AMONG THIEVES

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

There are plenty of things that could be one's immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have any meaningful presence on the radar of English-speaking cinephiles, despite his (and the film's) key role in developing an explosion of enormously popular sardonic social comedies in the ensuing decade. Mine was that it's nice to be reminded every now and then that there can be such a thing as comedy that boasts a deft screenplay, performed with brightness by a talented cast, and which is also good as a movie. It being the case that comedy, more than any other genre, has an annoying tendency (and has had it basically since the beginning of sound cinema) to coast on dialogue writing and staging physical gags, and to treat such niceties as well-constructed images and tight dramatic plotting as largely disposable.

Big Deal on Madonna Street - the infinitely less-evocative title of a film whose original Italian name, I soliti ignoti, means something akin to "the usual suspects" - is absolutely not that kind of comedy. As shot by Gianni Di Venanzo and designed by the great Piero Gherardi, it's a rich film of thick, moody atmosphere, low-rent and dangerous, perfectly etching out the grimy urban world its characters operate in and framing it as the site of constant hunted-animal tension. Take out every last joke but leave the rest alone, and you're still left with a crackerjack movie about a gang of frayed, mutually distrustful characters, operating in a mode that takes the spatial texture and busy, deep compositions of neorealism and genrefies them with the visual murkiness of film noir.

It's a splendid peek into a particular corner of the Roman underworld by any means, and that's a huge part of what makes it so much more interesting than a comedy content to keep the actors in frame, in focus, and clearly lit. But it's not only that. In fact, and this seems to have been Monicelli's great genius revelation, it's the very same aesthetic seriousness that makes Big Deal on Madonna Street such a great comedy - which it is to a degree that shocked me, given the difficulties of translating humor across language and culture, and the less than amazing state of film comedy generally around that period. The jokes present in the script written by Monicelli alongside Agenore Incrocci & Furio Scarpelli & Suso Cecchi D'Amico, as well as those inherent to the visualisation of that screenplay, come in a lot of different flavors, but if I had to pick the one thing the film tends to do over and over again, I'd go with its habit of allowing its characters to take themselves very, very seriously, despite their unfailing tendency towards incompetency. It's borderline parody how much the film mocks the figures at its center and the trappings of crime thrillers, and none of that humor would play if it didn't look so very much like an actual caper with its own internal reality. So the film gets it both ways: its style makes it thematically deeper and more sociologically alert than just any old dippy comedy about hapless idiots, and it's also a much funnier dippy comedy for the same reason.

The plot quickly becomes too sprawling to do much with a synopsis, but the basic outline is that minor criminal, Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) is in jail for a crime he did commit, but he wants somebody else to take his place regardless. After a great deal of finagling and hunting, his accomplices scrounge up Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), whose spotless record means he'll receive a much shorter sentence, to take the fall, but the unimpressed judge sees through the ruse and sends both men to prison. An irritated Peppe forces Cosimo to share the plans for a perfect heist, and is then immediately released on probation. This leaves him free to take over the heist himself, recruiting several of his and Cosimo's acquaintences for the job: the romantic Mario (Renato Salvatori); the tyrannical Michele (Tiberio Murgia), who keeps his sister (Claudia Cardinale) under lock and key; old Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), who's munching on something almost every time we see him; and most delightfully of all, sweet Tiberio (an absurdly beguiling, fresh-faced Marcello Mastroianni), whose wife is in prison, leaving him to hall around a baby through all of the gang's planning. After receiving advice from a very dubious career criminal, safecracker Dante (Totò, an icon of Italian screen comedy), the gang is... not so ready to take the job on. They spend at least as much time bumbling around, living their messy lives, as readying to carry off the great heist, and it's not the remotest surprise that the heist itself is one fuck-up after another.

There are subtleties that are invisible to anyone who isn't a fluent speaker of Italian - my understanding is that the characters are all regional caricatures and the dialogue a smorgasbord of slang and casual expression - but even in the form that the rest of us can appreciate it, Big Deal on Madonna Street is delightful, a perfectly-timed comedy that turns the fizzy pleasures of a Rififi (its primary stated influence) into something even more lighthearted, with the moody lighting always making even the most inconsequential gags seem sharper and more unexpected and thus funnier. It helps that, for something that basically pivots on "stupid criminals sure are stupid", Big Deal on Madonna Street is extraordinarily intelligent, both in pacing out its jokes and in the implications of those jokes; it's an overreach and a half to call this a "satire", but like the visually similar, vastly more serious dramas that were still the main force in Italian filmmaking, it's attentive to how people live in the everyday modern world, and its observations about machismo and culture are pointedly mocking, however gently, and however full of love for the characters.

There's a baseline of social realism that the film shares with tonier, graver films of the same period, it's just filtered through good-natured ribbing instead of shell-shocked melodrama. The actors are all having an obvious good time, goofing around, and yet there's enough meat to their performances that it never feels like they're just fooling around - Gassman, in particular, was no kind of comic performer prior to this movie, and while its success altered the face of his career, he didn't at all abandon the basic sincerity of his dramatic work. Peppe, and all the rest, are still recognisable, grounded human beings, even if they're flopping around like clowns and being subjected to the silliest, lightest-touch humiliations available. This essential grounding in real-life, with a sharp eye towards using ridiculous comic excess as a way of calling attention to real-life behavior rather than distracting from it, is one of the cornerstones of the commedia all'italiana movement that largely began here, and while I greatly admire some of its followers - Divorce Italian Style is particularly close to my heart - it's pretty clear that this was one of the cases where the first of its kind got everything just about perfect, right out of the gate.

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LOVE IN THE TIME OF CON

Having thought about it for a couple of days now, I still haven't decided if Focus is particularly enjoyable and solidly-crafted for a bad movie, or if it's extremely inconsistent and frustrating for a good movie. I think I ultimately tend towards the latter, if only because no project that depends so successfully on movie star charisma to drive its everything can be truthfully called bad, not in these benighted days when our movie stars are abandoning us. And it is fair to point out that only one-half of the leads of Focus can rightfully be called a "movie star" - Will Smith, making his first movie for adults in seven years - Margot Robbie absolutely throws off the kind of casual, gorgeous, screen-grabbing performance that would immediately confirm her as a movie star if that's still the way things worked.

