Review: X-Men: First Class

Clumsy, hollow prequel makes for summer’s first train wreck.

Neither a fresh reimagining of the stagnant X-Men film franchise or a back to basics return to what made Bryan Singer’s first two efforts in the series often (if never completely) enthralling, director Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class struggles to find its narrative footing and then collapses beneath a Frankenstein script and leaden, arrythmic pacing. Squandering an intriguing retro setting and a premise that ought to write itself on derivative and pained action sequences and mawkish dramatics, the film amounts to a long, tired rehash of a lot of hoary marketing gimmicks. And amid a widely divergent field of performances it includes an aggressively terrible performance by a veteran character actor who ought to know better.

The film starts with a scene lifted verbatim from Singer’s vastly superior X2, detailing Erik Lensherr’s - the boy who will grow up to become Magneto – struggles in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. This film continues his ordeal under scientist/cackling maniac Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), whose sadistic methods kickstart the young mutant’s abilities. Meanwhile in England, a young Charles Xavier befriends homeless, shape-shifting waif Raven, promising her a safe haven despite her otherwordly appearance.

Probably just a headache: McAvoy as Charles Xavier

Jump ahead to the early 1960s, when Shaw is under investigation by the CIA for interfering with U.S. military operations. Agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) infiltrates his casino/brothel and witnesses the mutant powers of several of his henchmen, but is dismissed by stodgy superiors who use her findings as evidence women shouldn’t be operatives. Instead, she contacts Oxford University grad Xavier for insight into mutations. Though the young geneticist’s earnest briefing is likewise met with skepticism, he and Raven are recruited by an agency scientist (Oliver Platt) to head up a division of mutant spies.

An aborted attempt to catch Shaw brings Xavier into contact with Lensherr, who’s spent his adult life stalking his former tormentor around the world in search of vengeance. Lensherr reluctantly joins the fledgling group, accompanying Xavier on a recruitment drive around the country. The script uses a familiar structure for this, one for which TV Tropes.org has a pretty ironic name, and it allows for a surprise cameo given extra spice by the precise use of an f-bomb.

The children of the atom model their fall catalogue.

The new recruits, who include a cab driver named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) who can adapt instantly for any situation and a stripper with dragonfly wings (Zoe Kravitz), continue their training until Shaw orders an attack on their compound. The resulting combat under Vaughn’s orchestration becomes both belabored and mean-spiririted, with repeated and derivative violence that fails to establish the bad guy’s menace so much as their one-dimensionality. One of Xavier’s team is murdered, and another defects, in efforts the script ostensibly intends to bring context to the Xavier-Magneto struggles of the later films. In fact it returns to that ambition time and again (at 132 minutes long, it’s got plenty of time) but seldom completely pulls it off.

Because Xavier, Lensherr, and Raven (played in adulthood by Jennifer Lawrence) are the only fully developed characters the script allows, the rest of the “first class” are practically cyphers, distinguishable solely by their powers or, more cynically, their boy band-esque personality types: the bad boy (Lucas Till), the sensitive one (Caleb Landry Jones) the geeky one (Nicholas Holt). Their training, free of the government’s meddling – us kids can do it for ourselves! – goes off with little impediment or setback, save the semi-humorous kind typical of such sequences. The evil mutants working for Shaw – teleporting Darth Maul knockoff Azazel (Jason Flemyng) and Euro-chic tornado thrower Riptide (Alex Gonzalez) – are similarly underdeveloped.

Shaw’s master plan sets the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Xavier, Lensherr and the gang scramble to stop. The ensuing set piece makes for the film’s best sequence, allowing all the mutants to finally let loose with their powers. Though too much of the sequence details the U.S. and soviet navies looking on in fear and hostility, until its conclusion the battle is well-orchestrated and even suspenseful, a welcome relief after the previous plodding 90 or so minutes. Having said that, plot holes and continuity errors trouble its narrative coherence all the while.

