The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (American version)

Or, revenge is Swede.

First, I have to admit that I could not finish the book this movie was based on. I totally failed to be interested in either the righteous liberal magazine editor or the insular Swedish Krupps.

Interestingly, I totally failed to be interested in either of these when watching the movie, either. But it mattered less because books are about who, what, and where, and films are about whee! and wow! and whoa!

And there is plenty of those in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There's been a lot of talk about Rooney Mara's electrifying performance as the princess of damaged goods, Lisbeth Salander--all of it justified, and more on that later. But I wonder if Fincher's true muse here is actually Trent Reznor.

The electro-orgasmic credits to this movie are somewhere between a Bjork music video and a Jan Svankmajer film. Set to a Led Zeppelin song voiced by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, it's as breathlessly eerie as the opening sequence of Fincher's Se7en, which is set to a remix of NIN's Closer. 

Reznor wrote the rest of the score as well, and it's chillingly beautiful. Dress warmly when watching this movie. I had to turn up the thermostat. Sweden, in Fincher's movie, becomes a place where suicide seems eminently logical, if only because hell is warm.

As a result, many of the actors seem like they're trying to emote through a coating of hoarfrost. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the above-mentioned goody-goody magazine editor. Surprisingly, James Bond is completely conventional and adds little to the movie, except perhaps the interesting footnote that somebody with so much charisma is capable of making it all disappear.

Blomkvist's main squeeze is his editor Erika Berger, who you may recognize as Robin Wright with a terrible wig, unless you blink and miss her. 

Blomkvist, having been disgraced (unjustly, natch) by an evil corporate magnate, is invited to a remote Swedish island where good corporate magnate Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) and his various crazy relatives reside. Blomkvist is tasked with discovering who murdered Vanger's niece Harriet in 1966. 

As I've already mentioned, it's kind of hard to care, since Harriet isn't even a character in the movie. But the movie is energized by Rooney Mara, who slices through the frost with the taser that seems to be her weapon of choice. 

In a world filled with crazy people, the patently insane Salander is the only sane one. She's the only character with any nuance; everybody else is a straw man or a figurehead or a stereotype. She's blasé in a vitriolic way; depressive, but not passive; vulnerably violent. 

The real mystery of the movie's first half, though, is why Salander is even in it. She prepares a report on Blomkvist for the Vangers, and then continues on breathing life into the movie despite appearing to have no involvement with it. She hacks, cracks, snoops, spies, and in one very memorable scene...takes the subway. 

Once Blomkvist hires her to help with the investigation into Harriet's death, though, the other half of the movie begins to warm up as well. She turns his life upside down, a cybergenius Oscar to his journalistic Felix, or a punk Q to his tired, middle-aged Bond. She's the real hero, not Blomkvist, and she saves the day.

In the end, we find out who the bad guy is, and it turns out--SURPRISE!--that he's bad because his daddy abused him. Can the movie industry as a whole please retire this tired pop-psych trope or at least rotate it with something more creative? It's ironic that a movie which has a heroine who continues to fight for good despite being brutally abused also features a villain with such a cheap-shot background. Plus, even parental abuse can't explain the actor's central-casting portrayal of the villain. He does everything but cackle hysterically. 

Even worse, the movie doesn't end there. It segues maladroitly into an epilogue that aims to bring the story full circle--back to the corporate baddie who railroaded Blomkvist in the prelude. Salander has already punished two of the three bad guys in the movie, and now she heads off to do her thing on the third. But it's not as satisfying as the first two. Throughout the movie, Salander's near-magic cyberskills and Olympian vengeance have strained credibility somewhat, but Mara's winning performance has kept it from snapping. This final sequence really pushes that credibility to its breaking point.

To be fair, it was very late at that point, and I could have taken the opportunity to turn it off, go to sleep and finish it the next night, but I didn't. And the final shot might be worth the silliness and the wait--the movie finishes with a whoa! that I didn't expect, but of a very different, and welcome, kind than the one it began with.

Prometheus

Or, Goo bye and goo riddance.

How much meta-content do you want in your horror movies? Prometheus has been panned by some on the grounds that it starts out promising to tell you the origins of humanity and then fails to do so. To me, that's not nearly as much of a disappointment as the fact that it promises to scare the daylights out of you and then fails to do that. 

Our main characters, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), and her husband, Dr. Charles Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), have discovered cave paintings of big people pointing at a bunch of dots, which conclusively proves where life on Earth came from. I have no problem buying this premise, as long as it gets us to a really creepy planet. Which it does, of course, but it takes about half the movie to get there.

On the way, we are introduced to David, an android played by Michael Fassbender, who likes to watch Lawrence of Arabia for pretty much no reason except perhaps to learn a British accent. It would make more sense if he had been watching 2001, or Terminator 2, or Saturn 3. Are the robots ever the nice guys in movies like this?

David is in charge of waking everybody up from the obligatory cryosleep, at which point we meet Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the corporate executive who has been sent on this mission to do pushups, apparently, and walk around as robotically as David and bark at everybody because she's a corporate executive and that's what they do. Since Ridley Scott brought us Blade Runner, it's worth discussing whether Vickers is herself an android. If this review doesn't put you off the movie entirely, or you saw it too late, come back and discuss in the comments.

Are you scared yet? Exactly. 

There are a lot of conversations about how we're here to find out who created us, and Dr. Shaw wears a cross, which we discuss at length. If this makes you suspect that it is a symbological sledgehammer which will later be wielded against you, go to the head of the class.

There are a bunch of other characters. I'd tell you who they are, but they're all redshirts, so that'd be pointless.

Finally we get to the planet. They find a mysterious cave (yawn), and some mysterious black goo (probably not good, right?) Then a storm comes, and two redshirts get stuck outside the ship, and I thought, finally! The movie's starting!

It kind of never does, though. We've just seen this all before. There are nasty lifeforms, but they're surprisingly ho-hum. David does what you knew all along he was going to do, and again the results fail to truly scare. There's a creepy alien birth sequence, which would have bothered me more if I hadn't seen it coming since the otherwise pointless sex scene. The miniseries V had a creepier alien birth sequence thirty years ago (and I hear the Twilight series had one too), so if you're a connoisseur of these things, it's worth a look but otherwise not a reason to watch Prometheus. Oh, and you're pretty sick.

In between, the humans discuss whether the aliens on the planet made them, and David points out that humans made him, just in case you missed that wrinkle. I'm mystified that reviewers would say this movie was obtuse, because the characters really refuse to let the audience figure anything out for themselves.

And at the end, it turns out this is an origin story of sorts...the origin of a new set of sequels. That might be the most predictable thing about this very predictable movie.

