I Feel Personally Responsible For This

According to the New York Times, movie theater attendance is way up this year:

While much of the economy is teetering between bust and bailout, the movie industry has been startled by a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era. Suddenly it seems as if everyone is going to the movies, with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.

This disproves a notion I have heard lately regarding increased DVD rentals from Netflix etc. On the local Boston news, twice I have heard reporters say that this is because people are staying home from the movies because of increased ticket prices.

This may be true, but the fact is that movies are still the cheapest way to spend an evening out. As people economize, they are going to go to movies in place of doing more expensive things. I have found this to be true of myself, and I think a lot of other people will find out the same thing.

Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail

Last year when I started renting and watching the DVDs that had come out during the first part of 2008, I found myself asking: Who is this guy Tyler Perry? I'd never heard his name before, but I quickly learned that he was an African-American film writer and director who had the habit of placing his name in the title of all his productions.

It was sort of off-putting, but when I rented Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns from Redbox, I found myself liking it OK. It was a simple romantic comedy about a single mother from Chicago meeting her long lost family in Atlanta. It was a little rough around the edges for a romantic comedy, but not a disaster.

But cripes, I said, what the hell was it with the Madea character in the movie? It seems that one of Perry's favorite gags is to appear in his own movies in elderly drag, as a superfeisty old black woman who causes no end of grief to those around her, especially her family members. It felt revolting and embarassing to see him appear this way in Meet the Browns, ruining, I thought, what was otherwise a nice little picture.

Fortunately Perry's follow-up last September, Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, was a more serious drama. It had Kathy Bates in a supporting role, which gave the film more than a little a touch of class. I was impressed, and began to think that Perry was emerging as a mature storyteller. If nothing else, he churns out the narrative. It goes without saying that in The Family That Preys, there was no place for the slapstick of Madea. I thought maybe it was a phase which he had grown out of.

Well, I was sure wrong. For his first film of 2009, Perry gives us Tyler Perry's Madea Goes to Jail, which puts the cantankerous character in the title role this time. I was looking forward to seeing this movie about as much as taking a cross-country red-eye flight crammed in the middle seat between two overweight snorers.

Thankfully I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. First off, there is less Madea in it than the title suggests. Moreover, it is really two different movies, a serious one and a slapstick one, that are only loosely connected within the same filmspace. Perry was wise in this respect, because an entire Madea movie would have come off way too lowbrow, with obvious comparisons to Ernest Goes to Jail (1990). Instead he gets to have his cake and eat it too.

The "serious" movie is about a young assistant d.a. in Atlanta (Derek Luke) who, in the midst of prosecuting his cases, discovers that his long-lost childhood female friend (a grown-up Keshia Knight Pulliam, from The Cosby Show) has become a heroin-addicted prostitute. Over the protests of his fiance, who is also an assistant d.a., he resolves to help his friend get off the streets. Eventually we learn why he is so motivated to help her. By doing so, he comes to question his own relationship with his fiance, and his true goals in life.

It's not a bad story, not quite as deep and fully-formed as The Family That Preys, but still a fresh and interesting tale. I had only a few minor quibbles with it, specifically the method by which the protagonist publicly exposes the treachery of his fiance at their wedding---not very classy, if you ask me. That scene could have used a rewrite to give the protagonist a little bit more honor.

To my surprise, I wound up actually enjoying the Madea part, perhaps because it occupied only a minority of the film time. The Dr. Phil cameo was a bit too much camp for me (although the audience last Sunday in Leominster sure loved it), but other than that, I almost found myself becoming a Madea fan.

I still think that Perry is ultimately going to have to make a choice: is he going to be a serious, respected film maker, or is he going to be a slapstick comedian doing a drag bit? Despite having enjoyed Madea, I wouldn't mind at all if this was the last we see of her. Perry has a talent for storytelling, and for churning out interesting dramas that are watchable and pertinent. I hope he chooses that path.

Fired Up

The promotional material for Fired Up started appearing in movie theaters just after New Year's in the form of large cardboard stand-alone displays. The initial letters "F.U." were written large in orange, and underneath was written the phrase "Two guys. 300 girls. You do the math."

It was almost as if the distributors wanted to scream out: "this is going to be the worst movie of the year." There would surely be plenty of tits and ass, and gross body-part jokes, and wretchedly stupid juvenile humor. It would surely be a triumph of the animalistic man.

I knew I would have to see it on a day when I could take sitting through this kind of movie. It came out last Friday and by Saturday morning, I was in Tyngsboro at the AMC, to get it crossed off my list early.

But right from the opening scene, something was wrong. The movie was not only watchable, but fun. I rarely laugh during movies, and during many so-called comedies, I don't laugh at all. But I laughed many times during this movie. This movie was downright funny.

Here's the deal: the movie is not really a "guy fantasy" movie. It's only being promoted as such. Sure, it has elements of that genre, but in reality it's a cheerleading movie, with plot and characters aimed more at young women than young men. Moreover, it's a cheerleading competition movie, smack in the subgenre of Bring It On (2000), a movie to which it pays homage in a rather unique way, by having hundreds of cheerleaders recite the words along with Kirsten Dunst as they watch a screening at camp. Awesome!

The two male lead characters (Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen) are a cut and a half above the usual "party dude" characters, and it obvious that they have an affinity for cheerleading right from the first scene. The story follows their journey of self discovery as they infiltrate a cheerleading camp with the ostensible purpose of making it with as many hot babes as possible. But along the way they find out that they actually like cheering, and they also fall in love for real.

For much of the story, however, they fall into the category of impostors, and thus the story tension revolves around their avoiding being exposed. The plot trajectory of this type of story is fairly established, in that at some point, they both realize that what began as a charade is now genuine. They actually like being male cheerleaders. But because they do not confess their initial dishonor, according to the rules of classical justice their deceit must be punished. Thus they must be publicly exposed even after their change of heart, and their conversion to being "genuine." In this case, the exposure is through sabotage-by-romantic-rival.

After this seemingly unfair public humiliation, they justifiably lose the trust of their teammates and love interests, and are thus expelled from the camp. To do this, they must fully reject their previous bestial selves and turn their back on their animalistic friends. The final part of the story involves their regaining of their teammates' trust and the restoration of the "genuine" path. This restoration is simultaneous with the resolution of the love story, as well as the climax of the cheerleading competition (which had a fun ending that avoided cheap shortcuts).

This movie has already been declared D.O.A. at the box office and will surely be panned by plenty of sophisticated reviewers. But they are, I assert, completely full of shit. The only problem with this movie is that it is too cross-genre, and the elements of the "oversexed party guy" movie that are present in it will give plenty of people just enough excuse to pile on this movie to prove their so-called artistic bona fides.

But like I said, I laughed plenty, and thought it was fun. In a way, it about the triumph of the higher enlightened male self over the degraded animalistic man. There was even very sympathetic treatment of male homosexuality. I can absolutely say that this will be on my 2009 list for Movies I Didn't Hate.

He's Just Not That Into You

Halfway through watching this movie at Leominster last Friday afternoon, I said to myself, "Wow, this is a complicated screenplay." A dozen characters woven into multiple stories, a choreographed ballet of narrative---I was impressed.

After I got home, I took out a pen and paper and diagrammed all the story connections in He's Just Not That Into You.

It turns out that it wasn't such a hard feat after all to put the stories together. It just looked hard. But underneath the movie was essentially an ensemble of four (or more) different stories going on at once that could be a prior unconnected to each other.

These stories, all which are set in the hip yuppie neighborhoods of urban Baltimore, were all centered around women in age ranging from their mid-twenties to their forties. They were:

1. A young woman in her late twenties (Ginnifer Goodwin) has trouble forming stable relationships, in part because of her clinginess. After one date, she falls for a real estate agent (Kevin Connolly), and becomes obsessed with him. She meets a friendly male bar owner (Justin Long), who helps enlighten her about relationships. Eventually she falls for him as well.

2. A woman in her late thirties (Jennifer Aniston) has lived her boyfriend for many years and longs to be married to him. He has long made it clear that he doesn't believe in marriage. She must go through the humiliation of being her sister's bridesmaid, before coming to terms with her boyfriend (Ben Affleck) about being married.

3. A woman in her mid twenties (Scarlett Johansson) has an affair with a slightly older man (Bradley Cooper) who has fallen out of love with his wife (Jennifer Connelly). Eventually both women must wake up and break free from the deceptive man who has taken control of their lives.

4. A woman in her mid thirties (Drew Barrymore) can't meet anyone at all, because of the complications of modern technology and social norms. With the help of her gay male friends, she eventually meets someone.

Each of the stories by itself was fairly simple and straightforward, relying heavily on conventions of romance plots in order to provide an abbreviated narrative. What kept the entire movie fresh and interesting was that the four stories were woven together by having various characters appear in multiple stories.

For example, Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Connelly are lead characters in stories #2 and #3 respectively, but they are appear as the supportive co-workers of Ginnifer Goodwin in story #1.

