BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WATCHING OTHER PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the notorious insta-flop Pixels is an adventure about a group of competition-level video game players. It's also pandering to '80s nostalgia, so let's go ahead and travel back to that decade

The dominant criticism of The Wizard when it was new in 1989 was that it was transparently a commercial for Nintendo, crudely fashioned into a simulacrum of a feature film, and the idea was this was somehow a filthy trick to play on the children in its target audience. Having been exactly the right age with exactly the right interests to care, I would like to promise those worried adults: we knew. The fact that it was a commercial was in fact exactly the draw - this was the movie which would offer North America its first opportunity to see footage from Super Mario Bros. 3, and it was advertised on precisely that basis. If you were Nintendo-playing grade schooler in '89, this was about on par with Christ returning to play Himself in a movie before inaugurating the end times. That being said, despite being the exact sort of person who this movie was made for, I never bothered seeing it - I mean, hell, it was a feature-length commercial.

A quarter of a century later,* The Wizard looks no less like a commercial, and its single-minded commitment to the style and attitude that children of the late 1980s perceived as cool leaves it feeling very much like a communication from some alien species. The last half-hour of the movie, in particular, is an incomprehensible frenzy of sound and noise and color that feel like a bad acid trip. Or perhaps a really, really good acid trip.

Not that you would know this at first, for among the film's many peculiarities is its earnest desire for almost its entire first hour to function as a mordant domestic drama. The opening image, underneath the credits, is a telephoto shot of nine-year-old Jimmy Woods (Luke Edwards) walking along a featureless desert road, arriving nowhere and doing it slowly. It's a dead ringer for something out of a '70s movie, and it's frankly rather presumptuous for an '80s kids film of any sort, let alone one that has every intention of trying to sell us video games. And this will very much continue on as the film sketches its rather bitter family scenario: Jimmy is the autistic son of the divorced Sam Woods (Beau Bridges) and Christine Bateman (Wendy Phillips), the latter of whom has since remarried a snappish control freak (Sam McMurray), and retained custody of Jimmy. Having finally concluded that he's too difficult for his and everyone else's own good, the Batemans have made the hard choice to put him in an institution. This makes Sam unhappy, but it really pisses off his second son, Corey (Fred Savage), from his first marriage, who decides to spring Jimmy from the institution and run away from home with him. The Batemans hire a sleazy bounty hunter, Putnam (Will Seltzer), to track the boys down, while Sam, anxious to keep Corey from their punitive hands (we are assured that Christine, in her days as Corey's stepmother, didn't even feign affection for the boy), takes his eldest son, Corey's full brother Nick (Christian Slater), on a trip with him to track the boys down.

So far, so good: a little over-plotted, and you need to pay a bit of attention to catch all of the nuances of how these people are related and what they think about each other, but if the world actually required a serious '70s style domestic drama about the ugly fallout from a divorce done up as an adventurous road movie for children - and I really do not suppose that it did - this is good enough to get the job done. But this is merely the overture; the warm-up, even. From here, thing start to get enormously weird, and they do it fast. Trying to buy a bus ticket, Corey and Jimmy encounter Haley (Jenny Lewis), a girl Corey's age who seems to be some kind of '30s Depression-comedy vagabond in the body of a 1989 13-year-old. It's astonishing. She throws out punny, cutting quips, delivered at a rapid-fire clip in a snarky tone that the young actor is visibly confused by herself; it's like director Todd Holland took her aside on the first day of shooting to demand that she play her character as Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and refused thereafter to listen to any of her questions as to what the hell that meant.

As the quick-witted dame with a con artist's soul, it's Haley who figures out how to monetise Jimmy's newly discovered skill at video games, by betting against businessmen and tough skaterboarders and the like. It's at this point that it's impossible to stop noticing that The Wizard is no less than Rain Man with children, and thus at this point The Wizard turns into a mostly surreal experience. Not totally surreal; we still have to get to the final act for that. Before that happens, our plucky trio has to cross paths with Lucas (Jackey Vinson), the ballingest video game hot shot in the Southwest, who introduces them to the holiness that is the Nintendo Power Glove, and after quietly slipping around in the background, with a little music from Super Mario Bros. 2 here, or a little flash of the NES controller there, the movie explodes into its truest self, as a shameless plug for buying things from Nintendo, playing Nintendo, idealising Nintendo as the pinnacle achievement of human technology and society. For the Power Glove. One of the most notoriously awful video game peripherals ever built. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad" the boy says with the self-satisfaction of a dreadful yuppie from the era's sex comedies, and it at least half of that is the truest statement in this entire movie.

The shameless wallowing in Nintendo prowess and ownership as the keenest of all social dominance markers, plus Holland and screenwriter David Chisholm's constant inability to treat this kids' movie like a kids movie, forcing the poor child actors into positions of pantomiming adult behavior in their conversations about video games, or sometimes accusing innocent bystanders of being pedophiles ("He! Touched! My! Breast!"), plus the dazzlingly dated costumes and hairstyles, are all enough to make this an extravagantly weird viewing experience, now that we're a generation past its sell-by date. But we're still not to the part where the movie goes off a cliff. That happens at Universal Studios Hollywood, where Video Armageddon, the nation's premier Nintendo gaming competition, is held. For starters, the set of Video Armageddon looks like a combination of the boiler room on an aircraft carrier and an athletic shoe store. Second, the event's announcer (Steven Grives) declaims lines in a manner not compatible with any dialect of English, dancing about and grinning manically like he is the actual Satan and this is some particularly tacky corner of Hell. Third, there's not even a cursory relationship between the proclamations of gameplay and points scored announced over the loudspeaker, and what we can actually see with our own damn eyes.

In short, what is most mystifying about The Wizard isn't that it's a movie set up as a feature-length ad for video games despite being welded onto an emotionally lacerating domestic drama: it's that it's an ad for video games that makes video games look like a peyote hallucination, throwing fragments of game imagery up on screen in ways that make the games themselves seem like jagged, incomprehensible masses of arbitrary movement and the players all puppets in the grip of some helpless madness. It makes videogaming look like the most unpleasant, frenzied activity on Earth, better suited to punishment than entertainment

It's shockingly bad, and coupled with the enormous tonal shifts that happen throughout the movie, it feels basically like The Wizard has an aneurysm right as we're watching it. This is an appallingly jagged and messy film, ugly to look at and saddled with narrative developments that simply happen because the film knows that its end point has to be a video game competition. Everything within it is incongruous to everything else. For those who grew up in the video game culture it depicts, I think it probably serves as a fascinating enough snapshot to serve as a kind of hell-dimension nostalgia trip; but for everyone, its completely batshit insane concept of what human beings are like and what kind of physical spaces the inhabit makes it a thoroughly mesmerising So Bad It's Good spectacular.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE SIZE OF A BUG

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Marvel's Ant-Man shows us the fun side of being so small that you have to look up to an ant. Ah, but what of the scary side?

To begin with, it's thoroughly unreasonable to expect a '50s sci-fi thriller to star Orson Welles. But the teaser trailer for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man makes me faintly angry for promising such a miracle, knowing full well that it would never come to pass.

But enough about film advertising. In truth, even deprived of Welles, The Incredible Shrinking Man is a pretty terrific example of its genre, despite some rather obvious and avoidable flaws of story structure and a rather massive shortchanging of the sociological analysis of Richard Matheson's source novel, in favor of more straightforward survivalist adventure. In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon, the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade. And beyond the film's admirable strengths as a taut spectacle, Matheson's screenplay ends on an especially strong note, surprisingly managing to achieve in one speech all the moral philosophising that the film needs to feel like it has real depth and nuance, and that despite tapping from the same brand of flowery religiosity that did in many a sci-fi film of the time.

Having gone ahead and given itself that title, the film wastes the minimal possible amount of time in getting going. The Careys, Scott (Grant Williams) and Louise (Randy Stuart) are enjoying a boat ride on the Pacific coast, and at the exact moment that Louise heads belowdecks, a mysterious fog rolls in, covering Scott with a reflective sheen that apparently soaks into his bare skin. Six months later, he discovers that all of his clothes are slightly too large: loose in the belly, too high at the neck, too long in the arms. A doctor's appointment confirms that he's inexplicably become 5'11" instead of his customary 6'1", and he's dropped from 190 to 180 lbs. The doctor (William Schallert) comes up with pleasant, rational explanations for why this is absolutely nothing to worry about, but evidence increasingly pile up that not only is Scott smaller than he used to be, he's continuing to shrink. We're still in the first reel.

