A GIRL AND HER ALIEN

All things being equal, I am pleased that Home didn't turn out to be the movie to kill off DreamWorks Animation. I'd have been even more pleased if Home could have managed that feat while not sucking, but then, there had to be a reason why DreamWorks ended up on a cliff's edge in the first place, and it’s fun to believe that consistently churning out exhaustingly formulaic kids' films featuring ill-chosen celebrity casts and instantly-dated music cues could be part of that reason.

That being said, even by DreamWorks standards, the celebrities in this go-round are especially awful, and the music cues particularly distracting. It's unfortunate, because the bones of a stronger film are there. It looks pretty good: favoring a calm, pastel color palette mixed with soft lines and an old-fashioned, squishy approach to character animation, all of which goes a long way to mitigating what could easily be a grim and bleak scenario. The character design is a bit questionable, particularly the humans, but humans have been the Achilles' heel of DreamWorks/PDI animated features for as long as they've existed, and the ones in Home are no more stiff and soullessly robotic than the ones in Megamind or Turbo, and quite a great deal less so than the shuffling corpses of the Shrek films. The production design, meanwhile, is downright enticing, based as it is on an alien culture made up entirely of circles and curves, leading to plenty of smooth surfaces for the eye to glide around.

A pity, then, that Home ends up centering its lovely, if a bit simplistic world (it feels more than slightly like a collection of baby toys given life) on two of the worst performances in the annals of DreamWorks - the studio that has sucked every molecule of distinguishing personality from the voices of such diverse actors as Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ryan Reynolds, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, and Tina Fey. There's quite a wide range of talent represented by those names, but all of them are better than Jim Parsons, noted for his role on one of contemporary television's most obnoxious comedies, and Rihanna, a pop singer noted for not being an actor at all (what she was up to in Battleship I shall not dignify with the rich history that attains to the word "acting"). To be strictly fair, Parsons's performance collapses as least as much because of the wretched things screenwriters Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember have arranged for him to say as because of the choices he made in saying them, but in both cases, the effect is about the same: it takes only a few lines to grow tired of both leads and their characters, and that leaves an awful lot of movie to spend in the company of a deeply unpleasant pair of protagonists.

The hastily pencilled-in backstory - treated infinitely better in last year's prologue short film-cum-stealth trailer Almost Home - is that a race of five-legged purple aliens about a meter or less in height, the Boov, have colonised Earth as part of their longstanding strategy of running like hell across the universe to stay away from a much more powerful species called the Gorg. Our story takes place on the very day that the Boov, having shunted all the humans on the planet to a reservation in the Australian desert, are ready to take residence in the vacated human habitations of the rest of the world. Naturally enough, in this species that fetishises conformity and impersonal behavior, one and only one Boov is a happy, optimistic fuck-up, and his name is Oh (Parsons). Oh will teach us many things over the course of the movie, the chief one of which is that the children's film plot where a main character doesn’t fit into his repressive society because he’s accident-prone and non-specifically "different" isn't getting any damn fresher. But anyway, Oh manages to cross paths with Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (Rihanna), perhaps the only human who didn't end up captured and sent to Australia, and who has since focused on tracking her missing mother (Jennifer Lopez, turning in a perfectly fine and completely anonymous performance). Along for the ride is Tip's curly-tailed cat Pig, who is, in fact, one of our better cartoon cats of recent vintage, and a clear argument in Home's favor.

The scenario and world Home creates beg for a more interesting story than the latest in an infinite chain of stories where two outcasts bond despite one of them being criminally annoying (I have not read the book by Adam Rex upon which the film was based, The True Meaning of Smekday, but I gather it to be that more interesting story). And even that musty old cliché deserves better than what Parsons and Rihanna throw at it: Parsons managing to be cloyingly sweet and horrifically smug simultaneously, while stressing all the lame comic awkwardness of the tortured Yoda-ese that the writers have whipped up for him. Impressively, it never recedes into the background, no matter how much we hear of it; every new line is a fresh hell. Rihanna, at least, is just vacant; flagrantly miscast as a 12-year-old with what must be a two-pack-a-day smoking habit in order to have such a low voice, the singer speaks lines that she twists into things that absolutely sound like what happens when the director says "you're mad! you think that something is funny!", so at the very least, she correctly indicates what our emotional response is meant to be, even if the rote way she gets there makes it inordinately hard to have that response. The biggest problem is that there are points where actual Rihanna songs are played diegetically in the movie, and Rihanna singing and Rihanna talking sound exactly the same, which raises the distracting possibility that this throaty tween is also a major pop star, or maybe that she just has a tape of herself that she listens to in the car. Neither of these possibilities answer the unforgivable writing conceit that her name is Gratuity and her nickname is Tip, but I can at least imagine that kind of affectation from a pop star in the real world. Incidentally, listening to Rihanna forces Oh to discover that Boov have an irresistible tendency to dance that they never indulge in, and if the movie seems to turn into a Doomsday countdown to a random film-ending dance party at this point, congratulations on knowing your animation studios.

Oh and Tip being such unendurable traveling companions, Home is fairly well doomed as an entertaining story. The writing isn't horrible for DreamWorks - potty jokes are kept to a minimum and pop culture references are limited mostly to a tedious pun on "Busta Lime" that the writers love so much that they keep having characters within the film laugh at it, even ones who have no in-world justification for having heard of Busta Rhymes - and the story is boring and predictable down to the smallest beats, but not meaningfully harmful. It's a tragedy that the film wastes Steve Martin on a small comic role as the Boov leader, but it's not like he was trying to do anything interesting or funny with the part. So it is, really and truly, a very ordinary film in almost all respects; but those leads! They're as ordinary as dental surgery, and more than enough to turn a simple, straightforward kiddie comedy with some pretty design and more fun animation than I'd have expected from this company into a gnashing grind.

5/10

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APRIL 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

We're meant to be warming up for summer, but the whole month feels a little bit empty, from where I stand. Not even any good-looking limited releases, really. But it has the merit of opening big with one of the popcorn movies I'm most excited about all year. And in that respect, it is a good warm-up.


3.4.2015

If you'd asked me as recently as 2009 if I thought that the day would come when a movie in the Fast & Furious franchise could possibly have been one of my most eagerly anticipated films of a year, I'd have found that a totally ridiculous question (I'd also have wondered why in the hell you thought the franchise would still be around six years later). And yet here we are at Furious 7, and after two movies that flawlessly combined Looney Tunes physics, dumbfounding practical effects, and heist movies, I'll be onboard with the further adventures Vin Diesel and family for a good while yet. The one big concern: it's only seven minutes longer than Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, but 137 minutes is a gross length for what amounts to a live-action cartoon about people punching each other with cars. At any rate, I don't see an outcome where this doesn't prove to be the best wide release of the month.


10.4.2015

The annual Nicholas Sparks adaptation, The Longest Ride, apparently makes the argument that love affairs divided by one man's addiction to rodeo riding are equally as noble as love affairs divided by World War II. Which is an argument that one can make, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Clouds of Sils Maria starts its U.S. arthouse tour, and I would not expect any of you to believe me when I call Olivier Assayas & Juliette Binoche's latest a total flub enlivened only by Kristen Stewart an more than I believed it when I was told it by others.


17.4.2015

In a month notable for its anemic release slate, all of a sudden we get no fewer than four wide releases dropping all at once. The biggest will undoubtedly be Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, because you can never exhaust the possibilities of a fat man falling down. Or being kicked by a horse and turned into a shitty visual effect, a fucking terrible gag lovingly showcased in the film's trailer, which is my current reigning "I can't wait for the film to open so I don't have to see it in front of every movie" pick. Fighting it for dominance, we find the tacky and gimmicky-sounding horror film about social media, Unfriended, and Disney's newest animal documentary, given the dubious title Monkey Kingdom. And then there's Child 44, for which I have not personally seen a shred of advertising, and the hook - chasing a serial killer in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union - sounds a bit hacky, but Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman headline. And even if we can't always trust either of those men, surely we can trust them both?


24.4.2015

After years of lingering in development hell, the paranormal romantic melodrama The Age of Adaline finally has attained a form where it can be released, and we can all bask in its vaguely Benjamin Button-ey tale of a woman who stops aging, and then falls in love with a man and his grandson. And this is kind of the opposite of a Blart 2: Bigger and Blarter for me, since I've been seeing the trailer for this in front of everything as well, but it's one of those deals where it feels like I have to catch it, just to see what the hell. Also falling into "what the hell" territory: Little Boy, one of those faith-based movies about a little boy (imagine that!) who prays to move a mountain in order to bring his father back from World War II. Presumably, this makes sense.

It's not opening wide and I haven't the slightest intention of seeing it, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that Russell Crowe is making his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, featuring no less a movie star than Russell Crowe.

And since we live in a global world, I will observe without comment that 2015's pre-ordained Biggest Box-Office Smash (Unless That Space Picture This Christmas Beats It), The Avengers: Age of Ultron, shall be available in most of the world that isn't the United States as of this weekend.

