NO HAY BANDA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

It's clear long before Maps to the Stars reaches its conclusion that whatever it finds there is going to be unfulfilling. The film thrives far too much on a shaggy, wandering tone of mystified bitterness that flares up regularly into hilarious, but pitch black comedy; it finds interesting and unexpected echoes and overlaps between scenes, some of them adjacent, some of them separated by half the movie, but its most distinctive strengths are exactly those which come about because of its momentum-free shuffling of tones, perspectives, and plot elements, and which exist in the particular absence of a clear narrative drive. It is the sort of movie which plainly announces, by the midway point, that it's going to roll to a stop somewhere, rather than build to a pointed conclusion.

So if that's the sort of thing that sounds horrible to you, it's absolutely the case that Maps to the Stars will feel like an endless slog. It certainly does not do much to avoid triggering that reaction. But on the other hand, if one can approach the film without needing it to build and build towards a fiery conclusion, there's a whole hell of a lot going on here that's absolutely terrific. The film offers its own possible framework in the form of Paul Éluard's 1942 poem Liberté, which appears here in a new translation, and is broken up and recited in chunks, repeated in no clear order, throughout the film's running time. So let us think of it thus: as a poem. It is structured not as a story, but as series of refrains and rhymes, a collection of anecdote-like scenes that are all constructed like perfect little stanzas - all with unusually clear beginnings, middles, and ends -and which draw upon a shared pool of images, concepts, and language. Themes are woven throughout, subdued and barely noticeable in some passages, foregrounded in others with the implicit invitation to compare and contrast the way those themes are developed and how they change based on context. So maybe like a symphony, in addition to a poem.

Whatever the case, it's one of the most unusual films in director David Cronenberg's highly unusual career. It feels very much like the proper follow-up to his last film, 2012's Cosmopolis, though I couldn't honestly speak to a single element of aesthetic, performance, or story where the two films actually seem to meet. Maybe it's that both of them feel like they're using literary technique bent to the very different needs of cinema. Maps to the Stars perhaps fits more snugly into the general notion of what a Cronenberg film is: it has rampant psychotic behavior, incest both accidental and deliberate, and a fixation on the way people's bodies announce who they are to the world, without necessarily doing so with any accuracy. But little flickers of Cronenbergian madness certainly feel strangely out of place in a character-driven satiric comedy soaked through with snarky inside jokes about the state of modern Hollywood - Bruce Wagner's strange and somewhat terrific screenplay (that would be the Bruce Wagner whose erratic career includes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors, the best horror sequel of the 1980s) has the smug insider vocabulary of a particularly insipid Oscar telecast, only strung along a spine of disconcerting anti-realism that makes idle comments about Anne Hathaway, Garry Marshall, and "Harvey" feel like a bad acid trip that followed a day spent devouring back issues of Entertainment Weekly.

That combination of gossipy name-dropping, parodic broadsides about how those Hollywood fuckers live, and the steady drone of Lovecraftian madness that never quite lets the film go end up making Maps to the Stars one of the indisputably oddest pop culture satires in living memory, and to my mind, a staggeringly effective one. No film has better depicted Hollywood as a fever swamp of insecurity driving people to be their worst selves, all within a slippery structure of irrationality and subjective editing, since at least Full Frontal, and I realise that invoking that film as a comparison - and particularly a positive one - says more about me than about either movie. But they're working in similar territory, trying to explode the idea of stardom with the righteous rage of outsiders attempting to break cinematic language as a way of demonstrating the vapidity of the people who construct cinema.

I've gone a long way without even hinting at the plot, though that's at least in part because Maps to the Stars resists a plot synopsis. But here goes anyway: the film presents interrelated stories of Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an aging movie star trying to land the part her dead, (maybe) sexually abusive mother played in a movie that's going to be remade; her massage therapist and TV self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), husband to Christina (Olivia Williams), the surly manager of their 13-year-old son Benjie (Evan Bird), a foul-mouthed narcissist who's just leaving rehab. Slashing across these lives is Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a recent transplant to Los Angeles, covered in burn scars, who lands a job as Havana's new personal assistant, and has connections to the Weisses that the film smartly doesn't try to pretend should be a shocking revelation, but simply runs with as soon as enough evidence has piled up that we can start to put things together.

The film touches on themes about how acting can serve to knock one's sense of self out of order, and not just the acting that's done by professionals in front of cameras; but the more rewarding elements are those related to the insistence of the past in interfering with the present, with people having a difficult time grasping the reality of death, with how movies and the movie industry serve as a giant machine for trying to enable people to pretend that death doesn't exist, that stars are ageless, and so on and so forth. The best way it builds its ideas is through that poetic repetition; the way that things like burning, visitations from ghosts, specific lines of dialogue and images, all keep repeating in different places. It's complex without being terribly confusing, though the effect is more impressionistic than movies tend to be.

None of which should be meant to imply that Maps to the Stars is up its own ass, though I guess it probably is. On top of everything, it's frequently hilarious - there are multiple lines of dialogue so crude, absurd, or frequently both, that they're likely to hold on as some of the funniest things said in American theaters in 2015 - and brilliantly acted: Moore, who won the Best Actress award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, is the clear stand-out, plunging fearlessly into a desperately pathetic shell of a person, raging and awful but also so helpless that even at her most hateful, we feel sorry for her. Wasikowska is miraculously enigmatic without feeling inhuman, and Cusack mixes smarmy hucksterism, outbursts of violence, and sweaty terror in perfect balance, to achieve one of the best performances of his career. But the whole cast is great, with Bird being perhaps understandably swamped by his powerhouse co-stars.

It's not a film for everybody, though I suspect it's for more people than are likely to encounter it. Cronenberg and Wagner are up to some very peculiar things here, but the film offers plenty of entry points (its comedy, its relatively obvious and straightforward symbolism, the almighty Moore in her most commending and grabby performance since... Christ, a long time, The Hours at least) that make it rather surprisingly entertaining for something so rabidly artsy and anti-commercial. At any rate, you're not going to bump into anything else this year that resembles it much at all, and for that, I can only offer praise.

9/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: DUNE AND DUSTED

The facts of the history related by Jodorowsky's Dune are thus: in 1975, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, having made in quick succession the films El topo and The Holy Mountain, had become a massive celebrity among the art film set, virtually inventing the concept of the midnight movie. He was in a position that few directors reach, and virtually none with such radical artistic amibitions, which is that he had a blank check to do whatever he wanted. And, largely on the spur of the moment, he wanted to make a film of Frank Herbert's massive, indescribably important science fiction novel Dune.

Over the next couple of years, Jodorowsky assembled a dream team of designers, including French graphic artist Moebius, American effects designer and filmmaker-of-all-trades Dan O'Bannon, and British illustrator Chris Foss, and proceeded to build his universe. And what a universe it was! Jodorowsky's Dune was ambitious beyond the scope that filmmaking in the mid-'70s was even slightly capable of, an hours-long epic experience full of effects work that's frankly impossible to imagine carrying off without recourse to animation and computers. No studio was even a little tempted to take on such an expensive proposition whose full-throated commitment to avante-garde spirituality made it a guaranteed money loser, and so the film died, while Star Wars came along and re-shaped science fiction filmmaking its own image. But even in death, Dune begat marvels: its massive book of concept art has influenced decades of subsequent films, either implicitly or directly. For one thing, O'Bannon would not have written Alien without Jodorowsky's Dune, nor would H.R. Giger (who had never worked in film before Jodorowsky lassoed him) have designed its titular beast. And that alone would change the fantasy and sci-fi landscape in a great many ways.