God bless the film for its haste in getting us to this point, but it's symptomatic of the film's one overriding, unanswerable shortcoming. It's worth pointing out that the novel is non-linear: it intercuts the story of the very tiny Scott trapped in his own basement, facing down a spider, with the story of how he came to be in that predicament. In other words, it throws the good stuff at the reader first, and then luxuriates in the fine details of the story in the sure knowledge that our attention has been grabbed. By straightening out the narrative line, the movie suddenly makes itself vulnerable to the killer of all B-movies - and classic status notwithstanding, this is nothing if it's not a B-movie - which is that it permits the viewer to become bored. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen, Arnold absolutely flies through all of the material between Scott's discovery of his loose clothes and the moment that his pet cat finally decides that this tiny little biped would probably be an extremely fun thing to chase and dismember, thus precipitating his fall into the depths of the basement. That escalation starts some 33 minutes into the movie, which means that an entire feature's worth of psychological discombobulation, domestic strife, and medical suspense are condensed into just a half of an hour.

Pragmatically, it works: every last moment of the film from the shot of the cat looming through the window of the dollhouse Scott now calls home to the stately appearance of the words "THE END" is gripping, and the film gets to it fast enough that there's no chance of having burned off the goodwill the audience inherently brings to a movie titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (by which I mean, if you're going to hate a movie for showing a man the size of a bug being menaced by a spider, you know damn well enough not to start watching it). Subjectively, I'd say that the film almost doesn't survive it. The paradox is that, by racing through the material so quickly, Arnold and Matheson don't give it any chance to land and linger, which makes it difficult to feel very connected to the onscreen action. Which, in turn, means that it's more boring, because of the exact technique the film uses to keep us from being bored. The most significant example of what I'm talking about is a subplot about Scott's friendship with a little person from a carnival, Clarice (April Kent), who is at that point just about his size; it's undernourished, and the ramifications are left totally ignored (I mean, hell, you could get a whole act just out of what this means to his increasingly frustrated marriage), and while it adds some depth to Scott's arc, it's patently obvious how much more it could be providing to the film with a little TLC.

Please, though, let me be absolutely clear: at its very worst, The Incredible Shrinking Man merely repeats the sins of any given '50s sci-fi movie, and it repeats them at a higher level or sophistication. At its very worst. At its best, you can count on one hand the number of its direct peers that match or top it. Even before Scott ends up in the basement there are several individually terrific sequences that stress the helplessness and weariness of the Careys' situation, or the awkwardness and dysfunction of Scott's condition. In the latter case, there's a scene with Scott's brother (Paul Langton) talking to Louise in front of a chair, and it's only belatedly and thanks to a blunt cut that we realise Scott has been sitting in that chair the whole time. In the former, the best of the film's many exemplary forced-perspective shots (it's every inch as good as the famously ambitious forced perspective in The Fellowship of the Ring, 44 years later), Louise and Scott are having a difficult time talking, and she refuses to make eye contact, thus not only further selling the illusion but also turning a visual effect setpiece into one of the best character moments in the movie.

It's in the basement, though, where the film shines, in every way. The effects work is peerless, with close-up photography of a tarantula seamlessly married to footage of Williams, and the sets and props are impressively convincing simulations of the quotidian world at several times the magnification, an exciting change from the usual chintzy foam objects populating the era's sci-fi. And Arnold stages the action from acute angles that emphasise the size and peril of these routine objects: a scene where Scott tries to use a paint-stirring stick to cross a deadly crevasse of a foot deep or more is my personal favorite part of the movie, finding a way to make the laughably common (dude can't even throw away his spent paint supplies) into something alien and nightmarish. The translation of the banal domestic world of cats, junk in the basement, and crappy water heaters into an endless chain of danger is the purest kind of horror, and it's what gives The Incredible Shrinking Man so much of its brutal punch. It's a more immediate, visceral surrogate for the thoughtful introspection of the book, which crops up only in the last scene and, to lesser effect, in the film's annoying reliance on voice-over; but it's a worthy trade-off, since it means this is also one of the most immediate, visceral sci-fi thrillers of its generation, on top of being one of the most technically audacious.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: SWAPPIN' CONSCIOUSNESS WITH TARSEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: director Tarsem Singh shows us the terrible things that can happen when two personalities are stuffed into one brain in Self/less. In this, he is merely returning to his roots.

When it was new, The Cell was at the center of controversy about its content: is there something wrong and wicked about how this movie used absolutely breathtaking images to depict horrible, violent acts, stripping them of their real-world gravity. How innocent a controversy it was! Back in 2000, when this movie came out, we hadn't even seen Saw yet (a film through which you can draw a surprisingly straight line from The Cell), and we didn't know just how pornographic violence could get. I don't know about you, but if I get to choose between a film that might be fetishising violence and is also gorgeous, and a film that definitely is fetishising violence and looks like it was shot on film stock made of dog turds, I'm not going to have to think very long.

But even that's begging the question. To be clear, no, I don't think that The Cell is a fetish object for anything, outside of perhaps the impossible fantasy costumes (Eiko Isihioka and April Napier share costuming duty; I'm going to assume without any real evidence that Napier is responsible for the clothing that looks like what human beings wear, while Isioka's contribution were all of the gilded parade floats with space for people's legs at the bottom). In fact, of all director Tarsem Singh's movies - this was his first - it strikes me as the one where style is most clearly used as a function of the needs of the story and the rather horrible psychological depths that story plumbs (his sophomore effort, The Fall, strikes me more as a story built more to facilitate style than the other way 'round; not that I feel for The Fall anything less than total love).

That said, style is still a very, very important thing; style muscles its way to our eyeballs right from the opening, while the story is still deliberately keeping itself hidden. In the beginning there is desert: shattering orange sand and glowing blue skies, the undiluted colors of the very concept of The Desert of legends and myth (this sequence was shot in Namibia, which would, 15 years later, provide the same uncompromising primary colors to Mad Max: Fury Road). In the desert is a woman all in beautiful, flowing, feathered white, looking like a dove come down from heaven - we don't know her yet, but she's Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez), a psychologist. And we don't know this yet, either, but this desert is all in the mind of Edward Baines (Colton James), a boy of about 10. Deane is a member of a team working on an extraordinary technology to treat extraordinary mental disorders: she can literally enter another person's headspace and interact with their consciousness directly. Edward is suffering from a coma triggered by psychological trauma, and his well-to-do parents have sponsored the development of this extraordinary technology under the hands of Drs. Kent (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Cooperman (Becker).

I'm in awe of this opening for reasons that have nothing to do with its literally awe-inspiring scenery and the exquisite costuming. By the ten-minute mark of The Cell, Tarsem and screenwriter Mark Protosevich have told us exactly what their movie is going to be and how to watch it: there will be beautiful tableaux, framed with a sense of painterly composition by music video veteran Tarsem and music video cinematographer Paul Laufer (who shot only one other movie in his career) that is far more attuned to the rules of graphical art than traditional narrative cinema, and is meant to be read accordingly. These images are the expression of moods, and the moods moreover of very specific individuals: tell a sullen 10-year-old to think of a "desert", and it is very much the desert that we get in the opening scene that he'll probably have in mind. So the first thing we learn is to read the images as essential concepts, and not as narrative spaces. The second thing we learn is that we're either on-board with a device that lets a psychologist mind-meld with comatose patients suffering from transparently made-up mental conditions, or we are not. And the film makes its technology as unreasonable as it can: the rig is some kind of fantastic open space where the participants are suspended in mid-air on many fine wires, while wearing suits that make it look rather like they've been skinned alive, which cannot possibly be an accident given the film's eventual fixation on torture and murder. Basically, I mean to say, the opening ten minutes find the movie putting everything on the table: if we aren't on its side, we never will be, and I greatly admire a film that certain of itself.