Arbitrage

Or, A Criminal Waste of Susan Sarandon.

Nudity in art, if it has a reason to be there, can be very explicit and not be accused of prurience. But if it has no reason to be there, no justification, no artistic purpose, then it's just pornography.

Arbitrage is the bastard child of Wall Street and Bonfire of the Vanities, with the exploding car from Michael Clayton, but without the virtues of any of these. It's a film that spends a lot of time in fancy restaurants, richly furnished offices and townhouses with spiral staircases that would be at home in the last scene of Sunset Boulevard. But it's empty and pointless. It's just another form of pornography. And Arbitrage is too preoccupied with its real-estate porn to bother with a sex scene, anyway. It's M&A without the T&A. 

Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a Wall Street hotshot who made one incredibly bad investment which he is now trying to cover up. This involves a lot of boring conversations about bridge loans and Russian copper mines, so the writers have manufactured a subplot about the death of his unbelievably annoying mistress in order to manufacture some urgency.

In a better movie, this script might be used to prompt us to ask ourselves about the values of loyalty and family, and what money can buy and what it can't, and whether the police are any better than the criminals they're pursuing. 

Director Nicholas Jarecki simply isn't up to the task. He adds nothing to the script, which has some serious weaknesses. The police commit an act of jaw-dropping misconduct, they're caught by a judge, and he doesn't really seem to consider the possibility that this might be a case for Internal Affairs. Robert's wife catches him philandering and perpetrating fraud, and he appears to claim that this behavior is justified because she shops too much. 

Robert's daughter Brooke actually is helpful enough to point out another flaw in the script when she mentions that as the film's Chief Investment Officer, nobody is going to believe she didn't know anything about the missing $400 million, so it's kind of a cheap shot for her dad to claim he committed the fraud for the family, since she's probably going to jail too. Since Brit Marling, who plays Brooke, turned down a job at Goldman Sachs to go into acting, it makes you wonder if she helpfully suggested that her character shoot a huge hole in the movie.

Richard Gere is capable of subtlety as an actor, but he's at his best when he's cast against type. As the cuckolded schlep of a husband in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful, he's the best thing about the movie. He's surprisingly compelling in the improbable role of a Japanese-American in Akira Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August. But here, there isn't any subtlety for him to bring out. He winds up yelling a lot. It's almost as if Jarecki can't decide if his character is supposed to be sympathetic or not, and frankly, Gere seems just too nice to play a total jerk. Do we want the police to catch him or don't we?

The supporting cast is uneven. If this is the best movie role Susan Sarandon is getting offered these days, she should decamp for the small screen. She was hilarious as Frank's jailbait-loving teacher on 30 Rock. Here, she's window dressing. She's almost too good: the audience is bound to wonder why Robert would sleep around with Laetitia Casta's whiny, self-doubting, needy French artist tramp when he has Sarandon's elegant, fit, devoted Ellen waiting for him.

Tim Roth disappears into the role of the bloodhound detective determined to sink his teeth into Robert's leg, but his motivation is puzzling and neither the script nor the director comes to his aid. Nate Parker has the thankless role of the righteous poor African-American who demonstrates the hypocrisy of the rich white man.

Even the makeup fails this movie. Robert sustains some kind of stomach injury as the result of a car accident. This injury is key to the plot, but the editor doesn't stay on the shot more than a few frames, evidently because the makeup job is so unconvincing that lingering on it for so much as a full second would reveal its incompetence. In another scene, the police detective comments on a head injury that Robert is supposed to have but for the life of me I couldn't see.

For some reason this movie was a film festival darling, screening at Sundance and earning raves. Personally, I'm mystified. Maybe lefty critics are just happy to see a movie that portrays Wall Street moguls as selfish bastards. If so, they should browse the documentary category and pick up Inside Job. The truth in this case is so much more compelling than the fiction.

ParaNorman

Or, 28 Decades Later.

ParaNorman is Coraline's little brother: born at Laika Studios in Hillsboro, Oregon, he inhabits a stop-motion world that will stop your heart. 

Most of the 3-D animation we see today is characterized by straight lines and elegant curves, jewel-box colors and a feeling that the world is made out of plastic. ParaNorman is different. It feels like you fell asleep and all the inanimate objects in your house came to life. In most computer-generated movies, the test of their artistic success is whether each strand of hair flows luxuriously with every toss of the character's head. Norman's hair sticks straight up and never moves, but the toilet-paper ghost that appears to him in the boys' room at school is a work of genius in a class by itself.

I didn't see this film in 3D, and I regret that now, because Coraline is the only film I've seen in 3D that didn't make me feel like I'd wasted the five-dollar surcharge. ParaNorman feels more like Jan Svankmajer than John Lasseter, and as much as I love Pixar that's a good thing. It also means that, just like Coraline, there are parts that are genuinely scary and not Disney-scary. My six-year-old loved it in the end but spent a good part of the movie in my lap.

Not that I'm complaining.

Norman is a sensitive kid who lives in a twenty-first century Salem, a kitchy witchy tourist trap with a distinctly New England lower-middle-class vibe, only without the pahk your cah accents. He has an overbearing father, a dimwit mother, and an obnoxious teenage sister who don't understand him. Since he sees ghosts all the time, that's not so surprising. It's also not surprising that he's bullied at school.

As he wipes the word FREAK off his locker, we see another kid wiping off the word FATTY in the same handwriting, and we know they're destined to be friends. What's surprising about Norman's new friend Neil is that his disposition is so sunny that no amount of bullying can cloud it over. He doesn't rail against it or the kids who perpetrate it.

ParaNorman has a more nuanced view of bullying than your average kids' movie. In the world of the television series Glee, it's only a matter of time before the geeks, gays and goths are embraced by the jocks and the jerks, because once they realize they're hurting your feelings, how could they possibly continue torturing you?

The first half of ParaNorman seems to embrace a different, almost Gandhian philosophy: you can't keep them from hating you, but you can insulate yourself from their hate with the love of your friends and family. As Norman's dead grandmother says: "it's okay to be scared, as long as you don't let it change who you are."

This world is so new and interesting, and so lovingly constructed, that it's a pleasure to be immersed in Norman's loneliness and oddity. From the trailers you'd think this movie was funny, but actually humor's not its strong suit--all the good gags are in the trailer. It's more successful when it's being sentimental. A scene where Norman plays medium to help Neil connect with his dead dog is touching, and you can see Neil's positive energy affecting Norman–literally: for a moment the brilliance of a blue sky invades the neutral gloom of the film.

