THE LIGHTS THAT STOP ME

There is much to be argued for simple things done well. I present for your approval Beyond the Lights, a backstage melodrama and love story that invents nothing, does not surprise, and is still one of the most rewarding films to come out (and then almost immediately vanish) in the waning months of 2014. Blame an tiny distributor without the means to push it hard, blame marketers who are skittish about pushing movies about non-white people for mass consumption, blame the disfavor of audiences towards anything that feels even a little bit like a soap opera. Regardless of who to blame, the film deserves so much more than it's gotten or will ever get: this is not world-changing cinema, but it's satisfying like few movie remember how to be.

The beginning sets the stage for all that follows: Macy Jean (Minnie Driver) is an angry stage mother, and her tween daughter Noni (India Jean-Jacques) is a gifted singer with a retiring and accommodating personality. When we meet the pair of them, it's to learn that Macy has a hard time comprehending this thing that is her daughter: she can't figure out how to do anything with mixed-raced Noni's hair, and practically throws her at a thoroughly unimpressed hairdresser (Deidrie Henry, packing enormous detail and racially-aware backstory into a role that takes up a grand total of two scenes) to solve this problem for her. One second-place finish later, and the tyrant mother vows to her daughter and the heavens that they'll never settle for second-best again.

Skip ahead to the present day, and Noni (now played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a genuine musical superstar, winning a Billboard award for her collaboration with Kid Culprit (rapper Machine Gun Kelly, credited under his given name of Richard Colson Baker), a musical artist whose leering lyrics and pelvic dancing are like a lab-created experiment in distilling rape culture. And this before she has even released one single solo track. But though she has everything, and her mother is as happy about it as a pig in shit, Noni is miserable with what she does, who she has to be in order to do it, and the hope she has of ever doing anything else. And so she prepares to throw herself off a hotel balcony in Los Angeles. She's saved only by the quick work of Kaz Nicol (Nate Parker), a cop who took a night working the celebrity security detail for some easy money. Having finally met a person who responds to her as a woman in pain, Noni starts to make excuses to see Kaz more often, and soon enough, romance is in the air, or at least far more tender and mutually rewarding sex than she's been used to. Macy is pissed, and Kaz's father (Danny Glover) is even more pissed, since this threatens to derail his son's political aspirations, but you know how it goes with gorgeous young people in movies about secret emotional pain.

It's all thoroughly generic, but writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, making her third feature in 14 years, commits to her story completely, without either talking down to it, or apologising for it. It's every inch a melodrama, but a melodrama that treats the characters, situations, and emotions with ragged naturalism in the filmmaking and acting alike, not with florid escapism. The result is a film that has all the pleasures of melodrama (sweeping emotions, big moments, hot people making out) without any of the histrionics - even Driver's Macy, a snarling monster of a mother for much of the film, is written and played with one foot in kitchen sink realism, built out of desperation and fear for the future and not just slovenly, trashy greed.

The greatest pleasure, though, is Mbatha-Raw, in her second leading performance of her big debutante year (I haven't yet seen Belle, the first, but based on what she does here, I want to). The woman has a commanding ability to play for the camera, making every moment smaller and smaller, pulling us in and making for a more intimate act of character building: the whole performance is a masterful combination of small glances, little details of body position, carefully chosen stresses in her line deliveries. Prince-Bythewood's script and the tonal balances she achieves are already terrific at exploring topics concerning the sexualisation of women in entertainment, the way that money doesn't buy happiness, the torments of mother-daughter relationships built around a power struggle, and the film could certainly be interesting on those fronts with anybody. But Mbatha-Raw's performance isn't an "anybody" sort of thing: she takes all of the film's concepts and sociology and filters it into the lived experience of one single damaged person trying to determine what she wants her identity to be, who functions beautifully as an individual and an embodiment of The Trouble Facing Women Today. It's a simply terrific performance in every respect, a fully-formed Star Is Born moment as exhilarating as the one Noni receives in the film.

On the back of that performance, Beyond the Lights could be much worse and still work. But the fact of the matter is, it's biggest "problem" is predictability in the general shape of things, and rather than using that as a crutch, the writer-director uses that as a tool to guide us into the emotional truths she wants to depict. It's hard to imagine how this stock material could be treated in a more adult, satisfying manner than it is here. This is sturdy, rather than clever filmmaking and storytelling, but sturdiness is a virtue, especially in service to such a convincing, engaging character study of a young woman in turmoil. The vogue for this kind of well-crafted romantic is by no means at a high ebb, but Beyond the Lights demonstrates with crowd-pleasing earnestness and hard indie film seriousness just how effective and necessary the oft-derided world of chick flicks can be.

8/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2003: In which sufficient willpower, marketing, and blind luck can sell anything, no matter how unfashionable

Pirate movies were dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

The pirate movie had died many times since its heyday, from the early-'20s through the mid-'50s. It had a very high-profile death in 1986, with Roman Polanski's long-gestating Pirates, an enormous flop; it had another in 1995, with Renny Harlin's tormented Cutthroat Island, a flop so gargantuan it bankrupted a production company and ended several careers. And from that death there could be hardly any recovery at all.

None of this seemed to matter to the Walt Disney Company, which in the early '00s engaged in one of those horribly ill-advised adventures in live-action filmmaking that it frequently gets caught up in, spending gigantic piles of money on projects that will plainly never pay off. Before this, TRON; after this, John Carter. Just Disney doing what it does: making fortunes and then pissing them away on the most unfathomable nonsense. It was, in this particular case, an exercise in brand extension: after years of basing its theme park attractions on its hit movies, the company had finally decided to try and base some hit movies on its theme park attractions. The obvious badness of this idea should be obvious, and to those of us following this new scheme back in those days, it was; but we are not the executives in charge of Walt Disney Pictures. And so it was, that what we can arguably call the three most iconic brands from Disneyland and Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom were thrown into development as motion pictures: the Country Bear Jamboree, the Haunted Mansion, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

The first and last of the films that resulted - 2002's The Country Bears and Thanksgiving, 2003's The Haunted Mansion - were precisely what you'd expect, and audiences and critics responded accordingly. But despite having perhaps the most marks against it on paper, being a dead genre and a theme park adaptation and all, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl fared better than its siblings. A lot better, in fact. So much better that I don't have an appropriate way to quantify it. The Curse of the Black Pearl - a subtitle cunningly added when it seemed that there might be a franchise to milk from this picture, and oh! such a financially robust franchise it did turn out to be - is a genuinely surprising film, where nothing seems particularly special or interesting about it until you're actually watching the thing, and finding it to be one of a handful of legitimately bold, original summer tentpoles of the 2000s. Not that summer tentpoles as a class are all that bold or original to start with, but that's exactly why we need more movies like this, and fewer movies like... like this very movie's three (so far) sequels, for one thing.

It is the most obvious thing in the world to glance at the film and propose that it's effectiveness begins with the live-wire performance given by Johnny Depp in what becomes, retroactively, the central role. But sometimes things become obvious because they are demonstrably true. Depp has since burned through more goodwill than many actors will ever receive, and his character creation has become mechanical shtick: half of his characters subsequent to 2003 feel like they were created by filling in a Mad Libs. And with that being the case, it's hard to recall just how extraordinary fresh his Captain Jack Sparrow felt when it was new, such a chaotic, unexpected high-wire act that even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose hatred of both genre films and comedy is as unyielding as a mountain range, was obliged to throw an Oscar nomination his way. He serves the function here that Bugs Bunny or Harpo Marx does: infiltrating a closed system and throwing it into complete disarray with his total disregard for the rules governing the behavior of characters in movies. An 18th Century pirate swanning around like a coked-out rock star, with a whole makeup counter on his face? Why not? This totally changes the texture of the film: what should be a perfectly generic action-adventure movie about a heroic prettyboy chasing an unattainable hot chick who has been kidnapped by the bad guys can never manage to find its genre footing, because there's Jack Sparrow, wandering along with his physically erratic comedy and slurred line deliveries, decompressing the film and turning it into something else completely. There's still so much inventiveness, a clear sense of getting away with something absolutely delightful, underneath every moment of Depp's performance, even after his three subsequent performances as the same character should have curdled everything that made him interesting. Jack Sparrow in Curse of the Black Pearl is just as exciting now as he was in 2003, in defiance of all good sense.

