REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and in the future, that I'm going to review classic movies that happen to cross my transom that would otherwise never make it to the blog.

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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence (Andersson, 2014)

Just like that other Anderson from the United States, there's not point in denying that Roy Andersson tends to make films that resemble each other, and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, his Leone d'Oro winner from the 2014 Venice Film Festival, does pretty much exactly the same things as 2000's Songs from the Second Floor and 2006's You, the Living, and it it does them in pretty much exactly the same way. Long takes of barely-moving scenes, sudden eruptions of po-faced absurdism, and the whole thing would be suicidally depressing if it the comic timing weren't flawless. Third verse, same as the first.

Or is it? Whether I'm just starting to feel diminishing returns, or whether Andersson is slowly running out of inspiration, the one clear difference between Pigeon and its two forerunners in his trilogy of modern life is that it's not as good as they are. Which is a very different thing than saying it's not good, period, and I laughed heartily, many times, throughout the film, and was then cut off cold, many times, by the mordant shifts in perspective and tone. It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone who responded to the other films not liking this one at all, or even liking this one a whole lot. But comparatively, it lacks the passionate fire they possessed in such quantity; there are many handfuls individual shots and gags I could recite in loving detail from the first two movies, but the scene from Pigeon that lives strongest in my memory does not do so because I admire it the most (though a repeating motif involving 18th Century King Karl XII of Sweden, played by Viktor Gyllenberg, imposing upon the confused patrons of a rundown portside bar in the 2010s does give me enormous pleasure as I roll it around in my head).

Still, if we free it from the tyranny of having to live up to the standards of two of the most brilliant, idiosyncratic comedies of the 2000s, Pigeon is a fine piece of work on its own merits. The crawling pace of the static long shots - which are frequently exteriors or otherwise not beholden to the "this is a shadowbox in a room" staging of the earlier films, and that gives things a nice sense of sprawl - is absolutely perfect in establishing the film's erratic humor, and telling us how to appreciate it: first you're confused, then you're repulsed, and eventually the stiff stillness becomes hilarious. Or it doesn't. This is, beyond doubt, the kind of material that appeals to a very particular audience, and I think Songs from the Second Floor is absolutely more immediately winning, but there's no doubt that this is a thoroughly enjoyable experience for folks as what like morbid humor based in the pasty-faced frigidity of both people and their actions.

8/10

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A Star Is Born (Pierson, 1976)

Two terrific versions of the highly melodramatic story A Star Is Born - three if you count the original 1932 What Price Hollywood? (as you absolutely should), the same material in all but name - was perhaps already pushing it, but least the 1976 incarnation of the story tries to freshen the material by changing the setting from the movie industry to pop music. That doesn't entirely work out in practice, owing to the differences in image management between classical Hollywood and the '70s music industry, and it's only the least of the problems that brings the movie down to its knees.

One can have heard rumors and mutterings for years, as I had, that the '76 Star Is Born is nothing but a colossal ego trip for star-producer Barbra Streisand (who won the film's only Oscar, for the gooey love ballad "Evergreen", co-written by Paul Williams), but it's impossible to be prepared for how all-encompassingly dreadful a movie it is. It's not simply that the screenplay, assembled by too many cooks who clearly didn't work in the same kitchen, sacrifices its dramatic integrity in favor of giving Streisand one moment after another to show off. Though it's not possible to have enough favorable feelings for the star nor her vehicle to excuse the grotesqueness of extending the sodden 139-minute film's ending by a good quarter of an hour beyond its natural stopping point just to facilitate a showstopping solo number at the end.

But really, everything about the movie, save perhaps for its nifty grit-soaked concert-doc cinematography (by Robert Surtees, Oscar-nominated), is just embarrassing hackwork. Kris Kristofferson, cast as the third wheel in the love story between Streisand and herself, ambles in like a guy who figures that you'll buy him a beer if he has a relaxing enough smile, while the rest of the cast shuffle around in the background; the luckier ones get to furrow their brows and look sad at the thought of Kristofferson's drinking. Occasionally, a pair of African-American backup singers materialise to give the film a jolt of incongruous lazy racism. As a work of craft, the film begins and ends with Surtees; the '70s fashions are charmingly dated, but still more campy than anything, and the less said about the raw editing in some of the singing scenes, the better.

No, the film lives and dies on Streisand's talent, which is of course considerable, but sabotaging the drama to get us there is hardly worthy of anybody's time or energy, hers least of all. I would at this point name some of the films to better show off her iconic vocal powers, her loopy screen presence and comic timing, or her gift for turning woundedness into lashing anger, but it would take too long: all of Streisand's films are better showcases than this, even the most overt vanity projects. And yes, I have seen The Mirror Has Two Faces.

3/10

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Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer, 1966)

One of the last big sci-fi pictures before 2001: A Space Odyssey came along and fundamentally changed the possibilities of the genre, 1966's Fantastic Voyage is the platonic ideal of a movie that gets praised, sincerely, for its visual effects, by someone whose tone of voice and inability to maintain eye contact make it clear that they hope you don't ask about anything else. Because it feels bad to attack the movie: the visual effects are really good, even if they were supplanted and then lapped within a few years of its release. And how much nicer to have those kind of top-drawer visual effects in a movie about interesting concepts and adult characters, and not one that involves giant robots walloping the shit out of each other.

Still, you can't get too far into the film before you have to admit that for all its achievements, and the very real charm of mid-'60s sci-fi (notwithstanding the vast budget gap, the film more than slightly resembles TV's Star Trek, from the same year), Fantastic Voyage is a fucking slog. It shouldn't be: the hook is terrific. Both the U.S. and the USSR have developed miniaturisation technology, but only the Americans have a scientist who knows how to make the process last for more than an hour. And he's been almost fatally shot, and sent into a coma that can only be cured by shrinking down brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), and sub captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), and injecting them and their microscopic submarine right into the scientist's body, with government agent Grant (Stephen Boyd), along for manly protagonist duties, trying to catch Duval in the act of being a Commie spy.

That certainly ought to be a fantastic voyage, and if you've encountered the story in Isaac Asimov's novelisation, you even know that it kind of can be (Asimov demanded permission to re-work the story to make it less idiotic). But Henry Kleiner's screenplay and Richard Fleischer's direction show off all the seams and plot holes while pushing the plot along as slowly as a nominal adventure movie could possibly support. The sub voyage takes place in something longer than real time, during which the plot plonks along through a repetitive cycle of theoretically tense moments flattened by lifeless direction. Every actor who isn't Pleasance stands around being vastly too serious, and sometimes we are given blessed relief in the form of the production designers' florid, psychedelia-tinged vision of the inside of the human body.

It looks great - there will be those who carp about how dated it is (and, sure, it is), but really is quite a special visual experience. Tragically, behind those visuals, it's bloated B-movie nonsense built around false characters, expanded and perpetrated by people who didn't know how to capture the proper spunk and speed of a good piece of junk sci-fi.

5/10

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The End of the Tour (Ponsoldt, 2015)

Far be it from me to tell the nearest and dearest friends and survivors of David Foster Wallace, a great many of whom have said some pretty withering things about the beatifying biopic-in-miniature The End of the Tour, that they're wrong. There's something squishy and off-putting about the film just in relationship to itself, and the way it treats its version of Wallace (Jason Segel) as a soul too gentle for this cynical, cold world - literally, the film is set in the Midwestern winter - while constantly foreshadowing his suicide 12 years later. There's a distinct, appalling thread of "come laugh at the homey wisdom of Your Literary Idol®, and then cry to remember that he's dead" that runs through the whole thing.

