Big Blue

Avatar stands as a wildly uneven summation of director James Cameron's career, embodying every good, bad, awe-inspiring, and downright silly and embarrassing thing about the self proclaimed King of the World. While being touted as the next revolution in movie making, what's most striking about Avatar is how derivative just about every single thing in it is: second hand memories of every science fiction, fantasy, and colonialist tale ever told in every medium abound, and the lack of good storytelling makes the presence of these cliches pretty much inexcusable. The world that James Cameron's film inhabits may be fully realized, but the gateway into that world - actual thematic substance - is virtually nonexistent.

In Jean Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, two characters discuss the massive success of the ex-biggest movie of all time Titanic in a restaurant, and one character states "Why bother saying or writing that Titanic is a global success? Talk about its contents. Talk about things, but don't talk around things. Let's talk on the basis of things." Substitute the word Avatar and Godard's observation is relevant all these years later. It has become virtually impossible to discuss the movie on its own terms, as almost any criticism of the movie can quickly be met with "2 Billion dollars worldwide doesn't lie" or "The numbers speak for themselves" and, yes, both of these observations are correct, but they don't necessarily speak to the actual quality of the movie, merely to the power of the media in creating an 'event'. Anything becomes an event if you say so for long enough, and Cameron was touting that he was looking to redefine movies before a single camera had begun rolling. All the controversy and speculation surrounding Avatar has only assisted in advertising it even more.

But the so-called revolutionary elements have been done before, and done better. The main selling point of Avatar is that it creates its own unique world and submerges the viewer into it via 3D technology, and even people critical of Avatar have cited that the world is immersive; I have seen very few criticisms of the creature and ecological design of the film's setting, Pandora. This is what really makes-or-breaks the film, subjectively speaking - if the viewer finds the cinematic world convincing and enjoys being in it, then it naturally follows that they will enjoy the movie (I have read reports that some people actually "experienced depression and suicidal thoughts after seeing the film because they long to enjoy the beauty of the alien world Pandora", a notion that, if true, makes me depressed and suicidal). Speaking for myself, I never forgot that I was looking at a computerized forest populated by computerized creatures. Though one can't help but marvel at the scope of Avatar's planet, it reflects a stunning lack of imagination on Cameron's part, as it's ultimately nothing more than a cartoon forest. The creature design leaves much to be desired, as well, because all of the animals look like their earthly counterpart with a skewed color palette and odd flailing limbs.

The obtrusive 3D doesn't help matters much; Cameron filmed the live-action portions with two 3D cameras in an attempt to mimic peripheral vision and, while this idea sounds intriguing on paper, it simply does not work. It makes characters look like cardboard cut outs (which is fitting, really), any implication of depth of field flies out the metaphorical window, and it can occasionally be disorienting, as Cameron will occasionally use a rack focus and the foreground, the pane that is popping out from the screen, will go out of focus. The animated portions don't fare much better, though they're at least watchable, as I don't recall any bone-headed directorial decisions on the level of the rack focus catastrophe. Cameron actually managed to make me physically uncomfortable while watching a movie, and at certain intervals I had to take off the 3D glasses in order rest my eyes. I've seen Avatar twice, once in skullfucking IMAX 3D, the other in my decidedly non-skullfucking home in 2D, and I must say it played much better in traditional 2D; though the inherent silliness is still present, it goes down much smoother, even though it's plain as day that Cameron composed many shots strictly for the purpose of throwing stuff at you, cheapening many of the moments designed for emotional impact. It's always about the spectacle in Avatar.

And as I noted earlier, the spectacle isn't even particularly well done. The action sequences are loud and incoherent - visual noise that, in many instances, isn't even context appropriate. Cameron's big finale is one of the most hypocritical and ideologically confused sequences of the last few years, one that includes the gleeful and wanton slaughter of the SFWM (stupid fucking white man) in his third act epic battle extravaganza. Cameron falls into the trap that Terrence Malick so wonderfully avoided in his masterpiece The New World: Cameron demonizes the SFWM imperialists in cartoonish broad strokes and fetishizes the natives in a manner that is simplistic, disturbing, and kinda perverted - Cameron stated in a Playboy interview that he told his special effects crew that the female Na'vi "got to have tits, even though that makes no sense because [their] race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals". In Cameron's world, the natives are pure, wise and uncorrupted - so much so that an early scene details the female Na'vi, Neytiri, in mourning over some wolf-like creatures that she killed to save the life of the protagonist, Jake Sully, who is foolish enough to thank her for saving his life. "Don't thank! You don't thank for this. This is sad. Very sad only", says Neytiri, proving her love of the planet and respect for all forms of life, though as far as I could tell not a single tear was shed nor a single moment of silence observed for all the SFWM that are killed in Cameron's big finale. In spite of Cameron's blatant anti-American baiting (no small part of its worldwide success, I would wager), he is little more than a cinematic equivalent of George W. Bush, using an act of terrorism - the raping and pillaging of Pandora, including the destruction of a sacred tree, which is a blatant hijacking of 9/11 imagery - to justify further acts of terrorism, slaughter, and destruction.

Cameron has never been known as a wordsmith - even his previous works, many of which I like very much, are sorely lacking in this department - but Avatar's spoken word is about as poorly written as anything I've ever heard in a Hollywood blockbuster; the script is stuffed to the brim with movie trailer style one-liners and scene punctuations. I wouldn't mind such awful writing if I could find other things to admire but the story, visuals, and acting don't exactly pick up the slack. Many have excused the banal writing because they find the visuals so dazzling, but I was never particularly dazzled; when on Pandora, Cameron's camera is constantly moving (so as to impress us with things flying out of the screen), and we never get a particularly good look at the planet because Cameron doesn't believe in static shots anymore, I guess (so 20th Century). What we're left with is a poorly written and badly acted cinematic light show - flashing fluorescents and whooshing sound effects, but no technique or substance behind them.

Avatar is an ingeniously marketed but ultimately empty piece of exhibitionist technology. It is expressly designed to be seen and disposed; the film doesn't linger on a single image, emotion, or idea long enough for anything to register. Like the 3D process Cameron employs, Avatar is just about throwing things out at you, attempting to delight and wow you with its sights and sounds, but its effect is ultimately numbing. James Cameron has shown himself to be in roughly the same film making class as George Lucas: a man who has always been on the forefront of pushing cinematic technology further, but in the CGI-era when anything that can be imagined can be put on a screen, they have allowed technology to override the human interest in their movies. In spite of the fact that Cameron waited 10 years for technology to catch up with his grandiose vision, he was probably better off when a lack of technology forced him to imaginatively make a movie.

The Human Touch: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson has always had something of a storybook aesthetic and with his latest, the consistently delightful Fantastic Mr. Fox, the Prince of the American Eccentrics has succeeded in doing something far greater - and much more meaningful - than merely adapting a story to the screen; he has brought a picture book, the kind we all grew up, to vibrant, spirited life. Adapting Roald Dahl's picture book to the screen (the first book he ever owned), Anderson has clearly made a deeply personal work, one you can sense he's wanted to make since he was a child. But Anderson is much too sophisticated an artist to make a film for the child inside him - he fleshes out Roald Dahl's story with a distinctly mature and adult sensibility, and that makes the film more rewarding than the typical family fare that pollutes multiplexes year after year. In a time when movies, especially animated movies, merely cater to their target audience to distract them for a few hours in exchange for a 10 dollar ticket, Wes Anderson has dared to bring a personal vision to the family movie.

Wes Anderson is a film maker who finds beauty in flaws, and in Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson manifests human foibles - quirks, if you will - in the form of animals: examinations of masculinity, femininity, family, adolescence, and class are all put at the forefront of the movie, and that in itself elevates it above the diversionary family entertainment that the form of animation is unfortunately confined to. Anderson paints the portrait of an animal society where every creature has a well defined role in the animal community; be it a real estate agent, a super, a chef, a lawyer, a musician, a painter, or the author of newspaper editorials - and this is an extremely meaningful linking of a capitalistic society to that of the natural order of the animal kingdom. This examination of a civilization where each person (animal) has a different but equally meaningful place in it is perhaps Anderson's most well pronounced rumination on the true meaning of a community, a theme that has always permeated his work.