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TOY STORY

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

NB: Thanks to the work of curator Garrett Gilchrist, this film can be seen in nine parts at the indispensible Thief Archive on YouTube

Nothing titled Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure should have the pedigree that Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure possesses. It boasts what's probably the single most impressive roster of animation talent of any single feature film of the 1970s: among its lead animators we find the master Art Babbitt, exiled from Disney more than thirty years prior, the living legend Grim Natwick, the onetime Looney Tunes artists Gerry Chiniquy and Emery Hawkins. Tissa David became the first woman to serve as supervising animator for her work on the titular Raggedy Ann; the film was the first credit for future animation icon Eric Goldberg. And these people were all gathered together under the general guidance of Richard Williams, one of history's great animators and animation buffs gathered into one being - it is surely due entirely to Williams's desire that this be a showcase piece for his murder's row of under-appreciated and under-used talents that the film opens with individual title cards crediting the supervising animator of each of the main characters, a rare and perhaps even totally unprecedented gesture.

That Williams should be so eager to put the animation crew front and center is a generous and welcome correction to the broad sense that animation just kind of happens, at an industrial level; but it also implies the big problem with Raggedy Ann & Andy, which is that it would never, ever have occurred to me to first identify it as anything other than an animation showcase. The film was dumped in Williams's lap after the first director, the Warner and UPA vet Abe Levitow, died in 1975, and the production companies had firm, intractable ideas for what they wanted the project to be. Those production companies being an unholy alliance between Indiana-based publishing firm Bobbs-Merrill and the multinational telecom/manufacturing conglomerate ITT, neither of which had ever been involved in filmmaking before, and so perhaps had done better to keep their opinions to themselves. But no, Williams was given strict rules and no ability to wiggle out of some of the things he'd have liked to avoid, like scaling back on the almost non-stop musical numbers. And while it is deeply gratifying that Williams gave such an ambitious showcase to so many talented artists, the constant sense one has while watching the film is that the director was more or less giving up on the project, and focusing in on the animation simply because it's the part that interested him.

What we know now that was certainly not common knowledge in 1977, is that Williams had already started work on The Thief and the Cobbler, his never-quite-completed passion project that would have been perhaps the most artistically ambitious and complex animated feature ever produced in the world if he'd been able to see it to completion (it was taken away from him in the early 1990s and crudely wrapped up, and that's going to have to do for a summary of the phenomenally interesting and endlessly complicated history of that project). With that in mind, it's a lot easier to see Raggedy Ann & Andy working as something rather like an exercise reel, allowing Williams and his animators to try out small versions of some of the things that he had in mind for that other feature. For there is a mind-blowing quantity of difficult, sprawling, boundlessly creative artwork in this film, enough so that, not for the last time in his career, Williams would be kicked off the project once it became clear that his fussy perfectionism was going to make it impossible for it to meet its hoped-for release during the 1976 holiday season (it came out the following April).

At the level of craft, it was unquestionably worth it. There are obvious show-off moments, like Hawkins's stupendous sequence of the Greedy (voiced by Joe Silver), a flowing amorphous blob of sentient taffy that fills the anamorphic Panavision frame with constant, unpredictable movement, its face and arms constantly vanishing and popping out in a mesmerising nightmare of fluid, organic animation. It is, as a stand-alone sequence, perhaps the most technically impressive and audacious work of animation to come out of United States in the 1970s. But there are also far smaller and more silent moments that find the crew doing their absolute best to push the artform out to the edges: needless little swoops of the synthetic camera that require the repositioning of the entire background from a new angle, something that barely registers while you're watching, except maybe as a way to bring us in closer with the characters, but the sheer quantity of manpower required to make it means that it's not some little tossed-off thing; it's a mission statement, a brag, and a test to add something real and new to the animator's toolkit.

Viewed as a collection of such moments, and more general excellence in character animation - Babbitt's work bringing to life the Camel with Wrinkled Knees (voiced by Fred Sluthman) is a particular delight - Raggedy Ann & Andy is a damned miracle, though in the early going, when we meet the title characters and their friends in a playroom owned by a live-action girl named Marcella (Claire Williams, the director's daughter, and an animation professional in her own right), there's a definite tendency to err on the side of too much busy moving and twitching, a tetchy kind of over-acting that reminds me of the weaker passages in Don Bluth's films or the itchy shuffling that plagues Ralph Bakshi's 1978 The Lord of the Rings. Viewed instead as, you know, a movie, and the reasons for Williams's attempts to shove it in any different direction become clear. It's not exactly that the script for Raggedy Ann & Andy, adapted by Patricia Thackray and Max Wilk from characters invented by Johnny Gruelle in the 1910s, is a disaster of storytelling; given that it was the 1970s and psychedelia was everywhere, envisioning the world of toys come to life as a series of non-sequitur journeys through hellscapes in which nothing makes sense and everyone has malicious intent isn't totally out of the question. It doesn't make for a very charming or inviting children's movie, though. And it's rather conspicuously allergic to letting anything happen: Raggedy Ann (Didi Conn) and her brother Andy (Mark Baker) simply bounce from event to event without making any kind of impact on the world around them or being impacted. It's Alice in Wonderland stuff, only without the wit, and exclusively reliant on the animators to give it any imagination.

That's more a curiosity than a flaw. The only real limitation to the film is its soundtrack, composed by Sesame Street music guru Joe Raposo. This would seemingly be a surefire qualification, and yet the songs in this self-styled musical adventure are a generally sluggish lot, with only the Camel's mournful country song "Blue" actually making a claim for greatness. There are some fun notions - Raggedy Ann's theme, "I'm Just a Rag Dolly" rather sensibly turns out to be in ragtime - and a whole lot of overly vague lyrics that don't mesh well as a continued statement of ideas, and only rarely feel like they correspond to the onscreen action. Movies have survived dodgy soundtracks, but with some 15 numbers spread through its 84 minutes, Raggedy Ann & Andy is musical far more often than it's not; that's a lot of time to grow bored and even peevish at the songs that are the primary storytelling mechanism of the project.

What mostly registers from the movie, though, is its unfettered weirdness; and this is something that will be felt differently by every viewer. For myself, I was delighted by the way the animators chased their ideas down to extreme degrees without holding anything back, seeing how the discipline learned from Disney and Warner could produce some exquisitely warped surrealism. The lack of restraint can hurt the film at times: there's a layover with the tiny, angry King Koo Koo (voiced by Marty Brill and supervised by Chiniquy; the flickers of Warner-trained animation that bubble up in his reaction shots and and pauses are marvelous) that stops the film dead, and there are characters in the playroom, the tandem-dancing Twin Penny dolls, whose sing-song line deliveries and habit of punctuating their statements with a little jazzy riff are the stuff of pure horror. It's not a film that feels disciplined in any way but the draftsmanship, and that can get horribly draining, especially with such inert characters to serve as our guides (and only one vocal performance, Conn's, that adds much in the way of an interesting personality). If I had first seen this film as a child, I think it would have given me severe nightmares. But I first saw it as a crusty old adult animation buff, and in that capacity, the things about it that strike me as rare and totally essential and beautiful vastly outweigh the sometimes baffling missteps it makes a work of narrative entertainment. In its way, it's an outright masterpiece, though I'll concede that I have no real idea of what that way might be.

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WHERE LOVE GHOST

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

In requesting a review of Paheli as part the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser, K. Rice noted that I've never once in almost ten years reviewed a Bollywood film, and wondered if that was due to my dislike of the industry's redundancy and artlessness, or if I'd simply never seen any of the things. It is with a fair degree of shame that I confess it is the latter: as of Paheli, I believe I've now seen all of three Bollywood movies. It's a curious blindspot, one that I know to be shared by many other hardcore cinephiles; while nobody really serious about international filmmaking could get away with being unfamiliar with Iranian cinema, or South Korean, or Filipino, or sub-Saharan African, Bollywood doesn't "count" for some reason, despite being one of the oldest and most consistently prolific film industries in the world, and despite an influx of stylistic touches cribbed from it in European and American films in the 21st Century. There's a great deal that could be explored about this cultural ghettoisation, but I'm bringing it up at this moment mostly to explain why, for the rest of the review, I'm going to have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about.