The plot pretty clearly situates The Cell at the end of the big wave of film's cribbing from The Silence of the Lambs: there's a serial killer, see, who drowns women in an implausible elaborate automated drowning cube (the glassy set for which vividly predicts Saw and its sequels and their theatrical murder boxes), and then bleaches and paints them to resemble porcelain dolls. Catching this repugnant creature has become the fixation of FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, in what is by an enormously exaggerated margin my favorite of his performances), who has finally scraped enough evidence together to catch the killer, Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio), right in his house. The problem is, Stargher's kill factory isn't in his house. And Stargher is currently suffering from another made-up psychological coma, meaning that Novak and his team only have about 40 hours to find, based on no leads at all, where the killer's present victim has been imprisoned, before she drowns. And there follows the one piece of contrived screenwriting that I can't bring myself to overlook, out of the whole lacework of contrivances that makes up the first third of The Cell: Novak is somehow aware of the experimental dream-sharing machine, and he wants Deane to go hunting in the hideous reaches of Stargher's subconscious to find any scrap of evidence for where he might leave his victims while they die.

The thing that The Cell transforms into at this point is damned near impossible to describe - certainly, even attempting a verbal sketch of the imagery is pointlessness itself. Tarsem, along with Ishioka and Napier, production designer Tom Foden, set decorator Tessa Posnansky, and art director Geoff Hubbard, create mental worlds in this film, both Stargher's and eventually Deane's, that are without specific precedent, nor can I offhand name anything that has copied them since. A few points along the way, though: the film is not quite as straightforward as "the inside of a serial killer's mind is like this" symbolism, though that's enough to get by. Beyond that, it's a synthesis of imagery from European and at least South Asian artistic traditions, as well as American pop culture, and what this suggests within the film itself is not just "let's make the most horrifying hellscapes possible by drawing on multiple sources". Instead, it suggests that Stargher is himself making the same synthesis that the filmmakers do, pulling together fragments of remembered images to construct a worldview. Setting aside its applications to the film's deep wells of horror, this is a tremendously effective way of cinematically visualising the process of how human personalities are built out of piece of memory, whether from personal experience or appropriations of fantasies, stories, and the background radiation of culture. And of course, since this is horror, the personality we need to be chiefly concerned with is one dominated by suffering, directed inward and directed outward and even freestanding representations of pain and death that simply exist, independent of who caused the pain or who receives it.

Importantly, this all applies not just to Stargher, but to Deane herself (at which point I think it deserves saying: Lopez is better in this role than she gets credit for, a placidly calm presence whose relatively simple and straightforward way of presenting the character's beatific sensibilities starts paying considerable dividends when that simplicity runs into the dense imagery), who defines her inner life with signifiers of goodness as soft and generically calming as Stargher's are specific and increasingly draining to watch. The design is no less striking, for being less cruel; Deane's get-up like a cherry blossom that became a nun is among the film's boldest costumes. This is not about reducing the film to a Manichean good/bad framework, though the implication is certainly that Deane thinks in those terms. What it's about is providing a counterpoint to the inside of Stargher's head, while making the same point: we mentally visualise the world in terms of broad signifiers which we then decorate with our own reference points, and that process is called "having a personality". A variation on it is called "consuming art, up to and including the movie titled The Cell", and that's maybe the most cunning thing about the film: it contains within its own structure the expectation that we will be effected by what we're watching. If we are healthy and know that's what we're doing, we can leave the movie having broken down its enormously memorable visual setpieces into our own personal library of reference points. If we are not healthy, well, the movie has some very imaginative ideas about what happens to people whose personality-construction goes awry. The point being, though, that the film is one of the boldest depictions of how external stimuli are transformed into internal narrative, for good or otherwise, that I know the movies to have attempted, and that's rewarding even beyond the shockingly bold images that almost exclusively make up the film's final hour and change.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: MALE STRIPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Magic Mike XXL continues its predecessor's look at the lives of men who dance dirty for a living. Not the commonest subject in a male gaze-dominated medium, but nor is it the first time this milieu has been plumbed.

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama about a community college professor stuck in a dying marriage who has an affair with one of her students after discovering he's a dancer at the local strip club. So obviously it starts off with golden hour shots of Kennedy Space Center. What possible other opening gambit could there be?

So it's a disastrous film, anyway. The splendidly inappropriate opening isn't the reason for that (though it absolutely doesn't help). What it is, though, is perfectly symptomatic of the film's deeply broken sense of self. It's easy to joke, "what kind of movie about strippers opens with several minutes of Cape Canaveral location footage?", but the fact that A Night in Heaven is the answer to that question is telling of how unclear its goals are, as well as its execution of those goals. It is a film divided between the impulse towards smut and towards socially-minded character drama; it is exactly what you get when the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, John G. Avildsen, and the writer of the core material of Nashville, Joan Tewkesbury, find themselves in the business of making a star vehicle for Christopher Atkins, primarily known then and now as the male half of the teen soft-core drama The Blue Lagoon. It's possible to tell, if you hold the film at the right angle, that Avildsen and Tewkesbury had in mind a steady-handed narrative of marital stresses, female desire, and the hard cost of making ethical choices instead of economic ones, and found themselves obliged to readjust everything in the wake of a lead actor whose primary skill was his ability to not wear a shirt. I will say on behalf of the film's novelty that it is maybe the only thing ever filmed that derives virtually all of its dramatic value from the level, complex presence of Lesley Ann Warren.

She plays Faye Hanlon, a skittish-looking teacher of public speaking at a Florida community college and the wife of a bored, boring NASA engineer, Whitney (Robert Logan). For his part, he's facing down an industry in decline, and the company he specifically works for is hunting down Defense Department contracts to make ends meet. This sits poorly with Whitney, who chooses to be laid off rather than work towards what he considers immoral ends, a fact he massages when relating it to his wife. There is surely a deep and interesting subplot involving Whitney to be explored, but A Night in Heaven is resolutely disinterested in it; at 83 minutes long, it could probably afford a little more meat on its bones, but the film is hellbent on getting to the steamy stuff as fast as possible and staying there as long as it dares, and Whitney's existence comes to feel more like an imposition levied on the the film than a possibility for dramatic expansion early in the proceedings.

Faye has a particular student, Rick Monroe (Atkins), who's one of those quintessential movie youths, a brilliant kid with all the potential in the world and no drive to exploit it. So she is compelled to flunk him, on the very day that her sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) is coming to town for a few days of girl bonding, including drinking and a night at Heaven, the local strip club that she found on her last trip. The most popular and lusted-after of all the dancers there is one Ricky the Rocket, and you get zero points for guessing ahead of time that he's the exact same student that Faye just bawled out. She's both mortified and transfixed by his tremendously overt sexual energy, his fearlessness in grinding against patrons and passionately kissing them, and his inappropriately perfect abs. He can tell she's transfixed, and comes along to give her his special treatment; this turns into an intense mutual infatuation that leads her to (gasp!) lie to her husband and (shock and horror!) go back to the strip club to continue ogling. And eventually, it leads to them making tender love. But this was the '80s, and social standards must be maintained, and that means a very abrupt series of plot developments that feel more like the notes for a third act than actual third act. The upshot being that Rick turns out to be a callous little shit.

There are no ways around it: the story is a dog, collecting musty clichés and not even pretending to freshen them up. Avildsen is not without an eye for capturing the sweaty fatigue of environments, and that trick serves him well at multiple points throughout this movie, but it's mostly just spackling a respectable gloss on a tawdry scenario in a tawdry milieu. Which is not, in and of itself, a problem, except that none of the filmmakers seem tremendously interested in making a tawdry movie and that's just not really an applicable strategy here. When the action switches to Heaven, and there's no choice but to make it a tasteless cartoon, it's palpable how weirdly the energy rotates: suddenly the lighting and framing become very self-conscious, like we'll hopefully be so aware of the abstract qualities of the shots that we'll ignore the gyrating men who are, by and large, given curiously unerotic dance moves - witness the Dance of the Kitchen Stools!), or the fever dream hectoring of the Heaven M.C. (Spatz Donovan). His dialogue is the one element of the film that's so incomprehensible that it turns out to be funny - "They'll steam the crease right out of your polyester, ladies!" he leers at one point. "Do you wanna see Ricky take his clooooooothes off?" he later asks, in the kind of hyper-literal statement that suggests children play-acting at strip club management. For unclear reasons, he has been costumed to look like a disco version of the Mad Hatter, but that's just part and parcel of the uncompromising hideousness of the wardrobes. Anna Hill Johnstone, the costume and production design, had an apparent vendetta against the cast, burying Warren especially in costumes so over-the-top in their '80s signifiers that it feels like an Expressionist nightmare about the decade. "You look like a hibiscus in bloom!" coos Patsy to Faye before their first night of debauchery, and that is a thoroughly accurate statement, which certainly would appear to be meant as a compliment.