But this film is also an examination on the manner in which a civilized society neuters our animal instincts. When we're first introduced to Mr. Fox, he is a wise cracking, arrogant, and untamed wild beast; sneaking onto farms and stealing himself some dinner. Needless to say, this is a dangerous line of work, what with angry farmers who don't like having their property raided by a hungry fox. In the opening scene, Mr. Fox and his wife get caught in a fox trap on a squab farm, and his wife drops the bombshell: she's pregnant, and should they escape the farmer's clutches, she demands that he find another, less dangerous, line of work. Flash forward to 2 years (12 fox years) later, and Mr. Fox is distinctly middle class; a domesticated father, husband, and working man, writing newspaper editorials for the local rag newspaper. He wants to move out of their little hole in the ground (literally) because it 'makes [him] feel poor', and he brazenly ignores the advice of his wife and lawyer (Bill Murray, here manifested in badger form, of the law firm Badger, Beaver & Beaver) and buys himself a house a stone's throw away from the farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean: "three of the nastiest, meanest, ugliest farmers in the history of this valley". He does this despite the fact that, as his voice of reason wife points out, foxes live in holes for a reason.

The three neighboring farms light Fox's instincts afire. Fox hatches a Master Plan with the help of his loyal opossum super and friend Kylie to raid each of the local farms over the course of three nights. As he and Kylie sneak onto the farms and steal the farmer's squabs, apples, and alcoholic cider, Fox's Master Plan quickly reveals itself to be more about territoriality than survival, more about hubris than instincts. Fox is simply getting a kick out of 'cussing with their heads'. With this, Anderson reduces masculinity to its animalistic essence, as the back and forth between the animals and the farmers becomes a literal pissing contest. The farmers first attempt to simply shoot the fox, so he runs into his house. The farmers tear the tree down, the foxes dig underground. The farmers rent tractors, the foxes dig further underground. Survival, not social status, becomes the priority of Fox and his family.

However, Fox's antics create something of a crisis in the film's animal society. The farmers' attempts to dig out the Fox family displaces the other animals within his community, and this leads to the typical Andersonian third act where the lovable scamp patriarch convinces everyone to give him another chance and join up with him in an attempt to correct his wrongs. In spite of the fact that this is typical thematic material for Anderson, it feels fresh, mostly because the cast of animal puppets recontextualizes motifs that have come to define Anderson as an artist.

And yet this film is more than an animated Life Aquatic - it is a technical marvel, the most incredible technical achievement of 2009, in spite of the crock of shit James Cameron and his partisans are trying to sell. Every frame is packed with detail; I've seen the film several times and still haven't even come close to absorbing all the nuances that adorn each and every one of Anderson's delicate compositions. And the plethora of detail isn't superfluous eye candy - art design has always been a vital element of his films, saying as much as about his characters and the world they inhabit as their words and actions do. The level of detail both in the puppets and the sets are simply eye popping, and the use of animal fur is one of the many little touches that makes the world feel organic. The animals look so real that you want to reach out and touch them.

The voice acting is also some of the best I have ever heard in an animated movie. Generally in American animated films, the 'name' casting feels utterly tacked on; take the animated films of Dreamworks, for instance, where the character and the voice that emanates from it don't seem to match at all. For Fantastic Mr. Fox Anderson abandoned the usual process of recording in a studio and instead did location recording; in attics, cellars, and in the woods, and that brings a certain ease and spontaneity to the voice performances. There is such a relaxed, almost naturalistic delivery by the voice actors here that you almost completely forget that you're watching puppets synced up to a recorded soundtrack. George Clooney's smooth baritone is a perfect fit for the titular sly fox, Meryl Streep drops the theatrics and is instead soothing as Mrs. Fox, and Jason Schwartzman captures adolescence in all its awkward glory as poignantly as he did in Rushmore over 10 years ago. The supporting players are Anderson's usual cast of characters, merely manifested as animal puppets, so that lends a tone of familiarity to those of us who are familiar with his previous work.

Anderson acolytes and detractors alike will notice how perfectly he has transposed his aesthetic - perhaps the most singular vision in modern American movies - to animation, and some writers have used the fact that he seems to work more comfortably within the realm of animated movies to backhandedly diss his earlier work, specifically his last two, wildly misunderstood movies; as though making idiosyncratic pictures is the worst thing a person could do (perhaps these people live in a fantasy world where too many people are making movies on their own terms). Yes, animation affords Anderson the opportunity to fashion an even more distinct world then he usually does, but Anderson's cinematic universe is and always has been intimately connected to the world we live in, and this connection has never been more evident than in the stop motion puppetry of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

On Dangerous Ground: Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino simultaneously sends-up and celebrates cinema's corrupt nationalist history in his latest film, the revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds. This contradictory dichotomy in many ways sums up this most confounding film, one that I found exhilarating and exasperating in nearly equal measure; it's simultaneously the director's most sophisticated movie and his most adolescent, at once nothing like what you would expect from Tarantino and exactly what you would expect from him. He satisfies the blood lust of both himself and his audience, all the while turning an extremely critical eye towards the power of illusion in creating these visceral reactions towards violence, and the feelings of jingoism that screen iconography can exploit.

Yet there are many moments where it feels like he is simply making the movie for the adolescent inside of him, attempting to vicariously live in the cinematic wonderland of war movies that he did as a child, and these mostly isolated moments of shallow wish-fulfillment serve as a bizarre counterpoint to the far more numerous moments that indicate a mature artist. The weakest moments of the film are the ones that detail the exploits of the titular band of American soldiers, led by a charismatic (and psychotic) Aldo Raine, played in broad comic strokes by Brad Pitt; and it's in these sequences that Tarantino's "violence is the most fun you can have at the movies!" philosophy wore me down. Revenge has been a vital part of his movies since the Bruce Willis episode of Pulp Fiction, but here it feels like he's using the tailor made emotions that the Nazi uniform brings with it to justify his penchant for violence on the screen. Though this isn't the cartoony violence of the first Kill Bill, the tone of the violence strikes me as decidedly more 'realistic' in this one; there are many instances where the violence is chilling, as it should be (the most chilling one involving no blood at all), but there are also moments where I feel that the violence is supposed to be 'fun' (such as during the aforementioned second chapter, or when Pitt's Aldo Raine sticks his finger in a woman's bullet-wound to get information). I've honestly never been bothered by the violence in Tarantino's films before, but something about the brutality of the head-scalpings (which leave nothing to the imagination), and the glee with which the Nazi's are brutally murdered rubbed me the wrong way.

Far more interesting to me is the personal revenge tale of Shosanna Dreyfus (an enchanting Mélanie Laurent); who, after witnessing the murder of her family in the opening scene, gets a unique opportunity to bring down the Nazi regime when the movie theater she runs is going to be used for a Gala Nazi Premiere. Her story is interwoven with that of the titular basterds, and the two come together in the end for the big finale (set in, appropriately, a movie theater), but the contrast of the two narratives struck me as particularly sharp; whereas the sequence that details the band-of-outsiders is exactly the kind of uber-violent revenge fantasy that the movie was marketed as (it is admittedly a small portion of the overall movie), the tale of Shosanna is poignant and, in the end, the most singularly moving thing Tarantino has ever done. This is the first time I've ever felt he painted an honest and accurate portrait of a female; instead of being in stately awe of them, treating them as Goddesses, this is a multi-faceted, nuanced portrayal of a woman, and Mélanie Laurent's wonderful performance tows the line expertly between vulnerability and empowerment. Those who decry Tarantino's films for lack of 'character development' would do well to take a look at Shosanna's character arc in this film. Part of me wishes she had been the core focus of the movie, because to me she was the film's heart and soul, but Tarantino's vision is much too ambitious to be confined to a single character as it was in the Kill Bill movies.

