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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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2014: In which our study of one hundred years of Hollywood filmmaking ends as it began, with a well-heeled amateur directing a dubiously effective adaptation of a hot literary property

The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn't even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that's what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of the screenwriting process and WGA arbitration that led to a title card proclaiming this adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's book to be by "Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson" would be fascinating in its own right, though I would not want those four men to be responsible for writing it. Because if their combined skills couldn't do any better than this for poor Zamperini...

Zamperini, played here by Jack O'Connell in what is the highest-profile title of his big "look at me!" coming-out year as a new actor to watch, was an Olympic medalist in 1936 at Berlin, who set a handful of records during his career as a runner. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, survived one emergency landing and one crash into the ocean, floated for 47 days with two other men (one of whom died along the way), and spent two years in Japanese POW camps, including a lengthy stretch under the cruel ministrations of notorious war criminal Watanabe Mutsuhiro, "The Bird" (Japanese rock star Miyavi). After the war's end, Zamperini struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder which only started to recede when he converted to evangelical Christianity thanks to the preaching of Billy Graham, and his newly reinvigorated religion led him back to Japan, in order to offer his forgiveness to all the guards that had abused him during his time as a prisoner. After a lifetime as an inspirational figure, he was one of the runners carrying the Olympic torch near the end of its journey to Nagano, Japan for the 1998 Winter Olympics. And after all that, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 97.

That's a hell of a lot of living, and choices had to be made about what to focus on. But Unbroken finds the whole mess of writers making the very worst ones, alongside director Angelina Jolie, movie star, humanitarian, and most importantly for our present needs, helmer of the rather dreadful 2011 Bosnian War romance In the Land of Blood and Honey. Unbroken is certainly the better of her two films as director, though it's not much of an achievement, and more than it teaches us anything about the nobility of the human spirit or inner strength or anything else, the film teaches us that not every actor can automatically make the leap to directing, and that simply because one has the clout and access and moral fervor to make movies, that doesn't mean that one has the talent.

The film does not want to be a decade-spanning biopic, which is a thoroughly respectable impulse. In theory, then, it focuses all its energy on Zamperini’s time during the war, taking place across three narrative chunks: the failure of his first bomber under a barrage of enemy fire, done as a little mini-thriller to open the film, the crash of his second bomber and the 47 days floating on a pair of life-rafts, a much longer stretch of narrative, and at last his two years as a prisoner of war being singled out for his Olympic fame to receive the nastiest abuse at the hands of his captors. Good enough, but there are two gaping problems, entirely unrelated, and they collaborate to make what could have been a nerve-wracking study of desperate survival into the most tedious drudgery. For one thing, though it attempts to not be a stock biopic, this is exactly what Unbroken ends up transforming into, thanks to its self-destructive over-reliance on flashbacks. They start early, and they start heavy: during that same assault that opens the movie, while focusing on Zamperini’s stressed-out face, the film snaps its fingers and BOOM we’re in his childhood, watching a potted history of his early passion for racing as a way of funneling all his rage against the racist bullies maltreating him into something active and construction, on to his Olympic glory. I will say about this that C.J. Valleroy, playing Zamperini as a child, is inspired casting: he’s a dead ringer of O’Connell and has the acting chops to sell the character.

On the other hand, this is a terrible, terrible digression, right off the bat: teasing us with story momentum and stakes that are instantly shelved in favor of a capsule biography that speeds by too fast to do much more than communicate information artlessly. And this is information we’ll receive later through dialogue, anyway. Of all the ways in which it beggars believe that the Coens were supposedly the last screenwriters to take a whack at this script, the puffy flashback structure (they’re threaded all through the first two chunks, drying up for the most part after he’s captured by the Japanese) is the one that seems most obviously dysfunctional and beneath the talents and accumulated wisdom of any of the credited writers.

This bone-headed mismanagement of structure rears its head in a different and maybe even uglier form at the very end: the main action concludes with the V-J Day, and the rest of Zamperini’s life story is told in the form of title cards with photographs of the actual people involved, as well as some footage from 1998 of the man trotting along with the Olympic torch. Standard biopic procedure, but the enormous volume of the closing text, spinning out for minute after minute, is indescribably crude: besides being an admission that there was a whole lot more story to tell, it strongly implies that the untold story was the more important bit, and that the material the film was able to cover was maybe not done in an efficient way.

No, make that definitely not done in an efficient way. The other gaping problem is that Unbroken, for a whole hour of its running time, is nothing but a repetitive catalogue of suffering, all done with a bloodlessly refined classiness that keeps cozily within the limits of a PG-13 rating. So it’s not just torture porn, it’s torture porn with no cumshot. Never has the endless suffering of a man who refuses to give in to his tormenters felt so goddamn boring: Jolie and her team never switch things up in any way, or structure things to feel like the stakes and tension are rising: you could isolate all the scenes for that second hour and re-arrange them any way you wanted, and the film would basically flow the exact same way: the Bird wanted to hurt Zamperini in some creative way, did it, Zamperini stayed strong.

What the film lacks is any insight into the mind of the sufferer or the torturer: after its last good scene, in which Zamperini and fellow survivor Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) are stripped in the jungle and force to the ground, where they expect to be executed and Zamperini breaks down, there’s not a single beat of the movie that focuses on the psychological impact any of this has. We are done spending time inside Zamperini’s head, where the first hour and its litany of flashbacks was so eager to position us: from here on, it’s just watching brutality. The only connective tissue between Jolie’s two films as a director thus far is an overweening interest in violence, shot with a clinical detachment that removes the human-scale cost of that violence; it’s not a lovely trend, and though absolutely nothing about Jolie’s very public private life suggests that she’s full of bloodlust, her directorial style has a nasty way of lingering on suffering for no reason other than the joy of lingering. The idea is that this is an inspiration testament to human endurance - “If I can take it, I can make it” chants Zamperini with poster-reader sincerity - but despite the clear evidence that plenty of viewers have walked away from it duly inspired, I don’t see a molecule of that in the film’s eager, documentarian interest in capturing all the nuances of how prisoners get beaten.

Jolie’s not incapable of making good cinema: the entirety of the raft sequence is generally great, a more severe, realistic version of Life of Pi with noticeably crummier CGI, or a three-handed successor to All Is Lost. If we think of Unbroken as three films stitched together (something the writing and editing and visual styles all encourage us to do), this one is above reproach, one of the best sustained passages of filmmaking of the (anemic, to be sure) 2014 prestige movie season.. But the ghastly structure of the first filmlet and the just plain ghastliness of the third hold the whole thing back.

The film is, on top of everything else, slackly made: the editing by William Goldenberg and Tim Squyres, is satisfactorily functional without being clever, surprising, or insightful, and the cinematography is a bit over-attractive when it’s not blandly reducing everything to a generic mixture of nostalgically-tinged brownish-greens. For living legend Roger Deakins to have overseen this tremendously uninteresting-looking film is even more shocking than thinking that his regular directors the Coens could have helped effect the script: it’s basically just a third-tier knockoff of John Schwartzman’s style executed without Schwartzman’s conviction, and with no complexity to the lighting. I can think of a handful of individual frames that really worked tremendously well, some despite themselves (the idea to visually represent Zamperini as a Christ figure was a terrible one, but Deakins executes it beautifully), but this is as thoroughly routine as anything he’s shot in over a decade. It’s heartbreakingly adequate. So to is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which is far less surprising - it’s a rare year that goes by without him producing at least slightly treacly, schlocky score, and after surprisingly dodging that bullet in The Imitation Game, he was due.

It is unfair and inappropriate to ask Unbroken to stand in as the sacrificial lamb for an entire movie year, as I have sort of done by making it the finale to this series. If anything, it feels like the embodiment of the movie year 15 years ago or so (it has been eleven years since Seabiscuit, also adapted from a Hillenbrand book, and the aesthetic similarities between this film and that are hard to ignore: they have virtually identical color schemes, for one). This kind of pseudo-inspirational Oscarbait-by-numbers filmmaking is almost quaint in 2014. And yet its dogged commitment to making something that tells us exactly what to feel in its pushy score and its dabbled images, to shamelessly courting emotions even though it’s sort of really bad in a lot of ways - well that is Hollywood, is it not, and even if Unbroken seems fated to be a (possibly Oscar-nominated) footnote in cinema history, it is exactly the sort of thing that the American film industry has always made to prove how damn-ass dignified and serious and artistic it can be. The firmly mediocre polish and surface-level thematic messaging that go into this film are, for better or worse - worse, definitely worse - the life’s blood of Hollywood filmmaking, now and forever.

