulpy thriller: community college professor John Brennan (Russell Crowe) lives a peaceful existence in Pittsburgh with his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) and son Luke (Ty Simpkins). Lara has a fiery temper with other women, but when police arrest her for the murder of her boss John stands by her, bankrupting the family savings obtaining appeals while raising Luke alone. Lara, a diabetic, suffers with the guilt and isolation of three years of waiting in the city’s mammoth country jail, her spirits kept buoyed only by her family visits.

Still, her hopes continue to sink, slowly but surely, and John starts formulating a plan to free her. Much of the film’s second half-hour depicts his halting and sometimes foolhardy attempts to plan a jailbreak: the failed experiments prompted by YouTube tutorial videos, his own naivety, bad circumstances. As a criminal John is, at first, something of a wash, and the script mines unusual sympathy in depicting his everyman academic approach to crime fail humbly and miserably.

John searches out the help of enigmatic ex-con Damon Pennington (Liam Neeson), who we learn has staged seven escape attempts but couldn’t live with the fear of getting caught again. The advice he gives, cynically and without hesitation, is so logical and pragmatic in its efficiency that John is immediately taken in, inspired as much as convinced that his plan is feasible. Neeson makes the most of his single scene. He doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen him do before, but it’s effective for what’s required, as are turns by Daniel Stern as the family lawyer and Brian Dennehy as John’s father. (It’s a shame that the once perennial Dennehy no longer makes many screen appearances. He’s a paragon American character actor.)

Though adapted from the 2008 French Film Pour Elle, Haggis and screenwriters Fred Cavaye and Guillaume Lemans (creators of the original) wisely avoid Americanizing their leads with a lot of wealth and sex appeal. John and Lara are a middle class family in a middle class town, working not particularly lucrative jobs and living in a relatively simple house. If they were affluent the film would appear so much more disingenuous, and John’s desperation that much more specious. Their relative poverty puts a cold light on the necessity of their actions.

Those actions, unfortunately, are ultimately too few and far between and too lethargic in its execution to emerge as more than occasionally suspenseful viewing. The lack of suspense is partly visual: Pittsburgh’s windy autumn streets and cozy Craftsman homes seem too languid for the events within them; even a meth lab appears relatively Americana. Crowe, though nimble in portraying a loving father and husband, seldom allows John’s dread and panic to boil over. It’s a performance that’s perhaps too reserved and deliberate to compellingly work.

Did anyone else see this jacket and immediately think of Star Trek:TNG?

By way of comparison Banks displays formidable dramatic talent in the tougher of the two roles, explaining in a handful of scenes why John would move heaven and earth to save her. We can also understand, thanks to an awkwardly staged prologue that displays Lara’s anger, why her innocence might seem, to some, a little suspect. You might spend a lot of the film waiting for her to admit she’s guilty; she does, but Haggis, Cavaye and Lemans put a sharp touch on the scene you might not expect.  Banks has so far had few chances to display her dramatic chops  (Oliver Stone’s disorganized W. notwithstanding), but here she more than keeps up with Crowe’s formidable screen presence. Taking into account her comedic prowess, she’s a formidable talent; alongside Michelle Monaghan and Gretchen Mol, she might be one of the most unfairly unsung actresses currently working.

The plot does pick up steam once John sets his plans in motion, beginning with a taut sequence in which he robs a drug dealer (Kevin Corrigan) of the money he’ll need to carry out the escape. And, as with films such as Ocean’s 11 and the Mission: Impossible series, there’s a satisfaction in watching his best laid plans come to fruition (many details of which are too inventive to spoil here.) But there’s story waiting to unfold after Lara is free, much of it hers, and if the film drags on to the last moment – including an exculpatory denouement that goes on entire minutes longer than it needs – they’re additional time for Banks to prove herself again and again, so you probably won’t mind.