It's worth noting that the crude nationalism of the film's second chapter bothered me in the same way the misogyny of Death Proof's first act bothered me, but I think he does unique things in both those films that shifts the context of what I had falsely perceived as misogyny in his previous film, and nationalism in this one. We were all hearing for years and years about Tarantino's revisionist-history war epic, and the early plot synopsis I read (this is going back a few years) detailed that it would be Jewish soldiers taking revenge on Nazi's; while there is something amusing about this concept on the surface, there's also something dubious about turning Jews into perpetrators and Nazi's into victims, something that goes far deeper than issues of moral relativism. On paper, this could have been an exploitation of people's personal biases to justify extreme acts of violence, but Tarantino does something unexpected and, later in the film puts the brutal, borderline sadistic second chapter titled "Inglourious Basterds" into a unique context with war movie history. The audience I saw the film with the second time laughed and cheered during a sequence when "The Bear Jew" (Eli Roth, who is not nearly as bad in this as he's made out to be) beats a Nazi soldier to death for not revealing the locations of his fellow soldiers. I truthfully found this incredibly off-putting, as I didn't honestly find anything funny about a sequence that details a clubbing at the hands of a sociopath (Tarantino's Producer Lawrence Bender called the movie a "fucking Jewish wet dream"), but the somewhat troubling response of my audience was mirrored during the climactic premiere of the movie-within-a-movie Nation's Pride, about a German soldier who kills some 300 enemy infantry while stationed in a bell tower in Italy. Of course, this propaganda film is nothing but an exploitation film with political import, and as the in-film audience applauded the killing of soldier's actions in the fictitious Nation's Pride, I couldn't help think that Tarantino was, in some way, critiquing the way some audiences take a giddy, perverse joy in violence, especially when that violence appeals to our innate sense of xenophobia. Of course, many people (his fans included), refuse to accept that Tarantino is capable of such insight, especially because these insights come from within a genre film.

And it strikes me that many detractors were just waiting to rip Tarantino a new one for his revisionist history, deciding their stance based on the marketing ("Jews fight back!") as opposed to what is actually presented on the screen. Many of the negative reviews of Tarantino's latest simply cite what's being referred to as the 'Jewish Revenge Porn' element (leading one to think that they are reviewing the teaser trailer from last year, as opposed to the actual 2 and a half hour movie), ignoring the essence of the film in favor of axe-grinding polemics. Tarantino's movies are never explicitly about what they present on the surface --- be it gangsters or samurais or soldiers --- but rather they are about cinema itself, and this is his most sophisticated rumination on the power of images; rather than stuffing this film to the brim with references to other movies, cinema is an ingrained part of the film's story --- both as an art form and as a physical object (the combustibility of celluloid is a vital element of Shosanna's revenge). This is the first time Tarantino has displayed a deft knowledge of film history instead of trivia, and the way he puts films into a social context --- acknowledging that they can be as powerful weapons in a war as bullets and bombs --- is the first time he's used his encyclopedic knowledge of film to an ends outside of creating an inclusive film universe (one important character is an ex-film critic turned soldier, which gives Tarantino a venue with which to comment on how the German film industry changed under Goebbels). I know a lot of Tarantino's detractors simply won't accept such depth from him, but the centrality of cinema to Inglourous Basterds is an inspired and extremely perceptive storytelling device; it's a wonderful metaphor that celebrates all movies, not just the genres that Tarantino has displayed a special affinity for.

If this is the first time he's put his considerable knowledge to good use, it's also the first time he's ever really encapsulated his idols, while still developing one of the most idiosyncratic directorial voices in modern movies. He spent the entirety of Volume 2 trying to approximate Segio Leone's distinct visual style (which isn't to say I don't think he was directing from his own sensibility as well), and I don't think he quite succeeded --- though he almost did. The opening chapter of Inglourious Basterds, fittingly called "Once Upon a Time... In Nazi Occupied France" (which would have been a much better title for the film, I think), is pure Leone; Tarantino films the gorgeous French countryside the way Leone filmed his barren landscapes, and the recontextualizing of locales is perfect for Tarantino's aesthetic, as the use of color has always been a central element of his compositions (since he tends to be thought of as more of as a writer and good director of actors than anything, his considerable visual panache is rarely discussed). This opening sequence kicks the story into gear by introducing us to Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz, who is justifiably getting praised to the heavens for his turn here), nicknamed "The Jew Hunter", as he is going into the French countryside looking for any potentially hiding Jews. This opening sequence is some of Tarantino's very best work --- wrought with tension, it aligns our sympathies with the French farmer as Landa plays him like a fiddle, knowing exactly which buttons to press and how to manipulate until he gives him the information he wants: where the Jews are hiding. In a very powerful moment, you can see the heartbreak and devastation in the man's eyes as he announces the location where his friends are hiding. Landa, as portrayed by Waltz, is not your typical raging socio-path Nazi (it's just so easy, not to mention convenient, to blame the Holocaust on a couple of bad apples); rather, he is a cunning and artful manipulator, one who takes pride in his job not because he believes in the final solution, but because he's an opportunist.

This opening sequence illustrates how the film will function; each 'chapter' is a self-contained set piece, working both as an individual unit and as part of a much richer whole. The most daring of these is a nearly half-hour long sequence set in a bar, with German actress Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) meeting the German-speaking members of the titular band of soldiers in a pub filled with Nazi's to plot the bombing of the Nation's Pride premiere. This is the mirror of the suspense-filled opening, which similarly drew out the tension with long stretches of dialogue. Some have complained that this sequence stops the movie dead in its tracks, but I think it displays sheer movie-making gusto; Tarantino is audacious enough a film maker to pull in the reigns and allow time for the situation to develop, to the point where we're intimately familiar with not only every detail of the room, but with all of the people who occupy it as well (Tarantino goes to great pains, for instance, to establish that one Nazi soldier is out with his comrades celebrating after the birth of his son), so that when things finally do explode in a shoot-out there is a significant emotional involvement on the part of the audience as well. This sequence is sheer masterful storytelling, proving that Tarantino the goofy, nutty post-modernist is something of a classicist at heart. Though my favorite chapter is aptly titled "Revenge of the Giant Face", where all the loose, seemingly unrelated narrative threads come together in a glorious, exciting, audaciously conceived finale.

But there is something in the film's final sequence that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Hans Landa has surrendered to the United States, but as one final gesture Aldo the Apache carves the Nazi swastika into his forehead, because he can't abide the thought of Landa one day taking off his uniform and living a normal life. In the film's final shot, Pitt's Aldo Raine proclaims directly that this particular carving "just may be my masterpiece". In interviews, Tarantino has always struck me as somewhat arrogant, but in his movies that confidence translates into remarkably assured, supremely confident and idiosyncratic direction; but this narcissistic final shot reminds me of the Tarantino I see on television, as opposed to at the movies. I left the theater with a bad taste in my mouth, so much so that afterward I wasn't sure if I even saw the movie I thought I saw, and seeing it a second time the whole thing went down much smoother; I admired what I admired all the more, while also having a more firm grasp with the few things that bother me about the movie.

But the more the movie fades into hindsight, the more my misgivings with it disappear into the background, to the point that the point where they feel almost trivial. At the end of the day, this represents ultimate Tarantino; virtuoso, expertly crafted entertainment that is rooted in, but not defined by, genre tropes, and a great soundtrack (particular favorites would be the opening theme "The Green Leaves of Summer" from The Alamo, the Morricone, and a gloriously anachronistic David Bowie). That I'm not quite enamored with it (but damn close) simply reflects things that bother me personally about the handling of this particular subject, and don't necessarily speak to the director's intent. All of Tarantino's movies have been about celebrating the guilty pleasures that the movies have to offer, while at the same time supplying the lowbrow with his own unique stamp. But Inglourious Basterds and Death Proof represent the first of Tarantino's more critical takes on genre, where he transcends the more disreputable aspects of his favored genres by expanding them in a cheeky, delightfully postmodern way. It is perhaps best to think of Inglourious Basterds as a unique summation of the history of Nazi's on film --- from Reinfenstal to Spielberg to everything in between.

