Reviews: Whiteout, Repo Men

Making sense of bad movies that come from good books.

Released with vastly different amounts of fanfare in 2009 and 2010 but experiencing similar box office failures, Whiteout and Repo Men nevertheless both come from various forms of print media. Whiteout was adapted from an Oni Press graphic novel written by frequent Batman creator Greg Rucka. Repo Men was adapted from Eric Garcia’s 2009 novel The Repossession Mambo. Neither film can be considered especially good, except possibly within the broader criteria of their genres, though they’re both at times entertaining.

Oddly, despite vast differences in setting, subject matter, and mood, in many ways the same failures and shortcomings undermine both, and those shortcomings cast a dreary comment on so much of what’s wrong with modern American mainstream cinema. In short, they’re different films with the same problems, and the problems are tediously, balefully typical.

Of the two, Whiteout is the better film, and then in many ways only barely. Too formulaic where it could be innovative and leaden in pace and momentum where it ought to run, it’s nevertheless just competent enough at manipulating its B-movie tropes to remain entertaining for much of its 101-minute runtime. Despite its exotic setting and innovative take on the traditional closed-door mystery, director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia) allows too much of the plot to dissolve into routine slasher-flick motions, skipping over plot and character development in favor of action that seldom looks realistic and almost never captivates.

U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale, starving herself into an approximation of Victoria Beckham) is the sole law enforcement officer at a scientific research station at the South Pole. Two days before the station shuts down for the long Antarctic winter – and Stetko makes her first departure from its grounds – she’s obliged to investigate a dead body spotted on the ice sheets. Journeying out to the crime scene with neophyte pilot Delfy (Columbus Short), with help from the station’s doctor (Tom Skerrit) she learns the man was killed by an axe and belonged to a research team searching for meteorites.

The team, it seems, had also discovered the wreckage of a Soviet plane downed more than fifty years before (the demise of the Russian plane and its crew is shown in violent detail during the film’s prologue), and that its cargo hold still contains a mysterious, if potentially priceless, treasure. Stetko and Delfy follow the scientists’ trail to an abandoned Russian base, then team with a UN investigator (Gabriel Macht) to pursue the killer.

Too much of the film’s middle act involves Stetko running from an axe-wielding, masked stalker, whether through blinding snow drifts (that give the film its name) or within the decrepit or sanitary confines of the research bases. Beckinsale is up to the physical demands – even if much of the film is obviously created on a soundstage – and manages to make the wounded, haunted Stetko sympathetic without stumping for the audience’s pity. Of any modern comics writer (and by extension, comics writers ever) Rucka shows the most acuity and intelligence in writing convincingly tough, feminine protagonists, and there’s some rough echo of that dexterity at work in her performance.

It’s everything around her that feels rote, from the eventually duplicitous mentor figure to the gore of the prologue’s firefight to the red herrings represented by Macht and Short’s otherwise trustworthy male presences. Short and Macht, two very good character actors, aren’t given much to do except wander around on the occasionally fake-looking ice and look worried beneath their parkas. Skerrit is charming, and effortless (though it’s depressing to remember he was in M*A*S*H – how Hollywood sometimes treats is veterans) and his concluding scene offers one of the film’s few genuine surprises.

Ultimately, though, Whiteout is a slasher film in exotic clothing, nowhere near as smart as it could be and not as innovative as it ought to become. It’s one of the oldest gripes in the world that Hollywood dumbs down good books, a complaint so common it’s become cliché; in this case, the cliché is lamentably true.

The horror and action film cliches are on dreary parade in Repo Men, a gore-soaked misfire that squanders its intriguing premise while exploring virtually none of its potential. Combined with his other leading roles, and contrasted with his appealing supporting work in 2009′s Sherlock Holmes, the film also suggests that as a leading man Jude Law fares better as a character actor.

At an indeterminate time in the near future, synthetic organs have become commonplace, replacing and in some cases outpacing the real thing. Installation of these “artiforgs,” and the financing to obtain them, are provided by an oligarchical finance corporation called The Union.  But once recipients fall more than 90 days behind on their payments (and they’re expensive – the film explains a pancreas costs upwards of $600,000), the Union assigns “repo men” to retrieve the machines. These repossessions often cost the recipients their lives, to the utter nonchalance of the repo men.

Built on such an intriguing concept rests a plot of routine structure and drama: ace repo man Remy (Law) has a crisis of conscience after receiving an artificial heart following a botched repossession. Since his new-found empathy prevents him from snatching away others’ artiforgs, he falls behind on his payments and must evade his supervisor (Liev Shreiber) and ex-partner and war buddy Jake (Forest Whitaker.) Retreating into the city’s underbelly (the same postwar urban jungle you’ve seen many times before), he teams with a drug addict (Alice Braga) whose body is a virtual artiforg catalog to evade the Union’s operatives and attack its central payment processing system.