Seen as a group, Haggis’ films have a habit of overreaching – In The Valley of Elah, Quantum of Solace, Crash, to name a few – and while here the film’s objective seems a little fuzzier in comparison the results are perhaps as a result just vaguely underwhelming. Crowe could use a good film about now, and Banks deserves one, but it’s not this one. Still, at the risk of damning it with faint praise if you’ve got the time to spend it’s worth  your time to watch.

-Michael Kabel

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Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in a sophisticated, elegant thriller of predestination.

There’s an old proverb, certainly hundreds of years old and probably British, that begins with a horseshoe losing a nail and ultimately leading, through a cascade of dire consequences, to the collapse of an entire kingdom. Such small twists of fate – seemingly random yet maddeningly well- and ill-timed alike, holding the potential for disaster or joy - lie at the intelligent heart of The Adjustment Bureau. Helmed by first-time director George Nolfi (who also adapted the Philip K. Dick short story), the film trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions and rewards their patience with genuine suspense and characterization of an elegant, old-school Hollywood flavor. Until its few moments, when the script veers into a pat ending, it’s probably the best new release of the year to date.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past has cost him a Senate race that, it’s explained to us, most voters felt certain he’d win. Moments before his concession speech he encounters Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

But forces are literally conspiring to keep them apart: Norris has been watched since childhood by “adjusters,” men in mid-20th Century clothing who periodically fine-tune reality on behalf of a vaguely defined ”Chairman” who lays out intricate plans for everyone on Earth. Norris and Elise must not be together, the group’s leader (John Slattery) explains, because their togetherness violates the plan intended for Norris. (The Chairman, we learn later, wants him to be President.) When Norris intrudes on the adjustment team tweaking the venture capital firm where he works, the team makes him swear to not pursue Elise again. Confused and frightened, he agrees.

The film jumps ahead three years, to when a chance encounter brings the two would-be lovers together again. But the adjustment team is right there to intervene, even as one of their number (Anthony Mackie) decides to work on their behalf. Norris’ attempt to reach Elise through narrow Manhattan streets, while the adjusters manipulate reality and circumstance around him, makes for an unusual but gripping chase sequence that’s breathlessly staged and handsomely photographed.

Comparisons to last year’s far murkier Inception are unavoidable, probably, but where that film sacrificed plot for spectacle Nolfi’s script and direction keep emphasis on character – particularly Norris’, but also allowing Elise ample screen time to develop into something more than the object of Norris’ obsession. She’s a well-rounded character in her own right, deserving of happiness and even sometimes pitiable: suffering without benefit of knowledge of the adjuster’s machinations, much of her life through the story is lonely and frustrated. (How many of us have wondered, sometime in our life, if vast forces weren’t keeping us alone? Elise becomes our proxy for that dilemma.)

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver spotless performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability at the same time. His performance isn’t for a moment showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. In this way, too, the film is too smart for that.

Can you imagine if the plan for your life included her?

Blunt, without benefit of Damon’s comparatively greater screen time, matches Damon’s restraint while making her character alluring on several levels. In that initial men’s room scene, her dialogue suggests a free-spirited type similar to the over-used and (and perhaps over-celebrated) pixie dream girl trope. Thankfully Elise the character outgrows that shoebox in seconds; she’s too old for the impish behavior suggested by the scene, for one thing; for another, such contrivance would derail the film’s better aspirations. Blunt’s best moment in the film comes later, when Elise confronts Norris for abandoning her: rather than allow herself to sink into bitchiness or spite, her hurt and anger fuel her reasoning with him.

The adjusters, meanwhile, carry frustrations with their job but keep a brusque professionalism with each other. John Slattery, playing the adjuster Richardson, makes an effective foil for Norris’ determination, at once amused by the humans’ resolve but wary of the consequences of defiance. His impatience and disappointment with Mackie’s rebel angel, communicated with impatient gestures and harried asides, speaks volumes without lapsing into bald exposition. “Three years later and I’m still cleaning up your mess,” Richardson tells him bitterly, as they pass in a hallway. You get the sense the adjusters feel as mystified by the Chairman’s plans as anyone else, but their’s isn’t to question why, no matter how much the job drains them.