Stripped down to its elements, Paheli is a folk tale; it admits as much, explicitly in its final line and implicitly elsewhere. So, once upon a time, Lachchi (Rani Mukerji) married Kishanlal (Shah Rukh Khan), the son of the wealthy merchant Bhanwarlal (Anupam Kher). She was extremely happy about this, and all of her girlfriends were happy for her, and the whole world seemed happy for her, to judge from the bright colors blowing their way off the screen. And something else was happy, too: while the bridal party stopped over on their way back to Kishanlal's home, a ghost spotted her, and was so taken with her beauty and joyful mien that it started following her, first in the form of animals. But the happiness was about to come crashing down, for Lachchi discovered on her wedding night that Kishanlal was leaving on a five-year trading journey first thing in the morning. And he was so busy with preparing for it, and thinking hard thoughts about money and business, that he couldn't be bothered to consummate his marriage. Thus the abandoned bride was devastated and wept, and the ghost made its move, taking Kishanlal's form to seduce Lachchi, after confessing its true identity. And thus, after four years of living as husband and wife - the ghost using ghost-gold to keep Bhanwarlal from looking too closely at this rather suspicious turn of events - Lachchi found herself pregnant, and the real Kishanlal came home ahead of schedule. And this caused the insoluble riddle that the word "paheli" translates as.

The film occupies, for nearly all of its 140 minutes (which I take to be very much on the short side for the kind of production this is), two apparently incompatible states. As a piece of storytelling, Paheli is grandly presentational and flat, starring essential personality types done in bold, thick outlines rather than psychologically plausible characters, working through big rich, showy emotional states. And while it's doing this, it's exploring themes of social obligation and female empowerment and sexuality with understated subtlety. Mukerji is called upon to give a performance that's less a matter of finding her way inside a character than striking poses with names like Joy and Ardor and Fortitude; and while she's doing this, she's also called upon to believably play a concept of upended gender roles that needs to feel like it's coming out of a character's head. It's an odd mixture of the highly generic and the highly particular, all the odder because neither Mukerji nor Paheli seem to notice or care. Perhaps because of this lack of visible strain, the mixture ends up working perfectly; it's full of bold, proclaimed moments that all add up to something smaller and more delicate than any of them individually.

Perhaps also because the theatricality on display in the movie ends up standing in for character development: it's fair to suggest that things like costumes (which are extravagantly artificial) and color palette (which favors heavy saturation and lightness) are the medium through which Paheli tells its story, rather than what its characters think about what's going on. And as far as that goes, director Amol Palekar does miraculous work in maintaining the film's visual splendor, and using it to express the richness of the character's feelings with intensity that, were it all dumped on the actors, would leave things feeling faintly ridiculous and overheated. Of course, Paheli is overheated, to be strictly fair; and even a little ridiculous. But the way that Palekar uses the sprawling spectacle and sudden musical numbers to focus our attention on the subjective experience of of the characters, rather than letting the style roll heavily over the film (which I have found, in my minute knowledge of Bollywood, happens much too easily). Palekar is able to move from big expressions of delight to big expressions of morbidity without any whiplash, because he's already done such a good job of convincing us that bigness in all its modes is the natural state of his film.

The result may be lavish and gaudy, but convincing in its gaudiness, if you will; the notion of musicals the world over is that they represent the overflowing of feelings so strong that they can only be sung, and Paheli carries that over to all the trappings of musicals, its sets and design and baldly implausible plot. It's all wholly inauthentic and implausible, and it knows that we recognise it as such; so it welcomes us over, asks us to have a good time enjoying all the dizzy nonsense, and then while we're enjoying ourselves, shows us through a parade of strong feelings both good and bad, and asks us to think about the lives of its characters, and how sad it is for them that, in the "proper" order of things, they're not allowed to have those feelings. It's how the film sells its social message without seeming even vaguely a message film; it's what forgives a final plot development that should be all means come across as sour and hateful, turning our heroes into sociopaths. The enthusiastic lack of persuasive realism and the strong emotional authenticity make for a most rewarding combination; the thing acts fizzy and shallow, and yet it ends up feeling like there's truth to it. Now, I repeat myself: I have no fucking clue if this is some kind of exemplary Bollywood film or if ten films like this come out every month (in my uselessly small sample size, this is the clear standout). And I don't know if I'm responding to its quality, or its novelty, for this is nothing like a normal Western film. But even at its most frustratingly erratic, I found it all rather entrancing, and never less than extraordinarily easy on the eyes. So take that as you will.

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NO HAY BANDA

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

Spoilers are going to be crawling up and down this post like ants. If you haven't seen Mulholland Dr., know that I'd give it a perfect 10/10, and if I were making a list of the films of the 21st Century that are essential viewing for anyone even moderately interested in the art form, this would be jockeying for very top spot.

There was a time when any discussion about David Lynch's magnificent Mulholland Dr. would automatically turn into an attempt to piece out exactly what the fuck is happening within it. Having been right in the thick of the film's original release in 2001, I took part in more than my fair share of such conversations, and I am pleased that, in the interevening 13 years and change, cinephile culture has arrived at two basic groups of theories that represent the consensus "solutions" of the movie's mysteries ("it's all a dream" and "it's two versions of the same story in alternate universes" - I much prefer the former, but the film mostly works the same either way), thus freeing us all to talk about anything else. For I cannot think of a film that more clearly demonstrates the truth of Roger Ebert's dictum that what a movie is about is less important than how it is about that thing. In fact, the how of Mulholland Dr. is almost totally inseparable from the what - it is a film that burns its artistic themes and believes about life deep into the bones of its story structure, its acting technique, its sound design, its editing. Unpack the gnarled narrative, and you find a potboiler about desperation among wannabe actresses. Unpack the aesthetic, and you find one of the best - no, fuck it, the best autocritique of cinema as a medium that has yet been made.

But just in the interest of having something to talk about, let's start with the plot. And I mean "plot" in its strictest sense: what events are depicted onscreen and in what order we see them. "Story" is a different matter. "Story", in Mulholland Dr., is puking its guts up behind the dumpster around back of a little coffee shop. What happens is that a woman (Laura Elena Herring, about as far as you can go on the Prestige-O-Meter from her 1990 feature debut, The Forbidden Dance - though not, actually, giving much better of a performance) survives a murder attempt that's interrupted by a car crash on Mulholland Dr., the cliff road overlooking Los Angeles from the north. She staggers away from the crash without her memory, and finds solace in an abandoned apartment; the next day, she's found by Betty (Naomi Watts, in her never-bettered starmaking role), who was coming to stay there at the invitation of her actress aunt, currently shooting a project in Canada. Betty herself wants to be an actress, but she finds herself dividing her time between job hunting and trying to help this mystery woman - who calls herself "Rita", after spotting the name on a Gilda poster - determine her own identity and figure out whether she's in any danger, as she clearly feels without being to articulate it. Meanwhile, a film director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is being leaned on hard by a mysterious cabal to cast an unknown named Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his picture, The Sylvia North Story. There are scattered scenes throughout in which characters who seem momentarily important simply evaporate away, sometimes after interacting with one of the two main threads of the story and sometimes not. Eventually, Betty and Rita track Rita's past back to a place called Club Silencio, where notional reality is shown to be a fake, and the film restarts itself as the story of Diane Selwyn (Watts), who is having a very rough time dealing with the fact that her girlfriend, Camilla Rhodes (Herring) has gotten the lead role that Diane wanted herself, apparently by fucking the director, Adam Kesher (Theroux).

There are a lot of things that the movie can be about, depending on how hard you want to run it through an analytical wringer, but the one thing it's always about is that motions pictures and the industry that produces them are toxic shit-holes of lies. And nowhere is that more evident than in the famously insoluble mystery. It would be trivially easy to re-edit the film using all the footage it contains and only the footage it contains in its present form, basically just swapping the concluding fifth of the movie (where Watts plays Diane) to the beginning, and in the blink of an eye you've made thoroughly comprehensible story: a woman is thrown over by her lover, so she hires a hitman to murder her; the night after the job is done she has a fantastic dream dripping with symbolism, in which she and her now-dead girlfriend lived the exact happy life she wanted, and she is herself a promising, desirable young star, though hints and details of her guilt keep nudging in. Awakening, she is so horrified that she kills herself, and her last thoughts are flashes of that pleasant dream. Now, that does require ignoring the fact that Mulholland Dr. was born a TV pilot for ABC that the network passed on (aghast that they hired David Lynch to make a David Lynch show for them, upon which he did so), which included none of the Watts-as-Diane material. But the film has been re-worked from the material originally worked into that pilot enough to make them distinctly unique properties even in the places where they overlap, so writing off the story's past life seems fair. Even necessary, given the amount of its plot that's all about writing off personal history that gets in the way of a pleasing reality.

The point of Mulholland Dr., of course, is that it does not make this one simple shift, and that proves to be all the difference. Instead of an almost boringly straightforward Freudian psychodrama, the film turns into a morass of almost unnavigable narrative mysteries, breaking down the idea that films represent some kind of Thing That Actually Happened by inviting the viewer to bring together all sorts of details that seem like the must be Important Clews - I mean, if they weren't important, then why would Lynch have included them? - only to find that most of what happens in Mulholland Dr. is baffling nonsense. You can do what I just did, and mentally re-edit the movie, to make it relatively easy piece of dream analysis where we know that we're picking apart the details of a symbolic dream. Or you can catalogue all the places where Rita seems to take over or recede from reality, and use those as evidence for how it's a film she's dreaming into existence in real time. Or you can leave the movie entirely and discard all of the random effluvia as detritus that would have been explored in the full TV series, and Lynch left it in just because it was fun and stylish, in which case you will forgive me for accusing you of being kind of boringly literal.