When the battle’s over and the character interaction resumes, the film again finds itself in trouble. The reasons for Xavier’s confinement to a wheelchair are revealed with the grace of a sledgehammer, and with a bathos that defies common sense. Lensherr’s character arc ultimately lands him on the side of the devils, as we knew it would, and in joining him Raven becomes the terrorist Mystique (Rebecca Romihn puts in a cameo as her grown up self, too.)  The film can’t resist indulging in multiple denouement, letting Xavier and Lensherr both come to their epiphanies about their identities.

Fassbender is compelling and charming as the haunted Lensherr, and Lawrence is affecting as the shape-changer with no sense of herself. The worst turn, ironically, belongs to the film’s most seasoned veteran. Bacon is hammy and nonchalant playing a villain who ought to be halfway between Dr. No and Dr. Mengele, and his nonchalance works against the film’s sum dramatic weight. In terms of performance his idea of evil apparently runs more to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor than Heath Ledger’s Joker, in a way that sometimes patronizing; at other times the apathy seems to waft off him. Another weak turn comes from January Jones, playing Shaw’s operative/concubine Emma Frost. Perhaps because of the 60′s setting she recycles her Betty Draper iciness, but only to diminishing returns.

The film’s screenplay carries no less than six writing credits, including Singer and Vaughn both, and the confusion typical of too many cooks in the storytelling kitchen create persistent, debilitating troubles that the final film product never takes time to figure out. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s sometimes tempting to try to spot the segments that must have come from the aborted Magneto-only prequel rumored several years ago, and then to call out the parts that must have accumulated with successive treatments – the toyetic Azazel, the tween-friendly Xavier recruits, the cursory understanding of Cold War geopolitics. All in the name of money, of course, and served up with enough bombast that maybe you won’t notice. X-Men: First Class is a film that doesn’t expect very much from itself. It hopes you won’t either.

- 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 the old cliche 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 naivete. 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. If not quite ever matching the artistic successes of the 1970s, the 90s at least offered a Silver Age of film craftsmanship and experimentation. 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 are seven films that were released between 1991 and 1995, more or less the heydey of marketing strategies aimed squarely at the so-called Generation X, though this list is not limited purely to films aimed at that demographic. Rather, it’s meant to illuminate the lesser known but no less noteworthy films of the time, so more famous works – i.e. Pulp Fiction, Reality Bites and its 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 (Ashely 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 instead – harder to demonstrate on film, though Judd nails her performance. It’s time for a DVD re-release.

Rush (1991): Remember Eric Clapton’s comeback song “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, and more in keeping with the gritty cop films of the 70s than the fast-talking wiseguys that comprised much of 90s crime cinema, nevertheless it’s still gripping viewing.

Patric was for many years a popular public choice to play Jim Morrison – a role that eventually went to Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone’s turgid 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. The trailer below is virtually a time capsule, including voiceover (like many of the trailers in this piece) by the late, great Don LaFontaine.

Bob Roberts (1992): Tim Robbins’ creative output has dwindled in the current 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 that kept period audiences guessing and will keep current viewers ruefully shaking their heads. 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 jolt of fun. And much like its spiritual ancestor Fast Times At Ridgemont High a decade before, the film was a 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, overshadowing this Dominic Sena (Swordfish) directed thriller. A pre-X-Files David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes (Homicide: Life On The Streets) 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. Now, why Forbes wasn’t a bigger success as a femme fatale we’ll never understand.

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 on the eve of the millennium, 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.

Next Wednesday 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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The Road To Gangsterland

Eight classic films from eight decades, all about gangsters, gunmen, and mobsters.

White light, white heat: Cagney

Our preview of Michael Mann’s upcoming Public Enemies, about the pursuit of notorious folk hero/bank robber John Dillinger, got us thinking about other gangster movies worth recommending to those unfamiliar with the genre. Since the crime movie has been a staple of American cinema since its advent almost eight decades ago, there’s actually a lot of films to suggest.

