DVD Review: Source Code

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

Sincere without growing mawkish, intelligent without becoming 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, 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, 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 remnants of immediately recent events allow the project to gather intelligence about upcoming terrorist attacks.

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, he 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 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 – he fails many times, often in ways that ought to evoke pity from the audience – reveals his mission capsule in greater disrepair. Pressing Goodwin for more information, he 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 year’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 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). As 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.

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.

As with probably any great science fiction film, enjoyment relies somewhat on your willing suspension of disbelief, in giving the film license to let a hole slip into the plot when perhaps you’re less likely to notice. But in the meantime it offers the best kind of not just science fiction but fiction itself – rooted in humanity and letting emotions rather than spectacle guide its way. Source Code brings that all together while still maintaining its action-charged momentum – it’s a lot more movie than it seems.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

DVD Review: Cedar Rapids

Ed Helms’ leading-man debut is a funnier movie than The Hangover Part 2. It’s smarter, too.

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 often 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 virtually 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 his new friends’ 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 content 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 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” (Not least of which, obviously, The Hangover Part II.) 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. Given a small release in the theatres last winter, it’s unmissable home video entertainment.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

DVD Review: The Adjustment Bureau

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

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

Matt Damon stars as David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past (which fortunately does not involve Twitter) has cost him a Senate race in a bitter upset. Moments before his concession speech he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

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

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

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

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability without coming across as showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. The film is too smart for that.

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

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

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

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

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

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: The Hangover Part II

The wolfpack takes a trip they’ve by and large taken before.

Probably since the moment of its official announcement, the hype and anticipation surrounding The Hangover Part II speculated that the sequel to the 2009 monster hit comedy couldn’t avoid a presumed – and expected – sophomore stumble. Much of that first film’s success, really, grew out of its out-of-left-field surprise : with its pairing of journeyman comics Ed Helms and Zack Galifianakis with then-unproven leading man Bradley Cooper, and a concept that seemed to owe more to Las Vegas tourism commercials than organic inspiration, the film’s raunchy escapism and bromantic camaraderie was, if not exactly fresh, a modern take on the “boys will be boys” comedic trope. Enjoying a playing field more or less left to itself in the no-fun zone of the summer 2009 movie season, the original grossed close to half a billion dollars worldwide.

Jump ahead two years to this sequel, whose guiding maxim seems to run something along the lines of “nothing succeeds like success.” But can it succeed? Well no, maybe of course not, but then it doesn’t often try very hard. The budget is more than doubled, the jokes are raunchier and there are more genitalia on display, but audiences will likely find a depressing amount of sameness anyway. If you liked the first, you’ll like this one, but not as much and perhaps even in spite of yourself.

Changing the environs from Vegas to the more picturesque – but perhaps no less heady – setting of Bangkok, this second adventure has the gang decamping for Thailand to celebrate the marriage of “wolfpack” member Stu (Ed Helms) to a woman of Thai descent (Jamie Chung.) Buddies Phil (Cooper) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are onboard as groomsmen, and the gang reluctantly invites Doug’s brother-in-law Alan (Galifianakis), as before, at the urging of Doug’s wife (Sasha Barrese.) The marriage is far from ideal almost at once. The bride’s father (Nirit Sirijanya) disapproves of Stu, comparing him to rice porridge, and Alan takes an immediate, competitive dislike to her brother Teddy (Mason Lee.)

Stu’s plans for a low-key, beachside campfire bachelor party take a turn for the disastrous – the movie has to happen somehow – and the gang wakes up the next morning in a Bangkok hotel room with, naturally, no memory of the previous night. Teddy is missing, though one of his fingers is recovered from a glass of water, and bumbling criminal Chow (Ken Jeong) is naked and unconscious on the hotel room floor.

Panicked but determined to find Teddy, the group reenters the sun-drenched, sun-bleached Bangkok streets hoping to find him before the wedding ceremony that evening. Their search gets them entangled with a corrupt businessman (Paul Giamatti, completely wasted here), a hermaphrodite strip bar/brothel, and Russian gangsters who want the obnoxious, cigarette-smoking monkey the wolfpack found in their room.