So that, anyway, is what happened. Jodorowsky's Dune is about two things: one, it tells that story, at length and with an easy, stretched-out attitude. Two, it tries to communicate, in some small way, what that film might possibly have looked like, throwing concept art at the camera every so often and animating it to suggest, in the broadest sense, the scale and visual splendor of the film that wasn't. All of which is interesting enough, but only really to sci-fi buffs and film historians, and director Frank Pavich isn't a very flexible or imaginative documentary maker. Jodorowsky's Dune has the aesthetic of a TV episode, intercutting wave after wave of talking heads with not nearly as much visualisation of Jodorowsky's dream project as one could easily hope for, since what we see of the film looks absolutely jaw-dropping.

In short, Jodorowsky's Dune could easily be written off as slack, workaday filmmaking, more of a DVD special feature than a standalone motion picture, except for one thing: it has, in Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, an amazing, one-of-a-kind storyteller, whose enthusiasm for the film he didn't get to make is electrifying and magnetic, even after almost 40 years. The 84-year-old director (who came out of retirement as a result of his involvement with this documentary, making The Dance of Reality in 2013) positively glows with enthusiasm and passion as he describes the philosophy and spirituality behind his filmmaking career, and the consciousness-changing experience he wanted his Dune to be; as he talks about his experience finding Moebius and Giger, he feels like a genuine art enthusiast proudly sharing his interests and insights. He even feels smugly, relatably human when he talks about his shameful joy at finding out that David Lynch's film of Dune from 1984, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, was a dismal, incoherent misfire. Hearing Jodorowsky relate his life and tell the story and themes of his Dune is an absolute privilege; it's like finding yourself seated at a long dinner next to the most animated raconteur you will ever meet, and as much pleasure as Jodorowsky's Dune offers in showcasing the images of the failed film, the pleasure in getting to listen to Jodorowsky and watch his amiable, excited face is far, far greater.

The net experience, then, is a good one, though there are some pretty rough spots throughout - in addition to his lack of formal imagination, Pavich has some questionable instincts. The most dubious misstep is the choice of interview subjects: director Nicolas Winding Refn makes at least a kind of sense, as he was given a tour of the Dune concept art book by Jodorowsky himself, and has solid insights as a result, even when he starts to wax rhapsodic about the transformative possibilities of this movie and the fear in Hollywood that shut it down (the fear of losing a shitpile of money, yes; the fear of transgressive art, probably less so), suggesting a bit more fannish enthusiasm than critical awareness. Showing even less critical awareness: film critics Devin Faraci and Drew McWeeny, a rather odd pair of experts to rely on, whose ability to form links where they don't belong (e.g. "this somewhat unexceptional shot set-up could only mean that this director saw the Dune material and copied it!") doesn't always come close to passing the smell test. Pavich waves through their theories without hesitation; he's clearly smitten with his material as well, and doesn't appear to suppose that anybody on any side of the camera could do with a little bit of cold objectivity.

This doesn't make Jodorowsky's Dune any less enjoyable, but it does make it less informative, or at least makes it feel less trustworthy, which amounts to the same thing. It's a boosterish film, a documentary only because it reveals a history (and a worthwhile history at that), but certainly not because it has a strong journalistic spine. It's a skillful sales pitch for a film that cannot exist, and which gives considerable joy to those involved to remember as the best work they almost did; their enthusiasm is contagious, but there's still a kind of shallowness built into the project. While Jodorowsky's Dune does a fine job of suggesting that Jodorowsky's Dune would have been marvelous, and possibly even the great work of spiritual philosophy the director wanted, but it never quite admits that maybe the thinking about it was the best part of all, and the execution might not have been up to the inspiration. Still, the inspiration is pretty damn inspiring for all that, and Jodorowsky is such a blast that it's easy to want to be on his side. Sometimes, hearing a yarn spun with energy and commitment is more important than all the big budgets and enormous scope in the world.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: JAMES FRANCO'S HOME MOVIES

To hear directors James Franco and Travis Matthews tell it - and oh, how much you get to hear Franco tell it, over and over, across the movie's achingly long 60 minutes - the purpose of Interior. Leather Bar. is to interrogate the comfort level of the viewer and performer alike surrounding explicit gay sex in cinema, in art, and in real life. But around the five minute mark, the film shares its actual purpose, in the foggy phrasing of actor Val Lauren, the anchor of Franco's experiment:

"I don't personally like this project, personally. It doesn't, I don't, nothing artistic in it, right now. Maybe it's 'cause of my lack of understanding of what it is, doesn't respond to it. What I do respond to, and always have is his mission [points to Franco]. I like James's mission, I don't always understand it, but I like it. I like it. I like what he's doing, even when I don't understand it, and I'm into supporting it and being a part of it."

Let's summarise, to clean up the talky, inarticulate stumbling over language, which is itself a key part of Interior. Leather Bar.'s aesthetic: "this idea is dumb, confusing, and underthought, but if James Franco wants to do it, then let's go ahead and do it".

Interior. Leather Bar. is a categorically difficult little beastie, taking the form of a documentary but obviously scripted, and yet the thing it purports to document is actually being documented, though not depicted. Let me start over again. Interior. Leather Bar. finds Franco and Matthews deciding to re-imagine 40 minutes of gay sex supposedly cut from William Friedkin's 1980 thriller Cruising (about five seconds of practical thought makes it pretty obvious that no such footage could imaginably have been shot, if for no other reason than the implausibility of Cruising having been conceived as a film that was two-fifths gay sex; it's not clear if Franco and Matthews, at any level of fictional or nonfictional remove, indulged in that five seconds). In the role of the character originally played by Al Pacino, they cast one of Franco's current favorite meat puppets in his weird art projects, Val Lauren. The film consists of Franco enthusiastically talking about how boldly his project is confronting reflexive heternormative values and representations, while Lauren wonders if it's a violation of ethics, taste, or his personal sexual comfort levels for him to watch as other people have sex in front of a camera.

The film doesn't try very hard to keep up the pretense that it has anything to do with Cruising, a dull potboiler whose latter-day recovery by a certain strain of queer theorists hasn't managed to address the fact that even if it has some interesting representations, it's still pretty crummy at basic thriller mechanics. From the evidence of how they frame (and frame, and frame) their arguments, their images, and their performances, it's entirely possible that neither Franco nor Matthews hasn't even seen Cruising. Instead, it is a platform to allow Franco, playing a modulated, scripted version of himself (Matthews is the film's credited writer), to launch into a series of painful exploratory discussions about what this whole experiment means in the grander scheme of society, and how daring he is for asking these intensely bold questions about what we are and are not comfortable with, and why. Questions that are mind-numbingly juvenile, and cannot possibly come across as new or probing to any of the very self-selecting audience for an experimental psuedo-documentary full of explicit man-on-man blowjobs.

Mostly, Interior. Leather Bar. is massively fascinated with and impressed by James Franco, self-challenging heterosexual visionary whose desire to break down the limitations of labeling and normalising things results in this film about filming the making of a film based on another film. It is possible, and indeed pleasurable, to imagine a version of this film as filtered through the mind of Christopher Guest, where the mingling of documentary and mockumentary would serve to poke fun at the rambling pretension of the actor/scholar/director/author who surrounds himself with people too cowed by his power over all of them (just several weeks after this film's debut at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Franco appeared as the lead in Disney's ungainly Oz the Great and Powerful, a fact observed here multiple times) to call him on his aimless verbal splattering, too directionless to work even as provocation. Even Lauren's film-long reiterations of his feeling that the film is a bad idea that makes no sense and makes him feel uncomfortable as an actor is constantly framed in terms of his admiration for Franco, and his conviction that it must be in the service of some greater social purpose, or it wouldn't be happening.