Kevin Connolly's character appears in three of the stories, and basically gets his own story in the process. He is stalked by Ginnifer Goodwin in #1, romantically chases Scarlett Johansson from story #3, and eventually winds up as big part of story #4.

The point is that these stories could have been told without the overlap, but it would not have been nearly as much fun to watch. In a sense, the overlap among the stories was the point of the entire movie. The message, it seems, is that it is a lot easier to cope with life (and to meet romantic partners) when you have a strong social network.

One of the things I drew from the movie was an appreciation for Ginnifer Goodwin as an actress. I had seen her for several seasons on Big Love, but seeing her in a completely different type of character was enlightening.

Overall the movie strongly endorsed the culturally prevalent idea that "good men are hard to find." The men in the movie comes in four types

1. Losers that you fall for (sexy cads)
2. Losers you don't fall for (weak and socially awkward men)
3. Gay men
4. Good men you fall for (the rarest type)

The movie has fun parading various "throwaway men" of category 2 past the women---inferior males who are not worthy of their attention, and who must dismissed out of hand. We know that every woman deserves a happy ending, but these male losers that no woman would want get no such consideration. They don't get to be a part of any of the stories, except as walk-ons, and the butt of jokes. Above all else, this is what makes this a supreme "chick flick."

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Say what you want about Jerry Bruckheimer, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of American tastes. Confessions of a Shopaholic, which I saw up in Tyngsboro last Friday, is a perfectly timed movie.

Ilsa Fisher plays a young woman in Manhattan who is a journalist for a gardening magazine. Her real passion is fashion, as well as shopping for designer clothes. She dreams of being a writer for a fashion magazine.

In American romantic comedies, bad luck is actually disguised opportunity, often in the form of Cupid playing matchmaker. Moreover, movies reward spunk in their protagonists. If you take a courageous risk, you will be rewarded, even if it takes time. Put these two principles together, and you get one of the canons of Hollywood poetics: when you lose your job, you should take a daring risk to do something you really want to do, and you will wind up being the better for it. Often you need the advice of a friend in order to push you in the right direction.

Thus you get the premise for Confessions. The young woman loses her job, but through brashness, she lands a better one at a magazine that is part of the same publishing conglomerate as the fashion book she so dearly wants to write for. Her plan is to bide her time and to work her way up to her desired publication.

Her new job is at a financial magazine, something she knows nothing about. Since she landed the job on false pretenses, the movie places her in the position of the "pretender." The plot arc of the movie must follow as thus: her naivete and ignorance must actually turn out to be assets in the sense that her "fresh take" on financial matters will impress and amaze her big boss. Despite many close scrapes with being exposed, she actually adjusts to her outrageous situation and earns the respect and admiration of her peers.

Since this is a romantic comedy, her brashness also lands her in the company of the man who will become the love of her life (Luke Brandon). He must be impressed with her even more than anyone else, and thus he is also the one most deceived by her.

It turns out that her love interest, the editor of her magazine, is independently wealthy. According to classical dictates, however, she must remain unaware of this until she has fallen for him. In the old-school formula, love could never be about money. In this case, the movie follows the classical prescription perfectly.

Eventually, however, she must suffer a downfall. Movies must punish deceit of this kind, especially in matters of the heart. The protagonist will realize this at some point, and must attempt to "come clean." There must be a scene in which she resolves to privately tell the truth about her deception to her boss and love interest.

What must happen? Before she can open her mouth, the deceived party must interject something that will make it excruciatingly hard and painful to reveal the truth. At the last minute, the stakes will be upped, and she must back down from her resolution, and continue with the deceit.

Eventually, when the whole house of cards comes down, this missed opportunity will haunt her, and cause her much more pain than she would have otherwise incurred, had she come clean and told the truth in private. Instead she will not only lose the trust of the deceived party, but she will be publicly exposed and humiliated, completely discredited in a way that leaves her seemingly worse off than she was at her lowest point before she landed the job.

But true love must conquer all. The protagonist having debased herself, the story now shifts to the formerly deceived male love interest. The ball is in his court, according to the narrative. The crucial moment arrives when, in the company of his superiors, he has a chance to advance his career by forsaking her, and renouncing his belief in her.

For the hero to be worthy of her love, he must remain steadfast under this test, and he does. The most potent thing for a classical movie hero to do, romantically speaking, is publicly defend the honor of the woman he loves when she is under attack, even at the expense of his own welfare and reputation. After this point, their romance is sealed.

The resurrection of the heroine must be predicated on her confession (as per the title) of the character flaw (sin) that led her to create the deception in the first place, namely her addiction to shopping. When she is able to do this, not only is the romance possible, but she can now re-ascend in her career path, and resume the status she once achieved through pluck, gumption, and beginner's luck. Everything now is honest and above-board.

Given all this classical formula, whether or not the movie is successful as a narrative depends on the minute craftsmanship in the story so as to make the characters fresh, topical, and interesting. There are an infinite number of variations on the old plots, and the trick is to come up with a way that speaks to the audience of the present day.

In that respect, I have nothing against Confessions of a Shopaholic. As a romantic "pretender" comedy, it did pretty much everything you could ask for it. It was fun to watch and went by quickly. The worst I can say against it is that in order to bring down the protagonist, it relied on sabotage, which is one of those "story crutches" that weakens a plot.

But you have to cut corners somewhere, and the sabotage here was set up well and was believable in the context of the characters presented. So it is only minor quibbling to bring this up.

Something 2009-ish about this movie that stuck out to me was that its release seems to solidify the existence of a subgenre, namely the "Label movie," which is about the obsession among certain women to purchase and wear clothes from certain manufacturers and designers. We've seen this plenty in Sex and the City, as well as in such movies as The Devil Wears Prada and the remake of The Women. Confessions of a Shopaholic may signify the apogee of this subgenre, just as the nation comes to grips with its own consumerism.

Like I said, Bruckheimer has the touch.

The Visitor

By the time the Oscars were broadcast this year, there were only two feature films among the nominees (outside the documentary and foreign film categories) that I hadn't seen in the theater, because they had come out earlier in the year, before I started going to see every movie.

Fortunately they had both come out on DVD, so I used Netflix to catch up. The first movie on my list was The Visitor, a small independent film for which Richard Jenkins was nominated for Best Actor.

Watching movies on DVD here at my sister's place is almost like going to a theater, because of their large flat-screen television mounted on the wall, and the awesome sound system set up by my brother-in-law, who is an audio-video connoisseur of sorts. He's very picky about having things just right, in a good way.

The DVD arrived while I was in New York for my trip. When I watched the film, I was struck by the irony that so much of the movie takes place in exactly the places I had just visited: the West Village, Washington Square Park, and NYU. On my Sunday walk up to Harlem, I had even heard the drum circle players in Central Park, and had seen the musicians in the Broadway subway station, which is in the final scene. I had even come into the City from Connecticut, which was a first for me. The whole movie felt like a blurring of life and art, which is an odd but not unpleasant sensation.

The movie is another powerful statement regarding the taboo subject of loneliness in contemporary American life (I was just reading a nonfiction book in Nashua, N.H. that said Americans will generally much more readily admit to being depressed than being lonely).

The very first shot of the movie establishes the character in powerful fashion: he is standing in his house by himself with his back turned towards us. He is looking out the window with a glass of wine in his hand. The scene that follows establishes what the character wants: he wants to learn to play music, and he wants someone with whom he can share a glass of wine. In the following scene, he is in his office at a university. He coldly repulses a student, and we learn everything we need to know about how he treats his college teaching. The writer, director, actor all collaborate to paint a solid portrait in only a few short minutes. This is the stuff that makes for really great movies.

The story is told with subtlety in the narrative, including many small ironies that I didn't pick up on until later. For example, in the opening scene, the piano teacher tells him to "make room for the train" with his fingers as he plays at the keyboard. This seems like an innocent statement at the time, yet it turns out to encapsulate his entire journey in the movie, which will eventually see him letting go of many parts of his life in order to play a different musical instrument inside a train station.

He gives away an instrument. He gets a new one as a gift. The "tunnel" made by his fingers becomes a literal one that surrounds his entire body. Out of his hands have come the new reality into which he has placed himself. Do stories get any better than this?

His repelling of his student at the beginning is mirrored in the way that a immigration service detention guard treats him.

The sharing of wine also becomes a journey fulfilled, but only after he has abandoned his attempt to share it. It eventually comes from an unexpected drinking partner.

As a final gift to us, the movie refused to go for a cheap, sentimental ending. It left things complicated, and thus with real emotional depth. I'm really glad Jenkins got nominated for this film.

La maison en petits cubes

Frozen River and the The Wrestler may have been shut out, but...not only did my favorite animated short film win the Oscar, but its creator gave the best speech of the evening!

If I picked the Oscars 2008

Here is what I would vote for, among the nominees. These are not my "personal bests" for the year 2008, by and large, and moreover these are not predictions, as I have no idea what will actually win. I have included only the categories in which I have seen all the nominees.