5/10

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2014
-Darren Aronofsky's distinctly non-traditional Noah is the biggest hit in an unexpected surge of religious and Bible-themed movies
-The government of North Korea and President of the United States Barack Obama both take a keen interest in the release pattern of innocuous dudebro comedy The Interview
-Guardians of the Galaxy is the only film to break $300 million during one of the financially weakest summers of the modern era

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2014
-Crabby old icon Jean-Luc Godard says Goodbye to Language with the help of avant-garde 3-D
-Australia's Jennifer Kent makes the scariest pop-up book in history the center of her directorial debut, The Babadook
-Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, an oblique philosophical drama, is among the better-received of the year's Argentine-Danish co-productions

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2013: In which, oh my God you guys, women like movies

There's a nifty piece of advice for screenwriters trying to solve the apparently intractable problem of Strong Female Characters; I think it was originally said by Geena Davis. In a nutshell, the trick to writing a Strong Female Character is thus: write a Strong Male Character. Then give him a girl's name and make him a woman. Done.

Obviously, in the best of all possible worlds, there's a bit more nuance to it than that. But it has the benefit of being pithy and tremendously easy to put into practice (as an experiment, I once took a half-written screenplay I had lying around, and tried it out. Other than personal pronouns, I had to change a grand total of one line). And while it's demonstrably not literally what happened when screenwriter Katie Dippold cranked out The Heat, which was conceived as a vehicle for Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock, that's the spirit animating the project. Here is a buddy cop movie, as beholden to the formulas as it's possible to be: this mirthless, by-the-books FBI agent and that loudmouthed Boston police officer butt heads over every possible issue, only to find themselves inseparable friends by the time they're done hacking through the hierarchy of the local drug cartel. Plus, they're women. Just like that.

So, it matters that they're women: there are gags and entire scenes that would never, ever play if the characters were two men. But it's heartening to see how much of Lethal Weapon and its ilk could be re-gendered without even the slightest effort, and without compromising its bona fides as a buddy cop movie first and above all. It's the kind of movie that has a little something for everybody without bragging about it, and while it is flawed (severely flawed, in some ways), the fact that it can take one of the most quintessentially masculine of film genres and make it about women without sacrificing any of its generic elements, well, that's something we need more of. And it was received that way as well, earning a nice spiffy pile at the box-office and serving as the trigger for the 2013 edition of the evergreen "what the hell is this bizarre market sector that flocks to movies with lady protagonists? Should we make more movies for those viewers?" theme that has dominated most of the 21st Century alongside "criticism is dying" and "where are the movies for grown-up audiences?" in the hearts and minds of lazy culture critics.

Like most buddy cop movies, The Heat thrives not on the basis of its negligible crime plot, which as mentioned involves a cocaine cartel (the details can be tweaked in a thousand insubstantial ways, but it's always a cocaine cartel), but on the interplay of its leads. Bullock is Sarah Ashburn, the bossy FBI agent angling for a big promotion and prone to caustic, patronising treatment of everyone she meets; McCarthy is Shanon Mullins, a burly, mean, abrasive cop with a tendency to lash out violently and spew curse words like it's going out of style. They're thrown together when Ashburn's boss (Demian Bichir) nudges her towards playing nice with the local PD rather than just shouting about jurisdictional issues and alienating everybody, and they clash instantly. Ashburn's pacific, condescending, squeaky-clean approach is no match for Mullins's "wave a gun around and terrify people into cooperating" mentality, and oh! how much Ashburn does hate the profane little Tasmanian devil she's partnered with. The feeling is, naturally mutual.

Tediously overfamiliar material, given ebullient life by the flawlessly-matched leads. Bullock and McCarthy, first and above all, fulfill the single greatest requirement of comedy teams: one is tall and lean, one is short and fat. That's three-quarters of the battle right there, and the actors carry it the rest of the way with their heavily contrasted line deliveries (Bullock glides across her words, McCarthy sputters improvisationally) and physical acting (Bullock holds herself straight and still, McCarthy is constantly moving and gesturing). Their timing is balletically matched: every volley of angry banter is as cleanly executed as the best vaudeville training every could have taught a comedian. It is the kind of tight, flawlessly choreographed interplay of two crisply-defined personalities that's enjoyable to watch completely without any reference to what the hell they're doing together; it's a crime movie here, but the Bullock/McCarthy show could be transplanted to any setting and retooled only minutely for equally terrific comic effect. Whole careers used to be founded on that principal.

So, basically, The Heat is a terrific little character comedy, and a definite step up from Bridesmaids, McCarthy's prior collaboration with director Paul Feig, which was funny as all hell when it wasn't lumpy and misshapen and stuck on scenes that could not find a natural ending. The Heat still halls all the hallmarks of comic filmmaking from 2005 onwards, with some rather confused editing that tries to shape untamed performances rather than funnel them into something clean and focused, and which abandons plot development for enormous stretches, leading to some puffiness and air: right in the middle of the rising action, there's a wandering sideplot involving Mullins's comically Boston-Irish family, which doesn't offer nearly enough strong gags to compensate for how bloated it leaves the film. Unless you maintain that Bullock being confused by people saying "nahk" when they mean "narc" is priceless top-tier comedy, in which case, um, okay. Rock on.

But anyway, the film has good momentum and it's not actively unpleasant to look at, which sets it well on the right side of the bell curve of modern American comedy.

There is, however, a whole other thing that the movie has going on, and it's certainly not limited to The Heat: it is the original sin of all cop comedies, in fact. Basically, it's pro-police brutality - explicitly so. The conflict between Ashburn and Mullins is precisely the conflict between "let's move slow, follow the rules, and respect the dignity of our witnesses and suspects" and "punch the fucker in the nuts, he'll talk". And there is not one occasion in the movie when Mullins's approach doesn't prove to be the right one, and Ashburn's concern for due process and not, for example, having an abusive episode recorded and thus rendering all their police work rendered inadmissible, is uniformly shown to be a byproduct of her stick-up-the-ass priggishness (though The Heat, like so many cop movies, appears to exist in a universe in which the judicial branch simply doesn't exist). This, again, happens in a lot of movies. But some movies at least seem to be aware that there might be a problem there, and The Heat is not one of those. It requires, for its comedy to function properly, that the audience never confront the possibility that Mullins's thuggish behavior is an actual social problem, and not just reflective of her playfully obnoxious personality. And so there is not so much as a tip of the head to the moral underpinnings of the film.

What a stark difference a year makes! In 2013, I'd have probably had the same concerns, but felt a bit schoolmarmish for it, because, I mean, it's just a comedy. In 2014, police brutality is seriously the least-funny thing imaginable. The Heat is pretty terrific in a lot of ways, and there's an easy argument to be made that it's the funniest major American film of its year purely on the merits of its joke construction and action. But there's some ugliness to it, a painful reminder as we reach the end of this tour of a century of Hollywood filmmaking, that one of the things Hollywood has always done best is to prevent you from thinking about the implications of the art you're consuming.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2013
-Alfonso Cuarón, Emmanuel Lubezki, and the best CGI team in recent years make space look awfully big, awfully terrifying, and awfully three-dimensional in Gravity
-A weird-ass fantasy version of 47 Ronin is lovingly ushered to theaters just in time for Christmas, because apparently just setting $150 million on fucking fire was too easy
-Veritable armies of girlchildren from an attachment to Disney's Frozen and refuse to "Let It Go", if you see what I did there. What I did is, I punned on the name of a popular and well-known song. I am clever.