Even before the search really begins, anyone paying attention can spot the crippling loyalty to the original’s bag of tricks: the seamy morning-after locales, the replacement of Teddy for Doug as missing person, the use of Chow as manic comic foil; Teddy’s final rescue comes not as a result of the group’s diligence but as a brainstorm that reveals his hiding place all along. That’s fine by itself, but the innovation this time around seems largely based on amping the shock value of the first: as the original had frontal nudity, this one displays transsexual body parts. Stu has sex with a man instead of a woman. People are shot instead of beaten up.

In time the devotion becoming slavish, then almost compulsive, except the jokes fall flat – nothing’s as funny the second time – and there aren’t enough of them to make the repetition besides the point, as in similarly comedy sequels like Airplane II and all the iterations of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Director Todd Philips, working with two screenwriters who didn’t participate in the first, keep the jokes at the same pitch as the predecessor. But without the element of surprise – with the expectation of getting shocked – the shock value deflates, like a punch you know is coming and then doesn’t sting as much as a result.

The performances are similarly uniform, and not in a way that’s always endearing. Cooper can coast by on looks and charm – that’s all the role asks of him, really – but Helms, Galifianakis, and Jeong have a harder time keeping their respective schticks fresh. We’ve groused before that Galifianakis was already on his way to becoming what Steve Zahn was in the 90s: a talented, oddball comic actor whose welcome was squandered on inferior projects. But his weirdo routine is starting to show its age already, particularly in the malice Alan shows for Teddy and his childlike devotion to the monkey. Helms and Jeong, meanwhile, go through R-rated motions of the characters they play on NBC Thursday nights.

There’s an old piece of conventional wisdom that sequels will typically reap sixty percent of the box office as their hit predecessors. Why shouldn’t the same formula apply to audience satisfaction? The Hangover Part II is sixty percent as entertaining as the first, the rest lost to limp shock value and diminished inspiration. If you can settle for that, you won’t have a bad time.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Primary Green: A Green Lantern Crash Course

A layman’s guide to one of this summer’s most eagerly awaited comics blockbusters.

Already one of the most-hyped films of the summer thanks to weeks of relentless marketing, Green Lantern arrives in theatres with a legion of expectations dogging its trail. The subject of intense scrutiny since the earliest days of its preproduction – and extensive reworkings by Warner Bros during and even after its post-production process – the film has seemed to get better with each new marketing cycle, shifting from the dopey adventure of its earliest previews to a gritty, suspenseful space opera in the tradition of, obviously, Star Wars or Star Trek.

Which suggests that director Martin Campbell and the film’s producers are changing horses in midstream a bit, tweaking the final cut to move it closer to audience tastes: initial response to those earlier previews was lukewarm at best. The film is significant – important, even – for several reasons, especially to publisher DC Comics. A success at the box office will mean the company can build franchises from its second-tier characters (everyone besides Batman and Superman); it’ll also provide another tentpole for the Justice League film that Warner Bros keeps saying it wants to make.

As with Marvel’s currently shownig Thor, the biggest issue facing Green Lantern’s success is his relative obscurity among non-comics (and cartoon) fans; everyone knows Superman and Batman and their origins and histories; fewer know GL’s basics, despite a giant surge in popularity since a 2004 restart of the comics franchise. That surge by and large has made this film possible: similar efforts such an adaptation of DC’s The Flash (ironically a project once connected with star Ryan Reynolds) have languished in development for years.

The following represents some of the more interesting and/or important parts of the Green Lantern mythos, gathered from its seventy-one years of history. All our opinions are just that. For our part, we’re keeping an open mind about the movie – to be honest, we’re keeping it wedged open with a couple of steel bars, using only our willpower.

Hal Jordan wasn’t the first Green Lantern to star in comics.  Though the film centers on test pilot Hal Jordan and his trial by fire into the galaxy-spanning Green Lantern Corps, the first character to bear the GL name was a little more shadowy and gothic. When railroad engineer Alan Scott discovered a piece of the mystical Starheart in the wreckage of a derailed train, he used its otherworldly power to fight crime. Eventually, he joined the Justice Society, comics’ first super hero team.