And yet I find myself not only not-hating the film, but even admiring bits and pieces of it, though probably not the bits that the filmmakers wanted. Frankly, I found Segel's Wallace to be all mimicry (good mimicry) with limited willingness to let us inside - and this is, to be fair, much more a function of Donald Margulies's script, which presents the author as an enigma and a concept in the first hour, than it's a sign of Segel's limits as an actor - with not nearly enough thought behind his eyes. The movie depicts Wallace, but it's terrified as hell at grappling with him.

Instead, the real protagonist and by far the deeper, more thoughtfully played character, is minor novelist David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), assigned by Rolling Stone to interview Wallace near the end of the promotional tour for the author's 1996 novel Infinite Jest. Eisenberg performance isn't as "revelatory" as Segel's, I guess - the doubt-ridden, antagonistic urban Jewish figure he plays here is securely in his wheelhouse - but it's far more expansive and tricky, full of threads that aren't quite in the script, allowing his version of Lipsky (whose story was never finished and ultimately turned into the 2010 book, Although of Course You End Up Meeting Yourself, that this film is adapted from) to be sufficiently resentful under the starry-eyed nervousness and awe that the film's lurch towards an interpersonal conflict as it goes along feels like a natural outgrowth rather than an imposition. It ends being, Amadeus-style, better as the story of an average man admiring and fearing a genius, than as the story of that genius itself, and it's easily Eisenberg's best work since The Social Network.

Stylistically, it's wholly undistinguished American indie filmmaking of a sort that has been unchanged in all particulars since sometime in the 1990s; director James Ponsoldt is clearly more interested in presenting his characters than in doing anything to frame them cinematically. A literary approach certainly fits the material, but the lack of aesthetic challenge is exactly the problem: all the film wants to do is gawk at Wallace/Segel, not engage with him, and the result is often more trivial than penetrating.

6/10

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ON PTERRY

Once upon a time, I pledged in a very idle way that I'd like to share my thoughts about Terry Pratchett, an author whose books I uniformly enjoyed and frequently adored. And I never did it, because of laziness and fear of mission drift (film critics critiquing prose? Anarchy!), though every now and then one reader or another would bring it up (and one reader in particular, whose enthusiasm for the prospect of knowing what I had to say on the matter, kept it alive in my head almost constantly for most of the last ten years). There'd always be time to do it later, I figured.

On 12 March, 2015, Pratchett died. It's not worth going through the whole affair of his final sickness; a century from now, when we're all dead and buried and people are reading his books from a good period of detachment, nobody will ever know from the late texts themselves, which are fearlessly sharp and precise in all the right ways, focused when they must be and shaggy when shagginess is actually just a different way of getting back into focus, that anything might possibly be wrong. Only the overachieving kids who read not only the editor's introduction to the annotated version of old books, but also the timeline of the author's life, will ever have a clue what was going. I will say only that when I heard the news, the first thing I thought was to be sad in a way that was hugely disproportionate to the death of a man I never knew who lived in a country I've never been to, and the second thing I thought was that I'd waited long enough and I had to write this essay. But I wanted to save it for a special occasion. That week wouldn't do; I needed time to gather my thoughts and recover a little bit. August, though, I knew would be good. August was the 10th anniversary of when I started blogging, and I wanted to make it a celebratory month. The week of 27 August was even more special, and if you don't know why, you'll find out at the end.

Enough preamble, and now allow me to share with you the reasons that, if I'm being honest with myself and taking off my "I was an English double major" hat, and my "of course, we all know that Best is more important than Favorite" hat, Terry Pratchett was pretty unshakably my favorite author of my lifetime.

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To talk about Pratchett is almost invariably to talk about the 41 books in his Discworld series, stretching from 1983 to 2015. They are not his only books: he had three novels to his name before the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic came out, and he intermittently published one-offs and a trilogy in the intervening years. They are probably not, at least in the United States (where his books have never attained a fraction of their popularity in the UK), his best-known work: Good Omens, from 1990, takes that crown, owing in large part to being co-authored by Neil Gaiman.

But they are his definitive opus, and frankly, all of his best books are to be found within those 41 titles (to be fair, there are some much weaker efforts, which had a nasty tendency to come in twos or threes). Good Omens is a terrific comic novel, and the 2008 Nation is a greatly impressive piece of thoughtful, highly literate historical fiction for young people, but those are easily the cream of the crop outside of Discworld, and they're nowhere near the heights of the series. So just the Discworld it's to be, and that leaves more than enough to be said.

For the uninitiated, the Discworld is a setting first and foremost, cobbled together from scraps of myths that have popped up across the globe. A giant sea turtle, Great A'Tuin, swims stoically through the void of space; on his back stand four elephants, and on the elephants' shoulders rests the flat disc of the world. The cultures that live on this world represent a panorama of fantasy fiction tropes, and in the beginning - The Colour of Magic and 1986's The Light Fantastic, a pair books that form a single arc - the purpose was nothing more or less than to create a funny riff on one of the most reliably uninspired genres in literature. Funny they are, too, though at times so committed to genre parody that you need something like a degree in '60s and '70s nerdery to get it all - one-quarter of The Colour of Magic is a specific parody of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, and another quarter a parody of Fritz Lieber's ongoing characters Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser - which makes them a little harder to dive into than the most often-cited comparison point for Pratchett, the comic science fiction of Douglas Adams. Who is, I think, easier to love for his comedy than Pratchett.

There are other things to love Pratchett for. And they start to show up in his third Discworld novel, 1987's Equal Rites, which has many of the same basic limitations of the first two books, in terms of its central parodistic intent and its overall thinness, but is the point where the core of what would eventually be the best Pratchett novels would show up: the fiery, anguished optimism in conflict with the deep disappointment in humanity's pettiness that only a down-to-the-bone humanist could feel. His great gift was in smuggling through his goofy genre pastiches a series of moral problems: how do we do good, why do we do good, and why bother if everybody around us is going out of their way to do very bad? Not every Discworld book hinges on these problems, but the best almost uniformly do, and I have particularly found that the best do them through one of two characters, the ones that strike me as being the most obvious author mouthpieces in the series. The first of these is the old wise mentor figure of Equal Rites: irritable country witch Esmerelda "Granny" Weatherwax.

The great flowering of Granny Weatherwax's ethical philosophy would be delayed until the 12th and 14th Discworld books, 1991's Witches Abroad and 1992's Lords and Ladies, part of the strongest sustain run of books in Pratchett's career (six straight books between 1991's Reaper Man and 1994's Soul Music which could all be easily defended as the best individual title Pratchett ever wrote). But I do find the books starring her or the other witches of her countryside to be certainly the most consistent of the main subgroups in the overall series - the books centering on Rincewind the cowardly, inept wizard (including the first two written, and many of my least favorite - he quickly became a vestigial organism, a parodic clown in an increasingly nuanced world); those involving the City Watch of the quasi-medieval city Ankh-Morpork, and its boundlessly cynical leader, Sam Vimes; the books focusing mostly on the anthropomorphic personification of Death (who puts in at least a tiny appearance in virtually every book in the series) and his human granddaughter Susan Sto Helit; and most recently, the books providing a whirlwind history of the industrial revolution, falling mostly upon the shoulders of the quick-witted con man turned civic visionary Moist von Lipwig.