Best Picture: Milk
Directing: Gus Van Sant, Milk
Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Actress: Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler
Animated Feature Film: Wall-E
Art Direction: Revolutionary Road
Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire
Costume Design: The Duchess
Film Editing: The Dark Knight
Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Music (Score): Defiance
Music (Song): "Jai Ho", Slumdog Millionaire
Short Film (Animated): La maison en petits cubes
Short Film (Live action): The Pig
Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
Sound Mixing: The Dark Knight
Visual Effects: Iron Man
Writing (Adapted Screenplay): Doubt
Writing (Original Screenplay): Frozen River

Easiest calls were in Best Picture, Costume, Makeup, and Actor. Tougher calls were in Actress (Meryl Streep was very, very good, and Melissa Leo---wow), Supporting Actor (Josh Brolin may be the greatest living actor in Hollywood), and Visual Effects (Button was very good).

My big hopes are that Frozen River takes home the Original Screenplay Oscar, and that La maison en petits cubes wins the Animated Short category.

I didn't include Foreign Language film (since I've seen only two of the films), nor Documentary (since I've seen only one), nor Short Film (Documentary), since I've seen none of them. That being said, I would vote for The Class over Waltz With Bashir, and I have no problem with Man on Wire winning. I did manage to see all the trailers for Documentary Short on Youtube, and based on that I think Smile Pinki looks like the most compelling.

Push

One of my criteria for fantasy-scifi films is that if you're going to create a "world of whimsy," in which the rules of reality are suspended, you absolutely must spell out the alterations to reality so that we know what they are. You can't keep changing them in some open-ended fashion during the story.

One of the reasons I liked Push is that near the beginning of the movie, we get an inventory rundown of all the special powers that various "super" individuals have. Some can move objects, other can intrude into people's thoughts and memories, other can track people, still others can scream in a way that will burst your eardrums. We don't get to meet all these types of folks right away, but when we do, they seem familiar because of this brief courtesy rundown.

See how easy it is? You would think all movies would do such things, but a lesser film than this one would have forgone this preview and simply introduced the "super powers" on the fly. As a result, we would have been left in confusion about just how many superpowers are out in the wild.

Another way of stating this is that it is important to delimit the scope of the fantasy powers right away, so that we know what the boundaries are. With those in mind, we can build expectations of story, and of character behavior.

A glaring counterexample is the recent abysmal Mummy series (the ones staring Brendan Fraser) in which the powers of the Mummy just seem to keep growing, on and on, without end. Whatever the Mummy needs to be able to do, he does.

Push, which I saw in Leominster last Monday, got me interested in the characters, because it cared to limit what they could do, and to tell us what those limits were. Moreover, it wasn't all action and martial arts, as you might expect for a movie shot in Hong Kong. There is plenty of mental chessgame action between the good guys and the bad guys that culminates in an inspired caper-type Act Three that takes advantage of the superpowers of the good guys in just the right way.

One of my favorite plot premises is when one of the characters can't distinguish between reality and disreality, and must figure it out using some kind of insight or logic. The climax of Push provided a nice example of that, of characters screwing with each other's minds to confuse them of what is true, and what isn't. As the audience, we too are in the dark, but we are led into truth by the actions of one the characters, who must figure it all out in time.

In many ways, this movie seemed like an evolution of last year's Jumper, which is not awful but is nevertheless an inferior movie to Push. One similarity between the two movies is that having superpowers of some kind can be more a curse than a blessing, since it tends to bring you unwanted notice of the government, or some other evil organization, who is bent on using you for their own purposes. This is what we've come to in 2009: the Shadowy Establishment preys upon those with unique and special abilities. No one in power can be trusted. And by the way, they can track you down anywhere.

A well-balanced scifi thriller---I didn't even mind those damn screamers.

The International

The spy-thriller genre is one of my favorites, but one with which I have a troubled relationship. Many of the recent films in this genre have really let me down, not because of their narrative structure per se, because they often wind up endorsing the premises of the Global War on Terror in a way that makes me want to vomit (e.g. it's all the damn A-rabs' fault for corrupting us with their Islamofascism). That is, the high concept of these movies are deeply flawed to me. Because of that, I have come to have a low expectation of these movies. In baseball terms, they often seem to swagger up to the plate, then strike out.

So I went into The International in Leominster last Saturday with mild expectations. The subject matter seemed intriguing: a big evil global bank that is trying to corner the market on certain kinds of arms shipments. But you can't always tell from the trailers how things are going to go, concept-wise. I was hoping that perhaps the movie would at least reach first base.

To my surprise, the movie hit a double and stole third. Not the home run I have looking for, that really spells everything out, but a darn good start.

Given my pleasant surprise at the concept level of the movie, I could forgive many other things about it, but in this case I really didn't have to. The story was well told, moved along nicely, and was well acted and directed. If anything, it was a bit cerebral, and thus I suppose it will not make a lot of money at the box office. There is probably not enough action and brain-splattering head shots to satisfy certain segments of the audience, despite a very intense and well-directed shoot-em-up scene at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (I can hardly wait to get the DVD to see how they pulled that off).

I also have a weakness for Clive Ovens because he is the movie star closest in age to me. He plays an Interpol agent on a lone quest to discover the truth (now you're really speaking my language), and he spends most of the movie looking as haggard and worn-out as you would expect such a character to be.

Naomi Watts plays opposite him as a Manhattan assistant D.A. who looks like she has walked right off the set of Law and Order. The story doesn't waste time on any romance between the two characters. It is established early on that Watts' character is in a stable, loving marriage. More importantly, in this world, there is no time for such dalliances. No time for "lovey-dovey," as the Talking Heads song says. There is too much danger, too much truth to expose.

The "evil" in this movie is the from of giant bank, called the IBBC, an obvious play on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a one-time Bush-connected bank that was involved in world-wide arms shipments. The bank here is like the BCCI on steroids, in a millennial world in a which elite bankers rule everything without fear of reprisal from governments. I kept expecting the movie to back down from this high-level premise, but it kept it going all the way through.

Armin Mueller-Stahl (who else could possibly do it?) is perfectly cast at the ex-East German apparatchik who reveals the "facts of life" to Owens' character in a scene reminiscent of the "architect's confession" in The Matrix Reloaded. We are told: the governments cannot help you. There is no recourse for justice, because there is too much high-level corruption.

The lack of recourse to obtain justice is recurring theme in movies over the last few years, even ones based on flawed concepts. This is one of the most important symptoms of the breakdown of the classical order, in which plot resolutions were always based on the establishment of justice.

Without justice, movies are telling us, there is only private revenge, which is always an inferior resolution, one that degrades the hero. Fortunately in this case the hero is spared this degradation, in a climactic scene that is reminiscent of the end of Three Days of the Condor, a movie that The International somewhat aspires to be. The mechanics of the climactic scene are nicely foreshadowed by an assassination scene in a plaza earlier in the film.

But it is not as daring as Condor, and thus not as dark at the end. In Condor, the hero Joseph Turner (Redford) is left all alone, facing the vast inscrutable darkness that surrounds him ("How do you know they'll print it?"). At the end of The International, on the other hand, the hero is let off the hook, left standing as a meaningless and impotent pawn in a world of battling global elite forces of varying degrees of malignancy.

The movie suggests that perhaps this is the best hope we have: that in their titanic struggle for control of the world, the elites will destroy each other without destroying us.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

For ten years, I thought I have been the only person who thought this film was a masterpiece, and that it perfectly captured the malaise of millennial times. Finally, someone agrees with me.

It’s taken me a few viewings to come to terms with the orgy sequence, which is audaciously silly, and the most decisive break from Schnitzler’s novella. With the help of his old friend the pianist, Bill infiltrates a Long Island estate where the rich and powerful, hidden behind cloaks and masks, convene for a ritualistic sex party. Bill doesn’t belong there—and is told that he’s in danger, too—because he isn’t a member of the elite, and as an imposter, he’s punished by being unmasked and exposed before everyone...

The important part is that Bill doesn’t have access to the party; the whys aren’t that relevant. Critics pilloried the anti-erotic ridiculousness of the orgy, with its funereal organ music and self-sacrificing hookers and mass-like rituals involving cloaked high priests and great plumes of incense. But the orgy is more about power than sex; in that respect, it’s the opposite of some free-love hippie bacchanal, where the fucking is more democratic. Here, the rituals are about affirming the elite, and Bill doesn’t belong to this exclusionary country club, whose members are intent on subjugating their inferiors. For Bill, it’s the peak of a humiliating journey, and Kubrick accomplishes the remarkable feat of making Cruise, the brashly confident movie star, look small and scared behind that mask.

The year 1999 was an incredible year for movies, with the best of them centered around a common theme: characters that are delusional, psychotic, or the walking dead. Say what you want about Hollywood, the power of art transcends the corruption, and for that moment at least, shined a brilliant light on America at the end of the Clinton administration as it sleepwalked into the Bush years.

