BEST SHOT: BRIGHT STAR

Sometimes, in choosing candidates for Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel decides to just give all of us a present. And so it was this week, with the selection of Jane Campion's 2009 feature Bright Star (her last film, which reminds me that I still need to catch up with Top of the Lake). Do you know what the best shot is in Bright Star? Trick question, it's all of them. This is one of the loveliest movies of the 2000s, the film where we all got our first good look at this awesome new cinematographer Greig Fraser, and marvel at Campion's flawless ability to translate the textures of poetry into images. For the film is about a love affair with a poet; it is Fanny Brawne's (Abbie Cornish) movie, but the title and the artistic sensibility are John Keats's (Ben Whishaw), legendary poet and dead young person.

Bright Star is, to me, a film about four things: romance, Romanticism, being outside, and costuming. The last of these provided by Campion's longtime secret weapon, Janet Patterson, who manages the nifty twofer of easily evoking the first half the 19th Century in its prim, buttoned-up elegance, while using the colors and lines and shape of the costumes to editorialise about the characters in a way that almost turns the film into an abstract visual essay on how imagery evokes an emotional response.

So the goal then became to pick just one image that would cover all four of those bases, and here's the thing: that wasn't even slightly hard. I had a dozen candidates. So I split the difference and threw "awesome compositional strategies" on the pile because why not, I dig Fraser and I want him to do more things. So with that cutting my list down by a couple, I finally settled on this one:

Being outside is obvious, and it brings Romanticism along with it: here we are, in the world of plants and nature, where everything is more correct and right and true than it is in houses. The characters are surrounded and protected by the trees overhead, given a private world that reflects their mood. Romance is almost as obvious: the way that Fanny and John are sneaking a little kiss, quiet unconcerned about anything, the way that people desperately and goofily in love will. And that's only underscored by the composition, which puts them in the crispest focus of anything in the shot: they are the center of each other's worlds, the only thing worth paying attention to. And yet they're stranded in the deepest part of an extremely deep image, almost invisible through all the busy lines and colors, even though the lines all draw our eyes to them, and the focus does the same. For even if they are at the fixed center of each other's lives, they are stealing a private moment, and we have no right to go barging in and getting in their way.

And as for costuming: no, this is not a shot that anybody would pick because it first foregrounds what they're wearing. And yet, what they're wearing is perfect, and very nearly the star of the image. Fanny is in pink and white, the colors of the flowering trees all around; Keats, in his black clothes, is dark as the tree trunks that are the only other objects in the frame that don't erupt with color. By my count, at least three things are going on here, in ascending order of complexity and, if we want to be fair, critical bullshittery:

1) Their clothes color-code them as belonging in this natural space

2) Their clothes specifically code them as two parts of a single object; neither one of them is a complete tree alone, but together they are.

3) Keats is equated with the part of the tree that supports the rest, lofting the blossoms/Fanny up to the sky where they can be more fully appreciated in all their beauty and splendor. And that's exactly what romantic odes do: they provide the subject of the ode with a kind of artistic importance and immortality - they are a means of holding the subject up and saying "here, please, observe this world, and love it the way I do". The story might be Fanny's, but the famous person is John Keats, and we know her well enough to care about her because he wrote the words of praise towards her that showed her off to the world.

Like I said, bullshittery. But I like to think that the utterly splendid images of Bright Star, and the glorious romantic film communicated through those images can withstand being gnawed at a bit too enthusiastically. Some gorgeous films are merely gorgeous, and that's good enough; but some gorgeous films use their beauty in complex and probing ways, and that is what makes them great cinema. The least we can say about Bright Star is that it's great cinema.

Incidentally, this 2009 release has never come out on Blu-ray, because who needs high definition for one of the prettiest movies of its decade?

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THE BLART OF WAR

By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That's even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the "fatty fall down" genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres.

So it is bizarre to say, and even more bizarre to think, but I am genuinely horrified by the things that Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 does to the original film, to the dignity of the titular character, and to the basic affability of Kevin James, who isn't funny but usually can be called upon to be likeable and sweet. He is, in PBMC2, a bullying asshole, miles from the puffed-up but still earnest and decent protagonist of the first movie, and this adds a pervasive sour note. But to be fair to the newer, meaner Blart, he comes by it honestly, as a reaction to the film's opening, which under the guise of "absurd comedy" piles a series of arbitrary cosmic cruelties on top of him worthy of an Ibsen play. This adds an additional sour note.

But yes, so after saving the day and winning the girl in PBMC1, we find that Blart's marriage lasted all of six days, until his new bride found herself so repulsed by his body that she couldn't stop vomiting, and so had the marriage annulled. Two years later, Blart's beloved Mama Blart was run over by a milk truck picking up the paper. And for the last four years, he has sat in his solitude, in the company solely of his teenager daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez), upon whom he lavishes all his frustration and bitterness by micromanaging her life into a socially empty oblivion. Comedy tonight!

The surprising notes of meanness and bitterness extend into the main bulk of the film, which finds Blart rather snottily throwing his weight around (metaphorically; all he does with his actual weight is serve as the butt of low-intensity slapstick), acting like a big deal because of that mall heist he stopped in 2009, and then being humiliated. You know that absolutely wretched shot of Kevin James suddenly turning into CGI and getting kicked across the street by a horse that was in the trailer? In case not, now you do:

The movie is so proud of that horrible, horrible joke, it positions it as the very last gag in the whole movie. Two lines of dialogue spread across a couple of shots are all that stand between this image and the end credits. Spoiler alert, I'd say, but it's more of a humanitarian gesture. The point is, the film detests Blart a little bit. Not the easiest way to feel like you have a way to connect with anybody or anything going on.

The pretext is that Blart has been invited to Las Vegas for a convention of security officers, luckily arriving on exactly the same weekend that a disgruntled gambler named Vincent (Neal McDonough) is executing the theft of several priceless pieces of art from the excellent and glamorous collection at Steve Wynn's twin resorts, Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Las Vegas, home to shopping, fine food, and exciting live entertainment. While staying at the Wynn resorts, recipients of several five star and AAA ratings- beg pardon? A movie? What mov- oh, fuck, 2 Blart 2 Mall, that's right. Well, sometimes the film makes it really fucking hard to tell, particularly when Steve and Andrea Wynn show up for plastic cameos that bespeak the kind of pants-shitting horror people feel when they've never been on a film set before, and the director just yelled "action", and what am I supposed to do wait the movie is filming right now, and goddammit, keep smiling...

Now Blart, having no idea how conventions work, hears of a rumor that he's going to give the keynote speech that night, which adds even more to his insufferable ego, and leads to even worse mortification when he finds out otherwise. Eventually, he does get to deliver a speech, through the usual shenanigans - and by "usual shenanigans", I of course mean "sloppy blackout drunkenness", because this is a kids' film. And when Blart does manage to deliver that speech, he does so with timorous self-doubt that finds its footing and resonates really well with the audience, and that's it, there's no joke, no cringe humor. I was so unbelievably grateful to the film for giving me this one moment that wasn't irredeemably angry or demeaning that I was prepared to stand up and applaud myself. It is an oasis, filled with precious pure water, and in any other film it would be a solid 4/10 moment.