The Discworld books are, I have indicated, essentially humanist texts, no mean feat for a series where gods and paranormal elements are burned deep into the concept (words to exactly that effect show up in Vimes's inner monologue at one point). Granny is the greatest expression of that tendency. Her presence after Equal Rites, which is more of a satiric comedy on gender roles than an ethical argument per se (otherwise, the witches books are the most overtly ethical), is as the grounding element to the fantastic elements around her; she is the sour, bitterly practical response to the florid genre elements, belittling and diminishing the very same trappings of magic that she nominally embodies with good common sense and a functional code of behavior more driven by what needs to be handled than what is, on paper, the Right Thing. It's telling that when, in the last decade and change of his life, Pratchett split the Discworld into the main series and a "children's" series, Granny Weatherwax was, as it were, demoted. Her last starring role was in 1998's Carpe Jugulum; her next appearance was in 2003's The Wee Free Men, the first book centered around adolescent witch-in-training Tiffany Aching, and there Granny served only as a supporting character, a role which she has filled in most of its sequels.

We live in an environment of literary consumption where I could be forgiven for trying to argue that the Tiffany Aching books aren't really for children. But they are. They are, and this part matters a lot, profoundly sophisticated children's books, leaving the thorny questions of the "adult" witches books intact, and revealing their hope of a target audience largely by clearing out the sex. They're also a bit blunter in their intention to tell theme: this is how to behave, this is how to make hard choices, this is how to take responsibility, this is how to deal with the fact that it is in fact not possible to remove all the suffering from the world. Putting a slightly softened version of Granny Weatherwax into that setting as the Voice of God is just about perfect, and while the "grown-up" Discworld books since the start of the 21st Century have been a bit spotty, the Tiffany Aching books have been splendid, one and all, top-tier Pratchett even as he occasionally lost the thread in the main series.

That being said, even the weakest of the later Discworld books is still a generally pleasurable experience of conflating parody with great flourishes of witty prose (Pratchett's humor was of both the "joke that causes a loud guffaw" and the "wry situation that builds up piles of verbal complexity* and is more 'clever' than 'funny'" varieties, and it's the latter that tends to stick with me), all in a distinctively warped setting. As he went along, the fantasy elements generally drifted away - in later books, the fact that the Discworld is a flat disc is relegated to a throwaway, usually in the opening paragraphs - and the series's interest focused in on using the mirror universe possibilities of a magic-tinged parody of Medieval and increasingly Enlightenment-era Europe to comment on our own real-world history and contemporary life. I have mixed feelings about this; the Moist von Lipwig books,† in which the sword-and-sorcery metropolis Ankh-Morpork is very suddenly and violently aged into 19th Century London, feel the least "Discworldy" in a lot of ways, and the author's interest in those books changes from character-based considerations of philosophy and morality to musings on how social change works and how technological advance can be painful and terrifying but also important - the most recent book, 2013's Raising Steam, has many lovely moments of bittersweet musing on the fact that trains must be invented, but trains also mean that there won't be the old world anymore. They're generally less funny, and less psychologically acute, and those are both rather disappointing failings.

It is to be greatly lauded that Pratchett tried so hard to avoid repeating himself, though. Certain elements of the Discworld books are formulaic; they tend to open and close their plots in the same rhetorical gestures, and it's easy to see when he's building a certain flavor of joke, if not necessarily to guess the punchline. But for the most part, the differences between the books are much more striking than the similarities. The second anything becomes stale, it gets cut off, or even before that: the books about Death and Susanare some of the most deep and probing, but also hilarious, and grandly-plotted, they're all remarkably different, and there's only five of them. I presume this is because both Death and Susan have certain limitations as personalities; but Susan's are very much like Vimes's, and Pratchett never ran out of stories to tell about him. But then, the madcap attempt to keep Vimes stories fresh didn't always pan out well. But then, Vimes is a character quite on par with Granny Weatherwax: bitterly sober-minded and clear-eyed, an angry populist and someone who can never see the world being unfair enough times for it to stop bothering him. It's easy to understand why he's the most common figure in the series, and the clearest vessel for the things the author cares about.

Not that all of the books are earnest tracts; they're all, ultimately, comedies, some with a very serious tinge and some with only the ghostly shape of depth. The sharp humor of his most cynical characters is always contrasted with the broad comedy of the more grotesque cartoons, and the acute observation of certain types; one of the compensations for the author's occasional returns to the Rincewind strand (a character he plainly liked more than I could ever manage to) was that it meant revisiting the burly, arrogant Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully of the wizards' school, Unseen University, and the extravagant parodies of academic bureaucracy in the form of his most trusted faculty members. One of the added pleasures of Granny Weatherwax's presence is that means the earthy, sex-minded witch Nanny Ogg, and her endless array of dirty songs, is close at hand. The books are smart, the books are furiously thoughtful about the way the world works, how we can make it better, and why we surely won't, and the books are crisp and direct in presenting ideas that they care about, without being in the least bit artless or uncrafty - it's amazing how many of his novels have what amounts to an Aesopian moral spelled right out, but so woven into the plot and the characters' responses to it that it never feels clumsy.

But the books are also fun - pleasurable to read and let the twisty sentences ebb and flow; exciting to get lost in the well-detailed corners of one of the most fully-built, if often inconsistent, worlds in all of English-language fantasy literature. They are so much fun that it can be damned hard to believe that they could also possibly be good. And yet if we can't use that word to describe a body of writing with this much knowldge about human beings and their ways, both the good and the bad, then what's the point of loving literature in the first place? Pratchett wasn't a literary genius, but he was a galvanising storyteller and an unsparing observer and one of the great wits of the modern age, and his books have taught me everybody as much as far more literate novels with far more sophisticated philosophy and far more inventive form. And they've done it while always, always leaving a big damn smile on my face.

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On 27 August, Terry Pratchett's final book, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in the UK, following in the US on 1 September. It is be the fifth book in the Tiffany Aching cycle; I will read it (when I finally get the chance to, which I am afraid will be weeks from now) with great enthusiasm because it is a new Discworld book and greater enthusiasm because it's about her, and when I'm done (after trying to make it linger as much as I possibly can), I will undoubtedly be more grateful and more sad than I have been in a very long time.

I won't end by writing, "thank you, Terry", because acting like he'd be around somewhere to appreciate it would be all contrary to the ideas to which he dedicated his life and his career. So I will simply say that I am very, very thankful that I've been there to read at the same time he was there to write, and leave it at that.

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Lastly, thumbnail reviews of all the Discworld books. My ratings are relative; compared to all books ever, none of these would really be an "A", and certainly none of them would be a "D"

The Colour of Magic (1983) C+
-Necessary to get the world built, and it's funny enough, but the in-jokey parody hasn't aged well.

The Light Fantastic (1986) B
-Funnier, cleaner in its structure, and more balanced in character than its immediate predecessor, but still a touch primitive.

Equal Rites (1987) B+
-The proto-Granny isn't as rich as her later incarnation, but she anchors the first book that feels like it "means" something.

Mort (1987) A
-The first Death book is a staggering leap in ambition and imagination, and the themes start to get really tough here.

Sourcery (1988) B-
-Richer than the earlier Rincewind books, but not as funny.

Wyrd Sisters (1988) A-
-You can see Pratchett figure out what he wants the witches books to be, now he just needs to go out and do it.

Pyramids (1989) B
-Remarkable, crafty, literate humor, and there's no faulting the ambition of the setting or content, but this one-off suffers from its lack of connection to anything else in the franchise.