The gangster film has changed with the times, too, remaining vibrant by adapting to the public’s shifting perception of crime and criminals. Originally debuting in the hard times of the 1930s, the genre waned as prosperity grew after World War II, giving way to the murkier and more complicated story structures of film noir. Reaching something of a nadir in the law-and-order 1950s, the gangster film rebounded amid the social turbulence of the 60s thanks to films like Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank.

Their names Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow: Dunaway, Beatty

The trend of championing the gangster character, a kind of urban re-expression of the American outlaw figure – continued through the 70s and 80s. The 90s, the era of Taranantino, saw an explosion of new attempts to capture its spirit, but the genre has contracted in the current decade towards films of a more realistic tone and scope. The following eight works represent one gangster film from each decade, and each one is available on DVD. Trust us when we say there are plenty more.

 The Public Enemy (1931): William A. Wellman’s steel-nerved tale of a bootlegger (James Cagney) on a ruthless ascent and eventual demise through the Prohibition-era underworld included several characters based on real-life organized crime figures. Cagney and co-star Jean Harlow shot to stardom after the film’s release, and its success helped cement Warner Brothers’ position as the studio that catered to working-class Americans.

The scene in which Cagney goes to exact bloody retribution on a rival gang, appearing at 1:08 in the clip below, has inspired legions of imitators and become synonymous with Hollywood’s Golden Age.

High Sierra (1941): Humphrey Bogart got the part of world-weary gangster “Mad Dog” Roy Earle after Paul Muni and George Raft, both bigger stars at the time, turned it down. Bogart’s friend John Huston wrote the script, and under the direction of gangster film auteur Raoul Walsh (White Heat, The Roaring Twenties) the cross-country adventure helped steer Bogart’s career towards the roles for which he’s now most famous.

The story, and Bogart’s portrayal of Earle, gave a melancholy spin to the typical gangster caper drama, including elements of doomed romance and encroaching fate while revealing the psychological scars of its characters. The action sequences were gripping and inventive as well, as this car chase sequence demonstrates:

On The Waterfront(1954): The gangster film shifted in the 1950s, as a prosperous country’s interests reversed towards championing cops over criminals and conformists over outlaws. Not explicitly a gangster picture, Elia Kazan’s based-on-actual-events depiction of life on a New Jersey dockyards portrayed organized criminals as ruthless destroyers of dreams, turning its sympathies instead to the ruined lives left in crime’s wake. And it starred Marlon Brando, the actor of his generation, as simpleminded ex-boxer turned dock worker Terry Malloy. In the clip below, Terry’s mobbed-up brother (Rod Steiger) offers him a plum job if he refuses to testify about mob influence on the dockyards. You’ve heard the famous quote, but here’s the entire scene:

Bonnie and Clyde (1967): The pendulum of public sympathy swung back again in the anti-establishment 1960s, with a new generation of filmmakers willfully pushing the envelopes of violence and sexuality as a response. Director Arthur Penn and several screenwriters, including Robert Towne (Chinatown), reached back to the gangster heydey of the 30s to revisit the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, two bank robbers in love with breaking the law as well as each other.

Stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, backed by supporting players including Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Gene Wilder, recreate the Great Depression era as an allegory for the restless modern day, complete with treacherous authority figures and crumbling social institutions. (Read our full review here.) The ending, scandalous upon the film’s release for its bloodshed and seeming cruelty, actually sums up the entire film in violent, unforgettable veracity.

Black Caesar (1973): Though 70s crime cinema is perhaps best known for Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather epics as well as William Friedkin’s The French Connection and its derivatives, the urban-focused blaxploitation subgenre was meanwhile adapting many classic gangster tropes to fit the spirit of the era’s black culture. Black Caesar took the homage a step further, remaking the 1931 Edward G. Robinson-led Little Caesar as a ghetto tour de force, complete with soundtrack by James Brown.

For whatever moral ambivalence conventional American cinema possessed through the decade, the low-budget blaxploitation films took it a step further, and Black Caesar is no exception. Directed by horror maven Larry Cohen (Captivity), it’s a tawdry and bloodthirsty assault on the audience that only just redeems itself, as the early gangster films did, by its self-possessed swaggering cool. In the trailer below the gangsters have apparently even stolen Jim Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” riff.