Dealing with a demoralising convention isn't Blart's only problem at the moment. As he does not know, Maya has been accepted to UCLA, and has to decide how to break the news that she's going to movie all the way across the country to her dysfunctionally clingy father; as he does know, she's also been flirting up a storm with Lane (David Henrie), one of the parking valets at the fabulous Wynn Las Vegas res- I am so sorry, I just keep getting confused whether this is a movie or a 94-minute tourism video. Meanwhile, his colorful polyglot coterie of security guard colleagues - including Fuckin' This Guy Ovuh Heeyuh (Gary Valentine), Sassy Black Lady, Mm-hm (Loni Love), and Vaguely Gross Narcoleptic Indian (Shelly Desai) - pal around with him as he needlessly makes an enemy of the hotel's head of security Eduardo (Eduardo Verástegui) by repeatedly, if inadvertently, sexually harassing the man's girlfriend, the hotel's general manager Divina Martinez (Daniella Alonso).

And so Blart struggles on to keep his masculinity intact in a world that keeps telling him he's a lonely fat loser with no purpose in life but to eat himself into a diabetic coma. It's a damn pity that no team of highly methodical yet easily buffaloed art thieves are around for a poor bastard like Blart to stymie with the help of his wacky security guard colleagues and thus regain the respect of his peers, his family, and the person who matters the most: himself.

I swear to Christ, I wish they still shot movies on film just so we could have something to set on fire.

1/10

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MAY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Sumer is icumen in! A summer that is surely going to be a Much Bigger Deal than last year, and probably Not As Good, though the latter point is of course subjective. But seriously, it was terrific few months, and 2015 looks to be... franchisey. Even by normal standards.


1.5.2015

And what could be more franchisey than a new Marvel film that's pretty much earmarked to sail to some of the biggest box-office numbers ever? Here comes Avengers: Age of Ultron, Film #11 in a franchise also including five short films and three televisions series, and at a certain point I simply ran out of any ability to give a fuck. "I remember when I saw that exact thing but it was funnier and more entertaining the last time, and I barely liked it then" is not by any means the kind of headspace that one wants as one heads into a ridiculously crowded opening weekend theater crowd. But hey, you gotta pay your pop culture bills.


8.5.2015

Faced with the ugly prospect of counter-programming what will surely be an enormous second weekend, the best the studios could come up with for a wide release is Hot Pursuit, which actually makes great marketing sense: a woman-driven action comedy feels just about right for all the various needs the film must fill. But ye gods, that trailer is dire...

Not wide release, but the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Abigail Breslin's dad in the low-key indie zombie film Maggie is, at any rate, fascinating.


15.5.2015

Two sequels to cult hits! Having not seen the original, I have no real sense of what we should expect from Pitch Perfect 2, but the ads promise a lot of broad humor about how fat girls are gross, which doesn't seem to fit the "empowering!" motif I've heard. But then there is Mad Max: Fury Road, and I know exactly what I expect, based on the two-thirds of the original movies that are awesome, and the best trailers currently in circulation. I expect the best movie of the summer, is what I expect. In fact, the best popcorn movie of this year and probably next. It's going to be ugly on this blog that weekend if the film is less than perfect.


22.5.2015

So there's a new Brad Bird movie coming out. And that's the only thing that appears to be working in Tomorrowland's favor, given the almost complete lack thus far of plot specifics in the ad campaign, or even a solid sense of what the movie is even going to look like. So Brad Bird. A man who has comfortably gone four-for-four on his movies to date. Working with the notorious screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who has fucked up some very unfuckable properties in his career. I really, really wish I could be excited for this one, but it's not working.

Also, Poltergeist remake, because why not.


29.5.2015

If a gifted director can't get me onboard with a movie, a goofily entertaining star surely shouldn't be enough. And yet there's even less reason to be excited for San Andreas - not just a disaster movie, but a disaster movie in the most dubious of all disaster movie subgenres, the earthquake picture - but the mere presence of Dwayne Johnson is literally all I need to put this in my #2 slot for the month. Not a great month, sure, but a month.

Sharing space with it: Aloha, which finds Cameron Crowe doing the Cameron Crowe romcom thing, with a breathtakingly splendid cast, and hopefully that's enough to compensate for a story that can't even by synopsised in a two-minute ad without every damn beat of the plot being totally obvious.

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INTO THE WOODS, AND OUT OF THE WOODS

A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

As I write these words in the spring of 2015, the 2012 French animated feature The Day of the Crows has no distribution plans in North America, nor even an announced distributor (and that despite being a Canadian co-production, and based on an award-winning book by Québécois author Jean-François Beauchemin). This is both weird and infuriating. Weird, because releasing films like this and goosing them into Oscar nominations is, like, the whole thing that GKIDS exists for. Infuriating, because The Day of the Crows presents a strong case for itself as being the best animated feature in any Western aesthetic style in the 2010s so far.

Things start out with a wonderful few minutes of distraction and sleight-of-hand, beginning with a thoroughly uncertain opening that finds a mountain of a man tearing ass through a forest at night, and dropping a baby in his hurry; that baby spends the night being kept safe by a mother animal of some kind (I'm sure they have them all over Europe, but it looks not quite exactly like any of a half-dozen cat-size mammals I can come up with), before his father comes back to retrieve him. That, then, is our first introduction to the less-than-functional relationship of Courge (voiced by Jean Reno), the father, and the boy (Lorànt Deutsch), who never does quite end up with a name. When next we see them, they're living in a hut of sticks and the walls of a shallow cave, eking out a hunter-gatherer existence and wasting no time on niceties like love or familial affection; to Courge, the boy is only an obligation that must be taught how to hunt and survive.

After a few minutes of this, two things happen in very short order that blow away what has already proven to be a visually excellent, appealingly no-frills story of life in a primeval European wood. One is that the boy crosses paths with a human body topped by a ginger cat head, wearing a heavy coat, and communicating with gestures and knowing looks. The other is that the boy, hunting a stork, comes all the way up to the edge of The Outer World, which his father has very angrily forbidden him from ever entering, and the boundary is marked by high-voltage power lines. And just like that, the film announces without even raising its voice that it's going to be much less straightforward and explicit than the opening implied.

As it turns out, Courge and the boy have been living just a few miles from a small town in the French countryside in a period that's never marked, but it's surely well after the end of World War II, to judge from the clothes and general attitudes. The boy learns this quite by accident, when his father is wounded and the silent animal-people inhabiting the wood guide him out of it; in town, he finds a kind doctor (legendary director Claude Chabrol, in the final work of his professional life; he died two years before the film opened), and his daughter Manon (Isabelle Carré), no older than the boy himself, and they take the wildmen in to heal the unconscious Courge and give the boy food and shelter. The townsfolk, meanwhile, remember Courge from the as-yet unspecified history that sent him into the woods a decade ago. and they are not happy to see him back; one old woman, Mme. Ronce (Chantal Neuwirth), is convinced that he kidnapped her niece and murdered her, and she whips up the whole town into a frenzy against the newcomers, in a fashion most reminiscent of that other small-town French drama with a corvid in its name, Henri-George Clouzot's Le corbeau.

The story, adapted by Amandine Taffin, deftly combines that kind of parable of social conflict with the essentialism of a fairy tale, and surprisingly naturalistic psychology, given the other two things. It's unexpectedly eager to plumb some dark, nasty depths of human behavior in the form of Courge, a wicked father straight out of Grimm, who does not have any of the soft edges of most kid-friendly films about poor parenting; even when we start to see the shape of his tragic backstory, it merely makes him an explicable asshole instead of an inexplicable one. The same is true of Ronce, a brittle and brutal woman whose character design makes her look like a gleefully angry skull perched upon a human body - but the character design throughout the film is divine. Let me hold off on that for just a second longer. For I was not done praising The Day of the Crows for being absolutely willing to own up to the fact that there are some bad and nasty things that happen in life, and even when they're survivable, that doesn't make them less horrible. The film gets quite a lot of mileage from something as simple as the repeated way that the boy responds with confusion and some mistrust to any attempt to show him affection or kindness - without having to spell it our or dwell on it, the animation consistently shows how the boy's upbringing has left him entirely ill-equipped for even the slightest human interaction that isn't based in control and desperation.