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2013
-Edgar Wright blends mid-life crises and alien action in The World's End, capping of a trilogy of genre-comedy experiments
-A straight man directs two straight women in a kaleidoscopic study of the lesbian experience in Blue Is the Warmest Color
-Rithy Panh, survivor of the 1975-'79 killings in Cambodia, makes The Missing Picture, a filmed memoir of his experiences told in clay figurines

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2012: In which we dabble in politics

Politics and commercial American cinema rarely have ever played together nicely. There was a long stretch during the Depression,* when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was adored in ways that no nationally significant politician has been since the Vietnam War started, and it was generally safe to make movies that openly talked about and engaged with Democratic ideas; there was, much later and for entirely different reasons, a run in the 1970s when most everyone was so disgusted and disillusioned with everything that nihilistic political tales and thrillers became big business. But the one great truism of commercial American cinema is that it's, well, commercial: it needs to turn a profit and that means it needs to appeal to a lot of people, and staking out a real position is a great way to not do that. And so, outside of a tendency to suggest that Democrats are pie-in-the-sky dreamers and Republicans are crabby pragmatists (and also far likelier to be old, white, and male), mainstream movies do their very best, for the most part, to avoid specifics: the political world is okay to talk about, but only in the vaguest possible way. Consider, if you will, the most legendary of all American political films, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the movie so righteously enraged about the state of politics that Congress tried to bury it. And while you're considering it, tell me what real-world situation it speaks to, because I think you'll find it actually doesn't. Or hell, just tell me, without referring to the personal beliefs of the men involved in making it, what party Mr. Smith belongs to, because I think you'll find you can't do that, either.†

That's a situation that only entrenched itself as time has gone by, international markets have become a more essential part of the Hollywood financial landscape, and domestic audiences have grown more intolerant of actually thinking about politics. And that's part of what makes 2012's The Campaign so incredibly damn peculiar: it's a film that absolutely knows what the political landscape of that year's election cycle looked like, and its plot engine demands specific awareness of the difference between Democrats and Republicans - even the particularities of being a moderate-to-conservative Democrat who has managed to hang on to an incumbent seat in what ought to be, by all rights, a Republican-leaning district. That such a movie would be made and given a wide release that took in a solid pile of money is unexpected enough; but The Campaign goes even weirder, in that it's a Will Ferrell vehicle with Zach Galifianakis on co-lead duty. And even by the standards of mainstream comedy, Ferrell's filmography is studded with the kind of broadly absurd nonsense that suggests a fanbase particularly disinterested in honest-to-Christ political satire, which is exactly that The Campaign ends up delivering. The enormous gap between the two registers of "Ferrell comedy" and "satiric takedown of the corrosive effects of corporate money in American elections, with some particularly hard thoughts for the Citizens United Supreme Court decision" is one that The Campaign ultimately can't resolve, but watching it try is vastly more intriguing than it has any right to be. If only Kathryn Bigelow hadn't directed Zero Dark Thirty and raised all sorts of ambiguous questions about America's use of torture in the 21st Century, it would be a shoo-in for being the most politically alert movie of the year. Not what one expects for a film where Galifianakis patiently listens to his son describe his nascent fascination with bestiality.

The actual content of the film suggests itself from even the sparest logline: Ferrell is Cam Brady, a four-term Democratic congressman from North Carolina's home 14th district, running unopposed in the 2012 election. This makes him the perfect target when the Motch brothers, Glenn (John Lithgow), and Wade (Dan Aykroyd), need a malleable freshman in the House of Representatives to introduce a criminally awful bill they want to open the door to being even more savage in their attempts to destroy the American and Chinese working class through exploitation in the name of eking out higher profits. Their great white hope proves to be Marty Huggins (Galifianakis), the son of North Carolina political fixture Raymond Huggins (Brian Cox), a gentle and effeminate family man who can't even bring himself to say a word as dirty as "fart". Does this strangely random character trait suggest that a shockingly large number of jokes in The Campaign will involve him finding polite ways of talking around scatology and sex? Does a bear make its doo-doos in the woods?

I will not call it "subversive", since I have no desire to use this pulpit for the sole purpose of lying to you all, but there's definitely something sharper to The Campaign than meets the eye. Satire has been mixing low comedy and riled-up political observations for a very long while; look no further than the fratty sex comedy bursting at the seams of Dr. Strangelove for proof. Clearly, The Campaign in its single brightest, most incisive moments isn't satire enough to tie Dr. Strangelove's boots, but it shuffles its dopiest jokes in with some nastily acute dissections of how politics gets done in the United States in the 2010s, in a manner that actually does make it feel kind of more potent than a more direct, intellectual satire on the same topic might do. Such is the privilege of low expectations, maybe, but it's also the merit of unpredictability.

Now, this is still a mainstream film; Ferrell's fanbase is not made up of NPR junkies, and this is above all things part of that man's "Will Ferrell takes a comically incongruous job" subgenre: Will Ferrell does the news (Anchorman), Will Ferrell is an ice dancer (Blades of Glory), Will Ferrell plays basketball in the 1970s (Semi-Pro), Will Ferrell is a licentious congressman. It all fits.

The point being, The Campaign must, at a certain point, asset itself as a Will Ferrell movie, and particularly one with Galifianakis playing a particularly weird and distressing version of his kind of stock "hugely sensitive soul who's kind of a freakish babyman" character. Eventually, it simply runs out of satire, which it never possesses in any more dangerous capacity than pipping the Koch brothers with its horrible Motches (incidentally, Lithgow and Aykroyd make for thoroughly convincing and enjoyable evil brothers). What it becomes, and this is fatal, is nice: supposing that America is basically okay, and the right guys will shake out as the victors in the fullness of time. Despite this being the polar opposite of the theme it trumpets with its early, "American democracy has been bought out and we're all fucked if sub-functioning morons like these keep getting put in charge" jokes. It is, for a time, weird and brave for a mainstream film; but a mainstream film it is.

And even when it is strongest, it is limited to being what it is: the jokes that Ferrell is shout and foul-mouthed, that Galifianakis is undersocialised, and that vividly describing sex acts is an endless fount of comic potential are omnipresent, and just as the film was sold as being that thing, so the film is. If you love that kind of thing, it's all fine, of course. I do not, myself, love it, by 2012, I had moved from my "this Galifianakis fellow is a breath of fresh, if bizarre, air in the blandly over-exaggerated world of American comedy" phase to my " fucking motherfucker Zach Galifiankis, why don't he and his beard just fall into the sun already" phase, and The Campaign does not strongly argue against that position. But even not loving this kind of thing, I was unexpectedly satisfied by larger parts of the movie than I'd have ever anticipated. Not enough to declare it a future classic in waiting; not even enough to call it actively "good" on a binary scale of quality. But it has its compensations and it even has something like a brain with awareness of the world outside the film, and that is too rare of a commodity in American film comedy in the 2010s.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2012
-Steven Soderbergh sneaks a fable about life during a recession into mainstream theaters pretending to be making a beefcake epic starring Channing Tatum as Magic Mike
-Yeah, superhero movies were already a license to print money, but it wasn't until The Avengers that we found out just how much money
-Andrew Stanton and Disney incorrectly estimate the mass popularity of Edgar Rice Burrough's 100-year-old pulp hero John Carter

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2012
-Pablo Larraín demonstrates that you can make a drama about real-life politics and the advertising industry actually delightful with the Chilean satire No
-France's Leos Carax ends a 13-year drought with the madcap tribute to make-up artists Holy Motors
-Joshua Oppenheimer travels to Indonesia on Danish and Norwegian money to make the utterly horrifying documentary The Act of Killing

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2011: In which I profoundly regret that I did not write myself a loophole

With 2011's Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, we arrive at my favorite point in the life of a franchise: when everybody stopped caring and lost their goddamned minds. The chief failure of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, made two years prior - and oh, how many different ways that film fails! it is an impossibility to pick the best - is, I think, that it blandly transposed its characters into the most generic possible high school scenario. This is not a problem with Chipwrecked. It is many things, and not a single one of them is good, but it's not generic. It's also thematically incompatible with The Squeakquel, which is all about the pressures and responsibilities of adolescence, while Chipwrecked is about kids struggling to prove their ability to be independent beings from their parents. Perhaps, in this franchise's underexplored universe, chipmunks age backwards, like Benjamin Button. Maybe that will be the plot of Alvin and the Chipmunks 4.