At times, almost exclusively in the second half (when the action moves to the film set, and away from Franco's head), there are flashes of the film that Interior. Leather Bar. could have been in the hands of someone with a stronger head for filmmaking, queer theory, or both, than this film evinces (Matthews is an award-winning director of documentary films about the gay male experience, so I am compelled to assume and hope that he's capable of more thoughtful filmmaking than the mish-mash on display here). The best sequence, by far, starts with the recreated footage of two men engaged in oral sex, with pulsing lights and music, cutting suddenly and harshly to the filmmakers shooting their act from multiple cameras, a stark and dare I say it, witty depiction of the distinctly anti-sexy ways in which onscreen sex is filmed, a matter of angles and lighting and choreography. It's a moment that feels like it actually has something to say, and keen insights into its subject matter; other moments like this are peppered in the last half-hour, though it is a chore to find them.

Having something to say, though, is not typically high on the film's agenda. Having something to ask is, but the film so joylessly over-enunciates all of its questions in bluntly literal ways that it leaves the viewer with nothing to engage with, no work to do ourselves. The film could just as easily function as a series of tweets, and even then, it would tend to reveal more about the author's lack of experience with social issues that have been debated well into the past, and on more interesting, sophisticated battlegrounds than Interior. Leather Bar.. Franco, or "Franco", at several points confesses that he's making this project mostly to see whatever happens: that approach can yield surprising, unmediated insights, but as this film proves, it's far likelier for it to end in frivolous tedium.

4/10

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JUST WRIGHT

The Congress, Ari Folman's first film since his international breakthrough with the animated pseudo-documentary Waltz with Bashir, is surely a broken-down disaster of a movie, barely able to function as an entire self-contained object. But I am absolutely confident that I wouldn't be half as thrilled by it if that wasn't the case: like far, far too few movies out there, it offers the sight of a filmmaker clearly working without a net, pursuing enormously challenging ideas, and experimenting with strictly visual means of expressing them. If the resulting film is a sometimes inscrutable mass of surreal, psychedelic moments strung along a narrative that feels like it's made out of at least three completely irreconcilable parts, oh well. I'd rather watch something with The Congress's absolute fearlessness to make every possible mistake than a polished, functionally flawless, but completely unimaginative stock character drama or popcorn action movie every day of the week.

The movie features Robin Wright as a heavily modulated version of herself, in a role that Folman initially intended for Cate Blanchett (the shift was critical, and correct: it requires a certain kind of "you used to be in pictures; you used to be big" backstory that Blanchett c. 2013 can't claim, but Wright absolutely can). And if Folman's bravery in his storytelling and artwork is admirable, Wright's bravery is incomparably more personal and affecting. She's anchoring a movie about the difficulties that come to women as they age, depicting herself as a prickly, unemployable, "difficult" actor, and allowing Folman and his international team of animators to render her as an exaggerated caricature for a great chunk of the second half. The movie's very first shot says it all: the camera is right in Wright's face, catching her distant, sad look, making her look heartbreakingly beautiful but also every day of 45 years old. I can't recall a single image in a long time that so perfectly sums up the sheer fact of what aging does: leaving a woman who is still remarkably pleasant to look at, but who's not the dewy ingenue that she sees a little while later staring out from a poster for The Princess Bride.

This matters - both the fact that Wright has visibly aged, and the fact that she still looks better than most of us on the most beautiful day of our life - because The Congress is in large part an exploration of the ways that people try to avoid acknowledging the aging process, in some increasingly metaphorical and deranged ways. Opening in live action in something very close to the present, Robin and her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) field inquiries from the slick Jeff Green (Danny Huston), a high-level executive at Miramount Studio, to buy her digital likeness rights. That is, to scan every inch her her body and her every facial expression to make a computer-based Robin puppet to be placed into any movie they like. And Robin can no longer perform anywhere: not in movies, not on TV, not onstage, not on open mike night. The very idea appalls and infuriates Robin, but the increasing sickness of her son Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee), suffering from a rare disorder that is slowly destroying his eyesight and corrupting his ability to process auditory information, and the unexpected, uncharacteristic support of her daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) nudges her into reconsidering.

20 years later, at the very end of the exclusivity contract she signed, Robin drives into the desert to attend Miramount's grand Futurism Congress. Here, she is forced to snort a drug that alters her perception to believe that herself and everything around her are animated; and it's in this bizarre alternate world that she learns of Miramount's new plans for an interactive new storytelling medium, in which persons can ingest chemicals that will allow them to experience other person's lives from the inside out, not just mimicking their outward appearance, as many of the Congress attendees enjoy doing. And even that's not the last enormous narrative leap that The Congress makes, but the last one that I can describe without collapsing into spoilers, and also spouting out random nouns that might suggest the shape of the increasingly convoluted, metaphorical narrative, but certainly couldn't spell it out in a useful way.

Folman based his script on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress from 1971, a book I have never read; though some elements that feel like vintage anti-Soviet symbolism creep through, in bits like the description of Miramount's new chemical experiments as allowing people to experience the free will they are actively denied, or creation of persons forced to do any job the studio wants, with absolutely no choice in the matter. Mostly, though, it's a free-for-all of themes and interests and styles. How people interact with an increasingly synthetic world of screens and people whose chosen identity elides their real one? The Congress looks at that from both pro- and anti- stances. The degree to which new film technologies count as "acting", and what happens as computer filmmaking replaces real flesh and blood people, I mean, that's obvious. The value of fantastic lies versus miserable, filthy realities - not developed very well, but it's vividly presented in film's final sequence.

The effect is less of being presented with an argument and its supporting evidence, than being blasted with ideas at a nonstop pace, and realising only after it's all done how very random and arbitrary some of the shifts between those ideas actually were. Still, ideas are better than the absence of ideas.

And what really matters about the film is the language and style through which those ideas are expressed: after Waltz with Bashir, Folman needs to prove nothing else about his control of animation style, but I was pleased by the frequently gorgeous images that he and cinematographer Michael Englert and production designer David Polonsky were able to concoct. The scene of Robin being scanned is one of the most beautiful sequences of science-fiction I've seen lately, with dramatic, flashy lighting and sets contrasting with Keitel's soft monologue in a simply terrific way.

Of course, the animation that takes up a good half of the two-hour movie is more of an obvious, overt standout. Taking his cues from the animation of the '30s, the Fleischer brothers especially, Folman and his teams create a bright world of shiny grotesques, morphing and slipping and looking inhuman and warped but also soft and round and appealing. And the wildly old-fashioned style makes the highly un-'30s intrusion of moral blackness and violence far more startling than they might otherwise be. There's plenty of overreach - some of the LSD fantasylands of the last portion of the film feel like lazy '70s album cover design - but the fludity and creativity of the animation is a top-notch example of the medium being used in an apparently standard way to achieve entirely deranged goals.

For all that, though, this is Wright's movie. She's only seen in her own flesh for a little while, but the impact she makes with that time is enormous: stiff and stern and defensive most of the time, but melting in calmness or self-doubt in moments that hit with explosive force. It's not just the bravest work of Wright's career, but surely among the best performances she has given, even when she's just providing the reflective, regretful voice to a weird caricature of herself as an old woman. There is steel-like human strength and frantic animal terror flowing into each other throughout her work in The Congress, and while it's certainly a great if wildly inconclusive work of style, Wright always pulls it back to being, ultimately, about what human beings feel, and that's what makes it, through all it's indescribable weirdness, a marvelous and compelling piece of cinema.