 Goodfellas (1990): Arriving at the close of the Reagan Era, Scorsese’s audacious mobland saga remains the director’s definitive masterpiece and a bona fide American classic. Depicting both the mob’s everything-up-for-grabs heydey in the 1950s and 60s but also its slow rot from within through the 70s, the film follows based-on-real-life mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta, never better) and his two robbery and hijacking confederates (Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci) through twenty-five years of heists, betrayals, and retribution. 

Scorsese structured the film around movement, including a number of set pieces that dazzle in their bravado and montages that remain in the memory forever. In the scene below DeNiro’s paranoid gangster Jimmy Conway has decided to close ranks, elminiating the crew that helped him carry out the infamous 1978 robbery of Lufthansa Airlines.

Donnie Brasco (1997): Like Goodfellas, Mike Newell’s (Four Weddings And A Funeral) heavy drama is set in New York and depicts a true story about the mob in the 1970s. And that’s about where the similarities end. The titular character (Johnny Depp) is an undercover FBI agent cozying up to Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino, keeping a lid on the hooa-ah), a mid-level gangster with little to show for his lifetime of loyalty. The two work for Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano (Michael Madsen) a thug with the brutality of the classic gangster antihero but little of the ameliorating brains or ambition.

There’s no elegia for the mob lifestyle that was, no nostalgia about vanished eras. The gangsters are a backbiting and bullying wolf pack more than an organized outfit, driven at one point to ransacking parking meters for money to buy booze. The New York they inhabit, full of greasy cigarette smoke and ugly cars,  is a shithole evocative of The French Connection rather than the grandeur of Scorsese’s romantic vision. If the film fails to arrive at any real point about the mob or its setting, it’s nonetheless eminently watchable for Pacino’s exquisite performance as a man who’s wasted his life and lives with the weight of that on a day to day basis.

Eastern Promises (2007): Romantic criminals were a tough sell in Post-9/11 America, and the majority of the current decade’s crime films have borrowed from Tarantino’s increasingly impressionistic rendering of criminal life or, like Donnie Brasco, centered on undercover operatives working to destroy the corrupt system from within. Among the best of these was 2007′s underrated Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg’s (Dead Ringers) gritty look into Russian mob operations in London. Viggo Mortensen (Appaloosa) plays the undercover cop, Naomi Watts (The International) is the doctor investigating the death of a Russian white slavery victim, and the great Armin Mueller-Stahl (Avalon) co-stars as the charming head of the local crime family.

Cronenberg’s reputation rests on his sizeable body of overtly weird films like Videodrome and eXistenZ, but a late-career turn into crime cinema begun with 2005′s A History of Violence (also with Mortensen) shows him eminently capable of working within gangster film structures. Eastern Promises is the kind of film where you grip your seat’s armrest for 100 minutes, horrified at what your eyes witness, but then recommend it to friends starting the minute you leave the theatre.

- Michael Kabel
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Review: Revolutionary Road

Mendes, Winslet, and DiCaprio drive an award vehicle down a classic American novel.

Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road wants you to love it. In fact, it wants you to think it’s a “true masterpiece,” a “searing vision,” and an “instant classic.” It wants you to think its stars are giving the performances of their careers in a heart-wrenching story of a doomed American couple. It especially wants you to think you’re watching a brilliant, Oscar-worthy turn by its star Kate Winslet. The film does everything it possibly can to convince you of as much.

Don’t get suckered. Overlong but tediously paced and embarrassingly staged, it’s the kind of hyperwrought melodrama that, from less celebrated sources, might be dismissed as the earnest thesis of journeymen creators who have read more than actually lived. That’s bitterly ironic for fans of Richard Yates’ original 1961 novel, on which the film is based. Yates’ work was crushingly honest and, like all of his writing, candidly autobiographical. Yet the film is synthetic to its self-satisfied core, all polish and period detail (the gray flannel suits, the big cars, cocktail hours with giant glasses) without once inhabiting the time frame or risking a distraction from its stars’ capital-A acting to consider why such events might have happened the way they unfold. It has atmosphere but no depth, noise but nothing to say.