Director Miguel Sapochnik is a former storyboard artist, and the film takes delight in staging crisply rendered glimpses of its future-scape: a towering apartment tower, a metropolis at night, the sleek contours of a giant office building. Taken frame by frame, the film sometimes amazes visually but cannot bind those images into a smooth-running narrative. The plot stalls as Remy goes through too many story threads: a romance, a crumbling marriage, his love for his son, his friendship with Jake, his animosity towards the Union. The story’s most interesting aspect – a wry commentary on the barn fire that is our modern health care system – gets lost in the shuffle as a result.

That’s partly the fault of the script (co-written by Garcia even while he wrote the novel), of course, but the ensuing lack of momentum makes the issue worse. Every moment spent exploring them all distracts and deflates the relative simplicities of the artiforg concept and the Logan’s Run riff plot structure. The actors involved aren’t bad – though the women, including Alice Braga as Remy’s love and Carice van Houten as his harridan wife – are too often two-dimensional and bland. Whitaker is good, as always, all sleepy eyed rage and deliberate cunning; Shreiber, having participated in a Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, could probably play this part standing on his hands. Law gives his best effort, but lacks the intensity and edge the part often seems to need. He often seems in danger of finding himself outshined by the twin forces of his two co-stars (probably most actors would.)

The film comes apart nearly completely in its last half hour, when too much splatter gore and an awkward sleight-of-hand ending jumble together in a bottleneck of half-realized scenes; Sapochnik manages, however, to make the gore lovely in its own brutal and gratuitous way, which in all fairness deserves recognition as an accomplishment all by itself. If that sort of thing appeals to you, you might be willing to overlook the other problems all along the way.

- Michael Kabel

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Forces of Evil On A Bozo Nightmare

Eight of the worst films of the early 1990s.

About half a dozen things wrong with the era are in this picture.

When assorted by quality, the movies of any given period resemble a pyramid, or a mountain: the bottom is the part that’s hardest to get around or avoid. There are far more bad movies than good ones, and really, really awful films – films that can make you angry they even exist – outnumber the movies that deserve lasting notoriety. Yet our culture is mesmerized by irony (a trend that started – ironically – in the 90s), so as a bitter result many of these craptacular failures linger on, year after year.

The early 90s were not the best handful of years for American cinema, but they weren’t the worst, either. Earlier this week we mentioned seven good films from the period that deserved more recognition. Listed below, as threatened, are eight misfires from that same pocket of history. A couple of them are justly forgotten; some were notorious in their time and then forgotten later.

And we understand that every film is somebody’s favorite. We hope yours isn’t found below.

Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991) An early cable TV mainstay, the first Highlander was an overachieving B-movie about immortal humans fighting among themselves for the prize of omniscience. For the sequel, the creators made the immortals dissidents from the planet Zeist instead, exiled here by its dictator (Michael Ironside).

Also, this time around the noble immortal Conner MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) teams up with a freedom fighter (Virginia Madsen) to overthrow the corporation that’s keeping Earth locked in perpetual night. Overly violent, yet pompous thanks to a global warming subplot, the film buried the franchise for years, until the first film got a TV spinoff that jettisoned almost everything about the sequel.

Hudson Hawk (1991) The early 90s were also a time when studios were still working out the bugs of making ultra-expensive blockbusters that people would get excited about seeing. Hudson Hawk, a smart-assed caper comedy starring Bruce Willis and the last dregs of the Bruno shtick he’d worked through the 80s, goes nowhere while spending piles of cash on pretty much everything – sets, stars, special effects, the works.

Yet the film died hard, becoming a punchline and euphemism for “megaflop” until Battlefield Earth stole that dubious distinction in 2000. Not the absolute worst film of the era, except that Tri-Star expected people to line up for tickets. And play the video game. And collect the plastic cups, all to pay off its wretched excess.

The Vanishing (1993) We figure in his fifty-year career Jeff Bridges has only made maybe four or five really lousy films. This remake of the 1988 Dutch thriller Spoorloos, directed by that film’s Geroge Sluizer, can without doubt consider itself one of them. Cast somewhat against type as Machiavellian serial killer Barney Cousins, Bridges steamrolls over costar Kiefer Sutherland (playing a boyfriend obsessed with finding his girlfriend, one of Cousins’ victims) so completely that the psychological tug of war between the two collapses under its own lopsided weight.

The original film understood how to build ambient dread out of the unknown, and the fear of knowing something you have no choice but to learn; The Vanishing telegraphs everything rather than take its time or risk boring its audience, then changes the script to give the story a happy ending. Ah, Hollywood.

Threesome (1994) Like the similarly disingenuous Reality Bites released the same year, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s (Hamlet 2) romantic comedy attempted to cash in on Generation X’s coming of age with this pretentious soap opera about three Gen X’ers – two guys and a girl – sharing a college dorm suite. The script contains every indie trope that got beaten to death throughout the decade: the world-weary voiceover narration, the superficial sex, the self-consciously “witty” vulgarity, the abrupt and unearned emotional reversals.