Smith plays Nicky Spurgeon, a legend in the world of con artists; Robbie plays Jess Barrett, a rank amateur who tries to play him one night in New York, with a sex-based con that she and her partner rush through, and which Nicky has figured out almost the second it starts. This lights enough of a fire under Jess that she chases Nicky to New Orleans, where he's leading a veritable army of grifters and conmen on a spree of pickpocketing and other minor tricks for extracting money from the clueless and ignorant. He takes her under his wing, teaches her the tricks of the trade, all while starting to fall in love with her, and she with him. Ah, but alas! this too is a con, and he's actually only been faking the whole thing so she'll better play her part in the mother of all cons, paying out beautifully for all concerned. And while Jess gets her fair share, the heartbreak isn't worth it. Three years later, their paths cross again in Buenos Aires, as Nicky finds himself selling his skills to a racing team owner, Rafael Garriga (Rodrigo Santoro), who wants to fix a race he's already likely to win. And this is a task the sullen, dead-eyed Nicky is fine to grind through, until he learns that Garriga happens to be Jess's new lover - and it turns out that he wasn't faking things with her after all, since having her thrust back into his life proves to throw him wildly off his game.

It's nice when things are simple, and the problem with Focus is such a thing: the first half of the film, in New Orleans, is delightful. The second half, in Buenos Aires, isn't. Not that the first half is flawless, any more than the second half is a wall-to-wall disaster, but the fact remains that Focus is basically two entirely self-contained movies wedged together, and rebooting into the second causes no end of problems for the filmmakers Glenn Ficarra & John Requa (who both write and direct). For one thing, the first half is told basically through Jess's perspective, while the second is through Nicky's; that's the kind of structural fancy-dancing that could easily result in a compelling mash-up of perspectives, but it's not what Focus is interested in, and the result is a confusion of focal points and anchors for the audience that leaves the film struggling to pick back up. It's easy to see what the film is aiming for, especially as it heads into its final twist, and the parallels between the halves start to strengthen themselves; it just doesn't get to where it wants to go.

The other big problem is almost as simple, though not quite as explicable. The best parts of the film, almost indisputably, I'm tempted to say, are those which center on the art of the con; when it is more concerned with the relationship between Nicky and Jess, it deflates badly (this is another reason why the second half is so much weaker than the first; the con involved with the race car trickery is not, to begin with, anywhere near as delightful in its complexity as the final reveals, or as the first half's litany of well-executed grifts). It's honestly kind of bizarre that this should be the case, since the film so persuasively argues that executing cons is how these two characters flirt, and the relaxed sexual chemistry between Robbie and Smith is certainly the strongest individual element in the film. But it only works when it's sublimated underneath sleek style and smooth patter; every time the film turns to focus on the flirting, sexiness, and attraction without filtering it, everything goes to hell. Part of this maybe can be blamed on Smith, who lets things get too serious (Robbie does a good job of keeping even the bleakest moments she has to play fizzy and tossed-off). Mostly, I suspect it's just that the film's lithe style works better when it stays at the level of shallow fun, and that Ficarra & Requa have a hard time recalibrating for actual emotions.

That all being true, when Focus works, it's absolutely splendid, a sugary sweet cocktail of glossy cinematography and editing that make all of the mechanics of conning hum and whir with expert cleanliness, while showing off the stars to absolute best effect. The pleasures of a movie that's willing to bask in having pretty people thrown up onto a huge screen should not be denied, and when those pretty people are so able to tap into the exact tonal register the film needs - in this case, peppy and confident dialogue mixed with a constant unspoken "I know more than you do and I am not going to rest till I prove it" tension that adds some quiet antagonism to the flirting - it can be an outright boon. The razzle-dazzle elements of Focus are terrific, and they exude a breezy refusal to be too serious that makes it easy to enjoy the small spectacle of watching professionals execute reasonably simple tasks flawlessly. A description that applies to the filmmakers and cast as much as to it does to the characters. The film bogs down, certainly, and it bogs down in some very damaging places. But it soars just enough to be, on balance, an enjoyable bit of fluff.

6/10

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BDSM WEEK: ROSIE CHEEKS

If, for whatever reason, you wanted to make the most ice-cold, vagina-drying, boner-killing movie about sex in all of cinema history, you would first have to confront the fact that Exit to Eden already exists, and it has set that bar inordinately high. It's no surprise, really, that nothing good could should come of a film taking place mostly on a Pacific island commune dedicated to the pursuit of BDSM, in the hands of director Garry Marshall, a man with an inerrant ability to turn everything into a stiflingly obvious sitcom. There's no tinned laugh track that follows the litany of terrible, coming-from-a-mile-away gags presented in Exit to Eden, but it sure as hell feels like there should be. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that garrulous, eager-to-please Borscht Belt mentality is just about the worst conceivable fit for an erotic drama about a man too proud to admit that he likes to be dominated and a dominatrix too terrified of being hurt to allow herself to drop her defenses. Which, let's be blunt, is already a pretty groan-worthy set-up for a BDSM story, but when you put that in the hands of a man constitutionally hellbent on making cookie-cutter mass entertainment, you have the ingredients for a truly punishing exercise in the worst kind of dopey humor mingled with the worst kind of prurient fascination with kinky sex.

And that's without even mentioning the way that Exit to Eden pairs its damp love story with a comedy about two sharp LAPD officers trying to stop a diamond smuggler, which I understand to be the entire invention of screenwriters Deborah Amelon and Bob Brunner, a massively misguided add-on to the novel vampire maven Anne Rice wrote under a pen name. I think one could spend quite a long time trying to figure out what, on balance, is the worst thing about the film: its deeply unerotic eroticism, or its more deeply unfunny comedy. The sex scenes are more boring, anyway.