8/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: THE 21st CENTURY SLASHER

In my head, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is a beloved consensus highlight of 2000s meta-horror that is well understood to be an essential work for genre fans. And maybe that's how it works in the real world, since every review I read about it seems to contain the sentiment "this is such a great film, even though nobody has ever heard of it or seen it", and all those dozens and dozens of reviewers can't have stumbled upon the same microscopic, obscure gem just like that. On the other hand, if the film's cult had any sort of heft to it at all, than producer/director/co-writer Scott Glosserman and co-writer David J. Stieve would have more (any) impressive horror films to their name since Behind the Mask hit the festival circuit in 2006, and leading man Nathan Baesel would have more credits for acting than for working in post-production on reality television shows. The universe is just a cruel prick sometimes, and so, while the dipshits behind stuff like V/H/S have an entire self-reinforcing cottage industry going on for themselves, Glosserman and Stieve, nearly a decade on, have just this one terrific little pearl of a satiric horror-comedy to their name.

But at least they have that. At least we have that. Behind the Mask isn't perfect - it has a doozy of a formal complication baked right into the concept that might not ever have been resolvable in a truly elegant way - but you sit around waiting for a perfect horror film, you starve to death. And there's plenty of outright great material generously littered throughout the film, especially in its absolutely glorious first third, when it becomes the best extant version of the self-examining meta-horror film that had become so popular in the decade following Scream. The film takes place in a universe where Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddie Krueger have actually existed to do their killing in the small towns of Crystal Lake, Haddonfield, and Springwood, information communicated to us in a breathless TV news report that turns out to be the opening scene of a documentary being pieced together by Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals), one-third of a team of graduate student documentary filmmakers (the others are Doug and Todd, played by Ben Pace and Britain Spellings in their limited onscreen appearances; I believe they are, respectively, the cinematographer and sound recordist). Their film is an investigation into the how of all these weirdly elaborate psycho killers who breed like rabbits in this universe, and to answer that question, Taylor has decided to go right to the source: Leslie Vernon (Baesel), who is building himself into the role of mysterious, possibly undead slasher monster for the little town of Glen Echo, Maryland.

The film shifts imperceptibly through two different phases in its first hour: the first part is an extravagantly funny and intelligent "behind the scenes" look into how all the contrivances and straight-up bullshit that go into making slasher movie plots actually involve a shitload of hard work and careful planning on the part of the psychos in question. Vernon is a proud nerd at heart, eager to show off his work, his research, bragging about how he's been carefully stalking his chosen Final Girl, Kelly (Kate Lang Johnson) - he prefers the term "Survivor Girl", which strikes me as the filmmakers being a little contrary just for the sake of it - making her paranoid without actually making her feel unsafe, planting clues about Glen Echo's mysterious (and partially fabricated) tragic history where he knows she'll find it, on top of doing things like working his ass off at cardio to make sure that he can run fast enough to do that "killer who only walks slowly is always just a few paces away" routine.

It's a film for and by people who understand the rules of the slasher movie very well, have some affection for the form, but also recognise that it's basically terrible. And having opened by complimenting those of us in that niche audience for our intelligence and sophistication, the film starts to get really interesting in its middle, and best third, when it ceases to be just one more post-Scream parody of slasher film tropes. Though, to be absolutely clear and absolutely fair, it is far more cutting and inventive in that vein than just about any film I've ever seen, certainly more than the Screams. Glosserman and Stieve have the knack for answering questions that we'd never think to ask, but once we see oh, that's how a psycho slasher killer would do THAT, it's clear and logical and easy to map onto the Jasons and Michaels and their numerous, less iconic brethren. Parts of Behind the Mask are just plain delightful in the way that a caper movie is delightful, as we see puzzle pieces coming into play in ways that are unpredictable and surprising and always, always rewarding.

That, anyway, is the superficial reason for loving the film. The deeper, frankly discomfiting reason, especially if you're a big slasher fan (and the movie relies on you being so, both to make its most impact and simply so that you get all the jokes), is that Behind the Mask rather craftily and invisibly turns itself around on the viewer through the form of its internal filmmakers, asking without voicing the words, "so anyway, why do you watch this shit?" There comes a point when Taylor... not exactly realises that she's filming the preparations of a terrifically friendly, funny geek who is, that night, going to murder at least seven teenagers, but more realises that she already realised it a little while ago. And then the film becomes explicitly about the ethics of filming a criminal act that the documentarian has the means to stop, but implicitly, and far more rewardingly, about the ethics of entertainment based in violent, elaborate death - something that, incidentally, Behind the Mask almost completely lacks. Only one of its fourteen actual or "what if?" deaths can be legitimately described as gory, and that's largely because it's paying off a silly one-off line about post-hole diggers from much earlier in the film.

I've seen the film three times now, and I'm still distinctly aware that I haven't unpacked everything going in on that middle chunk, as it implicates the viewer, and confounds its own status as a work of art. Vernon explains to an increasingly incredulous Taylor why all of the baroque elements of his work are necessary, how his entire focus is on empowering the Survivor Girl while also depriving her of her femininity, in terms that reek of medically outdated psychoanalytic lit theory, providing an intellectual spine for "doing slashers" that's plausible viewed from one angle, puffed-up double-talk from another; the film manages to discuss in easy, bite-sized form some of the weightier pro-horror arguments that have been offered and give them quite a bit of validation, and at the same time to make those arguments seem forced. "But aren't you really just excited to watch people die?" the film asks. "And don't you wonder if that kind of makes you a bad person?" There's even a gratuitous boob shot that's called out as gratuitous and then allowed to linger in a way that feels more self-aware and self-critical about male gazes than any other gratuitous boob shoot I've seen in a slasher movie.

The other important thing going on is that Behind the Mask really asserts itself not as a movie about the life of a slasher killer, but a movie about making a movie about a slasher killer. Between its 2006 premiere and its insultingly tiny 2007 theatrical release, the film came out too early to be consciously commenting on the "found footage" trend that exploded just a year later, though it's not really aping found footage to start with. Rather, when we see things through the camera's perspective, as we do for the great majority of the first hour, we're being put in the perspective of spectators of that footage - which is a dumb tautology, of course. Any time you watch a movie, you're a spectator of footage. But in Behind the Mask, there's not just documentary footage: the first scene, and a couple of moments dotted across the first hour, take place "outside" the documentary footage. And this makes the film different from virtually all found footage movies, where the entirety of the film takes place "within" the footage. The action of Behind the Mask takes place in a reality, and the film crew stands within that reality, filming it; when we then watch their footage, we're subtly being situated within that reality as well, since we know that the footage is a thing to be watched inside the film's universe, and we're watching the footage, and so it goes. And this makes us complicit with the film to a degree that we virtually never get to be with movies: not that we are present with the action and thus able to prevent, because that's just stupid. But because we become conspicuously aware that the footage has been made in order for us to watch it.

It's heady stuff, but it's also the direct cause of the film's greatest failure, and one that is completely inevitable. The peculiar effect of watching the footage as being separate from watching the movie only works because the film divides itself between "reality" and "filmed-reality"; but that exact same division cheapens the film. Every single time the movie shifts out of the camera's perspective into a more normal "horror movie" aesthetic (it's completely open about this, the lighting and video quality both dramatically change, and there's suddenly a musical score) it's jarring and feels somewhat arbitrary. To me, anyway. And then we come to the last third, when Taylor, finally thrown into moral awakening, aware that abstracting this killer's actions through the lens of cinema has been a tool to remove herself from the ramifications of filming and watching those actions, announces that the documentary is over - and just like that, the documentary is over. The rest of the film plays out in the top-level reality of polished lighting, classical visual vocabulary, and ominous music. It moves through the third act of every single slasher on the books, and let me be frank, it moves through that act beautifully. As a conventional slasher film, the last third of Behind the Mask is really one of the best out there. But it's also a conventional slasher film.