Scott debuted in All-American Comics in 1940, and remains one of the most popular “Golden Age” characters. He still appears every month in the Justice Society’s comic book alongside other enduring “mystery men,” and has two children who are also heroes.

Hal Jordan, Space Age Alpha Dog. Costumed super heroes experienced a steep drop in popularity after World War II, but rebounded in the late 1950s following the all-but total reinventions of several properties; in most cases the name and powers were similar in this “Silver Age” but everything else became different.

Following a successful revamp of The Flash, in which science and technology were emphasized over mystery and suspense, in 1959 creators John Broome and Gil Kane envisioned Green Lantern as a space cop whose Space Sector 2814 “beat” was Earth and its neighboring solar systems.

Jordan’s daily life was ripped from the headlines: as a brash test-pilot for Ferris Aircraft, he was meant to evoke the then-white hot glamour of Chuck Yeager and the Mercury Seven astronauts. Typical of the Silver Age “less is more” visual aesthetic, his comparatively streamlined costume is supposed to represent aerodynamics and speed. Finally, recurrent love interest Carol Ferris was also his boss, anticipating the gender struggles of the coming two decades.

Kane art from the 1980s

Co-creator Kane is a comics titan. It’s hard to overstate Kane’s importance and stature when discussing comics art. Pioneering realism and artistic grace at a time when the medium was visually still relatively simplistic and utilitarian, his dynamic, movement-centered illustrations played an influence on every artist to come after him.

Later in his career Kane helped lay the groundwork for the the modern graphic novel with his 1971 fantasy epic Blackmark. In the 80s he gave comics a bit of culture by illustrating an adaptation of Richad Wagner’s epic Ring of the Nibelung operatic cycle.

Hal Jordan isn’t always Green Lantern, and vice versa. Comics audiences’ tastes change every few years but often violently revert back, and from time to time Jordan has found himself supplanted by other heroes the book’s editors perceive as more in keeping with shifting trends. Within the larger narrative, these ersatz Lanterns are commonly explained as alternates or replacements while he’s unable to serve the Corps.

Additional Earth-based GL’s include the headstrong, overbearing Guy Gardner (since promoted to the Corps’ version of a SWAT team); architect and former Marine Corps sniper John Stewart; and Los Angeles graphics artist Kyle Rayner. In fact a bitter debate raged for years among Rayner and Jordan fans until DC comics restored Jordan to his initial status as the company’s preeminent Green Lantern.

The Green Lantern Corps is an army of strange aliens and beautiful freaks. GLC creators have traditionally taken advantage of comics’ broader storytelling capacities to include GL’s who aren’t remotely human. Some of the Corps’ stranger members include Rot Lop Fan, a being of pure sound, the sentient plant-man Medphyll, and living diamond Chaselon.

Jordan’s “neighbor” GL’s include fan-favorite “fish-parrots” Tomar-Re and his successor Tomar-Tu of the planet Xudar, whose Sector 2813 included Superman’s world of Krypton; and Arisia Rrab of 2815, a battle-hardened GL who resembles a teenager girl despite having already lived more than two hundred years.

This movie is not Jordan’s debut in other media. A cameo in Justice League Unlimited, two direct-to-DVD animated features and a handful of appearances on the 1980s-era Super Friends cartoon notwithstanding, Jordan’s other screen appearance remains less than auspicious. Actor Howard Murphy donned a whiter shade of green to appear as the Emerald Gladiator in 1979′s Legends of the Superheroes, a pair of NBC specials structured along the formats of traditional variety shows and celebrity roasts.

The shows’ cringe-inducing scripts, as well as production values that might politely be termed modest, kept them out of circulation for years. Nevertheless a DVD collection has recently become available.

Different corps use different colors to harness an “emotional spectrum” of power. Perhaps the biggest recent addition to the larger GL mythos involves the introduction of six additional corps, some of whom are friendly and some others decidedly hostile to the Green Lantern Corps’ mission.