Following the events of the last movie, chipmunk brothers Alvin (Justin Long), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler), and Thedore (Jesse McCartney) are now living with chipmunk sisters Brittany (Christina Applegate), Jeannette (Anna Faris), and Eleanor (Amy Poehler), all under the care of human Dave Seville (Jason Lee). They are also now one big six-member supergroup of international pop stars, and their familial bond does not hide the charge of sexual attraction that crosses between them in conveniently color-coded and body shape-appropriate ways, but they are not apparently having constant chipmunk orgies, which strains credibility even for a film wherein six of the seven named characters I have so far mentioned in this plot synopsis are talking rodents who sing heavily autotuned versions of actual pop songs to armies of adoring fans.

Watching Chipwrecked, I found my head wandering to the mechanics of all this: are these actually the Chipmunks' and Chipettes' songs in this reality, or are they just prolific, popular cover artists? When they sing e.g. "Vacation" and "Firework", does that mean that the Go-Gos and Katy Perry don't actually exist in this world? And why the hell are they so popular, anyway? Surely all these teenyboppers don't actually have romantic crushes on the chipmunks, please God, though in the last film, Wendie Malick clearly was thinking filthy thoughts about them.

You guys, I think the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies might be stupid.

So, Dave is taking his six adopted children on a vacation prior to their big performance at the International Music Awards, which means a Caribbean cruise on the biggest, newest boat in the Carnival fleet. Carnival Cruise Lines, everybody! The official cruise line of your very good buddies Alvin and the Chipmunks! Why not ask Mom and Dad to book a Carnival cruise right now? On the motherfucking boat, Alvin finds himself chafing under Dave's needlessly arbitrary rules, like "don't break into the bridge and provide possibly life-threatening false information to the passengers", and ends up under strict lockdown to keep him from sending the boat and all souls onboard down to the bottom of the sea. Not strict enough, since Alvin is able to talk the other five, including an increasingly resentful Simon, into helping him climb on a kite to do some parasailing. This goes terribly wrong, and the chipmunks are thrown out to sea, quickly followed by Dave and former record impresario Ian Hawke (David Cross), forced to pay for his sins with the humiliation of wearing a giant pelican suit (likewise Cross).

The chipmunks end up on a tropical island, where Simon is bit by a toxic spider that drives him to think that he's an adventurous French lover, forcing Alvin to adopt the role of "the responsible one" for a change. Meanwhile, the only other inhabitant of the island is the human woman Zoe (Jenny Slate), who has gone nuts from eight or nine years on the island, and now fancies herself the leader of a menagerie containing a talking football, basketball, tennis ball, and so on. For those of you playing along at home, yes, Chipwrecked devotes an enormous portion of its running time to parodying Cast Away. A film older than the target audience for Chipwrecked itself, in 2011.

The whole gamut of ideas animating everything in Chipwrecked once it leaves the cruise ship is so patently, obviously unacceptable on any kind of storytelling level, as an extension of the characters developed [sic] through The Squeakquel and the first Alvin and the Chipmunks, I am obliged to assume that the filmmakers - including director Mike Mitchell, formerly of Deuce Bigalow: Male Giglolo, and writers Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, returning from The Squeakquel - were simply angry and wanted to ruin the project from within. Certainly, Jason Lee and especially David Cross aren't hiding their boredom and annoyance with the whole shtick of having to interact with noisome CGI rodents to be added later (Cross badmouthed the film extensively after production wrapped); of the onscreen cast, only Slate seems interested in trying to do anything like acting, and it goes spectacularly poorly for her, as she overplays her characters' oddball madness in tremendously non-funny ways while trying to talk to the "chipmunks" with a sugared-up giddiness that's just sad to watch.

And yet, precisely because of the derangement animating it, I don't hate Chipwrecked with the same "burn it to the ground and salt the ashes" fury that I feel for The Squeakquel. It is many horrible things, but at least Chipwrecked isn't lazy. Combining ancient tropes of desert island adventure tales with stillborn pop culture jokes, and a truly daunting number of wedged-in musical interludes, that's not something you can just snap your fingers and do. It takes real ingenuity to figure out how to stuff a horrible Lady Gaga cover into this scenario.

Like its predecessors, Chipwrecked openly telegraphs its disinterest in the mental well-being of the children in its target audience, though with a much more aggressive edge this time: The Squeakquel is a contemptuous film, but Chipwrecked is almost enraged, cycling through one absurd, hallucinatory plot development after the next, tossing out its surrealistically bad jokes without slowing down or pausing, apparently trying to baffle its viewership into a catatonic state from the sheer random, discontinuous illogic of what's happening. Nothing of what happens makes sense, and the plot developments could hardly be more arbitrary, or flag how much they know that they're arbitrary; the CGI is lovingly, exactly detailed to show off just how ugly and gross the character design and animation is. It is awful, hateworthy cinema, not just stupid but eager to behave even more unnecessarily stupid than seems natural. But it is absolutely the farthest thing from boring, and for this franchise, and this genre, that actually feels like a kind of triumph.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2011
-During the pinnacle year for digital 3-D, Martin Scorsese directs the love letter to film technology, Hugo
-The Fast and the Furious franchise of racing movies is reborn as a car-based caper film series in Fast Five
-Producer John Aglialoro's adaptation of the first third Atlas Shrugged is a big enough hit to guarantee two sequels, or something

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2011
-During the pinnacle year for digital 3-D, Wim Wenders directs the dance documentary Pina, perhaps the most perfect use of the new medium to that point
-Asghar Farhadi's A Seperation brilliantly reminds everyone that Iranian cinema exists
-Hungarian icon Tarr Béla retires with the apocalyptic The Turin Horse

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2010: In which Adam Sandler ruins everything

There’s no dignity in spending all of one’s time complaining about how contemporary art isn’t as good as old art, which is why I do it a lot less than I’d like to. And while we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, living through a golden age of cinema right now (those of us living in South America perhaps coming closer than anybody else), there’s undeniably great works of the seventh art being produced in every country every year, with a full assortment of future classics waiting for future generations to linger on them and love them. Grumpy old classicists like myself might grouse over the paucity of masterpiece-level filmmaking of the sort that was thicker on the ground in the late ‘20s, the ‘40s, the ‘70s, or feel free to pick your own favorite filmmaking epoch; but masterpieces are still being made.

Except in one regard. Comedy in American cinema is terrible. Fucking abysmally awful. De gustibus non est disputandum - there’s no arguing taste - but film comedy is dead, and for a full generation there hasn’t been anything to compare to the glorious age of Chaplin and Keaton, or the masterworks of pre-WWII screwball, and the demented anarchy of the Marx Brothers, the cunning of Ernst Lubitsch and his caustic acolyte Billy Wilder, the snappy presence of the last generation of female comedic actors who had full authority and equal power to the men that Hollywood has always been much more comfortable placing in leading roles. There were bad comedies in those eras just as there are good comedies today; but in the present age, good comedy is a rare treasure, while in the ’30s and ‘40s, even a middleweight program-filler was constructed with a love for the craftsmanship of jokes, a sensitivity on the part of the actors, genuinely invested cinematic technique, and a willingness to assume that the audience is intelligent. 80 years ago, a couple of films like that were cranked out every month; we’re lucky to get one movie like that a year nowadays. It is, I concede, entirely possible for someone to love film comedy of the 21st Century and care for older styles not at all. We all know teenagers. But people holding this belief deserve more to be pitied than argued against, though they deserve most of all to be avoided.

This morbidity, never more than a few dark thoughts from the forefront of my mind, has been dragged up in honor of Grown Ups, the 15th highest-grossing film at the U.S. domestic box office in 2010, which makes it the year’s biggest live-action English-language comedy. It is a goddamn piece of shit. Cranked out by Adam Sandler’s Jiggling Boobies, Farts, & Fatties Falling Down Factory, AKA the Happy Madison production company, it is the apex of that man’s art, in so many ways, combining a motherfucking supergroup of Sandler and his buddies Kevin James, David Spade, Rob Schneider, and Chris Rock, along with the inconceivably over-qualified Maria Bello and Maya Rudolph as James and Rock’s wives (Salma Hayek, playing Sandler’s wife I do not think can be called “inconceivably” overqualified, though she’s certainly capable of more than this). It is a story of tacky men being under-matured, to the implausible amusement of the women in their lives, and the nominal amusement of the people in the audience, though finding Grown Ups funny necessitates that one finds it inherently marvelous when fat men talk about eating, old women describe having sexual desires, and old fat women break wind.