I truly don't think there was a way to "solve" that, so I'm not harping on the filmmakers for not doing it. The end of Behind the Mask is a logical and inevitable extension of everything that was set up before: countless little Chekov guns fire off, and there's one piece of foreshadowing that pays off because it specifically wasn't mentioned, which is a really awesome way of teasing the viewer's genre savviness (I don't want to give away things, so I'm putting it in spoiler bars, in all his chatter about gender metaphors, Leslie conveniently fails to mention to Taylor that the increasingly masculine Final Girl tends to have an androgynous name, something Kelly lacks). But after the complexity, the wit, and the astonishing versatility of Baesel's performance, veering from giddy enthusiast to unexpected sorrow and introspection to dead-eyed menace, even a very good conventional slasher ending feels like it's letting all the air out of a movie that has been, till that point, one of the boldest examinations I know of what viewers demand of the narrative, of the characters, and of themselves as they watch horror movies. It has a fine ending, but nonetheless a disappointing one.

But then it goes ahead and resolves its plot during the end credits: not a little bonus, but an actual scene without which the narrative of the whole is, though satisfying, literally incomplete. And so, having once again bent the reality of "what is the 'actual' movie and what isn't?" one last time - and with a Talking Heads song, on top of it! - the film gets itself back in my good graces for its final bow.

Anyway, it's funny, it's legitimately tense, and it's smart as all hell, and it's one of my favorite American horror movies of the 21st Century. Not a lot of competition for that title, we all understand, but a damned impressive film anyway, and badly in need of a bigger fanbase and more love until that glorious day when it finally asserts its birthright as a modern horror classic.

Body Count: 10, three of whom are also seen in a theoretical "what if they died this way?" flashforward. Also one person who dies in the same theoretical flashforward, but not in "reality".

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: LINDSAY AND THE PORN STAR

The operating thesis of The Canyons is that movies are awful, the people who make them are awful, and the culture that permits their continued existence is awful. It is perhaps a keen example of form reflecting content, therefore, that The Canyons is itself pretty goddamn awful; and given who director Paul Schrader is, it's possible that this really is deliberate. It is even more possible, particularly given that legendary New York Times Magazine piece from January, that it was such a strained, miserable experience that a certain raging anger could not help but saturate every frame and every cut, and that The Canyons is an unwatchable, miserable piece of crap because it was poorly made.

The genesis of the thing is a gnarled mess, but let's not bother recapping it here. Instead, let's dive right in where the film does: a non-diegetic montage of decaying movie theaters, a motif that the film will return to for individual, equally non-diegetic shots, and eventually a second montage during the end credits. "Movies are dead", says The Canyons, in a stripped-down, dead-eyed way; it is an empty pessismism sharp and bleak even for the world's most famous filmmaking ex-Calvinist, and reliably misanthropic writer Bret Easton Ellis. And having claimed that movies are dead, The Canyons immediately attempts to prove it, in an opening scene that sets the film off on a monumentally poor footing from which it never recovers. We're at a dinner party in a gorgeous but somewhat icy Los Angeles home, where four movie people are chatting: the producer, Christian (James Deen, America's most beloved "boy next door" porn star) is busily telling his assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend, his new lead actor Ryan (Nolan Funk), all about his adoration of swinging and casual sex with strangers in the home and bed he shares with co-producer Tara (Lindsay Lohan), who can't get a word in edgewise and grows increasingly brittle as the night wears on. A few things clearly announce themselves immediately: Deen has an unbelievably literal understanding of how to play a menacing bad boy, Funk can't out-act a porn star, and Lohan, permitted to do her own make-up, felt that enormous silent vamp cat eyes were exactly the right choice. And while, thankfully, this never crops again, it's all you can stare at or think about for what seems like 10 solid minutes of endless exposition delivered in a glowering monotone by Deen.

To be fair, The Canyons is never as unwatchable as this opening scene, but it's never as captivatingly bad, either. For something that seems so rife with possibilities for outrageous camp or deliciously comic smut, the film is paralyzingly mordant and bitter in execution, and above all else, boring. Schrader's clever enough to predict his audience's prurient desires (Lohan's ample breasts, Deen's enormous dick, sweaty sex scenes between them and each other and numerous other characters) to punish us by withholding them as long as possible, or by making them joyless, which means that even on the meager level of exploitative trash, The Canyons simply doesn't have any juice. The actors are all weak and stilted without being particularly funny in a The Room sort of way, and Lohan - who does, perhaps against expectations, give the best performance in the movie - is more tragic than anything else. The girl looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet, as they say; 26 years old at the time of shooting, the actress looks like a particularly dazed 40-year-old, the final nail in the coffin of a career that seemed so intoxicating in its promise and freshness back in the Mean Girls days, if there was any lingering doubt left. She has a movie star's ability to command the camera, but it's mixed with obvious desperation and fatigue, and it's not so much that Lohan's performance looks effortful, as it is wearisome to watch.

That the film isn't trashy and fun is one thing, and given the haranguing, moralising tendencies of the authors, not very surprising: that it's so outlandishly repetitive and boring is quite another thing entirely. Whatever little point the film has to make, it makes quickly: Hollywood types are sexually exploitative scum who can't feel feelings but just ragefuck each other into oblivion. That message, mixed and remixed, is a lot to stomach for 100 minutes, particularly with Schrader and his crew heads - cinematographer John DeFazio, production designer Stephanie Gordon - so apparently hellbent on making the most generic, empty version of Los Angeles they can manage, fascinating only in brief moments where its very cheapness (and, we must be fair, The Canyons was an exorbitantly cheap motion picture) enforces a kind of neo-realist awareness of space; the stores and public spaces of L.A. depicted with a plainness and honesty that movies try their absolute best to never depict. But that's not much of a compensation for how barbarically dull all of the first hour is, basically until the showstopper sex scene where Tara finally calls Christian out on his nastiness and flips the switch in his head that turns this nominal thriller into an actual thriller, as the sexually jealous soul-dead monster takes steps to punish everyone who disagrees with him.

The third of The Canyons that's kind of a thriller isn't any more effective as cinema than the two-thirds that are just angry and miserable, but at least it feels like it has a shape and momentum. It's not thrilling; the only scene that feels like it could work (a shock stabbing) undone by a certain mechanical streak in the direction. Though at least it threatens to pay off Deen's one-note acting by suggesting that it's based in actual psychosis, and makes the character something at all besides punishingly selfish male sexuality without pleasure. That's pretty much the best way I could sum up the entire movie, and while I get that being unpleasurable is the "point", being uninteresting surely couldn't have been. And for Schrader and Ellis, in their grubby wallow in D-grade noir cruelty, even human depravity and darkness can be rendered uninteresting if there's too much of it with too little creativity to spice it up.

2/10

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WHEN THE DAY IS GREY AND ORDINARY, MARY MAKES THE SUN SHINE BRIGHT

There's a very real danger of applying a most peculiar kind of grading curve to Saving Mr. Banks. It's a movie produced by Walt Disney Pictures, with Walt Disney as an actual character, and it presents him as more of a human being with good and bad characteristics than a plaster saint? He's seen stubbing out a cigarette? He says "damn"? WHAT A BRAVE AND UNPRECEDENTED MOTION PICTURE THIS BE.