The strip club sequence is at least appropriately erotic (less so the couple's sexual encounter, which is rushed through like Avildsen - editing as well as directing - just wanted to get it over with), and it's here that Warren really shines. In a lengthy scene that relies entirely on her reaction shots, the actor is able to evoke longing and an immediate wash of guilt at feeling that longing; a desire to stare but also conspicuously trying to make sure that nobody notices her staring; and, uncomplicated by any libidinous urge, a very real sense of confused horror that her professional life and her off-hours gallivanting with Patsy have been blended. It's remarkable acting, and it builds up an aura of goodwill towards the actress attempts to redeem the insufficiently probing remains of Tewkesbury's compromised script, which largely involves adding lots of complicated self-doubt and fear to the surface-level horniness. It's the most human, interesting material in the film, and it's largely wasted, but Warren deserves a lot of credit for the effort.

Nothing was going to actually humanise this material, not with Atkins sucking all the energy out of the room. He's pretty as hell, undoubtedly, but limited to one vapid expression of innocuous self-regard, and prone to making terrible decisions like rolling his eyes so hard during class that it resembles an epileptic fit more than an expression of annoyance, or wearing a nominally flirtatious grin that has virtually no sex in it, just the distant smile of somebody who just remembered the leftover pizza at home. Given his prominence in the story, and the prominence of his body in the film's visual scheme, his callowness, static expressions, and inability to build a solid character are limitations that A Night in Heaven was certainly never going to survive. Warren fights as hard as she can to buck this odds; Avildsen nervously tries to ignore it with needless shots of rockets and a blazingly fast pace; most everybody else just gives up and tries to slap some crap up there onscreen. It's not much of a tribute to the male body or the female libido, and it's an outright joke to pretend that we can cobble together the dog-ends of ignored subplots into a treatise on economic tension in the early years of the Reagan presidency. It's not sordid enough to be decent junk, but the filmmakers gave up on it before had stopped being any kind of junk at all, and other than offering the unusual sight of male objectification in a Hollywood studio picture, there's nothing about it that justifies so much as a sidelong glance.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TALKING ANIMALS AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the plot of Ted 2 touches on the sex life of a human woman and a talking animal brought to life with top-end effects. How nice it would have been if I couldn't come up with another such creation.

Howard the Duck isn't as bad as you've probably heard, but since you've probably heard that it's bad enough to melt the polar ice caps and give puppies cancer, that's not much of a defense. Still, let's run with it a little bit: as a story, it's neither more convoluted nor more contrived than any other '80s big budget creature feature and sci-fi romp (a bigger subgenre than I've just made it sound), and it has mostly the same strengths and limitations of any given superhero origin story in the three intervening decades. Jeffrey Jones dives right into a chewy, garish role, and makes a splendidly creepy voice as the family-friendly adventure bad guy. And I think that taps me out pretty much. There's nothing else good here; the best to cling to is that some of the elements are merely insipid and not actively rancid.

The film's origins stretch back to 1973, when Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik created a cynical, sarcastic three-foot tall anthropomorphic duck from another planet for Marvel Comics. Howard the Duck quickly found a spot in the Zeitgeist, ushered by Gerber into a potent force of comic book satire, running the character for U.S. President in 1976 among several less-showy examples of the character mocking society, pop culture, and the comics medium itself. He was as close to an underground comic book sensation as a character owned by one of the two big publishing concerns could get.

By the early 1980s, following Gerber's acrimonious split from Marvel over issues of creative control with the character, Howard wasn't quite the sensation he'd been in the previous decade. There was still enough there there for the character to attract the attention of the man who was, at that point, perhaps the most powerful individual in the American film industry: George Lucas, producer and overseer of the Star Wars trilogy, and the power behind Steven Spielberg's throne on the two Indiana Jones movies. In 1984, a year after Return of the Jedi, Lucas was in a position to do anything he could possibly have wanted, and what he wanted was... Well, the generous reading is that he just wanted a version of Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial to call his very own. I much prefer to believe that; it makes everything strictly a financial transaction. The alternative is to assume that Lucas was so infatuated with the Howard the Duck that he wanted to bring the creature to life, and so profoundly misunderstood the material that this ungainly display of ugly visual effects and nonsensical action sequences was in some way aligned with his actual vision. And that's just sad.

That being said, this is not a Lucas movie even in the sense that the Star Wars sequels that he didn't personally direct still count. Instead, it was a gift that the super-producer made to his longtime colleagues and friends, the married couple Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz. The thing to know about them is that they helped shape Lucas's 1973 breakthrough American Graffiti into a screenplay, and after its enormous success opened every imaginable door for him, he remembered them and what they did for him. As the intervening years made it clear that the Huyck/Katz magic was something nobody wanted much to do with, Lucas swept in and revived the couple's fading fortunes by offering them screenwriting duties on the heavily anticipated Indiana Jones and the Temple Doom; and once that was wrapped up, he blessed them with Howard the Duck, their seventh screenplay and Huyck's fourth movie as a director. It would turn out to be his last, as will happen when you direct a movie whose title quickly inserts itself into the cultural dialogue as a particularly mean-spirited synonym for "one of the highest profile bombs in the history of commercial cinema".

Huyck & Katz weren't the first filmmakers of limited talent to be given the reigns to a project because of their connection to a producer, and they weren't the last; but they might be the ones who got in over their heads the most. Howard the Duck was enormously expensive: some of the many 1986 releases that were made for less money include Top Gun, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and Aliens. Something else those films all have in common: they were big hits. Not so for poor Howard, which made less than half of its production budget back at the domestic box office, and became so tainted by the reek of failure that it was feebly re-branded as Howard: A New Breed of Hero for the rest of the world's markets, where it still came nowhere near turning a profit.

It takes mere minutes for the sheer forcefulness of how repellent Huyck & Katz's script is going to be to make itself manifest: it opens on a tour of the apartment of one Howard T. Duck (voiced by Chip Zien and operated by several puppeteers and six different suit actors, though Ed Gale did it the most), a duck living in a city on Duckworld. It's like our world, only with ducks. And to demonstrate this, we see several duckified versions of our own world, like a poster for My Little Chickadee starring '30s duck superstars Mae Nest and W.C. Fowls. The apartment is also decorated with posters for Breeders of the Lost Stork and Splashdance, and at this point I was done with the movie. We still haven't seen the protagonist's face or heard a single word of dialogue, by the way. But "Splashdance" makes sense only vaguely in that ducks like water, and "Breeders" is just fucking nonsense. "Brooders" is at least bird-related. "Breeders" just means "the ducks like to have sex". Though that is a useful piece of foreshadowing for the remainder of Howard the Duck, which for a dippy talking animal movie with all the satire and nuance sanded off and replaced with shticky jokes for a family audience, is remarkably smutty. For example, the scene that immediately follows, where Howard is caught in a tractor beam of yet-unknown provenance and sucked through several apartments in his building. One of these apartments includes a lady duck taking a bath, and for reasons that I am anxious to learn nothing more about, the filmmakers wanted to make sure that she had preposterously detailed naked breasts, with pink nipples poking through her feathers.

On the backside of that tractor beam, Howard ends up in an alley in Cleveland, where he crosses paths with punk rocker Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson), who decides to help him figure out what the hell is going on. This first involves visiting a science lab janitor named Phil Blumburtt (Tim Robbins), who can do nothing at all but flail around crazily. Dejected, Howard fights his way into the Cleveland night, discovering that he can do nothing, and returning to Beverly, at which point they play-flirt and come about thiiiiis close to having sex, in a scene that should have been set on fire the moment it was written, and then set on fire twice when they actually went to all the work of filming it. Apparently, the mechanism to have the feathers on Howard's head stand up erect when he becomes aroused was the one of the most complicated effects involving any of the duck suits. This was a waste of Industrial Light & Magic manpower that borders on a moral crime.