Miyazaki Artistry, Disney Product

It's a testament to the film making craft of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli that even The Walt Disney Corporation's patented whitewashing (or should that be white supremacy?) can't rob Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea of its artistry --- only its culture. The circumcision of the title from the elegant, alluring Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea to the decidedly more marketable Ponyo is only part of Disney's pandering to Western xenophobia; as per their tradition with Western Studio Ghibli releases, all the original voices are dubbed with marketable 'stars', a move that draws more attention to itself than anything. Instead of the voices fitting their characters as they do in the Japanese versions, they just find 'name' people to voice the roles for Western audiences, depriving these animations of their spirit and their ethnicity. This is as transparent move to appease jingoism as I've ever seen, not to mention it encourages illiteracy amongst children and adults (illiteracy in third-world nations is the only reason dubbing became a practice in the first place, then laziness made sure it was here to stay). The more voracious the marketing campaign (it's opening in 800 whole theaters. That's, what, a third of what G-Force and G.I. Joe got?), the more these distinctly Hollywood personalities stick out from the film itself. Still, it's amazing that in an era where animation is dominated by Pixar and Dreamworks banality that something as benign and visually imaginative as Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea even made it to American shores in the first place. That we must tolerate DisneyCo tarting up what they view as mere product is the sad price we must pay.

Miyazaki's films bring an Eastern folk-element to traditional coming of age stories, and this is probably why his films have struck as much of a chord overseas as they have in Japan. In spite of the fact that Miyazaki perceptively documents Japanese culture and social issues --- bourgeois attitudes, war, and environmentalism in his latest three films --- he is never patronizing or moralistic, mercifully avoiding the Pixar trap. Ponyo concerns a young anthropomorphic goldfish-girl's (it's a lot less contrived than I make it sound) quest to break out of her fish form and become a human; touches of Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid abound, but Miyazaki avoids directly reminding us of any thematic similarities by fleshing out the story with his own unique sensibility. Ponyo, even in its more low-key, quiet moments, is packed with Miyazaki's typically eye popping visual palette; every frame feels like the illustrations in a storybook brought to life, fleshed out with Miyazaki's breathtaking sense of color and wondrous, seemingly limitless visual imagination.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea may be more simplistic and directed at children than some of Miyazaki's other, more universal works, but it's refreshing seeing a movie that actually pays homage to the depth of childhood experience. Unlike Pixar, who has taken to portraying their core demographic as fat, lazy, and ignorant, Miyazaki has the utmost respect for children; he portrays them as pure, wise, and intelligent. When Ponyo first ventures to the shore and is captured by a young five year old boy Sosuke, he immediately takes to her, as we took took to animals as children. The central conceit of a goldfish struggling to become human is a brilliant metaphor for what we projected onto our pets as children; we thought of them not as creatures inferior to us, but as companions and friends that were our responsibility. There is a scene early on where Sosuke is afraid he's lost Ponyo forever --- without even thinking about what could happen to him, he rushes out into the water trying to find his fish. As he struggles, hopelessly, to find his lost pet, I felt the same sadness and frustration that the little boy on screen felt; anyone who has ever lost an animal has probably felt the same kind of outpouring of emotion, the feeling both of missing the pet and of feeling like you let the animal down. It's because Miyazaki has such an intimate connection to childhood that he's able to detail what it feels like to be one so effectively.

Miyazaki also understands the way adults don't take the concerns of children seriously; in Spirited Away, all the problems arise from the fact that the main character's parents don't listen to their child. In Ponyo, the titular character wants to escape from her undersea life and join the ranks of humanity, but her father won't hear of it --- partially because he doesn't like people very much (and with all the pollution of his undersea home, who can blame him?), but mostly because he doesn't want to lose his daughter. While it would have been easy to cast Ponyo's father into a villain role Miyazaki refuses to deny him his humanity; he doesn't have 'heroes' and 'villains' in the traditional sense, as such obvious storytelling cliches are beneath his sensibility.

Ponyo is one of few new releases to be daring enough to find joy in life, and to allow that sense of joy and wonder to be its guiding force. I have minor quibbles with it (Westernization aside), namely in the way the plot is resolved at the end, and the general cutesy nature of it all, but I can look passed them because Ponyo is a feast for the eyes and for the soul. I can also let the how child-friendly it all is slide because children deserve a movie that respects them instead of condescending towards them --- and children (bright children, anyway) respond to this element of Miyazaki's films. Their emotional simplicity, their honest reflections of human experience, and humanity are essential values that have long since disappeared from Disney's work. When so many animated movies have the cold feel of being made on a computer (including, in many cases, a story that feels as mechanical as the animation), it's refreshing to see a work of animation that has a distinctly human touch; there is almost an impressionist quality to the drawings, which may not flesh out every solitary detail but are still visually ravishing. Ponyo proves that Miyazaki is one of the few popular artists saving animation from banality and formula, and he deserves nothing but support and respect for doing so.

Terminal Adolescence

Not even the great Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski can dignify Judd Apatow's latest ode to perpetual adolescence, Funny People; in spite of the fact that Apatow tries, sometimes embarrassingly hard, to make his first 'serious' movie, Funny People still displays the same adolescent misogyny, crude frat boy humor, and bland TV aesthetic that has defined his cinematic career thus far. That it has 'serious' pretensions only distracts from --- but does not subvert --- this issue, and the fact that the movie attempts to break itself away from its predecessors by tacking on a contrived (and wholly incidental) leukemia subplot only highlights how juvenile and incompetently made his movies really are. I would imagine that Apatow thinks Kaminski's gorgeous high contrast and grainy cinematography, coupled with the film's dramatic import, marks his arrival in the Los Angeles community that he spends a great majority of the movie sucking up to (more sycophantic B-Grade guest star cameos than a lousy Apatow television production), but he is starting to expose himself as the Emperor with no clothes. Funny People is something of a bi-polar movie; it tries so hard to intertwine so many narrative threads and emotions, and fails so miserably at virtually every single one of them, that it's not so much a movie as a cinematic identity crisis.

The biggest failings of the movie are the wasted performances of its two male leads, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. Sandler is so often written off as talentless, but he has displayed real depth as an actor in several film roles this decade (he may have made a more effective transition from comedy to drama than the much-touted Tom Hanks did), and his performance in Funny People as the sad, lonely misanthrope George Simmons could have been among the best of his career, if he had been working with a real director. Sandler may have something of a rigid star persona, but in the past decade (since a game-changing performance in P.T. Anderson's underrated Punch-Drunk Love) he has shown that he can pitch that core character at varied frequencies, subtly tweaking and honing that persona depending on the material. This is what made his performance in Punch-Drunk Love a revelation; suddenly Sandler shifted the context of his traditional repressed, socially defective man-child, and the result stands as one of the bravest turns by a star in modern movies. And Seth Rogen's gifts as an actor have always been beyond Apatow --- who else could have brought warmth and energy to the stereotypical entitled stoner slacker at the heart of Knocked Up? Not to mention the screenplay he and Evan Goldberg wrote for Superbad stands as the best Apatow production to date; in no small part because it acknowledges that these films relegate themselves to a High School boys' understanding of the world. One day, I am certain, Rogen will find material that does justice to his talents; until then one can do nothing but feel sorry for him as he shuffles through Apatow product, dignifying the material more than it has any right to be.