So, step #1: avoid that kind of thinking. Saving Mr. Banks is charming and surprisingly non-saccharine; but it's still the Disney monolith protecting its own. A "brand deposit", in the creepily Orwellian phrase that has been going around lately, after Disney decided against all logic that it would be fine for one of their executives to use it in a public forum. The whole plot is still dedicated to a climax that represents the triumph of Disneyan whimsy and sweetness over pain and sorrow, and which is exactly contrary to the established facts of real life. But, yes, it does allow Friendliest Living American Tom Hanks to portray his Friendliest Dead American Walt Disney with considerably more bite and nuance that any sane person would ever have expected. Here is a Walt who is charismatic and charming, and perfectly willing to use those qualities to get his way in a business meeting; a Walt who hands out pre-signed autograph cards at Disneyland without even noticing the possibility that someone might find this tacky or unctuous. Here is a Walt who can't entirely keep his expansive smile plastered on as he starts to get entirely pissed-off when he doesn't get his way, exactly how he wants it.

All that being said, it's not Walt's movie; he might not even be its second most prominent figure, in fact. This is, every inch, a movie belonging to P.L. Travers (played gorgeously by Emma Thompson in her first big leading role in a generation), the Australian-born author of the über-British Mary Poppins books that Disney eventually adapted into his 1964 masterpiece Mary Poppins. The film largely documents the process by which Disney managed to cajole Travers into selling him the film rights to her characters after 20 years of wheedling, succeeding only because the author had reached a point of financial desperation and was finally ready to let the glad-handling creator of frothy, bubble-headed cartoons convince her that he was going to make a film she wouldn't entirely hate.

Spoiler alert: she did entirely hate Disney's Mary Poppins, in real life. But as much as Saving Mr. Banks is willing to humanise its iconic co-star, it will not do the same for the entire edifice of Disney Magic™. And so Travers must end up loving the live-action/cartoon hybrid musical (despite her burned-in hatred for both cartoons and musicals), because, in this incarnation of her life story, it is the key to healing all of her deep-set emotional traumas, centered around her Australian childhood as simple Helen "Ginty" Goff (Annie Rose Buckley), daughter of the lovingly unstable alcoholic bank manager Travers Goff (Colin Farrell).

The huge, slab-like problem with Saving Mr. Banks is not, in the end, that it tells appalling, self-serving lies about its real-life subject; movies have been making fiction of reality for decades, and the story that the movie tells is more satisfyingly dramatic than the story that actually happened. It is not that the film ends up being a commercial for the transformative power of Disney, either: mostly, it's a commercial for the idea that Mary Poppins is a goddamn wonderful movie, and since this is merely accurate, I have no problem with it. The problem is that Saving Mr. Banks, as first written by Kelly Marcel with latter contributions by Sue Smith, began life as a straight-up biopic of Travers that only drifted into its current form once Disney got involved and cleared the way for both likeness rights and, even more crucially, music rights (Thomas Newman's score uses themes from the earlier film to great effect, and the narrative is built of phases centered on "Spoonful of Sugar", "Let's Go Fly a Kite", and "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", with a sweet but spurious cameo for "Feed the Birds").  But enough of the biopic material remains that a huge chunk of the movie - certainly more than a quarter of the overall running time, maybe as much as a third - is spent in Travers's 1906 childhood in Australia, a place where momentum goes to die, slaughtered at the feet of Farrell's twee leprechaun of an Aussie banker.

The 1961 material is aces: directed with maximum bland hand-holding and redundancy by John Lee Hancock, for whom this still manages to be a major career peak (aye, it somehow manages to trump both The Alamo AND The Blind Side), though mostly because of everybody and everything that isn't him. The script is a friendly but largely accurate look inside the story-building process, with Bradley Whitford as producer Don DaGradi and B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman as songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman playing the part of Virgil to Travers's descent into the Burbank inferno (along with Paul Giamatti as a friendly chauffeur, barely more than a cameo), and being completely great at it. The sweaty desperation of trying to get the very brittle and angry Englishwoman to respond with positive emotion to anything they have in mind for the project is funny and accessible without being sitcom-style broad, and all three actors are in pitch-perfect form, Novak especially. And it should come as no surprise, given how fully the film has been built around her, that Thompson is wonderful, easily the best element of the whole affair. The role probably did not offer her very many challenges, but still could hardly have been executed better than this: her default glacial expression of lifeless superiority is modulated in all sorts of beautiful little ways - her struggle not to enjoy herself as the Shermans present "Let's Go Fly a Kite" is a particular highlight - and her priggish line readings are reliably the most hilarious part of a movie that ends up being much more of a comedy than it presents itself.

Of course, the sparring between her and Hanks is the main event, and it's awfully good too, though to be honest, I prefer the scenes with the Shermans and DaGradi; they feel more alive and honest, and not so pre-ordained. Hanks is very good, even so - more at playing a character in a movie than in portraying anyone who resembles Walt Disney to a closer approximation than "white guys with mustaches" - and there's plenty of impressive character material to be had in his battle of wills with Thompson, between a depressed woman pretending to be unreachably proud and a stubborn businessman pretending to be the source of all happiness in the world.

But then there's that goddamn Australia material, sucking the joy right out of the movie, by rendering it schematic and bland in the most prototypical biopic manner. I don't mind Travers having personal demons that influence her reluctance to sell Mary Poppins to Disney; that might very well have been the fact, anyway. I mind that the movie slows itself to such an oozing crawl to show us these demons in such overwhelming detail, and that it leaves a punchy, deeply entertaining movie about the sausage-making process of developing a script at Disney in the '60s as such a wretched paint-by-numbers things. I really mind how much screentime is devoted to Farrell's awful, shticky performance (and I consider myself a Farrell partisan most of the time). Just about the only thing I don't mind is the John Schwartzman cinematography, for his customary Rockwellian softness and golden-hued nostalgia fits what the film is trying to do with the Australia scenes - and with the California scenes, when it comes down to it. Outside of that, the only worthwhile thing done with the flashbacks is a scene of daddy Goff getting drunk at a fair surreally chanting the lyrics to the Disney film's song "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank", intercut with the Shermans' first performance of it for Travers; it is the only cinematically complex thing happening anywhere in the film.

Basically, we have here a giddily enjoyable confection undone by its anxiety for a Something to be About. Give Travers a big weepy monologue about her drunk dad that explains all of her brittleness, and the story functions, at a mechanical level, exactly the same way (also, Thompson gets more to be awesome). As it stands the filmmakers wanted to make a standard biopic, for whatever reason, and that's exactly what they have on their hands. Far more of the film works than doesn't - and even more works for the dyed-in-the-wool Mary Poppins fan, who can pick up on the impressive number of Easter eggs littered throughout the script and the mise en scène, but the po-faced "daddy issues" focus of the narrative is tedious drudgery, and it's never very far away. It shouldn't be this much work to enjoy something this bouncy and fluffy.

6/10

-but a very strong 6/10. Or perhaps 7/10, but a very weak 7/10. I wonder if I shall never fully resolve this question in my mind.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: SOUND AND FURY

Writer-director Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio works, I am tempted to say, in spite of itself; it works "for all the wrong reasons" might do just as well. They key is that it works. The film is smart as hell, for one thing. It has been carefully worked out just so, with a final third that significantly up-ends what we think we've been watching in a way that at first blush seems random and ridiculous, but gels rather neatly, if you let it percolate and bear in mind what genre this belongs to. Which is a genre that the film itself seems to have invented, for it's basically a combination of the British psychological thriller of the 1960s and the Italian post-giallo paranormal horror film of the 1970s. And one of these things is much more eager to play "fuck you" games with the audience's desire for logic, but both tend to be what we might call subjectivity-based genres, and in the case of Berberian Sound Studio, the subjective viewpoint we're adopting is that of a man losing the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction; the final third of the movie might be read as the ultimate expression of his subconscious preoccupations throughout the first two-thirds, or it might be understood as the real reality which has been hiding all along, in the fashion of Mulholland Dr. Either way, it is the expression of the mind of a man who has lost his tether.