But no matter how you try to square Mulholland Dr., you're ultimately trying to compensate for the fact that David Lynch has handed you a broken movie. And since we are accustomed to movies being things that aren't broken, but only appear to be in the interests of shocking us, we busily set ourselves to the task of fixing it. This is our habit as viewers trained by Hollywood to watch Hollywood film. But really, isn't Lynch only actually saying, "this thing is broken - I broke it on purpose". Five years later, he'd be more explicit in doing the same thing with Inland Empire, which not only breaks cinematic structure, but cinematic form,* recklessly chopping up hideous digital video footage into a frenzied slurry of anti-cinema. That film took place in Hollywood, too, which is one of the closest things Mulholland Dr. has to a tell. The other is its lynchpin scene at Club Silencio, in which sound and editing march right up and announce themselves: do you hear how a record soundtrack can lie to you, the film asks, and do you see how dissolves can be used to make you think that discontinuous motion is continuous? It is the equivalent of a magician who confidently states "I'm going to trick you now", and then does so.

The two most important developments in the plot - Betty and Rita's sexual encounter, and the unlocking of the blue box that collapses the Betty/Rita plot, by eliminating Betty completely and consuming Rita - are both preceded by moments where the film openly breaks itself, in fact. Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And then, in the cheekiest movie reference in a film saturated with them, their lovemaking is followed by a variation of the classic "Persona shot". So it's not like all this is an accident.

Like Persona, Mulholland Dr. isn't just a breakdown of the sacred rule of narrative filmmaking, that the viewer should never realise that they're watching constructed reality. It's a breakdown of form that mirrors the breakdown of personality that its plot - in whatever interpretation or lack of interpretation we want to describe that plot - depicts. The film itself is having a psychotic split from reality, in effect. Whatever that reality might be: there are at least three "realities" in Mulholland Dr., leading off with the banal, cheery reality of Betty's plotline, with the corny dialogue and campy acting that dominate it, the shiny, sparkly clothes she wears, the sexualised parody of the stock "some nobody gives a dynamo reading, is discovered and made famous" scenario, and the fact that her fucking name is "Betty". We know Lynch; we've seen Blue Velvet; we get that he likes travestying '50s tropes by exaggerating them and filling them full of rot and perversity. So the "Betty" third of Mulholland Dr. is easy to read as a joke. But it's maybe not so easy to read the "Adam" plot the same way, with its menacing lighting and quavering Angelo Badalamenti score, its terrifying dwarf puppetmaster played by Michael J. Anderson, whom Lynch employed in Twin Peaks to let us know in the most disturbing way possible that the gum we like was going to come back in style. Since we know that we're watching a Lynch film, we're ready for the darkness, the screeching horror injected into banal spaces, the migraine-inducing flickering light. And Mulholland Dr. comes along and wipes it away just like it does the corny scenes with Betty. And what does that leave us with? The plain style and grit (I gather that the new footage used to complete the pilot was on a different stock for practical reasons, but the texture of the newer material is certainly less polished than the rest, whatever the cause) of the "Diane" sequence, the "real" sequence, the "explanation". Which Mulholland Dr. also includes in its collapse of signifiers and narrative clarity near the end.

The idea behind Mulholland Dr. isn't that some movies are realer than others; it's that movies are constructs designed by liars. Ever since he smashed in a TV to kick off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's movies have all been some kind of commentary on the unreliability of classic cinematic forms - yes, even the sedate The Straight Story, which depicts all the moments that most movies cover in a dissolve or montage, and barely cares about its nominal dramatic stakes - it's just that Mulholland Dr. is the one where he actually did it in the context of movie stars and movie-making. The film's slantwise namesake, Sunset Blvd., made waves in 1950 by reveling in the fact that the people who made movies were selfish, greedy, arrogant pricks; a half-century later, that baton had been picked up by many people in many places, but virtually nobody had ever done a better job than Lynch and his note-perfect crew of extending that bilious observation to the movies themselves, which are here supposed to be nothing but the natural extension of the broken minds involved in making them. It's there in the soundtrack, full of misleading and confused audio cues; it's there in Peter Deming's intense cinematography that's all shadows and sugary sunlight, pushing our mood in directions not determined by the script; it's there in Mary Sweeney's elusive editing, stitching together moments with the illusion of connectivity; it's there in Jack Fisk's romanticised and patently artificial production design.

In Mulholland Dr., a movie can be a comforting and optimistic lie; it can be a horrifying and upsetting lie; it can be a sad lie; it can be a confrontational lie designed to make us furious at the pretentious dick who made it just to mess with our heads. But it cannot not be a lie. That is its essential nature. And the film's beauty, its intellectually gripping complexity, its slippery and unpredictable performances, all make it a pleasure to have it lie to us, to calmly assert how much more intelligent it knows itself to be than we are.

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AVENGING ANGELS

The original sin of the anthology film is that no matter how tightly controlled it is, no matter how thematically tight, and no matter how aesthetically consistent, there's always going to be a segment that isn't as good as the others, and it's going to feel like it showed up in the worst possible place to fuck up the flow of the whole thing. In the case of Wild Tales, recent Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from Argentina, which finds Damián Szifrón writing and directing six otherwise unconnected short stories about the highs and owes of seeking revenge, the structure is almost perfectly designed to make the whole experience seem less than it deserves. I do not gather that this is the consensus opinion, but for my money, the film begins with its absolute best (and shortest) segment, gently and almost steadily declines in quality until it goes off the cliff it its last, worst (and longest) segment, the only one of the six where it's obvious within the first few minutes how it intends to end, and the only one to build virtually its entire narrative on hoary old clichés - in particular, "women are like this, but men are like this" gags involving infidelity and the wildly over-the-top reaction to same. It's shrill finale to a generally whip-smart collection of social satires, and it leaves a sour aftertaste that disproportionately affects the whole movie's effectiveness.

Still, five out of six is an exemplary batting average for a movie of this sort, and Szifrón's fearless embrace of the blackest comedy gives the whole film a striking personality, even in its weakest patches (and there's a nasty tendency for the individual segments to either begin blandly or fizzle out - only the relatively brief first two are at a steady level from start to finish). Good or bad, Wild Tales comes from a sparklingly nasty and savagely witty place that isn't like much else; the presence of everyone's favorite florid melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar as one of the five producers (along with his brother Agustin) is enough to prime us for the ebullient bad taste Szifrón exercises, but there's cutting criticism and anger behind Wild Tales that goes beyond anything found in Almodóvar. It is, whatever else is true, it's own thing, and that's spectacularly valuable.

The punchy opening segment, which finds passengers on a plane discovering their unexpected connections to a failed musician named Pasternak, sets the tone of things perfectly. The humor is a bubbling pot of farcical absurdity - before the shape of the thing begins to clarify itself, the continual pile-up of random jokes is some of the best sustained comedy I've seen in years - that builds to a terrific bleak punchline, and it follows the best rules of sketch comedy, in that it makes its point, sells its gag, and gets the hell out. Nothing else that happens for the remainder of the movie is so focused or deliberate, and this, too, is a sin of the anthology format: starting off strong means that the rest of the feature will feel like pulled punches. That said, "Pasternak" couldn't ever be moved; its brevity functions perfectly as a prologue.

Still and all, it casts a shadow that the rest of the film can't escape. "Las ratas", the second segment, which also feels more like a sketch than a short film, does the best job of darting in, stabbing, and vanishing back into the shadows, and its much tighter dramatic scope - a waitress (Rita Cortese) and cook (Julieta Zylberberg) debate the morality of poisoning a vile mobbed-up businessman (César Bordón), and the cook's increasing impatience with the waitress's refusal to take her just revenge eventually takes an abrupt, extravagant turn - allows it to examine the social and personal impact of revenge more clearly than "Pasternak". It's not as funny, or as effortless, but it still makes for a combined opening gambit that starts Wild Tales at full speed with impressive braininess for something so prone to sophomoric jokes.

But after that, Wild Tales never quite finds its sweet spot again. The third segment, "El más fuerte", has a strong beginning and stronger close, as it examines two men (Leonardo Sbaraglia and Walter Donado) getting into an increasingly disturbed and violent pissing match over road etiquette. But it's also somewhat belabored in its pursuit of a fairly straightforward idea - it's by far the most obvious and predictable of the shorts prior to the last one - and there's simply not that much modulation of its one gag. Segment four, "Bombita" makes some killer social critiques by the end of its tale of a normal working man (Ricardo Darín, the castmember with the biggest international exposure) buffeted by random chance and bad luck until he decides to turn himself into a anti-bureaucracy terrorist, but it takes a long time to find its footing, during which point it's just an exercise in cringe humor. Segment five, "La propuesta", has the opposite problem: it's satiric points about the way the very rich exploit everybody else to avoid having to deal with their own problems are all scored in the early going, and it becomes eminently clear that Szifrón couldn't figure out how to end it.