Friday the 13th

Because American horror is creatively dead as a genre, it offers perhaps the best window into the wider breakdown of our culture and our art, as expressed through motion pictures. A movie like this year's Friday the 13th, produced by Michael Bay, is a perfect case study in this principle. Everything you need to know about why America is falling apart, you can find right in this movie, especially when you stack it up against the originals from the early 1980s.

Not that those 1980s movies were masterpieces. As my friend Thor likes to point out, the brutal slayings in those early Friday the 13th installments were copied straight out of 1970s Italian horror. He has a small library of classic video tapes to prove it.

But for U.S. audiences, they were (in conjunction with the Halloween movies) somewhat revolutionary in their depiction of stark, mindless killing, not of innocent bystanders, but of sinful souls (usually teenagers) who had transgressed the bounds of decency and morality, and had foolishly brought an evil retribution down upon themselves. It was a medieval formula. Most of the time it was sex and drinking that brought about their doom, not engaged in with wanton abandon and evil intent, but simple human curiosity. That is the tragic nature of sin, according to the old model: it traps the curious alongside the crazed evildoers.

But the new Friday the 13th, while still seemingly holding to parts of the old formula, is missing something that made the originals gritty and scary. It is like comparing the real New York City to the Las Vegas version. The new movies are a thrill ride version that actually somehow obscures and covers up the true horror-generating effects in the 1980s movies.

For one thing, we are inured to teenage sexuality, so it doesn't really fill the bill anymore. Everyone is looking at porn, so seeing a couple kids screwing on the big screen hardly evokes that sin-fear reflex. Instead it's now marijuana. Virtually all the killings in this year's version have to do with pot somehow. In thie opening, marijuana in a forest generates greed, and substitutes for the role that gold plays in Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale." Later on in the movie, anyone who touches a bong, or anyone who gets near a bong, gets killed.

But if were only as simple as that. In the original, the use of Jason and of the abandoned Camp Crystal Lake were integral to the actual story, which was about teenage counselors gone amuck. In this version, Jason and the Camp play no real explicit role in the story. Let me repeat that: Jason and the Camp play no real explicit role in the story.

Instead they are invoked as cultural archetypes, trotted out to provide mayhem when another character comes in contact with the deadly weed. The entire movie could have been made without mention of Jason, or the original camp, with the substitute of some kind of lake monster instead. So decrepit, so moribund, is the craft of American horror storytelling that no one even cares anymore. All we want to see is people getting hacked. The flimsiest non-sequitur narrative will suffice, so long as there is enough blood. Could there be a more perfect metaphor for the antireality False Narrative being propagated the Judas Goats in the national media?

A couple switcheroos from the original story are useful in chronicling the downfall of America since the 1980s. In the original, all the counselors, and the thus all the victims, were of the same socio-economic class. In the contemporary version, the college kids at the lake are psychologically abused by the rich asshole prick whose house they are staying in. It's a perfect portrait of America right now, so much that we wind up rooting for the rich asshole to be killed, in horrible brutal fashion. Jason has gone from being an agent of terror to an agent of collective vengeance.

But like the real America in its death throes, everyone has to die, along with the rich dude. No one gets spared. Jason is a psychopath who sees everyone as vital threat who must be extinguished. We are all in the path of his machete.

The movie ostensibly bills itself as a remake of the 1980 movie, but is really more of a remake of the 1981 sequel. This makes sense, because the 1980 movie was naturalistic (only "real" causes), whereas the sequels invoke the quasi-supernatural, with the repeated resurrection of the deceased but unkillable Jason. Naturalistic horror (which used to be the rule until the early 1980s) no longer appeals to faith-based American audiences. We understand only fantasy anymore. We don't like the "real."

Perhaps the most glaring difference between this movie and the 1980s installments is the dropping of the most controversial directorial feature of those originals: killer POV. In the Sean Cunningham-directed original, when a victim was about to be offed, we often got to switch to see their reaction screams from the vantage point of Jason himself (or his mother, depending on the movie). This technique was considered the hallmark of the originals, in fact (although Thor will tell you that it was stolen as well from the Italians, who have the most gruesome minds for bloody horror).

Somehow those techniques don't matter anymore. The contemporary movie isn't about generating horror in a way that would really shock, and therefore enlighten. It's about serving death porn eye candy, pure and simple, while pillaging our cultural memory to make a fast buck. Better that no one really notices what's going on. In return, we get to see a rich prick get skewered.

Like I said, our defunct horror actually says a lot about who we are right now.

I saw this in Leominster on its afternoon of release. There was an enormous crowd for the evening show trying to get in as I left. It's what people want, I guess. The best things I can say about my movie are the performances of two of my favorite young actors, Jared Padalecki (formerly on "Gilmore Girls") and Amanda Righetti. I didn't even notice the latter as the same actress in "The Mentalist" on CBS. That's how good a job she did.

Inkheart

The next morning after going to the Angelika, I said goodbye to my cousin, thanking her for a marvelous stay in New York. I caught the B line heading towards downtown, catching a nice glimpse of the musicians playing the Broadway station before getting off at Grand Street in Chinatown.

As I schlepped my bags up the narrow sidewalk across from Sara Roosevelt Park, a Chinese woman waved at me from across the street, to a Lucky Star bus that was just about to leave. Being a long-time Fung Wah patron, I was reluctant to change companies. But the Lucky Star bus was leaving right that minute, so I paid fifteen bucks and got on. It's a cut-throat business, those buses (I actually started the Wikipedia article about the Chinatown bus lines, and uploaded photos that are still there).

Within minutes we were crossing the Manhattan Bridge, and an hour later we were up in Connecticut again. When I got to Boston, I went straight to Massachusetts General on the red line, where my sister and her husband were tending to their son, who had been intubated for respiratory problems, which were thankfully not serious. He's had these kind of problems every winter since he was born.

After dinner at the hospital cafe, I caught a ride with my sister back to their place in the country. I was hoping to take the next day off entirely, but it was Thursday---the last day of the movie-schedule week, and Inkheart was about to leave the theaters. It had barely been out two weeks, and it was being flushed from the marquee, a sign of a real turkey.

My only real option was to go down to the Regal Cinemas at the Solomon Pond Mall. Fortunately there's a Borders Books nearby, and I killed time in the coffee shop there by reading a book on the JFK assassination, one that I eventually bought.

Inkheart, as it turned out, was an absolute disaster. It is my early candidate for Worst Movie of 2009. It has set the standard for suckdom that bad movies will have to surpass for the next eleven months.

I'd been the seeing the trailer to this since last summer in the discount cinema in Fort Collins. I think the release date was pushed back a couple times. In any case, a movie based on the idea that special people can read books and make the characters literally "come to life" seemed particularly mistimed, coming out right after Bedtime Stories, which turned out to be a pretty good movie.

But whereas Bedtime Stories stays within the realm of the naturalistic, Inkheart is pure fantasy---lots of fantasy, bending the rules of reality willy-nilly as it pleases.

My criterion for these movies is that if you are going to create a "world of whimsy," you must stake out the rules very clearly, and early on. Inkheart seemed to just make stuff up as it went along. It's as if the screenwriter didn't really know what the fantasy rules were, and the characters never really discovered them.

Why do people from our world disappear into the book world too? Not explained. No one knows. What process governs this transference? No clue. How can characters actually "die" in the book world? Wouldn't reading the book again make the characters come out again? How can you really change the text of the book? How can characters in world even go there? Does the text of the book change?

Please, please, make it stop and go away. If this sloppy fantasy-world problems were the only issues with the movie, it might have a chance, but that's only for starters. The narrative itself just stinks. The story couldn't decide who the protagonist was. Was it the father (Brendan Fraser), or his daughter, or Dustfinger, the fire-eating thief who looks like the guy in the "Safety Dance" video? I couldn't really tell.

Casting Fraser is always a bad sign for a movie. On the other hand, the movie wastes a performance by Helen Mirren. But my god, what the hell is Jennifer Connelly doing in this movie in a stupid cameo, not even listed in the main credits? She's an Oscar winner for god's sake. Does she owe money to the mob?

What a train wreck of a movie. It's fashionable to diss the tastes of the mass audiences, but they voted with their feet on this turkey, and they were right. This is yet another proof that story makes the movie. This one didn't tell a coherent story, despite lots of money spent on special effects.

One more thing about this movie that was highly disappointing, although not suprising. It completely upheld two principles I've noticed about movies that have come out over the last few years: the Law of Book Destruction and the Law of Library Destruction. Sometime I'll have to write about them in detail, but basically the first one states that if a book appears in a book as a significant part of the story, it must destroyed, either completely or partially, at some point in the movie. The second one states that if a library, public or private, appears in a movie, it too must be desecrated, rampaged, or destroyed during the movie.

I personally believe these laws speak to the barbarism, anti-intellectual denialism, and thuggish blindness of contemporary American culture in the Bush and Post-Bush era. Not surprisingly a stupid, ridiculous, clumsy film like Inkheart, a movie so wretchedly constructed that insults one's intelligence to watch it, upholds these laws to a very high degree.