Once the actual plot begins to intrude the film gets somewhat less interesting. We're told everyone in the film, including his parents, are scared of Norman because he's different. That doesn't ring true, because Norman's not scary in the slightest. But it's necessary in order to create a very artificial parallel between him and the seventeenth-century girl who was sentenced to death by a group of Puritans who were scared because she was different.

So Norman's crazy uncle appears to him and demands that he deal with an ancient curse, and Norman tries, eventually involving his curvy teenage sister and Neil's hunky triangular teenage brother, and if you think you know how that plays out I guarantee you're wrong. There's a sassy African-American female cop who teeters just on the edge of stereotype, and maybe falls over the edge, I'm not sure; a drama teacher who's a boring caricature; a dumb bully who adds nothing to the film; and an amusing group of Puritan zombies.

It's too much, and Norman and Neil get crowded out. It all reaches a goofy climax in a scene in the woods between Norman and the witch girl that just has no energy in it despite the desperately pulsing yellow streaks. The bigger the movie tries to be, the smaller it becomes; the more action it tries to inject, the more flaccid it gets. 

The irony of ParaNorman is that unlike its hero, it's trying to be something it's not. Still, half a brilliant movie is worth the full price of admission.

The Artist

Or, The Silence of the Frogs.

I love what André Bazin called the "exquisite embarrassment" of silent films. Freed from the fetters of speech, silent film was a more universal medium, a more transfixing one. When the images tell the entire story, you can't close your eyes or look away.

The Artist is a loving hommage to the golden age of Hollywood silent film. And heaven knows Hollywood loves nothing more than a loving hommage to itself, except maybe an hommage made by the people who invented the word hommage. 

So it's no surprise that Hollywood was wracked with ecstasy over The Artist. And it's a superbly crafted film, a cinematic wedding cake; you wouldn't want to eat it every day, but it's perfect for a special occasion. Silent film star George Valentin, on his way down, meets rising talkie star Peppy Miller on her way up–in fact, in one scene, he does so literally. The Artist is filled with  clever moments like that. An exquisite cut on the drumming of fingers; a riff on the famous montage of Charles Foster Kane and his first wife at breakfast; a wink at Garbo's most famous line.

If silence awakens creativity, it has aroused a sleeping giant in director Michel Hazanavicius. He has chosen the perfect collaborators: actors Jean Dujardin, who gives Valentin a megawatt silent-movie star smile; and Bérénice Béjo, whose Peppy Miller embodies the word ingénue. Perhaps more important is his third star, Uggie, who plays Valentin's valorous pooch. Dujardin and Béjo adapt well to silence; but only Uggie speaks it natively, and at times he almost trots away with the film.

Actually, there isn't a false note in the international cast, which finds American superstars playing the supporting roles–John Goodman as the ruthless studio head; Penelope Ann Miller as the faithless wife; and James Cromwell as, of all things, the faithful chauffeur. Where else but in a silent film could a director get away with that?

Like Charlie Chaplin, Valentin's downfall is his inability to talk. Which begs the question: why make this movie, anyway? Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho wasn't just bad because it was poorly executed and occasionally just plain silly; it was bad because it was attempting to xerox genius. 

As a lover of silent film, I wanted The Artist to point the way to a new era of silent film. Unfortunately, it points resolutely backwards instead of forwards. It's almost as if it needed to be made because people haven't seen the genius of The General or Sunrise or Man With a Movie Camera. And that's a worthy goal, I suppose, but it wasn't enough for me. There is one exception–a Trojan Horse of sound inside the silent city walls, a comic nightmare–that at once violates the film's code and redeems it. 

I look forward to Hazanavicius' next film with quiet anticipation.

The Queen of Versailles

Or, "Cinderella, Foreclosed."

A successful documentary often requires sheer dumb luck: sure, choosing the right subject is important, and finding the story in the footage is critical. But sometimes a filmmaker starts out to make one film, and ends up making something quite different. The Queen of Versailles is one of those films.

David Siegel, the King of Timeshares, was a very rich man. When he and his wife Jackie set out to build the largest single-family house in the United States, modeled on the French palace of Versailles, filmmaker Lauren Greenfield set out to document the construction.

The collapse of the real estate market in 2008 took David's empire with it, and what begins as a story of jaw-dropping opulence gradually becomes a not-quite riches-to-rags story. The house, during the course of the movie, remains an empty shell. The Siegels, just like so many people in America, found themselves at the mercy of the banks. That's both its singular power and its greatest flaw: the Siegels do not, of course, wind up on welfare. But the story is still tremendously revealing. Greenfield has a knack for pulling out moments that will stay with you long after the film is over; the dull parts will be easy to forget.

You might wonder why the film is called The Queen of Versailles. Isn't it about a couple, after all? It is, and it isn't. Jackie Siegel is a fascinating character: a beautiful girl who grew up in a working-class neighborhood and eventually married one of the richest men in America; a woman who got an engineering degree and went to work for IBM yet still isn't quite the brightest pixel on the plasma display; a model who went on to have seven children; a generous woman who took in her niece and sent a check to a high school friend who couldn't pay her mortgage. It doesn't take an MFA to recognize a character like this when you see her.

Meanwhile, whenever David shows up, the movie seems to transform momentarily into Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. David is only interesting as long as he's rich. Towards the beginning of the film he takes credit for putting George W. Bush in the White House (and he's a Florida billionaire, so you have to at least consider the possibility that this is more than mere boastfulness). He doesn't quite sweep the audience off its feet, but you can at least understand the appeal, as Greenfield investigates the epic grandeur of the timeshare business. As the family fortune spirals lazily down the drain, though, David quickly becomes a grumpy grandpa, huddled shirtless in the TV room surrounded by boxes of papers.

If you think Jackie's a golddigger–and come on, of course you did–this is where she will surprise you. Partially. She's neither as shallow as your suspect nor as plucky as you hope. On the one hand, she clearly isn't going to leave David, and in fact she refuses to despair or even to raise her voice.

On the other hand, she clearly wasn't cut out for the drudgery of taking care of a Brady Bunch-plus of rugrats in house which (we learn early on in the movie) has seventeen bathrooms to clean, to say nothing of a few dogs. As Jackie herself puts it, in one of the previously-mentioned moments that will stay with you, she'd never have had seven children if she'd known she had to take care of them herself.

The movie makes a token effort to contrast the lifestyles of the not-quite-so-rich with the lifestyles of the servants-of-the-not-quite-so-rich, notably the filipino nannies and the limo driver with a secret. These make for some of the movie's most important moments, and the only really touching ones. It simultaneously leaves you wanting more and undercuts the entire narrative. 