And then we get to that ending, "Hasta que la muerte nos separe", with a bride (Erica Rivas) exploding with rage when she find out that her new husband (Diego Gentile) had an affair with one of their guests a while back. There are no insights here, only musty observations about A Woman Scorned, turned up to 11, and it's stretched out far beyond the breaking point for something that follows such an obvious predetermined line (the only thing that's not totally predictable about it is its concluding joke, and that's more because the joke is such a random piece of provocation dropped in for no obvious reason other than shock value. It sucks the last air out of a film that developed a slow leak around the 20 minute mark, and more than anything else, it leaves Wild Tales feeling like a series of naughty anecdotes instead of an insightful commentary on human misbehavior. Which is deeply unfortunate, given how well it occupies that more daunting, complex territory here and there throughout its running time.

Narrative lapses notwithstanding, Szifrón's sense of timing and his immaculate control of tone cannot be doubted: this kind of lacerating black comedy is terrifyingly difficult to pull off without lapsing into either banal niceness or unpleasant sourness, and he keeps the tone right on target throughout, even when his plots are starting to fail him. It's an energetic beast, mixing style, pacing, emotional mood, and acting style to great effect - whatever else is true, it's never boring - and while it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own personality, how wonderful to have that kind of dynamic, challenging, and at times insightful personality in the first place!

7/10

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TO RELUCTANTLY GO WHERE OTHERS HAVE GONE BEFORE

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

The story goes that J.J. Abrams, along with other chief creative minds involved in the making of the 2009 Star Trek reboot that one of their collective favorite films in the series up to that point was Galaxy Quest. This affection doesn't seem to have impeded Abrams & Co. any in their desire to make Star Trek resembles Star Wars as much as possible, but cheekiness and all, they make a trenchant point. Out of the ten pre-Abrams features adapting TV's Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation to the big screen, one of the easiest knocks against them is that they're not really at all faithful to the spirits of the shows they're presumably adapting. Whereas Galaxy Quest, a parody of those same shows and sometimes not a very nice one, does a vastly better job of capturing the awestruck matinee movie tone and sense of familiar camaraderie that "is" Star Trek. It is mockery, but it is mockery that comes from a place of knowledge and affection. The 12 official Star Trek pictures are all sincere attempts to distance themselves from the property their cashing in on, in their own ways.

Now, 1999, the year that Galaxy Quest came out, was at the waning end of Peak Star Trek, which is perhaps why DreamWorks SKG thought that a mainstream family-oriented sci-fi comedy founded on an in-depth love/hate relationship with Star Trek, its stars, and its fandom might be a good box office play. That, and 1999 was also the waning end of a period when big-budget effects-driven comedies were at least somewhat commonplace (I allow myself to hope that the extravagant success of Guardians of the Galaxy will help bring this long-dead subgenre back). DreamWorks's faith was misplaced; Galaxy Quest didn't tank, but it didn't end up making anything like a decent profit. We can all come up with reasons why that would have happened - an overestimation of the general audience's affection for Trekkies, the late decision in post-production and marketing to gun for a family audience and so rip out everything even slightly dark or edgy - but the last place I'd lay the blame is at the foot of the movie itself. It's a little fuzzy around the edges, and filmed with proficiency but little imagination by director Dean Parisot (a TV veteran making only his second feature, which cuts both ways for the movie: it's a touch bland but that also makes it feel more authentically like fake Trek), but the script by David Howard and Robert Gordon is a peach, full of well-placed lines and smart details about the lives of burned-out semi-talented actors with the questionable fortune to have an unquestionably loyal and ravenous fanbase. It also has a virtually faultless collection of performances - I will not say "a perfect cast", because they are not, on paper, all people that you'd want to see in a movie you intended to enjoy. But Galaxy Quest pulls top-shelf work out of performers as apparently incompatible as Alan Rickman and Justin Long, while also serving as the film that more or less introduced the world to Sam Rockwell. For which it would deserve our thanks even in the absence of anything else praiseworthy.

The film opens in the eighteenth year after the campy sci-fi adventure Galaxy Quest went off the air, leaving behind a small but embarrassingly passionate fanbase that holds annual conventions at which the C-list actors who brought that show to life are brought out to be worshiped and bothered by the faithful. By this point, most of the cast has grown sick of this - Shakespearean-trained Alexander Dane (Rickman), a hybrid of Leonard Nimoy and Patrick Stewart), is much the angriest about it, but former child star Tommy Webber (Daryl Mitchell), perpetually stoned fake Asian Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub), and token women/sex interest Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver) aren't any more fulfilled with the shape of their current careers. But what they really hate is the prima donna attitude adopted by Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen), the show's lead, and enough of a raging narcissist that even the cheapjack stardom he now enjoys is enough to feed his ego. It's bad enough that he doesn't even register the highly unusual behavior of a bunch of pasty people with improbable haircuts and a distinctly non-standard grasp of English, who he just writes off as a bunch of particularly invested fans. But indeed, they are emissaries of an alien race, looking to the great hero Commander Taggart, captain of the NSEA spaceship Protector to save them from an invading force. Once he and, eventually, his castmates have been convinced that the aliens are telling the truth, it takes surprisingly little goading for them to agree to pitch in and help, and finally do something that feels good after years of trading off their one goofy little TV show.

"Actor is mistaken for character, enters an adventure" isn't the most original concept - in most of its general details, Galaxy Quest was beaten to the punch by the 1995 telefilm The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space, and if we take "cheesy sci-fi television" out of the mix, it's a much older gimmick still - but it's done particularly well in this particular case. Maybe even as well as it could be done. The particulars of Star Trek lend themselves especially well the the basic scenario, especially the particulars of William Shatner, whom Allen isn't copying in any particular way, though the egotism, vague dislike by his co-stars, and peremptory treatment of his fans are all ultimately taken from that sort. What we have, in essence, is screenwriters drawing upon a very specific real situation to flesh out their work of fiction with a plethora of real, lived-in details, but keeping themselves free to do whatever they want with those details. The result is an entirely plausible cast of characters, all of whom feel just sufficiently more deep and specific than the stock version of themselves that when the generic sci-fi action-adventure hits, we're more concerned about what these people we like will do about it than the sci-fi itself. Which is the reason Star Trek itself works, so it's satisfying to see it employed so well here.

The details extend beyond the writing to the acting: for a frothy comedy with lots of CGI, these are some unbelievably wonderful performances. A lot of the acting is simply about building and committing to a reality: Enrico Colantoni, as the leader of the helpless aliens, brought some kind of insane wizardry to his part in which he delivered lines in a pained sing-song that sounds perfectly like somebody who knows nothing of English pronunciation trying to fake it, while wearing an enormous smile in a way that clearly indicates that he has no idea what a smile is supposed to be for. Mechanically, it's astonishing acting, and the impressive thing is how quickly it recedes into the background as something true about the character, and not something Colantoni is doing because of sci-fi. Comparatively, all of the humans have it easy, though all of them are still awfully good: it's the best Allen has ever been in a live-action film, playing up his standard "idiot alpha male" persona with an unusual background of slow-arriving self-awareness; Weaver's frequent outbursts of confused impatience are consistently the funniest things in the movie ("This episode was badly written!", screamed at a totally useless death trap that exists solely because it was randomly tossed into the show once, is a great laugh line and all the greater because she delivers it with the exquisite frustration of someone who has decided to cling to one thing that makes sense as a shield against everything that doesn't).

Thanks to its emphasis on its characters - which extends to the obsessive fans it charitably treats as the real heroes at the end, after having engaged in the usual light mockery about introverted teen boys with nonexistent social skills - and its dogged pursuit of a PG rating. the film is probably a bit more genial than it is funny, though many individual lines are hilarious (in one case, Weaver has obviously re-dubbed herself saying "screw that!" instead of "fuck that!", which her mouth visibly says; it's obviously the case in context that the latter would have been funnier. And that is the kind of trade off that, in less specific forms, lets a bit of air out of the whole movie). And it's certainly more of a comedy than a sci-fi action film, though in its defense, the film at no point pretends otherwise. But it does leave it feeling a bit weirdly dated, in these days when genre-based comedies are so eager to have full-on action movie third acts. In a good way, I think; the film never really bloats or sags, and remains utterly pleasurable throughout its entire running time. "Pleasurable", of course, isn't the most full-throated defense of a movie that could be made, because a sharper, funnier, more merciless Galaxy Quest that ended with the same warm affection for its characters isn't hard to imagine. But the Galaxy Quest we got is still an awfully good thing, mixing warmth and cleverness to unexpectedly durable effect.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF DREAMWORKS

I don't make a habit of pimping out what I write over at the Film Experience, but I am inordinately proud of my articles for the last two weeks: a potted history of DreamWorks Animation from 1998 to today. It's in two parts: last week, I covered 1998-2009, and today, I go the rest of the way to the present. To the future, even, since I end with the impending release of the disgusting-looking Home.