So let's meet our two threads, anyway. The first starts in Australia, in 1974, where a young boy named Elliot Slater (Brian Davila) purposefully gets himself in trouble so the family's busty French maid (Rajia Baroudi) will angrily spank him. 20 years later, the grown-up Elliot (Paul Mercurio) still loves to be punished, but he's had a difficult time articulating that to his potential lovers, which is why he has applied for a most singular program. His friend, Dr. Martin Helifax (Hector Elizondo) is the proprietor of a private island of the coast of Mexico, Eden, which is a combination retreat/therapy center for the personal exploration of sexuality as it relates to domination and submission. Elliot has passed the apparently rigorous psychological profiling necessary to travel to become a "Citizen", or submissive partner, there to be able to live out all his fantasies of being smacked, yelled out, and ordered around.

Meanwhile, Sheila Kingston (Rosie O'Donnell) and Fred Lavery (Dan Aykroyd), partners on the Los Angeles police force, are hot in pursuit of Omar (Stuart Wilson), a mysterious jewel thief who has never been photographed or described, and his right-hand henchwoman, Nina Blackstone (Iman). The first we meet Sheila and Fred, they're disguised as, respectively, a dancer and a DJ at a strip club, which is what we call "foreshadowing" in the screenwriting business. Clomping around in her boa, waving a gun, Sheila cuts in with the first wave of a nightmarishly persistent pattern of voice-over to snottily joke, "I'm a cop. Thought I was a supermodel? Don't feel bad, everyone makes that mistake". Because, you see, Rosie O'Donnell is a disgusting fatty who nobody would ever find sexy. That's the least fair kind of joke ever - and circa-1994 O'Donnell is pretty damn good-looking by every human standard outside of the mainstream American film industry - and Jesus Horatio Christ, is Exit to Eden ever ecstatic to exploit her purported hideousness, standing back with arms wide open to let in all the guffaws as this ungainly, graceless, tart-tongued woman talks like somebody who could possibly be found sexual desirable, en route to putting her in a snug leather bustier from which she pokes out in all the wrong places. It would be infinitely more dispiriting if O'Donnell's performance wasn't so brittle and arch and thus felt like it was feeding the meanspirited humor even more than the script already would have it.

The stories cross paths when Elliot quite inadvertently snaps a photo of Omar in the act of pulling out a packet of black market diamonds, on his way to Eden. The criminals are thus after him, and the cops chase both the criminals and Elliot's film cans, and so everybody ends up on Eden: Elliot to find himself quite besotted by headmistress Lisa (Dana Delany), Nina to enjoy life as a sexually predatory gorgeous woman, Omar to stand around grousing, Sheila to shoot off zingers followed by zingy observations about how everybody is a people, even the ones who like BDSM, and Fred is miserable and uncomfortable and obliged to pretend that he's a janitor to avoid having to partake of the sexuality in any way.

Picking out the worst thing about Exit to Eden is prohibitively hard, but a strong candidate would have to be that awful fucking voiceover, which O'Donnell delivers in a speedy staccato that obviously wants to evoke terse narration of film noir - which it doesn't - only in way that's sassy and robustly comic - which it isn't. Another strong contender would be the absolutely impossible performances given by Delany and Mercurio (the latter having only ever appeared in one film, the sweet-minded "wacky Aussies" comedy Strictly Ballroom, where his callowness and artificial mien were used to more stable effect), stilted and inhuman, so devoid of human warmth that when they doff their clothes to make out and have simulated sex that Marshall and company shoot with a kind of delighted "naughty child peeking between interlaced fingers" remove, it's a little surprising that you can't hear the plastic parts squeaking as they rub together. Seriously, nobody gives a good, or even halfway functional performance in the film (except for Iman, maybe, who also has the broadest major role), but even by the lowered standards here, Delany is shockingly inauthentic and forced. There is no pleasure here, nor self-reflection, nor even a particularly strong command of the English language, based on some of her line readings.

To be fair, Delany is particularly ill-served by the genial comic tone that Marshall spackles onto everything, since hers is the most serious of all roles. Aye, the comedy, that's another thing going spectacularly wrong: at its best, it's desperately obvious and corny, and sometimes it gets worse and adds tone-deaf tastelessness on top of it (e.g. O'Donnell's cringing parody of Iman's speaking voice; the running gag wherein Sheila mocks Fred by loudly describing her period). But the really awful thing is how the broad, surface-level humor collides with the frequent nudity and frank sex talk, reducing everything the braying world of particularly filthy burlesque. It's a leering, dirty movie, though I think entirely by accident; Marshall is not a leering filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination (think of how successfully he denuded the R-rated prostitute comedy Pretty Woman of any genuine sexual edge), just one who wants to make things as safe and accessible to the most basic mainstream audience. In applying that mentality to the defiantly un-mainstream world of BDSM, the perhaps inevitable effect is to titter at it with embarrassment, to linger on it and make it seem outright smutty. I have no stake in the behaviors being depicted onscreen; I do however, prefer not to have to deal with the confusing mental anguish of such featherweight jokes being steamrolled by such crass depictions of clearly artificial fucking.

All of this coalesces into a completely unacceptable, unwatchable cinematic object: only a handful of times does a joke manage to spark enough to generate any kind of energy, and it sputters out again the second that either plot clicks through another generic event, or any of the actors cough up another line through palpable self-loathing (Aykroyd), dogged determination to make anything out of this hellacious mess (O'Donnell), or just plain ineptitude (everyone else). It's a movie whose insipidity keeps being sharpened with every new wrinkle, every new line, and every new banal bit of staging; it feels like the flatness of it all should end up turning into anesthetic mush, but no, Exit to Eden keeps finding new ways to inflict pain. Just like its characters, only there is nothing all pleasurable involved in this act of sadism.

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STANLEY KUBRICK: A DAY AT THE RACES

With The Killing, we arrive at a very exciting moment in the career of Stanley Kubrick, just shy of his 28th birthday when the film premiered in June, 1956: his third feature and sixth project overall is the very first work of the director's career that he'd acknowledge existed in later years. That's not entirely fair to the previous year's Killer's Kiss, but there's really no two ways about it: The Killing represents a jaw-dropping leap in Kubrick's talents, ambitious, and thoughtfulness. Not too many filmmakers have ever experienced such a staggering step-up in quality between two projects; Killer's Kiss is a fine, wholly generic mid-decade film noir, but The Killing is a masterpiece, one of the undisputed high-water marks of the American crime film whose reverberations can still be felt in a number of ways, and even if Kubrick's subsequent career hadn't included a single project on this level, it would still be sufficient in and of itself to justify him a place in the pantheon.