The Class (Entre les murs)

After the animated shorts ended, I barely had time to scurry across Sixth Avenue and over to Washington Square Park, where I'd arranged to meet my cousin after her law class at NYU. I told her we absolutely had to go to dinner together before I left the City, and this was my last night.

We had over an hour before our show at the nearby Angelika Film Center (map). First we dropped by the theater to confirm the showtime, and then we spotted the neon lights of a restaurant across Houston Street in SoHo. It turned out to be Fanelli's Cafe on Prince Street (map). It was place I've been several times years ago, where I'd even met out-of-town friends, and a person for a job interview. It seemed uncanny to be back at such a familiar place.

We had cheeseburgers and talked about her law classes. She was taking a course this semester on copyright law. We discussed Lawrence Lessig's ideas, and I brought up some IP issues I'd encountered writing for Wikipedia a couple years back.

I told her she should make sure to enjoy her last few months of law school, since it would never be the same after that.

"Years from now," I said, "I'll ask you, 'Hey, remember that time I visited you when you were in law school?'"

We timed dinner perfectly to get back to the Angelika and buy tickets for the show. We descended the escalators to the basement, where the auditoriums are, and found a seat among the already crowded aisles, near the front and along the side.

The movie follows a teacher at a middle school in Paris during the course of a school year. Through much of the movie, it feels in the style of a documentary, chronicling the class in real time.

During the opening scene, we are in a room full of teachers at the school as they introduce each other. It turns out the protagonist is in his fourth year there, and thus the story contains both his exasperation and his experience mixed together, along with his rapport with previous students. Without even knowing what will happen, we feel an ominous sense for the burdens of the first year teachers in the room.

The most dominant theme in the narrative is the unruliness of the class, much of it derived from seemingly irreconcilable multicultural clashes of the students from the various parts of France's erstwhile colonial empire. In many ways, it seems like the kind of problems that plagued American public schools in previous decades, and thus the movie has an almost "throwback" feel to American audiences. The lesson is that European schools may be on the verge of facing many of the cataclysms that have swept through and devastated American public education.

On a lower level, the story is about the teacher's often-tempestuous one-on-one relationships with his students. In this case, the movie is very fine-grained, and the most glaring emotional stress is the story is the teacher's attempt to be individual and fair.

The story culminates in the expulsion hearing of a male student from Mali who has caused severe disruption in the class. He had crossed the line, angered the teacher, and their relationship had passed a tragic point of no return.

As the movie let out, I asked my cousin if she spoke French, and she said she didn't.

I explained to her something about the movie I had noticed, but which would slip by English-speaking audiences. "The unforgivable act by the student was that he used the familiar form of the second person pronoun with the teacher. The French have a special verb for it, tutoyer, which doesn't exist in English. They couldn't really translate it correctly."

The tutoyer incident seemed like a "hold-the-line" moment for the teacher, trying to keep the old-style decorum and respect of the class, even as he broached the boundaries of familiarity in an attempt to connect with them. In a sense, this was the tragic moment of the story, the point at which the simultaneous demands cannot be satisfied. He needed to be both tu and vous to them, he could not, and it was the student in question who wound up paying the price.

One of the things I didn't realize about the Angelika was that it is right next to a subway line (the R/W line, I think). Every ten minutes or so, you could hear the roar of a train passing by, which got a little distracting.

But all in all, it was the perfect way to end my short visit back to City, my first in over four years. I'd kept myself very busy, having seen seven feature films, and over a dozen short films. If nothing else, it had been a fun exploration of the movie theaters of Manhattan.

Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts

After the live action shorts, I went outside to the ticket booth at the IFC and bought a ticket for the next show, which was the Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts. This time I was prepared when I placed my bills down in the counter, and I snatched them before they flew off into the booth like before. I went back inside, and took the same seat as before.

The animated shorts were, in order of presentation:

1. Lavatory - Lovestory. A Russian line-drawn short, about ten minutes long, about the adventures of a lovelorn female men's room attendant (if you've ever been to Russia, you know what I'm talking about). She spends her life daydreaming about romance, and then her life is turned upside-down when starts receiving anonymous flowers, which are the only color in the otherwise black-and-white short.

2. Oktapodi. Barely three minutes long, this French 3-D cartoon was about the adventures of a pair of octopi in the Cyclades (Santorini?) trying to escape being taken home for dinner.

3. La maison en petits cubes. A surrealist, slow-evolving hand-drawn pencil-sketch animation from Japan about an old man who lives in a community of houses that seemingly emerge from the water. It is revealed that the houses are built on layers over time as the sea levels have risen, and we learn the story of his life backwards as he dives down to the bottom.

4. This Way Up. A British 3-D animation about a pair of hapless country undertakers who are bedeviled (literally) in their attempt to retrieve a corpse they have lost on the way to a funeral.

5. Presto. An American 3-D cartoon in the conventional style of Warner Brothers about a stage musician who is thwarted by his hungry rabbit. If you saw the theatrical release of Wall-E, this was the cartoon that was shown beforehand.

The five nominees came to less than hour total, so they padded out the viewing with a few "highly commended" shorts that weren't nominated.

6. Varmints. A half-hour long British 3-D animation about a surrealist world of animals in a sort of Orwellian hellscape that emerges from a placid meadow, and is later destroyed by huge flying jellyfish. Yes, it was that weird, but it was somehow very compelling. I thought it was better than a few of the actual nominees, but is was probably too surrealist to get nominated.

7. Hot Dog. A U.S. hand-drawn short, about three minutes long, about a firehouse dog who dreams of glory and heroism but winds up wreaking havoc during a building fire.

8. Gopher Broke. A U.S. 3-D short that was actually nominated in 2004. A hungry gopher meets his match while trying to steal food from trucks on their way to a farmer's market.

Of the five actual nominees, I just absolutely loved La maison en petits cubes, which had a tremendous emotional impact. Lavatory-Love story was my second choice, but the subject matter of urinals may hamper its chances. Oktapodi was probably my third choice, and I have feeling it will win because of its compelling humor and wild action.

I am strongly rooting against Presto, because I didn't think it was that funny or novel, and moreover because it would be a win for Pixar. They are almost certainly going to win for Wall-E in the animated feature category. The big guys shouldn't be picking up the Oscars for the shorts, which should be reserved for rewarding emerging talent and low-budget productions.

Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts

Tuesday in New York was my day for nostalgia, and connecting with the past, which meant heading down to the southern tip of Manhattan. I took the 2 train to Wall Street, then walked down William Street to the glistening Staten Island Ferry terminal, where I bought some postcards and tried to picture what it was like before it was remodeled. The feature I miss most is the curved ramp down from the second story. It was such a magnificent way to enter the City.

I walked up along Battery Park, then up through Bowling Green and Broadway, recreating an old route. At Trinity Church, I detoured off Broadway to buy some post card stamps at 59 Wall Street, a building with particular significance to a current research project of mine.

Later I bought a pita sandwich from a street vendor and ate it while standing beside the entrance to Brown Brothers Harriman at 140 Broadway, and staring out at the empty area around Ground Zero.

After lunch, I killed some time in a Starbucks in the southeast corner of the Woolworth Building. The coffee shop was not there when I worked in the City, but if it had been, I would have spent a lot of time there. From where I could sit, I could see straight up to the 9th floor window where I used to work. I wondered if my old self from that time could see through time to see me. It was a weird sensation.

All in all, it felt like a very successful foray back into my past.

By mid afternoon, I was back up in the West Village, at the IFC Center on Sixth Avenue, where I bought a ticket to the showing of the Oscar-nominated live action short films. A bit of wind grabbed my twenty-dollar bill and sent it swirling through the ticket booth, forcing the young bearded dude to chase after it on the floor.

My cousin's roommate had spoken highly of the IFC, and it didn't disappoint me. It felt like a modern shrine of movie appreciation. The auditorium had curved rows of high-back seats, sort of like a planetarium. Before the films started, the screen displayed the levels of membership available in the IFC, going up to 1000 dollars, which allowed one access to all manner of special events. Would you get to meet Robert Osbourne? Now that would be worth it!

I had never watched a showing of the Oscar short films, before, so this was quite a treat. In order of presentation, they were:

1. Auf der Strecke (On the Line), a German film about a man who works video security at Swiss bookstore, and who has a crush on a female employee. His surreptitious fascination for her winds up leading to an interesting complication involving the Zurich subway.

2. New Boy, an Irish film about a boy from Africa during his first day of class in Ireland, interspersed with his memories of school in his home country.

3. Spielzeugland (Toyland), a German film about a mother in Nazi Germany who looks for her son, fearing that he has decided to go off to the concentration camps with their Jewish neighbors.

4. Grisen (The Pig), a Danish film about a patient in a hospital who feuds with the family of his Muslim roommate over a painting of a goofily smiling pig which he has adopted as his guardian angel.

5. Manon sur le bitume (Manon on the asphalt), a French film about a young woman who has suffered a bicycle accident and who narrates the expectations of the behavior of her friends and family as they receive the news of her possible death.