Whether Depp came up with that on his own, or whether he was guided to it by Gore Verbinski, it's certainly the case that this was a flawless meeting of actor and director. Verbinski had, at this point, made three features: the first, Mousehunt, was a live-action movie made with the physics and logic of a Tom & Jerry cartoon; the third, The Ring, was an exercise in probing the limits of terror available to a PG-13 horror movie (the second, The Mexican, is a film that nobody in the world has ever seen, despite it starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts). And with The Curse of the Black Pearl, he apparently decided to exactly split the difference between those two, and throw swashbuckling action into the mix just for the hell of it. The film is a cartoon, no two ways about it: there are physics-defying falls and fight scenes, wacky visual jokes ("wouldja look at that! He got a fork stuck in his eye!"), and snazzily-timed cuts that function as punchlines all over the place. The film is also a creepy-as-fuck story about zombie pirates skulking about in the moonlight. It never seems to occur to Verbinski to separate these two modes: there isn't another movie this side of Army of Darkness to make so much out of slapstick involving skeletons.

Verbinski's wild, erratic juggling of seemingly incompatible tones fits perfectly with Depp's thoroughly contemporary, chaotic performance of Jack Sparrow, and between them they manages to make The Curse of the Black Pearl a weird, dazzling display of energy and comedy piercing through terror as the terror curls around high-spirited action sequences that add a sense of grandeur to the comedy. The film can so readily tap into this energy that even its many apparent flaws simply don't find a foothold to disupt it. These include its lumpy shape - after an opening 40 minutes that pile action atop action almost nonstop, the film suddenly drops into a lumbering quest which decides, about 90 minutes in, to start over again fresh - its terribly bland lovers played by Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley (the latter of whom, at least, is capable of much better than the feisty damsel this film asks her to be, though I do adore her one-on-one moments with Depp), and its messy climax, the one point in the whole film that the generally sharp cutting by Stephen Rivkin, Arthur Schmidt, and Craig Wood lets us down. Honestly, it always occurs to me (but only after I'm done watching it), that the film really shouldn't work at all: that it does is testament to the devil-may-care attitude animating it, among other things' things like Dariusz Wolski splendid cinematography, which can be spooky as a campfire story in one moment, and a gaspingly gorgeous advertisement for the visual grandeur of the Caribbean in the next, and the wonderfully invigorating score by Klaus Badelt and a bunch of other composers who pitched in here or there (prominently among them Hans Zimmer), which includes what I'd likely call the last great piece of franchise theme music. Or just the wit and banter of Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio's script, which manages the weird assignment of capturing the sensibility of a theme park boat ride inside a Spielbergian adventure romp.

This is all the things popcorn movies should be: fun, energetic, simple enough to quickly grasp but full enough to not seem stupid, anchored by strong personalities among all the side characters (Geoffrey Rush's florid villain is a great bit of acting in its own right, unfairly overshadowed by Depp), and a cohesive world with a sense of history and depth. And that, coupled with the unmatchable scale of the Disney marketing machine and Jerry Bruckheimer's laser-like instincts for what audiences want to see, is what allowed The Curse of the Black Pearl to break a greater curse still: the matter of what audiences like. And yet, there was more to it than that: Depp and Verbinski and Disney's marketing all joined forces again ten years later to make another marriage of horror, action, and cartoon physics, The Lone Ranger, and it came nowhere near overcoming the contemporary audience's distaste for Westerns; we can say that it simply wasn't as good (because it wasn't), but then, why wasn't it?

Well, that's the alchemy of it. Everything came together at exactly the right time in exactly the right balance, just when the world was ready to be receptive to it, and there you go: the blockbuster landscape changed just that little bit, and now pirates are cool again. Sometimes, all of the parts of the Hollywood machine click together just perfectly, and magic happens, and one has a renewed love not for cinema, and not for filmmaking, but for the splashy, transformative power of The Movies.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2003
-The most eagerly anticipated sequels of the 2000s very quickly become the most despised sequels of the 2000s, as the Wachowskis' The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions underwhelm
-After years of cranking out largely unliked genre pictures, Clint Eastwood returns to everybody's good graces as an Important American Director with Mystic River
-The grand era of horror remakes begins with the Michael Bay production of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2003
-Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring and Park Chan-wook's Oldboy are among the most prominent emissaries of the new South Korean cinema to international film culture
-Sylvain Chomet directs the captivating, charmingly warped animated film The Triplets of Belleville
-The ensemble-based romantic comedy is invented by the British Love Actually, so feel free to blame it

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DISNEY SEQUELS I MISSED IN 2014: I TINK, THEREFORE I AM

The once-proud DisneyToon Studios, formerly a mighty machine ceaselessly cranking out sequel upon sequel to the films of the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon, has of late been reduced to listlessly cranking out Planes and Tinker Bell movies at a slow drip. And between these two points, we run almost the whole gamut of the company's output: Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue have been middling-to-awful, where as the Tinker Bells, when they are not busy telling pre-teen girls that science is stupid and a waste of time, have included some of the most thoughtful, nuanced stories in the entirety of the Disney direct-to-video program. And yes, that means we're talking about only a little bit of thought or nuance, but it's not nothing.

All of which is as much to say: I had expectations for The Pirate Fairy, the fifth feature in the Disney Fairies line, that were totally out of bounds for anything that it conceivably could have delivered. And it doesn't meet those expectations, though it's shockingly decent all in all: a considerable improvement over the somewhat idiotic Secret of the Wings from 2012, the last full-length film in the franchise. If it is a disappointment, it is a disappointment mostly at the level of theme: the whole deal of the series has been to expose young girls to what should be commonsense truisms about life and being a member of society, but are regrettably not. And The Pirate Fairy has no real theme of that sort: it does look for a while that it's trending back in the "oh, science, that's terrible stuff" direction of Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue, but the final scene so thoroughly muddies any kind of overriding message in any direction that the whole thing ends up being very little more than a straightforward adventure with pirates. And given the state of American animation right now, "girls can be the protagonist in adventures" actually does count as progressive messaging, which is the most depressing thing I can think of right this moment.

The story this time hinges on a new character, Zarina (Christina Hendricks), a fairy with radical and untested ideas about using experimentation and research to expand the possible uses of pixie dust. When one of these experiments goes wrong, she banishes herself from the fairy world for a full year, returning as the captain of a human pirate ship, to steal the fairie's precious blue pixie dust and continue her experiments, while also using the powers of the dust to aid in her career of piracy. The series standby heroes happen to be the only ones to avoid being walloped by Zarina's attack with sleeping dust, and so they head off to stop her: Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman), and the Southern one (Megan Hilty), and the bitchy one (Pamela Adlon), and the quiet one (Lucy Liu), and the nervous one (Raven-Symoné), and the nice one (Angela Bartys). Against them are Zarina and her human first mate, James (Tom Hiddleston), an excitable human pirate who can understand the fairy language.

The pirates form a more explicit link to Disney's Peter Pan than has yet been seen in any of these films, and it's not always a perfect join: there are details that do not line up at all concerning the relationship of that film's Captain Hook (whose identity is meant to be a shock here, and I suppose it might be to someone, somewhere, but the literal first shot in which the future Hook showed up got me to thinking, "oh, well I bet I know who he turns out to be...") and the crocodile who ate his hand. But then again, if the film didn't commit that continuity error, we'd have been deprived the sight of that same crocodile as a baby, and I would not give that up for anything whatsoever, because good God damn, is it cute.

The story itself is pretty basic and entirely functional, ushering the characters through the ginned-up conflict by which Zarina swaps out all the heroes' natural talents, and they have to spend almost a whole scene figuring out how to adapt. It's pleasantly entertaining by kids' movie standards, mind you, and it breezes by at a crisp 78 minutes, almost ten of which are credits; there's little depth, and the shift by which the pirates go from being Zarina's jolly crew to scurrilous traitors (because of course they do) is disappointingly abrupt and ill-motivated; the film had a chance to do something complex and make the process by which villains are formed feel more organic and aware of human desire and psychology, but it just plugs in a stock reveal by which we find out that they were terrible, wicked beasts all along. Subtlety and complicated morality isn't this film's strong suit, which is too bad: it is one of the things the Tinker Bell movies have done best.

As a shallow adventure movie for children, though, I can say nothing bad against it: the characters are likable and given more flexibility in their personalities than has elsewhere been true in the series, though five protagonists was definitely two more than director Peggy Holmes and her coterie of writers had the ideas to deal with. But there's a generosity with which even the most easily-forgotten of the characters is handled, and with which their in-group relationships are teased out, that makes it all very nice and easygoing. The result is a lived-in and familiar feeling that compensates for how rushed it all is.