Anyway, Beverly and Howard are interrupted by Phil, this time with a real scientist, Dr. Walter Jenning (Jones), who knows how Howard got to Earth, because it was his laser beam that brought him. Upon returning to his device, it malfunctions and warps another space being to our planet, this one a member of the Dark Overlords of the Universe, who inhabits Jenning's body and prepares to bring its allies here to eliminate humanity and take over. Naturally, only Howard, Beverly, and Phil are in a position to save the day.

That is a mercilessly stramlined version of the plot, which includes a lengthy side trip to Howard's job as a handyman at a sex club, and and even lengthier sequence at a diner that theoretically isn't more than a few minutes from Jenning's lab, but is also so far that it takes all night to drive back and requires commandeering an ultralight aircraft to fly back in time to save the day. Which is also a lengthy narrative digression that finds the movie stopping everything to lavish energy on a setpiece that is alarmingly flaccid and anti-exciting.

But while the script is a structural disaster and clunky at almost every line of dialogue, those are the least of the film's problems. The tonal mismatch present in the indecision between the blithe kiddie fantasy of most of the film and the unadulterated filthiness of a few key scenes is worse, exacerbated by Huyck's flat-footed direction. And it's not the only tonal imbalance in the film: Howard the Duck is, among its other sins, a comedy, and a particular wretched one with only one joke to speak of - he's like, a duck, but he acts like a person. Repeated ad nauseam, which only takes a few minutes. Certainly, the duck tits are about as nauseam as it gets. Mostly, the film tries to put over a playful, zany tone by getting really, really loud and broad, abetted by Zien's self-conscious delivery of almost everything he says in the arch tones of a sitcom catchphrase. The humans are much, much worse: Robbins's performance is a humiliating cartoon of '80s nerdiness, and Thompson plays a ditsy screwball character with such flighty detachment from anything going on in the plot or individual scenes that she appears to be the victim of some kind of terrible head injury. We know from the evidence of her nimble, insinuating comic performance in Back to the Future, just a year prior, that Thompson is not, in fact, the worst actor of the 1980s; but Howard the Duck certainly puts in a strong piece of evidence for the prosecution.

The film's worst element, though, is undoubtedly the title character. There might not have been anyone in the world who could do special effects better than ILM in the mid-'80s, and the Howard puppets are, if nothing else, miraculously well-engineered. There are God knows how many moving parts in the face, and the character is capable of incredibly subtle gradations of expression - we always know exactly what the duck has on his mind, and that's no small achievement. The thing is, though, there is no point at which Howard feels like anything else but a terrific piece of robotics. His textures and his foam rubber beak and the bland overlighting that cinematographer Richard H. Kline dumps on him make it clear, in virtually every shot, that Howard is a device: one that would bowl you over if you saw him at Disneyland, one that would catch your eye as a background character in Jedi; but crucially, critically, one that's vividly off-putting as a movie protagonist. There's no shortage of disastrous missteps in this movie, but what pushes it into the realms of the truly repellent is its amazingly unacceptable lead character, perhaps the only example on record of a live-action figure that falls into the Uncanny Valley.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Pixar's grand return to artistic greatness, Inside Out, goes inside the human brain to take one look at how our minds interact with our memories. Here is another such look.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has been one of the most highly-regarded films of the 2000s virtually since the moment it first appeared on the scene in March, 2004, and I'm damned if I can come up with a reason to challenge that perception. It is, honestly, an example of exactly the kind of film that everybody wants every film to be. For it is genuinely conceptually audacious, one of the vanishingly minute number of movies made in the past 15 years to be actually, legitimately Like Nothing You've Ever Seen Before. And at the same time, it's so flawlessly executed that it feels less like a brand new idea being worked out for the first time, than a refinement of concepts and techniques that have been kicking around forever, waiting for their definitive treatment.

With any movie that is so generally flawless, it's hard to know quite where to start with it, so let's just start with the two incompatible personalities that met to produce the idea of the film. The story was by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, & Pierre Bismuth, the last of whom has no other contributions to film worth talking about, so for ease we'll think of this as primarily the collision of Kaufman and Gondry. The former was already the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., two immaculately over-conceptual metamovies that spoke to an immense well of pensiveness and the terror of being alone; four years after Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman would write and direct Synecdoche, New York, which pretty much confirmed that his major fascination as an artist was the combination of perceptual mindfucking in service to a bleak, almost depressive concept of how the world works. Gondry, meanwhile, had only made one film - the Kaufman-scripted misfire Human Nature - but he had an extensive catalogue of music videos to his name that showed him to be a great visual fantasist with an impressive sense of using camera trickery as a form of playing with the medium, childishly having fun with visual representation almost aggressively disconnected from any sense of emotional rigor.

The combination of abject depression and flighty joyfulness should be baffling as all hell, but Eternal Sunshine profits immeasurably from having those two irreconcilable impulses driving it. Kaufman's morbidity concerning the basic hopeless of romantic relationships provides the emotional spine of one of the most insightfully sad explorations of the human drive for love since Annie Hall concluded that we need the eggs. Gondry's love of showy practical effects and dazzling post-production meant that this exploration could be achieved inside a movie whose insane structure, both narratively and visually, allows it to replicate the fluid, discontinuous process of thinking and remembering like literally no other coherent narrative film I can name

Such a complex topic gets the unabashedly complex treatment it deserves, beginning with a narrative structure that's almost impossible to parse until it's almost over; I clearly remember seeing it for the second time and having one of the biggest "ooooh, that's what that means" moments of my moviegoing life when I realised what the hell the first 17 minutes were all about. They are, for the record, the short story of how Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) decided one day, quite out of nowhere, that he needed to go to Montauk on this wintery day. On the train, he meets a woman with a bright orange coat and bright blue hair, Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), and they're both positive they've seen each other before. The best they can come up with is that Joel has probably shopped in the bookstore where Clementine works, which clearly isn't a satisfying answer. They enjoy each other's company so much that the return together to Clementine's apartment, and the film segues, invisibly enough for it to be confusing, to another point in time entirely, in the immediate aftermath of their breakup. As we'll eventually figure out, this is in fact a flashback. And we'll never figure out which if any of the film's 17th through 32nd minutes take place in reality, versus the ones that obviously take place inside Joel's memories.

For that is, of course, the film's hook: after two years of dating, Joel and Clementine had a terrible fight and broke up, after which she went to a company called Lacuna, Inc.* which specialises in erasing unwelcome memories. Joel only finds out about this after confronting the couple's friends, Carrie (Jane Adams) and Rob (David Cross), who reluctantly show him a card explaining to everybody who knows Clementine that she has absolutely no memories of Joel's existence, and no-one should ever speak to her about him. Aghast and distraught, Joel signs up to receive the very same treatment, and the rest of the movie, takes place on the night that Lacuna's top man, Stan (Mark Ruffalo), and its clearly not-top man, Patrick (Elijah Wood) come to Joel's apartment to erase Clementine, which he experiences in the form of out-of-order memories coming to the fore and then dissolving, either in clean fades to nothingness, or through perplexing, discontinuous destruction and collapse, as Joel finds that he treasures even his painful memories too much to part with them, and begins fighting the Lacuna techs.

Thus begins quite a hefty meditation on the value of relationships, even toxic and dysfunctional ones, and the importance of strong memories, even painful and humiliating ones. On one level, this is just a puzzle: we see Joel and Clementine's love grow, solidify, and die, all out of order, and the film insists on our actively paying attention to piece it all together and figure out the whys of it. But there are puzzles and there are puzzles, and Eternal Sunshine is absolutely not the sort of movie where the rewards stop the second we crack its mysteries. On the contrary, the very fact that this is all presented obscurely is one of the key ways that the film draws us in. It is a way that we are more tightly aligned with Joel's own feelings about the relationship, since we experience the jumble of memories in the order he does; we are thus placed in the position of trying to figure out what the hell is up with Clementine as well as he does. And yet, because we are an audience in a movie, and we get to be clear-eyed and not so hung up on stupid little nonsense as he is, we can pick up on all the thing she's saying and thinking and feeling that Joel didn't appreciate the first time around. It helps that both Carrey and Winslet give two of the best performances of the 2000s and maybe the best performance of their respective careers, and that Winslet in particular is energised by a vastly more complicated character. She is, after all, playing a woman who deliberately obscures her personality to avoid being hurt, as filtered through the self-centered memories of a man who was already too much of a sad romantic to see her clearly, and she's also providing enough in her body language and tone of voice to let us in the movie see the things that Joel can't. That's the other thing the fragmentary structure does: it demands we think very hard about what we're watching, so we can connect it to other fragments later, which invites us to have a much more sophisticated understanding of Clementine's own insides than Joel possesses.