The man in question is a nervous, ultra-British fellow named Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a sound designer for motion pictures who has just been hired by Italian producer Francesco Coraggio (Cosimo Fusco) to provide the effects and mix for Il vortice equestre, a horror movie whose plot details, barely dribbled out, make it sound powerfully like Suspiria (the film doesn't come right out and say "this is the 1970s", but that seems to be a fair assumption to make). Gilderoy is not a good traveler or even an especially functional adult - he lives with his mother, we're able to discover if we're keeping an eye on the letters held up to the camera but never read, a nifty trick that invites an unusual degree of interaction between viewer and movie. And the situation he's arrived in would make even a seasoned adventurer long for the comforts of home: one of the two lead actresses is a breathy, talentless bimbo, the director, Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancini) is a self-adoring auteurist whose vision for the movie is implicitly at direct odds with Coraggio's, and the very unfriendly company secretary, Elena (Tonia Sotiropoulou) is stonewalling his attempts to get reimbursed for his travel expenses, effectively stranding him in this hostile environment. And, of course, he doesn't speak more than rudimentary traveler's Italian, which isn't just a personal liability, but a professional one as well.

The film's most captivating strength and its Achilles's heel are one and the same, but let me not reveal it just yet. First, let's take a look at what this is, for Berberian Sound Studio is a film of many layers and metanarratives. To begin with, there's the matter of Il vortice equestre - The Equestrian Vortex, misunderstood as a film about horses by the country-loving Gilderoy - of which we see not a single frame, except for the opening credits; and these occur at precisely the point that you'd expect to see Berberian Sound Studio's own credits (and with as little connection to the diegesis: nobody is watching them, that we can tell, except for us). It's obvious enough that we're being invited to conflate the movie and the movie-within-the-movie. And since the bulk of the first hour consists of watching Gilderoy provide sound effects to unseen horrors that are verbally described, or detailed on his grand flow chart, what we get to do a lot of is listen to Il vortice equestre. In fact, solely through audio cues, we end up learning a lot more about what happens in Santini's film than in Strickland's, at the level of "plot".

To a great extent, Berberian Sound Studio is an experiment of sorts, exploring how much meaning we, the outermost level of audience, can extract from nothing but sound, augmented by watching the expressions of people watching the thing we're hearing (Gilderoy, to nobody's surprise in the audience and everybody's in the movie, has a weak stomach for gory horror). It's not exactly a film "about sound", but it's a film about how we piece together meaning in cinema.At all points, we're watching Berberian Sound Studio but also interpreting Il vortice equestre, until the the final third comes along, collides the two films in irresolvable ways, and having then done its job of demonstrating how little value there is in looking for "meaning in cinema" anyway, destroys itself as viscerally as any film this side of Persona.

So that's the captivating part. The problem - and maybe the fact that I'm calling it a problem reveals personal bias, but I don't think so - is that it's sluggishly intellectual, operating entirely at the level of thinking and not at the level of feeling. But, in keeping with the phantasmagoric Italian films it's both paying tribute to and parodying (the film is bleakly funny at times, far funnier than I'd have ever predicted), much of what "happens" at the film is so subjective and impressionistic that it can only be understood at the level of feeling: having yoked its perspective firmly to Gilderoy's, the film can thus break itself down as a means of dramatising his own loosening grip on reality. So we have a film that at one and the same time can only be understood as a detached, highly intellectualised experience that isn't a tiny bit scary, and a film that's only satisfying if we give in and just experience the thing as a disorienting ride through fragmenting psychology. Either way, that leaves a lot of nonsensical bullshit lying around, and it's really not possible, that I can tell, to resolve the film's disparate parts in any kind of coherent way. The result is a dazzling mess full of terrific visuals (the repeated use of a blood-red "SILENZIO" sign is the best horror movie image of the year), entrancingly confounding audio, and a lot of random tedium interspersed in between. I'm tempted to call it required viewing, doubly so for fans of Italian horror, but certainly not because it is objectively great, or even because it is, for the most part, very good. But the parts can be awfully good, and the whole is different - not more, just different - than the sum of its parts.

7/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: MURDER WILL OUT

It's not unutterably perfect - and who the heck wants a completely perfect movie, anyway, they leave nothing to talk about - but even better, The Act of Killing is the most unique and essential movie I have seen in 2013. It is maybe the only thing I have seen this year about which I would say that it is genuinely important; and not for the reasons that it telegraphs, because it confronts directly and painfully a history of violence that has been largely hidden by a society with a strong stake in never confronting that history. It would still be, I suspect, the most bruising and intelligent movie of the year even if it took place in a made-up fantasyland; that it instead involves real human beings and real moral crimes that took place in Indonesia in 1965 and '66 is hardly incidental, but it's certianly not the be-all and end-all of the film's justification for itself, and that alone is enough to make it stand out among both fiction and non-fiction films that address themselves to such self-consciously serious content.

The proximate subject of the film is the purge of identified Communists following a failed coup in September of '65 (the actual subject, now that's the question), though "Communist" is a word that, we are told by the men who committed the purging, meant something closer to "undesirable person" than anything legitimately ideological and political. At least 500,000 people were killed before all was said and done, and half a century later, the members of the gangs who perpetrated these acts are revered as heroes by the Indonesian people.

Director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and an anonymous co-director who is one of a great many crew members whose fear about giving their right name in the film's ending credits speaks more eloquently than anything else in the film about the state of contemporary Indonesia and how active and alive the issues explored onscreen remain decades later, rounded up a number of men who were involved in the purges in their youth, and have parlayed this into political careers, positions of idolatry among the young members of the paramilitary gangs which remain vital even now, or simply keep the memory alive in the manner of old men throughout the world who believe themselves to have lived a life well-spent. In addition to giving these men a completely safe space to talk about their histories, Oppenheimer encouraged them to recreate their killings in the form of a movie, which could be made any way they wanted to. It's not entirely clear from The Act of Killing whether all of the short film scenes we see are meant to be part of a unified project, or just fragments of individual psychologies, but the one thing that is unabashedly clear regardless is that the old men creating them are severely broken people.

Preeminent among the many things I was not expecting of The Act of Killing: that far more than a document of a mass slaughter that has never been faced within or outside of Indonesia, it would be an investigation into how media consumption creates behavior and is in turn created by it. There's little wonder why Werner Herzog threw his name recognition behind the film as executive producer (above and beyond its surface-level resemblance to his Little Dieter Needs to Fly), for this is a film about how we engage with cinema, and the personal of creating an image. Certainly, just looking at The Act of Killing reveals it to be a film like nothing else: the movies created by the former killers are hallucinatory reductions of Hollywood genres (film noir, musical, war movie) into arrestingly distorted copies that feel like somebody remembered having a nightmare about classical Hollywood cinema, but cannot remember having seen any of the films in his waking life.

And one of the main things we learn about the killers, and especially about Anwar Congo, the film's most consistent subject, is that they loved watching movies. Multiple people pridefully describe how watching violent American movies game them new ideas for how to more effectively - or just more playfully - execute their victims; one man brusquely suggests that it's hypocrisy to speak ill of the death squads if you've ever watched a film about Nazis, since the only reason anyone ever would is to pornographically indulge in the power and sadism displayed therein (in a film absolutely rotten with revealing statements, this is by far the most revealing thing that anyone says). In particular, there was a clear fetishisation of gangster films, which Congo still speaks of in glowing, rapturous terms; the gangsters idealised the figures they say in those films as free men (and the word "preman", their preferred slang term for "gangster", was etymologically derived from the Dutch for "free man").