Stars Josh Hamilton, Stephen Baldwin, and Lara Flynn Boyle are good-looking, vacant, and stiffly deliberate, as if they’re aware they’re in a movie “with a message.” Gen X’ers stayed away in droves, even while the demographic-targeted soundtrack became a hit on college radio stations.

There’s no trailer for the film on YouTube. Just searching the film’s title is awkward enough.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1992 and 94) We mention these two together because they were part of the era’s trend towards high-budget monster movies made by the era’s top talent. Francis Ford Coppola helmed the lush Dracula version, starring the reliably fearless Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight) as the titular count and Anthony Hopkins as his nemesis Van Helsing.

The film is flawed everywhere: Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves are as flat as ever portraying doomed lovers Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, and Hopkins – the decade’s highest-paid scene chewer - hams away as usual. Oldman, in a scrotum-shaped wig and old lady nightgown, tries to keep up with the increasingly overheated proceedings. Coppola’s direction and production design are bloated and unconvincing, making fans of the novel take umbrage to its liberal additions of blood-drenched sex and violence.

The film made money anyway, and two years later Coppola produced a Frankenstein film directed by rising triple threat Kenneth Branagh, who cast himself as the mad doctor and Robert DeNiro as his creation. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was bleak, turgid, and opaque while struggling beneath the same middlebrow overreach that doomed Dracula. None of the actors are really bad, though DeNiro often seems uncomfortable in period dress, possibly because Branagh and co-star Helena Bonham-Carter (Fight Club) always seemed to be in movies about Victorian England.

Critics at the time wondered if Branagh was out of his element or in over his head, and the film’s box-office failure delivered his until-then wunderkind career trajectory a punishing blow that hasn’t truly recovered yet.

Jade (1995) A film seemingly assembled in studio committee for box office success, William Friedkin’s (The French Connection) Jade aimed to recreate the kinky titillation success of screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus’ previous Basic Instinct. Featuring emerging leading men David Caruso and Chazz Palminteri alongside rising screen vamps Linda Fiorentino and Angie Everhart, the story of a gruesome murder linked to a sex club among San Francisco’s political elite was nevertheless muddled, hard to follow, and surprisingly light on sex appeal.

Friedkin, known for his gritty ultra-realism, was a poor choice to realize the story’s stylish affluence, and Caruso and Palminteri failed to generate chemistry with their gorgeous co-stars. The result was a dull potboiler uncomfortable with itself.

Exit To Eden (1994) A “comedy” about an island of dominatrices and the love slaves they love, this notorious bomb film inexplicably stars Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as New Orleans cops going undercover to catch a gang of jewel smugglers, and – and! – it’s directed by Gary Marshall, the creator of Happy Days. Not funny and aggressively unsexy despite Dana Delaney’s (Body of Proof) warm turn as a mistress learning to soften up, the all-over-the-place vibe isn’t helped by O’Donnell’s smarmy narration or the smutty jokes that seemed a cop-out from the issues that Anne Rice’s original novel eagerly confronted.

Even today, it’s hard to imagine the film’s target audience. Was it people who thought Julia Roberts should have worn more studded leather in Pretty Woman? Those who thought Aykroyd was sexy? Bondage enthusiasts who wanted to laugh at themselves? YouTube doesn’t have much of this film. Perhaps that’s just as well.

- Michael Kabel

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Here We Are Now! Entertain Us!

Seven unsung films from the first half of the 1990s, our generation’s gilded age.

The 90s were so great, even Mike Myers was cool.

To paraphrase an old cliché about the 1960s, if you can remember the 90s you probably wish you were still there. Described as “the best of times” by at least one historian, it was a decade of unheralded prosperity and at times tremendous naiveté. It was also often much darker than that, an era whose popular culture was at times strangled by the superficial, obsessed with appearances, and in many ways the foundation of today’s cynical approach to nonthreatening, non-challenging entertainment pablum. Find a problem with mass culture today and it probably began in the 90s, including not least of which this damned Internet fad.

For film enthusiasts and scholars, the decade was a treasure trove. The burgeoning indie film movement had yet to become the big business it’s mutated into now, and the major studios were still willing to take occasional chances on risky projects such as Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) and Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995). New directing talent such as Quentin Tarantino, James Gray, and David Fincher all began their careers, while many of the veteran filmmakers and stars of the 70s continued putting out quality work.

The following seven films were released between 1991 and 1995, more or less the heyday of marketing strategies aimed squarely at the then so-called Generation X, though this list is not limited purely to films aimed at that demographic. Rather, it’s meant to cast a spotlight on the lesser known but no less noteworthy films of the time, so more famous works – i.e. Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites and its platoon of imitators, The Shawshank Redemption – here suffer a small case of benign neglect.