Most of the pics available online feature DiCaprio and Winslet. Go figure.

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) Wheeler are a young American couple living in a Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. Frank works in the marketing department of an IBM-like business machine company while April raises their two children. She once had dreams of becoming an actress, but those dreams have withered into star performances in a dreary community theatre. Bored with their lives and recognizing that their marriage has begun to curdle, April begins a plan to move the family to Paris. She’ll work at one of the American government agencies there; Frank will have the time to “find himself” and “realize his potential.” As explained in flashback to their bohemian courtship, they both believe Frank is destined for something more meaningful than suburbia and corporate droning. Their plans fall apart as Frank is tempted with a job promotion and April becomes pregnant, a collapse that drags their marriage along with it.

We complained months ago that Mendes’ films often comprise a cluster of aggressively staged scenes rather than a thoroughly successful narrative, and that he readily sacrifices plot and suspense in order to allow his actors room to chew the scenery. Of all his previous films, those faults are nowhere more in evidence than here. Winslet’s performance ramps up to ten in the first scene of dialogue between her and DiCaprio and rarely lets up. Her mannerisms are so broad, her body language so loud and her enunciation so defined, there’s no room left for subtlety or shading. It doesn’t help that Mendes, her husband, frames most of the shots with her as their center, or allows her two Oscar-clip-ready monologues that sound pretty from a writerly standpoint (second-time screenwriter Justin Haythe often quotes Yates’ work without really catching the words’ context, or subtext either) but that come across as artificial and mannered when said aloud.

DiCaprio’s performance is more audacious, though not for good reasons. In creating Frank he chooses to mimic the vocal cadences and body lauguage of Jack Nicholson’s early work, particularly Chinatown and Five Easy Pieces. Failing that, he resorts to his usual screen trick of looking ready to cry, seeming on the verge of tears no less than nine times in two hours. Critics have compared DiCaprio’s turn as favorable to Nicholson’s 1970s performances, but there is a difference between resemblance and derivation, and what DiCaprio performs only amounts to acting karaoke. A more grounded performance might have led to Frank becoming either the sympathetic center or the tragic fault of the Wheelers’ marriage. By cycling between imitation and routine it manages neither.

The supporting actors do what they can amid the roaring of the leads. Michael Shannon (Bug), the cast’s sole recipient of an Oscar nomination, delivers a strong performance as a mentally unbalanced man who both admires and condemns the Wheelers. The temptation to turn the character into a holy fool was likely overwhelming given the surrounding production, but Shannon imbues deep reserve into the part of the damaged John Givings. Jay O. Sanders (Cadillac Records) is effective and understated as Frank’s boss Bart Pollack. The Wheelers’ neighbors are never given enough to bring their characters into full definition, despite solid work by David Harbour (Quantum of Solace) and Kathryn Hahn (Step Brothers). Kathy Bates (Misery) gives a perfunctory performance as the Wheeler’s realtor and social contact Helen Givings, while Elia Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe (Fracture) shows promise as Frank’s occasional dalliance. Every performance implies that with more screen time their characters might bloom into something bigger, more resonant of the book and its themes, but those chances never materialize. The film is simply a vehicle for its stars first and above all.

Yates’ novel has long been considered “unfilmable” because of its meticulous attention to interior monologue and nuances of emotion and character instinct. Not surprisingly, that charge has become the rallying cry of the film’s apologists. But Yates also found his characters’ redemption by mining their entire lives as explanation and pardon for their adult shortcomings. Given the grinding sorrow and loneliness of their impoverished childhoods, Frank and April’s ability to dream or want something better was a triumph in and of itself. Except for a few half-hearted asides from Frank, that material has been stripped. It should also be said that although the film defied our earlier expectation that April’s abortion wouldn’t survive the adaptation, the event is staged and filmed with all the grace of a sledgehammer and minus the flashback that gives it additional dimensions of poignancy. And in a trailer-ready moment, DiCaprio’s Frank goes running down the street, struck with grief, making a bald metaphor for escape as the character’s sole grace note.