The five guys, once the starring lineup of a middle-school basketball team, have all been reunited on the occasion of their former coach’s death. Their walks of life have gone very differently: Sandler’s Lenny is a super-agent with hot designer wife and two disastrously over-privileged children, and the other four just kind of sink into a vague differentiation of not-in-the-real-world problems, like Kurt’s (Rock) feeling that his wife doesn’t respect him, just because he’s a homemaker while she works, or Eric’s (James) mild embarrassment that his wife still breast-feeds their four-year-old son. Bello’s handling of this sub-plot is almost beyond description: faced with the dialogue and infantile female psychology of a script by Sandler & Fred Wolf, she marches right into the thick of things and anchors all of this in a consistent, thoughtfully-built character with feelings and personal history and everything. I don’t know whether this is more or less admirable than Rudolph’s approach to her own microscopically-conceived role, which is to speed-walk through it and make bland faces so the camera stays away from her.

I would slag the film a bit harder for how it presents its women, especially Hayek’s Roxanne, who shifts from prickly career-oriented nag into loving mom and wife with no in-story justification nor even the slightest authentic human emotion underpinning it. But that would be missing the forest for the trees, since that’s how basically everybody is written. Sure, Sandler has given himself the most obnoxiously overblown fantasy life, aware enough that this could read as unpleasant that he and Wolf put in some boilerplate about getting away from Hollywood living and back to nature, but it doesn’t feel like they actually believe it. But Grown Ups is an equal-opportunity misanthrope, scornful of all its characters. The rich ones such because they’re out of touch; the poor ones suck because they’re unsophisticated. The women suck because they’re dumb shrews; the men suck because they’re clueless boys in need of a kindly feminine touch. The old suck because they haven’t died yet. From all this, comedy ostensibly springs, though virtually nothing actually does, especially since the film prefers to divert to unimaginative slapstick whenever the work of writing modestly clever sarcastic asides proves too taxing.

It is a cruel film that mouths platitudes about family and coming together that makes it infinitely more offensive than the cruelty would be if it were left alone. And it is a film that stitches together anecdotes into a plot rather than creates a mechanism that picks up steam of its own accord and produces humor as the inevitable byproduct of its storytelling. This is perhaps the most frustrating and galling thing about the film, and the thing about it most symptomatic of contemporary film comedy. The whole affair turns on the notion that “Wouldn’t it be funny if X and Y did Z?” When “Z” is complex enough, you end up with the likes of Judd Apatow’s movies, shaggy improv that tries to remember that it’s about characters. In Grown Ups, “Z” isn’t complex. “Z” is Kevin James pissing in a pool, Rob Schneider getting his foot shot with an arrow, Kevin James swinging into a tree. Is there some specific trait that makes it funnier for Schneider’s character to be shot in the foot, or for James’s character to piss in a pool? There isn’t at all, though the film leaves open the possibility that “because Kevin James is overweight” is the reason. This is, anyway, the difference between tight, disciplined comedy and shallow gagging. There should be irreducible comedy of this one man being shot with an arrow, because of who he is and where that arrow came from. Instead, it’s most like primitive grunting - arrowfoot is violencelaugh.

This merry horror show of aimless shouting and slapstick and sleepy gross-out humor (15 years after the Farrelly brothers’ heyday, the Happy Madison folks should be ashamed that they couldn’t come up with more outlandishly tasteless breast milk jokes, even in a PG-13 environment) is all shepherded by Sandler’s good lackey Dennis Dugan, who keeps things light and harmless and makes certain to always keep Sandler seeming like the one sane man in a world of insufficiently weird goofballs, and presents jokes rather than sculpting and building them. More importantly, he keeps his eyes and ears focused on the film’s inordinately large product placement library, silently drawing our eyes to KFC buckets and Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and serving with religious fealty the idea that Grown Ups is a consumable product of no greater nutritional value than either of those things, with its only purpose to provide an audience with exactly the experience the audience was promised, right down to the easily predictable heartburn. This is the antithesis of great comedy: great comedy should be impossibly surprising right before it strikes and completely inevitable after it strikes. “Watch the famous people be silly idiots” is not that. It is a stone-faced ritual of the notional form of comedy divorced from the energy or content that would actually make it comic.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2010
-With Iron Man 2, Marvel Studios blurs the line between feature film and two-hour advertisement for other feature films
-3-D reaches its artistic pinnacle in Step Up 3D, wherein bright green frozen drinks fly right the fuck into your face
-A culture's doom is sealed when some nameless Warner executive asks the question, "what if we called it Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1?"

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2010
-Abbas Kiarostami, leading light of the Iranian New Wave, travels to France to make Certified Copy
-The found-footage horror game travels as far as Norway, and André Øvredal's Trollhunter
-Chilean experimental director Raúl Ruiz goes to Portugal to make the last major film of his life, the 4.5-hour Mysteries of Lisbon

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2009: In which children's entertainment can only be regarded as a vile act of contempt for both children and childhood

There is blackness, to begin with. Impenetrable black, with unfocused electric guitar chords slicing through the nothing. And then comes the giggling, shrill and mad, the voice of some otherworldly hellspawn that has seen things that any living thing would pray to never see, to never imagine. And then the voice speaks, and its words come in a taunting sing-song: "We're baaaaack..."

And that is the first thing to happen in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

It's a more auspicious opening for a horror film than a children's movie, which turns out to be just about right. As one of the most thoroughly unjustified sequels in the history of the moving image, the 2009 follow-up to 2007's miserable Alvin and the Chipmunks manages, somehow, to do everything worse. It manages, somehow to both function as a dull-minded retread while self-consciously "upping" the whole shebang, even introducing a whole new slate of second-tier protagonists, leading to a story that's far more enervating than it's possible to imagine or describe. The design and animation of the titular creatures is still an enormous liability, with their grotesque cartoon-realist faces squatting nastily on the well-rendered fur of their bodies, and the marriage between them and the live-action footage making up the rest of the film feeling positively awful, as actors gamely attempt to interact with characters they clearly don't believe in, in some cases. Appallingly, the only really committed performance comes from David Cross as the recycled bad guy, former record company executive Ian Hawk; he actually digs into the nasty depths of the role and the comic strip logic driving a very peculiar and uninteresting revenge plot. Everybody else is pretty much just staring at the chipmunks with expressions that plainly telegraph the thought process "there? Is that what they're sitting on? And if I put my hand right... here, I should be touching one of them". Especially Kathryn Joosten, an admirable seventy-year-old character actress whose befuddlement at everything required of her in a story-inciting one-scene performance reads with heartbreaking clarity through every over-articulate line reading.

In The Squeakquel - my fingers are going to go numb from typing that word, I can just tell - we find that talking chipmunk brothers Alvin (voiced by Justin Long), Simon (Matthew Gray Gubler), and Theodore (Jesse McCartney) are full-on international rock superstars, giving a benefit concert in Paris as the film opens. With stately inevitability, their human guardian Dave (Jason Lee) is injured and laid up in traction in a French hospital (with the Eiffel Tower looming outside the window, because of course it would be), and the boys' care falls to his kind Aunt Jackie (Joosten). But when she's almost immediately flung backwards down an escalator, in one of the very small number of scenes of slapstick violence I have ever seen in a children's movie that actually made me feel like something immoral was being done in the name of (extremely poor) comedy and (negligible) entertainment, they end up relying on her slacker gamer grandson Toby (Zachary Levi) for all their survival needs.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Dave's one great wish is for the chipmunks to go to high school. That this is fucking insane is not considered for a minute, even for the sake of a crappy joke; not even the bullies and such that show up with inexorable timeliness seem to find it weird that there are five-inch-tall animals wearing clothes wandering the halls. Especially not animals who are presumably worth millions and millions of dollars at this juncture. Also not finding it weird: the school's many girls who coo with sexual delight at seeing their favorite pop stars sharing classes with them. Because that's not creepy, confusing, and totally unnecessary in a movie for six-year-olds.