The one that stuck out in my mind the most was probably Auf der Strecke, possibly because at over a half hour it was the longest, and it was also the first one shown. It felt like a nice set-up for a longer feature, but as a complete story it felt a little open-ended, without a satisfying resolution.

Grisen was by far the most entertaining and funny, especially with the goofy pig painting, but it felt perhaps a little heavy-handed in its treatment of the intransigence of the Muslim family (but then I don't live in Denmark, so perhaps it is spot on).

New Kid was only eleven minutes, but it had a defined arc of a rich story line. It certainly made me glad that I didn't have to go to school in Ireland.

Spielzeugland was a bit choppy and confusing to follow at first, but in the end it presented a clean story that had a distinct emotional impact. Given the premium that Holocaust movies receive, this one is probably the favorite. I was almost disappointed that the other films have to compete against it, because of that.

Manon sur le bitume had a surreal floating quality, appropriate to the subject. I felt like perhaps it needed just a slight more touch of resolution, or a twist at the end to give it a little bit more emotional impact.

Don't mind me if I sound like I'm complaining. They were all excellent. My favorite was Grisen, with New Kid as my second choice. But like I said, I'd be surprised if anything but Spielzeugland wound up winning.

Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)

After I left the Film Forum in the late afternoon, I wandered around lower Manhattan for a while, through Soho and Astor Place, where I often used to walk during my lunch hours when I worked in the city. I had some time to kill before my next movie, and I wanted to give Wendy and Lucy time to emotionally gel in me, since it was such an excellent movie. It deserved its own breathing space before I saw another film.

Over the next few hours, I perused the one-dollar stacks outside the Strand Bookstore at 12th and Broadway, picking up a biography of Adlai E. Stevenson, a find that definitely plugs a gap in my personal library. Then I bought a falafel sandwhich from a vendor on Broadway and ate it standing up in front of Grace Church. The sidewalks were crammed with people, and the warm night air felt like buoyant spring, like the year was waking up.

A little after 7 p.m, I walked just a block or two over to the Cinema Village on 12th (map) and bought a ticket at the outdoor window for Tell No One, a French thriller that had been making the rounds of art houses last fall, but which I had missed while I was on my trip. I was thrilled when I saw that it was playing in Manhattan, and that I had a chance to see it.

The Cinema Village is definitely a Manhattan theater: it is about as compressed as you can get, and still have a multiplex theater. From the tiny lobby, you go either up or downstairs into one of the auditoriums, which are basically stacked on top of each other. There were about eight rows of seats, and a ramp between the seats and the screen was the roof of the auditorium below. The atmosphere had a throwback feel, like one was stepping back in the 1960s.

There were about ten other people in the audience, and I sat in the back row with my bag from the Strand. When the houselights came down, I settled in for what I figured would be a nice little murder-thriller, a perfect nightcap after an afternoon of emotionally weighty films.

At the beginning we see a dinner---a man (a medical doctor) and wife, along with his grown sister and other people, are sharing a meal outdoors. Later the man and his wife are swimming alone at a lake. They strip naked and make love. Then something terrible happens.

We skip ahead eight years. It turns out the woman was murdered, and the doctor was suspected by the police at first, but that is long since over, since the police determined that the woman was murdered by a serial killer.

Then things get all strange. A newspaper article seems to re-open something about the case. Then the man starts getting strange emails, ones directing to go to certain hyperlinks at a certain specified time, where he is shocked by what he sees. It turns out that his picture of what happened eight years ago was very wrong. The narrative is driven by his search to find out the truth about what happened to his wife. Along the way he will fall under renewed suspicion, and as part of the solving the mystery, he will have to play amateur detective in order to clear his name.

It sounds perfectly fine in concept, and for the first hour of the movie I was really riveted by the action, drawn deeper into the story. One of the things I really liked about the story was its use of technology to drive the tension and fear. Good thrillers often do this, exploiting our insecurities about new and innovative tech intrusions into our life in order to create tension. In a sense, these kind of horror and thriller movies are about the technology. The use or misuse of the technology becomes ultimately the emanation point of the horror and dread.

In this case, the technology was email, and specifically Yahoo! mail, as well as web cams. In principle, like I said, it was great.

But it just didn't work. After the first hour, the movie kept piling on more and more plot. By the climax, I had almost stopped caring about the charcters, because I had been forced to keep track of so much narrative. In order to learn what happens, the doctor (as well as the audience) must be subjected to a nearly ten-minute plot-dump explanation at the end, which still doesn't resolve everything nicely.

Another aspect of the movie I didn't like was that it turns out that the doctor and his wife were childhood sweethearts, something that becomes important in the story itself. In this kind of scenario, this should be the first, or nearly the first, thing we learn about them, so that it becomes a framing story of the entire movie. In this case, it was sort of "slipped in" along the way, and thus didn't have the correct emotional resolution at the end.

After the house lights came up, I overhead a younger guy with sideburns in the row in front of me, talking to two young women about the movie. He had thick glasses and a very intellectual look, with the build of Paul Simon but the facial look of Art Garfunkel. He was holding court about the deficiencies of the movie, especially in the opening scene. He was saying almost exactly the kind of things I had been thinking.

I jumped right in, "Yeah, you're absolutely right. The opening scene at the dinner table was completely wrong. Classically we should have seen the killer right there. The entire resolution to the mystery should have been prefigured there, in a way that made sense afterwards."

He completely concurred. I had found a kindred soul it seems. We shared opinions for a couple more minutes.

"Have you seen Taken," I asked them. They had. "Did you notice a lot of similarities between this movie and Besson's movie? High-level corruption, sexual abuse of minors, an abduction of a young woman, and even a chase scene on a motorway."

A look of understanding came into his eyes. "Of course," he said, "and Taken falls apart halfway through, just like this movie."

"Absolutely," I said. "They don't tell stories like they used to." Then thinking of the other two movies I had seen that day, I corrected myself, "Well, most of the time they don't."

That made him laugh. After that, I said goodbye and went out into the night by myself, leaving him talking to the two young women. The movie had sort of sucked, but those five minutes afterward had made it all worth while. Not only did I feel like I was in New York, but I felt like a New Yorker again.

Wendy and Lucy

Because Silent Light had started late, I barely had time to go back out into the street to the ticket window and buy a ticket for Wendy and Lucy, which was showing in the same auditorium right after it. Within minutes I was back in the same seat, with a nice large chocolate chip cookie from the concession stand, a special treat for my trip to the Village.

Wendy and Lucy blew me away. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, and it lived up to all of them.

It's a simple, short movie about a young woman (Michelle Williams) traveling across country with her dog. They are on their way to Alaska. She started out in Indiana, and the movie takes place in Washington County, Oregon, just south of Portland, where she has reached by the start of the story.

She has almost no money, and keeps track of her meager expenses in a notebook.

The movie completely broke through and shattered the Hollywood taboo about poverty. Specifically, characters are conventionally not allowed to be broke. They might be strapped for cash, but they always have resources somehow. No one ever runs out of money, and faces the grim reality of what life is like in America when you have exhausted your financial resources.

What happens to her is a mini-dissertation on just this topic. One of the best lines in the movie is spoken by the security guard at a Walgreen's, whom she befriends: "You have to have a job to get a job."

At another point, he looks at the people in the neighborhood (I think it was filmed in the town of Canby) and says, "I just don't know what these people do all day." If you've traveled through small-town America, it's a thought that you can't help having over and over.

In many ways, the Great Depression II already started in this country. It just hit the bottom rung of socio-economic ladder first, and is now working its way upward. The news media will stay ignorant of it as long as they can go back to their nice apartments in Manhattan and Long Island.

Among 2008 movies, Wendy and Lucy belongs alongside The Wrestler and Frozen River as the most powerful statements of the "reality" that our country faces, but which are continuing to push away until the last possible moment. It's a story about just one young woman and her travails, but is also the story of an entire generation of Americans in a way, even if they don't know it yet.

One of the ironies of the story is that most of the characters she meets are sympathetic. They've already been caught in the same wretched system, and are doing their best to cope with it. She meets one asshole---a young born-again Christian fittingly---whose actions cause her the most misery.

The narrative is tight. What happens is what must happen. The ending is exactly what had to happen, to resolve the tension of the story, which was only eighty minutes long. The storytelling has a beautiful symmetry, in that what happens in the opening scene also prefigures the ending as well.

Another highly positive aspect of the movie is its reality-based depiction of Oregon, a state that many outsiders often romanticize, especially East Coasters and Californians. The Oregonians I know will tell you that the place is more complex that is often depicted. Wendy and Lucy is the one of the best portrayals of the down-and-out lower-class aspects of life in the Pacific Northwest, after the collapse of the timber economy, which never make it to the Hollywood screen (arguably the best such portrayal since Drugstore Cowboy (1989)).

As the credits rolled, I heard an older gentleman behind me tell his wife, "Well it certainly doesn't make me want to move to Portland." I know a few people there who will welcome such sentinments.

Silent Light (Stellet licht)

My first full day in New York had been a three-movie day. On Monday I thought I would go for another triple, but this time I would start out in the Village.