Ruby In Paradise (1993): Among the earliest darlings of Sundance, this low-budget, low-volume drama about a Tennessee woman (Ashley Judd, in her breakout role) fleeing an abusive husband for the relative beauty of off-season Panama City, Florida won raves for its emotional honesty and realistic characterizations. Defying the modern female protagonist stereotype, Judd’s Ruby is not wise beyond her years, spunky, or even whimsical. She’s complex, clever, and curious – qualities harder to demonstrate on film, though Judd nails her performance. She’s overdue for a comeback, and it’s time this film got a DVD re-release.

By the way, that’s indie directing savant Todd Field (In The Bedroom) as Ruby’s motorcycle-riding suitor.

Rush (1991): Remember Eric Clapton’s comeback hit
“Tears In Heaven”? It was actually composed as the theme to this bleak based-on-truth drama about undercover Texas narcotics detectives (Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh) falling in love and getting hooked on smack while trying to bust a local drug kingpin (Gregg Allman). Eventually, the strung out pair resort to falsifying evidence to close the case. Not a cheerful film to watch by any means, more in keeping with the gritty cop films of the 1970s than the fast-talking wiseguys that comprised much of 90s crime cinema.

Patric was for many years a popular choice to play Jim Morrison – a role that eventually went to Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s clumsy The Doors (1992). The trailer above shows his uncanny resemblance to the dead singer in full effect.

Single White Female (1992): Leigh starred or co-starred in no less than ten films between 1991 and 95, so it was probably only a matter of time before she crossed paths with the era’s similarly prolific Bridget Fonda. That teaming came in Barbet Shroeder’s (Reversal of Fortune) psycho roommate thriller Single White Female. Playing with equal mean-spirited glee on Fatal Attraction-inspired genre expectations as well as Fonda’s and Leigh’s respective good girl and vamp screen images, it nevertheless falls apart near the end, when some unconvincing psychobabble tries to redeem the preceding tawdry fun. Still, it’s a great pastiche of the era’s twentysomething angst and vapid sense of entitled security.

We love that trailer. It’s virtually a time capsule, including voiceover work (like many of the trailers in this piece) by the late, great Don LaFontaine.

Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins’ creative output  dwindled in the last decade, and as a result his ballsy body of work from the late 80s and early 90s is slowly getting forgotten. Robbins wrote and directed this caustic, tortuously prescient mockumentary about a charmingly evil Senatorial candidate who wraps his neo-Nazi dogma in Bob Dylanesque folk songs and faux-rebellious swagger. No less than Gore Vidal portrays Roberts’ hapless opponent Brickley Paiste, a character based in part on Senator Ted Kennedy. Much of the film was improvised and drawn from both This Is Spinal Tap and the Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, weaving social and political commentary together with a wry assassination and conspiracy subplot. The finished product kept period audiences guessing and will keep current viewers ruefully shaking their heads.

Spoiler alert: the film concludes with Roberts winning the election with 52 percent of the vote.

Dazed & Confused (1993): A sensation among critics who were just old enough by the mid-90s to remember what high school was like in the mid-70s, Richard Linklater’s nostalgic but honest look back at the summer of 1976 remains a mellow bowl of fun. And much like its spiritual ancestor Fast Times At Ridgemont High, the film served as finishing school for the decade’s indie film mainstays, including Parker Posey, Adam Goldberg, Rory Cochrane, Joey Lauren Adams and Nicky Katt, as well as featured appearances by bound-for-mainstream stars Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, and Matthew McConaughey.

More about mood and setting than character or plot, the film remains merely a fun diversion, though its slacker aspirations never pretend to anything greater.

Kalifornia (1993): Stone’s Natural Born Killers got all the attention in the decade’s “serial killers hit the open road” sweepstakes, all but eclipsing this slow-boiling thriller directed by Dominic Sena (Swordfish). A pre-X-Files David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes play urbanite intellectuals (he’s writing a book on serial killers) who pick up redneck serial killer Brad Pitt and his girlfriend Juliette Lewis while visiting famous murder sites cross-country.

The film is deliberately 70s-esque in its approach to its subject matter and showcasing realistic characterizations – probably why the more simplistic Killers got all the public adulation.

Forbes has all but locked up her Emmy nomination after only three episodes of AMC’s The Killing. Why she wasn’t a bigger star back then we’ll never comprehend.

Strange Days (1995): Exploiting the decade’s pre-millennial tension, Kathryn Bigelow’s taut near-future suspenser cast Ralph Fiennes as the awesomely named Lenny Nero, an ex-cop turned dealer in illicit virtual reality videos. Stuck with a tape showing a powerful rapper/social reformer (Glenn Plummer) assassinated by the LAPD as the city explodes in millennial partying, Nero tries to use the tape as leverage in getting back the singer ex-girlfriend (Lewis again) who dumped him years before, ruining his life.

Even if the virtual reality angle is woefully outdated by now, Bigelow’s expert mood construction as well as ace acting by Fiennes, Angela Bassett and others – including Vincent D’Onofrio and William Fichtner as the last cops in the world you want pulling you over – make the film unmissable, even a troubled decade-and-a-half later.