In turn this only raises larger issues, but they’re the issues that the movie wants to face. Predestination is an old, old subject in art and culture, and here the film’s split-the-difference explanation of determinism grinding against free will might either intrigue or annoy you, depending on how you felt about such matters in the first place. Thompson (Terence Stamp, imperious as ever), the adjuster’s “hammer” sent in to separate Norris and Elise once and for all, explains the rises and falls of human history as a series of interspersed periods of free will and divine engineering. Agree with him or not, his perspective is both smart and chilling. The film’s submerged theme – that there is a plan, but it’s imperfect, and it changes all the time – is also troubling on any number of levels. The film doesn’t provide any answers, but  there’s something to say for a mainstream film of this day and age even asking the questions.

With so much done right and most often done very well, it’s almost inevitable that the film underwhelm a little at the ending. It does, but only mildly and only very narrowly. A resolution that allows for – well, a happy ending, honestly – comes along too tidily and too conveniently to earn its place among the scenes preceding it; listen to the dialogue closely and you may even be reminded of The Wizard of Oz, and realistically we can imagine that wasn’t Dick’s or Nolfi’s intent. Until those last moments, however, The Adjustment Bureau is handsomely excellent filmmaking.

- Michael Kabel

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Jane Russell: 1921-2011

Iconic actress of Hollywood’s golden age passes away at 89.

Jane Russell, the stauesque leading lady of such classic films as The Outlaw, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and His Kind of Woman, died yesterday of respiratory-related illness at her home in Santa Maria, California. She was 89 years old.

Born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell in 1921 in tiny Bedmidji, Minnesota, Russell spent much of her childhood in California, later studying acting at Reinhardt’s Theatrical Workshop while working as a chiropodist’s receptionist. In 1940 she caught the attention of RKO Studios chief Howard Hughes, who noticed her while visiting the doctor’s office. Hughes signed her to a seven year contract, casting her first in his Billy The Kid adventure The Outlaw. The film showcased her voluptuous figure, particularly her plentiful bustline, and production code regulations and censorship issues held up the film’s wide release for more than five years.

A popular legend circulated for years that Hughes constructed an underwire bra specifically to amplify her cleavage. Russell denied wearing the bra onscreen years later, explaining she was given it to wear but felt it uncomfortable and wore her own instead. Nevertheless her 5’7″‘ full figured frame became the subject of public fascination and many jokes. Bob Hope (with whom she co-starred in the Western spoofs The Paleface and Son of Paleface) once explained culture as “the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands.”

Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Russell began a musical career following the success of The Outlaw, achieving two hit singles while singing with the Kay Kyser Orchestra. In 1950 she released the hit single “Kisses and Tears” with Frank Sinatra and the Modernaires. Additional roles including The Young Widow and His Kind of Woman, in which she started opposite longtime friend Robert Mitchum, continued through the late 1940s and early 50s.

In 1953 she co-starred with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a frothy adaptation of the Broadway musical comedy about two gold-digging showgirls finding love on a trans-Atlantic sea voyage. The film sometimes showcased Monroe at Russell’s expense, though Russell nevertheless won critical acclaim for her comic timing and delivery. Two years later she starred with Jeanne Crain in the semi-sequel Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, though that film failed to receive the notoriety of its predecessor.

A devout Christian, Russell co-founded the Hollywood Christian Group vocal quartet, whose 1954 single “Do Lord” sold two million copies. She spent much of the 50s performing in nightclubs throughout America and internationally, occasionally returning to the screen in movies including The Tall Men (1955) and The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956.) Her film appearances waned after 1960, with Russell herself complaining she had become too old for most roles. In 1971 she made her Broadway debut in Company and later starred in a series of commercials for the Playtex Cross-Your-Heart Bra. In 2009 Glamour magazine proclaimed her one of the forty Most Iconic Movie Goddesses of all time.

By way of tribute, here’s Ms. Russell performing “You’ll Know,” from His Kind of Woman. Our deepest sympathies to her friends and loved ones.