Still, this is ultimately a film about Joel's experience of the relationship, and his experience of remembering the relationship even more. The cinematography (by Ellen Kuras), editing (by Valdís Óskarsdóttir), sound design (by Eugene Gearty), and directing are inseparably intertwined in creating a highly subjective experience, with the film itself breaking down and violating the basic rules of cinematic language in concert with Joel's loss of his memory; long before we know what's happening there are moments where the lighting blanks out and shots are cut together messily, foreshadowing the elimination of those moments, and as the film starts explaining what it's up to, those tricks and far more sophisticated ones pile up. Eternal Sunshine is a hard film to parse, and unlike most films that invents its own language, it doesn't ever have a moment where it explains its rules to us: it simply collapses in on itself, blurring moments visually and aurally, causing us a sense of dislocation as viewers of a movie that approximates Joel's dislocation as one of the core elements of his personality is removed while he witnesses it. It is one of the great marriages of content and style of the 21st Century.

It's so exhilarating to follow along as the film plays with these ideas that it's easy to forget that Eternal Sunshine ever moves outside Joel's head, though it spends quite a lot of time there. Some of this is quite brilliant, like the tiny moment nodding to people using Lacuna to forget children (I think) and lost pets, different traumas that the film acknowledges as equally hurtful to Joel's. Some of it is not; the subplots in which Stan is dating Lacuna's receptionist Mary (Kirsten Dunst), who has an obvious crush on company founder Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), while Patrick is using his insider knowledge to date Clementine have always felt oddly lumpy to me, an attempt to do parallelism that the film doesn't require and can't do anything particularly useful with (I concede that this is not the consensus opinion). All of it is casual and roughly naturalistic, the better to counterpoint the abstract, imaginative, stylistically dizzy scenes inside of Joel's memories. That contrast between fantastic staging and realistic cinematography is the thing I always think of most about Eternal Sunshine; it is a movie that romanticises love and then views it with blunt clarity, and that mixture is exactly what helps the film to its ambiguously hopeful concluding thoughts.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE KILLER THEME PARKS OF MICHAEL CRICHTON

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the failed theme park of Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park finally opens for business in Jurassic World, with the expected results. Let us now admire the career-long fixation the author apparently had with murderous versions of Disneyland.

It is not possible, and has not been since 1993, to bring up Westworld without immediately thinking about it in terms of Jurassic Park, either the book or the movie. But let us try to avoid that temptation as much as possible, in all fairness to the 1973 movie that was author Michael Crichton's first foray into directing (and one of his small number of screenplays that weren't based on a book). Let us also note that the 20 years between Westworld and Jurassic Park is a smaller gap than the 22 years separating Jurassic Park from 2015, when I write these words, and let us as a result feel extraordinarily old.

The film takes place right smack in Crichton's thematic wheelhouse: it's about people trying to create a contained system to cheat nature (human or otherwise), and having that system blow up in their face. Sometime in the near future that looks and acts exactly like 1973, there exists a theme park complex named Delos (which just screams "I'm a mythological reference!", and it's the name of a Greek island of considerably religious significance, though what possible thematic point Crichton is trying to score here, I can't begin to imagine). Here, in the middle of a desert, are three individual resorts, Westworld, Romanworld, and Medievalworld, and they are populated by extraordinary, life-like robots inhabiting replicas of the American frontier, Imperial Rome, and a medieval English castle. Here, those guests willing to pay out the $1000/day price tag can enact any fantasy they want in one of the three environments, at absolutely no physical risk to themselves.

Among the tourists we meet upon our arrival at the complex are John Blane (James Brolin) and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) of Chicago. John has been to Westworld before, and he thinks that the no-stakes shooting and whoring opportunities provided by the park will re-inject some old-fashioned masculinity into his newly-divorced and thoroughly depressed buddy. Unfortunately, they arrived just as the Delos robots were starting to suffer from a kind of malfunction that passes through them like an infectious disease - at this point, computer viruses were a theoretical possibility, but they wouldn't appear in reality for almost another decade, and the disease terminology wouldn't be coined until 1984 - and while the park's chief supervisor (Alan Oppenheimer) has his whole team working to figure out what's going on while it's still tiny annoyances rather than any kind of programming flaw that could actually interfere with the guests, there'd be be no movie at all if he succeeded, now would there?

There are many lovely things about Westworld, and many things that are just kind of there, but it's best to start with the elephant in the room: Delos makes no goddamn sense. It's easy to buy the idea of a playground where adults can pretend to be knights, cowboys, and... whatever is meant to happen in Romanworld; the implication is that it's the "constant orgies, presumably with robots that look like 12-year-olds" park, but it's very clearly the odd man out, and the film spends almost no time in it until the inevitable robot uprising. Anyway, the appeal of Delos in the abstract makes sense (though spending days on end in a simulated Wild West and only getting involved in a shootout once or twice per day sounds stultifying). But the way Westworld fleshes out that concept is so absurdly self-defeating that I'm surprised most of the details made it to a second draft - I could spend the rest of this review nitpicking the script and concept, but that would be tedious, so let's stick with just one of my biggest gripes. It's great that the guns don't work because they detect human body heat; what about the swords? Why give the robots live ammunition in the first place? That was two, sorry.

Even the way it's staged rings false: the streets of Westworld don't look like a town packed with tourists, or even lightly populated with the very rich, they look like three real humans are poking around a world full of robots. It's all immensely unpersuasive, in the broad strokes and the specific details, and the whole structure of the film feels like you could knock it all down with a mean look.

The central conceit of Westworld is so flimsy that it's only possible to take it seriously at all by treating it as a metaphor. Which, fortunately, can be done pretty easily. And that metaphor is all about the crisis of American malehood in the immediate post-feminist era. That sounds like exactly the last topic in all the world that a sane person would want Michael Crichton to address, but actually, Westworld is rather smart in its diagnosis about the inherent immaturity and foolishness of trying to regress to a state of mythic, purified masculinity. The basic self-righteous smugness shown by John Blane - the rhyme with "John Wayne" could hardly be coincidental - as he pushes his nervous buddy into living out a sanitised fantasy about the most virile place and time in the history of North America is a perfect depiction of a personality building walls to protect itself, and Brolin is just about the perfect person to embody all of those traits. He is an egotist who doesn't realise that he has nothing to be egotistical about, and it's what costs him as the film progresses.

At the same time, the film doesn't try to undersell the appeal of the place it creates - Benjamin gets a fantastic line delivery when, at the end of his first day in the (still functional) Westworld, he laughs "John? This place is really fun!", and in so doing succeeds at convincing us that Delos is an actual vacation spot more effectively than anything in the movie outside of its opening commercial (written by an actual ad executive, giving it the perfect stilted come-on feeling). So this is not a philosophical harangue - it's critical of the blinkered state of mainstream masculinity from a place that understands and sympathises with the urges of that masculinity.

Ultimately, though, the film does want to be a techno-thriller, and purely at the level of genre mechanics, it succeeds. Crichton's directing is anonymous at best, but that's partially a result of his self-conscious desire to copy the trappings of a generic Western, since Westworld is meant to be the ultimate expression of of a generic Western (or not-so-generic: there's a slow-motion shootout that could only be regarded as a deliberate parody of the then-recent The Wild Bunch). And for the villain of the piece, Westworld nabbed one of the all-time great killer robots: Yul Brynner as a gunslinger 'bot plainly modeled on the actor's role in The Magnificent Seven. Despite Brynner's top billing and prominence in the film's ad campaign, his gunslinger only appears intermittently in the film's first hour, turning into a an active threat only near the end, when Delos is all gone to hell. But the film makes all of his limited screen time count for a lot: his lean build and tense poses, and his unchanging expression of barely-contained rage are tremendously threatening and effortlessly iconic, and it's no wonder that the popular understanding of the movie elevates him above all the rest, even though he's largely defined by his absence.