The nanny hasn't seen her son since he was seven (he's now twenty-six). That makes it really hard to feel anything at all for the Siegels. Greenfield was extremely lucky to find both a memorable character in Jackie Siegel and a once-in-a-lifetime story in the disintegration of the Siegel empire; but she doesn't really manage to universalize that story. At one point Jackie says that if the family had to move into a three-bedroom home it would be fine; but that only makes you feel for the people who might have lost a three-bedroom home so that the Siegels could move in.

Brave

As the father of a very independent little girl who wears pants, I've been excited about Brave for about a year. Her world is filled with Hermione Grangers–strong, independent, second-fiddle female characters.

And Brave truly is all about the female characters. It's about the tension between mothers and daughters, in this case Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald). And the conflict isn't about them having different ideas of who Merida should marry (although it's kind of about whether she should marry at all). Theoretically I applaud the choice. It's almost like the movie was designed to pass the Bechdel test. My only objection is: does she have to be a princess? Is that some kind of unbreakable Disney rule? Sigh.

Because the princess thing is feeling a little tired. If you've seen the trailer for Brave, you can pretty much arrive forty-five minutes late and miss nothing. Elinor just wants Merida to be all princessy and sew and sing and get married, and Merida just wants to ride through the forest and shoot arrows. It feels like a movie that would have been very progressive in 1972. What mother in 2012 wouldn't just go ahead and enter a daughter like that in all the archery contests? She's a better archer than Hawkeye from The Avengers. If nothing else, she might grow up to get a part in The Hunger Games!

And surely a really caring mother would never make her daughter marry anybody as buffoonish as the three prospective suitors who come seeking her hand? Here Elinor hints that Merida's being selfish and endangering the peace by refusing to marry, but suggesting that she's pimping her daughter out for the good of the realm hardly makes her seem like a better mother.

So a conflict that should be interesting becomes a conflict between a three-dimensional teenage girl (nudge nudge, wink wink) and her two-dimensional mother. There is, however, one truly breathtaking shot in which Pixar's superb animators show us exactly how alike these two stubborn women are. A lot has been made of Merida's red hair, but it is a real artistic achievement. I don't know if anything else about the animation really stands out, which is either a mild criticism or a backhanded compliment acknowledging that Pixar movies are all so visually stunning that we've become totally jaded.

Once the movie moves beyond the trailer, Merida does something she shouldn't out of teenage anger at her mother, and spends the rest of the movie trying to undo it. Part of the trick of making a children's movie is sweeping the audience away so thoroughly that they forget that the happy ending is guaranteed.


Brave never quite does that. We've waited so long for the movie to actually get going, and then it sort of limps along. Maybe the problem is that there's not really a villain. Merida is a wonderful character, brimming with energy, and she's breaking down an open door. She's so good with a bow, and yet she never actually shoots anything except a target. Where's the Angus McGhastly standing in the way of her dreams?

More critically, it feels like this awful event is just an excuse to teach Elinor the error of her ways. If Elinor had been less of a cardboard character, maybe this wouldn't have been necessary. Is it possible that Disney has finally bumped up against the limits of the princess genre? First we had princesses who waited for their prince to come; then we got princesses who wanted to choose their prince; then we moved on to princesses who got to fight for their prince. Now, finally, we have a princess who really just doesn't want a prince at all.

Merida repeatedly misses a good opportunity to take responsibility for what she's done, which, considering that she's a teenager, seems realistic–but, of course, movies aren't about reality. Screenwriting convention requires that Merida change, and I didn't really see that.

Instead, the rest of the world changes to accommodate her, which is a nice thought. The world is always changing to accommodate men, after all. But there's usually a price to be paid for that, even for the guys, and it's almost as if the writers were afraid to exact that price from a girl.

On the flip side, Chris Heller in the Atlantic says that it can't really be a coincidence that Merida stands up for young people being able to choose who to marry in an era when gay marriage is front and center in the national political arena, and he may have a good point.  Pixar films have always been good at appealing to adult sensibilities where humor is concerned, but maybe this one just wants to make the adults go "hmmmm...." while the kids clap with delight.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

The performance artist Marina Abramovic declares in a manifesto, "an artist should not fall in love with another artist." I followed her advice, which often makes it difficult to convince my wife to watch movies about people like Marina Abramovic. I'll let my wife tell it: "if you'd told me you wanted to watch a movie about a woman who sat in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art and stared at people for three months, I'd have said 'What? No way.'"

Performance art is a little like documentary film in that both are often obscure, hard to appreciate, and let's be honest, a little boring. But when well done, both are mesmerizing; and both Marina Abramovic's art and Matthew Akers' documentary are. 

Akers chooses to document an installation where Abramovic sat on a chair all day, six days a week, for three months, and museumgoers could sit on a chair opposite her and look at her, for as long as they wanted. This is a big challenge for a documentary, because film is about movement and Abramovic doesn't move. 

Thankfully, Akers is a cinematographer and he has made a beautiful film. Usually documentaries can't compete with narrative films visually–they're shot on crummy formats, they're underlit, poorly framed, and the camera is moving around like it's 1994 and NYPD Blue is really avant-garde. Digital video has made documentaries so much cheaper and easier, but often it doesn't do the genre any favors. Sometimes you feel like you're watching The Eleven O'Clock News: The Feature Film.


The Artist is Present does none of that. It's easy on the eyes, but don't get the idea that I'm so grateful I'd watch a documentary about anything if they used a tripod. It's a beautiful story, during the course of which you come to understand just what performance art really is. Maybe the most telling moment in the entire film is when James Franco comes and sits in front of her; Akers doesn't identify him, but he does show Franco talking with audience members afterwards (one of whom asks innocently: "are you an actor?") One woman says that what Abramovic is doing is very much like acting; Franco denies it, and having come to this place in the film, you realize he's totally right. The actor is playing a role, and the artist is playing herself. Actors may be motivated by realism but not reality; they may talk about exposing themselves, but they can't do it as truly as Abramovic does.


Or as bravely, or as selflessly. You may not leave the film understanding her art any more than you understand credit default swaps, but you will certainly appreciate the grit and fortitude that it requires. There is a religious aspect to Abramovic's performance, and there are many shots of people moved to tears by it, or inspired by it to stare intensely at each other in the hope of finding the same fleeting feeling. 


That's not to say that The Artist is Present doesn't have its tangents and its dull moments. Personally, I found the story of her romance with fellow performance artist Ulay to be a little thin, although it does eventually provide a huge payoff, which I wouldn't want to spoil. The film finds many such small moments of beauty, and it is refreshing to see a movie that can move an audience by crooking a finger rather than unleashing an earthquake. 