Later this week we’ll return to the era of the early 90s and explore some of the worst films of that period. In the meantime, please post your own additions to this list in the comments section.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms strikes off on his own, into darker territory than you might expect.

Dying is easy and comedy is hard, as the famous adage goes, and by extension of that same logic it’s virtually impossible to get dark comedy right. The wreckage of failed attempts includes the best and the brightest artists of every comedy era, and not a few dramatic creators as well. Dark comedy – black comedy, gallows humor, cringe humor – carries its own additional pitfalls besides the usual minefield of problems awaiting its gentler cousin. And when dark comedy fails, too often the results land with a resounding thud, victims of creative overreach or slipshod understandings of tone.

Cedar Rapids, the at-times pitch-dark new effort from indie mainstay Miguel Arteta, walks its dark comedy tightrope constantly in danger of falling one way or the other. Though ultimately it succeeds, the suspense of waiting for it to collapse under its own ambitious weight suffuses almost every scene. You almost come to care about the movie itself as much as its conventional story or oddball characters, wondering when at any second its whole artifice will come crashing down. It never does, thanks largely to its cast.

A star is brown: Helms

Small-town man-child Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is sent by his boss (Stephen Root) at Brownstar Insurance to a regional convention after the agency’s alpha dog (Tom Lennon) dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Lippe isn’t ready for the responsibility, let alone the pressure of bringing home the convention’s “Two Diamond” award that the agency has secured several years in a row. But he goes anyway, propelled by his boss’ bullying. His wide-eyed, gawky enthusiasm, mixed with rustic suspicion, for the dangers and promises of the titular “big city” provide some of the film’s most unguarded moments.

The convention’s hotel (as uniformly cheerless, and cheerlessly uniform, as any of a million such places in America) and the people Lippe encounters there of course compel him to grow up emotionally and sexually. In particular, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of  hard-partying, foul-mouthed policy “poacher” Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), comparatively straight-laced Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the sultry, melancholy Joan (Anne Heche.) The quartet goof their way through the three-day conference while Tim readies his presentation to convention patriarch Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith). Moral fortitude and honesty count for a lot in winning the “prestigious” Two Diamond trophy, and in assenting to the group’s temptations – including a fling with Joan – Lippe risks costing his company the award.

Artete works well within the small confines of the hotel, showing the confines of each blandly friendly space and how, especially given the inhospitable winter outside, even such slim diversions as hotel bar margaritas and overheated pools can offer a welcome distraction. It helps a lot that Phil Johnston’s script does right by its main character, shrewdly demonstrating Lippe’s fish out of water ups and downs: his new friends are a welcoming, non-judgmental bunch, a distant cry from the McJesus snobbery of his home town co-workers and neighbors – the same people, Lippe is decent enough to remember, that depend on him. Of course everything works out in the end, but not before plenty of debauchery and clean, if slightly mean-spirited, fun.

As a comic leading man, Helms’ strengths center on the same aw, shucks likability that’s served him more or less unwaveringly since his tenure on The Daily Show.  Lippe is similar to The Office‘s Andy Bernard, more naive but less obtuse, with a greater vulnerability as a result. It’s tempting to thumbnail Lippe as Bernard freed of The Office‘s self-conscious repetition of character and story beats, but there’s more – a little more – to him than that. Helms makes him sympathetic but stops short of making him pitiable or charismatic.

He’s backed by, well, a dream supporting cast for this type of project. Reilly is a leading man trapped in the body of a character actor, and every one of his scenes tends to upset the tenuous balance Artete strikes between Lippe and his surroundings. In fact for much of the film’s first hour, the energy level rises palpably whenever Reilly’s motor- and foul-mouthed party animal comes onscreen. Comedies often rise or fall on the quotability of their dialogue; Reilly has most of the lines you’ll want to repeat to your friends.

The surprise performance, however, belongs to Heche as the otherwise happy soccer mom who uses insurance conventions as a vacation from the staid security of her normal life. Heche is sexy, sad, and smart all at the same time, without resorting to vamping or overheated line readings to achieve said results. Her confession to Lippe about the normalcy of her life and the release of Cedar Rapids carries some of the film’s best writing, and her well-modulated delivery of the scene works as an oasis to the dark shenanigans displayed almost everywhere else. Heche’s career was swallowed years ago by the media’s provincial fascination with her sexuality; this performance earns her a shot at a larger comeback vehicle.

Making the most of smaller roles, Whitlock makes a charming straight man for the others, especially in a late scene in which he gets to spoof his role on The Wire. The prolific Root is hilarious as Lippe’s boss, and Kurtwood Smith brings the same imperial menace to Helgesson that he brought to all those years as That 70s Show‘s Red Foreman. Arrested Development fans may find themselves a little shocked to see Alia Shawkat, Maeby Funke herself, playing the hotel’s prostitute; the role allows her to say filthy things and look sultry, which for a career transition vehicle is possibly as good as it gets right now.