Rogen plays Ira Wright (formerly "Weiner", pronounced "whiner", but spelled like the dong adjective, which I suppose is Apatow's idea of a clever pun), an aspiring comic living the kind of life not usually afforded to a struggling artist --- he may have to sleep on the pull-out sofa, but he still lives in the kind of Los Angelian yuppie fantasy land apartment that you might see on the likes of Entourage. I guess that would be Judd Apatow's idea of being destitute; this is beyond lacking class consciousness, Apatow is in a class coma. Ira lives with two fellow show-biz wannabes (played by Jason Schwartzman and Jonah Hill), and they have a petty, wholly underdeveloped roommate-rivalry; there are no insights into male fraternity and territoriality, it's all narcissistic petulance. When Ira is performing at a comedy club one night, Sandler's George Simmons stops in after his prognosis and performs a manic-depressive set. It's one of the film's only dramatically affecting scenes, because Sandler perfectly channels aggression into melancholy and hopelessness into rage --- it's the ability to pitch so many complicated emotions at once that makes Sandler remarkable. Unfortunately, Apatow isn't ballsy enough a film maker to follow through on his dramatic convictions, and thus the leukemia subplot drifts so far into the background that you completely forget it's there. Instead of being a tragic figure, a sad clown in the flesh, Apatow just paints a further portrait of vain self-absorption; it's hard to feel bad for the poor little rich man, with his mansions, fast cars, and garage full of stuff that was given to him (there is a particularly embarrassing scene where Sandler is yelling about how his television service doesn't work the way it should). Sandler's George Simmons eventually hires Ira to write jokes for him and be his assistant (read: bitch), and the May/December bromance is so hammy and clichéd, full of such typical romantic comedy niceties, that one almost expects the film to end with an embrace and whispers of "I love you, man" between Sandler and Rogen.

Of course, such sentimentality would be beneath Apatow, who is much too smarmy to embrace such blatant conventions. But Apatow is embracing the very conventions he is pretending to facetiously send-up; and this makes all the ham-fisted attempts at drama in Funny People wholly disingenuous. Apatow's ruminations on pop culture reflect the same kind of attitude he takes towards melodrama --- he pretends to be above the pop culture he ridicules ("I just saw the new Harry Potter movie, they should start calling him Harold Potter. Seriously, he's older than my dad!", "Are you mad that you died at the end of Die Hard?", "You make me feel like Danny DeVito", and so on), but he's more hung up on pop-culture trivialities than Family Guy. This elitism may pretend to be superior to pop-culture, but it's really a kind of pop-culture ignorance; Apatow confines himself to a certain set of universal pop-culture references, gratifying his infantile audiences' limited understanding of the world, all the while feigning moral superiority to the empty allusions that define his shallow brand of humor.

Amazingly enough, Apatow's blatant critic pandering seems to have pulled the wool over far too many people's eyes, accepting his half-assed stabs at seriousness as the mark of an artist; but tacked on dramatic contrivances permeate his career almost as much as dick jokes do. In The 40 Year Old Virgin, his crass raunchiness was given a pass because the movie had 'heart' --- which of course translates to a simplistic and patronizing view of its main character, played by Steve Carrell. In Knocked Up, he half-heartedly tackled an 'adult' issue, pregnancy out of wedlock, and the result was wide-spread raves. It's shameful that so many reviewers are appeased by such blatant critic-baiting, as Apatow's attempts at profundity are really the most transparent of bids for critical acceptance. While the dramatic devices he's used in the past have been insipid, the subplot of Sandler's character having a rare form of leukemia in Funny People is so trivializing that it's downright offensive; it's such a non-issue in the narrative that it's obvious that Apatow is just going through the motions, begging us to take him seriously. And what better way to validate one's worth as a film maker than to tackle a trite life or death scenario? This central conceit could be interesting, but Apatow has no insight into why we channel tragedy into comedy --- partly because he doesn't understand tragedy, but mostly because he doesn't understand comedy.

Funny People isn't even sound on a structural level; at 146 minutes, the movie meanders from contrivance to contrivance, from one mechanical narrative thread to another. Apatow has brought over every trick from the TV playbook, with the exception of economy of storytelling. When Rogen and Sandler go up to Northern California to visit Sandler's token one-that-got-away (Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann), now married to a statue-esque Australian (Eric Bana), the movie comes to a virtual halt; it meanders, with no real point or direction, seemingly endlessly. These sequences show the downside of Apatow's improvisational style; scenes drift off pointlessly, the shots feel randomally amalgamated together, and many jokes simply fall flat. As expected, Leslie Mann plays the token Apatow floozy --- confused, immoral, obsessed with appearance --- in other words, as in all his other pictures, his portrait of womankind exposes a misogynist. One early scene between Mann and Sandler has her character ask "How could you cheat on me? I was so hot." not "How could you cheat on me? I loved you so much.", her reasoning behind it being wrong is that she was too sexy to cheat on, a notion that speaks to how Apatow evaluates relationships and, more broadly, human beings.

Ultimately, Apatow isn't enough of a multi-faceted artist to balance the many layers of comedy and drama that this movie would have needed to be effective. Rather, the movie just displays the same crass toilet humor (the film seems to adopt a real stand-up's credo: when all else fails, whip out the dick jokes) interspersed with ineffective, Hallmark card sentimentality. Funny People goes in the exact opposite direction it means to; the dramatic scenes are funny, the attempts at comedy are sad. Perhaps the worst thing about Funny People is that it deliberately misrepresents itself as another Apatow side splitting gross-out fest, and then stifles the audience with poorly developed drama (the audience I saw it with laughed, but it wasn't the house-rocking I remember for The 40 Year Old Virgin and Superbad). Apatow may be throwing out 'deeper' themes in this movie, but attempts at depth does not equal actual depth; instead of expanding his range as an artist, Funny People actually brings Apatow's adolescent core even more clearly into focus.

Tetro

Francis Ford Coppola is entering what may be the richest phase of his career, though you wouldn't know it from the tepid reception of his two latest movies. The director made a startling comeback in 2007 with the quixotic, transcendent Youth Without Youth; the material, about a man who ages backwards after being struck by lightning, was a brilliant metaphor for an aged film maker who was rejuvenated by new movie making tools. Digital technology has Coppola's creative juices flowing, and in two features he has proven himself to be the most innovative independent film maker in America; and this comes after many years of, to quote Coppola himself, being "in bondage" due to debts (though, even in his so-called 'bondage' phase, he managed to get Dracula made). Now he is making films his way, by his rules, and this is to his benefit as an artist and our benefit as an audience. His latest film, the intensely moving Tetro, proves that the invention and expression of his previous feature wasn't a fluke, although Tetro is a very different movie from the highly formal Youth Without Youth. Which isn't to say that formal invention isn't present in Tetro, it's just implemented in a very different way; as opposed to the visuals suggesting the meta-physical, they evoke the meta-personal. It's a world where the past--- full of dark secrets, tragedies, and betrayals--- feels more immediate than the emotionally distant present.

Coppola has said that Tetro is "drawn from real emotions related to my experiences and life---though not in any way autobiographical", and this is a key distinction; the narrative is clearly shaped from his background in a family of artists, but the links between his life and the lives of his characters are more figurative than literal. The movie begins with Bennie, the audiences' surrogate, arriving in Buenos Aires to track down his long lost older half-brother, Angelo Tetrochini --- though he's now known simply as Tetro (a sullen Vincent Gallo). They are half-brothers, the sons of a renowned Composer, which explains why Angelo dropped the family name: in an effort to forge his own identity outside of the shadow of his famous family (the same reason Nicholas Cage dropped the 'Coppola', undoubtedly). While this would seem to set the stage for another of Coppola's boldly operatic familial sagas, Tetro takes a more intimate approach than we would normally expect from Coppola; like a stripped-down, more textured version of The Godfather films.

When Bennie reaches Angelo/Tetro's apartment , he is greeted by his girlfriend, a kind Argentinian woman who is delighted to see him--- a far warmer reception than he receives from the brother he hasn't seen for over a decade, who keeps himself locked away in his bedroom. Tetro would be, I suppose, the embodiment of the 'tortured' artist: troubled, moody, and a little on the crazy side (he met his girlfriend while she was working at his asylum). Once an aspiring (and promising) writer, he is now confined to writing stories that he never finishes, in a code that only he can understand. Angelo wears his families' dark history on his sleeve, and Bennie spends the entirety of the film trying to learn the truth about exactly what it is that drove his family apart; the film plays it almost as a mystery, with Bennie in the detective role. Though Angelo, with his desire to keep the past buried, does everything he can from stopping Bennie from learning the truth about his family; and therefore keeps Bennie from learning his own identity. While it is understandable that the past may be too painful to discuss, not knowing the truth is far more painful. A lesser director would have idolized Angelo's bohemian brooding, for being dour is a sure-fire sign that one is an artist, but Coppola sees through it. He understands that the familial wounds are the ones that cut the deepest, and Tetro aligns our sympathies with Bennie by giving us as much information to start with about the Tetrochini family as he has, which is to say none at all.