Guards! Guards! (1989) B+
-I freely admit that I'd love this one if its first sequel wasn't so much more complex, but Sam Vimes emerges fully formed.

Eric (1990) D+
-Its origins as an illustrated novel make for a story that's almost aggressively trivial, even by the standards of the Rincewind books.

Moving Pictures (1990) C+
-The sheer quantity of movie-parody jokes gets in the way of anything deeper, but it's fun enough as an exercise in filtering our world through the Discworld.

Reaper Man (1991) A+
-The cream of the crop. Grave without being unfunny, and the depth of Death's musings is all the more penetrating for coming in such an unassuming package as a comic fantasy.

Witches Abroad (1991) A
-In a pinch, this is my favorite witches book, the one where their warring personalities are most winningly explored in the context of a sprawling comic travelogue.

Small Gods (1992) A
-What Pyramids wanted to be: a critical but understanding study of faith and history that is chronologically apart from the rest of the series, but aware of its traditions.

Lords and Ladies (1992) A
-Granny Weatherwax's finest hour, a rich saga of Northern English folklore turned on its head with creepy splendor. And as the only meeting of the witches and Ridcully, it's invaluable.

Men at Arms (1993) A+
-An extraordinary cop movie parody that finds Vimes at his very best, and his supporting cast not so large that they can't all thrive in small moments.

Soul Music (1994) A
-The funniest of the Death books, and the one that introduces the magnificent Susan, though she'd only improve in later appearances.

Interesting Times (1994) B
-Having a more developed community of Unseen University wizards to play with makes for the first genuinely good Rincewind novel, though parts of it are weirdly fanservicey, and it's not always critical of Orientalism instead of just being Orientalist.

Maskerade (1995) B-
-Better than Moving Pictures, but similar in that it's "just" a parody of stale tropes, theatrical here instead of cinematic. Easily the weakest of the witches books.

Feet of Clay (1996) A
-Something of a retread of Men at Arms, but no less clever or effective, and it neatly introduces the great theme of the later books, the way that traditional fantasy creatures deserve consideration as sentient beings.

Hogfather (1996) A-
-Susan's peak as a character almost a rich in her earned cynicism as Vimes, and its one of the funniest books in the series, too.

Jingo (1997) C
-The first and worst attempt to get Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork. An anti-war piece that is the clearest case in the franchise of ideas that Pratchett hadn't fully worked out before he started writing.

The Last Continent (1998) B
-On one hand, a great parody of Australia, with the very best Rincewind material ever. On the other, terrific material about idiot academics out of their element. But boy, do the two halves not cohere.

Carpe Jugulum (1998) A-
-The last "adult" witches book is slightly too eager to show off Pratchett's ability to write vampire facts, but it's the most snugly-plotted book in this partculare sub-series, and probably the funniest.

The Fifth Elephant (1999) B-
-A slightly better attempt to get Vimes on the road; the plot is too ambitious for its own good, setting up many plot threads that will be explored better in later books, and some that were simply quietly dropped. Exquisite Chekhov parody, though.

The Truth (2000) B
-An experiment that didn't quite take; the Moist von Lipwig books would be steadier attempts to treat the Industrial Age with Pratchett's signature humor. The cast of side characters, however, is terrific.

Thief of Time (2001) B
-All transparent attempts at fixing one's gnarled internal chronology should be this exciting as race-the-clock thrillers, and the villains are an inspired creation. But points off for giving Susan very little to do in her last appearance.

The Last Hero (2001) B
-A vastly superior illustrated book than Eric, just slight enough that its elevation of a one-joke side character from earlier books to protagonist status goes down well.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) B
-The first children's book is the most childish, but that's not a real sin, and the riff on the Pied Piper is creative enough and then some for the target audience.

Night Watch (2002) A
-An apology of sorts for taking Vimes away from his city; this time-travel adventure and parody of Les Misérables is a beautiful meeting of past enthusiasm and present wisdom.

The Wee Free Men (2003) B+
-The first Tiffany Aching book presents her as a striking, terrific protagonist, worthy of admiration but not some soppy Chosen One. The plots get better.

Monstrous Regiment (2003) B+
-It really feels like this should not work: mostly divorced from the rest of the series and palpably an attempt to Share a Message. Still, its witty character-driven exploration of the absurdity of arbitrary gender and social roles is funny and smart, and the thoughts on politics are sober enough to help the sugar go down.

A Hat Full of Sky (2004) A-
-Deeper and more challenging than the last Tiffany Aching book, it's a simple YA scenario but a great exploration of interpersonal relationships.

Going Postal (2004) B
-The first Moist von Lipwig book is the funniest and also, frankly, the blandest, but it sets the Discworld in a wild new direction with some intelligence.

Thud! (2005) B+
-The redemption of The Fifth Elephant, though I still don't quite see why these characters and this story need to go together.

Wintersmith (2006) A
-The harshest, most unapologetically confrontational Tiffany Aching book in its refusal to ease up on its themes, and so far the best.

Making Money (2007) B+
-A retread of Going Postal with tighter plotting and more thematic intention, but also the one where I really started to wonder how I felt about the direction the series was going.

Unseen Academicals (2009) C-
-Aimless randomness. I gather that the previous year's infinitely superior Nation took too much of Pratchett's attention; this book signally fails to answer the question "why am I telling this story?", and it's not even all that funny.

I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) A-
-Starts to take the Tiffany Aching story into slightly too obvious YA beats, but she is, as a character, more deliberately-written and unconventionally brilliant than ever.

Snuff (2011) A-
-Would you look at that, a "take Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork" book that finally nails it, parodying rural English novels and murder mysteries alike, and repeating a recurrent Discworld theme - all people are moral beings, no matter what they look like - as smartly as it has ever been expressed in these books.

Raising Steam (2013) A-
-Thematically pushy, but the sheer scope is amazing - one senses that Pratchett wanted to give a whole bunch of characters and themes and locations one last hurrah, just in case. Making Money is "better", but this one feels deeper, richer, and worthier of revisitation.

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TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made throughout the 1960s reworks some element of his debut - which makes it frankly a wee bit harder to regard it with the same esteem that besotted critics and cinephiles did when it was brand new.And yet, this is The One. The single movie that you need to see and grapple with if you're going to have a reckoning with Godard's first phase, and arguably with the entirety of French cinema in that decade (arguably with any of the European New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s, of which the French New Wave that Breathless co-created with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows was the wellspring). It's indisputably on the shortlist (the top ten, let's say) of Movies You Need To See if you're going to have a proper conception of cinema history and the potential of cinematic form. So even while my heart says that we should care more about Band of Outsiders or Contempt or Masculin féminin, my head says not to be fucking daft.

The place: Paris in the '60s. The time: America during Prohibition. Here we meet self-identified bastard Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a young man who has certainly built most of his personality from a steady diet of B-grade Hollywood crime pictures, not unlike the writer-director who created him. He's apparently some kind of a real criminal, though you could be forgiven for supposing it's all an overbaked fantasy in his noir-soaked head, and he's also a loudmouth given to braggadocio and toxic sexism. Who's to say if we're supposed to admire him or find him absurdly hateful: the camera insinuates us right along side him, Belmondo's prickly acting and the relentlessly, self-consciously disagreeable things he keeps saying repel us, and the editing by Cécile Decugis, famously, doesn't much intend that we regard him as a real character at all: he's a dude in a movie with the misfortune to somewhat suspect that's the case, which leads him to act far too much like a movie character. And this is partially to blame for why he shoots a cop during a drive in the country.