Cedar Rapids shouldn’t be confused for a great film, but it achieves its difficult ambitions while remaining entertaining, and it has the rare gift of growing in your memory after you leave the theatre. If its raunchy gags and sometimes awkward staging keep it from really developing into something approaching a classic modern dark comedy – Rushmore, to make a contemporary example, or Ruthless People – it’s trying for something riskier than the pot and potty humor that dominates too many modern “comedies.” It’s also, admittedly, refreshing to encounter a comedy that doesn’t bear Judd Apatow’s factory-pressed mixture of bittersweet nostalgia and stunted male growth.

Dying is easy, dark comedy is hardest, and ultimately Cedar Rapids is a damned funny movie with a cast full of people who should appear more than they do.  See it  in the theatre if you can, but don’t miss it on home video.

- Michael Kabel

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Sidney Lumet: 1924-2011

Iconic film director passes away at 86.

Sidney Lumet, director of several classic American films including Network, Dog Day Afternoon, and Twelve Angry Men, died Saturday of lymphoma at his Manhattan home. He was 86 years old.

Born in Philadelphia to parents already veterans of Yiddish theatre, as a child Lumet appeared several times on the Broadway stage. He served as a radio repairman in the Army in World War II before returning to new York in 1946, joining the Actor’s Studio and shortly thereafter organizing his own off-Broadway troupe.

Lumet went to work in television during the early years of its ascendancy, garnering a reputation for working quickly that well-suited the new medium’s sparse production schedules. He directed live televised performances for theatrical programs including The Alcoa Hour and The Goodyear Playhouse, and collaborated with Walter Cronkite on the seminal history series You Are There.

In 1957 Lumet made his feature film debut with 12 Angry Men, an adaptation of the televised play he had previously directed. The film, starring Henry Fonda and a virtual Murderer’s Row of the era’s best character actors, was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Direction recognition for Lumet as director as well as Best Picture. His film career continued through the 1960s with works including Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Fail Safe, and The Pawnbroker.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, however, that the director reached his artistic prime. Turning his attention to the corruption and moral decay then seemingly endemic in American society, Lumet’s works throughout the first half of the decade – Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976) displayed sparse, uncompromising critiques of the systems normally used to check society’s worst excesses – the police, businesses, the media -  all crumbling beneath human weakness. As with his earlier dramatic efforts, the films displayed an objective, almost detached directorial voice, letting character interaction and story, rather than style or artifice, advance the film’s subtexts.

Ever versatile, during this same time he also directed the posh mystery Murder On The Orient Express and the Texas-set romance Lovin’ Molly (both 1974). In 1978 he became the improbable director of The Wiz, a musical, urban retelling of The Wizard Of Oz starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross.

Lumet remained prolific in the 80s and early 90s, directing several more New  York-set crime and corruption dramas including Prince of the City (1981), Family Business (1989), Q & A (1990), and Night Falls On Manhattan (1996). His 1992 legal drama The Verdict, starring Paul Newman, garnered five Oscar nominations including Best Director and Best Picture. In 1996 he published Making Movies,  his critically acclaimed memoir and guide to filmmaking.

In time, and following a string of box office and critical disappointments, Lumet’s output slowed down a bit. Much of the 00′s were given towards a return to television, including creating the A&E series 100 Centre Street and directing the telefilm Strip Search. His 2007 indie crime drama, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, received his best reviews in two decades.

Lumet’s work encompasses virtually all film genres and five decades, and though he was often accused of lacking a defining theme to his work in the strictest auteurist sense, nevertheless his films always bore the same respect for story and empathy for characters regardless of their subject matter. He presented stories he believed worth telling in the best way he knew how, which was often virtually flawless. We believe that the fullest appreciation of his work is yet to happen, that greater stature awaits his place among the great American directors.

By way of tribute, here’s a scene from Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al Pacino’s beleaguered, inept bank robber rises to the applause and control he’s craved his whole life:

Our most sincere sympathies to Mr. Lumet’s family and friends.

- Michael Kabel

Seven More 1970s Crime Classics

Concluding our series with the best of the rest from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike.

Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era premiered dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films laid down. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the following list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city at a time when real-world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels in those areas. Films including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar, and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, in one film or another, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973′s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At least the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border crossing at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars.

A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates.

Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap – it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning.

Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and after years of sporadic availability the film now enjoys a gorgeous Criterion edition DVD release.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study barbed with wicked irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent.

The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features. Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs.

We’ll be back next week with review of newer films. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Source Code

Director Duncan Jones’ second film is another intelligent, eloquent science fiction thriller.

Articulate and emotional without ever growing maudlin, intelligent without seeming geeky or pretentious, Duncan Jones’ Source Code justifies the promise the director showed with his similarly ambitious science  fiction mindbender Moon. Like that debut effort, Jones’ second film reveals a warm and compassionate concern not just for the workings of the science fiction elements of story but also for the human emotions spun out of their wake. The high energy marketing campaign focuses on the film’s time travel and exploding train aspects, but don’t be fooled: Jones and his cast and crew have created a film as much about loss and its aftermath as much as bombast and adventure, and the emphasis – especially in the last half-hour – is on character development and interaction.