On top of all that, it's also Kubrick's first film with a non-original source: the young director wrote a story treatment based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break, with the dialogue added to that skeleton by pulp author Jim Thompson. And this perhaps was critical; glancing ahead at Kubrick's filmography, which includes only one project that could even vaguely deserve the tag of an original story, and one project that so thoroughly changed the substance of its source that we might as well call it a new scenario, and both of those co-written by hugely important authors in other medium, we might conclude that for all his many indisputable gifts as a visual artist and cunning experimenter with the details of film language, the gift of imagining interesting stories was alien to him. At any rate, The Killing changes very little of Clean Break, mostly in the streamlining that comes from turning a novel built on a series of psychological vignettes into a chilly third-person thriller, though the climax is heavily shifted to amp up the cosmic fatalism and make the characters a bit less cruel. Both versions are otherwise process stories at heart: the depiction of high ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), after four years in prison, gathers together an assortment of downtrodden schmoes to act as his pawns in a singularly clever plot to rob the money room at a local horse track, watching with anthropological fascination as the various individuals observe their little corner of the plot play out, while we in the audience see the whole tapestry come together strand by strand.

Noir was a good fit for Kubrick's sensibilities, as they'd be more fully laid out in his future work; other than war films, it's the only genre he'd dabble in more than once. The Killing, a noir of the highest order, showcases the first appearance of what would become arguably the key theme of Kubrick's entire career: orderly systems being brought down by an inability to account for the human element. And while this is merely a facet or background element of films like 2001 (with its insane computer) or A Clockwork Orange (with its epically unsuccessful scheme of social conditioning), it's the driving force behind the entire plot in The Killing, which we might summarise as how the perfect crime is ruined because one dumb dupe couldn't keep his mouth shut around his wife in a feeble attempt to save his toxic marriage.

And that's all the more I'll say specifically about the film's plot, since it is a real and tremendous pleasure to see how it all unfolds. What I will say is that the plot structure that Kubrick devised for the film, though it contains nearly all of the same events as Clean Break, makes the movie vastly more exciting and tense: firstly because The Killing does not keep returning to all the characters over and over like the book does, and so we're allowed to forget about one major subplot during the bulk of the film's heist sequence, whereas the book's tendency to keep it fresh in our minds makes it easy to see the ending before it arrives (of course, this if this makes the movie more of a thriller, it also makes the book more of a tragedy; trade-offs do happen). The second and by far more significant and far-reaching change is that Kubrick tells the story in a discontinuous, overlapping chronology: we see an event in the afternoon, then an event from that morning involving different people, then an event involving a third set of people from in between. This fragmentary way of assembling the plot has influenced filmmakers ever since - Quentin Tarantino openly acknowledges his debt, for one - but I don't praise the film for its historical importance alone. The constantly shifting frames of chronological reference are one of the primary ways that the film keeps its headlong pace up; events spilling out in no real order makes everything that much busier and more frenzied, since we have to do so much work to keep up.

For it is a brutally fast film: at 85 minutes, it's neither especially long nor especially short by noir standards, but it screams by like a rocket sled. Even more than the way the plot is structured, this owes a lot to the way the thing has been assembled: editor Betty Steinberg has a marked tendency to end scenes without any kind of "button", a visual or dramatic beat that keys us in to realising that the moment is done now, and so scenes bleed into one another, frequently leaving it unclear what the relationship is until we've had a second to gather our wits (conversely, one fade to black, signifying a sex scene, comes as a purposeful and dramatic rupture in the film's integrity; which, given the nature of that scene in the development of the drama, is exactly appropriate). The result is a reckless narrative momentum that gives the plot the sense of, well, fatalism; a word I already used, and a word that can't really be overstated in regards to The Killing. It is a film where things, once they are started, seem like they can't possibly be diverted from their course; not until a pathetic, whinging argument over a suitcase at an airline luggage counter near the very end does it ever seem like there might be a moment when the choices a character makes will actually change the predetermined shape of the action, for good or for ill.

I am tempted, for this reason, to call it the most perfect of all caper films (I know, I know: Rififi would like to have a word with me). The subgenre is, of its nature, concerned with narrative-as-mechanism: the exact combination of flawlessly-planned coincidences that will trigger just the right results in the right order to spring the traps, silence the alarms, and leave the thief with a bagful of money and the cops with a locked door mystery. A really great one is exciting to watch precisely because of its clockwork precision, and that's a terrific thing to put in the hands of a storyteller like Kubrick, whose overriding personality as a director (some call it a weakness of his form, but that would imply he's doing it accidentally or to the detriment of his films, which is virtually never the case) is one of frosty detachment from his subjects, which causes him to always treat the characters in his films as cogs in a machine. Applying that tendency to this kind of story is a match made in heaven: The Killing is, in essence, a mechanism about the execution of a mechanism. Certainly, Hayden's performance - easily my favorite turn in the very gifted actor's excellent career - encourages this connection, with his mechanical-man patter as he describes his complex plans crisply, brisky, and without a scrap of emotion. So does the bossy narrator (Art Gilmore) whose flat elucidation of onscreen events always and obsessively includes the exact time, frequently noting the exacting precision of those times relative to the plan for the heist.

So does the camerawork, which finds Kubrick working with Lucien Ballard, the first of many cinematographers annoyed to find the photograpy-trained director treating him more like a glorified AC or camera operator than an artistic professional with his own decision-making process. Whatever it took to get it done, and whoever is responsible for the exact content of each shot, The Killing boasts an unerringly exact language of images: movements that glide from Point A to Point B on precise, emphatic beats; lighting (often with just one source) plays at times almost like bare-stage theater, where we are shown only the exact things we need to care about in that moment. Many compositions are totally flat, relegating every point of visual interest to a single line; this causes the handful of deep shots, in which both the action and another character's relationship to that action matter, to explode off the screen.