The GLC uses the “emotion” of willpower to fuel their rings’ energy constructs. Their adversaries include the Sinestro Corps, which harnesses the yellow energy of fear (yellow is the one color the lanterns’ rings are ineffectual against) and the Red Lantern Corps that uses rage. More benevolent groups include the Blue Lantern Corps of hope and the Indigo Tribe of compassion.

Here’s the latest trailer, in which Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush) relates the history of the Corps:

Green Lantern opens nationwide June 17.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

DVD Review: The Mechanic

Statham and Foster spin their wheels in the remake of a Seventies crime genre favorite.

A decade ago, around the time of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remake, someone involved with the film (maybe the director himself) said you can more easily remake a mediocre film than you can a well-made one. It’s a good theory: presumably the audience is more forgiving of mistakes made in the retrofitting of the story material, and at the same time possibly more eager to embrace improvements. American culture is proudly all about the upgrade, and for better or worse consumers are predisposed by tradition to equate the new with the improved, whether the connection proves true or not.

The target audience of director Simon West’s The Mechanic, a thunderous and messy remake of the little but fondly remembered 1972 Charles Bronson actioner of the same name, won’t give a shit if the film improves or denigrates its predecessor. Why should they? Within the narrow scope of shoot-em-up action films it’s neither remarkable nor terrible, and largely indistinguishable from star Jason Statham’s franchise of Transporter adventures. If you like those films, here’s more of the same.

Statham takes over Bronson’s role as Arthur Bishop, a contract hitman employed by an international company that contracts assassinations, murders, and vengeance killings to its stable of operatives. As Bishop explains, some killings need to be staged to resemble accidents and some need to send a clear message. Both kinds seem to require meticulous planning and preparation, including the opening set piece execution of a vaguely defined South American millionaire: Bishop kills the man in his tightly guarded mansion and then stages an unnecessarily elaborate escape.

Returning to his New Orleans base of operations, he meets with his mentor and friend McKenna (Donald Sutherland) but shortly thereafter learns the company has marked the older man for termination. A company executive (Tony Goldwyn) tells Bishop that McKenna sold information about a mission to a third party, resulting in the deaths of several operatives. Bishop reluctantly agrees to execute McKenna himself, carrying out the hit but staging the event to look like a carjacking.

Mulling over his guilt, he’s reunited with McKenna’s estranged son Stephen (Ben Foster), a ‘neer-do-well with a bad temper and, thanks to his father’s death, an aimless wellspring of rage. Bishop stops Stephen from executing a small time criminal and agrees to train him as an assassin, a regimen that includes buying a chihuahua and loafing around an Uptown coffee shop.

The revelation of those instructions’ hidden purpose, along with the final triple-cross conclusion, offer the only true – if moderate – surprises of the film. The rest is go-through-the-motions shoot-em-up, albeit motions handsomely and engagingly staged by West and his stunt team. Statham has done this enough by now to make it look easy, and the gunfights have a kinetic brutality to them that’s reminiscent – most likely deliberately so – of the early films of John Woo.

Wikipedia tells us the critics reviewing the 1972 version noted both the father-son rivalry between Bishop and Stephen and also a “latent homosexual bond.” But West and this latest version don’t bother with infusing the 2011 version with a murky subtext; the script lets the two men keep their thoughts to themselves tough-guy style; even when Stephen willfully disobeys instructions Bishop is slow to criticize, and their final confrontation outside a gas station is played with a minimum of pathos. It’s a lucky thing Statham and Foster have the laconic acting tradition to fall back upon – watching them open up might prove embarrassing.

As for the performances, as noted above Statham is an old hand at this. Foster, though improved since his dreadful performance in 2007’s 3:10 to Yuma, doesn’t often do more than smirk or act cocky on-camera. Yet his mugging, meant to telegraph detached, contemptuous cool, comes off as bratty next to Statham’s reserved-to-the-point- of-boredom swagger. Swedish actress Mini Anden gets the only substantive female part, playing Bishop’s prostitute love interest; their sex scene early in the film is a textbook example of “gratuitous nudity.” (I’m guessing her character is a prostitute, though she sometimes acts like a girlfriend; Bishop gives her money and she doesn’t know his name.)