My cousin had class that day, so I was on my own. On a warm sunlit morning I took the IRT all the way down to Chambers Street, then walked back up to the West Village, arriving at the Film Forum on West Houston street just before one o'clock. I was actually hoping to catch a showing of American Madness (1932), a Frank Capra classic in which Walter Huston has to stop a run on a Wall Street bank during the Depression. It's one of my favorite movies, but it wasn't showing anymore.

But Silent Light was showing in just fifteen minutes, and it was on my list anyway, so I bought a ticket. The Film Forum (map) is a very nice arthouse theater, modern in decor and very clean. I took a seat in the third row and watched the arthouse trailers, which included an upcoming showing of Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A. (1966). I was really beginning to feel like I was in New York at this point.

Then the movie started. The screen was completely dark. The sounds of the countryside grew softly---crickets, the moo of cattle, bullfrogs. We sat and watched the dark screen as the minutes rolled by with just these sounds. It seemed a very imaginative way to start a movie---just a black screen with sounds of the outdoors, and a farm.

Then there were voices---in a dialect of German. A woman was talking. A man was talking. A clock was ticking.

At this point, everyone in the audience began to start looking around. It soon became apparent that something was wrong. The screen wasn't supposed to be dark. One of the theater employees came in and announced they were going to start the movie over from the beginning. After a few minutes, they restarted, this time with the projector turned on all the way.

So it wasn't that avant-garde of a movie. It actually had images to go with the sound after all. Only in the West Village would something like this have happened, with everyone just sitting there, thinking that was the way it was supposed to be.

The film as a whole is somewhat hard to describe, although the premise is fairly straightforward. In a Russian Mennonite community in Chihuahua, Mexico, a farmer with a wife a children has an affair with an another Mennonite woman. At the beginning of the movie, the man has just informed his wife of the affair. Throughout the story he continues the affair, while his wife seemingly tolerates it without complaint. The man debates with himself and others about the nature of God, and whether or not his desire for the other woman is holy or unholy.

But like I said, it's sort of hard to describe the movie. For one thing it is very slow moving in parts, with each scene developing slowly like a Polaroid picture. That's very much the style of the director, Carlos Reygadas. Moreover, all the actors are non-professional Mennonites from the surrounding community in Mexico.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the movie is that it doesn't seem like Mexico at all, but like the United States. Almost all the dialogue in the movie is in Plautsdietch, the dialect of Low German spoken by the Mennonites.

Since the plot is fairly simple, it's hard to discuss the story without giving away the ending, which has a surprise twist, one that can leave you scratching your head at first.

After the movie ended, one of the men in the audience said outloud in full voice: "Does anyone know why she woke up?" (this won't mean anything until you see the movie).

A young bearded man, of college age, replied, "It helps to have seen Dryer's Day of Wrath."

"Holy Mackerel!" I thought to myself. "Now I know I really am in the Village, when people start citing Carl Theodor Dryer to help clear up confusion."

Afterward I went to the men's room. In the hallway, the same young man was angrily accosting the older man who had spoken up. "You don't say things like that in the movie! This is a work of art! That was so incredibly rude! You don't go into a museum and start asking people, 'So why did the artist use a paintbrush?'"

Yup, I was in the Village, all right.

Silent Light was on many critics' Top Ten lists for 2008. At first, after the movie ended, I was sort of wondering why, because it felt over my head. But a funny thing has happened in the last few days. The movie has really grown on me enormously. I can't really explain why yet, because it indeed is quite surreal in its narrative. Somehow it all makes sense even if it doesn't seem to make sense. It seemed very...alive somehow. I guess I'll just keep my mouth shut until I can figure it out. After all, like the dude says, it's art.

Not Easily Broken

When I came up out of the escalators at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, it was still sunny out, and moreover quite warm. The last two months had been brutally cold in New England, and it was quite pleasurable to hang out in Columbus Circle and people-watch. It felt like spring had started to arrive.

I didn't have another movie scheduled until the evening, and I wound up walking all the way up through Central Park into Harlem, taking my time navigating the muddy paths along Croton Reservoir.

Harlem is one of those places that used to scare me, but not anymore. When I first arrived on Saturday evening, I had gone out into the darkness and meandered up along Adam Clayton Powell Blvd, then walked the length of 125th Street to 2nd Avenue and back. Walking through Harlem on a Saturday night was not something I thought I would ever do, but it felt quite pleasant. This is not the old Harlem: almost every storefront had a poster for our current black president, and the barber shops advertised their wireless Internet access.

So on Sunday evening I was back in Harlem a second time, and it felt familiar. With over an hour to kill before my movie, I ducked into the Hue-Man Bookstore on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, where I bought a copy of When Africa Awakes, a classic set of essays from 1920 written by Hubert Henry Harrison. The bookstore was tidy and well-lit, like something next to a college campus. At the register, an African-American man saw what I was buying and struck up a friendly conversation with me, because he had never heard of the book. That kind of friendly, spur-of-the-moment conversation is something that seems so "New York" to me.

I took my book to a nearby Dunkin Donuts where I read for about an hour until the movie time. Then I went back to 125th Street and climbed the escalators three stories to the AMC Magic Johnson Theater, a spectacular modern complex with windows that look out over the street below, including the nearby Apollo Theater (map). Above the concession counter is an enormous mural of a city street scene with Magic Johnson, as well as kids of various races in NBA uniforms (Knicks and Lakers).

The movie I'd come to see, Not Easily Broken, had been playing in Boston for two weeks, but it never made it out to the suburbs. Before I came to New York, I noticed it was still playing in various theaters in predominantly African-American districts, so I made it a priority to go see it.

The story falls into the genre of Christian-inspired "marriage redemption" movies, in which a troubled husband and wife undergo trials and tribulations, then finally learn to come together again through the help of God. In this way, it seemed somewhat like an African-American version of last fall's Fireproof, a movie starring Kirk Cameron I had mocked before it came out, but which turned out to be quite watchable and well-written, for the kind of movie it was.

Not Easily Broken had God in it, but it seemed lighter on the Christian aspect than Fireproof, partly because it had African-American characters, giving less of the White-America judgmental flavor of religious story-telling.

In Fireproof, the source of the narrative tension was a defect in the husband, who was neglectful of his wife and "not a hero" to her. In Not Easily Broken, the tension springs from an unloving wife who puts her career above her marriage, and who denigrates her husband as an inferior provider. Furthermore she has given her mother "an equal vote in the marriage." The story revolves around the resolution of these issues, and the wife learning how to love and respect her husband, and to overcome the toxic influence of her mother.

The story was quite watchable and pleasant, for the kind of movie that it was. It would certainly be too preachy for most audiences, but as a niche movie (Christian, not African-American), it was well-written and well-made.

After the movie, as I walked back to my cousin's apartment, I decided that Harlem was one of my favorite parts of New York City. There was something about it that was so refreshing. Partly it was that in Midtown, every time I looked up at the new glittering buildings built over the last several decades, all I could see was the phony, criminal wealth that had built them, and the delusions we all lived under. But in Harlem people have always known that it was a con game. They were never fooled by those things, but saw them for what they were. I felt like I was among my people.

Waltz With Bashir (Vals Im Bashir)

After our trip to Ziegfield, my cousin headed back uptown to look at apartments with her roommate. Since it was early in the afternoon, I stayed in midtown and hoofed it the few blocks to my next destination, which was the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, just across Broadway from Lincoln Center, between 62nd and 63rd (map).

My plan for seeing multiple movies in one day in Manhattan was easy to execute because before leaving Massachusetts, I had made a detailed set of little maps of all the movie theaters in Manhattan, with all the cross streets, and all the movie times for the shows I wanted to see. It was fun to set it into motion.

The Lincoln Plaza Cinema was one of those movie theaters that was invisible from the street. There was a little box office on Broadway, in the middle of a strip shopping center with many other businesses. After you bought a ticket, you had to go into a separate entrance of the building, and down escalators to the lower level, where all the theaters were. The auditorium was about as "plain brown wrapper" as you could get.

I was really excited to see Waltz With Bashir because of all the buzz about it. It's up for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscar, and it is the strong favorite to win.

In case you haven't heard, it's an animated film made by an Israeli man, about his own search to unearth memories of his experience with the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the 1982 Lebanon War. In addition to telling the story of the war, it's also about the idea of memory itself, and how we choose to remember or forget certain things, especially during wartime.

I found the movie to be very fascinating and worthy of the acclaim it has received, both in terms of its story, and its production style. One of the things that interested me about the movie was something I heard on the radio, during an interview with the filmmaker, Ari Folman.

Folman said he has long been a dissident artist in Israel, and the Israeli government had often pestered him and hampered him in the past. But no such with this movie. In fact, the government had embraced it, and was enthusiastically promoting it around the world as a new model of Israeli filmmaking.

Given the controversial nature of the film, specifically that points to Israeli collaboration in the massacre (which was carried out by Christian Arabs), this seemed a bit puzzling even to Folman himself.