I hope it says more about the film than my inattentiveness when I declare that, having seen Breathless God knows how many times now (I went to film school, and I'm a self-professed Godard fan - that's good for at least six viewings right there), and remembering with great fondness that it's the first of Godard's gangster movie riffs, I am infallibly surprised to remember that the entire plot hinges on Michel's murder of a cop. It's just not that kind of movie, except that of course it very much is - the rest of the film down to the last scene all revolves around the detectives hunting Michel down and ultimately getting their hooks into visiting American student Patricia (Jean Seberg), possibly the most important of his current paramours; she's the co-lead of the film, but at the same time they don't really seem to like each other very much, the evidence of the signature bedroom scene notwithstanding. But I'm going all out of order.

It is so deeply tempting and dangerously easy to lock in and adore Breathless for all its little flair: the popular introduction of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous technique of the jump cut, which I think we typically remember as showing up during a car ride that gets propelled ahead in an attempt to make it seem artificially exciting and tense, with the full aid and comfort of Martial Solal's pounding jazz-influenced score. But that's at least the third major scene involving jump cutting, and the other two are both conversations, one between Michel and another one of his girlfriends (it just so happens to be right after Michel mentions his recent work at famed movie studio Cinécitta), one between Patricia and the editor nudging her journalism career forward, both relatively banal. I wouldn't suggest anything so trite as to say that the jump cutting is the film's attempt to hurry us through the dully quotidian scenes that shouldn't even be in a nervy gangster thriller in the first place, but I wouldn't tell you not to make that claim for them.

Or there's the brilliant way that the killing of the cop is shot, with close-ups of the gun and the unsynchronised sound of an gunshot, immediately followed by a scene moments later - the jarring image editing and discontinuous sound standing in as surrogates for the act of violence instead of that act being depicted (both times a human being is murdered with a gun in Breathless, the sound of the gunshot does not match the onscreen imagery. Just a fun thing to be aware of). Which would easily lead us to the film's bravura use of sound editing, which for my money is the far bolder aspect of Breathless's aesthetic developments, though the film editing was more quickly, more widely copied. And then I would talk about the floating, ghostly voices in the scene with a great, famous author (played by New Wave progenitor Jean-Pierre Melville) being peppered with high-minded but insipid philosophical questions leading to purposefully shitty answers ("Rilke was a great poet, so undoubtedly right" is his considered response to some journalist's "look how I did my research!" moment), and maybe the way that the score keeps jolting its way into the movie, mostly but not always motivated by the onscreen action.

The mistake I have personally had in the past with doing that is to lose the forest for the trees: Breathless is not just the sum of Godard's aesthetic. And it is here, I think, that something on the order of Masculin féminin argues for itself as an improvement over Godard's debut, since that film more clearly demonstrates the reason for its aesthetic rather than simply wandering, as Breathless occasionally does, into "look at me, I can be formally outrageous for the sake of it!" territory.

So let's not indulge that limited reading, huh? Step back from the jump cutting and the sound, from Seberg's stiff French and Belmondo's posing for the camera, from the litany of Hollywood genre film references and in-jokes, and Breathless does in fact take on quite a distinctive shape. It's not just Godard's riff on gangster movies of both the American and French tradition, and not even just his riff on the kind of young people so infatuated with pop culture that they'd fall into the trap of defining their identity in terms of the movies they enjoy most. Though that's getting us closer.

It's really nothing else but the first in a chain of films where Godard is interested in youth itself, the issue of how young, or at least young-ish individuals manage to find their way around a quickly globalising world whose values are evolving at a startling rate. For Michel, this means retrenching to an archly conservative, performance-based notion of masculinity, and the whole movie bends itself around him - though by no means does it do so uncritically - and eschewing the real world in favor of the fantastic one he thinks of in movies.

Reality, in the form of aesthetic realism, insists on pushing its way through; I return us to that bedroom scene, in which a film constructed out of three- and four-minute blasts of narrative propulsion jams on the brakes for 23 minutes as Michel surprises Patricia in her hotel, they have sex, they discuss art insofar as his dickish, petulant refusal to take her questions seriously permits. The editing slows down, the lighting (from cinematographer Raoul Coutard) turns ragged and rough, the setting becomes almost sublimely unexceptional and devoid of storytelling momentum. It's like the "other" New Wave, the one by Truffaut (who co-wrote this film) and Rohmer, based in languid humanistic moments of unadorned conversation pushes its way into Godard's more manic, formalist New Wave for the duration of a whole act. But for the most part, the film permits Michel his fantasy, even though it requires him to be betrayed by a woman who seems a little perplexed herself why she's been obliged to be a femme fatale in the film's glorious final shot, a deeply ambivalent close-up on Seberg's face that ends with her turning her back on us.

The jarring and groundbreaking post-modernism of the filmmaking - Breathless is not the first movie that is aware that it's a movie and which acts to make sure we're aware that it's a movie (that's not even an invention of the sound era), but it's the film that kickstarted that as a tradition that has never since gone fully into hibernation - isn't, then, simply a radical response to the hidebound aesthetics of the bulk of post-war French cinema. Of course it's partly that. To assert otherwise would be to deny the volumes of Godard's own writing at this time, when he was still a critic at the legendary Cahiers du cinéma. But the aesthetic violence of the film is also an attempt to encapsulate the rage of its characters, whose youthful energy is given no functional outlet, and so must explode somehow. Within the world of the film, that means destroying the traditional structures of cinema. In the real world, that meant the increasing unrest of the '60s that resulted in the May 1968 protests across Europe - and while I'll not be such a Godardian as to claim that he could predict those protests were coming, any quick glance at his films in '67 - Week End, La chinoise - and their continued development of the self-destruction begun with Breathless suggests that the nascent youthful resentment of this film had continued festering and growing ever bolder, more radical, and more intense. As much as they're any one thing, Godard's films are deliberate diagnoses of the era in which he made them, and Breathless is as precise an identification of the culture of the '60s-to-come as I have seen in the movies.

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THE FROZEN NORTH

A review requested by Scott, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

We live in an age when anime - an imprecise term that I try not to use very often, since it doesn't inherently mean anything besides "animation made in Japan", which strikes me as condescending at least, but let's not get bogged down in that kind of aside just yet - I say again, an age in which anime is pretty well understood to be somehow more serious, artistic, and worthy of consideration than other forms of animation. This was not always the case. At its origin, Japanese animation was stuck in the same ghetto as its American and Soviet counterparts: fantasies of one sort of another, generally made for children and generally at a level of quality that wasn't much better than "good enough for children".

No one film or one studio was responsible for changing that state of affairs in Japan any more than in the Soviet Union (where the shift happened somewhat earlier), but you could do a lot worst in trying to pick the one movie that birthed the modern, artistic animated film for a more discerning audience in that country than a 1968 release that has gone by at least a couple of different English-language titles over the years: I gather that the original Japanese is closest to The Great Adventure of Horus, Prince of the Sun, but it's much likelier you'll encounter it these days in the anglosphere as Hols, Prince of the Sun, and when it was first shown in the United States, it was thanks to AIP's television division, which provided a rather undemanding dub under the name The Little Norse Prince (and it is this title, and this dub, that you'll encounter if you look for it on any of the major streaming sites - and while I'd want that to be nobody's only exposure to the film, it's absolutely worth it.). Regardless of what the hell we are to call it, it's the movie that is to Japanese animation as that church picnic in Liverpool where John Lennon and Paul McCartney met was to rock and roll: the movie's director was first-timer Takahata Isao, and one of the key animators was Miyazaki Hayao. This was their first collaboration together, and it kicked off an artistic partnership that led to some of the greatest achievements in Japanese animation in the 1970s before resulting in the foundation of Studio Ghibli in the mid-'80s.