Army captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the covert operative for Project: Beleaguered Castle, an Air Force counter-terrorism group that can project his consciousness into the after-image of recent temporal events and allow him to occupy a host body of comparable age, height, and size. It’s complicated science, complex enough to stretch suspension of disbelief by force alone, though explained via simplified metaphor by the project’s direct Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright.) Source Code technology is not exactly time travel, and not entirely jumping between parallel worlds, but Stevens’ jaunts into the afterimage of immediately recent events allow the project to gather intelligence about upcoming terrorist attacks.

In particular, his current mission involves finding the bomb secreted aboard a Chicago-bound commuter train before those responsible detonate a dirty bomb within the city itself. But increasing disorientation hampers Steven’s effectiveness, even as he’s increasingly distracted by Christina, the woman (Michelle Monaghan) accompanying his host body into the city. Stevens tries, tries again to locate the bomb and the passenger he believes may set it off. But each failure – he has only eight minutes to complete his mission – results in the train’s explosive destruction and a painful jolt back to the project’s headquarters.

Worse, Stevens suspects the doctor as well as Goodwin, his mission control operator (Vera Farmiga) are less than candid with the information they provide him, both about his role in the project as well as the events surrounding his recruitment into it. Stevens remembers serving as a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan but nothing of the last two months, and Goodwin’s evasion of questions, as well as Rutledge’s condescension, make him even less trusting.

The film’s second act centers on Stevens’  abortive attempts to apprehend the bomber and disarm the bomb, even while he draws closer to the girl. Stevens also reasons he can use his time on the train to research the project itself and his service in Kandahar, the better to fill in the blanks of his memory. Each return trip home – Stevens fails his mission many times, often in ways that will probably evoke pity from the audience – reveals his mission capsule in greater disrepair. Pressing Goodwin for more information, Stevens learns he may not be in the capsule at all but that his physical body may reside somewhere else entirely.

But he eventually prevails, locating the bomber and confronting him – once disastrously, the second time with success. With a train full of suspects, Ben Ripley’s script has fun manipulating audience expectations regarding the bomber’s identity: the nature of his evil more closely resemble homegrown anarchist Timothy McVeigh than 21st Century notions of Islamic extremism. The remainder of the film focuses on the nature of the bottle reality itself, whether Stevens can escape his real-world fate, and whether he can mend his relationship with his estranged father and jumpstart a romance with Christina. The willingness to devote so much time to events and details outside the ostensible main plot thread is a curious structural decision, but thanks to Ripley and Jones’ expert handling the film never once sags in suspense or pace.

We’ve said this before. It bears repeating: pretty.

The actors are perfectly if sometimes predictably cast. Gyllenhaal is a talented and versatile actor who’s still yet to find his niche with audiences, but here the action chops that went largely unnoticed in last summer’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (coincidentally, another adventure driven by short-distance time travel) get better use in the heightened tension of the railway plot. Still, he fares better in the more character-driven scenes, especially with Farmiga and the actor playing his father (the actor’s identity is too much of a treat, and concession, to long-time sci-fi fans to divulge). Playing the sweet, beguiling Christina, Monaghan plays to the type she’s already performed in a half-dozen films. She’s a lovely and talented actress, but the role does little to showcase the range she’s demonstrated elsewhere.

Jones wisely casts two ringer character actors to play the heavier parts. Wright is spot-on as the pompous doctor who sees Stevens as nothing more than a resource, and Farmiga’s character arc - efficient to humane – may make her the film’s most fully development personality. Whereas Moon was centered – and carried – by the formidable acting talents of Sam Rockwell, the larger script gives Jones time and space to explore more complicated character interactions. Like Moon, the protagonist is separated by space and technology from the answers he needs; the answers this time rely less on shock value and more on character sympathy.

Like probably any great science fiction film, enjoyment relies somewhat on your willing suspension of disbelief, and in giving the film license to let a hole slip into the plot when perhaps you’re less likely to notice; those flaws will also likely emerge with repeated viewing. But in the meantime it offers the best kind of not just science fiction but fiction itself – rooted in humanity, letting emotions guide its way, and dedicated to continuing larger traditions while modifying them for new audiences. Source Code brings that all together while still maintaining its action-charged momentum. Don’t let the slam-bang advertisements fool you – the film is a lot more than it lets on.

- Michael Kabel

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70s Crime Cinema: The Seven-Ups

The French Connection‘s spiritual successor completed the trilogy of modern police action films begun by Bullitt.

For as much as Bullitt presaged and The French Connection ushered in a new era of violent, realistic police procedural movies, 1973′s The Seven-Ups took that gritty baton and barreled away with it, bringing a depth of character and dramatic pathos to its narrative that, by and large, those earlier films had little interest in developing. A tough and morally complicated story with a deep melancholy at its heart, the film isn’t just a copy or derivative of its predecessors’ successful tropes (though it shares many of them), it’s also a more mature and well-rounded work of filmmaking. And for those reasons, many will find it a more rewarding viewing experience.