This was the question I kept asking myself during the movie: why had the Israeli government decided to champion this film? Was this a genuine promotion of artistic freedom, or part of Israeli hasbara? Certainly I couldn't answer that question in any real detail, since I know little about internal Israeli politics.

Nevertheless some answers began to form in my mind. It was especially interesting to contemplate them in the midst of Lincoln Plaza Cinema, since the auditorium was packed, and about half of the people there seemed like old Jewish grandmothers out to see a Sunday flick. Given recent events, I couldn't help projecting myself into their shoes. Some of them might be critics of Israel for its recent actions in Gaza, but there were probably plenty of them who felt that any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. What would they think, watching this movie?

Like I said, I could only make guesses. But at the end of the movie, I did feel like I had at least part of the answer. It had to do with the story of the actual massacre. As bad as the Israelis looked in the movie, their perfidy paled in comparison to Christian Arab militia members who actually did the slaughtering. The Israelis looked civilized compared to the Arabs. So yes, the film was critical of Israel, but it seemed like it was also possible to walk out the theater thinking, "At least the Jews aren't as bad as those horrible Christians, who are bloodthirsty savages. The tragedy was that Israel got mixed up with those people in the first place."

So in some respects, the movie seemed to have something for everyone---except for Christian Arabs.

Coraline

I arrived in New York on Saturday evening by Chinatown bus, then took the subway up to 110th Street to my cousin's place. It turns out that she and her roommate were in the midst of looking for a new place to live. The rent market in New York City is incredible for renters right now, with unheard-of deals, so they were looking around to upgrade to a better place.

I told my cousin about my plan to see as many movies as possible in Manhattan, and had sent her my list. I told her that I wanted to go to as many different theaters as possible, and that she was very welcome to see as many as she wanted with me. On Sunday morning, she had a break in her apartment hunting, so I invited her along with me to see Coraline.

"But we have to see it at the Ziegfield Theater, though," I said. She was up for it. I was thrilled to have her along. The weather was warm for a change, and it was a pleasant journey by subway to Midtown.

It turns out that the movie theater is not the original Broadway stage theater, which was torn down in 1966. Nevertheless the movie theater is a huge, traditional single auditorium theater that is full of photographs and memorabilia from the old stage venue.

Although I've expressed an aversion to 3-D, the Ziegfield was showing Coraline in 3-D, so I cheerfully went along, apologizing in advance to my cousin in case it wasn't a good experience.

But it was. The movie was a fun story that kept my interest the whole way through. The 3-D technology turned out to be useful and interesting, although I did forget about it for huge stretches, as in previous cases. But I was definitely very glad I had seen it in 3-D, and restored my faith in the technology more than a little. At no time did I get a headache, as I had in previous 3-D experiences.

The tension in the narrative is driven by a neglectful mother character (Teri Hatcher), who is too wrapped up in her own interests to pay attention to her daughter. She's not enough of a "real mother" in traditional terms, and thus a dark fantasy world is created to balance out this "lack" in the real world. The narrative is driven by the reconciliation of the real world to this lack. In many ways, it is thus yet another statement of how women cannot have it all, but one that is expressed in creative and interesting terms that are not cliched.

My favorite part of the movie was the dancing mice circus. I'd see the movie again, just to see that sequence.

Pink Panther 2

I caught this in Leominster on its first afternoon of release, the day before I left for New York.

Seeing this movie had a little extra bit of personal significance for me, because it brought me back to some formative childhood memories. When I was ten years old, my family lived next to a shopping mall in Iowa. The mall had a twin movie theater, and I would often go over there by myself to see movies, especially during the summer months.

One of the movies I remember seeing from that time was The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), a sequel to the original 1963 The Pink Panther, before they rebooted the series in 2006 with Steve Martin. It absolutely blew me away. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I went to see it twice (the first time I ever remember seeing a movie more than once), and told my parents to see it, which they did.

That being said, I wasn't expecting any magic this time around. I had not seen the 2006 remake, so I didn't have any real expectations at all. In that regard, I was not let down.

The plot was lightweight and watchable, but it didn't have much that made it interesting. As far as humor, it wasn't even in the same league as the 1975 movie (which I have not seen since then, for fear that I will find that I don't like it anymore).

What really stuck out to me is how much the Clouseau character has changed. Sellers' Clouseau was a bumbling outcast, to be sure, but he was intrepid and impeccable. He just kept going forward towards his goal, without any crippling neuroses. Moreover, his impeccability was portrayed as making him studly. At the end of the 1976 sequel, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, he gets seduced by the voluptuous Leslie Anne Warren Down (although things go awry). The idea that a braniac nerd like Clouseau could land a woman like her, just by being his true self, was an idea that appealed to an introvert like me.

The 2009 Steve Martin version has washed away all that completely. Clouseau is no longer free of neuroses but consumed by them. He is now like the shy junior high school kid that I became, afraid to talk to girls and cringing at the idea of expressing his feelings. The old Clouseau never even had time to think about such things. Now it seems it is what consumes him most. It is a wonder he had time to solve any mysteries in the movie.

Moreover the woman who supposedly is turned on by him this time around turned out to have ulterior motives. Was her desire for real? This is our dogma of the new millennium: no attractive woman shows sexual interest to a man unless he is a rich or a rock star, or unless she has some devious reason to deceive him. Everyone else is just supposed to whimper to their therapist.

Such a sad, sad result, but at this point I expected nothing else from this movie. Typical Hollywood. I hope they are done making sequels to this reboot of the series. I don't want to see any more.

A Trip to New York City

I just back from a nice four-day trip to New York City, where I stayed with my cousin Emily, who is in law school at NYU. She lives on the Upper West Side. I spent nearly the entire time going to movies in the city, which was quite fun, since I had hardly ever seen movies in Manhattan, even when I lived in New York. It will be fun writing about them over the next few days, while I catch up.

Che

It's not everyday that you see a four-hour-and-seventeen minute movie. Even rarer is when the movie blows you away.

On Wednesday when I took the train into Cambridge, I had been half dreading, and half looking forward to, seeing Che, the two-part biopic epic about Ernesto "Che" Guevara directed by Stephen Soderbergh.

Over the previous week, I'd been completely engrossed in reading Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination by Lamar Waldron. It is a phenomenal book, extremely well-researched, and blows away just about anything else I've read recently about the events of November 1963.

If you haven't yet read it, or absorbed what's revealed in it, then it is very difficult to talk meaningful about what happened. Yet many of what is in the book was not known until 2005, when the files were made available. Suffice it to say that Cuba plays a very important role.

In order to understand the book, I wound up doing a lot of background research about the Cuban Revolution for the first time. All this research came in very handy when watching the movie.

I got off the train at Kendall Square and walked around the M.I.T. campus for about an hour on a cold sunny day before heading to the Landmark Theater nearby. I bought a fifteen dollar mantinee ticket for the "roadshow" edition of the movie. It started promptly at one p.m. without trailers. There was a fifteen minute intermission after part one, then the second half was shown. There were no credits at the end.

I had been dreading the possible grueling length of the two-part epic, but once the movie settled in, I realized my fears were overblown. The movie flew by. It could have been an hour longer, and I probably still would have enjoyed it.

You don't need to know anything about the Cuban Revolution, but it does certainly add to the appreciation. At the very beginning of both parts is a silent animated geography lesson for American audiences. In the first movie, you get to learn all the names of the former provinces of Cuba, and the major cities that will appear in the movie. In the second half, you get to learn about Bolivia and South America.

The two halves of Che actually turn out to be very different, much like the man himself. It is almost as if they were directed by different people.

In the first half, we follow the revolutionaries from the 1955 onward, when Fidel Castro first meets Guevara in Mexico City, followed by the epic boat ride to the southeastern tip of the island with eighty other men. Only twelve people on the boat will eventually live to see the Revolution become successful with the overthrow of the Batista junta.

The first half is buoyant, as Guevara and the rebels learn to fight in the jungle, and gain the support of the peasants, behind Castro's charismatic leadership. Their movement keeps building momentum as they take on the Army. Eventually the major cities fall to them, and Batista abdicates before the rebels even enter Havana. The first half ends with this triumph.

The second half is completely different, in both tone and narrative, as it follows Guevara in his attempts to instigate a revolution in Bolivia. Taken together the two halves of the movie provide a dissertation on what makes for a successful, or unsuccessful, revolution. Everything that went right is Cuba, went wrong in Bolivia.

I'm sympathetic to the criticisms of the movie that it glosses over the atrocities committed by Guevara and others in clamping down on dissent after their takeover of Cuba in 1959. But that really wasn't the subject of the movie. Even after two full-length movies, there is still plenty of room for additional commentary on the Cuban Revolution. I certainly would like to see more.

I'd love to see a movie made out of Lamar Waldron's book as well. That would certainly be mindblowing. I feel like I've only begun to scratch the surface of the topic.

Che may well indeed be the best motion picture released in 2008. It may wind up at the top of my list, when all is said and done. Soderbergh has created a masterpiece that will stand the test of time.