It is, that's as much to say, a perfect exercise in character animation as performance, despite the visual style containing not a speck of Disney-style realism (it is traditional cel-style animation, of a sort that remains common in Europe - think the beautiful Ernest & Célestine - even as it is largely extinct in North American theatrical animation). Director Jean-Christophe Dessaint - whose most important work till now has been as assistant director on The Rabbi's Cat, though I will remain breathlessly hopeful that he gets to do another feature of his own - and his team of animators and designers have made a film based clearly in the charming grotesque of European cartooning, with the characters all rounded line drawings with few details (ol' Skull-Face Ronce is the primary if not indeed only exception), whose basic "two ovals and a line" faces stuck inside squishy-shaped heads are capable of an enormous range of the subtlest emotions; Manon especially is a masterwork of communicating volumes of unspoken thoughts through the tiniest beats of "acting". Despite looking broadly simple and comic, these characters are run through an enormous range of serious emotions, and the fact that such complex loss and need play out in the caricatured cartoon shapes we see onscreen gives those feelings more impact simply as a function of how unexpected they are.

These characters are set loose in one of the most beautiful worlds in animation in a generation. To begin with, the film establishes a division between the woods and the town that serves it well: namely, the town is largely realistic, fully detailed backrounds, while the forest is laid out as a series of Impressionistic paintings. There is, for the most part, the insinuation of trees and earth rather than the clear depiction of them in crisp, steady lines; it is more a spectrum of colors melded together and treated to terrific lighting design and effects animation; the film boasts the best animated rainstorm in an age, and the whole thing is lousy with dappled lighting rolling over arms and faces.

It's as gorgeous and insinuating as animation gets, the kind of film where the raw beauty of the artwork would be worthy of acclaim even if it didn't add the layers of meaning it does to an already complex, smart story about family and social dynamics. It is, admittedly, easy for me to go nuts in extolling the merits of a film that most of my readership will probably never be able to see, but The Day of the Crows is exactly the kind of movie that drive a love of animation: the hope that one will get to see a film where everything comes together so perfectly justifies wading through a lot of halfway-decent trivialities. Not particularly insisting on a family audience nor deliberately rejecting one, and exploring a range of themes that would be impressive in any live-action film, The Day of the Crows is great moviemaking and storytelling of a sort that plainly demonstrates why the medium of animation is as artistically significant as anything else in modern cinema.

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ADALINE'S LAMENT

Adaline Bowman deserves a better movie than The Age of Adaline. And she probably deserves a better actor than Blake Lively, though this is vastly better work than Lively has done anywhere else in her career.

Adaline, as we are told by the authoritative, detached narrator (Hugh Ross, who filled the same role, and with much the same tone of educated boredom, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) was born on 1 January, 1908 in San Francisco, California. She lived a perfectly normal life, fell in love, got married, had a child, lost her husband in a work accident, and in 1937, she got into an car accident during a freak snowfall in the much-too-warm Sonoma County. During this accident, she fell into the water and almost died, saved when an equally freak lightning strike restarts her heart. Thanks to perfectly ordinary science that the narrator assures us will be discovered and written down in 2035, Adaline, from that moment forth, does not physically age.

It's perfectly fair for any viewer to have no interest in buying into such a dippy premise, though the dry narration from a chronologically placeless narrator does an enormous amount of good work in selling the concept. But anyway, let us assume that we're fine with the basic hook of a woman who doesn't age, with a snapshot of her life from 1937 to January and February, 2015; that's a fucking wonderful hook. There's so much you can do with that hook; almost by default, it's going to involve the character having a unique perspective on the development of the 20th Century, and also feeling increasingly profound loss as the people she loves age and die, one generation at a time. And The Age of Adaline engages with those things, kind of. It certainly keeps them humming along in the background. But the actual screenplay that J. Mills Goodloe and Salvador Paskowitz produced from that hook and with that background is definitely not the best one that could exist. It's also, God knows, not the worst - the superficial and less-superficial similarities between The Age of Adaline and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is sufficient evidence of how shitty and slack this easily could be, with the right mismanagement.

It is, at any rate, largely concerned with Adaline's life starting on 31 December, 2014 - the day before her 107th birthday - and going for the next month or so as she enters into an affair with Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), a young rich guy who becomes infatuated with her while donating rare books to the library and archive where she oh-so-metaphorically works. Her backstory is doled out in the form of flashbacks triggered by old newsreels, remembered spaces, and faces from her past drifting in unexpectedly, which comes off as a sweet and sad way of building the narrative around her awareness of time passing all around her, of being fundamentally not of the era she has been placed into. But it's also pretty clearly the case that the backstory is more interesting than the A-plot, with its wealth of dramatic possibilities: the McCarthy-era terror of a nice suburban woman who finds herself some kind of inexplicable freak in the period of American history least friendly towards freaks; the way that discarding old identities and moving every few years turns into a bored habit; finding her daughter growing from child to same-aged peer to older woman, all without the basic mother-daughter relationship shifting. There's a lot of material that's more unique than "woman with a past that leaves her gunshy about starting relationships meets a handsome but not very interesting young beardy fellow". Watching the film, I found myself palpably yearning for The Age of Adaline as a four-hour epic, or The Age of Adaline as a TV miniseries. The Age of Adaline the soap opera simply doesn't have the weight and scope and scale that the material implies; the filmmakers and Lively all try their best to impress upon us the grim history of Adaline's unchanging life, but there's only so much that can be done in 110 minutes, when most of it is dedicated to recapping the usual romantic drama beats with only a striking gimmick to differentiate it from the rest.

That being said, the parts of The Age of Adaline that tap into that awful stretched-out history of loneliness really are superb. Lively's performance is almost entirely at the mercy of her scene partners, but the two best actors in the film also happen to have the most interesting roles and the most interesting, challenging scenes for the star to attack. I am here thinking of Ellen Burstyn as Adaline's daughter as a senior citizen, saddled with the unfortunate name "Flemming" (and talk about a bizarre late-career niche; with this and Interstellar, Burstyn has now appeared in two consecutive films as the 80-something child of a visually much-younger parent), whose scenes with Lively are probably the best thing in the film, as both actors commit unhesitatingly to the weird requirements of their parts, and do more to insist on the reality of the gimmick than anything else does. The other is Harrison Ford as William Jones, Ellis's father, who was desperately in love with Adaline in the '60s and was ready to propose to her until she jumped ship for fear of being pinned down and found out (the character is played as a young man by Anthony Ingruber, whose appropriation of Fordisms from the '70s and '80s is impressively committed and somehow deeply off-putting). Ford's dazzled shock, suffocating nostalgia, and poorly-disguised desire at meeting the apparent clone of his One True Love - she claims to be Adaline's daughter - is easily the best work he's done since the 1990s, and he pulls Lively up with him; their portrayal of a pair of doomed lovers is so heartbreaking and honest that it makes Lively and Huisman's chemistry feel even weaker than it already did for the movie's first half. Which is very little - Huisman is a total non-entity in the film, and Lively saves all of her energy for putting over the idea of Adaline as a woman who came of age in the '30s and has been juggling new social mores for the rest of her live, leaving her with nothing left over to prop up the flagging romance.