Better still: the film looks pretty terrific. For the first time in the franchise, the characters don't feel like plastic toys: they have a flexibility and ranginess to their expression unknown in earlier films. Their faces evoke emotions other than revulsion; that's a huge step for this series.

The lighting and backgrounds are also quite lovely; this is not new for the films (they've always had better backgrounds than character animation), but the ambition of the dusty and foggy lighting here is at a whole new level.

It is, dare I say it, a Tinker Bell film that is pleasurable to look at: not up to the standards of the best feature animation, but an enormous improvement over the rest of DisneyToon's output to date. And that, coupled with the pleasant storytelling and character building, makes for a movie that ranks right up near the very best of the its franchise and thus the very best direct-to-video Disney movies ever. Even if it doesn't the thematic resonance of its forebears, it's enough fun as a simple, colorful yarn with genial broad comedy and energetic characters that it's surprisingly beguiling in its little way.

7/10

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DEATH MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

I know you all can't wait to hear my thoughts on the week's new invisibly mediocre animated film & box office underperformer, but in order to know my thoughts on Penguins of Madagascar, you'll have to head over to The Film Experience. Or not. I mean, it's Penguins of Madagascar, it is not exactly the stuff of heady analysis and sparkling back-and-forth conversation. But that is, anyway, where my review can be found.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2002: In which having too many resources can make interesting directors much less interesting

David Fincher has directed nine features as of 2014, and 2002's Panic Room is almost beyond question the least interesting one to talk about on its own merits (which isn't to say it's his worst: even that would make it more interesting). This is exactly why I picked it as his representative in this series: while Se7en is surely his most influential project, Fight Club the one with the most to chew on, and so on, Panic Room is the one that most emphatically shows what happens when fringe-type artists suddenly find themselves given room to do anything. While he had worked with big budgets and major studios before, it was always as an upstart music video director. The reception of Fight Club was the point that he landed as a newly-minted auteur, and thus Panic Room is the film that shows us what Fincher working with the freedom of a superstar looked like. And that does fascinate me a great deal, even if the movie itself fails to.

The film is a basic, snazzy little conceptual thriller. Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is going through a divorce and looking to find a nice place in New York's Upper West Side where she and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) can live relatively close to Sarah's dad. The solution is in an enormous old brownstone walk-up with all kinds of interesting nooks, but the one that creeps Meg out the most is a high tech "panic room", a kind of survivalist vault, built by the previous owner, a reclusive millionaire who feared everyone and especially his family. He also, apparently, left most of his millions hidden somewhere in the house, because soon after the Altmans take up residence, the house is broken into by a trio of thieves: Junior (Jared Leto), the grandson of the dead millionaire, proving the old man's instincts about his relatives to be correct; Burnham (Forest Whitaker), an employee of a company that installs panic rooms and other super-high-end security apparatuses; and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), a paranoid thug who has been brought onto the project without Burnham's knowledge and for uncertain reasons. But he clearly represents a destabilising violent element.Meg wakes up early during the robbery, and is able to hide herself and Sarah inside the panic room, alerting the robbers to their unexpected presence. So begins a stand-off, heightened by Sarah's pressing need for an insulin shot, and Meg's failure to hook up the panic room's isolated phone line.

All the ingredients for Panic Room to be a vicious little thriller are right there: the single location (albeit a huge location with several unique sets), the easily-defined conflict, and enough high-tech gimcrackery baked into the concept that it doesn't risk seeming overly familiar to all the other "woman in a tense, dangerous situation" thrillers that one would otherwise flirt with as comparisons. It could be sleek and relentless; it could have a wry, detached sense of morbid fascination with the fishbowl it has presented. Neither of these things come to pass. In fact, Panic Room ends up being a rather puffy and overworked affair. Screenwriter David Koepp trues much too hard to keep raising the stakes and starting to push things into arbitrary escalations and at least one burst of comic book fantasy in a ridiculous scene involving a propane tank; Fincher directs with a glowering, severe tone, having ace cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (stepping in for Darius Khondji, no slouch himself, who left shortly after the production began) underlight things like his life depended on maintaining an impenetrable murk. This does pay off for the film somewhat: the contrast between the gloomy interiors of the house and the metallic lighting inside the panic room works marvelously well at creating whiplash-inducing shifts in mood that help the overall thriller tone. But it also means that Panic Room is, for the most part, terribly serious, much more a film from the director of Se7en than the director of Fight Club (it is, though, especially a film from the director of The Game). The screenplay, meanwhile, is pure pulp: it needed something crazier and nervier to match its frankly trashy piling-on of elements.

Really, though, it never quite feels like Fincher ever trusted the scenario (and I'm not looking to solely blame the director: the script is convoluted where it shouldn't be, offering up far too much complicated backstory in the wrong places, and too many of its developments feel like excuses for protracting the action, not like a natural evolution of the situation). For he spends a great deal of energy trying to compensate for the limited scope of Panic Room by using flashy, aggressive style that serves no purpose other than to call attention to itself. This is a film that dearly loves its amazing computer-aided tracking shots, sending the camera speeding through walls and vents and keyholes, and while it's impressive technique (especially by 2002 standards, when this kind of digital stitching was still fairly rare) it doesn't add anything other than the feeling that the film is impatient with itself, and wants to rely on all kinds of whiz-bang visual dazzle to distract us from the unfolding mechanics of the plot. If there's anything the film gains from this, I missed it; it doesn't even help establish the contiguous physical layout of the apartment. Indeed, the location never ends up feeling like an organic whole, always just a bunch of sets cross-cut together. And if the nifty tracking shots couldn't achieve that...

The issue, then, is not that the filmmaking is specifically bad, but that the film doesn't hang together. It's a hollow thriller that's too sober-minded to get away with just being a tense potboiler (though I have read both feminist and class-based analyses of the film, trying to reclaim it from its shallow nature; I have found them thoroughly unpersuasive), and it's a film whose individually well-staged moments of tension - the director of Se7en and later Zodiac certainly knows how to build a good chase scene, and Howard Shore's musical score is terrifically obliging in elevating one's heart rate in those moments - aren't tied together comfortably. The mechanics of the film's narrative structure and editing announce themselves too pridefully for it to be a completely absorbing work of fiction, so even though the mechanics are at times quite beautifully refined, they're hard to enjoy. The acting is all top notch - Whitaker especially (but when isn't he?) brings real soulfulness and doubt to the most humane of the three thieves, and Foster's desperation never feels like a generic scream queen, but like a real person - but it's in service to roles that are all the sum of their one-line descriptions.

If I had to pick the single crippling problem with the film, it's that it can't bring itself to be disreputable, wanting desperately to be anything other than a genre film. While it succeeds at creating a certain mounting sense of dread, right from its famous opening credits - words hovering over New York like the hammer of God - Panic Room is simply not any fun, and its slow, deliberate construction robs it of all its momentum as a thriller.

So the question is, how did Fincher - a director who is very good at supplying thrills to thrillers, whatever his other strengths or limitations might be - end up shepherding such a leaden film, one that amplifies its emptiness in the attempt to compensate for it? And to that, I have no answer, other than a suspicion that there was simply no motivation for it not to be the case. The film was infamously shot over more than one-hundred days, divided by Foster's pregnancy, with dozens of re-takes to satisfy Fincher's perfectionism and the technical complexity of his shot set-ups. That kind of thing can begin to leech into the finished production, just as surely as a breakneck pace of filming a fleet little indie (it's easy to imagine Roger Corman knocking out a film like this over a long weekend) informs its energy. Fussy and claustrophobic in the wrong ways, Panic Room feels like a film that was made with an indulgent production budget and more resources than it needed. It feels like a film where decisions were made on the basis of "what can we do?" rather than "what should we do?", losing all its edge and energy in the process. Fincher is by no means my favorite, but I at least admire him when he's trying to prove something. When he's just using studio money to play around with aimlessly, the results are simply joyless and dull, even when they work at the level of craft.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2002
-The U.S.-Canadian My Big Fat Greek Wedding becomes one of the biggest word-of-mouth hits of all time
-Barbershop breaks out critically and financially, a rare feat for a film focused on an African-American cast
-Scooby-Doo ushers in a grim new age of bringing old cartoons back to life as CGI/live-action hybrids

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2002
-Digital filmmaking advances permit Aleksandr Sokurov to shoot Russian Ark as one feature-length take
-The Irish Bloody Sunday introduces the world to Paul Greengrass and his shaky docufiction aesthetic
-Gaspar Noé perpetrates one of the most disturbing and controversial films of the decade, Irréversible

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2001: In which rank cynicism turns out to be the thing animation needed all along

As the Hollywood Century takes us into the 21st Century and thus near to the present day, I shall find myself increasingly hard-pressed to do much good situating the films I'm discussing in any kind of historical context: we're still in that historical context, for the most part, and it will take a few more years to authoritatively state what the cinema of the early to mid-2000s begot and transformed into. But in at least one regard, I can state something with unflinching certainty: we owe the animated features of the 2000s almost solely to DreamWorks Animation's Shrek.