Simplistic where it should be profound and talky where it should be thoughtful, Revolutionary Road succeeds neither in provoking thought nor arousing emotion. Unlike even Mendes’ earlier American Beauty, it offers no solution to the characters’ misery, not even the hope for compassion and honesty suggested by its source material. It’s a wine cooler of a film masquerading as champagne, a work that aspires to nothing except to serve as a means of garnering laurels for its principals. With its recent all-but-complete shutout for nominations maybe this time the Academy isn’t fooled. You shouldn’t be, either.

- Michael Kabel
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Test Your Mad Men Acumen With Our Trivia Quiz

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!

The summer of our discontent is almost over. Mad Men, maybe the best television show since The Sopranos, returns for its second season Sunday night at 10 EST. As for what will happen, who knows? Show creator and runner Matthew Weiner has kept plot details to a top-secret minimum. Still, we know the season opener takes place on Valentine’s Day 1962, a full 14 months after the Season One finale.

AMC – which we think now stands for “Airs Mad Men Channel,” is giving the show a big push in both marketing and show budget, and that combined with its shitload of Emmy nominations means we expect the show will find the audience it deserves this season. Before it starts, however, we’re celebrating the first season with the trivia quiz below. Play at home or post your responses as a comment, and then we’ll post the answer key Monday. You can cheat if you must by using Wikipedia or IMDB, but remember cheaters only cheat themselves.

1. In the series’ pilot, what slogan does Don Draper invent for Lucky Strike cigarettes?

2. Account executive Ken Cosgrove gets a short story published in what elite New York magazine?

3. Secretary/junior copywriter Peggy Olsen is compared to a marine animal late in the season. Which animal, and for what reason?

4. What film does office manager Joan Halloway inadvertantly find herself emulating at the end of the episode titled “Red In The Face”?

5. Betty Draper gets the chance to model for which soft drink company’s ad campaign?

6. Sterling Cooper honcho Bert Cooper promises to introduce Don Draper to which famous author-philosopher?

7. According to Don Draper’s campaign for Right Guard, what do women really want?

 8. Sterling Cooper media buyer Harry Crane has a brief romantic tryst with an office secretary the night of the 1960 presidential election. Where does he wind up sleeping after confessing to his wife?

9. Before Mad Men, Vincent Kartheiser was best known for his role on the Buffy The Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel. What other Mad Men cast regular also appeared on a Joss Whedon-created show?

10. Roger Sterling often boasts about his time in which branch of the U.S. military?

11. Don and Betty Draper have two children. What are their names?

12. How was Don Draper’s father killed?

13. What must all visitors to Bert Cooper’s office do before entering?

14. Copywriter Paul Kinsey has written a one-act play he keeps in his desk. Name the play.

15. What was Pete Campbell’s nickname in prep school and/or college?

16. Which of the following brand names is NOT represented by Sterling Cooper: Bell Jolie Cosmetics, Secor Laxatives, Xerox Business Machines, Bethlehem Steel.

17. Following Roger Sterling’s heart attack, Sterling Cooper gets a new Head of Account Services named Duck Phillips. In what city had Phillips been working before?

18. Don Draper’s estranged brother Adam worked at what profession?

19. What kitschy wedding gift must Pete Campbell return to the department store?

20. Betty Draper briefly fantasizes about seducing a travelling salesman who’d visited the Draper household. What was the salesman trying to sell?

And as an added bonus, here’s the beautiful “Carousel” sequence from the season finale, in which Draper pitches the campaign for Kodak’s new slide projector.

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DVD Review: Bonnie And Clyde

A modern classic returns for a contemporary audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Michael Kabel

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