Eventually The Mechanic doesn’t amount to anything more than a place-holding link in the careers of its two stars.  Statham will certainly make more action movies, and for whatever reasons Foster seems on his way to becoming a durable screen presence as well. The Mechanic isn’t a bad film: it’s not a disappointment or travesty to the original, and it’s not a good film or improvement either. It’s just in the middle all the way around, until the last five minutes when things get very hairy and very unpredictable all at once. Now with its home video release you can watch those first, skipping to the best part. Everything else will be the same when you go back.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

DVD Review: The Killer Inside Me

Michael Winterbottom’s notorious thriller is troubled, frustrating, mystifying.

After more than two decades of filmmaking, Michael Winterbottom remains one of the most fascinating and yet frustrating directors working. His films are routinely energetic, ambitious, stuffed with memorable performances – actors routinely do their best work when participating in one of his projects – and his subject matter is never less than inventive and intriguing. So why aren’t his films, as complete works, better than they are?

The Killer Inside Me continues the recurrent trend that began with 1997′s Welcome To Sarajevo and continues through a half-dozen or so good-but-not-great films including 24 Hour Party People, The Claim, and Code 46. A great idea for a film, handsomely and adroitly cast, it never quite rises to its potential but instead languishes in unresolved issues and ideas that don’t quite work out to their best conclusions. It’s hobbled, too, by an abrupt and clumsy tonal shift midway through the third act that leaves its ending particularly disappointing.

It’s based on a novel by Jim Thompson, whose other works – The Getaway, The Grifters, After Dark, My Sweet - stand stark even in the bleak company of the hard-boiled genre. The story centers on Lou Ford, a soft-spoken sheriff’s deputy in small-town Centreville, Texas of the 1950s. Ford is amiable, gentlemanly, and deliberate, obedient to his alcoholic boss (Tom Bower) and content to live in the house left him by  his late doctor father. Some time previous Ford’s adoptive brother died under mysterious circumstances, following lurid innuendo concerning his activities with a child.

When Ford is assigned to investigate the activities of local prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), his barely restrained sadism begins to percolate. Actually a sociopath comfortable with his own amorality but happy to disguise it beneath a mild-mannered veneer, he embarks on an affair of rough sex with Joyce while romancing, ostensibly for the sake of appearances, playful but adoring town debutante Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson.) Ford tells himself, and the audience through first-person voiceover narration, that he loves Joyce but can use her to bring about the revenge he’s wanted since his brother’s death.

That revenge involves manipulating her into conning the son (Jay R. Ferguson) of the local construction magnate (Ned Beatty) that Ford blames for his brother’s death. But the revenge is only the excuse, it seems, for Ford to murder the magnate’s son in cold blood and then savagely beat Joyce to death, under a cover of framing the son for her murder but keeping the cash that the son believed would allow him to skip town with Joyce. The resulting brutal violence is central to the film’s greatest ambition but also creates its many failings.

The long, anguished scene in which Ford pummels Joyce, and a later similar scene involving Amy, caused a cyclone of complaints upon the film’s premiere at Sundance and elsewhere, and not without reason – they’re almost impossible to watch without revulsion. Joyce’s death manages, in brutal clarity, to reverse the moral center of the film, turning Ford from interesting if unsympathetic anti-hero (we get small, flashback hints to his true nature several times in the film) to contemptible villain. Affleck seldom changes the temperature of his performance, keeping Ford at the same spacey, plodding cool in almost every scene.

Cleverly, Thompson’s story – adapted by writer/director John Curran – builds a supporting cast that can slide into the vacuum of sympathy created by Ford’s curdling: the well-intentioned if useless sheriff, his earnest deputy (Matthew Maher), a county attorney (Simon Baker), the construction boss suspicious of Ford’s role in the killing, the union organizer who often seems to see through Ford’s “bullshit”; and of course Amy herself, who plans to elope with Ford in the immediate future.