It is not, by any conceivable means, a warm movie. Every character is to some degree a fool and amoral; unlike the book and so many other films noirs, The Killing can't even bring itself to seriously follow-through on indicting Sherry Peatty (MarieWindsor) for the crime of being a sexual libertine and female, finding her no more capable of real self-directed activity than any of the men, and preferring to blame her dim husband George (Elisha Cook, Jr, also giving my favorite performance of an excellent career) for being gullible enough to believe she loves him, rather than blaming her for using it against him. But blame or not, everybody in The Killing suffers; it's a movie in which people are bugs, captured by a surgical camera lens in the act of being stomped on by a universe that's wholly unimpressed by cleverness. Kubrick would make other nihilistic films - Kubrick would make mostly nihilistic films - but The Killing deserves special attention for basing that nihilism in such grubby, real-world concerns (the documentary-style footage of horse races that opens the film leaves a veneer of realism over even the most baroque compositions to follow), and finding a way to turn even the acidic realm of film noir into something darker yet, where decent people can't be eaten alive by the venality of the world because there weren't any decent people to begin with.

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IT'S NOT STARTING OVER, IT'S JUST GOING ON

When Disney conducted its grand experiment in rebuilding the Muppet brand name in 2011 with The Muppets, the results were inconclusive: pleasingly off-kilter and nostalgic, but in the most punishingly authoritarian way possible. Nostalgia was, at a certain point, the only driving element of the plot and the only thing to get back out of it.

So in some regards, the new Muppets Most Wanted is a step in the right direction: it is actually a thing that exists mostly in reference to itself, and not as a feature-length exercise in wish fulfillment on the part of its co-writer and top-billed actor. It's not even as blunt a remake of The Great Muppet Caper as much about the plot seems to promise, including some extremely specific details of structure. And at the same time, Muppets Most Wanted feels like a mighty, determined act of wheel-spinning: there's a profound sense of fatigue and non-creativity that overwhelms the movie and leaves its handful of undeniable top-shelf moments (nearly all of them involving musical numbers) feeling like a chain of lonely islands.

The film's best moment, at any rate, is the one that opens it: in the immediate aftermath of The Muppets, as the camera stops rolling everyone looks to Kermit the Frog (Steve Whitmire) to decide what to do now that the franchise has been reborn. This triggers a rollicking musical number, "We're Doing a Sequel", that has more than a little of Great Muppet Caper's "Hey, a Movie!" opening song in its DNA, and is the one place in the entire film where the guileless postmodernism of the Muppets at their best pokes through with something of the "Let's put on a show" attitude of the best of the earlier movies and The Muppet Show itself.

From here on, the film descends into an adventure-movie rhythm that's never draggy or dull, but is also frequently no more than wistfully amusing. Short version: the Muppets are encouraged by obvious conman Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais) - pronounced "badji", he insists - to go on a European tour to make the most of their newly regained fame; this is merely a pretext to allow international thief Constantine (Matt Vogel), a dead ringer for Kermit but for his mole, to swap places with the frog showman, and for he and Dominic to use the Muppets' appearances as covers to rob local museums of their treasures, all clues that will aid in a heist to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London.

That offers plenty of room for genial culture-shock comedy, with knowing caricatures of several Western European cultures drifting across the film's bow as it goes along, and I will happily admit to being hugely grateful after The Muppets for there to be a Muppet movie in which the actual Muppets are the main characters, with the flesh-and-blood humans (the usual constellation of cameos, with Ty Burrell and Tina Fey joining Gervais as the featured people) serving strictly in supporting roles. And without the heavy weight of reintroducing the characters, they get a good chance to breathe and express themselves in this new scenario - Whitmire's Kermit has certainly never been better, as the performer finally frees himself up to express some frustration and desperation that feel totally in-character for the iconic frog, and yet also like emotional places that Jim Henson would probably not have taken the character.

A little bit of pleasantly low-key comedy goes quite a long way, though. And as the film moves on, relying on the same small range of gags (the Muppet gang is all a bit short-sighted and unobservant! songs that are parodies of other song forms! the French have incredibly generous labor standards compared to the United States!), it gets sleepier and sleepier, feeling less and less creative. Without having any reason whatsoever to suppose that this is true, I can't help but feel like this is not a script that was filmed because the creators felt passionate about the opportunities it presented, but because a new film had to be made, and when it was time to commit, this was the material they had. It lacks inspiration, and even more, it lacks the squishy, profoundly sincere sentiment and love of humanity that animates all of the best stuff made during Henson's life, and in brief moments since his death. When Muppets Most Wanted starts to pivot to lessons about want vs. need, and the bonds of friendship and family, it doesn't feel like the heart of the movie bleeding through the comedy, but like kiddie movie boilerplate.

Also, the film puts a lot of emphasis on Walter (Peter Linz), the new human Muppet introduced as one of the main characters in the last film, and it's becoming increasingly clear that he's just no damn interesting. No slight to Linz; not even to writers James Bobin & Nicholas Stoller, whose attempt to turn the little beige man's simplicity in something charming and positive. But bland human Muppets just aren't that appealing.

Anyway, all this being disappointingly true, Muppets Most Wanted still offers plenty in the way of charming, light humor - those song parodies, however one-note the gag starts to feel, tend to be awfully good - and the breezy way that the plot is blitzed through in quick dialogue and short scenes keeps things moving without sacrificing the stakes. Bobin, who also directs, has learned quite a lot in the intervening years: the compositions favor the Muppets this time in a way that they didn't (and given the human focus, often couldn't) in the 2011 film. He and his crew - these are massively complicated films, it doesn't do to pretend like shots are set-up on the fly - also manage the feat of putting Muppet and humans in the same frame, without letting it feel like there's far too much headspace (a savvy combination of wide shots and unobtrusive high angles; there's also some smart use of deep compositions, especially during Kermit's sojourn in a Siberian prison). All of this contributes quite a lot to the sense that the Muppets are the focus and the stars, and their reality is quietly insisted-upon in a way that hasn't been achieved since Henson's death, really. This is, I want to be entirely clear, a Very Good Thing. The technical and to a large degree the performative aspect of the Muppets have been entirely re-learned and perfected (I remain vaguely unenthusiatic about all of Eric Jacobson's versions of Frank Oz's old characters). If they can nail the script next time, then we'll have some actual Muppets on our hands, and not these fan-fiction Muppet analogues who go through the motions well, but really just don't have the wit or the heart.