When details about the past do finally come through, they are fleeting. The portion of the film set in the present day is shot in 2:35:1 black and white widescreen, and Coppola uses this canvas to lend a simultaneous feeling of intimacy and detachment to the present. During flashback sequences that flesh out the familial back story, the aspect ratio suddenly switches to 1:85:1, and from black and white to color. This is as unique an approach to flashbacks as I've ever seen in a movie; the stately elegance of the black and white portions, with static compositions and a fixed camera, is brilliantly contrasted with the immediacy of the full-color handheld work in the flashback portions. Angelo is a character who lives in the past, however much he may wish to bury it, which explains why the past feels more alive and vibrant than the dispassionate present. Though the switch in aspect ratio, with half the cinema screen being taken up by blackness, makes us feel like we've stepped out of the world the rest of the movie takes place in and into a coffin.

Critics expecting more of the same from Coppola don't understand why his digital phase is as rich, if not richer, than his storied 70s period. When Youth Without Youth was released in 2007, the reception was abysmal--- ranging from callous indifference to maddening frustration--- but Coppola reminded those of us who are moved by images what cinema is: stories, emotions, and ideas expressed visually. Coppola was always thought of of as an artist who used visual broad strokes to express his operatic themes; the cinematic canvas feels almost too small to contain his ideas, and in Youth Without Youth he pushed his visual expression to the absolute limits. Tetro, though undoubtedly more conventional a movie than Youth Without Youth, is no less a testament to Coppola's ability to express emotions visually. Mihai Malaimare's stunning, intimate black and white cinematography fleshes out the cold, detached present--- which isn't to say Tetro is oppressively gloomy in any way. Rather, Coppola is illustrating the way family defines who we are as people, for better or worse. In his last two features, Coppola has moved effortlessly from the cosmic to the micro-cosmic; in Youth Without Youth he managed to personify the mystery of life and death in a man (Tim Roth's Dominic), in Tetro he embodies men in a cosmic fashion. He may be making smaller films, but the scope of the work is no less vast.

Perhaps it's because I identified with elements of Bennie's life that Tetro struck such a deep personal chord. Like Bennie, I have a half-brother almost two decades older than I am and, also like Bennie, I have a father who is considerably older than I am (46 years, to be exact). While my family's history isn't ripe with the betrayals and tragedy like the Tetrochini's (though we, like all families, certainly have our moments), Coppola paints such a deep portrait of the Tetrochini's family dynamics that I still related to the characters (like Ebert says "the more specific, the more universal"). Perhaps part of the film's power is relating to the masculine dynamics of the two brothers, and the way they live in their father's shadow. I fully empathized with Bennie's plight over the course of the movie; being born so long after my older brother, and to a different mother, I felt left out of the family to an extent--- a day late and a dollar short. Like being the new kid at school, you feel left out of the present because you simply weren't around in the past.

So Bennie's frustration arises from his lack of understanding of his own family; family is the essence of our identity, and Bennie has been living his life in a sort of existential purgatory--- he barely knows his father, never knew his mother, and hasn't seen his brother in years. Angelo up and left abruptly when Bennie was but a child, leaving behind only a letter that promised Bennie that Angelo would one day come back for him. Bennie carries this letter with him throughout the movie, the one keepsake he has from his family. Angelo is more comfortable relating to the world through his writing, and this is why the letter has been such an important memento for Bennie; he knows that Angelo is more honest expressing himself through writing than he is verbally. When Angelo refuses to discuss the past with Bennie (his one rule for the duration of Bennie's visit is "no questions"), Bennie decides to dig up Angelo's unfinished writing to illuminate details about his families' troubled history. Coming from a family of artists, Coppola knows how life is channeled into art, and Angelo's writing reveals more about his life than he could ever express in words--- both because he is unwilling and unable. The one problem is that Angelo's operatic familial opus--- the kind Coppola might have made if the success of The Godfather hadn't taken his career in a different direction--- is without an ending, so Bennie takes it upon himself to finish his brother's play. When Angelo discovers this, this sends him into a rage ("You're worse than a thief, you're a plagiarist", Angelo tells him), not because he values the writing itself, but because of the wounds that the play re-opens.

With Tetro, Coppola has made his deepest rumination on the subject of family, a subject that has long been the heart and soul of his work. What separates Tetro from his earlier dealings with the subject is how intensely personal it all feels; Coppola said of the film when it debuted at Cannes that "Nothing like this happened, and everything is true" (Coppola apparently likes dropping abstractions on the generally clueless Cannes crowd). While Coppola may not be giving us the facts of his life, he is telling us the emotional truth about his family, and this is perhaps more 'honest' than if Coppola had made a movie that is straight-up autobiographical. Tetro is ultimately about the powerful link that exists between life and art, brothers and fathers, existence and death, light and dark. The light illuminates us and blinds us, it inspires us and it damns us; and in plunging the depths of his soul, Coppola has made a profound statement about the tenuous relationship between unbearable darkness and blinding light, how painful it can be not knowing the truth, and then the pain of discovering it. Somewhere in between those two polarities lies family.

Dark Magic

Has any franchise in movie history been more plagued with inconsistency than the Harry Potter films? Not inconsistency in the narrative or even thematic sense, but an inconsistency of vision. In spite of the fact that the series represents the apex of modern-day production values, you can't take the series as a whole; rather, it must be looked at in terms of the individual parts. Chris Columbus cheapened Spielberg's aesthetic in the first two pictures, misrepresenting Rowling's allegory about adolescence as a cheap Cinderella knock-off. The franchise reached poetic heights for the first time with Alfonso Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkaban, but the moments of wonder in that film felt isolated from the whole. Cuaron didn't merge his aesthetic sense with the content of his story as effectively as he could have, but it was a noble effort nonetheless. Then, Mike Newell plunged into the depths with The Goblet of Fire--- an incomprehensible, oppressively glum train-wreck of a movie. Leading into the previous film, The Order of the Phoenix, the franchise had what can only be called a rocky history (a symptom of its status as a cash-in).

But with The Order of the Phoenix, director David Yates found the perfect frequency to pitch the series at. He managed to do justice to the stories' darker subtext, while at the same time not allowing the more sullen elements to bog down the ultimate point of the series: magic. Yates also has an extremely refined compositional sense; his frames have a staggering amount of depth to them, and he uses the width of his widescreen frame effectively. Unlike Chris Columbus or Mike Newell, Yates actually knows how to stage things for the camera and, unlike Cuaron, he knows how to use his aesthetic sense in service of his story and characters, instead of in addition to them. So, going into The Half-Blood Prince, I had high hopes that Yates would continue simultaneously doing justice to Rowling's original text, while at the same time bringing some much needed originality and consistency to the series.

Unfortunately, the inherent weaknesses of the source material drags down the otherwise exemplary Half-Blood Prince; the story doesn't unfold so much as wobble, occasionally spasmodically, to the finish line. There are stretches of this two and a half hour picture that are excruciatingly, laboriously dull--- and that the movie treats the teeny-bopping melodrama of Potter & Co. in an almost mythic manner only adds to the frustration. One really should master the art of basic story-telling mechanics before treading into such deep subtextual waters, but Half-Blood Prince presents itself in such a grandiose manner that the actual story fails to grab as much as the presentation of it does. The series has always worked best when it tells a story simply and effectively, and drops the highfalutin pretensions.

Still, credit must be given to the film makers for making an even reasonably comprehensible film out of Rowling's story, which is flat-out stupid. The twists and turns, the melodramatic arks, the hammy romance subplots, and the character-developmental broad strokes are all just contrived in this installment. The flimsiness of the source material can be forgiven, though, because the film makers behind the Harry Potter franchise actually care about what they're putting up on the screen--- rare for any film, let alone one aimed at children (which would explain why Mike Newell, who couldn't direct his way out of a paper bag, wasn't asked back). Save for a few moments of incomprehensibility (a disorienting and clumsy chase through a wheat field being the worst offender), there is a visual elegance to the Potter pictures, especially the last two, that is virtually unseen in modern day blockbusters.