Still, Lively's best moments are really quite lovely, presented by director Lee Toland Krieger and his team with enough of a wintry, faded tone (especially in the cinematography by David Lanzenberg and the fantastic costume design by Angus Strathie, elegant but just forced enough to make the character appear slightly uncomfortable) that what the performer can't supply, the movie props up for her. It's a surprisingly tired movie, The Age of Adaline is, one that manages to imply a sense of lost things and too many memories through its visuals and its cutting, even if the script can't do the same. Fix the central romance, and the rest falls into place quite naturally, right down to an ending that should feel contrived as hell, except that the film presents it with such no-big-dealishness that it simply doesn't. There's a historically richer Age of Adaline, and a more emotionally nuanced Age of Adaline, and even an Age of Adaline that's a better conventional romantic drama. But even this Age of Adaline is still surprisingly smart and moving and much worthier of a viewing than everything about it would naturally suggest.

7/10

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I AM JACK'S MOVIE REVIEW

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

More than a decade and a half after its underwhelming theatrical performance that sneakily begot one of the most omnipresent movie cults of the early '00s (I was in college in those days; the film was inescapable), I have to admit that I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It would be an insane thing to deny that the film is consummately well-made, and it's impossible to overlook how much it starts to overreach in its second half and especially its final quarter, as it begins to lose sight of whatever the hell it was trying to do in a flurry of super-clever twists that are very similar to, but importantly distinct from the twists in Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, adapted by Jim Uhls.

It is, I think, the platonic ideal of A Film By David Fincher; not because it uses his skills to best effect, by any means (I am quite sure that honor belongs to Zodiac, and even by the time Fight Club came out in '99, the director already had Se7en behind him), but because it best typifies the thing that he always does, whether it works well (as in those two serial killer films), or whether it sets the movie on fire (most flamboyantly in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button): he always puts a lot of energy and investment into working out the mechanics of how he wants to make this film, attending to the craft of cinema with an almost holy focus. And he always does this at the expense of the connection between that craft and anything else. That's resulted in films that are, in the aggregate, worse than Fight Club, but I don't believe he's made anything as split between its intentions and its effect.

We'll circle back to that. Meanwhile, I do not, truly, know how much this film's cult remains robust and important in the daily lives of cinephiles, so I shouldn't talk about Fight Club like we all know what I mean. The film's unnamed protagonist, played by Edward Norton, is an insomniac office drone whose soul-crushing job involves, very specifically, trying to help his company determine how much money human lives are worth. He's found one unconventional and rather shady, if ultimately harmless way of releasing his stress and angst at the world not working out properly: he attends support groups for various grave illnesses, and lets himself be carried away on a wave of crying and intimacy (feigned intimacy, but it's the best he's got). The first serpent in his paradise comes in the form of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter, in the role that inaugurated the "Crazy Wigs and Too Much Kohl" era of her career), who's also lying her way through the support group circuit, more out of boredom than anything else, and who naps his bubble of protection. The second, who at first seems like a divine guiding light, is Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a homemade soap manufacturer and salesman that our boy meets on a plane.

They end up living together in the ancient, falling-down mansion in the city's warehouse district where Tyler has planted his flag of late, after the narrator's posh-appointed apartment explodes in a freak accident. It's from this pre-modern base of operation that Tyler begins to craft his philosophy of anti-consumerism, seeking to replace the lost self-reliance of modern masculinity that has been bred out by too many white-collar jobs and bourgie junk shops like IKEA and Starbucks. Seized by a random inspiration on their first night, Tyler asks the narrator to punch him outside of a bar, and in hardly any time, they - and an ever-increasing circle of like-minded lost souls - have formed Fight Club, a basement athletic club of sorts in which men fight, one pair at a time, in unrestrained bare-knuckle brawls, just for the sake of feeling anything. And this seems to make everybody's life better, right up until the narrator starts to figure out that Tyler is actually planning a most destructive form of anarchy that goes far deeper than convincing middle-class men that they don't need so much stuff. And there's absolutely no point to talking about Fight Club 16 years later without letting spoilers happen, so if you haven't seen the film and think you might want to - even though I frankly don't like it very much, I still believe that it's an essential piece of American cinema that needs to be studied and grappled with for plenty of reasons - here's your place to bail out.

The issue with Fight Club that transcends all other issues is not a mysterious one; those of us who don't love it have been identifying it for years now (I, personally, first made a version of this argument in 2002, and I was already parroting someone else, long-forgotten). Basically, Fight Club is David Fincher being too good at his job in the wrong way. This is, pretty clearly, a satire of the kind of wannabe superhero American masculinity that felt weakened and feminised by the economic boom and attendant emotional introspection of the 1990s - this is such a Clinton-era movie, above and beyond the fact that it's final scene would be unthinkable just two years after its premiere, in the wake of 9/11/01 - that does exactly what satire is supposed to do: it starts out with perfectly simple precepts that anybody ought to be able to agree with (IKEA overcharges you for dubiously "stylish" particleboard crap with ludicrous names), starts nudging that towards a heightened level (which is why you should feel totally excited if your apartment and all your possessions blow up), and eventually races full-out towards the kind of clearly unacceptable claims that are meant to show the basic intellectual instability of a position that might not seem at all weird if you only encounter it one bite at a time. In this case, the idea that males can only defend their maledom through increasingly militarised acts of violence.

So what happens is that Fincher, with his methodical, surgical approach to building cinema, looks at the situation that must be devised: the narrator must be seduced by Tyler. So he very flashily visualises the choking ennui of a consumption-driven lifestyle - the film's IKEA catalogue montage is legitimately one of the finest sequences in the director's career at the level of technique - and he glorifies the DIY lifestyle that Tyler lives, treating it with a certain level of irony that's nevertheless clearly enthusiastic and friendly and funny, and he stages Fight Club with the intensity and dazzlement of '90s action cinema at its fleetest. Which was not too fleet, for the most part (not in America), and so it's easy for the fight sequences to feel absolutely stunning and exciting compared to almost everything else that shared its historical moment. And he has done such a great job of building all that up, he can't back out of it. The problem at the core of Fight Club is that it's appealing because of its style, and then it tries to walk back from that at an entirely intellectual level, and it's a mishmash of energies that makes absolutely no sense. The movie says that it's horrified at Tyler's excesses, but it feels jazzed up by them, and that's before the filmmakers make the absolutely unforgivable choice to let the destruction of skycrapers at the end play as the visual punchline for the narrator and Marla to end up together, the explosions filling almost exactly the same role as the fireworks in To Catch a Thief. Movies are a visual medium; if you show us explosions in a romantic, exciting way, that matters more than telling us that they are amoral at best, and by that point in the screenplay, Fight Club really isn't concerned with even telling us that. The result is a film that's irreconcilably broken between its thoughts and its guts, and there was no way the guts were going to lost. Not with such extraordinarily visceral work being done by cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (whose offensively good capturing of the chilly shine of nighttime made him a great Fincher collaborator, making it dumbfounding and annoying they'd wait a whole decade before teaming up again for The Social Network), editor James Haygood (funneling with slurry abandon between moments, channeling music video technique with a keen sense of the needs of a feature), and electronic/hip hop producers Dust Brothers to provide the jarring, frequently toneless and always intensifying score.