The film began life simply enough, as yet another of Jeffrey Katzenberg's "fuck you so hard" gestures to his old boss and nemesis Michael Eisner; their rivalry fueled the creation of the animation studio that Katzenberg had tried to use to out-Disney Disney, beginning with 1998's dramatic musical The Prince of Egypt, DreamWorks' second feature (their first, Antz from earlier in the same year was a more petulant but also lower-key "fuck you" to Disney's handmaidens at Pixar). But DreamWorks was unlucky: by 1998, the gas had just about run out on the Disney Renaissance, and it was starting to take with it people's enthusiasm for seeing animated movies. As far as trying to copy Disney's playbook, the game was up: The Prince of Egypt was a hit, but the next three traditionally-animated projects DreamWorks released, between 2000 and 2003, remain their lowest-grossing trio of films, even today.*

But it playing catch-up to Disney was proving to be a non-starter, the studio was soon to find vastly more success in simply insulting Katzenberg's old studios right to its face. And that brings us to the second DreamWorks animated film, and in some ways its all-time signature title: Shrek birthed three sequels that remain the peak of the studio's popular output. The four Shreks are, at the time of this writing, the four highest-grossing films DreamWorks has ever made (and given the studio's recent fortunes, they're likely to remain that way for years to come). Shrek itself was the highest-grossing animated film since Disney's own The Lion King in 1994, which must have delighted the shit out of Katzenberg: that smash hit was the last Disney release during his tenure as chairman. It also kept itself just ahead of Pixar's Monsters, Inc. from later in 2001, and managed to beat that same film for the first-ever Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Such success breeds imitators, so what, then, are we imitating? Shrek is a fairy tale, basically, directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, and adapted by a consortium of writers (Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio and Joe Stillman and Roger S.H. Schulman) from William Steig's children's book. But a fairy tale that self-consciously up-ends the normal morality: the handsome prince is an ugly little meanspirited shit named Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow), the monster is the grumpy ogre Shrek (Mike Myers), who turns out to be the hero, and the damsel in distress is Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), who knows wire-fu, has a calculating sense of her own worth, and turns into a hideous ogre herself when the sun goes down. The irritating comic sidekick is still the irritating comic sidekick: a talking Donkey played by Eddie Murphy, far less disastrously then when he played the same type in Disney's Mulan three years earlier.

"It's a traditional fairy tale only everything is subverted" gets us pretty far along the road to seeing how this is a parody of Disney's stock in trade, but just to make sure we totally get it, the filmmakers place Farquaad's palace behind a thick layer of satirising Disneyland with the cheery, sanitised, ugly castle of Dulac (they also open the movie with Disney-style storybook pages that the title character uses to wipe his ass, but I'd prefer not to linger there). And the "it's a small world" parody that beats that dead horse one last time is, I confess, my favorite gag in all of Shrek, though I also confess that ranking all the Shrek gags that I like doesn't take all that long.

For the thing that Shrek truly gave unto the world was not a spate of savage takedowns of Disney tropes - Disney was doing quite fine doing that in its fumbling incompetence that marked most of its output at that time (ironically, Disney wouldn't regain its footing as a powerhouse until it firmly and enthusiastically embraced the tropes that Shrek was making fun of so hard, with 2010's enormously square Tangled). It was, rather, the tone of Shrek that suddenly exploded as fully-rendered CG animated films became omnipresent in the following years, owing to the huge successes of DreamWorks and Pixar at exactly the time Disney's traditional animation was imploding. And the tone of Shrek is pop culture references, lots of pop songs driving montages - and the introduction of the infamous "film-ending dance party" trope, soon to become the worst bane to storytelling ever known to the animated feature - cutesy cutaways from dirty language, jokes pitched at the target audience's parents that don't even pretend to be for kids (seriously, "Farquaad"? Especially since Myers's arbitrary Scottish accent gives him some trouble enunciating it, and you can always hear the "fuckwad" he's struggling so hard not to say). And farts. So, so many farts. Shrek's function as a character, especially in the first third of the movie, is almost solely to provide a full array of gross-out humor, but even with a gamut of everything from ear wax to shit to body odor, the writers always retrench to the easy comfort of farts.

It was, too, in Shrek that the gambit of casting famous people and selling the movie on their names first paid off in a big way. Pixar had attracted heavy hitters like Tom Hanks and Tim Allen at the peak of his sitcom fame and Bonnie Hunt, the young people's favorite, but there was always the sense that they were chosen as actors first, celebrities second. But in Shrek, besides the proven success of Eddie Murphy as a fast-talking con artist and Mike Myers doing funny voices, gave us Cameron Diaz as an animated princess - Cameron Diaz! Who the fuck can remember what her voice sounds like when they're not actually hearing her talk? How is she an appropriate choice for casting an animated film? The simple answer is that she's not, and Princess Fiona is boring as hell and has no personality to speak of. John Lithgow is the only person trying to do anything interesting, and he's still just playing the typical Lithgow arrogant fussbudget.

This is, all of it, pretty dire stuff; the sarcastic, nasty tone of smug hipness clashes mightily with the film's shrill attempts at sincerity and lesson-learning, forced scenes of "I just want to be understood" plugged in exactly where the formula expects it, clearly not because the filmmakers particularly believe in it. And far too much of the knowing, in-jokey humor is stale and unfunny, ghastly now where it was merely dumb in 2001. Compounding all of this is how barbarically ugly the whole thing is: the Shrek films have always been the most unpleasantly designed in DreamWorks' stable, with their wave after wave of human characters who look like corpses given movement with rod puppetry that exaggerates all their gestures. But beyond the dead-looking, stretched flesh and emotionless faces, there's so much technical flatness that has only magnified over time, not that Shrek looked as good as its competition in '01. The cloth moves stiffly and has no texture; Donkey's hair is rigid and plasticine, and this in the same year as Monsters, Inc. and its groundbreaking fluffy hair. That film still looks terrific after 13 years: the backgrounds are a bit flat, maybe, and the animation of the little human girl's face leaves plenty to be desired, but it's still appealing and visually deep. Shrek, in 2014, is embarrassing to look at: you could throw a dart in a video game store and find something with better character movement and photorealistic rendering.

This, in fact, might very well be why Shrek generated so many note-for-note imitators: it proved that crappy jokes, sugar-addled music (Smash Mouth, where art thou?), and famous people cashing a check to sound like they're dashing off their lines on the way to dinner, are somehow appealing enough that it doesn't take significantly technical finesse to turn a profit. The lesson of Pixar is that CG animation could be big business if you have unfathomable talent and state-of-the-art resources; the lesson of DreamWorks is that CG animation can be even bigger business if you have marketing know-how and shameless in appealing to the worst side of children's natures. Not all of Shrek's immediate effects are still being felt - generally, more effort is put into character design than this ugly sonofabitch ever shows, and the climactic dance parties are largely a thing of the past - but its calculating, intensely mediocre approach to animated storytelling is with us still, strong and durable as ever, and with every Ice Age 17 and Despicable Me 8, the shadow of DreamWorks' flatulent ogre grows just a tiny bit longer.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2001
-A pair of multinational fantasy adaptations light it up at the box office, with the Chris Columbus-helmed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring topping the charts
-Wes Anderson's fussy aesthetic blooms into full flower with the doll's house inhabited by The Royal Tenenbaums
- Steven Spielberg shepherds the final vision of the late Stanley Kubrick in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, to the admiration of the few and the hostile bafflement of many more

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2001
-The Hindi-language Lagaan is an enormous international sensation, rare for Indian cinema
-The international success of Danis Tanović's No Man's Land throws light on the youthful Bosnian film industry
-Austrian miserabilist Michael Haneke explores the dark side of soul-destroying violent sex in The Piano Teacher

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: LARS AND THE REAL GIRLS

And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film's project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the vaguest possible way like a vagina. But Nymp()maniac is cumbersome to type out and a bit pretentious so I will, not without regret, let it go.

At any rate, the film is the latest project by international cinema's most important and reliable provocateur, initially came to us in the form of two volumes of about two hours each that debuted, with all possible showiness, on Christmas Day in 2013 in Denmark, before the director's preferred cut surfaced piecemeal over 2014. And it is this longer cut, coming to a total just shy of five and a half hours, that we shall be considering now. For Antagony & Ecstasy believes in honoring artistic intent, even in the case of artists who we do not much care for.