It's so easy to over-read that magnificent future into Horus, Prince of the Sun, which isn't just their show - in fact, not even primarily their show, really, since the director of animation, and therefore the man most singularly responsible for the film's visuals, was Otsuka Yasuo (though Miyazaki, along with a few other lead animators, helped Otsuka with the character designs). But this isn't merely an important footnote in Ghibli history: Horus is a splendid film in its own right, one of the most accomplished animated features up to that point in history, from anywhere in the world. It's visually rich like virtually nothing else Japan had produced yet: a clear attempt to meet the standard-bearers at the Disney studios on their own battleground and even surpass them (for it started production in 1965, by which point Disney's aesthetic decline from the lavishness of its 1950s Silver Age had already clearly manifested itself), with a great deal of time and care spent in getting everything perfectly right.

The results speak for themselves. In terms of technique, the film is best-known probably for a tremendous battle between the title character and a giant, murderous pike, which is simply one of the great animated movie monsters ever accomplished, lightning fast, and thick with muscle that twists and jerks with extraordinary fury. It is as great a setpiece as a fantastic adventure could possibly hope for. And every bit as impressive is the character animation - even more impressive, perhaps, because the pike battle demands that you notice it. Whereas the characters, for the most part, are the round little cartoon blobs of any random sample of children's animation in the 1950s or 1960s, but the animators poured so much time and intention into the details of how those soft, ovoid faces would move that the characters are as sophisticated in their range of expression as the more detailed, vividly realistic characters of Disney at its height. It's an extraordinary achievement, maybe even an unprecedented one in its native industry: the soulfulness of the main characters all the way down to the striking reactions of non-characters in comic cutaways are perfectly drafted and animated at a level of fluidity rare in Japanese animation of any generation.

Every bit as impressive, and every bit as foretelling of Ghibli's great achievements to come, is the storytelling. Taken as its basic ingredients, Horus looks like pure fairy tale boilerplate, and in fact the story is ultimately descended from a piece of Ainu folklore. Horus (Okata Hisako) lives out in the wild with his aging father (Yokomori Hisashi), where he one day encounters a rock giant (Yokouchi Tadashi) while escaping from a pack of particularly monstrous wolves. From the giant's shoulder, he plucks an ancient magical sword, thus proving his great fate: he, with his talking bear cub friend Koro (Asai Yukari), shall return to the land of his father's birth to fight a wicked ice demon named Grunwald (Hira Mikijiro). In so doing, he becomes the hero of a small fishing village, and meets a haunted young woman with an ethereal singing voice, Hilda (Ichihara). She is, as it transpires, Grunwald's sister, and initially just a pawn in his attempt to control Horus and destroy the village. But she longs to do good just as much as Horus, only it comes harder to her.

There's nothing about this that's not a kid's movie. But oh, how much more sophisticated and nuanced it is than "kid's movie" implies. The title and first act notwithstanding, this is not just a flouncy adventure about a Chosen One boy with a magic sword. What it turns out to be, first, is a story of how that boy finds himself part of a community, which is depicted mostly by centering on a few key characters, but emphasising the needs of the village as a whole, with the villains those who prefer advancement and power over the greater communal good. Second, it's the story of Hilda, a far more dynamic character than Horus ever comes close to being. Her moral struggle, which dominates the second half of the movie, makes her the first in a grand tradition of young female characters that the future Ghibli artists would take to such great heights in films like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. I have not, of course, seen every animated feature made prior to 1968, so I can only go so far as to say that Hilda is the most psychologically complex animated protagonist up to that point that I know of, not that exists, period. But I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised to learn that such was exactly the case.

In Hilda, Takahata and the story development team (which mostly consisted of Otsuka and the key animators) created a truly groundbreaking animated figure: delicated and conflicted in her visual expressions, deeply intriguing and challenging in her relationship to her sense of morality. It is she, more than anything else, that makes Horus, Prince of the Sun a truly great landmark in grown-up animation, and even as the film feels rather juvenile compared to just about anything that we'd stack it up against nearly a half-century later, Hilda is still as strong as animated protagonists get. Naturally, for this complexity and depth, the film underperformed at the box office; but it was immediately recognised for its greatness and ambition by those who needed to recognise it, and it has managed to acquire the legacy it deserved even if it took some doing to get it there.

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DO YOU WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

A second review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

In his two-volume collection of lyrics and personal recollections, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Stephen Sondheim acknowledges that among his impressive corpus of skills, the ability to construct a dramatic narrative has eluded him. He has been blessed with strong collaborators to write the books for "his" shows, but a playwright he has never been.

There has been only one original story co-written by Sondheim produced, in fact, and it's not a theatrical piece. In the early 1970s, he and Anthony Perkins - it's his only writing credit as well - collaborated on a on a screenplay for a film that was ultimately directed by Herbert Ross and released by Warner Bros. in 1973, The Last of Sheila. It's an old-school murder mystery written by obvious genre enthusiasts, and it's a solid piece of work, neat and clean in all its particulars. But it also doesn't really dispel Sondheim's belief that writing great scripts isn't a strong suit. There's a certain mechanical soullessness to the way the story unfurls and how the characters are built into it that, at any rate, doesn't show off the natural skill of its co-writers. Sondheim and Perkins wrote two later screenplays that were never filmed, which is a pity: it seems fully possible that they grew more comfortable as they went along, for The Last of Sheila has all the earmarks of a promising first attempt by a pair of first-timers mostly concerned with proving they could get ideas down on paper, and with the jitters worked out of their systems, they could build on its foundation.

The scenario is deliberately contrived: a year after the death of his columnist wife Sheila (Hammer vet Yvonne Romain, cameoing in the swell opening scene), movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn) reunites the six friends who were his guests the night of the hit-and-run accident that widowed him. These include director Philip Dexter (James Mason), screenwriter Tom Parkman (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett), the only person at the party who's not a film professional (and this will later prove to be, if not "important", then at least a nice grace note), movie star Alice Wood (Raquel Welch) and her manager husband Anthony (Ian McShane), and agent Christine (Dyan Cannon). On Clinton's gigantic yacht off the coast of the French Riviera, he announces the rules for the Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game: each of the guests are assigned a secret - a piece of fake gossip - and on each of the trip's six nights, they'll go on a scavenger hunt in a different port town to uncover one of those secrets. The night's game ends when the individual whose secret is the subject of the hunt finds the proof, hopefully before any of the other five have already done so.

It's tough to describe, because it's frankly pretty damn convoluted, and that's the mechanical soullessness I had in mind. For much of his life, Sondheim had delighted in constructing absurdly elaborate mystery games for his friend, and these games only grew more ambitious once Perkins started helping him construct them in the 1960s. The Last of Sheila is in great part an attempt to memorialise these games on celluloid, and the momentum-deadening scene where Clinton explains the fussy rules to the partygoers comes straight out of that impulse. It is not a sequence that grows elegantly and organically out of characters; we haven't even really met the characters yet. This is nothing but showing off on the part of authors who are really proud of the ingenuity of their mechanism and want to make sure that we notice how conspicuously Written it is, right down to the sound of typewriter keys clacking at the beginning and ending.