The Big Ol' Twist really doesn't help matters. If this was a film about the narrator trying to stop his secretly insane buddy Tyler Durden, it would have been a great deal easier to sell the idea that the film's last forty minutes are there to disprove the first ninety; if this was a film about a man finding that he's secretly insane, and unpacking all the things that he's done as "Tyler Durden", it could have been a great psychological thriller. Doing both of those things gets muddy as hell. But I do have to hand it to Fincher and Uhls: having only finally seen the movie for a second time, knowing the twist on your way through is a marvelous experience. The way that dialogue and blocking very casually state outright things that we're simply not interested in learning yet is brazen in the best way; the weird one-frame insert shots of Pitt before he appears as a character go from being a punkish in-joke to crafty foreshadowing, especially since it's also much easier to see how much of the film is being presented from the narrator's sleep-deprived POV without actually flagging it as such. Take out the social commentary, and Fight Club, and the rather mean jokes at the expense of people trying to muddle through sickness with emotional support groups, and there's a fucking wonderful depiction of psychological unreliability that even makes Pitt's oddly uni-dimensional performance turn out to be a strength instead of a weakness. But that's taking a hell of a lot of things out.

So back to where we started: I really have no damn clue what to make of Fight Club. It's all technically gorgeous, and along with The Matrix, I'm inclined to call it one of the first American films of the 21st Century, for all its accelerated continuity and don't-stop-to-think aesthetic. But it's such a wreck of tone and intellect, and it's so inhuman in ways that all Fincher films ultimately turn out to be; but no other Fincher film takes place so necessarily inside one person's head for 100% of its running time. It's electrifying, stylish cinema, of course, and I honestly do get why people love it - whether they love its cool or its satire of the same cool. That right there, I think, is why I can't pretend to come even close to loving it myself.

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JUST REMEMBER THE UNCANNY VALLEY

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

The 2001 video game adaptation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a bad movie. I apologise for the redundancy. But it's not just bad, the way that other entries in its peculiarly benighted subgenre are, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or BloodRayne. Or Street Fighter or Wing Commander. Or Super Mario Bros. It is a bad film that swings between the inordinately awful, the merely crummy, and even the genuinely good in a wild confusion. We cannot, for example, bluntly declare "it's an ugly movie", even though its ugliness is pervasive and surely the individually most important reason that it's also bad. Parts of it are as beautifully-designed and executed as anything in an animated feature from the 2000s. And the only reason it's so damn ugly is because it's so damn ambitious.

The thing about The Spirits Within - which has absolutely no connection to the nine games in the main Final Fantasy series (Final Fantasy X released just over a week after the film opened), nor any of that series' spin-offs, except for a character called Sid (though its spelled "Cid" in the English localisations of the games) - is that it was as much a proof of concept and technical exercise as it was an attempt to make a narrative film. The idea behind it was to make the first photo-realistic CGI humans in feature-length cinema, six years after Toy Story birthed the fully-rendered CG feature by including hideous deformities where its human characters should have gone. Actually, that's much too small a way of putting the film's ambitions: The Spirits Within was meant to create a whole new paradigm in movie acting, creating in its main character a CG "actress" who would show up in film after film, both live-action and animated, who would come to feel like a real movie star in her own right.

This did not come even close to happening, and most of the aesthetic technique that The Spirits Within pioneered turned out to be an immediate dead end. The film was a big flop, one that shuttered the new film division of video game publisher Square almost in the same breath that it opened it, and very nearly wrecked the company's planned merger with fellow software company Enix, now wary of linking its fortunes to company with such a high-profile failure. Worse still, the much-ballyhooed new style was a complete wash: The Spirits Within is a handsome movie in almost every way except for its photorealistic characters, who remain 14 years later the leading citizens of the Uncanny Valley, that place where the visually accurate representation of humans runs into the barely-not-right animation of their bodies and features, and gives everybody watching a screaming case of the heebie-jeebies. Far from triggering a new generation of computer-generated movie stars, The Spirits Within decisively proved that all-CG characters had better stay in the realm of pure fantasy, like the frog-man Jar-Jar Binks of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, or better still, the skeletal subhuman Gollum of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, released a year and a half after The Spirits Within, and a triumph in exactly the ways that The Spirits Within failed.

Ironically, for a film whose cast is so uniformly soulless, The Spirits Within is all about souls. The somewhat baffling story, freely mixing spiritualism and hard science in a way that feels quintessentially JPRG-ish (though the script, which was in English for maximum profit potential, was by Al Reinert & Jeff Vintar, the story was by Final Fantasy creator and series guardian Sakaguchi Horonobu, who also directed), is about the race of alien beings that have taken over most of Earth's surface by 2065, and assault and kill humans by eating our spirits. Which you can see as they're pulled out of our bodies, with your naked eye and all. Dr. Aki Ross (Ming-Na Wen) and her mentor Dr. Sid (Donald Sutherland) are busily working on a plan to fight these Phantoms by collecting eight elemental crystals alien spirits which will both cure Aki of her Phantom infection - the reason she's uniquely able to track down the target spirits - and help awaken Gaia, the spirit of Earth itself, to neutralise the Phantoms. Reluctantly helping them are Aki's former lover Captain Gray Edwards (Alec Baldwin), and his team of colorful soldiers, Ryan Whittaker (Ving Rhames), Neil Fleming (Steve Buscemi), and Jane Proudfoot (Peri Gilpin). And they have to work fast: they're being constantly stymied by the vicious General Hein (James Woods), who regards Aki's Phantom connection as proof that she can't be trusted, and just wants to blow the Phantoms apart with his giant space laser.

It would be charitable to describe the film's storyline as mildly confusing: the mixture of random spirituality and space marine clichés results in an irreconcilable collage of ideas and tones that lurches from heady discussions of New Age arcana bolted to technobabble, right into noisy action sequences, and then into moody expressions of creeping horrifying dread. The way to get through it, I have found on two occasions now, is to stop wanting the story to click along normally, and just go with whatever seems to be happening onscreen in the moment; ultimately, it always comes back to Hein being wicked and Gray shouting out exposition and looking sidelong at Aki, and it's easy enough to parse that as a thoroughly generic sci-fi action adventure. "Get through it", I say, not "find it marvelously enjoyable". In faith, The Spirits Within always feels a bit musty and overfamiliar, it's just that its individually musty elements jar with each other in inscrutable ways.

Which leaves us not with a particularly edifying story to sit through, but a series of visual spaces to watch unfold - it is a video game adaptation, after all. And fair's fair, the design of those spaces is absolutely exquisite. The film's evocation of a ruined Earth, turned into a literal alien graveyard, includes almost nothing but gorgeous backgrounds, full of hectically cobbled-together tech, flinty militarism, and an apocalyptic sweep in places. The Phantoms themselves are amazing-looking creations, translucent orange forms that flow and glide through the action with abstract beauty that offsets the inhuman horror of their design, which is usually spotted in brief snatches so that it never grows too comfortable.