I will say this much for Nymphomaniac, though: it wasn't nearly as diabolically unpleasant as I was prepared for it to be. It finds von Trier in a surprisingly overt comic mode; for those of us accustomed to viewing most of his films with a dispirited "he has got to be kidding, right?" reaction, this is the film where he pretty clearly admits that he is. The film takes the shape of a memoir in eight chapters, narrated by a middle-aged woman named Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg, reigning von Trier muse) to the older Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård, reliable von Trier mainstay), the man who found her bloody and bedraggled in an alley by his home one snowy night. The story is about her life as a nymphomaniac, ever since the fateful day she began to perceive her own sexuality; "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old" begins her narrative, delivered over a shot of a bare-chested toddler staring down out of the frame, because Lars von Trier does not believe in starting slowly. For the rest of the night, Joe tells Seligman of her lost virginity to the dashing Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf), who is in and out of her life forever after); her teenage adventures in casual sex (Stacy Martin takes over for the pre-30 version of Joe); the way that having sex constantly with a broad variety of men came to dominate her young adulthood; the crisis that happened when she lost all feeling in her clitoris and began to seek out more extreme ways of coming to orgasm; and eventually her career as a mob extortionist. And in all of this, we see so, so much genitalia.

But the real purpose of Joe's tale isn't to convince Seligman that she's insatiably addicted to sex, but to convince him that she is a morally unjust person, and therein lies the comedy. Throughout her long recitation (which increasingly seems to be made up, Usual Suspects-style, of the things that come into her head while she sits in Seligman's empty rooms - not a reading the film insists upon, but certainly one it welcomes), the action frequently reverts back to the two of them sitting across from each other, with Joe asking some variation on "didn't that bit completely offend, shock, titillate, or disgust your?" to which her audience responds with labored theoretical frameworks justifying her behavior. First, he eagerly compares her sexual hunting to his own beloved hobby of fly-fishing, and by the time dawn roles around, he'll also have dragged into polyphonic theory and the history of the Eastern Orthodox church, among many other random tangents. Eventually even Joe seems to find him fatuous and boring and over-written.

These cutaways with Seligman offering baroque readings of Joe's life are, for one thing, the funniest part of a movie that's often prone to going for weird comedy rather than the sober drama of most of von Trier's work, especially in the first three hours. For another thing, it doesn't take knowing that the director has basically admitted that he views the women in his films as his authorial stand-ins to realise that we're watching Joe-as-von-Trier trying to provoke Seligman-as-film-critics, with Joe's life including several obvious references to the director's past work, whether in images or plot points, and even to the details of his public life; there's even time to have a chat about the morality of the Nazis, recalling the most famous controversy of von Trier's career. Through the characters' dynamic, von Trier is both repeating his claims to telling something important and challenging that must be said, and also asking, somewhat aghast, "do you people actually buy this shit I'm selling?"

Which, for as impenetrably self-regarding as that it is, it definitely gives Nymphomaniac a peculiar goofiness that makes it far more watchable than the story of yet another woman mortifying herself to find transcendence ought to be, especially at such a monstrous running time. And, throughout, Nymphomaniac also reverts to more traditional von Trier territory: there is much that is visceral and angry, whether the melodrama of a spurned wife (Uma Thurman, in a disorienting, almost cartoonish depiction of rage that's perhaps the film's single best performance); or the frequent explicit sex scenes in which there is no hint of eroticism, only the compulsive movement of mechanical beings; or what has to be the most gut-wrenching abortion scene in cinema history. Or the atrocious final scene, a violation of all character and story logic that exists, as far as I can tell, solely for von Trier to laugh at us on the way out of the theater, having ruined anything resembling a character or thematic arc across the whole immense beast of a movie.

In all of its modes - self-regarding, absurdly comic, clinically unsexy, violently distressing - Nymphomaniac never quite gets around to justifying the why of all this. Any insights into human interaction, sexual behavior, or gender politics are filtered through so much visually staginess and tonal insincerity that they hardly feel authentic in any way; the film is so long, repetitive, and predictable in its arch-European sexual chilliness that it doesn't even work as a provocation. It makes outrageous sex look absolutely tedious, and while I am sure there are those who would be shocked and outraged by this, and whose prudishness would thus give the film some merit as a "gotcha!" exercise, they wouldn't ever end up watching it. Besides, the idle emotional punishments von Trier ladles out on his characters for the sexuality is prudish enough on its own.

Essentially, it's a hollow plaster cast of a movie, acerbically funny enough to give it some personality, but devoid of any real meaning; it is an artificial construct of suffering than hardly feels painful even when we're watching it, an exercise in watching the director demonstrate once again that he can push buttons, even as he announces right there in the dialogue that he's just pushing out buttons for the hell of it. There are plenty of impressive shots throughout, some comic, some moving, some astonishing; and the way sound is used (especially the way it gives the film a broad structure) is clever, though the songs that crop on the soundtrack frequently are virtually never anything but obvious and dopey. So it's not poor cinema. And it's certainly varied enough that even as slow as it moves and as long as it lasts, it never feels pokey. But it's self-referential and self-rewarding to the point that it has virtually no other content. Although, in a film with this many close-ups of human orifices, I suppose it makes sense that the film basically takes place up Lars von Trier's ass.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2000: In which we consider the matter of movie stars in the modern era

There are two ways to primarily think about Erin Brockovich, I believe: one is that it is among the most conventional films in the career of director Steven Soderbergh, which isn't to say that it's really so conventional as all that, but coming sandwiched in his career smack-dab in between The Limey and Traffic, it feels distinctly low in its ambitions, if not its execution. The other way is that this is a Julia Roberts vehicle, and maybe even THE Julia Roberts vehicle, the last big hit sold exclusively on her name after a solid decade of being one of America's hottest stars, and the film for which she won her Oscar (a win I fully support, so let's just get that out of the way now; for I am well aware that the internet in general is pretty down on this particular victory).

What we could not have known in March, 2000, when the film was young, and is perhaps not as obvious even now as it perhaps should be, is that the gap between Erin Brockovich the auteur exercise and Erin Brockovich the star vehicle isn't all that large. There have been few constants in Soderbergh's magpie-like career, but one of the things that crops up again and again is his interest in the concept of who gets to be an actor and celebrity, and what that means. There's the meta-textual games he played with Roberts in 2004's Ocean's Twelve; there's the way that Channing Tatum played a kind of alternate-universe version of himself in Magic Mike; there's the game of putting non-actors front and center in roles that take advantage of their non-acting abilities in The Girlfriend Experience and Haywire; and so it goes in several of his movies.

Erin Brockovich is thus, in a certain light, his attempt to experimentally answer the question, what does it mean to be Julia Roberts in a Julia Roberts vehicle? What we find there ties into one of the greater threads coursing through cinema in the '90s and especially the '00s, which is the changing expectation the audience has in its movie stars. We don't really have them anymore, you know. Movie stars. We certainly have famous people that show up in movies, and they still drive a bit of box office, but huge hits aren't driven by that any more. Visual effects and genres and source novels are the movie stars now. Actors are just frosting, box office-wise.

I have a thought experiment that will probably be rough for a lot of you, because it hinges on a woman who hasn't been a major star since before my parents were born. But anyway, imagine Erin Brockovich as a 1940s movie starring Greer Garson, and that's totally who it would have been - it's right in line with her saintly, save-the-world star persona (not that Garson's home studio of MGM would have been a good fit for the plot, Warner Bros. would be the obvious choice. But Bette Davis as Brockovich is just... no). Now how would Garson have played the role? The same way she played every role: Erin Brockovich would have been the same soft-voiced mothering figure with a steel spine that reveals itself in times of need. That's the woman Garson always played: she could be named Marie Curie, or Kay Miniver, or Edna Gladley, but she was always, first, the woman Greer Garson's fans wanted to see. That was the nature of movie stardom in the 1940s: watching people give variations on a core character, with the really great actors in the bunch (Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart before he said "fuck it" and started playing anti-heroes) standing out because of the gradations they could give to differentiate each one of their roles, rather than because they ever flouted their basic set persona.