6/10

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WES HAS HIS CAKE AND EATS IT TOO

15 years and change since Rushmore, it would seem that there couldn't possibly be any more development in the aesthetics of Wes Anderson, a director whose personal stamp is about as obvious as anybody's ever has been. And yet here we are, and The Grand Budapest Hotel exists, and it feels like it might be the most purified and direct expression of the Anderson Style that has ever existed, the one that most completely takes place entirely within the artificial world that he has created for it. Even the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox doesn't feel like it takes place in such a thoroughly artificial series of locations.

Which would ordinarily be enough to mark the film out as the most airless and irritatingly arch thing in the director's career, yet a miracle has happened, and the exact opposite is true: if anything, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the film that Anderson was born for, unabashedly the best thing he's done since The Royal Tenenbaums, and I could probably be gotten drunk enough to start declaring how it's the new masterpiece of his whole career. For despite the unbelievably and almost literally indescribably fussiness of the imagery, it's one of his most thoroughly expressed depictions of theme and feeling. Despite the understanding we all have of what the Anderson Style actually means (brightly color-coded sets and costumes; centered compositions with actors staring directly at the camera; staccato, patter-like dialogue involving a nest of clauses and subjunctions that can barely be diagrammed, let alone spoken aloud), it's easy to forget that it also involves a healthy dose of melancholy and loss, and Grand Budapest doubles-down on this by opening and closing in a wintry cemetery, of all places, where a young woman (Jella Niemann) visits the grave of a great author (Tom Wilkinson), clutching a copy of his book The Grand Budapest Hotel (the onscreen depiction of the book cover doubles as the only statement of the film's title). From this setting we flash back to 1985, with the author giving an interview of how he came to come upon that book's story in 1968, when as a young man (Jude Law) on a spa trip in the Ruritanian country of Zubrowka (which, in our reality, is a brand of Polish vodka), he met Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), the owner of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the nearly empty ruin where he was then staying. Moustafa, sensing a receptive soul, told him the story of how he first came to the hotel during its greatest period of splendor, in 1932, when he (Tony Revolori) was a green lobby boy under the command of the legendary concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes).

It's not insisted on while you're watching the film burrow through its layers, but the return to the girl and her book in the cemetery at the end makes it impossible to forget: we're watching a tremendously fluffy bit of nonsense in which all of the participants are dead - so dead that the film has to add an entire outermost layer of framework narrative to make sure that it's given enough time for all of the people with speaking roles to die. And that is how a movie that, for the great majority of its running time is a blissed-out collage of '60s Euro-caper, pre-Code Lubitsch comedy (an obvious, surface-level comparison to make; but I don't think all those shots of people walking through doors can possibly be an accident, and unyieldingly brutal black comedy (not only is "the cat is dead" used a joke, "the cat's brains are splattered all over the cobblestones" is the amazingly funny punchline to that joke, and I say that as an unrepentantly ideological cat lover), can actually be about the tang we all feel when we stop for long enough to glance back and realise how much we have lost, and how much has changed beyond our ability to recognise it. It's not a sorrowful wallow in misery: the signal moment in the movie comes when a character, recounting how someone he loved died, lightly and almost laughingly describes it as a ridiculous disease.

It is, however, absolutely saturated in the awareness of time passing. At the structural level, there is its layering, distancing accumulation of frames and narrators (to the common complaint that Anderson's films hold the characters at arms' length, The Grand Budapest Hotel enthusiastically replies, "oh, no, much further than that!"); at the narrative level, there is the constant, film-long spectre of revolution and war in a time place that the film rather specifically situates in the space between the Russian Revolution and the outbreak of World War II, a time when the charming tourist's Europe in which the film takes place was wiped from the face of the Earth; at the stylistic level, there is the use of the 1.37:1 aspect ratio for all of the 1932 scenes, which is both good film history and a very obvious attempt to make something alien and old-fashioned out of the material (also, Anderson and his longtime cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman create more exciting compositions in that ratio than they ever have before, so there's that). It could not more literally be a film about how things decay and die. And compared to this, the brittle Andersonisms play less like the work of a man who truly does not grasp what people behave like and why (the impression one can sometimes get from something like The Darjeeling Limited), more like the witty anthropologist of The Royal Tenenbaums, who understood how highly artificial, presentational behavior could be understood as an attempt by the damned and dying to assert control over an uncontained situation. There's a line in The Grand Budapest Hotel that says this almost overtly, near the very end where it can't possibly be missed as anything but a statement of purpose. It is with this film that I first realised that Anderson is depicting bands of small-c conservatives, standing athwart history and yelling stop, without realising that history is already far past them.

Which makes the film sound like an unbearable slog, so I should backtrack and talk about what an immensely pleasurable film this is. The dominating theme of the film is pastry: the Grand Budapest looks like an elegant multi-layered frosted cake that might serve as the triumphant climax to one of its own dinners; baked goods of the highest quality and most fussy sort serve as key elements of the plot at multiple turns. And the film itself is an immaculate dessert, dauntingly sweet and impressively complex. There are those who would use this as an argument against the film and the filmmaker, because even the fanciest dessert is just junk food, and to them I say: I have made more than one dacquoise in my life, and just because it's not nourishing doesn't mean that it's not profoundly difficult artistry that only the most brilliant can make look as fleet and easy as Anderson does with this film. Everything about the film is candy: Adam Stockhausen's sets and Milena Canonero's costumes are pink-and-purple-and-blue eye candy, Alexandre Desplat's score (which by the film's halfway point, had already become my favorite thing he's done since at least The Painted Veil) is playfully multi-ethnic, Mitteleuropean ear candy, and the typically swirling dialogue delivered by Anderson's best cast ever (Fiennes in particular giving, the best performance in an Anderson film since Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenanbaums or Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore), full of anachronistic cursing and gleefully self-aware wordplay, is mind candy. But candy is not bad unless you have a steady diet of it, and I don't think there are enough Lubitch-slash-Tarantinto-slash-Nabokov exercises in the world to be worried about it.