And yet, what is this marvelous world populated with? Plastic zombies. In an early use of motion capture, the human cast of The Spirits Within tends towards stiffness in their actions that clashes oddly with their elaborately detailed and free-flowing hair, but that's not really the thing that leaps out of the screen to devour your brain from the inside. For that, we needs must look instead to their faces, which are subtle horrors, but abiding ones. You'd not be able to pick it out in a still shot; other than the matte flatness of their eyes, these are photo-realistic creations. In motion, they are living nightmares. It's the skin, above all else: there isn't a millimeter of squash and stretch in the characters' exposed flesh, which doesn't stretch, or wiggle, or move at all - it's at its most obvious in something like the vein on Dr. Sid's scalp, which sits there, flat and cold and motionless, like an iron cord stapled to his head. But it's at its worst whenever a character moves their jaw, and their face gives way while their cheeks stay rigid and flat. It's so hideous that it almost doesn't even register that the mouth movements don't meaningfully line up with the spoken dialogue most of the time, so in addition to watching faces move the way faces can't, we're also watching mouths flap around like dead puppets being waggled by a monstrous and perverse unseen puppetmaster.

I don't care how beautiful the design and compelling the world; and it wouldn't matter in the least if the story were a captivating masterpiece of curlicuing plot and piercing insight into the human condition. As long as the protagonists looked like that (Aki gets a bit more work put into her, but mostly at the level of texture and eye movement), The Spirits Within could never work as a motion picture. It is viscerally off-putting. The fascinating thing about it, is that for all that it horrifies me to watch more than a couple of minutes of it in a row, I am terribly glad the movie exists; it's like absolutely no other feature that I've ever encountered or even heard of, and its ambition is off the charts. This is the kind of severely disturbing dysfunction that only comes from pushing the envelope much too far, much too fast - all these years later, and we're still not caught up to the place where The Spirits Within wanted to get to in one step. It's absolutely one-of-a-kind, the perfect cinematic embodiment of Hunter S. Thompson's "Too weird to live, too rare to die", and in all its beautiful spectacle and skin-crawling ugliness, it is very much something that should be at least sampled, just for a taste of it. Because this film exists, we get to know what that kind of thing would look like; and better yet, because it exists, we know that we want to stay the hell away from that kind of thing, and why.

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DON'T PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD

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

Scout's honor, I'll get to the review part of the review in a minute, but I can't go into without getting something off my chest, which is that Foodfight! is monstrously unattractive. I would swear at The Hague that this is the absolute ugliest bastard of an animated feature that has ever been released by something resembling an actual animation studio, though in the case of Threshold Entertainment, that resemblance is fucking meager. The whole production history, which would make a movie that's vastly more entertaining than this one, starts with Lawrence Kasanoff, chief executive officer at Threshold (a company specializing in producing short projects for theme parks and such exploiting existing intellectual property), who came up with the kind of must-miss idea that only a studio executive with no connection left to humanity could have whipped up: what about, like, Toy Story with food corporation mascots instead of beloved childhood toys?

That was in 1999. The next couple of years found Kasanoff greasing the necessary palms to get the ultimate experience in grueling product placement off the ground, and beginning production on the thing, with Kasanoff himself as director. It all purred along nicely, until the drives containing all the completed animation were reported stolen in 2002. It would be delightful to assume that this was part of some plan to defraud the investors and corporations who'd paid to have their characters come to life in this film, but that seems hard to square with the rest of the story, which gets vastly more bizarre. Kasanoff, you see, was undaunted by this loss, and attempt to throw himself back into completing his marketing opus, though as recounted in a 2013 New York Times article that reads more like the eyewitness reports of a plane crash than a making-of piece, he didn't know much about direction animation, and his animators didn't know much about the specific tasks they were suddenly forced to do. At this point, the film - now to be carried out using motion capture, which in 2004 was about to score its first major success with the zombie horror film The Polar Express - managed to secure a distribution deal and a release date in 2005 that zipped by without notice; another went by in 2007. Then came the legal action, and in 2011 the film was auctioned off by the insurance company for immediate completion and distribution: the honors went to Viva Pictures, who silently dropped the thing into UK theaters in 2012 for hardly any time, and released it directly to DVD in the United States in 2013, after securing a favorable deal with Wal-Mart.

And under those circumstances, it's no surprise that Foodfight! - see, it's fun because it has an exclamation point! - looks like pulsating ass. It was made quickly by animators who didn't quite know what they were doing with software that wasn't right for the job and given instructions by a man with no clue about anything to do with technology and craft. Still, knowing why something isn't exactly anybody's fault is by no conceivable stretch of the imagination the same thing as making it not an outrageous crime against art and humanity.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

In addition to images that look like what would happen if John Lasseter had the DTs, Foodfight! has a plot. And that plot is this: in the small, traditional grocery store Marketopolis Market, when the shop closes up for the night, the aisles turn into a thriving city populated by all the corporate mascots for all the products sold there - "Ikes", they're called, in recognition of their innate love for the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower* - who spend their days enacting '40s movie tropes and concocting shitty puns. The most level-headed and admired of all the Ikes is Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen), a cereal mascot who works as a private eye disrupting the surprisingly robust criminal underground of Marketopolis. He's just cracked his 500th consecutive case, and he plans to celebrate by finally proposing to his girlfriend Sunshine Goodness (Hilary Duff), who with a name like that is amazingly not the logo for a line of racy leather underwear. She's a catgirl who sells raisins. And Dex gives her a four-carrot ring, do you get it, because the three credited writers had a drinking habit to get back to.

Before he can pop the question, though, Sunshine goes missing. And that's not all that's about to shatter the beatific world of the Marketopolitans: the owner of the supermarket has just been strong-armed into stocking the new Brand X by a corporate salesman named Mr. Clipboard, who is voiced by Christopher Lloyd and designed like a level boss from one of the first House of the Dead games. As soon as Brand X shows up on the shelves, its own related Ike, Lady X (Eva Longoria) enters the community, and it's around now that one starts to wonder if the writers actually know what "generic" actually means, This happens, by the way, on the same day that a grim-faced Dex is opening his new club, Copabanana, to drown the sorrows of his lost love and the career that he sent down the shitter when she vanished. It takes absolutely no time before Lady X and her fellow off-brand Ikes begin to take over the city, murdering Ikes left and right, which apparently makes their product taste bad, or not work, or whatever. The film does not clarify its rules. It brags about how much non-clarity its rules have. It straddles the viewer and teabags us with its zeal for not having clear rules.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

Anyway, the whole thing is a clumsy attempt to do bright CGI noir with Dex Doggevtive - I mean, what the fuck. "Dogtective" is not a word that a native speaker of English can pronounce. Longoria, who has to say it the most times, doesn't even try. She just calls him "Dex Dog Tective". But as I was saying, Dex Doveffiv is Humphrey Bogart, trenchcoat and hat and all, and the movie keeps lifting huge chunks of Casablanca in the apparent assumption that it would have violated the dignity of Warner Bros. to try and stop it. This does, incidentally, mean that Foodfight! needs Nazis. And Nazis it gets: the Brand Xers are about as unambiguously Nazi-esque as you can get in a kids' film, right down to the part where they torture an elephant to death with a dentist drill in a kids' film.

Not that Foodfight! has a very clear sense of what it means to be a kids' film. The filmmakers apparently had heard that some family movies have jokes that are mostly for the kids but also some subtle innuendo that's meant for their parents, and they tried their hand at it. This means that Dex's sidekick buddy, Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady), an incompetent flying squirrel who sells chocolate and is a mind-bogglingly racist caricature, gets to sneak in such subtle winks and nods to the adults like: "How about some chocolate frosting? I'd like to butter your muffin!" and "I never even got a chance to play 'lick the icing' with Sweet Cakes". or there's this chestnut of seductive dialogue between Dex Doggive and Lady X:

"There are some stains you can never wash out."
"Let's try. I want to scrub your bubbles, Dex."