The Avengers

If all genres eventually end in satire, then The Avengers is the logical evolution of the superhero genre, and Joss Whedon is the perfect person to helm a superhero movie. I wasn't sure if Whedon could make the transition from Dollhouse, which for all its brilliance often felt like it was filmed in someone's basement in the Valley, to a $200 million blockbuster. 

The answer is that he definitely can. Points for the additional degree of difficulty afforded by having to write around incredibly boring characters like Captain America (Chris Evans), whose main weapons are a shield with a bullseye painted on it and a deadly earnestness; Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who wears phylacteries and shoots arrows at things that don't seem to be bothered by guns; and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who talks like Yoda and wields a weapon that looks like something you'd play whack-a-mole with. 

The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) shows up tied to a chair in her underwear, and in a charming set piece, um, answers the phone–to say any more would spoil it–and really sets the tone for the movie. For the rest of the show, Johansson does her best to act out from under a harrowing dye job and a character who doesn't actually have any super powers at all, although she is super-sexy. Her specialty is allowing men to think she's weaker than she is and using their assumptions to her advantage.

It only takes one thing to make up for all of this: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) We meet Tony in the penthouse of the Stark building, bantering with Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and the two of them ignite the movie, like a modern Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. 

In fact, it's a tribute to Whedon's writing skill, and Downey's acting, that the movie doesn't collapse like the Golden Gate Bridge in a disaster movie when Paltrow and her cutoff shorts get into the elevator and leave the building. For that, we have Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to thank, since he gives Stark somebody to talk scientific twaddle with, and somebody to needle. 

Here's the plot: there's a glowing blue energy cube, and whoever controls it controls the world, and...oh, really, nobody gives a rat's ass. It's all just an excuse for the heroes to quarrel with each other, and then eventually team up against supervillain Loki (Tom Hiddleston, having almost as much fun as Downey). There might be a hidden message here about whether the superheroes are causing more damage than they cure, or whether the good guys are actually using the superheroes to help them build evil weapons, but if there is, the audience is pretty much guaranteed not to get it, because they'll be too busy laughing at Stark's nicknames for his fellow Avengers (Hawkeye the archer is "Legolas"; long-haired Thor is "Point Break"...you get the picture).

When the action scenes start, though, Downey has trouble projecting his mojo through the red and yellow suit, and Whedon's writing feels trapped in there with him. The heroes yell stupidities at each other, get thrown into a bus from a mile away, and arise breathing hard and lightly covered with dust. What finally saves these sequences is the animated Hulk; the incarnation of the character looks a little like Claymation, but the movement is so filled with life that it doesn't really matter. The Hulk is, in a word, hysterical.

Is it the best superhero movie ever? I don't know. It's certainly the best one that doesn't take itself seriously. And since comic books themselves often don't take themselves seriously–Spiderman is all about corny puns, isn't he?–that's probably okay. There's a little hint of backstory between Black Widow and Hawkeye that makes a perfunctory effort at drama, but overall it doesn't really aspire to more. Which is a shame, because usually Whedon does aspire to that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, especially, had juicy layers of serious right underneath the crispy strudel of one-liners. Maybe now that he's proven his box office abilities, in his next movie Whedon will be able to give us, along with his trademark wit, the depth of, say, Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Chronicle

Or "Heathers, if it starred teenage boys with super powers."


This movie is saddled with an unfortunate title–unfortunate because I had seen trailers for it and knew I wanted to see it, but kept forgetting the name.


It's also weighed down by the eye-rolling contrivance that one of the characters is filming all of the events in the movie. Thanks for nothing, Blair Witch Project. But if you make it past the first twenty minutes or so, Chronicle swiftly becomes a breathtaking film–visually and aurally stunning and emotionally wrenching.


Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHaan) is a shy high-school loser with a videocamera, an abusive father, a dying mother, and an alpha male cousin, Matt (Alex Russell) who feels compelled to hang out with him but clearly doesn't relish the job. 


At a party, Andy, Matt and student-council president Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find an alien-artifact Maguffin. It quickly becomes clear that the encounter has given them super powers, and we watch the trio's sophomoric glee as they use their telekinetic powers to pull adolescent pranks, and their genuine joy as they use their newly found ability to fly to play football in the clouds and hang out having incredibly awkward conversations on top of the Space Needle. While I wasn't fond of the found-footage conceit, I did find myself amazed at how much more interesting the special effects seemed when melded with footage that wasn't quite so slick. In that respect it reminded me a little of Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (and ironically, Chronicle was also shot in South Africa).


As I watched this unfold, I was struck by how much more feasible this superhero-origin story seems. If a sixteen-year-old boy was able to move things with his mind and fly, would his first impulse really be to put on a colorful costume and nab crooks?


From the beginning it's clear that of the three, Andy is the best at mastering his new abilities. One of the first things he does is learn to levitate his camera, which measurably improves the movie from a visual standpoint. At first he just basks in the respect he gets from Matt and Steve, and we cheer him on as he finds the strength to confront his dirtbag father. Gradually, Andy becomes the alpha male. Watching the teenage dominance pyramid invert is a barrel of monkeys.


It's only at this point that the real genius of Chronicle becomes apparent. In most superhero movies, an external threat would materialize and the new superheroes would save the earth. In Chronicle, the real threat turns out to be within. We realize that the source of Andy's power is actually the explosive rage that he has spent years repressing, and now that he's more powerful than anybody he knows, there's no reason for him to keep repressing it. As his mother gasps and wheezes frighteningly in the next room (some of the best sound design I've ever heard), Andy dies inside too.


All it takes is one brief Carrie moment, one public embarrassment he'll never live down, to snap him. As the film escalates, the visual effects up their game, as well--Chronicle is a $12 million movie that feels like it cost ten times that much.


Maybe the most interesting conclusion of Chronicle, in the end, is that all boys turn into their fathers.

The Lorax

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."
That's one of the very few rhymes left in this movie, although there's plenty more left in it. Enough left, anyway, to make the right freak out about it. How dare Hollywood making a movie denigrating captains of industry?


They might not have bothered. In 1971, when The Lorax was published, it was pretty far ahead of its time. To most, its save-the-Truffula-trees ideology must have seemed utterly daffy. But forty years later, it's the people who think saving the trees is daffy who look like idiots. So from a political standpoint, the movie's self-congratulatory tone feels a little like the guy who takes you aside at a party and tells you he's just discovered the abacus--and it's going to take the world by storm.


Thankfully, The Lorax has done a much better job than other Dr. Seuss adaptations of turning a few hundred words into a movie of 94 minutes (yes, I'm looking at you, The Cat in the Hat). Some of the padding is achieved through musical numbers, which are done well enough that I wish there were more of them. They're big, and bold, and modern, and they don't sound like they're begging to be in The Lorax--The Broadway Musical.