I have said not a damn thing about the plot because it's much too joyful in its precise clockwork to give away even the earliest details, and much too complicated for a spare synopsis to do much good for anybody. I will mention, however, that you need to stay for the ending credits. Not only is the best musical cue in the whole film ("Traditional Arrangement: Moonshine", the name for a madcap orchestration that's anything but traditional) at the end of the credits, the most delightful joke in the movie and the most delightful joke I expect to see in 2014 is there as well. It's as fussy and silly as anything else in the movie, with the added delight of being astoundingly random, infused with the same kick of self-critiquing nostalgia that makes this such an ambivalently frothy lark.

10/10

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DO THE HUSTLE

American Hustle is set in the 1970s, and tells a vigorously fictionalised account of the ABSCAM sting set up by the FBI to target corrupt politicians in 1978, but its heart belongs to the 1960s. For despite its grittastic cinematography and the word "American" there in the title, both of them promising a neo-New Hollywood exercise in studying culture and people through a filter of grubby naturalism, the film's heart belongs to the '60s. In particular, to that decade's widespread subgenre of ensemble caper films, movies about cunning, well-spoken con artists pulling one over on each other and on us, wearing gorgeous clothes and acting generally like they're well aware that they're part of a script, but oh! isn't it such a wonderfully clever and nicely-constructed script at that? There is much of Topkapi in its DNA, I mean to say, far more than there is of The Fighter or Silver Linings Playbook, director David O. Russell's last two low-key genre experiments, from which most of the new film's cast has been culled)

The plot gets mighty convoluted mighty fast, but it opens nice and slow, with a terrific character moment in which the paunchy, balding Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) delicately and with great focus and intent attaches an indescribably complex toupee/combover contraption to the top of his head, in one arch, detached long take. It is the first moment of many in which we'll see a character making deliberate choices about how he or she wants to be perceived by everyone else, for this will end up turning into one of the film's two overriding major themes: creating a facade as a survival strategy. The other theme is of how people can either do things that are safe and reliable, or they can have strong emotions, but not both, and this is introduced only minutes later, in the form of Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), whose entry into Irving's life makes it far more exciting and passionate, and also triggers every subsequent action that shifts dozens of lives, nearly all of them for the worse.

Irving, you see, is a small-scale con artist who has figured out a perpetual scheme that won't ever make him fantastically rich, but keeps him and his dumb harpy of a New Jersey housewife, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) stable and safe. Sydney adds a new wrinkle in the form of a fake English noblewoman who adds enough tatty legitimacy to the con that the dollar amounts start to increase, and after the two new colleagues fall in love, Irving finds himself willing to make stupid decisions to keep Sydney happy. One of these involves moving on an unsafe mark, who turns out to be FBI Agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), looking to make a name for himself in the Bureau. And this is where things start to get terrible: the low-stakes deal he cuts with Irving and Sydney gets him so excited that he almost immediately starts to concoct a new and bigger and much, much dumber plan that won't just take town a few nickel-and-dime con artists from New Jersey's streets, but will snag senators and mayors and mobsters of all sorts.

In essence, American Hustle is about enthusiasts getting in miles over their head and then trying to scramble back to the surface using nothing but ideas they can come up with on the fly. It's all pretty fizzy and even maybe shallow - the only character who's especially well-written is Irving, and the film's exploration of social mores begins and ends at "some people will do desperate things if they think that's the only way to survive". It is, though, massively pleasurable, in the way that watching committed performers throw themselves into the act of telling a snappy story with sparkle and energy. And just because the writing leaves most of the characters with more of the notion of an inner life than an actual personality and psychological core, that's not to say that the actors don't draw out quite a bit that ends up making this much more a story of three very specific figures than the "Irv and his two buddies" situation this could easily have devolved into.

Adams and Cooper give two fantastic performances altogether, in fact. Absolutely the best of Cooper's career, and the best in the film as well, a wide-eyed mixture of utmost childlike joy and a deeply nasty conviction that he's way smarter than everyone around him even when that's demonstrably the opposite of true. It's the best kind of movie star performance: when he's onscreen, there's no point in looking at anyone else. Adams, with a comically ludicrous English accent for most of film, is doing something a little bit simpler but even further outside of her comfort zone and no less arresting. And certainly, given her far greater centrality (she shares voiceover duties with Bale early on, when the film is in a mode of ironic nostalgia - Cooper has a little bit of narration, but not remotely as much), the film's success rests more on her giving it a steady foundation. On the reading that everything Irving or Richie do is ultimately about impressing Sydney (this is not a hard reading to mount), Adams is, in fact, the central focus point of the movie, and she's exactly charming and steely in exactly the right mixture to make that work. That Bale, doing another of his outrageously showy physical transformation deals, recedes so far into the background comparatively is perhaps testament to the character's function in the story as the One Sane Man who can't do a thing to stop the rest of the zanies from going overboard.

And that, right there, is the big surprise about the film, to me at least. American Hustle, a con movie about politics, a grittily-shot movie about American capitalism in its 1970s period of decline, a bitter love story about how people make terrible decisions that hurt everybody when they're too invested in romance, is above all else an outright farce, in a surprisingly classic sense of that word: problems are caused because people lie, they lie even harder to solve those problems, which only exacerbates them, and soon the victory condition is not "we got what we wanted", but "we figured out how to keep things from getting geometrically worse every time somebody breathes".

It's hilarious as all hell, nominally a thriller, but much too much in love with its dialogue and its absurd wrinkles and the gleeful fun of piling on complications to really bother with serious ramifications or anything like that. It is a miraculously well-made truffle, anchored by some of the best performances and most ballsy story writing of 2013. It's not particularly arresting cinema: Russell and DP Linus Sandgren do not a single interesting thing with the camera, and the most present artistic choice consists of a soundtrack so hilariously overreliant on the most obvious possible '70s rock music that I'm half-certain it's a deliberate parody. Also, like basically every movie of the 2010s, it's about 30 minutes too long. But whatever great artistic heights it doesn't reach, it's deliriously entertaining and sexy, two adjectives that describe some of the most outstanding shallow thrills that any human has ever enjoyed.