While David Yates may not have brought the series into its own with this latest installment, he's certainly the man who has most effectively streamlined the movies to reflect a personal vision, while at the same time remaining pure to the source material. He's certainly established an effective template for the final movie(s), which admittedly is part of the problem with Half-Blood Prince--- as with the first movie in the series, we simply feel like we're viewing the foundation for a more complete, satisfying affair. So much of Half-Blood Prince is hackneyed exposition, it's unfortunate the movie couldn't be more stripped down to function as its own entity. The groundwork is certainly there for the Potter-to-end-all-Potters, and I look forward to seeing how Yates brings this always enjoyable, if frustratingly inconsistent series of films to a close. The ball is, as they say, in his court.

A Mann's World: Public Enemies

Michael Mann strips a classic American genre to its bare elements with Public Enemies, another fascinating use of digital technology from the director after 2006's underrated Miami Vice--- one of the first feature length movies to harness digital as a separate medium with its own unique capabilities. Public Enemies represents a more streamlined, though no less dynamic, use of digital-video and its potential to be an extension of 35mm, as opposed to a cheap replacement for it. The technique lends an incredibly intimate and immediate feel to the proceedings--- a feel that is being mistaken for 'realism.' It would be better, perhaps, to think of the technique as an embodiment of the titular public enemies' mode of living--- hard and fast. "We don't have time to think about tomorrow, we're having too much fun today," Johnny Depp's John Dillinger says early on in the film, and the urgency that the digital movie-making tools provide compliment and contrast with what on the surface seems to be a traditional cat and mouse gangster picture.

A spectacular opening sequence illustrates immediately the unique perspective toward the era that Mann will convey. An early establishing shot shows the exterior of a prison that houses John Dillinger, and the prison walls stretch beyond the edge of the frame, and seemingly into eternity. The sense of scope that Mann brings to his compositions is breathtaking in more than a few instances, and when you contrast this with the stripped-down, elemental feel of much of the rest of the picture, there is something particularly striking about the expansive depth of his frames. Public Enemies' unique epic/intimate dichotomy is typified in the prison-break that begins the movie: Mann gives us exteriors that establish the prison, and then he brings us almost disconcertingly close to the action with incredible, fly-on-the-wall handheld work. As the cops and robbers engage in battle, the sounds of gunshots and empty shells hitting the ground resonates powerfully--- this is not a movie that relishes in the violence propagated on screen. Punches sting, knives cut, and bullets penetrate the flesh in a visceral, gripping manner; a lesser movie would have embraced this kind of violence while at the same time moralizing about a sinful lifestyle. Mann's film does not fall into either of these traps.

Credit must be given to Mann and Depp for stripping away the usual glorifying elements that one would usually associate with this genre while, at the same time, avoiding Hays Code style sermonizing. It would have been so easy for Depp, a naturally charismatic actor, to instill John Dillinger with charm. A scene toward the end where Dillinger sees David O. Selznick and W.S. Van Dyke's Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable, typifies the way Public Enemies rejects Old Hollywood romanticism for a more objective, cosmic take on gangsterism. The clashing aesthetics between James Wong-Howe's stunning black and white cinematography in Manhattan Melodrama and Dante Spinotti's high-contrast photography in Public Enemies is, in many ways, the essence of the movie. In the gangster pictures from Hollywood's Golden Age, the films would romanticize their subjects--- especially in the Depression, the movies were an escape for the masses, and people enjoyed living the life of a gangster vicariously through the movies. At the same time, however, the movies had to fulfill a "responsibility to the public", and thus the main characters always got their comeuppance after the movie had relished in their immorality. Whether they were arrested, killed by the police, or killed by rival gangs, none of the screen's hoods got off scott-free, and therein lies their great contradiction: relishing in screen violence while at the same time railing against it. During the controversy surrounding the final scene of the last episode of The Sopranos, series creator David Chase illuminated this inherent hypocrisy: "The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted 'justice.' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly."

As Chase's quote above notes, we see ourselves on the screen, and Dillinger sees himself in Clark Gable's charismatic gangster. What's unique about this scene set in Chicago's Biograph theatre (where the real John Dillinger spent his final hours) is that Mann hones in on Dillinger's subjective impression of the film he's watching. Myrna Loy's character in Manhattan Melodrama reminds him of his girlfriend, Billi Frechette (an enrapturing Marillion Cotillard), and Depp conveys Dillinger's longing for his lover powerfully and wordlessly. An extremely telling smile comes over Dillinger's face when Gable's character in the film says "It's best to die how you lived--- all of a sudden", this sequence beautifully articulates the way we identify with art, while at the same time deconstructing the camera's inherent iconographic gaze (much like the scene in My Life to Live when Anna Karina's character watches The Passion of Joan of Arc). The use of digital film making tools embodies Clark Gable's "all of a sudden" philosophy, as Public Enemies is a movie that, like Dillinger himself, always lives in the moment.

This sense of immediacy suits the movie's period elements particularly well. The digital actually allows Mann to focus on details that would perhaps seem irrelevant in a typical period drama--- the speedometer on an antique car, the logo on Zenith radios, the text imprinting the barrel of a Tommy gun. So, while the digital lends a decidedly modernist feel to Public Enemies, at the same time it fleshes out the details in a more unique way, and the Depression-era feel more alive in this movie than it usually does in period pieces. Michael Mann has taken an era that feels distant to movie-goers and brought it to life in the most organic way imaginable; the period details never call attention to themselves, and that actually gives them more power than movie's that do call attention to their art direction. The way the movie handles the past is one of the things that makes it among the most singular movies released by a major studio in recent times.

It's such a unique work in an overcrowded genre that when the traditional plot-elements of a cat and mouse gangster picture come into play, they feel especially banal. We would assume that, at this point in motion picture history, it would be something of a given that law-enforcement authorities would pursue our main characters; but Public Enemies, as so many movies of this kind before it, feels the need to weigh down the heart and soul of the story with a contrived police procedural. Scenes that would be considered characteristic of the genre feel particularly out of place when put along side the intoxicating, pulsating imagery in the Dillinger narrative. The FBI jargon, endless bureaucratic corridors, men in suits, and mundane details of the investigation led by Melvin Purvis (a stern but engaging Christian Bale) bring an element of familiarity to this otherwise idiosyncratic picture. These sequences (along with a money laundering subplot) bog down the audience and disrupt the momentum that the movie has going for the sake of semantics. It's these overly-familiar elements that ultimately hold Pubic Enemies back from being one of the best movies of its kind.

So, while Public Enemies may not be a 'great' movie (and really, who cares about such superlatives?), it is a fresh, bold, and exciting one. It may have some dull stretches, but the film's inventive sequences (of which there are many) make it a more than worthwhile effort. Michael Mann has taken an old genre and given it a face-lift, and in a deeper sense than simply the aesthetic--- the film takes a unique, non-judgmental stance on its main characters. He strips away cinema's romantic gaze, while at the same time providing lush, intoxicating imagery. In terms of Hollywood film makers working with digital technology, Michael Mann is without equal--- and Public Enemies, like Miami Vice before it, shows that Mann will be on the forefront in pushing the medium forward.

Curb Your Humanism

An eerie, deafening silence (save for the occasional sigh) permeated the theater in which I saw Woody Allen's latest, the odious Whatever Works. I don't think a single of Woody's famously 'witty' lines earned so much as a smirk for any of the patrons--- rather, we were all in awe of Allen's shockingly narcissistic misanthropy. Woody Allen, who was at one time unquestionably one of America's truly great film makers, has grown out of touch with the city and its people that he once portrayed so lovingly. There was a time when he could view New York and New Yorkers from outside the isolated prism of The Five Boroughs, but his newer work reflects the inclusive, effete snobbery that he once so pointedly and piercingly ridiculed earlier in his career. Not a 'comeback' (has any director alive had more 'comebacks'?) so much as a half-hearted return to what he's told he does best, Whatever Works is the nasty B-side to Woody Allen's great love songs to New York (think Woody Allen's Gran Torino and you're halfway there).

