Argo

Or, Farsi this movie.

The quote "truth is stranger than fiction" has been waiting around all these years just to describe the movie Argo. The movie's greatest achievement is the mere fact that people are not watching it and thinking, "what a crock of %*$@$."

Argo comes off a little bit like a steamy love letter to the CIA. Perhaps because the movie itself is aware of this, it begins with a series of animated storyboards explaining the recent history of Iran. This history explains that the CIA deposed a democratically-elected Iranian government and installed a lunatic despot, thus indirectly causing the Iranian Revolution and explaining why Iranians might stand outside the American embassy day after day chanting "Death to America."

Whether you buy this particular Luther-to-Hitler line of historical reasoning is kind of moot, because you are almost immediately plunged into the storming of the embassy, which is a beautifully created set piece. I don't know if it's historically accurate, but more important for a movie, it's visually accurate. It feels a little bit like you're watching Nightline–and Ted Koppel does, of course, make several cameos on television sets throughout the movie. 

As the students storm the embassy, six minor bureaucrats slip out a side door and find refuge in the Canadian ambassador's residence. Not only is the movie head-over-heels in love with the CIA, but it has a definite hard-on for Canada as well, which took these hapless functionaries in (when the British and the Kiwis would have thrown them to the wolves, as the movie points out).

Victor Garber, as Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, is asked only to wear a funny wig–he is spared the funny facial hair and the gigantic glasses and the hysterical hairstyles that afflict many other characters. Maybe, being a real Canadian, he needed less makeup? Not so Ben Affleck, as CIA exfiltration specialist Tony Mendez. Affleck may deserve an Oscar for pulling off not just the beard, but the gold chain. 

When the scene moves from Tehran to Washington, the mood changes from horror to comedy, and it's a very deft move. The State Department wants to sneak the six Americans out of the country by giving them bicycles and asking them to ride across the Iranian countryside to the border in the middle of winter. Affleck's best acting moment is not rolling his eyes at this ludicrous proposal, or the ones that follow.

And then he suggests something even more outlandish. Mendez wants to pretend the six are part of a Canadian location scouting team looking into Iran as a location for a breathtakingly stupid science-fiction film called, of course, Argo. They will just drive to the airport and fly right out with their fake Canadian passports.The CIA brass ask him: "you don't have a better bad idea than this?" and Bryan Cranston, as Mendez's boss, deadpans: "this is the best bad idea we have, sir."

The genius of this premise is that it allows director Affleck to poke fun at Hollywood–and himself. The joke is that everyone, including the Revolutionary Guard, knows Hollywood is filled with people who'd sell their mothers for a hit movie. When Mendez asks makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) if he can teach one of the hostages to be a director in a day, Chambers responds: "you could teach a rhesus monkey to be a director in a day." 

It's the best double-entendre of the year. How can you not like a film that allows the characters to talk to the director that way? And it's not the only moment where Affleck compares the spy business to the movie business: both Mendez and the director of the film-within-a-film, Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), have messed up their personal lives. Lester says: "it's like working in the coal mines, you come home and you can't wash it off." And you can't help thinking: well, he and the CIA agent clearly have that much in common.

Nothing is perfect. The table read of the fake movie is head-scratchingly intercut with a revolutionary press conference, for instance. But that's the thing about Argo. It's like a dog that follows you around and rubs against your leg and simply refuses to give up until you love it. Criticizing the movie is like kicking the dog. 

What's nice about all of this background is that by the time Mendez arrives in Tehran, we really feel like we know him. That's the fault with most action movies; the action begins so early that we know absolutely nothing about the hero. He's a cipher, an archetype, a straw man. Not so in Argo. 

And it's not just Mendez: Scoot McNairy plays one of the fugitive nobodies. He's clearly in love with Iran (he's the only one of the group that speaks Farsi) and wracked with guilt that he wouldn't leave with his wife when he had the chance; he's also a coward and threatens to wreck the whole operation. You know he's going to redeem himself; the way he does is both poetic and hilarious. All of the acting is superb. Affleck isn't shabby himself, but his directorial modesty even extends to hiring actors who can make him look mediocre.

The climax in which the hostages finally escape is predictably Hollywoodized, but let's forgive the dog for being a dog. Let Argo smell your butt, sit on your lap, and lick your face.

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.