Instead of being a '40s prestige picture, though, Erin Brockovich was a crowd-pleasing legal thriller made in the late 1990s. And what makes it a stand-out Julia Roberts performance, an Oscar-winning Julia Roberts performance, a capital-I Important Julia Roberts performance, is that it is an outright subversion of the kind of roles that Julia Roberts had made her career out of. Hewing to the true-life version of the character, Roberts's Erin Brockovich is a foul-mouthed woman perpetually on the verge of pouring out of her tacky clothes; she is fond of brittle sarcasm and screaming at people who dare to be less than 100% in line with her opinions. Hardly America's Sweetheart, but the central aspect of the film in its current incarnation, the characteristic driving all of it, is that it still looks and sounds like Julia Roberts: the same voice, the same big smile, the same perfectly-shaped face. So the appeal is two diametrically-opposed things at once: we get to watch the cute, funny, totally approachable Roberts going about the lightly comic-dramatic material that she has always been best at, while also being totally shocked by the lewdness and anger that completely destroy our sense of what she's "supposed" to be (see also: My Best Friend's Wedding, which does similar things to different ends). She's lovable, but she's also bossy, arrogant, and unthinkingly cruel to her loved ones, and these things do not make her less lovable, but instead make her feel more like a tangible human being.

The result is a perfect marriage of star and role, talent level and requirement of the movie, invisibility in the part and showy mimicry. There is much that is enjoyable and smart about Erin Brockovich, but surely, Roberts is what stands out most, even beyond Soderbergh's quietly perfect re-enactment of the beats and textures of a late-'70s social issues thriller. Which is not, of course, something to discount, for it's the foundation upon which Roberts is able to do her work.

Based on a true story, with moderate fidelity as such things go, Erin Brockovich tells us of a woman with three children by two ex-husbands who badly needs a job in the soft economy of the early 1990s. Erin Brockovich has no demonstrable skills, but she has drive, an uncommon quantity of common sense, and a defiant way of talking, which is how she finagles her way into a position as an assistant at a Southern California law firm under the bemused, cowed lawyer Ed Masry (Albert Finney). It is in this capacity that she uncovers, entirely by accident, a paper trail leading to the town of Hinkley, CA, where a great many people have come down with a great many terrible illnesses. This all tracks back to the chromium-poisoned groundwater, the result of misbehavior at a nearby power plant run by Pacific Gas & Electric. Her rage fired off, and with access to real power for the first time in her life as a member of the put-upon underclass, Brockovich strong-arms Masry into helping the Hinkley residents sue PG&E for damages, against all odds. Since this is a movie based on a true story, it is not terribly surprising that things go well.

It's all a perfectly-balanced concoction, blending angry anti-corporate populism with breezy audience-friendly quips and characterisations, filtered through Soderbergh's steady, controlled formalism. There are so many ways this could have gone terribly wrong, feeling overstuffed and tonally insane - and even in its current state, it returns a little too readily to scenes of Brockovich's thorny domestic life that sometimes go on a little too long - and not many at all that it could be as singularly enjoyable as it is, but that's what committed filmmakers will do for you. Soderbergh's slightly ascetic style, as shot by Edward Lachmann and edited by Anne V. Coates (I confess that I enjoy his movies more when he's doing all three jobs), keeps a certain sense of coolness towards Susannah Grant's rousing, poppy script; while the conventional story beats keep things warm and familiar and not too remote. Which maybe wouldn't be exactly what I'd want, as a Soderbergh junkie (not in 2000, but ever since...), and the parts of the film I am privately most satisfied by are the most auteur-friendly: the mixture of '70s-style realism in the settings, lighting, and camera movement with the director's beloved use of hardened color schemes (without going to any extremes, it's all pushed towards yellow, giving this incarnation of California a dusty, dried-up feel that marries well with the script's overtones of economic despair) especially marks it out as a Soderbergh film.

But it's not an auteurist statement; it's a popcorn movie filtered through a budding auteur's sensibility. Perhaps that's what gives it the very distinct kick it has as a bubbly entertainment. If most of his earlier films are, at some level, an experiment in bending narrative and genre, Erin Brockovich is their polar opposite: it's not a subversive crowd-pleaser but a genuine one, with its stated themes identical to its implications, and all of its subtleties designed to support the main feeling of watching it rather than push it in unexpected directions. But it is a genre experiment even so: a frothy entertainment grounded in real setting peopled by authentic humans whose reactions aren't always quite what we'd predict, and a political movie that actually seems to understand what makes people frustrated and angry at the way things are, rather than congratulating itself for having correct opinions that have been thoroughly validated by history. If Roberts's work here is emblematic of the new challenges facing movie stars in a culture with increasingly complicated expectations for its celebrities, Soderbergh's represents the ideal marriage of the best strengths of '90s indie cinema with Hollywood populism, and in both regards, Erin Brockovich is a shining example of everything promising about American moviemaking as it entered the 21st Century, even if much of that promise would ultimately go unfulfilled.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2000
-What Women Want is, to judge by the box office, Mel Gibson having the ability to peer into their minds
-Cinematographer Roger Deakins, working under directors Joel & Ethan Coen, sort of invents modern post-production digital coloring techniques in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
-Bryan Singer's effects-heavy X-Men film ushers in a wave of superhero epics that continues unabated for... well, at least 15 years, anyway

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2000
-Taiwan native Ang Lee makes the Taiwan/Hong Kong martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for a predominately American audience
-The second golden age of Mexican cinema hits its popular zenith with Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores perros
-Jafar Panahi gets in trouble with the Iranian government for the first of many times with the dangerously feminist The Circle

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: 35 SHOTS OF RUMSFELD

It's stretching a point to call The Unknown Known a "sequel" to The Fog of War, but they make for a hell of a double feature. At a sufficient remove, the films are all but identical: Errol Morris, one of the great pop-journalist documentarians of the modern world, interviews a controversial U.S. Secretary of Defense, allowing him to narrate the story of his life and career, and especially giving him room to explore the ramifications of the notorious war that flowered under his care; all driven by a repetitive, propulsive score (Philip Glass then, Danny Elfman now, with a sort of Elfman/Glass hybrid that's by light-years the most interesting thing he's composed in at least a decade). And if that was that, it would still make for a remarkable and greatly useful project: honestly, if Morris wanted to flesh out his "Portraits of the Defense Secretaries" series with all the rest of them, even the ones who didn't help plunge the United States into military quagmires, I'd be there for each and every one of them.

But here's what matters most: The Unknown Known isn't simply The Fog of War with Donald Rumsfeld subbed in for Robert McNamara. Taken as a pair, the films represent two wildly divergent ways of thinking about the past: McNamara is reflective and anxious for absolution, while Rumsfeld is patiently icy, expressing nothing that betrays a hint of curiosity or introspection about his tenure as George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense during the plagued early years of the Iraq War. Like the earlier film, it's a character study and political history rolled into one, but it might honestly be even more fascinating as cinema: for Rumsfeld proves to be a complicated, slippery subject, and the film frequently turns into a form of verbal fencing between him and the unseen but often-heard Morris, with the director constantly trying to find some new angle with which to attack the ex-secretary's one-sided storytelling, only to have Rumsfeld easily turn Morris aside with a rhetorical flourish that turns their conversation into a meditation on what words actually mean, all without ever loosening his toothy, disarming smile even slightly.

The Unknown Known delights in exploring sophistry and fine distinctions of language that Rumsfeld frequently seems to be making up on the spot (in fact, the famed quote that gives the film its title comes under the scrutiny of the subject itself: he claims that "unknown knowns" refers to one thing, at which Morris gently points out that Rumsfeld's original memo claims the exact opposite, at which point Rumsfeld furrows his brow, re-reads his original wording, and airily concludes that the memo was wrong, as idly as one might choose between two barely distinguishably shades of white paint). In the one flashy stylistic gesture that Morris ever makes, he occasionally throws up the dictionary definition of some key word Rumsfeld says onscreen, as Rumsfeld continues to talk, a kinetic and purposefully distracting way of pointing out that a) words have set meanings; b) those set meanings don't matter if you can talk fast enough to outpace them.

All this dancing with language clearly frustrates Morris, who has never been so audible, nor audibly annoyed, in any of his movies; no Fog of War is this, where the subject allows himself to be analysed, nor Mr. Death, where the subject doesn't realise that he is spilling his guts. Rumsfeld is guarded and artificial, refusing to speak one syllable that he hasn't vetted in his head. He does one thing, in fact, that I can't remember ever having seen in a documentary: when Morris holds before moving on, leaving a long conspicuous silence, Rumsfeld doesn't fill it. That's a rudimentary interview trick: let the subject fill an uncomfortable pause with an expansion or clarification or contradiction of what they just said. Morris waits, and Rumsfeld just gazes pleasantly at him - at us, since the film has been shot in the way of all recent Morris documentaries, where the subject appears to be looking the viewer in the face - and refuses to even twitch a muscle in his mouth. And Rumsfeld, one of the great politicians of the modern age at using journalists' tricks against them, clearly knows that's what he's doing: even without his expression changing, you can see his eyes smile.