In the plastic city of Thneedville, where zeppelin-dwelling tycoon Mr. O'Hare sells people bottled air (he sells them something they can get for free, get it?) tween Ted (Zac Efron) is in love with the beautifully bemaned Audrey (Taylor Swift). She wants a tree, and he's going to get her one. You would too, if your beloved's locks were so beautifully rendered. Spurred on by his grandmother (the ubiquitous, luminous and hilarious Betty White), he goes in search of the Once-ler, who supposedly knows where they went.


There follows a kind of awkward plot structure in which the Once-ler (Ed Helms) narrates the story, in installments, of how greed and mommy issues drove him to become an evil tycoon and chop down all the trees. But it's punctuated with beautiful moments. When the Once-ler chops down his first Truffula Tree, all the animals build a ring of stones to bury it. That brought a tear to my California liberal eye, although I imagine it caused the Fox News team to roll theirs and wonder aloud how many trees died to print the script of The Lorax.


Visually, the movie is nice, although they've slipped visuals from Dr. Seuss's original artwork under the end credits, and added just a little three-dimensionality (if you see it with specs), and it's hard not to judge the movie harshly in retrospect, with a few exceptions. I've already mentioned Audrey's hair, and the Lorax, who actually looks not unlike Audrey's hair, is also very attractive. Watch the credits for the people responsible for the hair and cloth rendering, and give them a special round of applause. The birds and fish and bears are beautiful and speak volumes with their eyes. The humans look a little bulbous, and truthfully, they don't emote so much as bloviate.


I'm guessing I don't have to tell you there's a chase scene, Ted delivers a big eco-friendly lecture, and trees win out at the end. 


But I can't help thinking that if you're going to the political well, you might as well drink. And if you're going to end with the quote I began with, maybe you should give people a little push. On your way out of the theater, how are you going to make things better? Aside from singing "Let It Grow," which, mind you, will certainly make the world a little brighter all by itself? And hawking "Truffula Tree Approved" eco-friendly cars?


So take the little ones to see The Lorax. And then teach them to turn out the lights when they leave the room.

The Ides of March

Or The West Wing, minus all the walking and talking. Where's Aaron Sorkin's right hand Tommy Schlamme when a film needs him?

The title of this movie is very carefully chosen, as if to say that they want to appeal to an audience that remembers its high school Shakespeare just enough to remember what exactly "the Ides of March" is. It's almost as if the movie is saying: if you have to Google it, don't bother. It's kind of elitist. Why exclude John Q. Public from your movie by giving it a title that he doesn't understand?

But it's actually kind of accurate, because the movie appeals to exactly the sort of overeducated liberal political junkie who finds a title like that appealing. Ryan Gosling plays Steve Meyers, a brilliant young political operative working for the presidential campaign of George Clooney's Governor Mike Morris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clooney also directed this film, and surprisingly, his direction lacks flair. The scenes where Morris is on a podium have the requisite bright klieg lights; the scenes in stairwells or the back of limousines are appropriately high-key; but the camera doesn't move much and the editing adds nothing to the dialogue. I wasn't really fond of the performances either, with the exception of Clooney's. It's almost as if he knew what he wanted but was unable to convey it to everybody else.


There's a lot of pseudopolitical babble in this film, "we're going to run the numbers in the 17th and the 22nd and check the demographics against the voter reg," and the like. The purpose of this eye-rolling nonsense is to give the movie a veneer of truthiness that it totally doesn't deserve, and to make us feel, as The West Wing does, that these are not slimy political operatives, but whip-smart, dedicated professionals. Meyers even makes a point of telling someone that he's working for Morris because he truly believes in him, because the country needs someone like him. Come on, only the interns really think that. You're bound to think that this kind of naiveté is going to get its comeuppance.

Morris is a liberal's wet dream. In the course of the movie, he manages to give speeches supporting every progressive cause. He refuses to compromise, dammit! He's going to win this his way! He's like Dennis Kucinich without the plaintive whining.

It makes you wonder why Clooney is play-running for President. After all, he's very good at it. Unless you live under a rock, you know that he's one of those liberal actors who teases the public about running for something, like Harry Belafonte or Alec Baldwin, and never does. Good God, he's like a horny teenager who watches porn endlessly but is afraid to actually approach a girl.

Luckily for the movie's ultra-liberal audience, Morris is a shoo-in for the nomination--unless he fails to make a huge, contrived compromise in his ideals, by making a deal with a senator played by Jeffrey Wright. If he sticks to his ideals, he will lose Ohio, and then he loses the nomination.

Frankly, though, this deal does not seem particularly awful, and I'm not fond of this kind of contrived plot anyway. My first thought was: if this is the worst thing you have to do in order to be president, jump at it! I know I'm sounding very politically cynical, but in a country of 300 million people, compromise and accommodation are necessary. Note that I didn't even say "necessary evils." This is the way things get done. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Then Meyers learns that Morris is not as squeaky-clean as he seems. The posters in his campaign headquarters rip off Obama, but his behavior is more Clinton. Need I say more? Meyers seems tragically upset by this discovery, which makes him look even more naive, and he handles it in a way that seems unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger. Again, my reaction was to think that if the movie really wanted its progressive audience to feel that outraged at Morris, they were going to have to find a much bigger skeleton.

So you clearly know there is a betrayal in this play, and I say "play" because it is actually based on Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, and unfortunately it looks a little like a play, as well. Morris often appears to be running for student council president, and Cincinnati, where most of the action takes place, appears to be completely deserted.

When the long-awaited knife in the back comes, the film wants us to see the birth of a political Darth Vader. Instead, it only feels like the allegedly smart Meyers has just figured out what everybody else has known all along: that politics is sausage and you shouldn't ask what the ingredients are unless you have a strong stomach.

Contagion

This movie is so good, I actually think I caught something from it. As I write this, my throat is sore, my nose is running and I have a mild cough. These symptoms are not unlike those of MEV-1, the fictional virus at the heart of this movie. I'm a little worried for me, because in the movies--dating back to Camille--a slight cough is usually a sign that you'll be dead in a week.


Many of you will be glad to know that the first cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow. She is Patient Zero for this scary new epidemic--an epidemic that was not caused by evil scientists or frothing terrorists and does not turn people into zombies or body snatchers. It just kills a quarter of the people who get it, and mathematically, that's more than enough. For the first few minutes of the film, the camera lingers on spots where germs are apt to spread; a doorknob, a keypad, a glass. It's a great way to heighten the tension right from the start.


The first half of the film, in which the virus gradually spreads all over the world, wreaking logarithmic havoc, reminds me of two books: Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, the story of the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, and Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, about the Ebola and Marburg viruses. In these books, the heroes are CDC doctors, and they are in Contagion as well, played by Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle.