Please, go over! Enjoy! Join in the conversation!

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BLURGEY WURGEY MURGENT

The best thing that I could possibly will myself to say about Divergent is that it was by whatever thin margin the more watchable of 2014's two virtually indistinguishable post-apocalyptic YA adaptations about the Enormously Special Snowflake whose pluck and to-heck-with-your-rules-man attitude helps to knock the legs out from underneath an inscrutable and preposterously contrived writerly conceit masquerading as a functional fantasy world, just besting The Maze Runner. And now all that stored-up goodwill I had gets quite spoilt by The Divergent Series: Insurgent, whose repellent death march of a title is one of the best things about it. This is the quintessence of what I mean when I call a film joylessly mediocre: everything about Insurgent is functional in the most detached, unimaginative ways, precisely in the places where an allegory built on a loopy sci-fi premise particularly needs to be imaginative. It is not merely a film that has no fun with itself, it is a film that constantly calls your attention to all the fun that really absolutely should be going on, and makes the whole thing that much more teeth-grinding and enervating than is remotely fair.

The film drops us, via a clunky but straightforward bit of "I am your fascist dictator for the evening, and let me tell you things on giant monitors" re-expositioning, back into the world of Post-Apocalypse Future Chicago, the last outpost of humankind, where all people are separated into factions based on their solitary personality trait. Candor is home to reliable truth-tellers, Amity does good work for the betterment of all, and Erudite is home to cold evil logicians who worship knowledge and try to kill Christians. I mean, Abnegation, the ones who put the needs of the rest above themselves and get all the shitty work done, and who were effectively wiped out at the end of the last movie by that selfsame dictator Jeanine (Kate Winslet). For some reason, Jeanine's lack of a surname really started to crack me up this time around.

So in addition to the loss of nearly all Abnegationeers, the miltaristic police sect Dauntless has been scattered to the winds, leaving Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), with a surprisingly fresh and salon-tousled new hairdo, considering that she gave it to herself with a pair of garden shears, hiding in Amity along with her hunky boyfriend Four (Theo James), her confused Erudite brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), and her sullen, irritable rival from Dauntless, Peter (Miles Teller, completing the "Boys Who Have Played Shailene Woodley's Lovers" hat trick). But Tris, of course, is no Dauntless member at all; she is a Divergent, one of the magic special ones who combine all five extant personality traits. And for this reason, Jeanine wants to find her; for Jeanine, we now find, found a Box buried by the Founders 200 years ago and protected by Tris's now-dead parents, but the Founders made it so that only a Divergent could open the Box and thus receive their Message about what to do in this moment of Crisis, because having determined that just copying The Hunger Games was too limiting, the series at this point goes for the classics and starts stealing plot points from Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

In practice, this means a lot of trekking through parts of Georgia that make for a passable simulacrum of Illinois, encountering Four's estranged mother (Naomi Watts), and band of radical Factionless, which aren't the same thing as Divergents, but it's not totally clear why. And then Tris has to decide if she'll be the Mockingjay join with Mama Four's team to replace Jeanine's dictatorship with a different dictatorship or... not do that. The stakes are all a bit fuzzy. But eventually, she is taken by Jeanine and put through a series of video game levels to prove her righteousness to open the Box and discover the sequel hook. Except it's not a sequel hook at all: it feels precisely like the final beat of about a hundred other post-apocalypse films that that end with a slightly ambiguous "...and did they restore the world then? Perhaps, children. Perhaps" note as the limitless horizon stretches out. But there are in fact two more The Divergent Serieses to come, unless Insurgent's apparent inability to expand Divergent's audience even a tiny bit spooks Summit Entertainment into committing the unthinkable heresy of adapting a YA novel series with exactly as many movies as there are books.

The central problem of Divergent turns out to also be the central problem of Insurgent: this world doesn't work, and the screenwriters writing the adaptation - Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman (!), and Mark Bomback - don't have the creativity, or more likely the motivation, to find a way of fixing it. Inherently, this society can't work and doesn't make sense, though it's revealed in a mysterious film-ending transmission, by a mysterious woman whose identity the end credits totally give away (she's played, anyway, by Janet McTeer, completing the hat trick of stupidly over-qualified actresses who are reduced to this now? Fuck Hollywood), that it might have all been engineered to be this transparently artificial and synthetic. Which doesn't speak well of the Founders. Last time around, director Neil Burger directed with a deft enough touch and a good sense for how to work action sequences around characters that the draggy plot and nonsensical world-building at least felt like they had some momentum underpinning them, but his replacement, Robert Schwentke, suffers from a pronounced tendency towards flat visuals and too much time spent lingering on the barely present reactions of his actors, and his decidedly anti-epic staging leaves the feeling that the entire last kernel of humanity, spread throughout the city limits of a still semi-functioning Chicago, numbers around 1200 people.

Whereas Divergent at least felt like it took place somewhere, I mean to say, Insurgent feels like a cheap, jerry-rigged post-apocalypse on a budget. It's small and boring, and that just calls attention to how much the story is made up of jerky half-measures - go here, go here, stop, look sad, go here, get involved in some nonsensical battle with Shadow Link - and how utterly daft the whole allegorical conceit is.

It's so bland: it looks bland, and the actors play it excessively bland, either because, like James and Elgort, that's what they do; or like Woodley, they're aware that this is not going to be their $400 million ticket to Jennifer Lawrenceville, but they have to muscle through anyway; or like Watts, they've been weirdly made up to look like Elizabeth Olsen, despite being a 46-year-old woman. Winslet stands out: her absolute defeated dismay in ever single frame, like a starving person who just realised that the only food in the whole house is cream of wheat, is horrible sad to have to watch. Teller is the other; with a small part that has absolutely no shading, he goes for broke on playing up the most nauseating entitled personality of a lazy, self-satisfied asshole that he can muster - which is a lot, for Teller - and as a result emerges as the only onscreen human who feels like he has thoughts and feelings which aren't directly communicated by the lines of dialogue he says.

Anyway, there's not a single frame wrong with the movie, though some of the CGI is regrettable; but there also isn't anything in the whole of that's even fleetingly entertaining. It's as devoid of any energy as is possible, and it's every bit the soulless commercial calculation that has the word "Series" in its official goddamn title had ought to be.

4/10

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BEST SHOTS: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

Fun times! For Hit Me with Your Best Shot this week, Nathaniel has assigned Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, one of the finest examples of that marvelously oddball genre, the 1960s Italian Anthology Film. And, on top of it, perhaps the most uncharacteristic work ever directed by Neorealist master Vittorio De Sica.

The film is made up of three individual segments, each named for the woman played in it by Sophia Loren; cumulatively, they explore the sexual mores of three different slices of Italian life, as Loren and Marcello Mastroianni play three enormously different kinds of couples. Naturally, Nathaniel left the optional rule that we could select one shot from each segment; naturally, I'm exercising that option.

First up is "Adelina", the brightest and best of the segments, showcasing De Sica's almost entirely untapped gift for comedy. Adelina has run up a stupefying list of bills, and the police have come knocking; but she and her husband Carmine discover that Italian law provides for any pregnant woman, or woman who has given birth within the last six months, can't be sent to prison. And thus do the couple forestall the inevitable for years, as an increasingly fatigued Carmine keeps knocking Adelina up, while she brings her ever-expanding brood to help her sell black market cigarettes and keep the family afloat.

It's breezy, but there's still a satiric bite, and it offers a surprisingly rich array of images to pick from: the way that Adelina is situated in the midst of a supporting community, through a series of repeated set-ups, ensures that much of the comedy and storytelling are achieved visually. That being said, I went someplace entirely differently. Herewith, my pick for Best Shot, in which Adelina demonstrates to the newly-arrived cops that she's pregnant once again, and safe from their clutches:

What I love about it its bluntness. Loren's face is just so utterly devoid of affect or even the slightest interest in her unwanted visitors. She knows, even if they don't, that she's too damn busy to deal with their nonsense - can you see that already-born kid standing right there? And look how cluttered that kitchen is! It's a fussy, jam-packed mise en scène that wonderfully suggests why Adelina, in this moment, doesn't even have the stamina to open her mouth and speak words to the cops, just to blandly indicate why they need to get the hell out and leave her be. In a funny short, it's the moment that made me laugh the loudest, and that's sometimes all you really need.

Next up: "Anna". The shortest of the segments, and also the film's obvious clinker (but then, what anthology film bats 1.000?), it's a banal drama about a shallow rich woman and her increasingly disillusioned lover, who realises over the course of a drive out from Milan that she cares more about things than people. Particularly when he damages her precious Rolls-Royce in order to avoid hitting a child. The points made by the wan script - credited the three writers, the most of any segment in the film - are obvious and there's limited visual interest; De Sica and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (who shot all three segments) are hemmed in by how much of the action takes place in the front seat of the car, and long passages of the film go by with only three or four different ideas for how to set up the camera.