What we get, therefore, is not a film about the Iraq War and how it was sold, nor a film about what the ramifications of the war have been in the intervening decade. And this has irritated some viewers, expecting any kind of historical accounting - even Morris tries when he can to put an editorial spin on things, most prominently when Rumsfeld is speaking about how "they" - meaning the Iraqi government - refused to take any steps to avoid war, while the director holds on a fish-eye panorama of Washington, D.C., clearly hoping to ironically make us think of the other "they" who didn't try very hard to avoid conflict. But's that simply not what The Unknown Known is about, and Morris does clearly realise this, by the way he structures most of the movie around word choice and language usage. It's a film about how powerful men represent themselves to the world and to history, selecting which facts to acknowledge and defining concepts in whatever way best suits their purposes. Morris is clearly no fan of Rumsfeld or his politics - a fact that informs the film's surprisingly funny last beat - but The Unknown Known doesn't fashion itself as a liberal message movie, nor as specifically anti-Rumsfeld.

Instead, the perspective adopted here seems to be not one of judgment, but observation: this is the way the mind of this man works, and it is why he was able to perform the actions he did that had the enormous international repercussions that we still live with. But that's not the film's focus: it has a timelessness that goes far beyond its failures to trick Donald Rumsfeld into acknowledging remorse. Indeed, the fact that Morris's subject was so perfect at obfuscating and stonewalling is what makes The Unknown Known far more interesting than just a mere contemporary issues documentary. It is about the nature of politics and power and how they are secured by wit and control, and as such it has a sick fascination that's not quite like any other documentary I have ever seen.

8/10

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QUENCHING FIRE

If nothing else, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 demonstrates with bleak efficiency that the director can only do so much. Francis Lawrence, making his second Hunger Game, still has all the chops he demonstrated with 2013's THG: Catching Fire and back further still to the 2007 adaptation of I Am Legend, once again capturing with admirable rawness the desperation and raggedness of life after apocalypse. But consistency and strength of tone, as vital as they are in a film of this sort, are powerless in the face of such a useless script as the one adapted by Peter Craig, Danny Strong, and Suzanne Collins from the worst half of the worst book of Collins's dystopian trilogy. Catching Fire and I Am Legend weren't the most perfectest screenplays ever crafted, mind you, but Mockingjay 1 doesn't just have an imperfect screenplay: it has an actively draggy, tepid screenplay that all but dares you to find anything pleasurable or meaningful in its wretched plonking arrangement and re-arrangement of characters on a chessboard that the folks up at marketing said we can't actually play with yet.

This comes as no surprise - did we not see the Part 1 in the title? The arbitrary division of one book into two halves hasn't been made for artistic reasons yet (even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the instigator of the trend and easily the most successful, is pokey and frequently aimless), and Mockingjay isn't about to be the one to start. It's crippled from the outset by the structure of Collins's novel, which is all wind-up until almost exactly the point that the film is obliged to end at (and "obliged" is exactly the word: with the decision to cut the story in two coming from the corporate overseers and not the writers, presumably, there was virtually no other point at which it made sense to do so, while leaving Mockingjay 2 with any chance of being functional in its own right), and if that means that I get to be yet another critic to wander out of the film with a wan expression and the words "...but nothing happened" dancing on my lips.

Well, fuck originality. Nothing does happen in Mockingjay, just a lot of discussions of how something might happen if, like, we just... nope, nevermind, there it went. The film starts at least several hours, maybe a few days after the close of Catching Fire (offering no opportunity to play catch-up: sorry newbies, you don't get to join in this time), with Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) dealing very poorly with life in the underground bunker called District 13, home to the only military-trained rebels left to oppose the future dictatorship ruling North America from its glitzy, tawdry Capitol. The leader of District 13, the unsmiling commander President Coin (Julianne Moore), wants Katniss to serve as the face of the rebellion's propaganda, in the form of the "Mockingjay"; so do the far warmer faces of Beetee (Jeffrey Wright), a tech whiz who helped smuggle Katniss out of the Capitol's murderous Hunger Games, and Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last completed role), a former Capitol bureaucrat, and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Katniss's friend from their now-destroyed home, who gets more screentime than in the previous two movies combined, and no longer seems to give a shit about becoming Katniss's boyfriend. For her part, Katniss just wants to find some quiet hole to abandon all the world, but when the Capitol starts releasing its own propaganda videos, starring Katniss's friend and fellow victim of the Games, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), she's finally jabbed into action. And so the filming begins, as Katniss and the other District 13 refugees get a firsthand look at just how wretched live in the 11 surviving colonies has become as President Snow (Donald Sutherland) of the Capitol begins mercilessly cracking down on the revolutions that have sprung up in the wake of Katniss's defiance during two successive Hunger Games.

So, so many words for such a simple concept! "An apolitical woman reluctantly agrees to help the propaganda wing of an unpleasantly militaristic rebellion" - that's it, that's the plot. Not the logline, not the plot of the first half: the plot of the whole goddamn movie. Francis Lawrence and the writers do manage to push that to a running time almost all the way up to two hours, without end credits, but it's not interesting in the slightest. Just about the only thing in the entirety of all this slow drip of incidents that's remotely intriguing is the film's depiction of radicalism in an era of mass media, and its limited suggestion (due to be fleshed out more in the sequel) that just because one side is obviously bad, that doesn't mean that the other side is obviously good. None of which is terribly insightful or politically savvy in any way, but it helps to recall that Mockingjay has a target audience of teenagers, for whom these concepts are more revelatory than they are, I hope and pray, to grown-ups who've spent more years consuming carefully massaged political media.

Dramatically, though, it's one long, low, wet fart, consisting of scene after scene of people talking glumly, interspersed with scenes where the walk outside among ruins and corpses, even more glumly. Within the film's first ten minutes, it has a sequence consisting of Hoffman, Moore, Wright, and Jennifer Lawrence all sitting at a table arguing: that's a shitload of acting talent to have on one set at the same time, and yet all they get to do is mushily voice wobbly concepts and aching exposition, and Francis Lawrence does nobody any favors by framing all of the actors mostly in one-shots, so we only barely even get to see them respond and react to each other. And with so little interesting to do, none of the film's many terrific actors has much to do, and so they largely end up relaxing: Jennifer Lawrence irritably meanders her way through all but the biggest scenes (and even those are inconsistent: she completely blows her delivery of the big "They can take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom" speech in the middle by biting off each word too harshly), and she's still far livelier and more emotionally present than Moore, playing a brittle military commander as a collection of war movie clichés, or Wright, playing the world's most visibly bored tech nerd ever (I think Hoffman is doing the best work in the film, but I can't trust that it's not just mourning talking there).

The only thing that brings any kind of meat to the film whatsoever comes in Francis Lawrence's gift for ushering us through a world: it's what was best in I Am Legend, and it's what's best here, with the caveat that the film's limited dramatic scope is matched by its limited physical range. We spend a lot of time in District 13, and it's a dim, grey place; pointedly so, and it's a good physical expression of the kind of unimaginative concrete hole that a rebellion like this would have to occupy, but there are only so many ways it can be shot before it starts to get needlessly monotonous. Meanwhile, the script has cut out all the details about how District 13 actually functions, so the impression we get is of a bunch of people in grey jumpsuits who spend all their days walking back and forth against grey walls. It's brutal.

Outside, though, Lawrence and his team are in terrific shape: there is a shot of charred skeletons that the filmmakers frame with hideous awe, and it's powerful enough to make up for quite a lot of bland talking. Other moments are similiarly high-impact, and even within the warren of District 13, there are some shots where the geometry and action combine to suggest a level of tension and activity that brings the movie, temporarily, to life (one shot of a stairwell, in particular, is absolutely terrific, energising cinema).

We can argue if this is the point: the film is using its form to dramatise the stilted, tunnel-vision world of District 13 by contrasting it with moments of dread and disgust, asking the viewer's own shift from boredom to horror to serve as the stand-in for the gulf between the peremptory efficiency of the rebellion's higher-ups and the actual human lives they're sacrificing. But Jesus, is that ever meeting the film more than halfway. No, Mockingjay 1 is, I think, exactly what it seems to be: a tedious exercise in place-setting that could have been easily handled in 30 minutes, enlivened solely because its director has a good eye for expressing the misery of a bombed-out world in a PG-13 context. The film's commitment to market concerns over storytelling ones is vividly obvious throughout all of its aimless, airless minutes, and the only pleasure to be extracted from watching it is the knowledge that the thing coming out a year from now almost certainly has to be better.