This is, for good and ill, a major component of the screenplay. Not that it's a two-hour exercise in Stephen and Tony showing off, exactly; but it is very tangibly the result of people who love making and solving murder mysteries. It's very rare to find a mystery film - by the way, what ends up happening is that Clinton ends up dead on the second night, and everyone quickly concludes that it must have been the one who mowed down Sheila that night last year who killed him, and it then turns into a tense yachtbound stand-off as everyone starts to suspect everyone else - that's so conscientious in its construction to make sure that all the clues you need to figure the movie out are right there in plain sight, without foregrounding any of them with a neon sign reading "THIS IS A !!CLUE!!" Not even with a scene that finds Clinton grandly announcing, in almost so many words, "you can figure out everything just from the details presented in this scene". And I confess that I didn't figure out the movie and wasn't really interested in trying to. But that is, kind of, the point: it's an immaculately made puzzle that is damned proud to dot every i and cross every t, not like all of those other mysteries that hinge on an unpredictable twist (viz. The Sting, which came out later the same year).

That leads to a movie that's undeniably a bit chilly: the writers were so busy making sure the mystery was structurally airtight that they missed out on crafting rich, deep characters, or giving them anything but the most ordinary relationships to each other. This doesn't end up ruining the movie almost entirely because of the efforts of a number of people to make sure that interesting human wrinkles are saved from the gears of the plot: obviously one of these is Ross, whose direction has never been peppier in any of his films that I've seen (which isn't even half of them, and "peppier than Funny Lady" is one of the easiest bars to clear ever), and so are most of the cast, but it would be bad form to overlook production designer Ken Adam (miles away from the florid fantasy of his Bond fortresses), art director Tony Roman, and set decorator John Jarvis, for building a well-stocked box of little details and red herrings, and for the staging of Clinton's two successfully-executed and highly baroque puzzle rooms, and for augmenting the inherent loveliness of north Mediterranean architecture without feeling like they're gilding the lily. Hell, I'd even have to tip my hat to costume designer Joel Schumacher - that Joel Schumacher) - for the niceties of showing who has money and prestige, versus who had money and prestige through fashion. (I do not know who out of all the possibilities deserves credit for the strangulation via clown puppets climax, but they are a hero to me).

But back to Ross, whose aggressive show-off touches are few and far between, but are all the better for it. The opening sequence, the night Sheila died, is maybe the most elegant, impressive part of the movie: the camera follows Romain as she's obscured by people, plants, sheets of distorted class. It's easy to presume that this must be Sheila, but the film puts so much energy into hiding anything about her that it starts building up tension and mystery right away. There are other sharp visual moments: Clinton descending out of frame on a lifeboat as he finishes a florid monologue, or a hunt for clues inside an old monastery, setting up a stuffy, dark space that helps the artful misdirection that ends up taking place there, and which we see elucidated late on in flashbacks.

As for the cast, it's a collection of people who aren't, like great great - only Mason and Coburn had a truly impressive body of work in '73, and only McShane has come anywhere close to forming one since - but who have spirit and energy and dive into the one-note characterisations with a good eye to fleshing them out. Cannon especially; and when there is a film with Dyan Cannon and James Mason in it, and Cannon gives the better performance, we've entered some kind of mirror universe. But she gives maybe the most blunt and uninteresting of the characters a loopy, electric sense of presence; that's a hell of a lot. The only person whose performance falls short is Welch: she was angry and combative on set, by all accounts (including her own), and that seeps into the performance, which is all sharp angles and spikes in places that keep the other actors at bay, rather than the other characters, if you feel me.

Outside of her, the cast is having enough fun cruising the Riviera and play-acting detectives that their energy turns contagious: while the emphasis on problem-solving is enough to make The Last of Sheila fun for fans of mystery paperbacks, it takes a bit more of the human sparkle that the cast provides to make it fun for the rest of us. It's never more than a lark, but it's at least two different kinds of larks designed for two different audiences, and it's pretty damn good at both of them.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world's most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of history's other rap biopics - because they're pretty much all dreadful - let's take a peek at something of a freer, more impressionistic pseudobiopic of its subject and lead actor.

History is littered with movies in which popular music stars attempt to show off their acting chops, often playing a variation on themselves, and the results are disastrous. The list of films that are A) impressive as cinema, and B) demonstrate that their stars have anything resembling screen presence or acting talent is a brief one: 1964's A Hard Day's Night, with Richard Lester directing the Beatles to heights that defy the project's obvious "let's cash in on the teenybopper!" impulses.

That said, A Hard Day's Night is so fucking good that it has encouraged generations of filmmakers and pop stars to try again, almost always to no damn good effect at all. So this much credit must absolutely go to 2002's 8 Mile, starring Marshall "Eminem" Mathers as an impressionistic gloss on himself in the mid-'90s: it's a pretty strong movie. Director Curtis Hanson leads a terrific below-the-line team including the great cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editors Craig Kitson and Jay Rabinowitz, and costume designer Mark Bridges, in the creation of a striking vision of urban decrepitude embracing and nurturing its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the director fills out the margins with wonderful performances by Mekhi Phifer, Brittany Murphy, Michael Shannon, and Anthony Mackie in a virtually nonexistent role that still benefits enormously from his extraordinary ability to control the camera with his scowling face.

So that handles A), though this is not a Lester-esque explosion of inventive style (on the contrary, the film subscribes to a stock-issue "let's film urban poverty" aesthetic, it just happens to execute that aesthetic tremendously well). It does not, however, do well by B). Eminem doesn't embarrass himself in the way that Britney Spears did in the repellent Crossroads earlier in 2002, or Mariah Carey did in the insipid Glitter the year prior. He's perfectly unexceptional, with a fairly limited palette of facial expressions that leave the impression that his character doesn't feel feelings; he looks uncannily like Elijah Wood much of the time, and that's all it took me to long helplessly a re-casting in which Eminem could be taken out of the movie that only exists because he is in it (also, "how much better this would be with Elijah Wood in the lead role!" is a pretty awful place to be in).

Eminem's alter ego in the script written by Scott Silver is Jimmy Smith Jr, an automobile factory worker in Detroit whose life is in that singular state of perpetual collapse that only true poverty can create. As the film begins, he has just moved back in with his mother Stephanie (Kim Basinger), whom he resentfully tolerates, his kid sister Lily (Chloe Greenfield) who is unique among living human beings in having the ability to make him feel joy and love, and his mom's abusive wretch of a boyfriend, Greg (Shannon). When he's not slacking off at his job or skulking around his house with undisguised disgust, he pursues his great calling, freestyle rap; he has immense talent but no confidence at all, and at a rap battle emceed by his best friend Future (Phifer), performing as "B-Rabbit", he chokes completely, humiliating himself in front of virtually everyone whose opinion he cares about, and earning the disdain of Papa Doc (Mackie), who lambastes Jimmy as nothing but white trash trying ineffectually to muscle into the African-American territory of rap.