Having thus taken their behavioral cues from movies, it is through the movies that these men engage with their past, seemingly for the first time ever. It is stunning, mesmerising stuff. Without ever having to indulge in sad-faced moralising, Oppenheimer and his colleages have managed to make the most brutally effective takedown of the unexamined system of institutional violence of Indonesia past and present that I can imagine, simply by stepping just far enough back from their subjects that they end up seeming mentally fragile at best, totally divorced from reality at worst. Congo, at one point, slides effortlessly from remembering the time he saw an Elvis movie at a certain theater to recalling the building where he used to take people to kill them, one of the most abrupt of the film's many bitterly ironic reversals, all of which build up a clinically outraged depiction of the gangsters as men whose violent past has left them incapable of the most basic rational thought (and the wild, weird, off-putting, magnetic films they make do absolutely nothing to counteract that impression). It is a film that does all of its work by trusting in the viewer's own humanity, being troubled not just by the acts being discussed by troubled by how untroubled the onscreen subjects are, and letting us draw our own conclusions about how dangerous it is to let history go unexplored and unchallenged, not just for the potential victims of a repetition of that history, but for the perpetrators of it, who have clearly not come out fully intact.

This is great, complex filmmaking, presenting visions that are as totally original as anything I have seen this year in service of a shattering depiction of inhumanity. It leaves itself open to only two serious criticisms, as I see it: the one I am prepared to agree with is that it's redundant, and a 90-minute version of the film would probably not be meaningfully less profound than a two-hour version. The other is that the film does a shit job of contextualising the history involved; this is absolutely true, but I don't think it's an accident, nor a problem. Oppenheimer isn't telling a history lesson, he's presenting a scenario in which brutal acts poison individuals and societies that valorise them. If anything, by leaving the historical specifics, I think that the filmmakers leave their film significantly more universal in its reach: the Indonesian killings are the entry point, but the themes are not tied to any one place or time, and those themes are explored with unbelievable richness, sophistication, and horror, in the most clear-cut masterpiece I have seen in quite a long time.

10/10

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RAISE YOUR VOICE

Generally speaking, In a World... is so gosh-almighty damn adorable that it's way too easy to lose track of how weirdly dense its script is. Herein, we have a movie that wants to be an affectionately wacky inside-baseball comedy about one of the most marginal acting fields in the film industry; that wants to be a loud and proud feminist statement about using talent, passion, and cunning to chip away at male privilege so vigorously entrenched that it's impervious to even the smallest measure of consciousness-raising; that wants to be an emotionally unflinching dramedy about professional jealousy between parents and children; and that wants to be an indie romantic comedy that combines the quirky excess of a mid-'00s film with emphatically naturalistic performances by an immoderately well-stocked cast. It manages to succeed at each and every one of these goals in the span of a relentlessly laconic 93 minutes, which shouldn't have been possible anyway, let alone in the first feature-length project made by its writer-director.

So let's start, then, by praising with great praise the name of Lake Bell, who's also the star and producer; if this is one of those "talented actress writes herself a leading role because nobody else was going to fucking do it" stories, it has the benefit of an especially talented actress who surely did deserve a terrific, worshipful leading part, something I've felt ever since she elevated the tacky, typical romantic comedies Over Her Dead Body and What Happens in Vegas with her terrific supporting turns, a long half-decade ago. If In a World... had nothing to offer but an hour and a half of Bell knocking it out of the park, one scene after another, playing a privately self-amused and constantly self-doubting artistic striver and self-appointed smartest person in the room; I insist, if this was the sole merit of In a World..., that would be enough to make me glad that In a World... exists.

But that is not the film's sole merit, for Bell turns out to be a hell of a comedy director - not possessed of any particular intuition for elegant visuals (not that contemporary comedies bother about having meaningful aesthetics most of the time), but well aware of how to run her fellow actors through their paces, keeping the film gliding forward at a steady, smooth clip. She also keeps the film situated in a most unusual tonal register, which I hope the phrase "relentlessly laconic" already pointed out: it's cool and remote for the most part, virtually never punching up the jokes or encouraging its audience to laugh. Yet it's simultaneously so absurd and goofy in concept, setting, and plot, stopping off for so many random, loopy asides that it feels, at times, like every line and reaction shot is a new gag, however underemphasised. Clearly, this kind of low simmering wry comedy isn't to everyone's tastes, even more than most comedy; all I can say is that I, for one, haven't found anything so playful, so flat-out enjoyably funny, all year.

The movie, anyway, involves the world of voiceover acting, with Bell playing Carol Solomon, a voice coach for actors and others, and the daughter of Sam Soto (Fred Melamed), widely regarded as the greatest trailer narrator in the business following the death of legendary Don LaFontaine (who puts in a few cameos via stock footage, a slightly ghoulish, off-putting decision). But Sam is getting on in years, and grooming Gustav Warner (Ken Marino) as the heir to the throne, totally ignoring Carol's hints and outright statements that she'd like to maybe break into the traditionally male-dominated trailer-voicing business. That's the simplest way to describe a collage of plots that also involves Carol's sister (Michaela Watkins) flirting with a sexy client and misleading her decent, busy editor husband (Rob Corddry), and the population of a recording studio where Carol does most of her work, and where random chance puts her unexpectedly in the running to narrate the year's biggest trailer, advertising the first movie in a wildly-hyped series of book adaptations.

If the film, at a certain remove, exists to show off what Lake Bell can do - voices! self-effacement! gloriously expressive reaction shots! - it's also pretty generous to everybody else in the cast, giving Melamed in particular a chance to shine like all the stars in the heavens, playing a beautifully smug man of limited by undeniable talents. But everybody, even the smallest parts, have some wonderful lines and cute or funny or sweet beats to play, and Bell has managed to assemble a pretty swell population of cameos, best of whom is Eva Longoria (Bell's Over Her Dead Body co-star) in a uniquely selfless portrayal of herself as an incompetent idiot and bad actress.

Beyond the human element, Bell's exploration of a niche community within the already hermetic worlds of Los Angeles and Hollywood is at once loving and hilarious, admiring the foibles of her characters without feeling obliged to mock them or their work. The dominant mood of the film is one of pleasantness and affection, in fact, even when Bell is at her most direct in attacking the "boys only" mentality of the voiceover industry; without forgiving the entrenched sexism of the world she depicts, she also treats it more as ignorance to be pitied than villainy to be stomped on. Anyway, Carol herself is purposefully a being of flaws and sometimes poor judgments, not a figurehead, which makes the movie more entertaining and more intelligent at the same time.

The movie's only real problem - discounting its characteristic and potentially alienating sense of humor - is its dully functional aesthetic: the filmmakers (including cinematographer Seamus Tierney and editor Tom McArdle) are talented enough to know when a close-up is funnier than a wide shot, and vice-versa, and when to let moments play out in long takes as opposed to when to use rhythmic cutting to build humor, but the film as a whole has a rather uninspired and generically flat appearance, and for a film so emphatically about sound, there's nothing clever or evocative in the audio mix. It gets the job done, and stays out of the way of the script. That's important, but there have been comedies down through the years, believe it or not, that are great cinema; In a World... is merely adequate, well-crafted cinema. But it's also fantastic comedy and hugely appealing character building, and the whole thing ends up being one of the most charming and delightful movies in a very long time.

8/10

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