5/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1999: In which very old stories are given a very contemporary coat of paint, to the benefit of all

How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean "almost certainly, but let's not be smug know-it-all dicks about it") the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some of their most important films that year: Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, David Fincher leap to mind, while Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes, the Wachowskis, Kimberly Peirce, Alexander Payne and M. Night Shyamalan all made their debuts or had their big breakthrough. Technology advanced by leaps and bounds, starting with the Wachowskis' The Matrix and continuing through the year's highest-grossing film, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, with its groundbreaking use of all-CGI characters and CGI-augmented sets. Animation had a banner year, as did horror. American Pie brought back sex comedy in a big way, and we've had a golden age of raunchy humor ever since.

It's simply not possible to grab all of those threads and collect them in one essay, so I didn't bother trying. Instead, I elect to focus on just one of the many cinematic trends that passed through the bottleneck of 1999, the fad that dominated the second half of the decade of adapting classic works of literature into the high-stakes world of American high school. I confess that my choice was aided by the years and years I've been told that I absolutely needed, just needed right the fuck now, to finally see 10 Things I Hate About You. This was serendipitous: while I can't swear to its timeless important in the development of cinema the way the way I might about Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or even something totally disreputable like The Mummy, I don't think I could have consciously come up with anything that more perfectly captured what the late '90s felt like if that had been my sole intention. Also, everyone who told me was right: I did, in fact, needed to see it right the fuck now, because on top of everything else, it's one of the absolute best teen-driven romantic comedies that I have ever seen.

So, about that perfect embodiment of 1999: herewith, a motion picture that stars Julia Stiles, whose name is featured drawn in bold, sketchy style in magic marker colors during the opening credits, while the Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" bounces its way across the soundtrack. The film at least has the forward-thinking wisdom to make this last detail a joke: the undying Ladies dominate the soundtrack until until we see Stiles herself pull up to a red light next to a bunch of giddy, pop-loving girls, blasting Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" loud enough to drown them out. I cannot say whether the filmmakers planned for this to be a sign that her character, Kat Stratford, is completely awesome or a bitch; but it made me like her a lot, anyway.

The awesome/bitch divide is, in many ways, the heart and soul of 10 Things I Hate About You. For the film is a dressed-up retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, a late entry in the great explosion of William Shakespeare adaptations that flourished in the 1990s, on top of the "put it in high school" trend that had been purring along steadily since Clueless in 1995 (the Venn diagram combining these two trends also contains William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and O, and I believe nothing else; though it wouldn't do to not at least mention the modern dress Hamlet with Ethan Hawke). And The Taming of the Shrew brings with it an amount of baggage like no other Shakespeare play outside of The Merchant of Venice. To wit, the play's sexual politics, which may or may not be as straightforward as they seem (the amount of irony to be read into the last scene is not, that I am aware, a settled matter), but they seem pretty damn toxic. And this makes any modern treatment of the play a project that needs to be handled with delicacy, especially a modern treatment set among teenagers.

So while we are surely meant to recognise in Kat a certain stiffness and problematic standoffishness - there couldn't be a plot if she didn't have to be redeemed in some way - Karen McCullah & Kirsten Smith's screenplay also has to allow plenty of room for us to like her just the way she is, a blunt, tough-talking punk kid with an appealingly sharp tongue. To a certain degree, the writers game things by surrounding Kat with transparently unacceptable people: her sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) is a shrill, bubble-headed twit (established early and firmly in a beautiful line of character-establishing dialogue: "I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack"), and her father Walter (Larry Miller) is a deranged anti-sex lunatic, owing to his work with pregnant teens. It's impossible not to like the "bad girl" when the people she's being contrasted with are so immensely vacuous. And so we end up not with Kate the Shrew, but with something more complicated and ambivalent: Kat the Riot Grrrl but also Kat with the Self-Negating Priorities. The character is a bit artless, and Stiles's clipped performance in the film's early going doesn't do much to flesh out the humanity in a distinctly artificial part, but it's perhaps the best that could be done.

Anyway, the film mostly follows the story play quite closely, doing a decent job of finding analogues for things that need updating: the newcomer to Padua High is one Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who falls hard for Bianca on day 1, only to find that her father has forbidden both of his daughters to date before college. Except that he's just changed the rule a little bit, in a bit of nasty-minded sophistry worthy of Cinderella's stepmother: Bianca can date only when older sister Kat has a boyfriend. And since Kat has decided that she's better than every other person attending Padua and would rather die than touch any of them, this is as good as a chastity belt. Except, that Cameron and his friend/co-conspiracist Michael (David Krumholtz) come up with a plan: hint that his his rival for Bianca's hand, Joey (Andrew Keegan), should pay to hire somebody to ask Kat out. And the target is the sullen, alienated bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), one of the only people at Padua who can go toe-to-toe with Kat on her snarling antisocial nastiness.

If 10 Things I Hate About You ends up falling into a lot of the narrative rhythms of any old romcom, this is at least partially because Shakespeare's plays did a lot to invent those rhythms: not the grimly de rigueur bit where the third act needs to be ushered in by the discovery of a terrible secret taken somewhat out of context, and the lovers have a fake fight (something that wasn't as ossified in 1999 as it is now; I think 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is what carved it into stone). I expect that nobody could be genuinely surprised by the direction the plot headed, even if they hadn't read the play, but formulas do not need to aplogise for themselves when they're executed well; this is a lesson that the works of Shakespeare teach us if they can teach us anything (after all, all but three of his plays were remakes). And in 10 Things I Hate About You, the formulas work splendidly, thanks largely to the energy with which McCullah & Smith draw their characters, and the way Gil Junger directs his awfully solid cast into a breezy, bantery register of dancing at each other with salty quips. It proves once again something that should have been obvious since the 1930s, but never seems to stick for very long these days: romantic comedies are best when they play as a series of verbal battles of bright, staccato dialogue, and then that dialogue is as filthy as the circumstances will allow. In the screwball era, that meant high-concept innuendo. In the case of the PG-13 10 Things I Hate About You, that means a lot of surprisingly bold chatter about sex that avoids feeling raunchy solely because the actors always speak their lines like they're trying to score points against a debate opponent, rather than because they actually seem to be thinking much about sex. Which I mean as a compliment.

There's too much naturalism in the film, particularly in the form of Ledger's bracingly caustic performance (it was the film that put him on the map, and while it's not at all one of his best performances, it's obvious throughout that he's got some real acting chops, far beyond the usual teenybopper pretty guy), for it to feel like a long-lost '30s film made about '90s teens, though honestly, the pacing of it is much closer to that than to the logy romcoms of the modern era. For all that the hook and the soundtrack make it sound like a generic teen-audience cash-in, the film is shockingly committed to functioning as a character-driven comedy, and when Stiles starts to loosen up as her character gets more flexible, it turns out to be a pretty delightful one.

Genre will be what it will be, and there's nothing surprising in 10 Things I Hate About You at the level of writing, and nothing remotely inspired or memorable at the level of film craftsmanship: it has the stolidity of the modern romcom, cleanly lit and squarely focused. But it's got good bones: a sturdy structure on which well-built jokes are arrayed, delivered with in-character nuance by a relaxed, enjoyable cast (also appearing: a delightfully curt Allison Janney and a frightfully fresh-faced Gabrielle Union). Nothing world-changing, and in 1999, films that were content to be the best piece of finely-tuned entertainment they could be seemed about as unambitious as at any other time in history. But for all its period trappings in slang, in style, and in tone, the film has aged well: good meat-and-potatoes filmmaking is never easy, and it's certainly never disposable. 10 Things I Hate About You is low-key and has small goals, but the way in which it meets those goals is in line with the best tradition of audience-pleasing Hollywood craftsmanship all through the years.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1999
-South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut becomes the highest-grossing adults-only animated film of all time
-Samuel L. Jackson makes a memorable exit from Deep Blue Sea
-Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is one of the largest hits ever greenlit on the basis of its predecessor's cult success on home video

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1999
-Filthy-minded Spanish melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar suddenly has an enormous critical smash with the sublime All About My Mother
-Kang Je-gyu's Shiri is the first homegrown megablockbuster made in the rejuvenating South Korean film industry
-French madman Leos Carax makes certainly his hardest, and maybe his best film, Pola X

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