There are soon enough going to be more species-appropriate objects for the chipmunks' burgeoning sexuality, though: Ian has recently managed to find and swindle three talking chipmunk girls, and hearing that the boys' new school is putting them up as its competitors in a regional music competition, he enrolls his new victims in the same school, hoping to convince the principal (Wendie Malick) to put them in competition instead. With her own fangirlish enthusiasm for Alvin and his brothers, she is reluctant to agree, but the school body demands otherwise, and so the chipmunks are thrust into competition with the objects of their first-ever crushes, all of them conveniently color-coded and designed so that we know instantly who goes with who: sporty girl-Alvin is Brittany (Christina Applegate), brainy, glasses-wearing girl-Simon is Jeanette (Anna Faris), and plump, kind girl-Theodore is Eleanor (Amy Poehler). Point 1: playing the romantic determinism card quite this forcefully is no good for anybody. Point 2: you have to be a staggeringly enormous asshole to cast Faris and Poehler in your voice cast only to run them through all those layers of processing to make them anonymously chirpy and shrieking, devoid of anything that even accidentally resembles personality. It's like buying wagyu beef filets and drenching them beneath a sea of ketchup.

Overprocessed, deeply unpleasant covers of pop songs spin out at routine intervals, while the shockingly thin plot sneaks its way through all of the extraneous nonsense, much of it involving the completely superfluous Toby, designed for no better reason than the give the film enough padding to stretch out to the epic length of 88 minutes. The Squeakquel owes its existence solely to financial considerations, due to its predecessor's unwarranted box office success, and this does not by any means make it special in the annals of cinema; nor does the fact that its creators make no effort to justify its existence even so. Storytelling at even a basic functional level is of no interest to writers Jon Vitti and Jonathan Aibel & Glenn Berger, nor to director Betty Thomas, and not, I assume, out of ineptitude. Why bother? The first movie was a vicious and vile wreck of terrible characters doing terrible things, and it left little reason to improve either the characters or the incident. Put the characters in, turn their nasty little voices up all the way, and include the same bullshit comedy (though The Squeakquel at least dials back on scatology - there's not one single gag about coprophagy in the whole damn thing), and the money rolls in. Which it did, in abundance. Faced with that kind of can't-lose scenario, and such inauspicious ingredients, who wouldn't just coast on terrible, lazy ideas that don't make sense, like putting talking superstar chipmunks in a public high school, and then cranking through routine plot developments that have no interest in what being a chipmunk among humans might entail, either at the character level or even just as a source for comedy.

It's infuriating enough when this kind of "fuck you, we know you're seeing it anyway" sequel comes out, as happens multiple times every year (we're in a particularly ripe time for such things, but they've been part of Hollywood's arsenal since at least the 1930s); but when it's married to the equally insufferable "fuck your kids, we know you just want to shut them up for a little while" tang of far too much children's entertainment, it becomes positively evil. The Squeakquel is not, on its merits as a work of cinema, any good at all: flatly shot, with obviously confused actors spitting out terrible lines of dialogue and stomping through unmotivated scenes. But what it is and what it represents is far, far worse than just a witless and uninspired children's comedy. This is the living embodiment of the intellectual contempt of a system that views its audience solely as passive consumers, and movies solely as product designed to meet the needs of a checklist. There are objectively worse films than The Squeakquel made every single year, but this is about as close as it comes to a motion picture totally stripped of any value as art or entertainment in any respect.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2009
-Tired of nobody having made the most immersive 3-D spectacle of all time yet, James Cameron provides Avatar
-Disney briefly attempts to roll back American animation's total embrace of CGI with The Princess and the Frog
-Drunk with power, Peter Jackson uses CGI and cloying sentiment to smother The Lovely Bones

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2009
-The late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is adapted into three rather drab Swedish films starring the magnetic Noomi Rapace
-Proving that Hollywood isn't unique in pitting virtually indistinguishable movie against the next, France produces two entirely unrelated Coco Chanel biographies, Coco Before Chanel and Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
-Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth raises the bar for familial dysfunction in the movies

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2008: In which cinema inters a recently-finished television staple

The question has been nagging at me for some weeks: six years later, is there any sort of value to be had in another white male critic lambasting the first Sex and the City movie? The good news, then, is that I'm not entirely inclined to do that. Not all of it, anyway. The trick, I find, is to muscle through the utterly foul first hour to get at all the stuff that's actually kind of smart, sensitive to its characters, and at least slightly willing to interrogate the franchise's status to non-fans as the thing that sold a grim late-capitalist hallucination of rampant consumerism in a bluntly fictive version of New York. The other trick is to have one's first real engagement with that franchise having been the rather vile 2010 feature Sex and the City 2, compared to which just about anything would seem measured and intelligent.

Set three years after the conclusion of the 6-season HBO Zeitgeist hit of the same name, Sex and the City tells of the travails that happen to four beloved archetypes of all women who live privileged lives in a white urban enclave, after they think they've all found their happily ever after. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the narcissist with abysmal taste in expensive clothes (first thing in the movie: Carrie walking by a gaggle of teens who are all in awe of her dress, dominated by a hideous fucking crepe flower the size of a dinner plate that's perched on her right shoulder like a badly conjoined head), is just about to move in her hunky millionaire boyfriend John James Preston AKA "Mr. Big" (Chris Noth); brittle, feelingless lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is barely tolerating life in Brooklyn with her husband Steve (David Eigenberg) and son Brady (Joseph Pupo); mousy doormat Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is so happily married to Harry (Evan Handler) and so happy to have just adopted a daughter, that the film can't even come up with a decent plotline for her. Samantha Jones (Kim Catrall), the voracious sex addict and generally awesome deliverer of filthy quips and the only one of the four who doesn't threaten to plunge me into a rage of woman-hating Marxism, is living in Los Angeles with Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), and starting to feel sad about all the sex she's not having. They're all four about to be pressed back together as close as close can be, thanks to Carrie's out-of-character impending nuptials to Big; so out-of-character, in fact, that he starts to panic, and she freaks out, and they split up, and this triggers a range of difficulties in all their lives.

Eventually, that happens, anyways. First, we have the wedding planning, and it is horrible, rancid, consumer porn bullshit. I tried to prepare myself: I tried to figure out what, besides gender, makes something like James Bond "okay" and Sex in the City "not okay", and was all prepared to grapple with that question, but really, fuck it. Sex and the City's depiction of attaining things is unholy, particularly with the film coming out right at the tipping point of the world economy into disarray, and the lifestyle of Carrie & company turned into something not just distasteful, but actively repellent. For very long stretches, it doesn't seem as though the film is able to communicate any other thought than "buying things makes you happier and better"; no matter how many anonymous brown people James Bond guns down, it doesn't offend my sense of basic decency nearly as much.

But after an hour of this, something magical happens: it all just sort of melts away, and in its second hour, Sex and the City turns into a comfortable, lived-in depiction of four female friends who know each other well trying to help everybody else keep it together during a series of emotional crises. This is not without its swerves into idiotic comedy: it is based on a sitcom, and there's a consistent regression towards that mean in the way the script by director Michael Patrick King (a regular contributor to the series as both writer and director) builds its jokes and steps through all of its character arcs according to nice, neat principles of episodic dramaturgy. It is not possible, that is to say, to mistake Sex and the City for elegant cinematic storytelling: even setting aside that the first two-fifths of its running time is given over to godawful non-drama (and setting aside, also, the fact that it's two and a half fucking hours long, with enough content to stretch itself out to 90 minutes). It has lumps, and it has painfully obvious punchlines, and it has an almost comically misjudged sense of pacing, with a moment at the 110 minute mark that clearly seems to be cuing up the last spate of reconciliations until- nope! let's grind another half-hour out of this sucker.