Towards the end, though, intriguing images start to pile up, and among them we find this:

In the foreground: a furious Anna and a flustered Renzo trying to deal with the smoke pouring out of the broken Rolls. In the background: the boy whose non-death triggered this most severe tragedy in Anna's life, silently watching the clownish flapping about of these two sophisticated, wealthy Milanites. Generally, "Anna" grows more successful as it buries its judgment of the title character in silent, weighty moments, instead of handing off dully horrified pronouncements to Mastroianni. And this is the first and best of a handful of shots which position an out-of-focus in the back behind a two-shot in the foreground, allowing the depth of the staging and the static silence of the background character to serve as an implicit commentary. These people are putting on a little show of human behavior, and their audience is at best unimpressed with their noisy self-regard.

The film ends with "Mara", a return to genial comedy, though of a more grounded sort than was shown in "Adelina". Mara is a prostitute, whose cranky old neighbors have taken in their grandson Umberto (Giovanni Ridolfi), a seminary student. As the sheltered young man sees her untroubled ownership of her life and her sexual drive, he of course falls in love with her, which forces her to rely on her most amorous regular client, Augusto, to help her shake the boy out of his puppy love and get back on the right track.

It's the sweetest of the three stories, and the sexiest, and those mostly come in the same form: the smoldering hot Loren (who spends the film's final moments doing a striptease) dealing as nicely as she can with the boys who fall head-over-heels for her without stopping to think what her opinion on the matter might be. In practice, this means multiple scenes of her and Mastroianni (who is at his clear best in this segment, out of the three) playing scenes that weirdly blur the sexual charge of a john visiting his beloved whore, and two adults in a comfortable long-term relationship jousting with each other. That's when this happens:

Augusto wants to have sex; Mara, pissed off at her judgmental neighbor, just wants to fume and vent and do some cleaning till she calms down. He flirts, canoodles, talks dirty, and eventually gives up, as she passes him the dishes to dry. Of course, he's still an immature horndog, and this moment will pass, but for for the moment, "Mara" speaks a wonderful truth about the way grown-up lovers work together. Sometimes you have rich, passionate, filthy sex, and sometimes the damn dishes need to be washed.

And if you were to accuse me of also picking this shot for the bright, joyful '60s color scheme in the green-yellow cabinets and Loren's pink apron, day-glo domesticity that makes this plain little moment hum with visual energy: dear reader, I would not deny that accusation.

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FAMILY REUNIONS

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

It's entirely possible that Tokyo Story isn't the best movie ever made. But I suspect that it might be the most perfect. Its construction is unthinkably good - not one single shot is wasted, and every cut serves a very clear and deliberate purpose. It is the film out of all films that I would want to show anybody who was curious how cinema works - how duration, framing, editing, and acting all combine to create a particular mood, and to communicate specific meaning about the characters. Meanwhile, the story it tells and the emotions it explores mark it as one of the wisest human dramas filmed: immensely specific in its characters and setting, but able to depict dynamics and tensions that are as universal as it. So it has wonderful form, extraordinarily rich narrative content, and those two things inform each other in the most satisfying, invisible way. So, perfect. It is not, in fairness, the only perfect film made by director Ozu Yasujiro: there are no quantitative ways to measure the difference between it and Late Spring, and I wouldn't bat an eye at the suggestion that his final two films (both in color), The End of Summer and An Autumn Afternoon, are more accomplished than either. But I nonetheless plant my flag in this soil: Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the most consistently great director in cinema history. It is as perfect in its craft as any of his other masterworks, and more robust in its emotional landscape. I'm glad we've gotten that sorted.

Though the film never lags, it's not on account of its thin wisp of a plot, as devised by Ozu and Noda Kogo: sometime long enough after World War II that the scars of battle are almost completely invisible in Japan, the elderly Hirayamas - husband Shukichi (Ryu Chishu) and wife Tomi (Higashiyama Chieko) - travel from the town of Onomichi, where they live with their youngest daughter, Kyoko (Kagawa Kyoko), to the big city of Tokyo, to visit their eldest children, son Koichi (Yamamura So) and daughter Shige (Sugimura Haruko), and Noriko (Hara Setsuko), the young widow of their third child, who died in the war. Upon their arrival, Koichi and his wife Fumiko (Miyake Kuniko), and Shige and her husband Kurazo (Nakamura Nobuo) receive them with a chilly formality that makes it clear that they - to say nothing of Koichi's utterly disinterested, impolite children - don't really know what to do with the old folks and would prefer it very much if they didn't have to think about it. After a few stilted days, Shukichi and Tomi return home; she grows sick on the trip, and their children all rush to Onomichi to be with her as she passes away; fourth child Keizo (Osaka Shiro) arrives just too late. And then they all return home, leaving their father and Kyoko alone.

That's the entirety of what happens within the 136 minutes of Tokyo Story, as far as dramatic incident. No, that's not true. I elided the night in Tokyo where Shukichi gets drunk with his old friends and they all complain about their children. Even so, if it sounds like that's not very much content to fill the time, that's because it isn't. And it's what makes Tokyo Story so powerful. The film is not fueled by incident or melodrama - the clearest break it makes from its avowed inspiration, Leo McCarey's heart-rending Make Way for Tomorrow of 1937 - but by character interactions: the film simply places us in the middle of a family situation and allows us to be thrilled and enthralled by the greatest cinematic spectacle of them all, the feelings of human beings.

And by "in the middle", I do mean "in the actual, literal middle": Tokyo Story is the most successful expression of one of Ozu's most characteristic stylistic tricks (and while it's easy to use the director as a shorthand, one should fairly point out that the Ozu style was developed by the director alongside editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu and cinematographer Atsuta Yuharu, who were both as important recurring members of the director's troupe as his regular actors), in which the camera is perched in the exact middle of two characters in the middle of a dialogue, cutting from one center-framed shot of an actor staring right down the lens to another, a rhythmic back-and-forth that offers the dizzying sense that they're talking right to us. This single gesture, which shows up everywhere in mature Ozu (that is, at least everything he made from 1949's Late Spring to his 1962 retirement; I profess total ignorance of anything he made between the end of Japan's silent era and '49), is the most basic no-no in the Hollywood continuity rulebook, which by the '50s had become the dominant mode of narrative filmmaking in most of the world - Ozu's legendary countryman Kurosawa Akira used a version of it, though Mizoguchi Kenji didn't, and that uses up my knowledge of 1950s Japanese filmmaking. It is a way of staging and cutting that totally ignores the all-holy 180° line, which is meant to ease confusion on the viewer's part when the action cuts between largely opposite perspectives.

Nobody ever put the lie to that rule better than Ozu, and he never did it better than here: the smooth transition between perfectly-matched images in shot-reverse shot conversations isn't confusing in the least, and it provides even the most banal conversations in Tokyo Story with a thrilling charge of intimacy. Indeed, that charge comes about because the conversations are so banal; one of the things we learn very quickly is that the gulf between the parents and their adult children is unspeakably vast, and can only be roughly bridged with simple, dull statements of fact, and the limpest kind of small talk. Presenting these conversations in a movie at all is utterly presumptuous, and staging them in such a direct, forceful aesthetic of direct address doubly so; but we are thus involved in the conversations in a way that enthusiastically welcomes us to study the speakers, their body language, their tone of voice, and begin to dig at what they're holding back in talking. Tokyo Story is a drama about not saying things - not telling your parents that they're making it impossible for you to go on with your business, not telling your children that they're rude boors - and in plunging us directly into those forced, shallow conversations, the filmmakers invite us to feel the full weight and impact of how it feels to be part of them.

This goes at least part of the way towards explaining why Tokyo Story is so uniquely able, out of all the films ever made about interpersonal dynamics, to depict with such probing depth and uncomfortable accuracy what those dynamics look like in real time. Even out of Ozu's many films so successfully working on that topic, for if there is one measurable difference between Tokyo Story and his other works in the same vein, it might be that here, the director anchors his images on characters relatively more often, and a bit less on the rooms containing them - though there are, undoubtedly, many shots and even full scenes that play out with the camera crouched at the famous height of an individual sitting on a tatami mat, backed into a corner like an unobtrusive object of furniture as characters go about their miniature plays in a series of fully lived-in shadowboxes. The settings in the film are unquestionably important, and our sense of how the characters fit into space matter. Befitting its place in history, and its story of an old generation that can't understand and can't be understood by the next generation, Tokyo Story is made up primarily of traditional rooms in which individual props and some costumes creep in suggesting the shiny new Westernised Japan that was just starting to coalesce outside. And the quiet imposition of, say, an electric fan in an otherwise totally classical, austere space is monstrously important in dramatising that generational shift without stating it outright.