How refreshing to see a movie in which the scientists are actually the good guys. And they actually get to be the good guys by just doing what they do. There is no eye-rolling fake biobabble. The scientists do not have to swashbuckle through an African forest in search of a magic ingredient. The CDC labs look exactly like real labs, although you might not believe it unless you Google it. Apparently somebody in Atlanta takes a little time off from saving the world to make a few flashy graphics now and then, but hey, it's a movie.

If there's a flaw here, it's that the doctors are a little too goody-goody, which is why one of my favorite moments is when Fishburne's Dr. Ellis Cheever makes a very bad, and yet totally understandable, error in judgment, and starts a rumor that spreads like the virus he's fighting.

It's not all doctors versus germs, though. Matt Damon plays Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, who loses his wife and son but is determined not to lose his daughter as well. Damon may be moonlighting as Jason Bourne, but he really shines as a regular, overprotective dad. Meanwhile, Jude Law chews the scenery as a conspiracy-mongering blogger.

As the virus spreads, we quickly realize that it isn't the biggest threat out there, and this is where Contagion really sets itself apart. Civil society starts to fall apart. People become paranoid and violent; hucksters and charlatans reign; the authorities tighten their grip or lose control completely. The real question the movie means to ask is this: will the virus destroy us or will we destroy ourselves first? I'd tell you, but *cough*.

Drive

There really ought to be an Oscar category for "Best Film Noir," since it's really one of the most important categories in American cinema, and if there were I think this film would take it easily. Ryan Gosling plays an ordinary Joe with no name, some kind of unmentioned, criminal past, violent impulses, and deep down, a good heart.

In film noir heaven, Bogey is smiling.

If it's important to you that you be able to understand the plot of the movie--perhaps you have an advanced degree in particle physics and believe you should be able to follow a movie made for teenagers--then maybe you should give this a pass. There's something about one mob group hiring somebody to steal money from another mob group so they can...so they can...oh, never mind. It's really not important. Like The Big Sleep, this movie has no plot to speak of and it really doesn't matter. It's about acting. Well, okay, acting and car chases.

"Drive" is refreshing for what the characters don't say and what they don't explain. My favorite scene is where Ordinary Joe meets his pretty neighbor's husband, just home from the big house. It's pretty clear Joe has been sleeping with the neighbor, although the movie never actually shows us. So the tension is tighter than a PG&E gas line. And then the ex-con next door says to his son: "c'mon, let's go, let mommy talk to her friend." And the entire plot turns on the forgiveness that he never explicitly grants.

Did I mention there are car chases? Ordinary Joe has many jobs. He's a mechanic, he's a stunt driver for Hollywood films, and apparently he's also a getaway driver. The car chases in this film are notable for their lack of cliche. In your average car chase, it goes to eleven right away, and frankly, I get bored quickly. This is different. There is a very exciting moment in one chase scene where Joe is...stopped at a red light. Director Nicolas Winding Refn creates scenes with highs AND lows. It's breathtaking in its originality.

Since it's a film noir, there are bad guys who are much badder than Joe. One of them is played by Albert Brooks--lots of people are upset that his performance was overlooked. Personally, I can take it or leave it.

And yes, Joe will do One Last Job, as the noir hero must do in order to pay his debts and go legit, and this job will go spectacularly wrong, as it must do in order to get the screenwriter paid. If the film has a flaw, other than its inexplicable use of the totally inappropriate and illegible font Mistral, it's that Joe crosses a line that I don't think the filmmakers mean for him to cross. There's a moment when he does something very bad in front of the girl, and you can see on her face that he's lost her...and comes close to losing us, too.

We're supposed to love him for being willing to alienate her if that's what it takes to save her, but in point of fact at that moment the audience stops identifying with Joe and starts identifying with the girl: what did you do, Joe? We liked you, but you've crossed the line.

I liked Joe, and the movie. Your mileage may vary.

Midnight in Paris

Just as Avatar is a militaristic film that's ostensibly about the dangers of militarism, Midnight is a nostalgic film that's ostensibly about the uselessness of nostalgia. It's easy to forgive it, though, because it's such beautiful eye candy, a sort of "Manhattan" for the Left Bank. Woody Allen owes cinematographer Darius Khondji a drink.

Owen Wilson plays the Woody Allen character, a nebbishy screenwriter named Gil engaged to a harpy played by Rachel McAdams who exists only to be completely unworthy of Gil. As Kenneth Branagh discovered, it's a tough job playing Woody's stand-in, but Wilson is actually pretty good at capturing the stuttering, intellectual essence of a Woody Allen role without actually seeming to ape him.

Gil is rather fond of Paris, which apparently is an underappreciated city, like San Francisco, or Buenos Aires, or Venice, at least among American Tea Party philistines like his fiancée's parents. He discovers that if he waits on a certain street corner at night, a car will come take him back to Paris in the Twenties, a place populated exclusively by famous people--Fitzgerald, Picasso, Eliot, etc. Most of the actors don't really seem to know what to do with the opportunity, and Fitzgerald comes off as a frat boy, Zelda as a ditz, Buñuel as clueless, and Picasso as a bore.

There are some really great exceptions, though, which totally make it worthwhile: Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Corey Stoll as Hemingway, and especially Adrien Brody as Dalí. Gil tells a group about the dilemma that is his love life, and Man Ray says: "I see a photograph," Buñuel declares: "I see a film," and Dalí exults: "I see...a rhinoceros!"

The question is whether Gil will return to the present or stay in the past with Marion Cotillard's Adrianna, who is not as scintillating as Gertrude Stein, but presumably Gil stands a better chance with her.

That question is solved rather cleverly, although the cleverness of it is brought down a little bit when the characters actually explain it to the audience. Still, this is some of Allen's best dialogue in ages, and I found it very enjoyable.

Tree of Life

Or "Koyaanisqatsi, if it starred Brad Pitt."

There's a lot of whispered voiceover, pretty pictures and thundering classical music here, and part of me wants to dismiss this as a very expensive student project: "for my thesis, I'm going to do a bricolage where I mash up 2001, Baraka, Sean Penn's 35mm childhood home movies and a National Geographic special."

That would not be entirely fair, though. It's not every day you see a huge blockbuster movie about the nature of God, starring Brad Pitt. The title of the movie is from Proverbs ("[wisdom] is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it") and it begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, and if you guess right there that a big tragedy is going to occur and the movie is not going to explain it for you, then give yourself five points.