What it also has, though, are four actors who are not all equally gifted, to be nice about it, but whose comfort level in the skin of their characters is enough that even with my unfamiliarity towards the series (and hostility to the little bit I knew of it), the warmth of the relationships between the four women feels alive and real and quite inveigling. It's downright pleasant to watch them interact with and support each other, even though, by all logical rights, it doesn't really make sense that Charlotte would want to hang around these people, and it makes even less sense that anybody in the whole world would want to hang around Miranda.

The film's human-level coziness clearly marks it out as a simple bit of fan-pandering, but done with enough affection towards those fans that it's not impenetrably insular. Mind you, this coziness doesn't gel at all well with the film's need to be cinematic: it has an acute awareness that justifying the leap from the little screen to the big screen requires a kind of Event! sized storytelling to match (in which respect it certainly bests the stubbornly low stakes of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, from later in the same summer), and that Event! focus is the source of many of the film's problems. It keeps interrupting the characters for enormous drama, life-changing stakes, and so on, all of it feeling bloated and unnecessary, and all of it should with stiff ineffectivness by King and cinematographer John Thomas, another veteran of the show, who between them have very little sense of how to do anything with the visuals but make them look large and flat.

In short: the film's strengths are those of television, not of film; it doesn't look like a film; and yet here it is, a film. The odd impulse to make things into movies that are perfectly well-suited to television neither started nor ended here, of course (did we not just find ourselves examining The Simpsons Movie?), and at least Sex and the City tries to go big. It simply doesn't succeed. Intimacy is the right fit for this material, and when it allows itself to be intimate, it's charming in its way; it would, undoubtedly, have been better for this never to have pretended it was a movie at all. But that is not the thinking of Hollywood accounting, which prefers above all and especially in the 21st Century, to use established brands to make money off of established fanbases. And if there's one thing that Sex and the City can teach us, it's the almighty importance of brand names.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2008
-Pixar's WALL·E makes the fate of a dirty robot the stuff of the greatest soul-stirring drama
-Iron Man and The Dark Knight create the only two flavors that future superhero movies will ever come in for the rest of time
-Sensitive indie poet of natural spaces David Gordon Green reinvents himself as a bro-com auteur with the pot epic Pineapple Express

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2008
-The unbelievably bleak and distressing British/Irish political drama Hunger makes director Steve McQueen and star Michael Fassbender into major artists overnight
-Pascal Laugier's Martyrs instantly becomes one of the most talked-about examples of the French extreme horror scene
-Israeli director Ari Folman produces the unclassifiable animated docu-biography Waltz with Bashir

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2007: In which cinema rejuvenates a long-exhausted television staple

Conventional wisdom holds that the eighth season of the undying television juggernaut The Simpsons was the last that regularly hit the highest peaks that the series was capable of summiting. And while I don't know that conventional wisdom has necessarily decided which season exactly was the last one where the show was still predominately good, the eleventh seems to be a widely agreed-upon cut-off point. The eight season ended in 1997, the eleventh in 2000, and it wasn't until the summer of 2007 that The Simpsons Movie finally sashayed its way into theaters, by which point the 18-season-old show had fallen into the status of that thing fans watched out of habit and momentum rather than any sort of pleasure. The promise of a feature-length theatrical release based on the series had gone from being generally thought of with enthusiasm, to generally dreaded, to generally looked on with yawning disinterest. And then along came 20th Century Fox's crackerjack marketing team to blast away with nostalgic appeals and The Event You've Been Waiting for trumpets, and sure enough, almost a decade after its sell-by date, The Simpsons Movie turned into a for-real cultural event.

It helped that the feature was at a generally higher level of quality than the bulk of the episodes in the seasons immediately preceding it. There are, sure, the expected stretch marks and wobbly decisions that proudly declare the writers - all eleven of them! - veterans of 22-minute stories rather than even such a brief feature as the 87 minutes of The Simpsons Movie. Like most great television comedy, one of the strengths of the show is a fleet pace, pushing everything through quickly enough that its surrealist excesses can fly by without being distractions, and so that the rhythm of gags never lets up. The Simpsons Movie cannot claim that as a gag: its plot is not meaningfully more complicated or bigger in scale than a TV show could handle in a single bite, and the two main threads of the story basically repeat plots that had been featured on the parent series, many times already.

Still, the relatively leisurely pace that the narrative operates under in its stretched-out form has its own compensations. The whole thing feels a bit more lived-in and comfortable, to begin with; and while I have no idea what sort of reception the film has had among fans vs. non-fans of the show (or even if, throughout its life, it has been seen by enough non-fans for that to represent a meaningful audience segment - for the record, I consider myself someone who enjoys golden age Simpsons just fine when it's playing in front of me, and who has seen an enormous number of episodes from the first 14 seasons, but doesn't meet the definition of a "fan"), but it strikes me that this probably makes The Simpsons Movie a bit friendlier to a newbie than any random episode from that era might: it slows down to study the character relationships more and is more fully "about" its domestic drama than a single episode of television gets to be on its own. Moreover, having a slacker pace is at least partially to credit for the obvious superiority of the movie to the television episodes produced around the same time: it gets to stretch and relax a bit more, and not have to be so manic and unflagging, and that leaves to a great deal less forced zaniness. If that cuts back on the comic inventiveness, or sense of fearlessness... well, it does cut back on those things. But the film is still funny, if slightly too gentle (the attempts at political satire, for one, fall completely flat). And while the jokes are, for the most part, akin to the kind that show up on the TV series (absurdist one-offs, or examples of the characters being themselves), the enlarged palette allows room for a bit more interleaving and call-backs than the series ever tended to rely on in quite the same way. And there's a bit more crudeness: an inspired nudity gag in the early going that plays with and then against expectations with beautiful timing, a wee bit harder language than family-hour television gets to exploit, but nothing that seriously stretches the boundaries of PG-13.

Mostly, though, the extended running time doesn't show up in any kind of expanded ambition. This is still animated sitcom humor based around the well-established natures of characters that the terrific voice cast (Matt Groenig's shows have always been kind to traditional voice actors) is as comfortable with as a second skin, and the happenings are pitched at the level they had been pitched at for eighteen years. Fat incompetent Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) still manages to do tremendously stupid things that earns him the enmity of the whole town of Springfield and threatens his marriage to Marge (Julie Kavner); their son Bart (Nancy Cartwright) still has unexpressed pain that flashes out as antisocial JD behavior. Daughter Lisa (Yeardley Smith), easily the most ill-served of the Simpson family in the film, still passionately chases down progressive causes that nobody around her gives a shit about. The specifics hardly matter; it's not the first "the town is almost destroyed" plot in the franchise canon, nor the last, and not even the first time that Albert Brooks played a smooth-talking villain. It's just that it all takes a little bit longer to play out.

With the jokes mostly purring around smoothly, and the cast taking care of itself - though it's a bit surprising that the well-stocked universe of Simpsons side characters aren't more present - the only thing that really overtly sets The Simpsons Movie apartment from its parent is the greater scope and ambition of its visuals. Oh, how much the animators, both in the United States and South Korea, thrive on the expanded budget and screen! It's not a particularly great work of animation - especially with Pixar's exquisite Ratatouille having opened less than one month earlier - but in the innumerable computer-aided pans and tilts and craning shots through busy crowd scenes, the whole film buzzes with an obvious sense of freedom to do bigger and more sprawling things than a TV show, with a TV budget and a TV production schedule, could daydream about. The colors and shading are richer, the effects are more detailed. It is certainly the most beautiful-looking piece of work in Simpsons history, though not also the most eager to explore the extreme possibilities of animation.