The film is not, in truth, very plot-heavy; there's a bit of back and forth involving Jimmy and Papa Doc's rap gang, the Leaders of the Free World (I'm looking for some kind of irony with Papa Doc's name, and I can't figure out if it's actually there), and the danger in which it puts Jimmy and his friends; there's a B-plot in which Jimmy's relationship to a young woman he meets accidentally one day, Alex (Murphy), helps to drive him to stop being such a resentful lump and take some ownership of his actions. But this is mostly a hang-out movie, of a particularly bleak stripe: the bulk of the film is scenes of Jimmy simply inhabiting his world and bumping against the people in it, with his character arc slowly coalescing as we observe the minute shifts in his behavior from moment to moment, rather than big dramatic shifts that come as the result of melodramatic incidents. The film doesn't even end melodramatically: the film eschews the rags-to-riches arc of Eminem's own life in favor of ending with the triumph of Jimmy being ready to seriously grapple with his life and nascent music career, rather than having actually become a success anywhere but in the tiny world he has always inhabited.

It's a refreshing way to build a story that is ghoulishly overfamiliar in nearly all its particulars, and it leaves 8 Mile feeling like it has earned its emotional claims on the audience, rather than just blindly insisting that we should be moved because of the poor. Parts of it are undernourished, beyond a doubt: the most troubling is the film's decision to steadfastly not think about race beyond Papa Doc's mockery of Jimmy for his whiteness (though it's not the most absurd "let's pretend that nobody is having conversations about Eminem's place in politics and culture" moment: that would be when he stops the film cold to explain why it's not okay to make fun of people for being gay), and while Murphy is utterly incandescent in the role of Alex, bringing a fire to the cold grey movie that emphasises better than anything else just what the absolute, burning desire to get the hell out of there looks like, there's no denying that the romantic subplot is the one that the film has by far the least desire to do anything with.

The biggest case of undernourishment, though, is Jimmy himself, owing mostly to Eminem's fine but basic performance, and the central relationship with his loved, hated mother, owing to Basinger's. The common complaint against her when the film was brand new was that she was too beautiful for the role of a broke drunk, and that's true; but it's also true of Murphy, and she didn't have a problem overcoming it. Basinger, though, simply retrenches to shticky performances of grinding poverty, with director Hanson failing to draw out the same once-in-a-lifetime brilliance that made her so shockingly potent in their previous collaboration, L.A. Confidential. "Shit. We're be-ing evicted. God damn it" she intones at one moment of crisis, and the effect is not "woman who is too far gone into the bottle to have human responses", which might have saved it; it's "didn't think through the right emotional tone for this most important scene". Her onscreen son, meanwhile, has a confrontation with his possibly-pregnant ex-girlfriend (Taryn Manning), and he stares and speaks at her like a Scandinavian tourist dropped into the heart of Detroit with only a tourist's dictionary to get by, so perhaps wildly unacceptable line readings are genetic within the film or something.

There's an absolute upper limit to how good the film can be when its two most important roles are filled by its two most disappointing actors, but 8 Mile comes remarkably close to that ceiling. Its depiction of urban squalor is right on-point without being so realistically hellish that it no longer makes sense to locate an unresolved Horatio Alger fable there; Prieto shoots it with moody, almost horror movie shafts of light and shadow that make it all look interesting without glamorising it, and the frequently impressionistic editing - which starts right from the bravura opening sequence, which muddies the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic music as Jimmy practices his rapping, while the editors keep flashing from point to point around him - keeps our attention on the physical environment as an object and a force, not just the backdrop for the characters.

The film's depiction of urban Michigan is stellar, visually; it could, of course, be a bit more rigorous sociologically, but given what the film easily could have been, I am inclined to be excited for any little victories. Ultimately, the takeaway is that all this is a touch too easy and a touch shallow, which is far, far better than I'd have ever expected from it: a narcissistic autobiography of a non-actor is one of the most surefire no-win situations in cinema, and that Hanson, his crew, and most of his cast were able to haul this into something that's at least somwhat admirable is a huge triumph.

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BEST SHOT: ANGELS IN AMERICA

For the final-but-not-actually episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot in 2015, Nathaniel has picked an old subject, one that I didn't follow along with at the time: 2003's Angels in America, the HBO production of Tony Kushner's monumental 1993 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and a late masterwork in the increasingly spotty career of director Mike Nichols.

The original play was presented in two parts, "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika", and the HBO version follows suit. Each half is around three-ish hours long, so Nathaniel presented a couple of options: choose the best shot from the overall 6-hour monolith, choose the best shot from each episode, or just pick one half and then pick the best shot from that. And while I have prided myself on always trying to pick whatever option is most onerous, this was simply not the week for it. So I confess to taking the easy way out: I only watched "Millennium Approaches", which I've always preferred, on the page, the stage,* and the screen (though the two halves are closer in quality in Nichols's hands than in Kushner's original).

Part of the point of Angels in America is that it is a massive, uncontainable beast of a thing, serving as a summary referendum on the history of the United States from prior to its founding to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s (the story is set in 1985), with special attention paid to how identity intersects with history; mostly, but not solely, homosexual identity. It's trying to be about Everything, and the scary thing is how close it comes to succeeding.

This of course means that it's not possible to pick one image and say "yep, that's emblematic of everything I want to say about the piece" (and I also didn't want to pick any of the big obvious showy images: skipping the Jean Cocteau sequence hurt real bad, though). Not even if we're just limiting ourselves to "Millennium Approaches", though I suspect that I'd end up picking the same shot if I were considering the film as a whole (sadly, I did not have anything resembling the free time to watch "Perestroika", and so I rely on memories that are at least eight years old).

In addition to being about the giant courses of history and society, Angels in America is also about just four characters, with some more important figures on the periphery: two are a Mormon couple whom we needn't concern ourselves with (though they're played by Patrick Wilson and Mary Louise Parker in their star-making turns, and they're both fucking wonderful - in particular, given the amount of top-tier talent showing up onscreen, I never cease to be baffled how Wilson could give my favorite performance out of everybody. But anyway, this is totally irrelevant). Two are a gay couple in New York, Prior (Justin Kirk) and Louis (Ben Shenkman). If there's a single thing that drives the engine of "Millennium Approaches" - which there isn't - it's that Prior has AIDS and near the start of the story, finally tells Louis about it.

But that hasn't happened yet at the time of my choice for Best Shot - this is less than ten minutes in, and all we've seen so far is Louis's grandmother's funeral. Prior leaves first, lights a cigarette, and waits for Louis to break away from his extended family. They touch so little that it's almost an accident, then round the corner, and then, out of sight of the judgmental eyes of relatives, they finally move in close.

Two things are going on: first, the obvious one from the blocking that precedes this image, is the need to hide one's true self for fear of the cruel opinions of society. The pain felt by the gay characters in Angels in America isn't simply the mortal terror of AIDS; it's also being found unworthy by majoritarian culture. It's about being unable to live an authentic life because of the Way Things Work. The delay of this moment of physical contact draws all of our attention to that fact, and when Prior finally touches Louis's shoulder, it is a profound statement of identity just as much as it's simple gesture of affection.

The other thing is, I confess, a hoary bit of obvious symbolism. AIDS suffocates every part of the play and movie, and the nearness of death is a major theme. So here we have two emotional impulses simultaneously marching along: love, in the form of the two men comforting each other, and doing so in a way that unambiguously announces to anyone watching that they are a couple and will not, for now, hide that. And death, in the form of the memorial chapel sign, a thick black bar looming over them as they walk towards it. It is a literal memento mori. This tension - love in the presence of reminders of death, love in the presence of memory bearing down - is one of the major propulsive forces in Angels in America, and this moment foreshadows how important that will eventually be in these two men's lives.

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