8/10

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TONY SCOTT: DOMINO (2005)

One year after Man on Fire, Tony Scott directed Domino, and the vast chasm between the two of those films is telling. Of what, I'm not sure - but man, is it ever telling.

Domino, I believe, has its share of passionate defenders, and it ought to: it's the kind of movie precisely designed to have a small clutch of people whose enthusiasm for it knows no limits, and part of me dearly wishes I was in that group. Certainly, it's a pull-out-all-the-stops, damn-the-torpedoes orgasmic exercise in wall-to-wall visual and auditory craziness, and typically I am prone to like that sort of thing very much. But Tony Scott would have appeared to have found my wall: there is a point where I need something resembling content in order to get off on pure, abstract style, and Domino lacks that content. To say the least.

The film opens with an absolutely perfect pair of title cards: "This is based on a true story." "Sort of." Perfect, that is to say, in that it very much establishes what sort of mood we can expect the next two hours and change to play around in: it establishes a sense of snotty irony that is absolutely caked over every inch of the feature, with flippant attitude standing in for wit. It's not, "Most of what follows is true", is what I'm saying. Anyway, the sort-of true story is that of Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley), a bounty hunter living and mostly working in Southern California, where her beauty and ruthless efficiency set her apart in a field dominated by burly male ex-cons. Domino was the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, who died when she was four years old; she spent some time as a model before a lifelong affection for violent adventure mixed with what the film promises us was a strange case of Daddy Issues sent her into her most curious career. It was because of the press accumulating around such an offbeat character that Scott first sought her out, striking up a friendship that would last the last ten years of her life or thereabouts, and convincing both of them that he absolutely had to make a movie about her exploits; it finally came out mere months after Harvey's death by drug overdose.

Now, what about Domino Harvey? That is not a question I am able to answer, for it is not something the film itself seems to have quite settled on. It is an unbelievably significant bit of trivia that Scott, who had been unable to fashion Harvey's life into a meaningful dramatic narrative despite years of trying, was inspired to hire Richard Kelly as screenwriter on the strength of reading his script for Southland Tales. A film that I will happily admit to enjoying for the sprawling, over-ambitious mess that it is, though I'm inclined to say that the script is the single worst element of the whole entire project, and hiring somebody to write you a movie specifically on the strength of that script is as much as saying, "Here. I would like for you to create an absolutely insane fucking disaster for me".

Sure enough, Domino is that insane fucking disaster. There's a plot - there's definitely a plot - there's so much plot that the whole movie threatens to choke to death on plot. But there's not much that happens. Basically, Domino, her boss Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke, perfectly cast as a drugged-out man mountain), and her co-worker and semi-romantic-interest Choco (Édgar Ramírez) tackle a few bounty hunting cases sent their way by one Claremont Williams (Delroy Lindo), until they eventual get to That One Case, the one that was fucked-up from the word "go" by secrets and lies, in which the merry band of hunters end up on the wrong side of the law and the DMV, and Domino ends up relating the whole plot to FBI Agent Taryn Mills (Lucy Liu), from the omnipotent perspective of a framing narrative.

If you were to go through the events of the movie in a simple way, it's all very straightforward, but it was massively important to Scott and Kelly that it was not straightforward, and so the story (for which Steve Barancik was also credited, though Kelly never read his draft) hops back and forth between the framework and a variety of barely-established moments in the past, constantly shifting how much Domino "knows" about what went on when she wasn't present, and using Knightley's voiceover narration as a tool for constantly abstracting the content of the plot while saturating it in so much irony that it abandons having any baseline reality. And that's without bringing the style in, but let's hold off on that for a second. We're still at the point where, at the level of storytelling, Domino is actively trying to make itself more complicated than it is, solely to be messier and harder to parse.

Once we bring in style, well, damn. Superficially, this is apparently a continuation of what Scott was up to with Man on Fire, shot by his frequent collaborator Dan Mindel instead of Paul Cameron, which may or may not have anything to do with anything. The difference being that, for all that Man on Fire was a barrage, a constant assault that was great at knocking the viewer around like a ragdoll, it had a clear purpose: it was evoking the subjective perspective of its main character, aggressively visualising his emotions and the things he noticed and thought about. If that's going on in Domino, I can't track it. Sometimes it's subjective, stuck inside Domino's head. Frequently it's not. Either way, it's largely arbitrary: the sound hops around from speaker to speaker, sometimes with voices booming and sometimes with voices muffled and tinny; the film is constantly bathed in a putrescent yellow that couldn't look more like urine if Scott and Mindel had literally pissed on the camera negative; shots cut together with more regard for speed than coherency or even graphic compatibility; and the make-up that Knightley has been saddled with makes her look like a punk rock raccoon.

If anything, I suppose what the film is about is creating a visual corollary to the experience of living through its plot, though that same plot is so heightened that it's not fair to say that it corresponds to anything experienced by human beings in the real world. Still, it's bombastic and constantly keeps you from being relaxed in any way, just like the chaotic mess that the characters are living through, thanks to filmmakers who went out of their way to fabricate such a mess. That said, while visual anarchy can be starling and bracing in chunks, Domino quickly settles into a one-tone-fits-all groove that's desperately wearying: 20 minutes of the movie, with perhaps a slightly less florid approach to narrative (or, alternatively, no narrative at all) could be excitingly revolutionary, but two hours of it is grueling and tedious. It's style, but it's not an aesthetic: that implies some level of choice and concern for the shift in effect from moment to moment. Domino is a feature-length exercise in watching Tony Scott, totally unhinged, vomiting the id right onto a movie. I don't know whose id - his? Domino Harvey's? The character in the movie based on her? And nothing in this pulverising mess, however energetic and fast-paced, makes me want to find out.

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