At any rate, it works as a solid comedy and an effective piece of fanservice that doesn't bog itself down too much to alienate a more general audience. One would hope, perhaps, that the filmmaking team would have a bigger idea for making the jump from television to the enlarged palette of cinema than "why not?", and even at its best, The Simpsons Movie never quite manages to argue that it has grander concerns than making some money off its brand name (it even guiltily admits something like this in an opening meta-joke about paying for something you can see at home for free), though even just seven years ago, the American film industry wasn't as suffocatingly besotted with brand recognition as it is now. Anyway, even if the film hardly exploits its new medium, working without commercial breaks and time limits freed up the creative team to make something lighter, fresher, and more affectionate towards the characters than they'd been for a long time. Given how obviously financial concerns weighed in the film's instigation and production, the fact that you can feel some kind of inspiration wafting of the screen is a legitimate, even unexpected triumph.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2007
-The jagged editing and frenzied camerawork in The Bourne Ultimatum uncontroversially delights everyone, leading to a new action movie aesthetic that remains fresh and appealing years later
-Diablo Cody invents a new English-adjacent language for the snappy teen comedy Juno
-In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis drinks Paul Dano's milkshake

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2007
-Roy Andersson's You, the Living reaches new heights of deadpan Scandinavian black comedy
-Hou Hsiao-Hsien travels to France and gives Juliette Binoche one of her best roles ever in Flight of the Red Balloon
-Guy Maddin turns his hometown into a blur of frozen horses and surreal soap operas with My Winnipeg

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2006: In which family audiences will damn well take what the studios give them and like it

The history of classical Hollywood film style, based in a characteristic form of continuity editing that dates back to the early 1920s, tells the story of making things easier and safer. This is the dominant theme that courses through every study of box office trends, every memoir of a director or actor's career, every aesthetic survey. Outside of a burble in the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, there is a direct connection that can be made, with the American film industry wanting to make money by giving American (and later, international) audiences exactly what they claimed to want in the most unchallenging form that could be devised. It is a national cinema based upon ease of use - sometimes producing great art, sometimes great entertainment, frequently just satisfactory and bland product that does nothing but fill up 90 or 120 minutes. Take away nothing else from all I have written, but at least take that.

I mention this now because with 2006's Night at the Museum, we arrive at something like the perfect embodiment of that ethos. It is a film that can be perfectly and wholly described with the word "harmless", which is a kind of victory. This film's own three-years-later sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, cannot claim to rise to such heights, with its fetid anti-history and trivial jokes that diminish the humanity of the characters within the movie and the audience watching alike. No, there is something that's actually quite perfect about Night at the Museum, which meets its goals with clean, elegant precision. "Being a worthwhile movie that is in any way memorable" simply isn't one of those goals.

Let us not start with the plot, but the plot hook, for that is exactly what the movie (adapted by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Grant from Milan Trenc's 1993 picture book) does itself. Ben Stiller is the night watchman at the New York Museum of Natural History, where every night all of the exhibits come alive through Egyptian magic. Look at Ben Stiller running from a T-Rex skeleton barreling through the halls! Look at him taking life lessons from President Theodore Roosevelt, played in a remarkably calmed-down register by Robin Williams! Look at him fight with a naughty monkey! Look at him patiently endure the ineffectual weaponry of an inch-tall cowboy played by Owen Wilson and an inch-tall centurion played by Steve Coogan!* And other equally fantastic concepts that nudge us in the ribs and ask "wouldn't that be cool?" as urgently as they possibly can.

And I suppose it is, at that - it's the kind of stuff that bookish 8-year-olds eat up (full disclosure: I was a bookish 8-year-old, but that was over two decades before I first saw the movie), which is probably why Night at the Museum made a startlingly large pile of money for such a ditsy little lark (it was the second-highest grossing film of the year in America, though it was a soft year at the box-office). The seams are showing now, with some compositing that looks pretty ratty (any shot where the Wilson & Coogan characters share the screen with Stiller feels like shitty midcentury rear-projection), and erratic CGI (anything non-organic - dinosaur bones, statues - looks fine, but the animals are all dreadful, and I have to imagine that was obviously true even in 2006). And these do serve to knock a little pixie dust off the magic, which hurts the film overall, since that magic is the one and only card Night at the Museum has up its sleeve.

Certainly, its disinterest in the story it uses to stitch together all of the effects is palpable. It's part of the weird subgenre of movies about the difficulties of parent-child relationships after a divorce, aimed at children but with all of the film's emotional attention paid to the dad's feelings about the whole thing (the genre's most famous entry, Mrs. Doubtfire, also starred Williams and was directed by NatM producer Chris Columbus). A sociologist might have a field day with unpacking what the hell is going on there (male film executives with guilty feelings about their failures as parents, trying to make propaganda to convince their children to love them?), but I'm going to stick with pointing out how weird it is to expect those same bookish 8-year-olds to empathise with Larry Daley's (Stiller) angst over seeing his son Nick (Jake Cherry) starting to drift closer to his mom's (Kim Raver) new husband (Paul Rudd, only about a year away from being able to reject such thankless, unfunny small roles). Or to nod in sorrowful agreement at his difficulties finding a job which can sustain him in a decent-sized New York apartment despite a spotty employment record. In the real world, I doubt very much that job would actually turn out to be night watchman at an underperforming museum, but this is a fantasy.

So anyway, Larry is given a very useless introduction by the old guards - twinkly Cecil (Dick Van Dyke), surly Gus (Mickey Rooney), and soulful Reginald (Bill Cobbs) - and thrown into the lion's den, which turns out to be literal, trigger the part of the of the movie that drops all the plots and focuses on the gentle comic mania of Larry dealing with the museum's many wacky, uncontrollable denizens. When the plot wanders back in from its cigarette break, it has completely changed its character to become a random and insufficient "stop the crooks!" bit that the film cares about so little that it doesn't even bother to resolve it, leaving the wrapping up its wholly inauthentic conflict to a mid-credits stinger that doesn't fit with continuity anyway. The family drama, at least, fits a bit more organically into the whole thing, with Larry and Nicky re-bonding over their adventures stopping the bad guys. Bet you didn't see that coming.

But really, the narrative of Night at the Museum is blobby and incoherently paced; it has no meaningful structure until the second half begins. It really is just an excuse watch Stiller interact with CGI and celebrity cameos, and the script is just there to give it some kind of pretext and emotional stakes that are only present about 40% of the time. All of this is shaped by director Shawn Levy into a carefully anodyne collection of slapstick gags interspersed with silly scenes of broad characters talking. Which is actually enough to make this, arguably, Shawn Levy's all-time best movie: his work is usually aggressively stupid and loud and insulting to human dignity, but Night at the Museum actually turns out to be simply bland and impersonal in the way it cleanly builds up its gags using a very clear set of visual cues (like the T-Rex coming to life sequence, in which every shot telegraphs the next one with dogged strictness of purpose that's such a perfect example of playing by the rules and not injecting a whisper of imagination into the proceedings that I'm actually kind of impressed by it), and the slow-downs and leading close-ups that tell us when to feel feelings and what those feelings out to be.

The film is safe and airbrushed in every regard - even the concept for opening credits, the "floating words over New York" trick that had been greeted with such acclaim just four years earlier in Panic Room, is repeated with all the thematic resonance taken out: now it's just a shiny toy among many shiny toys. It takes invisible little pauses to stop and do a little bit teaching about many of its subjects - the Roman Empire, Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck), the Hun empire - to make it even safer, since it's not just a vague, pleasantly forgettable fantasy that can be easily napped through while the kids are hopefully enjoying it: it's vague, pleasantly forgettable, and educational. And its success did spike admissions at natural history museums, which is the one absolutely unambiguous good to have come out of the whole production.

All in all, then, a perfect example of what the studio system has always wanted: they spend money, you spend money, they get more money from you than they spent, you don't feel like you just had somebody piss in your face. Even though pissing puts in a regrettable appearance to help the film meet its scatology quotient. Nowhere in all that contract is there a requirement that the studios do anything inspired or that you end up feeling meaningfully entertained. And so we end up with the platonic perfection of Night at the Museum, an effects-driven exploration of endless fantasy that ends up being one of the most neutrally adequate blockbusters of the modern age.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2006
-Pixar proves itself mortal with the fine but unexceptional Cars
-John Cameron Mitchell brings explicit sex, a staple of European cinema, to the States with Shortbus
-David Lynch endeavors to straight-up murder cinema with his video experiment Inland Empire

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2006
-Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul releases the bifurcated tribute to his parents Syndromes and a Century
-Ten Canoes is the first film made entirely in an Australian Aboriginal language
-Paris, je t'aime attempts to bring back the great omnibus films of the '60s with 18 segments by an international consortium of brand-name directors

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