The rest of the film's limitless humanity comes in large part from its gifted cast. Ryu and Hara, the indispensable Ozu regulars and stars of Late Spring, can't help but stand out to any viewer familiar with that movie, but they're only the leaders of a stellar ensemble; as good as both of them unquestionably are, Sugimura actually gives my personal favorite performance, prickly impatience that keeps spilling out when she forgets to keep it in check, that then triggers silent but palpable waves of guilt. Right up to a brutal final sequence in which she's peremptory and bullying without being aware of it. But let's not go singling anyone out. The very concept of Tokyo Story demands that each and every performance has the necessary subtlety and conviction that we believe in the tiny gestures, facial expressions, and cut-off words as though they were being thought and felt in the moment by actual humans. One raw performance, and the film stalls out. And this never happens.

To give all of the delicate staging and acting room to make an impact, the film is silent and slow-moving, composed entirely of still images, with only one camera movement in the whole feature: and it is a powerful, jarring moment, perfectly timed and devastating (there's also a bit of a cheat: one scene involves a still camera looking out the windows of a moving bus, but the visible window frame helps to keep the shot feeling static). There are some tremendously dramatic wide shots, establishing exterior space as a series of open skies and graphic, angular lines, and these somewhat temper the potential monotony of all the largely similar interiors, but for the most part, Tokyo Story allows itself to breathe steadily and smoothly through its repetitive interior set-ups, preferring not to excite us through style but through the accumulated effect of its character drama. It does this magnificently - no film has ever been so flawlessly attuned to the way family works and sometimes doesn't work, no film has ever made domestic space so enthralling cinematic. And no film has ever been more natural and honest in its depiction of what normal human behavior looks like and feels like.

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I'M WITH THE BAND

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

Almost Famous of the year 2000 is surely the Cameron Crowest of Cameron Crowe films. Not just because it’s also the most baldly autobiographical of Cameron Crowe films, though I suspect that fact informs everything else that is true of the film. There’s a strong current of observed reality suffusing it; there’s a wealth of detail in the way people talk and think within the movie, the attitudes they hold and the society in which they move that has a rich, thick feeling of authenticity. Crowe’s screenplay and his direction mix finely-honed reporting skills (it is, after all, about a time in his life when he was a journalist) with an unapologetic lacquer of happy nostalgia, looking back to a time that was neither more innocent nor more promising but keenly remembering what it felt like to think that everything was innocent and promising. And because of all this, it is a film that treats all of its characters as wonderful old friends, people to be forgiven all their mistakes and celebrated for even their smallest triumphs. It is, as much as anything else I can name, a movie that loves its characters with the most ebullient love, each and every single one of them, even when they’re acting at their worst: it is the most generous kind of storytelling, and that is Crowe’s strongest and most characteristic mode.

Whether this is an entirely good thing isn’t clear. Without Almost Famous, it’s quite impossible to imagine Elizabethtown, a film of almost radioactive sweetness and guileless affection for its characters and scenario - I film whose absolute refusal to judge or show even the tiniest measure of cynicism I find awfully endearing, though in the most artless and barbarically clumsy way. Almost Famous isn’t that: it’s a far steadier and more thoughtful piece of filmmaking (I would suggest that it is, in fact, the clear high water mark of Crowe’s CV), if only for the nuance of the way it uses its wall-to-wall classic rock soundtrack as a signpost for character development, rather than the crude nostalgia-baiting of most films that rely on music to do the heavy lifting of authenticating a time period and insisting on the audience’s feelings (Forrest Gump, you shameless hussy).

Is it, though, a gloppy wad of sentimentality? Maybe. Kind of. There is a fine needle to thread here, and not at all moments does Almost Famous thread it - for every scene that's a sturdy piece of observed wisdom about coming of age as a human male, a critical thinker, and a lover of the transporting power of music, there's another that's pure cheese. There are moments that are both of these things at once, including what I'm inclined to think of as the movie's signature scene and probably my favorite moment in all of Crowe: a bus full of tired rockstars, groupies, and teenage journalists joining in, one by one, to sing along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". It's hokey and sweet and honest, aggressive and demanding in its appeal to the naïve belief that a song has that kind of unifying, uplifting power. Which of course it does: there are probably not many things that every single adult in the developed world has experienced, but I'm willing to bet that a pleasant sing-along with friends is one of them.

Whatever universal feeling come out of the film are generated from one of the most thoroughly specific scenarios ever to support a coming-of-age film: riffing on Crowe's own life experience, Almost Famous centers on the weeks in 1973 that 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) spent touring with the fictional band Stillwater after having lucked (and lied) his way into an assignment to write a 3000-word story about the band for Rolling Stone. The minimal plot that follows finds him swooning with fannish delight at the band's soulful leader guiatarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), with only his good sense for journalism leading him to discover that even very good-natured people can be selfish users and egocentrists. But mostly, it's a hangout movie, in which a slice of early-'70s rock culture parades by a guileless kid and reveal some measure of themselves to him. And this is where the writer-director's peaceable humanism explodes, showing a deep forgiveness and affection for his characters, who even at their shittiest are never really judged by the movie (Jason Lee as generally irritated singer Jeff Bebe is the closest the film has to a spoilsport, and even he never seems particularly unreasonable). There's also the quiet-unto-laconic performances he teases out of a cast that seems even more impressive 15 years on than it did in 2000, when people like Zooey Deschanel, Jay Baruchel, Rainn Wilson have turned into, if not household names, at least That Guys of the first order. These are reasonable, soft people, with even the angriest ones - Lee, Frances McDormand as William's overprotective mother who constantly caves into him to avoid driving him off - tending towards smallish, level-head demonstrations of rage and impatience.

The film tries to do two things at once: present these people as 15-year-old William/Crowe would have seen them (thus the firebreathing but always comforting mother, or the spectral presentation of Kate Hudson's breakthrough role of Penny Lane, teenage earth mother and philosophical groupie who represents exactly the kind of world-altering Feminine Life Force that Crowe would later turn into a hollow nightmare with Elizabethtown, the film for which critic Nathan Rabin coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl", only in this case always distinctly too aware of how the boy hero sees her to get within her grasp), and also as fortysomething Crowe, far smarter than his teenage alter-ego, understands them to actually be. Generally speaking, Almost Famous is best when it keeps this perfectly balanced, or errs on the side of adult wisdom; too much youthful innocence is bad for the teeth. It's probably why all of the film's best moments after the "Tiny Dancer" scene are the handful of appearances of Philip Seymour Hoffman as rock writing god Lester Bangs, giving what I think can be uncontroversially counted as the film's clear standout performance, not least because he's the only character who plainly knows more than William in every one of his appearances. When he drops his prickly, sometimes antagonist nuggets of wisdom, Hoffman represents the exact kind of clear-eyed, brutally unromantic perspective that the whole arc of Almost Famous generally moves towards, but he does it without sacrificing Crowe's basic decency. The iconic "we're uncool" scene gets to be iconic in no small part because of Hoffman's rich friendliness in delivering blunt truths, sugarcoating nothing from a position of complete respect and love: the closest the film comes to openly having Adult Crowe sit Boy Crowe down and explain what the next 27 years are going to bring.

This register of clarity saves the film from its indulgences (which include a 162-minute director's cut that transparently wants nothing more than to add time for Crowe to linger with the characters and music he loves; an even more generous, humanist statement than the 122-minute theatrical version, but it's here that we really take the exit ramp to Elizabethtown), which certainly include the generalised Baby Boomer conviction that this particular music really mattered; every generation believes that of their music, of course, and every generation is equally wrong, but 1973 is right at the end of the era that the media at large has generally been willing to play along with (full disclosure: I'm actually a huge fan of all the music on this film's soundtrack - I can only imagine how enervating it must be to anyone who can't claim the same thing - but I was born late enough for the Boomers to have already revealed themselves to be full of shit). And the uncritical attention given to the beatific, hushed expressions of late-hippie thought (but what isn't given uncritical attention in Almost Famous?) does leave the film a little stranded in its writer's reveries.

There's always something to pull it back (and that's actually the shape of William's development throughout the movie: be captivated by indulgence, then pull back; so perhaps it's meant ironically): the steady drumbeat editing by Joe Hutshing and Saar Klein, the crisp and uncharacteristically domesticated (which is not to imply that it's bad) cinematography by John Toll, or simply the uncommon humanness of the characters. It's a screenplay-driven film, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but Crowe-the-director knows when to have his collaborators stop babying Crowe-the-writer. And the movie that emerges as a result is, despite its lumps, awfully lovable: beyond question my favorite of the filmmaker's career, albeit one that I like less now (almost inevitably) than when I first saw it at the dangerously impressionable age of 19. If Almost Famous teaches us anything, though, it's that we're all capable of surviving what we do as idiot teens, and then to look backwards at our shapeless young selves with affection and forgiveness. And in a movie full of nice thoughts, I wonder if that might be the nicest.

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