Brynner and the character are so good that they almost make it possible to ignore that the film hasn't earned them. For if we're to allow that the sci-fi elements of Westworld are a metaphor when the subject at hand is the arrogance of the individual male, we can't really play the same trick when the sci-fi elements are a literal expression of scientific hubris and the collapse of a system. For the gunslinger to be a great villain, stalking the characters through the desert and into the guts of Delos, we have to believe in its reality, and Westworld does such a piss-poor job of presenting this colony of malfunctioning robots as something that could possibly exist the way the film wants it to, there's no real way to take the plot seriously enough that when the programming finally snaps and the robots run amok, we can feel the tension shift. Brynner has amazing screen presence and Crichton and director of photography Gene Polito do an amazing job framing the gunslinger to make it absolutely terrifying. But it is terrifying in a vacuum; it's hard to accept it as the embodiment of a system breaking down and killing its creators, because it's virtually impossible to believe that system ever functioned in the first place.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: GUYS FROM L.A.

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: bro, they made an Entourage movie. Time to spend a little time looking back through the annals of lifestyle porn for horny twentysomething dudes.

The trick in writing about Swingers almost two decades after it entered this world is to remember to talk about it as a movie and not for the remarkably large cultural influence it had for several years following its release. For the movie got in on the ground floor of the neo-swing movement of the '90s and early '00s, so early that most of the world outside of California didn't know that movement existed yet when the film exploded in its little way. Or even not so little. 1996, the year of the film's U.S. release, was maybe the exact peak of the too-brief period when an indie production could become a legitimate mainstream talking point, and Swingers absolutely did just that. And it carried along with it (and was, in turn, carried by) a new love of big-band style swing music, and the kinds of retro clubs and classic cocktails that go along with that music. I confess to having absolutely no clue whether the film or the lifestyle still have even the remotest cultural currency: I happen to be in exactly the narrowly-defined age cohort that encountered Swingers's role in pop culture in college in the early '00s (and yet it took me until just now to actually watch it, which was an extremely weird experience), and this perhaps dooms me to being forever convinced of an omnipresence it does not possess any longer. But this much is true, anyway: Swingers was seismic in its moment. Swingers is why we have Vince Vaughn's career, an affection for Las Vegas in white American males born after 1975,* and Jon Favreau as the director of Iron Man.

But here I go, doing exactly the thing I said you shouldn't do, like an asshole. Not quite as much of an asshole as the characters in Swingers, but an asshole nonetheless.

Written by Favreau, Swingers is basically autobiographical, at the level of theme, place, and character, if not story. It stars Favreau and Vaughn as Mike and Trent, two not-getting-any-younger men in Los Angeles trying desperately to find some kind of professional traction, based largely on the way that the actors themselves poked around and inhabited life during their pre-fame days. To pass the time, Trent picks up women, and tries to show Mike how to do the same, only Mike hasn't gotten over the relationship he abandoned when he moved to California six months prior. With the help of their three buddies, Rob (Ron Livingston), Sue (Patrick Van Horn), and Charles (Alex Désert), Trent tries to teach Mike all about the game of seduction, and how to be a pick-up artist (concepts which weren't as viscerally toxic in 1996 as certain ghastly subcultures on the internet have since made them, though there's still a foundational level of unpleasantness to the acts). Mike is pretty terrible at all of these things, or at being a fun, laid-back, hedonistic Angelino generally; he's that one person in the group who you can never catch smiling or looking particularly relaxed.

Swingers generally falls into that weird valley occupied by a surprising number of movies, where it depicts a lifestyle in seductive, TV-commercial images, makes its most charismatic and quotable character the one most outspoken mouthpiece for that lifestyle, and then wraps up by saying, "but of course that's all bullshit and people who live like that are shallow and will never know love". Maybe not quite that extreme. The last scene certainly makes it clear that any resemblance between Trent and a narcissistic jerk has been quite deliberate, and what Mike has needed all along is a different flavor of advice from a different kind of man. Still, this is ultimately a generous, shaggy comedy, and harsh judgments against the characters and what they do aren't on its radar. Do you have a friend whose behavior you don't really agree with and you suppose that if you strictly followed through on all of your ethical beliefs, you shouldn't be their friend, but it would never actually cross your mind to give them a bad time about it or cut them out of your life? Swingers adopts that attitude with Trent, and that's only in the moments when it isn't basically going along with him.

It's beyond question that Favreau's writing and even more so Doug Liman's directing and cinematography do a great deal to make the culture around the swing revival look utterly enticing and classy (I'd include production designer Brad Halvorson, but frankly, given the literally out-of-pocket production budget, it's not clear what percentage of the locations are just dressed the way the filmmakers found them). The film has the soft, grainy look and slightly washed colors of cheap '90s film stock - the look of Reservoir Dogs and its many imitators, in whose company Swingers unexpectedly but deliberately places itself, despite being no more of a gangster movie than it is a Japanese period picture - and it makes that economical necessity a virtue, by letting that drive a kind of hazy timelessness. The vocabulary and behavior, as well as Vaughn's terrifyingly youthful baby face, are all time-stamped to the mid-'90s, but to look at Swingers, you'd have a bit of a hard time placing it exactly. That "when is it?" feeling blurs the lines between swing as a hip affection and swing as a living art form, which intensifies towards the end in a narratively contrived dance sequence that's nevertheless the most stylish and emotionally pure moment in the movie.

The film absolutely, incontestably works as an advertisement for a hip attitude, as a celebration of a particular kind of club scene, and as a visit to a kind of preening masculinity that's (ostensibly) funny and appealing, though you wouldn't necessarily want to live there. It's lovely in its scuzzy lo-fi aesthetic, the dialogue snaps, and Vaughn, young enough to have not learned what his fallback tics were yet, is the most magnetic human being you could put onscreen. For all that, I'm not sure that Swingers does much with that: it wants to be a close study of where male friendships and social dominance intersect, and it doesn't fail to be that, but the characters are a bit thin to hang too much on them. The three not-Trents are vague enough that even as I was watching the movie, I wouldn't swear to knowing who was attached to which plot threads. Favreau's acting, meanwhile, isn't up to his smart, personalising writing; his Mike is brittle and unyielding enough - you can tell that the actor had a "thing" he was doing as the spine for every individual scene, and he frequently won't let go of it - that it's less the case that we want to see him change and grow because change and growth are healthy, than because he's somewhat tedious to be around. And that, in turn, makes the overall film feel less "having guy friends is the best" and more "if we can't dump this dude, let's at least try to fix him".

What it lacks as a cutting character drama, Swingers makes up for in easily quaffable lifestyle porn, though it's up for debate whether one of those things is equal to the other. Regardless, the film has its seductive appeal, however shallow, and it captures the rhythms of hanging out and talking about Life And Stuff in a relaxed, undemanding way with unforced delivery of dialogue that has the tangy specificity of how a very particular type of people talk. The subsequent careers of its principals feel exactly right: Liman heading for glitzy thrillers where his persuasive, inveigling images could do good work at selling popcorn and being blissfully entertaining, Vaughn to refine variations on self-satisfied American maledom in movies that aren't too hard to avoid, Favreau to craft cinematic spaces for smallish people to comfortably hang out. And I might add editor Stephen Mirrione to that list, for putting together images with just enough flair that when a more driven visual stylist in the form of Steven Soderbergh got hold of him, he could combine a certain craftiness with his evident clarity and good sense of momentum (to its great benefit, Swingers never lags for even a minute). It's not the case that Swingers is great itself, but it's amiable enough, and impressively executed for something with such microscopic resources, that it's pleasing to think that everybody involved got good results from it.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CALIFORNIA IS FOR EARTHQUAKES

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we all know that San Andreas brings back the noble and intensely cliché-happy formula of the all-American disaster picture. What is perhaps a bit surprising is just how far back in history this particular lineage can be traced.