But except for Amy, none of the characters is given the opportunity to establish themselves as presences in the story independent of their relation to Ford; they are not persons themselves so much as types that Ford must evade or manipulate in his day-to-day existence, and in their normalcy they seem scant opposition to his ruthlessness. That’s probably exactly the point Thompson’s book wanted to make (I haven’t read it), that normal civilization is powerless in the face of true evil  – a lesson that’s apparently common in Texas, the original no country for old men. Still, that basic imbalance effectively allows Ford to gambol through the film with no clear threat of retribution. It’s frightening, but not in a way that’s especially rewarding to watch.

Winterbottom’s intention may have been to disconcert the viewer rather than entertain all along; there’s plenty to suggest that the entire purpose is to repulse rather than garner sympathy for Ford’s monstrous depravity. If only the last twenty minutes or so held up that level of malicious drive. Following Amy’s death, music and staging coincide to bring a bizarre and awkward sense of camp to several scenes, including a poorly staged chase sequence through town whose indifferent conclusion grows annoying upon reflection. The equally off-putting ending, rife with contortions that set up weirdly symbolic overlays to the story but that run all over the place tonally, virtually collapses the preceding story into dissolution.

Regarding the performances, Ford is a dangerous part to undertake, and it’s hard to imagine other contemporary leading men hazarding such a risky commitment (imagine Brad Pitt doing something like this.) But Affleck’s determination to make his character casually sociopathic keeps the emotional intensity at a level less than what it needs to bring the film. He also never allows much insight into Ford’s inner psyche, and though again that may have aligned with Thompson or Winterbottom’s design ultimately it makes his performance an important question mumbled in a loud room.

The two women are both well cast, if for different reasons. Hudson has made a career of playing the love interest in comedies with the weight of pollen grains, so watching her act both randy and then victimized has a shock value that works forcibly to the film’s advantage. Alba received a lot of negative press for her performance, including a Razzie award, but she’s adequate and at times even pitiably affecting in a part that doesn’t allow her to do much except get ravished or beaten. Of the male co-stars, Bill Pullman steals scenes (as usual) as a lawyer who comes to Ford’s rescue once the plot steers itself into a corner. Maher, an actor who ought to be seen more, is compelling as the last deputy left  in town to represent real law.

Speaking of the film’s graphic violence against women, Winterbottom told The New York Daily News that the story exists in a “kind of parallel world” that he was “drawn into.” Yet for as much texture as the film has – it’s a visceral, immersive world that irrepressibly sucks you in – there’s almost nothing by way of context or theory to explain Ford’s implacable rage and madness. The resultant displays come off too casual, too callous, as a direct consequence.  And perhaps because the violence is savaged upon women who love and who need to be loved, audiences will expect and for that matter probably have a right to expect closure or at least insight. The women’s performances are good enough that they’ll want to know why; in the absence of such the banality of Ford’s evil inevitably blurs with a lack of articulation of the film’s – and its creators’ – ideas.

They’ll come away disappointed. Ultimately full of problems and dark promise alike, The Killer Inside Me takes us through the life and mind of someone almost impossibly evil but loses itself before offering anything like a way out.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Thor

Kicking off the summer movie season with a thrilling, uncomplicated adventure.

Thor may finally settle a debate about Marvel Studios, one that’s brewed for years now: whether the company can build a successful film out of its lesser known characters, following earlier thuds such as Elektra and Ghost Rider. Hardly a household name and not even one of Marvel’s most popular characters among its devoted fanbase, mainstream audiences may approach this film with even heavier doses of skepticism than those earlier misfires. The almost simplistic story of an upstart Norse godling roaming the Earth in combat with his evil half-brother Loki can seem simplistic at best and, honestly, a tad goofy at worst.

Nevertheless, director Kenneth Branagh and his production team  must have taken those pitfalls as a challenge. Despite a hefty run-time that sometimes feels a bit belabored and a romantic subplot that often threatens to become superfluous, the film is a perfect opening volley for a summer movie season swamped by superheroes. Here’s hoping that they’re all as enjoyable as this fast-paced, smartly dumb adventure.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), his parents Odin and Frigga (Anthony Hopkins and Rene Russo) and half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) rule the other-dimensional megalopolis of Asgard, the highest of the universe’s Nine Realms. In centuries past they had defended Midgard (their name for Earth) from an invading army of frost giants, until Odin pushed the monsters back to their own realm of Jotunheim. In the present day the Asgardians and giants maintain an uneasy peace guaranteed by Odin’s supervision of an artifact (more or less a giant battery) containing the bulk of the giants’ power.