Then there's a long montage of truly breathtaking scope that attempts to cover the majesty of the entire universe. So you might well ask yourself why this human tragedy matters, when the point of this montage seems to be that the universe is vast and not being run for your comfort or your happiness? Why should we care about Brad Pitt's stern father-who-should-have-been-a-musician-but-missed-his-calling, or Jessica Chastain's adoring mother and their sullen-faced son Jack growing up in Waco, Texas in the fifties?

Well, if we roll back a few verses in Proverbs we come across the instruction: "whom the Lord loves, he chastises, as a father does the son he loves." So maybe Brad Pitt is God. And like the common view of the God of the Old Testament, Pitt is stern but also loving towards his children.

And what about mom, who flits around in gorgeous shifts that catch the breeze and the light? Is she the more loving God of the New Testament? Are the brothers Cain and Abel? What does it mean that dad is a little sorry he treated his family like a jerk? Watch the movie and make up your own mind.

I said earlier that it's not every day you see a movie about the nature of God. But the movie that this reminds me of the most, in terms of subject matter, is the Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man, which is also loosely based on the Book of Job and asks us to think about the nature of a God who allows such terrible things to happen to His children.

I would say that personally, the Coen Brothers' less bombastic, less pretentious, more human-scale, even humorous film appeals to me more. In the end, my feeling about The Tree of Life is that it is very well made, thought-provoking, and it reminds me of a lot of other movies that I like very much. The one thing I'm not sure it reminds me of, is itself.

Jumping the Broom

Or alternatively: "My Big Fat Black Wedding." 

This is a pretty slight movie, as you might guess, and wouldn't be worth your time except for one thing. There are so few good roles for African-American actors that this trifle is actually brimming with talent who make it surprisingly entertaining, in a schmaltzy, cliche, checking-off-the-boxes kind of way.

Rich Sabrina is going to marry poor Jason (Sabrina! Get it?) Their families don't get along. They break up the happy couple, but Love Conquers All. Oh, did I ruin the ending for you?

Sabrina (played by Paula Patton, who was so much better in Mission: Impossible 4) comes from a wealthy creole family, who live on Martha's Vineyard, which, as we all know, is the wellspring of Cajun culture. And the Vineyard has never been more beautiful. The whole movie looks like an L. L. Bean catalog.

Jason's family is from--GASP--Brooklyn, which is used here as a synonym for "the hood," which makes me wonder if the screenwriter has ever actually been to Brooklyn. The director clearly hasn't, as the only time we see Jason's mother in New York, she is on--don't snarf--the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But Jason's mom is played by Loretta Devine, an amazingly skilled actress who manages to eat the role of the villainous, emasculating, easily offended mother of the groom rather delicately and with great humor, at least until she finally gets her comeuppance and magically turns into the good mother-in-law fairy.

She arrives with a retinue of cardboard characters that talented actors somehow manage to breathe life into: Tasha Smith as the sassy best friend, Mike Epps as the groom's ghetto-wise uncle.

On the bride's side, we find badass Angela Bassett in the unfortunate role of the cold rich bitch mother of the bride. I'm sorry, make that the cold, rich, French-speaking bitch. Could it be any worse? Ms. Bassett deserves an Oscar for actually managing not to make this character hateful. Julie Bowen from Modern Family even manages to generate a few laughs in her role as White Person Who Says All the Wrong Things Around Black People.

So where does this leave us? Well, I'm happy to report that nobody gets shot in this movie, you won't learn any cool ghetto slang, and it has absolutely no aspirations of being a Racial Message Movie. And it's not too painful to watch. Unfortunately what it isn't...just isn't enough to recommend this movie.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

This is a really great, stylish movie. The lead's green hair is a little precious (he was an art student!), but Ryu is a great character. He's a deaf mute with a sister badly in need of a kidney--and he's the wrong blood type. That could be really schmaltzy, or really contrived...okay, actually it's a little of both, now that I think about it. But during the movie, I didn't.

Park has tied one hand behind his back by taking on a character who can't speak, but he actually turns it to his advantage. In one scene we learn that Ryu is double-shifting; a bell rings and all of the workers get up and leave. Ryu stares after them...and sits down wearily. After a few moments, more workers arrive and he gets up and starts to work again. That told me more about the character than ten voiceovers.

It also prepares us for another great scene, in which Ryu is fired; we see the boss extend his hand so that it looms threateningly in the foreground of the frame; Ryu puts his grimy thumb in red ink and presses it on the contract. This isn't the most dexterously political film, but if you feel strongly about Obamacare or multinational banks, it may resonate a little with you. Maybe Park is trying to say that the carnage in this film is nobody's fault except that of "the system"...I can't say. But that's as plausible an explanation as any.

Park kind of has a reputation as a really gory director; if you really like this kind of thing, then you might like this film for all the wrong reasons. If you don't like this kind of thing, you might hate this film...also for all the wrong reasons.

While there are moments where it's hard to watch, it actually didn't make me as squeamish as, say, Requiem for a Dream, and not because I didn't care about the characters, but because Park genuinely tries to spare us. There's a scene where a father is watching his daughter's autopsy, and the camera stays on him the entire time; only the soundtrack hints at what he's seeing. Okay, more than "hints at": it's actually pretty horrific despite the fact that it's all sound and no visual.

I have a few minor technical quibbles; I've complained about fades-to-black before, and this film is riddled with them. Also, there's a totally unnecessary voiceover at the end, that might as well say, "do you remember this earlier plot point which is suddenly relevant? No? Well, here it is again!"

On the one hand, I can't wait to see another one of Park's films. On the other hand, I'm not sure I ever want to. Maybe I'll try his film Lady Vengeance and see if I can discern some kind of a pattern.

crazy, stupid, love

Another expecting-to-hate-it-but-didn't movie. If you're a happily married middle-aged man with kids, this is totally your flick.

Everybody else, you'll have to let me know. There's a scene where Julianne Moore calls her ex-husband Steve Carell and pretends the water heater isn't working just so she can hear his voice. I swear I almost cried. I can totally see why Steve Carell, a happily married middle-aged man with kids, felt it needed to be made.

And this is a comedy! Not only is it very funny, but it's very well made. There's a moment where the 17-year-old babysitter is telling her 13-year-old charge why she can't be in love with him, and right at that moment it cuts to a wide shot so you can see she's a head taller than him. Early on Steve Carell asks Ryan Gosling why he's helping him, and he says "let's just say you remind me of somebody." By the end you know who it is, but they actually fail to sledgehammer the audience with that one. It's a nice change of pace.

Sometimes I think a lot of Hollywood movies would be 100% better if they simply ended ten minutes earlier. This is one of those movies. It has a goofball coda that almost ruins the whole thing. But not quite. Still highly recommended.