The greatest of all city theme songs, "San Francisco" ("...open your golden gate / You let nobody wait outside your door") feels like something that should have simply come into being spontaneously, not turned out as the result of something so crude as songwriters writing it. But that's exactly what happened: before it became one of the official songs of one of the world's great cities, it was written by Bronislaw Kaper, Walter Jurmann, and Gus Kahn as the theme for 1936's San Francisco, one of MGM's biggest productions that year, headlined by its A-listers Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. It's common for even non-musical Hollywood production of that era to sport a big song (and with MacDonald in one of the lead roles, San Francisco can't help but start to drift into the world of the musical), but rare indeed for that song to be used in such a structural way as we see here: over the course of the movie, "San Francisco" starts out off as a brash declaration from the rough-and-tumble underclass of the Barbary Coast, the most long-lived outpost of the city's birth in Old West lawlessness, it gradually shifts into an audible signifier of the characters' humble, honorable pasts as they attempt to disguise and redefine themselves, and it finally ends the film in the same way it's been used for eight decades since: as an anthem for the pride and resourcefulness of the people of a city that survived and rebuilt in the face of one of the most destructive natural disasters in North American history, the earthquake of April, 1906.

For that is exactly the subject San Francisco takes for itself. Not the earthquake itself, precisely, though the very first thing Anita Loos's screenplay does it to remind us via a title card that at 5:12 in the morning on 18 April, the city was devastated by a major quake, and the second thing it does is to portentously roll back the clock to the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day, 1906. Thus the first three-quarters of the movie (which comes in just shy of two hours) take on a grim cast, as the reasonably conventional romantic drama that makes up the bulk of the drama clicks by without ever quite letting us forget that we're only months - weeks - days - from the onset of horror. But the movie is only about the earthquake symptomatically; its deeper concern is with the rugged survival instinct of its characters, the kind of people who'd set up shop in what was, in 1906, just s 57-year-old city and still very aware of its rough, brutal roots. The film is enormously guilty of making Sweeping Proclamations about the kind of people who live in a given place, but it's still one of the best combined tributes to and criticisms of the character of a community. You needn't go any further into the future than 10 months later to find Fox's In Old Chicago, a movie that's almost a carbon copy of San Francisco in its plot structure and characterisations, to see what this looks like when it's not going right. This picture might be corny as all hell and its depiction San Francisco might be clichéd, essentialist, and reductive, but it has the goods.

As is already clear, I suspect, the film's basic shape is identical to disaster movies for decades to come: we get to know the characters, we get (hopefully) invested in their hopes and dreams, and we are as wrenched as they are by the slashing interruption of death and destruction across the smooth development of a conventional series of dramatic and melodramatic plot beats. And for as much as the movie hangs a sign reading "mind the earthquake" around the movie right at the start, it's genuinely startling and confusing when the world finally starts to move - having seen the film twice, I managed to be caught completely off-guard even the second time. Before that all happens, though, we get a loving recreation of the Barbary Coast of decades ago, in which "Blackie" Norton (Gable) is the owner of the Paradise, one of the Coast's most beloved and glamorously tacky clubs. The film kicks off when he hires Mary Blake (MacDonald), a classically trained singer from Colorado who has been in San Francisco for several fruitless weeks, trying to make her fortune in California like so many hopefuls before and after. Mary's exquisite voice is too rich and big for the Paradise, and she's aggressively courted for a job by Jack Burley (Jack Holt), a member of San Francisco high society and manager of the Tivoli opera house. Complicating things, while Blackie and Burley feud over Mary's career, they're both falling deeply in love with her, and her attraction to Blackie gets in the way of her own best judgment for her career and her dignity. Complicating things even more, Blackie has been tapped by the rest of the Barbary Coast business owners to run for the city's board of supervisors, a position he takes not to help secure their crooked interests, but to help reform and rebuild the coast. And he thus makes a major political enemy in the form of none other than Jack Burley. While all of this swirls around, Blackie's childhood best friend, Father Tim Mullin (Spencer Tracy) tries to act as his conscience, but at least tries to make sure that Blackie can't drag Mary down into the mud with him.

The film benefits from a director with as tight a control of characterisation as Loos, and from director W.S. Van Dyke, one of those studio workhorses who has been almost entirely lost to history, but who could always be counted on for a drum-tight treatment of whatever story or genre was handed to him (his film with the longest shelf-life is undoubtedly The Thin Man, a crackerjack sophisticated comedy that resembles San Francisco only in that it is fearlessly well-paced and has a great central pair of performances). Having been gifted with a handsome reconstruction of 1906 San Francisco thanks to all of MGM's considerable resources, the filmmakers smartly fail to linger on it for the sake of sheer period spectacle, one of the most common mistakes of that studio's most prestigious film in that decade. Instead, the focus in on character and performance, with the result that the central trio of Gable, MacDonald, and Tracy are in great form: even stalled in the "beaming, moralistic Catholic" mode that he dealt with somewhat often at this point of his career, Tracy is up to some of his best work of the decade, while MacDonald is as good here as any anything she ever made outside of her defining collaborations with Ernst Lubitsch.

But Gable is the stand-out, given a tole that plays to every single one of his strengths, minimises his weaknesses, and guided by direction that encourages him to own the nastiness of his character rather than use his huge charisma to paper over it. Temperamentally and functionally, Blackie is a pure stock character, and there's nothing Gable can to do to fully eradicate that fact, but he does deepen it considerably. The actor and character mix sharp business acumen, borderline thuggish emotional bullying of Mary and Father Tim, and a goofy, sweet little boy attitude to love and the possibility of making the world a better place. He is a deeply enthusiastic figure, above all things, which makes his passions all the more moving (the way he cheerily snaps off the phrase "art-tistic achievement" is as good a line reading as any in Gable's career), and his blindly self-serving cruelty all the more horrifying, since we can so easily understand why his victims can be carried along with his pettiness.

Gable's performance is the thematic spine of San Francisco: the combination of can-do will and unsophisticated roughness that the film posits as the defining characteristics of the city's people. He makes such a life force on screen, in fact, that the movie can't quite cope with it: Loos's script, perhaps owing to jitters about glamorising bad boy behavior in the early Production Code era, obsessively ventriloquises Christian morality that it doesn't fully believe in, harping on Blackie's sinfulness and the danger he poses to Mary's very soul. But it feels very much not of a piece with the rest of the film, and the harder it tries to veer towards religion (which it does most strenuously in the final scene), the more inauthentic it feels. Doing good and being good isn't the film's true purpose: moral and spiritual ambiguity are where it's far more compelling and where it makes its strongest impact.

Gable, then, is one of the two reasons that San Francisco is more than an enjoyably polished studio picture; the earthquake itself is the other. It's not, maybe, the best effects work that could have been scrounged up, even in '36: the shaking sets feel an awful lot like shaking sets. But the sequence is a triumph of sound design (for which the film won its only Oscar, out of six nominations, including Best Picture) and even more of editing, which was overseen by John Hoffman for this sequence only. It's openly indebted to the Soviet montage theories of the late silent period, cutting between images with a frenzy that's impressive in the 2010s, and incomparably brutal and disorienting by the standards of the '30s. The savage chaos of the earthquake, the suddenness with which violence can strike, are both impressively communicated by this sequence; it is one of the triumphs of spectacular filmmaking in its entire generation. Even more so, given that it manages to achieve something that has evaded disaster movies since as long as they've existed (and this was by no means the first, though the genre began to take its most complete form beginning in the '30s): it depicts its disaster in an engrossing, spectacular way, while also making sure that we're not just exulting in mass death. The earthquake in San Francisco is utterly horrifying, showing how quickly and painfully human life could be snuffed out, and spending a great deal of time in the smoking, ruined aftermath, with Gable's glib Blackie turned into a shocked, dazed shell of a man as he moves through the devastation. It's closer to a horror movie than an action film, while also being as humane as any disaster picture on record. The passage of years would make onscreen devastation look more and more impressive and realistic with every new fad for the frequently-resurgent genre, but they'd tend to double-down on bland characters stuck in tired formulas (San Francisco is formulaic, but not bland), and this is one of those rare cases in which one of the earliest examples of a style is also among the very best.

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