There is arguably no film maker alive who has done more to contribute to New York's rich filmic history than Woody Allen. He has captured the city's unique, breathtaking beauty and majesty, all the while wryly observing the unique social climate that separates New York from all the world's other big cities. With that in mind, the way New York is treated in Whatever Works is a travesty--- as a nameless, nondescript metropolis. In his stronger works, New York was a character unto itself, but Woody Allen has clearly lost the passion that he once had for New York; perhaps he doesn't like what the city has become, or maybe he's more interested in his fancy-schmancy European locales. Either way, the spark simply isn't there anymore.

The fundamental problem of Whatever Works is highlighted by Allen's choice of leading-man (or stand-in), Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David. At its best, Allen's self-absorption reached poetic heights when he would play characters like Alvy Singer (Annie Hall), Isaac Davis (Manhattan), Gabe Roth (Husbands and Wives), or Harry Block (Deconstructing Harry)--- all characters self-involved to the nth degree. But Allen would inflect these characters with certain mannerisms that would endear them, because he would reveal their ultimate humanity through these quirks. It was the little touches in his performance that would expose his characters as insecure and lonely underneath the mask of vast cultural knowledge and inspired witticisms, and this element is what gave his earlier works their dramatic weight (and by 'early' I mean beyond the 80s and into the 90s). He is very rarely given his dues as an actor; but look at the raw humanity exposed in the closing moments of Manhattan, surely an homage to the end of City Lights, and in many ways the emotional equal of Chaplin's famous final closing shot. Or his transformation from narcissistic, vindictive asshole to empathetic, illuminated artist over the course of Deconstructing Harry, or the poignancy with which love and loss is reflected on over final lines of Annie Hall. I don't want to go on too terribly long a polemic in favor of Allen's performances, but the point is that even while he's presenting what seems to be the same character on the surface, he subtly, though effectively differentiates his core themes.

It is Allen himself that is the unifying feature of most of his strongest works, in the same way the presence of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd unified their films. As he's gotten older, he's used actors to stand-in for himself, though still playing variants on the same core 'Woody' character--- Jason Biggs, Will Ferrell, and now Larry David (he actually pre-emptively satirized this in Deconstructing Harry, which had Tobey Maguire, Robin Williams, Stanley Tucci and Richard Benjamin playing Woody type characters in the titular characters' short stories). On paper, Larry David sounds like the perfect outlet for Woody Allen's endearing pseudo-diatribes. On screen, however, David is frustratingly one-note and hammy (and this is coming from someone who loves Curb Your Enthusiasm), and I never felt like the David's Boris Yellnikoff was really fleshed out in any meaningful way beyond shallow broad strokes; when the movie begins he's an angry, self-involved misanthrope and when the movie ends he's a marginally less angry, though still hugely self-involved misanthrope. David's awkwardness in the role is highlighted immediately in an opening scene that I can only describe as painful--- the movie begins with Boris and a few 'friends' of his (it's hard to imagine a character so unlikable gaining and maintaining friendship, but I digress) sitting around while he expounds on the worthlessness of humanity, his superiority, and his belief in amorality and self-indulgence (whatever works!). David, in typical Woody Allen fashion, breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience--- only Allen uses this opportunity to insult the audience; Allen, via Boris, informs us that we've 'wasted our money' to buy 'some moron in Hollywood another swimming pool' and that if we're "one of those idiots who needs a happy ending" that we'd "better leave now". I don't have a latent desire for a happy ending, and I certainly don't think I'm an idiot, but looking back on it I wish I'd taken Allen's advice.

In interviews, Allen has been forthright about his contempt for young people ("The films that are made for young people are not wonderful films, they are not thoughtful. They are these blockbusters with special effects. The comedies are dumb, full of toilet jokes, not sophisticated at all. And these are the things the young people embrace. I do not idolize the young."), and one need only look at the disdainful portrait of young people in 2004's Melinda and Melinda for proof of this outlook. He takes this contemptuous attitude to an extreme in Whatever Works, manifested in Evan Rachel Wood's character, Melodie St. Ann Celestine; a Mississippi girl who ran away from home looking for love and excitement in the Big Apple (and this makes one wonder if Allen has ever been to the south). She winds up in an alley near Boris' apartment in the beginning of the film, asking for something to eat. After being reticent to allow her inside--- after all, she is but a submental inchworm cracker (his words)--- Boris eventually recants and gives her food, and eventually even allows her to stay with him while she gets her feet on the ground (because he "has a heart as big as the outdoors" he tells us, and it's hard to tell if he's joking or not).

Since she's one of those dreaded young people, Allen knows that she is incapable of an original thought--- and, if she stumbles upon a unique insight every once in a while, it certainly isn't a very interesting or deep one. As the movie presses on and their relationship develops, Melodie drops the bombshell that she has developed a "little crush" on Boris (Allen shirks off any morality element with respect to the May/December romance by making her the aggressor), because she has mistaken his misanthropic platitudes for wisdom and insight (those stupid kids can't even tell the difference, Allen is telling us). No, she's not interested in the male-bimbos she meets around the city of New York--- you know the ones I mean, the ones with no real drive, personality, opinions, or goals--- the ones with names like Perry Singleton (ho, ho) who drag you to band concerts with names like Anal Sphincter, and force you to hob-knob with his equally vacuous friends. I suppose that, in contrast to this, Boris' pessimistic elitism is more desirable, but then a lobotomy is preferable to both of those potentialities (thank God she meets an Englander who sweeps her off her feet, and this is the only character that Allen gives any dignity to whatsoever).

But there is never anything remotely believable about the way the relationship between Melodie and Boris develops over the course of the movie. In Manhattan, the relationship between Woody Allen's 42 year old Isaac Davis and Mariel Hemingway's 17 year old Tracy is believable because Hemingway's character is already an 'adult' in every sense of the word, while the other so-called 'adult' characters in the film are actually quite childish. Conversely, in Whatever Works, the 21 year-old Melodie might as well be 13--- she doesn't need a grown-man because she is still a child emotionally, and Boris' cranky old man schtick doesn't seem at all compatible with the sweet, bubbly nature of Melodie.

Allen's disdainful perspective toward the south is more clearly illuminated when Melodie's parents come into the picture. Allen uses these characters as a gateway towards attacking what he seems to view as the southern Christian theocracy--- all bible thumping, sexually repressed gun nuts just waiting to come to the big city so they can shed their 'traditional' skin and become the promiscuous amoral sluts they were always were on the inside. Allen isn't suggesting that one should simply be who they are--- he's saying that one way of life is qualitatively better than the other. His titular slogan and philosophy, endorsed by Larry David's Boris Yellnikoff, is one of amorality and apathy--- fuck a sheep, cheat on your wife, marry this person while you're sleeping with someone else, whatever--- there's no God, no consequences, nothing... and that's what Allen's so-called 'statement' ultimately amounts to. Like Deconstructing Harry without the deconstruction, Whatever Works embraces Boris' hateful world-view instead of transcending it.

Woody Allen will always be one of the greats, but his later work reflects his apathy toward audiences--- the overriding impression I got from Whatever Works was that the man simply doesn't care anymore. This is the time for Allen to grow as an artist--- a film maker's later years are often among their richest, but Allen is content to remain stagnant; I don't want to see him making the same movie he was making 30 years ago, I want to know how a man in his 70s, whose fear of death is legendary, feels about getting older and dying. But Allen is content to pander to his inclusive fan base and half-heartedly tell the same story has been telling most of his career, only there was a time when he told this kind of story effectively. Instead of expanding upon the themes that defined him as one of America's most idiosyncratic auteurs, Allen has indulged his worst assumptions about humanity, and Whatever Works is the unfortunate result.