Small wonder, considering the shared talent involved. Produced and directed by Philip D’Antoni, who had previously produced both The French Connection as well as Bullitt, The Seven-Ups featured a story by NYPD detective Sonny Grosso, whom Roy Scheider had played in The French Connection. The film’s crew included stunt legend Bill Hickman, who had masterminded the car chases of both earlier films , and by Don Ellis, whose French Connection soundtrack won a Grammy. Finally, both Scheider and co-star Tony Lo Bianco returned in similar roles to their French Connection originals, playing respectively a rogue cop and low-level mobster.

For all that shared talent, it’s tempting to under-value The Seven-Ups as a cash-in to its predecessors’ immense popularity. The 1970s were an age of quick, cheap sequels that did little justice to their inspiration, all too often made hurriedly while the first film remained fresh in the pubic awareness. Yet The Seven-Ups’ elaborate plot, rooted as it was in character and police culture, belie such an easy dismissal. Scheider plays Bobby Manucci, leader of an elite “dirty tricks” squad of detectives who orchestrate sting operations that facilitate arrests by conventional police. The rank and file cops see Manucci’s group – named because their arrests are guaranteed to bring at least seven years in prison – as dangerous compromises of police tradition and morality. The squad keeps to itself, not especially close to their colleagues or even with one another. A leader by example, Manucci builds the group’s intelligence with a wallet full of mug shots of known gangsters combined with hearsay from childhood friend Vito Lucia (Lo Bianco), now a working-class wiseguy with a wife and children.

What Manucci doesn’t suspect of his old friend forms the crux of the film’s tension. Though supplying him with information, Lucia is using Manucci’s wallet file to target upper-level mobsters and loan sharks for kidnapping by two thugs (Hickman and Richard Lynch) that pose as police to bypass their victims’ defenses. The mobsters are ransomed off but seethe with hostility towards the police, and when one of the Seven-Ups is caught while conducting undercover surveillance a twist of fate ends in his murder at the hands of Lucia’s men. What follows is the film’s intense chase sequence, an effort that must surely have been D’Antoni and Hickman’s conscious effort to top The French Connection‘s landmark car-vs.-train set piece.

The sequence was shot in Uptown New York, down crowded city streets and busy thoroughfares. While its higher ambition lacks the novelty of Bullitt or The French Connection, like those other films’ sequences it improves with repeated viewing, when new camera angles and details come into better focus.

Scheider plays Manucci much as he played The French Connection‘s Buddy Russo, but minus Gene Hackman’s scene-swallowing screen presence his intense reserve and brooding intelligence hold the story’s center through moral ambivalence. Always an actor who understood the importance of not revealing everything, Scheider often seems more dangerous than other action stars of the period simply by remaining aloof. The realization that his lifelong friend has betrayed him plays out entirely in his eyes, as a scene in which their back and forth movement slows to a stop, indicating Manucci’s cold determination.

Yet Manucci never suffers for want of ruthlessness. Following the death of their compatriot he leads the remaining Seven-Ups on a midnight raid to a mobster’s home, threatening the gangster’s wife while holding a gun to the man’s face. Later, he coaxes information from a hospitalized mafioso by repeatedly removing his oxygen hose. The final shootout, set in what must have been the ugliest vacant lot in New York, is nasty, brutal, and merciless, while the denouement meeting between Manucci and Lucia makes a grim a comment on justice as opposed to legal procedure.

The film is not without its flaws. The hard-to-follow plot at times gets lost in the gritty atmosphere. Important plot points that bear further explanation (character movements, exposition that establishes characters’ relations to one another) are skimmed over, so that first-time viewing can provoke some searching-back and reviewing of key scenes to clarify story movement. In particular, the opening set piece in which Manucci and his men set up a sting against counterfeiters never quite comes together as much as it should; Lucia’s exact stature and position within the Mob also remains frustratingly nebulous.

But the film completes a growth set in motion by Bullitt and continued through The French Connection: whereas the former was about innovation and the latter about realism, both at the expense of conventional audience expectations, The Seven-Ups infuses its main character with depth and angst. Unlike Frank Bullitt’s glacial self-confidence or Popeye Doyle’s self-igniting rage, Manucci is troubled by self-doubt and self-recrimination. He tortures criminals but approaches his superiors with a trepidation born of doubt. He exacts revenge for his subordinate’s death, yet betrayal even to avenge betrayal leaves him miserable. The film’s frozen last image suggests as much: “You can’t do this to me, Buddy!” Lucia protests, as Manucci prepares to rat him out to the gangsters he kidnapped. “You watch me!” Manucci retorts, before storming away as the camera fades to black.

In our next installment we’ll have seven more classic crime films of the gritty 70s. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel

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