Later, Dex calls her a "cold-farted itch", which isn't just horribly dirty, it doesn't make any sense. But you, know, for kids! They love the farts. Which is probably why the second thing that in any way resembles a gag in the whole movie is a a frog farting, a propos of nothing.

Though to be fair, the context for a frog farting would probably never make more than an incidental kind of sense.

And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

But I was just starting to talk about the Nazis! There are Nazis. There are Nazis trying to take over the city of corporate mascots, using food-based tanks and all. One of the main Nazis, voiced by ace voice actor Jeff Bennett, who I suppose was just glad for the work, discovers in the moment of his death that he's sexually aroused by urinating himself, and that is not a lie. It's not even an exaggeration.

The screenplay for this film is unforgivable, pure and simple, between the leering sex, the awful puns on corporate names and slogans (which is, for the most part, as close as it comes to its mission statement of combining corporate mascots in a fun shared universe; any character who has anything to do of real importance in the plot is either original or a terrible knock-off), the goddamn Nazis murdering people and taking over their city, the shameless Casablanca thievery. Even so, the screenplay deserved better animation.

There aren't words for how off-putting Foodfight! looks. The characters look like hell, with weird, stiff faces and body movement that has as many points of articulation as a cheap action figure. Most of them have just the one expression, which is how we have a (wildly, wildly sexist) climax in which Sunshine Goodness beams her ecstatic "I love all the world and especially RAISINS!" smile as she wallops the tar out of Lady X, who grimaces with the exact same "I want you inside of me right now, humanoid dog" smolder she's worn all through the film.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

It is insulting to primitivism to describe this as primitive. There has never been a period in the history of commercially-released computer animation where the technique was as clumsy as it is in the very best moments of Foodfight! Hair moves with heads like a thick plastic helmet; liquids slump across surfaces like tar on a frozen day; the backgrounds are fuzzy and indistinct and the foregrounds tend to be slabs of smooth colors with indifferently-applied lighting techniques. If this was a video game and you were playing it in 1996, you might think it looked okay, though not the best thing you'd ever seen. For a theatrical release in the 21st Century, it's an outright insult to the time of the hoped-for audience to think they'd tolerate this for even a minute. Which is a lot longer than I was able to tolerate the unchanging expressions, the unbelievably crude effects work (in the early going, a character cries, and it looks like he's shooting Tylenols out of his eyes - fuck, maybe that's another piece of product placement) and the way that no two objects seemed to be interacting with each other properly.

I'd say that I'm happy that something born from such a vile, mercenary place turned out so poorly and tanked so badly, but compared to the abject misery that is watching Foodfight!, even that happiness is fleeting. This is, in all sincerity, one of the very worst movies I have ever seen, not worthy of even the most morbid ironic fascination. It is dreadful, ugly, stupid, filthy-minded, and morally bereft on multiple levels. Also, you can totally see it for free on Amazon Prime.

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GREAT WORKS OF CLASSIC SCI-FI

In the very small hours of the morning - so small that I failed to notice it -a new group Top 10 went up at The Film Experience: the eleven-including-a-tie best science-fiction films prior to 1977.

As always, lists are a fun and contentious thing to talk about, so head over there and do so. But for the curious, my abnormally on-consensus ballot went like this:

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - #1 on the TFE list
2. Solaris (1972) - on the TFE list
3. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) - on the TFE list
4. Fantastic Planet (1973)
5. Metropolis (1927) - on the TFE list
6. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - on the TFE list
7. Forbidden Planet (1956) - on the TFE list
8. Godzilla (1954) - on the TFE list
9. Planet of the Apes (1968) - on the TFE list
10. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - on the TFE list

And the runners-up, chronologically:

When Worlds Collide (1951)
The War of the Worlds (1953)
Them! (1954)
La jetée (1962) - on the TFE list
Alphaville (1965)

This was as terrifying to whittle down as any list we've done: between this and its impending sister list, the sheer glut of worthy candidates and the constant terror that I'd forgotten something obvious and brilliant made it almost impossible for me to commit to a final list. Not to mention that "best science-fiction" is not a term that means any one particular thing 100% of the time. So please, tell me what I overlooked!

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BEST SHOT: NINE TO FIVE

Forgive me, dear readers, but I have to make my contribution to this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot a short one. It's One Of Those Days.

Our subject, selected as always by the kind and good Nathaniel R, is the classic anarcho-feminist comedy Nine to Five (or 9 to 5, I'm never clear which is the more "official" title), in which three hard working women played by the once-in-a-lifetime trio of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Dolly Parton (who contributed the title number, one of the best songs to ever lose the Best Song Oscar) decide they've had enough of their bullying, condescending sexist prick of a boss (played, quite inevitably for 1980, by Dabney Coleman), and so they tie him up in his house and run the office in his absence. There's more to it than that, but even though this development occurs rather more than halfway through the movie, it's the thing everybody knows about it, so it seems fair enough for a précis.

All the attention usually goes - and fairly - to the film's role in the burgeoning Power to the Working Woman genre, and the three widely varied characterisations and performances of the protagonists. It's clearly slanted to encourage our viewing it through that lens: this was the era that "anything a man can do, a woman can do better" feminism was at its peak, and Nine to Five is one of the most iconic triumphs of that belief in pop culture.

But not wishing to be enormously obvious, I found myself gravitating towards the film's other inversion of traditional gender roles, the one that never gets talked about, because Coleman's Franklin Hart is such an un-nuanced gargoyle. Still, it's worth pointing out that as the three women in the movie take over the customary male role of decision making and office managing, the male villain is thrust into the role of a stay-at-home woman, literally tied down to his house. And that leads, at a certain point, to this delightful visual gag.

By this point, the film has already exploded traditional girly fantasies from the inside in the form of a marvelous series of sardonic dream sequences; it doesn't espouse a particular attitude about soap operas, but it's not hard to assume that it would be balled up with all the other things used to keep women docile and bored, and happily discarded. Or, in this case, left to rot a man's brains for a little while, as he learns firsthand how shabbily he and people like him have been treating 51% of the population for his entire life. And Coleman's resigned slumped posture just sells it that much more: he's not even miserable and angry anymore, he's just stuck in the house, watching his stories because there's nothing else for him to do. This obvious lesson is wasted on the character, but the punchy, perfectly-timed visual joke makes it impossible for us in the audience to fail to see and appreciate the irony.

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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DOWN ONCE MORE TO THE DUNGEON OF MY BLACK DESPAIR

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

Like just about anyone born after 1970 who loves musical theater, I had my Phantom of the Opera phase. I'm not sure when or how it ended, exactly, but it was well before December, 2004, when at long last The Phantom of the Opera The Movie bombasted its way into theaters, 18 years after the musical had premiered. And yet I still found myself sitting there opening weekend, duty-bound to see if there was anything in the sprawling concoction heaved up by Joel Schumacher, a filmmaker uniquely devoid of a sense of proportion or fear of being thought tacky, that could make me believe again in the transporting power of the music of the night.

There was not then. There still isn't.

Yet it's not enough to say "The Phantom of the Opera ('04) sucks because The Phantom of the Opera ('86) sucks, and Andrew Lloyd Webber is a farty toot-head". Love or hate the source material, the fact remains that The Phantom of the Opera is nowhere near the movie it could have been, committing one unforced error after another on its way to becoming one of the damned sloppiest major musicals of contemporary times. The cynic might say that the filmmakers knew they had an enormous pre-sold fanbase, and simply didn't need to care about doing a good job; but I legitimately don't want to be that cynical. Schumacher had been invested in this project for years before it was completed - I can't imagine that he just didn't give a shit about the material.