Branagh keeps the back story moving fluidly and quickly, zooming past derivations from The Lord of the Rings series (which are unmistakable, even if possibly coming from the same source) and getting the story into the present day. When a frost giant raid on the Asgardians’ armory spoils the celebration announcing Thor as Odin’s designated successor, the young prince determines to lead a counterattack into Jotunheim despite his father’s explicit orders. Joined by his friends Sif (Jaimie Alexander), Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Hogun (Tadanobu Asano), and Fandral (Josh Dallas), Thor crosses the rainbow bridge leading out of the Asgardians’ fortifications and into Jotunheim, assisted by the city’s stoic gatekeeper Heimdall (Idris Elba).

The point of the mission, at least for the script, is to establish Thor’s fighting credentials. The film is shrewd in understanding that, as a character, Thor lacks the cultural universality of Spider-Man and Superman or the simplicity of the Iron Man concept (Watch Green Lantern hit the same speed bump next month.) The early battle scenes, full of flying bodies and sharp weapons, demonstrate the young goldling’s skill before establishing his character dept in the second act. The action scenes are thrilling, though predictable, as is Thor’s banishment to Earth for his impudence.

He crash-lands in New Mexico, where he’s found by astrophysicist Jane Foster (Nathalie Portman) and her mentor (Stellan Skarsgard) and intern (Kat Dennings.) Foster monitors the atmospheric disturbances over the desert, looking for evidence of wormholes in time and space. Meanwhile residents of the local town stumble upon the crash site of Thor’s war hammer, sent after him by Odin and cursed to resist any attempts at lifting except by those worthy to wield its power. The impact crater quickly gets locked down by SHIELD, the same spy agency so prevalent in the Iron Man films and led here by those movies’ Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg).

Hemsworth remains convincing in taking the upstart god from brash and entitled to self-sacrificing and mature. His chemistry with Portman helps, as does the easy friendship he shares with his Asgardian compatriots; Hiddleston is equally effective as the silver-tongued trickster God, though the script takes his characterization a step further in providing a more classical motivation for his treachery. Odin’s family is conflicted and at odds against itself in the film, making for meaty intrigue that plays directly to Branagh’s Shakespearean strengths. But ultimately it’s Hemsworth’s show, he and Hiddleston’s, and the two make solid counterpoints to one another.

Loki eventually gains the upper hand, supplanting Odin on the throne and sending a towering metal giant named The Destroyer to kill Thor and his friends, leading to the film’s climactic battle.  The fight between the lumbering destroyer and the determined thunder god comes closer to the Tony Stark-Obadiah Stane duel of the first Iron Man than the comparative anti-climaxes found in Iron Man 2 and The Incredible Hulk.

Just don’t expect closure. Thor the movie, resting as it does on the franchise trajectory leading to next summer’s The Avengers, has to keep its ending open not only for its own sequels but for that coming film crossover. (The much-reported appearance here of longtime comics Avenger mainstay Hawkeye doesn’t satisfy, exactly, but doesn’t disappoint, either.) The film drags on a bit too long near the end as it winds down all its moving parts, and a final scene between Odin and his two sons drags for feeling perfunctory. Hiddleston does what he can, however, making Loki pitiable in defeat, however temporary.

CGI-rendered exotic worlds are a commonplace in current cinema, but the production design and sets displayed here are staggering, particularly the Asgard and its many hallowed, echoing chambers. By contrast, the New Mexico desert community is simple and Modernist in a backlot kind of realism, a town seemingly full of chrome diners and Atomic Age facades, dotted with references to the characters’ histories.  

The after-credits preview, incidentally, establishes what’s likely the MacGuffin of the Avengers movie while validating a theory many filmgoers will likely concoct about Dr. Foster’s mentor Dr. Selvig. As a teaser goes, if you’re familiar with the object displayed it’s a great story twist. Those not familiar with the item in question will be less amused.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::