That material, of course, is one of the most popular stage musicals in the history of the medium, adapted from Gaston Leroux's 1910 romantic horror novel, which had been translated into Lord knows how many movies by the time Schumacher's version came along. The basic story is as familiar as it gets: young opera singer-in-training Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) is able to pinch hit on the night of a grand gala at the Paris Opera (the fictional Opéra Populaire in the musical), when the stormy prima donna Carlotta (Minnie Driver) decides to pitch a hissy fit, and wins an enormous success. What nobody knows is that she has been receiving lessons from an unseen tutor, her "Angel of Music". What even Christine doesn't know is that this is actually a disfigured man living in the catacombs and sewers beneath the opera house, whose inhabitans refer to him in nervous whispers as the Phantom of the Opera (Gerard Butler). When she connects with childhood friend and current patron of the Opéra, Raoul, Victomte de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), she pushes the shadowy Phantom into a jealous rage, and while he plots to have her firmly entrenched as the company's new leading soprano, he also works to fully possess the young woman whom he already has in an enraptured haze.

Every version of Phantom is basically a melodrama; in the case of the legendary 1925 Universal production, it's melodramatic horror, while the musical, with score by Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, and book by Webber and Stilgoe, is a melodramatic romantic triangle that juts out into horror here and there. The movie goes a little bit more in for thrills and chills than the stage version did, owing largely to some new orchestrations that live threateningly in the baseline, but the core is still swoony romance, and that's probably why the film committed one of the two absolutely crushing sins that would have turned it into a failure no matter how great everything else was - and in this Phantom of the Opera, there is nothing whatsoever that deserves to be called "great", except for maybe the costumes designed by Alexandra Byrne. We'll get to the other one in a moment, but let's pause for a moment to contemplate good ol' Gerard Butler, the pretty boy Phantom cast with an eye towards making the disfigured murderer a sex symbol who could compete with the handsome young Wilson (whose subsequent career of shifty, pathetic emblems of self-loathing masculinity makes it incredibly hard to take him seriously here, but that's not the fault of the movie or his performance) and Wilson's ludicrous shoulder-length wig.

Permit me to be blunt, dear reader, in stating directly that Butler's casting doesn't work on any level whatsoever. Madonna's lead performance in Evita, the last film made from a Webber show, wasn't necessarily any better, but at least she makes sense from a metanarrative and marketing perspective. Butler is just wrong. He's too attractive to be remotely plausible as the scarred, angry outcast - and the make-up design is quite ashamed to cover him up with more than a bad rash and a bit of modest scar tissue around the lips, compounding the problem.

"So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face"

Nor was he nearly enough of a noteworthy heartthrob in 2004 to make up for it by re-making the role into a star vehicle. He's also not tremendously good as an actor, find one emotion per scene and clinging to it like a life raft, resulting in a far plainer Phantom than the material deserves; instead of a tragic Byronic antihero, the character is just a mopey creep.

But the worst of it, and it's not even a close race, is in his singing. It is mind-blowingly bad - it competes only with Pierce Brosnan's cow-giving-birth performance of "S.O.S." in Mamma Mia! for the title of worst vocal performance in a musical in the 2000s. Butler has to bark and bray his way through the musical's signature ballad, "The Music of the Night", leaping for notes that he can only hit through momentum, not through good pitch, and turning the song into an uncomfortable straining ruin. There are certain points - the first time he sings the line "The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind" in "The Phantom of the Opera" is the clearest example - where he drops his AmerBritish accent and lets the Scots flow through him. He sounds, throughout, to be in dreadful pain. And that, infinitely more than his incongruous appearance, is what causes him to jam the brakes on the film and throw the audience out through the windshield.

That is one of the film's primary sins. The other one - the worse one, I'd say, given that I've thought about it constantly in the decade since I saw the film last - is that the sound mixing is the fucking worst. I have seen movies from 1929, where the microphones were hidden in potted plants, that didn't have such brutal shifts in the texture of the soundtrack. Of course, any musical where the songs are prerecorded and the actors lip-sync on set (generally not all that well, in this film) is going to show the seams between the two, but in Phantom of the Opera, it feels like they're singing on a different continent from the action depicted onscreen. Thankfully, it's mostly sung-through, so there's not that much spoken dialogue - though quite a lot more than in the show - but when it arrives it is dramatic and horrible, particularly during the lovers' secret banter in "Masquerade", where a sweet moment is turned into an earache. Or there's the grisly experience of "Stranger Than You Dreamt It", in which Butler sounds like he was delivering all his lines on the back of a truck speeding through a windstorm.

Mind you, just because Butler and the sound mixing are so utterly, unrelievedly vile that I have to separate them out, that doesn't mean that Phantom of the Opera has much of anything to recommend it. It's easier to praise the performances on a moment-by-moment level than any of them across the board: only Wilson is generally solid throughout, along with Miranda Richardson as the curt ballet mistress with A Dark Secret, but her role is too tiny to make a film-saving impact (she's also the only character in this Parisian-set story to speak with a French accent, because Miranda Richardson says "fuck you, I'm doing it"). Rossum's best moments are sublime, playing Christine as the guileless child that most films and stage productions tend to age up into her mid-20s, radiating an innocence that shades deeper into sorrow and fear as the film proceeds; but there are enough rocky patches in her performance that it's not flawless, and while it's a pity her career evaporated until TV saved it in 2011, this is hardly the kind of grand coming out as a leading lady the 18-year-old probably hoped for. She looks sleepy and distracted during the soaring love duet "All I Ask of You"; her singing is never better than satisfactory, and she has an enormous problem with the semi-parodic opera aria "Think of Me". Incidentally, nothing about The Phantom of the Opera indicates that Webber or Hart had even a micron of knowledge about actual opera. Driver goes way broad, and her Italian comic villain is the next best thing to a hate crime; it's also impossible to take her seriously as an actually talented, popular, and world-class diva, a reality that the entire rest of the plot springs from.

The staging is generally indifferent, save for a few scattered shots that prove Schumacher had seen Moulin Rouge! sometime in the three years since its release, and the utterly tacky lift at the start of the garish, over-lit "The Phantom of the Opera" sequence that proves he'd also seen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and inaccurately assumed that he had earned the right to lick that film's taint, let alone pilfer one of its most famous images. Some moments - a series of high-angle tracking shots during "Prima Donna" the dreamy incoherence that precedes that ghastly Cocteau homage - are clever and lovely; and the way he stages the framing scenes from years in the future as a flickering silent film (albeit with sound) is well-done if not effective. Some parts - the baffling destruction of the fourth wall in "Masquerade" and the anachronistic choreography that pops up in the same number - are irritating and lousy. The vast majority of it, though, is just there, doing nothing in particular but plopping the action onscreen in a way that's a bit brighter, more glittery, and tackier than the stage version.

I don't know if it's the worst Phantom of the Opera that I can imagine - it has no space aliens or dubstep remixes of the songs - but it's surely the worst that could have been made under Webber's personal supervision. What isn't sleepy and tediously literal is messy and inept, shots slamming together rather than cutting neatly, the sets looking garish and flat, the performances drifting aimlessly and in no real relationship to each other. It feels like even an enthusiastically mediocre and hackish adaptation should have been better than this; this is an actively terrible motion picture that every reason to be bland and perfunctory. That's takes some kind of skill, I suppose, but it's not really something you'd want to brag about.

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